Cat Schroedinger (Patreon)

The kids in this story are heavily based on my real life kids, but I am pretty much nothing like Dr. Schroedinger.

I think I probably posted a piece of this in 2019, but there's more.

I probably should have refused the job as soon as she told me I was going to have to change my name, but it was Cat Schrödinger, man.  What hench in her right mind wouldn’t give her left tit to work for her?

“I can’t have you calling yourself Diamond Bitch,” she said. “Can you go by Diamond, instead?”

“It’s a play on words,” I argued. “You know. Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. So I’m a Diamond Bitch. What’s wrong with that? I mean, we’re villains.I don’t have to have some kind of hero-code-compliant name.”

“Bitch is a misogynistic slur and it offends me.” She looked up at me through thick glasses like I was a specimen she was analyzing. It made me uncomfortable. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“I… guess I can call myself Diamond,” I said. “Doesn’t sound really original, though. I mean, there are girls in trailer parks who are namedDiamond on their birth certificate.”

“If you’d like to call yourself Diamond Dog, I can accept that.”

Yeah, no. Maybe Cat Schrödinger was offended by the word bitch, but I thought it had a lot more chops than dog. A dog is loyal and kinda dumb and will follow you everywhere wagging her tail. A bitch will bite you if you fuck with her. “Nah, I’ll stick with Diamond, I guess.” I leaned back on the wall, adopting my “cool” pose. I like my cool pose. I’ve practiced it in the mirror a lot. “So, what’s the job? You got something spectacular planned for your coming back to the game? Or is it just general henching?”

“Neither,” Dr. Schrödinger said. “I need a bodyguard—”

“Okay, that’s cool, I can bodyguard—”

“—for my kids. Someone who can keep them safe while I go back into the ‘game’, as you put it.”

That was the point where I should have definitelyrefused the job.

***

So if you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years, or you’re avoiding learning anything about the cape community the way I avoid learning about the Kardashians, maybe you’ve never heard of Cat Schrödinger. In the Umbra, though, she’s a legend. Mad scientist type, you know the kind. Most female mad scientists have to go out of their way to look young and pretty and wear makeup to be taken seriously as a villain, because people expect mains who are women to be sexy or else how dangerous can they possibly be? Henches like me get to be hard and butch, but mains gotta be sexy, whichever side they’re on. But Schrödinger broke that mold. She was overweight, she had frizzy hair, she wore glasses – not sexy, stylish ones either, she wore the kind that get nerds with pocket protectors beaten up – didn’t wear makeup, stared right through people, wasn’t suave or sexy… just incredibly smart and competent. Always six steps ahead of the heewees (excuse me, “heroes”… little Umbra slang, there). She left innocent people alone, for the most part, and went after big corporations, with knockout gas and teleportation rays to take out the security guards instead of killing them. She only engaged with the heewees, like, five times directly, plus her henches took on some sidekicks a few times, but each time she got away without getting hit, captured, or tracked. Despite the fact that she appeared to be a human of only average combat skill and no superpowers.

No one ever captured her, or learned her real name or where she lived. And then she disappeared, for sixteen years.

So when I heard she was looking for a hench, I was there with bells on. She had me come to a nice, fancy, rich-person house, which I thought was a little weird for a supervillain’s lair, and then on the inside it turned out to be decorated like a fancy rich-person house, which was pretty surprising but I figured, maybe the place is a cover. We didn’t get very far in the interview in all when she told me that she’d already investigated me and I was perfect for the job, and then she told me I had to change my name, and the rest you know.

“You want me to be a fucking babysitter?”

“Language!”

“Are you Cat Schrödinger or are you a Sunday school teacher?”

“I am a mother,” she snapped. “And you are going to be taking care of my children, so watch your language.”

“I didn’t come here to take a job being a babysitter, I came to hench for one of the world’s top Umbra mains.”

“And that’s what you’d be doing. I need a bodyguard for my kids. You think being my bodyguard is acceptable, but being a bodyguard for my children isn’t?”

I glared down at her. “I don’t do kids.”

“Perhaps you misunderstand. I don’t need a nanny to read Goodnight Moon to my children and sing them clean-up songs and cut out paper dolls with them. I need a bodyguard. The children are old enough that they can take care of themselves, when we take my enemies out of the equation. They need a hench for a bodyguard because they might come under attack from capes – heroes, or other Umbrals.”

