Jeff Mach's Blog, page 66

Her Demon Heart

She doesn’t hide her demon heart because she fears being hunted as a demon; she hides it because she will never share it with anyone.

She had always wanted a warm heart; now her heart could melt iron. She’d always wanted a kind heart, and her heart is kinder than a human one. It might cook you alive, but it would never claim to be doing so for your benefit. We’re told to want a heart which shares, a heart which loves, a heart which is strong and passionate. This heart is all of those things; perhaps you do not want what it shares, and no-one ought love the things that it loves, but those things are beside the point.

When she had a human heart, she never could figure it out. Who can?

But she knows, very much, what is in her demon heart.

Her demon heart is vicious. It pumps, not blood, but distilled brutality. That heart, too, is passionate, but it’s very often a cold passion, the passion of someone who looks at you to decide which pieces to remove first, to make you last the longest before you die. And if that passion becomes hot, it’s heat that will damage. It’s not a heart that warms you when you’re chilled; it’s a heart which will give you a third-degree burn if it comes near you.

She speaks softly. She seldom shows aggression. What strength she has is not there to impress you. If you don’t look deeply enough to see it, the results are your own (rapidly) damned fault.

Her Demon heart is rarely angry – perhaps a few times a year. Demons are not in a constant fury; that’s simply a projection on the part of humans. Anger is often both wasteful and self-indulgent; and Demons have purpose in life. There’s a War for Reality going on, after all. It makes her calm; it makes her cold; it makes her able to do things she might never have done before she’d concluded this particular deal.

No, she hasn’t sold her soul. Demons need believers as much as anyone. A captive soul may not believe in anything but the eternity of its jail. That’s not much use.

Don’t worry; you’re probably useful somewhere. At least, you’re probably safe enough, unless you get in the way of what she needs to make happen, and she happens to be near some spot that’s convenient for disposing of your remains.

It’s her Demon heart which thinks certain music is tinny and flat if it’s not accompanied by sounds of hurt.

It’s her Demon heart which knows that a glint of fear in the eyes is sweeter than moonlight.

It’s her Demon heart which knows best that common, but oft-ignored, truth: that to build, you sometimes must tear apart.

Life ought not, need not, be randomized pain. But random pain is good for the Other Side; some forms of Divinity are best fed by a cowed populace, and studies have shown that intermittent and uncertain reward and punishment is more effective than the predictability of consistency. If righteous action always led to righteous reward, life would be without challenge. The fruits of success are pleasant, but the souls which sway other souls are full of ambition. They want to get somewhere and do something. If everything simply fell into your lap because you prayed the right way and followed one set of rules, humans would (again) rebel against the sterility of perfection. Humans are restless, stubborn, stupid enough to harm themselves seeking to break new ground, brilliant enough to make strong foundations in that ground.

A random world runs the risk of being lost; a perfect world is lost. This is why we hear of Angels helping, but we seldom experience it.

One side is betting that serendipity is good marketing. The other is out to tear things down in the hopes that humans are stubborn enough to build new things.

She is the forest fire that (sometimes) devours the whole forest but (often) creates the rich soil needed for new growth. That’s the Girl With The Demon Heart.

Listen to her chest, and you’ll hear a normal beating sound, as if it were an ordinary human organ keeping her alive. But there is another sound, too low to hear, but one which she might share with you, if need be: the arrhythmic, remorseless song of joy that is her Demon heart.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

The post Her Demon Heart appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Acrid Acid of Memory

This is the heart that brokered the deal

With the horde of those who could no longer feel

What, from the heart, did the mouth conceal?

Ask the acrid acid of memory.

This is the ear which listened not

To the ones who shouldn’t have been forgot

Take the ear and let it rot

In the acrid acid of memory.

This is the chest which bound the heart

Which screamed that it would not take part

In the actions which give the end its start,

And made acrid acid of memory.

These are the hands whose cunning work

Did more harm than bomb or dirk

Enacting the will of the thoughts which lurk

In the acrid acid of memory.

This is the tongue which spoke the thought

Which uncountable horrors wrought

By dopamine was the conscience bought

(Now it’s acrid acid of memory.)

And this is the mind, oh, this is the mind

Which every skill did combine and grind

What remains of it? All we can find

Is the acrid acid of memory.

But this is the trick that memory plays:

Memory can tell lies for days

And it denies, in a thousand ways,

The acrid acid of memory.

And so the ‘self’ is unaware

That (strictly speaking) it’s no longer there;

Its brain chemicals can no longer tell it to care:

They’re all acrid acid of memory.

And if thine ego is over-blissed

You just might be a narcissist

And you’ll never know half the things you’ve missed –

Gone,

in the acrid acid of memory.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

The post The Acrid Acid of Memory appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Totally Normal

But I am normal.

I drive a Datsun and dream of starships, is that weird?

I see iguanas and imagine shen-lung, is that strange?

I’d rather navigate the cosmos than the New Jersey Turnpike–who wouldn’t?

Can I help it if I take matters in my own hands?

Is it my fault that the dimensional rift caused by the short-term effects of my FTL drive during that unforeseen instance of time displacement just happened to unlock the psychic gates to a world of leviathans, gnomes, and drunken thunder lizards?

It could’ve happened to anybody.

Totally Normal

ut I am normal.

I drive a Datsun and dream of starships, is that weird?

I see iguanas and imagine shen-lung, is that strange?

I’d rather navigate the cosmos than the New Jersey Turnpike–who wouldn’t?

Can I help it if I take matters in my own hands?

Is it my fault that the dimensional rift caused by the short-term effects of my FTL drive during that unforeseen instance of time displacement just happened to unlock the psychic gates to a world of leviathans, gnomes, and drunken thunder lizards?

It could’ve happened to anybody.

Black Knight of the Skyways

The first thing you must understand about the Black Knight is that I am evil, irredeemably evil, absolutely evil, and because of that, I have no pity, no mercy, no disregard for human life; I will stop at absolutely nothing, and no action, no thought, no plan is too foul, too murderous, too treacherous, or too destructive for me to embrace and enact.

All of these things are, to one degree or another, lies. But this appears to be the only thing they understand, so I’m going to roll with it.

To be a bit more precise, I am certainly “evil” by quite a lot of definitions, and in the eyes of many, and I’d consider that if there are such things as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ lying around, what I’ve seen of ‘good’ doesn’t particularly inspire in me a sense of fellow-feeling. Saying that I ‘reject conventional conceptions of morality’ would be philosophically more appealing, but there’s a certain generalized contempt in simply assigning ‘conventional morality’ to others. Internalized intellectual laziness is a deathwatch beetle in the neocortex. It’s why “antiheroes” don’t do the ‘opposite’ of what heroes do; imagine someone whose daily routine included “Don’t brush your teeth, don’t take supplements, and don’t eat, because heroes do those things”; that would be a very short-lived (and overly literal) interpretation of the role.

