Post By Close-to-home nastiness from... the Hooded Hood Fri May 18, 2007 at 11:20:09 am EDT	Subject #312: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Over Our Dead Bodies - Complete
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#312: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Over Our Dead Bodies Go straight to Part Two. Go straight to Part Three. Previously: The Parody Master’s greatest emissaries, the Singularity Riders or Doomwraiths, have come to Earth to bring a bloody and terrible end to the Parody War. Many of the Lair Legion are missing, and even the Hooded Hood has vanished with Herringcarp Asylum, victim of betrayal to the conqueror of galaxies. The protective barrier keeping the Parody Forces out of the solar system through Goldeneyed-channelled Celestian energies is almost gone. Meanwhile, Citizen Z, secretly the villainous Baroness Elizabeth von Zemo, continues to work out her own plots, although she faces a difficulty in the form of an angry troll, Wangmundo, who has interrupted her conversation with her unalive Grandfather Baron Otto by tearing him apart. There’s some interesting things happening off-planet as well, but I’m afraid that’s going to have to wait for next time again. Sorry. This story arc’s turning out to be a major writing problem! 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     Great B’Rath stepped over the mountain of frost-rimed new corpses that had formerly been the population of Karachi, Pakistan and surveyed the world he had come to punish. The other Singularity Riders spurred their bizarre shadow-mounts to circle round him so that the greatest of the Doomwraiths could address them.     “We could ssplit this planet into fragmentsss,” B’Rath hissed. The noise came from somewhere in his ragged hood, but if there was an actual face there it was obscured in darkness. Only the occasional hint that things were slithering there suggested physical form. “We could sssimply sssuck the life from itssss bio-field. But the Massster wishesss thisss world to ssssuffer. He wantssss captivesss to punissssh, broken defenders to ensssslave. He wishes to ssset an exssample.”     The Singularity Riders shifted in anticipation. They had been literally made to be cruel. The half-million deaths they had caused so far were only a calling card.     “We will dessstroy their planet piecsse by piecsse,” Great B’Rath announced. “We ssshall ruin everything they possesss, then ssstrip them of anything they hold dear, then enssslave them to ssslow bitter death.” He turned to the local SPUD scout who’d been caught doing a reconnaissance of the newest tactical threat. “Tell your massssters that, ssspy.”     Agent Kolachi didn’t answer, since the Doomwraiths had torn his tongue out. Their messenger could still impart the message with the one good hand they’d left him. He didn’t need eyes or feet or flesh on his face.     “Tell the Earth that the Sssssingularity Riders have come,” B’Rath crowed. “Their resssistance is over. Their penance beginsss. It is judgement day.” ***     “Ouch,” said Bry Katz, sitting up unsteadily. “Where am I?”     “In your own head, from what I can gather,” answered Lara Night, elemental visitor from another reality. “Xander the Improbable did explain it but he lost me about half a sentence in, right after ‘teleological inference paradigm’.”     “He does that sometimes, when he doesn’t want to answer a question, the hero known as Goldeneyed admitted. “Okay, so I’m in my head. And who are you?”     “I’m Lara. I’m helping the Lair Legion with the Parody Master crisis.”     G-Eyed nodded. “And I should trust you because?”     Lara smiled. “Because I have an honest face.”     Bry looked around him at the gloomy mindscape or broken rocks and jagged edges. “This place is a mess. What shape’s my head in?”     “Not good,” Lara admitted. “Your body’s not in the best repair either right now. You’ve been channelling and directing the power that the Celestians placed to defend Parody Island, for months now, projecting it to surround the whole solar system to keep the Parody Master out. It has a cost.”     “That much I remember,” Bry admitted. “Xander set me up for that one too.”     “You’ve saved your world a thousand times over,” Lara advised him. “A million. You’ve endured and struggled on no matter how much it hurt.”     G-Eyed felt the aches in his imaginary limbs. “Yay me,” he answered. “And the reason for this little visit? Nothing personal, Lara, but Xander couldn’t send Beth or Laurie for my pep talk?”     “Bryan, you stopped breathing three times in the last seventy-four hours. You’ve lost twenty percent of your body mass. Your major organs are all on the verge of shutdown.”     “Ooh, good pep talk.”     “So we’re going to try and give you some rest to recover. Just a short while, I’m afraid. I’m not from your universe and I wasn’t born for this task so the Celestian power won’t flow through me easily like it does through you. But I am an energy being so I’m going to try and shoulder your burden for a little while, okay?”     “Hold it, time out. You’re saying I get it easy? And what’s this stuff about me being born for it?”     Lara reeled back the material Xander had briefed her on. “You and your two cousins were born in the far future under extraordinary circumstances, each controlling an aspect of fundamental power – distance, energy, and matter. You got brought back to this time to grow up and there was a prophecy…”     “That one of us would gain the powers of all three and become a super-superhero or villain, yeah,” G-Eyed recalled. “That’s why Suicide Blonde kept trying to kill Rick and me.”     “Well, Derek – Exile – left his powers behind when he went to the Mythlands,” Lara pointed out. “Suicide Blonde lost her powers like you did when the anti-mutate wave swept the Parodyverse. When your gifts were awoken again…”     “I’d got the access to all three that was always prophesied,” G-Eyed realised. “It was all manipulated, all my life one big set-up to chin me in that doorway in agony.”     “To save the Parodyverse,” Lara advised him. “But you can’t hold out for much longer without a break. I’m going to try and hold things together for a short while, okay? You just use that time to recover the best you can.”     Goldeneyed looked hard at the unknown woman in this unexpected encounter. “Can I trust you? I mean, if this is another PM trick…”     “I promise I’ll uphold the barrier for as long as I can,” Lara told him. “On everything I hold dear, I promise it. Just be ready to pick it up again when I falter.”     Bry knew he couldn’t keep going much longer anyway. “Deal,” he said.     Lara leaned over and kissed him to transfer the duty.     G-Eyed blinked and when he opened his eyes he was in the deep cellars of the Lair Mansion with Xander and Beth Shellett looking down at him. ***     “Sit rep?” asked Mr Epitome as he and Glory climbed aboard LairJet Three. Even as the man of might was strapping in Trickshot was starting the pre-flight sequence and firing up the turbines.     “At 4.15am local time the FMRC C-Team investigating another barrier breach in Pakistan encountered a pack of Doomwraiths,” Yuki summarised tersely. “The Singularity Riders let them get away to serve notice on the planet that the end was nigh.”     Mr Epitome scowled. “How many Singularity Riders?” It had taken all the resources the team could muster to survive an encounter with one of them, and the only two Legionnaires that had successfully destroyed these ultimate agents of the Parody Master , Donar and ManMan, were not around to help this time.     CrazySugarFreakBoy! shut off his walkie-talkie wristband looking paler and angrier than was common for the happy-go-lucky sucrose superman. “There are five,” he announced. “They caught a SPUD agent and tortured him then sent him back with a challenge for us. They froze off the guy’s limbs, blinded him, all kinds of stuff. To send a message.”     “Those bozos gonna wish they never did that,” Trickshot promised as the LairJet left Parody Island and set a course westwards. “Those bozos goona whish they never heard of Earth and the Lair Legion.”     Glory whined uncomfortably. “It is good that pack morale is high,” she suggested, using a portable keyboard to translate her paw movements to voice synthesiser, “but how can five of us take on beings designed to destroy whole planets?”     Mr Epitome’s hand came down to rub between his border collie’s ears. “Think of it as a compliment that the Parody Master’s taking us seriously,” he advised. “He’s even sending his biggest thugs out in gangs against us now.”     “We’re going to need more firepower somehow,” Yuki Shiro judged. She’d run hundreds of combat simulations of Legion versus Doomwraiths and few of them went well. “We’ll need some protection as well. The C-team people are all hospitalised, nearly dead just from being near the Riders.” She rubbed her forehead. “Satellite intel suggests the Riders are travelling south, into the most populated parts of India. The Indian authorities are considering a nuclear option anyhow. Estimated death toll is already near the million mark.”     CrazySugarFreakBoy! shook his head. “Tell the Ops room no backup. This smells like one of the PM’s oh-so-clever military strategies. While we’re all battling the unstoppable Ringwraiths he’ll be trying to slip something else in through one of the unattended rifts. Get the Globetrotting Guardians and Giant Robot Six and everybody on full alert at every other anomaly. The Doomwraiths are a Lair Legion problem.”     “We’ll kick their butts alright,” Trickshot agreed. “But how?”     CSFB! considered this, then a Bugs Bunny grin spread across his lemon-hued face. “We hit them in their weak spot,” he suggested. “Patch me through to Mumph and get me a line to Citizen Z…” ***     The troll Wangmundo howled, and his voice could kill. He stepped over the two gory halves of Baron Otto von Zemo and lunged towards the current Baroness von Zemo, Otto’s granddaughter Beth.     Silicone Sally yelped but buffed out into a thick protective sheathe to shield her employer – who was currently wearing the pliable plastic Sally Rezilyant as a garment –from the incoming monster. “Do something!” she shrieked. “This thing has claws!”     “And fangs,” noted the Baroness as Wangmundo slapped the ray blaster from her hand, slashed through Sally’s resistance, and pinned his quarry to the floor.     “Why are you not dead?” the hairy troll demanded of the woman beneath him.     Beth wasn’t about to explain about the special ear-filters she’d commissioned from the Necromancer general to protect her from Wangmundo’s voice of doom. The troll looked quite ready enough to rip her ears off. And she was rather concerned that her supposedly indestructible grandfather was now in two pieces on the dungeon floor. Anything that could do that required careful consideration.     “If I’m dead I can’t answer your questions,” the Baroness pointed out.     “Answer his questions,” squeaked Silicone Sally, suffering from the great gashes the monster had left in her substance.     “Where is she?” demanded Wangmundo. “Where is Laurie?”     “So it’s true then,” Elizabeth von Zemo noted. “You did fix upon that little nobody as your living talisman, your portable nest, and my research team can remain uncrucified. I hear you’re not the only one who found little Lisette to be a comfortable place to spend the night.”     The sound of faint Germanic swearing came from the corners where Baron Otto had been thrown. The magics which kept the Baron unalive prevented him from harming or being harmed. Even getting ripped in two by an engine of supernatural destruction was really only a minor inconvenience, even if it itched like hell; and Otto would know.     Wangmundo shook the Baroness like a rat. “Where is she? What did you do?” he leaned in close. “I can smell her on you. I can sense her.”     “Yes, well, you would,” Beth admitted. “The occult rite my grandfather arranged with his specialist consultant was designed to transfer the trappings of her mind and soul to me. I needed to pass all kinds of identity tests, physical, scientific, psychic, mystical to get me where I needed in the Lair Legion. Borrowing from little Laurie was the way to go.” She shrugged. “You could say I stripped her down for the parts.”     