Forest Week: If You Go Down To The Woods Today… Parts One to Four
Go straight to Part Two
Go straight to Part Three
Go straight to Part Four
 “Sit-rep,” Hatman said gravely as he strode into the Operations Room at the Lair Mansion, pulling on his trademark baseball cap with its H-logo.
“Emergency flag tripped eighty seconds ago,” reported Amber St Clare from the communications console. “Hallie’s on it now. Hallie?”
Hatman looked from the Legion’s government liaison to their resident artificial intelligence. The trim green-skinned hologram of the Mansion’s sentient computer program gestured to change the situation display globe to show a patch of national forest in New England. “At 19.22 the President’s plane was attacked in flight over this area. The internal assault alarm was triggered and then nothing. The plane’s not in the sky any more.”
“Do we have any readings to give us a clue?”
The Ops Room door whooshed open as archscientist Al B. Harper and CrazySugarFreakBoy! hurried in. “Did someone say readings?” Al asked. “I love readings.”
“There was a coded video feed going out from the cockpit,” Hallie replied. “I’m decrypting it now. I can give you the audio.”
“Put it onscreen, Uhura,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! commanded. “Then give nu-Spock some sugar.”
Here was a tweeting noise as Hallie broke through fifteen layers of top-secret signal encryption. Then the pilot’s voice rang over the speakers. “Aaagh! Koalas! Koala attack!”
“I’ve got video now too,” Hallie announced. Screen One was suddenly filled with an image of Airforce One’s cockpit, filled with rabid marsupials.
“No!” gasped Al B. Harper, taking an involuntary step backwards. “Drop-bears!”
“I’ve got SPUD online now,” Amber called, announcing a link-up with the Super-menace Principal Undercover Directorate. “Colonel Dan Drury.”
Hatman stepped forward. “Drury, what have you got?”
“Bitch of a day, Boaz. First they’re tryin’ to replace me with some bald black guy an’ now the President’s plane dives into the wilderness. I’ve got a guy goin’ in to investigate.”
Yuki Shiro hurried into the room. The crisis was three minutes in and she’d been hitting bars for information in Paradopolis when the alarms had triggered. Her bike was parked outside the Ops Room. Half a dozen traffic cops were heading for therapy. “I’m up to speed,” the cyborg P.I. announced. She’d been following the Ops Room chatter on her internal communications array. “Who’s your agent?”
“The Pres of the USA’s missing,” Drury replied. “Who d’you think we’re gonna send?”
“Jack Bauer?” suggested CSFB!
“Patching the operative through now,” Hallie reported. “He’s para-diving into the area.”
“This is Silver Aegis entering the crash zone,” came back the bold confident tones of America’s apotheosis. “I can see a trail of broken trees. Looks like Air Force one is down.”
“He’ll need backup,” Hatman decided. “Call the team.”
Nats hurried through the door. “Did someone say Lair Legion Line up?” he asked eagerly.
“They did now,” sighed Amber. She pushed the big red button to call the other members of the world’s greatest superteam.
In a disused library in Manitoba, Canada, Moon Public Librarian Lee Bookman triggered his automatic return transport to the Lunar Library so he could take his Galactibus shuttle down to Parody Island (he wasn’t allowed to use the digital data transferor for non-Library business).
In a shoe sale at Mimble’s Department Store mild-mannered waitress Sarah Shepherdson dropped the lady with whom she was competing for a set of discount sling-backed sandals with a neat neck chop, elbowed the guy behind her who was rubbing far too many body parts against her in the sale scrum, and made for the counter. The Probability Dancer was needed; just as soon as her footwear needs were satisfied.
In the shower at Visionary’s dimensionally-unstable lighthouse the possibly-fake associate member of the Lair Legion groped his way towards a towel. He hoped the bleeping was his LL comm-card rather than any kind of detonation countdown device, but given he had Kerry Shepherdson living in the tower it was an even chance. Of course, it could just as likely be the comm-card destruct mode warning. It was a shame the towel and his clothes had all been packed up while he showered and sent to deserving orphans in Africa. Still, at least the new bathroom livecam was working.
In a bucket in a cyclopean lair beneath the Mansion the Manga Shoggoth formed a rigid sandcastle shape where his gelid mass had frozen. “Mmm,” he considered. “Interesting, but it’s not going to replace universal heat death,” he judged. “Still, thank you Icy. I’m always open to new experiences.”
“Once you’ve gone slushee you never go back,” promised the visiting snowman. “Perhaps you need a carrot and some coal to really get the hang of it?”
“Then I’ll be beloved of children everywhere,” anticipated the loathsome elder being. “Ho ho ho.”
The traumatising of the world’s youth was postponed by the summons to line up.
While CSFB! and Nats were prepping LairJets One and Two, Hatman and Yuki were interrogating Dr Harper. “Drop bears,” Yuki said, “There’s nothing in our files about them.”
“Well, there wouldn’t be,” Al B. warned. “Nasty little buggers. Their main power is to make people not believe in them. Half an hour after meeting them you won’t remember who chewed your arm off.”
“You seem to remember them,” Hatman pointed out.
“I’m extremely clever,” explained the archscientist. “But what would make the drop bears swam at this time of year, and so far from home?”
“So the President might have been eaten?” Yuki worried. “Maybe it was the Republicans?”
“Silver Aegis here,” came in the voice of the perfect patriot Scott Scoggins over the SPUD linkup. “I’m at the crash site. No sign of the President. No bodies. We may have an abduction scenario. I’m checking the area.”
