Disclaimer: This is original non-profit fan work, intended solely for the entertainment of the readers, and in no way intends any infringement on any copyrights, trademarks, or licenses held by Dreamworks Animation SKG, Alan Schoolcroft, Brent Simons, or the holders of any other legal rights or licenses pertaining to Megamind.

Author's Note: This continues in my same fanverse as all my previous stories, set approximately two years after the defeat of Titan. While I am aware of the existence of the Doom Syndicate and such villains as were created by the folks at Dreamworks and the comic book, I'm letting them have that part of this sandbox for their own, as I prefer the artistic freedom to invent my own troublemakers (aside from our beloved blue-skinned troublemaker!). Just a personal quirk. Enjoy!

In our play, we reveal what kind of people we are.

Ovid

I
The Problem

It couldn't last forever. Minion had known it right from the start, and he'd been dreading it — very, very privately, because he knew that if he breathed even one word of what he was thinking to Megamind, his mercurial ward would take it to the extreme, and begin worrying so much that he'd find a way to make things even worse.

Really, it wasn't such a big deal; Minion knew this in his heart of hearts. From all he'd seen and heard, it happened in all relationships, be they with friends, lovers, families, what have you. Sooner or later, there would come tensions, and disagreements, and fights. They happened. Nobody was perfect, after all, and the more stress one had in one's life, the easier it was for even the smallest friction to rub itself into an inferno all out of proportion with reality.

And so, it had finally happened between the Boss and Ms Ritchi, whom Minion was now happily permitted to call Ms Roxanne (which was the closest accommodation he could achieve between his own natural politeness and her request that he call her by her given name). Not with a huge fight or a single incident, but with bickering. Sniping. Emotional skins worn thin by stress and strain until the tiniest scratch seemed like a huge wound. Then the separating — not to the point where Roxanne moved out again, nor to the point where Megamind considered kicking her out, but to the point where they were retreating to separate corners at night, one or the other stalking off after a round of unpleasant verbal sparring, to sleep in the second bedroom without the other. Some nights, one of them would end the self-imposed exile before long and sneak back to join the other at some point during the night, to apologize and reconcile. Sometimes the night of cooling off would let their common sense (or what passed for it) prevail, and come morning, there would follow the apologizing and the making up. It always happened, so Minion had no real concern that their relationship was headed toward permanent disaster.

There was no doubt that the couple still loved one another, quite devotedly. That was not the problem; it was never the problem, even when Megamind got carried away once in a while with fits of jealousy when other men dared to flirt with Roxanne, or when Roxanne felt that Megamind wasn't taking a firm enough stand with some of his female groupies. They were both possessive as well as protective, and sometimes had trouble sharing their significant other with the rest of the world. Strangely, those things weren't actually problems, as any arguments they caused resolved themselves in a matter of minutes. It was the mounting stress of their work lives that was the real issue.

Being a superhero or a star reporter was never an easy job, but ever since the beginning of April, the level of that stress had ramped up dramatically. It started when Roxanne's bosses at work had decided to give her a promotion into a position admirably suited to her skills, that of a full time investigative reporter and interviewer on the order of Barbara Walters at the height of her career. It was a challenge Roxanne was eager to take on, not for itself alone but because it took her off the regular street reporter routine and allowed her to enjoy a somewhat more secure lifestyle. But the amount of work involved was tremendous, even though she only did a special report or an in-depth interview twice a month. Some of the obstacles to be overcome were more difficult than she had imagined, but she was determined to make this work, and Megamind had been perfectly supportive of it.

For his part, there had been an equally dramatic shift in his own work, since beginning of April. Following the absurd reappearance of Nico Teen at the charity benefit in late March, a small band of vastly more competent villains had made their presence known in Metro City, a threesome that picked up the collective moniker of the Terror Trio. Commanding powers of destructive sound, powerful lightning, and extreme temperature control — calling themselves UltraMach, AmpeRage, and Hyperthermia — they had made the lives of everyone in Metro City miserable with random attacks that were designed to undermine the morale of the citizens and seriously shake any confidence they had in their current defender. And, to Megamind's annoyance, they were good, especially when it came to eluding capture, as they were able to use their powers in tandem to thwart the blue hero's efforts to catch them. For the better part of four months, their reign of random terror went on, until finally, during a horrible natural heat wave in mid-July, Megamind was able to get a break in the case, in the form of a bit of broken technology that had been left behind during a fearsome battle in which he had managed to force the three to give up and run rather than destroy City Hall.

