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This message #100: Ultimate Untold Tales of the Ultimate Lair Legion was posted by And now the triple-sized hundredth issue represented, without that traditional HTML error, by... the Hooded Hood on Saturday, August 3, 2002 at 11:10.
#100: Ultimate Untold Tales of the Ultimate Lair Legion
Author’s Note: As readers may have guessed from the title, this story takes a few swipes at the current trends of the comic book world. I know this is a touchy subject, with new developments such as Marvel’s “Ultimate” line having both vociferous critics and staunch supporters. This story isn’t intended to persecute anyone’s choice of reading material or preferred style, only to derive some humour from contemporary trends. I see it as a modern retelling of the original Parodyverse stories that often featured comic book creators as villains, just repackaged for a new audience. Those of you who don’t read comics enough to be aware of the situations this story, um, refers to needn’t worry. There is hopefully a coherent narrative with a suitable storyline in there anyway. Well, as much as usual.
In the best confused comic book tradition, this hundredth episode of Untold Tales is of course the hundred and nineteenth issue of the series. Or hundred and twentieth if you count #0. That’s because the series started out as The Hooded Hood Chronicles and got a new #1 when it changed its name. It’s all there in the archives at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom if you want to go check. And like all good comicky #100s it features as many characters as possible, even if it’s just a brief cameo or naming. I’m sure I’ll have omitted somebody (other than Deathstar Druid) so please just cut and paste the story and type the missing folks in there when you spot their absence. My apologies to CyberVenom and other newer poster for not including them, but I haven’t really got a decent enough handle on your characters to feel I could toss them in yet. My apologies to Balefire for including him.
In keeping with the spirit of modern comic book storytelling, I’d like to go on record as saying that Kirk Boxleitner’s many enthusiastic and useful suggestions for this story were all crap and I’d thought of them before and used them all anyway. He sucks, as does anybody else who ever wrote anything except Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison.
Anyway, read on to find out if next issue is Ultimate Untold #1 with #101 in teeny writing somewhere on the cover. And remember, a superhero is for life, not just for Christmas.
HH
Character profiles at Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Other useful things in Where's Where in the Parodyverse
“Oooh,” smirked Dr Teeth, “I don’t think I’ve got enough superstar dentistry in my collection.” He dropped Shannon Elizabeth onto the pile of toothless celebrities that was accumulating at his feet. “This is the best Oscar night ever.”
“Not yet,” smirked Garbage Burner. “We haven’t burned this place down with all the guests inside it. But I’m nearly ready.”
English Man tipped his bowler hat at the cameras that were still being held by terrified TV crews. “We’d like to remind you all viewers at home that our terrorism of this event is being sponsored by Bautista Enterprises. Their motto: Buy our products or we’ll send armoured thugs round to your house to stomp on your babies. Thank you.”
Marker Man didn’t take part in the general banter. He was too busy trying to colour match the spleens he was etching on.
Then the roof of the auditorium was ripped clean off, sending fragments of debris all over the screaming crowd. The red and gold armoured figure flying overhead hurled the top of the building over onto the nearest freeway. The musclebound guy with the hammer dropped a wall on the League of Losers. The woman with hell-green eyes in the low cut green silk number gestured and the four villains started screaming, “Bugs! Bugs! Bugsbugsbugsbugsbugs!”
The Lair Legion descended as Commissioner Graham and the Paradopolis SWAT team surged into the building. “What the hell happened here?” the old policeman demanded, looking at the massive casualties amongst the hostages.
“Look, we took care of business. Now f&ck off,” Fin Fang Foom told him, pushing past the Commissioner to get over to the press.
He was too late. Sorceress was already there. “…just opened their minds to the general nastiness of the universe. Standard spell. I describe it in detail in my latest book, and you can find details on my website.”
“That witch is always stealing the limelight,” scowled Goldeneyed. “Hatman never puts her in her place. What she needs is a real good…”
“Leave it to me, folks,” grinned Dancer. She whirled round towards the swarming paparazzi, whipped her top off and called, “Oh boys…!”
While the press was distracted, Exile and Trickshot held the captured enemies down so Donar could bugger them.
*
Meanwhile, Donar and Yo followed Visionary down a seedy alley in Hell’s Bathroom to find a seedy plumbers repair shop and watchmakers. “I think I’ll wait out here, if you don’t mind,” Visionary said nervously.
“This art not a good part of town,” the hemigod of thunder pointed out. “Thou hast no further need for thine wallet?”
“Well, it’s not like there’s anything in it,” Vizh admitted, “I’d just prefer not to remind Xander the Improbable that I owe him a favour.”
“As if I’d forget a thing like that,” the master of the mystic crafts said in his left ear. Visionary shrieked and leaped in the air as if stung. Xander moved past his visitors to unlock his shop door and remove the card that said ‘Out for lunch and to reorder the multiverse, back in ten minutes.’ “But please don’t worry. I’m saving that for a time I need something appallingly stupid and dangerous to be done.”
“Yo is thinking Visi is to be good at that.”
The three heroes followed Xander into his crowded dingy shop. “I hast a problem…” began the thunder hemigod.
“Yes, yes,” the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse agreed, pausing to carefully water the cactus by the door. “You don’t know why Troia’s ignoring you, other than the obvious. We all have problems. Mine’s due through that shop window in about two minutes.”
“What are you to be meaning?” Yo puzzled.
Xander sighed. “I mean that my unwanted visitor is going to attack soon, and then die horribly before he can tidy his mess up. And I’ll get stuck with the cleaning bill.” He looked up into Donar’s eyes suddenly, and there was no trace of humour in his expression. “Sometimes being a hero has a terrible price.”
“Er, about this attack…” prompted Visionary nervously. He had a nasty feeling that the master of the mystic crafts had somehow manipulated things so that there would be heroes present when whatever nasty it was crashed into his shop.
“I wouldst pay any price to win the fair Troia CCXV,” Donar vowed.
“Really?” demanded Xander. “And what would go sacrifice to save her from a horrible, painful death? Because that’s what she’s facing right now, her and all the Amazons with her. My sources tell me that Amazon Isle has been invaded by undead hordes seeking its destruction. A faithless former Amazon named Polypheme-1 led them there, bribed by their terrible master. Queen Titania is dead, and Troia fights a desperate losing battle against impossible odds.”
Donar was pale. “I must hie me to her aid,” he breathed. “But the isle ist protected by the will of all the pantheons, and Mjalcolm may not take me thither unaided.”
“If you go there,” Xander warned him, “you will be hurt as never before, a wound that will never heal, a most terrible sacrifice. Make no mistake, this is the real thing. Your choice.”
Then the front window of Xander’s shop blew in, shattering in a spray of disrupted defensive magics. Powerful spells sent Donar, Yo, and Visionary writhing to the floor.
“Did you really think you could use them to stop me, impotent shadow?” the intruder demanded, picking his way over the debris to where Xander had taken cover behind the counter. He looked identical to the master of the mystic crafts except for the pony-tail, the leather robes, and the attitude. Oh, and the shimmering majicks cascading from his hands. “Did you think you could stop me and mine through subtlety and intellect? Those things are of the past, shadow. This age belongs to the gross and the grand. To me.”
“Actually, no,” sighed Xander. “I was fairly sure you could beat them, given that probably could given sufficient preparation time. That’s why I called in the Bog Thing.”
Suddenly the cactus beside the shattered entranceway move, rising and growing, reaching out with needled arms and incalculable strength. “Intruder,” it boomed in hollow, vegetable tones, “You… are not… wanted… here.”
Ultimate Xander glared at his counterpart. “You dared strike a bargain…?”
Less than ultimate Xander looked guilty. “Who did you expect me to call. Manahssus? Dracu? Wangmundo?”
“It is of no import. I shall make brief work of this nature spirit!”
There was a short, gory confrontation as the new kewl Xander discovered how effective gross and grand chaos majicks were on a guardian of the green empowered by the Earth.
“It… is done,” the Bog Thing said when the gristly task was over. “I have… fulfilled… your bargain… with the hemigod’s… mother… Now you… must do… your part… Send him… to his fate…”
“Yes,” agreed Xander sadly. “Let’s get these heroes to Amazon Isle.”
*
There were a lot more people at the press conference than Lisette had anticipated. “I know line-up announcements are news,” she panicked to Valeria of Carfax, Amber St Clare, and Amy Racecar,” but I didn’t think they were this much news. We’re going to need more sandwiches. And booze. Those are press people out there, after all.”
“Well, people have been waiting a long time to hear about the new team,” Amber shrugged.
“We could use some of Space Ghost’s secret alcohol stash,” suggested Valeria. “He’s been gone a long time now. I’m sure he wouldn’t notice if we borrowed some and replaced it tomorrow.”
The four women looked at one another “But what if he does, and comes back?” Amy said at last.
“I’ll send Flapjack to the liquor store,” sighed Lisette.
*
Fin Fang Foom was in his humanoid draconic form. He stepped up to the podium nervously and glared suspiciously at the microphone. “Is this thing on?” he asked, sending a shrill shriek through the sound system.
“Damn, I thought I’d fixed that,” growled NTU-150. “Just hold on while I realign the feedback suppression generators…”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Hatman assured him hastily. “Just put down the toolkit and back away slowly.”
“There sure are a lot of people out there today,” noticed Sorceress. “I guess Finny had better get this show on the road.”
“Er, ladies and gentlemen of the press… I mean men and women… not that you’re not ladies, of course, except that some ladies don’t like to be called that now… I mean, they aren’t ladies… unless they want to be…” Finny began.
“We voted him in because of his tactical abilities,” Goldeneyed reminded the team.
The press wasn’t going to wait for the Makluan’s prepared statement anyway. “Mister Foom,” a man at the front holding out the CNN mike called, “What has been the public reaction to your coming out of the closet about your relationship with the Dark Knight?”
“Huh?” Finny shrugged. “What do you mean? Er, not that I can confirm that there is such a person as the Dark Knight.”
“How long have you been partners?”
“Since Gothametropolis’ Finest vol 1 #1, wasn’t it?” CrazySugarFreakBoy! remembered.
“Do you practice safe sex?”
“Is it a monogamous relationship?”
“Do you feel you are good role models for the gay community?”
“What?” spluttered the dragon. “DK and I aren’t… not that there’s anything wrong with it… well, not any more than the other Bad Thing… but we aren’t… so we don’t…”
“What about your demand to the city that they disinter Jarvis’ body so you can bugger it to prove that you’re a better leader than he ever was?”
“WHAT?” roared the Makluan.