For a minute the Baroness thought she’d pushed too far. The troll was unravelling fast, his fury overtaking his reason. He looked like he might just pull her face off. “Where is she?”     “Just give him the address, will you?” pleaded Silicone Sally. “He’s ripping me to shreds!”     “Yes, stop playing with the monster and get on with it,” growled Otto. “Did anyone see where my left arm went?”     Beth swallowed hard and tried to maintain her game face. “I couldn’t have her staying around in this reality,” the Baroness told Wangmundo. “Even dead her psychic spoor would apparently mess up my disguise – and I needed the Legion to believe I was secretly Laurie Leyton, even if Wilton did somehow see past that, damn him. So I had her sent away.”     Another shake. “Where?”     “We gave her to Vrykolakas the Elder Vampire in part-exchange for his work on the transfer spell,” Baron Otto chuckled. “I didn’t think she was his type. Too animated.”     “The consulting vampire dropped your talisman through a dimensional gate to her new owner,” Beth revealed. “And since the Lair Legion set up that Celestian barrier there’s a very limited number of dimensions that gates can get to. Fortunately hell is one of them, since people keep on dying.”     “Laurie is not dead,” growled Wangmundo. He’d know if she died. His mind would die with her, leaving only the beast.     “Just suffering, is my guess,” the Baroness answered. “But fortunately for us, her passage did leave traces. The gateway wasn’t entirely healed, so it can be opened again to send you to her.” Beth von Zemo’s mouth curved up into a tiny cold smile. “In fact that’s the entire plan of luring you down here to the conjuration dungeon. Grandfather?”     Baron Otto was together again. The sudden rending of his unalive flesh had been an unexpected problem but Beth had kept the beast distracted long enough for the old necromancer to restore himself. Now the Baron mouthed words that had been blasphemous before humans evolved speech centres and Wangmundo felt a chill wind blowing over his tangled fur.     “It would have been great to torment you more,” Beth told him, “but really I can’t afford the distraction this close to my supremacy over the whole planet. And I can’t let anything spoil my masquerade at this critical time. Bye bye.”     Wangmundo slashed a claw to tear her head off. It passed right through her.     “Where does that dimensional tear lead?” Silicone Sally asked curiously as the troll began to fade away.     “Who knows?” shrugged Baron Ottakar von Zemo. “Who cares? Somewhere unpleasant and obscure.”     Wangmundo howled in rage as he vanished into nightmare.     “He’s ruined my shirt,” grumbled the Baron as the creature vanished. ***     “Easy,” Beth Shellett told Goldeneyed as the medics fussed around him on the gurney. “You’ve got to relax and let them see to you. You’re half dead.”     “More than half,” clarified Marie Murcheson, former Lair Mansion banshee. She could tell. “You have to let the doctors attend to you while you have a brief respite.”     “A respite?” Bry Katz struggled to look over at the dimensional doorway in the cave beneath Parody Island where he’d been hanging for more than half a year. “But the Celestian barrier. It had to be projected…”     “Lara’s handling that for now,” Beth assured him. “She can’t do it for long though, so we need to do what we can to make you well.”     Xander the Improbable shuffled forward and tapped G-Eyed on the forehead, cheeks and chest with two fingers as if trying to locate a blockage in a kitchen drain. “You’ll need to go back with renewed strength,” he noted. “In its current state the Celestian barrier won’t last more than a couple more days. You have to give us at least two weeks.”     “I-I’ll try,” Bry promised. Now he was free of his torment his body was demanding repayment for the abuse he’d put it to. He wanted to curl up and die.     “I wish I could help more,” Xander told him, “but there’s another little problem demanding all our attention right now. But here’s a little gift from Sir Mumphrey Wilton. It’s some slow time. Inside the circle where you are time will pass much faster. In fifteen minutes out here you can have twenty-four hours to rest and restore yourself. It’s the best we can do.” He glanced over at the doorway where Lara was struggling to channel unfamiliar energies. “If we can last fifteen minutes,” he added worriedly. ***     “All those advocating surrender go and stand facing that wall over there,” barked Sir Mumphrey Wilton at the crowd of officials in his office. “I’ll get back to givin’ a good trashin’ for being mewling puke-faced wheymongered traitors to the human race when I’ve got the time. Remind me to get some dogs so I can set ‘em on you. Hanging’s too good. Rest of you shut up and listen to the plan.”     “He really does have a way with diplomacy,” Amber St Clare admitted to Herbert P. Garrick.     “He’s led us to the brink of disaster,” the President’s advisor on metahuman affairs fretted, “and now he’s pulling us over the edge.”     “Problem is,” Mumphrey warned, striding up and down in front of the fireplace with his hands clasped behind his back, “even if we surrendered to that Parody Blighter now, he’d only use that to make our existences more miserable than before. He’s out to destroy us all in the nastiest ways he can think of, and givin’ in now would just be gravy on top of everything.”     “So how do you suggest we survive five of these Singularity Riders?” A UN Ambassador demanded.     Sir Mumphrey glared at him and snorted. “By winnin’,” he answered. “No other way. Now everybody who’s not going to be useful get out so the rest of us can plan the impossible. Go on. Shoo!”     Amber ushered most of the room’s occupants out and began the smoothing of yet more ruffled diplomatic feathers. Sir Mumphrey tapped a button on his desk intercom. “Hallie, how are you doing up there?”     The reception was quite crackly all the way from the dark side of the Moon. “We’re still sorting through the Deviate and Abhuman papers,” she admitted, “but we think we’ve located a suitable place for what you wanted, about twenty-five miles north-east of Bhiwani.”     “Splendid. Advise Mr Foxglove and the others that there’s where we need them to face off the baddies.”     “Briefly,” chimed in Garrick. “Even Mr Epitome won’t survive that energy-draining death field for long. Summers’ team are still weak as kittens and they only got caught on the periphery of it.”     Mumphrey gave Bad News Herb a glance that had the G-Man backing off a step. “We’re working on that right now,” said the eccentric Englishman. “Those Doomwraith chappies might be big scary bullies, but at least we’re playing on our home pitch. They might find that things are a bit more complicated than they’re used to when it comes to global annihilation.”     “Such as?”     “Such as there’s a queue.” ***     The sentinels were enhanced zombies, but that was like calling Mount Rushmore a bit of a carving. These were the deluxe models that were fast, smart, invulnerable to anything that didn’t shred them to maggot-sized gobbets, and able to shrug off magic as if it didn’t exist.     Xander the Improbable fended them off with bars of chocolate. The flesh-hunger of the monsters had been curbed by tightly-worded orders stapled to their anima but there was nothing in their instructions about not lusting after Snickers.     “Can all major undead be stopped by candy?” Grace O’ Mercy wondered as she trailed past the guardians after the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse. “I know I can.”     Xander smiled softly at the Night Nurse. “If only,” he replied. “No, some undead require a good deal more effort, which is why we’re here in the deep sewers under Parodiopolis.” He looked around him. “Some of these channels predate human civilisation, you know. It’s good to know that even pre-human ab-species needed sanitary arrangements.”     Grace looked around uncertainly. She was definitely lost in the deep winding waterways far into the bedrock under the modern city. They’d already passed through the territory of the Morshlocks with a minimum of bloodshed, then down past the cultists of the Groper Out of Grossness in the lairs carved out by the Deviates half a million years ago. Now they were deeper still.     “This way,” Xander called brightly, and rapped his spanner on a heavy circular iron portal that was more storm drain lock than doorway. “Hello? Anyone at home?”     More of the guardians rose from the water channel beneath them. Xander quietened them with M&Ms.     The wheel at the door’s centre turned, then the metal barrier swung open to darkness.     Xander shone his X-Files style torch into the gloom and led the Night Nurse into the monster’s lair. “Call out to him,” advised them master of the mystic crafts. “I’m hoping he’ll be intrigued enough by you not to want to wipe us out without a hearing.”     Grace swallowed hard. Her vampiric senses were still developing, but there was something here that she’d not felt since she’d encountered the elder vampire Nosferos. “Hi there,” she called out. “We’ve come to talk. And not with the zombie-Frankenstein things.”     Vrykolakas oozed out of the shadows, a tall bald pale thing with googly eyes and a reptilian sheen to his dead flesh.     “Ah, there you are,” Xander noted, waving a hand towards the consulting vampire. “Sorry to bother you but…”     “How did you find my lair?” demanded the ancient dead.     Night Nurse pointed at Xander. “He showed me,” she answered. “He seems to know things like that.”     “I have a very eclectic rolodex,” the little mage replied. “I’ve known where you’re hiding for years now, Vrykolakas. I just haven’t had the time for a social call.”     The elder vampire glared over at Grace. “But now you’ve brought me a snack?”     Grace O’Mercy swallowed and tried not to be intimidated. She’d drunk the blood of Nosferos. She was powerful in undeath now, if only she dared claim that power. But standing before Vrykolakas she was sure he could see Nosferos’ blood within her and it only served to stir his appetite. “The only snack you’re getting has chunky peanut butter goodness in it,” she warned.     Vrykolakas perceived how the annoying master of the mystic crafts had bypassed his guardians. “What do you want, Xander,” he hissed impatiently. “Give me three good reasons why I shouldn’t just tear off your head and drink you and your little newly-dead wisp right now.”     Xander rubbed his chin. “Well,” he considered, “firstly, that wouldn’t be as easy as it sounds, because as you’ll have smelled by now Grace might be new but she’s got old blood in her, and she’s got virtues that separate her from the undead pack; and because I’m, well, me. Secondly, you can be sure that I left word with my familiar where I went and what I was doing, so if I don’t return whole and unsucked you can expect a lot more visitors to disrupt your schedules and make a mess of the place.”     Vrykolakas hissed and glared at the mage.     “And thirdly and most importantly, if you don’t do something right now you’re going to have to get a new planet to keep your stuff on. You see there’s some new undead here and they’re not wanting to keep the code and they have no respect for the local dead. They’re called Doomwraiths, servants of the Parody Master, made from the knotted tormented souls of whole murdered planetary populations. And they’re on your turf.”     Vrykolakas stopped hissing and flexed impossibly long clawed fingers. “Tell me more of these Doomwraiths,” he demanded. ***     Lara Night bit back a scream and held the line. Stretched out in the doorway portal where the Celestian energies that once powered Parody island’s defences surged she caught the raw power and channelled it out to maintain the ragged barrier that protected the solar system from the Parody Master’s invasion. It burned.     Lara had held back the Celestians’ power before, from fractions of a second to allow transit through the barrier. That had been difficult enough. Now Lara was channelling the raw source of that shield and unlike Goldeneyed she hadn’t been born to do it.     She felt her palms and soles begin to blister.     A world was depending on her. If she failed they all died.     She wondered if this was why she’d been sent to this reality; if giving this brief respite in taking the weight of the world like Hercules for Atlas was the moment of truth, the turning point of the Parody War. She wondered how long she could bear the pain. Every instinct screamed for her to give up.     