#132: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Extreme Measures

#132: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Extreme Measures

    The refugee boat coasted up to the old wharf, under a crooked moon that painted the city of Badripoor with silver and shadows. The far-Eastern nation-state clustered around the bay, rising from seedy wooden shanty hovels through the crumbling stone and brick townhouses of its colonial past to the new steel and glass skyscrapers of its recent wealth. And it was rotten to the core.
    The refugees crowded the old tramp steamer, pushing it low in the water. Perhaps another three hundred desperate people fleeing the wars and terrorism of the neighbouring countries, paying everything they had to the corrupt sailors that smuggled them to the city. They didn’t see it for what it really was, a bloated spider in its web of corruption, waiting to catch them and poison them and devour them whole.
    The usual welcoming committee was waiting on the dock. Half a dozen soldiers with futuristic anti-personnel rifles covered the newcomers as they were herded down the gangplank and separated into groups. The girls were pushed over to one wall for ‘inspection’ before being taken off to the brothels that earned so much of the city’s fortune. Able young men and children were selected for work gangs in the sweatshops and diamond mines. Any remaining wealth was confiscated from the trembling refugees who had trusted their fates to a new life in Badripoor.
Now they had their new life..
    VelcroVixen watched with distaste as the soldiers manhandled the young women and remembered her own childhood. She noted that Slayhawk, her designated metahuman muscle for the evening, was reserving a pair of wide-eyed twins no more than twelve or so for his own personal use. That marked him as one of the newbies amongst he growing cadre of super-villains that served the Lord of Badripoor. The novelty of absolute power over these human cattle son wore off for all but the most perverse and evil of the elite staff.
    The razor-letter sliced neatly across Slayhawk’s face, slicing half of it away, sending him screaming to the ground in a welter of gore. Messenger vaulted over the side of the steamer and loosed a sawn-off shotgun into the villain’s stomach at close range, smearing him across the surprised security crew.
    The soldiers were quite well trained, but they’d never faced the postman before. Messenger spun low beneath their wide-beam energy sprays, taking one out with a shot to the kneecap and a second with a parcel bomb. He rolled over still firing as he went and two more fell backwards in sprays of blood.
    VelcroVixen pressed the emergency stud on her earring to get backup.
    The refugees were fleeing in all directions, pelting away down dark alleys to find what safety they could in the midnight shadows of Badripoor. That cleared the field for Messenger to find VelcroVixen.
    “Wait…!” she called as he stormed towards her.
    The postman didn’t wait. He hurled a razor-letter to slice off her head. He was quite surprised when she caught it.
    Then he crumpled to the ground with a grunt of rage.
    “What?” puzzled Vicki Vee, still holding the gleaming metal rectangle that had been meant to decapitate her.
    “Oh, don’t worry about him, Ms Vee,” a tall stranger called to her as he emerged from the shadows. He wore a well-tailored grey suit but he walked like a predator. “I merely disconnected his central nervous system for a while by manipulating his bio-aura. It’s a little gift I have.”
    Messenger struggled to move but it seemed he just couldn’t shift.
    “I can make him feel pain too if you like,” the stranger offered helpfully. He glanced down at the postman, and Messenger grimaced as he tried to restrain a scream.
    VelcroVixen looked the newcomer over with interest. “That’s a useful talent you have there… Exemplary?” she guessed.
    The grey man looked flattered. “I was hoping my reputation had preceded me,” he admitted.
    “We’d heard you had received something of a setback,” Vicki admitted. “On the run from the Shadow Cabinet or something?”
    “Yes. They don’t take kindly to their operations going wrong, and they have a long arm. That’s why I decided to take a holiday in beautiful Badripoor.”
    “And perhaps seek gainful employment?” the svelte villainess suggested.
    “With the emphasis on gainful,” admitted her rescuer. He glanced down at the quivering Messenger. “He’s just a freebie. Anything else and we need to talk salary scales.”
    VelcroVixen took him by the arm. “This is going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

