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Post By The Hooded Hood pushes his cast to the limits. Maybe the readers too. Fri Aug 04, 2006 at 04:39:14 am EDT |
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#280: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Sleep When You’re Dead | |
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| #280: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Sleep When You’re Dead Previously: The dimension-conquering Parody Master has been temporarily thwarted from claiming the Earth and seven chosen brides from it. An ancient Celestian energy barrier has been reactivated, supposedly protecting the solar system from all kinds of incursion, and yet forces of the Parody Master are still appearing across the planet. The Parody Master’s Doomherald sneaked into the Lair Mansion to free his master’s captive bride Princess Annar of the Skunks, and also absconded with Liu Xi Xian and the bottled city of Badripoor. The Lair Legion Line-Up this issue: Hatman (Jay Boaz, Leader), CrazySugarFreakBoy! (Dreamcatcher Foxglove, Deputy Leader), Lisa Waltz, Donar, Trickshot (Carl Bastion), Dancer (Sarah Shepherdson), The Manga Shoggoth, Mr Epitome (Dominic Clancy), Al B. Harper, Yuki Shiro, ManMan (Joe Pepper), Citizen Z, (Baroness Elizabeth Zemo) The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse (note that these links will probably not work for long after the 21st of this month)  CrazySugarFreakBoy slammed into the first Avawarrior, avoiding the molecule thin Avasword, kicking aside the energy-absorbing Avashield, and snapping back the armoured invader’s neck. He didn’t stop to see the result but continued haring forwards down the corridor, barely dodging the lasers that followed him. He wasn’t as fast as usual. The orange and greens of his costume were less gaudy. He’d been fighting almost non-stop for six days and nights, and by now he was battling on reflex and instinct alone. The Avawarriors sensed his exhaustion and pressed forward, matching his speed down the long maintenance tunnel beneath Cuba’s Juragua power station. In the confined space there was limited room for the wired wonder to dodge their attacks. One laser seared right through CSFB!’s heel, burning a neat hole through his Achilles tendon. Dreamcatcher Foxglove rolled through the exit doorway, unable to stand on two feet, lurching out of sight for a moment as he tumbled sideways to avoid the follow-up shots. The Avawarriors burst through the double doors ready to carve up the lone Legionnaire who had tried to stop them. “Right, laddies, let’s ha’ at th’ Sassenachs!” called a thick Scots voice; and the waiting Detonator Hippos fell upon the Avawarriors as the invaders raced into the killing zone. CrazySugarFreakBoy! dragged himself away from the combined blast zone of two dozen excited warlike genetically-engineered bipedal hippos with the metahuman ability to explode then reform themselves. He felt no joy in the slaughter he’d led the Avawarriors to, just a relief that another incursion had been stopped. Another incursion. This was the six hundred and fifteenth reported cell of Parody Master troops to appear in the last six days. Some had been lone Avawarriors, others had been full units complete with ordinance. Once it had been a squadron of three Avajets that had devastated Calamanca before Donar could take them down. Despite the toughness of the Avawarriors, the Detonator Hippos knew their jobs. The invaders were dealt with in short order, if somewhat messily. Finally Sergeant MacHarridan stomped over to where Dream was recovering and saluted. “The beasties are all fragged tae hell, sirr!” the Hippo reported. “Thanks, Sarge,” the Lair Legion’s deputy leader replied. “Contact the Mansion for your next assignment.” That prompted him and he pulled out his own comm-card. It took him two attempts to press the connect button. His eyes wouldn’t focus and his fingers wouldn’t respond. “CrazySugarFreakBoy! here,” he called in. “Mr Foxglove,” Contessa Natalia Romanza responded from the Operations Room of the Lair Mansion. “How did it go?” “You can call me Dreamy, you know,” CSFB! assured her. “Everybody does. Except Mr Epitome.” “I know what Mr Epitome calls you,” the Contessa assured him. She could see how unfocussed the hero’s eyes were, how faded his colours. “Tell me how the mission went. Is Juragua secure?” “Yeah, we did it. I led the Avs into a trap and the Hippos finished them. I took a bit of a shot so I won’t be walking for the next few hours. I can heal while I’m travelling.” “I’m afraid you’ll have to,” Natalia Romanza told him apologetically. “We have three more incursions unaddressed near you. I’m sending Sergeant MacHarridan to Georgetown, Brazil. I’ve got the FMRC B-Team heading to Managua, Mexico. You need to get to the Quito Research Facility as fast as your pilot can get you there. Reports of two armoured