Untold Tales of the Aellaverse #362: I Want To Be Where The People Are
Previously: Untold Tales of the Parodyverse #356 #357 #358 #359 #360 #361
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
And in summary for the link-phobic:
After an attempt by former cosmic power Wilbur Parody to rewrite the Parodyverse to his liking that ended with the celestial infrastructure in tatters, the Dreaming Celestian Space Robot has awoken unrestricted to fulfil his great intentions. Primarily amongst these is to conduct the Resolution War, the last great conflict of the Parodyverse that will reveal the Answer for which the Parodyverse was created – at midnight tonight. Meanwhile, the mermaid Aella has been revealed as the Celestian Messiah.
***
35. Aella and the Inevitable Loophole
Aella was awoken by birds, who sang differently to fishes or crabs, and whose songs she did not know. Slats of late afternoon light angled through attic shutters, across the patchwork quilt under which she had slept. The quilt was rather old, its fabrics rubbed smooth by time and use, but the blessings stitched into it were still strong.
She sat up and shook off her long sleep. She hadn’t realised how badly she needed a rest after her adventures. Home seemed a long way away now, but there were plenty of new things to explore and learn about.
“Hello,” Aella called to the ghosts who hovered just at the edge of her perception. “How are you?” But they could not answer, being so smudged and faint that they were scarcely even echoes now of whoever they had once represented. They were timid too, and flittered back to insubstantiality when the girl called to them.
There were other things to occupy Aella’s attention anyway. Sunlight not filtered through ocean was a real novelty. For over four years the mermaid’s Curse had forced her to her sea form every sunrise and prevented her from living above water in daylight. Now the terms of that Curse had evidently been adjusted. Being able to feel the sun’s rays and breathe air at the same time was really nice.
Aella padded (on actual feet) to the washstand where an ewer of water awaited her ablutions. A dress had been laid out for her too, different from Mrs Tillinghast’s clothes. This garment was also hand-stitched, and the threads were filled with wardings of protection. Aella couldn’t read them all, because they were very complicated, but she knew they had been put there when the dress was made, well over a decade ago; she rather thought that they were mostly to stop the girl who wore the dress being noticed or bothered by boys.
She wondered why boys might want to bother a girl anyway, or vice versa. Of course, there was Zach, who had come here with her. He could be a bit annoying sometimes. But Aella rather thought that the spells could have been put on a big stick or something and that would have worked better.
She glanced around the attic but couldn’t find such a thing. Perhaps the girl whose room this had been had taken it with her? Aella knew that the girl had been called Whitney because it was written on a book of poems she had found. There were also some really good charcoal sketches of animals and birds and flowers; Aella only recognised most of the creatures from the books she had read in her lonely exile.
Whitney hadn’t done any fish or undersea flora though, so Aella decided that before she left she had better sketch a few and leave them as a thank you for borrowing the room and the quilt and the dress.
Some of the drawings had little marginal notes that described the medicinal properties of what was in the picture. It was quite instructional.
When Aella was certain that she was ready, she found the slippers that had been left out for her – she thought slippers an altogether remarkable invention – and took the creaking staircase down to the guest house kitchen.
The landlady was there, pouring a cup of herbal tea for Reverend Fleetwood. They were talking in low tones, “…pleased they’re all back, of course, but that won’t do any good when the imperative geas cuts in at the chime of midnight,” Hagatha Darkness was saying. “After that it’s all going downhill remarkably fast.”
“So I understand,” Mac replied. “But I’m also told the Celestian Messiah might be able to stop all that. So young Zach seemed to think.”
“That young man? He’ll be all the better for chopping the wood I set him to.”
“Last I heard, Zachary Zelnitz had become one of the Heralds of Galactivac.”
“It won’t help him with my woodpile,” the witch of Covenant House answered smugly. “And it’ll keep him busy while we…” Hagatha didn’t turn round but she paused and called out, “Why don’t you come in and join us, young lady?”
Aella came in. “Thank you for your kindness.”
“Don’t thank me until you see the tally at the end,” Sorceress’ grandmother warned sharply. “Come and sit at the table with us. Tea or milk?”
Hot drinks were also a novelty, so Aella tried an elderflower, borage, and gooseberry tea. It also contained a little cantrip against mind control and something to help settle the stomach against unfamiliar foods, Aella noticed as she sipped it carefully. Also, evidently nobody who drank it was likely to get pregnant soon after.
“Do you know why you are here?” Hagatha asked the girl.
“Zack told the Reverend and Mr P that my Enemy was closing in on me and we needed to get somewhere safe. So Mac brought me here.”
“It seemed to be your sort of problem, Hagatha,” the minister apologised. “The magic was still gone yesterday, but you even then you know all the lore and things. and you’ve turned Covenant House into a boarding house so I figured you were the specialist to call.”
“Quite right,” the witch assured him. “I’d have expected you to have more moral problems with a Celestian Messiah that isn’t in your book.”
“The Bible, you mean? The Seahawks aren’t in there either but I still like them. Besides, God likes to work through people and the choices they make themselves. Messiah is just a Hebrew word for ‘saviour’ so if Aella’s been set up to save us from this Dreaming Celestian and his imperative then I’m all for it. I quite like Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ but it doesn’t mean I’ll confuse her with the Virgin Mary.”
Hagatha snorted. “You’ve been quite fortunate in your encounters so far, Aella. Molly Tillinghast who took you to the Willingham Museum, and then Spiro Papadapopolis who took you to the best-defended café in the universe. And then the only sensible preacher in Paradopolis brought you here. Your Enemy is quite frustrated by now.”
“The Hooded Hood is still hunting me?”
“Not the Hooded Hood, no,” the witch revealed. “He has been trying to discover the Celestian Madonna for his own complicated reasons. There have been a considerable number of annoying ploys. That must be why you conflated him with your actual Enemy.”
“Who is that, then?”
