System Supervillain, Chapter 37 (Patreon)

Chapter 37 – Morning in a Supervillain’s Lair

It is a common misconception in the media that the life of a criminal, even a supervillain, is one chock full of danger and excitement. How can it not be, when you’re doing dastardly deeds, and dodging the police and superheroes at every turn? The truth, of course, is that the life of a criminal is much like any other field: lots of boredom punctuated by moments of high excitement and peril.

Oh, as a supervillain, I could set my own hours, doing heists whenever I wished. That was never in doubt. However, criminals (at any level) who became TOO active started moving to higher and higher priorities on people’s ‘To Do’ lists. You get too active, and eventually you have people becoming willing to do whatever it takes to take you down.

Depending on how dangerous you make yourself out to be, ‘taking you down’ can mean different things. For most, it means getting captured and thrown in jail, for eventual trial and probably a lengthy prison sentence, if everything goes as the ‘good guys’ want. However, after a certain threat level, cops and heroes will go for the kill, and if they end up taking enough of you alive that you can stand trial from a hospital bed, that’s bonus points.

So, part of the calculus involved in a supervillain’s daily life is measuring the need for funds (or entertainment) involved in doing a job against how ‘hot’ they are, according to the law. The hotter you get, the more willing the hero teams are to pull out all the stops, and ignore little things like collateral damage and due process in order to get to you. The hotter you are, the more effort they put into finding you, and forcing you to ‘cool off’, whether it is in a cell or the morgue.

Obviously, you don’t get much hotter than killing a Senator on the floor, during her speech, on live TV. Everything I’d done up to that point since the Apocalypse only added to the heat. However, that was tempered by the fact that I was highly mobile thanks to my various means of teleportation. This meant that I could show up when and where I wanted to, which made it easy to pick places to go where people were not as interested in actively hunting me.

Another mitigating factor was the fact that very few people knew my face, and I always wore a mask while on the job. This meant that, even when my face was caught on camera, so long as I avoided checkpoints with dedicated security software, such as airport security desks or buildings like the Capitol, my civilian guise wasn’t going to be popping up on people’s radar. This gave me more freedom to act than most supervillains, since I could just pop up anywhere in the world and hang out as a civilian, while other villains had to worry more about people tracking them back to their lairs.

Of course, it wasn’t like people didn’t have ANY idea of where I hung my hat at night. According to Crystal, most groups had narrowed my lair’s location down to somewhere in the area between Trenton, New Jersey, and New Haven, Connecticut. I simply had too many ‘small jobs’ in the area, and my online presence reacted to different things in that area enough that people considered it a reasonable guess. Of course, it was still a hundred and fifty miles between the two cities, with all of New York City and Long Island lying in between.

Even if the heroes were dedicated to finding my lair, they simply had too much ground to cover, so long as I didn’t get a case of terminal stupidity. Especially since, unlike a lesser villain, I could just pop over to Paris, Moscow, or Tokyo for a quick vacation, and no one would be the wiser unless I decided to make it a working vacation. Oh, locals would notice me, sure. But what is one more American tourist, really?

At any rate, even I wasn’t immune to the heat levels surrounding my actions right now. Even with all the advantages I had, if I did too much more, I risked people doing something real nasty, like busting out ritual magic with all the mages they could gather to try and divine my location, or worse. So, I was currently engaging in the time-honored tradition of villains everywhere when they didn’t want to get caught: down time.

“Oh, MASTER!”

Of course, in my case, right now ‘down time’ involved pinning my lovely Min-yuè face down and ass up on the bed as I plowed her from behind. The former heroine had found that life as both a supervillainess and my slave suited her quite nicely. Also, now that she was free of the burdens placed upon her by her former powerset and the state, she was quickly opening up to the joys of sex, eagerly taking the training I gave her.

“Oh, damn, that’s hot!”

A voice from the door alerted me to the fact that my sister was engaged in one of her new favorite pastimes, watching me have sex with one of my slaves. Ever since she’d gotten a dose of my ring’s pheromones during our first meeting after the Activation, she’d been like this. Of course, one ought to expect a certain level of degeneracy from someone who lives pretty much their entire life on the internet. At least her degeneracy expressed itself in this relatively mild form, instead of something potentially more dangerous, like a breeding kink, gangbangs, or consensual non-consent.

Not that I was shaming others for their kinks. I certainly had enough of them, myself, seeing as how Min-yuè currently had a collar with leash around her neck, cat ears on her head, and a cat tail plug in her ass. But some kinks brought dangers and vulnerabilities that were not conducive to a long and prosperous life as a supervillain. Gangbangs and CNC opened up dangerous situations where you might not know you were in trouble until it was too late. And breeding, well, caused little rugrats to go running around, which was its own level of pain.

I groaned in appreciation as I came inside my little pet, thankful once again for the invention of birth control and free clinics where you could get such things, no questions asked. After taming them, I ensured that all my pets got the morning after pill, and from then on were on some kind of birth control, to ensure that there would be no accidents. Sure, such things weren’t 100% effective, but a failure rate of somewhere around 0.1% was as close to certain as scientists were willing to go.

