Posted by The Hooded Hood presents this special anniversary invocation of the Parodyverse's early years, featuring Jarvis, Enty, Lisa, spiffy, Finny, DK, and one Bad Word on September 23, 2001 at 05:54:40:
Lair Legion: Year One, part 3 – What happened when Banjooooo declared war on the human race, and why it’s a bad idea to ever go to the lavatory again
THE STORY SO FAR: The
cosmically-powered Jarvis, the amorous advocatrix Lisa, armoured adventurer
NTU-150, and completely unpowered cub reporter spiffy have been joined in the
League of Regulars by the Makluan dragon Fin Fang Foom. Finny is the only one
who knows for sure that urban legend the Dark Knight is real and out there.
Gavan Carstenson is lost in the Warralorracaves in the outback, tormented by the
mysterious Hoki, Ausgardian god or goddess of mischief. Pure alien thought being
Yo is seeking a human host, having failed to merge with the explorer who has now
discovered a mystic cave and been transformed into the Master of the Gah! Force
known as Starseed. Space Ghost’s TV show has been cancelled. And the cosmic
entity known as the Chronicler of Stories has taken an interest in the doings of
the growing superhero community of the Parodyverse.
Previous episodes are available here.
“And in closing, I’d
like to officially welcome you here to Paradopolis – in this all-important
mayoral election year – and invite you to say a few words to the fine people of
our fine city.” The Mayor stepped aside and made way from Banjooooo, King of the
Sea Monkeys, to come to the podium. “Alright you surface dwellers. This is Banjooooo, King of the Sea Monkeys
speaking to you, using my occasional power to communicate through all forms of
sea life. So listen up.” “The way I see it, there are still all kinds of things to do to establish a
proper superhero team,” Fin Fang Foom told the League of Regulars. “I mean, we
don’t have any kind of equipment, we don’t have any kind of protocols,
codewords, procedures of operation…” “So how did it go, dear?” Cheryl asked her husband as he trudged into their
condo in the quiet suburb of Dullard’s Corner. “Did anybody take any notice of
you this time?” The creatures were about seven feet tall, with mottled green-grey hides of
stone and iron talons. They merged out of the rock all around Gavan ready to
rend him to pieces. They brought with them an aura of fear which made it
impossible for the young man to move. He was crushed by their very presence, and
then they moved forward to crush him physically too. It was clear that the government man did not care for superheroes. He took
the chair furthest away from Lisa, Jarvis, NTU-150 and Fin Fang Foom, unlatched
his briefcase, and took out a dossier. “This is what we have on the so-called
King of the Sea-Monkeys,” he told the League of Regulars. “Our intelligence
assessments indicated that he was of little strategic or diplomatic importance.
We have no proof this his supposed kingdom exists at all.” “Er, hello? Big giant sea monkey? We need to talk. Please don’t step on
me!” “So what you’re saying,” Jarvis sighed as he spoke to Commissioner of Police
Graham, “is that the building-high monster got fed up of terrorising the city
and went off with one of our members to get a drink?”
A thousand light years from Earth in the voids of space, red LEDs lit up long
darkened visual receptors. A computer brain with more capacity than all the CPUs
on Earth calculated odds and examined sensor data. Then something huge and
metallic began to move towards the Solar System at speeds which made light stand
still.
The grimiest and most dangerous part of Paradopolis is the area variously
known as Seedytown or Hell’s Bathroom. It was quite an achievement on behalf of
the individual who lay on a pile of rotting garbage in one of the many dark
alleys that he actually managed to make the whole place slightly more grimy on
average. As the mound of empty bottles around him showed, it had been quite a
bender. “Where exactly is this again?” Lisa asked uncertainly, looking round the
lobby of a building he hadn’t actually known was there
before. Several meteor tracking stations noted the burning object that impacted into
the Baltic Sea, and logged it down as another argument for more budgeting to
stop things happening like they did in that movie, you know the one where they
have to nuke a meteor, and dude that could really happen you know. None of them
were able to continue tracking the metallic object once it had gone into
underwater mode and continued its quest.
NTU-150’s experimental sub-aqua suit worked perfectly except that the plastic
ducks kept sinking. The young technologist propelled himself deeper and deeper
into the abyssal rift, an old tectonic faultline in the middle of the Sargasso
Sea. His only light now was the thousand candlepower beam from his chest unit.
His only navigation method was the computer overlay on his optical sensors.
Without his duck flotation devices he had no other way of knowing which was
up. “I’m only going to ask you one more time,” the Dark Knight told the thug he
was dangling over the edge of the Gothametropolis Peace Hall, “Where is
Visionary? Where is Banjooooo?” “Right,” breathed Jarvis as NTU-150 picked bits of combat robot out of his
charred underwater armour and replaced the modular attachments to revert to his
regular battle suit. “So Banjoooo’s got a huge alien device down there which is
how he’s making the change to the physical properties of water, and he’s got
killbots protecting it.” “That was to being exciting!” Yo panted as s/he and Gavan finished off the
last of the trolls. “Yo is going to be liking this planet.” “I’d like to point out that I’m not actually a member of the League of
Regulars,” Visionary pointed out to the King of the Sea Monkeys. “I mean, Jarvis
isn’t likely to pay any ransom for me. He might give you money to keep
me…” The metallic creature from the stars rose out of the water at Bermuda,
ignoring the screams of sunbathers and tourists. It stood seventy feet tall and
was composed entirely of alien metal. It paused only to take another sensor
bearing and then walked inland. Any cars and houses it crushed were purely
incidental.
