Evil Genius 2: Becoming the Apex Supervillain

by Logan Jacobs

  Then we opened the gates, closed them behind us, and walked up to the mansion. It was plantation style with a veranda and pillars. Modern construction, not original, and it kind of stuck out as incongruous with the region, since Grayville was a distinctly industrial city. Nothing genteel or Old South about it.

  “Not too shabby,” Dynamo pronounced, “although not as nice as your place, Miles.”

  “It was the best property available to rent in Grayville,” Norma said apologetically. She glanced up toward the ceiling as we unlocked and entered the front doors. “Hey Miles, think we should install a propeller blade like the one at home?”

  “I don’t know if that’s the kind of modification the homeowners would appreciate,” I reminded her, “and I’m not really in the market to buy property in Grayville. From what I can tell about this city so far, it seems like a shitty investment.”

  “…Propeller blade?” Dynamo inquired suspiciously. She only knew what I felt she needed to know about the various security features of my home, and the propeller blade fell under the category of things she didn’t need to know. I never, ever lied to Dynamo, not only as a matter of principle, well not even primarily as a matter of principle, but because her superpower made it impossible to get away with any kind of deceit. So there were some subjects that I just preferred not to discuss with her at all. I didn’t want her to see me as a bloody-minded psychopath. Just a lovable sociopath. Sometimes, especially in the context of crime fighting and supervillain elimination, that was a fine line to walk.

  The week before, Dynamo, Norma, and I had all watched a gory horror movie together. The whole time, Dynamo had been shouting in frustration at the victims to inform them of the tactics that they should obviously have been using in order to combat their sadistic abusers. Norma, on the other hand, had been eyeing some of the rather disturbingly ingenious torture contraptions and whispering to me at intervals, “Think we could create an electrical version of that? Manual seems impractical.” or, “Well, if that bench were better adjusted to the captive’s height, you’d be able to get better leverage…”

  Personally, I could see the merits of both perspectives.

  “Figure of speech,” I told Dynamo airily and sped up past my companions into the foyer.

  Norma and Aileen went to unpack our luggage, Dynamo’s and mine into the master bedroom, and Norma’s into what appeared to be the family’s oldest daughter’s bedroom.

  Meanwhile, Dynamo and I wandered through the place and admired the wooded views from the back-facing porch and the well-stocked kitchen from which the family had instructed us to help ourselves.

  I also stood next to the marble counter in the kitchen and the dining table and found them both to come up to my mid-thighs. “Just about the right height,” I remarked with a smirk.

  “For what, exactly?” Dynamo raised an eyebrow even though she knew the answer.

  “So I can lay you on your back, spread those long beautiful legs of yours, and then--”

  “I asked them to stock the kitchen,” Norma said as she and Aileen walked back into the room and headed toward the fridge.

  “Anything good?” Elizabeth asked after she shot me a quick but smoldering look and then glanced at my mousy assistant.

  “These.” Norma found a bowl of white chocolate covered blueberries and started munching on them. “Want some?”

  “Sure,” Elizabeth answered, and she let her hand slid over my ass as she walked to join my assistant by the fridge.

  Aileen, meanwhile, examined the family photos that lined the walls and tables. She found one of a small redhaired boy ecstatically clutching an ice cream cone, turned to me, and recreated the expression of open-mouthed childish glee.

  “Very good,” I chuckled.

  Aileen found another photo of a dark-haired woman gazing lovingly down at an infant in her arms. She circled her own gleaming silver arms around an imaginary baby and cocked her head toward it.

  “Hmm, not quite, you look like you want to eat the baby,” I said.

  “How about this?” She adjusted her expression.

  “That’s better, you could pass for maternal now. I don’t know though, to be honest you’d probably still scare most babies. Once you have some skin, then maybe we can test out your childcare skills.”

  Not that babies would fit into my current lifestyle and career plans, nor Dynamo’s. I thought Norma actually had the potential to be a good mother and enjoy motherhood, since she tended to be self-conscious and have a lot of personal insecurities and focusing on someone else rather than herself might be a relief for her in some ways, but the poor girl never even dated anyone.

