I really thought Ruritraya was going to be our retirement community. It had plenty of mineral wealth to exploit, a sturdy population of underlings and peasants with decent work ethics, a nice coast-line, constant small-scale wars with neighboring countries to keep any native thinkers distracted, and exquisite cuisine.
We kept watch for the various standard hero approaches, but no one had challenged us in a year.
Things were going too well.
I was lulled. Despite my determination never to relax my vigilance in all directions, I was lulled.
Betrayal came from a direction I never expected.
Rusty led the intervention on me. When I get out of Rehab, I’m going to spend some quality time with his head. I don’t care what happens to the rest of his body.
The rest of my top staff participated, though some of them wore masks. Masks could not hide their visages from my awful wrath. I know the name of everyone who conspired to humiliate me. At night, when I am strapped to the bed, I use the point of a loose screw to inscribe their names, one by one, into the patina. My bed stinks of fresh paint because the minions here are efficient and desire that everything remain pristine, so they paint over my list every day. I don’t care that my list disappears. I am really scribing the names in my memory while I try to erase the things my inferiors said to me.
The things they said to me!
“We caught you being nice to a random dog.”
“Your personal assistant used sarcasm on you, and you didn’t have him flogged.”
“You smiled in public, and it wasn’t the smile that sends small children screaming into the night.”
“You’re letting the intervention proceed without ordering us all killed immediately,” said Rusty. “Boss, you’re losing your edge. Trust me. You need help.”
Refocusing Personality Rehabilitation takes place in a satellite orbiting an unnamed planet that is not on most star or node charts. I knew about Rehab because of jokes people told at supervillain reunions. I laughed, same as everybody else, about those weak-willed idiots who came here.
I never even noticed Rusty putting a jump node to Rehab in our palace, another indication that the intervention was probably timely; I was slipping.
Most of the patients here have no living family. Family is what drove us to be evil dictators and ruthless overlords in the first place. We would have been better off without them in the beginning of our lives, and most of us rectified that situation by the time we hit our teens.
Nevertheless, there is a portion of our treatment called Family Therapy, a.k.a. “Group,” where those nearest to us participate in group sessions. This is when I see Rusty every week.
My roommate Bob, the Purveyor of Ultimate Misery, has four trusted lieutenants who come to Group, and a wife. She is not one of those trophy wives you marry just to ruin her life, foil the aims of her Hero, whoever that might be, and because you get off on humiliating her. Bob’s wife is dumpy, and she knits. Her major vice seems to be a love of large, inappropriately flashy jewelry. She wears a new and clashing assortment every week, which demonstrates that Bob has been overly generous in the past.
This is what’s good about Bob’s wife, Rose: she never says anything in group. Her sole virtue, as far as I can see. And yet, Bob envies me Rusty. That’s what he told me at breakfast, just before we headed in to another of those nightmare extended torture sessions called Group. “I wish someone cared about me the way Rusty cares about you,” Bob said.
I don’t think Bob has much of a future in this business, revealing a weakness like that to someone he doesn’t know well.
Or maybe he knows me too well. Because of all the things Rusty says during Group.
There are so many people I’m going to have to kill when I get out of here. For a while I’m going to have to risk looking like a Hero. I know their respective worlds will be happier places with these Multifarious Crushers of the Many Flavors of Joy removed, but I have to kill them anyway.
If I were orchestrating Rehab, it would have a whole different outcome. Anyone sent to this place would immediately be rendered into fertilizer and sprinkled somewhere they could make people sick. Obviously we are all failures in our chosen fields, both because we are vulnerable to something as lame as an intervention, and because someone felt they could subject us to such a thing in the first place. Failures deserve no mercy.
I’m not sure how I would spin the whole thing to the media, which I would absolutely control. Probably I would use one of the lesser euphemisms. I like “aneurysm.” I enjoy words with y in the middle.
I have big plans for someone in denial about his own shortcomings.
Just now I’m in art therapy, supposedly drawing pictures of large-scale destruction to reinvigorate my imagination with possible future triumphs. I never drew anything before, but I find I enjoy art therapy, even though I demonstrate no real skill. Mostly I like it because I’m using it to mask a couple of other activities.
The art therapy dictator is staring at me, but I don’t think she can read this particular code, which I’m writing in red, part of a large picture of a village in flames.
My mind has been fragmented while I stay here; I can’t concentrate with my usual focus and finesse. I suspect some sort of drugs in our water or food, though what the aim is, I don’t know. Somehow it helps me think to use art therapy this way. I’m the only one who will ever know what I write here, and I will burn this picture as soon as I finish it.
The art dictator just came by and castigated me for not creating a picture with more scope. Why did I decide to destroy a mere village instead of a major city, or even a planet? Such thinking demonstrates how reduced my ambitions and abilities are. I’m behaving in a self-limiting fashion, she said.
I told her the scene I’m painting is not just any village. It is the village where I was humiliated as a small child, and I set it on fire when I left town. I am using it to build up my anger at my past so I can reinvigorate my tyrannical tendencies.
She believes this fabrication, which demonstrates how incompetent she is. If she had read my file, she would know that Rusty and I grew up in the megalopolis called Tourist Trap on the planet Sanitation.
She allowed as to how painting the destruction of a village where I was tortured might be a legitimate use of my art therapy time, and moved on to harass Alan, Supreme Leader of the Dark Legions of Destruction. He was painting giant flowers. I, too, considered his project an exercise in lameness, until he told Supervisor Susie he was imagining flesh-eating flowers with concealed teeth, his favorite tactic for use in subduing inferiors: lull them with a false and pleasing surface, and when they least expected it, leap out with teeth and chew them in half.
This place is full of useless, time-wasting activities, like meditations in the blood chapel to attract a new and more ruthless personal god. I think gods mix everything up and get in the way when you least need their help. Sometimes they switch sides in the middle of the battle. Once I had a personal relationship with Krrgoth the Blood Reaver, and the Hero I was opposing, who professed to honor life in all its forms, even the lowliest, grubbiest churls, sacrificed six beautiful virgins (where he found them in that particular kingdom I don’t know; lord knows I had scoured the hills for them before he got there, and used up all the ones I could find) to Krrgoth in one big bloodletting gorefest, and the damned god helped the Hero overthrow me.
That Hero went on to be a worse tyrant than I ever was. The peasants used to whisper my name (Darkblood, not Spiff) longingly years after I had left. Some even hung tapestries of me in their living rooms-tapestries that could be reversed to show the image of a popular clown figure if any government troops dropped by for inspection.