"Did you really mean that, Bernard? About Megamind not being that bad?"

"Well, sure, Roxanne. He's cleaned up the city, he's put all the art back in the museum, he's let the banks reopen. Maybe he's figured out that evil isn't all it's cracked up to be."

"Bernard, I was there in the fake observatory when Metro Man's skeleton came flying in. I saw how they reacted, Megamind and Minion, like fans at a football game when their side scores a touchdown. There was a man dead at their feet and they showed no remorse."

"I remember that video, and I remember thinking that, well, this is one of the things abuse victims do when their abuser dies."

"Abuser?! Bernard, what on Earth are you talking about?"

"Roxanne, what I'm about to tell you, I can't back up. It came from an interview I did with a dying ex-convict at the V. A. hospital a few years ago. He was one of the men who raised Megamind. Everyone knows that Megamind was raised in prison, but what's less well known is that for a few years he was also a scholarship student at an exclusive school for gifted children. During the time Little Blue, as the old man called him, attended that school, not a week went by that he didn't come home with bruises. Every couple of months, there would also be a broken arm or a dislocated shoulder. He used to hide these injuries from the prison infirmary staff and go to one of the prisoners who knew first aid. He healed very fast. A broken arm splinted before dinner would be healed by morning. The thing that confused the prisoners was that Little Blue could already handle himself very well in a fight. He was quicker than a human, and resourceful. Hardened adult criminals with plenty of street fighting experience couldn't lay a fist on him. So how was he getting hurt in a school where all his classmates were children from affluent families?" Bernard leaned close and his voice dropped. "As it turned out, he was not the only alien child in the school."

"Wait a minute. You're telling me that Wayne Scott and Megamind went to school together? And Wayne... bullied him?"

"I think Wayne was practicing. He knew he was destined to be a hero and who better than the boy from prison to play the role of the criminal? That would explain the arm and shoulder injuries. If you look at a recent photo of Metro Man bringing in a criminal, you'll see that he always holds on by the cloth between the shoulder blades. It's the most effective way for someone as big as he is to restrain another person without injuring them. But did he know that as a boy? I suspect that he didn't and that he also didn't entirely know his own strength. He'd grab Little Blue by the arm and break it or pull it out of the socket before he knew he'd done it."

"So when Megamind used to talk about revenge all the time, that's what he wanted revenge for."

"I think there's more to it than that. The old man remembered a kind of turning point for the boy the day he came home with his talking fish in a sand pail instead of his globe."

"Wait. I thought Megamind created Minion somehow."

"He created the suit that the fish uses to perform human tasks, but the fish himself was there from the earliest prison records. In those earliest records, the fish lived in a transparent globe that was not glass; it was some kind of alien technology. The boy could push food through it, but at the same time it could fall down two flights of stairs and roll away undamaged. He took the fish everywhere with him. How did that globe get broken? I doubt we'll ever know, but I think that day was the birth of Megamind, the terror of the city, when the future hero of the city put his friend's life in danger."

"So everything Megamind has done for the past month amounts to a gigantic school shooting."

"If Megamind had continued his education into high school, he might have become a school shooter. It's impossible to say, because Little Blue was expelled the week after the fishbowl incident for what looks, in the records, like his first act of deliberate, if petty, malice. He set off a smoke bomb that dyed the skin of everyone in the school blue."

Roxanne laughed in spite of herself. "God, if he'd only stuck to that level of, of pranking."

"Some of his early capers did amount to not much more than that. But what I think is happening now is that the Master of All Villainy persona has outlived its usefulness for him. Its whole purpose was revenge and he has his revenge. What we're going to be seeing now is the return of the Little Blue persona, and Little Blue seems to have been a nice kid who really just wanted to be liked."

"To be liked?" Roxanne took a moment to digest this. "And what happens when he realizes that it's not enough to put things back the way they were before he started his rampage? When he realizes how many thousands of strikes he has against him just from all the years he terrorized the city? Is he really going to have it in him to atone for all his misdeeds?"

"I hope so, Roxanne. I don't like to think about the alternative."