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How many heroes does it take to bring down one megalomaniacal emperor? Seriously. What a bunch of slackers.
While he hates to admit it, Nefarious isn’t in much of a position to put up a fight himself. Despite all of his meticulous planning, he’d never counted on being dragged about by his alternate self like some common lackey. And it had been pretty obvious that the Emperor didn’t want Nefarious near anything that could be used against him.
So here he is, digging himself out of the smoldering remains of the Emperor’s ridiculous mech suit. Again.
It’s more than he could have hoped for when the Emperor crashes nearby, dangling off the ledge and being hauled to his doom by a kraken. The begging’s a nice touch too. Nefarious looms over him and watches, prepared to enjoy every moment of his counterpart’s demise.
“Looks like you’re about to drop.” He drags out the last word in a menacing sing-song voice, and the Emperor’s pupils contract to pinpricks.
Nefarious grins. When was the last time he’d felt such merciless, sadistic glee? He straightens, clasps his hands behind his back in a show of faux decorum, and toes daintily at the spot where the Emperor’s claws dig into the mangled shell of his defeated mech.
“Wait! Please! I’ll give you anything—anything you want!”
The kraken gives another sharp tug, and the pathetic, broken mess of a ruler screeches like a newborn infant. Nefarious pauses. Pretends to think about it. Taps a finger to his jaw to really sell it.
“Anything I want, hmm?”
It works.
The Emperor latches onto this perceived uncertainty like a lifeline. His optics blow wide, dart over the Doctor’s face. This version of Nefarious has always come out on top. It’s all he knows. And even here, on the precipice of certain and absolute annihilation, he thinks he can still turn the tide. Salvage the wreckage of his plan and carry on as before.
That burns Nefarious up more than any defeat he’d ever suffered at the hands of Qwark, Ratchet, or Clank.
“What I want…is for you to finally experience the complete and utter DEVASTATION of crushing DEFEEEEAAAAT! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
With that, his carefully composed character crumbles away. He falls back into his usual habits, relishing the feel of it, and with a jubilant sweep of his foot the Emperor falls too, his ear-shattering screams providing the perfect harmony to Nefarious’ own unbridled laughter.
When at last he comes down from his victorious high, the rifts have disappeared and the dimensions restabilized. His gaze focuses on the place where his counterpart had fallen. He kicks at it for good measure.
“What a prick. Good riddance.”
Then he spins on his heel and is met with the confused, uncertain, and possibly even concerned stares of everyone who’d taken part in this epic, final battle. Unamused, he stares back.
“What? None of you ever seen a criminal mastermind revel in his own victory before?”
The lombaxes share a look. The warbots share a look. The…Qwarks (oh god, there’s two of them now) share a look. Finally Ratchet takes a cautious step forward, his counterpart following suit, and says, “Give it up, Nefarious. We’re ending things for good this time.” At those words, his entire entourage of squishy rebels and robotic pirates shift as if readying themselves for an encore.
Nefarious blinks. “What?”
Then, as comprehension rams into him with all the force of an exploding grenade:
“Whaaaaaaaaat?! I don’t BELIEVE this!” He stomps his feet. “Weren’t any of you watching at all?” He gestures full-bodied-ly to the Emperorlessness at his side. “It’s not like I invited him here. This is MY dimension! If anyone’s going to conquer it, it’s ME! Not some—some pompous…insufferable—nnnnnngh!—NARCISSIST with a god complex!”
He’s getting too worked up. He can feel his systems on the brink of overloading. And without the assurance of Lawrence lying in wait nearby for a last minute escape, they really will nab him if that happens. With more effort than he thinks he’s ever put into anything in his life, he works to loosen his tightly bound fists and clenched jaw—the only Fongoid calming techniques he’d ever managed any vague amount of success with.
“Is this guy for real?” The female lombax—whatever-her-name-is—juts her thumb at him. Ratchet shrugs.
“After a while, you just learn to expect it.”
“Dr. Nefarious.” All eyes turn to Clank as he makes his way just ahead of the lombaxes. “We acknowledge that you, too, have suffered at the Emperor’s hands. But that does not relieve you from taking responsibility for your actions here.”
Nefarious laughs. Long and loud and tickled pink at the hypocrisy of it all. Clank’s confidence visibly wavers in the wake of its splendor. Doubled over, Nefarious barely manages to gasp out, “You wish to…to speak to me of responsibility? That’s hilarious!”
He slaps his knee, and with one final round of manic cackling brings himself back to his full height. If he still had tear ducts, he’d no doubt be wiping the tracks from his face. Leaping up to a higher level of the fallen mech, he throws his arms out wide.
“Look around you! None of this would have been possible without the dimensionator. Which you all but gift-wrapped for me.”
