despicably good (1/2)
despicably good part one
sehun-centric, gen, crack, pg-13
wicked is the new black. brought to you by our star villain, Oh Sehun and his minion squad, and everyone's favourite Jongdae. despicable me au.
this literally would not be here if not for badwolf_x, thanks jannah for holding my hand throughout this and betaing it ♥
This story starts with a Number One Villain, or a villain aspiring to be so. His name is Oh Sehun, a perfectly normal boy upon first look - perhaps a little prettier than the average person, but nothing to show that he’s in the running for the evilest villain the world has ever seen. Sehun goes about and does villainy things all day in place of work; in fact, that is Sehun’s work, for every successful villain job pulled off earns him a mountain of cash from the Council of Bad, which helps keep villains in business.
Sehun has three minions, as he likes to call them, though they much prefer themselves be called the SWAT squad, never mind that they look nothing like the part. Leading the minion squad is Park Chanyeol, in his trademark blue overalls and goggles smushing his curly orange hair. Sehun is occasionally - only very occasionally, mind you - unable to comprehend Chanyeol, but that’s definitely because Chanyeol speaks in a sort of gibberish when he’s excited. The minion squad also includes Byun Baekhyun, a pint-sized package of talent that does anything and everything, and Do Kyungsoo, another pint-sized package of good sense and reason. Kyungsoo smooths out all the creases in the blueprints Chanyeol comes up with and, together with Baekhyun, the three of them make a motley, but pretty strong team.
Sehun is, however, not at all pleased with his minion squad today.
“Chanyeol,” Sehun calls as he storms into his Pod of Evil, the equivalent of a house to normal people, and plops down on his leather sofa ergonomically designed to fit the curvatures of his body, jamming the button for the kitchen to send up a cup of chocolate bubble tea.
“Yes!” Chanyeol zips to a stop on a bike-scooter hybrid in front of Sehun.
“We need a new heist.”
“Sure! Should we make away with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon this time?” Chanyeol offers up, whisking a notebook and pen off a nearby passing trolley. Sehun makes sure not to look like he doesn’t know what those are.
“That’s imaginary,” Kyungsoo, who has appeared out of nowhere, comments, and smiles at Chanyeol.
“Oh. Damn.” Chanyeol fingers his chin thoughtfully. “How about the Mona Lisa? I heard someone tried to steal it the other day, but those loser, second-class villains failed, of course,” A slow smile spreads on Chanyeol’s face, and Sehun thinks he’s starting to look a little crazed.
“No,” Sehun interjects, “we’re going intergalactic.”
“What?” Baekhyun rides up in a sports-car-UFO hybrid, protective goggles still on.
“Is that a word....?” Kyungsoo wonders, but trails off when Sehun gives him a look.
“Interplanetary,” Sehun incorrectly corrects, “we need to steal the sun before Jongdae does.”
“Jongdae?” Baekhyun wonders, but Chanyeol’s and Kyungsoo’s faces turn dark. Baekhyun had been recruited only a little while ago, so he’s a tad inexperienced in the villain world.
“Yes, Jongdae.” Sehun pinches his eyebrows together even more, “Jongdae is currently - I mean - uh -”
“Jongdae is the current Number One Villain, according to the latest quarterly report from the Council.” Kyungsoo prints out a sheet from his handheld laptop/printer and passes it to Baekhyun. “He’s been so for the last four quarters.”
Sehun narrows his eyes, and Chanyeol slides Sehun’s cup of chocolate bubble tea right in front of him. A bubble-tea-imbibed Sehun is a happy Sehun more often than not. It kind of works this time; Sehun still feels like smacking something upside the head, but at least he isn’t damaging his leather seat anymore.
“Anyway, as I was saying,” Sehun sniffs delicately, “we’re going to have to steal the sun before Jongdae does.”
“Okay,” Chanyeol says, “no problem! We’ll just have to find a vacuum-cleaner-like zapping thing that can suck the sun right up into a compartment where it’ll get cryo-frozen, so we won’t be burning from the heat or blinded by the light.”
“We might need to consider the size of the sun,” Kyungsoo pipes up, and Chanyeol nods thoughtfully, scribbling down a few haphazard notes.
