Baron Zemo's Lair. - <font color="lightslategrey" face="Lucida Sans Unicode">The Hooded Hood Chronicles #15: The Hooded Hood and the Dimensions of Doom</font>

Baron Zemo's Lair

The Hooded Hood Chronicles #15: The Hooded Hood and the Dimensions of Doom
Tuesday, 07-Dec-1999 18:49:13
195.92.194.42 writes:

The Hooded Hood Chronicles #15: The Hooded Hood and the Dimensions of Doom

Behold: the Portal of Pretentiousness, ultimate manifestation of the Hooded Hood’s power to retrospectively change continuities, instrument of his masterplan to consolidate the entire history of the Parodyverse into one unified story with a happy ending only for the Hood himself. See the images flash across the mirrored surface of the great crackling gateway as the cowled crime-czar sits on his throne and watches the fate of the heroes whom he believes that he has conquered.
“All is proceeding according to my schedule,” the Hood proclaimed, staring with glowing green eyes into the depths of the Kirby-blotched Portal. “Once the heroes were distracted in combat with my Purveyors of Peril it was simplicity itself to use the cosmic awareness I acquired second-hand from a fallen celestial Observer to select the precise moment to carve them out of the Parodyverse. And I had already prepared other places to send each of them, according to their weaknesses.”
Having neatly recapped the main plot points to date for readers who had forgotten what was going on, he turned back to the black leathered woman by his side
In the matching throne, Lisa, last of the Lair Legion, its former leader, allowed herself a small, satisfied smile. After all she had given her all – literally – to the Legion on more occasions than she could count. And yet when she had needed them most they had abandoned her to the horrors of her past. In the last few days her whole life had been swept away, her origins modified by the archvillain at her side so that she was no longer Jarvis’ lover but his sister, her childhood a red memory of pain and abuse. Or perhaps worse, there was the possibility that everything that had come before was actually the Hood’s retcon, and that this life she had now was the real history. “I hope it hurts them like hell,” she spat.
“There is much you do not yet comprehend, Lisa,” the Hood replied. “But you will. Let us now look in upon each of our fallen champions, and see how they are coping with their new situations.”
The cowled crime-czar gestured with one gauntleted hand, and the swirling images in the Portal became Perez-precise.

Banjooooo awoke with a horrible headache. His first instinct was to cast about for Gromm, the Living Flatulence, his ancestral enemy whom he had been fighting when he had inexplicably faded away. But there was no villain for him to fight against.
The king of the sea monkeys looked around. He seemed to be back in his palace under the ocean. Yet there was something different. The great hall seemed somehow smaller, more plastic, than usual. And none of the usual courtiers and supporting characters were waiting to attend on him.
Banjooooo cautiously got up and checked what was going on outside the main gate.
A vast, bloated, distorted face leered down at him, so wide and pink that it filled half the horizon. Banjooooo instinctively lurched back to the cover of the palace. But even that glimpse had confirmed his worst impressions.
This was not the real oceanic palace. It was a small, cheap toy inside a spherical glass bowl, Peering in through the convex glass of the wall was a seven year old boy, staring at Banjooooo with undisguised disappointment. “Gee whillikers! It’s not anything like it showed you on the packet!” the child complained to an unseen adult. “The picture in the comic showed you them all doing clever tricks and stuff, leaping over each other and being… well, being fun. This one just looks kinda like a tiny frowning flea!”
To Banjooooo’s horror he realised that he was now sized like a genuine sea-monkey, trapped in an eight-year old’s bedroom, at the child’s complete mercy.
“Well, he better get more interesting soon,” the boy warned, “Or this sea-monkey’s going down the pan!”

“I said, where the hell are my fries?”
Sersi jerked herself awake and looked around her in alarm. The whole situation was alien to her.
“Hey, dumbass! I’m talkin’ to you! You owe me a Woppafries an’ if I don’t get it soon I’m gonna get your butt busted by the manager.”
The Austernal turned on the irritating lout and unleashed her eyebeams. Nothing happened.
A spotty youth in a ridiculous paper hat came over to where she was standing, behind some kind of counter. “Is there a problem, sir?” he asked the foul-breathed man who was shouting at Sersi.
“Sure there’s a problem!” the customer shook his fist. “I ordered a Mega-Meal with Double Cheese. I paid for a Mega-Meal with Double Cheese. But this dumb b*tch forgot to give me my fries!”
The spotty youth had a badge on that read “Deputy Manager”. It had five plastic gold stars on it. “I’m very sorry sir. Please accept this complementary Thick’n’Shake with our apologies. Sersi, tell the man that you’re very sorry.”
Sersi tried to lift the youth from the ground by the throat. But she wasn’t strong enough. She suddenly realised with a dawning horror that she was entirely human.
She was entirely human, and she was behind a fast food counter, and there was a queue of increasingly rude and stroppy customers queuing all the way out of the door and into the swirling grey fuzz of non-existence beyond the windows of the diner.
“Sers… get with it girl,” the teenager at the next serving point hissed to her. “You get fired, they throw you out there… outside… and then… nothing! You’re history!”
Sersi gulped back her anger and her pride. “I’m… I’m very sorry sir. Would you like fries with that?”

