The Mole Master's lair

So let's talk about the Mole Master's new lair. This is the sort of lair that most supervillains won't create, but he's got earth manipulation powers and has options many villains don't.

Power

Mole Master tapped into some geothermal vents and is using a binary cycle power plant to drive energy for the base. His control over magma flows made setting this up easy, and he reports that the theft of the power plant itself went off without a hitch. Congratulations!

The efficiency of this type of generator is about 12%, That sounds low, but nuclear plants for years operated at numbers like 5%. MM also informs me that he's rigged the system to vent lava into the base as a last-ditch mechanism in case of invasion.

Plumbing

Water is distributed through the base using a gravity pump. Water purification isn't an issue for him right now as the base is situated below the water table and he's just draining off that for now.

He installed a back-flow prevention system to account for flooding, and there's several sub-caverns and weakened floors that are strong enough to support foot traffic but will give way to reveal emergency reservoirs if a large enough mass of water comes down on them.

Circulation system

The air purification system is only for the holding cells that MM installed. They're run from the geothermal power plant. I'm not 100% sure of the terminology here, but I did some searches. Mole Master says they're "venturi scrubbers", or wet scrubbers, that supplement the ventilation fans that keep air blowing through the complex.

Mole Master is using the CO2-laden atmosphere in the rest of the area as a supplemental security system, since he doesn't personally need to breathe.

Expenses

The biggest expense in the lab is the circulation system. Mole Master reports that the scrubber mechanism will suffer from wear and abrasion and must be replaced. The rest of the system is good for 2-5 years, with period maintenance and checkups. Fortunately Mole Master knows enough mechanics and engineering to do the basic stuff, and he's got a gang of guys who'll take cash under the table to work on the base for him.

Conclusion

Overall this is a mid- to high-level villain base, well situated and well defended (you'll note that I omitted any details about his security system besides the obvious - this is intentional). Kudos to Mole Master for a base worthy of a veteran villain!

Movement powers: teleportation

I asked Exodus, probably the most powerful teleporter on the planet, to do a short piece on the hows and whys of this form of super-movement, but he said it was "boring", and Pyrepower wasn't willing to provide the "accommodation" he asked for in return for his services, so screw him. Instead, I'll talk about what is known (or suspected) about teleportation.

Teleportation

Larry Niven's "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation" gives us the obvious definition: "Teleportation is any method of moving from point to point in negligible time". Published in 1971, it included some speculation on psychic and mechanical teleportation. With the emergence of Apollo in 1962, it was hoped that provable psychic teleportation would eventually lead to a mechanical substitute. So far, no dice. Keep hoping, misfits.

Nobody is really sure exactly how teleportation really works. Most of the people who can teleport aren't interested in sticking around to be studied. It's one of the strongest arguments in favor of a radical new cosmology. Maybe we'll get there once a professional scientist develops the power.

Lairs

If you can teleport, your lair is anywhere you want. Seriously, I don't even want to write this section.

That said, your best bets for lairs are abandoned salt mines, underground cave systems, abandoned military complexes, and that sort of thing. It usually takes some doing to find a secure location, so the hardest part about constructing such a lair will be research. Also remember that many such places will need ventilation or may have problems such as chemicals, radiation, or other contamination. To stay safe, educate yourself.

Slightly less exotic lairs can be constructed in hard-to-reach areas such as northern Alaska, Siberia, or the Antarctic.

Defenses against teleportation

We don't have force fields or weird alloys or anything that's likely to keep teleporters from entering a place. This leads to tightened sphincters from strategic defense thinkers and law enforcement types, and it's not likely to change in the future.

That said, there are ways to stop teleporters, but they're costly. Exodus was first caught because he blabbed about his next target to a cute girl who happened to be a Fed. They flooded the complex with an aerosol version of a "generic" (non-tailored) power-suppression drug, harmless to mundanes, and he finally took a Taser to the face once he actually teleported in and couldn't get out again. From what I hear, it cost them about $1.5 million, and they still couldn't keep him locked up for long.

Contrary to public opinion and popular fiction, teleporters don't necessarily need "line of sight" to hit their targets. Just how they reach their target varies from teleporter to teleporter, but an opaque wall isn't always going to work. That said, seeing where you're going is definitely safer.

Conservation of momentum and energy

Niven's article asserted that conservation laws must hold. Apparently they don't - teleporters can and have moved between altitudes or inertial frames of reference without difficulty.