In practice, there are neutral sides in a Galactic war, but they are (if you’ll stretch your historical searches back a bit) best-suited to take on the role of a 19th-century Switzerland: a firmly-stated neutrality, reinforced by, in practice, taking on an essential role as middleman in international banking affairs, and, not coincidentally, surrounded by mountains.

As a single, large-but-not-massive colony ship, my crew and I have none of those options. Oh, we could hide in some faraway system, surrounded by, say, asteroids or solar flares. But space is not the same as the Earthscape; the Swiss mountains were not likely to pulse unexpectedly and wipe out your life-support; and there’s no metaphor for hovering near an asteroid field. There doesn’t have to be one; if you don’t understand the likely risks of keeping your ship close to asteroids, you ought not be Captain.

And maybe I ought not be Captain; but there was no-one onboard who hated the idea of my Captaincy more than I did, and I was the one holding the plasma blaster on the duly-elected representatives of my people. And I’d do it again; hypothetically, I rule by force, and my people are helpless in the grip of an interstellar madman. In practice, we knew that every option we debated, back when the war broke out, was likely to get us killed. I’ve kept us alive so far, and they’ve all got plausible deniability. If we’re ever captured, they can say that they had no choice but to obey the dictator whose forces held all the weapons.

In reality, if every single one of my guards accidentally fell asleep on duty, their weapons on the floor beside them, they’d be awakened by a sharp, quiet poke in the ribs, and a whispered hiss, “Get up, you idiot.” But the rest of the Galaxy doesn’t need to know that.

The Black Knight duels other spaceships. Yes, duels. I find (through my sources, my unexpected and manifold sources) military ships which are floating somewhere in space, and I challenge them to duels.

My goal is the humiliation of all those in the Galaxy whose pilots are not as sharp as I, whose weapons are not as well-tuned, whose crews are not so bloodthirsty and ravening for blood. I do not seek to obliterate my targets. I damage their ships and then demand a ransom of transferred credits immediately. I don’t finish them off, for they must live to know that The Black Knight is their superior, and they have been bested, defeated, wrecked, left to limp home in disgrace.

An observer with a sympathetic perspective might note that this is a reasonable method of committing as humanitarian a form of space-piracy as possible. Certain journalists have done this, and I—well, my chief propagandist—has found time to search out these articles and rebut them in the strongest of terms. The Black Knight does not want your pity or your sympathy; I want your fear, your respect, and, should we cross spaceways, your credits. My attacks have crippled ships, ruined missions, certainly killed at least some of their recipients, even (rarely) destroyed ships, particularly if those ships came close to destroying me. The Black Knight is like a rabid creature—but not some small creature, or a domesticated animal like a former pet. The Black Knight is some great beast, dangerous in its own right, and dangerously ill in ways which make me ferocious, make my bite lethal, make me unpredictable.

And let me emphasize this to you: sure, this is showmanship. But it’s also quite real.

If any of my guards did fall asleep on duty, they’d be disciplined. If the former heads of my people asked for their jobs back, the kindest thing I’d do is laugh at them. We’ve gone from a democracy to a dictatorship; and if the governed find that comforting, that doesn’t necessarily make it a kindness.

We are a small people, in a relatively small ship. For weeks, as the War drew ever-closer to us, we debated what side we should join; or if we could possibly flee as far as possible; or if there was any neutral role we might take on. By the time my crew and I marched into the conference rooms with cocked weapons and some serious anger issues, they’d been long deadlocked; and had I waited much more, they, and we, and I, would simply be dead.

I said I was evil; I might be. The truth is, both sides of the Galactic conflict have proclaimed themselves holy, and the other side heretics; and that’s why there are no neutral parties. “How can you be undecided between that which is Right and that which is Monstrous?” Quite a number of ships, early on, declared the neutrality. Those ships still exist, in a technical sense, in the form of bits of floating wreckage. Most of the time, they very quickly found either an immediate understanding of the correctness of those with the bigger guns, or they discovered whether or not there’s an Afterlife.

I’d rather not learn either thing. I’m prepared to do quite a number of things which I might, in my heart, consider unforgivable in order to avoid either of the fates above, and I might even forgive myself. I don’t know my own sense of morality anymore. You can’t necessarily proclaim a role, and live by it, without eventually becoming it, and deep down, I have no regrets whatsoever. Perhaps that means I’m damned; I don’t care. All I care is that when they see most ships, they attack. When they see The Black Knight, they flee.

Survival isn’t always justification. But I’ll worry about survival now, ethics later.

I’d like to think that, deep down, people are scared right now. They’re easily led by those who suggest that there’s clearly a “just path” and a “wrong way”, and that’s understandable. Someday, the Black Knight might be able to come out of the shadows and take its rightful place along with all the colonies and nation-states of the Galaxy.

For today, though, we’ll take your credits, and we’ll leave you what remains of your ship. Go ahead and tell your story to anyone you’d like; this room’s scrambler device will garble any attempts at recording you might have made, and if you ever tell anyone that The Black Knight is anything less that a demon of the spacelanes, they’ll just think you’re lying, because it’s not what they want to hear.

But if we ever cross paths, I think you’ll surrender without a fight, yes?

…what’s that?

Oh, no, the name “Black Knight” is hardly trademarked. What nation would give it that level of legal standing?

No, I wouldn’t mind if you took on that name. There’s at least a half-dozen of us now, each claiming we came up with the idea. That’s why The Black Knight is everywhere, and why, even if one ship is sure it has blown up The Black Knight, it always returns. There’s no formal agreement between any of us, but we do tend to leave each other alone; why attack each other when the skyways are full of pigeons, waiting to be plucked?

It’s historically inaccurate, but given that both phenomena are in our distant past, nobody really cares, so I’ll let you in on a secret: a bottle of rum really is a lovely thing, and for reasons I cannot explain, letting out a hearty “Yo ho ho!” always improves my disposition.

Here, have a slug of grog, and try it out for yourself. Draw out the “y” in “Yo”, and sort of bite off the syllable at the end; that shows ’em you mean business.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

 

 

The post Black Knight of the Skyways appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Dragon Master

It was the last fortress because it was the strongest, and we saved the strongest for last because we wanted to gather as much of our own puissance as possible. Its gates were twenty times the height of the tallest man. None knew how it had been built, or by whom. Nor did any know why it had been abandoned by its original occupants, but it can’t have been conquest; when it was found, its vast doors lay open, and its halls, unoccupied. Now it was home to the last holdouts against my forces. I’d hoped they’d see reason; but it has been my experience that few humans are reasonable when it comes to the subject of power.