“I want the sun displayed right here in my living room,” Sehun says airily, sweeping an arm at his display cabinet, currently housing the Holy Grail and the English Crown Jewels.
“Aight.” Baekhyun nods. “Do you know the other - Jongdae’s progress?”
“He’s planning for - for rocket launch in two weeks,” Sehun replies with a much smaller voice than he’d meant.
“Two weeks?!” the minion squad choruses, Kyungsoo’s eyes doing their thing out of his eyelids again.
Sehun frowns.
“No can do, man.” Baekhyun proffers his palms up in helplessness. “Two weeks isn’t even enough to build the rocket. I’m good, but not that good....”
Sehun’s frown deepens.
“But I can’t let Jongdae steal the sun! I’m never going to become Number One Villain like that! Think of something, Chanyeol!”
“Right, right, I’m on it! Uh... uh, let’s see. We just need to top his idea, which means....” Chanyeol angles his chin up, clearly deep in thought.
“Uh, he’s stealing the sun, Chanyeol....” Baekhyun points out.
“Yeah, I know, I heard Sehun, man. How about we steal Earth?”
This suggestion is met with silence and a lot of eye-rolling on Baekhyun’s part. Sehun and Kyungsoo pretend not to have heard Chanyeol.
“We could just... thwart their plans, like steal their rocket...” Kyungsoo seemingly weakly suggests, but the more Sehun considers the better it sounds.
Sehun nods. “I like this. Stealing from the slimy thief!” He ignores the looks that the three of them exchange.
There is a newfound glint in Sehun’s eyes, and so this is their new heist: stealing Jongdae’s ride to the sun.
---
It is, of course, not that easy.
The four of them decide to take a trip down to Jongdae’s pod to check things out - a reconnaissance trip is the proper term, Kyungsoo says, and they hop on their segways, save for Sehun who’s clearly too big and important for something that requires you stand for the length of the ride. Sehun gets into his obnoxiously large space car approximate, barely narrow enough to fit on regular roads. Sehun had it built exactly for that purpose, hence its lack of any sort of streamlined structure. It goes at an excruciatingly slow speed, much slower than the segways (so the minion squad has to keep stopping and waiting for Sehun to catch up), but Sehun rides it religiously; it had cost him quite a bit of the first mountain of cash he made.
By the time Sehun’s excuse for a transportation device makes it to Jongdae’s pod, the sky is already dark, but this makes for good cover in the bushes nearby. Baekhyun sets up camp, prepping a remote-controlled hovering camera, and Kyungsoo taps away at a FBI-database loaded high-speed supercomputer, fixed with a headset on which he is hooked up to Chanyeol and Baekhyun. Chanyeol is one foot away, rapidly hammering away at a quantum supercomputer with equations that calculate what sort of force it would take to penetrate the walls of Jongdae’s pod. It all looks very high-tech and Sehun nods with approval as he lifts his binoculars to his eyes.
At first sight, Jongdae’s pod a single building, roughly five stories tall, enclosed in solid, hard cold bulletproof reinforced opaque hybrid silicone-glass. There is one single entrance in the front, flanked on the right by a fingerprint scan, and on the left a retina scan. Jongdae seems also to have considerately added an awning over the front of the entrance, but Kyungsoo discovers that it doubles as a body-contour scan as well as a organism-vaporiser. Sehun shudders inwardly. All of Jongdae’s security measures are probably not uncalled for, given the number of enemies on both sides of the Good → Evil Spectrum Jongdae has against him, but this just makes Sehun’s job triply, quadruply difficult.
Baekhyun finishes prepping their camera then, and steers it into an orbit round the building. Kyungsoo, who has the camera feed, shakes his head as a confirmation that there is no other orifice that anyone or thing could enter apart from the front entrance. Chanyeol is getting nowhere with his equations, Sehun assumes from the amount of gibberish Chanyeol is muttering to himself.
Just as their camera rounds the building and is about to make its way back to their makeshift camp, Baekhyun miscalculates the radius of the orbit (he’s never been great at geometry) and the camera slides against the wall of the building. It fizzles to nothing in a second, and Sehun is wondering if he’d imagined things. He looks to his left, where Kyungsoo is doing that thing with his eyes again, and Baekhyun curses loudly.
