Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-A-Villain — Villain who has their hands in all the pies
"I'm not certain," Lindy says, hands clenched to stop them from trembling, "exactly why I'm here."
The Red Contingent spins their big retro supervillain chair around, and cocks their head theatrically. They do everything theatrically; and Lindy can't help watching it, and thinking it's probably one part because you can't be that naturally expressive behind a featureless, glossy, fibreglass oval mask and dark goggles and probably-a-wig of waist-length bone white hair; and several parts the fact that when the costume comes off, all they have to do is stop emoting so loud and nobody will ever recognise them.
Their expensively tailored suit is a wine-stain red; the mask brilliant mirror-finish crimson. The shirt under their jacket is black, as are their low-heeled patent leather shoes, their socks, their tight fabric gloves.
"You're not?" they say, voice obviously but expensively electronic. Lindy's betting the mask is soundproof, running a speech recognition to synthesis pipeline, keeping mannerisms and inflections safely firewalled inside.
"I've been investingating you for years, and I'm no closer to unmasking you. I can barely get anyone to believe in you — and most of the ones who do prefer not to admit it. I'm not a threat. And you're clearly busy — you've taken, what, seven phone calls in the time I've been standing here ignored behind your chair? And I don't even think it's a power play. You're too confident to need cheap management-psychology tricks to prop you up. Why even kidnap me if you don't have time for whatever you wanted?"
"In my position," the Red Contingent says, "people tend to accelerate toward the failure modes of megalomania. Feelings of invincibility. Delusions of immunity to normal human foible. You're here as part of my scheduled self-reminder that I'm just another person, however remarkable my enterprise."
Lindy blinks at them, several times. "Oh, goodie," she says dryly. "How edifying."
"I have a certain fondness for you," the Contingent says plainly. "I wanted a look, close up. To remind me that you're just a person, I'm just a person, and I can admit and sort through whatever affection I have for your courage and persistence and factor myself into my future plans. You know how many people in similar shoes to mine have thwarted themselves at the last minute, unable to dispose of their nemesis, and unable to win unless they do? I'd rather know and admit to myself early if I can't bear to have you offed, and I can arrange something else. A contingency, if you will."
Lindy scoffs. "And I'm to cooperate, am I, having been kidnapped?"
"It is kidnapping," the Contingent says. "I admit that. I am ruthlessly dedicated to a minimum of self-deception. Similarly, I don't delude myself you'd cooperate — not sincerely, and not for long, in any case. You'd be in the air ducts or sneaking around my secret projects in twenty minutes, I should think."
Flattery, Lindy thinks. Carefully nonchalant flattery. They don't need to deploy cheap psyops out of insecurity; that means no more than it precisely means.
"Speaking of projects." Lindy waves her arm around the cavernous control room. "All those phone calls, and all this — how many ventures are you simultaneously running, just out of this location? This is absurdly complex—"
The Red Contingent rocks back in the chair, and seems to be silently ticking things off on their fingers for a few moments. "Thirty—" they begin, then shakes their head, impatient. "Forty projects, from this office."
"Forty." Even with the undefined nature of the word "projects", Lindy whistles, impressed and appalled admixed. "That's—"
"That's as many as four tens!" the Contingent says delightedly. "And that's—"
"Oh, you did fucking not!" Lindy sputters, as the supervillain slaps their knee, shoulders shaking with quiet hilarity. "Oh my god how dare—"