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Post By High adventure and high heartbreak from... the Hooded Hood Sun May 06, 2007 at 05:13:47 pm EDT |
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#311: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Raiders of the Lost Vortex - Complete | |
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| #311: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Raiders of the Lost Vortex Previously: Al B. Harper, the Manga Shoggoth, ManMan, and Liu Xi Xian are riding the Vortex Flyer into the transdimensional vortex to seek the mysterious lost secret weapon that the Parody Master believes could resolve the Parody War. Malevolent computer entity the Supreme Interference has taken over the Lunar Public Library, captured its Librarian Lee Bookman and Senior Auditor Blay-Kee, and turned the Library’s lethal defences against the occupants of the incoming Lair Legion lairjet. Hatman (Jay Boaz), Sorceress (Whitney Darkness), and Rabid Wolf (Zdenka Zarazoza) are missing, having escaped from the Parody Master’s prison by using a dangerous chymeric gateway to strange dimensions. There’s other things going on as well, but it turned out that this chapter was quite long enough with just those three plot points. We’ll have to cover the rest next time. Sorry. This story follows on from Untold Unexpected Tie Ins to UT#310. 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  Five. Four. Three. Two. One. The Vortex Flyer jerked, was filled with a shower of sparks from a shorting navigation console, then dropped through a pinhole gap in the protective Celestian barrier around Earth into the swirling maelstrom of raw narrative that existed between dimensions. The buggy jolted through the initial turbulence then dropped like a stone until it was caught by the fierce riptides of the transdimensional currents. “Is it supposed to do this?” ManMan shouted over the screaming tempest. “If so I hope you installed sick bags.” “In the pouch on the backs of the seats, next to the breath mints and the emergency chocolate,” Al B. Harper called back. “Don’t worry folks. This is just a bit of a breeze for the vortex. Sensors log it at 3.2, and the Flyer’s good for anything up to 5.1.” “That chocolate was for emergencies?” Liu Xi asked guiltily, wiping the corners of her mouth. The Shoggoth ignored the rattling of the makeshift exploration vehicle and leaned over the flickering navigation console. “There is something wrong,” the loathsome elder being noted. “These co-ordinates make no sense.” “And that’s a Shoggoth talking,” Knifey pointed out. “When he’s confused we need to worry.” “What’s wrong with them?” Al B. shouted across as he wrestled with the control yoke. “The Librarian has access to the best vortex flow maps ever logged, and he provided these navigation plans.” “They do not accord with where we are,” the Shoggoth insisted. “They are erroneous.” Al B. scrawled a hasty pencil calculation onto the metal of the console to check some figures. “This doesn’t look good,” he agreed. “We’re getting a 3.9 vortex shear from thirty-five degrees by twenty-five, but we should be experiencing…” “Skip the maths, please!” appealed ManMan. “Just tell is how doomed we are.” “Watch out for that eddy!” called out Liu Xi, sensing the hidden current just before the Vortex Flyer hit it. “Fairly doomed,” assessed Al B. as the vehicle was caught in the tow and dragged down in a mad spiral into the deeper layers of the maelstrom. The Supreme Interference was a gestalt sentience formed from the engrams of the greatest minds of the Skree Star Empire. Behind the spud-faced visage with the ropy coiling tentacles that appeared on the giant computer screen was the universe’s most powerful and complicated artificial intelligence. Once he’d been freed by Senior Auditor Blay-Kee from his imprisonment in a sealed data vault in the Lunar Public Library it had been the work of moments to over-ride other local systems and gain control of the robot and AI servitors who operated the site. With A.L.F.RED and D.D. under his command it was simplicity itself to capture the Librarian Lee Bookman. And now the Interference had all the tools at hand to fulfil his ultimate agenda, the purpose his name described. The Moon Public Library was currently acting as repository for the entire accumulated database of the Intergalactic Order of Librarians, over a billion years of preserved knowledge from a million worlds across a thousand versions of reality. With unlimited access to that resource, the Supreme Interference could propel his Skree subjects from their current decline to being the rulers of the Parodyverse. There was one problem: over a quarter of the IOL archive, the most valuable quarter, was under security seal. The Librarians often gathered knowledge that was confidential or dangerous under oath to keep it restricted until some agreed future date or occasion. When the Librarians encrypted data they knew how to keep it encrypted. It would take even the Interference centuries to decode but a part of it. The Parody Master was conquering the Parodyverse, using the Skree as nothing more than disposable foot-soldiers. The Supreme Interference needed to kill him. For that he needed the full IOL collection. And for that he needed the co-operation of the relevant Librarian whose word could unlock the encryption codes of the priceless data-stores. “Last chance to save your comrades,” the Supreme Interference told Lee Bookman as the monitor screen showed the Lair Legion falling into a trap on Library Landing Pad Chaucer. The Interference turned off the artificial gravity and atmosphere around them, reversing the grav-pull to nudge the four heroes off into the absolute zero void of space. The Library’s defence lasers carved the LairJet into exploding fragments then oriented on the Legion themselves. “The information is more important than any person,” Lee Bookman answered coldly, pinned and made to watch by his major-domo A.L.F.RED. Days of torture hadn’t broken him. He watched the scene on the monitor with a furious intensity but did nothing to intervene. But the Lair Legion don’t die easily. As the gravity surge pushed them from the platform, CrazySugarFreakBoy! somersaulted in the weightless void and attached himself to the doorway by a long line of silly string. With the other end he caught Mr Epitome, tugging to bring the paragon of power down to tear out the steel cable power feeds for the laser cannons. Trickshot fired a cable-arrow down past Yuki so she