“Best I don’t say yet, child. Names have power and he is hunting. Fortunately at the moment, he is troubling the Sea Monkeys, who know how to fend off that sort of attack. We must consider what to do with you.”
“Do with me?” Aella sipped her tea nervously.
“Yes.” Hagatha paused. “Excuse me a minute.” She moved to the back porch just as the windows lit up with a blue glow from millions of floating, interacting numbers. The light was momentary; it was gone by the time the witch had opened the door so that Zach Zelnitz sprawled full length across the faded kitchen linoleum.
“Zombies!” shouted the troubled Hacker 9. “And I dropped the axe!”
“You did however convert them into collapsing binary statistics,” Hagatha pointed out.
“Well yes, but… zombies!”
“What are zombies?” Aella wondered. She peered out into the yard. “There are some little shreds of some kind of nasty magic out there, a sort of animation spell?”
“So there are,” agreed Hagatha. Aella didn’t know if the others present could see the witch of Covenant House grasping the tattered remnants of the necromancies and given them a sharp vicious tug.
There was a scraping of reality and a black-robed figure with a skull-topped staff and blood-drenched knife tumbled down from mid-air and crashing into the hen coop. The birds there attacked him.
“Aaaagh! Aaaaaaahhhh!” the Necromancer General shrieked. He fended off the hens and a very pecky rooster long enough the escape the run. He toppled out onto the dry dirt before the porch.
“That’s the guy who set undead on me?” Hacker 9 demanded, trying to regain the calm and poise that a Herald of Galactivac who hadn’t watched too many zombie movies might possess.
“Vlastimock Bogoff!” Hagatha called in a very different tone of voice to that in which she had spoken to Aella. “You think to intrude upon me? Here?”
“Out of the way, old woman!” the Necromancer General warned, raising his skull-staff. “The girl is…”
“Here, where the land is mine. Where the dust is mine.£
Vlastimock’s threat was choked off as he found it hard to breathe.
“Where the air is mine?”
The Necromancer General clawed his throat. He didn’t entirely need to breathe - unless he wanted to speak to cast spells.
“Where the waters and the flames are mine?” Hagatha pressed on.
The intruder began to steam and smoke.
“Where the spirits and the ghosts are mine?”
Vlastimock tumbled over as if he had been invisibly kicked in the balls.
“Where fate and narrative are mine?” the Darkness witch snarled.
Aella watched as very old spells that kept the necromancer alive began to unravel like torn knitting.
“Can you send him away?” she asked Zach urgently. “Far, far away.”
“Oh sure,” agreed Hacker 9. “Minor locational hack, really. Watch.”
H9 saved the Necromancer General’s existence. He just saved it to Mars.
Hagatha turned on the young man. “He was mine to slay by right of conquest.”
“I didn’t want you to,” Aella told her. “I don’t want anyone killed because of me, even horrible people who use such horrible magic. So I asked Zach to send him away.”
“Nix Olympus,” Hacker 9 assured the witch. “Biggest volcano in the solar system. Downside – inactive. Upside – on Mars.”
The Covenant House landlady glared at the Herald of Galactivac a moment more. “That will do for the present,” she eventually conceded. “It is troubling that Bogoff was able to trace Aella here, though. Others will surely be following, with greater resources to pit against me.”
“I’m making it dangerous for you,” Aella understood. “I need to go.”
“I can get her out of here,” H9 promised. “I already told Reverend Fleetwood.”
“But not without her consent,” Hagatha sensed. “She is the Celestian Messiah. You are restricted. By whose orders?”
Mac drained his cup. “Aren’t you supposed to work for Galactivac now?”
“Yeah. I do. That’s why I’m here. The Boss sent me to fetch Aella to him.”
***
Gamma Ray Gary, the last Equinnite, grasped his enchanted weapon Ljouis and picked himself out of the new crater he had contributed to Earth’s moon. “Is that your best shot?” he asked.
The lunar rock around him rose up like gigantic hands and clapped him between them. Images of his dead people welled through his brain, picking at his sanity. A fast moving red blur hit him ten thousand times before he could even scream.
“In addition to your other faults, you don’t seem very good at sums,” Undermind Obscura pointed out to the cosmic champion. “You’re moderately powerful with your bio-technological upgrades and your borrowed Ausgardian enhancements, but we outnumber you three to one.”
Terrorox clenched his fists, commanding the terrain that pinioned his adversary to extrude jagged spiked through the captive. “You should have at least brought that spaceship of yours, Equinnite. I’ve always wanted to break that.”
Ship was elsewhere, trying to get as remote from the coming Resolution War as possible before the imperative in her AI forced her to turn back and join in the carnage.
“It’s not you, pal. It’s us,” Crimson Cyclist assured the captive. “There’s not a lot that can stop the Heralds of Galactivac.”
A swift blur in De Brown Streak’s sweatband caught him by the waist and propelled him away from the fight. “You shouldn’t give opening lines like that when you’re doing your bad-guys speech,” Hatman cautioned him. “Haven’t you worked out yet how this Parodyverse works?”
A baseball bat-with-a-nail-in-it screaming with energy caromed into Terrorox’s face. Then he was run over by a goat chariot. Then he was facing Donar.
“Well met, boon Gamma Ray Gary!” the hemigod of thunder called greeting over the sound of him whomping the rock-controller. “We did’st receive thy call and lo, we art come. Mine thanks for sharing the whoppage of yon Galactivac minions for the nonce!”
Donar was having a frustrating day. He was happy to share it with mass murderers.
Undermind Obscura would have shredded the Ausgardian’s mind into screaming tatters had she not suddenly suffered a critical wardrobe malfunction. There were serious disadvantages to wearing spiked underwear if it somehow got twisted round.
