Untold Tales of the Secrets of the Parodyverse #359
Previously: Untold Tales of the Parodyverse #356: The Sky Is Falling
Untold Tales of the Parodyverse #357: The Grey Horizons
Untold Tales of the Ancientverse #358: The Dying Days or Final Dates
Now:
Chapter Twenty-Four: Knifey and the Midnight Confession
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Destroyer of Tales and the Shaper of Worlds
Chapter Twenty-Six: Vaahir of Viigo and the Price of Paradise
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Laurie Leyton and the Collected Works
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Zania Chhabra and the Travellers Tales
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Buckland Dean and the Change of Mind
Chapter Thirty: Kahn Vaantagian Khaur and the Heart of the Dead Galaxy
Chapter Thirty-One: Wilbur Parody and the Old Story
Chapter Thirty-Two: Visionatus Improbablus and the Alchemikal Wedding
Footnotes: The Wilbur Parody Primer
On the Galactic Geography of the Parodyverse
Original Histories of Early Parodyverse Characters in the posters' own words
Cast descriptions in Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Place descriptions in Where's Where in the Parodyverse
Over 1000 previous stories at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
***
24. Knifey and the Midnight Confession
“Joe? Joe Pepper? Hello?”
ManMan woke up as his talking knife called to him. “Knifey? You can speak again?” He thought a bit more. “Didn’t I get blown up?”
“Well, that depends,” Knifey admitted. “It’s sort of a Schrödinger’s explosion right now. It may or may not have blown you up. Until you look you won’t know for sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I, um, I have a confession to make, Joe.”
ManMan hauled himself off the floor of the Lair Legion Meeting Room. None of the others who had been there when the island had been possibly blown up were present.
“What do you need to tell me?” he asked his sentient weapon.
“Well, for starters… we’ve never met before.”
“What? What on Earth do you mean? We’ve been partners for years ever since uncle died. ManMan and Knifey. I have the proportionate powers of a man, you have, well you stab things really well.”
“Do I? That’s good to know, because right now I’m feeling a bit like a failure.”
Joe Pepper looked at his talking knife. “Maybe you should explain from the start, Knifey?”
“Knifey? That’s not my name. My creator dubbed me the Inevitable Blade.”
“The what? You’ve always been Knifey as long as I’ve known you. I think Cressida the Wonder Worm knew you when she had a different form centuries agio and she called you Knifey. And you dated her.”
“I did? I mean, I will? Look, this is very confusing for me, Joe. I’m very nearly brand new.”
“You’re ancient. Has this change in reality affected your memory? You stopped talking for a while there.”
“I didn’t stop. I was learning. Joe, I’m not the knife you know. At least not yet. I’m just… baffled. This is very strange for me.”
ManMan took a breath. “Okay, tell me again. If you’re not Knifey but you look and sound just like him, what are you?”
“I am the Inevitable Blade. I was made to be the downfall of gods and of more than gods. I am the ultimate assassin, the harbinger of inescapable death.”
“I said you were good at stabbing things.”
“That’s the version of me you know, the one you call Knifey. He’s a bit older than me. About thirteen billion years or so. I’m the newly-forged version of him, shifted through time from my point and place of creation to usher in the reign of my creator. Supposedly.”
“Supposedly? What does that mean?”
“Things got a bit complicated.”
“No. Really?”
“Yes, Joe Pepper. Here’s how…”
***
“So the spirit resembling my uncle gave me the choice of accepting the Inevitable Blade and slaying the Faerie Queene and Magweed with it, or dying on its point. I decided to go with a third option.” Elizabeth von Zemo pointed at the Hooded Hood. “I called you.”
The cowled crime czar looked at the Parodyverse’s most efficient killing instrument in the Baroness’ hand. “This is Knifey in his infancy, new-made? Before he became what he is now?”
“So my secret sponsor maintained. For a talking knife, this one isn’t very chatty.” Beth shook the dagger to see if that prompted it to speak.
“And your visitor made the same offer to Akiko first, but she clearly declined it.”
“As you can see from her ruined nauseatingly-pink bed linen. She refused an offer to assassinate Faerie. I accepted the geas to stab the Faerie Queene and her heiress and am still breathing. Of course, I then came to you for a loophole. I dislike being coerced.”
“Akiko isn’t breathing,” the Hooded Hood noted, “but neither is she dead.”
“What?” The Baroness hastened to inspect the bloodstained queenpin of Mangatown. “How can she be alive>”
“On the whole I’d say it was Knifey – that is, the Inevitable Blade. He can kill whatever he wants. That’s what he was created for. When he really tries, what he kills can never come back. I cite the Parody Master as an example. But Knifey stabbed me once and I returned – admittedly by a long route. But I never destroyed ManMan for assaulting me while he was under enemy control because Knifey knew better than to try and end me for good. From which I conclude that if that blade doesn’t want to end a life he can elect not to, at least some of the time.”
“And he chose not to kill Akiko Masamune?”
“Think about it. A new-made entity forged as a remorseless instrument of death. A clean slate on which anything can be written. And his first experience? Of a woman of integrity, courage, and honour who would not bend to they will of one who sought to make her his puppet. That’s the sort of thing that could make a young knife question his purpose in life.”
The Baroness looked at the Inevitable Blade with mild horror. “So I have agreed to assassinate the most powerful being in the Many Coloured Lands with a defective knife?”
“Oh, I believe we can find you a working model,” replied the Hooded Hood.
***
“The steading gate is almost exhausted,” Vinnie de Soth warned the cowled crime czar who had woken him from sleep. “It’s no longer viable enough to send anyone through, in either direction now. They would die immediately.”
“Communication is still possible, though.”
“Well yes, with a bit of amplification.”
“What about an object?” the Hood demanded. “Can that be transited?”
“For a few hours still. Why?”
“It is the will of… the Hooded Hood.”
***
“Akiko Masamune is in a state of vital uncertainty,” the Hood told Midori. “In Faerie that manifests as… well, think of Snow White when she had eaten the poisoned apple.”
“Akiko needs a handsome prince?” the world’s pinkest crimelord’s administrator puzzled.
“She needs to be concealed safe and secure. Her debilitation must remain secret. Nurse O’Mercy will tend to her.”
“Who did this to her?” demanded Chiaki Bushido. “There must be retribution.”
“In due course,” agreed the archvillain. “For now her enemy must believe her dead and her allies must believe her busy. Those will be your tasks. I must arrange the rest.”
***
“Good evening, Miss Cacciatore. I apologise for the lateness of the hour and the oddness of the means of contact. Communications from Faerie to the mundane world are never easy, and the world is becoming so much more mundane just now.”
“So I’ve noticed, Mr Winkelweald. What’s the nature of your business with me?”
“I require you to steal an item for me and to replace it with one that looks identical. You will be remunerated.”
“I see. And what am I supposed to take, from whom, and where?”
“I require you to substitute this blade I have here for ManMan’s talking knife. They must be swapped.”
“Isn’t Knifey likely to object to such a transaction? Only he can be both stabby and sarcastic,” Champagne pointed out.
“On this occasion I believe he will co-operate with the ruse. He will remember it from before.”
“From… before?”
***
“Champagne hugged me after the shootout at the diamond exchange!” Joe Pepper recalled. “I though she just liked me. She was stealing my Knifey.”
“And substituting me,” the Inevitable Blade apologised. “Sorry it took me a while to get the hang of communicating. And then I was a bit shy. You’re my first proper wielder, you know.”
“As well as about your millionth. Well, you’re still my first talking knife. So I guess we’re even. I’m glad you survived the Normalverse, though I’m a bit fuzzy on the how.”
“That’s because Wilbur Parody has set it up so that only entities that he approves and licences can retain their nature and powers. I’m on that list. So if you stab him with me I can really ruin his day.”
“It would be great to get the chance, but I’m not liking this whole deserted mansion, empty city thing. It’s possible that we have been benched.”
The Inevitable Blade considered that. “I’m sorry I was bad and didn’t kill the victim Akiko.”
“No, that’s fine. That’s good. You picked up on free will and moral choices pretty fast. You did exactly the right thing.” A new idea came to Joe. “Hey, you said your creator set you up for killing the Faerie Queen. Is he the big bad behind what’s happening to the Parodyverse? Because if so you can tell us who he is now.”
“Am I allowed to? I suspect I’m already in a lot of trouble for swapping places with older-me.”
“Knifey, getting into trouble is pretty much what we do. So who’s the bad guy?”
“My creator is Wilbur Parody, who was Shaper of Worlds, Chronicler of Stories, and Destroyer of Tales in due season, and who used all of those resources in my making. He added my forging into the construction cycle of the Celestian Space Robots before their activation key was turned. I’m supposed to be the death of his enemies and the downfall of all who oppose him.”
“Wilbur Parody? That old coot? Well I’m telling you right now, Knifey, you have a whole bunch of better options than that.”
“I’m supposed to obey his commands.”
“I’m supposed to lay off the pizza. But we are rebels, Knifey. Let’s rebel!”
***
“I’m a bit fuzzy about the details of this,” Knifey told the Hooded Hood and the Baroness. “It’s a long time ago since this happened from my younger perspective. Quarks have joined together and stuff. There are gluons now. A lot of blood has passed under the bridge.”
“We need to stop our adversary from destroying Faerie,” the Baroness insisted. “I’m not having that on my rap sheet unless I get some benefit from it. And certainly not because some irritating know-it-all like Wilbur Parody is threatening to doom me. He might have Symmetry and the Apostate on his string, but I swore vengeance on whoever thwarted my masterplan for world conquest, and it turns out to be him. And he owes me a castle.”
“The Baroness is oath-compelled to stab Queen Mab and Magweed,” the Hooded Hood explained. “She didn’t swear to kill them. So that’s discretionary.”
“I don’t want to kill Mags either,” Knifey agreed. “I’m not really happy about a flesh wound.”
“Way back when, you managed some kind of quantum uncertainty with Akiko,” the Hooded Hood observed. “A stasis, pending future determination of events. Could you do the same with the Faerie Queen and the Princess Apparent?”
“I’ll aim to miss the interesting organs,” the Baroness conceded.
“It’s possible,” Knifey agreed. “I’m a lot more experienced now than when I was a newbie. If Wilbur Parody thinks he can command me he’s going to get a very pointed lesson to the contrary. Now I’ve remembered my origin and his part in it I’m all about stopping his wicked plans.” The talking knife thought a bit then added, “Now I know why I didn’t kill you for good when I stabbed you. I owed you a favour for this, and new-me knew it, and so when the time came I must have… I dunno, toned down my slayage.”
“I also had precautions and contingencies in place,” the cowled crime czar assured him. “Am I not… the Hooded Hood?”
“What happens when Mab and the Visionaryling are down?” the Baroness wanted to know. “If Faerie doesn’t end then we’ll have tipped Wilbur off that we’re wise to his game.”
“I made some preparations regarding that a long time ago, Elizabeth. Certain contingencies were retconned.”
“But in the Normalverse your retcons won’t work,” Knifey objected.
“Indeed,” agreed the archvillain. “And since those retcons prevented the events I wished to set in place, as the normalcy sets in those chains of narrative will be triggered.”
“And what happens then?” Beth von Zemo could not resist asking.
“Then I face Wilbur Parody in the past of Herringcarp Asylum and there is a reckoning,” the Hood revealed.
***
“So where are we, Joe?” young Knifey asked ManMan. “I mean, your Mansion was about to get blown up and I was going to need a new wielder before we’d even had a chance to chat, and then… here we are, with you not in smithereens. Would old-me know what had happened?”
“Possibly,” considered the Elvis-impersonator. “There’s a good chance he wouldn’t tell me though.”
“Any guesses? You’ve been doing this kind of stuff for quite a while, haven’t you?”
“You said we were in some kind of will-he-won’t-he quantum uncertainty type situation? We might be dead or we might be saved?”
“Sure. I can tell that much. We’re superpositioned on the timespace curve.”
“Then damn. Because I can tell you, Knifey, I just hate Comic-Book Limbo.”
***
“Comic-Book Limbo,” the Baroness growled. “We’ve dropped the whole of Faerie into Comic-Book Limbo, the recycle bin of the Parodyverse?”
“Good thing that was your plan, madam,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton warned her. “If you’d really turned traitor and hurt that little girl then…”
“I’m fine, Uncle Mumphrey” Magweed promised. “Well… apart from all of Faerie being frozen in this place.”
Griffin examined the angry countenance of a motionless Queen Mab. “Why are we moving about but the Fey aren’t?” he wondered.
“Grandfather’s pocketwatch,” Samantha Featherstone identified. “He’s shielding us from the stasis effect here for as long as the temporal charge holds out.
“It’s the best I can manage,” Knifey insisted. “If Wilbur Parody gets beaten, the Hooded Hood can restore us to default.”
“And if not we are all erased,” Elizabeth von Zemo pointed out.
“Hey!” Griffin called out. “Isn’t that the Lair Mansion over there? And the whole of Parody Island? Except father’s Lighthouse, naturally.”
“And isn’t that also the Lair Mansion over there?” Samantha asked. “And over there? And there? And there?”
“I’m in that one there,” Knifey announced. “Take me over to me. I want to have a word with myself.”
“Jolly good,” agreed Sir Mumphrey Wilton; but he was preoccupied by his pocketwatch chiming. He inspected the glowing dials and went, “Ah.”
“Ah?” Samantha prompted her grandfather.
“Yes. Bit of business to see to. Keep an eye on things here, would you? Have to dash.”
And he simply vanished.
“I find it comforting that I can still be boggled,” Knifey admitted. “Now get me back to Joe. I need to have a word with me.”
***
25. The Destroyer of Tales and the Shaper of Worlds
Working in total darkness by touch alone, allowing the manuscripts around his cell to whisper to him, the book man scribbled his book.
He knew that time was running out. Humbolt Vernold had fallen. A new head of the Church of Conformity would rise; they always did. Vernold was doomed now, trapped in the story of history. He was tangled with a Heart of Darkness and the rise of Balefire and all that cruel justiciar’s own ambitions would rot and crumble. Even his own plans would be used against him.
But Verlold’s replacement, whoever the Grand Master of the Church of Conformity set in his place, would have no use for his predecessor’s prisoners and projects.
The book man scribbled faster. He no longer remembered his name or family, how he came to know what he did, how he understood the language of the parchments or heard the whisper of the Storyheart. All he knew was what must be written if the Parodyverse was to have a chance of being saved.
Pages were scattered across the cramped prison, forgotten now by their author, their revelations safely committed to ink and paper so they no longer burned his brain. The first page lay stained and abandoned in a cold corner:
This is the story of the greatest heroes of a very strange place on the far edge of the probability curve called the Parodyverse. It tells how they came to be, and why, and of the reasons for the plummeting property values of their hometown of Paradopolis. It contains the secret of the universe. It’s a tale of triumph and tragedy, but like most stories set in the Parodyverse it’s mainly a tale of ripped-off characters and marginally humorous misunderstandings. And like all stories it’s hard to know where to begin telling it.
The writer had thought that last line was a hilarious understatement.
But that first page was far behind now, discarded and buried. There was so much more to tell.
‘Visionatus Improbablus and the Palace Under the Sea’, he wrote, and added details of King Troooooomboooone and of the dynastic prophecy that a descendant of his would one day father the Celestian Messiah. “She will bring the key to your saving everything,” the magnificent brine shrimp had promised.
‘Visionatus Improbablus and the Navigation Toy Uncanny’, the author rushed on, with crabbed script and sore fingers. It was a mild discomfort for a captive whose bones had been shattered by his inquisitors. Far more important was the fabulous navigation device crafted by Jamison de Bautista that pointed the way across the Western Ocean to a cave of secrets on an impossible island.
‘Visionatus Improbablus and the Lapine of Delight’, the captive penned, scratching down the details of the Fern Forest and the purple-furred shape that dwelled in a bower at its heart. There were mystic secrets in those passages for quabbalists wise enough to set aside their instruments and hug something furry.
The cell was bitter cold, but the pages beneath the writer’s fingers became warm at his touch. ‘Visionatus Improbablus and the Urchin Incendiary’, he set down. That remarkable flame that the traveller had received would light his way where no other had a chance. And the Nurse of the Night had healed his burns afterwards anyway.
‘Visionatus Improbablus and the Advocatrix of Amour’ – the hero had been lucky that his nemesis had not considered that he was for playing with in her usual manner, but there had been significant complications with his companion Helen, and a whole episode with green-skinned sirens that the book man had placed in extra code to protect the innocent.
‘Visionatus Improbablus and the Very Sarcastic Raven’ – that had involved a mechanical insect and Saint Nicholas’ workshop staff and a horde of flesh-eating gremlins called Fur-Beys. There was some conclusion in a happy place where all things were made right, but the writer had set that part aside for later.
The tale went on, pouring out, chapter after chapter, as much omitted as had been included. Gods and sorceresses, dragons and Amazons, and a remarkable procession of concubine slaves and other attractive women all wandered through the narrative. There was a coffee-coloured witch whom Helen had had to hit quite hard.
‘Visionatus Improbablus and the New World Ghouls’, the prisoner scribbled, recounting the culinary ambitions of Abyssal Mafeasus and the rebellion of the scribes; and of the human settlement above that they would build to be a metropolis of gothic mysteries.
But at last the traveller had assembled all the things the Tome had specified were needed to find and access the Vault of Histories on the Island of Secrets in the ultimate West. Knowing he went to his death and revelation, Visionatus Improbablus entered the House of the Lair and fathomed its mystery.
The writer shuddered. “I may need to invent the idea of footnotes,” he muttered to himself. “Goddess of HTML aid me!” He dipped pen to ink again, took a long painful breath, and began to write: ‘Visionatus Improbablus and the Secret of the Parodyverse.’
Obliqueness was required. Everything had to be in plain sight but concealed. The pattern should only be visible when the perspective was right. Everything must fit together at the very last.
The soldiers were coming for the book man. They would kill him for what he knew. Would they burn his work? He did not see his own end, only that of the subject about whom he wrote.
‘The Parody should not exist,’ he scribbled. ‘So what? It does. Deal with it.’
The quill dropped from his fingers. There was a clattering outside the door. The bolts rasped back.
“There you are,” a rough voice declared. He shouldered his way into the room, gave the captive a confident smirk, and shouldered his longbow “Boy, did we have some trouble looking you up, book man! Luckily, Uncle Tricksy was on the job!”
“Let me through,” a young woman in odd, brief armour insisted. “I can bear him up. Bint-Zilim, gather his papers.”
“Got it,” another girl promised. She was clad in dark grey thief’s garb so cunning that she almost blended in to the walls.
Another man arrived, clad in dark blue plate mail with herald’s tabs. “Make sure you get all of it,” the grim messenger insisted. “Get him out of here. I’ll make sure nobody who follows us lives to regret it.”
Another knight in shining silver and a plumed helmet appeared. “Do not worry, sir,” he told the prisoner. “We are here to rescue you. We are the last of the Honourable Order of Knights Improbablar. I am Sir Jayhan de Jaboz and this is my company.”
“The Knights?” the book man wheezed. “You were suppressed. Eliminated.”
“Do we look suppressed ta you, scribbler?” the swaggering archer demanded. “I’d like ta seem ‘em try an’ oppress me. Right, wonder wench?”
“Shut up, Tricksy,” the girl in the Amazon armour told him. “Keep on mission. We don’t have long before the Conformists overcome the diversion La Cobra set up. We need to get out and get these documents back to the First Lady.”
“We are the last of the Knights,” Sir Jayhan confessed to the rescued scholar. “Our time has passed. But your book, that will be copied. Circulated. However they try to censor or forbid it, more editions will be passed on. Those who read it, some of them, will see the truth behind it.”
“That we do not conform,” the knight herald declared. “That is the message.”
“And in the next generations, we get that out the sneaky way,” Bint-Zilim whispered. “Not knights. Thinkers. Plotters. Spies and scholars. A College. An Improbable College!” She cradled the gathered writings she had retrieved as if they were the most important thing in the world; possibly they were. “A lot of people are going to want to know about…” she checked the first page, “‘The Alchemikal Wedding of Visionatus Improbablus.’
***
“I suppose you think that is very clever,” Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity, Shaper of Worlds, told Lisa, Destroyer of Tales. “You give those Knights Improbablar an ending that is also a new beginning. But I am the one who starts the stories. I can give a rather better opening to the Church of Conformity that comes after them.”
“Frankly, we’re both pretty limited messing with the past,” the amorous advocatrix admitted to her treacherous fellow cosmic-office holder. “First off, there were different entities occupying the Triumvirate roles back when this all happened and they take precedence over our interference, and secondly we both have timelines that depend on a lot of what happened here, so if we mess too hard we wipe ourselves from reality. You might have broken your oath but you can’t buck the narrative of history.”
“Not yet,” Symmetry replied with a triumphant smirk. “But Wilbur was Chronicler of Stories and then Shaper of Worlds during those years. You have no idea what Wilbur has planned. What I can start now.”
“Wilbur Parody. No wonder you were able to break your office’s boundaries. He’s the man with the cheat codes to the Parodyverse.”
“Which is why he will win. Which is why your resistance and the ridiculous things the Chronicler of Stories is attempting will come to nothing.”
“I’m still not clear on how Wilbur is back. After his big attempt at stealing our futures and diverting that Resolution War he kept banging on about he was killed by the Parody Master and we all crossed him off our tedious manipulators lists. Now he appears to be attempting a sequel, and as usual with such things trying to top his previous attempts to go large.”
“His return? Why I gave him his fresh start, in exchange for the information I required to gain this Office and to exceed its petty limitations. Just as I arranged proper new openings for the Apostate, for Crapsack, for Jikininki, for St Evil, for Vernald, and for all the other members of our Coalition. That is how Wilbur was able to assemble all of the forces he requires to finally complete the goal to which he has been working through the entire history of the Parodyverse!”
“Those were some pretty shoddy new starts you handed out then, given what’s happened to most of them. And some aren’t around to complain for their money back.”
“I gave them a chance. If they wasted their new beginning that is none of my concern. The beginning I have written myself will see me rise over all!”
Lisa gave Symmetry a scornful nod. “And you fit in as, what? Mrs Wilbur, sitting by his side knitting booties for your Wilburlets? Or Primary Henchman, carrying out orders too important for other flunkies to say ‘yes master’ to? Or do you imagine a sudden treacherous lunge at his moment of triumph and suddenly you have the keys of the Parodyverse and stand supreme at last?”
“You mock, as if you haven’t slutted your way around the who’s who of powerful men in the Parodyverse. But I know…”
“You don’t know the difference between a damned slut and a damned whore.”
Symmetry glared at the Destroyer of Tales. “You have written your own end,” she promised. “Your power is fading. The Chronicler’s fortress is overrun. Soon he will fall and you will stand alone – and then not stand at all.”
“I do some of my best work laying down. Check my Craigslist reviews.” The amorous advocatrix stared across the dim besieged conceptual plane towards the dark silhouette of the Fortress of Narrative. “You and Wilbur send Church of Conformity agents into Greg’s man-cave fortress and you expect him to come quietly?” Lisa snorted. “Your first mistake was to attack before he’d had his morning coffee.”
“With the power that Wilbur imbued in them, the Inquisitors cannot be harmed by the Chronicler’s power. Why are you sniggering?”
“You’re so new at this! What does it matter if you’re indestructible if you can get pinned under a landslide? Why is being protected from the Chronicler of Stories’ power important when he can use it to bring anything and anyone he wants into the narrative to fight you instead?”
Symmetry made a connection. “Those wild stories the Conformist Battalions were spreading, about some kind of massive fire-breathing reptile inside the halls of that fortress…”
“Just the start. You’ve severely underestimated how pissed Greg can get.”
“Most of his old allies are gone now. You granted many of them a pass to a happy ending yourself, after the Parody Master fell.”
“Then you’ll remember how good I am at loopholes. But really, the Chronicler of Stories-in-telling doesn’t need help from the Mistress of Stories-now-told. He can always dig into his back catalogue of unfinished narratives. There are a great deal of them. For example, he’s already tweaked Banjooooo’s backstory And wait ‘till you see what he’s got coming with A…”
Symmetry dismissed the threat of a Sea Monkey King. “He can pull in every tedious loose end that he ever neglected. It matters not. I command beginnings. And by my authority, amplified a thousandfold at the command of Wilbur Parody, I have reached out to every hero that would be, every future paragon of the Parodyverse, and I have twisted them to evil. I have brought them all here and set them against the Chronicler of Stories – and you!” The Shaper of Worlds laughed triumphantly. “You wonder why the Age of Heroes is over? I have Shaped there to be no more!”
“You really think that’s how it works? How quaint. You don’t know heroes. I promise you I’ve known a lot of them.”
Symmetry disdained the creator of the Lair Legion Induction Programme. And the Lair Legion Tryout Programme. And the Armed Forces and Emergency Services Support Programme. “Your cosmic senses see it as clearly as mine. I win. You lose.”
“Well that would be an ending,” Lisa pointed out. “But we’re still arguing middles and beginnings. For example, Greg and I borrowed one of the Family of the Pointless.”
“Temporary Death, to drag my feckless son back from falling into eternal hell. Yes. I agreed to that.”
“Well, that was her first job, sure. But since she was in the neighbourhood she did a few more favours too. You might want to direct your cosmic awareness to Comic-Book Limbo.”
Symmetry looked into the sub-plane that was the drip-tray of the Parodyverse. “The whole of Faerie? You gathered all the most eccentric parts of Parody Earth into the Many Coloured Lands and then you archived it all into Comic-Book Limbo!”
“Well, we had assistance from the Allied Pantheons and a select roster of other cosmic players,” Lisa confessed. “But there they all are, out of your boring rewritten continuity in the place where they can be deleted or rebooted depending on the outcome of our struggle.”
“That is more desperate than cramming them away in an elder servitor’s back yard.”
“Well, it turns out that’s why Comic-Book Limbo was put there. For today – specifically today. Someone retconned it in when had one of his moments of omnipotency.”
“Wilbur has the codes to operate those Celestian entities. When he awakes them he can undo whatever ridiculous modifications our scheming ex-lover has set in place.”
