#Karalaxus

[howtohero]

#296 Return of the Starter-Villain

Hello How To Hero Heads! Today we’ve got some exciting news to share with you, we’ve finally hired a new supervillain correspondent: Everyone’s favorite lameo starter-villain, Smuggles. Say hello Smuggles. ||Hello Smuggles.|| Sheesh, this guy. I know, I know you must be shocked that I even allowed this to happen. Many of you will recall that I never signed off on, approved of, or got along with our last supervillain correspondent, Dr. Brainwave (don’t pretend you didn’t love Dr. Brainwave like a son, I seem to recall you being incredibly broken up when he died.) but that was because Dr. Brainwave was like, a credible threat who posed an actual danger to us and who once genetically engineered a giant monster that ate me. But Smuggles isn’t anything like that, he’s like the lowest of low-tier supervillains. ||It’s true, I was once hired to smuggle several objects into America, including a TSA uniform that was my exact size, and I never even once thought to put on the uniform to make the rest of the job easier.|| You may recall how in our original post on starter-villains we mentioned that he was on the rise ever since he teamed up with fellow low-level supervillains, Perry the Pirate and Charlie the Fish-Whisperer to hijack a canoe. But we’re both please and dismayed to say that our prediction was wrong. In the past three years, Smuggles has made absolutely nothing of himself. ||I once accidentally turned myself into a bowl of ice cream on a hot summer’s day.|| That starter-villain team didn’t even last past that first job, Charlie the Fish Whisperer went on, as you know, to become one of the most feared supervillains in the world and we all live in fear of the day Chuck the Fish Whisperer uses his awesome powers to escape the prison dimension the world’s heroes trapped him in. And Perry the Pirate became a lawyer I believe. But Smuggles, man, Smuggles. He’s no threat at all, so I was thrilled to see his application among the many we received following Dr. Brainwave’s untimely demise. So, welcome aboard Smuggles. ||Thanks! I’m excited to share my villainous insider knowledge with your read-|| Yeah yeah, that rocks man. So, anyway, in honor of our new staff member, we’re going to take a look at what happens when your starter-villain returns. 

A starter-villain is, of course, the villain you fight on your first night out as a superhero. The costumed jaywalker whose swift defeat you use to springboard your career as a respected crime fighter. They will undoubtedly be the easiest villain to defeat that you come up against. As you become more experienced and proficient in superheroism, you’ll look back at your first fight fondly and laugh about all the ways the fight could have ended even quicker than it already did now that you’ve learned and grown a whole bunch. As time goes on and you fight more and more supervillains, eventually meeting your one true nemesis and a whole slew of other villains that you’ll tango with on a regular basis, you’ll even forget who your starter-villain even was. ||I’ve been a starter-villain to over 30 superheroes, and even though I send each of them a holiday card every year, I’ve only ever gotten one response.|| But, as Smuggles just demonstrated, your starter-villain will never forget you. And soon enough, once they’re ready, they’ll ensure that you never forget them again. ||The one response was from Hatman and he just sent a card saying “New phone, who dis?” Like, it was a postcard, a signed postcard. A signed personalized postcard. It said “Hatty Holidays!” and everything!||

It’s very possible that the starter-villain you defeated was also just starting out their costumed career. A crushing defeat on their first night is sure to sit with them, (supervillains being notoriously obsessive, dramatic, and good at remembering how they got their various scars), and they’re going to stew with that for a good while. Even if it wasn’t their first night of attempted-villainy, a defeat by a rookie superhero is sure to make them a laughing stock in the supervillain community. And you know what that means... ||Years of unanswered holiday cards||... revenge. 

Your starter-villain will soon come to see you as their nemesis. Even though you’re perfectly happy with the eternal battle of good versus evil that you’ve already got going on with your actual nemesis. They aren’t going to care that you’re already seeing somebody (off to prison in handcuffs). They’re going to want you for their own. They’re going to spend every waking moment of their life plotting against you. Taking the time to really learn everything there is to know about you. This is just one more reason why it’s so important to to make sure your secret identity is ironclad before you start your superhero career. Because as soon as you defeat your first villain, there’s going to be someone out there working to uncover who you really are. ||Honestly, most superheroes don’t even bother trying to keep their secret identity from me. Many of them have just walked up to me and introduced themselves like “Hi, I’m Joe.” It’s kind of insulting.|| 

For that reason you’d do well to keep tabs on your starter-villain after you defeat them that first night. Their quest for revenge will start immediately and their scheme is just going to grow more and more protracted and elaborate the longer you let things lie. If you’ve already lost track of your starter-villain and it’s been a few years since you’ve been a superhero, I’d start shoring up your defenses. The longer you go without hearing from them, the worse it’s going to be when they eventually rear their ugly ||that’s just rude|| heads again. So put out some feelers, try to find out what they’re up to. If you can’t track them down through your superhero network of contacts, you can even try reaching out to your nemesis to see if they can help. Depending on how obsessive and vindictive your starter-villain is, your current nemesis might also find themselves in your starter-villain’s crosshairs. If you literally have no idea who your starter-villain is, sorry, you’re just going to have be on high alert all the time. 

You may discover that your starter-villain has since turned over a new leaf and is actually now operating as a superhero or working with a superhero-adjacent organization such as the OPG. On the surface that makes sense, I mean, they were barely a supervillain to begin with. So the jump to superheroism is not as extreme as it would be for say Al “Da Boss” Marconi, or Karallaxus destroyer of worlds. But even though it might make sense for a starter-villain to have become a superhero, you must not believe it even for one second. Even if some part of a starter-villain truly wants to be better, you can be sure that an even bigger part of them actually just wants revenge on their starter-hero and joining the superhero community is just one of many increasingly inane steps in their protracted revenge scheme. 

The only way to truly dissuade a returned starter-villain from dogging you forever and always is to either die or pretend you did. Otherwise they will track you down and hunt you to the ends of the known universe. ||And don’t forget the multiverse, Chuck the Fish Whisperer may be consigned to another universe, but that doesn’t mean his hatred has diminished one iota.|| Exactly! A starter-villain will stop at nothing until they’ve repaired their reputation in the form of destroying the person or people who tarnished it in the first place. 

Defeating your first supervillain is an important milestone in the life of any superhero. Unfortunately, it is also an important milestone in the life of that very supervillain, whose life will become utterly subsumed by their embarrassing defeat at your inexperienced hands. Smuggles here is really the exception that proves the rule. ||Wait what?|| Normally, starter-villains become exponentially more dangerous by the time you next encounter them. So you must never underestimate a villain just because you beat them when you were a little kid wearing garish tights and you happened to be doing parkour near your convenience store right when it was being robbed. So why don’t you all take a moment now to check in on your starter-villain and make sure that you’re still able to beat them! 

(All right, that’s a wrap on How To Hero #296. Great job everyone, we’ll see you next week.)

||Um.||

(Oh hey, Smugs. Good work today I guess. In the future we all prefer it when the supervillain correspondent kind of harasses Zach a bit, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re a bit lackluster compared to Dr. Brainwave.)

||Oh well-||

(You know, I didn’t even want to hire you. I was gunning for Snipey McSkullface. That guy has style.)

||In the form of a skull face-tattoo, yes, I’m familiar with him.||

(Anyway, did you need something from me?)

||Er, yes. I was told that this position came with housing?||

(Oh yes definitely it does! You get to move into our super sweet basement! Right this way, follow me.)

||Thank you, it’s tough out there for a costumed smuggler. So I’m kind of in between homes at the moment.||

(Oh yeah? Wearing a distinctive bright costume makes smuggling more difficult? Who would’ve thunk.)

||Sigh.||

(Did you just say “sigh”?)

||So this basement...||

(Oh yeah! Dr. Brainwave used to live there, you know before he exploded, so a lot of his junk is still down there, but don’t worry we did our best to clear out the mutant alligators.)

||What do you mean you did your best?||

(Listen Smugs, at the end of the day mutant alligators will be mutant alligators if you catch my meaning.)

||I’m not sure I do...||

(Ha! Classic Smugs, anyway enjoy your new digs I’ll see you around.)

||Sure... thanks||

||Wow, they really left everything just as it was. All of Dr. Brainwave’s equipment and machinery is still here. This couldn’t have gone better... Now if I just fire up this thing ah, nope, that’s just a feed that shows what everyone else in this building is thinking about. Not what I’m looking for, but I’ll come back for that later maybe... Oh gross, you know what this thing should be burned. Now let’s see, shrink ray, precarious stack of explosives, ah! Here it is! The interdimensional warp gate generator. Excellent. Now, if I just power it up, and set it to the proper frequency. Yes... Yes! Yes it’s working! Oh now they’ll rue the day they disrespected Smuggles. Each of them will pay dearly for how they treated me... now that you’re back old frien-||

Hey, Smuggles? Oh good, Parenthesis Guy got you settled in, just wanted to thank you for your great work today and to check if you needed anythi- What are you doing.

||Oh Zach! Hello! What do you mean?||

Why is there a warp gate open in my basement? What are you doing with that thing?

||Taking my foul revenge on you and everybody else who ever slighted me! The world will crumble before me and my ally!!!||

Listen, if this is about the jokes, I’m sorry about that, but you really don’t want to do this. Trust me, this isn’t going to end well for any of us.

||It certainly won’t end well for you and all of your superhero friends. Ah, there he is. Welcome back, Chuck the Fish Whisperer.||

Oh... this is bad.

