Short Story Contest Winner: Wannabe Villain, by Winston Crutchfield

Every villain has to start somewhere. Even at the fryer station.

Nevin Dobbins is destined for greatness. Just ask him. He’s a fast-food fry cook, an engineering prodigy, and a man certain that history will remember him as something far more sinister than “the guy who fixes the milkshake machine.” He doesn’t just want recognition—he wants infamy.

But in Freedom City, where superpowered heroes hog the spotlight and even villains get their own movie deals, the climb to notoriety is slippery. Every brilliant scheme Nevin crafts to introduce the world to his alter ego, The Dread Architect, is somehow hijacked by coincidence, bad luck, or—worst of all—his annoyingly perfect coworker Troy, who steals the limelight without even trying.

Armed with gadgets, ambition, and a flair for the dramatic, Nevin refuses to give up. Yet if the world never fears his genius, will he fade into obscurity forever? Wannabe Villain is a laugh-out-loud superhero comedy set in the same world as Lucas Flint’s Fake Superhero series, proving that sometimes the hardest thing about being a villain is just getting noticed.

Read the winning story of the Lucas Flint Short Story Contest 2025 and discover the funniest villain you’ll ever root for!

1

I rebuilt the milkshake machine with a phone charger, a rubber band, and the broken dignity of three coworkers who’d tried and failed before me.

“Hey, uh, Devon—you’re not supposed to mess with that,” said my manager, Mandy, without looking up from her phone.

“It’s Nevin,” I replied, brushing chocolate syrup off my fingers. “Nevin Dobbins. And I didn’t mess with it. I fixed it. There was a coolant bypass jammed with a stir straw and about two pounds of synthetic guilt.”

She blinked once, nodded vaguely, and shouted, “Milkshake machine’s working again, folks!”

I stood there, waiting. Nothing. No ‘thank you,’ no acknowledgement. Not even a head nod.

The crowd returned to eating their chemically perfect cheeseburgers, and I returned to my domain: The fryer station.

I will not always toil in anonymity. Napoleon suffered the slings and arrows of school bullies as a child prodigy. The death of his father forced him to complete his education early and support his family. He was forced to flee his Corsican home by political persecution. Napoleon Bonaparte rose above his trials to become Emperor of France and author of the Napoleonic Code, which still undergirds modern law.

Napoleon believed in destiny.

As do I.

Mandy, still looking at her phone, called out, “Hey, Kevin? Someone fixed the milkshake machine. Mrs. Finklestein’s waiting for her regular chocolate-vanilla swirl.”

I emptied a bag of onion rings into the basket and hung it in the prep area while I poured the dessert. Mrs. Finklestein, the sole occupant of a family-sized six-top booth, watched me suspiciously from the middle of the dining area. I carefully placed the milkshake on a napkin in the exact center of a serving tray and laid a straw to the left of the napkin—vertically, not horizontally.

I carried the dessert to Mrs. Finklestein’s booth and set the tray in front of her. “Thank you for coming to Burger Blitz. Enjoy your meal.”

Mrs. Finklestein eyed me with undisguised criticism. “The straw should be placed to the right of the drink container, Bobbins, not the left.”

I rotated the tray 180 degrees and silently returned to the boiling mixture of beef tallow, vegetable oil, and exogenous despair.

For two years, I’d worked at Burger Blitz, the third most popular fast-food chain in Freedom City, Oklahoma. Not because I liked food service—my greatest achievement here was programming the fryer’s safety sensor so it wouldn’t scream every time someone made curly fries—but because I needed tuition money. Graduating high school at sixteen, finishing my first engineering degree by twenty—none of that mattered when rent was due and textbooks cost more than my soul.

All I had to do was make it through school. I could build a harmonic stabilizer with a paper clip, staple remover, and a healthy dose of petty resentment, but I couldn’t get an engineering firm to take me seriously without the signature of some eminent body of divines. And so … Burger Blitz.

I viewed the experience as a minimum-wage substitute for the traumatic backstory that was missing from my childhood development. In a world where heroes enjoy the backing of public service retirement plans and villains sign life-rights for movie adaptations of their escapades, a suitably tragic origin story is seen as essential motivation. I was resigned to simply being overlooked for my entire life. Honestly, when I debuted as a villain, civilian anonymity would be an asset.

Still, some small recognition would have been nice. It was nice to know that I was due a promotion to junior assistant shift lead, with all of the prestige and privilege that responsibility entailed. Until Troy showed up, I had really been looking forward to advancing my position.