“Eeep,” eeped Lisa. The amorous advocatrix stared around her at the strange
alien architecture. “Alright, Sea Monkey. Don’t move or the plankton gets it!” spiffy warned,
holding a sample of pondweed hostage in an attempt to stop the Fin Fang Foom /
Banjoooo battle. Things were getting quite literally messy. “Get it yourself!” shouted Jarvis, shrugging aside the man with the size
nineteen hob-nailed boots and the irritating little guy who was trying to give
him Chinese burns. He picked up a vast fat dog and used it to hit the woman with
the hair who was strangling Lisa. Before the surprised canaine could use its
Abhuman teleportation powers Lisa was free. In the weed-choked depths of the Sargasso, Banjoooo and Fin Fang Foom
examined a patch of dark and empty water. “Gone!” snarled the King of the Sea
Monkeys. “I’ve been set up. ZOXXON has stolen my artefact.” “So you’re, um, you’re real,” spiffy told the Dark Knight. “Hi honey, I’m home!” Visionary called out as he trudged back into his
condo. Impossibly high in the Himalayas was the Kirbyesque futuristic city of the
Abhumans. Pointlessly tall needle-shaped towers were surrounded by overhead
zoomways and large pole-mounted spheres that crackled off black dots for no
apparent reason. “All is in readyness, my lord,” Mr Montiver Hole, CEO of ZOXXON oil told the
monitor screen. “The device is secured in our Atlanta plant, under heavy guard.
By now the heroes will have worked out that we have taken it, and probably
traced its emissions. They will be hurrying over there to retrieve it, little
knowing that when they arrive we will trigger the thermonuclear device concealed
in the plant, thus eliminating Jarvis and his troublesome team forever.
Admittedly we will leave a big glowing hole where Atlanta used to be, but on the
bright side our preliminary studies suggest that the artefact won’t even be
scratched so we can really use it later.” The seventy-foot tall metallic humanoid robot was named the Obliterator, and
his gun metal grey body was packed with enough killing devices to keep Arnold
Swarznegger happy for at least twenty minutes. Think of the Iron Giant on
steroids. “No, I don’t know what the hell it is,” Montiver Hole snarled as he punched
buttons on his comm panel. “And I don’t know where it came from. Fortunately it
seems to be killing the heroes for us.” “It’s all over the web, Mister President,” Herbert P. Garrick warned his
Commander in Chief. “An exposé of the ZOXXON corporation, with live webcams
showing their depredations in the Sargasso, and a whole set of pages linking
them to all kinds of shady deals breaking federal and international conservation
laws. The public think this Sea Monkey creature is vindicated in his protests
against what they were doing.” “We did it, Cheryl!” Visionary beamed. “Well, you did it and I sat and
watched. It’s a PR coup! You should do this for a living!” “I summons the brain of that big Obliterator robot!” Lisa shouted; but either
the creature was shielded or her power didn’t work that way. “Oh poo!” “Shred everything,” Hole demanded. “Then we blame some stupid mid-level
employee and get public sympathy as the corporation abused by a man we
trusted.” “Ouch!” Banjooooo said, as the Obliterator dropped the ZOXXON complex on him.
“Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch!” “Where is it?” demanded the Obliterator, seizing up Lisa in one massive hand
that could have squashed her to pulp with the slighted squeeze. “Where have you
taken it? I hate teleporters!” “So we are pleased to announce that the threat of, er, world toilet clogging
has been averted and the lavatory is safe for people everywhere once more,”
Jarvis told the press conference. He was healing nicely now that the broken
bones had been set. And afterwards:
“Thanks for tying up the ZOXXON end,” Finny told the Dark Knight. “No, really, we need a PR expert,” Lisa smiled, “and after that coup with the
Sea Monkeys we can’t think of a better person to offer the job to.” “So what are you going to do now?” spiffy asked the King of the Sea Monkeys.
“I mean, you’re not going back to trying to conquer the world are you?” And in his dark tiny office at Coot, Coot, Wellfudge, and Coot, the old man
known nowadays as Ezriah Coot chuckled over his ledger and prepared to make his
move.
And assuming there is ever another episode of this: The League of
Regulars meet Starseed and Space Ghost, Sersi throws a party and Rocket Racoon
crashes it, the Sorceress suffers a broken heart, Pilar has an unexpected
visitor in her shower, a gritty new vigilante rises to send a Message to
organised crime, Gavan finally finds out what that baseball bat is all about,
and the secret of Ezriah Coot is revealed.
“He looks just like a man-sized mutant
prawn,” spiffy considered, trying to peer over the shoulders of the taller and
more experienced pressmen to get any kind of decent camera angle on the strange
visitor from beneath the oceans.
“There’s certainly more to him than meets
the eye,” Gregory Burch agreed, speaking suddenly in the cub reporter’s left ear
and scaring him out of his wits.
“Zoinks!” spiffy gasped, in his best Shaggy
impression. “What are you doing here, Mr Burch? I thought you covered the crime
beat for the Gothametropolis Times?”
The dishevelled and grizzled reporter in
the stained trenchcoat gestured to the podium where the Mayor and City
Councilmen sat and watched a giant humanoid shrimp move to the speaker’s desk.
“There’s more crime up there, more greed and betrayal and faith-stabbing septic
voids than in all the slums of Hell’s Bathroom,” Burch warned. He looked down
and glared suspiciously at Mark “spiffy” Hopkins. “I’m surprised to see you
here, though. I’d have thought that old man Jerkson would have fired your butt
off his newspaper the minute he discovered you were palling around with those
League of Regular superheroes he’s so busy writing inflammatory articles
about.”
“Ah well…” spiffy admitted to the man who, if he but knew it, was the
urban legend the Dark Knight in one of his many alternate identities, “the thing
is I don’t think J. James Jerkson has actually worked out my name yet. Old JJJ
just doesn’t associate the copy boy he throws his coffee mug at with the spiffy
who’s in the League of Regulars. And I need the cash he pays for hero pictures,
to be honest.”
“You didn’t take those shots of Lisa that appeared in…” Burch
growled.
“No,” spiffy assured him quickly. “I’m not even old enough to buy
the mag.”
By this time the King of the Sea Monkeys had come to the front of
the platform and launched into his speech. “Ladies and gentlemen of the surface
world, Mr Mayor, members of the press, thank you for inviting me here today. I’d
like to take this opportunity to tell you that since you have not ceased your
oil drilling operations as I demanded when I first appeared amongst you many
weeks ago, and since your petrochemical industry has persistently blocked my
legal and diplomatic efforts to prevent the destruction of my undersea homeland,
I am now declaring war on the human race.”
