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This message Untold Christmas Tales of the Lair Legion: You’d Better Watch Out - Part One was posted by The Hooded Hood offers this seasonal story with best wishes to the PVB for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year on Monday, December 24, 2001 at 22:07.
Untold Christmas Tales of the Lair Legion: You’d Better Watch Out
“And with drifting snow five feet high and worse tomorrow, Mayor spiffy is warning that all interstate highways out of Gothametropolis are closed. The Campaign to Impeach Mayor spiffy blames the notorious fern-wielder for global weather conditions and today said…”
“Shut that crap off and get over here wit’ that crowbar,” Dogbreath growled at his companion. “Dis stuff is heavy.”
Sweatbath flicked off the radio, turned up his collar, and joined his five comrades in lifting down the heavy tea chests from the nondescript delivery truck. This was the perfect night to move the merchandise, with the weather obscuring the city in a shroud of white and the cops busy with drunks and holiday leave and three dozen road accidents.
“Heavy and illegal,” the Dark Knight pointed out, speaking right in Dogbreath’s ear.
The thug jumped in surprise, skidded on the ice, and rumbled heavily into a snowdrift. Sweatbath and Meathook both hefted their crowbars and took swings at the urban legend.
The Dark Knight took their weapons off them and showed how they should be applied. “Ho ho ho,” he told them, seasonally.
The two felons who were still in the truck gunned the engine, slammed the vehicle into reverse, and tried to mow the man in black down. They slammed into the warehouse wall then careened forward, skidding away as fast as they could.
Then the dragon picked up their vehicle, and a head the size of a limo snaked round to look through the windshield. “Would you like to come quietly, or would you like to have your chestnuts roasted?” Fin Fang Foom asked them.
The GMY police arrived in less than ten minutes, which was pretty good considering the weather conditions, but by then DK and Finny had time to examine the crates that their captives had been transporting.
“An entirely different kind of snow if I don’t miss my guess,” DK noted, wrenching the lid off the first crate.
“Uh, I don’t think so,” Foom answered, as the crate began to cry; or at least the child inside it did.
--------------------
Wangmundo rather liked Christmas Eve. The Paradopolis Municipal Library closed early, leaving him along in the peaceful darkness, in the book-lined sanctuary trimmed with paper chains and tinsel. Relaxed at last in his secret home he hurled himself from the gallery and landed lithely on the main floor to consider a suitable literary repast.
His keen senses alerted him to the intruders, and his fur bristled. In an instant he was in shadow, watching, waiting. His every instinct was to defend his territory, to rend the intruders; but caution warned him to find their purpose first.
“I don’t understand,” the girl said, looking around her curiously as she played her torch over the shelves. “Why does it have to be tonight? I was looking forward to Visionary’s egg nog. People always joke about how they would rather drink rancid goat’s urine but that is just their way. He is a Great Man.”
“He’s a jolly good chap,” agreed the man, carefully not commenting on the egg nog. He was old, older than he looked, and time moved in strange eddies around him. As he walked he was studying a pocketwatch in his hand, almost as if it was a compass. “But I’m afraid if we’re to get the message it has to be at this time and this place. Old Lucius Faust was most specific.”
“That’s another thing I don’t quite get,” the perky girl in the catsuit admitted. “Faust was the old sorcerer supreme, right, before Xander? And he vanished, oh, thirty years or more back? How could he post a letter back then and yet it was only delivered to you two days ago?”
“Insufficient postage,” Mumphrey explained. “Anyway, he said the book we needed would only have the page we want on Christmas eve, so here we are.”
Wangmundo suppressed his urge to kill and indulged his curiosity. He had long since got over his doubts about nesting in a place once occupied by a master of the mystic crafts. Faust was long gone (although he remained technically on the library’s payroll for reasons only a wizard could explain) and his influence was fading. But the troll felt a certain morbid desire to learn what the old sorcerer supreme had been up to, and why he would send this strange old man and his bright companion on such an odd hunt.
“Ah, here we are,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton called to Asil, plucking a book from the shelves where the oldest manuscripts were housed, “This is the thing.”
--------------------
It was very cold in the alley but Jenny no longer felt the sting of the ice. She hoped that when she cut her wrists with the razor blade the cold would make that not hurt either. She hoped that it would be quick, and then nothing would hurt her any more. She fumbled the sharp rectangle with frozen fingers and bared her arm and closed her eyes.
“Hey! Over here!” someone called.
Jenny opened her eyes again in fear that someone might stop her.
There were three men and they didn’t look like rescuers. “A kid,” the one who had shouted first noted. “She’s perfect.”
Suddenly Jenny, who wanted to die, was terribly afraid that they might kill her.
“Keep back!” she warned, trying to stand up, holding the razor blaze in front of her uselessly.
The first man laughed and slapped her to the ground.
“Don’t damage her,” another of the men warned. “We need ‘em in good condition.”
“S-stay back,” Jenny whimpered, all the strength gone from her thin form.
The men laughed and didn’t stay back.
