9. With Great Power Comes a Great Big Painin the Hiney

CHAPTER 9 WITH GREAT POWER COMES A GREAT BIG PAIN IN THE HINEY Melvin enjoyed being a superhero—at first. It was fun stopping runaway trains, rescuing lost children, and saving people from burning buildings. Whenever anybody needed help, all they had to do was lift their heads to the sky and cry out, "YO! Big Melvin!" And Big Melvin would drop whatever he was doing and zip to the scene and save the day. It was all good, at first... until it started to get bad.

You see, after a while people started to abuse the system. They started crying out "YO! Big Melvin!" all the time, and it got old pretty quickly. Melvin would drop everything, throw on his cape, fly out the window, zip through the city, and arrive at the scene, only to find out that it wasn't an emergency at all. Usually it was just someone who had misplaced her cell phone... or a kid who needed help with a video game cheat code... or some guy who had accidentally dropped his wallet in the toilet.

It was a complete waste of Melvin's time, and the interruptions were beginning to drive him crazy. But the final straw came one evening as Melvin was doing a synchrotron radiation experiment with his homemade oscillating- field particle accelerator. Eleven months of research were finally about to pay off. The klystrons and electromagnets began to accelerate the hadrons faster and faster through Melvin's homemade copper cyclone tubing. Soon, Melvin would be the first person on Earth to definitively prove the Higgs boson's existence and solve the mystery of everything.

But then, with his supersonic eardrums, Melvin heard a cry for help from across the city. Quickly, Melvin shut down his experiment, which caused the particle accelerator to overheat. The resulting explosion blew a hole in his bedroom floor forty feet deep. But Melvin didn't care. Somewhere in the city, a citizen needed his help. So he grabbed his smoldering cape from the pile of ashes that used to be his bedroom closet and flew to the scene of the emergency.

When he arrived, he found a middle- aged woman screaming frantically out her apartment window. "YO! Big Melvin! HELP!!! HELP!!! It's an emergency!!!" "What's wrong?" Melvin asked desperately.

"Do these pants make me look fat?" asked the lady.