System Supervillain, Chapter 103 (Patreon)

Chapter 103 – Running the List

The next name on the list was Deus, real name Biagio Cardo, an Italian national and supervillain. He was actually one of the biggest threats that Serafina fought against, back before he went into quarantine and I turned the angel into my pet. His magic-based powers didn’t function on holy ground, which made her the perfect counter to him.

Honestly, looking at his profile, his big problem was that his powers gave him godlike powers, which gave him an ego the size of the moon. He really believed that he was a god, and should be worshipped. Everything he did was to try and get people to start being his cult. Of course, the fact that he mostly targeted beautiful women to be his first inductees to the cult was pure happenstance. Not like he was just using the whole thing as a roundabout way to get laid.

Sure, I didn’t have much room to talk, given the size of my harem of enslaved supers, but at least I was a bit more honest with my intentions, than trying to hide behind religion. So, while I couldn’t exactly fault him for getting lucky with his powers, I wasn’t a fan of his methods. Which just made the question of what to do with him all the harder.

I couldn’t just delete all the supers that weren’t useful to me, after all. Besides the fact that doing something like that might cause a higher level of Administrator to strip my access if they found out, there was the more immediate concern that getting too free with the deletions would probably get enough people thinking that I was a problem that needed to be ‘solved’, permanently, that I was almost sure to have someone try and take me out. I could deal with most assassination attempts easily enough, especially with Web Mistress looking out for potential chatter online, but they only had to get lucky once.

However, this guy was full of himself enough that I was almost certain he’d land himself back in quarantine, if I didn’t lock his powers all the way down. And that would just leave me with more problems in the long run. No, he needed to be neutered, so that he didn’t cause trouble for me, and mine. The only question was how.

Obviously, I started with the disadvantages keeping him from trying to destabilize the system or attack anyone with Admin access, but I wasn’t sure that would be enough. He wasn’t stupid, which, combined with his ego, meant that he’d likely get his pride hurt by this, which meant he’d try and work around the rules, somehow. So, I either needed to alter his disadvantages further, to make him obedient and law-abiding, or I needed to pare back his powers to the point that he was more controllable.

Completely changing someone’s personality through their disadvantages was another thing that might get people to believe I was a problem to be solved post haste, however. Which meant the only real option I had was to break his powers to the point that they were in the realm of ‘standard’ abilities, rather than something like reality manipulation. Of course, just because I was doing this, didn’t mean I had to put in the work to make him incredibly efficient…

Now, there was an idea! I skipped power structures altogether. No variable power pool, multipower array, or elemental control to lower costs for him! Instead, I gave him a basic armor power, an energy blast, flight, and a couple other things that ate up his points in a hurry. Now, he was more the ‘flying brick’ or ‘paragon’ type of super, rather than a reality warper. Still fit with his name and attitude, but far less troublesome to deal with, with fewer resistances than he had before. I released him in the middle of the Mediterranean, so he would come to grips with his new weakness before he ran into people.

Moving on. Next was Redacted. Real name [Redacted]. No, seriously. Redacted was one of the nongendered individuals in quarantine, primarily because they weren’t biological in nature. They were actually a sentient and sapient robot that was infused with a codebase that allowed them to ‘hack’ reality. Their primary ability was to delete, or ‘redact’, things from reality, but they could make edits, as well. Most worryingly of all, they could make edits or redactions to their own ‘code’.

Trying to keep them under control would be a pain in the ass. Their codebase looked to be part of the System itself, and any limits I put on them could be redacted out, unless I worked hard to word them particularly well. There was some concern about how this robot got the System as part of their codebase, but that was something I could file away for later, to ask when I met an alien admin. But for now, Redacted was getting redacted and purged.

Eight down, nine to go. Next on the list was Lucy Morningstar. That was her actual name. She was a demon of some sort, and her father was listed as… Lucifer Morningstar? I wasn’t the most attentive back in Sunday School as a kid, as evidenced by the fact that I was very much not walking a pure lifestyle, but that name rang all kinds of alarm bells.

Checking up on her profile, I actually breathed a sigh of relief. The girl was a villain, yes, but they were more my style of villain, or perhaps more like Party Girl. She did what she wanted, and had fun doing it. If people got in her way, she dealt with them, but, for the most part, she was a pretty laid-back person, unless someone annoyed her, or she got bored.

She was… well, not harmless, but as close to it if I didn’t provoke her. I could just make a few changes to limit her powers, and keep her from attacking admins, and that would be fine. More importantly, I didn’t want to make any major changes, or do anything to bind her too tightly, just in case she ever got in touch with her dad. I’d dealt with angry fathers before, but I didn’t want to try and talk down the literal devil to keep them from causing me problems.

