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Post By The Hooded Hood takes the plunge into total war Fri Jan 12, 2007 at 11:16:16 am EST |
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#300: Untold Anniversary Issue Tales of the Parody War: The Bloody Ground | |
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| #300: Untold Anniversary Issue Tales of the Parody War: The Bloody Ground Previously: The worlds-conquering Parody Master’s protracted siege of Earth is close to success as the dimensional barrier keeping him back weakens daily. Now the Lair Legion and Earth’s combined military and super-powered forces prepare an invasion into the otherdimensional conceptual plane where the Parody Master has assembled his armies and raised his power-enhancing Infinity Forge. Their mission: to destroy the Forge then take down the weakened Parody Master. Easier said than done. Previous chapters at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Descriptions of cast at Who's Who in the Parodyverse Locations explained in Where's Where in the Parodyverse  Widescreen: First there was the sonic boom, rippling across the chequerboard conceptual plane from two dozen dimensional rifts torn from Earth. The shockwaves rippled across the vast level, overturning tanks and flattening buildings, sowing chaos amongst the nearest of the half a billion troops of the Parody Army encamped there. Next came the earthquake. Improbable collisions of conceptual shelves deep under this incarnation of the home of the Parodyverse’s cosmic office holders cast up vast and sudden new mountains, rending the polished plain into a broken jigsaw of scattered pieces. Seething lava bubbled from new-made volcanoes, spraying magma that had not even existed seconds before across the ruptured land. Despite the vast odds against it and in spite of the massive property damage the landslides caused, somehow nobody was killed by the upheavals. Then the storm broke. The starry skies turned as black as the wrath of gods. Sudden clouds choked down rendering visibility to zero. A hail of ice intensified until chunks the size of cars were shattering down on the Avawarriors below. Lightning burst amongst the soldiers, dancing from vehicle to vehicle like a thing alive, searing and destroying. Chains of Avatanks exploded across the new wasteland as the tempest progressed. Hurricane force winds followed in the devastation’s wake sweeping the ground clean of men and equipment. And Donar saw that it was good. Slowly, too slowly, the Ava-armies began to react. Time seemed to slow around them while enemies from Earth surged through the dimensional portals: the fighter jets and bombers of three entire carrier groups, tank divisions, sappers, heavy cavalry, supporting infantry. Overhead a pink-stained Dimensional Dreadnaught shimmered into view. There was still no chance for counterattack. A gelid wall of writhing protoplasm veered up between the besiegers and the Earth forces that had come to break that siege. The Shoggoth replicated his biomass again and again, his anger fuelling his transformation. A wall of bubbling churning translucent jelly rose five miles high and a hundred miles across, rolling out over the devastated plane, rolling over the enemy that could not retreat quickly enough. And the Shoggoth sang: Tekke-Li! LairJet One powered over the devastation, its five powerful jets bringing it fast and low over the wrecked front ranks of the Parody Master’s army. “Attention, enemy forces,” Hatman called into the transmission array aboard the Lair Legion’s aircraft. “You have one chance to stand down and surrender. This is it.” Three dozen missiles peeled from the ground bases below to destroy the aircraft. Al B. Harper activated the Technopolitan force-field that the Red Watchman had once trapped the Legion in and the ordinance detonated harmlessly around the Lairjet’s perimeter. “That’s our answer,” breathed ManMan from inside the vehicle. “Yes,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton agreed, monitoring the advance from the Operations Room of the Lair Mansion. “War it is then. Godspeed.” And the Lair Legion took the kid gloves off. Close-Up: “How are you?” Cleone Swanmay checked on the two women lying beside each other on benches in the firehouse headquarters of Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises. “Surviving,” replied Lara Night, visitor from another reality. The elemental was powering the EEE engines that in turn established the dimensional gates through which Earth’s forces were entering the conceptual realms. The cost in energy was staggering even without the special twists Lara was adding to help the engines do their jobs. “It’s not what I’d pick as a hobby.” “It has to be done,” Liu Xi Xian added grimly, concentrating as the machines around her enhanced her void-folding abilities, “so it will be done.” “Amy?” Miss Framlicker checked, glancing over to where the overall-clad engineer was monitoring a haphazard bank of dials and gauges. “It’s just about holding,” Amy Aston answered, reaching out with a spanner to hammer one reluctant device. “Gates in Paradopolis, Arachknight City, London, Valencia, Delhi, Riyadh, and Durban all nominal. We’re at 65% in St Petersburg.” “Sorry,” Lara apologised. “I’ll try harder.” “The Celestian barrier is stronger over there just now,” Miss F admitted. “And we had to use some of our oldest and most worn components for that gate.” “The time-distortion is still working,” Liu Xi sensed. “We’ll get all our people through and deployed in just a few seconds.” “Which is a good thing,” Amy judged, checking the dials again with a worried frown. Zoom: “They’re coming,” announced Sir John de Jaboz, knight Improbablar from the allied alternate dimension of the Swordrealms. He and a thousand of his fellows manned the captured dimensional dreadnaught now rechristened the Bunny of Crossness by pure thought being Yo. The vessel also held five hundred SPUD technicians and six hundred plus Esperine battle mages; plus one artificial intelligence and a possibly-fake man. “How many are coming?” Visionary asked nervously, trying to make sense of the combat screens daisy-chained around the command deck. “Six dimensional dreadnaughts in the first wave,” Hallie announced. “At least two others further off.” “Those aren’t good odds,” Vizh noted. His math was that good at least. “Donar’s storm has grounded all the smaller craft, though,” reported Princess Lileblanche of Elsinore. “We will not have to worry about lesser threats.” “Well that’s good to know,” Visionary said uncertainly. “Hallie, are you ready?” “Possibly,” agreed the green-skinned hologram. “They’ve got very sophisticated firewalls. But I’m using a bit of code I pirated from Hacker Nine and I reckon I might be able to slip into a couple of their computer systems.” “Be careful.” Hallie shot Vizh an If-I-was-being-careful-I-wouldn’t-be-here look then vanished into a jumble of random pixels. She surged her consciousness across the tangle of electronic communications between warships then battled her way through the computer defences of the nearest dreadnaughts. “Is she doing it?” Sir John asked anxiously. For him and his people the higher applications of science were indistinguishable from the magics their old enemies the Esperines used. “She’ll do it,” Visionary assured him. “She’s Hallie.” The Bunny of Crossness shook as the first missiles from its opponents burst across its bow. “They’re using nukes,” a SPUD tech-officer warned. “We’re returning fire.” “They are sneaking a third vessel up below us,” Lileblanche sensed, glancing for confirmation at the circle of telepaths she’d linked into at the rear of the command deck. “It is in stealth mode, moving to tear out our guts with a surprise attack.” Sir John drew his sword and checked his guard commanders. “Lili, do you need us to…” “Not yet,” the Esperine princess said. “I think we can handle this one.” The most powerful telepath of her generation turned to her fellow battle-mages. “Mesh,” she commended them. “Now, as we practised it, focus on the shining atomic core of their vessel.” On the Screams of the Conquered a score of alarm klaxons burst out as the nuclear engine casings buckled and failed, as delicate control machinery twisted like pretzels. There was no time to react as the atomic pile cascaded, as the fusion rods detonated. The Screams of the Conquered exploded, its burning radioactive city-sized bulk tumbling down over the Parody forces below. The Esperine battle mages staggered as their minds returned to their bodies. “Well done,” Sir John told them, overcoming his horror of such magics. “Well done indeed.” “We cannot do that again,” Lileblanche warned. “Many of these people are exhausted now, and I can sense the other ships shielding themselves against such assaults.” Just then the two nearest dreadnaughts lurched then slammed into each other as if clapped together by giant hands. Tangled into one confused lump they span down to impact on the industrial manufacturing complex below. Their mutual destruction sent out a mushroom cloud of radioactive debris that cleared a thousand miles around; but the Bunny of Crossness was already further off than that. Hallie blinked back onto the command deck. “I got to their navigation systems,” she reported. “If they hadn’t used such vicious antivirus measures I could have disabled them without loss of life.” Visionary noted how pale the AI was. “Are you okay?” he demanded. He reached out for Hallie but her form was insubstantial. “Hallie?” “It was hard,” the computer sentience shrugged. “It hurt. And I didn’t want to…” She turned away. “This is war. But now they know how to shield themselves from me.” “Three more incoming,” Sir John reported. “and we’re running out of tricks.” “We have one more,” Vizh replied. He thumbed his comm-card. “Citizen Z?” Action shot: The Z-Wing was nothing more than a fast-moving open platform with weapons capability. Baroness Elizabeth von Zemo had cherry-picked the very best weapons for it though, and as Citizen Z she rode it with deadly authority over the churned-up battlefield picking off survivors of the Parody Army. Every so often she peeled off one of Al B. Harper’s surveillance drones so that Lairjet One could keep an overview of the battlefield. “Do you need ta shoot every single Avawarrior?” Trickshot complained. “These guys already got pounded by Dancer, Donar, and Shoggy. They ain’t about ta give us any more trouble now.” “But they might later,” CZ retorted. “Besides, I need to test out my arsenal. These new singularity point bullets seem able to rupture ava-armour, and it’s important to know that.” She stared down at the modified Luger in her hand. “In fact who knows what these things could kill?” A damaged but still working War Platform veered up in front of them. Trickshot loosed a blast arrow into its ventilation grille and the whole thing crumbled into pieces. “We’re the good guys,” he reminded his team-mate. “That doesn’t mean we have to be wimps,” Citizen Z replied. “These people want to enslave the Earth, stealing it from its rightful ruler… er, it’s democratically elected representatives. They want to destroy us. We can’t just handcuff them to a lamp-post and wait for the police to arrive.” “I guess,” conceded Carl Bastion. “But still…” “They want to destroy everything you hold dear. They want to enslave both your girlfriends,” CZ added with a sly snicker. “Hey, it’s not like that,” Tricky objected as Beth swooped low to decapitate a Parody technician with the sharp front edge of the Z-Wing. “Me an’ Talia an…” “Oh, you’re a hero,” CZ told him. “I’m sure ordinary morals don’t apply.” “It’s not that at all,” squirmed the irritating archer. “It’s just…” Then his comm-card beeped and rescued him. “It’s Vizh. He needs us ta take down a dreadnaught.” Citizen Z muttered her opinions of the possibly-fake man, but she powered the Z-wing up to twenty thousand feet so that two people on a flying surfboard could take on a city-sized battleship with the firepower to crack a world in two. “You’re sure about this?” CZ asked nervously as the Needles of Agony bore down towards them. “Easy,” Trickshot