The beautiful woman in the almost transparent gown had thick golden hair down to her waist. Her jewellery was worth the annual GDP of a small third world country. And she was chained to a rock high up on the desolate moors awaiting a fate worse than death. So she screamed.
Fin Fang Foom wasn’t sure how he had got here, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to allow a damsel in distress to go unrescued. He swooped down to get a closer look at what the problem was.
There was a knight. An honest-to-goodness knight in armour, on a coal-black charger, heading for the girl. “Stay away from the lady!” Foom commanded, interposing himself to protect the damsel.
“Vile dragon, you shall never devour the Lady Glasrobel!” the knight shouted, lowering his enchanted lance and spurring his horse to the charge.
“Devour her? Hey, wait a minute!”
“Save me!” the Lady Glasrobel screamed.
“No, hang on. I think there’s a bit of a mis…”
Then the enchanted lance pierced the dragon’s armoured skin and it hurt a lot. Foom instinctively lashed out with a mighty claw, but the knight already had his magical shield in the way and the impact was reflected back on the wyrm, knocking him over onto his side. The knight followed up with his sword, leaping from his horse and seeking out the dragon’s heart.
Foom breathed. It was self-defence.
The knight’s talisman of fiery protection made the flame-breath fork in two before it touched him. His blade slashed down into Foom’s chest.
“Get off me, you bloody tin can!” Fin Fang Foom roared, the pain and the shock making him lose his temper. “I’m not here to threaten the lady. I came to help her!” He lashed out with his tail, managing to dislodge the knight just before the final death-blow could be struck.
The knight rolled over skilfully and leaped onto his charger again. The black lance began to throb with a sinister purple light. “You will die, dragon. Die before the might of Sir Edmin the Dragonslayer!”
Foom felt himself getting light-headed from loss of blood. Evidently Sir Edmin knew his business. It was only a matter of time before the dragon passed out. He had to get away.
“Wait!” the Lady Glasrobel screamed. “Save me!”
“I’m not threatening you,” Foom shouted back, unfolding his wings in an attempt to get airborne. “You don’t need saving!”
“Yes I do!” she answered. “I mean save me from Sir Edmin!”
The Dragonslayer charged Foom. The dragon had no time to think this all out. He seized Glasrobel, snapped the chains binding her, and lurched off into the skies.
It was almost five minutes later that he passed out from the blood loss.

Messenger was in a big, impressive hall filled with marble columns and wood panelling. There were a hundred or more counters lining the sides of the building, but no apparent exits. At each counter there was a queue so long that it snaked around the vast room, controlled by those little barriers with rope hanging between them. Celine Dion was playing over the speaker system, the same song again and again. There was an inscription engraved in the marble over one of the impressive archways. Neither sleet nor rain nor… “It’s a post office!” Messenger realised. “A vast, overcrowded post office!”
Only Celine Dion replied. It appeared that Celine was a natural woman.
“Excuse me,” Messenger asked the nearest customer, who was one-hundred and ninety-second in one of the queues. “Where am I? How did I get here? How do I get out?”
The customer shrugged and turned her back on the superhero. So did the second and the third and the fourth person Messenger approached. The fifth pointed briefly before ignoring him. Messenger saw that over one of the wooden counters there was a sign that read ‘Information’.
The only problem was that there were about three hundred people in the queue before him.
Messenger took his place in the line. Five hours later he would find that he had been queuing in the wrong one. Seven hours after that he would be directed to the Departures line. Nine hours later still he would be sent to get a Departures Request Form from the other end of the hall. And so it went on.

Donar looked around him wrathfully. “Hämmerblade, thou mighty jessie, getst thee out here so I canst kick thy butt!”
There was a happy giggling. The Thunder Godling swing round to see what new form of attack he was under.
There were about twenty of them. They were blue and they stood about a foot tall. They had funny little hats and some of them wore shorts or flowery skirts. They all had big, soulful eyes.
“Who art thou, gnomes?” Donar demanded, brandishing Mjalcom because these sorts of little buggers could turn nasty is Ausgard and the last thing a warrior wanted was a dozen tiny pixies clawing their way up the inside of his leggings.
“We are the Smurfs,” one of the blue beings giggled. “And we are here to be your friends!”
“To play with you!”
“To dance in happy circles with you!”
A shy little girl-Smurf came forward and gave him a primary-coloured flower. “We all love you very much.”
Donar tried to summon a blast of lightning to blow them away, but the worst he could manage here in Smurfland was a happy little shower of light rain to help the garden grow. He tried to punt the nearest Smurf over the distant mountain range but his foot was restrained by the Rules of the Place. Nobody did anything nasty here. It wasn’t permitted.
“We’ve been waiting for you so long!” the Smurfs said dancing in happy rings around the appalled Donar.
“Now we can play our games!”
“Now we can sing our songs!”
“Now we can put flowers in each others hair!”
“Mayhap some wenching and pillaging?” Donar proposed.
But he already had the feeling that he was deep in the bowels of hel.

