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<body class='hmmessage'><div dir='ltr'>[8FOLD/HCC] Journey Into #22 <br> <br>Eightfold Comics Group Presents<br>A High Concept Adventure<br>JOURNEY INTO #22: 'Joanna Has Two Daddies'<br>by Saxon Brenton<br>[8F-144][HCC53]<br> <br> "Poppa, who's my mother?" asked Joanna.<br> Michael looked up from the engineering blueprints had had spread <br>across his work space. They were routine work for him, but to anybody <br>else they would be gibberish. This was because Michael Huld was a <br>metahuman, a semi-retired cape, and most importantly, a mad scientist.<br> And now, as he looked at his precocious and super-intelligent ten <br>year old daughter, he suddenly doubted his abilities to do the <br>impossible. <br> "Well honey, that's a bit complicated," he said. He weighed down <br>his papers with a piece of extraterrestrial bric-a-brac that he used as <br>a paperweight and turned his full attention to Joanna. There had been a <br>time when he was much younger when Michael would have continued to work <br>as he talked, but Peter had put much effort to instill in his husband <br>better social graces, for which Michael was - in retrospect - grateful.<br> "You know that that your Dad and myself..."<br> "I know that you're gay, Pop," she interrupted with the exasperated <br>voice of children the world over who know that they are smarter than <br>their parents but wished that the adults would at least try to keep up. <br>"That doesn't change the fact that you need a female to contribute an <br>ovum to produce a viable zygote. And I want to know who she is."<br> Michael frowned at her. "If you'll keep from interrupting," he <br>said sternly, "I was going to remind you that your Dad and myself were <br>active superheroes when we were younger and fitter, and one of the <br>things about superheroes is that they have weird adventures."<br> "Sorry, sir," she said, briefly cowed.<br> "Right then. The thing you need to know is that there was a time <br>when there was a supervillain with a sex reversal ray gun."<br> Joanna's face had the briefest flicker of bamboozlement cross it <br>before settling into a sober frown. "Okay," she said. Michael gave her <br>an assessing look. "Does that worry you?" he asked.<br> She shook her head. "It's just not the type of thing I was <br>expecting."<br> He raised an eyebrow. "And what were you expecting? That maybe <br>your Dad and myself had girlfriends before we discovered boys and that <br>one of us is really just your stepdad?"<br> "That is such a soap opera," she said with vast derision, <br>attempting to avoid the question. She considered. "So you're saying <br>that one of Dad and yourself went and made yourself female and carried <br>me to term."<br> "Yes," Michael agreed. "And before you ask, it was me." He <br>deepened his voice and in his best James Earl Jones voice said, "Luke, I <br>am your mother."<br> "Oh Poppa," she said, half giggling and half wearily. She <br>considered some more. "So I was conceived in the middle of an <br>adventure? That doesn't seem right. It takes months for a woman to <br>realise that she's missed her periods. Did you get stuck that way for a <br>while?" Joanna knew from the stories that she'd been told and the scrap <br>book about Dad and Poppa's adventures that she'd been shown that <br>sometimes her Poppa used his devices to change his shape or species or <br>physicality. Like the time he gave himself an ant's head in order to <br>communicate with the Animekt hive mind and track down the criminals who <br>had holed up in their pocket dimension. Or the way he still sometimes <br>used a body of organic steel for rescue work. This was why she wasn't <br>particularly surprised by the idea of him changing his gender. <br> But on the other hand, as far as she knew he had always changed <br>himself back soon afterwards. Which seemed reasonable enough when you <br>had a secret identity to protect. <br> He shook his head. "No. The ray gun had easily reversible <br>settings, so I turned myself right back," Michael said. "You see, at <br>that time I hadn't built the someone-else's-problem field generator to <br>conceal the fact that I'd changed."<br> "They're called perception filters these days..."