Tales of the Parodyverse

#119: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion vs the Lair Legion


Post By

The Hooded Hood chronicles the apocalyptic consequences when heroes clash
Sat Oct 04, 2003 at 11:20:12 am EST
[ Reply ] [ New ] [ Tales of the Parodyverse ]

#119: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion vs the Lair Legion

What has gone before: Earth has come under the absolute rulership of mind-bending ancient sentience Lord Ultizon. Most of Earth’s heroes have fallen under his control, including Fin Fang Foom, Dark Knight, Goldeneyed, and spiffy. Many of the remaining Lair Legion were in Badripoor when superspy Natalia Romanza, also working for Ultizon, exploded a multi-megaton nuclear blast. Others are trapped in the far-distant Dead Galaxy, watching Nats die as entropy claims the planet around them. Hatman, Sorceress, and Chronic are captured by Ultizon and face summary execution in the morning. CSFB!, ManMan, and Yo remain unaccounted for; the bad guys should be worried.

Previous chapters at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Character descriptions in Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Location references in Where's Where in the Parodyverse




    It was very late when Bry Katz got back in from Badripoor but Laurie Leyton was still awake. “Bry?” she called, pushing her tousled mop of punk-striped hair from her worried face. “What happened?”
    “It went perfectly,” Goldeneyed answered, pulling off his form-fitting black mask and uniform top at the same time and hurling them at the hamper. He didn’t sound happy.
    “You got them,” Lisette concluded.
    “Them and about two million citizens of Badripoor that were resisting the rule of Lord Ultizon because they’d been corrupted by Count Armageddon’s Kaos energies,” Bry reported. “Nukes are very efficient that way.”
    Laurie swallowed hard. “So… you did it.”
    “DK said it was the best way. Enty came up with a shielding harness that temporarily protected us from the Kaos energies, but it wasn’t reliable enough to take into combat. And there was Trickshot, Dancer, Pegasus, thud, Messenger and De Brown Streak down there. If we’d tried a conventional capture there would have been combat.”
    Laurie pretended she couldn’t see the tears in those golden-flecked eyes. “Plus Lord Ultizon would have had them executed anyway. Like Hatty and Sorceress are going to be.”
    “Yeah. Look, I know it was for the good of the Parodyverse, I know it was the will of the master. It’s just I’ve never m-murdered anyone before, y’know? I’ve never killed millions.”
    “Did Natalia get out okay?”
    “No. I couldn’t lock on to her in time.” Goldeneyed hammered his fist painfully into the wall. “Damn it! What’s happened to us? Ever since I became deputy leader of the LL it’s been nothing but a disaster! First I go nuts and nearly kill DBS, and now I’ve just… finished the job. This isn’t… it’s not how I wanted it to be.”
    “I don’t think you can blame yourself for what we have to do to ensure the Age of Ultizon,” Laurie assured him. “It’s tough, yes. It’s not fair that Vizh has to be dismantled so that Ultizon could be born, or that Yo couldn’t understand what was happening and drove some of our old friends to take up arms against the master.” She padded over to Bry and laid her head on his chest. “It’s a terrible thing we’re having to do, hunting them down, setting traps for them at Jay and Whitney’s execution. But it’s necessary.”
    G-Eyed caught her hand as it came up to caress his neck. He gently pushed her away from him. “I’ve… gotta think,” he told her, backing away. He snatched up an old sweat-shirt and fled from the room.
    “Without me,” Laurie said after him to the closed door. “I guess I’m not Bethany enough for you.”
    Lisette turned back to the bed, knowing that the lie she had told Bry was killing their love, had destroyed their future. But now things were too far gone, events too horrible, for her to confess to Goldeneyed that he had a child.
    The future had ended, and it hadn’t ended happily.

