Tales of the Parodyverse

#121: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The Issue Before It Gets Far Too Weird


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The Hooded Hood concludes this section of our ongoing plot with a party, and everyone's invited.
Sat Oct 18, 2003 at 06:52:07 am EDT
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#121: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The Issue Before It Gets Far Too Weird




    It was the party before the end of the world.
    All along the waterfront revellers lurched in drunken celebration. Some waved flags or carried flashlights. Others embraced, or laughed, or cried. There was plenty of liquor, liberated from stores whose owners no longer cared what became of their stock. A hundred different kinds of music blared out across the promenade.
    In the morning Ultizon would announce his brilliant programme for bringing the world’s population under control, a campaign of euthanasia to reduce the human race by four fifths. Tonight those who expected to die for being unworthy – far more than four fifths of the population – enjoyed their last night of life and partied because there was no tomorrow.
    Nowhere was the party louder or more furious than at the exclusive Willow nightclub in the shadow of the Englehart Bridge on Paradopolis’ western shore. Even now a crowd of wannabees and poseurs, of the curious and the desperate crowded outside, held back by the sinister black-coated bouncers who picked for admission only those interesting enough to amuse the jaded elite that revelled behind the neon-splashed glass walls.
    “Fascinating, aren’t they?” Camellia of the Fey asked, turning away from her full length one-way window where she had been watching the heaving turmoil of humanity in the street below. “I could watch them for centuries and not get tired of their hungry passions and pathetic struggles.”
    “I never saw the attraction in humanity, myself,” scowled Exemplary.
    Camellia flicked back her beautiful silver hair (it was silver today, to match her lipstick) and smiled at her visitor. “Yes, I can sense the tight knots of repression right there under your surface thoughts. Would you like me to loosen them for you?”
    “Keep your faerie glamours to yourself, madam,” the agent of the Shadow Cabinet warned. “We know who you are and I came prepared.”
    The lady of the fey laughed a tinkling, bell-like laugh. “Nobody is ever really prepared for faerie,” she promised. “Still, I have laid my webs just as you requested. All is in preparation for your bold heroes to burst in, or sneak in, or trick themselves in. Now all we need are the bold heroes.”
    “They’ll be here,” Exemplary assured her. “We know from interviewing the patrons at that super-villain bar where we picked up Hatman that the Legion’s asking questions about your Willow nightclub. They evidently think you can somehow help them bring back the Hooded Hood to fight against Lord Ultizon.”
    “Well that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?” the faerie asked.
    “It would be the last thing you ever did. We don’t care about your drug-trafficking, your soul trading, your dream-stealing, any of that magic crap. But we care about the Hood. Cross us on this and we’ll be back with Inquisition Iron and we won’t stop till every last one of you is nailed to the cathedral door.”
    “There’s no need to be rude,” Camellia told him. “In fact there’s no need for you to be here at all. We’d have caught your heroes just for the fun of it. It’s been a while since we had good sport here.” She sighed and looked through the other office window, down into the vast tropical glasshouse that was the Willow nightclub. Humans and others writhed down there under strobe spotlights to an incessant techno beat. “Most humans have such small dreams to shred these days.”
    “So you’re ready for the Legion when they come?” Exemplary persisted.
    “Ready?” the mistress of the Willow repeated, and her beautiful smile never reached her cold distant eyes. “We’re yearning to have them.”