To almost anyone else, the piece of debris would have told them precious little about the trio of villains, but to Megamind, it was a goldmine of information. For one thing, it told him that his adversaries were device-dependent supers rather than ones in possession of personal powers beyond the norm. This meant that they were ordinary humans under their tremendously effective gadgetry, not even in possession of the few superhuman abilities that the alien genius could boast. For another, the materials from which the broken bit had been made were a good indication of where it had been manufactured. Most importantly, the designs of even so small a bit of circuitry and mechanics were red flags telling him a great deal of how their devices of power and mayhem worked.

After that, it had been a question of time, to devise effective ways to render those devices powerless, to lull them into thinking that they had him outfoxed, then to wait until all three of them tried to take him on at once in a final battle royale for the control of Metro City. At that point, Megamind, with the help of Minion and a small army of brainbots, was able to unleash the countermeasures he'd created to combat their technology, and after a fierce but fortunately not overly long fight, the three were defeated and hauled off to prison.

But it hadn't been easy, no, not by a long shot. A number of the brainbots had been destroyed beyond any hope of repair, their circuits fried by lightning and then shattered by the prolonged hypersonic they had bravely faced in order to carry out their parts in the fight. Minion's robotic body had also been severely damaged in the encounter, and even with his own protections in place, Megamind had not come through the battle completely unscathed. The one thing none of his protective gear could yet handle sufficiently well was extreme heat, and the need to engage in close combat with Hyperthermia had pushed what little that gear could do beyond their limits.

He had been lucky to avoid getting more than a few minor burns from that fight, but the real hyperthermia he'd suffered had been bad enough to lay him low for a week, while his body fought to recover from the abuse. He had immediately launched into making plans to account for such attacks in the future, but for too many days, he'd simply been too exhausted to do more than get Minion settled into one of his back-up bodies while he twiddled with ideas for redesigning his sidekick's primary robot habitat.

That was late July, and by then, both Megamind and Roxanne were suffering from an excess of stress, frayed nerves, and just plain exhaustion. Roxanne's station manager had wanted her to do a series of in-depth reports to be aired during August and September, and he'd wanted them completed by the end of July. She'd finished the work five days early, but only following a considerable push of extra-intense effort. During that final high tension week, the sniping and bickering between the couple got worse, as did the periods of upset for Minion while the alien fish could do nothing but watch his two friends mope and be sad or be angry and upset over the awful rut they couldn't seem to get out of.

Finally, at wits' end, he decided it was time to seek advice. Not exactly sure who he could talk to about it, Minion ended up going to the closest thing to a mutual sympathetic friend that they had: Wayne Scott.

To his surprise, the retired hero seemed to understand the situation perfectly, and told Minion so over a lunch they shared one afternoon at Wayne's hideout. "It's all stress — the downside of the whole superhero gig, one regular people don't think about very often. When you're a hero, you're supposed to be above all that, immune to it. Happens to celebrities in Roxie's position, too. Even people who love one another like those two do can get on each other's nerves when the stress piles on too high. Heck, my folks had the same problem, and they weren't even a tenth as gone over each other as Megs and Roxie."

"So what did they do?" Minion wondered, taking it all in. He was in the nicest of his various back-up suits, one that came closest to a human body, albeit a very strong human body. It had been designed to mimic certain aspects of Metro Man, as it had been part of another failed plot some five years ago. While Minion rather liked it — it was his only cybernetic habitat that could wear real clothing without looking ridiculous — it had been kept out of action since that failed plan because it reminded his ward too strongly of his nemesis and his seemingly endless doom of never defeating him. That Megamind was willing to let the thing come out of retirement now could either be a good or bad thing, and at the moment, Minion wasn't sure which it was. "What did you do? Before you decided to retire, that is."

Wayne grinned. "What normal people do: take a vacation, get away from all the usual faces and the daily grind for a while. It wasn't so easy for me, with the city always counting on me, but I managed it, when there were lulls in the action. They always happened, and I just had to be ready to take advantage of them when they came. And that's what my parents did, especially when they got on each other's nerves. They've got vacation places all over the country, and they take world tours from time to time, too. Sometimes separately, if they needed to cool off bad enough."

"I'm sure things aren't that bad between Sir and Ms Roxanne," was Minion's almost certain opinion. "They never go more than a day before making up — less, really — but it's been happening so often, almost every day now, that I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before it does get worse. I don't want to see that happen if there's anything I can do to help."

"You're a good friend, Minion, to both of them," Wayne approved, wistfully wishing he'd had such a friend all his life. He scratched his chin as he chewed a big bite of his laser-vision grilled burger, then swallowed. "It's gotten that bad with the two of 'em, huh? Then I think it's definitely vacation time, a good, long vacation — and by that I mean rest, relaxation, not the kind of package deal the travel industry likes to sell, where you need to take more time off when you get back just to recover from it. Megs has been working his little blue butt off for over two years straight, now, and I know it's been pretty much the same for Roxie, first fighting to get considered for a promotion, then working overtime to prove to her bosses that they didn't make a mistake giving it to her. When they went to Summerfest last year — wasn't that supposed to be a pleasure trip?"

