Short Stories By Rebel 28426

1. Finding a Villain

    So, here is my first short story for this collection inspired by this prompt here, http://www.writersdigest.com/prompts/hiring-new-villain I didn't quite follow the prompt because my writing just took off in a different direction. Feedback is welcome! I hope that you enjoy this short story.

    My novel was coming together great, the plot was exciting and humorous, and the characters were all wonderful. All except the villain, and as the villain is one of the most important parts of a story I wasn't going to stand for it, but what to do? I couldn't scrap the entire story, no no no, I had come too far for that. Then, the solution came to me like a ray of sunlight piercing through the crowds. I would use a villain finder app. After all there's an app for everything nowadays, so there had to be one for finding villains.

    After much extensive searching through the app store, I had found the perfect app. Simply called Villain Finder with the description reading, “the perfect app for finding a villain for your story or general mischief”. A little bit weird of a description but it had the best rating so I decided to go with it.

    Practically bouncing up and down with excitement I pressed the install button only to get the worst pop-up ever. “Insufficient storage. Device does not have enough storage to download this app”. Cursing my small hard drive I exited out of the app store, wondered why I couldn't delete some of the apps that came with my tablet that I never used such as the newsstand, and eventually settled on clearing my tablet of some old selfies and memes.

    Of course, once I had enough storage space the app took forever to download. So I spent my time twiddling my thumbs, shooting off some of my Nerf blasters, humming the theme songs of shows, and messing around with my rotating chair. Finally, finally, the app was ready to go and find me the perfect villain.

    Firing up the app I was greeted with an account creation screen. Borrowing information from one of my other characters from my story, after all, you should never use your real information while online if possible. Still getting the hang of the app I went to the browsing tab and started putting the villains into two categories, maybe and no.

    The first villain was an evil wizard who wanted to kill off all non wizard humans and become immortal. An interesting idea but my story didn't involve much magic, so no. Next up was an ancient being who was plotting to overthrow and destroy the gods. Again, my story didn't have any gods so that wouldn't work. A little bit discouraged I continued on and found the first villain who could work. An evil dictator who kept the rest of the population in check by kidnapping their kids and forcing the people to watch them fight in a yearly battle royale to ftye death.

    Scrolling through some more options I eventually settled on a person who wanted to conquer the world, because hey, this is my story and if I want to have a boring and unoriginal villain I'll do it. Of course I'd expand on their character and try to justify their desire to conquer the world.

    Clicking on the button that said “choose this villain” I was suddenly presented once more with a loading bar. I repeated my actions from before only to be interrupted by a loud cry of, “what the, where am I?” Standing in the middle of the room was the villain that I had selected. Scrambling for my phone I realized that I had selected “send villain to me” instead of “put villain in my story”. Quickly rectifying my mistake I sent the villain into my story despite his protests of, “no! I need to conquer this world too!”

    Disaster averted I leaned back in my chair and let out a sigh of relief. “That was a close one. Also, shouldn't it have taken about five business days for my villain to arrive via mail? Oh, the app automatically signed me up for the premium version. Man, I hate when that happens!”