"You big stinky monster! You're going down!" the lad shouted, his absurd cape almost tangling as he leapt forward.
Doctor Evil let the lad hit him, faking that it bowled the much larger man over. "Argh! Curses!" he cried, the voice modulator on his helmet making his voice nasally and appropriately campy.
The boy smashed a fist into his helmet, making the villain's head ring. No matter. He could endure a few blows from a ten-year-old, and he made cries like he was getting seriously hurt.
"Bluebird, stop!" his ally, a female shapeshifter, cried. "He's been beaten!"
Doctor Evil mentally nodded. Good, good. A beaten foe shouldn't be brutalized--that was bad heroing.
Bluebird gritted his teeth and stopping hitting, though he stayed on the villain's chest. "He needs to be stopped Wondera! We can't let him get away with this!"
'This' in question was the robbery of a near-empty bank. The tellers had all fled, sans one who cowered in the corner. Doctor Evil had clocked the damage on everyone--nothing the cities healers couldn't fix. He'd pay the costs, of course.
For Doctor Evil was not a villain. He was a trainer--a way of letting young heroes learn the ropes against an opponent that wouldn't smear them across the wall, like many, including himself, could.
"Let the police handle it!" Wondera cried. "We can't kill him!"
"Neh heh heh, kill me? Oh, you call me evil!" he taunted. "Go on boy, do it! Let me see you try!"
It was a silly taunt, one that an adult would roll their eyes at. But the supervillains an adult would face would have much, much better taunts and offers. Better to learn to equate 'villain speech' with 'stupid' now, not later.
He had a moment of curiosity as Bluebird hesitated, then sighed in relief when the boy turned his face and muttered, "You aren't worth it."
"Good boy," he said in his head, but out-loud he said, "And just what will you do with me, neh?"
"Wondera, can you turn into rope?" Bluebird asked. She nodded, and did so. "Imma tie him up!"
Doctor Evil hesitated--he couldn't burst the bonds without hurting the girl, and as a supervillain he had to get away. The police had enough work without helping him stage a fake prison break. So, as Bluebird got off him to roll him over, he did a jump forward.
"Neh heh heh, not so fast!" he cried. "I must--"
An alert came in on his helmet. Danger. Grade S alert. All heroes in area respond.
The kids, of course, couldn't hear him, and as the news fed through his hidden headphones, he ran around and dodged them in a silly way. But inwardly he was sweating. As a trainer, he had to make sure they didn't go after this--they were grade C at best, not nearly experienced enough. But he also couldn't just not respond--he only got alerts when he was absolutely needed.
An idea popped in his head. From his cartoony utility belt he pulled a small container, and threw it on the ground. A smoke cloud filled the area, and the heroes coughed weakly, before falling asleep.
Doctor Evil's helmet filtered out the chemicals, and he quickly tied up the kids with rope that was both soft and incredibly strong--only a special knife would cut it, and that mean either police or another hero could do it. That would keep them out of the action for now.
He also secured the civilian, just in case. Then, he placed a monitor discreetly in the building, and sprinted outside.
It took about two seconds to identify the issue: an alien invasion. More worrying, he didn't see any other heroes in the area. The city was small, but not that small, there was a few. Then he remembered: it was a conference. Ah. Perfect invasion time.
Rubbing his helmet, he activated the jets on his boots--silly but functional--and flew up, towards the swarm of spaceships that darkened the sky, and fiddled with his suit's power limiter.
Most of his tween and pre-teen students assumed his power was super-intellect. Leaving aside the broad and non-accurate nature of the term, it wasn't. They thought it was because he always used gadgets, had a fancy mechanical suit, and never used anything flashy that he must be a genius. He teen trainees accurate guessed that he had an inventor on-call--though 'evil scientist' was inaccurate, as she was neither evil nor a scientist, but an engineer. But even they didn't have a clue what his ability was.
The suit shivered, and the nanomachines that made it up shifted from rigid to lax, from a metal to a silk. The colors changed from the blacks and reds befitting a villain to the golds and whites of his hero identity: Flare.
As he exited the atmosphere, where the aliens were setting up, he let the power within him well up. His suit wasn't there to aid him.
It was there to stop him.
Energy gathered at his fingertips, white-hot plasma ready to shoot out. He closed his eyes, concentrated, and then let force a nuclear burst of white-hot energy that would have been catastrophic within the atmosphere. The ships were not prepared, and a third of them were blown away in the single blast.
Opening his eyes, Flare shot beams of plasma from his hands, hitting ship after ship. The power flowed through him, from a well so deep he wondered how he could contain it at times. See, his power was simple: energy absorption.
The kids and teens who looked up Doctor Evil's record would find lots of destruction in his early days and more reversible crimes later. There was a reason for that. As a child, he couldn't contain the energy he absorbed from kinetic force, heat, hell even sunlight; and would explode, nuking an area.
The league found him, terrified and on the run, and offered to help. They made his suit, which allowed him to re-direct the energy within him and thus release it before the danger point.
But his name was tarnished, so the League made a plan, and an offer: be a superkid trainer, as 'Doctor Evil', and they'd wipe the slate clean of the petty crimes he'd done to survive.
He only used Flare when necessary. And as ship after ship exploded, so were cut to pieces, the rest tried to attack. Any laser fire only fueled him, fed him, and Flare mused that if he really wanted to, he could be an excellent supervillain.
The last of the ships finally exploded, and Flare, running a little low on air, descended to Earth. He took a huge breath once in atmosphere, feeling exhausted--though that tiredness faded from the heat of re-entry. Which was good, because he still had kids to care for.
Landing back down in front of the bank, he quickly checked the empty streets, before shifting his suit back to Doctor Evil. Checking his clock, he saw not five minutes had passed--good, the kids would be waking up.
Walking in, he rehearsed the lesson he'd give, the lines he would say, the role he would play. Yes, he could be a real supervillain. But what would be the fun in that?
