Episode 1: The New Girl

read time: 10 minutes

Martin

Word was out: Doc Psyclops had finally chosen a new sidekick. Jenny Collapsar had caught the old man’s mystic eye, and every kid in Radium Heights was jealous.

I wasn’t impressed. I saw her on the train, feet up on the seat, knees to her chest, playing a video game. Early 20s maybe, too young for Doc. But at 130 years old, everyone was too young for Doc. She was small, tiny really, even though her helmet and boots looked big enough to fit me. I liked her mask though. Domino style. Classic.

She caught me staring and I stuck out my tongue. Her eyes rolled back to the game.

Had I known then the calamitous effect she’d end up having on my life —the bitter seeds we’d sew together and the bloody fruit they would reap— I would have walked away right then. I would have got off at the next station and never looked back.

But I couldn’t have known all that. So I decided to rob her.

JENNY

First off, he looked ridiculous. Everything he owned back then was black and a size too small. He always wore at least two belts for some reason. His cape was too long. He was too smug to be genuinely handsome, and I’ve solved entire mysteries in the time it would take him to do his hair. He might as well have worn a sweatshirt with the word “HENCHMAN” written across it. Idiot.

He was working for Mister Sadistic in those days. I knew he was going to creep on me the moment he sat down. An empty car and he picks the seat right across from me? Subtle, jerk.

He got off behind me at Argon Street Station, where Doc was supposed to pick me up in the Phantasmobile. When we got down to the street, he pulled a busted old ray gun on me. Seriously, a ray gun. Can you even imagine?

Martin

I had this cool ray gun back then, an Alamo Industries Matter Accelerator I got off of eBay. The emitter was janky and it only fired half the time, but it was still pretty badass. I leveled it at her while demanding her utility belt, and the video game. She responded by kicking it out of my hand.

Then I got punched in the chest by a god.

JENNY

Doc hit him so hard that he actually flew halfway down the sidewalk and landed in front of a check cashing place. Seeing someone with that kind of power clobber a normal boring person is pretty gross. If you don’t know how to pull the punch, their spine will come right out of their back. If you’ve ever seen those awful videos from when The Centurion got high and killed all those poor people in Sao Paulo you know what I mean.

The thing was, I didn’t need the help. I’d already disarmed him. Doc didn’t have to step in like that. I know it came out of his old school way of looking at crime, but honestly that Man Out Of Time shtick was worn thin before I even joined his Tomorrow Squadron. And having him come to my aid all lantern-jawed like that actually made me feel less confident about my new role on the team. But that’s being a side kick. It’s like a game where your role is to get kidnapped and tortured just so that your mentor can come save the day. I mean, am I a protagonist or a plot point? Being assistant to divine justice leaves you with a lot of questions.

Martin

I woke up handcuffed to a hospital gurney, in custody of the Science Police. They had a lot of questions and I wasn’t having a lot of luck answering them with my newly collapsed lungs. I also couldn’t feel my legs. But they moved when I told them to, in the way I told them to, and that put a smile on my face.

See, Mister Sadistic smacked us around a lot. He’d dole out beatings pretty regularly. No one in the crew went without a black eye or a broken bone for long. He even disintegrated Moishe, and one time he got so mad at Jerry that he put him in some pocket dimension slightly out of phase with reality, where we could still see him but not touch him, and we had to watch him starve to death right there in the Lair. Took weeks.

But that’s a big part of the henchman lifestyle. Sometimes the boss loses it and takes it out on you. If your boss doesn’t, then their arch nemesis will. It’s not a career regular people excel in. And there, lying on that gurney, realizing I had just taken a punch from the strongest man on earth and survived, proved something I’d always been sure of: I wasn’t like regular people. Hell, I wasn’t even like regular henchmen. I was better.

I was Super.

JENNY

He still thinks he’s Super. He isn’t.

Martin

The boss had enough Science Pigs on the payroll to have me out by morning. I wasn’t completely sure I should be leaving the hospital yet, but we had crime to do. The boys picked me up in a stolen van and I was back at the Lair before lunch.

Jenny

We took the Phantasmobile back to Doc’s Seclusium. I gotta say, I’ve been on space stations more lame than that flying car. The whole interior was chrome and leather and mahogany, and the seats laid all the way back. There was even a candy dish in the shape of his weird All Seeing Eye motif, which I was devastated to discover was full of horehound lozenges. He wouldn’t let me fire the retrorockets but he did let me push the button that turned the exterior invisible. You couldn’t really tell from inside though.

It was the coolest place I’d ever been. At least until we got to the Seclusium.

Martin

Calling Sadistic’s hideout a Lair was a bit of a stretch. I’ve seen much better compounds since. It was mostly just a dirty warehouse. We didn’t even have defense lasers, and most of the death traps didn’t work. We did have a big table for planning jobs though, and the boss had a really spooky chair that we’d dare each other to sit in whenever he was out. It had a button that could drop you into an alligator pit, but he’d already sold off all the alligators by the time I joined the outfit.

Since most of the gang didn’t know any better, it felt like we were living in a proper Murder Castle. I still look back on that time as the halcyon days of my villainy.

Not a care in the world, apart from subjugating the world.

Jenny

“Welcome, my youthful ward, to the Psyclops Seclusium!”

It was a hidden temple carved into the side of a mountain in the Himalayas, the site where Doc was chosen by the Ascended Masters to become the keeper of the Exalted Eye of Eternity. It was filled with artifacts and souveniers from the Tomorrow Squadron’s exploits.