***

    Lisa tousled her hair as she scratched her head dramatically. “I don’t understand,” she told General ‘Lightningstrike’ Wright as he sat on the judge’s bench at this military tribunal. “Falcon has already brought in this Falko mercenary after saving Hell’s Bathroom from him. It must be pretty clear by now that Sam Wilson isn’t Falko. Falko is. It’s the classic Clone/Alternate Dimension Defence, with the added virtue of being true this time.”
    Sam Wilson watched the hearing from the dock. He saw the growing flush of fury in special prosecutor Herbert Garrick’s face. “We don’t dispute that there’s an… an alternative Sam Wilson who has been somehow pursuing a life as a high-tech mercenary,” Bad News Herb told the bench. “We’ve heard cross-examination of the sister, this Lindy Wilson who somehow got brought here from ten years back…”
    “That’s a typical Hooded Hood Continuity Revision Annulment,” Lisa chipped in brightly.
    “As I said” Garrick almost screeched, “we don’t dispute that Falcon didn’t do many of the things attributed to this Falko version we have in custody. But we now have firm evidence of Sam Wilson’s behaviour before the divergence point when he became two different people, er timelines, of whatever…”
    “I refer counsel to the testimony of Dr. Al B. Harper,” Lisa chipped in.
    “Nobody even understood that,” Garrick snarled back.
    “Exactly,” Lisa answered smugly. “Carry on, Herbie.”
    “Counsel will address Special Agent Garrick by his proper form of address,” General Wright rumbled.
    “But sir, I have far too much respect for the court to use words like that,” Lisa answered innocently.
    Falcon stifled a snort.
    “Before he ever became a costumed annoyance called Falcon he was still breaking the law,” H.P. Garrick insisted. “Drug use and drug peddling. Theft with violence. Assault. Possession of stolen firearms. Prosecution contends that this man has no place in public service with a security organisation like SPUD. In fact he belongs behind bars, like the criminal he is!”
    “Defence calls prosecution a dickless wonder,” retorted Lisa, “and points out the dozens of times Falcon has saved the planet. Plus, all these alleged offences were supposed to have been committed when he was a minor. It’s beyond this court’s jurisdiction…”
    “I am not dickless!” objected Special Agent Garrick.
    “Oh yeah? Prove it!” challenged the amorous advocatrix.
    And the trial went on…

***

    “Nice place you have here.”
    “Thank you,” VelcroVixen smiled as she led her guest into the Hotel Resplendent, the largest and most luxurious of the exclusive gambling places up on the lofty heights above the city. “Most of Belasco’s elite forces choose to live here, Exemplary.”
    “Belasco Medici,” the newcomer noted. “So Count Armageddon himself really is in charge of the city these days?”
    “In the kaos-tainted flesh,” Vicki assured him. “Just put Messenger down there, Exemplary. I’ll get Flesh Crawler and Moodswing to take him down to the Interrogation Rooms in the Low City.”
    The big man unceremoniously crumpled the fallen postman into a chair. “Call me Brett,” he asked the velvet-clad blonde. “I think I’ll be resting the name Exemplary for a while.”
    “Alright Brett,” VelcroVixen smiled at him. “And you can call me anytime.”
    “I’m sure.” He looked around the richly-furnished private lounge. “Flesh Crawler and Moodswing are two of the Technopolis Science Villains that got left behind after the war, aren’t they? Are all the escaped SV’s here?”
    “Most of them,” Vicki shrugged. “I guess they’re more comfortable working for somebody they know from the old country. Count Armageddon ran a nation-state back there too. There’s fourteen of them here. We’re only missing Technovore, who’s still imprisoned, and Yellow Fever, who’s too creepy, and Mad Wendy, who’s too… Mad Wendy.”
    “Some big names then,” considered Brett. “Biohazard, Dimensionweaver, Dreamripper, Ultraninja are all on the Interpol most wanted list.”
    “Who isn’t?” VelcroVixen shrugged interestingly with a little smirk. “Speaking of Dreamripper, I guess we’d better get her to take the Messenger’s mind apart to see why he’s decided to come to Badripoor all of a sudden.”
    “Oh, I know that,” Brett told her. “He recently had a glimpse of an alternate future where he came to the city. That’s how he found out about Medici and his private army of super-villains ruling the roost, doing whatever they wanted to above the law. So he came here to stop it.”
    “On his own?”
    “He’s working for SPUD these days. But I guess there’ll be plausible deniability on a mission like this.”
    That tallied with information Vicki Vee already had. She only looked like a dumb blonde. It looked like Exemplary was playing things straight.
    “We’ll deal with him later then. Right now we have to get you to the boss so you can be signed up.”
    “In that case I’ll keep hold of the postman a while longer,” Brett grinned nastily. “Nothing like a little present to get a potential employer in a good mood.”