“Ooh, that looks painful, Undie,” the young woman in the back of the goat chariot sympathised. “That’s the trouble with posy villainware. Those straps look cool on the montage splash page but when they misbehave they can be a serious problem. Especially when they’re made of unsteady molecules or whatever Al B. calls them. Did you know that there’s actually a 0.00000000001 chance of them spontaneously combusting when they get caught in awkward intimate cracks?” The Probability Dancer winced in sympathy and ducked below the rim of the chariot.
“You cannot stop us!” the Cyclist warned Hatman. “The mortal whose powers you simulate was fast. But I am the very incarnation of speed. I can…”
Hatman had switched to a peaked traffic warden’s cap. The cyclist was caught in a wheel clamp of Dr Harper’s design.
Undermind Obscura tore away her offending costume. “You think us mere mortal foes that we will fall for such trickery, fallen Herald?” she demanded of Dancer. “How much you have forgotten!”
Sarah Shepherdson’s chance powers derived from her technical role as one of Galactivac’s heralds. All attempts to remove them had failed due to extreme circumstance. “I didn’t fall so much as reposition. The gig wasn’t right. I don’t do planet-killing. It’s not me. I told Vaccy that when I quit. Frankly the whole lot of you, him included, need to take a serious look at your career paths and life choices.”
Undermind turned her attention from the errant Herald’s prattling distractions and loosed a barrage of childhood guilts to reave the mind of the Serious Matter wielder who assailed the Cyclist.
Dancer spotted a tiny chance that Terrorox might get in the way and made it so.
“Neeaaaagggghhhh!” screamed the bone-shifter. He clutched his skull. “No, Mee-Ma, don’t make me plextrate all the vernuculims!”
In sympathy, Donar hit him in the face with Mjalcolm.
“Ready, team?” Hatman called. “All change!”
He came at Terrorox in his Giant’s cap, shifting size to stomp the distracted Herald into the lunar landscape. He knew that the only way to beat such powerful opposition was to keep them reeling and hit them hard over and over. He shifted to his Con Ed hat and jammed four million volts into the troubled villain.
That freed up Donar to head for Undermind Obscura. “Tis fortunate I do not usually think when in battle,” he warned the omega-class psionic. “Or out of battle.” He crashed into her and introduced her face to the crater.
Dancer somersaulted over to the Crimson Cyclist. “Are you okay, Noggin?” she asked him. “Here, have a coffee.”
The Cyclist tried to call his cosmic bicycle to him but it was still clamped and appeared to have fallen into a clump of previously unsuspected lunar thorn bushes that grew here in the artificial atmosphere of the Skree ruins called the Turquoise Area. He viewed the pressed foam cup suspiciously.
“I know you’re not like the others, Noggin Rupp,” Sarah scolded him. “You told me your origin story, how you agreed to be Galactivac’s Herald to save your world and some girl in an unfeasible science fiction bodystocking. You’re not horrible like Terrorox and Undermind, so please drink the frappe of peace with the cinnamon sprinkles of harmony and tell me what on Earth you’re doing fighting poor Gary there.”
“The Resolution War has come,” the Cyclist said insistently, as if that explained everything.
“Oh sure. But we don’t have to pick sides until midnight.” Shep leaned in confidentially. “I’m tending towards being a goodie. What about you?” It had occurred to the Probability Dancer that if she could convince everyone to be a goodie by the time the imperative fully activated then it would be a very short Resolution with a fantastic afterparty. She was willing to try for it.
“Switch!” called Hatman, hurling Terrorox back to Donar and heading for Undermind Obscura in his Thinking Cap.
The Crimson Cyclist was about to blur back to assist his fellow Heralds but decided he needed to lift the plastic lid and test the brew in the bright container that said Bean and Donut on the side. “The Master sent us to Earth. We are to find the Celestian Messiah. She has the Key that operates the Control Board of the Space Robots. With that the Dreaming Celestian can be reprogrammed – probably.”
“Well that sounds like a plan,” Dancer agreed. “And the fighting Gary bit?”
“The only way to locate so shielded and protected a person as the Messiah in the time remaining to us is by destroying the Earth and discovering her in the ruins. She will survive, you see. Such is the order of Galactivac.”
“And Gamma Ray Gary objected to that,” Dancer understood. “You’re really okay with destroying Earth, Noggin? We have girls in science fiction bodystockings. And a few ladies of more mature shape whom we refuse to fat-shame because it is mean. And some middle-age male cosplayers who really deserve what they get.”
She pulled the Cyclist aside as Terrorox crashed past them followed by a shouting Ausgardian who was becoming increasingly incomprehensibly Nordo-Australian as he ranted.
“I don’t want to do it,” the Crimson Cyclist admitted. “But you know that the Space Robot isn’t the only one that plants imperatives. I never understood how you shook off Galactivac’s persuasions.”
“He didn’t buy me Guinness or tell me that I was the love of his life and he just happened to have a camera on his phone,” Sarah explained. “Honestly, if you don’t want to be a mass murderer, don’t be. Drink the fancy coffee of absolution and be sure to recycle your cup in the trash bin of new starts. And duck.”
A swarm of screaming psionic ghost-sprits welled from Undermind Obscura, seeking to rip Hatman apart. He switched to his Buffy Fan Club cap and fended them off while making perky quips.
“Your friends are powerful but they can’t stop us,” the Cyclist apologised.
Gamma Ray Gary introduced Undermind to Ljouis. He had finally broken free.
“There’s a chance they will,” Dancer assured Noggin Rupp. “But that’s not the plan.”
“It’s not?” the Cyclist puzzled. “Then what is the plan?”
The abandoned Turquoise Area was not entirely abandoned. These days it had one resident, the enigmatic Utah the Observer, whose role it was to record the universe to its last day.
He tended to get cranky when kids played on his lawn.
The fight ended as everyone was imprisoned in individual spheres of absolute containment and suspended over the broken Lunar surface.
“What?” Terrorox screamed, hammering futilely at the bubble that held him despite the full fury of his power. “You dare?”
