Posted by The first slice of a multi-part #92, featuring homefront horror as the cowled crime czar moves closer to his greatest victory, chronicled by none other than... the Hooded Hood on October 28, 2001 at 02:03:50:
#92: More Untold Tales of the Lair Legion vs the New Purveyors of Peril – The Final Countdown
Previous chapters at
The Hooded Hood's Homepage
of Doom
Character profiles at Who's Who in
the Parodyverse
Villain profiles for Purveyors of Peril in #75:
Untold Tales of the Lair Legion Who's Who Special Edition: The New Purveyors of
Peril
Other useful things in Where's
Where in the Parodyverse
Paradopolis,
USA
“Aw, man, I can’t believe you did that!” Dynamite Boy told Chronic as the
guitarist was football-tackled off the stage by De Brown Streak and dull
thud. “We are going to be so wiped off the planet that they won’t be able to
identify us from DNA traces.” spiffy was still screaming. “I can’t take on the Hooded Hood! I can’t fight
one-on-one with a guy who can retcon everything I ever did! And he’s my
dad!” “Is this going to work?” the diabolical Dr Moo asked nervously. Daio Waltz
didn’t like being nervous. Even Davidowicz, her rat lab assistant hiding in her
labcoat, seemed nervous. The tornado was visible from two states away. The tempest ripped Messenger,
dull thud, De Brown Streak, Dynamite Boy, and Chronic from the ground and
tossed them like straws half a mile into the air. Chronic tried in vain to reach
for Steve, his demonic guitar, but even the devil’s instrument would have been
hard pressed to make itself heard over the roar of the tornado. dull thud
comforted himself with the knowledge that his power was to fall from any height
without harm; so he only had to worry about freezing to death or being ripped
apart by the killer eddies. Messenger fumed as his razor letters were swept away
by the wind. Dynamite Boy made the mistake of trying to blow the wind-funnel
apart by self-detonating. Tornado swept him apart and distributed him over half
of America. Coming next: Onslaughter.
“What can I say,” grinned Chronic manically.
“The concert needed a climax, and I had to do something to top the
fireworks.”
“Blasting a Celestian Space Robot to Vermont wasn’t it,” dull
thus assured him. “We’ve got to get out of here. Those other fourteen Space
Robots are looking at us!”
“Bring ‘em on!” shouted Chronic. “It’s time to…
urk!”
De Brown Streak rubbed his knuckles as dull thud swung the young
musician over his shoulder. “Do ye know how many people will be envious that you
were the one t’ do that?” thuddy asked.
“We’ve got to get out of
here!” Dynamite Boy worried. Most of Paradopolis was in a zombie-like state as
their psychic energies were used to power the grid that was entrapping the
Celestians. The massive crowd that had gathered for the Save the Variety Theatre
Benefit Concert watched with glazed eyes as the heroes ran offstage. “Where
to?”
“Into the sewers,” Messenger told them, appearing again to scare the
hell out of the others. “Those Space Robots are being trapped somehow by the
architecture and layout of the city. They aren’t going to be allowed to start
ripping it up to find us.”
“Sewers!” complained dull thud. “Why is it
every time I go to a concert I end up in the sewers?”
Dynamite Boy gave him
an odd look and blew up the pavement so they could climb down into the main
channel below Park Street.
“Can anybody give me a hand with Chronic?” dull
thud asked plaintively. “He’s not exactly a lightweight.”
“I could always
transmute him into cotton wool,” offered Cressida, dull thud’s psionic
stomach tapeworm. “I’m sure I can think of a word to describe Chronic that
rhymes with wool.”
“Hand him here,” De Brown Streak offered. Then he dropped
Chronic into the sewer. “Wake up,” he called him. “And don’t be fighting any
cosmic beings this time. There, that should do it.”
“This way,” Messenger
told the others. “And stop messing about. We have a job to do.”
“I wasn’t
messing about,” Chronic complained. “I was trying to strangle DBS.”
Following
him into the darkened malodorous tunnel the heroes glanced at each other. “Wait
a minute!” dull thud ventured at last. “What job?”
Messenger scowled
at being questioned. “We need to take down those Robots, or at least stop them
being controlled.”
“We could blow up the buildings controlling them,”
suggested DB.
“The Twin Parody Tower, the Cathedral, the Variety Theatre, the
Municipal Library, and the Lair Mansion,” De Brown Streak said sceptically. “I
don’t see that going down too well.”
“It could go down pretty well if I
shaped the detonations right,” Jeremy Wick insisted.
“I’m cool with the
plan,” admitted Chronic.
“We are not blowing up the buildings,”
Messenger emphasised. “Except as a last resort. I rather think we wouldn’t be
allowed to anyway.”
“So where are we going and what is the plan?” dull
thud demanded.
“We’re going to invade the Lair Mansion and take control
ourselves,” Messenger told his impromptu team.
After a little while the
screaming stopped.
“Exactly,” agreed the Abyssal Greye, leader of the Ghouls under
Gothametropolis. “That’s why it has to be you. Besides, if he retconned
everything you ever did would that be such a terrible thing for the
universe?”
“Oh, thanks,” the ferned phenomenon spat. “So what happens now? I
go invade the Hood’s lair, fight my way past any guards and death traps the Hood
happens to have left lying around, then confront the archvillain and bring him
in for questioning?”
“Or kill him,” Abyssal Greye shrugged. “Your
choice.”
“Or die horribly,” spiffy pointed out.
“If you must,” conceded
the ghoul. “As we say, your choice.”
Just so long as you keep him busy for
long enough, the Abyssal Greye didn’t say out loud.
“Of course,” the Paradox Stranger promised calmly.
“That’s why the Hooded Hood manipulated his creation in the first place.” He
gestured to the crooked young man who was concentrating his tornado powers on
the back door of the Lair Mansion. “Twisted Organ was ‘planted’ as a superhero
when the Hood arranged for him to be captured by the Heckfire Club along with
Dynamite Boy and some others. Organ never knew he was a fake, of course. In
another reality the Hood had him actually become a member of the Lair Legion.
We’re counting on the Lair Mansion being sensitive enough during its… heightened
state of alertness in the current crisis to be able to recognise Organ as one of
its own.”
Twisted Organ sucked the back door clean from its socket and spun to a
painful halt. The young man was flecked with his own blood. Every use of his
mutant power to control – even become – the hurricane shattered his body a
little more. “We’re in,” he croaked, coughing up more red sputum.
