Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #352: Bookkeeping
Previously: The New Pantheon has fallen and the Lair Legion has triumphed. It’s all there in Untold Tales #351: The End of Superheroes - which clearly it wasn’t. But there were revelations that required an epilogue. And then there was an epilogue that demanded promotion to a full chapter. One shouldn’t try to deny epilogues that assertive.
During a contretemps with the now-late Iscanean Went, God of Retcons, Baroness von Zemo and Sir Mumphrey Wilton encountered a room that laid out the Hooded Hood’s plans. As you might expect, the Baroness took notes. She has questions. There may be a quiz. Or a diagram. You have been warned.
The Legion have discovered that their new member, Citizen Z, is actually the ghost of former superhero Laurie “Lisette” Leyton, now Amnesia, spirit of Herringcarp Asylum, possessing the comatose burn-victim form of her best friend, schoolteacher Beth Shellett. Since Beth and Laurie are both ex-girlfriends of Goldeneyed and Amnesia was once the lover of the Hooded Hood, and since Silicone Sally helped Baroness von Zemo to send Lisette off to her death in the past anyhow, there are a few tangles yet to be straightened out. Let’s go there…
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
***
There were chambers beneath the Lair Mansion that predated the house above by millennia. Few could find them and fewer could gain access. Goldeneyed managed the navigation through the ancient carved vaults. Marie Murcheson unsealed the iron doors that blocked the way. Vinnie carried the torch.
“I could make light,” Liu Xi Xian pointed out. “My elemental powers have returned.”
“Best not to yet,” her boyfriend/jobbing occultist advised. “You’re still kind of hooked up to the Void Spectre’s void. That’s part of why we’re down here.”
“It’s spooky,” Citizen Z pointed out. The spirit of Herringcarp wasn’t used to being spooked. “Can’t you feel the chill?”
“Can’t say it’s comfortable,” agreed Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “Can you tell us why you’re dragging us down here yet, young De Soth?”
“And why just us?” Liu Xi wondered. “Why not Yuki or Sally or Hatty or the others?”
“Well, this is a bit private,” the young occultist admitted, “so I only brought the people who were need-to-know.” He turned a last corner and found one last set of battered, scratched mausoleum doors. A worn etched message read ‘Post CCCLXX Annos Paterbo’ - when 370 years have passed – and lower down ‘Nequaquam Parody’ - The Parody Should Not Exist.
“We’re here.” Vinnie confirmed.
“Good?” asked CZ. “Where is here? Some kind of sepulchre?”
“The tomb of Visionatus Improbablus,” Vinnie announced. “You know, founder of the Improbable College?”
“Of course,” agreed Marie Murcheson, as the others exchanged looks of greater or lesser puzzlement. “He was a Great Man, they say.”
“Heard mutterings of him from the League of Improbable Gentlemen back in the 90s,” admitted Mumphrey. “The 1890s that is. Forget the details. Miss Darkness had a new dress at the time. Most fetching.”
There had been various iterations of heroes throughout history before the current Lair Legion had become Earth’s champions. CZ found her fragmented memory contained information about some of them. “The Asylum – my Asylum – remembers them, the Confraternity of Improbables. But it believes that their founder was not real.”
“That’s what they say about our Visionary!” Liu Xi giggled.
“Yeah…” Vinnie admitted. “Moving on… Marie, could you open the way in there for us? There’s very few things can break in there without major mystic mojo and huge lengthy ramifications.”
The Lair Banshee paused. “I’m not sure if I should. Or want to. For a while my stolen bones were in there. Back before I was restored to life by the Lair Mansion’s Celestian defences.” The 19th century girl stared around the gloomy annex. “This area, this place… there’s some very delicate balances at work. Links to the tidal Lighthouse on our shore, to the Celestian secrets laced into the island, to things so old I can’t even put them in words.”
“Temporal folds as well,” Mumphrey noted. “Complicated stuff. Recursive footnotes, probably.”
“If Vinnie thinks it’s important…” Liu Xi insisted.
“It is,” the jobbing occultist promised. “I don’t intend to disrupt anything. Not even a footnote. Just to do a bit of necessary book-keeping, okay?”
Marie nodded and opened the tomb.
***
“I want you to know that this is nothing personal,” the Widget told her sometimes-boyfriend ManMan.
The Elvis-impersonating sometimes superhero looked down at his leg where a shiny new band of high-technology equipment was clamped on and counting down. “It feels personal,” he admitted. “Is this about what I said about your Game of Thrones cosplay? Because I’m really not sure I have the build for a Drogo, Alice – I mean Khaleesi.”
