|1| Hidden Fire |Max Thunderman|

|VIII|

|HiddenVille High School,

Three Weeks Later|

Julia had been avoiding the Thunderman twins for the better part of the last three weeks and they were being irritating to no end, as Julia caught them following her everywhere throughout the school and Max's phone calls and texts, were becoming more and more irritating the longer that they kept on coming for.

Julia found Max harder to ignore in general, since she missed him more than she was willing to admit to anyone but when it came to ignoring people at school, Phoebe was the much harder of the twins, the harder one to deal with. Phoebe was in many of Julia's classes and it was getting all too irritating for Julia, since Phoebe kept trying to pair up with her for study groups and all of the group projects that their class was assigned.

"For this week's project, it will count as 45% of your final grade in this course." Their teacher intoned and Julia looked up, as she knew that she was falling behind a little bit, since her taking care of her father had gotten harder to deal with over the last few weeks and she had much less time for homework, during the periods of the year when things got significantly harder for her dad and her. "You must build a miniature rocket. It can be anywhere in length from a foot to 5. But you must build it from nothing but scrap metal and old engines. Today, your challenge is the junkyard." The teacher declared and Julia let her head bang down to hit the desk, as she groaned when she felt a familiar tap on her shoulder.

"So, my place or yours?" Phoebe asked and Julia sighed, as the paper and pencils came out, the graph paper and the markers soon followed, as the engineers got to work.

|Thunderman House,

A few hours later|

"Mom! Dad! Max! I'm home!" Phoebe called out and Max groaned in annoyance, as he came storming up the stairs from his lair.

"I'm not helping you with any of your stupid school projects again." Max grumbled and Julia walked into the house, as she slung her backpack over her shoulders and Max raised his eyebrows at her. "On second thought, what do you need?" He questioned, suddenly sounding interested.

"We are supposed to be building a rocket. Not having a therapy session." Julia snapped at the twins, who had been waiting for her to say something for almost an hour, as she had been writing down ideas for color combinations, logos, and structural ideas. She was also sketching out what they would need for all of these things. "I'm not taking none of the credit, if you try to pull a fast one on me Phoebe." She pointed out and Phoebe groaned.

"All right then... goodbye!" Phoebe scrambled up the slide and she swiftly managed to hit the emergency lock button on Max's lair entrance, which shut off all ways in or out, coming from in the lair itself.

"Phoebe, what the hell??" Julia shouted, but it was too late and the lockdown had been initiated, though the emergency self-destruct button on the table had not been pushed yet, thank the supers. "Did you put her up to this?" She snapped at Max immediately, who was putting on a good show of looking around to try and override it.

"No, I didn't. Why would I ever want to be trapped down in my own space, with a person that really, really hates me?" Max didn't look up from the work bench to see Julia flinch at his chosen words.

"Is there any way to override it?" Julia asked, forcing her voice to turn into a calm that came after a raging storm. A tone that Julia didn't use often, but when she did, there was always a real and truthfully good reason for it.

"No. I set the timer on it for 12 hours and there is no way to override it. It is on my computer clock's timer and of course, I can't override it until it is over." Max said and suddenly sparks were beginning to fly from the breaker in the wall. "Oh, come on, no! No, no, no!" Max was pleading as out of nowhere, the power went out and Max groaned. "Where are you?" He asked and looked around in the darkness, as he tried to pinpoint exactly where Julia was standing in the darkness.