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I’m pretty sure my mom is a supervillain.
I’ve been going over it in my head for a while, but it totally makes sense. For starters, Mom keeps me in this force field here. See? It’s clear, but when I tap my pincer against it, there’s obviously some sort of high-tech barrier. There’s no getting around it. There’s no plowing into it. It won’t budge.
And then there’s the rest of my container. The gravel is the wrong color. It was always a really light shade before and now I’m certain that it’s not. Mom spends a long time drilling her little army of soldiers on things like numbers, and colors, and shapes… and they called it “Purr Pull” or something like that. Mom’s cat, Whistler, does something Mom calls purring. It sounds like a boat. At least, she says it sounds like a boat. I’ve never heard a boat before. I wouldn’t know.
Mom takes me with her to the winter castle where I live most of the time, but I live at her summer castle when it gets warm. I think that must be when she gets all of her supervilliany done, to be honest—all of her minions are released to other adults in the building, some of them never to be seen again.
What do they do exactly? I don’t know.
I can only imagine it to be the most exciting of missions, where all of her briefings come together in the most spectacular way possible. I think I saw one of their missions through the “wind oh” one year—they called it “Feel Day,” but it didn’t look full of emotional love, ya know. Her underlings were pitted against all of the other underlings in the winter castle, doing strange things like… shouting at the top of their lungs, and leaping in the air. Kind of impressive really, I couldn’t think of jumping that high.
As for Mom, she’s usually neck deep in books that she borrows from someplace called the “Lie Bary.” She spends a lot of time typing at the computer, furrowing that flat place above her eyebrows, and typing like crazy on her flat box of pressing buttons. She has me set up pretty close to her during the summer months, so sometimes I can see her screen if I get really high in the tree that she has planted in my room.
She seems to have heroes on surveillance, though! The feed is usually interrupted with what must be some secret network of unique villain organizations like “The Schenectady local News at 9.”
I got REALLY good at learning that word, Schenectady, because she spends a lot of time teaching her minions that word. “Schenectady, From neck to knees, It’s full of trees, Schenectady.” Even Whistler doesn’t know how to say it properly, but it’s not for lack of trying.
Until he can, I won’t believe him when he says that mom is anything but the most successful of evildoers.
I mean, she always keeps me fed, and water, and sometimes she even gives me wander-about time. I LOVE wander-about time. Whistler gets shoved into a room and I get to go wherever. Meanwhile, mom practices stretchiness while her taskmaster on the screen calls her an upside-down dog or whatever. It’s great.
But:
It’s her little goblins I can’t stand. Like, some of them are fine. But once in a while, when one takes me on vacation to visit a different part of the castle, it’s… It’s… SO annoying! They always slosh the water in my travel house, and make my food smell different. But those times when they tap their fingernails on my shell repeatedly, it just… it just… IT GETS ME, you know?
Mom’s boss is pretty scary, too. No matter how loud or unruly Mom’s underlings are, with a look from Mom’s boss, they go SO quiet I can hear myself breathe. That’s power. Raw. Power.
Whistler keeps trying to tell me that I’m wrong, but it doesn’t matter what he thinks. I mean, he’s a CAT. He’d probably eat me if Mom would let him. Not that I wouldn’t give him a proper pinch first, I can defend myself pretty well.
I AM the son of a supervillain, after all.
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