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Post By You know those stories where they say "This issue changes things forever"? Well here's one of those stories from... the Hood Fri Jul 22, 2005 at 07:47:50 pm EDT |
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#222: Untold Tales of the Wastelands: The Tangled Web | |
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| #222: Untold Tales of the Wastelands: The Tangled Web Previously: A five million dollar bounty has been placed on the head of cyborg P.I. Yuki Shiro, which many villains are eager to collect. Donar seems to have mislaid his mythological realm of Ausgard. The robots of the Machine Shop have deactivated the force field around the radioactive Wasteland northwest of Gothametropolis to leach off the radiations for their mystery employer, leaving the giant mutated insects in the area to escape and wreak havoc. The creepies have gained a leader in mutated eco-rights terrorist Ewan McGore, the Bagpiper, who has imprisoned the Lair Legion in his Sporran of Doom – until now. The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse There was a canyon in the Mythlands, a perfect meniscus eight hundred miles wide and deep where the golden realm of the Ausgardians had been that afternoon. “Aaaanjj!” Donar called, flying over the chasm in his goat chariot. “What is to be happening here?” worried Yo. “How is to be that whole of cute Ausgard is to be not being here?” “It’s a plot to make sure we don’t get our money for the big smelly thing,” Kerry suggested. She glanced at Harlagaz. “I mean the big smelly thing we killed earlier.” The goats pulled the chariot lower into the abyss. Already the bottom of the hole was steaming with volcanic activity where deep lava floes had been ruptured when the land was wounded. “This art not happening,” Harlagaz protested. “Naught couldst do this to the realm imperius!” “Big guy, could you use that Oldmanpower of yours to, y’know, twitch your nose and find out what happened?” Dancer suggested to the distraught Regent of Ausgard. Donar shook his head. “I needs didst leave yon Oldmanpower with mine Queen Annj whenst I cameth to Middlinggard. By decree of the Celestians the Oldmanpower mayest not be brought to thy plane any more, nor used to affect thy world.” “The Celestians!” Harlagaz gasped. “Father, they didst once punish our peoples and banish them hereth to the Antipodes of yon Mythlands. Thinkest thou that they…?” “The Space Robots are down at the moment,” Dancer reasoned. “Unless somebody fixed them and didn’t send us the memo?” “It is to be certaining that cute Ausgard is not to be being anywhere to be seen,” Yo admitted. “Yo is to be thinking that we are needing to be talking with our friends to be finding out of what is happening here, yes?” The pure thought being was pale as s/he spoke and staggered a little. “Are you okay?” Visionary asked his friend worriedly. “Yo is being to be in two minds for too long, Yo thinks,” came the reply. “Yo is to be being fine as soon as Yo that is here joins up with Yo this is with cute Lair Legioning.” “We wilt proceed there forthwith for the nonce,” Donar assured him/her. “And verily we wilt findeth the felons who hast stolen mine kingdom and smite them most wrothfully.” “You guys did notice that that rainbow bridge thingie’s gone with all the rest of the stuff, right?” Kerry noted worriedly. “How were we planning on getting home? Gothametropolis Mayor Velma Klein’s official helicopter lifted off at 4.41am. News reports suggested that an unstoppable wave of thousands of giant mutated insects was swarming from the Wastelands, commanded by a mad Scotsman in a kilt that caught the wind far too often. Smug experts on the West Coast were predicting that the swarm would reach Gothametropolis York in less than an hour, slaughter every resident in half an hour after that. Velma Kline was flying out to Arachknight City to consult with them. Fast. “Do we need to pick up the Lynchpin?” Klein’s security chief worried. “Only this isn’t a heavy duty chopper.” “Flask isn’t budging from that office of his,” the Mayor reported disdainfully. “He doesn’t know when to back off.” She looked on the bright side. “After he’s been eaten by bugs we’ll be saving the 60% cut he rakes off all our enterprises.” The helicopter rose up into the grey pre-dawn cloud. Yuki Shiro clung onto the undercarriage and wondered if any of her pursuers would be smart enough to work out why she’d triggered the security alert by invading the Mayor’s mansion – she’d figured Klein for a runner. When they were high enough to be beyond any help from the ground she dragged herself up from under the aircraft and climbed up to talk with the pilot. “Got her,” Diagnostic