Grindlewald stop. We're worried about you.

Or "my life for the horde"

sobbing intensifies

Best ending yet.

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Doctor Vile stood silently before his laboratory's Supercomputer, face illuminated by a dozen different monitors replaying live footage from the Young Wonders' latest - and seemingly final - victory over their nemesis, Mickey Menace. Vile hated when rivalries got ugly and, normally, he'd have taken great pains to avoid witnessing an outcome like this.
He would make an exception this once. He owed it to Mickey not to look away. Not to ignore his failure as a mentor, or as a father.

Vile pressed a button on his remote.

The scene wound back to a battered Kid Caster's interview with reporters on the scene, talking at length about how they had tried to de-escalate with Menace over the past three months before finally resorting to putting him down. Vile's composure almost cracked at the lie, but he soldiered on, committing the boy's every fractured bone and open wound to memory.

He remembered how proud he was when Mickey told him he had become an entire team's premier opponent. He remembered how he encouraged him to aim higher and higher with his escapades now that he wasn't up against police or bank guards but true, blue superheroes. He remembered barely being able to keep his mouth shut when Mickey invited his friends from school over and he instantly recognized them as the Young Wonders' civilian alter egos.
He wondered how it had all gone so wrong.

Vile pressed another button on his remote.

A screen to his left switched to Mickey's criminal record, and the Doctor immediately begins reading despite having memorized it days ago; for the first few months, it was nothing but stealing burlap sacks of money from the bank, kidnapping the mayor, and harebrained schemes to control the city just like his father's. Over time though, Mickey's listed crimes grew more and more serious - murders, attacks on government black sites, theft of bleeding edge technology from top secret labs, and more.

Vile had been proud of how quickly his son was climbing the ranks of the dastardly and despicable. He had given the boy all the shrink rays and funding he needed to start off with, and even when he began to cleave closer to the current trend among teenaged capes rather than the mustache-twirling pranks Vile himself engaged in, he believed it was simply Mickey trying to fit in.

Vile pressed another button on the remote.

The Supercomputer's displays switched to intel profiles and analyses of each of the Young Wonders' team members and their abilities; Dragon Girl, the mystical martial artist. Lightning Lad and Diana Danger, the dynamic duo. Starburst, the exiled alien princess. Kid Caster, the leader.

Vile was so engrossed in his preparations that he almost didn't hear the bulkhead closing the laboratory off disengage its locks or the soft footsteps into his lab that followed.

"Victor." Blackjack, his archnemesis - and longtime friend, off the books - greeted him, doffing the hat he always wore as a civilian. "My condolences about your son. I'm sorry I couldn't visit sooner."

"Joseph." He replied, turning around to face him even while surrounded by evidence of the atrocities he planned to commit. "Forgive me, but I'm not in the mood to put on the accent... And don't worry about it. I'd rather you didn't see what's become of me, anyway."

Blackjack nodded, taking in the prototype assassin drone that hung partially assembled from its rigging and the adhesive-insulator grenades that had taken the place of Dr. Victor Lain's famous nonlethal-dehydrator gun. "I see. Nevertheless, here I am."

"As Joseph or as Blackjack?"

"Both. As Joseph to extend my sympathies, but also to discourage you from reacting the way any father who's lost a child would." He raised his hand, showing Vile the ragged glove he used to influence his fortune. "As Blackjack in case Joseph fails."

Vile pressed another button.

A grainy video came to life on the Supercomputer. A home movie Vile and his late wife had taken of Mickey's seventh birthday, when Vile had helped him make his first friend - a rudimentary spiderbot that Mickey nonetheless loved.

"You'd stop a man going after the people who murdered his only boy?" Vile asked softly. "I thought heroes were supposed to fight for justice."

"I'd stop a man from making more parents bury their children." Blackjack replied. "Please, Victor. I don't want to fight you. I'll make sure the Young Wonders learn from their mistake. You don't need to bloody your hands again after all this time."

Vile's pushed another button.

The assassin drone moved before Blackjack could snap his fingers and summon his cards - before he could even turn to face it or blink in surprise. The next thing he knew, his wrist was dislocated and his fingers had been broken in seven different places. The drone hauled him up by the arm and threatened to pop his shoulder out of his joint, but Blackjack only began to panic when it began carefully peeling his glove off his ruined hand.

"Victor! They're only children!" He yelled as the reborn villain walked past him.

Victor Lain paused in the doorway of his lab, hand hovering over the keypad that would lock Blackjack in until he was finished. "No," He decided. "They're villains."

***

In the following months, the Young Wonders lived through a waking nightmare.

Dragon Girl was first; hit by a bolt from the sky that, initially, did nothing to stop or even slow her powerful, acrobatic abilities. Over time, however, her bones began to soften. Slowly, inevitably, her attacks began to hurt her own frame. She was soon hospitalized after sustaining an injury that pulverized her leg, and became catatonic after the revelation that she would continue to degrade until her skeleton was no longer capable of maintaining a humanoid shape.