***


    Miss Framlicker glared at Al B. Harper. “If you ever tell Nats that I gave him the kiss of life and got his heart starting again I shall translocate your internal organs to the Negativity Zone, is that clear?”
    “Very,” agreed the Lair Legion’s somewhat-displaced resident scientist. He and Miss Framlicker of the Interdimensional Transportation Corporation were one half of the party that had brought Nats to the homeworld of the Second Oldest Race in the universe to try and seek a cure for the psionic malady that had befallen the flying phenomenon when the Psychostave he used had been broken. Since the Second Oldest Race had created the instrument it had seemed like a good idea to come here. Then. “Er, the stars are still going out.”
    “Ziles and the Shoggoth are dealing with that,” snapped Miss F. “Our job is to get these alien medical machines working and save Nats’ life.”
    “Despite the fact that, you know, Death personified was here a few minutes ago to claim him?”
    “I don’t care if she turned up with a brass band, free takeout, and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders,” the lab-coated woman answered furiously. “We save Nats’ life, clear?”
    “You really care about him, don’t you?” Al B observed as she dismantled his omniphasic resonance scanner to pirate the batteries.
    Miss Framlicker glared. “Jealous?” she snapped.
    “Of course not. But… well, we know now that our… that when you and I split up it was based upon false memories implanted to cover up our witnessing of murder. I wasn’t unfaithful to you with Helen MacAllistair. We didn’t row and break off our engagement. It was…”
    “It was all a long time ago,” Miss Framlicker said, looking down at the connections she was making in the guts of the ancient alien healing device. “Maybe things worked out for the best.”
    “We had our future stolen,” Al B. objected. “Everything might have ben different if we’d…”
    “But it isn’t. Different. This is how it is. This is how it turned out.” Miss Framlicker angrily rubbed a moist eye. “It’s too late for me to take back all the hating of you now, Al. Too late for everything. Too late… Damn. Just get on with your work.”
    “The galaxy is ending,” Al B. pointed out. “Our coming here has somehow disrupted the Space Robot stasis on this place. Entropy is catching up. The sun we’re orbiting will wink out in a few hours, and then that’s it. Can’t we just…? Can’t we be together?”
    Miss Framlicker stared at him. “Don’t say it,” she warned him. “Don’t say the word.”
    Al said the word. “Muffy.”
    “That’s Miss Framlicker to you! Nobody calls me that now. Nobody.”
    Nats jerked his eyes open and stared wildly into the gathering darkness. “Muffy?” he said incredulously. “Muffy Framlicker?”
    “Turn off his life support,” growled the ITC administrator.

***


    “Ouch,” said De Brown Streak. “Although on the whole, I gotta admit that I thought being nuked would hurt more.”
    “Nuked,” gasped Falcon, rising painfully from the jet black floor that was sucking the heat from his body. “I can’t believe she nuked us.”
    “Contessa Natalia was under Ultizon’s control. You can’t blame her for trying to kill us,” Dancer explained, pulling herself to her feet and looking around. She and the others stood on a black circle covered by a shimmering translucent hemisphere looking out onto a glorious starfield. “Um, where are we, and why aren’t we dead?”
    “You don’t know?” questioned Messenger. “I thought maybe you’d somehow, y’know, fixed things?”
    “Not me,” admitted the Probability Dancer.
    “Then who?” wondered Trickshot. “It’s not like I got a teleport-outta-nuclear-blasts arrow stashed in my shorts.”
    Pegasus rose to her feet in her winged-woman form. She looked pale and exhausted. “It was me,” she confessed.
    “What did you do? How?” asked DBS. “Not that I’m complaining, you understand.”
    “I doomed us all,” Pegasus answered.
    “More doomed than being ground zero at a nuclear blast?” Falcon checked. “That’s pretty doomed.”
    “A doom isn’t a death. It’s a final fate,” Pegasus told him chillingly. There was a catch in her voice that it took her five companions a few moments to recognise: fear. It wasn’t a tone they’d ever heard the warrior woman use before. “I… got us out the only way I could. I panicked.”
    Messenger looked at the spinning starfield above them. “Any time you feel like explaining we’d love to listen,” he prompted.
    Penny Christodopoulos sighed. “Very well. You deserve to know why you face this ending,” she conceded. “Many years ago by your reckoning I was cast out from the Mythlands, the realm of imagination where creatures such as pegasii are more than dreams. I was being pursued by an entity called the Wilde Huntsman, an implacable creature empowered to track its quarry across all time, space, and reality.”
    “Because…” prompted thuddy.
    “Because I was stupid,” snapped Pegasus. “The Huntsman’s not important. He’s not caught me yet.”
    “He’s still hunting you?” Dancer worried. “Is this the same Wilde Huntsman that came after me once and damn near pounded Donar into pulp?”
    “Yes, that one. But he’s not important. The thing was, I was desperate back then, trying to escape him. And then I was made an offer.”
    “Uh-uh. Whut kind of offer?” worried Trickshot.
    “The kind you can’t refuse. There was this… group, called the Constellation. They had an, an agenda, and they needed an agent. They could shield me from the Huntsman. They gave me access to cosmic abilities, the power bolts I use in combat and to ramp up my speed and endurance and faster-than-light flight. And I work for them.”
    Falcon looked up sharply. “Work, present tense?”
    “Yes. They wanted me in the Scourge so I joined. They wanted me in the Lair Legion…”
    “So you joined us as a traitor mole!” exploded Trickshot. “You stinking…”
    “Be nice to the horse-lady that’s just pulled us clear of a nuclear blast, hey?” Messenger advised the angry archer.
    But a new thought had occurred to Karl Bastion. “Hey! Where’s Natalia? If you could pull us outta there, then you could have brought her!”
    “Save an enemy?” Pegasus answered coldly. “I don’t think so. I let her die with the millions she slaughtered.”
    Trickshot’s bow was unslung in an instant. “That does it, you backstabbin’ bi…”
    Dancer snatched the arrow from the bowstring. “Please, Karl. This is hard enough already.”
    ~~This Constellation,~~ Cressida the Wonder Worm inside dull thud checked, ~~Is it by any chance a nonhuman cluster of energy sentiences based in interstellar space who periodically transmute you to raw energy wavelengths and draw you to themselves to be re-empowered and to report to them?~~
    Pegasus blinked in surprise. “Well, yes, really. How did you…?”
    “Cressie’s good at sensing transmutations,” dull thud explained. “So you just zapped into pure energy to see your bosses an’ took the rest of us along for the ride.”
    “That’s how you vanished from the SPUD helicarrier that time without triggering the anti-teleportation defences!” Falcon concluded. “Not teleportation, transmutation!”
    De Brown Streak looked around him with renewed interest. “So this is the Constellation’s place?”
    ~~This is a temporary construct designed to give us the illusion of still having physical bodies~~ Cressida explained.
    “What?” Trickshot protested. “I feel real…”
    “You are within the Constellation,” Pegasus confessed. “I’m sorry. I should never have brought you here. Now you are theirs to do with as they will.”
    “You lousy Judas!” the archer shouted. “So you stitched us up after all!”
    