“It has nothing to do with that, although my widgets were very disappointed after I made them all cute little dragon costumes. No, this is purely business.”
“You think Knifey can’t cut through this… weird thigh clamp thing you just locked me in?”
“Don’t bring me into this,” ManMan’s hereditary talking knife muttered. “It was bad enough when you were being Han and Leia. And don’t get me started on Spike and Buffy…”
“You’d blow your leg off, Joseph Pepper” the Widget told her boyfriend triumphantly. “It’s set to explode if it gets cut open.”
“It’s down to 156 already!” ManMan objected. “155… 154…”
Alice White took another look at the rapidly-diminishing countdown. “Oops. I may have misplaced a decimal somewhere. Drat!” She looked around for hard cover.
“Knifey!” Joe wailed.
“Push me into the ventral port that charged the priming mechanism,” the blade instructed. “That should discharge the timer battery and short-circuit the detonator.”
ManMan grabbed Knifey and made the suggested correction. The thigh-band fizzed, coughed out a little cloud of smoke, and dropped to the floor.
“Bother,” the Widget frowned. “I hate it when I get outsmarted by a billion year old kitchen implement.”
“But it happens so often,” Joe pointed out maliciously. “Now will you explain why, in the middle of a perfectly normal discussion about how I don’t love you because I won’t grow a braided beard, you suddenly decided I needed an explosive leg-ring?”
Alice looked a little sheepish. “I’d have shared the reward with you afterwards,” she promised. “I mean if you’d lived. Plus, if I hadn’t done what she said and rendered you harmless then we’d probably both end up dead. So really I was doing you a favour, until you and Knifey ruined it.”
“Reward? Favour?” Joe puzzled. Then one word caught his attention. “Dead?”
The Widget shrugged. “A little bit, yeah. Look, do you think maybe you could tie that restraint band back on and pretend to be my helpless captive? Please? I did the Leia slave costume.”
“Who’s the ‘she’ you mentioned?” Knifey cut in before the young couple could start haggling about cosplay scenarios again.
Alice looked more panicked. “Eeep. She’ll be here to gloat over Joe’s helplessness any minute…”
“Now,” declared the Baroness from the doorway. “She’ll be here any minute now.”
***
The interior of the tomb wasn’t that impressive. A smallish chamber contained a fairly plain sarcophagus with eroded diamond patterns on the sides.
Vinnie sat on it and called everyone else inside. Liu Xi entered curiously. The oppressive atmosphere outside was notably absent from the dingy interior. The tomb of Visionatus Improbablus smelled faintly of rabbit droppings and burned toast, that somehow leant it an almost domestic feel. Had there been a pair of slippers neatly lined up beside the sarcophagus they would not have seemed out of place.
“This place feels… comforting,” the elementalist admitted. “Like people care about it.”
Citizen V found a slightly-charred yellow rag abandoned in one corner. “They have strange ways of caring,” she mused.
Mumphrey frowned at the whirring dials on his pocketwatch. “Hmph. Deuced awful tangle of timelines in here. Can see it’s partly your fault, young Goldeneyed, from your rampage through the past with Lisa. But there’s also some interference from a couple of HV incarnations, the Legion’s trek back to interfere with Miss Murcheson’s history, and some other snarls that haven’t bedded properly yet. Are you sure about this, young de Soth?”
“Sure-ish. That’s as good as it gets on some levels with magic. But on the bright side, all that confusion that your pocketwatch is disliking is also playing havoc with anyone scrying us. Even folks peering in from beyond the universe, or from a secret base on the Moon, or using a certain reflective primal artefact.”
“The backstory of this place always confused me,” Marie admitted. “And I’m the Lair Banshee.”
“I’m disconnected from Herringcarp here,” CZ sensed. She shuddered again, like an addict coming down.
Vinnie asked Marie to close the reseal the door with everyone inside the tomb. Only then did the acting sorcerer supreme relax a little. “Okay, here we are. So here’s the problem: thing is, to stop the New Pantheon I had to link Liu Xi up to the deep void, the oblivion beyond the Parodyverse we know, where the Void Spectre lurks. That was fine for clearing the immediate danger, so two thumbs up for that, but there’s still a bit of contaminated void in her, and she won’t be safe until we get rid of it.”
“I’m fine,” lied Liu Xi. “Nothing I can’t handle, anyway.”
