When I finally finish trudging back home, the first thing I do is step into the closet and take off my power suit. The machinery inside whines as the release sequence goes on, all of the pieces grinding against each other in a precarious balance between snapping all of my bones out of place and letting me out.

A single declaration of ‘release sequence complete’ returns my breath to me, the cool air from the AC brushing against my skin. In the absence of the floaty, suspended feeling that never leaves me in the suit, the real significance of the events today comes crashing into me.

I look at my arms, covered in little scratches and clotted wounds. My head feels foggy, my vision swimming in rhythm with the pulses of burning pain all over my back. When I reach my hand to prod around my spine, it feels like my fingers are leaving tiny trails of fire.

Stumbling to get my bearings, I plop down on my bed. Alright. Chemical burn, battery acid, that’s fine, that’s fine. Check the fingers. When I check my hands for any residue, I don’t see any, but I do see something much worse. My nails, the ones I’d just gotten manicured, are all chipped and peeled!

… it somehow seems wrong that I’m focusing on that of all things, but it still irks me anyway. Wait. Are my hands shaking? I take a second look, but they’re not shaky- just distorting, like rolling waves. On second thought, everything’s doing that.

The tears pour down my face without my permission, but I shake them out of my eyes and straighten up. I’m Megan Porter. I’m a genius, a supervillain, and I just held my own against a real-life superhero! I don’t need to cry, I’m stronger than that.

I know I should be attending to my wounds, but I can’t muster the strength to do anything but fall sideways onto my pillow and lie down. I look over the footage from the fight over and over while I lay there, trying to figure out what I did wrong.

But I just don’t know. My fighting is clearly sloppy, but how can I fix that? Lessons, maybe? That’d work, but I don’t have time for that. I keep freezing mid-fight, my decision-making is nonoptimal, everything is just- urgh!

And my boxbots, they were terrible, just terrible. I lost all of that hard work for nothing, zilch, not even a single piece of metal or a spool of wire. All fifteen of my boxbots, gone. My suit, wrecked. The mission was a failure. Objectively.

And yet… I could have won. If my boxbots were there, if they could defend me against being outnumbered. Someone to watch my back…

At that thought, something catches my eye. A hint of movement at the side of the bed, repetitive flashing peeking out on occasion. It’s dim, but the route pattern catches my eye. When I look down, I see it.

One of my boxbots, trying and failing to walk into a wall. It just keeps bouncing off, angry-face from the command I’d ordered it to do, still draining its battery to no avail. Yikes.

If I just squint, I can see the little label… yes! “Fourteen, come to me!” I whisper-shout excitedly, hopping off the bed and looking down at it. It clambers over to me, haphazardly waddling on its broken spider-legs. The frame is all busted up from repeated impacts, and the screen is cracked, but…

I still have something. It’s not all lost. I’ve got my power armor, my prototype solidifying-rubber wristcannon, and a single boxbot.

I just… need to make this one better than the others. Shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe this time, I’ll not try to code it from scratch? There’s got to be an example I can look at somewhere for this sort of thing… how do all those tech-villains get sentient computers, anyway?

I might be able to do it with a lot of work, but I doubt every joe schmoe is as well-endowed (mentally) as me. Cracking the key to artificial life isn’t exactly first-grade level science, after all.

With a bit of searching, I find out something I really should have figured out sooner. I mean, of course somebody sold robots.

‘Neurocomputation & Personality Emulation Core’, on sale for… oh my god, that’s a lot of money. Even for me. And you need government approval to buy one? Alright, scratch that plan. The Mechanism isn’t going to be buying her world-conquering AI off of the market, especially if you need government approval.

Alright. Programming it is. Genius time, Megan. My fingers immediately move into a flurry of keystrokes, my other hand firmly grasped around the mouse as I navigate through my computer and open up my environment.

Then, I just stare at the blank page without a clue where to start for what feels like hours. But after a long spell of rigorous thought, I realize something. If I can’t buy this ‘NPEC’, I can just borrow (steal) its code and then base mine off of it! And, of course, since I’m a supervillain, I don’t need to credit the government for anything! Sometimes I astound myself with my own intellect.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Since I have the know-how and the right search engine, finding illicit material is easy-peasy. And with no government tracking, all I have to worry about is downloading malware! Or malicious code, which in this case, could literally mean me getting shot at by my own creation. Or betrayed at a cinematic moment due to a newly-gained empathy module, which I have to admit, would be very climactic.

… when I look up ‘NPEC code decompiled’, it instantly comes up on the first page in a repository of ProgramLive.

The code is, expectedly, a garbled mess full of remnants of the software they used, tokens scattered throughout the lines like digital blemishes. Clearly an amateur’s work, but I can parse it.