men with swords defending the high energy research unit at the university.” “I’m on it,” Dream promised her wearily. Maybe he could get some sleep in the LairJet on the way to his next battle? “Dancer here,” Sarah Shepherdson reported back to base. “The threat in La Coruna is contained. I brought down six Avawarriors and three of those strange mutated monster-warrior things they use as battering rams. The locals are keeping them prisoner.” “Good job, Dancer,” Amber St Clare congratulated the probability-shifting heroine. “I’ll send an OPS team to collect them.” “Not such a good job,” Dancer confessed. “By the time I got here they’d already ploughed through half the base personnel, and when they were cornered they tried to accelerate the reactor core. I’ve minimised the chances of a leak and contamination, but to be honest I’ve no idea right now if I managed it or not.” She seemed defeated, smaller than usual. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair was lank and greasy. A line of bruises ran down one side of her face. “We need you at the next invasion point,” Amber apologised. “It’s a bad one.” Dancer tried to give a carefree smile and failed miserably. “Sure,” she told them. “I’m good to go.” Mr Epitome threw aside the last of the Avawarriors then turned and hurled their Avatank into the nuclear reactor core behind him. “Hey, could you give some warning before you try to irradiate the entire country!” objected Yuki Shiro. “What the hell are you doing anyhow?” The star-spangled splendour looked around the shattered R’Ungsan Nuclear Power Station angrily. “I’m burying this place in its own rubble is what I’m doing,” he told the cyborg P.I. and the Manga Shoggoth. “This place wasn’t built to be a power station really anyhow.” In the distance a few of the North Koreans started shouting as they realised what Epitome was doing. The looming writhing mass of the Manga Shoggoth encouraged them to keep their distance. “You are referring to the configuration which suggests the purpose of this place is to create weapons grade radioactive material?” the loathsome elder being concluded. “And so it does. I consumed some of it earlier. It gave me the hiccups.” “Okay, so it’s a treaty violation,” Yuki agreed, “but Epitome, you can’t just march into their country…” “And save their asses from an invading army of extraterrestrials?” Dominic Clancy demanded as he continued his work. “And demolish their property. We’re allied to them right now. Here as guests.” “You can be their guest. I’m an American, and I’m doing my job. Which is taking down enemies of the USA.” Yuki stood in the way of the angry paragon of power. “Stop it! This isn’t what we were sent here to do.” The Shoggoth made an unpleasant burping noise then waited until the bits of him that had flown off squirmed back to the main biomass. “Or what?” Epitome asked Yuki, “You’ll attack me again?” “What you’re disassembling here will have more consequences than your petty vandalism of my bike,” the silicon shamus said hotly. “You’re just a bully! And a thug!” “Better that than a weak liberal hedonist with a secret death-wish,” Clancy shot back. “Keep out of my way or I’ll be happy to help you with that.” “You could try. But that wouldn’t make any difference to my basic point that you are damaging the reputation of this team and your country by using your powers to impose your world view. And that doesn’t make you a hero, Clancy. That makes you a prick!” “Like I care what a punk-haired Anime wannabe thinks of me.” “Like you care at all, except for you own bigoted prejudiced political agenda.” Neither Yuki nor Epitome had slept more than an hour at a time since the latest wave of Parody Master incursions had started a week before. They were frazzled and exhausted and neither was in any mood to back down or compromise. They stood facing each other as the reactor collapsed behind them, each on the verge of doing something even more irreparable. The Shoggoth rolled over them, sweeping them up in his biomass and rolling down the hill towards LairJet Three. “Amber has called,” he told them as he went. “We are to respond to a call for help in Kyoto, Japan. Shall I drive?” Just outside Cape Town, South Africa, four of the Parody Master’s war machines had manifested outside the nuclear power plant. The airborne unit had cleared the area of human life while the three ground druids began to ramp the reactor core up to the red line; not beyond it, though. An early attempt by South American militia to storm the building had been disastrous, leaving bodies strewn across the causeway outside the concrete building. A second diplomatic attempt had increased the body count. Then Donar had arrived, dropping from his goat chariot to crash through the flying war platform then striding into the building to subdue the others. Ten minutes later he staggered out, gently steaming. “Tis all right now,” he