“The walls vaporise things, too?” Sehun asks, but no one needs to affirm the obvious.
Just then, a large robotic arm extends out from the top of Jongdae’s pod, rotating 360 degrees. Baekhyun notes that a similar camera to theirs is fixed on the end, and it’s hardly subtle when its rotation halts just as the camera points in their direction. There’s a beat, and then something shoots out right at them -
Sehun and his minion squad get away before the grenade explodes in their faces by diving into the adjacent bush, but only just barely. They emerge considerably much more pathetic than before, Sehun’s hair mussed and Chanyeol with a branch sticking out of his shirt, but safe. The four of them pile back into Sehun’s space car after sending the segways home first to discuss their next step after having gotten out-villain’ed by Jongdae.
“So,” Sehun starts in his best Important voice.
Chanyeol nods, still looking at his equations.
“Mmmmm.” Baekhyun looks sombre as he packs away his remote control.
“What?” Kyungsoo looks at Sehun, Chanyeol, and Baekhyun in turn.
“Uh.” Sehun clears his throat. “Right, Chanyeol, what’ve you got? I want a post-reconnaissance report from all of you.”
Chanyeol frowns a little and approximates a facial spasm before looking up, lips pursed. “I got nothing.”
“Nothing?” Sehun echoes.
“I just know that we can’t break in or anything. They weren’t kidding when they said it was the Impenetrable Pod.”
“Ugh.” Sehun wrinkles his nose. “Baekhyun?”
“I - nope, no sort of opening at all on the outer surface of the building, that’s what the camera got before it - y’know, got fried.”
“Sshh.” Sehun could have done without that last reminder. “Okay, Kyungsoo.”
“Databases say there are five people living in there. There is a Kim Jongdae, of course, a Kris Wu, who seems to be - his head engineer, a Kim Minseok, second in charge. Also a Zhang Yixing, who is registered as Chef, and a Huang Zitao, who is listed under Very Dangerous by the FBI. Not sure why...” Kyungsoo trails off.
Sehun gulps. Shit.
He adjourns this meeting, mostly because he doesn’t know what to do next, but not before he gives his squad orders to work on it.
---
When Sehun collapses on his bed that night, he finds himself unable to sleep, the failure of today's attempted break in weighing down on his chest. It's a little discouraging-well, more like extremely discouraging, because, if Sehun is completely honest with himself, things haven't been going well lately. Sometimes, when everything's going particularly badly, Sehun will question if he's even made for this villain stuff. If he’s extremely honest with himself, he wouldn't be able to even do anything without Chanyeol, Kyungsoo, and Baekhyun, and that just makes him feel like a screw up.
It just makes him feel like the sad, pathetic little brother again. The sad, pathetic little brother always tagging along after his smarter, wittier, better older brother, Lu Han.
Sehun sighs and rolls over. Oh, Lu Han.
All his life Sehun had grown up in Lu Han's shadow, listening to their mother praise all that Lu Han was (and still is and more). She'd tell Sehun to please grow a pair and be like your brother whenever he attempted-and miserably failed-to emulate Lu Han's budding, evil plans. When Lu Han decided his calling was to be a villain, Sehun had joined the Council of Bad too in an attempt to work out a sort of brotherly partnership with Lu Han, but Lu Han had had no time to show a little brother the ropes.
Sehun had just watched with a cloud of dust in his face as Lu Han stole the pyramids and Mars. Lu Han was everything Sehun wanted (to be), and sometimes when Sehun is in one of his more contemplative moods, he wonders if he’s in all of this villain business solely because of his need for Lu Han's attention. For validation, for the world, his mom, his brother to sit up and notice Oh Sehun -
But then again, Sehun doesn’t really like thinking about this, so he tries putting all of this profound big brother business out of his head and dreams about chocolate bubble tea fountains instead.
---
Sehun decides sometime in the middle of the night that it had been a stupid idea to begin with, anyway. If he had stolen Jongdae’s rocket, it would have no big impact on the world, since the world doesn’t actually know about Jongdae’s plans to steal the sun, and he would have gone through so much trouble for nothing. He brings it up at breakfast the next morning.