Minion nodded. "For Sir, yes, and a little bit for Ms Roxanne. But it didn't turn out that way because of everything that happened, and that was the last time they were able to get away from the city when work wasn't involved."

"And when was the last time before that?"

The ichthyoid had to think about it while he munched on the — amusing, he thought — crab nuggets the former Metro Man had provided for his lunch. He chewed on both his thoughts and the tasty crab meat for a bit. "I don't know about Ms Roxanne," he confessed at length, "not for sure. I know that before Sir decided to give up being evil, she did go away from time to time, on work assignments and to visit with her family, but from the way she talks about them these days, I don't think the visits were always pleasant for her."

"They weren't," Wayne confirmed, a little sadly. "Her folks were divorced, and they had strong opinions about what their little girl should be doing with her life. To be honest with you, neither of them liked Megs, or me. We kept messing up her life, and I have to admit, they had a point. And most of it was my fault. Your boss had a grudge against me, and it wasn't unjustified. If I'd been nicer to him when the two of you first showed up at school, we could've been working together as friends all these years, instead of doing this stupid hero and villain shtick. I wasn't fair at all to Megs, turning him into the bad guy just because I had this idea that I was going to be the hero, so somebody had to be the villain. I was a stupid kid, I admit it, and I was such a spoiled brat, I wasn't willing to let anybody share in my glory. And because of that, Roxie got dragged into the middle of it when I did another stupid thing."

Minion was quiet for a moment before answering. "You did deliberately take advantage of Ms Roxanne's trauma to make her think you'd saved her that day, when she was attacked by the Bradford gang in that alley in Gangland, didn't you?"

Wayne hesitated, then nodded. "I even let her believe the people who told her Megamind must've set that blast where she thought she'd been hurt. I know he told me he didn't want anyone to know he'd saved her, but I carried it too far. I'm just glad that the two of them are together now. I know he felt something for her right off the bat, I could see it by the way he talked about her and looked after her in that alley. He really did care, in a way I'd never seen him care about anybody but you before. If I hadn't interfered, worming my way into the picture and letting people think she and I had something going, I think that maybe he would've given up the Game a long time ago. All these years, right from the start, he's just been trying to get people to accept him. If they wouldn't love him, he'd make them hate him. It's better than nothing — but it's not the way things should've been. We should've been friends, not enemies. I was too stupid to see it when I could've done something to make a real difference. And I should never have misled Roxie like that, and let her think there was nothing good in Megs. I knew better."

For what felt like ages, Minion could only look at the former hero, truly surprised. At length, he let loose a tiny sigh. "You should be telling this to Sir and Ms Roxanne, not to me, Mr. Scott. They're the ones you hurt, after all. Especially Sir."

Wayne smiled crookedly. "I know. But I thought it would be easier to tell you first — call it a dress rehearsal, to see how you took it. I'll tell Megs, I promise — but I don't think this is the right time, not when he's stressed out to the max and so's Roxie. She hasn't had a real vacation for at least five years, and I don't know when's the last time he did."

"Never, really," the fishy sidekick admitted. "The closest we ever got to that was a month we spent hiding out in an abandoned furniture store in Ludington, after you and he had one of your first big fights, before he'd found ways to protect himself from being injured so much. Even though we escaped, Sir was pretty badly beat up, and he needed time to recover in peace, so we stole a car and kept going until we could find a safe place to hide. We found the empty store and stayed there, but it wasn't really a vacation. Sir was hurt, and all I could do was take care of him while he got better. It wasn't easy, because we had very little money, and I had to sneak out at night to find food and supplies, since we didn't have the holowatches back then. It was quiet, but it wasn't enjoyable."

"So he's never had a real vacation, at all?"

"No. Really, Mr. Scott, just think about it. He lived in a prison from the day he arrived on Earth, and until he got the disguise generator to work, where could he have gone? Even if people didn't know him as a villain, there would have been a lot of stares and fear and probably ridicule. When he was young, nobody knew who or what he was, and once they did know who he was, they hated him because he was the bad guy. Since he stopped that and they've started to accept him, there just hasn't been enough time to take a break, or when we try, things happen, like they did last year. Even now, if he went somewhere, it would have to be under a disguise to keep people from bothering him, and he and Ms Roxanne really hate doing that."

"I don't blame them," the ex-hero agreed. "Sounds to me like they need a place where it's quiet enough so that trouble won't come looking for them, but with enough to do so they can do more than just kick back, if that's what they want." He considered the puzzle, then grinned. "And I think I have just the place."

To be continued…