Free The Rules of Supervillainy (The Supervillainy Saga Book 1) by C.T. Phipps Page B

and so on. I...perjured myself when I was brought to court as a witness. They found me guilty.”
    I blinked. “I see.”
    “I got my sentence reduced to community service because someone pulled strings. They even kept me in the program.” Mandy looked back at her father’s picture. “I had a criminal record, though, now. Worse, I’d been proven to be involved in a sexual relationship with a supervillainess. I might have gotten away with it if I was a man, but a woman? No. My father never said anything about it but I could tell I’d disappointed him in a way he never forgave.”
    That was very much like the Colonel. He never stopped loving his daughter. He also never stopped judging her. I still hadn’t told Mandy about his ever so delightful conversation with me about how I should convert to Christianity so I could help her back to the righteous path.
    “ He sounds like a real ass ,” Cloak said.
    “ Thanks ,” I said back. “ Now would you stop listening? This is private .”
    “ I wish I could .”
    I decided I needed to convince Mandy she wasn’t the biggest fuck up in the room.  “If it’s any consolation, this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to be a supervillain.”
    “What?” Mandy asked, eyes widening. “You did this before without telling me?”
    I went to the fridge to get a beer. “No, this was before we started dating.”
    Mandy blinked. “When?”
    “It was a phase in college,” I said, using words which caused Mandy’s eyes to narrow. “Not that kind of phase.”
    “I dislike bisexual erasure,” Mandy said, shrugging. “What can I say? It’s a pet peeve.”
    I unscrewed the beer bottle top and took a swig. “I was pretty idealistic during my Junior year. I was away from my parents and I thought I could honor Keith’s memory by taking up his mantle.”
    “You became Stingray?” Mandy said, stunned. “Why didn’t I hear about this?”
    I took another drink of my beer. “ Because I was awful at it .”
    “When has that ever stopped you before?” Mandy said, smirking.
    “Ha-ha,” I said, still smiling. “I decided I would take up the environmental cause of the oceans versus, you know, robbing banks and stuff.”
    “The oceans?” Mandy said.
    I gestured with my half-empty beer bottle in hand. “Words cannot express what terrible horrors mankind has unleashed on the sentient porpoises, Atlanteans, Lemurians, Merrow, and transmigrated Space Whales.”
    “I had sex with a Merrow once,” Mandy said. “It turns out the whole fish tail thing is a myth. Not that we needed that part. She was great in a hot tub.”
    I stared at her.
    A minute passed.
    “Gary,” Mandy snapped her fingers.
    “Hmm?” I said, finishing off my beer. “Sorry.”
    “Must you make that joke every time I mention my sex life?”
    “Do you have any people not ridiculously hot you’ve dated other than me?”
    Mandy paused. “...no?”
    “Then joke I will continue to make,” I said. “Anyway, I defaced corporate property. I got help from the computer department and whistleblowers to hack corporate records and expose the truth. I also sabotaged some Omega Corp dolphin nets during trips with my girlfriend at the time and her father.”
    “That sounds less like supervillainy and more like social activism,” Mandy said.
    “Yeah,” I said, throwing away the bottle in the trash bin. “So I decided to blow up Omega Chemicals.”
    Mandy stared at me. “Goddess.”
    I stared at her. “That may be a bit dramatic. I was going to set a bomb to blow up their pumping station on the weekend after hours and expose they’d been leaking stuff into our groundwater for decades, causing gross mental illness and homicidal rages.”
    They’d settled the lawsuit last week.
    Still in business.
    Mandy said, “That’s still terrorism.”
    “Maybe,” I said, sighing. “In the end, I couldn’t go through with it. A bomb wasn’t my style. I might have been willing to go up to the CEO’s office, put a