Tales of the Parodyverse

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Back from holiday, the Hooded Hood drops this double-sized dollop of pre-nuptial peregrinations on the Parodyverse
Fri Jul 27, 2007 at 04:05:39 pm EDT
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#318: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Brides of the Parody Master, or The Wedding March
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#318: Untold Tales of the Parody War: Brides of the Parody Master, or The Wedding March

Previously: The Parody Master’s siege of Earth has almost succeeded. Hallie’s capacity to hide the world in her virtual realm is almost exhausted. Already the Parody Master has been able to teleport the seven women he desires to be his brides to his side. Now he waits for the Lair Legion to try to rescue them and fall into his trap.

A cast list for this episode is included as a footnote. It includes spoilers.

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.



***


    The Parody Master’s flagship Inevitable Destiny knifed through space on a course for Earth. It didn’t move at maximum speed. Earth had not yet been forced to return from the virtual digital realm to which it had fled. And the Parody Master wanted Earth to know he was approaching, They needed time to despair.

    In the meantime, the Parody Master could amuse himself with the seven Earth women he had captured as spoils of conquest to be his brides.

***


    “Where am I?” Liu Xi Xian asked as she regained consciousness. The young Chinese elementalist groped around her as if blind, unable to feel the materials beneath her head with anything but a sense of touch, unable to see things with more than her eyes.

    “Be calm,” Annar, princess of the shaper-shifting alien race of Skunks, reassured her in a soft kind voice. “The Master has suspended your elemental abilities. They will be granted to you again when you are obedient to his will.”

    Liu Xi looked around her in panic. She noted the opulent interior of a windowless room. She felt the distant shudder of mighty engines. Finally she blinked fully awake with the realisation that she was being watched by her former friend, the girl who had been taken and broken as a bride of the Parody Master.

    “The Master has claimed you too,” Annar explained with a happy smile. “At last we can be friends again. Sisters. We can serve him together.”

    Liu Xi shattered the crystal vase beside the bed and brought a jagged shard straight at her own throat.

    Her hand stopped short of its own accord.

    “Self destruction is not permitted,” Annar explained, gently prising the glass fragment from the captive. “A number of spells have been woven upon you to prevent you from harming yourself. Even if you die there are soul catchers aboard the Destiny that will keep your essence safe until a new form can be cloned for you.”

    Liu Xi’s face was a mask of horror. She was trapped, unable to escape even into death, facing torture and an eternity of brainwashed service as the paramour of the greatest mass-murderer in history. What had been done to her once-friend Annar, what had snuffed the spirit and defiance from those sparkling innocent eyes, would happen now to the captive elementalist.

    “There is pain and degradation,” the princess of the Skunks admitted, “but eventually you will thank the Master for it. There is joy in abject servitude.”

    Liu Xi shook her head. She fumbled beneath her neckline and pulled out the small crystal pendant she always wore there now: Annar’s jewel. “Do you remember this?” she asked the Skunk.

    Annar’s eyes widened. “Why yes!” she breathed. “It was once my dearest possession, a comfort from my childhood. I gave it to you to remember me by before I came to my Master.”

    “You said then that you would be destroyed, that I should keep this thing that had once meant so much to you because what you would become would not value it or know its meaning. You said I should keep it so that some part of the real you would still exist!”

    The Princess of the Skunks tossed her green hair and sneered. “What a small, foolish child I was back then.”

    “That child was my friend,” Liu Xi said. “She was a victim of the Parody Master. You are only the thing that he made to wear her body.”

    Annar flushed, whether in anger or guilt the elementalist could not tell. Without warning she lashed a sudden tentacle across Liu Xi’s face, smacking her down onto the bed. With another deft slash she ripped the chain from the captive’s neck and hurled the crystal against the wall. The little jewel shattered.

    “You will serve only the Master,” Annar told Liu Xi. “Nothing else matters. The past is gone. The future is his.”

***


    “We have to do something!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! demanded, squatting on the back of his chair and bouncing up and down in livid rage. “We have to do something right now!”

    “Like what?” demanded Mr Epitome, sitting across the Meeting Room table from the wired wonder, his balled fists resting before him on a jotter. “Rush off to fight the Parody Master straight into his trap and die like idiots? How does that help anybody?”

    It was fifteen minutes since Dancer, Sorceress, Liu Xi Xian, and Jury had vanished from the Lair Mansion, extracted from the virtual realm by clever codework by the alien digital sentience Nexus 935 of the Reticulum Matrix. Since then Hallie, the Lair Legion’s own artificial intelligence and the program running the virtual Earth, had confirmed that Rabid Wolf, Pelopia of Order, and Kerry Shepherdson had also vanished.

    “This art not the time to fight like an idiot,” rumbled Donar, hemigod of thunder. He was sat in his usual chair, gripping his enchanted baseball-bat-with-a-nail-in-it Mjalcolm, and a small thundercloud was gathered over his head. “But it art time to fight!”

    Visionary nodded. He was pacing the room, his long yellow coat billowing behind him. “I agree,” he said, staring hard at the bewhiskered old man at the head of the table. “We had this argument before once, when the Hellraisers had Lisa and Dancer and Whitney.”

    “And you all died trying to get them free,” Yuki pointed out apologetically.

    “But we’re still here anyhow,” Hatman declared. “We don’t do things because they’re sensible. We do things because they’re right.”

    “Can’t we do things that are sensible and right?” asked Lee Bookman mildly. “And aren’t we doing the Parody master’s work for him, bickering like this? Isn’t this what he was hoping for when he took our friends from us?”

    “Quite right,” agreed Sir Mumphrey. “Well said, that man! After all this we can’t break ranks and fall apart just when the world needs us the most.”

    “Right now Dancer and Kerry and the others need us!” blurted Visionary.

    Al B. Harper rubbed his forehead unhappily. “Yeah, but… given the choice between us saving all the world and saving them, who do you think Dancer would tell us to go for?”

    “It’s not an either/or choice,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! insisted. “I don’t go for that fatal choice bullshit. We save everybody and we save them now and we do it with style.”

    “Amen!” shouted Trickshot. “Br’er Tricky’s ready fer the biggest longshot of his life!”

    “And quite possibly the last,” noted Knifey, the sentient blade.

    “You’re saying we don’t go? That we abandon Dancer and the others to the PM?” argued his wielder ManMan.

    The Manga Shoggoth stirred behind his bandages. “This is undoubtedly a ruse to provoke the Lair Legion to unwise early action,” he noted. “Therefore I recommend wise early action.”

    “The PM’ll be expecting us to come out and fight,” Yuki warned. “But it’s not enough for us to get angry. He wants that. We have to get angry and smart.”

    “Well,” Sir Mumphrey decided, standing up and clapping his hands, “if that’s what the Parody Blighter wants we can hardly disappoint him, now can we?”

    “And I just got the last blood out of my best Elvis suit,” sighed ManMan. “Okay, let’s go!”

    Sir Mumphrey held up a restraining hand. “Mr Boaz, Mr Foxglove, be so kind as to brief our comrades on what we decided to do.”

    “ManMan blinked in surprise. “We have a plan?”

    “No,” replied Hatman. “We have a Plan.”

***


    “You can keep that creepy probe gizmo away from me if you don’t want to be in your own infirmary having a probectomy,” Kerry Shepherdson warned Genius Protovek. “I’m warning you, there’s a long line of people walking funny with new skin grafts who didn’t back off when I gave them a last chance.”

