Stanley Hotchkiss wasn't screaming. He couldn't scream. Completely deaf, he was capable of making only low-volume, low-pitched noises. Which was why Barry Comeau had chosen him for a victim. He had learned just enough ASL to sign "Come over here. I'll show you something cool." He had tried it at recess, when Stanley's interpreter was taking a bathroom break, and succeeded in luring the younger child over to the one corner of the school playground that was neither visible from the windows where the adults watched nor covered by the security cameras. Once there, he stood between Stanley and the rest of the playground, mostly blocking the other children's view. Not that they, intent on their own play, noticed. Pinching and twisting Stanley's flesh and pulling his dreadlocks, he had brought him to a state that would have involved screaming if the deaf boy had been capable. Instead, he was weeping and making the few sounds he could make.
"Pig noises," Barry called them. "That all you can do, make pig noises? Are you a pig? Huh? Huh?" He emphasized his words with more pinching, twisting and pulling. He had planned to enjoy his torture of Stanley until about thirty seconds after the warning bell, then push Stanley down and run to join the crowd moving into the building. He had arranged with his cousin, who was in his class and who owed him money, to provide an alibi. With the deaf kid's word against his and his cousin's, he figured he could get away with it.
"Bowg!" Suddenly bully and victim were surrounded by brainbots. Megamind was known to have a deep hostility to bullies, but Barry had not heard of him putting surveillance on public school playgrounds.
"I didn't do it! I didn't do it! Don't bite me!" He had found that flat-out denial, coupled with a show of fear, was his best strategy.
There were six brainbots. Three surrounded each boy, separating them. One of those around Stanley, specially equipped with a pair of five-clawed graspers, signed "Are you injured? Are you bleeding?" Another offered him a tissue. Stanley took it, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, put the tissue in his pocket and signed, "I'm okay, I think. Not bleeding." Assured that there was no need to call for medical intervention, the cyborgs herded the boys into the school.
The teacher, grading papers at her desk, looked up in shock as the little group came in. "What on Earth is going on here?" she asked, but got only "Bowg," for replies. The brainbot who could sign stayed with Stanley. Two stayed with Barry. The other three quickly moved to darken the room and pull down the projection screen. Then one of them floated to the back of the room and began to project. Only about ninety seconds of the torture session had been recorded, but it was more than enough. The teacher got out her phone and dialed the principal's office.
The brainbots stayed at the school for the rest of the day, replaying the ninety seconds of video for the principal and then for the parent-teacher conference with Barry's mother. At the end of their shift, they reported the incident to Megamind and Minion. Their Daddy pronounced them "Good little cyborgs," and rewarded them with a jolly game of wrench-throwing.
The vast computer system at the Lair was set up to produce a "Summary of Dangers to Citizens" nightly at 4 a.m. Barry Comeau's name was flagged for coming up in two incidents. The second was outpatient treatment for a fractured rib at a local emergency room. His mother, who'd brought him in, insisted it was caused by a fall, but the pattern of bruises around the fracture looked more like the result of a beating. Knowing that abusers are often victims of abuse, Megamind called up a background report on the family. The report showed that Barry's father, Rick Comeau, was a member of a group that had, in the past six months, seen a significant uptick in arrests for assault of various kinds, disorderly conduct and property damage incidents, as well as involvement in traffic accidents. The kicker was the name of the group: employees of Scott Industries. The increase was greatest among blue collar workers such as Comeau, but it was noticeable even among the white collar staff. Something was going on here. He decided to have a little talk with Rick Comeau, not just to give him a little warning about domestic violence, but to hear an inside perspective on whatever it was that was happening inside the city's largest employer.
Comeau was a regular at Miller's Tavern, a long-established bar a block from the company's Number Two Wireworks. Megamind simply showed up there, resplendent in his full costume, during the after-work rush the next evening. The overwhelmingly male crowd greeted him with cheers and offers to buy him a drink. He knew that, to get these men talking, he had to at least go through the motions of having a beer, though he was no great fan of the blunting of brain function that was the inevitable result of drinking alcohol.
"Well, I'll be on duty again very shortly, so nothing too strong," he said. "I'll have a half pint of Grand Traverse Stout." A local microbrew, it was low in alcohol and high in sugar, just his kind of beer. "Is Rick Co-moo here?"
