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Post By The Hooded Hood's kicks Mansion Week while it's down Thu Sep 02, 2004 at 05:15:46 pm EDT |
Subject The Lair Mansion Notes Originally The Untold Tale of the Lair Mansion |
In Reply To The Hooded Hood expects to be rather busy at the weekend with a certain other story, so here's my unilateral nuking of Mansion Week Thu Sep 02, 2004 at 05:11:35 pm EDT |
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| This isn’t the first time we’ve discussed mapping or otherwise chronicling and documenting the Lair Mansion. Here’s an updated version of the material I produced last time, when Dynamite Boy was going to produce some layouts. Firstly, there’s a set of very old plans from the original (and now defunct) BZL Archive site, as prepared by Hollywood V at the dawn of time: Original Mansion Plans. Then there’s the article I did on this subject in November ’99, as updated for April 2001, which I have dragged out yet again and re-present here. Finally there’s some all-new and original notes and comments thereafter. The main wing of the Lair Mansion was rebuilt in 1811 as the meeting place for the League of Improbable Gentlemen, an eccentric’s club who dabbled in mysteries and suchlike. Little is known of this group, although the work orders for building the neo-gothic flanking wings and rear courtyard block were signed by the club secretary Headley Valentine. Sometime before the end of the nineteenth century it was acquired by architect, politician and city founder Wilbur Parody, who opened up the old cave systems beneath the mansion and allegedly conducted dark deeds in the name of civic duty. Parody mysteriously vanished in the late 1800’s and no heirs appeared to claim the decaying building. It was derelict and abandoned at the time second world war hero 40’s Fan entered it just after Victory in Japan day and never returned. Up to this point the mansion had always sat upon Parody Island, a small outcropping in the Parody Sound (the bay between Paradopolis and it’s twin city Gothametropolis York), joined only by a bridge created by Wilbur Parody. Somehow the mansion was then retconned to have always been in the city itself, except for a brief period on top of an active volcano. When it was apparently destroyed by a nuclear blast along with Paradopolis itself the Lair Legion operated for a time from the airborne headquarters known as the LAir Fortress. When the destruction of Paradopolis was itself reversed the mansion was restored to have always been in its original position on Parody Island. Some of this is actually even explained in some of the Untold Tales stories. The derelict mansion was granted to the League of Regulars, the prototype Lair Legion, by the city, in Lair Legion Year One #3. Nowadays the stone and brick mansion has three above-ground floors and a tower. There is a central courtyard flanked by former stable blocks and outhouses which are now the Lairjet hangars and NTU-150’s labs. The cellars are stuffed with high-tech superheroey stuff. The caves beneath may or may not still be there but if they are then they’re hiding. The only other building on Parody Isle was Visionary’s condo, over the hill on the other side of the rock, but most of that is now back in its original location in Dullard’s Corner. HV’s plans of the mansion were accurate as far as they go for layout during the early days of the Lair Legion but do not show the whole of the site. Since that time the top (4th) floor has been found and disposed of and a vast range of subterranean tunnels uncovered. Also the membership of the Legion has radically changed, so room assignments are quite different now. We haven’t yet seen an LL training room, but Lisa’s own gymnasium is feared by all. Off from the main hall there’s an admin. office where Troia works one day in ten, and a closet where Space Ghost sleeps. There’s a PR office somewhere with one of those stress relief punchbags in it wearing Visionary’s cardigan. There is a monitor room which has been the source of many boring hours of monitor duty. NTU-150 still has a lab on site. Flapjack has a basement room with a strange smell coming from it. CSFB! once had a shrine to Cobra in his walk-in closet. Members of the current team who seem to live mainly on-site are Finny, Hatman, Sorceress (don’t know if she and Hatty share a room), and Trickshot. Donar stays with the League of Regulars, CSFB! commutes from Seattle, nobody knows where Dark Knight goes, and the others have homes in the city. Finny also has an apartment but he rarely uses it. Flapjack, Lisette. and Space Ghost also live in the mansion, and Amy Racecar commutes from her father’s garage. spiffy used to live-in, but now he’s got a choice of mayor’s mansions. The main mansion entrance now has adamantine doors, as spiffy recently discovered when he tried to burst through them. A series of increasingly ingenious defences by NTU-150 protect against all but invading supervillains. This includes the notorious disintegrator stunners. The computer mainframe is the occasional home of artificial intelligence HALLIE. As the probably former hiding place of the Secret of the Parodyverse there are still a few vestigial mysteries, arcane defences, and general weird things about the mansion.. The mansion is haunted, for example, and banshee Marie Murcheson’s favourite walk takes her along a no-longer-existing corridor right through Goldenyed’s shower. Although having no standard magical protections the mansion can and will protect itself against cosmic level threats, drawing upon ancient wards placed on Parody Island by the Celestian Space Robots. Hence the mansion won’t react to a standard super-villain disintegration ray, but it would shield itself from, say, an Obliterator disintegration ray. Oh, and the flush on the downstairs bathroom tends to stick unless you know just where to hit it. The first colonial structure, a brick and wood construction built atop an older site scattered with broken stones, was begun by His Grace Humbolt Vernal, Lord Bishop of Nihil, in 1680. Little is known about this structure, although the ground plan seems to conform to the current layout. Some of the cellars may date from that time, or may be from an even older dwelling carved from the bedrock by the indigenous (and now extinct) Parocroix Native Americans. What is more certain is that this dwelling was destroyed very thoroughly around 1723. By then it was being used as a mission house by the Church of Conformity, a radical and mysterious sect with links to both the European inquisition and the Puritan witch-burners. Some ascribed the site’s devastation to the even more mysterious and never-proved Confraternity