He walked in like he belonged here, like the polyester visor completed him. His name tag still said “TRAINING,” but by lunch rush, he’d somehow charmed his way into running the register.

“Oh man,” he said, flashing his infuriatingly sincere smile at the drive-thru screen. “Welcome to Burger Blitz, where the burgers come faster than your paycheck disappears!”

Mandy laughed. I nearly dropped the basket of onion rings. Troy grinned as though he’d just won the lottery. I watched him—this golden retriever in khakis—high-five a customer through the window and make exact change without looking.

Within four days, Troy got the shift lead title. My title. And as a cherry on this steaming sundae of betrayal, a glitch in the payroll software reset my employee status. Mandy handed me my new pay stub with a pat on the back and a cheerful, “Fresh start, huh, Neil? You’re going to like it here. We’re like family.”

My eye twitched so hard I may have burned a hole in reality.

At first, I thought it was a system error. I filed a formal complaint, then another, then a strongly worded email with inline diagrams, a flowchart, and a scanned copy of my original onboarding paperwork. The response was blissfully swift. “We appreciate your passion for process, Mr. Dobkins. Welcome to your new career at Burger Blitz!”

Resigned, I wrote off the extra $0.35 per hour differential for seniority and the questionable prestige of the junior assistant shift lead position and returned to my fryer. The food service industry was only a greasy pit stop for my star, which was certainly rising to the recognition I was due.

At the milkshake machine—I had made a habit of fixing it at the beginning of every shift—Troy poured a perfect chocolate-vanilla swirl and passed it to Mrs. Finklestein, sloppily positioned on a serving tray with no napkin and the straw hanging over the edge of the tray. I smiled to myself and watched from the corner of my eye with anticipated malice aforethought.

Troy made an offhand comment I didn’t catch and presented the whole arrangement with a casual flip of his hand. Mrs. Finklestein smiled in return and cooed over the “artful presentation” of his desserts. Light of step, she popped her straw into the milkshake and floated to a window table for two.

In the fryer, my forgotten cheesesticks exploded. Heavy, yellowish-brown smoke mushroomed up from the pit and rolled around the vent hood, pouring into the greater kitchen area. The smoke alarm screeched a futile screech and warbled into choked silence.

I lifted the basket of ruined snacks. I could feel the pressure on my back of righteous social judgment, the multivarious gazes of every single employee and customer alike bored into the scraps of my competency.

Mandy appeared at my side. “If you need help at the fryer station, Liam, just ask for it.” She took the basket of charred panko breading and curdled pride. “The timing on these can be tricky. We’ll just have Troy finish training you in.” She beckoned him over and handed him the basket of shame and grease.

Troy accepted it with a smile born from the glow of a thousand warming lamps. “Accidents happen, dude. You just turn that bummer into a winner!” He dropped the scorched remains of mozzarella and 17 secret herbs and spices onto the prep table, chopped the single mass into cubes with the Saf-T-Omato cutter and scooped them into fry boxes. He turned to the dining room, “Who wants to try our new Cubic Cheese? Limited edition test market!”

That’s when I realized that Troy would make an ideal test subject.

I did what any rational, emotionally stable, definitely-not-simmering genius would do. I started surveilling him; not obsessively—I’m not a stalker. I simply kept a detailed, timestamped log of every interaction, quote, and bizarre coincidence. Now, I just needed to perform a little scientific experiment.

Troy was at the register the night two hulking professional wrestlers in full spandex stormed through the doors and turned the dining room into an impromptu arena. It wasn’t an accident, and Troy wasn’t supposed to get involved in bumps—I booked them; I’m not a rube.

The masked luchador leapt onto a booth bench, pointing dramatically at the other, while his opponent—a bodybuilder who carried a railroad tie as a prop—ripped off his warm-up jacket and began cutting a promo at full volume about betrayal, destiny, and steel cages. The customers froze mid-bite, phones whipped out, fries dangling in the air.

As the two combatants liberally splashed the service counter with sweat and condiments, Troy casually filled their increasingly aggressive orders for food at 200 beats per minute, coolly swept the countertop clear for a powerbomb, and calmly passed over a wet-floor sign for the heel to deliver his finishing move. With his every move I watched probability curve toward him like an affectionate cat; not so much as a ketchup glob landed on his apron.

By the time the wrestlers power-walked out, Troy somehow had a line of customers thanking him for making the night unforgettable, while he smiled dazedly and returned with inane comments.