“I’ve decided,” Sehun says airily, waving his pancake fork around, “that stealing Jongdae’s rocket was a dumb idea anyway. Whoever made the decision should be very ashamed of themselves.”
No one really has the heart to remind Sehun who it was.
“So,” Sehun says, “we’re going to have to steal something else.”
“Okay.” Kyungsoo nods, still stirring batter at the counter. Kyungsoo doubles as the chef occasionally, because even though they have a robot that makes anything - anything - Sehun wants, sometimes the robotic touch just isn’t the same.
Chanyeol sticks his pencil behind his ear. “I was thinking about it, and maybe we could steal light.”
“What.”
“Light! You know, the thing that - lights up -”
“We know, Chanyeol,” Baekhyun replies exasperatedly. “How?”
“You see, light is composed of visible electromagnetic waves that could technically be disrupted by a strong enough electromagnetic field, and if we design a contraption that is magnetically electromagnetic, we could suck all of the light from the world right into our contraption,” Chanyeol explains, or at least that’s what Sehun thinks Chanyeol says. It’s a little mind-boggling, but Baekhyun’s eyes brighten at once.
“You’re right! That’s genius! And also relatively easy to do, I could design a magnetically electromagnetic block from lodestone in a day or two.”
“How about fixing it on a remote-controlled satellite that orbits Earth to really make this project international? We already have one of those in - our basement, if I remember,” Kyungsoo suggests casually as he smooths a dollop of batter on the stove.
“Good.” Sehun takes a bite of pancake. “Yes, I’ll throw the world into darkness before Jongdae can steal the sun!”
Sehun is exceptionally pleased at how he’s going to be one-upping Jongdae with this plan, before Jongdae manages to steal the sun, and so this is their new heist: stealing light.
---
When Sehun gets home from the Bank of Bad that evening after securing a large loan for the best lodestone in the world for Baekhyun to work on, he is pleased to see that the minion squad has unearthed the satellite from the basement. It is perhaps a little dusty, or rusty, and the hinges could do with several tightenings, but Kyungsoo cleans it up in a jiffy and Chanyeol sets up the quantum processor hooked up to the satellite.
“Alright,” Chanyeol says, “I can steer this, but not from here, because we installed that new magnetic safety encasing around our house a few days ago. The park several kilometres away seems like a good vantage point, so I need Kyungsoo to prepare for base camp setup there. Things like food rations, of course. Snickerdoodles.”
“Done.” Kyungsoo smiles, and pads away.
“The lodestone is coming tonight,” Sehun announces proudly, and basks in the looks of awe (awe it is, Sehun’s sure) Baekhyun and Chanyeol give him. “Are we all set?”
“Yep.” Baekhyun puts his safety helmet back on. “I’m just coming up with a holding compartment to fix onto the satellite to hold the lodestone in place, and when the lodestone comes I can do my magic fast enough for us to start Friday.” A week before Jongdae plans to set off for the sun.
“Good, good.” Sehun sips his bubble tea. “Very good.”
There’s a loud buzzing sound, rather similar to what the physical movement of electricity would sound like, and the basement is thrown into darkness.
“Ah,” Baekhyun says, and Sehun blinks.
“Was... that supposed to happen,” Sehun asks, as Chanyeol gets up to the fuse cupboard, crashing into the right panel of the satellite, his desk, and a wall in the process. When the lights turn back on, Baekhyun’s hair is kind of fried, and not because of too much hair dye like Sehun’s, either.
“...yes, of course,” Baekhyun replies smoothly, “I had to test the electrical capacity of this setup.”
“No you didn’t,” Chanyeol replies with a grin, and visibly withers under Baekhyun’s death glare.
“Okay.” Sehun thinks he’d better leave them to their job. “Just remember, Friday, okay?”
