Vicious Servant

**The Servant**, sometimes known as the "**Vicious Servant**" or simply "**Vicious**" for short, is a secondary antagonist in the 1998 PC and PS1 fantasy videogame Heart of Darkness. Vicious Servant is a slimy deceitful alien who serves under the Master of Darkness and begrudgingly does his bidding but has loyalties that are incredibly self-serving and dictated by personal gain.

## Appearances

Vicious Servant is a humanoid pink alien creature with rubbery slimy skin and an elephant-like trunk for a nose. He has four-fingered hands and two-toed feet, standing about the height of a child and with a paunchy stomach. His jaw is lined with broken filthy teeth, he has bulbous large eyes and is hairless save for three long scraggly black strands atop his head and his eyebrows.

## Personality

At first, Vicious Servant appears to be a mere psychopath, happily being bossed around by, and even tolerating physical abuse from the Master of Darkness. However, it is revealed that he despises his boss, and is constantly willing to usurp him and take his powers and kingdom for himself. Whether he is top dog or punching bag, one thing about him never changes--the servant is an extreme sadist, willing to capture children and hurt and even kill them. Despite his clumsiness, Vicious Servant is actually a very intelligent and manipulating individual, able to win over Andy's trust, as well as come very close to usurping his boss.

## History

Vicious Servant's first appearance is receiving physical abuse at the hand of the Master of Darkness within the Master's lair. Soon after he confronts the winged Spectre who had returned back to the castle with Whisky the dog in a sack, believed to be Andy who was brought instead of the boy as a mistake. Vicious Servant sucks up to the Master of Darkness relentlessly with groveling praise and adoration until the Master evidently grows tired of the display and demands that he cease his pandering, instructing Vicious Servant to present Andy from within the sack as the boy was an intended gift from Vicious Servant to him. Upon realizing the mistake, the Master becomes outraged and nearly kills Vicious Servant, incinerating the winged Spectre in the process and violently grabs him with the intent to fling him into a spiked outcropping, where Vicious Servant narrowly avoids impalement when Mefudoka steps between him and the hazard.

Later in the game, Andy is captured by a group of Spectres after breaking into the Master's lair in an attempt to free Whisky and is brought to Vicious Servant, who imprisons him in a cell along with his dog, threatening that the Master will soon finish him off and teasing him about the inevitability of this outcome.

Andy uses the environment to his advantage to escape the cell and tricks Vicious Servant into taking his place with a rolling boulder before running off further into the lair. Vicious Servant wastes no effort escaping the cell himself however, and with surprising speed and efficiency brings the green meteor known as the Magic Rock into the Master's lair and presents it to him on the bridge. Vicious Servant has a brief moment where coming into contact with the rock bestows upon him the same power granted to Andy and the Amigos, but the Master of Darkness quickly dispels his newfound abilities by shattering the meteor into several pieces with a fireball. This evidently is the last straw for Vicious Servant, after having a taste of powers of his own, he finally decides to take revenge on the Master. Concocting a plan to destroy him as payback for all the abuse, poor working conditions, and low pay he has had to put up with over the years.

After Andy kills Mefudoka and is armed with his plasma cannon, he crosses paths with Vicious Servant a second time who deviously explains to Andy his plan to put the pieces of the meteor back together and kill the Master of Darkness by throwing it into the black hole at the center of the lair. Vicious Servant sends Andy off to retrieve the pieces one by one, and gradually Vicious Servant decides his newfound alliance with Andy will be fleeting. When there is but a very small piece left, located on the bridge at the center of the lair, the Servant sends Andy into an ambush to retrieve the piece where the Master and an army of Spectres will be waiting for him. The Servant then kicks Whisky into the black hole, laughing mockingly at Andy's naivety at trusting him in the first place.

Whilst Andy deals with the onslaught of the Master's shadowy forces on the bridge, the Amigos break into the Master's lair and apprehend Vicious Servant, tying him up and crushing him with the rock in the process of getting it down to where Andy is. After the Master is defeated, one of the Amigos goes back for Vicious Servant and flies him out of the collapsing fortress. The Amigos take him back to Space Island, where Head Honcho is seen torturing him by jabbing him in the butt with the nails previously reserved for his voodoo dolls.

## Trivia

For the entirety of the game's credits, Vicious Servant performs various tasks on-screen such as conducting the music score and trying to stop the credits from rolling up the screen.