Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel Read Online Free

Everything you did had to be out of your own pocket and you spent about as much time running from heroes as you did fighting crime.
    Yeah, no thanks.
    So, with those unappealing options aside, supervillainy just sounded like the perfect fit for me. It had its risks, of course, but you’d get to keep 100 percent of the profits and gained automatic bad boy sex appeal with a lot of the groupies out there.
    I’d be a fool not to try supervillainy.
    There hadn’t been a real supervillain since the heroes won the War on Villainy back in 1993, when the Protectors captured, exiled, or killed all the villains who opposed them. Sure, every so often you’d hear of some idiot with a superpower pulling on a cape and a mask and declaring himself the next great villain, but the Protectors would usually take them out within a few hours.
    Idiots.
    These wannabe heels were being taken down by heroes with more experience filming commercials than fighting crime. The old heroes had gotten soft, and the young ones didn’t know what real villains were like.
    Even so, these villains-in-training didn’t properly prepare, didn’t think, and when push came to shove, rarely even fought back.
    I was going to be different.
    Better.
    No, the best .
    I knew that I could succeed where all of them had failed.
    While all of them rushed out to buy spandex and bust open the nearest bank, I studied. I absorbed all the information I could on historical supervillainy. When I should have been doing homework and worrying about graduation, I was reading Villainpedia articles and books while streaming every true crime special on supervillains I could find.
    During this time, I worked out with my powers some, enough to learn some pretty good tricks. I could levitate things pretty well, and was even better at breaking things. I could’ve spent more time trying to hone these, maybe do some real cool stuff like flying, but that would take years, and I couldn’t wait that long. Besides, I was confident that I was strong enough to deal with any problems, heroes or otherwise, that might come up.
    Only then, after I was confident in my strength, did I let myself work on my costume and codename.
    The costume part was easy. The thrift store two towns over had everything I was looking for: black leather jacket, black leather pants, and black leather boots. None of them were the right sizes, as the pants were too tight and the jacket was too big, but I figured I could make it work. Especially seeing as I had no sewing skills nor access to those tailors and polymers the heroes could afford.
    It took a separate trip to the bike shop (while sneaking some money out of my dad’s emergency stash) to get a motorcycle helmet, and another to the craft store to get the bright-blue puffy and spray paints I’d need. They wouldn’t sell me the spray paint, something about them not trusting teenagers, so I had to pay a not-too-terrible-smelling bum off the street to buy it for me.
    After getting some advice from my mother on how to use puffy paint (for an unrelated school project, of course), I set about decking out the jacket and pants with bold blue lightning bolts, while spray-painting the same pattern on the helmet. They didn’t come out straight, but I felt they got the point across. Then some duct tape and strategic cuts to an old electric-blue tablecloth I “borrowed” from grandma’s house gave me the cape to complete the costume.
    I looked good. In the right light, I could almost pass for a real hero or villain. I spent a lot of time in front of the bathroom mirror posing, taking a few selfies for posterity.
    So I had my costume. That just left the codename.
    After gathering all my online resources, I’d made a list of nearly five thousand supervillains that used codenames. Almost two-thirds of them were from English-speaking countries (stupid British Empire), and no way was I going to use one that had already been taken. I mean, the last thing a newbie villain wants to