    “Your powers are neutralised, child,” the Scientist Prime of the Science Elite told the youngest of the new brides. “You are bound with so-called sorceries and captive on your Master’s flagship, the mightiest vessel ever to traverse space. Your threats are meaningless.”

    Kerry nodded sagely. “Right. I just didn’t want you whinging to my fake-o brother that I never gave you a chance.”

    Protovek had done his homework. “Visionary? He is a powerless fool. He is nothing. Now hold still while I determine if you are indeed the prophesied Celestian Madonna.”

    “I’m not,” the probability arsonist answered. “Because if I was then I, or some descent of mine, would have to mate with spiffy or some descendant of his, and I’ve gotta tell you that is just not going to happen. Maybe if he’d come across with the nuclear weapon we talked about back when we were on the lam together but… nah, we’re not going there now.”

    Protovek consulted the readouts on his monitor-pad. “You possess second-hand energies via Galactivac, Hooverer of Worlds,” he noted without surprise, “but you have no trace of Celestian power within you. You are not the Madonna.”

    “Well duh!” Kerry scorned. “So now do I get to go back to Earth and tell everybody what a set of circus clowns the PM and his bozos are or what?”

    Genius Protovek thumbed a small red button on his pad. “Now you are classified as of no use to the Master,” he replied. “You will be taken from this ship and sent to one of the troop carriers to serve for their comfort for the remainder of your short and miserable life.”

    He smirked at her, ignoring her oaths as she was dragged away by the Avawarriors. He was still smiling right up to the point where the homemade napalm bomb Kerry had slipped into his equipment satchel went off.

***


    Visionary had just said his goodbyes to Magweed and Griffin and left them in the care of their mother Miiri as they were evacuated to Lisa’s Ohio ranch. “And don’t open any cupboards marked ‘Toys’!,” he shouted urgently as the transport chopper left the ground.

    He turned to go back to his lighthouse where Urthula and Johnstantine were doing incomprehensible things to the strange sorceries around the place, but he found Danny Lyle blocking his way.

    “Danny,” he said cautiously. Although the young man had been auditing some of his classes along with Kerry, the possibly-fake man was still a little nervous around the Hooded Hood’s son.

    “You’re going after Kerry,” Denial said. It wasn’t a question.

    “Yes,” agreed Visionary. “but not directly. There’s a plan. It all made kind of sense when CSFB! and Hatty and Mumphrey were all explaining it to me.”

    “I don’t care about the plan,” Danny answered. “I care about my Firecracker. I want to go get her.”

    Vizh found himself arguing a case he wasn’t comfortable with. “The Parody Master will be expecting us to run in and save them. They’re bait for his trap. What we’re doing…”

    “I’m going after Kes,” Danny insisted. “I need a way out of this digital realm. I need you to have Hallie let me out.”

    Visionary paused. “It would be suicide,” he told Denial.

    The young leather-jacketed man shrugged. “I date Kerry. It’s a high-risk life choice.”

    “You wouldn’t stand a chance alone,” Vizh warned him. “It’s a good thought but no hero would stand a chance…”

    “I’m not a hero, though,” interrupted Danny. “I’m a villain. I’m not nice, I’m literally a bastard. I don’t have the same rules. Let me go after Kes.”

    Visionary wavered, then nodded. “Go get her,” he agreed.

    “Right,” said Denial. “Let me just go gather my stuff together.”

***


    Pelopia, Priestess of Order, daughter of the Word of Logos, stared evenly at Holy Taus with a faint contempt upon her lips. “Your logic is flawed.”

    “Flawed?” the high priest of the Parody Master hissed. “I speak the sacred truth of the Master.”

    “You repeat fallacial dogma as if it were self-evident with no regard for context or cognitive process,” critiqued Pelopia. “Your assertions confuse the subjective and objective, you make an assertion in one part of your thesis which you then promote to a certainty in the next part. Your theology is sloppy and derivative, your apologetics are poorly reasoned, and your principal tenets do not stand up to rigorous intellectual evaluation.”

    Holy Taus slapped her and fumed. “You are a heretic!” he bawled at her face. “I shall break you at the wheel until you sing the praises of your Master!”

    Pelopia’s usual perfect physical control was being blocked. She had no way of suppressing pain nor stopping the blood trickling from her lip. She only had her mind. “In resorting to force you adduce further evidence to my assertion of the basic weakness of your doctrines and the general inadequacy of your intellect.”

    The contest continued.

***


    Hatman took twenty precious minutes to say his goodbyes to Mac Fleetwood and the kids he coached at the Zero Street Mission. In his mounting anxiety over the missing Zdenka and Whitney he was surprised to find Grace O’Mercy at Mac’s making her farewells also.

    “I thought you didn’t usually come out at this time of day,” the caped crusader ventured to the pretty woman in the white nurse’s uniform. “On account of you… having the night shift.” That was a polite way of avoiding the tricky topic of vampirism.

    “I’m shipping out with your deployment teams,” the Night Nurse answered. “So I came to say goodbye to Mac.”

    “Goodbyes are important,” agreed the pastor of the Zero Street Mission. “Grace and I don’t seem to be very good at them.”

    Hatman left feeling he was somehow missing something. He was distracted, but alert enough in the spot where he’d once been ambushed before that he whirled round with his Boxers cap at the ready as he sensed someone waiting for him in the alley.

    “Truce!” called out the curvy blonde as he rounded on her. “I’m not here to fight!”

    Jay Boaz did his homework. He recognised his adversary immediately. “’Silicone’ Sally Rezilyant,” he noted, “Sometime retainer of Her Excellency Elizabeth von Zemo.”

    Sally nodded. “I hear I’m wanted for stuff. And I don’t mean wanted in a good way for the stuff I do on a hot date.”

    “You’re wanted for questioning in association with your employer’s recent world takeover, yes,” Hatman agreed. He shifted to his Sonics cap and prepared to take the pliable plastic-girl down.

    “Yeah, about that. There’s information you don’t have, Jay. Mr Boaz. Hatman.”

    Hatman frowned. “Talk fast.”

    “You know by now about the voodoo and the retcon that fooled you into thinking Beth von Zemo was Citizen Z, right? But what you don’t know is that she wasn’t the only one who was being CZ. I was too.”

    “There were two of you?”

    Sally squirmed a bit. “I can shape-shift, okay? I’m flexible. I can bring written testimonies. I can do all kinds of shapes. The Baroness was Citizen Z. I was her costume.”

    Hatman blinked. “She wore you?”

    “Kamikaze,” confessed the supervillain with a shudder. “I was how she did all those acrobatic feats and survived all those attacks and stuff. And all the time she was around the LL so was I.”

    “We don’t take well to blackmail, Ms Rezilyant. I think you’d better…”

    “I’m not blackmailing you, Jay. Mr Boaz. Hatman. Sir. I’m… I’m volunteering.”

    That caught the capped crusader off-guard. “Volunteering? For what?”

    Sally sighed – always a spectacular sight. “For the fight. I’m not a big patriot or hero or whatever, but… when I was with the Legion I saw what that Parody Master bastard and his people do. I saw that he has to be stopped. That we all have to stand up and be counted. So one time only, against my better judgement, I’m volunteering. I’ll fight him with you. If you want.”

    “And then?”

    Sally looked confused. “Then I don’t know,” she confessed.

***


    “We don’t know what happened,” confessed a panicking Parody Cultist as Holy Zadokus peered through the viewport into the cell where his Master’s bride was supposed to be confined. “As soon as we applied the power inhibitor to her she… exploded into that.”

    The interior of the cell was a confusion of beings, hundreds or maybe thousands of lifeforms braying and squawking and roaring and howling as the divided and merged together. The whole chaos was lit by wild northern auroral fire.