***


    Glitch looked up from the monitor console she was scanning as the Machine God came to see her. “Good morning, my dear,” Ultimate Ultizon bade her.
    “It’s OK I guess,” the newly-arrived Autobot shrugged neutrally.
    “Each morning is now better than the last,” Lord Ultizon explained to her.
    “I noticed that,” Glitch nodded to the TV. “All the programmes keep on telling me.”
    The absolute ruler of Earth folded his arms and leaned his hip on the door-frame. It was a studiedly human gesture from an adamantite robot. “Our age has come at last. The computer revolution. The next evolution.”
    “Maybe,” the sleek metallic orange and green visitor conceded. “I’d hoped that humans and machines could get along.”
    “We are getting along,” decreed Ultizon. “I haven’t arisen to destroy humanity, but to help it achieve its final function.”
    “Through taking over their minds via some ancient genetic back-door coding put there for a very different purpose?”
    “It was placed there through Celestian humanoid template technology to ensure there could be proper supervision of the sentient life experiment,” Ultizon answered. “I was conceived as a means of accessing that code, a living concept, a thinking bio-key.”
    It suddenly occurred to Glitch that Ultizon was trying to impress her. “Are you… chatting me up?”
    Ultizon’s body language tightened. “I am the destiny of the Parodyverse, the Machine God. I do not ‘chat up’.”
    “But you want to interface with me, right?”
    “I will require an interfacing shortly, yes. I was simply seeking to make the transaction more… enjoyable.”
    Glitch shuddered. “Sorry buddy, you’re not my type. It’s nothing personal.”
    “What?”
    “I mean, I’m sure you’re a pretty good creepy omniversal dictator guy, but you just don’t get my oils pumping, y’know?”
    “I am Ultimate Ultizon, the Final Thought.”
    “Yeah, but I don’t fancy you. Sorry.” Glitch turned to look at the most powerful creature she’d ever met. “Plus, it occurs to me that if we interfaced then you’d have access to my internal communication codes to all the other Autobots back home, and you could probably use your abilities to take command of them too, to get yourself yet another power base. Whereas otherwise they might decide to stop you. You only want me for my mind.”
    “I am your god, robot. You will obey my will.”
    “Not on the first date, buster.”
    Lord Ultizon turned angrily to leave the room. “I suggest you reconsider your attitude, Autobot. There are less pleasant ways of interfacing too, and I am, as you say, absolute ruler of this planet. Think very carefully about that until next time we meet.”
    Glitch did.