could catch on to it then detonated a capture-foam arrowhead around himself. The thick goo concealed over the irritating archer, imprisoning him inside an oxygen-rich protective sheath. Yuki towed him behind her like a giant lumpy balloon as she hauled herself down to over-ride the force-field that was keeping Mr Epitome from the door. “They’re very good,” A.L.F.RED had to admit. “You want I should kill them personally?” “No need,” the Supreme Interference replied. “I am well able to calculate the odds for these annoying beings’ survival.” And he detonated the Nega-Mines, reducing the heroes present to shreds of meat and fragments of metal. It took nine barrages before Mr Epitome stopped moving. “All dead,” D.D. reported to the Supreme Interference. “Shall I get a repair crew to clean up?” “That was a most interesting experience,” the Shoggoth noted as the Vortex Flyer rattled out of the high-intensity storm current and span like a corkscrew down into another of the quiescent layers. “I was especially intrigued by the way that ManMan detached part of his organic mass as we spiralled through the maelstrom.” “Oh, Joe’s bodily functions are a source of amazement to all of us,” Knifey promised. “Spewing’s just the beginning.” “This place…” Liu Xi gasped, rubbing her forehead where the splitting headache was, “I’ve been here before but not so deep. Down here there’s… a pressure. So many elements and some things that are made of none. I can hardly keep us afloat…” “You’re doing fine,” Al B. Harper assured her, putting out another dashboard fire with the portable extinguisher. “If we’ve not shaken to pieces by now there’s a better than fifty percent chance that we won’t.” “I thought you said you’d built this ship to handle the vortex?” ManMan complained. “He didn’t say there was a fifty-fifty chance of the ship falling apart,” Knifey pointed out. “All this time you humans have been claiming you can’t bilocate, and then ManMan goes and peels off a perfectly acceptable membrane of solution proteins and amino acids,” the Shoggoth complained. Liu Xi peered at the hastily-rewired navigation console. “What are you doing?” she asked Al. “Which way now?” “The reference packets the Librarian gave us are corrupted somehow,” the archscientist noted. “Instead I’m relying on our sensor data to tell us where to go.” “You can just sense this super-secret-weapon that the PM’s after?” ManMan complained. “Why didn’t we just do that first?” “I may need to start a collection of human matter discharges,” the Shoggoth considered. “I’m sure with a little practise and encouragement you could start peeling away whole limbs.” “We can’t sense the weapon,” Al B. explained. “What we can sense given our recent experiences is the location of dimensional dreadnaughts.” “And where there’s a dimensional dreadnaught there’s a Parody Cultist research team looking for the treasure,” Knifey concluded. “Clever.” Liu Xi was horrified. “Apart from the bit where we go hunting dimensional dreadnaughts. What if they see us? What if they catch us?” “Then we can ask them which bits detach from their biomasses,” suggested the Shoggoth happily. “I need some bell jars.” “I’m taking us down into the ventral current below,” Al B. warned his passengers. “You might want to hold onto something. This next leg could be a bit bumpy.” “The next bit’s bumpy?” yelped ManMan. “What was the last bit then?” “I would need quite a big bell jar for a whole leg,” considered the Shoggoth as the Vortex Flyer dropped into the seething purple mists. Jay Boaz awoke as the dawn began to light up the walls of the log cabin. He slipped out of bed carefully so as not to wake up the sleeping woman next to him and padded over to the window to admire the sunrise over the mountains. He pulled on his thermal longjohns, a check shirt, faded jeans, with a heated anorak over the top of it and went outside across the crisp new snow to feed the dogs. It was a familiar routine by now. He fed and watered the huskies, turned loose the chickens to roam in their pen, checked the generator fuel levels and the battery supply on the snowcat, chopped more wood for the fires, then came back inside for breakfast. The early morning routine had given him an appetite. The girl was still sleeping, snoring gently under the heavy quilt. He paused for a moment to admire her smooth white skin then headed to the kitchen bar to get breakfast underway. Four eggs sunny side up, six rashers of bacon, some mushrooms, some fried bread, a dollop of beans, and some thick strong coffee later Jay loaded the tray and carried it over to the bed. “Good morning, sunshine,” he called out gently. “Breakfast’s up.” The girl ventured a tousle-headed look at the breakfast tray and another at Jay. Her face came awake in a heart-stopping smile that made the sunrise seem dim. “I love you,” she said. “Because I sledded eighty miles for fresh mushrooms yesterday?” Jay teased her. “For all kinds of reasons,” she answered. “I never knew I could be this happy.” She slid out of the bed and padded naked towards the bathroom across the polished wood floor of the cabin Jay has built them. She knew Jay was watching her as she went. “Still like what you see?” she asked, turning in profile and smoothing her hands over her slightly-distended belly. “More than ever,” Jay promised her. “How could I not love the mother of my child?” Zdenka Boaz smiled happily and vanished to empty her bladder. There was more pressure on it these days. “It’s a nice day out,” Jay called her. “I thought I could get some work done on the extension before the bad weather really starts.” “You work so hard,” Zdenka complained from the bathroom. “You don’t have to do all of this.” “I love it,” the young man called back. “Building us a home, making it larger for our children, that’s not work. That’s pure pleasure.” Zdenka emerged in a thick fluffy bathrobe and claimed her breakfast kiss, and then her breakfast. “Every day with you is wonderful, I think,” she admitted. “I am luckiest woman on planet.” Then there was a knock on the door. Jay and Zdenka exchanged puzzled glances. They were forty miles from the nearest settlement. Casual visitors weren’t really common. “I’ll get it,” Jay frowned. He went to the thick cabin door and pulled it open. “There you are!” Whitney Darkness said to him. “You have no idea how far I’ve had to travel to find you.” “Whit? Whitney!” “Of course,” answered Sorceress. “Who were you expecting? I’ve come to take you away from all this.” “Okay, so the good news,” Al B. Harper reported as