If anyone at the university knew what I was doing, they’d probably have me arrested… Or very possibly committed.
Not only did I lack the appropriate ethics documents for my experiments, I was also using (or more, misusing) very expensive equipment in some truly appalling ways.
But it was worth it. I was going to take revenge on everyone who’d ever laughed at me-on those jocks who pushed me into lockers and those rich kids who would make fun of my clothes. I was going to make the grant committees rue the day that they rejected my proposals, was going to make the Ivy League wish that they had accepted me for my undergraduate. I was going to be a supervillain, dammit, and I would be feared by all.
But superpowers weren’t exactly easy to get. I’d handled dangerous organic solvents, walked around reactors without hazmat suits, I’d even spent hours in the radiation labs. I didn’t care if it was telepathy, flight, metal controlling… I just wanted superpowers. Except for Aquaman’s powers. To hell with Aquaman.
I allowed myself a soft, nefarious laugh as I added the last drop of Hydrogen Peroxide to my latest mixture. A truly menacing laugh was a key part of being a supervillian, and practice, as they say, makes perfect.
The concoction in the beaker in front of me bubbled gently, catching and reflecting the sunlight slanting in through the windows. My lab was immaculately clean, as usual- the benches all polished and dusted, the floor well-swept. My failed trials were tucked into their fume hoods against the opposite wall. I took a second look to make sure that the hoods were on- no point repeating Dr. Wong’s mistake from last week.
The silence of the lab was broken by gentle splashes as my many tadpoles jumped and swam around their tanks. Tadpoles were wonderful research animals- this species was somewhat translucent which made internal examinations easier. I made a face as I realized that my current stores were getting low- the world of illegal pet trading was hardly a pleasant one.
I turned on the hotplate under my latest chemical solution, pulling on a gas mask just in case. The liquid began to boil almost immediately and I watched with mounting excitement as it turned blue, then green, then flashed a beautiful pink. It stuck to the inside of the pipette as I drew a small volume up, dropping it into the tadpole tank.
“Sorry guys,” I muttered, “but the needs of me outweigh the needs of a few slimy baby frogs.”
The chemical sank to the bottom of the tank, forming a perfect, spherical ball. It rested against the glass, wiggling slightly.
Then it adhered itself to the surface… And everything blew up.
I’m not too sure what caused it- maybe the order in which I added the reactants or some environmental factor I forgot to factor in- but I do know that it was not intentional. Scientists don’t agree on many things, but a concept that they will almost unanimously maintain is that labs most certainly should not go boom.
Well, my lab had gone boom- and quite spectacularly too. The shockwave had started in the tank and rippled outwards, catching me and flinging me backwards with a terrifying velocity. I felt the glass shards bounce off my safety goggles and mentally said every prayer I could think of to the great god of chemistry equipment. The fume hoods against the far wall trembled under the force of the explosion and the containers within them tipped over, allowing more of the chemicals to mix.
Another boom, and I was flying in the other direction, and up. Then, almost immediately, falling back down.
A physicist, I’m sure, would have been impressed and more than a little moved by the perfect parabolic arc in which I was flying. They might have even attempted to calculate my velocity, derive the acceleration and turn that into some sort of angular momentum equation. I elected not to do any of these things as my focus was more immediately drawn by the extremely sturdy supporting wall that stood at what would have been the apex of my arc.
The sound of flesh against concrete very closely resembles that of an aluminum baseball bat colliding with a bag of street cats. My scream likely added to the effect.
There was a loud, creaking crash as one of the lab benches fell over. I heard the far-off shriek of a fire alarm, one that was almost immediately accompanied by a spray of water from the roof sprinklers. Now I was sitting in a mushy soup of drywall dust and water, my lab coat stained pink and blue and red, my head ringing and the world spinning around me. Just like last Monday.
As the lab slowly slid back into focus, I was aware of a warm sensation in my chest. It spread slowly outwards, rushing up my arms and into my fingers and I felt my heartbeat speed up. Had I succeeded? Was I becoming… A superhuman?
I fixed my gaze on a somehow-unbroken graduated cylinder. I would make it move. Just with the power of my mind, I would make it…
I tried to raise my arm and was immediately met by a flash of pain so intense that it left me curled up in the fetal position, screaming out a string of multilingual curses. Apparently I’d broken something. Perhaps several somethings. No superpowers yet.