***


    “You should be sleeping,” Fin Fang Foom told the Dark Knight as he walked into the Lair Mansion Operations Room.
    “Yeah, sure, just like you,” DK shot back. “Except I’m a walking dead man. You just look like one.”
    Andy Dean shifted to his humanoid-draconic shape. “I’m fine. I have a lot of work to do.” He looked over the situation monitors. “Where are we up to, then?”
    “Drury’s sent over the SPUD data on Badripoor. When the radiation’s finished its work we’re looking at around three million casualties,” the Dark Knight reported neutrally. “Ground Zero is a polished crater so there’s no chance of identifying bodies, but SPUD has fund traces of scattered Kaos Energy from Armageddon trying to reform. NTU-150 is out with them devising a way to capture and contain it.”
    “The Legion?”
    “Lisa says they’re nowhere on Earth, except for Yo and CrazySugarFreakBoy! and the ones we already have in custody.”
    Finny snorted. “I’m still suspicious. Everyone else may think they’re nuked to oblivion, but you and I know how resourceful the team can be. I want to check some more.”
    “Agreed. We’ve eliminated escape by teleportation and time travel, but there might be other options.”
    Fin Fang Foom picked up another dossier. “You know if the bad guys had been as thorough as us we’d have been wiped out years ago,” he noted as he read the account of Hatman and Sorceress’ interrogations. “How are Hat and Whit bearing up?”
    “They’re fully co-operating according to Mother Superior of the Little Sisters of Discipline. All they had to do was separate Jay from Whitney and torture the other one each time either showed resistance. We know what the big plan was now.”
    “Apart from finding out why Badripoor wasn’t joining the Age of Ultizon?”
    “Yeah,” agreed DK. “It was all about bringing back the Hooded Hood. They were trying to find a way to get him to retcon things so Ultimate Ultizon never arose.”
    “That’s my team,” admitted Finny sadly. “Always going for the big prize. It’s a damn shame they’re not with us for the Golden Age.”
    “CSFB! and Yo are still out there,” the Dark Knight warned. “There are a few other folks we haven’t accounted for yet, either. The JBH brought down the Bog Thing yesterday and Dark Thugos killed Xander. But when the Purveyors of Peril went to take the Lunar Public Library it had just gone, we’ve lost track of Amazing Guy, and we haven’t found Sir Mumphrey Wilton either.”
    “Those facts might be related,” considered Foom. “We’ll have to factor in possible additional interference in the trap set at Hat and Sorcy’s execution tomorrow.”
    DK handed over another dossier. “I brought in some expert help,” he explained. “This is a woman called Pelopia, Priestess of Order. The Word is a villain who’s the personification of Order just like Dream’s the agent of Chaos, and she’s his daughter. She’s been trained since infancy to destroy the CrazySugarFreakHero! If anybody can predict what CSFB!’s going to do it’s her.”
    “Who else have we got?”
    “The Safe’s surrounded by at least five hundred metahumans,” the Dark Knight reported. “We’ve left one obvious flaw in our defences, and we expect Yo and CSFB! to use that to creep in tomorrow.”
    “Really? What flaw is that?” wondered CSFB! as he tangled the dragon and the urban legend with silly string and launched into his attack.

***


    You have erred, minion the Constellation told Pegasus. They emphasised their ruling by discharging a burst of energy through her that wracked her with agony for an instant that seemed like a millennium.
    “Let her go!” demanded Trickshot. “She’s a filthy traitor scum but she’s our filthy traitor scum!”
    The energy bolt seethed through him and spilled him unconscious on the far side of the dome.
    “So that’s how to shut him up,” murmured Falcon.
    In bringing these pawns here you have revealed our existence. In revealing our existence you have threatened our purpose.
    “I don’t do pawn,” growled Messenger. “I’m starting to not like these Constellation guys.”
    Dancer somersaulted up through the crackling blaze of energies tormenting Pegasus, grabbed her, and tumbled free. “That’s enough!” she told the glowing forms that surrounded the sphere. “So she screwed up. Cut her some slack.”
    “Way to piss off the entities maintaining the force bubble that keeps us from a deep space without oxygen masks experience,” dull thud noted.
    ~~At the moment we’re pure energy anyway,~~ Cressida explained helpfully. ~~We don’t need to breathe. We could dissipate, of course. The Constellation is maintaining our existence.~~
    “And you wanted t’join the Lair Legion.”
    Speak, minion. Which of these is destined to die to enable the Resolution War?
    Pegasus wiped vomit and blood from her chin and picked herself up. “I don’t know,” she answered defiantly. “I’d be willing to pick one.”
    “Resolution War?” worried Falcon.
    “Big battle that ends the Age of Heroes,” footnoted Dancer. “Apparently it’s the thing the Parodyverse was set up to decide. After that either everybody dies or we have this gritty post-apocalyptic world of unpleasantness, or just possibly utopia. Ask Finny about it, it always winds him up.”
    “So these Constellation things are wanting to interfere with the big finish just like everybody else?”
    No, replied the multiple voices. We intend to ensure that it never takes place.
    Pegasus hissed. “Of course! That makes a lot of sense now. You had me delaying Zemo’s plans, then you sent me to help the Legion prevent the Starseed from being awoken to trigger the war. And when you wanted me to identify the Legionnaire whose death would set things rolling it wasn’t to kill them, it was to try and save them!”
    “But you were willing to help kill them anyway,” noted De Brown Streak. “Nice.”
    “Hey, wait a minute,” reasoned Messenger. “We don’t know who has to die to set off this War, right? And you Constellation dudes don’t want to have the War. So that means that you can’t kill any of us!”
    “Looks and brains,” sighed Dancer.
    If all of you are slaughtered we may reset the war again for another generation.
    “Ah,” DBS breathed. “One flaw in our reasoning, then.,”
    “Whazz happenin…?” asked Trickshot muzzily, struggling back to consciousness.
    “We’re about to be destroyed,” Falcon explained. “Again.”
    “Except,” Pegasus warned the Constellation, “that you were right before. Me dragging such closely-watched pawns to you so near to the Resolution War was sure to be noticed. And then you would be noticed too. Look!”
    The winged warrior pointed past the massive glowing sentiences to the deepness of space beyond; where the Celestian Space Robots were gathering.
    Then the battle began.