“What?” gasped the Mayor, checking
his copy of the script Banjoooooo was supposed to have used.
“After midnight
tonight I shall prevent any and all forms of sea travel, fishing, water pumping,
and hydroelectric applications. We have activated a device which changes the
physical properties of water, and will turn all large bodies of H2O solid.
Within two weeks we will have reduced your surface civilisations to ruins. Then
you will regret the day you ignored the rightful claims of the Sea Monkey
peoples. Thank you for listening, and for the excellent lunch.”
“What?”
gasped the Mayor again, for emphasis. “Why you overgrown crustacean! Your people
– assuming they exist at all – must be about a fifth of an inch high. How
exactly do you imagine you’re going to stop humans?”
“Ah,” Banjoooooo smiled
sweetly, “We can grow.” And as he spoke he stopped being a six-foot tall
pinkish-white humanoid with three prominent head-crests and swelled until he was
fully sixty feet tall and could lean on skyscrapers. “See?”
“Whore your way
out of that one, Mister Mayor,” Greg Burch snarled at the stricken city
leader.
spiffy’s League of Regulars pager went off – well, it was NTU-150
designed so it first vibrated then set fire to his pocket. “Gee,” spiffy sighed
as he doused his groin with water from the Paradopolis Square fountain, “I
wonder what this call could be about?”
Deep in the Worralorracaves in the
Australian Outback, Gavan Carstensen scrambled ever further into the confusing
labyrinth of passages. He had long since lost any sense of direction or of time.
He didn’t know if he had been in the tunnels minutes or days, although his torch
was dimming and the passageways were getting narrower. All he knew was the
tugging of the strange wooden object in his hands, the baseball bat with a nail
in the end that had been sent to him from a mysterious attorney’s firm in
distant Paradopolis. It seemed to guide him unerringly ever deeper, and Gavan
followed.
Occasionally he would pause as he spotted carvings on the walls of
the tunnels. They were thin scratched runes, and they looked familiar to Gavan
though he couldn’t understand them. He traced his fingers across the sigil
Thuriaz and wondered at it. “What does it say?” he whispered.
“That’s not
important right now, meat” the trolls told him. “Except that it makes a really
appropriate grave marker.”
Across America, the sound of the angry giant brine
shrimp echoed out of goldfish bowls and aquariums. Diners in restaurants were
horrified to hear their grilled bass and jellied eels talking to them. Such was
the power of the King of the Sea Monkeys.
“My people and I have been pretty
patient. We’ve tried to establish proper lines of communication with you humans
and all we’ve got is copyright infringement from those guys selling sea monkey
eggs in comic books. We’ve warned you about the devastating effects your actions
are having on the ecology of the seas, on the ozone lair, on the whole planet
and you just won’t listen. So we’re declaring war on the surface
world.”
“Yeah right,” snickered Defence Advisor Herbert P. Garrick. “Don’t
worry Mister President. It’s not like we have much to fear from little wriggly
things a quarter inch long. What are they going to do to the United
States?”
“Even as we speak, agents of our undersea empire are working to
bring your country to its knees,” Banjooooo continued. “We have infiltrated your
sewage systems and, um, well clogged them up with our own bodies. From this
moment forth, no lavatory in America will work! We shall leave you to stew in
your own juices – well, you know what I mean – for twenty-four hours. After that
our water-solidifying apparatus will have brought the oceans and rivers to a
standstill. Then you will hear our demands.”
Herbert Garrick stopped
laughing.
The President reached for the telephone.
“I’ve sort of come up with a battle
cry,” spiffy called out helpfully.
Everybody ignored him.
“Actually, I
have been thinking about the equipment requirements,” NTU-150 noted. “I have an
idea for a kind of all-environment vehicle called a Lairjet, after our
mansion.”
“I was up all night working on this battle cry,” spiffy said
aggrievedly.
“I was up all night too,” Lisa smirked wickedly. “Some might
call it working.”
Jarvis looked worriedly at the pretty brunette. By popular
accord the battling butler had taken the Chair of their new alliance. Of course,
that didn’t stop Lisa trying to sit on the same chair on top of him. “I hope
part of your activity included finding out how you gained the power to summons
people from across the planet to be teleported to you when you need them,” the
butler said worriedly. “There are too many mysteries about this group which will
come back to bite us if we don’t fathom them.”
“I agree,” Lisa nodded. “Then
there’s the matter of this house that HV got for us, and the problem of the
Scourge of the BZL, and how we convince the public that Finny here isn’t going
to eat them any more…”
“That wasn’t me,” Andrew Dean protested. “It was
before this body was under my management.”
“It’s a good battle cry,”
continued spiffy plaintively.
“Finny is still a PR problem, though,” Lisa
noted. “Let me work on it.”
“I am not going through your proposed induction
screening process,” the Makluan dragon told her firmly.
“I’ve upgraded my
armour especially to avoid it,” Enty admitted.
“Doesn’t anyone want to hear
this battle cry, then?” spiffy kept trying.
Jarvis sighed. “What is it then,
spiffy? I hope it’s less lame than ‘League of Regulars, Line Up!’”
“Er,”
spiffy hesitated. “It’s not that urgent. I’ll get back to you on it.”
There
was a small explosion from the hallway and fragments of molten plastic sprayed
the walls.
“An attack?” Jarvis gasped, leaping to his feet with the
JarvisCosmic shimmering around him..
“Actually, no,” NTU-150 admitted.
“That’s the emergency warning signal that an important telephone call is coming
in. Only it seems to have got overexcited.”
“Alright,” Jarvis said, his hands
buried in his head. “Lisa, would you please go find a payphone and find out who
was trying to call us before our emergency line exploded into several hundred
pieces?”
“I didn’t actually get into the Lair Mansion,” Vizh answered
disconsolately. “When I got near the door these automatic stunners tried to
disintegrate me. If they hadn’t got tangled up with each other and blown each
other to bits it might have got nasty.”
