#131: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion vs the Sorceress: Dead End

#131: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion vs the Sorceress: Dead End

Previously in Untold Tales: After a shattering showdown with Resolution the lair legion was left with members missing, injured, comatose, and presumed dead. Whitney (Sorceress) Darkness was unwilling to accept her lover Jay (Hatman) Boaz was deceased, and actually she was right since it was a Faerie shapeshifter in his guise who had died in battle, although she doesn’t know it. So Sorceress has decided to bring what she assumes is her beloved Jay back from the dead. Meanwhile Falcon has been arrested on suspicion of being an international terrorist, Dancer is still off-planet at the behest of Galactivac the Living Death that Sucks, and Fin Fang Foom remains unconscious, his mind wandering far from its body. All ripe for trouble? You bet.

As a matter of interest, I wrote this episode just a couple of days before Hallowe’en. It probably shows

Previous episodes at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Character details in Who's Who in the Parodyverse

    The old Abandoned Legion headquarters seemed… abandoned.
    The former firehouse in the oldest part of Gothametropolis had been unoccupied for some time now. After the AL had vanished during the Technopolis War it had briefly been used by the Justa Bunch of Heroes, but the JBH had passed on in turn, leaving the building to the vandals and the squatters. Now it was a ruined shell of the place it used to be, its shattered windows boarded, its empty rooms filled with debris.
    Whitney Darkness stood in the shadows and looked sadly at her former home. She wondered where her friends had gone. Cobra, Cap, HV, even the silent Paste Pot Pete had all vanished, some said died. Warrants for their arrest were gathering as much dust as this old place. They had moved on, and left the Sorceress behind.
    Whitney knew it was stupid to blame Jay for dying. He’d been a hero, and he was a hero to the end, and she knew he could never change his nature. She wouldn’t have loved him as much without that selfless self-sacrificing streak. But she was starting to forget what he smelled like, and how his touch felt on her skin. Even his memory was slipping away, and leaving her alone.
    She steeled herself and got on with drawing the summoning circle. She purified the ground, sweeping aside the needles and old condoms with brooms of hyssop, scrubbing the stained boards with sacred oils. She warded the nailed-up doors and windows, even the fireman’s pole, to prevent any interference. Then she carefully scribed the diagram with virgin chalk, carefully etching each rune just as her grandmother had taught her when she was a child.
    Her grandmother had taught her not to do this.
    She checked the books she’d brought with her, ancient volumes of forbidden lore, to make sure she was doing this right. She focussed her will and empowered the circle, then lit the candles around its perimeter; black candles for necromancy.
    Far off, the Gothametropolis Town Hall clock was chiming midnight. The Witching Hour. Whitney Darkness slipped off her gown and padded naked to the centre of the magic ring.
    “Very nice,” said Blackhurt, Prince of Fibs, although whether he meant her preparations or the lush nude body of the witch-woman he did not say. He was there in the corner, lurking in the shadows.
    “I’m ready,” Whitney Darkness told him defiantly. “But let’s just review the terms of our agreement again, shall we?”
    Blackhurt held up a vellum scroll, tied with a blood-red ribbon to match the signature on the contract. “I invest your spell with the infinite energies required to drag a soul back from the dead, so that you can raise to life the corpse you buried two weeks ago. The revenant will be fully alive, body and mind, in the same condition as he was one hour before dying. He will appear to you here on the spell’s completion, and I will not do anything, directly or indirectly, to cause his death, injury, or absence from your side hereafter.”
    Whitney nodded. “And in exchange I will not give you my soul,” she said emphatically. That had been her primary condition. Jay would not have wanted it, would have been repulsed by it. “However, in exchange for the power to perform this magic, I agree to… to…”
    “To give me your body, or rather ownership thereof, for twenty-four hours at some future time of my choosing,” Blackhurt reminded her. “With the caveat that I shall do that body no permanent harm, nor harm others with it, but with the clear understanding that it will be mine to play with, no matter what disgusting things I might choose to have you do.”
    The Sorceress shuddered. “Yes,” she said in a small voice. To get Jay back she would endure anything.
    The Prince of Fibs smiled nastily, his serpent eyes glowing with pleasure. “It’s good to do business with a woman who knows what she wants,” he said.
    Whitney resisted the urge to cover her nakedness with her arms. Instead she tossed back her shawl of long blonde hair and knelt in the circle. “Let’s get on with it then.”