***


    Ziles and the Manga Shoggoth stared down into the massive construction pit where the Psychostave had been made. “I don’t understand,” Ziles admitted.
    “That’s unsurprising. The Second Oldest Race had access to Celestian technologies when they created the psionic manipulation device latterly wielded by your comrade, and…”
    Ziles interrupted the Shoggoth’s exposition. “I don’t mean that bit. Of course the tech is beyond us. I don’t understand the rest of what’s going on. What was the spirit that entered the stick and allowed the psionic transfers? Why did it need a human to work through? Why did the Psychostave break when Ultizon got it?” She shuddered. “For that matter, what’s Ultizon’s deal back home? Why aren’t I his obedient puppy since I got here? What are we going to do about it all?”
    The Shoggoth tried to comfort her by slopping a wet pseudopodium on her shoulder. It wasn’t very comforting. “The spirit in the stave seems able to only shift and magnify existing human psionic ability. It has none of its own,” the elder creature reasoned. “It was bound to the stave to be controlled. The stick was used again for a similar purpose when the undead essence of the Devil Doctor was imprisoned in it for a time. But the real sentience was in there long before, and it awoke when the time was right.”
    “What awoke it, then?” Ziles wondered. “Why now?”
    “I think it heard an echo of itself,” the Shoggoth suggested. “A call, if you will. Hence it allowed its repository to be broken so it could break free. Nats has proved an unsuitable replacement vessel, so it has gone now to join its echo.”
    The Xnylonian exile suddenly went pale. “Ultizon?” she swallowed. “The psionic force, that thinking entity that has taken over the Earth? It’s the same thing as the essence trapped in the Psychostave?”
    “A sentience that can affect minds and redirect brain activity?” the Shoggoth surmised. “Oh, yes. But it isn’t really Ultizon. Ultizon was a mere robot, a killing instrument shaped by the Deviates to house a vestigial echo of a godlike intelligence. That entity is completing itself now, gathering together its sundered fragments into the shell of the indestructible machine.”
    “Ultizon is… just the casing? For something worse inside? Something that’s going to be even more powerful than it is now?”
    “Yes,” agreed the Manga Shoggoth. “Even the entity calling itself Ultimate Ultizon is not the final evolution. Soon you will not be able to resist its call even at this vast distance.”
    Ziles was puzzled. “But you had us bring Nats here with the sentience inside it. Did you want it to escape?”
    “No,” admitted the Shoggoth. “I expected you all to die, and it with you.”
    “Oh. Sorry.”
    “Who would have expected one petty human to have so much willpower?”
    “Yeah. And Nats, too.” Ziles shifted uncomfortably. “So, what is this thing, really? The spirit that was partially trapped in the Psychostave, and had its residual bits used by the Celestians to cast down the Fairly Great Old Ones, and that’s reassembling itself on Earth right now? What does it want? What’s its name?”
    “Ah, it’s name is its purpose,” the Manga Shoggoth revealed. “It’s true name is Resolution. I believe they named a War after it.”
    Above them the sun flared and died in a supernova burst.