Hatman pulled on a communications headset. Suddenly he was as one with the entire comms system of the USA. “Okay,” called into his headset. “Ops team one is with me. That’s Dancer and the Shoggoth. We do primary crash location, check for clues. Team two’s with Dream, that’s Yuki and Nats. You find Silver Agent and hook up with him, keep on quartering the area. Lee, you’re research. Find out what we don’t believe about Drop Bears.”
“I don’t believe we’ve got anything,” the Librarian replied. He paused as he considered what he’d said then added determinedly, “And that’s why they need to be indexed.”
“Yep. Al, I want some way of us taking down the opposition, and maybe some idea of why they’re suddenly, er, dropping.”
“Don’t let them get their teeth into anything vital you might want to keep,” the archscientist advised.
“Vizh, you’re on monitor duty.”
“Great,” replied the founding Legionnaire. “Do they have towels in the Ops Room?”
“Let’s go!” Hatman called. CSFB! was able to stifle Nats before he shouted anything out.
Visionary arrived in the Operations Room wearing Donar’s old dressing gown. It smelled of goats and had a flagon of beer in one pocket and a two-handed axe in the other. “The LairJets are away,” Hallie informed him. “Nice to see you. And I don’t just mean the u-tube file your students just uploaded.”
Marie Murcheson slipped into the Ops Room behind the possibly-fake man. “There’s another thing you probably need to know about,” she advised the support staff.
“What did Flapjack do now?” demanded Amber St Clare. “Why haven’t you designed a Neutering Ray yet, Harper?”
“It’s not Flapjack,” Marie told them. “Nats’ bathroom is a swamp.”
“Tell me about it,” shuddered Hallie. “I think Kenny’s growing new kinds of fungus in his bathtub.”
“No,” clarified the mansion’s resident banshee. “I mean there’s a swamp in Nats’ bathroom. You open the door and there’s a thick boggy forest right there. Some kind of dimensional anomaly, I’m sensing.”
“Ah,” Hallie understood. “Sounds like a job for Visionary.”
“Wait – what?” spluttered the possibly-fake man.
***
“This is Silver Aegis calling SPUD. Are you receiving, over? Aegis calling the Lair Legion?
The hero of history got no reply but the static hissing over his headset. He continued to scout the deep forest where the President’s plane had gone down twenty-three minutes earlier.
“I’ll continue broadcasting in case you can still hear this,” he said into his microphone. Modern technology was still new to the walking warrior of World War II and he hoped his commentary would be of some use to those who came after him if something went wrong. “I’ve located the wreckage of Air Force One and it looks like it had a soft landing on thick vegetation. I didn’t stop for a through analysis. However, it’s abandoned. Looks like it was evacuated in an orderly manner. No indication of casualties.”
Silver Aegis swung round suddenly, raising his shield, but a fat moorhen squawked out of the bushes and winged away.
“There’s a column of smoke about three klicks away from the LZ,” he reported. “I’m making for it now. I’ve found a clearing in the woods and… there’s a house. A small wooden house, old timber-frame building with a smoking chimney. Logical place for survivors to go. I’m approaching.”
The defender of democracy slipped from the treeline and sprinted across the open ground until he reached the wall of the old shack. He peered inside through a thick half-opaque panel of leaded glass window. “There’s no sign of occupation. The house is really one big room with a mezzanine balcony. Hardly furnished. Just a table with two chairs, one much larger then the other, and a child seat. Table’s laid out for eating. Mezzanine has three beds, one huge, one… Wait a minute!”
Silver Aegis’ comm-signal went silent.
***
“That was the last you got from him?” worried Yuki Shiro on LairJet Two.
“I’ve got the tech boys analysing th’ transmissions right now,” Dan Drury grumped back over the monitor feed to the SPUD helicarrier. “And the psych boys.”
“Hey, Silver Aegis could so take three bears,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! assured them. “Can you find the location, Natster?”
Nats was flying alongside the LairJet using his own psychokinetic powers. “Yeah, there’s smoke over there. I can see a clearing. And there’s movement.”
“What kind of movement?” demanded Yuki suspiciously. “Bears again?” She’d reset her internal computer systems to constantly keep reminding her of the existence of Drop Bears.
The flying phenomenon zoomed closer. “Bears, yeah,” he agreed. “A helluvalot of bears.”
“Drop Bears?” the cyborg P.I. asked as she was reminded of their existence again.
“Lots of kinds of bears. Even polar bears.”
“They’d be from Lost,” CSFB! reasoned. “Look for Evangeline Lilly. Hope she’s in a wet t-shirt.”
“No sign of starlets in wet clothing,” Nats reported. “I never get the interesting missions. Just a whole lot of bears.”
“The Legion never prepared a contingency plan for bear takeover of the world,” worried Yuki Shiro. She blamed herself. “Racoon People, sure. Detonator Hippos, yes. Talking Gorillas, we have three. Not bears.”
“That was maybe a boo boo,” suggested Bill Reed, marking himself for death.
“What are they there for?” CSFB! wondered. “I’m taking us down there to see if they’re doing what they should be doing in the woods. Or is that the Pope?”
Bill Reed hovered above the massive accumulation of ursidae and had a big surprise. “I’d have to say that it looks like they’re having a picnic.”
***
Hatman was wearing his Thinking Cap for two reasons. Firstly it helped him retain knowledge of the existence of Drop Bears, whose special power was to make people believe they didn’t exist. Secondly he needed to boost his cognitive reasoning abilities as he inspected the cockpit of the downed Air Force One.