assured her, clipping the special arrowheads onto the shafts he pulled from his quiver. Beth bit back a cheap shot about the archer’s love life. Now wasn’t the time to break his concentration. The Needles of Agony came in very fast, but its sensor array only breached the stealth shielding of the Z-Wing at the very last moment. By then Trickshot had loosed off six arrows into various vents and crevices of the massive vessel. Citizen Z jinked her Z-Wing away from the first spray of countermeasures, but it was clear that it would take the dreadnaught only seconds to orient on so small an opponent and blanket the area in deadly fire. Aboard the Needles the special arrowheads burst open and the Shoggoth oozed from all of them. He quickly replicated, sending squirming multi-dimensioned worms of protoplasm right through bulkheads to slither around the interior of the ship. He made especially for the command deck. He didn’t bother to hide his true shapes and angles, sending all those who saw him instantly insane. The dreadnaught veered to the side then tried to fly through a new-made mountain because the dimensions made sense at the time. “Gotcha,” Trickshot told the Needles of Agony as it exploded in a burst of nuclear fire behind the Z-Wing. Pan: Lisa Waltz piloted LairJet One through a cluster of airborne drone war platforms towards Objective Two. On the aircraft’s right wing CrazySugarFreakBoy! balanced and fended off the attackers with his combat candy. On the left wing PsychoAcidPervGirl! similarly fought to defend the ship. Amazing Guy was providing cover from above. The Technopolitan force field had taken a hammering that would have destroyed a small moon but it was still just about working, thanks to Al B’s curses and burned fingers. AG was doing his best to swat down the various combat vehicles that challenged the LairJet’s progress. “We’re almost there,” he reported, his cosmic awareness attuned to the place the Legion had to reach. “But there’s heavy resistance ahead.” The LairJet pulled over another broken ridge and the vast humanoid bulks of the Avabots could be seen. Twenty robots each the size of a skyscraper were set to guard the ruins of the Hall of Stories, once the headquarters and home of the Shaper of Worlds. “Fine,” Lisa scowled. “Heavy assault coming up. I summons Donar.” A goat-pulled flying war chariot blinked in on the LairJet’s flank. Queen Annj was holding the reins, her long raven hair streaming in the wind, directing the racing animals towards their enemy. That left Donar both hands free to wield Mjalcolm, his enchanted baseball-bat-with-a-nail-in-it. Donar saw the robots and went for them with that primal warrior’s cry: “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!” “”We’re close,” ManMan noted from the navigation board. “Very close.” “Take us right inside the building through one of the holes in the walls,” Hatman told the first lady of the Lair Legion. “We need to be as close to the centre of Jury’s old base as possible for this to work.” “On it, Hat-Guy,” the amorous advocatrix grinned. “I’m glad you decided to come along. We couldn’t do this without you.” Jay Boaz winced. CSFB! had heard from the Hooded Hood that today was the second marriage of Zdenka Zarazoza, the Candian heroine Rabid Wolf, the woman who Hatman loved. She had caught the eye of the Party Chairman; or perhaps this was another was of binding that troubled alternate-reality Canada to the state that ruled it since Zdenka was goddess of the north, an avatar of the land itself. CrazySugarFreakBoy! had told Jay, and Jay had to choose between leading his Legion on a mission for the future of the Earth and saving the person he cared about most. “This is the job,” he told Lisa, his face bleak and grim. “This is what Zdenka would want.” The forcefield around the LairJet spluttered and failed. The first of the Parody Master’s special forces had arrived, and one at least was an energy-eater. “Dream, PAPG!, go,” Hatman ordered. “Run interference. Distract them.” “Aye aye, Keptin!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! called back. “Phasers on confuse!” “We need to be somewhere to the left,” the Librarian reported. “I’m sensing a huge repository of narrative that way. It has to be the Shaper’s captured workshop.” “We’ve faced enough creations out of that place, twisted by the Parody Master’s people,” Knifey opined. ManMan’s talking weapon seemed uncharacteristically jumpy this mission. Lisa twisted the LairJet through the broken hallways with an expert hand. The conceptual plane existed only as a place where those who were appointed to cosmic roles maintaining the Parodyverse could meet and work. The Parody Master had usurped most of those offices, converting the power allotted to the officers into more energy fror him through the searing destruction of his Infinity Forge. Of the Triumvirate of three great office holders the Destroyer of Tales was himself destroyed, the Chronicler of Stories had vanished in Comic-Book Limbo, and the Shaper of Worlds had fled, her power stolen. Now at last the heroes had returned to her palace to try and set things right. Finally Lisa had to land the craft, spinning it to the ground on a polished marble floor in a great vaulted room. “This is as far as this bus goes,” she told Hatman. “Be careful out there.” Hatman took ManMan and the Librarian with him. Al B. Harper stayed on the LairJet with Lisa to monitor the input from the surveillance drones. “Be careful,” Knifey warned the explorers. “The Parody Master wouldn’t leave a place like this unguarded.” “Though there,” the Librarian pointed, indicating a charred, blackened door ringed by scorched skeletons. “That’s where the raw stories are.” He shivered at the idea of seeing the workshop of the Shaper of Worlds. Hatman pulled on his Bulls cap and wrenched the doors apart. The cold sapped his strength despite his cap as soon as the portal opened. It was a chill of the soul. “Ahhhh,” whispered V’Zel the Pious, “I have prayed to the Massster that you should come to faccce me.” “Doomwraith,” warned Lee Bookman unnecessarily. “A Singularity Rider.” Hatman’s numb fingers fumbled in his Hatility belt for his sun hat. “I think not,” hissed the darkness-swathed monster, looming forward to drain all the life from his opponents. “I think you are too weak. None can resssist the Singularity Riderssss.” “T-tell that to D-Donar,” Hatman retorted through chattering teeth. V’Zel snarled. Donar had destroyed S’Chen the Empty in single combat. “Donar will sssuffer long before he diesss,” he promised. “You ssshall know it, for you ssshall be ssscreaming insssside me as it happenssss.” The Librarian tried to access the lore he’d stored in his brain from the Lunar Public Library about these dark emissaries of the Parody Master, but the fear that washed from it overwhelmed him. “Joe,” Knifey told ManMan, “Throw me.” Joe Pepper’s arm was so heavy he could hardly move it; but his friends were going to die. Perhaps the most heroic thing he ever did was to make his arm move then. V’Zel leaned over Hatman, his long vaporous fingers squirming and moist. Knifey flew through the air and embedded into the Doomwraith’s throat. V’Zel the Pious died. Hand-held: The Chronometer of Infinity gave a warning chime as its power was exhausted. “That’s it,” George Gedney warned. “We’re back in real time now. No more advantages.” “You did fine,” Dancer assured the anxious young museum curator. “You got all out troops into position. You can relax now. The rest is up to us.” “Is true,” Yo agreed, leading the charge on the first remaining enemy emplacement with nothing more than a rapier in his/her hand, black silk Zorro cloak streaming behind her. “Now is up to cute-army to be doing of battling.” Dan Drury bit down on the stogie between his teeth and spoke into his field radio. “You heard the lady and/or gent, boys. It’s time ta do some damage to the bad guys. Bring it to ‘em. Wah-hooh” The military forces of Earth surged forward through the divided ranks of the adversary. Tangled pockets of military force from a hundred plans were disorganised across the shattered plain. Earth’s armies were still badly outnumbered, facing troops with superior weaponry and sometimes with superior physical abilities. Their only chance was to keep moving forward. Drury called it “keeping up the skeer”. Dancer cartwheeled into a nest of Z’Sox assassin spiders and improbably rendered them all unconscious. Yo jumped down to assist but it was all over by then. “Is cute-Dancer being to be okay?” the genderless thought being checked. “Yo is worried that Dancer is being to look very pale.” “I don’t like all this killing,” Sarah answered honestly. “I know there’s no other way now, but…” “Is to be tragic waste,” agreed Yo. “Is not to be happy-making. But is wicked Parody Master who is to be blamed, not cute-Dancer.” Shep nodded. “I know that in my head,” she admitted. “But also… Well, I turned down an offer last night, and now I’m second-guessing myself. I mean, if I die today…” “Cute-Dancer is not to be dying today!” Yo ordered firmly. “But if I do…” “Not,” Yo scolded. “Now to be coming on. Cute-Dan Drury is to already be wah-hooing over the horizon. This way!” Arial: The Bunny of Crossness was taking heavy fire from the remaining two nearby dreadnaughts. Already blazes were out of control in three sectors. The damage board was one mass of red lights. “We’re not going to win this one,” Hallie warned Visionary. “I don’t think the ship can stay together for that much longer.” Vizh’s eyes closed for a moment, then opened again with a fierce determination. “Right,” he ordered, “ramming speed. Embed us in one of those other ships. Both if you can.” Sir John de Jaboz looked up with blissful wonder. “We can board them,” he realised. “We can fight!” “It’s going to be tough,” Hallie warned. “Those things hold thousands of Avawarriors.” “We can do it,” Lileblanche told them. “We have…” she glanced across at the earnest young knight ready to take on an evil empire by himself if required. “We have right on our side.” Hallie grinned and slammed the Bunny sideways to skewer the first of the other dreadnaughts. Tight Shot: Hatman pulled himself from the floor and staggered to the point that the Librarian indicated. He carefully unfolded the scarf from his hatility belt and wrapped it across his head. “Is it working?” Lee Bookman asked anxiously. “Yes.” When Jay Boaz looked up his eyes were lit with the fires of creation. This scarf had been given to him by Jury, the Shaper of Worlds. “I am Shaper.” “Whoa,” ManMan swallowed, taking a step back. He couldn’t pick up Knifey again yet. The blade was too cold. “I am Shaper,” Hatman repeated, “and this is my place of power.” His mind was flooding with so many ideas, so many beginnings, so many secrets. He knew he’d never be able to keep them, to understand them. For now it was a struggle just to stay sane. “Hold on,” the Librarian encouraged him. “Control the stories. Don’t let them control you.” “So many… so many starts…” Jay gasped. “So many intentions…” Lee Bookman was shouting more advice, but Hatman could no longer hear him… “…was a troll who set out to find the only mortal woman he’d ever cared about, to save her from a villainess who had stolen her life and deceived her friends…” “What was that?” panted Jay, staggering. But there was more. “With the knowledge of the Great Repository at my disposal there is nothing that I cannot achieve. Nothing. My rule will be absolute, eternal…” “No!” Hatman struggled to keep his mind as more ideas flowed through him. “Then search again! There is a weapon here, a weapon that can change the course of this war. It came from Earth and it is frozen in the Vortex. Find it. Awaken it. Make it our Master’s.” “I want to be useful in this war, Sir Mumphrey. I want to make amends for my mistakes when I let Wexford use me so horribly. Let me help out Asil on your staff. I’ll find a way to make a difference, I promise it.” “What are the lives of some few children compared to the harm such events will do to the Parody Master? What matter if the Caphan race is destroyed, so long as it serves the plans of… the