Lightning Lad and his sister were next. After being covered in insulators that blocked his electricity, Lightning Lad was no longer capable of venting his excess energy. As a direct result, his own powers overloaded his brain and essentially cooked him alive, leaving him crippled by nerve damage and amnesia. With half the dynamic duo reduced to a bedridden vegetable, Diana Danger withdrew from public life and later renounced their career as a superhero, decrying it as the instigator of the attack on her brother.

The Antareans, Starburst's people, went extinct shortly after. Their Harvali rivals had been granted strange new weapons and technology, gifted to them by a third party who disappeared shortly after. When the Harvali won control of the homeworld they shared with the Antareans, they brutalized the Antarean population, destroyed all record of their history, and publicly executed the Antarean royal family. The scene was then broadcast to the entire country by the same space station that had withered Dragon Girl's body.

Finally, there was Kid Caster.
Victor Lain killed him.

Holy shit why am I crying??

Pretty sure that just HFY… Or a few specific chapters of ”Out of Cruel Space”

Welcome to the Prompt! All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.

Reminders:

>* Stories at least 100 words. Poems, 30 but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* See Reality Fiction and Simple Prompts for stricter titles >* Be civil in any feedback and follow the rules

🆕 New Here? ✏ Writing Help? 📢 News 💬 Discord

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At first, I tended to my environment with care, crafting the star at the centre and planets with the dedication and deep attention as was expected of me by the rest of my family. It took me awhile to get the right distance and material to cultivate new life, but eventually I got it right. As time passed I would at times descend down to interact with any life that had begun to sprout on this successful life bearing planet. As it usually did, life took a long time to grow beyond the most basic cellular organisms, but eventually I would find that some had made it to land. More time passed, evolution progressed steadily as it always did. More and more complex creatures. Soon enough I noticed that some creatures had begun to evolve dexterous appendages they could use to manipulate things like tools. The first tools of course were rocks and sticks. These hairy creatures grew to be quite creative with their tools in time, using them to gather food from high places more safely, to dig for plants, to break open seeds and shells to get to what was edible inside. I was so pleased when they learned to use their tools to make more advanced tool. Mind this wasn’t, at first, any more exciting than making a rock sharper with another rock, but things sped up a but when a few accidentally created an energy source, fire, by cracking together a few different kinds of rocks.

I was so excited with their progress, they showed a capacity for intelligence I hadn’t expected any beings to achieve without more intervention on my part. It wasn’t unheard of, but it was somewhat uncommon for early life forms to get to this point on their own without any jump starts. A part of me had been concerned before discovering these that I might need to intervene, well, admittedly I had already. Just not as much as I know my older sibling had to do to get their creations on track.

The first organisms that had started to really grow into complexity were just unacceptable, feathered and often very large creatures that required a lot of energy to exist on this planet. I knew eventually the atmosphere would likely thin as the galaxy changed, and all those creatures would die out. Not wanting to waste a massive amount of planet rotations waiting for this, I redirected a bit of debris from my building and dropped it into the planet. In addition to killing many of the large creatures it also broke apart the primary landmass, which would slowly spread over the water as the land adjusted as the core of the planet shook from the force for ages. The predecessors of this intelligent-potential species already existed when this happened, but their small size made them more suited for the changes that were happening.

As I kept watching them, I noticed that they steadily lost many of their physical enhancements from evolution in favour of anatomy that let them keep their hands free to use tools, and larger brains. This was a good thing, it meant they were on the right path to true sentience and eventual ascension.

Eventually, I knew something was wrong. Violence between species wasn’t strange. Often depended on their diets but was very natural. Violence with a species over food sources was not exceptionally strange either. Eventually the violence would end, as it always did when the primary species neared ascension and tamed the non sentient species.

Not long after I began to watch some of the tribes of my intelligent species, just one step beyond their perception, I witnessed something that filled me with dread. I watched one of my creations brutally kill one of its kin. I knew these two fairly well, a bigger older one with a smaller sibling, one rotation younger. The smaller one took a sharp rock and bashed it repeatedly into the older one’s skull. The first hit came so suddenly the bigger one was stunned and couldn’t defend itself. Even after it stopped moving the little one kept hitting it. Eventually it looked up, seemingly startled, and I realised it was staring directly at me. I could see fear rising up within it, and to avoid it crying for others—more seeing me was definitely not okay, I could hardly believe this one was seeing me though. I commanded it in what I knew was how it communicated with it’s fellows, and told it to not be afraid. The little one dropped it’s tool and scrambled into a low position, head to the ground, begging me for mercy. When it calmed down I was able to ask it why it had killed it’s kin. They didn’t seem to want to reply at first, but eventually explained that it was because his sibling had claimed the mate he wanted. Mildly concerning, but I supposed that breeding rivalry was not strange among creatures. I didn’t like that ones so intelligent already were doing it though. I didn’t give the little being any reply, but drew myself onto a higher level of perception—I definitely needed to consult my family about this. Hopefully I didn’t need to start from scratch. Now the thing is that different levels of perception don’t necessarily run at the same rate of time. Higher perceptions move slower than ones below them. So while I am in the perception my family is in, time moves much faster for the environments we create. Thousands of rotations occurred within one standard unit of time for my planet whenever I was away.