Machine reported. “She’s up there on that Bell 204C over central Gothametropolis, veering southwest at nine thousand feet.” “On it,” answered Flying Machine. “Mah Sporran!” wailed the Bagpiper as the Manga Shoggoth interrupted the meta-Einsteinian effects that turned Ewen McGore’s Highlands pouch into a psycho-dimensional trap for his enemies. The Legionnaires he’d imprisoned there tumbled out angrily – Hatman, CrazySugarFreakBoy!, De Brown Streak, Trickshot, Yo (again), and the Shoggoth itself. Another thought came to the bagpipe-skirling Scotsman. “And mah nuts! Ye’ve crushed mah nuts!” It was hard to get hickory-smoked dry roasted peanuts in decadent jerky-eating America. “That’s still no reason to wear that kilt,” Hatman objected, dragging on his Steelers cap to hammer a fist into the nearest of the giant cockroaches. “Right,” CSFB! replied. “It’s not like we’ve got Space Ghost here to do a big tackle comparison, although I suppose I could…” The world was spared Dreamcatcher Foxglove’s idea, whatever it was, by him being eaten whole by a giant grasshopper. “Okay, Yo-friends,” Yo called out to the Lair Legion. “Yo is to be thinking we are being far too near to those farming houses and the peoplings in those evacuation buses. DBS is to be being to get all the people away from here, and semi-cute Shoggoth is to be herding of all bugs towards us so we can be dealing with them. Tricky is to be dealing with uncute Baggingpiper.” “Hey, isn’t anybody slightly worried that CSFB! just got eaten?” De Brown Streak pointed out. “Just slightly?” The other Legionnaires had worked with the wired wonder for longer. “He can take care of himself,” Hatman answered. “Combat candy to blow his way out, or maybe something more creative. He’ll escape.” The capped crusader though about this for another moment then added ruefully, “One way or another.” “Heathens!” screamed the Bagpiper. “Iidjits! Can ye no’ see this is a holy crusade tae cleanse the world of the eevils o’ fossil fuel an’ daytime chat shows?” Trickshot fired an electroshock arrow up McGore’s kilt. “Buddy, you’re stood way up there on that giant ladybug. Y’don’t wanna know whut I kin see.” It was as the Bagpiper fell and his psionic control over the various insects of the Wastelands ended that all hell broke loose. “There has to be some way to get us out of Disney’s Norse ride,” Kerry Shepherdson complained. “I’m expecting the Paradopolis U football team to call tonight.” Kerry, her big sister Dancer, Visionary, and Yo were still stuck in the mythlands with Donar and Harlagaz. Since Ausgard had vanished so had Bifrosting, the rainbow bridge that was the conduit with the mortal world. “Mjalcolm taps into the power of yon rainbow bridge to transit twixt worlds,” Donar explained, hefting his enchanted baseball-bat-with-a-nail-in-it. “Without yon bridge we art not able to use that route to returneth.” “There art other routes though,” Harlagaz suggested. “In yon deep troll caves or at the ravening heart of the muspelcanoes, or under the depths of the sea of all-drowning.” “You guys sure know how to run a tourist industry,” Visionary shuddered. “Yo is thinking that is to be important to be finding of what has being happened to cute Ausgard,” Yo suggested. “Is not to be many powers which are to be able to steal city of the gods.” “The Celestians did it once” Dancer worried. “When the Ausgardians were transported here. You don’t think…?” “Tis impossible to say, mine lady” Donar scowled. “But we wilt find mine missing queen and mine missing city, and yea verily I wilt plant Mjalcolm so far up yon malefactor’s…” “But first we are needing to be getting of back to Lair Mansion,” Yo suggested diplomatically. “Is to be what we are concentrating on now, yes?” The SPUD helicarrier guns cycled and fired again, maintaining the trench it had carved to keep the swarms away from Shyminsky Falls. “They’re retreating,” Al B. Harper reported from his computer station. “This is odd. Their whole behaviour pattern just changed.” “Changed in what way?” the Librarian asked with interest. “Oh, I see. They’re attacking each other now, species against species.” Drury was watching the overhead camera feeds. “That’s cuz your little Lair Legion buddies just fried that haggis-eating no-good, an’ now there’s nobody mind-controlling the bug squad.” “Bill?” Princess Uhuna asked, eyeing the combat zone. Uhuna’s boyfriend Nats hadn’t been seen since he and Fin Fang Foom had headed to the centre of the Wastelands well over an hour ago. “Fraid not,” Al B. told her. “That’s Yo and Hatty and the main group. Look, there’s CSFB! yo-yoing his way out of a grasshopper.” But the Abhuman princess had noticed something else. “There on the ground!” she called out. “People are