Plots in motion to their critical points from... the Hooded Hood
Thu Feb 16, 2006 at 09:49:18 am EST
| #257: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Very Forbidden and Very Dangerous
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 This morning, 11.35am
Donar scowled at the grizzled man with the feral eyes behind the counter of Mr Lye’s Laundry of Doom. “Thou hast the stink of lycanthrope about thee,” he noted.
“You’re not smelling so April fresh yourself, hemigod,” answered Tanner, glowering back.
“We’re not here to fight,” Mr Epitome chipped in, stepping between the mythological beings. “We heard that Mr Lye might be able to help us with a little stain problem we’re having. Is he here?” The paragon of power used his x-ray vision to scan the labyrinthine interior of the dingy Gothametropolis wash-house, but he found himself slightly nauseous and looking at the back of his own head.
“Bring in the garment and we’ll have our specialist team look at it,” suggested Tanner.
“Tis not a garment but a person,” answered Donar. “A lady in our care hath been cruelly infected with a sorcerous Obedience Brand by the fell Parody Master, he who must be smithethed.”
“Ah, that,” breathed Tanner. “Yeah, everybody seems to be lining up on one side or the other.”
“’Tis said the Guild of Werewolves hath cast their lot with the minions of the Parody Master,” noted the hemigod of thunder.
“Well I’ve got as much time for the Guild of Werewolves as I do for petty mythlands godlings.”
“The point is,” intervened Mr Epitome again, hastily, “does Mr Li make housecalls?”
This Morning, 11.55am
Flapjack of the Carpathians was one of the very tiny number of people who did not flinch when a Shoggoth bubbled through the cracks around his door. Instead he cleared some Modern Malefactors off a chair in his dingy windowless basement and waited for his visitor to assume humanoid form.
The Shoggoth oozed onto the proffered seat. “Thank you,” he bubbled. “I came to speak with you, Flapjack.”
“So long as you don’t mind the lsurring… that is the slurring,” the major domo replied. “Stealing the good sherry is part of a good butlers dutures… duties…”
“I believe you acted with honour in the matter of Ms St Clare,” the Shoggoth went on.
“But you all promised not to tell anybody,” the hunchback pleaded, taking another swig from the bottle on his mattress.
“And not without cost to yourself,” went on the loathsome elder beast.
“Well, my dating life’s not what is was in the Balkans,” Flapjack admitted. “People take one look and run screaming. And not in a good way. Just because I’m a disgusting perverted malformed deviant I seem to have trouble meeting nice women.”
“But you did not take advantage of Ms St Clare’s slavery,” the Shoggoth approved. “I see no reason to suck your head off.”
“Nor do any of the ladies I ask out,” mourned Flapjack, taking another swig.
“I have a duty for you,” the elder being announced. “It may be that work will take your mind off your sorrows.” “I hope it doesn’t involve standing up or walking straight right now.”
“It involves answering my correspondence. There are some letters which I prefer not to pass on to Ebony to reply for me.”
Flapjack looked puzzled. “You get letters?”
“Yes. And e-mail. That Nigerian prince was very surprised when I helped him reclaim his homeland. But I do not think that Ebony should have to reply to the young women who send me photographs of themselves without their ritual cladding on, along with suggestions culled from the more lurid fiction about my kind as to how we might combine our genetic materials.”
“They what?”
“The hentai fan club, and others of their ilk,” explained the Shoggoth. “For some reason they find the idea of procreation with a grasping grappling monster to be sexually arousing. I wish you to reply to the letters from these troubled young women, and see if you can do anything to assist them in their concerns.”
Flapjack perked up and saluted. “Yes, sir! A Flapjack is always ready and upstanding to help out with his master’s correspondence, sir! I’ll get onto them… I mean it… right away, sir!” And he went to the job with a will.