    “They said she was the goddess of the North,” Zadokus frowned. “That she personified something on the world of the humans. How can she contain such multitudes?”

    “And what do we do about her?” pleaded the Cultist.

    A hundred thousand creatures morphed in and out or existence, screaming.

***


    The sea splashed sullenly on the raw rocks where Herringcarp Asylum had stood, breaking into spume to douse the weed-choked spit and add to the gloom of the lonely headland. The sinister old house had vanished weeks before when the assassin Ultraninja had betrayed her employer and detonated a Narrative Bomb to carve the site and all within it out of existence.

    Danny Lyle walked out along the flagstone and cobble causeway, the wind billowing out his leather jacket behind him, and stood where the front gates should have been.

    “Herringcarp isn’t gone,” he announced. When nothing happened he called it again, shouting.

    The high black gulls seemed to mock his passion.

    Danny shucked off his rucksack and clenched his fists. “Look,” he breathed at nobody, “this only ends one way, with the Parodyverse doing what I say. I’m not leaving her to the mercy of that Parody Master %*&£! and I’m not giving up. So stop playing silly buggers and listen to me. Herringcarp. Is Not. Gone!”

    Denial’s powers flared, his eyes burning with unholy green light. All creation seemed to pause around him. He screamed and dropped to his knees but his will did not flicker.

    There was a ripple in reality as his power to deny past events dredged deep into the timeline and carved a new channel. Slowly and reluctantly the louring black gloom of Herringcarp Asylum shivered into view. The screeching gulls veered away, disturbed by the wrongness of the place.

    Danny knelt on all fours until he’d finished puking, then wiped the blood and vomit from his face. “Right,” he breathed, and dragged himself up to push the gates open and enter.

***


    “I thought it best that I explained things to you personally, Mistress Darkness,” said Grand Inquisitor Flay.

    The Sorceress folded her arms across her chest and glared at the torturer. “Well?”

    “We have inhibited the metahuman abilities of each of the Master’s new brides,” Flay revealed.

    “Well damn,” said Whitney. “Nobody can save us now.”

    “But I am aware from our studies of you, Miss Darkness, that such measures have proved less than effective on previous occasions.”

    “Ah.” Sorceress wasn’t too happy that the Inquisitors had caught that little nugget of information. As a true sorceress she didn’t actually have many powers as such, just a lot of knowledge and a certain understanding with the forces of the universe. The psychic inhibitions they’d laid on her were rather like locking a general in a barred cage to stop him commanding the army around him.

    “However, I believe we have found another way of binding you.”

    “I’m not going to be the Parody Master’s bride,” Sorceress answered. “I’m so fed up of that scenario. And by the way, pretty much everyone who tried to impregnate me against my will is dead now.”

    “We can tell if you use your powers,” the Inquisitor revealed. “The first time you do we shall torture to death ten innocent children. The second time it will be a hundred who die screaming. Then a thousand.”

    Whitney’s face darkened. “Okay, you just made my list,” she warned him. “And here’s a curse that I don’t need magic for: May you meet my ex-boyfriend!” She leaned forward to the torturer and confided in him. “I think you will.”

    “I do not fear Hatman.”

    “Then you’re stupid as well as ugly.”

    Grand Inquisitor Flay smiled unpleasantly. “We shall get to know each other soon, Whitney of the Darkness Clan,” he promised the Sorceress. “I always enjoy breaking witches. We have planned your renovation for a very long time. I look forward to having you on my rack.”

    Whitney snorted. “I’ve been threatened by experts,” she scorned.

    Flay was unmoved. “I am an expert,” he replied.

    “And I’m the Sorceress,” replied Whitney, her eyes becoming cold and hard. “Let’s see who screams first.”

***


    Al B. Harper concluded his exposition and clamped his bubble-pipe between his teeth. “Any questions now?” he asked Baroness Elizabeth von Zemo. “You understand all the ways you could act to make yourself explode?”

    “You have adequately explained every facet of your cruel and unusual punishment of an unconvicted prisoner,” the Baroness assured him, “albeit in your usual rambling and incoherent style, betraying a lack of social skills and an inability to communicate your ideas in a logical and ordered manner.”

    “Oh, he didn’t explain every facet,” chuckled Miss Framlicker. “We left a few things for you to find out for yourself.”

    The Baroness shot the administration of Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises a dirty look.

    “My vote was not to bother with all those trackers and behaviour inhibitors and just to beat you to death with a spanner,” offered Amy Aston. The engineer hefted a large wrench cheerfully. “This one,” she clarified.

    “You’ll be just fine, Baroness,” Al B. assured her, “unless you turn against us or move more than ten yards from another Legionnaire. Then they’ll be scraping your head off walls three miles away.”

    Beth von Zemo refused to rise to the bait. “And you have no moral qualms about dragging me into a suicide conflict with an adversary who has previously promised to have me dissected alive and to torture me for a hundred thousand years when I am his captive? An interesting moral choice, Dr Harper.”

    “I voted to just hand you over to the Parody Master right now,” Miss F comforted the villain.

    “You didn’t make any friends when you betrayed us and tried to take over the Earth,” Al pointed out to the Baroness.

    “I didn’t try to take over the planet. I succeeded.”

    “Well then I guess you won’t have any trouble beating the Parody Master in the next few hours,” Amy told her with a nasty smirk. “Break a neck.”

    “You mean break a leg.”

    “I know what I mean.”

***


    

    The Parody Master was tall and imposing in his red and black battle armour. He stood amongst his generals and gave his last orders for the conquest of Earth. “At this stage I want the fatalities at a minimum. There must be no escape for those who have opposed us. Every human death diminishes the shock and awe that the whole Parodyverse must feel at my vengeance upon these rebels. I want them enslaved and weeping. I want to take my time with them. Casualties must remain below ten percent of their population.”

    He was disturbed by a commotion at the entrance of his command deck. He was surprised – and the Parody Master did not appreciate surprises – as one of his newly acquired brides shouldered her way past his guard and dodged round his Avatar to speak with him.

    “I know it’s supposed to be bad luck to see the bride before the wedding and all that,” Dancer told him, pushing her lustrous dark hair away from her face, “but really I think I deserve at least a conversation before I get tortured into being your perfect wifey and all that. So hi.”

    “How did she escape confinement?” the Parody Master demanded angrily. “Were not her powers neutralised?”

    “Oh, sure they were,” Sarah Shepherdson agreed brightly. “Which shows a lack of trust, I’d say, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. No, I just chatted with a few of the scientists and guards and eventually they agreed that really it’d be best if I dropped in to see you. They were only thinking of you, really.”

    “I want all those guards flayed,” announced the Parody Master.

    Sarah’s face hardened. “Well you jolly well shouldn’t!” she scolded him. “What kind of person punishes people for thinking about him with consideration? Is that really how a great general rewards his troops? I thought you were supposed to be some kind of great leader of men?”

    “I am the Parody Master.” They were the first words he had addressed directly at Dancer.

    “Of course you are. That much is obvious. And I’m very cross at you. You’re a mean, nasty, despicable murdering bully with more power than character, but you already know that. But I’m here to do you a favour.”

    The conqueror of the Parodyverse glared down at the waitress from Bogall, Ireland. “Really.”

    “Really really. Because you’re making the biggest mistake of your life right now. You think you’re going to win but you’re actually going to lose.”

    “The pathetic plans your leader Wilton has made to oppose me? My telepaths dragged everything you know about your former comrades’ preparations from your mind as soon as I captured you.”

