Reply - #113: Untold Tales of the Parodyverse Ancient and Modern Revised

[ Tales of the Parodyverse ]
#113: Untold Tales of the Parodyverse Ancient and Modern Revised

1217, Damietta, the Holy Land:

“Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.”
The Grand Master turned round to see who was telling him that the times had changed, and we with them. He wasn’t surprised that it was the annoying little friar from the Brothers of the Crooked Cross. “So you came out of hiding at last,” he noted, turning round and looking down his nose at the rumpled, battle-stained old man. “You can’t think you’re winning.”
The other two knights beside the Grand Master both drew their weapons and stood forward to protect their leader.
Friar Humbolt leaned on his staff and looked out of the pavilion tentflap at the carnage below. The crusaders had broken the gates of the city and were murdering every man, woman, and child they could find in the name of God. The ancient town burned. “Nobody is winning out there,” the monk answered sadly. “But I rather think that you believe you are.”
“His holiness Pope Innocent commanded us,” the Grand Master replied.
“He told you to retake Jerusalem from the pagan,” accused the young warrior who followed behind the monk. This young man was wounded but defiant, his armour torn away by hard fighting. His buckled, scorched shield still carried a device of orange-gold and green. “This is Damietta. You seem to have got lost, Grand Master.”
“A tactical necessity,” the patrician assured him. “You should return to your liege lord now, jester, before this meddling friar gets you hanged for desertion in battle.”
“You’ll miss the rapine,” the larger of the two knights flanking the Grand Master leered at him. Flecks of anticipatory spittle dribbled down his beard. “There’s won’t be any virgins left.”
“A tactical necessity if one is to cover up what happened to the five thousand children who shipped from Marseilles five years ago, the surviving sixth of all those who set out with Stephen of Cloyes to pilgrim to the Holy Land as an act of faith,” suggested Friar Humbolt. “The ones who were supposed lost at sea, or sold as slaves to the Moors by unscrupulous ship captains.”
At the monk’s flank William of Wonkham shuddered. The Children’s Crusade was a dark stain on history. With child-like innocence, forty thousand German children had set out across the alps to Rome. Few had survived to be turned away by the Pope. Another thirty thousand had left France for Jerusalem. None arrived.
The Grand Master nodded acknowledgement. “Another tactical necessity. Those young people wished to be of service, to see a god. We gave them the opportunity.”
“You murdered them!” William accused. “Just slaughtered them to your damned Idol of the Order.”
“We put them to a logical use,” the Grand Master replied. “They would all have died anyway.”
“And did it do any good?” challenged Friar Humbolt. “Did your Idol wake up and speak to you, as it did that once when you won it in combat from the Deviate-beast of Badenweiler? Did all that innocent blood win you a single word from your damned talking head?”
“No,” conceded the Grand Master of the Order. He glared down at the monk. “Perhaps it needs older, wiser blood?” He nodded at his companions and spoke with the Voice of Reason which few could resist. “Destroy them.”
The burlier of the two knights fell upon William with a sadistic glee. Bigger, stronger, veteran of a thousand battles he intended to hamstring the youth first and then take his time. The BabblingBardJesterJouster! ducked below his charge and sent him spinning into the fabric of the pavilion wall.
The second guard swung her sword and nearly sliced the Grand Master’s head from his neck.
“Very good,” breathed Friar Humbolt. “So you are the Cobra.” The legendary assassin of the Sect of Buto was renowned for her abilities to infiltrate anywhere under deep cover. No-one here had suspected the patrician's guardsman of being an enemy, let alone a woman.
“Justice is done, the children avenged,” breathed the Hand of Buto as she cleaned her sword on the man she had just executed. When she removed her helm her hair was cut short like a boy’s. “Only one thing remains.”
William of Wonkham limped back to join them, clutching a long gash on his side. “That man was a good fighter,” he admitted. “I think he had… something in his head that made him so good. He cut me.”
“You will live,” the Cobra told him dispassionately. “Most likely.”
Outside the carnage was ending, and the bold crusaders and Knights of the order were settling down to enjoy the spoils of their war. The air was acrid with smoke and dying men’s blood. The screams of the victims reached even here to the attackers’ camp. Friar Humbolt hurried forward to the shrine and pulled the cloth away. There wasn’t much time now.
The black metallic head was more insectoid than human, jointed like a helm to allow the jaw to move. Eyepieces of smoked glass and small horns incorporated into a prominent eyebrow-and-forehead design gave the life-sized model a sinister look.
“Is that it?” Cobra demanded. “all this slaughter for a lump of iron?”
“Oh, rather more than that, I think,” the monk warned her. “Don’t underestimate this malefic thing even now. It’s old and canny. It was old, I deem, before ever the Deviate race were inspired to construct its current housing, to bend the technologies they had scavenged and stolen from those who created them to make this engine of wrath. Their enemies destroyed its body at last, but they could not find the head. And so it bides its time, waiting until some ally can restore it and it can continue its development.”
“Is it looking at us?” worried William.
“We cannot destroy it,” the old friar sighed. “But we can end its threat for an age. There are mountains of fire, my children, and into those pits shall we cast this thing.”
“Until some other ceremony of blood awakens it anew?” scorned the Cobra.
“It is not blood this head awaits,” warned Humbolt of Versailles. “It is lightning.”

