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Post By The Hooded Hood hammers down another batch of pre #300 sub-plots Fri Dec 15, 2006 at 05:10:14 am EST |
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#298: Untold Tales of the Parodyverse: The Adventures of Al B. Harper in the Twenty-Third Century | |
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| #298: Untold Tales of the Parodyverse: The Adventures of Al B. Harper in the Twenty-Third Century Previously: During an escape from the Parody Master, archscientist Al B. Harper and Kinki, daughter of time-travelling Wang the Conqueror, became lovers. Their offspring Cody returned from the future to the present day as a teenager. When Kinki tried to eliminate the other women in Al’s life Miss Framlicker turned her ray back on her, casting both of them out of the timestream. This caused Cody to be expelled from the timeline into Comic-Book Limbo, where he later met the similarly-trapped Amazing Guy and Dan Drury, director of SPUD. In the altered future Kinki instead birthed a daughter, Kara, who likewise returned to the present day as a teen, and who fears being erased if Cody is restored. Al B. seeks to find the missing Miss Framlicker, Cody, and Kinki. He does not yet know that Cody is in Comic-Book Limbo, or that similarly missing Liu Xi Xian and the Doomherald have also found themselves trapped there. The adventures of Liu Xi and the Doomherald in Comic-Book Limbo are described in Destination Part One Part Two Part Three, and Part Four, by Jason and HH.   Al B, Harper, genius archscientist, checked his to-do list: 1. Find Muffy Framlicker, wherever she got zapped to when she stopped Kinki 2. Find Cody, wherever he got erased to when Muffy stopped Kinki 3. Rescue Muffy, probably from Kinki’s clutches in the future 4. Rescue Cody, probably by impregnating Kinki in the future 5. Stop Kara from being erased because I rescued Cody 6. Stop Kinki killing Muffy 7. Stop Muffy killing Kinki 8. Stop Amy killing Kinki and Muffy 9. Find a way to get everybody home again past the impenetrable Celestian barrier 10. Return library books 11. Stop the Parody Master 12. Buy new sneakers “Right,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Better get started.” “It’s very simple,” Amy told Joseph Pepper, the Legionnaire called ManMan. “Shall I go over it one more time?” “It’s one lever,” Joe pointed out. “I have to pull it down to start the portal. I have to push it up to switch it off. I think I can manage.” “But it’s an important lever,” the senior (and only) engineer for Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises persisted. “Would you like a rehearsal?” “You sure do inspire confidence in your co-workers,” Knifey chuckled at his Elvis-impersonating wielder. “Then again, you have been known to confuse up and down.” “Not without an all-night bar crawl with dull thud,” ManMan defended himself. “It’s a lever. What can go wrong?” Amy rapped him on the cranium with a size 6 spanner. “You never tempt fate by saying something like that just before you pull the big lever. Never.” “Ouch,” complained Joe. “Knocking on wood,” Knifey suggested helpfully. “This is not simple, okay,” Amy insisted. “We are trying to punch through a barrier that the Parody Master can’t get through, to shift through space and time to the dimensional crossroads city known as Starcross. And that’s been hidden so the Parody Master can’t find it. It involves processes so complicated that I can’t even remember all the syllables.” “Isn’t punching a hole through the Celestian barrier going to kind of let the Parody Master and his countless hordes through to, you know, conquer the Earth?” Joe checked. Amy dinged him on the head again. “That’s why we have you on the big lever,” she reiterated. “Down starts the electromagnetic disruption generator that weakens the barrier enough for us to project through. Up shuts if off so nothing can come back the other way, until the prearranged time when you open it up again for no more than one second. It’s an important lever. I have no idea why we’ve put you in charge of it.” “Shouldn’t you be doing the important lever work?” Knifey suggested to the overall-clad (and nothing but overall-clad) girl mechanic. “Your firm hired Joe as a delivery boy to dive through dangerous portals to unknown locations. You’re the engineer. Why are you going with Al rather than letting Joe risk his life?” “Thanks for the support, Knifey,” ManMan sighed. “I’m going because Miss Framlicker is my friend,” Amy replied. “I need to find her and kick her personally for pulling this stunt. And because otherwise Al is likely to do something stupid. I mean something else stupid.” “I thought he was a genius,” ManMan ventured. “Sure. A dumb one,” the engineer retorted. “Just concentrate on the lever, Pepper.” “She’s nervous,” Knifey noted as Amy Aston stalked off to check the tech-backpacks they were taking with them on their adventure. “That’s why she’s being so rude to you.” “She must be nervous a lot,” Joe Pepper observed. He was the newest employee of EEE and he was still finding his feet. Joining the staff in the middle of the Parody War had hardly been an ideal introduction. “She’s okay,” Kara Harper told him, dropping down from the balcony above and landing dexterously beside the Elvis impersonator. “You just have to know when to give her sweet black coffee and when to duck.” ManMan noticed that Kara was also carrying a tech-pack. “You’re going too?” he surmised. “Well sure. I’m not just hanging around here looking at a dumb lever,” Al B.’s daughter from the future answered. “As if I’ll just wait about to find out if I get erased from history.” Joe frowned. “About that…” he ventured. He needed exposition. Knifey summarised. “Al B. met and romanced Kinki the Conqueress, daughter