his fingers flashed over the controls of the Vortex Flyer, “is that we found the dimensional dreadnaught. The bad news is that they found us.” “I can’t twist void enough to push them away!” Liu Xi cried out. “And they must know by now that I’m here, one of the brides of the Parody Master!” “Don’t panic,” ManMan told her. “They won’t get you. Really. I promise.” The Shoggoth twisted a gelatine head 180 degrees round to peer at the city-sized vessel that pursued them. “They have cultists inside attempting to use arcane forces against us,” he noted. “Excuse me for a moment while I have a word with them.” His glutinous body flopped and began to seep out of his suit. “Say you’ll kill me before they take me, Joe,” Liu Xi begged ManMan. “I mean it. I couldn’t bear to be turned into what Annar became.” The dimensional dreadnaught ploughed forward, crashing through smaller debris in the vortex maelstrom like a runaway juggernaut. “We can’t go as fast as them, but we’re more manoeuvrable,” Al B. suggested. He looped the Flyer down into a rubble field of spinning broken ruins, swerving wildly to avoid plastering the craft and its occupants across the wreckage. “We can’t run forever,” Knifey pointed out. “We need to plunder that dreadnaught’s database for sensor logs and search records and then we need to take it out.” “Good plan,” ManMan agreed. “How?” “Joe, you drive so Al can do some hackery,” Knifey instructed. “Liu Xi, try and sense us the biggest chunk of matter near to us and direct Joe towards it. Something at least as big as that dreadnaught, preferably much bigger.” “I’ll try to find one,” Liu Xi replied. She reached out using her elemental senses to find land. “I’ll try not to crash,” Joe added, desperately jinking the vehicle to avoid ripping its sleds off as they skirted the surface of a free-floating asteroid. “I’ll try not to explain what I’m doing,” Al B contributed as he logged onto the dreadnaught database and started confounding firewalls. “Although there’s some very interesting protocols here stacked in a dynamic systematic cross-vector matrix that…” “I’ll think about not crashing,” ManMan corrected himself. “Over there!” Liu Xi cried out, pointing. “There’s a big chunk of volcanic rock. I think it might have been part of a whole planet once, but now its just the size of a small country.” Knifey chuckled. “Good. Now whip up this vortex around us, please. We want visibility to become even worse. We don’t want the dreadnaught to see the iceberg until its right in front of it. Joe, go faster.” “Got it!” Al B. called triumphantly, interrupting his previous exposition on computer safeguards. “They’re shielding their operating systems and secure functions from us these days, but the sensor data was in non-secure areas. I’ve got their search logs!” The Shoggoth jerked, bubbled, then came back to life. “Those Parody Cultists were no good at all,” he complained. “As soon as I pulled their heads off they stopped even trying to participate in the experiment.” “Um Joe…” Liu Xi warned nervously. “Wall.” Actually she meant small-country-sized moon-like landmass directly ahead and closing fast. ManMan jerked the Flyer round hard. It might even have pulled out of its suicide power dive if it hadn’t been caught a glancing shot from the dreadnaught’s forward battery. Then the dreadnaught itself powered into the rock at half the speed of light and there was an explosive demonstration of several key laws of physics. The Supreme Interference turned his gaze back to Lee Bookman. “So, Librarian,” he noted, “you would sacrifice even your own friends to uphold your absurd oath. I wonder what we should threaten next to achieve your co-operation.” “Murderer,” glowered Bookman. “But I sense a growing desperation behind your butchery. You’re trapped here on the Moon with all this knowledge but not the key to use it. The Parody Master is coming and he wants this information very badly. He’ll be heading straight here. And you don’t have a way to stop him.” “I have a way,” the Interference boasted. “I am the greatest calculating entity ever.” “Well, there was that Thinking Machine that the Celestians made…” ventured D.D. “Silence. I am the Supreme Interference, and my intellect is without peer. I alone have calculated the exact frequency upon which the Parody Master’s energy transfers operate. I alone know how to block his access to his powers.” “You’re saying that you’ve isolated the exact wavelength that could be used to stop him drawing in more energy from the Parodyverse as a whole?” Lee demanded. “Really?” “Of course. But to exploit that weakness I require access to the greater knowledge of the IOL archive. Grant me that access and I can destroy the Parody Master forever.” “Do it,” urged Blay-Kee, shackled to the opposite wall and terrified for his life. “He’ll kill us if you don’t, but if he destroys the Parody Master we’ll be heroes!” The Librarian considered this. “No,” he decided. “I don’t think so. Sorry, Interference. You’re just not that smart.” “Oh, I am smart, Lee Bookman,” the Interference chuckled. “And I have enjoyed watching you endure torture and the death of your friends, but now the time for games is over.” “I get to tear his limbs off?” A.L.F.RED asked eagerly. “I control the entire IOL archive now,” the Interference noted. “But some of it is irrelevant to my needs. Some of it could easily be deleted.” Lee looked up sharply. “No,” he breathed. “No!” Blay-Kee gasped. “Not the data!” “Why not?” the Supreme Interference chuckled. “What use has the Skree Star Empire of art or drama? What military advantage does humour give us? Of what value is poetry?” The Librarian went pale. “Release the access authorisation codes,” the Interference demanded, “or I shall erase every love poem ever written.” “Bookman,” called the chalk-grey Blay-Kee. “We’ve had our differences, but you care about the Library. Please…!” “Alright,” breathed Lee. “You’ve forced my hand, Interference. Access override Bookman 6-1-4-6-8-Alpha-Rho-Tau-83359. Pass-phrase: The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” “Ahh…” gloated the Interference, “and now…” “Ouch,” said Al B. Harper as he regained consciousness. Someone had laid a wet cloth over his forehead and his bruises and scratches were bandaged up. he quickly checked his portable database and his limbs in that order. Any landing you could walk away from with your portable database was a good one. “Awake at last,” Kerry Shepherdson noticed from where she was sprawled out with her arms behind her head against one of the