    Sarah Shepherdson watched the black-jacketed security people frisk Joe Pepper for weapons, while they failed to notice the foot long sentient knife he was gripping in his hand. Her own search was almost date-intimate, but the two undercover heroes were allowed inside.
    “So how do you do that?” Shep asked with interest, adjusting her sparkling purple boob-tube to near decency. “Have them not notice Knifey?”
    “I dunno,” admitted ManMan. “I guess it’s just something he does.”
    “Hey, I haven’t been around all these years and not picked up a few tricks,” Knifey pointed out. “If the faeries knew I was coming into their demesnes we’d be neck-deep in ogres by now.”
    “How many years?” Dancer asked curiously. “When will we get round to hearing the origin of Knifey?”
    “I don’t do the O-word,” growled the sentient weapon.
    Joe Pepper led his companion past the coat and bag check and into the great arboretum that was tonight’s rave venue. A wall of mind-numbing sound blasted over them. Hundreds of people writhed together beneath the flashing lights.
    “…….” shouted ManMan.
    “…….” Sarah called back. She pantomimed walking and pointed over to the bar.
    Knifey twitched in Joe’s hand. He had already warned the two young people not to eat or drink anything in this place, not to ask or accept any favour, and not to kiss anyone. The Willow was a faerie place, a bastion of the twilight people, and it pedalled things worse than drugs.
    Obediently, although ManMan negotiated two very expensive drinks for himself and Dancer – Bloody Calleachs – neither did more than pretend to sip at them. When Joe automatically reached for the nuts set out on the bar counter Knifey pricked him.
    The two infiltrators looked over the seething dance floor. Beneath the boughs of ancient twisted willow trees that rose from bubbling pools of underlit water the rich and the beautiful of Paradopolis met and danced. Handsome looking stewards and heartbreakingly gorgeous waitresses shimmered between them, passing out drinks, and sometimes little heart-shaped tablets. The Willow could offer you your heart’s desire, or at least the illusion of it, for a little while. All it cost you was your dreams and your future.
    It was a little quieter away from the bar. There were shady secluded arbours where those who wanted to get to know their dates better could retreat to semi-privacy. Gilded gages were strewn with paper lanterns, and pretty lost-eyed men and women danced within the golden bars forever.
    “I wonder how you get that job?” wondered Dancer.
    “I wonder how you quit,” shuddered ManMan, and drew her onwards.
    Behind the great arboretum was the Blissgarden, a raised labyrinth of mirrors and glass where more specialised amusements could be found, and below that the Ninth Circle, carved from the very bedrock beneath the club, where pain and pleasure were inextricably blended.
    “Where do we start looking?” Joe asked Knifey. “How will we know a gate to faerie when we see it?”
    “They’re usually common things,” the knife lectured. “A doorway, a mirror, a stile, a wardrobe. Don’t worry. If you look for it, it’ll find you.”
    “Looking for something?”
    Dancer and ManMan turned round to discover the most beautiful twins they had ever seen. The male was tall and athletic, his long golden hair framing a rugged, angelic face with blazing purple eyes. His sister was as graceful and pretty as he was handsome, a blonde confection of curves and valleys like a secret fantasy. They unwrapped themselves from embracing each other and approached Joe and Sarah.
    “What’s your name, lover?” the woman asked ManMan as she coiled her perfection around him.
    “M-Man-Man.”
    She breathed in his ear and her breath smelled like night flowers. “What’s your real name?”
    “Joe.”
    The faerie male cupped dancer’s chin in his hands so she was gazing into his well-deep eyes. “And you, my sweet?”
    “Sarah.”
    “Your real name?”
    “Dancer.”
    “Come with us,” the twins said together. “We’ll have lots of fun.”



    As the sewers approached the waterfront where the Willow nightclub stood they got stranger. The stonework was older, hewn from the living bedrock by hammer and chisel. Old runes decorated the walls, and small carved faces topped the archways.
    “You are heading down a dark ten-foot wide corridor heading east,” Dreamcatcher Foxglove grinned to himself. “Smaller passages run off to both sides, and the water ripples as if there was something beneath it…”
    “What are you muttering about?” demanded Pegasus irritably. She didn’t like the smell of the sewer, she didn’t like confined underground spaces where she couldn’t use her winged forms, and she didn’t like CrazySugarFreakBoy! The fact that he was one of the few Legionnaires willing to work with her right now didn’t make it any better.
    “This. It’s like a D&D scenario,” CSFB! explained. “Dungeons and Dragons? Everyone should role play, it’s important for learning how to deal with the world. ‘I didn’t play D&D all those years without learning a little something about courage’.”
    “Why there are laws to prevent slaughtering geeks in defence of the gene pool I will never know,” hissed Penny Christopoulos.
    “No, seriously. Look at the walls here. Dwarven masonry, I bet. We’re already moving into faerie territory.” Dream sighed. “Shame Sydney’s working for the bad guys like all the mind-controlled heroes right now, because the Fashion Fairy would’ve been great on this kind of mission.”
    “You don’t need a wench of changeling stock,” Pegasus replied. “I come from the Mythlands, and Faerie is in the same neighbourhood. More or less.”
    “What’s the difference?” CSFB! wondered.
    “Well, the Mythlands was shaped by what people believe, I suppose,” the winged warrior conceded. “Faerie is shaped by what people dream.”
    “And people have some pretty scary dreams.”
    “Right.”
    CSFB! and Pegasus passed into a vaulted chamber where the various waterways confluenced. Body-thick roots of some ancient tree grew from the wall and pushed down into the dirty water like wooden stalactites. The heroes’ torches made disturbing shadows on the rimed walls.
    “So where does Frightmare’s territory fit into all this?” Dream speculated.
    “Shut up.”
    “I was only asking, because Frightmare operates through the dark side of the human subconscious and…”
    “I said shut up. We’re not alone.”
    And just then the roots of Old Man Willow burst into animation, wrapping round the intruders and dragging them down into the cold murky well.