Chanyeol gives him a thumbs-up without turning back, and Baekhyun starts whistling, so Sehun goes to bed that night with a beautiful dream of himself getting awarded Number One Villain and snatching the reigning trophy right out of Jongdae’s hands. (He has to change his pillowcase himself first thing the next day instead of letting Kyungsoo do it, like he usually does, because of the embarrassing drool spots.)
part two
sehun-centric, gen, crack, pg-13
wicked is the new black. brought to you by our star villain, Oh Sehun and his minion squad, and everyone's favourite Jongdae. despicable me au.
this literally would not be here if not for badwolf_x, thanks jannah for holding my hand throughout this and betaing it ♥
This story starts with a Number One Villain, or a villain aspiring to be so. His name is Oh Sehun, a perfectly normal boy upon first look - perhaps a little prettier than the average person, but nothing to show that he’s in the running for the evilest villain the world has ever seen. Sehun goes about and does villainy things all day in place of work; in fact, that is Sehun’s work, for every successful villain job pulled off earns him a mountain of cash from the Council of Bad, which helps keep villains in business.
Sehun has three minions, as he likes to call them, though they much prefer themselves be called the SWAT squad, never mind that they look nothing like the part. Leading the minion squad is Park Chanyeol, in his trademark blue overalls and goggles smushing his curly orange hair. Sehun is occasionally - only very occasionally, mind you - unable to comprehend Chanyeol, but that’s definitely because Chanyeol speaks in a sort of gibberish when he’s excited. The minion squad also includes Byun Baekhyun, a pint-sized package of talent that does anything and everything, and Do Kyungsoo, another pint-sized package of good sense and reason. Kyungsoo smooths out all the creases in the blueprints Chanyeol comes up with and, together with Baekhyun, the three of them make a motley, but pretty strong team.
Sehun is, however, not at all pleased with his minion squad today.
“Chanyeol,” Sehun calls as he storms into his Pod of Evil, the equivalent of a house to normal people, and plops down on his leather sofa ergonomically designed to fit the curvatures of his body, jamming the button for the kitchen to send up a cup of chocolate bubble tea.
“Yes!” Chanyeol zips to a stop on a bike-scooter hybrid in front of Sehun.
“We need a new heist.”
“Sure! Should we make away with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon this time?” Chanyeol offers up, whisking a notebook and pen off a nearby passing trolley. Sehun makes sure not to look like he doesn’t know what those are.
“That’s imaginary,” Kyungsoo, who has appeared out of nowhere, comments, and smiles at Chanyeol.
“Oh. Damn.” Chanyeol fingers his chin thoughtfully. “How about the Mona Lisa? I heard someone tried to steal it the other day, but those loser, second-class villains failed, of course,” A slow smile spreads on Chanyeol’s face, and Sehun thinks he’s starting to look a little crazed.
“No,” Sehun interjects, “we’re going intergalactic.”
“What?” Baekhyun rides up in a sports-car-UFO hybrid, protective goggles still on.
“Is that a word....?” Kyungsoo wonders, but trails off when Sehun gives him a look.
“Interplanetary,” Sehun incorrectly corrects, “we need to steal the sun before Jongdae does.”
“Jongdae?” Baekhyun wonders, but Chanyeol’s and Kyungsoo’s faces turn dark. Baekhyun had been recruited only a little while ago, so he’s a tad inexperienced in the villain world.
“Yes, Jongdae.” Sehun pinches his eyebrows together even more, “Jongdae is currently - I mean - uh -”
“Jongdae is the current Number One Villain, according to the latest quarterly report from the Council.” Kyungsoo prints out a sheet from his handheld laptop/printer and passes it to Baekhyun. “He’s been so for the last four quarters.”
Sehun narrows his eyes, and Chanyeol slides Sehun’s cup of chocolate bubble tea right in front of him. A bubble-tea-imbibed Sehun is a happy Sehun more often than not. It kind of works this time; Sehun still feels like smacking something upside the head, but at least he isn’t damaging his leather seat anymore.
“Anyway, as I was saying,” Sehun sniffs delicately, “we’re going to have to steal the sun before Jongdae does.”
“Okay,” Chanyeol says, “no problem! We’ll just have to find a vacuum-cleaner-like zapping thing that can suck the sun right up into a compartment where it’ll get cryo-frozen, so we won’t be burning from the heat or blinded by the light.”
“We might need to consider the size of the sun,” Kyungsoo pipes up, and Chanyeol nods thoughtfully, scribbling down a few haphazard notes.