“Eeew,” shuddered Sorceress. “Can I reconsider my voting?”
“Is it true that Troia 215 is conducting an incestuous affair with her brother spiffy?”
“I, um, I don’t think he’s her brother any more,” Hatman offered weakly. “Where are you getting this stuff from?”
“Hatman, at your press conference this morning you admitted to your addiction to hard drugs and steroids. Can you confirm that these are the source of your power?”
“This is ridiculous,” flared Fin Fang Foom – literally. A gout of flare played over the heads of the press crew. “We were all meeting here this morning. There was no conference. There was no… hey, where are you all going?”
The pressmen were racing away back to their trucks and starting to move over the bridge back to mainland Paradopolis.
“Just a guess,” Dancer offered, “but maybe they were discouraged by the blast of flame?”
“Never mind that,” the newsman that CSFB! had tackled called, struggling. “There’s a major battle going on right now downtown, and you LL guys are in the thick of it. Er… hold on…”
“We’re there?” Goldeneyed puzzled. “But… we’re here.”
“And not gay in any way,” growled Fin Fang Foom.
“But something is going on, isn’t it,” frowned Sorceress. “And we’d better find out what it is pretty soon.”
*
“So… what the heck is it?” asked Amazing Guy.
Al B. Harper floated beside the Protector of the Universe in the interdimensional void and looked at the swirling pattern that was chewing its way towards them. “It’s plaid,” he said, describing the design of the unknown phenomenon.
“I see. That explains it then,” AG sighed. “Now I know why Eggo, the Living Waffle, the cosmic being who gives me my powers and mission, warned me to check this thing out. He wanted it fashion critiqued.”
Al B. looked at his sensor unit again. “I’m sorry,” he shrugged. “I’m just not getting anything off it. All I can say it it’s moving through the interdimensional void towards the nexus with our universe and if it isn’t stopped it’ll probably gobble up the Parodyverse.”
Amazing Guy swallowed. “Right. Another easy one. So how do we stop it?”
Al B. Harper looked at him incredulously. “We?”
“You don’t,” the battle-armoured man appearing from the surface of the phenomenon announced. He hefted his energy sword and struck an uncomfortable-looking pose. “You die.”
Al B. glanced at Amazing Guy. “You know him? One of your rogues gallery?”
“It looks like Captain Marbles, my predecessor as Protector of the Parodyverse, if he’d had a radical makeover and gained dreadlocks, a mullet, and a goatee,” AG admitted. “But he’s dead. And, you know, not a dork.”
“I’m the new, reconceptualised Captain Marbles,” the warrior told them. “Now we fight, and the one that’s most popular wins. The other… he gets cancelled.”
*
spiffy was opening the newly rebuilt Gothametropolis Mall for the third time this year. “It’s great to see this tribute to commerce open again,” the ferned phenomenon who was Mayor of Gothametropolis announced, just like he had the other times. “And let me join in with all those who say we hope this time the building will last more than four months before being ripped apart by super-powered terrorists or alien invaders or… oh crap!”
The giant brine shrimp that had just pulled the roof off the main shopping arcade looked down at Mark Hopkins and called, “Hi!”
“What are you doing, Banjoooo?” spiffy shouted back. “You’re not a beaver. Why are you tearing up the mall?”
Then Cap hit the ferned phenomenon hard from behind while Cobra and HV slaughtered his bodyguards. Paste Pot Pete was about to glue spiffy’s symbiotic fern to the floor ready for the kill but the Dark Knight melted out of the shadows and took the Abandoned Legionairre down with a nerve pinch.
“Wha…?” spiffy gasped.
“They’re here to kill you,” Messenger warned, entering into a fight with Cap which resulted in a balletic exercise where neither one could hit the other. In the end he lost patience and took HV down with a parcel bomb.
There was a brown streak and Cobra found herself tangled in the fallen Paste Pot Pete. The source of the said blur screeched to a halt holding a gash on his shoulder. “Ouch,” he complained. “She is good.”
“I don’t understand this,” spiffy repeated as the Abandoned Legion were neutralised by the newcomers. “I know mayor-killing and spiffy-hunting are national sports these days, but usually the Abandoned Legion are the ones who save me.”
“We’re the new Abandoned Legion,” Banjooooo explained as he dropped the mall on the heroes below, including his own fallen teammates. “You’ve been deemed an unsalvageably tangled silver age embarrassment. You have to go.”
Then he stamped on the rubble until it was flat.
*
“So let me get this straight,” Nats frowned from behind the controls of the Lairjet. “You are both Samantha Featherstone, but one of you is a seven year old girl from the present and the other is from twenty years in the future where she’s a member of the Lair Legion?”
“Right,” agreed the older Samantha, the one in the cool leathers and the vest. “That’s how I have the comm-card and the access codes.”
“She does have a residual chronal field signature around her,” admitted Ziles. “But I’m having difficulty reading her empathically.”
“Because you taught me how to block it,” Samantha observed. “Back when I first got my powers.”
“Which are?” prompted Nats.
“Secret,” answered Samantha. “I mean, the less you guys know about the future the more chance that I won’t go back home and find it’s been taken over by ants or robo-monkeys or something, right? Let’s just say I’m from one possible future where I happen to be a member of the LL, and I’ve been able to jump back here because a big-time villainess called Madame Symmetry of Synchroncity is pulling on powers she’ll have in the future if she wins today, and there’s a kind of balance to these things, okay?”
“Makes sense to me,” seven-year old Samantha observed.
“We can’t just believe you,” argued Nats. “For all we know you could be part of some elaborate trap.”
“You’re William Reed,” Samantha the elder told him. “You have a primal artefact called the Psychostave which amplifies and focuses your telekinetic and pyrokinetic talents, and it allows you to use your powers to keep your body working after clinical death. Ziles is an exile from Xnylonia, quest-prey of the Gahream, and she fled her homeland after committing…”
“I believe her,” Ziles said quickly. “I think she’s telling the truth. Or at least she thinks she is.”
“We have to find Grampa Mumphrey,” younger Samantha suggested plaintively.
Nats, Ziles, and the other Samantha exchanged glances. “Let’s just get you safely back to the Lair Mansion,” suggested Nats.
Then the Timewraiths shimmered through the airframe of the Lairjet and attacked.
*
“I’m sorry,” Reverend Mac Fleetwood told ManMan back at the Zero Street Mission, “but I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Right,” snorted Chronic. “You were in a sleepwalk the whole time that you were going out and chloroforming homeless guys and making them disappear. I knew you were too good to be true-oo-oo!”
“Has anybody got a bucket?” asked dull thud woozily, having been on the receiving end of that chloroform.
“He really doesn’t seem to remember,” worried ManMan. “Maybe it was some kind of possession?”
“I did what?” Fleetwood puzzled. “I’ve been trying to discover what’s been happening to those poor folks. I pulled a few strings to get it looked into.”
“That’s it,” snorted Chronic. “Either we beat the crap outta this phoney or I’m out of here-ere-ere.”
“Cause I could really use a bucket right about now,” warned thuddy.
“Actually, there is one thing bothering me,” admitted Knifey, ManMan’s sentient weapon. “I usually get a kind of low-grade animosity emanating from that devil’s guitar of Chronic’s, but right now it’s gone really quiet.”
“What’s that got to do with beating the crap out of the Rev-ev-ev?” demanded Chronic. “Bah! I’m gone-on-on.”
“Or some kind of paper bag,” suggested dull thud.
“And what’s with the weird echo?” Knifey wondered.
“That?” the Dark Knight answered, looming from the darkness near the vestry. “That’s just an effect of Chronic being replaced by a shapeshifting Space Fandom. I guess it mimicked Fleetwood earlier, then when you caught him it switched with Chronic.”
“Oh shit-it-it,” worried Chronic, backing away.
Messenger appeared from the shadows around the alter, literally like an avenging angel. “Yeah,” he agreed, smashing a fist into Chronic’s face. The fugitive crumpled and toppled to the floor, resuming its true form, a kind of pale, big-nosed alien. The real Chronic and Steve shimmered back from comic-book limbo beside them. Chronic kicked the Space Fandom.
“Nice work,” admitted De Brown Streak, blurring over to secure the fallen impostor. “Shame we couldn’t save poor spiffy like this.”
“Too late,” warned dull thud, vomiting noisily.
The Dark Knight leaned over his captive. “Not too late to find out a few answers,” he declared menacingly.
*
“Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Jarvis grinning at the cameras, “I give you the new, the improved, the cool and radical, the one and only… Ultimate Lair Legion!” He swept his arm back towards the mass of leather-clad heroes who had just teamed up to prevent Birthday Bandit from robbing a liquor store.
The heroes struck dramatic montage poses suitable for a double-page poster spread. Behind Jarvis were Lisa, NTU-150, Donar, Starseed, DarkHwk, Fin Fang Foom, Dark Knight, Goldeneyed, Hatman, Exile, Sorceress, Sersi, CrazySugarFreakBoy!, Rocket Racoon, Dancer, Trickshot, Visionary, Ziles, Troia 215, Messenger, Avatar, Pegasus, and Magnetic Techbird.
The crowd went wild.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that this old world is getting too hard for people to follow,” Jarvis continued. “Too much to remember. Too hard to understand if you’re not paying attention. And most of all, not kewl. So we’re going to put that right.”
“We’re out here with you plebs so everyone understands the new rules,” Lisa explained. “From now on, we’re in charge, for your own good.”
“Unless you muthas wants a superhero fight on top of yo’ skinny asses,” shouted an angry black Goldeneyed. “Don’ make me come to yo’ hood and give yo’ pain.”
“Word,” agreed DarkHwk, twisting his gauntleted fingers to make complicated rap gestures.
“That means you all have to buy my new diet video,” Dancer explained. “Christina Aguilera guest-slims.”
“I’ll also be expecting you to set up a rota of hot young women for me,” Finny grinned. “Gotta keep the super-shlong in practise, y’know.”
“Hey, anything you can do I can do better,” challenged Rocket Raccon. “Virgin deflowering contest. Right here, right now.”
“Yeah, right,” Exile hissed, popping his adamanantium claws. “And where are you going to find a virgin in Parodopolis?”
“Excuse me!” objected Ziles.
“Ch’yeah, right,” snickered CrazySugarFreakBoy! “Like we don’t know about you and Foom and DK and Hat and Sorcy . Hey, some of us have got the video.”
“Never mind that,” Sersi interrupted, miffed to have been out of the spotlight for so long. “Back to the demands. Listen up, mortal worms.”
