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The Moderator Saga #41: Assembling the Pieces, or How To Thin Your Cast Down To Manageable Proportions In Six Bloody Lessons |
The Moderator Saga #41: Assembling the Pieces, or How To Thin Your Cast Down To Manageable Proportions In Six Bloody Lessons
Previous Chapters
What has Gone Before: The Moderator’s deletion power continues to keep him alive and on top. He’s undone the damage Functionary did to the his Trophy Storage Facility and Lair Tower. He’s downgraded Anna’s lethal attack and the events leading up to it to a VR simulation to learn about his enemies. He’s got Doorman leading the Purveyors into a deadly ambush. He still plans mass executions on the morning before his ascent to power.
The Purveyors – CSFB!, Killer Shrike, Gamma Ray Gary, Gamona, the Mouse, Professor Manyarms, Atomic Bumpkin, Twisted Sister, Fanboy, Niobe, Dynamo Dolphin, and Krotch - face the Legion - The Link (Cath Katz), the Scarlet Lawnmower (Bill Reed), Search Engineer, Sigmund the Superlative Simulacrum, Dr Spoon, Pirate Monkey, Partial Man, Dead Boy, and Killer Flea. Ham-Boy (Fred Harris) is also on site, brainwashed to be an Agent of SPAM for the Moderator. There’s still said to be an unaccounted-for traitor in the Purveyor’s ranks.
But all is not lost. Miss F/Al B, Amy, and the Shoggoth have rooted out the Moderator’s origin. Liu Xi, Yuki, Chiaki, Lara, and Anna have escaped the Death Camp with busloads of liberated prisoners. And Vizh, Sam, Salieri, Brap, and the Sorting Hat are flying by Yellow Flashlight-power to Iowa so that Salieri can do whatever it is he’s supposed to do to turn the tide – but will he, when he realises he might be erasing himself and his family from existence?
And that leaves Flapjack unaccounted for…
***
“This is a very sad time for sir and madame,” the sombre undertaker comforted the grieving parents. “To have one so young taken by the Space Fandoms is a tragedy indeed. But we here at the Westminster Necropolis Company can be relied upon to provide the best funeral care possible in this dark hour.” The black-suited man reached for the casket catalogue. “Now if we can bring ourselves to consider how the dearly departed might have wished…”
He was interrupted as the door slammed open and a bloody, bruised, and limping hunchback staggered into the funeral parlour. “I have a complaint!” shouted Flapjack of the Carpathians.
“Sir,” the undertaker began, gesturing for his colleagues to get the gore-splattered wretch out of the showroom before he scared the customers, “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”
“You call that a funeral you gave me?” Flapjack accused. “Shoddy spadework, no precautions in the grave against me returning as a vampire, not even a death trap to deter graverobbers! And you wobbled the casket all the way from the lych gate. Getting evenly-matched coffin carriers, that’s lesson one, that is! I don’t know how you can call yourselves undertakers. I was so annoyed I had to crawl out of my grave and come to get a refund!”
Customers and mourners began to quietly slip out of the premises.
The Chief Undertaker sniffed exasperatedly. “Sir, the Westminster Necropolis Company has been burying people since 1789 and I can assure you…”
“That long? Well you think you’d have got it right by now,” Flapjack shot back. He wove his way past the two clerks that tried to tackle him, did something painful with a floral array and decorative ashes urn to the carpenter that got in his way, and arrived at the Chief Undertaker’s desk. “I demand to see the manager.”
“Sir,” the Chief Undertaker managed to convey a world of doubt about whether this intruder was even human in that one word, “I am the manager. And I am certain we would have recalled arranged a funeral for a… person of your nature.”
“Okay, I lied about the burial. But you’re lying about being the boss. I want to see your real boss.” Flapjack pulled the Chief Undertaker across the desk by the scruff of his neck. “I want to see Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity.”
***
“Mrs Meng?”
The incarcerated mother of genius Salieri Meng looked up from her prison cell in the secure interrogation block of the Iowa Death Camp. She didn’t know why she’d been brought there. She couldn’t convince her warders that she wasn’t a shape-shifting Space Fandom monster.
“What do you want with her?” It was Mrs Meng’s cellmate who spoke up, a young woman called Catherine Gillespie. Kat still had a split lip and black eye from her earlier refusal to bow to authority but the tougher things got the harder she fought against them.
The door opened and a grey figure floated in. It had a full-length grey cape and a grey face and from certain angles it was transparent. “I wish to speak with Mrs Meng,” whispered Partial Man. The half-there hero of the Lair Legion always spoke in whispers.
The widow Meng looked up with hope in her face. “Have you realised this is all a terrible mistake?” she asked optimistically. “Because I don’t belong here. I’m not a monster. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Nobody here’s done anything wrong,” Kat told her, “except get in the way of the Moderator’s power-grab. The only monsters in this camp are running it!”
“Please be silent now,” Partial Man told the younger woman. His quiet tones sent a ripple of fear through Catherine. “Mrs Meng, there are things I must explain to you. And then you must record a message for transmission to your son, to explain them to him.”
“My son? You know where Salieri is? Is he alright?”
“Our master, the Moderator, has done you a great favour,” Partial Man told the widow. “Do you recall the first day of the Parody War?”
Mrs Meng nodded. “How could I forget? Those terrible huge ships looming over our cities, firing down. And those inhuman soldiers in their red and black shells, marching through the streets. If it hadn’t been for the Moderator and his Lair Legion defeating the Parody Master so quickly…”
“Exactly,” Partial Man intoned. “You see, thanks to the Moderator’s blessing, what happened that day has been changed to what you recall. Without his interference things would have been very different.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Kat. She remembered something Mr Spooky had said to her, just before the Agents of SPAM had come for her. “Different how?”
“Without the Moderator’s interference, a stray blast would have destroyed Moench Villas that day,” Partial Man explained, spraying foire and destruction all across Upper Wuthering Heights.”
“But we live at Moench Villas,” Mrs Meng gasped. “We’d have lost our home?”
“You would have lost your lives. Without the Moderator reshaping the world – causing the world to be reshaped – you and your son would be dead now,” Partial Man concluded in his hushed whisper.
Mrs Meng clutched her chest. “Oh! My!”
