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Post By The Hooded Hood follows up on tragedy Fri Jan 19, 2007 at 01:50:37 pm EST |
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#301: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Harvests of the Killing Fields - Complete | |
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| #301: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Harvests of the Killing Fields Previously: Earth’s attempts to break the Parody Master’s siege by attacking the conceptual plane where his forces were massed hasn’t quite gone to plan. Although his Infinity Forge had been shattered and his armies have taken significant losses, the Parody Master himself survived the attack of the Lair Legion and now hunts them through the shattered remnants of the collapsing reality. Lisa Waltz was slain in battle by the Parody Master. Hatman and Dancer were captured. Yo and the Manga Shoggoth are missing in action, possibly also destroyed. Aboard a small pilfered dimensional flyer, CrazySugarFreakBoy!, Citizen Z, Al B. Harper, the Librarian, spiffy, Visionary, and Hallie nurse the fallen Donar, NTU-150, Amazing Guy, Mr Epitome, ManMan, PsychoAcidPervGirl!, and Queen Annj. The storm is closing in around them. On the fragmenting ground of the collapsing conceptual plane Colonel Dan Drury heads the combined Terran armies, who along with most of the remaining metahumans in combat have been trapped when the dimensional gateways to Earth were sundered. Many heroes are scattered and lost in the chaos and disaster. The enemy is regrouping and will soon be able to destroy them all. Earth’s defences have been stripped bare for the desperate gambit which has now failed. Earth lies vulnerable to the Parody Master’s vengeance, which will be swift and sure. The footnotes below contain a Dramatis Personae for this episode. 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  Prologue: The bride appeared at the door of the great hall and everyone stood. The People’s Glorious Choir began the wedding anthem. The wedding of the year began. Party Animal looked resplendent in her abbreviated white bridesmaid’s dress. “It is not too late to punch out Comrade Pukin and Comrade Borin, blow the wall out of the People’s Glorious Hall of Achievements, wipe out the National Guard battalion outside, then fly to freedom to be at Comrade Hatman’s side,” she advised the bride as they glided up the aisle. “It is too late,” Zdenka Zarazoza replied. “It was too late when we were born in different places, each separated from the other by a quirk of continuity, one as living avatar of Candia, the other as hero of Canada, the alternate reality land that coexists with our own in the same geographical space.” “You are about to be married again to a man you do not love. Again,” Party Animal pointed out. “How can you waste your time in exposition?” “Look beautiful,” Comrade Borin instructed the women as they moved to the platform. “All of Candia is watching you on the People’s Glorious Television Network.” “Well, the 10% that can walk to one of the public viewing points,” Party Animal muttered. She flashed a bright smile at the Party’s political officer. “It will be a great day for the glorious people,” she told him insincerely. “Watching the union of a hero of the republic to our beloved Party Chairman and supreme leader.” “Stop that, Masha,” Zdenka warned her. “You’ll get yourself into trouble one day.” “I like trouble,” Masha Marikova pointed out. “And if only you had taken the time to get yourself into trouble we wouldn’t be here in this mess right now.” Zdenka knew what her friend and team-mate was talking about, of course. The ruling state party of Candia had sent her, Zvesti Zdrugo, Rabid Wolf, on an exchange to Paradopolis, hoping she might come home bearing the child of the powerful decadent Southern hero Hatman. When she had started being sick in the mornings they had brought her back believing their plan had succeeded. The party needed powerful new heroes for the next generation of ideological conflict. What they hadn’t known was that Zdenka had been faithful to her previous marriage vows to Candian superhero Captain Mud, despite that being a state-arranged loveless showpiece marriage. As goddess of the north, Zdenka merely became ill the longer she stayed away from her native land. She was the land. Hence the new arrangement. Nullifying Rabid Wolf’s marriage to Dmitri Dobusski and wedding her instead to the Party’s chaiman was another way of binding people and land to the service of the Party. “I have duty, Masha,” Zdenka argued. This was the latest round of a long set of arguments between the two friends since Comrade Borin had announced the wonderful news to her three months ago. “Maybe as wife of Comrade Chairman I can influence things for good, help our people?” “Maybe you could stop being such a martyr and do what you want for once?” Party Animal shot back. “Honestly, Zdenka, you make me want to kick you. What do you think your Hatman would say about all this?” Zvesti Zdrugo closed her eyes. “He would say… He understands duty. He has his work for his people. I have mine. We are not masters of our own fates.” “Mistress,” Masha corrected her. “You should be a mistress.” “We had a stolen season,” Rabid Wolf whispered, more to herself than to her friend. “That is more than some people have. That will stay in my heart forever.” “Never mind your heart,” Party Animal snorted. “Why didn’t you let him at your…” Comrade Pukin coughed. They had arrived at the podium. The Party elders were all present to witness their Chairman’s wedding. First would come the annulment of Zdenka’s marriage to Captain Mud. The hero of Candia would receive a medal in compensation. Perhaps he would finally be allowed to return to the wife and children of his first marriage, whom he missed desperately. Then Rabid Wolf would be bound in matrimony to the man who ruled Candia with absolute authority; bound forever. The Chairman rose and nodded for the ceremony to begin. Zdenka fixed her gaze at the wall and endured without expression. “People of Candia, we are gathered here today to witness the glorious union of the fortunate people’s hero Zvesti Zdrugo to our beloved and wise Party Chairman and Commissar. This is a day of great rejoicing in the People’s Fraternal Republic, and a high honour for Rabid Wolf as she…” Zdenka let the words wash over her. It didn’t matter now. It was over. She let her mind drift away, remembering the good times. Times with Jay. And then she saw him, in a flash, in a vivid instant of what she knew to be the future. Jay Boaz, Hatman, in agony, tortured, screaming, pinned helpless as he was destroyed slowly and methodically. Jay Boaz being changed, stripped of himself, murdered by slices. “Jay! she shouted. The vision was gone. She was back in the People’s Hall, and everyone was looking at her. “What?” asked the Party Chairman dangerously. Rabid Wolf thrust her bouquet at Party Animal. “I have to go,” she said. “Jay needs me.” “Well all right,” Masha grinned. “At last!” “What is this?” Comrade Pukin demanded. “Zvestri Zdrugo, you will resume your place! All of Candia is watching you!” Rabid Wolf shifted to a half-wolf form, towering over the protocol officer. “You will get out of my way,” she growled, “or you will die!” “Stop it!” ordered Comrade Borin. He turned to Rabid Wolf’s team-mates in the Glorious People’s Crimefighting Apparachik. “Dialectic! Cold Warrior! Party Line! Hard-Working Man! Bring her under control.” “Zdenka, what is this all about?” asked Captain Mud, confused and worried. Rabid Wolf swelled in size, scattering all those about her. The Party Chairman fell backwards off the podium into the flower arrangements. Comrade Borin shouted orders to GloPCrAp to take Zdenka down. Party Animal made sure no-one was looking and broke a chair over Borin’s head. “Well?” she challenged Zvesti Zdrugo, “What are you waiting for? Go help your Hatman.” Rabid Wolf slammed Dialectic back into Cold Warrior and Hard-Working Man. Then she blew the wall out of the People’s Glorious Hall of Achievements, scattered the National Guard battalion outside, took the shape of a giant eagle and flew to freedom to be at Comrade Hatman’s side. Part One: Homefront Marie Murcheson screamed and screamed and screamed. As well she might. The last thing she remembered was being dragged down onto an altar to be sacrificed as the bride of a monster from before the dawn of time. There’d been a sharp stabbing pain in her chest and then… And then a kaleidoscope of bizarre images. And deaths. So many deaths. So many comforting presences ripped from her. And then this, being pinned down onto a white cloth on a bed while somebody came at her with a hypodermic needle. The man with the syringe was hammered to the ground. A large worn boot was stamped onto his… lap. Another of the attackers went down with a kidney tray to the temple. A bizarre apparition in a dusty frock-coat chased the others away and snarled, “Back off, you idiots. Can’t you see she’s terrified?” Marie blinked and focussed her eyes. It was hard to focus after so long. She recognised her rescuer from a dream. She’d seen the mis-shapen little man – well, probably a man – before. “Flapjack?” “Sure. It’s me. You’re gonna be okay, so try to relax. Any of these people try to do stuff to you again they’re gonna be glad they’re medically trained.” “We were just trying to sedate her,” the military doctor staffing the Lair Infirmary complained. He felt his mouth. “I think you knocked out a cap.” “She’s been in a coma for months, after she got brought back to life by the Parody Master,” Flapjack roared at him. “Before that she was murdered in the nineteenth century by some wacky Parody cult and existed as a half-sentient banshee haunting the Mansion here. You really thought holdin’ her down and sticking sharp things into her was the answer to her problems? Bozos!” Marie scrambled off the table and huddled in the corner of the strange white room. The smells and sounds were all wrong. Everything was all wrong. And her heart was breaking. “Flapjack,” she called out, because who else was there to tell? “Lisa is dead.” “Lisa,” Asil repeated for the fifth time. “Dead?” “So Miss Murcheson believes,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton told his young amanuensis. “And she was the house banshee for almost a century and a half. She knew when members of the household passed away.” “Lisa? The d-doody head? Dead?” “It seems very likely,” the eccentric Englishman said gently. “Of course, we can hope there’s some mistake. Not all deaths are permanent in our line of business.” “Lisa…” Asil was cloned from Lisa’s DNA. Asil felt suddenly alone in the whole universe. Mumphrey folded the girl in his arms and hugged her tightly. “Bad business, all of it,” he comforted her. “But you know we have to mourn later and do the right thing now, don’t you?” “Of course,” Asil agreed, blinking back her tears. “Visionary and the others are still lost, trapped in that dying conceptual plane. We have to rescue them.” “Good girl,” Mumphrey said, stroking her hair. “The right