The drywall mush had now gotten into my hair. And my mouth. I spat it out, tried to move again, screamed some more and might have cried a little. You can hardly blame me, considering the day I’d had.
I heard the unmistakable tinkle of breaking glassware- the one that haunted every scientists’ nightmare- and lifted my head just in time to see the graduated cylinder plummet to the ground. Its shards were mingling with the ash and water and potentially toxic chemicals that I was now practically bathing in.
If this doesn’t give me superpowers, nothing will.
The glass shards trembled slightly, making a high pitched keening that made the fillings in my teeth ache. They rose into the air, spinning around each other before knitting back together into a complete cylinder that landed gently on what remained of my lab bench. I watched wide-eyed as the water from the ground surged upwards, dropping neatly into the newly-formed container.
And then, just as I was convinced that maybe… Just maybe I had actually succeeded, I saw something else.
A tadpole.
Or more specifically, a levitating tadpole. One with the apparent ability to live outside of a water source and (based on my current observations) a limited amount of telekinesis.
The tadpole glanced (can tadpoles glance?) at me and I swear the little bastard was radiating an aura of smugness.
I’d made a superpowered tadpole. Well, wasn’t that just typical?
I needed to see it more closely. I needed to study it. I tried to push myself upright, reaching for the cylinder. I didn’t get very far before a new flood of agony rushed through me and my brain made the very wise decision to run as far away from the pain as possible. The shadows from the corners of the room seemed to rush inwards and upwards, filling my head with a warm, dark feeling.
I saw the super-tadpole swoop gracefully towards the recently-repaired cylinder, its little body making an audible plop as it entered the water. Then the darkness grabbed my brain and twisted and everything seemed to fall away.
~
“Dr. Ruth? Are you alright?”
The fact that I could hear a heart monitor beeping and could smell the too-clean air of a hospital told me that I most definitely was not alright. Alive, maybe, but not alright.
“It’s a miracle, really,” continued the voice, which I now recognized as belonging to the Dean of Science- my boss. “Your lab was completely blown to bits, but-”
“The tadpole?” I croaked out, grasping at his sleeve desperately, “Did the tadpole survive?”
A mix of pity and concern flitted across his greying face. “Um… Yes. A tadpole was found swimming in a cylinder on one of the surviving benches-”
I let out an audible sigh of relief. If the tadpole survived, I could use it to continue my work.
“- but are you sure you didn’t hit your head, Dr. Ruth? Or breathe in a gas of some sort?”
I beamed widely at him and I saw something akin to panic register in his blue eyes.
“Erhm… I should let you rest. I just came here to inform you that the Hazmat team happened to test the residue that we found in a broken beaker and… It appears to be a viable treatment for cancer.”
“Oh you’ve gotta be kidding me.” I muttered.
“I’m sorry?”
I coughed, “I mean, ‘I just had an epiphany.’”
“Oh,” he smiled brightly, “I just wanted to come and personally thank you for your amazing work and the lengths to which you are willing to go to improve the plight of humankind. You are a true asset to the university and I look forward to having you back in the lab. There may even be a Nobel Prize in your future!”
I smiled painfully, the expression demented enough to make him take a step back. “Just doing my job.”
Some supervillain I was shaping up to be.
~
“Alright then, Clark,” I leaned down, gently tapping the glass with a fingernail, “let’s try this again.”
Clark- who I’d recently found out was, in fact, female- glared at me through the glass. I took a hurried step back, slotting down the mirrored shields just as she turned on her laser vision. That particular ability had kicked in sometime between our tenth and eleventh trials. It had taken me hours to mop up afterwards.
“Nice try,” I muttered, feeling a small amount of satisfaction as Clark hurriedly dodged her own reflected laser beams, “but I’m on to you.”
I leaned my pipette against the Nobel medal box sitting on the edge of the bench, right next to the NASA coffee cup and a balled up letter from the Prime Minister. A congratulatory plaque from the Canadian Cancer society was dangling upside down on the far wall, one of my spare lab coats hanging off its corner.
I sighed, dropping some pufferfish venom into the bubbling liquid and taking a quick step backwards as it let off a large cloud of noxious green gas. “Alright, let’s try this.”
