Courtroom Conflict: Dr. Doofenshmirtz vs. Megamind

Witness Testimony

Modern science and the state of technology are among humanity’s greatest achievements. Sicknesses are cured with medicine, messages are sent in the blink of an eye, and the world is mostly a better place because of it. But it’s in the grey area of that “mostly” where trouble tends to show up, and that can come in the form of geniuses twisting their intelligence and technology for evil… Or, well, attempts at it.

Doctor Doofenshmirtz, the middle-aged schemer of the Tri-State Area…

…And Megamind, the blue-skinned savior of Metro City.

I’m Starlow, she’s Squigly, and he’s Leviathan, and there can be only one slapstick scientist left standing at the end of this Courtroom Conflict!

Credit for Doofenshmirtz Research: Strunton’s DA bio

The Tri-State Area is a pretty unassuming urban sprawl at first glance. Full of pleasant people and a thriving state of affairs, this city-spanning and geographically anomalous region is overseen by its mayor, Roger Doofenshmirtz, whose looks and charm win over the people in most situations. There’s plenty that goes on there that’s outside of Roger’s control, from an organization of secret agent animals to a gifted set of stepbrothers and their inventions, but the seat of mayor is still a coveted position.

So coveted, in fact, that a man in a tall purple building comes up with plans to take it over almost every day. He does this not just for power, but to spite Roger. Who could this person be, you ask? A political rival? An anarchist? No; in truth, it’s simply Roger’s less successful older brother, whose genius is only matched by his own incompetence: Doctor Heinz Doofenshmirtz.

Like most evil villains, Heinz’s childhood had its fair share of hardships. …I say that, but sheesh, he must have broken a mirror after opening an umbrella indoors when a black cat was walking by, because Doof’s childhood trauma is ridiculous! Growing up in the country of Drusselstein, he was forced to live with ocelots, work nonstop as his family’s garden gnome, draw a face on a balloon so he would have a single friend, and fail at pretty much everything he ever tried doing. I mean, neither of his parents were there for his birth! How is that even possible!?

Heinz’s parents were mentally abusive in just about every sense. In fact, they loathed him so much that they tricked him into boarding a ship bound for America when he was only sixteen. One long early life filled with further failures and instances of unluckiness later, Doof developed into an evil genius filled with desires for revenge against the world, fueled by his tragic and humiliating backstory.

And when we say that he’s a genius, we’re not exaggerating! Doofenshmirtz has invented dozens upon dozens of machines for his evil plots. He’s turned his building into a giant robot and created rocket boots in the past, but his most impressive creations are usually dubbed -inators, and their effects range from simple inconveniences to scientific marvels. He can put people in slow motion with the Slow Motion-inator, blind his enemies with the Eye-Fog-inator, control others’ behavior with the Slave-inator and the De-Volition-inator, speed up something’s natural aging process with the Age Accelerator-inator, and erase peoples’ memories with machines like the Forget-About-It-Inator, the Amnesia-inator, and the Delete From My Mind-inator.

And we’re just getting started with the kind of crazy stuff Doof’s inventions can do! He can manipulate living and non-living matter in a number of ways, whether that’s transmuting it with -inators like the Turkey-inator and the Metal Destruct-inator or duplicating it with the Copy and Paste-inator. He can reverse the natural process of evolution with the De-Evolution-ator, drain someone’s special abilities with the Power Drain-inator, manipulate the luckiness of others with the Stinkelkrampen-inator, speed up time with the Accelerate-inator, and make a day repeat itself again and again Bull Murray-style with the Do-Over-inator. The latter two can even mess with space-time when they malfunction!

Which begs the question… How the heck do you make something that can destroy the fabric of reality on accident?

By being as smart as Doofenshmirtz, that’s how. In fact, the only reason he hasn’t taken over the Tri-State area already – aside from his own general impracticality – is his arch-nemesis from OWCA, Perry the Platypus. But you can call him Agent P. Their relationship is usually more akin to coworkers than serious enemies, but Perry’s job still demands that he put a stop to the threat that Heinz presents, and for a problem solver like Heinz, that means he also has plenty of other machines built to restrain and trap Perry.

These platy-traps include cages, decoys, tractor beams, robotic restraints, quick-hardening chocolate spray, nets, glass domes, and robotic servants like Norm, a super-powerful and artificially intelligent war machine that’s… powered by a squirrel on a wheel.

Yeah, Doof’s machines might be really powerful, but he has a really shoddy inventing philosophy that leads him to include obvious and exploitable flaws in everything he makes. This is usually in the form of a self-destruct button, which he goes out of his way to include in just about everything he creates. It’s a good thing he’s tough enough to survive the explosions they create, otherwise he’d have been toast by his first invention!

Right, for being as incompetent and unlucky as he is, Doofenshmirtz is quite the physically capable scientist. This much is made apparent by his frequent battles with Agent P, where although he’s always defeated in the end, he’s been able to match his strength on numerous occasions. This is impressive because Perry can hurt Doofenshmirtz with physical strikes, and Doof was more affected by those strikes than he was by explosions the size of tall buildings. 

What’s more, Doof can keep up with Perry in combat, and Perry’s dodged the lasers fired from the mad doctor’s -inators. We know these beams are real lasers because they exhibit the same properties as lasers do in real life; Specifically, they bounce off of reflective surfaces and refract through things like crystals. And because lasers are beams of light, this means that Doofenshmirtz should have reactions nearing lightspeed going off of direct scaling!

If you stumbled a bit on “direct” scaling, that’s because Doof’s reaction speeds get even greater when we expand our scope. You see, Perry is a classically trained and highly capable secret agent, and thus he would naturally be superior to Phineas and Ferb in every way, as they are average children in-universe, physically speaking. This is important, as the boys can pilot spaceships through asteroid fields and fly their rocket-powered surfboards to a quasar in the space of no more than a few hours. These feats are difficult to measure, however, so we’ll stick to one such feat: Ferb piloting Meap’s spaceship to the Milky Way Bar.

I’ll take it from here! Bring out the Evidence Board, please! Okay, so this feat occurs in the music video for My Ride From Outer Space. Ferb takes off from his backyard on Earth at around 0:07 and arrives at the Milky Way Bar at around 0:27, so the trip takes 20 seconds, give or take.

Normally, this wouldn’t give us a concrete measurement because we don’t know exactly how far the Milky Way Bar is from Earth. But we can get an estimate from the episode Out To Launch, where Phineas and Ferb traveled to it under the pretense that it was a star. It’s clearly not one, but the fact that they couldn’t tell that from Earth means that we can assume it’s at least as far from Earth as the closest star aside from the Sun. That would be Proxima Centauri, which is 4.22 light years from Earth! It’s possible that it’s farther than that, but we have no way of measuring how far it would be in that case, so this is the lowest possible assumption for the distance.

Alright, now we have the numbers! Ferb travels most of the way there in what looks to be a mostly straight line, so with some basic math, we find out…

…That Ferb was piloting Meap’s ship at speeds of 1.996 times 10 to the 15th meters per second! That’s a blindingly fast 6,658,511 times the speed of light!

Wow, that’s insane! I never would have guessed Doof could be that fast going into this.

Well, he technically isn’t. This is just reaction speed, remember, and it doesn’t translate into his movement speed. Nonetheless, it’s a remarkably impressive feat to scale to.

Right, right. I guess it would be consistent, too, given the other obviously faster-than-light reactionary feats we mentioned before. Too bad that Doof can’t out-react his own incompetence, otherwise he might actually be able to put his genius to effective use.

It’s very true that Heinz’s incompetence is, for all intents and purposes, his Achilles’ heel. His machines are all easily destroyed or rendered nonoperational because of design flaws, and his solutions to a problem are usually needlessly complex. He may be an incredible inventor and scientist, but practicality is not Doofenshmirtz’s strong suit.

What’s more, a lot of his traps are designed with Agent P in mind, so they’re sized and suited for capturing something around his size. Against larger targets like humans, they can be less than effective because of this.

Still, it’s no wonder that Doofenshmirtz is regarded as one of the most dangerous threats that OWCA has to deal with! He’s succeeded in taking over the Tri-State Area, started a Doof-ified zombie apocalypse in Danville, drained the powers of Marvel heroes like Thor and Hulk on accident, stopped his evil self from the 2nd dimension from taking over the 1st dimension along with the rest of the cast, and after summer was over he turned over a new leaf, inventing a machine that could sustain time travel under the title of Professor Time. In a world chock full of child geniuses and evil masterminds, Heinz Doofenshmirtz has no trouble bumbling and scheming on a level all his own!

Dr. Doofenshmirtz: Ever since that stupid billboard went up, my panoramic view is completely ruined. I used to have this perfect vantage point for enjoying the delicious misery of others. But, after I launch this baby into orbit, my problem will be solved! Then I can go on to eliminate all the other annoyances that make my skin crawl. Like, uh… Nature! Beauty! Morning talk show hosts! Soon, there will be nothing that can withstand the wrath of Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz!

Beyond our Earth and among the stars, there is infinite potential for extraterrestrial life. Few can say for sure what lies out there in the vast vacuum of space, but fiction has come up with its own guesses of what our first contact could be with, ranging from chest-bursting monsters to home-phoning softies in bicycle baskets.

But for one elite family on a dying planet, their infant son would be among the first to walk amongst mankind. With their homeworld on the brink of complete annihilation, they were forced to load their child into an escape pod and launch him into the depths of space, hoping he would be safe and saying farewell with a prophetic declaration: “You are destined for…”

Well, their kid never got to know what they were destined for, because they were off for Earth in a flash! And after flying through space for a long time, they eventually came to Earth in a rocketing heap, with their launch pod landing safely in… prison!

Yes, if you thought this was the story of any men of steel or super saiyans, you’re in for quite the surprise. Another refugee from a different dying planet would instead take up that heroic role as his escape pod landed in the home of a loving family. This boy would grow up to manifest incredible powers, and one day he would become the beloved protector of Metro City: Metro Man.

As for the other child, he grew up into villainy, fostered by the inmates of the prison and pushed toward it by his classmates at school. Metro Man may have been able to shower them with laser-cooked popcorn and win them over, but the blue-skinned outcast had something they didn’t: an incredible intellect. With it, he began inventing machines from an early age, and he came to decide that his prophetic destiny was to fight Metro Man as a supervillain. And so he took up the name Megamind, devoting himself to evil and to terrorizing Metro City.

Megamind didn’t have much luck when it came to fighting Metro Man for most of their lives, usually ending up back in prison with another loss to add to the list. But that all changed one Metro Man Day, where after Megamind escaped prison, kidnapped reporter Roxanne Ritchi, and lured Metro Man into a trap, something unexpected happened: he won.

With Metro Man evidently fried, there was nothing left to stop Megamind from conquering Metro City, but that in itself grew to be a problem for the blue-headed villain. Despite all the chaos he had caused after his victory, he felt unfulfilled, as Metro Man – the one person who gave his villainy any purpose – was gone. You see, Megamind is not evil by nature; rather, it was the only thing he was ever allowed to be thanks to his upbringing and the effects of societal pressure on his outlook. 

But Megamind had a plan to fix that Metro Man-shaped hole in his life. And it was that plan that would eventually lead him to be able to do what was truly in his nature: use his intellect and inventions to help others. 

And over the decades, Megamind’s amassed one heck of a weapons closet! His go-to weapon is the De-Gun, which has a bunch of settings that have to do with “De-“. His favorite settings are Destroy, which shoots destructive energy blasts from the gun, and Dehydrate, which reduces any target to a moisture-less cube.

The Holo-Watch is another invention that Megamind usually has on his person. It’s a fancy-looking watch that can transform the wearer and make them look like someone else, mimicking everything about them aside from the color of their eyes. It’s also a communications device with which Megamind can get in touch with two of his most reliable sources of backup: Minion and the Brainbots.

Minion is the other remaining survivor of Megamind’s home planet, being sent with Megamind to Earth in the escape pod. He keeps track of Megamind’s inventions and plans along with offering him general assistance around the lab. The Brainbots are a type of sentient machines created by Megamind to act as basic henchmen, and while their intelligence isn’t as high as Minion’s, in numbers they are incredibly strong, capable of holding up the top of a skyscraper.

Other inventions of Megamind’s include a freeze ray, a large combat mech, a light-refracting and therefore invisible car, a hoverbike, a suit that mimics Metro Man’s powers, and the Mega Megamind, a colossal robot that has Megamind’s evil personality programmed into it. There’s also a personality-reversing chamber called the Reversalator 5000, a thunderstorm-generating blimp, and some elemental gloves.

But these are all child’s play compared to the Death Ray, Megamind’s strongest creation. By drawing power from the solar energy of the sun, this satellite cannon can fire a concentrated beam of energy from orbit to annihilate whatever it’s targeting. It was even used to kill Metro Man! …Or so everyone thought.

In reality, Metro Man had faked his own death under the Death Ray to stop being a superhero. But without knowing the truth, Megamind had sequenced Metro Man’s DNA from his cape and accidentally infused it into Hal Stewart, lowly cameraman and borderline stalker of Roxanne Ritchi. When a rejected and spiteful Hal took up the mantle of Tighten and threatened Metro City, it was up to Megamind to stop him and fix his mistake.

Thankfully for him, Megamind’s intellect isn’t the only thing that’s superhuman about him. His inventions give him great enough strength to toss around the Mega Megamind, which is the size of a large building, and even without them he’s capable of punching hard enough to shatter steel. And as you could expect from a loss-heavy supervillain, Megamind can take a fair amount of punishment. He’s been crushed under the Mega Megamind’s foot, blasted with a focused stream of water from a ruptured dam, and had huge explosions go off in his face several times without much issue.

He could even take a beating from Tighten, who lifted and threw the top of a skyscraper across Metro City! By measuring the size of parts of the building in comparison to Hal’s arm and finding the speed at which it’s moving after he throws it, Tighten’s building throw comes out to having a kinetic energy of over 36 billion joules! That’s the equivalent of over 8.6 tons of TNT.

Calc credit to Arrogant Schmuck

Megamind is quick on his feet too, likely thanks to his mental processing capabilities. He can dodge Tighten’s laser vision, evade cars being shot by the Mega Megamind’s crossbow, and when Metro City was falling from space in a rocket-propelled dome, Megamind piloted it back to its spot on the Earth!

That rocket-propelled dome, by the way? Megamind built that. In secret.

Well, should it come as any surprise that someone as smart as him has done some incredible things? He’s been breaking out of prison since he was a baby, and as a teenager he hatched a plan to ruin his high school prom by blasting Metro Dude – yes, his name is really just ‘Metro’ – with water from an exploded dam.