stuff. Well then, let’s be at it, what?” The leader of the combined Earth defence force could not allow any time to mourn. “How is she?” Cleone Swanmay asked as Dr Whitwell concluded his examination of Lara Night. The senior physician at the Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital tucked his stethoscope back into his bag. “She’s exhausted, dehydrated, and malnourished,” he reported. “If I had to guess I’d say that when the dimensional gateways collapsed she tried to hold them open with her own strength, her very life force. She’s burned off her own body tissue to do it.” “There was no way she could have kept those gates open,” Liu Xi Xian chipped in. The young elementalist was wrapped in a blanket sipping one of Amy Aston’s lethally strong black coffees. Her hands were still trembling. “The place the gates went to ceased to exist. There isn’t enough power in the universe to keep a door open then.” “There is,” Cleone sighed. “The Parody Master sustained the conceptual plane for a while. I can’t begin to imagine the energy that took.” “But it’s gone now,” Miss Framlicker snapped. “So we have another problem. We have three million troops out there in a dying dimension, not to mention Al B. and the Legion, and we need to find a way of getting them back.” “Two million,” Cody answered soberly, swallowing hard. “The last casualty estimated have been processed. We have two million troops in the field.” “The equipment’s totally shot,” Amy Aston pointed out. “We still have the primary vortex-shunt generators in Paradopolis, Arachknight City, and Durban, but the gateway portals are fused and useless.” “I could do it,” Lara said quietly, wiping the blood from her cracked lips. “I could still do it.” “Not without, y’know, exploding,” Kara Harper offered, looking up from her calculations. “If you’re going to do that give me warning so I can duck behind something. This is a new top.” “It’s true, Lara,” Liu Xi warned. “I was twisting void to help stabilise the big portals and I could feel the way the dimensions were tearing apart. Even on your best day you wouldn’t last a minute.” “And this is not our best day,” Cleone agreed. “But we need to do something.” The silver-haired swan-maiden considered for a moment, then asked Miss Framlicker for her mobile phone. She self-consciously dialled a number just as Hallie had showed her, then waited for the call to go through. “Um, the whole city’s blacked out,” Kara reminded her. “The mobile phone network’s down.” “Not this number,” Cleone replied. “Hello? Aunt Lavinia? Is Woodbend Windyway with you, please?” “The Keeper of the Boundaries,” Cody recognised. “Maybe he can help.” “Or maybe…” Liu Xi speculated reluctantly. “That was the Portal of Pretentiousness that Exu stepped through earlier, wasn’t it? When he killed the Doomwraith that was going to devour us? The Hooded Hood’s Portal?” Miss Framlicker snorted. “Such a comfort to know your boyfriend is now working for the most dangerous archvillain in the Parodyverse.” “He’s not my boyfriend. But the Portal of Pretentiousness is an elder artefact,” Liu Xi pointed out. “We know it can bypass the Celestian barrier, open up to anywhere.” “The Hood has made it quite clear where he stands in this conflict,” Miss F replied. “On the sidelines, profiting from our troubles.” The secure comm-line buzzed just then. Amy answered it. “Surely anything is worth a try at this point?” Lara suggested. “Maybe there’s something the Hooded Hood wants?” “There was,” Amy interrupted, her face pale. “But she just died.” The rumours spread fast. Everyone saw when the massive dimensional archways blew out. Everyone knew that couldn’t be good. Earth soldiers, Earth heroes, were trapped on the other side in an uneven contest on an alien battlefield. They wouldn’t be coming home. “And we’re next,” a gloomy man with a sweaty cowlick predicted, staring into the grey skies. The world was in blackout, since any electrical activity might weaken the already-fragile Celestian barrier that was all that held back the Parody Master’s hordes. “That force field thing’s getting weaker every day. We don’t have anyone to protect us now. We’re next.” Mr Papadapopolis whacked him on the side of the head with a newspaper. “Do not be spreading despondency!” shouted the owner of the Bean and Donut Coffee Bar. “You are doing of the enemy’s work for him. Have some faith in our boys and girls. They are heroes.” “But they’re saying now that Lisa Waltz is dead,” another customer reported. “Maybe all the Lair Legion. Maybe everybody we sent. The whole place they went to got blown up and everybody…” Whap! went the newspaper again. “Careless talk costs lives!” Mr P chided. “Is not over until the fat lady does an encore. And even if worst is, you think whining here will make it better? My father and grandfather, they fought Nazis and Communists, and maybe they thought they would never win either. But here I am, in land of the free, with shop and grandchildren. You think they give up? You think I give up?” He pulled a baseball bat from behind the counter. “If Parody Master comes to my shop, I not serve him anything.” He glared at his customers defiantly. One of them started clapping. Then they all started clapping. Earth didn’t give in that easily. “The conceptual plane is gone,” Jury told the worried people crowded into the Lair Legion’s meeting room. “I can tell that much. I think the Infinity Forge is destroyed too, but I thought that before so… No, it’s gone. Everything’s gone.” “So all our forces are lost?” Herbert P. Garrick asked in a hoarse whisper. This was almost the worst of his worst-case scenarios. “Maybe not yet,” Jury considered. The former Shaper of Worlds tried to make some sense out of the last echoes of her narrative awareness. “I think… maybe the plane fragmented. Like ice cracking on a pond. There are still shards of it out there, tossed in the transdimensional vortex, melting.” “When you say shards…?” Amber St Clare prompted. “Little bits. Some as small as your hand. Some as large as a mountain. All fading.” She tried to find something to encourage the stricken high command. “If your soldiers reached the more substantial fragments they may have hours to live yet. Five or six hours.” “Assuming the Parody Master’s forces don’t corner them and wipe them out first,” noted Garrick. Then nobody said anything at all for a long time. They were out of options. “Did anyone happen ta hear how th’ Detonator Hippos were faring?” asked Sergeant MacHarridan at last. Part Two: Trenches The air was filled with grey dust from the rotting tiles that made up the remnants of the collapsing conceptual plane. Great swathes of the realm had already fallen away into the eye-searing turmoil of the massive Vortex maelstrom below. Some parts of it had crumbled, losing atmosphere and gravity and sometimes even the strong and weak forces between electrons. Other parts still clung together, broken fragments of shattered rock, bombed out buildings of former cosmic office holders, natural caves buried beneath the ruptured surface of the great plain. “Come on, you gold-brickin’ knuckle-draggin’ excuses for combat soldiers!” screamed Colonel Dan Drury, commanding field officer of the combined Earth armies sent into this nightmare. “Git those wounded down into the caves then start lashing down the fighter jets before this storm blows ‘em away. You lose ‘em you pay for ‘em. And line them tanks up just below the ridge there. We still got bad guys out there wantin’ ta blow us to hell.” “Wouldn’t be a long journey,” complained Captain Turner after relaying the orders. “This place is falling apart around us.” “If we’d wanted ta have it all nice we’d have been ballerinas,” the old soldier retorted. His uniform was torn and bloodstained because he was a very hands-on commander. He’d been hands-on a number of Parody Troopers in the course of three hours fighting. He looked even more dishevelled because he’d not shaved that morning – an old ritual of his before battle. A nurse threaded her way through the litter of broken trucks and exhausted men and approached Drury and Turner. “We’re going to need some more blood donors,” Grace O’Mercy warned them. “We have too many wounded down there. If we can’t get them proper treatment soon we’re going to lose a lot of them.” “See to it,” Drury told Turner. “But don’t pull too many sentries.” He turned back to the Night Nurse. “Do your best, sister.” Grace’s uniform was splattered with blood, but blood didn’t bother her. The blood was the life. She returned to the dark interior of the tunnels where the largest element of Earth’s assault force had gone to ground. The wounded and the dying cried and moaned and she passed amongst them offering help where she could and comfort where she had nothing else to give. “There are too many,” Ebony of Nubilia noted. “And no way off this place.” The priestess of the Manga Shoggoth was helping with the injured, her own vestments soiled and stained now. Her usually coffee-brown skin was almost grey with exhaustion – and more. “Still no contact with your Manga Shoggoth?” Grace asked sympathetically. The high priestess shook her head. “I think… maybe the Parody Master got him,” she confessed. “The element of him in my amulet was denatured when I entered Taus’ compound, of course, so he wouldn’t have anywhere to retreat.” She busied herself caring for the wounded and the dying. “So no chance of help getting us out of here,” the Night Nurse concluded. “I don’t think here is going to be around much longer.” “Not for long, no,” Ebony admitted. “I think Xander is out there trying to hold things together for a few more hours.” “He did borrow rather a lot of my sticky tape,” Grace admitted. “This makes no sense at all,” complained George Gedney, curator of the Willingham Museum of Curiosities and Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity. He watched Xander the Improbable and Con Johnstantine measuring out lines on the broken ground using dog-tags as divining tools and medical tape as markers. “If it made sense to the layman then we’d be out of a job,” the master of the mystic arts replied without looking up. “Right, let’s see if this one works. Could you concentrate a temporal rewind charge on this set of tags please, Mr Gedney.” George obliged again, using the other instruments of his office to charge his pocketwatch and sending the chronal energies as indicated. “And there’s no chance of an explanation?” he pressed. Con Johnstantine stood up, dusting his hands together to clear off the fragments of rotting conceptual plane. “Explanations are so over-rated,” he argued. “Learn to love the mystery.” “They’re doing telluric harmonies,” Urthula Underess interrupted, heading back through the ruins of what had once been a pleasant village where the support staffs of minor cosmic office holders had lived and worked. “The whole plain – the whole plane – was laced with leys, lines of energy that maintained the spiritual essence of the place. Now those lays are as shattered as the land itself, and the Hardy Boys here are trying to join some of them together again.” George looked out over the broken edge of the