| #316: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Wartime Romances, or The Awkward Pause Previously: In the last days of the Parody War against the all-conquering Parody Master, most of the heroes of Earth are gathering together for one last stand. Artificial intelligence Hallie has managed to conceal Earth for a few brief days of preparation by digitising it into a virtual reality. Dancer has discovered and returned with lost Technopolitan science hero Premiere. Now the Lair Legion has short precious moments to tie up their affairs and open their hearts before the end of the world. 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.  Premiere hung limply on the conduit cables through which he was channelling his life force; offering the energy to maintain the reality bubble that kept Technopolis from dissipating into meaningless chaos in the interstitial void it travelled. Well past his limits, his former wounds were telling on his strength. Old scars had burst open. His chest was a bloody mass of gore. He was pale and ragged and exhausted. “Victor Brooke,” the Hero Feeders called to the last science hero, “We have come for you.” He looked up savagely and released his thermal spray on the Feeders. They absorbed it. “You will be a great feast,” they promised him. “You have been a great hero, and your city would have been legend. But we shall take them and we shall take you, and all will be forgotten as if it never was.” “No,” growled Premiere. “Technopolis is going home.” “Going home,” muttered Victor Brooke, turning uneasily in his sleep. The Hero Feeders came at Victor Brooke from all directions, tearing and clawing at his very being, Unable to release the cables in his hands lest Technopolis be destroyed Premiere could only writhe as the creatures’ talons shredded his very self. He tried not to scream. “It’s alright, Victor,” the soft voice told him. “You’re having nightmares.” The Lurkers recoiled as he impacted, writhing and twisting as they found they could not rend him to non-existence. Something greater and nobler than they could understand was amongst them, blazing like a nova, unstoppable, eternal. The shrieked and struggled as Premiere plunged into their dark host, ripped away from the city they trailed. Angrily they turned on their enemy seeking to rend him, but Premiere struggled on. They sought to erase him, but failed. Too many people believed in him now. He believed in the virtue of what he was doing. He knew how it all had to end. Legends cannot be forgotten. “They need me,” Premiere gasped, struggling to rise despite his wounds. “I have to save them…” The Doomwraith hooked his claws into the hero’s chest, trying to suck the very life from him. The chill was more than mere absence of heat. The presence of E’Koor the Vengeful could bring death to whole planets. Premiere headbutted him, then followed up with blows that could shatter even undead bones; because he believed they could. “Fool,” hissed the Singularity Rider. “You do not realisssse who and what you facsssse.” “Somebody who threatened Dancer,” Premiere answered, ignoring his injuries, concentrating on damaging his opponent. The last science hero had been doing this supervillain-fighting for a long time. “That makes you the bad guy. That makes me responsible for putting you down. That means you are going down.” “You saved me,” the sweet voice told him. “You saved everyone. It’s alright now, Victor. Wake up.” The Parody Master rocked backwards from the hardest blows that Premiere had ever struck, then hit back so hard that even Premiere’s enhanced senses didn’t see it coming. And that was all. “Aaah!” Victor gasped, sitting up and opening his eyes, looking around for his enemies. There was only a friend, sitting cross-legged on the bed next to him, holding his hand. “Hey,” smiled Dancer. “Welcome back. I’m sure you used to heal faster than this.” “Sarah,” Premiere blinked. He noticed the hand in his. “That was very dangerous. I could have crushed you without realising it.” “No chance,” promised the Probability Dancer. “So, how are you feeling now you’re back in the land of the living?” “I never died,” clarified the last science hero. “I pushed Technopolis home through the Vortex, then had to stay to fend of the Hero Feeders that would have otherwise destroyed it. We plunged into the deeps and gradually became embedded in a layer of… something.” “Al B. says it was legend,” Dancer supplied. “With a strata of myth. There was some maths too but I kind of zoned out when he go to that bit. In the end Trickshot escaped Al’s lecture by gnawing his own leg off.” Premiere snorted. He’d forgotten how impossible it was to be down around Sarah Shepherdson. “Then you cracked me out of the ice, dropped a monster on me, sucked me into a Shoggoth, brought me back your dimension, threw me at some armoured warlord, and got me pounded into pulp. Just like old times.” Shep grinned. “Pretty much, except for it not being. You had a close encounter with a nasty fellah called the Parody Master, who’s currently about eight to ten days off conquering the Earth then conquering the Parodyverse for dessert unless we can stop him.” Premiere nodded. “That’s the job, then. If you’d care to avert your eyes while I put on my uniform then I’ll liase with your team commander and see what I can do to help.” “That’s great,” Sarah beamed. “Great to have you back being all square-jawed and heroey. Except I have to tell you there will be no averting. Or have you forgotten that you promised if you ever got back to this dimension again to make mad passionate love to me over and over until I haven’t even got the breath to scream?” There was an awkward pause. Shep blushed and began to feel stupid. After all, there had been no guarantees that what she’d found before, that spark of passion with the hero from another world, would still be there. “I never promised anything of the…” Victor Brooke began to reply automatically before his brain caught up. He made a serious face. “Um… a science hero always keeps his word, Miss Shepherdson.” “I’m so glad I can help with your recovery,” Sarah winked. “We’ll have you up in no time.” “Up and about,” agreed Premiere. Dancer didn’t clarify. “If you ask me how I am again, I’m going to have to erase you from reality,” Hallie told Visionary as he poked his head round the door of the computer centre. This was the seventh time in the last hour. Vizh surreptitiously shifted the frosted glass of coke and plate of cookies behind his back. “You could do that?” he checked nervously. “Well, not without also deleting Mexico, the Alps, platform shoes, Iggy Pop, and lemurs,” admitted Hallie. “The algorithms are a bit complicated. But really, you’re taking your guilt trip a little too far.” The Lair Legion’s resident artificial intelligence was currently straining to maintain the whole of the planet and the nearby moon as data in a virtual realm as a stop-gap way of hiding the Earth from the Parody Master. It wasn’t easy. Hence the crabbiness. Well, not just that. “Guilty?” Vizh prevaricated. “Who said I was guilty?” Hallie pointed to her desk, where the detritus from the last nineteen plates of cookies and cold drinks were piled, along with eight comfy cushions, thirty-one magazines, four framed photographs of Magweed and Griffin, and a stuffed cuddly owl – or possibly an eagle. Or gecko. “Just trying to be helpful,” Visionary told her. “I mean, it has to be a strain, holding together all of the Earth in mathematical data and all that. HAGGIE couldn’t do it.” “HAGGIE,” snarled Hallie wrathfully, “was cheap unimaginative psychotic rabid murderware, a sad excuse for a heuristic intelligence entity. Just another of Zemo’s mad schemes.” “Like you and Fleabot, only, um, not,” Vizh amended quickly. “I’ve already told you and the Legion that I can maintain the Earth in a virtual state for another 156 hours nine minutes and fifty-four seconds,” the A.I. declared, rubbing her holographic forehead. She was getting a migraine from her efforts. “After that the formulae become too unstable for even my processors to keep up with and I haven’t the capacity to design yet more software to cope. I’ll have to return Earth to normal space, and to the Parody Master.” “And we might all die and stuff,” Visionary summarised. “Yes, I recall the briefing. Then CSFB! said something rude about the PM and Sir Mumphrey held his jacket lapels and made some kind of stirring British speech and Hatman said something determined and quietly heroic and then we all got given work assignments.” “Which you seem to have ignored to keep me supplied with cookies,” Hallie pointed out. “Hence my deduction of the guilt.” “Well, I do feel a little guilty,” Vizh admitted. “Just a little.” “Why?” demanded the computer sentience. “Well, because there’s a few things that in retrospect I…” “I mean why just a little guilty,” the green-skinned image of Hallie clarified. “Why the hell aren’t you feeling a lot guilty?” “Um, what?” Hallie planted her virtual hands on her virtual hips (except here she could be solid even without her holographic display emitters because in some senses she was the virtual realm). “You wandered off to hunt the Celestians and save the universe and you didn’t even think to leave a note,” she scolded him. “Did it never occur to you that people might be worried