Chapter 4 – Currying Favor

She got home and found her dad finishing dinner. He said, “It’s curry.” She just rolled her eyes.

Years ago, back when she was still trying to keep her powers a secret, her mom had made a curry with too much curry powder, and some other stuff that wasn’t in the recipe because she was trying to use up some leftovers and stuff. And it had reacted with Alex’s GC-161 enhanced body. Alex had super-strength on and off for like eighteen hours before it faded away — at the worst possible time, naturally. And so, ever since she and Annie had come clean about everything that had happened, her dad would cook curry for dinner once in a while, with careful measuring of every ingredient, in an attempt to give her super-strength again. It hadn’t ever worked, but there was always a chance it might someday, and anyway her dad’s curry was totally better than the gloppy stuff her mom made that first time. After making it about forty times or so, he was really getting good at it.

Her mom had gone back to school on top of everything else, and was just finishing up her Master’s Degree. So they ate late dinners, because whoever was cooking needed time to get home and then cook stuff. And whoever cooked got out of the other tasks. One someone else cleaned up in the kitchen after dinner, and the other someone else did some house cleaning and laundry.

And one of the rules was the cook had to make enough for lunches the next day or two or three, even if Ray was coming over for dinner, because Ray ate like a horse. And then in the morning, everyone did their own breakfast and made their own lunch and cleaned up after themselves. It worked way better than Alex expected when her folks had laid out the rules, but she had to admit that was mainly because she was doing her fair share of the housework. Okay, she could get the housework done about ten times faster than her dad, and at least four times as fast as her mom, because she did it with her telekinesis. She could dust with the feather duster, and pick up stuff to put away where it was supposed to go, and vacuum even under the chairs, all at the same time. She could even lift the chairs and vacuum under them and put them back without stopping the vacuuming. She just couldn’t lift the hide-a-bed couch in the den, because it was way over two hundred pounds. She had to tilt it up on its back feet with her telekinesis.

Her dad did all the yardwork on weekend afternoons, and what he couldn’t get done then, he hired some teenaged guys she knew to do it for him. Unless it was something she could do really easy, like take down a limb forty feet in the air, or clean the gutters. She’d done both in the past six months, and both times she did it late at night when there weren’t any lights on and no one would see her. The limb? She just flew up into the tree and used her dad’s saw to cut off the broken limb. The gutters? She just went silvery, went up a downspout, and cruised through the gutters, shoving everything over the edge where her dad could pick it up the next day. Okay, she had to wash her hair like twice after that, to get the grit from the asphalt shingles out. Maybe next time, she’d put on a swim cap first and see if that helped.

And since they all had cars, they divided up the family errands based on where the errand was. Like the dry cleaner was pretty much on the way to her school, so Alex would take the dry cleaning and pick it up. And the grocery store mom liked was on the way to the university, so Mom did the grocery shopping. And the drugstore was near the plant, so Dad did that shopping. And if they wanted doughnuts, it was Alex’s task. Alex had to admit it worked pretty well so far. Even if there had been that one problem when Alex had to rush off in the middle of things to go stop one of the Atron super-crooks again. She totally forgot about the dry cleaning, and her dad really needed his good pinstriped suit for an important meeting the next day. Oops.

So when she saw that her dad was cooking and her mom was setting the table, she went ahead and started some laundry. The laundry really wasn’t that bad. Most of the stuff her mom and dad wore during the day ended up going to the dry cleaner, and she usually wore her jeans for three or four days before washing them unless they got stinky, because she read on the internet you shouldn’t over-wash jeans. So with Annie not around, they were only doing maybe three or four loads of laundry a week. And now that Mom had Dad trained on sorting his clothes right, and putting everything in the right holders in the laundry room, laundry was really simple.

She still had to check her dad’s pockets, though. He left pens and notes and all kinds of stuff in his pockets. Ink pens. Eww. That would be awful. Once he even left his wallet in his pants!

Ray knocked on the kitchen door and walked in, and her dad put him to work dishing up the rice while her dad sliced the beef. Once she had the washing machine going, she came in and gave Ray a huge hug.

Ray grinned. “Curry night again, huh?” He knew that always meant testing Alex’s strength an hour after dinner, and the next morning.

Her dad smiled. “That’s right, Ray. Some day we may be able to recreate the formula. I am a little worried about the effect on Alex’s skeletal structure and ligaments, but we can monitor the process and make sure she’s healthy.”

Her mom said, “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to get it right, because I used the beef broth that was going to go bad soon, and that was homemade.”

Her dad nodded. “There may have been mold spores in the broth, or related precursor biochemicals. They may have been the important ingredients. We just don’t know.”

She sighed. It was just a good thing she liked her dad’s curry, because having to eat gloppy yuck a couple times a month wouldn’t be fun.

