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This message Premiere #22: Old Acquaintance was posted by The Hooded Hood believes it's time to get this show on the road. So let's go! on Wednesday, August 21, 2002 at 07:23.
The Story So Far:
Victor Brooke, Premiere, the greatest of the science heroes in an alternate universe where Earth is more scientifically advanced, fled to the Parodyverse after turning his back on the corrupt Science Council who ruled Technopolis. Shortly afterwards the Science Council fell under the control of escaped lunatic science villain Assak Malevi, the Red Watchman. Malevi has transported Technopolis to the Parodyverse on a mission of conquest, leaving behind him a devastated world on the brink of destruction.
Premiere and the Lair Legion have battled against the Technopolitans with the unlikely help of the archvillain the Hooded Hood, and are currently taking refuge in the Hood’s base of operations, the mysterious Herringcarp Asylum. They have achieved three major successes in liberating tortured prisoners from Technopolis, in assisting and gaining allies from Premiere’s homeworld (which is currently and temporarily being run by Lisa, Yo, and Cheryl), and in freeing Parodiopolis from Technopolitan control. However these conflicts have not been without cost, and many of the heroes are injured and weary. Some have been captured and must now survive the cruel amusements of the red Watchman himself.
So begins the final arc of our story, in which our protagonists get pushed as far as they ever will be -and then push back.
Previous chapters of this story are available at The Premiere Archive. Technopolis characters are described in Who’s Who in the Technoverse?. The rest are to be found in Who's Who in the Parodyverse.
Premiere #22: Old Acquaintance
Note: This story makes reference to events in Sarah Shepherdson’s excellent Dancer/Premiere tale “Let It Be”, which takes place between Premiere #21 and 22.
Sorceress smiled as Dancer and Premiere arrived together at the breakfast table in the Hooded Hood’s gothic kitchen. “Looks like Premiere’s been getting a little Dancer therapy,” Whitney whispered to Hatman, noting the sleepy but satisfied expression on Sarah Shepherdson’s face. “Good for her.”
“Hm?” Jay Boaz answered absent-mindedly, still concentrating on the bundle of reports coming in from Parodiopolis and Gothametropolis. Most of the Lair Legion were back out in the field again, either doing rescue work amongst the wrecked buildings and remaining fires, rounding up the stragglers amongst the science villains who had not made the evacuation in time, or feverishly working to get the SPUD helicarrier airborne again as soon as possible. With Fin Fang Foom on the critical list and the Hooded Hood in deep seclusion recovering from transporting an entire army to Antarctica the bulk of the responsibility fell on Hatman’s shoulders.
“Never mind,” sighed Sorceress. “So what’s the plan?”
“Debriefing Amazing Guy and ManMan at 0930 hours on their escape from the Technopolis Behavior Modification Center, then we plan a strike to get the rest of our people out of there. They have spiffy, Messenger, Falcon, and dull thud at least, and heaven knows what they’re doing to them right now. But we can’t go in without careful preparation.”
Premiere couldn’t help but overhear the conversation – literally. “We have to end the Red Watchman soon. Once we’ve patched up the Sov-Bloc grav-wagons and your helicarrier we need to find a way past the Technopolis defense screens so we can take the war to Malevi. The longer we wait the more likely that madman is to do something terrible.”
“More terrible than launching nukes at Parodiopolis and Gothametropolis?” worried Sorceress.
“Do you really think he would badly hurt Mes… spiffy and the others?” Dancer worried.
“He’s wiped out a continent before now on my world because he got frustrated,” the last science hero answered. “Pray he keeps himself occupied torturing prisoners.”
___________________________________
“Hi there,” Nats called to Kareen O’Connell as she watered the seedlings she had planted to brighten up Herringcarp Asylum. Today she wore an orchid in her hair to match her pastel purple kaftan.
“Hello Bill,” she answered, but she seemed skittish and unsure in Nats’ presence.
“Are you okay?” he asked her. “I haven’t had time to say hi since you got back from your homeworld ‘cause Hatty’s had me flying across half the planet playing messenger boy. Was it very rough for you?”
“Everything is in ruins,” Windblossom said, tears forming in her eyes. “And I… well I had a bad time too.”
