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Post By At last the tale can be told by... the Hooded Hood! Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 09:05:40 am EDT |
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Great Parodyverse Moments #2: The Fix | |
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| Great Parodyverse Moments #2: The Fix This is another of our occasional series exploring some of the key events in Parodyverse history that somehow never got told. Until now. This story takes place at a hectic time in the Parodyverse, when a cascade of reality-breaking plots had occurred, including Lair Legion Special Ultimate Edition #1 and 2, the reality-reshaping merging of the Happy and Unhappy Places in the Dancer/Finny Valentine’s Day Special Series, the retcon schemings of Kumari in Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #105-109, the Untold Tales of the Broken Parodyverse, and the erasing of Visionary and the return of the all-conquering Apostate in Surplus to Destiny. In fact this story tells how all of those other stories were concluded. The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse  Image by Dancer The great metal doors were pitted with the marks of war, and the desolate plain outside the Chronicler’s castle was littered with the dead. Only the ravens were happy. Jury cautiously pushed open the heavy portal, worried that it opened at the slightest pressure of her hand. There was no sign that the Apostate’s soldiers had penetrated this far into the realm of the Chronicler of Stories, but something was definitely wrong. The halls were pitch black and silent. Jury conjured an orb of light to penetrate the stygian darkness. “Chronicler?” she called nervously. “Anyone?” Her voice echoed back to her, distorted and desperate-sounding. It reminded her of the woman she had been before she became the Shaper of Worlds, that mortal girl who had died before her time and been preserved from oblivion by the former Shaper to take his place. It made her feel vulnerable and finite. There was a skittering in the darkness, and the fluttering of wings. A heavy weight dropped on her shoulder, wringing a little cry from one of the most powerful entities in the Parodyverse. “Oh!” gasped Jury. “Pallas! What happened here?” The huge raven trod the Shaper’s shoulder nervously. “Outside? The Apostate lay siege to the Halls of Narrative. Didn’t he come after your aspect of the Halls?” “He didn’t get as far,” Jury answered. “Too many false starts to lure his fanatics down.” She glanced at the sliver of outside visible through the nearly-closed castle door. “I’m surprised they came so close here.” “The Chronicler was distracted,” Pallas answered worriedly. “I don’t know why. He wasn’t defending the place. He left it to us and the lesser wardens. We couldn’t keep them all back.” “And then the Apostate vanished,” the Shaper noted. “Just ceased to exist again. He came from nothing and he returned to nothing. Then his armies crumbled and lost all will, and his forces were destroyed.” “Yes,” agreed Pallas. “Why?” “Nothing to do with me,” Jury admitted. “That sort of thing is more the Chronicler’s department. Or the Destroyer of Tales, but I don’t see Dark Thugos caring to stop what the Apostate was doing. He’s never liked the Earth anyway.” “The Chronicler’s locked himself in the Hall of Mirrors,” Pallas worried. “He won’t let anyone in there to him.” The raven fluttered an agitated wing. “I think he was crying.” The Shaper of Worlds felt another pillar of her universe crumbling. Since she had unexpectedly come into her role when the previous Shaper Carrington had inexplicably disappeared the Chronicler of Stories had been a mentor and close colleague, the one reliable rock in her terrifying new career. “I’d better go and see him,” Jury decided with a nervous swallow. “You’d better see about getting tidied up out here.” “Ravens are good at tidying up battlefields,” Pallas admitted with a wry dark humour. The Shaper of Worlds breathed onto her fingers and touched them to the glossy head of the bird of destiny. “Use some of my power to set the place right,” she instructed. “I’ll try and talk to the Chronicler of Stories.” “Chronicler?” Jury called tentatively, tapping on the door to the Hall of Mirrors. “Greg?” There was no answer, and in this place the Shaper’s perceptions were no better than those of the human she’d once been. Losing patience she let her power flare and burst the lock asunder. She cautiously pushed the door open and peered inside. The Chronicler of Stories lay on the floor, hugging a bottle of twenty year old Glenlivet