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Post By 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 |
Subject The Untold Tale of the Lair Mansion Originally Perhaps we should delay "Design the Mansion Week" a while, what with the server move and as there's not a lot of traffic currently. |
In Reply To Visionary certainly won't stop anyone from sharing ideas anyway. Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 06:44:16 pm EDT |
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The Untold Tale of the Lair Mansion “I really didn’t mean for anyone to go to this much trouble,” Visionary worried. “Or get in to this much trouble,” he added, looking unhappily at the low barrel-roofed tunnel that seemed to have been clawed out of solid bedrock. “Oh, it’s no trouble,” bubbled the Manga Shoggoth , oozing along ahead of the possibly-fake man, glowing slightly in the darkness. Vizh hoped his torch batteries would last out. He didn’t relish trying to get back along the winding tunnel by touch with all the Shoggoth-goo around. “I only asked if anyone knew when the Lair Mansion was first built,” protested Visionary. “Ham-Boy was asking and I didn’t know. Nobody seems to know. But… I really didn’t want to know this badly.” The Shoggoth continued to lead him along the dank tunnel that began in one of the spectacular caves that were sunk beneath the bottom layer of the mansion basements. “Knowledge is important,” the Shoggoth announced. “You humans are so brief it is important you communicate your histories to each other. That is why I have brought you to this meeting.” “Meeting?” swallowed Visionary. “I have a meeting?” He became aware of a shuffling in the darkness. Now the passage opened up into some deep vault. There were human bones carefully piled in the stone niches. “Yes, you have a meeting, Mr Visionary,” said a fussy, ancient voice by Vizh’s left ear. “Agh!” the possibly-fake man cried. Then he realised he was surrounded. There were at least half a dozen of them, humanoid, mostly bald but with stringy scraps of hair clinging to their heads and faces. They had preternaturally elongated limbs and long sharp fingernails. They smelled of loam and mould. And they were wearing academic robes and carpet slippers. “These are the Ghouls Under Gothametropolis,” the Manga Shoggoth told Visionary. “They have devoured many historians.” “How do you do?” the Abyssal Greye asked his guest. “Devoured?” Vizh worried. “As in eaten?” “Please do not be alarmed,” Greye told him. “We only devour the brains of the finest minds of the city upon their death, so that their experience and intellect are not lost but rather combined into our gestalt intelligence. You are quite safe.” Visionary blinked as he tried to work out whether he was happy or sad to have an inferior brain. “Visionary was asking about the founding of the Lair Mansion,” the Shoggoth told the ghouls. “I thought he’d like to meet you and ask about it.” “You’re still learning about humanity if you thought that,” Vizh assured the elder beast. “The Lair Mansion,” considered the Abyssal. “Which one?” Visionary was puzzled. “There’s more than one?” The ghouls chuckled to themselves, which was a little disturbing. “There was an edifice on the site of your mansion back when all the continents were one large landmass,” another of the creatures hissed. “A temple raised by nameless beings before ever the first man crawled from the primordial slime.” “Where do you think those tunnels came from?” the Shoggoth asked. “When the Space Robots elected to hide the Secret of the Parodyverse here for a while, guarded by the Dreaming Celestian in his Lair, the emanations attracted all kinds of bizarre creatures and events.” Visionary looked from the bubbling blob of protomatter to the carpet-slippered scholar-ghouls. “No, really?” “The most terrible incomer was the Groper Out of Grossness, the fairly great old One known as Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu,” the Abyssal explained. "It dwells in eternal slumber beneath Gothametropolis, Parodiopolis, and your island, until the stars are right." The Manga Shoggoth made an unpleasant gurgling noise that sounded like he was spitting. “Yes, I remember all of this from the Coming of the Celestians adventure,” Vizh interrupted. “I still get flashbacks. That was when we found out about Wilbur Parody, founder of Parodiopolis, and how he lived here after the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was destroyed. And we have this old chap called Sir Mumphrey Wilton who…” “We know Sir Mumphrey,” Greye interjected in turn. “He is an old friend of our fraternity.” Visionary paused again to absorb this new information. “Okay. So anyway, Mumphrey’s ancestor – or maybe Mumph himself, although we haven’t worked out how – was one of the members of the League at the end of its time. Apparently the original League founded the site back in 1811 or so.” Vizh didn’t like the way the ghouls kept looking at him and whispering. “He really has no idea, does he?” one of them mouthed, peering through a set of pince-nez. “Why do people always say that?” Visionary worried. When even the undead questioned your abilities it was time to worry. The Abyssal Greye glared at his colleagues. “Pardon my confederates’ rudeness,” he declared. “They don’t get out much these days. What they mean is that your Lair Legion is in many ways the successor to Mumphrey’s League of Improbable Gentlemen, or perhaps the logical conclusion to it. But the League itself grew from earlier iterations, such as the Improbable College, and the Knights Improbable. And at some point all of them have had ado with your Mansion site.” “They have?” Visionary puzzled. “But America wasn’t discovered until… whenever it was discovered. Unless you believe those Discovery channel documentaries about Vikings that get Donar so worked up.” “I don’t think Visionary is ready to understand the role he plays in all of that,” the Manga Shoggoth rumbled. “Perhaps you could just tell him about the last few centuries of the Lair?” “Probably for the best, yes,” considered the scholar-ghouls. Visionary sensed more things planned for him that nobody was bothering to tell him about. “In 1626 the first Dutch settlers came and built a fort on the sandbank that is now called Flanagan Island,” the Abyssal Greye lectured. “That was the start of Gothametropolis.” He glanced over at one of the crumbliest of his colleagues. “Why on Earth did you call it that?” The ghoul shrugged, dislodging some of the maggots from his cranium. