#127: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: They Saved Visionary’s Brain, or The Old Shell Game

#127: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: They Saved Visionary’s Brain, or The Old Shell Game

Previous episodes at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom (this story starts with #110)
Character details in Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Locations described in Where's Where in the Parodyverse

    Visionary vomited across the time/space continuum.
    “Well that should give the Celestian Space Robots something to do,” noted the Hooded Hood. “If they ever resolve their eternal conflict with the Constellation, that is.”
    “The interdimensional vortex makes me queasy,” apologised the possibly fake man. “Plus, I didn’t get any breakfast before I came back from the dead.”
    “You’re not back from the dead. Our objective is to make sure you never died – or were never dismantled.”
    Vizh shuddered. “Yeah, about that. I think there must have been some mistake, because I’m not filled with little plastic tubes that look almost human, and I’m not this very sophisticated synthesoid created from the remains of a second world war robot. I keep telling people, but they never seem to believe me.”
    “Perhaps people just don’t care enough about you to be interested?” suggested the Hood unfeelingly. “That whole episode where you accidentally got erased from existence after the Not-So-Happy Place incident showed that you were really only put here as a cosmic placeholder, to prevent the rather unpleasant Apostate from bringing his own brand of sunshine to the Parodyverse.”
    Visionary was hurt. “I thought I needed to come back now to save the universe?”
    “More like you’re a necessary prop to prevent it going in one direction. If it makes you feel any better, we needed you back to confuse the Parodyverse and ensure things don’t work out the way they’re planned.”
    Vizh worried about this. “Is Cheryl going to be mad with me?” he asked at last.

***

    The Thinking Machine, Ultimate Ultizon, personification of the prophesy of the coming Resolution War, looked down on the machine his minions had created for him with some satisfaction. “So we strap the robot girl down here, restrain her thus, and then I can conduct the interface?” he asked Dr Day-Vincent.
    “That’s right. Then you can access the communication codes that put Glitch in contact with the other Transformers and extend your wonderful rule to them all,” the scientist told him enthusiastically.
    “I don’t really need to do that now,” Ultizon confided. “Since I’ve united the fragmented portions of my consciousness I could probably seize command even at this range. But the girl has defied me, and must be taught a bitter lesson.”
    “Oh really,” scorned the Hooded Hood, phasing in at the doorway to the workshop, with Visionary trailing behind. “Why don’t you just tie her to a railway line and laugh manically, you sad two-dimensional cliché?”
    Ultizon whirled his indestructible robot body round and raised a hand with the firepower to obliterate a city at the Hood’s head. The cowled crime czar stepped behind Vizh.
    “Um…” said Visionary uncomfortably.
    “Kill him, if you’re sure what portion of the timeline the possibly fake man comes from,” the Hood challenged the Machine God.
    “You can’t be here,” Ultizon told the cowled crime czar. “You’re dead.”
    “I got better.”
    “It doesn’t matter now anyway. I’m too powerful for you to stop.”
    “I’ll bear that in mind,” the Hood assured him. “Has it never occurred to you that just because you were created to provoke the Resolution War into beginning you don’t have to do it? That few people who actually live in the Parodyverse want the conflict? That you are merely acting as a pawn for those powers and principalities who created it as some kind of toy or lab animal?”
    “I’m pretty sure they could have settled their differences with a bowling match,” Visionary suggested.
    Ultizon was very tempted to call the Hood’s bluff and blow Vizh’s head off right now.
    “I thought it best to give you one chance to step down from your current course,” the Hooded Hood told the Sentient Thought. “Before we have to take things to their illogical conclusions. If you step down from power and release the wills you are holding then what you’ve done so far can stand and you can leave. I give you my word.”
    “You are threatening me, Hooded Hood? You are nothing, an insignificance, a footnote in the cosmic vision that I follow.”
    “So that’s a no, then?” Visionary checked.
    Ultizon discharged his energy at full power; but the Hood and Vizh were gone.