  More likely, a situation would arise that either required us to rescue someone else’s baby from a supervillain and temporarily care for it, or to kidnap a baby that had some kind of importance to a supervillain to use as leverage. Then Aileen could add nursemaid to her resume.

  “So, what were the coordinates for where the nanobot shipment ended up?” Dynamo asked as she munched on some berries.

  “Patience,” I said. “We’ll head there tonight, after it gets dark. But whoever took the nanobots doesn’t know we’re here yet, so I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “So what are we going to do all day in the meantime?” Norma asked.

  “Whatever we want,” I replied. “I think we should explore Grayville a little. Get a feel for the place. Scope out the hotspots.”

  Aileen struck a pose with a smug smile, her legs clamped together, one arm rigid at her side, and the other raised straight in the air with a triumphant fist.

  I glanced at the photo that she was imitating and saw a small child in costume as a black crow wearing boots and a cape and a mask that covered his face except for the mouth. “Some kind of… giant bird superhero?” I asked. “Who’s he supposed to be?”

  Elizabeth glanced at the photo, and her expression lit up. “Oh! That’s the Shadow Knight! This is his city.”

  “The Shadow Knight?” I asked.

  “How do you not know who the Shadow Knight is?” Elizabeth’s teal eyes opened wide with surprise.

  “I haven’t tracked all the various heros and villians of the world,” I scoffed. “I just got into this game recently. Up until a month ago, I tried to ignore all of them. Norma, do you know who the Shadow Knight is?”

  “Yep,” she replied around a mouthful of berries. “He’s a big deal. At least as big as Optimo and the Wardens.”

  “Have you met him before?” I asked Elizabeth.

  “No,” she sighed. “I’d love to though. He’s one of my inspirations. He’s not like the rest of the Wardens, or a lot of other superheroes. He kind of avoids social media and just focuses on crime fighting.”

  “Sounds like my kind of guy,” I said as I nodded.

  “Nope,” Norma laughed. “He doesn’t kill any of the villains he catches. He just puts them in jail.”

  “Oh, so he’s an idiot,” I sighed, but then I saw Elizabeth’s eyes harden and her mouth go flat and decided to continue talking. “Well, maybe not an idiot, he just has the wrong world view. Maybe I can convince him to join us?”

  “He’s the primary superhero operating in Grayville,” Dynamo explained. “Well, the only significant one really. There are other wannabes, but they’re basically all his former apprentices, and none of them have ever amounted to much. But the Shadow Knight has cooperated with The Wardens on a number of operations before I joined them.”

  “So, what’s his power?” I asked the three women.

  “Actually, he’s a bit like you,” Norma explained. “In the sense that he doesn’t have superpowers, he’s just really smart and uses technology to combat supervillains. Weapons and other gadgets of his own invention.”

  “Like me?” I laughed. “First Slade, and now the Shadow Knight. Hey, you guys do know that I’m one of a kind, right?”

  “Of course we do,” Aileen purred as she ran her hand through my hair, down my spine, and then trailed it across m
y hip. “You are an anomaly in several respects, and a statistical outlier in many others,” Aileen agreed.

  “Thanks, Aileen.” Compliments from AI always felt nice since even though she was programmed to please me, providing me with strictly accurate information took precedence. That also meant her occasional insulting remarks landed a bit harder than the like coming from a human.

  “Must be nice to be exceptional,” sighed Norma as she swiped her fingers across one of my datapads. “Okay, this website says the top two tourist attractions in Grayville are… a statue of the Shadow Knight, and a sculpture of a giant umbrella.”

  “A giant umbrella?” I asked. I loved modern technology and couldn’t fathom how life would have been worth living in a pre-industrial age. On the other hand I loved traditional art and couldn’t fathom how certain types of postmodern art were worth producing.

  “Yeah, because it rains a lot here,” Norma said.

  “How many people live in this city?” I groaned.