Utah appeared, a giant Charlie Brown-headed sandal and toga-wearing Burning Man refugee surrounded by a nimbus of special effects. “I dare,” he boomed. “I… the Observer!”
***
“Don’t try turning me into a frog,” Hacker 9 warned Hagatha Darkness.
“I may be too late,” the old witch considered. “Just so you know, I was dealing with Bogoff the kind way.”
“You said you were here to help Aella, Zach,” Mac Fleetwood objected. “You left out the part where you were dragging her off to a planet-devouring monster!”
Aella saw where this was going. She saw the powers shifting round the kitchen, the ancient magics of Covenant House and the cosmic shortcutting of Galactivac’s herald; it was not going to end well. “Stop it, please,” she interrupted before anyone could be hacked or frogged, or possibly Marine-wrestled onto the linoleum. “It’s alright. Zach can’t take me anywhere I don’t want to go and he can’t take my Key from me. Nobody can.”
H9 glanced over at the girl. “Right. Because of the thingie. But relax, I wasn’t going to try.”
“What thingie?” Mac asked suspiciously.
“He means the destiny that goes with carrying my Silver Key,” Aella explained. “If it could be stolen or if I could be kidnapped then my Enemy would have done it long ago. But he couldn’t get mother when she had it, or grandmother before that, and he can’t get me. Not like that. It’s not allowed.”
Hagatha snatched up Aella’s teacup and then also grabbed the one that Zach had discarded earlier. “Hold on while I catch up,” she commanded, staring at them furiously.
“I was sent by the Living Death That Sucks to persuade Aella to go to him,” Hacker 9 confessed. “After all, I’m from the same planet as her. I know the terrain and the lingo. But I never intended to actually take her to him. I hacked past my Galactivac obedience programming ages ago.”
“It’s true,” Hagatha muttered, reading tea-leaves. “He has a number of other disgusting teenage habits, though.”
“Um…” H9 worried.
“So why did you came to meet me, Zach?” Aella wondered.
“Yeah, well, Galactivac wants the Celestian Messiah. And since I’ve kind of gone a bit AWOL he’s probably sent his other Heralds to finish the job if they can find you. But he’s hardly the only one looking for you.”
“You also have ties to the Hooded Hood,” Mac recalled. “In fact you were apprenticed to him at the point you became a Herald of Galactivac.”
“Yeah. Only sort of. I didn’t really think that apprenticeship through as much as maybe I should have. I pissed off all my friends past the point of any number of cat .gif e-mails putting it right. It’s very possible that Ioldabaoth manipulated me into taking the Herald gig so he’d have a guy inside Galactivac’s Hoover-Ship.”
“So you are working for him?” Aella accused. “My Enemy – or is he?” She scowled, apparently at the sliced loaf on the kitchen table but actually at confused memories. “Sometimes when I think back it seems like he must have been the adversary who tormented my mother and me all my life. Other times that doesn’t seem to fit.”
Hagatha set down the teacup she’d been studying. “Of course it doesn’t,” she mentioned. “You’re actually remembering things from before the retcon as well as after it.”
“What retcon?” Hacker 9 puzzled.
“What is a retcon?” Aella wondered, more puzzled.
H9 answered. “It’s short for ‘retroactive continuity’. It is ‘a literary device in which new information is added to already established facts in the continuity of a fictional work’. But it’s also the Hooded Hood’s superpower, to change some detail of backstory that can cause massive alterations to what is happening now.” He dared glance over at Hagatha. “You’re saying Aella has been retconned? When? How?”
“The retcon was applied quite recently, judging by the sugar crystals,” the Darkness Witch considered. “However, it altered a point of continuity when this child was nine years old.”
Aella caught in a gasp of breath.
“Is that important, Aella?” Mac asked.
The girl nodded. “That was when everything went wrong. When father was lost, and mother and I had to run for our lives from the Enemy. When I received my Curse, and the Silver Key. And then the Enemy could find mother too, and he killed her, sucked her into darkness.”
“Hold on,” H9 objected. He conjured up a complex hologram representation of Aella’s lineage.
“Your mother was Elyse the Earth Maiden and your father was Banjoooooo, King of the Sea Monkeys. Though you’re not an Earth Maiden or a Sea Monkey.”
“Of course not. I’m a mermaid. Except, after the Curse of Atargatis I could only be human after night came and only be a sea-breather by day. That’s why I had to hide out in my cave for so long and not go ashore. If I stray too far from the water people would get hurt when the tidal waves comes to reclaim me at dawn. At least until the curse was suspended and I was able to go to Willingham.”
Mac was baffled. “The curse of who now?”
H9 had the internet at his disposal. “Assyrian legend circa 1000 B.C., a goddess who also went by the name Deceto and got knocked up by a young man.”
“Hmph,” grunted Hagatha; but what happened in the nineteenth century…
Zach went on downloading. “So she jumped into the sea and instead of being drowned she became a mermaid. The first recorded mermaid. So the Curse of Atargatis is the curse of being a half-girl half-fish?”
“Or of being bothered by impregnating young men,” Hagatha growled.
“No, being a mermaid is not a curse,” Aella told Zach hotly. “It is wonderful. The Curse just prevents me from properly controlling it, the change, the tides, the storms, those sort of things. And it’s nothing to do with… boys,” she added to Hagatha. “A least… no-one mentioned that when I was nine.”
“Perhaps you should explain what you do remember?” Mac suggested. “Then we can sort out what was retconned?”
“Because you said your grandmother had that Key and I don’t think it ever belonged to Laurie Leyton, did it? Or Banjoooo’s Sea Monkey Queen mother, who was…” – he checked – “nobody in the Who’s Who.”
Aella could see there was a need to clear things up. “The Key came to mother from her foster-mother, not her birth mother, and that’s why the duty came to me after. The Silver Key belonged to the line of the Mountain Princesses in the Hall of the Mountain King…”
“You mean Cleone Swanmay?” Mac recognised. “Xander’s, um, familiar.”