about you? That people might want to come along and help?” “Um, I didn’t want to bother… people. And I had Asil along to help. And I suppose I had, um, others.” “Others? What others?” Vizh swallowed and shrugged. “Just general others, you know,” he babbled, his nerve breaking. “The sort of others anybody might have helping in, er, an othery way. Others.” Hallie scowled at the possibly fake man. “Visionary, I’m straining my systems to maintain an impossibly large chunk of essential data called planet Earth, after doing miraculous voodoo-science things reversing my reversal of the digitalisation process that the Movie Gun has originally performed. Do you really want me to have to spare time to do a global web-search to find out what you’re babbling about?” Vizh blanched. “Er, what was that first bit again?” he asked. “What. Others.” Vizh shrugged casually. “We just got assigned helpers in the Celestian demiplane, that’s all. Asil got George. I got Prmumble.” “You got who? Speak clearly, Visionary.” “Er, Prismumble. But the really interesting thing I saw was…” “Visionary… who?” “Priscilla DuBois,” Vizh explained. “But nothing happened. Well, nothing too bad.” Then he panicked under Hallie’s stare. “I got my pants back as soon as I could and I refused to lace up her bodice. Pleasedon’tdeletereality!” “Why should I delete reality, Visionary?” asked Hallie stiffly. “I’m sure you had a perfectly nice time with your old girlfriend. It must have been lovely for you. How simply wonderful that you were able to meet up with her while I was being deleted by Baroness von Zemo.” Vizh went pale. “I am so sorry that I wasn’t here to help you and Miiri and the children when Citizen Z turned out to have always been a criminal mastermind bent on our total destruction. I thought she just hated me especially, not that she wanted to take over the Earth.” “She does hate you especially,” Hallie clarified, “but it was the rest of us she tried to murder. HAGGIE came damned close to erasing me. If it hadn’t been for Tandi she would have. And then she sent Wexford after the children!” “Okay, so I’m a lot guilty,” Vizh confessed. “I thought I was doing the right thing trying to get our friends back. I didn’t think through…” “Oh, you did the right thing,” the A.I. conceded. “Who can blame you for trying to resurrect Lisa and Yo? And you did manage to get pretty much all our strays back home so we can all die together when the time comes in 156 hours, 2 minutes and 31 seconds. I’m just… this is hard, Vizh. It hurts.” “Anyone would strain trying to keep a whole planet in existence, even with the help you’re getting from the others,” Visionary agreed. Hallie looked at him. “I don’t mean that.” “Oh.” There was an awkward pause. Then Hallie changed the subject. “So how did Kerry adapt to aunthood, then? And what fire-damaged furniture do we need to replace?” Danny Lyle’s apartment was fairly typical for a young bachelor living in a two-room walkup. It was cluttered with pizza boxes, DVDs, magazines, and discarded socks. Kerry swept a great pile of unwashed t-shirts off the bed and dumped her bag down on it. “I’m moving in,” she announced. “You’re what?” asked Danny, still standing at the doorway where he’d almost answered the angry knock before the lock had exploded across the room. “Moving in,” the probability arsonist answered in a determined manner. She upturned her rucksack and spilled out a hastily-bundled pile of underwear and personal items. “This is now our place. All those drawers there now belong to me.” “No they don’t,” denied Denial. “Firecracker…” Kerry determinedly tugged at the suddenly-locked drawers of a bureau that hadn’t had locks on it a moment before. “We are moving to a new phase of our relationship,” she argued. “It will be wonderful, or I will burn this city to the ground, I swear it.” She thought for a moment. “We should buy something together. Furniture or curtains, or a puppy. For our flat.” “My flat,” Danny insisted. “And a dog is for life, not just for a tantrum. Kes, what the hell is going on? You can’t just march in here and decide to move in. This place is hardly big enough for me, and I only have one fire extinguisher.” Kerry glared angrily at her boyfriend and crossed her arms. “Oh, so I’m not good enough to share your space with you, Daniel Lyle? I’ll do for sex when you feel you want to get some use out of the handcuffs or kitchen produce or policewoman uniforms but as soon as we start to get serious it’s ‘goodbye Kerry I’ll give you a call sometime’, is that it? You men are all alike!” Danny denied his lock back into place and scratched his head. “How did you throwing my laundry across the floor turn into me being a bastard?” he frowned. “Can we go back to the bit where I say good morning and you say hi and maybe we kiss and take it from there?” “Oh, so first you use me, then you throw me out destitute into the gutters, then you want a kiss?” raged Dancer’s little sister. “Do the words clinically insane mean anything to you?” Denial demanded. “Do the words [expletives deleted] mean anything to you?” fumed Kerry. Danny took the offensive. “Okay, so say you moved in here with me,” he said. “Does that mean you’re dropping out of school? Cutting the Juniors programme when the others get back from their time-jump? Will you be getting a job to help pay your way or am I keeping you as a mistress? Do I have to eat your cooking? What’s your ma going to say when she hears about your new living arrangements? Besides, I think this building isn’t zoned for heavy military-grade weaponry storage.” “You don’t love me any more,” Kerry accused her lover. “Next you’ll be filling the flat with cute twins.” Danny blanched. “You’re not pregnant, are you? Because if you are…” “No,” snapped Kerry. “I am not pregnant. Can’t I just want to move in with my man, away from all those people that pretended to care about me but…” “Ohh,” said Danny, catching on. “Twins. Like Magweed and Griffin. Visionary’s kids, in the lighthouse. You were Visionary’s ward, like a daughter to him before you became his legal little sister, and now…” “Shut up,” snapped Kerry. “It’s not like I care who dweebo goes and spawns, how ever cute they might be, or whether they turn out to be smart kids that save the world and stuff. Why should I care? I just need my own space, to be me, that’s all.” “Technically, you seem to want my space,” Danny pointed out. “Firecracker, I really don’t think Vizh would want you to be upset. You’re part of his family now. He’s not gonna not want you any more. Magweed and Griffin, well… that’s just more family to love you.” There was an awkward pause. “I guess they could use somebody to show them how to avoid lameness and dweebery,” Kerry admitted grudgingly. “Somebody who’s had to live with the pain for years now.” “And the pain would be glad to see you back in your old room at the lighthouse too, I’m sure,” Danny encouraged her. “If I don’t help those kids they’re going to get filled with Dancer ideas,” Kerry reasoned. “They’ll grow up to be saccharine-sweet saps, afraid of even the tinest gas-tank detonations, always preaching about not setting fire to people who deserve it.” “That’d be the whole non-Kerry portion of the planetary population, right?” Danny checked. Kerry began stuffing her underwear back in her bag. “Okay, you’re off the hook this time, Hood-junior,” she told Denial. “But don’t think I won’t forget that in my hour of need you were going to throw me out into the snow.” “It’s not snowing.” “Oh sure. You would deny that.” “It’s not winter.” “That’s not the point. The point is I came to you in my hour of need and you…” “Helped?” “Shut up.” Danny grinned. “Come on, auntie Kerry, I’ll take you back to the lighthouse on my bike and you can get on with the whole being the cool rebel black sheep shtick for Mags and Griff.” Kerry glared at him. “If you call me Auntie again, bad things will happen.” Denial glanced back challengingly. “Really? Auntie Kerry.” “I warned you.” “Auntie Kerry.” “That does it. Now you die, Lyle!” Danny managed to avoid the flare from the light-switch and the detonating door-knob. He took a flying leap, caught his attacker round the middle, and toppled her back onto the bed. His father would probably never have neutralised one of the most powerful probability-twisters in the Parodyverse by tickling her in just the right places, but Danny had a style of his own. And then the battle continued in other ways for a long, long time. Dancer breezed through the Lair Kitchen humming tunes from Fame, grabbed a loaf of bread, a bottle of Chianti, and several kinds of spread, and headed back upstairs. “Is Premiere feeling better then?” ManMan called after her. “He feels just fine,” Shep answered over her shoulder. “He’s doing great. But he needs to get his strength back. Don’t worry, I’m on him.” Marie watched the young woman vanish back onto the bedroom level of the mansion. “She is a very devoted nurse,” she noted. “She really seems to enjoy caring for others.” “Yes, she’s probably just what Premiere needs right now,” Knifey agreed. He was currently embedded in the roast that ManMan was slicing into sandwich meat. “From Premiere’s point of view only a very short time has passed since his ordeals in the Technopolis war. I think some serious nursing from Dancer will do him a world of good.” “I