3-38: Damn it Feels Good to Be a Villain

I looked around the room. It was a hell of a sight. I was no stranger to destruction, but this was destruction on a level that…

Well I’d be lying if I said it was anywhere close to the worst thing I’d ever seen on the job. I’d seen a giant lizard’s intestines and colon from the inside today and come out on the other side to tell the tale, after all.

“Well shit,” I said. “That portal blowing fucked things up a lot more than I would’ve imagined.”

“Dr. Lana punched a hole through the fabric of spacetime,” CORVAC said. “You of all people should appreciate that requires a lot of energy. It is only natural that it would expend a great deal of energy when it collapses. It is a miracle the thing didn’t blow up the entire city.”

“Yeah, well it blew the fuck out of all those robots you were controlling,” I growled.

I kicked on the low light on my heads up display since it was difficult to see much of anything beyond the shaft of light where CORVAC’s robot dug through, and even that wasn’t much since the robot he was tooling around in had a big ass and it was blocking most of the light.

“Would you mind either lifting that thing out of that hole or bringing it down in here?” I asked. “You’re sort of blocking the light.”

There was a sound of scraping. I didn’t hear the sounds of robotic articulating legs slamming into the floor, so I figured that meant he was taking his latest giant death robot chassis to the city above.

I sifted through rubble and tried not to think about what’d happened to Fialux, or the fact that she’d just been transported to who knew where somewhere out there in the galaxy.

Hell, somewhere out there in the universe. It was a wonder that other civilizations hadn’t discovered teleporting over long distances by warping space and used that to invade the planet, but somehow no threatening aliens out there had discovered that it was possible to move entire civilizations over impossible distances.

Or maybe there was something the other civilizations out there knew about teleportation technology that I didn’t because I’d just discovered it and was still working out the kinks. Kinks like the fact that the last two serious relationships I’d been in had resulted in someone being flung out there somewhere I couldn’t ever find them again, which made me not want to touch long range portals like that again.

I wasn’t all that broken up about the first one, which probably made me an asshole on some level, but I was definitely broken up about the second one.

I did see something that was worth a smile despite all that. I tossed a nearly intact robot aside and found none other than Dr. Lana on the ground, writhing in pain.

At least I assumed it was none other than Dr. Lana. Sure she might look like someone who’d just decided to practice their fifty meter freestyle by jumping into one of the many lovely superheated pools at Yellowstone, the post low ground Anakin look really wasn’t a good look for her, but I figured that would change soon enough with her healing.

Besides. She was the only other living creature in this room as far as I knew. I told myself that wasn’t Fialux. That couldn’t be Fialux.

Even if there was a part of me that knew it was entirely possible that being tossed into that portal had done this to her instead of tossing her across the galaxy. That I could be looking down at the pained charred remains of my girlfriend.

I leaned over her. Her eyes flew open and she stared up at me. They were a creepy grey color, which led me to believe blindness was one of the many unfortunate fates she’d suffered when she found herself right next to that portal collapse.

I looked to the side of her face and didn’t see any ears there, but I figured of all the senses she had, hearing was probably the most likely to still be preserved. It boiled down to two holes in the side of a person’s head, after all, and the actual ears were really more to aid hearing than anything.

“Genius idea,” I said. “Collapsing a portal like that while you were standing right in front of it. You really got me there.”

That was going to be a shitty thing to say if it turned out this was Fialux. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to wait for very long to confirm this wasn’t my girlfriend. Her body was slowly recovering.

Trust me. The only thing more unsettling than seeing someone burned to the degree Dr. Lana was as she writhed on her invasion room floor was watching those burns slowly but surely healing.

That’s something I wouldn’t mind scrubbing from the old memory banks.

She mumbled something, but her lips weren’t working all that well.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t quite catch that. Could you maybe try to repeat it?”

She mumbled again.

“Here, let me help you,” I said.

I held out my wrist blaster and set it to a focused beam setting. A focused beam that wasn’t all that powerful. She looked like she was already in enough pain as it was without me blowing holes in her head.

I blasted. It hit her lips and she arched her back and shrieked in pain as whatever had crusted her lips shut was broken by the laser. I guess that must hurt like a motherfucker.

Oops.

“Sorry about that,” I said, not really meaning it. From the way she glared at me, she totally picked up on the fact that I wasn’t all that sorry.

“Fuck you,” she hissed.

“Not if I was doing it with a twenty foot strap on,” I said. I put my hands on my knees and knelt over her.

“What are you going to do?” she hissed. “Kill me? That worked so well the last time.”

“Yeah, that’s the thing,” I said.

“What’s the thing?”