injured.” De Brown Streak had managed to drive away two of the last refugee buses, using his ability to confer superspeed to shift the stranded vehicles at amazing velocities; but the third commandeered schoolbus was already overturned. Hatman has his fire marshal’s cap on and was dousing the flames. “I have to get down there,” Uhuna said. “I have to help those people.” “You’re not a healer,” the Librarian reminded her as she pulled on her Lair Legion flight jacket. “You just shift wounds around, or into yourself.” “I can average a serious bone break to be a fracture between half a dozen people,” she argued. “Look, there are children hurt down there. Get me to them! Now!” Nats and Finny had been outnumbered ten to one by lethal robots of the Machine Shop. Finny had a neat hold blown right through him, and he was having to shapechange his vital organs round to keep going. Nats was streaked with blood from the injuries of battle and his telekinetics were all that was letting him still move. They appeared back at the damaged force field apparatus that the Machine Shop had sabotaged, courtesy of the captured Fax Machine. “What?” the surprised Kidney Machine had time to say before Finny melted him to slag. “You’re too late,” Fax Machine said defiantly. “We already have what we came for. It’s already been delivered to the client.” “And who’s the client?” Nats demanded. “As if Master Machine’s going to inform me,” Fax scorned. “Who are you, for that matter?” insisted Foom. “A whole bunch of robot types, but you seem to speak and behave in a human fashion…” “Like I’m going to tell you, fleshlings” Fax Machine snorted. “I just wanted to teleport you back here to ground zero.” She indicated the little countdown timer on Al B.’s generator before she shimmered out. “Back where we started,” Nats said. “And does anything good ever happen with a little black box counting down very quickly, and currently at 10756?” “Never,” Finny agreed. “We need to get this force field generator up and running again. We can’t let it be destroyed.” “We need Al B. to defuse this whatever-it-is and get the shields going,” Nats suggested. “Comms don’t work in this green fog. I could… try and fly out and get him.” “We don’t have Al B.” the Makluan dragon snorted. “Only us. You’ll have to shield the generator from the bomb with your telekinetics.” “That’s… really gonna hurt.” “Too bad. Deal with it. And then we need to work out how to repair whatever damage those robots did to this thing. In… 7223 whatever it’s counting ins.” “We need Al B.” “We don’t have him. Suck it up and stop that blast.” “Excuse me,” said a voice from the mists, “I’m not Al B. Harper of course, but perhaps I could be of some assistance?” “What is this?” shrieked Velma Klein as Yuki Shiro vaulted onto the platform beside the pilot’s seat. “All passengers are asked to strap in and return their seats to an upright position,” Yuki announced as she grabbed the steering yoke from the pilot she’d just rendered unconscious. “There may be a little turbulence.” Flying Machine came in at MACH 1, strafing as he went. “See?” Yuki pointed out as she dropped the helicopter much faster than the hastily-downloaded owner’s manual advised. “Don’t worry though, Mayor Klein. These killer robots are all authorised to work in GMY.” Mean Machine was grounded, but he hurled a motorbike that barely missed the chopper’s rear rotor. “By you, your worship,” Yuki rubbed it in. Mayor Klein hung on for dear life, and so did her bodyguards. Factor X’s emergency teleport escape service wasn’t looking so expensive now. “You’re going to die for this,” Velma Klein promised the cyborg P.I. “Like the five million bounty isn’t enough.” Yuki tossed the radio mike to the terrified politician. “We’re about to make an emergency landing somewhere they won’t like it. You have about twenty seconds to convince them not to blast us from the skies. Good luck.” Flying Machine swivelled round for another strafing pass and Yuki Shiro dropped the helicopter down towards the exercise yard of the Safe Metahuman Penal Facility. “She’s down inside the Safe!” Speed Machine warned the others. “For some reason they didn’t blow her unauthorised chopper out of the skies!” “We can still get her,” Threshing Machine growled. “There’s nothing in that Safe that can stop me.” “It’s well defended and it’s far too public for us to break in like that,” Fitness Machine advised. “Master Machine wanted the bounty, and a chance to wipe out another miserable robot-wannabee-making-good, but he won’t want us setting off that many red flags just yet.” She sighed. “Another day.” “At least Ghost In the Machine’s group got the radiation,” Diagnostics consoled them. “We’ll need to reboot Death Machine and some