“And now your son has fallen in with enemies of the state,” Partial Man went on. “Enemies who seek to use him to reverse the changes the Moderator has made. Enemies who wish him to doom himself and you by undoing the master’s kindness.” Partial Man gestured for Novice Agent Harris to bring forward the recording equipment. “Now we need you to tell this to your son, so that he knows why he must turn against those evil men and save himself - and you.”
***
The Shoggoth’s chymeric portal had brought Amy Aston and Al B. Framlicker out somewhere in the Wookiegetlucky Swamp; something to do with harmonic convergence resonances, so Amy was given to understand. All she knew was that her overalls were soaked to the knees, and it wasn’t like she could peel them off to dry them.
An unfortunate farmsteader’s truck gave its life so that the Framlicker/Harper gestalt being could come up with a working transmitter to hook into the Moderator’s satellite communications system. The Venom symbiote laced into their body proved very useful for getting shiny black tentacles into the guts of the truck engine to make those delicate adjustments. Amy kept well back.
The Shoggoth spent some time communicating with Liu Xi Xian half a continent away, appraising her of the nasty truth they’d just discovered in the secure basement beneath the Lair Tower: that the Moderator was an evil, ultra-powerful version of Danny Lyle, the Hooded Hood’s son.
“But why would the Hood set his son up to fail?” worried Miss Framlicker.
“Maybe he didn’t?” questioned Al B. “Maybe he set us up to think he’s set him up?”
“Maybe the Hood wanted to defuse the potential Moderator situation and conceived Danny?” Miss F suggested.
“Maybe Danny was supposed to do this all along, which is why the Hood pushed him and Kerry together?” speculated Al.
Amy backed away further. These Harper/Framlicker rows often degenerated into throwing things and breaking furniture, and that was before the two of them had been melded together into one body and given a powerful alien symbiote and in internal transnuclear bomb.
“Hello, Ebony,” the Shoggoth bubbled behind Amy.
“I’m not Eb…” began the EEE mechanic before she realised that the loathsome elder being was again communicating with someone far, far away. Except…
“Ebony’s dead,” Amy pointed out.
“You should take that with a pinch of salt,” noted the Shoggoth.
Amy noticed he was oozing more than usual, and the blobs of protomatter which he shed to the ground were melting into nothingness rather than crawling back to him.
“Is… is something wrong”? she ventured.
“I’ve made a mistake, Ebony,” the Shoggoth confessed. “When I broke into that vault I never expected it to be protected by all that probability. The power of a thousand probability shifters, harnessed to protect that place. I wasn’t braced against it.”
“There,” said the Harper/Framlicker composite with some satisfaction. “The information about Danny’s been encoded into the carrier sub-feed. Now we just need some clever person at the other end to pick up on the pulse wave differential and perform a simple reverse interstice four-d reversion and they’ll know what they’re up against.”
“So we couldn’t just have phoned them up and told them?” suggested Amy.
“I feel very strange, Ebony,” went on the Shoggoth. He was smelling bad now too, as if his material form was rotting. “I’m starting to see things that are there.”
The Harper/Framlicker squabble had gone quiet. “Guys,” Amy called. “I’m not liking the sound of this.”
“It was a very powerful curse,” the Shoggoth went on. “By chance it has triggered the mundane matter contamination inside me, set it running wild. Like cancer. Like… Ebony, I think I am becoming a plastic-formed maquette of myself.”
“Do something, guys!” Amy called. “The Shoggoth’s been probability-cursed!”
“That makes sense, yes,” answered the Harper/Framlicker gestalt. “That would explain what we’re feeling too.”
“You?” Amy worried. “What do you mean? What’s wrong with you?”
“Apart from being butchered into one brain-pan with an implanted alien killing biomorph and a weapon of mass destruction? I guess that would be the third brain they stitched in here with us.”
“Third brain?” asked Amy.
“Third brain?” asked the Shoggoth.
“Third brain,” agreed Baroness von Zemo, before she had Venom lash out to grab Amy. “Rip her head off and let’s get on.”
“Stop that!” ordered the Shoggoth, but he crumbled as he tried to move. “Oh dear…”
“Stop that!” agreed Al B. Harper and Miss Framlicker.
“Or what?” challenged the Baroness. “You’ll think me to death?” The venom symbiote shifted around her to sheathe her in a glistening black bodysuit. “I think differently.”
***
“Is there some special reason that you wanted to die in this way?” asked Madame Symmetry as Flapjack was led into her oak-panelled director’s office.
Flapjack dusted himself down and limped over to plump down in a padded Louis XVI chair. “Do you want the lisping or non-lisping version?” he clarified.
“The non-lisping, I think. What do you think you’re going to achieve, coming here to annoy the Shaper of Worlds?”
“Non-lisping it is, then. Although I want you to know that I could project spittle right across to where you’re sitting if I had more time to catch my breath.”
Symmetry raised one perfect eyebrow in silent warning.
“Okay, here’s the thing,” her hunchback visitor declared. “I’ve been trying to piece the plot together, and there’s a corner bit missing.”
“Which plot would that be?” the Shaper of Worlds replied.
“The Moderator Saga. Or the Moderator Saga as some folks would have it. There’s a part I don’t understand.”
“I imagine there’s a lot of things in life you don’t understand,” Symmetry told him. “Personal hygiene. Self-preservation.”
“The Moderator wandered to my world out of that big narrative anomaly where the Narrative Bomb went off,” Flapjack recounted. “He came with a bunch of alternate-reality versions of super-types that he’d picked up in travels across all kinds of other alternate version of the timeline. Most of those worlds weren’t happy places. Most of them were destroyed, either before the Moderator got there or with his help before he left.”
“So?” challenged Symmetry.
“So the Mod comes to town. It must have looked like a good time to call, given we’d just seen off the big bad Parody Master and the Hooded Hood was AWOL and all the great powers were just getting their stalls set up again.”
“It is a time of cosmic turmoil,” admitted the new Shaper.
“Yeah. A real fixer upper. So the Moderator turns up, offers to do the fixing, so long as he can be in charge afterwards. He blows his take-over-the-world interview with the Lair Legion and goes to Plan B. Plan B is to use the Hooded Hood’s hidden contingencies and things to defeat the Lair Legion and take over the universe. Instead he triggers a Hood trap that zaps the world to where it would be at the end of the Moderator’s to-do list, dropping Moddy in at the deep end before he’s really ready to cope.”