Then there was what can only literally be described as a Brown Streak. And suddenly there were three punks head down in garbage cans packed with snow. Then the blur stopped and there was a black man in a runner’s outfit looking down at the girl.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay, miss?”
Jenny didn’t answer. She didn’t feel strong enough to look up.
“It’s alright now,” De Brown Streak assured her. “The bad guys are snowmen. We’ll get you safe to a hospital and then…”
“No!” Jenny panicked, almost as frightened now as she had been a few moments ago. She stared around now looking for her razor blade. “No hospital!”
“Okay,” DBS agreed carefully. “No hospitals, but I really think you need some help. This is no night to be out on the streets, miss. How about I take you to see a friend of mine at the Zero Street Mission? Confidentiality guaranteed.”
“I don’t know.”
“Humour me, please,” Josh Clement urged her. “It’s real cold standing about in running shorts on a night like this.”
--------------------
“Goodnight, everyone,” waitress Sarah Shepherdson called to the last of her regulars as she closed the shutters at the Bean and Donut Coffee Bar, “Be careful getting home in this snow have a Merry Christmas!”
“Night Shep!” folks called, trudging though the rising blizzard to their cars and homes.
“Night, Sarah,” Chronic echoed, slinging his guitar across his back and turning his collar against the wind.
Sarah hesitated. “Chronic?” she called after him. “You… you do have somewhere to go, tonight don’t you? A place to sleep, I mean?”
“Oh, sure. No problem,” the young man lied.
“’Cause I have a couch you could borrow if you need it, you know.”
Chronic looked back at the waitress in disbelief. “You do know who I am, right? Chronic. The bad guy? Demonic guitar and all that?”
“Yeah, I heard. Merry Christmas, Chronic. Now do you need the sofa or what?”
“You can’t just invite guys you don’t know to bunk on your couch,” Chronic pointed out. “It’s not safe.”
“Aw, don’t worry,” Shep smiled at him. “I’m not Lisa. You’ll be okay.”
“That… wasn’t what I meant.”
Sarah laughed. “Look, take the keys, go up to the attic, get the hot chocolate on. I’ll be with you when I’ve got the main door locked, right? And don’t worry. If we can’t look after each other at Christmas then what was the point of all that stable stuff anyway, right?”
Chronic shook his head in disbelief; but he took the keys and found the staircase.
Shep went over to lower the shutter over the front entrance to the café. That was when she noticed the cardboard box. Then she noticed that the cardboard box was crying.
Sarah Shepherdson looked into it. “Oh my,” she breathed.
--------------------
“I don’t understand,” Bernice Tessmacher, radical journalist admitted, shaking her head. “Why don’t you want this reporting? Surely it’s good PR for once.”
“We’re not doing this for the PR,” Dreamcatcher Foxglove, a.k.a. CrazySugarFreakBoy! answered with a big grin. “We’re doing it because it’s right.” Just then he was jumped on by a pile of children and disappeared under a pre-school horde, only to bounce off with them giggling around him.
“When we do public appearances we tend to suffer from unscheduled supervillain attacks,” Hatman explained to the surprised reporter. “So when we come to see the orphans at St Jude’s we tend to keep quiet about it.”
“Which is more than they do,” Sorceress laughed, watching the children playing with the minor sprites she had conjured. “No, don’t try and put them in your mouth, Sebastian.”
Across the room Nats was levitating children so they could decorate the tree. “No really,” he told them. “Santa contracts the Interdimensional Transportation Corporation all the time these days. Seems his reindeers kept getting eaten.”
“Happy to help out,” Amazing Guy told Exile and G-Eyed. “And the presents were no problem either. When my kids found out where I was going tonight they were glad to let me take a few old things with me.”
“Nay verily,” Donar earnestly told a bunch in the corner. “In mine land when an old bewhiskered traveller doth visit thine house be most certain to counteth his eyes and be ware of thy manners, for the Oldman doth bring both blessings and banes as he judges the worth of his hosts. And also he art very partial to a nice drop of mead.”
“Hey, Finny, you finally got here,” Troia called out as the Makluan entered from the snowstorm.
“Oh yeah, I forgot you guys were scheduled for an unscheduled visit here,” the dragon answered. “Probably just as well. Saves the call-out.”
“You forgot we were here?” Nats echoed. “Then why are you here?”
The Dark Knight loomed from the storm. “We had an unscheduled orphan emergency,” he admitted. “Is there room for seventeen more here?”
--------------------
“Mimble’s?” Asil puzzled. “The biggest source of evil in the city right now is in the most famous department store in Paradopolis?”
“That’s what the book said,” Mumphrey reminded her. “It’s a good thing you can change your age at will. If you make yourself, say, seven or so, I can play grandpa and take you into Mimble’s Magic Santa Grotto to find out that’s happening in there, m’dear.”
“Deal,” agreed Asil. “I am amazed that so many people are still last-minute shopping despite the snowstorm.”
“And what do you want for Christmas?” Mumphrey wondered as he led his now child-sized amanuensis into the gaudily lit, crowded store.
“A talking Visionary doll of course,” answered Asil. “I just love it when they say ‘I’m real dammit’”
“Don’ t they usually explode right after that?” Mumph pointed out.