1633, Constantinople

“Enough. I don’t want him entirely gone yet,” Lord Slaughter told his flunkies. The four black-clad, bewigged servants backed away from the man chained between the classical pillars so their master and mistress could inspect their work.
“Is that it?” panted the Paradox Stranger as his blood dripped onto the beautiful marble floor. “I’ve had amorous liaisons rougher than this.”
The President of the Knights of Heck-Fire cupped his prisoner’s chin in his hand. “There is very little of you left, now,” he noted. “My Hero-Feeders have taken nearly everything. A fraction more attention and you will be erased from history, not even a memory. And of those few entities that would recall you, who amongst them would even miss you?”
The Stranger hung heavily in his chains and maintained his mental defences even to the last. “A gentleman never tells,” he answered. He glanced over at the Black Queene of Heck-Fire.
“Maleficent?” Slaughter snorted. “You think you’re the only one to enjoy my wife’s favours? Or to sleep with her hoping to gain some knowledge from her prophetic visions?”
Maleficent Darkness flexed her magnificent body and smiled reminiscently. “Simonides knew when I married him that my heart belonged to Another,” she noted. “But that I was willing to make available certain other parts of me on a short-term basis.”
“Such as her visionary gifts,” Slaughter continued. “That was how we were able to track down this treasure we have both been seeking. Maleficent’s dreams led us to it.”
“You don’t know what you’ve got,” warned the Paradox Stranger. “A lot of people went to a lot of trouble to bury that black head a long time ago for some very good reasons.”
Slaughter scraped his fingernails over the lash wounds on his prisoner’s chest, just to make him wince. “But you know,” he pointed out. “And you’ll tell me. We’ve weakened you so much that you can’t escape. You don’t exactly have a lot of friends who might want to rescue you. And we have literally all the time in the world to persuade you to co-operate.”
The Stranger’s mind was filled with the Hero Feeder’s projections. Outside the palace the busy streets of the city that had once ruled the civilised world thronged with people and animals, with commerce and politics and religion. Inside these walls, nobody knew or cared about one helpless prisoner, alone and weak and frightened. Surrender was inevitable.
“So have you always wanted a talking head, or is this just another way of staving off the boredom of being an immortal idea-eater?” the Stranger snorted.
“I started having the visions nine years ago,” Maleficent Darkness told him. “That must have been the time the volcano wall crumbled and the peasants rediscovered the head.”
“Other people had been having dreams about it long before that, of course,” Lord Slaughter added. “The sorcerer Roger Bacon even constructed a facsimile, before the sorcerer supreme came and stamped on him.”
“Yes, I read Greene’s Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” confessed the Paradox Stranger. “Bacon creates a brazen head, which speaks three times then crumbles to dust. Shoddy workmanship. I don’t think it’s a patch on what Byron’s going to write later, though: ‘Like Friar Bacon’s head I’ve spoken. Time is. Time was. Time’s past.’” And he looked up at his captors. “Time is past.”
The wall of the chamber dissolved, its elegant Roman murals crumbling into dust. A lady in court dress and a buccaneer in riding leathers leapt into the room.
“What?” Simonides Slaughter caught up a blade as the gestured his servants forwards. As they attacked they shifted shape, become wolflike, hairy, fierce, and fast.
“I can’t stop them,” the lady warned her companion, stepping behind him for protection. Then she spotted the Black Queen summoning green flames from the depths of hell. “Her, I can stop.”
“No problem, my lady,” Daniel Roncevalle assured her. “I am very well versed in killing these things. Er, whatever they are.”
“Sounding pretty confident there, Danny, up to that last sentence.” The words came from the glittering knife in the hero’s hand. “As for what they are, it’s best you don’t know. Just stab them and leave the rest to me.”
Roncevalle ducked a lacerating claw and kicked a werewolf below the belt. “There’s more to stabbing than pushing pointy metal things into folks?”
“There is with Lurkers like Hero Feeders,” Knifey assured him. “Just keep fighting and leave the thinking to me.”
A spray of demons burst from Maleficent Darkness’ fingertips towards the intruders. Roncevalle’s companion frowned, concentrated, and transmuted them into butterflies. “You know, I hear they burn witches,” she hissed wrathfully, gesturing again.
The Black Queene’s dress burst into flame around her. She screamed and flailed for help as the fire immolated her.
Lord Slaughter noted the burning of his wife and the stand-off between his minions and the intruders and decided it was time to cut his losses. The recovered head was packaged in a carriage below, and a boat was ready to sail down in the harbour. He could consider vengeance later. He turned to slit the Paradox Stranger’s throat and leave.
The chains were empty.
“Good night,” the Paradox Stranger spoke in his ear, just before taking Slaughter’s neck and snapping his spine. “It’ll be a while before he can remanifest.”
The other Hero-Feeders faded with their master. The lady in the court dress sent a brilliant beam of light from her eyes that put the Black Queene out of her pain. Besides, there were dark shadows gathering about Maleficent that she didn’t want to encounter. The Paradox Stranger crumpled to the ground.
“Are you alright?” Daniel Roncevalle checked, rushing over to help pick up the tortured man. “We came as quickly as we could.”
“And they said I didn’t have any friends,” murmured the Stranger, trying not to collapse entirely now the ordeal was over.
“You don’t,” said Knifey, “but you paid us, remember?”
“You never mentioned receiving payment, Daniel,” the lady noted.
“I was afraid you’d think I was trying to buy your affections, Lady Sersellotti, rather than wanting you for the pleasure of your company.”
“And my ability to disintegrate walls?” she added wryly. “It’s a good job you’ve got a cute backside.”
“We’ve not done yet,” the Paradox Stranger interrupted before the banter could develop. “The black head? We still need to destroy it?”
“Yes,” agreed Sersi. “If it’s the last remaining part of some Deviate engine of destruction based on Celestian technology then we… I mean, yes, let’s go.”
But it was too late. Slaughter’s associate Wilbur Parody had already stolen the artefact and taken ship, fleeing all the way to the New World.

