Temporary Superheroine: Temporary Superheroine, #1

By Irene Vartanoff

Chloe Cole is a failing webcomics artist, but in her crazy dreams she's a costumed superheroine who can fly and shoot power bolts out of her fingers—and battle a menacing supervillain. Other weird stuff is happening, too. Something is up. That's why she accepts a part on a really lame television superhero game show taping in New York City, so she can question people in the comic book business. They ought to know if supervillains are real or not, right? But what if they don't have the answers? Why is it Chloe's duty to become a temporary superheroine and save the world all on her own? Make that two worlds. It's complicated.

PG-rated nonstop comic book style adventure set in two universes, with plenty of super-powered battles and recognizable classic comic book scenarios—and some iffy romance thrown in.

This novel can be read as a stand-alone story. Further adventure in the Temporary Superheroine series are also stand-alone stories.

CHARACTERS IN THIS STORY

Chloe Cole: Reluctant female superhero, strong female protagonist, possessor of super powers, snarky twenty-five-year-old with parent and boyfriend issues

Roland Kirby: Eager comics fanboy, dependable partner in other world adventures, ex-boyfriend who won't go away, sweet geek who believes in comic book science

Eric Wood: Suspiciously charming comic book company CEO, possible secret supervillain, questionably honest potential lover and confidant

Jovial Jerry Fine: Beloved elderly icon of the comic book world, benign but skeptical participant in fast-paced adventures, knows more than he tells

Diabolical Dave McCay: Maverick comic book artist, man who wants the modern world to be what it was like in 1962, troublemaking genius

Bodacious Barb: Knows the secrets behind the comics, doesn't give a hoot

The Purple Menace: Supervillain, mad scientist, wants to take over the world—make that two worlds

• Language: English
• Publisher: Irene Vartanoff
• Release date: Dec 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9780986125201

Irene Vartanoff

Award-winning author Irene Vartanoff combined her love of romances and comic books by working for Harlequin, Bantam, Berkley, and MyRomanceStory.com as well as Marvel Comics and DC Comics. Irene’s novels published to date range from women’s fiction to contemporary western romance to chick lit superhero adventure. A lifelong East Coast resident, Irene lives in a forest of tall oaks in the wilds of West Virginia. To sign up for Irene's occasional newsletters, visit her website or https://www.subscribepage.com/w4i7j8

Book preview

Prologue

This Friday

I always thought girls who screamed in action movies were idiots. Yet there I was, screaming my head off. A man in a purple supervillain costume had grabbed me from the sidewalk, flown me up to the top of a nearby office building, and now held me dangling over the side of the roof. He stood safely on the flat part, behind the crenellations. He laughed maniacally as he waved my protesting body over the street far below. I clutched his arms desperately, looking all the way down, terrified.

So I screamed.

I can’t fly. I’m a normal human. This man could fly. He wore a black domino mask covering the top half of his face, and a tight-fitting spandex outfit colorful enough to make any superhero gasp in envy. Only he wasn’t a superhero.

This supervillain looked like he planned to send me on a fast elevator to the sidewalk.

Aaaaaaah!

Chapter 1

The Sunday Before

I was asleep. I was dreaming. I saw a bridge in a big city. It had to be New York. A flying, masked man in purple spandex grabbed a piece of bridge superstructure and shook it. Cars on the span tumbled every which way. Men and women shrieked and cried out. A cop shot at him, but the bullets bounced off. Another cop, also firing, shouted for backup on his radio, as they both crouched in standard protective position behind the open doors of their vehicle. Two police cars arrived, sirens blaring. The purple-garbed bad guy took an abandoned car from the bridge and hurled it at the police as if it were a coffee cup. It crashed into the two newly arrived squad cars and bounced off, hitting a fire hydrant and causing a sudden geyser. The noise was intense.

I had to stop this devastation. I rose in the air.

I flew toward the baddie and sent jagged, yellow power bolts at him out of my fingertips. He let go of the bridge. He shot bolts back at me from his own hands. Somehow, I anticipated his bolts and dodged them. I tried again to knock him down, but this time he evaded my bolts. I flew to the top of the bridge and dive-bombed him, hurling those lightning-like bolts from my fingertips as fast as I could.

How did I have these powers? I didn’t know, but I was more powerful than the police. I was the one who must save the day.

The supervillain abandoned the bridge entirely and came after me. I landed on a hilly piece of park surrounding the massive cement bridge support. As he swooped in, I took a defensive stance, the kind I’d learned in karate as a kid. When he rushed at me and tried to grab me, I used his momentum to fling him over my shoulder. I turned and pummeled him with my bolts, each lifting him in the air ten or twenty feet, until he fell into the nearby river.