The keep was called, in modern times, “The Tower of the Scar”, named after the vast, jagged ugly line which ran deep across (but came very far from penetrating) the seaward wall. Long ago, a mad ruler commanded a dozen ships be filled with a mixture of naphtha, bitumen, lime, and a few other alchemical oddments; the entire wealth of decades of a spice monopoly. She herself commanded a huge barquentine, whose many, many archers slowed (but did not stop) the hail of defensive fire which was decimating her crews. Calmly, she ordered the cargo fleet to sail straight towards the earthworks of the enemy spire, while tacking hard away therefrom. When her little sacrificial fleet came near enough, her warriors set their arrows aflame and aimed straight at the doomed vessels.

Incendiary devices have not played much role in our warmaking. Too much alchemy upsets the Wizards, and that’s a dangerous thing to do. Further, this particular action set a longstanding precedent. For the explosion was tremendous; it tore even the vessel of the Empress to shreds, and even if it had not, it’s unlikely she’d have survived the forty-foot wave which emanated out from the eye of that man-made storm, and which swamped craft and drowned humans fifty leagues away.

And it cracked the wall of this Keep, the first and only fissure in its defenses throughout its history.

But that’s all it did. The Makers of old had knowledge which, perhaps, we now lack. Repairs were made; the best mortar available was pushed as deep into the wall as possible, and the structure seems none the worse for this imperfection in its appearance. Some have even taken it as a warning: you clearly cannot overcome this structure without a force beyond any hitherto known unto man.

Actually, let me correct that: There are things known to us, but seldom utilized ambitiously. The great Monolith in the Silent Hills has much power, but no Druid will reveal its secret under even the most horrifying tortures. I speak from experience. Spellcasters will not ally behind a single banner; it is said that where there are two Sorcerers, there are three angry opinions and one death-duel waiting to happen. This is not untrue.

I am third in a line of monarchs who have sought to awaken Dragons. We’ve spent the Kingdom’s treasury on it, and we know more about them than almost anyone. It was my grand-sire who first deduced that where there are Dragon bones, there might be Dragon eggs. It was his daughter, who became Queen, who sought out wise-woman, knowledgeable in the birthing of things, to consider how the eggs might hatch. It was I who, along with many scholars and students of the subtle arts, discovered the series of incantations which could bring forth a living Wyrm from a dead-seeming, rock-like Egg.

The key is simple: immersion in human blood. And fortunately, I had many critics, and an aqueduct.

There is a little thundercrack, one to which I’ve almost become accustomed, as a Dragon changes course with a violent shift of wings and disruption of air, wheels hard, and heads towards me.

We didn’t quite know what to expect. But it turns out that Dragons are quite sentient, and they master human speech with great rapidity. They have long racial memories, and remember when they were hunted, one by one, and how they died. They are grateful that their species lives again, and, animals at heart, all they want is free range, space for them to hunt and fly without interruption. We will leave out cows and sheep, and they will live beside us in harmony.

The Dragon, as is the way of their kind, speaks without preamble.

“Are we prepared?”

I am used to their brusque manners. I take no umbrage. “We are,” I reply. “I have readied fifty viceroys, who will, between them, control a portion of the known world. They, in turn, report to my Council and myself. Once this Keep falls, all of humanity kneels to us.”

It is sheer chance that my words are punctuated by something never heard before: a full hundred Dragons, spiralling from the sky as if Hell-sent. No-one before me has ever gathered so many together in one place. They don’t need to be told what to do; they’re aware of the plan, and they execute it flawlessly. It’s not complicated; one hundred vast mouths open, one hundred sets of great jaws part, and the flames of one hundred towering magical beasts strike the huge gateway.

It begins to glow and buckle in the heat almost immediately. And why not? Every human incendiary in history, all combined together, are as a stuttering candle compared to the vast bonfire of Dragon’s breath. I smile. “The world is mine,” I say, a simple statement of fact.

“And you, in turn, are ours,” replies the Dragon, seizing me in a vast claw and leaping into flight.

“Treachery! This is trea—”

And that’s all I say before I blast of smoke emanates from between the Dragon’s lips. I cough and I die.

* * *

…or perhaps not.

I wake, coughing, at a deafening noise. I see, now, that we’re not far from the Keep. The Dragons have broken through, and my troops are sweeping in; it would be a slaughter even if my soldiers weren’t supplemented by vast thunder-lizards, whose every surface, from wingtip to tail, seems to be made of razor-sharp ridges.

I try to speak. “I…brought you all to life.”

“And we are grateful, of course,” replied the Dragon. “We’re letting you live. In fact, we’re letting you govern. Would you have been as kind to us?”

My vocal chords are slightly charred, and I make no response. I note that we’re not far from the Keep, but we’re now flying over the sea. Presumably, that is partly to make sure that our conversation is private, and partly to remind me that if I wasn’t being lifted by something that could fly, I’d be drowning right now.

The Dragon continues: “There have never been so many of us alive at one time. It’s joyous, but we’ll also need more room than we’ve needed before. And we’ll have no Dragon-hunting…will we?”

It’s been staring ahead this whole time, gazing out at the sea, but now, in a truly inhuman motion, it turns its neck almost 180 degrees and looks me in the eye. I nod, slowly. “No. No Dragon-hunting, now or ever.”

I realize that I’ve never asked the Dragon its name. I don’t even know if Dragons have names. Its gaze is unnerving in ways that go far beyond anything ever claimed by legend or myth. “Is there anything else you desire?”

“Not in particular. We imagine you’ll face some resistance when you announce that we now govern your species. However, we’ll destroy that resistance ourselves. It’s more practical that way. There’s no need for anyone to think of you as a tyrant, working for monsters, when they can have proof that, in fact, you’re all helpless in this regard. Your entire race couldn’t stand against this many of my species, even if you all could all unite in a common cause. And we’ll just kill off whoever doesn’t recognize that our hide is nearly invulnerable, our minds more sharp than yours, and our breath more effective than any human weapons of war.”

I look, once again, at the fallen Keep. “What will you do with us, now that you have us?”

A strange note creeps into the Dragon’s voice. And, just as oddly, it avoids my gaze. Its voice is soft, almost gentle. “Not so much, little monkey-thing.” As it begins flying back towards land, it says, quietly enough that I can barely hear,

“Far, far less than you would do to yourselves.”

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

The post The Dragon Master appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Mall Provider

Even in the Post-Apocalypse, it would be ironic and a bit tragic for a community of survivors to live through a zombie attack, only to be overrun by a tribe of cannibals.

Fortunately, such a situation is extremely rare. I make sure of that.

Well. I make as sure as I can be. Which is never 100%. Nobody’s perfect, and things don’t always go according to plan. But one does one’s best.

I like this particular community a lot. They seem very nice. And they do live in an actual abandoned and (now) fortified shopping mall. I find that rather charming.

Frankly, I find the whole human race significantly more charming now that there are a whole lot fewer humans running around. Misanthropy? That’s for me!

Mallville isn’t so bad, though. At least, not from a distance.