    Camellia’s personal chambers were in a great glass rotunda on the roof of the building. Usually only the most desperate, most amusing of mortals were allowed into her sanctum. Goldeneyed and the Librarian teleported straight in, arriving in her private study.
    “I told you!” L smiled triumphantly. “I can detect a collection of books at quite some distance.” He moved over to the calfskin-topped desk – at least he hoped it was calf – and looked down at the collection of scrolls and grimoires.
    “What are we looking for?” G-Eyed asked. “Some incantation that will get us into faerie?”
    “That and some indication of how the Hooded Hood ended up there anyway after he was apparently killed and Herringcarp Asylum was blown up,” Lee Bookman answered. “He presumably had some contingency, but when he was assassinated it was in a retcon suppression field so things may have gone wrong. After all, his other-reality daughter Kumari turned up, didn’t she, with all his powers and triggering off all his back-up plots at once?”
    Bry Katz shivered. “Don’t remind me. Less than a week after we formed the current LL line-up we had to take on the Parody Master, Dirth Vortex, the robots, Evil Monkey, the Obliterator, the Parody Master, Count Armageddon, and – yuk – Magenta St Evil. Oh, and did I mention the Parody Master?”
    “You may have touched on him,” the Librarian admitted. “Anyway, the point is that we don’t know why or how HH got to faerie, even if we can trust that Amazing Guy’s cosmic awareness is right about him being there at… Hmm, that’s odd.”
    G-Eyed turned from the bookcase to see Lee puzzling over a manuscript in his hands. “What is?”
    “There’s some kind of oily film on this document, as if it’s been coated with…” Then the contact poison did its work and the Librarian toppled over to the floor.
    “L?” called Goldeneyed, rushing over to attend to the fallen researcher. He couldn’t find a pulse.
    “Thank you, Mr Katz,” Camellia of the Fey told him, appearing from nowhere. “That will be all.”
    G-Eyed hardly had enough time to turn and see the enemy before reality seemed to ripple and he was somewhere else.



    “Don’t you think they make a lovely couple?” Joe Pepper’s exquisite companion asked as they sprawled together on one of the silky divans beside the hedge maze and watched her brother and Sarah Shepherdson dance together. “And don’t we make a wonderful pair too, ManMan?” She leaned across him and traced a finger over his lips. “Won’t we all be marvellous together?”
    “Urk,” answered ManMan.
    “I know your heart’s desires, of course,” she went on. “I know what you want, what you really really want.”
    “You do?”
    “Oh yes, you wicked boy. And you shall have it. Once you’re ours, you shall have all you desire forever, for every day between now and eternity, and we shall take great joy in giving it to you and watching you receive your heart’s wish again and again and again. Won’t that be lovely?”
    There was something intoxicating about her perfume that made it hard to think. Joe found himself leaning towards her scented warmth, and her lips were glossy and shining.
    “I have to get to faerie…” he stammered.
    “You want to experience faerie?” his companion laughed. “That too we can grant you.”
    Over by the fountain Sarah’s own dance had slowed into a soft, erotic writhing with her handsome partner. “I think we’ve exhausted the possibilities of dancing while we’re standing up, don’t you?” he purred at her.
    Dancer flicked her long shining mane. “No,” she answered with a sudden grin. “There’s plenty of stuff we could still do. The mambo. The tarantala. The fandango. The gavotte. Break-dancing. Hula. The Dublin Stomp.”
    “That’s fine for later, my little beauty,” the faerie told her. “But for now, there are other pleasures awaiting you, a world of sensual delights that you have never dreamed possible.”
    “That’s pretty sensual,” admitted Shep, “but there are two problems.”
    “Oh?”
    “First, I’m a sucker for bad boyfriends but they really have to be hard-luck cases to get under my radar. And second, when I dance my probability powers peak, far better than any minor faerie glamour and chance-tinkering, y’know?”
    Her partner smiled his handsome smile and laid a sensual hand on her shoulder. “Silly little mortal child…” he began.
    Dancer flipped him over her head and dropped him in the fountain.
    “What?” gasped his sister, perfect violet eyes flashing wide.
    “He’s not her type,” ManMan explained. “Here, this is for you,” And he pressed Knifey’s cold iron blade flat onto her exquisite exposed skin.
    The faerie creature screamed, and suddenly she was a pathetic thin stick-thing with huge watery eyes scrabbling away crying in pain.
    Dancer vaulted into the fountain and came down hard on the other twin. Something crunched. “And that,” she told him, “is the Dublin Stomp!”
    “Nice,” approved Knifey, “but I think our cover might be blown.”
    Then an infinite number of faerie creatures came to take them down.



