Chapter 2

Greetings, lackeys, to the second installment of Villain 101, the ongoing saga of my criminal mastermind, Twilight Dusk, as he continues his adventures in City of Villains. As usual, this column will be written in two voices, one from my perspective, beginning with Jeffprime, while the other, saying Twilight Dusk, will be from the viewpoint of Twilight Dusk himself.

Twilight Dusk: After skinning some Snakes for some new boots, my henchman, Trask, and I returned to Burk, my mercenary contact for Mercy Island. Burke had a nice job waiting for me. It seems that Arachnos has several factions, each of which are fighting and back-stabbing each other. It seems that the Ghost Widow’s faction stole a book, the Mu Codex, from a rival faction. The original owners want the book back and are willing to pay a hefty sum. Burke, sharing my dislike for those spider wannabes, has a different plan in mind. He wants me to steal the book for him for which he’ll reward me handsomely. The only catch is that all the Arachnos agents in the lab where the book is now located need to be killed so that there’ll be no witnesses. Laughing, I told him that I had planned to kill them all anyway so it’ll be no big deal.

My henchman, Trask, and I broke into the lab, guns blazing. It was full of Arachnos agents of differing ranks. Once again, those Arachnos bastards’ bark is far worse than their bite. My twin .45s filled their puny frames with vast amounts of lead. Laughing, Trask and I fought our way into the heart of the lab and retrieved the book. Naturally, we left no witnesses. Burke was very pleased and my bank account got a lot bigger.

Burke then asked me to do another special job. He asked if I had the guts to go up against Longbow, the superhero organization that seems intent to force their laws on all of the Rogue Isles. I told him, “Hell, yeah!”, but my fee would be higher. He agreed to my new rates and then told me the job. Burke wanted me to retrieve the files of an Agent Kursk, who was a cryptographer for Longbow. Those files were chock full of Arachnos cyphers and other nuggets of information. Killing good guys while helping screw Arachnos? Awesome! After picking up some more ammo, Trask and I headed out. Once we got to the Longbow headquarters, Trask and I went to work. I have to admit one thing – those Longbow guys are well-funded! They had the newest computers, equipment, and every fancy doo-dad you could think of. After I retrieved the files from the recently deceased Kursk’s (at my hands) computer, Trask and I helped ourselves to some electronics that we could easily sell on the black market.

After paying the remainder of my fee, Burke told me that he had no further jobs for me for the time being, but he gave me the name of a new contact, a Doctor Creed. Trask and I headed towards the good Doctor’s location, blowing away any losers that tried to get in out path. I must admit that the appearance of Doctor Creed surprised me. You could see his brain! His brain! I asked myself, “What kind of guy has his top half of his head lopped off and exposing his brain like it was nothing?” Well, apparently the answer is a huge nut-job. Creed kept going on and on about the Infected, an ever-growing group of people who have been, well…, infected by some strange disease or something. Normally, I’d steer clear of crap like that, but the good Doctor’s money was too good to pass up. The first job that he had was to kill an Infected that had somehow gained superpowers and was negotiating with Longbow to gain support and champion the cause of the Infected. The job went off without a hitch. The superpowered Infected was pretty powerful, but not powerful enough to withstand some .45 slugs to his belly. It also felt good to kick some Longbow ass. Man, it feels great to grind those self-righteous mugs of Longbow agents into the sewer water! Afterwards, Doctor Creed asked me to free an Arachnos member from Longbow’s custody. Asking what the hell do I care about an Arachnos bum, the Doctor gave me two replies. The first was a butt-load of money and the second was that the Arachnos guy had some information on the source of the contaminant in the water which produces the Infected. Hell, the Doc could have stopped at reason number one! So I went and busted some Longbow heads and freed the Arachnos bum. It seems that he was a guard in Fort Cerberus, the main Arachnos facility on Mercy Island, and that there was a secret lab there run by a Doctor Geist. It seems that this Geist is performing biochemical experiments and the runoff from those are being pumped into the Mercy Island cesspools. Doctor Creed went into a rage at hearing Geist’s name. Creed feels that Geist stole his thunder back when they used to work together. I wonder if Geist is a total nut-job like Creed. Probably. Mad scientists seem to pop up all over in the Rogue Isles.

Jeffprime: So far, so good. I’m enjoying playing my mastermind very much. The missions are a pretty good mix of different styles. The newer groups to fight such as Longbow and the Infected help keep my interest up. It’s a lot cooler to shoot up some weird looking zombie dude or goody-two-shoes in tights rather than killing boars or spiders as in other MMOs. Playing a mastermind really fits my style. I like hanging back slinging lead while my henchman does the same. Dark Miasma is proving itself to be a valuable power. Without it, I couldn’t heal my henchman and he would die pretty quickly. Which means that I would die pretty quickly! 🙂 I can’t wait to get another thug to join my ranks and to be able to equip them better.

As I’ve been going up in levels, I’ve been putting all my slots into my thugs and my Dual Wield. Those are the two powers that I use the most so it seems smart to concentrate on those. I still haven’t gotten tired of firing my twin .45s. All the other powers I’m just leaving with their original slot.

As for the missions, I’ve been picking ones in which I don’t work for Arachnos. I’m trying to stay true to the background concept that I created for Twilight Dusk, that being that he intends to work for himself and, hopefully, rule the Rogue Isles (or a portion of it) himself. So far, I’ve been able to pick missions that don’t conflict with that, but I don’t know if that will continue. I hope so.

That’ll do it for this time. If you have any comments or suggestions, please post them in the forum. Adios!