I got stuck cleaning up the shattered napkin dispenser and ruined condiment station, but it was a small price to pay. The results were conclusive. My plans were perfect. Every moving part fitted together with Machiavellian precision.

Troy would make a perfect witness to my debut as the new villainous power of Freedom City.

***

That night, I returned to my apartment—a third-story walk-up, barely held together by duct tape and simmering acrimony. My loft was a shrine to calculation: blueprints; circuit boards; notebooks filled with contingency trees and mechanical designs. My library told the life stories of the movers and shakers of history: Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Mao Zedong.

Next to the library shelves stood a large, rotating corkboard, one side of which charted my destiny. I rotated it to the other side, which I’d covered in a timeline of key events—no red string, I’m not a lunatic—and pinned up my first official plan:

Operation: BURGER BLITZKRIEG.

Goal: Prove to the world that I, Nevin Dobbins, am not just some background character in this overlit drama of corporate mediocrity. I am…

No. We are not using our civilian name for this.

My board contained a number of cover identities I had been workshopping, all designed to show off my unmatched planning and design ability. Captain Contraption. Blueprint. Circuit Breaker. In-Genius. The Iron Draftsman.

My whole future unfolded before me with the precision of a vintage pachinko machine. I grabbed a Sharpie and scribbled over every unsuitable nom de guerre. Beside them I scrawled the only title worthy of my mind, my vision, my carefully cultivated mechanical aura of doom.

I would be … The Dread Architect.

2

Everything was ready.

The security cameras at the Burger Blitz on 84th and Vine were conveniently installed three inches below what OSHA recommends for proper field of view. I knew this because I installed them. Mandy had asked if I could “tweak the angles a bit” to avoid catching customers slipping on wet tiles. Liability, you know.

I gave her what she wanted—and gave myself three perfect blind spots.

By the time my shift ended at 10:30 p.m., the plan was in motion. I walked two blocks, doubled back through the alley, and slipped in through the mop closet door, which I’d rigged to bypass the alarm three weeks ago, just in case.

The building was silent except for the occasional hiss of the fryer cooling down. I moved with precision, dressed in black work pants, a charcoal-gray thermal, and my freshly spray-painted utility vest. Duct-taped pouches held my tools—non-lethal gadgets, of course. I’m not a monster.

I pulled my mask down over my face. The cowling was a matte black affair with green-tinted goggles and a reinforced nose bridge, built to withstand a five-story fall and, more importantly, appear terrifying on camera.

In moments, I would etch my name into the annals of history. In moments, I could put Burger Blitz behind me and launch myself into notoriety. I took one deep breath and whispered: “Today, Freedom City. Tomorrow, the world. Time to introduce the city to The Dread Architect.”

Step one: Sabotage the roof-mounted letterboard sign, the one that made a whomp noise every time we changed the deals of the day.

Tonight, the message read: NOW HIRING – JOIN THE BLITZ TEAM!

I rewired the mounts, reversed the tension servos, and slathered the bolt tracks with ice spray and preemptive revenge. When Troy opened tomorrow’s morning shift and tried to flip the sign to the “BURGER BATTLE: TWO-FOR-TUESDAY” promo, it would fall—harmlessly but dramatically—directly behind him, just as I hijacked the PA system to deliver my first public villain monologue.

I almost couldn’t bear to think of the total humiliation. Troy’s fate would bear mute witness to the precision of my calculations, while his unquantifiable aura of affability drew the attention of the world. All would be caught live on the store’s security feed and synced to a flash drive I’d hidden in the camera housing.

I would upload it to all the local message boards. Reddit, YouHero, even CapeChat, the forum where wannabe villains and sidekicks argued over cape physics and non-compete clauses. Everyone would know my name: The Dread Architect. They would fear me, respect me. I’d be interviewed. My tactics and weapons would be studied. Maybe I’d even be hunted.

I pressed the test button on the PA. It clicked. The static gave me chills.

I returned home at 1:37 a.m., smiling, cloak coiled over one arm like a gentleman’s scarf. The city skyline blinked faintly in the background, and I imagined it—Doctor Mind tearing through the city in the Mindmobile, hearing my name whispered over police scanners.

I slept like a mad genius with an empty inbox.

***

The next morning, I arrived at exactly 11:03 a.m., just in time to watch it unfold.

Troy was there, of course—smiling, handing out samples of our new cubic cheese bites with unfailing enthusiasm. Mandy was laughing at something he said. Someone had made him a sticker that read “BLITZ MVP” and stuck it to his visor.