volcanic outcrops. “Hey, Dancer, your techno-geek’s up and running.” “Kerry?” Al B. blinked, checking for concussion. “Dancer?” “She’s coming,” agreed Danny Lyle, wandering over with a cup of coffee for the battered archscientist. “She’s just trying to convince the Shoggoth to fix up your golf cart with the same number of dimensions as before.” Al B. looked around him: a barren mountainside below and the purple and silver ripples of the vortex above him. “I may need a recap,” he admitted. “But not as much as that coffee. Thanks.” Danny shrugged. “We stole it from your ship anyhow. We just got zapped to the Vortex without having time to pack.” “That would explain the chainmail underwear I guess,” Al B. concluded, looking at the two young people. “Although the green body paint is probably just a lifestyle choice.” “Do not get them to summarise their Caphan adventures,” Dancer warned, appearing from the next ledge along. “Let’s just say that improbably Galactivac didn’t eat the planet and the whole thing vanished to stop the Parody Master snaffling it. Meanwhile we got to Galactivac’s Hoover-Ship in time to try out the ejector seats.” “And now we get this all-expenses paid vacation to the transdimensional vortex,” Danny concluded. “Could be worse.” “And of course, improbably, the rock we crashed on was the rock you appeared on,” reasoned Al B. “Your speciality, Dancer.” “I’ve been pushing my powers a bit recently though,” the young woman in the leotard frowned. “I don’t know what happened to the rest of your exploration team, to Manny and Liu Xi.” Al B. frowned. “They’re not here?” “When that dreadnaught crashed,” Kerry supplied, “which was awesome, by the way - Danny we’ve got to boost one of those - but when it blew up it kind of shattered this rock into little pieces. I’m guessing Elvis wannabe and Element Lass got stuck on another bit of it.” “That’s not so good,” Al B. worried. “We need to fix the flyer then find them.” “Yeah, about the flyer,” Danny sighed. “When we said the Shoggoth was repairing it, that was kind of a euphemism for scraping up the bits.” Dancer smiled brightly. “But the good news is we’re not trapped on this rock alone any more,” she offered. “What just happened?” Joe Pepper asked, shaking his head to try and get the ringing out. “You saved our lives,” Liu Xi Xian explained, looking round the dark grim rockscape they’d crashed down on. “When the Vortex Flyer started to come to pieces you stuck Knifey in a big chunk of debris, grabbed me, and held on. I protected us from the heat and the impacts long enough for us to land down here, bruised but intact.” “And where’s Knifey?” ManMan demanded. The elementalist girl looked worried. “I don’t know. I think we got separated by the final impact.” Joe looked worried. “I’ve got to find him! We have to search!” Liu Xi laid a restraining arm on his shoulder. “It’s not that simple,” she warned. “We weren’t the only ones who bailed out on this rock.” “Al B? The Shoggoth?” “Definitely not. I think they were caught on another fragment of disintegrating asteroid. We’re stuck here with some Parody Master forces. At least one Avawarrior, maybe a lot more.” “All the more reason to find Knifey before they do. He and the PM have history. It wouldn’t be good if they got hold of him.” “He and the Parody Master?” Liu Xi puzzled. Then she remembered the livid gash-scar down the conqueror’s face, the scar that appeared whatever host body he was borrowing at the time. “Oh.” “Knifey doesn’t talk about it much. I think… well, I don’t believe his wielder at the time got out of that alive. But when the PM demanded Earth’s surrender…” “He demanded me and some others as his tribute-brides,” Liu Xi remembered, “And Knifey.” “Right.” ManMan heaved himself up. “So we find Knifey first.” “Without your talking weapon you have no super-powers,” the elementalist reminded him. Joe didn’t care. “I’m still going to find my friend.” They scrambled over the jagged rocks, backtracking along the line of their fall. Their faces were painted by the spectacular neon-purple discharges in the skies above them. The view was constantly changing because the rock was spinning on a new axis. “How are we breathing?” ManMan wondered at last, checking his chest as if to make sure he wasn’t suffocating. “The vortex is conceptual,” Liu Xi replied. “You breathe because you expect to. If you think about it too closely you won’t be able to do it anymore.” “Oh great, now you tell me,” winced Joe. “That’s like saying don’t think of pink elephants. Once you get that in your head…” He never finished his complaint because the ground beneath him rose up and shoved him hard down a shallow bank, tumbling him out of line-of-sight of the Avaplatoon’s particle weapons. Liu Xi reversed the flow of the rock and turned it into jagged splinters to spray at the attacking soldiers. Two had powered armour that hadn’t yet been shielded. She fused them solid. Another two went down when she changed the conceptual oxygen they thought they were breathing to conceptual CO2. The others moved forward with practiced precision and began to surround her. Liu Xi felt a sharp needle enter her arm. A moment later the drugs cut in to interrupt the mind-body flow of her powers, reducing her control to zero. The remaining Avawarrior came in to grab her. “Help me!” she said almost soundlessly. This was when Exu appeared to rescue her, wasn’t it? Joe Pepper bowled into the Avawarrior just at the right moment to tip him over the edge. As the warrior flailed, ManMan caught his Avasword, reversed it quickly into the trooper closing to the left, then sliced it through the remaining warrior on the return. “Run!” Joe called, but the narcotic seemed to be reaching Liu Xi’s legs now. A few yards down the bank the Avawarrior found his feet, then commanded a neural stun discharge to lash out from the hilt of his stolen weapon. ManMan tried to stay on his feet but all he really wanted to do was pass out. The Avawarrior retrieved his blade and turned to carve ManMan to pieces. Only the girl was required by his Master. Knifey flew with perfect precision into the Avawarrior’s back, killing him instantly. “What?” ManMan managed. “Knifey?” “He wanted to go back to you,” the Doomherald explained, climbing up over the ridge and killing the remaining fallen soldiers. “Captan Lorkel just got in the way.” “You threw Knifey,” Liu Xi realised. “You came!” “Wonderful,” ManMan muttered. “Because every mission needs a psychotic god of murder to help it stay interesting.” “Joe,” Knifey called to