1862, Blackheath Common, Sussex, England

It was twenty-four hours and the last green lights on the Mynadrine transfer arch had died out. “I don’t think they are coming back,” Major Wilton mourned.
The police officers and soldiers present on the devastated heath removed their caps and stood silent for a moment remembering the brave men that had just died giving their lives to save humanity, taking the fight against the invaders from Mars right back to their base of operations on the distant red planet.
“I’ll compose a wire to send back to the States,” Lucius Faust offered. “Let the League of Improbable Gentlemen know that they’ve lost four of their members.”
“Bravest damned thing I’ve ever seen,” Wilton told the strange advisor from the War Office. “Those saucer thingies with legs were cuttin’ us to pieces. Shells couldn’t stop ‘em. They’d have marched straight through to London. Then these chappies arrive and fight their way right through to that archway affair the blighters are swarmin’ through, taking a… a…”
“Cosmically-charged electromagnetic pulse bomb of Austernal origin,” the foreign lady in the elegant grey coat explained. “A bomb,” she translated.
“A suicide mission,” Lucius Faust scowled at the mysterious Miss Christopoulos. “Did you warn them that your device would disrupt all the Mynadrine technology, including the transfer portal they’d used to link between here and Mars?”
“Of course I did,” the disguised Pegasus told him. “But warriors do not fear death if it is what is required to achieve victory. The Mynadrine Host will swarm no more. On Earth, the greedy fools that activated their signal beacon have been dealt with. Mars is again a dead planet, not beachhead for an extradimensional invasion. The lives of four brave men are a small price to pay to prevent what could have happened.”
“It was a costly victory however it happened, ma’am” Major Wilton contradicted her. “Hundreds of soldiers lost, as well as Dr Hopkins and his team. Bravest damned thing. Bravest.”
“There should have been another way,” Faust muttered, still glaring at Pegasus. He stuck his hands into his pockets and turned to go. “Well, I’ve still got things to be doing. I was working on the theft of that iron head from the Gothametropolis York Museum of Antiquities before we all got distracted with an alien invasion.”
“The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one,” Pegasus noted. “And still they come.”
“My regards to your family, Wilton,” Faust bade his farewells. “I imagine your youngest will be at Eton by now, eh? I’m keeping my eye on young Mumphrey.”
A carriage drew up at the perimeter and a dapper man in a grey morning suit alighted onto the muddy field. “One of your people, Mr Faust?” Wilton asked; but the master of the mystic crafts was gone.
“Quite the conjurer, that one,” the soldier confided to Ms Christopoulos. But the Pegasus was also gone.
“Major Wilton, this apparatus is to be confiscated for reasons of national security,” the man in the grey suit announced. “By order.”

13th February 1943, Dresden, Germany

Overhead the allied bombing turned the seventh-largest city in Germany from a mediaeval treasure-house of art and architecture into a crater of rubble. In the hidden laboratories deep beneath the surface, dozens of soldiers and scientists laboured to secure and evacuate important documents and machinery vital to the Nazi war effort.
“Faster!” shouted Dr Vizhnar, “If you don’t get this materiel out of here before the structural integrity of the roof fails the Baron will have your skins! And be careful with those vats!”
The statuesque blonde woman in the SS uniform shook her head at the screaming bald man with the pebble glasses. “This is not efficient,” she complained. “You had no prepared procedure for emergency evacuation. You gave no thought to how you would move delicate biomechanical components. There are some devices, such as the logic machines, that are too heavy to port away.”
Vizhnar scowled up at her. “Frau Rotwang…” he began.
“Major Rotwang,” she corrected him. “You were about to tell me that you were in command here, yes? But I have the rank.”
“The evacuation goes apace,” Dr Vizhnar hissed. “The gestation tanks for the psionic parasite Dream Demon have already been transferred, and the guards that shifted it humanely disposed of. Your own work on the unbreakable mechanical body is secured elsewhere. And we have the plans for the logic calculating machines and can rebuild them anywhere.”
“And the Head?” Hel Rotwang demanded. The rogue Science Counsellor from Technopolis was not impressed with Vizhnar or his master, or the mad dictator they both served. Shortly she intended to leave, and she wanted as much information as possible to take with her.
A lucky shell shook the laboratory. Dust and a few brick fell from the barrel-arched ceilings above. A chunk of masonry the size of a fist bounced off Rotwang’s skull without her feeling it.
“The artificial intelligence templates are being moved now,” Vizhnar assured her. “The prototype synthezoid you helped us assemble proved flawed, but the next generation will be far more adaptable and intelligent.”
“I cannot be expected to work miracles with your backward technologies,” the blonde woman frowned. For just a moment Vizhnar could see the imperfect seam where the organic plastic patches on her face met, and he shuddered to think that in her homeland the beautiful Hel Rotwang had chosen to have portions of her own body replaced by machinery to improve their functionality. The components available to her on this Earth were cruder, and she could maintain her systems but not the absolute perfection of her Aryan good looks. Not always.
“That is why we gave you every assistance,” Vizhnar reminded her. “Every resource. We even let you use your machines to amplify the prophetic abilities of the Filipino child we captured, until you burned her out.”
“She didn’t burn out,” Rotwang argued. “Just sent her telepathic abilities down the timeline to one of her descendants for a while. But she was useless to us thereafter.”
“At least she helped us discern the circuitry for the Head before you snapped her neck,” the scientist admitted. “If only we could have found the original. If only the Expediter could have…”
“Maybes and could haves are not helping move the artificial intelligence template,” interrupted Rotwang. “If your men are not capable of taking it to safety then I shall transport it myself.”
Vizhnar shook his head. “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? A chance to interface or whatever you want to do with it? For it to imprint on your mind patterns, to take on your character with its infinite genius and power? I don’t think so.”
“Get out of my way, little man,” Hel Rotwang warned him. “Or I will kill you.”
Then the bombs brought down the roof of the laboratory, crushing the fleeing soldiers, sending Vizhnar and Rotwang staggering away in clouds of rubble-dust; and burying the project they were arguing about for nearly fifty years.

