Managing your media presence

There's a saying, "all publicity is good publicity". This is true in business, when the goal is to drive brand awareness and hence sales. It's true for celebrities, because ultimately the celebrity's product is himself and the media in which he or she appears. But villains aren't really selling anything. Instead, they're protecting a valuable asset - their reputation - from attack. Managing your media presence, then, is a unique challenge for the villain.

Not all villains will need to worry about this. Starting villains should focus on getting established - several solid capers, a known name, integration into the larger super community. Veteran villains have already firmly fixed their own narrative in the minds of the public. It's the mid-level villain - the one who can make the front page reliably, but can't control what they print yet - that has the most to worry about.

Let's start with the fundamentals of media management. Media is a plural (the singular is "medium"), and refers to tools used to store and forward information. Most of the time when people say "media" or "the media", they mean journalism, aka news media. This includes newspapers, magazines, journals, TV, radio, and the Web. "Media management" is the ability for the villain to influence what other people say about him or her via any of these channels, and/or to have influence when speaking directly through them.

I talked more about building relationships with the media earlier, so for many centralized forms of media (TV, radio, print), you should refer to that guide for how to proceed. Much of the media today is built around the concept of "access" - a journalist's ability to get privileged information from a special source - and if you are big enough, you can try and bargain access in exchange for reporting things you want reported. It's a delicate balancing act and takes time and practice to get good at doing, so I suggest working your local channels first. Only move to the national media outlets once you feel confident in your technique.

That leaves managing the "new media", of which "social media" is a subset. This is basically the Web - YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and probably a bunch of others I either have forgotten about or never heard of. There's two ways to proceed here: get the ear of influential new media personalities, and manage your own social media presence.

Like traditional reporters, "access" still matters to bloggers and vloggers and whateveroggers tomorrow holds in store. Thanks to a perceived rivalry with old media, one thing many bloggers prize is better and faster access to a source than the "dinosaurs" in print and television can muster. They're the guys with the camera at the crime scene, metaphorically speaking. This is the theory behind websites like Brickwatch, which collect and collate information about super-battles in near-realtime.

If you are interested in building relations with such people, you'll want to pick a few personalities to interact with, then read their sites. Get a sense of what interests them - every blogger started with an itch they wanted to scratch, and many are idiosyncratic in what they'll cover. Find out what you want to say that works with their angle, then get in touch with them.

Alternately, you can go directly to Twitter, YouTube, and so forth. It's not as easy as getting your own account and just posting your crimes, though. There's several reasons why you should work with an intermediary or assistant.

1. Terms of service. All modern electronic services have rules about what content they'll let people post. For example, YouTube's section 6E ("Your Content and Conduct") forbids content that's "contrary to applicable local, national, and international laws and regulations". In general, villains posting their own stuff get flagged and banned. However, the government has pushed back against this several times, by requesting that such services retain the content. Their argument is that useful intelligence about villains' activities can be gleaned from what they post. Of course they're notoriously vague about how, when, or if this really happens, but hey, it opens the door to doing so.
2. Security. If you ask Comcast to run DSL to your lair and then post from there, expect the Feds to come knocking. By having someone else post your content, or by doing so from innocuous locations (Starbucks free wifi, for example), you avoid being traced back. Learning all the rules of securely posting content comes at the cost of your other villainous skills, though - it's usually better to leave this sort of thing to someone who knows what they're doing and is sympathetic to your cause (or who stays bought).
3. Domain expertise. I don't know a thing about search engine optimization, aside from what it is. I have no idea what cross-posting tools are the best, or which support Google Plus vs. Tumblr. And I don't know these things because I'm too busy being a kick-ass villain. Leave the specialty tasks to specialists.

Many villains work with someone (or pose as someone) who claims to be "documenting <villain name>'s nefarious activities for the authorities". This excuse is paper-thin but it's enough to keep videos from being auto-flagged. In general it will not hold up in court (and yes this has been tested).

Finding a new-media biographer isn't easy. This is generally the sort of task you can put onto a villainous apprentice, if you have one - and provided she isn't grounded. Never let such people into your lair, or give them details about your plans ahead of time - after all, they might be planted. But should an opportunity arise, feel free to take advantage of it, if you can do so cautiously.