“There’s signs of a struggle,” he puzzled, looking at the spilled coffee mug and the scattered flight logs. “That fits with the video footage we got of Drop Bears attacking the pilots. But there’s no blood, no sign of those fierce killers tearing up and devouring their prey.”
“That’s good though, isn’t it?” asked Icy the Snowman, who’d tagged along at the Shoggoth’s invitation. “I think that’s good. Eating people would be yucky. I don’t think anyone should eat people. They should be a no-eating zone.”
“I’ve found where the black box should be, Hatty,” announced Dancer. “It’s gone. It’s been wrenched out of the bulkhead. I’m guessing that generally the manufacturers of these planes try to prevent that kind of thing from happening.”
“This whole place tastes unusual,” announced the Shoggoth, sniffing the air and bubbling. “Usually aircraft are all turquoise and curry, with dashes of anxiety crusted on the inverse angles. This one is more peppermint candy.”
“Right, thanks for that… diagnosis,” Hatman told the loathsome elder being. “Any sense of where the passengers might have gone of who might have taken them? Al didn’t seem to think that Drop Bears were natural hostage takers.”
“I’ve been trying to ramp up the chances of us finding a clue as to where they went,” the Probability Dancer promised. “Nothing so far, as if there was no chance. I think I might have to resort to the Claudia Schiffer Lower Body Workout.”
“CrazySugarFreakBoy! said that if you were going to do that again I had to find a video camera,” Icy worried. “I didn’t bring a video camera.”
“There are dimensional anomalies all around us,” the Shoggoth noted. “They are trying to drag us away from that little reality all you humans are so fond of and enmesh us in different dimensions. So cute.”
“Could you please prevent that,” Hatman requested of the non-Euclidean legionnaire. “I like my dimensions right where they are, no matter how cute the attempts to drag me elsewhere might be.”
Dancer looked more carefully at the elder being wobbling inside the shabby Edwardian three-piece suit. “Hold it, when you said about dimension drag and how something was trying to take us off, did you use your descriptive word in the general or specific sense?” she wondered.
“Very specific,” replied the Shoggoth. “I’d say the cute was verging on about 11.9 on the Puppy-Hamster Codex.”
Hatman still had his thinking cap on so translation was easy. “11.9? That’s… that’s Yo-levels of cuteness.” He referred to the sometimes Legionnaire who was a pure thought being from an alien world.
“That’s right,” agreed the Shoggoth. “but don’t worry. I’ve anchored us here. We won’t be dragged away to the Happy Place.”
Dancer gasped. “The President’s gone to his Happy Place?”
“I think that’s nice,” declared Icy from the main cabin of the wrecked plane. “And look, everyone who’s gone there has left behind these little action figures of themselves on their seats. And all of them are smiling.” He demonstrated by pulling the string that protruded from the back of one of the dolls.
“Fiscal policy!” it cried out, “Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!”
***
“Anything yet?” Visionary asked the Librarian hopefully. “Some ancient volume that explains why stealth forests are suddenly eating towns? A scientific treatise on how the Wookiegetlucky Swamp can appear in Nats’ bathroom? A note from my mother saying I don’t have to go through this dimensional portal and die horribly?”
Lee Bookman has just landed his Galactibus on the Lair Lawn and joined the investigators braving Nat’s bedroom sock pile to examine the dimensional doorway that had replaced his bathroom. “I’m not sure a letter from your mother would be allowed in continuity,” the Librarian warned the possibly-fake man. “However I do have a large body of literature on the Nexus of Unreality said to currently reside in the swamp there.”
“Fascinating cosmology,” agreed Al B. Harper. “Hallie, if Visionary explodes at all during this investigation make sure you record his splatter patterns. They could tell us so much about the origins of the Parodyverse.”
“Should somebody stop Visionary choking?” worried Marie Mutrcheson, the Lair Banshee. “Only I don’t want to have to spend all night wailing his death. Amber was going to show me a modern cultural piece called Sex in the City.”
“Visionary had better not explode,” said Hallie firmly. “He’s going to see Mama Mia! live tonight with… a friend… and they wouldn’t want to miss it.”
“I vote against exploding as well,” added Vizh. “Why are we discussing me exploding?”
Marie Murcheson ran her fingers over the jamb of the bathroom door. “This isn’t a new connection,” she sensed. As part of Parody Island’s ancient defences she’d know if a new dimensional attack had occurred. In fact she’d have drawn upon the residual link to the Celestians that had first defended the location and used that power to destroy such an attacker. This was different. “This has just been dormant for a while.”
“So we can’t just blame Liu Xi for messing up?” Flapjack sulked. “I was gonna offer to spank her.” He looked up hopefully. “Still will, if it helps any.”
“Why not let him try?” suggested Amber. “It’s cheaper than paying him his notice. Or we could just throw him through the door into the swamp.”
“It’s a Legionnaire’s job to explode first,” Hallie conceded. “Although he’s in big trouble if he does. Go on, Vizh.”
“I’ll be right behind you,” archscientist Al B. Harper promised him. “Maybe with a beach umbrella.”
“It will be interesting,” the Librarian agreed. Then, catching Visionary’s look he clarified, “I mean it will be interesting to discover the link between the Lair Mansion and the Nexus of Unreality. There’s nothing in the literature.”
“And to find out how this all links to forests and Drop Bears,” Al B suggested.