As a sidenote, I have a bit of headcanon that this is a case of Life imitating George Romero, which delights me to no end. I suppose what I’m watching could be seen as a symptom of something more sinister. It’s possible that George Romero had an uncanny and perhaps suspicious level of insight into how a real zombie uprising would play out. I mean, nobody knows how all this happened; we sure couldn’t figure it out before the Incident, and we double sure don’t have the technology to analyze it now.

(And that’s assuming that technology even could figure it out; this might be some kind of supernatural phenomenon. And if it’s the latter, then all bets are off. Mr. Romero, are you out there somewhere? And did your angry ghost do this as a punishment for some of the shakier remakes of your later films? Because if so, that is even more enchanting, if you ask me. (Not that people ask me about things in general. They didn’t before, and they don’t really do so now. Plus ça change, and all that.)

If I were really analyzing this in depth, which I am, life in the Mall is a little bit less like Cinema, and a little more like one of those old-school zombie-survival video games, back in the days when our understanding of the cosmos seemed to make some kind of, and in the midst of what claimed to be rational order, we somehow chose to immerse ourselves in impossible horrors for fun.

(Hm. Even after all this time, I need to remind myself that that distinctions between lost technologies are a luxury, and some people, especially the younger ones, only grow irritated if you reference that stuff. I’ll leave it all in, partly because we’ve gone back to the days when rewinding a cassette made it much too easy to overwrite things you intended to keep. (In a minimal-electricity, zero-Internet world, analogue still sometimes makes you miss some of the conveniences of digital.)

(Besides: If I’m listening to this for myself, in order to keep myself company in the Wasteland, I use this moment as a reminder to modernize my speech and leave out inconvenient details from Before. And if I’m not the one playing this back, then ask whoever’s doing it for you to explain what I’m talking about. If they can use a tape recorder, then they probably know the rest of my references, plus it almost certainly means that I am dead, and I don’t care if you are offended. I mean, I care even less than I would have when I was alive, which would, itself, been a vanishingly small amount by any reckoning.

Shopping malls tend to be resource-management challenges. They foster a significant sense of community, different from taking over part of a ghost town. The stores of a mall were designed to give the impression of a slightly idealized version of what we used to think of as “daily life”. You can’t get much more indoors and artificial than a candle shop whose wares use an exotic blend of chemicals to emulate fragrances which are otherwise impossible to capture at all. But they do capture those fragrances, and soon after, you, as well. Between the atmosphere of the wax and the carefully-chosen colors and decor, they work hard to make you feel a little bit like you are in a crisp wintry Wonderland, or pastoral country in early spring, or perhaps celebrating some seasonal holiday.

Thus it is that the person assigned to live in that niche has a very practical job: that of providing a much-needed light source…but in a wistful environment, one which reminds some of days which are very long past. It’s good to assign that place so either someone very pragmatic, who will get right down to business on trying to figure out how the hell candles are actually made and if we can make some…or to someone very dreamy, who will carefully store a small, clever little horde of nonessential flamelets and, as ‘evening’ rolls around, will touch flame to some particular precious candle and telling stories by its glow. In a world where Madness and suicide run rampant, the dreamer is every bit as useful an investment as the pragmatist. Not everyone realizes that.

(I am lucky. Like most successful entrepreneurs, I am able to live out some of my dearest wishes with very little compromise. But I am alone in my field. As I am alone everywhere, really.)

The whole thing is a series of non-trivial choices. Do give your sporting good stores to the former coaches and the jocks, that they might (hopefully) increase the general athletic health of your tribe? Or do you give those sprawling places to your Warriors, to train and run amok and (if possible) adapt old tools and articles of gameplay into usable weapons? (Have you considered that the lowly bat is the go-to weapon of zombie apocalypses everywhere?) …and no, your athletes and your warriors are not necessarily the same people. Both occupations involve strong spirits, and strong bodies, if possible. But the instincts which make a coldly calculating tactician, in this particularly cruel version of reality, are actually best found among your geniuses and your psychotics. Assuming there is any difference between the two, or ever was to begin with.

This particular tribe has been lucky of late. A small group of academics were led to believe there’d be safehaven, and even value for their knowledge, if they fled to this place. They did so, and found both these things to be quite true. There was a certain rejoicing. A bit later on, a crazy but ultimately too-small biker gang heard there were easy pickings at this mall, and they could make a killing. The pickings were not easy, and they were killed. But the tribe was able to make much use of their gear.

It’s amazing how much weight people will put into a short, handwritten note in a mostly-illiterate culture.

The Mall’s survival is not just luck, of course. It never is, with the worthwhile ones. More than a few tribes had good fortune, but not the ability to purvey that into long-term survival. You wouldn’t believe how many Supermarket employees turned out to be good at “eating stuff that was in the supermarket when everything went to hell”…and not a whole lot more. The big supply of food led to an early rush of followers, and an early rush of followers led to better defenses than those enjoyed by smaller or less obviously-useful outposts.

But very few among them displayed the leadership, the kind of strategic thinking which would enable them to survive more than the first or second wave of hungry challengers. (And the challengers did come, and they were so hungry)

(To be fair, this isn’t a reflection on supermarket employees in general. The primary survival indicator for most people, post-Incident, seems to have been an early understanding that the world had changed in fundamental ways, and nobody was coming to save you, and wherever and whoever you were, you needed to start work on saving yourself ASAP pronto right now. In almost every case, this meant leaving wherever you were, and getting somewhere significantly more defensible. Supermarkets are, by design, big giant boxes, simple squares or rectangles. You have perhaps two concrete walls, then big windows and doors on one side, huge loading bays in the other. Malls are intended to distribute a very large crowd, disperse it, set it to wandering through endless halls of consumery goodness. Supermarkets are meant to herd people in and out rapidly, buying as they go.

Zombies could do a direct frontal and a direct rearward assault, and catch the inhabitants like, well, like supermarket employees in a big trap with two entrances and no way out except through the howling, stomach-growling undead.)

Malls, obviously do have lots of ways in, and lots of windows, but they also have lots of defensible space, and lots of stuff inside for creating makeshift barricades, traps, outposts. What you make of it really depends on you. That’s another reason I like malls, they tend to attract people who recognize the need to take a couple of risks. That’s a very American spirit, I think. Not that there’s an America, or any other countries, these days. Still.

Malls can be defended, once you do something about all those windows and those big glass doors. But they can’t feed you initially. You are going to have to forage and scavenge and maybe, if you are particularly resourceful, get way the hell out to somewhere you can acquire seeds or seedlings, and maybe start growing something your descendents can get their teeth around.

Malls are also relatively suburban. The very dense population centers, like cities, relied a whole lot on specialization of labor. You need to move a lot of provisions in and a lot of garbage out to keep most of your people healthy. And when that stops, let’s just say that situations… deteriorate. In every possible sense of the word.