“Good boy”
Moo told him. “Here, have another sip of milk.” She held out her udder gun and
allowed a few more drops of the addictive lactose to fall onto Twisted Organ’s
cracked tongue. “Now let’s see what we can do to introduce this new programming
the Hooded Hood wants into these Space Robots.”
The trio strode into the Lair
Mansion that had been captured by the Hood a few days earlier. Flecks of light
ran along invisible channels in the walls. Surfaces shimmered briefly as massive
energies flashed through them. The whole mansion hummed like a purring beast or
a massive engine, and both analogies were close to the truth.
“This is why
the Hood had to get them on a World Tour,” the Paradox Stranger observed. “Of
the five nexus points this was the one old Wilbur Parody always intended to be
the control centre. This was the one that harnessed the power of the Secret at
the Centre of the Parodyverse.” [See #17:
The Final Untold Tale of the Lair Legion: the Judgement of the Celestians. I
really intended it to be the series conclusion]
“Let’s just do this and get out of here,”
Davidowicz demanded. “This place is giving me the creeps.”
“Well, it is
haunted,” agreed the Paradox Stranger. “But having Organ here should keep poor
Marie Murcheson confused enough not to use that lethal banshee wail of
hers.”
Then a large portion of the living room wall blew in. “Sorry,”
Dynamite Boy announced. “I miscalculated the kilotonnage.”
“More sorry than
you think,” Messenger told him. “You just dropped a wall on Donar’s
entertainment centre.”
“Hey, look! We’ve got company!” Chronic noticed as
Moo, Dox, and Twisted Organ reacted to their presence.
“Ah, minor heroes.”
commented Dr Moo. “Organ, kill them.”
In the background, the banshee of the
Lair Mansion began a low, desperate, sobbing wail.
De Brown Streak accelerated his metabolism as far as it would go.
In a moment the very speed of the whirlwind became tangible to him, a thing
alive. He could even see the strands of consciousness that motivated it,
trickling back to the broken addicted thing that had once striven to be a hero.
He forced himself to concentrate on the vector forces, the acceleration which
kept the funnel intact. If he drained the velocity from some parts and
channelled it into other, the whole thing would become unstable.
On the
ground, Twisted Organ screamed as he spun, and his eyes were flecked with tears
of blood.
“Whatever we have to do to infiltrate my virus, do it quickly,” Dr
Moo warned the Paradox Stranger.
“Done,” Dox replied with a satisfied smirk.
“The Space Robots are now at the Hooded Hood’s command.”
In a hundred
thousand possible realities the Paradox Stranger, or Dr Moo, or both, or a
hundred other adversaries interfered to usurp control of the creatures which
ordered the Parodyverse to themselves; but in the one reality that mattered the
Hooded Hood ensured that the outcome was in his favour alone.
With a human
scream the tornado burst asunder. dull thud eventually landed in the
Boxleitner Sewage Works north of Gothametropolis. De Brown Streak literally swam
at super-speed through the air currents, grabbing the falling Messenger on the
way, and navigated them back to the Lair Island before collapsing in an
exhausted heap.
Twisted Organ flew at them, rotating like a corkscrew,
whirling shards of broken glass around him like a lethal shroud.
“I’m sorry,”
Messenger told him. “I can’t play spandex games here.” The razor letter flew
swift and true, slicing through the air turbulence just as the postman knew it
would and catching Twisted Organ right across the throat. There was a
spectacular spray of whirling blood and then the artificially-created
almost-hero fell dead on the turf.
“Now that was just plain rude,” Dr Moo
pouted, spraying Messenger with her udder gun and using her control over dairy
products to freeze the postman in place. “I was just getting him properly
trained. Still,” she brightened, “I imagine I’ll have a lot of fun with a
milk-addicted Messenger.”
spiffy’s fern caught her round the throat from
behind and pounded her on the floor until she went to sleep. Then he did the
same thing to Davidowicz. “Sorry I’m late, Messy,” the ferned phenomenon told
the paralysed postman. “And not dead, of course. Well, not sorry I’m not dead,
just sorry you thought I was because these ghouls faked… well, anyway, sorry. I
was almost late because they wanted me to go to Herringcarp to stop the Hood,
but I figured that…”
spiffy was still babbling when the Paradox Stranger hit
him over the head with one of NTU-150’s stun guns. At least that way they worked
as stunners. “Nice try, kid,” the Stranger conceded, “but it’s too important
that the Hood gets his shot at the powers that created this place we laughingly
call reality to let anyone screw it up.”
Then the Paradox Stranger got
clubbed from behind even as he had knocked out spiffy. He went down hard and
sprawled on the grass beside Moo, Twisted Organ, Messenger, and De Brown Streak.
“Oh, I don’t know,” sighed Xander the Improbable, putting his stone hamster
familiar Harry back in his pocket. “I think you underestimate the ability of the
Lair Legion to screw up anything.”
Posted by The Hooded Hood picks up the story where we were so rudely interrupted, with the Lair Legion taking on the baddies across the world. This time it's Donar and Finny's turn to bleed. on November 10, 2001 at 12:58:30:
Note: At the time of posting, the previous bits of this story are still just a little way down the board.
#92: More Untold Tales of the Lair Legion vs the New Purveyors of Peril – Riot in Russia, or Let the Onslaughter Begin
Moscow,
Russia The Razor Ballerina wasn’t in the best of tempers. Although the terrible
treatments that has transformed a world-class dancer into a death-dealing sadist
had protected her from harm from the dragon’s blow it had not preserved her
dignity. Even now the battle was raging across central Moscow and she was keen
to rejoin the fray. But there was still one act of malice to perform
first. “Tis only a fractured skull,” Donar assured Fin Fang Foom. “I hast had much
worse brain damage in mine time, and it hath left me unaffected.” Coming next: Visionary, ManMan, Al B, Yo and the gang are in the
ultimate place they shouldn’t be, and trespassers will be prosecuted.
“Move and we kill you,” the Russian Special Operations Team
warned the intruders. Powerful gauss cannons on their combat suits oriented on
the Purveyors of Peril and twelve men with two hundred million dollars worth of
anti-super-terrorism gear prepared to take down the Purveyors of Peril.
“I
guess you didn’t look at our press release,” sighed Indigo Impostor, currently
in his default purplish silhouette form. “You know, the bit about us decimating
your population centres if you tried to resist us?”
“Last warning,
scum.”
Mindy Kovskovski glanced to her left and right at her colleagues
Spacewarped and the Imposter. “They’re Russian. I think I should be the one to
slaughter them,” the Razor Ballerina suggested.
