Tales of the Parodyverse

#116: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Ultizon Triumphant


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For the 5th Birthday of the PVB the Hooded Hood offers this cheery anniversary tale featuring the NEW new line-up of the Lair Legion, plus breakfast, tea, and sudden execution.
Sat Sep 13, 2003 at 06:12:16 pm EST
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#116: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Ultizon Triumphant

    “Good morning, all,” Pegasus called out warmly as she breezed into the breakfast kitchen at the Lair Mansion. “Something smells good. Wait, it’s me!”
    “Morning Penny,” Sorceress smiled. “You’re in a good mood today.”
    “And why not?” Hatman asked, wearing his cook’s hat and tossing pancakes. “For once things are going right for the LL. The damage from the robot attack’s more or less repaired, Amy Racecar’s out of intensive care soon, HALLIE’s back in the mainframe sorting out the mess EDWIN left, and all’s right with the world.”
    “Except for Nats,” Dancer reminded him. “Has he woken up yet?”
    “He’s moved a few times, moaned a little,” Ziles answered with a sober little shake of her head. “And I’m sensing lots of turmoil in his mind. But who knows when he’ll return to us?”
    ~~I didn’t think that Psychostave of his could be broken~~ Cressida the Wonder Worm commented.
    Her host, grunge music maven dull thud stopped chugging milk for a moment to answer. “Aye well, it was, and Nats is a right mess because of it.”
    “I’m sure he’ll be okay,” Hatman assured them. “Nats is tough. He’ll pull though. And while he’s down, our new members are doing a great job of filling in for him.”
    “True,” agreed Fin Fang Foom from behind the newspaper. “It’s just great to have you back on the team, Messy.”
    Messenger hoisted his coffee in salute. “To be honest, it’s great to be back. I don’t know what I was thinking during my grim vigilante phase.”
    “I know what you mean,” agreed probationary member De Brown Streak. “I was pretty far out there myself, back during my mutant rights days.” He grinned across the table at Goldeneyed. “You were right to shoot me.”
    “All water under the bridge now, pal,” G-Eyed assured him. “Welcome to the Lair Legion.”
    “Huh,” muttered Trickshot. “Like we needed another headliner distracting the adoring fans.”
    “But DBS is doing loads for our PR,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! argued as he helped himself to a second plate of sugar-coated wheat flakes and sprinkled extra sugar and honey on them. “I mean, he’s already dated about half the general public in Paradopolis.”
    “Just because things are going so well we shouldn’t get complacent,” Dancer pointed out.
    “Hey, I’ll date the rest in time,” DBS promised.
    “I mean, we still do have a couple of ongoing investigations, don’t we?” Sarah Shepherdson persisted. “Has anyone found out where Yo went to?”
    “DK’s working on it,” Finny assured her. “I’m guessing Yo was pretty upset when Vizh got dismantled.”
    “Killed,” Sorceress shuddered. “Even though he did turn out to be some kind of fake man in the end like everyone said, it was a shame they had to take him to pieces to retrieve the Omega Codes.”
    “There’s talk of a Visionary Day, you know,” Hatman told them. “And possibly a big statue in his memory, looking over the harbour.”
    “That’s be nice,” sniffed Dancer sadly. “He should be remembered. After all, it was his sacrifice that ushered in the golden age.”
    “That’s right,” Pegasus agreed. “No warrior, real or fake, could wish for a better death than to bring in the Age of Ultizon.”
    “Speaking of which, I’ve got to go down to Washington today with G-Eyed to meet the Master,” Finny told them. “We’re discussing how to implement the sterilisation programme to bring world population down to sensible levels.”
    “And if we get time, we might be able to do some preliminary planning about extending the Master’s influence to other planets,” G-Eyed added eagerly.
    Ziles shrugged. “He doesn’t really need our help. His will has already extended across covert Skunk espionage systems and the Hero Feeders networks to other planets and planes anyway. It’s only a matter of time before they all see the light.”
    There was general happiness at the Lair breakfast table.
    “Hey, if the rest of you are free today, anyone want to come with me to watch Chronic’s execution?” De Brown Streak asked.

