Ah, finally. A couple weeks into this endeavor and I was graced with an audience. The Oligarch got around to visiting with me. He pretty much decided he’s the leader of this “Order” group, which is to be expected. He is the arrogant son of a bitch who called us all together and decided we could take over a city. And then, the world! Of course, it’s all doomed to failure.
I got an email from him. “Are your affairs in order?” is all it said, though the sender said “O”.
Looking at it, I figured it was either Oligarch attempting to get a hold of me, or someone threatening me. Turns out it was just an invitation from Oligarch to another meeting, this time to be held in slightly less swanky conditions. A shame, really. The fancy room at Rothstein’s was much better than I thought it’d be last time.
This time, we all met in some old community center in one of the bad neighborhoods. Naturally, it meant we dressed down for the occasion, but I still kept a mask on me for when I walked through a foyer with coloring best described as various shades of depressing yellow and brown. I didn’t think “kill me now” was a color, or at least I figured it was a sort of pink.
I found a circle of chairs, some of them occupied. I didn’t show up last this time.Oligarch reserved that honor for himself, barging in and tapping his cane on the floor. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to see all of you again!”
“A step down from Rothstein’s,” mentioned Man-Opener through the vocalizer on his helmet. Excellent point.
“Last time, I spoke on where we can be. After that, we broke for mutual cooperation but little direction of how to achieve that goal. Our meeting place today reflects where we are now, a word choice including both our group and the world itself. Look-”
I interrupted here. “Last time I checked, the world had donuts. Danishes maybe.”
“Look around.” Oligarch started up again.
One of the others, a man in a rainbow costume, spoke up, “What about coffee? Even AA has coffee, and they’re required to give their lives to God.”
Terrorjaw chuckled. “Oligarch, I mean this in a good way, but you’re not my higher power.”
Oligarch slammed the bottom of his cane against the floor and raised his voice. “Look around! This is a humble state, but this is where we are now. If you don’t like it, work!” he slammed the cane again for emphasis on the final word.
“On what project?” asked Giuseppe.
Oligarch smiled warmly. “I think you are all going to enjoy this idea. We begin by driving out the heroes.” He tossed a stack of files onto the floor in the middle of us all. “The Saurus. Captain Lightning. The Lone Gunman. Forcelight. Vixen. I have other names in there. If we topple this ‘tower of justice’ from the top down, the bottom floors will pull themselves out.” He gave the base of the pile a poke with his cane. “You get the point.”
I raised a hand. “I’m trying to keep myself from being publicly known as a villain, something that’s become somewhat difficult with Venus and Wildflower linking my identities. I can help a lot, though. We have lab space for rent, a moving service, chop shop, transport resale, and temporary hiding places in our various Double Cross businesses.”
Oligarch nodded before dismissing my concerns. “You bring a lot to our organization. I have others more qualified for beating our fellow superhumans in a fight. Barring a change of mind from the current Rubik, you can assist us by working on containment of superpowered threats. A prison or laboratory would work best for holding the heroes we defeat. Perhaps Giuseppe can assist you?”
Giuseppe nodded, but then another of the villains I’d yet to look up announced his urge to speak with a knock on the side of his metal chair. If I remembered correctly from introductions, he was Herne the Hunter. He wore the same mask as last time, a luchador-style that exposed his mouth, chin, nose, and eyes. He wore an antlers design on the forehead as his symbol, apparently. He pointed to me. “I c’n whip up some traps ye’ll find useful.”
I shrugged, then nodded. “If you have anything particularly useful against Wildflower, that might help. Kind of a human-plant-catgirl hybrid. I think she’s reporting to Venus on me. It’s real annoying having her around company headquarters. Last I heard, Security’s started using burning pitch.”
A little bit of an exaggeration. Pitch would do terrible things to the windows, sidewalk, and passerby. Instead, they’ve taken to using large barrels of boiling water to dislodge Wildflower when they catch her hanging around. It doesn’t work as well when she’s at the very top, for obvious reasons. Worse, she’s delaying installation of more defenses for the building. The cannon was just the tip of the iceberg. I have rockets and a surface-to-air missile emplacement sitting in storage until we put them in. If a more permanent solution isn’t found soon, I’ll just have to authorize my guys to start launching cattle at her. It’ll be messy, but it’s a lot more effective than hurling insults.
So that’s how the meeting went. Oligarch’s keeping the long game under wraps, but a conspiracy to expel or capture heroes from the city is a fairly solid start. He’s right in that once you get rid of the big threats, the smaller ones won’t be able to pick up the slack. Sun Tzu would be shitting bricks over it, though. The old Chinese fellow was a firm believer in winning the fight first, then starting it.
