Rex Rogue And The League Of Teenage Supervillains
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Rex Rogue
And The League of Teenage Supervillains
C. H. Aalberry
Published 9 March 2017
Dedication
This book is dedicated to everyone who enjoys singing in the library.
BLURB
In a world full of superheroes, being the good guy is boring. Any idiot with superpowers can be a hero, but only a genius like Rex Rogue can take on the world’s superheroes with nothing more than his cutting wits and an army of super–powered minions, mad scientists and lawyers. Superheroes beware, because Rex and his League of Teenage Supervillains would rather steal the day than save it!
But Rex is more than a simple supervillain… and sometimes it’s good to be bad.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter One: The Joys Of Being A Supervillain
Chapter Two: Superheroine For Hire
Chapter Three: The Business Of Villainy
Chapter Four: Saving The Steel Mill
Chapter Five: Master SCREAM’s Grand Retirement Party
Chapter Six: The Rise Of Duke Terror
Chapter Seven: The Icarus
Chapter Eight: The League
Chapter Nine: Robbing A Bank Is A Walk In The Park
Chapter Ten: Supervillains Don’t Cry, They Scream
Chapter Eleven: The Scrapheap
Chapter Twelve: Chaos Always Beats Order, Because Chaos Holds Fewer Meetings
Chapter Thirteen: As If We Need A Reasons To Visit The Worst Bar In Luna City
Chapter Fourteen: Duke Terror Needs YOU!
Chapter Fifteen: Mad Robbo And The Outback Rangers
Chapter Sixteen: The Heist
Chapter Seventeen: Date Night, With Explosions
Chapter Eighteen: Romance, Supervillain–Style
Chapter Nineteen: Escape!
Chapter Twenty: Tricks, Traps And Treasure
Chapter Twenty-One: Inside The Temple
Chapter Twenty-Two: An Advanced Guide To Maniacal Laughter
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Superhero Trap
Chapter Twenty-Four: A Spy Amongst Us
Chapter Twenty-Five: Inside Duke Terror’s Secret Base
Chapter Twenty-Six: Superheroes Charge In Where Angels Fear To Tread
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Treachery On The Icarus
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Don’t Send A Hero To Do A Villain’s Job
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The League Strikes Back
Chapter Thirty: My Enemy’s Enemy
Chapter Thirty-One: When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Rocket Launchers
Chapter Thirty-Two: When Supervillains Attack!
Chapter Thirty-Three: Riot Master Gets His Due
Chapter Thirty-Four: Psycho!
Chapter Thirty-Five: Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Often
Chapter Thirty-Six: When Supervillains Collide
Epilogue
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Bonus Story: Rob Echosoul And the Alice Investigation.
PROLOGUE
High above the world, in a cage known as the Icarus, the most dangerous superhuman of all time dreamed of revenge. He threw out blasts of psychic energy that burst against his cage, but this anger was simply absorbed for others to use.
He had ruled most of the world, once, but defeat had turned him into a battery used to power the ambitions of lesser beings, trapped in prison with no hope of escape.
But no prison lasts forever.
CHAPTER ONE: THE JOYS OF BEING A SUPERVILLAIN
Any idiot with superpowers can be a hero, but why would you bother? Being a villain is both far more fun and far more challenging.
–Rex Rogue’s guide for aspiring supervillains, unpublished.
Master SCREAM was every superhero’s worst nightmare.
The sight of his terrifying white mask and red cloak were enough to send most superheroes fleeing for their lives, and only the bravest or most foolhardy would every try to stand against SCREAM’s army of minions. He went where he liked, took what he liked, and answered to no one. Unfortunately for a small mining rig on the wastelands near Newtopia, he had taken a liking to the diamond bits they used in their drills.
“Bring me those drill bits or I’ll have your heads for dinner!” ordered Master SCREAM.
A motley crew of his minions flew out of the sky on rocket packs and landed on the mining rig. Some of the minions were human and carried stun rifles and batons, others were mutants armed with claws or rock–hard heads and a few were superhumans who needed no weapon other than the powers they were born with. The rig had its own armed guards and soon the whole drill was engulfed in gunfire, but Master SCREAM was unconcerned. He floated on a disk made of light and whirling blades, a dangerous thing that screeched loudly whenever an enemy looked at it. A rocket flew past Master SCREAM, missing him by inches.
“Hurry up down there,” he demanded.
There was a superhero on the drill, a D–grade who couldn’t even fly. Master SCREAM’s minions rushed over the superhero, mobbing him. There was an explosion that lit up the drill like a lightning strike, and when it faded away the superhero was laying on the floor, unconscious, beside a handful of Master SCREAM’s minions.
“Idiots, you should have expected that,” snapped Master SCREAM.
It was a minor setback. Most of his people had been too fast or too tough to be much affected. After all, they had a lot of experience fighting superhumans. They bound the drill’s crew in chains and began to strip the drill of everything valuable they could find. Master SCREAM landed his spinning sphere of light on a gantry and made his way downwards. The mere sight of him made most of the drill’s crew cower in fear, but one was more ignorant than the others.
