Tales of the Parodyverse

#117: Untold Tales of the Dead Galaxy: The Silent Worlds, or Nats vs the Universe


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The Lair Legion get to play for all the marbles in this tale of cosmic carnage, fatal choices, and seedy bars, from... the Hooded Hood.
Sat Sep 20, 2003 at 09:01:05 am EST
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#117: Untold Tales of the Dead Galaxy: The Silent Worlds, or Nats vs the Universe

Secret Message for AG


Nothing happened.
    Nothing happened for a very long time. Far away civilisations rose and fell, suns were born and died. But in the Dead Galaxy nothing happened.
    The stars there should have gone, of course. The primal fuel that lit them would have exhausted itself billions of years ago under normal circumstances. The planets that swung in silent orbit round the red giants would have crumbled or been consumed. The grey buildings that clung to the lifeless continents beside the sterile seas would have been wiped away. But they weren’t. Everything stayed the same. Even the processes of decay need life and the exchange of energies, and both those things were prohibited here.
    Nothing happened for a very long time. And then the strangers came.

***


    “Gah!” gasped Al B. Harper as he was spewed out of the dimensional portal. “What the hell was that?”
    “I don’t know,” panted Miss Framlicker of the Interdimensional Transportation Corporation. “Something interfered with the conduit, made it much harder to open a gateway. We almost didn’t make it.”
    “It was as if we hit some kind of metaphasic interstitial barrier,” Ziles added. She’d check her sensor gadgets when she could get her fingers moving.
    “Is Nats all right?” Al B. worried
    Miss F looked over at her comatose employee. “Well, he’s still deathly pale, breathing shallowly, and not moving,” she noted. “So he’s no worse. And I never did discern any higher brain functions in him.”
    Al. B looked around him. “Er, where are we?” he wondered. Then a more urgent question came to him. “Why are we surrounded by jelly goo?”
    “That would be me,” rumbled the Manga Shoggoth who was enveloping them.
    “Aaaaagh!” Al responded. “Get off me! Get off!”
    “Well, if you insist,” the Shoggoth agreed. “Of course, only my oxygenated plasma is keeping you alive in this airless void, but if you say I should withdraw it…”
    “No, that’s… not necessary,” interjected Miss Framlicker with a nasty glare at the Lair Legion’s scientific advisor. “I’d rather have to wash my hair than suffocate to death on an alien world. Really.”
    “Where are we, exactly?” Ziles asked the Manga Shoggoth. “You said we had to whip up a portal to get Nats somewhere to save his life, so we did. But the jump wasn’t exactly text book, and we seem to have ended up in some mouldy ruins.”
    Just then Nats woke up. And screamed. “Noooo! Not again! Not here!”
    “That’s… in improvement,” noted Miss F uncertainly. “Now he’s ambulatory. And… vocalising.”
    Now Nats had worked out he was inside a Shoggoth. “Aaaaaaaaaagghh!!”
    “That’s what I said,” Al B. told him.
    “What… how… why did you bring me here?” Nats demanded.
    “You know where we are?” Miss Framlicker asked. “The co-ordinates should have bounced us near to the universal core, the oldest part of the Parodyverse, where no-one has gone before…”
    “We have to get out of here!” Nats screamed.
    Al B. nodded. “Just one or two problems with that. Lack of any return signal from base, burning out our transport conduit coming here, having no means to create another one. That kind of thing.”
    “We couldn’t have got here at all,” bubbled the Manga Shoggoth, “if we hadn’t had him with us.”
    “Him? Nats?” checked Miss F., giving one of her I-knew-this-was-your-fault glares at the flying phenomenon.
    “I-I didn’t ask to come here,” Bill Reed stammered. “I’ve seen this place before. In dreams. Well, in nightmares. I’ve heard the people screaming.”
    “People?” Ziles. Then she noticed the thousands of skeletons strewn across the dead streets. “Oh, those people.”
    “Where are we?” Miss Framlicker demanded. “And what happened here?”
    “We are on the homeworld of the Second Oldest Race in the Parodyverse,” the Manga Shoggoth told them gravely. “And we are at the place where they were destroyed by Nats’ Psychostave.”