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. The English added the York suffix when they captured the colony later. Damned redcoats.” “Because the name wasn’t complicated enough?” spat Greye. “Never mind. The settlers soon found the ruins on what you now call Parody Island, and assumed the stones must have come from an earlier, failed pilgrim settlement.” “They never settled on the island though,” the Shoggoth noted. “Not until someone laid the barghest.” “Is that some kind of euphemism?” Vizh ventured. “A barghest is a phantom black hound of death, and it was one of the guardians of the site at the time,” the Abyssal explained testily. “I believe your mansion has adopted a banshee to fulfil its functions now.” “Marie Murcheson,” Visionary agreed. “You see, we all got mentally transported back to the 1850s when Wilbur Parody was going to do this Celestian-trapping ritual and needed this sacrifice – Marie – and then we interfered and…” “Yes, you were very heroic,” grouched the Abyssal. “We know all about it. But the woman died and her spirit was preserved and empowered by the site. The mansion has its habits, and a supernatural guardian is one of them.” Visionary digested this. “Sometimes she seems very quiet, except when G-Eyed’s showering, and then other times she’s very powerful.” “The mansion has defences against cosmic-level attacks, from when it was the Dreaming Celestian’s Lair,” the Shoggoth explained. “Marie is one of them. She can literally draw upon the power of the Space Robots if she has to, but only under those circumstances.” “So back to these settlers,” said the Abyssal Greye, emphatically. “Eventually one of the iterations of the Hell Void claimed the site, exorcised the spectral hound, and erected a new house on the ruins of the pre-Columbian cairn.” “The Hell Void?” Visionary sighed. It seemed like his destiny in life to ask for footnotes. “The enigma that renounced his role in the lower planes and keeps reincarnating to assemble or test generations of heroes?” Greye prompted. “HV?” “Oh.” “We wish we understood his story better too,” admitted the scholar-ghoul. “So that house was put up around 1680, and burned to the ground when the Improbable College visited it in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.” Visionary couldn’t help but notice that the Abyssal Greye seemed rather smug about that. “That was a good thing?” he checked. “We thought so when – they thought so when they did it,” Greye answered. “The land lay fallow for some time thereafter, although the mansion manifested when it had to, using the vestigial memories of earlier and later buildings. The site was thought haunted, which is why it was never really used. Until it was bought by Lady Alarcon in 1747 to build her strange reclusive retreat. She died in 1800, and there was a legal battle over her estate between distant relatives. By that time the house she’d built was in terrible disrepair, and it was sold very cheaply to Headley Valentine on behalf of the Improbable Gentlemen.” Despite himself Visionary was intrigued. “What did it look like back then? He wondered. “Only every time I look now, the house seems a little bit different.” “It was very similar in shape to what it is now,” the Abyssal Greye remembered. “As I said, the site has habits, and layout is one of them. And I rather think it’s engaged in some kind of , well, pardon the crudity, some kind of pissing contest with its old enemy. One of them develops turrets, the other adds gargoyles. One adds crypts, the other remembers a bell-tower. And so on.” “It’s old… enemy?” “Herringcarp, of course,” the ghoul snapped. “Do pay attention. Surely you’ve understood that the Hooded Hood in his many guises through history has shaped his Asylum site to counter your advantage with the Lair Mansion?” “Er, I’d have to check with the Librarian,” Vizh mumbled. “Y’see he’s been doing some filing and…” “The site was very obliging when I required a temple,” the Manga Shoggoth noted. “It found me a nice subterranean cavern with cyclopean stonework and broadband internet connections and everything.” “You make it sound like it’s alive,” Vizh laughed very nervously. “It’s not though, is it? I mean, otherwise we’d never be able to go to the toilet there again, with it watching us.” “It is not sentient,” the Abyssal assured the possibly-fake man. “But it does remember. And memory is surely one of the characteristics of life. “He looked at his brethren. “Indeed, for some of us it is the only characteristic of life,” “Er, yes,” nodded Visionary. “Well then, I’d better be getting back. Classes to prepare. Toast to make. That sort of thing. They’ll be missing me. Probably organising a search party for me right now.” “Your mansion is older and stranger than you know, Mr Visionary,” the leader of the Scholar-Ghouls declared. “Which is fitting, for your fellowship of heroes is older and stranger than you imagine too.” “I’ll be sure to tell them that,” Vizh promised as he retreated up the tunnel. “1680. Thanks. I’ll remember that. Yes. Bye then!” The scholar ghouls and the Shoggoth waited until the wildly-flickering torchlight had vanished up the passage. “Well?” asked the Shoggoth. “Just as I remember him,” the Abyssal Greye admitted. “Just like he was back when I met him before, when I was alive.” “You are certain it was Visionary?” “Right here in these very tunnels,” the Abyssal insisted. “His tomb is just behind that wall.” The Shoggoth considered that. “Perhaps I’ll wait to tell him about that for another day, too,” he decided. Lair Mansion Notes 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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