    Shep shrugged. “I never really understood all that military stuff anyway. At least your staff know how to make a sizzling cappuccino now. But really I’m not talking about your upcoming cosmic-level ass-kicking by the Lair Legion. I’m talking about the whole war-against-the-multiverse shtick. Even if you do win this Parody War, take over the whole Parodyverse, absorb it, then go start again in some other cluster of realities, you’ve still lost.”

    The Parody Master snorted. “I will be supreme over all!”

    “No, you won’t!” Dancer argued. “You poor idiot, you’ll be supreme over nothing. You’ll do all that fighting, kill all your enemies, and you still won’t have any friends. Wives who only obey you because you’ve tortured them into zombies, troops who only follow you because you’ve attached obedience circuits to their battle armour, populations who only obey you in fear or annihilation. You might think that’s respect, triumph, victory. But it’s not.” Sarah looked up at him. “There’s another way.”

    The tyrant shook his head. “There is only my way.”

    “You could just stop all this,” Dancer urged him. “You’ve done terrible, unforgivable things, but you could stop now. You’ve got the rest of eternity to make amends for what you’ve done. You could use all that power, all that passion, for good. You could win real respect, real affection, by being a hero.” She swallowed hard and added, “Look, I’ll marry you if that’s what you want. I’ll stay with you and help you try again. You could be somebody different. Somebody better.”

    The Parody Master struck her away with a savage blow, sending her sprawling bloodied to the ground. “I am supreme!” he shouted. “I am complete! I am the Parody Master!”

    Sarah was too hurt to move, but she could still snort. “My boyfriend is so going to kick the crap out of you,” she promised.

    The Parody Master restored her broken bones with a gesture. “Take her away,” he ordered. “She will be the first of my brides to be processed.”

    “As you command, Master,” bowed Avatar.

    “Wimp,” said Sarah Shepherdson.

***


    Danny Lyle pressed his way into the main hall of Herringcarp Asylum, where high gargoyles looked down on panelled and marbled walls beneath a high rotunda of lurid green glass. Fourteen of the most dangerous supervillains in the Parodyverse, a varsity of evil, were just now regaining consciousness from the nightmare they’d been cast into and were beginning to argue.

    The Purveyors of Peril: Anvil Man, the appalling Appendage Man, Brass Monkey, Clonar, Dr Roentgen, El Futbalista Atomico, Grit the Granulated Man, Gromm the Living Flatulence, Mary Prankstar, Razor Ballerina, UltiMAX-TremeMan, VelcroVixen, Voodoo Vicaress, and Wyrmfood. Danny watched them as they looked around, as they realised that they were somehow saved.

    VelcroVixen was the first to notice him. “Danny?” puzzled Vicki Vee. “What happened? What did you do to us?”

    Grit the Granulated Man raised one massive sand fist. “It wuz the kid what did that stuff to us? I’m gonna tear him a new one. Lots of new ones.”

    “No, you’re not,” denied Danny. “Just settle down all of you. It was Ultraninja who released a Narrative Bomb to plummet you into nightmare. She confessed everything to Akiko Masamune – eventually. I’m the man who got you out of that torment. I’m the man you owe.”

    “You are just a jumped up kid,” sneered UltiMAX-tremeMan, approaching belligerently.

    “And you have no balls,” answered Danny with a vicious smirk. Martin Lillard bent over with a scream, cupping his crotch.

    “Ooh, that was mean!” admitted Mary Prankstar. “I like him.”

    Denial glared at the other villains present. “Anyone want to go for ‘you have no lungs’? Anyone want to guess what happens if I stop denying you out of that nightmare narrative you got blown to? Anyone? Speak up.”

    “Who are you?” demanded Dr Roentgen, who had no lungs to deny.

    “He’s Daniel Lyle, purported by some to be the Hooded Hood’s natural son,” supplied Brass Monkey in superior tones. “The evidence is pointing to that being the case.”

    “Great to see you again, Danny,” simpered VelcroVixen. “I often think about you and the times we had together.”

    “I’m Denial,” Danny told the Purveyors of Peril. “The Hooded Hood is gone. I can’t bring him back. I wouldn’t if I could. Now you people all work for me.”

    “You expect us to follow a jumped-up little punk like you, Lyle?” hissed Wormfood venomously. “I knew you when.”

    Danny flicked a nonchalant shoulder and Wormfood vanished with a scream. “Anyone else want out?” he asked them with a snarl.

    There were no takers. “So what’s the plan, boss?” asked Anvil Man.

    “And what’s the percentage?” demanded El Futbalista Atomico.

    “And who do we slaughter?” enthused Razor Ballerina.

    Danny took his place on the high stone chair at the end of the chamber and gathered his thoughts.

***


    “I won’t let this happen. I won’t give in to become what you did! I won’t!” Liu Xi Xian rushed to the door, tripping and falling as she avoided the clutches of Annar of the Skunks.

    “You think there’s any way to resist?” snorted Annar. “You think I wasn’t trained in mental discipline, in resisting pain? I am the Prime Princess of the Consortium, I am the most accomplished shifter of my generation. Do you think any of that mattered against my Master’s will?”

    Liu Xi shivered as she grovelled in the corner. “Exu…” she began. “Exu…”

    “Your Doomherald lover? The great traitor? He won’t be coming for you. The prophets have foreseen his end. He has sundered himself from you. There is no rescue there.”

    Liu Xi realised that Annar was leaning right over her, half tormenting half comforting.

    “But he gave me a gift,” Liu Xi whimpered. “Just like you did. Something to remember him by.”

    “You have already been bioscanned for any possible weapon,” the Skunk pointed out, “or for any arcane or metahuman device or energy signature.”

    “Exu was once the god of murder,” Liu Xi whispered, so quietly that even Annar had to bend close to understand. “His gift to me was one of knowledge. I taught me how to kill.”

    Liu Xi moved so swiftly that Annar had no time to react. The young elementalist had grabbed up the broken shard of the crystal pendant as she tumbled. Now she drew it’s jagged razor edge across the Skunk princess’ throat. For one moment, before Annar could shift her vital blood-vessels and windpipe elsewhere, Liu Xi rasped that impromptu knife with lethal force and deadly intent.

    Two friends who loved her had given her gifts to remember them by. Both presents had proved to be deadly.

    Annar tried to scream, but her injuries morphed with her whatever shape she took so no sound came. Green blood sprayed across the bedroom cell and across Liu Xi Xian.

    “Be free now, Annar,” Liu Xi sobbed, leaning over her friend’s dying body. “Oh please let this make you free!”

    The concentric circles of Annar’s luminous eyes went out one by one. Liu Xi held her until the Skunk was dead.

***


    “I want to understand,” demanded Bernice Teshmaker as she straightened her clothing and slid off Sir Mumphrey Wilton’s desk. “I’m your embedded reporter- don’t smirk – I have a duty to the future to know why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

    “Quite right, m’dear,” agreed the eccentric Englishman who commanded the combined Earth defence force. “Very proper. But careless talk costs lives.”

    “Sir Mumphrey, in less than half an hour you’re intending to prematurely terminate the virtual reality shift that’s been shielding the Earth from the Parody Master’s forces and make some kind of final attack for some terrible last battle. You don’t have to look so shocked. I’m a reporter. I’m supposed to notice stuff. Like how distracted Hallie’s become because you’re asking her to do something more than just send the world back to where it was.”

    “Hmph,” responded Mumphrey. “You are a dashed perceptive young woman, I’ll grant you that.”