So what do you do with all this? In short, you protect your good name. If you see crimes attributed to you that aren't yours, sad to say but you need to tell people that. Accused of murdering innocent children, and it wasn't you? Set the record straight. Reporter said you "bumbled through the crime"? If you didn't, tell them why they saw what they saw - or demand that they get a more reliable source. Like I've said before, the most convincing explanations are those with plausible details, and you can get into (safe to reveal) specifics of your crimes in ways nobody else can. Use this inside information to prove your identity, then use that credibility you acquire to say what you need to say.

Relations: organized crime

Let's talk about "The Godfather", because it's both your key to understanding organized crime, and a great movie. Why is it the key? Not because it was an accurate depiction of the Mafia as they were when the film came out, but because they adopted some of the conventions of the film. The "Dapper Don", the effect of the film as a recruiting tool for the Mafia, even the fact that Joseph Colombo first attacked and then later influenced the picture.

Everyone has images of themselves. We love those larger-than-life self-portraits we draw in our minds, and we absolutely love it when someone else contributes to that grandeur. And we'll fight to the death to protect those images from harm by reality. You all know what I'm talking about. You got into villainy for similar reasons.

Maybe this sounds like a lot of pop psychology. But it's useful, because when your business consists of the threat of violence and the management of dirty money, anything that dresses it up will help you sleep better at night. Realizing this is important.

What they want

Organized crime, like any big organization, looks at the world through its own lens. They acknowledge things bigger than them - governments, the military, and so on - but they look at those things as opportunities. Anything smaller than them was business. "The Corleone family was like the Roman empire," says Frank Pentangelli.

What you have to understand is that even if you have superpowers, even if you walk like a demigod among mortals, organized crime will still see you through this lens. They will think that they can manage you, or use you, or influence you. They will look for chinks in your armor. They will try to identify loved ones, favorite hangouts, habits, vices. They will have you followed. They will try to plant listening devices or tracking devices on you. They will look for leverage.

Once they have it, they'll try to work you into their program, whatever that might be. If you're hip with this, that's fine, but you're not really a supervillain any more - you're a mob enforcer with superpowers.

What you want

Generally, what you want from organized crime - the Mob, the Yakuza, whoever - is their interface between legitimate and illegal interests. You want guys who can handle a hit and launder money. You want a source of henchmen whose presence won't automatically get them arrested, even if they might tip off the cops. In short, you're doing business with a company whose existence is illegal but whose services are vital.

How to interact

Everything you want is a business transaction, so treat it as such. Don't get suckered into "free favors" or "benefits". Pay for everything you ask for, and do everything you accept money to do. Cash is your mediator for everything.

The rules for business transactions with organized crime:

• When money is the subject of the transaction (such as money laundering), the fee should be a percentage of the total.
• Always get a handshake or other clear acknowledgement of the deal, in the presence of witnesses.
• Let them make the security arrangements, within reason. They want to feel safe from you, so respect that.

What to watch out for

The number one thing to worry about with organized crime is deviations from the norm. If you're used to meeting with your contact at a certain place, and they say they want to meet somewhere else, ask why, then independently check out what they tell you. If your normal contact isn't available, find out why and check it out. Ronald Reagan learned the Russian proverb "doveryai no proveryai" and used it a lot in its English form: "trust, but verify".

The number two thing to worry about is power plays within the organization. If you're used to dealing with one particular lieutenant, and he decides to get ambitious, he may try to compartmentalize dealings with you as part of his program. Maybe you're on board with that, maybe not - but if you think it's happening, always have a few members of the organization in your Rolodex that you can check with.

Relations: civilians

Normals. Mundanes. Stage Zero. Muggles. Well, that last one is from Harry Potter, but it's always been a thing to separate the privileged and powerful from the masses.

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx talks about a class emerging from self-realization and then acting against those who exploit them. His perspective on economics gave us the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Superpowers gives us mundanes and supers. Like a lot of capitalists, we supers are born into privilege, though often we don't realize it until adulthood. While I don't necessarily subscribe to Marxist class theory, I think it says a lot of interesting things about supers and normals interacting.

What got me thinking about this was a conversation with Ekaterina Avrilova. She mentioned a talk that the American All-Stars' ex-member Link had given last year. I want to reproduce part of that here:

"A superhuman has fewer physical needs than a normal. He doesn't get sick. He will not understand when someone is sick, because he is not. He will not understand hunger if he doesn't feel it. He may remember these sensations from before his progression to Stage Three or higher, but those memories will fade. Empathy is based on a shared framework of experience. A super who doesn't understand mundanes will simply stop knowing how to care about them."