***

    “You can’t come in here!” the doctor protested. “This is Intensive Care! And there are guards out there!”
    “There were guards out there,” Trickshot answered. “They’re sleeping now. And you might wanna tell Dan Drury that his security is a piece o’ crap.” He pushed the medic aside and hurried over to the oxygen frame where Natalia Romanza lay. “Princess?”
    The heavily-bruised eyes flickered open. She was swathed almost from head to foot in bandages and plaster casts. She saw Carl Bastion and looked terrified.
    “Talia? What is it?”
    The injured SPUD agent on the floor flexed a finger and tried to discharge a palm-held tranq dart at the irritating archer. Trickshot easily caught it, even though his own right palm was still swathed in bandages from his recent combat injury. “Whoa! What’s happening here?”
    There was the sound of a Turret 720 APG combat semiautomatic’s safety catch being slipped off right by Trickshot’s ear. “Whut’s happenin’ is that our security’s better n’ you thought, Bastion,” Dan Drury, Director of SPUD told him. “One twitch n’ well see if you kin still beat up women without a head, you bastard.”
    The archer froze. “What is this? Am I walking into some kind of scam? I heard Talia was hurt an I came runnin’.”
    “By you,” Drury accused, grabbing Trickshot’s reflex longbow and hurling it into a corner, then starting to frisk his arrowhead pouches. “You came ta Talia’s house, and ta her bed, and then you did this ta her.”
    “What? Are you outta your freaking skull? When I catch the guy whut did this ta her I’m gonna…”
    “Save it for the judge, you miserable bastard. When they nail you for this I’m gonna pull the lever myself.”