I had a conversation with one teleporter (Papa Legba), who described the act of teleportation as "going out" and "coming in". He mentioned "the rushing of the wind that is not wind". When I asked him if you could "go out" without "coming in" again, he just laughed, and it was not a fun sound to hear. The impression that I got was that conservation issues are dealt with in the passage through the medium he hinted at - teleportation isn't a straightforward bridge between two points in space. Or that guy could just be off his rocker.

Teleportation as the ultimate killing tool?

Teleporters, generally, can't just pull someone's heart out of their chest. Current physics suggests that whatever teleporters do requires a clear energy differential - which is good if you want to teleport someone along with you and you do so by grabbing hold of them, but bad if you want to be selective. Apparently the "force" that teleportation exerts is stronger than gravity but weaker than intermolecular forces.

In layman's terms, a typical teleport can't pull your wallet out of your pocket, or your heart from your chest, but he can drag you somewhere if he grabs hold of you. Higher-powered teleporters, like Exodus, have been observed selectively teleporting objects away from people, even at extreme ranges - Exodus himself was able to pull a pair of pistols out of a man's hands from across the planet.

None of this really matters since you can just teleport a mundane 500 feet in the air and drop them, of course. Supers are another matter, but aren't we always?

The ability to rapidly teleport works a little like a speedster's powers, from what I am told - you basically "program" your mind and your subconscious does the rest. This is how Papa Legba is able to do his notorious "crossroads walk" and visit hundreds of places in a few minutes. Some teleporters have done similar tricks while in combat, moving rapidly and disrupting an enemy unit's formation.

Movement powers: swimming

Today I want to talk about one of the under-respected superpowers an aspiring villain can have, which is amphibious adaption or super-swimming.

Swimming

Like flight, there's definite limits past which unmodified humans can't go without risking long-term injury or death. Ordinary air mixtures can't take a diver past about 250 feet, while a modified rebreather allows a distance closer to 750 feet. Navy divers have gone down as far as 2,000 feet in special suits. The only contenders for truly deep dives are specially designed submarines or mini-subs, like the Trieste (36,000 feet). By comparison, heroes like Pelagos have reported unaided dives to 20,000 feet and have probably gone deeper. I have second-hand knowledge of villains like the Deep One and Sea-czar who have reached - and sometimes casually hang out in - the Hadal zone at the lowest level of the ocean.

That's pretty incredible if you stop and think about it. That's 1000 times the pressure of the atmosphere. A mundane would be crushed flat. Even the specially designed subs meant to reach such depths will start breaking down, and it takes hours for them to get down and back again. So why do aquatic supers get a bad rap? "Earth is 70% of water", they say, which is true. The reason is that the interesting parts only happen in that other 30%, because that's where the humans are. So how do you make the most out of an affinity for water?

Lair placement

Like flying, only more so, the ability to reach depths of 1000 feet or greater basically immunizes you from conventional pursuit. Unlike flight, you have nearly infinite options for lair location - you aren't restricted to mountains, you can just dive and dive and dive until you find something you like. For this reason, aquatic villains are nearly impossible to track down. Conventional radio transmitters will cease working quickly if you were tagged for some reason, and satellite tracking isn't an option for governments or military trackers.

It's not completely awesome. Villains on teams, or who want to take a prisoner, mistress, etc. home with them, are out of luck - unless you can grant your ability to someone else, your lair is for you alone.

Caper options

Aquatic villains tend to build capers around the following:

• Piracy on the high seas. Surprisingly lucrative - unlike mundane pirates, depending on the cargo, you can just sink the ship, let the crew abandon ship, and salvage the cargo from underwater. Not always an option, of course. Sea-czar got around this by actually flipping ships, which left the cargo hold high and dry but obviously screwed the crew up but good.
• Use of waterways as an approach or getaway tactic. Villains have operated everywhere from Venice to the Mississippi river by sneaking up on their target, doing the job, then swimming away.
• Storage of valuables in unexpected places. Watch the 2003 "Italian Job" for some ideas here - the thieves drop a safe into the canals, then send a decoy speedboat to lure the cops away while two guys crack the safe underwater. Similarly, the "Kraken Skulls" villain duo would steal fully loaded tractor-trailers. Skulls would drive the truck off a dock into the water, and Kraken would retrieve its contents.
• Use of water as an area denial tactic. This isn't something you can do in every time or place, of course. The Deep One was fond of blowing dams, then swimming through the drowned areas and looting whatever he could.