of the time-travelling villain Wang the Conqueror. He impregnated Kinki and she birthed Cody, sending him back in time to be raised in an orphanage in this time period before he showed up as a teenager a year or so back. But when Miss F stopped the jealous Kinki from murdering her the two women were thrown out of the timeline, the future was changed, and Kara was conceived instead. Or at least that’s the working theory.” “Almost right,” agreed Kara, an attractive teenager with short blonde hair. “Except dad didn’t romance mom. She seduced him to prevent herself becoming a bride of the Parody Master. And in my timeline mom imprisoned Miss Framlicker in dad’s city of Starcross and tortured her for eighteen years or so.” “We all have to date our share of psychopaths who try to kill us and our friends afterwards,” ManMan offered philosophically. “There was this one time with Kumari…” Joe’s reminiscence was interrupted by the clattering of Al B. and Amy dragging the final projection module down from the workshop onto the floor of the converted firehouse that was EEE’s headquarters. “Well, good luck,” Joe told Kara as she dragged on her backpack. “I’ll need it,” the young woman admitted nervously. “I mean, if this goes wrong I just won’t be any more. And that means no more of our fumbling, confused dates with the inappropriate touching, Joe Pepper.” ManMan was baffled. “We’ve never had a date, Kara.” “Well that’s because you’ve never asked me yet, Joe.” “Everybody ready?” Al B. called from the transfer grid platform. “Amy? Kara?” “Hey, wait a minute…” Joe called after Kara as she climbed up behind her father. She shot him a dimpled, mischievous smile. “Joe, you sure you can handle that lever?” Al asked the knife-wielder. “It’s a lever,” ManMan repeated. “It goes down and up.” “We should have given him extra training,” Amy worried. “All condition jumpers are green. Generators are optimum. We’re good to go.” “Alright, Joe,” called out Al B. Harper. “Pull the lever.” “Downwards,” added Amy. ManMan pulled the lever. The transwarp tachyon shift modulator overloaded, spraying the room with molten fragments of cherry-red metal. “Yow!” shrieked Joe as a piece of debris the size of a washing machine flew over his head and embedded itself in the field node stabiliser behind him. The room filled with choking black smoke. The sprinklers went off. “What did you do?” demanded Amy, flying off the platform towards the unfortunate lever-puller. “How did you screw up something so simple?” “So it was simple,” ManMan argued. “See, I told you…” “Hmm,” scowled Al B., chewing on his bubble pipe. “That was unexpected. There’s probably a phase variation in the decay resonance of the Celestian barrier that I didn’t account for, probably where e is inversely related to the virtual co-ordinates if n squared is…” He turned towards the nearest wall, his hand fishing chalk from his pocket. Only Kara looked out of the window. “Um, dad?” she called. “We’re not in Gothametropolis any more.” “Can I just say… yeow!” Cody Harper cried as Amazing Guy swerved out of the way of the vast grey-white misty silhouette that rose from the ground to surround them. “That proto-Hero Feeder is about a zillion times bigger than anything I’ve seen in this place before.” “Yes, I think we woke it up from its ancient slumber,” the protector of the Parodyverse admitted, trying to gain altitude. “It’s very powerful. It’s eating through my energy constructs like they weren’t there.” “That’s comforting,” spat Dan Drury, rescued head of SPUD. “O’ course, if somebody had let me raid, say, the Austernal armory then we might have had somethin’ that could put a dent in it.” Amazing Guy narrowly avoided another life-erasing slash from the primal monster. “Is this the time to try I-told-you-so-ing me?” he demanded. “Looks like there won’t be a later to get it in,” the old soldier pointed out. “Guys, that temple down there,” Cody pointed out. “The one with the funky half-eroded bas reliefs. That thing was trying to break in there, but it was having trouble.” “We could shelter inside there,” AG understood. “Catch our breaths. Plan.” He swooped low, still dragging the platform of quantum multiversal energies on which he drew his companions. He found one of the rents in the ancient stone wall, large enough for a person to squeeze through, far too small for the massive beast that followed them. “Watch out!” Drury called. “It’s coming for us!” AG rammed Cody and Drury through the hole then let loose with his full power to slam the proto-Lurker away from them. Exhausted, he toppled back through the hole himself. He narrowly avoided the spray of razor-sharp chips that erupted from the ground beside him. “Don’t move or you’ll die,” warned Liu Xi Xian. “And she’s not kidding,” advised Exu, former god of murder to whom this temple had been raised. “I can tell you that much.” “Invaders!” shrieked Wang the Conqueror, rising from his loungeomatic executive chair to pace before the captives his Wang Troopers had dragged before him. “Intruding interlopers interfering with my incandescent innovations. Iconoclastic irritants seeking to infiltrate my, my…” “Ignorance?” offered Al B. Harper helpfully. “Wang Troopers?” ManMan asked the guards. “Really?” “Grandpa, chill,” Kara advised the time-travelling tyrant. “That vein in your forehead is going again. And we all know what the robodoc said about that.” “Grandpa?” Wang fulminated. “You bring your time-travelling fire station past my masterful temporal defences then insult my age!” Amy glanced at Kara. “You don’t recognise her? But she’s your granddaughter.” “Vapid, venal vandals with your vile… what did you say?” Wang asked. “Time travel,” sighed Knifey. “Ask the Wang Troopers what year it is, Joe. And don’t snicker at them.” Al B. was studying the monitor