by Erin Halfelven
 

2.6 Getting Jiggly

The girl dressed in the Maidenfly costume had to be my cousin, Kevin Lockyear – transformed just as I had been by the power of the magic rings given to us by my great-great-grandfather and Kevin's great-great-uncle, Steve Sunderman. Gumpy, as I called him, stood there in the midnight and scarlet uniform of The Mighty Skarab, nearly seven-feet tall with bulges on his bulges.

"You will let Karen call you Darla, won't you?" He asked me again.

I was in uniform as Damselfly and we all had the stupid antenna, too. I looked at 'Karen' and grinned, seeing her dealie-bobbers waving around like she was confused. "I guess she can call me Darla," I said.

"Very funny, Unk," said Karen. "I hope you can change us back?" She moved her shoulders experimentally while looking down her own cleavage. Other than the color of our uniforms, we probably looked almost like twins, I knew just what she must be seeing.

"I think so," Steve said, not smiling. "But maybe you needed to wear the high-heel boots for a while." He sighed and stretched. His body rippled with muscles and power, straight and if not slim, at least trim. He hadn't actually changed that much, but the skin-tight costume made him look even bigger and more impressive.

Skarab seemed almost out of place in the daylight; the warm afternoon sun glistened on the silky surface of his uniform. What were the costumes made of, anyway? They might very well be silk, since that would fit with the existence of the otherworld beings Steve called the Insect Lords – who had given us our powers and cursed me, and now Kevin, with being girls. For the moment.

Behind Steve, the bulk of one of the coastal California mountains rose, green all the way up as far as we could see. Around us, the hidden pasture Gumpy had called the back nine waved with nearly knee-high grasses and scattered shrubs and weeds. It seemed an odd setting for a legend come to life, but that was what The Mighty Skarab was.

According to him, Gumpy had come back from the dead more than once and was nearly a hundred years old. Only the lines around his mouth showed any age, though, because a mask covered his face from nose to hairline. And his full head of hair was faded ash-blond, not the gray or white one might have expected.

He grinned at us, closed his massive fists and flexed like a Muscle Beach pin-up.

I think 'Karen' and I both felt the strength radiating off the old man because we both gasped at the same time. We stood there with our mouths open for half a minute or so while he did warm-up jumping jacks and push-ups, hurling himself upright with just the strength in his arms. Then he started doing spread-eagle hops before falling back into push-up position to repeat it. He did that sequence about twenty times without popping a gallus or a blood vessel.

Awestruck, that's the word; we were awestruck. All of a sudden we understood that this guy was more than human, someone who could do battle with monsters and supervillains and beat the crap out of almost any number of ordinary thugs or soldiers. And had.

"What are you girls staring at?" he asked. "Do some exercises, get a feel for what you can do. Run, jump, throw things, wrestle with each other. I brought baseball and field hockey equipment. Loosen up." He smiled slowly when he said that last part. "I'll watch for a while."

"Girls," said Karen, sounding disgusted, looking down at herself.

I couldn't help it; I laughed.

Karen shrugged and giggled. I hoped I didn't sound like that. "It is funny when it happens to someone else, isn't it?" she said.

"I guess so. But if he can change you back, I don't see why he can't do both of us." I looked at Uncle Steve hopefully.

"Less talk, more practice. I may keep you both like this and go back to being Skarab full time myself if you don't get to work."

"He's kidding," said Karen. "I hope he's kidding."

"I wouldn't count on it, we better do what he says. But if he thinks we're going to wrestle while he watches—well, it just ain't going to happen."

Karen giggled again. "Might be fun?" she said, pretending to look me over.

I rolled my eyes. I could tell she was pretending, looking at her did nothing for me, and I knew that my looks didn't affect her that way, either. We might as well have been sisters, even though intellectually, I knew we were both cute and embarrassingly curvy.

"C'mon," said the old man. "What do the kids today say? Get jiggly with it!"

"That's 'get jiggy,' Unk, and you know it!" said Karen after a glance down at her chest and an experimental bounce on her heels. "Besides…." She trailed off after a glance at me. I shrugged.

"Depends on what I'm talking about, doesn't it?" he said.

Karen and I both snorted and gave him a dirty look. He just smiled, all relaxed looking. "Race to the rock over there." He pointed. "First one back doesn't have to do dishes tonight."

I took off running.

"Hey!" yelped Karen. She didn't waste any more breath though and started running, too. The jump I got made a difference; I reached the rock first, but somehow she made the turn faster and we headed back, neck and neck.

