by Erin Halfelven
 

1.6 When Is a Damsel...?

"They turned it down?" I yelped. "Why did they get to refuse and I don't?"

Steve looked uncomfortable.

"Doesn't seem fair, Unk," put in Kevin. "It really doesn't."

"Well, it isn't fair," Steve admitted. "I guess I should have said, not that they turned it down but that they washed out. Couldn't deal with the training, couldn't stand the idea of hurting people…."

I stared at him. "I don't want to hurt anyone either, not anybody. Except you."

Steve and Kevin both grinned at me, I don't know why. So I stepped up to the big guy and slapped him in the face. As hard as I could. He didn't wince or flinch or even dodge. I tried punching him in the gut, but it was like hitting one of the padded practice boards in karate class.

When I moved to put a knee in his crotch, he stepped back and held up a hand to keep me at a distance. "That's enough," he said.

"Oh, sure," I said, holding back tears. "You can dish it out but you can't take it, old man." I don't think I had ever been so angry in my life. And being that angry hurt.

"I'm sorry, Darryl," he said. "I should have explained it all to begin with. But I was afraid you would not even try if I hit you with too much at once. And I really didn't expect the ring to trap you."

I didn't want to let him off that easy but I wasn't sure what to say. We just stared at each other for half a minute or so. "You said this had happened before?" I finally asked him. "I want to know more about what's going on. You said this was family business earlier and… and that I'm related to the other Damselflys. I want to know how. And I want to know now, at least some of it."

I crossed my arms which meant that I was more aware of my chest than usual but I ignored that, trying to look firm. Kevin winked at me and I felt my heart sink a bit. It's hard to be firm when you know how cute you look.

He nodded. "Maybe the first thing I ought to do is tell you who we are…."

I frowned at him. "Who we are? I'm Darryl William Breslaw, or I was until a few minutes ago."

Kevin piped in, "And I'm Kevin Sunderman Lockyear, and you're my mom's uncle, Steve Sunderman."

"Steven Cyrus Sunderman," said the old man. "Though some of my old records have my middle name as Cyril."

"Fascinating," I said.

"You know that I'm not actually Kevin's uncle? I'm Kevin's mother's great-uncle. My younger brother, David, was Marlette's grandfather. David Sunderman. Originally, Xanderov when our father came over in the 1890s; Kiril Xanderov, from Bulgarian Macedonia but was part of Turkey then. He changed it to Sunderman and gave us English names to fit in better."" he went on. "So, I'm your great-great-uncle."

"Like I said," I noted again. "But you're not my uncle."

"No," he agreed. He looked off in the distance for a moment. "I visited my dad's old village thirty or forty years ago. Dirt poor farmers and miners the people were when Dad left, and when I went there and they probably still are."

Kevin and I kept quiet for a moment while he stared at the floor. I tried not to feel bad for having slapped him; it seemed stupid now.

He started talking again. "I…. Do you remember your grandmother Katrinka, Darryl?"

I shook my head. "Not really," I said. "She went away before I started school."

"She was my grand-daughter," he said. "Her mother was Laura, Josie's daughter."

I stared at him. "I remember you now," I said in a small voice. "You… you visited us once…. Mom and Tanya called you Gumpy."

He laughed with genuine enjoyment. "Easier to say than great-grampa or even great-great-grampa." Still smiling, he said, "You can call me that, too, if you want."

"Then I guess I should call you 'Gunky,'," said Kevin, grinning. "How about that, we're cousins, Darla."

"Don't call me that! And we're just barely related, third cousins or something. Who's Josie?"

He looked sad. "The first Damselfly. My partner and my wife…. She died. Laura was our daughter; she married a Russian named Anton Breslaw. Katrinka was their daughter, she was Damselfly, too."

"Crap," I said. I knew my mom and her mom had kept the Breslaw name, but no one had told me about Damselfly. Mom and Aunt Marlette, Kevin's mom – not really my aunt but I guess my cousin, too – had gone off somewhere leaving Kevin and me with Uncle Steve for spring vacation.

Knowing the family story, why had they done that, leaving us with this crazy old man? Did they know what would happen? They must have had some idea. My sister, Tanya, had married Kevin's brother Mike, and they had moved up to somewhere near San Francisco. They must have known all this too, but nobody told me anything.

I glared at Gumpy again.

The crazy old man looked very bleak. "Laura and Katrinka are gone; I don't think they're dead, but it's complicated. David and Anton both wore my Skarab ring for a while each; they're both dead. Besides family, there's been at least one other Skarab and one other Damselfly that I know of, and both of them died."

I had a sinking feeling and I guess it showed on my face.

"That's… a lot of dead people," said Kevin, looking at me with probably the same expression.

Steve, my Gumpy, nodded. "It's been a long time; I was born in 1916."

"Holy crap," said Kevin. "You're almost a hundred years old." That thought shut him up, and Steve and I stayed silent, too, for a bit.