“Right,” sighed Visionary. At least they’d found him his proper clothing again. He had to trust Hallie that the green shirt and pants and the yellow coat weren’t only hard-light holograms. This time. “Let’s go.”
Visionary stepped through the doorway and sank ankle-deep in swamp mud. Al B. and the Librarian followed him.
The doorway closed.
The Drop Bears fell on them.
***
“So just to summarise,” sighed Amber St Clare, “we’ve lost not one, not two, but three teams of Lair Legion and we can’t make contact with any of them.”
“I think lost is a strong word,” objected Hallie. “We have a pretty fair idea of where they are.”
“Yeah. Hatty’s gang and CSFB!’s bunch are dying in the woods up north,” Flapjack contributed, “”Vizh’s team’s dying down south in the Wookiegetlucky Swamp.”
“We have other folks looking into other bits of the world as well.”
“And how many of them are we in contact with?” demanded Amber.
“Well, nobody's confirmed as horribly massacred yet,” went on Hallie evasively.
“They’re not dead yet,” Marie Murcheson assured the others. “I’d know.” As the Lair Banshee it was part of her duties to keen for the fallen. “I suppose they might be horribly crippled.”
“I want to know why there was a sudden doorway to the Nexus of Unrealities right in my mansion,” Flapjack grumbled. “I’m telling you right now if I’m supposed to mop up that swamp I want a pay rise. And concubines.”
“I can’t do anything about the concubines for you,” Amber replied, “on humanitarian grounds. But you can go out onto the lawn and explain to Kenny the Gardener why the Librarian parked a Galactibus on it.”
“What are we going to do about the missing Legionnaires?” worried Marie. “We’ve run out of teams to send, unless we call in the Juniors.”
“It’s not that critical,” Amber said hurriedly. “It’s never that critical.”
“I’ll put a call in to Asil,” Hallie decided. “See if Sir Mumphrey’s free. There’s something about this situation that calls for a crusty old Knight Commander of the British Empire. And then I’ll try and contact… wait, I’m getting a signal from Nats!”
“What does it say?” demanded Amber.”
“It says ‘Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!”
***
“Bears aren’t supposed to be able to jump,” complained Bill Reed as Yuki Shiro used the first aid kit on him.
The Legion’s tactical officer finished applying field dressings. “They’re not supposed to explode either but it didn’t stop you using your pyrokinetic powers on them.”
“They started it.” Nats indicated the tears on his canvas pilot’s jacket. “This was new, first time on.”
“Because every flyboy needs a jacket with Ghost Taxi Cab Co. shoulder patches,” scorned Yuki.
“Hey, these jackets cost three-quarters of out last week’s takings,” objected the new manager of the world’s arguably spookiest transport system.
“Guys, I’m gonna have to set the Lairjet down,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! warned. “Seems we’ve got vegetation in the air intakes. Or possibly drop bears. I’m gonna land us while I can control the kinetic impact. We might bounce for ten miles or so, but it’ll be fun.”
“Fun,” snarled Nats.
“Fun,” anticipated Yuki Shiro.
“Also, I’m going to try and crash us into that wall of thorns around that big old mansion over there.”
***
Silver Aegis entered the little cabin in the woods. The house seemed deserted, but his honed combat senses warned him different. He slid carefully past the table with its porridge bowls. He paused and listened.
He threw open the cupboard door.
The naked woman punched at him. He barely avoided it.
“Miss, I assure you that I mean you no harm,” he promised, dodging a second blow, this time from an arm that extended further than a human limb should be able to. “You can trust me. I’m working for the government.”
Silicone Sally expanded into a wagon-sized beachball and slammed him across the room. The patriotic paragon hit the wall feet first in a combat crouch and sprang back to plant his silver shield smack in his opponent’s midriff.
Sally deflated and toppled back onto her ample backside. “Ouch!”
“There is no need for conflict, Ms Resilyent,” Silver Aegis assured the gasping former supervillain. “You are being assessed for amnesty for your former wrongdoings as a mercenary terrorist after your assistance in the recent events when most of Earth’s heroes disappeared. I am not required to take you into custody.”
The pneumatic young bodyshifter looked up at the muscular man standing over her. The adventurer of integrity was tall, handsome, and confident. “How do you want to take me, then?” she offered.
Silver Aegis passed her a gingham sheet from the middle-sized bed. “You’ll want to cover yourself,” he suggested. “And then you can explain how you came to be here in this area in such… dishabille.”
Sally tossed the cloth back to him. “Oh no. You’re not tricking me into putting clothes on. I know guys like you.”
The veteran villain-smasher was puzzled. “You mean you’ve met Hatman and Epitome and the Carnifex?”
“I mean guys who try to get me to put clothes on so I’ll get torn to shreds by that nudist mob.”
“Nudist mob?”
Silicone Sally sighed. It was spectacular. “There I was, in St Tropez, recovering from my amazing heroism and stuff like you said, when the riots started. All the guys and gals from the nudist beach started to attack the guys and gals from the topless beach. And then when they’d got the bikini bottoms off the topless beach guys and gals they all attacked the vanilla beaches. It was like Dawn of the Dead made by Larry Flynt.”
Silver Aegis frowned. “That doesn’t seem to make any sense. How did you come to be here.”
“Hey, it doesn’t take much brains to work out when to whip off your g-string and blend into the mob,” Sally pointed out. “Pretty much no IQ at all, really. That’s why I have such a great dating life. But then in the middle of this… bare attack… we all found ourselves in this forest. I morphed into a beach umbrella and made for cover. I found this cottage. Then I made my big mistake.”