of the others, but they secured the materiel for the client.” “I’m not finished with that Shiro broad,” Mean Machine warned sullenly. “I’ll be back for her!” “This is not being to be good!” Yo worried as Donar found that the Caverns of Implausible Adventure were collapsed by the shifting tectonics of the vanished Ausgard. “There art still several other ways of travelling to Middlinggard,” Harlagaz assured the genderless thought being. “They are mayhap more dangerous than merely fighting our way through countless hordes of rampaging ur-dwarfs, but still…” “The ur-dwarves were the little guys that shouted “Hi Ho!” as they hurled giant boulders down at us?” Kerry checked. “The ones with the home-made gelignite improperly secured in their backpacks?” “Yo is meaning…” Yo clarified, “that this is not to be being good.” And the pure thought being toppled over. “This is not being good,” Yo told the Lair Legion. The major inter-species giant insect killing spree was mostly over now, leaving just the largest and meanest of the rampaging monsters to attack the humans after a Darwinian contest of target hardening. “There’s only a hundred or so of them now,” Trickshot pointed out. “Easy!” “But there’s only six of us,” Hatman pointed out. “If it wasn’t for the Shoggoth splitting off into chewy chunks and DBS racing about everywhere we’d never be able to contain these things.” “We need that force field again,” CSFB! advised. “Where have Finny and Nats got to with that report?” “I got all the injured up at the schoolhouse,” De Brown Streak called, blurring in and screeching to a halt. “Uhuna and some SPUD medtechs are taking care of them. Al B. wants me to take him to where Nats went, to look at his force field generator.” “It could be much worse,” the Shoggoth suggested. “We are fortunate that no burrowing insectiforms have attempted to leave the area. And then the schoolhouse dropped into the giant termite hole. “Yo is meaning… that this is not to be being good,” Yo declared, before s/he folded over and started to fade away. The bomb countdown flickered down to 2337, then exploded. Nats screamed as he tried to divert the kinetic energy away from the cobbled force-field generator. He was flung to the ground, bleeding from his ears, nose and eyes. The generator was saved. “Sneaky,” noted Fin Fang Foom. “Not set for zero. Somebody in the Machine Shop has a nasty sense of humour.” “Remind me to tell them how tickled I was,” moaned Nats from the mud. “In my next life.” “You can’t die now, Mister Reed,” Xander the Improbable told him. “You have to survive to fulfil your side of the little bargain we just made. One very unusual pick-up mission for your comrades at Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises.” “We’ve done our part,” Finny pointed out to the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse. “You said you could fix this Technopolis tech.” “Ask him why he’s not dead from the radiation,” Nats suggested, still lying on the ground where he’d been blown. “Very little left now,” Xander told him cheerfully, opening up a roll of plumbing tools and wrenching off the control surface of the force field generator. He sucked his breath in and said. “Nasty. Can’t get the parts these days.” He reached for a sink plunger. “I had to wait until those rogue next generation offshoots from the Urban Robots had removed the lethal levels of radiation before I could wander in and offer my assistance.” “This isn’t a mystic problem though,” Foom pointed out. “Is it?” “No. But there’s some very major mystical problems due very soon, and I need Nats to do me a favour.” “I thought I already owed you a favour. Several favours.” “You need to owe me a really big favour.” “Can I die now, please?” Xander rummaged around inside the force field generator, mainly hitting things with a wrench. “Not yet,” he suggested. “After all, if you’re not there to rescue Princess Uhunalura from the giant termite nest she’s just been dropped into she’ll most certainly die.” Yo was definitely fading; literally fading. “We have to do something!” Dancer panicked. “I think s/he’s dying! S/he never meant to be split in two for this long!” Donar watched helplessly as his nightmare day continued. His kingdom was gone, his wife with it, and now his dear friend was vanishing to oblivion before his eyes. “Okay,” Vizh said, dropping down in his shabby torn bunny suit to cradle the fallen pure thought being. “This is definitely a horrible situation with horrible things happening to us all, and Yo dying is the most horrible situation of all. We can’t cope.” “Vizh, this isn’t the time to suddenly feeb out on us!” Kerry scolded him, with a note of panic in her voice. “And I gotta admit, all the dweebery aside, I never