***

    “Why me?” asked Visionary, for perhaps the thousandth time.
    Lisa Waltz smiled at him. It wasn’t pleasant. “Those who can, do,” she told him. “Those who can’t, teach.”
    “What about those who can’t teach?” Visionary asked plaintively.
    “Look, you agreed to this stuff when we set up that course at Paradopolis U, Superheroing 101,” the amorous avocatrix pointed out.
    “But then I had Cheryl and Donar and Yo and Enty and you teaching things,” Vizh whined.
    “And we all want you to know that we’re right behind you in this,” Lisa assured him. “Of course, the big guy’s in Ausgard, and Cheryl’s off on business, and Enty’s still recovering from his heart transplant in hospital, and Yo’s pinch-hitting for the Legion while Dancer’s AWOL, but I want you to know I’m right there behind you, looking at that vulnerable spot just between your shoulder blades.”
    The possibly-fake man winced. “Why do we need to teach the next generation of superheroes anyway?” he complained. “I mean, nobody trained us and… er…”
    “Exactly,” smirked Lisa. “Besides, are you really telling me you want Kerry Shepherdson using Dancer’s probability powers without supervision?”
    “I still say we should have been able to sedate her for the national good,” argued Kerry’s new guardian. “Or at least designated her a global catastrophe zone.”
    “I’m sure the painters and decorators will be able to install your new kitchen before Cheryl gets back,” the amorous advocatrix assured him.
     “I don’t know why G-Eyed suddenly came up with this idea for an LL training class,” Vizh argued. “He’s been having an awful lot of ideas lately. I think I liked him better when he was…”
    “Stupid like you?” Lisa queried.
    Visionary turned away in a huff. “I have monitor duty,” he said with what dignity he could muster for that phrase. He’s thought himself past the monitor duty stage years ago, back when he’d stopped being a member of the Lair Legion. Now he was back on the monitors but not on the team, which meant he got all of the monotony but none of the stipend. “Whitney called earlier and asked us to be specially on the lookout for any sinister undead stuff over in Gothametropolis. Just in case, she said.”
    “And are we?” asked the first lady of the Lair Legion.
    “Before he went off to Falcon’s hearing, G-Eyed sent CSFB!, Nats, and Yo over there just in case.”
    “Really? Why not Ziles? I thought she’d be a good choice for this kind of scouting mission if Pegasus is still on the recovery list.”
    “Um, we don’t know where Ziles is right now,” Vizh confessed.

***

    Ziles made sure her netra field equaliser was fully operation and applied her dibitzer to the final interlock. With an angry ping the last safety protocol of the Lunar Public Library’s main computer gave up, and the repository programs were open to the Xnylonian’s inspection.
    She was a little surprised at the volume of information. Googlebytes of it. Possibly a million times more than she could download to Roboti.
    “Quite a collection, isn’t it?” D.D. admitted, watching the intruder from the doorway.
    Ziles spun about and reached for her relaxor crème.
    “Please don’t,” the Library’s AI asked her. “First, I’m a hologram. Second, if you did knock me out then there’d be nobody to stop A.L.F.RED from ripping all your limbs off.”
    “Got that straight,” agreed the heavy combat robot that served as the Library’s major-domo. “And after that I’ll get mean.”
    Ziles knew when the game was up. “Alright,” she sighed. “It’s a fair cop.”
    “You’ll have to show me how you managed to get in this far,” D.D. asked her. “We take the security of our data very seriously round here. Nobody’s ever got this far before.”
    The Xnylonian warmed to a technical discussion. “Well, mostly it’s about fooling your systems into thinking they see what they want to see. Half the time I just let it believe I was a ticket-holding member of the Library, and it let me straight through to the information I required.”
    D.D.looked puzzled. “As a galactic citizen aware of our existence you are entitled to be a ticket-holding member,” she pointed out. “Why didn’t you just ask?”
    Ziles looked stricken. “Oh,” she confessed. “That never occurred to me.”