“Attacking me?”
Silicone Sally shook her head and pointed to the doorway. A huge grizzly stood there, red eyed, pulsing with strange energies. It advanced into the room, stretched up on its hind legs and demanded, “Who’s been eating myporridge?”
***
Hatman pulled off his Sherlock Holmes deerstalker and rubbed his forehead.
“Well, o glorious leader?” asked Dancer mischievously. “What does the great detective have to say about this place?”
“It’s a gingerbread house,” the leader of the Lair Legion was forced to confess. “Well, gingerbread, toffee, caramel, and some chocolate. Traces of praline and rock candy too.”
“Yes,” agreed Icy happily. “It’s delicious.”
“Snowmen can eat candy?” Dancer wondered.
“Mostly we just use it for fashion statements,” Icy revealed. “We have canes made of the stuff. Is this walnut whip ‘me’?”
The Manga Shoggoth peered through an acid-drop window to the cottage’s interior. “There is a different dimensional distortion here,” he noted. “This isn’t like the one that shifted the humans on that plane into collectible action figures – although I still say we should have taken them back and added them to my maquette shelves. This one is sharper. More cruel. A different kind of childishness.”
Dancer found the chocolate doorknob. “Maybe we can go into the house and ask the inevitable wickedy witch to explain what’s going on?”
“And for chocolate syrup sauce,” suggested Icy. “Mom always says I look good with chocolate syrup sauce eyebrows.”
Hatman began to wonder why he’d assigned himself this team. “Okay, we’ll scout inside, but be careful. We’re facing a high level of reality reordering here. There’s only a few people who could do that and less who’d do it like this. Right now I’m watching out for Mad Wendy, the omega-class omnipath who replaced Frightmare as mistress of the dream realms. This is right up her street.”
“Her street has candy houses on it?” Icy marvelled. “What’s her address?”
“She lives at the back of all your minds,” the Shoggoth answered. “A little bit behind your Oedipus Complexes, right beside your death wishes. You mortals cram a lot of things into such small places.”
“So I’m going in,” Dancer summarised the plan. “I’ve literally got the best chance.” She pushed open the wafer door. “Hello, wickedy witch and/or Mad Wendy? It’s only us, come to try and borrow a copy of the plot summary. Hello? Oh…”
Hatman rushed in to check that Dancer was alright. “What is it?”
Dancer pointed to the corner of the room. A child-sized, child-shaped sculpture of confectionary stood immobile, looking a little surprised. “Doesn’t that look like Mad Wendy?” worried Sarah Shepherdson.
“Mad Wendy has chocolate eyebrows too?” Icy noted. “I told you they were in.”
“That’s not a replica,” warned the Shoggoth. “That’s the real thing, transmuted.”
“Who could do that to Mad Wendy?” worried Hatman. “Cressida, maybe, on a really cranky day? Liu Xi with about a week’s preparation for the complexity and a really good sweet catalogue? Suicide Blonde? Eddie the Imp? Alcheman?”
The Legion’s review of the Who’s Who of the Parodyverse came to an abrupt halt as the back wall of the cottage exploded in a shower of whipped cream and cookies.
“You!” shouted the vast brick and turf marauder who loomed over the shattered gingerbread cottage. “You’re the ones who did this to my Wendy! Now you DIE!”
“Ah, the Yurt,” recognised Hatman. “Of course. Now my day is complete.”
***
“Okay, we’ve got a bramble-choked palace in the middle of an ancient forest and a high tower protected by thorns,” Yuki summed up. “There’s something preventing people flying over the wall of thorns.”
“You think?” spat Nats, picking the sharp spikes out of his pants.
“And in the tower there’s got to be a princess,” grinned CrazySugarFreakBoy! “With luck there might be a dragon as well!”
Yuki warned Nats. “If there is a princess in the tower, do not marry her.”
“Hey, I only accidentally married one princess,” objected the flying phenomenon. “Anyone can do that.”
CSFB! tested the thick wall of lethal vegetation and sucked his finger. “So the plan is, we fight our way through the brambles, face down the goblin hordes, take on the trolls, hit the ogre for about 8d6 damage, get to the sleeping beauty in the tower, apply tongues, then ask her what the hell’s going on round here. Okay?”
“They elected you deputy-leader,” Nats admitted. “Somehow.”
“I hate when Dream’s plans are the best option possible,” owned Yuki. “Let’s go. I’ll take point because these things can’t really hurt me. Nats holds my jacket so it doesn’t get scratched and if it does he dies. “
CrazySugarFreakBoy! reached into his backpack for a bottle of Rocket Fuel Soda and began to blast his way into the wall of thorns.
***
“What bears?” asked Visionary, looking around him at the drowned koalas in puzzlement.
“Drop bears,” Al B. Harper replied. “Try to keep up. These are the same species that invaded the President’s plane. But they’re half a world away from their regular spawning ground.”
“The drop bears are fierce pack carnivores with an unusual defensive mechanism,” the Librarian explained. “They emit a low-level psionic field to make people not believe they exist or forget about them. Fortunately I wrote down the information then absorbed it into my temporary internal literature store.”
“And what are they again?” Vizh asked.
Al B. looked around the swamp and began to make hasty adjustments to his scanner array. “The better question is what made them drown? I can vaguely remember getting ambushed by these little buggers when the dimensional door back to the mansion closed but I’m a bit hazy after that. And I don’t do hazy.”
