The Origin of a Reluctant Supervillain
It all started with the blender.
Every day, Quin from accounting hogs the office kitchen for nearly half an hour while he makes this disguising green smoothie thing that looks like a nice cup of pond scum.
It makes getting to the coffee pot freakin’ impossible.
Of course, no one ever mentions it, because Quin’s a petty tyrant who will hold your purchase orders hostage if you cross him.
Normally I just go back to my desk to wait him out, but I had a meeting and staying awake was going to be impossible without proper amounts of caffeine.
I could feel my blood pressure rising as the whiling blender toiled and smelled of kale and brussels sprouts. Glorious caffeination was only feet away, but utterly unattainable until Quin moved his skinny butt.
I was just as surprised as anyone when the blender blew up in his face.
I wasn’t the only one who stepped around him to the coffee pot and tried to hide a grin.
Of course, the blender was relatively mild compared with the toilet.
I was trying to escape my boss after the meeting. He was going on about a project that I wasn’t involved with, but I didn’t want to mention that. I jerked my head toward the john in an attempted to get away from him, but he just followed me in and kept talking as he entered the stall while I stood at the urinal.
He kept talking and kept talking while I zipped up and washed my hands. I wrinkled my nose, extremely unhappy to be in there.
And the toilet exploded.
The paramedics said my boss would be ok…eventually.
I was driving home and some idiot in a Jag nearly took off my bumper because he was weaving in and out of traffic. He got about a hundred yards from me and turned into a lovely fireball.
It was about that time that I realized that something wasn’t quite right – once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action.
As the ambulance pulled up and sirens filled the air, a lurid purple muscle car pulled up beside me.
An elderly woman in a purple jumpsuit and a supervillain mask lowered the window and drawled in an Irish accent. “Get in, ye idiot.”
“Excuse me?” I remembered her now. The Indomitable Hattie. The car especially. Growing up in a town full of superheroes and supervillains you got to know the main players. Nobody wanted to be on the evening news as ‘passerby blown up by rampaging banana bombs’ or something equally ridiculous. So, you learned to avoid anyone in tights and a mask.
She huffed a little. “Ye can get in and make a proper getaway, or ye can sit on yer arse an’ wait fer the superheroes to show up and haul ye over to the supervillain pen.” She took a long drag off a purple cigarette. “Yer choice.”
“But I’m not-“
She looked down at her cell phone and interrupted, “Potato Man is coming this way.”
Well crap. Even if it was a misunderstanding, getting in between Potato Man and his spuds of steel had a high mortality rate. I parked my car and hopped into the purple abomination of a car.
The Indomitable Hattie pulled a last drag of her cigarette and tossed it out the window as she pulled into traffic, breaking a dozen laws as she started weaving flawlessly in and out of emergency responders and wreckage, thankfully avoiding hitting any of them.
“What’s yer name lad?”
“Gary. Gary Toft.”
“And you just had yer first power surge today?”
“Today’s the first time odd stuff happened-“
“Yer a bit old fer it, but we’ll get ya trained, right as rain. We take care of our own. Unlike those so-called heroes.”
“I just want to go back home. Isn’t there some way to not be-this-anymore?”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid not lad. Now hold on tight. Potato Man can’t see us through my invisibility field, but the blighter can smell us from a mile away, and he’s surprisingly fast for a spud.”
As she hit the accelerator and the speed plastered me to the car seat, I managed to get out the words, “Who is we?”
“The League of Larceny.” She made a turn at sixty-five miles an hour while lighting another cigarette. She took a long drag and looked at me as she shifted gears. “Yer a supervillain, Gary.”
A note from the author: Thanks for stopping by – be sure to check out the other fabulous tales by clicking the links below:
Fishing Expedition by Laurie Hicks
The Deed by Chris Makowski
Fetching Water by Katharina Gerlach‘
Cataclysmic Disaster by Bill Bush
Fiddle of Gold by Barbara Lund Author
The Origin of a Reluctant Supervillain by Vanessa Wells <<< You are Here!
Help Wanted by Juneta Key
I love it!
So much fun, love it
Love the story, so funny! Could be a useful power though 🙂
Heh – love the ending line. 😀
Awesome! And the last line made me laugh. 😀
The thing with villains is, they could always start out to be “good”. But the so-called “good” people end up bullying them in the name of “justice”.
Great story!