***


    On the other side of the universe, ManMan was getting a late breakfast when he heard a tapping at his window. He opened it to find CrazySugarFreakBoy! and Yo hanging to his fire escape.
“Hello, cute ManMan!” Yo called happily as Joe Pepper reached for Knifey. “We are to be coming to be needing you.”
“Traitors!” the Elvis impersonator hissed. “I’m going to have to dice you up in the name of Lord Ultizon!”
“Not with me you won’t,” Knifey answered. ManMan suddenly found the blade was terribly heavy to hold, or perhaps the super-strong grip that the talking blade conferred was somehow reversed. “All of you DNA types might have gone a bit looney with Ultizon’s mind-control, but some of us are still thinking clearly and biding our time.”
“Yay, Knifey!” CSFB! cheered, leaping through the casement and pining Joe to the wall with silly string.
“Let me go!” ManMan shouted until Yo helpfully pushed a quietening hamburger into his mouth. “You mvusht die, traitorvh!”
“Yo is thinking you are not to be being yourself,” the Zorro impersonator told the Elvis impersonator. “But Yo is to be sure that when you are feeling better then is to be you helping us to find the Hooded Hood.”

***


    They walked down the main street of what had one been a massive city, past empty fountains and fallen towers. They breathed because of the thin sheath of Shoggoth-ooze that surrounded them and filled their lungs. The main clump of the Manga Shoggoth slithered behind them, twisting around as it flowed over the bones of the Second Oldest Race.
    “What happened here?” Al B. asked.
    “Nobody is quite certain,” the Shoggoth admitted. “This place has been… closed… for many millennia. Interdicted by the Celestians.”
    “We’re trespassing on territory forbidden by the Space Robots?” snapped Miss Framlicker. “Oh good. This just keeps getting better and better.”
    “Yes,” agreed Ziles happily, without the slightest hint of irony. Exploring forbidden planets was high up on her personal to-do list.
    “The Second Oldest Race were exploring the Parodyverse,” Nats told them. “They discovered other dimensions, parallel realities, the Negativity Zone, the proto-Mythlands, all kinds of stuff. Then they discovered the Vortex, the Nexus of Unrealities, the multiversal crossroads, kind of the scaffolding that all the other realities hang on. The Parodyverse’s backstage.”
    “There are many natural conduits to it,” Miss Framlicker explained. “The one on our world is in the Wookiegetlucky Swamp, guarded by a… weed creature, who doesn’t take kindly to intruders.”
    “But back then there weren’t any such places,” Nats went on. “The Second Oldest Race made the first conduit there. And released what was lurking in therein.”
    “The Hero Feeders,” Miss F. breathed (via Shoggoth-ooze). “Natural predators in a multiverse made up of stories. They consume whole narrative stands, literally eating characters out of history.”
    “Poor Dynamo Dolphin,” said Ziles sadly.
    “And now they are but pale copies of what they once were,” Nats went on. “They faced the Second-Oldest Race at the height of that empire’s power, surrounded by allies and tributaries. And still they prevailed.”
    “Is it just me,” Al B. whispered to Ziles and Miss Framlicker, “or is Nats very well informed compared to his usual relative ignorance?”
    “And his speech patterns are more literate too,” the ITC researcher muttered back. “I don’t like this. Smart employees scare me.”
    “The Invasion of the Hero Feeders. It was one of the early crises of the Parodyverse,” the Manga Shoggoth said. “And this was at a time before many of the maintenance mechanisms of what you people call reality had been put in place. There was no once-human Triumverate to prevent the overthrow of cosmic destiny.”
    “Hey!” called out the dark-haired girl in the black jeans and tank top. “What do you call me then?”
    “You?” the Manga Shoggoth answered, sounding worried. “I call you Death.”

