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Elizabeth Dewdrop Sweetwater von Zemo had had enough. She was reasonably sure that the yellow blur flapping his arms wildly who had just bounced off the screen door of his own kitchen and then raced inside was Visionary. If this one was fake it was a genuine kind of fakeness, not the Liefield Model Decoy who’d been supposedly been babysitting that pyromaniac pubescent that was alleged to be Visionary’s ward.
The Baroness picked up her list of complaints and damages costs in one hand, and casually slipped an omno-wave negaton projector into her other pocket. Just in case Visionary didn’t have his wallet with him.
As Elizabeth van Zemo had originally promised Kerry Shepherdson: "Somebody is going to pay for this."
She stroke through one of the charred areas of the lawn fence and made for the door. She was rudely cut up by a man dressed as a raptor flying past her at three feet from ground level, his onboard weapons systems hot. "Falcon," the Baroness recognised. "Well, that Visionary’s going to need a bodyguard."
When she finally got to the back door it was opened by a zaftig young woman wearing what appeared to be a gauze-mesh bikini and tassels.
"This… is Visionary’s house?" Elizabeth von Zemo checked.
"Oh yes," agreed the green-skinned slave girl. "Has your Master sent you with a message for him?"
There were at least half a dozen similarly dressed emerald-hued supermodels strutting round Visionary’s kitchen. One of them was looking in horror at the sink, where a trail of slime dribbled across the counter and down the cupboard front. "Does anybody know how to get Shoggoth off of work surfaces?" Sayaana asked despairingly.
The Baroness’ hand twitched instinctively towards the omno-wave negaton projector, but she held her temper. "I do not have a master," she pointed out through gritted teeth. "Also, Shoggoth goo is usually dissolved by vinegar and ammonia."
"No master!" the girl at the door repeated aghast. "You poor thing! Would you like a piece of bread or something?"
"Bread?"
"You must be starving!" another (Losiira) sympathised. "You poor, abused creature."
"Not so fast," Philaana warned. "We don’t know what she’s done. She might have been disobedient or undutiful. She might not have accepted her floggings. She might have deserved being cast out. We don’t know!"
"No, remember," Miiri, the girl at the door interrupted. "The women on this planet don’t all have owners. Some of them do not benefit from the corrective floggings of a Master. It is a very strange world we have been brought to."
"On this planet?" The Baroness was starting to think she’d called at a bad time. "Where are you from?"
"We were born on Caph IX," Miiri told her. "It’s a hot planet in the constellation you call Cassiopeia, much hotter than here. You poor people have hardly any sunlight, I swear I don’t know how you photosynthesise at all."
"Photosynthesise?" Elizabeth regarded the green-skinned women who weren’t wearing a lot.
"We were sold to the Slimy Slaver Lovetoad of Frammistat Eight," the Shoggoth-goo-scrubber explained. "He was not a kind master. He liked to hear us scream."
"Miiri wanted us to kill him," Odoona said in whispered tones of confession, pointing to the slave girl by the door. "But that would have been Wrong."
"We were rescued anyway," sniffed Miiri rebelliously. "We were captured as prizes of the Lair Legion and became the legal property of Master Visionary. Now we are his to command to his pleasure."
The Baroness considered that the genuine Visionary was clearly very different from that defective LMD. "So you seven… eight… nine… are Visionary’s slaves?"
"Oh yes," they agreed happily.
"And… he manages to… to occupy you all?"
"Yes. He has given us more than we can easily handle," agreed Miiri, who has seen the pile of laundry that had come back from the Transworlds Challenge. "We will be up half the night."
"Perhaps I should have accepted that date," Beth van Zemo reconsidered.
Just then something exploded in the living room.
"Perhaps I’ll come back later," the Baroness decided. It was clearly a bad time to call.
"Okay, time out!" Kerry shouted, and to illustrate her point the coffee pot exploded sending showers of hot liquid across the room. "Everybody just chill, okay. There are minors present, you know."
"That’s kind of the point," snarled Falcon, brandishing a finger at Hacker Nine who was currently sheltering behind the sofa. "This little, little…"
"Punk," Visionary supplied. "Little punk."
"Yeah, this little punk’s been skulking around with my sweet fourteen-year old sister…"
"Skulking’s a very harsh word," Zack Zelnitz suggested. "Perhaps creeping? Or sneaking?"
"Who I see is none of your business, Samuel Wilson!" Lindy Wilson screamed.
"He is your brother," Visionary pointed out. "He has to take care of you."
"I’m not his green-skinned alien slave girl, thank you very much!" Lindy shot back.