"Superhumans have their own masks. The hero and villain and monster masks, imposed on us by a legacy of mythology and religion and popular narrative. Masks forced onto us by the jealous or the fearful. Masks we adopt of our own accord. What you must understand, ladies and gentlemen, is that the face behind the mask is increasingly inhuman. Removed from the concerns of mundane life, and without those same social pressures, the superhumans you know are becoming something other than what they were born and raised to be."

Clearly this is some heavy-duty shit. But what does this mean for villains?

Mundanes as a class will continue to be important to you throughout your career

Unless you retire to an island with a hot significant other and plan to live there, you will always interact, in some capacity, with mundanes. This means you need a policy in place for how to deal with them. Even if it's "normals are insects", you've at least thought about it.

Almost every time you want something that you can't produce or steal yourself, you'll be going to a mundane. Casual friends, lovers, henchmen, financiers, fixers, fences, and so on will probably be mundane. Maybe you don't think you will have a use for such people. I'm here to tell you that you will, sooner or later.

Mundanes as a class can curb-stomp individual supers

Father Freak hangs out in his Detroit church all day, sure. He can get away with that because the military hasn't made a concerted effort to kill him, and they haven't done that because he hasn't made himself enough of a nuisance to demand it. My little excursion to Virginia was a necessity because the CIA had in fact captured a super and were experimenting on him - and he was definitely not the only one.

Dr. John Schindler's rules of spycraft includes this wisdom: "All important intelligence methods have already been perfected by the Russians. We need to figure out how to do them nicely." His advice also applies to anti-super tactics in general, both intelligence gathering and wetwork. The Grasscutters are all mundanes, as far as anyone knows, mostly ex-KGB, and they have killed dozens of supers since the fall of the Soviet Union. A lot of people are sitting up and taking notice, especially when a noob villain overreaches and blows up something (or someone) important.

Yeah, there's a lot of talk about how easy villains can escape from prison, but there's plenty of holding facilities where that's not true. By and large, what's lacking in villain containment isn't the technology, it's the funding or the political will to effectively use it.

Individual mundanes can be just as sneaky, smart, interesting, or useful as supers - maybe moreso

I have some mundane acquaintances, and even a few friends. Some know my villain identity, others don't - and a few could figure it out if they read this guide. Those people that I choose to keep around me are there for a reason. More than a few times, I've been blocked on a caper, only to run it past one of the most intelligent, canny motherfuckers I know, who always had a solution. I've had some amazing romantic relationships with mundanes as well.

Powers are only one part of the human equation. Yeah, they're a game changer in a lot of respects, but they don't replace all the other things that make humans interesting. Given the choice of spending time with an intelligent normal girl or a super like Beaver Boy, uh, sorry BB but I'm going out for drinks and dancing with the lady.

The best parts of mundane life are still fun for supers

As a villain, you can stop paying taxes, house payments, auto insurance, and all of that dreary stuff. But you can still go for dinner, see a movie, travel the world, stay at five-star hotels, and all that great fun stuff. I encourage you to go enjoy such things whenever you have some free time. And when you do, look around, and watch people. Remember that this is as good as it gets for them.

Villains can give back to mundanes without losing their game

My discussion on presentation and showmanship talks about crowd management. I've made the comparison to professional wrestling and lucha libre in the past. I want to repeat those things now and say: as a villain, your actions can actually provide a sort of entertainment to your audience. When doing capers, you'll have more fun if you make a sport of it. If they feel they're part of something exciting, they'll appreciate it more. And you can make it exciting for them - and in doing so, you'll feel gratified by their enjoyment. Seriously, go out and have a blast. Don't be a bore. If you're robbing a bank, talk smack to the bank officers and compliment the cashiers. Make it exciting.

Villains have so much opportunity to profit from mundane attention. A cooperative crowd is a rare and precious thing, and you can cultivate it. By understanding their feelings, by remembering that their feelings matter, you'll connect with them, entertain them, but most importantly they'll give that back to you.

So, Mr. Big's words of wisdom: "To be superhuman, you have to be both super and human."

Relations: other villains

As I talked about in my guide to villain sidekicks, fraternal association works much better with heroes than with villains, because heroes tend to have compatible goals and villains do not. Despite that, many villains can and do work with each other for their own reasons. Here are a few key tips to interacting with your fellow villain successfully.