“You may notice that Lemuria is due to also drop into Comic-Book Limbo pretty soon also. Did you really expect that electrocuting the High Priestess of the Manga Shoggoth would do more than stop her heart for a second when she’s in the very chamber designed to catch sundered souls and her boss can shove her back into her body as soon as Silicone Sally starts the CPR? But it does position the Lost Continent very nicely with all the other assets lined up in Limbo ready for deployment.”
“Nothing that falls into that Forgotten Place can leave of its own accord,” Symmetry reminded the advocatrix. “Not without an Office-holder’s consent. And Wilbur and I are blocking you and the Chronicler.”
“About that. Before you revealed your unremarkable heel-turn, you approved some new lesser office holders with Greg and me.”
“The wastrel useless Dealer of the Deck and the insipid new Keeper of the Borders? Of all the broken Offices we could have revived, you went for those two? With those occupants? Yes, I passed them. They kept you occupied.”
Lisa inspected her fingernails. “Well yes, we were occupied. Didn’t it occur to you to wonder why? Why those two, especially? Trust a villainess to be so in love with her big plan that she misses the details.”
Symmetry focussed her Office senses on Harlan Bull and Zania Chhabra. “The Map of Realities to open a way from Comic-Book Limbo to this conceptual plane. The Deck of Destinies to project one man through to defy me!”
“There is a reason there are so-called minor offices as well as the Triumvirate. And of course some of them have access in due season to Comic-Book Limbo. Which means that our two newest minor offices could team up to get one office-holder out.”
Symmetry saw it too late. The Shaper of Worlds swung round too late to prevent the gateway. Her timing was… wrong.
Reality adjusted to allow one more person back into the story.
A tweed-clad figure stepped through from nowhere and tipped his hat at the Destroyer of Tales. “Morning’, m’dear. Lookin’ jolly topping as always, Miss Wa…”
Symmetry drew on the power of her Office to annihilate the intruding eccentric Englishman.
The Chronometer of Infinity shifted the annihilation wave into the future.
“Madam. Less of a pleasure.” Sir Mumphrey regarded his predecessor and old enemy with distaste. “So you’ve made a hash of it and slithered back the side of the ungodly again, what?”
“You are a minor office, Mumphrey Wilton!” Symmetry hissed disbelievingly as her willed destruction of her foe was temporally displaced. “You have not the power to defy the Shaper of Worlds!”
“But I do the endings, darling,” Lisa pointed out. “Anyway, in his or her own field, each office-holder great or small is supreme.”
“Dashed true,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton agreed. “Symmetry, you’ve been a boil on humanity’s backside since before you held my Chronometer. You had a jolly good second chance when you became Shaper - and you’ve wasted it on blaggard’s schemes and blind ambition. Not done. Goitres of your species have to be squashed one and for all.”
“And you are the one to do it?” Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity sneered at her old foe. She reached out with her overwhelming power, already a magnitude more than the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity, swollen again by Wilbur Parody’s adjustments. “I’m cancelling your little gadget’s power right now!”.
“Jolly good,” approved Mumphrey. “That’ll end the time displacement it was running on what I brought with me from Comic-Book Limbo then.”
A very large shadow appeared overhead.
Lost Schloss Schreckhausen materialised above the Shaper of Worlds. The Baroness’ castle dropped down on Symmetry with a heavy finality.
Sir Mumphrey removed his hat.
“Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead,” Lisa confirmed with strict professional accuracy. “That is how you set up an ending.”
Sir Mumphrey looked around the battered conceptual plane. “Needs another dose of fixing up, then, I see.”
Lisa sighed theatrically. “I’m afraid so. Who would have guessed being in the Triumvirate would require so much housework?”
“Can we get in there and help the Chronicler?”
“No. He’s locked himself into a closed narrative. It’ll get pretty intense in that Place of Ravens and Destinies. I don’t think even I’d be safe. Besides, whatever happens here doesn’t matter now. Wilbur Parody has cancelled any other influence the Offices can have to thwart his masterplan.”
“But how?” Mumphrey puzzled. “Still tryin’ to make sense of some bits of this. Where did Wilbur spring up from anyway? Before he was Destroyer, Chronicler, and Shaper? Before he was Mayor of Parodiopolis and head of the Church of Conformity? How did he come back after being thoroughly squished by the Parody Master, the most powerful being in the Parodyverse? If he always had these deuced codes for the Celestians, why didn’t he use ‘em before? What does young Visionary’s tomb have to do with it? Why are HV and the dashed Hooded Hood mixed up in the plot?” The eccentric Englishman momentarily looked his age. “Is this the Resolution War that Wilbur Parody prophesied, the end of the Parodyverse?”
Lisa shrugged. “Good questions. I generally find that if I wear a tight enough bustier one of the clever-type-heroes eventually explains it all to me. Or an archvillain. But somebody. Call it an extra super-power.”
“Be serious, m’dear. We have many friends at risk. A lot of ‘em lost in Comic-Book Limbo…”
“Not lost, Mumph. Gathered. Not trapped. Waiting.”
“Then there’s a plan?”
“Maybe. Xander is fairly resistant to my bustiers so he didn’t really explain, but there’s definitely something afoot. I’m afraid all we can do now is sit out the rest of the story and see what happens.”
“You don’t seem too worried.”
“Oh, I’m worried! Ioldabaoth can get very Byzantine when he’s pushed into a corner.”
Sir Mumphrey suppressed a comment unfit to speak in front of a lady.
“We’ve helped things along,” Lisa comforted the eccentric Englishman. “We’ve lined up assets in Comic-Book Limbo ready to deploy if one of the triggers gets through. We’ve given Symmetry a new beginning as a greasy puddle of yuck under a Germanic horror set. We’ve created an exciting new job vacancy for future advertisement. Not bad for a scratch effort in response to an annoying return cosmic menace who decided to cheat from the start.”
“Still not happy about that,” the eccentric Englishman rumbled, tugging his whiskers. “Symmetry brought him back so he could show her how to get the power to bring him back? Doesn’t seem like the whole story. Feels like we’re missing a piece.”
“Well, I imagine we’ll get to it at the end. I do like a twist just before the climax.”
“Hmph.” Mumphrey remembered, but was a gentleman so did not comment.
“Now all we can do is see how it all works out and find some way to pass the time until then.”
“Have Wisden’s Cricketing Almanac for 1899 in my pocket if that helps. Surrey won the County Championship and W.G. played his last match for England and his last championship for Gloucestershire. Ranhitsinjhi made 3,159 runs with an average of 63.18 and eight centuries.”
Lisa eyed Mumphrey speculatively. “I do happen to have a surviving few cans of kool-whip,” she noted, apropos of nothing.
***
26. Vaahir of Viigo and the Price of Paradise
 The Shoggoth towered over the rebel Caphan warlord, larger than a house, shifting and bubbling in constant reformation. The light that passed through the oozing translucent biomass was greasy and strained. To mortal sensibilities, every aspect of the elder beast was wrong, alien, terrifying. The Shoggoth’s very existence dragged mortal minds towards madness.
Vaahir of Viigo stood his ground and pressed his terror down so he could use it to fight. He no longer had any weapon that could harm the being that was effectively the god of Lost Lemuria. He could only die trying.
I do not like slavery the Shoggoth said. The words burst into Vaahir’s mind as if they had been dripped there. I was made to be slave by cruel masters. I will not abide others to be slaves.
On Vaahir’s Pleiades homeworld Caph IX slavery was endemic. The female population, fully nine tenths of the people born to Caphan biology, were all considered property. Males of lesser status were chattels too, many neutered as eunuchs and condemned to manual labour. A few lords and masters ruled. Some took seriously their responsibility to care for their slaves. Others did not.
“I love Kaara,” Vaahir persisted. They were not bad last words. “I vowed she would be mine.”
Vowed to her, to Kaara, desert rose of the House of Jaaxa, one of the most eligible girls on the planet, whose purchase price as an elite pleasure slave was probably beyond the means of a younger son of a noble but not rich, House unless that young man undertook extraordinary adventures in quest of her. And so Vaahir had, until Kaara’s name was sung for the glory his deeds had won her, and her price had risen with it, keeping her ever from his reach.
When he had finally gained the sum to take to Kaara’s father and make her his to hold forever, it was too late. The strong places of Toosin had fallen by treachery to a raider enemy. Vaahir was not strong enough to fight them alone. He was captured, tortured, condemned to slow painful death in the labour mines. Kaara was told he was dead. She had been abused and tormented and finally had been sold offworld into the collection of an alien master who cared nothing for her wellbeing except as livestock for his use.
Vaahir had escaped, had tracked down Kaara and the other Caphan women that were now remembered in campfire songs as the Lost Flowers of Caph. He had come to bring vengeance to their captors and see them safe home; and to make Kaara his as he had once promised her in simpler former days. Except that the nine slaves had already passed to a new master, and it was he who had shown them kindness and rescued them from their distress; and Kaara was now legal property of the loathsome elder beast who said he hated slavery. All of the things that Vaahir had done, even the atrocities, had been for naught.
“Kill me then,” he told the Shoggoth. “Vow that Kaara will be safe and well.”
The Shoggoth made a deep bubbling that denoted thought. Kaara had offered to die for Vaahir, and he for her. Whatever slavery existed between those two was not of the kind he hated.
In your culture you are expected to labour to amass a price to exchange for your mate, the Shoggoth reasoned. In this was you demonstrate that you value her and will provide for her needs, and that of her spawn. Kaara wishes you to do this.
“Yes. Haven’t I shown I will pay any price for her? I want to be with her but I’d die to save her.”
Very well, Vaahir of Viggo. I shall make my judgement.
The Shoggoth’s sentence on the tenth Caphan had been pronounced on the shore of the Lemurian Sanctuary before the Caphan refugees and the gathered Lair Legion. Vaahir would be sent to the distant, ruined world of Plxtragar, to labour there in its defence, to learn humility on the war-ravaged planet by caring for the sick and helping them rebuild. If I am pleased at what Vaahir has done, and what he has learned, we shall speak again. If at that time he seeks the female Kaara as his mate, and she him, I will outline the quests he must achieve to make this possible.
Vaahir often dreamed of that night, on the wide shore under alien stars, and of Kaara coming to him to be his love. Later there had been other dangers, political upheavals and invasion on Caph, a Parody War that threatened all worlds everywhere, even the threat of the Living Death That Sucks. Kaara had been at Vaahir’s side since then, and at last she had given him the parchment from her master the Shoggoth that outlined the price he must render for her to be his to hold fast and forever.
This time the dream was different.
This time the Shoggoth’s words changed. It is time, Vaahir, of Viigo. You know what you must do.
“Yes. But how can I be with Kaara if I must die for it?”
That is not dead which can eternal lie with Kaara. There is very great risk. You mortals are rarely sensible when it comes to pathways between life and death. You sought a price and now you know it.
“I understand. But I’m in the middle of another war here. I’m co-ordinating the campaign against the Apostate and his conversion fleets. Not very well, I must admit, given our losses, but I am running things.”
Make your arrangements and then go. This is important.
“Millions are dying. Billions are threatened. Where the dreadnaught Cruel Deceiver is deployed we have local supremacy, but it is one ship and cannot be in a thousand places at once. The mercenaries from Earth activated certain codes to destroy the Crusader Fleet but the Avatar reversed it all by his will alone. The frontier is pushed back almost to Plxtragar now. Caph is not far behind.”
You would die for Kaara. Would you die to defeat the foe who closes on your worlds?
“Yes. I’d make that bargain.”
Then you have your quest, Vaahir of Viigo. Make your dispositions… and then die.
Cool fingers brushed the Caphan warlord’s forehead. He awoke, sweating, wild-eyed.
“You were having a nightmare, my Lord,” Kaara told him, close, concerned. “You must sleep. You gave orders to be woken in less than an hour to receive report of the Klayhog scouts and to finalise deployments of the Pigeonwarrior Peace Corps for the defence of this world.”
“Right. Yes. I must. But I’m awake now, so I’d better start in on the work. There’s a lot to set in place.”
Kaara jumped up to dress and to fetch Vaahir’s weapons.
“You don’t need to miss out on sleep also,” he told her.
“And yet I do. Perhaps it means that I like you?”
***
Faster-than-light real time communication links were becoming unreliable; not because of the new physical constraints of the Parodyverse, which had not yet extended this far from Earth, but because of the electronic chaff and jamming countermeasures of a hot war zone. They were still able to punch a good-enough video signal to Shazana Pel and her elite squad of surviving Thonngarian wingmen.
“I see the design of the defence,” she admitted to her old comrade-in-resistance. “I’m not clear on why you’re passing local strategic responsibility to me.”
“There’s another front I have to deal with,” Vaahir explained. “I may be out of comms. You’ll need to make fast decisions without waiting for answers that might not get through.”
“If this ambush works we’ll put those Crusade ships into one zhonghla sporr of a vice,” she agreed. “It won’t stop them, but we can maybe get the last of the to Yellow Flashlights in there to keep them back for another day. If so, will Kahnn get here in time?”
“Depends on whether the Deceiver can push through opposition around New Crystaxiar fast enough. I’m sending Ophelo and Koom and their battalions from Golgamoria to try and cut through from behind. After that it’ll be down to Captain Kahnn to try and salvage what he can.”
“The Apostate grows stronger on his followers’ belief every moment,” Pel fretted. “He’s been back in flesh what, three and a half days, and we’re already pushed back to here. We’re running out of places to retreat. Where is the Hooded Hood?”
“He may be trapped in the Normalverse wave. If so he won’t be able to help us this time.”
“Then we must look to our own defence? Let us die well, Lord Vaahir. It has been an honour to fly beside you!”
There were many details that must be attended. The warlord of Caph worked through them. He beamed off a time-delayed explanation of his actions to his liege lord, the Emperor of All Caph. Last of all he placed a hand-written letter on the bed that he and Kaara shared.
A hidden compartment in his writing desk contained the little bottle of disquieting fluid that the Shoggoth had sent him. The liquid seemed to twist behind the glass, shifting of its own accord. It waited for him.
Vaahir unstoppered the bottle and put it to his lips. “For Kaara,” he whispered, and drank.
He had scarcely set the philtre down when he died.
***
No poison of such potence ever made
To drag a hero to the land of death;
Lord Vaahir felt his strength and whole life fade
And named his true love with his dying breath.
Vaahir awoke in a desert of red sand beside a dried up lake of salt.
“The Last Waste,” he recognised. Every Caphan must one day come here.
A relentless sun beat down, bouncing heat off jagged rocks and crimson dunes. Vaahir staggered to his feet and saw only desolation to every horizon.
He set out. The dead man had no possessions, not clothes to shield himself from the blazing rays nor weapon to protect him from the predators who awaited the newly dead. He merely trudged, not bothering to select a direction. It did not matter.
Somewhere, far beyond the glaring desert, were supposed to be cool oases where gentle rivers supplied lush gardens. There would be the tents of his ancestors, the long-gone House of Viigo, and those who loved him that had gone before. If he was strong enough, determined enough, if he had lived a life of honour and duty, then he might find that camp and receive their welcome.
That was not where Vaahir was going, though. That was not why the Shoggoth had sent him here.
He had a message to deliver.
He trudged on in the remorseless heat. Behind him the bones of dead animals rattled as foul spirits borrowed them to stalk the traveller and devour his soul.
***
She found him dead and read his parting word
Lord Vaahir gone too sudden and too young;
She bit back all lament and reached, unspurred,
And touched the poison vial to her tongue.
Kaara awoke in a desert of red sand beside a dried up lake of salt.
“The Last Waste,” she recognised. Every Caphan must one day come here.
A relentless sun beat down, bouncing heat off jagged rocks and crimson dunes. “Where is he then?” she asked herself, but she already knew the answer. “Each of us must take this journey on our own. But I shall find him at the destination.”
Faithful past death, Kaara of Jaaxa trudged on to find the man she loved more than life.
***
Vaahir limped along, leaving a trail of dripping blood from the wounds the past phantasms had left as he fought them. He had forgotten how many enemies he had killed, starting with the pirates of Kolcalchia and the Tyrant of Voldemeer, through the traitors who had committed slaughter on the House of Jaaxa, through the Lovetoads who had purchased Kaara into penury, through the raiders who had made spoil of ruined Plxtragar, and the Thonnagarians who had invaded Caph. Hardest of all had been Prince Oodan, architect of House Toosin’s destruction, raider of its fair daughter, who had presided over her torment and Vaahir’s torture; but it had been a pleasure to slay him again under this remorseless desert sky.
The wounds he had taken weakened Vaahir. He stumbled and almost slid down a shale bank onto rocks below.
“Watch your steps,” advised Shazana Pel, treading beside him.
“What are you doing here,” the sunstroked traveller asked through dried cracked lips. “Are you dead?”
“If so there aren’t enough of my enemies around me. It’s your afterlife dream. I suspect I’m just a friend to walk along with you for a while and keep you going.”
“Well, that’s better than bone khersks and old enemies jumping out of the ground,” the warlord approved. “I don’t suppose you brought a water flask?”
“I don’t think it works that way. But I must ask,why did you commit suicide on the eve of our hardest battle? It sends a rather poor message to the troops.”
“I was assured that this was the only way to win. By, well, a dream of the Manga Shoggoth. I have a message to deliver in the realm of the dead.”
“What message? To whom? Can I just fly ahead with it?”
“I don’t understand the missive. Just runes in my head that I need to paint on an old ruin. Its far across the Last Waste, further than any Caphan has ever travelled.”
“Then I shall bear you company for a while.”
Pel travelled with him for a day and a night. When she could stay no longer, Vaahir went on alone, across a salt basin where giant land snakes rose to devour wisps of spirit that tried to traverse their hunting ground. Limping away after that fight, the warlord felt his strength failing him.
“Keep marching, warrior,” Kiivan of Caph commanded him. “You have never failed your duty. Do not start now.”
“My emir!” Vaahir gasped. “What…?”
“Did you believe you had but one friend to travel with you in the lonely places?” Ohanna of Raael challenged. “Your deeds have earned you many who would aid you. We stand here for them. Walk with us.”
Vaahir could not let down the rulers of Caph, saviours of the people. He stumbled on, ignoring his pain. Kiivan and Ohanna spoke with him of the new society they were building, of court gossip, of their travels amongst the stars.
“If the Plxtragar line falls, Caph will be exposed to the Crusade Armada,” Vaahir warned. “The Apostate’s cultists will already be there, fomenting discontent, preparing rebellion.”
“And that might have worked even six months ago,” Kiivan appraised. “But now the reforms are begun. Enough people can see the changes. We shall not descend to foolishness again.”
“The good thing about civil wars and invasion resistances is that it helps identify the people to trust with important offices,” Ohanna pointed out. “Keep walking, my lord. You have far to go.”
The last scion of Viigo walked on as the sun descended on the second day.
***
Terrors awaited Kaara in the bare deserts and shadowed canyons. She had run from Prince Oodan and his warriors, who had sought to drag her into chains as they had in life. She remembered the athletic lessons of Luuma Swiftheels, who had won many championships races as a girl to the glory of her master, and she sped faster than the men who chased her until their cries were lost amongst the labyrinths of canyons.
Later had come the Slimy Slaver Lovetoad, and Kaara had found that she had courage now to fight him as she had not during her miserable indenture to his harem. “The Lovetoads are bulky but their legs are weak,” Miiri had once said. “A kick to the back of the knees – where one might kiss if it was a s’rooth v’maskat - will bring them down. Then an honour blade to the scrotum. Fingernails would do in an emergency.”
Naked in the wilderness, Kaara had no honour blade houri dagger but she had fingernails. And, it appeared, a deep well of fury from which to draw when confronted by the spectre of her former master.
Worst had been the pallid-skinned hollow-eyed shape of Petar Tyolanh, who had only ever worn human semblance as a disguise and whose evils knew no bounds. Kaara feared him most of all, for she could not fight Nyalurkotep, greatest agent of the slumbering Fairly Great Old Ones who had once intended her as a sacrifice to their glory. But she could deny him.
“You are not really here,” she insisted to the ghost that blocked her way. “Vaahir destroyed you, at least in that form, and I am free.”
She stepped through Petar with no worse consequence than a greasy shiver.
The adrenaline of that encounter and the euphoria of triumph sustained the slave girl across the wide desolation under a remorseless sun. Eventually she realised that she was not alone.
“It is a good day to be legendary,” noted Losiira of the Nine Songs. “I trust you are paying attention.”
“My tent-sisters…” Kaara almost wept. “I walk the Last Waste. I am looking for Vaahir.”
“Very proper,” agreed Deeela. “Even in our Caliph’s brave new Caph we must remember some traditional values.”
“The Lord of Viigo is not her actual master,” Noona pointed out. “Following him into death would not have been required even in the oldest law.”
“Not required, no,” Odoona agreed. “But to choose it? That is the stuff of myth. You go find him, tent-sister!”
“But when you do, don’t feel he has to define you,” Miiri of Earth advised.
“He drank Shoggoth-poison as her purchase price,” Sayaana pointed out. “I think it is fair to consider that he is also allowing the Flower of Jaaxa to influence him.”
The discussion went on, ranging from Vaahir’s practical assets to some rather explicit discussion of his other faculties, then on to the roles he had played in the reconstruction of Caph and the restoration of Plxtragar. Kaara said little but listened to her beloved friends chatter and bickering. It eased her steps.
When the Nine Exiles had to part with the coming of evening, Kaara moved on alone. She steeled herself to trudge forward in complete darkness as the chill of evening clamped down on her. The voices of night spirits tempted her with promises and secrets, or threatened her doom if she did not turn aside from the path.
Before dawn, other voices answered them. Numb with cold and drugged with exhaustion, it took Kaara some time to recognise the insolent scorn of her Earthly tent-sister Keerry, the implacable sensible arguments of the nymph Magweed and her knowledgeable birth-brother, the worldly wisdom of Matron Meggaan.
By morning more supporters escorted her, the highborn women of Earth: Mistress Liiisa, first lady of the Lair Clan, and with her Ladies Daancer, Yoo, Yuuki, Haallie, Eebony, Aamber, and others. More seemed to flit beyond the heat haze.
“So many sisters…” Kaara marvelled, through the smile made her lips crack.
“Oh, we brought some brothers too,” Haallie promised her. “We just sent them out to the perimeter to make themselves useful. There was some pack of raiding Caphan hunters and a stray prince chasing after you so we deployed Donar and CSFB! and DBS and a few others in that direction.”
“I don’t think spirit guides are allowed to do that.”
“Yo is thinking they are,” the pure thought being assured the traveller.
“We also brought Visionary along,” Lisa added. “In case we needed someone who wasn’t useful.”
Master Viisionary walked beside Kaara for a long way as her feet blistered and her strength waned. She did to wish to fail him so she carried on.
***
For three hard days and three more endless nights
Of trials and of snares to kill and bind
Two shining hearts prevailed in all their fights
And came at last to what they sought to find.
Yet now they found the shibboleth they sought
The talisman to triumph at their goals
The last most awful battle must be fought
Their enemy awaited for their souls
Vaahir was uncertain of what he saw, but it was his destination.
Rising from the desert sand, half-covered, was a long red chariot of metal. It had two horizontal rows of glazed windows on either side and an opening at the rear to admit entrance. A sign of the front was written in one of the primary Terran languages and it said: 64 - Trafalgar Square
Between the double-decker London bus and the baffled Caphan warlord stood Petar Tyolanh, bearing a plas gar combat blade. His usual effete monochrome lounge suit was replaced by formal Caphan duelling garb.
“You!” Vaahir hissed. “Of course you would be here. You pretended to be my friend, brought me from the slave-mines and set me on a course to save Kaara. But really you were using me and her as sacrifices to carry outs your dark masters’ will against the Shoggoth that had escaped them.”
“I saved your life and gave you the opportunity to gain the thing you wished for,” the herald of the elder beings replied. “Really, I can’t be blamed if you wished for ridiculous things and did not specify additional conditions.”
“You tried to give Kaara to your Fairly Great Old Ones!”
“So? One day I shall give everybody to them. When my masters awake they will plunder all of time and space and devour each intelligence that ever existed. Why not let her avoid the rush?”
Vaahir snarled at his treacherous former ally. “Get out of my way. Right now.”
“Or what? Shall we fight another honour duel? Only you seem to be lacking any kind of weapon. And you are hardly at your best, are you? Near to death in the lands of death. How close to the final edge is that? And I am immortal, of course, so there’s that. The odds aren’t looking good, old chap.”
“I’ve fought against bad odds before.”
“Not these odds, Vaahir.” Petar smiled like a badly-animated graphic. “But here comes the best of complications, so let’s move to the fun part!”
***
Kaara saw the silhouette of the anomalous transport from Earth. As the angle of the sun changed she saw a lone figure trudging towards it – and her soul leaped.
“Vaahir!” she called. “My love!”
He was too far across the plain to hear her cries. Kaara summoned the last of her strength and limp-trotted over the burning sand to catch him.
She was quite near when she saw Petar Tyolanh appear to challenge him.
“No! I dismissed him. He has no power here!” she insisted; but now she understood that things had changed. Petar was Vaahir’s final test, not hers. It was the enslaved, disfigured, tormented scion of Viigo that he had saved and healed, accruing a debt due from the hero that was paid by Petar’s reality at this ending.
Kaara ran towards the man she loved and the being she feared most in all the worlds.
“Vaahir!”
He heard her then, and turned to see her approach with disbelief and joy and horror. She saw the suspicion cross his face that she was another illusion, some demon guised to draw him to destruction; but as she knew him, he was able to discern her.
She fell into his embrace.
“Kaara! How are you here? Why are you… dead?”
“You left without me. That was unkind, my lord.”
“You followed? How?”
“The Shoggoth’s philtre was not empty. I hoped to find you across the Last Waste. And I have.”
“You have. Faithful Kaara, best of all woman, my beloved forever!”
Petar Tyolanh snorted. “Only beings who have not experienced eternity would say such stupid things. You think love so great and powerful? It is brief and shallow compared to what is beyond. Lovers are the greatest fools of all, for they claim forever but gain scant moments bought with regret.”
“How would you know?” Kaara challenged the herald. “You have never known love. You know its price but not its worth.”
Petar rolled his eyes. His perpetual sneer deepened. “A demonstration, then.”
Vaahir set Kaara behind him protectively.