Al B and Kinki were bundled into the security lock that passed them through into the dreadnaught’s Correction Area. “So let me get this straight,” the archscientist checked. “You’re from the future, given as tribute to become one of a select group of women who get to be brides of the Parody Master after an intense period of torture conditioning that you really didn’t fancy. So you broke loose and ruined your engagement by jumping my bones so we’d both get tortured to death instead.”
“I checked the ship’s logs to see which prisoner would be the best to seduce,” Kinki pointed out. “You seemed the most likely to find a way to escape and save me. Your psyche profile suggests a high level of unconventional intelligence coupled with a touching naive loyalty to your friends and lovers. I’m hoping that you’re still planning some kind of rescue before we get turned into screaming quivering blobs of agony and regret.” She glanced at Al. “You can start any time now,” she prompted.
The security doors opened onto a scene of carnage inside the wrecked Correction Area. Correctioner Lorrigaz lay on the floor trussed in his own pain manacles, his face a bloody mass of deep welts and scratches, all his limbs broken. Lisa was tapping her way through his computer files, absently stroking the soft purring ball of feline gingerness that was curled peacefully on her knee.
Al turned to Kinki. “Okay, how was that?” he asked her.
The avawarriors reacted, drawing their weapons and moving towards the first lady of the Lair Legion. “I summons you right here” she told them, and by the gifts granted her by the Booke of the Law the avawarriors appeared in easy arms’ reach of the amorous advocatrix. Their armour and weapons stayed by Al and Kinki.
Lisa laid their bodies down next to the pile of other unconscious guards. “I can’t summons through the walls here,” she noted, “but line of sight seems to work just fine.”
“How did you get loose?” Al wondered. “How did you summons your cat here? And what did he do to these people?” “I didn’t summons him. He just got hungry when it got past feeding time and he came to look for his mummy. He’s an old softie really. But of course, his essential catliness is backed up by the power of the Celestian Space Robots, which is enough to punch through pretty much anything if he really wants to. So he came here to see me.”
“The scratches I can understand,” admitted Kinki, “but how did he manage to break all the limbs of this torturer?” “He’s a clever cat,” said Lisa evasively, looking innocent. “He must have found a way.” She glanced at the blonde in the low-zipped catsuit then at Al. “Who’s your friend?”
“Lover,” Kinki corrected her. “I’m his lover. I’m Kinki.”
“Who isn’t?” Lisa smirked. She gestured to the desk and slipped out of the chair. “Al, do that thing you do so well with this computer system will you?”
“Oh yes,” breathed Al B. Harper, settling in behind the terminal with a happy wicked smile spreading across his face. “Now we’ll see whether it was such a good idea to kidnap the genius.”
Liu Xi reached down into herself and tried to squeeze more from her elemental gifts. The cold, the hunger, the knots of fear and anger in her stomach all sapped her energy. She clung to the wildly spinning remnant of the ancient stone block she’d shattered and watched the Dreadnaught glide nearer. Her power was exhausted.
Brilliant headlights flashed over the jagged debris, picking her out. She was tiny compared to even this remnant fragment of the ancient rock she’d alighted on, but the beams were pinpoint precise. As the Dreadnaught got nearer it caused a shift in the narrative currents, a backwash that moved Liu Xi’s refuge out of the passive little pocket of calm and out into the eddies of the dimensional vortex’s main funnel.
Liu Xi considered plunging into the swirling miasma, letting herself be ripped apart by the forces of the maelstrom. It was better than Princess Annar’s fate as a bride of the Parody Master.
The fury snapped inside her. Her gifts blossomed from their loam of terror and rage. Her power washed over the Dreadnaught uselessly, but she carved off truck-sized gobbets of rock from her spinning sanctuary and hurled them with meteor force at the incoming warship.
The Dreadnaught paused, countering this new threat.
Liu Xi made her choice. She grabbed the whole remaining rock with her mind, a fragment the size of a tower block. She held it close, allowing herself to become one with it. She propelled it with suicidal force at the Dreadnaught, shattering through the vessel’s shields.
