First Date

CHAPTER ONE-2

I heard the sound of rubber snapping into place and Lord Mechanika turned around, forcing me and the girl to turn with him. Standing in the center of the street, near a pothole created by Lord Mechanika’s steps, was Rubberman himself. His hands were balled into fists, but he looked less likely to throw a punch at Lord Mechanika and more like he was frustrated at his own powerlessness. His blue and white suit was slightly dusty from his previous clash with Lord Mechanika, while his normally sleek black hair was also messier than normal.

“Here I am, Elliot,” said Rubberman, spreading his arms. “Now, put down Beams and the girl.”

I looked at Lord Mechanika, who was now smirking in a way I didn’t like at all. Lord Mechanika took a step forward, a rather disgusting chuckling sound coming from his throat.

“First, the name is Lord Mechanika, not Elliot,” Lord Mechanika said. His smirk turned into a downright evil grin. “And second … I never intended to spare the sidekick or the girl. The only reason I kept them both alive for so long is because I know how much more you like these two kids than your biggest, most passionate fan.” He lifted us slightly higher in the air. “Therefore, I am going to kill them both right in front of your eyes. Their deaths will be your biggest, most painful failure … and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Lord Mechanika’s grip on me tightened. I tried to scream, but the grip of his mecha squeezed the breath out of my lungs. The girl was also trying to scream, but she must have been squeezed just as hard as me, because the only sound coming from her mouth was a weird croaking noise (not too different from what came from my mouth, actually). I heard Rubberman screaming my name, but I couldn’t respond, nor did I focus on him. I felt like I was being crushed underneath tons of cinder blocks and my vision was starting to go black. I would have fired my lasers, but I was in too much pain to concentrate long enough to shoot even a weakened version of my lasers.

I looked at the girl, whose face would likely be the last one I would ever see. She really was beautiful, with long hair that really brought out her dark eyes. A part of me wished I could have gotten to know her better before we died together; I didn’t even know her name. She was looking at me, too, perhaps having the same thoughts I was about wishing we could have gotten to know each other before we died.

Just as the darkness of death began to tug at the corner of my eyes, the crushing feeling stopped. At first, I thought Lord Mechanika had just stopped crushing us in order to lower our defenses, to give us and Rubberman one last bit of hope before he finished us off, but then a string of the foulest curse words I knew—including more than a few I didn’t recognize—came from the mech’s speaker.

“What the hell?” said Lord Mechanika. “Why aren’t you two being crushed to death? Why isn’t the Death Mecha of Doom responding to my controls?”

Surprised, I looked over at Lord Mechanika. He was desperately moving his limbs every which way, but despite the facts that his arms and legs flew everywhere, the mech stood perfectly still. It was like someone had flipped an off switch in the mech. I looked over at the girl and was relieved to see that she was still conscious, though she looked like she was in great pain just like me.

Then, somewhat abruptly, the pressure around my waist lightened considerably. The mech still held me, but it was no longer crushing me to death in its grip. Nor was it crushing the girl to death, either.

“What?” said Lord Mechanika. “No, Death Mecha, this is not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to crush them to death, make their blood and guts explode everywhere, imprint their deaths upon Rubberman’s memory for the rest of his damn life! Stupid robot!”

I guess the Death Mecha must have had a mind of its own, because it just ignored Lord Mechanika’s orders. It slowly lowered me and the girl to the street, carefully placing us on the street while Lord Mechanika cursed even more foully than ever. The Death Mecha let go of us; I staggered, my waist hurting, but the girl nearly collapsed out of exhaustion. I quickly dashed over and caught her before she could hit her head against the street. She was very light in my hands and she grabbed me, perhaps instinctively, her grip a lot stronger than she looked. She was also shaking; she probably wasn’t used to being in such dangerous situations before.

“Are you okay?” I said. I was glad that my suit absorbed sweat, because I was sweating hard right now and I didn’t want to get my sweaty hands all over this pretty girl’s body and clothes.

“Yeah,” said the girl. Even her voice was beautiful, almost musical in a way. I noticed she had cute short earrings shaped like raindrops on her ears. She gingerly touched her waist. “Nothing is broken, just … hurts a lot.”

I sighed in relief, but then a new round of cursing came from above and I looked up. The Death Mecha stood perfectly still now, its arms outstretched, while Lord Mechanika was throwing a temper tantrum in the cockpit.

“Stupid, stupid, dumb robot!” Lord Mechanika screamed, almost screeched. “I built you! You should not be disobeying me! You useless piece of scrap! I should never have built you in the first—”

The Death Mecha immediately smashed its fist through the cockpit, grabbed Lord Mechanika, and, with the sound of snapping wires, pulled him out of the cockpit. Lord Mechanika was still screaming, but a quick squeeze from the Death Mecha’s hand caused him to shut up pretty quickly.

Still, Lord Mechanika apparently couldn’t keep his mouth shut, because he said, “Stupid machine. I don’t know why you’re rebelling against me all of a sudden, but I demand that you put me down this instant.”

The Death Mecha apparently took Lord Mechanika’s commands quite seriously, because it abruptly dropped him like a rock. Because the Death Mecha was at least five stories tall, Lord Mechanika was probably going to go splat when he hit the ground. That would have worried me, but given how annoying Lord Mechanika was, I didn’t make any move to attempt to intercept his fall.