Space Ghost had a killer headache, and the loud music and the bright lights weren’t helping. Neither were the people clapping and cheering.
“Isn’t he a sport, ladies and gentlemen? Let’s have another big hand for our brave contestant, Space Ghost!”
“Let’s not!” SG begged. “Let’s have a moment’s silence for him… Wait a minute! Contestant?”
Space Ghost peered around through painful, bloodshot eyes. Bright spotlights were on him, and he seemed to be on some sort of stage. Four rather attractive ladies wearing feather swimsuits with plumes on their heads were helping him towards a gigantic roulette wheel which formed the focal point of the platform. An oily fellow with a sequinned suit and a thin, waxed moustache was holding a microphone and talking to the audience. “Space Ghost is a first time contestant – well, he’d have to be, wouldn’t he, because we all know what happens to contestants who don’t win, don’t we?”
“Yes, Cholly, we know!” the crowd chorused obediently.
“And what’s the prize for coming second?” Clarence “Cholly” Oxenburger interrogated the selected studio audience.
“Painful and slow oblivion!” they chanted back excitedly.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Space Ghost objected. “I don’t remember agreeing to any of this!”
“Are you backing out, Spacey?” Cholly asked him. “Are you saying that you’re coming second?”
There were oohs and aaahs from the audience. A drum rolled.
“Er, no, not if that’s the oblivion thingie. I was just… asking.”
“Then it’s time for you, Space Ghost, our intrepid contestant, to spin the wheel and play… Superhero Endurance!”
Space Ghost was about to object to this when one of the feathery girls set the light-bulb-strewn roulette wheel in motion. SG focused on what was written in each of the sections as it clicked past the giant arrow: Spaghetti wrestling… tarantula pants… trepanation … snake juggling… the half-ton date… and then the wheel stopped.
“Now hold on a minute!” Space Ghost objected.
“Yes!” Cholly told the hooting and cheering audience. “For fifteen points, let’s prepare the hanging frame and bring on the nipple clamps!”

Rocket Racoon could hardly breathe. He felt his heart pounding and pounding as his muscles knotted and his lungs ached. And still he ran, faster and faster; but never fast enough. His hands gripped the bar in front of him as the ground whizzed beneath him, but no matter how much he tried he could never quite keep up. His vision blurred as his massive stamina was stretched beyond its limits.
And the giant running wheel he was in still went faster and faster…

Starseed coughed up some seawater and dragged his head up to look around. He was on a beach and he felt like he’d just been vomited up by a whale. What’s more, his legs hurt like hell.
As he forced himself to sit up he felt something drag on his front. He looked down. He looked up again. He looked down and then rubbed his eyes. Then he tried to get the sand out of his eyes that’s he’d just rubbed in. Then he checked downwards again but they weren’t going away.
The growths.
Two of them.
On his chestal area.
About 34B.
Then there was his long, flowing red hair which also seemed unusual.
“Gaaaaahhhh!” he shouted, trying to make some sense of it all, trying preferably to make the unwanted anatomy dissolve. Unfortunately all that came out was “ ”. Starseed’s voice was gone, and with it, his power.
Before he even had time to take this in, a big shaggy dog and a handsome young man were striding along the beach. “Well what do we have here? A shipwrecked girl?”
And somewhere nearby a Cajun crab was worrying about what was going to happen next.

NTU-150 woke up to find somebody opening up his chest. This was a rather disturbing feeling, although not exactly painful because he appeared to have hinges for the purpose. He had a small jet skateboard concealed inside. He found himself making a beep-beep noise as a knob in his back was depressed. He actually got quite interested when his arms transformed out into wings and his legs folded back to become a racing car.
It took the technological genius a little while to work out exactly what was wrong with this picture, and by that time what appeared to be a sixty-foot high child was sending him into transforming action in a battle to the death against Web Action Spider-Man and Barbie.

Hatman woke up because of the cheering and clapping as the scene began. He opened his eyes to see two fresh-faced high-school teenagers staring down at him. “Wow! Are you alright Hatsie?” one of them asked.
“What happened?” Hatman wondered, noticing almost reflexively that he appeared to be wearing a 1950’s beanie, the sort with a little propeller on the top.
“You breathed on Mr Cool’s bike is what happened,” Flotsie told him. “Don’t you remember? And Mr Cool told you that only guys who had dates for the prom were allowed within fifty feet of his cycle.”
“And then you panicked and you told him you did have a date for the prom,” Rog Podge reminded him. “But he didn’t believe you.”
“So this Mr Cool guy hit me?”
“Hey, nobody lies to Mr Cool. And he’s given you till Friday to prove that you really do have the prom date you said you did or he’s gonna come back and mulch you to mush!”
“Oh, man,” Rog worried. “You are so much toasted!”
Hatsie tried to make sense of all this, even though his head was ringing from the coolest pounding that he’d ever had. “So… I need to get a date for the prom or I get beaten up again?”
“Not just a date,” Flotsie warned. “You told Mr Cool that you had a date with Jane Lane!”
An invisible audience laughed and whistled.
“Yeah, Hatsie,” Rog shook his head. “You got until Friday to get the greatest cheerleader in the history of Standard High to agree to go to the prom with you!”
The Hatman was helplessly trapped in a neverending episode of Hatty Days.