“Go ahead,” Spacewarped
answered absently. “I think I need to be elsewhere anyway.”
The Operations
Team were spurred into action when the time/space warper blinked out, but as
they fired their weapons the Razor Ballerina blurred towards them. At every
movement she generated shimmering needles which somehow sliced through vanadium
steel armour as if it was hot butter. Impossibly every single laser guided
computer co-ordinated shot missed her, but every single one of her razor
missiles cut home.
It took less than a minute before Red Square was silent
once more.
“I think that might make out point,” Mindy suggested.
“All the
same,” Indigo Imposter suggested, “I think we should have Onslaughter level this
city and everyone in it. We knew we would have to provide an object lesson
sooner of later, and the architecture here depresses me.”
“Seems fair,”
agreed the Razor Ballerina. “Let’s do it.”
“Let’s not,” the first Lair
Legionnaire on the scene objected. “Let’s have you lying on the floor
surrendered, and then let’s have you back in your cells where you
belong.”
The Impostor and the Razor Ballerina glanced over at the
leather-jacketed orange-haired hero who was stood on the steps behind them,
hands on his hips. “Nats,” Indigo Imposter snorted. “I hope you brought
backup.”
“What are you going to do?” Razor Ballerina mocked. “Fly us to
death?”
“I don’t need backup against you two. Last chance to give in.”
“My
turn to kill somebody,” Indigo Impostor told his comrade. He blurred his shape
and suddenly he looked exactly like Savagetooth. “I’ve always wanted to try
this,” he admitted.
The Legionnaire waited until the Impostor was committed
to a leap before moving aside, catching him in a necklock, and hammering him to
the ground so hard that the paving slabs cracked. “Next?”
Razor Ballerina
sprung forward in a leap so fast that Nats would have no chance to fly away or
protect himself. A clean strike would sever the hero’s head entirely.
Instead
the Legionnaire did something unexpected. He… uncoiled. The Nats shape twisted
and grew, becoming scaly and reptilian. The Ballerina found herself leaping
towards a huge reptilian tail which hammered into her like a steam
train.
“Ouch,” Fin Fang Foom complained as he sent the villainess arcing away
over the city. His scales were gashed where he had hit her. “Last time I pretend
to be Nats,” he vowed. Still, the ploy had been effective. Two villains down in
less than a minute.
The ground shook beneath the huge wyrm. A pair of
steel-gauntleted hands burst through the pavement, grabbed the Makluan, and
swung him like a child’s doll into the Kremlin. “Last time you do anything,”
Onslaughter promised, rising from the rubble. “Time to break you,
lizard.”
Fin Fang Foom unleashed the full fury of his nuclear fire
breath.
Onslaughter did not seem impressed. “I hope you brought help,” he
mocked and he squeezed the Makluan in his bone-splintering grip.
The
screaming hammer pounded into the genetic killing machine’s chest and ploughed
him quarter of a mile backwards through buildings and ground.
“As a matter of
fact,” Donar Oldmanson shouted over the sudden tempest. “He didst!”
There in the Russian Parliament building the former Legionnaire
NTU-150 was strapped crippled and helpless as hostage and bait. It might be
amusing to see how the dragon reacted to being shown his friend’s lifeless,
severed head. There were good reasons why little Mindy was called the Razor
Ballerina.
Enty’s helmet-mask had been wrenched away so that his
bruise-mottled face was exposed. The Razor Ballerina had already carved away his
cybernetic arms and legs, leaving Jamie Bautista transfixed on a pole where he
could watch his teammates be slaughtered. “Sorry you won’t get to see the end of
the show,” Mindy Kovskovski told him insincerely, “but at least parts of you
will be there for it. Which ear would you like to lose first?”
“The LL’s
beaten worse than you,” Enty spat at her. “In fact I could probably beat you
with two teaspoons and a dry cell battery.”
“Perhaps the tongue, then,” the
Razor Ballerina decided. “Any final words?”
“How about ‘leave him alone,
bitch, and pick on somebody your own size’?” suggested the Probability Dancer.
“You know, I always thought ballet was overrated.”
“Dancer,” recognised the
Ballerina. “You don’t know how many times I’ve peeled off your face in our
training simulations.”
“I know how many times you’ve done it against the real
thing,” Sarah Shepherdson pointed out. “Am I supposed to be worried by that
anti-probability field you’re generating?”
“In that your ability to twist
events to your liking is your only power and your only protection then I’d say
yes,” Mindy answered. “You can beg now if you like.”
Dancer smiled grimly.
“Enough posing and dialogue. Take your best shot. I have to go and fight the
serious villain after this.”
Razor Ballerina somersaulted forward in a blur
of malice. A moment later she would have sliced Dancer’s torso from throat to
navel, except that she was intercepted in mid-air as Shep’s feet impacted with
her midriff and sent her tumbling to the side. “And now I’ll show you what
dancing is really all about,” promised Dancer.
Jamie Bautista’s eyes were
crusted with blood but it seemed to him as if the two lithe forms shimmered
around each other. The slightest touch of the Razor Ballerina could slice
through steel, but she needed to make contact and Sarah Shepherdson simply
wasn’t there to hit. The Ballerina sprayed off sheets of lethal edges but none
of them impacted on Dancer as she moved.
“You’re good, but you can’t keep
this up forever,” the Ballerina noted. “I’ve played this match before. Soon
you’ll get tired, and slow, and sloppy. Anyone would.”
Shep rolled to avoid
another spray of razors then dodged a butterfly kick that would have cost her a
leg. She knew she was in serious trouble, and there was no reason why the real
thing shouldn’t end as bloodily as all the alternate-reality simulations that
the Hooded Hood put his agents through for training. So what was different here
that could be turned to Sarah’s advantage?
NTU-150 hardly noticed when the
Probability Dancer stumbled against him. He did have chance to see that three
different mild gashes now ribboned Sarah’s limbs, signs that she was slowing
down as predicted. Then his full attention was occupied by the fizzing in his
chestplate.
The armour was ruined, of course. It was barely able to sustain
its basic function of life-support for the quadriplegic genius. But somehow the
mild shock of Dancer brushing against him has brought one system back online.
The Razor Ballerina might be able to counter probability effects upon herself,
but Dancer was being sneaky and the one difference between the present combat
and simulations was the presence of NTU-150.
