You say any idiot can be an Evil Overlord? Prove it.

Cafe Society
1

Most everybody who reads comics has come across a super-villain plan for world domination and said to himself, “That’s a ridiculous plot. Who comes up with this stuff, lobotomized houseflies? Give me a little super-tech, and I’d have the Earth under my thumb inside of a year, no question.”

Prove it.

We’ll need a few rules, of course, and since I’m doing the OP, I’ll supply them:

  1. Your target is Earth-616–that is, Marvel Comics Earth. The time is immediately before the KangWar arc in Busiek’s Avengers run, so Earth’s defenders consist of the Avengers, the FF, the various X-teams, the Hulk, Dr. Doom*, Spider-Man and his ilk, and SHIELD.

  2. Since I obviously have godlike power in this setting, I’m using my handy-dandy Infinity Gauntlet to seal Earth off from all adjacent dimensions, time travellers, and interstellar empires (so there’s no interference from the Asgardians, Kang, Shi’ar, Celestials, Mephisto, et cetera). I’m also making it impossible to create or utlize Cosmic cubes, the Darkhold, or other magical omnipotence-granting thingies (neither your nor your opponents have access to such), and expelling the likes of Dr. Strange, Phoenix, and so forth from the playing field. In short, there’s no super-hero more powerful than Thor to contend with, and no super-villain more powerful than Magneto. Characters from other times/worlds who are nevertheless usually found on Earth (like Thor and Cable) remain, but will have no access to reinforcements or resources from their native planes.

  3. I’m offing Justin Hammer (Tony Stark’s biggest industrial rival) and setting you up with his fortune and resources, in such a way that seems entirely legitimate to the rest of the world. That makes you about as rich as Bill Gates.

  4. I’m protecting you and any **two ** people you designate from mind-control and telepathy. I’m also giving you the ability to recruit any one character to your side for the duration of your campaign, in such a way that this character is entirely and irretrievably loyal to you. You can recruit other characters and make other alliances, but they may not remain loyal depending on their character and how you treat them.

  5. As the campaign begins, no one has any idea of your perfidious plans, but obviously as you proceed you run the risk of revealing yourself.

  6. You have two years to conquer the Earth.

What’s your plan?

***Yeah, I know he’s a villain. but you think he’s gonna sit by idly while somebody conquers Earth? That’s where he keeps all his stuff. ** ;j

2

Good thing. Only my fiance gets to utlize me.

3

whoops. I mean finacee of course. Stupid second E.

4

Nice.
My plan? Gain control of the world’s oil resources. My mind-control immune recruits are Magneto and Water Wizard. Magneto gathers all of the oil drums and derricks, then flies around with Water Wizard to bring up all the oil and store them in giant Magneto-created containers. Mags defends all the oil from attempts to take it, and I hold the entire world hostage. I win.

5

::gently slides DH a card with the proper spelling of “fiancée.”::

6

My 15 point plan for total domination.

  1. Recruit the President of the United States as my loyal lackey and make him immune to all mind control (except whatever control keeps him loyal to me).

  2. Have POTUS make an alliance with Magneto, offering him domination over half of the world if he joins up and helps conquer it.

  3. Make Magneto immune from mind control if he takes up my offer.

  4. Have POTUS announce a list of nations that have committed acts of war against the US, and declare that the US will pre-emptively strike any nation that does not surrender its sovereignty.

  5. Make an example of a major european country. Launch a nuclear strike on Spain, magneto to protect missiles from being intercepted.

  6. Have POTUS fire the VPOTUS, and appoint me.

  7. Have Magneto eliminate the legislative and judicial branches of the US government.

  8. Have POTUS declare martial law in the US.

  9. Have POTUS declare that he is now Emperor and name me successor.

  10. Have US Military devise a biological weapon (X-plague) that kills persons possessing the mutant gene.

  11. Eliminate the Emperor.

  12. Assume control of The American Empire.

  13. Unleash X-Plague.

  14. Watch Magneto and his minions die.

  15. Cackle.
    I should point out that I’ve never read a comic, so my plan is based purely on films and TV.

7

This is reasonable, since Dr. Doom weeped when the WTC collapsed.

8

Repeat after me…

“That never happened. JMS meant well, but he was over-emotional himself when he wrote that issue. The Lord of Latveria, the Master of Magnetism, and the Unstoppable did not gather to help relief workers when the towers fell. Particularly not Marko, as he knocked one of them over himself once just to be a jerk.”

You’ll feel better.

9

I presume that Magneto or someone else will help with this? Otherwise you end up with large puddles of glass in the US, starting probably with Washington DC.

10

I think that’s probably what was meant by “magneto to protect missles from being intercepted.”

11

Yes, I should have specified that Magneto would defend against reprisals.

I would highly doubt any of the other nuclear nations would think about reprising my attack. I picked Spain because it’s non-nuclear, and sufficiently far from the main European business centres that it would serve as a good demonstration without being too damaging. If Europe refuses to capitulate I would simply order it sterilised.

