System Supervillain, Chapter 87 (Patreon)

Flew up to Boston, since I'll be on some panels at Rising Phoenix Games Con. If y'all are in the Boston area, I'll be here through Monday.

Anyways, chapter from the buffer, since writing on the plane doesn't fly.

Chapter 87 – Guest List

The guard led the way into the ski lodge, taking us past the desk area, and into an area that clearly was designed for meetings. Perhaps it was used for small business conventions at one point? At any rate, the room was one of those large halls that had sliding dividers that could be pulled out to divide it into smaller sections. For this meeting, though, they were all open, leaving it as one big space.

I could see that we weren’t the first group to arrive. The others were there, all in different groups, with each villain quietly keeping some distance from the others, until everyone was convinced that this wasn’t a setup. With their ‘guests’ around them, this meant that there were several huddles around the room.

Obviously, Stepford was there, with a collection of four Wives. I didn’t recognize them off the top of my head, but Web Mistress was on the ball. The one dressed as a flight attendant was April Nielson, a pilot in the US Air Force that had been reported missing two months ago. The naughty nurse was a doctor by the name of Jazmine Wyatt who recently opened a ‘private practice’ here in Colorado. The dark-skinned cowgirl with a pair of pistols on her hips was Mequashia Haynes, a former policewoman from Dallas. And the woman dressed as a prim and proper secretary was Su Xiulan, a former deputy to the Chinese Ambassador to the US.

Clearly, Stepford was showing off both the quality and breadth of his collection of Wives. That was understandable, since the only real villainy he got up to was in capturing those wives. Once he sold them to their eventual owners, he didn’t get involved with their lives. Well, besides sometimes using them as spies, if they were going to someone he had reason to mistrust.

Closest to him was the Tamer, and his collection of collared pets. The Tamer was an unfortunate person in many ways. He’d been involved in an industrial accident when he was ten. Something about some toxic compounds getting released, or something like that. The result was that he still looked like a ten-year-old boy, even though he was closer to fifty.

Naturally, this had caused some trouble for him, growing up. High school kids were not known as being the most empathetic creatures, after all, and he quickly developed a few complexes related to his features, and how he was treated. Of course, the fact that he couldn’t get clothes that weren’t from the kids’ department didn’t help anything.

However, he was actually quite smart, and had both the ego and presence to go with his boyish charm. Which meant that people didn’t expect it when he created his Willbreaker Pistol that left targets vulnerable to his Tamer Balls. And they certainly didn’t expect him to use them the way he did. But the Tamer was a vengeful and sadistic sort, so he enjoyed collecting those he thought had disrespected him.

I’d actually seen him at work, once. I was hunting a target in the same building as he was. Different targets, naturally. After weakening his target’s will with sever shots of his pistol, the Tamer had thrown one of his tamer balls at his target, hitting them on the back. It glowed brightly, and then disappeared, leaving a metal collar around the target’s neck, which force them to obey him.

Currently, the Tamer was using one of his pets as a chair, sitting on the back of the man who even I recognized, from his scandals in the news. The guy was a priest, and had been defrocked after it came to light that he was a little too interested in the development of the altar boys at his church. Clearly, even after his getting thrown out of the church, he’d been foolish enough to make a pass at the Tamer, and was now being made to regret all his life choices.

His other tamed pets were all models, each of whom had apparently disappeared after a fashion show in different parts of the world, according to Web Mistress’s data. Clearly, he’d wanted them, and got them. His body might be that of a boy, but his mind was that of an old man, after all.

Moving around the room, the next group belonged to Mindtaker. Female mind controllers were no less common than their more masculine counterparts, but there was definitely a difference in how the public reacted to them. Especially when they looked like Mindtaker did. While not drop dead gorgeous, she was statuesque, which helped her with her day job as a model. She wasn’t a supermodel by any means, but she got steady work modeling fashion for ‘real world’ companies, rather than the high-end places, appearing in many catalogues over the years.

As a villain, she was known as a more well-rounded mentalist, rather than as a mind controller, specifically. While she did have the ability to convert people into Thralls, this was the only permanent mind control ability she had. Most of her stuff was either temporary mental domination, like forcing guards to shoot each other, or telepathic probes, to rip information from people’s minds. That was how she got the name Mindtaker, after all.

Her cohort were Thralls. You could tell by the glassy stare in their eyes. Something about how she turned them into her permanent slaves made them look dead inside. All four of them were big, strapping men, who were clearly there for her protection from physical threats. According to Web Mistress, the only news on them was that they matched the appearance of different bouncers who had gone missing over the last couple years. Nothing special about them, other than looking big and tough.

The group closest to the door on his right-hand side was headed by Party Girl and some of her groupies. Well, groupies was a little generous. See, Party Girl was one of those villains who was only a villain because she had some ‘dietary issues’. Most people didn’t like how she needed to feed on human flesh every day in order to keep her powers going, but trying to tell people she had to because she was cursed into being a zombie after taking some bad drugs at a rave in New Orleans didn’t really help her case. The fact that, if she bit someone, she passed on the zombie curse made it even worse. Those groupies were actually four of her zombie minions.

Lack of pulse and unseemly diet aside, though, Party Girl really lived up to her name. She just wanted to party all night, every night. If she wasn’t a zombie, and didn’t use voodoo  powers to make people party with her, then she probably wouldn’t even be counted as a villain, honestly.