“Hey, Ballerina!” he called. As
the villainess turned instinctively he flashed his now-working chest-flashlight
in a high-intensity strobe. It burned out almost immediately but sent Mindy
Kovskosky blinking backwards in a momentary epileptic seizure. And that was
enough to distract her from diverting Dancer’s probability field.
One of the
Ballerina’s own blades bounced off a statue of Dotoyevski at an oblique angle,
rebounded again as it shattered a priceless Romanoff vase, and embedded itself
in Mindy’s chest.
Then Dancer hit her with a chair.
“Are you okay?” Enty
and Dancer asked each other simultaneously.
“Yeah,” Sarah panted, leaning
over the fallen Razor Ballerina. “Now talk me through the emergency first aid I
need to do to save her life.”
Finny had
his private reservations about that, but he didn’t express them just then. His
brain shrieked at Onslaughter’s psionic attack, which his own defences were
barely withstanding. His body was bleeding and torn from the rends made by the
impossibly strong exo-carapace ridges on the alien killing machine. And so far
Onslaughter didn’t seem to be breathing hard. “Okay. Go with Plan Armageddon
then,” the Makluan instructed. “I’ll keep him off you while you do it.”
“I
wilt require nigh upon a quarter of the hour,” Donar warned, “and furthermore I
hast not attempted this feat before. Tis theory. Right mightily wilt the
valkyries sing of us if it goeth wrong.”
Finny smacked Onslaughter back with
his battered tail. “Do it,” he ordered. “Evil doesn’t win. We don’t let it. Full
stop.”
“Bring it all on,” laughed the brutal Onslaughter. “There is no force
on your pathetic adopted planet that can do me harm.”
Finny engulfed him in
flames so hot that the creature sank down into melted rock, but Onslaughter
clawed himself free and hurled half a building at the dragon.
It was one of
the longest fifteen minutes of Fin Fang Foom’s life. He unleashed the full range
of his power against Onslaughter, and for each attach Onslaughter dealt him more
harm. Seething with pain from a broken wing, hardly able to stand with a leg
gashed to the bone, still Fin Fang Foom kept coming back for more.
“I think I
shall have you stuffed and mounted when I have finished with you,” Onslaughter
considered. “The Last of the Makluans is surely a worthy trophy.”
Finny
didn’t have any time for a clever repartee. He forced himself to shrink (his
broken bones grinding together with the strain of shapeshifting) and hurled
himself down his enemy’s throat. There he literally wormed his way into
Onslaughter’s chest and started doing damage.
Onslaughter screamed for the
first time. Then he plunged one taloned hand into his own chest and ripped Finny
clear, Onslaughter’s own innards with him.
“Now I’m pissed,” the villain
croaked. “Now I start pulling your limbs off one by one.
“Ho, villain!” Donar
boomed, suddenly rising before the gore-stained enemy that held a limp dragon by
the neck. “Thou hast challenged the defenders of this world, and hast boasted
that no force herein canst stop thee. Thereupon hast I petitioned the All-Pappy
and extended the control of the storms which art mine birthright to reach
further from these fields we know. Yon solar storms are not of this world, and
yet at my behest their tongues hast reached out for thee!”
There was a bright
burst of radiance, literally as brilliant as the sun, as a tightly-controlled
plasma flare licked ninety-three million miles across the void, seared through
the atmosphere, and evaporated a six-foot-wide hole through Onslaughter’s
torso.
Donar cried out as the forces he controlled burned through him too,
and toppled to the ground with blackened skin and smouldering hair. Small fires
surrounded him on the melted pavement. The ambient heat melted the surfaces of
nearby buildings.
Fin Fang Foom tried to rise but found his body no longer
responding to him. He felt curiously detached from his body, and he wondered if
this was what death felt like. It was strangely welcome.
Then Onslaughter got
up.
Posted by The Hooded Hood continues serving up stressful situations for the heroes of the Parodyverse on November 12, 2001 at 10:07:01:
#92c: More Untold Tales of the Lair Legion vs the New Purveyors of Peril – Intruders in Infinity, or Where Bad Things Dwell
Celestial City, in
the very fabric of the Parodyverse
Imagine a city stretching forever, designed to house and maintain the cosmic
robots that maintain a universe on the cusp of the improbability horizon.
Imagine it as a place where gravity, physics, mathematics, and time are only
local phenomena. Imagine fifty mile high towers connected by gleaming arches,
gothic spires crackling with unknowable energies, sounds of distant machinery
that might be the music of the spheres. “Get it away! Get it away from me!” “So what’s the story with you two?” Meggan Foxx asked Al B. Harper and Miss
Framlicker as they followed Flapjack through what looked like a tangle of giant
coathangers. “I mean it’s pretty clear you have some history, an’ not all of it
good, huh?” “Uncouth, improperly-gendered entity of sloppy cognitive activity!” Anti-Yo
shouted, crossing rapiers with its Zorro-clad counterpart. “C’mon! talk to me, Knifey!” Joe Pepper shouted at his sentient knife.
“You’ve gotta help me find the others. I think they might be in
trouble.” The Celestian city continued its pristine mechanical revolutions, the
clockwork core of a multiverse. Every element spun in perfect harmony. Deep in
the crystal core of the shining Space Robot depot the Celestians were receiving
new orders via the trap they had walked into in Paradopolis. Next time: Only Hatman can save China from nuclear death, but that
leaves Nats alone to fight the Purveyors of Peril – all of them! Issue #92 ends
with the fight to the finish.
That’s exactly how the hidden City of
the Celestians looks. It is literally just how you imagine it.
Now imagine
that fantastic dwelling shivering to life, vast buildings opening like petals
and unfolding bizarre machinery designed to change the very reality of the
Parodyverse. Imagine the whole construct sliding and grinding and hinging into
new, ever more bizarre configurations.
Now imagine a possibly fake man in a
yellow raincoat saying, “I didn’t touch anything.”
“Well something is
happening,” Cheryl frowned at her husband. “And spiffy’s not here to
blame.”
“Actually I rather think it’s not his fault, your grace,” Sir
Mumphrey Wilton defended the guilty-looking Visionary. “This whole place reacts
to thoughts and whatnot. As soon as Dr Harper and Miss Framlicker worked out
that we could possibly use some of the gadgets here to affect the outside
universe then it probably woke up the internal defences.”
“What?” the Lair
Legion’s hunchbacked retainer Flapjack yelped, dodging two walls which almost
closed together around him to form part of a transmitter array, “You’re saying
this place has woken up and is trying to squish us.”
