They didnât call you a superhero when you started. You didnât claim to be one, either.Â
You didnât have a costume or a sponsor or training or anything like that. You were just a kid who had just seen your entire world knocked down. So, in a moment of childish determination and belief, you thought you could fix it all.Â
The first emergence of your powers wasnât a huge triumphal moment. Moving stone and earth and steel doesnât matter if you donât know anything about how to stack things up so they donât fall back over again.Â
Your first attempts crashed right back down again. That was your first lesson.Â
Even when you got good at what you did, they didnât call you a superhero.Â
You still didnât have a costume, but youâd gotten your hands on every architectural diagram you could and done plenty of practice. Then you started to show up to the aftermath of battles and put them quietly together again.Â
But it still wasnât right. You couldnât do much if you didnât have the diagrams for the buildings demolishedâif the city planners didnât let you have them.
So you stitched together a costume, something bright and colorful that would grab the attention of the cameras on the scene afterward as you tried to work.Â
âLook! Someoneâs putting those houses back together!âÂ
The effect was instantaneous. The moment youâd grabbed public attention, there were requests for interviews, think piecesâeach giving you a platform to ask for the help you needed.Â
This was your second lesson.Â
You didnât call yourself a superhero, or come up with the name yourself. You were never really good about all of those things. But once the attention was on you, you got offers from managers and sponsors. One, a blonde with perfect hair who introduced herself as âjust SandyâÂ
âI donât have any money.â
âThatâs alright,â she said, her grin showing spectacularly white teeth. âAll I need is for you to take on some gigs and give me a cut.âÂ
Sandy set you up. She got you the costume people would know you for, gave you the name, managed all of the PR and set up interviews. Your fame skyrocketed, and soon you were seeing yourself on billboards.Â
Soon you had access to hundreds of city plans and blueprints. After enough attacks happened, you learned them well enough to hardly need to reference them. After a few years, you could rebuild a tower in a matter of minutes, and cities in a matter of days.Â
Your powers evolved as your understanding did. Soon, you could read the entire layout of a building just from touching. Then, just from touching the ruins. You no longer need blueprints, thenâjust your own hands on the metal.
The gigs were simple, tooâjust fixing up hero bases after theyâd gotten wrecked in attacks. Feel good work that paid well.Â
With the help of many people, you do more. Thatâs the third lesson.
The problems started with the homeless thing.Â
You were in between projects and itching to use your skills more. Creating homes for the homeless seemed like the perfect, feel good project to flex on.Â
It was, for the first few weeks. Then came the backlash. City dwellers crying foul, saying they hadnât agreed to an enormous den of undesirables in their backyards. There were protests, white suburban moms holding up signs about drug dealers and rapists and criminals.Â
It wasnât your choice in the end. Eventually the city mandated that you deconstruct your shelter, or they would do it the hard way.Â
Regretfully, you took it down. You did not look in the eyes of the people that had sheltered there as they had to go on their way.
It was the same story in every area you tried to build shelters in afterwards.
âCan we just buy the land to build them houses?â you asked Sandy.Â
She clicked her perfect teeth. âSorry, there are laws against building new things in the city. You need mayoral approval to start a new construction project.â
âWell, there are already too many empty houses,â she said matter of factly.Â
You stared. âWhat? Then letâs just buy those and put people in them!â
âYou donât have that much money,â she pointed out. âNot when youâve been giving it away every year. Also, it wouldnât do as much good as you think. Just think of the effect on the marketââ
This is not why you fired Sandy. But it was the first time you thought of it.
Opinion started to turn against you when you began using your interviews and platform to talk about this problem, to demand permission to build or otherwise help. Exasperation turned to hostility when you started to reshape the landscape to be softer to the unhoused, anywayâwhen you created caves in parks where people could easily shelter, or made every bench large and soft so that anyone could have a place to sleep.
Laws and ordinances passed, all regulating the amount of alterations one was allowed to make to public property. About how many changes you were allowed to make as you were reconstructing a city. The fines for altering things started to heap up.Â
Firing Sandy didnât help. Your good reputation was always as much her work as yours, but after what she said aboutâyou couldnât.Â
You learned not to read the scathing opinion pieces on you. That was the hardest lesson yet.
Of course, shit really hit the fan when you were contracted to rebuild another base.
It was a simple enough decision for you. You found out they had been building drones and firing them on civilians. That at this base Techno has been building surveillance technology that would be able to monitor every single person in the country at every moment, and be able to fire upon them with impunity the moment suspicious activity was detected.Â
It made you rethink every base you had built in the past.
âNo,â you told them.Â
âYou already signed your contractââ
Instead of dignifying that with an answer, you transmuted the entire area into the rockiest, most impossible terrain you could. Every trick you had learned to make land easier to build onâyou reversed it, turning what had once been the base into a precarious canyon of jagged, diamond-hard steel, nearly impossible to remove or build on.
Stopping the construction of the stadium was the next kicker.Â
âYouâre insane!â said the heroes who came to remove you.
âThey evicted a hundred families for this!â you spat. âThose were peopleâs homes. Itâs disgusting that itâs allowed for the government to do thatâmuch less to do it for-for a stadium? For entertainment?âÂ
And so you stood there for the next 48 hours, deconstructing every single thing they tried to put on their ill-gotten land.Â
Then, they sent the heroes to stop you. You were never the best at fighting, so they knocked you out quickly.
They donât call you a superhero now. Behind bars, you glance over every thinkpiece and profile about the worldâs most beloved hero fell. You read speculation about evil, greed, madness. All things youâve heard about âvillainsâ who came before you.Â
It makes you wonder about those people. If maybe you had misjudged them, too.
But thatâs alright, you realize after the sting of it fades away. That was the second lesson, after allâmore than anything, you need people to be talking. And for all the bitterness in these words, you realize grimly that people will never stop talking.
Once youâve thought things through, you decide youâre ready. The steel of your cell melts away. After all, there is no prison that can contain you. No earth or stone or metal can withstand your will.Â
Your legacy as the worldâs greatest supervillain begins with a left turn down the hallway, right to where the other villains are kept.
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