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The Hooded Hood and the Anniversary of the BZL, or Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #0 Friday, 17-Sep-1999 15:29:42
The Hooded Hood and the Anniversary of the BZL, or Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #0 The Shaper of Worlds hammered the raven’s head onto the hardwood desk to illustrate her point. “It… is.. not… a… date. Are we clear?” “Eeep,” the Raven acknowledged, as little humans span round its head. “The Chronicler of Stories convinced me to give him a chance to make his case, that’s all. If it was up to me I’d erase him once and for all and damn the consequences to the multiverse.” “Urk.” “So no more of this date nonsense, or sparrows become the new birds of destiny, clear?” “Mmmk.” The candle-filled room was suddenly lit by the golden shimmer of the light between worlds. An ornate gold-framed wallmirror fully twelve feet by eight feet slid into existence. It rippled for a moment like water as a grey-cowled figure stalked from behind it’s reflective surface. “Good evening, Shaper of Worlds,” the Hooded Hood declaimed. “Your date’s arrived,” a brave and anonymous raven called out from the rafters. Shaper shot it a venomous look that promised she was going to use every resource at her command to find and make miserable the perpetrator. She might even reincarnate it as spiffy. “It’s not a date,” Shaper said too quickly to the Hooded Hood. The Hood seemed perplexed. “Of course not. We have important matters to review. I need you to understand a few things…” “I am the Shaper of Worlds, you know,” the trim girl answered tartly. “I do have access to all the knowledge of the Parodyverse, and the power to trim, twist, and prune the narratives which are it’s fabric.” “Most impressive,” the Hood conceded. “But knowing and understanding are two different things. Come with me.” The dormitory was dark and cheerless, and the only sound was an occasional sob from one of the ragged children curled up on – in some cases chained to – blanketless beds. Despite the snow piled up outside it was unheated, but the welts on the girls’ bodies kept them burning hot. This was the intransigents’ wing, the place where the ones who just wouldn’t learn, wouldn’t conform were kept. They had chained their worst offender hand and foot after the flogging and the salting, and there was no way she should have been able to get out, but Sister Manicle had accidentally dropped a pair of cuticle-tweezers from her correction kit and the girl had quickly concealed them for tonight. Now the offender painfully slipped off the shackles and crept off towards the barred windows of the orphanage. It was her ninety-seventh escape attempt. They had warned her. One hundred was the magic number. One hundred made her not only intransigent, but incurable. One hundred and they turned her over to the alumni for one last masterclass in pain. They had tried reasoning with her. Mother Whipcord herself had reasoned with her, had told her that she could go far with the Little Sisters of Discipline, as far as her older sister had gone, maybe further. She had the wrong stuff. But the girl still limped over to the windows and sought her freedom. “What’s going on here?” Shaper asked as she stood unseen with the Hooded Hood and watched the event. “You can know,” the Hood reminded the Shaper of Worlds. The keeper of stories concentrated. “The child is escaping from.. from such cruelty. She won’t give in, even though they’ll do such terrible things if they catch her.” But there was more to it than that. “And outside the window?” the cowled crime-czar prompted. The Shaper’s eyes widened. “They know!” she gasped. “They’re waiting for her. It’s a trap. It’s to break her spirit. They’re just waiting!” “Such evil in the world,” the Hood reflected. “And the Shaper is not permitted to interfere unless there is a cosmic imbalance. So this child will be caught, and tortured, and left bleeding and sobbing, entirely alone in a cold, loveless place which exists only to train cold, loveless servants of darkness. Unless…” Shaper saw where this was going. “Unless you use your ret-conning powers to help her escape? To illustrate to me that sometimes interference is necessary? I don’t think so, Hooded Hood. In fact I forbid it.” “The girl must be caught, hurt, imprisoned again to satisfy your sense of cosmic law?” Shaper shuddered. “Yes.” The Hood turned back to the Portal of Pretentiousness. “So be it,” he declared. And Lisa screamed as Mother Whipcord leaped out of the darkness to seize her. The Shaper caught her breath at the new vista before them. “Jarvis,” she hissed. She glared at the Hooded Hood for bringing her upon this particular scene. They were in a rainforest somewhere. Jarvis was young, younger even than he had been when the girl who had died and become the Shaper of Worlds had first known him. The woman he was lying with on the jungle floor, the woman he was making love to, could only be Lo-Chi, his first wife. Lo-Chi, the psychotic stalker who would return again and again to pursue him. Lo-Chi who was really nothing