As far as the company goes, things are starting to get on track. Our more basic prosthetics are blowing people away. The big bucks, though, will be in celebrities. Once a famous enough person loses a limb and their career, we’ll be there to offer a premium prosthetic with full range of motion for extremely high cost.
Also of note is that the food and coffee division of the company will be releasing a new candy bar for public consumption. The Asylum Bar. I was quite firm on the name of our little wrapped-up stick of peanut brittle, but Marketing is still debating on a slogan. Most of the team is pushing for “When life gets stressful, seek Asylum Bar.” Of all the other suggestions in the pipeline, nobody but me wants to go with “Asylum Bar: it’s packed full of nuts.”
Finally, there’s the issue of Technolutionary. I try to keep tabs on the guy since I don’t like him. It’s gotten harder because he’s holed himself up in a sub-basement to Sigma Labs that does’t even show up on the blueprints. Despite the successful recovery of most of his research, he no longer has the files needed to continue on the T-rex cloning project. Looks like we’ll just have to kidnap the fresh new dinosaur back sometime in the middle of all this “taking over the world” business.
Technolutionary also apologized for all the heat Wildflower’s invasion caused, but he’s going to turn the corner on human-computer bonding any day now. Yeah, right. In my experience, most people say “any day now” when they aren’t even sure what year something will get done. I finally gave this guy what he’d been masturbating to, a sample of my DNA, and he still resorts to scooping the brains out of homeless people and putting in slave computer units.
He has fewer of those, too, and mainly serving as lab assistants since he doesn’t trust anybody else to work with him.
I suppose he has a point when it comes to Wonder, our resident R&D drug guru who tells me that Stang’s been selling a lot of Boneless ever since a series of odd accidents caused most of his business to do their titty oggling elsewhere. It’s one of the drugs Giuseppe had, and I think it’s pretty funny what people will come up with. Boneless is, to put it mildly, a muscle relaxer. Except it doesn’t just relax muscles. It relaxes muscles, tendons, and even the bones themselves. There’s some rumor floating around that somebody did so much of it his bones completely disappeared.
Regardless of that exaggeration, it does relax people more than any other drug out there, and the bones are affected. Whatever the drug is made of renders bone soft and malleable to relax the fuck out of people. I’m not likely to try it until they figure out how to pack a Chinese masseuse into a pill so she pops out and steps on your back wherever you are.
Wonder suggested we get some ourselves and put it in the herbal tea, then charge double per cup. I like his thinking. That’s one use for Boneless that wouldn’t extend to masseuse-in-a-pill. I know from personal experience how hard it is to hide a pair of women in a bunch of tea after this one infuriating incident involving Wheel of Fortune.
Becoming a non-action villain sure has been boring, though. Sure, you’ll get tired at a desk, but it’s not the same thing as being out in the field, knocking heads. Seriously, if you coop me up, I start to go a bit crazy. And I needed to go find a place qualified to hold violent people.
Naturally, I shopped for an asylum. If only they still had one of those classy old places where people abused the patients. They’d be very well equipped for dealing with supers. I wonder what Venus looks like strapped to rusty bed springs?
You’d think a neighborhood with an abandoned, creepy old asylum would be a safe place for a woman to walk by herself nowadays, but then I was accosted by a mugger. A mugger! Me! He walked up and pulled a knife out like that’d do something. “Give me your purse.”
I giggled. “Is that all you got, that dinky little knife?”
“It’s a knife, bitch. I’ll cut you!” Combined with the hoodie and the loose jeans, I was reminded why cliches are sometimes created in the first place.
“With that? I can understand if someone’s got performance issues. Can’t quite bring a big weapon to the table. If that’s all you’ve got to work with, maybe you ought to get someone else and doubleteam me.”
The fellow cussed and grabbed for my purse. I kicked my heel right into his crotch. The mugger dropped to one knee, holding his wounded crotch. I grabbed the knife from his hand and walked around behind him. “Now then, let’s give the emergency room doctors a funny story.”
Ya know, it really sounds like it hurts to get a knife shoved up your ass.
It’s also rather odd that Venus didn’t show up. The one time I need a hero and one doesn’t show? She better not show up whining about me hurting someone. That was clearly a reasonable self-defense response.
Look at me. I’ve toppled supers with godlike powers, and I’m so starved for personal conflict I’m settling for muggers. I mean, it was hilarious, but still. That’s it. I’ve got to call up Herne and set up a hunt. I’m thinking big catgirl, preferably with plants.
World Domination in Retrospect 
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