My eyes narrowed. “You said you were looking for a woman to hench for you.”

“That’s right.”

“So what the fuck? You pick me because girls are better at taking care of kids?” I sneered at her.

Her eyes stared right through me, like I was nothing, like I wasn’t even there. “Statistically men are much more likely to be rapists. My husband’s in Europe. I don’t want a strange man in my house.”

“You have a husband?”

“I didn’t get my kids through parthenogenesis, no.”

“Yeah, but I figured… someone like you, doesn’t needto buy into society’s bullshit…”

“I didn’t. I met a man I liked. I decided I would rather share a life with him than take over the world. Then he decided to go on a business trip for three weeks without me. Three weeks is long enough to get a plan into action.”

“He doesn’t know you’re Umbral, does he?”

“No, and he’s not going to… not unless I’ve got the world to give him on a platter.”

I thought about having a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, who wanted to give me the world on a platter, and I shivered just a little. I never had anyone care about me like that. Not that I wanted Professor Schrödinger or something, she was way too old for me. But to work for someone who was that passionate about what she did – who’d give up being a cape for the person she loved, who’d throw everything she had into taking the world so she could give it to that person…?

“I… guess I could at least meet the kids, see if I want to do it.”

She nodded. “They’re upstairs. I’ll show you.”

I probably should have backed out. Like I said. I’m notgood with kids.

But it wouldn’t exactly be the first dumbass move I’ve made in my life.

***

The three kids were upstairs in a playroom. There were shelves of books and stuffed animals that looked just a little bit dusty, up against most of the walls. But the wall directly of the door was occupied by a TV that had to be like 100 inches across, with a couch in front of it, and the kids were sitting on the couch playing a video game. Or, to be precise, the two boys were playing the video game, and the girl, who was sitting on the couch next to them, had a tablet console that she was playing her own game on.

“Children,” Cat Schrödinger said. “This is your new bodyguard.”

The little girl looked up, glanced casually behind her at me and her mom, and said, “Oh.” Then she went back to her game. The boys were playing some kind of team shooter, covering each other under enemy fire, and were completely ignoring their mother.

Dr. Schrödinger turned to the like sixteen or so switches on the wall, and flipped one of the ones in the middle. The boys’ game immediately froze.

“MOM!” the younger one wailed. “We’re on a server!”

“Yeah, you can’t freeze us right now! You’ll ruin our game!” the older boy said.

Dr. Schrödinger sighed deeply. “I told you not to play a game that you can’t pause today,” she said. “If you can’t listen to me, then I’m not really concerned about what happens to your game.”

I immediately had a flashback to my opinion of my mom’s boyfriend, when my mom had turned off my Nintendo because I wasn’t paying attention to the new guy. “Hey, Doc, maybe it’s not my place but can you let them have their game back?” I said. “As a favor to me? I don’t want to be the reason their game gets f- uh, screwed up.”

Those piercing eyes turned on me and looked right through me again. “A favor to you?”

“Yeah. Let the kids finish their game and I’ll meet them when they’re done, okay?”

“They need to learn discipline,” she said. “I told them not to play a game they can’t pause.”

“Yeah, and most of the time, I can get behind that, but I don’t want them thinking I’m the reason their game got ruined, so could you please turn it back on before they get dropped off the server or killed?”

“We’ve probably been killed anyway,” the older one muttered.

For a moment Dr. Schrödinger said nothing, and then, without a word, she flipped the switch. The character the older one was playing had almost no health, and the younger one’s character was on half health, but they were both still alive.

“Jeez!” the older one said. “I’m practically dead!”

“I got you, get a health pack!” the younger one said, covering his brother with his gunfire so his brother’s character could activate a health pack from his inventory. I had no idea what game this was, but it looked kind of cool.

“Ifrita, can you pause your game?”

The girl didn’t pause her game. “Dr. Criminy,” she said.

Schrödinger took a deep breath. “You are not a supervillain, Ifrita,” she said sharply. “You’re eight.”

“Don’t deadname me,” the girl said. “I’m Dr. Criminy.” OK, that was a ridiculous name for a kid but then, last I checked, kids weren’t supposed to be Umbral in the first place.

“Oh sh-ift!” the older boy exclaimed, the tiny pause in the word making it fairly clear what he would have said if his mom wasn’t in the room. His brother followed with “No, no, no!”

“Already picked your Umbral name?” I asked the kid, who ignored me, going back to her game.