And CrazySugarFreakBoy! knelt beside the grave of his true love whom he’d lost again and shouted his anger to the heavens, finally dragged down by all the pain and the misery and the loneliness of a world that just didn’t care.

And the man in the Dark Knight’s costume awoke in a straight jacket in a mental institution with all his rogues gallery around him and started screaming.

“There’s one more,” Lisa declared, determined to see the whole of her former team’s downfall. “Why are you shielding me? Are you afraid I might change my mind and go back to the Legion?”
The Hooded Hood looked carefully into her black-lashed eyes. “You wish to see the fate of Jarvis?”
“Of course I do,” Lisa spat. “I hope it’s really bloody painful!”
The Hooded Hood gestured at the Portal. “Nothing but the best for the leader of the Lair Legion,” he promised.

Jarvis woke up with a lot of tubes in him and his chest and pelvis hurt a lot. He tried to move but the casts kept him immobile. “What the hell…?” he croaked. He tried to calculate how many times he’d been crippled in the last year.
“Jarvis, is that you?”
The bedridden butler managed to turn his neck and open one painful eye to see the woman who had spoken; the woman whose voice had made his heart leap. “Melissa?”
Soft hands touched a wet cloth to his parched lips. “Of course it’s me. I’m so glad you’re awake. You’ve been in the coma for such a long time.”
“A coma? I was in a coma?”
“After the accident,” Melissa explained. “Don’t you remember?”
“We were fighting the Purveyors of Peril and the Hooded Hood…”
“No. A building fell on you. It was just… bad luck. That was nearly a year ago. We had almost… given up hope.”
Jarvis was taking this in when the door to the mansion infirmary slammed open and a handsome man with a big red W on his t-shirt bounded in. “Melissa! My darling! How’s old Jarv?” And he caught the woman Jarvis loved – that he thought he was engaged to – in his super-strong arms and gave her a huge, passionate kiss.
The worst thing was, she was kissing back.
“Hey!” Jarvis objected. “I’m awake you know!”
“Jarv! My best friend!” Wonder Man beamed. He fell on Jarvis’ newly-mended ribs and gave him an affectionate hug to start the internal bleeding again. Then he looked a little bit abashed. “Ah. I suppose there’s something I should explain to you.”
“You see,” Melissa said carefully, “You were unconscious so very long, and Wonder Man had to take over leading the Legion…”
“We brought in lots of great new members,” Simon smiled. “Mr Rodgers and Linda Tripp and everybody…”
“…and he was so kind and gentle with me, and eventually, well…”
“We fell in love!” Wonder Man shrugged. “I knew you wouldn’t mind, us being best buddies and all. And now our girl has taken her rightful place in the Legion as the Scarlet Melissa!”
Jarvis felt another twist in his heart. “You… you would never put a costume on for me!” he moaned.
“Oh, don’t be bitter Jarvis. It was just a cruel trick of fate that Simon accidentally dropped that house on you. But can’t you be a little bit glad that I’ve found true happiness with my… my Wonder Man!”
Jarvis thought his life had reached its very lowest ebb. He found out how wrong he was ten minutes later when Nurse Byrne arrived to give him his enema.

Lisa laughed until she cried. “I am so going to enjoy being a villainess,” she promised.
“Then I have a task for you, Dark Lisa,” the Hooded Hood decided. “One for which you are uniquely suited. Come with me.”

