There are an almost endless number of ways sentient creatures organize themselves to go about the business of living in groups of more than one. Civilization in its broadest sense demands that rules of some sort are put into place so that primary goal of existence, namely group survival, can be accomplished. And where there are rules, there are rule makers and rule enforcers.

That’s you, if you pay attention to my advice.

I’m not going to get into all the various ways you might organize your own Dominion, because there really is only one optimal way an Evil Overlord should go about it. Behold, the Evil Overlord’s organization chart:

[https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/4369/55OsTs.jpg]

Look, this shouldn’t need explaining. You manage the capable minions. They manage the war fodder (you can call them soldiers if you like, and probably should in public, but I’m being real here), the farmers, the merchants, and suchlike.

That’s it. It really is that simple.

Simple, however, doesn’t mean easy. Talent can be very difficult to find, first off, which means you have to do the job yourself until you can get someone on board who won’t make an utter shambles of whatever particular thing needs overseeing. Once you do get a position filled by someone (or some thing; I’m very big on equal opportunity and you should be as well), you’ll constantly have to be on guard against your minions getting ideas above their station. It’s a headache, but if you really want to achieve Utter Domination, there’s no way around it. You want to be lazy, I’m not sure what to tell you. Get born into some rich household?

~ * ~

When I woke up, it was to Modie’s eternally put-upon face. The half-orc, half-human son of the Dripping Bucket’s proprietors looked exactly as over life and its discontents as he always did.

“Wake up, humie. The doc is here.” He’d been kicking my bed frame for a while, I realized.

“Alright. Send him up.” I no longer had the ability to feel pain, but my body was wrecked from days of beatings and torture. Counting ribs, fingers and my left leg, I had at least eight broken or cracked bones that needed attending to. There was also considerable soft tissue damage. I just hoped nothing internal was severely or permanently buggered.

“Yeah, he’s not so good with stairs. Ma sent me to carry you down to him.” Modie said it like it was just the latest pointless, exhausting shit job he had to do in an endless parade of them, and he was losing the will to carry on.

I sat up, carefully, and stuck my arms out. “Onward, then, noble steed.”

Modie did his eye roll and hoisted me up on his back.

When we got down to the common room, I saw why stairs weren’t really an option for the healer. He was a centaur. The common room’s ceiling was a high one, for Mudhelm anyway, but not high enough for the doc. His human bit had to crouch, and his curly brown human hair still brushed the rafters (his horse hair was also brown, though not curly).

“Lay him on the long table,” said the centaur, whose name was Keepeach. He had a deep, rumbling voice. Modie complied, not especially gently. If I’d still been able to feel pain I probably would have complained.

The doc clopped a step closer. “Remove his clothes.”

“Ugh,” said Modie.

“I can tell you what’s broken,” I said.

“I wasn’t aware you had medical training,” he replied. “I’ll just be on my way, then, after you pay me for my appearance.”

“Fine, fine.” I started taking off my shirt. Or tried to. My left hand had some important fingers broken, which made it challenging. Eventually Modie sighed and pushed my hands away.

“You do care,” I told him.

“Only thing worse than doing this for you is watching you bumble-fuck your way through it,” he muttered. Anyway, he got me stripped and laid out flat on the table, which was sticky from last night’s ale, but nevermind.

Even I was a little shocked by all the damage my body had taken. It was… extensive. I was more bruises than anything else. Even Modie was impressed, and that was an emotion I would have bet gold he was incapable of.

“Shit,” he said. “You’re more purple than pasty.”

“Thanks. It was all the torture.”

“And yet somehow it’s still not an improvement.”

“Hold still if you please,” said Keepeach, and he began to poke and prod various places. When I didn’t react, he said “Have you taken the juice of the poppy?”

“No. I just can’t feel pain anymore.”

“What was the cause?”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“A demon burnt the ability out of me. You might have noticed him squatting over what’s left of the bastion.”

“That is an unusual curse,” was all Keepeach said to that.

“It saved my life.”

“Be that as it may, it means you will be at greater risk of relapses, injuries and reinjuries for the rest of your life. You must take great care with your physical self. I suggest you make it a habit to perform visual checks of your person several times a day.”

“You’re the doctor, doctor.”

He continued with his inspection, which included looking in uncomfortable places, like the backs of my eyelids. And my backside. Then he had me piss in a jug. Then he stuck a finger in the jug and tasted it, which, ew. Then he checked my mouth (not with the same hand, thank fuck). Then he thumped my chest and told me to breathe while he pressed an ear to my back. I had to stand on the table for that one, because of the height issue. Modie had to help me again. I was pretty certain he was going to die of being inconvenienced before the day was done.

Cata- uh, Grim strolled in just as he was finishing that up. She took one look at my naked form and flinched.

“No free show, Grim,” I said. “You want your jollies, show me some coin.”

“You look like absolute dogshit. Is there any part of you that isn’t mangled?”

“His toes,” the doctor supplied. “They’re filthy but otherwise fine.”

“How long is it gonna take for him to heal up?”

“Weeks.”

“I don’t have weeks to lounge around in bed,” I said, reaching for my clothes. Then I realized just how disgusting my clothes were, and turned to Modie.

“Could you bring me my pack? I think these have had it.”

