Untold Tales of the Broken Parodyverse Special was made by The Hooded Hood on 2/8/2003 at 9:08:25 PM.
Proving he really does have contingency plans for everything, here's a little tale of broken boards and the heroes who pay the ultimate price to fix them, from... the Hooded Hood!
“So what’s the problem?” Omike asked, looking over Pulse’s shoulder at the tangle of wires and realities.
“What do you think?” Static Pulse snarled, waving bits of the Parodyverse crossly. “It’s buggered?” Omike suggested helpfully. “No,” Pulse explained impatiently. “It is truly buggered. It is so buggered that it is giving new definition to the word buggered. If a committee of two hundred language scholars spent a decade discussing the matter they could not find a better definition of buggered than this is.”
“Ah.” Omike considered this. “So on the whole, not good then.” Static Pulse gave him a dirty glare. Omike shuffled round the workshop a bit, fiddling with detached components of Parodyverse because he had nothing better to do. “So what buggered it?” he asked, shaking the Negativity Zone to see if that helped and banging it on the desktop. Pulse snatched the card from him and magnified his glare even more. “Probably somebody messing about,” he answered crossly. “It’s not like there aren’t plenty of candidates.” “It wasn’t me,” Omike promised quickly. “I’m not even in the Parodyverse yet.” “I know,” Static Pulse sighed. “That’s why you’re here to plague me. You didn’t get shut down when it crashed like everybody else did. Pass me that alternate universe up on the shelf there. We’ll try powering it up with a different core reality and see if that helps.” “This one?” Omike checked, blowing the dust off a chunky purple device with BZL stamped on the side in yellow stencil. “Nope, the warranty expired on that,” Pulse answered. “Another one.” “This?” Omike suggested, wiping cobwebs of the AMB module. “Ah, no. I think they’ve upgraded so that system isn’t compatible now from what I hear. Just a standard variant core universe, please.” Omike watched Pulse connect it up to the causal networks. “So who do you think blew the last one?” he speculated. “I bet it was spiffy.” “Hard to say,” scowled Pulse. “So many candidates. Hooded Hood. Space Ghost. Grim Reaper. Paradox Stranger. Pearson’s Porter. Dr Phobia. Infrequent Aardvark. There was that massive dimensional transfer from Technopolis that upset the Constellation so much. We’ve got Librarian redefining outer realities every ten minutes, and IDC sending Nats to stranger and stranger places, and Xander the improbable doing nasty things to causality, and Con Johnstantine, and the Bog Thing, and the Probability Dancer, and upheavals in Ausgard, and illegal time-travelling. I’m pretty sure the manual warns you about that kind of stuff.” Omike was about to ask how the patch-up was going, but just then there was a loud bang, a puff of smoke, and Static Pulse jumping up and down waving his fingers in the air and swearing. “Did that fix it?” Omike asked curiously. “No,” hissed Pulse. “But on the other hand, I don’t think the Parodyverse is going to have to worry about Dr Mango or Dynamo Dolphin ever again.” He sucked his hand for a moment and thought again. “It’s got to be part of the operating system,” he reasoned. “As soon as I installed a new core reality it fell right over, so there’s something wrong with the basic programming.” “Well sure,” Omike agreed. “Have you read some of those stories? Weird.” “Not that,” growled Static Pulse. “Look, when the Parodyverse was set up, whoever did it threw in all kinds of checks and balances and stuff. Auto repair systems. Anti-virus precautions. Firewalls.” “I can’t say I noticed,” argued Omike. “Isn’t the whole multiverse infested with Outer Elder Beings sleeping until the time is right? Trickshot just woke one up.” “Good point,” Static Pulse noted. “I suppose a major awakening of elder beasties could cause a sanity cascade. I’ll check that later.” “Not just that, though,” Omike pointed out. “There’s about fifteen different origins to the Parodyverse, and lots of alternate futures that keep interacting with the present, and the Celestian Space Robots keep deleting planets that get too troublesome and there’s Galactivac the Living Death that Sucks and…” Pulse handed him a handful of loose components. “Just count these for me would you?” he asked. He didn’t need them counting, but he was hoping it would shut Omike up for a bit. “Hey, I recognise these bits,” Omike called out. “Family of the Pointless, right? And that’s the plug that slots them into the main power conduit. Looks a bit charred.” “It’s all a bit charred,” came Static Pulse’s voice from inside the box under the desk. “Frankly, the whole device was a bit of a botch job from the start. You know how these things designed by committee go. Everybody has a different vision, and you end up with Visionary.”