***

    “Ah, welcome,” Count Belasco Medici called. The European nobleman had a Mediterranean complexion, a forked beard, and eyes that shone slightly with the kaos energies that suffused his entire body. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Do come in.”
    VelcroVixen led her guest into the penthouse apartment and made herself at home. “You can drop that package on the sofa there. You’re still inhibiting his nervous system, Brett?”
    “Sure,” agreed the man in grey. “Shame I couldn’t stop him before he chopped down your flunky.”
    “There are always more flunkies,” Count Armageddon assured him. “Fools are one of the planet’s greatest natural resources.” He poured a drink for his visitors. “So you want to know more about our operation, Exemplary?”
    “I’m looking for a career change.”
    “Yes, I’d heard that the Shadow Cabinet was trying to eliminate some embarrassing loose ends after that Ultizon fiasco. It never pays to underestimate the dogged persistence of heroes.”
    “I know that now.”
    “Good. I like a man who learns from his mistakes. I’m gathering quite the army of metahumans here who are seeking second chances to make good – or evil.”
    “So I hear. You’ve got nearly all the science villains…”
    “I have over a hundred metahumans already on my payroll, and more to come. I have mutates seeking refuge here every day, and it is always granted.”
    VelcroVixen grinned. “One little suffusion of Kaos Energies from the boss and even the most moral of them seem to lose their inhibitions and consciences. We’re actually funding the radical mutate support groups now to ship them out here. And of course we’re doing lots of work supporting metahuman offender rehab programmes.”
    “You’re not worried that the heroes will find out and come down here?” Brett challenged. “You may be a sovereign state but you’re not recognised by the UN, and the Count here is on every Most Wanted list on the planet.”
    “Let them come,” Armageddon grinned. “They are just a vulnerable to Kaos corruption as anyone else.”
    “The Hooded Hood got it right,” VelcroVixen chipped in. “When he wanted to take over the planet, he gathered twenty-five powerful villains as the Purveyors of Peril. And we damn near conquered the world, would have done if that had been HH’s actual goal. Just twenty-five of us, two-to-one odds versus the Lair Legion. What if we made it twenty to one?”
    “You want to conquer the world?” Brett asked incredulously. “Isn’t that passé?”
    “Eventually I may do that,” considered Medici. “For now I am just securing my stranglehold on the world’s black markets and criminal enterprises. Nobody since Zemo has organised things on an international scale, and frankly he was a meddler rather than a co-ordinator. The Cartels and Agencies have their little conferences, but there is no vision or purpose to them. That will change.”
    The master of Badripoor strode over to the glass wall that overlooked the shining, shadowed city. “My strength is growing. My army is training. My word here is absolute, and three million residents are mine to do with as I please. Life is good here for those that choose to follow me. Wealth, power, pleasures, whatever you want. Riches? Women? Take them. Just so as you recognise who is the ruler over all.”
    “There’s never been a place and a time like this before,” VelcroVixen added.
    “Sure there has,” Brett argued. “Caribbean, seventeenth century, the pirate years. The Scottish border reavers of the sixteen hundreds. South China Seas, late eighteen hundreds. Anywhere that a petty tyrant can gather scum together in a lawless margin and plot against the civilised world.”
    Count Armageddon turned sharply. “What?” he demanded angrily.
    “Belasco Medici,” said the man in grey, rising to his full stature, “You’re under arrest!”
    Then Mr Epitome dropped all pretence, dived forward at super-speed, and smashed Armageddon through the plate glass screen to topple from his skyscraper down to the city beyond.

***

    “Okay,” Al B. Harper said hastily. “Don’t eat me.”
    The Manga Shoggoth considered this. “I was not intending to do so,” he admitted. “I had croissants.”
    The Lair Legion’s scientific advisor relaxed his grip on his atomic slide rule. “Great. Croissants are much better than people to eat. Really.”
    “You are referring to your previous trespass at my Arctic lair, where I intended to redistribute your long chain molecules in other projects I was then working upon,” the Shoggoth surmised. As he spoke he moved around the Lair lab with interest, prodding and poking those parts that seemed most interesting to him.
    “Hey!” objected Mindy Pyrite, who objected to being prodded just there.
    “You are not organic,” the Shoggoth told her. “Interesting.”
    “Just keep your pseudopods to yourself, buster. I’m seeing someone.”
    Al B. hastened over to the bandage-swathed protoplasm and the android who was trying out as the Lair Legion’s mechanic. “Mindy is a robot,” he explained. “There’s this breed of sentient machines now, and since we’re an equal opportunities employer…”
    “Fascinating. Life mimics art. I have a number of animation films that feature such concepts. Of course, in many of them the robots were ripping the heads off the humans.”
    “We don’t do that,” Mindy assured him. “Much. Sometimes Uncle Walt gets a bit cranky and we have to… I mean, no, we don’t do that.”
    “Was there a reason you came to the lab?” Al asked the Shoggoth. “Not that you’re not every welcome, nosiree, happy to have a loathsome elder being inspecting the old place anytime, really…”
    “I was seeking a means of decontaminating my essence of mundane matter, and particularly of the narrative-dense mundane matter of this island,” the Shoggoth explained. “Until such time as I am cleansed I must remain separate from my main mass, and that may have unpleasant and unforeseen consequences.”
    “So does prodding me with pseudopods, bub,” Mindy warned.
    “There are a number of cultural mores that will require further investigation,” the Shoggoth admitted. “Fortunately, Ms Waltz has offered to orient me on the basics.”
    “Crap,” breathed Al B. “We’d better see about getting that mundane matter out of your system as soon as possible.”