“In fact, since we’re the ones keeping you safe from evil and all that, we’ll be expecting you to give us anything we might want,” explained Hatman. “On pain of, um, pain.”
“Compulsory membership to Greenpeace, for one,” prompted Donar. “Er, Greenpeaceth.”
“And abject worship,” added Darkhwk.
“Excuse me,” intrepid girl (she’d correct that to “woman”) reporter Bernice Teschmaker dared to interrupt. “But you can’t be serious. And isn’t Jarvis dead?”
“Who cares about continuity?” shrugged the battling butler. “You can’t appreciate us unless you see us as we are, independent of all that derivative crap that came before us. And we won’t be interfered with, edited, or censored. Anyway, this is dead.” And he fired a blast of Jarvis cosmic to evaporate Bernice.
Except she wasn’t there. She’d been swept out of harm’s way by a green and orange blur. CrazySugarFreakBoy! dropped her on the nearest rooftop garden and turned back to leather-and-rubber red, gunmetal gray, and shadowy black-clad Ultimate counterpart. “Hey, do you guys know the difference between the Lair Legion and the Ultimate Lair Legion?” he called back.
“What?” demanded Ultimate NTU-150 orienting his computerised missile array.
The entire battlefield erupted as a full-sized Makluan dragon rose from the sewers beneath, scattering the newcomers in all directions. “You’re about to find out,” warned classic Fin Fang Foom.
*
The pall of battle hung over Amazon Isle worse than the black smoke from burning paradise. It was three months since the siege had begun and the undead warriors had first assaulted the stronghold. Now the final hours of the genocide were being played out.
“They’re assembling their forces again for another attack,” reported Meneleptra 14 with dismay in her voice.
Troia looked up from bandaging Daphne 111. “Then we’ll fight them. And we’ll fight and we’ll fight and we’ll fight. And when they’ve run out of undead I am personally going to get that Polypheme and stick this spear…”
“Do you really think we can hold out again?” Meneleptra asked. “Look at us. We’re down to a last few defenders able to fight, holed up in the Temple of the Oracle, surrounded by hordes of those skeleton warriors and our own fallen warriors returned as undead.”
“And somebody’s going to pay for that too,” Troia vowed.
“Your father?” the Oracle wondered.
The new (and as yet unacknowledged) Amazon queen pushed back her raven hair from her blood-spattered face. “I’m still not convinced that was my father,” she considered. “I mean he said he was, and he looked kind of like him in a I’ve-been-dead-for-a-hundred-years way, but this… it just doesn’t feel like his style, y’know.”
A thin, wailing horn sounded over the battlefield. “They’re coming,” Meneleptra warned.
“Then we fight,” insisted Troia. She looked round at the ragged, wounded collection of Amazons that remained to defend the Chimes of Honour from the invaders. They seemed to want some kind of speech from her, some words to hold back the terror of a final, doomed combat. “Um… Never surrender! Never give in!” she told them.
Then the skeleton warriors came, hammering their bronze swords on their elaborate shields, marching in rank after rank with perfect precision.
The sky blackened and rumbled. The first heavy spots of thunder rain splashed down on the island like promises of vengeance.
“Hello, cute Troia 215!” Yo called as s/he led Visionary and Xander into the Temple compound. “Now is being the time to be getting one’s head down, Yo am thinking.” The pure thought being considered this further. “And to be not wearing metal headgear,” s/he added.
And in the skies above the island ordained by the gods, a man in a cart pulled by two flying goats screamed towards the enemy swinging a weapon that could split planets.
*
“Manga Shoggoth!” boomed the slimy tentacled protoplasm that invaded the elder beast’s Antarctic lair. “I am the Ultimate Shoggoth, here to destroy you and take your place!”
“Oh dear,” fretted the more familiar glob of sanity-mangling protomatter. “Then it’s a good job I’d just finished that dimensional gateway you’re standing on, isn’t it?” The Manga Shoggoth etched the final rune into place and there was a five-dimensional transfer effect.
“Betelguese is a terribly hot sun,” he commented to Sh’Ron as he reached for the DVD remote control.
*
As the Timewraiths passed through the skin of the Lairjet it rotted away as if aged ten thousand years – which wasn’t a bad description of what the transparent grey silhouettes were doing.
“Aw crap!” Samantha Featherstone scowled, pushing stops on her wristwatch. “I hate having to calculate the negative temporal vectors to neutralise these things.” She glanced at younger Samantha in the next seat. “You really have to try harder in maths, okay.”
“The jet’s going down,” Nats warned. “Everyone grab hold of me. Er, anyone that’s not a timesucking scary monster, that is.” He grasped his psychostave and released his telekinetic capacity in a wave of concussive force that split the rotting aircraft into pieces and sent the Timewraiths spinning away. The Samanthas and Ziles remained levitated beside Nats himself.
“They’re reorienting,” Ziles warned, checking the sensors in her skin-tight silver-foil combat suit. “And they’ve rephased their temporal condition to ignore any more of your psychokinesis.”
“I hate when they do that,” the flying phenomenon admitted. “Hold on. We’re going fast.”
“Wheeee!” cried Samantha junior.
“Keep ahead of them for a few moments longer,” called Samantha senior. “Once I’ve locked on to the folds of the temporal packets Symmetry used to create them I can unravel them like a badly knitted jumper.”
“No problem,” the flying phenomenon assured her.
“And watch out for that time/space rift opening ahead of us,” added Ziles quickly.
“Oh sh-”
*
“That has to hurt,” Al B. Harper said sympathetically to Amazing Guy as the combat against the Ultimate Captain Marbles concluded.
“Only when I breathe,” hissed the Protector of the Parodyverse. “But at least I cleaned his clock.”
The plaid energy wall shimmered again, and a new Captain Marbles variant (with the detachable accessories) burst forth to challenge AG. “Fight me now, outdated icon, for I am the future!”
“Right,” winced Amazing Guy. “How many of these things are there, Al?”
“As many as there need to be?” worried Al B. Harper.
*
The Zero Street Mission had seen many ugly and unusual sights, but even that battered desperate building had never witnessed the terrible sight of Dark Knight and Messenger playing bad cop/bad cop with a Space Fandom. “I’ll talk-alk-alk!” the bizarre shape-stealing creature mutated from a Hero Feeder screeched. “I’ll talk-alk-alk-alk-alk!”
“We haven’t even touched him yet,” Messenger assured Reverend Fleetwood.
“So this guy can take the shape of anybody near him, and the real deal gets zapped away until he takes another shape,” Chronic checked.
“Looks like,” ManMan admitted. “But he doesn’t strike me as the archvillain type.”
“So who are you working for?” De Brown Streak demanded of the captured emissary.
“Well…” considered dull thud.
“I said who?”
“Just a guess,” dull thud admitted, “but maybe… him?”
The heroes swung round and saw the wine-red mantled intruder with the red eyes glowing beneath his voluminous hood. “Good evening,” the interloper bade them.
“The Hooded Hood?” ManMan gasped. “Er, with a new costume.”
“And a bad makeup problem,” added De Brown Streak.
DK reached for a Knighterang but found he had somehow inexplicably forgotten to bring them with him today,
“I’m not sure that is the Hooded Hood,” Knifey noticed. “At least not the Hood we know and loathe.”
“Very astute, blade,” the villain admitted. “I am indeed different from the feckless fool whom you have occasionally encountered. I… am what he will become.”
“A poster boy for better dental care?” dull thud suggested.
“I am… the Cowled Criminal!”
Messenger shrugged. “Right. Well don’t give up your day job.”
The Cowled Criminal gestured and the last of the Messengers toppled over clutching his chest. “Battery problems?” the villain enquired, referring to the time-limited biotechnical device which kept the hero’s body functioning. “Perhaps a little more courtesy would earn you a little more longevity?”
“&5*£ you!” the postman hissed through his agony.
“So you have been sending out this minion to lure homeless people to the old Variety Theatre and then draining their energies,” surmised the Dark Knight. “Care to explain why?”
“And why you’re a Hooded Hood wannabe,” added ManMan.
“Fools! I am the Hooded Hood in his ultimate incarnation! I am what he becomes after the Resolution War, after the pain and suffering of a thousand, thousand years. I am the Hooded Hood as he has become at the end of time itself. I am…”
“The Cowled Criminal?” ventured dull thud.
“Er, yes. And I have allied myself with Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity who has returned to this time period, aiding her by offering victims whose temporal energies she can borrow until she is able to regain the equipment of her office as the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity.”
The Dark Knight looked up sharply. “She’s trying to take her cosmic office back?”
“Such an ally will be most useful to me, and she will then enable my scheme to reboot the whole Parodyverse as it should have been – modern, relevant, cutting away the sentimental crap and confused continuity of yesteryear, starting again in a pristine new history of my choosing.”
“You’re planning retcons and you don’t think the Hooded Hood’s going to stomp all over your head?” ManMan checked.
“Fool! I am…”
“The Hooded Hood?” ventured dull thud.
“The Cowled Criminal?” suggested DBS.
“Oh shut up,” sulked CC. “The point is, when the Hood of this time period learns of my schemes – the destruction of Amazon Isle and his daughter Troia, the corruption of his son, the replacement of the heroes with those of my own redesigned genius – then he will be forced to intervene. And that will be his downfall, for then he will be walking into my trap!”
“You’re trying to replace the LL?” Messenger glowered from the floor. “Won’t ever work.”
“It’s a very popular trend these days,” the Cowled Criminal assured him. “And it’s happening right now.”
*
The regular Lair Legion won an early advantage through teamwork. While Dancer pirouetted over the newcomers Goldeneyed teleported in sixty thousands gallons of Paradopolis Sound seawater to engulf his foes and NTU-150 electrified it. A gesture from Sorceress brought the liquid to boiling point, engulfing the tableau in stinging steam. Then Hatman went in with his Steelers cap and smashed his Ultimate counterpart on the jaw.
And vanished.
“What?” worried Finny as a key team member vanished in a flicker of interdimensional energy.
“Surprise!” called Ultimate Dancer, tagging Dancer on the shoulder so she too vanished, and then pausing to pull her leotard top back up.
“Watch out, guys!” called Goldeneyed. “When we touch our counterparts they’re cancelling us out. We’ve got to…”
The Ultimate Goldeneyed blinked in and kicked him in the ass – and he was gone.
“We’ve got to trade adversaries,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! completed the thought. “It’s a classic comic book manoeuvre.”