Hacker 9 did another hasty databank check. His eyes widened. “She got exiled to Earth after some attempt to enslave her by Baron Morbo went horribly Xander. And she gave up her mantle to save the sorcerer supreme.”
“He has quite a knack for getting young women out of their mantles,” Hagatha mentioned sourly. A much-younger master of the mystic crafts had encountered young Vervain Darkness, Hagatha’s daughter by Mumphrey, and now Hagatha had a granddaughter called Whitney. It was even on Hacker 9’s wretched chart.
“It was very romantic,” Aella assured everybody. “But Grandmother Cleone couldn’t keep the Silver Key when she was exiled, so she gifted it to mother. It was exactly right, what was always intended to happen, just as Cleone’s oldest-mother had prophesied.”
“Oldest mother?” checked H9. “Crap, I don’t even have a family tree for Cleone on this chart!”
“Of course you do.” Aella pointed. “There. That was where the Mountain Princesses traced their lineage, and that’s who retrieved and kept the Silver Key when it was dropped into existence. She kept it safe in the receptacle provided for it, the Chalice of the Secret Fire.”
“Aaagh!” Zach freaked. “Valeria had it! Valeria of Carfax, who according to my chart has an entirely unexplored lineage we haven’t even gone into yet?”
“That seems consistent with the young woman’s destiny threats,” Hagatha considered calmly. “She always had an affinity for exiles. So the Silver Key’s history is cleared up. But child, you mentioned other traumas.”
Aella looked down miserably. “While mother had the Key, the enemy couldn’t harm her. But he could hurt me, so when he found us at last, mother gave me the Key, transferred it to me, so I couldn’t be harmed…”
“But she could,” Mac understood.
Aella’s brows furrowed. “I thought he killed her. But other people say she didn’t die like that, that she and father went on to… to…?”
“A happy ending,” Mac confirmed. “I was there to see it, at the end of the Parody War. There was a chance for heroes to, well, retire really, to be reunited with loved ones they’d otherwise have lost. A really amazing balancing of the scales. I think that must be what happened with Elyse. This wasn’t actually a Hooded Hood retcon. It was a Happy Ending overwriting an unjust one.”
“So the Enemy never got mother?” Aella ventured.
“If he did, she got another chance anyway. I suspect she had people looking out for her.”
“Xander, Cleone, Banjoooo, Lisa…” H9 reeled off.
“The point is, Aella, that while it was all very real and very horrible, especially for you, it wasn’t allowed to stand like that. It won’t bring your parents back to you, but they are happy.”
“That seems likely,” Hagatha Darkness admitted.
“Oh…” Aella took a moment to think about that. It was as if a chain had been lifted off her. “Then the rest doesn’t seem so bad. When the Enemy caught me there was… I suppose a sort of stand-off. He was able to confine me to my cave, where I was a girl by night and a mermaid by day, and I couldn’t venture far. But he had to keep me relatively well looked after or I’d have been able to leave, so he provided me with food and books and things.”
“Whole new form of self-educated,” Zack recognised. “No TV? No… no internet?” He looked at the girl with new sympathy.
“And that’s how it was for four years,” Aella went on. “I wouldn’t give him the Key and he wouldn’t let me go and the Curse kept me from escaping properly, until the storm and the day when it didn’t.”
Hagatha reached over as if to pluck a stray thread off Aella’s skirt, but she grasped a little strand of consequence instead and tasted it on her tongue. “Hmm. This Curse is borrowed,” she announced. “Your Enemy acquired it from Camellia of the Fey, back in the days when she was still La Belle Dame Sans Merci. But evidently Xander was being clever again, because he secretly replaced it with something from the Cailleach Bheur, the Old Woman of Winter who lurks in that Laundry of Doom under Mister Lye’s neutral charter for now. So instead of turning you into a ravening sea-monster with siren appetites and giant sea monkey-sized stomping fits you were cursed to be…”
“To be what?” Aella asked anxiously. “What am I cursed to be?”
“Reasonable,” Hagatha told her regretfully. “Oh my dear child, you have been cursed with common sense. There is no greater punishment in the Parodyverse. But no wonder your enemy couldn’t get to you. Every absurd attempt he made was grounded by the very Curse he placed on you.”
Zach spotted a problem. “But the Curse stopped working. It’s daytime and Aella doesn’t have a fish tail. She got away from her cave.”
“And she met you,” Hagatha agreed. “Poor girl.”
Reverend Fleetwood wasn’t letting Zach off his earlier question, though. “So did the Hooded Hood send you after Aella?”
The mermaid turned her green-blue eyes to Hacker 9. “Did he? I thought we were friends.”
“We are friends,” Zack Zelnitz protested. “I mean, yes, the Hood told me to come get you. Well, he told me that Galactivac would tell me to come get you but in fact I was to convince you to go to Hoodie instead…”
“Go to my Enemy?”
“No. The Hood’s not your Enemy. Well, not that one, with the capital E. He doesn’t go around murdering mothers. It’s wasteful. Dead people can’t be used in massively complicated multi-part plots. And if he knew where you were all these years he would have acted on it instead of spawning countless other schemes to identify Celestian Madonnas and Messiahs and sneak into the Celestian Control Plane.”
“The being who spoke to you from shadows is a different creature,” Hagatha confirmed. “I could even name him now, I think, would it not draw his eye here.”
Zach’s brows rose. “Sauron?” he gasped. “Or… Voldemort?”
“So Hacker 9 isn’t part of Aella’s curse?” Mac checked.
“You believed the Hood was your enemy because he has been sniffing around,” the Darkness Witch continued. “Doubtless now he is aware of you he is trying to retcon himself into your story. Impertinent fellow! Between that and the Happy Ending alterations and the Curse warping your destiny it is hardly surprising that you’re having difficulties establishing your history, child.”
