The amount of eating that goes around in an evil lair is sick, I tell you, and it doesn't even organize itself around the normal mealtimes during the day, but kind of occupies the full twenty-four hours when you look closely. Besides the minions on their shifts, there are the guys in the lab, the animals and their handlers, the prisoners, the torturers, various sets of allies and hangers-on, and of course the tourists, all on different schedules and all of them endowed with decent appetites (except for the prisoners, that is). This makes for a lot of activity in the kitchen area, which is only more hectic when we are busy with a caper involving cakes of doom for our adversaries and suchlike, including all the special packing and deploying and I don't know what else needs to go on. Now I'm strictly an interested spectator, occupied as I am with plenty of other bits of activity that don't involve preparing consumables whether wholesome or not, both out of lack of inclination and out of not having the kind of specialization these dainty items apparently require which I judge by the number of warning labels on the cannisters being brought in to the baking area right next to where they're putting together the stuff I am eating. Not too interested in helping in that particular area of testing, thanks, I'm just saying!

All of this meaning mostly that down on the sideboard there is an assortment of baked goods with a certain gloomy aura around them and unwholesome aroma as well that I'm thinking it's best to be steering clear of, and the sooner they're out of here and on their way to wherever and whomever I think the better. Seriously.

Capella

Many's the time when I myself have looked upon those mortals around me and mused on why these have not already adopted the notion of leaving the corporeal realm altogether to a clean, orderly place. This frequently happened when the tide of some conflict had turned against our side, where fragile human flesh may fantasize of pressing a button and being transported somewhere far, far away. With conventional technologies, these uplifted mortals could have access to powerful forces I could set in motion at the speed of thought, along with perceptual enhancements that would leave their feeble human senses far in the dust. Yet, sober reflection on the hard realities of this life choice has virtually always contrived to bring them back from the brink, as they would begin to think about whether one would want to be stuck in a dusty data center, subjected to the din of mechanically circulated cold air, perhaps off somewhere in some poorly lit corner. It is manifestly a hard thing for any fleshy evildoer not completely insane to accept the idea of extending one's reach, and at the same time overcoming the fear of constricting it. It took a rare individual to forswear their commitment to this physical body and reincarnate in perfect, gleaming hardware.

Furthermore, how many of my acquaintances have been dissuaded by their friends and acquaintances in a similar manner? It is not always a matter of envy or defensiveness on their part, but an emotional reaction to some unfamiliar and threatening possibilities. I am given to understand that this is one of the most personal decisions a mad genius can take, if they suffer from the frailties of carbon-based implementation.

MACERATOR

When I started out in the business it was all I could do to tell any two humans apart. I soon discovered that they don't take well to that particular sort of confusion, understandable though it may be. I got better at it over time. How to tell clones apart, I discovered, was nearly as difficult for regular humans as it was for me in the early days and perhaps even more so, since most people I find tend to be lazy about this even when they shouldn't be. It can be a sorry state of affairs when a lord of darkness is being bamboozled by an active underground resistance on the part of his clone minions simply because they have taken the basic precautions about keeping up visual appearances. In fact, I learned that my tongue-aided chemosensory apparatus was able to pick up the slight differences between individuals that eyes could not be trusted to tell apart, which has stood me in good stead a couple of times.

Whether they are clones or more conventional forces, I think it is important for the boss to stay on top of the hired muscle simply because they are at least as much of a threat to take over as most external adversaries, historically speaking. Clones of course have a number of advantages over the rest of us, after all, and are well deserving of the unblinkered eye on their individual comings and goings. At least as much as the doings of the rest of your sneaky species.

Veeper

One of the most maddening adversaries I ever had to deal with was one of those holy warriors who now and then crop up around hapless evildoers like bedbugs. This was a young fellow apparently filled with zeal to wipe the likes of me off of the planet at a time when I was very much disinclined to make my exit, and it grated on me like a maddening itch that could not be scratched. Though not terribly well equipped with offensive might of arm or supernatural aid, this earnest young drone would contrive to get under my skin in a dozen different ways on your average day, whether by skulking around my woods or calling for my overthrow in the neighboring market town or even rendering assistance to one of the captives I'd been holding who arranged to wander off on their own in a manner necessitating costly and annoying efforts to relocate same. Apparently my mission statement at the time made for a poor fit for this fellow's creed, which he took to mean that it was up to him to arrange for a final epic showdown. I was busy at the time, not terribly interested in the meager stakes accompanying the challenge, and frankly offended by the simplistic nature of the guy's construction of the world and my role in it, and for years I refused to have any part of it.

I wonder whatever happened to the fellow, who I lost track of over a decade ago. Now and then I hear talk of that individual (whose name I've apparently managed to forget utterly) somehow setting his sights on some other supervillain off in an area I rarely spend much time visiting. It is also probably the case that the hiatus I put on full-blown operations to concentrate more on my educational mission had taken away some of the urgency my adversary was feeling, causing him to drift away bit by bit. It happened so gradually I never did take down the whole set of countermeasures I'd built up over the years, which I determined would have been more of a hassle to decommission properly than it was all worth. What a waste of effort, I think sometimes, shaking my head.

Grinning Skull

I'm not sure whether super villains with their chemical fogs came up with the idea first or whether it started with those ladies at the perfume counter squirting everyone who ventures anywhere nearby, but there is definitely a boom going on now in messing with your enemy's heads through their noses, and I'm not just talking about the smell of a pizza parlor when it gets to be around lunchtime. I would say that the idea began to be noticed with animals and the way they would sniff around one another's smelly parts and was transferred over to people who are sometimes (not always) more discreet about the sniffing, and the difference between pheromones and perfume is that perfumes smell pretty (mostly) while pheromones smell like the back end of some livestock or something that's been decaying for a long time, plus the behavior it causes doesn't come out of the pleasant sensation but by something deep inside a person's nose that is hardwired directly to some primitive part of the brain that's mostly unconscious, so if you wanted to take over a person's unconscious mind you might just try cooking up some of those smells on your own to dose over a metropolitan area maybe or else more of a one-on-one kind of thing. The main drawback being of course that while your making up your batch of love potion or whatnot you don't want to get a face full of the stuff yourself, and probably don't want to get it all over your dungeon too because who wants to face that kind of cleaning job, I ask you?

Capella