Baron Zemo's Lair

Untold Tales of the Lair Legion in Comic Book Limbo
Thursday, 29-Jul-1999 19:46:29
    195.92.194.44 writes:

    Untold Tales of the Lair Legion in Comic Book Limbo

    “Jarvis, I’m not sure how much longer I can keep on pedalling this exercise bike,” Hatman admitted. Even with his cyclist’s cap on the capped crusader was starting to feel the strain of the equivalent of a twenty mile hike.
    “Jarvis, unless Hatty keeps it up we can’t get the power for the microwave,” NTU-150 warned.
    “Jarvy, we’re really sorry we bought that story about you being behind all of this,” Darkhwk apologised again. “We know now that it was just another of old Wilbur Parody’s deceptions. Do the bruises hurt much?”
    “Jarv, we’ve got an unholy row in the kitchen about whether it’s OK to cook one of the former Asils now that they’re kittens,” Banjooooo warned.
    “Jarvis, Yo is saying no to be eating cute kittens even if they weren’t formally cute Asil Lisa-clones,” Yo argued.
    “But they are our most handy form of protein whilst we find out where we are and how to get out,” Cobra replied.
    “Jarvis, I still say humans would taste better,” Fin Fang Foom suggested. “Nobody would notice if spiffy got ate. It’s probably all his fault anyway.”
    “Jarvis, I’m not going to allow a perhaps member of my perhaps team to be swallowed by a dragon. We can survive by foraging and eating the things already in the house,” Cap argued. “Eating spiffy should be seen as absolutely a last resort.”
    “And possibly as a vegetarian option,” Banjooooo suggested.
    “Hello? Does anybody mind that I’m here?” the fern-wielder complained. Several heroes did.
    “Jarvis, Space Ghost won’t come back down the chimney until someone can find him some alcohol. He’s screaming in withdrawal,” updated Tina.
    “We have some Vermouth somewhere, I think,” Visionary offered, with a helpless glance at his wife Cheryl. Just after they’d had the place decorated this had to happen.
    “Jarvis, I’ve been trying to discover why none of our powers work in this Comic Book Limbo place,” the Sorceress reported. “As far as I can tell, we’re all so remote from whatever usually gives us our powers that we just can’t draw upon them.”
    “The demon Oddhorn was protecting something hidden beneath our mansion and was able to use his association with it to block not only our powers but whatever it was that made us unique as heroes,” Dark Knight remembered.
    “Jarvis, Baron Zemo has annexed the bathroom as his personal territory and is demanding tribute from anyone who needs to use it…”
    “Jarvis… Why are you screaming?”

    “This is so cool!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! “This is like the Phantom Zone and the Negative Zone and an old comic book convention all rolled into one. There are legends here!” he told Starseed. Jarvis had sent out pairs of heroes to scout the strange misty wilderness which they had been sent to when Visionary’s house had disappeared through an ancient spacial rift. Donar and DarkHwk had quickly discovered the exiled heroes of the Abandoned Legion – Cap, Cobra, the increasingly erratic Paste Pot Pete, and the Sorceress - along with spiffy, Zebulon, and Frog-Man. So far all that CSFB! and Starseed had worked out was that they were in a lot of trouble.
    “Look, we need to head on back,” the Gahless Gah! Master judged. Even though his watch looked like it had been designed by Salvidor Dali he felt they had been away rather too long. After all, there were only so many Asil kittens to go around.
    “But we’ll never have a chance like this again, never,” his enthusiastic and brightly coloured companion argued. “Where else would we get to meet such great characters as Moustache Max from All-American #50? Or Vance Corlin from World's Finest #57, who was raised on a small island off Metropolis coast under scientific conditions identical to Krypton's and hence has same powers as Superman, although his powers decline with absence from island – Corlin’s that is, not Superman; Supes just had the Kryptonite problem. And we got to chat with the Red Bee (Hit #6, of course)!”
    Starseed was amazed once again at Dreamchaser Foxglove’s capacity for memorising every detail of obscure comic-book lore. Still, it was nice to be able to identify the almost completely transparent two dimensional shades that wandered round this place unable to do anything but mouth the same words they had once uttered in long forgotten publications. “We’d still better get back. It’s hard to navigate in this swirling mist.”
    The ruins in Comic Book Limbo were composed of all those places once seen in a comic book and then abandoned forever. Hence the heroes had investigated quite a lot of warehouses and secret laboratories, several cave complexes some with very impressive idols to volcano gods and so forth, but discovered a remarkable absence or, say, good delis, and more importantly, toilet facilities.
    Then there was the flash. It lit up Comic Book Limbo, sending the silvery mists swirling like cappuccino for a moment as a beam of immense power vaporised a spooky old house on the hill and most of the hill with it. “What the hell was that?” Starseed demanded, but CSFB! was already running over there to find out.
    There are several tests to determine if somebody is a superhero. One of them is to fire a beam of pure Celestian energy and disintegrate a mountaintop. If the subject runs towards the destruction rather than away from it, they are probably a hero.
    When CrazySugarFreakBoy! and Starseed arrived at the melted stump all they found were Lisa and Goldeneyed checking their limbs and marvelling that they were alive.
    “You two?” the Gah! Master gasped. “But… but we found your charred bodies hidden in a secret compartment in the mansion.”
    “Oh, that’s probably be the duplicates that HV made to fool the Parody Master,” Goldeneyed said nonchalantly. After a while this time-travelling stuff has its effect on anybody.
    “Where are we now?” Lisa asked, gently detaching the hugging CSFB! from her knees.
    “This is Comic Book Limbo, apparently,” Starseed answered. “The place Peter von Doom tried to send us to? Well the Hood managed it, and here we are.”
    “Old Hoody does all the best inescapable traps,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! grinned loyally.
    “The whole Legion is here?” Lisa checked.
    “Plus guest stars galore” Starseed promised. “And a lot of people are going to be very glad to see you.” Especially, he thought, considering the male to unattached female ratio of the exiles, to see Lisa.