***

    VelcroVixen watched in shock as her employer and his attacker vanished into free-fall from the skyscraper window. She reached for her brooch-transmitter to summon security.
    A razor-sharp rectangle of metal pressed over he jugular vein. “I suggest you don’t do that,” said Messenger.
    “Of course,” she breathed. “A set-up. You were never paralysed, were you?”
    “Epitome can’t do that,” the postman assured her.
    “Mister Epitome. Now this starts to make sense. An OPS/SPUD joint operation.”
    Messenger quickly frisked her and relieved her of half a dozen concealed weapons and pieces of jewellery that might have been concealed weapons. “Close,” he told her, “but it’s actually two different operations running concurrently. Me and kung-fu grip action man out there don’t really see eye to eye on how to finish this.”
    “You want to kill everybody here and raise the city to the ground, and he only wants to beat us all to pulp?” surmised Vicki Vee.
    “He wants to arrest your boss – or at least drag him onto US soil so he can arrest him.”
    VelcroVixen squirmed against her captor. “And what do you want?” she purred.
    “I want access to your bosses’ private files, the correspondence with all these other crimelords and cartels he’s been doing business with.” He pushed the razor letter harder to the villainess’ throat. “More exactly, I want you to get me access to them.”
    VelcroVixen considered her options. There weren’t that many. “You want me to break into my employer’s secret vault and extract his most secure documents?”
    “I want you to stop wasting my time and get to it now.”
    “And what makes you think I even know where the vault is, let alone how to open it?”
    “Because I believe you want to live. Last chance. If the next words from your lips aren’t ‘yes, I’ll take you right there, Messenger,’ then the words after that will be ‘aaakkkkkkhhh!’.”
    “I’ll take you right there, Messenger.”

***

    “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” Visionary confessed. “I thought looking after little Christopher was bad, and he’s just got the super-powers of six insane superheroes. But Kerry is sixteen, and she’s not only got Dancer’s probability powers but the hormones of a teenager. And the larcenous tendencies of a psychotic pyromaniac.”
    “Yo is to be thinking is kind to be doing taking in poor sweet Kerry while sister is off to be emergency waitressing in Tibet,” the pure thought being smiled at his/her old friend.
    “I mean, last night? spiffy comes round to say hi. spiffy. And suddenly I’m trying not to leave him alone in the same room as Kerry. I kept finding excuses to go in and offer them cups of coffee and stuff – and the kitchen’s still a burned out wreck from that incident with Kerry and the gas cylinder and the gerbil, so we can’t even make coffee at the condo now.”
    “Yo is thinking that spiffy is to be a nice boy. Is not to be wandering hands.”
    “I dunno. He’s a growing boy,” Vizh worried. “Visibly, when Kerry was sitting with him.” He shuddered again. “Oh, and Kerry wants me to give her the Talk.”
    “Talk? She is wanting to chat?”
    “The Talk. The one about sex? Where babies come from?”
    “Oooh! Is good idea. Yo is wanting to be learning this too.”
    “Aaagh!”
    “Do not to be stabbing your hand with forking, Visi. Yo is just funning you. Yo knows about the birds and the rabbits. But is to be good that you are ‘splaing all to cute-Kerry.”
    “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” repeated Visionary. “I’m pretty sure she knows more about the Talk than I do.”
    “Then you might be to learning something,” Yo offered brightly. “And anyway, is to be only week one to opening of cute LL Hero School with cute-Visionary as to be Headmaster.”
    “And I still say I’m not shaving my head,” the possibly-fake man insisted. “Or sitting in a wheelchair.”
    Yo gently took the fork away from him.