“Only in Roni Y Avis’ early designs,” the girl pointed out. “Oh look, there’s the grotto. Look what it says over the door.”
Mumphrey read it with a frown: “Abandon all cash, ye who enter here.”
--------------------
“Well?” De Brown Streak demanded of Reverend Fleetwood as he came back down into the chapel at Hell’s bathroom’s Zero Street Mission. Already a few folks were filing in for the Christmas Eve Carol Service, so they had to keep their voices low.
“She’s comfortably in bed for now,” he answered, “but she won’t tell me her name or where she’s run away from.”
“She seemed pretty ill.”
“She is, and that’s something we have to deal with. You see that poor runaway child has just given birth herself, less than twelve hours ago. And she has abandoned her baby.”
De Brown Streak scowled. “How can she do that?”
“She’s hurt, hungry, scared and alone,” Fleetwood replied. “She’s not in any state to make rational choices right now. So I have a little favour to ask…”
“You want me to try and find the kid, one kid lost in the snow in this massive city.”
The Reverend nodded and shrugged. “Well, when you want a job doing quickly, who else do you ask?”
DBS sighed and was gone. Reverend Fleetwood breathed a silent prayer that one helpless child might find the succour it needed before it was too late.
--------------------
“I am a total sucker!” snarled ManMan, as he wiped baby-spew off his Elvis costume.
“No argument from me,” noted Chronic, returning from Sarah’s kitchen with a warm bottle from the microwave.
“’Hi, Manny’, she says, ‘Come on over for a Christmas surprise,’ she says.”
“Well, you’re pretty surprised, right?” Knifey pointed out unhelpfully.
“Someone has to look after the kid. What do I know about babysitting?” Chronic demanded. “And Visionary and Cheryl are out of town, or she’d have lumbered them.”
“Where did she go to anyway?” ManMan demanded.
“Said she needed to find the mother,” Chronic replied. “But what are the chances of that?”
ManMan knew that Sarah Shepherdson was also secretly the probability-altering superheroine Dancer. “About a million to one,” he sighed, “and falling rapidly.”
--------------------
The staff at St Jude’s were surprised but capable. With the Legion’s help the distraught children were settled in and calmed down after their kidnap trauma. “Commissioner Graham’s already trying to chase up next of kins,” Finny explained, “but in the meantime we need to find out why somebody is snatching kids in big numbers across the state.”
“I guess I could donate a little festive butt-kicking,” admitted Exile.
“Yeah,” agreed G-Eyed. “It’s not only turkeys are gonna be stuffed if we catch the slime who are organising that kind of thing.”
“Lead us forth to smite these felons unto oblivion for the nonce,” suggested Donar.
“We’ll be back later if we can,” CSFB! told the orphans, “but right now the Lair Legion’s gotta go smite evildoers and stuff. You enjoy those free comic books I wangled outta the comic companies and we’ll go kick the… that is, put lumps of coal in the bad guys Christmas stockings.”
“Yeah,” growled Amazing Guy. “Right up them.”
--------------------
“Peace on Earth?” Mimble’s Santa asked scornfully as Asil sat on his lap. “What kind of child wants peace on Earth as their Christmas present?”
“A good one?” Asil answered helpfully. “I would also like goodwill amongst men. And women. Even for doody-head Lisa.”
Mimble’s Santa frowned a little. “Wouldn’t you like a full boxed set My Little Princess, with all the add-ons? Or a Pre-pubescent beauty makeup kit? Or a Barbie CD player?”
“No thank you,” Asil answered politely. “But if it makes you feel any better I would like to root out the great source of evil that is said to be hiding in this department store and bring it to an end.”
“W-what?” Mimble’s Santa stuttered. “What did you say?”
“That one,” a rich, rounded, honey-coated voice called over the tannoy. “Bring her to me. And her uncle.”
“What’s that?” Mumphrey demanded as he was surrounded by six-foot security men dressed as elves. “What’s the meanin’ of this?”
“You’ve both won a special gift,” Asil and Mumph were told as they were whisked off. “This way, through the doors marked Secret Grotto.”
--------------------
“Don’t panic,” the Crime Chicken told his men. “This is by way of being a specially designed stronghold to keep out superheroes. The walls is ten foot thick and lined with steel. There are all kinds of traps. If those guys try to break in they’re dead meat. Besides, everybody knows Nats can only fly.”
Then the building lurched. The Chicken of Crime toppled over in a flurry of feathers. In the corner the children he had snatched clung to each other in terror.
“Boss!” a panicking minion shouted from his post by the gunslit. “The stronghold. It’s moving.”
“They can’t break through, don’t worry,” Crime Chicken assured him.
“No boss, you don’t get it. It’s moving upwards!”
Nats, holding onto the massive crack fortress at one corner and using his ability to fly with pretty much anything, chuckled.
When they had reached a couple of hundred feet in the air, Amazing Guy blew the wall through.
“Hi there,” the protector of the Parodyverse smiled amiably as the bullets ricocheted off his protective quantum-field. “I’m here to convince you that crime does not pay. Surrender or you’ll believe that a man can fly. Briefly. Before he hits the wall.”