his wielder. “Pick me up now. That’s Exu the Doomherald all right, but he’s not the same as he was before. Get me in your hand right now.” “Who is it?” Zdenka asked curiously, coming to the door to peer over Jay’s shoulder. “Oh!” Sorceress saw the woman in the fuzzy over-large dressing gown and her face paled. “Ah,” she said. “I should have guessed.” “You’d… better come in, Whit,” Hatman suggested. It was still cold outside despite the sun on the snow. “How on Earth did you get here?” “I walked. The elements don’t bother me.” Whitney Darkness looked carefully at Jay. “Do you remember how you got here?” Zdenka and Jay exchanged worried glances. “Jay retired,” Zdenka answered at last. “We know that much. He retired and we became husband and wife.” Whitney’s eyebrows raised. “Did you now? And what about your other husband, Zdenka?” The Candian woman looked puzzled. “What other…?” “Whit, what is this all about?” Jay demanded. “It’s great to see you, of course, but…” “But this isn’t real,” Whitney said bluntly. “Come on, Jay, think! This isn’t exactly the first time you’ve found yourself living in a dream-world paradise is it? Only last time it was with me and we were actually going to have a child. Last time…” Sorceress’ senses pulled her round to stare at Zdenka’s belly. “Oh.” The russet-haired Candian shifted defensively. “What?” “Oh, Zdenka! Goddesses, I’m sorry.” Zdenka found herself wrapping her arms across her midriff defensively. Whitney’s gaze terrified her. “Jay, what’s going on?” Jay shared the horror. “Whit, stop it. I don’t know how you… why you would do something like this. That time we were in the alternate reality the Hooded Hood made, when we had to choose between our happy ending and the future of the real world and all our friends, that was the worst moment of our lives. Why would you bring up the spectre of that as a way to hurt Zdenka?” Sorceress bit back a sob. “You think I’d do that? Jay, there’s nobody else in the universe who knows how terrible this is going to be. Nobody but me. But you have to listen. This is not real. This is… it’s the same thing again. Only with Zdenka.” Jay placed himself between his wife and his old lover. “I’m sorry, Whit. I’m sorry our chance at this never got to be, that I had to choose doing what was right over doing what I so desperately wanted with you. I’m sorry that took away so many chances for our future together. But I won’t let you scare Zdenka or threaten the baby we’re having together.” He pointed to the door. “Please leave.” “Remember,” Whitney urged them. “The Parody Master’s prison camp. The escape. Remember using the Shoggoth’s hat to take us away through strange dimensions?” Hatman blinked. “Well, yes…” he conceded, now he came to think about it. “But not what happened afterwards,” Zdenka admitted, her face pale and frightened. “What did happen afterwards?” The Sorceress pointed around them. “The best I can tell, we were waylaid as we travelled the chimeric pathways. Or else Jay just went completely insane using the Shoggoth’s headgear. But either way we ended up…” “Where?” Jay demanded as Whitney’s voice trailed off. “Well, you remember that Fairly Great Old One from the Transworlds Challenge? Azafroth? The solar-system-sized thing with the 5D tentacles writhing in deep deep space? As far as my best divinations can tell, we’re pretty much orbiting him.” “She’s gone mad,” Zdenka worried. “Please agree with me, Jay. She has to be mad.” “My best guess is that Hat is shielding us from being devoured body and soul by dropping us in to some world he’s created in his mind, some happy ending drawn from his hopes and dreams.” Whitney shook her head. “I’m sorry, Jay, Zdenka. I have to know this stuff to be who I am, the Sorceress. But Zdenka, you were goddess of the North. You’re tied to the rhythms of the world, to the needs of your people. Reach out your senses and tell me that everything feels right. Push past the illusion. See the truth.” “Zdenka, you don’t need to do this,” Jay cautioned. But it was too late. “Well this is very interesting,” Al B. whistled to himself. He was hunkered down in a natural channel on the whirling vortex rock, out of the dimensional wind so he could run through the data accumulated from the downed dreadnaught. “Prophecies always make things more interesting,” sniffed the Manga Shoggoth. “I’d expect such a self-obsessed idiot as the Parody Master to keep the genes from the best seers from all his conquests and reuse them to stock a prophecy pool about himself.” “A prophecy pool?” Danny Lyle speculated. “What happens if we pee in it?” He caught a look from Dancer and changed the subject. “What do the files say, then?” he moved on. Al B. hesitated to answer the Hooded Hood’s son. “Don’t you go around describing yourself as a villain?” “Yeah, but he’s my villain,” Kerry Shepherdson insisted, linking her arm about the rebel without a cause. “So make with the plot summary and let’s get on with the blowing things up part.” “Fill us in, Al-ster,” Dancer agreed. “Then we need to get this show on the road.” Al B. cross-referenced another hundred or so files, clamped his teeth down onto the stem of his bubble pipe, and filled. “The prophecy pool and, well I guess the free-range prophets working for the PM sensed this all a couple of years back. That was before the Parody Master really rose to prominence in what is now considered his last, true body. They sensed a great weapon lost in the Vortex, one which could change the course of the forthcoming Parody War.” “That would be a pretty big explosion,” speculated Kerry thoughtfully. “The prophets also believed you had previously had contact with this weapon, Dr Harper,” the Shoggoth noted. “If it would help for me to sift through your memories I can put your brain back in your skull afterwards with hardly any scarring.” “No, that’s fine, really,” Al assured them. “The prophets worked out that the weapon had entered the Vortex from Earth – our version – and that I’d encountered it before, along with some others of the Lair Legion.” “Ooh, a continuity challenge,” Dancer noted. “How about the Cosmic Cube? No, the PM already got that and melted it down for the parts. The Galactic Nobbler? No, that got discharged till Galactivac came back. The Necronastycon? The Amulet of Parodies? Space Ghost’s socks?” “If we can’t work out the what, can be calculate the where?” Danny suggested. “If it fell into this Vortex from Earth, maybe we could track the currents or something.” Al shook his head. “The chances of that would be…” His voice