“Well at least this time you didn’t
get Jarvis throwing garbage out of the upstairs window at you,” Cheryl suggested
as the would-be hero trudged into the bathroom. “Visionary, don’t use
the…”
But it was too late. An appalling smell gushed out of the smallest room
in the house.
“Have you forgotten that that sea monkey creature is holding
the nation’s sanitary facilities hostage?” Cheryl asked. “Visionary?
Vizh?”
But inexplicably the toilet was empty. The possibly fake man had gone.
“Yo is thinking that
that would be not be being a very nice thing to do,” a voice from the darkness
suggested. The trolls turned to see a slim grinning shimering figure of
indeterminate gender doffing the swashbuckling black hat that s/he had deemed
appropriate Earth attire. “Hello,” Yo bade them all.
“What in Fafnir’s name
is that?” a troll demanded. “That is weird.”
“Oh, like you’re not,” Gavan
complained.
“Yo is preferring for you you not to be rending cute human, thank
you,” Yo explained to the menacing trolls. “Yo is to be visiting Earth for some
time to be, and Yo can only be doing that if Yo is be able to merge with cute
Earth human. Yo is to be hoping this Earth-human will be to merge with
Yo.”
“You want to, uh, merge?” Gavan worried. “Could you kind of tell me what
gender you are before I answer?”
“Rend them both,” the troll commander
ordered.
“Yo is thinking you are uncute and nasty,” the pure thought being
began, but was slammed to the ground by the trolls’ sudden attack.
Gavan has
been unable to shale off the fear paralysis while his own life was in danger,
but as he saw the bright creature hurt he somehow managed to break free of their
spell. He had to do something. And in his hand was a heavy wooden bat.
“So you ignored
his warnings that this oil drilling was endangering his people, and now that it
turns out he can become a sixty-foot tall monster you want us to do something
about it?” Fin Fang Foom answered cynically. “Have you got something
against beings that grow to giant size, hmmmm?”
“Sympathetic monster
or not, if he’s menacing the people of Paradopolis then we’ll have to put him
down,” Jarvis pointed out.”
“He seems to have manifested a number of
additional super-powers as well,” NTU-150 considered, looking at the dossier.
“Lightning strikes, super-speed, the ability to turn any object orange…”
“The
President is very concerned,” the government man warned the League of Regulars.
“He’s thinking of using a low-yield nuclear strike if this menace can’t be
stopped by conventional means.”
“A nuke?” objected Lisa. “That’ll kill
millions in Paradopolis! It’ll do more damage than this giant sea monkey ever
could.”
“But Paradopolis didn’t vote for this president, remember?” Finny
snorted.
The first lady of the League of Regulars swivelled round to the
Special Liaison on Superhuman Affairs. “Look, Mister…?”
“Garrick, Herbert P.
Garrick.”
“What’s the P stand for?” Jarvis wondered.
“I could hazard a few
guesses,” muttered Fin Fang Foom.
“…Mister Garrick,” Lisa continued, flashing
him her best advocate’s smile, “why not leave this with us for a while. I’ll
check into the legal situation about these Sea Monkeys and their oil drilling,
Enty can inspect this oil drilling site, Jarv will make sure Banjooooo doesn’t
cause any trouble while we’re checking things out…”
“I’ll make a view
investigations my own way,” Finny added. “I have a… contact that can
help.”
“And spiffy can…” concluded Lisa, “Er, where is spiffy anyway?”
Banjooooo, king of the sea monkeys, looked down at the juvenile human
cringing beside his feet. “Yes?” he boomed.
“Hi there!” spiffy called. “Er,
before you go rampaging across the city and all the usual stuff do you think
that we could talk for a minute? Perhaps get a coffee?”
The sixty foot high
crustacean considered this. “With biscotti?” he checked.
The stern men in the pristine white coats who were closing in on him
were the ones who brought up the danger quotient however.
“Hnnnh? Washsup?”
Space Ghost slurred as he felt himself being lifted up and placed into a
straight jacket. “Whassit?”
“Don’t worry, partner. We’re just going to make
you comfortable,” one of the mental health workers told him. “We’re going to let
you have a nice lie down in our padded wagon.”
“They cancelled m’ show. M’
lovely show.”
“Eeew. What’s he been drinking?” another one asked, shying away
from the pile of detritus that surrounded the unemployed former chat show host
and superhero. “And where did all this chewed tandoori come from?”
Space
Ghost helpfully demonstrated by producing some more.
“Let go’a me,” he
struggled. “You don’ love me. Nobody loves me.”
“Just come with us, buddy,
and we’ll make sure you’re never unhappy again.”
“Leggo. ‘M not
coming.”
“Oh, but I think you’ll find you are.” In the gloom of the alleyway
the men in white coats had red glowing eyes. “I think you’ll find you’re never
going to trouble the world again.”
They were called the Hero Feeders,
parasites of the Parodyverse, and they preyed upon stories and the heroes in
them. Vulnerable, forgotten characters had a special flavour.
“And I think
you’re going to back off and let him go,” the newcomer in the alley demanded. He
was dressed in ordinary street clothes but flickers of purple light danced
around his silhouette.
“Or what?” the Hero Feeders smirked. “What can you do
against us? This prey is ours.”
“I have only one thing to say,” Starseed
answered the interdimensional predators who preyed upon heroes and devoured them
from existence. “GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
The sound reverberated
across the city, shredding the corporeal essence of the Lurkers. Starseed looked
quite shocked that it had actually worked. Ever since his awakening to the Gah!
Force during his escape from Dirth Vortex and his minions he had known he should
be able to do things like this; but to actually see the force at work was
astounding.
“You saved me,” Space Ghost rambled, clutching Starseed’s knees.
“Frien’!”
“You’d, er, you’d better come with me so we can sober you up and
get you cleaned,” Starseed decided uncertainly. “And for goodness’ sake put on
some pants, will you?”
“Interdimensional Transportation Corporation,” Fin Fang Foom
explained for the seventh time. “Their building is shielded from normal view.
You can only see it if you have a legitimate reason to.”
“Ah. Right. That
makes sense. Of course.”