“Best not push it, eh m’dear?” Mumph advised. “Found it best to let the wizard-chappies potter on as they like. Unless they’re the sacrificin’-virgin sort of wizard and then they need to be thumped on the snoot like a navvy on payday.”
Liu Xi looked about again, trying to track the things she saw with her mundane and extra senses. “But why this dismal place?” The green and yellow wall plaster had long since flaked away. The stones that lay exposed seemed familiar.
Vinnie tapped the chipped sarcophagus. “It’s about as secure a location as we can get that still has links to time and destiny. Any nearer to the Celestian power beneath Parody Island and we’d be overwhelmed by that, right Bry?”
“Pretty much, yeah.” The teleporter had first-hand painful experience of channelling the energies left behind by the great Space Robots. Even the mere footprint of their presence had almost burned him out – and given him enough power to shield the whole planet from invasion by the Parody Master. “So what’s the plan?”
“We bleed off the void by getting Liu Xi to activate some other causal strands we brought with us,” Vinnie revealed. “The Hood’s retcons wrap all round CZ, but with Mumph’s temporal pocketwatch and Liu Xi burning off her unwanted void to make other connections we might be able to do something clever.”
“Something clever like what?” Citizen Z asked nervously. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she was parted from the Hood’s alterations.
“Hey, the Hood himself gave me the idea for this with what he said earlier today. Will you trust me, CZ?”
“Well…”
“If so, take your mask off.”
The spirit of Herringcarp hesitated. “I’m occupying the body of a burn victim,” she pointed out.
“A burn victim called Beth Shellett, who was one of us,” Goldeneyed reminded her. “She was crippled and sent into a coma fighting the good fight. She was supposedly healed by the Baroness’ nanotechnology, only for it to fail when she was no longer of interest to her. Beth was a good person, and she was hurt in so many ways she didn’t deserve.”
“You liked her,” CZ understood.
“I loved her. She left because she couldn’t face all the horrors that this kind of live inflicts on people who date superheroes. She didn’t run far enough and fast enough.” Bry took a deep breath. “She matters to me. Still. A lot.”
“Splendid lass,” Sir Mumphrey agreed. “We owe Miss Shellett a debt of honour.”
“Bookkeeping,” Vinnie repeated. “This is where we settle up.”
***
The clean-up damage control in the aftermath of a national crisis where every lockable item had been sealed was both expensive and diverse. Ham-Boy and Silicone Sally were assigned to the Hell’s Bathroom clean up where the world’s meatiest hero was helping Reverend Mac Fleetwood with an emergency refugee cook-out and the flexible ex-felon was checking burned-out building rubble using her malleable stretching form to squirm through wreckage.
It was Hell’s Bathroom. Of course locked doors had led to blazing tenements.
Sally squeezed out of the last of a row of charred ruins and examined her costume. “Okay, well we can tell Al B, that we’ve discovered the limits of his stay-clean improbably molecules,” she assessed.
Ham-Boy handed her a wiener in a bun. Another good thing about Hell’s Kitchen was the proliferation of burning barrels suitable for outdoor cooking. “Mac thinks we’re nearly done here. It would be okay to take a supper break.”
Sally regarded the proffered food with mild suspicion. “Don’t you make this stuff out of… you?” she hesitated. “I mean, like this is a by-product of Ham-Boy?”
“My meat vision doesn’t work like that at all,” HB assured her. “It’s complicated. I haven’t read the whole manual. I don’t actually have a manual. But that’s just what it seems to be. With ketchup.” He looked down to his belt. “I could probably holster a bottle there, and maybe a mustard dispenser.”
“You think about that way too hard,” Sally warned him, but she took a bite of the hot dog. “Hmm. You give good sausage. I’ll be sure to tell my friends.”
Whatever HB might have replied was interrupted by the blazing light from above as an aircraft-carrier-sized helicarrier decloaked.
“Finally!” a member of the crowd proclaimed, “A proper Hell’s Bathroom law enforcement initiative, just like the Mayor of GMY was calling for!” Then he thought again and hastened away before the napalming started.
“That’s SPUD,” Silicone Sally recognised. All her instincts told her to run now before the Super-menace Principal Undercover Directorate caught her. “Why would they turn up here now, hovering all threatening over the slums like that? Your sausage is good, HB, but not that good.”
“They’re just a diversion, kid,” Dan Drury, the organisation’s director said from close behind them. “Ms Rezilyant, we need ta talk.”
