It’s the villain who makes the story.
This was a truth that I knew without a shadow of doubt, even at nine years old. I didn’t give a solitary fluffer-nutter sandwich if Superman used one of his bajillion overpowered special abilities to rocket-punch a bunch of dumb evil robots into space or if Spider-Man hog-tied a pair of mindless thugs and left them all wrapped up and dangling from a flagpole for the cops. So what? Superheroes did that every Saturday.
Boring.
No, it was the bad guys I admired. They were the ones who wanted to make a real difference, not the ones fighting blindly to maintain the status quo. I had no idea what ‘status quo’ meant back then, but I knew I was destined to be a villain; to change the world. Besides, the bad guys were the ones who got all the cool names, like Megatron and Lady Deathstrike.
Or Shiva the Destroyer. Mum had told me once that I was named after one of the great pillars of our religion, that my name was quite special. Of all the strange bits and pieces that made up the person I was, it was my name I liked the best. Shivali. It felt powerful, important. Unstoppable.
Like I really could change the world.
But it wasn’t a name or any sort of superpower that changed everything. It wasn’t Kismet, or Karma or even their obnoxious glitter-dusted…
