Love & Plunder – Down Madripoor Way

My time being a bottom-feeder In Miami taught me another lesson about the psyche of the supercriminal.  I never understood chronic backstabbing disorder before but that’s because I was never at the bottom of the totem pole before.  I have a better handle on it now better now.  When you’re skilled and talented and smart, or think you are, it galls you to be doing scutwork for someone else.  “I should be in charge of this crew” you think to yourself.  And you may even be right, but being right just makes you more impatient.   

I fell for the same trap, I wanted to be the leader RIGHT NOW and I bit off more than I could chew.  I went too far too fast.   I got a gig working with a teleporter, a cyborg, and a couple of invisible girls ripping off rich people.  It was such low rent shit that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about how we should be going after better scores.  With that suite of powers and all they’re doing is simple burglaries?  They wouldn’t listen to reason though, they wanted to stay the course.

It’s like when a dude with super-speed sticks to purse-snatching.  It’s such a waste.  The leader of this group, who wasn’t even powered, told me to shut my gob and do what I was told and that’s when I decided it was time for me to take over.   Since they were all friends and I hadn’t laid any groundwork that didn’t work out.  Can you believe that?  Honor amongst thieves. 

I survived that failed coup attempt but after I flamed out with them no one else in town wanted to work with me because I was unreliable, not even that puppet fondling idiot would take me on.  I had to put in some time with a drug boat smuggling ring just to get enough cred to get back to the bottom rung of proper villains.  

It should have been a humbling experience but it just made me more pissed off.  Which only makes it harder to have the discipline and patience to have the patience to gather power, establish my own reputation and, finally, make all those people who laughed when I was weak rue the day.  It’s like a sick Sisyphean joke where the more you want it the farther away you get.   

Things got so bad that I teamed up with a sad-sack loser who sold their soul to the Power Broker to get the medical care his girlfriend needed to not die from a rare disease.  Insert biting social commentary here about the American healthcare system where that’s a valid choice people make to deal with shit.  Our first mission was to break some dude out of the Vault, which we failed.  And in failing that job the Guardsman let us go.   

It was the low point of my life so far.  I was caught and I was so pathetic that a 9^th rate Iron Man knockoff prison guard wearing a dildo helmet just let us go after he thwarted our evil plan.  He felt sorry for us.  It was almost enough to make me call the whole thing quits.

Our next failure was trying to knock over an armored car with the 10^th guy with iron cable tentacles and the 55^th guy with a Green Goblin glider and bombs.  We didn’t even get the car cracked open before getting our asses kicked by some fat Asgardian POS.  After that I went to the Power Broker’s local rep and told her that if she gave us goals to accomplish instead of trying to plan the jobs for us I could pull this shit off. 

She didn’t like my “sass” but she agreed to give it a try on a trial basis.  Next time out, with my planning and leadership we successfully stole a shipment of exotic beasts from the Savage lands and then followed that up with another win, ripped off some laser weapons from an earth-based group of Ravager and Starjammer rejects.   

The pièce de résistance was yours truly masterminding a taking over a facility producing Atlantean drugs and knocking off some 19^th cousin of Namor 12 times removed who was exiled from the ocean for being a jerk.  The entire ocean.  Can you imagine being that much of an asshole that you’re not welcome in the ocean?

Of course that’s when the Power Broker turned on us.  The usual “you have outlived your usefulness” supervillain bullshit.   

I got out of there by the skin of my vag and once again was penniless and hopeless.  And where else do you go in that state but Madripoor?   

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Once my stint with the Big Blue One came to an unceremonious end Malligator hooked me up with the Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation.  While I had been wasting my life with that Cobra Commander-knock off organization Malligator had got busy making bank working for the UCWF.  He had just lost his Missouri Region Championship to the Battler so he hooked me up with a job as his tag team partner.  Good guy that Malligator. 

People always ask me, is Unlimited Wrestling phony shit like pro wrestling or is it real like MMA?  For $8 million I’ll tell you.   

What no one ever asks anyone is if the UCWF is a front for the Power Broker because everyone knows that it is.  I figured that wouldn’t matter since Mal and I are already enhanced individuals and the Power Broker’s deal is selling people superpowers, but I was wrong as usual.   

After a good six months of Mal and I teaming up and fighting and getting paid and hanging out, the Power Broker’s rep came to me and said she needed a favor.  The Notorious PB had missed out on the Tempo craze and she wanted a sample from my blood, thinking there was still some swimming around in there that she could reverse engineer.  Not to mention she also wanted to know more about my maybe probably stable version of Extremeis.   

Once again I was asked to be a lab rat.  I said “thanks but no thanks”, I had been down that road before and I wasn’t going to visit it again.  When I declined at first the Power Broker’s agent turned on the charm but when that didn’t work she switched into full force bad bitch mode.  She told me that any number of people would be interested in cutting Malligator apart to see how he worked if I didn’t want to play ball. 

When I told her to get bent she sent Armadillo, Puma, and Nightshade to rough us up.  Those fuckers.  I get that a job is a job, but we freelancers need to stick together.  The bosses don’t need more help screwing us over.  Malligator’s tough as hell but he can’t heal like I can and they put the hurt on him good.  I never felt so helpless in all my life.  Not even as a kid when I was sick and housebound.  My friend was in danger because of me.  But there was no way I was going to give in to the Power Broker.   

What I wanted to do was to figure out who the Power Broker is these days, I know it’s not that blonde SHIELD lady anymore, and have a chat with him/her.  I wanted to bust up the whole ugly organization.  PB has burned so many people with their deal with the devil crap I probably could have built an small army of supers that wanted to get revenge on that bastard, even if it isn’t the same bastard that screwed them over.   

That’s what I wanted to do.  But what I did do is run.  And when you’re on the run where else is there to go but Madripoor?