The air was cold outside. Somehow, it had been warmer inside the warehouse. Even without a heating system the walls still kept out the wind, which carried a freezing malice to it.
On any other night, Luke would’ve bundled up inside.
But not tonight. Tonight, Luke likes being outside. The dark sky above was welcomed him and the many lights and signs ahead on the horizon leading all the way to the innards of Venus City beckoned him.
He felt… calm.
Complete calm.
All his immediate rage had been taken out on Puck, who had been taken to the nearest hospital by Bloom. Well, not taken per say, but definitely thrown out a vehicle close enough to one to receive urgent care.
The thoughts of Reggie and that whole new quest still danced on the edge of his thoughts, but Luke couldn’t be bothered with them for tonight.
Tonight, all that mattered to Luke was the was that the job was finished for now. He’d committed the crime. In fact, he committed a multitude of them in the course of enacting his vengeance.
And it was freeing.
To be able, for just once, to do what he wanted to do. Without anyone in his way to stop him. To live out the fantasy in his head and enact upon what he thought was right. It was amazing.
Even when the dopamine and adrenaline had left, the underlying satisfaction with his life, for just the select few hours previous, was like nothing he remembered experiencing in his whole life.
It felt right, it felt fantastic, it felt addicting.
Luke realised from the moment he felt the sting through his baseball bat as he crushed Puck’s knees that he wouldn’t be the same after the blood stopped dripping down Puck’s pants. After he was packed up and piled away.
After Luke woke up the next morning.
He wouldn’t be the same.
I can't go back to the way things were before. The way I was before.
Luckily for Luke, he didn’t have to go back to the way things were before.
And the catalyst for that change floated in front of him, writing his future with glowing red words.
[Would you like to claim the rewards for completing {Daily Dose of Evil}?
[Yes/No]
“Sounds good to me,” Luke spoke aloud, leaning against the railing that overlooked the street.
[You earned 100EXP]
[You have earned the Skill {Punchline}]
[You have earned a {Status}]
[Please prepare for Ether integration]
Huh… it really is like a game-
“Wait.” Luke paused. “Ether what now?”
Then it happened. For a brief instance, System’s Seven words disappeared as the black sky above seemed to stretch out around him. The protections of the Globe faltered momentarily as small creatures of light crawled out from the sky above and opened. Some were eyes that watched him, whispering an expression of curiosity into his brain.
Others were teeth that gnashed in the sky, begging him for just a bite. Just a morsel of his mortal shell in exchange for secrets unfathomable.
The whispers in the dark encroached on his mind as Luke looked up in indescribable horror. The bastions of the end times called his name-
Then everything popped back to normal, eyes, teeth, lights and whispering being eaten by reality itself.
[Ether Integration complete, Status is ready to be viewed]
“Huh… can you warn me next time you pull that shit,” Luke said, suddenly a lot less calm as he found it hard to breathe.
Gazing at the horrible truths of the universe on a weekend night was not something he wanted to make a habit of. Nor the irradiation sensation of coming back to reality a little… different. Luke was tempted to call how he felt better, but his whole body radiated a certain sense of discomfort. For a moment, his skin felt more like clothes than a part of him, and that was something the cashier struggled to grapple with.
But then that brief feeling left his body feeling light and warm like when you’d just got off the treadmill after a brief warm-up. Except every part of him now radiated a bit of extra something that hadn’t been there before, all flowing from that special place in his heart. His power.
The same power had been there before, but now Luke realised it had been hollow. Filled with energy, but no purpose to drive it through. A hammer without a nail. Now, however, something new had sneaked its way inside, sitting snugly and just waiting for him to use it.
All it took was a little nudge of focus, and the power inside his heart bloomed.
[Status]
[Name: Luke Welter]
[Age: 22]
[Class: Supervillain]
[V/L: 2](0/200EXP)
[Infamy: Nobody](0.5)
[Persona: Locked]
[Status points]
[Mastermind: 0]
[Brute: 0]
[Rogue: 0]
[Swindler: 0]
[I.T Factor: 0]
[Free points: 5]
[Active skills: {Punchline}(Lvl: 1)]
[Passive Skills: None]
[Quests: (Medium){Rabbit Hole}]
That’s a whole lotta numbers. Luke thought, scanning over his Status. He’d played video games before, so he knew what he was looking at, although it did feel surreal to see his own power treat him like a character.