Respect is key

Every villain relationship is based around respect. Sometimes it's mutual, other times it's not. But villains who don't respect each other are eventually going to squabble, and then fight, and that is how relationships end.

You may not like your fellow villains, but you might still need them. If so, find something about them that you can respect. Their technique, their soliloquy, their power, even their enemies. Find something to latch onto that you can get on board with before you ever talk to another villain.

Trust is expensive

Every bank you rob is a bank your rivals can't hit. Every dollar that goes to the police budget thanks to your shenanigans is a dollar spent to lock up your fellow villains. Every death, accidental or otherwise, poisons the public against all villains, not just the instigator. In short, villains don't trust each other because we always run the risk of making each others' lives harder.

Like I said in the introduction, relationships are a balance of risk vs. reward. With other villains, you can mitigate the risk by creating trust. Open your communication with any of the following:

• Territory agreements - where your turf begins and another villain's turf ends
• Mutual non-aggression agreements
• Information exchange - police tactics, hero weaknesses, and so on

It's instructive to note that these sorts of things are how both gangs and nations interact. And people ask me why I distrust government.

Power level matters

If you're a novice Stage 3, and you're thinking about interacting with a veteran Stage 4 or even the rare Stage 5, you aren't dividing territory. You're offering your services as a powered henchman. In my opinion this is the worst thing that can happen to an aspiring villain. If you're okay with this life, stop reading my guide and get out.

Even if you don't personally like the more powerful villain, you should show him respect. If you disagree, pick a fight. I'll come visit you in the hospital and you can tell me how it worked out for you.

So how do you manage relations with more powerful villains? By carving out a niche that the more powerful villain doesn't care about, and sticking with that niche. If the senior villain in your area doesn't do kidnapping or prefers not to mess with the police or whatever, learn how to do these things well, and start doing them. If the senior doesn't do these things, you've got a career unimpeded by his presence. If the senior discovers a need for something you do, they'll hopefully come to you - and if so, even if it's not as equals, it's as peers.

Relations: the media

I know what every single last one of you are thinking. You've read Superman comics, you've watched documentaries on Deep Throat, and you bought into the hype. You're convinced that you'll meet some plucky reporter who will hang breathlessly on your every pronouncement and give you an easy route to fame.

This is your wake-up call.

The media, taken overall, is interested in selling interesting material through their channel. Television, radio, newspapers, magazines, whatever. They make a profit through sales of their product (if they have one), and through advertising revenue. Those profits are used to pay the journalists, editors, and other staff who work at the media outlet. Their profits fluctuate based on how interesting their audience finds their content - or how much the owner thinks the audience will enjoy it. But all that money also buys access - people will take you seriously when you have an airbrushed anchor, a blonde reporter, a news van with a professional logo painted on it, a building in downtown New York with your name on it, and so on.

What this means is that the people most willing to talk about the stories you want them to talk about are the people least likely to have incentive to do so. The more powerful the organization, the more their agenda will dominate yours when you play along with them. This is why Internet forums like Wavelength, ATS, and so on will post absolutely anything, while big news companies like CNN have strict rules about speaking with villains. Independent media - local papers, local-access or the old UHF news, college radio, bloggers, and so on - fall somewhere in the middle.

So how do you decide who you'll contact? The rule is: work with the outlets covering the area in which you can pursue your villainous capers at your leisure. Your stature as a villain dictates the people who have their own reasons to talk to you - if you run roughshod over the heroes in Topeka but Chicago is beyond you, talk to the Topeka media. If you can do crimes anywhere in the Eastern Seaboard, congratulations, you don't need my guide, but at that point you're ready for MSNBC or Fox News.

You should expect to work with a media organization, not a specific person. Reporters come and go. Journalists can get reassigned, quit their jobs, or be fired. Accusations of favoritism, bias, and compromise can cost you the reporter you've been carefully cultivating for weeks or months. Always make it clear that you're willing to cooperate with any member of the organization that speaks to you. And also, always beware the crusading reporter who insists on being the only person to talk to you. If you can get a hold of their editor, explain the situation - you'd rather work with known quantities, and reporters who make you their pet cause are anything but.