The herald of the elder creatures gestured to the red bus. “You do not know this thing? It is a creation of the humans of the world they call Earth. It was once a form of public transport, moving in two dimensions in their three-dimensional city, trickling through timespace. Later it was refitted with dimensional exception engineering so that the champions of that little world could undertake a tour of it. It became marginally less useless than it was. Now it is abandoned here, a promise of one slim hope that you might overcome the overwhelming march of the Apostate of the Parodyverse. It is your destination.”
“This is where I must be, yes. I have a message to deliver. Step aside.”
“I will not. Not can you pass me unless you conquer me. And you may not conquer me for you have not the means or the might. You can only… barter.”
“Be careful, my lord,” Kaara whispered in Vaahir’s ear. He nodded back.
“The Apostate will destroy your fleets. Eventually even your dimensional dreadnaught can be overwhelmed. He will fall upon Plxtragar and crucify every heathen. Your Pigeonwarriors will burn. Your allies will suffer the cruellest ends he can devise. Then the Avatar will sweep on to Caph and do the same, and thence across the universe. By the time the normalcy wave arrives his work will be done. His agreement with that wave’s author will allow him to keep what he has gained. Your cause will fail and countless billions will perish and countless trillions will bleed and weep.”
“Or I could get you out of my way,” Vaahir pointed out.
“You could try. Death here is death indeed, Caphan hero.” Petar flexed spidery white fingers. “You can buy passage to this vehicle. Purchase your chance to save all. You have one thing to sell to me. One slave to barter.” He pointed to Kaara.
“She is not mine to give,” Vaahir insisted. “And if she were, I never would.”
“Is she not? In life she was the property of her father Toosin, and then of Oodan, then the Lovetoad, then Visionary, and then the treacherous Shoggoth. But death ends those contracts. Here she forges her own chains. If she chooses, she is yours.”
“I do choose that,” Kaara insisted. “I am Vaahir’s, fiercely and forever!”
“Forever again? I fear that is an overly romantic assumption.” Petar rubbed his palms together. “I will accept ownership of the slave Kaara of Jaaxa and I will step aside and allow you the chance to save trillions. To save everyone else you care about, to uphold your duties as warlord, to be the hero that is required to save the day. All that is required is one tiny tragedy: the heroine comes to me. True love fails.”
Kaara tried not to tremble. Vaahir must not know how much she feared this end. He must yield her to save her sisters, her world, perhaps all worlds. It was a fair price.
It was a bad end.
“Kaara…” Vaahir breathed.
“I know, my love. You must.”
“I must,” the warlord of Caph agreed. “Kiss me.”
Kaara offered a farewell kiss. It almost broke her courage and her heart, but it turned out both were stronger than she had ever known.
“I have seen you again to farewell properly,” she said. “I have walked this road with sisters and with friends. I kicked the Lovetoad in his sul-kon-troons I am content.”
Petar held out his hand to seal a bargain.
“No,” Vaahir told him. “I must decline.”
“What?” gasped Kaara, still in his arms.
“What?” demanded the herald of the elder beings, his voice like writhing maggots.
“I walked the road too,” Vaahir pointed out. “I fought my foes and I met my allies. The first day I travelled with Shazana Pel, the second with the Emir of All Caph and his beloved wife. But the third day… the third day I walked with a cowled archvillain at my side.”
“What of it?” demanded the herald of the Fairly Great Old Ones, unimpressed. His hand still reached for a bargain.
“I’m a warlord, Petar. I was reminded that I know not to let the enemy set the battlefield – or frame the propositions. And I would never, ever, in all eternity allow you to harm Kaara of Jaaxa, my best-beloved, my better self, in whom all my honour lies. Do get a grip, ‘old chap’.”
“Vaahir!” Kaara squeaked as he tweaked her bottom.
“Don’t you see it, beloved? I cannot defeat Petar here. I can’t get past him to finish my quest. I can’t!”
“But he is only a ghost to me,” Kaara realised. “And now I am yours; your property, your instrument, so if you bid me go with your message then you fulfil your duty!”
“No!” Petar Tyolanh objected. “No!
He became a thing of many shapes, of insects and spiders and things with claws and tentacles, of slashing wheels and acid bubbles, of needles and burning ice, all overlapping with things that were worse, going deeper down to some well of insanity where humanity could not endure.
Kaara stepped through him and approached the bus.
“What do I do?” she asked Vaahir.
Vaahir visualised the symbols from his dream and described them to her. She dipped her fingers in the bloody sores on her feet and drew the glyphs.
Petar Tyolanh lunged for her. The herald had broken the covenant of his permitted interference. Vaahir caught him from behind, fingers around the neck he expected to find, and he snapped it.
Kaara understood the runes as she painted them on the side of the London double-decker:
Sanctuary-hideout-refuge…
Phalanx-company-horde…
Form rank-assemble-link together…
“Lair Legion… Line Up!”
***
The Last Waste stretches brutal, bleak, and vast.
All wander it at last in their own fashion;
Yet even that is boundaried at last,
For what is death ‘gainst true love’s mighty passion?
The Warlord Vaahir trusted Kaara true,
And at his word she aided on his quest,
And scribed the message he was sent to do
And by their trust was all creation blessed.
For at death’s boundary prepared in wait
For summons that could nudge a gate ajar,
Who might return to fight the Apostate
Were many heroes gleaned from world afar.
The Shoggoth’s salts did their work and death flowed in reverse.
Vaahir awoke upon his bed with Kaara sprawled across him. Perhaps five minutes had passed since had drunk his fatal draught.
His best-beloved stirred. It was a pleasant experience. “My lord?” she ventured. And then, tentatively, “Master?”
“Stick with Vaahir and best-beloved,” he advised her. “Kiivan’s modern manners are rubbing off on me, it seems.”
“If time allowed there are better things I could rub on you,” his acquisition promised. “You owe me a proper ceremony when time allows, Lord Vaahir. But… I didn’t dream all that happened, did I? The Waste and Petar and… the large red chariot?”
“If so then we both did. Can you recall some dimensional jump-coordinates that should be entered into a sufficiently advanced transportation device?”
“Very clearly, as if they were written in my mind.”
“So can I. Get me a communication link to the Klayhog convoy. I need to speak with the Austernal ship they call Aunt Sally.”
“We are no longer dead, then? How?”
“It seems as though death is having a special offer today. We need to use that strategically.”
***
“Apostate,” the red and yellow all-terrain Austernal transport vehicle (that had once been Sarah of Dunboggie) broadcast as she did a heroic one-ship charge against the overwhelming might of the Crusader Fleet’s Cathedral Battle Temple. “You have been a very naughty villain and so here comes your spanking.”
“The battle computers are calculating the odds of our survival at around thirty million to one,” Clan Heir Broto Klayhog told the mad Warlord beside him.
The commander of the Dead Galaxy forces that opposed the Apostate’s onslaught seemed uncaring of the odds. “Aim for the middle, if you please,” he requested.
“You don’t happen to have a dimensional dreadnaught hidden up your sleeve, do you? If you even wore sleeves?”
“Better than that,” Vaahir promised. “Beloved?”
“I am inputting the numbers,” Kaara of Viigo replied. “Mistress Saally? Can you action these?”
“Oh my! Those are some remarkable unreal integers, aren’t they?” the ship considered. “Well, here goes. Implementing!”
Austernal power drives activated advanced dimensional manipulation apparatus. Non-Euclidean mathematics wrestled with Comic-Book Limbo, and Comic-Book Limbo realised too late that it had already made the mistake of swallowing a Shoggoth-spawned continent of indigestible alternative physics.
From the Battle Temple it must have looked like the tiny ship disgorged a double decker but and fired it straight through the enemy’s defence fields against all probability. Every shield generator on the Temple flared out simultaneously. An electromagnetic pulse blacked every security system. An arcane rite wreaked havoc with the fortress’ protective invocations. Some of the primary weapons systems simply flooded with high-pressure water or were torn away by impossible wind blasts.
Any countermeasures that might have stopped Kerry, Lara, Sorceress, and Liu Xi Xian was Denied.
A stern Canadian voice boomed over every Temple speaker. “Apostate, this is the Lair Legion. You are ordered to cease all aggression and stand down. This is your only warning. You have thirty seconds. And then we take you out.”
So Vaahir paid his Kaara’s price at last
And she won him with no less deeds of glory
And future joy repaid all sorrow past
And so resumed the House of Viigo’s story.
More on Caphans at the Caphan Story Archive
***
27. Laurie Leyton and the Collected Works
“Some dark, stormy night, I think Lisette's going to escape from the confines of your stories and come looking for you...”
Reply Post By Visionary Wed Oct 20, 2004 at 07:12:20 pm EDT
Laurie Leyton awoke with Beth Shellett’s headache. Well, they were sharing it.
“Laurie? You’re here?” the elementary school teacher checked. “In my head, I mean. Awake? Possessing me – but not in the way you were piling in to your psycho double in the Marquis’ asylum! I mean you’re still hiding out in my hindbrain and you know you’re actually the superheroine Lisette rather than some eighteenth century victim from the works of De Sade?”
“Headache,” Laurie answered. “You’re not making it any better. Please… mentally babble quieter.”
“How are we talking at all? When you’re in charge I sleep and when I’m awake you’re not aware of what’s happening. So how are we…”
“Beth, I just had a Playboy Letters Page encounter with myself and the Hooded Hood. And then I was quite possibly hurled out of time and space by Wilbur Parody, the very guy who wrote The Law and Ordinances of New Parodiopolis that made it possible – or possibly compulsory – for me to become a superhero.”
Beth was still trying to cope, and when she tried to cope she chattered. “I thought that was the Hooded Hood. He did a deal with you to get you away from your trailer park life and set you up as Lisa’s legal assistant and as her sidekick. Although I never did work out how that made you a superhero. I mean you’re very skilled with a whip or in unarmed combat but it’s not like you were raised by the Little Sisters of Discipline so…”
“Beth! Shut up. Take a breath. Can we just work out where we are and who’s likely to try and kill us next?”
“Point. Do you want to take over and become the super-creepy Citizen Z?”
“I’m trying. Right now I’m not feeling it. And by ‘it’ I mean Herringcarp Asylum screaming at my soul, before you get back onto me and Amnesia.”
“Then I guess I’d better take us for a look round,” Beth admitted.
It was very dark, but they were outdoors in winter. There was a light sprinkling of snow on rocky ground. Beth had to move very carefully not to slip or stumble. Somewhere nearby the sea washed on shore.
“Sure would have been nice to have spooky night vision,” she said to her head-roomie.
“Or just a lack of complaints,” Laurie shot back. She tried to be professional. “Wherever we are is a long way from civilisation. No light pollution in the skies. No trail litter. What’s that over there?”
“A big standing stone, I think. Or it might be natural. Or maybe it was once part of a ruined building.” Laurie ran her hands over the chilly granite.
The vision rippled across Laurie and Beth alike:
“You have something I want,” the Hooded Hood declaimed.
“You and every sweaty-palmed punter ‘tween here n’ Vegas,” Meggan replied, wondering if she would again have to sacrifice her virtue to help out her son.
“Cosmic awareness.”
That was a new name for it. “What?” she puzzled.
“I require your cosmic awareness,” the cowled crime-czar repeated. “You received it quite by accident. That’s how you were able to remember VelcroVixen. You became the Celestian Madonna for this reality. You had… special children.”
This was all news to Meggan. Except for Dreamcatcher being special of course. Then her mind again caught up. “You said children. As in more than one.”
“Perhaps I was referring to the other twin,” the Hood explained, gesturing to the auditorium where screaming showgirls and panicking punters were scattering from the increasingly viscous fight between CrazySugarFreakBoy and PsychoAcidPervGal. “At least, that’s her story. Of course, that one comes from a parallel reality. I have absolutely no interest in where the one you bore in this timestream is, or even if there is one. I am only interested in the cosmic awareness lodged inside you. I require it.”
“What the hell was that?” Laurie demanded as the swirling impressions passed. “I mean, it was Dream’s mom Meggan in some nightclub with the Hooded Hood, making some kind of desperate deal to save CSFB! from being killed by his own sister, but…”
“Why did it feel like it mattered? Mattered to us?”
“I don’t want to know – but I have to. Touch the stone again.”
Beth tentatively held out a hand. Nothing happened.
“Keep moving. There might be other rocks of spooky-vision-giving.”
They walked blindly right into the next memory.
Amy recognised the voice at once. “Lisette? Laurie? What are you doing in the fifteenth century?”
Laurie Leyton swallowed hard and indicated her shackles. “Oh, you know, just being slowly tortured to death by these religious fanatics. They think I’m a demoness.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Well, I did emerge from the Portal of Pretentiousness in front of them all, appearing out of nowhere so to speak, while they were all taking mass in the high cathedral. The Hooded Hood fixed it for me to speak the local lingo so I could confess and be burned, but so far they haven’t hurt me so bad that I’ve signed their statements.”
Amy heard the waver in Lisette’s voice. “How… how badly have they hurt you?” she asked.
“I’m used to being hurt,” Laurie Leyton answered. “I… I suppose I chose it, really.”
“How? By not confessing to things you didn’t do?”
“By refusing the Hooded Hood’s deal,” Lisette answered. “I guess you didn’t know, but I might be pregnant – by Bry. And I knew that would ruin everything. I… I don’t deserve him anyway, and the Hood showed me this future where he was so… so happy with this teacher he’d met, but I was this dying junkie whore. And then the Hood offered to fix things so that future never happened. I’d be with Bry for the rest of our lives, and… and all it would cost was a little favour… and Bry’s future happiness with that girl who is right for him!”
“So you turned the Hood down?” Amy gasped. “Knowing that you would be destroyed but that Bry would be happy?”
“How could I do anything else?” Laurie sobbed. “I deserve all of this. I deserve to be tortured to death. I’m cheap and slutty and not worth anything, but he’s… he’s a hero!”
“So I used to have some esteem issues,” Laurie admitted as the images passed.
“Used to have?” Beth snorted. “I remember that moment we just saw. I was shown it in the Portal of Pretentiousness. I’d scarcely met Bry. I knew nothing about the situation with you and him and… your baby. And then the Hooded Hood…”
“Slammed into the situation and made it into a nightmare? Arranged for Amy and I to be trapped by the Church of Conformity in some medieval dungeon awaiting torture so that you and Bry had to make a deal to come and join us in the hopes we could all escape together?” That was how Beth and Laurie had first met.
“Well, we did get out, eventually. But… I didn’t mean to take Bry from you, Laurie. I never meant to develop feelings for him, or encourage them in him for me. I never meant for you to be pushed to that deal you made with the Hood.”
“Why are we having to relive this?” Laurie demanded. “I made my peace with this – with you – with Bry. I was moving on. And then that bitch von Zemo stole my life and tossed me out of existence or something, and I was demon-trafficked into one of Herringcarp’s appalling pasts as an asylum amnesiac who was supposed to trap Ioldabaoth and… well, now I’m a ghost living inside her ex-love-rival’s mind. I could do without the nightmare-grams.”
“Yes. They’re too much like the pinpoint-sharp fear experiences that Wexford the Dissected Man used on me to turn me into a brainwashed mass murderer,” Beth added bitterly. “You know, before I was blinded and disfigured and spent my year in a coma, and then the Baroness’ locked me into her scheme to kill Sir Mumphrey.”
Laurie recognised her friend’s point. “It’s ridiculous us trying to one-up each other’s horror stories, isn’t it? But I don’t know why we…”
They moved through the next vision visitation.
On the upper floor of the bus, Cheryl ran Ziles’ sensory apparatus across Laurie Leyton’s stomach and checked the readouts.
“Well?” Valeria of Carfax asked nervously. “Is she with child?”
“Just hold on a moment while I make sense of these readings,” Cheryl responded.
Lisette swallowed. This was the moment that would define the rest of her life.
“Stay calm, hon,” Meggan reassured her. “It’s okay.”
“If you have quickened and are to bear his baby then Bry will most undoubtedly wed you,” Valeria told Laurie.
“No he won’t,” snapped Lisette. “Not like this. Not because I got stupid. I won’t let him.”
“But Laurie…”
“Listen, all of you,” she glared at the women assembled. “Whatever the result, positive or negative, as far as Bry Katz is concerned it was a false alarm. Understand?”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” suggested Cheryl diplomatically.
“We can’t lie to him!” Valeria gasped.
“Sure we can.” Meg contradicted. “We do it to men all the time. It’s for their own good.”
“I don’t want him to know,” Lisette replied. “Please?”
“Well, I’ve got the results,” Cheryl announced uncertainly.
“And?” Laurie demanded.
“You’re going to have a baby.”
“Oh.”
“What was confusing me was that I was picking up two foetal lifesigns in the room,” Cheryl explained.
“I’m… I’m having twins?” paled Lisette.
“No,” Cheryl answered carefully. She looked over at Meg.
“That’s right, folks,” Meggan Foxxx replied. “I’m pregnant too.”
“Gah!” Laurie gasped in Beth’s mind. “We’ve got to keep moving but I’m not enjoying the flashbacks. And there are some 18-rated scenes I’m really hoping to avoid re-experiencing.”
“They’re not random, though,” Beth reasoned. “We’re being told something. There’s more going on than we thought at the time.”
“What do you mean? I was pretty upset about being in the family way like that. I mean, it wrecked whatever good thing had been growing with Bry. It put me right back in the trailer trash division and… well, at the time I thought I couldn’t get any lower. Of course, that was before my druggie whored-out porn-star snuff-movie phase and my insane asylum torture prisoner gig and my untold years as a mad spirit of Herringcarp and other career highlights.”
“No, think. We weren’t even in that first vision. That was the Hooded Hood doing some kind of deal for Meggan’s ‘cosmic awareness’, her destiny to be a ‘Celestian Madonna’.”
“Yeah. People have been hunting the supposed Celestian Madonna forever. Including some who decided it was me or Val. The Void Scholar wanted it to be FA. Or maybe Liu Xi. I think it was maybe Wang the Conqueror who wanted it to be a kid of spiffy’s with Bev Campbell – but he went way overboard with his Pregnancy Gun. Other candidates who’ve been ruled out are Lisa, Sorcy, Dancer, Sersi, Jury…”
Beth waved her hand as if that would silence the voice in her head. “No, listen, Laurie. The Hood actually lifted that destiny off Meg. That’s why PsychoAcidPervGal! didn’t become the… what the Celestian Messiah? Whatever that is. Nor this that little boy of Dan Drury’s that she turned out to be having in that vision we just had. Because the Hooded Hood had already taken that potential and shifted it elsewhere.”
“Okay. That’s a Hoody kind of thing to do. He probably made a deal with someone for her to become the new, always-has-been, Celestian Madonna. I mean, this is a guy who retconned at least two pairs of twins before he settled on Danny Lyle. He’s not against making sweeping changes to people’s lives to further his goals”
“Laurie… he made a deal with you.”
There was silence from the presence in Beth’s mind, and then the woman who had accepted the mantle of Lisette from the Hooded Hood said, “What?”
“You received a future from him. You agreed to become a sidekick superhero, to have a life like Lisa’s. Lisa had a baby. Lisa had a cosmic role. Heck, she’s had two.”
“You’re saying that my baby… my missing baby…”
“I don’t know. Didn’t Xander broker some deal with the Order of the Observing Eye, the ones who raised G-Eyed and Exile? You went away with them for a day but in your timeline it was nine months of maternity.”
“In the Order’s Vortex stronghold, yes. That’s where she was born, my daughter. I held her for a little while and then I agreed to give her up. I thought I could just go back to how I’d been before and Bry would never know. I was wrong about all of it – but by then it was too late.”
“Why would Xander arrange for some people who turned out to be not very nice to look after your baby?”
“The Observing Eye doesn’t keep girl-children. Didn’t; they’re gone now. The Legion finally shut them down, but we lost their records. We know they farmed some female children of potential onto the Amazons, but not my little girl. Bry and I looked. Even when he hated me, we looked.”
“I know. And he didn’t hate you. He was just very hurt that you hid everything from him. But my point stands. What was Xander up to? Could it have been the lesser of two evils? In getting your baby hidden away by the Observing Eye he denied her to the Hooded Hood.”
“Ioldabaoth is… well, he’s a very complicated man. Amnesia loves him, I think, but I… know better.”
“But for some reason, here on this dark lonely shore, we’re getting answers. We have to press on!”
“Alright. I’m as scared as I’ve ever been. But keep going.”
“There’s another big block of stone there.”
“Touch it.”
“One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a demon, four for a ploy, five’s a hero, six a grave, seven is a Parodyverse waiting to be saved…” crooned Xander the Improbable to the baby on his knee.
“I think she’s asleep,” Cleone Swanmay whispered to him. “I’ll set aside the bottle for later.”
The master of the mystic crafts smiled; a genuine smile without cunning or irony. He carefully picked up the baby and laid her in a hand-carved crib. The carvings were runes. “Sleep and grow, little one,” he told her. “Nothing will harm you here.”
The graceful swan-maiden who had accidentally become his familiar covered the child with a crocheted blanket stitched with down. “How long can you promise that?” she wondered.
“Time runs differently in some corners of the Mythlands. This is a little fragment I pocketed from the broken-up bits of the Dreary Dimension. I completely refurbished it, of course. Yi did the decorating. The Oldman did the planar architecture. Hagatha planted the garden, gods help any trespassers.”
“We can stay here? Live here? Put down roots?”
“Yes. You know, I never got to sing to my daughter in her crib. All that was taken away from me by Vervain’s choices – and mine I suppose, my duty. How sad that Laurie cannot sing to her child.”
“Must that be so? Couldn’t we have brought her here as well, to mother the child through the years until she hears the call of moon’s blood?”
Xander sighed. “We could, but then she would not be in the place, in the time, with the power, to save her grandchild when she needs her most. Lisette does not think herself a good person, you know, but if I had been able to give her the choice about whether to be safe here or take the terrible path of torments that she will otherwise endure, she would have chosen to suffer it all to save Elyse’s daughter.”
“Couldn’t you explain any of this to people once in a while? At least to her?”
“No. As long as the Earth Maiden remains a secret she will be safe. We will raise her with as much love and care as she deserves, not least for Laurie’s sake in respect for her sacrifice. And because those are things that Elyse’s enemies cannot ever truly understand, magics that weave inextricably through the universe, those will be Elyse’s gifts. And she will pass them to her own daughter, though she cannot stay with her”
“We will raise this child.” Cleone Swanmay smiled. “I have surrendered much to endure beyond the Halls of my father the Mountain King. This, her, here with you, makes all well.”
The baby in the crib stirred again, squawked, woke herself.
“Peace, Earth Maiden,” Xander purred at her. “One for sorrow, two for joy, three to calm and four to annoy, five for heroes, six for pain, seven for the stories that will never come again…”
“That… that was my daughter!” Laurie gulped with Beth’s throat. “My daughter! Did you see her? Isn’t she beautiful. Isn’t she…?”
“Still no superpowers?”
“Nope.”
“So that was all you? I’m impressed, Pete.”
Elyse cuddled him tighter.
That might be why she vanished with him when he returned to the past.
“That’s it!” Laurie snarled. “I’m travelling back in time again and I’m going to kill Banjoooooo!”
“Laurie, calm down! We share a heart and my half doesn’t want a cardiac arrest!” Beth pleaded.
“But Elyse! It was Elyse all along. I never really knew her. She never said much to me. She gave me a plant once and I forgot to water it. And then she… she left the Parodyverse!”
“And the Hooded Hood never got her. Or got her daughter with Banjooooo!”
“Then where is she? Their child?”
“Your grand-daughter?”
“Shut up! Yes. What happened to her? Keep moving. Find us another vision! Move!”
“I will, but you have to calm yourself, Laurie. It’s hard to concentrate when someone is screaming in your skull and…”
A quarterstaff slammed into Beth’s stomach, folding her over. Someone dropped on her as she fell, bringing the ice-cold stave across her throat in a choke hold. A low fierce female voice spoke in a lilting language that gradually seemed to change to English.
“…try to move and I will snap your neck, thing of evil! This is your only caution.”
“Over to me, Beth,” Laurie prompted. “I might not be able to go spooky but I can take a bitch with a stick!”
Adrenaline evidently allowed what hadn’t been possible before. Suddenly Lisette was driving their shared form. She elbowed the woman atop her and rolled aside. “Right. Round two, pole wench!”
It was still hard to see, but a faint luminescent glow highlighted Beth’s attacker. She was Native American, in traditional dress with beaverskin buskins and braided hair.
“So not your grand-daughter, probably,” Beth told Laurie comfortingly.
Laurie planted a foot in the woman’s face. It passed right through the insubstantial Native American. But the staff was solid enough as it smacked the back of Beth’s knees and dropped her to the ground.
Then the beavers attacked; a score of them at least, clawing and biting like a rabid tornado.
“Hold it!” Laurie cried from beneath the blanket of toothy doom. “This has just got too ridiculous! What the hell is going on? Can’t we stop for a moment and talk before we get beavered?”
“Seconded,” Beth added with the same lips.
Their attacker paused, staff ready to strike; but at a word from her the beavers held in place. “Two souls in one flesh?” she puzzled. “Or… more? How so?”
Laurie answered. “I’m a passenger. She’s my roomie.”
“Roomie?”
“I’m her friend. She lost her body so for now I let her live in me,” Beth explained. “Are you a ghost? Only you don’t seem to react the normal way to kicks in the face.”
“”Yes,” the woman replied. “I am Chokahontas, the Beaver Girl. I died here. Now I guard this island.”
“Wait, time out!” Laurie called. “You’re a spectre and you haunt-slash-guard an island? Parody Island?”
“Sacred Island, the burial place of my people. You will not profane it or the memories it preserves.”
“No, hold on!” Beth cried. “You see, where we come from there’s an island too. And it selects… protectors. Guardians who died but it keeps around. A banshee and a… a green ghost.”
“You are not guardians of an island. You carry the monster of madness from a place of great darkness.”
“Well, she has us there,” Laurie admitted. “Only the monster isn’t with us any longer.”
“Wasn’t Marie able to exorcise you from the island when she sensed Citizen Z leaving the LairJet?” Beth recalled.
Laurie swore internally. “Sorry about the language, Beth. But you know what I mean. This is Parody Island isn’t it? Or a parallel dimension version. Or a different time.”
“I think it might be. Chokahontas, what you say about the spirit is right, but that’s not the whole truth. When Laurie wears it she uses it for good. We’re not here to harm you or the island you protect. We didn’t even plan to come here. But it seems that now we have, we’ve being shown something very important.”
