Tales of the Parodyverse

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Dancer, with sinister plotting assist from a certain absent archvillain
Sat Oct 08, 2005 at 11:57:24 am EDT
Subject
Far Away - Part 9
Originally
Far Away Part... 8 is it? I'm pretty sure it's 8. Or 7. It's part 7.5 on average anyhow :-)
In Reply To

Dancer is great at acting, dancing, massage, fitness etc, not so much on the maths
Sat Oct 08, 2005 at 06:10:55 am EDT
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    Cybervenom was woken by the motel phone ringing at 6.15am. He reached out one metallic appendage and crushed the device into fragments.

    He wasn’t in a good mood. He dragged himself out of his pit of a bed and staggered over to the sink. The fluorescent light over the mirror made him look like a waxy corpse. Even the metallic and circuitry portions of his face seemed dull and lustreless.

    He punched in the mirror too and dragged on yesterday’s clothes. Personal hygiene wasn’t really a priority anyway.

    He paused to will the black gooey trailers dangling behind him back into his torso. Sometimes his symbiotic cybernetic parasite seeped out while he was sleeping. It was hard to travel undercover if you were dragging alien tentacles out of the bottom of your trenchcoat.

    He picked up his overnight bag and left the cabin. His rented car was there in the lot. He needed to be on the freeway by seven if he was going to be sure to make the meeting.

    He savagely kicked down the accelerator. This was a punk job, a milk run. It was beneath him.

    He needed the cash though.

    He didn’t like the South. Too hot, too sticky, the people too nosey. All that Good Ol’ Boy crap. Hey buddy, you lost the damned war. It was a hundred fifty years ago. Deal with it.

    Cybervenom’s mood wasn’t any better when he saw the traffic on the interstate. He resisted the urges the symbiote was feeding him to get out and shred the car and its owner who were leaning on the horn behind him. He promised himself and his parasite that he’d kill somebody slow and painfully when he got to where he was going.

    He got out of Arkansas around noon, picked up a bag of burgers at a drive-thru in Bastrop, then headed down the I20 towards his destination. A little after two, with the air conditioning in his rental car working at about 20% of what it should have been, he pulled onto the local roads that took him through Gibsland and Bryce into the town of Bienville.

    He didn’t bother checking into a hotel. He didn’t intend to stay.

    The local agent turned up at the bar ten minutes late, swearing about the bad parking. Cybervenom nearly ripped his head off right then. He’d had about enough.

    Everybody in Bienville was polite, methodical, clean. He wanted to kill them all.

    “You’re the outside talent?” the agent asked.

    “I’m not a touring burlesque show,” the killer growled.

    “But… Screwdriver sent you, right? Righ…ack!”

    “We don’t mention the S-word. Not if we like our windpipes in our throats.”

    “Right. Right. Sorry. My bad. Sorry.”

    Cybervenom sank his beer and ordered another. The agent was paying. “So what’s the story? Why am I in this pissant place?”

    “We’re having a problem,” the agent explained. “An enforcement problem.”

    “The cops or rivals?”

    “We don’t know. We’re having a hard time placing product here. Our dealers just disappear. So we sent in some more experienced boys. And they vanished too.”

    “Someone’s kakking them?”

    “Must be. The locals have a closed shop here. I don’t know where they get their drugs from, but it ain’t us. But it will be. We need you to disrupt their supply, show them who they’re dealing with, and then…”

    “I’m a killer, not a P.I.,” Cybervenom growled. “You want me to send a message, I do it by demolishing the town centre and leaving a row of body bags. And then I get creative.”

    “Right. Er, okay. You’re da man. We’ll leave it to you how you manage it. But we set up a meet tonight. 6pm at the bus station. Us and some local guy what has a big mouth about us horning in on his turf. You think maybe…”

    “I’ll be there. He’s dead.”

    “Great. Great, man. It’s a real pleasure working with…”

    “Buzz of now, or you’re dead too.”

    “Right. Okay. Right. Bye!”

    It was a hundred and twenty in the shade but Cybervenom daredn’t take off his coat and hat. His circuitry-striated skin would attract too much attention.

    There was a row of picturesque craft shops off the main street, out of the sun. He passed some time in a bookstore, then an antique shop. At last he found a tiny place that sold hand-woven fabrics, made on the premises. It looked cool inside.