I hovered near the condiment station, pretending to refill napkins while watching the sign’s tension mounts strain in the wind. As the time approached, I vanished into the stockroom, changed into my battle togs and made my way to the roof in anticipation of the big moment.

Five… four… three…

From around the corner, an alarm bell clangored into raucous hysteria. A late-model sedan took the corner on two wheels, tires screeching, mentholated clove cigarette smoke billowing from the open windows. A hubcap spun free and sped in front of the getaway care. I could hear the whoops and yells of the occupants, flying high on adrenaline and an utter absence of self-reflection.

Oblivious to the world, Troy handed out the last of the free samples, and flipped the switch to rotate the sign to the new display. In a shower of sparks—taking no chances, I had added a magnesium powder flare to enhance the effect—the back end of the marquee separated from the backlit Burger Blitz football sign. The molded plastic and neon powered hand of doom lurched toward the road.

It missed Troy by two full feet and crashed through the windshield of the fleeing felons determined to reenact the motor stunts from The Fury of the Fastest. The impact stunned the driver, who had just pulled into the parking lot, presumably in an effort to lose themselves in the nearly half-dozen customers that constituted the early lunch rush. The airbags deployed; the hood, trunk, and all four doors flew open. Bags of stolen cash spilled out of the gaping trunk.

Troy shaded his eyes with his hand and looked up just in time to see me vanish from the roof of Burger Blitz, momentarily thwarted but undaunted. This was simply not the right time for the world to quake in fear of my unparalleled intellect.

Police swarmed the lot moments later.

***

Short videos and glamour shots flooded Reel Hero and CapeChat the rest of the day with captions like, “Blitz Boy Hero Saves the Day with Snacks and Swagger” and “Local fry guy’s casual cool thwarts criminal caper.”

I watched every single one of them from the break room, clutching a melted Frosty Blitz and trying not to scream as I watched Troy give his statement on an endless loop. “It was Goggles, I saw him on the roof!”

Troy’s golden mane framed wide-open eyes and slack-jawed sincerity as he maintained an eyeline just perfectly to the side of the camera lens. “I saw him on the roof!”

Neither Troy nor any of the cape chasers posting their blurry clips and unfettered pledges of devotion seemed bothered that Goggles and Doctor Mind had been in Ohio all week according to their social media. No one questioned the timing, or the rigging, or the glitch in the PA system that somehow played a hard rock rendition of “Flight of the Valkyries” over the loudspeakers during the commotion.

The video looped. “On the roof!”

***

Back home, I sat in the dark, rewinding the security footage on my laptop. After the failure of Operation: Burger Blitzkrieg, I knew I needed a bigger play. I needed something undeniable. Check that—failure implies I did something wrong. I don’t do things wrong. I had blueprints. I had backup blueprints. I had flowcharts detailing how to adapt if I ran out of flowcharts.

There is an art to true villainy. The greatest crimes in history have always been deeds of darkness and anonymity. The world would see the evidence of my genius after the fact and whisper The Dread Architect’s name in trepidation.

The true criminal artists understood that their power did not lie in the act itself, but in the silence before discovery. A thief must slip past every guard unseen. A saboteur must leave no trace until the gears grind to a halt. A forger must have a masterpiece circulate for years before a single flaw is noticed.

That is perfection: The crime living in the world, unrecognized until the proper moment, its creator invisible. The whispers come later, long after the damage is done. The perpetrator’s only identity is a mysterious calling card left by unseen hands. By then, the architect has already vanished, his mark upon the world is undeniable and untouchable.

The brilliance of such work is not in its noise, but in its delay. I think of the great art thief Vincenzo Peruggia, who walked calmly out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa under his arm. For two whole years the empty frame hung there while Paris gasped in disbelief. Nations accused one another, reputations collapsed, and yet the truth sat quietly in Peruggia’s closet, gathering dust. The theft was not the taking of the painting. The theft was the silence that followed. Peruggia left the world to stumble around in the dark, robbed not just of art but of certainty.

This must be my destiny. It was sheer vanity to think that in a world where gods walk the earth, loud explosions and messy chaos could distinguish my intellect. I am due for a different kind of fame, the kind where the world blinks, looks around, and realizes it has already changed, too late to stop it.

I must prove to the world that no treasure is safe, should I desire it. The Freedom City Star beckoned me from the corkboard in 72-point newsprint headlines. I will steal the legacy of their heroes.