Hooded Hood?” “Control it,” Knifey warned Hatman. “Everything depends on you.” Jay Boaz wrestled with the stories that threatened to drag him to insanity. Focus it down, he told himself. Cope with them one at a time… “Do you, Zdenka Zarazoza, take Our Glorious Beloved Chairman as your lawful wedded husband, to serve, honour, and obey him so long as you both shall live?” “NO!” Hatman shouted, grasping the power of the Shaper of Worlds in his wrath and seizing the narratives that lashed around him. “That doesn’t happen. Not like that!” The Librarian and ManMan caught him as he spasmed. “He’s flipped,” Joe Pepper cried as the capped crusader jerked and twisted in his arms. “That amount of data in somebody who hasn’t been trained and prepared,” the Librarian admitted, “it would burn out any mind.” “No,” Hatman snarled, sitting up. “I’ve got it. I’m Shaping.” He reached his mind out across the conceptual plane. It was his plane, not the Parody Master’s. The intruders had no right to be here. There were thousands of dimensional doors opened across the infinite chequerboard surface, connecting all the dominions of the Parody Master. Hatman grimaced, strained, and closed every one of them. No reinforcements would come now to help the army in the field. There were dormant defences still untriggered, long hidden by the Triumverate and not yet suborned by the Parody Legions. Hatman awoke them. There were stories, millions of stories, and many of them were about how ordinary men and women rose up and triumphed over impossible odds. Hatman set them free. And there was the Infinity Forge, created from captured power, bloated with stolen authority, a towering pyre that destroyed and enslaved to amp up the Parody Master. Hatman brought it near; near enough that the Lair Legion could reach it. Near enough to destroy. He didn’t even realise his head was beginning to smoulder. The Librarian snatched the scarf away and tossed it to the floor where it seared itself to ashes. ManMan carried Hatman back to the LairJet. Candid: “He’s done it,” reported Jury, former Shaper of Worlds. “Hatman has closed off the conceptual realm. Except to Earth.” “Good show,” breathed Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “Jolly good show. Now we have a chance.” “I’m hearing from Colonel Drury,” reported Contessa Natalia Romanza from the intelligence Desk. “He and the ground forces are encountering heavy resistance under a neutral sky. The distraction seems to be working though, because the enemy are sending most of their reserves to pincer our conventional troops and their metahuman support elements. They’re not focussing their weight of numbers against the Legion.” “We’re getting estimates of casualties from Al’s sensor drones,” Asil added. “Initial figures suggest that the enemy took forty percent losses in our initial attack. But now they’re rallying and fighting back.” “The butcher’s bill goes up from here,” Mumphrey agreed. “Now our boys have to stand.” Night Shoot: The darkness welled over the battlefield, sucking even the noise of combat out of the air. The zombie troops shambled down towards the human lines, careless of small arms fire. The higher undead glided behind them, sleek and deadly and thirsty for blood. “Right,” Con Johnstantine noted, his lips pulled back in an angry snarl, “Here come the rot-squad. Let’s show ‘em how to stay in their graves in future, shall we?” The Cockney sounded angrier than usual. That was somehow disturbing. “There’s an awful lot of them,” worried LeVeau M’Tumbe, the Voodoo Vicaress. “Either you’re the zombie queen or you’re not,” Urthula Underess told her. The party ghoul was stood very close to LeVeau and kept licking her lips. “I am,” the Voodoo Vicaress promised. “All my line has the gift. But there must be thousands of those things. Tens of thousands.” “Better get started then, darlin’,” Johnstantine suggested. “They don’t even come from our planet.” “You’ve dated one zombie you’ve dated all of them,” Urthula complained. “Now make with the hoodoo.” LeVeau M’Tumbe began to trace out a circle in the dirt. “What about the vampires and the nastier stuff?” Urthula asked Johnstantine in acid tones. “You can’t ask all of them out then steal their sacred artefacts.” “You didn’t seem to mind at the time, love,” the irritating Englishman retorted. “But as it happened I called in a bit of heavy duty help.” A cloud of bats screeched past overhead. “The League of Righteous Vampires?” Urthula scorned. “The temperancers?” “They’re out there as well,” Johnstantine agreed, “but against this lot I decided we needed someone special. So I dialled 911 for a nurse.” Red Filter: Countess Velvet was a bride of the undead before she was a bride of the Parody Master. She was a nosferatu of the first rank, nobility of Bloodworld, a planet where vampires ruled a slave human population. She was looking forward to free-range hunting on Earth. “Move forward, my children,” she commanded the vast clouds of bats and vermin that swarmed towards the approaching human army. “Show them the beauty of fear. Make them yearn to die.” Where Velvet glided the light shrivelled away. A trail of frost marked her passing. And then the horde wavered, stopped. Another cloud of black bats screeched out of the darkness and consolidated themselves into a white-clad woman with a holy symbol on her absurd cap. “I heard there was trouble,” the Night Nurse told Velvet. “Apparently some poor woman got trapped in a stereotype.” The Countess sensed that the undead wisp in front of her was being disrespectful. She swathed her long black cloak around her and let her eyes flare red. “Do homage to me,” she commanded, turning her will on the new vampire. The girl smelled of Earth and was not long from life. “No,” Grace O’Mercy told her. “I don’t do the homage thing now. Sorry.” Velvet realised there was power inside the child. “You have older blood within you,” she sensed. “You have… devoured an elder.” “Nosferos,” Grace shrugged. “He didn’t go away when he had the chance. Now I’m telling you to get lost too. Pack up your pets and head back to your coffin.” “You believe your petty Earth holds any power that can prevent me from draining every human on it dry as bone?” Grace nodded. “I can think of a dozen things off the top of my head, without even getting creative. And that doesn’t even include me.” Velvet pressed her will down on the Night Nurse. “So many ways I can destroy you, child,” the Countess warned. “Shall I have my minions tear you to gobbets? Or command your heart to burst from your chest? Or sear you with flames? Or cause your own innards to turn on you and tear you apart? Or shall I simply drink your ichor and add Nosferos’ power to my own?” Grace felt the power opposing her. It was huge and old and very experienced. She sensed her own allies moving into position to engage the enemy host. She swallowed hard. “You know what?” she hissed. “I really don’t like vampires. And you are getting right on my nerves.” Countess Velvet lunged for the kill, twisting her shape as she came into an inhuman amalgam of bat and wolf and vampire. The Night Nurse shifted shape to meet her, medical bag still in one hand. She slammed a fist down Velvet’s throat and crushed the holy water bottle she was gripping in her fist. Grace O’Mercy was used to surgical procedures. Cutaway: “There it is,” Yuki Shiro pointed out. “The Infinity Forge. Objective One.” “Yes.” Chiaki Bushido agreed. The Psychic Samurai wasn’t one for unnecessary conversation on a mission. “I’m logging the defences now,” Yuki went on. The cyborg P.I. connected Al B.’s handheld sensor module to her computer systems through the jack-point as the back of her neck. “Quite sophisticated electronic stuff they’ve got there. Some things I’ve never seen before.” “There are Avawarriors too,” Chiaki noted. “And some of those lobotomised Maxellians who have massive strength and speed.” “Well good. I’d hate for this to be too easy,” Yuki grinned. Then the sneak attack came. Chiaki sensed it a moment early, so the razor-shard that would have severed her jugular merely slashed her shoulder. Yuki’s enhanced reflexes allowed her to catch the missiles coming at her on her steel-reinforced forearm. The EMP discharges numbed her limb but didn’t put her down. The largest Z’Nox assassin spider Yuki had ever seen decloaked above them. “You did very well,” the creature hissed, her mandibles clacking as she moved to her next attack. “Assassin-Mother S’Tab is impressed.” Chiaki broke one way, drawing her blade. Yuki moved the other, avoiding the acidic secretions which the Assassin-Mother sprayed in complex patterns. The ground where the fluid hit bubbled into goo. It would be equally effective against cyborg frame. “Please tell me you’re not a bride of the Parody Master,” Yuki Shiro begged the spider. “Eeew.” “I am Z’Sox’s tribute to the Master,” S’Tab agreed proudly. “Consort and aide, the finest assassin in the universe.” She easily caught Chiaki’s attack with one leg and lashed back with another. She continued to bracket Yuki with a series of micro-bombs that tested the cyborg’s reflex capacities. The Psychic Samurai realised that the Assassin-Mother wasn’t going for the kill. Her combat pattern was wrong for that. She was merely delaying. “Something is wrong,” Chiaki warned. “She is…” Then the poison kicked in. The gash where the razor had torn the samurai’s flesh burned like fire and the strength went from her limbs. She staggered back as the spider pressed its attack. Yuki saw the blade-tipped leg flash down towards Chiaki’s unprotected midriff. She blurred forward and caught the steel, then realised that the assassin-mother had wanted that. The negativity-energy discharge drained Yuki’s internal batteries to less than 2% capacity, dropping her to her knees, systems shutting down across her whole frame. Chiaki couldn’t stand either. But as she fell she closed her hand over the blood-rimmed razor that had poisoned her and hurled it back into the assassin-mother’s belly. “Oh, very good,” she heard S’Tab approve as the poison did its work and the spider wobbled beside her victims. All three females toppled to the floor. Yuki’s last thought was: We did the job. They found us but Fleabot’s in position. Montage: The Battle of the Conceptual Plane had been raging for twenty minutes. Earth’s forces had established their beach-head in the shattered ground near the former Palace of Stories, under cover where the chequerboard surface had been churned into peaks and valleys by the tectonic upheaval. Their left flank was protected by a new sea of lava bubbling from deep below. Their right flank was covered by the burning wreckage of downed dimensional dreadnaughts. Dan Drury was pushing the tank columns out to establish a perimeter so a temporary landing zone could be set up to refuel and re-arm the combat helicopters and short-range attack aircraft. The larger planes had dropped their loads and were cycling back through EEE’s gateways for prepping on their carriers back on Earth. The battlefield was still confused. Wherever the Avawarriors were able to bring their forces to a point humans died. The initial surprise of the assault was passing and now the Parody Master’s forces were regaining discipline and formulating strategies. It had taken longer than expected because nobody had anticipated being cut off from the Parody Master himself, trapped by the closure of the planar portals. But that advantage was waning. The perimeter beyond the Palace was a churning cloud of darkness where night creatures swarmed. It was impossible to tell who – or what – might be winning that conflict. No human participant could hope to last long in that sinister roil. The last two dimensional dreadnaughts in the battle hovered a hundred miles away over Holy Taus’ new-built temple, awaiting his command to engage. Back at the Lair Mansion, Sir Mumphrey Wilton tried to piece together whatever fragmented reports he could to keep an overview of the battle. “Resistance is hardening,” Contessa Natalia summarised. “It’s taking too long to reach the objectives.” She send coded commands to the various metahuman elements on the battlefield to shore