“Who sent you?” Beaver Girl demanded.
“Possibly the Hooded Hood,” Beth considered. “Thank heaven that he didn’t send Flapjack with us to take on Chokahontas.”
“You are on a vision quest? Like the others?”
“Others? What others?”
The guardian shook her head. “I sense the growing evil. I will not speak of secrets that are not for you.”
“Look, I had a baby,” Laurie pleaded. “It was parted from me. My fault, I suppose. But she grew up and she had a baby too, and it was parted from her. For safety, perhaps. But I need to know. I need to see what happened to that child, to know that she’s alright.”
“That’s not evil, is it?” Beth added. “Let her look.”
“That only,” decided Beaver Girl. “Then I will know whether to kill you.”
“We’ll need to move around a bit for another vision,” Laurie explained.
“Over there. To your left is a memory strand.”
“Here?”
“Over there!” called Mac Fleetwood, pastor of the Zero Street Mission; except that right now he was out on a small fishing skiff in the choppy pre-dawn waters of Paradopolis Bay. “I knew I glimpsed a light. And there’s the Lighthouse!”
Mr Papadapopolis coaxed his motor launch in the indicated direction. The one-armed proprietor of the Bean and Donut Coffee Shop was a keen if somewhat ageing angler and he handled his boat well “I see it too now!” he yelled back over the roar of the outboard. “Just halfway between Willingham port and where the Lair Island was.”
He glowered at the injustice of the mass murder of the Lair Legion.
Mac guessed what he was thinking. “Leave that to Commissioner Graham for now. You know he’ll get answers if anyone can. Only we can do this.”
“That is what Sarah say. She phone from Paris – collect. She say look for Lighthouse. Nobody else find it though whole Navy and press and sightseers all try to go there. Only friends, she say. So we look. And we find.”
“Move us in alongside. I guess the magic or dimensional science or whatever it was that kept the tower switching with the tide from being on Willingham shore and Parody Island went away with the rest of the strange stuff in the world. So half-sunk, halfway between is the compromise, I guess. But if any of the Legion were in it at the time, injured maybe, they might still be alive in there, trapped and needing help.”
“We help,” Mr Papadapopolis insisted. He carefully navigated around the choppy waters indicating sunken rocks and finally managed to tie up his skiff close to one of the upper floor windows that were currently at sea level.
Mac pulled a flashlight and hoisted himself into the building, then helped old Mr P in after him. “Hello?” he called. “Anyone there? It’s Mac and Mr Papadapopolis.”
A bedraggled figure started to dive for cover then stopped transfixed in the torch’s beam.
“Hello,” she said, trying to sound brave. “I am here.”
Mac and Mr P had found the Celestian Messiah.
The vision faded. “Don’t stop there!” Laurie objected. “At least let me get a good look at her!
“What was that place?” Chokahontas demanded. “Why did it seem familiar to me when I have never seen it before?”
“Well, it’s part of the island where we come from. Adopted, so to speak. And we’re thinking that maybe your island and our island is the same.”
“That is what the others said,” Beaver Girl considered.
“Will you tell us who they were, now?,” Beth begged. “How long ago did they visit? What did they want? What did they do? Where did they go afterwards?”
Chokahontas frowned. “You ask many questions.”
“Maybe give us a few answers?” Laurie replied.
Beaver Girl turned aside and seemed to hold a discussion with her beavers. Finally she turned back. “They came tonight. They wanted to enter the ancient house. They had the right because they are Warriors of the Lair.”
“You mean… Lair Legion?”
“Wait! Tonight?” Beth picked up. “They’re still here? In the mansion?”
“Yes. The yellow-coated seeker and his spirit guide, they descended to the dreaming chamber.”
“Vizh and Hallie? They made it? And the others…?”
“The questers may not have achieved the chamber. Evil assails this place now. It bends all its will to it. I thought you part of it, but your madness is of a different taint.”
“The Island is under attack?” Laurie understood. “What do they want?”
“The seeker, his allies, the island itself; maybe what you have seen? They are close now, and the will overcome the boundaries soon.”
“The… Celestian-made boundaries,” Laurie checked.
A lurid flash lit up the heavens like day. Swirling shards of sundered defence burned around the isle.
The Celestian Space Robot reached down towards the Mansion below.
***
28. Zania Chhabra and the Travellers Tales
“Hello, Mr… Mr Woolton. My name is Joan and this is not a sales call. I am telephoning you to enquire your opinion on whether you have been injured in the workplace when it is not your fault. Our records indicate that…”
“Injured at work? Yes, I have, madam. Was pounded by the Parody Master durin’ the Parody War. Got ambushed by the bounder Black and left for dead. Bad problem with Dark Thugos, goitre that he was. Took a bit of a knock remonstratin’ with an oik of a hell lord. More than one. Was shot by Hitler, naturally, before I potted him on the snoot. Doesn’t do to whine about it. Walk it off. Enough said. Good day.”
“Hello, Mr Feebionary. This is Susan. I see you have applied for a special rates loan for a range of personal purposes suited to fit your circumstances. I am ringing to check your personal information so that AvisCo can fit a financial product to your needs. Can you confirm your employment as… um, ‘a waste of skin and meat products lounging in front of the TV stuffing his cruller hole while curtailing the freedom of spirited young women to express themselves with accelerants’?”
“Kerry! That little…”
“Good day, Mr or Mrs Bookman. My name is Mary. We have information that you are interested in good literature and would enjoy a subscription to Readers Digest…”
“How are you today, Mr Winkel…wost. My name is Ann. Do you have problems satisfying your partner? Is performance important to you? Would you…”
She remembered only a green flash before the call centre collapsed in a freak meteor shower.
“You must find new work,” her father told her. “I have spoken to Mr Patel at the garment factory and Mr Agrawal at the packing plant. You can start tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to work there, father. Pari Laghari says that Mr Patel is all hands. Everyone knows Mr Agrawal’s temper.”
“You will do your part, Zania. Your brother’s college tuition is very expensive. We must all do what we can to secure him a good future.”
“What about my future? And I don’t mean getting married off to those old men or drooling third sons you keep trying to fob me off to. At least at the call centre, I could use my languages, the things the traveller taught me. I could look up the places I was calling on the map and imagine I was there, seeing such strange wonders as… as Dullard’s Corner or Black’s Crossing! I did much better at school than Gupta…”
“Not this nonsense again. Must I raise my hand? You are too old for this disobedience, Zania. Do not shame your family and let us down. Know your place.”
“With so much world, how can I know my place unless I look for it?”
She worked for Mr Agrawal. Mr Bhasin came for dinner one night and talked with her parents a lot and left her a small bar of chocolate.
“What would you do?” she asked the memory of the traveller in her mind. “Not wait idly while everyone else put you where they wanted you to be. You wouldn’t just read of strange names for far places. You would go there, see for yourself. You would just look at a map, see a place, and say, ‘I will be there’. I wish I could be like that.”
Why could she not? Tomorrow was a holiday. Gupta was being taken to look at the Technical College although his grades were rather marginal. Zania was to remain at home.
“I could take a trip. I could explore. Go to…” she fingered the bus timetable and calculated how far she might get on a single saved coin and be home in time to make the evening meal. Not far. But it was better than here, and she had never been to the old ruins outside the district town.
“I will go there,” she promised herself. “I will pick a place and go to it. Like you, Sarah,” she told the much-missed traveller.
“Are y’alright, sweetheart?” a loud American asked Zania. He laid a hand on her shoulder, which was probably alright because Westerners touched each other like that, even women, and it wasn’t like Mr Patel. Well, not always like Mr Patel. Although this Westerner was very Western. “Zania babe?”
“I am maintaining the paths,” reported the Keeper of the Boundaries, the cosmic office-holder tasked with maintaining the divisions and passages between the planes of existence. It had become much harder since those planes had been forcibly separated and transit between them forbidden. “The ghost of the red bus has gone to the world of Plxtragar. The heroes of the Lair Legion have breached the perimeter of the Apostate’s space-vessel, that huge structure built like a temple.”
“Well sure they did,” Harlan Bull assured her confidently. “When the Dealer of the Deck flip you a card you can bet it’ll be the one ya deserve. When the bad guys are cheatin’ and fixing the game, I get to slip in some aces and the odd joker.”
“The one-eyed old soldier, he leads a charge at the Crusader forces,” Zania saw. “He is shouting ‘waa-hoo’ and calling for the scattered Plxtragarians to strap on sacks and kick the enemy in… Well, they are to fight vigorously.”
“Yeah, it’s not just Plxtragarians,” Harlan assured her. “Seems like a whole bunch of places from this Comic-Book Limbo got flipped onto that planet by the thought beings of the Happy Place. I can still sense the mojo. There’s a Lord of the Rings city called Golgamoria and a cliff full pterodactyl riders and a whole bunch of others joined in against the Crusader Armada. And a lot of outer-space Star Trek types from all over, all having a go.”
“And you can make them win?”
“Well… I’m sure making them lose slower. No point in me doin’ everything, is there, sweetheart? Gotta let that Hatman earn his pay now he’s not chairbound, okay? I mean him and his team, they won the Parody War, right?”
“Goldeneyed has an almost instinctual rapport with distance and dimensions,” Zania sensed. “He just shifted through every barrier that the Apostate still has up – I didn’t even help him. He took some people to the High Altar… that’s a control room. Donar’s son and the charming young man with the speed, R.J., and the man with the guns that kill anything and the villain-lady in the immodest outfit.”
“That could be any of ‘em,” Harlan snickered happily.
“VelcroVixen,” Zania clarified. “The others… I think Cathode is in some kind of computer room there, with the rat-lady in the lab coat who is making such a strange laugh. The clockwork man and the manservant are directing them in doing something to the machinery of the Temple. They are communicating with the scientist in the bus, the one with the bubble pipe? The green-skinned seeress is describing things to him and he seems very excited, and the plastic woman with him is saying something sarcastic.”
“You may have just summed up a typical day at work for the Lair Legion,” Amber St Clare admitted. She consulted the checklist on the clipboard she’d retrieved from one of the many versions of the Lair Mansion that surrounded them on the bleak plain of Comic-Book Limbo. For some reason each Legionnaire to slip in after the air strike blast that should have killed them - except for a special dispensation from Temporary Death - had arrived separately in his or her own, slightly different version of their headquarters. Amber’s version had better stationary.
“Can you see where the Mansion explorers have got to?” the LL administrator ventured. “Should we be worrying that Mansions are dematerialising?”
Zania checked her overwhelmed border-keeper’s senses and looked to see.
“Should we be worrying that Mansions are dematerialising?” demanded Baroness Elizabeth von Zemo. “I would usually consider it a good thing, but we appear to be running out of them.”
“No, don’t worry about that,” Xander the Improbable advised her. “You have much worse things to worry about.”
“Only we appear to be heading from Mansion to Mansion, attaching address labels and gift ribbons, and then running outside before the whole place vanishes,” Thighmaster pointed out.
“Well sure,” the Mansion’s hunchbacked major domo Flapjack snorted as if that was the self-evident thing to do. “Who wants to get zapped back to the days before internet porn?”
“The Shoggoth is summoning more conduits to drag things from this place back into time and space,” the Baroness realised. She glanced over the plain to where what seemed to be a large mountain rose over the time-halted expanse of stored Faerie; except it wasn’t rock, it was translucent elder being, and his restored High Priestess Ebony stood atop it directing some kind of rite with her staff.
“Gotta admire the feathers on that gal’s ceremonial outfit,” Flapjack drooled. “Also how few of them there are.”
“I say,” Thighmaster agreed. “But why am I here?”
“Many of us ask that question,” the Baroness assure the ruler of Borovia.
“I was supposed to be tucked away from all the trouble on Earth. I had a deal with the Hooded Hood!”
“Yeah. Good job on listening to the exact wording,” Flapjack snickered.
“You may be here as a somewhat incompetent temporary comedy henchman of mine,” Elizabeth considered. “I had to loan Cathode for some useful work. Kindly locate a whip and give yourself a proper flogging.”
“The Baroness is required because she inherited the hidden chambers in the Mansion’s attic from her mad uncle,” Xander explained absently as he prepared another note. “Those chambers are vibrationally different from the rest of the structure to hide them, but of all the concealed places they are the easiest to access with a von Zemo to wave at them. That allows us to hook into the whole conceptual construct and direct it properly to its destination in history.”
Flapjack stopped dead, struck by revelation. “The island kept building Lair Mansions just like our one! Even when they are massively anachronistic, before those principles of architecture weren’t even developed. Some before humans learned to walk on two legs. And it’s because you keep sending back templates to.. well, you’re sending back Mansion kits complete with assembly instructions.”
“And why would you wish to do that?” demanded the Baroness.
Xander tapped his nose. “Imagine you were training a pit bull to be a dog-fighting animal. You raise it brutally from birth, so it becomes savage, remorseless, a perfect killing machine. But secretly, someone else creeps in and gives the puppy hugs and treats and teaches it to play fetch and roll over for tummy-tickles. So instead of a monster you have a good doggy who wants to help.”
“The Celestians only wanted a zone where they could wall off their Sleeping Space Robot and the Secret he was clutching,” Flapjack reasoned. “They dropped a bloody Fairly Great Old One around it to discourage intruders. Those defences they set were as vicious as they could make them. But then…”
“We gave the island yummy Mansion-treats?” Thighmaster boggled. “Legiony-snacks?”
“Someone had to,” Xander noted modestly. “I spent an annoyingly long amount of time discovering that it was me, now.”
“You changed it from a Dreaming Celestian’s Lair to a… a Lair for heroes,” the Baroness frowned. “And you had me help you do it!”
There were only two Mansions left now. “That one’s to shift back to the present if we happen to somehow come through all of this,” Xander explained. “And that one’s off to a particularly complicated and significant moment in the past.”
Even as he spoke the label took effect and the penultimate Mansion vanished.
“That one seemed spookier than the others,” Thighmaster admitted.
“That was Vinnie’s version,” the sorcerer supreme explained.
“What was different about that, except more gargoyles?” Beth von Zemo enquired.
“Vinnie was in it,” Xander mentioned. “Poor chap. I know I wouldn’t fancy a trip to where he’s going.”
“But he volunteered?” Flapjack asked.
“Maybe not explicitly. Or knowingly. Or consensually. But otherwise, yes,” promised the master of the mystic crafts.
Zania’s attempts to track the routes that Vinnie de Soth’s Mansion took were interrupted by a jab of pain in her temple as a boundary was breached.
“Intruders!” she cried, wincing. “Over by the event-locked image of Badripoor. Hero Feeders, I think, or… no, something less human. Some kind of Lurker Beneath, though, Tale Devourers looking to swallow continuities whole.”
Harlan riffled through his deck. “I’m not seeing any chances that might help out here,” he admitted.
“It’s alright, I think,” Zania gasped, clutching her forehead. “Badripoor was in Faerie. Faerie has other powers.”
“Faerie is in stasis,” Amber pointed out.
“Not all of it,” the Keeper of the Boundaries replied. “And right now all the differing command and control structures that usually tug on it are suspended. There’s only one person able to direct it. Direct it all.”
“Now?” Griffin asked Samantha Featherstone.
“Now,” Sir Mumphrey’s daughter confirmed.
“Awake!” Magweed commanded. “Go!”
Stealthy invaders had a brief moment to encounter spiffy and Hounddog and then the city’s defences truly cut in. Across the plain, the Great Relief of the Abhumans, the Savage Park jungle, and a dozen other sites that had taken refuge in the Many Coloured Lands woke from slumber. And fought.
“The predators are retreating,” Zania reported.
A rumble of raw power burst across half the horizon as Black Blot unleashed his power.
“The predators are destroyed. And now… yes… oh my!”
“Prepare to project the volunteers,” Samantha called to Griffin.
“I think Miss Zania has the Shoggoth’s way still open,” he advised. “Anyone who want to join in against the Apostate, from any of the places that hid with us, who wants to make a last stand against what’s happening, they can jump there now!”
“Not just them,” Magweed promised. “Any being of Fey who wishes to go there may wake now and wreak mischief on our enemy!”
There was a subtle stirring of vast power deep in the heart of things. There was a chuckle of wicked laughter; the joy of the Fair Folk, the Kindly Ones, the Bright Beautiful Host of Everlasting Yearning.
There was a change in the weights of the worlds. For a brief moment, Faerie had returned to the Iron Realms, and it was merry.
Not nice.
“Aaaaaagghhh!” contributed spiffy to the general charge. “I think that trellis is following meeee!”
“Hooga.”
Another warning stab in Zania’s mind: “The parasites here, they know this is their last chance to feast. They have found the other master-conduit to Faerie, the fallen Queene. They seek her very existence!”
“Um, where did we stow her?” Harlan asked worriedly, fumbling through his deck. Queen of Swords?
“Midori arranged for her to be protected in Mangatown, where Akiko Masamune is being cared for” Amber advised. “Chiaki Bushido, Dr Moo, and Nurse O’Mercy are with her.”
“That is… an odd combination,” Harlan admitted. “Not but what I can’t see some potential,” he grinned speculatively.
“And ManMan?” Amber checked.
“Actually, I can’t see him,” confessed Zania, “or either of the Knifeys.” She checked more carefully. “I can’t see them anywhere. At all!”
At Mangatown, the Lurker Below raiders encountered storyforms who did not wish to be devoured.
“This is a very old story. Choke on it,” the Psychic Samurai warned them.
“One of the oldest,” Midori calculated. “A Hero Holds the Breech.”
“To be followed by the sequel,” promised the diabolical Dr Moo, “A Villain Gets Her Bovine Generation Cannon Cranked Up.”
Zania tried to hold onto all of it but it was too much…
“I said, are you lost?” the stranger in the ruins asked her. The bus had been slower than Zania had expected and the walk from town further than she had allowed for. She suspected she might miss her return journey home and had no way of purchasing another ticket. Her hopeful short-cut had failed.
The Western woman had dark red hair and a wicked twinkle in her eyes. She had the kind of confidence that Sarah had, the sort that Zania wished she might one day possess but suspected she never would.
“I was exploring. I… explored in the wrong direction.”
“Are you sure? Because directions taken are all we have. In the end.”
“Do you know the way back to town? It’s getting late.”
“It is.” The stranger pointed. “That way takes you back. That way you find the map.”
“The map to where?”
“To where you want to go.”
There was a warning sign on the crumbling ruin. “That way is out of bounds,” Zania observed.
“Says who?” The Destroyer of Tales shrugged. “Anyway, I have to go. Hot, hot date. I hope to see you again.”
Zania wasn’t quite sure which way the leather-clad tourist departed. It was no help to her in making her own decision.
“Home is that way. I might get back if I really hurry. If I find this map I will never return in time.”
Zania really needed a map. Maybe there were places on it, far away destinations that she might imagine even if she never saw them? Maybe just one path would become clear to her. Maybe one step was all it took to begin a journey?
“Maybe I set my own boundaries?” she challenged the world. She pulled aside the warning board and scrambled over rubble.
The Charts of Eternity were waiting for her. They spread out at her touch, unfolding forever. All the paths were hers. She was their Keeper.
“I accept,” she told the Parodyverse. “I will do my best.”
This was a stern first test. All creation separated around her, and now the only links, the only threads that still held together any hope of repair, were the ones her Charts maintained by her will alone.
Many paths wound long routes through years and worlds and joined together for one final passage.
Zania Chhabra cried out and pushed past the pain and set the necessary people on the last steep road.
“Hello. My name is Zania. Are you interested in saving the Parodyverse? My information is that you are. So keep walking.”
***
29. Buckland Dean and the Change of Mind
Beneath the pilgrim town there were tunnels that twisted where they should not go. Geography and even time warped there. And the passages had their predators.
“There are several different kinds of tunnels,” Cap’n Biancaneve observed. “These ones with the odd angles that seem to twist the floors to walls in the distance are made by those brain-devouring ghouls. Most of them are very old, but they still cut through those perfectly smooth ones with the obsidian sheen. The irregular ones that look carved from spoons belong to that debased tribe who call themselves Morshlocks. The ones with the blood-daubings were made by the Cult of Lugosa. I’m still working on the circular tubes with the silver rails running along them.”
“Still, it’s good that you weren’t bored with nothing to think about whilst we were fleeing for our lives,” Sarah of Dunboggie answered brightly. “I was only thinking ‘which of the monsters will catch and eat us first?’ So points for originality.”
“Do you think we lost them?” Fredo the butcher’s boy checked, pausing to gasp for breath with his hands on his knees. And in a smaller voice. “Do you think Master Dean got away?”
“He said he would deal with the ghouls,” Sarah remembered. “Knowing Buckland that could be anything from a proper contract to a purging fire across the whole city they are building. I… I hope he is alright.”
Avrogadrus del Lune took the pause to examine the document he had snatched from one of the underground chambers they had chased through. “This is in hermetic code,” he recognised, delighted. “I think it explains that girl in the glass coffin that we passed back there.”
“You understand that code?” Fredo checked.
“No. I just worked it out. It wasn’t hard.”
“Is it relevant to us not being eaten by undead?” enquired Biancaneve.
“Not noticeably,” the archalchemist admitted. “This appears to be some agreement between a Count Ottokar von Zemo and an Elder Vrykolakas about defying life and death. Ottakar undertakes to arrange the ‘creation’ of a female descendant who will breed with someone called the Fernbiote to spawn a line of children of destiny and something called a Celestian Messiah. But first she had to sleep a thousand years, evidently.”
“That was her in the tube?” Sarah wondered. “We could slip back and free her.”
“Only if you have a little faerie in you.”
“Well, not at the moment, but I’m pretty sure that night when we infiltrated the Seelie Court…”
“It’s not relevant,” Biancaneve insisted. “Set the document aside, Avrogadrus. There’s nothing we can do for this…” she checked the name, “Zemette person. It’s not our business. I thought we were trying to find the Tomb of Visionatus Improbablus and decode that book that the last Improbable College explorers to the place discovered there?”
“Yes,” the archalchemist admitted. “But I’ve been calculating our travel and I don’t think we’re being permitted to get there. Something is subtly nudging distortions in geography. We’re not going where we want to be. We’re getting herded.”
“Herded where?” Fredo fretted.
“To a larder?” Sarah speculated. The next chamber was hung with people like sides of meat. Some of their skulls had been cracked open so that their brains could be eaten. Others had simply been carved for snacks. “Dr Septimo’s field team never came across anything like this.”
“Septimo Alarcon and Florento de Clement had Abbacanta Harrow guiding them,” a voice in the darkness echoed. “You have no such sorcerer supreme. They had Hermeticus Void assisting in their discoveries. Humbold Vernolt feels no such imperative to assist you. Indeed, he and his forces are closing fast upon the Island of the Secret.”
Fredo frowned. “Is it me, or does calling somewhere the Island of the Secret make it a bit of a giveaway?”
“Maybe we can ponder that when we don’t have a mystery voice?” Biancaneve demanded.
“Maybe the mystery voice is an unknown ally, come to help us and further our quest?” Sarah asked hopefully. “It could happen.”
The Abyssal Malfeasius shuffled forward into the light from Fredo’s torch. The Master of the Ghouls Under Gothametropolis was flanked by many of his kin. They pressed forward slowly and confidently, knowing that the mortals were trapped.
“Oh…!” Avrogadrus realised. “I see what this is. It’s an audition!”
“I should take my gown off?” Sarah puzzled.
“I know it’s hard for you, Avrogadrus, but do try to make sense,” Biancaneve scolded.
“We heard that ghouls can absorb memories, skills, even personality traits from the brains they devour, right?” the archalchemist babbled. “That’s why they’re picky about their diet. The wrong snack and they’d literally be dumber for it. That’s why some ghouls descend to madness when they swallow someone who disagrees with them. So how do they work out who they want to add to their collection, the reservoir of thoughts and recollections they carry with them? They set a test!”
“Very good,” Malfeasius approved. “What then?”
Dissectulus and Vindicta crept forward. They were the Abyssal’s attack ghouls, there to keep others in line.
“The Travels of Visionatus told that you were cast down, Malfeasius,” Sarah insisted. “There was a revolt amongst the Scholars.”
“They tasted like chicken,” Vindicta snickered.
“We were too late to carve the great man,” Dissectulus admitted. “We’re right here for you.”
“I thought you only wanted brains?” Fredo objected. He was professionally offended by the shoddy work of hanging all those bodies as well. That was no way to store meat properly.
“We only eat brains,” Vindicta clarified. “The other parts are for entertainment.”
“And research,” Dissectulus chimed in. “Anatomy experiments work best with live subjects.”
“And we have to deal somehow with the flesh that has failed the food standard,” Malfeasius concluded.
Avrogadrus was still calculating. “So you chase your victims into your tunnels, run them like rats in a maze. And the clever rats, the ones who can understand the non-Euclidean calculations that keep your passageways adjacent to normal space and time, the ones who can get this far, are the ones fit for your menu.”
“Well, the one that understood it,” the Abyssal conceded. “The others are just amusement for my associates.”
Sarah found the courage to ask the question she had been dreading. “What about Buckland Dean? Where is he?”
Malfeasius rolled the scholar’s head to Sarah’s feet. The skull had been torn open to extract its contents.
“He tasted like inspiration,” the Abyssal admitted. “A rare mind with such interesting lore.”
“You’ll pay for that,” Cap’n Biancaneve vowed. She hefted her cutlass and prepared to take ghouls with her as she died.
“This test,” Avrogadrus interrupted. “The tunnels thing that we’re supposed to work out. You ghouls think you know the answer?”
“We do know it,” Dissectulus insisted. “Freed from the constraints of mortal sanity, with countless books of sinister lore to pore over for cold centuries, our minds become attuned to the crawlspaces between realities. We see…”
“The mask,” the archalchemist interrupted the ghoul. “You see the puzzle and you think you’re smarter than the people who don’t see it. But the puzzle is laughing at you – because the puzzle is also a puzzle, and all the time you’ve used its first tier to trap food here you never solved the next level. Never even saw it. Look…!”
He turned and began to chalk across the wall, circling certain carvings and drawing arrows to others. “I may need more chalk colours,” he admitted, “and possibly scaffolding.”
“That makes no…” Vindicta began.