Neither of us said anything, winning the race had become very important, more important than a couple of sinks full of dishes. For lack of a finish line, we just plowed right into Steve.

And bounced off. The old man felt like upholstered granite; we both landed on our butts in the dirt in front of him.

"I won!" shouted Karen.

"No, you didn't, blondie!" I shouted.

We glared at each other. Where had such ferocity come from all of a sudden, some part of me wondered?

"Too close to call," said Gumpy. "I'll do the dishes."

We stared at him. He shrugged. "It was a photo finish. And I'm not doing this to be mean, you kids really need training."

"Do I need training like this?" Karen gestured at herself.

I frowned.

"You need a lesson, and a lesson is kind of like training," said Gumpy. "What happened to Darryl shouldn't be a reason for you to mistreat your partner. You two may get into situations where you'll be depending on each other."

We made faces at each other.

He stopped to consider for a moment. "And if you last with this long enough, you will certainly depend on each other for your lives."

Karen thought about this for a moment. I did, too, but mostly I thought about how Karen would have to be a girl only for this training but I might be stuck forever. I stared at the ground and concentrated on not getting angry, or worse, crying.

Then he clapped his hands and said, "Let's do some training, kids." He pulled a baseball bat out of one of the duffels and a net bag of balls. "Shag some flies for me," he said.

While Karen snickered for some reason, I went out for the long fly Gumpy hit toward the mountains, marveling at my own speed and my awareness of where the ball would come down. And there I was to catch it, barehanded, no problem.

Karen went for the next one; a deep drive to left that would have cleared any fence in the majors except maybe the Green Monster because it was still going up at about 250 feet. Another bit of evidence why metas were not allowed to play most professional sports except wrestling and dangerball.

We caught flies and chased line drives and wicked grounders over the rougher parts of the field, but we seldom missed a catch and it actually got almost boring. As a utility player on the school team, I knew the skills and difficulties involved, and my confidence in my abilities grew.

When I threw a caught fly back, it went right where I intended, fast as thunder, like a strike thrown from mid-centerfield. If I were allowed to play pro-ball, I would be a star like no one had ever seen before. The thought annoyed me on several levels; not least of which was that even if I weren't a meta now – girls don't play in the major leagues.

While I worked that out, I noticed Karen had begun stockpiling her catches in a pile rather than throwing them back immediately. She looked at me and winked. I immediately knew what she had planned and began building my own stockpile.

Gumpy kept hitting them; we kept catching them and throwing them into heaps. The old man pulled the last baseball from the net bag at his feet and hit a smoking line drive directly at Karen. She caught it bare-handed; we had made all our catches without gloves. We knew it was his last ball.

She glanced over and grinned at me and quick as a flash; we were throwing baseballs back, and every one of them aimed at his head. In less than a minute, we had thrown about fifty baseballs at that old man.

And not one of them hit him.

He batted some of them away, and we caught those and threw them back, too. The rest he just dodged, somehow. It was the most amazing thing to see. Gumpy is about six-foot-eight, he must weigh over 300 pounds, and he ducked and weaved, and jumped when necessary and not a single thrown ball hit him.

And he laughed the whole time.

We were laughing too. I'm not sure why. We were both girls, and we were mad at him. Honestly, we intended to hurt that old fool, legend or not. And we couldn't hit him. It was just so ridiculous.

We ran out of baseballs, in about twenty seconds we threw all forty or fifty of them, some of them twice. Without signaling each other, Karen and I ran toward Gumpy.

The old man was pulling sticks out of the other equipment bag. "Got some kind of aggression going, girls?" he asked. He handed each of us a stick. "How about a little one-on-one field hockey?"

He pointed left. "Karen, your goal is that patch of mustard weed over there." He pointed right. "Darla, yours is between those two red boulders." He threw a shiny black ball down between us. "First one to score a goal, I'll buy you a car."

Kevin had just had a birthday, but mine wasn't until June; then we'd both be fifteen. "We're too young to get licenses, Bugbrain!" I said.

He grinned at me. "You're supers now, in costume you can drive whatever you want as long as you don't run over anyone who didn't deserve it."

The Overman Act. Committing a crime with superpowers was a federal offense. Did that mean that local cops couldn't give even traffic tickets to a meta? I'd read about this. It wasn't that they couldn't, but they wouldn't because of all the paperwork involved.

When we didn't move right away, Gumpy said, "Change of rules, you both get cars. Win, and you get any color you want; loser gets a pink one."

Karen moved her stick toward the ball….