up difficult conflicts. The Terminus Teams, Giant Robot Six, the Federal Metahuman Resource Centre, the Globetrotting Gangbusters, the Belgian Waffle Three were all engaged. Reserves were running thin. “Hatman closed the plane,” Asil pointed out. “That’s half the battle right there.” “Yes,” agreed Jury. “There are many things working against the Parody Master now. Subtle and terrible things. Without them the soldiers who dared brave that fight would all be dead by now.” Beth Shellett shuddered at the magnitude of the conflict. “How much longer do we have?” she ventured. “Only these holes in the Celestian barrier are hurting Bry as well. I mean more than usually.” “Not much longer now,” assured Mumphrey. “This is do or die. Either we take down that Furnace thingie in the next twenty minutes or so or it’s game over.” Rough Cut: The combat drones swarmed over the lead tanks of the Second Combined Brigade, mostly British and Russian vehicles, some of 1960s vintage. The battle robots easily shredded their way through the tracked vehicles and the soldiers inside. The nearest metahuman team deployed as quickly as possible. The Widget sent in her remote-controlled golf-balls emitting disruption frequencies. That left the way open for Brass Monkey to tear into the enemy war machines and for Enormous Irma to pound them flat. There was a lull in the combat as the medics rushed in to help the wounded and the Terminus Team caught their breath. “You okay?” the groovy Gecko-Girl asked the Widget as the rescuers swarmed over the wreckage. “I’ll be fine when I stop dry retching,” Alice White promised. “Why did I ever sign up for this?” “Looking round at all the people in trouble, how could you not?” April Apple (Foxglove) asked simply. “We’ve all got to do our thing, that’s all. Nobody enjoys it. Except maybe Savagetooth.” “Excuse me, you’ll need to keep moving,” a khaki-clad woman with tousled red hair told the others. She hefted a wounded man over her shoulders with little sign of strain because she was actually a robot herself, one of the newly recruited medical corps. “We got a call from Fashion Fairy. There are more Avatroopers coming and we’re being ordered to fall back.” “Thanks, Tandi,” Alice answered. “I guess we’ve got to run, then.” The smart bombs began to drop around them as they carried the last of the wounded from that part of the battlefield. Sylvia St Sylvain led her scratch team of Valiant Vanguard forward to cover the retreat. The next engagement began. Reverse Shot: The Parody Master’s Special Forces Unit raged along the top of the newly-created ridges, frying tanks and clearing the skies of the annoying human helicopters. From this position they could flank Colonel Drury’s main assault element and the slaughter could begin properly. “This is typical of humans,” explained Dronon the Public Accoster. “They start out well but they have no stamina. They blunder in, all enthusiasm and wild courage, but then they find they don’t have what it takes to play the long game.” He stared through his binoculars at the besieged column below. “Had they any tactical understanding they would have recognised this ridge as being vulnerable.” Mr Epitome hammered into the Skree political officer, twisted his Rod of Authority from him, snapped the weapon, and hurled it into the main body of enemy special forces where the released nega-energy would do the most good. “We did recognise it, jackass.” Glory piled in beside him as Kwatrain moved behind her master for a killing stroke. She didn’t like Apocalyspians. By the time the Special Forces Unit realised their outflanking manoeuvre had been outflanked the rest of Terminus Team Two were upon them. First came the duststorm as Grit the Granulated Man raged down on them. Then Google Volt washed them with a massive armour-fusing wave of electricity. Then Atomic Bumpkin dropped amongst them to unleash radioactive meltdown. Temptest and Sunburst fought back. The former Imperium Guard unleashed their own energy powers, blasting back the humans with a military precision that exploited the indiscipline of the Earth villains’ attack. Mr Epitome recognised the danger and shifted targets, using Dronon as a shield against the solar flares and cosmic rays of his opponents until he could get close enough to grapple. “Watch out for Dronon!” barked Glory. The mutt of might had spotted the battered Public Accoster reaching for a stud on his belt. The pacification field was a localised solid force-wall that held every living thing immobile, friend and enemy. Suddenly the two dozen combatants found themselves unable to continue. Dronon picked himself up and glared maliciously at Mr Epitome. “Did you think you could stop me?” he demanded. “Me, the High Accoster? Me, chosen leader of the Master’s Elite forces? Me, whom he has blessed above all others?” “All others?” Mr Epitome chuckled. “Our intel from the Doomherald is that he’s been blessing your fiancée rather more.” Dronon’s face darkened. “No sacrifice is too great for the Master, who will lead the Skree to a glorious destiny. Oma is nothing. Nothing.” “I guess she didn’t miss you,” Epitome jeered. “Did you help with her brainwashing and torture when she became a bride of the Parody Master? Did you enjoy watching?” The Public Accoster snorted and approached the paragon of power with a stubby lethal disruptor knife. “Your pathetic attempts to turn this fight with psychology mean nothing to one such as I. Die, human, and let that divine spark return from whence it came.” “I wasn’t psyching you,” Dominic Clancy replied. “I was delaying you. While my x-ray vision overloaded your pacification field generator.” There was a small crack and black fumes from Dronon’s belt. The energy field vanished as suddenly as it had come. Glory blurred forward and took down Temptest before anyone else could react. Mr Epitome reached out and closed his hands around the Public Accoster’s head and squeezed. Intercut: “This has long gone past amusing,” Holy Taus, High Priest of the Parody Master, told his hierophants. “Losses are enormous. The Master will flay his generals for this. It is time to unleash the greater weapons.” “The Singularity Riders are in the field,” Holy Zadokus reported. “Pious V’Zel has somehow… fallen, but M’Rak the Vicious, T’Tharn the Lurid, and E’Koor the Vengeful now howl their rages towards the forces of Earth.” He allowed himself a little smirk. “K’Soth the Cruel has instead traversed one of the humans’ own portals and has gone to visit them at home.” “Not enough,” Taus spat. “For their blasphemies today the human race must bleed. Weep and bleed.” His face crumpled into a mask of hatred. “Earth shall die, and its people shall become a new Rider to replace that which they have destroyed. I shall see them tormented and damned for eternity.” Two hallways along, Xander the Improbable, master of the mystic crafts, placed a spanner back into his plumber’s kit and dropped the last of the mystic sentries to the floor with a satisfying squelch. “This has gone on long enough,” he frowned. “Too many people have died. It’s time to kick Taus where it hurts.” “It’ll be difficult,” Ebony of Nubilia warned him. “This place has more complex mystic wardings than pretty much anywhere I’ve ever seen. It must have taken the lifeforce of worlds to set this up.” She shuddered a little at the magnitude of necromancy required for such a feat. “If it was easy I wouldn’t get the big job title,” pointed out the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse. “But as usual, the evil archmage has pulled out all the stops on his mystical defences and forgotten to put conventional bolts on his back door. Come on.” In the great temple, Holy Zadokus hesitated. “Shall we then refrain from weapons of mass destruction on their planet?” he enquired. “In favour of a more… personal touch?” “Yes,” agreed Holy Taus. “Unleash the Wasting upon them.” Ebony kicked the door in. “No Wastings,” she shouted. “Put down the runes and back away. Now!” “Xander,” noted Taus, without surprise. “I was hoping you’d pluck up the courage.” Xander shrugged. “Talk to the stone hamster because the sorcerer supreme doesn’t want to know.” He glared at the huge summoning matrix in the many-angled diagram on the temple floor. “You’re idiots, you know that don’t you?” “I am High priest of the Parody Master,” Yaus smirked, “and by his will my might outstrips yours manifold.” “He’s an idiot too,” Xander noted. When the Infinity Forge was destroyed the energies summoned in the circle would no longer be restrained. The whole conceptual realm would rupture. “Step aside while I defuse this.” “You and your strumpet will not interfere in our holy work,” Zadokus warned, his fingers twisting to make the Binding Rune of Painful Confinement. Ebony dodged between the Holy Guards and lashed her foot out in the Swift Kick of Doubling Over With Watering Eyes. “Do what you have to, Xander. I’ll keep them off your back.” “You?” sneered Taus. “A little servant of a minor elder beast? Your Shoggoth is exhausted and our wards prevent him from aiding you here.” He gestured and sent a blinding bolt of disintegrating energy at Ebony. The spell made the priestess shudder then grounded itself along the mithrum wire that Xander had attached to her ankle. Ebony kicked Zadokus while he was down. Taus gestured for the guards to overpower her. “You were very foolish to come here,” he assured her, “but you will make a splendid sacrifice.” “She’s already done that one,” Xander pointed out. He stopped examining the binding and picked a heavy chest to duck behind. “By the way, that mithrum wire is attached at the other end to your mystic arsenal chamber. Would you like to speculate where your spell travelled to?” There was a really loud explosion. Two-Shot: “Vizh? Are you okay?” The possibly-fake man tried to focus his eyes. “Hallie? What happened?” “You ordered us to crash into the enemy,” the AI reminded him. “So we did.” Vizh realised he was in the wreckage of an escape pod. “Everybody else?” he checked. “Lili? Sir John?” The whole battlefield was a haze of noxious black smoke, covered in massive burning wreckage. “No idea. I can’t uplink with anything right now, given the interference. We just need to get out of here.” The fumes cleared enough to see the other two dreadnaughts moving over the battlefield to find them. “Now,” clarified Hallie. Pan: The brides of the Parody Master crashed down on the Lair Legion, separating them for ease of destruction. Annar of the Skunks selected a war-form large enough to consume PsychoAcidPervGirl! whole, then lashed tentacles out to try and crush her older brother CSFB! Skree Prime Mistress Oma went straight for Amazing Guy, the particle dispersal net in her warsuit scattering the multiversal energies the protector of the Parodyverse used long enough for her to smack him with her enhanced strength. J-Kyle, Vidian Superstar, sparkled down and overloaded the Librarian’s senses with her billion-credit smile. Nexus 935 of the Reticulum Matrix simply translated herself into data and surged out from the console where Al B. Harper was working to ring his neck. “They’re in trouble,” Annj noted, steering Donar’s goat chariot while the hemigod took on the newly arrived dimensional dreadnaughts. “I’m going in!” But then there was a massive detonation as a doom tube opened beside her. Huge Helga, Apocalyspe’s tribute-bride to the Parody Master, leaped through and stabbed her giga-rod at the Ausgardian queen’s chest. The flaring doompit energies seared through Annj. The explosion sent goats, cart, and shieldmaiden burning down to Earth. “This is not going well,” Lisa realised. She lashed her whip out to sever the metallic hands that Nexus 935 had grown to kill Al and added, “I summons Yo and Dancer.” A flash of summonsing energy brought in the reinforcements. Yo punctured Annar with his/her rapier, giving CrazySugarFreakBoy! a chance to drag PAPG! from the Skunk shapechanger’s stomach. Dancer went up against J-Kyle with all the jealous disdain that a talented but undiscovered entertainer can muster for a talentless success. The Librarian mustered enough to sear the entire biography collection