8FOLD/HCC: Journey Into #22 (HCC53)

Sun May 10 03:57:41 PDT 2015

[8FOLD/HCC] Journey Into #22 

Eightfold Comics Group Presents
A High Concept Adventure
JOURNEY INTO #22: 'Joanna Has Two Daddies'
by Saxon Brenton
[8F-144][HCC53]

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

Author's notes:
     Written for High Concept Challenge #53: 'Gender Defenders', 
stories that deal with some aspect of gender.  In this case, a 
daddy/daughter discussion of the facts of life, made into a farce by 
superhero comic tropes.

-----
Saxon Brenton   University of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia 
     saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au     saxonbrenton at hotmail.com
"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex 
world of jet-powered apes and time-travel." - Superman, JLA Classified #3

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