The Librarian examined one of the dead predators. It’s teeth and claws were much larger than a regular koala, and crusted with blood. “These things haven’t just drowned,” he noted. “Their throats are packed with mud or something. They were choked to death.”
“What happened to the door home?” Visionary asked. He’d survived in the Lair Legion for so long by focussing on the essentials as he saw them, like a good way out.
“I guess the Mansion didn’t want to let the Drop Bears through,” Al B. theorised. “So it shut down the connection in self defence.”
“The Mansion’s trying to kill me,” Vizh concluded. “It hates me. I always suspected it.”
“In fact this isn’t mud,” the Librarian went on. “It smells really bad.”
Al B. finished recalibrating his equipment to his satisfaction. “It looks from these log readings as if I’d got this psionic waveform generator set to reflect back the Drop Bears’ psi-field on their own frequency, ready to initiate a feedback loop and zap the little bastards if they got too close. But I never got a chance to do it. Something else got them.”
Lee Bookman had reached his conclusion. “They seem to have drowned in faeces,” he noted. “Oh, the Lair Legion owes me a new pair of gloves.”
“Faeces,” frowned Visionary. The possibly-fake man had extensive experience of a wide variety of unusual, unpleasant, and usually humiliating supervillains. “The new guardian of the Nexus of Unreality is Crapsack, a being who can manifest through any kind of biological waste product. He controls it.”
The swamp before them bubbled and boiled and an angry shit-elemental rose to tower over them. “They call me Mister Crapsack!” it announced.
“We come in peace,” announced the Librarian. “We’re here to investigate how… Blurghhh!!”
And then the Legionnaires vanished under a tide of sewage.
“This coat was new on today…” choked Visionary as he drowned.
***
There was a sleeping beauty at the top of the tower, laid on a silken bed beside a bloody spinning wheel. CrazySugarFreakBoy!, Yuki, and Nats burst into the room and slammed the door shut on the care bears that wanted to wuvvle them to death.
“I sometimes really miss my time imprisoned in that sex crystal,” Bill Reeed admitted. “I was almost never attacked by nauseating collectible stuffed toys trying to gum me to death.”
“We’re not just facing drop bears,” Yuki concluded. “We’re up against all kinds of bears, in a strange forest-gone-mad.”
“But now we have the damsel in the tower,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! pointed out, “lying awaiting true love’s first kiss, or at least a fairly heavy first date with a boy she quite likes.”
Yuki pushed through the cobwebbed room to look more closely at the beauty on the bed. “Okay, there’s a few things you’re missing,” she told the Legion’s enthusiastic deputy leader. “First, this isn’t a girl, it’s a guy. In a dress. Second, he’s surrounded by sleeping bunnies. Third, he’s Yo.”
CSFB! slid forward and found that the cyborg P.I, was right. The pure genderless thought being former Legionnaire lay in a deep trance on the silken sheets. “Yo?” Dream called out. “Hey, Yo-ster! What’s with the Grimm’s fairy tales stuff? Don’t tell me you’ve been bitten by a radioactive Walt Disney!”
“Yo’s behind this?” Nats puzzled. “That makes no sense. Unless it’s that evil Yo from the Anti-Legion. And why the spinning wheel – ow, that’s sharp!”
“Wait a moment,” Yuki called out. “No biggie that sleeping Yo’s surrounded by bunnies. That’s baseline. But what about that battered old one-eyed teddy bear over there? Is that something we usually see around him/her?”
CSFB! looked more closely at the threadbare toy. “That’s not Yo’s,” he agreed. “But it… does seem… familiar…”
“Hey, I’m getting… sleepy…” said Nats as he sucked his finger where he’d pricked it on the spinning wheek.
“Fortunately I’m a cyborg,” pointed out Yuki, “so I’m… not… affected…”
The teddy bear sat up and stared at the heroes as they sank to the floor. “Of course you’re affected,” he told them. “You have a human brain, Yuki Shiro. And don’t try preprogramming your robot body to act without you. I’ve already anticipated that strategy and countered it.”
“Now I’m seeing a talking teddy,” Nats said in a sleep-slurred voice.
“It’s worse than that,” CSFB! warned him. “I know who that is. I know…”
“Know who is behind this little scenario of tangled realities and remarkable juxtapositions?” asked the teddy. “Understand whose genius captured the President of the Unites States of America merely to entangle the heroes of Earth in my schemes? Recognise who brought about the downfall of the Lair Legion at last, and whose vengeance is only just beginning?”
“Yeah,” agreed the wired wonder before he slumped to the ground beside Yo and his fallen comrades.
“Good,” replied the toy, rising up and striking a dramatic evil pose. “It is good that my adversaries should understand that they have fallen before the might of… Pooty, the devil-doll!”
***
“Yurt will smash!” cried the house-sized radioactive monster of turf and slate, smashing a massive fist towards where Hatman had been a moment earlier.
“Okay, you need to get an overview of all this, Hatty” Dancer decided, causing the peasant-hut-that-walks-like-a-man to crash down into a debris of milk chocolate as he demolished part of the gingerbread house. “We’ll keep Vlastimock busy and you’d better fly up and see if you can spot the rest of the guys.”
“Watch out for flying monkeys though,” Icy the Snowman warned as Hatman pulled on his Eagles cap.
