The Knights Illuminati 5

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“The ayes have it. We’ll keep on developing our own social website instead of turning over development to Zuckerberg,” Ouroboros said from the middle of the tent.

A man in a white and light blue costume with a giant lower-case f on the chest stood up and pointed to another villain. “Not fair, Beholder was counted more than once!” A glance at the man in question, who had multiple arms with eyes on their palms lowered them sheepishly.

“That’s enough, Facebook the Villain, TM,” Ouroboros said, pronouncing the trademark symbol of that bozo’s name. Facebook the Villain is actually sponsored as a supervillain. That’s technically illegal, just like Facebook technically claims the villain was meant to be a superhero who went rogue instead. Nobody’s buying it, but Facebook is buying enough Senators to keep the heat off. I’m still leery of the guy. He keeps trying to take selfies with everyone and post them online. He didn’t do himself any favors trying to give his boss control over this thing we were building for ourselves.

“Besides, the vote was almost unanimous in opposition to your proposal,” Ouroboros added. “There are no more proposals in need of discussing or voting on today. Per the last vote yesterday, we are taking proposals for the device you decided on. Our host is willing to donate time at his manufactory’s for the fabrication of prototypes if we need it. Let’s dismiss until tomorrow.”

Facebook the Villain walked to the center of the tent where Ouroboros was to object, but Ouroboros rapped him on the head with the flat of one of his curved claw daggers and declared, “Dismissed!”

Facebook turned to me, “You’re going to let him do that?”

I shrugged. “I’m only making assumptions about extreme offenses until you vote a tap on the head into a capital offense. Come back once the rules people make that happen.”

Facebook the Villain stormed off in a huff. He’ll probably get over it once he understands why it’s probably a good thing I’m not killing everybody who hits another person on an island full of supervillains with access to drugs and liquor. Just the other day, Captain Zombie got high on Bath Salts and tried to force someone to eat a bunch of vegetarian tacos with him. With vegetables in them, not vegetarians. He was aghast at what he did when he snapped out of it.

Luckily, Ricca is on the forefront of brain cloning technology to help handle his appetite. They’re just empty, data-less brains, though, so the only people lining up for transplants are from a website that believes pizza places are secret child sex dungeons. I went through all the trouble of making my own actual conspiracy and they pull shit like this. Anybody who’s anybody knows pizza places are the secret cremation sites,. The gossip spreads like wildfire, with all sorts knowing that deep dish. Damn conspiracy theorists are too thin-crusted to admit they’re wrong though.

Back to the matter at hand, my refusal to do anything about Ouroboro’s assault is not my usual hypocrisy. I said I’d be the executioner who handles the very worst punishments. I’m not going to be the hall monitor who tells a bunch of other villains to stop making out in the hallways. I enjoy watching too much, and that’s way too stupid a thing for me to do. Let them do councils or juries or whatever to figure that shit out. I have to go see a man about a Nazi.

Ok, ok, so I was just meeting Dr. Creeper instead. He’s related to a Nazi. One of his mothers was the Baroness von Kampf, a German noble who took up their cause and traveled the United States as a saboteur. For her trouble, somebody branded a swastika on her forehead and her son was taken to be adopted by a heroine who fought her. Dr. Creeper’s lived a fairly quiet life, but he’s finally getting a chance to live his long-time dream of being a supervillain. Except just as soon as he starts building old-fashioned giant Nazi robots, the United States decided to have itself a little civil war with American Nazis killing people.

I put on my armor to meet him formally at the airport. I had wanted to bring him over by submarine for added flavor, but I don’t have those anymore. Kinda wish I knew where those nuclear submarines with missiles got to. They’re probably sold off to some other dictator by now, or sitting in the hidden subpen of one of the masterminds out there that I didn’t bother to invite. It’s like Al Capone said, “You can get more with a kind word and a nuclear submarine than you can with just a kind word.” Classy guy, that Al.

I met him myself, but just myself. He stepped out, loaded down with all sorts of luggage and dressed in labcoat and goggles. “Psychopomp Gecko!” he called. I waved. He dropped a suitcase as he waved back. It was caught by a woman in a dark green dress and white hair. Despite the color of her locks, she was no old lady. She’d be his daughter, the second Baroness von Kampf. She smiled as she looked around behind mirrored sunglasses.

“Hell again, Creeper. And you must be the new Baroness von Kampf.”

“Kampf,” she said, trying to correct my pronunciation despite me totally getting it right. Like I’d mispronounce a word in a language I don’t naturally speak.