***

    The mists rose from the centre of the circle, and an unholy green light shone up onto Sorceress’ sweating form. She called by ancient names of things best left sleeping, and by things that had no names, and by gods who had been forgotten and dismantled before Earth’s mantle had cooled to solidity. She drew upon the dark power being lent to her and reached beyond the freezing veil, groping for the soul she needed to reclothe in flesh.
    Blackhurt watched her with amusement, well pleased with his bargain. Whitney was searching for the wrong person in the wrong place. She didn’t know that the creature they had buried as Hatman was a changeling that had taken his form. The real hero was caught in stasis in a block of ice far away. It pleased him that the Sorceress would trade away everything she was or could be to bring an impostor back to life. Blackhurt anticipated what the false Hatman might do to her, and to her friends. Then the demon lord planned what he would do to his enslaved Whitney that would make all of that seem trivial.
    “Come to me,” the Sorceress demanded, and pleaded, into the darkness. “Come to me.”
    The tides of death rolled backwards, and dead things swam to shore.

***

    “Boy, this rooftop patrolling in Gothametropolis is great!” CSFB! enthused, vaulting over to the top of the First Bank of Gotham. “Doesn’t it make you want to, you know, get a really long dark cloak and prove that criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot?”
    “Not really,” complained Nats, flying down to join him. “It makes me want to go home and get a good night’s sleep. I’ve got work in the morning, and Miss Framlicker doesn’t cut me any slack because of my LL activities.”
    Yo jumped across, Zorro cape fluttering in the night wind. “Yo is to be thinking that the city is to being very beautiful by moonlight.”
    “It sure is,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! agreed. “Nats is just grumpy because it was G-Eyed who ordered him to miss Friends.”
    “That’s not it,” Nats retorted. “Anyway, we have TIVO unless somebody’s let Flapjack at the remote again. But isn’t anybody else bothered about how much time Goldeneyed is spending with the Hooded Hood?”
    “Hey, he’s a classic villain,” CSFB! countered. “Who wouldn’t hang out with him? Of course, when I go see him he rubs his forehead a lot and sighs in a Latverian accent, but that’s just part of…”
    He fell silent as the scream rang out from the streets below.
    “We are to be needed!” called Yo, leaping over the parapet. Nats and CSFB! followed.
    They landed right in the gang of zombies.

***

    The movement on his mattress woke spiffy up. He opened his eyes suddenly, wondering who was creeping to his bedside in the middle of the night.
    “Kerry?” he asked hopefully.
    “I’m afraid not,” said the Abyssal Greye, Dean of the Scholar-Ghouls of Gothametropolis.
    “Gahh!” screamed spiffy, tumbling out of bed. The four undead perched on his mattress watched him with interest. He commanded his fern to cover any parts it was better not to show them.
    “Sorry to disturb you, young fellow,” the Abyssal told him, “but as Mayor you seemed the appropriate person to inform about the necromantic energies building up across the city.”
    spiffy blinked ands tried to slow his heart to a mere pounding. “What? I mean, what?”
    The ghouls exchanged glances. “There is a necrotic portal opened somewhere nearby,” the seemingly-kindly old scholar told him. In his shabby dressing gown and carpet slippers he seemed like an undead version of Xander the Improbable, assuming Xander ate corpses raw and didn’t object to maggots crawling over his shoulders. “It is allowing all kinds of dead spirits loose to cause trouble. Hoi-poloi. We don’t want their kind around here.”
    spiffy remembered Disco Hitler’s zombie plague. “Urk,” he winced. “Okay, what do I have to do?”
    “You must find the source and prevent the summoner from completing their work,” Greye suggested.
    “Fine. I’ll just find a robe first, shall I? And, um, who’s the villain I need to take out?”
    They told him.