***


    “This is a super-villain bar,” Hatman noticed as he was let into the crowded smoky cellar behind the disused garage in Hogan, Gothametropolis’ notorious red light district.
    “Well, yeah,” Chronic agreed, letting the bouncers pat him down for concealed weapons. Hatman didn’t have any, so the doorman loaned him one. “Where else are we going to come for information of the sort you’re looking for?”
    “Somewhere that everybody in the room isn’t mind-controlled to seek us out and kill us?” Sorceress suggested.
    “There’s nowhere on the planet meets that description,” Chronic pointed out, “’Cept maybe Badripoor, but you already got that covered.”
    “Somewhere that everybody in the room isn’t mind-controlled to kill us and doesn’t have lethal metahuman abilities to help them do it?” Sorceress amended herself.
    “Hey,” the doorman objected as Chronic showed himself for admission. “I thought you were wanted for busting outta the Safe ‘cause you wouldn’t obey the master?”
    “Aw, that?” the guitar wielder shrugged. “Storm in a teacup. It was those Legion traitors that caused all the trouble. The, er the master just pardoned me like he did everyone else when I saw sense. So, any sign of the Lair Scum?”
    “Nah. But it’s only a matter of time before we track ‘em down and rip ‘em up, right?”
    “Right. Good riddance to them I say,” agreed Chronic.
    The doorman looked at the newcomers suspiciously. “Who did you say these were?” he grunted.
    “Newbies in town,” the guitarist answered. “But they’re very big in, uh, Belgium.”
    “Belgian super-villains,” the bouncer frowned.
    “Uh… oui,” agreed Sorceress.
    “I’m Evil Executioner,” Hatman explained, gesturing to the hangman’s mask he wore over his hair and eyes. And this is my partner, Fortuneteller.”
    “I never heard of you.”
    “Oh, we’ve been around,” Sorceress promised. “I’ve fought Hatman a few times.”
    The doorman sniffed. “I heard he was overrated.”
    “Really?” Jay Boaz answered., noting down name and location.
    “They’re just in town like everybody else,” Chronic interjected, “Looking for the Lair Legion. So get out of the way and let me get a drink.”
    “Okay,” agreed the doorman. “But this time stay away from the karaoke machine.”

***


    “Dancer?” swallowed Nats. “What are you doing here?”
    “I’m not Dancer,” the girl with the wild black hair and well-packed figure answered. “Your Shoggoth guide is right. I’m Death of the Pointless.”
    “Only of the pointless?” Al B. puzzled.
    “Of the Family of the Pointless,” Ziles hissed in his ear. “They’re these… beings, who serve some kind of representational function of the key forces interplaying in the Parodyverse. Coincidence, Lusting, Whinging, Glamour, Death, Temporary Death, and Space Ghost. Common Sense has abandoned his office. Don’t you read the Who's Who in the Parodyverse?”
    “Why do you look like Dancer, then?” Nats asked the dark damsel.
    “I wanted somebody familiar to you, to put you at your ease,” Death explained. “And of your Lair Legion, Dancer’s the one responsible for killing the most people.”
    “Dancer?” Al B. frowned. “I don’t think so.”
    “Tell that to the burned-out cinder that used to be a planet called Skree-Lump,” Death shrugged. “Even Fin Fang Foom doesn’t have that kind of head count.”
    “What about Messenger?” Nats asked.
    “Not even a footnote,” Death said dismissively.
    “Well, the putting us at our ease thing is really working,” Miss Framlicker observed.
    Then the skeletons of the dead began to rattle, join together, and rise up to attack the intruders.

***


    Lord Ultizon, master of the world, turned away from the adoring masses outside the Oval Office to look at the heroes who were filing in to see him. “Well?” he demanded.
    “They’ve smarter than I expected,” the Dark Knight reported. “The renegade Lair Legion didn’t use any of the prepared hidey-holes and fall-back covers we set up. We even checked that Magnetic Techbird hideout that Beth Shellett told us about. No luck. They may be getting outside help. We haven’t located Xander the Improbable yet, for example.”
    “We called Lisa to try and summons them,” NTU-150 offered. “But her powers are affected by your wonderful mind control, master, so she can’t lock on to them. We have the JBH and the Man Team out hunting for them., and we’ve sent Indiana Gnome and Gunther to the Gothametropolis Ghouls to see what they can do.”
    “We’ll get them,” Fin Fang Foom promised. “We know them. We know how they think. It’s only a matter of time.”
    “See that you do,” Ultizon told them. “This is already eating into my schedule for world harmony. Garrick?”
    The G-Man stepped forward with a clipboard. “We need metahuman assistance to implement the mass genocide programme that will bring the planet’s population down to sensible numbers,” he noted. “We have begun selecting the 20% of humanity fit to survive, and the remainder will assemble in designated areas until we can get round to eliminating them. In the meantime we can put them in work programmes to demolish places of worship, museums, art galleries, other useless relics of the former age.”
    “But you really need our help,” agreed Goldeneyed. “We’ll get the traitors very soon, master.”
    “I’m sure you will,” Lord Ultizon assured him. “When you find your former colleagues, kill them on sight.”
    “I’ve planned and prepared for this over and over,” the Dark Knight assured the master of the world. “Long before this current crisis came up. They’re as good as dead.”