19th May 1947, Washington DC

The cigarette smoke swirled around the naked light bulbs in the crowded room where the meeting would have never happened. Over two dozen men in suits and uniforms hunched around a table and decided the future of the world.
“The Shadow Cabinet has decided,” the man in grey told them, handing round the deniable folders with their damning materials. “We’re shutting down the masks.”
“All of them?” a five star general across the room asked. “That won’t be easy.”
“Just the high profile ones,” grey suit replied. “We don’t need to waste the resources on a total blackout. We just want them out of the public eye.”
A senator flipped through the dossier. “The plan we discussed? We encourage them to retire, we find ways of neutralising their powers, in the last resort we sanction them?”
“That’s about it,” grey suit agreed. “We know enough about most of them to bring pressure to bear. We know their loved ones. We know their weaknesses. Through threats and blackmail and a little bit of force we can send a message to all these masked marvels and their sinister enemies: time to call it a day.”
“We’re proceeding to a different phase, then,” a high court judge noted, examining his dossier. “A kind of cold war, with secret things done in dark alleys of far-off cities. Won’t we need superhuman operatives for that?”
“Our affiliations with the Order of Order, with the Ninjas, with the Cults of Buto and Nebti, with Observing Eye, with some of the weird science terrorist groups will continue,” the general assured him. “As long as they learn to operate quietly. Hell, we’ll probably even keep a mask or two on the payroll – but discretely now.”
“And our Soviet counterparts will do the same?”
A bulky man in a heavy overcoat at the end of the room stirred. “Da,” he agreed uncomfortably.
The general nudged his aid, who fumbled open another thick dossier. “We’ll start the programme by dismantling the Golden Age Matadors. Without the GAMs there won’t be a media focus. We can deactivate Burning Boy, encourage Crusher’s drink problem. As for the others…” he glanced nervously at the grizzled old man slouching across his chair in the corner where the shadows were thickest.
“And as for MH, I think it’s time for him to learn about the old Parody Mansion,” agreed Harry Vintner. “We can put these heroes in the ground for you, if that’s the way it has to go. For now, anyway. Later on…”
“Later on we will have perfected the omega technology,” the man in grey assured HV. “Then we can allow their return.”
“Um.” All eyes turned on a bespectacled man in a bow tie and tweed jacket. “I was just wondering… if you’re going to disassemble the artificial man called Burning Boy, do you think we could have the parts for the Visionary project?”
The men around the table exchanged glances. “I don’t see why not,” the general admitted. “Senator?”
“As long as the personality’s wiped, and the parts aren’t identifiable, sure, why not. Specially if it brings forward the completion of the robot that’ll carry the omega codes when they’re done.”
“N-not a robot, sir,” the scientist stammered. “Miss Rotwang and Dr Vizhnar call it a synthezoid, a – a human-looking machine man, almost indistinguishable from the real thing. When it’s done we can place the omega codes deep into its hidden instructions, what M-Miss Rotwang calls its programming. We can transfer them straight from the, from that Black Head at the Beginning Fields. Then, when we imprint a personality on the fake man, even he won’t suspect they’re in there.”
“Till we need them,” the senator smiled, stubbing out his cigarette hard to illustrate his point.
The man in the grey suit gathered up his papers to signal the meeting was at a close. “Ensure that this new age begins smoothly and efficiently with the removal of the players that are no longer needed,” he instructed his colleagues. “And get that fake man prepared. The time will come when the omega codes will be vital to our future.”
And sinister men filed out for the sinister room to change the world.

