The Normals

Chapter Twelve: Show Business

 Cindy Cyan stood under a canopy at the beach. The canopy was a small one, held by two of her younger camera crew members, and the sun it was protecting her from was not unbearably bright. But she had recently spent hours at a tanning salon working her skin to a perfect shade of unnatural orange, and she wasn’t about to ruin the hue with exposure to real sun.

“If he doesn’t show in ten minutes, we’re leaving,” she said to one of her lead cameramen. Cindy had an appointment up at the Stuffed Cloud; she was part of a team developing micro-cameras that could nearly replace X-ray vision. It was one of the numerous smaller projects undertaken by the Stuffed Cloud. Like all other volunteers, Cindy didn’t know what the overall Secret Grand Project was, but she had a pretty good guess.

The waves washed up and down on the beach, reminding her of younger, more romantic times. Once she saw a spot out on the water that looked like it could be the Shark, and she hefted the TV camera up onto her shoulder. But it was nothing.

None of the cameramen offered to take the camera from her. Cindy did most of the camera-pointing herself nowadays. It saved viewers the pain of seeing her wrinkle-lined face standing in front of it, but her bouncy cheery voice and enthusiastic warbling—her only selling points left intact—could still be used.

“Look out!” screamed somebody on the beach. Instinctively, Cindy raised the camera. A plume of whirring sand came racing down the shoreline, zigzagging back and forth. It came too close to Cindy, and she and the camera got sprayed with kicked-up grains of sand. 

“My goodness!” she chirped. “Could it be—the one and only—the Dust Devil?” It was a stupid line, as the only Supers she ever pointed her camera at were the Shark’s sidekicks and the Shark, but it was a requisite for all Reporters. “What on Earth is that he’s chasing?”

What James was chasing was a whirring, flattened-out hexagonal bundle of gears and servos with blinking red lights. Cindy recognized that too. She had seen one tested earlier that week on the Stuffed Cloud. It was an improved model of robo-guard components.

A streak of white and gold came down from the sky and zoomed around the moving fountain of sand. It swerved in front of the red-and-black blur that was the Dust Devil, herding the flying mechanism away from the parking lot it was trying to escape to.

“Just look at those twins go!” cried Cindy with an excitement she didn’t feel. The Soaring Angel and the Dust Devil looked great on camera when they were standing still, but when they actually used their powers there was nothing to look at but a pair of colored blurs.

The robo-guard component swerved this way and that, its mechanical senses whirring with a painful noise. Every time it tried to escape from side to side, the flying sand grains of the Dust Devil were there in front of it. The Soaring Angel kept it pinned down from escaping to the sky. It was a pitiful sight.

They played it well, as sidekicks were trained to do. More than once the Dust Devil’s fist shot out of the tornado of sand to punch the robot one way or another. It turned this way and that, confused. And then, in what Cindy chirpily narrated to the camera as “A crowning moment of Super!”, the Dust Devil batted the little robot to the golden blur that was his sister. The Soaring Angel spun around, stretched out her leg, and daintily roundhouse-kicked the machine out over the cerulean-blue waves.

“This is it,” cried Cindy, “this must be it! The moment that the Shark appears!”

For a couple of seconds, it looked like nothing was happening. The robo-component slowed itself down, and then hovered uncertainly over the water. It seemed to focus in on the two sidekicks now still on the shore. With a low humming noise, it started to move again, back in their direction, picking up speed as it went.

Then water erupted around it. Two giant mounds rose out of the waves and formed themselves into jaws, crashing around the tiny piece of metal. Sparks erupted and fizzled inside the giant swirling mouth, searing Cindy’s eyeballs as she tried not to imagine the mechanical death happening in there. Light flashed across the entire beach.

And then a figure emerged, blue and gray and impossibly dry, with his boots planted firmly in the mountain of water. “There he is!” Cindy announced with a hint of true happiness. “The Shark, as heroic as he ever is!”

He held the water-soaked, fizzling robo-component in his hands. He lifted it above his head in a gesture of victory, and Cindy zoomed in the camera even though she didn’t want to. She had to admit that the Shark looked wonderfully superb out there, and she wished that everybody else could see on their TV the same thing she saw, the man she had fallen in love with too many years ago.

The moment passed unexcitingly after that. The Shark made his way to shore, still clutching the dead robo-component so that the camera could see it. He brought it up close. Cindy handed the camera off to one of her crew.

“You caught it!” she squealed when he was close enough, her face frozen into the wide lipsticked smile she always wore for TV. “You are such a hero, Shark!”

“I was only doing what I had to, Cindy,” said the Shark. He turned to the camera. “But I do want to announce to the public that this device I just captured may pose a new, unknown danger. My sidekick the Soaring Angel apprehended it in the air above Fantastic City, and we believe it came from a supervillain’s base hidden somehow in the clouds.”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Cindy, her face shifting into horror.

“Yes,” said the Shark grimly. “I must urge all civilians to be careful when they dare to travel in the airspace above Fantastic City.”

Most of the civilians use the Stuffed Cloud’s helicopters to travel in the airspace above Fantastic City, thought Cindy. And they don’t need to worry about the robo-guards. On screen, she said, “What horrible news! You heard it, Fantastic City, there’s a new threat above our heads. We’ll have a follow-up story at eight o’ clock.” For the two people who were watching this broadcast now. “This is Cindy Cyan, Fantastic City Reporter, over and out.”

She held her trademark smile for several seconds longer, until the cameraman lowered the camera and gave her the signal that it was over. Then she turned to the Shark.

“It’s a robot,” she said, “this big.” She held up her hands to show how very not big it was. “Stop looking so proud of yourself. Nobody was watching that on TV.”

“I didn’t catch it for them,” said the Shark. “I caught it for you.”

Cindy looked down at the little dying robot. Bits of it still popped as it faded. “I can’t imagine why you’d do that.”

“I just thought you’d like to know about it,” said the Shark. There was something else in his voice, a second layer with a hidden meaning. “I thought I ought to warn you about the Stuffed Cloud.”

It was a threat. Cindy looked straight into his eyes. He was trying to intimidate her, trying to accuse her with his silence, but it wasn't working. She had her Reporter stoicism, a thousand times stronger than his Super showiness. “I appreciate the warning,” she said, “but I have an appointment with a plastic surgeon to hurry to, and I can’t spend any more time chatting.”

“Plastic surgeon?” the Shark repeated, caught off guard.

“Yes. In case you haven’t noticed, Shark, I’m getting old. I’ve got to keep myself going any way I can.”

“But you don’t need it,” he said.

“That’s a wonderful sentiment. But you’re getting old too. You have no idea what’s needed in these times.”

Cindy looked over his shoulder at his two sidekicks, who were muttering to each other and casting glances in their direction. It was no surprise that he knew about the Stuffed Cloud now; of course the Soaring Angel had told him. Cindy had recognized her in the line that day—the girl’s mask was makeup, for goodness’ sake—and she was just glad that the Secret Grand Project was so close to being finished.

“Goodbye,” she said to the Shark, and with that she followed her camera crew up the sandy beach slope. He was left standing there, water puddling into mud around his boots, clutching a dead piece of metal in his hands.