***

    Mr Epitome had researched Belasco Medici before engaging in combat. The science villain had become suffused with a sinister power source he termed Kaos Energy that had transformed his entire body into an ionic shell. Apart from massive physical resources such as strength, speed, and damage resistance it also allowed him to control tendrils of Kaos which sprang from his body to spread their caustic influence, searing flesh like acid and attacking the moral centres of the human mind at the same time.
    What Count Armageddon couldn’t do was fly. When Epitome pushed him through the plate glass of the penthouse he therefore grabbed the villain by the throat (Medici didn’t need to breathe) and rocketed straight upwards.
    Medici didn’t resist. He calmly reached up, pushed his fingers into Epitome’s eyeballs, and released his Kaos blasts.
    “Aagh!” gasped the paragon of power, flinching away. He brought his free hand in to club Armageddon on the head with all his might.
    “You’re not Exemplary,” Medici concluded, ignoring the blow. He peeled off strands of Kaos Energy like octopus’ limbs to burrow into Epitome’s flesh. That freed his hands to better pound close-in on his enemy’s torso. “Exemplary can’t fly. A bold ruse. I will enjoy punishing VelcroVixen for allowing herself to be taken in like that.”
    Epitome jammed the EMP disruptor into Armageddon’s forehead. The handsome features of the European nobleman swirled like coffee as the human façade roiled revealing sickly green energies latticing beneath. “You’re the one that’s taken,” promised the hero.
    The Kaos strands instinctively burrowed deeper into Epitome’s body, racking him with cold pain that dredged up the worst of his old sorrows and hurts, and dragged his every doubt into his forebrain to distract him. Armageddon reached up and crushed the EMP disruptor. “You are better prepared than most,” he admitted. “You will make a useful slave after my Kaos Energy has hollowed out your soul.”
    Mr Epitome couldn’t remember feeling weaker. He wanted to be sick. He wanted to do all kinds of disgusting things. He briefly sketched out in his mind an afternoon’s vicious fun with the Idiom whether she liked it or not. Then he forced himself back to the battle at hand. “So much for the tech,” he noted. “Let’s try this.”
    The bottle contained only salt water, but blessed in the Roman rite by the OPS chaplain. It spilled over the Kaos tendrils and they too rippled and burned as Armageddon had earlier.
    Epitome ripped them apart.
    Medici reached up and took him by the throat. “I’ll do worse that kill you,” he promised.
    He was stronger than Epitome; twice as strong, maybe more. But Epitome had the leverage. He braced his hands inside Armageddon’s arms and pulled outwards, breaking the criminal’s grip. Then he let Medici go. “I think I’ve distracted you long enough,” Epitome told him. “Next time we meet, I’ll be dragging you back to the USA for the justice you so richly deserve, punk.”
    The battle had taken them far out over the bay, so that Badripoor was just a glittering allure on the dark horizon. Count Armageddon tumbled down into the black waters and did not reappear.
    Mr Epitome wobbled in his flight as the terrors and hurts of the battle caught up with him. He turned back towards the city to exfiltrate Messenger. Then his injuries overtook him and he too toppled down into the bay and lay there atop the torpid waters until the Epitome Express arrived to find him.