As an adult, he’s saved Metro City from Tighten twice, defeated the Doom Syndicate, replicated Metro Man’s powers from some dandruff DNA, obliterated the Mega Megamind when it went rogue, and even counter-predicted Minion’s predictions of his plan to outsmart and beat him.

But like his track record suggests, Megamind’s brilliance doesn’t make him perfect. He can get really cocky and short-sighted when he gets too into a fight, and this can put him in a bad situation, like the time he taunted Tighten into fighting him and got his butt kicked for it.

What’s more, weapons like the Death Ray have to warm up before they’re ready to be used, forcing him to stall for time. That’s if he even remembers them to begin with; Megamind is horrible at keeping track of his inventions and tends to forget about them after using them for the first time. He didn’t even remember that the Mega Megamind existed until it was accidentally activated. He relies more on Minion to do the bookkeeping on his machines for him.

But if he has the right gear on him and he can keep his self-doubt in check, Megamind can tackle almost any situation. Metro City’s defender might be a good guy now, but he can still make bad look good!

Megamind: I was destined to be a super-villain, and we were destined to be rivals. The die had been cast, and so began an enduring, epic, lifelong career. And I loved it! Our battles quickly got more elaborate. He would win some… I would almost win others… He took the name Metro Man, defender of Metrocity. I decided to pick something a little more humble: Megamind! Incredibly handsome criminal genius and master of all villainy!

Cross-Examination

The mad scientists’ inventions are loaded and accounted for. Now all that’s left is to see who’s the best of the bad.

Hang onto your seats, everyone, because this is gonna get crazy! Roll that battle!

Setting: Metro City

It was a morning like any other as day broke over Metro City, the sun’s light breaking through what few clouds there were to bring light to the bustling city. The rising sun peering over the top of the cliffside observatory was framed perfectly by the window frame of the nearby laboratory, whose master was sound asleep in the bedroom just beyond the window. Tucked beneath the cover of a black and blue quilt and with a cyan sleep mask stretched over his eyes, the big-headed brainiac Megamind had yet to wake up for the day, and from his comfortable posture sprawling his arms and legs out over much of the bed’s space, it was clear he had no intention of doing so in the near future.

Just audible beneath the alien’s loud snoring, the sounds of birds chirping and cars driving past could faintly be heard through his open bedroom window. Unusually, however, there was something else: the sound of rocket thrusters slowly rumbling in the sky further into the city, and this noise stopped for a moment only to be followed by an echoing crashing and booming that coincided with a brief tremor, lurching the still-sleeping Megamind into the air. While he was still airborne, the door to his bedroom was thrust open by an alarmed Minion, who took no time to note his master’s sleep before calling out.

“Boss, wake up!” cried Minion, finally snapping Megamind out of his peaceful sleep just as he fell back onto his bed in a disorganized heap.

“Argh, Minion!” Megamind grumbled, tearing off his sleep mask as he crawled out of bed and onto his feet. “Have we not discussed interrupting my slumber for your morning mealworms on… SEVERAL prior occasions? You nearly made me jump out of my beautiful blue skin!”

“Well, I am quite hungry this morning… Wait, no; this is much more urgent, sir!” Minion assured, grabbing Megamind’s arm and yanking him down the stairs to the lab. “You need to see this right away!”

The alien inventor’s aquatic assistant dashed across the lab, weaving around the many work stations and inventions racks to fling his master over his shoulder and into a large leather chair seated before a multitude of computer monitors. Dazed, Megamind shook his head and rubbed his eyes with the back of his pajama cloak’s sleeve, clearing the last traces of sleep from his giant blue head.

“I’m really not sure what’s got your gears in a bunch, my fishy friend,” the blue genius said as his vision focused, “But this early in the morning, it can’t possibly be anythiiiHIHEAOW WHAT IS THAT!?”

Recoiling into his chair in terror at what the computer monitors beheld, Megamind was appalled to see a massive purple building that stuck out like a sore thumb against the traditional metropolitan architecture surrounding it. From the news channel’s helicopter coverage on the screen, the pancaked building below it and the smoke rising from its base made it painfully clear how this strange new fixture had arrived in Metro City: from above, and with immense force.

“…Coming to you live from the scene of the incident, where a massive building flew into the city limits and seems to have parked itself firmly on Metro Street,” came a familiar voice that quickly drew Megamind’s attention to the news coverage. Roxanne Ritchi was standing in the helicopter with one hand around a support bar and the other around a microphone, reporting on the disturbance. “So far, we do not have confirmation that its inhabitants come with ill intent, but judging from the, uhh… unambiguous signage, I’d say we might be in need of intervention.”

Following Roxanne’s vocal cue, the camera’s focus moved up the side of the building to capture the large teal sign near the very top of the invasive edifice: ‘Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc.’

“Minion…” Megamind said in a hushed tone, “What is this… atrocity?”

“It flew in from somewhere in the southwest, sir,” replied his faithful servant, pulling up and highlighting some statistics on the monitors. “It only just touched town in the downtown area, so we’re not sure what it’s intending, but if the news is right about the-“

“What? No, I don’t care where it came from!” Megamind interrupted, thrusting Minion’s statistics away with a grand swipe of his hand before pointing to the towering construct on the news feed. “Who built this thing and thought it looked evil!? Why is it so skinny? So purple? And is that a nose? Who gives their giant evil lair a NOSE!? And don’t even get me STARTED on the sign, it’s so obvious! There’s no secrecy to it!”

“Sir, your valid construction criticisms aside,” Minion interrupted, cutting off his boss before his ranting could continue, “Don’t you think this seems like a problem we should handle? They might be planning to attack the city.”

“Yes, of course, Minion!” Megamind agreed, rising from the chair and whistling for the Brainbots. “Nobody will be better poised to take this invasive fool to shool than Metrocity’s defender. First lesson: Designing an Evil Lair, 101! Ready the Invisible Car!”

Minion couldn’t help but facepalm at Megamind’s one-track thought process as his big-headed boss let out an excited laugh, Brainbots swirling around him as they delivered him his signature suit and cape. The day had only just begun, and yet with a confrontation against this new villain brimming on the horizon, it promised to be an eventful one.

Meanwhile, within the building that had dropped in on Metro City’s downtown, a scrawny man in a white lab coat was leaned over a steel contraption, face shield on and blowtorch in hand as he operated on his invention. The darkness of his vast, dimly lit laboratory cast his visage in an ominous light, lit only by the sparks flying from the flame of his tool.

Then he set the torch down and gripped the underside of his face shield and struggled with it for a moment before finally flipping it up, revealing the face of the notorious Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz and shattering the ominous atmosphere of the lab in one fell swoop.

“Aghh, finally,” Doofenshmirtz grumbled as he slowly unstrapped the shield from his head. “You know, I-I don’t really know why I try to wear these things, my nose always gets stuck on the bottom rim. Kills my productivity every time, I swear; I… I should just invest in a custom fit.”

As he griped to himself, the mad Danville doctor put the shield down on a workbench to his left before clapping twice, remotely triggering the overhead lights to turn on with a collective buzz of electricity. His lab was something of a mess after the rough landing they’d had when arriving in Metro City, and although he’d taken care of most of the cleaning near the deck, his robotic assistant Norm was taking care of the rest of the reorganization in the rest of the spacious facility.

“Boy oh boy, it looks like a tornado went through here!” Norm quipped in his typical upbeat voice, halfway through lifting a partially finished -inator off the floor to put it back in storage.

“Well, excuse me for not expecting the building we landed on to just collapse underneath us!” Doof retorted as he fiddled within his latest invention’s wiring panel. “I mean, what do they build their apartment complexes with in this town to make them that flimsy? Grad students’ sleep schedules?”

As the Tri-State Area’s would-be usurper argued with the metal man about their rough landing, both of them failed to hear the sounds of a jet engine roaring to life and flaring up below the lab deck. Before long, Megamind appeared over the railing with a rocket pack strapped to his back, carefully hovering in place to peer into the building and observe its occupants before entering. From the deck, he could see a man in a white lab coat hunched over next to a strange cannon-like contraption with a loop-de-loop-shaped magnet at its tip, and his intuition as a reformed evil scientist clued him in that this was some sort of nefarious invention that he needed to stop.

“Come in, Minion,” Megamind whispered into his Holo-Watch. “I have a vishooal on someone in the building. Code: moving in for a closer look.”

“Code: it’s ‘visual’, sir,” Minion corrected through the communications device. “And I hear you: standing by for engagement.”

Once he had his assistant’s confirmation, Megamind stealthily slipped over the railing of the deck, deactivating and removing his jet boosters to stay unnoticed. His steps were slow and cautious, and once he was close enough he did a quick tuck and roll to reach the outer wall of the deck, peering around the corner with one hand on the holstered De-Gun at his hip.

“Oh, okay, you know what? Maybe next time I’ll let YOU handle all of the planning for our next evil out-of-town trip, you business-suited bucket of bolts!” Doofenshmirtz shot back at Norm from across the room as Megamind crouch-walked inside. “At least I managed to get everything in order with enough time to put the finishing touches on my latest -inator. After all, it should be another hour before-“

As Doofenshmirtz was in the middle of talking, Megamind happened to step on a square-shaped pressure plate in the floor, which swiftly triggered a hidden trap that had the floor beneath Metro City’s blue defender open up and raise a brightly-painted roller coaster car that locked Megamind in place with a steel safety bar that automatically extended from the sides and fastened itself across his chest. However, the train car was clearly meant for a much smaller passenger, as Megamind barely fit in the seat and had his legs forcefully bent in order to press his feet into the space at the tip of the car.

“Wha- woah!” Megamind exclaimed, caught off his guard by the too-small trap. He squirmed in his seat against the safety bar, but he couldn’t make it budge at all.

“Ah! P-Perry the Platypus!” Doofenshmirtz exclaimed at the sound of his trap going off, talking over the intruding alien’s surprised shouts as he hastily stuck his head back into the wiring panel of his current -inator to finish what he was doing. “You’re very much ahead of schedule; I-I wasn’t even expecting you for quite a while now! I guess OWCA found room in the budget for faster fedora jets, because I was sure based on my careful scheming that you wouldn’t-“

As Doof continued to talk, he concluded the wiring task he had been focused on and quickly slammed the panel shut before standing up to face the trap, only to stop short and look incredibly puzzled when he beheld a very unamused Megamind glowering at him from his thematic but uncomfortable restraints.

“Ollo,” Megamind said, his eyes conveying all of the emotion that his voice lacked.

“…You are NOT Perry the Platypus,” Heinz flatly noted, pointing at the big-brained being in his trap with a hint of annoyance. “What the heck are you doing walking into his traps?”

“Keen observation there, my angular-headed friend,” Megamind replied, attempting to keep his theatric composure up despite the circumstances. “But if you must know, then allow me to introduce myself: I am Megamind, former master of all villainy and current defender of Metrocity. You know, the place you crash-landed in this morning?”

“‘Metrocity?’ I could have sworn the tourist infomercials said it was ‘Metro City,'” Doofenshmirtz pondered. “And- wait, wait, hang on a minute. ‘Former master of all villainy?’ I’ve never even heard of you!”

“Ohoho, that’s no surprise,” Megamind laughed. “But I’ll have you know that I’m kind of a big deal around here… Far more than you must be in the small town you call yourself and your ‘Inc.’ ‘evil’ in.”

“First of all, pal,” Doof snapped back, folding his arms and tilting his chin upward at the slight, “It sounds GREAT in the evil jingle. And second, I’ll have you know that the entire Tri-State Area fears the name of Doctor Heinz Doofenshmirtz! …Okay, maybe in another dimension, but still! At least I wasn’t so bad at being evil that I gave it up to become a goody-two-shoes instead!”

“…Excuse me?” Megamind asked, glaring slightly and lowering his gaze a bit at the perceived insult. However, his movement was intentionally inviting the Danville doctor’s attention on his face, for beneath the trap’s safety bar he was slowly reaching for the De-Gun at his hip to fire it and release himself from the snare.

“You heard me! ‘Ooh, look at me! I like Megamind!’ ‘Oh really?'” Doof droned, feigning a conversation while moving his hands around like people and making them fawn over Megamind, whose hand slipped closer and closer to the De-Gun as Doof continued. “‘Oh yeah! He’s so amazing and heroic and big-headed and blue!’ Seriously, what kind of evil villain gets talked about like THAT?”

Metro City’s blue defender narrowed his gaze and bared his teeth in anger at the biting sarcasm from the invading doctor, concentrating his focus on reaching for his weapon rather than replying.

“Ehh, whatever,” Doofenshmirtz shrugged, turning around and walking to the side of his new machine. “I guess I’ll do this now, since you already stepped in my trap. BEHOLD: THE ROLLER COASTER CONSTRUCT-INATOR!”

The showy dramatics of Heinz’s announcement grabbed Megamind’s continued attention, inviting the alien genius to watch him as he paced around the machine and launched into his traditional evil monologue.

“You see, Muggymind,” Doofenshmirtz began, “It all began back in my childhood at the Gimmelshtump County Festival. My parents took me and my brother Roger to the Festival every year, but they never let me go on its famous roller coaster: the Flaming Zugbrechen! Of course, Roger was allowed to ride it with all of his friends as much as he liked, but I was forced to endure countless humiliating spins on the Esel-Go-Round! So, with this ingenious device, I will strip the construction materials from the surrounding buildings and create the most extreme roller coaster imaginable, so I can take back the nausea-inducing elation that was rightfully mine!”

“…And why, exactly, is this an ‘evil’ plan?” Megamind asked, clearly unimpressed with the tragic backstory behind Doof’s latest -inator. In the time it had taken Heinz to lay out the reasoning for his latest creation, he had managed to reach the De-Gun and was now carefully cycling it to the setting he needed in order to bust loose.

“Well, uh… I-It’s not exactly ‘rule the Tri-State Area’ material, I know, but I just needed a change of pace. Self-care comes first, you know?” Doofenshmirtz answered. “That’s why I’m doing this here instead! After all, if I’m not gonna take over the Tri-State Area with this bad boy, then I might as well just enjoy myself at some other city’s expense! Haaaahahahahaha!”

“Well, that plan just sounds wonderful,” Megamind said, his voice dripping with sarcasm as he neared the final turn he needed on the De-Gun’s barrel. “It’s a shame that I’ll have to put a stop to it.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s TOTALLY happening, buddy,” Doof mocked as he rolled his eyes. “I’m a professional, y’know, and I really don’t think that Perry the Platypus would treat me this way, even if he COULD talk. I mean-“

At last, in the middle of Heinz’s reply, Megamind turned the De-Gun’s setting over to the one he needed: De-Hydrate. The blue defender grinned as he instantly moved his hand back and pulled the trigger, firing a blue ray of energy that struck the inside of the roller coaster car trapping him. As the gun sucked the moisture out of it, the trap folded in on itself and shrank into a small blue cube that Megamind caught in his hand as he landed on the floor, free of his restraints and the De-Gun in hand.