feedouts scrolling on the screens behind Wang’s control lounger. “It’s 2241,” he told them. “We’re in Starcross, that little town that Wang visited after his last multi-part disaster with the Lair Legion. The one where he met some girl, cleaned his act up, and set about creating Earth’s first spaceport. But the whole place has been temporally shifted to hide it, I’m guessing from the Parody Master.” He caught Wang’s surprised stare. “What? It’s all there on the screens. Do the math.” “So I went to Starcross and all I got was this lousy plot headache,” Amy commented. “Grand-daughter?” Wang repeated, thumbing the bioscanner stud on his pink and purple battlesuit. He looked at the holographic DNA readouts. “Grand-daughter!” “Hi, Gramps,” Kara waved at him. “I’m guessing Wang doesn’t have a grand-daughter at this point in his timeline, then,” Amy surmised. “Given the pink and purple outfit and the head-sock I’m really surprised he even got to the daughter stage at all.” “You do know we’re surrounded by armed mercenaries with big guns, don’t you?” ManMan cautioned her nervously. “I’m working on the theory that you’re here to protect me, being a big name superhero,” the engineer shot back. “Yes, Kara is your grand-daughter from an alternate future timeline,” Al B. confirmed to the time-traveller. “We come in peace to try and save her future, and that of your other alternate future timeline grandson Cody.” Wang studied the readouts further. “According to this, she also has your DNA,” he noted dangerously. “Busted,” smirked ManMan. “Ah yes. About that…” the archscientist babbled. Wang looked up angrily. “You seduced my innocent, virtuous daughter!” “No,” Amy denied. “This was definitely the other one. The evil bitch-queen slut.” She dodged behind Joe Pepper as the Wang Troopers all levelled their weapons in unison at her. “Superhero!” she called, pointing at ManMan. “Is mom here?” Kara asked her grandfather. “If I could just talk to her for a moment…” “Kinki is not present, child,” Wang told her. “After the Parody Master sent his Doomherald to demand my daughter in tribute I had no choice but to send her to an alliance with the archvillain. That lulled the tyrant sufficiently for me to be able to sneak away Starcross and all we had accomplished here into the timestream and hide it. Your mother was a necessary sacrifice. She is to be a Bride of the Parody Master.” “Um, about that,” interjected Al B. “Supposing she didn’t actually want to be brainwashed into a life of slavery and worship and she kind of went off with somebody else?” “And got knocked up,” Knifey added helpfully. Amy and ManMan pointed at Kara. “Take them away!” screeched Wang. “Take them to the interrogation pits!” “Sir,” the Chief Wang Trooper replied, “We don’t have any interrogation pits these days, if you recall. Your late wife insisted that…” “Yes, yes,” Wang hissed impatiently. “Alright. Make some interrogation pits and take them to them. But leave my grand-daughter for now, while I decide what to do with her.” “Will it involve seventeen birthday presents?” Kara asked hopefully. “You can’t just drag us away and build interrogation pits, Wang,” Al B. Harper warned him. “Why not?” asked Wang. “Yes, why not?” Amy asked challengingly. “Come on, genius. You got us into this. Well, you and Joe the lever puller over there.” Just then the alarm klaxons sounded all across the teeming future-city. “What now?” winced Joe Pepper. “What now?” demanded Wang the Conqueror. Al B pulled on his 3-D spectacles and looked at the monitor screens again. “More incoming time travel events,” he predicted. “A small one that was probably what we tracked to get here. That’d be Kinki and Miss F, I’m guessing. We undershot by a few minutes. And a really huge one following her like we did. That’d be a dimensional dreadnaught from the Parody Master.” That really got everyone’s attention. “Right,” said Kinki the Conqueress, stalking into the laboratory Al B. Harper had borrowed and reaching for the zipper at the front of her white catsuit. “What is it you want me to do?” “Er…” said Al B. “Is that a trick question?” “Come on, spit it out,” Kinki sneered. “You’ve blackmailed my father into sending me to you. So tell me what disgusting perverted things you’re going to make me do to save Starcross and let’s get it over with.” Al B. put down the temporal eddy inverter he was tinkering with and rose from his lab stool. “I think you might be getting the wrong idea, Kinki,” he confessed. “This isn’t… I mean I wouldn’t… Well, obviously I would, but not like…” “He’s not blackmailing you into more sex to save your father’s city from the Parody Master’s dimensional dreadnaughts,” Amy summarised, dragging herself out from under the huge narrative suppression generator they were building. “He’s too dumb for that, even though that would solve the impregnating you with Cody and/or Kara problem. He just asked your father to send you here so he could talk with you, even though if I had my way we’d be pummelling you with an adjustable spanner for that trick you pulled with Miss F. So zip away your goodie bags and try to act like a grown-up for once, you cheap bimbo future-floozy.” “Not quite how I’d have explained it,” admitted Al B. “I’m going for a coffee,” Amy scorned, flinging down her screwdriver. “Unless they have alcohol in this place.” She glared one last time at Kinki the Conqueress and slammed the door after her. “I should have murdered her first, when I had the chance,” Kinki concluded. Al B. cast around for a topic of conversation. “I invented some new chronal vibration rhythms,” he offered brightly. “To stop the dreadnaught finally homing in on Starcross’ temporal signature, I mean. It’s not a permanent solution but it’ll keep them from finding our exact co-ordinates for a while yet. As long