Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain Read Online Free PDF Page B

other with a grinding resistance.
    Oh, right, that’s how I got it moving the first time! I grabbed the band and rolled my fist around. The Machine began to writhe on my wrist. The head unbuckled, the tiny legs came out, and it crawled sluggishly around my arm. Sluggishly? It picked up steam, spiraling up my arm like the crazy metal bug it vaguely resembled.
    “Hey, stop that!” It stopped. “Sit on my hand, not my face!” I yelled. The Machine scuttled forward again, now twining down my arm with purpose and crawling up on my hand.
    “Voice commands?” asked my mother from the doorway.
    “She’s thirteen,” my father threw back skeptically.
    “Sit up!” I ordered The Machine. HA! It reared up on my palm like a snake!
    “Voice commands,” my mother repeated. She sounded amused, and her folded arms and lazy posture as she leaned against the doorjamb shouted her sarcastic amusement at my Dad’s cautious attitude.
    “Unless you think she found a voice recognition unit in her middle-school shop class, she built one in less than half an hour. We’re well into superhuman territory here already,” she added.
    HA! I resisted my urge to stamp my feet and laugh. HA!
    “It is an advanced-placement middle school,” Dad tried. Neither Mom nor I dignified that with a response. He hadn’t been serious anyway.
    “May I examine it?” Dad asked when we’d been silent at him long enough.
    “Sit still, and don’t do anything,” I ordered The Machine. It didn’t respond, which was good, right? I picked it off my hand with two fingers—kind of heavy to carry that way—and put it in Dad’s hands. It stayed in its reared up posture like a statue.
    Good enough!
    He unlocked his computer, laid The Machine on his scanner, closed the lid, and started tapping buttons. “An interior layout will tell us the most. We’ll try scans all across the wavelengths, but we’ll begin with a simple x-ray.”
    The giant virtual screen he built just to prove that it could be done lit up. There was The Machine, a white cylinder with little legs sticking off of it. Solid white. Dad magnified one of its segments. The straight edges weren’t straight, they were blobby in this representation. The interior was solid, unvarying white. Plain white.
    “It’s made of metal, so I guess x-rays were never going to penetrate too well,” I said.
    “At the intensity I bombarded it, I should get at least a blurry interior picture,” Dad countered. I watched him adjust the wavelengths. I watched nothing whatsoever change on the picture. Okay.
    He switched to magnetic imaging. Same thing. “Well, it eats a very broad range of energy types. I might be able to overload that effect, but if I succeeded I’d only damage the device,” he observed.
    “Please don’t.” This was my first invention as a superhero. Even if it did nothing we hadn’t seen already, or stopped working in ten minutes, I wanted to keep it to show my grandchildren one day!
    “We’ll try passive mapping systems,” Dad assured me. He clicked a few menus. There, that was the passive magnetic scan.
    Well, I guess it worked. “All I can tell is that it’s full of junk,” I said. It looked like a regular medical x-ray, all cloudy bits inside solid shell.
    “You really packed in the gears, Pumpkin,” he told me. Complimented me, I guess. I held up a finger, and Mom nodded. I was cleaning up on the Pumpkin jar this week!
    “What’s the bright rectangle?” I pointed at the one shape that stood out in the body.
    “I think it’s a 9-volt battery. It’s mostly drained. I’m not seeing signs of electrical current,” Dad answered. Then he sighed, clicked off the scanning program, unsealed the scanner and heaved up the lid. “Eyeball examination will have to do.”
    He picked up The Machine, and, on an impulse, I ordered, “Straighten out.” It did, extending into a straight line maybe a foot long. Less, really. So it was still active!
    Watching Dad put it in a vise and