    The shop had an old-fashioned bell over the door that tinkled as he went in. It annoyed him. Inside the shop was filled with racks covered with rugs and shawls and curtains, all priced ridiculously high. There was a girl sitting at a spinning wheel who looked up in greeting as he came in. She was the only damn thing in the shop worth checking out.

    “Looking for anything special?” she asked.

    “Maybe,” he answered. “But I think I’ll come back later for it. What time do you close?”

    “Five. Five fifteen,” she answered. He liked the way her blouse swelled under that chaste neckline.

    “That’s no good for me. I’ve got a meeting at six. Can you stay around till say six thirty? I promise I’ll be back and I’ll do some business with you.”

    “I guess I could come back after I’ve done my shopping. What were you wanting?”

    Cybervenom suppressed a snicker. “Oh, pretty much everything.”

    “Everything?”

    “Stick around. I’ll be back to see you.”

    That took care of the post-match. He took a stroll round the bus station to scope out the land before he went for another beer.

    The afternoon dragged and the symbiote was getting impatient. Cybervenom nearly went back to the chippie in the weaving store early, but he knew that’d be unprofessional. At last it was 5.45 so he strolled back to the bus station and waited for the kill.

    He scoped the scene. Guy in newsstand, unwrapping the late edition. Man with suitcase checking the timetables. Guy with a laté and a laptop – he was going to be a peripheral casualty. A kissing couple, lost in passion over in the corner. Some homeless bum stumbling about.

    He spotted the agent about 5.55, walking in with a paper under his arm, thinking he was so cool in his reflective shades. The guy had watched too much Sopranos. Cybervenom decided then to help the guy be a soprano properly before all of this was over. The symbiote agreed.

    At six on the dot the local operator arrived, driving up in a black corvette that Cybervenom decided was going to be scrap metal too. His driver was a spectacular trophy blonde.

    Agent Soprano and Local Guy spotted each other and walked to meet. The blonde bombshell kept an alert lookout to check her principal’s six. So she was more than eye candy.

    Cybervenom allowed his mechanical tendrils to burrow beneath the pavement all the way across the bus lot, until they were coiled under the spot where the two men were talking. It was time for a disruption.

    “Don’t,” a voice behind him advised. “Is not to be a good idea.”

    It was a set up. Cybervenom ripped up the pavement, sending shrapnel flying everywhere, and let his symbiote off the leash.

    The bystanders leaped into action. The kissing couple, the hobo, laptop man, suitcase man, even the news vendor were all coming at him. He saw a fluorescent green and orange costume under the bum’s rags.

    It was the flaming Lair Legion.

    He allowed his symbiote to scream, the high-pitched wail that could stun enemies at close range, leaving them vulnerable to be shredded by his steel tendrils.

    Nothing happened. The symbiote was quiescent.

    Laptop man was smirking. Somehow they’d dampened down the symbiote, weakening him. And then the heroes were on top of him, the one in the Con Ed helmet, and the big guy with the suitcase, and that horrible gooey thing bubbling out from inside the suitcase!

    Agent Soprano and Local Guy turned to run, but Dancer and Trickshot of the Lair Legion were there to catch them. Blondie seemed at a loss for a moment, but finally she turned away too, only to bump into Yo.

    She punched Yo through the bus shelter and crumpled the thought being into the coach behind it.

    Cybervenom had to admire her. She turned round then and fired some kind of energy rays from her hands. Dancer dodged out of the way but Trickshot would have been toast if the girl who’d been spooning in the corner hadn’t jumped in the way and taken the charge right in her belly. She went down burning.

    Cybervenom turned back to his own attackers. Hatman was hurting him the most, so he headbutted the capped crusader, sending him flying back. Then he amped his strength up to the max and slammed a steel fist into Mr Epitome’s rib cage.

    CrazySugarFreakBoy! bounced over him, hurling things that crackled and exploded and stuck to him, enraging him more. Then that bubbling thing – the Shoggoth – was on him, clogging his tendrils, disrupting his systems. Then he saw Mr Epitome rise up in front of him and draw his fist back.

    And then he didn’t see any more of the fight.