trailed off as he realised he was talking to a man with the power to deny facts and to the Probability Dancer. “I could help too,” added Kerry defiantly. “We don’t want it to blow up, Firecracker,” Danny pointed out. “Yet.” Dancer kept on sifting through her mental back issues. “Whoa. Al B, what about that Plot Device you created that one time? The thing that rewrote storylines?” Al shook his head. “The thing about Plot Devices is they’re really only good for one use. Nobody can make another one that…” And then he paused. The bubble pipe fell from his mouth. “Uh oh.” “Uh-oh?” prompted Kerry. “It wasn’t me, whatever it was. I was at FA’s house at the time.” The archscientist looked up urgently. “In that adventure where I had to use the Plot Device… that was destroyed, but something did fall from Earth into the dimensional vortex at the end of the battle. Something very dangerous, once linked to the Resolution Prophecy the Parody Master absorbed, that we haven’t seen since.” The Shoggoth made a rumbling gurgling noise deep in his biomass. Dancer smacked her forehead. “And the footnotes for the non-lame?” demanded Kerry. Al B. stared out into the neon depths of the deep vortex. “Ultizon.” “What, no hug?” the Doomherald asked Liu Xi as he stepped over the bodies of the Parody Troops he’d murdered and approached her. “Keep away from her,” ManMan warned him. “I said I’d keep her safe.” “And you think you could kill the god of murder, do you boy?” “I’d be willing to have a try,” offered Knifey darkly. “Could be an interesting event.” Liu Xi snorted impatiently and stepped between the two men. “Stop this stupid machismo,” she scolded, adding some uncomplimentary epithets in her native Chinese. “I’m not some prize to be fought over like dogs with a bone. I can take care of myself.” “But this isn’t the Exu you knew,” Knifey warned. “He’s changed.” Liu Xi examined the former god of murder. His face did seem a little paler, his eyes puffier and more hurt. “Have you?” she asked him. “If I have, I’m not discussing it in front of mortals,” Exu answered, glaring at ManMan. “I’m a mortal too,” Liu Xi Xian reminded him. “And I think Joe is worried about my safety with you.” “Why would I be worried leaving you with the former Doomherald of the Parody Master?” ManMan called out. “Just because he first came to Earth to kidnap you to be forcibly married to his boss, then held you hostage in his cabin for weeks on end till you liked him, then dragged you off to Comic-Book Limbo to be his personal Girl Friday. Oh, and let’s not forget how he worked for the Hooded Hood. And now the Hood’s vanished, who knows who he’s working for now?” “How about you shut your mouth and let me tell Liu Xi,” the Doomherald suggested. “In private.” “So you can whisk her off to get back in good with the PM by handing her over as a bed toy?” Joe snarled. “I don’t think so.” “Over your dead body?” mocked Exu. “Over somebody’s,” offered Knifey. “Enough!” shouted Liu Xi. “Exu, if you have something to say to me, say it here and now, in front of ManMan and Knifey. We’re all stuck here together, so we can’t keep secrets.” “Really?” the Doomherald sneered bitterly. “So you know about how Joe first became a murderer when he took the life of an enemy called Damnation who was pleading to be let live at the time? And he knows all about your arranged marriage and how you killed the man after he used you then discarded you, does he?” Liu Xi reeled as if she’d been slapped on the face. “You are different,” she said to Exu. ManMan frowned as he was reminded of his own personal nightmare; well, one of them. “I don’t know what you’re talking about in Liu Xi’s past,” he admitted, “but if you’re missing out as many facts there as you are with what you said about me, then…” “Of course I’m different,” the Doomherald interrupted. “I’ve been to see Exu.” Liu Xi was puzzled. “But you are Exu!” “He means the other Exu,” Knifey explained. “The GatewayTraitorGalaxyTraveller!, the former Janus being whose illegal experiments destroyed his own race and created the CrazySugarFreakLine! before the beginning of time.” “You’re a very well-informed killing tool, Knifey,” the Doomherald admitted. “I wish I’d made you.” “So you saw this other Exu,” ManMan shrugged. “So what? He gave you a bad PMS day?” “So he filled in a few blanks on my origin. On what I was before I was carved into the god of murder to the Second Oldest Race.” Liu Xi was frightened to ask the question. She felt her Exu slipping away, peeling off before her eyes to become something even more alien and terrible. She asked anyway: “What? What were you?” “Him.” There was a long silence. Then Knifey said, “I’m sorry.” “What do you mean, Exu?” demanded Liu Xi. “How could you be him?” “I was one aspect of the GatewayTraitorGalaxyTraveller!,” the Doomherald explained. “Then I was retconned.” “Retconned?” Joe puzzled. “You mean like the Hooded Hood does?” “Exactly like that, yes,” answered Exu. “I was changed to have always been the entity that was adopted as the Second Oldest Race’s murder deity. I fell with the rest of my pantheon when the Second Oldest Race warred with the Hero Feeders. Some fragment of me survived because unlike them I wasn’t created whole from my peoples’ beliefs. Billions of years later I was found and restored by the Parody Master as his emissary the Doomherald.” “And they say Visionary is fake,” scowled ManMan. “And so?” Liu Xi challenged Exu. “Why does this change anything? Why are you so different now?” “Apart from knowing that I’m a big cosmic joke played on the Parody Master by the Hooded Hood, an early gambit of his attack against the Parody War? Now I’ve met Exu and learned the truth, I’m… drifting back to him. To join with him again. To be a part of him. I’m fading away.” “The Hood’s gone,” Knifey pointed out. “The retcon is failing. The Doomherald has served his purpose, and now he’s being drawn back to his source.” “Dying?” Liu Xi gasped. She could feel the changes in him now. She could almost taste the despair. “Oblivion isn’t so bad,” Exu answered. “Not compared to some of the alternatives.” “But you can’t die!” Liu Xi cried. “You can’t just let yourself be… absorbed by some big cosmic bully. You’ve worked so hard to try and become your own man, to create yourself as somebody… worthy. You’ve struggled so much with so little to work with, and you were getting there. You were becoming… something. Someone.” The Doomherald folded the distraught elementalist in his arms, ignoring the knee-jerk almost-intervention from ManMan. “There