as we stay temporally quiet.” “Shut up, Al,” Kinki told him. “I hate you.” “But… in a good way, right?” the archscientist ventured. “I mean, you did let me… ask me to… I got you…” “Yes, I’m pregnant,” Kinki snapped at him. “I needed to be pregnant to put the Parody Master off making me his bride. But now I’m home I have machines in my room that can solve my condition in less than a minute.” “Hey, hold it!” Al B. objected. “That’s my son or daughter you’re carrying in there! You can’t just flush – or zap – him or her to oblivion. You met Kara?” “I’m not her mother. That’d be some insipid future variant of me. That’s not going to happen. That timeline has gone.” “Well good, because in that timeline you tortured Miss F for years in revenge for her thwarting your attempts to eliminate all my friends.” “So I wanted your undivided attention,” shrugged Kinki. “I’m high maintenance.” “And psychopathic,” Al B. added. “Look, I just want to find a way of saving Cody and Kara. And then I’ll take Amy and Miss F and we’ll go home and never bother you again.” Kinki considered this. “You’d be right next to that Framlicker woman on a torture bed if you didn’t happen to be a genius who might just save Starcross from the Parody Master,” she admitted grudgingly. “But you’d better be specially brilliant or I’ll turn an omni-diode gun on you myself.” Al B. swallowed. “I’m thinking fast,” he promised. “Right now this whole city is playing the submarine in Run Silent, Run Deep. If it gets pinged then I die with the rest of you, and so do Kara and Miss F and Amy and Joe.” Kinki perched herself on one of the high stools, and she seemed to slump. “So you didn’t come all this way, defy the Celestian barrier, brave the intertemporal maelstrom, just to find me,” she commented. “Honestly?” Al admitted. “No. You’re a great girl, in a lethal villainess kind of way, and if I had to choose just one hot psychopath to impregnate you’d be number one on my list, but…” “I really would have done anything you wanted to save the city,” Kinki told him quietly. “If, y’know, you wanted me to.” “I’m not that kind of mad scientist,” Al B. assured her. “Really?” she asked, making a disappointed little moue with her lips. “Well,” Al considered, tugging at his collar. “Not usually…” “I’m tired,” Wang the Conqueror admitted, slumping down on his loungeomatic and turning away from the static-fuzzing temporal monitors. Somewhere out there a fraction of a second away, a dimensional dreadnaught bigger than the whole city of Starcross was hunting the timelines until it located its prey. “I’m so tired. Tired of everything.” “Take off the pink sock,” Miss Framlicker instructed him, “and we’ll talk.” “You’re my prisoner,” Wang reminded her. “Hostage for Harper finding a way to get us out of this mess.” “Yes, yes,” the administrator of EEE answered testily. “Now take off the sock mask and grow up.” Wang snorted, and peeled off the faceplate and hood to reveal a greying head and a lived in face. “You sound like my wife,” he said. “I imagine she didn’t allow stupid costumes round the house,” Miss F responded. “Sensible woman.” “I’ve been doing this for so long now the mask’s become a second skin,” Wang confessed. “And yet she still married you? Remarkable woman. And presumably lacking a sense of smell.” Wang frowned at the impertinence. “I am Wang…” “Oh don’t start again,” Miss Framlicker snapped at him. “It’s as if you can’t go five minutes without reminding yourself how important you are.” She pointed out of the full-wall window at the starport beyond. “But you don’t have to. You are important. Look at what you built here: a fabulous city of the future.” Wang followed her finger and looked at the night skyscape. Even with the port closed there were a thousand flying taxis flitting around the neon buildings, swerving above and below the monorails and transport tubes. “I don’t look out much now,” he admitted. “When I started out, as Kink the Conqueror, all I wanted to do was win. Destroy. Plunder. Then I entered my Wang phase…” Miss F surpassed a laugh. “Please, you have to recognise that name doesn’t translate well into my era’s language.” “But since my wife went, even this isn’t satisfying me. I spend more time with my books, or on the omniscanners peering into the Vortex.” Miss Framlicker was reading the on-screen printouts just as Al had done earlier. “The Parody Master’s searching the dimensional void for something,” she noted. “We heard he was searching for a lost weapon there.” “He scares me,” Wang admitted. “That’s why I didn’t fight him. Why I gave him Kinki to secure an alliance, then fled with Starcross into the timestream. I can’t stop him. I don’t think there is a way to stop him.” “It’s on Al’s list,” reported Miss Framlicker. She looked closer at the 4-D tracking readouts showing her arrival and Al’s. “Are these the complete temporal logs showing how Kinki and I got here?” she demanded. “Of course,” Wang told her testily. “Look, could you just go sit down over there and be a cowed captive? Only I have a reputation to uphold, you know.” “No. There’s something odd here.” The EEE administrator jabbed an accusing finger at a clump of data. “This is where your daughter tried to kill me and I reflected her beam back on her, throwing us both out of the timestream. This is her emergency recovery circuit cutting in to automatically transmit us back to Starcross now. But this… There’s an event there.” She held out a hand. “Give me a pencil,” she demanded. “And get me Al.” “How do we know it’s really you?” Liu Xi asked suspiciously. “You could be Hero Feeders in the shape of people we know.” “How do we know it’s you?” Cody challenged back. Outside the enraged proto-Lurker renewed its efforts to erase the temple keeping it from its prey. There was a lot of belief to eat through