wouldn’t know,” sulked ManMan. “Even though we were accidentally married for a little bit I never got nursed. Not even a quick bandage.” Marie was an innocent from a different age. “Why did you need nursing?” she wondered. “Were you sick? Or wounded?” “It must be nice for you to be able to meet the rest of the Lair Legion at last,” Knifey said, changing the subject hurriedly. “I don’t think you really ever met Hatman or Sorceress before, for example.” Marie considered this. “I do feel that I know Miss Darkness,” she confided. “I was somehow aware of her when I was a banshee haunting the mansion. After all, she is the Sorceress.” “You should take time to get to know Hatty too,” advised Joe. “He’s a great guy. And Premiere too, if he ever stops getting nursed.” “Who is the Premiere then?” Marie Murcheson asked Joe Pepper as they sliced beef together in the Lair Kitchen. “I saw a portrait of him hung in the hall, and he seems somewhat familiar, but…” “Short version,” ManMan replied, “is that he’s a superhero from another universe, a place called Technopolis. He was kind of an official policeman there, the most famous science hero of his world. He helped out the Lair Legion a few years back when Technopolis was taken over by a big baddie and tried to invade Earth. He went missing getting his city home.” “He’s also about as powerful as a human can possibly get,” Knifey added. “Enhanced durability, strength, speed, senses, the works. He’s as powerful as his will can make him, and I don’t think he ever gives up.” “Then why does he need Dancer to nurse him?” puzzled Marie. Then she flushed a bright pink. “Oh!” “Things are a bit different in the twenty-first century,” Joe admitted. “You’ll get used to it.” Marie shook her head, sending her long brown locks streaming. “I don’t know that I will, Joseph. Even after all these weeks everything here seems to strange and alien. Not just the technology, but the values and language and culture. I feel so… lost. Trapped.” “Enty was right that we can’t send you back in time,” Knifey advised her as gently as possible. “We know you didn’t go back. We’d be changing the timeline, and that never works out well.” Marie turned away suddenly. The plate in her hands shattered on the kitchen floor. “Marie?” ManMan called out. “Are you okay? Are you crying?” The girl tried to keep her back to the Elvis impersonator. As he tried to hold her she squirmed away. “Keep off me. You’re not my lover!” There was an awkward pause. “I, er, no, of course not. But you were upset, and I thought we’d… well, we’re getting on, and…” Marie blinked tears from her eyes and glared at Joe Pepper. “I had a lover, almost,” she told him. “And a fiancée. You’re not either.” “Er…” “Marie was betrothed to city architect Leyland Reed,” Knifey reminded his wielder. “But she fell in love with his brother William. They planned to run away together, to elope, but things turned out differently.” “You mean my fiancée offered me up to city founder Wilbur Parody’s cult as a bride to the Groper Out of Grossness and I killed myself in the cellars of this very mansion to avoid being impregnated by an elder beast and spawning myriad elder horrors upon humanity?” Marie asked bluntly. “And my love, my William, he lived on and eventually married someone else.” “You’ve been checking the records,” ManMan realised. “I’ve seen Nats’ painting,” Marie replied. “He’s William’s direct descendant. Leyland screamed out the rest of his days in Herringcarp Asylum. William got on with his life. I died and was bound to this house as a banshee spirit wailing for deaths in the family.” “I’m sorry about that, Marie, really I am,” Joe assured the Victorian girl. “But don’t you see, that just means you have to make a life for yourself here in this time now. I’m not saying I have to be part of it, thought that would be nice, but…” “I’m dying again, Joseph!” Marie blurted out. “Dying. Whatever force the Celestian power on Parody Island used to resurrect me is fading away. Dr Whitwell thinks I have the better part of a year, no more. So don’t tell me I have a life to make. My life ended in 1860. My lover died in 1899. My fiancée died in 1907. And I am not Dancer and I cannot be like her, or any of you. I have to go!” She raced from the Lair Kitchen and vanished into the depths of the Mansion. “Damned good to have you back, young Boaz. Damned good!” Sir Mumphrey Wilton snorted, pouring out a brandy for himself, a ginger beer for Hatman, and a double-jolt cola for CrazySugarFreakBoy! “You’re recoverin’ from your torture?” “It was nothing,” Hatman lied uncomfortably. “Nothing worth mentioning.” “I saw the medical reports, Hatster,” CSFB! pointed out. “It was worth mentioning.” “Been tortured on a few occasions myself in my time,” Mumph admitted. “Stiff upper lip’s very important when the ungodly are sticking electrical wires into you, but you’ve got to deal with that stuff afterwards or it’ll destroy you from inside. Enough said.” “Zdenka and Whitney got to me in time,” Jay told them. “Just in time,” he added more honestly, and shuddered. “Yay for them!” cheered Dreamcatcher Foxglove. “I mean, it was a buzz to lead the LL while you were off doing the Shawshank Redemption, but it’s great that the Hat is back!” “And Citizen Z is Baroness von Zemo,” Jay pointed out. “She completely fooled me, but you knew all along, Sir Mumphrey.” There was an awkward pause. The eccentric Englishman looked abashed. “Almost from the start,” he agreed. “Xander warned me that she’d be needed where she was. The Hood set her up with some kind of minor retcon so you’d be fooled, but I shielded myself from that kind of nonsense a long time ago usin’ my Chronometer of Infinity. Didn’t quite expect her to get so far with her own agenda, but fortunately she’s not the only determined young woman in the Lair Mansion, what?” “At least she’ll be with us for the big push,” CSFB! noted with satisfaction. “There’s going to be a big push, right?” “I don’t see we have any other choice,” Hatman agreed. “We have to stop the PM once and for all. Somehow.” “Hey, we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve,” CSFB! enthused. “Plus with Donar and Premiere and you back we’re packing plenty of raw power again. Now all we need is for everything else we’ve planned to come together and we have, um…” “A slight chance of beating the Parody Master,” acknowledged Sir Mumphrey. “Which is better than none,” Hatman pointed out. “But look, however slim the chances, we’ve got to stop him. I’ve seen what a universe under his control would be like. I’ve seen what he’ll do. If no-one else can halt him, the LL’s got to make a stand.” “See, this is why we’ve missed you, Hatty,” grinned CSFB!. “You and Cap, you’re the only ones can say that with a straight face and we all find ourselves agreeing.” Sir Mumphrey was still watching the capped crusader with a little concern. There were shadows round the young hero’s eyes that came from more than physical fatigue. “How’s Miss Zemazoza copin’ with things now that you’re back?” he asked quietly. Hatman flinched. “Ah…” he said. Zdenka Zemazoza, Rabid Wolf, the goddess of the North, had been discovered as a tiny child in the high wilds of her native Candia on a night when the lights danced across the skies. She was raised by the state in the Glorious People’s Orphanage, then inducted into the Glorious People’s Crimefighting Apparachik when she was identified as having extraordinary shapechanging abilities to assume the form of any native Candian beast. When the Party had ordered her to marry fellow superhero Captain Mud she had obeyed their orders. When they had arranged for her to divorce from that childless marriage she was ready to comply. When another alliance had been planned to bind her and the land she epitomised in wedlock to the Party Chairman she went along with it. Until… “Jay,” she whispered, remembering all the times she had whispered Hatman’s name to herself in secret in the long dark northern nights. He’d come into her world so briefly, but in those moments she had changed entirely. She’d seen herself mirrored in his eyes, seen what she might become, how small she’d allowed others to make her. She knew she could never be together with him, but she treasured those snatched moments for all time. And then circumstances had twisted upon them. Zdenka had been forced to choose between comfortable obedience and marriage to the Party Chairman or exile and disgrace to run to Hatman’s side and save him from torture and destruction. She had followed her heart. By cruel fate they had found themselves alone together in a prolonged happy dream, where oblivious to the realities they had lived blissfully as man and wife. And then they had awoken. Zdenka was perched on the high apex of one of the roofs of the Lair Mansion, watching the midnight storm wash ever neared to Parody Island over the turbulent sea. The stars weren’t there, not just because of the clouds but because they hadn’t been translated into the virtual realm where Earth currently sheltered, but the steady wash of light from the Willingham lighthouse alternately lit the scene then plunged it back to moody darkness. Zdenka sought out high places when she was troubled and unhappy. “Yes,” agreed the Sorceress. “Jay.” Whitney Darkness had climbed through the same casement window to scramble