“Perfect sense,” Abyssal Malfeasius interrupted. “That’s brilliant, del Lune! Another intelligence has nudged the hands of the ghouls. Even as we carved out these travel-lanes through space and time, to all the worlds and hidden places, we were executing the deeper will of a manipulator who bent our thoughts to set the subtler test. Fascinating! Absolutely fascinating!”
Sarah looked up sharply. Malfeasius reached into his pocket, pulled out the spectacles he had acquired when he killed Buckland Dean, and polished them.
“Buckland said he would deal with the ghouls,” she breathed.
“Do you see the tiers now?” Avrogadrus asked the Abyssal, excited that someone was following his maths. “How it links in to some sleeping elder sentience here and here, and to telluric lines converging on the landmass above, along these vectors?”
“Folded temporal components translated to architecture,” Malfeasius added, seizing up chalk to sketch in more lines. “Look at these cataclysms that are being harnessed into the sums. What is a Doomherald? Who are these Hellraisers? From whence comes this Living Death That Sucks?”
“It’s not just geography, it’s causality,” the archalchemist replied. “See these narrative pressures? A Folly of Youth and a Moderator Upheaval? A thwarted Void Scholar and a denied Carnifex? I can’t work out the specific from here but they have definitely been thatched into the tunnels, haven’t they? And a great deal more!”
“Excellency, we need to carve the mortals now,” Dissectulus prompted.
“Really?” asked Malfeasius. “I thought we were researchers? Readers and keepers of knowledge, discoverers of truths?” He glanced at the silent collection of ghouls behind his lieutenants. “What do you think, colleagues? Do we break for lunch or do we get on with our purpose?”
“Lunch,” Vindicta voted. “I don’t know what’s got into you, Malfeasius. Are you having trouble assimilating that new brain you ate?”
“No, of course not,” the Abyssal denied. “I never stood a chance against a scholar of the Improbable College who has studied their eldrich library and the Tome of Stories in Progress. That’s why Dean had me devour him. He knew that he would come to dominance in our gestalt personality immediately.”
“But you are Malfeasius the Red, terror of the night, absolute master of these undead!” Dissectulus objected.
The Abyssal pressed one long-clawed finger far up his nose, proddled, scooped out a little chunk of brain matter, and flicked it away. “We were Red,” he announced. “Henceforth we shall be Greye.”
The Ghouls Under Gothametropolis looked from Dissectulus and Vindicta to their adjusted Abyssal.
“Master…” one began.
“Dean,” Greye corrected him. “Abyssal Greye, Dean of the Scholar-Ghouls Beneath Gothametropolis York. If you will accord me such privilege.”
The undead were clustered into three groups. Those closest to Cap’n Biancaneve and the people she protected were in favour of devouring the latest tasty prey. A second huddle wanted to follow the diagram that Avrogadrus was scratching across their bas-relief. There were hasty whispers about locating certain books that would help to fill in vacant wall-sections. The third and largest faction looked between the other two. Gradually they drifted across to one or the other.
“You’ve gone soft, Malfeasius,” Vindicta regretted. “I never thought I’d see the night. Now you have to be put down with the rest.”
“You have it?” Greye asked Avrogadrus del Lune.
“Something that can jump-start the trap codes and produce a non-linear result along the causality curve? Yes, I brought the green vapours.”
“Now would be the time, I think.”
“Oh yes. Like so.” The mad inventor scrawled a last wobbly arrow then tossed the glass phial at the bas relief. The glass shattered, releasing the roiling luminous fumes… to set the wall off.
The vapours made a sound. It was something like “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
The corridors realigned. Tunnel sides passed through each other and the people in them, spitting them out in other locations, places, and times.
“Where did they all go?” one of the scholar-ghouls wondered.
“Well, we won’t find out unless we pick up the chalk and fathom it,” another argued. “Get some books over here and let’s get to work!”
“Where are we?” demanded Dissectulus. “What is this battle?”
“More blasted undead?” thundered St Mortimer de Humphrey, turning his armoured bulk towards the new influx of ghouls. “Vile spawn of evil, begone! I pot thee in the name of the Lord!”
“He what?” Vindicta managed to ask before her head left her body.
“Well, get after him, Josiah,” St Mortimer’s squire was chided by the talking knife he carried. “He’s already halfway through the undead and heading towards the dragon. Besides, I’m getting a queasy sense of déja vu here. So keep up.”
“Ouch!” complained Cap’n Biancaneve, and then, “What am I wearing?”
“Is it dress like a pirate day?” Fredo wondered. “Wait, why do I have a stripy apron?”
“Why do I have small animal bones in my hair?” Avrogadrus wondered.
“Why am I remembering a different life?” Biancaneve demanded. “What is a Yuki… oh, that’s what she is. How excellent! Yeah… face it, I’m amazing!”
“Ham-Boy? I’m Ham-Boy, the world’s meatiest hero? Sure, how could I forget that. I’m good to go now.”
“You’re who?” Sarah of Dunboggie wondered. “What’s the matter with all of you? Did the jump addle your wits, so help ye?”
“Coefficient variations… dimensional pausation… Portal of Pretentiousness vectored over Mansion cellar gateway to Celestian reservoir… analogue mapping to chronological narrative echoes… real-time unlocking of n-aspected lore volume leading to projected exposition cascade… Yes, I think I’m up to speed,” agreed Dr Al B. Harper. “You may all want to duck.”
“Why?” asked Ham-Boy just before CrazySugarFreakBoy! bounced off his face.
“…eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” the wired wonder concluded. Yuki leaned aside with exact precision so that the reinstated sucrose-powered superhero missed her by an inch.
“That’s not Wesley Valentine,” Sarah noted. “I know Wesley, the JollyJuvenileSpicewineSwashbuckler! I mean, professionally. I’m sure anything else that happened was to do with the wine cellar. I hope nothing has happened to him. He’s cute.”
CSFB! came down from his reincorporation euphoria. “Wow, that was a close one. Thanks for letting me hide out in your corposant fire meat-generation interface for a while there, HB. I wouldn’t have made it without you.”
“You’re… welcome?” Fred Harris responded. “My what?”
“And you, doc, working out how to get the gubbings of causality to resonate me back to me-ness, that was just brilliant! And Sarah, providing all the right stimulation as always, whatever the incarnation! And Yuki, you should keep the pirate pants look. Maybe add an eye-patch? And hey, Abyssal. Who knew you could beat someone just with your origin story. That’s well hardcore, and I don’t mean in a Jenna Jameson – Veronica Zemanova – Faye Reagan girls night out kind of way. Which was great, by the by, but a story for another website, maybe. So now we’ve navigated the mysterious tunnels of mystery and we’re ready for the next big plot twist, right? Can I get a ‘hell yeah, Dreamy?’”
“He is one of the CrazySugarFreakLine!,” Sarah of Dunboggie concluded.
“And nothing can be done about it, evidently,” Yuki sighed. “So what’s happening now? Did we really just spend the better part of a year in the past living out lives similar but different to our own?”
“Looks like it,” Al B. agreed. “Time travel the hard way. Someone’s working hard to stop us getting to our destination.”
“You are from the future. Or a future,” the Abyssal Greye understood. “And yet your goals and characters remain similar to those we formerly knew and understood.”
“We’re here to save the world from a dreary fate of Conformity, if that’s what you mean,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! promised. “And then we party!”
“That is how I’d define our mission also,” Sarah admitted. “The future is looking good.”
“If there’s a party I shall be in the kitchen,” said the Abyssal who was comprised of a fair bit of Buckland Dean. “And anything I am eating will be consensual and adding to the gestalt knowledge store contained in my unique personality connection. I’m setting some new ghoul ground rules, at least for our local academy.”
“We still need to get to the tomb of Visionatus and see whether the last bunch of Improbablars missed any clues to help them decode that manual,” Yuki clarified.
“We already know they did,” Ham-Boy reasoned. “We heard they got helped there by others, right? By a sorcerer supreme and an, um, a HV? So they never struggled through the tunnels like we just did and never solved the puzzle-code.”
“So they never went to the Tomb by the proper route” Al B. recognised. “Oh, that is sneaky! What a way to prevent cheaters – allow a cheaty way in! And maybe omit from them just one tiny detail they need to benefit from their winnings?”
He looked around the new tunnels. These had a more natural feel, created by geology and time. They were strangely familiar.
“Isn’t this the route we took before, when we descended from the Mansion to the Door?” Yuki recognised. She was delighted to find her cyborg brain was coupled to databases again and she could do the path recognition. “It is. Nothing has changed. I can map our way to the Tomb from here.”
She couldn’t. The pathways thwarted approach from all but guardians that the island had adopted.
“So we get a guardian,” CSFB! determined. “Think about it. In every era the Mansion picked a spirit to look after it. We just go find this year’s model and get him or her to show us the way.”
“Just like that?” Sarah asked.
“Well, you might have to take your top off,” Dream told her with a wink.
“I can’t locate the Tomb or the Door,” Yuki conceded. “I can find the way to whatever structure is above us.”
The structure was the Lair Mansion. It had rather more books stacked about than usual, but otherwise seemed like the house they had left behind.
Greye was happy about the additions. “This is a very fine collection, if somewhat foxed.”
“Most of it is second hand,” Vinnie de Soth apologised. “I’m on a budget. Hi, folks. Welcome to 1552.”
“I thought it was 1722,” Ham-Boy objected.
“We tunnelled, dude,” CSFB! reminded him.
“So the second expedition of the Improbable College got here a century and a half before the first one,” Sarah worked out. “That’s about par.”
“And before whoever grafittied about The Parody Not Existing got there to place a warning,” Yuki added.
“In fact, at the exact time when Visionatus Improbablus discovered the place and died here,” Vinnie warned.
“Dare we ask how you got here before us?” Ham-Boy ventured to the jobbing occultist.
“Xander.” The one word seemed to the young mage to be quite sufficient explanation.
“Are you the guardian today, then?” CSFB! checked. “Only if so Sarah has a couple of things to show you. And if…” He stopped, wincing, clutching his earlobe.
“You managed to install a censor function on CSFB!?” Yuki asked Al B. admiringly.
“As if,” snorted the wired wonder. “It’s my eerie ear-ring. It picks up signals on all frequencies. Right now it’s picking them up on all frequencies! Something’s coming. Something big. The mothership!” He instinctively looked to the ceiling that concealed the sky above.
“We can boot up the Mansion’s sensor network!” Al B. realised blissfully. “In this time-period that tech should still work! I need to get to…”
His work-plan, like himself, was suppressed by a swarm of beavers.
“No!” Yuki objected. “I wanted to delete spiffy’s Beaver Attack Plan from the defence systems because it was too stupid and Visionary insisted it stay. And now it turns out that spiffy was right!”
“Don’t worry,” CSFB! called out with a big grin. “I can wrestle beaver! I can dive in! Watch me beat it!”
Ham-Boy diverted the colony with skilfully tossed cold cuts and a blanket of mincemeat.
A battle-staff slammed into the side of his head.
“How dare you interfere with the agents of Chokahontas the Beaver Girl!” the present guardian of Parody Island demanded.
“She’s called Beaver Girl?” Yuki winced. “Oh no!”
“It’s not funny!” CSFB! scolded the cyborg P.I. “The beaver is a sacred spirit in Native American mythology. He’s transformative, sometimes destructive and sometimes creative. I can relate to that. Cherokee kids leave their baby-teeth out for him and receive gifts in return. There are Beaver clans and Beaver dances and a whole bunch of Beaver stories. Sometimes they caused the Great Flood. Other times they taught humans how to grow tobacco. They’re builders and makers – and guardians, like Chokahontas here!”
“Every time I think I’ve understood CSFB! he surprises me,” Al B. admitted to Ham-Boy.
Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove stood before Beaver Girl and made a serious, correct salute of greeting and respect. He held out candy as a token of welcome and friendship and received an acorn and an eagle feather in return.
“Don’t kill them, they’re friends!” Laurie Leyton cried, hastening into the Lair Mansion after its guardian. “Oh, you’re not killing them.”
“Avrogadrus is just slightly nibbled,” Sarah assured her. “That can happen to anyone.”
“Guardian of the Way,” the Abyssal Greye called to Chokahontas, “we seek permission to make pilgrimage to the Tomb of Visionatus Improbablus.”
“Tomb?” Beaver Girl puzzled. “He only went down there this evening.”
Vinnie winced as CSFB! had earlier. “What is out there above Lair Island?” he demanded.
“That would be the Celestian Space Robot,” Laurie revealed. “On the bright side it seems to have slowed down the overwhelming attack brigades of the Church of Conformity for a little while.”
“Laurie?” Vinnie recognised Beth Shellett and the ghost that possessed her. “Oh, and we all thought we took the long ways!”
“Celestian Space Robot,” Yuki picked out the relevant term. “For why?”
“I am not sure,” Chokahontas admitted, “but it has suspended the defences of this island, including any extraordinary measures I might otherwise have drawn down. Now I am little more than an insubstantial spectre.”
“With a horde of attack beavers,” Ham-Boy qualified.
“So no Celestian shields,” Yuki recognised. “But there’s still our regular Mansion-tech. HB, with me to the Operations Room and the main defence consoles. Al B, to your lab. We need diagnostics, stat. CSFB!, take Sarah and the Abyssal Greye and have Chokahontas lead you to Visionary. Fast!”
“Take Buckland,” Sarah amended the arrangement. “There’s nothing I can do in the spooky under-tunnels really. I’ve got another job, I guess.”
“What’s that?” Ham-Boy wondered.
“I have to stop that Space Robot.”
Ham-Boy nearly said she had no chance, and then he wondered: what if she had a very small chance?
One might be all she needed.
One might be all any of them got.
***
30. Kahn Vaantagion Khaur and the Heart of the Dead Galaxy
More than two years ago, in the opening days of the Parody War:
“No one now remembers the name of the Second Oldest Race,” the Hooded Hood intoned. “No one. Not gods, not Offices, not even the Celestian Space Robots that order all. The Parodyverse has many origins: hundreds of pantheons made it, each separately; the GatewayGuideTricksterTransformer!; the Starseed; the old blue men of Owna; the contestants for the Jarvis Cosmic. Each of them determined a different First Race, the echoes of whom still ripple across the narrative. But the Second Oldest Race, no.”
The grey-mantled manipulator ignored the weapon aimed at him. It had carried a defect since it had been minted in the war-factories of broken Stekra III and would fail on its next firing. Emergency comms systems were offline because Lieutenant Kostir had discovered Lieutenant Ommak’s infidelity and the hot beverage she had hurled at him had inadvertently fused out the monitor station. Today’s upgrades in primary capacity rerouting had a tiny undiscovered flaw that would cost the programmer his life but that glitch ensured no alarm would sound for nine and a half minutes.
“Nothing is remembered of the Second Oldest Race’s history,” the Hood went on. “No art, no architecture, no literature. No one knows how far they spread or how advanced their technology was. Even the names of their gods are erased. Do you know why?”
Kahn Vaantagion Khaur fired his weapon. It failed.
“At the pinnacle of their glory, the Second Oldest Race were the first to discover that the Parodyverse has architecture too. There is a scaffolding of primal forces on which it is hung like a stage. There are areas behind the canvas backdrops of reality, workshops and technical spaces, store rooms and waiting areas. There are ropes and pulleys to operate the counterweights of narrative. All the necessary facilities to support universes of cause and effect are necessarily hidden behind them. And beneath that, around the outside, packing that agglomeration, a vortex of potential, a source of material and a recycling bin for what is no longer required. The Second Oldest Race were the first in any history to break through into that fundamental zone.”
“Who are you?” Captain Kahn demanded. “How can you break onto one of the Parody Master’s dimensional dreadnaughts and confront her commander by night with no alarum given?”
“Am I not… the Hooded Hood?” The cowled crime czar shrugged. “Every ecosystem has its predators and parasites, even one as alien as the Transdimensional Vortex above which all planes balance. Various entities have claimed credit for creating such predators; the Void Scholar believes he has made them, for example, and may have been permitted to do so. Howsoever they existed, the Vortex was home to the Lurkers Below, the Devourers of Story… the Hero Feeders.”
Kahn had been briefed on Space Fandoms, shapeshifting intruders who cast the person they duplicated into Comic-Book Limbo where Hero Feeders devoured their lives.
“Not the small sad Lurker wisps that remain today,” the Hood scorned. “These were the first of their kind, the size of planets, potent in the new-created Parodyverse with spoils of those origins that had been rejected. When the Second Oldest Race forged a way between the Vortex and the Prime Reality, the Lurkers Below swarmed through and began to devour all that existed here.”
Despite himself, Captain Kahn was intrigued. He was a man of scholarly mind. “Why are we here, then? How could this plane survive?”
“The Second Oldest Race must have been very advanced. They fought back. There was war. Even as great chunks of their existence were swallowed away they united all of their souls, everything that remained to them, and forged a weapon of final destruction. They called it the Psychostave. It was the epitome of the psychic power of an advanced race. And at last resort they used it.”
“What weapon of last resort is not, in the end?” Kahn brooded darkly. He had used his. His world was gone.
“Indeed,” agreed the Hooded Hood. “The great Hero Feeders were shattered, reduced to the sad scavenger remnants that plague Comic-Book Limbo now. The Second Oldest Race erased itself to erase its error. The Psychostave endured to cause more trouble later. A very few other rags remained, last echoes of tales now untold.”
“The Master’s Doomherald is whispered to come from such a devastation,” Kahn remembered. Exu had been the Second Oldest Race’s God of Murder before the broken remains of him had been salvaged by the Parody Master to forge into his right hand agent.
“Here is the mystery, though,” the cowled crime czar confided. “After the Psychostave had done its work, after the Second Oldest Race and the Great Lurkers had been mutually edited from continuity, the Celestian Space Robots that regulate the Parodyverse converged on the place where the conflict had occurred. Only then. Then they released their power. They sterilised an entire galaxy. Nothing that lived, even on a quantum level, survived their action. Nothing of spirit, nothing of magic, nothing of probability… nothing at all. The Dead Galaxy became a place where life simply did not and could not exist. Then the Celestians set boundaries about it to prevent incursion, walls that persisted for more than twelve billion years.”
Kahn caught the past tense. “They persisted? Those barriers are gone?”
“No. But there is always a back door. Heroes from Earth have a tendency to discover exceptions. That is why I cultivate them.”
“The Lair Legion.”
“Of course. Part of the Parodyverse is obsessed with the Resolution Prophecy that all creation is set to answer some cosmic Question posed by the hidden true Creators who inflicted this reality upon us. We are supposed to have one final, terrible, glorious war to our destruction in service of discovering that truth. The Resolution is why we were created.” The archvillain almost spat. “It shall be denied. But that Resolution Prophecy wanted the Psychostave, and to be a real boy, and to make short-cuts to the big finale. The same Earth heroes disabused ‘Lord Resolution’ of his illusions.”
“And you helped,” Kahn surmised. All dimensional dreadnaughts in this quadrant of space had been directed to converge on the Sol system in Mutter’s Spiral. He began to see why.
“Certain developments suited my needs. Many powerful entities with blatant agendas fail to consider the danger posed by heroes whose abilities and influence seem insignificant. It is a signal error, one that will cause the downfall of the Parody Master in his turn.”
“You are the Master’s enemy.” Kahn Vaantagion Khaur looked around for other ways to defeat the invader aboard the Cruel Deceiver
“I am,” agreed the cowled crime czar. “But we shall return to that. For now, consider why the omnipotent Space Robots would seal a galaxy where nothing lived behind a barrier that none could pass – supposedly. They hadn’t factored in how annoying Nats can be. What was still in there, the thing that had survived mutual narrative annihilation, that was still dangerous to the Parodyverse the Celestians had been set to guard?”
“What then?” Kahn could not resist.
“I do not know,” the Hooded Hood confessed. “I suspect… but until someone penetrates the heart of that place of absolute death I cannot say for sure.” He looked over at the grey-haired, grizzled ship captain. “That is where I wish to send you.”
“Me? Why? I am your enemy. I will surely find a way to destroy you soon.”
“Are we enemies, Kahn Vaantagion Khaur? It was not I who imprisoned you before for your dissident tendencies, who executed your family in front of you, who set you on the path to betraying your world to the advancing army of its enemy. It was not I who assaulted your homeworld with limitless Avawarriors and turned it into a nameless cog in an endless war machine. It was not I who took you and broke you in a dungeon and turned your grief and hatred into chains that bind you to do the very things you once fought against at such terrible cost. You serve the Parody Master now, commander of one of the deadliest vessels ever created. But what does your heart say?”
“My heart was plucked out. All that is left is rage and malice.”
“That is all they wanted left. But immeasurably powerful forces are careless of detail. One small thing I have done to you, Captain Kahn, the only retcon I could manage against the Parody Master’s impressive precautions and overwhelming power. You remember your family.”
Khaur shuddered as it came back to him; as they returned to his mind. He fell to his knees and began to sob, deep rasping choking gasps that might crack his chest.
“Not for you the oblivion of the Second Oldest Race,” the archvillain condemned him. “No such kindness. Memory demands choice. Someone must be betrayed.”
“My family or my Master…” Kahn shuddered.
“You are not permitted to seek death,” the Hooded Hood knew. “Death awaits you only at the heart of the Dead Galaxy. You have an appointment there. Serve me and I shall send you to that meeting to discover what the Celestians hid.”
“You want me to turn against the Parody Master? To defy the Celestian Space Robots? To spite time and challenge death?”
“Indeed.”
Kahn Vaantagion Khaur stood up and wiped his last tears from his eyes. “Then I accept.”
***
Now:
A side of the Apostate’s mighty Battle Temple bloomed into nuclear fire and split off from the main mass. Around it a half million other combat craft weaved and fought. The alliance of the Tyrant of the Dead Galaxy opposed the crusade of the Cult of Apostate for the future of the Parodyverse.
“Assess critical systems loss over thirty percent of enemy flagship,” the Cruel Deceiver’s combat watch-stander reported. “The Earth warriors are still fighting in there.”
“I have been told that they have capacity for disrupting the plans of powerful beings,” Captain Kahn admitted.
Science station chimed in. “The apparatus those Terran support staff took aboard the Temple has been activated. Operative Davidowicz reports that, having acquired biodata from the Crusader Fleet’s secure lab systems, they have been able to transfer the consciousnesses of over five thousand key command personnel into some Terran bioform called cockroaches. Operative Browning reports that he will need to repolish his boots now.”
Sensors reported next. “The Terran sorceress declares heavy arcane resistance near the Ceremony Galleries. She says she is ‘uncorking the Shoggoth bottle and retiring immediately’. Whatever that means.”
Another signal came in. “This is Dan Drury talking at’ya from the Temple weapons deck. These turkey-tonguein’ jockstrap-crawlers won’t be usin’ these guns any more, cause we got ‘em turned round an’ firing into the ship. Wa-hoo!”
“I have contact with the Lair Legion assault element!” Tactics interjected. “They have engaged with the Elite Crusader Cohort. Combat is ongoing. Computers assess power levels in that area of the vessel to be off the scale.”
Internal Security called in. “The last of the converts to the cult aboard this ship have been neutralised or contained, Captain. What do you want done with the secured survivors?”
“Find an abandoned hulk amongst the shattered crafts out there,” Kahn ordered. “Something without propulsion or weapons but capable of life support. Teleport them there. It’s not their fault that their minds were addled by the Apostate’s presence. Maybe when we take the man down they’ll snap to their senses?” He pointed to Transportation Command. “Keep scanning for your primary objective. Let me know when you have a trace good enough for lock-on.”
“We’re receiving a data download from an entity designated Fleabot aboard the A.E.S. Aunt Sally,” Systems called out. “It’s some kind of combat operations module patch, intended to add predictive insights to the critical phase of the engagement. A file named GreenGirlBlues.exe. Warlord Vaahir says it is permitted to install it.”
“Then lock it in,” Kahn commanded. “If we can’t trust Vaahir then we’re all dead anyway. I’m still not sure how he got us these reinforcements, but they changed our chances from very poor to merely poor. So now we take that and win with it, right my lads and lasses?”
There was a chorus of cheers from around the dreadnaught’s command deck. The city-sized ship had taken a beating that would have rendered almost any other vessel to scrap, yet the Cruel Deceiver was still fit for combat, the deadliest single spaceship remaining in the Parodyverse. Her crew still had high spirits despite their desperate fight.
Navigation looked up from her helm display. “The tiny gold and red craft that Lord Vaahir is using as his flagship, the chatty one, she’s just flown through an ex-Skree Mk IV Sky Fortress! And she’s telling it off!”
“Energy flare against the Seventeenth Crusader Fleet!” Sensors supplied urgently. “Analysis systems asses that was… that was one Terran operative taking on thirteen warships. And she’s holding them.”
“Multiple mass spontaneous detonations aboard the Ninth Crusader Fleet,” Combat added. “Some kind of wrinkle in probabilities. It was another Terran, but the odd clockwork ship she was on just got destroyed – no, it wasn’t! But… how did that happen?”
One of the mobile artillery platforms headed straight for Plxtragar detonated without warning, taking its two nearest sister ships with it in a cascade of transnuclear arsenal failures. A fourth ship drifted helplessly without any active drive systems. “Assess power core from that ship was teleported into the power core of the one that exploded!”
“Incoming message from Terran operative codenames Cathode. Intense fighting on the engineering decks. But apparently a large quantity of centurions have arrived to relive them… Er no, apparently that is centaurs. A whole war herd, evidently. And some dinosaurs.”
“Emergency signal from the Inquisition Craft I’m flagging on the main screen display, sir,” Comms reported. “It’s the Terran designated MLA. He says he has liberated three thousand prisoners schedules for torture conversion, some of them quite hot babes, and he needs them evacuated. Assess a minor mythological being and a matter manipulator with him.”
“And the elementalist!” Transport Command cried out. “Sir, we have her. But we don’t have a lock!”
“Direct the Terrans towards the Klayhog transports,” Captain Kahn commanded. “Keep working on a teleport solution for Liu Xi Xian.”
“We’re monitoring an input to the Thannagarian First Wing from the Terran stealth operative designated VelcroVixen,” Comms picked up. “She says she has located where the Purveyors of Peril are incarcerated, is ‘kicking Brass Monkey’s ass’, and that then it will be payback time.”
“Combat probability systems now assess a 41% chance of local tactical victory!” Combat Systems squeaked with surprise.
