Accidental World Domination: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Death Ray

Stories

### Chapter 1: Chapter 2 Okay Lets Come Up With A Plan

Alex reflected on the fact that he’d spent almost his entire life since he could first form a memory looking up to villains who tried to take over the world. It was what got him to put on a mask in the first place. Now he’d killed one of them by mistake.

He had been pacing around his apartment for almost an hour now, a modest single-bedroom-and-half place. It had seen better days but was still several notches up from “old” or “in disrepair,” even though a few of his projects scattered across tables made it look messier than it truly was. The walls had accumulated marks on them over the last ten years but the paint was barely beginning to fade – much less chip or crack. The same couldn’t be said of the posters stuck to the walls with museum putty, most of which were beginning to curl or tear. He was going to miss it.

Okay, he thought to himself, not trusting himself to speak out loud, so I gotta get out here. You obviously don’t kill one of the League’ s head members and just stick around in the same 400 mile radius .

B ut! I f I bolt immediately, even if it takes an yone awhile to notice, that’s too damn obvious, he reasoned. T hey’ll figure it out the moment someone looks at a date . Plus, it takes more than what I’ve got to get set up in a new city.

He had a modest emergency fund, but he’d spent so long with that earmarked for a specific emergency he was loath to dig into it now. Especially since outside of the mundane-but-still-substantial costs that a normal civilian might deal with when picking up their life and moving elsewhere, relocating as a supervillain came with a lot of its own expenses.

Especially being a tech villain who isn’t also a mad scientist. With his kit in disarray thanks to some super powered teenagers, he’d need to get that sorted here before he could even consider hopping on a bus. You don’t just show up in a new town and begin asking “where can I buy a bunch of illegal super tech?”

Then there was ingratiating yourself with the locals, both the villains and a few interested parties. You could almost never bribe heroes or Arrestors outright, but you tended to want some local businesses to know you were a big spender when you moved in. Suddenly, cameras got less reliable and broken windows were slower to be reported. As for other villains, it wasn’t often that you’d need to assure them you weren’t muscling in on their turf. Rather, you’d need to start trying to lay the groundwork for future team-ups quick.

There was this idea that being a villain meant being a loner, completely against the world and unwilling to share your spoils with anyone, but Alex had found the opposite to be true. It sometimes felt like you had to network and team up more than most heroes, especially if one wanted jobs to actually go smoothly.

As for funding his actual move?

Most of the mundane worldly possessions he’d bother keeping wouldn’t be too expensive to move. Over roughly the last decade that he lived here, he hadn’t accumulated too much, outside of his Iron Menace gear. A career which saw you make large sums in relatively unpredictable intervals with some expensive maintenance wasn’t exactly a great one for expensive hobbies. The tricky part was that he’d need to be careful with his villain gear and the few things he had stolen over the years which hadn’t been fenced.

Despite the fact that it was an open secret that the authorities, such as the Amera Union government and the various superhero “guilds”, ¹ could always be more proactive when it came to tracking down villains, they weren’t idiots. Letting villains move all over the globe unchecked was a pretty stupid idea and one they tried to crack down on. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the same might be true about letting villains run freely in whatever city they took up residence in, but there was an uneasy equilibrium when it came to that.

It turned out to actually be good business for everyone to let villains who could understand the unwritten rules run loose. Obviously not the type that leveled buildings when they wanted to make an entrance, but a smattering of B-listers and below that kept the property damage to a reasonable minimum and who mainly stole things you could get back made for a decent ecosystem for places like Victory City.

New superheroes got to train by going up against known threats. Businesses garnered a lot of sympathy from the general public after becoming the poor victims of a heist, one which barely flickered on their annual profit reports compared to the free advertising they raked in if the villain managed to stay in the headlines long enough. Construction agencies constantly had work and reasons to keep R&D departments running to make better buildings when you had to keep up with all the superhuman shaped holes knocked into them.

Not to mention, villains were likely to do their own self-policing if someone threatened to bring the heat down. Heroes were as prone to puff out their chest and start cracking heads when they felt disrespected as villains were. Things got ugly for everyone when goodie two shoes capes felt that you robbing a bank no longer meant a quick tussle with nothing broken that ended with confiscating your sacks of cash all just because some little shit on your side went on an ego trip and caused a bloodbath. Problem villains weren’t welcomed by their peers.