“I am aware of all this, Flapjack,” Symmetry pointed out. “Why are you wasting time I could be more productively using snuffing your existence?”
“Well here’s where it gets interesting. When the world changed, a few folks got to remember it the way it was. Sir Mumphrey and his grand-daughter resisted the retcon through his temporal pocketwatch. Some hippy-chick cosmic type called Faite shielded Yuki and her all-hottie girlie squad in one of Liu Xi’s hard-to-clean hidey holes. The Chronicler did something complicated and clever with a kid called Salieri Meng. CrazySugarFreakBoy! remembered all by himself, probably because that was the most annoying thing he could do. And then there was you.”
“Me?” Symmetry asked. “What of me?”
“A little computer-whiz called the Mouse broke into some of the Mod’s hidden files,” Flapjack reported. “Looks like you’ve been tipping the Moderator off about what your fellow cosmic types have been doing, so he can set up ways to counter them.”
The Shaper of Worlds pursed her black-lipsticked lips “Why would I do that?”
“Why indeed. See, the Moderator thought you were supporting him in this big bet he’s got with the Chronicler and Lisa, some kind of keep-in-control-of-Earth-until-midnight-tonight-and-win-all-the-marbles deal. Hope he checked the small print. But then I got to thinking that actually you were pretty tight with the Hooded Hood for a while back there.”
“What of that? Ioldabaoth is an interesting man.”
“Word is – although I haven’t mentioned this to the Legion because of employer confidentiality and stuff – but word is that you had his kid. So why would you be working to undermine a Hooded Hood plot?”
“I would only do that if it was to my benefit,” agreed Symmetry. “I have given the Moderator that he wanted; but not, of course, what he needs.”
“Yeah, I figured that much,” Flapjack admitted. “But then I got the call from Amy Aston. She and the Shoggoth and that damn sexy Frankenstein girl they made out of Miss Framlicker broke into the hidden levels under the Lair Tower and found the Moderator’s secret stash of Kerry Shepherdsons, his hidden power store. And they worked out who the Moderator really is.”
Symmetry’s face changed. “His what?” she frowned.
Flapjack grinned a gap-toothed smile. “So that’s it. I wondered if you knew he was actually your son by the Hood, Danny Lyle, gone totally to the dark side, or whether somebody had actually managed to put one over on the mistress of beginnings.”
“The Moderator is… Daniel?” gasped Symmetry. “But how could I not know that?” She tested the truth with her senses. The denial melted away as she brought her power to bear.
“So you were working to support what the Hood was doing, pretending to help the Mod, but you didn’t know that the Mod was an alternate version of Danny Lyle going around wiping out all the other versions of himself and stashing their Kerrys away in his power-larder to maintain his reality-deletions.”
“No,” admitted the Shaper of Worlds. “This… changes things.”
“And that’s where the missing piece comes in,” Flapjack concluded. “See, if you didn’t set dark Danny on this road, didn’t arrange for him to hit the core reality of the Parodyverse right here, right now… then who did?”
***
“Watch out, everybody!” called Vicki Vee, VelcroVixen. “It’s a trap!” She spun round, kicked Doorman’s legs from under him, and tackled him to the ground.
“Wha?” gasper the alternate Jay Boaz in surprise. “You silly bitch! You’re supposed to be betraying them to us!”
“Hey,” answered the deputy-leader of the Purveyors of Peril, “when I’m bought I stay bought!”
“Hold on,” growled Killer Shrike. “Are you saying Doorman’s still workin’ for the Parody Master?”
“Hey,” objected CSFB! “Weren’t you just telling me how much we could trust him?”
Doorman shifted in his full nelson. “But we hired you first knowing from Symmetry that you’d get called on by these loser rebels!” he complained to VV,
“But before you hired me, I was already working for the Hooded Hood,” VelcroVixen smiled sweetly. “Don’t try teleporting out, by the way. I’m pinching your pressure points to keep you in too much pain to concentrate.”
“What do you mean, a trap?” Professor Manyarms demanded, his three remaining robot tentacles twitching in alarm.
“Hey, it so happens that I like pain, baby!” Doorman grinned, then shifted himself away before the new lair Legion began their assault.
“He means we have been led to a killing zone,” Gamona replied. She leaped onto one of the thick concrete walls of the rear entrance to the Iowa Death Camp and surprised Pirate Monkey by punching her fingers through his chest.
“Hey, at least let me get one line in…” the Evil Ape/Johnny Depp hybrid complained before his heart was ripped out.
“It is a trap!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! realised. “Ambush! Purveyors purvey! Or perilise.”
The Dominator slammed down in the midst of the would-be liberators of the people in the Death Camp, scattering the Purveyors so his Legion team-mates could pick them off. “Round two,” he told the wired wonder. “What’ll I tear off you this time, do you think?”
Gamma Ray Gary smashed the Dominator in the head with his baseball bat Ljouis. The impact shattered every window in the death camp.
Then the Legion swarmed over the wall: The Superlative Simulacrum assimilated Gary’s power and went straight for the Ausgardian-gifted alien. The Scarlet Lawnmower cut through Niobe and Fanboy without breaking a sweat and leapt in to engage Gamona and Shrike. Dr Spoon aimed his lethal cutlery at Twisted Sister. Killer Flea reared up, thirty feet tall, to stomp on Dynamo Dolphin. Dead Boy phased his insubstantial ghost into Atomic Bumpkin to take control of the walking nuclear accident. Partial Man allowed Professor Manyarms’ robot appendages slide right through him and moved into to extend thin cold fingers through Krotch’s brain.
And there was war.
***
“Now,” said the Search Engineer, and Zachary Zelnitz’ head exploded.
Liu Xi Xian was right next to the young man at the time and was sprayed with gore as the behaviour failsafe that LOL INTERNET thought he had disabled went off.
“What’s going on?” demanded Lara Night from the top of the bus where she was riding shotgun. The distraction was just enough for CAPS LOCK to shout at her. “DIE, BITCH!”
The sound waves from CAPS LOCK’s voice bowled the last busful of people being evacuated from the death camp over and over, like a toy slapped by an angry child. The people inside were hurled around as the vehicle tumbled roof over base and slammed into a copse of trees half a mile from the Death Camp.