“If it can read
Flapjack’s thoughts I don’t blame it, actually,” Lisette admitted, nimbly
pulling Valeria and Meggan Foxxx from another shifting monolith.
“Sir
Mumphrey may well be right,” Al B. Harper admitted. “They say observation
changes the thing being observed. Here that’s literally true.”
“Can’t we look
somewhere else then?” complained ManMan as he barely avoided being skewered on a
series of antennae spines rising up rapidly from the polished floor beneath
him.
“We have to overcome this,” Valeria of Carfax insisted. “We have to get
back to Paradopolis and stop the Hooded Hood from getting control of the
Celestian Space Robots.”
“The Hood had a trap ready for us when we tried to
dimension-jump through his forcefield,” Miss Framlicker reminded her. “But I
don’t think he expected us to be shunted here. I’d say our best chance was to
try and stop him from this place.”
“Where exactly did HH expect us to get
thrown to then?” shuddered Amy Racecar. Her last Hooded Hood-related trip had
landed her in a fifteenth century torture chamber.
“That is not to being
important of questions just now,” Yo the pure thought being suggested. “Is to be
more to know how is stopping to the Hood while we here in place are.”
“We
have to use the Celestians’ city to counter any programming the Hood might try
on the Space Robots,” Cheryl translated.
Meggan looked around the baffling,
ever-changing machine that was the home base of the entities which maintained
the framework of reality. “Where do we start?” she asked worriedly.
That was
when the defences caught up with them.
“Calm down, Amy!” Laurie Leyton told
the hysterical mechanic. “And turn down the temperature. You’re burning my
fingers.”
“I was not aware that wardrobes were objects of terror in your
culture,” Valeria of Carfax admitted.
“No!” moaned Amy. “Noooo!”
It was
five minutes – at least subjectively – since a sudden twist of walls and floor
levels had split the intruders in the Celestian city into a number of groups.
Lisette, Valeria, and Amy were inside a maze of metallic corrugated tubing, and
had been making good progress until Amy had discovered the wardrobe.
“What is
frightening you so, Amy?” Valeria asked worriedly.
“I know that wardrobe. I
know it. It’s my wardrobe. My old wardrobe. From my room,” whimpered the
mechanic.
“So?” Lisette shrugged. “I still don’t see…”
“It has a knothole
like an eye. It looks at me. Night after night, when I was little, laying awake
terrified, knowing it was looking…”
“A childhood nightmare,” understood
Valeria. “Sir Mumphrey said we brought things here with us. The city must be
dredging our minds for things to scare us with.”
“It’s just a wardrobe, Amy.
You’re all grown up now. Just come past it with us,” Laurie urged.
“No! I
can’t. I can’t!” Amy shied away and began to back down the pipe.
“She’s too
scared, Laurie,” Valeria warned. “We have to…”
“No,” Lisette called out.
“C’mon Amy. You have to face your fears. After all, you were only a little girl
when this thing scared you. Now you’re all grown up and have the power to set
fire to things.”
Amy Racecar looked up with a manic gleam in her eye. “I
do, don’t I,” she said carefully.
“Nice solution,” Valeria breathed to
Lisette.
“Nice solution,” the other Lisette said, wrapping her whip around
her counterpart’s neck and hurling her to the floor. As Valeria tried to
intervene she kicked the slave-girl in the stomach and sent her sprawling to the
ground. “In case you haven’t worked it out I’m Laurie’s worst enemy, fresh from
her psyche.”
“But… you are Laurie!” gasped the doubled over Valeria.
“I
always was my own worst enemy,” smirked evil Lisette.
Amy was still
fascinated with the wardrobe, drawing near trying to summon the courage to burn
it. Its door creaked open slowly to grant her entrance.
“This place is
drawing our enemies from our minds?” panicked Valeria. “But… that means I have
an enemy here too!”
“Indeed you do, faithless minion,” snarled the dread
Dormaggadon, his burning face locked in a malevolent grin of anticipation.
“Indeed you do.”
“It’s private,” snapped Miss Framlicker. “Between me and the
slime.”
“Ouch,” chuckled Flapjack, making a note to dig into this stuff as
soon as possible. It could be juicy.
“Let’s just concentrate on finding a
Celestian control node,” suggested Al. “I feel kind of responsible for helping
the Hood get this far, even though I didn’t know the pure research I did was for
him or for this purpose. Let’s put a spanner in his works.”
“Heh. Is that
what you did to Miss F?” snickered Flapjack.
Before anybody could club him
into unconsciousness a wave of pure nightmare washed over them, engulfing them
in its stygian horrors.
“Don’t leave me all alone…” Miss Framlicker whimpered
to the darkness. “Not again…”
“It has to make sense,” Al B. Harper grimaced.
“Everything has to make sense. Otherwise what’s the point of anything?”
“No,
Daddy… it hurts,” whimpered Meggan.
“Wow, what a rush,” acknowledged
Flapjack, who was a connoisseur of bad experiences. “What else have you
got?”
The darkness pressed in colder and harder than ever.
“Is to be you are
uncute nasty nasty!” Yo called back. “And Yo is not to be thinking that Anti-Yo
is going to be to winning!”
“Oh dear,” Cheryl exclaimed as the two
black-silk-clad duellists tumbled past, “That evil English version of Yo always
did upset him/her, didn’t it?”
“But how did it get here?” Visionary
worried.
“Monsters from the id,” answered Sir Mumphrey gruffly. “Come on. We
have to find the others before our own nemeses turn up.”
“I don’t have a
nemeses,” Visionary assured him. “I’m harmless.”
“That has always puzzled me,
dear” admitted Cheryl. “For somebody so basically harmless you actually have a
really nasty rogues gallery.”
Visionary looked around with slightly panicky
eyes. “No. No I don’t,” he breathed.
Cheryl, under control by the archenemy
she shared with her husband, clobbered him from behind. “Yes you do, dear,” she
said turning to the iron-masked tyrant known as the Apostate.
“I say!”
objected Sir Mumphrey, just before time stopped around him and Madame Symmetry
of Synchronicity stalked from the shadows.
“Shut up,” the weapon hissed back at him.
“Shutupshutupshutup!”
“What is it? You’ve been behaving strangely ever since
we got here. What’s going on?”
“I’m trying not to think. Now stop talking to
me and let me go on not thinking.”
