Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Random Supervillian Story

Tomorrow we're going to Arkansas after school. Fun, huh? We're going to visitors day at JBU, also known as John Brown University. So I won't be posting for a while. So to tide you over while I'm not here to annoy you with rants about punctuation marks, here's an unfinished story that I started during finals.

You think it's easy being the villain? Well, I'm telling you, it's anything but. You do just as much work as the hero, running around gathering minions, robbing banks, even building death rays, but everyone hates you anyway. And I should know.

Oh, I seem to have forgotten to introduce myself. My name is Andrea Smith, but most people know me better as Thorn. I'm one of those over-dramatic psychos who regularly gets beat up by a “defender of justice” just as psychotic and dramatic as myself while you all cheer. For him, not me. Him, generally speaking, is a guy in a white cape and mask who talks like he's just gotten his degree from overused-dramatic-cliche university. He calls himself Climax. I call him Oedipus, because he doesn't know what it means but it's plenty insulting anyway, if you know your Greek tragedies. I don't think he knows what his own name means, but I digress. Climax is a thoroughly annoying person. I remember one time when he was particularly bad. I'd kidnapped the mayor and was holding him for ransom in one of those standard variety abandoned warehouses. Of course, I'd left a note for the police, so I was expecting someone. Now, in my mind, there's nothing particularly wrong with ransoming a corrupt government official, right? It's just a little bit off the top from those bribes they get on a regular basis. Well, Oedipus doesn't exactly share my opinion. For some reason, he acted like I'd just dropped the atomic bomb on a box of puppies. Puppies are almost as annoying as he is, what with the fuzziness and the yapping and the big eyes. Give me a giant squid any day. Now that's cute. But I digress.

Climax came bursting through the skylight in full-blown dramatic pose mode and said, I kid you not, “Ah-ha! So we meet again, you villainous vixen! I have discovered your dastardly plot, so release the mayor now, and maybe I won't have to hurt you.” Of course, he struck about seven different dramatic poses while he spoke, so any hope he had of seeming like a serious threat was lost.

How he really thought that discovering my “dastardly plot” was impressive is beyond me. I mean, I gave the police the address to drop of the money at, although I was keeping the mayor somewhere else, and it's no great thing to follow a robot that's been sent to pick up the money. Good thing I had it put the money somewhere else before leading Oedipus to the warehouse. But I digress.

I asked him how his mother was. If you know your Greek tragedies, this would be a terribly insulting thing to ask someone who you call Oedipus. Unfortunately, he doesn't know, so it was wasted. In any case, it confused him quite a bit, but he promptly recovered and responded with one of his famous witty comebacks.

“Keep my mother out of this, you dastardly diva! Release the mayor now!” Three more poses accompanied his statement. If I was being nice, I'd say I didn't see that coming, but that would make me a lier.

I considered telling him to make me. Past experience and common sense told me that this might be a bad idea, so I decided just to get it over with. I went with the standard villain, “Nevah! Muahahahaha!” Of course, that was the end of the “witty” banter (note the quotation marks) and we commenced with the fighting. He won, I escaped, the mayor was free to go accept bribes and trod upon the poor, and the day was saved. I did get away with a few hundred thousand, so it wasn't a total loss.

Anyway, he's annoying when he's being a super-zero. But, it's much better than when he's not. Normally he's one of my co-workers.

Oh, right, I've forgotten to tell you. I work as a sketch artist for a newspaper, when I'm not endangering lives, of course. It's not the best job in the world, but hey, it provides it's share of alibis. Unfortunately, there's the little matter of Climax, aka Terrence Mason. He works there too, as a journalist. He's pretty bad at it though. Apparently journalism is a prerequisite for superheroism. Anyway, he writes fairly biased accounts of our battles, and I am generally called upon to illustrate them, given that I've taken great care never to be captured on film. I often use this opportunity to balance the bias of the article, so it's not so bad in that respect. I like to get little details of his costume wrong and watch him struggle not to tell me for fear of giving himself away, like making his logo pink instead of orange. It gives him a feminine touch, in my opinion, but I digress.

The problem isn't really that I have to work with him. The problem is that he likes me.


And that's all there is, folks. Tune in next time for me being back!
Suggestions, especially those for a title, would be appreciated.

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