“Brainbots!” Megamind shouted as he twirled the De-Gun a few times before standing at full height and pointing it at the Danville doctor’s face. “Hit it!”

At his command, a massive swarm of the monstrous-looking machines floated up outside the lab from below, blotting out the view of Metro City’s buildings beyond as the red of their eyes illuminated the air. From the cluster, a few flew out and hovered at Megamind’s side, producing a portable CD player and setting it down on the deck before one of them reached down and pressed the play button.

“You might think you’re sharp, Heenz Doofenshirts,” Megamind gloated as his accompanying music kicked in, “But it seems I’ll have to show you that villainy is no place for a pharmacist with a grudge.”

“I’m not a pharmacist, and my name is Heinz Doofen- You know what, forget this!” Doof growled in response, reaching into the inside of his lab coat and pulling out a generic ray gun before pointing it back at his cerulean aggressor. “It’s go time, you overgrown blueberry!”

Thanks to @CarbonatedJem for the fight art!

Rack Your Brain For A Way To Win!

The two genius inventors pulled the triggers of their respective firearms simultaneously, the blue dehydration beam from the De-Gun and the red laser beam from Doof’s blaster colliding and exploding with a burst of energy between the new combatants. As Doofenshmirtz struggled with the recoil from his shot, Megamind rolled to the right and whistled to the handful of Brainbots that were attending him, holding up the dehydrated cube that had moments ago had been the roller coaster car-styled trap before throwing it past Doof’s shoulder. With their attention fixated on the cube, the Brainbots began beeping as they chased it down like dogs fetching a stick, shoulder-checking the Danville doctor as they passed by.

Following his Brainbots’ lead, Megamind ran up and bashed into Doofenshmirtz’s chest with his shoulder, following up his approaching attack by shifting the De-Gun into his right hand and spinning before socking his foe’s triangular chin with a punch from his left. Heinz staggered back as he recovered from the quick one-two combo, and in that time, Megamind set his weapon’s sights forward and fired again.

Doofenshmirtz’s face dropped as he threw himself out of the way of Megamind’s dehydrating blasts, the shots whizzing past where he had been standing and hitting spare bits of machinery and furniture around his lab. Landing behind a row of cardboard boxes full of items he’d packed for his trip, Doof employed some quick thinking and used the boxes as cover, running parallel with them as he peered over the top of them to return fire with his blaster.

Seeing the volley of laser shots coming his way, Megamind smirked and prepared himself before smoothly leaping and stepping around each shot, continuing to fire on the evasive Doofenshmirtz all the while with De-Gun beams. Seeing as how the cover of the boxes was minimizing the efficiency of his position, however, the blue defender switched his tactics and adjusted the setting on the barrel to De-Stroy. When next he fired a blast from the De-Gun, he aimed it at the base of Doofenshmirtz’s row of cover, the beam striking the floor and creating a small explosion that toppled Doof’s defensive line and caught the Danville doctor by surprise, knocking him on his side with a painful grunt.

As Doofenshmirtz recovered from the blast, he noticed that the contents of the boxes were now scattered across the floor around him, surrounding him with his past inventions and giving him an idea. A crafty smile spread across his triangular face as his mind began to work, and he reached for one scattered invention in particular to begin: a pair of rocket boots.

Smiling confidently at the lack of a rebuttal from his opponent, Megamind twirled the De-Gun on his finger like a classic gunslinger and approached the gap in the boxes left by his attack. Before he could assess the damage done, however, Doofenshmirtz burst through the boxes on his right, flying parallel to the floor with the jet boots strapped to his feet to approach from an unexpected angle. Megamind scrambled to aim his weapon, but he wasn’t fast enough to stop Doof’s knee from flying into his chin in a rising attack propelled by the jet boots.

Heinz pursued the advantage while he held it, landing from the flying strike and following up first with a punch to Megamind’s cheek, then by whipping his blaster into the side of his giant blue head. Dazed, Megamind responded by throwing an unsteady punch that Doof evaded with ease, leaning on his back foot before using his rocket boots to do an impressive spin kick in midair that again struck Megamind upside the head.

Megamind growled as he stumbled back, regaining his footing and spitting out the taste of iron in his mouth, a trace amount of blood and spit hitting the floor. Heinz, seeing an opening, flew ahead with the rocket boots again, and in response, Megamind threw the De-Gun into the air to free up his arm, a mechanical sleeve extending from his suit to form his Blower Glove on his right arm. With his gauntlet equipped, Megamind thrust his arm forward as though he were throwing a punch, unleashing a powerful torrent of wind that repelled the rocketing Doofenshmirtz enough to render him immobile in midair.

Effectively having trapped his foe in place, Megamind brought his free hand to his lips and whistled. At his summons, two Brainbots flew up behind Doofenshmirtz and jabbed at the thrusters of his rocket boots with their clawed appendages, damaging the boots until they were no longer capable of producing thrust. In the blink of an eye, Doofenshmirtz found himself being blasted across his lab by the Blower Glove’s forceful gusts, just in time for Megamind to catch the De-Gun as it fell with his free hand and fire a destructive shot that struck the Danville doctor in the chest. The force of the blast sent Heinz flying further into the recesses of his laboratory, and with his enemy out of sight for the moment, Megamind resigned the Blower Glove back to its retracted state and activated his Holo-Watch as his Brainbots hovered next to him.

“Come in, Minion!” Megamind spoke into the device. “The building seems to be under the control of an inventor-pharmacist villain. Activate all of our defensive protocols and join me on the upper floor.”

“Roger that, sir,” crackled Minion’s voice through the watch. “Hold him off while you can, I’ll be there in just a-“

Before Minion could finish, two green beams flashed from the other side of the lab, striking the two Brainbots near Megamind and transforming them into harmless heads of broccoli that fell to the blue defender’s feet without a sound. Shocked both by the surprise attack and the bizarre effects, Megamind snapped his attention to the source: Doofenshmirtz, who stood aside his Metal Destruct-inator, a tall machine with a green-striped body and a blaster mounted at the top.

“Haha! Eat that – literally!” the Danville doctor taunted. Then, reaching again into his array of past -inators, he dragged a large cylindrical invention over to him and aimed the attached hose toward Megamind, unleashing a cloud of brown formula that wafted over to Megamind before disappearing again into his lab’s storage area.

The blue defender coughed and waved his hands around his head to clear away the fog, but as he did so, he felt something long and prickly begin to slither up his legs. Megamind looked down to see that the broccoli heads that had once been his Brainbots had been mutated into monster plants with snapping mouths of teeth and long, extending vines of thorns that were attempting to ensnare him in their grip.

“AAH! Gah- Let go of me, you- grrah- fiendish florae!” Megamind attempted to pull and kick at the vines, but his efforts were in vain, and as the plants began to bind his arms to his sides, he acted quickly and switched the De-Gun back to its dehydration setting and shot the one on his left, reducing it and its prickly appendages to a single blue cube. He moved to do the same to the other, but it snapped its vines over the De-Gun before he could pull the trigger and wrestled it from his grasp, tossing it away.

Disarmed of his preferred weapon, Megamind was forced to change plans. He quickly grabbed another weapon from his holsters and fired at the plant, the gun unleashing a bright blue ray that struck its target and encased the corrupted vegetation in ice. With the moisture in its cells freezing over in an instant, the plant was rendered as brittle as glass, and Megamind shattered it with one kick to free himself. With the distractions neutralized, Megamind turned his attention once again to the further recesses of Doofenshmirtz’s lab, walking in with his ice ray at the ready as he expected to be ambushed.

“Sir! Over here!”

Before he could be surprised by an attack from Doofenshmirtz, however, Megamind was instead surprised by the familiar voice of Minion pipe up from his right. He looked over to see Minion stepping out of the Invisible Car, which had been lifted up the side of Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc. by the Brainbots to escort his aquatic ally to the top floors.

“Good timing, Minion!” Megamind praised. “This villain is unlike any other we have seen before. His name is… Heenz Doofenshirts!”

Minion gasped with feigned shock horror, playing into his master’s dramatics. “So that’s how you pronounce the name on the sign! What have you learned, sir?”

“He plans to turn Metrocity into his own personal roller coaster. Something about a tragic backstory with a spinning easel…?”

“…Well, whatever that is, we must stop him!” Minion exclaimed, picking up the discarded De-Gun from the lab floor and tossing it back to Megamind. “Metro City won’t fall to Doofenshirts as long as we’re around!”

Megamind nodded, appreciative of Minion’s characteristic optimism, and the two turned to charge into the depths of Doofenshmirtz’s laboratory. However, before they could get far at all, they were struck with a bright green tractor beam that froze them in place. The beam’s source was revealed to once again be Doofenshmirtz, who stepped out from his lab’s depths with the tractor gun in hand with an annoyed look on his face.

“That’s NOT my name! Come on, i-is your head blue because there’s no blood going from your ears to your brain? That’s literally the only way it would ma- Ooohh… I see how this is.”

Doofenshmirtz placed his hands on his hips as he regarded Minion, evidently unimpressed by Megamind’s sidekick. “So, you think you can just tag in your assistant whenever you want, huh, Meggymind? Is the sanctity of a good rivalry lost on anyone that’s not an animal wearing a fedora these days?”

Disgusted, Heinz swung the tractor beam holding Megamind and Minion upward before releasing them from it, sending both of them crashing into the ceiling before they painfully came crashing back down to the floor.

“Well, two can play at that game then, pal!” With that said, Doofenshmirtz cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “NORM! Get your old-fashioned tin can in here!”

At his surrogate father’s command, Norm burst through the sliding storage door to Doof’s right, saluting as he marched through the metal hole into plain view.

“Honey, I’m home! Who are our esteemed guests?” the tall robot queried with his usual tone.

“Esteemed might be a bit much,” Doof noted ominously as he turned to grab one of the sliding doors that led to the rest of his lab’s storage space, “But we’re gonna roll out the red carpet anyway.”

Following Heinz’s lead, Norm grabbed the sliding door he had just exploded through and slid it open at the same time as Doof did the same with the opposing door. Megamind and Minion, recovering from being thrown around by the tractor beam, looked up to see the rest of Doof’s lab was lined wall to wall with his past -inators, and seated on each of them was an army of imperfect Doofenshmirtz clones, all staring them down at Metro City’s heroes from atop their mounts.

“Good thing I left the Copy-and-Paste-inator plugged in, eh?” gloated Doofenshmirtz. “You oughta give it a spin sometime; a tan might be what you need to feel less blue!”

At his own bad joke, Doofenshmirtz let out an evil cackle, and the Doof clones atop his -inators began to fire on Megamind and Minion, the two of whom both scrambled to avoid the myriad beams.

“You get his giant robot!” Megamind called to Minion as he ran toward the Doofenshmirtz duplicates. “I’ll try to shut these machines down!”

“Right!” Minion called affirmatively, running up to the stationary Norm and yelling as he threw the first punch, To his surprise, though, Norm caught his fist with a grip much stronger than he had anticipated from the business-suited machine, and he looked up into Norm’s blank eyes with a sheepish smile on his face.

“I love it when company comes for dinner!” Norm quipped with good cheer, lifting Minion by the hand and tossing him across the lab before thrusters in his feet rocketed him across the lab to pursue the fishy alien. Thus, with Norm and Minion taking their brawl across the lab, it was left to Megamind to take on Doofenshmirtz’s army of faulty clones and array of -inators.

From the first steps Megamind took into the room full of Doofenshmirtz duplicates, he was beset with blasts of multi-colored energy that he was forced to dodge with haste, the beams emerging from dozens of -inators that were firing on all cylinders. A force of Doofs with misaligned facial features raced forward to meet him as he encroached on their territory, thrusting Megamind into a precarious dance where he weaved between punches, tackles, and -inator blasts. Reactivating the Blower Glove to use gusts of wind to help him maneuver around, his bright green eyes flashed around the room, sizing up all the -inators that were shooting at him while also looking for a way to deactivate them.

The Doofenshmirtz copies were relentless in their pursuit, reaching out and piling on top of each other like a horde of zombies in an effort to grapple Megamind’s frame as he flew about. To repel them and thin their ranks, Megamind used his free hand to fire De-Hydrate blasts from his De-Gun, turning a few of the mangled clones into blue cubes that were swiftly trampled by the other replicas. Just as Megamind was about to make further use of the Blower Glove to propel himself away, however, he was struck in the side by a stray -inator beam, and he suddenly found himself turning his upper body to look behind him.

“What the-?” was all Megamind managed to say before his initial action with the Blower Glove came out. A blast of pressurized wind from the gauntlet, now aiming at the floor just ahead of where the blue defender’s momentum was carrying him, reversed his direction of travel and sent him slamming straight into the writhing mass of Doof lookalikes. The clones seized the opportunity and assailed Megamind as soon as he landed in their midst, striking him with blows across his whole body and piling on him to restrain his movement. Unable to move his arm to use the Blower Glove, Megamind strained against the combined might of the clones, his vision starting to be obstructed by the bodies that approached him.

It was then that Megamind’s keen eye took notice of something. Plugged into the far wall and sitting on the floor was a surge protector, a horrible mess of electrical cords plugged into it that slithered in several different directions. It didn’t take Megamind long to reckon that this was likely the source of the many -inators’ power, and he hatched a plan to exploit the egregious vulnerability that seemed too good to be true.

As he retracted the Blower Glove, Megamind wrestled his other arm free from a Doof copy’s grip and tapped the buckle on his suit’s waistbelt, pressing a button laid therein. Triggered by this button press, several airbags popped out from the blue defender’s spandex pants and rapidly inflated, forming a protective bubble that forced the clones away in a violent fashion. The force of the inflatable belt also propelled the encircled Megamind upward like a bouncing ball, and he deflated the airbags mid-flight as he careened through the air in an arc, reaching for the surge protector with his right hand as he began to fall.

The Doof clones could do little as Megamind landed on the floor next to the wall outlet and grabbed the cords emerging from the surge protector, his hand now equipped with the Tesla Glove. A massive torrent of electricity was loosed from the gauntlet once Megamind’s grip was secure, flooding the outlet and sending the discharge into the wiring within the wall. Within moments, loud bangs could be heard from within the foundations of Doofenshmirtz’s building, and the overhead lights flickered before going dark. The -inators that had been plugged into the wall also dimmed and powered off, leaving the Doof copies manning them confused and aimless.

Megamind grinned to himself. With the fuse to the room blown and the inventions there lacking power, dealing with the horde of copies was now a far easier task. He brought his fingers to his lips and whistled again, calling forth a surge of Brainbots that began engaging the clone army, clawing and swiping at the disfigured clones that struggled to fight back without machines to back them up.