Clank recoils, and both lombaxes see fit to comfort him with a hand on his shoulder. Disgusting. It’s a wonder Nefarious ever idolized that squishy-loving little…
“Still. That is no excuse—“
“Oh, blah, blah, whatever.” Nefarious rolls his eyes, one hand on his hip while the fingers of the other open and close mockingly at his side. He should probably let them ramble on and give himself the extra time to figure out how to make a run for it, but he’s never really had the patience for those goody-goody speeches. What did they honestly think was going to happen? That he’d suddenly see the error of his ways? Convert to a life of altruistic do-goodery in order to atone for his past sins? Yeah. Right.
He doesn’t see a way out, though. And it’s just. So. Frustrating. Is it really so much to ask that things go his way even once?
They have the weird, floating monks and those moronic mercenaries—that he’d been the one to pay an arm and a leg for, by the by—and most of a fleet of pirate ships at their disposal. Meanwhile, all Nefarious has on him are his rocket boots. Even if he did somehow manage to outrun them, he’d been dragged here at the Emperor’s whim and is otherwise wholly unprepared: no weapons, no underlings, and no ship with which to return to his lair. He is, to put it lightly, completely screwed.
They know it too.
He scowls at the lot of them, just daring them to do something about it, and as always seems to be the case, they call his bluff. Those with the means to travel by air hop aboard their ships while the rest immediately converge on him from below. Nefarious takes a step back, stumbles on a loose bit of debris, and wishes he’d let Clank prattle on after all. He’ll never make it far without a plan.
Then there’s a sharp gust of wind from above, and the rebels come to a halt, forced to shield their eyes from the strength of it. Unencumbered by such needs, Nefarious looks up and sees—
“Lawrence?!”
“My apologies for the late arrival, sir. The scenery is a tad bit different from the last time I was here. The usual landmarks no longer seem to apply.”
“Lawrence?! What are you doing here?”
It’s all he can say as he stares slack-jawed up at his assistant. He still has weeks of leave left. They’d drawn up that new contract together years ago. There were rules in there. And right up at the top of the list was, ‘[Lawrence] is not required to take part in evil bidding when on his own time.’
A flimsy rope ladder tumbles over the side of Lawrence’s ship, and Nefarious turns his attention to it dumbly.
“Oh, I just happened to be in the neighborhood. Thought I’d pop in and check on things. It’s a good thing I did, it seems. It would have been most unfortunate to return from leave only to find I no longer had a job—I did just become a father, after all. And it’s so hard to find good work-life balance in this line of employment.”
“Huh. Makes sense.”
With a shrug, Nefarious steps onto the ladder, and the ship begins to rise. He looks out over a sea of his stunned foes.
“You MORONS! You really thought you could catch ME?” He laughs. Then, cupping his free hand as a make-shift megaphone, “Hey, LOMBAX! How many successful escape attempts from you and your little backpack does this make NOW?”
Said lombax sighs, throwing his arms out in defeat. “I dunno. Like eighty or something?”
“THAT’S RIGHT! AHAHAHA! And YOU!” He stabs a vicious finger towards the Goons-4-Less leader. Or at least he tries to. It’s kind of hard when the ladder keeps twirling around in soft, little circles. “I want a refund!”
“Oh. Uh…no can do, bro. It’s all in the fine print. In fact, like, you still owe us for the kraken and the whole being incarcerated in Zordoom thing and stuff. Not to mention that half my guys are still like…lost throughout the dimensions or whatever? We’ll just charge it to the card we have on file. That cool?”
“Nnnnnnngh! When I’m through BLASTING you on the holonet, you’ll never work in this galaxy AGAIN! I am a RESPECTED member of criminal society!” And with that, he scrambles his way over the side of the ship, tugging the ladder in after him. “Let’s get out of here, Lawrence.”
“Getting out.”
Lawrence closes the cockpit with the press of a button, and in moments the city of Megalopolis is little more than a speck in the distance.
Head in hand, Nefarious stares out the cockpit dome listlessly. Save for the occasional little ditty hummed by Lawrence, the entire ride has been dead silent.
It’s enough to drive Nefarious mad.
He taps the fingers of his free hand against his knee, and when he can no longer stand it says, “So how do I need to mark this on payroll then? Overtime? Emergency overtime? Extra emergency overtime? Do we need to create a new code for whatever this is?”
Lawrence pauses halfway through reaching for a dial on the dash and tilts his head slightly in Nefarious’ direction. After a moment, he completes the movement as if the distraction had never occurred before settling himself more comfortably in his seat.
“Not at all, sir. It’s just as I said. I happened to be passing through, and you looked as though you needed a ride.”
“Hmm. Sure,” Nefarious says skeptically. There has to be a catch in there somewhere. Lawrence had been so fastidious about every facet of his renewed contract after the Z’Grute incident, and having realized just how much he relied on Lawrence in turn, Nefarious had—with no small amount of fuming and resistance—ended up conceding to his every demand. No matter. Whatever the price, he’d still gotten more out of it than the small fortune he’d paid for those good for nothing Goons.