but the beast was very powerful and single-minded. “I think he’s the genuine article,” Exu admitted, pointing at Dan Drury. “I know him of old.” “The Parody Master’s Doomherald,” Drury spat. “if you were lookin’ for a shape we’d trust you sure screwed your research up.” “I was the Parody Master’s Doomherald,” Exu admitted. “Now I’m Liu Xi’s Doomherald.” The young elementalist blushed and looked like she was going to object, but just then the first few fragments of the remaining roof started to fall. “Anyone got a good idea about how to get out of here?” Cody asked. “We can all mistrust each other just as well somewhere else when we’re not being chased by that big thing out there.” “I think they’re genuine,” Amazing Guy admitted. “My cosmic awareness gets confused in Comic-Book Limbo though.” “So this is Comic-Book Limbo!” said the Doomherald. “Hmm, it’s going to be tricky getting out of here.” “Stay back,” Liu Xi warned the newcomers. “I still don’t trust you.” “Liu Xi Xian,” Dan Drury noted. “Elementalist from Sangtung, China, raised in the US for arranged marriage, went rogue and has been hiding out with the Lair Legion fer the last year or so. Yeah, I know about you, kid. It’s my job.” “I’m not afraid of you any more,” the girl told him. “Or your immigration services.” “Good fer you,” the SPUD director told her. “If I’d thought you were a threat you’d be in the Safe by now. Otherwise I was – and am – happy to overlook you. And to lose a few files to keep you off the radar. Consider me an old softie.” “A murderous old softie,” the Doomherald murmured quietly. The creature outside began to erase the last of the stone slabs holding the roof in place. More rocks began to tumble down and shatter in the nave of the temple. “We really need to get out of here,” AG decided. “I’ll go and distract the monster. You people try and slip away while I’m fighting. Make for our base at the Fortress of Stories. If I make it I’ll join you back there.” “Suicide mission,” the Doomherald warned him. “You won’t make it back.” “No other way,” Amazing Guy answered. “This is the job.” Cody turned away from the ancient carvings of the Second Oldest Race that he’d been translating. “No other way out,” he added, “except the secret passage behind this wall.” Starcross was a sprawling town of silver and glass buildings erected around a classic Normal Rockwell small town centre. The hover-cars and monorail flew over the roofs of the original shingled roofs of the place where Wang had retreated and settled down after one defeat too many. “Of course, my Starcross was more developed than this,” Kara Harper reported as she led Joe Pepper through the streets to admire the ships in the spaceport. “This must be Starcross from, well, pretty close to your timeline. Twenty-thirty years or so. It gets a bit more modern.” ManMan admired the interstellar vessels currently grounded beside the skyscraper docking columns, the shimming reflective glass of the main teletransport terminals. “More advanced? How?” Kara shrugged. “Well, once grandfather shifted the town out of Earth’s regular timeline to prevent technology contamination and really opened it up as a trading waystation – and especially after the horrible destruction of ITC and E… other places – it went from strength to strength. Mother always said that Wang conquered more with Starcross through economics than in all his time travelling campaigns.” “That wouldn’t be hard,” Knifey pointed out. But Joe was still distracted. “Kara, when we were talking earlier, about, um, inappropriate touching…” “I really don’t know why you keep bringing it up, Joe. You’re clearly obsessed,” the young woman told him. “Come on, let’s go grab a grav-ski ride. That was always my favourite. Then we’ll need a dino-burger.” “But I just want to know…” Knifey chuckled. “All these years and he still doesn’t know when a girl’s screwing with his head.” Kara was about to reply when she noticed something strange. “People are going into the high energy particle transfer terminal as usual, but nobody’s coming out. That’s weird.” “The what? Where?” ManMan peered over at the big silver dome with the blue-glass spires. “It’s probably just coincidence, but I’ll check it out. You stay here.” “Sure,” scorned Kara. “Like you can do the n-space math in there by yourself.” ManMan paused. Since when had superhero investigations required n-space math? “Since when…?” he began. Kara cut him off. “You think I don’t have a super-power?” she demanded. “I may not have a super-strong grip on a talking knife but I can do any kind of number calculation instinctively. Grandfather always got me to do his shunt gate vertices assemblies, even when I was tiny.” “Your brother Cody could translate languages.” Kara halted as they passed through the door of the HEPT terminal. “He’s not my brother, okay? He’s an alternate reality replacement and he’s likely to force me out of existence by his continuing presence in the consensus timestream. He was conceived instead of me. Understand? Any other questions?” ManMan shook his head as his companion glared at him crossly. “I have one,” Knifey ventured. “Why is this building full of Avawarriors?” Joe and Kara looked round. The high energy particle transfer building was full of Avawarriors. The Parody Master’s forces had found a way into Starcross. “Move!” Dan Drury called to Exu and Liu Xi. “And move fast! That thing’s right behind us, and its dredging up all the other Hero Feeders to come outta the woodwork too.” Cody was dragging the exhausted Amazing Guy. The long flight and running battle from Exu’s temple back to the Fortress of Stories had left the protector of the universe barely conscious. “We’re safe once we get inside the walls,” he advised the others. “They don’t come in there. It frightens them.” “Scares the