***


    “Don’t look at me,” said Death as the last of the current wave of undead was mashed by Nats’ telekinetics and the Manga Shoggoth’s inexorable oozing. “They’re dead. Nothing to do with me.”
    “Hello?” Miss Framlicker pointed out. “You are called Death, right?”
    “Exactly. And these things are long dead. I did my bit for them a very long time ago. Not long after I first took human shape, really. These things that just attacked you are just… vestiges, animated to act a bit like they did in life. Not my department at all.”
    “I notice they didn’t attack you, though,” Al B. Harper observed, running a Transchordic Resonance Scanner over a shattered femur.
    “Of course not. They’re sensing life,” Death explained. “Which, pretty much by definition, isn’t me.”
    “So why are you here, dark angel?” the Manga Shoggoth rumbled.
    “Well, it’s a pretty quiet spot for when a girl wants to do a bit of pondering,” Death shrugged with Dancer’s shoulders. “But to tell you the truth, I thought I’d better be here to explain what was happening to Nats.”
    “To me?” Bill Reed swallowed.
    “Sure. Your friends brought you here to get you on your feet again after that Psychostave you became psionically linked to got shattered by Ultizon.”
    “Which is another thing,” Ziles interjected. “I thought Nats’ stick was pretty much indestructible?”
    “If it wants to be,” Death agreed. “Walk this way.”
    “If I could walk that way, I wouldn’t need the explanations,” muttered Bill Reed half-heartedly.
    Then another wave of skeletons rose to kill them.

***


    Chronic, Hatman, and Sorceress made their way towards the bar counter, pushing their way through a crowd of talking, drinking, seething super-villains. “Isn’t that Balefire over there, talking to CyberVenom?” Hatman twitched. If Ultizon hadn’t stopped everybody’s evil tendencies and revoked the most wanted list, the Lair Legion could have cleared up half a dozen cases in one fell swoop. “And Quake. And Anvil Man. Geez, Chronic, why didn’t you tell us about this place before?”
    “Hello? Bad guy?” The anarchist musician threaded his way to the front of the queue and caught the barman’s attention. “Hey, Grosso, got a minute? I’m looking for someone.”
    “Directions are expensive,” the fat barkeeper replied.
    “Pay him, Evil Executioner,” Chronic grinned at his companion. Hatman grudgingly handed over some crisp banknotes.
    “Well?”
    “We’re seeking an enforcer type,” Sorceress explained. “A brute calling himself Mr Oxalis.”
    “Works for Camellia,” Grosso answered.
    “Who?” Hatman puzzled. The barman reached out his hand for more payment.
    “Camellia of the Fey,” Sorceress scowled. “Runs a nightclub, an exclusive little place down by the Englehart Bridge in Paradopolis. The Willow.” She glanced around her at the seedy cellar with its shabby pool tables and smoke-stained ceiling. “A classy joint.”
    “Hey, there’s nothing wrong wit’ Grosso’s,” Grosso complained.
    Just then Savagetooth draped an arm over Sorceress’ shoulder and breathed beerily into her face. “Hey, babe, new in town? How about you and me go someplace private an’ compare powers?”
    “No need,” Sorceress told him, slipping out from the arm. “I’m a Fortuneteller, and I’m predicting that if you don’t go away right now a nasty misfortune will befall you.”
    “Hey, I’ve got adamantine bones and a healin’ factor,” leered Savagetooth. “Now show me what you got.”
    Hatman looped a rope round the berserker mutate’s neck. “She’s got a jealous boyfriend with a gift for knots and cords who knows that adamantine bones and healing factors mean squat of you can’t breathe.”
    “Hey, boys. No trouble in here,” Grosso warned them. “Remember the rules.”
    “I’m still paying for the furniture from last time,” Chronic complained. “And I was only…”
    He fell silent as he realised everybody in the bar was staring up at the entrance, where a young man in a conservative business suit and with a large green fern growing from his head stood looking down at them.
    “Er, hi,” spiffy told the room that included a good half of his rogues gallery. “I’m here on Master Ultizon’s business. So please don’t kill me. He wants you to know that everyone here’s drafted.”
    “Drafted?” complained Balefire. “What the hell for?”
    “To work with me and Fin Fang Foom and the others,” the fern-wielder explained. “To hunt down and destroy the rogue Lair Legion.”
    “Oh, okay,” Balefire agreed, along with everybody else.
    Chronic took another sip of his beer. “Whoops,” he breathed.
    “What’s the matter?” Hatman asked him. “We can just tag along, learn their plans, then slip away.”
    “Whoops because I forgot who sometimes moonlights here, slipping back on his old ways and associations,” Chronic answered, pointing over to the card table where one of the players had just recognised Evil Executioner and Fortuneteller.
    “Hey!” called Flapjack, dropping his six aces on the table and pointing. “That’s Hatman and Sorceress! Right there! Get ‘em!”