told the crowd that the police could no longer hold back. “I hast quelled the felons for the nonce. Their pieces art mostly in the walls.” A half-brick bounced off the hemigod’s skull. “What?” asked Donar, turning round in time to get another missile in the face. “Go home!” came a shout from the crowd. “We never asked to be dragged into this war. It’s not our fight. Go home and take your war with you!” The Ausgardian looked puzzled. “But twas not I that bade yon Parody Master demipuppets to invade here.” Another barrage of debris hit him. “Tyrant!” “Arrogant American!” “Warmonger!” “Coward!” Donar’s face darkened. His grip tightened on Mjalcolm, his enchanted baseball bat-with-a-nail-in-it. “Coward, say thee?” he hissed. Somewhere thunder crashed. It was going to be a dark wet summer in South Africa this year. Six Avawarriors had appeared within the Paradopolis research facility of Bautista Enterprises, breaking out of the Exotic Energy Research Unit’s cyclotron tunnel and slashing their way through the plant’s security personnel while trying to capture as many of the technicians as possible. Hatman, Trickshot, and ManMan responded, taking the initiative when Trickshot piloted their LairJet right through the roof of the research building, allowing Hatty to go in with his Hurricanes hat and pin everyone to the walls. Knifey directed his wielder ManMan on the exact spots where a well place slash could shut down Ava-armour motors. It was still a hard fight, complicated by screaming civilian casualties. Trickshot abandoned the Lairjet and took to the air on his Flying Ass, a personal hover-vehicle from which he loosed pinpoint-precise shots at the angry Avawarriors. If he noticed his aim was a quarter-inch off after days of sleep-deprived struggling then he didn’t admit it. At last it was over. Hatman pulled off his Bulls cap and thumbed his comm-card. “This one’s done. Send in the emergency services. We have a lot of casualties. And we’ll need containment for five Avawarriors.” “On its way,” Kat Allen promised him. “Are you guys alright?” “You could send over about eight big macs apiece,” ManMan suggested. “And maybe the Swedish bikini team with some massage oil.” “What’s happening next on the threat board?” Hatman asked the Operations Room. “We have another report from the Hoover Dam,” Kat warned. “This’ll be the third. And there’s something bad happening down in Richmond near the ZOXXON installation. And we’re just getting a call for help from the Denver Nuclear Installation.” “We’ll need to split up again,” Hatman concluded. “Tricky, you head to Richmond…” “Hold it, boss,” the arrogant archer called. “I need a quiet word with you.” Jay Boaz allowed himself to be led away from ManMan and the clean-up crew. “What is it, Tricky?” the leader of the Lair Legion asked. “We don’t have time to pick and choose our assignments.” “Right. We’ve been on the go since last Wednesday without any kinda break. How long before we get too sloppy and one of us makes a bad mistake? The kind that ends in body bags.” “We already have body bags. Too many.” “Yeah, but these wus caused by the bad guys. How long till one of us gets it wrong, state we’re all in? How long till one o’ th’ Legion is in the body bag?” Hatman pushed his sweaty hair back from his face. “I don’t know. But we have to keep responding to the calls. We can’t allow the Parody Master to gain a beach-head here on Earth.” “Wrong,” Trickshot told him. He pressed a pointed thumb to his chest. “We have ta keep responding ta the calls.” He pushed a finger into Hatman. “You ain’t Deputy Leader any more. It’s not your job ta steer us through the grunt work now. You’re Leader of one’a the most experienced line-ups that the LL has ever had. We know whut we’re supposed ta do, and if we don’t we got CSFB! to yell at us.” Hatman blanched. “You’re saying I’m not doing my job?” “I’m sayin’ that between my time with this Legion an’ the one from the parallel America I originally came from I’ve seen pretty much every boss the LL’s ever had. You’ll do just fine. But right now we don’t need another joe down in the trenches. We need a leader solvin’ the bigger problems. Capeesh?” Jay Boaz nodded his head slowly. “Thanks, Tricky.” “Just do somethin’ clever, willya. Br’er Tricky could really use some downtime.” Hatman activated his comm-card. “Kat, I’m sending Trickshot to Richmond and ManMan to Denver. See if you can get hold of Lara and get her to the Hoover Dam. If not then divert Dancer. And send a driver for me. I’m coming in.” “We have to get out,” spiffy declared. “As opposed to yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that?” asked the Idiom without even looking up from her workbench. “Yes, I’m one hundred percent appraised of the reason I’m working 24-7 in this hot stuffy lab.” Bev Cambell pushed back a grin at her boyfriend’s face. “Have you made any progress since we came and interrupted