Some specific considerations for underwater capers:

• If you are driving vehicles off docks and the like, remember that the weight of the engine will tend to pull a car down nose first, and probably flip it. Big rigs do the reverse, since most of the weight is in the trailer.
• When working with a team, remember that you probably can't just communicate freely with them. Some teams are accustomed to a secure radio hookup. In such cases, the underwater members can buy specialized wireless transceivers and similar gear from companies like Ocean Technology Systems. OTS also sells ComRope for wired communication, if you are worried about having your comms sniffed.
• Dive watches (ISO 6425 compliant) are rated for a specific depth, and they're getting better. If you need to schedule your capers, or otherwise just keep track of the time, make sure it's clearly marked as a diver's watch.
• The magic distance for bullet penetration is about 8 feet. Get deeper than this, and people shooting at you from the surface are out of luck. If they're using assault rifles or something, it's more like 10 feet. By comparison, the canals in Venice are fairly shallow - 6 feet or less. The grand canal is closer to 15, but it's still a tight fit.

That's it for aquatic operations! Remember that there are no stupid or useless powers, only stupid or useless supers.

Late Addendum

"Pacific Pirate" writes in to talk about the subject of sonar detection. I'll let her message speak for itself:

Mr. Big, you talked about detection for flyers, but not for us aquatic types. The thing every super-swimmer has to know about once they wade out of the kiddie pool and into blue water is thermoclines. 

Thermoclines are layers in the water that reflect sonar. They're created by temperature differential. They're found at specific depths - you can feel one as you swim through it. They're crucial for us because of the use of hydrophones and sonar is becoming more prevalent. Modern hydrophones are sensitive enough to pick up a typical super-swimmer within a few miles. That may seem like a lot, but it's not when you're diving. Still, it's a problem. Passing through a thermocline hides you from these instruments. 

Understanding sonar in general is probably useful too, so here's some additional information.
Sonar is being used to repair trans-oceanic cables, find oil deposits for offshore drilling, look for wrecks, and gather geological data for volcano monitoring. It's also being used to find our underwater bases, and track us. Side-scan sonar will pick up protrusions from the sea bed immediately. If you plan to build an underwater base, find a cave system, or burrow into the surface if you can. Building a structure up from the sea bed will be spotted. This is only an issue if someone has scanned the area before and can do a comparison, of course. When in doubt, do some research and see if you can find evidence of prior scans. 

Thanks for the shout-out, and good luck with your guide!

Movement powers: flight

I'm doing a series on alternate movement forms available to supers. Some of these things you will have figured out already, or really should have. Others might be new.

Flight

Flight is the dream of man. Gods, wizards, and ancient heroes were all able to muster this power in the stories. A lot of supers have it, via a lot of different options: control over fundamental forces like gravity, some sort of force field or barrier, actual wings, and so on. Almost all supers who can fly also have the required secondary powers necessary to use it effectively: resistance to oxygen deprivation, extreme cold, and so on.

The red line for humans is about 26,000 feet. Past that, an unmodified human will basically suffocate to death because they can't take in enough air to oxygenate their blood. Tibetan natives and other people have shown actual evolutionary adaptions to these conditions, and high-flying supers either share similar traits or possess alternate mechanisms (such as long-term oxygen storage, like whales, or even independent systems for sustaining cells that doesn't require oxygen at all).

Lair placement

Flying supervillains have found it advantageous to build their lairs on mountains. The top ten tallest mountains in the United States are all found in Alaska: Mount McKinley, Mount Saint Elias, Mount Foraker, Mount Bona, Mount Blackburn, Mount Sanford, Mount Fairweather, Mount Hubbard, Mount Bear, and Mount Hunter. Colorado is the big winner for those who prefer the continental United States, with peaks at the 14,000 foot mark throughout the Front Range and Sawatch Range. Such lairs are largely impregnable without serious effort, and to date, no such lairs have been successfully raided by mundane law enforcement. They have been successfully hit by heroic supers, though - you're not the only one who can fly, so beware!

Detection

It's been observed that people aren't accustomed to look up when searching for someone. That's usually true, but military and elite law enforcement teams are getting better training these days, so don't count on just floating on the ceiling. What you can count on is getting to hiding places that nobody can effectively search, even if they suspect your presence.

In general the human body cannot be detected on air traffic control radar, military aircraft radar, and the like. Long-range targeting systems will find it a challenge to pick you up. Sophisticated thermal sensors, motion sensors, and anti-missile systems are all built to pick up small, fast-moving objects - that's you, by the way - so you're not totally undetectable while flying.