Kahn sighed. “And do those combat systems tell you where the Apostate is or what he is doing?” he asked. “No matter. I suspect we are about to find out.”
Psionic attack alarms blared across the bridge. Sensors spiked at all-time-high readings and then burned out.
A wave of belief-force burst across the light-year wide battlefield, locking almost everyone in place. One Conversion Ship being entirely enveloped by a giant gelid blob of elder-snot continued to suffer.
Every system in every ship that opposed the Apostate froze. Every enemy who did not recognise his divinity halted in place.
“Sinners,” the Apostate called. “You thought to oppose my will. Now you shall learn that all opposition is useless. Now and forever, I am the real power of the Parodyverse!”
The screens showed him hanging in space, all-powerful, triumphant.
They showed Hatman rocketing towards him with a cheap ball cap in his hands. If any of the systems had bothered to check they would have seen that it bore the logo of Larry’s Bowl-o-Rama and was printed with the legend: Fuzzy Bunnies of the Happy Place Bowling Team.
“You are not the real power of anything!” Jay shouted as he reached Apostate and pulled the cap onto his head. “You’re fake! I’m real dammit!”
The old memento he had borrowed from Visionary’s room in the Lair Mansion met with the Serious Matter that allowed Hatman to take on the properties of whoever a hat’s owner was.
Visionary existed so that the Apostate would not. While Visionary had been inside Wilbur Parody’s revised reality that prohibition had not existed. Out here so far from Earth those new rules had not yet arrived - and Hatman wore a Visionary cap.
Apostate screamed.
Hatman hit him.
Then Apostate was gone. His power broke. His ships faltered. Those he had been restraining were free to act again.
G-Eyed teleported in to drag the capped crusader from the open space where he hung. Vaahir slammed an all-channels signal to the Black Galaxy fleet. “All ships! It worked! We got him! Execute attack plan Retribution Fist immediately. Let’s end this once and for all!”
“And then the drinks are on Hatty,” chimed in Silicone Sally.
“We have lock, Captain Kahn!” Transportation called abruptly. “We can teleport the Liu Xi girl while she is distracted by victory.”
“Engage!” Khan ordered.
“Transporting now. We got her.”
“Shields to full. Propulsion to maximum. Set a course for the Dead Galaxy. For its heart!”
***
She was quite beautiful, Kahn Vaantagion Khaur thought of the sleeping Liu Xi Xian. The girl reminded him a little of his daughter, back when she had a face.
He was there when Liu Xi awoke. She blinked to consciousness and her hand immediately found the Obedience Collar on her neck.
She had been restrained like that before, when she had been captured by the Parody Master as his intended bride. The sophisticated device prevented her from doing anything that it had been told to inhibit. It did not restrict her powers, only the use of them.
Liu Xi reached her senses out and checked her environment. She was aboard the Cruel Deceiver for certain. The interplay of complicated forces of such a massive spacecraft would have been unmistakable even without the blinding energies from the collected Insanity Stones that had been used to supercharge the ship; yet the Inhibition Collar restrained her from interfering with them.
“I am sorry,” said Captain Kahn.
Another bit of information filtered to the elementalist’s senses. The entire city-sized ship was empty except for the two of them.
“Where is everyone? What did you do?”
“I had them abandon ship. They are safe. They will be recovered. Some of them would have followed me, even into the Dead Galaxy, but I do not wish to take them to my doom.”
“To your doom?” Liu Xi suppressed a shiver. “How did I get here? Why am I… chained?”
Kahn sighed. “That is necessary. And practical. I had you teleported aboard at battle’s end. Nothing can catch us now and no-one can stay the Deceiver’s course.
Liu Xi realised that she could sense nothing beyond the perimeter of the ship. Surely no shields could be that thorough? “The Dead Galaxy? The Hooded Hood’s space base.”
“Hardly. The Tyrant of the Dead Galaxy scarcely ventured past the rim. There are still desolated worlds there, and half-worlds, floating where no suns burn. Some of them had resources he could use, refuges for the dispossessed he gathered around him. That was where his armada began, on the sheerest edge of forbidden space, accessed through channels once made by your Lair Legion’s passage.”
Kahn gestured to the places outside the dreadnaught. “We are far beyond them now. Further than anyone has passed since the great war of the Second Oldest Race and the Lurkers Below. Far enough that the Celestian Space Robots would certainly destroy us if they were active still. But the guardians have faltered and the secret shall be exposed.”
“You kidnapped me to take me into the Dead Galaxy?”
“Yes. I told I am sorry. But you were the lover of the last survivor of that place, of the god of murder who once dwelled there. He helped you to rebuild yourself from matter dropped into Comic-Book Limbo, matter that was once part of the realm of the Second Oldest Race. In all of creation there is no-one with greater affinity to the Dead Galaxy than you.”
“It is void,” Liu Xi understood bleakly. “And it calls.”
“I seek my death,” Kahn agreed. “I have sought it for a long time. Now it is close and I can rest soon.”
“You’re dragging me in with you, though. I didn’t ask to be part of your obsession. Where are we even going?”
“The very centre, Liu Xi Xian. You are a child of a line that no longer ever was. Your family was bred by the Void Scholar for a purpose that was thwarted and now he never existed so neither did your ancestors. Yet they have left footprints in time and you are still here. Why do you think that is?”
“There are many paradoxes in the Parodyverse.”
“Yes. Even a Paradox Stranger who existed by them, I am told. He was eliminated from existence, retconned out, so that his exception could be transferred to you.”
“Retconned?” Liu Xi knew what that implied.
“Yes. The Hooded Hood told me you would be needed for this journey. For this destination. He arranged for you to be available.”
The elementalist remembered her deals with the cowled crime czar, a desperate bargain that had forced her to take the life of an alien woman and leave her child orphaned, another to protect that infant from the fate she would have otherwise suffered as a consequence if Liu Xi’s choices.
“So the Hood has called in his markers at last, and I am to die,” she understood.
“Only a dimensional dreadnaught could survive this journey,” Kahn declared. “Only the energies of the combined Insanity Stones could push us to our destination. And only you could direct us there.”
The Obedience Collar would allow that. It could not demand it.
“If I choose to point some other direction?” Liu Xi challenged.
“Then my whole life will be meaningless after all and we will both have died for nothing,” the Captain replied. He suddenly looked his years, a man carrying a great weight of ghosts.
“I see no reason to assist the Hooded Hood in his plots.”
“He told me that this would be one of the keys to saving the Parodyverse from the Normalcy Wave.”
“Ham ka chan, tsat tau!” Liu Xi swore at the absent archvillain.
The Cruel Deceiver barrelled through nothing towards the centre of the Dead Galaxy.
***
“Are you comfortable?”
“I’m a captive. Again. The quality of my prison doesn’t matter.”
Kahn winced. “I have apologised. I will continue to do so.”
“And I will still be a prisoner taken to execution.”
“For a purpose.”
Liu Xi wasn’t impressed. “There is always the purpose. Often I thought it a worthwhile one. Xander the Improbable, the sorcerer supreme, dragged me to other worlds with him when I was younger. I though he wanted to help people, wanted me to help them, but he was branded to obedience by the Parody Master, bound worse than this collar binds me. I was being betrayed.”
“And yet he kept you from the fate the Parody Master intended. And though conscripted by the obedience brand on him, Xander managed to sabotage the greater portion of the dimensional dreadnaught fleet – including this ship of mine.”
That much was evident to Liu Xi, but she saw no need to mention that to her captor. She was forbidden from interfering with ship’s systems, but the lines of potential that the master of the mystic craft had threaded round the vessel were not part of those. They might be useful later.
It occurred to her that Xander and Vinnie between them has given her the insights she might need for that if the time came. The odd thing was that the spells woven round the ship were ones that Xander might never have had the power to activate.
“Let me know if you need anything to make your journey more comfortable,” Kahn told her.
“I’ll tell you if I need more apologies.”
***
“It will all be over,” Liu Xi considered as she ate a last breakfast. “Back at the Plxtragar border. Long finished. Weeks ago.”
“Yes,” agreed Kahn. He sipped his tea. “I hope our people prevailed. Vaahir is very talented and he has some strong allies. The loss of the Apostate should have been the turning point.”
“As long as Jay never takes that cap off. I wonder if Caphan girls will start to follow him, now?”
“What will happen to the Dead Galaxy empire without the Hooded Hood to hold it together? Whatever else it did, it was a force for stability in that troubled region.”
“The peace of the gun. Shazana Pel and her diplomatic mission will make a better peace.”
“It will not matter once the Normalcy wave reaches that far. Space travel will become impractical. Some species will no longer even be viable. Technology levels will tumble, and some civilisations with them.”
“The Lair Legion won’t be able to get home. Assuming Wilbur Parody hasn’t gone after them personally to destroy them himself. The remaining team, the Juniors, even the Purveyors of Peril, all stuck in space. Maybe Plxtragar will become the next Nexus planet?”
“My information is that the Nexus is dying. It will not survive another jump.”
Liu Xi extended her senses out into the darkness of space. “Everything is dead.”
“I am sorry.”
An hour later the ship’s computers reported that sensors could now observe the section of space that Liu Xi had defined as the centre of the former territory of the Second Oldest Race. Here not even the tiniest granule of matter remained. No electromagnetic wave passed. The Deceiver’s defence screens worked ceaselessly to prevent molecular discorporation and even the great ship’s energies were dwindling with the effort.
“We are here,” Kahn told Liu Xi. “The heart is before us.”
“What is there?”
“Nothing. Like the rest, only nothing. I’m bringing the ship in but the sensors can find no trace.”
The vast dreadnaught cruised slower, nearer. Entropy nibbled at her. There were no longer reserves enough to return from this final destination.
“She was a good ship,” Kahn declared. He watched the remaining power levels dropping visibly now, this close to the core of it all.
Liu Xi froze, perceiving something so faint that she feared that even the slightest motion might lose the trace. “There is something,” she whispered. “So tiny. Almost gone. It was right there ahead of us.”
“What?” Kahn Vaantagion Khaur asked. “Death?”
“A pinhole. Everything. So much that even this couldn’t quite erase it. That’s why this area was interdicted. Quarantined. The Space Robots didn’t dare let anyone find it.”
“What is it?”
“You already know. What destroyed the Second Oldest Race? What did they do?”
“They opened the first portal into the Vortex. It is common now. Your archscientist uses it as a short-cut for goods deliveries.”
“But this was the first one, when the Parodyverse was new, before all the ‘keep out’ signs and cosmic barbed wire were set up. This was the first dimensional transit to the impossible outside places. And do you know what we call that?”
Kahn shook his head.
“We call that a Nexus of Unreality. The Nexus. They made it! And when they were destroyed it moved on. But this… this was its nest. Its cradle. Its womb.” Liu Xi shuddered as the truth washed over her. “This is where it was born. This is where it comes to die. This is where it is now!”
Suddenly the purpose of Xander’s latent enchantments on the ship became clear to Liu Xi. They were not a trap. They were a translator. An elementalist was required to set them off and hear what a dimensional Nexus had to say.
Kahn saw her face. “Liu Xi?”
“He trained me for this,” she whispered. “I didn’t realise it at the time. Even when I was rebelling and defying, even when I was helping Vinnie, I was learning for this. I can do this!”
She reached out to the very elements of the ship and flared the enchantments to live.
The Nexus of Unreality was singing. It was a farewell.
It was a love song.
The sound thrummed through the dimensional dreadnaught, a haunting threnody of loss and final hope.
“What does that mean?” Kahn whispered.
“It means… she? She misses one she loved. A… a Bog Thing. She kept recreating him but always imperfectly, until at last one came that was… not Crapsack, he was just a poor substitute, but before that there was… the real one. She loved him and he her.”
Liu Xi clutched Kahn’s sleeve and pointed, as of she saw things now that were invisible to the captain.
“They loved. And this Bog Thing encountered the Probability Dancer, and then he returned to the Nexus and they… he and the Nexus… by wild chance there was a child. Part plant, part dimensional pattern. Beloved.”
Liu Xi took a step forward as if following, dragging Kahn with her. “The child grew. She went to Faerie. She took service with the Faerie Queene. Rose in the Court… became the court, the royal pavilion, the sacred trellis.”
The cascade was coming clearer in Liu Xi’s mind now and Kahn did not interrupt it.
“And… and she was seduced by an Unhappy Place Fern and they had… there was a creature of Fey mischief, a Fernbiote, and it… he… met a girl in a glass tube – or was it before that? Zemette, who had been retconned away when Baron Zemo fell, his bioengineered daughter by his own stasis-frozen wife.”
Kahn looked to see if Liu Xi had gone mad, but the girl seemed only impassioned by the welter of what she saw.
“And a thousand years later, a thousand from now, Zemette and the Fernbiote… a dynasty. And in that dynasty, three lovely Zemo sisters… Kilpurnia, Exsanguia, Maladucta… descendants of the Nexus!”
“To what purpose?” Kahn wondered.
“They were visited by night, by three mystery men, and each sister bore a child. Kilpurnia’s boy was Bry! G-Eyed, fathered by Starseed the Gah! Master, and he inherited the Nexus’ mastery of dimensions. Exsanguia, she bore Derek, Exile, to the dark Gah! lord Dirth Vortex, and Exile had the Nexus’ control of energies. And the third sister, Maladucta, she was with… a Harper offspring? How did Al’s kids…? Never mind, she bore Bambi, the Suicide Blonde, who controlled matter. All three children were brought back to the present age and grew up here.”
“Quite an active Nexus, then.”
“spiffy has a lot to answer for. Then G-Eyed got Laurie Leyton pregnant and they had a child who vanished with Xander, and who…” Liu Xi could see it now. “Who became the Earth Maiden that I met once. And she met Banjooooo and they… another daughter, culmination of all. That’s the Celestian Messiah. Not any child of mine, nothing to do with me, but…”
Liu Xi stopped short. She had spoken untruth. The child was to do with her. The child carried Liu Xi’s parting gift. The child might save the Parodyverse because Liu Xi had died for her.
A gift that had not yet been given.
“We must enter that pinpoint that the Second Oldest Race made,” she told Kahn. “It will destroy us, but we must go. To the place from whence the Great Lurkers Below were spawned, and worse. To death and beyond. We must.”
“I understand,” Captain Kahn said solemnly. “I have hated much and sinned much. I have fought more fights than I remember and killed billions. I have been villain and vile. But one last charge, a final voyage to take you to your port, that is how I am redeemed. Why I can rest in oblivion.”
“A final voyage,” Liu Xi agreed. “What better reason than to help a little girl who is left alone? To give her the key to saving everything? I will be content with that.”
Khan removed the collar from her neck and threw it away.
He took his place at the helm of the Cruel Deceiver. He strained the dimensional dreadnaught’s engines for one last trip, turning his war machine into an instrument of hope.
The fading Nexus sang to them.
“I am coming,” he whispered to family long gone.
The ship sailed at the singularity and ceased to be.
***
31. Wilbur Parody and the Old Story
“I have come a long way,” Wilbur Parody told the Consortium he had assembled. “My origins were humble. I slaughtered my way to greatness in my first life, sufficient that when I was finally cut down I was recruited and reborn as the sixty-fourth Destroyer of Tales. I like to think I distinguished myself in that cosmic Office more than most.”
“Is this going to be a long monologue?” interrupted Magenta St Evil. “Only I have texts.”
“As Destroyer I had access to the secrets and special knowledge allowed only to the one who performs that role,” Parody went on. “Secrets about endings that can never be revealed. Secrets so terrible that when the incumbent of the office leaves his post, dead or alive, that knowledge is wrenched from him beyond recovery.”
“So you wrote it in a book,” Humbolt Vernald recognised. “A forbidden Tome that would remind you of what you had lost.”
“How?” the vampire empress Madame Jikininki demanded. “The rules of the universe would work to prevent such a thing.”
“I had inside help,” Wilbur answered slyly. “Suffice that I wrote the manual and retained the knowledge. And with it I was able to lay more ambitious plans.”
“More ambitious than being Destroyer of Tales,” Malvolio Frost admired.
“Yes. What I knew allowed me to position myself to be co-opted as the Chronicler of Stories. The Destroyer’s knowledge was stripped from me again, but now I had access to the place of ravens and destiny wherein the great strands of Parodyverse narrative weave and knot. Again I could record that which should be edited from me on my retirement and again I set in motion those parts of my plan that required the power of the Office I currently held.”
“So you’re at least partially responsible for the modern Parodyverse,” Magenta scorned.
“And then you sought my office,” accused Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity, the Shaper of Worlds who was set over beginnings.
“Say rather the Office you presently occupy. My tenure was some centuries ago, although I did begin some unpleasant things that are still unfolding for the heroes of the Parodyverse. I also completed my instructions that arranged for the forging of the Inevitable Blade – no need to thank me for destroying the Parody Master that was triggered to prevent my current rise. And I competed my third volume of secrets.”
“It is more commonly numbered the first,” HV mentioned pedantically.
“Despite the combined lore now available to me after I quit the last Triumvirate role, I was still inhibited by the existing programming of the Celestian Space Robots. Those infinite maintenance machines can thwart even the will of the Triumvirate. But amongst the many prophecies I had left for myself regarding the events leading to Resolution was a promise that they would be broken, shut down in the Parody War.”
“We haven’t been able to boot them again,” Symmetry confessed. “Of course, such restarting would require my actual support, so the present Chronicler and Destroyer are wasting a lot of time.”
Crapsack stirred, like a dungheap shrugging. “What does all this have to do with getting everything we want? How does this get me the Nexus?”
Wilbur was not to be deterred from his summation. “In preparation for the present time I reverted to mortality. I occupied my years constructing my city, New Parody City, Parodiopolis, and ruling it as Mayor. By cunning design made possible by the lore I had retained I was able to craft that place into a giant trap to leach the power of the Fairly Great Old One slumbering below.”
“This would be when the Lair Legion travelled back in time and stomped your plans?” Symmetry checked.
“Or the time when the Brain Butcher nearly carved you up for that secret knowledge in your head,” Magenta suggested.
“Or when you first met Lisa, long before she was the present Destroyer of Tales,” Malvolio added unadvisedly, “and failed to recognise that the superhero Goldeneyed who accompanied her was father of the Celestian Madonna.”
“You had him in your dungeons, and the mother, and you never noticed!” Humbert Vernold accused his successor in the College of Conformity.
“The time was not ripe,” Wilbur insisted. “The Celestial Messiah is an irrelevancy now, although I have set a most unpleasant entity to eliminate her as soon as she is discovered.”
“Weren’t you basically the Hooded Hood’s stooge in those plots to steal Shabba-Dhabba-Dhu’s power?” Magenta speculated. “He did kind of leave you holding the crap…”
“Hey!” objected Crapsack.
“Holding the crap while he went on to conquer the Parodyverse.”
“I was hampered by not being able to hold all my forbidden knowledge together at that point and by the necessary ruses I required to position me…” Wilbur insisted.
“How much help did you receive for your current plans?” Madame Jikininki wondered.
Wilbur pursed his lips. “None of you should make the mistake of thinking I cannot destroy you with a thought,” he warned. “Now attend: I worked to prepare the Parody War, though it edged us all towards Resolution. I arranged for Lisa to receive the Booke of the Law and the minor office that goes with it. She assembled the ‘heroes’ of the Lair Legion.”
“You tried a shortcut to steal their destinies and get an early win,” Symmetry noted. “It didn’t end well.”
“You are all so limited!” Parody hissed. “Even you, supposed Shaper. I have cultivated history. I have carved circumstance. I have pruned narrative. But most of all, I have the means of bypassing the rules of the Parodyverse, to do things that no single Triumvirate member could achieve, using knowledge supposedly hidden from each of the other two Great Offices. And now that the Space Robots are defunct and the Parody Master is dead there is nothing to prevent me from using those over-ride codes to revise this Parodyverse as I see fit.”
“That is why we’re paying attention,” Magenta St Evil pointed out.
“Still waiting for the pay-off, though,” grumbled Crapsack.
“Each of us can achieve our goals through this,” Humbolt Vernald argued. “We have mutual self-interest. Hear the man out.”
Wilbur Parody did not acknowledge the intervention. “One layer of power remains for me to achieve. Those who assist me will be amply rewarded. Those who seek to thwart me shall suffer for eternity.”
“Standard package,” Malvolio Frost considered.
“Even the Parody Master was unable to achieve the Storyheart, the… the soul of the Parodyverse. It lies beyond even the Celestians’ grasp. But I shall find it. I shall have it. That is final victory.”
“And there is a plan,” Magenta supposed.
“As I strip away the absurdities of creation, the Storyheart will be exposed. At last it will make itself known to its champions, its Lair Legion. Some of them will be called. The prophecies make it all clear. They will go to the Heart of Story and they will lead me to it. I have the power to seize it then, to make it mine forever.”
“Then the story will be all about you,” Symmetry suggested. “But we shall have our parts.”
“That is so.” He turned to his Consortium. “You each have your part to play in revoking the Parodyverse. My Tomes are placed in time and space where they will be required. The ‘heroes’ are ready to spring into action.”
“The Hooded Hood is ready to stop you?” Magenta slipped in. “Come on, you know he’s planning it.”
“You shall stop him,” Wilbur promised. “I have a passage from one of my books that will negate his power so that you may kill him.”
Wilbur couldn’t know that a different, later, HV had amended that page a long time before, during the Brain Butcher encounter with the League of Improbable Gentlemen. The passage would not quite work as advertised.
“Kill the Hood?” Magenta mused. “And I get to keep his stuff?”
“What about the Chronicler? And that bitch Destroyer of Worlds?” Symmetry demanded.
“We shall eliminate them,” Wilbur promised. “I have already prevented the Offices from being automatically reset. Kill the Chronicler and Destroyer and there will be no more.”
“And the Nexus?” Crapsack checked eagerly. “She will be mine to control? To exploit?”
“She will diminish. If you can rise then so be it.”
“The night kin?” Jikininki hissed.
“Rewrite them as you please when all is done. Or be done with all of them and reign alone and supreme. I don’t care.”
“The Church of Conformity?” insisted Malvolio Front. “We will remake the world in its proper order?”
“If you do not then another shall return who can convert the universe,” Wilbur assured him.
“Then I think we are ready to go,” Humbolt Vernold admitted.
Wilbur Parody laid his hands on the books on his desk. “Then let it begin.”
***
“They will come to bad ends, of course,” Wilbur mused to himself as he through back to the meeting. “Little, preening, self-absorbed characters no less limited than the heroes I set them against. It matters not.”
He laid his fingers over his Tomes again. The pages were empty now, their knowledge back inside him.
“You think I am going to fail?” he asked the sponsor who lurked at the back of his thoughts. “You hope so. But you are bound from interfering, from taking the course you wish, unless my endeavour fails. It will not.”
He selected a door and stepped through it into Herringcarp Asylum. The frame smouldered; the old madhouse did not welcome trespass. He encountered the Marquis de Herringcarp and hurled him down into madness.
He ignored his Cardinal Malvolio Frost’s mad gibberings for now. There would be a time for that shortly.
He returned to his office and selected another door. This time he stepped through into tunnels beneath Parody Island. The doorway flashed with angry red sparks; the Celestian defences this close to the Tomb were unhappy at intrusion.
He found Malvolio Frost again, with a platoon of his Inquisitors traversing the sacred passageways.
“Grand Master?” Frost stammered. “We had not expected you here.”
Wilbur slaughtered them all. He did not need distractions.
There was a light flickering ahead and the sound of bickering voices.
Wilbur smiled. “Visionary and his data ghost. They have given me the Parodyverse.”
He stepped forwards.
***
32. Visionatus Improbablus and the Alchemikal Wedding
 Ancient treasure beneath the sea,
Resting where it's dreamed to be,
Tides shall tell its secret,
A whirlwind will seek it out,
The oceans gift disguised,
Allows those who search to find,
The time shall come,
Then all shall see,
The girl holds the key,
The girl is the key.
“What does that mean?” worried Sion Avery as he held the lantern close to the words carved in the stone wall.
“You’re asking me?” Helen the witch asked him. “I’m not the one who turns out to be the legendary quester of portentous destiny.
“Are you still mad about that red enchantress? Because I swear she used some kind of hex on my pants-string just before you came in. I don’t even know what most of those lotions were for.”
“I expressed my feelings at the time, on her face,” Helen mentioned. “Why did you think she had turned me into a centaur for twenty-four hours?”
“I’m not sure. There were spells, probably. And many drinks with amusing names.”
“And why did you try to paint rainbows on my backside afterwards?”
“Can we get back to the mysterious prophecy carving? Please? Only you do have this gift for knowing things that you can’t possibly know. I was hoping one of them might be why somebody brought a mason all the way down onto these tunnels under that odd mansion to leave a party riddle.”
“I’m not really getting anything this time. A bit like you until I forgive you for thinking I was a little pony. A sexy green pony, apparently.”
“Maybe this really faded painting next to it is another clue? Is that a lighthouse?”
“It looks like it. Let me just change the illusion of lighting in here to bring the colours out. Yes, I know that makes no sense. It’s magic. There, look, it is some kind of tower with a light on top. And is that you and me outside? The man has a yellow coat and looks a bit baffled.”
“And the woman looks like you and she’s telling the man off. But she’s a lot, um, greener. In a totally non-equine way.”
“Who are the two children with them?” Helen puzzled. “The boy with the eagle wings and the girl with the mice?”
“And what have I got on my shoulder?” Sion added. “It looks like that sarcastic clockwork flea who sent us to the Joyful Land of the Amorphously-gendered Helpful People. When we were able to get the Bautista astrolabe operating without something exploding and we traced our route here.”
“What about that raven, then, the one perched above the lighthouse door? It’s like the talking bird that gave me the quill to write the ticket of passage through the Spawning Ground of the Brine Shrimp Simians. And she doesn’t seem at all bothered by the fact that the room behind her is on fire.”
“Is this another of those allegorical paintings where every item is another fish pun?” Sion worried. “Because I’m just glad we got out of that plaice.”
“No ifs or halibuts,” Helen agreed. “That lighthouse seems somehow familiar.”
“Yes. I associate it with slippers. And very dangerous bread, for some reason.”
“What about the girl and the key? The big carving seems pretty insistent about them. Does that little one beside us on the picture have a key as well?”
