So I am awakened from my hibernation by Green Hunter, as he and the Earth's Elite are having some sort of skirmish with an alien armada of some sort. I am woefully uninformed when it comes to the various alien empires. You'd think that I would know more, what with me being the (former) Scorloon Emperor for Life and all, but I never could keep all of the colliding constants straight on those names. Just mash your hand on a keyboard and you have a 75% chance of hitting on the name of one of those races. "Duygbl?" "Gytrublv?" "Lcytjvkjbhhk?" Yeah, those are all (probably) accurate. And that's before you even get to the ones who communicate telepathically. For those you need to visualize a potato dancing with an empty orange bucket in order to say "hello". That way lays madness, I say.
Anyways, in the course of their battle Green Hunter is sent sailing off into an asteroid belt and he bumps into my asteroid-y looking cocoon. This awakens me, and after I burrow my way through the (delicious) larval crust I shatter the cocoon off my body. I'm a little groggy and out of it, so I say "Innnnttttteeeeerrrrnnnn?" I'm pretty sure this scares the crap out of him, and looks at me with shock (and awe) and says, "You!? It can't be... you're dead!"
Yeah, welcome back. Thanks idiot. So I fired some energy blasts at him and then took off to get my bearings. So now I'm on my way back to Earth. Dead? What do they think of me back there? What did that stupid robot do now? Dead? Not cool, doppelganger, not cool.
Thanks, Dr. Hunter
A wake-up call
Apparently, I've been, uh, out of it for a while. This is news to me, of course. I was trying to get a handle on the new, totally awesome, cosmic scope of my Walking Blackhole-gifted-abilities. The transition was, I'll admit, a little rough. The days of sleeplessness had me grappling with real philosophical demons; "Is my 'Super-villain' moniker stupid, or brilliant?", "Why are my eyes on fire?", "Does anyone else smell cotton candy?".
Finally (finally!) I was able to reach a singular state of Zen With The Universe And All The Life It Encompasses Throughout The Countless Eons and find sleep. Or I just punched myself in the face until I blacked out (U-Make-The-Call!).
Well, let me take a step back here for a second. There are 2 terrible things that happened during my rest. First, my body recuperated from my cosmic upgrade. Well not recuperate, exactly. I've gathered that the cosmic energy is rewriting my body to comply with the Walking Blackhole's needs of a Vanguard: flight, cool energy abilities, and a singular tuning to his Terrible Hunger. To do all that, the old body has to go. So the glowing eyes were just a sign of my body being disintegrated from the inside out! So in exchange for these new powers I get cooked from within, like a hot dog in a microwave. So my body more is more "regurgitated", than recuperated. I guess it's a long process too, because I had to form a cocoon of organic rock and lose two months on my Year of Super-Villainy.
Yes, I was floating in the depths of space in an asteroid like cocoon for 2 months. Will anyone back on Earth even remember me? All that brand building I worked on, and I let it all go to waste? Gah! Actually, 2 months isn't so bad. The process didn't totally finish. I actually got prematurely awoken from my hibernation by an interstellar super-hero fight. That brings me to the second terrible thing to happen to me. The thing that woke me up? The first face I see after the long metamorphosis?
Green Hunter!
A bounty of riches
Old crab-face (Noticer's ID's him as the Walrus Warlord. I don't know what sort of walruses they have around where he grew up, but they don't look like that.) didn't get over to the Turning Observatory in time before I was able to snag three (count 'em) cosmic scatterers. I know, the teleportation rig only requires one, but now I can flip one for a pretty penny and keep one as a spare. I am becoming certified-awesome, am I right? You'd think that would be enough, but guess what?
No, not a robot invasion.
No.
No! Come on! I would never breed with an Alien! Disgusting!
Green Hunter was there! He was there doing something for the Observatory and tried to thwart my scheme. I blasted away at him until my batteries were near empty. Unfortunately, he was able to deflect my shots with his stupid green sparkles (They should have been mine!). But, in all the confusion I knocked over something and it imperiled a civilian. Being the goofy super-hero he is, of course he ran over to rescue them. Ah ha! But I got away! Suck it, idiot intern!
Motivation
I'm all moved in now. I've got the wide screen TV for monitoring my schemes/henchmen. (Currently still only in the "plotting" phases.) I've got a good supply of canned food and water for the next time some cosmological deity decides to crash its sun-eating ass into the city power grid. I've got my computer set up locked in and running some battle simulations against various heroes. I've got all of my spare machine parts in the "office." (Soon to be renamed. I haven't decided on which is better; "Den of Evil" or "Crime Lab". That would be where crimes are created, not solved.) And over there is the cot I found on a street corner where Z, the minion, (fitfully) sleeps.