“You mustn’t stop us now!” Crime Chicken screeched desperately. “Not when we could get in at the ground floor on the new deal.”
“And all it would cost was a few children?” Nats surmised, lowering the building back to its foundations now that AG had the hostage situation under control.
“He said he was going to trade us to the new power in Paradopolis,” one of the children accused, thrusting a finger at the dishevelled Crime Chicken. “For a place as one of his lieutenants.”
“Does this new power have a name?” AG demanded of their captured felons.
They told him.
--------------------
“Ah, a minor cosmic office holder and an age-shifting clone,” the man in the Armani suit noted, flicking shut his filofax and stepping out from behind his stainless steel and plastic desk. “Oh please, don’t be surprised at my recognising your natures. After all, I am a conceptual entity, albeit very much the new kid on the block so to speak. But I feel I’m about to have a grand debut.”
“Who are you, sirrah, and what the devil is your game?” demanded Sir Mumphrey Wilton.
“Why can’t you guess?” the plastically-handsome young man asked mockingly. “I’m the creature who is going to sap the soul out of this misbegotten city. I am the chill behind the ice-storms, the Christmas heartbreak, the progenitor of meaningless cheerless revelry, of broken hopes and false promises, or holiday loneliness and year-long debt. I am born of the greed of society, and the void of faith, of the cynicism of children, of the glitter which is not gold.”
Mumphrey and Asil suddenly felt very cold indeed, as if a chill wind was blowing through their hearts.
“Who am I? I am the Spirit of Christmas, as it has become. I am manifest at last, and now in this season where hope is lost, all of you will be mine.”
To be continued, probably in a couple of weeks time.
NOTE: Scroll past the replies to find PART 2
This poster posed from 212.159.1.5 when they posted
Message Thread
This message Untold Christmas Tales of the Lair Legion: You’d Better Watch Out was posted by HH presents the concluding section of uour festive Yuletide romp on Monday, January 7, 2002 at 13:17.
“This is decidedly sexist,” noted Ziles, as Finny piled another three kidnapped children onto her at the door of St Jude’s orphanage. “Why do Whitney and I have to guard the children you guys keep rescuing? You must have brought back, what, sixty or so now?”
“And they’re all so very cute,” gurgled the Sorceress from beneath a pile of giggling infants. “Yes you are!”
“Uh dude, you may want to watch out for broody girlfriends,” Nats muttered into Hatman’s ear in the background.
“There’s a major weather front hitting the Big Banana right now, Ziles,” Finny explained to the Xnylonian exile. “It’s difficult to navigate, so it makes sense to have the members who can best survive extreme elements go into the storm.”
“Or, in one case, go hunting for Frosting Giants,” sighed Hatman.
“What we do know is that there’s a major new player in the City, and entrance price to his organisation is a donation or captured children,” scowled the Dark Knight. “That’s why we need the orphanage protected, and that’s why when we find this new bad guy he’s going to wish he and his grandparents back six generations had never been born.”
“Why only six generations?” wondered CSFB.
“There’s no point in being extreme,” shrugged the urban legend.
“Well, thank goodness for the Cartoon Channel,” is all that Ziles could say.
--------------------
“Hi, Hello? Is that Lisa? Lisa Waltz?”
The long distance line was filled with static.
“What did she say?” ManMan asked urgently, attempting to simulate breast-feeding for the foundling with an inflated rubber glove and a carton of cranberry juice.
“I couldn’t quite hear her, but it sounded like ‘I’m real dammit’,” puzzled Chronic.
“What? What do you mean? Put me on, you useless drug-addled guitarist. “Hello? Hello? Damn, the national lines must be down again.”
And across the nation on a quiet ranch, Visionary looked at the phone is puzzlement for a moment before returning to the party.
“Who was it dear?” asked Cheryl, happily. While her husband was out Yo had been able to pour his entire egg-nog down the toilet, and everyone was sitting at table with empty glasses.
“I dunno,” Vizh admitted. “It sounded all crackly. I think it was a man.”
“Some guy was phoning Lisa?” NTU-150 pointed out. “It does happen, I hear.”
“You haven’t been improving my phone have you, Enty?” Lisa asked suspiciously.
“Not yet,” admitted the technologist. “But give me ten minutes and that light-up Harry Potter Snorting Stomping Norbert Toy little Chris got and…”
“Ah well,” beamed Yo, looking round at his/her friends. “God blessing us every one.”
--------------------
“Hey kid? Kid? Are you okay?”
“Merry Christmas and piss off!” the young man on the Sheldon Bridge told the stranger.
dull thud turned his collar up against the driving snow and tried again. “You’re Shane Jackson, right? You’re a school friend of Jeremy Wick?”
“He’s a geek. You’re a dweeb.”
“Look, we’ve both been out looking for you. We were worried after you walked out of the Wick Christmas party.”
“Well now you’ve found me, so you can sod off, granddad.”
dull thud growled. “I’ll have you know I’ve got years of youthful angst still left in me yet. And you’re not too big for a smack in the teeth.”