Ray grinned. “So, what’s up? I spent half an hour on the school computer today, and I didn’t find anybody running around showing off superpowers anywhere, and you know it ought to be all over YouTube if someone’s doing it. But I did find some of Alex’s names. They may even be the right people. There’s a Captain Samantha Carter, Ph.D., who’s at NASA and is probably going to be going up on the next shuttle flight. And there’s a Willow Rosenberg who’s a computer guru and she’s famous for writing a lot of cool freeware and shareware programs. She’s in the news right now because Oracle’s trying to buy out her company for this new data hyperlinking software she wrote. Don’t have anything on anybody else.”

Alex looked at the pictures Ray had printed off with the news articles. That was definitely Sam and Willow. This Sam had slightly longer hair and used more eye makeup, but otherwise it was exactly her. And this Willow’s hair was a less vibrant red, and she looked a lot less self-assured in the picture. But maybe she just got caught by surprise. Or maybe the Willow she knew was a lot more confident because she was an all-powerful witch who was so awesome she could beat the snot out of a real hellgod.

She said, “Ray, this is great. You found them!”

Her dad said, “But if they’re a successful astronaut and a computer company CEO, they wouldn’t be interested in the kinds of things your Sam and Willow want to do.”

“Yeah. Maybe not.” Willow had said she used to be shy and nervous and super-nerdy and not confident at all. If this Willow was like that, she might not be any help. And if this Sam was an important astronaut in the public eye, there was no way Alex could even go talk with her and ask her … what? The things that made her Sam so awesome — besides her brains — were things that this Sam hadn’t gone through. And how could Alex convince either of them to help her out?

Her mom said, “Let’s find out more about these two, and track down the others on your list, and we’ll see how things go. I think we have time.”

“Okay,” she shrugged.

Her mom said, “I have news, too! My major professor really liked my latest chapter. So I think I can finish my Master’s thesis after finals, so I can graduate summer term.”

Her dad said, “That’s great, honey! I’m so proud of you!” Her dad really was a nice guy. Maybe that was what made Ray so special, too.

She said, “Me, too, Mom. This is great.” She pretended to frown. “Except I’ll be the only person in the family who doesn’t have a graduate degree. Annie’ll probably end up with like six or seven.”

Her mom asked, “Does Aunt Ashley have a graduate degree?” Alex shook her head no. “And isn’t she still great?” She nodded, naturally. Even if Aunt Ashley still hadn’t been able to use her flight miles as a flight attendant to take Alex to Paris, but now Aunt Ashley was talking about doing it as a graduation present, which would be pretty awesome.

Her dad said, “There are lots of fields where it doesn’t make a ton of sense to insist on having a graduate degree. You’re not going to become a biochemist, are you?”

She smiled and said, “No. I’ve been thinking about what my team told me, and I think I should try to become a photojournalist.”

Her dad frowned. “Honey, that’s a really hard profession to break into.”

Her mom agreed, “Even with your powers. You’ll have to really work hard to learn how to capture what you want to express with just a camera.”

Ray said, “I think it’s genius. Think about it. She can have a job that pays her to go around and investigate crooks and check out disasters, so she can save people. She could go anywhere, and what would she need besides a digital camera and extra batteries and maybe one of those satellite phones so she could send pictures back to headquarters?”

“A video camera, so she could get video footage of interesting things,” her mom said.

“Maybe more than one camera. And some special features for the cameras, like timers or remote controls. Maybe a special infrared camera, or something,” her dad thought out loud.

Her mom said, “You know, you already have a really solid background for this. Photographer for your junior high and senior high papers, one of the photographers for your yearbooks, too, photography editor for the papers and the yearbook, and you’re going to be editor of the yearbook. Annie never had extracurriculars like yours. And there are lots of really good schools for journalism. We should look into schools that have good training for photojournalists.”

Ray said, “And you ought to get your superhero costume set up the way you want, and then take some pictures of yourself in action, and sell ’em to the local newspapers.”

She cringed. “I’m not good at selling stuff to people. Waitressing isn’t hard, but …”

Ray said, “So get Louis to do the hard sell for you. His father’s great at it.”

Her mom finished chewing a big bite of beef and said, “That’s a really good idea. Which reminds me. I picked up the wig and the padded bra. Now Alex, are you sure you need a padded bra?”

Alex nodded. “Two reasons why. One, I want to make sure that no one thinks Superhero Girl could be me. And if she’s stacked like Libby or Miranda, no one will believe it’s me. Same deal with the wig. And two, Jaime had a really good idea. Instead of plain old padding inside the bra, a kinetic gel, so when I get hit where it hurts, I’ll have built-in protection.”

Her dad looked at the ceiling and thought out loud. “We make a kinetic gel like that, and Dupont makes one that they use for high-impact protection, like around black boxes in aircraft.”

