First Date

CHAPTER ONE-1

CHAPTER ONE

Sometimes, I wish I had a normal job like most teens my age. Like working at a fast food restaurant or a convenience store or even mowing lawns for the neighbors. Flipping burgers or bagging groceries would be a lot easier than fighting supervillains who like to rampage through downtown Golden City in giant mecha suits. And I’m not even paid more than if I worked in a restaurant, either. I’d have to talk with my boss about getting a raise one of these days. It didn’t help that today was Sunday, which was normally my day off, but my boss called me in to deal with this emergency and I couldn’t say no, not when we were dealing with a real threat here.

Not that a pay raise was my biggest priority at the moment. As I crouched behind an overturned sedan, trying to catch my breath, I was more concerned with defeating the aforementioned supervillain in a giant mecha suit who was currently searching for me and Rubberman, my boss. Although I heard him smashing the street and yelling some really nasty threats at us, I couldn’t help but peer around the side of the overturned car to get an idea of what the villain was doing.

Right in the middle of the street stood a gigantic mecha. It was about two stories tall and shaped kind of like a tank with arms and legs. Its body was covered in blackened laser blast marks from where I’d hit it dozens of times over the last hour, but its hide was incredibly thick, because even my strongest eye blasts couldn’t pierce its skin. The mecha had twin machine guns on its shoulders and carried a gigantic sword half as long as a school bus in its hands. Its plating was mostly silver and gray, while on its back was a rocket pack which apparently helped it fly. At its feet lay a bisected car, cut cleanly by the sword’s energy blade, smoke rising from both halves, though thankfully the car’s owner had apparently fled at some point.

In the head of the robot—which was shaped like a bucket—sat the villain in question, a guy who called himself Lord Mechanika. You’d think, with a name like that, he’d be some kind of big, imposing regal figure with a cape and clothes fit only for royalty, but in truth, he was kind of a scrawny computer nerd (not hating on nerds here, because I’m kind of one myself). Thick glasses were perched on a long, hooked nose, from which crazy black eyes flashed like bombs. He wore one of those stupid nerd chic T-shirts with a Star Trek quote on it or something, but I couldn’t read it from a distance. I could, however, tell that Lord Mechanika wore gloves and boots with wires that disappeared from sight, gloves and boots that apparently let him control the mecha itself like it was an extension of his body. It would have been an impressive creation if he wasn’t also a psycho who was trying to kill innocent civilians for no reason.

“Rubberman!” Lord Mechanika shouted, his screechy voice amplified by the speaker where the ‘mouth’ of the mecha would normally be. “Show yourself, you coward! Or are you afraid of the power of Lord Mechanika and his Death Mecha of Doom? Not that I blame you, because this is the most advanced mecha on the planet. Even the US military doesn’t have access to this kind of technology!”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Death Mecha of Doom? Seemed kind of repetitive and melodramatic, but given how he had already wrecked half of Main Street and given both me and Rubberman a run for our money, I should probably take him more seriously. That’s kind of hard to do, though, given how high-pitched his voice is.

Speaking of Rubberman, I glanced at the building tops to see if I could spot him. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see Rubberman anywhere at the moment, but that wasn’t surprising. Rubberman had told me to find cover while he set up a trap to disable Lord Mechanika’s robot, which I was more than happy to do, given how ineffective my laser blasts were against his machine’s tough hide. Even so, I couldn’t help but silently agree with Lord Mechanika, though for different reasons, because the longer it took Rubberman to set up his trap, the more time Lord Mechanika had to cause more property damage and either kill or harm any civilians. Granted, most of the people in the area had either fled or locked themselves inside the safety of nearby homes and businesses, but that didn’t mean much, given how Mechanika’s ‘Death Mecha of Doom’ could easily level a whole skyscraper it wanted. And given how frustrated Lord Mechanika sounded, it would not be long before he began smashing up even more cars and street lamps in an effort to get Rubberman’s attention.

But then, that was basically why Lord Mechanika was doing this stuff in the first place.

According to what I’ve been able to piece together from Lord Mechanika’s partially coherent shouts of rage, he was a normal robotics engineer known as Greg Elliot, who worked for McCoy Robotics, a robotics company with a factory near Golden City. Elliot, however, was also a superhero fan; in particular, he was a fan of my boss, Rubberman, and once tried to get his autograph at some event Rubberman was at, but apparently my boss had rudely ignored him or something.

So Elliot—excuse me, ‘Lord Mechanika’—did the logical thing that any spurned fan would do and built a mecha that wouldn’t look out of place in a mecha anime. Apparently, he’s made it his life mission to destroy Rubberman for the crime of rudely refusing to give him his autograph or something like that.

I know Rubberman always says that most criminals and supervillains tend to be petty megalomaniacs who pull these sorts of stunts just to feel better about themselves, but I didn’t really believe it until today. For that matter, I wondered what Lord Mechanika thought would happen after he beat Rubberman; did he intend to perform the time-honored supervillain tradition of attempting to take over the world?

I shook my head. Focus. I had to focus. Rubberman always told me that I let myself get too distracted sometimes and that being distracted can often get you killed in a fight. I needed to stay behind this car and wait for Rubberman’s signal, a signal I could miss if I wasn’t careful. I would worry about Lord Mechanika’s terrible motivations for becoming a supervillain later.