“Gesundheit,” I responded. Ok, so maybe I did purely for the sake of a joke. Creeper laughed, though it only got a polite smile from the Baroness herself. “Welcome to Ricca, Creeper and Baroness. I’m glad I remembered y’all, actually. I’ve been holding something of a convention here to determine important social matters for villains going forward. Something to help us organize. It was just an oversight that led to me not contacting y’all.”

The Baroness gave a playful, smiling wince. “No, it wasn’t. The message you left my father was garbled and slurred. The only thing he got from it was you asking for my number. The message you left me wasn’t much better.”

I shrugged. “I was degreasing a Soviet tank and ended up drunk as a result. A couple years later, the tank tracked me down with a little technical alongside it and insisted I take responsibility.”

They didn’t burst out laughing. No, that would be too much to ask. But at least they smiled. Their expressions weren’t quite so joyful upon seeing where Creeper was to work.

“It has a nice… personality,” the Baroness said, trying to maintain her smile.

“Does anyone else smell bacon?” asked Dr. Creeper.

My armor remained sealed, so I didn’t, but I realized what he was referring to. “Oh, that’d be from the corpse disposal.” When they started to blanch, I added, “Don’t worry, they weren’t human.”

“Oh. I will try not to let it dampen my appetite for this meal you have left us,” Creeper said, walking over to a table with slabs of pork chops covered with a mushroom sauce.

I stepped over and guided him away. “Those are some of the remains from the fungal men and mutant pigs.”

“Even the buffalo wings?” he asked, glancing at them.

“Pig wings,” I corrected.

I left Creeper to his new duties overseeing the place while I went about grabbing a pair of the Alternate Reality glasses to alter with a translation program similar to mine. I’m fairly certain the Riccans know enough English to get by in their interactions with most people, but I expect him to work more closely with them. They had plenty of home-grown scientists, unless those got snatched up by other countries in all the chaos. I got my eyes on you, Peru and Argentina.

I was still working over the issue when Ouroboros visited my box in the next session of our little parliament of rogues. Hey, that’s catchy. Ouroboros got right up in front of me and began snapping his fingers to get my attention. “Ahem.”

I turned my helmet away from where I’d just happened to have been looking while I did other things in my head. “What’s up?”

Ouroboros glanced back at where I happened to have been looking, which turned out to be at the dark-haired woman in the harlequin outfit sitting in an area designated for Spinetingler. “Never mind. That’s not my business.”

“What isn’t?” I asked.

“Whatever is going on there,” he said, looking at me but nodding at her. “Every time I look up, you’re looking at her.”

I pointed at my helmet. “Just so happens to be where my head’s pointed. I can see a lot of different things in here.”

“Like I said, this is none of my business. I thought we should talk about something I’ve heard through the grapevine,” he said. He pulled his own chair over to sit down at my table. “I’ve heard a rumor going around that people I trust confirm, and we need to get ahead of it before it gets out of control. They haven’t brought it up here, but a sizable proportion of the people here are expecting us to inaugurate this entire thing, this legion of doom, with some score we can only accomplish together.”

I leaned forward. “You think this is an issue?”

He nodded once. “They have their hopes up. They expect this. Some of them think we’re hitting Fort Knox.”

I rolled my eyes under my helmet. “That’s ridiculous. So many people have robbed it by now, there might only be a single real gold bar left in the place. But yeah, I can see how this could bite us in the ass. If they think something awesome might happen where they get to do cool shit and make a lot of money, and nothing does, we could see rioting.”

“So you see the problem. Good. I hope you have ideas, because I doubt there is anything on this planet big and important enough for us to steal to live up to the hype.”

I steepled my hands in the traditional evil mastermind thinking gesture. “Yeah… especially after I got rid of the Kremlin and the White House, and that time with the Eiffel Tower, and Big Ben… Any money we stole would have to be enough to fuck up the world economy. We could hold another country hostage, maybe?”

Ouroboros shook his head, also just the once. “We’re stuck with a country if no one pays, and then it looks like you’re doing what Claw tried.”

“Yeah, you’re right, that’s so been done. Guess that’s something for us to work on here. Let’s keep this in the back of our minds, work on this, see if we know anyone else who has a good idea on the down-low. I’ve got a couple thoughts, but I need to do some calculations to see if they’ll work.”

“These sorts of team-ups are much more difficult with villains who don’t want to destroy the world,” Ouroboros said with a chuckle, casually standing up.

I nodded and stood as well. “Yeah, and that’s not what any of us want nowadays.” I didn’t point out we now had access to other worlds via the portal in Canada and my dimensional breach technology. “Just like we’d all tear each other apart if we tried to take over and be a ruling body. Doom isn’t our business. We, sir, are the Parliament of Rogues. Hang together or hang separately.”

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