“I found out about it while I was being trained in
the Golden Age Heroes dimension,” Finny continued. “They contract for all the
business from the order of the Observing Eye and that kind of stuff.”
This
helped Lisa’s comprehension just as much as the previous statement. “So we’re
here to see somebody who can tell us about Sea Monkeys?”
“Yes,” conceded the
dragon. “We’re here to see somebody who can tell us about Sea Monkeys.” He
turned to the receptionist. “Is Mr Limpqvist in, please?”
The thin effete
administrator of the ITC complex looked up in surprise as he saw the Makluan and
the amorous advocatrix enter. He put down the resumé dossiers of a Mr Harper and
a Miss Framlicker and rose to greet his guests. “Oh!” he gasped. “Oh, excuse me,
you quite startled me for a moment.”
“Yeah, well it’s not every day you see
a humanoid dragon in your office, I guess,” Lisa noted.
“Oh no. I’m well used
to seeing young Mr Foom. It was your lingerie that made me take notice,”
Limpqvist shrugged.
Lisa smirked and stretched. Finny shuddered.
“I must
get some like that,” Mr Limpqvist concluded. “Do you think they make it in my
size?”
Finny choked as he swallowed his tongue. Lisa hammered him on the back
until he could breathe again.
“So what brings you here, dears?” the Manager
of the Interdimensional Transportation Corporation asked at last.
“Sea
Monkeys,” Finny said hoarsely. “We need to know about Sea Monkeys.”
The ZOXXON oil company’s depredations were easy to see. Cruel steel
columns had been planted down through the delicate coral patterns, and a greasy
sheen hovered in the deep waters. The sounds of the drilling carried well
through the ocean, a series of persistent throbbing hums. But NTU-150 tuned
those sounds out, masked those energy sources. He was seeking something
else.
He almost didn’t sense it, so alien was the power source; but there it
was, even deeper in the trench, further than he’d ever tested the pressure
tolerances of his NTU-150 subsea rig. And already around it the physical
properties of the water were changing. It was becoming turgid and gluey – not
frozen, because the temperature remained unchanged – and if that carried on over
a planetary scale then the human race really was doomed.
“I’m going in,”
Jaimie Bautista reported, although he was unsure if his communications gear
would work this far down. “I can just about see something glimmering down there.
Something big.”
“Be careful, Enty,” Jarvis advised the armoured inventor.
“Enty?”
“I swear man, I don’t know. Really. I
don’t.”
“Don’t give me that crap, Benny. You work for the Lynchpin, run
messages for the fat slug. And word is you’ve been delivering supplies out to
the Boxleitner Sewage Works upstate. Lots of sanitary workers suddenly get a
craving for pizza, Benny?”
“I… I just did what I was told!”
“What’s
happening out there, Benny?” the Dark Knight demanded, his eyes boring into the
criminals’ mind.
“He’s… he’s gathering hostages. That Sea Monkey guy. I dunno
why. He’s setting something up. That’s all I know, man. Really.”
Two figures
watched the drama from the side of a nearby building. Neither of them seemed to
notice that they were stood at ninety degrees to gravity.
“He’s rather good,
isn’t he?” the Chronicler of Stories admitted.
“I suppose so, in a
criminals-are-a-cowardly-and-superstitious-lot way,” admitted the Shaper of
Worlds. “Does he remember?”
“That he had done this before, twenty years ago?
That he died and became me? That I arranged for him to be born once more and
grow up to become a Dark Knight again, so that I could interact in the Age of
Resolution?” shrugged the Chronicler. “I’d say not. But he’ll work it out one
day. He’s smart.”
“I’m going to have to do something like that, you know,”
the Shaper suggested. “I’m planning an accident involving a young man named
Carrington, the Man Who Wasn’t There from the Scourge, a winning lottery ticket,
and an enraged Jarvis. Then I can create myself and play too.”
“Lots of
cosmic agencies are lining up their players for the big finale,” the Chronicler
suggested. “Some of the fundamental forces are getting ready to manifest again.
There’s a new CrazySugarHero due in a couple of years or so, perhaps the
template for all the others. The Order of Order is going to want to imbue
somebody with Serious Matter. The Psychostave is active again. The Observing Eye
have saved their two best champions and will be cutting them loose in a while.
Eggo the Living Waffle is considering a new Protector of the Parodyverse. We
might get a DarkHwk manifestation. I understand that even Knifey might be
looking for a new wielder.”
“It’s going to be exciting,” the Shaper of Worlds
anticipated. “And the best part is, nobody knows how its going to end.”
“Yep,” agreed NTU-150. “It seems like we found a
solid lead to where this Banjooooo character is getting his energy from. The big
device in the Sargasso Sea that is receiving projected power, and the energy
signature I’m detecting here is exactly the same as the one in Visionary’s
toilet.”
“This Banjooooo guy really wanted to protect that device, didn’t
he?” Lisa worried. “It’s a good job Enty had those anti-personnel charges with
him when those undersea robot drones attacked.”
“Honestly, I think the
explosions were just Jamie’s underwater propulsion gear malfunctioning,” pointed
out Jarvis, “but it had the same effect.”
“At least he got out,” Lisa
conceded. “We really need Finny here too for underwater action. I wonder where
he ran off to after Mr Limpqvist told us about Sea Monkeys being genetically
engineered?”
“We’re all allowed to keep our secrets,” Jarvis reminded the
first lady of the League of Regulars. “Like what you have locked in that trunk
in your bedroom.”
“Oh, I’ll show you that sometime,” Lisa smiled
wickedly.
Jarvis hastily moved back to business. “Where’s the power being
projected from, Jamie?”
NTU-150 looked up into the starry Atlantic sky where
a big sickle moon hung over the silent sea. “Actually…” he admitted.
“What the
Niffleheim is going on?” Gavan Carstenson demanded. He hadn’t even noted his
strange Norse reference. “Who are you and what’s this about you needing a host
and…”
“Yo is sorry. Yo cannot be to be accepting of you. Yo sees now that you
are to be not counting as mortal. Yo must have to be going before Yo’s time to
bonding find is at an end. Goodbye cute friend.”