The police tramped down toward the river, shouting at us to drop our weapons. Yeah, right. My weapons were my hands.

The din suddenly included an odd rushing sound. The purple villain rose from the water, shaky, but flying. He turned to leave, but then looked back and shook his fist at me, mouthing words I could not hear. The noise became an overwhelming roar, as if every machine in the world operated at once.

I woke up. I was in my apartment. I had nodded off in front of my laptop, my face pressed onto my keyboard. The laptop’s noisy cooling fan was the source of the last sound I’d heard. The screen showed a black-and-white drawing of the very fight scene I’d just dreamt.

Hackers? Malware? I hadn’t drawn what was on my screen. How had it gotten there?

I struggled to shed my grogginess. Was it day or night? My apartment window never got much light and the shades were tightly closed. Maybe it was night.

The clock on my laptop said 9 PM. Now I remembered. I must have dozed off after dinner. Too many carbs. Living on ramen noodles had consequences.

I was still feeling dopey, fighting my way out of the enervating hangover after a too-deep nap. I couldn’t deal with the implications of my dream yet. I pulled myself up from the desk, found a mug of leftover coffee and a half-empty can of flat Diet Whatever. I took a swig of one, then the other. Both tasted terrible, but the caffeine almost instantly did the job. I was alert.

I dared to glance at my computer again. I identified the bridge, the supervillain, and the cops fighting him. But I, the superheroine in my dream, was nowhere to be seen.

This wasn’t the first time I wondered how a drawing got into my computer. Was I drawing in my sleep? Why wasn’t I in the scene? In my dream, I was the center of the action. I was the superheroine who saved the day.

My cell phone rang. I searched for it through the litter of papers, books, and photos that covered every surface, including the floor. My caller, unidentified, hung up by the time I found the phone under a couple days of junk mail and a sweater. I wasn’t in the mood for a phone chat anyway. All I could think about was my computer and the unwanted gift of a comic book page detailing an impossibility I had lived in my dream.

The pencil and ink drawing style conveyed the menace of the supervillain perfectly. Only problem: I didn’t draw superhero comics. The smooth ink line outlining the scene was not mine. This was not my drawing. What was it doing on my computer?

My e-mail was open even though I had left it closed. The sender’s address was a dummy, of course. I’d investigated it over and over again. Had my computer been enslaved? Had a zombie computer sent the drawing? Why? I had no answers.

For two long months now I’ve experienced incredible, frightening, yet exhilarating dreams. Plus mysterious gifts of line drawings on my computer.

I looked unhappily at the file named Average Chloe, my online humor comic that I used to post once a week. I’ve been so spooked, I haven’t drawn anything in days and days. I posted my most recent panel strip over a month ago.

I didn’t draw all those bulging muscles and dramatic fight scenes. My style was cartoony and spare, and my subject was not mayhem, it was the everyday happenings of my namesake, Average Chloe, a young woman trying to cope with the first steps of adulthood. Like me.

I picked up more drawings from the floor, samples of recently published superhero artwork. None matched the mystery artwork.

My ex-boyfriend, Roland, was convinced I drew the mystery scenes. He and I split up because I caught him watching me all night, to prove I was drawing the mystery pages after all. He said he cared about me, but that was creepy and over the line. I booted him out. Maybe I was hasty. Anyway, the dreams and the drawings that followed them kept coming.

I stalked through the mess and pulled out a change of clothes from my bureau, something more suitable for my job than loose shorts and a tank top. As I shrugged into the regulation polo shirt and black twill pants, I felt in my bones how tired I was. I was afraid to sleep much. I drank a lot of caffeine to ward off the dreams, but the caffeine stopped doing its job after a while. Then I dozed off, like tonight. I had become tired and jittery, unable to draw my own online cartoon, and also, as a bonus, messing up at work.

In the dreams, I was always the superheroine who could fly and stop the supervillain. Quite a leap for me. Ha, ha. Not a joke. Saving the day had never been on my list of lifetime goals. I wanted success as an artist, not an action hero.

Before these crazy dreams and the mysterious spam artwork began to rule my life, I didn’t question who or what I was. Now I wondered if there was some deeply buried, weird part of myself trying to burst out. Like adult-onset disease or something. Cheery thought.

My nerves twitched. If I wasn’t going crazy, then I was under attack. I wasn’t safe in my own little studio apartment anymore. My dreams and my computer had been co-opted by some mysterious force.

