Ranter's Lament

Yesterday I wanted to relax a bit for my evening, and a bit turned into a lot. Later, I didn't feel like digitally archiving my thoughts, so you wretches get another special Tuesday bonus edition of Overlord in Exile¹ just like last week. Aren't you lucky. Don't come to expect it though.

I've been finding my undercover status... inconvenient, lately. My isolated fortress allowed me to avoid contact with the rabble, no matter how much they beat at the portcullis with pitchforks and torches². Unfortunately, with my current situation, I'm forced to do things such as "shopping" and "picking stuff up on my way home from drudgery." This leads to myself, omnipotent humble genius³, being thrust into close quarters with the great unwashed masses⁴. This inevitably results in chains of human detritus, sometimes attached by harnesses and sometimes free-floating, clustered around a shopping cart, blocking my path and generally making nuisances of themselves. They are often reminiscent of the cloudy stringers descending from the mother in a jar of vinegar, or the twisted mass of a jellyfish's tentacles, stinging and feeding upon the unwary.

While infuriating, this is not even the most bothersome part. Biological life is messy and, in truth, often causing inconvenient obstructions⁵. It tends to multiply uncontrollably, more so the less intelligent it is. While palpable, it is akin to despising the motion of the tides⁶. No, the inspiration for a loathing with the seething intensity of an Ebola outbreak in Manhattan is the inability of the (often massive) nucleus of such a cluster to fail to notice either the vile behavior of its spawn or the fact that I am... very patiently... waiting and trying to pass while it vacantly stares at the shelf, attempting to decide whether to purchase chocolate frosted sugar bombs for its hyperactive lineage or to go with the generic variety, saving a good portion of its annual income in the process. I know that I am in its peripheral vision, and that my cloaking generator is not on my persona⁷.

Normally, I would simply excite the chemical bonds of every atom in each of their impudent flesh until they burst into flame, or pull out a hyperneutrino phase-wave collapser and cause them to dissolve like a sugar cube in tea, or fold a U.S. one hundred dollar bill, fold it into the shape of an atmospheric dart assault craft and throw it into freeway traffic while they watched and let natural selection take its course. However, all of these admittedly tantalizing options would draw far too much attention to my presence and power, revealing me to my enemies.

So I stand there... staring... resisting the urge to open my mouth for fear of the obscenities that would pour forth, coating them in a sludge so viscous that they could not breathe; my hand twitches, resisting the impulse to lift their fully loaded cart over my head and bring it down upon them as a club, crushing them beneath it as flat as the final stage in the life cycle of a common opossum.

No, no... I wait, and commit each line and every fold of the foul creature's upper protrusion that can only be tangentially called a face to memory, assigning it a priority that rises the longer I wait, and plot my revenge.

For now, I am off... there are curious... "tents" that have popped up at various locations all over town, advertising the free and open sale of rockets and trinitrotoluene by the barrelful. Evidently they take all manner of credit, as well. This merits investigation.


1. Now with 10% more snarkiness!
2. This stopped once I installed the automatic drawbridge. Amusingly, it had enough torque and tensile strength to actually catapault people on it when I'd shut it fast enough. Glee!
3. ...and Champion Supreme of footnotes!
4. And indeed, depending on the store, "unwashed" only begins to describe the stench.
5. The piled corpses of my slain enemies, for instance, can sometimes make it difficult for my chariot to pass. They also used to fill up the moat before I switched to the magma-filled model, solving the problem with the price of leaving a faint ashy residue about.
6. ...which can be changed, but you need a graviton mass displacement generator, appropriate feedstock (napkin-math says about 700 rabbits or 40 orphans will do) and about 4600 GW of electricity. Preferably provided by solar sources; I must think about my planet's overall health these days.
7. Having left it in the lab of my island fortress during the insurrection, and not having enough tellurium to build another... yet.