“I get the feeling this might make my FPS worse,” Luke laughed, enjoying the sight. It was partially a joke, but also partially a legitimate concern.
The cashier got the gist pretty quickly, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t some legitimate confusion mixed in. For example, Luke understood perfectly that his free points were numerical values he could individually distribute to each status point. But on the other end, he had absolutely no clue what any of those status points did individually.
He had guesses, but until he tested them, they would remain just that. For the sake of it, Luke whipped out his phone, momentarily cringing at how late it was before googling the terms for each status point. An interesting thing immediately stuck out in comparison to games he’d played before.
All my stats are at zero. From experience, that was almost never the case, and from practicality, it made even less sense if these stats represented something preexisting.
If Brute has something to do with strength and things around that, then it can’t be zero, can it? Because if he had zero strength, then he wouldn’t be capable of moving anything. He pondered that for a moment, trying to come up with an answer. Ideas popped into his head, but none of them lasted long.
“Enjoying the view.” A voice commented to his side, causing Luke to jump as he noticed Bloom leaning against the rail not too far from him.
“I uh…” He really needed to come up with a good excuse for staring at his Status and System Seven as a whole. “Was just enjoying the view.”
“It is nice. The perks of living further away from the centre of the Globe.” Bloom- no, Cassandra, admitted. “Always nice to be able to see the Tower.”
Luke couldn’t say he agreed. Although the headquarters of E.R.A.O. in Venus City was meant to radiate a sense of security, the cashier had always found it a bit intimidating. A giant obelisk of white, taller than any building in Venus City, dedicated exclusively to maintaining the safety of the Globe. How easy it would be for the people inside to watch and know what he was doing every waking minute was enough to make Luke nervous.
A halo overhead was necessary in the world they lived in, but if it doubled as a leash, Luke could hardly say he enjoyed it.
“It’s a pretty building.” Luke nodded, not wanting to piss Cassandra off.
She turned and gave him a funny look.
“It’s gone.” She noted.
“Puck?” Luke asked, confused. He was already well aware the Supe was long gone.
“No, that look,” Cassandra said, pointing at his eyes. “The intensity you had disappeared.”
“Well yeah, achieved what I felt so driven to do,” Luke said, a little embarrassed. Now he was more clear-headed, the last twenty-four hours felt like a much wilder ride than they’d felt when he was living them.
“It’s a bit sad, I liked it that way. Like a reminder of a much younger, dumber me.” Cassandra said softly, with a hint of solemn before lighting up again, stretching in the cold night. “Anyway, I suppose that my part of the deal is done. The Pit opens in a couple of days, I assume you’ll keep your end of the bargain?”
She gave him a suspicious grin that scared Luke for just a moment before he realised she was just pulling his chain. The cashier laughed, nodding.
“I’ll be there.” He answered.
“Good, I’d kill you if you weren’t,” Cassandra said, walking away and waving him off. “Make sure to get a better outfit and come up with a name. You’ll need one to get registered.”
The supervillainess left him with that, waltzing off into the darkness to do god knows what. Considering how he’d seen her act over the last day or so, what she did in her free time couldn’t be that bad. In fact, a small part of Luke felt like he’d almost… misjudged her. Only seeing Bloom and not the person she was most of the time when she wasn’t feeding turf enemies to her plants.
I think she’s still a little bit of a monster. But she was a pleasant monster, and Luke kind of liked that. Although he didn’t like what she said about his outfit. What did she mean by better? He felt he looked like the perfect image of villainy. Maybe some things could be upgraded to a higher quality, and he definitely needed some prodigy-tech, but it wasn’t that bad, was it?
“She's just jealous of my supervillain swagger,” Luke whispered, turning back to gaze at the night again.
If there was one thing he didn’t want to do at that moment, it was think of a name. Names were hard, and they also tended to be permanent with Supes. Once you called yourself something, it tended to stick unless you had a very targeted and aggressive marketing campaign. Luke didn’t have the sorta cash to fork over for a rebrand, so he would get stuck with the first name he spouted.