of Sarah Bernhard through the vivacious Vidian. Amazing Guy managed to summon a cushion of energies to catch him as he fell from the skies. He reached it out more by instinct than planning to catch Annj. Oma and Helga came down at him fast. Al B. hammered the Purge Program key on his database, ejecting Nexus 935 and rebooting. “No time to play,” Lisa warned the Legion. “Get Hatty aboard. We have places to be. AG, hold them off. CZ, Trickshot, find Yuki then join us. I don’t want to risk summonsing her from so near the Furnace.” The brides rallied for their second attack as the LairJet took off again. AG blew a straight passage for the aircraft out of the palace, sending walls tumbling and causing the entire structure to collapse before he was dogpiled by brides. “I’ve locked on to Fleabot’s signal,” Al B. reported. “He’s at the Infinity Forge.” “Attack run, then,” CSFB! ordered. “Low and fast and prominent. Engage!” Tracking: “Something’s wrong,” Liu Xi Xian sensed, shivering although she usually never felt the cold. “S-something’s very wrong.” “We’re getting as massive energy loss on the Paradopolis portal,” Amy Aston noted, checking the gauges and smacking them with a wrench in case that helped. “I don’t know why.” She glanced over at where Lara Night was powering the dimensional grids. The woman was no longer coping easily. She had become corpse-pale and was straining. Blood was trickling from her nose and ears. “I won’t stop,” Lara assured them through gritted teeth. On the upper platform Kara Harper ran some mathematical equations through her head. “The numbers don’t make any sense,” she complained to her almost brother Cody. “Even suspending the Celestian barrier in so many places, burning enough energy to power a supernova, she shouldn’t be draining that fast.” “Well do some different sums,” Cody argued. “She won’t last long the way this is going. What the hell’s happening?” “Something is coming,” Liu Xi warned. She shuddered. “Something wicked.” Miss Framlicker hammered an emergency button. “Sir Mumphrey, we need security here right…” The dimensional grids overloaded in a shower of sparks. The EEE firehouse was plunged into darkness. K’Soth the Cruel’s cold chuckle filled the blackness. The women in the firehouse found themselves drained of all energy, too weak even to scream. Lara felt worlds being pulled from her. Liu Xi felt her very soul being consumed. The tears froze on Miss Framlicker’s face. Amy tried to struggle but her fingers wouldn’t close on a tool. Cody and Kara were further from the epicentre. Cody almost made it to the lab bench with its array of soldering irons. Kara pulled an omni-diode disintegrator from her waistband but found it drained of power. Then both of them slumped with the others in their debilitated anguish. K’Soth whispered to all of them, promising them torments, relishing their fears. It was a very intimate moment. Liu Xi tried to defy the Singularity Rider, but she was pitted against the malice of a whole civilisation. She looked to Lara but realised that the elemental’s nature made her more not less vulnerable to the soul destroyer. As if sensing her defiance, K’Soth swivelled round and leaned over Liu Xi Xian where she was strapped into the dimensional apparatus. His pitted face split into a smile as he reached down for her. Miss Framlicker tried to call out, to tell him to get back. She could no longer remember how to speak. Liu Xi felt her life draining from her. She had time for only one last word. She said the name. The Doomwraith’s fingers came down towards her face. The soldering iron went through the back of his hood and pierced his brain, even though he was an insubstantial wraith composed of the tormented undead spirits of a whole murdered world; but then the man wielding the burning steel knew all about that. K’Soth split apart, coiling into separate components as the magics binding a whole twisted people together were sundered. He coiled like smoke, trying to reform elsewhere; but he’d been killed by an expert. He faded away in impotent fury. “Always wondered if I could manage to do a Singularity Rider,” noted Exu the Doomherald before he vanished back through the Portal of Pretentiousness. “And now you know,” the Hooded Hood told him. “Congratulations.” “Now I know,” agreed the former god of murder. “Well, I suppose the bo… the Parody Master couldn’t actually get any more pissed at me.” “Oh, I believe we can find ways to make that possible,” the cowled crime czar promised him. “Now, I have fulfilled my side of our agreement…” “Yeah, you did. She’s safe, so I’m in. Sign me up.” “Very well, Doomherald. Welcome to my service. Welcome to the Purveyors of Peril.” Close Up: The Z’Sox Assassins Guild swarmed over the wreckage of the fallen dreadnaught, seeking humans to slaughter. They were disciplined about it as befitted the finest stealth warriors in the galaxy. They remained cloaked until they could find a kill. “Now,” called Sir John de Jaboz. At his word the Knights Improbablar each activated their gift to repress metahuman abilities. A thousand psionically-masked spider assassins were suddenly exposed in the orange flames-light of the burning vessel. “Charge,” Sir John commanded, and began the battle. Chase Scene: LairJet One tracked low over the battlefield. The Technopolitcan force field was overloaded and Amazing Guy was far behind deterring pursuit, so now it was up to the Librarian to find ways of overwriting the targeting programs of incoming missiles and up to CrazySugarFreakBoy to physically fend off intruders. “We’re heading past the wreckage of the Bunny of Crossness,” Lisa reported. “Any signs of Vizh or the others?” “Can’t make sense of anything in this electromagnetic fog,” ManMan apologised. “Al?” “”They’re systematically targeting the intel drones,” the archscientist warned. “Somebody’s in charge of things again.” “We knew it had to happen,” Hatman said, slowly recovering from a world-class headache in the back of the aircraft. “We’re running out of mission time. ETA?” “According to the last fix on Fleabot’s signal we should be seeing the Forge any time now,” Dancer answered. There was a thump as Huge Helga dropped onto the starboard wing of the LairJet, giga-rod already flaring Apocalyspian energies. CSFB! distracted her with a dizzy disc then hurled his entire collection of rocket-fuel soda pop at the villainess to literally blow her off the craft. He turned triumphantly, to be shot in the face by Prime Mistress Oma’s Obedience Ray. “Now you are mine to command, Earthling.” “Earthling!” cried CSFB! through his agony. “An alien just called me Earthling. That’s made my day!” He didn’t obey, but he did roll off the wing clutching his head. He bounced three or four times then vanished into the rubble. Citizen Z brought the Z-wing low so Trickshot could catch Oma in the buttock with an electroarrow. “Not that she needs another stick in her butt,” the irritating archer muttered. “LairJet One, I’m peeling off the retrieve the wounded,” Citizen Z called over the comm-link. “I’ll leave Trickshot here and go attend to our missing members personally.” “No, stay together,” Hatman countered. “Cover each other’s backs.” “Don’t worry, CZ,” Trickshot promised, “I won’t let anything happen ta ya.” “Wonderful,” replied Baroness Zemo in cold tones. Lisa twisted the LairJet over the next broken ridge between tottering tangled spires of dreadnaught wreckage. The local sky was lit red by a hellfire glow. There was the squat bulk of the death-grey furnace capable of breaking down even cosmic artefacts to feed the Parody Master’s power. “Yo is not liking of the look of that thing,” Yo shuddered, peering out of the cracked windshield at the distant device. The pure thought being had a sudden premonition that s/he kept to herself. "Yo is loving of all Yo-friends very much,” s/he added. “What defences are we registering?” Hatman demanded. “What did we get from Yuki and Chiaki before they went offline?” He suppressed any concern for missing comrades, shutting it in the small screaming corner of his mind where his fears for Zdenka were locked up. Hatman had a job to do no matter the cost. “They managed to neutralise most of the ground-to-air stuff,” Knifey answered, “but there’ll be all kinds of things protecting a place like that.” “Which is why we came ourselves,” Lisa pointed out. “We’re here. Say it, Hatty.” Hatman pulled on his Steelers cap. “Lair Legion, Line Up!” Then one of the Maxellian zombie-drones flew at super-speed through the LairJet’s port wing, tearing it clear off and sending the vehicle slamming into the ground to roll over and over again before exploding in a rosette of flame. Stunt Sequence: The Manga Shoggoth forced himself to proliferate again, swelling around the Legion as the Lairjet impacted, shielding them from the explosion of aviation fuel even as it burned away the outer surfaces of his own biomass. Hatman and Dancer were the first to roll free of the blazing wreckage. The capped crusader caught the Maxellian’s fist in his own steel hand so Dancer could leap in with a head kick that disrupted the techno-organic implant keeping the tormented metahuman alive. Lisa and Al B. came after, dragging the unconcious PsychoAcidPervGirl! and Annj from the wreckage. “More incoming,” Knifey warned as ManMan climbed from the dissolving Shoggoth-goo. “Aim me at the next one, Joe.” “Running fight,” announced Hatman. “Keep me covered while I get the package forward.” “I love football,” Lisa grinned. “Well, I love football players, anyhow.” The enemy was clustering. Yo launched him/herself at the nearest brain-dead meta-slave and sadly carved out its chest. ManMan barely avoided a skull-splintering smash and a bone-searing heat gaze and ended another zombie’s torture with a deft thrust of his talking knife. Nexus 935 of the Reticulum Matrix rose up in shining metallic streamers all around Dancer and the Librarian. “Don’t try the information-writing trick,” she warned Lee Bookman. “I’m briefed and shielded.” “Always good to prepare before a date,” the Probability Dancer admitted, somehow tangling the twisting metal tentacles of the silicone-and-steel bride. “I usually carry a toothbrush. Does that make me a slut?” “Her main database is there,” Lee Bookman indicated, pointing at Nexus 935, using his other Librarian ability to locate stores of information wheresoever they might be. “Fine,” Lisa said, flicking her dimensional whip to carve through it and send Nexus 935 clanking to the floor in pieces. “Keep going after Hat.” Hatman was jetting along still clutching the satchel, moving at MACH 2 towards the Infinity Furnace. Princess Annar shifted to become a giant spiny net and hooked him from the skies as only one who has been trained in combat metamorphosis from infancy could do. “Your plan will fail,” she promised as she pummelled the capped crusader into the ground. Yuki Shiro grabbed Annar by the nearest ridge and slammed her full swing in an overhead arc. “What plan would that be, then?” the restored cyborg P.I. demanded, changing strategies every second as Annar shifted shape. “Yes, we rescued Yuki,” Citizen Z announced, dropping her Z-Wing to neck level to take a run at the oncoming Avawarriors. “Imagine our delight.” “Kid just needed a few electroshock arrows into her,” Trickshot announced, somersaulting from the Z-Wing to plant a dozen shafts in the rapidly-twisting Annar. “Course, I still have the sonics and the chemical tips fer you, sweetheart.” Annar transmuted to liquid then formed up again around the archer’s legs. She whipped him up and slammed him into Yuki. The cyborg P.I. had to choose between shielding the archer from bone-shattering impact or avoiding Annar’s assault. She fell tangled with Carl Bastion, the two of them breaking through the chequerboard ground surface into the tunnel systems below. “I like the liquid state trick,” the Shoggoth told Annar. “This is how I do it.” The Princess of the Skunks screamed in horror as her own metamorphing body flowed through the Shoggoth; and that was the end of the battle for her. “Keep going,” Knifey told Hatman. Jay Boaz pulled his Eagles cap and twisted into the skies. Hatman felt