Literature / Constance Verity Saves the World

Constance Danger Verity, World's Greatest Adventurer and repeat-saviour of the universe(s), managed to do what even she thought was impossible: Achieve a work/life-balance. Or trying to, anyway.

One of Connie's old foes Lady Peril dies suddenly (again) and her son, Connie's old friend/ex-boyfriend Larry Peril, is left in charge of her evil organization. Thing is, he's not all that evil, and he even plans on using his resources to do a little good, and he needs Connie's help in not-dying when some of his coworkers don't like the direction he wants to take them in.

Constance Verity Saves the World is the twelfth novel written by A. Lee Martinez published in 2018, and the second in the Constance Verity trilogy after The Last Adventure of Constance Verity and before Constance Verity Destroys the Universe.

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Constance Verity Saves the World contains the following tropes:

• A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: Scimitar studied under the same master as Connie — Master Chaput — before he killed him. Now he wants nothing more than to kill his master's favorite apprentice.
• Action Prologue: The first chapter reintroduces us to Constance Verity's casual badassery by having her fighting an alligator woman wearing nothing but a towel. Connie was wearing the towel, the alligator woman was wearing Connie's underwear for some reason.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The computer that was used to calculate and apply the Global Peril Index on world-threats became self-aware, hacked into a bunch of satellites and threatened the world by using them to make tornados.
• Always Someone Better: Hiro oozes confidence from every pore with his ninja stealth ability, so you know it's serious when he's certain that he can't sneak up on Akane (who was valedictorian at the same Ninja School he went to). Of course by then Connie had not only sussed out that she was an assassin, she fights and kills her while Hiro tells all of this to Tia, so the trope applies twice over.
• Ambiguous Syntax: The novel opens with an example that would make Groucho Marx blush:
  It was date night, and Constance Verity was wrestling an alligator woman in her underwear. How the alligator woman ended up wearing Connie's underwear was a mystery she never solved.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: While Apollonia was supposedly working for Lady Peril the whole time, it's revealed that she's actually loyal to Larry. Both because he pays her more and he won't kill her as a Villainous Demotivator like Lady Peril would.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • While Connie is getting ready for a date, she finds an old-timey gangster rummaging through her cubbards, looking for a bag of diamonds that was stashed in her home. Even when she gives him the bag without issue, he still insists on whacking her because she knows too much, somehow never having heard of Constance Verity.
  • A group of masked men perform a home invasion on Connie and Byron's housewarming party and threaten everyone with assault rifles. Connie didn't even need to do anything, considering the people attending the party includes a retired supervillain/mad scientist and his robot wife, various aliens and robots, a vampire, a Vampire Hunter, a vigilante, a rogue archeologist and various other fantastical neighbors.
• Call-Back:
  • Connie uses the Sleeping Grace to knock out an ornery alligator woman she had managed to tie up before her date with Byron, a move that was established to be in Connie's arsenal in The Last Adventure.
  • When Larry's private jet takes Connie to an undisclosed location with rolling hills, she sardonically asks if they're in Kansas, her disdain for the state having been established.
• Caught Monologuing: When meeting Debra, Connie is quick to predict her Evil Gloating right before she does it.
  Debra: I am no longer the simple experimentation subject I once was. I now operate—
  Connie: On a level I couldn't possibly understand. You have evolved unto goddesshood. You have already calculated every possibility, and your triumph is inevitable. Only a fool would dare challenge you, and I'm only still alive because it amuses you. Also, I'm perhaps the only person alive who can appreciate your genius, and it'd be a shame if I died before witnessing your inevitable victory. That was what you were going to say, wasn't it?
  Debra: No necessarily.
• Control Freak: Lady Peril possessed a "pathological distaste for disorder", having once executed a minion for not buttoning up their uniform properly and interfering in Larry's love life to absurd lengths (as in killing and/or inducing Laser-Guided Amnesia). Considering she runs a Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy with aspirations of world domination, this is to be expected.
• Conversational Troping: While enjoying a Romantic Comedy at home with Tia, Hiro points out that a lot of the protagonists would look be colossal assholes if they weren't framed as the main characters, specifically the love interests who crash the wedding, the Disposable Fiances who're meant to be worse by comparison, and the brides who gravitates to such men.
• Counter-Earth: There's apparently an alternate version of Earth that exists on the other side of the sun and Connie had to fight her Evil Doppelgänger there.