land fragment where Drury had assembled his own fragment of army. Beyond the landmass was nothing but the distant livid purple spiral of the interdimensional vortex, an angry whirlpool of unused storylines and discarded matter. “I think you’re going to need more sticky tape,” he noted. “Ah, a sceptic,” Xander said, patting George on the cheek. “Quaint.” “He’s reactivated – or rather he’s had you reactivate – the link between this fragment of the land and the one it was once joined to,” Urthula explained to the curator. “The two will be attracted to one another again like… like magnets or…” “You and Asil,” Johnstantine added helpfully to make George blush. “Except these bits will come together eventually if they get close enough.” “We’re trying to temporarily reassemble bits of the conceptual plane,” summarised Xander impatiently. “That way the people who are trapped on smaller fragments can join our main group, and the larger landmass we’re stood on will dissolve more slowly, leaving Mumphrey and the bright young women at the EEE firehouse time to work out how to rescue us.” He paused and added uncertainly, “In theory.” Out across the void another spinning fragment aligned itself to be on the same angle as the bit of rock where George stood, and slowly began to glide towards it. “Come on,” Xander told him briskly. “I have plenty more tape yet.” “Pull everyone back,” Princess Lileblanche of Elsinore ordered. “Get them inside the wreck of the Bunny. It’s more defensible there.” Sir John de Jaboz looked at her incredulously. “You mean retreat?” “How did you people ever win the war with Esperholme?” the daughter of one of Esperholme’s ruling cadre wondered despairingly. “Not by retreating,” answered the Knight Improbablar. The Princess’ face reddened into a snarl. “We’ve lost half our people. We’ve got those wounded Earth warriors and technicians to care for. The enemy has superior numbers and firepower and is led by a Singularity Rider.” She brushed back her golden hair and glared at the young knight. “The charge-the-cannons method is not working, Jaboz. We need to do something different.” Sir John took a look over the bloody battlefield. Even a casual glance indicated that the heroes were not winning. “Okay then, get them to cover,” he agreed at last. “Set up blockades and find a good line of defence. You can hold them for another hour or two, maybe.” Lileblanche caught the tense. “You can hold them? You as we? We as in us and not Sir John? And where will Sir John de Stupid be?” The Knight Improbablar pointed his bloody sword out over the battlefield. “The Doomwraith. Somebody has to hold it off.” “That is suicide.” “That is what has to be done. As long as that thing is out there, sapping the strength from our limbs, shoring up the enemy’s malice, there can never be hope.” “You can’t defeat a Doomwraith. Even Lord Yo would struggle against a Doomwraith.” “Well, if you have a better idea I’d love to hear it,” Sir John challenged the psi-witch. Lileblanche cast around for inspiration while the remnant of their forces took refuge in the downed dimensional dreadnaught. “I thought so,” the Knight Improbablar told her. “Think well of me, Princess of Elsinore.” “I have a better idea,” Lileblanche blurted as he made to ride away. Even as she said it she knew it wasn’t a better idea, but she said it anyway. “We will fight the Doomwraith.” The fragment where the Psychic Samurai was trapped was no more than thirty feet wide, barely enough for the gravity enchantments on it to maintain an atmosphere, and it span in a wild rotation that made the livid purple eye of the vortex maelstrom seem to orbit it half a dozen times a minute. Chiaki Bushido drew her sword and steadied herself on one of the outcrop handholds. Her enemy found it easier to hold on, given that she had eight legs and the natural ability to adhere to surfaces. High Assassin-Mother S’Tab was a Z’Sox queen, one of the elite giant spiders that served the cause of the Parody Master. S’Tab herself was their tribute to him and had been taken as his bride. The rock shook as it was attracted to a larger mass, shuddering into a different axial rotation, shearing great chunks away as it shifted course. “We need to declare a truce,” Chiaki decided. “Otherwise we will both be destroyed.” “I will accept your surrender,” the Assassin-Mother replied. Neither combatant was in the best shape. They’d been clashing ever since they awoke from S’Tab’s poison. So far the battle had gone on for an hour, during which time the rock they clung to had halved in size. “I didn’t say surrender,” the Psychic Samurai responded. “I said truce. Otherwise this place will kill us.” “I am an assassin of the Z’Sox,” S’Tab proclaimed. “If I must die to kill my quarry then that is an honour.” “Honour?” snorted Chiaki. “You use poison, you attack without warning, and you speak of honour?” “An opponent who is unaware is weak. The weak die.” “A coward’s way,” Chiaki spat. “An art,” countered the spider. “Subtler by far than the warrior’s brutal code of force.” The pair of them faced each other over the fragment’s summit. S’Tab held two curved blades in two of her claws. Two others were tipped with needles. Both warriors were wounded and close to dropping. “We need to get off here,” Chiaki urged. “It’s our only chance. I’m offering you one chance to be honourable and accept a truce.” “And you’d trust me if I said I wouldn’t slaughter you while your back was turned?” “No. I’d watch you like a hawk. But I could divert some of my attention to getting us off this piece of dissolving rock to somewhere more stable.” S’Tab considered this. “No,” she decided, “I think I’d prefer to kill you.” “Fine,” spat the Psychic Samurai. “Be like that.” And she plunged her sword into the summit, right into the fault crack she’d observed as she parlayed. The whole rock splintered into two parts, separating the combatants and sending them spinning away in different directions. “This is not over, Samurai,” S’Tab called as she vanished away through the gritty haze. “Agreed,” Chiaki called back, before she turned her attention to ways of escaping destruction. For now. The latest arrivals were three Italian tanks and two dozen ragged exhausted Argentinean soldiers carrying their wounded with them. “We found them on one of the jigsaw bits,” Sydney St Sylvain, the Fashion Faerie, reported to Dan Drury. “They’d got corned by a pack of robohounds and a cyborg controller, but Widget was able to jam the baddies long enough for us to send in Brass Monkey.” Her face fell. “We lost Brass Monkey.” “Medical caverns are over here,” Captain Turner told April Apple. “If there are able-bodied, I need them on the perimeter. We think the dimensional dreadnaught might have tracked us at last.” “A Dreadnaught?” Fashion Faerie asked, looked up into the dust-grey sky worriedly. “Can we beat a Dreadnaught?” Drury shrugged. “Do we have a choice?” He pointed to a rough sketch-map drawn in marker pen on the side of a bombed-out supply wagon. “We’re gonna need ta send you out again, Sydney. We got another new fragment joinin’ on here and I think it might have the Brits on it. Oh, and maybe a cabal of Parody Cultists. Be careful.” “What about that one?” April asked, pointing to another jagged lump newly marked on the impromptu world map. “Undead, mostly. We lost Voodoo Vicaress there. I’ve got Glory scoutin’ it.” The ground shuddered as more fault lines spread over the surface of their rock. “So we have a Dreadnaught hunting for us, enemy all around us, scattered friendlies is desperate need of a lift home, and the ground beneath us is falling to pieces in the next few hours,” Sydney summarised. “But on the bright side,” Drury told her, champing his teeth onto his second-to-last cigar, “we ain’t bored.” Part Three: Flotilla Sir Mumphrey Wilton looked at the eclectic collection of people on the video link to the Lair Mansion Operations Room. “Well?” he demanded. “What have you come up with?” It was quite a crowd at the EEE firehouse. In addition to EEE staff Miss Framlicker and Amy Aston and Al B’s alternate-future children Cody and Kara, the room was filled with Lara Night, Liu Xi Xian, Cleone Swanmay, Woodbend Windyway, and the Abyssal Greye. “We might have a way to get our people back,” Miss Framlicker admitted. “Some of them.” “At a cost,” qualified the Abyssal Greye, dean of the scholar-ghouls of Gothametropolis. “What do you mean?” asked Amber St Clare. She hoped it didn’t involve anyone getting eaten. Well, perhaps Garrick could be spared. “The main gateways are fried,” Amy reported. “But the dimensional energy apparati in Paradopolis, Arachknight City, London, and Delhi can still be fixed. Lara says she could still power it.” “I can,” the visitor from another reality told them. “For a while at least.” “Which leaves the problem of a means of getting to a plane of reality that technically no longer exists,” Cleone carried on. “Fortunately, there is one person who still has an affinity for what is left of the conceptual plane, a link because of her former role there as a key resident.” Jury was stood beside Sir Mumphrey Wilton in the Ops Room. “You mean me,” she guessed. “I’m not the Shaper of Worlds any more. I had to abandon my office.” “But you still have links there,” Woodbend Windyway argued. The Keeper of Interfaces would know. “In fact you are the only being still linked to each fragment of your former plane.” “We think that link could be used to open a small dimensional conduit,” Liu Xi explained. “Well, not just one. Hundreds. Thousands. To every shard.” Jury looked stricken. “If I exploit the last links I have to my former office like that then I’ll never be able to reclaim it,” she said. “Jury,” Mumphrey told her softly, “People are dying.” “But… I’ll have no defence then when the Parody Master comes for me!” “If we’re going to do this, we need to do it fast,” Kara calculated. “There’s one other problem,” Miss F reported. “The conceptual plane is a place of stories. We can only use this link to send one person there each time, using their own storyline, one person through each link. We can probably only send each person there once, and they can each bring one person back with them.” “With perhaps a one in fifty chance of the transfer failing and of them never coming back,” Woodbend Windyway warned soberly. “People have to know the risks they are taking in doing this.” “But… we have two million soldiers on the conceptual plane!” Asil objected. “Then we need two million volunteers to save them,” Sir Mumphrey noted. He glanced at Jury. “And one great sacrifice.” “What about the Hooded Hood?” demanded Jury. “He could use his Portal of Pretentiousness to…” “Herringcarp Asylum has gone,” Cody Harper reported. “Again. We tried that one. We’re on our own.” “We need this from you, Jury,” Cleone declared gently. “Nothing else can be done.” The Shaper of Worlds was as pale as a ghost. “Do it,” she agreed. “If this is how my story ends then… so be it.” “Get Jury over here to EEE fast,” Miss Framlicker ordered. “Cody, Kara, get one of those pain chairs, er, I mean interface chairs ready for her. Amy, reinforce the conceptual transfer