more than a cruel deception, a simulacrum created by a race of weaponsmiths called the Nebulus who wanted to breed Jarvis as a living weapon. “Why are we here?” Shaper demanded. “Did you think this would upset me?” “Why would it upset you?” the Hood asked. “She’s not real, and he’s dead. You let Samhain, the Destroyer of Stories, steal his future away from him. It turned out that everything he thought was true was a lie, that his involvement as a hero in founding the Lair Legion was part of the manipulation of aliens who wanted to ship Earth’s heroes away as war commodities, and that the only way to prevent a bleak future in which Jarvis betrayed all he held dear was to sacrifice himself. I fail to see why watching Jarvis take the first steps on his road to deception and destruction should concern you. After all, the knew already.” “Jarvis made that deal with Samhain to get an edge on you!” Shaper argued back. “He needed to prevent you gaining the Secret of the Parodyverse and using it to control a Celestian!” “I gave him the only bit of free will he ever had that really counted,” the Hooded Hood shot back. “You condemned him to death by abandoning him to Samhain. But you can correct that error. Look.” The cowled crime czar pointed to a butterfly hovering beside one of the rich rainforest flowers. “Chaos theory in action. If Jarvis and his wife roll left in their lovemaking they will crush a certain flower, and this butterfly will never alight on it. Through a fractal chain of cause and effect that choice will determine whether he meets his second wife and true love Melissa, and hence whether he ever discovers the truth about his origins which leads to his death. Remove Melissa and you remove Jarvis’ one true moment of free will, but you save his life. Which is it to be?” “You know I cannot interfere,” the Shaper snarled. How could the Hooded Hood, with no power worth speaking of, without the omnipotence of a Great Being of the Parodyverse, have the Shaper of Worlds on the defensive? “And you will not allow me to prevent them crushing the bloom?” “No.” Again the Hood turned away. Of course, he had never specified whether the flower had to survive or be destroyed to cause the outcome he had described. “I fail to see the point in all of this,” the Shaper of Worlds told the cowled crime czar. “But you know everything,” the Hood answered, feigning surprise. “I know you will fail to convince me that I should break the rules of my office and interfere where I should not, or to make me believe that it is alright for you to do such a thing.” “You have the power to make the universe a place of joy, justice, and beauty yet you fail to give that gift?” the archvillain behind her marvelled. “And they say I am evil.” “Who’s there?” A ragged voice came out of the darkness which surrounded the two travellers. “Who is it?” “He can hear us?” Shaper gasped, turning to look into the gloom to learn who was able to penetrate the aura of obfuscation which protected them. “Sometimes when people are at their most desperate they have the most profound of insights,” the Hood suggested. “Who are you. Speak. I have a gun!” “This is none of your concern,” the Shaper told the man in the darkness. “You have no part in this?” “No part? Who dares tell me where I may participate? Do you think me a spent force, shattered and broken? Do you?” Shaper concentrated to learn what was hidden in the lightless ruined cellar. She felt rather than saw the ruined man, the gun in his trembling, weak fingers, the intention in his mind to place the weapon to his temple and end his wasted life. Yet now that suicidal urge was replaced with a reflex arrogance, a spark of fury which directed all the self-hatred and disappointment outwards towards her. She recoiled away from such a mind. “Who are you?” she gasped. “I have no reason to hide my name,” the man declared, staggering to his feet. “I am not ashamed. My minions, my laboratories, my fuhrer may have gone, but I am still Heinrich Zemo, and I will not be ignored!” “Zemo!” Shaper gasped. “It’s 1945 and he… he was about to kill himself. He would have died if we hadn’t arrived right now. Hood, you tricked me into saving the most evil man in the world.” Zemo was no longer interested in following his leader into death. The fury had overtaken the despair and he raised his pistol and discharged the remaining three rounds at the Shaper of Worlds. She was gone and the last of his resources was spent. The Baron shifted his wounded carcass and squatted in the darkness with no assets, no future, no allies, and every hand against him. And the Baron laughed. In the faceted interior of the Portal of Pretentiousness the early turning points of the original Legionnaires flickered past: the great draconic hibernation pods of the fallen Makluan spacecraft splitting wide open; the Sea Monkey swarm mourning the death of their last great hive queen even as her final offspring struggled into the world; a nervous man buying a cup of java for a wonderful girl called Cheryl who was clearly out of his league; a hero called Space Ghost abandoning the safe shallows