***

    “Okay, let’s start with the easier question. Which members of the LL haven’t been arrested?” G-Eyed asked irritably.
    “You,” answered Nats, with a certain degree of regret. “The only members in custody are Falc and Tricky, and Falc’s due to be released as soon as he’s been debriefed.”
    “I don’t see why SPUD’s suspending him,” CSFB! complained. “I mean, who hasn’t had an evil double counterpart blackening their good name?”
    “And where is Ziles?” Goldeneyed continued. “Pegasus? Dancer?”
    “Penny’s taken some sick leave after getting her head blown off,” dull thud answered. “Dancer’s still lost in space, and nae word from AG and Manny, nor from Mumphrey, Xander and the Librarian. And Ziles… I dunno.”
    “More to the point,” Nats demanded, “where’s Finny? You know, our Leader.” He glared at G-Eyed.
    “He’s also taking sick leave,” G-Eyed answered. “He’s got every confidence in me to carry on in his absence.”
    “Nice that someone has,” the flying phenomenon noted.
    ~~How’s Whitney?~~ Cressida the Wonder Worm interjected hastily.
    G-Eyed hissed with frustration. “I don’t know. As soon as we got her back here after her little raising-the-dead adventure her grandmother turned up from nowhere, scared the hell out of everybody, and took her away somewhere. Another absent without leave.”
    “What does the Hooded Hood say you should do about that, then?” Nats challenged.
    “He says I shouldn’t allow trivial things to annoy me or get in the way of what I’m trying to achieve,” snapped Bry Katz, glaring at Nats so it was quite clear what trivial thing he was talking about.
    “Are we really going ahead with Hoody’s plan to start up new branches of the LL?” CSFB! asked excitedly. “I’ve already talked with Lesbian Liberator about getting the Globetrotters to sign up, and we could induct the JBH right away! And maybe if we offered like a free pardon we could get the Abandoned Legion to come out of hiding or wherever they went to? And Fetish Boy could set up a Las Vegas branch for us, and we could sign up Rodney the Irritating Git to to a LLUK, maybe get the Rakshasas on board as LLIndia…”
    “It’s not the Hooded Hood’s plan,” G-Eyed interrupted. “It’s my plan, based on a suggestion from the Hood. Let’s face it, we’ve been getting mangled a lot recently. The threats are getting bigger. I don’t want us to lose another hero like Hatman.”
    “I don’t want to end up working for the Hooded Hood,” argued Nats.
    “If you’re not happy with the way the team is going, you can always leave,” G-Eyed pointed out.
    “Or we could have an election and get a proper Deputy Leader,” Nats retorted.
    ~~Boys, boys, this is getting us nowhere~~ Cressida interrupted. ~~Perhaps we should move on?~~
    “Cressida for Deputy Leader!” grinned CrazySugarFreakBoy!
    “Let’s talk about the Lair Legion Superhero Training Academy that we’re opening next week,” G-Eyed said firmly. “Now this is going to be the first intake roster…”

***

    “There it is, hero-man,” VelcroVixen pouted. “Past the laser grid, the aerial combat drones, the nanobots, the sensor net, the gravitic imploders and all the other Technopolis-quality defence kit in that room is the information you’re looking for. Easy, eh?”
    “With that info we can roll up half the organised crime on the planet, or else infiltrate it and get the other half as well,” Messenger considered.
    “If they let you,” snorted VelcroVixen. “You really think your political masters will allow you to actually use that information?”
    “I don’t have any political masters.”
    “You came in from the cold. You’re SPUD’s little puppy now,” Velcrovixen mocked him. She saw the plume of range darken his face for a moment before he controlled it. “What, you’re going to bite me?”
    “I’m considering killing you.”
    “Well, I am completely helpless in your big, strong arms,” Vicki Vee admitted. “You could do anything you wanted to me, really.”
    Messenger looked contemptuously at the gorgeous ash-blonde villainess. Then he looked again. “Alright,” he told her. “Come on. Where’s the bedroom?”
    “What?” That had startled even the worldly VelcroVixen, but she quickly recovered. “That way.”
    Messenger grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her into it. “This better be good,” he told her.
    Vicki Vee shot him a killer smile and shimmied out of her silky black dress. “That I can promise.”
    After all, if she could keep Messenger distracted long enough for Armageddon to kill Epitome and return home then she could save the day after all. And it was a long time since she’d seduced a postman.
    The bedroom door closed behind them, leaving the open vault with its lethal array of defences silent and abandoned.
    At least until the Dark Knight slipped out of the shadows and began his slow, painstaking entry to extract Count Armageddon’s files.