  “Nearly three million in the main city,” Aileen informed us, “but another two in the suburbs.”

  “And their main attraction is an umbrella?” I asked. “Don’t they have museums or theatheters or--” I paused when I saw Norma’s face started to fall, and then I cleared my throat. “Are you sure the website you are looking at is the official tourist website of Graysville?”

  “I…” Norma started to say, but then I just waved my hands.

  “We can go visit them and get the lay of the city, but Elizabeth and I shouldn’t be in any pictures. We are too easy to recognize.” I wasn’t about to post any photos of myself in Grayville, and I knew that Dynamo, a celebrity in her own right, knew better than to do that too.

  “I’ll stay here, monitor the house, and do some research on Grayville,” Aileen said. I kept my AI assistant a secret, so her face wasn’t publicly identifiable the way mine and Dynamo’s were. But that didn’t mean that a bald bright silver barrel-nippled unnervingly sexy robot could just stroll down the street unnoticed. “By the way, the tracker just died. But its location has not budged for the past six hours.”

  “Sounds great,” I agreed. “Just notify us if anything comes up.”

  Then the house security system, a store bought package that was of course laughably rudimentary compared to my custom design back in Pinnacle City, notified us that someone was requesting entrance at the gate. I checked the video feed and saw that it was a suited employee from the luxury car dealership that I had arranged to have come and deliver a couple of cars for us. I buzzed him in, and Dynamo and Aileen retreated upstairs out of sight while Norma brewed up some coffee and I completed the necessary paperwork to sign for the cars. Then, he left me the two sets of keys and headed back to work.

  I passed off one set of keys to Aileen for safekeeping and pocketed the other. Then Norma, Dynamo, and I headed out to the driveway and climbed into one of our brand new cars. I drove, Dynamo took shotgun, and Norma hopped into the backseat.

  Dynamo was wearing a tan belted trench coat, knee high brown leather riding boots, oversized sunglasses, and a red cashmere scarf. She looked like something out of a designer fashion ad. Ralph Lauren or Burberry maybe, something classic that bespoke of a time when people wore suits to fly on airplanes.

  The first time I ever met Elizabeth she’d been wearing sweats and a baseball cap in an effort to pass incognito in her own hometown, but I guess she had relaxed her dress code a bit now that she was in a city where she wasn’t as well-known, and of course, now that she was no longer a Warden and constantly making public appearances in that job capacity. I knew she preferred to dress fashionably, and I didn’t blame her, but with her body she could have worn a garbage bag and on her it would have looked like haute couture.

  Norma was wearing a hideous purple sweater with puffy sleeves over a patterned skirt with textured stockings and chunky red heeled Mary Jane shoes. It was an awful combination, but she seemed pleased with it, so I didn’t want to make a comment. It wasn’t that clothes always looked bad on Norma, there were some that suited her very well indeed, it was just that she always seemed to choose the combination that looked worst.

  We drove through the city to get to the giant umbrella sculpture, which was only a few miles away from where we were staying. Some of the neighborhoods were dreary and rundown like the one where the taxi driver had erroneously taken us to at first, and some of them were factory districts filled with warehouses and belching smokestacks, but the downtown was a different story. It had more of an austere, monumental look to it than Pinnacle City did with all the huge gray buildings that looked alike with their gothic style, as if the industrial revolution personified and mixed with gargoyles and columns. Most of the buildings were corporate offices, but others contained museums and libraries.

  When we reached the umbrella sculpture, it turned out to be made of dazzling chrome much like Aileen’s current complexion. It rested on its side with the handle extending out. The awning part was about twenty feet in diameter. Both sides, inner and outer, reflected artfully distorted versions of the Grayville skyline.

  Norma was excited to get out of the car and take pictures of the umbrella, of herself standing in front of the umbrella, and of every possible funhouse variation of her reflection from different angles of the umbrella. So we did that for a while, and then we moved on to the nearby Shadow Knight statue.