over the wet roof and join Rabid Wolf. Zdenka didn’t turn round to meet Hatman’s former lover. “Whitney,” she acknowledged. “I wondered whom they would send.” Sorceress settled herself on the sloping shingles next to Zvesti Zdrugo. “Nobody sent me. I thought you might need a friend.” “I have a friend,” Zdenka remembered, “or had one, who talked to me on a rooftop before. She advised me to come to Paradopolis and have fling with famous Hatman of the Lair Legion. And to bring her phone number of De Brown Streak.” Whitney almost rattled the number off before she caught herself. Instead she said, “You didn’t have an affair with Jay though, did you? Not then.” “It is not his way now,” Rabid Wolf agreed. “Also, I have husband. Still. I am not divorced from Dmitiri – Captain Mud. I do not break promises I made.” She stared into the oncoming storm. “Usually.” “You can’t blame yourself for what happened when you and Jay were in that dream-realm,” Whitney Darkness argued. “Jay used his Shoggoth cap to try and get us away from the Parody Master. We all nearly got consumed by the elder god Azafroth. Jay managed somehow to create a little haven of happiness to protect us from insanity till the Shoggoth came to get us away. Neither of you remembered the truth. You thought…” “We thought we were husband and wife, with baby to come, in happy retirement,” Zdenka completed the explanation. “It was best time of my life.” Sorceress swallowed hard. She’d been there too, in a similar situation with Jay cruelly devised by the Hooded Hood. “And now it’s shown to be false,” she recognised. “It’s hard.” “It was not false!” declared Rabid Wolf. “Everything we felt, that was real! Our love, that was real!” “The time Jay and I thought we were married with… all that, that was what caused us to break up,” Whitney admitted. “And now I see it,” answered Zdenka. “How can we go back to how it was before, Jay and I, when we are not husband and wife, not lovers, not together? How can we bear to be close to each other but… less? It is impossible.” “Do you have to go back?” Sorceress asked. “Zdenka, Jay’s a good man. He loves you and that’s the best thing that could ever happen to you. Trust me, I know. You’re been together and you know how good it could be. Couldn’t the two of you get over your ethics just this once and…” There was an awkward pause. “I do not think it,” Rabid Wolf replied. “I do not see it can be. I am goddess of the north, and soon I must return home, so that harvests will grow and seasons will turn and animals and people will live. Jay is hero of planet, and he has other destiny, I am thinking. And all complications from before are still there. What happened in that dream, it is one complication more, is all.” “I’m sorry,” said Whitney. “I too,” said Zdenka Zarazoza. Then she shifted into the form of a great bald eagle and wheeled off, away from the Mansion, out over the Atlantic waters, into the tempest. Goldeneyed dragged on his shirt and was buttoning it up before any of the nurses had worked out he was making an escape attempt. “What are you doing, Mister Katz?” demanded the eagle-eyed matron who was the first to note his departure attempt. “I’m leaving,” the young man answered determinedly. “Don’t try to stop me. I’d only teleport anyhow.” “But Dr Whitwell has instructed another seven days of bed rest for you,” chided the nurse. “You’re still suffering from malnutrition and extreme exhaustion and all kinds of trauma.” Bry wasn’t going to be put off. “And my friend needs me.” Any further argument was forestalled by the arrival of medical reinforcements. “Tell him,” argued the matron, appealing to her colleague. “Tell him it’s stupid.” “This is Goldeneyed,” answered Grace O’Mercy with a little smile. “He’s a superhero. Doing stupid things is his full-time occupation.” “Yeah, thanks for that,” Bry answered a little uncertainly. “You’re going to go to Beth Shellett, right?” the Night Nurse checked. “You heard she’s been cleared off attempting to assassinate Sir Mumphrey Wilton because she was mind-controlled at the time by Baroness von Zemo and you want to be there when she gets home from police custody, right?” “Pretty much. Poor Beth was already mind-zapped by Wexford into attacking Hallie and destroying all those robo-sapiens. Now this cruelty. I’ve got to be there for her. I have to, because…” “Because you weren’t able to be there for Laurie Leyton,” supplied Grace. “Yes, I heard about that too, from Yuki Shiro. Baron Otto von Zemo did some deal with a demon or something and Lisette got sold to it so the Baroness could take her aura or something. Xander’s on it.” “But I’m not,” Bry argued. “Laurie’s my friend. She was my lover. She’s the mother of my child, wherever the baby is. And I wasn’t there for her. I wasn’t there for Beth. I was…” “Stuck in a dimensional doorway saving every man, woman, and child on this Earth from the Parody Master,” the Night Nurse interrupted again. “Including saving Laurie, Beth, and me – for which I thank you.” G-Eyed had to concede that was a point. “Still, I’m going to Beth now,” he insisted. “Quite right,” agreed Grace. “I’m not here to stop you.” She smiled again. “Anyway, I have a late date, so I don’t have time to talk you out of it. Go to her. Make things right. Have a wonderful life. You both deserve it.” Bry looked at the nurse suspiciously. “What do you mean?” “You are going to ask her to marry you, right?” she guessed. “So go.” Goldeneyed burst into a great big grin. “Yes ma’am,” he agreed. “Love is the best kind of medicine!” He vanished in a golden flash of teleport energies. “She’s not here,” said Commissioner Don Graham, standing in the middle of Beth and Laurie’s empty apartment. “She’s gone.” “Gone?” Goldeneyed demanded, staring round the cold dark space. “What do you mean, gone?” “Like you, I came over as soon as I heard that SPUD had released Beth,” the Commissioner explained. “I may not always get on with my daughter but I wanted her to be alright. And I found these letters.” There were two of them, an opened one addressed to “Dad”, and a sealed one for “Bry”. Goldeneyed took his letter and checked the contents. There was an awkward pause. “She’s gone away,” Graham summarised. “She doesn’t want anything else to do with Paradopolis or supervillains or…” “Or superheroes,” concluded Bry Katz. “She wants a new life. Without me.” The rain beat against the windows, streaming down in complicated rivulets like tears for a lost future. Mr Epitome caught Premiere’s fist with an outward arm-sweep, reversed the thrust of the attack, and tried to flip the science hero over his shoulder onto the mat. Premiere countered, trying to sweep the paragon of power’s leg from under him. Epitome was ready for that and parried, almost managing an arm-lock before Brooke broke free and replied with a jab at the nerve cluster at Clancy’s shoulder. All of that happened in under two seconds. “Okay, break!” called Dancer, throwing a towel between the two combatants to end the sparring match. “I’m calling it a draw. You were both going too fast for me to judge how you were doing anyway. Leave it for the mansion computers to figure out the scores.” “I make it that Premiere was three holds ahead,” admitted Epitome. “I wasn’t familiar with that technique you used in your hundred and thirteenth pin attempt.” “That was something I picked up from and Orient-Bloc techno-ninja,” the science hero replied. “I liked that thing you did with the reverse hook-punch. That works well with hyper-speed.” “I worked out a whole bunch of enhanced boxing manoeuvres back when I first got my powers,” Epitome explained. “It’s not enough to just be strong and fast. There has to be…” “Skill and precision as well,” agreed Premiere. “Discipline is as important as raw power.” “And none of it’s worth a bean if it’s not used for a good purpose,” added Clancy. Epitome and Premiere had a lot in common. Both were law-enforcers at the top of their professional trees. Both were used to working for large government organisations. Both had honed their skills to the peak of perfection. “Maybe you two would like to go on the date by yourselves?” Dancer asked the two heroes. “Don’t say that,” complained Kat Allen. “If we’re all going to die horribly tomorrow then I want my last evening with Dom.” “Last evening it is,” Epitome promised, grabbing his girlfriend and holding her close to him. “After you hit the showers,” Kat qualified her statement. “Quickly,” Dancer told the men. “Or we’ll miss sunset at Mount Rushmore.” The heroes hit the showers. Dancer rolled the combat matting away and lowered the reinforcement force fields that protected the Lair Gym from excessive shock damage. Kat watched the doorway where Dominic Clancy had vanished with a pensive look on her face. “Thinking that maybe we should go in and join them?” Dancer teased. Kat Allen shook her head. “Wondering if I’ll ever see him again after tomorrow,” she confessed. There was an awkward pause. “The good guys always win in the end,” Dancer told her. “You know that.” There was another awkward pause. Cody Harper decoded the 16384-bit encryption sequence without effort, fired up the proton pack, and secured his alternate-reality sister in a quantum force-wall. “Gotcha!” He ducked behind a console to avoid the blast from Kara Harper’s ultra-wave projector and hastily