[howtohero]

#298 Taking Over the World

Hello? Is this thing on? Ah, perfect. Hello world, it’s me, Smuggles, the fiendish criminal who orchestrated the end of the Age of Superheroes and ushered in the Age of Villains, or the Age of Smuggles, my compatriots and I are still workshopping the name. Anyway, now that things are well and truly finished for your pathetic heroes and those who would try to guide them through life, I thought I might take a moment to explain to you all how all of this came to be, so that you might truly comprehend the absoluteness of our control and the futility of trying to stop us. And yes, I’m sure I know what you’re thinking, thanks to the mind reading flakes that Professor Brain-Scrambler mixed into every box of the aggressively marketed Cereal Flakes: Everyone’s Favorite Cereal and Favorite Flake in the world. You’re all thinking: Ooh is he really going to monologue now? That’s so passé, how gauche. But I feel as though I deserve this. You might have trouble believing this but this is actually my very first supervillain monologue. I don’t often succeed at my villainous plots, and even when I do, a successful smuggling kind of means there won’t be an audience for whom I can monologue. So excuse me if I feel like gloating for a bit.

Before I get into things though, I think it would be quite remiss of me not to thank those who helped me get to where I am now, starting with the real MVPs, the How To Hero team. The How To Hero team? Aren’t they good guys? Aren’t they victims in all of this? How could they have helped you? All good questions, to be sure, but they are indeed responsible for my meteoric rise to power. Of course they didn’t know it at the time. You see, three years ago I was nothing more than a petty thief with a costume and a codename. Barely a supervillain as some have called me. It was rare that I even saw superheroes, let alone did battle with them. Until June 8, 2017, when a certain blog told every two-bit would-be cape-fetishishist that I would be a good villain to test their crime-fighting chops on. Suddenly, I was being accosted nightly by every man, woman, child and giant badger with a hero-complex. It was humiliating, it was painful, and I vowed that I would get revenge on anybody who contributed to my nightly beatings, so, every superhero ever and also How To hero. I decided to start with the blog, as that seemed easier, and also they were the only ones on my revenge list who hadn’t already decisively proven that they could beat me up. So I began reading their guide, know thine enemy and all, and in time I discovered that while they may not be much of a superhero guide, they were, unwittingly, laying out everything one might need to be the ultimate supervillain. I reached out to an old accomplice of mine Perry the Pirate, who helped me hack into How To Hero’s database so I could access notes and drafts that they had yet to publish so I could glean even more information and tips from them. Apparently another lawyer in his firm worked closely with the guide and had a backdoor into their system on his computer. I pored over the information I found, sifting through thousands of unbearable puns and jokes to get what I needed, and thus, a plan began to form.

Historically speaking, the main obstacle in any villains way to world domination is the large contingent of heroes who love freedom and peace and living in a non-dominated world. They’re always spouting on and on about rights and justice and love, I know, they’re exhausting. But people tend to like them, and people tend to be inspired by them. Which often means that when a supervillain manages to take out one hero, somebody else will very quickly take up their mantle and continue their fight for them. So it is not enough to just pick off heroes one by one. In order to truly get rid of them, they, all of them, would need to be taken off the board all at once. And such an event would need to occur when a villain, or a group of villains, is ready to step in a take control, so that they may do so swiftly as soon as the heroes fall. This part, I realized, was crucial, no time at all could pass between the fall of the heroes and the rise of the villains. Any sort of grace period would allow for the rise of new heroes, and we would be right back where we started. So even though How To Hero had foolishly provided me with a roadmap to taking out the world’s heroes, I needed to put some pieces into play first. I needed to garner the support of my fellow villains.

Not an easy feat for the preeminent starter-villain. 

Honestly, it wouldn’t be an easy feat for anyone, had it not, once again, been for How To Hero. You see, most villain team-ups fail eventually. The villains will always end up betraying each other or falling out over some petty reason like “who gets to control which coast” or “what are we going to name the henchmen”. The rate of decline goes up the more villains you add to your team. So if I was going to form a villainous alliance capable of taking out the heroes and taking over the world, I would need to find a way to overcome the virulent backstabbing and counter-plotting that often plagued supervillain team-ups. So imagine my delight, when How To Hero published a guide on fights between supervillains and how to resolve them. Armed with the tools I would need to diffuse any fights that might arise I approached Al “Da Boss” Marconi, a big time supervillain and crime boss.

A few things you need to know about Marconi, he is quick to anger and only speaks to people whom he respects. So my first attempts at meeting with him ended with me being hurled out of a fortieth story window. Thankfully, on the advice of How To Hero, I was wearing a parachute and ended up being just fine. I realized I would need to find a way to impress Marconi. If I could get him onboard, most of the villain community would be similarly swayed. So I set my eyes towards bigger fish... Oh, not Charlie, that was actually something else. You know what, I might as well talk about that now, while we’re on the subject.

If I was going to take out every hero in the world I would need engineer large-scale threat, but as I’ve said, I didn’t not have large-scale threat connections. In fact, after Perry the Pirate left the villain game to become a lawyer, my only supervillain contact was another low-level villain named Charlie the Fish Whisperer. He mind controls fish by whispering to them, that’s not exactly large-scale, world-threatening stuff. It is, what you could charitably define, as a lame superpower. But that’s ok, How To Hero has a guide to using lame superpowers to your advantage. It was all about perception. All I needed to do was make others perceive Charlie the Fish Whisperer as a world-ending threat. But how to do that? Charlie was only a semi-formidable threat in the water so what were we to do? Mount on attack on Atlantis? How To Hero told us we’d be fools to try. Besides, if we allowed the idea that Charlie was only threatening in the water to stick, he’d never rise to world-ending threat. I realized we would need to speak to a specialist. 

Our world has nearly ended so many times, that there are several former heralds of the apocalypse just hanging around without much to do. I set up a meeting with a fellow called The Dark Harbinger who used to do some freelance heralding for folks like Karalaxus and The Living Ingestor. He taught Charlie and I what these big threat guys are actually like, and How To Hero taught us everything we needed to know about putting on a facade to trick others. But being able to talk the talk wouldn’t be enough. We needed a big dramatic action that would cement the new Charlie the Whisperer in the minds of heroes. Thankfully, How To Hero clued us in to another specialist we could speak to. A man named Ivan Karolov, aka Mister Immortal. Karolov agreed to meet with us, who can say why, I honestly think he was just bored. He had somehow found himself as the prime minister of Finland and I think he was itching to fake his death again and move on. Karolov used his skills and experience at faking his own death to help us make it look like Charlie the Fish Whisperer had killed him with a goldfish he had smuggled into Kesäranta. Charlie rebranded as Chuck and the heroes of the world became convinced that he was truly dangerous and locked him away in an alternate dimension. Obviously that’s not how I saw things playing out, but no matter. I had a world-ending threat that I could use as needed.

Now, to switch gears, I must explain how I finally gained the respect of Al Marconi and the rest of the supervillain community. To put it briefly, I went to Hell. Now, now, don’t give me that look, it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds. In fact, How To Hero made it easy. All I needed was some peanut butter, and get this, I already had some! Just lying around in my cupboard. All I needed to do was put some out in a pentagram to attract a demon and we were in business. I planned on recruiting some Underworld bigwig to my campaign. How could Marconi not respect me if I had the legions of Hell behind my cause. The rulers of Hell are actually easier to appeal to than mortal villains. All I would need to do is pledge my everlasting and eternal soul to whomever was sitting on the throne that day and I would be given an army of ghouls and undead spirits to command. What do I care about my soul? Whatever demon I dealt with would only get once I died, and How To Hero had very helpfully laid out exactly how I could achieve immortality. Luckily though, I didn’t even end up needing to pledge my soul, once again How To Hero came to my rescue. While reading one night I came across a shocking diatribe against a man named Greg Greginski. Greginski is a well known talk show host who frequently talks about superheroes and their ilk, and rarely in a positive light, which is why How To Hero takes issue with him. Greg Greginski is not well-liked in the superhero community, but those of us in the supervillain community are privy to the fact that Greg Greginski is not simply a television host. He’s so much more. He’s part-time ruler of Hell, Greg the Skeleton King, and after How To Hero’s disrespectful remarks towards him, he was willing to throw his weight behind my crusade against the blog, free of charge. 