"It's Com-yo," replied Rick, who was leaning on the bar holding a pale ale. Physically, he was a typical Northern Michigan combination of Welsh, French and Pottawatomie, dark haired and light skinned, a little larger than average. Megamind crowded in next to him. He was visibly uncomfortable, and started speaking before the alien could ask him anything. "Look, uh, I know my kid's been having problems lately. The whole family's under stress. I don't know what to tell you."
"Tell me about the stress. Something is going on inside Scott Industries, isn't it?"
"They've speeded up the line." Rick took a nervous sip. "Plus, they've laid off three guys and told the rest of us to just cover for them. We're all frantic, trying to keep up. When we complain to our super, he freaks out at us, like he's under just as much pressure as we are. He used to be a decent boss. And there's rumors. The contract is up for negotiation next year. They're talking about give-backs, about loosening up the overtime rules. With the cost of living like it is, we're barely making it now, and they want to pay us less?" Comeau's voice rose in volume as he spoke, so that the whole room ended up hearing that last question. Another factory worker leaned in from Comeau's other side.
"I'm in Tool and Die, Mister Defender," the stranger said, "and it's the same thing. Pressure, pressure, pressure, like they're in some kind of money trouble and they've got to get as much out of us as they can." Other workers joined in, painting a picture of a sudden change in policy about six months previous. He thanked them and went back to the Lair to do some research.
Megamind's infiltration of Scott Industries went back a long way, to his earliest efforts to undermine his longtime rival. With the information the workers had given him, it required less than an hour's hacking to trace the orders that had started it all to one man: Miles Scott, current CEO of Scott Industries. And when he searched on that man's name, he came up with some very interesting things, indeed.
#####
"What are you doing here? How the hell did you get past Security?" Miles Scott, arriving at his office, was not happy to find Megamind already there. The CEO bore a strong physical resemblance to his late uncle, Bobby Scott, who was also his predecessor in this office on the top floor of the Scott Building in downtown Metro City. It was 6:30 a.m.
"Good morning, Mister Scott. I thought it better to get this meeting taken care of early, just in case the police become necessary. Better than having them struggle through rush hour traffic." Megamind lounged in Scott's leather chair. "You've instituted a very interesting change in policy just within the last six months. Greatly increased pressure on your employees. Nothing illegal yet, but you're just asking for a major industrial accident."
"I'm refocusing on shareholder value. That's the name of the game in business these days."
"Oh, shareholder value. And that's why you're quietly selling your own shares-"
"The stock rose twenty-eight percent after our better than expected third quarter earnings report. I'm just taking my profits."
"But that's under your own name. As Henry K. Devries, you've been selling this company short on a very large scale. Almost as if you expected trouble of some kind. Doing it from your, excuse me, Henry's address in the Cayman Islands, too, so that it will be neither taxable nor you extraditable if everything here were to come a cropper. I've perpetrated enough dastardly plots in my time to recognize one in the works when I see it. You're setting this company up for disaster and positioning yourself so as to profit from it."
"I haven't done a thing that's illegal."
"Of course not. Some of my most successful plots were perfectly legal. On the other hand, some heroic and necessary actions are unavoidably illegal. I'm thinking here of the threats that I'm sure your cousin Wayne made to keep you from doing this while he was alive. His powers made it possible for him to personally find you anywhere in the world, or at least anywhere offering the sort of quality of life that would make this whole scheme worthwhile for an individual of your background. I may not have powers, but my technology can find you, wherever you go, whatever you do. As for what I could do after that, let's just say that, for heroes, the rules can bend. You can dot every i and cross every t in order to make yourself legally untouchable, and not deter me at all."
"What do you want?" Megamind was delighted with the tone of defeat in the man's voice.
"I want to sit here and watch while you type out your letter of resignation, effective immediately. Turn over the reins of power to your chief financial officer." Megamind had read enough of the emails to know that the CFO had been against Miles' change of policy from the beginning. "Then I will escort you directly to the airport. I'm not going to bother with making a judicial case. Just going to unofficially banish you from the city for good. I'm not taking my eyes off you until you fly out of here."
"So I'm not allowed even to say goodbye to my wife and family?"
"You seriously expect me to believe that you weren't planning on running out on them, taking only that young woman whose bills you're paying and whom you frequently visit in her condo on Bergeron Avenue? Sit down and start typing. If you have the letter ready in fifteen minutes, I won't tell your wife and family about her."