***

    “Um, hello?” Visionary called plaintively. “Help? I seem to be tied up inside a cupboard of some kind? Hello?”
    The cupboard door opened and Vizh saw a black teenager staring down at him worriedly. She quickly cut through his ropes with a kitchen knife and stepped away as if terrified of him.
    Visionary stepped out of the cupboard then fell over. His legs had gone to sleep.
     “Visionary,” said a muscular-looking black man. “I had Visionary in my closet.”
    Vizh recognised the voice, although he’d rarely seen Falcon out of costume. “Hey,” he called. Manners seemed to demand more, so he added. “Nice closet.”
    The teenager helped the former prisoner to limp to the sofa. It was rather battered and the springs were a little intimate, but it was better than the cupboard. “Please don’t call the cops,” she begged Vizh.
    “Okay,” he agreed. “Mainly because I’ve no idea what’s going on here.”
    “Add me to that list too,” said Falcon.
    The Hooded Hood sighed. “Visionary, you are currently occupying your body of nearly ten years back, at the time you were a student at Paradopolis University. Falcon, you are in the form you had at that time too, the body of the teenage punk thug Sam “Falco” Wilson.
    Lindy Wilson, the little sister Sam had no memory off, blinked in bafflement.
     “Falco and his gang were hired by the Shadow Cabinet to kidnap and ultimately to murder the student Visionary,” the Hood explained.
     “The dude in the grey suit that Lindy mentioned,” Falcon recognised. “Exemplary?”
     “His boss, Cromlyn. At this point in the timeline Exemplary is a recent graduate from Professor Xalter’s Academy for the Gifted, just being recruited to work for covert operations.”
     “You were going to kill me?” Visionary said to Falc in a hurt tone. “Why?”
     “Don’t ask me,” shrugged Falcon. “I just got here too.”
     “Because Falco was a vicious, nasty little street-trash,” suggested the Hood. “Until I retconned things so Sam Wilson had a different past and became the Falcon you know instead.”
    Lindy’s eyes flicked from her brother to the cowled crime-czar. “What’d you mean that I didn’t exist, then?”
     “Oh, in the alternate history I constructed there was no place for a little sister to hold the Falcon back,” the Hood told her.
     “No,” Falc said. “Look, I know you didn’t do none of that change to help me, you Hooded bastard, thought you did give me my big break, however incidentally. But I won’t let you do it at the lost of my sister’s life.”
     “A sister you never knew?” the Hood challenged him. “A worthless piece of street-trash that’ll be used up and dead in two years from now?”
     “Hey, you don’t talk about Lindy that way!”
    Visionary was watching the girl, and he saw the tiny spark of hope and love that flickered just for a moment in her eyes as she heard her big brother stick up for her. She was so hungry to believe in Sam, so desperate for him to really care for her.
     “Fix it, Hood,” Visionary ordered. “I mean it. Keep Lindy alive, and safe, or I’m climbing right back in that closet and your plans can just go rot.”
     “Despite the consequences to Falcon?” asked the Hood dangerously.
     “Yeah,” Falc told him. “Do it.”
    The cowled crime-czar’s green eyes flashed.