<br> "Bah! New fangled Doctor Who techno-babble," Michael said wryly. <br>"Give me good old fashioned Douglas Adams terminology," he added, not <br>quite managing to keep a straight face. Not that Joanna would have <br>recognised the irony in what he said. "Anyway, I didn't make the SEPF <br>until later... When I started thinking about using the sex change gun <br>to start raising a family, as a matter of fact."<br> "So you just went and made yourself female and had a kid," said <br>Joanna. "Just like that."<br> "Well, maybe not 'Just like that'. But this was something your Dad <br>and myself were able to plan out. It wasn't like some a crazed black <br>cape plan, where we had to have the solution an hour ago or the world <br>was going to be destroyed."<br> "Okay them, so what about Geoffrey?" she asked, referring to her <br>little brother. "Who's his biological mother?"<br> "Ah," Michael said, and there was rolling of eyes involved. "Well, <br>see the thing is that I was hoping that your Dad would take a turn <br>bearing a baby. I thought it would be a good bonding experience. But <br>Peter wouldn't have anything to do with it." He made a small cough of <br>embarrassment. "I'm afraid we had a bit of a fight about that, and I <br>had another 'I'll show you, I'll show you all' moment."<br> And now it was Joanna's turn to roll her eyes. "Oh Poppa, another <br>one?"<br> Michael frowned at her again, but this time spoke with a lighter <br>tone. "Don't take that tone of voice with me young lady. I know you. <br>You take after me far too much for your own good, so there'll come a <br>time when you have a few 'I'll show you all' moments of your own." <br> "I will not," she said, outraged. <br> "You will too," insisted Michael with sage calm. "Anyway, to get <br>back to Geoffrey. I went and reverse engineered some cloning tanks that <br>we'd confiscated off the Social Chameleon after we'd defeated his plan <br>to replace the heads of the IMF with doppelgangers. Then I used my mad <br>science to splice together our gametes to fertilise your brother's <br>zygote."<br> "You grew my little brother in a cloning tank?" she asked.<br> "Well, yeah. Sure. It was easy. I mean, it's not like when the <br>bad guys use their cloning tanks and pseudo-RNA education to force grow <br>whole armies to adulthood so that they can fire a weapon from the moment <br>they're decanted. This was just a simple exo-uterus growth of a single <br>infant." He looked at her. "Here, I'll show you the baby pictures."<br> Michael stood up and walked to the shelf where the scrap books were <br>kept, and took down one labelled 'baby pictures'. Joanna had never <br>looked at that. Partly because she was privately embarrassed by the <br>idea of looking at her own baby pictures and making cooing noises over <br>them, and partly because she was far more interested in the scrap books <br>that showed the four-colour adventures of her fathers.<br> "These are yours," Michael said, briefly showing Joanna pictures <br>of herself, both the photographs as a newborn and the ultrasound of her <br>pre-birth. "And these are Geoffrey," he continued, pointing to the <br>photographs of a cloning tank with a glass front, where floating inside <br>the bluish liquid was a growing mass of flesh at different stages of <br>development. "Isn't he adorable?"<br> Joanna looked with clinical interest. "Okay, so you used the sex <br>reversal ray gun again, collected an egg from yourself..."<br> "No," said Michael emphatically. "You weren't listening, honey. <br>I was having an 'I'll show you all' moment. I didn't use a female ovum. <br>I quite deliberately spliced together two male spermatozoa to fertilise <br>Geoffrey's zygote."<br> "Oh," said Joanna, who was far more impressed with that than all of <br>this cooing over babies stuff. "Okay, that *is* cool."<br> <br> <br>==========<br>Copyright 2015 Saxon Brenton. All characters created by me. <br> <br>Author's notes:<br> Written for High Concept Challenge #53: 'Gender Defenders', <br>stories that deal with some aspect of gender. In this case, a <br>daddy/daughter discussion of the facts of life, made into a farce by <br>superhero comic tropes.<br> <br>-----<br>Saxon Brenton University of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia <br> <a href="mailto:saxon.brenton@uts.edu.au">saxon.brenton@uts.edu.au</a> <a href="mailto:saxonbrenton@hotmail.com">saxonbrenton@hotmail.com</a><br>"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex <br>world of jet-powered apes and time-travel." - Superman, JLA Classified #3<br> </div></body>
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