3

The framework came to me in a white heat of inspiration. I filled an entire graph-paper notebook with layout drawings, contingency plans, decryption routines, and escape routes. In merely hours, the caper gelled into a perfect fruit salad of villainous daring and irreplaceable memorabilia.

Operation: Museum Masterstroke.

The Freedom City Museum of History recently debuted a new exhibit: “Costumes Through the Cape Age.” Genuine hero and villain uniforms from decades past—complete with gadgets, mini-thrones, hover-capes, and the infamous Luminol Gauntlet. Worthless to collectors, but incredibly symbolic. It was a perfect setting for a showpiece crime.

I would cloak myself in fog from a dry ice rig and fill the museum with obscuring mist. To ensure maximum confusion from unruly, sugar-fueled grade schoolers, I was going to steal the Gauntlet during a school tour under the cover of a carbon monoxide alarm. The museum’s electronic security consisted of a numbered lock pad and wishful thinking. The only evidence they would find was my calling card: a hex key inside a blueprint cylinder. In my wake, Doctor Mind would find only instant mystery, chilling implications, and an undeniably catchy signature. No one knew this was coming. No one would interfere.

I was exfiltrating the ventilation system when my mobile phone chimed the first few bars of my theme song. I had written it myself, of course, in anticipation of my debut; I know better than to tangle with copyright lawyers.

Troy’s text scrolled across the screen: “U cvr my shift, dude? I got 2 take lil bro to FCMOH 4 skul.”

Furious, I ripped off my dry-ice gloves and started a scathing reply about responsibility and consideration for other people’s schedules.

With precision timing, my CO2 pellets dropped. Cold water boiled into obscuring mist and the blower system roared to life. Clouds of heavy vapor and premature celebration rolled toward me, pushing life-giving oxygen in front of it like a tsunami of misplaced worship, curling upward, collapsing in on itself, and leaving you breathless in its wake.

I grew light-headed. The ventilation system grew dark. “This is Troy’s fault,” I protested dazedly, “I haven’t set the alarm.” The last thing I remember was the klaxon of the museum’s carbon monoxide detector.

I awoke in the arms of a fireman to the taste of medical-grade polyvinyl chloride. The flood of oxygen swelled my head and lifted me into clarity. My mask and goggles dangled from their restraining straps.

“You could’ve gotten really hurt in there, kid,” the fireman said as he set me on the floor. “It’s a good thing that Paranoyd was watching over the museum.” He waved a hand at a newsreporter conducting an interview on the other side of the room.

A six-and-a-half-foot mannequin of a female Neanderthal held a sign introducing a display of clubs collected from feral heroes over the years. Next to the dummy stood another dummy. Troy rested one hand on a half-sized version of himself and pointed the other at the manual pull for the emergency alarm. His words floated to me from across the room, “I didn’t even see the smoke until I heard Paranoyd’s mysterious whisper tell me what to do. He said, ‘Troy, halt,’ and then, ‘Get the alarm.’ So I did.”

***

That night, the news ran the blurry stock photo of Paranoyd provided by the Fakers’ press agent next to the Luminol Gauntlet and called it a “public safety drill gone right.” Paranoyd’s thread on CapeChat exploded with conflicting sightings of the hero at other places in town. I got into a flame war with DennyCk47, who insisted that the Stalking Overcoat could be in many places at once.

I unleashed the full force of my scorn, criticism, and ridicule on the lot of them, secure in my anonymity and righteous indignation.

Secrecy had its place, but perhaps I had been deceiving myself. The shadows are for thieves and ghosts. I was not meant to be a whisper in the dark. A whisper is forgotten the moment it fades.

If one wishes to reshape the world, one must step into the light and make the world watch. History remembers not the hidden hand, but the open spectacle that leaves no chance for ignorance. Caesar did not conquer Gaul in secret. He marched his legions across the Rubicon in plain sight and let the Senate tremble at the inevitability of his will. That single crossing was not a military maneuver—it was theater. It was a declaration so large, so undeniable, that Rome itself bent under the weight of it.

And there is the truth:

Power is not only what is seized, but what is witnessed. The audience makes the act immortal. A silent crime lives only in rumor; a grand gesture is carved into stone.

So why should I content myself with being unseen, when the world itself can be my stage? I will not whisper. I will thunder. I will build an act so vast, so undeniable, that thousands will see it at once. Their heads will turn, their voices will cry out, and in that chorus of recognition my power will be born.