“Not a bad start,” judged Search Engineer. “For all their ability to project energy, Night and Xian have only baseline human resistance to injury. That puts them out of the fight. But beware the android Anna and the cyborg Shiro. And especially beware the samurai Bushido, who will undoubtedly be seeking ways of covertly bringing the fight to us.”
“NOT A PROBLEM!” shouted Caps Lock as he saw Anna rising from the wreck of the bus. The sonic wave impacted on the war machine like a giant’s fist, hammering her down into the ground. “OOH, SHE’S A TOUGH ONE! BUT SHE’S BUCKLING NOW, CRUMPLING LIKE TINFOIL!”
Chiaki Bushido, the Psychic Samurai, slid her sword up through CAPS LOCK’s ribs from behind, neatly slicing his heart and lungs. “Should have listened to your commander,” she advised her enemy.
“I did,” the Link told Chiaki. She gestured and suddenly the Psychic Samurai was at ninety thousand feet, freefalling towards to Mohave Desert. “Now, Lee?”
“Yes please,” agreed Search Engineer. “I imagine Miss Night will be regaining consciousness at about this point, and Miss Shiro will have torn herself free from the wreckage.”
The Link concentrated, and half a million gallons of ocean water and silt teleported in over the stricken vehicle.
Doorman blinked in. “Is that the best you can do?” scorned Jay Boaz. “Oh, of course, you only create transient links between two places, don’t you? I open doors that can stay there.” He gestured at Yuki Shiro as she climbed free of the mud, pulling Lara behind her. “For example, do you know how many logic gates robots have? And if they all open at once…”
Yuki spasmed and fell again. Lara spotted the threat and loosed a bolt of lightning horizontally across the battlefield.
“Now, please, Cath,” Search Engineer told the Link.
“Nah, leave it to me!” smirked Doorman. He pinched space together and made a hole between the assault on the rescue bus east of the compound and the ambush of the Purveyors to the south. Lara’s energy discharge passed between the two, wreaking havoc on the remaining Purveyors.
“I could have done that!” the Link objected. “And without letting enemies from that battle swarm through to here as a way of escaping.”
“Stick to the plan, Doorman,” Search Engineer warned.
“Oh, very well,” snorted Boaz. “Here’s another application of my power, then. You know that the valves of the heart are really just another kind of door?” He pointed at Lara and watched her go down clutching her chest. “Too easy, really.”
“Stop being overconfident,” Search Engineer told him. “And do what you’re supposed to.”
Doorman concentrated and created yet another wrinkle in space. Suddenly the side of the hidden compound where Yuki had evacuated six busloads of refugees already was right here, exposed, bringing the rescued prisoners right back to the combat zone.
“Like shooting fish in a barrel,” grinned Jay Boaz.
“Shoot them then,” replied Search Engineer. Already his mind was on the next part of the strategy. “I have to go and catch a Mouse.”
***
“It’s just a piggyback algorithm encoded into the carrier sub-feed,” Salieri Meng lectured as he tinkered with his pocket calculator. “Now we just need to pick up on the pulse wave differential and perform a simple reverse interstice four-d reversion.”
“That ees what I thought also,” agreed Brap. The bioengineered bipedal pig was clinging rather queasily to Visionary’s leg as Samantha Featherstone flew them at several hundred miles an hour on a raft of yellow light that existed only as long as she concentrated on it.
“In English, Salieri,” Samantha prompted. She was clutching the Yellow Flashlight she’d retrieved from the murdered D’ur Acell and using its power to propel them. She’d somehow felt called to the device, and as soon as she’d picked it up she’d known how its former owner had died by treachery.
“With footnotes, if required,” urged Vizh. The possibly-fake man was struggling with the unpleasant fact that once again he was in a position of leadership, and once again he was responsible for minors in harm’s way. And a pig.
“There’s important information encoded on a hidden sub-channel of the Moderator’s satellite network,” the seventh-smartest boy genius on the planet explained. “Brilliant work, hiding that in plain sight. And it’s telling us that the Moderator is actually someone called… Danny Lyle?”
Visionary’s face clouded. “I knew it! That little punk…”
“Apparently he’s getting his deleting-stuff powers from a secret store of probability-altering alternate reality versions of a girl called Kerry Shepherdson.”
Visionary looked up sharply. “He’s what?”
“The Shoggoth’s come up trumps,” Meng explained. He summarised the gruesome finds in the basement of Lair Tower.
“That explains how the Moderator was able to hold off all those cosmic powers and cut this wager deal with them,” considered Sam. “A lot makes sense now.”
“Turn this thing around,” Vizh ordered the girl. “We need to get back to Paradopolis right now!”
“Zere is ze problem in breaking into ze Tower basement,” Brap pointed out. “It ees defended so well that not even ze Shoggoth could interfere zere.”
“I don’t care,” Visionary insisted. “We go there now, and we find a way.”
Salieri was still checking his communications feed and he went pale. “Mother,” she mouthed.
“What now?” demanded Samantha.
“Question,” said the boy genius. “You’re so very well connected, Miss Featherstone. You and your big Legion leader here. So between you, have either of you ever heard of me back in your version of reality?”
“Never mind that now,” Vizh insisted. “Just get us back to Lair Tower.”
“No wonder the Moderator moved his team off the Island,” Samantha reasoned. “And fixed up the Tower so fast after it got damaged in battle. He needed to protect where he’d placed his power source.”
“I asked a question,” Salieri snapped harshly. “Had you heard of me? Either of you?”
“Oh, I’m sure I’d remember hearing about ‘the seventh greatest boy genius on the planet’” if I’d come across that,” Sam promised. “Why?”
“The Parody War, then? Do you remember an attack on GMY, on a place called Moench Villas?”
It seemed important to the boy. Vizh wracked his brain. “I think that was one of the early tragedies,” he recalled. “One of the first losses in the first battle. At the time it seemed like such a big thing, but that was before… so much else.”
“So it happened,” breathed Salieri Meng. “People were killed.”
“The LL helped with the clean-up,” Vizh remembered.
Samantha caught on at once. “You lived in Upper Wuthering Heights. In the main timeline… you’ll be dead.”
Salieri pointed to the wizard’s hat on Visionary’s head. “Lend me the Sorting Hat,” he demanded. “It’ll know the truth.”