She tried to focus on other things to overcome the pins-and-needles agony creeping up her limbs. She explored the perimeter of the barrier, one with the field that excluded the Parody Master’s forces. She could see the black and grey hulks of the dimensional dreadnaughts assembled at the bubble’s edge. Each strike of their transnuclear barrage burned across her flesh. She could feel the fury of the Parody priests hammering their occult strikes at the weakest parts of the protective shell. It was like maggots burrowing into her skin.     She started to divide time into minutes: come on Lara, you can endure one more minute; then into half minutes, then into seconds. She so wanted to give up. It hurt more than anything she’d ever experienced, more than anything she’d ever imagined.     She wondered how bad it had been for Goldeneyed all these months.     The agony was up to thighs and shoulders now, screaming pain of exploding nerve clusters relayed into a brain spread across a planetary system. Lara forced herself to think of Visionary’s children, to imagine their fate if she let the barrier fall. That gave her courage to survive another five seconds.     She spent a precious moment cursing Shema, the being who’d sent her here, and another wondering what they’d say about her when she died.     Then she felt the caress.     She blinked in surprise. The agony lessened for a moment, as if the pressure was abated just a little. She tried to make sense of the experience.     She felt a hand on her cheek, smoothing away the tears of pain, running down to caress her neck, to brush over the curve of her breast.     “What?” she gasped. “How…?”     There was a breath on her neck, and a familiar chuckle.     Lara Night a dry voice spoke in her ear – or her mind. What an unexpected delight.     “Parody Master,” the visitor from another reality recognised with a shudder of horror.     The exploring hands roved over her stretched torso. Why yes, came the answer. Imagine my delight when I discovered there was a new mind behind the barrier that so troubles me. Imagine my delight when I found out it was you.     Lara gritted her teeth and tried not to shy away. She was holding the entire weight of the Celestian globe now. if she flinched everything was lost.     The Parody Master’s hands slid lower. This is not your energy, he noted. You have no means of protecting yourself as you protect others. To resist for them you have to be open to me.     “Don’t,” Lara stammered. “Please…” She tried to find some way of turning the Celestian power against her tormentor, then realised that he was hoping for that; for anything that would give him a hold to tear through the defence.     Lara realised she could only endure.     I can give you pleasure, the Parody Master noted, and Lara almost dropped the barrier as a wave of ecstasy washed over her. I can give you pain, he added, demonstrating by dropping his full will onto the Celestian construct as his fingers clawed into Lara’s flesh. Which would you prefer?     Lara bit back the tears and tried to hold on. “No…” she whimpered. Stretched out there guarding the doorway to Earth she was completely at his mercy; and he had no mercy.     Let’s find out, shall we? laughed the Parody Master. ***     The trail of the Singularity Riders was obvious, an eight-mile wide swathe of rotted black vegetation degenerating to dust and slime, a body count that already hit the high hundred thousands. Their presence disrupted nature itself, turning the lush Indian rainforest into a gloomy death-choked wasteland under a bleak cold sky.     As LairJet Three crossed over the ruined landscape the mood in the high speed jet got angrier and angrier. “I don’t care whut it takes,” Trickshot declared, “we are takin’ these bastards down.”     “You got that right,” CSFB! agreed. “Yuki, any word on the mystic warding yet?”     The cyborg P.I, nodded and unshipped her network jack from the comms panel. “Xander’s just contacted Mumphrey. Apparently he’s brokered some kind of deal that we really don’t want to know about that should protect us from the whole entropy effect for a while. We can get up close and personal with the bad guys.”     Mr Epitome continued the strap the silver-tipped knuckledusters to his gauntlets. He’d had then blessed by the Vatican and he was hoping the Doomwariths wouldn’t like them. “Don’t get carried away by righteous anger,” he warned everybody, himself included. “We don’t have the firepower to take down five of these adversaries in a straight fight. So we have to…”     “Get ‘em good and mad, split ‘em up, and take ‘em one at a time, natch,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! interrupted. “That’s the plan. We get them to be werry werry quiet and we hand them the big barrel of TNT.”     “There they are!” Trickshot noted as the sensors picked up a null-area below. “Everybody get ready to bail while I line up this bucket for a kamikaze attack.”     On the ground below, in the ruins of what had been a fishing village by a fertile river and was now a corpse-strewn cesspit by a dead mudhole, Great B’Rath looked up with eyes that had seen the death of civilisations. “Ah. They come. Do not let them die easssily. And sssave their sssouls for later.”     “Thessse are the champions of their world?” asked T’Tharn the Lurid, disdainfully. “Thessse?”     M’Rak the Vicious noted the direct line the aircraft was making on their position. “They exssspect to harm us with so small an attack?” he scorned.     “They are desssperate,” noted W’Lure the Bitter. “But not asss desperate as we ssshall make them.”     The Singularity Riders were ready for the incoming Lairjet to detonate around them. They didn’t expect the sixty gallons of pink paint stored in the cargo hold. They didn’t expect the orange and green blur streaking past scattering combat candy trails to confuse and dazzle. They didn’t expect the follow-up sonic grenades from Yuki set to the exact frequency derived from an earlier attack on EEE. They didn’t expect the vibratium-tipped arrow that sank right into M’Rak the Vicious’ shadowed forehead.     And then Mr Epitome and Glory went in, up close and personal. ***     “You are an undisciplined, prating fool,” commented Chiaki Bushido, the Psychic Samurai.     “And you have a great pair o’ buns,” replied Simon Maddicks, the once and future Killer Shrike. Right now he was just dressed in faded fatigues with an M16 in one hand and a B.A.L.D.-designed sonic disruptor in the other.     The Samurai glared through narrowed eyes. “I tracked this malefactor across half the globe by diligent research and insightful perception,” she noted. “How did you come to stumble across this hidden dojo in a forgotten corner of Tibet?”     “I found the mark the old fashioned way, sweetheart,” Maddicks smirked. “I beat it outta people. And don’t think I’m going to be sharing the bounty with you either. Only way you’re getting any part of the cash I’ll be getting from Akiko Masamune is if you’re there in the hot tub along with the other bimbos.”     “I am not seeking a fee,” Chiaki answered with contempt. “I am providing a favour for an old associate. She asked that I aid in the tracking down of this quarry, so here I am.”     “Okay, you can assist me as a freebie,” Maddicks agreed. “Just don’t get in the way of a pro, babe.”     “If I see one I shall point him out,” the Psychic Samurai replied.     Then the bickering stopped. They were too near the target now to trade quips or insults. Chiaki gestured with her fingers to indicate that she was heading round to the back of the long snow-covered meditation hut. Maddicks nodded and slipped quietly towards the main door.     Ultraninja came from the shadows, a vicious sai in each hand, and made to rake out Shrike’s guts. The Psychic Samurai came from a different set of shadows, having anticipated her quarry’s ambush, and caught the attack with her own long blade. Maddicks at least made good bait.     Shrike had different ideas. As the black-clad Ultraninja reacted to her samurai attacker he picked up the nearest water-butt and smashed it across the back of his quarry’s head.     Ultraninja tumbled with the blow, rolled and came up hurling poison-tipped shuriken at her attackers. Chiaki deflected them with her blade. Maddicks dived behind the water trough then came up firing.     “Alive!” shouted Chiaki. “Akiko wants to know what this traitor did to the Hooded Hood!”     “You can live with a dozen bullets in your legs,” Maddicks shouted back. “Now I found shadow-chick I’m not letting her get away again. You know how many guys are looking for this bounty? I’m not losing out to that Captor bastard again.”     Ultraninja sprayed choking toxic dust at Chiaki’s face, but the Psychic Samurai had again anticipated the attack and slipped aside. She had to fall back a little though. Ultraninja was very good and Maddicks wasn’t being too fussy where he sprayed his bullets.     “Hey, kung fu mamas!” Shrike called. “Wanna wait while I get a video cam so we can try and sell this pay-per-view?” Then he ducked for cover from Ultraninja’s firecracker bombs.     Chiaki guessed that Ultraninja expected her to try and take advantage of the distraction to tag her. Instead she dropped backwards, her sword slicing through the ropes on the stack of barrels beside the waystation. Ultraninja spotted the new threat and somersaulted over it, but that left her vulnerable for just a moment. Shrike’s tazer dart caught her in the flank.     Ultraninja shuddered as the electric shock raced through her. In the single moment where her co-ordination failed Chiaki brought her down with the butt of her katana.     “Not bad,” Maddicks admitted as he emerged from behind the broken barrels. “You’re not related to a chick called Keiko Stabbypants, are you? She so wanted me.”     The Psychic Samurai ignored the distraction and made sure Ultraninja was secure. Akiko had questions for this one about a missing archvillain and his Portal of Pretentiousness. ***     “Get her out of there!” Before anyone could stop him, Goldeneyed lurched out of the bubble of altered time in which he’d been recuperating and lurched back towards the dimensional doorway where Lara writhed.     “Mr Katz, you’re not ready,” Dr Whitwell warned. “You’re still dehydrated and exhausted, borderline…”     “Look at her!” Bry shouted. “She’s dying!”     Framed by the doorway Lara was struggling with an invisible assailant. As her head lurched violently to one side bruises in the shape of a hand formed on her cheek. Scratches appeared on her exposed skin from invisible nails. She gasped with pain as something hard slammed into her belly. A little trail of blood dribbled down her chin.     “What’s happening to her?” gasped Beth Shellett, horrified.     “She’s done all she can and a damn sight more than she should! Get her out of there!” G-Eyed ordered. He dived into the doorway, physically shouldering Lara aside. She jerked for a moment as if an electric shock has pulsed through her then she folded into a tight ball and lay there gasping and trying not to cry. Little pulses of Celestian energy still sparked around her, leaving livid red traces beneath her skin. The other weals on her, the bruises and the scratches and the fractured ribs were more mysterious.     Bry jumped into the energy streams, feeling them lock onto him and surge through him with familiar pain. Then his head snapped back as if he’d taken a hard head-punch. He reacted back physically, slamming a fist forward at an unseen enemy. It didn’t connect. He twisted the forces around him into a tighter knot and guided them down a harmonic to shield himself better. He felt the intense agony recede to a familiar ache. He saw Beth’s appalled face as she looked over top him in the doorway while she tended to Lara.     A low chuckle filled the cavern chamber. The Parody Master was having a good day. ***     Three Doomwraiths surrounded Mr Epitome while Great B’Rath continued his ride towards India’s massive population centres and T’Vorkh the Cancerous concentrated on killing Glory. M’Rak the Vicious was laughing as they piled onto the paragon of power.     