Normalized (The Complete Quartet) Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by David Bussell

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  About the Author

  David Bussell is an award-winning British humourist. Born in 1976, David spent his early years growing increasingly larger until he reached adulthood. Among his interests are amateur parkour, the Oxford comma, and writing about himself in the third person. Rumours that David was conceived on an Indian burial ground remain largely unfounded. David would beat you in a fight.

  Things people have said about David Bussell:

  “Hilarious” Graham Linehan (Father Ted, The IT Crowd)

  “Really good” Shane Allen (BBC Controller of Comedy Commissioning)

  “Ha!” Sam Bain (Peep Show, Fresh Meat)

  You can find out more about the author by visiting BussellBooks, or by following him on Twitter @Busselling

  Contents

  About the Author

  Part One: Superfluous

  Part Two: Powerless

  Part Three: Grounded

  Part Four: Cape Closed

  Get a Free Book!

  Dedications

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  Part One: Superfluous

  The Journal of Captain Might

  Written by Captain Might

  Footnotes after the fact by Captain Might

  November 6th —January 18th

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  To read footnotes, click on the bracketed numbers, e.g.[1]

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  November 6th

  It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time there were no such thing as superheroes, let alone an epidemic of them. That ‘95 Macy’s Parade – when the Bart Simpson balloon got loose and a fourteen-year-old me knifed through the sky like a buttered bullet to rescue it – that was the first time the world got to see a real life superhero. Can you imagine? A whole wide world with one superhero in it? Everything I did was front page news…

  Captain Might Plugs Erupting Volcano with Iceberg!

  Captain Might Repels Tsunami with Super Breath!

  Captain Might Shouts Comet out of the Sky!

  And folks hadn’t even seen a fraction of what I was capable of yet. How I could hammer a mountain flat with the back of my hand, or run on water like a late-for-an-appointment Jesus, or fire beams from my eyes so pinpoint mean they could knock the prick off a Martian. The list goes on and on. Honestly, I could spend the next four hundred pages listing just half of my incredible feats. It’d be a cheap way to fill a book though.[2]

  Likewise, I won’t be padding out these pages out with the details of my origin story. What’s the use? It’s already out there in movies, rebooted movies, reimagined reboots of movies and enough comic books to choke Humungo the Devourer. Seriously, just try reading everything that’s been written on my superhero genesis, you might as well try printing off the internet. If you absolutely must have it again, here it is for you in one sentence: I visited the Statue of Liberty with my ninth grade History class, stood on her torch and got bitten by a radioactive bald eagle.[3]

  Not long after that the whole game changed. Suddenly everyone and their uncle was hoisting a cape up the flagpole. Newspapers the world over were bursting with stories about gamma rays and mysterious meteors and toxic spills and mystical birthrights and vigilante orphans. Out of that soup came heroes and monsters of all stripes – paragons, speedsters, deep-sea princes, mind-readers, warlocks and witches – you name it. I heard one guy’s mole fell off, tied on a mask, and started calling itself The Cyst.

  You want to know how bad it’s gotten? Just this morning I was gliding over the streets of Manhattan when down on the ground I spotted a huddle of superheroes stood outside a Dunkin’ Donuts. There they were for the world to see – Dynamo, Impervious, Cascade, Kilowatt and Switchback – totally oblivious to the fact they were spelling out ‘D.I.C.K.S’ with their chest insignias. Clowns like those, they’re a slap in the face for this profession.

  The world’s become lousy with superheroes, and no place has it worse than NYC. Just like wannabe movie stars flocking to LA, the capes came here in their hundreds, then thousands. A state census a few years back showed we were harboring a population that was roughly 20 percent superpowered. Then thirty. Who knows where we are now? It’s like someone crossed out ‘huddled masses’ on that plaque at Ellis Island and wrote ‘walking A-Bombs in full body Spandex.’ Welcome to New York City: the safest and most dangerous place on Earth.

  November 10th

  C.H.A.M.P is my place of business. It stands for the Corporation of Heroes Against Menacing Persons. What it doesn’t stand for is crime, superpowered or otherwise. C.H.A.M.P is the City’s first and last line of defense against civil disorder. A private firm contracted by the government to enforce the law according to a strict contract known as the Heroes Code; a set of rules all registered capes are duty-bound to swear by.

  Some of the rules are good rules: Protect and Serve the Innocent, Maintain the Virtue of Rectitude, Ensure the Rights to Liberty and Justice. Those rules are your nice hot shower. Then there are the other rules: Set Expectations for Behaviour and Conduct, Punctually and Promptly Perform all Appointed Duties, Dedicate Yourself before God. Those are the rules that flush the toilet on your nice hot shower. The real prick-shrinkers

  Another rule C.H.A.M.P is forced to abide by is this one: Maintain Fair Employment Practice. That might sound dandy on the surface of things, except part of maintaining fair employment practice is recruiting from the outside as well as promoting from within. This, sadly, means were required throw open our doors to the great unwashed, and the worst part is that yours truly – C.H.A.M.P’s Chief Officer – is personally obliged to interview every Tomcat, Dictum or Harrier with the nous to fill in an application form. The whole thing is a monumental waste of my time and talent. I mean, you wouldn’t force Spielberg to direct gonzo porn, would you?