Gavan looked in astonishment
as the pure thought being vanished. Then he noticed that where there had been
fallen trolls there were only piles of old rubble. “Hallucinogenic gas pocket,”
he told himself. “Has to be.”
That just left the baseball bat tugging him
forward to explain. Instead he just followed it.
Vengeful eyes watched him
from the shadows. “You got lucky getting help with the first challenge,
half-brother,” Hoki the Deceiver admitted. “But next time there’ll be nobody to
help you.”
Banjooooo seemed rather nonplussed. This wasn’t really the way he had
planned his war with the surface world to go.
“And another thing,” Vizh added
more crossly. “This is the second time I’ve been whisked away whilst sitting
quietly in my lavatory. If this happens much more I’m going to get constipation
or piles or something.”
“The man has a point,” spiffy admitted. “I mean as
world conquests go, blocking lavatories is a bit gross isn’t it?”
“No,”
Visionary argued. “Using his ability to shrink people down and suck them away
through the u-bend is gross. I would like to emphasise that.”
“Shut up, you
two,” Banjooooo complained. “I’m trying my best to fight against the
despoliation of my seas and you two just keep…”
“I’m all for green issues,”
Visionary promised. “I’m not too keen on brown issues just now,
admittedly.”
“The point is that this isn’t the way to do it, Banjooooo man,”
spiffy cajoled. “We can still try again to take on ZOXXON through the courts. I
even know a lawyer, and her fees are very… atypical.”
“Until the Sea Monkey
nation is recognised I can’t apply to the courts,” objected Banjooooo. “So I’m
afraid it’s taking over the planet or bust.”
Then Fin Fang Foom smashed
through the wall and pounded the Sea Monkey into the ground.
“Ouch,” snarled
Banjooooo, hurling the massive Makluan back through the other wall. That was
when the roof fell in. Visionary and spiffy had enough time to spot that they
were at the Boxleitner Sewage Works before being buried in rubble. Meanwhile
Finny and Banjooooo wrestled with each other, rolling over and over across the
ground until they found the treatment pools the hard way.
“Shit,” snarled the
Dark Knight.
“Don’t worry,” Jarvis assured her. “Even before I
teleported us here with the Jarvis Cosmic I’d erected a force field around us.
We brought our own air along.”
“But we don’t actually need it,” NTU-150
reported, consulting his armour’s scanners. “Somehow there’s air out
there.”
“Out there?” Lisa puzzled. “This is the moon, isn’t it?”
Jamie
Bautista was engrossed in examining the turquoise ruins of the abandoned lunar
city. “Whatever this place is, it’s old. Really old. And it wasn’t constructed
with materials from Earth.”
“Aliens,” Jarvis surmised. He had met aliens
before. “Could be the Puppeteers, maybe?” he suggested. “Or those shapeshifting
Skunks?” Actually the city in the Turquoise Area had been built by the Skree
Star Empire to exploit abandoned Celestian machinery but he had no way of
knowing that just then.
“I still don’t see why you couldn’t just let me
summons Visionary and the other folks who vanished off their toilet bowls to me,
Jarvykins,” Lisa protested. “I mean, we could just pull them out and…”
“We
might not have got them all out in time though,” Jarvis pointed out. “Suppose
hostages start vanishing and then this Banjooooo menace decides to kill the
rest? We don’t know how quickly or how often you can use your mystery power, and
this isn’t the time to experiment.”
“But we can experiment later?” Lisa asked
sexily, brushing up against the butler.
“I’m not so sure about this lead
after all,” NTU-150 interrupted hurriedly. “All the energy signature readings
I’m getting here are residual, from waaaay back. The Sea Monkeys sure aren’t
using this as a base of operations now.”
“Damn,” scowled Jarvis. “Still, if
we look around maybe we can find some clue to where these things…”
An alarm
siren sounded in Enty’s red and gold battlesuit. “We have incoming! We have…” he
had time to shout before the sonic wave smashed him into the
ground.
“Actually, we have in-come!” the first of their attackers announced,
gripping Lisa’s throat with impossibly long hair so that the First Lady of the
League of Regulars couldn’t call a summons. “We’re the Abhumans, and we don’t
like trespassers.”
“I don’t think
that’s going to work,” Visionary admitted. “It’s kind of like holding a gun to
somebody’s Big Mac.”
“That’d work on me,” spiffy admitted.
The Dark Knight
sighed. He detonated a few remote thermite charges to get the combatants’
attention and then made his play. “If I might just ask a salient question?” he
hissed scathingly. “Banjooooo, where exactly did you get those killer underwater
robots from to protect your water-changing device?”
The King of the Sea
Monkeys looked puzzled. “What killer underwater robots?” he asked.
“The ones
that nearly killed NTU-150 when he investigated the Sargasso Sea,” Finny
answered.
“I don’t have any killer underwater robots,” Banjooooo told them.
“It’s a bum rap. You can’t frame me.”
“That’s strange,” Visionary admitted.
“If you didn’t send the killer underwater robots then who did?”
“Aw man!”
spiffy exploded. “Don’t you see? It’s a set up! Banj, where did you get that
water changing thingy from?”
“I know many of the secrets of the sea,”
Banjooooo admitted. “I am the King of the Sea Monkeys you know.”
“But where?”
spiffy persisted.
“There’s this hidden island of monsters. I borrowed the
artefact from there. It’s really old.”
“And this isle of monsters is usually
shielded from normal detection, which is why we haven’t heard of it?” Fin Fang
Foom deduced.
“Sure. Occasionally the monsters take a field trip to go stomp
Tokyo but otherwise…”
“So anybody wanting that amazing machine would have to
set up a scenario where somebody who knew where it was brought it out where they
could get at it?” the Dark Knight suggested. “Perhaps they might provoke some
sort of conflict that would prompt its use?”
The giant Sea Monkey looked
pale. “You’re saying… I was set up? By ZOXXON?”
“If we can’t trust
multinational petroleum organisations who can we trust?” asked a dismayed
Visionary.
“A device which can change the physical properties of liquids
would be a huge asset to an oil company,” Finny observed.
