#255: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Forbidden and Dangerous Previously: To secretly appease the galaxy-conquering Parody Master, the governments of the world have begun to enact protocols to place Obedience Brands – techno-organic behaviour packages – on all metahumans. Special Resolution 1066 has just been passed in the US, requiring all superheroes to submit to branding in the next four weeks. The Lair Legion’s government liaison, Amber St Clare, has already been covertly branded and is now spying on the team for the SPUD espionage agency. Various apparently spontaneous hate groups have sprung up acting as vigilante enforcers of SR1066.A public show trial against Legionnaire Al B. Harper ended with his arrest on more serious charges of treason, but en route to detention he and his counsel Lisa Waltz were transported straight to the minions of the Parody Master. Hacker Nine discovered evidence about the disappearance of SPUD operative Contessa Natalia Romanza which has prompted Legionnaire Trickshot to try and infiltrate SPUD’s flying helicarrier base to learn more. In the vortex between dimensions, young elementalist Liu Xi flees from the minions of the Parody Master who hunt her to become their master’s bride. Legionnaires Yo and the Librarian were ambushed in deep space to prevent their mission seeking allies in the conflict to come and were apparently destroyed. And while all this is going on, Legionnaire Visionary and many of his friends and allies travel to the mythical realm of Lemuria to attend the birthing ceremonies of the child he fathered upon the Caphan former pleasure slave Miiri. Tie-in that precede this chapter include: The Day Before Their Day in Court by Killer Shrike Nations Within Nations by CrazySugarFreakBoy! Semi-Transparent Lad: The Calm before the Storm by L! Dancer's Official UT SR1066-type Tie In: "Is there actually no known way of shutting you up?" by Dancer Cast and locations are at Who's Who in the Parodyverse and Where's Where in the Parodyverse. Previous chapters are found on The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom.  Sarah Shepherdson shut down the coffee machine, emptied out the filter, and set the pots to stoke. Then she flipped out the overhead lights at the Bean and Donut Coffee Bar, moving towards the door by just the illumination from the street-lamps around Paradopolis Plaza. She picked up the long pole that pulled down the shutters and slid the safety rails into place. It was quiet for eleven p.m. on a Wednesday, so she heard the running footsteps before ever the girl raced into view. The brunette waitress turned round and watched the teenager pelting towards her. “You!” the girl shouted. “You’ve got to run! They’re coming for you!” Sarah recognised the voice, although she’d mostly been playing superhero when she met Gloria. Mild mannered waitress Sarah Shepherdson was also the Probability Dancer able to twist the odds to change the world. Gloria was a street-kid from Hell’s Bathroom, and she’d been missing for long enough for her unofficial guardian Lisette to go frantic. “What’s wrong?” Shep demanded, catching the frightened girl in her arms. “They’re coming!” Gloria repeated urgently. “For you!” That was when the pick-up truck and the muscle car screeched into the plaza, bumping over the no-vehicles signs and driving straight towards the women. “Into the shop,” Sarah told Gloria. The young goth girl had a razor in each hand. “I can fight. I’m not just leaving you to them.” “I was kind of thinking about coming into the shop with you,” Sarah explained. “The shutters are down. It’ll take them a while to break through, and there’s a fire exit at the rear.” “They’ve got it covered,” Gloria warned. “Those MetaWatch thugs. They’ve planned this.” Dancer had seen the reports on MetaWatch, a “grass roots” vigilante organisation inspired by hatred of the super-powered. Lately their “action groups” had been hunting down former mutates and putting them in the hospitals. “They’re after me?” Sarah realised. “I’m flattered.” Gloria helped her pull the door shutter down and padlock it while the men screeched to a halt outside and left their vehicles. “They know you’re friendly with lots of metas,” Gloria warned. “They know the Lair Legion drinks here. They want you to… they want to send a message.” “And you know this how?” “I joined them. Undercover. I went to their meetings, listened to them spewing their crap, chatted up some guys, got their names and phone numbers.” “Sounds dangerous. Where was your robot cat during all of this?” “Oh, Catbot was around. Why do you think only two of the attack vehicles got this far? But there’s no way he’ll get here in time to help us now!” There was the sound of a sledge hammer hitting the security shutter. “They might have forgotten to cut off the phone,” Shep suggested. “I’ll try the shop line, you see about my mobile, up in my flat. Up those stairs. Speed dial 1, the Lair Legion.” “Gotcha!” Sarah waited until Glory was safely heading to her flat before hanging her waitress pinafore on its hook and changing into her Dancer leotard. Just transforming the kinetic energy of her everyday movements was enough to twist the probabilities of the latch on her flat door jamming, trapping Gloria safely inside. By the time the crowbar had prised off the shutter padlock she was more than ready. Gloria couldn’t use the mobile phone. Somebody had sabotaged the local satellite nodes. MetaWatch seemed to be a low-level collection of vigilante hicks, but they were well supplied and trained, organised into cells across the country. “Got a message for you, meta-loving bitch!” shouted the first thug through the door of the coffee shop. He left the way he’d come, but more horizontally, and into three of his fellows. “We can exchange messages,” Dancer told them as their vehicles exploded through freak gas tank accidents, scattering the mob all over the plaza. “For example, I want to tell you just what a crappy twenty-four hours I’m having…” Last night, 8.30pm: The ninety foot