“It’s a tired old cliché of just the kind we’ve gotta get rid of,” Ultimate CSFB! argued, bouncing up wired on experimental Sucrose-Fueled Sociopath Formula (created by a sinister shadow conspiracy within the United States government's byzantine and Machiavellian military-industrial complex in order to turn an entire generation of American adolescents into remorselessly cold-blooded agents of the establishment – really, ask Kirk). “Nobody these days wants cutesy silver age battles. They want blood and gore. Realism.”
“Why is blood and gore more realistic than thinking or smiling?” wondered the Sorceress. “And why do you think…?”
She got no further because Ultimate Sorceress caught her from behind and she vanished from view. “Why did you think you could appear in public with that hair, skanky?” Ultimate Sorceress bitched.
That left Fin Fang Foom and CSFB! alone in combat with over a dozen Ultimate superbeings. Ultimate Banjoooo, Ultimate Jarvis, Ultimate Starseed, and Ultimate Donar teamed up to give Foom the beating of a lifetime. CSFB! bounced through Ultimate Trickshot and Ultimate Troia but was batted to the ground by Ultimate Finny’s, um, ability to suddenly grow parts of his anatomy.
“Don’t let them vanish into oblivion just yet,” Ultimate Lisa called. “Let’s have a little fun with these geeks.”
“Yes-eth,” agreed Ultimate Donar. “Bendeth them over.”
“I say peel l’il Dreamy’s genitals till he squeals that old comics are only fit fer toilet paper,” grinned Ultimate Trickshot.
“I have a tool for that,” Ultimate Ziles promised.
“Spaaaaaaaaaannnnkkkkk Raaaaayyyyy!!!!!!!”
Suddenly a cosmic force impacted upon the lower rear regions of everyone in the area, Ultimate or classic alike, spinning them apart like toys kicked by a careless infant. “What the f…” gasped Ultimate Dark Knight. “Somebody dies.”
“It’s Space Ghost!” warned Ultimate Visionary from inside a pile of rubble. “What are you doing, you moron?”
“Oh crap, it’s worse than that,” warned Ultimate Exile. “It’s Ultimate Space Ghost.”
The pantsless crimefighter played his Spank Ray across the battlefield again.
“I… I don’t think there’s a difference,” warned Ultimate Sorceress.
*
Troia 215 shattered her spear through Polypheme-1’s shield and sliced it deep into her arm.
“Bitch!” screamed the crazed Amazon betrayer, swinging her own sword to scoop out Troia’s intestines.
But the Amazon administrator was too fast, getting one dull metal wristband in the way and jerking her head forward to impact with Polypheme’s nose. “Loser,” she told the traitor.
She made a last thrust with her spear, snapping it’s haft off in Polypheme’s chest. “Dead loser,” she concluded.
As Polypheme toppled to the floor atop a pile of the skeleton warriors she had led to Amazon Isle Troia toppled to her knees and tried not to pass out. “Steady there,” Visionary cautioned her, running forward to hold her up. “You can’t pass out now that you’re winning.”
“Winning?” Troia looked around her blurily.
“Yes,” agreed Yo, dancing between incoming undead with his/her rapier using the finesse of an Olympic champion; well, of an Olympic champion that had missed the gold and was now slaughtering the judges. “We are to be pushing back evil dead-things and to be stomping on them.”
With a final shriek of lightning the storm ahead spent itself, leaving a clear starry night. Torn and bloody but triumphant, Donar dropped down to join the others in the ruins of the Temple of the Oracle. “They hast been ass-kickéd for the nonce,” he agreed. “But they wilt gather unto their number more of their kin and attack again come the morn.”
“Donar,” Troia breathed. “You came.”
“Well spotted, young Troia 215,” conceded Xander, emerging from the interior of the besieged shrine now that the fighting was lulled. “But sadly we do not have time for happy reunions.”
“Is always time for happy reunions,” Yo protested.
Xander pointed to the camps of the Skeleton Warriors surrounding the promontary. “You know why they are here?”
“Because that muscled cow Polypheme led them here,” Troia spat, “and because some guy who says he’s my dad summoned them.”
Donar looked uncomfortable. “Thy father art here?” He removed his arm from Troia’s shoulder just to be on the safe side.
“I don’t think it was him. It looked like him. He said it was him. But… I dunno. He just wasn’t… it wasn’t the right sort of evil.”
Visionary looked over the devastated island. Most of the fires had died down now, but every vista was dappled with corpses. “It seems like a pretty good evil to me.”
Xander shrugged. “The Cowled Criminal claims to be a future incarnation of the Hooded Hood, motivated by an insane envy of his former, living, self, and a fanatical desire to shape current events in the direction which will result in his own creation. That’s why he needed to take this island.”
“Because I’m the Hooded Hood’s daughter?” Troia puzzled.
“Because we guard the Chimes of Honour,” the Oracle of the Amazons revealed. “They are an instrument of the gods, once the device which held us plugging the dimensional nexus to the Dreary Dimension.”
“Exactly,” the master of the mystic crafts agreed. “The Cowled Crook is drawing his powers from a phenomenon he has engineered at the end of time, the Plaid Wall of Entropy, pure anti-story. He’s had a short-cut on his plans for the Parodyverse because he’s allied himself with Madame Symmetry, who has time-manipulating abilities and has allowed him to transfer his energies here – hence the Skeletal Warrior minions and the Ultimate heroes.”
“The what?” puzzled Visionary.
“Never mind. Unless that dimensional transfer conduit is blocked the world as you know it will end sometime tomorrow,” Xander concluded. “Just before lunch, I expect.”
“Then Yo is thinking we must be to be stopping it, cute Xander.”
Xander the Improbable nodded, and suddenly he looked tired. “Yes,” he agreed. “The real reason the Cowled Criminal wanted Amazon Isle destroyed was to prevent the Chimes of Honour being used to move this place to stop up that conduit, to guard it as it once guarded the way from the Dreary Dimension.”
“The Chimes cannot do that,” objected the Oracle. “You may be a clever clockmaker, mortal man, but to realign the chimes thus would require divine energies.”
Troia was the first to realise what that meant. “Oh,” she gasped, looking at Donar. “You mean the energies of a god.”
“I art a god,” admitted the Ausgardian. “Borrow of mine energies to attune thy instrument.”
“Not borrow,” Xander warned him. “Take. Use up, never to be replenished.”
“Hold on,” Visionary objected. “You’re saying this will… use up Donar? Kill him?”
“Worse,” predicted Xander. “But it will save the Parodyverse.”
Troia looked up at Donar and blinked back tears. “I… I don’t want to ask this of you, big guy,” she told him. “I don’t want you to go. But protecting the world, that’s always been the Amazon’s duty.”
“And now you are Queen of the Amazons, my lady,” the Oracle told her. “As your mother and your aunt before you, now you lead us to our destiny. But you must choose it.”
“What,” stammered Troia. “I can’t even type or file! Donar, I…”
“Hush, milady. I had looked for many sweet and happy years with thee, but now duty is upon us and we cannot fail. Middlegard must be preserved.”
“Is not… is not to be fair!” wept Yo.
“It is the price,” answered Xander implacably.
“Come on,” Visionary called to the others, biting back his own emotions. “They get a few minutes alone for a last farewell kiss. It’s in the rules.”
“Then we are to be sacrificing our friend to be saving the Parodyverse,” mourned Yo.
*
The Westminster Necropolis Company was headquartered in a vast Edwardian building just off Oxford Street in London. Behind the sober stone façade were dark wood-panelled offices and board rooms, tiled hallways with wrought-iron staircases, musty file-rooms with the secrets of kinds hidden within. On the top floor were the chambers of the Company’s founder, and the hundreds of thousands of people who used the services of the world’s largest undertakers would have been surprised to find that she had just returned to take up residence once more.
“Ah, guests,” Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity noticed as Nats, Ziles, Samantha and Samantha were shepherded in to her presence. “I trust you have recovered from the temporal rift we used to bring you here.”
“I could have thwarted it given a few more seconds,” older Samantha muttered, eyeing the temporal wristwatch that she had inherited which now lay on the desk before Symmetry.
“Yes,” agreed the mistress of the Westminster Necropolis Company, “but I have several hundred years of experience using the Chronometer of Infinity which you cannot be expected to match in just a few short months. Sadly you have no more chance to practise, little time-ghost.”
“Me?” Samantha scorned. “I’m not the one who’s using borrowed chronal energies from an unstable future to try and claw my way into the main continuum. Do you think the Shaper or the Chronicler aren’t going to object to what you’re doing?”
“I think that every office holder is supreme in their own area of expertise,” Symmetry answered. “My ally will be giving the Triumverate quite enough to worry about for now, until I have opportunity to deal with the situation myself.”
“And you really think the Lair Legion isn’t going to pound you into jelly?” Nats asked. “We do keep track of where missing members go, you know.”
“At last report, all the Lair Legion were gone except two, and it was only a matter of time before our improved Ultimate Lair Legion tracked them down also. Other groups such as the Abandoned Legion, the JBH, the Abhumans, the Secret Seven, the Belgian Waffle Five, were all replaced beforehand. A few minor solo heroes are unaccounted for, but their updated counterparts will hunt them soon enough.”
“Who’s left?” Ziles wondered. “Of the LL?”
“The dragon and the CrazySugarFreakHero,” Symmetry replied. “They slipped away while a little internecine fracas was occurring. Why are you smiling?”
“Oh, you’re going to get soooo stomped if you failed to get those two.”
Symmetry shrugged. “It will be amusing to wring your defiance from you. As for the others, well if the redefined heroes don’t get them, we shall shortly be implementing Ultimate Baron Zemo, Ultimate Dr Moo, Ultimate Grim Reaper, Ultimate Pearson’s Porter, Ultimate Evil Monkey, Ultimate Canadian Nightmare, and Ultimate Gurl, with a new Ultimate Scourge.” She paused to contemplate this. “There are far too many cities on this world these days anyway.”
“And us?” Samantha demanded. “I’m sure you have some gloaty thing to do with us?”
“She’s a big poo-poo head,” little Samantha explained, pointing at the black-silk clad villainess.
“I do,” admitted Symmetry. She gestured to her funerially-garbed retainers. “Take Nats for his lobotomy – as if anyone would notice. Tell them to make sure only to remove his free will, not the portions of his brain that control his psionic gifts or link with the Psychostave. I want him to be useful hereafter.”
“When I get out of these power dampners I am so going to deliver something to you,” the flying phenomenon warned.
“Take Ziles down to the fear generator. I am curious to learn what these Gahreams she so dreads actually are,” Symmetry continued.
“Noooo!” screamed Ziles, struggling against her captors. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“Take the child out and cut her throat. I have no use for her. Strap the older version up here. I have some diverting experiments I’ve been wanting to try upon a time-displaced subject.”