of the Improbable College. The island on which the house stood had always had a bad reputation, and given that what is now modern Paradopolis was then an ill-drained swampland there was little reason for most people to take any interest in the site. However, in 1747 the reclusive and ancient Donna Alarcon bought the whole island for a song and built the second recorded dwelling on the site. From the surviving engravings of her house it featured a prominent tower where she would sit alone for hours staring westwards over the sea. Visitors were not encouraged, and the Donna’s deformed manservant was enough to scare away all but the most determined callers. The eccentric lady died in 1800, reputedly over a hundred years old. Her distant relatives engaged in lengthy legal battles over her estate, a decade-long dispute that exhausted most of the assets in legal fees. Eventually the island was sold at auction and was acquired by Mr Headley Valentine acting on behalf of one of the new gentlemens’ societies that were becoming fashionable. Seeking estates away from the smell and bustle of growing Gothametropolis York, the League of Improbable Gentlemen rebuilt the rotting wooden mansion with stones found lying around the site, and following the three-sided courtyard design of earlier structures. The mansion was gradually extended and improved, sometimes arbitrarily as various club members returned from overseas adventures with ideas for new extensions. Innovations such as the great library, the Turkish baths, the observatory, the art gallery, adytum, phrontistery, billiard-room, and zenana date from this period. It is not clear how the League of Improbable Gentleman came to an end in the late nineteenth century, but by the time the dust had settled the Mansion and island were in the ownership of Wilbur Parody, founder and mayor of Parodiopolis. He did relatively little to modify the house, but undertook extensive subterranean work, reopening many old caves and passages beneath the cellars for reasons never fully specified. After Parody’s abrupt disappearance the site remained part of his estate until he was legally declared dead, then reverted to municipal ownership by default. Attempts to reuse the site by the ruling officials of Paradopolis were never successful. Rumours that the site was haunted were made stronger after the disappearance there of researcher-hero MH, 40’s Fan, in 1945. A quirky clause in the deeds from the time of the League of Improbable Gentlemen made the site available to any legitimate team of heroes that made claim to it, on payment of one silver dollar. Hollywood V, mystery benefactor of the League of Regulars (the prototype Lair Legion) drew the attention of Lisa L. Waltz to this loophole and with the assistance of her colleagues the team gained legal title to Parody Island and the rotting manor thereon. Thereafter millionaire industrialist Jamie Bautista instigated a thorough refurbishment and partial rebuilding of the site to make it a suitable venue for a team of adventuring superheroes. Once early squatting attempts by Baron Zemo had been quashed, the building was equipped as a state-of-the-art crimefighting suite. Of course, different members had different ideas as to what constituted state-of-the-art. Rather than quibble, all of the ideas were incorporated. As of Untold Tales #177, the rooms that have been most documented are: · The Meeting Room – there’s a big table in a wood-panelled chamber, overlooked by portraits of the founding members (although Lisa’s picture is covered, for decency’s sake). · The Monitor Room – there’s lot of video screens here, and a big hologramatic threat board. · The Lair Legion Living Room – a casual communal space with a massive wide-screen TV and a huge DVD collection. Members quickly learn to avoid sitting on Lisa’s Cat’s chair, since the malevolent indestructible beast will sit there and strop its claws no matter who else might be in the chair at the time. · The Main Hall – this is where the adamantine front door is, with its infamous lethal stunner array. The cupboard under the stairs where Space Ghost once dwelled is now completely gone. · The Labs – a variety of places for tinkering and exploding things, mostly wisely located underground to minimise the damage. A number of bizarre gadgets like the Happy Place portal generator are kept here. · The Gym and Training Suite – which now includes holographic technology governed by some severe usage rules enforced by HALLIE · Some offices – the Leader of the team has a ground floor office off the main hall, and the administrator’s office is beside it. Elsewhere there seems to be more offices, used by the Liaison Officer, the Juniors’ Team Headmaster (directly under the rather unsafe belltower), and a windowless office set aside for Mr Epitome. · The Lair Kitchen – there’s a back door here that is often left unlocked. Villains are politely requested to attack through the main entrance. · The Schoolroom – where Visionary attempts to educate the Junior Lair Legion. · Bedrooms – currently resident at the Mansion are Mumphrey, Yo, Hatman, Trickshot, the Manga Shoggoth, Asil, Flapjack (who has a cellar bedroom), Princess Uhuna, and Amber St Clare. Semi-permanent residents with their own personalised rooms include Lisa, Al B. Harper, CSFB!, Nats, and Mr Epitome. There are also a number of guest bedrooms. · The Computer Core – HALLIE resides here, and the disassembled components of the Movie Gun are kept in storage nearby. · The Archive and Library – when the Librarian is in residence he prefers to use a camp bed here. · Hangars and Garages – accessed via the old stable block that forms one wing at the rear of the mansion, these vast areas hold a whole range of fascinating forms of transport, including Aunt Sally’s bay for when she is in residence. · The Manga Shoggoth has a cyclopean temple in one of the caves beneath the Mansion. · The Tower – nobody remembers commissioning the restoration of a tower such as the Mansion used to have in olden times, but there it is now, in all its unsafe glory, with a huge iron bell suitable for a hunchback to swing from. · Other places that have been occasionally mentioned include an arboretum, an art gallery, a zero-G room, a swimming pool, an observatory, a zoo, a sick bay, and holding cells. The only other recent change of note is that a large blast has hollowed out a crescent-shaped bay on the south-east side of the island, flooding some of the caves beneath and suggesting interesting possibilities for submarine docking facilities. And that's all we've got so far. Over to you. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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