Something so permanent should not be decided when he hadn’t slept in the past thirty-something hours.
“Don’t worry, kid, you’ll think of something good.” A voice said to his side, carried by a cold breeze.
Luke recognised the eerie, static-sounding tone in an instant, snapping his head to the side it echoed. There was nothing there but a concrete path and more metal railing. No masked man who’d brought him back from the dead. Even though that was who that voice belonged to.
“I need to go to sleep.” Luke groaned.
More than anything, he needed to stop talking to himself.
***********************
Dawn light that would soon change to that ever-present light shined through his window, blinding the cashier as he blinked the sleep out of his eyes. The familiar smell of pinewood and cinnamon told him he was indeed back in his apartment, but the ache in his back made him feel otherwise.
Luke sat up in his bed, almost surprised by the sight of the blank black sheets and the sheer comfort. It was strange to feel almost unfamiliar waking up in your own bed, but he hadn’t done it for what felt like ages.
His bedroom was as bland as he remembered it. Same boring dresser. Same indistinct sports posters from an age where athletes were the true peak of humanity. Same TV with a broken corner. Everything was the same as he’d left it. But it felt different.
Because Luke was different.
If I say the day seems brighter, I think I might hurl. The cashier thought internally, sinking back into his warm, comfortable sheets. He vaguely recalled how he’d stumbled in last night, using the car Bloom had rented for their antics. Part of him wanted to stay in bed and enjoy it until noon… but he did need to return that car.
Or else Bloom might skin him.
Wait no, can’t think of her like an absolute monster after she helped me. Luke chided himself, pushing his body up. The motivation he built up to maintain being productive died the moment he felt a nagging pain flare in the side of his ribs.
“The table,” Luke recalled painfully, lying back down as the memory of Puck throwing furniture at him danced across his mind.
I’m going back to bed. He could sleep off some of the pain and some of the exhaustion that weighed on his body. One night of sleep didn’t seem to quite have the healing effect Luke needed. Hell, the only place that felt good on the entirety of his body was his heart, which pounded with that same super energy that belonged to him now.
That’s something I’ve got to do today. The cashier had many, many questions about his new powers that had been unlocked last night. With how close his entry into the Pit was, he needed to figure them out sooner rather than later. Out of sheer curiosity, Luke mentally prodded his heart. For a second, he was worried nothing would happen, but nope, his Status popped into existence in front of his face, displaying the same confusing array of stats he’d seen last night. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
“Problems for later,” Luke mumbled, snuggling back into his pillow. A bit of relaxation therapy after all the shit that had gone down would be good-
The phone on his bedside table buzzed.
“GOD DAMMIT!”
Luke angrily shot a hand out, retrieving his phone and thumbing to whoever disturbed his slumber.
Hey Luke, how are things? Listen, we’re a little understaffed today and could use a hand in stock, if you’re up for it. No pressure if you aren’t up for it. - Bossman
“Hah, nope.”
Nathan wasn’t a super bad boss, but he hadn’t ever done anything to earn Luke’s loyalty. So Luke decided to just ignore him and go back to sleep. It wasn’t like he was going to lose his job over not coming into work when he was meant to be dying.
Unfortunately, System Seven had other plans.
[New Quest unlocked]
[(Stage 1)Quest available]
[(Stage 1)Double Life:
Description:
Every good crime has an alibi. Every good villain has a life to mask the truth beneath.
And who’s to say the lie cannot benefit the truth?
Evil can spawn from anything, from home to the workplace, and you have to see fit that all your actions are infested with terrible machinations.
Invest yourself in the life you live now, aiming for a promotion at work, a group of friends or even just a new hobby. Any area that can be used as a distraction, cover, resource or advancement in towards super evil intentions will be counted. Living in any way that will advance your dark powers will also be counted towards the quest.
Reward: 1000EXP, minor increase to Infamy and access [Persona] System feature]
And of course, my last respite is taken from me
Luke got up and forced himself out of bed. The price of his power was already starting to rear its head. Because now everything he did was part of the game.
The System by which he now operated.
 