No, I went with a light touch on her. Just enough that she wouldn’t cause trouble, and a warning note, telling her why she was quarantined. On second thought, I also added in a dinner invitation, if she wanted to talk in person. I wasn’t going to use admin powers to alter her too much, but having powerful friends with powerful family wasn’t a bad idea. If we became more than friends, well, that was good, too.

Next up: Reset, real name Nelson Brown. Reset was interesting. His powers qualified as reality manipulation, but they were actually a form of time travel. He changed reality by deciding that he would go back and alter something, and it happened. Basically, if he was faced with a guy with a gun, he would say that he would go back in time and remove the bullets from the gun, and the next moment he had a handful of bullets, and the gun was unloaded. It reminded me of an old movie about two stoners who used a phone booth to travel in time, and used similar methods to solve their problems.

Of course, he also had time travel powers, which made him even more of a threat to the System, but I could deal with that, easily enough. The problem was the rest of his abilities. The System threw out all kinds of error codes when it tried to parse what the hell he did, which is why he got thrown in Quarantine to begin with. I couldn’t just let him loose without nailing this down, somehow.

I decided a multipower was the best setup for him. Limit the kinds of things he could do. Time travel, obviously, as well as teleporting himself, or teleporting people he touched as an attack. A couple different attacks that kept with the ‘time’ theme, and a big healing power with the ability to resurrect someone to represent his rolling back time on someone who’d gotten killed. That would do. He’d still be quite powerful, but there wouldn’t be any more errors when he did his thing. I sent him back to Houston with what was quickly becoming my standard Admin warning.

Animator was next on the list. Real name, Amber Watson. She was another ‘reality controller’ in name only. Most of her abilities centered around manipulating, changing, and, well, animating things in her area. So, she could turn a sofa into a fire-breathing hippopotamus, but she wasn’t going to turn gravity off with a thought, or make the color green cause hallucinations in right-handed people, or some of the other bullshit some reality manipulators got up to. That meant that she was relatively safe, at least as far as the System was concerned.

Most of her abilities could be replicated with various forms of the Summon or Transform power. However, both those powers were fairly specific. Summon Goblin was a different power from Summon Horse. Same with the different types of Transform. If I was going to go that route, then I’d need to give her a variable power pool, but limit it to Summons and Transforms. Then, I could use the leftover points to cover her costume and weapon that she normally used. And, of course, the hard stops on destabilizing the system or attacking Admins.

Lord of All Things was the next on the list. I’d actually had to deal with some of the fallout of his bullshit before, when he turned half of Cleveland into glass while I was pulling a heist in the city. All because the local baseball team lost! If the local heroes hadn’t beat him senseless and managed to turn things back so I could actually steal the items I was after, I’d have been even more pissed. Enjoy deletion, dumbass!

Petty revenge done, I turned back to the list, and brought up Eldritch’s file. Otherwise known as Skye Woods, they could be best described as ‘genderfluid’, mainly because their shapeshifting ability let them go from male to female, both, and neither at will, while they also could copy themselves, creating clones who had the same abilities as they did, at lesser levels. They actually had a child, where they were both mother and father to the kid.

As freaky as that whole thing was, I did do a quick check on the kid. They were thirteen, and living with a group of witches that Eldritch helped out on occasion, so they weren’t in danger. I was a villain, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed putting kids in the foster system. Eldritch’s powers were chaos personified, and their outlook on the world could best be described as alien, but they weren’t an insane narcissist or bloodthirsty wackjob. They could stay, once I put proper controls on them, limiting the scope of their abilities.

Emperor (AKA Zindelo Cork) was next up. Honestly, he was one of those insane narcissists. He believed that his power gave him the right to rule all of creation. However, he actually put in work. Before the System, he was the ruler of his own kingdom in central Africa, and he’d done a good job of stomping out some of the tribalistic, genocidal tendencies of some of the assholes there. Usually by literally stomping them into the dirt.

In his absence, his country, Taskea, had suffered. But the infrastructure he put in place was actually holding up the country, even without his leadership. How long that would last before some warlord took over, I couldn’t say, but I was definitely impressed. I decided that he could stay, once I gave him the standard control package.

I took a breath, and looked at the clock. Time did not flow quite the same when I was doing Admin tasks, but I still saw that I’d been at this for over ten hours, and that was just after I got back to work once I was done playing with Lady Abstract and the girls. There were still three names on the list, but I could clear them in the morning. Some rest would allow me to think clearer about what to do with them, anyways.