(As an aside, you know what else did really well, as a “This is my new-world fortress” culture? Old school bowling alleys. No, really, the big ones, the sprawling aircraft hangar types that were built in the 1950s, when credit was loose and Fred Flintstone was a role model. You can laugh at those joints if you like, but the regulars who would show up three times a week to bowl a few frames, or get beered up at the bar with a couple other regulars, they formed close-knit communities faster than just about anybody.

Given that the bowling alleys which survived up to the Incident were a motley medley of very different people, from the older white guys who had been coming there since they were knee-high, to the tough young Latino kids who liked the pool tables, to the roller derby girls who came in for the slightly ironic aesthetic and stayed because nobody looked at them funny. It’s almost enough to renew your faith in humanity.

Assuming you were the kind of person who had faith in humanity begin with, which I certainly did not.)

(I don’t know everything, I just get around. You know what I wonder about a lot? Basements. Some of them were already bug-out bunkers. A lot of them just stored a ton of food. I could see people making entire lives hiding out in basements, coming out at careful intervals for necessary supplies, slowly improving their living conditions over time. Then again, I can also imagine that literally every single basement in a hundred mile radius has been completely wiped out by persistent zombie hordes just scratching away at back doors until eventually they caved in. It could go either way. I will tell you this, I am not about to go scrounging through any parts of suburbia to try to figure out which way it went.

I don’t want to die now, when almost everyone else has done me the courtesy of dying in my stead.

Ahhh.There is a reasonable amount of activity at the Mall now. It’s almost a parody of what it was like when civilization was up and running. They’re lively, and a little pissed. Maybe sad, I’d say. They lost some good people in that zombie attack. You always do, when the Living Dead come in force. They’ve also acquired a few new recruits, former independants who took shelter within the roomy confines of what used to be a center of Mercantile Delight.

A few of that latter group are warriors, but most are just very green. I think the mall could stand off another serious attack, but they would take heavy losses. Not insurmountable ones, though. At least, that’s my estimate. A little more sadness, a little more practicality, and perhaps one or two steps less-close to re-establishing the systems of the Old World, should they be so inclined.

They’re a little jumpy. That’s probably a virtue; if the Zombie Apocalypse isn’t a series of jump-scares, then media lied to me all my life. (I mean, it did. It deserved its gruesome death. But that’s not the point.)

It doesn’t help let someone keeps hitting their outside walls with strange explosive devices. (Well, they’re not all that explosive. Model rockets. But not everyone knows what those are, and they’re particularly hard to identify when they’ve crushed themselves against your walls.)  No damage done, but the Mallists sure are on the alert.

Good.

Restarting Society is hard. It’s going to be really difficult to get back to where we were. And that’s even if somebody, somewhere, figures out where the zombies come from and what they mean and how to stop them or, at least, how to survive their longterm existence.

But that person won’t be me. I have no idea. The Dead just started coming at us, as if the Universe had begun getting its cues from fiction as opposed to physics.

Maybe fiction’s not as fictional as we thought.

Maybe something like this has happened before. There are a lot of lost cultures out there, a lot of mysteries, a lot of things that were strange and unexplained even back when we had functional orbital surveillance and the ability to house and feed people whose whole job was figuring out the physical world.

(They died as they lived: going “Wait, what the HELL is that?!?“)

Cataclysms happen, and if the human race survives, it gets reshaped.

I never really cared for things the way they used to be. People are not kind. People are not nice. I suppose I have a bone to pick with the (thankfully-vanished-please-do-not-return) former world, where folks pretended to be civilized but were pretty much prepared to skin you and roast you if you didn’t fit in.

And I plan to be literal about that bone pickin’.

The local cannibal tribe doesn’t have a name. Or more specifically, it does, but that name changes every time they change leaders, and they change leaders not infrequently. Their rule is simple. The leader provides protein for the tribe. If they don’t get the flesh of others, then it’s the Provider’s head on the block.

That’s also literal.

If I were civilized, I’d be disgusted. Or maybe I’m just civilized enough to know:

There are far, far worse systems.

The current leader joins me behind my makeshift hunter’s blind, as I peer at the mall through my binoculars. This leader’s name is Sweetbread. That is because he is ambitious, and I am not the only professional whose services he employees; he also works with, of all things, a baker. That baker is part of the tribe, and probably has to be given the difficulty of carting a heavy makeshift oven from place to place, and the challenge of finding ingredients. I am a freelancer myself, working for a couple of the wealthier anthropophages.

The last leader of the tribe thought that I ought to be a member, willingly or otherwise. She imprisoned me when I refused to work for her. The coals under their vast grill were being heated for me soon after, but there was grumbling in the tribe. Sweetbread broke the law when he rose up against her, because technically she was offering meat, but Sweetbread created eloquent and spontaneous new law. “Don’t kill the food that brings better food”.

(You would think that they then consumed the former leader, but she also showed extraordinary legal finesse in advocating willingly, thus setting a heartwarming precedent for longterm survival). “If your meat is best, then you are the Provider.” Now they both train the best and the brightest yong of the Tribe, so that there will be Providers in the future.)

I remember that moment fondly. I was unchained, and I led them in a glorious march towards a certain supermarket of my acquaintance. The tribe agreed that this was excellent sustenance; there was even a little fat, a rare thing these days. (Woe betide those who are too fond of baked goods with a long shelf life, and not fond enough of martial training.)

Now Sweetbread’s Clan has grown, and my services are in high demand. My payment awaits me back in the camp. I will accept their compensation, as well as their lodging, and spend a comfortable few days.

They will not conquer the Mall, but there will be a dozen fresh corpses between Sundown and daylight. And they will be perfectly ripened, just muscular enough, just well-fed enough, just content enough that there will be a minimal amount of bitter adrenaline, despite their sudden and violent deaths. They will be delicious. Because I am the finest farmer of the most prized bacon in this whole godforsaken Post-Apocalyptic world.

I am so respected that the tribe doesn’t even take offense anymore that I will not join them in their feast. It’s rude of me, I know; still, old habits die hard. I like certain individuals, and I admire certain groups of people, sometimes. But in general, I hate Humanity. Even when it’s cooked just the way I like it.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

The post The Mall Provider appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Provider In The Wasteland

Even in the Post-Apocalypse, it would be ironic and a bit tragic for a community of survivors to live through a zombie attack, only to be overrun by a tribe of cannibals.

Fortunately, such a situation is extremely rare. I make sure of that.

Well. I make as sure as I can be. Which is never 100%. Nobody’s perfect, and things don’t always go according to plan. But one does one’s best.

I like this particular community a lot. They seem very nice. And they do live in an actual abandoned and (now) fortified shopping mall. I find that rather charming.

Frankly, I find the whole human race significantly more charming now that there are a whole lot fewer humans running around. Misanthropy? That’s for me!

Mallville isn’t so bad, though. At least, not from a distance.