I picked up my pipette and drew up a small amount of the newest mixture, dropping a bit into Clark’s tank. Then I rushed to the other side of the lab, ducking behind the reinforced steel barrier I’d had constructed just for this purpose. The front of the barrier was already covered with burn marks and deep dents from previous experiments.
This had better hold.
I stuck my fingers in my ears, screwed my eyes closed and counted to ten.
Nothing happened.
I counted to fifteen.
Nothing happened.
I counted to twenty.
Nothing-
BOOM. The floor of the lab shook as Clark’s newest tank exploded into shards. I sighed heavily, flicking down my face shield and peeking over the top of the barrier. The tank was lying in pieces all over the floor, water dripping from the work surface onto the newly laminated tiles. The bench had actually survived this time- I was getting close. And Clark…
Clark was hovering above the bench, facing me. She’d gotten bigger- significantly so– and as I watched she flew directly into the coffee cup, easily breaking into two. I gulped.
Well now what?
~
“Dr. Ruth…?”
“WHAT?” I screamed, my eye twitching slightly as I brandished the steel-reinforced lacrosse bat. “WHAT IS IT?” The eye twitch had started somewhere between my 15th beaker of coffee and my 20th can of Coke. I’d lost count by now.
“I brought the Hazmat suit you requested, I just… I’m a little concerned about you.” The Dean’s voice drifted in through the door, which I had barricaded with what remained of the spare lab benches. “Your research is incredible- we’re still in awe over your cure for Zika-”
Oh good God don’t remind me.
“- your discovery for greenhouse gas reabsorption,”
I was so sure that one would at least give me flight.
“- the glow in the dark kittens…”
I shrugged slightly. Even I had to admit that was a good one.
“But I am slightly worried about your mental health. Could I perhaps convince you to take a sabbatical-”
Clark rose up from her tank, the dark energy field gathering around her (that showed up after trial 52) and I let out a blood-curdling shriek, sweeping at her with the bat. “BACK! BACK, DEMON!”
I heard the clatter of something falling outside the door and the sound of rapidly retreating footsteps. “Brilliant scientist,” I heard the Dean mutter to someone, “just a bit high strung.”
I swung the net over the tadpole- she was getting closer to a frog now- and wrestled her into another sealed tank. The ruins of her last five enclosures littered the floor around us. I’d given her super strength, flight, certain amounts of dark magic…
And yet, none of the thousands of chemicals worked on me. I’d swallowed them, inhaled them, poured them onto my skin. I’d tried things that I never wanted to think about again and the closest I had gotten to having superpowers was that one concoction that bleached my hair white-blond. I let out a low, animalistic growl, bending to look Clark right in her beady little eyes.
“I’m going to figure out your secrets,” I snarled, “I’m going to rip them right out of your slimy little body… If its the last thing I do.”
~
The sun was blotted out. I heard the screams of students and faculty alike as the abomination rose into the air, its slimy body taking up every last inch of the sky above. Clark’s shadow fell over the university and its buildings, over the rolling green hills, over the duck ponds within which her relatives had once frolicked. My creature rose into the air- her enormous, mottled body staining the very sunlight a sickly green and filling all onlookers with a true, primal terror.
My experiment, it seemed, had failed. After a quick mental calculation of the probability and distribution curves of my current situation, I could only conclude that some higher power was leaning back in their easy chair, eating popcorn and laughing hysterically at me- trapped under the rubble of my lab while I waited for my own research to destroy me.
My research- a giant, flying tadpole. Named Clark.
I lay numbly in the grass where the Chemistry building once stood, before a superpowered tadpole ripped its roof from the walls and the walls from the foundation. I was aware of my colleagues’ screams from beneath the rubble, aware of the pain screaming from every inch of my own body as the stone pressed down on me.
But my gaze was arrested by the creature that bobbed in the air. As I watched, her eyes glowed a demonic red and her body grew darker as the antimatter collected around her.
I resigned myself to my fate. I felt the weight of eternity pressing down on me. I saw the endless darkness stretching out towards a limitless horizon and felt the final calm grip my soul. As Clark the hell-tadpole drew back for her final, mighty blow I found myself confronting my ultimate mortality. And so, I uttered my last words.
“Well, shit.”
Tapestry of Tales 