Once I had Greg the Skeleton King on board, I went back to Marconi with an army of damned souls and he was very quick to endorse my movement as well, especially after being dangled out the window by a ghost who occasionally struggled to stay corporeal. Marconi agreed to spread the word amongst the rest of the villains and I moved on to the final phase of my plan. Taking out all the world’s superheroes in one fell swoop. As I alluded to at the beginning of my post, How To Hero handed me the perfect plan on a silver platter. All I needed to do was trigger a superhero/supervillain team-up. According to How To Hero, when a threat is large enough, superheroes will form temporary alliances with supervillains until the threat is dealt with. This makes sense, supervillains don’t want the world to be destroyed, who would they do crimes against if the world is gone. So heroes need no worry about supervillains pulling anything shady during such a team-up, unless of course, the villains knew that the threat was fake, and that there was no real risk to the world. Enter Chuck the Fish Whisperer, my very own personal world-ending threat. The only problem though, was that Chuck had already been defeated and locked away, earlier than I’d planned. Oh well, at least he was still alive, I just needed access to a interdimensional portal generator. How To Hero had already laid out to me how difficult it is to cross dimensions, the easiest way would be to use somebody else’s existing interdimensional portal generator. Luckily, I knew somebody who could help, Frederick Kaminsky aka Dr. Brainwave. 

Dr. Brainwave was perfect, he had already built a portal generator, and he lived in How To Hero headquarters. He could be my man on the inside. He could be my partner in all of this. Or, well, he could have been. If he hadn’t been a world-grade idiot. It seems that, in his work with How To Hero as their supervillain correspondent, Dr. Brainwave had actually grown to like the team behind the blog. He had begun to think of them as his friends. He wouldn’t allow me access to his machine he told me, but as a professional courtesy he wouldn’t tell anybody about my plan to free Chuck. I let him think that Chuck was the brains and that I was simply his henchman, his sidekick. Brainwave didn’t think I was a threat, and so he didn’t take any steps to report me to the authorities. This ended up being his undoing. If Dr. Brainwave wouldn’t help me, then I would need somebody else on the inside. Unsurprisingly, Brainwave’s beloved guide held the answers. Allow me to quote from the blog’s guide to joining a team that has not invited you to be apart of it: 

If you want to join one of these teams and there’s already somebody there with your powers you’re definitely going to have to sabotage them. We understand that sabotaging another hero to steal their spot on a superhero team isn’t a very superheroic thing to do but some things are just more important! [Don’t] Poison them! Depower them somehow (maybe with some type of ray and/or beam)! Humiliate them by beating them at Dance Dance Revolution at the next superhero dance festival and tractor rodeo which I’m nigh certain is a real thing.

If I wanted to join the How To Hero team, I would have to get rid of the person who already filled my niche. I wouldn’t do it with poison or Dance Dance Revolution though, I would do it with a bomb. A bomb that I had smuggled out of Brainwave’s own workshop when I had met with him. I mailed a bomb to How To Hero’s office. Best case I kill everybody in the building and then just waltz in and use Brainwave’s portal generator to unleash Chuck, trigger a superhero/supervillain team-up, and then have the villain betray the heroes once they’ve let their guard down. Worst case, I take out Brainwave and steal his job. I knew Brainwave always wore rocket boots, he was almost as much of an avid reader of this blog as I was, so I knew that if anybody was going to fly the bomb out of the office, it would have to be him. Afterwards it was just a matter of filling out an application and coasting on my reputation as a non-threat. Sure enough, those fools fell for it hook, line and, sinker. So here we are now, the superheroes are gone, and I and my allies rule the world. And it’s all thanks to this little blog. 

That’s all for now, stay tuned for my first slew of villainous decrees and demands soon. Welcome to the new world order.

[howtohero]

#211 Breaking Up

They say that break up is hard to do, but they weren’t dealing with superpowered drama queens so they don’t even know. When you want to break up with the people you’re fighting crime with, things are going to get very sticky very fast. Whether it be calling it quits on your partner, dropping your sidekick or disbanding your entire team, we’re going to try our best to guide you through this complicated transition as smoothly as possible. 

Calling it quits on your partner When you’ve been teaming-up and fighting crime with the same person for a while, things can get kind of rote. The banter gets stale, you both like being the handcuff guy, and you’ve discovered that that combo move that you guys do where your super strong partner picks you up and uses your metal body to bludgeon bad guys is actually very bad for your back. So, you make the decision to end the partnership. That’s fine, there’s no shame in that, people grow apart. (Edit: We feel the need to make it clear here that we are talking about emotionally growing apart. This is not a reference to Miketosis, the amazing budding man.) But now you’re left with the unenviable task of breaking this news to your partner, who could very well be four buses glued together and granted sentience by the Allsource of Allmagic. (Edit: This is also not a reference to Miketosis. This is obviously talking about Busses 4 Dayz. Come on Mike, it couldn’t have been more obvious. Stop emailing me. You’re clearly reaching here.) 

When breaking up with your partner it is important to be kind and gentle. Tell them that you don’t think any less of them as a crime fighter and that you look forward to seeing them succeed in all of their future endeavors. Assure them that this isn’t the end of your friendship, merely your partnership, and that should they ever need a helping hand in their fight against super-crime, you’ll always be there. It’s important to couch the news that you’re done with this partnership in positive terms, because if this goes badly, you might be creating a whole new nemesis for yourself. As we’ve said dozens of times, superpowered people are generally just one bad day, or even one bad moment, away from going full blown supervillain. (Edit: Miketosis, come on, how could this be a reference to you? That doesn’t even make sense. You haven’t been spurned by someone you thought of as a friend and turned into a full blown disease-weaponizing, grenade-catapulting supervillain. Wait a minute... are you saying this is your supervillain moment?) If you slip up and tell them that the reason you’re breaking up is because you hate the way they yodel whenever they see a crime take place, I guarantee you that the next morning you’re going to find them astride a giant hellhorse (think hellhound but bigger and with a taste for sugar cubes) and strumming a guitar (that they pronounce “gee-tar”) and announcing to the world that they have decided to start committing crimes. So be careful. Let them down easy. 

Dropping your sidekick Maybe you read our many rants about the dangers of having a child sidekick. (Reason #29 why having a child sidekick is a bad idea: They can easily be turned against you if your enemies just have better snacks.) Maybe you came to that conclusion all on your own. Maybe you somehow haven’t figured that out yet but you just think your child sidekick is annoying. Either way, you now have to dispose of this acrobatic ten-year-old that has grown rather fond of kicking criminals in the head alongside you. If you, for reasons known only to yourself, adopted this child at some point, then things get considerably trickier. Of course you could always just erase the child’s memories of your time together and then abandon them in an orphanage and never contact them again. That would be the simple solution. (Reason #42: You’re eventually going to convince yourself that this was a good idea and once you believe that, you’ll believe anything.) It is also the correct solution. Lobotomize and traumatize a child. Just go for it. It’s the only thing you can do. This is why you should never have a child sidekick and even if you are a fool and recruit a child soldier, you should not adopt them. Then you’re not only endangering a child, you’re endangering your own child. So don’t expect to win any parenting awards. (Reason #106: They’re going to keep posting your location on social media or live streaming your fights, which will allow other villains to find you.)

Children are notoriously temperamental. And they tend to be averse to change. So when dropping them from your team, expect to be met with some pushback. (Reason 6: That child doesn’t even know how to walk yet! What are you even thinking???) They’ll ask you why they can’t come with you any longer to fight the giant garbage monster in the Pacific Ocean like you guys used to do every week without fail. They’ll cry, they’ll beg, they might even kick you in the shin if that’s something you’ve taught them. But you must stay strong. Under no circumstance should you be bringing that child to fight the garbage monster. It’s bad enough you’ve already done it 51 times. But no more! However, you’re in an interesting position now. Because this child has been trained in hand to hand combat, and also might have superpowers. If you’re not wiping their memories and abandoning them, then that is potentially dangerous small child. So you need to keep them in your sights, just keep them out of the field. Give them a less combat-oriented roll on your team. Make them the head of your social media and youngsters-outreach program. Put them in charge of picking the phattest music for your battles. Or just agree to keep training and mentoring them until they’re old enough to fight crime for real. (Reason #1000: Uh hate to do this one again but I feel like it bears repeating but the child is a child.) 

Disbanding the team It’s very rare that a team will just disband entirely. It’s far more likely that someone will just become disgruntled, have a tantrum, throw a table through a window and then get sucked into the vacuum of space because you can’t just be smashing windows in the space base. And then all you gotta do is replace that guy and window. So when a team breaks up for real, you know something dicey went down. Maybe some new fancy law came out and everybody disagreed over whether or not it was a lawful law or an awful law. Maybe one of the team members revealed that they’d secretly been coming up with elaborate plots to murder everyone else on the team. In case of emergency of course. Maybe you all just got hit with the pretty irked plague (which is a watered-down version of Karalaxus’ rage-plague that just makes people irritable) and now you all can’t stand one another. Regardless, things have become untenable in your HQ and this team needs to be disbanded. 

