The beer was cold and so was she. Jeremy Bo sat at the bar, gazing lustfully at the barmaid who was cleaning a glass and waiting for her next customer. She wasn’t a pretty girl, not by any stretch of the imagination, but for reasons unknown to him, he could not take his eyes off of this girl. Her name was Miranda Pint. Jeremy had a sneaking suspicion that she had only been hired on the basis that her name was so appropriate. He thought about changing his name to Jeremy Shuttle to try and get his dream job as an astronaut, but he could never find the time to fill in the paperwork.

He had asked Miss. Pint out on one occasion, but she had turned him down, rather spectacularly, in front of the entire pub. Unfortunately for him, he’d decided to make his move at the same time as the pub was playing host to a team of footballers, so his rejection quickly became the talk of the town. Jeremy had not forgiven her for this humiliation. He knew one day that she would get her comeuppance, but until that day he was just biding his time, drinking his beer and marking her for certain public embarrassment. Every night for the three months since that fateful night, he had written down a new way to get revenge in his notebook. As the days and weeks had passed, the plans and schemes became even more elaborate and entertaining. Jeremy never took into consideration how expensive it would be to hire a 40 piece orchestra, nor had he thought about the logistics of getting 13 trained seals into Leeds, but he knew that whatever it took, however expensive it might be, he would do something, anything, to ruin her life the way she had ruined his.

In order to make his revenge efficient and painful, he studied her every weekend as he watched her from his bar stool. Jeremy knew her favourite perfume, her most frequently worn outfits, her boyfriend’s phone number, her allergies and her national insurance number. He could not be too careful when it came to gathering information about her. Anything could be of use, so he stored as much as he could in the spare room in his flat. With notes, photos and stolen possessions arranged on a table, it was not unlike a shrine to this poor girl. He never saw it in that way, especially when he was praying to her high school yearbook photo. Jeremy had not told any of his friends about the girl or his plans, partly because he didn’t want to spoil the surprise and partly because he didn’t have any friends to tell. His cat knew, but it didn’t care.

As he sat, gazing lustfully at the barmaid, he smiled to himself. After a while, his smile started to fade as his lips felt numb. After a while his left arm felt numb. Within minutes he could no longer feel his upper body. The last thing he saw before he passed out was the barmaid smiling menacingly at him. Miranda Pint was smiling because he hadn’t noticed the poison that she had slipped in his drink. Of course she knew of his plans and schemes; the cat had told her while Jeremy was at work. It had been easy to let her cat infiltrate Jeremy’s home, as he so adored taking in stray cats and giving them a nice home. He was a nice person, and that’s what Miranda hated about him. As far as she was concerned, there were too many nice people in the world. The world was not a nice place, so people shouldn’t be allowed to be nice. The fact that he had secretly been plotting to kill her made her more hopeful of Jeremy, but she knew that he would never have the guts to actually do anything, so she’d decided to get rid of him.

What Miranda didn’t foresee was the inexplicable repercussions of her poisoning a customer. Mere hours later, Jeremy Bo flew out of the hospital window and began to experiment with his new found superpowers. Within days he was saving people’s lives, capturing criminals and altogether being a really nice person. This sickened Miranda. She had created the very thing she despised. Therefore she had to do something about it. She plotted and schemed, in much the same way that Jeremy had, to become a super villain and take down Jeremy in an explosive showdown on top of a tall building in the middle of the city. Sadly for Miranda, her boss wouldn’t let her have time off to train herself, so she never got to become a super villain and eventually wound up more miserable than she had ever been. This made Jeremy Bo very happy indeed.