“Take your best shot, and spend Christmas in hospital.”
“Why you little…”
“Perhaps this isn’t the best way to handle this?” Cressida, the telepathic tapeworm who lived in dull thud’s stomach, suggested. “He’s psyching you out.”
“Right. C’mon Shane. I heard about your girlfriend dying.”
“And?”
“And Christmas is a hard time when we’ve lost someone we love.”
“And I shouldn’t jump into the freezing river and end it all?”
“Er, well ideally no.”
“Because?”
“Because… because you’ll just plummet to an icy death. Like this.” And dull thud launched himself over the side of the Sheldon Bridge.
“Wait!” gasped Shane, reaching too late to catch the imbecile who had just tossed himself to his death.
“I suppose you think that was very smart,” Cressida told dull thud as he used his ability to teleport directly upwards to appear up above the bridge again. “Shock him from his depression, that kind of thing.”
“Yeah. Good wasn’t it?”
“But you can only appear directly above where you were before, and you jumped over the side of the bridge.”
“Oh shi…”
Splash!
--------------------
“You can’t steal Christmas,” Asil warned the new Spirit of Christmas.
“Of course not,” the smarmy businessman agreed. “I already own it.” He gestured some of his PR boys forward. “What are our latest slogans, gentlemen?”
The ad people held up posters with the legends ‘Christmas, it’s not for giving anymore’, ‘I got more presents than you did, and none of mine were sucky soap products’, ‘Keep religion out of Xmas’, and ‘It’s Christmas Day and all I got was $3,000 of presents.’
“I don’t understand what you are doing, though,” Mumphrey puzzled. “Why this elaborate department store Santa setup? Why the blizzards outside? What is going on?”
The Spirit of Christmas sneered at the stupid old fool. Then he told him.
--------------------
“He is seeking to consolidate his hold upon the realm of men by absorbing the life essence of many children at the moment of their greatest greed,” the mysterious voice whispered to Donar. “That is why various criminals who wish to join this new organisation are seeking foundlings to give to their new master and thus prove their worth.”
“Tis a fell deed indeed,” noted the hemigod of thunder. “And I art most certain we must now kicketh his butt for the nonce. Why hast not this dimensional incursion been thwarted already by yon forces appointed to such taskeths”
Donar’s informant shuffled uncomfortably behind his Santa beard. “Christmas break. The new Spirit of Christmas is gradually growing in power, so he can actually force most of the guardians to take a holiday by now. And of course, Christmas now officially starts in May. Soon it will be Christmas all year round.”
“And thus his power wilt be complete! Tis a dire plot.”
“I’m surprised he made his move so soon, actually,” the false Santa noted. “But I suppose it helped that he was invited.”
“Invited,” frowned the Ausgardian. “Then somebody art due to be smitethed by the Sorcerer Supreme also.”
“Not really,” came the reply. “It was the current Sorcerer Supreme who summoned him.”
“Vile betrayal and treachery! Then shalt I also smiteth him anon. Mine thanks for this information, jolly old stranger.” Donar smirked knowingly. “And I art not going to spoil thy disguise by countething thine eyes, old man. Heh!” Whirling his enchanted baseball bat with a nail in it Mjalcom around his head, the hemigod flew off into the blizzard.
“Good,” Wangmundo shuddered, pulling off the fake beard and sloping off to defrost his fur. “Anything past one would probably be an intellectual challenge.”
--------------------
It wasn’t Christmas Day yet, but Al B. Harper felt that he was allowed to open just one present. Perhaps the Electro-Fluron Nanometer, or the Trans-Phase Ossilic Modulating Coil?
“It won’t hurt to have just one gift now, to keep me busy,” he told himself, reaching for the Transverse Multi-Frequency Monitoring Resonator. “Santa would want it this way.”
The snow was piled high outside Al’s upstate Gothametropolis cabin, but inside he was kept warm by the heat discharge from his Van Der Graph Generators. “Yes, what a beauty,” he sighed, unwrapping the gunmetal grey component. “I’ll just see if it can spot disturbances on the conceptual wavelengths.”
It was the work of a moment to hook up the device into the array of equally baffling technology lining the walls of his hut. “Excellent. Hmm, there does seem to be a rather bizarre local fluctuation, over there by the…”
Then there was a cloud of dust and a jolly old elf in a sooty red gown toppled onto the hearth.
“…chimney,” concluded Al B. Harper.
--------------------
The pile of presents was hissing at Whitney. “Psst! Psst!”
The Sorceress put down The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, told the children to amuse themselves for a while before bedtime, and went over to examine the phenomenon.
There was a Brown Streak under the pile.
“Brownie! What are you doing here?”
“Well,” explained Josh Clement, “number one, trying not to get arrested by your law-happy boyfriend and his amazing superfriends. And number two, trying to find a newborn kid that some poor frightened girl abandoned on the streets. I don’t suppose it’s here?”
“No-one that young,” admitted the Sorceress.
“Why is Whitney talking to the Christmas tree?” Exile wondered from the other side of the room.
“Probably a witch thing,” shrugged Goldeneyed.
