Dr. Coolbad braced his elbows on his desk. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and pushed up his glasses with two fingers.
“Fuck,” said Dr. Coolbad.
And fuck was right.
He was shocked he hadn't considered the possibility before. As far as he was concerned, his plan had gone off without a hitch, if you didn't count this rather large and important one.
“Can't you just- I dunno, amnestic-tize them?”
No, said the person on the other end of his bluetooth. And it's pronounced “amnestitize,” they also said, but Dr. Coolbad was busy considering the former comment. He tugged at his collar, his office growing increasingly warm.
“Hmm. This certainly is… something. Something indeed.” said Dr. Coolbad, stroking his chin in a way that suggested he was both dastardly villainous, but also considered sexy by a specific demographic of people on the internet.
Admittedly, he was surprised “The Foundation” had lasted as long as it did. The premise of the whole thing, while not actually being his idea, was rather overcomplicated. And it wasn't even a good name. But hey, he needed that engineer, and he didn't have a better plan. So monsters it was.
It was after he gathered the lower staff that it stopped being just monsters. Now it has expanded to objects, people, phenomena. Too much for him to keep track of. So he let all the eggheads keep track of it, while he sat in his office being broody and incredibly vague about what he “knew,” so that nobody ever asked. Which worked. People listened to him, on account of how cool he was. But they also feared him, on account of how bad he was. And Dr. Coolbad was a conventionally attractive white man, which meant he could get almost anything he wanted.
Anything but the entire United States of America, apparently.
Was one lousy global superpower too much to ask? He frowned, pushing himself away from his desk in the only updated office chair in the building. The plan had worked. It did exactly what he wanted it to. The people he exposed to the mysterious effect filled in the blanks on their own, making up their own version of whatever they thought was going on and not asking annoying questions like “Why are we turning this grocery store into a front for a top secret shadow government organization?”
The UN did get involved, eventually, but he sorted that out soon enough as well.
“The UN sucks,” he announced to “The Foundation.”
“The UN sucks,” they agreed.
“They're blowing up all our monsters and stuff,” one of them posited.
“Yeah, they're blowing up our monsters and stuff,” the rest agreed.
“Sure,” said Dr. Coolbad.
“Fuck the UN,” the lot of them concluded.
“Fuck you,” said Dr. Coolbad, to the UN.
And with nothing else standing in his way, Dr. Coolbad took over the United States of America. And the United States of America didn't seem to mind, because despite his being very bad, he was also very cool.
“ALL of them?” he asked the person on the other end of the phone, whose name he had been told but had forgotten immediately.
“All of them.” They answered.
“What about the Groups of Interest?”
“We have all of them too.”
Dr. Coolbad tapped his fingers on his desk.
“What do we do now?” asked the person whose name he had forgotten.
And Dr. Coolbad didn't know.
“Celebrate,” he said hollowly, “The mission is over and uh, humanity is safe or whatever.”
“Yes, sir.”
They didn't hang up. In fact, they kept talking. And his office kept getting warmer.
“…where do we buy the party supplies?”
Where do they buy the party supplies indeed.
The mission had succeeded. Dr. Madmaxson Coolbad's incredibly designed company logo and its mysterious mind-controlling properties had successfully conducted a crusade to convert every business in America to a Scan Copy Print office supply store. His plan had worked perfectly, and now every store belonged to his corporation, and every human being in the country was among his “personnel.” It was an office supply mogul's paradise.
Except now that all the stores were office supply stores bearing his own branding, there was nowhere to buy the party supplies.
Or food. Or air conditioners.
“Fuck,” said Dr. Coolbad.