ManMan was puzzled “Why? I
don’t…”
“This place is taking thoughts of our worst nightmares and dragging
them in from across time and space,” Knifey snapped. “Now you have some pretty
nasty enemies, right? Thighmaster, Mefrothto, Hooded Hood, Dormaggadon, the
Supreme Interference, Blackhurt; you’ve annoyed loads of people waaaay out of
your weight class.”
“And you don’t want them manifesting to get us.”
“Oh
no. It’s not them I’m worried about. It’s the enemies I’VE picked up over the
years that are really scary. Hope for Blackhurt.”
“Is this time for one of
those origin confessions, Knifey?”
“Nope. This is exactly not the time for me
to think about… oh crap!”
ManMan spun round as a ninety-foot tall glowing
skeleton surrounded by cosmic flame rose up from the ground to reach towards the
parapet where he stood. “What the hell is this?” he shouted as the
supposedly-indestructible platform he stood on began to bubble and melt.
“You
know I might have mentioned having to kill a few gods and cosmic beings in my
time?” Knifey answered, trying to sound casual. “Ixion was the first.”
Then
the parapet gave way. ManMan leaped for the smooth wall of the nearest Celestian
tower. Knifey’s tip managed to penetrate the surface but not enough to hold in
and prevent them from falling.
Ixion snatched Joe up as he tumbled, catching
in him a giant bony hand whose cold flames seared ManMan to the core.
“Aaagh!” the Elvis impersonator screamed as his essence began to burn away.
Quite by reflex he jabbed Knifey into the monster’s wrist.
Now it was Ixion’s
turn to wail, and ancient multiple-voiced telepathic scream that almost shredded
Joe Pepper’s sanity. As he was dropped, ManMan reached out and managed to hook
his fingers on one of the strange ridges of a transmitter mast. His super-strong
grip allowed him enough time to scramble to precarious safety.
“Not him,”
Knifey was moaning softly. “You’re not ready. I’m not ready. I don’t want to
lose another partner. Not like this. Not to him again.”
“Knifey, c’mon! Snap
out of it!” ManMan had never seen the experienced, confident weapon like this
before. “Hey, I’m the one who loses it and you talk me through.
Knifey?”
Ixion had recognised the sting of the weapon that had once killed
him. Now his burning gaze turned full upon Knifey and his wielder. Joe couldn’t
even scream as he was engulfed in waves of malevolence. In a moment everything
was swept away from him; memory of self, every happy thought, even knowledge of
why he was there or what was happening to him. Through it all only one thought
remained: Knifey really needed him, perhaps for the first time.
“Okay,
partner,” ManMan shouted, “let’s do the cutting thing!”
And he leaped in a
high arc straight off the tower towards Ixion’s heart.
Already the
configurations of the miles-high buildings were shifting to accommodate the new
programming.
Insignificant as dust inside the infinite structures a
struggling handful of Earth’s protectors writhed and fought against impending
doom. One by one they fell to their greatest enemies, unable to resist the
calculated dooms prepared for them by the Parodyverse they existed in.
Then a
single shimmering control interface was shattered as a blood-streaked, wild-eyed
desperate madman stabbed an inchor-stained indestructible knife through it.
“Bugger you!” ManMan shouted, with an oath that was heard across the
cosmos.
Then the Celestian city stopped.
Posted by The concluding part of the chapter demonstrates just how bad it can get for a team of superheroes, courtesy of... the Hooded Hood on November 14, 2001 at 10:46:35:
#92d: More Untold Tales of the Lair Legion vs the New Purveyors of Peril – Chaos in China, or Three Surprises to Doom the World
Wuhang, China
“Y’know, this rulin’ the world stuff is kind of fun,” Anvil Man admitted as
he strode into the communist Chinese missile base “All these people bowing and
scraping and doing whatever you tell ‘em. I’m gonna get used to this real
fast.” First came the wind, pressing Rox-Hoff, HuntingJustice DeathMarrow, and
Savagetooth to the ground with its tornado force. Only Anvil Man ignored it and
could see Hatman in his Carolina Hurricanes cap bearing down on them. Before he
could react the hero had switched to his Seattle Supersonics hat and streaked
down to shatter the weapons console that Rox-Hoff had been about to use. At the
same time a leather-jacketed streak pounded into Savagetooth, hurling the
psychotic killer into DeathMarrow. Jay Boaz seared the first three missiles in their silos using his Calgary
Flames hat. As they exploded he hurtled away with his Torpedos cap. He knew now
that he had no time to defuse the weapons, so he had to try and destroy the
delivery rockets. Using his Giants cap to grow to massive size, he tore a
parabolic disc from the roof of the station and hurled it to slice through
another two missiles. HuntingJustice DeathMarrow hoisted two impossibly-huge shattercannons on her
forearms, set them to continuous fire, and launched the detonation grenades at
the flying idiot who opposed her. Nats executed a swift barrel roll, grabbed up
a chunk of fallen wall, and rocketed it at her. In our next gripping and penultimate episode: The Lair Legion and
the Purveyors of Peril in a fight to the finish! Natasha Romanza and Beth
Shellet vs an army of cons! The SPUD helicarrier vs the HERPES space fortress!
spiffy vs the Hooded Hood! More villains than is usually legal in such a short
space of time, plus all the heroes still fit to fight for truth and justice and
a few who aren’t! The World Tour ends but will there still be a world? Find out
next time in Yet More Untold Tales of the Lair Legion vs the Purveyors of
Peril – Last Man Standing, or Test Unto
Destruction.
The armoured killer and his companions had just returned from their
inspection of Beijing. There was no violence in the streets there – now. “I
prefer them a little bit more frisky,” admitted Savagetooth. “I was hoping for a
little more resistance. I’m the best there is at what I do, and what I do best
is slaughter.”
“I didn’t notice you being especially restrained,”
HuntingJustice DeathMarrow observed. “Even I felt that slaughtering people
because they didn’t understand your orders when you spoke in English was a
little extreme.”
“Hey, if they’re that ignorant they deserve to
die!”
Commander Rox-Hoff sighed and returned to his monitor screens. He had
selected this base of operations rather than the Chinese capital because the
equipment here was much better suited for his tactical planning. “Don’t get
distracted,” he warned the others. “The Lair Legion counterattacks have
begun.”
HuntingJustice DeathMarrow strode over to the video screens. “What’s
happening?” she demanded.