I knew the backstories behind every one of them: a taxidermy triceratops from the 2nd Great Dinosaur Invasion, the Astral Abacus, a figurehead from the riddle galleon of the Ultrasphinx, a deadly color that doesn’t exist on this planet, the False Crown of Lemuria, Hitler’s 3rd and 7th clones, a set of cybernetic limbs built for Serpent People, one of Zomb-Ra’s self-mummified zealots, and the phantom head of William Howard Taft that kept appearing on Mt. Rushmore in the summer of '67.

I couldn’t believe I was standing there, in the Halls of Science and Sorcery, a living museum of the greatest adventures of all time, with the greatest adventurer of all time as my guide.

Martin

I call bullshit on his whole origin story: a wealthy mountaineer separated from his expedition wanders into Shambhala and walks out a year later, having traded one of his eyes for a magic Sapphire? I mean, how many other white men have claimed to get their superpowers in Tibet? There’s gotta be a dozen at least. Just off the top of my head you've got:

The Green Lama

The Jade Lama

The Aghartan

The Utopian

Kommander Mystiker

The Seven Sons of Shangri-La

Captain Yeti

Madame Samsāra (technically a white woman but you get what I’m saying)

It’s like when people go on vacation in South America and come back with plastic surgery, except if you went on vacation to 1930’s Tibet you came back with mystical superpowers. I’m just saying, it’s a little hokey. Like, you never hear of anything like that happening these days. Probably because people don’t want racist superpowers.

Anyway, we all knew that Eye came from outer space.

Jenny

“It’s time you met your new team mates, Jennifer. Allow me to introduce you to… The Tomorrow Squadron!”

Doc always talked like that, shouting the parts of sentences he wanted you to be the most impressed by. It worked when he was delivering speeches to the United Nations, or trying to inspire an alien race to overthrow their tyrannical leader. But it got kind of annoying when he was just sitting around in front of the Seclusium’s 40 foot tv screens, yelling out the answers to Jeopardy questions.

“These loyal comrades comprise the greatest scientific exploration and crime fighting team ever assembled. They are...

(Obviously I knew who they were, everyone did. But I could tell Doc really liked doing this introduction)

“Rourke. The greatest pilot I’ve ever met. Next to him is Stryker, our quartermaster and Man at Arms. The big Sikh fellow is Balwinder, martial arts expert. He holds doctorates in Chemistry, Marine Biology, and Electrical Engineering. Armando speaks 17 languages, is a two time gold medalist in fencing, and has more patents than Tesla. The one brooding in the shadows back there is Solomon Dark— master of occult studies and esoteric lore.”

They all either saluted or bowed in an “at your service” kind of way, except for Simon. Every one of them was at least 30 years older than me.

“Gentlemen, say hello the newest addition to our humble ranks: Jennifer Collapsar, AKA …Tomorrow Girl!”

Tomorrow Girl IV actually. We were all called Tomorrow Girl. Sally Easter, the original Tomorrow Girl, died when Atlantis re-sank. The Murderoid killed number 2 (Celia something or other), and her replacement went missing in the Annihilation Zone and was assumed dead. No one can remember her actual name because, well, Annihilation Zone. Basically, that’s how I got the job.

I really hated that name. First of all, it was obviously unlucky, second, I was 24 years old. At least let me be Tomorrow Woman. The worst part is people still call me that when I do convention appearances.

I’m 44 now. Ms. Collapsar will do just fine, thank you very much.

Martin

We went back to work the day I got out of the hospital.

The boss had stolen blueprints for a Quantum Disentangler from a guy that had just been laid off at Alamo Industries. Technically he paid him for them, but Mister Sadistic only ever paid for things with exploding money, so “stolen” is technically correct.

“Gather round boysssss! It’ss time for another heissssst…”

He had to talk like that on account of his weird snake tongue. That’s why he always wore a hood. A lot of the Heroes mocked him for it too, which I always thought was kind of mean. What’s a guy going to do when he’s born with a snake tongue? 99 percent of the time, the answer to that question is: he's going to grow up to be a Supervillain.

“Here’ssss the caper: In three nightsss, we’re headed to Prossspero Polychemical to relieve them of sseveral pounds of Tritium. A sssingle gram of Tritium sssells for—

Danny interrupted. “Holy neutron initiators, boss! We finally gonna build that nuclear bomb?!?”

I closed my eyes, expecting to be covered in Danny’s blood at any second. But Mister Sadistic must have been in a good mood that day, because he just kept planning.

“Prossspero is heavily guarded, ssso no ssmash and grab thisss time. Thisss is a sssSStealth mission, ssso we’ll be using code namesss.”

“YES!” Danny was really pushing his luck with the interruptions, but we all shared his excitement about code names.

“Ssssilence! Felix, you’ll go by Astaroth. Henry, you’re Belial.

(Demon names?! This was going to be awesome!)

“Viktor, Leviathan. Danny, you’re Moloch. And Martin…

(That was me, and this was the moment I’d been waiting for)

“Martin my boy, you’ll be known asss—

“Kid Lazarus!” It just came out of my mouth.

I’d gone through a few options but this was the one that seemed to fit my powers, without being too expected. Plus, most of the cool demons were already taken and I was worried I’d end up with something stupid, like Pazuzu.

The boss seemed kind of taken aback. “That’sssss not even a demon.”

I took a deep breath and continued. “I understand that sir, but I’ve been thinking about this ever since I went toe to toe with Doc Psyclops, and I think I did pretty well in that fight, so I think I’ve earned a real alias, and I want that alias to be Kid Lazarus.” I heard some of the others snickering, but I didn’t care. I was pretty much invincible after all.

“Fine, whatever. Jussst don’t ssssscrew thisss up.”

We couldn’t have screwed it up worse if we’d tried.

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