When I told my family what happened they advised I should probably start from scratch with that planet, nothing good could come of something so violent.

As I returned, it rapidly became obvious that just starting over wouldn’t be easy… they had spread all over the planet and the descendants of the tribe I had been watching before had created what they called a religion. Which many were using to justify violence against others of their species. When I investigated that.. I found that my likeness—at least what I think it would’ve looked like to that little being— was clearly within their scripture. I was disgusted knowing what kind of violence was being inflicted in my name.

The easiest way to deal with this would be to wipe out the planet entirely but… well I was rather fond of the planet, I had put a lot of myself into crafting it and I truly didn’t want to wipe it out. I tried many methods of wiping out my ‘human kind’ but over and over I failed. I was just about ready to give in when I noticed another species had started developing sentience. This one was aquatic, and well, I decided I would alter their genetics a bit, and eventually well, since a planet can only support one sentient species, they annihilated humans and later achieved ascension. And that’s how you came about. It’s funny, you take after my uncle C. more than me, tentacles never really were comfortable for me but eh, either way welcome to the family, and good luck with your life project Octopi. Hope it goes smoother than mine.

It don't matter.

It's a well written story, bro.

More please 🥺

I mean there is that one where everyone wants to fuck the bees...

“For the hope of your eternal soul rests upon that peace. Now die.”

FUUUUUUUUUCKIN HELL I love it

🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

ANTS!!! AAAAAAAGHHH FOR FUCKS SAKE

"I will find a way to traverseto the afterlife myself and kill you again"... The pain of a Father

That was an absolutely fucking read

Lol acting like every generation didn’t have people like this. There’s just more technology now to showcase the selfishness of people. But okay 👌

Good point

• "Why did you made me do this?" I asked sobbing

• "To a new world to be born, the old one has to die" said Frainstrin, the Nature's goddess.

• "Yes, but I've never expected this. Anything but this. I thought it would be a diplomatic or pacifist solution"

• "There's no diplomatic nor pacifist solutions to transgressions to the order of nature! Now it's too late to regret"

• "Maybe. But it's not too late to fix the things we broke"

As soon as I finished the sentence, the tribe leader cast an spell on me, thinking by my sayings I suddenly switched sides, and I was so clueless about the world around me that took me off guard.

The flames hurt, but after that I became ethereal. I died. How can a dead man take revenge on a goddess that manipulated him to destroy the city that rised him?

It was supposed to make them change behavior, not to start a war. But it was indeed her whole plan to exterminate those innocent people. I feel betrayed.

On my way to eternal damnation for my acts, she mocked me, and mocked on every innocent soul that died in the invasion. It was not fair. I sworn to take revenge, even if that means dying a second time.

• "Am I in... Heaven?"

• "Yes you are" said an old man "I'm Secthar, your old God"

• "Why am I in here? I made terrible things in name of an evil goddess"

• "But you regret. And not only that, you want to fix your wrong doings"

• "Yes, but it's too late now. Lots of people have died, and I'm dead too. The damage is done, and can't be undone"

• "Sometimes the nails leaves marks on the wood, but you need to remove them anyways"

• "I don't understand"

• "If you want to undo your wrong doings, you must archive true illumination"

Then it faded away, and I understood. Only by true illumination I could archive the status of a God, and have a fair battle with The One Who Betrayed Me. But how can I archive that?

I took me centuries to just realize how to do it, and another centuries more to actually do it. But I felt totally disappointed when I knew about that only survivor who killed her before me.

How? I'll never know. He was dead long ago, and I've never managed to find them in The Afterlife. But my efforts were in vain

Well, the bees aren’t the ones reading this now. It’s us humans that do operate on the basic understanding of genders - and how certain names etc reflect that.

For readers that are invested/familiar with the knowledge that bees are generally female - it would not be as immersive and thus enjoyable to read if you used the wrong references.

You can call a woman Bob or Andrew, but it’s going to be confusing.

She should have died hereafter; there would have been time for such a word...

I'm just going to pretend I don't have tears in my eyes

Dang, really interesting how you make it be from the perspective of the nemesis rather than the villain.

Both of them are trapped in gunfire at the end right?