It would probably be wise if I parked a few medium size asteroids, cloaked ofcourse, in geosynchronous orbit over the major world powers. That way I can eliminate them in future should they become troublesome without bringing a lot of nuclear fallout.

Actually, I envisioned Magneto and his minions protecting my missiles from being intercepted by any of those pesky so-called ‘Heroes’. They are meddlesome when it comes to plots of world domination.

12

Sorry, but I wouldn’t be Overlord of the Marvel earth if you handed me the job. When the two years are up and every magical/ mystic/ alien/ cosmic/ extradimensional/ time traveling/ superevolved/ etc./ etc./ nemesis comes back, then it would be MY responsibility to deal with it all. Forget it! It would be like declaring myself King of Afghanistan. Who needs it?

13

Not to mention that there’s a lot of non-mutant heroes out there. Thor, the Hulk, Spider-Man…

Still, it’s an excellent plan given the limitations, Szlater.

14

One other modification I’d make: You probably want to develop the anti-X virus before you started doing anything too overtly evil, not after. You don’t want those pesky heroes to twig that something’s up and foil you before you have a chance to develop it.

And while many supers aren’t mutants, even most of the non-mutants (Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, etc.) gained their powers as a result of activation of the X-gene. So the same virus that works on the X-Men should also affect those folks.

15

Wait. I don’t get how the Hulk and Spidey are not mutants. True, their powers were conferred by external forces, but weren’t they mutated?

16

Never mind.

17

Simply recruiting/making Xavier loyal to me, the both of us immune to mind-control, and parking outside the U.N. for a couple of days is too easy, right?

I might recruit the leader of SHIELD (Fury’s out, for the moment, sadly). SHIELD helicarriers had their own ICBMs (one each)(!) as of awhile back, so I’ll gamble that the organization still has some kind of nuclear capability. That, and with the peerless network of spies and commandos at SHIELD’s disposal, I’ll arrange a series of confrontations between the superpowers leading to a massive nuclear exchange.

In the aftermath, with the world decimated and it’s rightful leaders wiped out, I’ll have SHIELD step in to act as an emergency interim government, recruiting as many surviving superheroes as possible to restore order and rebuild the world. (I’d try to use as many as I could for “plowshares” duty—use weather controllers for re-terraforming, telepaths for education, etc.) The plan would be to create a system where the surviving population is not only grateful and indebted towards the superhumans—and resentful towards the “old regimes” who’d pointlessly lead them into WWIII—but are also heavily reliant on them for survival.

SHIELD will take in new recruits (for military, civil, and administrative work) as young as possible, especially from shitty locations, to essentially form a new Janissary order, loyal to SHIELD’s world government as possible.

In the end, Earth is united under a world government; the long ingrained anti-superhuman attitude of baseline 616 culture might be finally undermined and reversed; there would finally be a true organized program of utilizing Earth’s superhuman resources for progressing and furthering civilization as a whole, rather than simply maintaining status quo against supervillain interference*; even overpopulation and global warming won’t be a problem again for quite awhile.

If I play it all right, if the heroes find out about me and my scheme, but at too late a time, they’d really have no choice but to go along with it. They could kill me, but they’d still have to follow my plan, just to keep humanity alive. (And if they balk at it, I’d have my villainous last laugh…they, and any future generations would live under the fact that they could have rebuilt a shattered world into a utopia, but they chose not to for the sake of their own morals.)
How’s that? Evil enough?

*The swarms of villains I can’t convert, or at least safely control…I take it they will have to go. Mindwipes, Punisher Squads, targeting them for nuking during WWIII, whatever it takes, and/or I can get away with. Which, considering I’m starting a post-apocalyptic civilization after destroying the previous one, and I don’t have a writer who needs to have the villains around for the crossover next year…I think I can get away with quite a bit.

18

I did consider that, but I was concerned that the earlier I develop it the more likely it was that Magneto would discover the treachery. If I could have two loyal lackies I would have developed the X-plague earlier, as Magneto discovering it would have had no consequence.

I didn’t know that, but that info does kinda sort out the one major concern I had which was what to do about the non-mutant heroes and villains.
Ofcourse, the ironic twist to the story for the final page of the comic is that unknowst to me, I have an activated X-gene.

Noooooooooo! :smiley:

19

I was going to go for Magneto as my loyal henchman (and possibly something about a giant cloud of sharp adamantium caltrops), but now I’m going to have to go with Ranchoth. There is none more evil. “We had to destroy the [world] to save it”, indeed… :slight_smile:

20

Agreed, Ranchoth is impressive. I still think, however, that anyone who doesn’t pick Prof. X in a hearbeat as their “ally” is a fool. Ok, I’m only going by the movies, but Cerebro must be the most powerful weapon the world has ever known, and if not for Magneto’s helmet (and those pesky “morals” of his) Xavier could rule the world.