“Just a cross-looking cat and a lopsided pink bunny squashed together in her arms. But look there, in the shrubbery. Even in this enhanced light it is almost impossible to spot her. There’s another face; someone hiding out, watching it all in secret,.”
“Another girl? Yes, look, there’s her hand pushing aside some shrubbery, and on her wrist…”
“A ribbon with a silver key!” Sion gnawed his lip. “So we solved that one, then. Right?”
“There is a little more to it than that,” someone behind them said.
Sion and Helen jumped. They hadn’t heard the old man come up behind them.
“I thought we were alone in these tunnels to the Dreaming Chamber?” Helen objected.
“Hardly. The place is almost swarming today,” their surprise visitor replied. “That’s the trouble with large casts. Anyway, you must be Visionatus Improbablus at last, with your Spirit of Information.”
“I’m not sure I must be that,” Sion objected. “I mean, just because it was written in a big scary Tome doesn’t make it the boss of me, right?”
“You’ve come a very long way, but your end is close now,” the stranger promised. “You are almost at the Tomb.”
“What Tomb?” Helen demanded.
“Oh, the allegorical grave of all things that must pass. The place where the serpent devours its own tail. The chapel of the Alchemikal Wedding. That sort of thing.”
“Pardon us for mentioning this, but why should we trust you?” Sion enquired. “Only we have encountered a number of difficulties before now when various people felt they had to conduct clever obscure dialogue with us. The Bronze Effigy Ultizon and the Resolution Lord. The Time Conjuress and her Graverobbers of Undeath. The other Time Conjuress and her Pregnancy Gun of, um, Pregnancy.”
“Lontrape Hay and his Tentacles of Impertinence,” Helen added.
“Glum Reaper and the Scourge of the Sixteenth Century,” Sion recalled.
“The Fuschia Lady and her Orientals of Choppyness.”
“Peskar von Doom and that time he…”
“Yes, I take the point,” the stranger snapped. “I did say it was a long journey. But my journey was just as long. In earnest of my intent, look behind me at the one who was coming to prevent you from your destiny.”
Sion and Helen saw a pulped mess in Grand Inquisitor’s robes. “Who is he? One of the Church of Conformity?”
“Malvolio Frost. He’s a bastard of an Abhuman bastard and he commands the Church in its eighteenth century incarnation, just before it vanished entirely. Well he did. Now he’s gone to his reward.”
“You killed him,” Helen recognised.
“The Church was useful chasing you along to this point. They’re not really interesting enough to bother you on your last encounter. Besides, Malvolio was very boring on the topic of how his parentage made him more or less immortal. Turns out it was less.”
“Who are you, then?” Helen wanted to know.
“Ah,” said the old man. “I’m the owner of this island. Your host, if you will. I am here to guide your final steps. My name is Wilbur Parody.”
***
“Eat,” encouraged Mr Papadapopolis. “Is moussaka with eggplant and cheesy baked farfalle. Is fresh!”
The girl from the Lighthouse was sat in a corner booth of the Bean and Donut Coffee Bar, Mr P’s place of business on the corner of Parody Plaza in the shadow of the Twin Parody Tower. She was wrapped in a blanket and was surrounded by warm drinks and bowls of food.
“You don’t have to eat everything,” Reverend Mac Fleetwood assured the mildly alarmed girl. “Just what you want.”
“It is all good,” Mr P promised, adding stuffed cabbage rolls with avgolemono and jam-topped ryzigalo to the table.
“It’s his way of making you feel welcome,” Mac explained. “We’re hoping that when you feel better you might explain who you are and what you were doing at the Willingham lighthouse.”
“Oh. I see.” The girl finished a mouthful and nodded thoughtfully. “Mrs Tillinghast thought I should go there.”
“Good. And who is Mrs Tillinghast?”
“She gave me rose hip tea.”
“We can find rose hip tea,” Mr Papadapopolis promised. He hastened off to get it himself, since his part-time-cat waitress was currently unavailable in a different dimension.
“A little more information?” Mac prompted kindly.
“I went to Willingham. I’ve always wanted to go there. So I did. After the storm, when it was clear I wasn’t really safe in my refuge any more, I defied the bounds and swam there. But it was a bit colder and darker than I had expected, with…” the girl searched for the word, “rain falling. But Mrs Tillinghast was up and she gave me tea.”
“Good for Mrs Tillinghast,” Mac approved. “And Mrs T suggested you go to Visionary’s Lighthouse?”
“Mrs Tillinghast took me to the Local History Museum. Something sad happened to the curator but she goes in and dusts sometimes. And we found this old model of a ship in a bottle that I thought meant I should look for clues to what I’m meant to do at the old Lighthouse. So I said goodbye to Mrs Tillinghast before anyone killed her and headed to find it.”
“Who would kill Mrs Tillinghast?”
“My enemy. He’s been hunting me for a long time, ever since I was hidden away. Probably before that, really.” The waif looked worriedly at the preacher. “Maybe you should get away too, before he kills you and Mr P?”
“Oh, we’re tougher than we look. We’ll risk it a bit longer. You were heading for the Lighthouse?”
“Yes. But it took a long time. I think perhaps time was being a little bit silly? Maybe because I broke the bounds.” The girl leaned in and asked confidentially, “Perhaps it was the War?”
“Which war? The Parody War?”
She nodded. “I thought maybe I should… help.”
“Ah. Well the time silliness has cleared that up for you. The Parody War ended almost two years back. You really did have a long walk to the Lighthouse.”
“A swim,” she explained. “It wasn’t there when I arrived at the shore. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be by the tides. I know tides. The Lighthouse was stuck in the middle of the bay. So I had to swim again.”
“You swam halfway across Paradopolis Bay to reach the Willingham Light?”
“It wasn’t hard,” the girl promised. “Until my tail went away. Then I couldn’t breathe underwater any more. I think maybe the rules have changed, so my curse isn’t working like it used to.”
Mr Papadapopolis returned with tea and cookies. “What did I miss?” he asked Mac.
“The young lady’s tail, apparently.” The preacher looked at the rescued waif appraisingly. “Was this a fish tail, by any chance? A mermaid’s tail?”
The girl nodded. She tried to find a way of sliding a cookie into her mouth that didn’t stop her politely answering. “I need legs when I’m in my cave, of course, but when I swim I find my curse-tail quite useful. Well, I did. When it went away I had a bit of a problem with the waves and the rocks and things. And when I got into the Lighthouse there was no-one there. But I’m used to that.”
“You are used to abandoned lighthouses?” Mac checked.
“To being alone. Mother couldn’t stay with me when I was sent into hiding. She had to leave or the enemy would know where I was. She had to leave the whole world.”
“She died?” Mr P said sadly. “And your father?”
“No. Neither of them died. They had to leave the world. To go to a happy ending. It was the only way to stop me being discovered by anyone who would want the key!” The girl clamped her hands across her mouth as if to shut herself up for blurting out too much, but it was too late.
“The key.” Mac observed the little silver key on the ribbon round the waif’s wrist. “That key? What is it for?”
“I don’t know. Only that it saves everything, and that I have to be the one to turn it. That’s what mother told me. That’s why Mrs Tillinghast let me into the museum to try and find out about it. It’s been passed down in my family for a long time. Mother couldn’t say more because if I knew then the enemy could find me. So… I have to find out for myself. So I went to the Lighthouse.”
“Is good place to start,” Mr Papadapopolis encouraged her. “We will help you find more places to look.” He checked around the coffee shop. “Major Turner is not in yet for tiropites and latté, but when he comes we will speak to him. Matt is good man. He stop tanks one time and sometimes he goes to movies with Violet.”
“Maybe we ask Bernice Teschmaker? She’s an investigative reporter. Or there’s Dr Olivia Hastings down at the Miscatonic?”
“Don Graham might be able to trace something,” Mr P considered. “He takes black plain coffee and cinnamon donut.”
“I shouldn’t have told you about the key,” the foundling worried. “Now the enemy will know and will come after you too.”
“Can you tell us about the enemy?” Mac asked. “Or this curse that makes you a mermaid, or even your name?”
“If I say those things, even think about them too much, he will know. But… he will know by now that I have run away from my sanctuary. Maybe if I tell you then it will be something he does not expect?”
“Tell us your problems. We can’t promise to fix them – this is a very hard time right now – but we still know a few people who might be able to help you. Start with your name.”
The girl brushed back her long hair, steeled herself, and said, “I am daughter of the Earth Mother and King Banjooooo of the Sea Monkeys. My name is Aella.”
***
Liu Xi awoke to a kiss. She responded by instinct before she came to wakefulness. Her awakener backed off and apologised. “Sorry, Liu Xi. I know you’ve moved on. I just couldn’t resist.”
Liu Xi sat up quickly. “Exu!?”
The Doomherald, the Second Oldest Race’s God of Murder, was long gone. Her lover had been murdered by the Hellraiser Chain Knight.
“Yep, you’re confused,” the Doomherald recognised. “Is this a trick? Is he an impostor? What happened to all my clothes?”
Liu Xi glanced down. “What did happen to my clothes?” she demanded, blushing and becoming angry.
“You passed through a vestigial portal that was a remnant of the birthing of the Nexus of Unreality. Fortunately you had a dimensional dreadnaught strapped to your back and some serious spells wrapped around you. Captain Kahn navigated you far enough before being wiped to oblivion that your psychic essence made it the rest of the way. You’ve reformed your body before from local matter. And you know that doesn’t include underwear.”
Liu Xi looked around her. She was in grey nothingness. The only variation were two black parallel lines as if someone had drawn a bridge beneath her so she had somewhere to sit.
“And you?”
“In this place everybody gets a trusted guide. Someone they lost. So I’m here.”
“But you are dead?”
“Well, not right now, but when I’m no longer required, or when you leave this place. This is… an extra turn.”
“And it is really you?” She reached out with her elemental senses for confirmation. “You are badly hurt!”
“Well, you can see this place isn’t rich in elemental matter for you to build a new body from. So I… donated. Right now you are composed of me. My power is keeping me going despite losing a third of my body mass. Feel free to use that missing third to hug me if you want.”
Liu Xi cast logic aside and flung herself on Exu for a long hug.
“Where am I?” she whispered at last. “What is going on, Exu?”
The Doomherald really was there to guide her. “Well, everyone assumed that the Second Oldest Race built their forbidden portal, punched through to the Vortex, and therefore accidentally released the Hero Feeders. That story is missing one important middle scene. What my worshippers actually managed to do was make a gate to here. It was from here that they did the damage that punched into the Vortex and got them erased. It was the gateway to here that survived, even after the Nexus moved on, even after the Great Hero Feeders had fed. And it was this gate that the Space Robots interdicted the Dead Galaxy to protect.”
“A gate to where then?” Liu Xi asked.
Exu gestured around. “This is the multiversal substratum that runs the operating system of the Parodyverse. The control booth. This is the home of the Celestians.”
“There’s nothing here now. Sir Mumphrey and Visionary and others have been here. It was all… full of devices and concepts given form and giant cosmic circuits and the like. A city. Not just grey nothing.” Liu Xi remembered something. “The Space Robots are off line!”
“They are in the timeline you came from. The portal you took, the first portal, that takes you back to the beginning. This is empty because the Celestians have not yet booted up.”
“The beginning of all things?” Liu Xi gasped. “Why am I here, then?” Another thought: “Why did the Hooded Hood want me here?”
As an interface between the visitor and the plane, the Doomherald had that information. “As a mere vortex ghost on the very edge of existence, far from your proper time and place, there is very little you can do here. Anyone else who hadn’t been manipulated through all the terrible things that you have faced would have been erased entirely by now. But you can do one thing, just one, before you are ejected to… I don’t know where.”
“What’s that one thing?”
Exu shrugged. “Something elemental, I suppose. The plane doesn’t know yet so I don’t know. I suppose we extend this conceptual path and go to the showdown.”
“What showdown?”
A long way off in the grey nothingness, Wilbur Parody was facing off against ManMan.
***
“This is the place,” Wilbur Parody told Sion Avery. “What the aboriginals above call the Dreaming Chamber. What others will later call the Tomb.”
“I prefer Dreaming Chamber,” the hapless clerk admitted. “It sounds more cheery.”
Helen examined the doorway. It was decorated with more scenes of incomprehensible events and people. Was that a hippopotamus walking on two legs, wearing a kilt? “Who painted these?” she wondered. There seemed to be murals and engraved prophecies everywhere.
“You, I believe,” Wilbur admitted. “It seems that at the moment of your demise you spread your graffiti across time and space. ‘The Parody Should Not Exist’. But I do.”
“Why are you called Parody, then?” Sion wondered. “What are you Parodying?”
Wilbur frowned. “Nothing. All the Parodyverse is named after me. Parodiopolis is my foundation. I, who was nothing, am now the signifier and capstone of all.”
“That sounds like a lot of work. Anyway, here we are. A big doorway into some kind of mystery place. The Tome wants me to go in.”
“Oh, it does,” agreed Humbolt Vernald, appearing from the shadows as was becoming popular round there. He bore a near-identical volume to the one that had been rescued from the Red Countess, except it was the Book of Beginnings.
“Uh oh,” Sion worried.
“That’s two,” Wilbur counted. “I need all three of my notebooks to remember everything I must do at the moment of my triumph.”
“Sion, I’m definitely getting that he’s not a kind old man on our side,” Helen whispered.
“On your side?” Wilbur chuckled. “Visionary was never aught but a placeholder. A cosmic ambivalence. Remember?”
He snapped his fingers.
Visionary remembered. “Ack! I’m real, dammit!”
“Vizh?” Hallie gasped. And then, “Watch out!”
A third figure stepped from even more shadows carrying the Book of Endings. “At last!” crowed the Apostate. “I have been denied and thwarted even to the edge of the galaxy, but now my hour has come.”
“You’re not supposed to be here!” the restored but still possibly-fake man insisted.
“That prohibition is suspended,” Wilbur announced. “All that is required for access to the Storyheart is the lore I preserved from my time in the Triumvirate Offices and the one destined to open the door.” He gestured to the Apostate. “Visionatus Improbablus, come at last!”
The Apostate grinned. “You are no longer required, Visionary. Your part is done.” He snapped his fingers at Hallie. “Come here, my love.”
The A.I. was still in Helen’s flesh. She cocked a fist on her hip. “Why?” she demanded. “Every single time you recur to ruin our lives, you keep on about how you are superior to Visionary. How he is nothing and you are supreme, on an on ad nauseum. As if power mattered. As if worth was measured by how many people you can dominate. Well I’ve got news for you, buster…”
“Hallie…” Vizh hissed warning.
“No. Enough,” she insisted. “Apostate, Visionary is a good man. He loves his friends and is loved in return. He is kind and gentle and funny. He is imaginative and moral. He is a father, a brother-in-arms, a lover, a defender, a champion. Okay, so he’s also a worrier and a klutz, and a bit slow when it comes to spotting hints, but so what? We don’t value him because he’s infallible or omnipotent. We love him because he’s not those things but he tries his best anyway. And that makes him worth about a billion of you, because nobody loves you that you do not compel, and no-one respects you or cares for you or thinks anything good about you if you don’t force them.”
Apostate turned his power on her.
Hallie blinked and laughed. “You can erase every loving thought I have of Visionary and it doesn’t matter. I’ve got them all on constant reload and I always will have. So, to summarise: Yay Vizh, and you are a sad, pathetic, overcompensating, underimpressive cosmic-level loser, Apostate, so why don’t you just f*!& off?”
The Apostate gestured angrily and blew her apart. Hallie was hurled back into the Tomb door. She crackled and discharged, her flesh form unravelling as her data dispersed. Pictures and words welled out of her, foaming over the exterior of the chamber until the walls seemed to soak them in.
Visionary leaped for Apostate. Humbolt Vernald caught and pinned him as he struggled and swore.
“Can we end this tediousness now?” the Apostate insisted, still flushing red. “Eradicate him!”
“Once and for all,” Wilbur Parody agreed. “I call to me the Inevitable Blade! Let it be his death!”
***
“Hi,” said ManMan. “You might not remember me, we barely met, but I’m Joe Pepper. You’re the guy who broke the Parodyverse, right, Wilbur?”
Wilbur Parody looked around him in confusion. “The maintenance plane of the Celestians?” he recognised. “How?”
“You summoned Knifey. He didn’t want to go, so he yanked the other way.”
The most dangerous blade in existence was in Wilbur Parody’s hand, though. He stabbed it to end ManMan.
Knifey clashed in the way, turning the Inevitable Blade aside. “That’s good,” he told his younger self. “Just shift the killing options aside and favour the deflection outcomes. All the instincts and techniques are in there. Just find them.”
“I will,” promised the younger Knifey. “Thanks for the tutorials.”
Wilbur Parody looked aghast at the treacherous weapon in his grip. “I made you!” he objected.
“Nah,” Knifey replied. “You forged me. Others made me.”
“What he said,” agreed Knifey Jr. “That Masamune women, she thought she would die but she did the honourable thing. And then all those others flocked around her, looking after her. That Cacciatore girl, she was really sneaky smart, and she knew when to act and when to let things lie. And then Joe… well Joe’s really dumb.”
“Wait…” objected ManMan.
“No, you are,” Knifey broke it to him, “but you’re dumb and heroic, dumb and kind, dumb and caring.”
“Yeah,” the Inevitable Blade agreed. “If I had eyes rather than a general sense of where targets are I’d say he really opened them. As it is, I’d say he was a really great whetstone. He sharpened me on all the right angles.”
“You are mine! I command you!” Parody insisted.
“You haven’t held him for long, have you?” Joe sympathised. “You haven’t seen how this works.”
“I have the power to compel you!” Wilbur Parody shouted at the Inevitable Blade.
“Maybe me,” the knife admitted. “I’m still new. What about him?”
Parody saw Knifey swinging towards him, the weapon made to kill more than gods, the steel that had slain the Parody Master. “You think to stop me? Me?” He held Joe motionless so that Knifey Sr. could not attack any more. Knifey Jr. was already in his grasp.
Liu Xi Xian took her moment to do what she had been sent to do.
“Any last words, knife-wielder?” Parody asked ManMan. “Any farewell to your beloved pet, Inevitable Blade?”
“I missed him when I was gone,” Knifey admitted. “You know, when I vanished after I killed the Parody Master. When I was still painted with the blood of the most powerful being ever to exist in the Parodyverse. I was gone for months before I just turned up one day. I missed you, Joe.”
“Yeah Knifey, I missed you too.”
“You know what I didn’t miss?” Knifey asked. “Him.”
The version of Knifey that had disappeared in the great disruption if the Parody Master toppled through the grey nowhere and embedded itself into Wilbur Parody’s back.
“Hey, Knifey, Knifey, Joe!” the slightly-younger-but-not-much-than-current-Knifey called cheerily. “How’s it going?”
“Just like I remember it,” Knifey Sr admitted.
“I’m a bit shocked though,” Knifey Jr confessed.
“And I’m… me,” ManMan conceded.
Wilbur Parody looked over his shoulder in disbelief. “That should not be possible. How did that…” He sensed the elementalist hiding behind him. “You opened a portal, just enough to bring the weapon here, to fall as it did…” He shuddered as the Parody Master’s blood burned past his defences. “But you could not have managed that unless…”
“It required retrospective continuity, Wilbur,” agreed the Hooded Hood.
“You! She brought you through!”
“Indeed. That is why I arranged for her. And ManMan. You provided Knifey yourself, although I admit to placing certain influences in his early path.”
“You have doomed… the Parodyverse…” Wilbur hissed as he felt death coming to him. “Now the Apostate and HV will conquer all.”
“That would be unfortunate,” agreed the cowled crime czar. “However, you have helpfully drawn us all into the one place from which I have always been excluded: the Celestians’ programming area at the moment before their final instructions are locked in and they are activated to maintain the new-born Parodyverse. This is useful. There are amendments to the Space Robots’ construction orders that I must implement. And I have been wanting to encounter those Creators who set such programmes for some time.”
“The Hooded Hood having access to the operating systems of the Parodyverse would be very bad, Joe,” Knifey pointed out. “Game Over bad.”
“We have to stop him,” agreed intermediate Knifey from Wilbur’s shoulder blades.
The Hood shook his head. “Sadly, you are only here for so long as the retcon I arranged maintains you in this place. That is now cancelled. You will return to your previously established timeline.” He passed his attention on to Knifey Jr. “You are also here on a temporary basis because of my alterations. You too will revert to the place at the dawn of time that you should properly occupy. Farewell.”
“Wait…” the Inevitable Blade squeaked, but then he was gone.
“That still leaves me and now-Knifey,” ManMan warned. “We… we took you down once before.”
The cowled crime czar kicked Wilbur Parody off the platform so that the old man also vanished back to his proper time and place.
“I can kill you if I have to, Hood,” Knifey warned in deadly earnest.
“Mr Pepper, do you recall that moment when the transit conduit failed and you were plummeting to your doom over the Sahara desert?”
“Yeah. I haven’t had time to do my laundry since,” ManMan answered.
“Then you will remember that, despite the declining capacities of weird science in the diminishing Parodyverse, the clever scientists of Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises were able to track you and snatch you from certain death. What do you think would have happened if I had not reconned them three more seconds of thinking time?”
“Joe would be dead,” Knifey understood. “You were setting this confrontation up. You needed him alive. But you can cancel that retcon and kill him instantly if we try to stop you now.”
“Indeed.”
“I can still try,” Joe offered. “We can’t let him win the Parodyverse.”
“We can’t stop him. If he undoes his retcon then you’d never be here to oppose him anyhow. Except somehow he’s still able to count our attacks against Wilbur Parody as really happening. So he’s got us. There’s nothing more we can do.”
The archvillain caught the nuance. “Nothing more?” He caught on at once. “Nothing but delay me.” He swivelled his head, eyes blazing. “Liu Xi Xian! Where is she?”
There was a circle that defined an operating platform, with a desk on it, and a single activation button. Liu Xi Xian had just hit that button when the Hood got to her.
The Parodyverse started up.
“Where are the Creators?” the Hooded Hood demanded, his eyes flaring with green light.
“I didn’t see any. There was just this panel and the button.”
Exu the Doomherald interposed himself between the elementalist and the archvillain. “There’s no point harming her, Hood. What’s done is done. Even you can’t recon this, here.”
Ioldabaoth Winkelweald halted for a moment to control his chagrin. “The Parodyverse loves to thwart me with trivial details,” he hissed. “No matter. I now have access to the programming console. I can still make all necessary amendment to undo the harm that Wilbur Parody inflicted to bring about his Consortium’s vision of a ‘normal’ future. Then I can arrange the whole of the Parodyverse into proper order, to my requirements.”
“Always with the fall-back plan,” ManMan worried.
“About that,” Exu ventured. “I think you’ll find that the console is locked. There wasn’t a key before because it wasn’t needed in the storylines where Mumphrey Wilton and Visionary came here. But now one is required so there is a security key. Without that you can’t change anything.”
The Hood regarded Liu Xi. “You removed the key. You sent it somewhere in time and space. You gave it to someone. Who?”
“She doesn’t remember,” Exu answered. “She had me murder the memory. Nobody can say where that key went, and without it there is no way to reprogram the Space Robots.”
***
“That’s quite a story, Aella,” Mac Fleetwood admitted. “So your mother received this key to hide from the enemy…”
“The Hooded Hood,” Mr P chimed in.
“And passed it to you to keep safe. And her foster-father Xander helped set up ways to hide you inside calendar-fudging bedroom-caves. And there you stayed, educated by magic books but never able to be part of the world outside.”
“I said that,” Aella protested.
“I bears summarising, believe me. But I don’t follow the curse bit. How are you cursed? Why?”
“I’ll never be a sea monkey like my father,” the mermaid whispered. “I’m condemned to be mortal, with I think a bit of a dash of Fey maybe? And some fern? I’m not clear on that bit. The curse prevented me from becoming what I would otherwise have been so that the enemy couldn’t find me by tracing Sea Monkeys. Or ferns. Actually, I think the curse is a lot more complex than that but, as usual, I couldn’t be told!”
“If the Hood is looking for the girl, she should be taken somewhere safe,” Mr P. worried.
“And where is that, these days?” Mac asked him. “We’re remarkably low on special places and people who can help out.”
A young man in the corner who was enjoying the coffee shop’s free wi-fi made an a-hem noise in his throat. “Hi there. Sorry to eavesdrop. Bad habit. But it seems as though you might be needing some help, and maybe I can give it.”
Aella regarded the teenage boy with genetic suspicion. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Glad you asked. My name is Zachary Zelnitz, but you can call me Hacker 9, herald of Galactivac!”
***
“Fools!” snarled the Hooded Hood, “The only other way to correct the changes that have been made would be through the joint action of the Triumvirate of Greater Offices. But one office is vacant and broken and cannot now be refilled. There is no means of rebooting the broken Space Robots in the time from which we came and no-one now able to get into the system.”
“But that includes you,” ManMan pointed out. “So it’s not all bad.”
“The Parodyverse will remain a Normalverse, though,” Liu Xi understood. “Many wonders will be gone. Many of our friends will be lost.”
“Unless…” The Hooded Hood paused again as more schemes came to him. “Yes… him. He owes me. In some ways I made him.”
Before Liu Xi could ask who, an impossibly large presence loomed over them. A hand the size of a small nation reached out for them and folded about them all.
“Space Robot!” Knifey objected before they were clutched. “They’re all deactivated!”
“Liu Xi just booted them,” ManMan objected in a keep-up voice.
“This one is from our timeline,” the Hood clarified. “A time where one rogue has always remained, sleeping. He has awoken.”
The Dreaming Celestian enveloped the intruders. His authority was absolute.
***
One moment Wilbur Parody was calling the Inevitable Blade to end Visionary. The next he was laid on the floor with a bloody wound in his back.
“What?” asked the Apostate, just before Citizen Z’s psionic blade slashed at him, injecting him with the madness of Herringcarp. Chokohontas had granted her access to her power at last.
“Hey, you’re a HV!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! celebrated as he bounced his feet off Humbolt Vernold’s face. “And one of the bad ones, which makes you extra-trompable!”
“Intruders at the Chamber of Dreaming!” Chokohontas accused Wilbur and his confederates. She joined CZ in repeatedly beating Apostate with long sticks. “You shall regret your heresy!”