To be great is not only to act—it is to be seen acting.

4

I’d mapped it out over four nights of zero sleep and sixteen cups of instant coffee—a multi-phase operation with redundancies, fail-safes, and hidden backups of fail-safes. I’d even installed an analog override lever, because nothing digital could be trusted anymore.

Operation: Minotaur’s Sandwich.

It’s a working title. I was running on a sexdecuple caffeine load and an empty stomach.

At its heart was a hidden labyrinth beneath the Sunfair Plaza Shopping Center. Originally built as a Cold War bomb shelter and later abandoned because of a sinkhole incident, it was now the perfect place for a villain to finally, finally make his mark. I would take captive the entire consumer and retail worker population of Freedom City’s preeminent mall.

All of my grand designs culminated in this one location. Under the cover of routine maintenance, I had moved all of the “EXIT” signs so that they led directly to the shelter area. I restored the power to the area and ensured the plumbing was connected; my cross-section of Consumer America would be there a long time. When you gotta go, you gotta go—I’m not a sadist. In the event we did lose power, each room had a stock of chemiluminescent tubes to keep people from panicking in the dark, potentially hurting each other and damaging their value as collateral.

Access to each room was controlled by a one-way door. Once inside, my mallrats would be well and truly in a maze that kept moving their cheese. Every room could access several other connected rooms, but keys to the locks were concealed in ordinary objects that must be combined in unusual ways. This would keep their hope alive and their hands occupied. I rigged a set of monitors and speakers to broadcast the Cold War propaganda films, Civil Defense drills, and fallout survival training instructions included in the original construction.

From my chair in the Den of Reckoning’s monitor womb, I could see everything, hear any whisper, and manipulate each piece of the labyrinth individually. At a whim, I could flood a room with an eerie fog, bathe it in an array of disorienting laser light, or overwhelm the occupants with pounding bass from subwoofers concealed within the walls. I could release any door or bolt it fast with the touch of a switch.

In moments, I would begin luring the unsuspecting masses into my grid of domination. Once trapped, their own social media feeds would broadcast my demands for nothing less than the complete and total surrender of Freedom City to the will of The Dread Architect. I ensured that YouHero and Bookface were whitelisted on the router. Satisfied, I dropped one hand over the arm of my chair to stroke the ears of a golden-retriever puppy. It licked my fingers.

I did a sharp double-take. A blonde-haired, big-eyed, wet-nosed puppy looked up at me, tail sweeping the floor with frenetic energy. It yipped once and bounded away, vanishing through the access to the Den of Reckoning. A movement on a monitor caught my eye.

Troy strolled placidly by on Camera 2, thirty feet deep into the maze, eating a soft pretzel and livestreaming on his phone. “Yo,” he said into the camera, “The Fur Baby said they lost a puppy, and I thought it might have got downstairs, you know? There’s a whole thing down here. It’s wild. I thought this was, like, a pop-up escape room thing, but it’s way better. Got a whole vibe, dig?”

I stared at the feed. The door that was supposed to slam shut behind him had stayed open. I could see a puppy-sized lead and collar caught in the revolving mechanism. I bolted for the access; in unanticipated vengeance, Troy was about to become my first hostage. It took less than a minute to get to the stuck door, less than thirty seconds to free the leash. The door clicked shut on the halo of my ascendancy, while I stood on the wrong side.

Too late, I reached for the perfectly concealed latch behind the wall. When the door opened at the same time I triggered the release mechanism, something inside snapped and the lock spun freely. Three people wandered into the room with phone cameras held in front of them like a ward against the evil eye. I could hear Troy from a speakerphone, “Off the chain, bro! Check this!”

A wall of sonic disruption turned my inner ear to mush and the world into a carnival-ground Tilt-And-Hurl. The three teens in the room threw their hands up and screamed in exultation, bouncing up and down on the balls of their feet. The lights blinked out and suddenly streamers of multicolored fire strobed through the darkness, scattering from cleverly positioned rotating mirrored globes and dissipating into the cool mist around our ankles.

I lurched to the side and staggered for the men’s lavatory. I barely made it in time to be sick in a toilet stall.

When I had emptied everything, I sagged back against the door. On my phone, I could see Troy in the Den of Reckoning, one hand whipping through the air while the other played with the controls of The Minotaur’s Sandwich.

Someone knocked on the stall door. “Hey, man, people are waiting.”