Modie let out a sorely put-upon sigh and trudged back upstairs. He wasn’t quick about it.

The centaur crossed his arms. “If you go about your business as you are, you’ll make yourself a cripple at the very least, and more likely you’ll make yourself a corpse. Lack of pain does not equal lack of damage. You must heal. To heal, you must rest.”

“I don’t know if you noticed, doc, but Cat- uh, Grim there and I just executed a coup on the leadership of this town. That was the fun part. Now the real work begins, and it’s the kind of work I can’t do from a convalescent bed. So tell me what I can do to speed things up. Please.”

(It never hurts to throw in a please or a thank you, even when you aren’t really asking or thankful, and even when whoever you’re talking to has no choice but to comply. Just because you’re both evil and an overlord doesn’t mean you also have to be rude.)

Keepeach shrugged his shoulders. The human ones.

“Magic.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Two questions: do you have any and if so, how much will it cost me? Please keep in mind that I’m now in charge of this shithole, that I can shoot fire from my pinkie fingers, and that my best buddy is a demon who very recently ate quite a few armed men.”

He frowned. “I might have a potion tucked away. They are very rare.”

“Indubitably.”

“Two thousand imperial is a fair price. Gold, of course.”

“Excellent! Five hundred it is. I thank you for your expert care and look forward to your swift return with the potion.”

He glared at me. Then he left.

I turned my attention to my new henchman. Henchwoman. Henchperson. “You look like you’ve got something to say, Grim.”

“I do. But I’ll wait ‘til you’ve got some clothes on.”

“Don’t be prudish. You’ve seen it all before, when you knocked me out, stripped me naked and left me to die at the Divide.”

She snorted. “I’m not prudish. Or interested. It’s all the, uh, damage. It’s distracting.”

“Well since you are at least partially responsible for my current state, just soldier on. Modie has probably fainted from the burden of bringing me my pack. It could be a considerable time until he returns, and we don’t have all day.”

“Fine,” she said, pulling out a chair and taking a load off. “There’s unrest. People are getting antsy, those that haven’t run off for the hills. I’m doing what I can, but we need to let the town know what’s what, or there’ll be trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The kind where somebody else steps in to fill what they see as a void in leadership. Anyway, that’s what I came here to tell you, but it seems like you’ve reached a similar conclusion.”

Actually, I suspected Grim had come to tell me she was going to ‘take charge’ of things in a ‘temporary’ fashion while I recuperated, but changed her tune when she saw that I was going to be up and about much sooner than she’d anticipated. But whatever. I knew she was ambitious. If she wasn’t, she’d be no use to me. I just nodded pleasantly.

“How many men have you got?” I asked her.

“About forty. Maybe a quarter of them are what you’d call solid.”

“What are you paying them?”

“Not enough. I let them loot a little last night, just to keep them satisfied for now, but the militia got paid directly from Dilit, and you know he didn’t leave a single bent copper behind when he fucked off.”

“No, he wouldn’t, would he?” I didn’t know him personally, but I knew goblins. Boy, did I know goblins. “The other councilors had to have some coin, though. Seize their property. We need a proclamation to make it look civilized and such. Can you write?”

“Not in a way that would make it look ‘civilized and such.’”

“Fine, I’ll do it. I doubt many of Mudhelm’s citizens can read, but the illiterate seem to get impressed by official-looking documents, I’ve found. I’ll need paper. And ink. And a pen. Dead gods, there’s a ton of work to do actually, but we need to start with something very public, so the good citizens of Mudhelm know exactly who’s in charge, and what will happen if they disagree. Or forget.”

“The stick is fine,” Grim said, her brow furrowed, “but don’t forget the carrot.”

“You’re right. We’re already going to seize – what was his name? Orson? – we’re already going to seize his property, which if I’m not mistaken included the brewery. We’ll give the masses some of whatever’s ready to drink, to celebrate their new government.”

Modie finally returned with my pack, then, and a few minutes later, Keepeach came back cradling a potion. I mean, I know he had double the number of Modie’s legs, but honestly.

I paid the centaur a hundred gold, which essentially wiped out everything I had earned during my goblin killing days. He frowned.

“It’s a down payment. I’m sure you’re fine with that,” I told him.

“I’m not, actually.”

“Lamentable,” I said, calling fire into the palm of my hand.

“Fine. But I expect interest.”

“Expectations are fine things.” I unstoppered the potion bottle and drank.

It was absolutely vile. Worse than the harsh Modie had served me my first night in town. For a moment I was certain that Keepeach had decided to poison me. But then I felt all the broken bones start to shiver and twitch around inside me (it was not a pleasant sensation) and various holes in my meat started to seal themselves up. Even the purple bits that showed outside my clothes faded, leaving me pasty and whole.

“Dead gods,” I whispered. “Where did you get this?”

“Swamp witch,” Keepeach replied. “She owed me a favor.”

“Does she live in the Debatable Lands?”

“She does.”

“I’m going to hire her if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Trying might end up being the last thing you do. She hates people, especially humans. Except as food.”

“Well I’m putting it on the to-do list, anyway. That stuff is…” I couldn’t think of an adequate word.

“Yes. Yes, it is,” replied Keepeach. “Which is why I will be insistent about repayment, fire magic or no. The favor I did her was not small.”