Escapology (Patreon)

Hello! Would you be interested in doing one with a civilian who is repeatedly captured by villain who takes up lock picking/escapology as a response?

--

The first time – or at least the first time they escaped – it was from a simple zip tie binding their wrists behind their back. There were Youtube videos to teach someone how to break out of such restraints. The civilian figured that at least showed how much of a threat the villain considered them to be: read, no threat at all. There weren’t even guards. They were just the mayor’s kid (albeit mostly grown up) after all. Standard fare.

It was, admittedly, a little satisfying imagining the look on the villains’ face when they came to do their hostage video and found the chair sans hostage. There was a strange rush too, beyond the frightened jolt of adrenaline, to escaping.

It was a cliché to suggest that they were trapped in their privileged life, role and many parental expectations and so found the act of other forms of escape thrilling as a result. But, well. Their mother had been a psychologist before she died. It sounded like the proper enough kind of bullshit to be true.

Or, maybe, being hostaged was just some mixture of highly boring and insanely stressful all at once.

Either way, it was all rather less satisfying the next time that the civilian found themselves captured, and found that the simple zip tie had been replaced by secure but padded cuffs on both their wrists and ankles. There were still no guards. No villain who bothered to say ‘hello, would you like some water?’ or anything so civilised. They supposed it was for the best that they were simply dumped into a room like a prop not ready to be lugged on stage yet.

Their dad said it was all rote, nothing to worry about so long as he paid, and of course he’d pay. Just be polite, kiddo. No one actually wants to hurt you. They just want the money, for someone to listen, it’s not about you.

Still. It did prickle. It wasn’t why the civilian did what they did next, but it definitely prickled.

They deep-dived into the art of lock picking.

The time they were taken after that, the civilian broke free of both sets of cuffs, using a paperclip smuggled in their pocket.

Then, well. It all sort of…escalated, after that.

It wasn’t, of course, a game. Being kidnapped (their father said, sternly) was absolutely not a game.

But in some way it soon felt like one.

The villain would scowl and huff whenever the civilian was brought in, but the new restraints were always only a step up from what they been secured with before. The villain could have surely made it impossible to escape, jumped straight to mummification or the kind of sealed coffin of a box that not even Houdini could free himself from.

Yet.

Always, a step, the traps scaling up alongside the civilian’s newfound escapology tactics. With time, too, the restraints became increasingly creative. Keys left in puzzles or dangling from by a thread from the ceiling just out of easy reach, elegant twists of rope instead of shackles, rooms with a ticking clock marking some penalty should the civilian fail to escape in time.

Whenever they failed to escape, the exact same trap was set up the next time, normally after the civilian had time to do some more research or get more practice on a new trick to wield against their predicament.

After a little over a year of it, they realised they hadn’t actually been held hostage in months.

It was then that, instead of the villain or their goons simply leaving the civilian alone in the (unguarded, always unguarded) room, a single guard stayed.

The civilian had seen them before, more and more as the traps to escape grew increasingly complicated.

That time, the civilian was spread-eagled on a dramatic web of different chains and ropes, set to jangle different sounds and trip alarms depending on which one was moved.

The civilian eyed the guard, warily. For all of their newfound expertise in the art of escapology and lockpicking, they hadn’t invested anywhere near as much time into the thought of an actual fight. The chains and ropes were always inanimate. No one got hurt. They didn’t let themselves think about the rest, because if they thought about the rest…

The civilian released a shaky breath, twitching against their bindings, letting loose a strange sort of melody of discordant musical notes.

Had the villain finally got sick of their escape attempts?

But, no, the guard was looking at them with a sort of glittering amusement and—

“Oh holy hell,” the civilian breathed, as the realisation hit them. “You’re the villain.”

“Good eye. Most people don’t twig that so quick.”

The civilian swallowed.

“My employees do come in useful, don’t they?” the villain sighed, leaning back against the door, hands tucked casually in their pockets. “Good for handling the little things, like civilians in general, and specifically the ransoming of rich people’s children for a steady low stress income stream. So long as everyone thinks they’re dealing with me, they’re too scared to do anything too troublesome.”

“I did.”

“Yes, well.” The villain smiled, all teeth and delight. “That’s why you’re my favourite. Not that you were ever particularly high stakes. Your father is a bit of a wet dishrag, isn’t he? I’m pretty sure he’s got ransom payments covered as part of the annual tax budget!” The villain took a step closer, leaning in, dropping their voice to a mock confidential whisper. “I think it makes him feel important.”

The restraints betrayed the civilian with another distracting cacophony of sound.

“No, no,” the villain said, straightening again. “You’re much more interesting than him.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“After all the wonderful work you did testing out security systems for me?”