Just under ten years ago, Paradopolis State U, Professor Day-Vincent’s Dangerous Sciences Lab:

“Hey, what’s the matter, Helen?” Al B. Harper looked up from his studies of student engram recordings as the agitated blonde girl burst into the deserted lab. “Hey, are you bleeding?”
“I’m being followed,” she cried out. “There’s some eight-foot high bruiser with a knife out in the halls!”
Al B reached for the phone. “I’ll call security.”
“Security isn’t here right now,” the voice on the other end of the line told him. “If I was you I’d put the phone down, send Miss MacAllistair away, and forget you ever saw her tonight.”
“Right,” Al B. swallowed, slamming the phone down, then dropping it into a microwave chamber just to be safe.
“What’s happening?” Helen demanded, trying to control her panic. Her assailant had caught her from shoulder to forearm with that wickedly efficient dagger and she was bleeding quite badly. “They’re trying to kill me!”
Al B. frowned and dived across to a complicated pile of machinery held together with scotch tape and string. “Hold on. I’m reshaping the dimensional transference cone to project a field coterminous with the walls of this room. It’ll act as a kind of force field and keep any big guys with knives on the other side.” Then he added honestly, “Until they figure out how to turn the power off.”
Helen swallowed. “How long will that be?”
“Depends how smart they are, whoever ‘they’ are,” her fellow graduate student answered. “What the hell’s going on?”
“I don’t know, Al. Not really. And I’m so sorry to have dragged you into this.”
“Hey, that’s what friends are for, right? For dragging in.”
“Yeah, but I know your girlfriend doesn’t like you seeing me.”
“I think under the circumstances even she would want me to help you, okay. So what do you know?”
Helen caught her breath and forced herself to speak intelligibly. “Well, you know I’ve been doing some work for my sponsors, NeoReich Improvements, yes? They wanted me to help unlock some computer algorithms that they were baffled by, something their top scientist Dr Vizhnar had come across. Al, I swear I didn’t know they got them by industrial espionage.”
“What? What files?” swallowed Al.
Helen handed him a set of five and a half inch floppy disks that she was still clutching in her terror. Al B. wiped the trickles of blood off one and rummaged around until he found an old drive he could run them in. “These aren’t normal discs,” he blinked as the gigabytes of data flashed onto his screen. “How are they doing this?”
“It’s not all relevant,” the blonde girl warned him. “The technical data is mostly for NeoReich’s projects, some robot assembly called Membrain, some industrial-application robotics for a defence contract of some kind, comparison studies of some technology called Obliterator, a whole bunch of stuff on some Autobot experiments. I just grabbed the whole pile of disks because I didn’t know which one was relevant.”
“They’re all being treated as component parts of a bigger project,” Al noted, bypassing security shutouts with casual ease as he studied the data. “Psychic Mastermind? Dream Demon? Those have got to be codewords for special projects at this Oceania factory they’re talking about.”
“Just look for the Black Head codes,” Helen advised him. “That’s what they wanted me to look at, what they wanted me to crack. I was…”
There was a flicker of lights and the sound of the force-wall Al was projecting changed to a deeper hum. “They’ve cut the building’s main power,” the young scientist noted. “Damn. Now we’ve only got until the UPS runs out.”
“How long will your Uninterrupted Power Supply hold?” his companion worried.
“Not long at this level of power expenditure. Say one over the power of the amplitude constant differentiated by the sum of the cube radius of the field, allowing for graviometric variances and… oh, about twenty minutes tops?”
“You did that in your head?” Al’s fellow students were always amazed by his mathematical genius.
“Here’s the Black Head codes you mentioned,” Al said. He was always surprised and a little embarrassed when people couldn’t do simple math. “Hey, these are pretty complex.”
“I know. And somebody has just done crude work to find out roughly what they’re meant to do and has copied them in huge chunks into an operating system for an artificial intelligence.”
It only took a few more mouse-clicks for Al B. to put together what was happening. “They’re building an android,” he decided. “Your employers are building one, and so are the people they must have stolen this info from. This is the core intelligence module, a mixture of the stolen programming and the engrams of some human mind-donor. It’ll create some kind of machine man with a human mind.”
“That makes a lot of sense,” Helen MacAllistair enthused, “It looks like NeoReich aren’t very nice people, and when I worked out more than they wanted me to they sent some nasty goon to get the data back.”
“More than get the data back, I think,” Al B. worried, looking at Helen’s arm. “We’ve got to work fast now.”
“You have a way out of here?”
“No. But I have a way of making them keep you alive.”
Helen watched him worriedly as he dragged a tangle of cabled over to a dentist’s chair.
“Hop in,” Al invited her. “I need to make a copy of your engrams. Don’t worry, it’s quite safe. I’ve been doing it all week with undergrads who needed to earn a few bucks helping with my experiments.”
“Why do you need my engrams?” Helen asked as Al B strapped electrodes to her head.