“Phew… That was close,” Megamind noted, letting go of the tension in his body as he tucked away the Tesla Glove and held up the De-Gun with both hands. “Now to go help Minion with-“

A long finger tapped Megamind on the shoulder from behind as he spoke, drawing his attention. The blue defender casually glanced over his shoulder, his guard so lowered that he didn’t think twice before looking directly into the lens of a bizarre phoropter. A bright flash of light burst forth from the lens of the machine, flooding Megamind’s vision and sending him stumbling away as his eyesight became blurry and unfocused.

“What’s wrong, bluebrain? Can’t see straight?” asked the gloating voice of Doofenshmirtz. “Did you leave your prescription lenses at home? Hah!”

Growling at the taunt, Megamind raised the De-Gun and attempted to fire on the Danville doctor. Because Doof’s Eye Fog-inator had effectively rendered him blind, though, his shots were wide and unsteady, striking the floor and walls around Doof as his blurry white visage grew closer in Megamind’s disoriented field of view.

“Don’t you worry. I’ve got just the thing you need!”

Megamind was unable to focus enough to stop Doofenshmirtz as he wrapped a metallic belt around his stomach. As the steel band latched shut around Metro City’s hero, the device gave off a beeping sound and a flickering green light as its effects activated, and Megamind was suddenly and roughly pulled from his feet as Heinz kicked him in the stomach with a laugh.

With its wearer in motion, the belt placed on Megamind began to pull him through the air at a rapid pace. He flew across the lab’s storage room with a helpless shout, slamming through both clones and Brainbots like a bowling ball through pins. The blue defender eventually impacted with the far wall of Doof’s primary lab space, the impact rattling his mind and helping to clear his vision somewhat. The belt beeped twice as it locked itself in place, securing the blue defender to the wall like a piece of décor.

“Sir! Are you okay?” Minion’s familiar voice called out. Focusing on the sound of his lifelong ally’s concerned question, Megamind shook his head again and groaned, looking out over the battlefield as his eyes came back into focus at last.

Minion was still engaged in combat with Norm, seemingly struggling to keep up with the business-suited robot. In the moment Minion’s attention had been diverted to look to his boss, Norm’s steel fist flew forward, narrowly missing Minion’s fishbowl head by inches and punching a hole straight through the brick wall behind it. Minion didn’t hesitate to roll away as Norm extracted his hand from the wall, his unblinking eyes still trained on his foe.

“Don’t leave yet! I just finished mixing the mimosas!” Norm exclaimed, raising his other arm as it shifted and transformed into a multi-faceted launcher of weaponry. Rockets and scorching flames flew in Minion’s direction as Norm unleashed a slew of attacks, keeping Minion on the back foot and once again forcing him to run away. The aquatic sidekick dug his hands into the floor and ripped out a splintered sheet of metal, holding it up like a shield to block the powerful explosions that continued to come his way as he tried desperately to find an opening.

Megamind’s first instinct was to light up the robot with a dehydrating blast, but he quickly realized that the De-Gun had flown free from his grip upon his impact with the wall, seeing it lying on the floor some distance away from him. Switching to his next best idea, Megamind unholstered his ice ray and fired a sky blue beam of light that struck the floor just in front of Norm, forming a short, jagged wall of ice that measured a few feet in length. It wasn’t much of an obstacle, but it was just enough to catch Norm’s foot as he attempted to take another step toward Minion, causing him to fall flat on his face and shake the entire lab upon impact.

“Phew… Thank you, sir!” Minion sighed before hastily coming to Megamind’s aid. “Don’t you worry; I’ll have you out of this in no time.”

True to his word, it didn’t take Minion long to bust apart the restraining belt placed on Megamind, the metal trap clattering down past Megamind’s waist as it was removed. The blue hero smiled appreciatively, but there was little time for thanks as Norm recovered from his fall and stood back up.

“Now now, friends,” Norm chastised as he trained his weaponized arm on his two targets. “No wayward conjuration of frozen water in Doctor D’s lab!”

Minion snarled at Norm’s unwavering cheeriness, put off by the machine’s persistence. He rushed forward with his arms outstretched, prompting Norm to unleash a torrent of fire in Minion’s direction. Because his body was largely mechanical, however, Minion powered through the scorching heat and blazing flames, swinging one arm in a wide arc once he closed the distance. The strike knocked Norm’s lethal appendage away just as Norm shot out a spray of missiles, sending the projectiles into Doofenshmirtz’s lab storage and causing several -inators to explode and catch fire. A number of Heinz copies and Brainbots were caught in the explosions as well, creating a scene of general carnage in the lab.

“Whoops! I hope the insurance hasn’t expired on those!” exclaimed Norm at the sight of his accident.

“Oh, believe me, buddy,” Minion replied as he pinned Norm’s arms to his sides, small embers and scorch marks dotting the patches of fur on his body. “Evil insurance claims don’t hold up in the trial court of heroes!”

Before he could follow up his quip with any forceful action, Minion’s arms and legs were abruptly clamped down upon by metal claws, the serpentine appendages they were attached to pulling Megamind’s ally up to the ceiling and holding him there. Megamind was taken by surprise, and after looking up to follow Minion, he shot his gaze back down to focus on the perpetrator of the abduction: a disgruntled Doofenshmirtz standing next to the Roller Coaster Construct-inator, remote for Minion’s restraints in hand.

“Eugh, that was a terrible line!” exclaimed Doof, a look of disgust on his face. “He’s really your right-hand man- err… fish? Better start scouting the next LOVEMUFFIN sidekick draft, buddy.”

“It’s not his fault you have no sense of presentation!” Megamind retorted, quickly swiping up the De-Gun from the floor and pointing both it and his freeze ray in Heinz’s direction. “Now release him at once, Doofenshirts!”

“Oh, you think you get to boss me around? That’s cute,” Doof responded. As he spoke, Norm stomped up to stand just off to the side of the blue defender, more destructive weapons emerging from his metal body and aiming at Megamind. Metro City’s hero’s eyes went wide at the sight, but he held his position, waiting to see what his opponent would do next.

“Look, I-I get why you’re mad about me stepping on your toes, Muggymind, and normally I would say sorry,” Heinz continued. “But I came here to get away from my usual big plans in the Tri-State Area, and you’ve been a very unwelcoming greeting. So if you don’t mind… I think it’s time for me to be first in line for the Flaming Zugbrechen: Metrocity Style!”

With an evil laugh as he finished his proclamation, Doofenshmirtz flipped a switch on the -inator next to him. Energy began to coalesce around the head of the weapon as it hummed to life, the invention charging its beam as Heinz trained its sights on the buildings of Metro City.

“NO!” Megamind shouted, realizing what was about to happen. He leaped forward into a sprint while shooting a surprise shot from his ice ray at Norm, encasing the robot in ice for the moment and freeing Megamind to unleash a dehydration beam from the De-Gun. The blue ray shot across Doofenshmirtz’s lab, rocketing toward the Roller Coaster Construct-inator as it charged up its own shot. Seeing the blast coming, Doof backed out of the way to avoid being hit, and Megamind’s shot had a clear path to its target.

Just moments before it struck true, however, the Roller Coaster Construct-inator finished charging up and fired a bright green beam into the concrete jungle of Metro City, only just beating out the dehydrating ray that struck it after it discharged its energy. As Doof’s latest -inator collapsed in on itself and fell to the floor as a single blue cube, its green ray of energy shimmered in the first building it struck, arcing across the streets to others nearby and eventually spreading across the entire cityscape.

As Doof looked out over the rooftops of Metro City’s downtown, Megamind raced toward him with an angry look. Before he could shoot at the Danville doctor, though, Norm shattered the ice surrounding him with a shrug and snapped his attention back to the blue hero, nailing him in the back with a rocket that sent Megamind sprawling and tumbling across the floor. A hole was singed in the back of his cape from the blast, but Megamind paid it no mind, far more concerned with what he could see happening to his city from the view offered by Doof’s building.

Chunks of metal and concrete were being ripped free from the foundations of the glowing buildings, floating into the air like a rising mist of rubble. Manipulated by the Roller Coaster Construct-inator’s power, the raw materials pulled from the city began to take the combined shape of a wild roller coaster, rebar reinforced by stone forming support beams and holding up the ramshackle tracks from below. Yet more metal poles were inlaid on the tracks to form the rails for the ride, and just past the edge of Doofenshmirtz’s balcony, a stretch of rail became home to a train of carts that rested on the tracks, waiting to take passengers across the miles and miles of high-octane fun.

“Haha! Yes! Oh, it’s everything I dreamed it would be!” Doof marveled, clutching his hands together at his chest as a wayward tear slipped from the corner of his eye. “And now I can recapture the lost moments of my youth while ALSO claiming the record for longest roller coaster made of completely recycled materials! It’s an evil double whammy!”

Doofenshmirtz wasted no time in leaping over the railing of his building’s balcony and into the front cart of his newly built roller coaster’s train. Taking his seat, he pulled down the safety bar over his chest in preparation for the start of the ride, grinning like a child on Christmas all the while.

“Norm, I’m off!” Heinz shouted. “Sort out our new friends in the meantime. And go grab some more -inators from storage back home if they make any more trouble! It seems like someone broke the ones I brought.”

“Of course, Doctor D! I’ll find the fiends responsible!” Norm replied, oblivious to the real meaning of his surrogate father’s words. With that, Doofenshmirtz was whisked away by his new roller coaster, the sound of his delighted cheering lost in the distance.

Finally recovering from being shot in the back, Megamind growled and pushed himself onto his hands and knees, furious at having been foiled in his protection of Metro City. Noticing this, Norm turned his focus on the downed hero, aiming his weaponized arms and preparing to fire.

Before he could reduce the blue intruder to ashes, however, Megamind whipped around and aimed the De-Gun in the blink of an eye, blasting a torrent of round, sticky orbs that pelted Norm’s robotic carapace. Some of the rounds found their way into the barrels of Norm’s weaponry, blocking them from inside with green webs and preventing the discharge of their rounds. Norm regarded the incapacitation of his armaments with surprise, giving Megamind the opening he needed to stand up and punch the machine in the torso with the Blower Glove.

Norm was propelled back by gale-force winds, slamming into the wall behind him and leaving a deep indent of his form. He attempted to extract himself from the hole, but found that the adhesive fired at him was gluing him in place, rendering him immobile for the time being.

“Sir! Are you alright?” called Minion from the ceiling.

“Well, I may need a change of cape, but I’ll manage,” Megamind replied. “I would get you down from there, but I’ve got to give chase, Minion. Just… hold it down, alright?”

“Um… if you say so, sir,” replied Minion, somewhat uneasy. “I know you can do it!”

Megamind nodded and smiled before turning away and running to the balcony, looking out after the distant form of Doofenshmirtz zooming along the track of the coaster. He put his hand to his Holo-Watch and put out a signal from it, and not long after he’d sent it the sound of a rumbling engine came within earshot. His black and blue hoverbike shot up to the railing before screeching to a halt in midair, allowing the blue defender to climb aboard before he revved the accelerator and blasted away, pursuing the train of carts on the rails.

As Minion watched his boss zip out of view, a wet suction sound followed by cracking brick drew his attention back to the floor of the lab. Norm had pulled himself free of the De-Gun’s immobilizing adhesive, freeing himself from the wall. The business-suited machine looked out after the rapidly receding visage of Megamind, seemingly giving no chase.

“Dining and dashing is in such poor taste!” Norm exclaimed. He then turned to Minion, his unwavering smile rousing fear from the trapped fish, before continuing, “At least one of you has some manners. What say I reward your decorum, friend?”

“Uhh… W-What did you have in mind?” replied Minion, afraid of the answer he would get.

Norm walked into the lab’s storage area for a moment, disappearing into the continuing fray of Doof clones and Brainbots. Moments later, he emerged, dragging a large, multi-tiered blaster machine across the floor before setting it down and aiming it up at Minion’s torso. The -inator buzzed to life, and Minion could only brace himself for what was to come.

“Congratulations! You’ve won an all-expenses-paid trip for one… to the white-hot sands of the Sahara!”

Further out in downtown Metro City, Doofenshmirtz was holding his hands up over his head as he was jostled to and fro on the surprisingly well-constructed roller coaster. Zooming from right to left across zig-zagging stretches of track and up and down over hill-like sections, he savored the feeling of the wind whipping in his face and the almost nauseating vertigo instilled in him by the ride.

“Wheeheeeeeee!” Heinz cheered. “This is the best… day… ev- ACK!”

His celebrations were cut short as a bug flew straight into his right eye. After getting over the instinctual closing of the eye, he scraped the bug out and onto the tip of his finger, glaring in frustration at the squished creature.

“Gah! I hate when that happens!” Doof exclaimed, flicking the bug off to one side as the track continued. A few seconds after he disposed of the small body, however, he heard a voice cry out over the sound of wind howling in his ears.

“AGH! My giant green eye!”

Alarmed, Doofenshmirtz turned to look over his shoulder while remaining seated in his cart. A hundred or so feet behind him, he saw Megamind clawing at his eye with one hand while continuing to steer his hoverbike with the other, slowly gaining ground on Doof’s coaster train.

“Wha- HEY! Buzz off, pal!” Doofenshmirtz yelled, shaking a fist at the approaching hero. “No entering the ride while it’s in motion!”

As the Danville doctor shouted, Megamind finished removing the bug from the corner of his eye, the poor insect now twice smashed and crushed against the two inventors. In response to Heinz’s protesting, Megamind revved his engines again and caught up to the last cart in the train, leaping on board just as his hoverbike ran out of fuel and began to plummet like a stone toward the city streets below.

“Sorry, Heenz,” Megamind responded as he stood up in the cart, De-Gun at the ready. “But I’m afraid this ‘rooler cowster’ has only one destination: prison!”

“What? No! That’s not how roller coasters work! That’s not even how you SAY roller coaster!” Doofenshmirtz retorted.

Annoyed and ready to be rid of his city’s intruder, Megamind leveled his weapon and fired. Doof was barely able to lean in his seat to avoid the bright blue dehydrating blast, the ray instead striking the safety bar of his cart and reducing it to a cube that flew out of reach as the train of carts left it behind. Undeterred, Megamind continued to pull the trigger of the De-Gun again and again, unloading a volley of beams that Doofenshmirtz was forced to stand up in his cart to effectively dodge. The close quarters made it a tight squeeze between the rounds, but he was able to get ahead of every shot fired, keeping him from meeting a fate similar to his safety bar’s.

Megamind was now truly angry, driven to the heights of frustration by his opponent. Slowing down on his rate of fire, he growled and shouted between shots, “Oh, come on already! There’s nowhere to go, and I’m not getting any slower!”