***

    Contessa Natalia Romanza checked security to see who was at the door, then opened it to see Carl Bastion on her porch. “I thought it might be you,” she admitted.
    “Who else, princess?” the irritating archer challenged. “I just figured you might want ta talk about what happened when we were in the lands of Temporary Death.”
    The Contessa shuddered, and it wasn’t just because she was wearing a silk peignoir having risen from her bed to answer this late night call. “No, that’s not necessary,” she assured him.
    “Talia, you were captured and almost tortured ta death by the ghost of your ex-hubbie who you kind of betrayed to his death,” Carl pointed out. “I think you need to deal with it. Can I come in?”
    “I suppose so,” Natalia conceded. “But I really don’t need to… I’ve been going over it all in my mind ever since it happened. Again and again.”
    The archer closed the door and poured them both a drink. “Look, it’s only natural fer you to feel guilty.”
    “Because I am guilty,” the Contessa confessed. “That’s why things have been so… so very strange between us, Trickshot.”
    “You can call me Carl.”
    “No. Carl was my husband, the version of you from this reality before you came here. Carl was the young hero who I met and married after a whirlwind romance. And it was only after I’d revealed my purpose in catching his heart was to betray him to Zemo that I realised I loved him. But I never knew they were going to kill him.”
    “I know, darlin’. But that’s still a lot ta cope with, an’ then when you met his corrupted shade in that dark place, an’ all he wanted ta do was to hurt you…”
    “A part of me knew I deserved it,” Natalia agreed. “He deserved his revenge.” She downed the drink and took another. “After Carl died, I gave myself up to Dan Drury, you know. I became a SPUD operative as part of my amnesty, tried to do good to make up for all the bad things I’d done before. But I never can, can I?”
    “Hey, we all do stuff we’re ashamed of,” Carl Bastion told her. “We just have ta keep tryin’.”
    They were very close together now on the sofa. “Yes,” she agreed.
    “Must have been tough for you, when a duplicate version of your dead husband showed up.”
    “It was. I… I didn’t know what to do. How to feel. I was attracted to you the same way I was to him, but I was his widow, his murderer, and…”
    “Was attracted? Or are attracted?” challenged Carl Bastion
    Natalia Romanza swallowed the last of her drink and didn’t answer.
    Carl Bastion kissed her. “Was attracted or are attracted, princess?”
    “Are attracted,” she confessed.
    Her visitor smiled and kissed her again. After a while he took her to the bedroom and closed the door.
    It was good to be back, thought Deadshot.

    ***

    “So what’s the big emergency?” Trickshot demanded of HALLIE. “I was takin’ the night off, you know. I wus just on my way ta see Talia.”
    “Something’s upsetting Marie,” the Lair Legion’s AI explained, referring to the Lair Mansion’s resident banshee. “I can’t even see her of course, but Flapjack says she’s pretty agitated. I wondered if you could find a way of talking to her. Whitney’s not here, and she seems to like you.”
    “The old Trickshot charm,” the archer smirked. “Okay, I’ll give it a shot.”

***

    “What the hell is this?” demanded Pegasus as she picked her way over the sidewalk debris and vomit along the seedy Hell’s Bathroom backstreet.
    “This is the Fatal Toilet, the best music bar on the East Coast,” dull thud answered her. “Admittedly, you’re not seeing it at it’s best right now, after chucking out time and before it’s rained, but all the same this is mah place of occasional work.”
    ~~What this is~~ chimed in Cressida the worm wonder, the sentient tapeworm in thud’s large intestine, ~~is Davie’s best attempts at making up to you after the revelation that you only joined the Lair Legion as a spy and saboteur. I know it’s a bit pathetic but if I was you I’d be grateful anyone’s making the effort at all.~~
    “It’s… a very nice Toilet,” Penny Christopoulos said, making an effort. “Why are we here again?”
    “Tomorrow’s a big night, with Flint Michigan and the Never-Ending Orgasm doing their stuff live on stage.”
    “That sounds more interesting,” Pegasus perked up.
    ~~It’s not~~ chimed in Cressida. ~~Believe me~~
    “Anyway, I told Big John that I’d set some’a the stuff up tonight so we could rewire the woofers later,” the rumpled roadie explained.
    He unlocked the door and led Pegasus into the darkened bar.
    Seventy or so zombies looked back at him.
    “It’s a bit dead in here tonight,” he managed to say before the battle began.