“For Annar,” she hissed through gritted teeth. She felt the unfamiliar tingle of a teleportation beam too late to counter it. A second later the Dreadnaught’s forward cannons shattered the incoming rock to mere dust that was whipped away by the fierce currents of the Vortex.
This Afternoon, 2.13pm
“I have a tracking signal!” Glitch called out urgently. “It’s very faint. I’ll try to amplify it!”
“How faint?” demanded Dancer. “Good enough to get a fix for a dimensional portal?”
“It usually takes hours to calibrate those,” Amy Aston warned, “but Glitch’s survey hardware shaves the time down by a huge amount. Just keep doing whatever it is you’re doing to make this possible, Dancer.”
Cody Harper strapped on a field harness and joined Yuki Shiro on the transfer platform. “I’m going too,” he said defiantly.
“No you’re not,” Miss Framlicker said sternly. “Al’s not going to thank us if his mystery son gets wiped out while we’re babysitting.”
“Hey, hold on!” objected Ham-Boy, dragging another harness from the lockers. “There’s only one person here trained to go through those portals and that’s me!”
“Except you quit,” Amy pointed out. The world’s meatiest hero had interned with Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises but things hadn’t worked out.
“So I’m freelance now,” HB shot back. “If anyone jumps into unknown danger to save Lisa and Al it’s going to be me!”
“I’m going,” Cody insisted. “There are some things you just have to do. This is one, okay?”
“Let the kid come,” Yuki urged. “Both of them. We shouldn’t be discouraging guts and initiative in the young, should we?”
“And when they comes back with those guts hanging out of their stomachs?” Miss F argued.
“I’ve got a spike!” Glitch called out. “We have contact.”
Amy cut short the debate by opening the dimensional gateway, pinching together two sections of space-time so they were linked on the transfer pad. The peripheral force field machinery whined as it ensured that the vacuum on the other side of the breach didn’t empty the EEE headquarters of air.
“Deep space?” worried Dancer. “Al’s in deep space?”
“It could be just his equipment that’s out there,” Cody pointed out. “Have you got an environment suit I could…” “Don’t bother,” Yuki called, hurling herself through the gateway. “I’m on it.”
“She doesn’t need to breathe,” Ham-Boy pointed out to the astonished young man. “Well, her brain needs oxygen but she’s got an internal supply that’ll hold out for long enough.”
The alarm panel attached to Yuki’s harness cable lit up with red. “Emergency!” shouted Miss F. “Winch her back. Fast!” Dancer somersaulted over the force field generator and kicked the fast-return lever on the cable reel.
Yuki tumbled back onto the transfer deck clutching Al B’s commcard and bubble pipe. Ham-Boy grabbed her with a hastily-generated sausage string and pulled her clear. Cody leaped aside and stared through the void at what was following her.
It was black as sin and somehow it was sucking the heat out of the EEE headquarters even through force fields designed to hold back the absolute cold of space. It was clad in a ragged black robe that shifted uncomfortably over something far from human. Mad red lizard eyes stared unblinkingly from beneath the tattered hood. It strode something as black as itself that might have been a winged horse or a mutated dragon or a giant insect, but it was something that could fly through the nothingness between worlds and seem to belong there.
It was T’Thran the Lurid, Singularity Rider, Doomwraith, and he had been waiting for someone to gate into his trap.
Miss Framlicker reached for the gate abort button, but all the strength had gone from her muscles. She saw Dancer and Amy and HB and Cody likewise slump like cut puppets. She saw Yuki struggling to get up like a wind-up toy that had run down, too slow. She saw the LEDs fading out across Glitch’s green and orange frame. The creature hadn’t even crossed the gateway threshold yet and it was already killing them.
They heard whisperings in their mind. They knew then that it wasn’t just going to kill them. It was going to claim them.
The main transfer coil moderator bus overheated and exploded, burying fragments of searing hot equipment into the far walls of the firehouse. The gateway fizzed and collapsed, just too late for T’Thran to leap through.
Life returned to the frost-rimed laboratory. “That was very lucky,” observed Cody Harper, his teeth chattering.
