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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 180: Brown 349
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 57
Returning to their room, they finished folding and packing their clothes. Vashti straightened up a bit more, and finding a broom worked on removing what Derek called “some perfectly innocent dust bunnies” from under the bed as he teased her. Opening an access panel on the robot he examined the interior to see whether anything had been knocked loose when the huge black bull rammed it (That had been before they had become friends with the bull.) He also plugged in the charger for his laser power packs and began recharging the spent ones.
“When he says ‘Superman’,” Vashti asked, “what does he mean?”
“Well, there’s what I think he means, and what it could mean. I think he’s talking about a man who can bounce Gatling gun bullets off his eyeballs, fly faster than the speed of sound, lift a ship out of the water, and punch so hard that his fist would go through ten feet of stone, easy.”
“But we don’t know his world, right? Superman could be really weak.”
“True. That, though, would mean that they were calling him ‘super’ for some other reason, or maybe to be ironic. He probably means someone with incredible strength or powers. Also, use context cues: he said there were people with super powers, but no one like Superman, which suggests an image of a Superman whose powers exceed everyone here. So he must mean there isn’t anyone quite as powerful as that, but there are heroes whose powers go beyond ordinary people.”
“That makes sense,” she agreed. “I guess that leaves me out.”
“Don’t count yourself out so quickly. You can already read minds. I’m planning to teach you quite a bit more--and you’ve been trained in self-defense. We didn’t enter you in the Throne World competition partly because we didn’t need to. You probably would have held your own there--you did some damage to more than one alien who accosted you, as I recall. I remember some martial arts school running ads that said ‘Be the wrong person’, with the suggestion that people who had attended their school became the wrong person to attack, that muggers would be sorry they had chosen this particular victim. I think that’s probably you in this world. You’re not a superhero yet, but you could be.”
She smiled. “I’ll think about it,” she said.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #519: Versers Congregate. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
