Perched on a strong arm of the battered couch, Mina Sputterspark rocked herself slowly back and forth, back and forth to the rhythm of a foreign heartbeat. The heart clocking her perfect movements came to stand beside her.

“I have my reasons,” she whispered, answering an unasked query. The second troubled heart hoisted himself onto the back of the couch. There he sat, resting his feet on a lumpy pillow while he waited for her to continue.

“I left because I was alone,” she continued obediently. “That in itself is not a bad thing. I’m used to being alone. I even enjoy it at times. But being alone when you know you shouldn’t be… it gnaws at your very soul in a way. Have you ever sat in your house and wished with all your might that you could go home, even though you **are** home?”

Megavolt nodded. He wondered at the accuracy of her description of the feeling. She went on:

“Well I feel like that all the time now. I want to go home, but I don’t know where that is. So I’m looking for it. I need to find a place where I’m understood… where people won’t judge me because of what I seem to be.”

“What’s that?” Megavolt asked.

“This…” The crystal in her belt began to glow. Megavolt knew the look on her face, but she was too quick. She zapped him before he had time to duck out behind the couch.

Instantly the room spun out of control. His head was filled with a noise comparable only to total chaos. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed, for he saw the same thing either way: swirling, flickering images with no rhyme or reason to them.

The spell, or curse, passed quickly. When he regained his senses, he was lying on the floor.

“What… was that?” he gasped, pushing himself upright.

“Piezoelectrically transmitted radio and television waves,” she sighed. “Not much, but enough to put any unsuspecting obstacle out of the way long enough to find somewhere to hide.”

The villain marveled at his cousin. “How did you…?”

“…develop my talents?” She turned her sad eyes to him. “I was born with it. You know, of course, how bones have a certain amount of piezoelectric charge? Well I happen to be supercharged. It was just a matter of developing my skills.”

“And that’s why you ran away, isn’t it? Because they think you’re some kind of a freak?” His inquisitive eyes pierced her from the floor.

“Yes,” she admitted. “And no.”

“And no?” Megavolt climbed over the back of the couch. He sat beside her, listening.

“Well, they don’t seem to think anything of me. Maybe if they thought I was a freak, at least I’d know they thought of me. But they just ignore me. I’m nothing to them. Not good, not bad. Only once I heard my mother speaking on the telephone to someone… she said I was just like you, and I’d probably amount to even less.” The words were delivered with perfect indifference, but Megavolt knew well enough to see past that.

“They talk about me?” he asked.

“Now and then. You’re the black sheep of the family… someone nobody wants to be.”

“Probably just as well,” said the villain. “It’s not like I care much for them either.”

“But I do,” Mina whispered. “I used to want so much for them to love me, or to need me, or even to hate me. Now… this is the last road I can take. I’ll be another black sheep. Then at least they’ll have someone new to make an example of.” Resentment dripped from the young girl’s voice. Megavolt knew the sound too well, for it was the sound of his own thoughts. The lullaby of the waves, that sweet sound he heard each night, sang in the same tone of lost childhood. But those were only waves. Now, personified in the voice of his cousin, it was a much darker thing.

“You’re welcome to be a black sheep,” Megavolt said. “But don’t be alone. That’s not much better than being an outcast in their presence.”

“It can’t be much worse.”

“You would know?”

Mina looked at her cousin. The expression of harsh scorn drained from her young eyes and was replaced by bright tears. “I would know,” she whispered, “Only too well.”