Lairs: shared and team lairs

Today I'm talking about shared and team lairs for villains. Generally these are a bad idea, but there are exceptions.

Why team lairs are a bad idea

Teams are more of a hero thing than a villain thing. Most heroes all want the same thing (justice, victory over some bad guys, whatever) and they all equally benefit by doing their thing. Most villains have competing goals, or want things that must be divided among them (money, commodities, whatever). This makes villain teams more volatile than hero teams, all things considered. Jealousy, greed, and selfishness aren't unique to villains, but our endgame makes us more vulnerable to those feelings.

If your team collapses, you've got a bitter ex-member or three who can report where you hang out to the cops, or your heroic nemesis. And then you're stuck. If any of your nemeses find a shared lair, your entire villain team is out of options. Even if the discovery is entirely accidental, or due to detective work by somebody rather than betrayal, everyone bears the risk.

When team lairs are a good idea

Team lairs are a good idea in the following circumstances.

• Your team includes one or more people who can create lairs in hostile or inaccessible locations - in a volcano, underwater, or very deep underground for example. This strongly mitigates the risk of discovery and destruction. The downside is that you're usually beholden to those people for lair maintenance, and stocking it can be a pain in the ass.
• Your team is mainly junior-league villains, or apprentice villains, and you are mentoring them. In this case, you want to keep an eye on them during their downtime, you want training facilities, yadda yadda. The risk here is that one or more of them will accidentally lead the heroes back to your lair. You can mitigate this risk by always traveling as a group. You'll want a security system that lets you monitor entrances and exits, but hey, you signed on for this if you took on mentorship duties. Suck it up.
• Your team is cooperative, and explicitly has a profit-sharing arrangement or is after some intangible reward like revenge. If the issues of betrayal aren't a factor for your team, then there's no reason not to build a shared lair. In fact, it can be to your advantage.

Construction differences

Team lairs aren't built differently from individual lairs in principle. You obviously need living space for each member of your team. Be sure to build a couple of extra rooms, in case the team grows for some reason.

Team lairs frequently have higher security requirements than an ordinary lair. You should always factor a security system into your building plans, and sketch out how it works and what it will cover before you start construction.

Team lair roles & responsibilities

A team lair should have a designated landlord. This is the person with final authority over the lair, its occupants, and its contents. If your team has a leader or senior villain, he's usually it by default. If your team has only one person whose powers make your lair possible, that person should be it.

There's two other roles, some or all of which could be done by the same person: quartermaster and security chief.

The quartermaster is responsible for obtaining lair furnishings, accessories, food, and other supplies. This is the person with the civilian identity, teleportation powers, or whatever makes this job easiest. The reason to have a quartermaster is that any interaction you have with the mundane world is based on two things: cash, and lies. Cash is easy to obtain, but keeping track of the lies you tell to keep people from getting suspicious about your lair is difficult for multiple people to coordinate.

The security chief is responsible for, obviously, lair security. He or she gets to control comings and goings. You do not let someone into the lair without this person's consent. The security chief is also on the hook for any cameras, security sensors, or whatever else the lair might use for access control and monitoring.

Maybe your team doesn't roll with the idea of "senior members" or delegating authority. That's fine - all I can do is tell you what is known to work within the villain community. Each villain is unique, meaning each team is as well. Ultimately you have to do what works best for you.

Lairs: design and construction

Roger Ebert's review of "Danger: Diabolik" includes a very logical question: "Didya ever wonder how these guys pull off the largest underground construction projects in history and keep them a secret?" Today I'm going to answer that question.

The three things that make lair construction work in secrecy are Modularity, Simplicity, and Deniability.

Modularity

Lairs can scale up in size by being modular. There are plenty of boxes that can form the framework of your lair's interior, such as ISO shipping containers. ISO containers and unit load devices come in a stock set of dimensions. Anyone with lifting powers, flight, super-strength, or just a hefty truck and some luck, can make off with enough containers to stock a lair in a single night, if they have an airport or harbor somewhere within easy access.

Modular containers are here to stay thanks to their use in legitimate shipping business. Their usefulness leads to their ubiquity, which is good for you. Covering over the butt-ugly weathered steel or aluminum shells is your business, but you can afford to do that in stages. Build your framework first. Decorate later - remember, this place is ultimately expendable.

