Evil Minions Profession in Victorian Evil Scientists | World Anvil

Evil Minions

Welcome to Victorian Evil Scientists! In a sexist 19th century Europe, Clothilde cannot find the funding to open her own research lab, until a Dark Lord kidnaps & threatens her to make her work for him & gives her... unlimited funding? Come read about Clothilde evil experiments!
Introduction to the story | Dr Clothilde Levert | Evil Minions | Novel upcoming

Table of Contents

Written by Dr Clothilde Levert for the attention of the Dark Lord.
    Evil Minions are an essential commodity for all Dark Lords worthy of the name. They are an all-in-one tool that is essential for lair maintenance, efficient running of lab experiments, and general evil operations. Thus, having good minions is imperative for achieving our evil goals.   However, minions vary in quality; competence is often lacking, making them require very detailed instructions, regular feedback, and constant supervision, and results in an atrocious waste of resources. Worse, good minions can become damaged through inadequate care. Both cases lead to at best less efficient evil operations, at worse complete failure.   In order to avoid such unfortunate fate, let us examine best practices for the adoption, care, and disposal of evil minions.  

Adoption

 
New evil minions are both easy and hard to find depending on their desired characteristics:  
  • Grunts selling their loyalty to the highest bidder are everywhere. However, never waste time going for religious individuals, as the simple mind of grunts will be unable to cope with any dissonance between their orders and their religious beliefs.
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  • Educated would-be minions are part of a smaller portion of the civil population and so are harder to find. Yet, they are more likely to question the established morals, more susceptible to twisted whispers, and more likely to consider their talents to be underappreciated. Unfortunately, they are more likely to play with philosophy and ethical considerations and have the potential to cause long terms problems.
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  • What works best is individuals with potential but who have lacked the opportunities to realise it so far. This allows us to both earn their gratitude and to shape their mind as we grow their internal world.
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    Note: Once a potential evil minion has been spotted, proceed with care. Kidnapping and blackmail are not appropriate approaches likely to lead to long term loyalty. Rather present them with a series of small tasks of increasing difficulties and enticing rewards. Once the minions have been properly ensnare by performing sufficiently evil act, reveal your Dark Lordliness and induct them fully into our movement.

    Types of evil minions by AmélieIS

     

    Care

     
    Good care of minions is extremely important to ensure they are loyal and in top form to perform their duties. They require a good salary, a work schedule with adequate rest and paid time off, access to excellent health practitioners, and a retirement fund.   It is also important to provide them with enclosure enrichment by giving them toys and small tasks to do in exchange for bonuses. This also has the benefit of making them feel important!   Minions' qualms and attack of conscience are natural occurrences and should not be dismissed out of hand or they will evolve in more serious cases. Frequent dialogue and reassurance prevent skiving off work, and self-sabotage and instead boost moral.   Failures are unavoidable, as minions would not be minions if they had the talents and skills necessary to be more. failures should be treated as a learning occasions and be associated with a resuming of teaching seminars and mild punishments such as pay deductions and undesirable tasks.    
    Note: It is important to remember that 1) the dead do not have the possibility of learning from their mistakes, 2) overtime only results in tiredness, weakening of attention, and lack of care, all undesirable characteristics in minions.

    Dark Lord patting minion.png

    Evil minion being congratulated by AmélieIS

     

    Disposal

     
    Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, minions can sometimes become defective or can refuse to answer the love we offer them with due loyalty. In such cases, the only solutions is to dispose of them and starts anew with better subjects for our affections. However, we need to consider what method works best for minion disposal.   While a bloody end will undoubtedly intimidate others into behaving, it also has some undesirable effects on witnesses, as shear terror also has been shown to impact with memory formation process and will not allow them to learn from the experience. It also affect moral and is not conductive to a productive work-place atmosphere.   A much better alternative is to allow the defective minions to make a final contribution to our evil operations by having them become part of our experiments, thus solving multiple problems all at once, including ensuring a higher quality of our products thanks to the use of human subjects.    
    Note: In order to facilitate this procedure, the urgent construction of a cell inside the laboratories is highly desirable, as well as an increase of the budget to include the upkeep of the new test subjects.

    Appropriate methods of minion disposal by AmélieIS

       
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    Cover image: An evil minion by Kruchenkova on DepostPhotos

    Comments

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    Jan 3, 2023 19:33

    Phenomenal and funny, it almost makes me want to be a henchman >:)   I kept thinking the bolded words would be a tooltip with some additional hijinx, or maybe rivaling viewpoint from Alina, but alas. Does either Clothilde or Alina have a favorite evil minion or evil minion mascot? :D


    Creator of Araea, Megacorpolis, and many others.
    Jan 29, 2023 11:14 by Amélie I. S. Debruyne

    Thanks! Yes no, the words are only bolded to give a title to the paragraphs, sorry to have disappointed you :( I haven't come up with evil minion characters yet, but that's a good idea! I need to think about something fun that they would like XD

    Jan 19, 2023 23:40 by Jaime Buckley

    This is one of my favorite articles of WE...and I agree with Qurilion, almost makes me want to be a Dark Lord, though.   As for the bolded words, I used to be a comic book artist -- my first thought was that this was emphasizing the points. My question is: can you breed the minions?   If so, can the traits you want be fostered into new generations of loyal subjects??

    JAIME BUCKLEY
    Storyteller, Cartoonist,..pretty awesome friend =)
    Subscribe to Life of Fiction to see the live results of all this worldbuilding.
    Jan 29, 2023 11:21 by Amélie I. S. Debruyne

    Thanks! I think Clothilde (the narrator of the article) gets it a lot better than the Dark Lord here XD She gets minions to boss around, unlimited funding for her evil scientist experiments, and doesn't have to worry about where the money comes from or having the notoriety of a Dark Lord all the troubles that come with it XD   The world is a fantasy 19th century Europe, and while I haven't yet fully decided on what makes someone a Dark Lord, I think it's going to be close to "international criminal/revolutionary + using Dark magic to do forbidden things". So I'm leaning into making the evil minions just normal recruits from areas nearby the evil headquarters, which means there won't be any breeding going on :p   However, in another articles I've mentioned that some of the experiments they're doing is to cure disease and increase life expectancy, and of course the Dark Lord would be the first to benefit from that. I imagine that once Clothilde and him will have secured their immortalities they will be able to turn their attention towards long terms projects like that...

    Jan 21, 2023 13:03 by Deleyna Marr

    Love this so much! For some reason it reminded me of the Screwtape Letters! Lol

    Deleyna
    Jan 29, 2023 11:15 by Amélie I. S. Debruyne

    Thanks! I haven't read those before, but I had a quick look and it seems like something I should read XD

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