All things considered, I expected my enemies would assemble to kick me out of their laboratory sooner than they did. The arrival of the Annihilation Eight was heralded by a call coming in live via the control room. Pivot, of course. I wondered what her angle was in all this. With the revelation that her new boss had a personal vendetta against me for some reason, maybe she was trying to move up in the organization. Maybe we had sex once and she wasn’t satisfied?
That was a joke. Ha ha. Fat chance. I haven’t had sex in a loooooooooooooong time. Some people have posited that this fact explains a lot about my behavior. They weren’t there the time I had a girlfriend and tried to destroy the world. Then she betrayed me and left me, battered, leaning against my own dimension bomb.
I guess you could say it worked out in the end. You might even say she dropped quite the relationship bomb on me.
But I digress.
Pivot called and I shushed the rejects around me before taking it. I had my armor on, though. I got to see her masked face and blonde bun, but all she saw of me was an eye filling her screen. “Hello,” I answered, “Kong residence. You calling for King?”
“I have someone with an animal name in mind.”
“You want Donkey then. He’s off getting smashed with his brothers. I swear, that guy’s practically off in his own little land half the time.”
“Cute,” she said, annoyance creeping into her voice like some sort of creepy creeping thing that creeped. Like an Aye-Aye with a pornstache shooting finger guns. She reached up and adjusted the corner of her domino mask.
“Alright, I’ll go easy on you, Pivot. What are you calling about? Is the master plan coming together? Is the masturbator coming? Or is this more of this little taunting thing you’re trying out?”
“I don’t need to taunt you. I just wanted to see the look on your face when you realized I have all my team at your gates.”
“All your team but the guys I already killed,” I reminded her.
“Even you can’t fight them all off. Rumble said you were so small you offended him.”
“Uh huh.” I nodded along as if I was listening. She couldn’t see the nod, so she noticed when my eye wandered off to the side. I was pulling up the exterior video feed, which showed six supervillains at the entrance gate. Rumble walked over it like it wasn’t even there.
“Well, we’ll see how your guys like it when I go medieval on their asses. Ready the catapult!” I called out to no one in particular. Improving on an idea from the Middle Ages, I decided to automate the catapult which you’ll remember fires cats. Irradiated and mutated leopards with three heads. I activated it from afar and watched as cages tumbled through the air. We only had three living ones, but I had them save some of the corpses too. More ammo.
I had been anticipating an attack for awhile.
Motley Sue blasted one crate out of the air with the power of rock. Gorilla Badass pulled the chain off his belt, but then he did something and a glowing blade grew from the end of it. Dextrous with both hand and foot, he whipped the chain around and carved through a cat carcass like it was nothing.
Geez, if I’d known friggin’ lightsabers were part of this struggle, I’d have cloned some troopers to fight these guys off with. I would also clone David Bowie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Andrej Pejic for personal reasons that should not be elaborated on at this time. Spoiler alert: the whipped cream would get eaten.
Rumble resorted to punching in order to solve all his problems, but that left him with a loose leopard. That wasn’t good. There were few enough situations where loose leopards were acceptable, and there was too little beastiality going on for this to be one of them.
Despite their best efforts, two of the leopards got loose and Terrorjaw got a mouth full of kitty carcass.
In the midst of all that, I caught a glimpse of the final members of my opposition. The first stalked forward in a suit of power armor that fell into the size range of a “walker”. It was about as tall as Rumble, headless, and bright white. Two thick legs that bent similarly to a human’s rose up into a wide torso. From the capabilities of the armor itself, it seemed a stylistic choice that the pilot’s helmet and armored arms extended out of the torso.
From the shoulders extended arms that were nearly long enough to reach the ground if fully extended. In place of a hand at the end of the limb, it had three heavy duty axe heads spinning around a central axis. The blade shaft in the middle was held between armored shafts that matched the same rectangular design as the rest all along the walker. These bright white plates ran diagonally with the interior corner at the lower end, on top of some sort of black underlayer that barely showed through at the corners. Where they met in the middle, they formed a “V” shape that protected everything but the exposed helmet and arms of the pilot. That was hardly a weak point; experience had shown that this suit could take a lot of punishment in that supposed weak spot.
“Huh, Man-Opener, eh? Interesting choice, Pivot. Tell me, is this one of those guys who has his own grudge against me?”
Man-Opener stomped straight through, not pausing at all even as he brought one arm forward and chewed through a leopard that put distance between itself and another member of the team. That guy was the final member of my opposition. He wore green boots, green gloves, and purple tights with yellow dots all over it in various sizes. The tights came up into a mask that covered his face, but there was something else on there I couldn’t make out. He was a let down after Man-Opener.
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Pivot’s reaction except to note that her voice had an edge to it, like she was tired of talking to me. That happened to most people who deal with me on a regular basis. “You’ve been doing some reading, I see. Frankly, I’m surprised you can sit still long enough.”
The Eight hacked their way through my stalling attempt relatively quickly, with Man-Opener in the lead. I closed the blast doors on the entire place.
“Trust me, Pivy baby, unlike some men, I know when it’s time to stay nice and still for a woman. Wait, that’s not what I meant to say. Damn! Anyway, looks like you have breached my outer defenses.” I switched to interior cameras in time to see the man in the purple step out through a yellow tinted portal. He turned to watch Man-Opener carve partially through the door before it was knocked against the opposite wall by Rumble. He and Man-Opener crouched to walk through halls designed for regular folk.