The specific choice of words his enemy used inspired an idea in Doofenshmirtz. He smirked as he reached into his coat mid-dodge, pulling out the Slow Motion-inator and firing a single beam in response to his foe’s barrage. Megamind was struck in the chest by the beam, and his movements abruptly slowed to a snail’s pace. Where the pulling of the De-Gun’s trigger had once been three times per second, it was now down to one every three seconds, dramatically slowing the speed of Megamind’s attacks.

“You just had to open your big blue mouth, didn’t you?” Doof goaded, carefully climbing from cart to cart in the train to get closer to his opponent without being flung off by the speed of the track. By the time he got to the cart next to Megamind’s, the azure alien’s eyes were wide with surprise, having realized how sluggish he now was. He tried to swerve to keep his aim trained of Doofenshmirtz, but he was far too slow, and Heinz landed a right hook to his jaw before he could do anything to stop the attack.

As his enemy reeled from the strike in dramatic fashion, Heinz chuckled and brought his right foot back, widening his stance and revealing a metal attachment strapped to his leg. Held around his waist by a belt and covering his leg from the knee down, the Kick-inator 5000 revved up as Doofenshmirtz concentrated his strength before swinging his leg up and slamming his foot upward into the base of Megamind’s chin, nearly dislocating it from the force added to the kick by the -inator. Megamind flew up in slow motion, lifted off his feet by a considerable measure, and was subsequently ejected from the back of the cart train as it sped away from him, Doof’s mocking laugh becoming distant as he was carried away.

Just as Megamind reached the apex of how high the kick had knocked him, the effects of the Slow Motion-inator wore off, leaving him to begin falling at a normal speed with a helpless shout. Before he could turn into a blue smear on the street below, however, two Brainbots swooped in to catch him by his clothes with their claws, alerted to his need for help by his shouting. Relieved to not be falling, Megamind reached for his Holo-Watch and activated its communication features, carried after Doofenshmirtz by his Brainbots.

“Minion! Come in, Minion!” Megamind called into his watch. “Do you read me?”

White noise and static were all that the blue hero heard from the device in response. The watch must have been out of range for Minion’s own watch to pick up the signal, leaving Megamind with no answer from his companion.

“Gah, never mind! I can handle this myself.”

With that, Megamind put out a remote signal from his watch, activating an autonomic ignition within his lair. Preparing to put his next plan into action, Megamind looked skyward as the Brainbots ferried him toward the rooftops of Metro City’s downtown area, his gaze fixed on the carts that sped across the roller coaster tracks.

Back on the ride, Doofenshmirtz had just finished clambering back up to the front of the procession of carts and was about to resume his enjoyment of the ride when he felt the entire city block shake. Something large and heavy had impacted nearby, the tremors caused by the drop shaking up the roller coaster’s support beams and making the entire construct vibrate precariously. Alarmed, Heinz looked around from side to side, not seeing anything in the nearby streets or on the rooftops alongside him. Soon, however, there came more quakes, repeating one after another like the beat of a drum.

Or, it occurred to Doof, like footsteps.

The Danville doctor turned to look over his shoulder at this point, his eyes widening with shock as he mumbled, “Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.” Sure enough, racing up the boulevard was a giant black mech, vaguely humanoid in the construction of its limbs aside from the purely circular torso. Stylized with spikes on the joint plates and blue lightning bolts painted on its outer shell, it wasn’t hard to identify this machine as belonging to Megamind, who glared at Doofenshmirtz from within the glass-domed cockpit in the chest.

Leaving craters in the road with every step, Megamind brought his big battle suit’s feet together before using its rocket thrusters to leap into the air, aiming to bring the machine down on the stretch of coaster that Doofenshmirtz’s carts occupied. Megamind swung his arms forward, the arms of his machine following his movements exactly as twin buzzsaws extended from the shoulders before firing toward the carts. Doof shrieked and took cover in the leg space of the first cart, but the blades landed short of him, bisecting the connecting hitches of the carts at the halfway point of the train and causing the back half to start slowing down.

Heinz looked up from his crouched-down position at the separated carts just as Megamind’s mech suit landed feet-first on top of them. The feet of the machine slid snugly into two of the carts, and the back half of the train lurched forward as Megamind used them like roller skates, ramming into Doofenshmirtz’s front half with the momentum of the mech’s landing. Doof lost his footing as his cart shook beneath him and struck the front of his head on the top of his seat as he stumbled, prompting a smug laugh from his foe as he got up and rubbed the surely bruising spot with one hand.

“Well now, Heenz,” Megamind shouted, his voice amplified through speakers on his mech, “You’re not a very sportsmanlike villain, are you?”

“Speak for yourself, buddy!” Heinz shouted back, waving a fist up at the suit. “I didn’t see your free pass for my backstory-inspired ride!”

“Really? Well, perhaps a rain of justice will dampen your day at the fair!”

Megamind fired up his mech’s energy blasters to follow up his banter, unleashing a rapid torrent of blue energy spheres that hailed down on Doofenshmirtz and his carts. Many flew wide as the track zipped to and fro, but some managed to strike true and pelt Doofenshmirtz, much to his annoyance. He took out the Coition-inator from his coat and fired on himself with the handheld device, forming a bubble of pure evil that surrounded his entire body and tanked the blasts for him.

“Alright, that does it!” Doof announced from within his bubble. “You wanna break out the big guns? Fine by me, pal!”

As he continued to fire on the now-encapsulated Doofenshmirtz, Megamind began to pick up on tremors that felt similar to what he had created with his battle mech earlier. However, these tremors were far more numerous in number, as if an entire pack of giant entities was closing in on the two combating scientists. It didn’t take long for the source of the quakes to reveal themselves, as a dozen or so mechanical penguins, each several stories in height, slid in from the streets and hopped up onto the tracks of the roller coaster in pursuit of Megamind. They slid on their bellies as they projected streams of ice in front of them, gliding across the frozen-over roads of Metro City and employing similar methods on the tracks.

As the penguin leading the charge drew up to Megamind’s mech, another jumped up onto the first one’s back, using its brethren like a platform on which it began pecking at the battle suit’s back and slapping it with its metal flippers. As alerts of damage began to pop up on Megamind’s internal display, the blue hero growled and made his mech jump up and do a 180-degree turn in the air, landing with its front now facing the penguins and the carts on its feet continuing to carry it in the same direction. The machine raised its fists to the massive mechanized penguin, now prepared to scrap with the flightless bird.

Megamind’s mech got the first blow in with a quick left jab at the penguin’s face. The bird lurched back, nearly falling off its comrade’s back in the process, but leaned back in with another flipper slap across the center of the battle suit’s torso. Megamind copied its technique and used the reversal of its stumbling momentum to come in with a devastating right haymaker, caving the penguin’s beak in with a spray of sparks from the exposed and smashed electronics within. Just as the damaged bird toppled from the back of the first penguin and landed in the street, however, another took its place and headbutted the battle suit, keeping up the offensive.

Megamind brought the mech’s arms up and wrapped its fingers together for an overhead slam in retaliation, turning the new penguin’s head concave and sending it sprawling off to the side without much resistance. Another was already on him before he could even lift his arms back up, emitting a frigid blast of ice and snow from its beak that froze the mech’s hands together. Stomping down on the frozen fists with one foot to keep the mech in place, the penguin proceeded to repeatedly peck at the glass dome shielding Megamind from the outside of his mech, eventually piercing it and shoving the tip of its beak inside the cockpit. Megamind had little time to react before it shot more ice and snow into the central chamber, buffeting Metro City’s hero with a concentrated blizzard.

Despite the involuntary shivering that racked his body, Megamind fought through the frigid cold and pulled the mech’s torso back, dislodging the penguin’s beak from the splintered glass before rushing back in to bash it with the machine’s full weight. Yet more glass broke free upon impact and showered Megamind in sharp fragments, but the hit had done its job; the penguin stumbled off the back of the first and fell off the tracks, a jagged shard of recycled concrete from a support pillar impaling it through the chest near the ground.

Fed up with the penguins, Megamind forsook the mech’s weaponry and drew the De-Gun, spinning the barrel to De-Stroy and charging the weapon’s blast before firing through the hole in the glass. A beam the size of his head flew forth and pierced through every penguin remaining in the line, a double helix trail flying through the massive puncture wounds left in its wake. The penguin strike force fell from the ride without further struggle, and Megamind used the one still sliding near the battle suit’s feet as a surface to break the ice encasing its hands upon, smashing in part of its back and leaving it lifeless on the icy tracks.

Megamind sighed with relief and shook some snow off of his outfit as he reholstered the De-Gun, watching the battered and broken penguin robots disappear from view as he continued to coast further along the tracks. Before he could turn the battle suit back around to face his true enemy, however, Megamind felt the entire mech shudder as it suddenly became outlined in a green aura. Almost immediately, Megamind’s big battle suit began to fall apart, the metal and steel that made up its form rusting and corroding as the material went through decades of natural aging in seconds.

“W-What!?” Megamind exclaimed, stumbling as the machine’s legs rusted and became unable to support its own weight. “How is this possible!?”

A familiar nasally laugh from behind the mech gave him his answer. Still in the front cart of the coaster’s train, Doofenshmirtz was now wearing the Age Accelerator-inator on his back, the bulky backpack of an invention supplied to him by a timely Norm. As Heinz’s helpful robot flew away to fetch more machines for his creator, Doof continued cackling as he watched the big battle suit topple over and jostle the carts on its feet free from the track, resulting in it skidding to a halt on the tracks as the black paint on its body peeled and revealed the rusting metal underneath.

“What a shame, Mooglemind!” Doof taunted as his sect of carts continued to roll along. “Looks like your inventions don’t stand the test of time! Aaah hah hah hah hah hah ha!”

Heinz’s gloating cackles drifted further and further away from Megamind’s downed mech, the battle suit lying face-down on the tracks as the carts that Doofenshmirtz rode in continued on their way. In a final act of surprise, however, the midsection of the suit shifted for a moment as it used the last of its power to enact the escape hatch built into it. In a burst of smoke and rust, Megamind shot out of the mech’s posterior, flying forward at high speed with the help of a jetpack strapped to his person.

Tucking in his oversized head in the few moments that passed between his escape from his crumbling mech and his impact with Doofenshmirtz in the front cart, Megamind slammed into the Danville doctor with a full-body tackle at incredibly high speeds, taking all of the wind out of Heinz’s lungs with the attack. As he was pushed back by Megamind’s bash attack, the Age Accelerator-inator found itself caught between Doof’s back and the inner rim of the front cart, pushing the backpack machine inward and nearly splitting it in half. As sparks flew from the machine’s destroyed inner mechanisms, Doofenshmirtz and Megamind bounced back from the impact and landed on the floor of the cart, both dazed and somewhat weary from their lengthy scrap.

Megamind clawed his way across the floor of the cart and was atop Doofenshmirtz before the latter could right himself, aggravated by his foe’s persistence. The blue hero drew his De-Gun and pressed the trigger guard against Heinz’s gangly throat, pinning him down as he raised his free arm and rapidly pummeled his enemy’s face with a clenched fist. However, despite the anger behind his blows, Doofenshmirtz only seemed to be feeling mild pain from them. This led Megamind to draw his arm back again, the Blower Glove extending from the shoulder of his costume as he prepared to strike with the added weight of the metal gauntlet.

Before he could bring his punch down, two pistols came flying into the cart, striking Megamind upside his head and distracting him as they fell at Doofenshmirtz’s side. Looking in the direction the guns came from with a surprised grunt, Megamind saw Norm starting to fly away from the train of carts, off to fetch yet more -inators for his creator’s use.

Megamind growled angrily and thrust the Blower Glove in the retreating robot’s direction. A mighty whirlwind emerged from the gauntlet and stretched across the air over Metro City’s streets, only managing to slightly disrupt Norm’s path of flight and make him slam into the side of a building. But with his attention focused on Norm, Megamind failed to notice Doof grabbing the two pistols lying next to him, dual-wielding the handheld -inators as he pointed the one in his left hand at Megamind’s torso.

As Heinz pulled the trigger of the -inator, the chamber housed in the barrel of the pistol emptied its contents in a forward spray, coating Megamind’s entire body in delicious milk chocolate that hardened into a tough shell before the blue hero could resist. No longer pinned down, Doof wriggled out from under the De-Gun while curling his legs into his chest before kicking them forward, striking the coated Megamind in the chest with both feet.

Metro City’s immobilized hero tilted back like a vase being knocked off a shelf, the back of his chocolate-covered head striking the metallic edge of the cart seat. Cracks began to splinter across the chocolate after the impact, and after a few seconds wherein Heinz pushed himself to his feet, Megamind broke free of his confectionery prison. The chocolate husk flew away as the roller coaster carts continued down the track at high speeds, shards of the candy breaking free from Megamind’s body as he stood up and exchanged glares with Doofenshmirtz.

The engines on Megamind’s jetpack flared to life as he used the thrust to get in Doofenshmirtz’s face in a flash, throwing a punch with his Blower Glove. Despite the speed of the strike, Heinz leaned to the side without trouble and dodged, training the chocolate-spraying gun on his foe’s jetpack and emptying what remained of its ammunition. Liquid chocolate coated Megamind’s thrusters and seeped inside the jetpack’s inner mechanisms before hardening, jamming the device and rendering it little more than dead weight.

Megamind looked at his defunct jetpack with shock as the engine choked and spluttered before ceasing to function, looking back to Doofenshmirtz with an angry scowl only to be met with a pistol whip to the face. As the cyan superhero recoiled in pain, Doof pointed the other -inator Norm had tossed him at his opponent’s chest and pulled the trigger. A green beam struck the chest region of its target, instantly surrounding Megamind’s body from the neck down as the verdant aura it created took the shape of a lovely blue ballgown that ran all the way down to the floor.

“Hah!” Doofenshmirtz laughed, taking in the sight of Metro City’s defender adorned in an ill-fitting dress. “That color suits you, buddy!”

Heinz accentuated the final word of his taunt with a shoving kick to Megamind’s chest, sending him tripping back before falling into the seat of the cart. His anger now turning to fury, Megamind attempted to stand up and rush Doofenshmirtz with haste, but he had only taken one step forward before he tripped on the flowing lengths of his new garment. Unable to catch his balance, Megamind fell toward Doof, and the Danville doctor capitalized on this opening by crouching down and throwing an unskilled, yet powerful, uppercut.

Megamind lurched upward as Heinz’s fist connected, spilling a trail of blood that began running from his nose. Blinded by the sensation of pain and his spilled blood, the blue hero answered the attack by swinging the De-Gun in an overhead arc, recklessly bashing Doofenshmirtz over the head with the barrel of his signature weapon. Heinz cried out and clutched at his left temple with one hand, nursing the injury left by his foe’s strike.

“Oh, on the contrary,” Megamind replied, swapping out the chocolate-jammed Blower Glove for the Tesla Glove. “I think blue would look much better… on YOU!”