    “Very well,” Jarvis called the meeting to order. “There are a few things to sort out.”
    Twenty-six heroes, one elf, and two villains gradually came to order. Visionary’s living room was hardly large enough to fit them all in, but Donar had helpfully broken down the wall into the kitchen to make more space.
    “I’d like to get something on record to start with,” the diabolical Dr Moo announced. “And that is that I am not sharing a room with Lisa. Ever.”
    “Well same here doubled,” Lisa responded to her sister. “You think it’s fun having to sleep next to your fermenting lactose cultures?”
    “Compared to some of the stuff you’ve slept next to I’d have thought that was a big improvement,” Moo shot back.
    “Hey, at least I have a social life, and I don’t have to cuddle a rat called Davidowski to sleep.”
    “I, er, I don’t think finding Lisa a roommate is going to be a problem,” Dark Knight discerned.
    “Finding places for people to sleep, on the other hand…” Cap pointed out.
    “Hey, we never invited you guys to come and take our condo into limbo,” Visionary complained. “There we were, trying to relax quietly at home after your mansion tried to kill us, and next thing we know we’re knee deep in heroes and villains and out house isn’t in Dullard’s Corner any more it’s in some weird place of exile set up by the Hooded Hood!”
    “I don’t see how you can complain,” Banjooooo snarled back. “We only had a possessed super-computer, a guardian demon, and a sleeping elder thingie under the mansion. You had old Wilbur Parody’s dimensional portal, which he set as a hero trap over a hundred years ago as part of the Hood’s plan to escape from this place by sacrificing us to it instead!”
    “That’s real quality villainy,” Lisa sighed.
    “Hmph,” Zemo hmphed. “This bickering is ill-suited to our situation. I demand that you all submit to my rulership for the duration of the crisis and then I shall turn my genius to our escape.”
    “I said, THE MEETING WILL COME TO ORDER!” Jarvis shouted, banging spiffy’s head against the table for emphasis. The butler really had taken enough. And ever since the Hooded Hood had departed Comic Book Limbo even Jarv’s wife Melissa had been strangely silent and thoughtful.
    “I went to order once,” Paste Pot Pete remembered, from whatever strange place he was in at the moment. “But it was closed.” The heroes had discovered that putting Pete next to Space Ghost and getting them to talk to each other was better than television.
    “Ouch,” complained spiffy. “Why does everyone think this is my fault?”
    “Because it is,” Lisa replied. “When G-Eyed and I travelled back in time and learned about the secret under the mansion we got a very clear impression that you were to blame.”
    “How can spiffy be to blame for something that happened hundreds of thousands of years before he was born?” Sorceress asked.
    “He’ll find a way,” Foomy asserted confidently.
    “Perhaps we should start by pooling the information we have about what’s going on,” sighed Jarvis patiently. He was really starting to miss that Sivraj personality.
    “Well, we sent Lisa and Goldeneyed off through time to interview Wilbur Parody, the founder of Paradopolis and the man who wrote the City ordinances which in our time led to all that proliferation of sidekicks,” Dark Knight summarised.
    “That was a trap,” G-Eyed reported. “Wilbur Parody knew all about us going back in time. And that triggered off an ancient defence which led to the Hallowe’en curse on the Lair Mansion.”
    “There’s a secret hidden deep beneath the mansion, placed there, or at least maintained, by these big Space Robots called the Celestians,” Lisa explained. “They, or the powers they serve, arranged for this secret to be protected. They placed the elder creature Shab-addaba-Dhu, the Groper out of Grossness, as the first guardian.”
    “Cute Shab-addaba-Dhu,” Yo smiled.
    “The Hood placed his Portal of Pretentiousness in the mansion so we would tumble through and encounter the Groper,” DarkHwk reasoned. He still shivered when he thought of those endless Dynasty plot summaries.
    “Hey, that room we found with Zemette in it!” Banjooooo remembered. “It had all kinds of pictures of the Lair Legion and stuff carved on the walls. Is that the secret?”
    “That sounds rather like the place that Hastings Vernon took us to, back in the nineteenth century when Wilbur was chasing us and the Parody Master was out to fry us,” G-Eyed remarked. “That’s not the secret itself, although it’s sure something to do with it.”
    Sorceress looked up sharply. “Hastings Vernon?” she repeated.
    “He was just passing by,” Lisa told her. “Best not to consider too many confusing things at once.”
    “So old Shabby was guarding the secret,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! smiled. “Kind of like the G’uranthic Guardian in Dormammu’s Dread Dimension where Doctor Strange had to face the test of the Pincers of Power to save Princess Clea from being exiled to the realm of the Forgotten Ones and then…”