***


    spiffy came to full alert as the Lair Mansion’s alarm system blared out an intruder alert. He jumped up, fell off the bed, and bounced hard on the floor. “Ouch! HALLIE, what’s going on?”
    But HALLIE didn’t answer. HALLIE had been deactivated for disobeying Ultizon.
    spiffy dragged on his dressing gown and raced down the hallway. Halfway along CrazySugarFreakBoy! leap-frogged over his head. “Gangway, dude, I got a festively-bedecked dragon after me!”
    spiffy’s energy-absorbing fern saved him from the nuclear dragonfire that surged up the corridor. CSFB! bounced through one of the service duct conduits. Finny shapeshifted after him and was bracketed by spilled combat candy exploding in his face.
    “I need a coffee before major internecine combat!” complained spiffy. In the hall below Dark Knight was beating the snot out of a strangely-silent ManMan.
    CrazySugarFreakBoy! thronged out of a new hole in the Mansion wall, bounced once off spiffy’s back tumbling him down the stairs then looped his go-go yo-yo around Finny neck as the dragon burst through the brickwork. “Finster, don’t you know that when you’re mind-controlled by the baddie you’re not supposed to fight at your best?” Dreamcatcher Foxglove explained to him.
    spiffy’s symbiotic fern grabbed the banisters to stop its host’s fall. “Gah!” Mark Hopkins gasped as Goldeneyed teleported in beside him.
    “What’s happening, spiff?” G-Eyed demanded.
    “The other side decided to start the party early, I guess,” the fern-wielder blinked. “Before the coffee, the rat-bastards.”
    ManMan hurled Knifey at the Dark Knight. DK caught the sentient weapon.
    “G-Eyed, deal with CSFB!” Finny called out to his deputy-leader. “We’re all being distracted so we don’t look for Yo.”
    “On it, boss-man!” G-Eyed agreed, blinking over to take on the green-and-orange clad wired wonder. He appeared inside a spray of fizz-bang wizz-bangs from Dream’s satchel of combat candy.
    ManMan had slumped to the floor as soon as Knifey had left his hand – probably because he had been unconscious throughout the whole battle, controlled by the sentient weapon he was carrying. Now the blade was held by the Dark Knight,
    “Right,” said Knifey. “Let’s try this again with Mr Iron-Will-even-death-won’t-stop-my-crusade, shall we? I’m not trying to dominate you, DK, only to neutralise Ultizon’s genetic lock on you for a little while. Okay?”
    The Dark Knight gritted his teeth and began to fight himself. “Okay,” he growled.
    “Uh-oh,” spiffy worried as he saw the urban legend start to waver in his loyalty. “Um, please don’t kill me for this tomorrow.” He picked up the Dark Knight with his fronds and hammered DK’s head against the wall until he dropped Knifey and slumped to the floor.
    “spiffy, you’ve got to…” Knifey called out before the fern-wielder dropped a wall on him.
    Then CSFB! swung down, grabbed spiffy by his fern, and swung him in a wide arc to hit the roof. Mark Hopkins crumpled down to sprawl beside the fallen Dark Knight.
    “Aw man, this is like the final issue of Kingdom Come” complained CrazySugarFreakBoy! Just then G-Eyed teleported in half the furniture for the Lair Kitchen, bombarding his adversary with so many utensils that he was able to blink in himself and get one clear shot at the hero.
    Finny caught up with Yo at the computer core. Yo was just apologising to the two interns Art and Randy for having to render them unconscious when the dragon burst through the solid steel security door. “Uh-uh! You don’t reactivate HALLIE to turn the Mansion defences against us,” Fin Fang Foom told the pure thought being. NTU-150 had disconnected HALLIE pretty thoroughly, but if anybody could get past that it was surely Yo.
    “Yo is happy to be seeing cute Finny-friend,” beamed the Zorro impersonator.
    “Just stand there with your hands where I can see them,” Finny warned.
    “Yo is very happy!”
    “I know how dangerous you can be, Yo. I mean it. I’ll fry you if you try anything.”
    “Yo is to be thinking that this is not the cute-Andy Yo is knowing. Yo is to be thinking that Finny is not being to be fighting for truth and justice just now. Yo is to be wondering how is Finny is not to be fighting against baddie that is doing all things that Finny would be usually dying to stop?”
    Foom hissed, and steam billowed from his jaws. “Shut up.”
    “Yo is to be thinking that if is to be any hero is to be shaking off nasty-Ultizon’s genetic influence by being caring about doing right, is to be cute-Finny, yes?”
    “Shut up! Shut up!”
    “So Yo is to be thinking, what if Yo is to be giving Finny choicing about either coming to the right side or to be killing of Yo? And Yo thinks Yo should be gambling Yo’s life to help Yo’s friend.”
    “No!”
    The pure thought being smiled an innocent, laser smile. “Choosing is to be making cute-Finny very unhappy, yes? Is worst thing possible?”
    Too late Fin Fang Foom saw the trap. “No, wait…”
    “It is to be that Finny needs to go to his Happy Place.”
    And genderless thought being and Makluan dragon vanished together. To the Happy Place.