“It’s true that I have very good knowledge of whoever’s cranium I adorn,” the hat agreed in fussy precise tones. “If you only…”
But Salieri had already grabbed the chapeau and jammed it onto his crown. “So should I be dead?” he demanded. “In the ‘proper’ reality these people want me to restore, am I?”
“Well…” prevaricated the Sorting Hat.
“I was killed,” Salieri declared. “Admit it.”
“Well, perhaps a trifle.”
“You’re asking me to help you by committing suicide.”
“Zat is a leetle bit tricky,” admitted Brap.
“Look, I’m really sorry about that,” Visionary sympathised, “but right now there’s a young woman who needs our help. Lots of them. And we…”
“There’s nothing we can do to save Kerry right now,” Sam insisted. “We have other friends too, putting their lives on the line to prevent the Moderator winning his big wager, not realising they’re walking into a trap. We have to get to Iowa. We’re almost there.”
“And I should help either of you why?” demanded Salieri.
“Because…” ventured Brap, “it ees ze right zing to do?”
Salieri closed his eyes and stood immobile for a long time while Vizh and Sam squabbled. Then his eyes snapped open. “Right,” he announced. “New plan. We need to change course.”
“That’s what I said,” agreed Visionary. “Because these archvillains always leave a back door into their secret hideouts, except they call it an escape exit. We just find that, get past the guardians and death traps and whatever, get to Kerry…”
“The Moderator’s not that stupid, Visionary,” argued Samantha. “And he knows you. He knows what you’d do.”
“We’re not going to Paradopolis. Or Iowa,” said Salieri. “We need to get to the root of this. We need to go to Arachknight City – where the Narrative Bomb went off. Where the Moderator came from. That’s the only way we can help this Kerry of yours, or aid our Purveyor friends. The only way we can beat the Moderator.”
Sam looked doubtful. “Are you sure?” she checked. “Can we trust you now?”
“It ees ‘ard to know whezzer we can rely on a boy ‘oo is dead eef he solves our problems,” pointed out Brap.
“Either trust me or don’t,” shrugged Salieri Meng. “Take me to Arachknight City or drop me off here and go die. Your choice.”
***
Killer Shrike slipped out of the flying harness and left it to power into Atomic Bumpkin without him. The impact adjusted the possessed atomic pile’s aim and caused him to fry Dr Spoon as well as Professor Manyarms. “Score,” said the butcher bird and went in to take on Crimson Lawnmower.
“This isn’t working!” called Gamma Ray Gary as he struggled in the grip of Sigmund the Superlative Simulacrum. “We need to so something.”
“Trade partners,” CSFB! called to him. “It’s an old trick but it might just work.”
Just then Doorman opened up the rift between the ambush battle and the destruction of the rescue bus. Lara Night’s diverted energies crackled across the battlefield, searing into CrazySugarFreakBoy!, giving the Dominator a chance to smack him right through the new doorway into the other zone.
“Finish them off,” whispered Partial Man, phasing through Gamona to short out her nervous system.
“Like I didn’t have to cope with that kind of attack three times before Thugos let me have breakfast,” the universe’s deadliest assassin scorned, shaking off the assault. She looped strands of her long razor-sharp hair round Partial Man’s throat, altered their make-up to match her enemy’s vibrational field, then sliced them like cheesewire to sever his head.
“How about this, darling?” asked the Dominator, catching her and stamping down to split her skull. “Did he train you how to survive being mud-stomped to pulp?”
Gamma Ray Gary shifted his stance and heaved Sigismund into the Dominator. Before he could follow up his advantage he received a blistering burst of nuclear fire from Atomic Bumpkin. “Ah’m sorry, y’all,” the Bumpkin apologised. “Ah don’t know what’s come over me.”
“That’d be Dead Boy, possessing you,” VelcroVixen answered, avoiding shrapnel teleported in by the Link and landing on Killer Flea to attach an EMP pack where it would do the most good. “You might want to resist that.”
“Sorry about this, AB,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! called as he bracketed the possessed Purveyor with fizz-bang whiz-bangs to distract him long enough to get close. “Gotta put you down.” His boot impacted with Atomic Bumpkin’s nose. The nuclear hick crashed to the floor, and CSFB! rode the shockwave to bounce into the Link and put her down.
/YOU DO NOT ATTACK MISS LINK!!!!/ the Simulacrum scrolled across his chest. He rose wrathfully but was smashed back to the floor by Dynamo Dolphin.
“I’ll deal with the Link chickie,” chuckled Krotch. “She is kute.”
The Simulacrum simulated Atomic Bumpkin’s power and incinerated Dolphin and Krotch alike.
“This ain’t going to plan,” Killer Shrike noted. “We were supposed to get in and rescue folks, keep everybody busy while not dying…”
“Well, one out of three’s not bad,” offered VelcroVixen. Scarlet Lawnmower reached out his psionic blade field and gashed her to shreds.
“Okay,” decided Shrike. “I’m outta here.” He raked his claws over the bottom of the wall he’d set explosive charges on, dropped it atop the Lawnmower and Killer Flea, and ran.
“Let him go,” the Lawnmower told the wrathful, damaged Killer Flea. “Dead Boy’s on him. Let’s take down the big horse-alien, piece by piece.”
CrazySugarFreakBoy! was away across the battlefield. Only Gamma Ray Gary now stood, surrounded by Sigmund and the Lawnmower and Killer Flea each taking their turns at him.
The charge of the Purveyors was over.
***
Liu Xi Xian awoke amidst the wreckage and the dead bodies. Someone was trying to pull her free. “Come on,” Kat Gillespie called to her. “You have to get up! You have to!”
“What… what happened?” The vomit rose unbidden from her stomach as she saw the slaughterhouse that the rescue bus had become.
“They caught up, I guess. Look, they’ve done something weird with space and dimensions and opened up the refuge to attack. You have to stop it.”
Liu Xi could feel the wrongness of Doorman’s manipulations. “Yes,” she agreed. “I need to summon void…”
“And fast,” mocked Doorman, coming across them in the wreckage. “Otherwise someone might die!”
“Jay?” Liu Xi wasn’t yet aware that the man she’d slept with wasn’t the Hatman of the world she knew. “Help me.”
