Memoirs of a Supervillain, Chapter 3 (Patreon)

Chapter 3 – The First Crime

There are many ‘firsts’ in a man’s life. First day of school. First car. First crush. First kiss. First time slow dancing. First time ‘going all the way’. First job. First paycheck. First speeding ticket. Being a super, whichever side of the law you might fall on, doesn’t change that. In fact, you only find that it adds a whole new level of ‘firsts’ that you have to remember.

For a supervillain, one of the big ‘firsts’ is your first real crime. I’m not talking about things that are technically crimes, like jaywalking or getting speeding tickets, or even minor things, like shoplifting a couple Playboys or a case of beer. I’m talking about your first real crime, where you set out to use your abilities to commit a crime on purpose.

Contrary to what people might think, the first crime for a supervillain is rarely a masterwork, and unless they’re one of the real psychos, then it rarely involves people getting killed, or even seriously injured. Most supervillains work up to that kind of thing, unless something goes horribly wrong. And things really can go horribly wrong. I mean, rookie supervillains are usually barely trained, if at all, have little control over their powers, are usually either young or desperate (if not both), and are almost always nervous as hell, since they know that getting caught means getting the book thrown at you, and the things you hear about regular prison are nothing compared to what you hear about super-prison. So, it isn’t unusual for a supervillain’s first crime to be their first introduction to Murphy’s Law, as well.

I would have been in the ‘desperate’ category. Fear and Hunger have a way of concentrating the mind. Fear OF Hunger is even better at getting you focused. Oh, I wasn’t starving, like literal, children in Africa starving, but I was used to getting three meals a day, and those meals being better than ‘the bag of Cheetos I managed to get at a convenience store without looking like I was going to rob the place’. My funds, such as they were, had already taken a hit, and they wouldn’t last too much longer at this rate.

I am fully aware that there are other choices I could have made. There are shelters for runaways. Super teams are always looking for more raw talent. I could have looked for some kind of job I could do as a transient worker, where I wouldn’t need to reveal my age or name.

I chose to become a thief. And that choice has shaped everything after. There may be times I look back and wonder the ‘might have beens’ and the ‘maybe if I hads’, and there have been times that I regretted other choices in my life, but I’ve never regretted that decision. The freedom of being beholden to no one, of being your own man, is exhilarating.

I had been riding the rails for a bit over a week at that point, and honestly I’d lost all track of where I was in the country. I just knew that the area around where I was had gone flat as all hell, and I saw a water tower saying I was in Iowa, so there was that. A few years ago I actually looked up some of my ‘early work’, and figured out that the name of the town was Ottumwa, Iowa. So, you know, you guys can claim that the wicked supervillain Iceblade got his start in your sleepy town.

I slipped off the train a few miles out of town. Iowa is basically flat, and you can see a long way if you want to, and the fewer people who saw me slipping off the train, the fewer people who could eventually connect that to what I was about to do. These days, I practically sign all my work, but in those days I was much weaker, and less sure of myself.

My first stop was the local Goodwill. I got great respect for the people who run the Goodwill. They get people to give them their old clothes, and then they sell them for cheap to people who don’t have better options, and use that money to fund job training and other programs. They’re good people.

My first crime was going to the local Goodwill, and freezing the lock off the loading dock door, so I could get into the building. Honestly, I’d love to say that I did something really, really cool here, going full on ‘heist’ movie by disabling alarms and the like, but that would be a lie. I froze the lock off the door, and opened it, setting off the alarm. 

The next few minutes were filled with finding the supply closet, grabbing a couple big trash bags, and running to the Men’s section. My ‘shopping’ consisted of grabbing t-shirts and jeans that were in my size, and tossing them into the bag. I was less focused on fashion than on having a change of clothes I could wear while I washed mine. Speaking of… I slipped over to the washing machines they used for donations to grab a box of powder detergent. That would be useful when I found someplace I could wash the clothes.

I had been as subtle as a brick to a plate glass window so far, and I wasn’t entirely surprised when I heard the sound of the grate separating the Goodwill from the rest of the little shopping mall. Mall cops coming to check on the alarm. Ten minutes to respond to the alarm was a pretty poor response time, but this WAS a sleepy little town, and I WAS breaking into a Goodwill. Not exactly the place you send SWAT.

My next decision is another one I have never regretted. Some supervillains, on their first crime, have the need to ‘prove themselves’ by taking on the police or security guards. This is one of the big ways that Murphy shows up and ruins your whole day. The first rule to being a supervillain is that you are ALWAYS on the clock. The longer you spend fighting the cops, the more cops show up. You fight long enough, then either SWAT shows up and takes you out with a sniper, or the local superheroes show up. Your best bet is to stay mobile, and break contact as soon as possible.