The Shoggoth abandoned his humanoid form, bubbled out of his suit to become a massive gelid blob, and engulfed the confectionary shape of Mad Wendy. “It might be best if the avatar of the conceptual manifestation of mortal delta-wave subconsciousness was not scattered into fragments,” he admitted.
“Eew!” objected Icy. “Nobody’s going to want to eat her now you’ve covered her in goo.”
“We’re not discussing my dating life,” snapped Dancer by reflex, “Er, I mean, let’s deal with this rampagingy rampager, team. Yes.” She somersaulted over a mountain-splintering punch from the Yurt, pirouetting on one of the creature’s buttresses before somersaulting down onto the floor.
“Yurt will crush!”
“The evidence of the gingerbread house does tend to support that,” the Shoggoth owned.
“We’ve not seen you for a while, Vlastimock,” Dancer noted to the creature. “I guess you’ve been happy in your friend Mad Wendy’s realm, right? You’ve gained a little weight around the conservatory and your gutters are bigger.”
“Yurt will crush!”
“But no dialogue coach yet,” Dancer went on. “Look, Vlasty, I know you get stronger the dumber you are but you really need to stop and think for one moment this time, okay. You’re going to hurt your friend Wendy and we can’t find out who turned her into candy if you’re trying to smash or crush us all the time.”
“And it’s very unfriendly,” added Icy. “Can’t we just be…”
The Yurt swung a slate-ridged fist through the snowman, dispersing him to powder.
The Shoggoth ignored the combat. He was more interested in the entity he’d enveloped. “Fascinating,” he whistled in a strangely disturbing trill. “It seems as though someone has managed to tangle Mad Wendy’s psychic frequencies with those of other conceptual waveforms. That’s why the Happy Place has been dragged into this too. They’re all knotted together so that somebody can play with reality.”
“Wheee!” called Icy, reforming. “That was fun! Do it again!”
Hatman power-dived in his torpedoes hat and exploded across the Yurt’s door-jalm. The radioactive peasant hut was pushed back half a pace. “Hey, bricks-for-brains!” the capped crusader called to the Yurt, “Before you powder my team you’ve got to go through me. Bring it on!”
The Yurt veered away from Dancer and pounded after Hatman, unfolding and growing with each step as his rage pressed out all thought.
“I’m guessing that Hatty’s spotted something interesting in that direction,” surmised Dancer as the Legion’s leader lured the Yurt through the forest. “I guess…” she paused and looked at the slithering gelid blob of Shoggoth. “What else have you got in there?” she demanded, staring at the other shapes beside the chocolate sculpture of Mad Wendy.
“Flying monkeys,” the Shoggoth explained. “I’m saving them for later.”
“Hadn’t we better get after that Yurt person?” worried Icy. “He seems awfully cross. I think he might hurt someone.”
Dancer looked to where Hatman was taunting the vast construction and grinned. “Yep. I think he’s leading Vlastimock towards those drop bears.”
***
“You’re big, fellah,” Silver Aegis told the massive ursine opponent lunging at him from the doorway, “but you’ve got pressure points just like everybody else.” He demonstrated by jabbing his shield into the huge bear.
Silicone Sally stretched out and caught the much smaller creature diving across the room for the democratic defender’s throat. She twanged it back into the third, middle-sized bear, knocking aside the Uzi that would otherwise have sprayed the room with bullets.
“This is getting kind of surreal,” she complained. “And why are they coming after me? You’re the one still wearing clothing, big guy. Want me to help you out of that spandex?”
“I think there’s a larger plot afoot, Ms Rezilyant,” Silver Aegis answered, fending off the three bears and manoeuvring them away from the doorway. Large, medium, and small chairs were shattered to fragments. “Kindly leave my pants where they are.”
Silicone Sally swung Mama Bear round and clubbed Papa Bear down. “I’ve got to have some kind of fun,” she complained. “Okay, how did we end up in a fairy tale?”
“That’s not the question, Ms Rezilyant. The question is how do we get out? And where is the President?”
“The President?” This was the first Sally had heard of the Commander-in-Chief’s involvement. “I need to get him naked?”
Silver Aegis had the three bears all perfectly lined up. “Kindly make an elastic surface,” he told the shape-shifting mercenary. After that it was a a simple four-way shield toss to catch his ursine opponents in vital nerve clusters and put them down.
“Eeew,” complained Sally. “I’m all covered with porridge. And some of it’s way too hot.”
***
Sir Mumphrey Wilton hung his telephone back on its receiver and reached for his temporal pocketwatch with a sigh.
“Trouble?” asked Asil Ashling as she saw her employer’s face. “I thought Hallie sounded serious on the comm-card.”
“Could be,” agreed the eccentric Englishman. “Looks like we’ve got forests rampaging about the place swallowin’ cities. Won’t do. Not on.”
“Some kind of radical eco-terrorism?” speculated his amanuensis. “The Idiom, maybe? Or the Bagpiper? spiffy on a bad day? I can go fetch the weed-whacker and take him down as a precaution. It’s no trouble.”
“Something deuced odd, that’s for sure,” noted Sir Mumphrey. “Legion’s gone incommunicado. Hallie’s worried. Looks like we’d better have a poke around, just in case.”
He opened the front door of Wilton Manor. It was completely blocked by forest.
“Hmph,” scowled the keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity. “They’d better not have grown on my cricket pitch.”
“Looks like somebody doesn’t want you interfering,” noted Asil. “What now?”
Sir Mumphrey reached for his old canvas cricket bag and stuffed a double-barrelled shotgun into it. And today’s copy of The Times. “Now I interfere,” he grumped.
