by Matt Carter
She smiled, broadly, tipping up her hat slightly to reveal the palest eyes I’d ever seen. “But I got news for you. Like the recruitin’ speech each of you got said, Earth’s in need of some villains to keep po-lite society po-lite. That’s why some of us in the Protectors have decided to put Project Kayfabe together. Its goal is puttin’ together a team of supervillains.”
Well there’s one puzzle piece in place, but why so many?
“We want the best, the brightest, and the worst out and about, giving us superheroes a hard time. You will commit crimes. You will fight us. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you’ll lose. Mostly you’ll lose, because you losin’ makes people know that the heroes are out there to protect them. Do this for us, and you will live the kind of life you’ve always dreamed of. Fame, fortune, freedom, women, men… respect, they’ll all be yours.”
As afraid and uncomfortable as I was, what she promised sounded awesome, more than I would have expected when I first went to hold up Sunnyside Liquor Store.
“But this ain’t gonna be a walk in the park. The team we’re puttin’ together’s only got space for seven of y’all, and as you can see, there’s a damn sight more’n seven of you.”
I flashed back to being the last one picked for kickball, and for being the first one hurt on purpose so I could get kicked out of the game. Seeing that happen here, where I’d be just as likely to be set on fire or turned inside out…
“So, we’re gonna test you. We’re gonna tear you apart and put you back together. If you pass muster, you move on to the next round of suffering. If you don’t… well, this ain’t some self-esteem course where everybody gets a trophy and moves on because you’re all so darn special. As of today, none of you legally exist. All of your records? Gone. The memories of those who knew, loved, or even vaguely recognized you? Erased. From now on, you are your codename and no more. If you don’t have one, one will be provided for you. You belong to us, and if we don’t want to play with you anymore, we’ll send you on a one-way trip to the Tower with its miles and miles of smiles…”
I shuddered. Everyone shuddered. Everyone in their right mind who’d heard about the Tower and its smiles should shudder.
I don’t know if it was this, or the erasure of our lives that hit people the hardest. Erasure mostly, I’m sure. It didn’t hit me as hard as I thought it might. My parents liked Andy better anyway, and I knew Vic would find someone new to play video games with.
Being erased gave me a clean slate.
Cool.
“The only real rule you’re gonna live under is this: play nice. This ain’t some ‘Most Dangerous Game’ competition where we just want you killing each other off until only seven of you are left. We want an honest assessment. You kill someone here and you will be punished. You fight us too much, or you try to escape, and…”
She flicked her wrist, and a small controller popped out of her sleeve and into her hand. She pointed it at the lava man and pressed a button. He screamed in pain, grabbing his chest and trying to tear it open. He soon stopped screaming, pitching forward and falling to the ground, his flesh melting away on the floor and leaving a crispy skeleton in its place. There were some shocked gasps, even a few screams (mine among them, though the helmet thankfully muted much of it), though most barely reacted.
“And we activate your Creeper.” She looked down at the steaming mess. “Creepers let us keep track of you and make sure you’re playin’ nice. I know there’s some pretty big brains in the crowd here who might think you can cut it outta your chest and beat the system. Go ahead and try. These things are set to go off if you even think about tampering with them. I also know there are some tough guys and gals among you who think this is bullshit. You think you’re hot shit and can fight your way out of here, and to that I say… be my guest. We won’t touch your Creepers, make it a fair fight. Those of you who want fame, fortune, and glory, those who want to live…”
She waved her hand dramatically to the island. “The island awaits. Now there’s barracks for y’all ’bout a mile or two inland. We didn’t clear out the island much, so you’re gonna want to watch for—”
I was off and running before she could finish the sentence. I jumped over the railing, catching my foot on the lip and sending myself cartwheeling through the air. It would have been bad enough if this was a five-foot fall. But the twenty feet it actually was really sucked.
I hit the water hard, thrashing and coughing when it filled my helmet. I ditched one boot and started pulling off my jacket. There were more splashes around me as others jumped in. My lungs burned as I took a panicked breath and sucked in water. I coughed. I thrashed some more. Things started going dim. Dammit, not again. Maybe if I just focus—
A large, hard hand wrapped around my chest and lifted me above water, setting me down on what felt like a small, jagged island. As my eyes cleared, I could see that I was on the back of the large boy made of crystals. He had grown into a giant since the boat, the top half of his body sticking out of the water while he calmly walked along the bottom. Large crystal points jutted out in every direction. He turned what I guess had to be his head to me.
“Do you need help getting to shore?” he asked, his voice thick and rocky.
“Yes!” I coughed.
“Hold on,” he said, picking up three more people along the way (including the Sasquatch, who smelled like a wet dog) and setting us all down on the sand. Collapsing to the ground, I had hopes that I was at least one of the first to make it here, but that didn’t last long. There were a number of fliers who had probably gotten to the beach in a couple seconds, several speedsters who could run on water even faster, and the Atlantean swimming in quick circles, showing off his “skills.” Firewall hovered a few feet off the ground with her crude jetpack, while Odigjod teleported excitedly from tree to tree as if he had never seen anything so strange or wonderful.