***


    “I think they’re getting tougher,” Al B. winced as Miss Framlicker detached a skull from his shin. “And more frequent.” The walk across the dead city had taken a couple of hours and maybe five thousand skeletons.
    “Now you’re being attacked by the bodies of the superhumans of the Second-Oldest Race,” Death explained. “They are favourite toys.”
    Nats didn’t like the sound of that. “Er…”
    “Of the Hero Feeders who are still trapped here,” Death explained. “The vestigial remains of the great Feeders that descended on the Second-Oldest Race to wipe them from history.”
    “They very nearly succeeded,” noted the Shoggoth. “So much of their art and science was lost in the assault, but some of their techniques lived on. The Librarians remembered the data-gathering methods. The Yellow Flashlight Corps kept their energy manipulation technology for a while. The Observers retained their monitoring sciences. Some of their bioengineering stayed with the Nacluv. But the source was erased.”
    “Not…lying around here waiting to be casually picked up by anyone who happens to slip past the impenetrable Space Robot defence barriers?” Ziles asked innocently.
    “One more time,” Miss Framlicker demanded through gritted teeth. “What actually happened?”
    “Here,” Nats breathed, looking up at a tall grey tower. All the buildings in the city had been leached of colour. “It happened here.”
    “A science building?” Al B. surged forwards to examine the devices inside more closely. “There are things here based on Celestian designs.”
    “The root of their great achievements,” the Shoggoth agreed. “Never again would the Space Robots willingly share their science with lesser races. Not after these consequences.”
    “This was where the Psychostave was made,” Nats announced, looking up at the massive engines. “It was the ultimate soul receptacle, designed to channel the psychic power of a whole people, of every sentient creature in the Second-Oldest Race’s empire. A massive weapon of last resort.”
    “Amazing how often last resorts come round,” spat Al B.
    “The Hero Feeders were overrunning them,” Death recalled. “Whole worlds, solar systems were being consumed. The people here feared the end. And the forces that governed the Parodyverse feared that its purpose would be undone.”
    “The purpose of the Parodyverse?” Al B. looked up sharply. “And that would be…?”
    “To resolve a question,” Death told him obscurely, but with a rueful smile. “It’s nearly set itself up to do that a few times. The first one was here. There were heroes not unlike your Lair Legion, and villains, and gods, and all the other stuff needed. Just like later in Atlantis, and Camelot. But the Hero Feeders broke through, and in the end the people felt they had to use the Psychostave.”
    None of the people in the great museum of technology noticed the gathering shadows as they spoke.
    “The Psychostave tapped all of their consciousnesses,” Nats shuddered, remembering with a deeper memory that stemmed from something that had been fed into him during his time as wielder of the walking stick. “They found some kind of sentience to put into the psychotronic cane they made, something that could direct all that collective thought energy. But it tapped their sub-consciousnesses too. Their destructive urges. Their own death-urges.”
    “Monsters from the id,” Al B. said. He felt somebody should quote the classic line.
    “Beware the ids that march,” Miss F quipped back.
    “The Psychostave needed lots of energy to destroy the Hero Feeders, I suppose,” the Manga Shoggoth calculated. “Life force, maybe, from a people whose self-destructive urges had been harnessed? And so a whole race was destroyed.”
    “Nearly wiped out by the Hero Feeders, then killed by their own defence,” Miss F winced.
    “Until only the Psychostave remained, hanging in space until it was retrieved eons later by the Makluans,” Nats surmised.
    “The Hero Feeders were diminished too,” Death told them. “They became sad lurkers on the edges of the Parodyverse, consuming but never giving back. The greatest of the survivors were trapped here when the Celestians intervened to seal off the Second Oldest Race’s empire forever, preserving it in stasis as you see it today.”
    “Trapped… here?” worried Al B. Harper.
    “Yessss,” the Hero Feeders answered. “And we are so very, very hungrrrryy…”