• Delusions of Eloquence: While waiting for Byron, Connie finds a mobster who thinks she stole his diamonds rummaging through her cabinets. When he tries to hold a "civil" conversation, she gives out a groan that he's "one of those verbose, civilized gangsters" that "loves his own voice and likes to talk around his actual threats."
• Department of Redundancy Department: There's an actual location called "Lake Lake Monster", Connie and Larry having uncovered a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax involving a mechanical lake monster used to drive down property value there. It was actually renamed "Lake Lake Monster" when they tried to use the now defunct mechanical lake monster as a tourist attraction.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Deep in the ocean depths lays a sleeping god of unimaginable horrors that would fit right in with your typical H. P. Lovecraft story, the sun allegedly being something that exists because it dreams that it exists. It's worshipped and guarded over by a race of starfish people that Connie happens to be on good terms with, their attack on a Siege Perilous ship having been their attempt to get one of them to play a flute that would lull it back to sleep.
  • The Chronovore is a giant gaping maw that eats "old time" and is a vital part of a functioning universe.
• Enemy Civil War: Siege Perilous was founded as a Nebulous Evil Organisation with aspirations of world domination, so when Larry tries steering it in a more egalitarian direction, this naturally led to a lot of internal strife among the organization. Just as Larry was about to explain the situation to Connie, the Assassinations Division had already begun their assault to kill him.
• Enlightenment Superpowers: The Most Perfect and Humble Yogi Atheeva the Exalted had somehow learned to burn holes in a wall by staring at it hard enough.
• Evil Weapon: Among Connie's collection of cursed artifacts is the Muramasa Blade, a sword that demands the wielder to take one life every day.
• Family Portrait of Characterization: In Larry's bedroom there's a picture of a five-year old Larry with his mother Lady Peril. She's in a black lab-coat and looking down at him disapprovingly, only tolerating him holding her hand in the picture.
• Festering Fungus: The Roquefort at Tia's party was tainted with a mind-controlling fungus that almost conquered France once, compelling anyone who eats it to violently attack Connie as revenge for thwarting it last time. The cure for it happens to be pickle-juice, causing the host to vomit it out no worse for wear.
• Frankenstein's Monster: Not only is Frankenstein's Monster real, but Connie cried as he died in her arms in her early twenties.
• From Bad to Worse: Played for Laughs and Drama. When rogue Siege Perilous agents attack Larry's estate just after bringing Connie there, he tries to assure everything is under control, only for everything to spiral.
  Larry: Everything's under control. It's only one division that's having the issue.
  Connie: What division is that?
  Larry: Assassinations. We'll be fine. Just so long as they didn't send Scimitar.
  Apollonia: Scimitar has been identified leading the assault.
  Larry: It'll be fine. It'll be fine. Just so long as Hardcastle isn't here too.
  Apollonia: Lord Peril... [Holds up a picture of Hardcastle.]
  Larry: It'll be fine. This facility is built to withstand a bomb blast. We already have reinforcements on the way. We only need to hold them off for half an hour. Forty-five minutes tops.
  Apollonia: Uh... sir, there are reports of preemptive strikes against—
  Larry: Fine. It'll be fine.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: While Lady Peril is a recurring villain in Connie's ever-expanding Rogues Gallery, her son Larry Peril is on good terms with Connie and finds his family's evil organization just as tedious as her.
• Good Luck Charm: It's discovered that Tia is an "unknown variable" in the Caretaker Destiny that increases the chances of Connie's adventures ending in her victory into an absolute certainty.
• Immune to Mind Control: Connie just casually reveals that she's immune to mind control, so Siege Perilous' experimental psychic super-soldiers controlling her won't be an issue. After suffering damage from Debra's psychic amplifier, her immunity to mind control and hypnotism starts wearing down, nearly throwing herself into the ocean after prolonged exposure to the sea god's siren song.
• Insistent Terminology: There is a difference between a "replicant" and a "replicoid" and Connie once spent twenty minutes explaining it to Tia.
  Connie: You'll thank me for that if you ever end up stranded in the future.
• It's Personal: While Apollonia is too much of a Consummate Professional to seek vengeance, she holds a personal grudge against Connie for throwing her brother in a vat of acid when she tried to shut down the weather-control device he had designed.