reconfigured the cage to have solid walls. “Cody, you freak of nature, take this force field down now before I accelerate every particle in your body to infinity then stomp on the pieces!” Kara shouted at him. “No can do, sis,” Cody told her, emerging from cover now he was safe; safe until Kara calculated the mathematical counter-harmonics for the energy cage anyhow. “I’m here doing the brother thing. It’s for your own good.” “Cody, I swear that I will devote my entire life to bringing horrible painful revenge upon you and everybody you know if you don’t let me out of this right now! I don’t have time for stupid sibling games. I’m late for a date.” “Yeah. See, that’s the problem. I don’t think a brother should let his sister go out on a date dressed like that.” Kara peered down at the white micro-mini and matching thigh boots. “What’s wrong with this outfit?” she demanded. “This is my lucky outfit. My date’s getting lucky.” “Not this time,” Cody told her. “This time there’s the brotherly veto. I don’t think your date is very nice. I don’t think he deserves you. I actually think he deserves driving over with a 1972 Maserati Ghibli SS. Which is Part B of my plan, by the way.” “Hey, I don’t interfere with your dates!” objected Kara, frantically calculating how to break the force-field and adjusting her weapon accordingly. “When you sneaked off to see that archer girl I didn’t handcuff you to the toilet or anything.” “That wasn’t a date,” Cody answered. “That was patrolling.” “So there was no use of handcuffs?” challenged Kara. “The point is, I don’t need some twenty-first century retard moralising over my dating choices and telling me who I can or can’t stay in with. Especially not my alternate-reality brother who has the emotional maturity of a whoopee cushion.” “Hey, we can’t all be brought up to twenty-third century sluttery standards,” Cody shot back. “Some of us were abandoned and had to be raised by dingoes – who still have better morals than you, by the way. But that’s not the point. The point is I don’t like this Alpha Dude guy from the Heck-Fire Club. I don’t think he’s good for you. So I’m putting my foot down.” “On the accelerator of dad’s Maserati?” “Well, I hear Alpha Dude’s pretty tough. But I hope he sees it as a warning to stay clear of my sister.” Kara stopped calculating. “You really care if Jason hurts me? Really? That is so sweet.” “Well, it’s not like I really care about you or anything,” shrugged Cody. “But I figured since you are kind of family…” “That’s so sweet that I’ll kill you quickly when I get out of this cube.” “He’s no good for you, Kara. Really. You’re better than that.” There was an awkward pause. “Okay,” conceded Kara. “If you let me out of this force-cage I won’t date him,” she agreed. “But I do insist on being in the Maserati when you run him over.” “Deal. If you like, you can reverse back over him afterwards.” Cody dropped the force field and the two youngsters shook hands to seal their tacit agreement. “I don’t need to have revenge on you for pulling this lame stunt anyhow,” Kara noted. “Dad’s going to kill you if you bend his car on Jason anyway.” “Ah,” grinned Cody, “but that’s the genius of the thing. It’s the last night before the end of the world and Dad’s spending it with the most significant woman in his life. He’s got plenty of other stuff to worry about.” “The most significant?” Kara puzzled. “Who’s that then? Mom? Miss Framlicker? Amy? Yuki? Frazetta?” “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Cody chuckled. “”See, I think both Amy and Miss F are expecting dates. Heh.” “Just so we’re clear,” said Killer Shrike, “I’m hired to bodyguard your kids from harm, Harper, not you. You’re on your own.” Al B. glared at the super-mercenary and went back to trying to fasten his bow-tie. “If you’re not protecting me then why are you still hanging around here?” the archscientist demanded. “Are you kidding? I take my fun where I can get it. I happen to know that both Amy Aston and that Framlicker chick are expecting a dream evening with you tonight. I wanna see how far the blood splatters.” “Anyone can make a simple e-mail error and hit Reply All,” Al B. swallowed. “It’s not a big deal. Really. Honestly. We’re all grown ups here. It’s nothing. At all.” The butcher bird snickered, popped a beer, and propped his feet up on the table, ready to enjoy the show. “Any sign of an early attack by the Parody Master?” asked Al hopefully. “Because if there’s the slightest danger, it would be irresponsible of me to take time out for social engagements when I could…” “The old geyser Wilton said you should all get your last-night jollies before the big push,” Shrike answered. “I know I will.” “Do you know how many ways a person could be particle-disassembled using just the components from this kitchen juicer?” asked Al dangerously. “Yes,” answered Miss Framlicker from the doorway to the main workshop. “I’ve been calculating them.” Al’s immediate instinct to flee via the back door was thwarted by Amy Aston coming in that way carrying a size 11 adjustable wrench. “I prefer the old-fashioned way of disassembling a man,” she admitted. “Slower but so much more personal.” “Ouch,” winced Shrike. Miss Framlicker turned to the butcher bird. “Be somewhere else,” she said. It wasn’t a suggestion. “But I was just telling him off,” Al said desperately as he saw Maddicks rise with his sandwich plate and reluctantly head out. “For, um, sending fake e-mails in my name.” “Like Killer Shrike would know how to turn on a computer,” snorted Amy. “Or write.” “Hey, I heard that!” called Shrike from the next room. “Sit down, Harper,” commanded Miss F. “It’s time we had a little talk about relationships.” “Is this really the time?” the archscientist prevaricated. “I mean, with the universe about to end and stuff…” “What time do you feel would be better?” “Um… any other time? After the universe ends?” Amy laid her heavy wrench on the table in front of Al. “Now.” she said determinedly. There was an awkward pause. That rat-bastard Parody Master didn’t choose that moment to appear and destroy them all. Al was doomed. The cloud of vampire bats wheeled around the pizzeria, clustered together in the alley next door, then formed up into a young woman in a little black number suitable for a first date; preferably the kind of first date that didn’t end up back in one’s flat sucking the life-blood out of the guy who’d bought you dinner. Grace O’Mercy would have checked her make-up, but she didn’t reflect in mirrors. Her date was already at the table, casually dressed with an open collar and an old leather jacket. He stood up as she arrived and held her chair for her. “Sorry I’m late,” the Night Nurse said. “I thought I’d better check in at the Emergency Room to see how crazy things are. With it being the night before, y’know, the big showdown.” “I only just got here myself,” Mac Fleetwood admitted. “I also had to check in at the office.” The office in his case was the Zero Street Mission where the ex-marine chaplain was pastor. Grace sighed. “Is this a monumentally stupid idea?” she demanded. “Us having dinner, I mean?” Mac shrugged. “So far I’m pretty okay with it. I haven’t got any great objection to dining with a beautiful woman on what might be out last night on Earth.” “Yes, but you know I don’t drink… wine?” Mac grinned. “I’m a Sprite guy myself.” “You know what I mean,” the vampire nurse told him. “Our personal circumstances don’t exactly lend themselves to us having a long-term relationship do they?” Fleetwood considered this. “Depends. We could solve crimes together and get our own TV show.” Grace cracked a smile. “I have to admit, one of the reasons I agreed to this date is knowing that if my… worse nature get the better of me you can fend me off with that whole Exorcist shtick.” “We have to agree safewords to share a pizza? Look, Grace, you’re way overthinking this. We’re just here to have a good time.” “Are you allowed to have a good time?” the Night Nurse checked. “I mean, what with you being…” “I checked the big book before I came out,” Mac assured her. “I couldn’t find the commandment against having fun. And we’ve already established that you’re on the wagon when it comes to the whole killing people by sucking their blood out thing. I think that plus the saving lives in the ER every day buys you the benefit of the doubt, don’t you?” “But Mac, ever since I drained the blood of that elder vampire Nosferos I’ve been… tempted.” “We all get tempted, Grace. I mean, when I see a hot girl in a tight black dress sitting across the table from me, I’m wrestling with temptation. And I really wish I’d not just thought of wrestling.” Grace snorted again as she broke into a grin. “You are not what I expected at all,” she admitted. “Well, you’re not exactly Vampirella yourself, are you? So why don’t we have dinner, laugh, dance, spend some time together, and stop worrying about the future?” “The world probably ends tomorrow,” pointed out the Night Nurse. “So we’ve got time to see a movie as well,” answered Mac. There was no awkward pause. There was a widow’s walk along the top of Covenant House, a high roof walkway that overlooked the ragged heath down to the distant shoreline. On a clear night the dome of stars above reflected in the sea like a sunken city. Liliblanche de Cour, princess of Salem on a different version of Earth, found solace from her nightmares sometimes gazing at the night. She sensed rather than heard the man scrambling through the trapdoor behind her. “Sir John,” she acknowledged. “Your highness,” he replied formally. When this Earth had been translated to its digital state by Baroness von Zemo a week before the remaining armies of Liliblanche’s homeland and of Sir John de Jaboz’s had been catapulted back to their own dimensions. Only the two young emissaries of their respective peoples had resisted eviction, perhaps because they had been in the company of the witch Hagatha Darkness. Since then and after the arguments that had followed, the young commander of the Knights Improbablar and the second daughter of the Queen of Salem had maintained a formal distance – a distance made all the harder by both of them now residing in Hagatha’s boarding house. “I was woken by the sound of someone arriving,” Sir John noted. “As was I. So I came up here to be alone.” “Then I shall leave you to your thoughts and to your high destiny.” As always when she talked with Sir John, Liliblanche’s temper began to flare. “I did not ask for the revelations that Miss Darkness showed us at the tomb of Visionatus Improbablus,” she answered hotly. “I have no wish for such a future.” The knight shrugged uncertainly. