How long it has been since I've been in a band of warrior maidens, ten, fifteen years now? Can that be right? We were sort of a barbarian Amazon valkyrie sisterhood, not so much obsessed with the looting as with the crazy raising of heck, and folks from all around will tell you that nobody else but our merry band of broads could be such perfect pains in the rear, certainly not the sorry cut-rate excuses for guy barbarians that were around back then. Back then we thought we former warrior girls would eventually and gracefully slide from being warrior women of a certain age to warrior matrons, later on (much later on) setting out on our way to becoming honored warrior crones. Good times, while they lasted, because wouldn't you know it that by and by we all kind of started to drift apart, disappearing for longer and longer times and getting more and more ragged a turnout, till we all ended up as housewives more or less, not warrior housewives really but regular ones who would hang up the old rusty spears in the backs of our closets and forget about squeezing into the tight leather jerkins any more hardly. The old guy has no idea.

I hear tell that there still are pockets of warrior maidens out there, not much around these parts though. I do have to admit to a shadow of a trace of envy of these gals, wild and free and armed, able to fight all day and carouse all night and not come back the next morning to keep house for some ungrateful wretch of a guy, happy to cleave heads when annoyed. Oh well, at least I don't have to put up witt those old tired rumors of how we were just a rogue knife-loving sorority of what they now refer to as "W4W."

Capella

Sometimes when one considers the vast population of a planet, one bewails how many one would have to get to to kill them all. Yet, by way of consolation there are lots of former planet-mates of ours who are already dead and which the enterprising villain might yet be able to goad into service. And, in a strange twist, those legions of spectres marching behind their banners will have reason to regard them as a liberator instead of the vile oppressor that everyone else thinks of. Is it any wonder that so many evil geniuses are fond of bands of undead?

Some are born undead, some achieve undeath, and some have undeath thrust upon them. It is the latter that we consider here: those who were bereft of life, perhaps with a vital secret, a unique talent, or a tremendous reputation that they took with them, but now suddenly called back from the brink of eternity to concern themselves with mundane affairs. It is quite poetic, in a way. Instead of embodying a second act it is more like a sequel to a drama which ended in tragedy for the player (for everyone is the protagonist of their own personal stage play), with new sets and new characters, a new sinister tone perhaps, but the same old backstory which propels the story onward along the lines of a new plot.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

Like many other supervillains, I have dabbled in the subject of beings incorporeal and unimaginably powerful, but it has never been a central driving force in my career, being reasonably well attached to the notion of personal physical existence. I do recognize however this to be an important field of study not to be overlooked by any serious student of the malificent art, hampered by a scarcity of authoritative source litereature on the phenomenon. Since we here at evilHow seek to be an encyclopedic reference to all things evil, it seemed to be only fair to address the subject of How to roll with a gang of energy beings in our no-nonsense, head-on, warts-and-all style, not so much as an endorsement of that mode of existence as a field guide to those who have to worry about staying out of the crossfire.

There are as many kinds of bad actors who have dropped off of the meat and potatoes plane of conventional matter and energy as there are ways to trick out a spiral arm, and it is usually the case that you can see them coming from a long way off, if you have instruments sensitive to the frequencies they hang out on. As the old song goes, there's nowhere to run and no place to hide, save in plain sight, using the Arctic hare's tactic of keeping still and blending into the surroundings as much as possible. The kind of tension and dread this engenders is not much to the taste of born troublemakers such as ourselves, and some will take the opportunity to transubstantiate into the higher realm themselves and introduce themselves to their superiors with all the bravado and moxie they possess. Nine times out of ten or ninety-nine times out of a hundred this does not turn out well for the newbie, but that one who cracks the code makes it through to what amounts to a cross between Godhead and Mafia membership, a sweet state of things all would agree.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

Wine is the result of something sweet and childlike (grape juice) allowed to go bad, making it the perfect drink for a dirty rotten villain, an idea which many in my experience have already discovered for themselves, judging from the number of such seen turning purple and fermenting on the floor of a late-night/early-morning bacchanal and snoring like one of the Elder Gods themselves. Some of them, while awake, did like to go on and on about the fine points of this sort and the shortcomings of that sort in a way that kind of bludgeoned their listeners around the head and ears, which I think was the main point of it, since it never ever seemed to enter in to whether they would drink any old thing that was nearby to get good and blotto when the talking was through. That was okay — sometimes we could roll them for a few bucks afterwards which usually would make up for all the yammering.

The good thing about the stuff is that when it is new you can drink it, when it's not so new you can cook with it, when it's got some serious age on it you can give it to your henchmen to drink, and when it is no longer recognizable as wine you can still use it to degrease the cyborgs (impressing them in the process, the poor deluded shmoes). There's white which is yellow, and there's red which is kind of a bloody purply color, and there's a greenish-blue color that they seem to like out in the Sirius system or whatever it is, and they'll all get you sloppily drunk. And when you are all done with the consuming of the stuff, the bottles are handy as weapons and you can occasionally put someone's eye out with a cork, which is more than you can say about most items in the pantry.

Capella

Mission secrecy is important when you are working out the details of an operation, but many supervillains take this tight-lipped attitude too far so that the average victim in the street has no real idea what they are all about or why they should fear him or her. The most direct way to combat this is to write a manifesto where you will set out in a more-or-less cogent fashion the ideas which drive your actions, a description of your present and future capabilities, a list of those who are most deserving to be your enemies, and various calls to actions directed toward your adversaries, your minions, and your soon-to-be victims.

I have met a few collectors of villainous manifestos, including one fellow who claimed to have one from an alternate timestream from ours in which the destruction of the library at Alexandria had been averted by some guy, leading to all sorts of entertaining and devilish consequences. If anyone's interested I can try to look the individual up some time and get more details. There's a whole elaborate system of grading museum-grade specimens according to considerations of rarity, historical value, provenance, annotations, artistic and literary expression, and depth of depravity.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)