INTERLUDE. A Retired Villain Reflects.
I like the simple things in life.
A cat, blacker than any coffee I’d care to drink, than any night I’d like to go into, but not half so dark as the long, deep ocean of my memories, sits contentedly by me, expecting nothing but care for his basic needs, and to be left alone. We are similar, the cat and I.
I live in a shack, now. Two rooms, albeit I’ll admit that the plumbing facilities are higher than the normal standard for this part of these little islands. My indigenous friends find it hilarious; I simply find it comfortable.
I have never, to my knowledge, driven a busload of orphans off of a cliff.
If you want to understand my past, know that. It’s important because I’ve done everything else you can imagine.
I wouldn’t call it evil. I wouldn’t give it a name. It’s just my past.
There are certain holdovers. I like a good book, a nice fire, and the sound of screams. I recorded more than enough to last a lifetime, but as with oysters, live is better than frozen, better even than fresh. They’re screaming in my traps right now, this week’s set of adventurers—two different teams? Three? I did not bother to ask.
They’ll be screaming for a while.
They’re not even in that much pain. But you can induce real terror by…
…things I oughtn’t put into words, as, after all, these are memoirs, and I do want you to continue reading.
They come for me. They die. They come for me; they get tortured; they die. They come for me; I broadcast their torture, I broadcast their deaths, and still they come. The bounty on my head gets higher and higher, my traps become more elaborate and more comprehensive as my life gets simpler. I have more books than ever—I keep them in a separate shack now, mostly—and more traps than that second time I ransomed the World.
Still they come. Still they die. Still the ransom gets higher.
I have a simple formula. When I’m bored, I exercise, I read, I write, I work on my traps. I have no real need for crime. I have a talented chef who stops by at intervals whenever he wants a great deal of money, which is often; otherwise, the fresh-caught seafood is excellent, and somehow almost as satisfying as catching one of my pursuers.
If none of these things cures my boredom, I access the organization which believes it’s devoted to fighting crime, and add another half a million dollars or so to the fund which provides for the bounty on my head.
If I ever get really, really bored, I’ll raise it by three million, five million; one month I had writer’s block and a blue funk, I raised it by twenty million dollars, and I had so many adventuring souls coming through that, by sheer weight of numbers, one of them made it to my door before collapsing. I had him airlifted out, hospitalized, cured, and sent to a famed martial arts school in Thailand. He’ll be a formidable opponent if I live another five or ten years. I’m excited for that.
There’s nothing like the simple life, my friend.
Villainy lives. Heroes die. This is the statistical truth; anything else is either a statistical anomaly or a lie.
Nobody believes that.
So they keep coming.
It is a good life.
___________________
If you enjoyed this vignette, might I recommend A Chain of Food — Jeff Mach Writes ?
Comments are closed.