***
Amy Aston set aside her No 6 money-wrench and peered at the inverted form of ManMan who hung from the main door security apparatus of Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises’ converted firehouse. “Why are you carrying Zemo technology?” she asked suspiciously.
Joe Pepper dangled by his ankles and wondered if he could reach up far enough to insert Knifey in another convenient access port. “It’s mostly because I wouldn’t be a barbarian horse-lord,” he confided.
Miss Framlicker joined Amy looking up at the captured Elvis impersonator. “Is that Mr Pepper clogging up valuable security equipment?” the EEE administrator asked. “Is there a special reason for it?”
“Nothing coherent,” Amy sniffed. “So he’s probably not a doppelganger. It really is him.”
“Joe is just having a bad day, that’s all,” Knifey explained. “It turns out that his date had accepted an undisclosed sum from Baroness Elizabeth von Zemo to incapacitate him so that he’d come over here bearing some kind of hologram projector to initiate a kind of conference call. Because supervillains refuse to do Skype.”
Al B. Harper joined the spectators. “Hello, Joe,” he called. “How are the vibrational muscle dampeners working on your gastrocnemius and soleus muscles? Would you say you felt more depleted or nauseous? I have a survey form around here somewhere.”
“The Baroness wants to consult with you,” ManMan explained. “She wants to run something past you without either, and I quote, ‘Stepping into that nest of mad science where Harper and his cronies perpetually discover new ways to torture the laws of physics, or allowing him and his interfering pack of freaks anywhere near the critical technology systems of Shloss Shreckhausen on pain of obliteration’. Also, my knees are going to sleep.”
“I’ve scanned the holograph projector he brought,” Amy reported. “It’s defused now.”
“Elizabeth von Zemo wouldn’t want to disappoint us by not including some kind of death trap,” Miss Framlicker considered. “Well, let’s see what she wants, shall we? That way I can start working up a consultation bill.”
“Maybe I could get let down from these clamps and cables?” ManMan asked plaintively. He felt both depleted and nauseous.
***
“What do you mean, bookkeeping?” Marie puzzled. She glanced for guidance at Liu Xi, who understood the modern world and had more experience of its strangeness.
“He means he’s being cryptic. Confess what you’re up to, Vinnie.”
“Of course I’m being cryptic. It’s a crypt,” the jobbing occultist pointed out. “What I mean is that there are several problems plaguing this little search party so I’m hoping to find ways to cancel them out. And I don’t want any of the people – or things – that would get peeved at me for trying this to know what we’re doing.”
“Hence the tomb,” Mumphrey recognised.
“One reason, yeah. But also, here we’re about as liminal as we can be and not get lost in our own backstories, okay? We can use that. We harness surplus deep void that’s stalking Liu Xi and that lets us apply Sir Mumphrey’s chronometer in ways we can’t usually. G-Eyed is the conduit.”
“Which will hurt,” Bry predicted from experience.
“Sorry, yes. Liu Xi’s part will too. Marie’s here to stop the mystic firewalls from interfering. We wind back Beth’s body in time to when she was functioning on the Baroness’ nano-tech. To her last good configuration, so to speak. We halt the process there for good. Beth Shellett is healed.”
“And… and awake?” Citizen Z asked.
“Yes,” Vinnie agreed. “You won’t have a mindless coma-body to possess any more.”
“I… I see.”
“Wait,” Liu Xi objected. “This repairs Beth but it kills CZ?”
“It can’t kill me,” confessed the indwelling ghost. “I’m already dead.” She peeled away the black and purple mask to reveal the scarred face beneath.
“No,” Liu Xi denied. “That body is near death but you are keeping it alive by animating it, keeping it functioning…”
“I’m not talking about Beth’s shell. I’m talking about me, the person haunting it. I died a long time ago. I was displaced back a couple of hundred years by… well, I don’t know how. But I died in Herringcarp and became its avatar.”
Goldeneyed pulled off his own mask to reveal he was pale as a spectre himself. “Hold on. You were originally from this time but you went back and…” He shook his head to clear his mind. “When we were all getting psi-zapped by that underworld Elder Brain, Silicone Sally was repeating dialogue from her past career. She said something about helping the Baroness send someone to the past, but that… that was…”
“Here it comes,” breathed Vinnie.
“Laurie? Laurie Leyton!” G-Eyed swallowed hard. “Oh, Laurie…”
Bry took a step forward but Citizen Z shied back. “Yes, I’m Laurie. Or I was. I don’t remember everything. For a long time I remembered nothing.” She hugged herself. “Soon, without Beth’s body I shall be Amnesia again, forever.”