Megamind’s gloved hand was around Doofenshmirtz’s wrist before the latter could pull away, and in that instant a surging wave of blue electricity arced through Heinz’s entire body. An unintelligible mess of sounds spilled from Doof’s mouth as the Tesla Glove’s energy scrambled his brain, causing him to drop both the chocolate spray gun and the Ballgown-inator as he became unable to clench his fingers together and keep a grip on them.

With his foe immobilized and disarmed, Megamind lifted the De-Gun again and spun the barrel on his other arm, setting the gun to De-Hydrate before training its sights on Doofenshmirtz’s head. Heinz was helpless to resist, the nerves in his body unresponsive as electrical currents surged through them, and Megamind grinned with a winner’s delight as he prepared to fire the weapon and reduce Doof to a moistureless cube.

But before he could pull the trigger, the cart they were standing in lurched as the track turned upward in a sharp incline. Unprepared for the shift, Megamind stumbled and fell back into the cart’s seat once again, his grip on Doofenshmirtz jostled away. Doof’s control over his own body returned just as he, too, slammed into a seated position in the cart, and as he shook off the buzzing sensation in his skin, both he and Megamind looked over the side of the cart train to see that the roller coaster track was curling up into a loop-de-loop, on which they were just beginning the ascent.

“Ooh! I have heard legends of this!” Megamind gasped. “Inversion of one’s gravitational pull at absurd speeds, with a chorus of screaming babies ringing in your ear… Is this… the fabled ‘lop da lop’?”

“Oh, for- It’s called a ‘loop-de-loop’!” replied an exasperated Doofenshmirtz. “Didn’t they teach you anything at the School for Gifted Martians!? Just hold on to the safety bar and-“

As Heinz was attempting to explain how to pass through the loop-de-loop without injury, his hands grasped for the metal safety bar that had been there during the initial construction of the roller coaster. However, he found only empty space, as the safety bar had been dehydrated into a cube much earlier in their cart-bound battle. Silence fell over the cart as the nature of their situation dawned on both of them.

“…You know this is your fault, right?” Doofenshmirtz said, shooting an unamused look at his blue enemy as they approached the crest of the loop.

“Oh, sure! Blame it on the hero! That’s exactly what a B-list villain would do,” Megamind answered, rolling his eyes and crossing his arms in disgust.

The train of carts streaked along the inverting rails of the track, flipping the ride and its passengers upside-down. With nothing to keep them fastened in place, Doofenshmirtz and Megamind both fell from the front cart and began falling at precisely the same time, their screams matching one another as the cold, hard pavement below drew nearer and nearer.

But moments before the two inventors would have been reduced to splattered flesh, two streaks of movement rushed to their aid from opposing directions, one scooping up Megamind and the other rescuing Doofenshmirtz. Megamind, his body curled up and tensed for impact, slowly opened his eyes as the whipping wind in his face alerted him to the fact that he was still among the living. What greeted him was a small swath of Brainbots holding him aloft and flying him away from the loop-de-loop, some pushing up from below while others clung to his fluttering ballgown.

“Ah…! Oh, my babies!” Megamind exclaimed with joy, almost breaking into tears from the sheer relief that hit him. “You make Daddy so proud!”

The Brainbots that had come to their master’s rescue chirped and beeped affirmatively, chuffed by the warm reception their last-minute save had been given.

“Now, to the secret lair! With haste!” Megamind commanded, looking at the beautiful dress that now flowed over his lower body. “I think it’s time for a change of clothes…”

Meanwhile, Doofenshmirtz looked up from his similarly frightened pose to see that his savior had been Norm, the mechanical blue-collar man looking ahead as he carried his creator in his arms.

“N-Norm!” Heinz exclaimed, briefly stunned before shifting to an accusatory tone. “I thought I told you to fetch my -inators, not me!”

“I was bringing one back from home when your piercing screams called to me, sir!” replied Norm. “I would not have made it in time with how heavy this invention is.”

“Well, put me back and finish bringing that one, then!” Doofenshmirtz commanded. “I’m missing out on the best part of the ride thanks to that big blue pain!”

Norm pulled a jarring 180 upon his father’s words, rushing through the air at high speeds until he returned to the emptied train of carts. The ride had just finished going down the other end of the loop-de-loop and was now hurtling along the tracks again, but even as the momentum of coming down the curve increased the ride’s speed, Norm was able to catch up to the front cart and safely deposit Doofenshmirtz within it. With that done, he rocketed away over Metro City’s buildings, heading off to resume his -inator delivery.

Doofenshmirtz allowed himself a sigh, glad to finally be free to enjoy his roller coaster in peace. Just before he could sit down in his cart, however, a strong impact in the back of the train alerted him to a presence, and Doof’s worst assumptions were proven correct when he turned around to see Megamind in the last cart. The blue hero had just touched down with a three-point landing, now adorned in his stylishly intimidating Black Mamba costume.

“Oh, come ON! For goodness’s sake, why can’t you leave evil well enough alone!?” Heinz griped, placing his hands on his hips to better portray how little interest he had in prolonging their battle.

“Because that’s not what a hero does, Doofenshirts,” Megamind answered, slowly rising to stand tall while locking eyes with his lanky foe. “You would be able to understand if you had a nemesis of your own, but mine said something very poignant to me long ago. If there’s bad…”

In the instant Megamind paused his reply, he moved from the back cart to the front one with inhuman speed, grabbing Doofenshmirtz by the scruff of his lab coat and holding him aloft. Heinz squawked with alarm, grabbing Megamind’s arm with both hands to try and pry himself free, only to discover that his cyan foe’s grip was far, far stronger than it had been earlier.

“…Good will rise up against it,” Megamind finished, reaching to the watch on his wrist with his free hand and twisting it. The image of Metro City’s defender flickered like a hologram before the illusion created by the Holo-Watch disappeared, the deep blacks of his Black Mamba outfit vanishing to reveal the stark whites of his Super Secret Superhero Super Suit.

Doofenshmirtz barely had time to react to Megamind’s change in costume before the blue hero spun him around like a ragdoll and threw him skyward, Heinz’s panicked cries fading away as he flew upward and out of earshot. Megamind watched his foe shrink to the size of a speck, his white silhouette becoming lost amidst the clouds, before he activated the jets in his boots and grabbed the inner rim of the front cart, prying the train free from the rails of the roller coaster and carrying it into the sky with the super strength afforded to him by his suit.

Tumbling through the air as he continued to rise upward, Doofenshmirtz flailed and cried out in desperation, now regretting telling Norm to prioritize the -inators over him. His grabs for a nonexistent foothold were interrupted as a streak of blue and white shot past him and higher into the air, a long streak of grey steel whipping behind the speeding object. As he continued to helplessly rotate, Heinz strained his neck to look after the blur, eventually beholding the entire train of carts being held by a patiently waiting Megamind a few dozen feet above him.

It took a couple of seconds before Doofenshmirtz sailed up to the height that Megamind was now hovering at. The blue hero met Doof’s panicked eyes as he wound up to swing the train, smirking and bouncing his eyebrows up and down in acknowledgment of what was about to happen.

The sound of heavy metal smacking against flesh rang out in the thin air of the sky as Megamind swatted Doofenshmirtz with the train of carts like a slugger hitting a baseball. A deafening boom exploded from the point of impact as the Danville doctor went sailing across the concrete jungle of Metro City at supersonic speeds, his cries drowned out as he sailed in the direction of the abandoned observatory. Megamind’s smirk widened to a full-on grin as he laughed to himself before taking off in the same direction that Doof was now hurtling in, discarding the train of carts by tossing it over his shoulder with ease.

The super speed generated by the thrusters in his boots allowed Megamind to easily catch up to Doofenshmirtz mid-flight. More than happy to let out his mounting frustrations from the Danville doctor’s invasion, he slammed the knuckles of his gauntlets together, activating the super strength once again before flying in and decking Doof across the face twice. Heinz spun even faster after being struck with Metro Man’s strength, a smattering of crimson flying from his pointed nose.

As the shattered cliff that housed the ruins of the abandoned observatory came into view through the clouds in the sky, Megamind shifted his rocket boots into full throttle, speeding past the defenseless Doofenshmirtz with slight unease as he was forced to focus on maintaining control over his movement in the Super Suit. Succeeding in this, he arrived in the airspace directly over his secret laboratory and ceased movement, crossing his arms and glancing impatiently at his Holo-Watch.

After several seconds of waiting, Doofenshmirtz eventually came hurtling toward him, his droning screams slowly drifting within hearing range. Megamind calmly raised out an open hand at this, catching Doof by the back of the head before rocketing down to the roof of his lair, landing on his feet while shifting his grip to again hold Heinz up by the scruff of his clothes. A wild look danced in Doofenshmirtz’s blue eyes as he dragged in frightened breaths, visibly shaken by the trip through the sky he’d just been subjected to.

“W-Wait! Wait wait wait!” Doof pleaded, holding up both hands as Megamind stared him down with an amused look. “Look, I… I get it. Clearly, I stepped on your toes with the whole Roller Coaster Construct-inator scheme… And sure, I may or may not have ripped up your city to build my roller coaster… A-And I kind of, sort of destroyed a bunch of your inventions to keep my evil scheme going-“

Megamind raised his free fist and let the sound of the super strength activating humm in the air to cut off Heinz’s begging, looking more unamused the longer Doof recounted his misdeeds since arriving in Metro City.

“ALRIGHT ALRIGHT! Please, no more!” Doofenshmirtz cried, shielding his face with his hands while looking off into the distance. “I-I’m a grown man, and I can admit when I’ve been wrong. So, p-please, can’t we settle this like adults? …Please?”

“You expect me to treat you like a grown-up, do you, Heenz? I find that… difficult to do,” Megamind answered dryly, walking across the roof of his lab with the Danville doctor in tow. “You’ve strolled into Metrocity like it’s your personal playground, disrupted the lives of thousands of innocents, accosted my Minion, AND interrupted my beauty sleep. I think you should spill out your issues to an audience that would care to listen… like a thorapest. Or, perhaps… the little fishies of the owcean.”

Megamind turned to face the bay that stood below the observatory cliff and just a stone’s toss from his lair, its calm waters stretching for as far as the eye could see. He brought his fist back a little more, indicating his intent to punch Doof away to a lonely, watery grave, and Heinz understood the message completely, flailing even more as sweat trailed down the sides of his triangular head.

“No! No no no! I-I can’t swim! Please!” Doofenshmirtz begged. “I-I’ll go back to the Tri-State Area peacefully! No more punching, I beg of you!”

“I’m sorry, do you take this head of mine to be empty space?” said Megamind. “I have no reason to take you at your word. How do I know you won’t go causing trouble in another helpless city?”

Doofenshmirtz was quiet for a moment, seemingly taking in Megamind’s argument. His eyes flashed past Megamind once again, and in that moment, an abrupt change in his demeanor came about: his panicked frown curled up into a devious grin, and his stammering gave way to a slowly rising chuckle. Unsure what to make of this shift in personality, Megamind hesitated, shooting a puzzled look at his laughing adversary.

“Heeheeheehee… Ohh, yes… you’re absolutely right, Mugglemoat,” Doofenshmirtz replied through his laughter. “I won’t go terrorizing another poor city after this. Instead… I think I’ll have a bit more fun with YOURS first!”

“You dastardly-” Megamind began, preparing to throw his punch as Doof’s maniacal cackling rang in his ears. But before he could get the rest of the words out, a giant shadow drifted over the two geniuses from behind him, plunging the bay area of Metro City into darkness as the midday sun was blocked out entirely. Recognizing that the shadow’s speed didn’t match that of the clouds in the sky, Megamind turned to look over his shoulder and see what the source of the darkness was, only for his look of mixed annoyance and confusion to drop and turn into one of wide-eyed, slack-jawed astonishment.

Being airlifted into the city limits by the distant figure of Norm was a giant purple building that appeared to tower over a dozen stories in height. The majority of the building was a straight rectangle, but towards the top, the walls widened outward into a trapezoidal shape, with circular windows implanted into the sides of this shape. Norm seemed to be struggling somewhat under the weight of his current delivery, but he was able to fly it close to Megamind’s secret lair before shrugging it off his shoulders and letting the building slam down onto the ground with a resounding crash.

Heinz’s laughter continued as Megamind stared in disbelief at the newly deposited building. With Metro City’s defender too gobsmacked for his own good, Norm was able to dash in and rip the Danville doctor free from the metallic gauntlets of his super suit, turning to fly his creator to the building he’d just brought with him. Upon realizing that his fist was now empty where there had just been a handful of Doof’s lab coat, Megamind focused on the retreating figures of his enemies and tapped the side of his visor, shooting forth twin beams of red lasers. This attack was no issue for Norm, however, and the robot transformed his left arm arm into a blaster that countered the Metro Man-inspired ocular beams with an energy ray of his own, easily keeping Megamind at bay while he deposited Doofenshmirtz inside the building.

Once Heinz was inside, Norm turned and departed again, leaving Megamind to stare up at the purple monolith that had just landed on his doorstep. For a moment, all was still, with the seaside breeze making Megamind’s cape whip in the wind as the hero considered what his next move would be. Before he could formulate a plan of attack, though, the sound of large mechanisms whirring to life from inside Doof’s building caught his attention.

The circular windows on the sides of the building’s upper portion shattered as two metal appendages burst out from within, revealing two flexible metal arms with simple claw-like hands topping each off. The building slowly rose off the ground as metallic legs and feet also appeared from the bottom, and as those legs stood at full height, the antennae on the roof began to rise as a square head rose from the top floors and flashed a frown down at the motionless Megamind, the blue hero’s head tilting further and further back to track the rising structure.

Once it reached its full height, the invention revealed its true nature as Doofenshmirtz’s laugh echoed across the bayside district of Metro City, amplified through the giant robot that the building had transformed into. Its clamp hands snapped open and shut as Heinz taunted his foe from within, just visible at a control module through one of the windows on the highest floor.

“Heeeeheheheheheheh! How do you like me NOW!?” Doof’s projected voice gloated. “When the going gets tough, big thinkers think BIG! I guess all that forehead really IS just for show!”

Doofenshmirtz’s laugh continued to echo over the city as his giant robot began to march toward Megamind’s secret lair, focusing its attention on the blue and white figure on the roof. On instinct, Megamind assumed a combat-ready position, holding his fists up before realizing that there was little chance of him handling an opponent of this size on his own. Even with Metro Man’s strength backing him up, he estimated that taking down this behemoth alone would be an unlikely feat.