you yesterday?” she asked Leticia Gagahan. The criminal genius sighed. “I thought I had, but then… it’s as if every possible thing that could work against me is working against me. Bad samples, glitched computer programs, unexpected power outages.” “I’ve got people working on that last one,” spiffy promised. The President-for-Life of Badripoor sighed. “Thing is, what with the entire nation-state getting shrunk down and enclosed in a two-foot high force-field bottle, we’ve got a few problems keeping the basics like food, water, and power going.” “Don’t worry,” the Idiom comforted him. “My models indicate that we’ll run out of breathable air before we starve to death.” “What?” spiff yelped. “When?” “Oh, not for over three weeks yet. We’ll have plenty of time for food riots, break down of law and order…” “We have law and order now?” Bev asked, thinking of the typical Badripoor street scene. “We have to find a way to undo the freak effect that got us like this,” spiffy said. “Apart from our internal problems, let’s not forget that the best we can tell the whole city’s been stolen from the Lair Mansion and we’re now in the hands of a minion of the Parody Master.” The Idiom nodded. “Well I’ll certainly be working faster now you’ve explained to me that it’s urgent,” Leticia snapped. “Before I was just doing it for a lark.” “He just feels helpless, that’s all,” Bev mitigated. “We all do.” The Idiom rubbed her temples. “The problem is,” she sighed, “that to undo our… situation we have to achieve several things at once. We have to simultaneously take down the mutated energy barrier that’s keeping us safe from the world but is also trapping us here. We have to correctly undo the size-change in ways that doesn’t cause us to explode. And we have to teleport Badripoor back to where it was, or at least somewhere that it won’t suddenly occupy ten square miles of somebody else’s city.” “But right now there’s that big Celestian barrier preventing teleports,” spiffy understood. “And cutting us off from the sub-dimension that the size-changing particles interact with,” the Idiom added. “So you can see my problem.” spiffy glanced out of the window at the teeming miniature city below. “I can see nothing but problems,” he admitted. “Talk to me, Al,” Hatman said. “What’s happening? How is the Parody Master getting troops through that supposedly-impenetrable Celestian barrier?” The Legion’s archscientist was surrounded by hundreds of files from the last week’s incursions. His desk and workbench had vanished and he looked like he was overwhelmed. “You want the non-technical answer?” “Yes.” Al shrugged. “I don’t know.” He gestured to the small pile of bubble-pipes he’d chewed through in the course of his frustrating researches. “I’ve tried all kinds of modelling, looked at a dozen theories. They’re not time-travelling in. They’ve not been sleeping in stasis all along. They’re not being grown and constructed here.” He pointed to field tests he’d had the Shoggoth conduct for him. “The Celestian barrier is weakening slowly, but it shouldn’t be soft enough for anything to pass through yet for months.” “I have bruises and scratches all over my body that say different,” Hatman argued. “Summarise what we actually do know.” Al B. punched up a map of the world. “In the first ten days after the Celestian barrier was triggered we had nine substantial encounters with Parody Master troops,” he summarised. “Of these, we can discount seven of them as being vestigial forces left over from the initial attack when the war started.” “But not the ones at Aswan and Hoover,” Jay Boaz agreed. “They seemed to come from nowhere.” “Correct. And both of those sites have been attacked twice since. In the last seven days, and with increasing frequency, we’ve had a total of six hundred and twenty-six attacks across the planet.” “Except they weren’t just blind attacks,” Hatman noted. “The Avaforces that came through went for power stations, nuclear facilities, high energy resources, but in no case did they destroy them. Instead they sought to capture them, in some cases even improve them.” Al nodded. “If the Parody Master does have a conduit to send troops to Earth, he could just as easily have sent trans-nuclear weapons,” he reasoned. “I think he wants to take us alive.” “That’s not a comforting rationale,” Jay admitted. “We have to stop this, Al. The team – and all the other folks we have out there coping with this one – can’t keep going much longer. And it’s getting worse.” Al B. reached for a new bubble pipe. “I have one theory,” the archscientist admitted, “but to prove it will be difficult and dangerous.” Hatman reached his aching hand down to his Hatility Belt. “Sounds like my job description,” he admitted with a sigh. “Okay, this uncomfortable cupboard-sized roofspace is all yours,” Amy Aston told the EEE Firehouse’s newest guest. “Bathroom’s down the hall and be careful because