3: Everybody's Got an Angle
Previously on And When Two Villains Woo, mysterious new superhero John Cute threw Candystriper and her stolen police car out into the void of space! Fortunately she survived, but meanwhile the thrudanium she carried has gone missing! We return to our story already in progress…
The Malevolent Med-Student didn’t find out until the morning afterwards that Candystriper had both escaped, which was good, and lost the thrudanium, which was bad. He was especially frustrated because the morning news was irritatingly vague on who now had possession of the thrudanium. Worse, just when the top-of-the-hour broadcast was turning over to a news show for deeper analysis and commentary, a group of other inmates who’d wandered into the day room that morning decided they wanted to watch something else instead.
The best the Malevolent Med-Student could make out, what they all wanted to watch was some sort of sporting event which had reached the championship level. He had no interest in which event it was: football, basketball, hockey, it could’ve been running around with a giant parachute for all he cared. Besides, he had possession of the remote.
“Give it,” demanded a very large man who had emerged as the other guys’ leader.
“No,” the Malevolent Med-Student said, standing on principle.
“I said, give it,” said the other man, standing himself, and turning out to be even bigger than he’d first appeared. Only then did the Malevolent Med-Student recognize him as the Warthog. The Warthog wasn’t what you’d call one of the city’s top supervillains, but what he lacked in brains he very much made up in the brawn department.
The Malevolent Med-Student knew he had no choice. He reluctantly surrendered over the remote and walked away, head high, as the others jeered and laughed at him. “Guard,” he said, with as much dignity as he could muster, “I’d like to return to my cell, please.”
Fighting a smile, the officer obliged. The Malevolent Med-Student was soon back on his bunk, alone, pondering where he had gone wrong. On the bright side, at least Candystriper was out now. His henchwoman would be making plans to come for him, he knew. That was what minions were for, after all. The idea that Candystriper might want to rescue him for reasons other than her job, or even that she might not want to rescue him at all, never even crossed his mind.
Just then he heard a distant boom. “Ah,” he said. “That’ll be her now. About time-”
He heard a second boom, much closer. Alarms started going off. Then the wall of his cell smashed open, nearly knocking him down. He was just about to upbraid his loyal minion for her carelessness in scattering debris and dust everywhere (“I could’ve been killed!”) when he realized that it wasn’t Candystriper standing in the gaping hole in the wall.
“Who the heck are-” he began, when to his outrage he was unceremoniously grabbed by the scruff off his uniform collar, heaved out of the cell, and carried off into the clear blue sky without so much as a by-your-leave.
Candystriper was lying in the hospital bed at St. Cupertino, waiting for her discharge papers and trying to figure out exactly what had happened. The doctor said she seemed fine, although he intimated strongly that she ought to reconsider her life choices, particularly the supervillain henchwoman part. Candystriper mostly ignored him. She had other things to think about anyway.
The last she remembered, she was flying out inside a stolen police car into space, then she woke up in the hospital with doctors fussing over her and all that. That was the problem. She knew John Cute had thrown the car with her in it. Had he changed his mind and rescued her, dropped her off at the hospital to make amends? He’d taken the thrudanium for sure; at least, the thrudanium was missing, and somehow she didn’t think one of the docs had made off with it. But then, why had he rescued her instead of leaving her to drift away into oblivion in space? Had it all been just an extreme version of the whole “Dangle the Bad Guy over a Ledge and See if They Talk” play?
Somehow that didn’t seem like John Cute. She’d gotten the definite and terrifying sense that he’d meant it when he’d thrown the car. Candystriper wasn’t the most logical of henchpeople, but even she could follow that train of reasoning. “So, if he didn’t save me, then who-”
No sooner had she asked the question than a ship’s teleport beam locked on to her coordinates at last and she disappeared in a burst of mauve and violet light.
A cliffhanger!!