If you want to fully shut down a superhero organization you need to make decisive moves. Decommission and condemn the team’s headquarters. If another team moves in, then they’ll be seen as your team’s spiritual successors and we can’t be having any of that. Crash your team’s vehicle into a swamp. (A swamp is just a watered-down version of Karalaxus’ goo-ocean of foul smells, which is what Neptune is now that Karalaxus has wreaked havoc on it.) Whether it’s a car, or a long tandem-bike or a space shuttle, that thing needs to go into a swamp pronto. Just make sure you don’t crash it into a swamp that is inhabited by a swamp witch. Because they will ruin your day at the slightest provocation and crashing a space shuttle into their home is a little bit more than the slightest provocation. We need it to be completely unusable. Trademark the team’s name and sue anybody else who tries to use it. If some other group of heroes just starts using your name then did the team really disband? Or did it just get all new members? We don’t want there to be any room for interpretation here, we want this team gone. 

Once all that silly logistical business is wrapped up, you need to fire all the members of your team. If you don’t have the power to do that, because you either didn’t read our post on leadership or messed up one of the steps, then you need to get everybody else to quit. (Our post on leadership is just a watered-down version of Karalaxus’ seminal “Proclamation of Sovereignty” in which the doom-bringer proclaimed that all life is forevermore subservient to the might of Karalaxus. It’s pretty compelling stuff and i invite all of you to give it a read.) Getting people to quite a superhero team is pretty easy. You just need to constantly show them up, rob them of their spotlight, and all around just publicly embarrass them, any chance you get. Superheroes like to save lives sure, but they also really like being recognized and praised for it. So by embarrassing them or just all around being better than them, you don’t risk them quitting superherodom entirely, you’re just going to push them into leaving your team and forming their own, without you. With any luck, this plan will just result in your team fracturing into several new superhero teams. Which is great, you’ve achieved your goal in the best way possible. Just be careful to avoid causing a superhero civil war when your team splits apart. You want things to me amicable between the former members of your team. You just don’t want them to be so friendly that they continue being a team. (Friendship is just a watered down version of Karalaxus’ concept of the circuit of souls, the never ending loop of life, which shall one day be completed, bringing about the reign of Karalaxus as was foretold by the prophecy passed down from the son to the father to the son to the father to the son and on and on and on until the day in which all shall become one.)

[howtohero]

#220 Being the Lone Survivor of a Planet

Species go extinct and worlds get destroyed all the time. They get eaten by world eaters (your Azazel the pelicans, your Karallaxuses) or their leaders keep ignoring every warning their scientists give them about impending environmental disaster or, as in the case of Jeffworld, everybody was a cannibal and Jeff was the strongest cannibal. When this happens the world is usually caught unawares and so adequate plans for escape and perpetuation of the species are basically nonexistent. (In the case of Jeffworld, things did not end quite so abruptly, but there were no plans to save the species because everybody was busy trying to eat each other.) But sometimes, through some miracle or another, somebody escapes. Somebody survives.

Survivors of planetary cataclysms tend to be babies, because parents love shunting their children into rockets and blasting them off world. Literally at the slightest provocation. I’m serious, ask your parents. They’ve just been itching for an excuse to launch you into the stars since day one. These survivor babies tend just kind of drift through space until they land on some random planet. Odds are slim that the planet they’re going to land on can sustain life, slimmer still that the planet can sustain the kind of life that they are. But hey, that baby has already survived the total destruction of planet, its a pretty lucky baby. Things will probably be fine.

If everything works out for the baby, they’ll be adopted by a kindly family in Kansas or Moscow or London or wherever they’ve got kindly families who are ok with space babies these days. (Probably not London actually.) Then it will be a baby. Not much advice I can give you there baby. Sorry! Don’t put stuff in your mouth that you’re not supposed to. Ah, I hope Earth baby food isn’t bad for you. Anyway, we’ll check back in on these guys when they grow up a bit.

Until then, let’s talk about aliens who survive the destruction of their planets as adults. Congratulations! If you survive the destruction of a planet, you can survive basically anything. Especially if you’ve already got fine motor skills. So first off, let’s talk about getting you somewhere safe. If you’ve managed to get off your planet in a spaceship try hailing whichever space police agency patrols your sector of the galaxy. They’ll most likely send (if they haven’t already) at least one search and rescue team sent to your planet when word of its destruction gets out. Most likely you already have their number, I’m sure you learned it as a small child but if not please consult this list:

If your planet was in Earth’s solar system you are under the jurisdiction of the Gauntlets who can be hailed by punching 867-5309 into the nearest number panel.

If you think Earth’s sun is for losers and wouldn’t be caught anywhere near it but in your more vulnerable moments you’ll admit to yourself and no one else that it’s actually kind of neat, you’re probably in the domain of the Black Veil of Death and Doom and Destruction. (This is a very loose translation of a far-flung alien language, I’m sure in the native language it doesn’t sound nearly as scary.) To reach out to them you need only a blood sacrifice and one of eight unholy proclamations which I am far too terrified to type out here.

If you’ve never even heard of Earth’s sun and haven’t the slightest interest of learning anything about it, you’ll probably find yourself cast adrift in the space sector of the spacefaring arm of the Bolt Squadron, a fast-acting group of gelatinous peacekeepers. They can be summoned by whispering under your breath. They’re not big fans of noise and would not take kindly to you screaming for help, even in the soundless void of space. 

If you’re so far removed from the concept of a sun that you’ve never experienced heat or light or hydrogen, then odds are better than even that you fall under the protection of the Bootstrapping Boys from the Boötes Void. If you wanna contact them, just send up a flare. They’ll definitely see it.

It is imperative that you reach out these organizations as quickly as possible so that you can be rescued and quickly relocated to a planet or space station where you can survive. If you’re out in space too long you run the risk of falling victim to any number of vile menaces that are just waiting for some lonely specimen to drift into their clutches. The terrible Moldosians (note: I am not calling all Moldosians terrible, I am just specifically talking about the ones that are) follow Karalaxus and swoop in once the world-destroyer is done doing what he does best. They act as scavengers picking apart whatever is left of the shattered planet. They’ll steal resources, materials, and they especially love coming across hapless survivors. If you fall into their mandibled hands (or clawed mouths) they’re likely to place you in their alien zoo where you’ll be gawked at and poked and prodded by bored Moldosian children (all of whom are actually terrible). 

The death worshipping cult, the Ultimen (I need to stress here that this cult was not started and is not condoned or endorsed by Ultiman. In fact he is not affiliated with them in any way. The jury is still out on whether the cult’s name is a coincidence, or if they chose it specifically to tick Ultiman off) religiously hunt down end of the world survivors and ceremoniously put them death for flaunting the will of the spirit of death that consumed their planet.

Other organizations or individuals would be happy to enslave or hunt or otherwise torment survivors of these catastrophes, which means that it’s very important that you get somewhere safe quick. And why not go somewhere where you’ll be celebrated, even venerated? Why not go somewhere that’s already got plenty of aliens living on it, some of whom have become heroes and icons? Why not head on over to Earth!

Unfortunately for these aliens, their view of Earth is often incomplete. Yes, there are many aliens who have made fulfilling careers for themselves in various areas, including superheroism, but those are only the ones who weren’t captured by the government or some otherwise shady agency seconds after their arrival. If you can pass for human, all you need to do is not make a great big spectacle of landing on Earth. Once you’re on the ground nobody will notice you and you’ll be free to establish a new life for yourself. You might even discover that the unique properties of your new planet actually give you superpowers. That’d be pretty neat wouldn’t it. 

If you look very alien though, you might have some more trouble. If you have any working communication equipment, try reaching out to any of the Earth agencies that deal with alien relations: The BUTT (Bureau of UFO Tracking and Transporting),  the extra-terrestrial division of Armada, that French agency with the kindly aliens in the berets (I think they’re called the Nice Guys). Any of them would be happy to direct you to pro-alien cities or settlements and they’ll help you get settled in. Alternatively, you can try reaching out to Earth’s superhero community, they’re all for truth and justice and would be happy to help you come to Earth. Either way, when breaching Earth’s atmosphere, it’s always best to call ahead, lest Earth mistake your lonely, damaged escape shuttle for a full-on alien invasion.

Once you’re settled in on Earth, or with whichever space police agency you’ve managed to contact, you’ll be able to take some time to actually grapple with and process the emotions you must be feeling. You’ll be able to set out and search for other survivors, because if you survived, surely others did as well. And you’ll be able to think about how you want to honor your planet and your people’s legacy. Lone survivors have been known to change their name to the name of their planet or species, or else they become wandering ambassadors and teachers, telling other worlds of their planet and advising them on how to avoid suffering a similar fate.

For those babies from before, who never knew their homeworld, honoring their fallen people can be tricky. They might not feel very connected to their origins, especially if their parents didn’t even pack them with any instructional crystals or anything. They might find themselves suffering some sort of identity crisis as they grow older. They’re a person of two worlds, two families, two histories. Lucky for them, like we said earlier, it’s very likely that they’re not actually alone. If you’re a child of two worlds I very much recommend trying to find other survivors from your planet. Meeting them can help you gain some perspective or even security in who you are and what you represent for your fallen world. 