As a sidenote, I have a bit of headcanon that this is a case of Life imitating George Romero, which delights me to no end. I suppose what I’m watching could be seen as a symptom of something more sinister. It’s possible that George Romero had an uncanny and perhaps suspicious level of insight into how a real zombie uprising would play out. I mean, nobody knows how all this happened; we sure couldn’t figure it out before the Incident, and we double sure don’t have the technology to analyze it now.

(And that’s assuming that technology even could figure it out; this might be some kind of supernatural phenomenon. And if it’s the latter, then all bets are off. Mr. Romero, are you out there somewhere? And did your angry ghost do this as a punishment for some of the shakier remakes of your later films? Because if so, that is even more enchanting, if you ask me. (Not that people ask me about things in general. They didn’t before, and they don’t really do so now. Plus ça change, and all that.)

If I were really analyzing this in depth, which I am, life in the Mall is a little bit less like Cinema, and a little more like one of those old-school zombie-survival video games, back in the days when our understanding of the cosmos seemed to make some kind of, and in the midst of what claimed to be rational order, we somehow chose to immerse ourselves in impossible horrors for fun.

(Hm. Even after all this time, I need to remind myself that that distinctions between lost technologies are a luxury, and some people, especially the younger ones, only grow irritated if you reference that stuff. I’ll leave it all in, partly because we’ve gone back to the days when rewinding a cassette made it much too easy to overwrite things you intended to keep. (In a minimal-electricity, zero-Internet world, analogue still sometimes makes you miss some of the conveniences of digital.)

(Besides: If I’m listening to this for myself, in order to keep myself company in the Wasteland, I use this moment as a reminder to modernize my speech and leave out inconvenient details from Before. And if I’m not the one playing this back, then ask whoever’s doing it for you to explain what I’m talking about. If they can use a tape recorder, then they probably know the rest of my references, plus it almost certainly means that I am dead, and I don’t care if you are offended. I mean, I care even less than I would have when I was alive, which would, itself, been a vanishingly small amount by any reckoning.

Shopping malls tend to be resource-management challenges. They foster a significant sense of community, different from taking over part of a ghost town. The stores of a mall were designed to give the impression of a slightly idealized version of existence. You can’t get much more indoors and artificial than a candle shop whose wares use an exotic blend of chemicals to emulate fragrances which are otherwise impossible to capture at all. But they do capture those fragrances, and soon after, you, as well. Between the atmosphere of the wax and the carefully-chosen colors and decor, they work hard to make you feel a little bit like you are in a crisp wintry Wonderland, or pastoral country in early spring, or perhaps celebrating some seasonal holiday.

This it is that the person assigned to live in that niche has a very practical job: that of providing a much-needed light source…but in a wistful environment, one which reminds some of days which are very long past. It’s good to assign that place so either someone very pragmatic, who will get right down to business on trying to figure out how the hell candles are actually made and if we can make some…or to someone very dreamy, who will carefully store a small, clever little horde of nonessential flamelets and, as ‘evening’ rolls around, will touch flame to some particular precious candle and telling stories by its glow. In a world where Madness and suicide run rampant, the dreamer is every bit as useful an investment as the pragmatist. Not everyone realizes that.

( I am lucky. Like most successful entrepreneurs, I am able to live out some of my dearest wishes with very little compromise. But I am alone in my field–as I am alone everywhere, really.)

The whole thing is a series of choices. Do give your sporting good stores to the former coaches and the jocks, that they might (hopefully) increase the general athletic health of your tribe? Or do you give those sprawling places to your Warriors, to train and run amok and (if possible) adapt old tools and articles of gameplay into usable weapons? (Have you considered that the lowly bat is the go-to weapon of zombie apocalypses everywhere? …and no, your athletes and your warriors are not necessarily the same people. Both occupations involve strong spirits, and strong bodies, if possible. But the instincts which make a coldly calculating tactician, in this particularly cruel version of reality, are actually best found among your geniuses and your psychotics. Assuming there is any difference between the two, or ever was to begin with.

This particular tribe has been lucky of late. A small group of academics would like to believe that there would be safe haven and even value for their knowledge if they fled to this place. They did, and found both these things to be true. There is a certain rejoicing. A bit later on, a crazy but ultimately too-small biker gang heard there were easy pickings at this mall, and they could make a killing. The pickings were not easy, and they were killed. But the tribe was able to make much use of their gear.

It’s not just luck, of course. It never is, with the worthwhile ones. More than a few tribes had good fortune, but not the ability to purvey that into long-term survival. You wouldn’t believe how many Supermarket employees turned out to be good at eating stuff that was in the supermarket when everything went to hell…and not a whole lot more. The big supply of food led to an early rush in followers, and an early rush of followers led to better defenses than smaller outposts.

But very few of them displayed the leadership for the kind of strategic thinking which would enable them to survive more than the first or second wave of hungry challengers. (And the challengers did come.)

(To be fair, this isn’t a reflection on supermarket employees in general. The primary survival indicator for most people seems to have been an early understanding that the world had changed in fundamental ways, but nobody was coming to save you, and wherever and whoever you were, you needed to start work on saving yourself ASAP pronto right now. In almost every case, this met leaving wherever you were, and getting somewhere significantly more defensible. That’s another reason I like malls, they tend to attract people who recognized the need to take a couple of risks. Moles can be defended, once you do something about all those windows and those big glass doors. But they can’t feed you initially. You are going to have to forage and scavenge and maybe, if you are particularly resourceful, get way the hell out 2 somewhere you can get seeds or seedlings, and maybe start growing something you can eat.

Malls are also relatively Suburban. The very dense population centers, like cities, relied a whole lot on specialization of labor. You need to move a lot of Provisions in and a lot of garbage out to keep most of these healthy. And when that stops, let’s just say that situations deteriorate. In every possible sense of the word.

( as an aside, you know what else did really well? Old school bowling alleys, the sprawling aircraft Hangar types that were brought up in the 1950s when credit was loose and Fred Flintstone was a role model. You can laugh at those joints if you like, but the regulars who would show up 3 times a week to bowl a few frames, or get beard up at the bar with a couple people they like to see every day, they form close-knit communities faster than just about anybody. Given that the bowling alleys which survived up to the Incident were a Motley medley a very different people, from the older white guys who had been coming there since they were kids, to the tough young Latino folks who likedthe pool tables, to the roller derby girls who came in for the slightly ironic aesthetic and stayed because nobody looked at them funny one way or the other, it’s almost enough to renew your faith in humanity.

Assuming you were the kind of person who had faith in humanity begin with, which I certainly did not.

( I don’t know everything, I just get around. You know what I wonder about a lot? Basements. Some of them we’re already bug out bunkers. A lot of them just stored a lot of food. I could see people making entire lives hiding out in basements, coming out at careful intervals for necessary supplies, slowly improving their living conditions over time. Then again, I can also imagine that literally every single basement in a hundred mile radius has been completely wiped out by persistent zombie hordes just scratching away at back doors until eventually they caved in. It could go either way. I will tell you this, I am not about to go scrounging through any basements to try to figure out which one it was. No way.