“Sam! Sam!” screamed Samantha the younger as she was dragged away. Her older self tried to fight but the undead undertakers holding her were too strong.
Symmetry returned to her desk to do a little paperwork.
*
De Brown Streak moved faster than the eye could see, speeding towards the Cowled Criminal intent on taking him down.
The Cowled Criminal had always been at the other end of the alley to the one DBS was racing towards. He held up a comic book and showed it to the heroes. “Appreciate this,” he advised them. “It’s very rare and valuable. Tales to Infuriate #5, featuring the first appearance of the heroes of the Parodyverse. Mint condition. Never unbagged. Quoted at $290,000 in the Overstreet Price Guide.” He stopped smiling and his eyes glowed redly. “I thought it would make a suitable final prison for the unwanted, outdated heroes of yesteryear.”
DBS vanished and appeared on a panel inside the comic.
“How can you say we’re unwanted?” ManMan objected. “See how much good we have done?” Then he too vanished into the pages.
“What have you done recently?” CC shrugged. “Besides, it’s now how much good you’ve done that counts, it’s your style and attitude. No point saving the world if it bores the pants off people.”
“Well, you’d know all about boring folks,” snarled Messenger, leaping forward to keep the Cowled Criminal occupied while DK moved through the shadows behind him.
“Your concepts have a lot to offer,” CC told them. “If only they were repackaged for a wider audience. It’s nothing personal,” he said as DK and Messenger winked out. “Just a demographic thing.”
The atmosphere around the villain burst into light, blinding him for a moment as Cressida transmuted air to flare. dull thud leaped in and kicked the Cowled Criminal in the crotch. “This is personal, hen!” he told the crumpled villain.
“No!-oh!-oh!-oh!” howled the Space Fandom, reaching out and swapping his form for thuddy’s, sending the Scottish superhero into comic-book limbo.
But the Fandom had made one mistake. ~~You do realise that Davie and I are two different entities, right?~~ Cressida asked from inside the Fandom’s stomach. ~~It’s a symbiotic relationship. If it wasn’t, I could flex and do this~~
“Aaagh!” screamed the Space Fandom, clutching his belly. There was another flash and thud was back. He slammed his head into the pain-stricken Fandom’s nose and sent the villainous minion toppling to the ground in a welter of blood and tears.
Then the Cowled Criminal blinked thud and Cressida out of existence.
And that just left Chronic.
“Hey, don’t look at me,” the guitar player shrugged. “I’m not a good guy. I just slob around with Steve here, see?”
Then he hit the Cowled Crook across the face with the devil’s guitar, grabbed the comic book as it dropped, and ran for his life. “‘Course, that doesn’t mean I can’t dislike you anyway, you big tit,” he declared as he fled.
*
Flapjack ran into Lisa at the door of Herringcarp Asylum. “What are you doing here?” the amorous advocatrix demanded of the Lair Legion’s hunchbacked henchman. “I thought you didn’t work for the Hooded Hood any more?”
“Only when the plot demands it,” Flapjack agreed. “I’m here right now to get his help for the Lair Legion.”
“You?” Lisa puzzled. “I thought you’d enjoy having a more degenerate, nasty, sex-mad, violent bunch of heroes to work for.”
“So did I, mistress,” admitted Flapjack, “but they fired me for not being disgusting enough. Said I was tame. Said I was camp. I’ll show them bloody camp, the bastards.”
“And since it was a retcon problem you thought you’d appeal to the expert,” the first lady of the Lair Legion surmised. “Come on then. He’s got to know we’re coming.”
The doors of Herringcarp Asylum creaked open. “Good evening,” said the Hooded Hood.
*
“Give up yet?” the Captain Marbles asked Amazing Guy.
AG spat out another tooth and glared up through swollen eyes. “Only… just… starting…” he wheezed.
*
“Heeere FinnyFinnyFinny!” called out Ultimate Messenger as the search party for the last two unaccounted for classic Legionnaires progressed into Slumtown.
“I still say we just line up some chippies as hostages an’ do ‘em till the dragon and the kid give up,” argued Ultimate Goldeneyed
“There’s no challenge in that,” argued Ultimate Trickshot. “Sounds fun though. Later.”
“Heh. We got little Valeria for later,” Ultimate Exile reminded them.
The group passed on, ignoring the garbage skip in the alleyway. Then it transformed back into Fin Fang Foom and revealed CrazySugarFreakBoy! hiding within.
“We’ve got to do something fast,” CSFB! urged. “Before these guys do something unpardonable.”
“I’ve tried contacting Dan Drury,” Finny reported, “but he seemed to be a jive-talking black man for some reason. Then Ultimate HALLIE tried to suck me into some VR sex game via my comm-card.”
“You should have let me handle that one,” CSFB! objected. “So where are we headed?”
“I think Falcon has a place near here. If we can get to him before he’s Ultimized he has the security clearance to get us in touch with the person we need.”
“And then we kick these Ultimate assholes all the way back to oblivion, right?” hissed CSFB! “They’re spitting on everything a comic book hero should be. They’re…”
“There’s nothing wrong with trying new approaches to material,” Finny argued back. “The form can’t stand still, and new radical interpretations can provoke massive public interest…”
“Prostituting what has gone before is no substitute for genuine creativity…”
“Can’t meet your narrow definitions all the time…”
“I knew I could find you guys,” spiffy sighed, limping out of the storm drain. “I just had to follow the trail of literary criticism.” Sure, Mark Hopkins had been buried under a building, but if there’s one thing a symbiotic plant knows how to do it’s to dig.
CSFB! beamed. “spiffster! Excellent. Now we’re assembling a scratch team to go and sort out the villains, kind of like in Giant-Sized X-Men #1 when…”
“Oh great,” complained Chronic, whom spiffy had caught up with in the sewers. “More heroes. Just what I needed.”
*
The Hooded Hood leaned back on his throne and cradled the tips of his fingers together.
“So what are you going to do about it?” demanded Lisa.
“Do?” the cowled crime-czar asked. “I am going to do nothing.”
“What?” gasped Flapjack. “Er, I mean, what, master! There’s some nut-job running around claiming to be an undead you, replacing the heroes with dark broad-brush reworkings, trying to kill Troia, plotting to fix the Resolution War, and you won’t stop him?”
“Please help,” Lisa asked. “I’ll do anything - anything - to save my friends.”
“I know that,” the Hood agreed. “Kindly button up your blouse again. Flapjack appears to be having respiratory problems. The reason I cannot interfere right now is that this Cowled Criminal buffoon has laid a series of causal traps. If I attempt to utilise my retconning abilities they will interact with his own and spill the Parodyverse into annihilation. This is what he hopes I will do and is why he is provoking me in this manner.”
“But you’ve got some devious plot up your sleeve anyway, right?” Lisa urged. “With about seven or eight different motivations, and a nasty twist in the tail.”
“There is nothing I can do, my dear,” the Hooded Hood apologised.
“Aw, c’mon boss!” protested Flapjack. “You’ve always got something in mind. You gotta… Awp!”
Lisa had grabbed the hunchback by the nose and was leading him from the chamber. “You heard the nasty archvillain. Nothing he can do. Let’s not waste any more of his valuable plotting time.”
She didn’t release Flapjack until they were once more outside the asylum gates. “My node!” complained the Lair Legion’s manservant. “What was that all about.”
“You heard Ioldabaoth,” the lovely lawyer smiled. “He never lies. He said there was nothing he could do. He said he couldn’t interfere right now. So you know what that means, right?”
“That we’re in deep doo-doo?”
Lisa grinned nastily. “That he’s already interfered before the Cowled Crook ever started this, and that anything that he could do has already been done.”
“Oh. Oh dear.”
*
The two undertakers bundled young Samantha into a dark room where a small coffin just her size was waiting for her. Unspeakingly they unfolded cut-throat razors that they intended to use for the traditional purpose. Sam screamed and clenched her tiny fists to fight to the end.
A cavalry sabre point burst out of the chest of one of the undertakers, then withdrew and sliced the creature’s head off. At the same time the other undertaker stumbled as somebody shattered the back of his knees. As he fell the wooden stake hammered into his heart and he shivered into a pile of dust.
“Hello, m’dear,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton bade his granddaughter.
“Grampa!” squealed Samantha, leaping to her rescuer’s arms. “Me and Sam have been looking everywhere for you!”
“Likewise,” answered Asil, retrieving her stake in case there were more undead undertakers later. “We had serious problems breaking into this place without using any time effects that might have triggered Symmetry’s alarms. She is a major doody-head.”
“I told her she was a poo-poo brain,” Sam confirmed.
“She is certainly no lady,” Mumphrey conceded. “But so far we have the advantage. She thinks Asil and I are dead at the hands of her assassins, whereas actually they killed some bizarre new versions of us that we had allowed to take our places. Just as well. Nasty blighters. No class.”
“We have to rescue your older self and the others now,” Asil explained. “But first, Sam, there’s something only you can do.”
*
The Chimes of Honour resembled a cross between a cuckoo clock and a crystal cathedral. There were several hundred moving parts, interlocking cogs each blessed by a different pantheon, each interacting in the way that the blessings of no one belief system could manage. There were springs so thin that their diameter was measured in charm and strangeness. There were clockwork figures that rang the hours, and each hour was a holy service at the bequest of the gods.
Xander tinkered with the mechanism using a plastic spoon and a wad of banana-flavoured chewing gum.
“Will this work?” Visionary worried nervously. “Only I promised Cheryl that I wouldn’t reorder the cosmos on my way to pick up fish sticks.”
“It’s ready,” Xander admitted. “All it needs is the very heart’s essence of a god.”
“Donar…” Troia called, reaching one hand forward before forcing herself to stand silently. The crown of the Amazons weighed heavily on her brow.
“Is not fair,” sobbed Yo.
“Tis the duty of the strong to protecteth the weak,” Donar told them. “Oftentimes must some sacrifice be made that all may prosper. I art guardian of Middlegard, son of Gail, as much as son of the Oldman. Let the transfer be done!”
“Very well,” said Xander sombrely. “Place your hands here.”
The Chimes rang then, discordant at first and then echoing out across reality clear and true. The skies above Amazon Isle turned black then red, and finally became a hazy grey as the whole land was moved to the Dimensional Nexus, shutting off the passage between the Cowled Criminal and the temporal rift that allowed him to draw upon the energies of the plaid phenomenon.