Pulling my head back behind the car, I was prepared to keep an eye out for Rubberman’s signal when a sudden shriek of terror caused me to look around the car again.

Damn it. Lord Mechanika held in his right mecha hand a thin, dark-haired teenage girl who was probably my age. She was pretty cute, I gotta admit, almost elf-like in her prettiness, but I didn’t know where he had gotten her from, given how the street was supposedly evacuated when Mechanika attacked. Perhaps she accidentally wandered into the street or something; not that it really mattered, given how Lord Mechanika could easily squash her between the fingers of his mech like a bug. The girl, to her credit, was struggling to free herself, but it was pretty obvious that she was completely at Mechanika’s mercy.

“Rubberman!” Lord Mechanika shouted, waving the girl above his mecha’s head suddenly. “See this innocent, sweet girl I have here? Unless you come out and fight me like a man, I’ll squeeze her until she pops like a balloon. And I’m not bluffing. I wouldn’t hesitate to hurt girls like her, who always choose those dumb jocks over the nerds who run this society in the first place!”

Great. In addition to being a spurned fan, Lord Mechanika was also a loser still hung up by the fact that he had been rejected by some hot girl in high school. I’m starting to think that Rubberman was actually understating just how petty most supervillains and criminals actually are.

Regardless, that girl needed to be rescued. I didn’t see Rubberman anywhere, but I figured that he was too busy setting up his trap to actually save the girl. That was bad, because Lord Mechanika looked like he was definitely going to kill her if Rubberman didn’t show up.

I know that Rubberman told me to stay put, but I couldn’t, in good conscience, continue to follow his orders if that meant letting an innocent person die. Rubberman would probably be angry with me, but I decided I would worry about that later after the girl was saved.

I dashed out from behind the car and, stopping next to a street lamp, shouted, “Hey, Elliot! Put the girl down now or else!”

Lord Mechanika looked at me and growled. “You’re not Rubberman. You’re just his stupid sidekick. What, is Rubberman so afraid of getting his pretty costume dirty that he’s sending teenagers to deal with me?”

I bit my lower lip. “It doesn’t matter. I said, put the girl down now or else.”

“Or else what?” said Lord Mechanika. He chuckled. “Look, kid, I know that your eye beams can’t hurt my machine, so fighting me would just be a waste of time. Why don’t you go back home and do your homework or something?”

“Sorry, but I can’t just let freaks like you harm innocent girls like her,” I said. “I mean, I know you were probably rejected by a girl like her in high school or something like that, but threatening to kill an innocent teenage girl doesn’t make you look like a big, bad supervillain. It just makes you look like a pathetic loser, to be frank.”

Lord Mechanika’s eyes widened in rage behind his glasses. “Loser? I’ll show you who’s a loser! Die!”

Lord Mechanika’s shoulder machine guns suddenly swiveled toward me. I dove back behind the overturned sedan I had been behind just moments before. A volley of bullets struck the roof of the car, creating a deafening sound of lead clashing against metal, but luckily none of the bullets managed to pierce the car. Still, Lord Mechanika probably hated me even more than Rubberman right now, which meant that he probably wasn’t going to stop until I was blasted into tiny little pieces. Mechanika may have been a loser, but he was a loser with a robot equipped with shoulder machine guns and carrying a giant sword, which meant that he was both more dangerous and yet somehow more pathetic than he normally would have been. I was starting to regret pissing him off.

A large shadow suddenly appeared over me and I looked up in time to see Lord Mechanika’s huge sword coming down toward me. With a yelp, I rolled forward, just barely avoiding the huge sword, which slashed through the sedan as easily as butter. Rolling back to my feet, I looked up at Lord Mechanika’s mech and fired twin laser blasts at the machine, which were amplified by my helmet’s refracted glass visor.

Unfortunately, the lasers only glanced off the side of the mech, which Lord Mechanika did not even seem to notice. His mecha turned to face me, raising the sword above its head while the girl in its other hand continued to scream her head off. Despite its size, the mecha was fast and it brought down its sword on me again, this time faster than I could dodge.

So I unleashed a powerful, continuous blast of lasers at the sword. The lasers struck the sword dead on and, to my surprise, actually cut through it, splitting the blade cleanly in half. The top half went flying off in a random direction, while the lower half remained in Lord Mechanika’s hand, though instead of bringing it down on me, he just stared at it in shock for a moment, like he could not believe that his sword was broken.

But then Lord Mechanika threw the lower half of sword away and snatched me up and lifted me up into the air. I began beating on the huge mech’s fist, but even after a month of heavy training with Rubberman, my own fists were useless against the iron grip of Mechanika. And when he squeezed me hard enough that I thought I heard something snap, I gave up. The girl had given up, too; she was not screaming, but instead whimpering in fear. And, despite how terrible the situation was, I couldn’t help but notice how cute she was.

“Rubberman!” Lord Mechanika bellowed, his voice even louder up close. “I have your stupid sidekick! If you don’t come out and face me like a man, I will crush him and the girl like soda cans!”