“The opposite, really,” Dancer explained. She felt as if she’d been lifting weights for a week. “I’d been holding back the probability of that thingie going blooey for some time. When I stopped…”
“It made some lovely dent patterns on the other wall,” observed Glitch. All of them were trying to avoid thinking about the thing that had almost taken them.
“It was an ambush,” Yuki Shiro said, to the point. “They were laying in wait for us, watching the bait.” She shuddered as she drew her conclusions. “They know what we can do, they know how we’re going to react. They’re specifically planning to get us.”
“And they’ve already got Al,” Miss Framlicker reminded them.
This afternoon, 2.49pm
Mr Lye wore traditional Mandarin dress, long silken robes and elaborate pigtails, and he clucked his tongue as he examined Amanda St Clare in the Lair Legion’s sanatorium.
“Well?” asked Sir Mumphrey impatiently. “I can not cleanse her,” the owner of the Laundry of Doom warned him. “The Brand stains her in many ways. On the physical it has taken over control of her neurological functions, ingraining itself in all the major nerve clusters. It cannot be surgically removed.”
“I could go in and attempt to dissolve it,” offered the Manga Shoggoth. The other Legionnaires shuddered.
“On the psychic level it has its hooks into personality, growing throughout the character, subverting it heart and soul to obey the Parody Master,” Mr Lye went on. “Those who are enslaved in this way will not hold back but will serve with all their resources and cunning, bypassing any codes of morality or honour they might usually possess, but retaining all their skill and resourcefulness to carry out their commands.”
“Amber would never have behaved like she did,” Hatman admitted. “Whoever did this to her deserves…”
“There is more,” the Chinaman cut him off. “The Brand also works on a mystical level. Neither science nor magic alone could defeat it. The other part will always act. Attempts to remove the Brand trigger curses both mystical and physical.”
“I thought it couldn’t kill her,” Mr Epitome declared, staring down at the writhing government liaison officer. “If it had that ability then she’d be dead by now. Instead it tried to have her slaughter herself.”
“It cannot make her do more than she would normally have the capacity to do,” Mr Lye replied. “Few humans have the autonomic control to will themselves dead. But it will kill her if you attempt to erase it.”
“It is a terrible thing,” growled Donar. “Those who useth such evil will face the consequences. This I swear.”
“It is terrible,” Mr Lye continued. “You see, it also somehow hooks itself into the very soul of the victim. It enslaves them even beyond death. I can’t see how to stop it.”
“Amber can’t stay like this for long,” Princess Uhuna objected. “Even with I.V.s and if I keep shifting her symptoms and giving her health she’s going to destroy herself. We have to cure her. She won’t last the week otherwise!” Mr Lye nodded agreement. “The only way to overcome these Brands will be to overcome the will of the Parody Master himself. It is his power which makes them powerful. If he was destroyed, his Brands would be destroyed with him.” he glanced over at Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “If you want to free this child, that is what you must do.”
“Understood,” replied the leader of the Lair Legion. He stepped forward to Amber and pulled out his temporal pocketwatch. “In the meantime…”
He twisted the winder and pressed a stud on the Chronometer of Infinity. Amber vanished four weeks into the future. Mumphrey prayed that by then things might be better and there would be a way to help her.
“Any good news?” Samantha Bonnington asked plaintively. “Anything at all?”
“We’ve heard from Trickshot and Hacker Nine,” Mr Epitome said, but he gave no indication whether he counted that as actual good news. “Zelnitz is downloading information stolen from the SPUD secure databases into our mainframe even now. Trickshot left again.” “He said that he hath the world’s longest longshot to set up,” Donar puzzled.
“And the plan to try and save Miiri’s baby should be good to go in under an hour,” reported Hatman.
Everyone tried to pretend they didn’t see Uhuna’s worried face.