    Pegasus loosed her cosmic blast in a wide-spread pattern, searing away the roots that dragged her ever downwards into the bottomless depths of the dark well. Old Man Willow pressed down on her trying to punch the breath from her body, the life from her limbs. She felt a strange lassitude.
    “Don’t go to sleep!” CSFB! warned her, struggling with his own tangle of strangling roots. “If you go to sleep then the willow’s roots grow into your brain and drive you mad,” the Shaman’s son remembered.
    “I know the properties of willow, thank you very much!” Pegasus snapped, her irritation helping her past her sleepiness. She caught the largest of the flailing roots and concentrated a sustained bolt of cosmic force into it. The willow writhed, then exploded.
    CrazySugarFreakBoy! poked a grinning head up from the mire of the black well. “Wow. Matchsticks!”
    Pegasus burst to the surface in her winged human form. “It’s not over yet,” she warned urgently. “We’ve been marked by Old Man Willow.”
    “What’s that mean?” Dream asked. Then he whirled round suddenly and loosed his yo-yo into the shadows.
    Pelopia caught it.
    Pegasus spotted the newcomer and prepared a cosmic blast.
    “Hold it!” CSFB! called. “I kind of know her.”
    “Is she one of the score of people on this planet we know not to be under the control of Ultizon?” Pegasus demanded.
    “Actually, I am not under the Final Thought’s influence,” the Priestess of Logos answered curtly. “My father is the Word. Do you really think that either he or I would be susceptible to such genetic trickery?”
    “You were working with DK and Finny back when they were trying to kill us for Ultizon,” Dream pointed out.
    “Yes,” Pelopia agreed. “Ultizon’s agenda matches outs in many ways, and it seemed simpler not to confuse him by letting him know we were not bound to his will. Besides, I have yearned for an opportunity to match my skills against yours in a battle to the death, CrazySugarFreakChampion!”
    “Ah, a grudge match,” Pegasus breathed, letting the cosmic charge she’d been gathering dissipate. “Now I understand.” She wasn’t averse to CSFB! being killed in a fair battle.
    “I don’t see why you want to fight me, though,” CSFB! told Pelopia, “unless it’s one of those heroes misunderstandings things that ends up with us teaming up.”
    “I am your destined adversary,” the Priestess argued. “We have to fight.”
    “You do,” Pegasus interjected. “As I was saying about Old Man Willow before this hairless young woman appeared, we have both been marked.”
    CSFB! checked his silly suit. It seemed intact.
    “Not that kind of mark. Old Man Willow can awake our dooms, our nemeses.” Penny Christopoulos explained. She nodded over to Pelopia. “She’s yours.”
    “Really?” Dreamcatcher Foxglove asked. “Cool!”
    Pelopia frowned. The encounter wasn’t going the way she had planned it when she had convinced Exemplary to let her lay in wait in these tunnels where she was sure her quarry would come. “What about you, then?” she challenged the Pegasus. “Where’s your nemesis?”
    And just then the walls of the tunnels burst open and the devil-hounds of the Wilde Huntsman thronged over them, howling and rending and thirsting for the living flesh of their master’s inevitable quarry.