“We called the Blue Avengers!” he yelled defiantly. “You don’t stand a chance!”
The rest of his crew groaned in annoyance.
“Wait to spoil the element of surprise, idiot!” the drill’s captain shouted.
“I am never surprised,” Master SCREAM declared confidently.
His minions spread out, readying themselves for an attack from the air. Three small dots of color appeared in the sky, closing fast. One of his crew, a mutant with three arms, raised a brass telescope.
“The three Blue Avengers,” he said.
“How dull, I was hoping for more of a challenge. Does everybody have their wasp venom darts ready?” Master SCREAM said in his booming voice.
“Boss? I found the diamond drill bits,” called out another minion.
Master SCREAM followed his scout to a room filled with diamond drill bits piled neatly inside.
“Excellent! Ready them for transport!” he roared.
A phone rang loudly; the sound was coming from Master SCREAM’s pocket. He stepped into an empty office and removed his terrifying mask. Beneath his mask was a teenager’s face, handsome with dark eyes. The teenage placed the mask carefully beside him and scratched the side of his face where the mask had been rubbing uncomfortably. The phone was still ringing; he sighed theatrically and pulled it out of his pocket. It was red, and it flicked open to reveal a screen and buttons.
“This is Rex,” he said. “No, nothing important, just a little shopping and general mayhem. Did you want something?”
Rex listened impatiently to the phone for a few seconds.
“Do you really need help taking out the Laser Lad? Come on, that guys a wimp.”
The voice on the phone grew louder, and Rex rolled his eyes.
“Fine. All you need is a mahogany barrel filled with red paint, he hates that. I’ll have one sent over. Was there anything else? No? Goodbye, then.�
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A superhero burst into the room and flew at Rex, but a blue flame leapt from Rex’s hand and knocked the hero out of the air. Rex had his Master SCREAM mask on before the superhero bounced back to his feet, and the hero fled through a wall when he saw who he had attacked.
“Excellent,” said Rex, smiling.
Rex Rogue was still dressed as Master SCREAM when he landed his spinning disk of light back at his base, a gothic castle high in the mountains. A series of heavy helicopters flew behind him, and it wouldn’t be long before the diamond drill bits were in Rex’s armory.
“That was fun,” said Rex, slipping his mask off.
His red cloak flickered and disappeared, revealing a grey holo–jacket beneath it. The superheroes he faced would never have believed that the person behind Master SCREAM’s mask was only fifteen. Three of Earth’s premier superhero teams considered Master SCREAM to be their arch nemesis, and eleven heroes on the ‘Twenty under Twenty’ list featured him in their backstories. It was whispered that Master SCREAM was invulnerable, that he could freeze time with a look, and that he had lived for thousands of years. None of that was true, but Rex loved hearing the rumors about his villainous powers.
Particularly the rumors he had started himself.
“People are so easily fooled… all it takes is a mask and a lot of lies,” he said to himself with a contented sigh.
He pulled his grey jacket closer to his face and shivered. He was standing on the balcony of the tallest tower in his castle. The castle’s walls and turrets were carved with skulls and bones, and snow collected in grey eye sockets and along skeletal arms. The castle was gloomy and filled with terror, but it had its downsides as well.
“This place is freezing. The next time I win a castle in a card game I'm going to make sure it's somewhere sunny,” Rex complained.
The sun was only peaking over the horizon as Rex considered the view. It was a rare moment of peace and serenity, and he didn’t like it at all.
“This is boring! Slade and Skyre! It’s time to set fire to something!” Rex said, striding impatiently into the tower.
Supervillains start work early, and the castle was already filled with movement and noise. Rex employed an army of thieves, madmen, thugs and lawyers to run his empire. Most of his minions never met him in person, but Rex had a handful of henchmen that he dealt with every day. Many were notorious villains in their own right and would have been deeply mortified if they ever found out they were working for a teenager. His two main assistants, however, knew the secret of his youth but cared more about their bank balances than their leader’s age. They also knew his habits and they were waiting for him as he walked into his control room.
“Coffee, boss?” asked Slade, Rex’s first assistant.
“Fresh light floods the world, yet to live is to know darkness,” said Skyre, his second assistant.
“Yes to both the coffee and the nihilist despair,” Rex agreed.
Slade wore tiny shorts and a tight red t–shirt that were very out of place in the dark castle. His superpower was doing the paperwork on time without making any mistakes. Most people don’t consider this to be a superpower at all, but it is. Running an evil empire required a lot of administration to make sure villainous deeds were carried out on schedule and all the minions were paid on time. Rex’s second assistant, Skyre, wore a long black trench coat and old black clothes covered in silver rivets. She was a goth from the toes of her heavy black boots to the tip of her tall purple Mohawk, and she never smiled. She also never slept and never blinked, which is why Rex had hired her to keep an eye on his empire.
“Did you get the diamonds?” Slade asked.
“I did. They will look great in my chandeliers.”
Slade and Skyre were used to seeing Rex when he wasn’t in his Master SCREAM disguise, and he trusted them as much as he trusted anyone. That wasn’t saying a lot, however: Rex was so paranoid that he had set up a camera above his bed to record himself when he slept, just in case he started sleep walking.