Simplicity

Go watch any Bond film. Look at the awesome bases the villains have. Look at the gadgets. Look at the expansive chambers and costly lighting. Then remember this fact:

All those lairs got blown up.

You don't want a fancy lair with all kinds of electronics and subsystems and complexity. You don't want to build your lair out of hard-to-find parts or expensive components. Go to Home Depot. Go to IKEA. Go to Staples. Go to Radio Shack. You always want to use commodity parts off the shelf.

Aside from the expendability of your lair, there's another consideration: most villains are not actually experts in architecture, security systems, interior design, and so on. Respect your limits, and build the lair your skills allow.

Deniability

Sometimes your lair simply demands that you get some outside help. You are unlikely to hire an actual architect (but if you do, you have really made it - congratulations). But you might need a construction company to help out with something, or just an afternoon with the contractor.

You have three things going for you here:

1. Most companies assume good faith. If you just tell a company you're building a container home, they're not automatically going to assume you are a villain. Come up with a convincing cover story and accumulate some cash, and don't be obviously evil when you talk to your contractor.
2. Most companies don't want to admit dealing with a known villain. After a certain point, blowing your cover would make them look bad, so as long as they don't make you immediately and you go back for some repeat business, you can count on their fear of bad PR. Just don't abuse this privilege.
3. Your lair design and construction doesn't necessarily need to happen at the site you've chosen for your lair, if you are building inside modular units.

You need to have confidence in your people skills before you hire a contractor for your lair, but once you take that step, it's not necessarily true that they'll throw you under the bus immediately. Just tread carefully.

Lairs: Placement and size

As anyone in real estate can tell you, only three things matter: location, location, location! When building a villainous lair, you need to be aware of the surrounding area and what it can do for you. You also need to make some early decisions about how big your lair will be. Resizing a lair is a difficult proposition.

Terrain

The first thing your lair's terrain will do for you is provide concealment. Anyone looking at the thing from the outside should be unaware that a lair is hidden there. This is what makes underwater and underground lairs so popular, despite the engineering difficulties. That said, you can use partially collapsed caves, mine shafts, or similar terrain features if you don't want to go entirely underground or do a lot of digging.

Lairs are as individual as their owners so I can't give very specific advice. However, I'll tell you about the most interesting general tips I've found over the years.

• Urban decay is a hard phenomenon to reverse. Once a building is abandoned, it often stays abandoned unless some large-scale redevelopment money is poured into the neighborhood. For this reason, abandoned buildings - most often large industrial structures, like power plants or factories - are popular for lairs on the cheap. Detroit is often the default destination for new villains who are working in Ontario because it's a mess, but every city has its share. You'll have to worry about adventurous photographers, because these sorts of buildings are a magnet for any yahoo with a camera who's already had his tetanus shot.
• Subway tunnels in the largest cities have a similar abandonment problem, and they give you easy access to transportation into the bargain. You run the risk of snooping city employees here, though, so you'll have to arrange some kind of cave-in to block access.
• With enough money, you can sometimes snap up an entire tenement building. The people selling such things don't usually investigate the buyer too closely, as long as the money is good. You will have some overhead keeping the city happy, since theoretically you are the owner of a residential building, and must pass inspections and other bullshit like that. Only do this if you are confident you can bribe your way out of inspections as a rule.

For villains with control over water, earth, metal, or similar useful elements - or just those who can move such things around with their other powers - a lair can be placed almost anywhere. If you are one of these people, consider yourself lucky. Even if your power isn't on that list of elements, you can be creative.

Take two villains, for example: Mountain Man and Tokyo Rose. Mountain Man lives in a wooden cabin, but his control of rock lets him move that cabin anywhere in the mountain range where he lives. Rose has plant control - she can infuse plants with Stage 2 superpowers, which includes mobility and non-metabolic growth - and she lives literally in a huge tree that she keeps growing underground. She sends tendrils up to break through the street or into buildings, and she literally steps out of a giant blooming flower. Stylish, that one.

Size and Layout

You should make a list of your typical activities. Planning capers will want its own area. Record storage, if you're into that sort of thing, needs its own area. You should budget at least 1500 to 2000 square feet for these things. Another 150 to 250 square feet will account for a kitchen and pantry, if you need to eat. The typical remodeling cost for a house assumes a 10x10 kitchen, and you want to include storage and a dining area as well. You'll want a place to sleep, so decide how big you'd like that to be - 200 square feet is more than adequate, but some villains prefer much more expansive sleeping quarters.