“No time now, darling,” he laughed at her. “I’m busy closing the mental doors in your psyche that allow you to access your elemental gifts. There. Done it. Now you’re as helpless as your girlfriend there.”
Liu Xi felt blinded as her elemental awareness shut off. “How… “she began, before a better question came to her. “Why?”
“Because this way I get to keep you for fun and games later?” Doorman suggested. “Maybe your goth friend too.”
“He’s one of the Moderator’s people,” Kat warned. “I think he always was.”
“But I slept with him!” Liu Xi protested.
Doorman peeled off five bucks and tossed it to her. “Yeah, thanks for that,” he grinned. “Now we get to the part with the pain.”
***
Killer Shrike leaped over an electrified chain link fence and kept going, heading away from the explosions, looking for cover. The plan was simple. Survive. Escape. Hook up with Amy. Keep running. The rest could go screw itself.
“Not so fast,” said a voice in his head. Shrike jerked to a sudden stop, unable to prevent himself. “I’m Dead Boy, by the way. I’ll be using you as my meat slave for a while, puppet.”
“Really?” snorted Simon Maddicks. “You think?”
“Well, one of us has to,” snickered the voice in his head. “Now be quiet while I steer you back to slaughter your allies.”
“I’ve been dead as well, jackass,” killer Shrike noted through gritted teeth. “And so I know how to do astral plane asskicking. Wanna see?”
***
“Hey, Foxglove,” called the Dominator from across the battlefield. “Where are you, you cowardly little worm? I got something here for you!”
Meggan Foxxx, CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s mother, had been safe in the refuge until a few moments before. Now she dangled in the Dominator’s grip, his hand around her throat.
“C’mon, wired wonder. Mommy’s dying to see you!”
Yuki Shiro staggered to block the villain’s way. “Let her go,” the cyborg P.I. warned.
“I thought Doorman had already fried your circuits,” complained the Dominator.
“I’ve got a human brain. I can do without the computer part if I really need to.”
“Bet it plays merry hell with your reflex time, though,” grinned Dominic Clancy. “Think fast, Yuki!” He tossed Anna’s head at the cyborg’s stomach at MACH 2, catching her unawares and slamming her back to the ground. “Yeah, no reflexes at all. You’re hardly worth turning into scrap.”
Yuki struggled to rise as the enemy moved towards her. She knew how powerful Dominic Clancy really was. From behind her dozens, maybe hundreds, of Agents of SPAM were closing to surround her. She refused to back down. “Bring it on,” she hissed.
CrazySugarFreakBoy! bounced down in front of her, between the cyborg and the Dominator. “Let my mom go,” Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove warned, “Then it’s you and me, Dominator, one on one, round two.”
“Your momma,” smirked the Dominator. “This whore? When I’m done with her I’m going after that pretty April of yours, to show her what it’s like with a real man.”
“I mean it,” CSFB! warned, his eyes blazing. “You let her go!”
The Dominator laughed. The SPAM Agents surrounded Dream and Yuki. The Dominator closed his fist and pulped Meggan’s skull like a melon. “Oops,” he laughed.
CrazySugarFreakBoy! went insane.
***
The flickering lights of the basin where the Narrative Bomb had erased Arachknight City were just like Samantha had seen them before with her grandfather. She wished he was here now.
“What are we looking for?” she asked Salieri Meng. “Why come all the way here?”
“We’re looking for three things,” the boy genius answered tersely as he led the way down into the haunted valley. “First, we’re looking for the trigger that turned Danny Lyle – one Danny Lyle – into the Moderator. Second, we’re looking for what brought the Moderator here, now. Specifically here, now.”
Vizh looked around nervously at the shifting ghost-buildings of possible storylines, and tried to shake Brap off his trouser leg. “And the third thing?” he worried.
“That would be me,” announced the AL 36-24-36, a.k.a. Muffy B. Harplicker, a.k.a. the new Baroness. She stepped forward towing Amy Aston wrapped in black venom tendrils and dragging the inert body of the Manga Shoggoth. “Hello, Salieri, I see you got my message.”
“Loud and clear,” agreed the boy genius. “Let’s do it.”
***
The distraction had worked. Helen MacAllistair negated the last security lock on the lab level of the Death Camp and hurried across to the workstation.
“The motherlode,” the Mouse told herself as she sat in front of the master terminal. From here everything the Moderator had done on computer – everything – was available to her.
She quickly assembled the necessary files. Proof that there were no Space Fandoms, that the arrests had been politically motivated to shore up the Moderator’s grab for power. Proof that LOL INTERNET and CAPS LOCK were using broadband subchannels to keep the population subdued and controlled. Evidence that reality itself had been rewritten at the bidding of the Moderator. Plans for shaping the world into a tool of war, a means of conquering the whole Parodyverse.
Files that could shatter the peace of the planet. Files that could lose the Moderator his all-important wager with the Chronicler of Stories.
“Very good, Helen,” admitted the Search Engineer. “Very well played. I doubted you had it in you to get this far.”
The Mouse looked up and felt her heart sink. “Not good enough, evidently,” she realised.
“Well, collating information is my speciality,” Search Engineer pointed out. “Once it became clear that you came in with the Purveyors of Peril it was logical that you’d try to do this while they occupied our attention.”
“I was hoping it would be a little bit less clear,” confessed Helen.
“Did you check the file on Salieri Meng?” SE enquired. “Take a look now.”
The Mouse flicked up the dossier and speed-read it. “He and his mother don’t exist any more in the Parodyverse proper?” she realised. “They died. And you told him about it.”
“Correct,” agreed Search Engineer. “It seemed only proper. For that matter, have you checked your own secure file, Helen?”
The Mouse pulled up her own data on screen, frowning at the assessment of her character and courage.
Then she got to the relevant data, the description of her murder in the prime reality. “Oh.”
Search Engineer allowed himself a little smile. The mousetrap had been sprung.
***
“So what do we do?” demanded Flapjack, baffled and slightly appalled at how accurately Madame Symmetry could bring him up to date on the doings of his allies. “Helen’s caught by the Search Engineer. Vizh and Sam are up against the Baroness and Meng. Shrike’s off in his head. Yuki’s all busted up and surrounded by SPAM. Lara’s in cardiac arrest. Liu Xi’s powerless against Doorman. Gary’s getting ripped to pieces by the Legion. CSFB!’s just gone Punisher. And the Moderator is the dark side Danny Lyle. Did I miss anything?”