Alex said, “I’m going to have Annie make me kinetic gel protection for inside my bra, and also a strip an inch or so wide and maybe six inches long, for the next time one of Danielle’s super-thugs kicks me in the crotch. That last time really hurt.”

Her mom grimaced, but both of the guys pretty much clamped their knees together and guarded their crotch, like they were the ones getting hit. Guys were so weird.

Her dad caught her mom glaring at him, so he sat up straight and said, “After what Alex told us last night, I finally got that website started today.”

Her dad was now the Chief Technical Officer of Paradise Valley Chemical. The company had a really bad six months right after the Danielle Atron scandal broke, and they just about went bankrupt. But the chemists put their heads together and saved the day. They hired that guy Dr. Johns from the FDA to be their new CEO, and that made everyone sit up and notice. Because Dr. Johns was the guy who wanted to stop GC-161 from going forward, and Danielle Atron and some jerk named Griffin drugged Johns and made it look like he’d gone crazy. And Dr. Johns was really famous in the pharmaceuticals world and had lots of guys who listened to him. And Dr. Johns was still known for being really strict about doing all the testing you needed to do. So people all over the country started acting like the plant was going to be trustworthy again.

And then there was the whole ‘pollution dumping’ thing that Danielle Atron hadn’t cared about. But her dad’s pal Scooter, who was now the Head of R&D for the company, which was her dad’s old job, figured out the perfect solution. He got two mega-million-dollar grants from the Environmental Protection Agency to study the problem and figure out the best ways to clean up the pollution from Danielle’s mess. And he set up a separate Hazardous Waste Reclamation Team at the plant, and they put their fellow chemist Tom in charge of it, and the EPA was really happy with the first studies they did, and they might even be able to get even more money from the EPA to do the clean-ups.

Tom and his wife Sally were over for dinner a couple months ago, and he told her dad at the dinner table that they thought they could pump a version of her dad’s GC-161 antidote into the contaminated areas and clean it up without doing four billion dollars worth of digging and ‘waste recovery’ work. And if that worked, they might be able to figure out how to do the same kind of thing for some other EPA Superfund sites and make the plant hundreds of millions of dollars as hazardous waste recovery experts. Her dad thought it was pretty much justice that everybody in the valley was getting rewarded for cleaning up the messes Danielle made of everything.

Alex was really happy things were going so great at the plant. Dr. Johns was really nice. And her dad’s friend Edward had a breakthrough on the foot odor problem, and they were moving that through proper FDA protocols even if they now had Dr. Johns and a couple of FDA investigators watching over everyone’s shoulders constantly so other people would trust their results. Which was Danielle’s fault, too. And her dad said Wayne was working on a new face-cream thing. And everyone in town said that no one wanted to think about making a new diet drug, after the GC-161 fiasco.

Her mom said, “The website?”

Her dad said, “You know, the one I was talking with Scooter about last year, but we were too busy? We’re calling it ‘Raising the Whistle’ because we want scientists all over the world to have a place to come and talk to other scientists about whether there’s unethical or even dangerous things being done at their labs, and whether they need to blow the whistle on their bosses, and who to contact about those kinds of problems. After all, we stood around not knowing how bad things were, and not knowing we needed to go to the FDA and the FBI, and in the end, you know who went to the FDA’s security office? Dave Watt.”

“The dopey guy who used to be the janitor?” her mom asked.

“Mom!” she fussed. “He’s nice! And he’s a policeman now. And he figured out it was me, a long, long time ago, and he never told anybody, even when Danielle was being really horrible to him.”

Her dad said, “I really underestimated him. Apparently, so did Danielle and Lars. All the time they were using him for underhanded purposes, he was apparently going along with their plans, and gathering secret data, and passing it on to me, so I could stop her. In the end, it was him. He went to the FDA investigators about Danielle, and he got photos of us being kidnapped and dragged into the plant so he could get us help … He really saved the day.”

Alex said, “And he knows Superhero Girl is me. And he hasn’t told anyone. He’s like … Well, Selina told me her boyfriend, the Batman guy, had a guy in the police who trusted Batman and alerted him when stuff was going down, and even signaled him in emergencies. And he was the commissioner of police in their city. Dave is sort of like my own Commissioner Gordon.”

Her dad said, “Well, the important thing is we can trust Dave. And with my website up, worried scientists all over the world now have a place to turn.”

Her mom got up to put away leftovers and put pans to soak. “And I picked up a pound cake and cherry topping …” She slipped into her ‘teasing’ voice. “Because Alex probably only ate five or ten doughnuts at Gloria’s and she needs to keep her strength up.”

“Mom!”

A/N: Oracle is a real database software company, in our universe anyway. Their name is used without permission. The other use of the name — as Barbara Gordon’s alias — is covered by the chapter 1 disclaimers.

 
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