So no, I did not fight the mall cop. I ran out the back door, the way I’d come, and found a nice quiet corner with plenty of shadows where I could change into my ‘new’ clothes. That was the glorious first crime of the supervillain Iceblade. Well, we might call that ‘part one’.

Part Two involved me finding a nearby sporting goods store. If I was going to live on my own, moving around the country on the railroad, I needed supplies. It also occurred to me that I needed some kind of cover, if people asked what I was doing when I made it into towns. ‘Teenage runaway playing hobo riding the rails’ was the kind of thing that people noticed, especially in this day and age, and being noticed was probably not in my best interests at that time. ‘Teenager backpacking across America’, however, has a kind of romantic sound to it, that people accept more than the whole runaway thing.

The sporting goods store I targeted was one of those big box, standalone buildings. I wanted time to properly look around for the gear I wanted, so I couldn’t afford for the cops to show up too quickly, so kicking in the door was a no go. Instead, I made handholds on the wall out of ice, which allowed me to climb up to the roof. This time, I was going to try my hand at evading the alarms.

Your basic alarm for a business has motion sensors on the doors, and probably glass break sensors on the windows. If they’re fancy, they might have a second alarm on the manager’s office. You might argue that this is lazy as hell, especially compared to the kinds of security you see on government buildings or, god forbid, superhero or supervillain hideouts, but your local sporting goods store in a sleepy Iowa town doesn’t need to defend against master thieves or supervillains, as a general rule.

Up on the roof, I looked around, and found the vent for the air conditioning system.alarm for a business has motion sensors on the doors, and probably glass break sensors on the windows. If they’re fancy, they might have a second alarm on the manager’s office. You might argue that this is lazy as hell, especially compared to the kinds of security you see on government buildings or, god forbid, superhero or supervillain hideouts, but your local sporting goods store in a sleepy Iowa town doesn’t need to defend against master thieves or supervillains, as a general rule.

Up on the roof, I looked around, and found the vent for the air conditioning system while I put on some gloves I’d grabbed at the Goodwill. Removing the hood that covered the vent would normally take tools of some kind, but ice powers makes some of those things irrelevant. I managed to freeze the hood, and break it off, giving me access to the ventilation system. And then I did one of the most foolish things I’ve ever done: I tried to infiltrate a sporting goods store through the vents, like I was Bruce Willis in Die Hard.

I was damn lucky I didn’t break my fool neck, climbing down through the vents which were in no way designed to hold a human’s (even a teenager’s) weight. The fact that it was a big box store makes it worse. I could literally have been fifty feet above the ground, with no way down except hoping my powers could do something to help. Great way to end up dead, let me tell you.

Fortunately, this store was one of the ones with the huge shelves that stretched thirty to forty feet up, filled with all kinds of things for your fitness needs. For me, that meant that I found a lovely shelf under the first vent I looked through, and I dropped down to it so I wouldn’t have to hear the creaking of the vent threatening to fall down with me in it. Thankfully, I was able to get to the ground without breaking anything.

This time, I took my time ‘shopping’. I got a good hiking backpack, travel cooking kit, matches, flint and steel, rope, carabiners, a second knife, some good hiking boots in my size, and a couple other odds and ends, like a sleeping bag that would give me a bit more comfort than just sleeping on the ground if I had to be outside. My plan was simple. I wanted to be able to live on the rails, or be able to run off into the woods if I had to, so I could evade capture.

Manager’s office was my next stop. The reason for this whole little crime spree was my lack of funds, after all, so checking out the safe was a natural next step. The reason I didn’t do that at the Goodwill was, well, because it was the freaking Goodwill, and I wanted to be a higher class supervillain than that! Anyways, freezing the door on the safe allowed me to open it without the combination. It took a while, much longer than I’d take these days, but it was my first safe (another first!) and I was pretty proud of myself as I pulled almost a grand in cash out of the safe. I left the coins and everything else, taking only the cash. Well, that, and the tapes from the security system. Yeah, actual VHS tapes. It WAS only ’99, after all. CD-RWs and portable hard drives were a thing that existed, sure, but not everyone had changed over to them yet for expensive security systems in sleepy little Iowa towns. Go figure.

So that was my first crime, and the ‘cleanup’ consisted of me dumping a couple tapes on the train tracks where they’d be crushed, and me looking forward to actually getting something decent to eat for breakfast.