“Now hold on…” objected Sir Mumphrey.
“It’s right,” Laurie insisted. “I died. Fortunately I don’t remember all the details of that, either. I died, but Beth deserves to live. You know it, Bry knows it.”
“It shouldn’t be either/or!” Goldeneyed objected.
“It shouldn’t,” Vinnie agreed. “But I kind of think it is.”
Citizen Z forced herself to take Bry’s hand. It was the first voluntary contact she’d had outside combat in… Amnesia couldn’t remember. “Look, I… I once wanted to be a hero, right? I tried. Maybe I even was for a while. I wasn’t that good at it. It turned bad. I screwed up with you, Bry, and then with all of it. We never even found where our baby went to in time and space, did we? But I learned a few things, I hope. What kind of hero wouldn’t die for her best friend, eh?” She blinked back tears. “Let me die a hero.”
“But to be a ghost, all alone,” Marie almost whispered, “and not in the Lair Mansion but in cruel insane Herringcarp…”
“I’ll sleep, mostly,” CZ insisted. “You know how it is, Marie. I’ll forget. After I while I won’t care. I’ll just… fade. But Beth will live.”
G-Eyed shook his head. “No. I want to save Beth. But I want to save you too, Laurie. There must be another way.”
“I’ve done as much book-keeping as I can,” Vinnie apologised. “There’s no more scores I can balance. And the choice has to be Laurie’s. I think I can get Beth restored. I can separate Liu Xi from the toxic void that will otherwise destroy her. There won’t be a Citizen Z any more. Laurie plays the price.”
Liu Xi bit her lip. “I knew you shouldn’t have gone to the Void Spectre like that,” she told Vinnie. “You saved me but that set up… this.”
“If I say ‘No’ then I’m dooming Liu Xi Xian too, right?” CZ guessed. “Don’t deny it, Vinnie, I can read your aura. If I fail to do the right thing then I don’t just condemn Beth, I leave Liu Xi open to the Void Spectre, don’t I?”
The acting sorcerer supreme nodded. “But I knew there was no risk of you doing that,” he confessed.
“Because you knew Miss Leyton’s heart,” recognised Sir Mumphrey. “A dashed noble heart, whatever has befallen her. One of the best.”
“Well then,” said Laurie, trying to be brave, “I’d better say my goodbyes properly this time. Say goodbye to the Legion for me. Send word to Val and Derek if you can. Tell them that Hatty and Vizh have a tough job for them sometime, bringing back my friend Wangmundo. Give CSFB! a cheeky pinch on the bottom. Tell Lisa… well, I guess she’s Destroyer of Tales now, so maybe I’ll be able to tell her myself at the end. Keep looking for our little girl, Bry. Don’t give up.” She gave Goldeneyed a little shove on the chest. “And Bry, if you don’t ask Beth out again and make it work this time I shall find a way to come back and haunt you regardless.”
“Gotcha,” agreed Goldeneyed, choking back tears. “Lis…”
“Hey, I was dying to get into the Legion. Turns out I did. And what a thing it was. I made it. Only one of the sidekicks that made good, except maybe FA. Best thing ever. The real deal.” She turned suddenly to Vinnie. “Get on with this before I start crying, will you? I’m supposed to be a supernatural horror, for ^£*!’s sake. Do your hoodoo stuff.”
“You agree?” Vinnie asked formally. “And the rest of you? You’ll help?”
“I don’t like it,” Liu Xi warned, “but it has to be Laurie’s choice.”
“It is better that she has a voice,” Marie agreed.
“It’s not fair,” Mumphrey confessed, “but it’s the closest to fair we’re ever likely to get with this, dash it.”
“Do you agree?” Vinnie asked CZ again. “Do you consent?”
“I agree,” declared Laurie Leyton, Lisette, Amnesia, the spirit of Herringcarp, Citizen Z, of the Lair Legion.
***
It took only a few moments to balance the books, and then Laurie was gone.
***
Next time (yes, it appears there’s a next time): The Hooded Hood gets a visitation from the heroes, EEE gets to consult with the Baroness, Silicone Sally and Ham-Boy get an interview with SPUD, and the Widget gets a new costume at last. We finally conclude the epilogue in Untold Tales #353: After the Bookkeeping.
The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Where's Where in the Parodyverse
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2016 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2016 to their creators. This is a work of parody. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works are in fair-use parody and do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. Any proceeds from this work are distributed to charity. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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