Scotch, staring at a mirror that reflected nothing. “Greg?” Jury called. The Chronicler twitched, but didn’t look up. “There is no Greg,” he answered in a dull quiet monotone. “Greg died long ago. His ghost became the Chronicler of Stories, and his body became the Dark Knight… but Greg is dead.” The Shaper’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “Are you drunk?” Now she could see the pile of other bottles and jars that littered the Hall of Mirrors. Wine, saki, mead, vodka, any kind of alcohol from champagne to gutrot, the Chronicler had drunk it, enough to kill a dozen humans of alcohol poisoning. “Of course not,” the Chronicler answered darkly. “But it’s nice to pretend I could be.” Jury knelt down beside the prostrate keeper of stories. “Coffee,” she ordered, and a steaming mug appeared in her hand. She handed it to her colleague and forced him to take a long deep drink. “What’s the matter? Why are you like this?” “Matter? There is no matter. Everything’s right with the world. Everything’s right with the whole bloody Parodyverse!” “Chronicler?” The dark-robed man shifted uneasily and pulled an uncomfortable beer bottle from beneath him. “Leave me alone.” “I don’t think so,” Jury frowned. “Not when you’re in this mood. What’s happened? What’s upset you so much?” “Upset me?” Chronicler snorted, almost hysterically. “Why should I be upset. I’ve saved the multiverse. Again. Whoopee!” Jury caught his face between her hands. “Look, Greg, I’m a really patient person but if you don’t start making sense now so help me I’m going to rip out your phantom spine and pound you to death with it! Now stop being so infantile and tell me clearly and plainly what the hell is wrong!” The Chronicler’s face darkened, his scowl deepening. “Right,” he breathed. “Since you insist. Come with me.” Drop beneath the surface of the Parodyverse, onto the scaffolding to which the realities are pinned, and you will find swirling masses of uncreated narrative, churning in massive unfathomable tides awaiting their time to be. This is the Vortex, the dimensional nexus. Go deeper still though, into the subatomic conceptual particles that make up the mass of the Vortex itself, beyond the threshold forbidden to all but the greatest of the cosmic office holders, and you will see the very mechanics of the Parodyverse laid out before you. The Shaper of Worlds found herself there now, amongst the shining silvery narrative threads that were the weft of the complicated intertwined realities she maintained. The Chronicler stood beside her, ignoring the singing potential of the thousands of causal links in his charge. “Alright, so why are we here?” the Shaper demanded. “Look around,” the keeper of stories told her. “Notice anything different?” The Shaper of Worlds looked, not just with her eyes but with senses and instincts unique to her office, discerning the whole pattern of the Parodyverse laid out in the infinite strands around her. “It’s… fixed. All the damage. It’s all repaired.” “Yes,” the Chronicler agreed. “All the various tears and flaws we’ve suffered recently, all gone. The reality breakdowns like the Happy Place breach, the Kumari Retcon explosion, even the upcoming Crisis damage, all sorted out.” “The broken Space Robots?” Shaper checked. “Not yet, but all ready to reset after the Resolution War if there’s anything left for them to do.” Jury smiled. “But this is wonderful. The whole fabric of the Parodyverse was getting so tattered that it was going to fall apart at any moment. Every time we fixed a breach two more opened up.” She shuddered. “You remember that terrible Mayhem in the Mall incident?” The Chronicler didn’t seem as happy. “Yeah, it’s wonderful,” he said flatly. Something in his voice warned the Shaper she was missing something. “But?” she demanded. “But it didn’t come cheap,” he answered. He gestured to a single loose thread that fluttered in a cosmic breeze. It was severed abruptly at one end. The Shaper touched it and cast her mind along its complex path. “What is this?” she frowned. “A failsafe?” “Back before your time,” the Chronicler explained. “At the start of the modern heroic age. Carrington foresaw a time when the Celestians would fail. He was clever at predicting stuff like that. The Celestians would fail and the Family of the Pointless would fall and the Triumverate would be unable to interfere.” “We can’t interfere now!” blurted Jury. “Not in the Resolution War outcome. And the Space Robots are broken!” “Right. So the then-Triumverate set in place a contingency, a plan in case the Parodyverse ever needed stabilising at a time when we weren’t able to do