the presence of the Doomwraith before he ever saw T’Tharn the Lurid, a chill in his soul promising days of horror to come. “Watch out!” Dancer cried, too late, for the Singularity Rider was moving his black flying beast with lethal speed at the leader of the Lair Legion. CrazySugarFreakBoy! bounced back into the battle, grabbing Hatman round the waist and shifting his friend’s vibrations with his own to make them both insubstantial for the two seconds it took for the Singularity Rider to pass. Then both toppled to the ground shivering and rimed with frost. Dancer lunged for the fallen satchel, but T’Tharn was stood over it. “Drat,” said Sarah Shepherdson. Mjalcolm screamed across the battlefield, shattering into the Doomwraith’s head with force enough to burst a moon. “Ho, Rider!” bellowed Donar. “Pickest on someone thine own size!” T’Tharn had been staggered back three steps, but he reined up his beast, its black wings stretching sixty feet from smudged evil tip to tip. Dancer hooked the dropped satchel with her foot then kicked it up to Citizen Z. “Go!” she shouted. Donar slammed into T’Tharn, screaming Norse obscenities as the warrior rage overtook him. CZ veered her V-Wing up and began a final assault run on the Infinity Forge. Huge Helga blew the V-Wing from the skies, sending the Baroness and her package tumbling onto the wrecked plain. “I am the greatest warrior of Apocalyspe,” Helga warned, blurring up to the stunned Citizen Z with alarming speed. “Yield and grovel or die where you lay. “Grovel?" Baroness von Zemo wasn't about to do the g-word. "Say please." The bride of the Parody Master negligently hurled a dimensional net to tangle the incoming Shoggoth and caught Dancer and Lisa with a handful of bloodthirst vineseeds. “Please try to resist. I enjoy hearing human bones snap." Citizen Z had run out of cover. “Fine,” said the Baroness, holding out the satchel. “Take it then,” Helga seized the device, Al B’s modification of the Abhuman negativity zone generator that had once been used to surround Paradopolis, now reworked as a nega-bomb of immense power. “You have failed,” the Apocalyspian announced. “And now you die for it.” Citizen Z hit the ground. Al B. hit the remote detonation switch. The satchel detonated with a strange reverse explosion sound. A black bubble bulged out from it searing everything around it from existence. “You okay, Laurie?” Hatman asked, cradling a stunned CZ in his arms and pulling off his Sonic the Hedgehog hat. “Who?” the Baroness demanded. “I mean, er, who are you? Oh, I remember. Hatman. I think I’m concussed.” “Nice feint,” the capped crusader told her. “No, I mean it. I think I was hit on the head with some debris when that bloody thing went…” “Nice feint getting Helga to take the package,” Jay clarified. “Okay, that distraction’s played itself out,” Lisa judged. “And pretty much everything on the battlefield’s looking at us now. Jamie?” “This is so modern,” CSFB! complained. “We do all the fighting then some other hero comes in at the last minute to save everything.” “I’m okay with that,” Dancer assured him. “Really.” NTU-150 decloaked LairJet Two, switching off the recycled Xnylonian stealth module that had kept it out of the battle so far, flicked on his own patented nuclear-powered multiple waffle maker, and aimed the craft at the Infinity Forge. Effects Shot: The Parody Master powered through the dimensional defences that had closed off the gateways of the conceptual realm. It wasn’t as hard as piercing the Celestian barrier around Earth – and he was confident that he could do that if he really had to. He appeared in the midst of battle, lashed around to vaporise the thousand of so Earth troops nearest to him, assessed the enemy’s strategy, then moved towards the Infinity Forge. His power welled out from him, shoring up his soldiers, amping the abilities of the remaining Avawarriors on the field, empowering the last of his clerics. The wae had already turned against the humans. Now their defeat was assured. The body count mounted. He called away his lieutenants from harassing the Lair Legion. It was time to face them in person. They deserved that personal touch. LairJet Two decloaked and screamed down to destroy the Infinity Forge. The Parody Master appreciated the cunning diversion the Legion had practiced. He caught the Jet just before it crashed into the vast engine and held it there by his will. Then he crumpled it into a ball the size of a fist and hurled it into the fiery heart of his furnace. The vessel’s lone occupant had managed to eject. He wore red and gold battle armour of eccentric design. NTU-150, the Parody Master recognised. A founder of the Lair Legion but retired now because of heart problems. The Parody Master gestured and stopped Jamie Baustista’s heart. He was surprised when half a dozen back-up systems cut in and restarted it. Then the Legionnaire crashed into him with immense force, actually pushing him back a step. The full spray of repulsors, pulse cannons, electromagnetic particle rippers, lethal stunulators and camping tools sent him another pace away. “You still have a lot to learn about us,” Enty warned him. “Such as?” the Parody Master challenged. He reached out, caught NTU-150 by the helmet, and cracked it off. He fused the main circuit distributors to cripple the battle suit so his enemy hung helpless. “Such as we don’t just have one distraction,” Jamie Bautista spat through bloody lips. Yo leaped from the cover of the broken ground, vaulted over the last dazed technicians around the furnace, and plunged his/her rapier into the red-hot steel frame. “Die, uncute machine!” the pure thought being called. Yo believed that would be enough to destroy the most powerful engine of destruction in the Parodyverse. Everybody on Yo-Planet believed it all at once. The conceptual realm believed it; it made the very best story. The Infinity Forge exploded in a flare that shone of a billion worlds across a million dimensions. The conceptual plane shuddered and disintegrated. Slow motion: “No,” the Parody Master commanded. He extended his gleaming sword towards the lurid red fireball of released energies from the shattered Infinity Forge. The massive plume of escaped power halted, frozen, then it reversed like a film played backwards. The Infinity Forge reformed before Yo’s surprised eyes. The pure thought being sliced his rapier at it again. This time he weapon skidded across the gunmetal surface of the artefact. The Parody Master had willed it so. “But that art cheating!” complained Donar. He dropped in close before the conqueror of universes and swung Mjalcolm right at the Parody Master’s head. The villain was jerked backwards and part of his helmet shattered, scattering metal shards. Donar hit him again. The Parody Master sliced his sword down at Donar. ManMan was there with Knifey to intercept it. Despite the massive force of the downward blade, Knifey reinforced Joe Pepper’s arm to catch it. The two weapons clashed edge to edge – and then Knifey sliced right through the Parody Master’s sword. “Knifey!” hissed the villain, recognising his old foe. Then Donar hit him again, leaving a great crease in his chestplate. “It’s over,” Amazing Guy shouted to the Parody Master. “Even you don’t have the power to hold together the Infinity Forge, prevent this plane collapsing, and fight the Lair Legion. Stand down and surrender!” His lance of multiversal energies slammed the Parody Master to the floor. And again. And again. “Over?” snarled the Parody Master. “This is just beginning.” He flinched once as he shattered AG’s energy constructs, knocking the protector of the Parodyverse from the skies with the psychic backlash. He drew his second weapon, the whispering soul-taker axe that reflected the screaming faces of every victim it had ever consumed. Yo avoided the axe’s heavy arc, dodged low, and stabbed the Parody Master through one of the rents in his armour. “Uncute Parody Master is to stop of being bad!” The Parody Master moved faster than he had before, enhancing his speed to be enough to grab the pure thought being. Even in the noise of the battlefield the Legion could hear the snap of Yo’s spine. An animal noise came from Donar as the berserker fury took him. Mjalcolm glowed with lightning as the hemigod raged upon the Parody Master like a tempest personified. Lightning welled from the dark skies and seared between them. CrazySugarFreakBoy! darted in to grab Yo, but the pure thought being had already dissolved. The Parody Master sliced his axe across Donar’s belly, then landed a skull-crumpling punch to cave in the hemigod’s head. “N-uh!” CSFB! cried, emptying his itching powder spray into the bloody wounds across the Parody Master’s face. He kept moving a fraction of an inch in front of the villain, striking blow after blow wherever his enemy seemed wounded. “Shoggoth, just like we talked about it!” The Manga Shoggoth oozed from the cracked ground, welling around the Parody Master then seeping into the tears in his armour, slithering caustically through strange dimensions. The Parody Master screamed. Dancer kicked the Parody Master’s arm, improbably hitting the nerve cluster that weakened his grip on his weapon. Lisa hooked the axe from him with her whip and sent it spinning away. “I summons Epitome!” Lisa called, then pointed at the battle. “To just there!” “What?” Mr Epitome blinked, looking round him and surveying the combat zone. “Why am I here?” “Because it’s where you belong,” the first lady of the Lair Legion answered him. “The bad guy’s that way, big fellah.” Dominic Clancy spun round and laid a classic uppercut on the reeling Parody Master. Then he got in close and dirty. It felt good to be able to cut loose. His fists hammered deep into his enemy’s broken helm until they were bloody and raw. Hatman took a deep breath then pressed a broken fragment of the Parody Master’s helmet to his temple. “Aaaaaaghhh!” he screamed as he understood who the Parody Master was and why he’d come to be. “You have to hold it together, Jay,” Lisa told him. “You have to get in there, now.” “Stand aside, woman!” Hatman told her, and lunged forward. He seized up the discarded soul-axe and swung it round into the Parody Master’s chest with a force to cleave mountains. The Legion came in again and again at the wounded enemy: CrazySugarFreakBoy! then Epitome then Dancer then Lisa then Hatman, each unleashing attack after attack to keep the Parody Master on the ropes. The great axe-cleft in his chest spurted ichor. The Shoggoth burned him from the inside out. The Parody Master staggered once, then twice, then drew upon the deepest reserves of his energy to prevent his defeat. “This does not happen,” he declared, willing himself whole again. “This does not happen!” His armour closed up, his wounds vanished. He isolated the Shoggoth inside him then seared it from existence with utter ruthlessness. “He’s drawing on fundamental powers,” Al B. Harper warned, “How can…? He’s sapping the laws of physics in the whole Parodyverse to just keep himself going!” Jay chopped at the enemy again, using the Parody Master’s own power against him. The screaming headache Jay Boaz suffered manifested by the blood trickling from his eyes. The helmet shard smouldered the flesh of Hatman’s temple. He wanted to conquer everything that lived. Amazing Guy didn’t have the strength to stand but he sheathed Dancer in a quantum sheath so she could hit the Parody Master hard enough to hurt. Donar staggered up, gory but undefeated, mindlessly slamming into the villain with blows that broke the ground beneath them. The battle had raged for almost a minute now. The Librarian threaded his way across the lethal exchange of energies, dropping to the ground to crawl the last fifty yards to the restored Infinity Forge. The scene was painted blood crimson with the raging flame of the terrible hearth. Everything was smoke and screaming. “You know that plan was rated as having less than a 20% chance of success,” Citizen Z commented as Al monitored Bookman’s progress. “I think we’re down to the longshots now,” the archscientist replied. “None of our models predicted the PM could take this much