• Joker Immunity: Lady Peril has a habit of dying climactically, only to resurface no worse for wear and ready for villainy. When news gets around of her tragic death, her son Larry Peril refuses to believe that she's actually dead until they find a body. He's right of course, having faked her death and entrusting Siege Perilous to Larry for the brief period she spent being legally dead. Even after falling into lava in the climax of the book, Larry finds her perfectly fine, enjoying a relaxing reprieve in one of her private getaways.
  Larry: Maybe it sounds terrible, but I'm not upset by her death. I stopped going to her funerals when I was twelve.
• Mage in Manhattan: At the end of the book, an interdimensional portal opens up across the street from Connie, Byron, Tia and Hiro's day at the park, an undead Evil Sorceress proclaiming that the world belongs to her's, intending on conquering the world with her army of the undead.
• The Masquerade Will Kill Your Dating Life: Much like Connie, Larry Peril's fantastical life as the son of supervillain parents has made being in a relationship difficult. After his sort-of thing with Connie, there was Linda (who was hired to bodyguard him and didn't reciprocate his feelings), Ida (who's memory of their relationship was erased because his mother didn't approve), and Patricia (who left him for someone else and was later killed by his mother for it).
• Misplaced Wildlife:
  • Tia lampshades how weird it is that they had a tiger (an animal native to Asia) encounter in Africa during their temple adventure.
  • Connie had almost lost her virginity to Larry Peril in the wild jungles of Australia if a bunch of wild gorillas hadn't interrupted them, the reason why there were gorillas in Australia being a mystery she's yet to solve.
• My Brain Is Big: Debra is the result of Siege Perilous' psychic super-soldier experiments; a blue-skinned woman in a spider-legged chair and a giant head.
• Mythology Gag: One of the magical artifacts Lady Peril collected to harness an untapped ley line to harness its power is the helm of the lost god, a MacGuffin from the A. Lee Martinez book Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest.
• Narcissist: Being an Evil Genius who believes that she deserves to rule the world by virtue of her inherent superiority over everyone else, Lady Peril's Evil Plan for the entire story was to magically steal away Connie's caretaker destiny (or what's left of it) for herself, making it so that the "unfair universe" would cater to her delusions of self-importance.
• Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy:
  • Siege Perilous is a Sinister Spy Agency that's rated eight on the Global Peril Index, founded to accumulate wealth and power upon the whims of their Mastermind Interim Lady Peril. Or at least it was until Lady Peril's timely death (again) and left to her less-than villainous son Larry.
  • The Scorpion Society is an evil organization ran by a Brain in a Jar and had attempted to launch Chicago into the sun. Oddly enough, that was a conspiracy that wasn't thwarted by Connie, but instead the US government.
• Never My Fault: Despite the fact that it was Lady Peril faking her own death and leaving Siege Perilous in her son Larry's not-so-evil hands that led to his (supposed) death, she's quick to foist all the blame onto Connie for failing to protect him when a Siege Perilous splinter-group (allegedly) kills him. It's even more damning when it's revealed that she had made a Magitek system that slowly drained Connie of the caretaker destiny (and the improbably good luck it provides), handicapping her chances of succeeding in the first place.
• Ninja School: Hiro admits that he learned ninjitsu at a secret monastery where kids are trained from a very young age in "the way of shadows". In spite of its curriculum, it was basically like a regular school with cliques and drama, Hiro having gone there with the Siege Perilous assassin Akane.
• Noodle Implements: Connie's father had ingrained in her the habit of never throwing pennies away. Lucky for her, this led to her carrying 58 cents in her pocket across the galaxy, this being integral to discovering the blueprints to a cosmic decimator station array hidden in a vending machine.
• Not Hyperbole: To emphasize how unusual it is that Larry was kidnapped without her knowing how, Apollionia claims that their security is so tight that they know how many rats are in the building. When Tia rhetorically asks "how many", one of the henchagents lists them off their numbers (four, in two days eleven since one is pregnant), where in their nest is and how they live day to day.
  Tia: Wow. I thought you were exaggerating for effect.
• Obviously Not Fine: When Connie has to cancel their romantic weekend due to Siege Perilous business, Byron insists that while he's upset, he isn't angry with her. Right after Connie leaves, he gives an intense load-out on Wilcox — a smarmy asshole that likes to hawk his workload onto him — and tells him to do his job before leaving early in a huff.
• Raised by Robots: Not being the most maternal of women, Lady Peril had her son reared by robot servants for some of his adolescence.