The boy made of crystals ran back out into the water, grabbing more people who were having trouble swimming. I pulled off my helmet, shaking the water out and feeling bad for him.
Didn’t he get that this was a competition? Didn’t he understand that helping them only hurt his chances?
While I was shaking out the final drops from my helmet, an explosion went off from the boat. When I looked over I saw that most of the upper decks were engulfed in flames. Blackjack and the guards were giving the ten or so villains who decided to stay back and fight a real time of it. Several from each side were draped over the rails, either dead or dying, while a couple of charred bodies floated in the water. One of the villains started a tornado that tipped the freighter onto its side.
There goes our ride.
More people made it to shore, some like me, standing around confused, others headed into the jungle, remembering what Blackjack said. I thought about following some of them, even made to do so, when my foot caught on something buried in the sand.
As I pushed the sand away with my foot, I uncovered a half-buried mask made to look like a porcelain doll. I bent over and began to dig it out, turning it over in my hands.
“Excuse me?” I heard from behind my kneeled-over self. The voice was sexy and soft, an accent vaguely British with something a little more exotic mixed in. I turned to face this mystery woman, hoping the face was as beautiful as the voice.
It wasn’t. At least not the part she wasn’t able to hide with the hood of her black cloak. It looked like someone had tried melting her face, and then tried to put it back together while blindfolded. It took everything I had not to recoil.
Instinctively I cast my eyes down. This view was a lot nicer. The white cotton bodysuit she wore was soaking wet, clinging to a body that belonged on a swimsuit calendar. Long, toned legs, wide hips, big boobs, with the faint hint of nipples sticking through in all that wet cotton.
All right, maybe she’s salvageable.
“Here,” I said, handing her the mask. Without saying a word, she pulled the hood of her cloak back and put the face-concealing mask back on.
Running a hand through her pixie-cut, dirty blonde hair and pulling her hood back up, she said, “Thank you for not screaming. I know you wanted to.”
“Uh huh,” I said, unable to take my eyes off her chest.
“The heroes want you to call me Ghost Girl, but my name’s actually Emma,” she said.
“Uh huh,” I said. If all the girls here looked like her (at least from the neck down), I would have a hard time focusing.
She shied away, trying to hide herself in the cloak before turning and darting into the jungle. Did I say something wrong?
The next voice that came from behind me was laughing, high and yipping, sending chills down my spine.
I turned to face the large gene-job that had been fighting with the guards. One of the noose-poles still hung around his neck, broken in half and hanging against his chest like a tie.
“You’re Apex Strike,” he said, revealing a mouth with way too many sharp teeth for my liking.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m Carnivore. They say you’re the strongest villain here.”
“Well…” I shrugged, trying not to sound terrified. He leapt toward me, clearing twelve feet in the blink of an eye. Long strings of drool trailed down from his teeth and onto my jacket as he stood over me, casting a large shadow and putting me in the shade.
“And if you’re the strongest, and I eat you, that’d make me the strongest, wouldn’t it?” he asked, his drool dripping onto the sand.
“No it wouldn’t!” I exclaimed, turning and running to the forest. He was on me fast, flinging me to the ground as I tried to crawl away.
“You can’t do this!” I pleaded. “This is against the rules!”
He laughed again, high and yipping, raising a hand over his head to tear me open. “Rules? We’re supervillains!”
He had me there.
Right before Carnivore could dissect me, a large villain barreled into him, knocking him off me and onto the sand. This newcomer was a pale, burly man clad in a suit of armor made of rusty scrap metal, its cowl shaped like a bear’s head. He was barely older than me, but twice as large (more in that suit of armor) and was more than a match for Carnivore.
“Don’t you know who that is, monster? That’s Apex Strike! Show some respect!” he shouted, his accent thick and Eastern European.
“He’s mine, you commie fuck,” Carnivore hissed back, dropping to all fours and baring his teeth, the hair on his back standing tall. The newcomer flexed his wrists. Several pieces of his armor uncurled from his body, hovered in midair and straightened into spears pointed at Carnivore.
“You were saying, my Yankee friend?” my new personal hero said cockily. Carnivore hissed, then turned and bounded off into the jungle. The new guy simply flexed his wrists again, causing the shards of metal to rejoin his armor.
“You saved… oh God… I mean—thank you, thank you so much!” I stammered, bounding over to him.
He laughed loudly, slamming one of his metal-encased hands into my back. “It is my pleasure!”
“Ow,” I said, trying to hold my smile. Thankfully he didn’t notice my grimace over all his laughter.
“I am Iron Bear. It is not my real name, but everybody calls me that. It is so great to finally meet a real, successful villain like you! You must have so many stories! I think we should be moving soon, I believe night will fall sooner than we’d like, and I do not know about you, but I would rather not sleep in the jungle. Like the hero said, ‘monsters are in these trees.’”
“She said that?” I gulped.
Iron Bear laughed, pounding me on the back again. “Come, we will walk together! I will tell you what she said if you tell me some of your villain stories, maybe give some tips so we might be a better team together, yes?”
Let’s see. He idolized me, was big enough to fight off Carnivore (and whatever else this island had to offer), and had information vital for survival?