“Point,” admitted Omike. “So why aren’t the auto-repair functions auto-repairing?” Pulse tossed out a handful of melted concepts. “The Celestians are going to need some serious resoldering,” he warned. “You know, this is starting to look malicious.” “Sabotage?” Omike frowned. “How the hell could somebody in the Parodyverse sabotage the whole thing? And why, if it shut them all down?” Pulse considered this. He didn’t like the answer. “Because it only left us to tell stories about. We don’t have all those hundreds of characters in the Who’s Who to cover for us.” He looked around the cluttered workshop worriedly. “This crash has brought us into the narratives. It’s a trap.” “Don’t be stupid,” Omike snorted, trying to keep calm. “We aren’t Parodyverse characters. Everyone knows that. Occasional lurkers, maybe, but that’s all. We can’t be in the stories.” Static Pulse slotted a plot chip into the tangle of tale-ribbons and premise-boards. “Don’t panic. We can get the system rebooted, load things up just as they were before, and this will never have happened. I think.” “You think? You don’t know?” “Look,. I’ve never had a Parodyverse plot directed at me before,” Pulse snapped. “I’ve never had a fictional character break out of a story and drag me into one. I’m having to make this up as I go along.” Omike looked at him suspiciously. “There are only two of us in this story,” he reasoned. “Two of us left in the whole Parodyverse. And I know I didn’t set this up.” His hands surreptitiously closed around a heavy archive in case he needed to bludgeon Pulse into unconsciousness. “Don’t think like that,” Pulse warned. “That’s what our enemy wants us to do. I didn’t cause this, and I know you didn’t.” “Well sure I didn’t, but how do you know?” Because you’ve got the technical abilities of a dyslexic walrus Pulse thought. “Because I trust you, of course,” he answered. Omike calmed down a little “So what do we do? Who’s gunning for us? Are they here now?” he glanced around the workshop. It seemed a little darker. A shower of sparks burst from the continuity board Pulse was testing. “Gotcha!” he spat. “It’s the Chronicler module. It’s not functioning at all.” “The Chronicler? That’s bad,” Omike worried. “Isn’t he one of the three most important regulatory systems? I thought those had all kinds of back-ups?” “For some reason the module’s not being reported as faulty,” worried Pulse. “Normally another module would be instantly upgraded and functionality would continue as normal. Somebody’s worked very hard to stop that happening, and it looks like there’s just been a jam in the narrative buffers until the whole lot collapsed under the pressure of uncontinued stories.” “Can you fix it?” Omike demanded. “Fast. I think I feel an origin coming on.” “Doing my best,” the technician promised. “I’m applying a heavy-duty Finny omnibus to it to see if I can blow the whole thing so it resets… Nope, it’s just rerouting it to the archives.” “Is it me, or am I speaking in exposition now?” Omike fretted. “Hurry up, dude.” “Okay, I’m hitting it with frequent AG bursts and intermittent Nats,” Pulse reported. “Damn, it’s just doing standard replies, mostly no text.” “What about a Hooded Hood tale then?” Omike suggested. “A huge dollop of convoluted continuity should be enough to knock out the whole system.” “The Hood died in Premiere #22,” Static Pulse explained. “Otherwise I’d have been fingering him for the systems shutdown. It’s complicated, surreal, improbable, and grandiose, exactly his style. Oh, and very irritating, of course. But he’s not around to use those retcons to drag us into the Parodyverse.” “Could someone else be using one of his plots?” frowned Omike. “Something he set up in case he ever needed to get us?” The two men exchanged worried glances. “No-one’s that devious,” Pulse said, unconvinced. “Right,” agreed Omike, uncertainly. “If I use the Hood as a means of jumping the story-flow again then I might let him loose in the system once more,” Static Pulse reasoned. “And that wouldn’t be good.” “Whereas us in a fictional universe where the main heroes wear underpants outside their clothes and fight unpopular comic book creators and flying rodents is fine,” argued Omike. Static Pulse considered this. “Connecting the residual Hood signature now.” “Fast,” Omike hastened him, looking over his shoulder at the approaching storylines. “I don’t think we’ve got much time before…” “It’s coming up,” Pulse shouted in triumph. “The Parodyverse is reinitialising. We have Untold Tales #109…” Then the Parodyverse continued as before, except for an empty workshop where two men had been just a few moments ago…
Untold Tales of the Broken Parodyverse Special
“Crap,” muttered Static Pulse. “Crapcrapcrapcrapcrap.”