***


    If Amazing Guy was surprised when the fauna of Praxelis IV rose up and started speaking to him he didn’t show it.
    “Scott… Brunsen… We must… talk…”
    “Bog Thing? I didn’t know you could extend your plant control this far.”
    “I am… receiving aid from… the interplanetary book loan… service…” the guardian of the Nexus of Unreality (as previously mentioned) explained to the protector of the Parodyverse. “Your aid… is required…”
    AG looked around at the devastated planet. Most of the fires from the meteor swarm were out now, and the worst of the earthquakes were over. He’d managed to stabilise the tectonic plates. The people here could probably handle things on their own now. “What do you need?” he asked, even though he knew.
    “You are required… to assist in seeking… the Hooded Hood.”
    Amazing Guy felt a shiver run through him that was more than just the knowledge that this request had been predicted by the unpleasant intruder known as Exemplary. It was a warning from the micro-robots that infested his system, nanites programmed by the Shadow Cabinet to transmit information if he used his cosmic awareness to undertake certain tasks, of if he agreed to help the Lair Legion locate the supposedly-dead cowled crime czar. Exemplary had made it very clear that any breach of that kind would result in the similar nanites infecting AG’s wife and children to terminate their lives.
    AG had fled the Moon Public Library for fear that he had discovered too much and might have endangered those he loved. Now the decision had followed him.
    “You want me to help you find the Hood?”
    “Yes… Your assistance is… critical…”
    Scott Bryan’s eyes were cold as ice and hard as obsidian. “Right,” he answered, using his energy-construct abilities to purge himself of the nanite intruders. “I will.”
    His family were half a galaxy away, but Amazing Guy still felt them die.

***


    Nats had fought Hero Feeders before, but not like this. These creatures flickered with stolen thought, translucent monsters that wrapped around him, trying to gouge chunks of himself away. For their amusement they raised up the corpses of their old enemies and sent them spinning against each other in mock battle, or forced them to play out grotesque scenes from their former lives. They were strong, and powerful, and so evil he could feel them dirtying his mind as they scratched at him.
    “They’re too fast!” Ziles complained. “I’m running out of crèmes and salves, and generating a countervibrationary pulse is only slowing them down not stopping them!”
    “Try and keep them back a little longer,” Al B. Harper called out, slipping free from his labcoat as it was seized and then devoured by the Feeders. “If I can just get some of this old Celestian-based technology working…”
    “As if we didn’t have enough trouble,” winced Miss Framlicker as the attackers cornered her.
    “These Hero Feeders seem… stronger,” Manga Shoggoth noted as he competed in an enveloping contest with the shimmering parasites. “More dangerous.”
    Death wasn’t being attacked. The Hero Feeders hadn’t even noticed she was there. “They are stronger,” she advised. “These are the ones that actually managed to survive the first use of the Psychostave and the Celestian interdiction. What you’re encountering are the broken fragments of what they were then, but still very potent from your point of view.”
    “Yes… I noticed that,” Ziles agreed, clutching the tear on her shoulder and trying to fight off the excited Feeders with increasing desperation.
    “Any ideas other than helpful exposition?” Nats asked as the Feeders pressed him to the ground. He suddenly realised that he couldn’t remember any of his fourth grade classmates. “Fast ideas?”
    Death shrugged. “You know how they were beaten last time.”
    “The Psychostave,” Nats remembered. “But Ultizon snapped it. The power’s gone.”
    “The power is relocated,” the various ripped-apart sections of the Manga Shoggoth corrected. “The spirit that was called and captured by the circuitry of the stave to direct all that psionic energy of a race had to go somewhere. So it found the nearest convenient shelter.”
    And something inside Nats shifted and stirred and woke up.
    Nats screamed.
    In a terrifying flash, Al B. Harper understood why Death was waiting there for them. This had been a place where she had been hard at work before, and now it was time for a repeat performance. “Nats, no! Don’t! Don’t let it free! Don’t let it use the power!”
    Bill Reed could sense the thousands of dead worlds in the interdicted galaxy, and a hundred thousand living ones beyond it, ripe with thought-energies that could be so easily redirected from mere continuance of individual life to shining better purpose. He could destroy these Hero Feeders as their forebears had been smashed, not only beaten but hurled back down the evolutionary scale to insignificance. He could put right the universe, make it as it was meant to be. It was all so terribly, terribly simple.
Nats could change the Parodyverse.
    “Nah,” he said.
    The raging spirit in his mind seethed as he directed the minutest fraction of the telepathic force available to them to peel away the Hero Feeders and squash them. Even as he succeeded Nats could feel it pulling away, peeling off him, leaving him cold and empty as it left to find a worthier vessel for its destiny.
    The marching skeletons crashed to the ground in a rattle of rotten bone. The Hero Feeders were smeared away as if a giant thumb had squashed them. Ziles, Al B., Miss Framlicker, and the Manga Shoggoth looked around surprised to still be in existence. “You did it,” Miss F told Nats in a somewhat surprised tone. “Who would have guessed you had such self-restraint?”
    “I am not terribly familiar with human biology,” the Manga Shoggoth noted, “but shouldn’t Nats normally have a heartbeat and respiration?”
And overhead, the ancient stars that had been preserved by Celestian decree for so long began to wink out in heat death one by one.
    A l B. Harper summed up his professional opinion of the situation. “Oh crap.”