***


    At ten twenty that morning, military sappers deployed a series of explosive charges that completely demolished a whole block of Hell’s Bathroom, that seedy warren of vice and poverty between Off-Central Park and the Upper Paradopolis River. Most of the residents were evacuated, although the area was rather crowded after the release of nearly all the residents of the nation’s prisons. The army was able to assure itself with a hundred percent confidence that the clock repair and plumbing shop of Xander the Improbable had been reduced to so much smoking rubble.
    Two blocks across, Xander’s shop was closed up with a handwritten card pinned to the door: Gone to not be there when it happens.
    As for the master of the mystic crafts himself, he was just pouring out five cups of tea and a coffee in a cosy antechamber of the Lunar Public Library. “One lump or two?” he asked the Bog Thing.
    “None. I do not… require… complex… hydrocarbons…” the guardian of the Nexus of Unreality answered, turning his leafy head to acknowledge the courtesy. “I only like tea… for the leaves.”
    “I like it for the ritual,” noted Sir Mumphrey Wilton accepting his beverage and reaching for the sugar tongs. “Fiddlin’ with the niceties gives one time to think of something to say, what?”
    “There are places you can get arrested for fiddling with the niceties,” warned Xander the Improbable.
    “Coffee, black and strong,” the Librarian called out. He was over at the wall, rummaging though the volumes on Pre-History. He’d unlocked one of the glass cases containing the restricted books, and was warily making sure none of them tried to escape while he consulted them.
    The Manga Shoggoth accepted his tea with a twist of lemon and absorbed it into his biomass cup and all. “You don’t need to worry about finding the reference to the Black Head,” he told the Librarian. “I was there. I know about the Thinking Machine.”
    “Thanks,” the keeper of the Lunar Public Library told him, “but I’m just generally happier reading it in a book than hearing it from a multi-angled elder being.”
    “Why… have you made… six… beverages…?” the Bog Thing asked Xander. “There are… but five… of us…”
    The sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse looked to the door, and sure enough it burst open and Con Johntantine hurried through, shaking the London rain off his Macintosh.
    “You,” said the Librarian to the newcomer, “are banned.”
    “Story of my life, squire,” Johnstantine admitted with a cheeky grin. “But any port in a storm, eh?”
    Xander handed him the last cup. “Try not to sneak anything out this time,” he advised the Cockney meddler.
    “Or in,” the Librarian clarified. “Next time it’s not a fine. It’s evisceration.”
    Johnstantine slouched into a chair beside the book-cluttered table. “So what’s goin’ on?” he asked bluntly. “Everybody on Earth’s just started being nice to each other, and if they start bursting into happy song next I’m going to have to buy a shotgun.”
    “The Thinking… Machine… has awoken,” the Bog Thing explained.
    “Oh,” Johnstantine replied. “Bugger.”
    “Perhaps a review of the salient information?” suggested Sir Mumphrey.
    “It’s fairly simple,” lectured Xander. “Very shortly after the Parodyverse was created, it was infected with intruders from far beyond, powerful creatures who operate under their own physical laws independent of the reality they dwell in.”
    “The Fairly Great Old Ones,” whispered the Manga Shoggoth.
    “These loathsome creatures dwelled amongst the stars and they eventually infested Earth too,” Xander went on. “They enslaved sentient life wherever they could find it and created servitor races to do their bidding.”
    “Like the Shoggoths,” said Johnstantine.
    “We rebelled,” the Manga Shoggoth replied with dignity. “We rose against the High Masters, dared to face their squamous turpulence.”
    “I don’t want to know,” the annoying Englishman shuddered.
    “The Shoggoths did rise against their creators,” Xander agreed. “But they would have lost, because for all their power they are but a shadow of those who now sleep. Yet that brief rebellion distracted the Fairly Great Old Ones for long enough. You see, whoever set up the Parodyverse ensured it had guardians.”
    “The First Host of the Celestian Space Robots,” the Librarian surmised, poring over illustrations of ancient carvings of ur-men from the dawn of history. “They came to Earth and stopped the Old Ones, made them sleep.”