    The dealer’s agent and Gloriana’s front man were both pinned on the ground by Trickshot. Dancer was leaning over the fallen Yuki, calling Al to leave his jamming device and take a look at the damaged cyborg. Hatman was checking over Cybervenom while Epitome pinned the perp, making sure he was down. Gloriana picked her targets and prepared to blow them to hell.

    A fast-moving streak caught hold of her and kissed her soundly. She hadn’t expected that.

    De Brown Streak was equally surprised when she tossed him over the roof of the bus station.

    “Stop, uncute unidentified supervillain!” Yo called out, closing in on Gloriana.

    “Don’t worry Yo, it’s all in her gadgets,” De Brown Streak said, zooming back into the combat with a big grin on his face. “Just let me grab ‘em off her and…”

    Gloriana vanished.

    “Damn,” said DBS

    “Al?” Hatman called out.

    The Legion’s scientific advisor looked up from Yuki. “I don’t know,” he answered distractedly. “I don’t have time to check.”

    “Anti-teleport field’s still up,” Trickshot reported.

    “And Cybervenom’s still down,” Hatman added.

    “Invisibility?” suggested Mr Epitome. And he listened hard.

    But Dancer had spotted something weird. People were still passing though the bus station as if nothing had happened. They weren’t even looking at the superheroes and their downed supervillain.

    “Does this kind of thing happen here all the time?” she wondered.

    “This is spooky,” Trickshot said. “What are they, zombies?”

    The Shoggoth coughed. “You were not aware that these people were androids, cloaked in holograms to appear human? I thought you were just being polite.”

    “Androids?” Epitome growled. His ribs hurt like hell after that punch from Cybervenom. He’d probably broken a few.

    “Al B, to be getting of holograms gone now!” Yo called.

    Al hacked away on his laptop. It took him less than a minute.

    As the holo-field went down, the robots were exposed in their dull metallic shapes, humanoid but nothing like human. But the whole of Bienville town centre dissolved too, leaving the Lair Legion in the centre of a shimmering maze of force fields that had simulated buildings and walls.

    “What?” DBS said. The whole middle of the town was gone. All the people were gone. And somebody had substituted holograms and force fields and androids so nobody would notice.

    “Whoa,” gasped CrazySugarFreakBoy! “Somebody did a number on this place!”

    “Is it anything to do with Cybervenom being sent to Bienville? Our source never said anything but a hired supervillain hit,” Dancer asked, “Or was this why the criminals hiring CV had such a hard time setting up drugs traffic here?”

    “That’d be Column B,” Gloriana answered, dropping her personal cloaking device and hitting Dancer from behind. Then she vanished again.

    “Who is this?” Hatman said. “What’s she done to Bienville?”

    “She is not homo sapiens,” rumbled the Shoggoth. “Her cloaking field is alien technology.”

    “Wait. Can you see her now?” Trickshot demanded.

    “Yes. Can’t you? She is preparing some kind of time/space fold to escape from this encounter. I shall endeavour to prevent it.”

    “I can hear her breathing,” Mr Epitome said. “This way.”

    Trickshot fired a smoke arrow in that direction to show Gloriana’s outline. CrazySugarFreakBoy! grabbed her.

    She dropped a thick metal rod on the floor. It bounced with a clang, spilling black energies from it as it activated.

    “No!” Gloriana had time to scream before the Doom Tube opened with a deafening bang.

    And then there was no Gloriana, no Legion, no Cybervenom, no Bienville, only an exposed array of shimmering force walls and mindless robots repeating the same actions they’d done yesterday, and the day before, and every day in this sleepy town for the last four months.



___




    NTU-150 activated the device he’d constructed, and the robots folded like stringless puppets. Mannequins who had been pushing prams, walking dogs, shopping, driving, playing in the park all slumped down as dead.

    “That is very, very spooky,” admitted Visionary.

    “They weren’t that sophisticated,” Enty said. “I don’t mean they were crudely made and primitive. They weren’t. They’re just not designed to be anything but place-holders.”

    Hallie tapped away at some of Al B. Harper’s sensory gear. “The force fields are being generated from a remote device about a hundred yards that way. I’ll see if I can deactivate them, and get any sense out of their programming.”

    The associate members of the Lair Legion looked out over the wasteland that had been a bustling town. Shimmering forcefields that had given substance to holograms and hundreds of slumped robots were all that distinguished Bienville from the Somme.

    “How long has this been going on?” Lisa asked in horror. “What happened here?”