willies outta me too,” Drury added. “We’ve moving as fast as we can,” the Doomherald told them. He was almost carrying Liu Xi now, and he wasn’t looking too well himself. The ragged bandage across his chest had started bleeding again. “She’s barely holding her body together with her elemental gifts and if she hadn’t… well, she found a way to keep me alive but I’m still not back to my usual annoying self.” “Just keep running!” Cody called. Drury sighed, turned back, and helped Exu with Liu Xi. “This don’t mean I’m not gonna kick your ass later,” the SPUD director warned the Doomherald. Behind them the proto-Feeder loomed ever higher, then dropped down to envelop them. The Fortress of Stories seemed to flare. The ancient monster screamed as it was evaporated, joining its race in oblivion. “That’s a good sign,” Liu Xi said hopefully. Then the other Hero Feeders surged forward. The Fortress’ defences were depleted, and nothing now prevented them from claiming their prey. Al B. Harper took the chalk off Miss Framlicker and continued her mathematic scribble to the end of the wall of Wang’s stateroom and round the corner onto the next surface. “You’re right,” he proclaimed. “That temporal anomaly you spotted on the chronal transit logs can only have been Cody slipping towards a null-sum destination because of narrative substitution vectors.” “I know that,” Miss F snorted scornfully. “Why do you think I interrupted your date with Zipper-Slapper over there?” Kinki the Conqueress scowled back at the EEE administrator. “I brought you here to torture you for all eternity,” she pointed out. Amy wasn’t impressed. “You ran home to daddy because she spanked your technical ass, and now you and he need Miss F and Al to save you from the big bad Parody Master.” Kinki looked the overalled engineer up and down. “And what use do you serve?” She asked. “Apart from satisfying the rough trade?” “I hit slutty time-travelling space-bimbos round the head with heavy tools,” Amy explained. “Keep talking.” Wang frowned at the chalk-markings across his formal hall. “What’s so exciting about a minor reality ripple?” he demanded. “How is that going to stop the Parody Master?” Al B. stabbed his bubble-pipe stem at the relevant calculations. “This shows what happened to Cody. Where he went. Look, as soon as Kinki got herself bounced out of time when Miss F fed her own omni-diode beams back at her there was a future reset. Right here under the quadratics. That’s when Cody got expelled from the timeline. And that’s where he went to. Comic-Book Limbo.” “Where?” asked Amy. Miss Framlicker waggled a finger at the newer calculations in the blue chalk. “It’s a fundamental underplane of the Parodyverse, or perhaps of all the ‘verses. It’s the recycle bin of reality. Everything that doesn’t fit into continuity any more ends up there.” “Natural habitat of the Hero Feeders,” shuddered Wang. He clapped his hands together. “Well, that explains the boy vanishing. Now how are we going to save my city?” “We save Starcross,” Al B. said determinedly, “by saving Cody.” “Can we get into Comic-Book Limbo?” Miss Framlicker asked the archscientist. “And if we do can we get out again?” “We don’t usually have the equipment,” Al conceded, “but given the time-travelling array here at Starcross I think if we replicate the chronal waveform projector co-ordinates in the passive reality bus…” “Geek technobabble alert,” Amy warned Kinki and Wang. “You might want to phase out for the next bit.” “I don’t see how rescuing my possible-future grandson is going to help,” the Conqueror argued. “I’m still coping with the idea that I have a teenaged daughter,” Kinki admitted. “Or will have. Or might have if there isn’t a slip up with the chronal waveform projector co-ordinates and the passive reality bus…” “Lalalalala!” Amy sang. “I can’t hear you.” “Oh, if we can just get this right,” Al B beamed at them all, “we can do something brilliant and save the day.” Wang looked disconcerted. “You can? You can actually stop the Parody Master finding Starcross and keep us all safe from his awesome wrath?” Kinki caught Wang’s worried, guilty expression. “Father,” she said warningly, “what did you do?” The reception room doors burst open and Kara and ManMan raced in. Joe Pepper’s Elvis jacket was torn and his pants were laser-scorched. Kara was pointing an angry finger at Wang. “He opened a teleport node to the Parody Forces, that’s what he did,” accused the girl. “There are Avatroopers pouring in from the HEPT terminal, moving all over Starcross!” Wang looked sheepish as everyone glared at him. “Who could know that Harper could actually find a solution?” he defended himself. “I had a whole city to think about. So I made a deal.” Kinki levelled her sci-fi gun at her father’s head. “What deal?” she demanded. ManMan hit the button to emergency-seal the hall with force-fields. The Avawarriors clattered into the barrier and bounced back. “I had to use the assets at hand,” Wang explained himself. “So I agreed to hand over Harper and Framlicker to the Parody Master in exchange for Starcross remaining an independently administered component of the Parody Empire under my control.” “Okay, you just got on my hit-with-a-spanner list again,” Amy told him. “What else?” demanded Kinki of her father. “What else did you promise him?” “Well, I may have agreed to hand you back to him as well,” Wang admitted sheepishly. “And Kara.” “Okay, I need to borrow Amy’s spanner,” Kara declared. The Avawarriors began to use their Avablades to cut through the force field. “I had to save Starcross, you see,” Wang cried out. “It’s all that’s left of… I had to save it.” Kinki shot her father with her omni-diode ray. “Don’t worry,” she told the appalled gathering in the reception room. “It was only on Agonising Stun.” “Al,” Miss Framlicker