“Why is the personality test necessary?” The hero asked. “Can’t I go fight any villain?”
The intern looked scandalized. “Absolutely not! What if your Myers-Briggs types aren’t compatible? Or your Enneagram numbers clash?” He fretted, waving his hands. “The city would be in disarray!”
“Why is the personality test necessary?” The hero asked. “Can’t I go fight any villain?”
The intern looked scandalized. “Absolutely not! What if your Myers-Briggs types aren’t compatible? Or your Enneagram numbers clash?” He fretted, waving his hands. “The city would be in disarray!”
“You play at authority like you rehearse in front of a mirror,” they smoothed the wrinkles out of their jacket with a well-practiced ease. “Some are born into the role they play.”
The hostage was ecstatic when their heroic rescuer came crashing through their ceiling. They were less happy when the hero and their kidnapper started flirting. And then kissing.
They coughed politely. “Hey… hey guys?” The kissing was rapidly becoming more handsy. The hostage strained at the ropes and averted thier eyes. “I’m still- oh dear.” The shirts were coming off.
“Hello!” The civilian said with a jaunty wave. “I’m here to flirt with you.”
The villain shovelled more money into the bag with a frown. Was this another crime-control tactic? The bank’s hostages looked as confused as they felt. “This is a robbery. Get out of my way.”
“A robbery!” The civilian exclaimed in delight. They pulled out an index card with multiple lines of text. “I have just the pickup line.” They read off the card. “Are you a thief? Cause you just stole my heart.”
The villain could see a large stack of index cards in the idiot’s back pocket.
“Wait… Why is that criminal letting the children leave?” The sidekick squinted at the bank robbery occurring below. Thank God for skylights. “You said he had a hard heart.”
A ghost of a smile echoed on the hero’s face. “One made of gold.”
You are a supervillain who has just captured your rival’s child. Rather than being afraid, they’re begging you to let them stay.
Frankly, you’d known those idiots had had a kid for years now. You’d pretended not to, because while you’d committed a lot of atrocities in your life, you weren’t willing to face the moral quandary of whether you would knowingly kill a child just to spite its parents.
They probably thought they were being clever though, what with the blaming you for an injury you knew damn well you’d never given keeping one of them out of commission for a few months, then references to what they would ‘leave behind’ or ‘could not follow’ when in the latest death trap. One of them had accidentally pulled a pacifier out of their utility belt once, and tried to pass it off as being prepared for any young children they came across while rescuing.
Idiots.
Still, you had standards. Standards that fell somewhere past war crimes and before common decency, but they were standards.