Al B. Harper was a little surprised to find an island materialising under him, but it gave him somewhere to lay the battered Amazing Guy after the Captain Marbles had melted into nothing.
The energies around the Chimes coalesced and the barriers ordained by the gods reformed. The besieging skeleton warriors were blown away, their very essences scattered across the Parodyverse. The island became green and new once more, paradise regained.
And Donar screamed.
*
The Ultimate Lair Legion arrived unannounced at the Safe, Gothametropilis’ supervillain containment facility, but made themselves known by blowing the front gates off their hinges. “Hi, folks!" Ultimate Starseed called. “We just decided to drop by.”
Some of the inmates who had been in the prison yard at the time decided to make a dash through the shattered exit. Ultimate DK, Ultimate Messenger, and Ultimate Dancer caught them and twisted their heads off.
“You’re not going to get ahead that way,” quipped Ultimate Messenger.
“We’re here looking for fugitives,” Ultimate Finny boomed. “Vicious sucky impostors who look like us except for the lame-ass origins and pointless characterisation. We have reason to believe that they’re here.”
“Yeah. Drury spotted a SPUD override code being used on some geek Commie’s prison cell and we hacked into the security cameras,” Ultimate Hatman boasted.
“And then we saw dear missing Finny, CSFB!, and spiffy with dear little Falcon organising a jailbreak,” tutted Ultimate Ziles
“And dear little Chronic with him,” Ultimate Troia grinned. “I so want his testes as earrings.”
“And thou shalt have them, mine princess,” promised Ultimate Donar. “Er, what art testes?”
“Got ‘em!” Ultimate NTU-150 called, looking at a wrist scanner on his shattercannon arm. “They’re trying to cut out that way.”
“Not for long,” Ultimate Goldeneyed promised, teleporting huge swathes of the wall away to reveal the fleeing heroes. “First we kill them. Then we party.”
“N-no!” the timid man with the thick Russian accent cried as Ultimate Jarvis pinned him to the wall. “Please… do not be…”
“Don’t!” shouted Finny, rising to his full draconic size and batting Jarvis away. “Don’t shut his mind down!”
“Why not?” shrugged Ultimate Tina. “You mean like this?” The telepath concentrated and switched off the struggling prisoner’s brain functions. He fell to the floor silent as a corpse.
And grew.
“Yesss!” yesssed Dreamcatcher Foxglove. “New radical character falls for the same old plots. You know who that is?”
Falcon rose to the air avoiding a sudden assault run from Ultimate Falcon, a brash negro bedecked with hundreds of gold pimp chains that seemed to slow him down just enough to outmanoeuvre him.
“I know he’s a dead man,” Ultimate the Man Who Wasn’t There laughed, appearing from nowhere to twist the prisoner’s neck.
Except there wasn’t a neck. Only a shingle roof topped with indestructible turf, atop a bulky slate body fifteen feet wide with the strength of a shifting continent. And it spoke.
“Yurt smash!”
The sentient peasant hut got stronger the more stupid it became, and Ultimate Tina has just shut down its higher brain functions. It moved with impossible speed and smeared Ultimate TMWWT across the wall of the Safe.
“Hey, this is a Fredrick’s of Hollywood designer original!” complained Ultimate Sersi as the blood spattered across her.
“Nothing is stupider than the Yurt!” the monster shouted, hurling Ultimate Finny and Ultimate Banjooooo across the bay and forty miles offshore.
“I think we evened the odds a little,” spiffy admitted, avoiding Starseed’s Gah! blasts and Exile’s energy bursts, vaulting over Ultimate Sorceress and Ultimate Magnetic Techbird, and using the power his fern had stored from the attacks on him to hammer Ultimate Jarvis through eight layers of reinforced basement.
“Yurt is the dumbest one there is!” The Yurt reached out one massive wall-like arm to pop Ultimate Pegasus’ head then buried Ultimate Troia and Ultimate DarkHwk under forty tons of rubble.
“Teamwork!” called out Ultimate Hatman. “We need to use teamwork.”
“C’yeah, right,” mocked Ultimate Trickshot.
“I just hope the cameras are on me as I take thing baddie down!” Ultimate Dancer crowed.
“Hey, my kill!” objected Ultimate Exile, popping his adamantium claws.
“But what about teamwork?” demanded Ultimate Hatman. “We have to…”
Ultimate Goldeneyed teleported Hatman’s innards to Havana. “Aw shuddup! We needed a new deputy-leader anyway. I vote me.”
“Hey!” objected Ultimate Sorceress. “That was my boyfriend you just gutted!”
“So? See me later and I’ll make you forget all about that loser, sweet-buns.”
“Well… okay.”
“Yo loves a happy ending.”
“Nothing can stop the Yurt!”
Ultimate Sersi flew into the air crackling with power. “Really?” she challenged. “Let’s test that.”
Her molecular rearrangement ray was joined by NTU-150 repulisvers, Starseed’s Gah! scream, Magnetic Techbird’s electromagnetic beam, Pegasus’ cosmic blast, and Exile’s energy stream. The Yurt writhed and struggled as primal forces tried to disassemble him.
“We’ve gotta help him,” Falcon called out. “We’ve got to…”
“Cracked the secret override SPUD put in his flying suit without him noticing,” Ultimate Ziles announced. “Shutting him down now.”
“What the…?” Sam Wilson suddenly found himself plummeting from two hundred feet.
Ultimate Falcon tagged him before he hit the ground and he vanished into the comic book with all the others.
“This is getting bad,” Chronic worried from his hiding place as the remaining Ultimate LL ganged up on Finny. “Even with the Yurt beating up anything that moves we’re going down.”
“Not yet,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! grinned. “All that was just the diversion. The real action’s right here.”
“It is?” Chronic flinched nervously. “Did I mention I’m not with you guys?”
“You got us this comic book that that Cowled Creep shut the others up in,” CSFB! noted. “And now it’s my job to let them out again.
“I didn’t know you had that kind of power,” admitted Chronic.
The experienced fingers of Dreamcatcher Foxglove unsealed the mint edition and slipped off the mylar covering. “Comics aren’t meant to be in that stuff,” he explained. “Comics are meant to be read. Like this.”
Mint pages turned and were immediately downgraded to very fine.
There was another trademark flash of light, and suddenly the battle was complicated by the appearance of the classic Lair Legion once more, along with the Abandoned Legion, Messenger, dull thud, De Brown Streak, ManMan, and a confusion of others.
“Hah!” mocked spiffy from underneath the dogpile of Ultimate Troia, Ultimate Trickshot, Ultimate Visionary, and Ultimate Rocket Racoon. “Lair Legion Line Up!”
And they did.
*
Nats did not enjoy being strapped to operating tables while somebody prepared to shave his head. “Nooo!” he called. “Male pattern baldness runs in my family! Don’t do this.”
“Don’t worry,” the surgeon told him. “By the time you’re lobotomised, you won’t care.”
“Yeah, about that too. Do you think that instead you… couldn’t?”
“The mistress commands it. Besides, you are a worthless triviality that will not be missed.”
“Hey! Do you mind? I’m lying right here!”
“Of all the Lair Legion, you alone were found unworthy to have an Ultimate version,” sniffed the surgeon. “Your concept was found unredeemable.”
“What? Hey! What do you mean unredeemable? They did Ultimate Rocket Racoon but not Ultimate me?”
“Think about that,” the surgeon smiled, reaching for his instruments. “Let that be your final thought.”
Then Samantha hit the surgeon with a kidney dish. “Or, alternately,” the woman from the future suggested to the flying phenomenon, “you could escape and help us save the day.”
*
“These undertakers are not very nice,” Asil confided in Ziles as she helped the trembling Xnylonian out of the nightmare chamber. “But they explode into dust in a very satisfying manner when stabbed.”
The alien adventuress retrieved her equipment from the lab bench and looked round for the exit. “I wonder if the same is true of Symmetry,” she speculated. “Just let me hack into this security system and set it onto shutdown diagnostic mode…”
Ziles was a big believer in empirical experimentation.
*
Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity watched the battle at the Safe on her monitor with some disgust. “That cowled cretin,” she sighed. “He may have brought back bigger, more brutal versions of the heroes of this Parodyverse but they don’t have the teamwork, or the motivation… the sheer character of the originals. And now that his conduit to the Plaid Wall of Entropy is blocked in this time period he can’t dismiss the originals by having them touched by their counterparts. Nor can be bring in more simulacrae to assist them.” She swivelled her chair away from the screen. “What a loser. Still, I have what I want.”
“Really, madam?” Sir Mumphrey Wilton asked sharply. “Are you certain?”
Symmetry turned round and froze the eccentric Englishman in a shroud of null-time.
Or not. “Please. You’re not up against a beginner now, madam,” Mumphrey told her, walking out of it. “Nor attacking a child.”
Symmetry reached for the Chronometer of Infinity, the hourglass on her desk, and seized it up to wield against the interloper. “Die!” she told him.
Mumphrey pulled the Chronometer of Infinity, the pocketwatch on his waistcoat and countered the lethal chronal energies. “I think not,” he answered.
“What?” gasped Symmetry, and for the first time she seemed less than perfectly poised and in control. “I have the Chronometer.”
“You have a Chronometer,” conceded Mumph. “The timepiece taken from the Ultimate iteration of me. The one powered by the Cowled Crook’s energies drawn through the conduit from the Plaid Wall of Entropy. The conduit that is now blocked.”
“No!” Symmetry looked at the hourglass in her hand and saw its flaws. “No! It can’t! I…”
“Borrowed from the future to make your power-ploy in the now?” completed Sir Mumphrey implacably. “Wagered time that you could murder and torture and thieve your way back to power before your debt was due? Madam, your gamble has failed and your debt to time will now be collected.”
“Not quite,” smirked Symmetry. “You see, I also have the future Chronometer of Infinity taken from your delightful granddaughter, old fool! And with that I can… Where is it?”
Seven year old Samantha held up her wrist to show off the digital watch there. “Here, you nasty old witchpoo!” she called out. Then she stuck out her tongue for good measure. “I know how to make the alarm go off as well.”
“Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!”
Time folded round the villainess, stripping years from her in payment for the unwise loan she had made. Skin cracked and became flakes. Bone whitened and became dust. The very temporal essence of the chairwoman of the Westminster Necropolis Company was smoothed out of the continuum as the forces she had unbalanced set themselves aright again.
“What that right, granpa?” asked Samantha Featherstone.
“Just as I told you, m’dear,” smiled Mumphrey proudly. “Now we can probably get some ice-cream.”
As Symmetry had said, every office-holder is supreme in their area of expertise.