“Is that what I was doing?”

The villain shrugged. “I’ve always found escapology interesting. It’s fascinating to watch a master at work.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“You have got very good. Don’t sell yourself short.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” the civilian said, after a moment. Think. If they had to get out of their current mess fast-

“I’m not going to kill you.”

The words froze them.

“If I was going to kill you,” the villain continued, “I would have done it quite some time ago. I certainly wouldn’t have bothered thinking up…” They waved a hand at the intricate mechanisms surrounding the civilian. “This.”

“I suppose you haven’t put me over a lava pit.”

“I have always wanted to try that, actually,” the villain said, tilting their head. “Can’t justify the cost though. Also I’m told it’s a health and safety hazard.”

“I did note that your ties are rather…safely done,” the civilian said. There had never been a moment when they’d felt anywhere in their body start losing circulation. The forums they’d looked at said that was a risk. That tying people down was a lot harder than it seemed.

They had a sudden flash of the villain matching their journey into escapology with one into all the finer points of its opposite.

The villain shrugged again, considering them. “No need to shake the boat by sending people back their children with a side of nerve damage. That’s when you start getting revolts, and heroes, and all those annoying obstacles to the proper business of villainy.”

The civilian coughed a laugh, before they could stop themselves. Even if that was horrific in its way, and even if they were sure the villain was actually being fairly genuine.

“So why reveal yourself now?” they asked. “Instead of continuing to play the lackey. I could expose you to everyone.”

Unless, of course, this was the point where the villain gave them a lock without a key.

“Eh, you’re not going to tell anyone. The last six months, at least, you’ve been enjoying yourself.”

“You’ve been kidnapping me.”

“I said what I said.”

The civilian glared at them, cheeks hot, but the villain was entirely unperturbed.

“Besides,” the villain said. “I haven’t made you miss anything too important. A gala, perhaps, that you didn’t wish to attend anyway.”

“Because you know me so well.”

“Would you like me to never do this again?”

The civilian opened to mouth to say yes, absolutely ‘are you insane?’ yes. They didn’t quite get it out.

The villain gave them that sharp, delighted, and now thoroughly smug smile.

“I see no reason not to continue to indulge this hobby of ours,” the villain said. “Do you mind me watching?”

The civilian had at suspected, at least as the nature of the traps began to significantly change, that the villain had hidden cameras – but given it had never stopped them from escaping, they hadn’t given it much mind. Or, at least, if they had occasionally thought of the villain (or the pretend one, at any rate) observing their every move, it hadn’t felt like the real villain’s eyes on them did. Or maybe it was only different when the civilian could watch them back.

“Would you stop if I said no?” the civilian countered.

“I wouldn’t wish to give you performance anxiety.”

The civilian coughed another, deeply reluctant but entirely unstoppable, laugh. Really, in all of the hostage situations they had ever seen, in all of the news footage of their grander and more shadowy pursuits, they’d never got the impression that the villain had such a dry sense of humour. Or, maybe, the civilian was simply going mad find any of it kind of funny.

They forced themselves to focus on the trap, and not the villain, searching for the boundaries of their new prison. The music was obviously deliberate because that took effort. But was it there to be a clue, or a false lead? A distraction.

They soon forgot about the villain, at least mostly, because the villain stayed quiet and there was something weirdly relaxing about sinking into the problem they’d been given.

After about half an hour, though, they stopped.

They looked at the villain across the room, mouth agape.

“Are you seriously making me perform Never Gonna Give you Up to get out of this?”

“Only the chorus,” the villain replied, perfectly solemn, except for that spark of mischief in their eyes.

“I’m finding another way out of this. You can’t had planned every move I have to make. It’s not possible.”

“As you say.”

It was possible. It was, apparently, possible. Or at the very least the civilian was red-faced, panting, and still somehow in a worse tangle than how they’d started off.

The villain clicked their tongue.

“I’ll be in the study,” they said. “Do come find me when you’re done, won’t you?”

There was no question, no doubt, in their voice that the civilian would manage it. They’d already figured it out. Even when the trap was something that went beyond all the normal scopes and rules of escapology.

“You are the worst,” the civilian said. “The absolute worst. You have too much money from ransoming me to waste it coming up with this kind of nonsense.”

There was no real fury in the civilian’s voice, and the prickle, that prickle of being utterly irrelevant as anything other than an object to be bargained over, had gone.

The villain tossed them a wink, before sliding seamlessly back into the impassive and entirely dismissible mannerisms of the security guard they had pretended to be.

They were the mayor’s kid, but the villain wasn’t looking at them like that because of who their family was.

The villain walked out the door, whistling a familiar tune.

And the civilian, for the first time, went to find them.