buses. Lara, get some rest. I mean it. at least fifteen minutes nap and a hot drink. Liu Xi, make her do it. Cleone, Greye, help Woodbend do whatever it is he has to to set up this transfer mechanism.” The EEE lab became a hive of activity. “Sir Mumphrey,” Miss F concluded, “find me two million people willing to risk their lives to rescue our boys.” Across the world the power crackled back on for long enough that Sir Mumphrey Wilton could make a broadcast: “People of Earth, we’re facing a crisis. The men and women we sent to fight the Parody Master are trapped now, stuck in another place in grave danger, facin’ certain doom if we can’t pull them back. They’re our sons and daughters who risked their lives for us, so now we have to risk our lives for them.” “I’m askin’ for volunteers to go across the dimensional gap, find one of our missing people, and bring him home. Every person can go out there just once, bring back just one of our lads. It’s dangerous as hell, with a risk you’ll be lost as well. But it has to be done.” “If you want to help, want to volunteer, then turn up at one of the locations flashing on the bottom of your screen. Wear what survival gear you can, take what medical supplies and weapons you can get your hands on. Someone at these locations will talk you through the rescue, help you make the dimensional jump, receive you when you get back with your passenger.” “This isn’t the victory we were hoping for today. We don’t know yet whether our forces achieved their objectives. We don’t know how many are lost. All we know is that they need our aid now. This is the moment when the human race shows whether we are worthy to survive. This is when we find out if we’re right to be proud of being human.” “This is the time when we learn that everybody has a chance to be a hero.” The broadcast went onto a recorded loop, the appeal going out again and again around the world. Big Thick Eddie slammed his mug down onto the bar of the Fatal Toilet, “Well I’m going,” he announced to the patrons belligerently. “Who’s coming with me?” “They’ve found us.” The tones of voice of the SPUD technician huddling over the scanning gear in the freezing blizzard indicated that it was no-one good that had found the Earth army. “What you got, Radar?” Dan Drury asked him, peering at the random jumble of electronic snow on the sensor boards. “I think its dimensional flyers,” the young man worried. “Four or five of them. They’re active scanning. I don’t think they can miss us.” “Are they alone?” Drury asked urgently. With luck the remaining ground to air batteries could fend off a few of the small cruisers. But of they were scouting for a dimensional dreadnaught… “I’m picking up electronic chatter with something beyond our range, sir.” “Damn.” The remaining forces of Earth had indeed been found. “Have we found them?” CrazySugarFreakBoy! demanded again. “Still no,” Hallie answered him, trying to mask her tension and irritation. It wasn’t easy, piloting a stolen dimensional flyer through the interplanar equivalent of a force 10 hurricane with rocks the size of Chicago flying around. “Keep trying that way,” CSFB! told her. “It feels kind of right.” “She’s doing her best,” Visionary argued angrily. “Stop interfering with her while she’s saving our lives.” He remembered what had just happened. “Some of our lives.” “We don’t know where Yo and the Shoggoth went to,” the Librarian reminded him. “Yo might just have… returned to her Happy Place.” “Her spine snapped,” Citizen Z pointed out. “If Yo believed that…” “And we lost Hatty,” CSFB! said bleakly. “Nobody can blame you for that,” CZ comforted him. “Except perhaps you yourself. You might think you let your friend down, played a part in his death. But we’re all ready to follow you, o glorious acting leader.” “The Parody Master took Dancer too,” Vizh went on. “And we know… we know about Lisa.” spiffy looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, about that,” he ventured. “There’s… another factor. Right, Knifey?” “Another factor?” Visionary frowned. “What do you mean?” “I’m sorry,” the sentient blade replied. “The Parody Master killed Lisa with his axe. His soul-stealing axe.” Visionary paled even more. “You’re saying that Lisa’s soul is caught in that axe?” CSFB! protested. “In torment?” “Probably,” Al admitted. “Well drat,” said Citizen Z. “Double drat.” Visionary’s fists doubled into tight white balls. “Enough,” he growled to nobody but himself. “That’s… enough.” Al B. looked up from another emergency rewiring of NTU-150’s life support unit. “We have to do something for Enty fast,” he announced. “And for Donar.” The little dimensional flyer shuddered again as a cross-wind span it off course. The whole vessel was not much bigger inside than a transit van. The Librarian and Al hurried to stop the injured people on the floor from being rolled about. “Medical assessment?” asked Citizen Z. Al shrugged helplessly. “Without diagnostic equipment it’s hard to say. Annj and Epitome are a bit beaten up but I think they’ll be fine. Epitome has some broken bones. PAPG! was worst but she heals fast. Manny’s just unconscious.” “Joe’s used to being knocked out,” Knifey assured them. “But Enty’s life support is failing. And Donar… Well…” “Donar’s brain pan was stoved in,” Citizen Z noted clinically, “and half his brain spilled across the Vortex. Chances are that even if he ever wakes up he’ll be a vegetable. More of a vegetable, I mean.” She looked over at spiffy. “No offence.” The dimensional flyer bucked again. A row of panels on the starboard side sparked as they fused. “We’re running out of power,” Hallie warned. “Reserves at 15%. Hull integrity at 55%. At this rate we’re good for another hour, perhaps a little less.” Citizen Z turned to CrazySugarFreakBoy! “What do we do now, leader-man?” she asked him. There were volunteers. First came the armed services, the sailors from the nearby carrier groups, base support personnel, the cooks and journalists and desk-jockeys who didn’t usually see action. Then there were the cops, the firefighters, the ambulance paramedics. They all came forward. Commissioner Don Graham was refused clearance to make the transit on medical grounds. Sir Mumphrey placed him in charge of the chaotic gathering around Parody Plaza where the nearest jump location was being established. And still the volunteers came: citizens of the Big Banana, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives; gangs from Hell’s Bathroom; students from Paradopolis University; workers from the offices and shops. Mr Papadapopolis led a line of customers from the Bean and Donut coffee bar. There were plenty of excuses why people couldn’t come, of course. There were others who were rejected as too young or too old, to ill or too unstable. But still the volunteers came. Akiko Masamune arrived in combat armour with a cadre of warriors at her back. Frankie and the Zoot Suit Gang arrived in their pinstripes carrying violin cases. Herbert Garrick drove down in a jeep with Asil and Kat Allen. Cody and Kara Harper helped Dr Whitwell set up the great outdoor field hospital where the volunteers were each injected with the tiniest infusion of the Shaper’s blood. Amy Aston supervised the cobbled-together transit doorway that would throw each of the rescuers to a dying plane for no more than ten minutes. Liu Xi Xian folded void to transfer similar technology to the other sites around the world. Lara Night braced herself, ignored the pain screaming through her body, and pushed again at the Celestian barrier to make passage. One by one the volunteers departed. Nobody knew if they would return. The Avatanks crested the ridge, their forward guns reducing the Earth forces’ missile emplacements to rubble within seconds, their sonics and percussion drones transforming the first line of defensive trenches into gore-filled meat pits. Glory, the mutt of might, streaked in and ripped the vehicles apart with her teeth. Giant Robot Six moved in for mop up as she blurred on to the next line of assault vehicles. “We have incoming air pirates!” the scanner operator warned. “Multiple contacts.” “Hold on, you yahoos!” Dan Drury shouted out. “This is gonna get rough.” The remaining fighter jets screamed away down impromptu runways, their last ordinance bolted to their wings. They were an insufficient air cover and they wouldn’t last long. The first of the high-altitude Avabombers dropped its load. The south end of the Earth camp exploded into crimson balls of fire. Computer-guided weaponry dropped with lethal precision on weapons dumps and anti-aircraft guns. There was nowhere else to retreat to. Drury raced across the shrapnel-laden open ground and grabbed the handles of the last field gun still mounted for action. Its crew were plastered over the debris behind it. Flames licked nearby, threatening the shell box. The one-eyed soldier swore and swivelled the weapon, taking down the first of the overconfident attackers, forcing the others to sheer off for a second run. He called over for an update from the officer on the scanners, but the man was dead. “Awright you pus-suckin’ sons of bitches!” Dan Drury shouted to the skies. “You want ta take us down. Come and do it personal. Come on, you cowardly bastards. Come on!” The Dimensional Dreadnaught Malice Triumphant drifted out of the swirling red clouds overhead and oriented its weapons. The front edge of the city-sized vessel exploded outwards, sending a shudder that span the whole massive construction around. “What?” Drury blinked. Fragments of dreadnaught scattered down across the besieged Earth camp. And amongst it a whisky bottle shattered into fragments. “What?” asked Drury. Up above another set of explosions rocked the mighty ship. At last the Detonator Hippos had been found. There was a bright flash of light beside Drury and Sir Mumphrey Wilton appeared. “Ah, there you are, old chap. Time to go.” One by one the rescuers appeared across the battlefield, wherever anyone from Earth still lived. As instructed they folded their arms round one of the trapped soldiers and waited for the energies that projected them there to expire. “Boys, don’t fight,” Fashion Faerie told the eager young men arguing over which was to rescue her. “I’m sure you’re all wonderful.” “This is a very unusual sort of day,” Glory barked. “I hope somebody can find Dominic, wherever Lisa summonsed him to.” “Me too,” agreed Kat Allen, scooping the dog up in her arms. “I can’t believe that people came for us,” gasped the Widget. “Jumped into the dark to bring us home!” “You don’t need a costume or a uniform to be a hero,” Alice Apple grinned. “Just a heart.” “You got that right, darling,” agreed Meggan Foxxx, clutching her daughter-in-law to her. A new set of detonations from overhead warned that the Malice Triumphant had recovered from the surprise of an invasion of bipedal self-exploding hippopotami and was taking seriously the eradication of the human race once again. New explosions ringed the camp, shredding soldier and rescuer alike. Terrified humans took what shelter they could from the lethal barrage. The dimensional dreadnaught shifted attack pattern. It had sensed