    “Yon felon Oddhorn was likewisethusly placed to protect yon isle which out mansion standeth uponeth,” Donar advised. “But now yon villain is jam.”
    “My minion in the Scourge?” Zemo puzzled.
    “Nay, Not Jam, the foulmouthed commentator on the human condition. I meanest that he be paste.”
    “Me?” Paste Pot Pete puzzled. This plot was getting out of hand.
    “Be silent lest I get vexethed and smite thee all,” Donar warned. “I meanest that I didst kick yon demons’ headeth in right verily.”
    “In fact both guardians have been neatly neutralised by the Lair Legion and now we’ve been shuffled off the map so that we can’t preserve the secret either,” Jarvis noted.
    “You heroes have always been pathetically easy to manipulate,” Zemo smirked.
    “And you’re here because…?” Tina asked.
    “The sidekick plague was all part of the plan,” Hatman judged. “That irritated us enough to start looking into history, at Wilbur Parody’s work and so on, and that triggered the curse which possessed HALLIE and all of that stuff. Eventually the sidekicks tricked us into going to Visionary’s house and here we are.”
    “That was because the Hood needed a major influx of heroes to Comic Book Limbo so he could slip out the other way,” Melissa explained. “He’d been sent here by the Chronicler or the Shaper or one of those confusing very powerful beings after he’d annoyed them by trying to take over the Parodyverse. And now he’s free.”
    “That’s a comfort,” NTU-150 shuddered.
    “I’m gonna kick Lisette’s butt,” Lisa promised.
    “But Zemette was a slightly different and more complicated creature,” Dr Moo reasoned. “She had to enthral Zemo here, since he was the one who thwarted the Hooded Hod last time. So she did whatever she had to do to get Zemo to Visionary’s house at the right time as well.”
    Fin Fang Foom shifted uncomfortably. “Hey, don’t look at me like that, Baron. She was lying, right. I don’t even like girls. Ask Troia. I mean, I do like girls, but not like that, with dates and… stuff…”
    The Makluan dragon’s embarrassment was relieved by the sound of Lis’a big and disreputable ginger tomcat discovering the location of Visionary’s sweet and innocent Asil kittens.
    “Stop him!” Frog Man called out. “He’s going to kill them!”
    There was a yowling from the kitten box. Zebulon was nearest and got there first. “He, um, he’s not killing them,” the elf blushed.
    “Alright,” summarised Jarvis quickly. “We have a secret under the mansion, which we may even have been manipulated into placing the mansion there on Parody Isle to protect. In fact the whole of Paradopolis might have been founded in some attempt by Wilbur Parody to harness this secret’s power. We have the Hooded Hood escaping from this place by tricking us into triggering a trap to bring us here once we had neatly neutralised the guardians that would otherwise keep that cowled maniac away from the secret. In this Comic-Book Limbo we are somehow cut off from the source of all our powers, whatever they may be. Even Yo is…”
    “A really cute if gender-challenged human being,” Yo happily reported.
    “Er, yes. So if we could just turn our minds from the damned copulating cats for a minute and plan a way out of here…”
    “Yeah. Before the Identity Suckers find us,” spiffy agreed.
    This stopped the Leader of the Lair Legion in mid summarise. “The what?”
    “The Identity Suckers,” Cobra remembered. “When we first got sent here we met this old man in a green and blue costume, but he couldn’t tell us who he was or anything about himself except that he’d been savaged by Identity Devourers.”
    “It was horrible,” Zebulon remembered. “There were great pieces missing from him, taken to create a new superhero with his name and powers. And all that was left was… a shell, a broken, lost soul with nothing of value left to him.”
    “They are out there in the mists,” the Sorceress promised. “Waiting… seeking forgotten ideas to rend and reuse. Waiting for us.”
    “Nobody… nobody’s going to want to recycle a superhero’s wife called Cheryl, are they?” Cheryl checked. It was hard enough trying to keep the coffee-stains off the dining room table without having to worry about Identity Suckers.
    “Order your rabble”, Zemo told the butler scornfully. “I often find a sudden random execution somewhat salutary.”
    “Right,” Jarvis hissed. “Here’s what we are going to do. Enty, there’s about a million mad scientists’ labs out there. Get what you need for a dimensional gateway. DarkHwk, Zebulon, Moo, help him. Tina, Sorceress, start figuring out how we got here and where the return bus runs from. Starseed, look after Space Ghost. Cap, take care of Pete. DK with me. Everyone else…”
    “Get some washing up done?” suggested Cheryl.