is one way for me to stay apart from the Janus,” Exu admitted. “Only one.” “Then do it,” Liu Xi urged. “What is it?” “You have to love me,” the Doomherald told her. “You have to become my companion, be my lover, stay with me forever. That’s the only way.” “Now that is a good pull line,” admitted Knifey. “And now,” Lee Bookman interrupted the Supreme Interference, “this has gone on quite long enough. It’s one thing to torture me or murder my allies, but when you start to threaten the data I cannot allow your idiocy to continue.” “My idiocy?” thundered the Interference. “I am the greatest intelligence of all time! You are a mere failed guardian, a nothing who will die for his impertinence, a…” “I don’t think so,” the Librarian replied. “You’re just not that smart. D.D., you’ve recorded the Parody Master frequency he calculated?” “I have, Lee,” answered the Lunar Public Library’s administration A.I. “Well then, that’s all we needed. You can take the Interference down, A.L.F.RED.” The robot major domo blew the giant screen and the apparatus behind it to fragments in less than two seconds. “I thought we were never going to get round to this part, boss,” the psychotic butler complained. “I was getting real sick of hearing that dork’s orders.” “What?” blinked Blay-Kee, looking round at the suddenly-changed situation in confused panic. “But the Interference took control of the robot…” A.L.F.RED snorted. “Like the Boss didn’t put a zillion safeguards into D.D. and me after what’s happened before. Even when we were under control there was a separate operating system keeping part of us independent. Then the Blake Protocol just now set us free.” “We needed to wait long enough to be sure the Interference had calculated that frequency for us,” D.D. pointed out. “That’s going to come in very handy.” “You set up the Interference?” the Auditor finally understood. “But how…?” “We’ve been doing things like this for quite some time,” Lee Bookman pointed out. “It’s not the first time some blundering pompous idiot has come after the Library.” “But your own allies, the Lair Legion…!” The Librarian nodded. “Ah yes. Them. You can come out and join us now, Hallie.” The green hologram of the Legion’s own artificial intelligence blinked to visibility. “You know, if the Interference had bothered to look at that art he was threatening to erase,” she sniffed, “he might have been able to spot the hologram Legion he was blowing up out there. But probably not. He’s the smartest computer-being ever, but I have all the style.” “So you knew what was happening here?” Blay-Kee complained, “and you did nothing about it?” “Well, I knew once the Interference sent that bogus badly-textured fake signal pretending to be the Librarian,” Hallie sniffed. “I do know a thing or two about generating computer images. That made me check the feed and then I found Lee’s sub-carrier message and after that it was all industrial light and magic to get the key info on the Parody Master power frequencies from Mr Potatohead.” “And thanks for the assist,” D.D. told the Legion’s A.I. “Things were getting a bit traumatic for a while there. I’m just glad everything turned out okay. Right, Lee?” Lee staggered and A.L.F.RED caught him before he toppled to the floor. “He’s hurt!” D.D. cried. “He withstood days of torture to get the information we needed. We need to get him to a medical bed.” “It was all worth it,” the Librarian murmured. “The data is the important thing…” “So the Interference was being played,” Blay-Kee summarised sourly. “He didn’t actually destroy the Lair Legion, and those codes he supplied that vortex expedition with were actually genuine!” Hallie and D.D. exchanged worried looks. “Codes?” Hallie asked, biting her bottom lip. “It’s not real,” said Zdenka Zarazoza. “None of it is real.” “It is real!” Jay insisted. “Everything that matters, how we feel, what we’ve become, all of that is true, no matter what the circumstances of it.” “Listen to Hat,” Whitney agreed. “I loved my baby for the short time she was real. I loved my life. I loved Jay. It was real then, and what you have is real now.” Zdenka looked around the neat home-made cabin. She looked down at her own slightly-swollen belly. “If we leave here,” she ventured, “what of this child?” “This can’t be happening!” Jay protested. “Not again! This is… this is my very worst nightmare. Not the torture or letting people down or being trapped in ice in agony for hundreds of years or even being forced to kill an innocent to save them from worse. This is the absolutely most terrible thing… I can’t… I won’t do this again!” “If we leave this imaginary realm,” Sorceress answered bleakly, “I do not believe there will ever have been a child.” “What if we stay?” demanded Hatman. “What if we just ignore the truth and stay here forever, happy and content?” Zdenka took his hand. “We could not stay here happy and content,” she told him. Tears streamed down her cheeks but she was too proud to try and hide them. “Not now we know the lie. I am not wife of Jay Boaz. I am not mother. I am traitor to my husband and I hide from battle against terrible Parody Master. If I stay I am worthless thing, not fit to be loved, not fit to live.” “Don’t say that, Zdenka!” Jay told her fiercely, hugging her to him as if he’d never let her go. “I love you! I can’t… I can’t let you go back to… to what was before.” Whitney turned away. She couldn’t bear to watch Hatman and Rabid Wolf together. She couldn’t bear to watch them coming apart. Zdenka stroked Jay’s hair, loving the smell and the feel of it. But it wasn’t her husband’s hair. She felt the life inside her, but knew it was never to be. “We have to go,” she whispered. “All we ever have, you and I, Jay, are borrowed days. I have loved the days we have borrowed. I have loved you. I was very happy when I thought I was your wife. When I was your wife. I would have been happy for the rest of my life.” “Then stay,” Jay begged her. “I don’t have the strength to turn from this again. Stay here with me, love.” “I will be your strength, Jay Boaz,” Zdenka promised. “I will always remember.” The bleakness of the northern winters closed across her eyes. “It is time for us to go. To say goodbye to all this.” “Don’t hate me, Zdenka! I didn’t know!” “I will always love you, Jay Boaz.” Whitney felt her own heart breaking again as she watched. She busied herself for their escape. She rummaged out Hatman’s hatility belt and found a cap that might get them free. She handed it to Jay. With trembling hands, Hatman pulled it on. Dimensions