the trans-planar breaches and had guessed what was going on. It stopped using conventional firearms to blow hell out of the enemy and instead released fast-acting nerve agents, infectious so that the escaping humans would take the disease back home with them. “Oooh, that is just cheating,” Grace O’ Mercy growled. Her anger manifested in a discharge of lightnings across the dimensional vortex that seared into the Malice Triumphant, over-riding its defence screens and shorting half its systems. “Cheating or not,” Ebony pointed out, watching the first blisters spread across her flesh, “they’ve just killed the human race.” There was no way of preventing the volunteers from returning back to Earth once their brief dimensional charge was over. On the outcrop overlooking the battle, Xander the Improbable turned and smiled at Cleone as she arrived to reclaim him. “Am I late for supper?” he asked. “We will all be late if you don’t do something about that malaise,” the swanmay pointed out. The sorcerer supreme pointed to where George Gedney was concentrating on the dials of his temporal pocketwatch. The Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity worked with his tongue out. Then the young man sent the infection one hour into the future, erasing it from people’s bodies. Then he froze time around the dimensional dreadnaught, excluding the detonator hippos. “There,” George gasped, amazed that he’d managed so complex a feat. “That should work as long as I keep concentrating on it.” A manipulation of time this extensive required him to draw power from his tools of office by his will. “Time to go?” Urthula asked the Abyssal Greye as he arrived to return her. “I can’t say I’ll miss this place. There are no decent night clubs.” Across the battlefield the volunteers kept appearing, finding somebody to reclaim, and vanishing with them. The Night Nurse supervised the evacuation of the makeshift hospital. “Does anybody know if Giant Robot Six got evacuated?” Semi-Transparent Lad asked the rescuers. “The Butterfly Twins?” “Keep moving,” warned Herbert P. Garrick. “Am I under arrest?” Bad News Herb scowled at the renegade FMRC team and reluctantly muttered something about granted amnesty. One by one, painfully slowly given the million and a half solders still alive on the battlefield, the evacuation proceeded. Lara Night strained in her energy projection cradle, stifling a scream. George Gedney concentrated on his temporal pocketwatch, sweating with the strain. “Okay,” Drury sighed, feeling his head for injuries. “Concussion.” “Evacuation, old boy,” the eccentric Englishman told him. “Time to go. Our chaps are coming to grab who they can and take ‘em back to Earth. Best get the rest of your lads ready, what?” At this point Drury wasn’t going to overlook a miracle or ask for explanations. “Right,” he agreed. “We need to warn them in the caverns.” He turned to the wounded Captain Turner and indicated with his head that the officer should carry the word. “As I understand it, wherever our men are the rescuers will appear with them,” Mumphrey assured the Director of SPUD. “But my time here’s about up, Drury. I take it you’ll be stayin’ to see the men out?” “Bet on it,” the old soldier growled. “Jolly good. Hope to see you at the other side,” Mumph told him. The old man bent down and touched one of the worst wounded of the casualties sprawled across the compound. “Come on, old bean. Let’s get you home, shall we?” And he vanished. Drury turned away and began to order the evacuation properly. Across the fragmented dimensional plane scattered soldiers were found and returned. In the ruins of The Bunny of Crossness beleaguered battle mages and exhausted knights were sought out and evacuated even as the attackers closed down the burning corridors to eliminate them. Out across the plain the leaders of those forces met at last. “I can feel him screaming in my head from here,” Lileblanche told Sir John de Jaboz. “Like millions of people all howling at once.” “That’s a Doomwraith for you,” the Knight Improbablar agreed. “Any idea what that thing he’s riding is?” “His hate,” the esper answered. “So, have you any plan how to…” “Singularity Rider!” Sir John shouted out across the battlefield. “Turn from your slaughter and face me, fell villain. I have come to bring you to your death!” “Oh, that plan,” winced Liliblanche. Sir John held out his sword and strained his power-suppressing abilities to the maximum to shield himself and the lady from E’Koor the Vengeful’s life-drain. He knew as soon as he tried that his power would not be sufficient. “If you fail here, I die as well as you,” the Princess of Elsinore whispered in his ear. “You got me into this mess, Improbablar. You get me out of it.” Sir John redoubled his efforts, dredging deep into his passion – into his soul – to overcome the Singularity Rider’s malice. It seemed to work for now, but it left him too slow when the black beast lunged at him to take off his head. A chunk of reinforced steel panelling like the side of a house slashed across the war zone and sliced into the mount’s neck as it came for him. The psionically hurled debris bit deep, gashing through phantasmal sinew and cartilage because a psi-witch demanded it. “What, you thought this was going to be easy?” Lileblanche demanded of E’Koor. Sir John slashed down with his sword and cleaved the stricken beast’s head in two. It seethed in darkness then evaporated, tumbling its Rider to the floor. Lileblanche buried the doomwraith in wreckage. The doomwraith ghosted up through it then reached out spindly hands to point at his two victims. The sword fell from Sir John’s nerveless hands. Lileblanche felt her will falter then fail. E’Koor the Vengeful chuckled. He gestured with his fingertips and brought the flesh towards him. There were so many possibilities now. The vial of holy water struck him in the face, beneath his shadowed cowl, and it should not have harmed him at all, mightiest of the undead; but it did. “In the name of God, by his power and grace, begone!” called the Reverend Mac Fleetwood, standing over Lili and John wielding a bible in his hand. “Go on, beat it!” E’Koor didn’t like the taste of true faith. “You think your power can match mine, little minissster?” he hissed. Mac shook his head. “I think my boss’ can.” E’Koor swelled up, his darkness clouding out all light as he swirled to envelop the humans, those who had challenged him and the other frightened wisp who huddled behind the holy man. Mac stood firm even as the heat left his limbs and the strength sapped from his body. “You cannot hold me off for long, minisssster?” the Singularity Rider gloated. “I don’t think I need to,” Mac replied. He dropped down to grab Liliblanche. Jenny Tolliver was already clutching Sir John. “Just long enough,” the minister said. The dimensional energies holding Mac and Jenny there evaporated, and the four mortals vanished from E’Koor’s grip. The doomwraith howled his rage across the dimensions. Part Four: Killing Fields A small battered raven was tossed about in the dimensional crosswinds, trying not so much to navigate as to avoid being crushed by the fast-flying bits of broken plane that were swirling in the maelstrom. “Is it me or is it getting a bit turbulent out there?” Fleabot asked from inside Quoth’s intestine. “Turbulent,” the former Raven of Destiny admitted. “Return your seats to the upright position and store all hand luggage.” Another blast wrenched Quoth’s wing, tearing more feathers loose, sending her spiralling on a new course. “We might need a change of plan,” Fleabot suggested. “How about if I grow and you climb inside me?” “You couldn’t navigate this.” “Like you can?” “At least I can sense where the narrative winds are heading. I can… ohh…” Fleabot shifted in the smelly darkness. “Ohh what? Quoth? Quoth?” The raven ignored him. She used the last of her strength to fly to the outstretched hand. As she alighted she was carried up and set on her rescuer’s shoulder. “Quoth, what’s going on?” Fleabot shouted. “Better tell him,” said the Chronicler of Stories. “Now come with me. We have things we need to do.” “How many more?” Liu Xi Xian gasped as a new set of spasms ran up her arms and legs. “How much longer?” “Just keep going,” Amy shouted over the sound of exploding dimensional transfer coils. “We’re getting there. And I think we’ve got the main dimensional gate in Arachknight City back online as well.” “We have,” confirmed Cody. “Kara worked out the co-ordinates to align it with the field hospital on the conceptual plane. They’re evacuating now.” Lara Night said nothing now. She was past words, locked in a private struggle with fatigue and pain. She knew that if she lost, a million people lost with her. “We’re past the half-way point,” Miss Framlicker encouraged them. “We’re getting it done!” “But we’re not the only ones that can use doorways,” worried Woodbend Windyway. On the disintegrating conceptual shards the rescuers kept coming. A dying soldier calling for his mother was amazed when she appeared to wrap him in her arms. Citizens of Arachknight city swarmed through the reopened gateway there to drag the wounded back home. Chiaki Bushido was clinging to debris no larger than a dinner table when Akiko Masamune appeared to retrieve her. Some rescuers returned shocked at having retired bipedal hippos in kilts. Two surprised volunteers came back clutching angry scorched battle goats. But the bombs kept dropping on the cornered soldiers, and some of them would not be coming back. Paradopolis Plaza was swarming with people as the troops returned. The scene was chaos. Ambulances pressed through the swarming crowds that were trying to find loved ones. The same square that had seen the farewell revels the night before, that had been filled with cheering crowds watching the soldiers depart that morning, was now filled with wounded men and women and with concerned citizens doing their best to help them until emergency services could arrive. The tall buildings were painted with red and blue flashing lights from emergency vehicles. More people were blinking back in by the minute, many carrying wounded men. There were tearful reunions and sorrowful partings. More rescuers returned, exalted at having brought home a loved one or stranger, appalled at the horrors they had seen and at the injured wreck they bore with them, screaming and bleeding from wounds of their own. Commissioner Graham stood atop a police cruiser in the midst of the swarm of humanity, directing resources, demanding aid of nearby Gothametropolis (including sending his Deputy Commissioner Hogglet and an armed SWAT team to relieve Velma Klein of important medical supplies), shouting orders, untangling problems. And still the wounded came. The dimensional dreadnaught was locked in time for as long as George could sustain it, but the smaller Avacraft and remote combat platforms were not. The museum curator tried to catch as many as he could but he was afraid of losing his grip on the city-sized warship that could eradicate all resistance with single transnuclear bomb. A pair of avatanks broke through the defensive perimeter and