“Ouch,” groaned CSFB! as Hatman pumped the water from his lungs. “I feel like I was clobbered by the Yurt!”

“You were,” the capped crusader told him. He pulled off his nurse’s cap and reached for his Donar helmet. “And now we musteth stop him for the nonce.”

“So the Yurt and Mad Wendy really did team up like ManMan claimed,” CSFB! said, climbing painfully out of the pool. “The unstoppable fighting machine that gets stronger as he gets dumber and the most powerful psionic on the planet with an Alice in Wonderland fixation and the emotional maturity of an eight year old!”

“It’s still better than being in the Sporran of Horrors,” Hatman pointed out. “Let’s go do it.”

The rest of the heroes were trying to contain an angry monster of slate and stone as he tried to smear them over the walls of Mad Wendy’s cave. The psionic was humming to herself as she tried to will the Manga Shoggoth out of existence.

“Yo is telling you two to be stopping of it!” Yo warned the Yurt and Mad Wendy. “Now! Otherwise Yo will be stopping of you!”

Uhuna scrambled to pick Trickshot up from where the archer had just been hurled. “Um, can Yo really stop those two?” she worried. “Only I thought nobody had ever beaten the Yurt in a straight fight.”

“I seen worse,” Trickshot shrugged, gathering up his bow and arrows and going back in. “Don’t worry, darlin’. The Yo-ster don’t make empty threats.”

CrazySugarFreakBoy! somersaulted over Mad Wendy head and planted a big kiss on her lips before being swatted away.

“You have a very long tongue!” she accused him.

“Too mucheth information,” Hatman said as he slammed into the Yurt from behind so hard that the walking peasant hut actually noticed him.

“We are to be needing a plan,” Yo called. “Firsting we are needing of Mad Wendy to be being busy…”

“I shall provide a suitable distraction,” the Manga Shoggoth agreed, pulling himself together with some effort. He oozed around the Yurt and enveloped Mad Wendy.

“Graaaaaaaahhh!!!” shouted the Yurt, flinging globs of Shoggoth away to try and free his friend.

“Now, cute-Uhuna!” Yo called. “Please be to be shifting radiation from Yurt. Is illness, yes?”

“I’ll… I’ll try,” the Abhuman princess agreed, rushing forward to lay her hands on one of the Yurts great thick pedestals. “But where do I shift it to?”

“To me,” called Hatman. He hurriedly pulled on a mortar board and his eyed filled with intelligence. “By placing this Thinking Cap on my cranium I should be prepared for the eventuality of a similar physiological transmogrification to that which the entity nomenclatured the Yurt previously underwent.”

Uhuna strained and dragged the massive radiations that had transformed nuclear plant worker Vlastimock Bogoff into the inconceivable Yurt out of the rampaging monster and into Hatman.

The Yurt screeched, shuddered, and turned round to pulp Uhuna. Trickshot caught the stick-like arm as it span, and knocked Bogoff unconscious with a roundhouse left. “Bozo,” he added.

Uhuna relaxed, and the radiations wracking Hatman passed back into the Yurt. Bogoff bulked up again into the great brute of stone and turf and slate; but he was still unconscious.

“Heh. I decked the Yurt,” gloated Trickshot.

“Dude, that was awesome,” CSFB! grinned, high-fiving the archer.

“No!” shrieked Mad Wendy, writhing within the Shoggoth. The elder being’s gelid bulk suddenly reflected the rainbow radiance within him, and then he exploded into little crystal droplets of solidified gel. They shattered into dust as they impacted with the cave walls.

“Now,” Mad Wendy said wrathfully, turning on the rest of the heroes, “I’ll teach you how to play properly”

The mega-psionic could not be more upset at the loss of her friend. Yo grabbed her and hugged her tight. “Is to be all right,” the pure thought being assured the struggling girl. “Do not to be sad! We are to be going to you Happy Place.”

Yo vanished with Mad Wendy, taking the troubled psionic to the conceptual dimension from which Yo-beings drew their power and nature.

With Mad Wendy gone paradise went too. The Lair Legion found themselves in another broken forest showing evidence of serious quake damage, surrounded by embarrassed naked people wanting to go home.

• Nearly there