Epitome was struggling despite being shielded from necromantic drain. The Singularity Riders were incredibly strong. Their touch was caustic and left his limbs rimed with frost. This close up he could feel them whispering in his mind. And nothing he had done yet had really hurt them. Somewhere behind him Glory yelped.     Dominic Clancy heaved T’Tharn the Lurid away from him and delivered a rapid series of head blows to W’Lure the Bitter. For all their massive power the Singularity Riders had never been trained in combat; they’d never needed to be. Epitome read most of their attacks ahead of time. That was keeping him alive for now. He was losing, but he was trading health for time.     “This way, people!” called out Trickshot, coating the sloping embankment with frictionless lubricant. His arrowheads contained size-changing particles that unfolded the minute amounts of slide-foam into a huge wave of high-viscosity lubricant. The Singularity Riders’ beasts didn’t usually need traction to move but just now they were resting their weight on the ground to allow them to exert maximum force in combat with Mr Epitome. When Yuki barrelled into T’Vorkh’s steed she managed to send three of the beasts sliding down the gradient in an undignified uncontrolled skid.     The whole weakened embankment gave way, dropping the combatants through the roof of an industrial building in a new business park not far off the Lahore-Jalandar motorway. The site had been hastily evacuated. All livestock and wild animals in a ten mile radius fell dead. As the Singularity Riders untangled themselves and their mounts the building rotted away and shivered to dust.     CrazySugarFreakBoy! webbed the intruders together with pliable silly string, a ridiculous gaudy mass of neon lines blistering around the raw black wounds that were the Doomwraiths. Mr Epitome and Glory followed the melee down, keeping the whole combat at close quarters and physical. The whole plan depended on the Riders not paying attention to the wider terrain.     Yuki somersaulted in, hammering a steel-boned fist into M’Rak the Vicious. “B’Rath’s slipped the net,” she warned. “Where is he?”     “We can’t hold them here any longer!” CSFB! decided. “We go with the catch we’ve got.” He screamed into his walkie-talkie wristwatch. “Now!” ***     NTU-150 rammed home the final connection between his red and gold armour and the Happy Place conduit he’d hastily constructed under the abandoned industrial site where the Lair Legion were fighting for their lives. The exception field generators screeched as they pushed straight past their design limits shearing against the Celestian barrier.     The four Doomwraiths staggered as happy thoughts and feelings washed through them.     “What..?” gasped M’Rak, struggling as if in an invisible wind. “How…?”     “Gotcha!” yelled CrazySugarFreakBoy!, bounding in to give T’Tharn the Lurid a big sloppy kiss on the hood. “The PM made you from the misery of worlds. Welcome to your Happy Place!”     T’Tharn sliced out with his talons and tore a gaping gash in the wired wonder’s side.     But that made the Doomwraith happy. He howled once as he was sucked into the conceptual plane of happiness and unravelled like a ball of wool.     “We’re getting multiple redundancy failures,” Enty warned as things started to explode around him and on his armoured suit. “Looks like they weren’t redundant after all. Uh-oh.”     “When Enty says uh-oh we know to duck,” admitted Yuki, grabbing Trickshot and rolling for cover.     Mr Epitome continued to pound at the weakened T’Vorkh. “You hit my dog!” Streamers of darkness began spewing from great tears in the Doomwraith’s fabric.     The Happy Place generators overloaded and exploded. NTU-150 went down with them. Only one of the Singularity Riders had been eliminated. T’Vorkh the Cancerous, M’Rak the Vicious, and W’Lure the Bitter rose and began to regain their strength.     “Stand down and surrender,” Mr Epitome ordered the Parody Master’s most powerful heralds. “If you do not placed yourself in US custody at this time you will be destroyed.”     “And we’ll make you look like tools while we do it,” CSFB! promised, clutching his torn torso as Trickshot applied emergency compression bandages.     T’Vorkh’s black lightnings burned around Mr Epitome without harming him. Then the others joined in too. The paragon of power pushed forward against the energies, his teeth gritted in an angry snarl as he ignored the pain to reach his targets.     Then the necromantic protections crafted by Vrykolakas burned out and expired. Mr Epitome jerked in the black energy sprays and shrivelled to resemble an emaciated corpse.     “Crap,” spat Trickshot. “Time fer plan B.” ***          “Give the word, Miss Shellett” Sir Mumphrey Wilton confirmed in the Lair Mansion Operations Room. Overhead satellite imagery focussed on the desperate battle. Wider angles showed the forty mile swathe of destruction since the combat started and the six hundred mile black smudge of dead land that marked the Doomwraiths’ progression.     “Citizen Z, Sir Mumphrey has given the word,” Beth Shellett spoke into one of the comm-channels. “He says now.”     “Why of course, Bethany,” CZ agreed. “Consider it done.” Half a world away Elizabeth von Zemo held her sword to the throat of the Hole Man. “Make it happen.”     The subterranean ruler glowered but knew better than to demur. He gestured for his Holeoid minions to pull the massive levers that engaged giant gears carved when humans still lived in caves.     “It’s started,” Citizen Z reported. “Oh, and Beth: Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”     Back in the Lair Mansion the innocent schoolteacher’s eyes went distant and unfocused for just a moment as the posthypnotic trigger cut in. Then she went back to her work. ***     Mechanisms built in the Palaeolithic era by terrified slaves of the Deviates ground into life deep under the planet. Rock plates shifted and moved powered by unimaginable telluric forces. The Hole Man had long since scavenged what remained of the abandoned Deviate technology in the hidden depths of the Earth. Now those machines pressed and moved vast columns of bedrock. Ancient transit machines shuddered and sparked to sporadic life.     At the industrial park outside Bhiwani the ground shook as if an earthquake was starting. Then the whole plot tilted sideways. Building crumbled apart under their own weight as their centres of gravity shifted by eighty degrees.     The Lair Legion were prepared for the sudden ground movement. The Singularity Riders reacted just a fraction too late to avoid tumbling down into the vast shaft that had opened below.     Trickshot had managed to get aboard his hovercycle and was gathering up the team. Yuki grabbed Glory who in turn had Mr Epitome pinned in her jaws. The man of might wasn’t even breathing at the moment. He looked brittle enough to snap. CSFB! free-fell until he could bounce off W’Lure to catch the cable arrow that the irritating archer had fired for him. “What, you came to Earth and thought we’d be easy meat?” the wounded wired wonder mocked. “You gotta learn, this place is complicated!”     The Deviate devices flashed once as they discharged energies that had been stored up for sixty thousand years, and the Singularity Riders were gone, each dropped into a separate area of the massive underground workings, each folded through space to another place. Divide and conquer.     “Very clever,” admitted Great B’Rath, sitting astride his winged carrion-beast hovering over the pit where his comrades had vanished. “A worthy gambit, adversssaries.”     “Okay,” CSFB! breathed, “We take down the big guy now. Tricky, that adamantine arrow?”     B’Rath flexed his negativity field and dropped the heroes opposing him to their knees. Glory slumped over Epitome’s body. Yuki toppled over with a critical power failure. Trickshot tumbled face down trying to find the strength to keep on working his lungs. CrazySugarFreakBoy! struggled to resist the effect, but his earlier injuries compounded the difficulty, leaving him crawling on hands and knees towards the greatest of the Doomwraiths.     “I will kill you,” Great B’Rath promised, “but I will hurt you firsssst. I have ssstudied your histories, Lair Legion. I know what to do. I know your worst fearssss.” He turned his mount eastwards. “I am going now to your Lair Manssssion.”     He blurred away before Dreamcatcher Foxglove could even call out to him. Less than a second later he was on Parody Island starting the massacre. ***     Marie Murcheson knew that the Singularity Rider had arrived even before the alarm klaxons sounded. The undead’s presence was like an icepick in her brain, like needles stabbing behind her eyes and maggots burrowing in her belly. The former Lair Banshee had wondered if she still had any tie to the Mansion’s defences. Now she knew.     “Major security breach!” Hallie called out over the mansion speaker system. “Emergency evacuation protocol one. Do I need to tell you this is not a drill…” Then the A.I. fell silent as B’Rath drained all power from the island. Every automated defence went dead.     “What’s going on?” asked Magweed, looking a little alarmed. “Where did the lights go?”     “Something bad’s happening.” Griffin noted. “We have to run. Back to the lighthouse.”     “No time,” Samantha Featherstone decided as the front wall of the Mansion crumbled to ancient dust. “To our hideout, now. Up the secret stairs. Fast!”     Great B’Rath sucked the life out of the soldiers that responded to his intrusion and carried on into the mansion. ***     “Transfer teleportation complete!” shouted Amy exultantly. “We got one!”     In the chamber below M’Rak the Vicious realised he’d been transported against his will across the planet. He rose up on his mount and examined his surroundings.     “By Order of the President of the Unites States of America I am remanding you in custody,” Warden Westwood of the Safe announced to the newly-arrived Doomwraith. “You will remain incarcerated as a prisoner of war until such time as your future status is determined.”     M’Rak reached out his death field to kill everyone in a hundred mile radius.     Nobody died.     “Oh come on,” chided Kara Harper from the control desk. “You think we didn’t map how you do that when we transported you?”     “Those mystic algorithms were pretty complex,” admitted Cody Harper. “But in the end the language of the dead is still a language.” Kara and Cody had gifts with numbers and words.     M’Rak smashed his fist into the wall to render it to dust. It remained where it was.     “You are in the Safe Penitentiary Facility,” Warden Westwood explained. “And that cell you’re in was designed to hold the Chain Knight.”     “And that was before I improved it,” added Miss Framlicker. “What, you thought you could tell us you were coming and we’d tremble in fear?” She snorted. “It just gave us time to get creative.”     “Welcome to the big house, sucker!” Amy called. ***     “We’re locked in!” Amber St Clare realised as she tried the Operations Room door. “We’re trapped! Like when the Science Police came for us. Like when the Hellraisers killed everybody here!”     “There’s a manual lever on the inside,” Kat Allen remembered. “If we could just get a light in here…”     “Don’t open the door!” objected Special Agent Garrick. “Right now we’re in the most secure part of the Lair Mansion, the bit that’s best defended.”     “Except those defences are weakened right now because they’re being projected out round the whole solar system,” Beth Shellett pointed out. “Whatever’s out there has got inside the perimeter of our usual defences. We can’t count on them to save us now.”     “There are so many people out there now!” Amber cried out. “Joint chiefs, senior world leaders, our top scientists. Oh Lord, the children are out there!”     Sir Mumphrey flicked his cigar lighter. “Try not to fret, m’dears,” he told the worried women in the darkened Ops centre. “No help in panicking. Best we take stock of the problem then work out how to deal with this chappie, what? Do we know exactly what we’re dealin’ with?”     “I think the sensors picked up a major necromantic signature before they went down,” Amber reported. “As in Doomwraith.”     “Hmph,” the eccentric Englishman frowned. “Drat. Right then, if you ladies would be so good as to remain here, I’ll go have a word with the blighter.”     Amber disagreed. “Sir Mumphrey, with respect, we know the Parody Master’s minions are protected against your Chronometer’s effects. You couldn’t stop them and they can bypass your defences.”     “Still need to be having a word with yon blaggard,” Mumph insisted. “Besides, if I can’t affect him I can speed up everyone else who’s gettin’ off the island, including yourselves.”     “I hate those tunnels,” Amber shuddered.     “It’s suicide to leave this room,” Garrick warned.     “What about Bry?” Beth Shellett asked suddenly. “He can’t run away!”     Kat laid a sympathetic hand on the schoolteacher’s arm. “That might be who he’s come for, I’m afraid.”     “All the more reason for me to go get in the way, I’d say. Help me with this emergency release mechanism, if you wouldn’t mind, ladies…”     Beth gave the old man a hug. “Just be careful, Sir Mumphrey” she told him. That was when she applied the poison patch to his neck, but the effects wouldn’t kick in for two or three hours yet. ***     W’Lure the Bitter had to get off his dark mount because the tunnels he found himself in were too low to otherwise pass. Some force was twisting dimensions here, making a straight teleport difficult. Occult energies tainted the air, fouling his senses.     “Come out, little mortalsss,” he hissed. “I can sssmell your life-force.”     “Actually I think that might be curry,” suggested Xander the Improbable, sauntering out from a side corridor carrying an old canvas rucksack. “I’m afraid I spilled a bit on my robes and I’m useless at laundry. Cleone’s been away and I didn’t have time to get it to Mr Lye…”     “The Ssssorcerer Ssssupreme,” the Singularity Rider recognised. Here was one of the people marked for a special death.     “Nasty lisp you have there,” the master of the mystic crafts observed. “I should have brought an umbrella. Anyway, hello. You’re trespassing.”     “This world belongs to the Parody Massster.”     “Actually it doesn’t,” Xander answered plainly. “The question of who it does really belong to is a long and fascinating one with many different opinions about it. But that’s not the trespass I meant.” His whimsy suddenly vanished. “You’re trespassing in the realm of the living.”     “He’s trespassing in the realm of the dead, technically, as well,” pointed out the Abyssal Greye, dean of the scholar-ghouls under Gothametropolis. “These tunnels belong to the ghouls. People like him give undead a bad name.”     “I’m all for a bit of style,” commented Urthula Underess, Russian party ghoul, appraising the Singularity Rider, “but really, what are you trying to say with black rags and a cloak of shadow? That’s so Time of Desolation.”     The Doomwraith laughed mirthlessly. “Ssso, even the dead of this rebelliousss pathetic world sssseek to ssstand in the way of the Sssingularity Riderssss!” he mocked. “And how will ssssuch minor dead sssstand against one who embodies the ssssundered ssssouls of a whole world?”     “I rather thought I’d do it by being a smarter and better person than you,” sniffed Greye. “In bullies versus brains, the bullies have the initial advantage, of course. But the dead know how to play the long game.”     “I thought I’d just stand around and watch how Xander takes you down,” Urthula admitted, slouching back on the tomb of Visionatus Improbablus. “I’d be dying to find out, except it’s too late for the dying part.”     “I am black pain and desssspair and the end of dreamssss,” boasted W’Lure. “There is no force at any of your commandsss that can ssstop me.”     “Well, you’re made from black pain and despair and the end of dreams, I’ll grant that,” admitted the mage, “but then again, I’m made of digested cow products and teacakes but that doesn’t make me a ruminant or a bun.”     “He’s gonna kick your ass,” Urthula told the Singularity Rider.     The Abyssal Greye’s necromantic perceptions were more acute. He could see the little beads of sweat freezing on Xander’s forehead, the tiny telltale worry lines about the mystic’s eyes. Behind the seemingly casual confrontation some terrible struggle was happening somewhere else.     “You will not die yet,” W’Lure told the master of the mystic crafts. “Your allies will perish ssscreaming.”     Xander shook his head. “All the people whose souls are bound up in that composite shroud-form of yours perished screaming,” he said sadly. “Hasn’t there been enough perishing screaming?” He held out his satchel. “Why not take this instead and just go away?”     The Doomwraith reached for the knapsack by reflex, took it before realising what it contained.     W’Lure hissed.     “Yes,” Xander said softly. “You know what that is now, don’t you? The Librarian prepared it for me when I found out which world you’d been forged from. All the writings of your people, combined into one knot of memory. Every sacred song, every children’s fable, every history, every love poem.”     The Doomwraith staggered.     Xander stepped forward. “All the bad jokes of a whole world. All the things people planned to do. Personal stories of tragedy and of triumph, great sinners and greater saints. Songs mothers sung to their babies in the night. Speeches that won freedoms that changed the world. All the things that were taken from you when you were harvested for your pain and fear. All that made you wonderful.”     “I am W’Lure,” whispered the Singularity Rider. “We are W’Lure the Bitter…”     “You don’t have to be,” Xander told him gently. “You get one chance. Just say the word and you could be more than the sum of your parts.”     “And if not we all die and our world dies with us,” thought the Abyssal Greye. Xander tended to play for all the marbles.     It became arctic cold in the ghoul tunnels, as cold as the genocide of a world. The Singularity Rider staggered forward, stretching an angry vengeful claw towards the mage. His mount hissed and pawed the ground, eager for souls. Xander stood his ground with the memory globe before him.     “Help me…” begged the Doomwraith.     “Yes,” agreed Xander. “Remember what you were, and let me unpick you, each and every one, and let you go.”     Urthula’s jaw dropped as the servant of the Parody Master took the little crystal from the mage. W’Lure toppled to his knees with a muffled sob, hugging the globe to him.     “These are creatures of destruction,” murmured Greye. “They were born of it and they live by it. It is all they know. Nothing Xander did could destroy it, for they are destruction’s masters. But compassion… kindness… salvation…”     The master of the mystic crafts rolled up his robe sleeves and sat crosslegged beside the unravelling Singularity Rider as it clutched the glowing ball of memories. It would take a very long time, hours, maybe days, to rest a hundred billion souls; but it seemed a job worth doing to Xander the Improbable. He wished he could neutralise all the Doomwraiths this way, but even one had almost killed him.     The Rider’s beast howled and leaped forward to prevent W’Lure’s defection; but the ghouls were waiting. And they were hungry. ***     “That’s far enough, ye murrained clarty Sassenach!” shouted Sergeant MacHarridan, head of Parody Island security and Detonator Hippo. He charged forward as Great B’Rath moved to the lower levels of the Lair Mansion. He couldn’t allow the leader of the Singularity Riders access to the Operations Room or to the caverns below the mansion where Goldeneyed hung in the dimensional doorway. “An’ ye can lose the bogeyman attitude, pal. Ah’ve seen worse at chucking out time on a Friday night in Glasgow.”     B’Rath poured killing black lightning from his hand to vaporise the strange creature blocking his path. Sergeant MacHarridan exploded.     The detonation was shaped, designed to wash up the corridor and hit the intruder with a force in the megaton range. B’Rath was hammered off his steed and tossed back into the hallway amidst the remains of the mansion’s security team. Before he could rise, the Detonator Hippo reformed on top of him.     “Stitch that, pet!” shouted MacHarridan, headbutting the Doomwraith and exploding on contact.     As the Hippo reformed a second time B’Rath’s steed clamped steel-trap jaws over the security chief’s head and bit down.     MacHarridan detonated again, a greater explosion than any before. The black steed’s head was smeared across the hallway, evaporated from halfway down its serpentine neck. The black bulk of the monster slumped sideways and crashed to the ground before melting to nothingness.     Sergeant Argus MacHarridan did not reform.     With a hiss of anger and a growing impatience, Great B’Rath rose and headed downstairs. ***     “Watcha, mate,” Con Johnstantine told T’Vorkh the Cancerous as the Doomwraith emerged from the Deviate dimensional shift. “So you’re the big bad are you?” He lit up a cigarette and looked at the massive fell beast the undead straddled. “Daddy wouldn’t buy you a pony, right?”     Mr Li tutted between his teeth and waggled a finger at the irritating Cockney. “You just show our enemy more respect,” he chided. “T’Vorkh is a terrible being who has brought misery and destruction to myriad worlds. He is not to be lightly dismissed.”     T’Vorkh stretched out his senses to discover his adversaries. One was a mere human, the other… it was hard to say. But neither could match a Singularity Rider. “You may plead,” he rasped, “And I may grant you deathsss that are not too ssslow.”     Johnstantine snorted. “You think you’re scary, mate?” he spat. “I’ve seen things that would make you soil your midnight black underpants. I’ve dated things that’d make you soil your midnight black underpants. You have no idea whatsoever what you are dealing with here, chum. None at all.”     T’Vorkh reached out to infect his opponents biofields with fast-replicating tumours; his personal signature attack. Something blocked his power from affecting them.     “You are not permitted to harm us,” Mr Li explained. “You have transgressed into a place where your power does not suffice. If you cease your aggression now you may not be judged so harshly. Persist and you will bring about your own destruction.”     The ancient Chinaman seemed perfectly poised, unafraid of the engine of death atop a beast of nightmare only a short distance away. Johnstantine seemed less sanguine, wiping his brow and taking another suck at his home-rolled fag end. “He’s not going to go for the soft option, squire,” the Englishman warned. “His type never does.”     It had been stiflingly warm in the foetid tunnels. Now it was cold as the grave. T’Vorkh extended his death field to sap life from everything around him. Fifty yards, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand…     Again those two adversaries were unaffected.     “Bad choice,” Johnstantine said.     Mr Li shook his head sadly. “You will require this,” he said, handing Johnstantine a beautifully-ironed silk scarf. “Cover your eyes. Quickly.”     T’Vorkh opened his palms and sprayed limitless necromantic energies at the defenders of Earth. And then he saw what was keeping them alive. A sparkling field of quantum energies from the multiversal substratum was shielding them, holding back the Singularity Rider’s power. And that power was emanating from…     The fell steed’s black claw raked out suddenly, slashing Amazing Guy from his hiding place in one of the coffin-like niches in the tunnel side, sending the protector of the Parodyverse sprawling across to join Johnstantine and Li. A vicious surge of Doomwraith power shattered the bubble protecting the others and knocked them all to the floor.     Now T’Vorkh understood that he faced his old enemy Amazing Guy he knew how to kill them all.     “Get behind me,” AG told the others. “I’ll try and hold him off.”     “That will not be necessary, sir,” Mr Li replied. “Rider T’Vorkh was warned that he was not the superior power here.”     Then the walls folded in. Time and space distorted and became something darker and bleaker. Suddenly the tunnel was filled with hundreds of squirming, twisting tentacles.     Amazing Guy pushed a shield around his comrades and himself just in time. To his horror the first of the squirming appendages passed right through the energy wall, but then Mr Li placed his hand on the bubble and suddenly it seemed able to resist the incursions.     T’Vorkh and his steed found themselves struggling with thousands of writhing strings of cephalopod that paid no attention to minor considerations of dimension or time. He unleashed his power to the full, the same power that could decimate worlds.     