Still, Luke supposed it was interesting that his power was trying to force him to act normal. He could understand why, too. System Seven may have been weird, but it was hardly the strangest power archetype someone had Exodus’d their way into.
 
He sleepily walked his way to his coffee machine, all the while texting his boss that he was in fact available.
 
“Thank you, you beautiful piece of machinery,” Luke mumbled, tapping his coffee machine on its side as it spat out liquid gold.
As he sipped it and looted through heaps of clothes for his work attire, Luke idly tugged on the System and perused its many offerings. There were many things on it he frankly didn’t understand, like Infamy.
 
But he understood Skills perfectly fine, and now he had one.
 
Punchline sounded vague but exciting. Luke assumed, based on the word punch that it was an offensive power of some kind. Which Luke would happily take, because he didn’t have any powers besides it.
 
The more he looked at it, the more he felt a little throb in his heart. A little… room?
A new screen popped up.
 
[Punchline(Lv 1):
Type: Active
 
Description: Every good fight has comedic relief, and now, every fight will be a good fight with Punchline; the one-and-done key to absolute offence, with a helping of humour mixed in.
Upon successful physical attack through whatever medium the user desires, an effect of the user's choice may be applied.
 
This choice is limited to the user's power, imagination, and mental control, scaling proportionally in effectiveness to how funny it is.
 
The effect also scales with I.T Factor/Brute/Rogue]
And immediately I have questions. Like, what was the minimum threshold for “attack” and just how far could this affect the skill creations be pushed? Could he smash atoms with it? Create fusion? Condense the matter he touched into a black hole.
 
And he knew that all those ideas were just scratching the surface. The greatest upside of this skill showed itself almost immediately.
Versatility. Since the effect wasn’t limited to a set scope, it could realistically do anything. Although the caveat gave Luke an inkling of why it was the way it was.
 
“It’s a skill that works off humour,” Luke mumbled, swiping his hair back as he put on his work clothes.
 
That could be very, very punishing. Mainly because it depended on whose humour it scaled off. If it was his… that could be worked around pretty easily with the right mental conditioning. If it were others, that was much, much harder to deal with. People didn’t tend to find being attacked funny.
 
Still, the skill was dripping with potential. With limitations and caveats so wide and unmeasured, it could surely be exploited.
 
Hmmmmmm… Luke had played video games before. Enough to know exactly what the next step was with a power like this.
 
Limit testing.
 
Cautiously, he placed a hand on the burnt edge of his couch. Luke tried to focus on that tiny throb he felt where his super was, and then he flicked the burnt edge, imagining it catching on fire. He felt a minuscule pulse of super, but absolutely nothing happened.
 
“I wonder.” He mumbled.
 
Luke did the same thing, only swinging his fist down as hard as he could, imagining the same thing. He wanted his couch to burst into flames. That didn’t happen. Instead, small sparks burst out of his hand, harmlessly splashing against the burnt couch before petering out.
 
I was right. He imagined the same effect, only this time he’d upped the scale of the attack and it had seemingly increased the potency of his skill. The cashier felt like he was getting a gist of it, but had just one more question.
 
Because to be honest, he didn’t find his couch spontaneously catching aflame funny at all.
 
Once again, Luke smashed his fist into the couch, only this time envisioning something completely different. Pink paint splattered out of the point he made contact with the couch to a much greater effect than previous embers, splaying a smiley face across half his couch.
 
“I get it,” Luke said, nodding to himself before his smile slowly faded. “But paint probably wasn’t the best choice.”
 
How did you even get paint out of a couch?
**************
“I’m telling you, man,” Fred said, leaning over the forklift. “The economy was designed to enslave us.”
 
“How?” Luke asked.
 
His hands were busy stacking a type of steak that secreted acid instead of blood when you bit into it. Why Supes wanted it, he had no clue, but it was on their inventory and so long as its packaging was acid-proof, Luke didn’t see a reason to complain. About the steak. The warehouse work was a completely different story.
“Think about it, the whole thing is a trap. They feed you information and make you think that the economy is a shared pool of commerce.” Fred explained, using far too many hand gestures. “But do you know how big a slice of Venus City Dot Industries owns? They’ve got damn near a third of the Prodigy in the city on their payroll and own a whole chunk of the Supe market. To make it worse, they’ve also got a strangle on groceries and convenience with Dot-mart and basically own the internet. You’d think Oblivion would do some em about it, but no, too busy.”
 