“I’m going to encrypt the information these guys need back so badly, using your brain pattern as the unlock code. That way only you will be able to get the info for them, so they’ll have to keep you alive.”
“Clever as usual, Al. But I don’t think we want these guys to have the information at all. They could be making some kind of killing machine, with the personality of a mass murderer or something. Better you wipe the data clean.”
Al B. thought fast. “Okay, how about this? We encrypt the data with your thought patterns, right? But we’ve already changed the data, replaced the engram mind-patterns of whoever NeoReich expected to have in their artificial man with somebody else’s.” H grabbed one of the undergrad engram recordings at random. “This guy, say. He’s an art student, totally harmless. We put him in instead of their candidate so they can’t tell the difference… like that… yes…And now we encrypt the whole thing so only your personality can unlock it… like so… and then…”
And then the power went down and something huge kicked the door across the lab.
“Just so you know,” the Bone snarled as he muscled his way into the room, “I’m pissed.”
Al B. pulled Helen from the engram chair and pushed her behind him. He was backing towards the corner where his prototype particle accelerator was sitting when the eight-foot high tattooed killer hurled a terminal at him with lightning speed and sent him sprawling to the floor stunned.
Helen MacAllistair screamed and backed away from the villain. “Oh! Oh no!”
The Bone grinned. “Yeah. You pissed me, bitch, so I’m going to kill ya slowly.”
“You can’t do this,” Helen warned, ready to confess about Al B.’s clever engram encryption. “You need me to… No! Get away!”
The Bone wasn’t big on banter. He smashed one super-strong fist into Helen’s face, shattering her jaw and nose, and then began to beat on her in earnest. Then he used his energy-blade to simply slice off her head to end it.
Al B. woke up in time to see his friend’s severed bloody head topple to the floor. “No!” he gasped. “You bastard. I’ll…”
“That’s enough,” the old man in the grey suit told the Bone and Al. “Best if neither of you moves now until I tell you that you can.”
Villain and scientist found themselves frozen in place. “What th…” growled the Bone.
“Be silent too,” the man in grey warned them. He sauntered into the wrecked lab and tutted at the crumpled body of Helen MacAllistair. “Dear me, this has become a complicated mess, hasn’t it?” He turned to the hallway and called, “Better come in here, Miss Framlicker.”
Al B. Harper’s fiancée dutifully entered the room, staring before her like the hypnotised woman she was.
“How to sort this, how to sort this,” sighed the grey-suited man. “Ah, yes, I see. Bone, you will forget that Al. B Harper was ever here, that anybody but poor Miss MacAllistair was ever here. You will retrieve the discs you were sent to find, and you will report that Miss MacAllistair encrypted them with her own personality.”
The Bone nodded, moved like a sleepwalker to obey, and left with the stolen data.
“Excellent. It was very clever of you, Mr Harper, doing all that engram-coding trickery. I’m so impressed that I’m going to let you live, because one day you may prove useful to us. Of course, Dr Vizhnar will eventually be able to use the very engram recording of Miss MacAllistair that you imprinted on the discs to create an artificial intelligence version of her that can be used to get past the locks; but you couldn’t know your adversaries AI capabilities were so advanced. You’ll slow them up for a few years though. The Virtual Zemo project is off to a bad start.”
Edward Cromlyn lit a cigarette. It was a bad habit he’d been unable to kick over the years. “Yes, that’s right. Miss MacAllistair died because a sad old Nazi wanted to create an artificial version of himself, in an attempt to usurp a long-planned programme of work initiated by others, based on ancient recovered technology. He sent his scientist Vizhnar to infiltrate the study team and so gathered some scraps to help him on the way. As if even his thefts can’t be incorporated into the grand design.”
He turned to regard the wrecked room. “As for this, well… I think the best thing is for you to remember something very different. Listen carefully, Miss Framlicker, Mr Harper. This is what you will always remember happened here tonight.”
Al B. and his fiancée were helpless to resist the telepathic power of the grey man. “Miss Framlicker here decided to call upon you in your lab. Imagine her shock, horror, and sense of betrayal when she found you right there, on the floor, making love to Miss MacAllistair. Harsh words were spoken, recriminations made. Expensive lab equipment was thrown and wrecked. Miss MacAllistair fled sobbing, perhaps even feeling suicidal. Mr Harper and Miss Framlicker rowed some more until they too parted, their relationship sundered forever.” Cromlyn paused to consider this. “Yes, I think that will do nicely. Somebody will be along to dispose of the body shortly, but you won’t notice anything untowards. You won’t recall anything about the Bone, or the Visionary project and your attempts to sabotage it, or any of the other strange things that have happened to you. Only the lifetime of hurt and betrayal you have caused each other. That is all.” He turned to leave. “Oh, you may move and behave as you will in five minutes time from now.”
Then he was gone, chuckling to himself, satisfied with a job well done.
He would have been less happy if he had seen the cowled crime czar with the glowing green eyes in the shadows, watching him leave.
“That is all,” agreed the Hooded Hood.