***


Next time: The Lair Legion undercover special. Falcon, thuddy, and DBS undercover at the casino. Yo, CSFB! and ManMan undercover at the ritzy Willow nightclub. Messenger undercover in the crime capital of the world – briefly. Hatman and Sorceress covered under a pile of supervillains. Dancer and the supervillain who wants to get under the covers with her. And the secret origin of Ultizon and the Psychostave uncovered. Brace yourselves for Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Badripoor Nights, coming to a screen near you same time next week.

***



The Inevitable Notes Section:

Fall of the Second-Oldest Race: We’ve touched on this before, but never as explicitly as here. It is now clear that the SOR used loaned Celestian technology to achieve their early greatness, but unwisely opened the first conduits to the Vortex or Nexus of Unrealities, loosing the primordial Hero Feeders on the Parodyverse. In desperation to stop the foes they had unleashed, the SOR used their technology to create the Psychostave, a powerful psionic focussing device that could harness the brain-power of their entire people and direct it to defeat the Hero Feeders. Some powerful organising sentience was bound within the stave to enable this transfer, and the nature of this sentience has not yet been chronicled (but see next ish). When the Psychostave was used, it acted on the unconscious death-wishes of the population as well as their conscious desire to defeat the Hero Feeders, breaking the primordial Feeders into the lesser creatures scavenging the Parodyverse today by using the whole life-force of the SOR’s empire. Realising what had been done with their technology, the Celestian Space Robots placed the entire Dead Galaxy behind a Barrier of Negativity, which only the Psychostave was able to escape. Between their spectacular mass suicide and the narrative ravages of the Hero Feeders, even the real name of the Second Oldest Race is now lost, but vestiges of their technology endure in other peoples. Their most telling legacy, however, are the myriad similar lifeforms they seeded on thousands of planets, and especially the bipedal humanoid form that the Space Robots seem so very interested in.

The Family of the Pointless are summarised in the text. Their other major appearance was in Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #44: The Family of the Pointless. Death was last seen chatting to (or being chatted up by?) the Hooded Hood just before his last resurrection.

Mr Oxalis, Camellia, and the Willow Nightclub were first chronicled in the Wangmundo series. Camellia of the Fey is a beautiful, treacherous, and wicked fairy. Her exclusive waterfront Willow nightclub is a place of dark delights and subtle entrapment. Mr Oxalis is her enforcer. More on this next issue.

Hero Feeders:, or Lurkers, are parasitical creatures that devour the very stories and characters of the Parodyverse, natural predators that slip through from the Nexus of Unreality on which the various dimensions hang to totally erase things from continuity. All those unfinished stories and characters we never hear of again? Hero Feeders. Some Feeders are more sophisticated and intelligent than others. Simonides Slaughter and most of the Inner Circle of the Heck-Fire Club are Hero Feeders, for example. The JBH encountered a planet where the Hero Feeders had taken on the shapes of vampires and bred humans for their table. Jarvis and Melissa discovered a Hotel in California occupied by Hero Feeder Sweet Transvestites. Dancer found Hero Feeder real estate agents. Any resemblance between Hero Feeders and board lurkers that don’t respond to people’s stories is purely coincidental.

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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