Problem Child 19: Suburban Paradise, brought to you by Lex Corp

“No, Aiko,” Dad repeated patiently. “I won’t vault the fence holding your mother in order to run away. First off, it would be a violation of her bodily autonomy. That’s not very nice, is it?” He drizzled olive oil on his beloved farmer’s market vegetables the whole time he talked. Ugh. The prison food in this place was going to kill her.

Aiko clicked her tongue. “This is unfortunate,” she muttered, ignoring the attempt at life lessons. Mom was even worse than he was, absolutely convinced that Luthor had saved them. Come on, people. Obviously he sent the house-destroying assassin. This was so frustrating!

‘Going to kill Lex Luthor,’ Aiko promised herself mentally. ‘Then Mercy Graves. And then the house-ruining assassin. Then Superman gets got. I am going to get them all. I am going to squish them like that telepathic worm. I am going to spill their blood and fingerpaint with it, and then send it to the child psychologist so that she knows she didn’t win.’

“Cranky face.” 

Aiko blinked her way out of her pleasant fantasy and scowled up at him.

Dad laughed at her, shameless after he totally ruined her self-soothing attempt. “Cheer up,” Dad said, because he was a fool. He made the oven beep. She glared at it, a bit angry that it was being used for something bad and not something good, like chicken nuggets. “I’ve got to get dinner ready, your mom will be home from work soon. Are you sure you don’t want to go watch TV with your brother?” 

This involuntary civilian protection posting was absolute hell.

“I might as well, since no one else wants to escape from this suburban prison,” Aiko said sharply. She turned on her heel and stomped up the carpeted stairs to the playroom. 

They had been there for two weeks, which was enough time to discover that Luthor had done a pretty tight job of isolating them from the outer world whilst providing the illusion of safety. Someone had stolen all of her work kit, including the phone that had Robin’s contact information on it. They were inside a gated community full of Luther Corp employees. Most people living there worked in the single tall office building at the center, but there were also a couple of labs for diversity in evil hiring. 

She couldn’t tell if they were all there willingly. But no one else was trying to escape when the delivery vans came in the gates. 

That might have just been symptomatic of their poor broken spirits. It was hard to tell. It was an incredibly beige community with hateful routine. 

For example. Once a week, a handyman knocked on their front door. He had a single hot drink with one of her parents at the table. Then he cut their grass to an intolerably short length at which no one could pretend there were tigers stalking through it. Then he rinsed off their driveway and left as the mailman came by, whistling, and gave them another community newsletter. 

“Everyone here is wasting their disgusting little worm lives,” Aiko muttered to herself as she pushed open the door. Natty looked up at her from his sprawl on the purple beanbag chair. 

“Yeah,” he agreed easily. “You wanna come up with another plot?” He squirmed until he was mostly upside down and grinned at her that way.

Aiko whumped down onto the yellow beanbag chair in a starfish pose and sniffled. “I would love to make a plot,” she agreed woefully. “Thank you for noticing my needs.”

He giggled and tapped his fingertips together. “Uhhh, so I was thinking. Last time you got caught clinging to the bottom of that delivery truck because of the weight sensors. Can’t we just get around that by removing stuff from inside the truck?”

She blinked at him. “You’re so smart.” Aiko felt a little better already. “But what if there isn’t much in there to toss out? And how do we hide it?” she wondered out loud. “I also need to know what kind of time frame there is between when they empty the delivery and when they leave to work, the last one basically didn’t stop.” 

Natty had a horrible little weasel grin that showed all of his teeth. “A spare tire weighs about 70 pounds, as long as it isn’t a donut,” he said. “Just get rid of that, wheel it out of sight and the switch will be fine. Just, like, make sure your equipment weighs like 20 and it should be good.”

“...Why do you know that?” Aiko asked, genuinely curious. No one in their family ever talked about car stuff.

“Catapults,” Natty said evasively, “but that’s not important right now. Hey, the commercial break is over.” He vaulted back to a better posture to view the screen, and, for all that she could tell, forgot that anyone else was in the room and trying to digest the information that he was making a catapult that would launch 70 pound objects. What was his prospective use case? Surely he didn’t intend to launch himself, right? He probably knew that he would get hurt if he tried, so… yeah. It wasn’t her business, but she was curious.

‘He is so lucky that my issues are more obvious than his,’ Aiko marveled. ‘I provide him cover. In this universe, I am the less subtle one.’

It was such a profound realization that she sat in silence for about ten minutes, just to come to terms. Natty wasn’t Naruto. But he wasn’t not Naruto, either. He was basically Naruto with a good childhood. This is how that turned out? He was healthier in this iteration. By contrast, Aiko was… maybe not thriving so much.

‘Damn,’ Aiko thought, in a rare and frightening moment of self insight. ‘I am not good at being a child. I never took direction well, and now I have less impulse control. How did I do this the first time? Was the difference really just that I was unsupervised?’

Oh well. She wouldn’t be a child forever, and then it would be socially acceptable for her to make her own decisions and kill people or whatever. Until then, she just had to keep it on the downlow as much as possible and try to save her family from the President and then just… wait. Chill. Maybe graduate from something a couple of times. 

She did a few of the breathing exercises she had picked up in child therapy (another thing you probably didn’t have to do if you were good at being a child!) and then got to work on the next phase of her plan.

“Sweetie.” Dad banged on the bathroom door again and pleaded. “Are you almost done? My stomach isn’t doing so hot.” 

“Don’t rush me!” she snarled, and stepped off the scale to make a note on how much that kitchen knife weighed. “We take turns! Mom said so!” Aiko grabbed the next item and got back on the scale.