This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Natalie Zina Walschots, author of VILLAIN.

About VILLAIN: The hench once called Anna, now known to her colleagues and enemies as the Auditor, has carved out a wicked name for herself. Any superhero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, her recent success should taste sweet: she has an incredible job with lots of perks, her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated—literally ground to a still-living pulp.

But the Auditor still has her sights set on a greater work: destroying The Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good (she has the spreadsheets to prove it), and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.

Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. As their relationship deepens, her work-life balance increasingly involves navigating the feelings of someone who doesn’t believe they have any. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has reappeared, forcing the Auditor to confront all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty haunt the Auditor, and the fear that their triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.

The Auditor soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her, someone much more dangerous: The Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. Their conflict isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as their fight escalates, she’ll need more than preternatural pattern recognition, data analysis, and a horrific imagination to meet this challenge. It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

About Natalie Zina Walschots: Natalie cultivates fandoms, builds new communities, develops character voices, leads interactive fiction workshops, designs alternate reality games, constructs branching narratives, and most mornings opens Tumblr before opening her eyes. Her client list includes scrappy indie game studios, critically acclaimed television shows, mixed martial artists, print magazines, talk shows, NGOs, and a few more that defy categorization.

Natalie’s work wins awards, grows audiences, and introduces people to the thing they often end up loving most in the world.

As a writer and journalist, you can find her work in the National Post, The Walrus, Quill & Quire, The Globe & Mail, and beyond. She’s the author of two poetry collections, DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains and Thumbscrews, and the novels Hench and its sequel Villain. Hench, dedicated to the plight of hench-people (the downtrodden and often expendable employees of supervillains), was a finalist on the 2021 season of Canada Reads and a nominee for the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

Natalie has presented at Console-ing Passions, CGSA, Digital Odyssey, TCAF/CSSC, and more. She is an active member of Dames Making Games, and has previously worked with Pixelles, Concordia’s Technoculture, Art and Games Lab, and The Hand Eye Society. She can be found causing trouble at DMG or talking about heavy metal on Banger TV. She has often been in the newspaper for swearing. She lives in Nova Scotia with her partner and four cats.

This week’s picks:

• Natalie #1: Antigen Shift: Verified Unidentified
  (album)
• Natalie #2: Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
• Tracy: Harley Quinn Vol. 1: No Good Deed
• Patrick: Pathfinder Bastion of Blasphemies Adventure Path

Links:

• Natalie Zina Walschots on BluSky
• Tracy Townsend on BluSky
• Patrick Hester on Instagram
• The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2026 Patrick Hester

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