Aella was still regarding Zach. “But are you working for the Hooded Hood to get me?” she persisted.
Zach shrugged. “He thinks so. Just like the Living Death That Sucks thinks I’m his. But honestly, I’m Hacker 9. I never work for the Man. I might piggyback on their systems for a while but… nah, I’m after something else.”
“What?” Hagatha asked suspiciously. “Because I’ll warn you now that her dress has…”
Zach pointed to Aella and her Silver Key. “This girl has the all-access pass to the operating systems of the Parodyverse! She can get me in to the ultimate hack! I can fix the Dreaming Celestian and save everybody. And then I can fix everything else, all the injustice and misery and poverty in the whole of creation.”
“That does sound good,” Aella admitted.
Mac was less convinced. “Even if we could trust you, Zach, there are many beings of great power in the Parodyverse who might make the changes, the improvements you propose. Why do you suppose that they haven’t?”
“Because they aren’t as awesome,” H9 ventured. “Look, I get that I’ve not had the perfect track record before, but this is the big one. Aella is our only shot at fixing things, and she needs me to run the programs. And then…”
The hacker paused as Hagatha stood up quickly. Her black cat dived for cover faster than if Lisa’s tom had entered the room.
“What?” H9 worried. “Has Aella’s Enemy come? Or the other Heralds? Or the Hood? It’s… it’s not really Voldemort, is it?”
Mac grabbed him in a full nelson. “Sorry, Zach,” the preacher apologised. “It turns out that the imperative won’t let you access the Celestian Plane. We have to stop you.”
Hagatha raised her hand and the room turned dark. “Dead Heralds deliver no bad news!” she proclaimed in a voice like Arctic ice.
Zack repositioned Mac Fleetwood back to the Zero Street Mission with a minor geographical hack. A similar shift on Hagatha failed and made him convulse, clutching his belly.”
“Madame Hagatha!” Aella called urgently, seeing how the witch had grabbed into Zach’s karmic field, his life force. Hagatha had been dealing with the Necromancer General the kind way!
“You should not have drunk the tea, young man,” the Witch of Covenant House told Hacker 9. “Now it is imperative that you die.”
***
“We’ve come to check your security,” Silicone Sally told Rupert Morgansten, Governor of the Safe Metahuman Containment Facility on Flanagan Island of the coast of Gothametropolis York. “You know, with the big Resolution War being less than four hours off. And since I don’t like you, I volunteered to be liaison.”
The facility’s senior staff member swallowed hard. “This is a maximum security facility for hardened criminals. We can’t treat them softly here.” He glared at the flexible ex-felon. “We couldn’t treat you softly when you were here.”
“And I won’t be treating you softly in this inspection,” she promised. “Amy?”
Amy Aston, the dungaree-and-oil clad engineer of Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises looked up from the diagnostic boxes she was attaching to the Safe’s systems. “So far so good,” she admitted. “Everything is doing what it’s supposed to do. If we’d been shapeshifters or doppelgangers or robots or whatever, we’d have been fried as we came in. If anyone tries to teleport or dimension-warp or time-travel or size-change, or any of the other regular ways of breaking in or out of places, they’d have ended up as random subatomic particles scattered over a creative variety of planes. Tech-wise the place seems up to spec. I can’t speak to the spooky stuff.”
“I suppose I can,” Vinnie de Soth admitted. “The wards are looking good too, Sally. This place is pretty strong with them, even the Zeku shielding against pixies.”
Governor Morgansten was still unhappy, and not just because of the murderous glares he was receiving from Sally Rezilyant. “I thought maybe you’d come from Colonel Drury with orders about Order 99,” he admitted.
“We’re Lair Legion, not SPUD,” Sally insisted. “What’s Order 99?”
“Nothing,” the Governor clammed up. “There is no Order 99.”
Amy had already pulled it out of the Safe’s operating systems. “It’s a kill-all-prisoners order,” she reported. “A final failsafe, looks like. Various systems are triggered off to terminate every inmate by some means appropriate to overcome their powerset.”
“Why am I not surprised that there’s such a thing here?” Sally asked, turning her death gaze up from 11 to 12.
“Why shouldn’t there be?” Morgansten responded. “Don’t you remember how much life was lost last time there was a breakout, when one of your heroes decided it was a good idea to let loose two hundred super-powered murderers? Or the time before when the worst metahuman psychopaths on the planet were only prevented from escaping because the Hooded Hood ordered them not to?”
“Why not? I dunno. Because it’s unconstitutional, cruel and unusual, and beyond any judicial oversight?” the silicone superhero suggested. “I mean, I was a bad gal. I worked for Beth von Zemo. When your security precautions start to look like hers you may want to rethink things a bit.”
Vinnie looked worried. “We’ll use Order 99 anyway, at midnight,” he predicted. “We’ll kill all these prisoners in their cells, because that’s what the imperative requires.”
“Or sooner,” Morgansten insisted. “When the Order is issued it will be carried out.”
“Probably not,” Amy judged. “I’m more a hardware gal than software, but I bet if Al B. or Hallie looked at this they’d say someone kludged your system to open all the cells rather than wipe out the inmates.”
“What?” Sally and Morgansten demanded in unison.
“Yep. I’d say this was old mods, too. Not today. Probably the same time the system was installed.”
“Blackbird!” the Governor spat. “It has to be. But we can still manage a manual takedown, when…”
The outer wall of the Safe crumbled as a tower-block-sized mole creature tunnelled up from below.
Morgansten yelped.
Sally stretched through a new crack in the reinforced wall for a better look. “It’s either one of the Hole Man’s beasties or something from the Wastelands,” she suggested. “It’s trying to break through the primary force fields.”
A nuclear pulse overloaded the generators. Doctor Roentgen laughed.