I was pretty sure I’d just found my new best friend.
#Supervillainy101: Bad Bug & Dart Lad
Like most people, Samuel Grunnings dreamed of being super.
And like most people, he wasn’t.
Unlike most people, Samuel Grunnings had escaped from an institute for the criminally insane. Even though it was the early 80s, the height of the War on Villainy, he was able to find the lair of Dr. Tongue, the premiere mad scientist and gene-splicer of the day. He told Dr. Tongue that he loved bugs and wanted to be one of them. The mad doctor didn’t hesitate to mix Grunnings’s DNA in a blender (or whatever it is mad geneticists use) with that of an ant, wasp, scorpion, praying mantis, and something like twenty other bugs to create the world’s greatest gene-job supervillain: Bad Bug.
Yeah, I know, it’s a pretty awful name, but what else can you expect from an escaped mental patient whose brain’s been fried even further by illegal gene-splicing?
Bad Bug set up shop in the Gamemaster’s hometown of Los Angeles, California, reasoning that a non-powered hero’s town would be easy pickings. As most villains found out, this was a mistake, as the Gamemaster was more than a match mentally and always managed to foil Bad Bug’s devious plans.
Dart Lad (the Gamemaster’s sidekick at the time) was known for being cocky and wasn’t particularly beloved by anyone, let alone the Gamemaster. During Bad Bug’s reign of terror, Dart Lad famously gave a press conference where he called Bad Bug a “brainless [expletive deleted by news station],” and dared Bad Bug to take them on in one final battle. Knowing how proud Bad Bug was, Dart Lad meant to use this chance to ambush Bad Bug with the rest of the Fresh Protectors (a Protectors subteam made of all the sidekicks) in an attempt to step out of the Gamemaster’s shadow.
Bad Bug didn’t quite follow the plan.
If he’d been human, maybe he would have just taken the insult and moved on, or maybe he would have fallen for it. But the splicing fried his brain so much that he couldn’t help but overreact.
He didn’t spring the trap.
He did, however, track down Dart Lad’s family and kill his mother, father, five sisters, two brothers, eight cousins, three grandparents, an aunt, an uncle, the paperboy who happened to witness the death of said aunt and uncle, his favorite elementary school teacher (though she was set on fire and partially fed to flesh-eating ants, she actually survived), and fifteen separate pets between all of them.
The videos and Polaroids that Bad Bug sent Dart Lad were rumored to be have been so horrible that veteran homicide detectives resigned after seeing them.
Dart Lad suffered a nervous breakdown, dropped out from superhero life, developed a crippling heroin addiction, and briefly worked the underground pornography circuit to make ends meet. Eventually he pulled out his old costume and rebranded himself as a villain. He was captured by the Game-master just two months before Bad Bug was taken in.
When being hauled off to the Tower, Bad Bug was famously quoted as he shouted to the media, “Make sure I have a cell next to Dart Lad!”
#LessonLearned: Don’t fuck with gene-jobs.
5
SWEETHEARTS
We had expected dinosaurs, as they were a really hot status symbol with supervillains back during the Silver Age, when Professor Death was active. Lucky for us.
They were easy enough to deal with.
I’d focus on the ground in front of them, or Iron Bear would fling a piece of jagged metal, or Odigjod would brew up a little hellfire and blast them to smithereens.
It was when we saw that car-sized gene-job, some mix of snapping turtle and scorpion, crouched over the half-eaten remains of some villain who’d tried going at it alone (sadly, it wasn’t Carnivore), that I was most glad to be surrounded by people more eager to fight and more likely to die than me.
“STAND BACK!” the scaleface loudly proclaimed. He unsheathed a curved sword from his back and a crystalline, blue dagger from his belt. “THIS ONE IS MINE!”
“Go nuts,” I said.
Weapons drawn and leather tassels trailing behind
his red and gold plated armor, the scaleface charged the beast. “FOR KOSAL!”
“Think he stands a chance?” Showstopper asked.
“He comes from Lemuria, the land of dinosaurs. He has probably seen much worse,” Iron Bear said.
“Green-skins are loud, violent scum with no appreciation for beauty and logic, but never doubt one in a fight,” Artok, (Prince Artok, of Atlantis, he’d quickly correct, currently exiled, if you believed him, which I didn’t) said in his high, shrieky voice.
“Should we help him?” Showstopper asked. The scaleface laughed, chopping off one of the beast’s front legs with his sword.
“I think he’s got this covered,” I said.
You don’t become a supervillain by sticking your neck out and volunteering to get killed. We all knew that (well, maybe the scaleface didn’t, but their heads work differently, so they don’t really count), and I think that’s why we just stood back and watched.
Of course, you also don’t get to be a supervillain by dying, which was why we’d all decided to band together in the first place, and probably why everyone except Artok and me were actually considering helping him.
There were six of us now, including the scaleface. Odigjod joined us first; he’d teleported to the barracks just to check them out, but decided to come back to join us because we “seemed fun.” I think he just wanted to moon over me. He was like what you’d get if you combined a hyperactive little brother and an overeager puppy and given them godlike powers.