Then an idea struck him. He opened one of his fists and planted the index and middle fingers of his metal glove into his mouth before letting out a piercing whistle, and within moments a single Brainbot emerged through the cracks in the lair’s roof, carrying something small in its claws. Megamind nodded to the Brainbot, and the sentient machine pried off a small glass dome from the metal object before passing it to its master. The Brainbot had brought Megamind a small red button inlaid within a palm-sized metal stand, stylized with his signature blue lightning along the side, and Megamind paused a moment to steel his resolve before pressing it.

A small flame burst to life as the jet hidden in the bottom of the stand flared up and carried the bottom out of Megamind’s hand. Following the device, Megamind took off running across the roof of his lab before leaping off the edge and flying through the air, flying toward a bunker hidden under the ground in the midst of a nearby power plant that had begun to open up. Steam and blue light poured from the secret containment space, and a colossal metal body began to rise from the depths, with Megamind soaring in and landing on its left shoulder.

“For once, you’re right, Doofenshirts,” Megamind shouted, his voice carrying over the open air as the metal colossus rose up from the ground. “So allow me to show you EXACTLY how big this giant brain of mine can think! Muahahahahahah!”

Megamind then reached to his Holo-Watch and activated its cloaking feature, his super suit becoming disguised as the Black Mamba once again. This coincided with the button and its stand flying up to the head of the robotic body, embedding itself within the skull and activating the machine. A glass dome flipped over the cranium of the robot as the screens on its face flickered to life, blue electricity flashing within its transparent skull.

“BEHOLD: THE MEGA MEGAMIND!” announced Megamind, the smile of a showman proudly displayed on his features.

“OLLO!” boomed a robotic Megamind voice, the screen representing the Mega Megamind’s mouth changing in real-time to mimic the motions of the sound. From across the area, Doof’s building robot halted with a cautious look on its face as Doof regarded Megamind’s answer to his own giant robot. As he stood there in the window, Megamind tapped on his creation’s neck to get its attention before pointing at him, causing the Mega Megamind to zero in on his image with its identification software.

“WHITE COSTUME… POINTED CHIN… BLUE EYES… WELL, WELL, WELL, IF IT ISN’T METRO MAN!” announced the Mega Megamind, flashing an evil smirk. “YOU MUST BE A GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT TO SHOW YOUR FACE HERE. IN WHICH CASE, I WILL GLADLY SERVE YOU A HEARTY HELPING OF EVIL!”

The Mega Megamind slammed its fist into its open palm as a display of intimidation as it began to stomp toward Doofenshmirtz’s mechanized building. Seeing this, Doofenshmirtz gritted his teeth and grabbed the controls for his building robot once again, marching it toward the Mega Megamind and preparing to clash with the giant machine.

“Fine then, chrome dome! If that’s how it’s going to be… then let’s finish this!”

The first punches thrown by the building robot and the Mega Megamind collided mid-swing, sending out a shockwave that stirred up the dust around Megamind’s secret lair and disturbed the waters of the bay. The titanic inventions similarly traded their next few strikes, both of them contesting their raw strength and bulk against those of their competition.

It soon became clear that there was little to no ground to be gained in this head-to-head clash. Doof’s building robot retracted its arm from the last punch it had thrown before extending both of its arms out in a straight line, its claw hands striking the Mega Megamind in the chest and shoving it back a few steps. Of course, a few steps for the Mega Megamind constituted hundreds of feet in traditional measurements, resulting in the simple push leaving Megamind’s side of the battle stepping into and through the defunct buildings surrounding the old power plant.

Noting the distance between it and its foe, the Mega Megamind raised both of its arms to be parallel with the ground, firing its rocket-propelled fists at the robot building one after another to attack from afar. Heinz directed his building out of the way of the first fist, only for the second one to strike true upon the robot’s shoulder, cracking the outer construction materials slightly before it followed its predecessor and reattached itself to the Mega Megamind.

Retaliating while moving forward to close the distance, Doof’s building swung one of its arms in an overhead arc, the metal in the limb shifting to extend the reach of its attack. The claw struck the Mega Megamind’s glass-domed skull, knocking its head down while cratering the ground beneath its feet. In the time it took the Mega Megamind to raise its head again, the building-sized machine was upon it, both arms crossed in front of it as Doof piloted it to plow into its target at full speed.

As the Mega Megamind dug its feet in to fight against the strength of Doof’s building, the roads and buildings around the power plant adjacent to Megamind’s lair were shredded and torn up, leaving deep trails of wreckage in the robots’ wake. Deciding to take advantage of his enemy’s commitment to his approach, Megamind leaped from the shoulder of the Mega Megamind and landed on the roof of Doofenshmirtz’s building, running up to the side of the robotic head emerging from it and throwing a few super-powered punches into the side of it. The dent left in the side of the metal head deepened with each strike, and Megamind eventually felt something inside shatter after enough strikes, haywire sparks fizzling inside the robot’s hide.

Doofenshmirtz balked as his control over his building was wrestled away from him by an unexpected error. Its charge against the Mega Megamind subsided as it staggered away, nearly toppling over before its pilot was able to regain control and steady the giant machine. Megamind had safely jumped back to the safety of the Mega Megamind’s shoulder, and the giant robot made in his image rushed forward, raising one of its legs to kick the sentient structure in the side.

Doof’s building was dazed for a moment, several windows on its lower floors shattered by the impact of its enemy’s strikes. Doofenshmirtz, ever the opportunist, looked through his viewing glass and saw that the Mega Megamind was only balancing on one leg, with the other still being lowered from the kick it had just delivered. He grinned as he grabbed the controls of his building once more, guiding one of its arms to clamp around its foe’s grounded ankle and pull with all of its might. The Mega Megamind had no chance for a retort as it lost its balance entirely, falling to the ground with a loud boom as the ground shook beneath its weight.

Before the Megamind-inspired behemoth could get back up, Doof’s building strode over to its side and planted one of its giant metal feet on its chest, pinning it down. Heinz’s robot threw a few punches down at its foe, slugging the Mega Megamind across the face a few times before it relented to reach for a nearby factory. Its claws clamped down on the building and ripped it out of the ground, chunks of rubble falling from its broken foundations as Doofenshmirtz slowly lifted it up to slam it down on his enemy.

Realizing the danger it was in, the Mega Megamind grabbed at the robotic building’s ankle and tried to pry it off, only for the combined weight of the skyscraper itself and the building it was lifting to prove to be too much for it to handle. Then it took note of a company parking lot off to its right, with several vehicles left abandoned by their drivers and parked therein. A smirk crossed its mouth-screen as the Mega Megamind extended its right arm into the parking lot, notching several of the larger vehicles into its arm-mounted crossbow.

Just as Doof’s building robot had the factory fully lifted and was preparing to slam it down, the Mega Megamind whipped its right arm up and slammed on its crossbow trigger with its left hand. A bus scooped up from the parking lot was launched through the air, flying into and smashing through the middle floors of the building robot. An almost nauseated look crossed the robot’s face as it stumbled back, removing its foot from the Mega Megamind’s chest as it struggled to keep the factory building held over its head. That was the Mega Megamind’s next target, as it aimed its crossbow at one of the claws supporting the load and fired a minivan at it.

The minivan slammed into Doof’s robot’s claw hand, knocking its grip on the factory free and causing it to begin to drop the building it had been holding up. Knowing there was no way to salvage his leverage over the situation, Doofenshmirtz had his machine abandon the weight completely and back away as the factory smashed to the ground in a destroyed heap.

As the factory fell apart upon impact with the ground, a great plume of dust was kicked up by the splintering rubble, obscuring the Mega Megamind’s view of Doofenshmirtz and his sentient skyscraper as it got back on its feet. Hoping for a lucky shot, it aimed the last remaining vehicle in its crossbow notch through the dust cloud and fired, but the SUV had barely even passed through the dust before it came flying back at the Mega Megamind, landing square in the robot’s groin before bouncing off and landing upside-down on the street.

“OW!” cried the Mega Megamind, hunching over to grasp at its pelvis with a sickened look. “MY GIANT BLUE-“

A slamming attack to the side of its head interrupted the Mega Megamind as Doof’s building robot emerged through the dust, wielding the bus that had been fired into and was now scraped out of its abdomen as a bludgeoning weapon. Pressing its advantage as the Mega Megamind struggled to bounce back, Heinz swung the bus back and forth, shrapnel and glass flying out with every impact across the giant robot’s face. The bus was reduced to a mangled, crumpled wad of steel before long, and the building robot chucked it at Megamind himself, who used his super suit’s laser vision to cut the makeshift projectile down the middle.

Despite its creator contributing to its defenses, the Mega Megamind itself was still recovering from the critical damage it had taken to its lower regions. This opened it up to attack, and Doofenshmirtz’s building robot charged in before tackling its colossal foe like a huge mechanical linebacker, striking the Mega Megamind in the throat with its elbow as both of them went down to the ground. The bay area of Metro City shuddered under the fighters’ combined weight once more as Heinz piloted his machine to pin his foe’s robot down, proceeding to grab at the huge blue ‘M’s welded onto the Mega Megamind’s chest. Grabbing the first and third letters, Doof’s building tore them off in brutal fashion, prying open sections of metal and wiring in its victim’s upper body in the process.

The Mega Megamind let out a robotic cry of agony, but Doof’s building didn’t let up. Tossing aside the steel letters it had just ripped off its foe’s body, its clamp hands now slammed into the sides of the Mega Megamind’s glass dome skull, pressing its hands toward each other with all its strength. A low groaning sound rang out as the building robot’s might struggled against the strength of the reinforced glass, eventually being followed by gradual cracking sounds as fractures in the glass skull began to slowly jut out from under the metal clamps.

Frantic in its need to fight back, the Mega Megamind roared angrily and raised both hands, grabbing ahold of Doofenshmirtz’s building’s upper arms before activating its rocket fists. The thrusters in its wrists engaged with a rumbling of smoke and fire, Doof watched from the upper floors of his robot as his grip on the Mega Megamind slipped away and his multi-story mech was sent hurtling through the air, unable to keep itself grounded as the fists wrapped around its arms pushed it away from its foe.

Once the building-based machine had been pushed across the power plant, the Mega Megamind got to its feet and recalled its fists, the disembodied hands releasing their grip on Heinz’s robot before flying back. Doof’s building came back to the ground with a rough landing, tearing up the ground as its hands and feet went down to steady itself. The building robot and the Mega Megamind exchanged hateful looks from across the district, as did Heinz and Megamind from their supportive positions. Without any need for further prolongation, both gargantuan machines raced toward each other, killing intent surging through their CPUs.

The sentient machines brought up an arm each before swinging forward, putting everything they had into a final punch that would cross the remaining hundreds of feet between them. Doof’s building’s right arm extended to its maximum capacity, and the Mega Megamind fired off its fist from the same arm, the clenched fist flying past the extending metal appendage. Both attacks struck home at the same instant: the sentient skyscraper’s clawed fist punched through the inner mechanisms of the Mega Megamind that had been exposed once the ‘M’s on its chest had been ripped away, and the rocket fist smashed clean through the upper-left portion of the building robot’s chest region, emerging through the back of the building before its rockets fizzled out and it fell. The fist fell toward the ground behind Doof’s robot, crashing into one of the old power plant’s domed reactors.

The fist bursting through the dome of the reactor triggered an explosion within it, and that explosion caused a chain reaction as the flames and rubble reached other nearby reactors. Before long, both giant robots and their creators were engulfed in a colossal explosion that shot flames and smog into the skies of Metro City’s creating an explosion cloud that could be seen for miles.

After a tense moment of silence following the power plant explosion, a giant figure began walking out of the smoke. Emerging from the fallout was Doof’s building robot, flames burning along its exterior and within its many floors, carrying a motionless and similarly burning Mega Megamind over its head. With one clamp around its neck and the other around its waist, Doofenshmirtz moved his robot toward the cliff housing the ruins of the observatory, the Danville doctor himself looking worse for wear in the aftermath of the explosion. Megamind, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen on or near the Mega Megamind, apparently a victim of the detonating chain of reactors.

After a solemn, silent march up the hill to the observatory ruins, Doof’s building robot hefted its opponent high above its head, preparing to consign the Mega Megamind to the waves of the bay as a finishing move. Before it could complete its throw, however, a voice rang out from nearby that made Doofenshmirtz pause.

“Not bad… But it’s not enough.”

Heinz craned his neck out the broken windows in front of him, seeing Megamind in his super suit flying next to his robot. He was clearly wounded and scarred from the flames, only just having escaped with his life from the looks of him.

“Still more, Brainy?” groaned Doofenshmirtz. “You can’t beat me, even like this.”

“Maybe not,” Megamind nodded, reaching behind him before pulling a long remote out of his belt. “But this can.”

Megamind jammed his index finger into the red button on the top of the remote before blasting away, flying away from the observatory as fast as his super boots could carry him. Confused, Doofenshmirtz looked around, expecting some kind of trap to spring out of the ground or for the ground below him to crumble away. Instead, his ears pricked up as he heard the very distant humming of energy, and he craned his neck upward with a sinking pit appearing in his stomach.

“Oh.”

A distant spark in the sky, like a star appearing in the middle of the day, told Heinz everything he needed to know about what his blue foe had just activated. Abandoning the control panel of his building robot, he sprinted across the top floor to the back windows, kicking open one of them and scrambling to pull himself out.

He had just extracted himself from the confines of the building by the time Megamind’s remote satellite in the upper atmosphere finished warming up, extending its firing mechanisms before unleashing a bright, concentrated beam of orange-colored energy that rocketed down toward the observatory cliff. The Death Ray struck with the force of a detonating nuke, bathing both the Mega Megamind and the building robot in light before they both exploded like colossal fireworks. The entire cliff was eclipsed in an explosion that eclipsed the power plant’s cloud by a country mile, rocking the greater Metro City area in the biggest quake so far.

Despite managing to get himself out of the epicenter of the Death Ray’s impact, Doofenshmirtz was still caught up in the explosive radius, and as such he was launched like a human cannonball across the bay district and back into downtown. A trail of smoke and fire trailed him as he arced across the sky, his screams audible to nobody on account of how high up he was. It felt as though he was flying and screaming forever, but a familiar sight soon appeared through the buildings of Metro City: the rapidly approaching visage of Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated.

Heinz’s first point of impact was upon the deck of his lab. As a result of the momentum the Death Ray’s blast had launched him with, he bounced like a ball upon landing, smacking off the floor in a similar manner several more times as he careened uncontrollably into the interior of his lab. Boxes, broken -inators, and other rubble from the earlier fighting were among the things that the Danville doctor crashed through before finally hitting the far wall, stopping at last and sliding to the floor in a pained heap.

Curled up on the floor, Doofenshmirtz groaned with pain and coughed as the smoke trailing from his singed lab coat filled his lungs. Across his dark, abandoned lab, the sound of thrusters slowly came within earshot as Megamind touched down on the deck, having trailed Doof across the sky after the Death Ray had done its job. Seeing his foe in such a pitiful state, Megamind smirked through his own pain, shedding his barely functioning super suit so he could comfortably approach Doofenshmirtz in his usual costume.