“One or two details,” answered the Shaper of Worlds, “but those are the key points. That and the clock ticking towards the Moderator winning his wager and becoming the new Triumvirate-in-one.”
Flapjack scratched his head. “So like I said, what do we do? Could it get any worse?”
“We do this,” answered Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity. She reached out a hand and evaporated the loathsome hunchback where he slouched. “There,” she declared. “Now you know whose side I am on.”
***
Coming Next:
CrazySugarFreakBoy! vs the Dominator (Kirk’s called this one)
Gamma Ray Gary vs Sigmund, Killer Flea, and Scarlet Lawnmower (only Sigmund needs to survive the battle)
Liu Xi and Kat Gillespie vs the Doorman (the Doorman doesn’t need to survive; there’s another way of getting him back to the PV proper)
Killer Shrike vs Dead Boy (we don’t need Dead Boy any more)
Helen MacAllistair vs the Search Engineer
Vizh, Sam, Brap, and Amy vs the Baroness (Salieri can wander into the anomaly and sit this out)
Ham-Boy on the battlefield – which side will he choose?
And, of course, whatever else people wish to write.
Nobody has to do these stories. If they’re not up by Friday then I’ll cover them in our concluding chapter next weekend: Absolute Moderation
***
Minutes of the Plotting Committee (Online Chat 8th February 2008)
HH: So, the Moderator Saga...
killer_shrike: I vote you finish it up however you want
Hatman: Heh
HH: Could we list the plot points people feel need resolving?
Visionary: Salieri needs to do... something... to justify his existence.
HH: The big one is probably the origin - and possibly the identity - of the Moderator
HH: We have the Doorman treachery/trap
HH: We have Team Jason defusing bombs and rescuing hostages in the basement
HH: We have the Purveyors vs the Legion
HH: We have Vizh & Co heading to the scene
Hatman: Doorman doesn't really need a big pay-off; he just has to betray the team and get shut down. Really Link could just port him somewhere and he finds himself in the Parodyverse Proper
HH: We have Kat Gillespie, Meggan Foxxx and others still in danger
Visionary: We have the Chronicler, Lisa and Shaper up to something.
HH: And Faite. Don't forget Faite.
Hatman: I'd like to see Ham-Boy get a couple of licks in, but it's nowhere near essential
Hatman: I've been warned Sarah needs to check her Facebook before we leave in 40 minutes
Visionary: Heh
Hatman: So I don't know how long I'll be here. :)
HH: Sarah so needs a character.
Hatman: The history of writing in significant others hasn't necessarily gone well...
HH: So true.
Visionary: Who said she had to be romantically linked to Hatty?
Visionary: Maybe he's not her type.
HH: Well, there's always that multiple girl I suppose.
Hatman: DupliKate. I need to write something with her
Hatman: Not the Moderator Saga though!
Visionary: She's not the secret identity of the Moderator then?
HH: Shrike, did you have a concept for the Moderator's origin?
HH: Because I believe we sent the Shoggoth and Amy off to find it out.
killer_shrike: I wanted it to be Teen Tony Stark
Hatman: That could work with my theory on where everything he deletes goes
HH: Also, I made an error in the last chapter I wrote. I completely forgot Flapjack.
Visionary: Well, that would have been unexpected.
HH: Even if he's not Teen Tony that's such a good line that it's got to go in there.
killer_shrike: Sort of a parody on what's happening to IM in Marvel, with a little of Superboy/man Prime thrown in
HH: I'm also tempted by Vizh's idea too though.
Hatman: To have Sarah be the Moderator?
Hatman: I'm going to have to veto that one
HH: I like his idea of a roomful of shrivelled alternate-reality Kerrys powering an evil Danny Lyle.
Hatman: Ah, that idea
killer_shrike: Works for me.
HH: I hadn't realised until he pointed it out how similar the moderator's power was to Danny's.
Hatman: I had the idea that everything deleted ends up in a corrupted on-line storage server (maybe Hallie's digital world preserved and corrupted from PV proper)
HH: Or, as Shrike says, it could be ending up in Marvel plotting meetings.
HH: If they have them any more.
Visionary: They have meetings for those plots?
Visionary: too slow.
Hatman: At the bar
Visionary: I'd like to see Helen get to do something since I dragged her into this.
Visionary: I suggested she knew a secret of the Moderator's that was dangerous.
HH: Noted.
Visionary: Not necessarily a way to take him down, just something she wasn't supposed to know.
Hatman: That he wears ladies underpants?
*** Brian has joined.
HH: Good evening.
killer_shrike: Howdy
Brian: Hello!
Hatman: Hey Brian
Visionary: Heya
HH: We'll certainly need to find something for every character to do. Otherwise the ending wouldn't resonate right.
HH: Brian, do you want to do a chapter covering Kat in the Death Camp?
Hatman: As I said, Doorman doesn't need anything much
Brian: Maybe.
Brian: I'm not sure what I'd do.
Brian: That's part why I wrote the HB thing.
Hatman: Neither do Gary or D'ur; they're just background. Or corpses
HH: I was thinking I might write another chapter that pulls everything together, then leave a window for final solo tie-ins from the main cast...
Hatman: Deal
HH: Vizh & Helen, Gary, Shrike, CSFB!, Kat if Brian wants to, Shoggoth if Chris wants to, Jason’s team...
Visionary: Am I in the main cast? I'm still trying to write a Christmas story...
HH: And then I'd tie it up with a finale that gets people home...
HH: And then if anyone wants to do epilogues we could let the main characters remember what happened.
Hatman: I wouldn't really consider Gary to be main cast; he hasn't done much really
HH: That's fixable.
Hatman: And I'd add Salieri to the main cast that may need a tie-in
Brian: I'd do something with Kat.
HH: Was it Al B. who brought him in? Anyhow, I'll find an important place for him and Sam somewhere in the story.
Hatman: Isn't Salieri Shrike's creation?
HH: In fact I've had a scene planned for them all along.
killer_shrike: Al did. I just made him the Amadeus Cho knockoff, which the character 's digressed from
Hatman: Ah, okay
Visionary: Amadeus Cho?
HH: I have no idea who Amadeus Cho is, so I may be responsible.