Well, that made… some sense. But like everything Fred ever said, it was filled with a bunch of holes that would quickly unravel the whole thing. Not to say that Luke didn’t enjoy listening to Fred’s conspiracy ramblings while he lifted boxes up and down warehouse shelves.
 
“I know for damn sure Oblivion changed the trading laws within days of Dotcom getting her powers,” Luke said with a sigh. He distinctly recalled the most powerful Supe in the Federation of Man showing up in Venus City just to deal with Dotcom. That was just how dangerous and unprecedented her power had been at the time.
 
“Yeah, but he didn’t change them enough.” Fred countered.
 
“Have you ever considered that maybe the quasi-monarch of a pretender capitalist society that's actually a caste system would much prefer the dominant share of the economy running through the hands of a singular, highly monitored and controllable entity with widely known and easily exploitable weaknesses as opposed to the public of which any joe-shmo could become a godlike being with just luck?” Luke asked. It wasn’t a complete viewpoint of why Dotcom had the power she did, nor an accurate depiction of their society.
 
But it was close enough. After all, Luke had thought extensively about the subject of just how unfair the world was when he was younger.
 
“I ain’t got a clue what half of that meant, my man,” Fred said with a shrug.
 
Never chang,e Fred. Never change.
 
“Well, I’m going on break,” Luke announced. “Enjoy forking the rest of that.”
 
Luke heard Fred grunting as he strolled away, aiming himself towards the freezer. There was a small section between it and the trash compactor, which was the break zone. A camera blind spot where one could relax without Nathan coming to breathe down their necks five minutes later. It was a good place to scroll on your phone, read comics and just chill.
 
The cashier had other ideas in mind. Sure, he had to be at work to complete Double Lif,e but that didn’t mean he couldn’t continue doing what he wanted to do more than anything: play with his powers, figuring out everything he could about them. Ideas and theories had been rolling around in his head all day.
 
And now I get to find out what you do. Luke thought, poking his heart and causing the Status to pop into existence in front of him.
 
[Free points: 5]
 
It wasn’t hard to understand what free points did, but what had stumped Luke originally was the zeros across the board for his very strangely named stats. He could think of two reasons they would all be zero.
 
Option one was that the stats simply were completely separate from his human attributes and didn’t count them as such. The easiest example was assuming that Brute made him stronger, so theoretically, since he was relatively strong, he should still have some statistical metric of Brute to begin with, unless it was sort of magical strength that didn’t factor his actually muscular strength into play like he guessed.
 
The much more worrying option two was that he was correct in assuming each stat did relate to something, and System Seven’s minimum threshold for one stat was so high that it just rounded down to zero. This was worrying for two reasons. The first was pretty simply that since he had no idea how close he was to a single stat point, putting just one into any stat from zero might not be that much of a difference. He could theoretically be already eighty percent of the way there, meaning for something like Brute, which he assumed had something to do with strength, he would only get twenty percent stronger.
 
The much, much scarier reason to be worried was that this meant that if he put two points in, he’d at least double in strength. That was also assuming he was close to eighty percent of a stat point. What if he was twenty percent?
 
That would mean he would immediately be ten times stronger than he was now with just two stat points.
 
That would be absurd.
 
If he got five free points every time he upped his V.L. and dumped all of them into one stat, things would very quickly get out of hand. Not that he was going to do that. The cashier had been surfing the internet looking for “build advice”, and one of the general rules Luke had set himself was to not overstuff a stat until he knew exactly what it did.
He was half tempted to just put one stat into every single stat and see what happened.
 
Again, not going to do that. Maybe in a game, he wouldn’t be so cautious with his free points, but this wasn’t a game, and free points were a precious resource. That being said, in the pursuit of knowledge, he was willing to give up a few.
 
Supervillain training on my break. Luke thought, grabbing the nearest heavy thing he could, which was a sack of flour. As soon as he lifted it up, he knew the thing was as good a reference point as he was going to get. Because while it wasn’t that challenging to lift, it put a constant strain on his muscles to keep it above his waist. He moved it around a little, trying to get a good feel for how heavy it felt, then put it back down.
 