In one of the nastier areas on the seedy side of the Infernal Abysm, in a neighbourhood where Pit Fiends walk around in pairs for safety, Visionary smiled weakly at Mefrothto, the demon lord. “Hello,” he said to the red-skinned being with the horns and cloven hooves. “I seem to have got rather lost.”
“This is the right place for it,” Mefrothto jested. And all of hell laughed dutifully.
Visionary looked around and absorbed the implications of the decorations – the eternal flames, the screaming souls, the thriving pitchfork industry etc. “I can’t help but notice that this isn’t where I was a little while ago,” he broached the subject politely.
“That’s right,” Mefrothto leered. “This is the Abode of the Damned, where you have come whilst your mortal shell is being possessed by five of my collection of souls. You are here because you have a decision to make.”
“A decision?” Visionary said. “I’ve always been bad at decisions. There was this time Cheryl was trying on these two blouses, one blue and one greeny-blue, and she asked me…”
“Silence!” the demon lord bellowed.
“In the end I went for the greeny-blue one,” Visionary quickly explained. Cheryl had bought the blue one, though.
“The choice before you is this. Are you a fake man?”
Visionary frowned. “You mean all that crap about me being made by some secret government project out of spare parts and all that? No, that’s complete rubbish. I’m as normal as the next man.” Then he thought back to Cheryl’s occasional comments. “Well, almost,” honesty compelled him to add.
“I see,” Mefrothto grinned. “Then you have a soul.”
“Damn right I do!” Visionary asserted.
“Good. Then you are my lawful property, a lost soul trapped in the Pit of Pain and Desolation. Take him away!”
Visionary noticed two very large and fat horned security guards approaching him. “Hey, wait a minute! What if I don’t have a soul?”
Mefrothto shrugged. “Why then, you couldn’t possibly be here – and you couldn’t possibly be real.”
Visionary considered this. “So either I’m real and have a soul and I get tormented in the torture pits of hell, or I don’t have a soul and I’m fake and I get to go free?”
“That is accurate. I said you had to make a choice,” gloated Mefrothto. “Right now.”

The Purveyors of Peril returned from their latest mission in something like a good mood. “This is just too easy,” Turbo Treesloth complained. “All of us taking on the rest of the Parodyverse’s heroes one by one. It’s no contest.”
“Don’t get overconfident,” VelcroVixen warned. “The Falcon nearly got away, and his only power is rapping with birds.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t get away, did he,” Appendage Man sneered. “He got stomped but good and put through the Portal of Pretentiousness into a never-place with the rest of them.”
“How many are there left anyway?” PychoAcidPervGrrl! demanded. “This is totally and absolutely boring. We can’t even kill them when we catch ‘em!”
VelcroVixen checked the list. “Well, we got all the Belgian Waffle Five… the sole member of the Man-Monkey Fan Club… Ed the Giant Tortoise… Rather Large Foot Boy…”
“Shame about Badger Man,” Expired Warranty snickered.
“He was delicious, though,” Rottweiler had to admit.
“And I caught Paste Pot Pete solo,” Mother Whipcord reminded them. “Of course, it got somewhat… sticky.”
“We would have caughteth yon Elsqueevio if you Indigo Impostor had not screwed upeth!” Hämmerblade complained. “As it is, he escapedeth and gave us the swivel sign!”
“We all have off days,” the man in the Indigo Impostor suit apologised. “I guess I’d better go and get some more practise in.” And he left the Rumpus Room and slipped into the shadows of Herringcarp Asylum.
VelcroVixen watched him go with a frown. “He doesn’t seem like himself today,” she worried.
“Hey, he’s never himself, by definition. Go on with the body count!” Partycrasher demanded. “I liked the bit where I got to crush Cap’s nuts…”

It was a dark and sinister place with far too many ravens for spiffy’s liking.
“This place is, like, cool!” a Junior Reader proclaimed, using the communal voicebox which all the possessing spirits sent by Mefrothto into Visionary’s body had to share. “It rocks like a Black Sabbath concert!”
“This is a between place,” Spandex Lass, another of the presences currently lodging inside Visionary’s body, sensed. “There are… terrible powers here.”
“I told you my idea was betterrrrr” the demon Oddhorn (ditto) grumbled. “We could be rrrruling some trrrropical island parrradise even now!”
“You wanted to come where we could find out what was going on in the Parodyverse,” the Voyeur (ditto again) told them, like an irritated schoolmaster. “So I brought you here. This is where you will find her… the Shaper of Worlds.”
“Um, the Shaper of Worlds is a him,” Fleabot, Visionary’s companion micro-robot (not in Visionary’s mind but in his hair) footnoted.
“The last Shaper was a him. Now it’s a her,” the Voyeur snapped. He was feeling an bit irritable in this rather claustrophobic little brain. “It’s only happened very recently, and the notification only went to key powers in the Parodyverse – the Chronicler, Death, Irony, Sarcasm, Cheryl and so on.”
“So, this Shaper,” a Junior Reader asked, “is she a babe?”
And suddenly a very scary presence was amongst them and nobody felt like speculating on the babehood of the Shaper of Worlds any more.
“Behold!” a voice which could melt mountains and create suns proclaimed, “The truth about the Parodyverse!” And there were many tangled strings, all knitted together in a sort of plait. But it was quite a motley rope, made of all kinds of twine and wool, and it looked as though it had been used to floss a giant. “This world came together from many others, and is made up of many dreams. Even more than other realms, it is held together by the belief of its inhabitants.”
“I believe I should be alive,” spiffy suggested quickly and hopefully.
“By the consensus belief of its inhabitants,” continued the Shaper. “That makes it vulnerable to invasion from other realities… the Byrne, the Anti-Parodyverse, and so on.”
“John Byrne. He’s so cool. His Spidey shows how it should have really been done,” Junior Reader contributed. “He is the way coolest * urk! *”
“You’re going to have to show me how you do that, Spandex Lass,” spiffy said interestedly as a Junior Reader lost all interest in Byrne-worshipping.
“It is very evil,” Oddhorn admitted admiringly as he metaphorically watched Junior Reader clutch the spiritual equivalent of his groin in agony, “and I know evil.”
“Would you all shut up!” the Voyeur demanded, “Some of us are trying to watch this!”
“If the Hooded Hood succeeds in consolidating the strand he had isolated from our protection,” went on the Shaper of Worlds, “then he can use that to rebind the entire Parodyverse into one unified vision – his own. He will become supreme arbiter of all that has happened or will happen. He will become… the Parody Master”
“But he’s a baddie!” spiffy objected. “You can’t let him win!”
“The Shaper can do no more than advise us,” Spandex Lass discerned. “It is up to us to do something to stop him.”
“Is that right?” spiffy asked. “Two dead guys, a woman who never was, a failed Watcher and a fiend from the pit have to save the universe in a fake body? What do we have to do?”
The Shaper of Worlds told him.
Spandex Lass eventually managed to stop spiffy from laughing hysterically.