I fell through the door and limped to the sink, pushed my costume cowl back out of the way, scrubbed my face, and rinsed my mouth. “I will reclaim what is mine,” I muttered darkly.

Standing up straight, I flung open the exit door and braced myself. Teenagers and young adults had filled every available space. Someone had found my stock of chemical lights and the waving multicolored phosphorescence lit their bearers with dancing shadows. Lasers blinked. The sound pounced on my battered eardrums with claws of vertigo.

I lurched for the sink.

***

Four hours later, an EMT walked me to a waiting ambulance while delivering a lecture on being cautious about what you drink at a rave.

Troy posted a selfie with the dog, a glow light swinging from its collar. #PetRescue #RaveOn #EscapeRoomGoals.

***

I paced my hideout—well, the abandoned vending machine room in the basement of my apartment building that I’d converted into my HQ—and stared at the monitors.

I called in to work for the first time, abusing the trust represented by my allotment of sick days. I needed to run some scientific experiments. I needed to find out what was going wrong with my plans, and why Troy always seemed to be on the scene.

Operation: Burger Blitz could have just been bad luck. I had no way to predict the sudden emergence of a group of losers determined to do exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. I had even planned for Troy to be there so he could bear slack-jawed, perfect-haired witness to my emergence. I wanted to pay him back for taking the junior assistant shift lead position that rightfully belonged to me.

Operation: Museum Masterstroke was a product of self-sabotage, I concluded ruefully. If my research had been more thorough, I would have known that Troy would be there as chaperone. I succumbed to anger and betrayed my own schedule. All things considered, I was fortunate that Troy was there to pull the alarm so I could be rescued before I suffocated on my own brilliance.

But I didn’t know what to make of Operation: Minotaur’s Sandwich. There was no reason for Troy to be there. The combination of lost dog, jammed door, and Troy’s presence was so unlikely as to be statistically impossible. That I was the only one to fall victim to my own security measures was just embarrassing.

But was there more to it? In a world with superheroes who routinely rewrote the laws of reality, I had to account for every variable. Was Troy somehow sabotaging me? Did he even know he was doing it?

After a bit of self-reflection, I acknowledged that long before Troy showed up, my very presence was overlooked and forgotten. I had worked at Burger Blitz for over two years now, and Mandy still couldn’t get my name right. On the other hand, I kind of expected Mrs. Finklestein to think that I was a new person every time I served her milkshake—she’s old.

I pulled my landlord’s rent invoice out of my pocket to look at it again. It was addressed to “Current Occupant”. I had moved into that walk-up when I started university. Now that I thought about it, my first engineering diploma had been issued blank. I had to fill in my own name. I’d better check that the university registrar had issued my credentials.

Maybe I’d been thinking too big. I started testing my premise by impersonating a valet and stealing a car from airport parking. The vehicle I had picked turned out to be illegally parked in a fire lane. Security thanked me profusely for saving them the traffic problems that a tow truck would have caused. I left the car at the farthest end of long-term parking.

Methodically, I worked my way down to shoplifting. I determined to take something from the convenience store on the corner. I wouldn’t even go back to pay for it later. I pocketed a soda pop, a candy bar, and a magazine, and edged my way toward the door with my back carefully toward the clerk. Just as I was about to leave, the door flew open under the momentum of a man covered in tattoos, piercings, and an inability to make healthy life choices.

We went down in a tangle of arms and legs. My stolen goods flew in one direction. His street-cred handgun flew in the other. The police took our statements and I paid for my snacks and magazine anyway—I still wanted them.

I sat in a dark, sugar-induced fugue, the silence thick around me. I was a ghost in my own story. I was a malfunctioning side character in someone else’s highlight reel. Every plan, every design, every hour spent soldering, sketching, and rehearsing speeches in the mirror with a paper towel cape had all been pointless. No one would ever fear me. No one would even remember me. I needed to do something that couldn’t be undone, something that could not be forgotten.

I opened my blueprint binder to a fresh page. The cover read: The Dread Architect — Omega Contingency.

The maze had been my masterpiece. It was a labyrinth of traps, false corridors, and dead ends leading into dead ends. Daedalus himself would have been proud. Instead, they turned it into an escape room and then into a rave. Strobe lights washed away my shadows. What I built to inspire dread had been stripped of its teeth and sold as entertainment.

Maybe that is the lesson. Perhaps the world can never fear what it can dance to.