“Hey,” Nats comforted her, moving forward to wrap her in his arms. “It’s okay. Really.”
Kareen rubbed a knuckle across her eyes. “Lisa said you don’t have very advanced biomedical scanners on this world.”
“Er, well I guess not compared to Technopolis tech, but…”
“She said that here you need a kind of chemical test instead,” Kareen remembered. She looked up with her tearful green eyes at Nats and asked, “Bill, can you get me a pregnancy testing kit?”
___________________________________
The Lair Legion met in the Hooded Hood’s library since NTU-150 hadn’t yet had a chance to check the Lair Mansion for booby-traps or listening devices. Amazing Guy and ManMan had been patched up after their unpleasant experiences as captives in Basement 13, and now with HALLIE’s help they reconstructed as much as they knew about the layout and security of the site.
“I managed to scramble their security while they were trying to reprogram me,” HALLIE explained, “but after this meeting I’m taking myself offline for Enty to do a deep diagnostic to make sure I’m still me.”
“It was a costly escape,” Amazing Guy admitted. “I wish we could have got Falcon out too. I’ve never seen a man so badly tortured. That Watchman character is madman.”
“An organized madman,” Joe Pepper added. “That’s what makes him so terrible.”
“I’m ready to take in the infiltration team,” Premiere decided. “Ziles, are you absolutely sure you want to go back in after last time?”
“Nope,” the Xnylonian shuddered, “but I can’t leave our friends in there.”
“Good woman,” Premiere approved. “Then join Goldeneyed, Hunter Victorious, Cobra, and ManMan in the staging area and we’ll be off. We’ll be going it at 1400 hours, a quick raid and a quicker exit. I don’t need to remind you that this is an extremely dangerous mission.”
“But you had to anyway,” swallowed Goldeneyed.
___________________________________
Joe Pepper found the Hooded Hood brooding on the balcony overlooking the turbulent ocean. “Am I interrupting some especially evil chain of thought, Hood?” he asked.
“No. It would take rather more than you to do that,” the cowled crime czar replied. “What do you want?”
“Don’t you know?” ManMan demanded. “I thought you always knew what was coming.”
“I can’t see the future, merely glimpse possible outcomes to current situations,” the Hood clarified. Then he frowned. “My current debilitation makes even that difficult.”
“Yeah,” Joe agreed. “And this random event normalizer I’m holding is specifically designed to neutralize your powers too, of course.
“What random event normalizer?” Knifey demanded as ManMan drew him from his sheath. “What’s going on, Joe?”
“Oh, just some long overdue payback,” the white-leather-clad adventurer snarled, plunging Knifey into the Hooded Hood’s chest.
___________________________________
Xanadelle liberated a grav-flyer and slipped it through the Technopolis defense barriers using the proper recognition codes and set a low-altitude course for the east coast. “There,” she said, flicking on the auto-pilot, “Now we can relax a bit and patch up your wounds.”
Messenger had just used the last scrap of bandaging in the flyer’s medi-kit on Falcon and still needed more. “I won’t be doing any relaxing until I find out who you are and what you’re doing,” he warned the dazzling redhead.
“Cressida says she’s a Sov-Blok special agent,” dull thud reported. “But she can’t read Xanadelle’s mind very clearly.”
“Standard training,” their rescuer shrugged. “A spy who can be mind-read isn’t a lot of use. And what I’m doing is rescuing you and returning you to your friends. Or, in Messenger’s case, returning him to people who know him.”
“Works for me,” spiffy admitted. “So who are you?”
“I’m Premiere’s dead lost love,” Xanadelle explained. “The one he murdered.”
___________________________________
When Nats returned with the discreet brown paper package Windblossom had asked for he found her in the basement vault that had been converted into a dormitory for the worst of the science hero refugees rescued from Technopolis a few days earlier. Dancer and Sorceress were chatting with the convalescents and trying to help them come to terms with the horrors they had endured. Windblossom was talking to Martin Hernandez, Phase Shift. It didn’t seem like a good time to deliver the parcel.
Amazing Guy entered the ward quickly with something cupped in his hands. “Hey, guys!” he called excitedly. “You have got to take a look at this!”