  That one was cast in bronze. The feathers in the Shadow Knight’s half crow costume with a cape and a beaked mask over a pair of stockinged legs were intricately detailed. There was a plaque between his feet which read,

  In honor of the anonymous defender of Grayville.

  The shadow flying over us from which all evils flee.

  We thank you for your service to the city.

  Dynamo had shown only mild interest in the umbrella, but when we saw the Shadow Knight statue she stared at it in awe, touched the feathers admiringly, and admitted sheepishly to wanting a picture, so I photographed both women together and individually until they were satisfied.

  Then we moved on to Grayville’s Wharf, which was a picturesque shopping district along the waterfront. The ports were crowded with cargo ships, along with a few cruise ships.

  Most of the shops were clothing boutiques or upscale restaurants or cafes of the type that Cockroach would have tried to poison, but there were also quite a few touristy shops mixed in, such as a toffee shop with forty-four flavors of toffee. Norma sampled a dozen flavors and filled up a large bag that was sold by weight. The toffee wasn’t bad by any means, but I’d tasted better in Pinnacle City.

  There was also a silly hat shop. They had wizard hats, mouse ears, Viking horns, and so on and so forth. But their top selling hat, apparently, was a feathered crow one modeled after the Shadow Knight’s headpiece.

  We continued browsing shops until Norma recovered enough from her upset stomach from eating too many toffees to be amenable to the idea of dinner.

  Then we rode up the Cantrell Tower, the tallest building in Grayville, to dine on the top floor, which had floor-to-ceiling windows with a three hundred sixty degree view of the city.

  As we started on our appetizer course of some oysters and salmon tartine, I asked my companions, “So, what do you think of this city?”

  “Not bad, but I don’t think I’ve seen enough of it to form a strong opinion yet,” Dynamo replied.

  “It’s sort of intimidating,” Norma said.

  “Intimidating?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s like… well, the place just looks so dark and serious. And kind of impersonal. I don’t know how to read it.”

  “A bit like its hometown hero, the Shadow Knight,” Dynamo agreed. “He’s all business and shares so few personal details with the public.”

  “Grayville is also kind of dingy,” Norma added. “And smells bad.”

  “Okay, I guess the resemblance to the Shadow Knight ends there,” Dynamo laughed. “He has impeccable grooming standards. Just like all
his other standards.”

  “Grayville does have serious drug and organized crime problems, based on the profile that Aileen compiled,” I said. “If I installed something like the C.D.S. here I bet the whole map would be red. There’s money, sure, but the income inequality is pretty drastic. Most of the jobs here are blue collar and dead end.”

  “More money can’t solve everything,” Dynamo said as the waiters came to bring us the entrees.

  “Of course money in itself doesn’t make your problems go away,” I said as I gestured to the food “But money can buy things that you need and can be used to make your problems go away. Like weapons to kill supervillains.”

  “Or counseling to re-educate them and help them reintegrate into society,” Elizabeth replied reflexively, but I knew she was just reciting Warden dogma and there was less conviction in her voice than ever. So I didn’t even argue the point with her, I just raised an eyebrow until she blushed and looked away.

  “Like makeovers to make you more beautiful,” Norma said wistfully as she took a bit of her food. “Hey, this is pretty good.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed as I took the first bite of my steak. “It’s very good. Maybe Grayville will grow on me?”

  “This city doesn’t seem like your style,” Elizabeth chuckled.

  “No?” I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  “Everyone knows you are Pinnacle City’s poster playboy. Grayville is less than half the size. You are too big of a fish for this pond.”

  “Perhaps,” I laughed. “I’ll just leave it for Slade once we conduct our business here.”

  Then my watch pinged me with a message. I held it up to show both women. “It’s Aileen,” I said. “She wanted to remind us that there’s only an hour left before dark.”

  “Does that mean it’s supervillain hunting time?” Norma asked eagerly.

  I chuckled. “Not quite yet, that’s not the plan anyway. This is just the recce. We need to find out who stole my nanobots before we figure out how to get them back… and how to make sure he never pulls any shit like that ever again.”