Next issue: Back to the present and things get worse. Josh Clement meets his new sponsor and has to make an important life choice. Undead spiffy meets spooky his new friends and learns things he’d rather not have known. Visionary meets some enthusiastic men with power tools who want to determine his fakeness. And Ultizon goes all-out to kill the Lair Legion and anyone ever associated with them – such as the population of Paradopolis. The chucklefest continues in Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #114: Secret Intelligence. It’s another shocker.

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Footnotes:

This storyline is about conspiracies, so I’m afraid I’ve had to dig rather deeper than usual into the old histories of the Parodyverse. I hope the narrative reads sensibly in its own right, so folks shouldn’t have to go through pages of explanations to get the story. However, I also believe that people shouldn’t be excluded by in-jokes and old references that everybody else seems to get. Hence I’ve included here the sources and explanations for some of the things in the story above, for those who may be interested.

* 1217, Damietta, the Holy Land: The Fifth Crusade really was happening back then, and Damietta fell to the knight of the Knights Templars and other forces. The Grand Master here, though, is of the Order of Order, the recurring enemies of the CrazySugarFreakHeroes!, who are represented in this era by Sir William of Wonkham, the BabblingBardJousterJester! The Order’s greatest weapon is Serious Matter, usually imprinted into the brain of a human servitor, as it is in the Grand Master’s bodyguard here. The Cult of Buto is a secret society worshipping the Egyptian protector-goddess of children, Their agent in the outside world is always a young assassin named the Cobra, who uses disguise to get at enemies of the Cult; as we see here. Humbolt of Versailles may well be another of the succession of mystery men initialled HV who seem to appear whenever heroes and villains clash throughout history.

* 1633, Constantinople: Simonides Slaughter was and is one of the interdimensional parasite Hero Feeders, who can utterly consume the heroic characters of the Parodyverse (and worryingly these characters’ posters also disappear as well). He is also the Black King of the Heck-Fire Club, and ancient gentlemens’ society dedicated to mutual power, profit, and pleasure. His wife at the time of this story is one of the lineage of Darkness witches of whom Sorceress is the modern-day descendant. Up until recent times this line of powerful women was enslaved to their Demon Lover familiar, and obscure references are made to that in the text of the story above. Slaughter appears not to have minded as long as he could make use of Maleficent’s power and body when he required them.

The Paradox Stranger is another enigmatic figure, an interferer who doesn’t so much fight for good or evil but has a real talent for fighting on the wrong side. Daniel Roncevalle is a young adventurer making his way in the world through charm, style, and a talking blade very much like the Knifey wielded by modern-age ManMan. Draw your own conclusions. His charming companion, the courtesan Lady Serselietti, displays all the powers and personality of the Austernal Sersi.

Wilbur Parody, sometime holder of each of the three Triumverate offices of Shaper of Worlds, Chronicler of Stories, and Destroyer of Tales, went on to become the founder of Parodiopolis (the older but still-legitimate spelling of Paradopolis). Much more about him is revealed in the Lair Legion: Year One series, and in Untold Tales #8: The Secret History of the Parodyverse: The Most Untold Tale of the Lair Legion of All.

* 1862, Blackheath Common, Sussex, England: The League of Improbable Gentlemen was officially constituted in the early 1800’s (but may have existed informally considerably before they moved into what is now the Lair Mansion on Parody Island). Dr Hopkins, who appears to have died with the team in preventing the invasion chronicled herein, may have left behind a family, since the page boy at the club in the late 1870s and the current Mayor of Gothametropolis also bear his name.

Lucius Faust was at the time of this story the Parodyverse’s Sorcerer Supreme, master of the mystic crafts. Miss Christopoulos is a common cover identity for Pegasus, who is known to have skimmed forwards through time from the classical Greek era, stopping briefly on the way at various intervals. Major Wilton is the father of the better-known Sir Mumphrey Wilton, who at this time was still a schoolboy.

The Mynadrine Host are an alien hive-mind machine intelligence from the Technoverse, a distant parallel universe where science is more advanced. From the Premiere series we learned that early contact between secret Earth government agencies and the Technoverse enabled the Host to establish an interdimensional gate from their universe’s Mars to the Parodyverse’s, and that from the red planet they intended to conquer parody Earth. This story adds more detail to the previous account of their defeat, and to the fate of their captured technology.

* 1943, Dresden, Germany: Dr Vizhnar is better known as an ally of the Scourge of the BZL, the villainous band led by Baron Zemo. Some have suggested that he was the creator of a fake man known as Visionary, but Visionary himself has not only denied this but also refuted his own fakeness. “I’m real, dammit,” as he is well known for saying. This and later portions of the story explain more about Vizhnar and his work.

Hel Rotwang, known in Nazi Germany as Futura, the Woman of Tomorrow, and known today as Deus Et Machina, was a 1920’s political escapee from the Technoverse who settled in the Reich. A robot-supremacist who believed that mankind’s destiny was to improve itself through transplant cybernetics, Rotwang herself was a human-looking cyborg at the time of this story. It was only when she was later forced into the furnaces of a concentration camp when she sought to quit the Fuhrer’s service that her external coverings were burned away leaving the art-deco robot to wreak terrible vengeance on her captors. Deus et Machina’s advanced robotics knowledge probably made possible, directly or indirectly, most of the other androids, cyborgs, and robots manufactured since on Parody Earth. More on Deus et Machina in our contemporary storyline.

A number of experiments are mentioned here and in the “ten years before now” section which blossom into full stories later, many as Baron Zemo plots. Seeds are planted for the (chronologically) later tales of the Dream Demon, of Membrain, of the Psychic Mastermind, of the Evil Autobot Uprising, and of the rise of Oceania. The Filipino girl who hurls her telepathic abilities down the timeline to another girl may be the explanation of the significant but temporary telepathic abilities suddenly gained by Jamie (NTU-150) Bautista’s then-girlfriend Tina Cabanez; at least until Enty tells us different.