The game reported that *ROBOMASTER* and *HYDROGEN ICE* had just died, in big red letters. Other players’ chat briefly noted the situation, commiserating or taunting them.

The younger boy put down his controller and stood up. “Crimmy, Mom says we have to pause our games so we can meet the bodyguard. Pause your game!”

“You’re not my dad,” the girl said.

“Ifrita. Pause your game,” Schrödinger said coldly. “One. Two.”

“Fine!” The girl threw her tablet console down onto the sofa. “I guess you just don’t want me to ever be able to relax and have fun!”

The oldest boy got up and moved to a tall stool near the TV, but at least he was facing me now. “Yo,” he said.

So this is the part where I describe these kids. The oldest one looked like he was around 12, with black hair like his mom’s, but thick and straight rather than frizzy like hers. He had the kind of skin where he’d probably get a really nice tan if he ever went outside except he never went outside. The other two were even paler, both blondes. The younger boy had glasses and straight hair and looked kind of like a blond, blue-eyed, paler copy of his brother, like he was a photocopy who’d been exposed to extra light. He was only a bit shorter and younger looking than his brother, so I guessed him at about 11. And the little girl, with curly blonde hair and the perfect skin and face of one of those poor beauty pageant girls, looked like she was 5, but Schrödinger had said she was 8. They were all wearing t-shirts; the younger two were wearing shorts, and the older one was in jeans that had literally no knees at all, like he’d worn them out so thoroughly it almost looked like they’d been made with holes for his kneecaps.

“Is everyone done with their important work?” Dr. Schrödinger asked sarcastically. “I wouldn’t want to interrupt anyone in their urgent tasks.”

“I paused it,” the girl said. “Can we do this quick?”

“Fine. Children, this is Diamond. She will be your bodyguard. Diamond, this is David, Jason and Ifrita—”

“Robomaster, actually,” the oldest boy said.

“I want you to obey her as you would obey me. In fact, judging from today’s behavior, I want you to obey her more than you do me, because it’s her goal to keep you safe, not to enforce good behavior.”

“Okay,” Robomaster said, and turned back to his screen.

“David!” Schrödinger snapped.

“What? We met her,” David aka Robomaster said. “Can we go back to our game now?”

Schrödinger released a very deep, very put-upon sigh. “Oh, very well.”

She motioned me out of the playroom, and closed the door behind her. “As you can see, they’re spirited, strong-willed and independent-minded.”

This sounded like a positive spin on “stubborn brats.” “Are they actually gonna listen to me?”

“You have super strength, and you’re able to use it with delicacy,” Schrödinger said, “so if they don’t, I expect that you can make them.”

“How come they’ve all got Umbral names? Do they know you’re a supervillain?”

“I don’t lie to my children,” Schrödinger said, pushing her glasses up on her nose. This did not exactly answer the question, but before I could ask another one, she was pointing out a room next to the playroom. “This will be your room. Ifrita’s room is directly next to it, and the boys’ room is on the other side of the playroom.”

I wanted to say I’d never actually agreed to the job. Instead I said, “What does this gig pay?”

Schrödinger named a number that was higher than any henching gig I’d had in my life. I decided that I’d agreed to the job.

***

A week later and I was bored out of my mind.

See, there’s a lot of downtime when you’re in a lair or a base, too. You do some chores for your main – you help put together the giant robot in the hangar, you test out the cartridges in the chemical-firing guns – but mostly there’s a whole lot of shooting the shit at the water cooler, training, playing video games, and sitting on watch. Until the heewees show up and everything goes to shit in a big hurry, and nine times out of ten, you end up in jail, or you’re out on the street with a concussion, and your main’s either fled, gone to jail, or is faking being dead.

It’s electric. Even during the downtimes, you knowthe heewees are gonna show sooner or later. And you’ve got your buddies all around you, and the main is generally shouting orders of some kind or another.

Cat Schrödinger barely talked to me the whole week. She’d answer my questions about where are the dishes or how do I find more toilet paper, if I happened to see her, but she was in her basement lab almost the entire time. The kids didn’t talk to me much either, but they were more helpful about telling me where stuff was. Also, Dr. Criminy wanted me to make her toast with eggs. Every day. Like I’m a chef instead of a hench or a bodyguard. She was really, really specific about the eggs, too; they had to have perfectly crispy whites and liquid yolks. You know how hard that is to manage?