Ziles diplomatically distracted them. “Oh look, mistletoe!”
Nice as the distraction was, Nats’ evil streak couldn’t help but manifest. “Oh look, here come Finny and DK.”
--------------------
“Are you alive? Are you okay?”
“If I say yes will you not give me the kiss of life?” dull thud pleaded, shivering on the frozen shingle shoreline where Shane Jackson had dragged him from the icy waters of the river.
“You are the dumbest guy I have ever met!” the former Messenger told him.
Cressida agreed. “But you did stop him killing himself while he saved you,” she added in slightly less severe tones. “Happy Christmas.”
--------------------
The plumbing and clock-repair shop in Hell’s Bathroom was buried under five feet of snow. Dancer was very fortunate that a freak explosion in a gritting truck earlier had left exactly the right amount of salt in exactly the right path to enable her to get to the front door. There was a sign there that said ‘Closed for the winter solstice. Carol singers please beware of the Pit Fiend’.
Dancer gently pushed the door, and found it was unlocked. The bell squeaked as she went in, since it had been replaced by a squeezy Santa. As the door became more ajar the Santa burst, releasing the balloon he had been weighting down. The red balloon floated to the ceiling, where a spiked hairbrush punctured it, releasing the string it held that struck a match and lit the fuse that ultimately set off the small explosive charge inside the fairy on top of the Christmas tree.
“You detonated?” Xander the Improbable asked politely. In deference to the season he had a spring of holly on his shabby red robe.
“Hi!” Sarah Shepherdson smiled brightly. “I wasn’t sure you’d be here or at your other shop?”
“Other shop?” the master of the mystic crafts asked.
“You know. The Magic Emporium?”
“Ah, that,” chuckled Xander. “That’s just a continuity error I use occasionally when I don’t want to mess up this place. It comes in useful when somebody’s trying to blow up my sanctum sanctorum, that kind of thing. You wouldn’t believe how much dusting it takes though.”
Dancer heard rather than saw the Manga Shoggoth oozing in from the back room. “Are you going to be long?” it demanded. “Only we have hardly started on Princess Mononoko, and after that it’s the All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku season.”
“No, this will only take a second,” Xander promised. “Dancer is looking for the mother of an abandoned child. Any instant now…”
There was a rush of wind, a flurry of snow, and De Brown Streak appeared in the shop just as Sorceress had advised him.
“…De Brown Streak will appear seeking my help looking for a child abandoned by its mother. You can take that DVD off pause now.”
Then the door burst open and rattled on its hinges as an angry thunder god literally stormed into the room.
“Or I may be a few moments longer,” warned the sorcerer supreme.
--------------------
“So you were Father Christmas, but now you’re unemployed?” Al B. Harper checked, handing the ex-Santa a mug of hot chocolate.
“Looks that way,” the old man sighed. “Looks like there’s a new Spirit of Christmas in town.”
“Can I do anything to help?”
Santa looked gloomily at his mug for a moment. Then he brightened up. “Well, a gingerbread man would be nice,” he suggested.
--------------------
“Look at them,” smirked the Spirit of Christmas. Mimble’s Department Store had closed its doors now for all but the lucky winners of the Santa Extravaganza (all the presents you ever wanted to break, just stay after closing time and be as spoiled and greedy as you always wanted to be). The kidnapped children watched enviously, chained to the walls as the haves played with, ate, and enjoyed all the things the have-nots would never have. “I have them. I have you all. And now I will have you all forever.”
“Poppycock!” snorted Mumphrey. “Always been greed and envy in the world, always will be. Case you hadn’t noticed, Christmas celebrates a time when someone came to teach us better.”
“I can’t say I had noticed, actually,” gloated the new anthropomorphic personification. “If it ever was like that, it is a thoroughly commercial marketing event now. Nobody believes.”
“Is that so,” the eccentric Englishman challenged. “Asil?”
“I believe,” the girl admitted. “I think it’s great that there’s a time when people could be feeding their faces and getting all they can but they take time to think about their friends, and about people they don't even know. So they pick out nice things that will make their friends happy, and they give their precious time to help those in need. And families get together and…”
“Argue like cats and dogs?” sneered the Spirit of Christmas.
“Argue like families,” Asil corrected him. “And things aren’t Christmas card nice, but people try.
“Bah!” dismissed the Spirit. “Release the have-nots. Let them tear the haves to pieces. As happens here in this store so it shall be across the city. And as ‘innocent’ blood is spilled the season will be mine forever.”
Mumphrey turned round and elbowed the security guards flanking him, then flattened them both with classic Queensbury uppercuts. “I’m sorry, old chap, but I just can’t let you do that.”
The Spirit of Christmas looked contemptuously at the old man. “You think a minor office-holder can stop me?”
Mumphrey’s fingers brushed over the ornate temporal pocketwatch he wore on his waistcoat. “I think it’s just a matter of timing,” he answered.
Then the Lair Legion came through the wall.
--------------------
“Base foul betrayer! Now shalt thou…”
“Make tea?” suggested Xander, looking up at the raging hemigod of thunder. “And perhaps get you a breath mint?”
