The Burglarizers are a themed Heavy RP group for bush-league villains in the VirtueVerse. The general tone of the group is a mixture of miniseries like Deadly Foes of Spider-Man and the tongue-in-cheek style common to third and fourth-string villains throughout superhero comics. We are focused on the lives and antics of Destined Ones when they find themselves completely unable or unwilling to link up with more deeply-pocketed groups.

Philosophy and Founding

For the independent operator in the Rogue Isles, crime really doesn't pay.

Say an enterprising young villain manages to get a lead on the possibility of a lucrative bank robbery. It's a tempting sum, somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. Said villain takes the job, kicks some ass, and makes off with the cash. So far, so good.

Now come the expenses.

First there's the money that's needed to keep Arachnos from simply entering the bank en masse and slaughtering our poor villain wholesale. That takes a cut. Then there is the money that has to be given to the street gangs that have caught wind of the robbery and could interfere given the opportunity. A few more cuts keep them out of the villain's hair. Then there are the other would-be robbers, mostly Destined Ones, that are likewise out for money, and could simply bushwhack the villain as he walks out of the bank, sack of cash in hand. Another cut or two more drifts off into the ether.

More pressing are the money's original owners. Most of the people who invest in Rogue Isles banks aren't little old ladies living on fixed income. They're powerful. The Family, Crey, the Malta Group...some of that money is theirs. And they don't necessarily like it being taken by some young punk. Fortunately, if a few hundred bills or so inflate the accounts of those who might tattle, well, there's no problem, isn't there? More cuts gone. And then the middle-man who initiated all these deals in the first places takes her cut.

At the end of all of this, the villain is left having risked his life for a fraction of the amount of money he actually stole. And that's for a bank in the Rogue Isles. On jaunts into Paragon, there are many more risks, and twice as many expenses. It stands to reason that hard, physical crime isn't actually worth the money involved.

There are three exceptions to this rule - if the villains in question are powerful and connected enough to ignore the bribing process, it's worth it. If the robbers are pursuing some other agenda, and the money is secondary, it's worth it. Finally, if the robbers don't expect to keep the money for very long anyway, it's worth it.

The Burglarizers fall into the third category. Their code is simple:

1. Get it. 2. Spend it.

The Founding

The Burglarizers began with the only person dumb enough to think that was a good name for a villain group - Mr. Minion. A die-hard criminal of the old school, Minion came to the Isles in the hope that the laissez-faire environment fostered by Arachnos would help him make a fortune. He turned out to be completely wrong, and lots of Plot happened to him that won't be discussed. But he did come to the philosophical conclusion outlined above, albeit slightly truncated to remove all the drunken rambling and terrible accent.

He also came to realize that there was a distinct divide between villains in the Isles - people who mattered and people who didn't. How good or evil the people in the former category actually were wasn't an issue. They could be the blackest bastards or the noblest of antiheroes, but they were always far more connected, powerful, and simply better than the people in the latter. Having always been a member of the "didn't matter" category himself, Minion found himself greatly empathizing with people possessed of patently silly or pathetic powers and natures, and the way in which they were completely out of place in powerful villain organizations. After all, if you were a guy like the Decaffeinator, you didn't get much respect as it was. How much less would you get when you had to rub shoulders with guys like Bonespike Souleater, Destroyer of Worlds? It was just embarassing.

Finally, he realized that for all these groups interested in changing the world for better or worse, he liked things the way they were. Arachnos might have made the Rogue Isles into a shambles, but it was a shambles in which he could scrape out a living doing things the way he liked to do them - with judicious violence and very little long-term planning. If somebody overthrew Lord Recluse and instituted a new age of peace and enlightenment and/or a dictatorship more serious about totalitarian control, then he'd find himself out of luck. Surely there had to be other villains stuck with the same conundrum.

Putting all of this together, Minion gathered together what money he could and founded the Burglarizers. Built as a refuge for the lower echelons of the Destined One, the Burglarizers are the dawn of a glorious new era of two-bit villains with a handful of powers and even less brains, robbing and looting as they see fit, and doing what little they can to make sure the Isles don't get turned into anything other than the nice little nest of villainy it already is.

So far, that new era isn't anywhere near rearing its ugly head, but the founder remains hopeful.

Key Members

Mr. Minion

Founder, President, Warlord, Grand Poobah and whatever other title he feels appropriate at the moment. He is completely out of place in a leadership role, a fact his alias alone would indicated. But he is rising to the challenge gamely, if not quite successfully.

FeMinion

A very strange woman with the ability to make constant copies of herself, each of which spawn as unique, living individuals with their own weaponry and a personality close but not quite identical to the original, FeMinion's ability makes her the majority of the Burglarizer's labor force. She would have the potential to be very, very dangerous if her power didn't seem to come at the cost of her intellect, a polite way of saying she can be dumber than a sack of hammers.

Associated Groups