Now to put plots into action. It got me thinking about motivation, why we villains do what we do.
For most of them, the motivation is the basic: cash. It's a trap though. You blast your way through a bank, collect a couple bags of money, and then... what? Where do you go from there? If you're a super-villain you can't just spend it, you're far too flamboyant to just walk into a store and buy your heart's desire. Plus, you're on the villain database and the latest edition of the Noticer's Guide, so you can't easily quietly slip off to retirement. You have to constantly battle authorities or super-heroes to keep your money. So then you end up spending it all on means to battle the heroes... it's a downward spiral, really.
Other villains are in it for revenge. That's all well and good. Certainly I have aspirations of blasting Green Hunter into non-existence, but that can't be your sole goal. Even if you succeed, it is only a fleeting accomplishment. Self-esteem is nice, but is it worth the potential death or injury. (Obviously, Green Hunter is the exception.)
Then, there's conquest. That's more up my alley. Remaking the world in your own image. A noble goal. Making the world a better place, really.
Then there's the poor saps who have devolved into semi-sentient threats. Your lumbering heaps of destruction that provide a nice punching bag for some dumb hero to slug away at. Some guy wanders into the wrong chemical plant and comes out a muck-beast of some sort, completely accidentally, and a "hero" get's his kicks out of punching the holy hell out of him until he blacks out from pain or injury? Who's the bad guy then? Bastards.
Victory! (hollow)
I alluded to it in my last post, but there was some action this weekend. The police, surprisingly, figured out that I vaporized that bar owner guy, Barry (?). I'm just terrible with names. Fortunately when they arrived I was suited up. I was just about to head over and dispense some plasma-hot revenge on that back-stabbing trollop. Instead, I spent my weekend in a 14-hour stand-off/firefight with a couple dozen armed cops. Fun, right? The good news is that I was victorious (finally!) and defeated all opposition. I am now the unquestioned ruler of a small mid-western town. The bad news is that I'm the unquestioned ruler of a small mid-western town. Frankly, it's not glorious at all. And police are my challenge? Am I a common thug? Where is the splendor and spectacle in that?
All the pointlessness of it just washed over me for a while. I prepared a drink (On the house. I'm the owner after all.) and just drank it in the burned out wreckage of a police cruiser for a while. Then I realized what I needed to do: it's time to take it up a notch. It's time to get into the big leagues. That idiot Green Hunter did what I should have done as soon I got this armor working. Damn you, Hunter! I am going to go the big city, Skyline, and shove a proton cannon down his throat. (And then fire that proton cannon. And incinerate his internal organs. Killing him. Dead, dead.) Yeah, that's sounds good. This current time-continuum is too short to waste with this pittance of a town.
Now, it is on!
Smells like scorched melon
Let me ask you a few simple questions. Who's a clanking, shiny vehicle of doom? Who's got death-lasers and death-laser-blocking forcefields at the ready to smack you down? Who's a walking menace that is going to wipe the Green Hunter off the face of the earth?
Booyah! I am!
Who spent their weekend vaporizing watermelons from 30 yards? Who has a terrifying mask that will make super-heroes shrivel at the sight of it? And most importantly, who is about to become the master of all he surveys?
That's right, me!
Hell yeah!
Who spent their weekend running back and forth to the store to stock up on watermelons? Who then had to draw Green Hunter style masks on all the watermelons and then place them on the target post with the name "Green Hunter" scrawled on them?
Not me! That's what minions are for.
First power, first step
Minion Z has injected his nano-technology into me. I am now blogging this with the power of my mind! I suppose this would count as my first super-power, but this is only a modest first step. Today, techno-pathy, tomorrow, the universe!
Oh, and Green Hunter? You can't blog with your mind, can you? No. No, you can't. Idiot.
Plan B begins
Re-assembling the Atom Vortex continues to elude my tech-minion and I. Even when I think it's fully formed, it will do nothing more than hum. Where are my beautiful green sparks? Where are my soothing blobs of super-power-dom?. Damn that Hunter! Damn him in his stupid, stupid face.
