Exploring the abandoned lab of a mad scientist, what could possibly go wrong?

Sheldon Wye stood naked within the circle he had marked out with orange chalk on the platform under the machine. He felt like an idiot. “I probably look like one, too,” he thought — a short, skinny idiot with messy auburn hair.

“S-s-say when,” his taller, pudgier friend and classmate George Thissel suggested from across the room. Both boys were in the seventh grade but George had turned fourteen in October and Sheldon wouldn’t be thirteen until June. They attended the same academy for exceptional students in the spring of 1973.

George reminded Sheldon, “N-nothing’s going to happen till you step on the tr-trigger, but I can start ch-ch-charging the condensers.” He had his hand on the power switch for the busbar that led to the coils and capacitors lining one wall of the underground chamber. Some of the items were huge, and all of them looked old, much like the rest of the machinery that mostly filled the sixteen-by-sixteen room under the old abandoned mansion outside of Thibido, Arizona.

‘Yeah, do it,” said Shel, nodding abruptly. He nibbled his upper lip nervously then made himself stop.

George pulled down, the massive switch made a loud clack sound, the lights dimmed momentarily and the room filled with an eerie, nearly subliminal, hum. George jumped sideways at the noise and laughed his high nasal chortle.

A whiff of ozone made Shel sneeze. “It’s come to this,” he thought. His bare foot inched sideways involuntarily, closer to the trigger button in the top of the platform. He hoped that he and George had rewired things properly. The lab, if one could call it that, had been almost wrecked when they found it.

“Don’t hit the button till things are properly ch-charged,” George warned. “You wouldn’t want to end up half-baked.” He pushed his stiff black hair out of his eyes, adjusted his thick-framed glasses and snickered again, laughing on the in-breath as well as the out.

“I wish he wouldn’t do that,” thought Shel. “It makes him sound like a cartoon character.” The not-too-bright companion of the main character, perhaps, but that thought made Sheldon blush. In reality, Shel would be flunking many of his seventh-grade classes at Carson Rogers Academy if not for George’s tutoring.

It wasn’t that Shel wasn’t bright himself, he just had a problem with reading, paying attention and sitting still in class. One-on-one with George, he did fine, but with twenty other boys in class, he got distracted. Reading in class was always hard and the courses based on rote memory, like history, were definitely not his strong point.

Shel’s parents had sent him to the special boarding school east of Tucson because of his reading problems, mostly, and George had ended up there for his stutter and general inability to communicate verbally. Except with Shel.

The school turned out good for both of them. Maybe it was the student-teacher ratio: instead of one teacher for forty students in many schools, at the academy, they had a teacher and an assistant for every twelve students.

As long as George and Sheldon kept their grades high, they were often allowed independent study on their own projects. That’s why it had seemed so important when he and George had done research into the history of the town and found out about it being where the not-quite-famous 40’s and 50’s superheroine, Ultragirl, had called home.

No one had seen her in more than a decade, but George was a whiz at researching the newspaper files in the town library. One thing led to another, and here they were — they’d found the lab underneath the mansion and the notes and journals that convinced them that Ultragirl had gotten her powers from this spooky machinery.

But they wanted evidence to show for their research. Fixing the machines had taken more weeks but what better proof would there be than giving themselves super-powers? Their first year at the top-rank prep school academy for gifted but troubled students would be ending soon and how cool would it be to go home for the summer as superheroes?

And if they turned everything over to the adults at the school, or even their parents, they might never get the chance—especially since the instructions had warned that bathing in the energy lights had to be done nude. Or, “N-n-nu-nu-naked,” as his partner in crime said.

“Ch-charged!” squeaked George just as a buzzer sounded.

Sheldon turned his foot on his heel and pressed the trigger button with his big toe.