• Reestablishing Character Moment: The novel opens to Connie wrestling an alligator woman minutes before her boyfriend Byron was supposed to arrive for their date, Connie more concerned that she hasn't picked out what she wanted to wear than she is about the more immediate threat. As a refresher for those who haven't read the last book in a while, this tells us that Connie is a badass who has Seen It All and is more concerned with normal problems than the more fantastical stuff.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: When Connie finds a picture of her, Tia and Larry in their twenties, Tia asks "where does the time go?"
  Connie: It gets eaten by the chronovore. The giant maw that consumes old time to keep the universe running.
  Tia: You know what I mean.
• Scylla and Charybdis: Connie compares her ex (Hiro) meeting her current bo (Byron) as this. She's also been stuck between the actual Scylla and Charybdis, but that's not relevant.
• Sex God: Connie's sex-life is just as fantastical as the rest of her life, having studied under the Pleasure Priests of Aphros. Allegedly, people agree wholeheartedly to be executed after a night with one of them to keep their secrets because they're that good.
  Connie: The pleasure priests believe the best sex eschews props, relying on the infinite pleasures available through pure physical contact.
  Tia: Sounds like a fun bunch.
• Shout-Out: The opening paragraph of the novel (see Ambiguous Syntax above) is very similar to the famed Marx Brothers joke "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don't know."
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis:
  • Millie is Tia's other friend and she and Connie have a rivalry over the title of "best-friend." While Millie is nowhere near the level of threat Connie is used to in her life of adventuring, she's still invested enough to imagine the many ways she could take her out physically without actually doing it, instead sticking to the kind of Passive-Aggressive Kombat "normal people" do in such situations.
    ...there was a weird conflict between Connie and Millie. A friendship tug-of-war, a struggle for best-friend status.
  • Two of Connie and Byron's new neighbors in their new apartment building includes the vampire Duke Warlock and Vampire Hunter Baron Solaris, both of whom deliberately avoid each other during the housewarming party.
• Sliding Scale of Villain Threat: Since world-threatening peril happens constantly, a Global Peril Index was put together to quantify all of it.
• Starcrossed Lovers: Tia describes Connie and Larry as having a "real Romeo-and-Juliet" vibe to them, her being The Chosen One thwarting evil and he the heir to a Sinister Spy Agency. It apparently never got past second base, and to this day they're still on good terms with each other.
• Straw Vulcan: Lady Peril views some of her less evil traits, like her maternal instincts towards Larry, as an unfortunate genetic defect on her part. She even shrugs at her desire for revenge against Connie (who she blames for his death since she was there to protect him) as another unfortunate side-effect at her emotional imperative.
• Stupid Evil: When Larry gets depressed over being a "lousy mastermind", Connie points out that a lot of the megalomaniacal supervillains are Genius Ditzs of the worst kind and him not being evil makes him a step-up. She had to thwart a mastermind that wanted to crash the moon into the Earth because it was the first thing he thought of when his scientists managed to invent a gravity ray, and another mastermind who'd built a non-waterproof base on the coast and was planning on flooding the Earth by melting the polar icecaps.
• Take That!: Connie considers enduring a commercial flight with screaming babies and a yapping shih tzu to be one of the most triumphant moments in her life, and she's endured more impossible odds on a weekly basis.
• Too Much Alike: When Tia points out how much in common Connie and Larry are, Connie retorts that that is exactly why it would never work if they ever actually started dating for real. Not to mention his mother is one of her Arch-Enemies.
• Unexplained Recovery: Doctor Malady, who died during a previous encounter with Connie, suddenly shows up at Connie and Byron's housewarming party.
  Connie: I saw you die, Doctor.
  Malady: Oh, that. I got better.
• What Have You Done for Me Lately?: Ellington tells Connie that their agency doesn't owe her any favors when she asks to help take care of an alligator woman attacking her in her apartment, even though it had been less than two weeks after Connie manages to thwart the Yellowstone caldera from erupted on their watch.
  Ellington: So?
  Constance: So, that's a pretty big favor.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: Bonita reveals that the caretaker spell gives Connie a form of probability manipulation. While much of Connie's success is skill-based, the balance of triumph and tragedy intrinsically connected to her role as The Chosen One depends on her being able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at the last second. With the Engine destroyed and the caretaker destiny removed from her, Connie's Plot Armor is slowly wearing out, resulting in more close calls until eventually she'll meet a grim end. It's revealed that Tia herself acts as a sort of living Good Luck Charm for Connie, her presence on Connie's adventures increasing the already good odds of Connie winning in the end and justifying her role as sidekick.

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