"I was kind of in a rush," she said. "And there wasn't much of a selection."
"And this is the car you bought?" I asked. "A lime green and rust red Gremlin?"
'Actually," she said, "it's just a lime-green Gremlin."
I leaned closer and flicked a finger at the car's fender. The rust red paint was, in fact, simply rust.
"I got a really good deal on it," she said.
"No air bags," I noted, walking around the car. "Too old for them."
"It's also all metal," she responded. "Being a really heavy car is really the next best thing."
I snorted. "Well," I said. "You can obviously drive. After a fashion, anyway. You took the car to the test, right?"
She raked some fingers through her hair. "Well. Yes. Though we stopped at the written. I was going to tell them my husband had driven me to the DMV, then went for coffee."
"Mistress of deception, huh?"
"Give me a break. I was working under pressure," she said. "And yes, I can drive. I mean, more or less. I didn't smash into anything on the way home, anyway. But everyone kept honking at me whenever I even came close.
People in cars can be really rude."
I tried to imagine this scene, and had to keep myself from wincing. "Okay then. Let's get in and start with signals and right-of-way."
"Signals?" she asked. "Right-of-way?"
I couldn't help it. My lips twitched. "I'm not laughing at you," I said. "I'm laughing with you."
She gave me a very stern look.
I held up my hands. "All right, all right. I'll be nice. Get in the car, and we'll go one step at a time."
We got in, but she didn't put her key in the ignition. "You're a good man, Peter Parker," she said quietly. "I love you."
I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
"You know," she said. "We never made out in a car when we were teenagers."
"We didn't have a car," I pointed out. "Plus we weren't dating."
"All the same," she said. "I feel cheated."
She leaned over, pulled my mouth gently to hers, and gave me a kiss that rendered me unable to speak and gave me doubts about my ability to walk.
We got to the driving lesson.
Eventually.
Chapter 10
I CLICKED THE PRINT BUTTON and my printer wheezed to life—though at this point, I doubted the dissertation on magical systems of power that it was currently reproducing would be helpful except maybe in an analytical retrospective, long after the fact. I muttered under my breath, and tried the next batch of Web sites, looking for more information, as I had been since Mary Jane went to bed.
There was a sudden, heavenly aroma, and I looked down to find a cup of hot coffee sitting next to my keyboard.
"Morning," Mary Jane said, leaning over to kiss my head. "I thought you weren't going to stay up all night."
"Marry me," I said, and picked up the coffee.
She was wearing my T-shirt, and I could not, offhand, think of anyone who made it look better. "We'll see," she said playfully. "I'm baking cookies for Mister Liebowitz down the hall for his birthday, so I might get a better offer."
"I always knew you'd leave me for an older man." I sipped the coffee and sighed. Then I glowered at the stack of useless information by the printer.
"How'd it go?" she asked.
I made a growling sound and sipped more coffee.
"Peter," she said, "I know that in your head, you just said something that conveyed actual information. But when it got to your mouth, it grew fur, beat its chest, and started howling at the moon."
"That's right," I said, as if reminded. "You're a girl."
That got me a rather sly look over the shoulder. Doubtless, it was the fresh, steaming coffee that made my face feel warm.
"I take it your research didn't go well?" she said, walking into the kitchen.
"It's this magical crap," I said, waving a hand at the computer. I got up from my chair, grabbed my coffee, and followed her. "It's such hogwash."
"Oh?"
"Yes. It's like we're reverting to the Dark Ages here. Which you're not actually supposed to say anymore, because it's not like it was a global dark age, and to talk about it like the whole world was in a dark age is Eurocentrically biased." I sat at the kitchen table. "And that's pretty much what I learned."
"You're kidding," she said.
"No. Eurocentrically biased. It's actually a phrase."
"You're funny." She opened the refrigerator door. "Seriously, nothing useful? Not even in the Wikipedia?"
"Zip. I mean, there's all kinds of magical creatures on the net, God knows. But how do you tell the difference between something that's pure make-believe, something that's been mistakenly identified as something magical, something that's part of somebody's religious mythos which may or may not have a basis in life, and something that's real?" I shook my head. "The only thing I found that was even close to these Ancients turned out to be an excerpt from a Dungeons and Dragons manual. Though I did run across a couple of things that led me to some interesting thoughts."
Mary Jane continued on, making breakfast and listening. I wasn't sure how she did that. Heck, I had to turn off the television or radio to be able to focus on a phone call. "Like what?" she asked.
"Well. These Ancients might have superpowers and such, but they still have the same demands as any other predator. They have to eat, right? And they're thousands and thousands of years old."
She nodded, then frowned. "But I thought that the super-powered types only started showing up kind of recently. I mean, fighting Nazis in World War Two, that kind of thing."
I shrugged. "Maybe. But maybe not, too. I mean, most of the super-powered folks who have shown up are mutants. I've heard some theories that it was nuclear weapons testing that triggered an explosion—"
"So to speak," Mary Jane injected.
"—in the mutant population, but that doesn't make much sense to me. I mean, the planet gets more solar radiation in a day than every nuke that's ever gone off. It doesn't make sense that a fractional increase due to nuclear weapons tests would trigger the emergence of superpowers."
"Worked for the Hulk," she pointed out.
"Special case," I said. "But I think that maybe what we're seeing—the rise in the mutant population—might be as much about the total population rising as it is about a sudden evolutionary change. We've got about six billion people on the planet right now. Two thousand years ago, the estimate is that there might have been three hundred million. If the occurrence of powered mutants is just a matter of genetic mathematics, maybe it just seems like there's a lot more mutants running around these days. I mean, they do tend to be kind of eye-catching."
She was making omelets. She assembled them as quickly and precisely as if her hands were being run by someone else's head while she carried on the conversation with me. "And you think that explains how these things ate before? By feeding on the occasional mutant with some kind of totemistic power?"
"Potentially," I said. "Even a reduced population might be able to sustain the Ancients. They only eat once in a while, sort of like a boa constrictor. Felicia thinks the last time Mortia ate was in the forties. Morlun told me that feeding on me would fill him up for a century or more."
"Tastes great," Mary Jane said. "More filling. I agree."
I coughed. "Thank you," I said. "But, ahem, getting our minds out of the gutter, think about it for a minute. How would people have described someone with, say, Wolverine's gifts, back when? He'd have been called a werewolf or a demon or something. Charles Xavier would have been considered a sorcerer or a wizard of some kind. Colossus would have been thought to be some kind of gargoyle or maybe a fairy tale earth-creature, like a troll."
She lifted her eyebrows. "So, you're saying that maybe a lot of folklore and mythology might be based on the emergence of mutants, back when. Like if… say, Paul Bunyan was actually a mutant who could turn into a giant."