This afternoon, 3.33pm
“Is this going to work?” demanded Visionary, staring at the trailing tangle of wires that lashed together the hologram recorders that NTU-150 had cobbled from three x-ray machines and a drinks dispenser. Hallie was nervously studying the womb schematics Dr Moo had generated on her laptop, aided and abetted by the kibitzing of a talking rat lab assistant and a talking robot flea.
“It’s our best chance,” Enty admitted. “But it’s dangerous for Miiri and it’s dangerous for Hallie. And it’s most dangerous for the baby. I’m getting very confused biosigns from the foetus.”
“Miiri is getting very weak now,” Dr Whitwell warned. “If you’re going to try something, it is now or never.” “Do you want this, Miiri?” demanded Ohanna. “You have to consent. This isn’t a Master’s choice, it’s yours.”
“Save my child,” Miiri answered.
“Hallie?” Asil checked.
“It’s only for a couple of weeks or until Enty can figure out how to reverse the process, right?” the computer sentience replied. “I can survive confined in the virtual realms in the Mansion computers for that long.”
“Thank you, Hallie,” Mirri called.
“You’re digitising the child, implanting it into Hallie in a virtual reality, gestating it there to recover from its injuries, then planning to spawn it back into the actual world thereafter,” summarised the diabolical Dr Moo. “And they call me mad.” “Pull the lever, Enty,” Hallie ordered. “I could use some maternity leave.”
NTU-150 pulled the lever.
Continued below... |
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6/Windows 2000 (3.6 points)
“You’re a long way from home,” Lisa Waltz commented to the young elementalist. “Miss the last bus?”
Liu Xi looked up in astonishment at the first lady of the Lair Legion and Al B. Harper. There was another woman there too, a purple-jumpsuited blonde who had operated the teleport scoop so deftly. Kinki didn’t seem that impressed with what she’d caught.
“I was being chased,” Liu Xi Xian explained. “I still am being.”
“Well they know where we are,” Al B. countered. “The entire Correction Deck is being cordoned off, and some bright spark has thought to separate the Discipline Terminals from the main Dreadnaught systems.” He didn’t sound too unhappy about it.
“We’re on one of the Parody Master’s warships staging a little prison break,” Lisa explained to the newcomer. Liu Xi didn’t overlook how brittle the amorous advocatrix’s breezy tones were. She recognised the unpleasant red discolorations on the woman’s body no matter how hard she tried to distract from them.
“Pain wand,” called out Al B. Harper.
Kinki took a moment to select from the large choice available. “How about this one?” she asked, weighting it carefully, still unsure.
“Drop it into the array,” Al told her, gesturing to the cats cradle he’d assembled from the various torture devices strewn around the Correction Lab. He twisted a final pair of wires together then connected the psionic agony rod to the whole. “There,” he grinned. “I connected it through the discipline circuits in that Avaarmour those troopers wear. Every Avawarrior in the place is being disciplined now. At these levels they should all be writhing on the floor in agony.”
“Good,” said Kinki. “Now we must seize this ship, slaughter our enemies, and return the vessel to your base so it can be used against the Parody Master.”
“Er, we can’t do that,” Al objected. “Right Lisa?”
“Well that was my plan,” shrugged the first lady of the Lair Legion.
“I was going to be made a bride of the Parody Master,” Liu Xi explained. “They were hunting for me.”
“Join the club,” Kinki told her. “I’m thinking we should grab all his wives and hit him with a cosmic level alimony suit.”
Al B. was still worrying about the plan. “You want me to somehow take over the biggest, most sophisticated, most deadly dimensional craft I’ve ever seen, despite it being packed with thousands of fanatical raving followers of the most powerful villain in the Parodyverse, including that scary High Priest, and pilot it out of the screaming inter-narrative Vortex to park it on the Lair Lawn?”
“Yes please,” Lisa told him. “Preferably before any more of those acolytes manage to magic their way through the force fields protecting us.”
Liu Xi looked up and around, her face set with concentration. “They won’t be doing that any more,” she promised. Every time she thought she was empty she found new depths of resolve to mine.
