I then turned to Dynamo, ready to send him on the same trip. However, as I was preparing to do so, I witnessed him getting tackled from the side by none other than Atalanta, who seemed to come out of nowhere. Her momentum sent the two of them smashing through (and obliterating) a shuffleboard table before breaking through a wall like it was made of paper-mâché.
Somewhat surprised but grateful for the Argonaut’s interference, I turned my attention to the projectiles. With the speedsters out of the way, dealing with these were child’s play, and I resorted to my usual method of avoiding harm: phasing. At the same time, I also stepped out of the path of the thrown items, became invisible, and then returned to normal speed.
The bottle thrown by Actinic seemed to have the lowest trajectory and hit first, striking the floor. The bottle was practically gone by that point, and the liquid it had contained splashed slightly as it struck. Almost immediately, noxious-looking fumes began to spew into the air from where the fluid had landed.
The wooden knife Boomstick had tossed struck the wall and exploded, blasting away plaster and exposing the interior wooden frame.
The third projectile – Nightshift’s weird energy bolt – hit a dartboard hanging on the wall, which then swiftly became engulfed in some queer, viscous substance that looked like dark gray tar. It spread rapidly all over and was seemingly dense, as the nail the dartboard hung from began to bend with the weight.
I turned back towards my fellow teens, hoping now I could make my presence known without being attacked. However, they were still so keyed up emotionally that they were likely to shoot first, so to speak, and ask questions later. Fortunately, someone came to my rescue.
“Stand down!” said a booming, yet feminine voice. It was my girlfriend, Electra. I hadn’t even noticed that she was in the room (as was Smokey).
“That was Jim,” she went on. “The real Jim.”
Sensing a loosening of the group’s collective tension, I decided to take a chance. Making myself visible, I immediately dropped to my knees and placed my hands behind my head.
“I surrender,” I announced to no one in particular.
Chapter 69
“Well, the teen lounge is a war zone,” Mouse said, “but the damage is pretty much cosmetic. We’ll have it back to normal in a few days.”
“Thanks,” I murmured, as did Electra and Smokey.
“Now,” my mentor went on, “does someone want to explain what happened?”
We were in one of the League conference rooms. In addition to myself, Mouse, Smokey, and Electra, others present included BT and Myshtal. We had congregated here after my “surrender” in the teen lounge in order to get debriefed.
“It’s pretty straightforward,” Smokey began. “I was in the teen lounge with Electra and Atalanta, waiting for Jim and Myshtal to join us. But instead of Jim, his evil twin showed.”
“I knew it wasn’t the real Jim the second he appeared,” Electra said. “His bioelectric field was different. But I decided to play dumb to see if he’d say something we could use.”
“Did he?” BT asked.
“Things never got that far,” Electra said. “First thing he did was try to kiss me, and I kind of lost it.”
“She blasted him,” Smokey clarified. “And then, while he was a little stunned, Atalanta tagged in. She grabbed him and flung him across the room, where he smashed into a table.”
“Nice of her to step in like that,” Mouse noted, “sizing up the situation solely based on Electra’s actions.”
I didn’t say anything, but it was a sure bet that Atalanta had known that Jack was a fake independent of anything Electra did. She would have seen his aura and realized that it didn’t match mine. However, I wasn’t sure how much the rest of the League knew about her abilities, and it wasn’t my place to out her like that.
“Anyway,” Smokey chimed in, “Jack jumped up and started telekinetically flinging stuff around – chairs, tables, supers – and at that point, the fight was on.”
“But it didn’t last long,” Electra interjected. “Next thing we knew, he was gone. And then Jim popped up, and the rest you know.”
Mouse’s brow creased as he seemed to consider something. “Was anyone hurt?”
Both Electra and Smokey shook their heads but it was the latter who answered, saying, “Just some bumps and bruises – nothing requiring more than a light bandage or an aspirin.”
My mentor suddenly leaned forward, looking at each of us in turn.
“This has gotten far more serious,” he said. “Before, he was incidentally causing people to think he was Jim because they look alike. Now he’s actively trying to mislead others. It was bad enough when he was breaking into secure facilities to torture those he presumed were guilty. Now he’s infiltrating our headquarters, fighting us in our own house.”
“So what do we do to keep him out?” asked Electra. “Set up additional checkpoints? Establish passwords?”
BT shook her head. “No, that’s not necessary. Jack’s biometrics have been fed into the security parameters here. When he pops up, an alarm goes off – like it did today.”
Curious, I asked, “How’d you get his biometrics?”
“The security system at AP’s mansion,” Mouse replied. “It recorded them when Jack showed up there – before he got drilled with a laser.”
“Well, you might want to tweak whatever we’re using to monitor his presence here,” I advised. “The alarms went off in Mouse’s lab when Jack showed up, but – now that I think about it – they weren’t going off anywhere else.”
“That was by design,” BT stated.
My eyes went wide. “What?”
“Think of it as a silent alarm,” Mouse explained. “If klaxons start going off all