The Expediter is one of two principal villains in the (unfinished) Mumphrey War Story.

* 1947, Washington DC: The Shadow Cabinet may be a myth, cover for a coalition of secret organisations who seek to control Earth’s future, or it may be an uber-agency working through many others. In either case, representatives claiming to be from it tend to wear grey suits, to be well informed, and to be better connected. As a result of this meeting, for example, the GAMs were indeed shut down, and with a few brief exceptions there was no public superhero activity hereafter until the eighties, and no sustained significant public-profile supergroup until the formation of the Lair Legion. The super-memoried MH is known to have entered the then-abandoned Parody (Lair) Mansion shortly after the Second World War and left an insane amnesiac until the modern-age events of the Coming of the Celestians in Untold Tales.

The “affiliations” noted suggest some kind of relationship with many of the shadowy groups inhabiting the Parodyverse. These notes have already mentioned the Order of Order and the Cult of Buto. The Ass-Raping Thunder-Monkey-Worshipping Ninjas are recurrent CrazySugarFreakBoy! enemies. Nebti was the counterpart goddess to Buto for the Lower Nile. The Order of the Observing Eye is a monastic group dedicated to identifying and training young heroes ready for the coming Resolution War. Their alumni include Goldeneyed, Exile, Deathspoon, and Exemplary. Harry Vinter has some suggestive initials.

* Nearly ten years back, Paradopolis U: Dr Day-Vincent is one of the scientific geniuses of the age, and his most famous students are Al. B. Harper and Miss Framlicker. This portion of the story finally reveals what went wrong with the engagement of his two talented prodigies, and explains more of the process by which the unfortunate Helen MacAllistair became the mind-template for the Lair Legion’s artificial intelligence HALLIE while leaving a headless body in a concrete block.

NeoReich is or course a cover organisation for Zemo’s plans. The villainous Bone has previously been heard of as the murderer of Mark (spiffy) Hopkins’ adoptive father, and is still being sought by the vengeful ferned phenomenon.

A really smart reader might now be able to deduce from the clues in the text what the Hooded Hood’s retcon was at the end of the story told here, and therefore why the modern day man in grey Exemplary is so keen to do something about him.

* Mysterious Black Head: We haven’t heard of this device in these terms before, and since a lot of the plot of this arc centres around it I can’t give everything away in a footnote. We learn here that the Head was acquired by the Grand Master’s mediaeval order from the “Deviate-beast of Badenweiler”, who was possibly one of the surviving Deviate race remaining after the Deviate-Abhuman War and its firm suppression by the Celestian Space Robot’s Second Host. The Head appears to be the surviving component of a robot killing device created by the Deviates with leftover Celestian technology (those Space Robots are damned careless with their tools, aren’t they?).

However, the Head appears to house an artificial intelligence which is capable of attempting to recreate a suitable shell for itself even when its current damaged storage space is dormant,. Hence a number of people have been prompted through “dreams and visions” throughout the years to either seek out the Head or to create imperfect facsimiles of it. The Grand Master and Simonides Slaughter both gained the true head, for example, but did not have the understanding or technology available to reactivate it.

The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (Robert Green, 1594) really does exist, as does the Byron reference (Don Juan 1. 217), and many other references such as Pope’s Dunciad III. 104 and Butler’s Hubidras II.i. All of them make mention of an old English legend about the wizard Roger Bacon, who created a Brazen Head to answer his questions about the nature of the universe. Setting his (no doubt hunchbacked) assistant to watch the Head, he slept from his labours. The Head spoke three times while he slumbered: “Time is,” “Time was,” “Time’s past,” and then crumbled to dust, bringing all Bacon’s works to ruin. But this myth is a late reworking of other sources, such as the story of Ferragus in Valentine and Orson, part of the French Carolingan cycle, and of much earlier Eastern stories. For the purposes of this plot, it just shows that people have been dreaming about building a Head for a very long time.

There are implications about the Mynadrine Host’s ability to translate from the Technoverse to the Parodyverse. The story here reveals that the Black Head was taken to the “new world” – what would become the United States of America – by Wilbur Parody. It was later stolen from the Gothametropolis Museum of Antiquities. The mystery of how contact between the relatively primitive industrial age factions of government on Parody Earth and the advanced Mynadrine hive consciousness has never been explained. Could the Black Head have first offered a communications bridgehead, enabling sufficient interaction between the two universes for humans to learn how to construct one end of a dimensional transfer portal? Only Eric von Daniken could tell for sure!

The more recent history of the Head remains obscure. At some time it may have been at the Beginning Fields secret laboratories (better known for their association with the ongoing torment of Messenger in the modern age), and it is there that it may have been studied by Dr Vizhnar and Hel Rotwang, both political refugees taken in by the US after world war two (as were other Nazi scientists such as NASA pioneer Werner von Braun). Certainly something in his brief undercover stay within the US scientific-military community inspired Vizhnar so that he could eventually complete a range of bizarre robotics and computer-related projects for his true master Heinrich Zemo.

And of course, the current whereabouts and activity of the Head form the subject of our ongoing plot, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want the ending all spoiled by premature exposition, now would you?

HH

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 © 2003 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2003 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. 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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