“Why exactly should I listen to a villain who has just temporarily killed my partner Frog-Man?” Goldeneyed demanded of Baron Zemo. Because of the relatively poor level of atmospheric lighting in Zemo's laboratory Goldeneyed had yet to work out that Zemo’s entire coterie of super-villain henchpeople were snacking in the next room.
“Yes, why should he?” Yo demanded, spring up from the energy-dampening restraints that Zemo had put on him/her just because Yo thought s/he could do so. “Yo is happy to be seeing new superhero-person rescued for place where new superhero-person needed rescuing from, but uncute nasty-Zemo never said anything about offerings to new superhero-person that new superhero-person couldn’t refuse.”
There was a pause whilst everybody present, including Yo, deciphered this.
“He has to help me for the same reason that you will, Yo,” Zemo finally announced. “Because of… the orphans.”
“The orphans?” the diabolical Dr Moo asked. Zemo hadn’t filled her in on this part of the plan.
Zemo gestured dramatically at a TV monitor which sprang from the wall. Thirty or more snivelling and destitute survivors of the St Aloysius’ orphanage that the Yurt had destroyed now cowered in one of Zemo’s annihilation chambers. “You will serve me or I will eliminate the rug rats,” he threatened.
“You… you wouldn’t!” Goldeneyed gasped.
“Yes he would. Yo knows nasty villain-Zemo. Uncute nasty-Zemo would even hurt harmless fluffy-bunnies to get uncute Zemo’s way!”
“You unspeakable fiend!” Goldeneyed scowled. “What is it you want?”
Zemo pointed at Yo. “You, go away. I’ve finished with you. I’m setting my castle’s sensors to automatically execute the orphans if you come within a thousand miles of the place again. Now get!”
Yo poked his tongue out at Zemo and departed.
“You,” Zemo continued, gesturing at Goldeneyed, “Clean up the mess that your dead partner is making and stand by to serve me. You’re my contingency plan.”
“Contingency plan?” Moo noted. “Then what’s the main plan?”
“Zemo always has an ace-in-the-hole,” the Baron boasted. “I have suborned one of the Hooded Hood’s Purveyors of Peril, and through him I shall undo the cowled crime-czar’s intricate schemes. I shall contact my double-agent now and set things in motion.” The archvillain strode over to an unnecessarily big desk-mounted radio mike. “This is Baron Zemo calling my undercover operative in the Purveyors of Peril. Come in… Indigo Impostor!”

Anybody who hasn’t worked out by now that the Dark Knight changed places with the beaten Indigo Impostor back in the mall deserves to have their Comic Book Reading License revoked. Yes, that was the Impostor totally failing to deal with the Arkham Asylum scenario which the Hood had worked out for DK; and that of course explains the Impostor’s unusual behaviour since the fight in the Mall.
So the figure keeping to the plentiful shadows in the basement of Herringcarp Asylum was of course the last free member of the Lair Legion. He was following Lisa and the Hooded Hood into one of the grim sub-basements of the old madhouse. It would have helped his stealth immensely if his uniform hadn’t started bleeping at that moment.
It took him a moment to locate the concealed communicator stub and activate it.
“Hello? Hello? Are you there? Come on, Impostor, or I’ll have your tendons as dental floss!”
The Dark Knight immediately recognised the haughty Teutonic snarl of Baron Heinrich Zemo. He flipped on the return communication channel. “Well, well, Herr Baron, this is a surprise! What can I do for you today?”
It took Zemo a moment to catch up with the fact that the voice at the other end of the link wasn’t his bribed toady but was in fact one of the hated Lair Legion. “Dark Knight! I had thought all of you verdammit superheroes had been eliminated by now!”
“Sorry, Zemo. We don’t eliminate that easily. I’m afraid the Indigo Impostor can’t come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?”
“I take it that you have somehow taken his place, disguising yourself as the disguise artist? Very ingenious. Well, it appears that we both have the same aim of taking down the Hooded Hood. So listen very carefully, Dark Knight, I will say this only once…”