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t marry a king,” he said. “That’s what princesses do, is it not? Politics and suchlike.” “I am the younger princess,” Liliblanche snapped. “Any such high alliance is my sister’s duty. If they can pry her off Hunter Wilde again.” She glared at the knight. “Besides, what is it to you if I’m destined to… what we saw in that tomb?” “Nothing, of course,” Sir John replied. “Of course.” “Our peoples are returned home now,” the princess reminded him, “and with them their camp gossip about me being your mistress, as if I would ever consort with a Knight Improbablar, slaughterer of my people.” The wounds were still raw between the alternate realities of Esperine and Swordrealm, where the Parody Master had arranged for the twin worlds to merge and fomented civil war between their peoples. “I have better things to do than seduce a witch of Esperine,” Sir John answered. “Because such things happened here on this world does not mean…” “No such thing happened here,” denied Liliblanche. “Merely because this world’s Hatman resembles you and your father, because Hagatha Darkness is like to my grandmother and Sorceress like to my mother does not make any bond between you and I.” “I agree,” answered Sir John. “Any bond there is between you and I is of our own doing, because of our own foolishness. We have fought great evils beside each other, and we have had to work closely coupled to keep our factions from killing each other rather than the enemy. That is all.” Liliblanche considered this. The night breeze caught her blonde hair and spun it out behind her. “How strange that we should be able to co-operate only when mortal danger is upon us. Without our troops to keep in order we fall to bickering like children.” Sir John acknowledged his behaviour by bowing his head. “So we do. My apologies, highness. The last days cannot have been pleasant for you.” “My life has become a series of shocks,” Liliblanche acknowledged, “from the moment you came to escort my sister to your capital.” Sir John unconsciously fingered the old battle-scar he’d received in war against Liliblanche a year before that. It seemed as though they were forever destined to wound each other. “It was not my intention to take you from a quiet life,” he apologised. “I don’t want a quiet life,” the princess snapped. “Who’d want a quiet life?” “From a pleasant life, then,” the knight amended. “I never intended…” “You think my life was pleasant?” interrupted Liliblanche. “Lares and penates, de Jaboz, I was a war-mage against your Swordrealms! My sister Elsinore was heir to Salem, but she isn’t a heavyweight psionic so I had to ‘help’ her when she undertook the feats of prowess. She never even realised I was lending my mind to hers, and they called her the most powerful witch of our generation. I spent years fighting as my friends and allies died around me, all the time living a lie for Elsinore’s sake.” She turned to Sir John. “I may hate you and all you stand for but my life began when you disrupted it.” The Knight Improbablar scratched his mat of brown hair. “It is strange that the most adverse of experiences can make one feel the most alive. I regret every loss we have taken on this campaign against the Parody Master, and yet… I have valued the adventure. It is the best and most worthy thing I have done.” “Being close to death makes one feel alive.” “And having so little time left makes one appreciate the moments that one has.” The two enemies realised how close they had come to each other in their exchange; almost into each other’s arms. There was an awkward pause. “I will not yield to you, John de Jaboz,” Liliblanche warned him. “Nor do I ask it,” answered the young warrior. “Nor do either of you have a brain in your head,” added Whitney Darkness, emerging onto the walkway. She had been the late-night arrival that the young people had heard. “Mother!” gasped Liliblanche, stepping guiltily away from Sir John. “No, wait…” “This is Whitney Darkness from this world,” Sir John surmised. “The grand-daughter of our hostess Hagatha.” “Right,” agreed the Sorceress. “We meet at last. Hi.” Then she folded her arms and glared at the youngsters. “I’m here to sort you out.” “It was beautiful,” said Cleone. “I shall never forget the moment the sun vanished and night’s shadows painted this place. I had no idea your world possessed such majesty and wonder.” Xander the Improbable, sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse, lifted the kettle off the campfire and made his familiar some tea. “There’s a reason they call it the Grand Canyon,” he noted. “Can you feel the spirits here?” “Of course,” the former swanmay answered. “I may be exiled from Faerie but I can still see souls. This place is rich with them. The land is fertile for them.” Xander sipped his drink then dunked a chocolate wholemeal into it. “It occurs that we have a very odd relationship, you know. We seem to have become an old married couple without any of the intervening steps.” Cleone considered this. “I am not your wife, though. I live under your roof and aid you in your work, but we are not lovers and we have made no vows. I am only a refugee, sundered by my folly from my sisters and my father.” Xander considered that the Mountain King’s daughter was beautiful in the moonlight. Her silver hair shone in the darkness. It must have been a night like this when she had doffed her swan mantle to bathe and had been captured to slavery and torn from her fairy home to the cold iron world of mortals. “You gave your life for me,” he reminded her. “When I was dead, you shared your life with me, binding us together. Now if one dies the other will too, and we have this odd unlooked-for intimacy.” “You fought to save me from the horrors that awaited me as a bound spirit slave. How could I allow evil to triumph when you had risked so much? What is my life weighed against that of the sorcerer supreme?” The master of the mystic crafts looked at the little petrified hamster that had formerly been his familiar. “It was so much simpler with Harry,” he sighed, “even before the medusa mishap. The difficulty, Cleone, is that my job got us into this mess, and ever since then it has got in the way of my cleaning this mess up.” Cleone nibbled a Jaffa cake. She realised that any world that had Jaffa cakes and the Grand Canyon might not be as terrible as she had once thought. “You saved my life and became my familiar,” Xander summarised. “Neither of us had much choice in that. But then before I could really talk with you, establish how you felt about exile from your home or being coupled to a grumpy mage…” “Bad times came,” Cleone acknowledged. “The mad scramble of the Transworlds Challenge, the deadly threat of the Hellraisers, the overwhelming evil of the Dead Hell-Lords, and then the rise of the Parody Master.” “I had to rely on you,” the master of the mystic crafts admitted. “I needed someone I could absolutely trust, absolutely depend on. You were the only one.” “I was proud to keep your true essence safe when you were bound to the Obedience Brand,” the swanmay told him. “I have been privileged to stand at your side in the battle with the dark forces of the Parody Master since your return.” “You have faced horror and hardship without flinching,” Xander told her. “Though you lost everything you have cared for others and served them without counting the cost. In all our trials you have been gracious, kind, intelligent, and wonderful.” The swanmay’s cheeks flushed red. “Whereas I have been bad-tempered, secretive, manipulative, and neglectful,” the mage contrasted. “But I can see souls,” the swanmay reminded him. “I see yours.” “Oh, I’m a master of the mystic crafts. We can obscure things like that. We can’t be trusted.” “I can see your true self, Alexander” Cleone answered. “Always.” Now it was Xander’s turn to blush. “Ah. Well…” “We both needed time,” the swanmay suggested. “I had so many things to come to terms with, a new world and a new role, new friends