***

    The Dark Knight dropped onto the roof of the old firehouse without a sound, but Blackhurt Prince of Fibs was still waiting for him.
    “This is private property,” the demon said. “You can’t go in there.”
    “I’m here to complain about the noise,” the urban legend answered. “And also about the undead.”
    Blackhurt looked sceptically at him. “I can see your mind,” he warned. “I can see the doubts there. Why bother? That’s what you’re wondering. Why bother saving them when all they do is turn on the one that gives up everything to keep them safe? They’ve made you a wanted man, haven’t they? Set spies and bounty-hunters on your trail. Made you the criminal, who has sacrificed all he had in the cause of justice. Why bother indeed?”
    The Dark Knight paused. “So you can offer me a better deal,” he scorned.
    “I might be able to,” Blackhurt answered softly, reading in the hurt in his adversary’s mind a chink in his armour that hadn’t been there before. “I might be able to offer you something…”
    “In exchange for my soul?”
    “No. I know you wouldn’t go for that. But I can offer you peace, make it as if you had never become the Dark Knight. As if you had never had to become the Dark Knight.”
    DK breathed twice before answering. “Keep talking.”

***

    The pain shot through Whitney like cold fire, like needles of acid burning into her, but she tightened her will and pressed on. She could feel an outline on the other side now, a shape that should be Jay Boaz; but it felt so different to what she’d expected. Had he changed so much in but two weeks in the grave?
    But there he was. Who else could it be? She had the grave soil in a silver dish in the centre of the circle. She had spilled her own blood onto it. It was the spirit of the man in the grave.
    She reached deeper and grasped hold to bring him back.
    The window shattered and four of her closest friends spilled into the room. “Whitney, no!” called spiffy. “Don’t do this!”
    The Sorceress saw Nats speeding towards the circle. If the line was smeared the magics would spill out and be lost. All she had done, all she had sacrificed, would be for nothing. She gestured and the earth rose up to hammer into the unsuspecting Bill Reed, slapping him down hard beneath a half ton of rock.
    “She’s possessed by the devil!” concluded CSFB!, manoeuvring for a leap. “Watch out for her head spinning round and luminous vomit!”
    The Sorceress released a portion of the world’s pizzo-electric charge up in to the wired wonder, sending him twitching to unconsciousness.
    “Yo is thinking that cute-Whitney is not to be thinking clearly,” Yo warned, dodging a flash of sudden witchfire and rolling to the side. “Yo is to be thinking that cute-Whitney is very hurting for cute-Jay, but is to not be doing terrible forbidden things to be having him back. Is not to be right, Whitney.”
    The Sorceress choked back a sob and dropped the upper floor on Yo.
    “Ouch,” spiffy winced in sympathy. “Look, we’re trying to be kind here, but you’re sort of creaming us. Whit, there are armies of undead rising all over the city. You’ve got to stop this.” He reached his fronds out to wipe clear the circle, but the Sorceress gritted her teeth and slammed him though the front doors. Right through them. She had work to do.
    There was the spirit. She only had to reach it.
    She grasped its shimmering nothingness and pulled it through.
    Graveyard dirt swirled in the air and drew essence from the materials around it. A little carbon, a little water…
    Whitney screamed in anguish as the body before her drew on her power and life force to reanimate itself, back to life, back to wholeness. She forced herself to hold on, for Jay.
    Bone formed, then muscle and sinew, then flesh and skin. At the last it shivered and shimmered as if adjusting its shape, and there was the perfect form of Jay Boaz, Hatman, standing before her.
    “Jay,” she whispered with all her heart, though her weakness had dropped her to her knees and she could taste blood on her tongue.
    “Hello,” said the changeling in Hatman’s voice. “Hello, Whitney.”
    The gateway to death roiled and bubbled, as if many other creatures were seething forward to be released.
    “Oh. We have to close the gate,” realised Sorceress. “We have to do it now. Help me Jay.”
    “I don’t think so,” said the faux-Hatman, and he smashed his hand hard across her face, sending the weakened woman toppling to the floor. “I made a few new friends and I think we’ll bring them through as well. All of them.” He leered down at her. “They’ll love to meet you.”
    A brown streak blurred across the magic circle and landed two hundred punches on the fake hero before he could take a breath. “You scumbag!” hissed De Brown Streak. “I was willing to let Whitney bring you back because that’s what she wanted, but you’re not going to hurt her!”
    “Wait!” pleaded the faux-Hatman.
    “I don’t know what’s happened to you in that other place,” DBS told him, “ but you’re not the Hatman I knew.” And he picked him up and hurled him back through the shifting black portal.