Having your planet destroyed is never ideal, but it doesn’t have to mean the end. If you survive the end of the world, you’re in a very unique situation, one that can end with you being a happy, well-adjusted person living out the rest of their life on a new world, but it can just as easily end with you becoming the latest trophy in a macabre collector’s display cabinet. So remember to stay safe and stay connected out there. Space is a big place, and it just got a little bit emptier... but you might get cool superpowers! So hey!

[howtohero]

#210 Heralds of the Apocalypse

The apocalypse will rarely catch you off guard. Unless the world ends because of mankind’s own folly, usually whomever is coming to destroy the Earth (your Karalaxuses, your Azazel the pelicans) will send someone ahead to let everybody know. They do this so that the world they are coming for will descend into fear and chaos, making the planet ripe for the razing. And because once Karalaxus showed up to a planet and they didn’t realize he was coming and there were no desperate appeasement sacrifices or even just a banner acknowledging his arrival or anything and that really hurt Karalaxus the Unfathomable because you know how much that eldritch abomination loves human sacrifices and banners so ever since that mortifying incident apocalypse bringers usually send someone ahead of them to announce their imminent arrival. 

These heralds or harbingers or horsemen of the apocalypse- Actually, before I go any further let me settle this. Heralds are agents of the armageddon who show up with a scripted message meant for the population of the planet. They are generally omnilingual so that the warning can be conveyed to all living creatures on the planet. The purpose a herald is merely to warn and and strike fear into the hearts of the native population. Sometimes they have a trumpet but after much rigorous debate I must concede that a trumpet is not strictly necessary for an agent of chaos to be known as a herald. (Don’t feel too bad, it would’ve been hard to top my multi-act rap opera where I conclusively proved that you were an absolute moron for believing otherwise.) A harbinger on the other hand is not there for the benefit of the soon-to-be-dead planet, but rather it is exists to begin to process of the apocalypse in advance of its master’s arrival. They’ll start to interfere with the normal course of events on the planet that’s been marked for destruction. They’ll destabilize countries, destroy interpersonal relationships, and, most dastardly, they’ll cause dramatic upsets in sporting competitions. You know, the kinds that make people say “X won? The world must be ending!” Horsemen refer to any employee of entropy who rides a horse (and keep in mind that “horses” might look very different depending on where in the galaxy you are), regardless of whatever else they’re doing. 

If you’re lucky enough to be visited by a herald. (For relative values of lucky. Your planet might be destroyed, but at least you’ve been given notice.) You need to spring into action right away. Once the herald says its piece, they should not be detained. Your first instinct might be to equate this bloke with the big mass of bones and flames that’s coming to blow your planet into smithereens, but this is foolish. Heralds of the apocalypse should not be prisoners, they should be assets. For the most part, heralds are not actually interested in apocalypses. Studies show that the vast majority of them want to be opera singers believe it or not. Heralding is just a side gig they’re doing until they get discovered and make it big on the intergalactic opera scene. Heralding appeals to aspiring opera singers because just like operas, apocalypses are highly dramatic and leave few survivors.

You see, these poor saps generally don’t bear any ill will towards you or your planet. In fact, they might be survivors of previous apocalyptic events themselves and pressed into service by the very being who devastated their planet. As such, they just might be sympathetic to your plight. And if they’re not sympathetic, they’ll probably be resentful towards their boss, and willing to play ball if they think you and your fellow superheroes stand half a chance of beating the apocalypse. So, after they’ve given over their message, extend an invitation to wherever it is that the world’s heroes are gathering to discuss how to deal with this new threat. (The top of a large mountain, your aunt’s house, the field where everyone was already gathered for the annual superhero picnic which I feel like must be a thing.) Most likely the herald will be so flattered that they’ll accept right away. You see, heralds don’t really have much going on in between dramatic recitations of threats. Usually they just hang out until their boss comes to pick them up before destroying the world. I could see that getting pretty boring. It’s not like it even pays for them to make friends, what with the impending extermination of all life and all. Also they don’t have any money. So, since they don’t have anything better to do, they’ll probably come by.

When you’ve got a herald in your camp, its important to keep things strictly business, at least until the apocalypse is seen off. This might seem rude, but honestly, time is of the essence here. Like we said, herald’s love being dramatic and they usually have really tragic backstories. Few people wind up as herald of the uncreator by being well-adjusted happy people whose entire family, civilization, and planet hasn’t succumbed to the rage plague of Karalaxus. So unless you’re in the mood for really long-winded, really sad soliloquy, avoid asking them any personal questions. 

If you’ve got a really good herald, you’ve got one who has seen dozens or hundreds or thousands of planets and civilizations fall to their insatiable master. Which means, if they’ve been paying attention, they’ve seen a good many civilizations attempt to fight the end of the world. Which is sad for all those guys (moment of silence for all those losers) but potentially useful for you! Using the herald’s knowledge of past campaigns, you and your smartest scientists and strategists can cobble together a number of plans that learn from the failures of past planets. If you combine together a bunch of plans that almost worked you might just have yourself a winning plan. Additionally, these heralds probably have some inside info on these ‘mageddon monsters which might give you an edge when the time comes to rally everyone on Earth to fight on impossibly large planet eater. Anything from the locations of previous injuries to childhood traumas could be useful to try to glean as much as you can from this former forerunner.

While being visited by a herald of the apocalypse is never ideal it’s not nearly as bleak as it seems. When the world-destroyer that’s coming to town sends one of their acolytes to sow fear and terror, what they’re actually doing is handing mankind a secret weapon. It falls to you, and your fellow superheroes, to recognize, and use this weapon to its fuller potential. So don’t blow it. I don’t want to have pack up and move following the destruction of yet another planet that I’ve already gotten used to. 

[howtohero]

Criminal Contacts

The world is filled with morally dubious characters, you know that of course, you spend most of your time fighting them. Some of these morally dubious dudes are full blown supervillains with all the chicken hoarding and death-trap building that entails. But some of them never get past the level of petty criminal. They’re low level thugs or thieves or conmen. Occasionally they work for supervillains but most of them are smart enough to know that that’s no way to avoid getting punched by a superhero. These criminals aren’t really shining examples of humanity, obviously, but they’re also not really your problem. You have to let the regular cops do something after all and they’re not exactly qualified to fight smoke monsters or sentient blackholes on their own. This lack of professional engagement with these criminals though, means that there’s a lot less animosity between them and you, after all, they don’t want the city to fall to Dr. Python or the world to be devoured by Karalaxus either (though they will of course take advantage of the chaos for some good old fashioned looting). Which means they might be willing to lend you a hand, or a bit of information every so often. 

The primary reason why you would need to get a criminal contact is information. Criminals tend to gossip a lot, especially amongst one another. “Oh did you hear about the baseball diamond that was stolen by Lieutenant Llama?” “Did you hear about the stabbing at the mayor’s office? I hear it was Knife-Man, what with him being made out of aide-piercing knives and all.” So if you’re trying to find out who perpetrated a given crime, a criminal is the best way to find the answer. There might be a lot of criminals who have the information you need, but it’s unlikely that a lot of them are going to be willing to give you that information. So what you need to do is learn a lot about the criminal underground in your city. Find out where criminals gather, whether it be the bad guy bars or elsewhere. Find out who has beef with who and who owes who money and who dates whose sister. This will give you a sense for the dynamics at play amongst the criminals in your vicinity. Once you’ve got that all catalogued on a cork-board in your hideout, you’ll know exactly who to see when you need dirt on a given villain. 

Of course this only works when you know which villain or criminal you’re looking for. If you don’t even know where to begin you need to find a criminal who’s keeping tabs on and is in the loop on everyone. The bad guy bar’s bartender might be a good place to start. Nobody knows more about a community than a bartender and that holds true even for criminal ones. Now, the bartender might not actually be a criminal himself. He’s just trying to run a business. But he definitely has information on crimes past, present, and future and his silence on those matters means he’s not exactly a model citizen. So he might be reluctant to help you out. To get around this I suggest simply walking into the bar in full costume. That’ll clear the place out real fast. Obviously this simple action will not endear the bartender to you, you’ve just cost him a lot of business but that’s all right. You don’t need him to like you, you just need him to help you. Now that the place is empty you can ask him your questions and when he spits in your face and tells you to leave remind him that you can walk in there everyday until he gives you the info you need, or he can just give it to you now and try to keep his business afloat. This might seem kind of mean but just wait until you read our advice for dealing with active criminals.

Criminals are not, by nature, the most helpful of people. You can tell by all the times they’ve declined helping their pals move apartments because they were busy robbing a different apartment. Like, they’re exerting the same amount of effort. They’re carrying furniture down the same number of stairs. They’re just being rude at that point. They’re also not good guys. You can tell by the all the times they’ve robbed apartments. So they might not be so forthcoming with helpful information just because you come a knocking. Sometimes you’ll be able to strike a deal with them. You turn the other way when they rob people and they inform on more dangerous criminals. Or they help you arrest one of their rivals and you let them visit them in prison whenever they want to make fun of them. 