“It’s the Purveyors of Peril!” Sally saw. “I mean, all of them. I’m counting… lots! Anvil Man, Appendage Man, Brass Monkey, Razor Ballerina, Gromm the Living Flatulence, Voodoo Vicaress, PsychoAcidPervGal!, Hellfrasier, Spacewarped, HuntingJustice DeathMarrow, Savagetooth… Aw crap, I thought Doorman was dead for sure! Wait… the Yurt?”
“They had the same idea about pre-checking on the Safe!” Amy declared.
“No!” Morgansten gasped. “We can’t wait any longer. We must activate Order 99! We must…”
Amy spannered him. “This is no time to panic,” she mentioned.
“They’re ambushing us?” Vinnie de Soth checked with Silicone Sally.
“Yep. They have us surrounded.”
“Excellent,” Yuki Shiro’s voice crackled over the LL commcards. “Amy, spin up the new force field projectors so they’re all trapped in there.”
“Done,” reported the engineer.
“Everyone else, attack!”
“Lair Legion Line Up!” yelled Ham-Boy.
The rest of the Lair Legion decloaked– in a contained environment while the team was still unconstrained by the imperative’s kill-order or priority changes.
They had decided to start the Resolution War early.
***
The Lair Mansion had a number of cartographical anomalies; rooms that didn’t make sense and chambers that did not appear on any map. One of them was a secret turret that made a suitable hideout for Magweed, Griffin, and Samantha Featherstone. It helped that the entrance door was located in at least five places around the more conventional Mansion layout.
Griffin became visible and tumbled back onto a battered old ottoman that had been rescued from one of the Lair Attics. A cloud of dust emerged from it as he landed hard.
Magweed handed him a brown paper bag. “Breathe slowly and deeply into this,” she instructed him. “Or vomit into it, I suppose,” she added with a sigh as her brother found another use for the container.
“Did you get anywhere?” Sam asked him. “Is this the puke of victory or the sick of defeat?”
Griffin swilled the Diet Coke of Recovery and swallowed a Snickers of Good Attempt. “I couldn’t find Marie,” he admitted. “If she’s still around after that Normalverse stuff then she’s not in any of the Mansion’s usual hiding places. But I did find something else.”
As well as being a thirteen-year old boy Griffin was also a conceptual information spirit who self-identified as a mythological guardian of secrets. His gestation-mother was Hallie, a sentient computer program. He tended to have built-in wi fi.
“What did you see, Griff?” Magweed prompted him, resorting to the Mars Bar of Sibling Patience; well, the Mars Bar of Limited Sibling Patience.
“There’s some really unusual data traffic whizzing round the superhero intranet,” the boy reported.
“Is CSFB! checking his websites again?” Samantha asked suspiciously. “Or… someone sent spam to the Shoggoth? That never ends well.”
“I mean different from that. Someone who shouldn’t be there, hacking in, strolling past Al B’s firewalls, past mom’s firewalls like they’re not there.”
“That is extremely not good,” Samantha declared with a frown. “Especially today. We need to warn grandfather right away.”
“No, wait,” Griffin told her. “I’m still kind of processing. This stuff mostly comes as blurred averages, as… there’s not the vocabulary for it. But I’m sifting down it, following trails and… yeah, I can see who it is now. Can I borrow your phone, Sam? This is the guy.”
Samantha checked the image and frowned more. “Zach Zelnitz, a.k.a. Hacker 9, a.k.a. The Junior Who Dropped Out To Understudy The Hooded Hood, a.k.a. The Newest Herald of Galactivac the Living Death That Sucks. He was before you guys came back from Faerie.”
“We know about him,” Magweed assured her friend. “Dad always calls him ‘that little punk’ and forgets about bedtime until mom calms him down. He’s a great distraction when your Mouse Guard happen to have failed to alert your parents about the latest man-traps.”
“Well he’s rooting through the LL intranet right now,” Griffin discerned. “He’s looking for… EEE operating systems. He’s trying to remote activate a dimensional portal.”
“Ooh, Miss F is not going to like that,” Sam predicted. “There’ll be staring and a large bill.”
“A portal to where?” Mags asked practically.
“I’m not entirely sure. Except he’s trying to lock on to some weird genetic co-ordinates. The nearest match the Mansion systems can find for it is Liu Xi Xian… but only since she got back today after her recent full-body makeover.”
“Her body materials came from Exu the Doomherald,” Samantha knew. “But he was only a temporary construction in the Demiplane where the Celestian Space Robots go for repair and instruction. He vanished when he was no longer needed to guide Liu Xi.”
“Except then she would have died too,” Magweed suggested, “because she needed the materials she borrowed from him. If he stops existing then so does the flesh and blood she used to rebuild herself. So she still needs him. So he’s still out there, living in a loophole!”
“And H9 is trying to get to him.”
Griffin puzzled out more from the data he had mined. “He’s ordering up a portal for two. Hastily, I think. There’s a wicked witch who’s a bit angry at him. I mean wicked in the proper sense of really, really wise and not a good idea to cross. I think it’s Whitney’s grandma.”
“Yes, she’s a good idea not to cross,” Magweed agreed. “She would definitely skip the gingerbread stage.”
Samantha Featherstone decided not to mention her grandfather once dating Hagatha. What happened in the nineteenth century should stay in the nineteenth century. “How did a Herald of Galactivac who is hacking into teleport systems also hack off a Darkness Witch?” she wondered.
Griffin fathomed right to the end of the datastream. “He’s ordering a portal for two. He’s not alone. There’s a girl with him.”
“About seventeen, dark skinned, athletic, goes by the name of Lindy Wilson?” Sam ventured. “H9 has past form kidnapping and teaming up with Falconne.”
“No… no this girl is younger. My age. She’s got long brown hair and she’s not that tall but she’s got long slender legs. And sea-green-blue eyes that are deep and mesmer… and, y’know, eyes. Two of them.”