Hatman: 7th smartest person on Marvel Earth. Recently introduced character during World War Hulk I think
killer_shrike: He's the kid who figured out that it was the heroes who shot Hulk into space
killer_shrike: And I think figured out a way to bring him back
Hatman: Anyway, I gotta go; Sarah needs the computer. If any major plot points I should know of come about, can someone e-mail me?
HH: Ah. So the Hulk's in space.
Hatman: Later!
HH: Good night, Jay and Sarah.
*** Hatman has left.
killer_shrike: Bye
Visionary: Facebook waits for no man.
HH: Okay, I'll try and get something together this weekend. I'm ploughing though Untold Tales #325 right now.
HH: Or, as it may become known, untold Tales #325 and 326.
Brian: I thought Salieri seemed familiar
HH: I'd like to use the bulk of Shrike's cutting room floor story to get Link, Sigmund, and Search Engineer back to the PV too.
HH: I can get Doorman back via another route.
HH: The main problem - and it's not insurmountable - is that I mentioned that two alternate reality versions of the same character can;t coexist in the same dimension for long.
HH: That kind of sets up a problem for the Librarian.
Brian: Why?
Brian: Lee has at least a few doubles out there currently.
HH: Because Search Engineer is an evil alternate reality Lee Bookman.
Brian: So, why not a an evil version?
killer_shrike: He is?
HH: I pinched a bit from the Avengers/Gatherers story that seems to have inspired some of this stuff and mentioned that two different versions of the same character from different universes couldn’t survive for long in the same one.
killer_shrike: Well, if Hatman and Doorman can exist in the same reality, which is Jay's plan, I don't see the problem
HH: SE doesn't have to be. It’s one reason I was okay about pushing him into another body when Jason killed him off.
Brian: I knew SE was an evil Lee & the body thing was also an interesting idea, too.
HH: I wouldn't have mentioned the Bookman connection if I'd known Shrike was planning to keep SE around.
Brian: I don't see a problem with the Bookman connection.
Brian: It might get me to actually do a Bookman story
HH: That's a plus.
Brian: & when was the last time that happened?
HH: 1871.
Brian: Ah yes. Such a nice year.
HH: Okay, I've got a copy of the comments folks have made. Anything else we need to cover on the Moderator saga?
Visionary: Hmmmm....
Brian: I don't know. What hasn't been covered?
killer_shrike: I can't think of anything
HH: Hatty was keen to see more of Ham-Boy's story.
Visionary: I'm not coming up with anything.
Brian: I'm not sure there anything more to Cadet Harris' story.
HH: Okay then, I'll try and jot something down tomorrow and post it Sunday.
Visionary: Nifty and much appreciated.
HH: Are people okay with me putting the text of this chat up to this point on the PVB as a footnote?
HH: Or as a posting?
Visionary: I suppose.
killer_shrike: That's fine
Brian: Ok.
HH: Then that's the end of the official business. How are folks?
***
Previously:
The Moderator Saga #1 by Hatman
The Moderator Saga #2: Minions for the Moderator by Killer Shrike
The Moderator Saga #3: Captured is the Carpathian! by the Hooded Hood
The Moderator Saga #4: Interview With the Archvillain by the Hooded Hood
The Moderator Saga #5: Lord and Master of All He Surveyed by various posters
The Moderator Saga #6: Mouse and Ming by Hatman
The Moderator Saga, oh let’s say #7 by Killer Shrike
The Moderator Saga #8: One More Day by CrazySugarFreakBoy!
The Moderator Saga #9: Let’s Be Bad Guys by CrazySugarFreakBoy!
The Moderator Saga #10: With his Hands Tied Behind His Back by the Hooded Hood
The Moderator Saga #11: The Moderator Strikes Back by Killer Shrike
The Moderator Saga #12: Acting On a Hunch by the Hooded Hood
The Moderator Saga #13: Something Nasty in the Cellar by the Manga Shoggoth
The Moderator Saga #14: My Little The Moderator Tie-In and More Tie-In by L!
The Moderator Saga #15: New Players by Hatman
The Moderator Saga #16: Meanwhile… by the Hooded Hood
The Moderator Saga #17: Outlaws of the New Law by Jason
The Moderator Saga #18: The Impossible Win by CrazySugarFreakboy!
The Moderator Saga #19: Time for Genius by the Hooded Hood
The Moderator Saga Part… What 19? by Visionary
The Moderator Saga #21: Visiting Time by the Manga Shoggoth
The Moderator Saga #22: Armed and Dangerous by CrazySugarFreakboy!
The Moderator Saga #23: Check Again by the Hooded Hood
The Moderator Saga #24: Outlaws of the New Law - 2 by Jason
The Moderator Saga #25: The Birth (and Death?) of a Hero and #25a by Killer Shrike
The Moderator Saga Part 25-odd: Attempting to Restrain Large Felines by Means of the Flexible Appendage to the Torso by Manga Shoggoth
The Moderator Saga #27: Too Close For Comfort by the Hooded Hood
The Moderator Saga #28: Outlaws of the New Law - 3 by the Jason
The Moderator Saga #27 #28? by L!
The Moderator Saga #30: Inbetween the Lines by Hatman
The Moderator Saga #31: Purviewing the Purveyors by Killer Shrike
The Moderator Saga #32: Outlaws of the New Law - 4 by Jason
The Moderator Saga #33: The Mountainside by the Hooded Hood
The Moderator Saga #34: Something Nasty in the Crypt by the Manga Shoggoth
The Moderator Saga #35: Outlaws of the New Law - 5 by Jason
The Moderator Saga #36: Fred Harris, Agent of SPAM by L!
The Moderator Saga #37: A Pair of Purveyors by CrazySugarFreakBoy!
The Moderator Saga #38: Outlaws of the New Law - 6 by Jason
The Moderator Saga #39: Eternal Love by the Hooded Hood
The Moderator Saga #40: Outlaws of the New Law - 7 by Jason
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2008 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2008 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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Post By
Despite the best efforts of the board host to stop him, the Hooded Hood moves the plot on
Sun Feb 10, 2008 at
11:56:54 am EST
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Posted from United Kingdom
using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6/Windows 2000
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 How do you DO this? How? - Dancer is thinking about getting a hat so she can take it off to you. And maybe shoes. - Fri Mar 07, 2008 at 05:33:24 am EST-
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