“Funny, isn’t it? I stared all of this with ‘Ollo’…” Megamind gloated as he slowly twisted the settings barrel of the De-Gun on his way over to the helpless Doofenshmirtz. Once the dial had been set to De-Hydrate, the electric chamber of the gun glowed a bright cyan, and the blue defender pointed it straight at Heinz’s face, grinning victoriously as he prepared to pull the trigger and reduce his foe to a moisture-less cube for the rest of time.

“…And now I’ll end it… with goodbye. Game over… Heenz Doofenshirts,” finished Megamind. But just before he could fire, a large cylindrical frame appeared behind him in a flash, and in the blink of an eye, Megamind was crushed underneath a large -inator that vaguely smelled of Thanksgiving. Doofenshmirtz, surprised, gawked as Norm stepped out from behind the -inator, revealing himself as the one who had averted Doof’s demise.

“Worry not, sir!” Norm exclaimed. “The blue devil is subdued!”

“Sheesh, about time, you big metal oaf!” Doofenshmirtz sighed, mixing his relief with the natural biting tone he reserved for his steel assistant as he got to his feet and dusted off his coat. “Where have you been hiding since the last song cue? I could have used your help blocking that giant laser beam!”

“Apologies, sir,” Norm answered, gesturing to the -inator that now sat atop the buried Megamind. “But I was one trip short of meeting my -inator-fetching quota!”

Doof turned his attention to the final -inator Norm had managed to bring him, lifting his nose to the air and taking a deep whiff of the machine’s familiar, tryptophan-packed smell.

“Hmmm… You know, I might have been off-base in the effects of the scheme for this one,” Doof commented, “But I think it’s just what I needed.” As he finished, Doof’s lips curled up in a fiendish smile, and he rubbed his hands together as a plan formed in his head.

“Maybe now we can discuss that end-of-the-year bonus!” Norm happily quipped.

. . .

Some time passed before there was movement underneath the flat boarding platform of Doof’s final -inator. It started small, but eventually, there was considerable struggling between its steel underbelly and the floor, struggling which culminated in a shaking gloved hand emerging from beneath the front lip. It clawed at the floor to pull its attached body along until the flattened Megamind was finally able to lift up the front of the -inator just enough to roll out from underneath it, the blue genius collapsing on the floor in a fit of pained wheezing. His eyes were squinting as he recovered, but with the lights in the lab all turned off, he couldn’t see anything regardless.

“Owww… My giant… blue… head…” Megamind groaned, the pain of the injuries he’d amassed over the course of the battle weighing heavily on him. There were even more scrapes and bruises along his body as a result of being turned into an -inator placemat, and the De-Gun, still clutched in his hand, was mangled and broken beyond usability.

“Aww, what’s the matter, Mangomud? Are the scars from your dome waxing acting up again?” the familiar nasally voice of Doofenshmirtz taunted, snapping Megamind back to his senses. A single bulb turned on and shone on a spot not far from his place on the floor, and when Megamind pulled himself up to look at what was happening, he saw Danville’s mad doctor seated in a comfortable-looking purple chair, smirking in his direction from his place in the light.

“You…” groaned Megamind as he took some uneven steps toward his seated foe, throwing aside the ruined De-Gun and balling up his fists. “You think… a little squashing… will stop me…?” he continued, his voice hoarse and weak. “Well, let me tell you… it takes more than that… to defeat Megamind…!”

As he finished, Megamind stood right in front of the seated Doofenshmirtz, cocked back his left arm, and threw an unbalanced punch directly into the doctor’s nose in a desperate effort to continue fighting back. To his surprise, however, his fist pushed Doof’s nose all the way into the base of his face, burying his fist in Heinz’s face with a slight squeaking sound.

“Huh…?” the alien genius wondered aloud, confounded. He had been tricked; this Doofenshmirtz was nothing more than an inflatable fake.

“Oh, I’m counting on it,” Doofenshmirtz’s voice replied from somewhere else in the room. In his mixed confusion and shock, Megamind was too late to recognize the trap that his enemy had laid, and the Doof fake suddenly inflated to an asinine extent, quickly exploding in his face and tying the blue defender’s arms to his body as its rubbery shreds wrapped themselves around him. Reeling from the exploding dummy, Megamind staggered and struggled against the binding bands, but it was no use; with his strength and stamina both depleted, he was utterly trapped.

Now that Metro City’s hero was bound in place, another set of lights turned on to reveal Doofenshmirtz standing in the cockpit of the same -inator that had flattened Megamind moments earlier. It name could be easily guessed from its design: from the whole bird controls to the drumstick-shaped firing ray, the weapon Doofenshmirtz now wielded was the Turkey-inator, and Heinz grinned as he trained the blaster directly on his ensnared enemy.

“You’ve got the brains for the part, pal,” Doof remarked as the Turkey-inator’s beam warmed up and as Megamind strained against his restraints, “But let me show you what a REAL evil scientist looks like! And just so you know who to thank, for the last time…”

A loud humming came from the bone-shaped tip of the leg-shaped ray as it neared its full charge, and as Heinz prepared to fire, he announced his final correction to Megamind’s mistakes.

“My name… is DOCTOR… HEINZ… DOOFENSHMIRTZ!”

The Turkey-inator fired a single blast as Doof finished shouting, its green spiraling ray striking Megamind directly in the forehead. A bright aura surrounded the alien genius as he screamed in desperate protest, and the -inator’s effects soon silenced those cries completely as Megamind was completely transmuted into a massive human-sized leg of turkey, complete with a bone at the bottom in place of his feet and a huge amount of cooked, steaming meat at the top, reminiscent of the defeated hero’s massive head. Without a sound, the turkey leg fell to the floor on its side, its scent wafting from its body in a visible trail of steam.

“Hahaaaa, yes!” Doof laughed, full of triumphant vigor despite the lengthy battle. “Haahhh… ehh, you know, now that I’m thinking about all of this, maybe the Turkey-inator was an anticlimactic way to close this out. Well, beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.”

“You were great out there, dear!” Norm announced as he stepped over to the Turkey-inator, picking it up once Doof had dismounted so as to carry it back to storage.

“Yeah, yeah, now hurry up and put that thing back where you found it,” Doofenshmirtz ushered as he began to walk to the other side of his lab. “We’re getting the heck out of this city. And, ugh – why the heck do the lights keep turning off in here!?” he complained, clapping twice and activating the lights once more. “Maybe that glove knocked out the fuse box; I should really check on that before we get go-“

Doof’s complaining about the lights was abruptly cut off by a small hole exploding in the wall next to the deck, which was followed by the head of a grappling hook latching onto the bottom of the opening. Doof stopped walking as the wire of the grapple gun zipped up to meet its hook, and from it, a familiar teal quadruped leaped into the room with one hand securely holding onto his fedora. With a dynamic entrance and a slick landing on the floor, Doof’s nemesis, Agent P, had arrived on the scene.

“Oh, hey, Perry the Platypus,” Doof greeted, nonchalant after the action he’d just been through. “Yeah, uhh, you’re a little late; I was expecting you earlier, but, ahh… things came up, you know?”

As his nemesis spoke, Perry relaxed his posture and widened his eyes at the scene of pure destruction in front of him: flaming -inators, explosion marks, scraps of metal, and tiny blue cubes littered the lab. Even Doofenshmirtz himself looked worse for wear, with bruises on his face, singes on the tips of his hair, and parts of his clothes looking burnt and ripped up.

“Oh, yeah,” Doof continued, looking over his shoulder at the destruction, “That was ‘things.’ Sorry, the lab’s not really suited for guests right now. Oh, and, uhh… my evil scheme for today kind of already came and went, so… yeah. Sorry to make you fly all the way out here for nothing, Perry the Platypus. I can spot you the gas for your return trip if you want.”

Not answering his nemesis, Perry walked past him and approached the giant leg of turkey that had been Megamind mere minutes earlier, still sitting on the floor. He poked it with one finger a few times, then leaned over to take in its deliciously cooked smell.

“Oh, that?” Doofenshmirtz said, noting his nemesis’ interest in the meat. “Yeah, that was, uh… Don’t worry about it; it’s been a long day for me. Help yourself if you’re hungry, though.”

“Gnarg-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g,” was Perry’s sole reply. He grabbed the leg by the bone with both hands, hefting it over his shoulder without much issue and flashing a thumbs up to Doof.

“Oh, yeah, no worries, I’m heading back to the Tri-State Area after this,” Heinz affirmed. “Just need to do a bit of cleanup first. I’ll – I’ll catch you tomorrow morning with a scheme just for you, alright?”

Agent P nodded before running out to the deck of the lab. He activated some thrusters in the brim of his fedora, and just like that, he took off for Danville, carrying the leg of turkey with him as he shrank into the distance over Metro City’s wrecked landscape.

“Oh, wait, I almost forgot!” Doof cried, running out to the balcony and gripping the railing before shaking his fist at the receding image of his semi-aquatic nemesis. “Curse youuuu, Perry the Platypuuu – aah, you know what, it’s not even worth it.”

Something tells me the Flynn-Fletcher family’s gonna be eating good tonight!

Kind of morbid when you think about it, though. I mean, isn’t that technically cannibalism?

Well, Megamind isn’t human, so not really. Still rather grotesque, but what they don’t know won’t hurt them.

Speaking of which, let’s get the readers in the know about this result. In terms of a direct physical battle, there’s not a lot of room for arguing that Doof wouldn’t be calling the shots. He’s physically matched Agent P in combat, and Agent P can hurt him with physical strikes. This kind of self-scaling might sound complicated on paper, but it essentially means that Doof’s strength is equivalent to his durability.

And if you recall, Heinz tanked the upper portion of his building exploding in his face. In terms of raw physicality, that’s much greater attack potency and durability than anything Megamind has displayed on his own. Remember that building throw Tighten performed? Well, even if we assume that he struck Megamind with the same level of strength later on, Megamind was seriously hurting afterward and was barely able to crawl once he got back in motion, so he could survive the attack, but he couldn’t endure it as well as Doof could endure his greatest feats of durability.

This also means that Megamind’s physical strength was nowhere close to what was needed to put the hurt on Doof; he’d need his machines for that. That segues into the main focal point of this match: with both of their full arsenals of machines, how does the matchup change in terms of results? It’s a complicated matter to delve into, which we will do, but the short answer is… not very much.

First let’s look at their right-hand men, where it shouldn’t be hard to see that Norm blows Minion away without even trying. The former’s huge salvo of weapons and raw destructive power is more than enough to put this fish out of water – heck, he’s stronger than pretty much anyone in the Megamind universe! Minion might be smart enough to lure out the squirrel powering Norm, but realistically he wouldn’t even get the chance.

Next let’s look at their weapons closets at large to stack them up against one another. Doof’s -inators are far more numerous and versatile than Megamind’s machines, which are more oriented toward basic combat. Their design flaws and self-destruct buttons might make it easy for Megamind to take them out when given the chance, but given how many of them Doof has made over his career he probably wouldn’t be able to get rid of all of them before losing. Why is that, you ask?

Well, that’s because this wasn’t necessarily a battle dependent on endurance, strength, or even intelligence. Because both of them had machines that could render the other defeated with a single shot, such as Megamind’s De-Gun and Doof’s transmutation -inators, this match was largely dependent on the speed comparison. Who would be more likely to avoid the other’s attempts and land the crucial shot first?

To answer that, let’s take a look at Metro Man’s super speed. When he was evaluating his place in the world and figuring out how to drop the superhero role, he was moving at such a speed that the world around him was frozen in place. It’s in a montage style, so we can’t accurately measure how fast this is, but toward the end of the flashback, we see Megamind’s Death Ray moving toward the observatory in slow motion.

I think I see where this is going… Because it was moving so slow from his point of view and he was able to outspeed it, we can scale Metro Man’s reactions to its speed?

Right on target! And with a bit of number-crunching, we can figure out just how fast the beam is moving. It takes about two seconds for the beam to strike the observatory in the movie, so we have the time frame. The part that seems tricky is how far it traveled, since it’s difficult to measure the height of a satellite’s orbit just from visual displays of it in space.

That is, until you apply real-world satellite facts to the big picture. Because the Death Ray was still aimed at the observatory in the Button of Doom short despite it taking place after the main film’s events, we can pinpoint that the satellite must be in a geosynchronous orbit around the Earth. Geosynchronous satellites orbit our Earth at a minimum altitude of about 36,000 kilometers, so for the lowest end possible, we’ll use that figure for the distance traveled by the beam.

And with the power of division, we can see that Metro Man’s reactions are at least 18,000 kilometers per second. That’s 16 percent the speed of light and on the low end of relativistic, but it’s nowhere close to the several lightspeed feats Doofenshmirtz scales to.

Even then, it’s hard to say that Megamind can truly scale to Metro Man’s reaction speeds. He’s never shown to be able to match his top speeds, and Tighten never uses those super-speed powers to fight Megamind. It’s possible that Megamind would still be sub-relativistic because he can dodge Tighten’s laser vision, which travels in a straight line and burns things like a real laser, but even an average dog in Milo Murphy’s Law – a show set in the same universe as Phineas & Ferb – could dodge a laser beam fired at point-blank range, which is also sub-relativistic when calculated.

And because Doofenshmirtz’s reactions were vastly superior to even the most generous assumption for Megamind’s reactions, it was highly unlikely that Megamind was going to land a dehydration shot from the De-Gun before Doof hit him with one of his many -inators that could transform Megamind’s physical shape.

Both Doofenshmirtz and Megamind wouldn’t have many of their inventions on hand in their standard arsenals, but as we’ve already laid out, Doof still takes it even without them thanks to his physical superiority. With his machines and inventions backing him up, he was just too much for Metro City’s blue defender to handle.

Looks like Megamind was utterly Doofeated!

The winner of this Courtroom Conflict is Doctor Doofenshmirtz.

Doctor Doofenshmirtz (Winner):
+Physically stronger and tougher
+Faster reaction times
+Greater intelligence and inventing prowess
+Greater skill in formal combat
+Has more powerful and varied machines
=Incompetent with practicalities
=Might not take the battle seriously at first
=Approximately equivalent amount of experience
-Machines all have easily exploited flaws

Megamind (Loser):
+More powerful machines in on-hand arsenal
+Strength in numbers with Brainbots
+Could one-shot with the Death Ray, but…
=Incompetent with practicalities
=Might not take the battle seriously at first
=Approximately equivalent amount of experience
-…The Death Ray isn’t part of his standard arsenal
-Minion is less suited for combat than Norm

Next Time On Courtroom Conflict…