"Oh, Visionary has quite enough green-skinned alien slave girls," Hallie pointed out archly.
"And on that very point…" the Manga Shoggoth rumbled ominously.
"I mean it. Time out or things are going to get unnecessarily volcanic!" Kerry warned.
"Er, Kerry can’t really do that, can she?" Hacker Nine worried.
"No," Vizh denied. "I mean, she hasn’t done it yet." He looked at his young ward uncertainly.
"Perhaps a cooling off period is best?" admitted Hallie. "Vizh can have all his green-skinned alien slave girls bring us some fresh coffee."
The Manga Shoggoth rumbled again, and Vizh joined Hacker Nine behind the sofa.
"Right," insisted Kerry, folding her arms petulantly. "I am so not the voice of reason here."
"I don’t think the voice of reason would have smuggled Hacker Nine into Visionary’s house and kept him here secretly for weeks," agreed Hallie.
"Well, he could have hid at our flat," Lindy pointed out defiantly, "but then he’d have had to sleep in my room."
Falcon bristled again, and weapons systems that could sink a warship oriented on Zack Zelnitz. Vizh yelped and did a spectacular barrel roll away from the sofa.
H9 held his hands up in panicked surrender "Look man, I never touched her. Well hardly. I’m not like that. Really. I’m playing nice. I haven’t even hacked into your weapons systems to disable it, even though there’s only a crummy eleven thousand bit encryption on the security overlocks. So please don’t vaporise me!"
"I really don’t approve of slavers," the Manga Shoggoth pointed out.
"Don’t eat me!" Vizh panicked. "I have tests to grade for the morning."
"Oh yeah," remembered Kerry. "Eat him."
"I do not eat people," the Shoggoth gurgled testily. "I merely break down their molecular structures and recycle them back into the matter pool of what you generally term your universe in a random and unstructured manner."
"Eeep," eeped Visionary.
"So you didn’t know this weasel was stayin’ in your own house?" Falcon demanded angrily of the possibly-fake man. "How dumb can you be?"
"Technically we usually reserve the weasel analogies for Visionary himself," Hallie interjected. "And also, Vizh’s sister hasn’t been seeing a super-villain behind his back while he knew nothing about it." She checked back on her case files archive. "Now we know who was Hacker Nine’s accomplice in that SPUD data theft, and where Lindy ran off to during the Badripoor incident."
"Aw man, I am so grounded," whimpered Falcon’s sister.
"You’re gonna be grounded when you’re sixty!" promised the angry Sam Wilson. "And by then they’ll still be thinking up new charges to nail Hacker Nine’s skinny butt to the wall."
"H9 helped with the Badripoor thing," Kerry interjected. "Saved lives and all kinds of good stuff. And if you take him into custody he’ll either get murdered or he’ll end up having to work for some secret mega-evil government conspiracy."
"Like Mr Epitome," suggested Visionary. He didn’t make clear whether he thought Epitome was forced to work for such a cause or was the mega-evil conspiracy.
"All of this can be worked out when the slaves here are liberated and their oppressor punished," declared the Manga Shoggoth. His tendrils dripped with outrage.
"Excuse me," came a quiet voice from the door. "But has anybody thought of asking the poor oppressed green-skinned alien slave girls for their opinions?"
Everybody turned to look at Miiri. "What, we can’t have an opinion?" she asked defensively. Then, to check, she turned to Vizh. "May we have an opinion please, Master?"
"Er yes," the possibly-fake man winced. "If that doesn’t get me dissolved by the Shoggoth."
"They have opinions?" Kerry asked worriedly. "Why did nobody tell me they had opinions?"
"I think you are all being rather unfair to the M… to Visionary," Miiri pointed out. "We have been in his household awaiting his return from his deeds of heroism, and we have had some time to observe what things are like on your strange and baffling planet."
She turned to Falcon. "We have seen this young man interact with your sister. He is not skilled in the arts of communicating with the opposite sex."
Lindy snorted in agreement.
"He has however shown genuine affection and attachment to her, and she seems to have appreciated him giving her the attention she needs to cope with her own strange and baffling situation of having appeared a decade later than she previously lived in a very different family."
"I did?" beamed Hacker Nine. "I mean, I did."
Miiri turned to Kerry. "This young woman tries hard to conceal her caring nature, but she offered the sanctuary of Visionary’s household to a young man who might otherwise be prey to many evils, knowing that her mentor would care for and mould him as he has done the other youths placed in his charge."
"I so do not have a caring nature," Kerry Shepherdson spat. "You take that back."
"Vizh would do as well with Hacker Nine as he did with the juniors?" Hallie worried.