The group stayed somewhat close together as they made their way down the hall. Just to be an ass, I switched off the lights.
“Yep, they’re in. So much for the leopards. Should call them leopeasy instead. Of course, they still have to get all the way through the power plant, then through the corridor to the lab. If you’re recording this to see some shocked reaction of horror, you’re going to be disappointed. Or your boss is, since he’s probably the one making you call me up. Am I right? This thing where you get a taste of my reaction, it’s for the benefit of Prime’s video archive, isn’t it?”
Pivot smirked. “You act like you’re smart now that you have access to our internal documents. That doesn’t take a keen deductive mind, Sherlock. If it wasn’t for the sight of you finally laid out on a slab, I would love to see you react to more of our surprises. You still don’t see them even when they’re right in front of your face. Every time you talk, it gives it away.”
She smiled as she held her hands up, palms toward me, fingers spread. “You think you’re sharing these big revelations, but you provide a showcase for your own ignorance instead. You petty, pitiful man. Your personal touch of madness is that you think you’re free even though you keep playing to someone else’s script. Like how you want to gab with me instead of running or fighting. I taunt you, you can’t help but taunt back. Tell me more about your brilliant insights while my men come closer and closer.”
She grinned like a mustached stalker in the night who had me alone. “I hate our conversations, but if it keeps you too preoccupied trying to prove you’re smart, then I’ll at least use that.”
I detected some hypocrisy there, which would make the next knowledge bomb I meant to drop on her even more delicious and destructive. I checked the cameras.
Yep, her team was in the corridor to the lab. I took a seat on my trailer couch then, between Roberta and Larry. “You know, when I showed up and took over Three Mile Island, I implied that I could blow the place up with a few pushed buttons. Truth is, it takes a lot more than that to convert a radioactive core to a nuclear weapon. Plus, I had my hands full just keeping that core maintained by my lonesome. So I thought ‘Hey, why not start disabling some alarms?’ So when Moai and I hightailed it a couple days ago, I left the place with only automated maintenance and a program to force a meltdown from a distance. Which I activated.”
Looking like a deer caught in a pair of headlights, Pivot said, “We cut outside access. You shouldn’t have been able to get anything to or from that place by internet.”
“True, true. Perhaps this is a bad time to point out that your soul-sucking bureaucratic procedures involved faxing things. Why bother hunting down how you folks got internet service behind those thick walls when I had a fax landline right there to get me in?”
“That’s a nuclear power station, Gecko! You won’t get away with this!” She restrained herself from baring her teeth at me, but I could see she was grinding them.
“Pivot, do I look like the world’s most charitable pimp all of a sudden? I only ask because I wasn’t aware I gave a fuck. Hey, you think you can have your guys pick up a box of Hot Pockets we left back in there? They might be cooked in the middle this time. Did you know that if you pay close attention to a person’s hair, you can find out their astrological sign? Before long, it’ll be obvious they’re all cancers. Cancer? I don’t even know her! You know what’s a good cheer for small teams? The micro wave.”
Pivot quit the conversation in a rage, presumably to try and get a hold of her team. I took off my helmet and smiled at my various rejected companions hanging out in the trailer. I mentioned Larry and Roberta. There were others, like the pinhead guy, but I didn’t have their names quite down. Boring names like “Bob” and “Steve” were always harder for me to nail down than interesting ones like “Sunbright” or “Arctica Blitz”.
“Ooh, how did she take the meltdown?” asked Roberta, swiveling her eye stalk around to look me in the face.
“She did not care for it. But you know what they say: if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the meltdown,” I said.
Microencephalic Man, which was purely a placeholder name, nodded. “Most of us didn’t like that plan either.”
True. That was why I only had six rejects with me out of the thirty or so who had stayed at the place. The others went their own way. Of the six with me, the other two were in the car with Moai, driving us to our destination.
“Did you warn them where we’re going? Please say you didn’t tell them that,” whined Larry next to me. I think he didn’t really have anywhere to go.
I put an arm around his runny looking shoulders. “Nope. We’ll have the run of L.A. before they even know we’re there.”
Another reject, who I think was named Steve, spoke up then. “Just to be clear, I didn’t sign up to get killed in a hail of gunfire. I want to survive getting a little payback on them.” His skin, muscles, organs, and blood vessels were all clear. His skeleton wasn’t. Unlike many of the other rejects, he had regained his confidence fairly quickly by wearing a hoodie and long pants. I didn’t know how he could see things, but I knew I didn’t want to face him in a staring contest.
I started to answer, but then Roberta jumped up on my side excitedly. “And I want to go sight-seeing! Rodeo Drive, the movie studios,…um…the Hollywood sign?”
I put an arm around Roberta too. It didn’t fit well because of how her legs worked. She leaned back against my arm, so I think she appreciated the sentiment. I looked over at Steve seated at the breakfast table. “We’re going to play this smart. Hell, if y’all just want to sit back and watch the fireworks, that’s fine with me. I never planned to bring a team along and I’m not much of a leader. Just help me out how y’all can and remember to enjoy yourselves. Uncle Gecko’s going to take Prime out to the shed for a little game of hide the bacon. It’s a fun one, for me at least.”
World Domination in Retrospect 
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Wow. What a suprise. Pivot sends in a team, and he isn’t there. What a new and non-cliche occurrence.
I think the only surprise is that She keeps forgetting to send in recon first.
Almost like, I dunno, her boss is micromanaging her and she is going along with it while hoping someone upstairs will finally notice and remove him(or her).
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