    “It was… not… so simple,” interjected the Bog Thing. “The Old Ones… warped space… and time… to maintain themselves.”
    “Dashed unsporting, really,” muttered Mumphrey.
    “As long as the stars were right, they couldn’t be beaten,” Xander footnoted. “But this is the Parodyverse, made of stories, where belief shapes reality. All the Celestians had to do was have all that enslaved humanity believe the Old Ones could be beaten and they would be. The stars would change and the Fairly Great Old Ones fade into myth, sleeping until their age returned again.”
    “How did they get everyone to believe that, then?” Johnstantine shrugged.
    “They created a Thinking Machine, a series of codes and routines that could tap into the basic programming of the human brain and direct its thoughts as was needed to destroy the enemy,” the Shoggoth remembered. “A formless concept dancing though millions of organic computers inside hominid skulls.”
    “Of course,” the Librarian enthused, flipping to another reference. “The human lifeform was one of the templates seeded by the Second Oldest Race, who used Celestian technologies to predicate the evolution of bipedal humanoids across the universe. And the Celestian technology left a… a kind of back door into the human psyche that their Thinking Machine could exploit.”
    “As commanded… the humans believed… that their dark tormentors… would fall. And they did,” explained the Bog Thing.
    “And so they’re all dead and sleeping and stuff until strange eons yadda yadda etc etc,” Johnstantine concluded. “Next apocalypse please.”
    Xander sipped his tea again and ventured a ginger nut. “But the Celestian Space Robots are notoriously bad at putting their toys away after they’ve finished playing,” he noted. “So the Thinking Machine – what they now call the Omega Codes – was still around to be redefined by the Deviates many years later. They used it as the operating system for a great killing machine, a robot to battle the Abhumans in the war that was then between them.”
    “A war that nearly destroyed the bally planet,” objected Mumph.
    “That was the occasion of the Second Host of the Celestians visiting Earth,” the Librarian nodded, rapidly pencilling margin notes. “All but a few of the Deviates were destroyed, the rest were imprisoned, and the Abhumans were locked in their stronghold, their Great Relief, behind a Barrier of Negativity for thousands of years. Until the middle of the last century, in fact.”
    “Don’t I know it,” chuckled Sir Mumphrey.
    “Right,” agreed the master of the mystic crafts. “The huge adamantine robot was destroyed except for its head, which was preserved until it could be restored to life. The sentience inside it tried to hasten the day by sending out visions and garbled dreams, advancing technology to the point where it could be recreated.”
    “As Ultizon,” noted Johnstantine. “I thought he was too bloody good to be true.”
    “The robot body was created to house an artificial intelligence that wanted to replace all human life on Earth with robot forms,” the Librarian noted.
    “Oh, the Lair Legion stopped that,” Xander said dismissively. “That was just their AI getting jumped up ideas about controlling all the technology on the planet and so on. All in a days work for our mighty heroes.”
    “The conspirators… who sought to… return the Thinking Machine… to life…merely supported… the robot project… as a means of… recreating the true Ultizon,” surmised the Bog Thing.
    “Yes,” sighed Xander. “Now the Black Head has a new and indestructible body, the Thinking Machine is fully awake, and it’s working with the Shadow Cabinet, the secret government that has been manipulating world affairs for hundreds of years now. At last the Shadow Cabinet has what it wants – total control.”
    “Peace in our time,” Johnstantine observed. “Cause the Omega Codes still cut right into our minds and take away free will. So this Ultimate Ultizon guy can control machines and people. And his power’s growing all the time as his range extends. Wonderful.”
    “Not everybody,” Xander observed. “A few people can resist it. And there are one or two folks out there who owe me a favour who aren’t really humanoid in the slightest degree.”
    “Yes,” agreed the Bog Thing. “I like Yo.”