It was spring, but the kids didn’t seem to be in school. They told me they were homeschooled, but I didn’t see any evidence of them getting any kind of schooling.

I was supposed to be guarding the kids, so there was basically nothing for me to do but sit in the playroom with them and watch them play video games. Sometimes Robomaster would log onto a PC in the corner instead, and the two younger kids would play together on some kind of game where you can build stuff, like Minecraft or a farming sim with cute animals or some kind of game where you’re a little burlap sack guy. Robomaster appeared to be programming, and sometimes, surfing Reddit, but I had no idea what.

Do you have any idea how boring it is to watch kids endlessly playing video games?

After about a week of this bullshit, I was thinking of quitting. I mean, any hench would have dreamed of working for Cat Schrödinger, unless they knew it consisted of watching kids play video games and being yelled at by an 8 year old because you cooked her eggs and they weren’t perfect. This was not what I signed up for.

And then Dr. Schrödinger called us all downstairs to her study, right about lunchtime.

“The improvements to the Uncertainty Field are finally completed,” she said. “So I’ll be going to the New York Stock Exchange.”

“When?” I asked.

“Right now.”

“Mom!” Dr. Criminy said. “I told you, it’s too dangerous!”

Schrödinger gave her daughter a look that would have wilted me. “I rather think I know more about the situation than an 8-year-old.”

“I don’t think you do,” Dr. Criminy said with the utter confidence of a little kid. “I’ve been monitoring the news about capes, and I don’t think you’re ready for how mean the heroes are nowadays.”

“What makes you think I haven’t done my own research?”

“Okay, then, where’s your body armor?”

“I’m not going to need—”

“Mom, she’s right,” the younger brother said. “You need body armor nowadays.”

“Maybe I should go with you,” I said. “The kids’ll be okay here-“

“They will not. I hired you to protect them, not me.”

“You could wait until I got the battle suit done,” Robomaster said.

“Children. I was doing this sort of thing for years before you were born.”

“Yeah, but you’re old now,” Dr. Criminy said.

I wondered why Dr. Schrödinger was putting up with this. My mom would have smacked the shit out of me if I’d talked back to her like that.

“It’s exactly because you are a child with no perspective on aging, among other things, that I’m not taking your advice. I appreciate your concern for me, but I can take care of myself.”

“No you can’t! It’s not safe!” Dr. Criminy yelled. I expected her to start stamping her foot like the little kid she was, but at least she had the self control to stay seated.

Robomaster said, “Crimmy, mom’s gonna do what she’s gonna do. Let’s just keep an eye on the situation.”

“You’ll remain here,” Schrödinger said. “Listen to Diamond and obey her as you would me.”

I wanted to point out that actually, as their bodyguard, I’d like them to obey them more than they obeyed her, considering I really hadn’t seen much obedience out of any of them so far. I didn’t, because Dr. Schrödinger herself had already said something like that the first day I’d met the kids.

“Fine,” the younger brother said. “Can we have pizza?”

“I don’t like pizza,” Dr. Criminy said.

“There are fish sticks, hamburgers, emergency pizzas, and frozen chili in the freezer.”

“I don’t like any of those things.”

“There’s also frozen spaghetti sauce, and spaghetti in the pantry.”

Dr. Criminy looked up at me. “Can you make me some spaghetti tonight?”

“I’m your bodyguard,” I said tiredly. “I guess that’s a thing I do.”

“I expect to be back tomorrow or the day after. Behave yourselves,” Schrödinger said.

She got up and left the study, heading toward the basement.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Robomaster said. “Crimmy, we’re going to my bedroom.”

I followed them up the stairs. The children didn’t generally invite me into their bedrooms, so I started going toward mine. Dr. Criminy called me back. “Diamond, you come with us.”

So here I was taking orders from an eight year old. Well, the pay was good.

***

“Mom doesn’t go into our bedrooms,” the younger brother said. “So Robomaster and I do our work in here. Sometimes we have to go borrow her tools, and then she gets mad, but since Criminy started helping out, she’sorganized, so she remembers to go return them. That way Mom doesn’t have any good reason to come in here, as long as we keep the room clean.”

“They’re slobs,” Criminy said.

“Says the kid who hoards food,” Robomaster said, opening the door to his bedroom.

“Hey! Everything you guys eat is gross!”