long stone laid across the floor of the Lair Legion’s largest laboratory. It was an unpleasant black and brown, carved with crude screaming faces. It still bore signs of its rough handling where the Manga Shoggoth had uprooted it from the ground it had been buried in, one of thirteen concealed around the perimeter of the city. “Well?” demanded Sir Mumphrey Wilton, scowling at the object. “What is it?” “It’s what we thought,” answered Hatman. “It’s just like the things we saw rising from the ground around that secret government base, just before the whole thing vanished. It’s how the Parody Master steals real estate.” “It’s techno-organic,” reported NTU-150, former Legionnaire and currently subbing for the arrested Al B. Harper as technical consultant. “It creates some kind of spatial web in conjunction with other such nodes.” “It’s mystical too,” added Ebony of Nubilia, priestess of the Shoggoth Cult. “And perhaps psionic.” “And it has a temporal component,” contributed Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “Freezes everything inside it in a fragment of time. Hmph.” “It seems a bit showy to me,” scorned the Shoggoth, oozing over the deactivated obelisk. “It is a shame that it only receives its destination instructions when it is remotely triggered, so we cannot use it to locate where the missing estates have been sent.” “But the Parody Master had buried these things round half the cities on Earth,” Hatman pointed out. “If we hadn’t known what to look for…” “Wasn’t that why you sent Fin Fang Foom undercover on a data-gathering mission?” asked Ebony. The capped crusader’s face clouded. “I don’t like the idea of Finny and Drury trapped in one of those things. I don’t like the amount of missing persons we’re racking up.” That prompted Mumphrey to check with the monitor room again. “Miss Glitch, any word from Ms Waltz about young Harper yet? No word? Not even a standard security check in?” The eccentric Englishman listened to the answer, then his eyebrows furrowed together. “Hmph.” Last Night, 9.57pm Hector Manchester had made a career out of doing other people’s dirty work. It paid well, it gave him prestige and power, and he liked it when people called him “Sir.” He was especially enjoying his appointment as Executive Director of the Office for Paranormal Security, the US government’s metahuman crime agency. Career officer Aaron Soames was Deputy for day to day operations, but Soames didn’t have the confidence of the power brokers behind Special Resolution 1066, the Freedom and Patriot Bill. Manchester did. Manchester’s Annapolis mansion was secured, of course. There were three Sentionoid defender robots, sixteen highly-trained OPS anti-terrorist personnel, and three Obedience Branded metahumans on guard at any given time. The site was also protected by a sophisticated array of alarms and sensors that guarded against covert intrusion even from exotic means like teleportation or dimensional rifts. The alarms didn’t go off when the torso of a Sentinoid was hurled through Manchester’s lounge window. Manchester squeaked in terror, and scrabbled for his pants where his emergency button was located. In the meantime he used his hired companion as a partial body shield. “I’m blocking all outgoing signals,” Yuki Shiro warned him, flitting over the rubble of his colonial mansion’s frontage and treading on the alarm device. “There’s no security system in the world I can’t beat, especially if I have the specs.” “You have… the specs?” Manchester gasped. He recognised the intruder, of course. Yuki Shiro had featured heavily on the news over the past couple of days, the cyborg detective at the centre of the show trial happening in Gothametropolis. He couldn’t figure how she was here. “I have the specs,” answered Mr Epitome, walking over the remains of a second Sentinoid and carefully laying down the stunned form of one of the protective metahuman detail. “You think I wouldn’t research my enemies? Especially an enemy who’s occupying my old organisation?” “And I hast a very big baseball bat with a nail in it,” added Donar, casually crunching the last of the giant robots as he stalked forward. “I findeth that it is most helpful with expensive security systems when I doth not have a key.” Hatman was wearing his Steelers hat. He laid the last of the perimeter team down on the rubble, checking that they were merely stunned by his sleeping cap, then helped the terrified escort up from behind the sofa. “I’m afraid Mr Manchester will have to cut the evening short,” he explained to Olivia. “Please wait over in the hall and you can go home when we’ve finished our conversation with him.” “This… this is illegal!” shouted Manchester. “I’ll hang you for this! I’ll…urk!” The urk was because he was now dangling at arm’s length with Donar’s hand round his throat. “Thou wilt speak now, caitiff, and say the whereabouts of mine lady Lisa and of Al B. Harper. Else thou wilt be facing thine eternal judgement in deadinggard ere the night is o’er.” “W-what?” stammered the OPS Director. Where was backup? Where was the supposed impenetrable security cordon? He saw Mr Epitome;s eyes upon him, cold and hard. “You have no right to do this.” Hatman moved forward and placed a warrant in Hector Manchester’s sweaty hand. “Search authorisation regarding a missing federal prisoner and his legal counsel, signed by a county judge, naming you and this residence,” the capped crusader told him. The judge’s son and daughter-in-law had been saved from a burning cruise ship by the Lair Legion four years earlier. “A country judge has no authorisation over…” began Manchester, then paused. “Over what?” Yuki Shiro grinned. “Over some kind of covert government operation you want to tell us about on record? Go ahead. I’m recording.” “It matters not what paper we hast,” Donar assured Manchester. “If mine lady Lisa hath come to harm then thy life is over, and all thy minions with thee. So if thou valuest thine miserable existence and liketh the number of limbs thou presently hast, thou hadst better start speaking.” |