The former Skree soldier indicated some of the
monitors. “As we expected, the enemy is going for scenario Alpha, splitting its
forces to try and engage us on all our principal fronts. Spacewarped has just
phased off to join himself in Sydney, where Goldeneyed and Trickshot are trying
to save their womenfolk. I’m only getting confused reports out of Rio as you
might expect, but I’d surmise we have CrazySugarFreakBoy! and the Sorceress
there. Exile and Troia are engaging Suicide Blonde’s team in LA. Comms are out
with London, which makes the most likely assault team there the Dark Knight and
probably Ziles. And Fin Fang Foom, Donar, and Dancer are busy flattening Moscow
with Onslaughter.”
“That leaves…” calculated Savagetooth, “Hatman and Nats
for us to kill!”
“They must be around here somewhere,” HuntingJustice
DeathMarrow noted, checking the sensors on her shattercannons. “All the other
Legionnaire attacks have begun.”
“I want Nats,” Anvil Man decided. “I wanna
see if he can still fly after I’ve pulled his arms and legs off.”
“Then I
call Hatman,” Savagetooth sneered. “I wanna see how tough a guy can be whose
power is to wear hats and…”
Then the lights went out, the roof came in, and
Nats and Hatman arrived.
“Not bad for a guy who just flys, huh?”
Nats demanded as he grabbed Anvil Man by the helmet and used his ability to
carry anything to drag the armoured villain up through the sundered roof and
into the sky beyond.
“Let’s see you fly after I’ve twisted your head off,
sonny,” growled Anvil Man, reaching back to try and seize the hero.
“Uh-oh.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave the tour, rusty,” Nats
answered, dropping him from about half a mile above ground. “Ooh, that had to
hurt.”
Roxx Hoff rolled aside as Savagetooth flung himself at Hatman. The
capped crusader was wearing a hat with a Pittsburgh Steelers logo now, but to
his surprise Savagetooth’s claws still managed to rake him. He quickly shifted
to a Bombers cap and blew Savagetooth backwards.
Radical physical changes
always winded Hatman for a moment, so HuntingJustice DeathMarrow took advantage
of the brief pause to bracket him with half a dozen mini-missiles in an
antimatter spread.
Nats stopped her from following up her attack on the
stunned Hatman by the simple expedient of flying down behind her, yanking her
shorts as high as he could hike them, and powering her into the wall.
“We say
this one time,” Hatman warned the Purveyors. “Surrender.”
Savegetooth snarled
an obscenity in response.
“This is all very amusing,” Rox-Hoff admitted,
surveying the wreck of what had been the Purveyors’ command centre, “and you’re
doing better than I expected. But you people clearly haven’t heard of remote
controls.” And with a small click he pressed a tiny button in his
palm.
Across the Wuhei Defence Installation a series of bangs indicated silo
lids being blown free. From the missile pits came the warning gases of imminent
launch.
“What?” Nats gasped.
“Say goodbye to Beijing,” Commander Rox-Hoff
smirked. “Why does nobody believe us when we say what will happen if we are
resisted? Well after this the world will know.” Then there was the roar of
nuclear missiles initiating their launch cycles.
“I have to stop them,”
Hatman gasped, dragging himself to his feet and fumbling for his Winnipeg Jets
hat. “But…” he looked around at the villains who were now pulling themselves
together to rejoin the fight.
“Don’t worry,” Nats told him. “I’ll handle
them. Go save lives.”
Hatman shot him the anguished look of a deputy-leader
who knows he’s leaving a young man alone whose only ability is to fly to face
four of the deadliest fighters on the planet. Then he streaked away to try and
prevent the atomic warheads from launching. He was already fumbling in his
subspace storage pouch for his Bomb Disposal helmet.
“Well this should be
brief,” smirked Savaegtooth, looking at Nats.
Bill Reed felt a sudden sick
fear of what was about to happen almost overwhelm him. The world was in mortal
peril, the Lair Legion were playing for all the marbles, and he was the last
hero. He'd been so proud to join the Legion, so happy to be accepted in their
fellowship, but now he was going to have to pay the price.
“With great power
comes great responsibility,” he told himself, and flew in to take on
Savagetooth.
The other seven nuclear weapons launched high into the
skies on their deadly mission.
Shaking off the torpor that came from using
too many hats in too short a time Hatman dragged on his Jets cap once more and
shot off after the contrails. It took him almost a minute to reach the first
missile and use his Rockets hat to take control of it and force it harmlessly
into the ground. He realised that this method would be too slow. Six to go, with
an estimated impact time of four minutes.
Ignoring the pain it caused, Jay
donned his Lightning hat and transformed himself into a bolt of electricity that
crackled between the hindmost two missiles. The rocket fuel in the delivery
housing ignited, destroying the missiles in a bright flare of exploding fuel.
Radioactive material rained down on the farmlands below, but did not achieve
fission.
Inside the remaining four rockets the tritium priming mechanisms
began to move.
Hatman literally puled himself together. He hardly noticed
that he had burned off twenty pounds of bodyweight in his latest manoeuvre. He
dragged on his Hurricanes hat once more and allowed himself to be swept upwards
by the winds. When it became clear that he was not going to be able to blow the
missiles to the ground (one minute left, Jay) he switched to his Lasers cap and
seared right through another of the rockets. There was another explosion, and
Hatman winced as he noticed that the burning jet fuel was now falling on the
housing at the outskirts of Beijing.
Gritting his teeth, Hatman dragged his
Devil Rays hat onto his blistered forehead. A sudden urge to let the missiles
detonate and see what happened washed over him, but he forced himself to resist
the evil urges and to transform into a sinister red laser-beam. He seared
through another of the missiles.
That left three missiles and twenty seconds.
Hatman dragged the Devil Rays hat off him and cast it far away before he
surrendered to its evil whisperings. He desperately catalogued his remaining
caps to see which one could save two million lives. Saskatechewan Roughriders?
Calgary Stampeders? Hillside Lakers?
Fifteen seconds.
There it was, right
at the bottom of his transdimensional storage space. He’d never used the cap
before. He had no natural affinity with it, which would make mastering it even
harder. But it seemed like the only one he could try to use, no matter what it
cost him.
Hatman dragged on the Mahoning Valley Scrappers baseball cap.
A
wave of energy burst out from the capped crusader, rendering all metal in its
path useless. The missiles were caught in the field and rotted to fragments of
rust and fibreglass.
The wave brushed against the ground and Hatman felt
rather than saw buildings collapse in a swathe across central Beijing. From a
long distance away he heard himself scream as he tried to control the forces he
had unleashed. He felt veins popping in his head, felt the blood trickling from
his eyes and nose.
At last it was over. He pulled the cap from his head as he
plummeted from the skies. He tried to drag on his Angels cap to prevent his fall
but his fingers wouldn’t close right now.