“Alright, got a good feel for that,” Luke grunted.
 
Now… He wasn’t actually sure that Brute had raised his physical strength. He wasn’t sure that any of his stats did anything. In fact, he wasn’t even sure they were stats. The more Luke looked them over, the more they looked like traits or… archetypes. Mastermind, Brute, Rogue and Swindler weren’t the powers of a villain. They were types of villains, all of them.
Except for I.T Factor.
 
But that one seems like it’s meant to be an outlier.
 
And something he was almost hesitant to raise, because he didn’t have a clue what it did. The polar opposite of Brute, which Luke was confident he understood. All he had to do was take the leap and find out.
 
I’m going to be severely disappointed if this doesn’t make me at least a little stronger.
 
[Free point: 4]
 
[Brute: 1]
 
Huh. He didn’t feel an immediate power flow through him the moment he upped Brute. The number just ticked up in front of him. It was kind of… underwhelming. But so long as it actually did something that didn’t matter.
 
Luke leaned down and hoisted the flour up. It was easier. But not by a lot. It felt like the flour maybe got… ten percent lighter. He moved it around some more to get a feel for and it was definitely somewhere around ten percent.
 
I’ll take it. It was a smaller boost than he thought it would be, but still a boost Luke was happy to receive. He was ten percent stronger now. The more he thought about it, the more wild that became and there a chance it was barely the tip of the iceberg.
 
“Now, to see if this is kind of broken or fair.” Luke thought, cringing a little as he lost another free point.
 
Please be broken, please be broken, please be broken.
 
[Free point: 3]
 
[Brute: 2]
 
Again, he grasped the sack of flour. Again, it was easier. Another notch easier than before. Not twice as easy as Luke had been hoping it would be. He tried not to let himself be disappointed that the free stats weren’t overscaled. Luke had learned something after all, or at least he thought he had. Unconsciously, he gazed at his bicep as he dropped the flour back down with ease.
It didn’t look different or bigger, even flexed. The cashier definitely would have felt his muscles expanding too, sooo…
 
It’s not dependent on physical alterations. Stats didn’t change his default body, which also explained why they started as zero. They weren’t rounding down his physical attributes because they weren’t what the stats changed. Instead, it created a sort of… magic strength, independent of his body.
 
“Weird, I wonder if this is how the other stats also work.” Luke mused.
 
Probably.
 
Out of curiosity, the cashier stared really hard at Brute on his red screen, the same way he had done for Punchline to get it to expand. It took only a few seconds for something to happen.
 
[System Seven notice: Statistical descriptions and information are locked untilthe User possesses the prerequisite comprehension]
 
“Say what?”
 
[Luke translation: Figure it out yourself dumbass]
 
Well, looks like the amorphous reality-bending video game system woke up on the wrong side of the bed. But he got the gist of what it meant. If he wanted the full description of what each stat did, he’d have to figure out the majority of it on his own. System Seven would fill in the holes, but it wouldn’t drip-feed him answers.
 
That was one more thing on the pile of shit he had to do. It took priority somewhere between buying a new outfit for his outing in the Pit and coming up with a passable villain alias. His favour to Bloom was only a couple of days away, not long to figure out how to best another Supe in a match.
 
“What if it's like… a speedster?”
 
He’d probably get mollywhopped. In fact, if he was against anyone with a simple, non-progressive, superpower like super strength, speed or just laser blades he’d be pretty screwed.
 
I need to buy a gun.
 
And a multitude of other weapons, hopefully prodigy-tech, that might give him a fighting chance. His screen flashed as he was creating a mental list of tools for murd- winning.
 
[Daily Quest available]
 
[Daily Dose of Evil:
Description:
An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
A victim a day keeps you from going astray.
Complete one minor act of villainy to grow your powers and infamy. The reward is static and will not increase with the scale of villainy accomplished.
Reward: 100EXP
Punishment: Owchies
Deadline: 23:59:48]
Forgot about that.
And there was just one more thing on the pile.
“Who knew being a supervillain was so much work?” Luke mumbled, before catching himself. “Probably shouldn’t have said that.”
It felt like he’d just jinxed himself.