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The evil Dr. Vandertramp had worked hard to develop his accurate and minutely scrutinized understanding of himself. He knew his own flaws and weaknesses as intimately as he knew his strengths and achievements. He remained outside the dichotomy of humility or pride in the way of a shark, its form and function fine-tuned by millions of years of existence. Dr. Vandertramp was equally pragmatic and perhaps even more predatory.
Dr. Vandertramp had once been unsure of the life of evil he felt called to. He was young, then, and concerned with ethical living, albeit in a very pragmatic way. The epiphany that had led to him accepting his true nature and his deeply-felt purpose as a human being had been this: there will always be someone who will do evil. If they're defeated, another will rise to take their place. So why shouldn't it be Dr. Vandertramp in that position, knowing that he could fight off all usurpers and do evil right?
The evil Dr. Vandertramp was convinced that truly great villains needed some formative, life-changing experience to turn them away from the natural human inclination for mild goodness (the kind that limply "does the right thing" only when it's not inconvenient and can't be said to truly align with GOOD or EVIL) and toward an existence bent on scheming, sabotage, and wickedness both surreptitious and blatant.
To his enormous disappointment, the children who had once been at least nominally in his care were now grown and were pursuing various forms of lukewarm mediocrity. He felt that he had failed them but wasn't sure what else he could have done for them.
Now Dr. Vandertramp's children were beginning to have children of their own and, bafflingly, were perfectly willing to include the nefarious grandfather in their lives. This meant that the pressure was on: these interactions might be his last chance to corrupt a generation who would carry on the Vandertramp legacy, and he refused to fail the children this time.
Dr. Vandertramp stood over the fallen form of his vanquished foe, managing to look simultaneously triumphant and a little bored.
"Do you know why I am standing, Generalissimo, and you are not?" he asked.
The man's only response was a wet cough and a groan.
"Sometimes, even your enemies will do you the favor of showing you your flaws, and perhaps even suggest a way to improve. You should take that very seriously, and be grateful, regardless of the source. If there is a 'next time' for you, try to remember that."
The evil Dr. Vandertramp had expected no other verdict, in truth, because he had made no effort to obscure the evidence of his most recent exploits. He was only surprised that it had taken so long for the system to catch on and convict him. Well, and he also thought it strange that it was the very ones who asserted that he had set up shadow governments in 28 cities and countries, orchestrated civil wars and sold weapons to both sides, and stolen all the denim in India-- that these same accusers somehow thought that a prison cell would hold him, was absurd to Dr. Vandertramp.
The evil Dr. Vandertramp received the latest report: a hundred more zeppelins and fifty new fighter planes were ready at strategic points along the arctic perimeter. Watchtowers and flak cannons were now fully manned. Everything was going according to plan; this year, Dr. Vandertramp would finally ruin Christmas.
YOLO had been a good one, reflected the evil Dr. Vandertramp; it had really caught on and had made a satisfyingly huge number of people very angry. But it wouldn't last forever, so he sat at his desk with notebook and pen and tried his hardest to think of the next one. There were other ways to crumble civilization, of course, but this was his favorite one.
The evil Dr. Vandertramp peeked out from under the ill-fitting and remarkably itchy cowl, which he was wearing in order to remain undetected during this routine assassination. He had been irritated when required to receive the confession of several parishioners, all astonished by this new, profanity-muttering priest. Now, however, he waited in peace, and that was one thing at which Dr. Vandertramp excelled.
Lately, things between Dr. and Mrs. Vandertramp had been tense; she had been holding three of his henchmen hostage for a week. The nefarious Dr. Vandertramp refused to negotiate, but felt pretty sure he could storm the living room and free his men when his wife fell asleep watching midmorning talk shows.
The piano came crashing down from the third floor window where Dr. Vandertramp had lovingly set the trap. He was pleased to note that, upon impact, the wrecked instrument played one last chord, a C# minor. With the ambassador crushed under a piano and a Rachmaninoff prelude in Dr. Vandertramp's mind, it seemed the day couldn't get any better.
The villainous Dr. Vandertramp was in a luxurious changing room at a very upper-class clothing store. He had three tailored suits in with him and a pushy Italian tailor outside the door, and a cold sweat was beginning to form at his greying temples. He had been on both ends of heists, air raids, and unfair fights, and nothing got to him quite like clothes shopping did.
Meanwhile, the evil Dr. Vandertramp had been roped into participation in the community bake sale. His thumbtack cookies hadn't done any damage yet, as far as he could tell, and he found this rather upsetting.
Dr. Vandertramp, avid collector of rare books, felt a slight tremble in his hand as he leafed reverently through the pages of Seven Acrostic Yiddish Haikus About Abraham Lincoln's Beard*, knowing that he must have it.
*Written by Moshe Goldstein, with a lengthy foreword by e e cummings.
"'Soon' is a very relative term," the evil Dr. Vandertramp said to the hostages, as though explaining something to five year-olds. "But yes, I will probably release you soon." He did not mention that their release would probably be into the crocodile pit.
It is a little-known historical fact that Jedediah Theophilius Vandertramp (an ancestor of the evil Dr. Vandertramp) was the inventor of flake-shaped breakfast cereal; it is even lesser-known that he specifically designed it to deflect milk poured over it out of the bowl and onto the floor.
Of all the shadowy organizations he funded, Dr. Vandertramp was perhaps most fond of the restaurant he had named The Tables Have Turned, where he had a permanent private room for conducting business and a cache of arms and ammunition.
Dr. Vandertramp practiced his evil smile in the bathroom mirror. The dashing federal agent waited nervously in the hallway where he hoped to ambush the warlord, not knowing that he had been allowed to enter the lair and would soon be mopped off the floor. It would be like a romantic comedy, with an unbearable script and improbable coincidences, but significantly more violent.
The evil Dr. Vandertramp found himself in the midst of his own midlife crisis. He bought an aircraft carrier that wasn't for sale, had his forces take over a few disputed African diamond mines, and took up the electric guitar, badly.
Dr. Vandertramp was, in fact, the holder of a legitimate doctorate degree; it wasn't just a title to make him sound more sinister. The degree in question was in French Literature, and his dissertation had probably been the only one of that field to have been defended by explosives and small arms fire.
It hadn't been easy, but Dr. Vandertramp had managed to violate the Geneva Conventions in several interesting ways while waging his campaign to stop the boy scouts from fundraising in his neighborhood.