***

    Visionary fell over a pile of his body parts. “Aaaagh!”
     “What is it?” asked a Teutonic voice. “Who’s there?”
     “Intruders, Dr Vizhnar,” the Hooded Hood answered. “And before you bother sounding the alarms, be aware that they have all unaccountably gone into self-maintenance cycles at the same time. I don’t want to be disturbed while we visit.”
    Vizh recognised the ageing Nazi scientist, of course. He looked closely but he couldn’t see the resemblance some people claimed between their appearances. He carefully climbed out of the bin of android Visionary parts and stopped shaking his own hand. “This isn’t a good place,” he muttered.
    The Hooded Hood was inspecting the laboratory, looking over anachronistic computer banks and weird bio-tech apparatus. “Quite the scavenger, Dr Vishnar,” he noted. “Pseudo-Technopolitan control interfaces courtesy of Hel Rotwang. Alien plastics extrusion kit from Dark Thugos care of Peter von Doom. Some Skree and Skunk equipment over there. A canister of Abhuman genetic foam. A Moo gene sequencer. You’re a very well networked mad scientist, aren’t you?”
     “Who are you and what do you want?” demanded the Nazi. “You’re not from… from Cromlyn are you?”
     “Why are you building bits of me?” Visionary demanded. “What year is it anyway?”
    Vishnar seemed to notice him for the first time. “Oh!” he gasped. “They got it working!”
     “Excuse me,” Vizh objected as the scientist tried to pry his mouth open to examine his teeth.
     “It’s brilliant!” Vishnar enthused. “Brilliant. Look at that dull glimmer in its eyes! It’s average. Completely average.”
    Visionary stepped back, hurt. “Cheryl says I’m special,” he defended himself. “She says no-one can break a remote control like I can.”
    Dr Vishnar was looking at the Hood suspiciously now. “How did you get him?” he demanded. “You re-used that old Burning Boy android, didn’t you? Damn, I should have stolen his carcase when I was working for the Shadow Cabinet. I’ve had to work on what schematics I could extract from the engram template I got from Day-Vincent’s laboratory.”
     “Hello? Could I request some footnotes?” Vizh interrupted. “Please? Before my brain explodes?”
     “He has a detonation device in his skull?” Vizhnar worried.
     “If only,” answered the Hooded Hood. “Visionary, the last half of the twentieth century was dominated by a secret race to complete a synthesoid, an android indistinguishable from an organic human. Such a form would be the ideal gestation place for the program known as the Omega Codes, the booting sequence for the Thinking Machine you know as Ultimate Ultizon. From such a form the Machine God could arise.”
     “And whoever achieves this will rule the world!” added Vishnar.
     “Don’t count on it,” advised Visionary.
     “The Shadow Cabinet phalanx behind the US Government sponsored research and created a prototype,” the Hood continued. “Before they could activate it, Vishnar here stole the code briefly and escaped with a disc he believed carried the engrams of the Machine God.”
     “It does,” enthused the scientist. “When they are linked in to my synthesoid synthesiser they instruct it, give shape and form and character to the android it creates.” He pointed at Visionary. “His form! His character!”
     “You’re making mes?” Vizh objected. “Fake mes?”
     “There are several attempts at you around,” the cowled crime czar frowned disapprovingly. “You’ve met some of them. Everybody wanted to create the template for the Machine God, knowingly or unknowingly. The Shadow Cabinet wanted their Visionary synthesoid to have as human a life as possible to facilitate the development of Ultizon, so they even arranged to have the student whose engrams their model was supposedly based on eliminated so the android could take his place.”
     “They tried to kill me?” Vizh objected. “Hey! That was when Falco and his ‘homies’ locked me in the cupboard! We saved me!”
     “Possibly,” agreed the Hood. “Thereafter there was no way of telling whether it was the organic or synthesoid Visionary was the student who went to college, met and married the lovely Cheryl, and became the annoying waste of space you are today.”
     “This is all very interesting nonsense,” Dr Vishnar told them, “but now you will please raise your hands and surrender. This is a protonic particle cannon and it will not do pleasant things to your molecular structure.”
     “Oh, we’re not stopping,” the Hooded Hood told him., “We only called round to confiscate your most completed Visionary android. We’ll need it later. Goodbye.”