    “Well then? Why not grant me the rest? Why didn’t you go to rescue those poor women who were taken by the Parody Master right away? Why won’t you commit your forces until it’s probably too late to save them?”

    “Reporters,” snorted the bewhiskered gentleman with a good-natured amusement. “If I had sent off the Legion and our remaining armed forces in a knee-jerk response to that Parody Blighter’s provocations then you’d be toasting me on why I was throwin’ away thousands of lives to save seven.”

    “Grilling, not toasting,” Bernice corrected him.

    “I prefer it when you’re toastin’ me, m’dear.”

    The reporter wasn’t to be distracted in the usual manner. She wasn’t sure whether her extra-curricular activities with Sir Mumphrey Wilton resulted him her manipulating him or vice versa, but she was enjoying finding out; just not now. “What are you up to, Mumphrey?”

    The eccentric Englishman became serious. “War,” he answered. “The Parody Master thinks it’s about winnin’ battles. It’s not.”

    “What is it then? Because winning battles sure seems to be helping him.”

    Sir Mumphrey chacked his pocketwatch. “Oh, he’s powerful enough to win pretty much any battle he’s part of. But he’s not part of every battle.”

    Bernice’s mind was racing. “The preparations at EEE. Evacuating Visionary’s lighthouse of his children and dependents. Those laborious repairs of the dimensional jump station in Off-Central Park…”

    “You’ve been payin’ attention,” hrummphed the old man. “Well then, Miss Teschmaker, you may tell posterity that it’s not enough for us just to beat the Parody Blighter in a punch up. That doesn’t solve the problem of vast armies with dimensional dreadnaughts and suchlike. It doesn’t liberate half a million sentient worlds under martial law. A couple of billion undisciplined space pirates with the best arsenals available wanderin’ the galaxy doesn’t make a much better situation that the Parody Master marching his jackbooted minions across the Parodyverse. So he can take his hostages and prepare his traps and get ready for his big battle with the Lair Legion.” Sir Mumphrey Wilton clutched his lapels and glowered across the universe at his enemy. “In the meantime, we’ll be fightin’ the war.”

    “But what about Dancer and Liu Xi and the others?” asked Bernice.

    Sir Mumphrey looked unhappy for a moment, then shook himself out of his gloom. “The Parody Master thinks they’re his victims. That we need to rescue them. He thinks they’re helpless. Do you really believe those young women will ever be entirely helpless, hmm?”

***


    Liu Xi Xian hadn’t known which of the buttons to push on the cell control panel and the armoured guards were right behind her; so she’d pushed them all.

    Pelopia was the first out of her cell, taking down the leading warders with economical movements that made maximum use of them being covered in armour that could be kicked into throats or joints. She’d made good use of her time to study her enemies, and if she was slowed by the inhibitions placed to restrict her abilities that didn’t take away years of training and specialist knowledge.

    Dancer was next out, and she swung a leg low to trip the next rank of pursuers, setting them up for Pelopia’s return. In a short while it went quiet again on the Destiny’s executive prisoner deck.

    “Quick check,” Sorceress called out. “Everybody okay?” She particularly examined Liu Xi, whose clothing was stained in green ichor and who seemed to be shivering uncontrollably.

    “I can’t see,” the elementalist stammered through chattering teeth. “They took my powers from me.”

    “I would seem that inhibition had an even more unfortunate effect upon Zvesti Zdrugo, observed Pelopia calmly, peering into the cell where Rabid Wolf morphed and morphed again into a hundred different species at a time.

    Dancer was checking the notes on the doors. “Kerry was here too,” she cried in surprise. “These notes say she was rejected and sent for disposal!” Her hands balled into white fists.

    “Logic dictates that we must seek some form of egress and attempt to absent ourselves from this starship,” Pelopia noted.

    “You can absent yourself all you want, Mr Spock,” Dancer snarled. “I’m getting my little sister back.”

    “And I am going to take down that Parody Master,” added Whitney.

    Dancer glanced over at her then grinned, her humour restored. “Okay,” she agreed. “I think the PM’s overdue for a little dose of girl power, and I’m guessing the Legion could use the distraction for whatever they’re going to pull.” She pondered for a moment. “Let’s blow this ship up.”

    Pelopia raised an eyebrow, unaware that she was cementing a cultural archetype.

    “The Parody Master would never allow us to escape him, or to die, or to blow his ship up,” Liu Xi reasoned, “but he’d have to focus attention and divert power to stop us, or reverse it.”

    “And there’s more,” added Whitney. “I can still sense the spirits about this place. There is opportunity here. We need to act.”

    Pelopia took charge. “In that case there are four objectives and four of us. I shall infiltrate and sabotage the main fusion reactors which will cascade a nuclear feedback throughout the ship. Sorceress will locate the inhibition matrices used to deny us our wider abilities and will neutralise them. Miss Xian will destroy the soul catcher mechanisms which deny real death to those who are killed here. And Dancer will…”

    “Dancer’s going to find her little sister and Jury,” Shep cut in. “And then she’s going after the PM to give him a good telling off.”

    “Noble sentiments,” applauded Prime Mistress Oma, appearing in the main doorway and taking in the nascent escape with a single discerning glance. “Especially from a lesser species. But unfortunately you forget that the Master already has brides to enforce his will. You cannot get past me.”

    The four women spread out warily. The Skree paragon was a dangerous hand-to-hand warrior but she was also armed with an Omniversal Punishment Rod.

    “Even with your powers you could not best me,” Oma pointed out.

    Dancer waited for the right moment then opened the door that contained Rabid Wolf, spilling the teeming menagerie out over the Prime Mistress.

    “Tell it to the ocelots,” Dancer said.

***


    There was a strange calm over the city that morning, the last morning of the Parody War. It was as if the whole world was holding its breath. Premiere and Amazing Guy flew low over Paradopolis on a last routine patrol, checking that everything was in order for the last push, but even the passing of those two remarkable superheroes caused little more than a few good luck waves and an occasional cheer.

    Yesterday everyone had been so business-as-usual, the shops full and restaurants booming, with dancing and courting and family gatherings – not the heady revels of the night before the foray into the conceptual plane, but an altogether more desperate, more poignant kind of farewell to life. Today few businesses were open, fewer people on the streets. People were either at their duties, preparing for the defence of the Earth, or they were home with the ones they loved, readying for the end.

    “They are frightened,” Premiere said as the two heroes passed above Off-Central Park. “They remember what happened last time our troops went off to war. Over a million casualties, the desperate evacuation, the waiting for news, the waiting for the end. They fear this time could be harder.”

    “I know,” AG agreed. Where Premiere could pick up the mood of the city through his enhanced hearing the protector of the Parodyverse could simply sense the truth through his cosmic awareness. “They’ve said their goodbyes, prepared themselves for the worst. If things go bad some parents are ready to gently kill their children to keep them from the Parody Master.”

    Premiere nodded. “It’s horrifying that we’ve reached a point where that makes so much sense.” He kept his feelings on the matter tightly battened down; Dancer had vanished from his very side.

    They alighted near one of the anti-aircraft batteries that ringed the edge of the great green meadow in the heart of the Big Banana. The new weapons might fend off the remote drone flyers or the single-person avajets for another thirty seconds. “I’m glad they get to say their goodbyes,” Amazing Guy said quietly. “To say what they need to say to each other before it… in case it goes bad.”

    Victor Brooke caught an undercurrent in what his colleague was saying. “You never got a chance to say farewell to your family, did you?” he remembered. “Their town was carved off into Comic-Book Limbo while you were away fighting the Singularity Riders.”