“Show me my base,” demanded Rex.
Slade pushed a button and dozens of screens lit up, each showing mutants, superhumans and heavily armed villains hard at work. Many were training with dangerous weapons, others sweated in the workshops, or plotted and planned in rooms filled with maps and phone lines, or baked in the kitchens, or went about the hundreds of simple and complex tasks required to keep a villainous enterprise of any size going. Rex’s base was an anthill of organized mayhem, an anthill that never slept and was constantly growing. Rex’s base was also one of the few places on Earth where mutants, superhumans and normal people worked together without any of the fights and friction that often arose between these very different groups. Rex didn’t tolerate intolerance, not in his base and not amongst his people.
Rex’s base was the heart of his empire, but not the whole of it. The screens flickered again to show the details of where Rex’s teams of minions were at work across the globe. He had nearly a hundred teams working on missions of theft and other villainy. A few teams were being hunted by superheroes or had come into conflict with other villains, but the majority were carrying out Rex’s plans without any problems.
“Fear the false comfort that comes from success. Our base is operating fine,” said Skyre.
“Good. And what of the world?” asked Rex, turning to the huge holographic map in the middle of the room.
It had been sixty years since unpredictable solar flares had started giving some people superpowers and turning others into mutants, changing everything. There were only six large countries left on Earth, and five were controlled by councils of powerful superheroes. The last country, Newtopia, was a small democracy with very few superheroes of its own. Outside these countries was dangerous wastelands containing only scattered towns ruled by petty villains and lesser superheroes. The villain and heroes of the wastelands were far better at fighting for land than managing it, and so the wastelands were at constant war as super powered humans fought over who would be allowed to rule the regular people. This ongoing conflict was a source of both profit and entertainment for Rex, and he did his best to see that it continued.
Rex slipped on his mask and used his holo–jacket to project a red cloak over his body to become Master SCREAM. He looked taller and thinner with the mask on, and his voice changed to the harsh and demanding tones of Master SCREAM.
“Soon the world will be ours, and the superheroes will be no more! Let us begin!”
CHAPTER TWO: SUPERHEROINE FOR HIRE
Choosing to be a superhero is choosing to conform, to allow other people to decide who you are, what you stand for, and even how you dress. Being a villain is freedom.
–Rex Rogue’s guide for aspiring supervillains, unpublished.
Jennifer Doom was a superhero, but she wasn’t much good at being good.
It wasn’t that she lacked power – she was very powerful indeed – but she just didn’t enjoy being a superhero. She could fly, of course, but that wasn’t a blessing to someone with a dreadful fear of heights. Jenny tended to bob and float awkwardly over rooftops rather than soar through the clouds, and she was always crashing into branches and TV antennae because most of the time she had her eyes tightly closed. She was also super strong, which she had found to be far more embarrassing than useful. Jenny had had problems fitting in at high school before she had started accidently pulling doors off their hinges.
Her school friends had pretended not to notice her powers, but everyone in the town knew what she was. It had become rather obvious on the day when she had leaned against the school bus and pushed it over by mistake. No–one would play sport with her anymore, and everywhere she walked people would avoid her gaze and whisper behind her back. Her name didn’t help. “It’s pronounced Dome… I think its French” she used to explain in a desperate attempt to be normal, but no–one believed her.
“Being a superhero isn’t much fun,” Jenny said to herself.
Flight and strength were typ
ical superhero powers, but Jenny was unusual in that she could also become invisible. Jenny didn’t like the creepy feeling she got when she could see other people but they couldn’t see her. She had used her powers once to spy on a boy from school who she had liked, but had quickly become bored when he spent the whole afternoon playing videogames and talking to his friends over the phone.
She had given up on him and walked home.
Jenny just wasn’t sure what she was actually meant to do with her powers. She had signed up for a few training sessions run by Newtopia for its superheroes, but she had been disappointed by the experience. Newtopia only had a handful of superheroes, and Jenny was already faster and stronger than all of them. Most of the training focused on team tactics and working together, which were not things Jenny felt particularly enthusiastic about. When the team was tasked with fighting a giant robotic monster, Jenny had kicked it so hard and broken it in half. It had been embarrassing for Jenny, who had only meant to knock it over, but also for the rest of her team who had been left looking completely redundant.
There had been more training, but Jenny had felt no connection to her teammates and no enthusiasm for following orders from her do–it–by–the–book team leader who shouted a lot but wasn’t very creative. At the end of the session she turned invisible and floated away, leaving with an overwhelming disinterest in joining a superhero team of any kind. She had, however, kept the small blue phone she had been given. The phone had never rung, but she still carried it with her at all times.
“Although I don’t know why,” she muttered to herself.
A week had passed since the training day, and Jenny still didn’t know what she was meant to be doing as a superhero. She had tried patrolling her town at night to stop crime, but that had ended badly. She had seen a man trying to break into a house through a second story window, but when she had appeared in front of him he had panicked and almost fell into the garden.