began to fire down into the compound. “Someone git those yahoos!” Drury shouted through the smoke and the screaming. Savagetooth went in, howling his bloodlust, but the percussion grenades took him down before he got halfway there. Gunther tried to stop them but was forced back by missile fire. The decimation went on. Drury looked around the besieged camp. It was almost empty of the living now. The last soldiers were being evacuated, although the rescuers appearing now were fewer. The volunteers now were mostly old men, some of them proudly wearing polished campaign medals from wars forty years earlier. Some of them died alongside those they came to rescue. He lit his last remaining cigar. There was a silver flash beside Drury and an old Greek shopkeeper was looking up at him. “Time to be going home, soldier,” Mr Papadapopolis said. “Get down, grandpa,” Drury warned, although in truth he was older than his rescuer. “I gotta tell my boys it’s okay ta fall back.” He gestured across the compound to Captain Turner. The kid has stood when the bombs started falling. He’d kept fighting despite the fragments of shell in his arm and leg. Drury liked the kid. He was glad when somebody arrived beside Turner to take him home. Through the fog of battle she looked like some kind of cat-girl. “Gedney!” Drury called out to where the tweed-jacketed scholar was still staring feverishly at his pocketwatch. “We kin get out of here now. Find someone ta get you home.” George looked up and shook his head. “If I leave then that dreadnaught comes back to life.” “If you don’t then you’re dead.” George nodded. The ground shook. New cracks appeared. The largest fragment of the dimensional plane was surrendering to entropy at last. “We need to be going, please,” Mr Papadapopolis shouted. “I can feel myself being pulled back!” Drury reached out for the old coffee shop owner. There was a livid explosion. The Parody Master rose out of the crater his landing had caused and looked up at the commander of Earth’s forces in the field. “I’ve been looking for you,” the Parody Master said. “I’ve got a signal!” Al B. Harper called out exultantly. “A signal! From a dimensional doorway. It’s one of ours!” “Yay!” called CrazySugarFreakBoy! “I knew this was the right direction. Take us in, Mr Sulu!” “Is he really in command?” the slowly-recovering Mr Epitome asked in dismayed tones. “Get us to the gateway if you can, Hallie,” Vizh told the A.I. “I don’t think Amazing Guy can shore up our craft much longer in his current condition.” “As long… as it… takes,” the protector of the Parodyverse gasped. He was still too weak to stand, but he was using his quantum abilities to reinforce the integrity of the dimensional flyer’s hull. “We’re almost out of power,” Hallie warned. “Out of gas.” “I’m channelling what energy I can from my fern,” spiffy promised. “Just keep trying, Hallie.” “Like I’m going to give up now,” scorned the A.I. Lee Bookman suddenly looked up. “That way!” he pointed. “The Arachknight City Central Library!” The Librarian could sense collections of books. “Who’d have thought such a lame power could come in so useful?” Citizen Z admired. The dimensional flyer suddenly dropped out of the maelstrom haze to get a clear view of the battlefield below. “Yeow!” called out CSFB! as Hallie jinked to avoid impacting with the time-stopped Malice Triumphant. “What happened here?” Visionary asked, appalled at the devastation below. “We did what we came to do,” Knifey told him. “It was a costly victory.” The dimensional flyer wobbled towards the gateway. The Earth forces defending the portal opened fire. Drury looked down to see Mr Papadapopolis’ blood splashed over him. The old man lay sprawled at his feet, welling blood from the stump of his left arm. The Parody Master laughed. Drury hurled his belt of hand grenades at the Parody Master. Mr Papadapopolis clutched at Drury’s leg as he felt the dimensional transfer ending. Drury vanished even as the Parody Master’s axe swept through the space where he had been standing. The Parody Master swore, unleashing a wave of energy that stripped the flesh off every remaining human in the compound. All but one; George Gedney’s chronometer automatically protected him by shifting the blast in time. The Parody Master strode towards the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity. “Another office holder,” he recognised. “And such a new one.” George Gedney concentrated to maintain his hold on the dimensional dreadnaught above. Even if this part of the battlefield was now cleared there might yet be other pockets of humanity evacuating elsewhere. He had nowhere to retreat. The Parody Master lined up his axe. “I’m ensuring that no time-manipulation will deflect this blow,” he promised George as he swung. George dropped down unexpectedly, ducking the slice. He held his pocketwatch by the fob chain and swing it in a long parabola, investing it with all the power he could still muster. It swung like the march of time. The impact shattered the Parody Master’s new-made helmet and tore half his face away. It smeared his essence across a million time zones. “I’m not scared of you,” George Gedney shouted at him, “you pathetic bully!” The Parody Master seared an energy beam through George’s chest, blowing out most of his internal organs. The museum curator was blown backwards, falling as if in slow motion. He was dead before he hit the ground. The Parody Master restored himself again, staggered once, then commanded the freed dimensional dreadnaught to attack. Hallie veered the dimensional flyer away from the friendly-fire missile barrage and began trying to convince the planar gate’s defenders that the Lair Legion was aboard – what was left of the Lair Legion. “Watch out!” Al B. called from the scanner station. “The dreadnaught’s moving again. It’s coming at us!” “Let me see if I can scramble its programs,” Lee Bookman called; but he knew that the Parody Master’s ships of the line were wise to that trick now and would be protected. “It’s not going for us,” Mr Epitome warned. “It’s launching a missile at the portal!” “Can we intercept?” CSFB! called urgently. “Hallie, get me close enough to…” There was no time. The missile evaded the defence battery with casual ease, passed through the great metal frame, and detonated on the other side. In Arachknight City. The Narrative Bomb flew through the dimensional gateway into the Meadow, the grasslands by the Arachknight City Tarpits. Sensors in its nose identified that it had reached a target-rich environment. The weapon detonated, rich with consequence. The blast rippled out like a red soap bubble. The wounded and those caring for them round the portal were the first to go, then the great charred dimensional gate itself. People hardly had time to react. One minute they were there and then they were gone, overwritten. The blast claimed all those who had gathered to help the rescue and passed outwards, erasing boulevards and shops, some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Then it reached the inner city housing, wiping condos and people with equal ease. And still it spread. In its wake it left not wreckage and devastation but… nothing. Green grass over bare rock. The city as it had been before ever settlers came here and found the bay a good place to live. The narrative blast bloomed outwards, claiming the suburbs. Roads and neighbours vanished as if they’d never existed. Most people didn’t even hear the roar of the explosion. Their stories were overwhelmed, the directions radically changed. Four seconds after detonation, Arachknight City was no longer there. The Lair Satellites picked up the explosion and alarm klaxons sounded in the Lair Mansion Operations Room. Contessa Natalia Romanza stabbed at the diagnostics panel and tried to make sense of what she was seeing. “Well?” came Mumphrey Wilton’s impatient voice from Paradopolis Plaza. “What’s wrong?” “A detonation,” the Contessa reported in a sick voice. “On the West Coast, A big detonation.” “Nuclear?” Amber demanded. “Trans-nuclear?” Jury cut in from the EEE townhouse. “No,” she said. “It was more than that. It was one of my weapons.” “Your weapons?” the Contessa frowned at the former Shaper of Worlds. “What do you mean, your weapons?” “From my workshop,” Jury replied. “That was a Narrative Bomb.” “Do we want to know what one of those is?” asked Miss Framlicker. Jury shook her head. “Sir Mumphrey,” the Contessa reported. “I’m getting overhead imagery of Arachknight City. It… isn’t there.” “Another dimensional transfer?” Amy speculated. “Zapped to Comic-Book Limbo?” “Not this time,” Jury told her. “Arachknight City is… well, it’s been given a… a happy ever after.” “What do you mean?” demanded Amber. “It’s been carved from the Parodyverse,” Jury explained. “It’s gone into its own ending. A happy ending. All those evacuated soldiers there, any heroes who were in town, they’ll all recover. They’ll spend the rest of eternity in comfort and safety having their dreams come true. But they can never come back.” “We’ve lost the portal,” Amy reported. “We’ve lost the city,” Jury rejoined. “In its place… I don’t know what the Parody Master would put into the narrative. But its there.” “And you made this Narrative Bomb?” Liu Xi asked with distaste. “Not just one,” Jury answered. “What just happened?” asked Le Truffle, leader of the Belgian Waffle Three. There had been five of them before the Parody War. “Some kind of narrative wave,” answered La Statistique, checking her calculator. “It detonated over the whole city.” “A bomb? What?” the Belgian braveheart demanded. “Who cares?” said Chocolat, pushing his way through the crowd to grab his friends by the waist and whirl them round in the air. “Choco!” Statistique squeaked as she was swing around. “But you’re dead. You and…” “L’Homme Metric?” asked Metric Man, joining them in the chaos. “We got better, chere.” The Belgian Waffle Five looked around again. On the Meadow the wounded were getting up and walking around. Their injuries had turned out not to be so bad after all. “Can’t you feel it?” asked the Walloon. “The war is over! Everything’s right now!” “It is!” Le Truffle realised. “I don’t know how but I can feel it! The threat is gone. We’re safe!” He turned to La Statistique. “And now I can finally tell you how I feel about you, Mariette.” La Statistique dropped her calculator and fell into his arms. “Oh George-Pierre-Françoise-Xavier!” she sighed. Everywhere around them friends were reunited and lovers were coming together. It was the happy ending. Forever. Arachknight City vanished from the Parodyverse. Nobody in it was ever heard of again. “Gateway’s gone,” Al B. warned. “And now the dimensional dreadnaught has noticed us.” “Okay,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! grimaced. “Turn us round, take a run at them, and look for any ventilation ports.” “And if there aren’t any?” the Librarian asked, failing to catch the cultural reference. “Use the Force,” Knifey chuckled. There was a bright flash and Asil appeared beside Visionary. “There you are!” she gasped. “We couldn’t lock onto you before!” “That’s some good using of the Force,” spiffy