I’d put art samples from comic books on every available surface. But I couldn’t identify the artist of the mystery drawings. A comic book art style was a signature in itself, so why couldn’t I find a match? The accomplished pen-and-ink artist who created these drawings must be known to someone, published somewhere.

I finished my minimal primping by dragging a comb through my hair. If I'd bothered to look in the mirror, which I didn't, I'd have seen an average face, an average shape, and average shoulder-length medium brown hair. Hence, Average Chloe. Time to get to my job, a late shift at a chain bookstore on weekend nights. It suited me because I no longer had a social life and I didn’t care. I wasn’t even dating when Roland showed up. At twenty-five the thrill of being with annoying guys who wouldn’t commit had worn off. With Roland, I got a taste of an annoying guy who wanted to commit. I was the one who backed away.

I turned off the lights, but there was no point in shutting my laptop and shoving it in a closet because I basically lived on the computer. Yes, the cell phone, too. I was an artist. I drew on my computer. I put my carefully cute girl art on my website for the universe to enjoy.

I was glad to lock the door on my mystery and head down the first set of stairs to street level. I didn’t have time tonight to check the news and discover a report about a supervillain who had tried to wreck a bridge for real. That was the scary part. My dreams turned into reality. That the images mysteriously appearing on my computer were what I dreamed, minus me, was weird enough. Weirder, was that those events actually happened.

Last month, I dreamt that a supervillain pulled a building down, and when I woke up I found a drawing of it on my computer. Bad enough, but then I heard on the news that someone mysteriously pulled that exact building down in New York.

Last week, I dreamed I used my superpowers to fight a man who was ripping up train tracks. In my dream, I stopped him. When I woke up, I found a new drawing, a drawing of the dream but of course without me in it. I checked online, and I uncovered a news story about someone ripping up train tracks. For real. Again in New York.

In my dreams, I pranced around in a superheroine costume, all tight spandex and cute tools on my utility belt. I fought the evil supervillains with my powers. I could fly and I shot lightning bolts from my fingertips. Very cool. Newsworthy. Yet in the public reports of these crazy events, there was never a mention of a flying female who fought the bad guy.

Nothing made sense. The scant reporting of the incidents was spotty and conflicted. It was like the famous Japanese movie, Rashomon, in which each character told a vastly different version of the same incident. Sightings of flying humans should provoke massive media coverage. They didn’t.

I fingered my throat and thought about the other big mystery in my life. The smooth milky blue pendant I wore, the size of a robin’s egg, was sent to me a short while ago from New York, where I grew up. I hadn’t recognized the handwriting on the package. Inside, I had found a note saying From your father. Wear this at all times. No signature. The return address was a dead end, a private P.O. box.

It was the first and only gift my father had ever given me. I didn’t know his name or where he lived or anything about him. The pendant’s arcane markings, like runes, were a puzzle, but receiving any gift at all from a man who had never been in my life was the bigger shock. So I wore the pendant. It was all I had.

I clattered down the last of the four flights of stairs, willing myself to let it go, but not succeeding. I’d moved to Chicago in part to get away from the frustration of my mother stonewalling any information about my father. Did my father send me the pendant, or did someone else? Who sent the drawings? What did these dreams mean?

The super was sweeping the small entrance hall. He barely looked up. You don’t got the rent to me by tomorrow, landlord says you be out of here the next day, he said in a flat voice.

I’ll get the rent. I put on my best sincere smile. I’m going to my job now.

Sure, sure, he muttered, visibly unconvinced.

Another mark of how messed up my life had become. I had a paycheck waiting for me, but it would be tiny. The bookstore had cut my hours again last week. At one time I’d had a bigger place, and roommates, and a better job. Then I got distracted. Now what remained of my life here in Chicago was falling apart. What with all the weird dreams and trying to solve this comic art mystery, in the past two months I had turned into a space cadet on the job. Result of the dreams: bad work habits. Result of bad work habits: less income. It was getting harder and harder to live.

The income from my webcomics would not pay the rent. They only pulled in a few dollars now and then. Putting something out on the Internet did not automatically make me rich. I could be ignored in cyberspace as easily as anywhere else.

I’d only walked a few steps from the building entrance when I heard my name called.

Chloe, you didn’t answer your phone.

Roland Kirby, my ex-boyfriend. He didn’t acknowledge being dumped. He treated our breakup as a minor misunderstanding in our friendship. Previously, he hadn’t behaved like a stalker, but ambushing me on my way to work verged on it.

I was worried, he said, catching up to me.

Roland was attractive in a cute, boyish way. He had dark curly hair and eyelashes to match, plus a compact body he kept in shape despite his long hours at the computer. Even though we were over, I couldn’t help smiling slightly as I lied.