To the left of the door we entered from, I saw Dollmaker, with four of his Dolls serving him. Unlike Stepford, who transformed women into Wives to sell them for profit, Dollmaker used them for his own amusement, and to torment people who he thought slighted him. He was one of those assholes who thought that he was god’s gift to women everywhere, and if a woman rejected him, then she had to pay the price. I couldn’t say much, since I literally enslaved women with my powers, but, well, I at least admitted I was doing it for my own power and pleasure, and didn’t have some kind of arrogant notion that I was delivering their just deserts, or something like that. Honestly, villains like Dollmaker gave the rest of us a bad name.

His current set of Dolls were all minor supers. None of them had ever done anything major with their lives or their powers before Dollmaker caught them, and, since they were under his control, it was unlikely they would ever amount to much, now. Another nasty habit of Dollmaker’s was using his Dolls as suicide bombers when they were captured, or when he needed to cover his escape. The lucky ones died after just one blast.

Next to him was Brain Drain. He didn’t have any actual powers, but he did have his Brainwave Manipulator Device, which he almost certainly stole from someone else. No one knew who the inventor was, though, so they were likely dead. At any rate, Brain Drain was the type that liked to launch city-level attacks, having his device drain away people’s willpower, intelligence, and personality over time, until they were mindless husks, ready to be controlled as he saw fit.

The fact that he was a staunch misogynist while at the same time being extremely combative about his five foot, four inches in height was not a great mix, either. Any time a woman got one up on him, he would fly into a rage. Which could lead to his defeat. Needless to say, there were very good reasons why Party Girl, Mindtaker, and Hypnodomme were keeping their distance from him.

Fortunately, the man next to his group was not someone who even Brain Drain wanted to cross, as a general rule. The General was known for being a sadistic disciplinarian, but he also had the ability to draft everyone in a six kilometer radius into his army, at least temporarily. For permanent changes, well, he had to do those one at a time.

Still, the General wasn’t all that bad, so long as he had a steady supply of Cuban cigars to smoke. Yes, he often caused trouble by having his soldiers attack a city, taking it over temporarily while he accomplished whatever goal he was after, but he rarely caused mass casualties, even amongst his temporary enlisted. He was also equal opportunity with his forces, as evidenced by the fact that two men and two women in uniform stood at ease next to him. They were all normal humans before he took them, but his powers did give them some extra abilities to make them more effective in battle.

I felt more than saw Hypnodomme’s glare as her eyes settled on me from her spot next to the General. She had some fixation on me, probably due to the fact that I was one of the few men who had met her face to face, and not been forced to play to her tune. Also, there was the fact that, while my ring also failed to pierce her defenses, her ability to defend herself from getting bound and gagged by ice was quite a bit worse than her mental abilities. Honestly, the rivalry was entirely one-sided on her part, since I’d been rather emphatic about showing her who was in charge.

Like the others, she’d brought pets to the party. In her case, all four were strapping young men who all looked like they were athletes of some kind. A quick check with Web Mistress said that they were seniors at a high school in California, and all on the football team. At least, they were, until they went missing after a ‘night out on the town’. Now, they were presumed to have been trafficked by someone, since there hadn’t been any ransom notes or anything like that.

Puppetmaster was next to her, and from the way he was eyeing her up, I was fairly certain that the only reason why they weren’t already battling to see who could dominate the other was because of the rules of the party. They were both arrogant enough to assume that they could beat any one of the other guests, but neither were foolish enough to think that they could take us all combined. Which was good, because Puppetmaster was actually a fairly powerful controller, in his own right.

His power worked by branding a target with a Puppet Brand, which was basically a magic tattoo that rewrote their mind, turning them into a mindless puppet, doing whatever Puppetmaster commanded them to. Which usually involved something sexual. While there wasn’t any gender limitation on Puppetmaster’s abilities, the fact that he almost always sought to put his brand on pretty women, and have them serve him in every way possible meant that he well and truly deserved his ‘pervert’ reputation.

As I led my group towards Stepford, so that we could get introductions and the like out of the way, Web Mistress sent me a message. She was inside the security system, naturally, so she was watching as two more groups were coming towards the hall. From the images she threw upon my HUD, it was obvious that Mistress Midnight and Maestro were now in the building, the last to arrive.

Mistress Midnight was one of the few international entries on the guest list. She was from Eastern Europe, which anyone who heard her speak could clearly tell, but her exact history was a mystery. However, what wasn’t a mystery was the way she controlled people.

She was a master of Shadow Magic, which is part of the reason for her name. The other part came from the fact that she could use someone’s shadow to control them. Once their shadow warped their mind, the victim became one of her minions. Interestingly, she looked to have only women in her party, though the shadows covering their bodies made it impossible to tell more about them.

Also, I was fairly certain that she wanted me dead. Something about not liking my way of dealing with women.

Maestro, on the other hand, was a rich white boy who lived in one of the nicer parts of Manhattan. His dad had been a major supporter of the arts, since it was a nice way to dodge paying taxes. He’d also covered up all of Maestro’s various illicit activities when he was a kid.

Now, as Maestro, he had the money and influence to do as he wished. His ability to ‘conduct’ a group of people, turning a crowd into an orchestra of sex or violence was top tier, but he still knew powerful people, and they always ‘adjusted’ the news stories enough that he was never identified, and anyone who really tried to make waves or testify found themselves inducted into his personal Chorus, with no chance of escape.

With this many big egos around, I had even money on someone slipping up and doing something stupid to cause a fight before the end of the night.