    The Librarian opened his eyes. He was just where he had been, except he was looking over at his dead body on the floor. “That can’t be good,” he murmured.
    “Dashed bad show, what?” Sir Mumphrey Wilton noted, perching on Camellia’s desk and staring longingly at the tea set. “I’m afraid you chaps have walked into something of a trap.”
    “The poisoned book? Yes,” agreed L. “I’m rather cross about that.”
    “Not just the book,” argued Xander the Improbable. “Camellia knew you were all coming. She set snares for all of you.”
    Lee Bookman realised that his vision was adjusting, like it normally did from light to dark. Only this time the study was getting fainter and the dead people around him were becoming more distinct. And there was a distant darkness behind the walls that chilled him to the soul.
    “I don’t suppose there’s a handy volume explaining all of this?” he asked plaintively.
    “I’m afraid not,” Visionary told him. “Although I was hoping it was in video format, or possibly something with bullet points.”
    “Visionary! You caused all this!” the Librarian accused.
    Vizh frowned. “I’m pretty sure it was actually spiffy’s fault,” he argued. “Also, I’d like it on record that whatever the evidence says to the contrary, I’m real dammit!”
    L looked down at his unmoving body. “We have to do something about this!”
    “Traditionally it’s somebody else’s job to tidy up when you’ve died,” Xander pointed out.
    “Stop tormenting the poor chap,” Mumphrey snorted. “Thing is, young Librarian-me-lad, we’re all currently in the land of the temporarily-dead.”
    “Temporarily dead?” Lee Bookman frowned.
    “That’s what I said,” noted Visionary. “I said it just like that.”
    “We’re in a state of quantum uncertainty,” Xander explained impatiently. “If the Legion get to the Hooded Hood and he somehow finds a way to retcon Ultimate Ultizon then it may turn out that our deaths never happened. If they fail, then we’re dead dead, and we won’t be back for sequels.”
    “But on the bright side we’ll have beaten the rush,” added Vizh.
    L thought about this. “What about all the people Ultizon killed? Are they only temporarily dead too?”
    “For now,” Mumphrey agreed. “But we thought it’d be deuced crowded to bring ‘em all in here to talk to you.”
    “And why are you talking to me?” the Librarian wondered. “I mean, why are you explaining all of this so closely? Unless…”
    Then the death demons leaped out of the shadows and attacked.