If I’d known it was you… Implying I would have called him back. No, I wouldn’t have.

I used an anonymous line. I thought you might not take my call.

I’m not angry at you, Roland, I denied. But I can’t talk right now. I sounded impatient because I was. I wanted to get to work on time for a change.

Did you hear? He ignored my comment as he had ignored many of my denials.

Hear what?

The Third Avenue Bridge in New York City was attacked.

I didn’t want to ask more, but I couldn’t stop myself.

What happened?

Witnesses said a flying man in a purple costume started rocking the bridge superstructure. He threw a car at the police. They subdued him, but he escaped.

The cops never touched him.

Did you dream it? Did a page appear with the scene? he asked, an excited look in his eyes.

I’m not telling. You think I’m somehow causing this freak violence, and there is no way. No way. I do not draw these attacks.

Ever since I told him about the crazy dreams and the weird drawings appearing on my computer, Roland has tracked them and tried to link them to world events.

Last week there was the crumbling building, he shot back. Eyewitnesses claim they saw a man flying in the air on his own power, wearing a Halloween costume.

Human beings can’t fly.

What about the people who were on the capsized boat a month ago? They said two men in ‘freak outfits’ in a large bubble in midair aimed a weapon at the boat.

Mass hysteria, I insisted, though my denials sounded hollow even to me. Millions of people have seen superhero movies and want to believe superheroes are real. Like the people who think professional wrestling is real.

He laughed a little, but wasn’t distracted. Roland was a Rottweiler when he had an idea, hanging on to the death. "Also last week, there was an unusual plane crash.

People inside the plane called their relatives and described colorfully garbed supervillains who used some kind of plastic grappling hook to force them down in a field. Pics from cell phones are up on photo-sharing websites.

I’d seen them. They were similar to Drawing #19 in my mystery file.

Roland warned, The attacks are happening more frequently.

What do you expect me to do? I asked, my tone surly.

I’m not accusing you of causing all this…

Could have fooled me, I muttered.

But it is reasonable to deduce you must be a link.

I couldn’t force myself to walk away. I couldn’t ignore Roland’s righteous fervor.

Chloe, it’s snowballing. Whatever is happening, you must stop it.

How? I kicked at a crack in the sidewalk with the toe of my shoe, scuffing it. Should I go into therapy? Maybe I have ESP? Or a split personality?

Nah. Although you should cut down on the caffeine. Your hands are shaking.

Proof it’s not me, I insisted. I held up my hands so he could see their tremble clearly. Hands this shaky can’t draw.

I started to walk away. I’m not creating this—this whatever it is. I nearly yelled. What do you expect me to do? Contact the FBI?

No, the federal government is keeping a tight lid on this, he replied. He walked closer, and lowered his voice. The photos and videos get taken down.

Your conspiracy theory doesn’t hold water. People keep putting the pics back up on other sharing sites, I pointed out.

One for our side, he said, not at all discomposed.

We both laughed, though the sound from my mouth was kind of rusty.

Why had I laughed? Roland could be right. Maybe there was a government-instigated news gag. The establishment media could be under orders to ignore or quash stories about sightings of a supervillain or his henchmen.

Paranoia did not help me find out the how and why of these bizarre supervillain attacks. Or why I was involved.

You should get help identifying the art. Contact a comic expert like Eric Wood. He runs Fantastic Comics, Roland proposed.

An executive? What would he know?

He’s a former comics artist. Totally cutting edge.

I don’t think so. Did I want to tell a stranger about my weird situation?

From his daily news feed, he sounds like a cool guy. Why not take a chance?

I shook my head. I don’t need his help. Or yours.

Roland put his arm around my shoulders, one buddy to another. At least let me look at your computer again, try again to find the source myself? Please?

Oh, okay. Come over tomorrow. I shrugged off his arm gently and hastened down the street alone. I was late again for my shift.

I couldn’t help turning around and yelling back at him. "I am not the artist."

I made tracks toward the bookstore. I had stated the obvious, as Roland well knew. I drew Average Chloe utilizing minimal, cartoony line drawings, trying to be funny, not serious. My art style did not have the flashy realism or the bulging, muscular figures of superhero comics.

These crazy dreams freaked me out. It was fun to read adventure comic books or watch movies about super people, but they were pretend. The real world had no superheroes and no supervillains.

I wanted to get these disturbing comic book drawings off my computer, and stop having these dreams. Roland was the opposite. He wanted to find the source so he could learn all about them. He sought proof that real supervillains were wreaking havoc on our city streets. He