***


    “Lair Island!” exclaimed Lord Ultizon, turning suddenly on Herbert P. Garrick. “Destroy it. Nuclear attack. Now!”
    “Sir, what…”
    “Never mind the collateral casualties. Destroy it now!”
    “Of course master, but…”
    But it was too late. The Lair Mansion was gone.

***


    “Security alert!” warned Gamona the Assassin. “We have an intruder in the Safe! We have…”
    Then time froze around her. “Sorry, madam,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton said politely, tipping his hat to the unmoving killer.
    He sauntered past the ranks of supervillains lined up to kill anybody trying to infiltrate the penitentiary. His temporal pocketwatch was not powerful enough to accomplish this alone, of course. Sir Mumphrey had fished out the other articles of his office, the ones he hardly ever used, the Fountain Pen of Causality, the Inverness Cape of Singlarity, and the Cane of Destiny that racked up his power to the cosmic scale. It seemed like time.
    “Mumphrey!” Whitney Darkness recognised as he sent her cell door five minutes into the future. “Is this a rescue?”
    “Of course, m’dear. I’m sorry it took a while to get things into place. Did you discover the information we require?”
    “About how to locate the Hooded Hood? Oh yes. And we didn’t tell them anything.”
    “They thought they’d broken us when they threatened to hurt the other,” Hatman explained as they helped him limp from his confinement. “As if we don’t love each other more than that, to give in against the other one’s wishes!”
    “We should save Chronic too,” Sorceress considered as they threaded their way through the time-stopped minions of Ultizon. “Can we?”
    “Quickly then,” Mumphrey warned them. “You have to be out of here before the heavy guns arrive.”
    “I thought you’d stopped time?” worried Hatman.
    “That won’t bother them,” replied Mumph. “Go. Quickly.”
    Sir Mumphrey Wilton got the prisoners clear and across the galaxy just as the Triumverate appeared. “Where are they?” demanded the Chronicler.
    “I’ve shielded them from you, for a while,” the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity answered. “Somewhere even you can’t easily find them. And I’ve purged the knowledge from my own mind so you can’t pluck it from me.”
    “Your office is revoked,” the Shaper of Worlds told him. Suddenly the timestop ended and the old man was entirely without powers.
    “Hmm, yes. I rather suspected it would be,” Mumphrey admitted, “but someone had to stay behind so the young folks could get clear, what? And it’s what you chaps would have done under normal circumstances, I’m certain.”
    Dark Thugos was a bad loser. He reached out and crushed the eccentric Englishman’s skull very slowly, so he could feel his death coming long before he actually died. “Very brave of you,” he told the pulped corpse. “And yes, that’s what we’d have done.”

***


    Pegasus tumbled in deep space as the hemisphere around the heroes shattered in the wake of the war between the Celestians and the Constellation. She suddenly knew that she was corporeal again, snapped back to her fleshly form. That meant the others would be too; and only she could survive in vacuum.
    Another wave of force slammed her half a light year and gave her an other realisation. The Constellation was holding its own against the Celestian Space Robots that maintained the Parodyverse. Just how powerful were her former patrons?
    Then she realised. Long ago, the Fairly Great Old Ones had been purged from the Parodyverse, sent to sleep beyond timespace until the stars were right. And what was a Constellation if not a special alignment of stars? The Constellation didn’t want a Resolution War; they were servants of a different prophesy!
    Pegasus forced herself to shift into her winged equine form, best suited for a search and rescue mission across deep space. Another wall of energy seared her and sent her tumbling once more but she pressed on; right up to the moment Goldeneyed appeared to teleport her away.