“I want the sun displayed right here in my living room,” Sehun says airily, sweeping an arm at his display cabinet, currently housing the Holy Grail and the English Crown Jewels.
“Aight.” Baekhyun nods. “Do you know the other - Jongdae’s progress?”
“He’s planning for - for rocket launch in two weeks,” Sehun replies with a much smaller voice than he’d meant.
“Two weeks?!” the minion squad choruses, Kyungsoo’s eyes doing their thing out of his eyelids again.
Sehun frowns.
“No can do, man.” Baekhyun proffers his palms up in helplessness. “Two weeks isn’t even enough to build the rocket. I’m good, but not that good....”
Sehun’s frown deepens.
“But I can’t let Jongdae steal the sun! I’m never going to become Number One Villain like that! Think of something, Chanyeol!”
“Right, right, I’m on it! Uh... uh, let’s see. We just need to top his idea, which means....” Chanyeol angles his chin up, clearly deep in thought.
“Uh, he’s stealing the sun, Chanyeol....” Baekhyun points out.
“Yeah, I know, I heard Sehun, man. How about we steal Earth?”
This suggestion is met with silence and a lot of eye-rolling on Baekhyun’s part. Sehun and Kyungsoo pretend not to have heard Chanyeol.
“We could just... thwart their plans, like steal their rocket...” Kyungsoo seemingly weakly suggests, but the more Sehun considers the better it sounds.
Sehun nods. “I like this. Stealing from the slimy thief!” He ignores the looks that the three of them exchange.
There is a newfound glint in Sehun’s eyes, and so this is their new heist: stealing Jongdae’s ride to the sun.
---
It is, of course, not that easy.
The four of them decide to take a trip down to Jongdae’s pod to check things out - a reconnaissance trip is the proper term, Kyungsoo says, and they hop on their segways, save for Sehun who’s clearly too big and important for something that requires you stand for the length of the ride. Sehun gets into his obnoxiously large space car approximate, barely narrow enough to fit on regular roads. Sehun had it built exactly for that purpose, hence its lack of any sort of streamlined structure. It goes at an excruciatingly slow speed, much slower than the segways (so the minion squad has to keep stopping and waiting for Sehun to catch up), but Sehun rides it religiously; it had cost him quite a bit of the first mountain of cash he made.
By the time Sehun’s excuse for a transportation device makes it to Jongdae’s pod, the sky is already dark, but this makes for good cover in the bushes nearby. Baekhyun sets up camp, prepping a remote-controlled hovering camera, and Kyungsoo taps away at a FBI-database loaded high-speed supercomputer, fixed with a headset on which he is hooked up to Chanyeol and Baekhyun. Chanyeol is one foot away, rapidly hammering away at a quantum supercomputer with equations that calculate what sort of force it would take to penetrate the walls of Jongdae’s pod. It all looks very high-tech and Sehun nods with approval as he lifts his binoculars to his eyes.
At first sight, Jongdae’s pod a single building, roughly five stories tall, enclosed in solid, hard cold bulletproof reinforced opaque hybrid silicone-glass. There is one single entrance in the front, flanked on the right by a fingerprint scan, and on the left a retina scan. Jongdae seems also to have considerately added an awning over the front of the entrance, but Kyungsoo discovers that it doubles as a body-contour scan as well as a organism-vaporiser. Sehun shudders inwardly. All of Jongdae’s security measures are probably not uncalled for, given the number of enemies on both sides of the Good → Evil Spectrum Jongdae has against him, but this just makes Sehun’s job triply, quadruply difficult.
Baekhyun finishes prepping their camera then, and steers it into an orbit round the building. Kyungsoo, who has the camera feed, shakes his head as a confirmation that there is no other orifice that anyone or thing could enter apart from the front entrance. Chanyeol is getting nowhere with his equations, Sehun assumes from the amount of gibberish Chanyeol is muttering to himself.
Just as their camera rounds the building and is about to make its way back to their makeshift camp, Baekhyun miscalculates the radius of the orbit (he’s never been great at geometry) and the camera slides against the wall of the building. It fizzles to nothing in a second, and Sehun is wondering if he’d imagined things. He looks to his left, where Kyungsoo is doing that thing with his eyes again, and Baekhyun curses loudly.