“It can do a lot
more than that,” explained Banjooooo. “It’s the alien device that the Sea
Monkeys were originally created from. It can alter any matter on the
planet.”
“And I’m betting it won’t be where you parked it when we go back and
look,” DK predicted grimly.
“Get us help, then relieve Enty!”
Jarvis called to the amorous advocatrix. “And by that I mean help him get away
from the folks trying to kill him,” he added hastily.
“Right,” Lisa agreed,
as Brown Blot swatted Jarvis through priceless Skree architecture. “I summons
the Marines!”
The first lady of the League of Regulars almost fell to her
knees with the strain of so massive a teleportation, but somehow her power
latched on to the same energy source that was feeding Banjooooo’s machine and
there was a golden flash. A fully armoured Marine combat unit appeared in the
lunar plaza. “Hi, Lisa!” they chorused.
“Hello, boys,” she called back. “Bad
guys need taking out.”
“Well I was thinking of Fin Fang Foom,” Jarvis
admitted as the elite fighting force went into operation, “but this is, um, this
is fine.”
“Hey, look!” Enty called as the battle raged. “Some of the old city
automated defences are still around. I bet I could get them working if I just
connect these things to my on-board computer.”
“Nooooooo!” both sides of the
combat screamed in unison. But by then it was too late.
“We’ll get it
back,” Fin Fang Foom assured him. “The League of Regulars has traced where this
thing of yours draws its power from. We can contact them and find out where the
signal is going now. But you have to call off your war with the humans
first, and unblock their toilets. Deal?”
“I guess so,” the crestfallen
crustacean agreed. “Deal.”
The urban
legend glared down at the cub reporter. “No,” he answered. “You never saw
me.”
“You’re standing right there,” spiffy pointed out. “Er, Dark Knight? DK?
DK?”
“Hello dear,” Cheryl called back. “You’re rescued then?”
“Actually
I helped get all the other kidnapped people home,” Vizh answered. “But I’ll
think twice before using a toilet again.”
“Oh. Good.” Cheryl shuddered,
making a note to buy some really big diapers. “And has Banjooooo been brought to
justice.”
“Actually…” Visionary began, and then explained how the Sea Monkey
King had been set up and robbed of his artefact. “So it wasn’t really
Banjooooo’s fault as such, apart from he did it all,” the possibly fake man
concluded. “I just wish we could find a way to tell the world.”
Cheryl
considered this. “Well perhaps we can,” she suggested at last.
The goddess of
HTML turned back to her computer.
“Welcome to the great relief,” Princess Aphasia told the
League of Regulars. “You are almost the first humans to come here since we awoke
from our great hibernation.”
“We come in peace,” NTU-150 told the beautiful
woman hastily. The LoR was outnumbered around a thousand to one here. Everybody
in Atticland had some kind of super-power due to the effects of the
Plot-Enhancing Mists that rose from the caves below. “That thing with the
automated defences on the moon was a bit of a misunderstanding. Besides, our
side got fried too. Jarvis is still smouldering. And Brown Blot will probably
wake up soon. Really.”
“I know you mean no harm,” Aphasia smiled. “It is my
power to be able to sense good and evil intent. I have even considered taking on
the name Spandex Lass and venturing out from the great Relief to be fight evil
in the wider world. I know that your hearts are pure. Except Lisa of course, but
then she’s a lawyer.”
“This place is amazing,” spiffy admitted. “If I took
pictures back for old man Jerkson he’d think they were fakes.”
“Our existence
must remain a closely guarded secret,” the princess warned them. “We have been
exploited and attacked too many times since our creation. Although our legends
say we were created as warrior-slaves by the aliens who built the sacred
Turquoise Area on the moon we rose up and became our own free people. We will
not become chattels again.”
“I’m glad we can be friends,” Jarvis answered
diplomatically.
“That’s because she’s a hot readhead wearing skintight yellow
spandex that’s wedged up her butt-crack,” muttered Lisa bitchily. “Sense my
intent now, you fat sow.”
“You captured those same gene-resequencing devices
the aliens used to create you and utilised them yourselves?” Fin Fang Foom
surmised. “And that’s where Sea Monkeys come from?”
“Nah,” Banjooooo smirked.
“What happens is when the tides are right, the King of the Sea Monkeys uses his
special powers to go to shore in search of a bride. Sometimes our memories are
kind of messed with so we wander around as bums or something but eventually we
find the special lady, and then we get to do these quests for her and stuff so
we can marry and interbreed, and then she spawns the next generation of…”
“I
think he meant where the Sea Monkey race originally came from,” spiffy
clarified. “You can come out from under that table now, Finny.”
“Go away,”
the Makluan called back. “I’m in my happy place.”
“I have quite a few happy
places,” Lisa smirked. “Want me to show them to you?”
“Ack!”
“You’re
saying that you Abhumans created my species?” Banjooooo checked of Spandex Lass.
“You’re our creators?”
“We made a number of races, of which you were the
last,” Aphasia admitted. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time, since we
needed aid in a war against terrible opponents. But the original owners of the
machines we used objected. They returned to punish us.”
“The aliens who
created you?” checked Jarvis.
“Oh no,” the Abhuman princess admitted, turning
pale. “It turns out that the aliens built the Turquoise Area only because they
found the abandoned machines there. It was the creators of these devices that
came in wrath and placed out whole Abhuman people in stasis, locked behind a
Barrier of Negativity.
“So if ZOXXON tries to use that machine they stole for
anything serious,” NTU-150 surmised, “then the builders of the thing might come
back and punish the human race!”
“I suppose so,” Spandex Lass admitted. She
was really enjoying being with this team. In fact, if she wasn’t about to be
retconned out of existence by the Hooded Hood she would have joined them at this
point and become one of their greatest members.
“We’ve got to stop them,” Jarvis determined. “We need a reading on where
the power is being beamed to, Enty.”
“Got it, Jarv.”
“Then let’s go!” the
leader of the League of Regulars called.
“League of Regulars, Line Up!”
whispered spiffy, very quietly so nobody would hurt him.