***

    “A difficult but successful mission,” Mr Epitome concluded on the Epitome Express back to America. “We gathered more data on Armageddon’s strengths and weaknesses, picked up first-hand intelligence about the conditions and threats in Badripoor, and acquired copies of Medici’s secret files without him ever realising that we’ve got them.”
    “And better yet,” added Messenger sourly, “we didn’t have to talk to each other much.”
    Epitome knew what the postman was getting at. “I should have hit you a damned sight harder. Killing Slayhawk was never part of the plan.”
    “No, it was just a bonus. Anyway, with that super-speed of yours you could have stopped it if you’d really wanted to save the raping swine.”
    “And blown the whole mission?”
    “I thought you tried that when you fainted while you were fighting Armageddon?”
    “He damn near killed me while you were… how did you get this data out undetected anyway? What was VelcroVixen doing at the time?”
    “Eating. And then I had to find my own way home.”
    “Without any help,” admitted Epitome, a little regretfully.
    “Without your help,” answered Messenger precisely. It wouldn’t do for SPUD to know that the person currently topping their most wanted list had been MVP in this sting operation.
    “You’re not telling me everything,” Mr Epitome concluded. “What’s the truth?”
    “You couldn’t handle the truth,” Messenger told him.
    “I could rip your head off and spit down your neck, claim it was the residual effects of that Kaos Energy.”
    “You could try, star-spangled boy…”
    And Badripoor brooded, and waited, and bided it’s time.

***

Next Issue: Five young heroes and a dog get the best training any superhero could ask for – as long as they were asking for a possibly-fake tutor who won’t even shave his head and sit in a wheelchair. Well, not voluntarily. Yes, it’s the turn of the next generation. Join Kerry and her Amazing Superfriends in Untold Tales of the Junior Lair Legion: Professor Xalter’s Academy Was Never Like This

***

Footnotes, My Footnotes:

The more I came to this story, the more I realised I was in danger of robbing Killer Shrike or Messy of the fun of writing a proper Messenger/Epitome clash. Eventually I developed a plotline that kept them apart as much as possible so as to keep something back for if and when either of them wants to write about the pair. But I couldn’t resist the final scene.

Badripoor is described fairly thoroughly in this episode. The Lair Legion and Messenger visited it previously in an alternate future in UT#118: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Badripoor Nights. It remains on the US government’s advisory list of places its citizens should not visit.

VelcroVixen, Vicki Vee, is a svelte acrobatic villainess who specialises in being aide-de-camp to powerful male archvillains. She is a very popular aide-de-camp, and she’s very good at aiding.

Exemplary, formerly agent and enforcer of Edward Gramayre’s faction of the secret Shadow Cabinet, is a confident bastard in a near grey business suit. He controls bio-fields, the aura of organising energy that surrounds all living beings, which means he can use it to hurt people or control them. He can use the same gifts to ramp his own strength and other physical abilities to Epitome-class levels. But of course, Exemplary doesn’t appear in this chapter.

Count Armageddon, Belasco Medici, was a Mafia-style ruler of the shattered Florentine nation in the Technoverse even before he gained his Kaos Energy abilities. Remaining on Parody Earthy after the Technopolis War he has quickly established a major power base. We may yet hear more from him and his cronies. A good summary of the ount’s powers and history can be found in Premiere#24: Ancient Foes.

Count Armageddon’s cronies: The surviving science villains that work in Badripoor are included in Hatman’s threat assessment in the Premiere Epilogue: Accounting.

Potential Lair Legion Members: The JustaBunchaHeroes appear regularly in their own series on the PVBoard, and are archived at Amazing Guy’s Stories. The Abandoned Legion used to have their own series too, but they’ve vanished for now (like their series). Fetish Boy is a Las Vegas-based adventurer whose adventures are sometimes chronicled by poster ManMan. Rodney the Irritating Git met the Lair Legion in UT#66: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour: London Calling, or A Very British Superhero. The Rakshasas, mythical tiger-headed spirits from India, featured prominently in UT#72: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour: The Game of the Rakshasas or Extreme Sports and Bad Sports.

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.