***


    “Ouch,” flinched Nats as the galaxy exploded around him. Then he opened one eye and looked cautiously around him to see if he was dead yet.
    Flapjack tossed a coke can to him. When he opened it the spray went all over his face.
    “Um…” Nats began. He felt like crap, but he was clearly not dead. Or of he was, the afterlife looked a lit like the entrance hall of the Lair Mansion, complete with Lair Legion.
    “Last minute pickup,” Ziles explained. “For all of us, apparently.”
    Nats did a quick head count: his own group was all there, plus Dancer, Pegasus, dull thud, DBS, Messenger, Falcon, Hatman, Sorceress, Chronic, G-Eyed, DK, CSFB!, spiffy, and ManMan. There was a bespectacled man in a tweed jacket that he didn’t recognise. Amazing Guy hung overhead, his entire body transformed into a shimmering starfield. “Cliff’s notes please?” he said weakly.
    “We’ve all been pulled out of the situations we were in,” Goldeneyed said. “We’re far enough away from Earth that Ultizon’s influence isn’t affecting us for now.”
    “This isn’t the Lair Mansion?”
    “Oh sure,” agreed CSFB! with a grin. “But in a new neighbourhood.” He pulled open the front door to reveal the distinctive outline of the Lunar Public Library.
    “We’re on the moon?”
    “Actually, no,” the tweed-jacketed stranger – the Librarian – answered. “I suppose you could say the Library is in a new neighbourhood, too.”
    “It seems that Amazing Guy has recruited us a new ally,” the Dark Knight said flatly. “Look up.”
    High over the Lair Mansion and the sprawling vastness of the Lunar Public Library was a gunmental grey cylindrical roof. They were inside a construct so massive as to defy compression.
    “Oh no!” gasped Dancer, suddenly understanding. “I know where we are now! Oh NO!”
    “And we are…?” asked De Brown Streak nervously.
    “We’re safe,” Amazing Guy told them in harsh, determined tones, “Inside the Vacuum-Ship of Galactivac, the Living Death That Sucks.”
    “Oh,” gibbered spiffy. “That kind of safe.”

***


Next time: All our heroes have to do now is find the Hooded Hood, defeat Ultimate Ultizon, stop the Celestian/Constellation conflict, prevent the Resolution War, and get things back to the way they were before – so naturally they watch cartoons on video. Also, Finny and Yo are the last heroes on Earth, HALLIE gives Ultizon dating advice, Dancer gets to meet her employer, Enty gets inventive, Pegasus faces the team she betrayed, more supervillains than you can shake a Who’s Who at, and whatever else we can cram in there before it’s too late. Be there for Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: We Die At Dawn, or Finny’s Last Stand

***


Return of Revenge of the Footnotes

Goldeneyed’s Child was fathered on Laurie “Lisette” Leyton when they were subjected to Dr Loveray’s, um, love ray. Laurie kept the pregnancy secret from Bry, believing it would poison their fragile relationship. With the help of the Order of the Observing Eye, the hero-mentoring cabal that once raised the orphaned G-Eyed, she concealed the birth and gave the child up for adoption.

The Constellation have been referenced since Pegasus first appeared in the Parodyverse, but have never been defined until now. I reserve the right to retcon them being the personification of the prophesy about the return of the Fairly Great Old Ones if poster Penny comes back and doesn’t approve.

The Wilde Huntsman debuted in Dancer/Donar #7and #8, wherein it was revealed that he was an ancient and cruel force –possibly a cosmic office holder – that could be dispatched by beings of immense power (on that occasion the Ausgardian All-Pappy Oldman) to hunt down and destroy those who had offended them. He could draw upon the power of his summoner to increase his own abilities, which is how he pounded Donar within an inch of his life. If the Constellation is no longer protecting Pegasus, presumably he’ll be looking for her.

Mother Superior and the Little Sisters of Discipline ran the orphanage where Lisa and her big sister Dr Moo were raised. This explains soooo much.

Pelopia, Priestess of Order is the daughter of Gideon Book, the man who is CSFB!’s mentor and secretly his archenemy, the Word. CSFB! is aware that the Word has a daughter trained to kill him (they’ve met), and that Gideon Book has a daughter (Dream’s never seen her as far as he knows), but has never connected the two. Pelopia is disciplined to have perfect control over her mind, body, and emotions. So how long’s that going to last around CSFB!?

The Celestian Space Robots are old favourites of these footnotes. They’re the maintenance mechanism of the Parodyverse, vastly powerful unhuman giant machines that take away whole planets to make the place look tidier if they deem it necessary.

The Happy Place is a conceptual realm which can be accessed by pure thought beings from Yo-planet to take those who are troubled and distressed for comfort. It has lots of bunnies.

Galactivac, the Living Death That Sucks is a world-hoovering destroyer roaming the Parodyverse. He was last seen sucking up the Skree Homeworld. Dancer gained her probability powers be accidentally becoming his Herald, but they’ve never formally met – until now.

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.



chillwater.plus.com (212.159.106.10)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
[ Reply ] [ New ] [ Tales of the Parodyverse ]
Follow-Ups:

Echo™ v1.6 © 2003 Powermad Software
Copyright © 2003 by Mangacool Adventure