“Excellent. Proceed,” came back the
Teutonic-accented commend from the shadowy masked figure on the viewscreen.
“Nothing can stop us now.”
That is always a stupid thing for an archvillain
to say of course. Immediately a panel started to beep.
“What?” Montiver Hole
gasped. “What’s this? I didn’t realise that the League of Regulars had a giant
robot on their side? I thought they only had a giant dragon and a giant Sea
Monkey?”
“That is correct.”
“Then we have a problem.”
Nobody knew where the thing had come from, but it was pretty
evident that it had been attracted by the shining cosmic device that was the
cheese in ZOXXON’s League of Regulars trap. Now it tore through devices designed
to destroy Fin Fang Foom and Banjoooo without even noticing. Its eyeblasts
melted tanks and combat drones, its chest missiles targeted command centres and
control nexii, and its point finger lasers seared the ground troops.
In
slightly under a minutes the killing ground was killed.
“Note to self: Humans
die so easily,” commented the Obliterator, reaching forward for the Celestian
artefact.
A blast of JarvisCosmic hit it in the chest and sent it spinning
backwards. “Nail him, guys!” the battling butler shouted as the League made a
dramatic appearance. “Whatever he is.”
“I’m on him with arrayed
electromagnetic pulses,” NTU-150 reported.
“I’m using a
previously-unsuspected matter disintegration ray I seem to have,” Banjooooo
contributed.
Fin Fang Foom rose to his full draconic majesty and breathed
nuclear fire over the robot.
“I’ll just, uh, take a tactical overview from
behind this debris, guys,” spiffy suggested.
The Obliterator ignored the
attacks except to swat Finny from the skies with one massive fist and to
detonate a spread of antimatter shells against Banjoooo. “Next?” he asked
smugly.
“This one is going to be tough,” admitted Lisa.
“Sir, we have other problems,” a
technician warned the CEO of ZOXXON oil. “On the internet!”
“You’re telling me that the voters approve of
this Banjoooo’s stand?”
“Yes, Mister President. What shall we do?”
“Are
you an imbecile, Garrick? We support him, of course. We always have done. Clear
up this unfortunate misunderstanding and get me a photo op, ASAP.”
“Yessir.
And shall I have the website creators assassinated?”
“No, we can’t afford the
scandal” snarled the President nastily. “Just alert then IRS”
“Now we only need
to wait for the League of Regulars to retrieve the stolen artefact then,” Cheryl
suggested.
“Hold
on, folks,” Enty called. “I’m digging up some national grid powerlines to boost
my armour.”
“As if we didn’t have enough to worry about,” answered Jarvis as
he was stomped underfoot by a robotic boot.
“We can beat this thing,” Finny
gasped as he took another pounding. “Heroes always find a way!”
“Like
Custer?” asked spiffy.
The Obliterator let rip with his remote attack drones
just then and the ultrasonic barrage blanked out any further dialogue.
“There’s only one problem with that plan, malefactor,” the Dark
Knight suggested, looming out of the shadows. “Me.”
“Hey, you think you hurt,” complained spiffy.
“I’m under you.”
“This isn’t working,” Lisa noted as the Obliterator hammered
quantum pulse bolts into Fin Fang Foom. “Jarvy, can you teleport that device
back where it came from?”
“I don’t know where it came from,” Jarvis pointed
out, “but I can get it away from here. I think. It’s rather huge.”
“Then do
it,” the first lady of the League of Regulars urged. “Fast.”
“Okay,” Jarv
agreed. “Meanwhile, Enty, see if you can repair that big robot.”
“Repair it?”
Jamie puzzled.
“Yes, look. There’s some wires loose where Finny tried to bite
it,” Lisa urged. “Perhaps if you… if you make it better it might regard us as
friends. Yes, that’s it.”
“Well, if you say so,” Enty agreed doubtfully. “I
suppose I could use some of the broken bits from the traps here to cobble
together some kind of fix-up.”
“Stay under the rubble,” spiffy urged
Banjoooo. “Don’t move, man!”
“Gah!” gasped Jarvis, and teleported the
Celestian artefact away. To his surprise, his teleportation was usurped by the
device itself; it seemed to know where it wanted to go. The butler found himself
on a volcanic atoll where the machine floated comfortably to rest in an old
hollow that perfectly fit its shape.
Jarvis was just congratulating himself
on a job well done when a giant lightning-breathing dinosaur stepped on him.
“Let her go!” demanded Finny. “Or I’ll…
urk!”
“Where is it?” roared the angry robot.
“Stop it! You’re killing the
dragon!” demanded Banjoooo. “Stop…agh!”
“Where. Is. It?”
“Where you won’t
find it, big boy,” Lisa snarled back at the Obliterator. “You’ve lost!”
“Then
you’re paste,” promised the giant robot. “You’re zaaaaarggggjhhh!”
The
Obliterator fell over and didn’t move.
“Sorry,” Enty apologised to his
friends. “I didn’t mean to break him. I was just trying to improve his power
induction grid. I guess if I could cross-wire the amplification circuits to the
interstitial fusion rectifier then I…”
“Don’t worry Enty,” Lisa grinned. “You
did just fine.”
“I’m still going to work on an improved vacuum fusion
lavatory anyway,” Enty confided in his teammates.
Lisa shuddered.
“No
problem. Hole was overdue to be taken down anyway,” Greg Burch replied.
“They
want you on the team,” Foom added.
“I don’t do teams,” DK replied.
“We
could really use you,” Finny persisted.
“I don’t like spotlights. I can’t
work effectively in public.”
“Couldn’t you be kind of, I dunno, our secret
member or something?”
“That’s stupid,” Dark Knight answered.
“That’s the
League,” Finny admitted.
“I’m not
a public relations specialist,” Cheryl explained to the advocatrix.
“You’ve
managed to keep people from beating him to death for years, haven’t you?” Lisa
pointed out, indicating Visionary.
“Nah.
That was boring anyway. The only bit I liked was when we went solving the
mystery of who stole the device. I kind of liked being a detective.”
“You
know,” spiffy considered, “I think I’m having an idea…”