    Goldeneyed arrived at the Lair Legion’s last stand. As he appeared he was just in time to see Ziles dodge the wrong way and run into Wormboy’s napalm spray. She tumbled down screaming, her hair and face a mass of fire. Fin Fang Foom swerved round and took Wormboy’s head off with a ridge wing-vane.
    “What…!” gasped G-Eyed, teleporting by instinct to prevent Quake from crushing him into the ground. He appeared where Trickshot was fending off the Captor over De Brown Streak’s bloody corpse. Before he could ever react Suicide Blonde had transformed the irritating archer to hydrogen.
    “G-Eyed!” Hatman called, desperately. He was cradling Sorceress in his arms and she wasn’t moving. “Help Donar!”
    Moving on instinct, Goldeneyed sprang across to where Onslaughter and Musk Ox were dogpiling the swearing Ausgardian. He was puzzled why every time Donar was hit there was a metallic crunching sound, but he didn’t know about the Ausgardian’s substitution with a Donarbot. He teleported Musk Ox roughly a mile upwards and was about to turn on Onslaughter when he tripped in the remains of dull thud and Cressida.
    “This can’t be happening!” G-Eyed gasped as he took a shot to the leg from Huntingjustice Deathmarrow. There were so many villains, too many for him to identify, and they just kept coming. “What went wrong?”
    spiffy’s fern wrenched HJDM’s neck and threw her hard at the Captor. “There’s just too many of them. We knew we had to hold them off to give you a chance over at the House of Camellia. Is it done?”
    “I… I don’t know. They… she shifted me here somehow, to your battle in Hawaii…”
    But Mark Hopkins couldn’t answer. He’d have needed his head for that, and currently it was on Head Case’s shoulders, granting the psychopathic villain all of spiffy’s powers.
    Falcon vaporised both head and Head Case with a tight barrage of mini-missiles. “G-Eyed, get your shit together! In case you didn’t notice, we’re getting massacred here!” He didn’t add that he had just exhausted his on-board arsenal.
    Goldeneyed tried to get a tactical overview. DK was clearly dead but there were half a dozen thugs still pounding his broken carcass. Messenger lay in a pool of blood beside the corpses of Professor Manyarms and Count Fokker. Yo’s pale body was sprawled beneath the fallen Savagetooth and Gamona. The shape behind them might once have been Lisa. Even as he tried to formulate some plan, G-Eyed saw Finny wobble and fall.
    “Not… yet…” growled the big dragon as he vanished beneath a swarm of vengeful enemies.
    “Help him!” called Nats, hurling the villains aside telekinetically and bursting them into flames. “They’ve got Mystic Morgana trying to block my powers and…”
    Nats didn’t have any time to react as Gromm the Living Flatulence exploded around him
    Then G-Eyed heard a familiar scream.
    “Lisette!” he called, hammering over Mirror Murderer and teleporting Roxx-Hoff down into solid bedrock.
    “Too late, buddy!” Frog-Man called, twisting Laurie Leyton’s neck.
    “Nooo!” screamed Bry Katz as he saw the life-light ebb from his lover’s eyes. “Damn you!”
    Frog-man reached out with his webbed gauntlets and raked them across G-Eyed stomach. The deputy-leader of the Lair Legion staggered back clutching the bloody ruin of his intestines.
    “Game over!” laughed Onslaughter, waving the faux-Donar’s head triumphantly.
    It was G-Eyed’s worst nightmare, and he had let everyone down.
    He laughed.
    “That is very good,” he called out. “I especially liked the way you kept me reacting so I wouldn’t realise that I’d know if Id been teleported.” He turned his back on the wave of supervillains that screamed towards him. “A glamour, right Camellia?”
    And the scene was gone. “A prediction,” the mistress of the faeries answered with an impish little smile. Goldeneyed was back in her office, and she was standing over the Librarian’s body. “Your dragon has just started the last battle over at Ultizon’s Human Resources Recyling Centre. They really are counting on you being able to do something to stop them all being slaughtered.”
    “Then show me the way to the Hooded Hood and I’ll stop taking up your time,” G-Eyed offered. His stomach still hurt from the imaginary wound and he was almost too weak to stand.
    Again that tinkling, mocking laugh. “If only life was that simple, Bryan Katz,” Camellia of the Fey told him. “But the truth is, we all have limits. You are nearly at yours now, your body barely able to stand, your will stretched to the utmost to keep on going. And I am restricted too by ancient covenant, able to stay and play here in your gay mortal world only if I provide certain services and tribute to the rulers of my homeland; to the current ruler of my homeland, in fact. And he is rather keen that the Hooded Hood remains his guest.”
    “If you don’t let me through, Ultizon will rule the Parodyverse.”
    “So? We fey care little for powers and principalities. We have rules of our own, and obey no others.”
    “I’ll… I’ll bargain.”
    “What with, Bryan Katz? Your heart’s love? Do you even know where it is any more? Your immortal soul? Do you believe you have one?” Camellia’s smile became more twisted. “Or perhaps you would offer me your only child, flesh of your flesh, eh?”
    “What do you mean? I have no children.”
    “Oh, but you do. Little Lisette just failed to mention it, and collaborated with your old mentors in the Order of the Observing Eye to conceal its birth from you.”
    Goldeneyed swallowed. He felt a coldness spreading inside him. “You’re lying.”
    “I don’t need to lie when the truth is so gallingly delicious.”
    Bry felt the last strength draining from him. “She said she wasn’t pregnant…”
    “It won’t matter,” Camellia mocked him, “She’ll be dead soon.”
    G-Eyed staggered and tried to stay upright. There was no wound ripping his stomach in two, no blood surging from beneath his clutching hands, but it felt as if there was.
    “You won’t die,” Camellia promised him. “We’re going to keep you feeling just as you are now, forever. For my personal collection.” She turned and admired herself in one of her many mirrors. “As for your friends, Mr Oxalis is taking apart Dancer and ManMan, CrazySugarFreakBoy! and Pegasus are dying to amuse the Wild Hunt. And of course you’ve seen how Fin Fang Foom’s last stand is going to turn out.”
    “No…” Bry grimaced.
    “Oh, yes, my pretty, broken toy. Yes.”
    Behind Camellia of the Fey, Lee Bookman stood up. His casual patch-elbowed tweeds had gone now, replaced by a cloak that was half superhero and half academic gown. He wore a dark jumpsuit with silver trim and gleaming data ports. He was holding the poisoned book.
    “Just so you know, madam,” the Librarian told her, “books can only harm me if I let them. For as long as I choose to let them.” He tossed the volume onto the desk. “In this case long enough to consult with a few experts to locate your conduit to faerie.”
    The mistress of the Willow covered her surprise with an arrogant sneer. “And what do you think coming back from the shadowlands will accomplish, bookworm?” she mocked. “Your powers mean nothing here, in the heart of my realm, and you will be another plaything of the fey.”
    “Gosh,” answered L, “then it’s a good job I’m carrying a tracking beacon.”
    Goldeneyed was slumped to his knees, but he was looking up at the faerie woman and grinning nastily. “We call this setting decoys, lady,” he explained. And then he triggered his teleportation powers one more time.
    That was all that was needed to open the gateway that Amazing Guy was waiting for. The Protector of the Universe brushed past Camellia’s defences and burst into the centre of her office, the very seat of her power. He flexed his energy construct powers and hammered Camellia through the floor.
    “Is that the best you can do?” screeched the woman, shrugging off the damage as easily as she sloughed her fair humanoid form. “Is that all you’ve got?”
    “Actually, no,” answered AG with a terrifying calm. “Right now I’m creating microscopic energy bubbles in your blood stream, your nervous system, your brain synapses. I’m separating your molecular structure chain by chain, and I’m shifting your essence across a range of relativistic dimensions.” He leaned forward to the twitching, quivering Camellia. “I don’t know what it takes to kill a greater faerie. Shall we find out together?”
    “Or we could keep her like that,” suggested Goldeneyed, “Feeling just as she is now, forever. For our personal collection.”
    Camellia did the only thing she could to save herself. She opened the gateway and hurled them all into the deepest realms of faerie.
    She curled in a tight ball for a while, drawing what strength she could from the water and the earth and the sky, and from the pains of those in the nightclub below. She limped to her feet, knowing it would be a long time before she would recover her full strength after this. The joke had gone sour.
    “I granted your wish,” she hissed bitterly to G-Eyed and the Librarian, to Dancer and ManMan and CSFB! and Pegasus, and to Amazing Guy. “Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.”
    The new master of the Many Coloured Realms would do far worse to her enemies than she could ever devise. That would have to suffice.