The ground rose up to thank Hatman
for saving China.
“See, the thing is,” Nats
explained as he avoided Savagetooth yet again and dropped another section of
base on the feral felon, “it doesn’t matter how powerful you are or that I can
only fly. It’s actually a good guy bad guy thing.” He avoided a series of homing
mines from HuntingJustice Deathmarrow and led the last few down towards
Rox-Hoff. “You’re bad guys, and you’ve just gotta be stopped. I’m the good guy,
so it’s my job to stop you.”
“Let’s see how good you are with your guts
untangled across the floor,” growled Savagetooth, leaping again.
Nats stopped
and twisted in midair, and again the killer came away empty handed. “Not to
mention some of you are really ugly,” Bill Reed added. “I mean, reeeallly ugly.
I wouldn’t mind dating HuntingJustice though. Call me.”
The
massively-proportioned tough chick snarled and launched a new plasma-barrage at
him.
“I probably wouldn’t go for a second date, though,” Nats warned her,
dropping below the line of fire and getting a good solid kick to her chin before
rising upwards again. “You’ve got a nice bod but you seem kinda shallow.”
“So
the ‘good guys’ always win, do they?” challenged Commander Rox-Hoff, rising from
the debris. “That’s why the grouping of secondary heroes on your
dimension-hopping bus got themselves wiped out in our trap earlier, is
it?”
“What?” Nats gasped. He managed to move again barely in time, so
Savagetooth’s claws shredded only his jacket.
“Did you think to take us
unawares by a covert strike at the centre of our operations? They tried to sneak
into Paradopolis while you were engaging us,” Rox-Hoff suggested. “We were
prepared for them.”
“Miss F… all the others?”
“Wiped out of reality,”
Rox-Hoff assured him. “I can play back the tapes for you if you like. I imagine
it wasn’t a pleasant end.”
Nats screamed down towards him but the Skree
Commander was prepared and backhanded the flying phenomenon away into the
rubble. “Take him now,” he commanded Savagetooth and DeathMarrow.
Savagetooth
grabbed him from one side, HuntingJusticeDeathMarrow from the other. Nats felt
the claws slice his left arm even as the bones in his right hand were
shattered.
Something inside his brain snapped. He had a momentary, mad vision
of that damned cane that had haunted his dreams of late. Then he used his
telekinesis as never before.
Nats could fly. He did it using a kind of
tactile levitation, the ability to move himself and whatever he was in contact
with fast and manoeuvrable. He’d never made people fly before without staying in
contact with them.
Savagetooth was hurled into the bulkhead behind him at
roughly seven hundred miles per hour. His bones happily penetrated it, but his
healing factor was going to take around two weeks to let him walk away from this
one.
HuntingJustice DeathMarrow was hurled directly upwards. By the time the
momentum had passed and she was in free fall she was around two miles above the
ground.
“Very impressive,” Rox-Hoff admitted. “I warned them not to
underestimate their enemies. Even you.”
“Nah,” snarled Nats, rising from the
floor cradling his damaged hands. Even now he could feel his powers at work,
keeping the blood inside his body, flowing through veins that were no longer
there. “Especially me.”
“Very well,” Rox-Hoff agreed. “I shall take
you seriously. Anvil Man, kill him.”
Nats turned in time to see the charge of
the unstoppable armoured enemy. Anvil Man had returned. He wasn’t even winded
from the fall he had taken.
Nats charged him, summoning all his telekinetic
force to hit the fast-approaching juggernaut head on. He hit Anvil Man with
enough force to flatten a battleship.
Anvil Man took a step
backwards.
Anvil Man swatted Nats. Bill Reed managed to fly backwards so that
he was only caught by a fraction of the force. He felt his ribs snapping and
something in his chest go squish. It was suddenly hard to breathe.
“Not bad,
little man,” Anvil Man admitted. “Only Donar hits that hard usually. Cause, I’ve
kicked his butt too. And I bet your head pops a whole lot easier.”
He rumbled
over to where Nats lay sprawled on the debris of the defence base and raised one
massive boot to crush the hero’s skull.
Nats lashed out one last time with
the same percussive force as before. He felt fire burning popping in his brain.
He realised his blood was pumping freely from his battered body as he no longer
had any concentration to spare for stopping it.. He narrowed the force and
narrowed it again, so that all the kinetic energy was vectored into one tiny
area – right between Anvil Man’s legs.
“Eeep,” squeaked the armoured villain,
folding over cupping his groin. He fell onto his side, right on top of
Nats.
Bill Reed struggled for consciousness. He couldn’t give in now. If he
could only fly up, push Anvil Man away… if he could just…
“A very good
attempt,” Rox-Hoff conceded, levelling a disruptor pistol at Nats’ head, “Better
than any of the simulations. Unfortunately for you and your fallen friends this
isn’t the full extent of our planning. Behold.”
Rox-Hoff thumbed the second
button on his remote control. With a video-effect shimmer the entire Purveyors
of Peril flickering into being. They were whole, fresh, and ready for battle. At
another click a second identical set of villains appeared. At a third click
there were three teams.
“What…?” gasped Nats. “Some kind of
holograms?”
“You wish,” snorted PsychoAcidPervGirl! “Dweeb.”
“I study my
enemies,” Rox-Hoff explained. “The last time the Lair Legion faced multiple
enemies intent on destroying them they overcame the opposition by using a device
which makes images real.”
“The Movie Gun,” gasped Nats.
“Since we had captured your Lair Mansion as part of the Hooded
Hood’s overall strategy I felt we should extract the plans for this device and
make use of it ourselves,” Rox-Hoff gloated. “But perhaps you don’t feel up to
taking on three iterations of the whole Purveyors of Peril by yourself?”
“You
bastard,” snarled Nats, coughing blood. “The LL will get you in the end. We’ve
never been beaten yet. Well, not too often and never when it really
counts.”
“Let’s put that to the test, shall we?” Rox-Hoff suggested to the
assembled Purveyors. “You see, human, we have a third little surprise too. Our
colleague Spacewarped has been present at all the battle sites, and he has
managed to get a teleport lock on each of your comrades-in-arms. So let’s bring
them here now and see what condition they are in, eh?”
There was a ripple of
interdimensional transfer and suddenly Nats was surrounded by the entire Lair
Legion and the villains they were fighting.
Four rosters of the Purveyors of
Peril had nasty grins on their faces as they fell upon their prey.