*
Donar fell from the skies, burning.
“Help him!” called Yo, running forward to catch the toppling hemigod in his/her arms. S/he looked up with wonder. “He is being alive!”
“He… he is?” swallowed Troia.
“Of course he is,” Xander answered dully, throwing down the spoon he was holding and walking off. “I never said he’d die. I said it would be worse than that.”
“Worse,” worried Vizh.
“What is it, Donar?” Troia asked. “What has happened to you.”
Donar looked around at the restored Amazon Isle flickering in the dimensional nexus. He looked at the shattered remnants of the skeleton warriors and at the corpse of Polypheme-1. He looked at the confused Al B. Harper who was tapping away on his calculator as the women-warriors tended to Amazing Guy’s wounds. Finally he looked at the Amazon queen and he shuddered.
“I have spent my heart’s strength,” he answered. “In all other ways, as warrior, as divinity, as hero I remain unscathed. But I do not love thee any more. That part of me is gone.”
“W-what?” Troia asked, stepping back a little.
“I regard thee highly. I hold thee as a true friend. But I can ne’ermore see thee as anything else.” He gripped Mjalcolm and stared down at the ground. “Tis a most bitter sacrifice.”
Xander found Gail down by the shore. “It’s done,” he told the Earth Mother. “Our bargain is complete.”
“It was a hard bargain for both of us, magus,” Gail answered. “The Hooded Hood may have manipulated the attraction between my son and the Amazon wench but it grew strong and fair. I took no pleasure in sundering it, but sometimes a mother must use her son to uphold her honour – her duties.”
Both of them looked back at the damaged temple as the storm clouds once again gathered overhead. “Now there is only vengeance,” Xander sighed.
*
Seven months of intensive therapy had almost cured Pudu Lad of his morbid fear of superheroes. He knew he was safe in his cell where nothing could hurt him. Then Ultimate Exile crashed through the wall and collapsed three stories of supervillain prison onto him.
“Aaaaaaaagggghhh!” Pudu Lad contributed.
The classic Exile crashed through the other wall and hit Ultimate Exile before the updated version could bring his claws to bear. Hit him with Pudu Lad.
“See, the problem is,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! explained as he used his Yowi-Zowie Yo-Yo against his Ultimate counterpart’s razor-smileys, “that you guys might be kewl but you’re just not interesting. You’re a fad, a gimmick…”
“We’re more popular than you, you little dweeb loser!” Ultimate CSFB! replied, bouncing the other way and catching his classic version by the ankle. “We’re the future. Look at me. Better looking. Harder. Faster. A babe magnet first class.. And I don’t wear something called a silly suit.”
“Right,” agreed classic CSFB! “But do you know the main difference between you and me?”
“I know how to treat my momma? Oh yeah!”
“Nah. The answer is, I don’t have exploding Combat Candy slipped down inside the pants of my superhero costume.”
There was a bright flash.
“Wow,” Goldeneyed called to his updated counterpart, “I can tell you’re way kewler than me, the way you’ve accessories the basic black costume with little dangly silver wristbands and thigh straps. Wish I’d thought of that.”
“You’re an idiot, Bry,” Ultimate Goldeneyed told him. “All that power and you never even tried to use it to make things better for yourself.”
“Nope. I used it to make things better for other people. Listen, it’s been really nice learning that I’m not as big a dweeb as I could be but I’ve gotta go do some serious superheroing now. I don’t need to fight you to prove I’m better.” Goldeneyed laughed at his Ultimate self. “I know.”
“Don’t fight and you die!” Ultimate G-Eyed promised.
“All he meant was that he’s got better things to do,” Hatman explained as he pulled on his Supersonics cap. “But since you killed my counterpart, I don’t.” And the Canadian smiled a nasty smile. “Want to try that again?”
“So you’re a big ass spellcaster,” Whitney Darkness shrugged as she faces Ultimate Sorceress. “And I do mean the big ass part, honey. But it doesn’t count for a thing.”
“I’m more powerful than you’ll ever be, you mousy little plebe,” Ultimate Sorceress laughed, hurling bolts of annihilation at her previous self.
“Sure,” agreed Whitney. “But we use sorcery. It’s not about power. It’s about knowledge. And heart. And being what we’re meant to be. And I’m here to tell you, spell girl… we’re meant to be me.” And the Sorceress summoned up her will and began the lesson.
“Teamwork, guys!” shouted G-Eyed, teleporting in to place a boot in Ultimate Trickshot’s face and then blinking Ultimate Tina and Ultimate Troia into the path of Ultimate Pegasus’ cosmic blast.
That freed up De Brown Streak and dull thud to take on Ultimate Sersi. “I can transmute you into slime!” she warned her opponents.
~~thuddy is already slime ~~ Cressida commented helpfully as she neutralised the Austernal’s transmogrification powers. De Brown Streak slipped Sersi the neural tranquillisers from the Star Trekkish labs two countries away before she could react.
“Don’t worry, sweet-tush!” called Ultimate Rocket Racoon, powerdiving dull thud into the ground. “It’s me to the rescue. You can thank me later in the hot tub.”
Messenger shot RR three times in the head, exploding his rodent brains across the battlefield. “You have no idea how often I’ve wanted to do that,” the postman admitted. “Now if only I can find Ultimate CSFB!”
Ultimate Pegasus was just goring Pudu Lad – not because he was a threat but because he made pretty squealing noises – when classic Pegasus caught up with her. “At what point did somebody decide that I needed bionic power-horns on my forehead,” she asked angrily.
“At the point we realised you were a complete forgotten lame-o,” answered her Ultimate self. “Let me demonstrate.”
Pegasus shifted to centaur fighting form. “Prepare to see some stars,” she warned her other self.
“This is getting intense, Knifey” worried ManMan, ducking under the warring winged women. “Did we really just deck Ultimate Freddie Prinz Jr?”
Cobra faced Ultimate Cobra with contempt on her face. “You caricature,” she spat. “You think it’s all about killing?”
“No,” the psychopath assassin answered her. “It’s about torture as well.”
“It’s about sacred killing,” the Cobra answered with eyes like chips of cold sapphire. “Let me demonstrate.”
“Your team is doing well,” Ultimate Finny admitted to normal boring Finny. “Co-ordination and all that. You know I’m going to eat your spleen, right?”
“You’re not going to win,” Fin Fang Foom replied. “You’ve got the look, you’ve got the names, you’ve even got the style sometimes, but you’ve not got the mission. I’m willing to die to save innocents and get the job done. You’re not even willing to spoil a book deal for it. Who do you think’s going to see this through to the end?”
The two Dark Knights flitted through the shadows like lethal ghosts. “We don’t have to do this, you know,” Ultimate DK finally offered. “We could just go somewhere more private an be alone.”
DK shuddered. “You know the problems with knock-off copies of me?” he asked. “They don’t even have the imagination to change the thermite charge remote activation codes in their utility belts. Sigma Theta Jerusalem Twelve, zero delay, engage.”
“Hi,” Dancer called to her own adversary. “Skanky stupid cutoff leotard, vacuous bimbette expression, and back-aching model pose. Please don’t tell me someone thought you were an improvement over me.”
“Don’t forget to add successful, popular, lusted after, not a loser waitress, and dating Ben Afflick,” Ultimate Dancer smirked.
“Or the broken nose,” Dancer added, cartwheeling forward. “Let’s not forget your broken nose. And frankly, I could manage without the Ben Afflick thing too.”
Then the skies darkened and storm clouds gathered. Lightning laced through Finny, Hatman, G-Eyed, Exile, and HV. “Game over-eth!” laughed Ultimate Donar.
“Crap. How many more of them are there?” worried a smouldering Hunter Victorious as he staggered from the blast.
“More than enough,” laughed Ultimate HV (with the simplified continuity, and renamed Spawn). “The rest of your little team’s down again, Stephen. Paste Pot Pete’s a smear on the pavement. Cap and his counterpart have debated themselves insensible. I think both our Cobras are bleeding to death.”
“Then let’s do the tie-breaker,” spat HV.
Ultimate Donar hammered the stunned Finny to the ground so that Ultimate Finny could move in to tear his throat out.
Ultimate Finny found himself telekinetically hurled seven hundred miles upwards.
“I just want you people to know I am so not impressed that I was considered too lame to be Ultimised, and at the same time amazingly relieved,” Nats announced, lowering his Psychostave and pounding Ultimate Magnetic Techbird with a force outside the elecromagnetic spectrum.
“And I want you to know that I can be attractive without flashing that much cleavage,” Ziles added, appearing behind her Ultimate counterpart, grabbing her hair, and introducing Ultimate Ziles’ chin to classic Ziles knee. “Or peroxide.”
Ultimate Donar hurled his hammer at Nats’ skull.
Mjalcolm TM intercepted and there was a shattering of windows in a three mile radius. Donar flew into the combat and the scary bit was this: he said nothing at all.
“Ho, pale forebear!” Ultimate Donar snarled. “I have long waited for a chance to – urk!”
“Is it me or does the Greek guy seem a bit tense?” worried spiffy.
“Tense,” agreed Chronic as they ducked the low flying building.
There was a flash of rapier and a hot woman in a low-cut silk blouse flattened both of them. “Foolish oldlings! Ultimate Yo will now be dealing with you all!”
“Is not to be so,” Yo disagreed, leaping forward to intercept his/her revised edition. “Yo is to be showing you.”
As the two of them touched they merged into the Happy Place. Then both reappeared smiling.
“Ultimate Yo is to be apologising to all you cute oldling characters,” Ultimate Yo called out. Then s/he reached out and clobbered Ultimate Lisa. “Ultimate Yo is seeing that Ultimate Yo should not be being on side of uncute nasty Ultimates.”
“Is it me, or are the Yos clothing a bit disarranged?” Al B. Harper worried to Ultimate Visionary.
“I don’t want to think about it,” shuddered Vizh, who had just tackled his own counterpart by passing him Cheryl’s latest complicated shopping list.
Balefire watched from the safety of his prison cell as the battle continued. Well, from under his mattress beneath his bunk. “You know, I think the classic heroes might actually yet win,” the villain puzzled. “Sure they’re outnumbered but they just seem more organised, more motivated.”
He ducked again as the returned Ultimate Finny continued his debate with classic Finny by rolling over the roof of the cell block.
“And Donar… I’ve never seen him in such a black, killing mood. He’s making Ultimate Donar look well balanced. Er, he’s also making Ultimate Donar eat his own hammer.”
The building shuddered as the Yurt continued to use Ultimate Jarvis as a hockey puck.