***

     “I like this lab better then the other lab,” Visionary approved as he looked round the tangled clutter of Dr Day-Vincent’s workshop at Paradopolis U. “And the cupboard.”
     “Good. Kindly sit in that sinister-looking chair and attach these electrodes to your skull,” said the Hooded Hood.
     “Hey, I remember this thing! In my freshman week. They were offering free pizza if you let them do a brain-scan for some student project.” Vizh frowned a little. “They said they had trouble locating mine.”
     “I can believe that. Kindly hold still while I take a copy of your engrams now. Ah, thank you. This is the key to defeating Ultizon.”
    Visionary looked uncertainly at the silver disc the Hood was holding. “Because it contains the Omega Codes embedded into my subconscious?”
     “Because it doesn’t.”
    Vizh shot the archvillain such a look of helpless despair that he relented. “Vizhnar stole the Omega Codes but he couldn’t decrypt them. Through a dummy corporation he hired Helen MacAllistair to unlock them. She worked out they were more than they seemed and asked her fellow student Al B. Harper to take a look at them. This is where Al B. worked as an intern at the time.”
     “It was Al who took my engrams!” Vizh remembered. “I didn’t recognise him without the goatee. And the bubble pipe.”
     “Indeed. At this point in the timeline, Vishnar’s patron, Zemo, has dispatched the assassin known as the Bone to retrieve the Omega Code disc and eliminate Miss MacAllistair. He will arrive too late, to find that Harper has re-encrypted a disc using Miss MacAllistair’s engrams as the key, thus hoping to prevent her from being murdered as expendible. The Bone cares nothing for this, kills her anyway, and escapes with the data. Vishnar uses the MacAllistair engrams to create the artificial intelligence HALLIE and when she unlocks the information he begins his Visionary-building program that you have already seen.”
     “So he’s got the codes?”
     “No. Because before the Bone escaped he encountered Mr Cromlyn of the Shadow Cabinet, a top-range telepath able to alter people’s memories. Cromlyn retrieved the real disc and sent the Bone back with a clever facsimile that didn’t have the true Omega Codes on it. Hence all of Vishnar’s Visionary attempts are deficient.”
    Vizh tried to keep up. “But… but… Okay, so the Shadow Cabinet revamped some old wartime synthesoid…?”
     “Burning Boy, based on Wang the Conqueror technology, was one of the Golden Age Matadors that fought the Nazi menace,” the Hood explained. “The Shadow Cabinet had him shut down shortly after the war ended when they instituted a no-superheroes era. He was retrofitted and altered and he too programmed his re-creation machines to make him into a Visionary.”
     “Because… my engrams were on the disk, and knew what I should look like?”
    The Hood seemed momentarily thrown off his stride by Vizh understanding something. “Yes. The Omega Codes were buried in one version of your engrams. Things got rather confused so nobody knew which one.”
     “How did they get so confused?” Visionary worried.
     “We confused them,” the Hood smirked. “Right now.”
    Visionary blinked. “We succeeded,” he admitted.
    The Hooded Hood picked up the engram disc from the high pile that Al had made earlier. His thumb obscured the name of the student who had shortly thereafter taken to calling himself Visionary due to some obscure dispute about a comic-book character. “This is the disc that causes all the trouble,” he noted. “Now we shall conceal ourselves, cloaked from view or telepathic detection, while this little drama plays out. I shall stand over here. You go there.”
     “I have to go into the cupboard again?” asked Visionary plaintively.

***

     “Well, that was certainly dramatic,” Visionary admitted as he crawled from the cupboard. “Also a little bit gory. It was a good job I’d already spewed over infinity.”
    Helen MacAllistair was murdered, but there was no sign of her death here after the Shadow Cabinet clean-up crew had done its work. Her headless body would not be discovered for the better part of a decade. Mr Cromlyn had done his telepathic worst and Al. B Harper and his ex-fiancée Miss Framlicker had departed, believing themselves players in a domestic drama of betrayal and infidelity. And the bad guys had taken the engram disc.
    Or had they? The Hooded Hood was considering a very similar silver circle in his hands right now.
     “Er, is that…?” Visionary ventured, although he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
     “This is the one you made all those years ago. Al B. Harper imprinted the Omega Codes onto it. This is the only complete copy.”
     “Then what did Cromlyn go off with?”
     “He’s got the engrams I just copied from you now. He can replicate Visionaries till doomsday and he’ll never gestate Ultizon from those,”
    A nasty thought stuck Vizh. “Um, back when I was dying, when they claimed they were dismantling me – which they couldn’t have since I’m real, dammit! – they actually found the Omega Codes in my mind. Otherwise all that Ultimate Ultizon stuff couldn’t have happened. So if that’s the brain-patterns they’ve got…”
     “Then we can guarantee they’re Omega Code-free,” the Hood concluded. “That’s why we needed to bring you back from the dead rather than just make use of an earlier version of you. You are the one Visionary we can absolutely guarantee no longer has the codes. They’re been removed from you, if ever they were there at all.”
     “Oh. So that’s good then?”
     “Yes. Not only don’t we know whether you are an artificial creation of one kind or another or not, but we can never tell. We’ve locked you in such a tight paradox that if ever the truth was determined then the Parodyverse would probably unravel.”
     “Would I have to pay for it?”
     “You are officially without an official origin. The only thing we can say for sure is that you are possibly fake.”
     “I’m real. Dammit.”
     “Perhaps. Nobody can prove it one way or the other. Guaranteed. And you’re completely Omega Code-less too. They can dissect you to a molecular level and they’ll never find a thing.”
    This didn’t seem like such a good deal to Visionary. “Er…”
     “Oh, very well,” sighed the Hooded Hood, “We’ll make a last minute on-the-operating-table substitution of the Vizhnar synthezoid we confiscated for you, shall we? That’ll explain the established autopsy result, and when we merge your mind now into your body then it’ll update your brain patterns with the Omega Codeless version so you’ll continue to be harmless and useless.”
     “Yes,” said Visionary. “Please.”