“The walls vaporise things, too?” Sehun asks, but no one needs to affirm the obvious.
Just then, a large robotic arm extends out from the top of Jongdae’s pod, rotating 360 degrees. Baekhyun notes that a similar camera to theirs is fixed on the end, and it’s hardly subtle when its rotation halts just as the camera points in their direction. There’s a beat, and then something shoots out right at them -
Sehun and his minion squad get away before the grenade explodes in their faces by diving into the adjacent bush, but only just barely. They emerge considerably much more pathetic than before, Sehun’s hair mussed and Chanyeol with a branch sticking out of his shirt, but safe. The four of them pile back into Sehun’s space car after sending the segways home first to discuss their next step after having gotten out-villain’ed by Jongdae.
“So,” Sehun starts in his best Important voice.
Chanyeol nods, still looking at his equations.
“Mmmmm.” Baekhyun looks sombre as he packs away his remote control.
“What?” Kyungsoo looks at Sehun, Chanyeol, and Baekhyun in turn.
“Uh.” Sehun clears his throat. “Right, Chanyeol, what’ve you got? I want a post-reconnaissance report from all of you.”
Chanyeol frowns a little and approximates a facial spasm before looking up, lips pursed. “I got nothing.”
“Nothing?” Sehun echoes.
“I just know that we can’t break in or anything. They weren’t kidding when they said it was the Impenetrable Pod.”
“Ugh.” Sehun wrinkles his nose. “Baekhyun?”
“I - nope, no sort of opening at all on the outer surface of the building, that’s what the camera got before it - y’know, got fried.”
“Sshh.” Sehun could have done without that last reminder. “Okay, Kyungsoo.”
“Databases say there are five people living in there. There is a Kim Jongdae, of course, a Kris Wu, who seems to be - his head engineer, a Kim Minseok, second in charge. Also a Zhang Yixing, who is registered as Chef, and a Huang Zitao, who is listed under Very Dangerous by the FBI. Not sure why...” Kyungsoo trails off.
Sehun gulps. Shit.
He adjourns this meeting, mostly because he doesn’t know what to do next, but not before he gives his squad orders to work on it.
---
When Sehun collapses on his bed that night, he finds himself unable to sleep, the failure of today's attempted break in weighing down on his chest. It's a little discouraging-well, more like extremely discouraging, because, if Sehun is completely honest with himself, things haven't been going well lately. Sometimes, when everything's going particularly badly, Sehun will question if he's even made for this villain stuff. If he’s extremely honest with himself, he wouldn't be able to even do anything without Chanyeol, Kyungsoo, and Baekhyun, and that just makes him feel like a screw up.
It just makes him feel like the sad, pathetic little brother again. The sad, pathetic little brother always tagging along after his smarter, wittier, better older brother, Lu Han.
Sehun sighs and rolls over. Oh, Lu Han.
All his life Sehun had grown up in Lu Han's shadow, listening to their mother praise all that Lu Han was (and still is and more). She'd tell Sehun to please grow a pair and be like your brother whenever he attempted-and miserably failed-to emulate Lu Han's budding, evil plans. When Lu Han decided his calling was to be a villain, Sehun had joined the Council of Bad too in an attempt to work out a sort of brotherly partnership with Lu Han, but Lu Han had had no time to show a little brother the ropes.
Sehun had just watched with a cloud of dust in his face as Lu Han stole the pyramids and Mars. Lu Han was everything Sehun wanted (to be), and sometimes when Sehun is in one of his more contemplative moods, he wonders if he’s in all of this villain business solely because of his need for Lu Han's attention. For validation, for the world, his mom, his brother to sit up and notice Oh Sehun -
But then again, Sehun doesn’t really like thinking about this, so he tries putting all of this profound big brother business out of his head and dreams about chocolate bubble tea fountains instead.
---
Sehun decides sometime in the middle of the night that it had been a stupid idea to begin with, anyway. If he had stolen Jongdae’s rocket, it would have no big impact on the world, since the world doesn’t actually know about Jongdae’s plans to steal the sun, and he would have gone through so much trouble for nothing. He brings it up at breakfast the next morning.