damage. He’s holding together pretty much this whole dimension with willpower alone. He’s holding himself together the same way. The damage we’ve done to him is incredible. And yet he’s still hurting us.” “Killing us,” Citizen Z corrected. “What happened to Yo and the Shoggoth?” “No way of knowing,” Al B. admitted. “This is coming down to the wire.” The Parody Master caught his axe edge in the palm of his hand, twisted it from Hatman, then clubbed Jay Boaz with the hilt across the side of his head. The capped crusader went down hard. The Parody Master stamped to smear his skull across the battlefield. CSFB! blurred down and pulled Hatman out of the way at the last moment. His reward was a backward slice from the soul-axe that ripped through his shoulder and left him shivering and half-frozen, laying sprawled over Hatman’s unconscious body, too weak to move. ManMan parried the cleave that would have killed the leader and deputy of the Legion in one motion. Knifey darted forward, past the Parody Master’s defences, barely missing his left eye. “Did you tell your latest fool what happened to the one you brought against me last time?” the Parody Master challenged Knifey. “Did you tell him how long that hero screamed for afterwards?” “Another reason to take you down, tall dark and creepy,” Dancer suggested. She managed to tangle the rags of the Parody Master’s cape to obscure his helmet, leaving the way open for Lisa to tear through his breastplate again with her dimensional whip. The Parody Master emitted a burst of force, bubbling out in all directions, searing away the obstruction, churning the ground and searing the flesh of anyone it hit. Amazing Guy used the last of his strength the shield the Legion, but those closest –ManMan, Donar, CSFB!, were all taken out of the fight. “Okay, you're still cheating,” Dancer complained. She’d improbably avoided the blast. She came back again with a kick that cracked the Parody Master’s helmet into fragments, then another that rattled his teeth. “With the cheating and the personal hygiene problems I’m guessing you don’t make a lot of friends.” The conqueror snarled, gestured, and sent Sarah slamming into the ground. A second motion caused the earth to slam together, closing like a book with the Probability Dancer between the pages. Then he froze the entire mass in suspended time, then teleported it far away. He allowed zero probability of Dancer saving herself. He intended to save her for later. “Dancer!” shouted Al B. “I summons Dancer,” called Lisa, but she already knew that her gift wouldn’t be able to overcome the will of the Parody Master. “Next?” growled the villain. That left Mr Epitome in the battle. The paragon of power was ragged and scorched but he went in again, wringing the Parody Master’s neck, shaking him like a rat. “You are… going to… die…” Dominic Clancy told him. The villain grunted as he felt his spine begin to creak. He drew on yet more of his reserves and shattered Epitome’s wrists, then laid out the man of might with one solid head-punch. The Parody Master looked around him for enemies to kill. “Um…” worried Al B. Harper. He turned to see what Citizen Z was doing, but Citizen Z wasn’t there. The Librarian reached the Infinity Forge. The massive engine of sheer destruction robbed the cosmic artefacts inside it of their purpose and identity, recyling their power to augment that of the Parody Master instead. The Intergalactic Order of Libraries had information about every cosmic artefact ever created. Lee Bookman now channelled them into the Forge, reminding the power that coruscated inside it what it had originally been. The Infinity Forge detonated for the second time. Fly-on-the-wall: “Information, damn it!” Sir Mumphrey Wilton barked. “What the blazes is happenin’ out there?” “We don’t have contact with the main Operations Team,” Amber reported. “Or anybody, really. We had some intel from Drury about an engagement with the main Avaforce. Reports that the Parody Temple has gone up in flames. But now we seem to have lost communications almost across the board.” “We’re getting some really mixed up readings on the dimensional monitors,” Miss Framlicker reported across the communications link. “We’ve lost the portals in Russia and England and we’re struggling with the one in Australia. India and Paradopolis were already down. Lara’s screaming and Liu Xi’s bleeding. I don’t know how long we can keep these links up with whatever’s happening out there.” “If we lose those doors we condemn our whole army in the field to death,” Herbert P. Garrick warned. “You have to do something.” “I’ve got voice link with Yuki Shiro!” Contessa Romanza called out, pressing the speaker bulb to her ear. “She and Carl are in some ancient tunnels under the surface. Some kind of temple, she thinks.” Jury gasped. “The chamber of the Storyheart!” she recognised. “Not a temple, but a sacred place. It’s where… once there was a great power there. The greatest. It’s been hidden away from the Parody Master now.” She frowned and paled. “But if even that chamber can be penetrated now, the whole of the conceptual plane must be dying.” She turned to Mumphrey urgently. “You have to get your people out of there. Now Right now!” “What’s going to happen?” Asil asked, catching the fear in the former Shaper of World’s voice. “The conceptual plane is breaking up,” Jury predicted. “Everybody there will be lost. Everybody and everything. Get them back here, now!” “The battle’s still ragin’,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton pointed out. “Our boys would be cut to pieces if they tired to retreat at this point.” “And destroyed utterly if they don’t!” Jury argued. “Please, you have to believe me…” A series of red lights and warning alarms lit up on the computer banks of the Operations Room. Miss Framlicker’s words came over the voice link, sounding dull and flat. “We’ve lost the dimensional doorways,” she reported. “All of them. Fried. The links are gone. Our people are totally cut off.” For a moment there was nothing anybody could say. Action replay: The Infinity Forge detonated for a second time. Nothing nearby could have survived the blast. Lee Bookman was very near. And then he wasn’t so near. He was beside Lisa, summonsed from certain death. Also next to her, looking confused and dishevelled, were Visionary and a hospital-pyjamad spiffy, and most of the rest of the Lair Legion. The amorous advocatrix had called them all. For a second time the conceptual realm shattered into fragments. The detonation cascaded across the chequerboard plane, breaking it into hundreds of wild random pieces dropping into dimensional maelstrom. Armies were scattered like leaves. The last of the planar guardians went insane, the huge shibboleths falling upon the Avawarriors with a final savage abandon. Fragments of spinning dying plane crashed together then tumbled off into the vortex. The catastrophe cascaded outwards, smashing through the engaged armies, breaking fortifications to rubble, toppling the new-made mountains, spilling fragments of plane into the oblivion of Comic-Book Limbo. The heavens seemed to crack. The clouds burned away and the stars behind them shattered like painted glass. A howling gale of the vortex between worlds swept everyone from their feet, overturned tanks, swatted aircraft as if they were nothing. Even the remaining dimensional dreadnaught was tossed like a straw in the wind. “Bother,” said Xander the Improbable, putting up his umbrella to shield Ebony. “Bugger,” said Con Johnsantine, dragging Urthula to cover. “What the f…” shouted Dan Drury. “Git those wounded over ta this shelter right now. Gedney, find us a way ta stay alive another five minutes, why don’t you?” “It’s all breaking apart!” screamed April Apple. “Dream!” The conceptual plane shattered like a pane of glass, fracturing into deadly shards that sparkled off each other as they tumbled into the merciless transdimensional vortex. “There was always, um, a 30% chance that might happen,” Al B. Harper admitted sheepishly. “Thank you so much for sharing,” spat the Librarian acidly. Then, in the midst of the destruction, the Parody Master rose up in his wrath. *** Discovery shot: From the air the entire chequerboard plane seemed to fracture then shatter. Livid cracks rippled out from the epicentre, breaking mountains as they spread. Those combatants who could retreat fled away from the spatial wounds. The dead were consumed. The raven struggled through the atmospheric turbulence, peering down at the dead. It was partly because ravens are hard-wired to spot corpses and partly professional interest. After all, Quoth had been a Raven of Destiny, employed by the Chronicler of Stories, until she had been deemed Surplus to Destiny. “This isn’t looking good,” she said to herself. Her comm-link with the Lair Mansion was down so she had nobody else to report to. “The whole plane is… is…” Quoth was overcome with horror. This had been her home. It was unchanging, eternal – or it was supposed to be. Now it was crumpling and breaking like brittle plastic. The Infinity Forge was gone. Even the land it had stood on was burned from existence, leaving the gaping hole that was the centre of the plane’s fragmentation. Quoth swooped low, risking her delicate pinfeathers in the storm of debris that spiralled the cataclysm. She had to see. She had to know. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” she said to herself. Somewhere behind her one of the Shibboleths broke with a massive detonation, lighting the sky and searing another hundred thousand Avawarriors out of existence. Quoth winged lower still, searching. Then she saw. Fleabot was clinging desperately to a shard of planar matter, teetering on the very edge of the vortex. The micro-robot looked battered and exhausted. Quoth swooped down and grabbed him with her beak. Then she swallowed him. “Sorry,” she apologised, “but it’s the best way I can carry you.” “Not a problem,” came back Fleabot’s muffled tones. “Hey, it’s not the first time I’ve been inside you.” “Shut up.” Quoth struggled into the dimensional gale and wondered where it was going to blow them. Bird’s Eye View: “Visionary,” said Lisa, “get everybody out of here safely. I mean everybody.” The possibly-fake man did a quick check of the people laying around the first lady of the Lair Legion: Hatman, Donar, ManMan, Epitome, Enty, AG all unconscious; CrazySugarFreakBoy stunned, shivering, and bleeding but refusing to give up. More worryingly, Yo, the Shoggoth, Dancer, Trickshot, and Yuki weren’t present at all. Lisa’s summons hadn’t worked on them. Visionary pushed that to the back of his mind. “Al, I need contact with Hallie,” Vizh called. “CZ, locate who else you can on the battlefield. Collect Annj and PsychoAcidPervGirl! as well. spiff, Librarian, see if you can wake up any of our downed friends.” “This is another LL crisis, isn’t it?” spiffy recognised, limping to help. A moment ago he’d still been in hospital from his last team-up with the Legion. “Remember when I just used to get invited to the parties?” “Wait!” called Visionary, worriedly. “Where’s everyone else?” The Parody Master extended his hand to restore his Infinity Forge once again. He moved slowly, painfully. Lisa moved to challenge him. The ground shook again, scattering fallen Legionaries down the new-made slope. “I’ve got Hallie,” Al B. called, frantically plugging things into the cobbled module he’d ripped from the wreckage of LairJet One and the Z-Wing. Vizh tried to stanch the blood coming from Donar’s head injury. “Tell her we need transport, fast. An ambulance would be good. An ambulance with Uhuna on it would be perfect.” He noticed the cracks spreading across the chequerboard ground. The integrity of even this small shard of the conceptual realms was failing. “But anything that flies will do,” he added. “It is too late to escape now,” the Parody Master gloated. “You have done your worst, and it has been a wonderful game. I respect you for it. I will have your broken corpses mounted in my personal trophy collection – except for Dancer, of course, who shall be a trophy of another kind.” “Vengeance-crazed, all-powerful, and