    The Librarian touched one of the slumped robots, reading its running log. “They were activated seventeen weeks ago. That should give us a start date.”

    “I’m getting some of the system programming,” Hallie called. “Looks like a typical day in Bienville was recorded, then the robots and holograms were just set up to simulate it. And there’s some kind of low-grade psionic generator here too, to stop visitors noticing anything weird.”

    “Like the fact that there’s a town gone completely Stepford,” Vizh shuddered. “Where is the field team?”

    “I can’t summons them,” Lisa said. “So they’re somewhere shielded. Feels like somewhere far off.”

    Hallie wasn’t happy. “This level of virtual reality, in its own way it’s on a par with what I could do with the Movie Gun. Maybe more.”

    “A missing town,” puzzled NTU-150, “but I’m not getting the same signatures as when Wakandybar and Ausgard went missing. This is a completely different process. More violent, in a way. It left very distinctive energy signatures.”

    The Librarian looked over the readings. “Just let me check with D.D. up at the Moon Public Library,” he said, and opened something that looked like a filofax. “Uh oh. There are records of those sort of traces before.”

    “Well?” prompted Vizh. He was spooked by the ghost town and worried for his friends.

    “It was Doom Tube technology, from Battleworld.”

    “Dark Thugos’ roving death star,” NTU-150 remembered. “But that was destroyed.”

    “And Dark Thugos died, then came back as Destroyer of Tales,” Visionary pointed out.

    “And then he got blown up by the Galactic Nobbler,” Lisa reminded them. “But he had another base, didn’t he?”

    “Another planet,” the Librarian agreed. “A vile tormented world orbiting a dying red sun in an ancient galaxy. We don’t know much about it. Librarians are skinned and crucified there.”

    “We got data on it during the Transworlds Challenge,” Hallie said. “We even have rough co-ordinates. Let me check to see if they match the Doom Tube traces.”

    Visionary was really fed up of being the one who always had to ask for the exposition. “Doom Tube?”

    “Means of pinching space together to form a temporary hole between worlds,” Enty said. “It’s a brutal way to travel. Unstable. Messy. Makes a very loud noise and tends to blow things up.”

    Lisa thought this was the pot calling the kettle black, but she stuck to the point. “So Bienville got Doom Tubed away four months back, and then Dark Thugos’ people set up an elaborate charade so nobody would notice?”

    “They left an operative too,” Hallie added, reading more of the computerised systems. “Someone called Gloriana had voice control to deal with equipment maintenance and unexpected incursions.”

    “I’d call the LL fighting Cybervenom an unexpected incursion,” admitted Vizh.

    “This still isn’t right,” Enty persisted. “Why would Thugos, or whoever’s in charge on his planet now, need to hide what they’d done?”

    “So the Legion doesn’t find out?” the Librarian suggested. “And when they did…”

    “They also got transported away,” Lisa finished. “They’ve been kidnapped to another planet!”

    But an urgent, horrible thought had crossed NTU-150’s mind. He slid back a panel on his armour’s left cuff and tapped at the keyboard beneath. “I’m just accessing the Bautista satellite system and the LL orbiting sensor stations. I need to check something…”

    “We have to get after the field team,” Visionary said. “They could be in trouble.” He looked at the Librarian. “You have that Galactibus.”

    “It’s unarmed, and we’d be going into some of the most heavily defended space in the universe.”

    “We still have to go.”

    “Hallie, look at this!” Enty called worriedly, sharing his data with the Lair Legion’s resident A.I.

    “And then maybe share it with the rest of us?” suggested Lisa archly.

    “This Doom Tube signature,” NTU-150 told them. “The reason for the holograms and stuff was so we wouldn’t come looking for it. Because then we might look for it elsewhere.”

    A horrible shudder ran down Visionary’s spine. “And if we looked for it again?”

    “Then we’d find it again. And again, and again.”

    Hallie projected a world map, showing over a dozen red spots dotted across five continents. “This isn’t the only place they took. I bet if we go to these locations we’ll find perfect little towns replaying each day like clockwork with robots and force fields, just like this place was.”

    Enty’s voice was cold. “They’ve been harvesting us and we never even noticed.”

    Lisa took out her commcard and thumbed the speaker button. “Asil, put me through to Mumphrey. Right now.”







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