That was the power that had woken Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu in the first place, when the Doomherald had sucked life from some of its lesser appendages down in the deep tunnels beneath Parodopolis.     “Told you you had no idea what you were dealing with,” Johnstantine told the Singularity Rider as the Doomwraith’s beast was shredded by the angry Groper Out of Grossness.     “Please get us away from here, Amazing Guy,” Mr Li asked with a little bow. “I am not confident in our ability to survive here for much longer.”     “One transport via the multiversal substratum coming up,” AG agreed. “This is going to be a little rocky, so hold on.” He concentrated and managed to slip his energy construct away from the turbulent twisted dimensions around the grumpy elder being that nested beneath Paradopolis. The wrench almost killed him, but he held on by willpower alone. They arrived back in Off-Central Park drained but alive three days later.     T’Vorkh turned his malevolent aura of death on Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu. “I am a Ssssingularity Rider of the Parody Massster!” he boasted to the Groper. “Die in my Masssster’s name!”     Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu didn’t care, didn’t even really notice that the Doomwraith was there. It just scratched at the fleabite. A billion billion tentacles overwhelmed the multiple souls bound in the Rider’s form, grasped at them and pulled.     And that was the end of T’Vorkh the Cancerous. ***     The sound of the detonations in the Lair Mansion echoed down even as far as the deep cavern where Goldeneyed hung in the framework of the doorway to the deeper dimensions. Dust fell from the chamber roof.     “I need to get up,” Lara Night fretted. “I need to help.”     “If you move you’ll puncture a lung,” Dr Whitwell pointed out practically. “If you don’t pass out from bloodloss or suffer brain damage from your major concussion.”     “Yeah, that sounds like moving would be a kind of bad idea,” agreed Flapjack, the mansion’s major-domo. “But if you need me to help loosen any of your clothing…”     Lara recognised the reflex letch for what it was, covering a deep nervous concern. “You can still get out of here, Flapjack. Get Dr Whitwell to safety.”     “Don’t be ridiculous,” the senior physician at the Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital chided. “If I leave a patient behind I lose my moral high ground to illegally park wherever I like in this city. Just lie still and stop trying to wreck my reputation as a medical miracle worker by killing yourself.”     “And I’m not goin’ anywhere,” Flapjack argued. “For starters, it’s a Carpathian Flapjack’s job to defend the castle when the master’s under attack. Heat up the molten lead, prepare the boiling oil for the death traps, that kind of thing. Secondly, I figure its only the screwy arcane stuff in these tunnels is keeping that Singularity Rider guy’s death field from snuffing the lot of us right now, so this place is looking good. And third… well, I can’t think of a third right now, but I will later. I’m just staying put, that’s all.”     “He’ll be coming here,” Lara calculated. “He’ll be coming for Bry.”     “And Bry isn’t going anywhere either,” Goldeneyed promised, standing firm in the arch. “Bry’s just a bit sick of these Parody Master bullies thinking they can do whatever they like to whoever they want.”     “Um, they kind of can,” Flapjack pointed out.     Goldeneyed clenched his fists and clenched his teeth. “Well I happen to know some guys who specialise in stopping villains like that,” he promised. “Lair Legion, Line Up!”     His eyes flashed golden. ***     Great B’Rath felt the end of T’Vorkh and W’Lure, sensed the captivity of M’Rak. It only made him hate the more.     He reached out to leach more life from the realm around him. Some property of the island prevented his power from extending to the mainland, but soon he would cross that narrow bridge and suck the breath from every creature in the metropoli beyond. In the meantime he could still sense a few souls shielded in hidden corners of these halls.     B’Rath stretched his perceptions further. There were some terrified humans in an adamantine room down the hall, waiting for death. A few more huddled in a cavern where the dimension-channeler hung in his Celestian doorway. A pair in the sanatorium behind him, one barely clinging to life. And… what was this?     The Singularity Rider sensed children, hiding nearby, shielding themselves behind an ancient architectural quirk; three special children, each one would be a feast.     The temporal pocketwatch swung on its chain in a bright golden arc and smashed into Great B’Rath’s head with the full weight of ages behind it. The Doomwraith was hurled back in confusion. He hadn’t sensed the time-dislocated Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity. The corridor aged around him, burying him in debris.     “Oik,” spat Sir Mumphrey Wilton, extending his temporal manipulation field to ensure that the last of the few survivors from the portacabins at the perimeter of Parody Island could flee across the causeway to safety. He was burning chronal energies at a frightening rate, but it didn’t matter because there was nothing he could do to permanently stop B’Rath anyway.     The Singularity Rider rose from the rubble, rotting it away with his necromantic discharges. “Ssssso, the leader of the Earth resssisssstance comes to die.”     Sir Mumphrey used a short Anglo-Saxon expression that summarised his opinion if that, of the Doomwraith, and of the Doomwraith’s Master. He came in for another blow but this time B’Rath was ready for him. The slightest brush was enough to send the old man toppling to the floor, nearly dead; not actually dead, though, because the Parody Master wanted this one to punish himself.     The blessed whitethorn stakes that Mumphrey had shifted slightly into the future materialised again in and around B’Rath, piercing the undead through his shadowy body, winning a scream from him. But he did not go down.     Then he was struck again, as hard a blow as he could remember, sending him shattering through one of the remaining walls to splash down into the Legion’s swimming pool. Queen Annj of Ausgard followed up by leaping through the gap in the wall and thrusting her hand into the water. “Blessed be!” she commanded it.     The liquid suddenly scalded the Doomwraith like acid. B’Rath hissed in fury, gestured, and vaporised the entire contents of the pool.     Annj came in and smote him again. “This house and these people are under the protection of Ausgard!” she warned. “You harm them at your peril.”     “Peril?” hissed the Singularity Rider. “I will teach you peril, little goddesssss.”     His hand snapped out. His talons closed round Annj’s throat. His death touch surged through her, sapping her of strength to fight, leaving her a limp helpless rag in his clutch.     “Sssso ssstrong!” admitted B’Rath. “Ssssuch a sssplendid immortal life-forsssse. I sssshall feed from you for a long, long time. Weekssss. Monthsssss.” He looked at the goddess affectionately. “I ssshall keep you assss my pet.”     Annj tried to struggle, but that chilling touch rendered her weaker than a kitten.     She was the last defender who could fight, B’Rath perceived. There was no other. Now there was only slaughter, and time to prepare a welcome for when the Lair Legion returned. ***     “What’s going on over there?” demanded Miss Framlicker at the police barricades on the land side of the bridge to the Lair Mansion.     “I don’t know,” Commissioner Don Graham answered honestly, “but anything that crosses that red line there dies. We can’t get in.”     “Singularity Rider,” Cody opined, looking at the dead laid out across Parody Island. “Has to be.”     “There’s one unaccounted for,” Kara agreed. “The boss one.”     “We’ve got to get in there,” Amy argued. “Our friends are in there.”     “My daughter is in there,” Graham agreed, “but how do we get through that?”     Nobody had a good answer for that one. ***     “Stand away from her,” warned Marie Murcheson, appearing at the doorway where the last Singularity Rider held Queen Annj in his death grip to feed on her immortality. “I’m telling you, let her go.”     Just another mortal, and a terrified one at that, sensed B’Rath. She was barely resisting the urge to run away. She was so easy to snuff out.     “You can kill me, yes,” agreed Marie. “I can’t stop you doing that. But if you do it, you won’t like what I become.”     Now B’Rath perceived it. “The Lair Banssssheee,” he recognised. “You repelled my brotherssss once, before you were curtailed, before the defenssses of this place were weakened by their extensssion. You were curssssed with new life for a ssssshort sssseason.”     “That’s me,” agreed Marie. “You’ll only take this Mansion over my dead body. And even then I’ll fight you to the last.”     “I sssshall not sssslay you,” agreed great B’Rath. “A human can live for yearsssss without limbssss or eyes or earsssss or tongue.” He dropped Annj to the ground and moved after Marie with hellish swiftness.     Marie fled. The Singularity Rider followed her, enjoying the chase.     “There is nowhere to run, little sssspirit,” B’Rath called. “There is no-one left to ssssave you.”     “Rubbish!” called Marie as she raced along the corridors of the Lair Mansion. “You don’t know anything about this place, or about me.”     And she screamed.     “You cannot give me death,” boasted the Singularity Rider. “I am death.”     “She can open the gateway to death a little bit though,” suggested Jarvis, appearing from nowhere and smashing a Jarvis-cosmic-enhanced fist into the Doomwraith. “And that’s all we need.”     “Correct,” agreed Pegasus, searing great chunks of black matter away from B’Rath as her own cosmic bolt burst through his chest.     “Well, we could use a date for Saturday night as well,” suggested Rocket Racoon, jet-packing into the Singularity Rider’s head. “You doing anything, Peggy?”     “I don’t see this guy as ever having a date in his life,” suggested Magnetic Techbird, willing the walls of the mansion to close in around and through the Doomwraith.     “I don’t see him at all any more,” replied The Man Who Wasn’t There, shifting away with a massive chunk of B’Rath’s essence.     Great B’Rath screamed and swatted away the little echoes of the dead. The effort left him gasping and staggering. “Ssssooo, this island ssstill hasss a few little tricks, does it?” He rose to go after Marie again, sealing the way so she could not bring more shades of the dead to champion her. “There will be no more help for you, banssssheeee,” he promised. “Now we reach the end.”     Marie ran for her life, toppling over debris and bodies, scrambling to get to the place she had to be. The Doomwraith came after her, gliding over the broken ground, ready for revenge.     “Help me!” Marie cried out. “That thing will kill everybody, then doom the world! He’s already murdered so many, and their spirits cry for vengeance and release! He’s hurt Annj, and Sir Mumphrey and he’s going to hurt me too! Please… I can feel the house trying to help, but its strained to the limit. It can’t call on the dead any more, only the living. I’m asking… begging… praying… Help me!”     B’Rath seized up Marie, holding her by the throat at arms length to enjoy her agonies. “There is no help, banssssheee. Sssscream for me.”     “No… help… say you?” asked a raw, rough voice from cracked parched lips. The Doomwraith realised he was in the Lair Sanatorium, where one fallen figure had been laid on a bed where he was tended night and day.     The bed was empty now. There was only a dip where a body had laid, and a smaller dent where a baseball bat with a nail in it had rested beside him.     “No help, say you?” The voice was firmer now, more assured. Thunder rumbled in the distance as the storm found its way. “I think thou wilt find that thou hast miscounted,” said Donar Oldmanson. “The lady hath called, and help hast come.”     “You were brain-dead,” hissed the Doomwraith.     Donar went in, broke B’Rath’s arm, and pulled Marie free.     “As if that wouldst stop me for long,” the hemigod replied. “Have at thee!” ***     From various corners of the globe the Lair Legion were teleported to the cavern with Goldeneyed. “Sorry to grab you all Lisa-like,” Bry called to them, “but the defences here are maxxing and we’ve got a Singularity Rider rampaging above us. I locked onto your comm-cards and shifted you back here.”     “Because misery loves company,” suggested Flapjack of the Carpathians.     “You’re getting really good with those dimension powers, G-Eyed,” Trickshot agreed. “Must be all the practise.”     “Time to pat G-Eyed on the bottom later,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! called. “Right now it’s clobberin’ time!”     “Yes, thank you so much for calling me in to fight an unstoppable death monster,” Citizen Z told Bry Katz. “I won’t forget it.”     “What about this man?” asked Dr Whitwell, spotting the emaciated shell of Mr Epitome.     “Look after him for us,” Yuki replied. “We’ll go find B’Rath.”     “I’m… coming… as well,” Dominic Clancy insisted.     “Dude, you’re not just half dead, you’re ninety-eight percent dead,” CSFB! pointed out to the paragon of power.     “Katarina’s here. I’m coming,” insisted Epitome, staggering to his feet, barely able to stand.     “Clancy’s with us, and that’s that,” agreed Trickshot. “Heck, we all got friends on the line here. Let’s go. Call it, Dream!”     “Lair Legion… Line Up!”     “Now that’s what I’ve been missing,” grinned Goldeneyed through his agony. ***          Great B’Rath tore through Donar’s chest leaving raking festering wounds bubbling with black poison. Donar headbutted the undead and smashed Mjalcolm into the monster’s kneecaps. B’Rath clawed Donar’s face, tearing deep gouges right down to the bone.     “You have fought my lesser brothersssss,” scorned B’Rath. “You have never fassssed the like of me.”     “The method art much the same,” the hemigod of thunder assured him. “I smite thee to Miserablegitheim and back again, tear off thy head, and spitteth down thy neck.”     “When I have ssssslaughtered you, I sssshall take your woman assss my pet,” promised the Doomwraith. “I ssshall ssstrip her lifeforssse from her a sssshred at a time for long yearsssss.”     Donar growled from his throat and lost his temper, going in close to wrap his hands round the Rider’s throat. That was what B’Rath had wanted, so he could plunge his good arm through Donar’s chest and wrap an icy fist around the Ausgardian’s heart.     “And ssso you perissssh,” Great B’Rath gloated.     Yuki Shiro dropped down and sliced with the vibra-knife that Citizen Z had given her. Programmed with the exact frequencies logged by EEE to affect a Singularity Rider, the blade severed B’Rath’s hand at the wrist, freeing Donar before the weapon shattered into icy fragments.     Trickshot’s adamantine arrow took the Doomwraith through the throat. The additional explosive payload would have taken anyone else’s head off.     CrazySugarFreakBoy! flew in, crammed B’Rath’s hood with combat candy, and somersaulted away before the next explosion detonated.     Mr Epitome caught the staggering Rider in a necklock and twisted B’Rath’s head three hundred and sixty degrees.     “Tis good,” adjudged Donar as the hemigod crumpled to the floor in a bloody mess.     B’Rath spilled out in greasy black coils, struggling to maintain himself in the face of this last in a series of telling injuries. Epitome came in again with those shining knuckledusters so the Doomwraith put him down with a spine-shattering swipe. Yuki caught him with a complicated kick-twist but her power battery was easy to empty. Trickshot’s holy water arrows burned yet more of the Rider’s body away, but black lightnings sent the archer spasming to unconsciousness; it was a sign of B’Rath’s weakness that Trickshot was still alive. Citizen Z got in three good cuts with a sword attuned as her dagger had been before she too fell.     That left only CrazySugarFreakBoy!, as wounded and exhausted as B’Rath was himself, but still blurring around like an irritating flea besetting a behemoth. “What’s up doc?” he demanded as he continued to tumble just a second ahead of the Doomwraith’s reach. “Rethinking the definition of unstoppable now, are we? I’ll tell you what’s unstoppable. Us. The human race. Heroes. Strike us down and we become more powerful than you could ever imagine.”     B’Rath grew himself another hand and used it to slice into CSFB!’s chest and rip out his heart.     Only then did he realise that the wired wonder had similarly dipped into the Doomwraith’s fraying darkness and done the same to him.     “One of us can grow these back given time,” Dreamcatcher Foxglove grinned even as the blood welled from his mouth. “Sucker!”     B’Rath tried to scream. He had defeated the heroes. They all lay at his feet. He had defeated them! He had…     Great B’Rath evaporated into a black cloud, then into nothingness; then he was truly dead.     Silence fell on the devastated ruin of the Lair Mansion’s cellar level.     Then Citizen Z sat up. “Well,” she said as she dusted herself off, “that was unpleasant.”     Nobody else moved. CSFB! twitched a little as his impossibilityum body began the long painful process of mending itself. Donar breathed slowly and deeply, critically injured but now ready to survive. Yuki lay unpowered, barely clinging to existence. Trickshot was pale as a corpse, his respiration so shallow as to be almost imperceptible. Epitome was sprawled at in impossible angle with a shattered spine.     “Interesting,” noted Citizen Z. “And very useful.” She pulled her revolver and loaded it with serious matter bullets from her utility belt. “It was a devastating battle,” she rehearsed out loud. “CrazySugarFreakBoy! saved us all, saved the world.”     She held the gun at the wired wonder’s temple. “His sacrifice will never be forgotten. I vow to take the Legion forward in his name and make a bright new future for a new world. With humility and pride I accept the task of leadership as the supreme commander of Earth. History will remember this day forever.”     Then she fired six rounds into Dreamcatcher Foxglove’s brain. *** Next Time: At last we get back to Vizh, Asil, George and Priscilla as they explore the forbidden realm of the Celestians, to Liu Xi, ManMan and Exu as they chart the complications of human (and non-human) relationships, and to Al B., Dancer, Kerry, and Danny as they discover the secret weapon that could change the course of the Parody War – and lose it to E’Koor the Vengeful! Our heroes are out of their depth and out of their league, but most of all they are Out of Bounds, coming soon to a Parodyverse near you. *** If You Gaze Too Long Into a Footnote, the Footnote Gazes Also Into You: Vrykolakas is an elder vampire, an ancient expert on undeath, and a consultant on necromancy. He is smart enough not to directly fight heroes or villains. Ultraninja, an enhanced metahuman from the Technoverse, became a member of the Purveyors of Peril and released a Narrative Bomb to eliminate Herringcarp Asylum and the Hooded Hood in Untold Tales #302: The Hooded Hood Goes To War. The Happy Place Portal Generator is a dangerous piece of equipment that physically projects beings into the conceptual Happy Place (or sometimes to its counterpart the Unhappy Place). Since it often involves the individual being translated into some kind of talking forest animal T’Tharn can be glad he was merely destroyed. The Hole Man is a deformed human who fled to ancient tunnels carved long ago by the Deviate sub-species. There he gained control of or created the Holeoid slave race and mastered some of the abandoned technology he found. This allows him to shift landmasses around, to create vast holes in the planet, and to transport substantial bits of real estate across the world. Of course, the Lair Legion hits him then. Bethany Shellett, schoolteacher, G-Eyed’s possible girlfriend, and daughter of Police Commissioner Don Graham, recovered from crippling disfiguring injuries through a special formula pioneered by Baron Heinrich Zemo and used on Beth by his niece Elizabeth von Zemo (secretly Citizen Z). The cure also allowed CZ to place a post-hypnotic instruction on Beth to get close to Sir Mumphrey Wilton and to be ready for further action. The quote which activates Beth’s further instructions this episode is from Nietzsche. Marie Murcheson was murdered in the Lair Mansion in Victorian times and became a banshee that haunted and protected the island through the intervention of the Celestian defences that protect the spot. She was recently resurrected by the agency of the Parody Master to neutralise her as a protection for the Mansion. That might have been premature. The Safe is a prison designed to contain supervillains. It’s first prisoner was the lethal Chain Knight, who was held for decades in a specially crafted mystical cell beneath Flanagan Island. Warden Westwood is currently in charge of the Safe. Mr Li is best known for running an unusual laundry in Gothametropolis York. Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu, the Groper Out of Grossness is a vast blasphemous elder monstrosity nesting in eternal sleep beneath Paradopolis, coiled near to the Celestian power source that was hidden for eons beneath the Lair Mansion. The Groper is not a good thing to wake up. Queen Annj is Donar’s wife, a goddess in her own right and a powerful warrior. She has recently stayed in the mansion nursing her brain-dead husband after his crippling in battle with the Parody Master in Untold Tales #300. Jarvis, Pegasus, Rocket Racoon, Magnetic Techbird, and the Man Who Wasn’t There are all former Legionnaires who died. Lair Legion Chain of Command: Sir Mumphrey Wilton commands Earth’s combined defence force. If anything happens to him the leader of the Lair Legion takes over. CrazySugarFreakBoy! was acting as LL leader in the absence of Hatman and named Citizen Z as his acting deputy. *** 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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* Q. superb work, Ian. Im cross that its not got more attention because it certainly deserves it. (no text) - Dancer thinks it deserves more attention - Fri May 25, 2007 at 12:13:25 pm EDT * If it's not getting attention I can hardly blame you. (no text) - HH - Tue May 29, 2007 at 12:27:40 am EDT * Excellent - Al B. Harper - Wed May 23, 2007 at 09:34:38 am EDT * Well, I'm not sure what it excelled over, but I'm glad its written - HH found this one a tough write - Wed May 23, 2007 at 01:33:38 pm EDT * Re: Well, I'm not sure what it excelled over, but I'm glad its written - Al B. Harper - Thu May 24, 2007 at 10:29:52 am EDT * Re: Well, I'm not sure what it excelled over, but I'm glad its written - HH - Tue May 29, 2007 at 12:37:09 pm EDT * Well that was tough. - ag - Mon May 21, 2007 at 07:13:01 pm EDT * Nobody would want our heroes to get off easy. - HH - Mon May 21, 2007 at 08:39:04 pm EDT * Except the heroes. - ag - Mon May 21, 2007 at 09:56:32 pm EDT * They're there to suffer. - HH - Wed May 23, 2007 at 01:27:33 pm EDT * Re: They're there to suffer. - ag - Thu May 24, 2007 at 12:56:59 pm EDT * Re: They're there to suffer. - HH - Tue May 29, 2007 at 12:37:49 pm EDT * Now that was a big finish... More comments tomorrow night, after I get home. (no text) - Visionary - Sun May 20, 2007 at 11:16:26 pm EDT * Proceed. (no text) - HH - Mon May 21, 2007 at 02:19:17 pm EDT * Proceeding... - Visionary - Mon May 21, 2007 at 08:42:27 pm EDT * Proceeded - HH - Mon May 21, 2007 at 08:57:18 pm EDT * Beth might be made a bit apprehensive ... [Spoilers] - CrazySugarFreakBoy! - Sun May 20, 2007 at 10:11:37 pm EDT * We'll certainly see. [Spoilers] - HH - Mon May 21, 2007 at 02:18:45 pm EDT * There goes the neighborhood. Literally. - Anime Jason - Sun May 20, 2007 at 08:35:03 pm EDT * Well, it was an old neighbourhood anyhow. - HH - Mon May 21, 2007 at 02:13:24 pm EDT * And they have no reason to complain because the plans have been on display for months? [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Mon May 21, 2007 at 08:02:19 pm EDT * I have no sympathy. [Spoilers] - HH - Wed May 23, 2007 at 01:24:25 pm EDT * None at all. