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You have let me down. Your task was simple! You were supposed to distract Captain Nebulon and lure him into the Shadow Zone, where our phantoms could have toyed with him for years. Now he has slipped your grasp, and he reaches ever closer to the Neutronic Modulator. You are not the first minion to disappoint me. I'm sure you recall what happened to your predecessor — you oversaw his fate yourself. We always need fresh brains for the Monster Pit. |
The seed for this story was the title, which came into my head from somewhere or other. The title sounded intriguing, and suggested a story written as a monologue, a format I've always enjoyed writing. There's a wonderful freedom that comes with monologues: you don't have to bother with descriptions, or the other tedious functions of narrative. You just imagine the character's voice, and run with it. (For this particular story, I imagined the protagonist speaking with the voice of Geoffrey McGivern in the Hyperdrive episode "Hello, Queppu".)
Flash fiction is, by definition, brief — there's little room for worldbuilding. Consequently it tends to draw upon familiar tropes: in this case, the archetype of the supervillain and his minions. When I contemplated the ways in which a supervillain might harangue his chief henchman, a host of topics occurred to me. Indeed, I found myself coming up with several more possible story titles:
I suspect that the world doesn't really need half a dozen versions of the same joke, so I won't write all of those titles as sequels. But maybe one or two....