***
Visionary pulled himself out of the thick crust of detritus that had just rolled over him. “Is there some kind of ancient gypsy curse on me that forces me to continually be in a situation where I have to ask what happened?” he demanded.
The Librarian surfaced too, spitting out a mouthful of material he didn’t want to think about. “There’s a good chance of it,” he admitted. “There’s a bunch of really old prophecies in something called the Da Visionary…”
Al B. Harper interrupted him, rising from the mire and wiping the goo off his psionic waveform generator. “We need to get moving,” he advised his team-mates. “I managed to set this gadget to disrupt the wavelengths that Crapsack uses to manifest in his… chosen material, but it’s only a matter of time before he figures how to work around it. Then we’re going to end up choked to death on the faeces he controls, just like the drop bears did.”
Visionary cocked his head. “”Hey, I remember the Drop Bears!”
“That’ll be because they’re all dead,” advised Lee Bookman. “They’re not able to project their anti-memory field any more. Or drop. Which is good for us.”
“We need to find out why there was a doorway from the Lair Mansion to the Nexus of Unreality,” Al B. told them urgently. “We need to find out why it opened right now. And we need to do it before Crapsack pulls himself together.”
The Librarian concentrated. “There’s a collection of books in that direction,” he indicated. “There’s a massive collection of… oh my!”
“Oh my?” echoed Visionary. “Is that a ‘good’ oh my? I bet it’s not.”
Al B. sloshed through the undergrowth to where a man in a dark suit floated face down in the swamp, surrounded by waterlogged volumes. “No bet,” he answered. “The transdimensional readings are going off the scale with this guy.”
Visionary hurried over to attend to the drowned man. “I can see why,” he answered, hissing in a breath. “This is the Chronicler of Stories.”
***
“Why are we tied up?” Nats demanded, coming to consciousness. His mind caught up. “Why am I even asking. I’m back in the LL.”
“We’re captives of a mad teddy bear,” Yuki Shiro informed him. “What do you know about an entity named Pooty?”
“Hooded Hood’s childhood toy,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! supplied, “except the Hood retconned his childhood so the bear’s some kind of anomaly. It was stolen by Mefrothto and used to torment Hoody until, well…”
“Until the Hood engineered the downfall of a Lord of Hell to get his stuffed toy back,” supplied Nats. “After that it was grabbed by that Cowled Criminal guy and somehow that managed to destroy the very timeline that brought CC into existence. The Hood’s tricky like that.”
“I’ve nothing on file to tell me that Pooty’s sentient,” worried Yuki. “He was just a toy.”
“Hell changes a stuffed animal,” answered Pooty the devil-doll, appearing in front of them to gloat. “Now I’m here doing the Chucky bit – albeit with far improved dialogue and an actual plot.”
CSFB! tugged at his restraints. “You know this isn’t going to work. We always bust free and take down the baddie. We’re gonna knock the stuffing out of you.”
Pooty chuckled unpleasantly. “You’ve not yet understood the full range of my genius, Mr Foxglove. Who but I, an anomalous icon with access to immense expertise and sponsorship, would be able to tangle together the powers and domains of the Keeper of the Nightmare Realms and the Thought Beings of the Happy Place? Who but I could use that morass of confused realities to drag down the Chronicler of Stories himself, and through him to pinion the other great cosmic arbiters? It’s a massive narrative fenderbender and I’m the one left in charge.”
“Except for when we stop you,” Yuki pointed out. “Oh, and you’d better give the President back.”
“As soon as you’ve finished with the gloating,” added Nats, who knew how this stuff went.
Pooty considered this. “Yes, I suppose I’d better complete the gloating phase before moving on to the next stage of my triumph. Take a closer look at yourselves, heroes. Take a look at what you’ve become.”
“What do you mean, what we’ve become?” demanded Yuki. “What sort of…” Then she realised what was restraining her. It was the kind of plastic-coated wire that held Barbies onto their packaging.
“We’re in action figure boxes,” CSFB! realised. “I have a realistic rubber bounce effect.”
“And I’m discounted if I’m bought along with ManMan!” Nats realised with horror.
But the worst was yet to come.
“And we’re made of plastic,” Yuki understood. “We’ve become toys.”
“Yes, you are my playthings,” Pooty agreed. “Your friends will soon join you. I intend to collect the set.”
“But why?” demanded Nats. “It’s so weird, so complicated, dragging in so many elements that…”
“That it feels like a Hooded Hood plot,” supplied CSFB!. “Pooty was paying attention all those years.”
“A Hood plot, yes,” agreed the devil doll. “I was paying attention. Learning. Planning. Biding my time. The Hood shall pay for allowing me to go to hell, for failing to save me for so long.”
“Uh oh,” Yuki breathed – except she didn’t breathe because she didn’t even have cyborg lungs now, being entirely plastic (and yes, that meant that CSFB was smooth between the legs), “Please don’t tell me this whole cosmic pile-up isn’t just a means of getting back at the Hooded Hood.”
“Of course not,” scorned Pooty.
“Good, because…”
“Destroying the Hooded hood is but one consequence of my many-faceted plan. By the time I am finished the Legion will literally be my toys, the multiverse will be my playroom, and I shall be the ruler over all!”
Then the Yurt smashed through the wall.
Continued…
***
Note: Newer readers who may not have encountered the name of Pooty before are referred to this ancient story here
The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Where's Where in the Parodyverse
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2009 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2009 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. |
|