    “The Parody Master wasn’t taking any chances with me,” AG acknowledged. “He kept me out of the fight early on when I might have done some good warning folks about what was coming. He took out Littlesmallville in an early attempt to neutralise me. He got my wife and my children instead.”

    “But they’re still safe in stasis, with all the other chunks of reality that got taken off,” Premiere encouraged. “You can still rescue your loved ones after the Parody Master falls.”

    “I visited them, yes,” admitted Amazing Guy. “Back when I was trapped in Comic-Book Limbo for a time, of course I looked for them. I found my town, our house, my wife and kids covered in that cobweb preservative, like some kind of fairy tale. I couldn’t disturb them because then they’d lose whatever protection they had there.” He paused and looked far away. “I said my goodbyes to them. I told them that I loved them. But they couldn’t hear me.”

    Premiere thought of Dancer, then of his own loved ones from his distant world of Technopolis. Most of them were long gone. Few of them had died well. “You’ll see them again,” he encouraged his comrade, “when all this is done.”

    Amazing Guy continued to stare at nothing, or perhaps at things only he could see. “To do my job I’m granted a cosmic awareness,” he said. “It’s kind of an ability to focus on the fundamental narrative of the Parodyverse, to know stuff. Sometimes I can even glimpse the future.” He turned to the last science hero. “I don’t see my family in the future. Not anywhere in the Parodyverse.”

    Premiere looked at Amazing Guy and finally pressed a comforting hand to his shoulder. “We have many families depending on us,” he offered at last. “We can still win some of them happy endings.”

    AG nodded. “That’s what I’m going to do with my last breath,” he promised.

***


    Dancer led the way into the Avawarrior barracks and marched up to the battle commander with the most stripes on his black and red combat armour. “You!” she shouted. “You know who I am?”

    The soldier rose up, reaching for his blade.

    “I am the Master’s new bride!” Dancer barked. “Stand up straight when I’m talking to you. That goes for the lot of you!”

    The officer stiffened to attention. The room fell silent except for the sound of Avawarriors jumping to their feet. “I’m sorry, your excellence,” the commander declared, staring straight forward. “How may we serve you?”

    Dancer patted him on the shoulder and beamed at him. “I have a list of chores for you,” she told him happily. “Let’s start with some information…”

***


    Yuki and Chiaki made it look so easy, Liu Xi thought with a scowl as she slunk past another pair of technicians. Drop them in an alien spaceship with sabotage in mind and they’d probably have the whole place in flames in ten minutes with time left over to stab the captain and get a drink afterwards. The young elementalist was reduced to crouching behind equipment banks and scuttling through security doors after busy hurrying scientists.

    She slipped through into the secure necromantics bay and dropped with a sigh of relief behind a rack of equipment. Then she saw what the rack contained and scrabbled away stifling a gasp.

    “This won’t do,” she said to herself. “I have people relying on me. I have a job to do, and this time nobody is coming to rescue me. I have to save myself, and I have to save others.”

    And remarkably, as if she’d turned off a tap, the fear went away. It was replaced with a muted excitement, a sudden joy. She was in charge of her own destiny at last. She was young and clever and powerful and whatever came next it was going to be her choice.

    She chose to tear apart the gory soul catchers so they could never be used again.

***


    Pelopia avoided the security guards with moderate ease. The routine of the ship worked for her. There was no alert for escaped prisoners yet, therefore there were no escaped prisoners. She wondered at the inefficiency of the Inevitable Destiny that it did not routinely monitor its secure cell blocks. She had no way of knowing the in-depth diagnostic shut-down that Dancer had ordered earlier.

    Although she was denied access to some of her higher techniques, the disciple of logos’ training was sufficient to the task of entering the engineering deck. She worked with methodical efficiency, locating a maintenance manual, educating herself in the fundamentals through study of the diagrams and careful logical reasoning, then determining how to over-ride safety systems in each of the trans-nuclear reactors that powered the warship. She moved swiftly and precisely between her objectives, calculating the most effective trade-off between speed and stealth.

    She was almost done before she was stabbed in the back by High Assassin-Mother S’Tab of the Z’Sox.

    “Don’t worry, little prey,” the huge spider-queen assured her victim, decloaking from concealment and waving combat-ready mandibles at her. “It’sss a minor wound and a non-lethal toxin. I know my Massster wants you alive. It’s merely painful and paralysssing. Did you think you could ssslink around on my ssship and not come to my notisse?”

    Pelopia could normally have delayed or neutralised the poison’s effect, but now she dropped to her knees and found her muscles disobeying her.

    “Is it just you who hasss sssomehow eluded your captivity, I wonder, or are all the insssipid new bridesss loossse for hunting?”

    Pelopia realised that she could still move a little, that her body control was sufficient to keep mobile for a few seconds more. She felt a surge of triumph. She wondered if this was what CrazySugarFreakBoy! felt like all the time. She moved one finger of one hand to activate the nuclear cascade she’d readied. She used one finger of the other to signal defiance to S’Tab.

    Klaxons began to scream, and so did the Queen of the Z’Sox.

***


    The Inquisitors had been so determined to prevent Whitney Darkness from using her sorceries that they’d forgotten that she’d trained for years with some of the best physical fighters on Earth. She brought down Inquisitor Maarn with a pressure point punch to the back of his neck. The specialist in nerve cluster torment wasn’t as professionally appreciative of the assault as perhaps he should have been, but Cap and Dark Knight would have been proud of their student.

    The unconscious Maarn’s palm-print opened up the Inquisition Chambers deck and allowed Sorceress to progress on. The small spirits of the ship guided her towards the psychic programming chambers from where the new brides’ powers were being blocked.

    Whitney hadn’t expected the lounge, or that the lounge would be occupied. She only had time to dive behind a huge leather couch before any of the senior inquisitors gathered for her future torment noticed her.

    Ashbelan was an ugly woman whose self-inflicted facial scars glowed livid read with enthusiasm for her speciality. “I still think we should condition them together,” she was arguing. “For maximum impact each should see how much the others have changed, and by cross-tormenting them, by punishing one for the resistance of another, we can break down the interdependent bonds and completely invert their emotional responses.”

    Inquisitor Lok shook his head. “Surgery, in the first place,” he suggested. “Dancer and Sorceress would both respond well to disfigurement. We can restore their faces later before we present them to the Master, of course, but our records show that Dancer once witnessed a facial dissection and would have a special horror of it.”

    “But the priestess Pelopia has been immured from such methods,” scorned Vespalin, the theologian inquisitor. “Her father has had her flesh mortified through torture, endurance, and rape since she was a child. We will require quite different techniques to break her and dear little Liu Xi.”

    Sorceress resisted the urge to sear all three inquisitors out of existence right now. Their wards and their threats were enough to stay her. Instead she waited until the argument had got heated about insult trauma versus psychosocial humiliation then dived into the chambers beyond.

    “But I’ll be back for you,” she murmured with arctic-cold eyes.

    The psychic net that inhibited the powers of the captives was a semi-sentient gestalt of harvested telepath DNA. Whitney set the tormented spirits within it free by the simple expedient of dropping a live monitor panel into the nutrient feed.

    And then things got interesting.
    

***


    “This is dangerous, Danny,” warned VelcroVixen. “Your father has all kinds of contingencies and retcons bound up to stop people doing this.”

    “That’s nice,” answered Denial, shrugging off the svelte blonde and sitting in the Hooded Hood’s throne. “Feel free to run.”