if anybody flushes then the shower gets very hot. I’m immune to heat but you aren’t.” “Thanks,” Kara Harper told her. “Good safety tip.” “That room across the landing is mine. If it has underwear hung on the doorhandle don’t come knocking.” “I promise I wouldn’t want to touch the underwear.” “Rules of the house: don’t unplug or plug in anything. This is very important. If you use the last of the milk, buy more. Same with the beer. If you hear explosions, duck. If you hear swearing, feel free to join in. It’s probably that you dad has done something stupid again.” Al B. Harper’s daughter from a potential future nodded. “Gotcha. Where’s the fridge?” Amy continued her tour. “This place isn’t that big. We’ve got the attic bedrooms, then the kitchen and office are on the balcony over the main workshop.” “This place used to be a fire station,” Kara remembered. “I like the pole.” “Don’t we all,” Amy snorted. “You get to work here without pay on whatever dangerous project your father’s got us into next, and if you’re good we’ll let you not just make the coffee but also take part in suicidally stupid ground-breaking experiments that’ll rock the world of physics. In between you get to bicker like the rest of us. Deal?” “Sounds good,” agreed Kara. “When do I start?” “Oh, one last thing,” Amy noted. “If you turn out to be an impostor trying to infiltrate us and do Al harm, then I have a size 12 spanner that I’ll smash into your skull so hard they’ll be getting the stains out of the walls in Europe. He’s had enough to cope with these last few weeks, so if you’re here to do bad things then start running now. This is your first and only warning.” Kara swallowed hard. “Okay,” she agreed. “Do I get my own doorkey?” Hatman pulled on a ninja mask. As soon as it touched his head he took on the conceptual abilities of a ninja. Even his thinking changed, becoming colder and more precise. He blended into the shadows as if he owned them and moved on silent feet through the outer perimeter of the Avawarriors around the Hoover Dam power generation building. It took him the better part of an hour to get inside. A part of him was screaming that he was allowing the enemy to gain a foothold, that the longer he delayed sending in heroes to flush the invasion away the more it would cost to succeed; but another bit of him knew that he had to fulfil the wider mission. There were at least thirty Avawarriors around the power station this time, supported by technicians and combat drones. Hatman even saw a pair of lobotomised Maxellians led around by their handler. He kept moving. The major security appeared to be around the massive hydroelectric turbines themselves, so that was where the capped crusader went. He selected a Scorpions hat and scuttled along the roof of the turbine chamber. The noise from the engines was almost deafening. There below, right between the vast electromagnetic coils that converted the kinetic energies from the dammed water into electrical power, the Avawarriors had set up a dimensional doorway. It was no bigger than four feet square and it kept flickering in and out but it was sufficient that every few minutes another of the Parody Master’s minions could squeeze through. Hatman pointed his commcard towards the scene below and set it to transmit. “Al, are you getting this?” he whispered. “Some interference, but yes,” came back the answer. “They are managing to break through. The electromagnetic fields here must be of the right frequency to locally weaken the Celestian barrier. It’s spread really thin, diluted a billion times from its usual strength because we’ve projected it so far. There are flaws in it, weak spots caused by EM activity at a certain frequency. That’s why all the spontaneous breakthroughs were at high energy sources. And why the Avawarriors wanted to crank up the power.” Al wasn’t the only one getting the transmission. Down below a defence drone beeped urgently and sounded the alarm. Three avawarriors and a combat platform peeled away to investigate. “Have you seen what you need to see here?” Hatman asked Al. “I know how they’re getting in, yes,” agreed Al B. “How to stop them…?” Hatman dropped from the roof as the combat platform opened fire. He pulled on his Torpedoes cap as he fell and slammed into the wire frame of the dimensional conduit, smashing it. The Avawarriors closed in on him angrily, slashing with their Avaswords. Coming Next: So little time, so many invaders. Our exhausted heroes have to hold the line and find some way of pushing it back. Liu Xi is the guest of the Doomherald. Baroness von Zemo does a deal with HERPES. Sir Mumphrey Wilton takes out his frustrations on the French. And things go boom. Untold Tales of the Parody War: The Lights Are Going Out… should be posted right under this story here. 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. |
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