and new enemies, literally a new life. And you have the weight of the universe on your shoulders. It’s not like you can take a sick day.” “Maybe we did need time,” Xander agreed. “But now time is running out.” “Yes,” agreed Cleone. “There are things we have to say to each other, before the darkness falls.” Xander put down his teacup. “Cleone, you know about Vivienne and about Morgosa…” “Never mind the preamble, mage,” the swanmay interrupted. “Speak your heart while you have the courage.” There was an awkward pause, then Xander said: “I love you.” A tension between them broke. The truth was in the open now. The problem had progressed. “There now. Was that so hard?” Cleone asked him. “It must have been, for it has taken you so long to tell me. You were afraid that if you said it then everything must change and we could no longer be comfortable companions in your daily duty, but must become something else?” “I didn’t want to force you away,” the sorcerer supreme whispered. “I can’t leave you. We are bound.” Xander looked away. “Actually, that can be sundered,” he told her. “I’ve finally been working on the problem. I am master of the mystic crafts, after all.” “Of course you are.” Cleone looked around her again. “Is that why you brought me here, to this place, on this night? Because the moment and the mood of the world are ripe to harvest destiny?” “One reason,” Xander agreed. He opened his backpack and drew forth Cleone’s swanmay cap, a white shining mantle of magic and romance. It had been shredded, soiled, past repair she thought. Now she received it back, whole and potent again. “How…?” Cleone’s voice faltered to a choke as then tears welled in her eyes. She hugged the feathered robe to her. “How did you…?” “I’m very good,” noted Xander. “I’ve found a way to give you your full life back too. Tonight, and tonight only, you can put on your cloak, become the swan, fly out over this ancient canyon and back to your own world. Back to your father and sisters. Back to your old life.” “Home,” Cleone said. “Oh…” “You said darkness was coming, Cleone, and you were right,” Xander told her. “Not just the Parody Master. If he wins tomorrow then that’s the end, of course, and nothing will survive his triumph for very long. But if he falls tomorrow…” Cleone caught the catch of fear in the mage’s voice. “Yes?” “If he falls tomorrow then the way is open for that which the Parody Master was tasked with protecting this Parodyverse from. And if that enemy triumphs then we would all wish for torment to oblivion at the hands of the Parody Master.” Cleone found herself trembling. “Is there no hope, then? No hope at all?” Xander burst into a great big grin. “There’s always hope,” he answered. “A fool’s hope. A hero’s hope. That’s what makes it fun!” He turned serious again. “But the end is close and bitter in most of our futures, Cleone Swanmay. If you want to return to your family in the Halls Under the Mountain this is your one chance to go. Your only chance.” “And what of you, Xander the Improbable?” “I have to go away too,” said the little man in the rumpled red robes. “After tomorrow, whatever happens, I’ll have to go. Whatever outcome there is after the Lair Legion meet the Parody Master it will be open season on sorcerer supremes. I’ll have to run hard and fast and hide where nobody can find me for a long, long time. I’ll be gone.” “So I must choose between my home and family or following you to an unknown exile?” asked the swanmay. “I’m not asking you to choose,” Xander told her. “But I must choose all the same,” answered Cleone. Xander nodded his head miserably. “I shall never forget you.” “Indeed you will not,” answered the graceful woman. “For you love me.” “I do.” “And you will not forget me,” Cleone added, “for I shall not forsake you, sorcerer supreme.” She stroked her swanmay cloak against her pale smooth cheek then handed it back to Xander. “Keep this safe for me until another time.” The mage blinked in surprise. It wasn’t often the master of the mystic crafts was surprised. “I do not say I love you, Xander the Improbable,” Clone told him. “I only say I could. The rest is up to you.” The full moon painted the canyon in whites and blues and purples and made the perfect backdrop for a first tentative kiss. “Tell me what you saw,” demanded Whitney Darkness. She couldn’t help but notice that Lileblanche de Cour cast an instinctive glance at Sir John de Jaboz before answering. “Your grandmother took us into tunnels beneath your city of Paradopolis,” the princess said. “Deeper than I could ever have suspected they would go. The psychic impressions on some of the walls were…” “There a bad things down there, yes,” agreed the Sorceress. “People keep on trying to breed me with them. Go on.” “We lost all track of time or distance,” Sir John contributed. The knight snorted guiltily. “If we had only been with our people, the warriors in our charge, when this world was translated into another state of being then perhaps we could have rallied them to resist being returned home.” “But you weren’t,” Whitney pointed out. “You had no way of knowing what Baroness von Zemo was going to do, nor what effect digitising the world and sending it to a virtual realm would have on people from alternate realities. No point worrying about what you can’t change.” “Deep, deep underground, there was an ancient tomb,” Liliblanche remembered. “On it was written the text ‘Neququam Parody’” “The parody should not exist,” translated Sir John. “The motto of my order, the Knights Improbablar, taken from the writings about our great founder, Visionatus Improbablus, in the twelfth century. I had not realised that such an order once thrived on your reality too, only here it did not last to the modern age.” “Oh, it reinvented itself a few times,” Whitney summarised. “It became the Improbable College for a while. And the League of Improbable Gentlemen. Some people claim that these days it’s called the Lair Legion.” Sir John nodded as if that made a great deal of sense. “There were carvings on the tomb wall,” Liliblanche revealed. “Images and names and dates. One depicted a young woman marrying a king. You could tell he was a king by his crown. And engraved beneath it was a name. A secret name.” She swallowed hard. “My secret name.” “You have a secret name?” Sorceress wasn’t too familiar with the strange culture of Esperine, a world where magic and telepathy were commonplace. “Names have power. Secret names have lots of power.” “I know,” the princess acknowledged. “Whoever knows one’s secret name holds one’s heart in their hand.” “But I was with you,” Sir John objected. “I read that name.” Liliblanche blushed and looked away. “So from that and guided by grandmother Hagatha you concluded that somehow you don’t make it home but rather somehow go back in time to marry a man with a crown and get engraved onto some ancient tomb of a legendary founder of mystic orders,” Whitney concluded. Liliblanche nodded. “What else could it mean?” Sorceress snorted. “Well, it could mean my grandmother’s up to her old tricks again. Women of our family have a tendency to be bred. Demon lovers mostly, but you wouldn’t believe the offers I’ve had and the things that have tried it on. Looks to me like she was trying to drop an arranged liaison off on the newbie this time.” “You mean that Lili may not be bound to that destiny, even though her truename is carved to it?” Sir John asked. “That perhaps there is some way of thwarting it.” “Apart from being slaughtered by the Parody Master tomorrow, he means,” the princess clarified. Whitney shrugged. “There may be. But why are you so bothered, John de Jaboz? It’s not as if you care for Liliblanche yourself, now is it? She’s your enemy, remember? An Esperine psi-witch.” “I gave him that scar on his cheek,” Liliblanche blurted guiltily. “She was my enemy,” Sir John said slowly, his mind whirling. “Now she is my companion-at-arms. And she is my… friend.” “And?” pushed Whitney. “And that is all she can be.” He was surprised when Whitney smacked him on the head. “I loved a man once. A man a lot like you. I lost him. I’m not watching that happen again to you two.” “There is no ‘us two’, Lady Whitney,” Liliblanche protested. “We only…” This time it was a rap on the forehead for the princess. “You know how to thwart that carving prophesy?” demanded Sorceress. “And my grandmother? Do you? Get married to each other tonight. Liliblanche, John’s a good man, probably a great man, and he loves you literally more than he can say. John, Lili’s head over heels about you and she can’t express it either, but I can see it in every word she speaks and every glance she gives you. It’s a shame Yo’s not around because s/he would have figured it out and made you see it in two seconds flat. But in Yo’s absence I’m telling you, kids, you are in love. Deal with it.” There was an awkward pause. “I’m going to grab a sandwich and argue with my grandmother,” Sorceress told the youngsters. “If you’re smart you’ll stay up here and start the kissing. Have fun.” And she headed back inside. The Shoggoth oozed out of the plumbing and caused Flapjack to yelp as he fell backwards into his laundry pile. “Yaaahhh!” objected the Lair Legion’s major domo. “Don’t do that. Humans invented doorknobs for very good reasons.” “Is it something to do with making old beds fly