thought you’d actually…” “We can’t cope,” Visionary continued, “so we’re going to our Happy Place.” “Zounds!” muttered Harlagaz. “Verily,” echoed Donar. “It’s a million to one chance,” the Probability Dancer exalted, “but it might just work!” The Shoggoth reared up as huge and terrible as the giant insects that still remained and wrestled with them, trampling the remains of the little town that had just become a remake of every 50’s SF movie ever. De Brown Streak sped off with Al B. Harper towards the locus of the Wastelands, the place where the archscientist had previously cobbled together the remains of Technopolis apparatus to create a containing force field around the irradiated zone. Hatman dragged on a miner’s helmet and scrambled down into the termites’ nest where the school had fallen. And CrazySugarFreakBoy! struggled with the fallen Yo. “C’mon Yo-ster!” he encouraged pure thought being. “Don’t go all fuzzy on me now. We still have to set up a play-date for Spaz and Rabito. Cause that meeting between my Chup and Lisa’s cat went so well.” Yo’s eyes flickered slightly. “Happy…” s/he whispered. “Well, things are going pretty good for me right now. I think I’m in a good place with April, and my little sister’s starting to crawl and stuff, plus I had a really good…” Then he caught up with the programme. “The Happy Place! You need me to get you to the Happy Place, right? You have the power to take people to the Happy Place when they really need it, don’t you?” CSFB! held the frail thought being in his arms. “Boy, do I need it now.” And they vanished. The termites were twenty feet long and they worked together in a colony mind. Just to make Hatman’s life easier they’d developed the power to spit ball lighting. “Okay,” seethed Jay Boaz, dragging off his smouldering pest control veil, “Let’s try something else.” He pulled out his Thunderbirds cap, transformed, and went back in there. The alarm klaxons were sounding all over the Safe, and Security Chief Flaherty’s wardens were racing all over with big guns. Prisoner #9477 sat back on his bunk with satisfaction and waited to be released. His cell door whirred open. “About time,” he complained. “I don’t pay you people to keep Peter von Doom waiting for so long before…” Then he realised it wasn’t who he’d been expecting. It was an angry young woman in a torn jacket. “You!” he spat. Yuki Shiro strode into the cell and lifted him up by the throat. “Me,” she agreed. “The person you put out a five million dollar bounty on, because I foiled your WeirdSciCon plot and brought you in for arrest.” “How… did you…?” “I knew because you were the only person I made that stupid joke about being in the Lair Legion to. It had to either be you or somebody you blabbed to.” She shook Peter von Doom at arm’s length. “You really need to get yourself a sense of humour. I had one until somebody shot up my brand new jacket.” “I’ll… get you a new one?” “No need,” Yuki told him. “The five million bounty that you’re going to transfer into my account should buy me plenty of jackets. After all, you won’t need the money after you’ve cancelled the contract on me, will you? Will you?” “N-no,” agreed the strangled archvillain. “Good. Because I’d hate to have to come back and be firmer with you, Peter. I really would.” The sound of running boots came from the corridor. “I guess they’ve found me,” Yuki sighed. “But don’t think I won’t be checking on that transaction, Peter. I’ll be seeing you.” She dropped the prisoner and turned round to face the guards. The expected tazer shots didn’t come. Warden Westwood and his security team were there, with the livid and fuming Velma Klein, but that wasn’t all.” “Miss Yuki,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton said mildly, “I’m sorry to tell you I’ve had a few complaints about your behaviour tonight. Hmph. We’ll have to have an enquiry you know.” He surpassed a grin under his thick moustaches. “The Lair Legion expects certain standards from its members, what?” The children were screaming. Uhuna couldn’t bear the children screaming. They’d been screaming before, in the hospital, where Phlegelthor the Pestilent was slaughtering them and Uhuna couldn’t do anything about it but die. She downed the first termite through the walls with a virulent cancer, and the second with terminal pneumonia; but many of the injuries and diseases in her internal collection didn’t translate to isoptera. The Librarian was there too, trying to help out with the two dozen or so wounded people from the overturned schoolbus. He reached out and used his gift to transfer information by tough, pulsing an entire book into the microscopic brain of the next termite to overwhelm it. The concepts were too alien to affect the creature. It just kept on coming. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince can’t stop these things,” Lee Bookman warned. “I thought that wasn’t in the shops yet?” Uhuna asked, despite her rising panic. “Please,” the Librarian said scornfully. The termites surged forward to interrupt a promising literary discussion. Uhuna reached out and ripped the very lifeforce from the next intruder, gasping with pain at the misuse of her powers. And still they came. The Librarian was pushed back, still trying to shield the wounded children from the incoming swarm. Uhuna saw him go down and then she couldn’t see him at all. She was surrounded by the termites, and her powers were exhausted. Now she understood the banshee’s warning. It wasn’t Nats that was going to die. “Bill!” she called out as they overwhelmed her. “I love you!” The insects were hurled away by a force so wrathful that they were smeared against the broken schoolhouse walls. “I love you too, Uhuna!” Nats called out, dropping down to stagger beside her, grabbing her in a close embrace as if he would never let her go. “Bill,” she breathed, contented. Nats tried to summon the will to lift them clear of the swarm. “If we go, they’ll kill the children,” Uhuna wept. “We can’t…” “We can’t,” agreed Bill Reed. “So this is our famous last stand, eh?” Uhuna held his hand tightly. “Okay.” The termites swarmed in. The roof was torn off. A giant bird of lightning hovered above them, shrieking madly. It reached down and pecked at the insects, searing them as it swallowed them. Uhuna glanced at Nats. He shrugged. “I thought Finny was behind me,” he admitted. “But there were some ladybugs over near the interstate.” The last of the termites was devoured. Lee Bookman crawled from the wreckage hunting for his glasses. Hatman pulled off his thunderbirds cap and collapsed. Radical transformations exhausted him and his powers for days. Nats collapsed too, his injuries finally overcoming him. Uhuna caught him. “No you don’t,” she told her lover fiercely and passionately. “William Reed, you are going to live.” “Ah, there you are,” said Xander as an exhausted De Brown Streak raced from the green fumes to drop Al B. Harper by the force field generator. “Just push that red button there, would you?” Al B. hit the activate key. The generator spluttered then flickered to life, re-establishing the boundaries around the Wasteland. “Splendid,” declared Xander. “The repairs are complete.” “I still get the same call out fee,” noted Al B. Epilogue One: “This way, McGore!” Dan Drury told the stunned Bagpiper as he was bundled into a SPUD armoured vehicle. “It’ll be a while before you get back to the bonny banks of Loch Lomond, that’s fer sure.” “Somebody give the guy a sponge bath that’s all I’m sayin’” advised Trickshot, hovering nearby to make sure the captive was properly incarcerated. “And find out how he got the power to make monsters listen ta his pipes, and ta do that spooky thing with the sporran!” “I would,” agreed Drury, “but word from on high is that he’s not in my jurisdiction.” Tricky noticed that the guards of the van were dressed in plain black uniforms, not the usual SPUD jumpsuits. “Then who…?” “Can’t say,” snorted the Head of the Super-Menace Principle Undercover Division savagely. The irritating archer stood beside him as he watched the van drive away with the prisoners. The security guards hadn’t said a word. “Can you say now?” Trickshot asked. “You know I can’t, Bastion,” Drury answered, grinding his cigar between his teeth. “Anyhow, you take good care of the real McGore, won’t you? Tell that Shoggoth he kin keep the Bagpiper on ice till the end of the world fer my money.” Hatman watched Drury go off to direct the clean up operations around the schoolhouse. “Smart guy,” he grinned. “Let’s hope whoever’s syphoning off captured super-villains from the criminal justice system for their own ends isn’t as smart. Otherwise Finny’s going to be in big danger.” Trickshot wasn’t worried “Aw, the dragon’s a pro. He’s where he needs ta be. Mumphrey’s gonna be well pleased. And the bad guys won’t be.” “It was nice to have Finny around again though,” Hatman said wistfully. Epilogue Two: The EEE transdimensional jump machines cooled down with an alarming pinging while Amy Aston doused the minor fires. Al B. Harper chewed on his bubble pipe and scratched his head. “Well,” he admitted, “ Ausgard’s gone, but I don’t know how, or why. Perhaps when we’ve had a chance to go over these readings more…” he glanced at Miss Framlicker for support. “There are many possibilities,” the EEE administrator agreed hastily. “We’re only beginning to investigate the possibilities.” Harlagaz Donarson shifted angrily. “How canst an entire realm of gods be