"But Kerry never warned me that little punk was here!" Visionary objected. "Hey, now I know where all my lasagne went, and why all my remote presets kept changing!"
H9 raised his hands again. "Hey, I’ll cop to the lasagne but Fleabot changes your presets just to irritate you."
Kerry placed her hands on her hips and confronted Visionary. "Look, fake-o, we just offered H9 secret membership of the junior LL training programme and didn’t bother telling you. Deal with it."
"I think SPUD’ll have something to say about that," suggested Falcon. "After I drag his scrawny ass back to the helicarrier and…"
"No!" Lindy cried. "You leave him alone if you care for me even the slightest little bit! Look Sam, you say you’re a good guy now, that you care about me. So why don’t you care that I feel something for Zack?"
"You do?" Hacker Nine perked up. "Lindy…?"
"Don’t push it," the teenager warned her potential boyfriend. "So Sammy, please…?"
Vizh saw Kerry’s expectant stare and threw his hands up into the air in surrender. "Alright dammit! The little punk’s on the junior LL programme, and he’s covered by whatever-the-hell immunity Mumphrey gets for people he wants associated with the team when he goes all British and exploits his old boy network. But he keeps his hands off my lasagne."
"I’m… I’m free?" Hacker Nine blinked.
"Oh no," Kerry warned him. "Now you have to go to classes with fakeman droning at you for days on end. Your nightmare is just beginning."
Miiri went on to address the Shoggoth and Hallie. "As for we Caphans, your Lair Legion rescued us from dire and vile servitude, and Yo awarded us to the care and ownership of Visionary. He has been a very kind Master."
"I bet he has," snorted Falcon, eyeing the buxom space-wench.
"We may have failed him," Miiri admitted, "for so far he has not allowed us to pleasure him, although we have trained since childhood in the myriad arts of drawing a man to the endless depths of carnal bliss." She flashed Vizh a smile that made him look even more stricken and baffled than ever. "But he has fed us, clothed us, housed us, comforted us in our fears, treated us with respect, and protected us from all harm."
Hallie looked a little disconcerted too. "You’re saying he never…?"
"No," sighed Vizh. "It didn’t seem right. Dammit."
"You are making yourself very difficult for me to dissolve," admitted the Manga Shoggoth.
"Yeah, what a dweeb," added Kerry.
"Yes" agreed Hallie, glancing at Visionary with a little secret smile.
Miiri looked worried for the first time as she came to the conclusion of her intervention. "We… we do not seem to fit well into this world," she admitted. "Nobody here understands our point of view, and some people – or, or whatever you are Mr Shoggoth – some… things and people don’t understand that slavery is our way of life. It scares us, the idea of not having a Master to depend on, to have to depend upon ourselves alone."
"Yeah," admitted Lindy Wilson quietly. "Depending on yourself, that can be real scary alright."
"But we know we cannot stay with our Ma… with Visionary. Your world would misunderstand, and we do not want any harm to come to him."
"Dammit, who said these bimbos could have brains and class as well," objected Kerry. She glared down the front of her t-shirt and compared herself to Miiri. "Life is so unfair."
"Sometimes she sounds just like Visionary," H9 whispered to Lindy.
Kerry shut up.
"I think I have the solution," the Manga Shoggoth bubbled.
"Is it a non-me-swallowing solution?" Vizh asked cautiously.
"Visionary, you will sell me your slave-girls," the Shoggoth announced. "I will take them to my Lemurian sanctuary, where there are many who were slaves from all times and shores. They will not be out of place there. Ebony will look after them and help them settle in. It is a tropical paradise by human terms, and I am sure it would suit their bio-organic and psychological requirements well. Then in their own times they can decide whom they wish to belong to, even if it is to themselves."
"You own your own beach resort?" Falcon asked.
"It is a refuge for those that life has not treated well, and a place where they can find new purpose to the betterment of all."
"Miiri, do you want to go there?" Vizh asked. "Would you check with your friends?"
"It is not a slave’s place to desire where she should go."
"But would you check with your friends anyway?" Visionary said. "With Deeela, Sayaana, Philaana, Noona, Odoola, Losiira, Luuma, and Kaara? If that’s what they’d like to do then that’s what I want to happen." He glanced back at the Shoggoth. "And, preferably, not to be eaten."
"Okay," grumbled Kerry reluctantly, "I’m slightly impressed he remembered all their names. But he’s still lame."
"Well, that’s that then," Hallie declared, looking round the coffee-stained living room. "All done bar the paperwork, and no volcanoes."
"Yet," smouldered Kerry, and bided her time. After all, non LMD-Vizh hadn’t met her highness next door yet.