My life isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty sweet.

I don’t want to die now, when almost everyone else has done me the courtesy of dying in my Stead.

MON 11:56 PM

There is a reasonable amount of activity at the mall. Almost a parody of what it was like when civilization was up and running. They lost some good people in that zombie attack. You always do, when they come in force. They also have a few new recruits, former independants who took shelter within the roomie confines of what used to be a center of Mercantile Delight.

A few of that latter group of warriors, but most are just very green. I think the mall could stand off another serious attack, but they would take a lot of losses.

It doesn’t help let someone keeps hitting their outside walls with explosive devices. Firecrackers. No damage done, but they sure are on the alert.

Restarting Society is hard. It’s going to be really difficult to get back to where we were. Even if somebody, somewhere, figures out where the zombies come from and what they mean. That person won’t be me. I have no idea. They just started coming at us, as if the universe had begun getting his cues from film scripts as opposed to the laws of physics.

Maybe that has happened before. There are a lot of lost cultures out there, a lot of mysteries, a lot of things that were strange unexplained even back when we had functional orbital surveillance.

Cataclysms happen, and if the human race survives, it gets reshaped.

I never really cared for things the way they used to be. People are not kind. People are not nice. I suppose I have a bone to pick with a world where folks pretended to be civilized but were pretty much prepared to skin you and roast you if you didn’t fit in.

I plan to be literal about that bone pickin’.

The local cannibal tribe doesn’t have a name. Or more specifically, it does, but that name changes every time they change leaders, and they change leaders not infrequently. Their rule is simple. Their leader provides protein for the tribe. If they don’t get the flesh of others, they take his.

There are worse systems.

The current leader joins me behind my makeshift hunter’s blind, as I peer at the mall through my binoculars. This leader’s name is Sweetbread. That is because he is ambitious, and I am not the only professional whose Services he employees; he also works with a baker. The baker is part of the tribe, and probably has to be given the difficulty of carting a heavy makeshift oven from place to place, and the challenge of finding ingredients. I am a freelancer myself, working for a couple of the wealthier anthrophages.

The last leader of the tribe thought that I ought to be a member, willingly or otherwise. She imprisoned me when I refused to work for her. The coals under their vast Grill were being heated for me, but there was grumbling in the tribe. Sweetbreads broke the law when he killed her, because technically she was offering meat, but sweetbread created eloquent and spontaneous new law. “Don’t kill the food that brings better food”. You would think that they then consumed the former leader, but she also showed extraordinary legal finesse in advocating willingly. “If your meat is best, then you are the Provider.”

I was Unchained, and I led them in a glorious March towards a certain supermarket.

Now sweet breads Clan has grown, and my services are in high demand. My payment awaits me back in the camp. I will accept their compensation, as well as their lodging.

They will not take the mall, but there will be a dozen fresh Corpses between Sundown and daylight. And they will be perfectly ripened. Because I am the finest farmer of the most prized bacon in this whole godforsaken post-apocalyptic world.

I am so respected that the tribe doesn’t even take offense anymore that I will not join them in their feast. I like certain individuals, and I admire certain groups. But in general, I hate Humanity. Especially how it tastes.

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How I Came To Rule The World: A Brief TEDEvil Talk

…and with the world reasonably firmly in my grasp, I can explain a little bit about how this came to be. You’ll notice that I’m still wearing the mask and tights, although my identity is reasonably well-known. To be quite honest, I enjoy dressing up as a Villain. It’s campy and it’s corny and it’s silly and it’s part of why the Other New Council of Villains picked me in the first place. Mad scientists are hard to find, because getting the balance just right is quite difficult in the modern world. You have to be mad enough to have near-impossible ideas, but sane enough to base them on actual workable principles; likewise, you have to be sufficiently out-of-the-box to want to build death rays, and sufficiently capable of working within systems that you can spend years filling out grant applications.

Ah, I can see we’ve got some research applicants in the crowd here. Yeah, it’s a difficult system. Listen, keep applying, but seriously, if you’ve got research with serious implications for a techno-dictatorship, feel free to send an inquiry my way. I’m always looking to fund new and better ways of enslaving the populace.

Now, world leaders seldom do TEDEvil talks. Most of them stay in the shadows, pulling strings from afar, influencing events in a subtle and clandestine manner. Me, I’m not just talking because I enjoy talking, nor am I doing it because it’s a villain cliché. Both of those things are quite true, but I’m actually fulfilling one of the contractual obligations of The Pact, that not-terribly-mysterious document that I signed when I was recruited and began my path to power. Assuming that I successfully hold onto said power for at least ten years without going insane, getting assasinated, or generally acting like a horse’s nether region, most of the League’s private documents will be made public regardless. I mean, if nobody takes me out in that time, you clearly need an assist.

Now, this is the time where I feel I could be reassuring if I talk to you about the complexities of Good and Evil, how, while absolute moral relativism is both unrealistic and contains its own set of problems, each of the two aforementioned ethos is actually just a particular perspective, and though the world is now ruled by an evil madman, you can basically assume that what you thought was evil is an essentially a literary device, and that life under me will, in fact, be better than under your current system of governance.

I have no intention of saying any such things, since they’re probably not true, but if it will make you feel better about this whole situation, feel free. I don’t really care much one way or the other, to be honest.

No, I’m going to leave out pretty much all of the philosophy, all the moralizing, all the propaganda, and all the rest of that stuff, and I’ll just tell you how this happened:

Heroes.

I won’t get into histories—they’re just theories, really, no matter whose side you read—of what came first. All I will say is that a small cabal of particularly enterprising Alchemists who were, in general, keeping to themselves and searching for (what else?) The Philosopher’s Stone…well, they found that their nocturnal gatherings kept being invaded by these masked figures shouting something about “Righteousness” and “Evildoing”. At first, the Alchemists figured it was the Church, their old enemy. But through a certain secret knowledge (it’s not all that secret: one of the Alchemists was the Bishop. Religion was really interesting in the old days)—they were able to figure out that these were not necessarily arms of amy religious authority, but rather, independents. Freelancers, if you will.

Now, one won’t assign current-day thinking to the ancient, but even then, the Alchemists wondered why the Heroes were going after “people who were skulking about at night” rather than “those who were just lopping the heads off peasants during the day”. As years went by, and various spellcrafting wars broke out here and there, and assorted organizations became relatively complicated, there was at least one constant, which would not be figured out until centuries later: Crowley was trolling us all.

…but that’s a story for a different day. Let me back up:

Alchemists are a complex lot. It’s said they evolved into the chemists and other scientists of the current day It’s also said, more quietly, that some of them evolved into various Magickal orders. And some of them, rumour claims, evolved into organizations determined to take over the world. Ha, ha, ha! How ridiculous! What kind of organization would try to take over the world, except for absolutely anyone with a certain amount of power and a little bit of ambition?

