A suit walked into a bar. No, this is not the beginning of a joke. It is how the world first became aware of the unseen menace walking all around.

Heads began to turn as it stood in the doorway. People either frowned, puzzled at this gimmick (as it seemed to them), or laughed at the suit.

The suit's arms reached for the knot on its tie and pulled it off its neck.

Some of the frowning people began to stare & nudge their companions.

The laughing people got flabbergasted for the most part. Others gawked.

The suit's tie was thrown on the floor by its invisible hand. The coat, too, followed suit. When the shirt began to get unbuttoned, people panicked.

As the undergarments left the invisible body, so did most - if not all - of the patrons of the restaurant. Some of them recorded the naked nothing.

The staff had run into the kitchen, alerting the owner, who had been supervising the courses. Now he supervised the calling up of police.

When he walked out cautiously into the leftovers of the panic-exited restaurant, there was nothing except for askew table and chairs there.

He surveyed the hall slowly. Nothing moved - that his eyes could see. Moving behind the bar, he slid out the panel that concealed the safe. It was untouched. He heaved a silent sigh of relief and slid the panel back.

The police arrived, collected the footage of the unseen nudist and left. The owner treated his shell-shocked staff to sumptuous dinner & wine.

Repeatedly discussing the weirdness of the event, and hearing accounts of it from the staff who'd witnessed it first-hand, they left rather slowly.

The owner stayed behind with his trusted aide, and opened the safe to add the day's cash earnings to the small but substantial stack inside it.

After double-checking the doors and arming all the alarms they had, both of them locked up and left, casting backward glances at the place.

Hours later, The InvisiOne approached the bar. Casing the safe was easy - he had trained himself to be a silent observer since he was a child.

He didn't open the safe himself. All he needed was the code for his crew.

They would be there on schedule to make it look like a normal break-in. But this time, it as different. Without telling them, he had anounced his power to the world. Earlier, he used to be discreet, cautious - invisible.

He glanced at the ornate antique-looking clock hanging above the bar. It certainly suited the upscale bar's decor, and told him that he had about a minute to while away before his exfil team arrived and did the damage.

He sat at the bar and envisioned his future. Did he, Invisi, want to pull off medium-sized heists with his crew all his life, risking getting caught and jailed along with this well-meaning, trustworthy gang of thieves?

Or did he want to use his invisibility to do something truly great? Evil?

Stuff it, he thought. After this break-in, he would have close to a billion rupees in cash stowed away at his hideout in the shady part of the city.

He sat down at the bar, facing the motion-triggered CCTV cameras, and reached behind the counter to pick up a bottle of Jack Daniels. Let the cameras show the police how an invisible person drinks, he thought.

He poured a nice stiff measure into a tumbler, lifted it and looked right through it at the light outside the windows of the bar's facade, raised it to the cameras recording the floating bottle and glass, and swallowed.

Still holding the bottle of amber liquid and the empty tumbler, he moved to the back of the room, far away from the entrance that was about to be shattered by an armored personnel carrier. Right on time, his crew smashed through the shuttered door, and his friend called out.

"Invi?"

"Coming. Behind the bar."

He told his friend the combination of the safe, and they packed the bills into a bag, finally unraveling the real prize: illegally traded diamonds.

Right at the back of the safe were heavy chamois bags full of pieces of ice. The bar owner was quite famous on the other side of the tracks for sitting on both sides of the fence and auctioning rare blood diamonds.

InvisiOne's friend's eyes were sparkling nearly as much as the jewels they beheld. With this loot, they would be able to take a long, long break.

Within a minute or two, they had executed their well-practiced escape. But what they had not accounted for was the extra attention on the bar ever since the appearance of an undressing apparition in the evening.

The road was blocked on both sides, cutting off their primary as well as backup exit route. The APC screeched to a halt, and InvisOne's friend was lost for words. He and his crew did not follow social media on the days of heists, preferring to focus on getting their planning spot-on.

It had proved to be their undoing. As they stared down the barrels of more than a dozen police and SWAT guns, a bullhorn broke the silence.

"Easy there, fellas. Just come with us, nice and slow, and there'll be no damage to any person. Y'all haven't offed anyone, have ya? Just do your time, pay your dues, and you'll be outta the paddock in no time at all."

InvisiOne's friend looked round at the crew. They were not killers. They were people who had been born into petty crime, and had worked their way into break-ins and stealing over the course of their miserable lives.

They may have been violent on occasion, true, but they had never killed.

InvisiOne whispered, "Give it up, yo. Turn yourselves in. Don't get mad."

They turned to look at the void where they knew he sat in the back seat.

"How did the cops know? Did you do something? Did you tip them off?"

InvisiOne wished his loyal gang could've seen the remorse on his face.

"I...I showed off, man. I'm sorry, I didn't want to, but I couldn't hide it."

The babble of curses & waves of disbelief hit him hard. They were hurt.

"Why didn't you tell us? Why didn't you warn us? Why did you do this?"

InvisiOne bottled up his regret and opened the door, stepping outside.

He was gone in the few seconds it took for his companions to relock the door, caught unaware as they were by his criminal betrayal of the gang.

In their shocked state, they made the wrong choice and tried to back out of the road. Having never faced a professional police blockade before, they were out of their depth, and in no time at all, they were all dead.

InvisiOne watched from the roof of a neighboring building. He wept. He was definitely the one responsible for getting them killed, but he was also selfish enough to justify his actions for his own means. He left.