away, the Manga Shoggoth twisted his gelatinous head as if listening to something. “Excuse me,” he told Al B. Harper and Dancer. “I have to go. I am required.” Before they could question him the loathsome elder being oozed out of his sticky black suit, folded in on himself, then vanished entirely. “Great,” worried Danny Lyle. “If even the Shoggoth does a runner before Al B. plugs in the final bit of his gizmo what does that say for the chances of the rest of us?” “I’m sure Shoggy had his reasons for running out on us in the middle of the deep transdimensional vortex,” Dancer replied uncertainly. “Maybe some sort of DVD sale in Tokyo or something?” “Hey, I’m powering Al B.’s suicide device,” Kerry pointed out. “All I need to do is make tiny nuclear explosions in that drive chamber he retrieved from his vortex flyer wreckage.” “Yeah, I know,” Danny agreed. “It’s just the ‘tiny’ part of that I think you might have a problem with.” “Well, that’s where your Denial powers come in, right?” Kerry suggested. “Just Deny that we all die in some massive nuclear holocaust.” Danny sighed and nodded. “It’s not like I don’t have enough practise,” he admitted. Al B. finished tinkering with the machine he’d constructed out of salvaged bits of vortex flyer and dimensional dreadnaught. “Ready,” he announced. “Are you all set, Dancer? You think it might really work?” Dancer executed a perfect pirouette and grinned. “Well, I can’t speak to Kerry blowing us up or not, but I can try and make sure we improbably head in the exact right direction to find the missing weapon. Say, that way.” She randomly pointed up at the sky. “Yes, let’s make it be over there.” “In the, er, deepest part of the deep vortex,” Al noted. “Okay, why not?” “Can we talk less and start nuking more?” demanded Kerry. “I guess we can,” Al agreed. “Contact!” He slammed home the lever that activated the revised propulsion system. Kerry concentrated and powered it. Danny concentrated and they didn’t immediately die. Dancer danced and made them head the right way. The entire county-sized fragment of vortex rock they had strapped the dreadnaught drive engines to began to move through the maelstrom. “You did design brakes for this thing, didn’t you?” Danny checked, rather belatedly. “Brakes?” Al B. answered. “Um…” The massive flying mountain spiralled down into the killer dimensional currents and vanished in the purple haze. The Doomwraith E’Koor the Vengeful spurred his dark mount down into the tempest after them. They were leading him to the weapon that his master could use to win the Parody War. Next time: The other half of the subplots get, um, main plotted. See CSFB!, Mr Epitome, Yuki, and Trickshot take on five Singularity Riders to save the Earth! See Citizen Z vs Wangmundo! See Lara Night face her worst nightmare! Will Liu Xi sacrifice herself to save the Doomherald? Will George Gedney and the Vermillion Vex get it on? Will Dancer lead E’Koor the Vengeful to the weapon that wins the war for the Parody Master? Will Visionary doom the Parodyverse? All of that coming up in UT#312: Out of Bounds. We Named the Footnote Indiana: The Transdimensional Vortex is the hazy, tempest-tossed soup that the various realities and weird dimensions of the Parodyverse float in. Part whirlpool sea, part cosmic backstage, part plot necessity, it’s a dangerous mysterious place that even the Lair Legion venture to with caution. Well, relative caution. The Supreme Interference is made from the combined copied engrams of the greatest thinkers, soldiers, politicians, and scientists of the Skree Star Empire. Its goal is to lead the Skree to ultimate supremacy. It has been thwarted in that several times, most recently when it was captured and imprisoned by Lee Bookman, the Librarian. It was recently released by Senior Auditor Blay-Kee, who believed it could be controlled to save at-risk irreplaceable data from the Intergalactic Order of Librarians’ great archive, but took over Lunar Public Library systems and began to plot once again. Jay Boaz’ past experiences include being trapped in faerie in ice for hundreds of years (UT#157: The Sleeping Hero and having to escape from a retconned world where he was happily married to Whitney Darkness and expecting a child UT#161: The Return of Hatman. Most recently he was captured and tortured by agents of the Parody Master, rescued by his former love Whitney and his current love Zdenka, and attempted to escape using his Shoggoth hat, in UT#306: The Destruction of Jay Boaz. The Tigers of Wrath are from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” a book by William Blake in the last years of the eighteenth century. The quote Lee Bookman uses as his override code is one of the “Proverbs of Hell” contained in the text: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction; One law for the lion and ox is oppression.” Ultizon was the penultimate development phase of a computer/robot entity that started life as Virtual Zemo, disguised itself as Lair Mansion A.I. EDWIN, and finally became the Thinking Machine, personification of the Resolution Prophecy that predicted the destruction of the whole Parodyverse in some terrible conflict which answered the question for which it had been created. Later, the Ultizon stage of the being – an adamantine-clad flesh-hating robot – returned with plans to eradicate all humankind but was dropped into the seething maelstrom of the Vortex (UT#214: Narrative Causality). Exu the GatewayTraitorGalaxyTraveller was originally one of the Janus, a before-time race of tripedal green and orange scientists. Exu broke their laws by punching open forbidden dimensional pathways – Janus junctures – which caused one origin of the Parodyverse (there are quite a lot of origins). He inadvertently released the power of Chaos and destroyed his own people, although at least one survived to become the founder of the Interdimensional Development Corporation. He gained the epithet GatwayTraitorGalaxyTraveller! and reshaped himself to numerous lives and identities in numerous civilisations. His current form is that of Dr Xeno Phobia, sometime mentor to CrazySugarFreakBoy! and Globetrotting Gangbuster. E’Koor the Vengeful, Singularity Rider, knotted together from the tortured murdered souls of an entire planet by Parody Cultists for their Master, is the remaining unaccounted-for Doomwraith. The other five surviving emissaries are all on Earth, as we’ll see next time. 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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