had to admit. “Dimensional dreadnaught is launching a full attack spread!” Al B. warned. “We don’t have countermeasures.” “I can take you out of here,” Asil cried. “Well, one of you. And we can send others to get the rest of you.” Al shook his head. “Impact in five, four, three…” “Transuclear warheads,” Amazing Guy sensed. “Three of them. The Parody Master’s taking no chances now. I can’t shield from them.” “Two, one…” Nothing happened; except that the flyer became even more crowded as more Legion support staff arrived to transfer the heroes home. “Ouch!” cried spiffy as he was trodden on by Sergeant MacHarridan. “Dinna fear, laddie, help is on its way!” “Well could the help get its damned foot off my fern?” “Ooh, a press!” Flapjack cooed, appearing in the crowd. “Where’s Yuki?” “Um…” Hallie puzzled as she saw a strange young woman in old-fashioned clothes join them. “Don’t I know you?” “You know me, Hallie,” Marie assured her. “But for now we need to bring you home.” The former banshee folded the A.I. in a sister’s embrace. “There’s been enough death.” “I want it on record that this is not in my job description,” complained Amber as she retrieved Annj. “I want to know why we’re not all exploded,” Mr Epitome insisted. The dimensional charges keeping the rescuers in the conceptual plane evaporated. The Legion vanished from the flyer a fraction of a second before the temporal stasis broke and the transnuclear weapons reduced the craft to quantum particles. “Paradopolis Plaza!” gasped spiffy. “It’s never looked so good!” Then he buckled over and folded onto the stretcher Grace O’ Mercy had waiting. “We’re home!” Visionary recognised. “But… not all of us.” He scowled to himself. “Not yet.” “A mass evacuation!” Mr Epitome exclaimed, using his vision powers to scan round the crowded square. He could see Drury helping some badly-injured old man into an ambulance, Graham organising more stretcher parties, Garrick trying to get a tally of who had been saved. “It’s an astonishing achievement, a testimony to…” Then he was winded as a fast-moving ball of rapturous canine slammed into him with a joyful bark and licked his face. “I don’t understand why we’re not dead,” puzzled Al B. Harper. “Not that I’m complaining, you understand.” “It was George!” Asil cried out, clapping her hands together excitedly. “That was a time distortion! He held back the bombs long enough for us to get away! George saved us all!” Sir Mumphrey Wilton folded his temporal pocketwatch into its familiar place in his waistcoat and took his amanuensis aside to break some more bad news to her. Epilogue One: There had been resistance at the Candian border, but Zvesti Zdrugo was a determined young woman. A number of Party guardsmen now had a greater respect for the goddess of the North. A number of Party tanks now resembled metal pancakes. The Commissar had closed the dimensional links to the rest of Earth when the Parody War had begun, but Rabid Wolf tore them open again and passed through. She took the form of a hawk as she streaked south, flying straight as an arrow to the place she knew she had to be. First she had to find an old woman in an old house and take her counsel. Then she had to go to the Mythlands. Then she had to rescue Jay. And for that she’d need the help of a Sorceress. Epilogue Two: “Initial estimates,” Garrick said, dropping the report on Mumphrey Wilton’s desk. “One point six million casualties, some of them civilian. Total loss of all deployed materiel. Three quarters of a million wounded. Loss of significant metahuman assets. Total destruction of Arachknight City, population 3.8 million.” “Destruction of the Infinity Forge,” Sir Mumphey responded. “Removal of the conceptual plane as a staging area. Death of a Singularity Rider. Destruction of an unknown but significant number of the Parody Master’s forces. Demonstration that we can fight back and hurt that bounder if we have to.” “Donar’s in a coma,” Amber reported. “NTU-150 is in surgery, will be for another forty-eight hours. spiffy’s back in hospital care. We lost Lisa, Hatman, Dancer, Yuki, Trickshot, the Shoggoth, and George Gedney. Fleabot and Quoth are missing in action.” “A hard fight,” sighed Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “We knew when we set out…” “We’re getting calls from quite a lot of places – quite a lot of countries – to reconsider whether we can continue the war,” Natalia Romanza warned. “Today’s losses…” “Are terrible,” Mumphrey agreed. “But look at what else happened! Today three million brave men and women faced unspeakable odds with untellable valour. And then one and a half million more people, ordinary folks, risked their lives and futures to save our boys. If that’s not a victory then it’s the most glorious defeat in human history!” The eccentric Englishman snorted. “You can tell those maundering snivelling poltroons of so-called politicians in their paltering cloth-headed…” Then he stopped, because the Parody Master had just appeared before his desk. “Sir Mumphrey,” the conqueror of worlds said, “We speak at last.” “Projected image,” the eccentric Englishman realised, checking his pocketwatch for the intruder’s temporal field. “Parlour trick.” “Projected through your Celestian barrier, Sir Mumphrey,” the Parody Master pointed out. “I have come to receive your surrender.” The old man shook his head. “Your forces are defeated,” the Parody Master persisted. “Your armies are broken, your equipment exhausted. Your heroes are destroyed. Hatman and Dancer are mine. I slaughtered Lisa Waltz, Yo, and the Manga Shoggoth. The Space Robot screen that protects you and the hero that projects it grow weaker every day.” He leaned forward. “You have fought a good fight, Sir Mumphrey. Now it is time to surrender gracefully and avert my wrath.” Garrick, the Contessa, and Amber watched to see what Sir Mumphrey Wilton would do next. Sir Mumphrey Wilton made a rude noise. “Go stick your head in a pig,” he told the Parody Master. “We came damned close to spanking you today, we’ll do better next time. You think we’re done? You think this is over?” He leaned over the table to bring himself face to face with the conqueror of worlds. “We’re going to see you destroyed for your deeds, you nasty putrescent pile of raddled rat’s-turd. We’re going to beat you. You are going to die.” The Parody Master’s eyes blazed angrily. “We shall see who dies, Wilton,” he snarled. “I gave you your chance.” He gestured and the skies went darker. By his power dimensional dreadnaughts breached the Celestian barrier and appeared over Paradopolis, Washington, London, Rome, and Hong Kong. And fired. Next Time: Things get more intense as we bring on the bad guys. The Purveyors of Peril go into action. Villains on three worlds scheme their schemes. Betrayals, revelations, and outrages. And The Hooded Hood Goes to War. Coming soon to what’s left of the Parodyverse. Tie ins and follow-ups include: Fear and DupliKate in Parodiopolis by Hatman Parodyverse Team Up #1 #2 #3 and #4 by Visionary and the Hooded Hood The Cast (in order of appearance): Rabid Wolf [Zvestri Zdrugo in Candian] (Zdenka Zarazoza) is one of the premiere superheroes of Candia, that strange alternate Canada that co-exists in the same space but apart from the better-known North American nation. Raised by the state party after being found as a baby one night when the Northern Lights played, the goddess of the North can shift her shape to become any beast that lives or has lived on her native soil. She also makes the corn grow and the animals wax fertile. She was married to Captain Mud for propaganda purposes and in the hopes of breeding metahuman children. Later she was sent to Paradopolis in the hopes that she might be impregnated by Hatman. Latterly she has caught the eye of the Party Chairman. Zdenka debuted and first romanced Hatman in Untold Tales #232 #233 and #234. Party Animal (Masha Marikova [last name unrevealed]) is Zdenka’s team mate and confidante. Her first speaking role, and the start of the conversation continued in this chapter, was in Call of the Wild #2 by Dancer. Other members of the Glorious People’s Crimefighting Apparachik (GloPCrAp) include Captain Mud (Dmitri Dobusski), Party Line (Party Animal’s brother), The Dialectic, Cold Warrior, and Hard-Working Man. Nuclear monster Dr Roentgen was previously a member before turning rogue. Comrade Vladimir Borin is GloPCrAp’s political officer and handler. Marie Murcheson was murdered in what is now the Lair Mansion in the mid nineteenth century. Her restless spirit became a banshee empowered by the Mansion’s Celestian defences and keened on the death of a member of the household. Marie had one brief resurrection during the Follies of Youth event, when her sixteen-year-old self met Lair Butler Flapjack. Marie was resurrected as a means of keeping her from defending the mansion with her occult powers during the initial attack by the Parody Master’s forces at the start of the Parody War. Flapjack of the Carpathians, lecherous toadying henchman extraordinaire, is major domo at the Lair Mansion. Asil Ashling is an innocent clone of Lisa Waltz, created by Lisa’s sister the diabolical Dr Moo. Asil has grown to become amanuensis to Sir Mumphrey Wilton. She recently almost avoided a romance with George Gedney. Their last meeting together did not go well. Sir Mumphrey Wilton was for many years the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity, one of the cosmic artefacts coveted by the Parody Master. He gave up the role to George Gedney. Mumphrey was also leader of the Lair Legion before stepping down to become commander of Earth’s combined defence force. Cleone Swanmay is an exiled faerie spirit now bound to Xander the Improbable by a shared lifeforce, making her his “familiar”. Cleone has the gift of seeing true natures. Dr Whitwell is the senior physician of Paradopolis’ Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital. Liu Xi Xian is a teenage elementalist with gifts to control the five traditional Chinese elements. She recently survived a prolonged stay in Comic-Book Limbo with former the Doomherald of the Parody Master, who returned last issue to save her by murdering the Singularity Rider that sought to slay her. Miss Framlicker is the administrator and secondary scientific genius at Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises. Cody Harper is archscientist Al B. Harper’s teenage son. He has the gift of understanding any language. Amy Aston is the engineer at EEE, infamous for her scruffy overalls and liberal use of the spanner on people paying too much attention to the scruffy overalls. Lara Night is an elemental – a human containing elemental forces – from another reality beyond the Parodyverse. She can generate and process immense amounts of power. Kara Harper is Al B. Harper’s daughter from the future. Her gift is to understand any mathematical problem. Aunt Lavinia is one of the ghouls under Gothametropolis. Part of her mind may be that of the Shoggoth’s former priestess Brigit. Woodbend Windyway holds the cosmic office of Keeper of the interfaced and Boundaries. The scruffy scarecrow of a man appears to