If you knew where the line was, then the job was always risky, but not rocking the boat too much meant the do-gooders didn’t try to crack down too hard and your “own” didn’t throw your body in a river.

The exact nature of that careful balance depended on where you were. Hallowsguard and Orion City north up the East Coast tended to be a little rougher. Villains there needed to prove they weren’t posers, but there was still a line. Sure, you were expected to hit harder, back up your threats if you wound up in a hostage situation, and kick the shit out of any hero who made the mistake of misjudging how dangerous you really were. But stacking bodies, fucking with government shit, or trying to make a play for the big leagues meant that you’d be marked as a problem that needed to be addressed.

Hopping town with a crate of super tech tends to get you on the same kind of lists as those problem children. The type of lists made by scary government agencies with acronyms for names. Those spooks made it kind of expensive to stay off their radar when you wanted to get a fresh start unless everyone was distracted by something else at the time.

And as scary as those people were, it was catching the attention of the League that was the real issue.

The League of Domination was birthed out of the ashes of the Great War, with their roots from Duchard’s regime change when those superpower supremacists came into power. While the Thelees ² were thoroughly trounced when the first hero guilds and Mr. Wonder decided to join the war, the ideology they spawned took root among some megalomaniacal types who liked the idea that they were entitled to rule as long as they were powerful enough.

Splitting off from the Thelees that made it out of the war, the League slowly formed in the shadow of the rising super heroes. Allegedly, they supported rising villains, preaching that anyone who would break the law to get what they want was entitled to what they could hold onto and they would back anyone who dared to call themselves a villain in a world of heroes. However, in practice it was a club with a clear in-group and out-group.

So if they actually took note of you, it meant you either bent the knee and tried to rise up through their ranks to play with the bigwigs, or ended up in a morgue as one of many nuisances. And their information net was vast and scary. Anything that a government’s spy agency learned, the League would know soon enough.

And people like that had egos to match.

Considering that the Iron Menace wasn’t exactly an up-and-comer who’d be threatening most of the East Coast of the Amera Union within a month, ³ if they discovered that Alex was the guy who killed Maniacal, it would be seen as an embarrassment. A personal slight against them, even, and those were the kinds of things they loved to make an example out of.

These people threw Endbringer at Mr. Wonder, nearly killing the invincible man, only to turn around and attack Atlanthea’s crown city itself the next month. They did not suffer watching one of their top members get knocked off by a guy with repurposed microwaves on his hands by simply taking that in stride.

A knock on the door pulled Alex out of his pacing.

His heart-rate spiked even as he tried to tell himself that there was no way that anyone could know this quickly. He began to creep towards the door, cautiously grabbing his single working gauntlet off the table and slipping it on.

As he powered it up, a melodic voice drifted through the door he was taking aim at.

“Hey! Don’t forget the rent!” his landlady, Ms. Song, called out.

Her voice was casual even though it held that slight edge of firmness to it that he’d never felt comfortable trying to test even with his super gear.

Alex relaxed, knowing Ms. Song was already heading down the hall to tap on other doors. She no doubt knew about his less than law-abiding career, or at least suspected it. You don’t get an apartment in a city like this and pay rent in cash without something to hide. The middle-aged woman wisely knew what questions to ask and what not to. Honestly, from the few times they’d actually spoken, she seemed to know all the answers anyways. As long as you didn’t bring trouble back, she was more than happy to turn many a blind eye towards her tenants’ professions.

Not that this complex seemed to visibly fit the idea of a den of crime and ne’er-do-wells. Surprisingly, most of Alex’s neighbors seemed extremely normal, with no obvious signs of being in a gang, organized crime, minion organization, or actually being supervillains themselves. Sometimes Alex wondered if he was the exception in this building. The healthy paranoia that kept him alive and afloat in this business told him that probably wasn’t true and that everyone here was just good at hiding their true lifestyle.

Which meant that if the League found out before he got out, there was a good chance most of this building would be gunning for the bounty that would be on his head. All the more reason to make this break clean and raise as few questions as possible on the way out.

Okay, so, time to start a plan.

Step 1. Figure out a cover story.

Easy, you’re a loser here and you want to try a reboot somewhere easier.

