due to the realities of the current real estate market, a supervillain who runs their superlair out of one of those rentable co-working spaces
Low budget supervillain just squatting in an abandoned Chipotle.
To keep a low profile they re-open it, but they know nothing about either fast food or Mexican food, they just don’t want Superpants McGee crashing in before they build out their underground bunker to tap into the local infrastructure without getting caught.
So they just hire like, out of work immigrants, anyone really who seems to know Spanish and how to cook. By an outrageous stroke of coincidence, one of his hires knows her way around a kitchen and has an encyclopedic knowledge of her mom’s recipes and spicy peppers. They’re making the best, most flavorful cuisine any Chipotle has every prepared. The supervillian just fakes all the papers for the staff, the whole place is funded by a virus siphoning off stock funds, they’re accidentally running the best Mexican restaurant in town because this villain doesn’t want to be bothered by anyone interrupting their work and does absolutely nothing to interfere with the staff.
Eventually the corporate offices of Chipotle notice the rogue franchise and begin to investigate, filing cease and desist orders, sending threats, until the police start showing up in greater numbers to the point where the staff finally has to go bother their boss, the supervillain. The villain walks out, sees a bunch of cops, and just straight up disintegrates all of them. Everyone has already gone back to work and basically no one saw a dozen cops just get turned to dust, so business as usual.
Unfortunately this triggers a bit of a domino effect, with more and more police showing up, actual hired guns from Chipotle, and in not much longer order private armies belonging to other fast food chains.
At some point, without quite realizing it, the villain has turned something of a corner with their plans for global domination taking a back seat to more important plans to eliminate corporate monopolies controlling food distribution, to provide a safe work environment, and to make the best Mexican food their sleepy little suburb has ever seen.
Superheroes are hard pressed to find an excuse to step in as the most nefarious outcomes seem to be undeserved communities having access to good food and a market reduction in health and safety violations.
Opening narration like:
This is not a story about the innate goodness of humanity. This is not a tale of redemption, or generosity. This is not about a good person who just keeps doing bad things. This is my story, and I am not a good person. I am greedy, and I want power and nothing, but nothing, is going to stand in my way.
This is a story about me, and these are the people who got in my way. And this… this is my restaurant.
I made so many typos in this.
First of all: I didn’t see the word “abandoned” at first and thought they were just setting up shop in an active Chipotle, like one of those people who buys one thing and sits there on their laptop for the whole day.
Second: Supervillains are all about branding and putting their symbol everywhere, why wouldn’t they change the name?
They wanted to be undercover, so they did their best to approximate what they think a Chipotle is, to avoid attention. However, they have zero interest in the petty details of fast food restaurants and did approximately zero research. Their idea was that they would draw the least attention by having Mexican food in a Mexican restaurant and zero excuses to be investigated by any kinda law or health enforcement. Which is why they accidentally made the most obviously fake Chipotle ever.
They’re kinda down and out, for a supervillain at the start, just had their last base destroyed by heroes, all their equipment wrecked, nothing to their name but a few million dollars which is a pittance by superscience standards. Chipotle was just the first building they found which looked generic and empty.
Of course, the ending to this whole story is when the ground opens up and they bring forth the doomsday weapon they’ve been making this whole time. After all, they do still want global domination.