declared, turning to the bubble-pipe-smoking archscientist. “If you are ever going to get one of your geeky implausible weird science plans to work properly, now is the time.” “Any time in the next four minutes or so,” estimated Knifey, watching the force screen around the room fizz and flicker as the Avawarriors besieged it. Al B. looked down at the control array for Wang’s temporal empire. “I don’t think I can do the sums that fast,” he admitted. “Hand them here,” called Kara. “Just get working.” “They’ve never found the courage to come in here before,” Cody Harper worried. The mists had flooded through the broken walls of the Fortress of Stories and now the first Hero Feeders were venturing into the heart of narrative. “Well they’re coming now,” Liu Xi noted as her party retreated from the perimeter into the deeper sanctum. “And I don’t think I can stop all of them.” “You can’t,” Amazing Guy assured her. “You’re barely keeping your body together just now. You can’t afford to divide your attention.” “Yeah, but if those Lurkers come an’ erase us from history it won’t matter whether she melts or not,” Dan Drury pointed out. He emptied his last clip into the first white silhouette to peer down the corridor. “We may have already lost members of our party,” the Doomherald pointed out. “If they had been caught by the Hero Feeders and devoured we would never even remember them.” “Thanks for that cheery thought,” Cody snapped at the former herald of the Parody Master. “Any other helpful ideas?” “Where’s the Chronicler?” AG puzzled. “He was here when his place of ravens and destiny was projected out of the conceptual plane into Comic-Book Limbo but he’s not been seen since. Nor his ravens. If he and they are somehow in stasis it’s more profound than that chronal webbing around all the other stolen cities here.” Liu Xi looked around the vast hall of shattered mirrors. “There are forces at work here,” she admitted. “Deep, massive, whispering… But I can’t quite hear what they’re saying.” “There’s murder here too,” Exu contributed. “I can sense it.” “Yeah. And Hero Feeders,” warned Drury as the first of the parasites loped into the room. “We need more weapons, fast.” Amazing Guy winced and staggered as the last of the multiversal energy barriers he’d blocked the entrance with was erased. “There’s an awful lot of those things out there. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions.” “You take the million on the left,” Exu quipped. “Can we kill them?” Cody demanded, glancing at the former god of murder. “I mean, if we try to, could you…?” “Oh, I can help you kill them,” the Doomherald promised, “if you want it bad enough. But not all of them. There’s too many.” Liu Xi caused an elemental flare amongst the largest knot of intruders. It kept them back for another thirty seconds. “It can’t end like this,” Cody argued as the refugees were surrounded by a writhing white ring of wraithlike Hero Feeders. “Not here, in the Hall of Stories. It doesn’t have the right cadence to it.” “Tell that to them,” Drury snorted. “No, he’s right,” Amazing Guy sensed. “There’s something else. Something coming, at the narratively right point. Something…” Then the skies flared purple and Starcross appeared above Comic-Book Limbo. Then it plummeted down onto the Fortress of Stories. The futuristic city dropped like a stone to where the battered greystone Halls of Narrative were flooded with Hero Feeders; but because it was phased one nanosecond out of time there was no explosive crash. Rather the two flickered together for a brief time while Wang’s temporal engines screeched and groaned. “Now!” Al B. called to the others in the reception room. “We should automatically cause sentients we touch to align with out own slightly-shifted timeframe if we encounter their bio-fields. Go!” “He means grab somebody and haul them aboard,” Knifey translated. “On it,” ManMan shouted, wrapping his arms round Dan Drury. “Hey, I haven’t been away from dames fer that long,” the SPUD director growled, shrugging the knife-wielder loose with an easy judo throw. “Got you!” Amy shouted, pulling Liu Xi into the Starcross timeframe. “Except what the hell are you doing in Limbo, kid?” “Tell me about it,” the young elementalist replied. “You’re the Doomherald,” Kinki announced as she retrieved Exu by clasping her arms round him and pressing herself into his embrace. “Powerful former emissary of the Parody Master. Hello.” “Hi,” she smiled back. He knew about Kinki. He’d been the god of murder. Miss Framlicker tugged Amazing Guy across by his cape. “Good to see you again,” she told the protector of the Parodyverse. “We’d been wondering where you’d got to just when you were needed.” “Well, I’m here now,” AG assured her. “Wherever here is. We seem to be… in a temporal anomaly on the cusp of Comic-Book Limbo and the Vortex? And surrounded by Parody Troopers?” “We’re working on it,” Miss F assured her. “Cody,” Al B. called to his son, clasping him by the wrist. “I thought I’d never see you again. Welcome back.” “You missed me?” the young surfer dude asked, grinning. “You actually missed me?” “No,” Kara told him. “Way to wreck everything in my life, doofus.” Cody looked across at the annoyed blonde. “Um, she is…?” he asked Al. “Your temporal double from another…” the archscientist began. “Your sister,” he decided at last. “She’s your sister.” The last of the force fields shorted out and the Avawarriors poured in. The Hero Feeders discovered how to cross the temporal rift and surged forwards. “Aagh!” cried Joe Pepper. “Right,” Al B. called, reaching for the console. “Time for the clever bit. Time to check Kara’s sums.” “Wait!” called Kinki. “Where’s…” Al B. rammed home the chronal shunt lever, sending Starcross another moment out of phase. The Hero Feeders and Avawarriors were