Ouch, but it works. Okay then step 2. Where to go?

He started by ruling out leaving the AU. Too risky at the moment, but that was probably the long term plan. Too many questions would come up on why anyone would try a reboot across the sea after failing out of Victory.

Obviously you can’t go back to Orion City for a number of reasons. You don’t leave Victory to go to Orion unless you actually outgrow this city, and there’s too much baggage there. Going there would be like going back home to the family but somehow ten times worse.

Hallowsguard is out too. The city of eternal night wasn’t hard to get lost in, but considering it was where The Dark Knight patrolled, you only went there if you were trying to build a reputation, not disappear. Alex didn’t feel as though he wanted to learn the proper way to break someone’s leg to send a message, which felt like a requirement for being a villain over there.

Okay, maybe Washgreen City or Seasmeet. There’s a couple of big names there but the vast majority were up-and-comers so either felt like the type of place someone starting over would try to hit up. Going further south to the other half of the AU is a little far to travel and would mean having to get things shipped and that’s too expensive and risky.

Good, we’re on a roll, then step 3.

Alex looked back towards his bedroom and remembered the safe hidden in a panel under the floor. It was practically empty. He’d been planning on filling it up after selling the goods from the heist that never happened. The emergency stash was there along with the other valuables he wasn’t going to be pawning off anytime soon, but in terms of what he could readily use, he was running dry.

Yeah, step 3: get some funds. Maybe kill The Broker if no one else has gotten that twerp yet. But priority one is making sure that Ms. Song doesn’t kick you out before you’ve gotten the cash to start getting yourself out of town.

Alex looked at the remains of his costume. The spandex was slowly healing itself. The joys of Dr. Iridium’s many inventions since the Revolutionary Six started superheroing almost 80 years ago was that clothing didn’t get quite as worn out these days. ⁴ Sadly, the tech components of his kit were going to be a little more costly to permanently fix.

He went over to his helmet and winced at the huge crack down the center of the face.

Alright, I’ve got to figure out how to rob enough money with a quarter of my suit working in order to fix the rest of it, pay rent, and still be on track for getting out of this city, all without attracting enough attention that anyone looks too hard and starts to get suspicious. No problem.

Alex wandered over to his workbench and sat down to quickly patch what he could, taking a short break to reapply some ice packs to his bruises and slap together a sandwich from what he had left in the fridge. With the supplies on hand, he had to jury rig up some patches and the interior of his gauntlet began to look more like a bored first year shop student’s experiments with electrical tape and soldering sculptures.

A couple hours later and he had something that could work. This wouldn’t hold up to a fight with anyone rocking a cape, but it should at least let him threaten a civilian or two. He threw what was in working order in a gym bag, pleased to see at least the cloth portion of his suit didn’t have any remaining holes. He’d have some dignity at least. Cautiously, he ventured out of his apartment and when seeing no one in the hallway, quickly scurried out into a darkening night.

--------------------------------------------------

The elevator doors opened to a luxurious suite on the top floor of Amberheart Tower, a meeting place for multiple hero groups in Victory City. Usually, this place housed maybe a dozen superheroes who mingled between patrols or came to mentor newbies in the business, but currently it was packed with almost every group and individual hero that was present at the morning’s fight with only a few footpaths between them.

It was into this packed room that Ned Nubudi disembarked with a stack of donut boxes in his arms.

If anyone had suspected ArachNed to show up, they would probably have thought he’d swing in via a webline onto the balcony outside, but that hadn’t been Ned’s style in years. A couple representatives from Victory City had approached him a while back and let him know that even though the webs he produced lost cohesion and fell apart within a few hours, they tended to get caught on windshields and gum up the sewers. Crossing the city that way could be devilishly quick, but it was a hassle for the streets below unless they sent someone to clean up his trail, and that meant having an Amberheart liaison tracking him as he worked.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

So he mostly depended on the four extra robotic legs he’d manufactured and stuck to his back, interspersing some parkour with them which let him launch himself throughout the city in bursts. That still let him show up along the sides of buildings and crawl his way inside through the roof, but the sad reality of going that route just so he could enter through the top floor would mean a lot of bouncing around to get anywhere at a reasonable pace. And jostling the valuable prizes he reverently carried with both his hands wasn’t worth the risk right now.