Anyway, one thing remained a constant through the years: regardless of what kind of group the (semi)-former Alchemists belonged to, no matter what the actual goals of the organization, Heroes kept breaking in and beating them up.

Now, some of these proto-scientists were more than a bit wroth. More than a few of them were quite idealistic, and some of them had certain views not wholly out of keeping with modernity (if you’re already committing heresy, it’s not so hard to challenge a number of other societal assumptions, after all.) Many of them genuinely saw Alchemy as the key to curing illness, or defeating some of the horrors of old age. It’s safe to say that, in the midst of numerous overt misdeeds on the part of the general populace, it was, to put it as mildly as possible, really annoying that these crusaders were picking on them.

It wasn’t hard to figure out the reason: the Alchemists gathered at night, and were secretive in their doings, and also, not for nothing, they didn’t necessarily have a lot of backup. In short, they may not have been ideological foes of humankind, but they were soft targets. Take on the Deputy Mayor who’s been taking bribes to let medical quacks do outright harm? Seems difficult. Fellow’s got a bit of an army and all. Tackle the weirdos in that strange laboratory? There’s only, like, eight of them, and they’re mostly fairly scrawny…

Presumably, the Heroes didn’t see it quite like this, but to be frank, who cares what they thought? They aren’t the ones telling this story, and besides, they made a horrible mistake: messing with some of the first humans who were really fanatical about creating systematic efforts to refine parts of the world into purer forms.

And they realized that Heroes were the perfect grinding stone.

How many alchemical organizations were originally nefarious? I can’t say. I mean, I don’t know, and if I did know, I’d prefer not having my tongue cut out. Suffice to note that a certain number of them chose a particular path from that point forward.

Figure: You are part of an organization determined to rule the world. You know it will take centuries. How do you speed the process?

Destroy and rebuild. Destroy and rebuild. Get really skilled at surviving destruction, become highly trained in the art of rebuilding bigger, better, faster. Refine, refine, refine, refine.

Certes, the Heroes played no small role in this. Who goes forth, night after night, to punch and rend and burn down, without ever questioning why the same groups should chose to return to their clearly-doomed schemes time and time again? People who aren’t likely to spend too long analyzing the thought processes of their opponents in the first place. “They keep doing it  because Villainy is in their hearts,” said the more philosophical of the Heroes; the less, philosophical, obviously, simply did more punching.

It took quite a while to bring together a workable solution for conquest. My own group was focused on technology (and be grateful; I’m biased, but those mind-control folks? They scare me) and we took quite a lot of time figuring out plenty of elements necessary. Death ray capable of taking out anyone on the planet? Check. And it’s adequately protected from those who’d try to find or destroy it? Check. Assorted complex protocols in the event of my death, including reasonable methods of deciding where and how to mete out proportionate punishment to discourage future assassination. Clear lines of succession? Check. Reasonable force-shielding for me? That’s not a part of the death ray technology itself, but it’s been pretty important; we’ve had most of this weapon since the 1950s, but a succession of spunky British secret agents kept shooting us in the head. That should be fixed now.

The World is mine; cower before me. Unless that’s not your style, in which case, do try to think of something terribly clever. As I suggested earlier in this talk, I do  expect to be unseated (heavy is the non-metaphorical head which bears the primarily-metaphorical crown) but not until I’ve had some time to enjoy myself. I’d like to thank all the secret Masters of the Art who helped me ascend to this worldly throne, and I’d like to give a word of encouragement to whoever will come next: Be inventive, be creative, and be really good at what you do. While the Orders I represent are some of the more major conspiracies, there are a few dark horse candidates out there with a little less financing, but a little more out-of-the-box thinking. They’re both good paths, honestly. See what works for you. Either way, the terms are going to be similar: they’ll help you see if you can develop something which will both defeat me, and assert dominion over the planet. And then you stand up and tell the world what happened, which means that at least a small population will get to work on a means of unseating you, and we’ll have constant innovation, which will increase overall planetary wealth, which will mean that successive Solar Despots will be increasingly better-off. Today, I’ll be relaxing in a reclaimed Versailles; but I’d like to think that, within 50 years, some future monstrous monarch will make a comfortable home in a rebuilt Atlantis. Dare to dream, friends. Dare to dream.

For myself, I, having read my Frasier, have no intention of being the hunted God-King. I’m going to be reasonably laid-back and have a good time right up ’til I’m killed and/or deposed, and as a note: if you’ve got something really good, it would be great if you can just give me a thirty-second head start, and I will teleport to our space station, where I will live out the last of my days in obscene amounts of comfort. You don’t have to, but consider the precedent you set. It’s what you’ll want for yourself someday, right?

This press conference is officially at an end, and I shall begin my reign by binge-watching a number of spaghetti Westerns and eating a lot of snails. Don’t judge; you spend thirty years on the hard work of becoming planetary overlord, and you’ll find you really treasure the simple pleasures in life. World governments, kindly keep governing; I’ll let you know if I need an aircraft carrier or something.

All right! All hail me, first Emperor of Everything! Melvin, throw some snails on the grill and let’s do this.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

 

 

The post How I Came To Rule The World: A Brief TEDEvil Talk appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Unrolled Bones

“Ah, me, ah, me,” the corpse did cry;

“My soul does wish for crossing!

For my poor bones, dug up and dry

The ravens now are tossing.”

Years did pass. The ravens died.

The corpse was left alone.

From yellow-white to white-as-frost

Did turn each brittle bone.

“Ah, me, ah, me,” the corpse did sigh;

“I yearn to cross that river

Of my poor bones I’ll make a raft,

My dry soul to deliver.”

He rattled up his bones a bit,

With eerie eldritch force,

Jumping ‘gainst the water’s edge,

To plot the river’s course.

“Ah, me, ah, me,” the corpse did cough,

“I must plot this thing correctly

Else to the deep, deep riverbed

My bones will sink directly.”

Years did pass. No raft was made.

The ghost was body-bound.

Though the bones were old enough to float

(If the will to cross was found.)

“Ah, me, ah, me,” the corpse did whine,

“There’s so much planning left

The wind’s direction, the current’s speed,

Each bone’s shape, and heft…”

To that spot he’s anchored yet,

And e’er he will remain thus.

For in the Land of Death, he knows,

He’d never again complain thus.

~Jeff Mach

 

I will admit that I have not been overzealous in checking the science behind the ability of one’s skeleton to ford mythological bodies of water, but as far as I can tell, the passage of time increases the dryness and brittleness of bone, leaving it less dense, and therefore, more buoyant. 

I’m not really sure that matters, but I spent way too much time looking it up, so I figured I’d share. 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

The post Unrolled Bones appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.