know Aunt Lavinia rather well. Exu the Doomherald was god of murder to the Second oldest Race before being almost erased in the disaster that destroyed them. He later served the Parody Master and has now allied himself with the Hooded Hood. The Hooded Hood is a cowled crime czar archvillain. More on him next issue. Mr Spiro Papdapopolis is the Greek immigrant proprietor of the Bean and Donut Coffee Shop where Dancer works. Jury was Shaper of Worlds, one of the great cosmic offices, before she became the Parody Master’s object of desire and fled to sanctuary with the Hooded Hood. The Parody Master has captured her power and her equipment, including various narrative resources. He still intends to take her as his bride. Herbert P Garrick a.k.a. Bad News Herb is the President’s Special Advisor on Metahuman Affairs. Amber St Clare is the US government liaison with the Lair Legion, and more recently Sir Mumphrey Wilton’s international liaison co-ordinator. Sergeant Argus MacHarridan, a detonator hippo, is the security chief on Parody Island where the Lair Mansion lies. He has the gift of exploding and reforming at will. And he’s, y’know, a bipedal hippopotamus. Colonel Dan Drury, Director of SPUD (Super-Menace Principal Undercover Directorate), grizzled war hero and tough-talking two-fisted combat soldier, is the senior field officer of the expeditionary force to the conceptual plane. He and Sir Mumphrey Wilton are old friends. Captain Turner, Drury's acting second in command by the point we begin our chapter, made his first appearance in UT#272: Take Them Down Hard, where he distinguished himself by refusing orders to drive tanks over civilians. Grace O' Mercy, the Night Nurse, is the best trauma officer at Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital's ER. She is also a vampire, but sticks to the medical credo of "Do no harm". Ebony of Nubilia is the current priestess of the Manga Shoggoth, the loathsome elder being who was or is a member of the Lair Legion and who went missing in combat with the Parody Master. George Gedney succeeded Sir Mumphrey Wilton as keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity. He is the other half of the unsuccessful George-Asil romance. Scholarly George is also the curator of the small Willingham Museum of Curiosities. Xander the Improbable, proprietor of his own plumbing and clock repair shop, is also the Parodyverse's sorcerer supreme. The unassuming little master of the mystic crafts in the shabby red robes has yet to be seen to do any actual spells. Con Johnstantine is an irritating English occultist with a habit of coming out on top. Urhula Underess is a party ghoul and general undead-around-town. She has a working knowledge of arcane ritual from her uncle, the Necromancer General. Princess Lileblanche of Elsinore comes from the alternate Earth of Esperine, where magic and psionics rule in a fantasy environment. Elsinore was merged with the feudal world of the Swordrealms by the machinations of the Parody Master, leading to war between the two peoples before an uneasy alliance was forged. Lileblanche is a powerful battle psionic. Sir John de Jaboz of the Order of the Knights Improbable comes from the Swordrealms where his father is Marshall of the defenders of the land. After years of fighting the Esperines he finds himself regularly paired with Princess Lileblanche in both combat and camp gossip. Knights Improbable have the gift of suppressing metahuman abilities in others. Chiaki Bushido, the Psychic Samurai, is a modern day Oriental warrior, formerly bodyguard and agent for Mangatown crimelord Akiko Masamune. Fashion Faerie (Sydney St Sylvain) is more usually a top fashion designer. She has come out of retirement as a superhero to use her size-changing powers to lead an ad-hoc Valiant Vanguard and one squad of Terminus Team convicts. The Widget (Alice White) is on the Terminus Team programme, seeking immunity from prosecution by using her mentally-controlled golfball-sized robots in Earth's defence. Brass Monkey is an orangutan made of metal. He's not as dead as people think he is. That was an alternate reality version of him that died; of which more anon. Alice April Apple (a.k.a. the groovy Gecko Girl) is CrazySugarFreakBoy!'s new wife, returning to the costumed identity she briefly held to help out in Earth's hour of need. Voodoo Vicaress (LeVeau M'Tumbe) is the latest in a line of zombie-controlling houngan who use their powers for criminal ends. She was also part of Terminus Team before her apparent death. Glory, the mutt of might, is Mr Epitome's super-powered canine partner. She's a sweetie. Abyssal Greye is dean of the scholar-ghouls under All Saint’s Cemetery in Gothametropolis, an expert on arcane gateways and rituals. Big Thick Eddie is one of the regulars at the Fatal Toilet pub, an occasional roadie and workman for hire, and a recurring large crowd member. The Lair Legion are the Parodyverse’s greatest heroes. No, really. As of this story, the conscious members in the dimensional flyer are CrazySugarFreakBoy! (acting leader, Dreamcatcher Foxglove), Visionary, Al B. Harper, the Librarian (Lee Bookman), Citizen Z (Baroness Elizabeth von Zemo), Mr Epitome (Dominic Clancy), and honorary member Amazing Guy. Retired member spiffy (Mark Hopkins) and Knifey, sentient weapon of unconscious member ManMan (Joe Pepper) are also awake. Donar (Gavan Carstenson) and NTU-150 (Jamie Bautista) are also unconscious on the floor. Aboard the flyer with them are Hallie, a sentient artificial intelligence in female form, and the unconscious Queen Annj of Ausgard, (Marion Nightshade) Donar’s wife and PsychoAcidPervGirl (Gwendolyn Lyons), CSFB!’s sister. Commissioner Don Graham is Paradopolis’ police commissioner, a career cop from Hell’s Bathroom. He has recently recovered from a heart attack. Akiko Masamune is the Parodyverse’s pinkest crimelord, the unquestioned power behind the Mangatown suburb of Paradopolis. Frankie and the Zoot Suit Gang are 1950’s–themed mobsters operating in Paradopolis’ east side. Katarina Allen, lacemaker and occasional Lair Legion support staff member, is Mr Epitome’s lover. The Detonator Hippos are a biogenetically engineered breed of warriors, patterns on a Highland culture with the ability to explode and reform at will. They serve as mercenaries in exchange for cash and alcohol. They are led by Captain Angus MacHarridan and Sergeant Grievous MacRabble. Meggan Foxxx (Melanie Hastings) is CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s mother. She has occasionally sidekicked him as Action Figure. Giant Robot Six are a team of Japanese giant robot-operators. The Cho Cho Futago (Butterfly Twins) operate two of the machines. Semi-Transparent Lad (Ben Hermes) is one of the absent without leave renegades from the Federal Metahuman Resource Centre’s C-class, currently hunted by the government (except that Sir Mumphrey appears to have okayed their presence in this big push). Ben rescued the cute Cho-Cho Futago during the Junior Lair Legion’s Graduation adventures (circa UT#244-250). Reverend Mac Fleetwood is minister at the Hell’s Bathroom Zero Street Mission. The former Marine chaplain has befriended a number of superheroes and troubled strange beings in his time, and most recently met Sir John de Jaboz and Princess Lileblanche. Jenny Tolliver was rescued by Dancer in UT#95: You’d Better Watch Out and has appeared since helping out at the Zero Street Mission, most notably in UT#209: The Day Hell’s Bathroom Burned. Quoth the Raven was formerly a servitor of the Chronicler of Stories, one of the principal office-holders on the conceptual plane. She was recently retired and came to work for Visionary as nanny to his children. She has previously romanced Fleabot. Fleabot is a size-changing micro-robot designed for espionage and sabotage. He got fed up with working for the villainous Baron Zemo and came to squat with Visionary. The Chronicler of Stories (Greg Burch) is the last of the Triumverate of major cosmic office holders to retain his abilities and survive. He has been missing since his Hall of Narratives was cast into Comib-Book Limbo in UT#238: Pebbles Before the Avalanche; but no sub-plot gets forgotten forever. Harold Hogglet is the swinish Paradopolis deputy police commissioner. Savagetooth is a mutated serial killer created by the villainous Dark Thugos. After being seriously injured in his last blood-spree he has been refurbished by the government and set to work in the Terminus Team metahuman convict rehabilitation programme. Gunther is a gargoyle, a silicone life-form created to combat evil. He is usually partnered with Indiana Gnome. The Belgian Waffle Five are European superheroes. They are named here for the first (and last) time as Le Truffle, La Statistique, Chocolat, L’Homme Metric, and the Walloon. The Sorceress (Whitney Darkness) is Hatman’s former lover and a former Legionnaire. She was last seen in Faerie. She’s coming back. This cast of ninety-one this is the largest number of characters I’ve ever managed to pack into an Untold Tale. The Scoresheet: The Parody Master’s significant losses are: Three Doomwraiths down (S’Chen the Empty, V’Zel the Pious, K’Soth the Cruel), two wives probably destroyed (Countess Velvet of Bloodworld and Huge Helga of Apacalyspe), three consecutive Avatars killed, the Infinity Forge lost, the conceptual plane destroyed. The Legion’s significant losses are: Lisa Waltz and George Gedney (deceased), the Manga Shoggoth and Yo (missing feared dead), Yuki Shiro, Trickshot, Quoth, Fleabot (missing in action), Hatman and Dancer (captured), Donar (comatose), NTU-150 (critically injured), Mr Papadapopolis (crippled). The Current LL Line-Up: Field Team - CSFB! (acting leader), Citizen Z (volunteer acting deputy), Mr Epitome, ManMan; Associates – Visionary, Al B. Harper, the Librarian; Honorary Member – Amazing Guy. The Historical Precedent: Readers doubting the likelihood of huge numbers of everyday citizens volunteering to rescue trapped and dying soldiers need look no further than the historical event that inspired this chapter. From May 26th to June 4th 1940, 338,226 British and French troops were pulled off the beaches of Dunkirk, France by a hastily-assembled scratch fleet of commercial boats, pleasure cruisers, yachts, fishing boats, and lifeboats. Many were privately-owned and manned by volunteer civilian crews. Smaller vessels ferried soldiers under shell-fire and air attack out to larger craft that could not come in to shore. Although the retreat marked a very significant defeat for Allied forces the event boosted morale in Britain and reinforced resolve not to seek a surrendered peace with Germany. It felt so much like a triumph that Prime Minister Winston Churchill was forced to remind the House of Commons that “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.” To this day the only civilian ships allowed to fly St George’s Cross – now also known as the Dunkirk Cross – on their jack staff are those that assisted in Operation Dynamo, the Dunkirk evacuation. 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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