    “Just… just how bad is it, Jaimie?” Tina asked the Lair Legion’s technologist.
    NTU-150 put down the transwarp scanner, pushed back his faceplate, and mopped his forehead. “It’s pretty bad,” he admitted. “This place doesn’t seem connected to anywhere. No warp space. No Negative Zone. No trans-spacial signatures to lock on to. Nothing.”
    “Then we might be trapped here forever?”
    “No, not forever,” Enty comforted her. After all, they would starve as soon as the contents of Visionary and Cheryl’s freezer ran out.
    Tina hugged her arms around herself to ward off the Limbo chill. “Lisa says we should accept it and found a new life here,” she told her boyfriend. “She says we should… settle down here.”
    NTU-150 dropped his spanner on his foot. “Tina, what are you saying?”
    “I’m saying… if this is the end, what should we do about it?”
    NTU-150 swallowed hard and made a choice. “I love you, Tina. That’s why I’m going to make certain this isn’t the end.”

    “I still say it’s worth a try,” Moo insisted. Melissa found the cow-headed villainess and her leather-almost-clad sister arguing over the toilet basin.
    “It won’t work,” Lisa insisted. Seeing Jarvis’ new bride she turned to Melissa for support. “What do you think? Moo is interested in where the lavatory waste is going. This is no surprise about someone whose life-specialisation is in a ruminant with four stomachs and bowels the size of Ohio. Moo wants to send someone down the pipe to see if it voids somewhere other than Comic-Book Limbo.”
    “I thought everyone’s powers were gone here?” asked Melissa. “How could someone shapeshift to get down a tube that small?”
    “We could chop them up and do it,” Moo offered helpfully.
    “Wouldn’t they be, well, dead?” Melissa pointed out.
    “So?” Moo challenged.
    “See,” demanded Lisa.

    “I’m not sure we’re ever getting out of here,” Hatman worried.
    “No liquor stores. No TV. Not even Cable. It’s hell,” opined Space Ghost. “Hellllllllllllll!!!”
    “Hey, it’s not so bad,” CSFB! enthused. “We’re all together, and we get to meet loads of cool old comics characters!”
    “I would not call Captain Ultra cool,” argued Cobra.
    “Even I’m cooler than Captain Ultra,” complained spiffy.
    “Mayhap,” contributed Donar, doubtfully.
    “I am!” spiffy persisted. “Aren’t I?”
    “We’re never gonna see another comic shop again either,” Hatty pointed out to CrazySugarFreakBoy!
    “Nooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!”

    “Look at it like this,” Visionary comforted his wife. “You know that long break away that you’ve been wanting…?”
    Cheryl threw an alarm clock at the possibly fake man.

    “You are accustomed to the trappings of rulership,” Zemo reminded Banjoooo. “I am putting together a consortium to conquer and rule this place…”

    “So,” Frog-Man said uncomfortably.
    “So,” Goldeneyed answered.
    “I… um, I’m sorry about the sidekicks thing, with the New Battlers and all.”
    “S’okay. I’m sorry I got so uptight ‘cause you got all that good press and they’re still spelling my name wrong on the menace editorials,” G-Eyed replied.
    There was an awkward pause.
    “Can I still be your sidekick?”
    “Hey, you’re my partner, web-footed wonder.”
    . There was a less awkward pause. “So,” Frog-Man began again, “How was the distant past?”
    G-Eyed thought about this. “A bit like Colorado,” he finally decided.

