Being the administrative assistant for an enormous evil supervillain organization is less fun than it sounds.
Sure, I’m a secretary for D.O.O.M, Inc, but working for them isn’t a guarantee of glamour. The strangeness of most things and the novelty wore off a long time ago. Still, as long as I’m writing my official defection letter with this job application, I might as explain why, and give you an idea of what I do around here.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my job. It isn’t for the faint of heart—if one is afraid of breaking a nail, working for supervillains is hardly an ideal career choice. That’s why I get the manicurists to give me titanium tips. I digress.
Why do I want to join the other side, you’re wondering, when I’ve spent so long interacting with you already? After all, I can guarantee that whether you’re an admin staff member like myself or a manager, you have probably heard my voice on the phone, requesting insurance information. I’m one of the front desk people, and you barely know my name, but you know me extremely well nonetheless. It’s the reason I’m not wording this as formally as usual for a cover letter. We’re on the same side, in a sense. I can’t ask you to think of me as ‘one of the good guys’ yet, I know that has to be earned, but maybe if you understand more about my job, you’ll see my reasons for defecting.
I have to admit that there are certain perks that never quite lose their charm. Calling down a batch of henchmen to the lower lobby to deal with the heroes who drop by does become routine. Watching an intrepid yet hapless captive romantic partner being slowly lowered into a lava pit full of fire sharks, however, always improves my day.
Then there are the benefits packages—perhaps the riskiest part of leaving this job will be abandoning my benefits. Full health and dental, complete accident coverage including vaporization, irreparable frostbite, evil clones, and alien abduction or enslavement in addition to the routine ‘dismemberment or death’ inclusions is a pretty sweet deal. The fact that they cover 50% of my salon visits and include a gym pass with ten personal training sessions a year—evil has to look good—is more icing on the cake.
So, all in all, it’s a decent package. Or, it was.
I should preface further exposition by mentioning my most unique assets. There aren’t many women who can calm a pack of ravening rat-wolves with a single look, and the titantium-reinforced skeleton and unique cybernetic enhancements mean that I’m technically a bit more than human myself. The interfaced network on my systems makes Google’s look like an infantile joke, even if it does mean that I’m technically mostly AI. It’s not a procedure you can request from standard health care coverage, and it was done for free here. You wouldn’t believe how useful an in-brain scheduler is for updating morning torture sessions and ensuring that minions are cloned on time.
Admittedly, there are downsides. I’ve been here for a year and a half, and that’s considered formidable. An uncomfortable number of my predecessors and coworkers have been eaten by unspeakable tentacled horrors—not just on dates. And, of course, we’re often in the line of fire when hero teams hit the building. Force-fields around one’s desk are only so effective, hence my upgrades.
Unfortunately, being partly computerized—bionic, if you prefer, though it’s more than that—hasn’t given me the godlike patience true computers and AIs have. You can only page the lab about a hyena-lizard-chicken escape so many times before the pall of cleaning up all that dung afterwards kills any excitement. Summoning the cleaners, forwarding our insurance bills to accounts payable every time The Strong Arm breaks the door down dramatically…it has become tiring.
Then, too, there’s the public vs. private image discrepancies with the villains. When El Destruyado, Hell’s Own Luchador, charges into the fray against La Esperanza and they smash the downtown core again, he seems terrifying. Thunder, lightning, and wrestling moves that would incapacitate anyone in the human leagues in a single blow are not to be trifled with. But when the same man comes into the office with a double-chocolate biscotti crammed into the lower half of his mask, latte in one hand and ePhone in the other, it’s a different story. When Dr. May Hem has once again unleashed the wrath of science on New New York or Toronto, she’s a sight to be seen. The way she awkwardly flirts with Venus Fly Trap around the water cooler, though, shows the body language of a different woman. And don’t get me started on The Merciless Blob’s Friday snack binges, or the time I caught The Frostinator crying deeply into the receiver as an awkward sex trade worker comforted him on speakerphone.