  Having arrived at the station I watched from the lobby mezzanine as the latest round of hopefuls flooded into the foyer. I caught something on the news the other night about a batch of mutated E Numbers giving rise to a fresh rash of superpowers and it looked as though these were the sorry spoils. A real bunch of no-hopers they were – the absolute worst table at the wedding. As for the names they’d given themselves, don’t even get me started...

  The Plank

  Bubblejet

  Rhomboid

  The Caped Crouton

  Hot Flash: America’s Only Menopausal Superhero

  Pussyfoot

  Mantrum

  Red Herring

  Polterguy: The World’s Strongest Ghost

  Placeholder

  Crumple Zone

  Nocturnal Emission

  The Human Spork

  As usual, the day played out like the saddest episode of America’s Got Talent you ever saw; an endless procession of wannabes and thrill-seekers, each more eager to please than the last, each more pathetic. Honestly, what a pack of duds. I don’t know who turned down the flow on the superpowers spigot, but some of those jokers barely qualified as super, let alone as heroes. Take the umpteenth interviewee of the day – a perky chick in a spray-on costume calling herself ‘Miss Transit.’

  “Says here on your résumé you can teleport from your point of origin to anywhere you can see.”

  “That’s right,” she said.

>   “How about a demo?”

  “Well... I would, except it’s a one-shot power and it takes twenty-four hours to recharge...”

  Jesus, even my iPhone powers up faster than that, and that thing bleeds like an open vein after ten minutes swiping Snapchat

  “Well, can I see your one-shot at least?”

  “No can do,” she told me, “I need it to cut traffic later if I’m going to make my sister’s baby shower on time.”

  Give me strength. Was this really her best shot at convincing me she was C.H.A.M.P material?

  “Pop a squat and listen up, kiddo,” I told her. "If I wanted to throw money at some chick in a skimpy outfit with low prospects in life I’d go to a titty bar. Dressing up like a jackass and insisting everyone calls you by a dumb name doesn't make you something special. Just ask P Diddy.”

  Tears sprang up in her big dairy heifer eyes. Not my fault, I was only doing the girl a favor. C.H.A.M.P ain’t your grandma’s superhuman crime-fighting corporation – it’s a dangerous world out there and I can’t afford to throw someone into that mix who isn’t up to the task. I’m not saying she needed to be another me (she might as well try being a unicorn) but she had to have something going on.

  Take my twin brother and partner, Birdy. The guy’s 125 lbs soaking wet and not exactly blessed in the ‘super’ department, but what he lacks in strength and speed he more than makes up for with quips and wisecracks. Believe me, in this business, that’s a power all of its own. I still get a kick when I remember the time we caught Mimix using his shape-shifting power to hoodwink us into thinking he was George W and I dropped him into a vat of wet concrete. Quick as a flash Birdy chimed in with, “That sets a bad president.” I’m telling you, when that kid’s on form he’s verbal Viagra. I really couldn’t have asked for a better sidekick partner.[4]

  Anyhoo, Miss Transit left blubbing and I did feel kind of bad about that, so how about I save us all some future heartache by listing a selection of talents that definitely won’t get you invited to the jock end of the superhero lunch room:

  # Good at hiding: Not the same as invisibility.

  # Radar sense: Sorry, we don’t count blindness as a proficiency.

  # The ability to wake up just as the alarm clock is about to go off: Doesn’t count as ESP.

  # Born in a swamp: You say you’re a “plant elemental,” I say you smell worse than a Phish concert and could only win a fight against someone with an extremely severe pollen allergy.

  # Immovable: You’re fat.

  # Unstoppable: You’re fat and you have sh*tty balance.

  If these “powers” or any like them are your claim to fame, finish your sippy cup, strap on your Heelies and roll on home to your momma. And do me a favor and stay there. Don’t act like you know better, cobble together an outfit and call yourself a freelancer. Us pros have enough on our plate without having to mop up your mess. Goddamned freelancers. How about you free this lance? (you can’t see, but I’m pointing at my crotch right now).

  November 15th

  The C.H.A.M.P signal went up over the Palo Verde nuclear plant.[5] I was the first responder to the distress call, which had been triggered by a gang of thieves tripping the alarm of the plant’s reactor core. By the time I arrived on the scene they’d already hightailed it though, along with a giant stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium. No one knows how they got to it, the core was sealed inside and out. The whole thing’s a regular locked room mystery – the only clue the thieves left behind was CCTV footage of their robbery, which I had security play back for me.

  The robbers turned out to be Mandroids: clunky, rivet-metal stormtoopers of steam age design. They coasted along on a pair of motorized wheels, a big one at the front and a small one at the back. If you’re struggling to form a picture, just imagine a Dalek humped a Penny Farthing. The Mandroids came equipped with a Gatling gun mounted on each arm, which gobbled ammo belts that sprouted from their navels and looped by their sides, giving them a characteristic W shape (a sort of bizarro world McDonald’s logo). Their faces were masks of metal, their expressions frozen into a sh*t-eating grin.