***

     “Not there?” Edward Cromlyn shouted at Dr Sethbridge. “What do you mean they’re not there?”
    The Shadow Cabinet techno-surgeon looked up in despair from his monitors. “Sir, we’ve checked every fragment of this subject’s artificial intelligence. The Omega Codes just aren’t present. In fact there’s an awful lot of unused capacity.”
     “How can they not be there? We’ve been plotting this, planning for centuries! This is the culmination of my life’s work! This is… What do you mean not there?”
     “I believe he means that the Omega Codes have been retconned from your subject’s brain,” the Hooded Hood explained, appearing with Visionary in the midst of yet another mad scientist’s laboratory. This one was too medical for Vizh’s tastes, and he had unpleasant memories of some equipment specifically designed for him. The substitute Visionary from Dr Vizhnar was dismantled across the workbench and seemed to look up at him accusingly.
     “You!” hissed Edward Cromlyn savagely. “So they got you back after all!”
     “Indeed,” agreed the Hooded Hood.
    Vizh noticed the stunned Fleabot locked in a stasis jar and rattled it hopefully. The micro-robot got free after Visionary accidentally dropped the canister.
    Fleabot saw the dismantled synthezoid first. “Visionary! Aw man, Cheryl’s gonna kill me!”
     “Hey, it’s okay,” Vizh assured him. “That’s not me. I am.”
     “Really?” Fleabot asked suspiciously. “Say something stupid.”
     “You’re thinking that you’ve won,” Cromlyn sensed, reading the Hooded Hood’s surface thoughts despite the sophisticated telepathic defence screens he used. The Shadow Cabinet administrator was a very powerful psionic. “You believe that you can prevent us bringing order to this sorry world through one simple sleight of hand?”
     “I was hoping so,” admitted the Hooded Hood. “The Omega Codes are gone now, where you can’t get them ever. The Legion will face Ultizon – the sentient ex-Zemo computer virus version, in the amalgam adamantite body – and overcome him with some difficulty and at some cost. And then I think your Shadow Cabinet will find a little light shining upon it.”
     “Oh, you do, do you?” sneered Cromlyn. “You think you can just waltz back from the dead, or fairyland, or wherever you’ve been, do some tricks with time, pull a fast one with fake men, and then set everything back to the way you’d like it?”
     “That seems an acceptable outcome for now,” the Hood agreed.
     “Well guess what, Winkelweald. You can’t fight an inevitable prophesy. You can’t put the cat back into the bag. You might have staunched one outlet by which the Last Thought came into existence, but you can’t stop all of them.”
     “Does this sound good to you?” worried Visionary to Fleabot.
     “Not so much,” the robot answered. “Plus, I’m picking up a major psionic event happening all around us.”
    The Hooded Hood looked at Cromlyn more closely. “Of course! The prophesy can’t manifest as the Robot God, the Thinking Machine, so it’s taking another route. The other half of it was in the Psychostave, and that part has had thousands of years of practise at occupying humans.”
     “He means that the Resolution Prophesy has chosen to manifest this time in Cromlyn, and to amplify his telepathic abilities several million percent,” Fleabot translated.
    Cromlyn had changed. He seemed taller now, more powerful. The conservative old man strode with confidence, with the familiar body-language of Ultizon.
     “What’s happening?” worried Visionary.
     “My plan worked perfectly,” the Hood answered, backing away from Cromlyn, “and it still failed. We changed the world, but we haven’t stopped the enemy.”
     “Correct,” said Cromlyn in an ancient, commanding voice. “It just means it’s time for Plan B.” Then he reached out and ripped through the Hooded Hood’s mental defences, hurled him telekinetically across the room, and slammed him hard against the walls until he crumpled unconscious.
    Then the Last Thought turned to Visionary.

***

Next issue: Double-sized conclusion goodness, with a full menu of delights for the discerning reader. Visionary vs Cromlyn. Xander vs the Chronicler of Stories. Mr Epitome vs Exemplary. DK vs SPUD. spiffy vs France – again. Amazing Guy gets crosser than ever before. All kinds of other stuff that I’m not going to spoil in a Next Issue blurb. But mostly it’s the Lair Legion against Resolution for all the marbles in the battle the Hooded Hood warned them would shatter the team apart. Coming next week in Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Head Games (Version Two), or Once More With Feeling. Be afraid.