“Okay folks,” Lisa announced over the ship’s intercom, “this is Lisa Waltz of the Lair Legion here. I just thought you should know that we’ve taken control of your ship, neutralised your avawarriors using their own discipline feeds in their armour, found a way of keeping back your voodoo priests, and right now we’re planning to hurl this Dreadnaught into the deep abyssal Vortex to its destruction. If any of that sounds bad to you then you might want to consider manning the lifeboats. In about five minutes Al B. Harper’s going to get bored and start randomly emptying compartments out into the maelstrom, so this would be a good time to take those vacations you’ve been promising yourself.”
Kinki nodded almost approvingly. “I would not have warned them,” she admitted.
“We are not actually able to do all of those things,” Liu Xi pointed out.
“Like they know that?” shrugged Lisa with an evil smile. “I’m a lawyer, remember?” She thumbed the intercom button again. “Oh, and could you please tell that Parody Master of yours from me that he’s a horse’s ass, except I quite like horses. Warn him that the time is coming when the Lair Legion’s going to spank his shiny red and black ass all over the galaxy, and if he doesn’t believe us then bring it on. That is all.”
Al B. was a strange ashen colour. “Lisa… I think you might just have doomed the planet.”
“Well when the PM invades people won’t be thinking about your court case any more, will they?” the amorous advocatrix challenged. “I’m looking forward to my win fee. Kinki, keep monitoring the people who are evacuating. I’ll be feeding my cat.”
Earlier this evening, 10.02pm
“Jason,” Gloria called. “Come over here.”
The MetaWatch vigilante came over to see the teenage girl that they were keeping in the burned out school. He was pulling on what looked to be a heavy ski jacket over his grubby t-shirt. “What is it?” he asked. “We’re nearly ready to go.”
“Already? You have a few minutes, Jase. I know you like me.”
“Well sure I do, Gloria. You know that. I figured you weren’t into me. All the girls go for Tobin because he’s so cool swith his tattoos and that…”
Gloria glanced at the barricaded fire exit. “We could slip out for a while,” she suggested. “While the others are getting the vans. Tobin doesn’t have to know.”
“We can’t,” Jason agonised. “Tobin said we stay you. You stay here. Operational security.”
“Jason, it’s going too far. We need to get out. This isn’t setting fire to some ex-mutate’s trash cans or breaking the windows of a pro-meta law centre. This is big time and it’s nasty. Not to mention dumb.”
“We’ve got everything planned out just great, Gloria.”
“You’re going to hit the Bean and Donut Coffee Bar and mess up Sarah Shepherdson. Everyone knows the Bean and Donut is protected. You’ll have Dancer and the Dark Knight and Messenger and half a dozen other heroes crawling all over you before you get halfway across the plaza.”
“We’ve got intel,” Jason said defiantly. “Dancer is away with those Caphan sex slaves. It was all on TV yesterday. Dark Knight and Messenger are no longer problems. And even the Lair Legion can’t be everywhere. We’ve got it all figured. And besides…”
“Besides?”
Jason opened up his ski jacket. It was loaded with packs of semtex and a dead man’s switch. “Stuart thinks I’m ready for this,” the young skinhead declared. “If any of those metas turn up then I get to offer the greatest service for freedom’s cause. All I do is get near to them and… boom!”
“A suicide bomb? Jason, that’s insane!”
“No. That’s me standing up for the freedoms this country used to uphold. ‘War means fighting and fighting means killing’. That’s what Nathan Bedford Forrest said. Stuart believes in me!”
Gloria had seen the persuasive mysterious leader of the “no more metas” movement, the secret force behind MetaWatch. He scared her because she almost found herself agreeing when he talked. It didn’t surprise her that he could manipulate a young idiot like Jason to die for him, to murder for him. “Jason, you must not do this thing. Stay here with me. It’ll be much nicer, I promise you.”
“I have a man’s work to do now, Gloria. I’m a man.”
“You’re an idiot,” sighed the young woman. “Catbot, get him.”