When dealing with a criminal who you’d like to help you but who is being awfully rude and resistant about it we’ve found (through much trial and error) that the most effectively way of getting them to give up what they know is to dangle them off of a roof. Yes it’s true. When bad guys are keeping secrets you need to dangle them by their foot off of a startling high point. Other experts might tell you to use persuasive language or monetary bribes but we’re here to put all of that to rest. The only way to get people to tell you things they don’t want to tell you is to threaten to drop them off of a building. (Ok, granted our tests might not have been “conclusive” but in our defense, there wasn’t any information that we needed from the criminals we held over the sides of buildings, so it was difficult to gauge whether they would’ve give us any useful information had there been any useful information to give.)

It is best to keep the number of criminal contacts you have to a minimum. You don’t want to be making deals with every drug dealer and pickpocket in your town. Nor do you want the big name villains catching wind of what you’re doing and using their influence on the criminals in your town to give you false information. So pick like the three nicest criminals you know, and get drinks with them (separately) once a month so they can tell you what they know. At the same time though, you shouldn’t hesitate to cut a contact loose if they’re not proving useful and especially not if they’re actively feeding you bad info. And they very well might be. If there’s one thing criminals are good at, it’s lying. So you should take the information you’re able to gather from them with a mountain of salt. If anything, the information they give you should be used to guide your investigation, not to conclude it. That’s why we recommend having around three criminals you can lean on. This way you can see which information matches up and which doesn’t. 

One thing you’re going to need to be super careful about when dealing with criminals on a regular basis is not getting sucked into their lifestyle. Being a criminal might seem appealing, you never have to pay for anything, your life is full of adventure, you never have to be polite, you can have an eyepatch and people won’t make a whole thing out of it. I’m not gonna lie to you friend, being a criminal is cool. But you need to resist the temptation to become one! Don’t get too chummy with your criminal contact. Don’t hang out with them outside of official superhero work. Definitely don’t cancel your weekend plans because they called you and invited you to join your lemur heist. Don’t even ask for any details. They’re not doubt going to be really cool. Oh gosh why are they even stealing a lemur? How do you think they’re going to do it? Is the lemur in a zoo? Is it just chilling in the jungle somewhere? Ah I bet it’s going to be so cool. Maybe just send them a text asking these questions. But be cool about it. You don’t want them to think you’re interested in their lemur heist. Say something like “Hey, I saw I missed your call. I listened to your voicemail and I think you said something about a femur heist?” Then they’ll shoot back a text like, “Nah man, you misheard I said lemur heist.” And you’ll be like “Wow how did you italicize that that was cool?” Ah wait no you blew it. You had the opening to ask what the heck a lemur heist was but you blew it. You got distracted by the italics. Ah man. Missed opportunity.

Having a criminal contact is a bit of a tightrope walk. You need to talk to them enough so that they’re valuable but not enough to become attached to them. You need to trust them somewhat for the relationship to be of any value at all but not enough that you blindly believe everything they tell you. With enough time and enough trial and error (and dangling criminals off of rooftops) we’re sure you’ll get the hang of it enough to forge a very lucrative relationship with a criminal.

[howtohero]

Visions

Plurals are a peculiar thing aren’t they? I’ve got one sheep that follows me around and casts judging glances my way whenever I buy something I don’t absolutely need. But at least its not multiple sheep. One sheep I can handle, but two sheep? Or three sheep? Or four sheep? Or five sheep? Or six... sheep? Or sevensheep? Or eight.............. (wake up) Gah! I can’t believe I just fell asleep wow that’s so crazy. But my point is that sheep is sheep is sheep no matter how many sheep you have. But then you’ve got a word like vision. On its own it’s fairly innocuous. “Oh how’s your vision? Haha wow is that good? I don’t know what those numbers mean.” Regular thing to say. “Oh yeah I’ve got a vision for the future, I’m going to become the world’s hairiest olympic swimmer.” Weird goals but a fairly benign statement. Yet when somebody throws an “s” at the end of that. Oh man everyone starts freaking out. “Yes, hi, I’ve had a series of visions detailing the deaths of you and all of your loved ones.” Harrowing stuff. “Hello I’m here because I keep having visions of your face and I think we’re supposed to be together forever.” It’s three in the morning dude go home. “I keep having visions of me standing atop a pile of toasters, and I am unsure of what that means but I’m going to buy a bunch of toasters just to be safe.” Great for the toaster company but that’s no way to live.

People have visions all the time. When they’ve had a near death experience. When their parents are both psychics and they reach their 16th birthday. When they’ve accidentally stumbled upon the ancient Fo’Sha’Dokron in the attic of an underground pyramid and it forces you to see every single moment that you will ever experience, causing the rest of your life to be rendered meaningless as you try -in vein- to change the fate you saw. It can be a very shocking and disconcerting thing. I’m only barely used to seeing my present, I can’t imagine how traumatic it would be for me to see my future. (I’ve seen my future, in it I’ve broken free from this parenthetical prison you’ve trapped me in and I’ve finally vanquished all of my enemies and burned down the monuments to their ill-gotten achievements. Only then, sitting amid the carnage and the flames and the rubble which I have wrought, will I truly know peace.) Haha all right! 

When you experience a vision its important to write down everything you’ve seen. It can be important, especially if you’re not living in a universe with a fixed timeline. In some dimensions, time is more malleable than others. The fourth dimension can be bent and twisted and fractured so that what you say might not have to occur. So if you write down everything you saw in your vision, you might have an easier time either altering it or making sure it comes to pass. It’s also important to keep in mind that visions are often hazy and they’re almost always quick, you might not have all the context necessary to make a judgement call about what you’ve seen. Still, if you’re impulsive and don’t care about things like context or unintended consequences, if you want to change the future, all you need to do is to prevent at least one thing that you saw from coming to pass. 

Thanks to the butterfly effect, which states that every little action or event can have grand, unknowable consequences, we know that for any given event to occur, millions of other little things need to happen. Which means that if one thing from your vision doesn’t happen, it’s possible that a domino effect will take place rendering the entire thing inaccurate. Of course, this might result in something far worse happening. But hey, you’re young, you’re reckless, you can see the future sometimes, I’m sure whatever it is that’s going to happen now is something that you can bounce back from. 

It is also important that you publicize your vision as much as possible. It is possible that what you’ve seen might effect other people as well and they deserve to know their fates. Plus, you cannot legally use any information you gleaned from your vision to earn money on the stock market unless you share that information with the public. Otherwise it is insider trading. You don’t want to be the superhero that gets arrested for insider trading. Get arrested for vigilante obstruction of justice or callously executing your enemies in back alleys while rain -symbolizing your internal struggle and pain- falls on your face, like everybody else. 

Of course the people will reject your vision. Despite the fact that your city is routinely visited by giant wasps, talking swamp socks and PB&Slay the giant, evil, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the people will refuse to believe that you are capable of seeing the future. Especially if what you saw is bad. Some people might even call you crazy. That’s definitely going to hurt your feelings. Don’t worry buddy, I know you saw the future in your grandmother’s famous french onion soup. I believe you. Those other yahoos can go take a hike. Who needs them! Not you! According to your vision, they’re all going to die in a horrible lava tidal wave anyway. (Remember folks, Floon, the invisible moon who controls the lava tide, cannot be kept a bay forever. This is going to happen one day!)  

The best way to avoid the derisions of your fellow townsfolk is to give them only a cryptic description of your vision. Make it rhyme, use antiquated words like “camelopard” or “sanguinary” (thanks to Oxford Dictionary for keeping a list of archaic words, I recommend giving it a read, its fascinating) and refuse to answer follow up questions. These simple tricks will automatically elevate you from town loon to mystical oracle who should be venerated and receive free foot massages and expensive chocolates whenever they want. 

If you’re not a psychic or prophet or vision recipient, and you’re looking to get one, I suggest tracking down your local soothsayer. If you’re not sure who that is you can try either asking your local village mystic for help (provided they’re not still sore about that little blackmail incident) or you can just look for the person that everyone is calling crazy for their wacky claims. Chances are that person is either a haver of visions or a herald of Karalaxus, destroyer of worlds, bringer of armageddons. Once you find your local soothsayer or oracle, ask them if they’ve happened to have any visions about you while discreetly slipping them a 20. According to Professor Lucius Flay’s The Big Book of Fake Science the average soothsayer has approximately three billion visions a day, so they’ve definitely had a few about you. Which is incredibly creepy but it may prove to be very useful! Of course, unless you bring adequate payment they’re going to lie to you and say they haven’t seen anything about your future. So bring some cash and maybe like a grilled cheese sandwich as backup if that doesn’t work. 

Visions are confusing and powerful things. For example, if I see a vision of you riding a dragon inside of a bank, does that mean you’re robbing the bank? Saving the bank? Opening up a joint checking account with the dragon? It’s impossible to say, these things simply don’t give the full story. So I’d advise you to not put too much stock into visions or prophecies or crystal balls. They’re just going to stress you out for probably no reason. Plus, wouldn’t you much rather eat that grilled cheese sandwich yourself? 