And before anyone asks, yes, I saw that Green Hunter stopped an alien invasion over the weekend. But, I mean, it was only the Scorloons. They've been thwarted before by such pitiful heroes as the guy who can throw his own hands and the girl who can form solid objects out of her love for puppies! Okay, I'm not sure about the specifics of those heroes powers, but the point is that they're lame. Just because the Earth's Elite have decided to lower their bar from being the greatest super-hero team in the world to invite Green Hunter to join them doesn't mean anything. The Elite must have some serious issues behind closed doors to even consider adding Green Hunter to their roster after such an unimpressive achievement. I mean, a high-school kid would be impressed that I can buy beer, but everyone else would see that it's no big deal. Yes, I'm equating the difficulty of defeating a Scorloon invasion with going to the store and buying booze; sometimes it's a hassle, but failure isn't really an option.
Ahem. Anyway, Zoo (?) and I are struggling with this challenge, when he makes some sort of sound that slightly resembles the word "robot." I still can't make heads or tails of what he's saying, but this coincidence gets me thinking that perhaps I'm taking the wrong approach with this. Maybe, instead of chancing that I might get deformed or annihilated in a nuclear accident, I should focus on making a robotic suit of armor!
The advantages are myriad: I won't get killed if it doesn't work, it will conceal my identity, it's upgradeable (it's always a plus when you can pull a new weapon out of your bio-mechanical hat), and it leaves open the option of creating robot duplicates! I'm already working it out in my head how some random hero will be struggling for their life against a lifeless automaton while I am safely escaping and moving on to the next phase of my scheme. Brilliant! And the look of frustration when they finally realize that all of their struggle was just against a robot. Delicious!
Zhou seemed excited as well when he finally grasped what I was aiming for. It seems that Zu is an enthusiastic aficionado of robots. Maybe he's Japanese? They love robots right?
No, no, that's fine.
I'm going to be realistic about this, the so-called super-heroes generally come out on top in the Hero/Villain conflict. Losing round one to the Green Hunter is no big deal. So what? He beat me up? Well, I have no hand to hand combat training (yet!), so that's to be expected. After all, he was an idiot frat brother. He's probably spent his entire college life having homo-erotic wrestling skirmishes and getting into bar brawls. That fine. And yeah, he might have smashed up the Atom-Vortex before he left. But I can rebuild it. Mostly. There were a lot of extra pieces that probably aren't even necessary! It's just cutting out the fat of the machine really. Now it's going to be even more powerful.
I don't even care that he left for the city to become a super-hero. It's just one more bug to squash later. In fact, it's better that I created him. Now we have a dynamic that links us together. Now I'll be able to cut him deeper than any other villain could. I can be the one to destroy his wife/girlfriend/gay-lover. Yes, definitely gay-lover. The more I think about it, the more I think that this was an important step in placing myself into the larger super-hero/villain sphere. Now I have a seat at the table. I'm in the game. (Pending obtaining super abilities, of course.) Yes, this is absolutely the best possible outcome. Excepting obtaining infinite power and ruling over reality, I guess.
That's why I'm totally not losing my mind that the Skyline Trumpet's huge headline is "GREEN HUNTER SAVES CITY". I'm happy that in his first day in the world's premier super-city my own lil' Hunter stopped a major Subterranasaur invasion that had knocked out a bunch of A-list heroes. I mean, it's all thanks to me. I gave him his powers. I choose such an idiot that he didn't know to be afraid. He's so stupid that he circled all the way around to brilliant in this case. Good for him.
When he succeeds, I succeed. In a way. In a totally, totally real way.
Boom!
Uh, okay. My ears are still ringing a bit. So, the bad news; the blast didn't kill Green Hunter. He shook off the explosion, knocked me out with one punch, and then left to become a crimefighter. But, the good news; my Vortex must work even better than I had hoped! I'm a genius!
That's going to be your super-hero name? Really?
All day I've been looking forward to eliminating Hunter, or as he has taken to calling himself, Green Hunter. I've been forced to tolerate his enthusiasm as he tests his powers, listen to him bounce costume concepts off me, and, worst of all, refer to him as Green Hunter. Or, alternatively, the Green Hunter. His goofy altruism is really quite sickening. Apparently I should have vetted my minon pool a little better to weed out low intelligence jocks with hearts of gold.
He's already worked out how he's going to leave this sleepy college town for the super-hero hot beds like Skyline or Metropolitan. He's so certain that he should be fighting crime. I just can't take it, my first act as as an aspiring super-villain is to create another idiot super-hero? That's just not good form. For some reason he has had all these good intentions bottled up in his beer-addled fraternity body, and because of my actions he thinks he's going to battle evil? I don't think so Gree... uh, idiot intern! No, you are going down! I have 50 pounds of "scavenged" explosives under your bunk that are going to change your path. For good.