    “The Portal of Pretentiousness is an elder artefact,” Vicki Vee persisted. “It was unique and potent even before the Hood enhanced it. It was erased when that Narrative Bomb went off. You don’t have the power to bring it back.”

    “But I need it,” Danny answered with grim determination. “I need it to get my Firecracker back. I need to beat my father at his own games.”

    “Danny, you’ve brought back the Purveyors. You’ve claimed Herringcarp Asylum.” VelcroVixen breathed deeply. “And then there’s me.”

    “Not interested, thanks,” answered the leather-jacketed young man. “It’s time for me to grow up. To stop being a villain.” He concentrated his denial powers on the spot where the Portal of Pretentiousness usually stood.

    “What will you be then?” VV asked him acidly. “Apart from dead?”

    “Only once choice,” answered Denial through gritted teeth as he strained against the chronology of the Parodyverse. “Only one way I can save Kes now. I’m going to be an archvillain.”

    And his eyes burned with unholy green light.

***


    “I have you now,” the Parody Master told Jury as she put down the love letter he had written her. “You are mine.”

    The former Shaper of Worlds tried to stop her hands trembling. “If you get the Storyheart you will become unstoppable,” she admitted. “And then I will have to be yours.”

    “You hid it beneath the Lair Mansion on Earth,” the Parody Master marvelled. “A bold stroke! All this time I was fuming at the ill-chances that kept the humans from my conquest and all this time the Story was working against me because of you!”

    “Don’t underestimate the efforts of the Lair Legion,” Jury argued. “They’ve thwarted you again and again.”

    “Never without cheating,” snapped the conqueror of the Parodyverse. “And that is why I have something special planned for our final confrontation. Something that will prove once and for all that I am superior.”

    “You’re going to take them on restricting yourself to powers equal to theirs?” suggested Jury.

    “Of course not. But you will see. You will see.” He chuckled to himself. “And when that time comes, in just a few hours, you will see very differently, my beloved.”

    Jury’s heart quailed at that look of triumph. “W-what do you mean?”

    “I am the Master of time and space,” the Parody Master boasted. “I shall stretch time now. A few hours will pass for Earth’s Lair Legion, but for us aboard the Inevitable Destiny it shall be many months. Months enough to break you and my other new brides. Months enough to bring you to my side, my loyal playthings, that you may celebrate my final triumph with me.”

    Jury tried to speak, to deny it, but the fear closed up her throat.

    “You thought your Storyheart gambit would save you, my beloved?” scorned the Parody Master. “Nothing can save you now.”

    As if provoked by his statement the alarm klaxons went off across his ship.

    “What is this?” the Parody Master demanded, glaring at the former Shaper suspiciously. “What have you done?”

    “If it was me, I don’t remember,” Jury noted. The monitor wall was scrolling with damage reports now: a meltdown in the reactor core, destruction of the inhibition webs and soul catchers, a hundred minor acts of sabotage across the moon-sized vessel.

    The Parody Master shouted for his guards. “What is going on?”

    The door swished open, but instead of his liveried retainers it was the Probability Dancer who strode inside.

    “Where’s Kerry?” Sarah Shephersdon demanded. “What have you done with my sister?” Across the vessel probabilities ran riot, triggering random weapons systems, devastating whole decks with climate change and gravity fluctuations. The inhibitions were gone, and the brides of the Parody Master were free to act.

    The Parody Master burned through the probability chains and confined Dancer on a rack of energy. At a thought he brought the other escaped women to his presence.

    Sorceress’ hex hit him first, a blight that toppled him to his knees and left him reeling for Liu Xi to tear his very elements apart. Pelopia, now unslowed by the poisons in her system, came in hard to slice a captured avasword across his neck. Then Rabid Wolf was atop him, her furious lupine form the size of an elephant, mangling armour and man alike in a goddess’ jaws.

    The Parody Master bellowed with rage and pain, willing himself whole once more, binding the other women as he had wracked Dancer. Even then he had to pause a moment to catch his breath after the unexpected savagery of the attacks.

    “You are as nothing,” spat Rabid Wolf with sheer contempt. “Power without discipline. You are to be despised.”

    “Silence!” bellowed the Parody Master, rising to his feet, summoning his soul axe. His agitation was such that the axe reflected the screaming visages of those whose lives it had ended. “You have displeased me! You have risen against your Master!”

    “You bet,” shouted Dancer. “And that’s as much touch as you’ll get off any of us without brainwashing!”

    “But your attempts at defiance are futile,” the Parody Master continued, sending spasms of agony through his captives to show them who was in charge.

    Liu Xi Xian screamed something mortally insulting in Chinese and decided that this was the way to die.

    “Hey, those were good attempts at defiance,” Sorceress quipped through her agony. “Some of them are still going.”

    The Parody Master detected the final curse and the twist of probability wrapped around it and the divine breath that had empowered it just a fragment of a moment too late. There was a bright flash and another bright young woman stood to defy the Parody Master.

    The newcomer tossed back her cape and drew her rapier. “You have been to be being very naughty, uncute villaining!” warned the pure thought-being Yo, levelling her foil at the conqueror of the Parodyverse. “Now to be letting go of Yo-friends or to be being very sorry.”

    “This is the best you can do?” snorted the Parody Master in scornful mirth. “This? You expect this genderless buffoon to stand against me?”

    “Yo is to be thinking yes,” grinned the happy Zorro-impersonator. “Yo is to be saying bringing it on!”

***


    Danny Lyle opened up a doorway through to the Lair Mansion. “Sir Mumphrey Wilton!” he called out. “We need to talk. We need to make an alliance.”

    “By Jove!” breathed the eccentric Englishman.

    “By Portal of Pretentiousness, actually,” offered the Manga Shoggoth helpfully. “Now this suggests possibilities.”

***


    “You seek to stand against me alone, pathetic wisp of happiness?” mocked the Parody Master.

    Yo deflected the massive axe with a flick of his/her rapier. “Is not so. Yo is to be working in team-up with all Yo-beings of Yo planet and all peoples of the Happy Place. Yo is to be bringing of Yo-friends and allies! See!”

    The Parody Master was rocked from his feet by a blow that would have cracked a mountain.

    “Helmet-man is rude to Yurt’s friend!” shouted a living rock-face looming over the conqueror of the Parodyverse. “Yurt will smash puny Helmet-Man!”

    Another blow struck the Parody Master from behind, tearing through his armour and gouging to his back. “Aw, give it a rest, Yurt,” snorted Quake, the future-killer who had the combined powers of the original Lair Legion. “Just pound this bozo into pulp.”

    The Parody Master rounded on his new attacker only to be hammered again by a different assault. He paused for a moment, distracted by urgent events he suddenly sensed far away in his Parodyverse-wide empire. Adamantine-hard bone claws took advantage of his lapse of concentration to slash through his helmet and tear through his face. “He is strong but not undefeatable,” judged the battle-hardened alien killing machine Onslaughter. “Grind him to paste.”

    The Parody Master had no time to wonder where three of the deadliest physical foes in the Parodyverse had come from. He redirected his focus to his immediate surroundings, increased his strength and stamina by a magnitude of ten, then was forced to raise it by as much again. There was a brutal bloody half minute of deadly combat before he rose battered and triumphant over his fallen enemies.

    Anihillatus, Lord of the Negativity Zone, the reborn Dark Thugos, ruler of Apocalyspe, and the strange reality-bending Shifter seemed as surprised as Dark Thugos to suddenly be present to take up the fight.

    Yo occupied his/her time by cutting the captive women from their bonds while the Parody Master fought.

