Being Thwarted

IF there's one thing I hate, it's being thwarted.

I mean, you go to the trouble of plotting and scheming for months.

Months.

Steal the right components for your master doom ray or whatever. Hire the goons, who are never worth the price you pay, but they're easier to come by than lackeys, who are loyal to a fault but so very rare. Make alliances with others of your ilk, comrades in arms, confreres, what have you. Find an underground grotto or dormant volcano. Build your secret lab. Begin construction on your ray of doom.

All this takes time, you know. Time and effort. And money. You think it's cheap, hiring goons and building a master control beam to take over the United Nations? It's not like you can just buy the things you need off the shelf. It's always some top secret project that someone else, someone hopelessly naive, is working on, that you saw a greater potential for, that now you have to go to the trouble of planning a heist to obtain for yourself. And every heist you pull is just one more chance to be thwarted. Or, at the very least, alert your hated enemies of your carefully constructed schemes.

And they always find out, don't they? Somehow, they always do. They stumble across a truck hijacking you've planned to obtain one component on the shipment and sell the rest to fund the next heist, denying you the critical component so you're forced to plan another heist with your dwindling assets to obtain that single piece of machinery or what have you, alerting them to the importance of the piece and subsequently giving them even more of a chance to glean what it is you're up to.

So infuriating.

And, even if you manage to collect the components you need without alerting everyone, there's always someone with a big mouth on your goon squad that has a big mouth and likes to spread the good money you've paid them around. That's why I never pay them until the job is done, minimizing the chance of loose lips sinking my ship of doom.

But, somehow they find out. And you know they're going to find out. So you have to incorporate traps and security systems and pits with sharks or crocodiles or whatever you fancy in them. These things take even more money from your funds. Just once I'd like to design a secret lab that didn't have a needlessly complicated torture chamber or an easily escapable prison cell. If I didn't need to build these things I could afford some goons who wouldn't be tricked by the "Hey one of us is sick, better come check" trick.

So they find you and discover your ray of doom and thwart you. Thwart thwart thwart. Sometimes I think I only exist to be thwarted. It's not like I went to thwart school. I never wanted to be thwarted.

I just wanted to take over the world, you know.