Dan Drury looked up from the latest budget estimates on the damage to Sentinoids as the omni-monitor viewer cut in. “Yeah, whut th’ hell d’you want? Cant’cha see I’m tryin’ to get this work done before the blastid President buzzes me with some more dangfool orders ‘bout arrestin’ good guys… oh, hello Mr President!”
“Drury,” the Chief Executive frowned. “I’ve been thinking again about this Lair Legion situation.”
“It is very bad to be doing bad things to heroes who are good people and Yo-friends,” a voice from off-camera in the Oval Office contributed.
“Er, yes. It has been put to me that we may have been somewhat premature in eliminating the world’s heroes,” the Prez continued.
Drury checked his list. “Well, this Hood bozo that you hired has sure been efficient about it. We got all but a few stragglers contained now, an’ a lot of ‘em have been confined for treatment at some place called…” (he checked his file) “…Herringcarp Asylum.”
“It is not being nice to do things to heroes who have doing such good things over all they are being to do,” the off-camera Presidential conscience insisted.
“The Hooded Hood and his Purveyors have proved very effective,” the Chief Executive admitted, “but I have been reviewing the circumstances of our… conclusions about the Lair Legion and the superhero community in general and…”
“An’ you ain’t so sure that you didn’t screw up big time!” Drury concluded.
“Yo is thinking that it was screwing big time surely.”
“An now you want me to check out if you’ve gone and placed you foot in a pile, huh?” the Director of SPUD surmised.
“There may have been a disinformation mismatch of communication interfaces,” the President admitted.
“The cute President is saying, to yes,” Yo explained. Yo spoke English so much better than the average politician.
So it was that five minutes later, Dan Drury, Agent of SPUD, was stepping into the holding cell where certain special prisoners were still being detained. “Ladies,” he sighed, addressing Cheryl, Tina, and the real Melissa. “We gotta talk…”

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” the Hooded Hood breathed, gesturing into the sub-basement dungeon of Herringcarp Asylum.
“The Legion!” Lisa gasped as she looked on the line of heroes stood to attention like cardboard cut-outs. They were all there, from Jarvis to Rocket Racoon, all staring forward like zombies. “I thought you had sent them all away through the Portal of Pretentiousness? We were just looking at them.”
VelcroVixen frowned. She was less than happy that the Hood seemed to be confiding so much in the former Legionnaire. She was very concerned about Lisa’s matching throne. She was definitely starting to feel threatened.
“I have sent the Legion’s essences through the Portal to the fates that they deserve,” the cowled crime-czar exposited. “Their Parodyverse flesh remains here. And without the restraining wills of the heroes themselves, these bodies retain all of the powers and skills of the Lair Legion but none of that troublesome independent thought.”
“Thought was never the Lair Legion’s main problem,” Lisa admitted.
The Hood pointed to the perfectly obedient parade of the Parodyverse’s mightiest heroes. “This is the reason I sent the Legion into the Portal. I need their bodies to work for me.”
“The Purveyors aren’t powerful enough?” Lisa asked.
“The Purveyors were beating the Legion when we met them before,” VelcroVixen argued. “Remember that.”
The Hooded Hood gestured her to silence. “The Purveyors are very busy crushing the remaining superhero population of the planet and sending what’s left afterwards through the Portal. Besides, the Purveyors don’t have the history with Zemo that the Legion have.”
“Zemo?” Lisa asked. “What does he have to do with this?”
The Hood’s glowing green eyes narrowed. “Zemo has everything to do with this. I have vowed that when I conquer this Parodyverse Zemo will suffer for his previous thwarting, his erasing, of my past masterplans. And the time has now come to bring him low, to break him like a whipped cur and set him grovelling before my throne as a footmat. How else could that be accomplished than by sending his most hated foes to destroy everything that he holds dear, and finally himself?”
Dark Lisa considered this. It seemed like a good game plan. “You said you had a role for me?”
“Someone has to command the newly-obedient Legion,” Zemo pointed out. “And you have had some experience in the job.”
VelcroVixen couldn’t remain quiet any longer. “Sir, may I have a word with you? Urgently. In private?”
“Very well,” the Hood agreed, striding off into the corner of the dungeon to hear VelcroVixen’s plea not to trust the sudden conversion of Lisa, even if the former Legionnaire had lost her entire life.
Lisa stood examining Jarvis’ immobile profile. So these were all fully-functioning but totally obedient Legionnaires? That had immense possibilities. And even a villainess had needs.
A hand from the shadows closed over her mouth. “Make no sound,” the Dark Knight warned her. “It is I.” He waited until Lisa untensed before releasing her and continuing. “I’ve managed to infiltrate the Asylum with a means to get rid of the Hood. Zemo equipped the Indigo Impostor with a concealed high-impact multi-realitied explosive dart, which I have here. It’s specially designed to take down someone with the Hood’s powers. All I need is for you to distract the Hood long enough for me to get to use it on him. It should be easy. Distracting men is the thing you do best.”
“One thing,” Lisa noted, glancing to the doorway to see if the cowled crime-czar was returning yet. “You know how I’ve been pretending to have turned my back on the Legion and surrendered to the dark side of my character?”
“Yes. What of it?”
Lisa flattened the Dark Knight with a well-aimed nerve-punch. “I wasn’t pretending,” she answered. “Hood! Hood! In here! I’ve caught the Dark Knight!”
The cowled crime-czar and VelcroVixen entered to see the fallen Legionnaire sprawled helpless at Lisa’s feet. And the Hooded Hood smiled, knowing that this was most definitely to be continued…