    “How are you doing that?” asked Liu Xi, trying to fathom the deep strands of causality that the thought being was somehow tugging. They seemed somehow familiar.

    “Yo is to be asking nicely. And now is to be time for friends to be joining in.”

    As the Parody Master scrambled up from the devastation that had made a wreck of a third of his flagship he was engaged again by yet more adversaries brought for his destruction. Yellow energy shapes slashed through his wounded body, sectioning him into separate pieces. A heavy mallet searing with anti-energies slammed down on him as he sought to reassemble himself. D’ur Acell of the Yellow Flashlight Corps and Gamma Ray Gary fell upon the tyrant, holding his attention until as assassin Gamona was in position to stab him from behind.

    Dancer and Sorceress and the others had recovered from their pain punishments enough to take an interest in the battle. “What do we do now?” asked Sarah, already beginning to spin to increase the combatants’ chances of survival.

    “Is to keep the uncute Parody Master occupied,” Yo told them. “While he is to be fighting of here he is not to be stopping of things in other places, Yo thinks.”

    “Understood,” growled Rabid Wolf, and re-entered the fray. Pelopia chose her moment and dropped down after her.

    Liu Xi instead concentrated her gifts on the Inevitable Destiny itself. The ship was just recovering from Dancer’s earlier probability storm. Now the very elements of the vessel turned against the crew. Liu Xi located Avatar and spat him into space.

    The Parody Master overcame his enemies again, slamming them away with vicious abandon, willing them to defeat, and rose to face Yo and the Sorceress.

    “You do not have the power to summons others to your aid,” he accused the women.

    That was when he realised that his soul-axe wasn’t screaming any more. It was chuckling. And he recognised that throaty female laugh.

    “Waltz!”

    “Yo is to be helping of Yo’s friend,” the pure thought being noted. “Yo’s friend is not to be as beaten as uncute Parody Master was to be thinking. Yo’s friend is to be having power given to her from sneaky Hooded Hood to be doing of this. Yo is to be first of people cute-Lisa is to be calling over to be helping. And now Yo is saying for cute-Lisa: Lair Legion, Line Up!”

    And Yo summonsed the whole Lair Legion to face the Parody Master one last time.

***


Next Time: The Purveyors of Peril go to war! Bride vs bride! High Priest vs High Priestess! Interrogating the Inquisition. Scientist Prime vs archscientist! And the know-holds-barred final confrontation with the Parody Master himself. The Parody War screams to its explosive, Parodyverse-changing conclusion in Untold Conclusive Tales of the Parodyverse #219: The Winner.

***


Dramatis Personae:

The new Brides of the Parody Master:

Liu Xi Xian, teenage elementalist formerly romanced by Exu the Doomherald, god of murder
Pelopia, Disciple of Order, daughter of the Word of Logos
Zvesti Zdrugo (Rabid Wolf, Zdenka Zemazoza), shape-shifting Candian goddess of the North
Kerry Shepherdson, probability arsonist, Dancer’s little sister, Denial’s girlfriend
Sorceress (Whitney Darkness), Legionnaire and witch, formerly Hatman’s lover
Probability Dancer (Sarah Shepherdson), Legionnaire, fast-talking waitress-turned-crimefighter
Jury, former Shaper of Worlds

The Minions of the Parody Master

Avatar, general of the Avawarrior Hordes
Most Holy Taus, High Priest of the Parody Cult
Holy Zadokus, his assistant
Genius Protovek, Scientist Prime of the Science Elite
Grand Inquisitor Flay, head of the Inquisition
Inquisitor Maarn, specialising in nerve cluster torment
Inquisitor Ashbelan, specialising in psycho-social conditioning through peer torment
Inquisitor Lok, a pioneer in insult trauma
Inquisitor Vespalin, theologian.

The current Brides of the Parody Master:

Princess Annar of the Skunk Imperium
Prime Mistress Oma of the Skree
High Assassin-Mother S'Tab of the Z'Sox
Nexus 935 of the Reticulum Matrix

The Lair Legion:

Sir Mumphrey Wilton, leader of Earth’s combined defence force
Hatman (Jay Boaz), leader of the Lair Legion
CrazySugarFreakBoy! (Dreamcatcher Foxglove), deputy-leader of the Lair Legion
Visionary, possibly-fake man, Dancer and Kerry’s adoptive brother
Donar, Hemigod of Thunder
Trickshot (Carl Bastion), irritating archer
The Manga Shoggoth, loathsome elder beast
The Librarian (Lee Bookman), keeper of the Moon Public Library
Mr Epitome (Dominic Clancy), paragon of power
Al B. Harper, archscientist
Yuki Shiro, cyborg P.I.
ManMan (Joe Pepper), Elvis-impersonating wielder of Knifey
Citizen Z (Baroness Elizabeth von Zemo), scheming world-conquering villainess
Amazing Guy, protector of the Parodyverse, honorary member
Premiere (Victor Brooke), last science hero, honorary member
Yo, pure genderless thought-being

The Purveyors of Peril:

Denial (Daniel Lyle), kerry’s boyfriend, the Hooded Hood’s son
VelcroVixen (Vicki Vee), fetishwear model and field leader
Anvil Man (Brendan MacGillicuddy), unstoppable demolitions juggernaut
Appendage Man (Milton Freebish), body-part-growing pervert
Brass Monkey (Gorilla Grott), genius scientist metallic ape with freezing powers
Clonar, brain-damaged clone of a hemigod of thunder
Dr Roentgen (Stanislaus Vladim Roentgen, PhD), Candian nuclear scientist turned radioactive entity
El Futbolista Atomico (Xatroc), Brazillian super-powered football star
Grit, the Granulated Man (Brick Basalt), sand-based mercenary
Gromm, the Living Flatulence, Deviate gas entity
Mary Prankstar (Mary Louise Pfeffercorn), psychotic joker
Razor Ballerina (Mindy Kovkoski), razor-sharp terpsichore murderess
UltiMAX-TremeMan (Martin Lillard), drug-fuelled superman
Voodoo Vicaress (LeVeau M’Tumbe), houngan pristess
Wyrmfood (Tina Drummond), disfigured draconian with a grudge

Others:

Hallie, the Lair Legion’s resident artificial intelligence
Magweed and Griffin, Visionary’s twin children
Miiri of Earth, their Caphan ex-pleasure slave mother
Urthula Underess, party ghoul
Con Johnstantine, annoying English occultist
Revd Mac Fleetwood, pastor of the Zero Street Mission
Grace O’Mercy, the Night Nurse, vampire senior medtech in the Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital ER
“Silicone” Sally Rezilyant, pliable rubber henchwomen of Baroness von Zemo
Miss Framlicker, administrator of Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises
Amy Aston, overall-clad engineer at Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises
Bernice Teshmaker, embedded reporter at the Lair Mansion
The inconceivable Yurt (Vlastimock Bogoff), gamma-spawned rampaging Russian peasant hut
Onslaughter, alien killing machine
Quake, multi-powered murderer from the future
Dark Thugos, granite-faced tyrant ruler of Apocalyspe, formerly Destroyer of Tales
Anihillatus, Lord of the Negativity Zone
Shifter, mysterious reality-warping undesirable
D’ur Acell, of the Yellow Flashlight Corps
Gamma Ray Gary, Ausgardian-powered last survivor of an ancient alien race
Gamona, the galaxy’s deadliest assassin
Lisa Waltz, deceased and sucked into the Parody Master’s axe and still first lady of the Lair Legion

***


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.




Fri Jul 27, 2007 at
04:05:39 pm EDT
Posted from United Kingdom
using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6/Windows 2000

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