Silence washes over them once more, and Nefarious decides to try again. “Sooooo…how’s the baby?”
The question perks Lawrence up in a way he’s never witnessed before. “Oh, very well, sir, thanks for asking. He’s been a little fussy these days, but I seem to have been uniquely prepared to cope with the challenge.” He chortles to himself over his own private little joke. “Ah, here we are. Lair sweet lair.”
Nefarious is more than a little bewildered when Lawrence exits the ship alongside him. He’d expected this to be nothing more than a quick drop-off before Lawrence returned to his family. But Nefarious doesn’t say a word, and if Lawrence notices anything unusual about his reaction, he doesn’t comment on it.
In fact, he leads the way inside with far more purpose than Nefarious currently possesses, pausing on occasion to swipe his finger across some surface or another and tutting disapprovingly at the results, until at last Nefarious breaks.
“You’re still on leave, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely, sir. Still a little over a month to go.” He rubs his thumb and forefinger together and frowns. “I did say I’d stopped by to check on things. I realized you weren’t here when I saw your suit missing, however, and we were on our way back out when the hv showed—“
“Wait a second. We?”
Lawrence brightens. “Oh, yes. The missus and I thought you might like to meet our newest arrival.”
“O-Oh,” Nefarious croaks. He’d never really thought of that. He was an evil mastermind. What was he supposed to do with a baby? But showing a little appreciation every now and then was another item that had come up when constructing their contract, and Lawrence had just rescued him completely unbidden. So in a voice straining with the effort of saying the opposite of what he really feels he says, “Yes. Meet the baby. That sounds…wonderful.”
Judging by Lawrence’s amused smile, the falsity of Nefarious’ words are not lost on him. “Oh, come now, sir. Don’t be that way. I quite think the two of you should get on rather well.” He follows his words up with that funny little laugh again, and this time Nefarious begins to feel a bit suspicious of his meaning.
“And what exactly is THAT supposed to MEA—“
He freezes.
Not as a result of anger or excitement flooding and overloading his circuitry. But because Mrs. Lawrence steps into the room at that very moment with a tiny bundle in her arms.
“Good day, Doctor,” she says in that musical voice of hers as she bounces the bundle up and down ever so slightly. “It’s such a relief to see you here. When we saw the footage on the holo, I feared Lawrence may not make it to you in time.”
“I…oh. Um…”
The baby is so swaddled up that Nefarious can’t see anything of it, but even so, he can’t seem to tear his gaze away. Mrs. Lawrence takes his sudden speechlessness in stride, however, and offers him a pleasant smile. Lawrence sweeps forward, greeting her with a tender embrace before pulling back and lifting the baby from her arms.
“Perhaps, you might like to hold him, sir?”
Nefarious stares down at his hands. He’s never held a baby before. “Oh. I, uh…” And he thrusts them out in front of him.
Lawrence takes in the scene dubiously before casting a glance at his wife, who ever so dutifully reaches out for Nefarious’ arms and folds them into a proper cradling position.
“Here you are, Wally. Meet the Doctor I’ve told you all about.”
One moment his arms are empty, and the very next he’s staring down into that little, elongated face, a single giant, blue-lit optic scanning over him just as intently.
It’s like nothing Nefarious has ever experienced before.
There’s a buzzing in his circuitry he can’t explain. Unlike the overflowing rush that tends to short him out, this one is calm and constant, yet still substantial enough to bring attention to its existence. Experimentally, he bounces his arms the way he’d seen Mrs. Lawrence do and is rewarded with something that sounds like a tiny laugh. It sends another surge through his systems, and then he joins in too.
“Did you hear that, Lawrence?! I made him laugh!
“Yes, very good, sir. I knew you could manage.”
He revels in this newfound joy of bouncing Little Lawrence and is contemplating the future enactment of mandatory bring-your-baby-to-work days when, as if a tripped breaker in his brain had suddenly switched back on, he sees everything.
Every exposed outlet. Every unlocked cabinet filled to the brim with the strongest corrosives in the known universe. Every half-finished doomsday device abandoned out in the open where anyone, a small child perhaps, could blast themselves into who even knows what at this point. Without even noticing it, he hugs Little Lawrence closer to his chest.
“How long did you say until you come back?”
“Oh, about five or six weeks.”
“Six weeks…”
So much time wasted on inter-dimensional coordinates and stalking heroes and finishing that mech suit which had just ended up blown to bits anyways. When all along there had been far more important matters to attend to right here.
There’s a lot of work to be done. But as Little Lawrence squirms in his arms while his parents look on adoringly, Nefarious thinks this may just be the beginning of things finally working themselves out in his favor.