***


    “Hello there, cute Space Ghost! Is nice to be seeing you again. Yo is thinking that Yo has never to be seeing Space Ghost without his mask before. Without pants, yes. Mask, no.”
    The young looking man with the unshaven lantern jaw stepped back from the doorway of his Notting Hill garret and let the pure thought being in the Zorro costume into his one-room apartment. “I’m retired,” he explained, clearing a stack of handwritten papers off the couch. “I didn’t think anyone could find me.”
    “Yo is thinking that Yo is a very good detectiving.” And whatever Yo believed s/he was, s/he became.
    “I just needed a fresh start,” David Garett, the man who had been Space Ghost told his guest. “It was all getting, you know, a bit stale. So after I got slightly discorporated at the end of the Technopolis thing I decided to start fresh. I’m a writer now.”
    “Yo is thinking you are to be having lots of things in your head.”
    “Oh yeah. But I’m pinning some of them on paper, working on an anthology, planning a novel. So I don’t really have time to be the drunken bum with the, er, bum.”
    Yo looked at the former hero’s face and smiled. “Yo thinks this is to be being good for you, cute SG,” he agreed. “But Yo is to be needing help. Is to be something very strange happening to Yo-friends.”
    “Ultizon’s planetary mind-takeover, yes,” Space Ghost agreed. “Most people with genetic structures aren’t able to resist it.”
    “Is hard,” Yo agreed. “Pilar is to be wanting to obey Ultizon, but Yo is putting Yo’s foot down. Is headachy.”
    “I can’t do anything,” Garett warned the thought being. “Really. I packaged all my powers and mailed them home. I needed to concentrate on my writing.”
    “Yo is needing to wake up Yo’s friends. And then Yo has to do something to help poor dismantled Visi. And then Yo has to stop uncute Ultizon.”
    Space Ghost sighed and rummaged under a pile of papers and bottles until he found his desk, then dug deep into the bottom drawer. He pulled out a futuristic looking silver plastic ray gun, fiddled with it a bit, then handed it to Yo. “Here,” he said. “Take it.”
    “Your Spank Ray?”
    “Yep. It’s still got a bit of charge left in it, enough for a few whuppings. I’ve set it to High Concept, so it’ll kick people in the metaphorical pants. That should be enough to wake the Legion up. Then they can take it from there.”
    “Yo cannot be taking cute SG’s Spank Ray.”
    “Ah, don’t worry. It’s only a water pistol really. I can always buy another one at Woolworth’s if I really need one. Oh, and if you could kind of forget that you found me, I’d really appreciate it.”
    “Yo is to be promising. Take care, cute Spacey.”
    “Kick butt, Yo-ster.”

***


    spiffy wasn’t surprised that Lisa answered the door at Visionary’s – at Cheryl’s – condo. He went inside worrying about what to say to the widow.
    “She’s asleep right now,” Lisa told the fern-wielder. “I slipped something in her drink. An old dating trick of mine.”
    “How’s she taking it?”
    The first lady of the Lair Legion shook her head. “Not well. At first she wouldn’t accept that Visionary actually had been an android. Said it was a funny running joke but that was all. Master Ultizon himself had to come and explain it all to her. Then she believed, and had to accept that it was all for the best. Visionary had to die so that Ultizon could live.”
    “Master Ultizon was here?” spiffy was impressed. He was omni-mayor and his appointment was still three weeks down the schedule.
    “He wanted to comfort Cheryl, and he needed to talk to Enty about some kind of project he wants doing. Something pretty secret, in Far East.”
    “Why would Ultizon need to keep anything secret?” wondered spiffy. “It’s not like there isn’t a man, woman, or child on the planet who wouldn’t happily give their lives so that his plans could be furthered.”
    “I don’t know. I was busy admiring how shiny Ultizon’s adamantine physique was. Do you suppose it’s… fully equipped?”
    “I thought you’d reformed,” spiffy chided her. “Weren’t you going steady with the Hooded Hood at one point?”
    “Ah, he’s dead,” Lisa shrugged. “Besides, Ultizon needs him to be dead. He explained it. Apparently, if the Hood hadn’t been stabbed by ManMan then he’d have gone on to do something to oppose Ultizon’s plans for universal peace. Ultizon’s Shadow Cabinet allies have been working for weeks now to make sure the Hood really is gone this time, and he won’t be coming back.”
    “That’s why Exemplary was asking all those questions,” Mark Hopkins realised. “But it still burns me a little that he didn’t tell me where the Bone was before Ultizon reformed everybody and gave them free pardons. Don Graham and I had just tracked down where that bastard was hiding out and…”
    “Please, spiffy, Master Ultizon doesn’t like swearing.”
    “Sorry. Sorry. This new world is going to take some getting used to. But it’s wonderful, of course.”
    “Wonderful,” Lisa agreed.
    “Wonderful,” said spiffy.
    “I sure hope Cheryl can see it like that.”