***

How Green Was My Footnotes:

The Robot Girl whose codes Ultizon is lusting after is of course Glitch. Dr Day-Vincent is usually one of the good guys, but remember that pretty much everyone on Earth is under Ultizon’s genetic control at this point.

’Falco’ Wilson is the teenage thug replaced by Sam Wilson after intervention by the Hooded Hood. Or he was replaced. Vizh has demanded that something different happen now.

Dr Ernst Vizhnar was an ex-Nazi scientist working for Baron Zemo, and has occasionally been credited with creating Visionary. Now we know the full story. Vizhnar was amongst those people lost when Zemo’s South American castle was retconned away by the Hooded Hood.

Vizhnar’s lab equipment includes materials from Technopolis, the alternate-universe world of advanced science, from which refugee cyborgs Science Villain Hel Rotwang, aka Deus Et Machina, hales from; offworld technology from Dark Thugos’ Deathworld, the shape-shifting Skunk Homeworld, and the former Skunk Star Empire; the gene-mutating chemical used by the hidden Abhuman sub-race; and apparatus from that classic Parodyverse geneticist villain, the diabolical Dr Moo.

So tell me about all these Visionaries again, then

*Sigh* Long ago the Celestians created the personification of the Resolution Prophesy as a way of getting rid of the Fairly Great Old Ones. After that it was dismantled into two parts. One of them was trapped in the Psychostave used by the Second Oldest Race, most recently owned by Nats. The other part remained disembodied on Earth, trying to create itself a robotic body through a series of ploys throughout history.

The first known Earth-built synthezoid was Burning Boy, a wartime hero created using technology from the time-travelling villain Wang the Conqueror. After the war the Shadow Cabinet had Burning Boy shut down and mothballed.

The Shadow Cabinet then began sponsoring work to create a suitable robot body that could incarnate the Resolution Prophecy. The half that was disembodied on Earth had an affinity for technology and had taken to calling itself Ultizon. The Shadow Cabinet managed to discern the Omega Codes, the programme that would allow a robot body to recreate itself as the perfect matrix through which Ultizon could return.

Before the Shadow Cabinet could create such a robot, naturalised ex-Nazi Dr Vishnar stole the Omega Codes for Zemo. Baffled by the program, Vizhnar and Zemo outsourced its deciphering to Helen MacAllistair, then murdered her to cover their tracks. Helen’s engrams were later used to create the Lair Legion’s AI, HALLIE.

However, Helen’s friend Al. B. Harper buried the stolen Omega Codes amongst the engram recording of a student he had examined that day for his doctoral thesis. The Hooded Hood swapped this merged data for a version that was only the engrams of the student – probably the young man who would later take to calling himself Visionary. Thus when Edward Cromlyn and the Shadow Cabinet retrieved what they thought was the stolen data and left Vizhar with a fake version, they too took away a second fake version themselves.

Whenever the supposed Omega Code data was used thereafter, instead of creating Ultizon, the intermediary form of the Resolution Prophecy, it created a synthezoid version of the student engram-donar. Visionary copies included Vizhnar’s attempts, the government prototype that the scientists Vizh once met in a karaoke bar worked on, a revived, refurbished model reusing the Burning Boy android, and possibly others. The Shadow Cabinet, believing that the Omega Codes must be latent in their synthezoid, arranged for the real student to be disposed of so their creation could live his life in the hopes of stimulating the evolution they hoped for. Nobody knows whether the replacement attempt worked or not. The Hooded Hood foiled Falco’s kidnap plot, but there may have been others.

In fact nobody knows which if any of the various entities around became the Visionary we know and… put up with.

Back before HH interfered, Visionary was definitely a synthezoid carrying the Omega Codes. That’s how the whole current Ultimate Ultizon crisis got started. Now the Hood has changed that, so that whether Vizh is real or fake, he definitely doesn’t carry the Codes. So the Resolution Prophecy can never manifest that way. That’s why it’s gone to its back-up plan and used its other half-self, from the Psychostave, to incarnate through Edward Cromlyn instead. More on that next time.

Meanwhile, all we can say for sure about Visionary is that he is officially and forever possibly fake.

Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2003 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2003 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.