In our next instalment: Will Lisa’s Legion completely wipe out Baron Zemo and all he holds dear? Will the dragon rescue the lady from the knight in shining armour? Does Banjoooo go down the pan? Can Space Ghost win big prizes? Will Messenger go postal? How far will Starseed go on a first date? Is Visionary real? How twisted can CrazySugarFreakBoy! get with this dead-girlfriend scenario? Will Jarvis win his fiancée back from the Man of Wonders? And just how far will Zemo go to prove that he’s a bad loser?

All this and more in our probably-penultimate instalment of the masterplan of the Hooded Hood, due to march in and capture your VDUs sometime over the coming weekend.

And the comments from the board were:

The Hooded Hood and the Dimensions of Doom (The Hooded Hood, anticipating death threats) (19-May-1999 16:11:36)

The Masterplan of the Hooded Hood to Date (Being a reposting of ALL the relevant HH stories so far in an attempt to see just how much text this board can actually take) (19-May-1999 16:44:39)
Still haven't quite got the hang of this HTML though, have I? (n/t) (HH) (19-May-1999 16:54:42)

A Little Research (HH) (19-May-1999 16:47:28) This was a posting requesting readers to outline their worst nightmares for use in the next episode. As you’ll see next episode, they did.

Simply smashing, Ian!!! How I envy your good lady wife for retiring each and every nightfall accompanied by a man with such enormously talented fingers... ;-) (n/t) (Lisa) (19-May-1999 21:19:16)
I don't get to retire with him. He's up all night writing on the bloody computer. (n/t) (Sally Watson) (20-May-1999 18:45:55)
Wow, is this really Mrs. Hooded Hood? Welcome to the board, ma'am! Ian really is a brave man if he's letting you near the company of loony goofballs like us. Oh, by the way, did he tell you that he's my sworn arch-enemy, dedicated to my destruction? I consider him to be a pretty neat internet friend as well. :) (n/t) (CrazySugarFreakBoy! will do Ian the favor of not telling Sally about the incident with the goat ...) (21-May-1999 00:13:26)
Not another goat incident. *sigh* (n/t) (Sally Watson) (21-May-1999 14:13:30)

As a Junior Reader would say, "DUDE! This kicks ASS! It's even better than that issue of NinjaDeathClawHellSpawn, the one where NinjaDeathClawHellSpawn rammed his fist down that gangster dude's throat, grabbed his sphincter, and turned his entire body inside out, while he was still alive and everything! Your story RULES! Ever think about writing something REALLY cool, like X-Man?" (n/t) (CrazySugarFreakBoy!, who couldn't resist the opportunity to make the jab ... ;)) (19-May-1999 22:12:40)
Oh, yeah - um, is it okay if I post MY story installment now, Ian? (n/t) (CrazySugarFreakBoy!, not wanting to throw off Mr. Watson's pacing or anything ...) (19-May-1999 22:38:01)

WOW!!! Just when I think Ian can't do any better, he comes up with something as great as this! My torture is terrible indeed! (n/t) (Sersi "Would you like fries with that?" *sob*) (19-May-1999 23:02:01)

Guess my charm and good looks will have to get me through my challenge. Oh, wait a minute... Damn!! :) (n/t) (Hatman, really really hoping his powers went with him to "Hatty Days") (19-May-1999 23:58:50)

Wonder Man? Nurse Byrne? Only a true master of evil could be responsible for such things! Man, that was good. (NT) (n/t) (20-May-1999 02:20:25)

NAY!! ANYTHING but those foul blue abominations... (n/t) (DONAR) (20-May-1999 06:51:41)

Wonder...Man....shall...die....slowly....and....painfully. (n/t) (Jarvis, running from Nurse Byrne...) (20-May-1999 11:18:23)

All I wanted was a little vacation... is that too much to ask? (n/t) (Visionary, apparently damned by triple-A) (20-May-1999 15:26:49)

Revised and reposted by the Hooded Hood