of normalcy for the secret tides which only poets and lunatics can know; a strange and alien fern growing and dreaming of a day when it might be planted in flesh; a Chronicler of Stories fallen in love with the tale of one of his tragic characters; a terrible car wreck which built a hero of spare parts and genius; a previous Shaper burning bright but briefly with unexpected friends; a student encountering a creature of pure thought that thought it was the student; and more, and more, and more… “Enough!” demanded the Shaper of Worlds, stilling the images with a thought. “You wanted a chance to make a case to me,” she accused the Hooded Hood. “My patience is done. Make it now so I can get on and erase you from time and space!” The Hood did not seem intimidated. “The orphan Lisa escaped on her one hundredth attempt,” he told his adversary. “But it was the attempt we saw which distilled the rebellion within her, that pushed her to love and to the law. If we had interfered then she would have escaped and survived, and she would have been a happier, healthier Lisa; but she would not have been the heroine we know. She would not have had the edge. In choosing to not interfere we have also shaped your stories, Shaper.” “A clever sophistry,” Shaper admitted, “but hardly profound. Every choice has consequences, inaction as much as action. But I am mandated by Higher Powers, and that mandate tells me when to act. In all other matters I may not interfere.” “Jarvis did meet the fair Melissa, and did learn the truths of his origins,” the Hood went on. “He chose to stop my plans and he chose to give his life to thwart the Nebulus.” The Shaper concentrated her special awareness of narrative. “That would have happened whatever became of that jungle flower,” she objected. Here at last she seemed to have caught the Hood in a lie. “But in one timeline Jarvis returns from the dead and in one he doesn’t,” the cowled crime-czar pointed out. The Shaper had the knowledge but not the understanding to have foreseen that. “It all depends on the choice you made about interfering back there in the jungle. As long as you observe you change what you investigate. Basic truth of the scientific method.” Shaken by the possibility of Jarvis returning which she had never seen before (and more so when she realised that the Hooded Hood had retconned that possibility long beforehand and that removing the Hood from time would also destroy that chance) the Shaper of Worlds demanded what he meant by the third visit. “Whether you choose to interfere or not interfere, whether you choose to look or not, sometimes you cannot help but affect the world merely by existing,” the cowled crime czar smirked. The larger you are, the more ripples you make. And since one such as I cannot help his stature, you can hardly hold me responsible for being true to myself. Unlike you servants of the Great Powers I cannot pretend to be less than I am. The Hooded Hood does not have the luxury of shirking his responsibility of remaking the universe into the place it should be.” The Shaper of Worlds had heard more than she wanted to. With a thought she returned them to her halls, to that place of ravens and destiny where all stories tangled. “You make… a good case,” she conceded. “But in the end I am the Shaper of Worlds, and I cannot allow you to go around messing them up.” “But you admit that I have made an impact on you? That I have profoundly altered your perspective on your work and your role?” “Perhaps.” “Only perhaps?” the Hood asked. “Ah, well, there is an easy test to see how much you have taken our little journey and our talks to heart. Simply erase me. If I have had no impact upon you it should be a simple matter for you to whether the minor effects of wrenching me from your history.” He paused to allow the shadows to fall over his face. “Of course, on the other hand… if you have been affected by what I have said and shown you, then erasing me will also alter, maybe even erase you, and the whole thing will reset to never having happened.” “No,” the Shaper of Worlds whispered. How could he have caught her in a paradox like this? Or was it just a bluff? “I shall bid you good evening,” the Hooded Hood smiled. “I can see you have weighty matters to ponder, and I have taken up quite enough of your time. I’m sure you know that. And perhaps now you also understand it. Farewell.” The Shaper of Worlds watched him go and wondered if she dared erase him now. “So how was the date – urk!” The ravens of destiny suddenly had a job vacancy. And the Shaper stood in her candlelit halls and wondered how deep the narrative strands of the Parodyverse truly ran, and what would happen if she tired to call the Hooded Hood’s bluff. And the stories went on. Many happy returns from the Hooded Hood, who wasn't there at the beginning... or was he? |
| The Hooded Hood and the Anniversary of the BZL, or Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #0 (Many happy returns from the Hooded Hood, who wasn't there at the beginning... or was he?) (17-Sep-1999 15:29:42) |
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