  Wearing a matching grin – not to mention face – was their master and inventor, Professor D’eath. He was dressed in his usual wardrobe – a stately robe draped over a complex steampunk exoskeleton. He stood by twiddling his mustache as his clockwork goon squad went about their business, extracting the fuel rods from their housings and assembling them into a nuclear Jenga pile.

  Professor D’eath is my nemesis. My big bad. He’s the kind of crook every cape wants gunning for them; a cold-blooded diabolic with a grudge that just won’t quit. They say a hero’s only as good as his villain and the Prof’s the daddy of them all. The man’s ruthless, merciless and suffers a severe case of moral dyslexia. I waited a long time to meet an arch of D’eath’s caliber, so you can imagine how pleased I was when he finally showed up. I’m telling you, I was happy as a dog on a trampoline. At least until he started murdering people.

  There’s a way to play this game, see. We snowball fight with automobiles, we uppercut each other into orbit, we miniaturize one another with shrink-rays, but when all’s said and done we dust off the dirt and we live to fight another day. We don’t kill each another and we certainly don’t kill civilians. We don’t exterminate innocent people and leave their bodies strewn about like used hankies, or at least we didn’t before Professor D’eath had his motorized militia mow down a staff of plant workers for no reason at all.

  It was a slaughter. Fourteen men made the mistake of interrupting D’eath’s robbery and fourteen paid the price. The Professor made sure to cull them before I arrived – he knew his minions wouldn’t have fired shot one before I tore them apart like a kid with a Christmas present. He knew I’d do the same to him once I saw the bodies too, which is why he was quick to make an exit before I showed up. Even so, he didn’t take off without saying goodbye first. Addressing the nearest CCTV camera and finding his light like a Hollywood diva, D’eath smirked, gave me a sly ‘eat-a-dick’ wink then vamoosed.

  I couldn’t tell you how. That’s the point the picture on the security monitor I was watching broke up. Just for a second, but by the time it righted itself the Prof was gone – his crew and the plutonium – vanished like an albino in a snowstorm.

  What the hell? This isn’t how it goes. Me and the Prof clashing radioactive rods like Luke and Darth – toe-to-toe with the reactor core going into meltdown around our ears – that’s how this was meant to be. A climactic, winner-takes-all dust-up, not a hit-and-run massacre. Where’s the job satisfaction in that?

  November 16th

  If you’re anything like me (and you really should be, it’s incredible) you like your villainy old school. Evil with the swish of a cloak, not the stuffing of a body bag. Only D’eath wasn’t playing that game anymore. He’d gone and spun his ‘evil’ dial all the way up to eleven. Heck, he was acting so twisted he could watch Tom Hanks in Philadelphia and come out rooting for the AIDS.

  I needed to figure out where the Professor had gone to ground, and on the double. Where to start though? I guess I never really thought about where it is he calls home before, at least until he started boosting bomb fuel and shooting up normals.[6] Truth told I was always having too much fun to sweat the details. It’s a merry old game, the ping pong of good versus evil – foil a crime, smile for the cameras, lather, rinse, repeat. If I knew where Professor D’eath’s base of operations was I’d have to have brought him in, and that was just bad for business. So long as D’eath was running wild this town had so many C.H.A.M.P signals flying it was lit up like a motel bed sheet on CSI: Miami. I’m talking proper crimes too, not rookie stuff. That’s all I’d have left if D’eath was taken out of play – busting drug deals and collaring prowlers and foiling bank raids. That’s not crime-fighting, that’s pest control. Besides, banks don't need robbers to steal people’s money anymore, they can take care of that by themselves.[7]

  Birdy called a crisis meeting to sleu
th out where D’eath’s portal had taken him to. What a ball-ache. So long as there’s a crisis going on surely there are better places for me to be than stuck in a boardroom listening to a talk so dull I considered eye-beaming a hole through my hand to stop from falling asleep. Seriously, you try staying awake through a hundred-slide Powerpoint presentation on hot spot policing and surveillance monitoring and targeted witness canvassing. You don’t read about that in the comic books, do you? No, it’s all Batcomputers and Danger Rooms, not slideshows and speeches. Three hours of that and it started to feel less like a crisis meeting and more like a very boring hostage situation. Christ, Birdy was working his jaw so hard I thought he’d give his face a six-pack.

  Considering we used to cosy up in the same womb, me and Birdy don’t share too much in common. Not that I don’t love the sh*t out of the guy, but stood next to each other we look less like twins and more like the Before and After pics from a Charles Atlas ad. And that’s just the start of our differences. For instance, Birdy might get his name for the pair of feathered wings on his back, but that doesn’t mean he gets to fly, same way I do every time I step over the edge of my penthouse balcony and flip off the laws of physics. There’s always been friction between us because of that, ever since we were little kids. Ever since he talked me into biting him – same way that radioactive eagle bit me – and all he got in the way of superpowers was a set of bird wings too crummy to get him an inch off the ground.