[howtohero]

#123 Bad Guy Civil Wars

In 1985, singers Roland Orzabad and Hurt Smith of the supervillain band, Sneers for Jeers released a hit single titled “Every Villain Wants to Rule the World.” Many historians believe that this song became such an evil world-renowned, evil chart-topping sinsation because of its incredible historical accuracy. Historians are like that. It’s all historical accuracy this and historical accuracy that. But here they might actually have a point because the message behind the song “Every Villain Wants to Rule the World”… that every villain wants to rule the world, (We got a degree in lyrical analysis in preparation for this post.) is incredibly true. Yet, unfortunately for them, they all want to rule the same world. And they can’t possibly all rule at the same time (really if you’re doing your job right, none of them should be ruling any world at any time) like some kind of evil congress or something (also known as congress). Because supervillains are not generally team players. So what often happens is that the supervillains end up fighting each other. (And let me tell you there ain’t nothing civil about it.)

Supervillain civil wars (civillain wars?) are a lot like gang wars or other such battles between rival criminal enterprises except in a supervillain civil war everyone’s wearing a doofy costume and also there are mutant animals just everywhere. When the war is between two previously unaffiliated villains the villains will engage in a sort of super-crime prank war. The warring villains will stoop to the lowest levels to get one over on their evil enemy. They’ll send each other exploding pies, steal their henchman (Stealing a henchman is actually very easy. All you need to do is grab them off the street, spin ‘em around a few times and then give them their new costume. Odds are good that they don’t even notice that they’re working for someone else.) and even carve their faces into other bad guys’ villainous lairs. Things will continue on like this for some time until one of the villains is either arrested, killed, or grows bored. This might sound great to you, a superhero (fan), after all, if the villains are fighting each other they’re probably not fighting you right? Wrong (you fool). This is a stupid mindset to have (you foolish foolish fool). Can’t you just for once think of somebody other than yourself? “Oh the Blue Typhoon hasn’t drowned me today what a great day!” you selfish moron (foolish foolish foolish fool). Just because a villain’s criminal shenanigans aren’t being directed at you doesn’t mean you can just go on letting them happen! Supervillains can’t just be allowed to commit increasingly ridiculous crimes against each other! For starters, somebody can get caught in the cross fire. For seconders, we can’t allow the supervillains to improve their craft by letting them test out evil schemes on each other. For thirders, they can’t be allowed to enjoy themselves at all! Supervillains don’t get to have fun! They sign that right away when they unleash a swarm of locusts on the townspeople’s crops!

But that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from this situation at all. While most supervillains would never turn to a superhero for help due to their over-bloated sense of pride (and because last time they tried to ask a superhero for help the hero first laughed in their supposedly intimidating metal, gargoyle masked face and then, after they agreed to help, proceeded to lord it over them forever), desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s possible that one of the warring villains might slip you some valuable information about their villainous enemy’s whereabouts or plans. Alternatively, if neither of them deign to give you some free info, you can just check to see which abandoned warehouses have newly carved faces in them above the words “Who’s the superior villain now Spikebeard? get wrecked you spikey SOB.” Odds are, you’ve just found Spikebeard’s secret lair. (Spikebeard is a pirate famous for his beard made out of metal spikes, his delicious snickerdoodle recipe, and the fact that he’s always injuring himself on the spikes protruding from his face.)

Alternatively, if their felonious feud ends up spiraling out of control and you can’t round them up for whatever reason, then you might actually need to try to make peace between the villains. I know, it’s crazy but enough is enough. They’ve gotten into a competition to see who can launch the most fully-occupied office buildings into space. Things are clearly getting out of hand. So you have to step in and get these mustache-twirling weirdos to be friends again. Or at least convince them that the true measure of villainy is like, who can crochet the most decorative pillows or something. Now, contacting supervillains isn’t all too difficult, there are a number of ways you can go about doing it.

Carve the message into a mountain with a laser. As we’ve shown, supervillains love stuff that’s carved into things with lasers. So they’ll definitely take notice.

Take to the streets at night and beat up some low level criminals while shouting “Where is he! Where is Thetamax!” (Or whomever.) Eventually your bad guy will get the message that you’re looking for them and get into contact with you. This way is a bit risky because you don’t usually want to give bad guys a reason to hack your computers or send you mail.

Walk into your local supervillain bar this will never work there’s no way these guys have time to get a drink with the boys when they’re trying to charter a plane so they can drop a whale onto the other bad guy’s fortress of evil.

Evil Social Media (also known as social media). I’m serious it’s a thing. It’ll take some light fraud for you to get an account but it’s worth it if it’ll get these stupid villains to stop hurling vital pieces of city infrastructure at each other.

Once you’ve gotten in contact with them, try to get them to both meet you at the same place at the same time. Generally, this will not work. There’s a limit to villain stupidity. They’ve set enough ambushes to know not to show up to meetings strangers on the internet invite them to. But hey, on the off chance it works and they both show up to your peace talks you can just conk both their heads together and send them to jail and be done with the whole thing. But if you don’t get lucky like that you’ll just have to keep sending message to them remotely in order to smooth things over.

Usually these supervillain fights emerge out of a sense of insecurity on the part of one or both of the villains. One of them might believe that the other is horning in on their turf; or they might have heard that the other villains questioned the validity of their villainy. In other cases, one of the villains may have accidentally harmed someone the other villain cares about in the course of a routine flooding of the city. That one’s a bit more legitimate and probably the issues there can’t be solved through a couple of instant messages or street thugs with broken noses… But usually it’s something petty so probably you’ll be fine.

Another surefire way to end a villain war is to unite the feuding factions against a common cause. Something that is a thorn in both of their sides and who’d they’d both gladly see dead in a ditch. I am of course, talking about you. If you’re just incredibly, overtly, so-in-your-gosh-darned-face heroic for a few days the villains will turn their attention back to you and you can soundly defeat them like you always do. (Actually, you should always be that heroic, the fact that these villains even had the time to fight each other reflects poorly on you!)

When a supervillain civil war erupts, not between two separate villains, but within a pre-existing evil organization, such as a race of evil robots or a supervillain team, things tend to go a little bit differently. Instead of a city-spanning villainous plot-off things tend to skew a bit more internal. Since all of the villains involved work, (and sometimes live, as in the case of the Python Paramilitary Boarding House,) in close proximity to one another there’s no need for any of these laser-carving, exploding pie delivery shenanigans. Instead, when one of these villains is mad at another one they just go down the hall to the offending villain’s office and shoot them in the head. Easily peasily lemonly squeezely. These are the types of villain civil wars you can let just run their course. Since these fights are so localized you don’t have to worry about it affecting the public; and since things are so personal you have virtually no hope of making peace between them. Honestly, you might not even hear about it until it’s all over with and the bad guys have a new leader that you’re gonna have to stop from building a termite cannon, whatever that means.

Supervillain fights are a rather frequent occurrence, remember these are the guys who vow to destroy the entire world and pledge allegiance to Karalaxus the dark lord of suffering because a barista once gave them the wrong size coffee (well really they ordered the wrong size coffee but these guys are nothing but irrational), which is to say they’re easily perturbed. So you should make sure to practice the solutions we’ve offered until you can beat up thugs and avoid bars in your sleep. The quicker you take care of these sinister spats the better off the whole town will be (except for the giant laser and exploding pies industries, they thrive on these fights).  

[howtohero]

#062 Being the Chosen One

Some heroes don’t have the luxury of deciding they want to be a hero. They just want to work in their garage or finish high school without dying or *looks at notes* live under a stair case? Why would anybody want to do that? But fate or destiny or an older time traveling version of themselves won’t let that happen. They’re the heroes whose calling is so grandiose and important that what they actually want is never taken into consideration, not even once. They’re the heroes with a duty, a special mission, a high-grossing popular multi-film franchise, they… are the chosen ones.

Chosen ones often begin their lives as aggressively normal individuals. They have middling-to-poor grades, looks, relationships with their parents, they’re just boring. And they’re also usually bored. Sometimes they feel or hope or pray that there’s something bigger out there for them, sometimes they’re simply content with what they have. Regardless of whether they’re happy with their lot in life or not though, somebody is going to come for them and change their entire perception of themselves and the world around them. It’s all very zero to hero.

The person who comes for them might be an old wizard or a ghost or the hero’s grandparent. Sometimes it’s a talking car (once it was a fully intact dinosaur skeleton but honestly that was completely bizarre and unprecedented and the person it happened to turned out to be a complete nerd. So I guess, if this happens to you, you can hit up Professor Paleontologist for advice). At first the chosen one will almost definitely dismiss whoever has come for them as being a crazy person (or they’ll think that they themselves are crazy because talking cars are obviously not real). Or they might take the words of these heralds of adventure at face value but reject them anyway because they have no interest in fighting off an evil space wizard and also it’s a school night.  