Next time: Untold Faerie Tales of the Lair Legion. The issue where it gets far too weird. Horror, sex, bloodshed, and talking animals – everything you’d expect in a proper fairy story.



And Now For Something Completely Footnote:
From Visionary’s notes about Camellia of the Fey: “The faeries seen here are all members of Camellia's house. They're fairly adept at magic (though not full blown sorcerers) and delight in exploiting human weaknesses. Camellia is head of a drug cartel that operates out of the Willow, a nightclub on the riverfront (Only those at the height of fashion, fame or fortune should even bother trying to get past the doorman). Mr. Oxalis is her right hand man. Her organization employs all the members of her house, as well as humans, some of which know what she and her fellows really are. All of these faeries within the city limits invariably live on waterfront property, or a lot adjoining the park”.
Frightmare is a conceptual entity who is master of bad dreams, and who has on occasion attempted to extend his influence to the waking world (such as in UT#96: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The Nightmare Scenario).

The villains piling on in Hawaii: Wormboy is a never-was-Finny’s-sidekick member of teen group the New Battlers. Quake is a multipowered villain from a possible future. The Captor is a huntsman specialising in trapping human prey. Suicide Blonde, G-Eyed’s lethal cousin, is a powerful matter transmuter. Onslaughter is a genetically-created organic killing machine. Musk Ox is the most violent creation of the Low Evolutionary. Huntingjustice Deathmarrow is a tough babe with kool guns. Head Case gains the powers of anybody whose severed skullcap he wears. Professor Manyarms uses robotic appendages in combat. Count Fokker is the head of the international terrorist gang HERPES. Savagetooth is a berserker runt who’s the best there is at what he does. Gamona is a deadly alien assassin. Mystic Morgana is a witch from the Destiny Carnival. Gromm the Living Flatulence is a Deviate who… well, what it says in the name, really. Mirror Murderer is a psychopathic being of light that exists inside reflections. Roxx-Hoff is the former commander of the Skree Star Empire’s Fifth Space Fleet. Frog-man is G-Eyed’s sometimes partner in crimefighting.

The Librarian: There are some apparent timeline problems with Lee Bookman being the Librarian in these stories, but don’t worry. All will become clear by the end of the arc.

And since next issue won’t have footnotes: Visionodonary Sackins really does have hairy toes.



The divider graphic used on this page is derived from an image offered at http://www.tendermoon.com/tendermoon.htm

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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