“This is really getting out of hand,” Balefire worried. “We have to do something before we’re all wiped out.”
“You know, you look real sweet crouching over down there,” said Twenty-Stone Stanley peering down at the villain and checking his breath.
*
“The battle is turning bloody,” the Hooded Hood commented as he came upon the Cowled Criminal watching the carnage from a safe vantage point.
“So, you dared come and face me at last,” CC sneered.
“I had to find a suitable small hole in my busy schedule,” the Hood shrugged. “Plot quickly because this is eating into my tea break.”
“You think your little heroes are prevailing down there, Hooded Hood? I have crafted these Ultimate Legionairres well. I can make then ten times more powerful if I have to. A hundred times.”
The archvillain considered this. “They would still lose.”
The Cowled Criminal frowned. “Why? They will crush the Lair Legion and spit on everything they ever meant. They will…”
“They will lose because they are the bad guys. The antagonists. And they are fighting in the Parodyverse, a reality literally made from stories, where the antagonist is defeated no matter what. As soon as you allowed me to cast the original heroes as the, well, the heroes and your thugs as the opposition your plan was doomed. No matter how popular, how well redefined, how brilliant your recreation is it will not win the sympathy of the narrative. Comparison is invidious. Any genuine brilliance your versions incorporate will be irrevocably masked by the derivative nature of the core concept. People will want to see their favourite familiar heroes triumph, and here in the Parodyverse at least that is enough to make it happen. Oh, there will be some good in-story reason for it, some amazing legendary feat or massive coincidence, but… your replacements are doomed.”
“Really? We shall see what happens when we introduce redefined versions of the Ultimates – the Postultimates. And the Postpostultimates. “The Cowled Criminal’s eyed glowed redly. “And the Postpost post…”
“I get the idea,” the Hood assured him. “Do please try.”
CC concentrated. Then his face paled. “W-what?”
“Amazon Isle is blocking the conduit,” the Hood explained. “You may recall that I fathered Troia on the Amazon Queen, arranged for her to learn of her heritage when Falcon accidentally disrupted the balance of the pact with the gods, reorganised the dimensional order when Dormaggadon was goaded into attacking, fostered an affection between Troia and Donar when she was threatened by Degenerus, that kind of thing. In other words, I made a few preparations.”
“You… you also stopped CSFB! from giving up his career so that a comic-book geek would be there to stop me today,” the Cowled Criminal accused.
“Yes. And set up Asil with Sir Mumphrey Wilton so they could stop Symmetry of Synchronicity, and got Visionary back from the corn and spiffy back from the dead, and pointed Amazing Guy towards Eggo, and reminded Space Ghost of one of his true identities, and a hundred other things to prepare for this moment.”
The Cowled Criminal backed away a step. “You haven’t won, you know,” he told the Hood. “My very existence proves that you lose.”
“It isn’t my job to point out your faulty logic, future shadow,” the cowled crime czar answered. “It is however my role to administer chastisement for your actions today.”
“You can’t use your powers against me here and now,” gloated CC.
“True,” agreed the Hooded Hood, punching him on the nose.
*
The Lair Legion were finishing off the last of the Ultimate Lair Legion when the revised future versions shimmered away.
“Hey, come back and be pounded some more!” complained Nats, who had a lot of issues to work out.
“They’re gone,” NTU-150 reported, “as if they never were.”
“Indeed,” agreed the Hooded Hood, shimmering through the Portal of Pretentiousness to join them. “This threat to what you laughingly call your reality is over. The so-called Cowled Criminal has fled back to his dismal hideout at one of the ends of time, but to do so he had to absorb and reutilise the energies he had previously vested in your grotesque counterparts. Thus you will find everything as it was before.”
“Except for the property damage,” Hatman sighed.
“And for Donar,” worried Yo as the unspeaking hemigod flew away into the driving rain.
“And some utterly icky mental images,” added Dancer. Then she smiled. “If it’s all the same with you I’ll be staying strictly penultimate for the foreseeable future.”
“I think we can cope with that,” accepted ManMan. “What am I saying?”
“They were a bold attempt,” considered Pegasus, “but they did not possess the heart required for the long haul.”
“Sometimes the short haul’s enough,” shrugged Cap. “But they needed stomping on. We stomped.”
“Yep,” agreed G-Eyed. “And after two weeks hospitalisation we’ll be as good as new. Ouch. I think Ultimate me teleported my spleen somewhere.”
“What about this Cowled Criminal, Hoody?” CrazySugarFreakBoy! demanded. “He’s not really Ultimate you is he? Hoody? Hood?”
The Hooded Hood was gone.
*
“Time to go,” Samantha Featherstone announced, looking at her chronal wristwatch. “Back to, you know, the future.” She glanced across at her younger self. “You gonna be okay, Sam?”
Junior Samantha smiled back. “Looks like I’m gonna be just fine,” she noted. “See you?”
“Yep. In about fifteen years time I guess,” older Sam smiled back. And they both laughed.
Mumphrey and Asil were also present to say their goodbyes to the visitor from a potential future. “I can change age whenever I want to,” Asil admitted as she gave Sam a hug, “but it is far more amazing when you do it, to see the person you become.”
“Might become,” Sam replied. “If certain things happen to the timeline. If you win the Resolution War, and grandpa pulls together the next gen Lair Legion, and… oh, all sorts.”
“Less you tell us more likely it’ll be to happen,” Mumphrey snuffled. “But nice to see you grow up to be a hero, Samantha. Not sure about the trousers with the holes in them but I suppose I can learn to cope. Hmph.” He paused for a moment and then smiled shyly at his granddaughter. “But the hero part, well that makes me very proud indeed. Take care, my dear. Hmph.” He pulled his pocketwatch out and pressed a combination of studs. “Synchronise.”
“Synchronised,” reported Sam. “But not Synchronicitied”
“Right,” Mumph admitted. “Mark!”
The two holders of the Chronomenter of Infinity activated their instrument together and Samantha was gone.
“Will I really be her?” seven year old Samantha asked hopefully. “And join the new Lair Legion and argue with Goldenexile and pal around with HyperActiveLunaticLass! and date Harlagaz and all that stuff?”
“Well, er, that depends on the temporal weft, m’dear,” her grandfather told her. “Although I’m sure if you did date, um, Harlagaz then you’d be home by eleven. But it’s a matter of quantum temporal mechanics where the causal planes intersect and…”
“Yes, you’ll become her,” Asil answered, taking the child into Wilton House for tea, “But only if you eat your greens.”
*
“Is okay,” said Mr Papadapopolis of the Bean and Donut Coffee Bar as Dancer let the battered warriors back for a beverage, “We are always open to superheroes.”
“Give me an ultimate java,” demanded the Dark Knight. “And make it dark and gritty.”
They poured into the little shop at the base of the Twin Parody Tower: Finny and DK and Enty, Hatman and Sorceress, Vizh, Yo, G-Eyed, Exile, Ziles, Nats, thuddy and Cressida, Pegasus, ManMan and Knifey, Falcon, spiffy, Banjoooo, Cobra, Cap, HV, Paste Pot Pete, Amazing Guy, Al. B. Even Chronic and De Brown Streak were there, looking slightly nervous. Messenger has vanished somewhere as soon as the battle had ended. Lisa, Cheryl, Fleabot, Lisette, Valeria, and Flapjack slipped in as people were sitting down. Lisa’s cat pounced on spiffy’s cheese sandwich and claimed it for his own.
Dancer handed round the coffee pot and waited until everyone had got a mug. “Listen, I know we’ve got to go back and explain to the press everything that happened, and announce the new line-up, and check on Donar and Troia and stuff,” she said to her friends, “but before we all go back I want us to take a moment and think, okay?”
“Thinking?” worried Visionary.
“We just finished a big battle that was about who we are. About whether it’s okay not to be… ultimate. Not to be perfect, or repackaged for a new audience, or slick and glossy, just to be… us.”
“I like us,” Hatman admitted, hugging Sorceress. “I especially like some of us.”
“The soft curvy bits of us are reaaaal fine,” admitted DBS.
“So I want us to just stop and think about that,” Dancer continued. “About who we are and where we’ve come from. To remember the friends we’ve made and the absent ones we wish were here.”
“Donar and Troia,” suggested spiffy.
“Messenger,” added Hatman.
“Dynamite Boy,” considered Nats, “And Ninja and Saint and Lynx, wherever they are.”
“Manga Shoggoth?” Banjooooo ventured. “You can never have too many giant monsters.”
“Sersi,” Sorceress offered, “and Rocket Racoon. Possibly.”
DK stirred in the shadows of the back booth. “DarkHwk,” he rumbled.
“Space Ghost,” called CSFB!, “Trickshot. Starseed. Avatar. Crazy Penguin Lady. HV, er, the last one.”
“Jack Rabbit and Wiblik,” AG recalled.
“Magnetic Techbird,” De Brown Streak scowled.
“Fetish Lad,” ManMan offered. “Not that, y’know… I just thought he ought to be included. Really.”
“Jarvis and TMWWT,” Lisa said.
“Well I was going to say Frog Man but I can’t top that,” admitted G-Eyed.
“All of those,” Dancer agreed, “and others, lots of others. All the everyday heroes who make things better just by doing their jobs or living their lives. We should celebrate them all. I know we’ve had some bad times – some terrible times – but there’s been good times too. We saved the world a bunch of times. We were there for each other when we needed it most. We did the right thing, no matter what the cost.”
The Probability Dancer raised her glass. “Ladies and Gentlemen and pure genderless thought beings, I give you: The Lair Legion and the Heroes of the Parodyverse.”
The crowd of extraordinary superhumans drank their toast.
“Wait!” Mr Papadopopolis called, turning up the radio. “Is emergency report. Is escaped supervillain Dr Enormoidstein from Safe terrorising old people’s home in Sheldon.
Fin Fang Foom rose up. “Then it’s time to go, folks.” Well over two dozen metahumans rose to follow him.
“You’re going with them?” DBS asked Chronic as the guitar player sprung from his seat.
“I’m not staying here to get stuck with the bill,” the musician answered.
“Do we all need to go?” Hatman asked. “I mean, it’s only one guy.”
“Sure,” CSFB! beamed. “Think what a nasty shock he’s in for.”
“Think of it as sending a message,” Finny growled. “Everybody this way.”
“Lair Legion Line Up!” called spiffy.
“Everybody but spiffy this way,” Foom continued.
The diner emptied. Dr Norm has picked a bad day to threaten truth and justice. The heroes raced off to meet him like the wrath of God.
But that tale must remain untold.
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