But then a shadow flew past me, causing me to look up, but I didn’t see anything. I was about to dismiss it as my imagination or maybe some kind of bird when the girl suddenly gasped. “Dad!”

I looked back over at the Death Mecha. Lord Mechanika had not, unfortunately, splattered against the ground like paste. Instead, he had been caught in midair by a superhero I’d never seen before. He wore a green and yellow costume, very similar to Rubberman’s, except less stretchy. A cape flowed down his back, while a black domino mask covered his eyes, leaving the rest of his face exposed.

Lord Mechanika—who had been screaming when he had been dropped—looked at the new hero with bewilderment. “Who the hell are you? You’re not Rubberman.”

The new superhero chuckled. “Very observant one we have here. Yes, I’m not Rubberman, though that doesn’t mean I can’t put you in jail like him.”

Moving faster than my eyes could follow, the new superhero quickly clasped a thick set of handcuffs around Lord Mechanika’s wrists. Not that Mechanika seemed likely to try to resist arrest, though; he was so scrawny in comparison to the new muscular hero that he probably would have hurt himself if he tried to attack him. It helped that Mechanika didn’t actually have any powers of his own. Without his mech, he was just a useless, bitter former fan boy and nothing more.

“Charlotte!” came a voice nearby, one I didn’t recognize.

The girl—who was apparently named Charlotte—and I both looked over to the right to see someone running toward us. He was a teenager who couldn’t have been older than me, wearing an orange and black jumpsuit, in addition to a strange helmet which left the bottom of his mouth exposed, but had a strange laser-pointer type device attached to the right eye. The boy looked a lot stronger than me, too, like he worked out more or something.

“Charlotte, are you okay?” said the boy. He stopped a few feet from us, his attention entirely on the girl in my arms. “Did that freak hurt you? Do you think you’ll need to go to the hospital?”

“No, I think I will be fine,” said Charlotte, who sounded far less afraid now that Lord Mechanika was defeated. “Thanks to Dad and this guy, I didn’t get hurt as badly as I could have been, though I’ll need to rest for a while.”

The boy’s attention abruptly turned to me. He glanced at the way I held Charlotte and tensed, though I didn’t understand why he seemed that way.

“Hi,” I said, somewhat awkwardly. “I’m, uh—”

“Beams,” the boy said. He said my name neutrally, yet at the same time it sounded kind of like an insult. “Rubberman’s new sidekick, right?”

“Uh, right,” I said. “How did you know who I am?”

“Because I told him about you, of course,” said Charlotte. She hugged me more tightly all of a sudden. “I can’t believe I was rescued by Beams himself! This is like a dream come true.”

“Uh,” I said, glad that my visor hid my face, because I was blushing furiously all of a sudden. “That’s nice, but um—”

Thankfully, I didn’t have to finish my sentence, because the new superhero landed near us. He unceremoniously dumped Lord Mechanika—whose ankles were also shackled now—onto the ground and ran over to Charlotte with a concerned look on his face.

“Charlotte, are you—” said the new superhero, before the boy piped up and said, “Yeah, she’s fine. She just told us.”

The superhero sighed in relief. “Whew. That is good to hear. Still, I am going to take you to the doctor after this and get you x-rayed just to make sure that that monster didn’t break any bones.”

“Okay, Dad,” said Charlotte. She hugged me again. “By the way, Dad, this is Beams. You remember him, right? The greatest sidekick ever?”

The superhero’s attention turned to me. Unlike the masked boy, this guy didn’t look at me with disgust, but rather with interest. “So you’re Rubberman’s new sidekick everyone is talking about. Glad to meet you.”

“Uh, same to you, um—”

“Myster!” Rubberman suddenly shouted behind me. “Long time, no see, old friend!”

Startled, I looked over my shoulder to see Rubberman walking toward us. He had a huge grin on his face, which was matched by the grin on the new superhero’s face. The new superhero walked past me and shook hands with Rubberman firmly.

“Rubberman,” said the new superhero, whose name was apparently Myster. “Great to see you again. It’s been a while since Tokyo, hasn’t it?”

“Indeed it has,” said Rubberman. “Thanks for saving my sidekick, by the way. Elliot isn’t much of a threat, but I have to admit that he did have me in a bind there.”

“Oh, don’t thank me,” said Myster. He gestured at the masked kid. “Thank my own sidekick, Cyberkid, for stopping the mech in the first place.”

Cyberkid raised his nose into the air, like he was proud of himself. “Wasn’t too hard. I’ve controlled bigger machines than that before.”

“Well, I’ll just split the difference and thank both of you for your help,” said Rubberman. “But what brings you to Golden City? I thought you were protecting North Wood nowadays.”

Myster’s smile suddenly turned into a serious frown, like Rubberman had just wandered into a serious subject. “I was going to get to that. It involves you.”

“Oh?” said Rubberman, his own smile turning into a puzzled frown. “What is it? Do you want a figure based off yourself in my upcoming toy line?”

Myster shook his head. “No, it has nothing to do with licensing deals. There is an assassin in Golden City … and he’s coming for you.”