scrobblethed thusly?” he demanded. “We’re working on it, big guy,” NTU-150 promised him. “We’ll find out. Just give us time. And, maybe a little breathing space?” “Yo is sure that Donar-friends will be to be finding Anjj and Ausgard,” Yo assured the worried hemigod. The restored pure thought being felt very deeply for his/her friend’s loss. “Lisa is to be already trying to be summonsing of Anjj and of Visioneery but is not to be.” “Try and get some rest, Donar,” Dancer advised. “Tomorrow we’ll go and check with Xander when he’s back, okay? And maybe ask the Chronicler?” “There wilt be foul and bloody vengeance for the nonce,” muttered Donar as Sarah Shepherdson led him out. Al B. studied the readings again. “This is one huge mission persons case,” he admitted. “And the disappearance of Ausgard is playing havoc at the theological end of the dimensional spectrum. “Why do I get the feeling the problems are only just beginning?” Miss Framlicker asked gloomily. Epilogue Three: “Deuced difficult mission,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton judged as he finished the Legion’s debriefing in the meeting room. “We’ll need to start a file on these Machine Shop chappies. Miss Waltz…?” “I’ll see what I can find out,” agreed the first lady of the Lair Legion. “Undercover work,” she added with a happy smirk. Mumphrey looked at the others gathered round the table. Only Trickshot was relatively unscathed. Hatman was bruised and wan after his thunderbird transformation, and all the termites he’d devoured were giving him the runs. The Librarian was turning a glorious shade of purple as his own contusions matured. CrazySugarFreakBoy! was rapidly healing from injuries he’d insisted that Uhuna shift from Nats, so Nats was no more beaten up and scratched than the rest of them. Even the Shoggoth looked sallow and drippy in his bandages from so much biomass activity. Yo wasn’t present, but the thought being would be pale and tired for a while too. “You did well, chaps,” the leader of the Lair Legion assured them. “Jolly good show. Now get some well-earned rest, what?” The team heaved themselves from their seats and collectively limped to their rooms. Except that Sir Mumphrey called one of them back. “Mr Reed. A moment if you please, hmm?” Nats shuffled back into the meeting room. “What is it?” he asked. “Only I’ve got an EEE job in about seven hours, something special Xander needs picking up.” “Just a thought, really,” the eccentric Englishman noted, pouring himself a cup of tea. “Saw in the reports about how Uhuna and you stood by each other in the termite attack. Could have run. Didn’t.” “It’s in the job description, I think,” Nats shrugged, declining the proffered Earl Grey. “Doing dumb stuff to save lives. There were kids there…” “Uhuna stood there too,” Mumphrey pointed out. “She faced a situation very much like the one that she died in before. And she stood there. Remarkable gal, I’d say.” “So would I,” agreed Nats. “And she stood by you too, to the end,” Mumph went on. “Guts and class.” “Yep,” Nats grinned. “That’s my princess.” “Well there’s my point, Bill,” Mumphrey said. “She’s not your princess. I know you’ve been dating her ever since she was exiled. I know you both thought you were married once, before the Hooded Hood retconned it. I know she’s given up everything she had to be here with you. I know when you thought you’d lost her forever you wanted to die. I know she loves you as much as you love her, and she wants to be with you, and she’s damned good for you. Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned, but why on Earth aren’t you making that wonderful girl your wife? Properly, this time? Why don’t you propose to her?” “I can’t,” Bill Reed replied. “Hmph. And why not?” “Because I already asked her half an hour ago,” Nats told him. His broad grin got ever wider. “Do you think we can avoid saving the world next Saturday?” Epilogue Four: “So what was all that noise about last night?” “Oh, that was Jackman screaming. He went to the ice machine about midnight and claims the shadows jumped out to get him.” “Man, he has got to learn to Just Say No.” “Tell me about it. He woke the whole dorm with his screaming. Larry Drover and Shawn Griffin shook their heads in disgust and headed back to their dorm rooms. And the shadows waited. Next time: More on missing Ausgard. More on Yuki’s career path. More on EEE’s little job for Xander. But mostly more on the disturbances at the Paradopolis U boys’ dorm, where, as our title tells us, Nitz Must Die! And for MangaJason's follow-up on Yuki's response, read Untold Tales #222.1 - Epilogue Five: The Invitation. 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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