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Wed May 23, 2007 at 01:50:56 pm EDT * Re: None at all. [Spoilers] - HH - Tue May 29, 2007 at 12:34:49 pm EDT * Brilliant! - Rhiannon - Sun May 20, 2007 at 04:31:06 pm EDT * Re: Brilliant! - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 05:05:51 pm EDT * Her uncle would be proud (Part Three comments) [Spoilers] - killer shrike - Sun May 20, 2007 at 12:33:31 pm EDT * It's a big moment for a girl. [Spoilers] - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 02:45:13 pm EDT * The supervillain's equivalent of a coming out cotillion [Spoilers] - killer shrike - Sun May 20, 2007 at 06:22:11 pm EDT * So much more personal than a newspaper advertisement. [Spoilers] - HH - Mon May 21, 2007 at 02:11:54 pm EDT * We're approaching a Lair Legion of one soon ... (no text) - CrazySugarFreakBoy! - Sun May 20, 2007 at 04:40:52 am EDT * But which one? (no text) - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 05:09:46 am EDT * Well, I am arguably the Captain Jack of the current cast ... (no text) - CrazySugarFreakBoy! - Sun May 20, 2007 at 06:06:15 am EDT * And you wrote that before seeing part 3. (no text) - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 02:31:41 pm EDT * I take it that T’Tharn wasn't made to put on a happy face? - Visionary - Sat May 19, 2007 at 10:35:47 pm EDT * Who knows with that [spoiler race]? - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 05:06:46 am EDT * Ouch. Did I say that already? Those guys are very tough. When you create these nasties, I expect you create ways to beat them, too. Right? (no text) - ag - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:35:56 pm EDT * Well, you could slip out the back, Jack, make a new plan, Stan, no need to be coy, Roy... (no text) - HH thinks there must be fifty ways to kill your Doomwraith - Sat May 19, 2007 at 05:50:18 pm EDT * And darkness falls... [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sat May 19, 2007 at 11:53:29 am EDT * Probably a power company issue. [Spoilers] - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 01:32:05 pm EDT * It usually is. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sat May 19, 2007 at 02:06:15 pm EDT * Still, if you get all four utilities on the board... [Spoilers] - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:20:57 pm EDT * I always liked the yellows and the railroads. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:40:05 pm EDT * And were you the car or the top hat? [Spoilers] - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 04:56:02 am EDT * The car, of course. The top hat was stupid. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sun May 20, 2007 at 12:15:52 pm EDT * I'm not sure they have IQs, but if so surely the shoe comes bottom. [Spoilers] - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 02:34:41 pm EDT * Or the shoe meets bottom, depending on the patience of the players. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Mon May 21, 2007 at 11:29:30 am EDT * That's kind of the kinky adult version of the game, I guess. [Spoilers] - HH does not confirm or deny playing strip Monopoly - Mon May 21, 2007 at 02:21:27 pm EDT * I'm sure CSFB! has that. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Mon May 21, 2007 at 07:51:33 pm EDT * I'd hope so, but its not exactly a special edition. [Spoilers] - HH - Wed May 23, 2007 at 01:22:07 pm EDT * "Pocket Shogun is smart not to try an' horn in on my bounty, is all I'm sayin'." (no text) - killer shrike - Sat May 19, 2007 at 02:28:55 pm EDT * *snort* Killer Shrike is so kewl! (no text) - A Junior Reader - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:21:59 pm EDT * Action! - killer shrike - Sat May 19, 2007 at 11:04:19 am EDT * Featuring Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen! - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 01:25:38 pm EDT * With a pocketful of Kryptonite? - killer shrike - Sat May 19, 2007 at 02:25:34 pm EDT * More on the Psychic Samurai and Killer Shrike... [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Mon May 21, 2007 at 11:50:31 am EDT * Re: More on the Psychic Samurai and Killer Shrike... [Spoilers] - HH - Mon May 21, 2007 at 02:22:48 pm EDT * Re: More on the Psychic Samurai and Killer Shrike [Spoilers] - killer shrike - Mon May 21, 2007 at 12:55:56 pm EDT * Re: More on the Psychic Samurai and Killer Shrike [Spoilers] - HH - Mon May 21, 2007 at 02:23:23 pm EDT * Well, little miss can't be wrong, after all. - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:27:43 pm EDT * A lot of people are in a lot of trouble aren't they. - Rhiannon - Sat May 19, 2007 at 09:54:58 am EDT * It could get worse. Well, it will get worse. - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 10:32:06 am EDT * Beth Zemo can be deliciously cruel when she puts her mind to it. - Al B. Harper - Fri May 18, 2007 at 08:24:02 pm EDT * It's one of her best features. - HHIt's one of her best features. - Fri May 18, 2007 at 10:19:10 pm EDT * Ah...this is why you were asking the questions below... - Al B. Harper - now with part two comments - Sat May 19, 2007 at 07:12:30 pm EDT * I did say it was for no particular purpose. A general purpose perhaps. - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 05:09:24 am EDT * And not checking for any particular reason, of course, but does anybody have any further need for any of the following characters... - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 05:40:42 pm EDT * My continuing mental happiness needs them, yes... - Visionary - Sat May 19, 2007 at 10:47:02 pm EDT * What, all of them? That's just greedy. - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 04:59:19 am EDT * responce to Ian's Death Chart - ag - Sat May 19, 2007 at 01:35:26 pm EDT * Your responses are noted but I have to go off now and watch Dr Who. (no text) - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 02:06:14 pm EDT * Meanie. Ah well. Not long. (no text) - ag - Sat May 19, 2007 at 02:07:29 pm EDT * Not a bad episode, but definitely one of the intermediate ones before next week's blockbuster. (no text) - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:08:48 pm EDT * This one was one of my favorites of the year so far. Especially after the last three, which were all disappointing. (no text) - Nats - Tue May 22, 2007 at 12:59:49 pm EDT * I'm certainly enjoying the Saxon build-up. (no text) - HH - Wed May 23, 2007 at 01:27:57 pm EDT * You guys wrapping up then? I know we get the fun stuff in July. (no text) - ag - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:38:30 pm EDT * This was episode 7. Episodes 8 and 9 feature [villain name blacked out] the Family of Blood. - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 05:48:59 pm EDT * Sounds like nice people Annabelle might want to meet. (no text) - ag - Sat May 19, 2007 at 07:13:07 pm EDT * Don't count on it. (no text) - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 04:59:18 am EDT * You're about as subtle as a windowless white van outside of a preschool playground. :) [Spoilers] - CrazySugarFreakBoy! - Sat May 19, 2007 at 05:25:51 am EDT * That could just be a high-security ice cream truck. [Spoilers] - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 10:31:11 am EDT * Since you asked... - Al B. Harper - Fri May 18, 2007 at 08:47:14 pm EDT * For no partiuclar purpose. - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 10:23:22 pm EDT * Re: For no partiuclar purpose. - Al B. Harper - Fri May 18, 2007 at 11:35:35 pm EDT * Re: For no partiuclar purpose. - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 10:24:36 am EDT * That sounds an awful lot like asking "does this make me look fat?" - Anime Jason - Fri May 18, 2007 at 06:42:51 pm EDT * It is? - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 10:16:26 pm EDT * Yes, as in there's no right answer. - Anime Jason - Fri May 18, 2007 at 11:32:38 pm EDT * But there is an answer. - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 10:36:20 am EDT * If you like pain there is. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sat May 19, 2007 at 12:13:25 pm EDT * Sometimes pain is neccessary. [Spoilers] - HH & the Dental Association - Sat May 19, 2007 at 01:11:10 pm EDT * Life is pain. Anyone who says different is selling something. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sat May 19, 2007 at 03:00:14 pm EDT * Or not manic depressive. [Spoilers] - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:29:52 pm EDT * It's a frustrated mess. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:44:12 pm EDT * Not a frustrating mess? [Spoilers] - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 02:31:23 pm EDT * It's past tense. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Mon May 21, 2007 at 11:37:29 am EDT * Re: It's past tense. [Spoilers] - HH - Mon May 21, 2007 at 02:24:24 pm EDT * Culling the herd? - killer shrike - Fri May 18, 2007 at 06:13:59 pm EDT * You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment. - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 10:17:36 pm EDT * Chevy Chase as Fletch, commenting sarcastically when Joe Don Baker walks in: "Oh ... thank God. It's the police." [Spoilers] - CrazySugarFreakBoy! - Fri May 18, 2007 at 05:09:11 pm EDT * "Just get me a glass of hot fat and bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia while you're out there." [Spoilers] - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 05:26:24 pm EDT * He's only mostly dead. - Anime Jason - Fri May 18, 2007 at 04:41:21 pm EDT * So far. - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 05:30:44 pm EDT * Have fun stormin' the castle! [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Fri May 18, 2007 at 06:36:54 pm EDT * Isn't that the Disneyland motto? [Spoilers] - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 10:15:17 pm EDT * No, it's the Princess Bride motto [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sat May 19, 2007 at 12:26:07 am EDT * Re: No, it's the Princess Bride motto [Spoilers] - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 10:40:17 am EDT * As you wiiiiissh... [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sat May 19, 2007 at 12:08:47 pm EDT * You've got an overdeveloped sense of vengeance. It's going to get you into trouble someday. [Spoilers] - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 01:19:13 pm EDT * Never bet against a Sicilian when death is on the line. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sat May 19, 2007 at 02:56:40 pm EDT * Is this a kissing book? [Spoilers] - HH - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:14:27 pm EDT * No. Okay, maybe a little. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Sat May 19, 2007 at 04:50:16 pm EDT * I've hired you to help me start a war. It's an prestigious line of work, with a long and glorious tradition. [Spoilers] - HH - Sun May 20, 2007 at 02:29:48 pm EDT * I'm much too lazy for that. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Mon May 21, 2007 at 11:41:56 am EDT * I do not mean to pry, but you don't by any chance happen to have six fingers on your right hand? [Spoilers] - HH - Mon May 21, 2007 at 02:26:40 pm EDT * My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Mon May 21, 2007 at 07:48:52 pm EDT * I'm sure you've discovered my deep and abiding interest in pain. [Spoilers] - HH - Wed May 23, 2007 at 01:20:43 pm EDT * Life is pain. Anyone who says different is selling something. [Spoilers] - Anime Jason - Wed May 23, 2007 at 01:48:22 pm EDT * Didn't you use this one before? [Spoilers] - HH - Tue May 29, 2007 at 12:36:06 pm EDT * Oh crap. She's in trouble. (no text) - ag - Fri May 18, 2007 at 01:34:15 pm EDT * Well, not that kind of trouble, so far. (no text) - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 01:36:17 pm EDT * Exciting stuff (no text) - killer shrike - Fri May 18, 2007 at 12:46:19 pm EDT * People still say "pulse pounding" as if heart attacks weren't the number one killer in Western society (no text) - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 01:37:07 pm EDT * Wow... things get nasty quickly in this chapter! Bring on the next one! - Visionary from vacation - Fri May 18, 2007 at 12:14:38 pm EDT * Well, we have a lot of nastiness to pack in. Where are you vacating? - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 05:18:25 pm EDT * There's a new one! And it's on a Friday! YES! *Hurries with stuff so he can read* (no text) - ag - Fri May 18, 2007 at 11:56:50 am EDT * You can thank the workmen who made me stay in all day writing before they arrived to fail to fix the problem they came about. (no text) - HH - Fri May 18, 2007 at 01:37:43 pm EDT

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