“Where are you going with this, mistress?” CORVAC asked.

“Oh you’re really going to like this one, I promise,” I said.

“Why would I like anything you’re planning on doing to me?” Dr. Lana asked.

I shook my head. I was having a three way conversation where two of the people involved in that conversation had no idea they were on the party line.

“I was talking to CORVAC,” I said. “He’s totally going to love what we’re going to do to you. I don’t think you’re going to like it at all.”

I figured she would’ve been at the limits of her ability to feel surprise or anger considering everything that’d happened to her, but that turned out to not be the case at all. 

She flopped around like a fish that’d just been removed from its nice wet environment and was desperately trying to get back to what it knew, but it looked like the flopping around was hurting her like a motherfucker considering every inch of her body was thoroughly charred.

Then again, maybe she was burned to the point that all her nerve endings had checked out. Of course the bad thing about her healing ability that’d shown up out of nowhere was that those nerves would be back and signaling her body about just how fucked it was in no time at all.

I reached down and poked a spot that looked like it was more healed than everything else. A spot she’d pointedly been avoiding pressing against the floor. Like her pain receptors had finally started working there.

The way she pulled away from me and screamed the kind of swear words you usually only hear from drill instructors and sailors who’d been on the job for a couple of decades told me I’d been correct in my guess.

“That fucking hurt!” she shrieked.

“That’s the idea my dear Dr. Lana,” I said. “The last time I made a mistake. I was in such a hurry to trap you that I forgot about the last part of my emergency protocol that gave you a handy escape because the computer thought it was cleaning up. I’m not going to make that mistake this time around.”

I reached out and poked her again. There was a time not too long ago, back when I was under the influence of Fialux, when I might’ve felt bad about causing pain like that.

It’s not like I felt good about it. Not exactly. I didn’t feel bad about it though. As far as I was concerned, she was getting what she deserved and then some.

Dr. Lana stared up at me once she’d finished writhing around, and her eyes were wide. Sure they were still that odd grey color and they stared up sightlessly, but she was wide-eyed and I figured that meant she’d finally realized just how deep she was in the shit.

“That’s right my dear doctor,” I said. “To quote another famous villain: I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you.”

I paused and grinned as the recognition dawned on her face. Not that I thought for a moment she wouldn’t recognize a quote from the late, great, Ricardo Montalban channeling one of the greatest sci-fi villains of both the small and large screen.

I leaned in closer and whispered the next part of the line. I wanted to make sure she heard it, but I wanted it to be nice and intimate.

“And I plan to go right on hurting you, Dr. Lana.”

She whimpered. Not quite the reaction I was going for, but I’d take it. That whimper said it all. I’d broken her with nothing more than a few words, and I hadn’t even gotten started on the real torture. Though that was going to come soon enough.

“You made a huge mistake throwing Fialux into that portal and collapsing it,” I said.

“Fuck you,” she said, but it was clear from the gibbering terror lurking just behind the anger in her voice that her heart wasn’t in it.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Because I’ve been acting weird lately. There was a time when I would’ve swatted someone like you with all the remorse I show to mosquitos who get caught up in the laser death net that keeps people from getting their blood sucked when I have a barbecue at my place. Yeah, there’s been something weird going on with me, and I think that was Fialux.”

I stood and brushed myself off. I was covered in dust and debris and some muck I was pretty sure was from the insides of that damned lizard, but I really didn’t want to think about that.

“You threw her through that portal though. That means the lodestone that was pulling my moral compass pretty firmly away from chaotic evil is gone, and things are about to get very bad for you since I’m willing to do just about anything to get out of you exactly what the hell you did to my girlfriend.”

Dr. Lana whimpered. That was about as much as I could hope for. Oh yes. She might think she was broken, or maybe she was entertaining ideas of escaping, but one thing was for damn sure. I hadn’t even gotten started on breaking this bitch, and I was seeing very clearly now that I didn’t have Fialux around hitting me with dirty looks every time I talked about doing something that verged into villainy.

“Take care of her, CORVAC,” I said. “No teleporting for her. We’re going to do it the old fashioned way.”

I looked down at her and smiled. She whimpered some more. It was a pity she couldn’t see my smile. It was a smile that felt like a return to form for yours truly. It was the first truly villainous smile, the first smile that made me feel like me, that I’d done in a long time.

“Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said.

His giant death robot arm reached down and scooped up Dr. Lana. I noticed he wasn’t nearly as gentle with her as when he was wrapping one of his claws around me. He was doing the villainous equivalent of the boys taking someone around back and roughing them up to show them who ran this town, basically.

I grinned. Damn it felt good to be a villain. It’d been too long.