***

    “What?” frowned Blackhurt as he sensed the reverse.
    “It’s done?” checked the Dark Knight. “Then I guess I don’t have to keep you busy any more, spooky.” It had been very hard to control his own thoughts to keep the demon interested.

***

    Whitney Darkness felt rather than saw the gateway shatter, dragging those souls that had borrowed time back on Earth away with it. Almost all of them.
    “No!” she sobbed, the blow stinging on her cheek and bleeding at her heart. “No….”
    De Brown Streak didn’t say anything. He just held her tight while she wept out all the pain and horror and grief, and he held her for a very long time.

***

    “I kept my side of our bargain, Whitney Darkness,” the Prince of Fibs told her in her mind. “Look for the day when I come to claim your side from you.”
At least the night wasn’t a complete loss. The destruction of the Sorceress would be sweet.

***

    “Dragging people back from the dead,” Trickshot explained to HALLIE and Al B. Harper after his strange communion with the Lair mansion banshee. “That’s never good. At least no real harm’s been done.”

***

    Deadshot watched as the emergency vehicles hurried away with sirens flashing carrying Natalia Romanza to ER. He licked the last drops of blood off his fingers with satisfaction. “I’ll be back for you later, princess, ta finish the job” he promised. “But first I have other scores ta settle.”

***

    Lania knew when Finny had awoken by the way he shied his claw out of her hand. “Welcome back, lover,” she told him. “We were getting worried.”
    “Where am I?” the Makluan dragon demanded, opening his eyes and looking round. “Why do I hurt so much?”
    “Lair Mansion sick bay. The Resolution crisis is over,” Lania assured him. “You hurt because you took psychosomatic wounds from the bad guy, which isn’t good for a shapeshifter. Or because you haven’t yet tasted my sweet sugar love. Take your pick.”
    “The wounds, please,” Fin Fang Foom answered.
    “G-Eyed’s been leading your team,” Lania reported with a resigned sigh. “He pulled in Falcon to replace Hatman and Yo to fill in for Dancer, but it turns out Falc was a secret psycho mercenary murderer, so there’s a bit of paperwork. Whitney went loony over Jay dying and tried to bring him back by filling the town with zombies. AG and ManMan went to the Dark Galaxy to look for the missing Dancer and haven’t been heard from in two weeks. Visionary’s setting up a junior LL. Lisette left and nobody’s talking about her. And it’s tuna casserole for dinner.”
    “Right,” breathed the Makluan. “I can see I have a lot to catch up on.”
    “You do. Welcome back, Finster.”
    “Thank you. Could you just give me a moment, please? I need to come to terms with all this.”
    “Sure,” the LL’s spokescelebrity agreed.
    She closed the door and went to tell the others the good news. The dragon stretched and tested his aching limbs and took a moment.
    After all, the Devil Doctor had a whole new body to get used to.