    “None of the stuff I’ve got the Lair Legion doing is going to get us out of this, is it?” Jarvis challenged the Dark Knight.
    “Why ask me?” the urban legend evaded. “What do I…?”
    “I know about the Chronicler thing,” Jarvis interrupted. “I know we don’t usually talk about it, but this is looking pretty dire, DK. Now I figure that you’ve got to know more about this than the rest of us, and you are our only chance of getting out.”
    The Dark Knight sank back into the shadows of his cowl. “I was once the Chronicler of Stories,” he admitted. “But I quit. And quitting has a price, just like everything does. My price was that I lost what I’d known, truths that had been so clear to me as the Chronicler. I forgot what the Chronicler knows but humans aren’t supposed to. I became both less and more than I had been.”
    “But you know about Comic-Book Limbo, right?”
    DK paused. “I know that few return from it unchanged. Many never come back at all. You have seen their fate. Others come back transformed, unrecognisable as the heroes who were once consigned here. There is no easy escape.”
    “I didn’t say I wanted an easy escape. I said I wanted an escape,” Jarvis insisted.
    Dark Knight sighed and came to a decision which might cost him a lot in the future. “Very well,” he agreed. “I will tell you…”

    “This whole place is made up of old, decaying stories,” Jarvis explained to the assembled heroes and villains. “The only way out is to appear in another story somehow, and that depends upon somebody’s imagination.”
    “I’ve got imagination,” offered CrazySugarFreakBoy! “Why sometimes I…”
    “Somebody outside Limbo’s imagination,” Dark Knight broke in. “A creator.”
    “I think I see where this is going,” considered Visionary, nursing a clock-shaped bruise on his forehead. “We get some creator of stories to use us and then we’re out of Comic-Book Limbo.”
    “Then tis time to pay back yon Hooded Felon and those most pesky sidekicks,” promised Donar.
    “We don’t just need a creator,” Jarvis warned. “To get out of here unchanged we need to be imagined by a great creator, somebody who won’t mangle our characters or make pointless changes based upon some personal inner vision of what we should be like.”
    “You mean we might get imagined by John Byrne?” Fin Fang Foom gulped.
    “How do we contact such a creator?” Lisa wondered. “I mean, how do we get them to write about us?”
    “Helloooooo! Great creeeaaaatorrrrrr!” Space Ghost helpfully shouted out.
    “We make contact with someone who is thinking about characters like us,” Sorceress judged, “and then we tweak him - not like that, Lisa.”
    “It’s just a matter of concentration,” Dark Knight told them.
    “We’re doomed,” Zemo judged, looking at the material he had to work with.

    On the fifth day, the Lair Legion and their allies made contact.

    On the sixth day they were born anew from Comic-Book Limbo.

    “Hey, this doesn’t look like the Lair Mansion to me,” spiffy complained as they all stepped out of Visionary’s condo and looked across the lawn at the stately brownstone townhouse. “This is far too classy.”
    “I’m reading multiple scanning devices checking us out,” NTU-150 reported. “And a defensive grid which I’d better neutralise before…”
    THRANNNNNNNGGGG! was the sound Enty made as the high-impact uru hammer pounded him into the turf..
    The Lair Legion turned to face the new threat. The hammer-hurler held one might hand out and it swerved returned to him with a resounding thwap. He stood amidst an assembly of costumed figures, each one at the ready for a terrible battle.
    “Intruders,” the man in the patriotic chainmail warned the Legion. “You are trespassing and so is your… condominium, so you’d better have a pretty good explanation.”
    “Speak now,” urged the wielder of mighty Mjolnir, “Or face the wrath of the Avengers assembled!”

    Next episode: The Lair Legion vs Marvel-Earth’s Mightiest Heroes? The New Lair Legion in Zemette’s Dungeons of Doom. The Falcon vs the Invasion of Earth. And the Hooded Hood seeks out the answers that the Celestians will destroy the world to protect.

    Due around next Sunday if the BZL board doesn’t do a spiffy again.

    By the way, if you could avoid spoilers regarding the Avengers in the main titles of your responses it might preserve the cliffhanger for other readers. Thanks.


    A new chapter in the ongoing machinations of... the Hooded Hood!

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Untold Tales of the Lair Legion in Comic Book Limbo (A new chapter in the ongoing machinations of... the Hooded Hood!) (29-Jul-1999 19:46:29)

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