Gloria’s blue-furred robotic cat (whose brain patterns were copied from those of Lisa’s animal) dropped from the rafters right onto Jason’s shaved head. By the time Tobin and the others burst in to join in the melée, Gloria was racing through the empty night-time streets, desperate to warn Sarah of what was coming to get her.
Earlier this evening, 10.23pm
“You asked to see me?” asked Exemplary, looking round the wreckage of Garrick’s office
“I demanded to see you,” the President’s Advisor on Metahuman Affairs told the acting head of SPUD. “Hours ago.”
“We had a security breach on the helicarrier,” Exemplary shrugged. “It’s dealt with now.”
“As you can see, I had a security breach of my own.” Garrick had just finished discussing that with his number two Ruben Holcomb in no uncertain terms. “Do you know what the Lair Legion wanted to discuss?”
“I imagine they were mewling over SR 1066, wanting special dispensation. We’ve had similar pleadings from all kinds of organisations.”
“They wanted to discuss how their liaison officer Amber St Clare came to have been Patriot Branded,” Garrick explained. “I want to discuss how their liaison officer came to be Patriot Branded.”
Exemplary shrugged again. “It was an operational issue, to ensure we had intelligence from inside the Lair Mansion. Rex Regent approved it.”
“I didn’t approve it!” snapped Garrick. “I wasn’t informed. And I know why!”
“Why don’t you tell me, then?”
“It was because I would have recognised it for the damned stupid bonehead rookie mistake it was,” Bad News Herb thundered. “Not only does it hand the Legion the moral high ground but now we don’t have any means of dialogue with them. And it was the Legion who cracked the way of interfering with the Obedience Chip technology during the Technopolis War. Now they’ve got a Brand sample to work on too!”
“They can’t break the Brands,” Exemplary answered confidently. “And we already have over a thousand metahumans branded at our disposal, not to mention Vicki’s deal with those robots. The only dialogue we need to have with the Lair Legion now is ‘Lie down with your hands behind your necks or die instantly.’”
“Maybe,” breathed Herbert P. Garrick, “but the fact remains that you went behind my back, that you assaulted a loyal member of this administration, that you did not think through the consequences of your adventurism. You are off this project right now, Exemplary. You are relieved of duty.”
The SPUD Director shook his head. “Nope. It doesn’t work like that now, Herb. You see, I have some serious doubts about your loyalty. About your commitment. No, don’t move to your alarm buzzer. I’m locking your muscles in place.”
Garrick struggled but Exemplary’s power held him.
“You’re wobbling, Herb,” Exemplary went on. “I heard about your visit from Dancer. I know you’ve been bleating at Barriere and Honig and Cromlyn. You’ve become a liability.”
“I’m serving the United States of America!” shouted Garrick; except it came out as a mere croaking whisper.
Exemplary smiled as he unpacked an Obedience Brand. “We can soon change that,” he promised.
“Beware of booby traps,” warned Kinki the Conqueress as she strode onto the command deck of the Galactic Dreadnaught. The last of the crew had been teleported into the Vortex only a few moments ago. There’d been some hard fighting before that, and she was glad she’s had her refractive jumpsuit and anode ray gun to help her survive.
“We actually did it?” Al B. asked, amazed at himself. “Four of us took over this whole vessel?”
“Five,” corrected Lisa, stroking the cat that flowed over her arm like a slightly mouldy dishrag. “But now we need to get out of here. We let this thing drift very near to the main turbulence of the vortex to convince Taus and his fanatics to leave.”
“I can feel the forces tugging to rip even this ship apart,” warned Liu Xi, staring with senses that only patched the information into the her optic nerves. “Deep, terrible. And something else.”
“What else?” demanded Kinki. She ran an expert hand over the diagnostics station console and located the new threat. “Hero Feeders!”
“What?” Liu Xi vaguely remembered Xander mentioning something about them.
“Vortex parasites,” Lisa supplied. “They feed on continuity, lurking but never contributing. When they can, they swallow plots whole. They erase heroes from history, devour their entire existences. They’re bad news.”