***


    “Any change?” Ziles asked Al B. Harper as the scientist checked the medical monitor readouts on the screen beside Nats.
    Al B. glanced down at the corpse pale hero. “I’m still getting brainwave activity, mostly in the delta wave band,” he reported. “He’s dreaming.”
    Nats shivered and his fingers twitched. “More like a nightmare,” Ziles judged.
    “What do we know about this Psychostave of Nats’?” Al B. wondered. “Before it got snapped by Ultizon, I mean.”
    Ziles picked up the two severed portions of the old wood stick. Now it was broken it was possible to see the tiny compact microcircuits inside it. “It was really, really old,” she began. “It was old when Finny’s race, the Makluans, discovered it and used its psionic properties to act as a prison for the spirit of their greatest bad guy, an undead body-stealer called the Devil Doctor. They trapped him inside the stave and sent him on a one-way trip as far away from Makluos as possible.”
    “He’s not… he wasn’t still in there, was he?” worried Al.
    “No. The Devil Doctor’s last act before being imprisoned was to make Galactivac, the Living Death That Sucks, aware of Makluos, so the whole dragon race were wiped out. The only survivors were the crew of the saucer taking the Psychostave and its psychic captive to a new resting place. From what I can gather, the Devil Doctor worked his nasty psychic mojo on the crew during the voyage, the ship crashed on your Earth, and the only survivor was a dragon called Fin Fang Foom.”
    “Holy secret origin!” Al B. breathed. “And later Andy Dean merged with the surviving dragon to become the grumpy fire-breathing obsessive we know and… know.”
    “More importantly, the Devil Doctor escaped the Psychostave and got away in the animated corpse of another of the dragons. He caused us a lot of trouble later. The Psychostave turned up in an Indian museum back in the 1800’s, and was owned by a guy called Hakenfakir, a member of the League of Improbable Gentlemen.”
    The sink made a very strange gurgling sound.
    Ziles ignored it. “Hakenfakir was clinically dead, but a property of the Psychostave was to amplify telepathic abilities. In Hakenfakir’s case it amplified a hypnotic talent and a telekinetic skill that let him keep his body going after medical death for over sixty years.”
    “You don’t think Nats is clinically dead, do you?” Al worried.
    “I think he died for a few moments when he gained the stick,” Ziles remembered. “Anyway, after Hakenfakir the stave vanishes for a while then turns up again as the weapon of one of the Scourge, the Late Great Don Blake.”
    “Another walking corpse?”
    “Dunno, but the name’s suggestive. When the Hooded Hood retconned the Scourge away, the Psychostave somehow resisted and eventually found its way to Nats. Because Nats’ flying abilities are basically levitation, for him the Psychostave amplified his telekinetic and pyrokinetic powers. But it’s also done other weird stuff like keep back undead spirits and stuff.”
    The sink gurgled, and a few gelid bubbles spluttered out of the drain hole.
    “What is going on over there?” Al B. wondered.
    “Now the stick is broken I’m thinking we might need to ask for the Master’s help in getting Nats restored,” Ziles suggested. “If we make a good case that… what are you doing, Al?”
    “Something weird’s happening with this sink,” the scientist noted, prodding a pencil into the goo that was bubbling into the basin.
    The pencil was sucked into the biomass that was oozing rapidly over the edges of the porcelain. Before Ziles could even register that the Lair Mansion had a security alert, the Manga Shoggoth had formed up into a vaguely humanoid albeit transparent shape. “Ah, there he is,” the elder beast gurgled, slithering towards Nats. “Still vaguely alive. I’ve got here not a moment too soon. We have to save his life.”
    “What?” Ziles asked, a little disturbed by the Shoggoth’s unorthodox entrance.
    “Don’t eat me!” Al B requested of the intruder, remembering his last encounter in the Antarctic.
    “No time for snacking just now,” the Manga Shoggoth gurgled. “If we’re going to save this young man and the universe as we know it we have to get him back to where the Psychostave was made.”
    “We do?” Al B. checked.
The Manga Shoggoth rose up to an impressive if pustulent height. “Of course. We have to go back to the lost birthplace of the Second Oldest Race. Now.”