“Donar, what’s going on?” Dancer demanded. “Why are you shouting at Xander?”
“Hey, I’d rather he shout at Xander than me,” De Brown Streak noted for the record.
“A new monster stalks the city, seeking to usurp Christmas, and it is here at the call of this… this treacherous son of a gjallingghast!”
“Ah. Donar is referring to the fact that I opened the gateway so the new Spirit of Christmas could manifest in Paradopolis,” the master of the mystic crafts explained.
“Of course you did,” understood the Manga Shoggoth. “Only way to deal with it, I’d say.”
“What?” Dancer said, confused.
“What?” echoed Donar, usually confused.
“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards,” Xander advised them. “For they are subtle, and quick to make tea.” He handed a cup to each of his guests.
“I don’t quite follow this,” DBS admitted. “There’s a new bad guy here because Xander encouraged him…”
“Encouraged him now,” emphasised the Manga Shoggoth. “Premature manifestation. Took the short cut, incarnated in the very city where a score or more of heroes are patrolling for evil, a city built as a psychic lens. He only gets one shot at anthropomorphizing, and Xander got him to take it here and now.”
“Where we could take him on?” Dancer understood.
“Actually, my predecessor already foresaw this, and made arrangements,” Xander assured them. “It’s just a matter of timing…”
--------------------
“A fight against giant-size Christmas consumer icons!” shouted CrazySugarFreakBoy! “Yeah, baby!” And he bounced over the Coca-Cola Christmas truck to scatter the Yuletide Furbies.
“Help! Somebody get these Santa’s Helper Barbies off me!” screamed Nats.
“Right after I’ve finished pinning this Hermione Granger to the wall,” promised Troia.
“Must… resist… Christmas… cookies…” sobbed Exile.
“Call that a wrist action flamethrower?” Finny told Action Man. “This is a flamethrower.”
“Chocolate…” gasped Ziles. “No! Chocolate has… effects on me!”
“Yay, chocolate!” shouted CSFB! as he streaked past.”
“I’ve always wanted to do this to Mickey Mouse!” admitted Amazing Guy.
“Halo level three!” G-Eyed snarled, avoiding the explosions around him. “I can take this.”
Hatman dragged on his riding helmet and jumped astride My Little Pony as it was about to give Dark Knight a colourful new hairdo. “We’ve got to get past these distractions and save the kids!”
“Not true!” Asil Ashling called down to them from the toy mall. “Kids, the Lair Legion needs our help this Christmas. Can we fix it?”
“Yes we can!” called back the children.
On the balcony above, the Spirit of Christmas frowned. “What?” he muttered.
“Start by rescuing the kidnapped youngsters tied to the Christmas trees,” Asil instructed. “And then grab some baseball bats and get down to the food hall.”
“Yay! Chaaaarge!”
--------------------
“Hi,” Sarah Shepherdson told Jenny. The runaway was bundled in an old St Jude’s sweatshirt in the vestry behind the Zero Street Mission. “I think you left something behind.”
Jenny saw the baby in Dancer’s arms and gasped.
“You don’t have to keep her,” Shep assured the girl. “You don’t even have to decide now. It must all be very scary and strange for you.”
“I did a terrible thing…” Jenny blurted, starting to cry.
“People do stuff when they’re hurt and frightened,” Dancer assured her. “Luckily you picked the right doorstep to leave your little one.”
“There’s a waitress in that café, she’s so nice…” mumbled Jenny. “I thought she’d be a much better mom than me…”
“I… see…” swallowed Sarah. “Well, maybe one day. But right now we’ve got to think about you and this baby. I think she’s really hungry, but the guys I had helping look after her haven’t been able to get her to take to the bottle.”
Jenny looked uncertainly at the infant. “What do I have to do?”
“Well, since you’re here… they do say it all comes naturally.”
Jenny shivered. “I don’t know. I’m not old enough… My parents are so strict…”
“Your choice, Jenny. Not theirs. Not anyone else’s. Do you think you could let her have a little feed while you’re thinking?”
Dancer waited until Jenny had fumbled her thin blouse open and found a good angle to hold the baby to her breast. She saw the girl’s eyes open wide for a moment as the child latched on. “I’ll just go find a cloth,” Sarah murmured, slipping out.
“Well?” Josh Clement demanded, waiting anxiously outside with Reverend Fleetwood, ManMan, and Chronic.
“She’s feeding her,” Dancer reported.
Reverend Graham smiled a little. “Did you use your…?”
“Of course not. It has to be her choice,” Shep answered. “But whatever she chooses, she chooses for the right reasons, not out of desperation, or fear, or loneliness. We’re there for her, right?”
“Right.”
--------------------
On the floor of Mimble’s, the Lair Legion were relieved by a horde of children who had an instinctive understanding of how to break expensive toys. Foundling and rich brat alike were united in their battle to rescue the Lair Legion.
“Not working out how you wanted it?” Sir Mumphrey Wilton asked the Spirit of Christmas. “Discovering too late that PR projections and market shares don’t mean as much as those faceless corporate nonentities think they do?”
“What have you done?”
