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In retrospect, Seattle may have been a worse choice than London:
no history or theater or international crime network to speak of,
though the food in the Pacific Northwest is slightly better than
in the U.K., and the music scene matches blow for blow. San Diego
would have been a good spot, maybe the European equivalent, somewhere
on the African continent. Puerto Rico came up in several discussions,
though our Spanish is broken—broken at best. Whatever we do now,
we know the dart-on-the-map method has failed us twice, proving
we really need to put more into our decisions. We’re a team of superheroes,
not a colony of commie beat poets, and choosing a location for our
secret headquarters should mean something, as much as getting
a cat down from a tree, or diffusing a grand-scale nuclear attack.
Thinking before we act is what separates us from the bad guys, after
all, and don’t tell anyone this, but we feel stupid about the whole
thing.
As far as superhero teams go, we can’t say locale was our first
mistake. Running the help-wanted ad during the Super Bowl seemed
like a genius idea, and for any other business, plunking $2.1 million
down for thirty seconds would have been worth it—response, after
all, is what most ads are looking for. But quality, not quantity,
was our angle, and the six months it took to screen all the applicants—nearly
400,000 the first week alone—was our own fault. Some of them were
easy to dispel, no superhuman powers to speak of, just autograph-seekers,
old girlfriends, and reporters. Others looked good on paper, then
blew it in the interview/audition. This one woman seemed promising,
calling herself Deer Abby. But when we called her in, expecting
incredible speed, perhaps even superstrong antler-type things protruding
from her skull, we found her to be more doe than deer, haunting
eyes and a gentle, nurturing disposition. “I’m what I call a decoy,”
she explained. “Cars and hunters have always been drawn to me, so
why not mad scientists bent on world domination?” Targets we didn’t
need, and that didn’t even cover the liability issues with her name.
And Deer Abby wasn’t the worst.
Our real problem, however, proved far less fundamental than geography
or membership. The nephophobia was the issue most in need of our
attention. In Seattle, London, on the equator, in outer freaking
space. Well, not outer space, no atmosphere to speak of, but you
can’t get to outer space without passing through at least one cloud,
and one cloud was all it took. When you’re nephophobic, the mere
hint of those white, puffy monsters can send you shrieking like
damsels in distress to the nearest cave, whether an enormous rhinobot
is running rampant through downtown Santiago, or you’re at your
niece’s soccer game and feel a drop of water on your forearm. It’s
amazing we function at all sometimes, let alone save anyone from
anything. A cave might be the best place for heroes afflicted with
our condition, but honestly, it’s been done before. Besides, save
attacks from mole or lava people, not much evil goes down underground.
The most amazing part of it all is that every one of us is struck
by nephophobia, all twelve members, a freaky coincidence that almost
makes us believe in fate or karma or other such New Age nonsense.
Every superhero has a weakness, that’s no secret, but rarely do
teammates have the same weakness. Some adventurers can’t
stand water, while others are just the opposite, undersea champions
pretty much exclusively. A handful of heroes we know balk at full
moons, while some can’t stand the taste of cinnamon. This one guy,
the Inhuman Buzzsaw, would get a debilitating stomachache if an
enemy spoke his name three times in Latin. What are the chances
of that happening? we asked him. Not good, he replied,
especially since there is no word for “buzzsaw” in Latin.
Everybody’s got their thing, and ours just happens to be clouds.
All of ours. And a fear of clouds is way more impractical than any
of those unlikely weaknesses, especially without a weather manipulator
on staff, and no less than eight members who can fly. Futuro, our
blind fortune-teller from Saturn’s closest moon, is the least afflicted,
not being able to see the clouds and all, but he can predict
them, so it’s not like he’s got a free pass. Basically, we’re all
screwed.
We first noticed our mutual problem when doing battle with Dr.
Doctopolus, one of those aforementioned evil scientists, this one
bent on spreading cancer, diabetes, and other noncommunicable diseases
to any nation unwilling to pay him his $1 trillion bounty. Just
minutes before he was to make an example of China, we discovered
Doctopolus’s hidden lair, a skull-and-crossbones-shaped island off
the coast of Crete. We were swooping in for what we liked to call
“The Intervention,” our first mission together. We were psyched.
Madame Throttle rocketed ahead to scout out booby traps, the seven
other fliers following close behind, serving as our first offensive
wave. Doctopolus, thinking his hidden lair undetectable, left it
defenseless, save a few goons with guns—nothing Madame T. couldn’t
handle herself. Like so many villains, pride and ego were Doctopolus’s
nemeses, his clouds, and we were more than willing to expose this
weakness, saving about ten billion Chinese in the process. It would
all be, as they say, in a day’s work. But upon entering the good
doctor’s no-fly zone, what started as a beautiful day turned disastrous.
As Robust Ron ripped through the domed roof of Doctopolus’s headquarters—cleverly
situated in one of the skull’s eye sockets—the sun, as if removed
by some equally nefarious villain, disappeared from the sky, instantly
crippling us all, our bodies falling to the ground like clay pigeons
in an earthquake. A nefarious laugh shrieked across our senses,
and within moments, anti-gravitational force fields enveloped us
all. It seemed as if Doctopolus would rule the day, China would
fall, and saving the world would land in the hands of one of the
other superhero teams, one with a less subjugating enervation. Reprieve,
like in most superhero stories, came in the form of irony, as good
an ally to the hero as strength, speed, agility, or panache. In
order to reach its destination, Doctopolus’s disease ray, the Hospice
Enabler, needed to be fired directly into said cloud, the fluffy
beast being situated in direct line with China. Through a series
of coincidences too complicated for even us to understand, save
Brainuar, the Hospice Enabler actually cancelled out the cloud,
and vice versa, both stopping the slow murder of all those people
and allowing us to recover our wits. We soon scooped Doctopolus
up like the tailless rat he was and, in the meantime, took credit
for saving the world. The entire team had sworn an oath to protect
the whole galaxy, but on that day we swore another oath, this one
to never bring up the cloud/disease-ray cover-up ever again. Doctopolus
didn’t want to be exposed for his gaffe, either, so with both sides
in on the secret, no one was ever the wiser.
Heroes to the entire world, we labor on to this day, picking our
battles the way a billionaire picks a wife—we have all the options
in the world, but know most of them to be more trouble than they’re
worth. So we lend a hand where we can, doing most of our good-deed-doing
at night, and in the South Pacific. You wouldn’t guess it, but Tahiti
sports an abnormal villain-to-helpless-citizen ratio, and Hawaii,
though rainy during certain seasons, is basically a volcano waiting
to burst. To avoid any future embarrassments (and future cover-ups),
someone just last week proposed we build our secret headquarters
at the core of the sun, leaving Brainuar to work out the logistics.
London was educational, and Seattle has been good to us, each and
every member having a new subdivision named after him, her, or it.
But at the heart of the sun, free of clouds, free of even the concept
of clouds, we, arguably some of the best superheroes in the universe,
will have what we have given the meek and helpless time and time
again: the power to step out our front doors each morning, to walk
confidently on dark city streets, to lay our heads down on our pillows,
knowing the world is a safe place, that there is nothing to fear,
no one, no thing.
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