The room was actually very clean. There was a bunk bed up against the wall, and dressers up against another wall, and a pair of desks covered with mechanical parts and tools. The middle of the room was a wide-open space. And the ceiling was a dome somewhere like twelve feet high instead of the eight foot ceiling the rest of the second floor had, with a skylight.

“So listen,” Robomaster said. “My mom has no idea what she’s getting into. Heroes nowadays are vicious.”

I shrugged. “I agree with you, but there’s not much I can do about it. She doesn’t pay me to bodyguard her.”

“Well, there might be something we can do about it. I’ve got something to show you,” Robomaster said, and pulled open the closet door. He waved at the thing inside.

“What do you think?” the kid asked excitedly.

I looked over the giant robot. “Uh. You built this?”

“Yeah! More or less.”

The younger boy piped up. “Technically, he programmed his robots to build it for him.”

“That’s still me building it, though.”

Okay. I was impressed. I still thought the name Robomaster was absolute cringe, but it looked like he could actually back it up. “How long did it take you?”

“Most of last year and part of this one. You wanna see how it works?”

“I am pretty sure I’ve watched enough anime to know how giant robots work,” I said.

Dr. Criminy said, “Did you ever see Food Wars? That’s my favorite!”

Robomaster hadn’t paid any attention to me or his sister; he was busy controlling the robot with a remote. It lurched forward out of the closet, one step, two. It was about ten feet tall, and had to bend to get out of the closet. “I haven’t finished armoring it yet, though. It won’t be ready for an engagement until that’s done.”

“Which will be forty million years from now,” Dr. Criminy said.

The younger brother, whose name I couldn’t remember, said, “Robomaster and I have been working together on some spiders. You wanna see the spiders?”

Arachnophobia was not a good look for henches. “Yeah, sure, I’ll look at your – holy fucking fuck.”

The kid was, like, 10. When I was 10 the closest I came to doing anything science related was one of those baking soda volcanoes. This kid had taken pieces of what looked like Barbie dolls and grafted robotic spider legs onto them. So the torso was a Barbie torso, the eight legs each had either a Barbie arm or a Barbie leg in the middle, and the spider’s head was a Barbie head, except that glittering toy gems had been glued all around the head like a real spider’s set of eyes. The Barbie eye sockets had been completely filled with gems. “These are real eye sensors!” he bragged.

“Kid, that is the creepiest thing I have ever seen in my life, and I’ve been a hench for supervillains for nearly fifteen years now,” I told him.

“Thanks!”

“I helped,” Dr. Criminy said.

“Now watch this,” Robomaster said, picking up a different remote and pressing it. The gem eyes lit up, and then the spiders – there was more than one, oh shit, did I mention there were more than just one? – started scuttling around, you know, like spiders do.

“Nice, kid.” I sighed. “But listen. You’ve got an incomplete giant robot without armor and some really creepy spiders. That is notgonna be enough to save your mom from the heewees. Why don’t you calm down and let her do her thing?”

“Because she’s gonna get hurt!” the little girl yelled. “We have to get over there to make sure she’s okay!”

“Your mom told me to protect you kids,” I objected. “I am pretty sure that does not include ‘go to the bank she’s trying to rob and rescue her from the heewees’. Your mom is a very competent Umbral.”

“She’s not going to a bank,” the younger brother said. “She’s going to Wall Street.”

“Whatever.”

“What’s an Umbral?” Dr. Criminy asked.

“A supervillain,” the younger brother, who from what I’d seen really liked to explain things to people, said. “But it’s the word we use for ourselves. It means Shadowed, or having to do with shadows.”

Robomaster said, “You know it’s true. Mom hasn’t been in the game for a long time. I’ve been reading the news. Heroes are a lotnastier than they used to be.”

“That is not making the case that I should let you go fight them,” I pointed out.

“All I need to do is put some extra armor on,” Robomaster said.

“I said no. You’re what, 12?”

“I’m 15!”

He didn’t look 15; he looked hardly older than his 10 year old brother. “Your mom told me to protect you, and that’s what I’m doing. All three of you are staying here.”

And that was what I thought was the end of that.

I’ll bet it surprises no one to hear that that was not the end of that.

***

I was downstairs in the kitchen, making Dr. Criminy her spaghetti and heating up frozen pizzas for the boys, when I heard a familiar *thwap thwap thwap* outside.

For a moment I didn’t recognize it – I just moved in its direction, fast, because when you’re bodyguarding, the weird noise you don’t recognize is always a thing you investigate right away.