it.” “I remember,” the Shaper realised as she tapped into the collective memory of previous incumbents of her cosmic office. “I – the Shaper of Worlds arranged for the creation of an entity that could set things right, become one with the Parodyverse and so stabilise things.” She concentrated further. “And that entity would incarnate as a mortal to be grounded in the core doings of the main characters in the prime reality before she became…” Jury looked up with horror in her eyes. “You sacrificed your wife? Your wife was the goddess who would put right the Parodyverse by becoming one with it and you let her?” The Chronicler of Stories snorted scornfully. “Absolutely not,” he spat. “What’s happening with my dear late wife, that’s an entirely different matter. Different plot strand entirely.” “But the goddess!” argued Jury. “She has to be the bride of the Chronicler. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to ascend.” “Sure,” agreed the keeper of stories. “But not this Chronicler.” They were back in the gloom of the Chamber of Mirrors. Most of the glasses were black. “They were focussed on her,” the Chronicler explained. “She’s gone now. One with the Parodyverse. But that means she’s gone from our levels of reality, gone further than even we can see.” The Shaper didn’t understand. “She was empowered to become the goddess who would repair the Parodyverse, and she had to marry the Chronicler, and she did, but it wasn’t you, and now she’s done what she was created for and ascended?” “Bingo,” spat the Chronicler. Jury rubbed her forehead. “Is there any more alcohol?” she asked. “Our latest crisis,” the Chronicler announced, standing up in a self-mocking dramatic gesture. “High jinks with the Happy Place and the Unhappy Place. We stitch everything back together as best we can, a rush job. It’s not a perfect fit, but it’s better than the total collapse of the Parodyverse, right?” “Right,” agreed Jury. “But we somehow left a gap, a loophole for the Apostate to come into existence…” “Look deeper,” the keeper of stories urged. “Long ago the Apostate was denied existence because a place-holder was dropped into reality to prevent him. See the strand?” “Visionary!” the Shaper observed. “A possibly-fake man so bland and average that he was the exact opposite of the Apostate, yet occupying the place in the Parodyverse that the Apostate would otherwise exist in.” “And where was Visionary during the Apostate crisis?” Chronicler demanded. Shaper checked. “Not existing!” she realised. “He fell through the gaps! He slipped out of reality – and the Apostate came in!” “Oh yes. And with the Apostate his army of interdimensional fanatic followers and his agenda of multiversal conquest and all the fun of the fair. The world changed, and few remembered it the way it had been. Dancer, Yo, Cheryl, a handful of others. The three women sought out the Hooded Hood to try and get things set back the way they should be, to try and recover Visionary.” “That wouldn’t work,” Shaper objected. “The Hood doesn’t have that kind of power and once the Apostate was here he would keep Visionary out of existence just like Visionary had once excluded him – ‘stolen his life’.” The Chronicler stirred uneasily. “So the Hood sent Cheryl here.” He shuddered. “And?” Jury prompted, fearing now she felt she was getting to the heart of the matter. “And Cheryl insisted I bring Visionary back. That he be restored, and that the Parodyverse be set straight and repaired. She insisted.” “Cheryl,” considered Jury, “the Duchess of Lake Superior… the Goddess of HTML…!” “Yes.” “But she’s never been your wife! She’s Visionary’s…” “Visionary was the Chronicler of Stories once,” the Chronicler snapped. “Briefly, a while ago. Remember?” “Oh. Oh… no.” “She’s… Cheryl is a hard woman to argue with,” the Chronicler confessed. “She understood then what her destiny was. Either she or Visionary had to be lost to the Parodyverse.” He looked up with desolate eyes. “She gifted it to him.” “And she saved us from the Apostate,” realised Jury. “And she has gone,” Chronicler concluded. “Ascended to her destiny. Triumphant. Brilliant. Glorious. But gone.” He looked at the black mirrors miserably. “She asked it of me, and I couldn’t say no.” And now Shaper understood. “Oh Greg,” she breathed and took the Chronicler of Stories in her arms. She held him to her breast for a long time then until his grief was all sobbed out. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2005 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2005 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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