“I’ve decided,” Sehun says airily, waving his pancake fork around, “that stealing Jongdae’s rocket was a dumb idea anyway. Whoever made the decision should be very ashamed of themselves.”
No one really has the heart to remind Sehun who it was.
“So,” Sehun says, “we’re going to have to steal something else.”
“Okay.” Kyungsoo nods, still stirring batter at the counter. Kyungsoo doubles as the chef occasionally, because even though they have a robot that makes anything - anything - Sehun wants, sometimes the robotic touch just isn’t the same.
Chanyeol sticks his pencil behind his ear. “I was thinking about it, and maybe we could steal light.”
“What.”
“Light! You know, the thing that - lights up -”
“We know, Chanyeol,” Baekhyun replies exasperatedly. “How?”
“You see, light is composed of visible electromagnetic waves that could technically be disrupted by a strong enough electromagnetic field, and if we design a contraption that is magnetically electromagnetic, we could suck all of the light from the world right into our contraption,” Chanyeol explains, or at least that’s what Sehun thinks Chanyeol says. It’s a little mind-boggling, but Baekhyun’s eyes brighten at once.
“You’re right! That’s genius! And also relatively easy to do, I could design a magnetically electromagnetic block from lodestone in a day or two.”
“How about fixing it on a remote-controlled satellite that orbits Earth to really make this project international? We already have one of those in - our basement, if I remember,” Kyungsoo suggests casually as he smooths a dollop of batter on the stove.
“Good.” Sehun takes a bite of pancake. “Yes, I’ll throw the world into darkness before Jongdae can steal the sun!”
Sehun is exceptionally pleased at how he’s going to be one-upping Jongdae with this plan, before Jongdae manages to steal the sun, and so this is their new heist: stealing light.
---
When Sehun gets home from the Bank of Bad that evening after securing a large loan for the best lodestone in the world for Baekhyun to work on, he is pleased to see that the minion squad has unearthed the satellite from the basement. It is perhaps a little dusty, or rusty, and the hinges could do with several tightenings, but Kyungsoo cleans it up in a jiffy and Chanyeol sets up the quantum processor hooked up to the satellite.
“Alright,” Chanyeol says, “I can steer this, but not from here, because we installed that new magnetic safety encasing around our house a few days ago. The park several kilometres away seems like a good vantage point, so I need Kyungsoo to prepare for base camp setup there. Things like food rations, of course. Snickerdoodles.”
“Done.” Kyungsoo smiles, and pads away.
“The lodestone is coming tonight,” Sehun announces proudly, and basks in the looks of awe (awe it is, Sehun’s sure) Baekhyun and Chanyeol give him. “Are we all set?”
“Yep.” Baekhyun puts his safety helmet back on. “I’m just coming up with a holding compartment to fix onto the satellite to hold the lodestone in place, and when the lodestone comes I can do my magic fast enough for us to start Friday.” A week before Jongdae plans to set off for the sun.
“Good, good.” Sehun sips his bubble tea. “Very good.”
There’s a loud buzzing sound, rather similar to what the physical movement of electricity would sound like, and the basement is thrown into darkness.
“Ah,” Baekhyun says, and Sehun blinks.
“Was... that supposed to happen,” Sehun asks, as Chanyeol gets up to the fuse cupboard, crashing into the right panel of the satellite, his desk, and a wall in the process. When the lights turn back on, Baekhyun’s hair is kind of fried, and not because of too much hair dye like Sehun’s, either.
“...yes, of course,” Baekhyun replies smoothly, “I had to test the electrical capacity of this setup.”
“No you didn’t,” Chanyeol replies with a grin, and visibly withers under Baekhyun’s death glare.
“Okay.” Sehun thinks he’d better leave them to their job. “Just remember, Friday, okay?”
Chanyeol gives him a thumbs-up without turning back, and Baekhyun starts whistling, so Sehun goes to bed that night with a beautiful dream of himself getting awarded Number One Villain and snatching the reigning trophy right out of Jongdae’s hands. (He has to change his pillowcase himself first thing the next day instead of letting Kyungsoo do it, like he usually does, because of the embarrassing drool spots.)
part two