Kinki nodded. “Around six hundred of them is worse news,” she reported. “We’ve definitely drifted too far.”
“I can’t pull us out of the turbulence,” Al B. warned. “It’s too strong here. And those Lurkers are closing in!”
“There must be a way out,” Liu Xi told him. “There were some priests of the Parody Master, out in the Vortex. They were looking for something, a lost Weapon. They said it was in the deeps. They must have had a way of getting out.”
“Perhaps… perhaps like a ship can use the centrifugal force of a whirlpool to increase its speed and break loose,” Al B. speculated, hastily jotting calculations. “But we can’t do that if we’ve got hero feeders clogging the hull, dissolving their way in.”
“It’s alright,” Kinki reported, surprised. “They’re breaking away, floating off! They’ve given up on us!”
“Why?” frowned Lisa.
Liu Xi felt it before ever the sensors picked up anything. “Aaagh!”
The three Singularity Riders swooped down from the higher eddies, their great black winged beasts keening in triumph at having found their prey. Liu Xi’s screams matched time with theirs.
“The parasites ran,” Kinki warned, “because the predators have arrived.”
“We have a problem,” warned Al B., just before the Dreadnaught lost all power and plummeted like a rock into the abyssal Vortex.
Now:
“It’s lucky Dancer was back early,” Commissioner Don Graham noted as he passed steaming coffees to the waitress and the teenager who were wrapped in blankets on the tailgate of the incident van. “Things would have been much nastier otherwise.”
“Tis sooth,” agreed Donar, still stalking up and down angrily with Mjalcolm tapping on his palm. “And now needs must we go and have wordeths with yon MetaWatch organisers.”
“It’ll be tough,” Gloria warned. “They operate in little cells. I don’t think anyone knows who everybody is, except maybe for Stuart.”
“Stuart?” asked Dancer sharply. “You’ve seen their leader? What’s he like?”
“Handsome enough in an oily sort of way,” Gloria conceded. “Charming, persuasive, kind of like a double glazing salesman. Hey, you’ve spilt your coffee!”
“They wouldn’t!” seethed Sarah, shaking as she worked out that the Apoclayspian villain Splendiferous Stuart was on the loose again. “He was imprisoned for crimes against humanity.”
“Earlier they sent Professor Manyarms, Anvil Man, the Atomic Bumpkin, Appendage Man, Brokenface, Spinoid, Grit, and Krotch against us,” pointed out Hatman. “I don’t think they’re choosy who they’re recruiting.”
“I could have smitten them all for the nonce,” grumbled Donar.
“You did well though, Gloria,” Graham told the teenager. “I can’t condone such terrible risks, but I can certainly use the information you’ve gathered to bring these people to justice.”
“If any court will convict them,” Mr Epitome added sourly. He stared out across the wreckage-strewn plaza and thought about the package from the Grey Eminence that he’d picked up earlier at a dead drop. “It’s getting very dark.”
12.00pm EST, 7.00pm GMT
“Gallowglass! My dear chap, it’s been far too long!” Mumphrey called down the phone to his old friend. He and the Gallowglass family went back a long way.
Inspector George Gallowglass of Scotland Yard had known Sir Mumphrey Wilton all his life, so he knew how much his news was going to upset the eccentric Englishman. “Mumphrey, there’s no good way to break this to you. I went to Madge’s grave today.”
A cold fist closed over Mumphrey’s heart. “And?”
“And it’s been… vandalised. Your wife’s coffin was in pieces. Her bones have been stolen. We found a piece of her shin, but that’s all.”
And that was when things got dark.
Next Issue: We ignore all of these plotlines and offer an experimental interlude that cant really be described in the coming next box except to say that it shows another aspect of the march of the Parody Master. But well be back with the unpleasantness on Earth right after that, honest. Its a promise. UT#258: War and Peace
L!'s FMRC Tie-In Story
JJJ's Baroness Tie-In Story
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright 2006 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright 2006 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.r>
