Chapter 2: The Perils of Paperwork

Summertime and the living is easy. That’s the mantra of all the schoolboys my age; the ones that I knew anyway. This summer was not turning out to be that kind of summer for me and Mike. We were feeling dazed and confused and the list of things to do, learn, figure out, clean, polish and repair seemed insurmountable. The biggest problem of all? Where the hell to even begin!

Sometimes the problem with coming into the middle of something is figuring out where the beginning and end is. Kind of a needed step before you can figure out where you are. Jumping into someone’s life is like that and then some. To add to the insanity, there was the fact that we had two ‘lives’ to jump into; The Dragonfly and The Gadgeteer. Thank the stars that Grandpa Melville documented everything!

To give me time to understand what I needed to understand before I was forced to help Mike do whatever it was he was going to do, I buried him in documents. I dumped everything I could find regarding the Dragonfly suit and Gossamer Wings on him. I slapped a laptop together for him, slightly less awesome than my own, and filled it with notes, blueprints, schematics and manuals. Repair manuals, maintenance manuals, operating manuals. Everything. I told him to learn it all, understand it all and get back to me when he did.

While Mike slowly digested all things Dragonfly, I dove into the Gadgeteer’s other files. Some were as mundane as invoices and manifests, sales slips and receipts, along with a surprisingly large number of legal documents. Who knew there was so much law involved in upholding the law? Fortunately, meticulous Grandpa Melville had included a summary and/or note explaining each item, among which were several trusts, one of which paid the monthly bills for the Dragonfly Lair so that the lights stayed on, the city property tax got paid, all the mundane stuff. I wondered for a moment where and how the stuff he didn’t want the garbage man finding got disposed of. My brain immediately popped up several streamers of inspiration and I filed them away in the back of my head while I moved on to other items on the list.

We lasted three weeks with our heads buried in data before Mike came to me and professed some doubts. “Nate, I’m too young for this. I’m only fourteen, and granted, I am bigger and stronger than most guys my age. My reflexes are sharp and my coordination is exceptional,” buffing his nails on his chest as he said it. I snickered in response. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but ... in the end I am still only fourteen. I’m not ready to be the Dragonfly and I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready.”

I sighed heavily then smiled and gave Mike a pat on the shoulder. “Smarter than you look too, don’t forget that,” I laughed. “Of course you’re not ready. Look at your grandpa. He was in college before he was even able to make the Dragonfly suit and build Gossamer Wings. If we go back and look at the history of the Dragonfly and compare it to what we know of your grandpa’s life, I think we’d discover that he wasn’t out fighting crime as soon as he had the suit made. I bet he took time to train himself until he felt he was ready.”

“Yeah, that makes sense I guess. I’ve got at least four years to decide whether I want to put the suit on for real. At least four years, maybe more!” Mike’s wide smile and cheery declaration told me I’d said the right thing, though I knew he would have come to the same conclusion on his own.

“Don’t forget you are an athlete, and a good one. Who knows what four years of high school sports could wind up doing for you. You could wind up in some major college sports program playing football or baseball, maybe even as a pro someday. Hell, even if you wind up a bean counter at Schlep, Schmuck, and Dweeb Incorporated you may never decide to put the suit on. Doesn’t mean you can’t spend time learning all about it just in case you do though, right?”

Mike’s refocused priorities were made easier than otherwise because Grandpa Melville had stuffed a very state of the art workout room in the Dragonfly Lair, which is how Mike and I both had come to think of it. Beyond state of the art really, as it had a lot of biofeedback and real-time monitoring circuitry built in. I was even using the equipment every other day. I may have been shorter and skinnier than Mike, but I was no couch potato, and the workout room was free!

With Mike gone I got back to work burrowing my way through the files. I was done with the bean counter stuff and had a good sense for how he sold his goods to his super clients. Given the exclusive nature of his clientele, he relied on word of mouth and everything he made was by request. He didn’t just make things and then offer them for sale. Each item was custom made. As I began to go through the records of what he sold, I decided to look at them in chronological order to see if I could find any trends or patterns in what he sold over the years. That meant starting with the Blue Blur.

The Blue Blur. He was a Baltimore legend whose career started about the same time as the Dragonfly’s, which made sense since he and Conrad Melville went to college together. His career lasted a good decade longer than the Dragonfly’s though before he too disappeared from the super hero scene. No announced retirement; he just stopped appearing at crime scenes. His suit was a little bit of pure genius when I looked at the technical data. The Gadgeteer had been particularly good with micro circuitry, though to be fair it was closer to nano circuitry. Every bit of fabric woven into the suit itself had circuitry woven into it, and together it generated a field of force that drew its power from the Blur’s own ‘Blur Field’. Even cooler than that was the suit’s ability to adapt to the Blur’s physical state. One of his coolest tricks had been his ability to ‘blur through walls’ and the Blur Suit mark III was able to ‘blur’ right along with him.

Crap! I stared at that bit of design logic and my own brain began spitting out inspiration streamers like mad! For the first time in a long time my brain had that ‘mad dog lunging at the end of its chain’ feeling that told me I had to build something, and I had to build it now! Crap, but I had to swat the mad dog on the nose and stuff it back in its doghouse for now. The mad dog was really what I thought of as the mad genius who lurked in the back of my brain. The mad genius was the source of my streamers of inspiration, and sometimes the mad genius really wanted to step up to the front and build something, and today was one of those days. I managed to stuff him back into the dark again with promises that we would do that first, once we could. Every gadgeteer, tinkerer, meta-inventor, whatever you want to call them is a mad genius of one kind or another.