Short Story; Thalia's Good Day

Credits; Thalia,

"This is fantastic news!  At last I shall have the Edge of Sanity, all shall bow before my power."  Thalia, Queen of Gravaga, delivered one of her famous evil laughs.  It was needlessly long and somehow managed to keep getting louder steadily despite lasting nearly ten straight minutes, more astonishing still was that she managed to do it without stopping to breathe. 
"Out of principle I'm required to shoot you, which of your feet do you tend to prefer?"
"What?"  The messenger was new at this, clearly he was a new hire.  Everyone knew that the villain always shot the messenger, everyone Nielda anyways.  Thalia was the best villain in the universe, and she knew it.  As such, she had to serve as a good example to all the younger, less able villains.  After all, what kind of world would it be if the villains just ran around randomly committing acts of evil with utter disregard for the rules?  She'd grown up in a world like that, every kid with a minion and a cape ran around taking candy from babies and kidnapping determined young reporters.  But she'd put a stop to that, candy was easy enough to get from stores and determined young reporters tended to be dating equally determined young heroes.  Now villains knew to kidnap the determined young reporter's nerdy looking boyfriend first and to rob the generally undefended candy stores instead of the equally undefended and noticeably less wealthy orphanages. 
Sadly in order to do that she had to occasionally shoot a few messengers. 
"My right foot I suppose, do you really have to shoot me?"
"No."  She snapped, one of her crystalline attendants stretched out a hand and blasted his left foot with a bolt of cold flame.  The young messenger collapsed, clutching the shattered appendage and howling in pain.
"But it reminds me of why I became a villain in the first place.  Take him down to the healer, give him time and a half while he recovers, and put his children on the Christmas mailing list if he has any."
"Yes creator"
"I prefer 'your ladyship', I'm not god you know."
"But you are the creator, we are your creation.  Without you there would be no us."
"Poppycock, I'm sure someone would have thought of you eventually.  It's not like no one has ever hypothesized a silicon based life form with a frost-fire nature and a logical personality type before, I just happen to be possessed of the incredible magical power needed to put it into effect.  I didn't create you, I just realized you."
She flicked on the galaxy map and keyed in the new information. 
"Besides, I've met you grandparents.  You're quite natural, they were my creation."
"I am aware of..."
"This discussion bores me, send for Cyssie; I am going to need a particular device for this mission."
"Yes creator"

Yes, she had worked quite hard to get to were she was.  The constant scheming, the needless shooting of innocents, theft of candy, corruption of heroes had drained her.  She'd managed to avoid a few of the worse sort of villainy though, dogs had nothing to fear from her and most of her children got along with her just fine even if they didn't all follow in her path. 
Cyssie was her youngest.  She was about as neutral as it got, sold to anyone for dirt cheap.  Spent every waking moment, and several sleeping ones, working on inventing new ways of doing things other people hadn't even thought of needing.  Not the prettiest thing in the world, but she was about as good of a daughter as a Mom could ever want, called weekly, showed up for dinner monthly, never brought home a weird boyfriend.  Admittedly she never brought any sort of boyfriend but no one was perfect. 
She heard the telltale pop of an incoming teleport. 
"Hey mom!  I've got the Kierothaumatic Illusory Disruptofier you wanted!"
Right, and she had the communication skills of a child comic relief sidekick.  There was that too. 
"I'm going to assume that it does what I need, which button turns it on and how can I tell it's working?"
Cyssie sighed.  She was used to it, and most people were probably interested in how things worked.   Or for that matter, what Kierothamatic meant.  But Thalia had always made it clear that she trusted it would work and didn't need to know how. 
"This switch turns it on, and this light flashes when it's on."
"And how do I know when to turn it on?"
Cyssie took it back from her and switched it on. 
"There Mom, it has an repeating internalized power supply.  It won't stop working so there's no reason to turn it off." 
"Any side effects I should know about?"
"Yea, staring at the blinking light to long will give you a killer headache, so I designed it to emit a periodic pulsing pain relief field.  And the field may cause you and your enemies to be unaware of injuries they've taken for slightly longer than is healthy."
"You built a device that suppresses pain into a device that disrupts enchantments?"
"Yeah, maxed out the power supply too, and it has a self-shield, fragmentation armor, and a big red self destruct button for when the hero inevitably stops you."
"Cyssie, when was the last time a hero stopped me?"
"Well, the family is getting together for dinner on Friday, so I figure Dad shows up in the nick of time midday Thursday to stop you."
Right, Hal would show up and stop her as always.  God she loved that man, he was the only thing standing between her and having to rule the universe.  Ever since he'd first showed up in her throne room and commanded her to let his girlfriend of the time go, a request which she had happily complied with, no one else had foiled her plans.  Over time they'd gotten quite close, and they'd eventually decided to go steady, he only foiled her plans and she never let anyone else foil her.  When he finally captured her after he foiled her plan to use the artifact from the temple of Kasun, they'd gotten married.  Soon afterward she had to postpone her plot to blackmail the King of Rhinsla while she was carrying their eldest daughter, Katherine.  Sure they'd had their fights every other month, and they were both quite determined to cause the other humiliating defeat, but as far as relationships went, few immortals could claim better. 

"Your payment will arrive in the usual manner.  So are you going to bring someone to dinner one of these days or am I going to need to start inviting nice young men over for you?"
"Actualy Mom, I met someone at the artificer's conference last week.  He's very eager to meet you, he's a big fan of your work with low decay reanimation."
"Really?  Always nice to meet a fellow necromancer, does this young lad have a name?"
"Dr. Igor, he used to work with the count back in the day."
"Isn't he a henchman?"
"Popular misconception, he's brilliant!  I was giving a lecture on the effects of high output power emitters on artificial reanimation and he came up to me afterwards to discuss it.  Apparently he's been working on the same thing for ages!  And yesterday he came over and we tried steady effect xyphonoids, made out for a while, and then calibrated some of the twitch-guided missiles I've been working on for the Pythens.  It was amazing, and we even had time for dinner!"

And she thought Hal and her had weird dates.  She couldn't help but feel like there was something in that statement that sounded normal for a date, but Cyssie always talked too fast for her to tell.  But it was good to hear that her daughter was actually doing something normal-ish for once. 
She sat back in her throne and relaxed.  It was a good day.