Any reporter or blogger coming to you wants something they can put to good use in their publication. They're not your fan club, they're talking about you to their real audience - their readers. You're an interesting curiosity, a means of accessing a world most civilians never get to experience, or an intelligence asset for learning more about super-crime. If you have an agenda, you're going to need to pay for it somehow, and information is the fourth estate's coin of the realm. This goes both ways - they can trade you something useful if you do likewise.

You might consider establishing a drop-box, prepaid phone number, or some similar means of contacting you, if you want to hear from journalists. This adds complexity, because it's one more thing to keep track of and one more avenue for tracking you down (were you dumb enough to bring a cell phone along for your heist?) It's better to demand that journalists who speak with you provide their own contact information. The more removed this is from their physical location, the better - for example, an email address, a voice mail service, or a Post Office box. This also sets the proper psychological tone. You aren't at their beck and call - they are able to speak to you only at your pleasure.

The Bourne movies are a great model for how to make contact with people in the media. Make phone calls from anonymous phones in random locations, never give them too much, and set up face-to-face meetings in places you trust. Always offer them some compensation for their time and risk.

Relations: Introduction

There's a difference between a successful villain and a career villain. The successful one has a set of objectives and is making progress on meeting most or all of them, and villainy is a method for doing so. The career villain, on the other hand, has proficiency as a villain as their goal.

This topic is advanced villainy, and is geared toward the latter sort of person. Today we're going to talk about relations - between you and other villains, heroes, the press, civil servants, private citizens, organized crime, the works. We'll cover specific classes of relation in specific posts, so the goal here is to lay down a few ground rules.

Every relationship is a balance of risk vs. reward. All the rules you must follow are based on that truth.

Risk

You're a villain, duh. What you have to remember is that this strongly affects the reactions people have with you, and dictates the sort of people who will work with you openly. Note the keyword "openly", kids - this is your ticket into legitimate channels, and you have to be careful when using it.

Anyone who isn't a worse person than you is risking their professional reputation - and, they think (rightly or wrongly) their lives and sanity - by interacting with you. To cultivate a successful relationship with someone, you must find ways to mitigate that risk. Saying "trust me" isn't going to cut it.

You have three methods to mitigate risk. The first is anonymity, the second is utility, and the third is reputation.

Anonymity

The easiest way to convince someone that you're a villain worth talking to is to pretend you aren't a villain. This is a common reason to leave a civilian identity or two laying around. But don't expect to pick an alias like "John Smith" and expect to roll into a new social situation. The key to making a new nom de la paix work is to be a known quantity. You can't just come off like Deep Throat. Wherever your target tends to hang out, you need to seem like you fit into that setting too.

Utility

Woodward and Bernstein listened to Deep Throat because Deep Throat had meaningful, important shit to say. If you want to build a relationship with somebody, you need to have something to offer them - you can't just lean on them for information or favors without reciprocity.

At the same time, as a villain, you don't want to give away the goodies. For example, a reporter who knows they're talking to a villain but does it because they get good intel on the super scene might eventually be hauled into court. At that point, they face a choice: protect their source and go to the clink for contempt, or narc and lose their access? Your goal is to avoid forcing your people into that kind of choice. Frequently, the only level of useful stuff you could offer to make a reporter take that gamble is also the stuff you don't want to be talking about anyway - for example, dishing dirt on your fellow supervillains will get you in trouble fast. Nobody likes a rat.

Reputation

You might have solidly established yourself. Maybe you've cultivated such a reputation that people now take you at your word. If so, risk is mitigated if your code of behavior also includes treating people well, not atomizing them if they offend you, that sort of thing. Nobody wants to risk being the first to push you over the edge, of course, but it does sweeten the pot if you are already offering something of value.

I'll be talking about villain morality (soon! I promise!) and that's one way to build up this sort of rep. But assuming you already have one, work it to your advantage.

The Face Heel Turn - relationships with heroes

Some villains have asked me about relations with their heroes - sexual attraction, interest in them as a friend, or whatever. Usually this comes down to "how do I turn my hero into a villain like me?"

This is usually the wrong question to ask. Flip that shit around and ask yourself: "under what circumstances would I stop being a villain and start being a hero?"