“As I said, all I did was make sure the timing was right. Listen.”
And the Paradopolis Cathedral chimed out midnight across the land.
“Merry Christmas,” Mumphrey bade the Spirit, punching him in the nose. The no-longer-smirking man in the business suit toppled over the balcony and fell amongst the melee below.
“Gunk bombs away!” yelled seven-year old Asil to her kid commandos.
--------------------
Across the city people were people, and acted accordingly with deeds of kindness and malice. The bad weather actually promoted more companionship and mutual aid than would normally have been the case. Thus Christmas came in and settled over Paradopolis. It was the feast of a Saviour and a time of giving, the season of greed and a time for lonely despair, an ancient festival and a modern marketing phenomenon. But most of all it was a time for people to be people. A personification typified Christmas, not ruled it.
“Ooops,” Santa told Al B, handing back the empty chocolate mug. “I’ve got to go. Seems like I’ve got to do a job tonight after all.”
“Wait!” the scientist called after him. “At least explain how do you accomplish that time/space phenomenon necessary for so many parallel appearances in an estimated three billion dwelling over a given time-span of…”
But the old man was gone.
And of course, he knew if Al B. Harper had been naughty or nice.
“Merry Christmas, Al,” Al said to himself. The cabin seemed a little cold and empty without the merry visitor.
There was a hammering at the door. Al hurried to open it and three snow-covered figures staggered in.
“Er, hello?” the scientist greeted them uncertainly, forcing the door shut on the icy gales outside.
“Oh, hi!” the first muffled figure shivered, peeling off her soaking fur coat and heading for the fireplace. “Sorry to bother you but our car got stuck in a snowdrift on the way to the Cheerleaders’ Christmas Bash. You don’t mind if we stay here tonight, do you?”
--------------------
“Ah-choo!” sneezed dull thud
“It’s your own fault,” Cressida told him unsympathetically.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” shivered the unheralded hero. “Ah-choo!”
“Just what I wanted for Christmas,” sighed Cressida. “A host with flu.”
--------------------
“I am the Spirit of Christmas, and I have gathered my power from the meanness and self-interest of many Yules. Even now I have the power to destroy all of y…”
“Bullseye!” CSFB! shouted, having impacted with the first of the mince pies. “Get him!”
“Now kids,” Amazing Guy warned, “You know not to run with sharp objects. You know… ooh, that had to hurt.”
“Well, I’d say our work here is done,” Fin Fang Foom judged. “Er, once we find a way of dislodging that Christmas Tree.”
--------------------
“Excuse me, Mayor spiffy,” the smarmy aid woke the Gothametropolis (and lots of other places’) Mayor with a sadistic satisfaction.
“Huh? Wha? Wassat? Not the giant niblets! Er, I mean… what is it?”
“A call from the Lair Legion, sir. Do we have suitable holding facilities for a discredited conceptual entity with a limp?”
spiffy reluctantly clawed himself out of the dream with Britney Spears and the custard factory. “Do we?”
“No, sir.”
“You woke me up to tell me that?”
“Yes, sir.”
spiffy decided this aide was going to have an exciting new career as a snow plough operator in the morning. “Right then,” he scowled. Then the first rule of politics came to him: share the problem. “Aw, just tell them to send whatever it is round to the Abandoned Legion. I’m sure HV will have a clever idea on how to deal with it. And it’s not like they’ll be doing anything right now.”
“The Abandoned Legion, sir?”
“Yes,” nodded spiffy malevolently. “And be sure to wake Cobra up first just like you did me.”
--------------------
It was well past midnight and the orphans at St Jude, permanent and temporary, had been carried gently to bed. Now only the grown-ups lounged around the embers of the fire, relaxing after a long evening of crimefighting and snowshifting. CSFB! and Nats were roasting chestnuts by the fire and ignoring Exile’s comments about how he could do it better with his powers. Sorceress had snuggled on the sofa with her head on Hatman’s lap. Donar was wolfing down his twenty-seventh slice of Christmas cake and Troia was watching him in disbelief. Asil was curled up asleep in an armchair; it had been a big day for her. Ziles was giggling happily and clutching a sprig of mistletoe to her chest. Finny was hiding under the table.
“Well, what was the moral of that story?” Amazing Guy wondered.
“The what?” Dark Knight glowered.
“The moral. It’s a Christmas tale, there has to be one.”
“Is it a rule?” G-Eyed asked, curiously.
“I think so.”
“How about, bad guys get their asses kicked when they take on the LL whatever the time of year?” suggested Hatman.
“How about it is important to promote peace on Earth and goodwill to all people?” Sorceress offered.
“Never turn your back on a child?” shuddered Nats.
“The moral,” announced Sir Mumphrey Wilton, sipping at his fourth claret and feeling all was well with the world, “is that Christmas for people, not the other way round. And a damn good thing that’s so too.” Maybe he was right and maybe he wasn’t, but he said it with enough feeling in his rich plummy voice that nobody felt like arguing.
Asil turned over in her armchair. “Merry Christmas, everybody,” she mumbled.
“A merry Christmas,” the Lair Legion agreed.
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