still horny,” Citizen Z observed. “What a great combination.” “He won’t get Dancer,” Knifey promised. “Lee, pick me up. Get me near that lunatic.” The Parody Master gestured, and suddenly the Librarian, CZ, Al B., spiffy and Visionary were unable to move. “Nobody will deny my victory now,” the conqueror said. “I am the final word of power in the Parodyverse, ordained from the beginning as its champion against the Final Threat. There is nothing that can deny me and no-one that can stop me, for such is the way it is written.” The Lair Legion hung motionless. “Sally, can you move me?” Citizen Z urgently whispered. “I’m stuck,” Silicone Sally, operating as Beth von Zemo’s combat suit warned. “We’re screwed.” The Parody Master strode towards the fallen Lair Legion. “You have been defeated. Now you must suffer for your loss.” Short: Yuki and Trickshot looked around them for a way out. Whatever the shrine had been it was now coming down around their ears. “I hope this means th’ Legion has spanked some Parody Master butt,” Carl Bastion declared as they scrambled to find an exit. The Chamber of the Storyheart’s walls of pearl tended to shatter explosively under pressure. “Hold on,” Yuki called. “I just want to log a few sensor readings on this place before we…” Then the whole place came down. Death scene: The Parody Master strode towards the fallen Lair Legion. “You have been defeated. Now you must suffer for your loss.” Lisa’s dimensional whip carved through the conceptual bedrock, slicing the fragment of reality in two. The chunk with the fallen Legion on it span slowly away, leaving the advocatrix and the Parody Master behind. “Sorry, the Legion’s busy right now,” the amorous advocatrix declared. “They’ll be back to take you down presently.” Separated from the villain’s power, the conscious Legionnaires could suddenly move again. The new tear had made their chunk even more unstable. “Get everybody over to that solid-looking bit over there!” spiffy called out. “Lisa, summons me over to help you.” “Not this time, young ‘un,” came back the voice of the first lady of the Lair Legion. “This bastard hurt my people and he is going to suffer” The keeper of the Booke of the Law turned round, spread her hands apart, and was suddenly holding the elder artefact, the very laws of the Parodyverse bound in leather. Her hair tossed in a cosmic wind as she moved to face the Parody Master. “Lisa!” Visionary called out. The distance between the two shards was lengthening. “You say you were given your power for a purpose?” Lisa challenged the Parody Master. “You haven’t used it for that. By the power vested in me as Keeper of the Booke of the Law, you are fired!” The words hit the Parody Master harder than Donar’s punches, staggering him to his knees. His attempts to reforge the Infinity Furnace failed, the sundered energies trailing away into the Vortex to vanish from his comprehension. He looked up at the amorous advocatrix with vengeful eyes. “Oh, and by the way,” Lisa added, “you’re not very good in bed.” The Parody Master rose up, soul-axe in hand. “You dare…?” “Oh sure. Big axe,” Lisa smirked. “Like that compensates. When will you learn its not about power, it’s about technique?” The Parody Master strode forward. Lisa was running out of places to retreat. “You should seek advice,” the first lady of the Lair Legion suggested. “Maybe ask the Hooded Hood for a few tips. He was worth more than one visit.” The Parody Master lashed out as Lisa laid into him with her dimensional whip. He caught her weapon and seared it from existence. “Call for aid,” the villain commanded her. “Summon your friends, so I can slaughter them one by one.” Lisa shook her head. “They’re my Lair Legion, and I love them all. You think I’d let you harm them?” She snorted disdainfully. “They’ll be back. You’ll fight them again. And they’ll beat you. I know we hurt you this time. We’ve decimated your armies, denied you your Forge, scared you to death. I’ve broken your high purpose. Now you’re just a super-powered thug with lots of power. The Legion takes down three people like that before breakfast.” The Parody Master struck her to the ground. “Summons them!” he commanded. “The Legion can’t come and kick your ass right now,” Lisa told him, sprawled on the floor. “We have so many more interesting villains to worry about. Ones that have more going for them than just an infinite force shtick. Hell, even the Resolution Prophesy had more personality than you do. You have to conquer all reality because you don’t have any other way of getting people to notice you.” The Parody Master hissed, his eyes burning in their helmet. He seized up the Booke of the Law and burned it to ashes. “Your power is broken, Lisa Waltz! There is no more office for you to hold!” Lisa wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth. “So? You can burn paper but you can’t burn truth.” “You are an office holder no more. A frail, powerless mortal.” “And I still have a life. You should see my date book.” She smirked again. “Oh, and by the way, I’ve beaten you. My people got away, you lost your toys, and you heard some truths you’ll never forget. Naaah naaah!” “And you will die,” the Parody Master proclaimed. Lisa shrugged. “At least I lived.” The Parody Master was so furious that he didn’t realise that he’d cleaved her head off until after it was done. Cutaway: In the Lair Mansion Infirmay, Marie Murcheson awoke from her months-long coma screaming at the top of her voice. Dutch tilt: “No!” screamed Visionary at the top of his voice. “I know,” spiffy told him, using his symbiotic fern to wrestle the possibly-fake man from the edge of the crumbling shard of reality into the light dimensional cruiser that Hallie had appropriated. “I know, man. But we can’t help her. We have to go. She wanted us to go.” “He’s got Dancer as well,” Vizh cried out. “And who knows what he’s Done to Yo and the Shoggoth. We have to stop him!” “We have to save the people here who are counting on us,” spiffy shouted back. “And you know that’s what Lisa, Dancer, and Yo would say too!” The howling dimensional gales carved more fragments from the crumbling planar fragment. The Librarian wrestled Mr Epitome’s bulk through the hatch. “Make sure everyone’s on board,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! called out. He was trying to gauge the chaotic interplay of forces that threatened to destroy them every moment. It was like manoeuvring in a high wind, with fragments of black dust choking everybody and the ground collapsing beneath their feet. “This place can’t last much longer.” Al B. tried to make sense of the controls of the crowded little vessel. Hallie had simply flash-fried the operating system and was doing her best to control it herself. “Try and pick up Drury’s beacon signal,” he called to the A.I. “I can’t find any of the portal signatures.” The Librarian laid ManMan down on the metal floor and returned to help spiffy and Vizh drag Donar. “Where’s Hatman?” he asked Citizen Z. The mysterious woman turned round to look at the edge of the fragmenting rock. “Why… he was there a moment ago!” she cried in feigned tones of concern. “Maybe he recovered and went to the ship by himself. I hope… he didn’t roll over the edge.” It really had been too good an opportunity to miss. Fade Out: The Parody Master was exhausted, more exhausted than he dared admit. His troops were scattered across the broken void, his personal energies depleted lower than they’d ever been. And he couldn’t get that mocking woman’s words out of his head. He reached down and dredged more power from his anger. He had to forge a track between conceptual shards so he could catch up with his enemies and destroy them. He was too slow. He saw the dimensional cruiser tacking away into the reality storm. He saw it vanish into the purple-red haze. He only found Jay Boaz, abandoned unconscious on the tiny melting fragment of conceptual tile. And then he laughed. P.O.V. “Boss?” VelcroVixen checked as she heard the noise in the Hooded Hood’s throne room. “Hood?” “Get out!” shouted the cowled crime czar. He was pressed up against his Portal of Pretentiousness, his hands clawing at the glass. There was blood on his fingernails. There was something in his tone that promised death if he was not immediately obeyed. Vicki Vee fled. The Hooded Hood was pale and his eyes burned with a livid green light. “This was not…” He struggled to find words. “I didn’t…” Lisa Waltz was dead and there was no retconning it. It was necessary. Ioldobaoth Winkelweald stared at his reflection, at those dead eyes shadowed by more than a funeral-grey cowl. “This is war,” he promised. “The Hooded Hood shall go to war.” Coming Next: Well, we’ve got two million stranded wounded soldiers lost in a shattered dimension. We’ve got a scattering of injured, exhausted heroes that need rescuing. We’ve got vengeful Avaforces looking for payback. We’ve got a royally pissed off Parody Master ready to finish the game. The dying’s not finished as we head into UT#301: Harvests of the Killing Fields. Link to Visionary's suggested soundtrack Link to the words to the song, "Village Lanthorne" Footnoting Is Very Hard To Do: There are a massive amount of characters in this chapter, most of whom are described in the Who's Who in the Parodyverse. However, a review of villains might be in order. The Parody Master is a universes-conquering tyrant who manifests by possessing a host and can call upon almost unlimited power. He is currently in his “ultimate” body, giving him access to the fullest range of abilities he has ever manifested. After all these years as a Parodyverse villain we still haven’t found an origin for him. His powers include vast physical capacities which he seems able to increase at will, energy manipulation, telekinesis, dimensional folding, time distortion, and whatever else occurs to him at the time. He is served by a number of special operatives. His Singularity Riders or Doomwraiths are evil artificial undead created by magically twisting the souls of entire species together into one dark entity. The Doomwraiths are T’Vorkh the Cancerous, W’Lure the Bitter, M’Rak the Vicious, T’Tharn the Lurid, E’Koor the Vengeful, and Great Br’Kath. S’Chen the Empty, V’Zel the Pious, and K’Soth the Cruel have now been destroyed. The Brides of the Parody Master are tributes surrendered up by conquered civilisations, typically powerful women of noble rank. They are “conditioned” to fanatically love and serve their husband. Known Brides include Princess Annar of the Skunk Imperium, Prime Mistress Oma of the Skree, High Assassin-Mother S'Tab of the Z'Sox Superstar J-Kyle of the Vidians, and Nexus 935 of the Reticulum Matrix. Countess Velvet of Bloodworld and Huge Helga of Apocalyspe are probably destroyed. The Parody Master has demanded a number of Earth women as his brides also. These include Dancer, Sorceress, Rabid Wolf, Liu Xi Xian, Pelopia, and the as-yet-unidentified Celestian Madonna. Princess Uhunalura was also on the list but has since been killed. The most recent Shaper of Worlds, Jury, is the Parody Master’s primary choice of bride; he will slaughter worlds to get her. Holy Taus leads the Cult of the Parody Master, magic-wielding priests, inquisitors, and fanatics whose worship allows them to draw upon the power of their Master. The Cult is adept as lobotomising captives to act as zombies, at brainwashing prisoners, and at raising nasty abyssal evils. Exu the Doomherald formerly served the Parody Master as his principal emissary but has now defected to the other side. Exu was previously the god of murder of the almost-forgotten Second Oldest Race, and much of his story remains unrevealed. The Parody Army also contains the battle-armoured Avawarriors, war robots, artificial mutates, cyborgs, necro-zombies, conquered special forces from hundreds of alien worlds, and a massive amount of assault weaponry platforms, dimensional dreadnaughts, micro-drones and so on. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2007 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2007 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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