We had sort of wandered out of the door of the garage/barn thing where the old car sat. Kevin looked at the hills surrounding the old farm while Gumpy just stood there, like the ruined statue of some old time warrior. Pigeon shit would have completed the picture, and I turned away so as not to look at him.

I didn't want anyone to see me, dressed like I was, but there was no chance anyone would, I realized. The nearest neighbor must have been half a mile away on the other side of a ridge, and the house blocked the view from the road. I folded my arms under my boobs again and practiced a good Tanya-style pout. I wanted to stay mad but I knew I was losing my edge.

Kevin picked up a rock and threw it at some trees down beyond a sort of gully. It made a noise like a bullet ricocheting before disappearing high in the sky. He and I just looked at each other for a moment, and he said the F-word, silently.

I shook my head and glared at 'Gumpy.' "What's all that stuff you've been talking about got to do with this?" I gestured at my body and what I was wearing.

"My wife, Josie…." Steve began. "Josie was born Joseph Willough."

I boggled.

He had a tear in his eye. "She… he discovered that I was the Skarab, and I gave him the green ring. The first few times he used it… it, uh, he became a sort of junior version of me."

"Oh, please, a boy sidekick? This was in the forties, right?" I said. Being a boy sidekick had once seemed like a pretty cool thing to me, and I would certainly settle for that as opposed to what had actually happened. And it had apparently happened to… to my great, great grandmother, too?

"What did you call him?" asked Kevin. A pretty inane question, I thought.

"Well, in costume, I called him Jack but the dimes and superbooks called him Beetleboy," said Steve with a fond look.

Kevin snorted then looked a bit concerned. He glanced at the hand where he wore the blue ring, and I smirked at him. Let him worry about turning into a girl for a bit.

Gumpy went on. "And we both developed some new powers, two rings working together are more powerful than one."

"Where did the rings come from in the first place?" I asked.

"I found the blue one, in Egypt, when I was in college on a field trip. I should have reported finding it; we were on an archaeological… 'dig' they call them now. We said 'excavation' back then. Digs were for dinosaurs…." He seemed prepared to go off on a tangent.

"But you didn't report it?" I asked.

"'My precious!'" Kevin quoted, hunching over and rubbing the ring.

"Shut up!" I told him.

"I didn't," said Steve. "I couldn't tell anyone about it. I tried – several times." He shook his head. "Things happened. We ended up back in the States, and I still had the ring. By this time, I had figured out that wearing it made me stronger. Mystery Men were a thing then…."

He looked up at us. "The newspapers were full of their stories. Crimefighters, adventurers, some of them villains and some might as well have been. Challenger was one of the first, back before World War I but others began to appear later, after the war. By the thirties, they were all over the place: Minuteman in Boston, Spectral in New York, Hoodwink, there, too. Stuntman in Los Angeles, Bellringer in Philadelphia."

He sighed. "I was going to college in Chicago; it was the Depression, lots of crime; booze had been made legal again, and the gangs were looking for new ways to make money. I had the ring; it made me strong and quick and I healed fast when I got hurt…."

He trailed off for a moment and waved a hand. "Not important right now. I started running around town in a blue suit with a snappy fedora and calling myself Skarab. The superbooks spelled it with a 'k' and I kind of liked that so I've always kept it that way." He smiles a very small smile. "I busted some heads of some gangs who had tried to claim the college as part of their territory and I felt pretty good. It was fun."

He glanced at the sky."This was about the time the Comet Prometheus appeared. The world was about to get even stranger."

"We studied the comet in school," said Kevin. "It's actually a gray dwarf star."

"Which is another way of saying no one knows what it is," I said. "Lots of people think it gives off radiations that cause supers and metanormal phenomenon." I did know something about this, and it fascinated me but I kept my attention on what Gumpy was talking about.

Steve nodded. "Makes physicists and astronomers crazy, it's like quantum macro-reality one of them said, whatever that means."

He went back to his story, "The Spanish Civil War started. In 1938, stories came out about a Red Cross ambulance driver who used blue light to stop bullets and bombs."

"The Protector," said Kevin. "The first documented metahuman."

"At least, the first one to get big press," I said.

"That's right," said Gumpy. "Shortly after that, I went back to Egypt with my archaeology professor as a grad student. The war began, and I went to the US consulate in Egypt and enlisted in the Army – even though we Americans weren't in the fight yet."

"Why did you do that?" I asked.

"Seemed like the right thing to do. And I was feeling guilty," he said. "I'd stolen something before… and I stole something again. A green ring I found in a box being sent to the British museum. It seemed like a match for the blue one I had been wearing for years. I wanted to get away from my professors before they figured out what I had done."

"Wow," I said. "You stole it, too?" I looked down at my hand that supposedly still wore the now invisible ring.

He nodded. "It seemed like the right thing to do at the time," he repeated.