Great power, history tells me, is never built on clever contraptions or subtle arrangements. No—power is built on blood. Machiavelli himself warned that cruelty, if it must be done, should be swift and decisive. Caesar’s legions were not feared because they built bridges, but because they crucified the vanquished upon them. The French Revolution is remembered less for its speeches than for the guillotine, its blade singing daily in the square. Nietzsche observed that creation demands destruction—that to build a new order, one must first shatter the old.

It disgusts me to admit it, but maybe they are right. The people only respect pain. They do not tremble at puzzles. They do not kneel before riddles.

They remember fire.

They remember ruin.

So perhaps my destiny is not to build clever cages. Perhaps I must finally step across the threshold that I have always mocked from a distance. To prove myself more than a joke, I must be willing to do the one thing that cannot be laughed away.

If they will not admire my art, then perhaps they will fear my cruelty.

5

The day dragged like a broken clock. I flipped burgers. I poured sodas. I scraped grease off the fryer hood, all while the bile in my gut simmered hotter than the grill. Every time someone said “great job, Troy,” it was another brick dropped on my back. My mind gnawed itself raw, circling the same thought: Maybe I had to cross that line. Maybe cruelty wasn’t a choice, but the only way the world ever noticed anything.

By the end of my shift, I was brittle with exhaustion, cracked through with despair. I walked home in the neon twilight, the smell of grease still burned into my hair, my apron dangling like a deadweight in my hands. At the crosswalk on 7th and Maple, I saw her—Mrs. Finklestein. The old woman who ordered a milkshake every day. She was also never satisfied. I made it too thin, or too thick, or some other trivial complaint. Today, I had run the swirl in the wrong direction.

She waited beside me at the curb, muttering about the drivers who never slowed down. And that’s when the thought struck me—dark, savage, absurd. All I had to do was extend my arm, one simple shove, and despair would become deed. She’d stumble into traffic, and I’d finally be the monster the world kept refusing to see.

My hand hovered just over her shoulder. She barely stood as high as my collarbone. I closed my eyes and surrendered to the darkness; my fingers tangled in the strap of her oversized purse. At that exact instant, a sedan barreled too close to the curb, determined to beat the light rather than add thirty seconds to their commute. The car’s mirror would have clipped her skull if I hadn’t pulled. Instead of casting her into traffic, I yanked her back, safe on the sidewalk.

She gasped, clutching her bag. Then she looked up at me with the watery eyes of someone who had just been saved from certain death. “Oh my… thank you, young man.”

I disentangled myself from her purse strap, my throat sandpaper-dry, a pit of acid congealing in my stomach.

Mrs. Finklestein gathered her wits and straightened her blouse. She peered at me around horn-rimmed glasses cocked askew on her nose. “You’re the nice boy who always fixes the milkshake machine, aren’t you?”

I nodded mutely.

She straightened her glasses, squinted at me, then asked, “Do you know who invented the modern milkshake machine?”

I shook my head.

“Frederick J. Osius,” she stated, her voice lilting with the pride of a schoolteacher unveiling a secret. “He made the Cyclone Drink Mixer back in the 1910s. Can you imagine? That little machine changed so many things. Suddenly, kids had a place to meet after school. Soldiers on leave had someplace to take their sweethearts. Families could share a treat on Sundays. All that happiness, all those small, golden memories—just because one man built a better way to stir milk and ice cream.”

She gave a wistful little smile. “He probably never knew how much good came of it. But you see, young man, the world is full of things like that. Kindnesses, inventions, little acts of care. The names may fade, but the good remains, woven right into everyday life.”

Her hand brushed my sleeve with grandmotherly gratitude. “That’s why I think fixing the milkshake machine is such a fine thing. It’s why I come back every day. You might not believe it, but people will remember the shakes they enjoyed long after they’ve forgotten who blended them. I’ve always thought you were a nice boy who just wanted to help people by fixing things, not at all like that scowling ruffian who serves the trays.”

It took me a moment to realize that she didn’t think that was also me, and then I didn’t trust myself to answer. For all of my engineering genius and meticulous planning, I had intimidated no one, stolen nothing, and harmed no living soul. I couldn’t even get a simple act of petty violence right. In the end, I suppose it truly is impossible not to become what others think you are—no matter what you believe yourself to be.

So I linked my arm in hers, and helped her cross the street.

***

THE END OF WANNABE VILLAIN.

About the Author:

Sent from the future to defend the past, Winston wants to read good books, write more books, and release them into the wild. His other works include classic-style science fiction, urban fantasy, murder mystery, slice of life, and endless technical manuals.