If I Were an Evil Overlord

Alessi was the first to be “let go.” In this brave, dead world I’d created, accountants were superfluous when budgetary concerns had to be cast aside in favor of basic survival needs. I’m sure he would have approved of my cost-saving decision-if I hadn’t slit his throat first. Krayle and Smythe followed him two months later. With no martial campaigns to map out, or intelligence to gather, I thought it best to downsize those departments on a permanent basis.

I have no doubt Elsinore could see her demise coming, might even have considered some ways in which to prevent it. And yet, her love for me was so great, so utterly blinding, that she could never bring herself to raise a hand against me, and apparently believed that I felt the same toward her.

Pitiful, really. You’d think a woman ordered to slay her own father would know better than to trust her life to the same man who’d given her that order… but no. At least she died knowing that her noble sacrifice would allow me to go on living a few days longer.

By the time the air grew heavy with the stench of the decaying bodies scattered throughout the facility, the repairs had been completed and the gateway reactivated. In six hours, it would be at full power, and then this blackened husk of a world would be just a distant memory. So with everything up and ru

Instead, I held a birthday party.

Gillian, my now emotionally traumatized niece, had actually turned six a month earlier, but with my top priority being the restoration of the portal, her special day hadn’t been properly celebrated. I promised to make it up to her then, and Josiah Plum always kept his word… in some form or another.

I found a stale angel food cake and a can of chocolate frosting in the back of my private pantry, then made a stop at my laboratory, where I added an extra ingredient to the frosting: a hint of one of my faster-acting poisons. Just to give it a little kick. Then it was off to the party in the main control room, where I found the remaining staffers had hung a large handmade ba

Charming.

The party was an overwhelming success, and the cake quickly devoured by one and all-except for me. I complained of a minor toothache. No sweets for me, thank you, so Gillian happily gorged herself on my slice, in addition to her own.

It didn’t take long for the poison to run its course. Gillian, having consumed the greatest amount, slipped away quickly… although I hadn’t expected her passing to be quite as disturbingly violent as it turned out. No doubt an allergic reaction to the drug. It was something to keep in mind for future reference…

The others died among a chorus of screams, whimpers, and vituperative utterances-directed at me, of course. Eventually, though, the bothersome noises trailed away, and the only sounds that could be heard in the control room were my labored breathing… and the hum of the dimensional portal.

And now I stand at the gateway, ready to cross over to a new world. There is nothing left here for me to come back to, so I’ve programmed the facility’s generators to overload minutes after my departure. One final, explosive gift for the dead planet I once called home. Yet I feel no sense of melancholy, no desire to choke back any tears, for a new home awaits on the far side of the portal, and I am eager to place my mark upon it.

The mark of its conqueror.

And should the inhabitants-whether costumed or not-foolishly decide to oppose me, then perhaps I will introduce them to the amazing, literally earth-shattering qualities of a special formula I like to call Professor Josiah Plum’s Controlled Detonation Compound (Patent Pending).

I’ll get it right next time.

In the end, I always do.

STRONGER THAN FATE by John Helfers

Deep within his Ebon Citadel, ensconced firmly if not altogether comfortably, on the Throne of Black Blades, Khazerai the Undying drummed his thin, ring-bedecked fingers on the cold arm of his chair, and wondered where it had all gone wrong.

How could it have come to this, when everything else has happened according to plan? he wondered. Granted, his rise to total dominion over the entire continent of Cauldera had not been without its set-backs, but overall things had worked out exactly as he had expected.

First, he had deposed the weak and ineffective ruler of the small kingdom of Yulen after quickly working his way up the royal chain of command to become the king’s personal adviser. A nip of poison in each of his twin sons’ drinking goblets to emotionally cripple the old man, and a series of successively larger glasses of wine before bedtime had ensured the old fool’s complete ignorance as Khazerai had slowly replaced the guards and staff with men loyal to him. When the coup happened in one swift stroke, the people were actually hailing him as their savior, which he was, he supposed, of a sort.

Next came the a

Khazerai then had his men trained and equipped with the best weapons and equipment that could be made or bought, and declared brutal war against the rest of the kingdoms. Often this a

Others thought themselves safe behind the ramparts of the Duchy of Tolera, which was twice the size of Yulen in both holdings and its military. But Khazerai’s spies had also brought that kingdom down from within, whispering to each of the three sons that he should be in charge when their father passed on. When the duke suddenly expired from an overdose of a sleeping draught in his nightly wine, each of the sons, thinking that both of the others had moved to kill their father and claim the throne, declared war on his siblings, dividing up the armies and navies and battling each other. All of which left the kingdom’s borders wide open. With such an invitation, how could Khazerai refuse?

Once again, the ruler of the Yulen Empire was hailed as a savior both behind and in front of the scenes. His men had brokered treaties with each of the three armies in turn, then destroyed each prince when the time was right; one vanquished on the battlefield, one assassination, and the third one by mob reprisal after it was learned about his (completely false, mind you) u

With Tolera’s rich farmland, ore-laden mountains, and healthy population under his control, the rest of the continent only needed to be mopped up, either by a show of diplomacy-usually by parking half of his army at a soon-to-be-subjugated land’s border while sending the other half around to flank. While his army was out consolidating his rule, Khazerai did not fear reprisal at home either. As soon as he had taken power in Yulen all those years ago, every able-bodied man and woman had been required to serve a two-year term in the military and spend one weekend a month and three weeks a year fulfilling their duties, making them more than able to fend off an invading army until he could return. But who would even dare try such a thing? No one, that’s who, he thought.