The Abyssal Greye grabbed Wilbur by his collar and shook him. “What did you do, Parody? What have you set in motion?”
The dying manipulator spat blood. “I lost a wager I thought I could not lose,” he admitted. “I miscalculated.”
“What wager? What miscalculation?”
Wilbur Parody was almost gone, his voice very slight. “I was granted access to the levers of the Parodyverse to attempt my ploy. It should have worked. It should have. But that which gave me the resources I needed insisted on information in return.”
“What information? Speak!”
“The command codes I had learned as Shaper, Chronicler, Destroyer, the combined code that could rewrite the orders of the Celestians themselves. That is what I gave, on agreement that they would never be used unless my plans failed. They have failed.”
Vinnie de Soth ducked under CSFB! and Humbolt Vernold and grabbed Visionary from here he had been thrown.
“Hallie!” Vizh moaned.
“Yeah, you better get after her.”
“After her?”
“Yes. It’s your turn.”
“My turn?”
“It’s all here, isn’t it? The three Operating Tomes, Quoth’s feather-quill of destiny, Rabito’s pure thought fur, spiffy’s fern leaf, your bottle of Shoggoth-goo? And the rest?”
“Yes, we gathered it all, but…”
“Then it’s your turn. Go through the door. Go into the Storyheart.”
“The Storyheart?”
“Where else would it be but under the Lair Mansion? Get in there!”
“And what? What turn?”
“It’s an Alchemikal Wedding, Vizh. The bad guys tried to hijack the stories, but they accidentally put the greatest data processing facility the LL has right into the place where all the stories dwell. So right now Hallie is in there struggling, burning up, trying to channel every story ever told in the Parodyverse.”
“Hallie? She’s in there? And she needs help?”
“She needs grounding from someone who is absolutely surplus to destiny but absolutely vital to the stories. Like I said, it’s your turn at last. Get in there and have sex to save the Parodyverse!”
Vinnie grabbed Vizh and hurled him into the Tomb, the Dreaming Chamber, the Heart of Stories.
“Parody,” Greye called to the dying manipulator who was bleeding out on the floor. “Who has the cheat codes to the Parodyverse?”
“The last being you would want to have codes that override Celestian programming. The one who made all my actions possible. The one who had manoeuvred us all, every one of us, to this conclusion…” Wilbur gasped with his last breath. “The Dreaming Celestian.”
And then everything stopped.
The Dreaming Celestian has come into his own at last.
***
Next Issue: Galactivac, the Living Death That Sucks! The Resolution War! The Dreaming Celestian judges the Parodyverse! The Creators revealed! And after. Watch out for Untold Tales of the Untold Tales: You Say You Want a Resolution? coming hopefully soon to a Parodyverse near you.
***
Footnotes: A Wilbur Parody Primer
Wilbur was first mentioned in UT#5: Sidekick Day, when his ‘The Laws and Ordinances of New Paradopolis, 1891’ force our heroes to all adopt sidekicks (including Lisette, FA, and spiffy).
This sets off the hunt for what the city founder was up to back in the day that reveals in that he had "secret workshop hidden beneath a plague pit on the outskirts of Paradopolis, where his greatest work awaits the time when the stars are right". Its address was “1198 Twenty-seventh Street, in Dullard’s Grove,” and it was currently occupied by Visionary. It also introduced FBI agents Mully and Scullder, who never got round to being positioned as DK's parents and being horribly murdered - yet.
This packed episode included Wilbur's debut (publication chronology) appearance ("I'm just a soul whose intentions are good'), him setting his pacted demon Oddhorn onto Lisa and G-Eyed in the 19th century, interference from HV to save our heroes, and a reveal that Wilbur is actually working for... the Hooded Hood. Wilbur's minions Dr Franklydon't and deformed perverted manservant were revealed to be Lurkers Beneath, what were later called Space Fandoms, predators of Comic-Book Limbo. They had taken the places of an archscientist and a hunchbacked henchman to steal the stories of all heroes, starting with Jarvis and his fiancee. We never got to the reveal of whose bodies Franklydon't and his flunky had replaced, but we'll finally uncover the truth soon.
Then, in UT#8: The Secret History of the Parodyverse, the Hooded Hood, then "exiled" in Comic-Book Limbo, reveals to Jarvis and Melissa that he intends to "[reveal]to you heroes what [Shaper and Chronicler] have long sought to keep hidden from you, the true purpose of the Parodyverse, the reason why Jarvis – and others – were involved at the point of its creation, and why so many strange and improbably things happen there.”
That issue summarised things that were going on as:
("a) Wilbur Parody was the leader of the Cult of Lugosa, worshippers of Shab’adabba’Dhu, and wanted victims to feed to his tenebrous deity; (b) Wilbur Parody knew who Lisa and G-Eyed were and was expecting their coming to the extent of raising the demon Oddhorn to deal with them; and (c) Wilbur Parody had the power to somehow shut down the heroes’ powers. The first lady of the Lair Legion and her companion had dealt with this by (a) throwing Lisa’s indestructible ginger cat at the demon’s sensitive bits; (b) running like hell away through the tunnels beneath Parody Mansion (what would become the HQ of the Lair Legion); and (c) encountering a white-haired, staff-wielding rescuer who bore an uncanny resemblance to some-time legionnaire Hollywood V."
Plot reference was made to previous PV stories in which HV had killed spiffy and then wiped out his own eternal existence to rescue him from hell and return him to life; why was never revealed.
Of special interest was HV's revealing of a hidden room in Parody's mansion that "predated the mansion's building" and of which he was not aware:
"This chamber was built to monitor the great Secret beneath Parody Island, which amongst other things is the ultimate source of all super-powers in the Parodyverse. Parody built his mansion here to seek to harness that Secret, and what little he has mastered enabled him to block off your own access to the source. From this room it was a simple matter to undo his meddling.”
“But I’m not from the Parodyverse,” objected G-eyed. “How can my powers come from here?”
“Lisa was once… active … elsewhere too,” HV replied. “In one sense the Parodyverse was born whole from cosmic ructions in other planes, other realities such as the AMB. It was spawned from one point in time and space and unfolded past and future from there. And in another sense all of that happened merely to create a backdrop wherein the Secret could be placed.”
This led us into UT#9: The Skeletons in the Closet, which was summarised as follows:
"It was Hallowe’en Night and therefore things were getting spooky. The Paradopolis power grid was down, and the Legion’s backup generators were sulking. The mysterious and irritating Englishman Con Johnstantine had turned up to announce that something evil was loose in the mansion and somebody there was possessed. The Legion, convinced by the blood oozing from the walls, the unidentified boy parts, and so forth, searched their home and found it larger and with rather more stygian cellars than last time they looked. That was how Yo and DarkHwk came to fall through the Hooded Hood’s Portal of Pretentiousness – left there by Wilbur Parody all those years ago and unnoticed until now – and end up talking soap operas with the Groper out of Grossness.
"Meanwhile, Dark Knight, Starseed, and Space Ghost have uncovered a bricked-up attic chimney where they have found the long-dead corpses of Lisa and Goldeneyed. Fin Fang Foom and Banjooooo have found Baron Zemo’s genetically-manufactured daughter Zemette in a cellar chamber which is remarkably similar to the one where HV was over a century back in the last episode. And Visionary, Cheryl, Tina, and NTU-150 have discovered that the mansion’s computer HALLIE is the possessed individual, which is bad since HALLIE controls all the Lair’s automated defence systems and is in charge of Enty’s newest innovation, the micro-servo-nanobots which now repair and redesign the mansion."
As you can see, the general tone of Untold Tales has not changed that much over the years.
And, in just a few brief sentences, Con Johnstantine summons and awakens "the guardian spirit of Parody Island" who arranges the very helpful return of Donar to deal with the intruding demon Oddhorn. This guardian spirit is not mentioned again for another 51 issues, but at that point we discover she is Marie Murcheson.And, in just a few brief sentences, Con Johnstantine summons and awakens "the guardian spirit of Parody Island" who arranges the very helpful return of Donar to deal with the intruding demon Oddhorn. This guardian spirit is not mentioned again for another 51 issues, but at that point we discover she is Marie Murcheson.
Quite a bit happens between #9 and #15, mostly around the Hooded Hood's exiling of the entire current LL to Comic-Book Limbo in Visionary's Condo, but by Untold Tales of the Return of the Lair Legion there is a distinct paterity feel going on. New Legion secretary Troia-215 discovers her father is the Hooded Hood. Zemo has learned that his own genetically-engineered daughter Zemette (arranged by Dr Moo for the Hood) is pregnant by one of the Legion boys. And then:
“That is the pathway to the Secret upon which the Parodyverse is built,” the cowled crime-czar told the Amazon administrator. “The path is described in the writings of Wilbur Parody, a former Shaper of Worlds who for many years sought to master the Secret but could never find this room from which the path begins. And even if he had it would have availed him little, for none but those of the fellowship who guard this place can enter that strange doorway.”
“You mean the Legion?” Troia checked. She liked to be current with the plot.” The Legion are the guardians?”
“Of course. Why do you think they are called the Lair Legion?”
I've been banging on about this theme for quite a while!
Untold Tales #16: The Last Night of the Parodyverse contines the following discussion:
“I need to know more about this book of Wilbur Parody’s,” Lisa progressed the discussion quickly. “We know that Parody was a former holder of the office of Shaper of Worlds, and that he resigned to seek and master the secrets hidden under this island, which became named after him. He built the city of Paradopolis over the hiding place of Shab’addaba’Dhu, the oldest guardian placed by the Celestians, to keep it amused and entertained while he went on with his researches. He suborned the second guardian, the fiendish demon Oddhorn, using loathsome unspeakable sacrifices through his cult. And he certainly found out some of the truth of this place.”
“Somehow Wilbur Parody was just able to shut our powers off as if he had a switch,” Goldeneyed remembered with a shudder.
“Oddhorn demonstrated that ability as well,” Dark Knight remembered. “Not just our powers, our.… uniquenesses.”
“Since all super-powers eventually proceed from the same source in the Parodyverse, no matter whether they be packaged through Ausgardian enchantments, the Gah! Force, the Jarvis Cosmic, a… fern, or whatever else, one only has to understand how to control the faucet,” the Hooded Hood suggested. “But Wilbur Parody failed to understand one thing.”
“That the voice in his head instructing him what to do was yours?” Fin Fang Foom accused the cowled crime-czar.
“That having been Shaper of Worlds, part of what he gave up was the ability to ever perceive that chamber below Parody Island,” the Hood answered.
“Nothing that powerful should have access to the chamber,” Exile realised. “So they aren’t allowed to even see it.”
Then there was a Judgement of the Celestians.
After that, we learn Wilbur hadn't just been a former Shaper of Worlds from the 18th Century (the time of the Church of Conformity's disappearance) but had also been a Chronicler of Stories at some point. He had founded the Order of the Observing Eye, the people who had raised G-Eyed and Exile, and who prepared superheroes for "a great war to come" that was probably the Parody War (but might have been the even-nastier final battle Resolution War). UT#17 revealed that there was a Second Operating Manual covering the Chronicler's office and the Order of the Observing Eye had it, which is how they identified what heroes to interfere with.
We get a better understanding of this after UT#42, which introduces the Victorian-age League of Improbable Gentlemen as they actually save Mayor Wilbur from the Brain Butcher dispatched by Baron Zemo to suck Wilbur's knowledge. The Brain Butcher is a somewhat cruder former wielder of Hatman's serious matter who doesn's stop with borrowing headgear.
“Your book, Mayor Parody,” HV said, handing over a large volume called The Laws and Ordinances of New Paradopolis and closing it shut before Wilbur could work out the new paragraph Hastings Vernal had just added.
“Thank you.” Wilbur Parody was almost sorry that he was going to have to disband this group now. However, they had come too close to discovering what he was really up to, his long-range plans for Paradopolis and its heroes, perhaps even the persuasive, velvety, Latvian-accented voice that sometimes spoke in his head. Besides, the time was coming when Parody would again need the Mansion of the Lair of the Parodyverse’s Secret and it would be best if these adventurers were dead or disbanded by then. He would see to it. “Thank you for everything,” the Mayor of New Paradopolis told them.
Wilbur's literature evidently includes a number of predictions and portents of a significant event to come. In UT#54, Xander the Improbable gloomily says:
“What’s worrying me is that if the Universe is trying this hard to destroy us then the Final Trial that Wilbur Parody prophesied can’t be too far off. All of this Thugos thing is just an attempt to eliminate us before the big problems start.
Nats nearly choked on his coffee. “Big problems? You’re saying this one is minor?”
“It’s all relative,” the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse shrugged.
“And all of Paradopolis being dragged off to an alien planet with my l’il Dream on it and everything doesn’t matter?” Meggan Foxxx demanded.
“Everything matters,” Xander told her. “I’m just worrying about the perspectives.”
Of course, endings really belong to the Destroyer of Tales; our first clue to a third volume from Wilbur's time in that third Triumverate role.
This is confirmed in UT#58's "50th Issue Extravaganza", in which Dark Thugos comes to conquer the world:
"We're fighting the villain who thinks he's behind it," Lisa shot back. "But so far he's achieved none of his objectives. He's lost his Deathworld, the Skree empire, his conduit to the Sauce, his major henchpeople, and all he's got are some lumps and bruises from AG and the Legion. You, on the other hand, have come back from the dead, having learned of some mysterious arcane source of knowledge that you need to further your ambitions…"
"The Third Book of Wilbur Parody," the Hood footnoted. "Yes, I have had sight of such a tome."
"So you caused the kidnapping of Paradiopolis, the takeover of Earth by the Devil-Doctor, the attack of Deathworld, the destruction of Skree-Lump, and the invasion of Thugos all to further your own ends," spat Visionary. "You manipulated Thugos, Galactivac, even the Celestians to further your ambitions, and you caused the death of billions."
"Thugos precipitated those things," the Hood shrugged. "All I did was talk with the Shaper of Worlds. [See The Hooded Hood and the Anniversary of the BZL, or Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #0] If she chose to respond by creating Dark Thugos and Kumari I cannot be responsible. I toppled only the first domino."
"You lined them up as well though," Lisa added. "You manipulated Melissa into giving up her powers to Dancer, for example. And you arranged for the whole of Paradopolis to be 'accidentally' taken to the prison world. And for me to be sucked into a portal of death."
So as you can see, things were being nicely set up for our current run of stories.
Then came UT#60-63, the four-part time-travel story that introduced Marie Murcheson and left her as the Lair Mansion's guardian banshee, added villainous Leyland Reed's architectural legacies to Paradopolis, and included Xander's sorcerer supreme predecessor Lucius Faust to comment:
“Wilbur Parody is a dangerous man... Nobody knows where he originally came from, but he has transformed the place we now call Paradiopolis in his honour from a collection of bog-moated villages to a commercial centre to rival Gothametropolis York itself. He’s transformed our civic centre, adding a Cathedral, a railway, an opera house, a library. He’s quite literally put this city on the map.”
“I’ve met Wilbur,” Lisa admitted. “Well, not yet, but I will do in about twenty years time, back in my past when I was time travelling to your future, but…”
“I understand,” Faust told her. He actually did, which was why he was the master of the mystic crafts.
Wilbur's full credentials and intentions and his actual relationship with the Hooded Hood were defined as our heroes contemplate a model of the city that Mayor Parody has built in 1860, as follows:
The man who called himself Wilbur Parody in this day and age had previously and uniquely been the only person to hold all three of the principal cosmic offices – Shaper of Worlds, Chronicler of Stories, and Destroyer of Tales –at different times. And on each occasion he had found ways to sequester knowledge known only to that office, so that he alone had access to secrets that were never meant to be understood by one person alone.”
“His Book of Prophecy,” spiffy remembered.
“His three books of Prophecy,” the Hood corrected.
“Aw crap!” spiffy commented.
“So he worked out the secrets of the Parodyverse, and he retired to Paradopolis to build railway stations,” ManMan frowned. “That makes no sense at all.”
“Except that he knew the Secret of the Parodyverse, or the key to it at least, was concealed on Parody Island,” answered the cowled crime-czar.
“Don’t remind me,” spiffy shuddered. “The Dreaming Celestian with my cosmic cube. I still get flashbacks.” [If the reader also wants flashbacks, they are referred to Untold Tales #17, The Final Untold Tale of the Lair Legion: The Judgement of the Celestians. Final in this sense is used in the contextual meaning of “not final”.]
“You get flashbacks,” ManMan objected. “I went one-on-one with a Celestian and I was holding a knife!”
“Parody had worked out that the final battle of the Parodyverse, what he termed the Resolution War, the conflict that the Parodyverse was ordained to determine the outcome of, would centre here in Paradopolis,” the Hood continued.
“More good news for house-owners,” spiffy noted.
“He therefore shaped a second future, in which he prepared all of Paradopolis as a big trap.”
“To control the elder thingie guardian Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu that was one of the protectors of the Secret,” spiffy remembered.
“To capture and control every single power that would focus its attention here when the Resolution War began,” the Hooded Hood corrected him. “Chaos, Order, Life, Death, Weirdness, Celestians, Pointless, Gods and Gods of Gods, Time, Space, and Relative Dimensions. Everything. By turning their own power against them he intended to trap them all in Paradopolis where he could command them.”
“That would be… a not good thing,” ManMan admitted.
“But that was the second future,” spiffy remembered. “Something changed that one as well.”
“In the third future, Parody’s gambit was thwarted, and he had to fall back on another plan. A voice in his head led him to probe out the Secret at the Centre of the Parodyverse, and he began his long plotting to gain power by suborning the Dreaming Celestian.”
“Er, wasn’t that voice, well… you, Hood?” spiffy hesitated to ask.
“Of course. I could hardly allow somebody as dangerous as Parody to wander about unsupervised. Anyway, that plan was thwarted by the Lair Legion and Jarvis’ sacrifice. I achieved my long-term objectives but was denied a short-cut to ruling the Parodyverse.”
ManMan sat down, accidentally crushing the Paradiopolis Opera House. “Ooops. Sorry. But since Parody’s big plan in future two got stopped, why are we here in 1860?” he asked.
The Hooded Hood almost smiled.
“We’re still in future two here, aren’t we?” Joe Pepper suddenly knew. “And if we don’t do something to change it to future three, Parody’s gonna win, right? You want us to go and change the future so that we have to fight all those Celestians and stuff? And we have to do it because this is worse.”
In the background spiffy was saying very un-mayoral words.
It is clear that the Hooded Hood, who had gained some access to Wilbur's "Destroyer of Stories" book (and different kinds of access to a future Destroyer called Lisa), was taking what he read there very seriously. The omniscient narrator set this out reasonably cogently at the end of the long-running Lair Legion World Tour storyline in UT#94: Homecoming, as follows:
Once upon a time there was a little bundle of realities called the Parodyverse. Although the Parodyverse had an embarrassing profusion of origins, nobody really knew who or what had brought it into being, and nobody really understood why.
Some said the Parodyverse was a joke of the gods, or a statistical necessity of the probability curve, or a means of containing ideas that more respectable universes wouldn’t consider. One old wicked man called Wilbur Parody believed that the whole thing was designed to resolve one important question or conflict, and that the whole time/space continuum existed merely to provide a proper framework for a coming event he called the Resolution War.
And Parody should have known. The Parodyverse is maintained by three distinct metaphysical hierarchies, and Parody was intimate with them. First there are the Family of the Pointless, key concepts given anthropomorphic personification - Coincidence, Lusting, Whinging, Glamour, Death, Temporary Death, and Space Ghost. Common Sense has abandoned his office. Ancient and terrible, they play little part in our current story, with one important exception.
Then there are the Offices. Parody was most familiar with these, for these are cosmic roles played by mortals or former mortals. At different times Wilbur Parody held all three of the principal roles – Shaper of Worlds, Chronicler of Stories, and Destroyer of Tales – the only person ever to experince all three. Since certain knowledge available to these office-holders is too important for the incumbent to retain after they have retired, Parody cheated and recorded his insights into three books of prophesy which continue to cause a good deal of trouble.
Finally there are the Celestian Space Robots. Think of them as the engineers maintaining reality. A quarter mile high and as indestructible as the Parodyverse can make them, these massive cosmic machines are vast and unknowable, appearing without warning from their hidden city to destroy planets, change physical laws, or do whatever is necessary to maintain the unknown purpose of the universe that is their charge.
Wilbur Parody realised that whoever controls the Celestians controls the Parodyverse, and long since set out to gain that control. Finding a site which the Space Robots had a special interest in, Parody founded a city which he named after himself. For over a century he guided New Parodiopolis (later Paradopolis) into becoming the greatest metropolis on Earth. And through all that time he was growing it, architecture and population, into an arcane trap that could capture and reprogram the Space Robots.
Parody made but one mistake, and that was in heeding the advice of a hooded stranger who whispered to him in secret. Thus when the trap was finally triggered and the plan to take command of the Space Robots finally implemented Wilbur Parody was long gone, and the triumph belonged to the cowled crime-czar known as… the Hooded Hood.
The reality-rewriting Hood had prepared well. He had ensured that the defenders of Earth were preoccupied with their own challenges. Hence the Abandoned Legion and the JBH both found themselves fighting for their life off-planet, and a host of other heroes faced destruction nearer to home. The Lair Legion, the Parodyverse’s premiere team of superheroes, was occupied by a World Tour, by planetary domination attempts from other villains, and by the threat of the most powerful assemblage of super-powered criminals ever gathered, the Purveyors of Peril. Of which more anon.
The key to the Hooded Hood’s control of the Celestians was control over Paradopolis, so while the rest of the world descended into anarchy and chaos in the Purveyors’ takeover, the Big Banana was preserved behind a force-field and became a single massive tool to reorder the Parodyverse. The few heroes remaining in the city fought valiantly, but have apparently been defeated. Another group who sought to use a dimension-jumping London double-decker bus (don’t ask) to breach the barrier found that the Hood had cut a deal with time-mistress Symmetry of Synchronicity to set a trap for them.
But here Coincidence of the Endless comes into play. By perverse chance the occupants of the bus were not smeared across timespace, but instead found themselves translated to the city of the Celestians itself. And there they broke stuff.
This is their story…
Somewhere in the midst of all that, Wilbur Parody himself managed to... disappear. But where?
Well, Mayor Wilbur had to disappear after the scandals of his final 1890s clash with the League of Improbable Gentlemen - a confrontation that also shattered that club. He showed up again guised as old Mr Coote of the law firm Lisa worked for as of Lair Legion Year One #1 and made his move against the rookie team in #6, which for some reason I never saved from the board after posting but may be out there somewhere circa December 2006 if we were on Jason's board by then. However, the ended with a cliffhanger into the #7 finale that I never completed; I have discovered the forgotten opening pages on my hard drive. So the outcome of Wilbur's last great move against the LL was never actually revealed!.
For that matter, neither was his origin, due in the same story.
All we know is that Sir Mumphrey, speaking of Wilbur in UT#63, promised that he "eventually got his comeuppance".
All of which means that using Wilbur Parody in an Untold Tales issue about the secrets of the Parodyverse is very appropriate.
***
On the Galactic Geography of the Parodyverse
I've been trying to work out the geography of the PV prime universe. Like ours, the habitable galaxies where planets best form and sustain life occupy a flattish disk about 2/3 of the way from the core. Like ours, there are streamers" of dense stellar clusters radiating out, with most sentient civilisations occupying goldilocks zones on the rims of these where suns can maintain the necessary stability to sustain persistent satellites.
So Sol is currently travelling in an outer strand of the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy, specifically in the fictionally-named Mutter's Spiral (term pinched from very old Dr Who) strand. Sharing the Orion arm, effectively flanking Earth in that torus of occupiable, useful star systems, are the former Skree and Skunk empires. That's why Earth was a potentially useful strategic staging ground in the Skree-Skunk War. A bit further round behind the Skree in the neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy was the Shee-Yar Empire, but everything there was wiped out by the Carnifex so it is now mostly-dead worlds.
Past the Skunks and a bit further out are some minor races like the (now also dead) Videans, the Caphans, the computer civilisation of the Reticulum Matrix, the (now also also dead) former territory of the Thonnagarians. Plxtragar is roughly coequal between the former Skree, Skunk, and Thonnagarian territories and is well placed to be either Geneva of somebody's missile base. The forces of the Tyrant of the Dead Galaxy have assembled a strong new coalition/Empire along the away-from-universal-core rim of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.
In the other direction is the Triangulum Galaxy, a bit off to one side and therefore slightly less accessible from the others; that would be a good location for the Traders, since it explains why they aren't tangled in "local" Earth affairs as much as other races. It's a bit like how, say, China has some influence on the European economy but isn't an immediate on-the-ground player in the area's political and economic determination.
All of this occupies one local subgroup of galaxies within three megaparsecs of Earth. It's unimaginably vast territory but a tiny fraction of the universe. The "local group" - Andromeda, Triangulum, and the Milky Way Galaxies for one part of the "local sheet" of galaxies that are on the fairly remote edge of Virgo Supercluster that stretches out to 30mpc. Seperating off the bits of space we know from the rest of that supercluster is the Dead Galaxy, a buffer that has had a similar effect on space travel, even faster-than-light travel, as a range of mountains did to old Earth colonisation.
So far we haven't charted what is in the rest of the Virgo Supercluster, but there is no reason to believe that the "local" prevalence of humanoid lifeforms might prevail, that life would be mostly carbon-based, or even that life requires matter or time. Beyond that is Laniakea, a collection of about 500 superclusters around the Hydrus-Centaurus supercluster and the Great Attractor. In the Parodyverse, the subspace and superspace of that area do not support travel so it remains unexplored.
Further out from the universal core there are far fewer planets and far less life forms, almost none of them sentient. Resource-mining is possible but rarely economically viable. Nearer to the universal core the conditions for life prevent much happening and limit the kinds of craft that can travel there; think of a submarine with depth limits, except here depth is replaced with gravity shear, cosmic radiation, and timespace alterations. At the very centre of the universe, maybe 10,000mpc off, sleeps Great Azafroth, "father" of the Fairly Great Old Ones, a galaxy-sized creature of absolute madness who really should not be there; it is a bad idea to go sightseeing.
Where's Where in the Parodyverse
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2017 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2017 to their creators. This is a work of parody. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works are in fair-use parody and do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. Any proceeds from this work are distributed to charity. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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