Magweed regarded her brother with a raised eyebrow. “Nicely done on the eye counting, Griff. And the database search to ID her?”
Griffin blinked. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No records, no photos, no social media, not even traffic and security cam hits.”
“H9 has erased her from the internet?” Sam speculated. “Is that what he does now when he steals girls?”
“Steals them?”
“And teleports them to another dimension, evidently,” Magweed disapproved. “We need to tell mom about this.”
“There’s no time!” objected Griffin. “The EEE equipment is cycling up. Amy is using some words I’ll have to Google later. I have to save her!”
“Does Amy need saving?” Sam questioned. In her experience, the EEE engineer was very handy with a well-placed socket wrench.
“He means sea-green-blue-eyes mesmerising girl,” Magweed clarified. “How could we do that, Griffin?”
“I could piggy back the dimensional gate,” the boy explained urgently. “Take us to wherever this Hacker 9 takes his prisoner. We have to rescue her!”
“Because we’re not grounded enough yet,” Mags suggested. “Dad hasn’t yet chained us to our beds.”
“She’s in trouble, right? We have to help her. I’m a Gryphon! We rescue girls in trouble.”
“Traditionally Gryphons guard secrets and treasures,” Sam pointed out.
“Well she is a secret and a treasure! And I’m going to rescue her! That’s what Gryphons do now! Are you coming?”
“Of course we are,” Magweed chided her brother, “on the clear understanding that you are to blame for this.”
“Sure,” agreed Samantha. “Right after I send a text.”
Griffin leaped up. “He’s operating the EEE portal. Amy is hitting something with a spanner. I’m pairing in a supplementary co-ordinate package.”
“Can you really do this?” Magweed checked. “I mean… he is supposed to be Galactivac’s herald of hacking.”
“And I was a data-ghost in mom’s womb nurtured by Celestian technology. And this is our system. And Gryphons go anywhere they are needed – especially when there is someone who needs to be guarded from a little punk!”
By the time the dimensional gate alarms had sounded round the Lair Mansion, the three young people were gone.
***
The ginger cat who owned Parody Island and the nearby city had also gained his indestructibility from the intervention of the Celestians. He had been a gift to Lisa from the Hooded Hood, who had arranged the feline’s special status vis a vis any kind of damage or restraint and had set him loose to further several long-term plots.
One such contingency had been if Magweed, Griffin, and Samantha managed to breach the Celestian Control Plane. The cat that accompanied them would create a small and traceable dimensional breach, allowing the Hooded Hood access to the place he had so long desired to find. In that way the Parodyverse would be his.
The cat yawned, stropped his claws on Yuki’s second-best leather jacket, and went back to sleep on the cyborg P.I.’s bed. He had no interest at all in Hooded Hood plots.
He was, after all, a cat.
***
Three Legionnaires, three Heralds, and one slightly-battered Equinnite floated above the moon’s surface in front of a cosmic Observer.
“You are back then,” Hatman declared. “You’ve been pretty quiet since the Parody War. We weren’t sure if your order was done for, since you sided with the losers or were Obedience Branded.”
“Some of us remained neutral and persisted,” Utah revealed.
“Thou can’st not remain neutral now,” Donar pointed out. His goats floated past him in their own bubbles, bleating wrathfully. “What side wilt thou be made to take when midnight comest?”
Utah discerned that the Lair Legion had diverted the fight to the Turquoise Area specially to get to him. And there was a king-sized mocha cappuccino stored in the goat-chariot’s locker with his name written on the side. “That choice is known only to… the Observer,” he intoned.
“Which is why we’re asking,” Dancer pointed out.
“Release us now!” roared Terrorox “Release us, or face the wrath of…” He fell silent as Utah made his force bubble soundproof.
“Observer, you’re tasked with watching events until the end of the Parodyverse,” Hatman called out. “And then preserving things, like… like an archive. The Intergalactic Order of Librarians package up the literature. Your people record events. But what’s happening now with the Dreaming Celestian, that’s not the proper ending, is it? That’s just a childish short cut, a quick fix last bash.”
“We hast heardeth of a child who mightst be able to helpeth,” Donar went on. “Yon Herald caitiffs didst seek to scrobbleth her so we didst remonstrate with them to the uttermost. But she might be our chance – if you canst stop yon Heralds from making a gjarlenwolf’s breakfast of it!”
“We really need you to be on our side, Uatu,” Dancer concluded. “C’mon. We’re due for a break!”
The Observer’s head turned. The stars above him were out-blazed by a multicoloured spacewarp effect and long chains of rippling black dots. An unimaginably vast spaceship arrived, that vaguely resembled an old-fashioned pneumatic cylinder vacuum cleaner with long flailing nozzles. The front opened up to release its sole occupant.
Galactivac, the Living Death that Sucks, stepped out into space for a full-page splash panel.
“Or we could have that,” sighed Dancer. “Utah, can you stop him?”
The Observer ducked.
Then there were two vast giants hanging in orbit around a doomed Earth. Galactivac was huge, but the blackened Dreaming Space Robot was larger yet.
The two cosmic beings faced each other and prepared to battle.
***
Next Time: Galactivac vs the Dreaming Celestian (and a modicum of collateral damage)! Griffins vs Mermaids! (and a modicum of emotional damage) The clock reaches midnight! A possibly-fake legend remains surplus to destiny! The Hooded Hood does not go quietly into that good night! What the hell is a Furby? What constitutes a proper ending? All this and more in the probably-too-long-for-its-own-good Untold Origin Tales of the Parodyverse #363: The Alchemikal Honeymoon, or Six Degrees of Visionary.
P.S. Can anybody think of any character who is more than three degrees of association removed from Vizh?
Special thanks to Rhiannon for finding all the reference links for this chapter (and many others). Now she can go back to that masters thesis on Ovid she would otherwise have been frittering her time on.
***
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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