Miserable Pile Of Words

Villain who runs a driving school.

I know your type. You're not here for driving lessons.

You're the kind of skidmark who goes to play tourist at serial killers' houses, standing outside staring and rubbing yourself through your pants. You're here to grin inanely at the irony I ended up a driving instructor.

It's some tabloid hack life-fucker who coined "Carbomb," you know that? I make machines break with my mind, sure, but I never did a car. I don't think I can do a whole thing the size of a car. And the closest to an explosion I ever got was a microwave catching fire, when I got my first period.

No, I'd just be a sad fuck with really expensive contents insurance, if it wasn't for that fucking Facebook post. You say online that you wish you could make a Republican senator's pacemaker pop like corn in his chest for what he's doing to abortion care, and that's so obviously a credible threat they wait two whole weeks before throwing a flashbang into your apartment.

I was in grad school. The place I was renting was so small, a flashbang in that space was practically attempted murder. I had burns, you know that? Of course you don't know that, creep. And I'm such a threat that I was just screaming on the floor when they kicked the door in. All those guns and radios and devices and it never occurred to me to do a damn thing except fear for my life, because having shitty powers doesn't make me homicidal—

Anyway. You know they put me in supervillain containment. Cedar Ridge. That place—

...

That motherfucking place.

...

Anyway.

Is that enough for you to get off to? Enough of a villainous rant? Oh, baby, of course you've been recording on your phone. Do you think you're gonna ride it to fifteen seconds of viral fame and literal dollars of ad click microcents?

Your smartphone's a machine, chucklefuck.

Let's!

Villain who works the same way a virus does.

"I work," the man in the mask says, standing on the table in the Burger King while all the staff and patrons cower on the floor, "like a virus—"

Aaaaand that's Aubrey's cue.

"You mean to tell me you're a mindless protein machine?" she yells, sticking her head out of the kitchen, her own mask firmly in place.

She'd meant to go into the white hat side of the business, really, but, everybody's kinda wary about partial telepathy — stupid fucking term, doesn't help, it's not as if she does diet mind reading. And then there's what her powers actually do, which is mostly annoy people.

Like, literally, Aubrey has the power to focus on someone and just made them low-grade confused and aggravated. Or a milder close-vicinity version without individually focusing, if she's not careful. Like, say, she's nervous about applying to be a white hat. And then she gets shot down for vague "sorry we didn't hire you" platitude reasons, and.

Story of her life.

So in the end, putting a black hat on it is pretty much just working through how annoyed she is right back at everything. She got dealt a sucky hand, so suck it. And hey, she mostly sticks to crashing other black hats' grandstanding and taunting them into fucking it up, which practically makes her one of the good guys.

"The Heckler!" today's target bellows, which is so gratifying. They sometimes know her name now! "...Oh, fuck off!"

"No, no, no, tell me more about your plot to chemomechanically latch onto cell surfaces and inject them with genetic strands which their own replication machinery will blithely process as instructions to build exact copies of you!" she calls. "I want to know about your species-level survivial mechanism to leverage the massive in massively parallel replication, because right now I can only see one of you!"

"MAYBE I MEANT A COMPUTER VIRUS," her target yells back, and Aubrey grins widely at the red-flushed neck visible below the bottom rim of his mask.

"Awwwwww," she coos, bouncing on the balls of her feet for when he gets het up enough for her to run for it. "Are you software? Are you a widdle computer program? Did someone replace you with a very small shell script?—" and dances back into the kitchen as he kicks a tray off the table in her direction. "Don't worry, dude!" she yells back over her shoulder. "It's not the lines of code, it's what you do with them that counts!" and kicks open the fire door, giggling, as he starts after her.