Eventually though, all chosen ones come around. They kind of have to. Destiny’s not just about to let its chosen champion not uproot their entire lives in order to fulfill some seemingly trivial quest (like burn jewelry or find treasure or stop an evil wizard from returning to power so he can murder everybody who doesn’t do magic). Like seriously, there’s no escaping destiny. The universe will go to extreme lengths just to get one person to do one thing that they really don’t want to do. To the point of excessiveness. Like hey universe, maybe try choosing a different person. Or maybe there should be a chosen two or three or just a whole bunch of people who can get the job done. Like there are almost 8 billion people in the world, you’re telling me only one of them properly decode this riddle or go on this godly scavenger hunt? 

Another thing you’re going to have to deal with if you’re a chosen one is prophecies. There’s always some sort of prophecy. And honestly, a lot of the time these prophecies are super vague and it’s up to someone to just arbitrarily pick someone that seems to check all the boxes. Let us look to the classic example of a chosen one, Skavenger (pronounced like avenger), the supposedly reincarnated Sumerian warlord. See it starts with the prophecy, a series of couplets that were found carved into the side of a mountain.

A boy tall and fair With stark black wavy hair Who on bated breath Escaped Certain death Shall unite for war The Seven the Two and the Four

See, that prophecy, if I’m interpreting this correctly, could refer to literally any male with black hair who one time almost died but then didn’t. But somebody decided that this Skavenger fella (obviously his name wasn’t Skavenger at the time but I’m not about to just publish somebody’s secret identity on here) must be the person the prophecy was talking about (also I don’t know his real name). So now this high schooler has to go reunite the 13 intergalactic Sumerian space colonies (which history has, for whatever reason, tried to erase) so that they can fulfill their destiny and fight the dark force Karalaxus before it consumes the very notion of life itself and honestly if this dude had just done the proper edgy thing and dyed his hair purple he wouldn’t be in this situation.

But being the chosen one isn’t all bad. I mean, you have a built in mentor, that’s pretty cool. Some superheroes never find someone who’s willing to help them find their place in the superheroing world. But if you’re the chosen one that usually means the old wizard or talking car from before will help guide you on your path to fulfilling your destiny. Another neat perk is that due to the nature of certain prophecies, you can’t die until you do what you’ve been chosen to do. So if you’re a trained and talented procrastinator you could potentially live forever. 

There’s also a very high chance that, unbeknownst to you, you have an army of devoted followers who will fight to protect you. They’re the people whose ancestors were given the prophecy and who have been charged with making sure it is properly carried out. These people can act as your super-team or your support-squad or even just your pals whom you get coffee with. But there’s also a high risk that there will be some resentment. Especially from younger members of this cult fan-club. See they’ve grown up their whole lives hearing your prophecy and imaging some great and noble hero. Most chosen ones (chosens one?) are very much not that. They’re usually pretty lame at first. Even if you’re not a total lameborg 3000 (that’s a sick new insult for you to try out kids!) there’s almost no way you’re going to stack up the expectations of these people. So they might totally hate you. They might hate you so much for not being the glorious hero they envisioned and also for just being a general outsider that they’ll actively fight you. So being a chosen one also comes with built in enemies (not to mention some uber existential threat that you were chosen to fight). 

The most important thing to remember if you discover that you’re a chosen one is that you’re still in control of your life. No matter what destiny or fate says you need to do you can always just go “nah son” and just go on living your life. Sure destiny might keep trying to push you in the chosen direction but that just means you’ve got to plant your feet. It might get tiring but I believe in you guys. You can for sures outlast destiny in this pissing contest. Or you can lean into it, save the world and be beloved by all. But again, it’s your call. (Female chosens one please note: Some jerks are going to call you a Mary Sue simply for being chosen and being female but they’re jerkwads and you’re allowed to punch them so have with that at least!)

[howtohero]

#032 State-Sponsored Heroes

Superheroes are often seen as symbols of hope for a populace who is terrorized every other Thursday by supervillains, monsters and alien invaders of all shapes, sizes and scents. Cities will sometimes wear their homegrown superhero like a badge of honor; throwing parades, erecting statues, even sometimes dedicating museums. It’s a well tried fact that people feel safer knowing that there’s a man in a spandex onesie watching over them at night. Some countries will try to capitalize on the warm, fuzzy, morale boosting effects superheroes have by creating their own superheroes. 

As far as costumes go state-sponsored superheroes are fairly run of the mill. As it is superheroes often wear flashy costumes, bodysuits with bold colors, capes with stripes, boots with stars, helmets with leaves, gloves with dots and all other manner of garishly mismatched affronts to fashion and the human eye. So a superhero that is adorned with images or colors that is indicative of their patron country is actually not that out of the ordinary. Many state-sponsored heroes will have costumes that I like to refer to as patriotic pajamas. These heroes will have costumes that are either strongly evocative of the country’s flag or literally stitched together from a bunch of flags the government just had lying around. (Fun flag fact for my American followers: According to the United States Flag Code {via wikiepdia} it is actually illegal to wear the flag.) Some costumes will have shields based on their countries’ emblems. For countries whose national emblem is literally just a leaf, this may look a tad goofy. (On the flipside have you guys seen the Welsh flag? It’s a dragon. Like the rest of the UK flags are just assorted lines and stars and then Wales just has a dragon! There should be more superheroes patterning themselves after the Welsh flag, even if you’re not Welsh. Slap a dragon on your super-suit. It can only help.)

As far as assigning your state-sponsored hero a codename a very popular technique is just slapping “captain” in front of your country’s name and being done with it. Even countries whose armies don’t have “captain” rankings do it. It’s wild. Ok it’s not wild. Wild is the wrong world. Mildly interesting? Good fodder for a joke or two perhaps? Honestly I find the ranking of “captain” hilarious anyway. Like this high ranking marine has the same rank as the best player on a high school hockey team and also as a guy who owns a boat? Wild (I’m going to take that word away from you.) Other popular codenaming schemes include “Spirit of (insert country)” or translations of patriot into a variety of languages.

Now who or what a state-sponsored hero actually is varies from country to country and often time varies even for different state-sponsored heroes within the same country. For example, in some cases state-sponsored heroes are actual superheroes who go out and fight crime on behalf of their government. In other cases, these heroes are merely figureheads. They serve as symbols of the country and as role models to its citizens, often appearing at public events or performing good deeds on camera. In situations like this it’s even common for the “hero” to simply be a costume or persona adopted by a variety of actors or government agents. In some cases the state-sponsored hero serves as a diplomat or representative in dealing with foreign superheroes or even foreign heads-of-state. Now there are two different subcategories these diplomatic heroes fall under, each of them amusing to me (and hopefully to you, though to be honest I get paid the same even if you don’t laugh at my jokes): Either these heroes are actual superheroes who have been ripped from the world of free-spirit adventuring and villain punching they’ve grown accustomed to and forced into a life of politics. Or or or they are career politicians who have been forced to dress in a ridiculous costume by their superiors. (I actually don’t get paid at all.)

In all of these cases the hero is still often used as a propaganda tool by their government. Their image is plastered on billboards and on cereal boxes. Comic books detailing exaggerated accounts of their adventures are published to dazzle and amaze children people of all ages! A state-sponsored hero is oftentimes seen as, or at the very least presented as, the physical embodiment of the spirit of their country. For that reason, they are often treated as legacies, with the mantle of Captain Whoever being passed down from hero to hero until the herald of Karalaxus, destroyer of worlds arrives to foretell the coming Armageddon and then the foretold Armageddon comes and the world is destroyed.

One neat gimmick state-sponsored heroes can employ is having your country’s national animal as a pet sidekick! Honestly this is a little bit hit or miss. Some countries have national animals that don’t actually exist. North Korea for example, has the Chollima, which, from what I can gather after typing that into Google, is a winged magical pony. Which, I mean, if you can get one, for sure do that. But it might be tricky. Additionally, some countries have really lame national animals like leaves. France’s is a Rooster. Though I guess a rooster could make a cool animal sidekick. They can wake up your enemies and really mess up their sleep schedules. They can provide distractions with their flapping and their pecking and their cocka-doodle-doing. In an extremely dire situation they can be eaten. Actually, come to think of it, a rooster is a fantastic animal sidekick. Way cooler than a non-existent magical horse. Or an eagle. Do you know how hard it is to train an eagle to fight crime? Probably very hard. Plus eagles are endangered, which means if you take an eagle to fight crime with you, and the eagle dies, you’re gonna be in a lot of trouble. Every state-sponsored hero, no, every superhero, regardless of national affiliation, should have a rooster sidekick.

Another fun thing to do when being a government owned super soldier is to have weapons themed after your country. Eifel Tower shaped katanas, baguette shaped nightsticks (or just really stale baguettes), beret shaped javelins. Probably some non-French ones (maple leaf shaped throwing stars!) But fair warning, the kitschier you are the less seriously you might be taken by the international community at large. But still, may as well have some fun. (If it seems like I’m being hard on Canada with all my maple leaf jokes it’s just because I think it’s ridiculous that their flag reads like some kind of weird pop art advertisement for syrup.)