Prompt: You are a villain, but even after decades of wreaking death and destruction on the land, after killing hundreds of thousands and almost destroying the world on more than one occasion, nobody is intimidated by you or even takes you seriously.

Submitted to r/WritingPrompts by u/Kitty_Fuchs

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My name is variola.

I was the greatest of villains.

I was immortal, living forever, and born more than 3500 years ago.

My hands would reach out and ensnare people.

those I touched, affected by my power would be torn apart from the inside, as if being boiled alive.

they would slowly heat up over a few weeks. The food they ate would be lost, as their guts try to escape their own bodies. blisters would form all over their skin, and there lungs filled with fluid, As they slowly died.

While my power would not kill all, one out of every 3 people, especially those who were young, would die. those who survived, even if unaffected by my touch anymore, would be left riddled with scars and sometimes blind.

It was glorious. Mothers, fathers, the young and the old, men, women, all watching those they love slowly suffer and die, being unable to do anything to help them, but desperately beg for my mercy.

but then one day they found my brother, his power much weaker than my own, much less capable of harming them.

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yet his power was similar enough to mine, once my brother had failed to wreak havoc on them, I could not touch them with my power.

they declared a silly war, desperately to stop me. Sure they could try, but there was not much they could do.

over the last hundred years alone i had killed 500 million people.

Until they decided that enough was enough, the entire World worked together to find every place I had touched, sending men in white suits of armor to strike my hands down and seal them with metal spears infused with my brother's power. Until eventually my hands would wither away into nothingness.

Over and over again they chased me, waited for my hands to appear just so they could snuff them out one by one.

no matter where my hands reached, no matter how many I touched, they arrived, by bloated beasts of wood on water, metallic Birds to soar through the air, even by there own feet, they refused to give up the hunt.

Ever so slowly my power weigned, until eventually they made a toast for my power was no more.

even so they do me a dishonor, for my grave is not carved in stone, but in footnotes in books and webpages. and but a single word denotes my death, a simple "was".

"Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by variola virus (often called smallpox virus), which belongs to the genus Orthopoxvirus. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (WHO) certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980, making smallpox the only human disease to have been eradicated to date." (Wikipedia)

[note: though the story is a little prettied up and dramatized, the stats in it are real. The most common form of smallpox had a 30% lethality rate, it caused fever, vomiting, fluid in the lungs, and blisters that would later scab over and fall off leaving scars. It is estimated to have killed 500 million people over the past hundred 100 years before it was eradicated. The vaccine used to prevent smallpox was created using a related virus called cowpox, that spread among cows, but could not harm humans that much, but it was similar enough to train people's immune systems to fight off smallpox. There was a world wide initiative to hunt down and treat every outbreak of smallpox.]