Pulling out of the Chinese supervillainess, I turned to look at Crystal, leaning against the door-frame wearing nothing but an untied bathrobe which was doing a spectacular job of failing to cover her. Again, not surprising since she was ‘helping herself’ with her fingers. But definitely something that I, as her brother, shouldn’t be seeing, but that I, as a man, couldn’t help but enjoy the sight of.

I slapped Min-yuè on the ass, and said, “Go clean yourself up, pet. I need to have a chat with my sister, it seems.”

“Yes, Master,” she purred, and went off on all fours, crawling past Crystal with her tail and head held high. After all, I hadn’t given her permission to stop being a cat, and she liked her rewards too much to risk punishment. Especially since the first punishment I usually gave her was forcing her to watch me with one of my other slaves, while she was forbidden to even touch herself. She really didn’t like that.

Turning my attention to Crystal, I said, “Well, sister, I think it is time you and I had a chat. I’ve been waiting for the pheromones to work their way out of your system, but this clearly isn’t just the ring. So, what’s up?”

“What’s up?” She asked, incredulously. “Really? Do you have any idea what it is like for me here? Your ring may not be draining my willpower and turning me into your horny sex pet every time you touch me, but you’re still the hottest guy I know! Like, have you actually gone and looked up how your stats compare to normal guys?”

She shook her head, not giving me a chance to speak. “Without the ring, you’re still a solid 7 out of 10, based on your stats, skills, and all that. With it? You are literally a 15 out of 10. A woman would have to be the most hardcore of lesbians to not have her panties get soaked when you’re around her. Hell, if that power actually worked on everyone, and not just women, I bet you’d have a bunch of guys out there who started questioning themselves whenever they see you walking around. In fact, I know you would, because you already do, and I HAVE THE INTERNET IN MY BRAIN!”

I just stared at her, my brain trying to catch up to all of this. First off, it seemed that being a technomancer had drawbacks that I hadn’t immediately considered. Oh, I spent plenty of time in the seedy parts of the internet, just like any guy. But even I wouldn’t want to have that in my head 24/7. That was… well, I don’t know what that was, but it definitely sounded like a recipe for emotional damage, especially if there was porn of people you knew.

“So, um, what you’re saying is that I’m so sexy that it is literally driving you to distraction, is that what I’m hearing?”

“Yes! Especially when you are taking your slave girls and using them like the sluts you made them. That would be hot as hell even if you were just normal, but with that damn ring? Unf! The only reason I haven’t jumped your bones and demanded you fuck me senseless is because you’re my actual, blood-related brother!”

I sighed, and leaned back on the bed. I didn’t bother covering up. She’d seen all that and more, after all, since she liked spying on me, so what did it matter? I did have to snap my fingers a couple times to get her attention. “Hey, my eyes are up here!”

“Yes, well, I wasn’t looking at your eyes, brother.”

I just shook my head. “So, what do you want? For me to not wear the ring around the house? That kind of back and forth won’t cause cognitive dissonance at all, I’m sure. And you said guys already go for me, despite the ring not working on them, so I don’t see how that would help.”

She groaned, and leaned her head against the door frame. “They might not be affected by the ring, but your appeal is more than just your looks, you know. You’ve got that ‘dark and dangerous’ vibe going on, and you deliberately cultivate mystery about yourself, since you’re a showman. That only brings in more people thinking about it. Add all that on top of you being a decently good-looking guy, who may not be ripped, but is clearly in good shape, given everything you do? Yeah, you’ve got fans. Hell, before I knew you were my brother, I wrote fanfic on one of the fan sites!”

“Fanfic? Of my villain persona? Dare I ask what kind?”

“You know what kind, damnit! It was a series about the cool, dark stranger approaching me for technical help, and then paying me by bending me over the nearest table, chair, or other appropriate object and fucking me like I owed him money! Oh, don’t worry, I wrote everything under different aliases, so there’s no way to backtrack things, but still!”

“Ah,” I said, finally starting to get the picture. “And I then just showed up, revealed who I was, and asked for your help, like I was stepping directly out of one of your fantasies. Like the hot teacher calling you back for detention, and then actually talking about studying, instead of offering some ‘extra credit’?”

“Yes, damn it all! A fucking sex demon in human form walks straight out of one of my personal porn fantasies, and he turns out to be my brother! And then he goes and does the porn thing with a ton of other women! Do you know how frustrating this is?”

“I’m starting to get the picture, yes. I’m just not sure what you want me to do about it. It isn’t like I’ve stopped being your brother.”

“What I want is for you to throw me down on the bed and break my back, brother or not!” Crystal stopped, suddenly realizing what she said, and her cheeks went redder than a goth girl who spent too long in the summer sun. “Ah, fuck.”

As the sound of dial-up internet heralded her retreat to the digital world, I let go a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. Clearly, we were going to have to deal with this, sooner rather than later. Fortunately, we weren’t likely to be doing any jobs for a bit, so there was some time to think about things.

Didn’t help me with knowing what to say, though.