In lucha libre, the tecnicos and rudos are the good guy and bad guy wrestlers. American professional wrestling has "face" and "heel" for good and bad guys. The trap you might be falling into is identifying too closely with "good guy" and "bad guy" here, because that "face" and "heel" opposition is basically just a marketing gimmick devised by wrestling promoters. Any time there's a "good" and "bad" side, "good" is expected to win because that's how society rolls. But villains aren't necessarily "bad". We do our own thing, for our own reason. You have to remember that heroes are the same way. They hunt villains and stop crime not because they're some sort of innately moral, virtuous people, but for as many different motives as we have.

The question you should be asking, instead, is: "is the hero-villain dynamic going to stand in the way of what we want?" The answer, generally, is: not unless you've made the conflict personal. And sometimes you can even get around that.

What do I mean by personal? Kidnapping family or friends. Death threats to loved ones. Bombed homes or the workplace of a secret identity. Outing each other's secret identity. That sort of shit. If that's the level you took it to, do not expect to be on cordial terms any time soon.

That said: there's plenty of times when the good looking villain is giving the D to the attractive heroine, and I don't mean the Death ray. I know of heroes and villains who meet for coffee - each pretending not to know who the other is. There are some who are bitter rivals in costume and good friends in their civilian identities.

Your challenges in building this sort of relationship are finding out if your nemesis is interested, and broaching the subject. Supers, as a rule, feel a certain alienation from mundanes. We can do things they can't, and vice versa. We share more with each other, despite our moral views, than we'll share with mundane allies of our particular viewpoints. This means that once you form such a relationship, it will probably be self-sustaining, provided neither of you throw a monkey wrench into it. Well, at that point, you guys were nemeses already, so it's back to business as usual.

Is your nemesis interested?

This is hard to gauge. You have to separate your own feelings about the matter from what you're getting from your hero. The easiest way to do this is to ask a few trusted friends if they see anything between you. Maybe your hero hesitates before attacking. Maybe he or she has let you off the hook more than other villains. Maybe he or she seems more receptive to your dialogues during a caper. That sort of thing.

A sub-issue is: does your nemesis want the same thing you do? Maybe you're an attractive female villain and really just want someone to talk shop with, and your male hero seems most likely to understand you, but when he gets home at night, all he can think about is your ass. This is not really going to work out, because he'll misinterpret your interest, and you will probably misinterpret his.

How do you broach the subject?

Assuming you have some confidence that your hero is interested, you should express interest of your own subtly, in stages. Get a little flirtier. Point out the couples at the coffee shop. Say things like "only you understand me." Put out those careful feelers.

You'll know if your hero is interested if he or she keeps up with your signs of interest. Whatever signals you're giving off, expect to see some of the same kind coming back from the hero. Again, feedback from a trusted source is really helpful here.

Never, ever trust the newspapers to accurately report what's going on here, by the way. "Sparks fly between dueling superhumans" is a story intended to sell papers, not describe reality. Magazines like "People", "Secret", and "Masked" routinely run stories insinuating non-existent relationships. A few years ago I was being linked romantically with Titania. I want nothing to do with that woman, and the fact that we're both size-shifters and "that means something" is bullshit.

So in conclusion - get a wingman or best girlfriend. Work out what you want, look for signs of interest, and gradually float trial balloons. Maybe it'll work out, and maybe not. You're not getting any younger, but you are getting older at a dramatically slower rate, so don't worry! You have time.

Q&A: Monologues and the Hero

DDT asked me a pointed question during our July 4 outing: when and why should a villain monologue at the hero?

I covered the basics of presentation and showmanship here, but we'll specifically talk about when a villain and a hero verbally spar.

First, if the hero isn't doing much except letting you talk, then he's not actively working to stop you. Sure, he might be stalling for time, thinking of a cunning plan, charging up a power, or waiting for the cops to show up, but he's not doing anything to you at the moment.

Second, the hero is the ideal audience on which to test out your theatrics. If you can intimidate a super-powered being, whatever you just said should scare the shorts off of mundanes. Take your "A" material and try it out on a hero. If he's unimpressed, it's probably not the best you can do - or maybe it is, in which case monologues are not for you. Grats, you found that much out at least.

Third, the hero may feel tempted to talk back. If he does, he may inadvertently reveal some useful information. Just be sure that you don't!

The danger of talking while on a caper is that you'll accidentally leak something you didn't mean to talk about. Controlling this tendency during your monologue is vital! If you can't, shut your mouth and keep villainizing. But if you can, the hero often feels compelled to respond in time, and that presents an opportunity to learn something interesting.