***

Next Issue: Those fun-loving spy-guys Messenger and Mr Epitome take on the laugh-a-minute Count Armageddon in hilarious Badripoor. Join us for belly-laughs a-plenty as the two wackiest guys in the Parodyverse team up in the comedy of the year to… uh, actually no, they’re not really well known for their chuckle factor are they? In fact things could get rather grim, possibly even gritty if we’re not careful. So next time Messenger and Mr Epitome go to Badripoor, but let’s just say they have somewhat different methods and leave it at that. Also more on Falcon, G-Eyed, Kerry, the Shoggoth, Natalia, Tricky, and most of the usual suspects. It’s in #132: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Extreme Measures , coming your way next week.

***

Bring Out Your Footnotes:

The Abandoned Legion were an unofficial grouping of unconventional heroes brought together by HV as the League of Left-Outs (those neither in the Lair Legion/league of Regulars or the Scourge). They operated on the edges of the law and society until they were eventually placed on the wanted list, and vanished shortly thereafter during the Technopolis War. Some say they died, others that they stowed away and went back to the Technoverse when Technopolis returned there. Hwatever the truth, Hunter Victorious, Cap, Cobra and Paste Pot Pete are missing, and the real truth won’t be revealed until spiffy writes it (spiffy being their principal chronicler). Astute HH-watchers will note this is yet another of my unauthorised tidyings to keep the cast numbers controllable.

Visionary and Superheroing 101: Vizh and the gang’s previous foray into the world of superhero academe is found in the excellent Parodiopolis University Continuing Education Program.

Abyssal Greye, Dean of the Scholar-Ghouls of Gothametropolis: The flesh-eating undead beneath the great All Saints Cemetery in Gothametropolis have the ability to absorb the knowledge and character of those corpses whose brains they devour in the proper form. They have therefore carefully chosen their food to become a living repository of many of the greatest historical figures in the city’s history, developing into a rather genteel academic society with a genuine concern for the wellbeing of the city many of them were founding fathers of. And spiffy owes them a favour.

Marie Murcheson is the banshee that haunts the Lair Mansion, appearing only when the building is under supernatural attack, or when death is very close to the Legion, or when G-Eyed uses his shower. Being a sentient computer program, HALLIE can’t perceive Marie (or so she claims). Marie’s tragic story can be found in Untold Tales #60-63, starting with Untold Hallowe’en Tales of the Lair Legion: The Bride of Shabba’dhabba’Dhu and Other Tragedies -Hallowe'en I - The Shower Scene .

The Devil Doctor is an ancient undead enemy of the Makluans, a body-thief who possessed the dragons to further his own twisted agenda. Captured too late to prevent him from betraying Makluos to the notice of Galactivac the Living Death that Sucks and thus dooming his people, he was imprisoned in the Psychostave and sent to eternal exile. Unfortunately his psychic influence (with the help of the Psychostave) corrupted the surviving Makluans conveying him to his fate. Battle broke out on the Makluan spaceship and it crashed on Earth. All but one of the dragons was killed. Fin Fang Foom survived but had to hibernate for hundreds of years to heal, and later gave up his body to be occupied by the consciousness of Andrew Dean. The Devil Doctor occupied one of the many draconic corpses at the crash site, used its shapeshifting abilities to become a Chinese mandarin, and went on to carve out an evil empire where he could continue his dark genetic experiments and further his long-range plans. The Devil Doctor’s downfall came in a confrontation with Fin Fang Foom/Andrew Dean, in which an attempt to possess the Lair Legion’s resident dragon resulted in the Devil Doctor being cast out bodiless (and with no remaining Makluan bodies for him to occupy). That was the last we saw of the villain – until now. The Devil Doctor debuted in The Journal of Sir Mumphrey Wilton, Extract Seven: In which the insidious Devil Doctor reveals his true colours, and nobody is quite who they seem to be, and took on Finny in UT# 55, Untold Tales of the Lair Legion Out And About In the Big Wide Universe: Worlds Apart.

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.