Plan for recreational use too! You'll often spend hours or days in your lair lying low, so you need something to entertain yourself. A gymnasium, library, or den - provided you don't get too attached to the contents - is perfectly appropriate.

Travel Time

You could theoretically build a lair on the Moon - Apollo did, after all - but that's not super helpful if you want a short commute to your crime scenes. For this reason, you should make sure that your lair is easy to get into and out of, and make sure you are close to the places you want to be. The longer you're moving from caper to lair, the more chances the cops have to pick up your trail. Conversely, a lair right underneath your major crime scenes will be discovered pretty fast as the cops search the area after you hit them.

Make sure your lair can't be found by a simple process of triangulation. What do I mean by that? Let's say you are too lazy to travel far - say, 10 miles at most - for all your capers. Pretty soon your crime spree looks like a big circle on the city map. The cops are going to rightly conclude that there's a moron villain somewhere at the center of that circle, and go looking for you.

Your lair will ideally be somewhere on the fringes of your activity area. Try to vary your travel time so that the lair isn't too far away (nobody wants to haul swag for three hours), but not necessarily within the borders of your preferred turf. Diligent villains keep a map showing past crimes using push-pins or permanent ink, and will look at it when planning their next caper.

Lairs: an Introduction

Villains have three places they usually hang out - a civilian residence (one or more), a safe-house, and a lair. This week, we'll be talking all about the hows, whys, and wheres of lairs.

What is a lair?

A villain's lair, basically, is where they hang out and do villainous things. This is where you keep your money, your equipment, weapons, captives, and whatever. If the heroes come after you, this is where you want them to show up.

The reason to have a lair is that it gives you a solid psychological separation between a civilian cover identity and your villainous alter-ego. Even villains who don't maintain a full-time secret identity often need to pose as civvies - you can't go into McDonald's wearing spandex and a mask.

Stocking your lair

A lair should have, at minimum:

• Two human-scale entrances, preferably well hidden.
• One service entrance, for loading and unloading cargo.
• Lighting, plus a stash of emergency lights (candles, flashlights, and so on).
• A cache of weapons. This is mainly for you and henchmen or hirelings. I recommend a combination lock, rather than a padlock. Change combinations regularly and do not post them anywhere.
• A change of costumes.
• A generator and enough fuel to run for several days.

More serious lairs will include any or all of the following:

• Cells enough to hold half a dozen mundanes for several days.
• Enough food and water to sustain you, and any captives you might have taken.
• Sleeping quarters, plus recreation and living facilities for any henchmen you have (pool tables, refrigerators, sodas, the works). You can typically find a good starter set at Staple's. IKEA also carries a nice selection of affordable kitchen, den, and bedroom furniture.
• A self-destruct mechanism. Carry around a dead-man switch which will set this off.

Security Introduction

A good lair will be secure from casual, and hopefully determined, searches. Cameras are not a deterrent - they are there only to alert you that someone broke in. Lairs are not meant to withstand a determined assault. Instead, they are there to act as a choke point for any heroes or cops who break in. A good lair will keep the good guys busy while you make your escape.

I cannot stress enough how important small details are when planning a lair. Even a random squirrel getting into your site can cause havoc. Lost cats have been traced to underground villains' lairs. Animals are as much a risk as human intruders, so seal up your lair as efficiently as you are able.

For these reasons, underground lairs are often the most popular design, followed by underwater lairs.

I want to talk about the self-destruct for a second. "Mr. Big, why should my lair collapse as soon as I'm defeated? I worked so hard to build it!" Here's why.

• It destroys evidence for you. No villain should need this explained to them. Did you have a better plan for erasing all the files you've been keeping on future bank robberies when the cops show up?
• It slows down the good guys. Let them think you've got captives in the back (or really take some, it depends on how you roll). They'll focus on rescue, letting you get away.
• If possible, it blocks off the good guys' own escape route. If these are mundane police, you can immobilize an entire raid if you're skillful about timing the explosion. This also ties up vital civic resources in a rescue effort, sowing further confusion (which is good for you).
• If your lair has been found, it is now useless! Losing a good lair is like breaking up with a hot girlfriend (or boyfriend if that's your thing) - you regret the lost opportunities, but hey, it's healthier if you move on.

Upcoming notes

My next several posts will talk about some important parts of lair design and maintenance, including:

• when to build solo vs. when to use contractors
• lair security in detail
• lair locations - terrain, concealment, and more
• shared and team lairs

As usual, write in with any questions you have!