It’s easy enough to get a sort-of maybe gist of what the different pieces are meant to do, but there’s so many chunks of code that I can barely get through a twentieth of the pages and pages of code before my alarm goes off. I throw my hands up in the air in frustration, going to turn off the stupid thing… but my mind catches up to me.

The only alarm I have is the one to wake me up for school at 7:00 AM, on the dot. And I’ve not slept a wink. And, adding onto that, I can barely keep myself awake trudging through classes normally. Crackerjacks, I’m so screwed…

I open my closet to fetch my school uniform, but when I grasp for where I always hang it, my hands come back empty. My eyes slide over to the power-armor, then look at the frumpy skirt and plain white shirt hanging off me, a little spin while I face the mirror revealing the dark splotch on the back where my battery had ruptured and spilled onto me.

Alright, play it cool. I can just wear a jacket. Mantodea might be a pretentious private school, but they can’t suspend me for wearing one. It’s not really that cold outside, I think, but what are they going to do- throw me into detention for being out-of-uniform?

…

As I learned in a couple of hours, they didn’t need to punish me for it. Although that's mostly because God himself already decided to scorn me for my villainous adventures. Between my aching limbs, fuzzy headspace, and the irritated skin stretched across my back, school is slightly more tortuous to sit through then normal.

“Mr. Chimehlo, could you come to my desk to show me your notebook, please?” a seemingly-pleasant voice calls out.

Mr. Beezly, the hoighty-toighty Ethics teacher, beams as he picks out students to ‘notebook check’. The reason why it’s a problem: he takes marks off if your notes aren’t up to his standards. I swear, the guy is like a snake. And, well, he looks like the little pot snake-charmers take theirs out of. Portly, almost gourd-like, with a reedy mustache and coarse, thin hair like the dingy coat of a wet dog.

His business-man smile doesn’t even dim as he shakes his head in disappointment, sending a teary-eyed boy back to his seat as he pleads for mercy. Jeez, and they call me a villain.

“Ms. Porter, you’re next.”

My pencil stills mid-drawing of me and Gladiator’s cinematic fight when he signs my death warrant. I don’t even bother fighting it, simply trudging to his desk and slamming down my doodle-filled notebook onto his desk.

He pries open the pages, scanning the doodles of Professor Terror and other villains intermixed with depictions of my exploits.

I wait there, stewing in the silence, waiting for my punishment to be dealt… and the bastard simply waves me off with a couple of ‘friendly’ words. “Excellent drawings, Ms. Porter! I hope that your Art teacher enjoys it as much as I do!”

I roll my eyes at his bullshit, swiping my treasure-trove of schematics and recordkeeping away from someone who clearly doesn’t appreciate them. I hold it tightly to my chest while I make my way over to my chair again, sitting down and preparing to barely tolerate another hour of his prattling.

Thankfully, I don’t have to, because I’m saved by someone’s nudging getting my attention. When I glance over, I see Ming’s bespectacled face turned to the side, winking at me before he goes back to paying ‘perfect attention’ to the teacher.

When I look back at my desk, there’s a small slip of paper peeking out from under my notebook. That’s Ming for you. Behind all the freckles and his mousy build is a razor-sharp wit and a deft hand from his years of pickpocketing and shoplifting.

Other people might call it ‘kleptomania’ to steal toothpicks from a grocery store, but I can’t help but respect him for it. He’s prime henchman material, once I actually get the reputation to have henchmen.

Cus’, you know, he’s not an idiot. Even though I’m awesome, it’s kind of a hard thing to sell your supervillain status when you’ve not even done a successful job.

When he glances back at me and notices I haven’t even touched the note, he flicks his eraser at my arm in annoyance. I flinch back and restrain a yelp when it touches a sore spot, making him freeze in place when he realizes he actually hurt me. I gesture that it’s fine as I pluck it out and read through it, my eyes scanning over the invitation with glee behind them.

‘Me and Ed R thinking of going out 2 Bar tmrw after School. U in or still chicken?’

Ah. That. See, Ming’s been calling me cowardly for weeks now, ever since I told him, truthfully, that I feared what intoxication could do to a mind with such potential for chicanery and shenanigans. And he wouldn't stop mocking me about it, even after so long. Normally, I wouldn't bend on this...

But after that utter failure… maybe a little pick-me-up could be useful. The more I toss the idea around in my head, the more tempting it becomes.

‘Alright. What time? I’ve got to be home before Eleven, optimally.’

‘Ok u square we’ll be back at least midnight just for u, meet us at Eds house’

‘Got it.’

With that, the stage is set. Luckily, this’ll be a breeze. After all, my stunning regular intellect is only shortly followed by my peerless social intelligence!

I sit there, tapping my pencil up and down while I wait for class to end. Okay, yeah, maybe I got a bit ahead of myself. There’s still, like, four classes in the day left.