Extraordinary stories about extraordinary heroes normally need extraordinary villains with extraordinary gadgets and extraordinary widgets and extraordinary deeds, facilitated by mind-numbingly extraordinary technology.
All this sounds extraordinarily exciting but this story is slightly different, so I need to tone down expectations by rewriting the paragraph you have just finished reading. How about this?
Stories about heroes normally need villains with gadgets and widgets and deeds, facilitated by technology.
That sounds more like it. There is not much about this story that is extraordinary; its heroes, villains, super or otherwise. However, all is not lost.
Dr Don’t Know does have a global crime network. He also has a large submarine that he uses as his secret base but none of this is quite as glamorous as it sounds. Let me explain.
Global crime networks expand and contract over the life of a supervillain and Dr Don’t Know’s network had experienced a downturn in recent years. Profits have been down for a while now and this is why he has a submarine.
During the good times, Dr Don’t Know rented office space in many of the major cities around the world. He also had penthouse apartments and hotels suites on permanent stand-by, just in case the crimes he was working on necessitated an overnight stay somewhere.
Legions and legions of uniformed staff manned these offices and apartments and suites, ready to serve his every criminal whim.
However, all of this renting and hiring and manning and possible overnight-staying was incredibly expensive. When the crime times were good, Dr Don’t Know felt justified in spending this kind of money but once the crime times were not quite so good, Dr Don’t Know’s army of accountants, in the last thing they did for their boss before they were all fired, reviewed Dr Don’t Know’s income and expenditure and concluded that he was paying too much for too much and needed to start cutting back.
So, all of the office space and penthouse apartments and hotel suites were given up, as were the legions of uniformed staff manning them. Realising that he had to base himself somewhere in order to remain both at large and in business, Dr Don’t Know bought a second-hand submarine called Dr Don’t Know’s Submarine.
Straight away, I am sure you will agree that this is a terrible name for anything, let alone the sub-aquatic headquarters of an international master criminal down on his luck. However, in a spirit of team building that he has since come to regret on a daily basis, Dr Don’t Know ran a competition amongst the few employees he had left to name the vessel. The winning name was drawn from a hat.
Dr Don’t Know’s Submarine is a terrible name for the vessel but things could have been a whole lot worse if one of the other entries had been picked instead. Imagine if the submarine had been called Float Float or Crime Swim? What about Giant Swimming Flying Thing? Sea Sky 33? Dr Don’t Know’s Evil Underwater Submarine and Criminal Hidden Hideout Machine?
Dr Don’t Know’s Submarine constantly patrolled the waters of the world, hoping to avoid detection by staying partially submerged for hours at a time.
According to its operating manual, Dr Don’t Know’s Submarine can also fly short distances and be driven the wrong way down a motorway but no one, Dr Don’t Know included, has been brave enough to put this to the test.
To find out more about Dr Don’t Know and his submarine click here. You can also follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter but don’t expect him to say much.
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