“What is it?” Dancer wondered, peering at the opaque quantum energy bubble. The heroes clustered round for a closer inspection.
Suddenly the bubble burst apart into five fast-moving fragments. Each one smashed into the forehead of one of those watching then reformed as an airtight mask around their faces. Dancer, Sorceress, and Windblossom were knocked unconscious by the initial impact. Phase Shift was stunned but then rendered the energy construct intangible to escape it. His face was bruised and bloody. Nats toppled backwards and instinctively used his telekinetic ability to shatter the quantum field.
“What the…?” he demanded, but Amazing Guy summoned up a dozen lethal energy-spines and tried to transfix him where he sprawled.
“Watch out!” Phase Shift called, unable to solidify because AG was filling the air around him with razor-sharp energy shards. “I think he’s been implanted with an obedience chip! No wonder the Watchman let him get away!”
“I’m terribly sorry about this,” Scott Brunsen apologized as he tried to kill them. “They even erased my memory of them doing it to protect me from telepathic detection. They needed me to get brought to Herringcarp, you see, to trigger this transcausal tracking signal so they could find where the Hood had hidden it. And now…”
Nats blew Amazing Guy three feet into the brickwork of the cellar wall. “And now you sleep,” he concluded.
There was a loud explosion as a teleportal ripped space at the end of the infirmary. Steel Enforcer, Thermonuclear Man, and Dreamripper leaped through into Herringcarp Asylum.
“Shit!” flinched Nats, realizing that the Technopolitans had deliberately chosen the hospital site as their invasion point. He hammered his comm-badge, “Hat, this is code one. We have intruders in the vaults. I need back up now!”
Thermonuclear Man sprayed the room with hard radiation and Phase Shift screamed as his vibrations were scrambled. Steel Enforcer flew straight at Nats, and to the flying phenomenon’s horror his TK abilities slid off the corrupted science hero’s metallic skin with no effect.
A draconic hand reached up and caught the Enforcer by the ankle and slammed him into the ground. Fin Fang Foom rose from his sickbed and actually managed three steps before collapsing.
But the delay worked. Suddenly Hatman, Donar, and Exile were there and battle was joined.
___________________________________
“It’s a trap!” Cobra warned as the science villains jumped out on the infiltration party. “They knew we were coming!”
“Isn’t life a bitch?” Count Armageddon laughed as he loosed his kaos energies into her. “Take these losers down!”
___________________________________
The Technopolitan smart-mines swarmed through the teleportal and took position round the room while the battle raged. Donar wrestled with Thermonuclear Man, even his Ausgardian skin smoldering at the villain’s radioactive touch. Exile tried to shake off the nightmares that Dreamripper shredded his psyche with, but there were too many horrors in Rick Foreman’s past to dredge to the surface. Hatman found himself contending with Steel Enforcer, his own Steeler’s hat barely keeping him from being pounded flat by the powerful metahuman.
“Nats, deal with those devices, whatever they are,” Hatman called. The smart-mines had taken station beside the walls and support columns under Herringcarp Asylum.
“On it!” Bill Reed promised, but then he saw what was happening by the teleportal. Science police troopers were dragging the fallen combatants back through the gateway. Already Dancer and Windblossom were on the other side. Sorceress was next.
“Ignore them,” Hatman ordered ruthlessly. “We have a roomful of sick people to save.”
“But they have Dancer and Kareen… and Whitney!”
Hatman took a blow to the stomach that left a visible dent in his metallic skin and traded one back that failed to hurt Steel Enforcer at all.
“Stop those devices, Nats. That’s an order!”
Steel Enforcer and Dreamripper stepped back through the teleportal before it blinked out.
Then the bombs went off.
This poster posed from 212.159.41.62 when they posted
Message Thread
- Premiere #22: Old Acquaintance - The Hooded Hood believes it's time to get this show on the road. So let's go! - 07:23 on August 21, 2002
- Kill the Net. Kill the Net. - (nt) Hey. I just finally got this place to load after two weeks of trying. Don't come to me looking for explanations as to why this place is at a glacial pace. And I'm printing this, so that I may answer. - 14:17 on August 21, 2002
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