***


    It was a nice afternoon for an execution. The early spring sun shone down on the courtyard of the Safe where the electric chair had been set up. The former super-villain penitentiary had very few inmates now, only those so set in their ways or so stubborn in will as to resist the call of the Thinking Machine. Soon they would be disposed of, and all resistance to the new age of perfection would be gone.
    “Shame about Chronic,” De Brown Streak noted as Falcon led the rebellious young musician down to the platform. “He saved my butt when you Legion guys shot and crippled me, and got me to Deus Et Machina to have the genetic damage undone.”
    “Plus he wouldn’t be bad on an Indy label,” dull thud added.
    Messenger watched the proceedings in his new stripy Aran sweater. Somehow the black clothes didn’t feel right any more. “He wouldn’t obey the Master,” the postman pointed out. “There’s no place for a disruptive element like him in our society.”
    “I just wish there was some other way,” said Dancer. Her face was pale and she was biting her lip.
    “It’s what Ultizon wants,” Hatman comforted her.
    Chronic wasn’t allowed any last words. He went to the chair gagged and blindfolded. Ultizon had heard enough of his defiant sedition.
    “I wonder where his guitar is,” Sorceress worried. “That’s a nasty piece of work.”
    “Sssh!” Pegasus bade them. “It is time for the boy to die.”
    Chronic struggled as they bound him into the chair and attached the electrodes. Trickshot was twitching to free him before he was securely fastened. Falcon checked the connections then nodded to the executioner to do his work.
    “Spaaaaaaaaaannnkking Rayyyyyyy!!!!!!” shouted Yo, vaulting over the yard wall and firing his/her borrowed weapon on wide dispersal.
    The Lair Legion stumbled forwards as if kicked in the pants.
    The executioner pulled the lever.
    De Brown Streak had already blurred forwards and had half the buckles holding Chronic undone when the current was released. He twitched as he felt the first tingle of what was surely lethal current moving through him as well as the convicted man. Then he was abraded by a shower of bolts as Cressida transmuted the volts in the electric chair into something safer.
    “What’s happening?” Chronic gasped as DBS pulled his hood off.
    “That’s what we all want to know,” Hatman growled as he shook off Ultizon’s domination.
    “Watch out!” shouted Falcon.
Then the Safe guards turned their weapons on the treacherous Lair Legion.