under the sea?” checked the Shoggoth who had been watching the Disney channel again. “Only I tried that with ManMan’s bed and he seemed rather vexed at his sudden shift to the Bering Straight.” “That’s bedknobs,” Flapjack clarified. “But feel free to keep trying with ManMan. Maybe he’d be happier next time somewhere where there are more sharks to play with?” The Shoggoth filed this away for future contemplation; assuming there was a future. “The mansion seems somewhat empty in your current time frame,” he noted to the butler. “Apart from Sir Mumphrey and the people in the Operations Room, everyone seems preoccupied.” “Yeah, well, what with the big showdown set for 1850 tomorrow you can’t blame people for doing their last night on Earth stuff. Soon as I finish this pile of underwear I’m going out to find me a little bit of last night on Earth stuff myself and bring her back to the Flapjackpad.” The Shoggoth regarded the pile of washing. “I thought you had been forbidden to launder any more of the Legion’s undergarments?” he remarked. “on pain of vivisection.” “I think that was more of a guideline, really. Why would people lock their lingerie in steel trunks in their padlocked wardrobes if they didn’t want it hand-washing?” Flapjack grinned ingratiatingly and changed the subject. “Epitome and Dancer are out with Kat and Premiere. CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s with his family. Hatman’s looking for Zdenka – who wouldn’t? AG’s doing a final cosmic awareness patrol or something. It involves a lot of sparkly visual effects and stuff, that’s all I can say about it. The Librarian’s actually spending the last night on Earth cataloguing as many libraries as he can. More little bits of stuff for the rest of us, I say. And you’re not going to believe this but I saw Trickshot and Yuki heading off together as well. I dunno what Citiz… I mean Baroness von Zemo is doing in her cell.” “We are playing bridge,” the Shoggoth reported. The loathsome elder being didn’t always feel the need to exist in only one place at once. “I thought she might like the company, but she is quietly gibbering.” “Well, bridge does that to people,” Flapjack admitted. “But hey, Tricky and Yuki? Who knows what wild, hot, sweaty stuff they’re doing on their last night alive?” “And for my next trick,” Trickshot announced to the roomful of wide-awake children at the Zero Street Orphanage, “my talented assistant is gonna do a triple back somersault while I shoot a lollipop from outta her mouth.” “Almost right,” Yuki Shiro corrected the irritating archer. “Except it’ll be a quadruple somersault and he’s my assistant. Dunno about the talented part though.” As things to do on possibly the last night on Earth, comforting three dozen frightened lonely orphans was no bad thing. “Well,” declared Dancer just before dawn as she walked hand in hand with Victor Brooke through the door of the Lair Mansion, “we’ve got to have last nights before doom more often if they’re going to be this wonderful. I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun.” “Fun,” agreed Premiere. “I’d almost forgotten it. But it’s coming back to me slowly.” “Well, I’m just going to have to remind you all over again, tall, dark, and scrumptious. Come on. Dom and Kat might have retreated to their hideaway loveshack but we’ll have to make do with a Legion guest room for now.” “You’re insatiable,” Victor told her. “Hey, there’s no point having a boyfriend with level 10 constitution and stuff and not getting some use out of that,” objected Sarah Shepherdson. “I mean come on, we’ve not got that much time left and there’s all kinds of…” And then she vanished. One minute she was padding up the stairs towards Premiere’s room, shoes in her hand and a big happy smile on her face; the next she was gone. “Dancer?” called Premiere, flexing his enhanced senses to the maximum. There had been a complicated electromagnetic flicker for a moment when his companion had disappeared, but now there was no sign of the Probability Dancer. “Sarah!” And there, at the far range of even Premiere’s hearing, so distant that it might almost be imagination: a deep cruel chuckle. In a hidden pocket room in the Lair Mansion, Liu Xi Xian looked up in alarm then disappeared. Across the country, Sorceress vanished from Covenant House. Zdenka Zarazoza was plucked from the skies. Pelopia disappeared from her father’s side. Kerry Shepherdson dissolved from Danny Lyle’s arms. Jury was the last to be taken, teleported away from her bedroom, translated back from digital state, reformed in flesh to stand with the other captured women before her captor. There was a final awkward pause. The Parody Master had claimed his brides at last. Next Time: We’ve heard one side of the war, now it’s time to hear the other. We turn a chapter over entirely to the Parody Master to explain the plot, fill in his origins, and tell us why his victory will soon be complete and what he’s planning after he’s conquered the Parodyverse. Shocks and surprises and a good deal of arrogance in I, Parody Master. And Then: Seven women have been taken as tribute by the conqueror of the Parodyverse, to be tortured and trained as his obedient chattels. They’re not happy about it. Quite a lot of their friends aren’t too happy about that. Learn the fates of Dancer, Sorceress, Rabid Wolf, Pelopia of Order, Liu Xi Xian, Kerry Shepherdson, and Jury as they are taken to become Brides of the Parody Master And Finally: The showdown we’ve been building up to for nearly a hundred issues now, as the Lair Legion take on the Parody Master for all the marbles. Guest stars galore, big-budget visual effects, more payoffs than a mafia-sponsored major league, and anything else the author can think of to toss in there, in Untold Conclusive Tales of the Parody War: The Winner. Tie-Ins and Contemporary Stories: Evolution of a Long-Term Romance by AG Finding the Frontier Part 1 Part 2 and Part 3 by AnimeJason Baroness #51: Sally Goes To War, by JJJ On Her Own Two Feet by Killer Shrike The Flight of the Griffin by Visionary Parody War Stories That Almost Happened: In a storyline this long and complicated there are lots of possible plotlines that never make the cut. The two main reasons are (a) the story twists another way, making the idea unfeasible, or (b) the poster character isn’t around any more, making it less worthwhile to take the trouble to follow that lead. Anyhow, here are some of the things that never got round to happening in the Parody War: Goldeneyed back in the Lair Legion – more stuff on G-Eyed’s origin and destiny, major role for Suicide Blonde, G-Eyed and Exile in the Mythlands, G-Eyed and JJJ trapped somewhere together, G-Eyed leads the team again at some point to make good. Sorceress back in the Lair Legion – major role in the Underwar, stuff with Xander vs the Parody Cult on Earth, team-up with Ruby vs Regret, possible progression to role of sorceress supreme. Yo in some sort of refugee camp, making things alright. Trickshot, Al B. and some other sneaky low-powered types in some kind of Colditz-like prison, planning the Great Escape. Dancer, Yuki and the Contessa undercover in the enemy High Command, doing some kind of espionage mission; a kind of champagne high life scam caper. Hatty and Epitome in some kind of dangerous swamp/forest environment leading a platoon of soldiers and being hunted by the enemy. spiffy and Badripoor transported to another planet and the subsequent rebellion. Donar discovering how Doomwraiths get made and getting quite cross at the Doomwraithsmiths. Use Hoki and Enthrallress and Hildegarde and the whole Ausgard cast. The Shoggoth and Visionary swapping bodies as a result of one of Jury’s stolen weapons. More on Yo and Enty with the Swordrealms and Esperine, and more on Sir John and Lileblanche. There’s some backstory there that I’ll save now for a possible future storyline. ManMan as leader of the Terminus Team, with a role for the Widget and for VelcroVixen. Citizen Z and the Shoggoth go undercover as supervillains to try and infiltrate some baddies that were hiring themselves to the Parody Master. AG and CSFB! compare families – one missing, one present and growing. An extended Librarian vs Supreme Interference plotline that took Lee and some of the LL to New Skree Lump and also included Prime Mistress Uma and the Public Accoster. A more detailed confrontation with the Parody Cult on Earth, allowing Ebony and Johnstantine more to do, probably reintroducing Crapsack and introducing the heard-but-not-seen-so-far Morgosa le Fey. A rematch for Psychic Samurai and the Z’Sox Assassin Queen. Epitome and Kat’s return to Apocalyspe on a diplomatic mission, picking up on L’il Buttie’s origins. A story featuring Mumphrey getting Victorian on the asses of the Shadow Cabinet with the assistance of the Abyssal Greye and the Detonator Hippos. Some material tying Boss Deadeyes into the Parody War, possibly dragging in Akiko and Frankie and the Fokker twins et al. Dancer in one of those Astrovid talent contests becoming a galactic star and clashing with J-Kyle; probably also featuring Kerry and FA. Xander meets Cleone’s father, the King Under the Hill. Bigger roles for Dark Knight, Fin Fang Foom, Messenger, and dull thud. A day in the life of Amber St Clare. 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. |