equally dropped back into the Halls of Narrative to fall on one another. Starcross skipped like a skimming-stone across the surface of Comic-Book Limbo and toppled back into the transdimensional vortex’s temporal aspect. Pretty much every circuit in the city blew all at once. The light went out. Dan Drury struck a match and lit his stogie. Liu Xi willed a faint luminescence to light the room. “Where are we?” Kara asked. “In a very obscure backwater of the space between realities,” Al B reported. “The Parody Master won’t find Starcross here for a very long time if you stay quiet and don’t use chronal technology. You’re safe.” “Safe,” Kinki repeated, tasting the word. “And where is my father?” Miss Framlicker and Amy realised that the Conqueror was no longer lying sprawled on the ground where his daughter had dropped him. “There’s no way he could have been accidentally left back in Comic-Book Limbo,” Miss F determined. “Not unless he deliberately chose to be there.” “Why would he want that?” Cody puzzled. “And how come both me and him are still here?” challenged Kara, pointing at her time-brother. “Wang dropping into Comic-Book Limbo was probably the narrative price required to get two alternate versions of mine and Kinki’s offspring into existence,” Al B. calculated absently. “You’re both temporally stable. Congratulations.” “Father is gone?” Kinki realised. “You eliminated him?” “That’s not what they said…” ManMan began to protest. “You can’t blame them for…” “Then I am the supreme unchallenged ruler of Starcross!” proclaimed Kinki the Conqueress. “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” “Not many villains can pull off a laugh like that,” admitted Amazing Guy. “If you try laughing like that I’m going to have to kill you for your own good, Exu,” Liu Xi warned the Doomherald. “Exu?” The Doomherald was gone. “Kinki’s the new boss round here?” Amy noted. “Time we were going, Al.” “Yes,” agreed Miss Framlicker. “In a moment.” She moved over to the manically laughing new supreme ruler of Starcross and punched her out. “Now we can go,” she conceded. “Unless Al needs to impregnate her first,” Amy added. “Al?” “No, that’s okay,” the archscientist replied hurriedly given the kind of stares he was getting. “I’ll just cobble us a transfer conduit to slip us back through the same temporal point we got out past the barrier through. That’ll seal the thing again and stop anyone unwelcome following us.” “Like her,” Amy suggested, surrupticously kicking Kinki while she was down. “Well, I was thinking of the uncountable hordes of the Parody Master,” Al B. admitted. “So you’re coming back with us?” Cody asked Kara suspiciously. “Yeah. You got a problem with that, Beach Boy?” “I need to get to the Lair Mansion,” Amazing Guy admitted. “There are things that Sir Mumphrey needs to know.” “Exu?” Liu Xi called. She started to cry. “Yeah. We got places to be,” Drury admitted. “I need a full briefing, and fast.” “Okay,” Al B. breathed. “I’ll just invent a new power source so I can reprogram the Starcross time transmitters, match that with the inverse of our chronal passage here allowing for revised Vortex co-ordinates and a shift in the narrative albedo…” “Lalalalalalalalalala!” sand Amy. “And then…” concluded Al B. Harper, checking his to-do list, “I’ll need to find my library books.” Hero Feeder and Avawarrior clashed in the misty darkness of the Hall of Narratives. It was brutal. It was savage. And then it stopped. A dry voice had just spoken. “A-hem.” And fear came upon Lurker Beneath and Parody Trooper alike. They fled the darkening Hall of Narratives, fled the Fortress of Story, scattered screaming into the web-choked stasis-held cities beyond. And then they ran some more. “Better,” said the Chronicler of Stories. He turned to the raven on his shoulder. “Set the next chapter off, Pallas.” “And so with a heavy heart I claim supreme rulership of the starport of Starcross,” Kinki the Conqueress concluded, flipping off the holoprojector and slumping back into her father’s loungeomatic. She kicked off her boots. Robot drones hovered nearby awaiting her every command. “Get me peanut butter,” she told them. “And anchovies. And coal. And a robo-obstetrician.” She smoothed her hands over her belly. “Al might get Cody and Kara,” she murmured to the child growing inside her, “but I’ll raise you right, and one day you can go destroy them all.” Wang pulled himself off the cold grey ground and peered through the cold grey mists. He peeled off the pink and purple socklike mask and dropped it as he walked. He shed the warrior’s armour too. He didn’t need those things any more. Comic-Book Limbo called him, and there was somewhere he had to be, something he had to do. Something he had to become… He strode away into the mists, the scholar in him dragging him forward, towards an immortal destiny.  Next Time: The big push is coming, when the heroes of Earth and its armed forces make their decisive foray against the Parody Master on his own turf. But first there are the preparations – and one huge going away party. Join our cast on their last night on Earth before the war takes them far away as they make their farewells at The Staging Zone - probably due on Christmas Eve.Footnote Story Links: Wang’s Starcrossed love story is told in Fate’s Misleading Smile #0 #1 #2 and #3, by Fin Fang Foom, a story-within a story at the conclusion of the Dancer/Finny Valentine Special crossover. The Al B. Harper/Cody relationship and the Al/Kinki stuff have been explored in Al B. Harper #11 Al B. Harper #12 Al B. Harper #13 and Al B. Harper #14 by Al B. The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse Al and Amy images by Visionary, logo by Dancer 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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