***


    Fin Fang Foom, Goldeneyed, the Dark Knight, and NTU-150 were in conference with Lord Ultizon at the White House when the word came in.
    “Sir,” Herbert P. Garrick, Ultizon’s advisor on all things interferey called, bursting into the oval office. “We have a problem.”
    “You have problems,” Goldeneyed told Bad News Herb. “The Master has only solutions.”
    “Well said,” agreed Enty. “Why just now we’re discussing his Euthanasia programme and the most efficient way of cutting down on those who waste our precious planetary resources.”
    Garrick glared at the four superheroes arrayed around the gleaming world leader. “It’s the Lair Legion, Master,” he reported. “They’ve gone rogue.”
    “What?” responded Finny. “What do you mean? If this is another prank of CSFB!’s…”
    “I mean they attacked security people at the Safe and busted loose with the condemned criminal Chronic.”
    The Dark Knight’s eyes narrowed. “Traitors,” he hissed.
    “This is… unhelpful,” Ultizon admitted. “I had great hopes for your Lair Legion, Makluan.”
    Finny almost wept from mortification. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “We’ll get over there and see what’s happening.”
    “Maybe they were taken over by some psychic overlord,” G-Eyed suggested, “I mean, a different psychic overlord, Master.”
    “One moment,” commended the Thinking Machine. He cocked his metallic insectoid head to one side in concentration. “Hmm. Somehow they have freed themselves from the genetic programming that subjugates them to me, and have neutralised the effects of the nanite infestation which serves as a secondary control measure.”
    “We can find them,” DK promised. “We can bring them down.”
    “Very well,” Ultizon told the four heroes. “I shall give you a chance to reclaim the honour of your Legion. I am now ordering a worldwide alert to bring these renegades to justice. Every hand will be against them, every man woman and child willing to kill them on sight. I am dispatching every hero and former super-villain on Earth to find them and destroy them.”
    “Very wise, Master Ultizon,” NTU-150 admitted. “And only just.”
“But you know them best, ” Ultizon continued. “Their methods, their characters, the secret places where they might hide, the things they might try to do. I expect you to find them first. I expect it to be your hands by which they die. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Master,” Fin Fang Foom agreed on behalf of the others. “It will be a privilege.”

***


Next time: The Lair Legion – wanted for treason, hunted by the whole planet. Chronic hits the super-villain bars. ManMan’s interrupted shave. The Lair Legion old guard – sent on a kill or be killed mission to bring the renegades to justice. Amazing Guy makes the ultimate sacrifice. But mostly it’s the story of one boy and his Psychostave, and the two humans and one elder being that got caught in his secret origin. Be here for Untold Tales of the Dead Galaxy: The Silent Worlds (or Nats vs the Universe)

***


Notes:

Xander’s Tea Party: Regular readers will be familiar with those present at the meeting at the Lunar Public Library. In addition to the library’s official Librarian and Xander the Improbable, the Parodyverse’s sorcerer supreme, guests include the Manga Shoggoth, a protoplasmic elder beast whose origins are somewhat recapped in the text, Sir Mumphrey Wilton, the eccentric English gentleman who possesses the Chronometer of Infinity, the Bog Thing, a plant elemental guardian of the Nexus of Unreality in Florida’s Wookiegetlucky Swamps, and Con Johnstantine, an irritating English dabbler in the occult.

This section covers quite a lot of Parodyverse pre-history. Although it is hopefully comprehensible in its own right, a few additional comments may be of use. When the Parodyverse was created as a vehicle for stories by the always-unspecified creators, the massive Celestian Space Robots were installed as caretakers and repair mechanisms. For reasons best known to them they used and allowed other to use their technology to influence the development of sentient life. Amongst the sub-races created by the Space Robots were the Deviates who later battled the genetically-modified Abhumans in a lengthy war. The Celestians also tended to interfere when they didn’t like the way that life was going, and they stepped down on that war hard, as noted above. The Second Oldest Race used borrowed Celestian technology to seed humanoid lifeforms throughout the universe before they spectacularly died in a single night for reasons we will be exploring in future chapters. The Fairly Great Old Ones are sanity-mangling Lovecraftian monster-gods, and are fairly well covered by the narrative and previous footnotes. All clear now?

Space Ghost, former Legionnaire booted for his drinking habits, former char show host, and possible member of the immortal Family of the Pointless, has been absent from regular action for some time. Known for his amazing ability to lose his pants and for his remarkable Spank Ray, he was once a regular adventurer, and his poster creator a regular contributor to the board. Both are now rarely seen. The last we heard of (fictional) SG, he’d retired to be a writer in England.

The Devil Doctor was a Fu-Manchu-type villain who turned out to be an undead Makluan dragon, a criminal who was being transported to eternal exile for bring about the extinction of the Makluan race. He escaped from his psychic confinement in the Psychostave and became an Earth criminal before finally having his undead form destroyed in battle with Fin Fang Foom. He has not been heard of for some time now. Maybe he’s really dead.

History of the Psychostave: This is covered in the narrative, but clearly there’s a lot more we don’t know yet. Watch this space.

Does anybody ever actually read this far down?

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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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