Baron Zemo's Lair. - <font color="lightslategrey" face="Lucida Sans Unicode"> #22: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The Things We Do For Love, or a Day in the Life of the Hooded Hood</font>

Baron Zemo's Lair

#22: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The Things We Do For Love, or a Day in the Life of the Hooded Hood
Thursday, 23-Sep-1999 17:43:05
203.29.113.3 writes:

#22: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The Things We Do For Love, or a Day in the Life of the Hooded Hood

The Hooded Hood watched carefully to see what CrazySugarFreakBoy! would do next. Even as an experienced CrazySugarFreakBoy! watcher he wasn’t really sure.
“Hi, Izzy,” Dreamcatcher Foxglove said to his formerly-dead girlfriend.
“Hi Dream,” Isobel Shapiro answered.
“So, the old Hoodily Hoodnik used that Portal of Pretentiousness to go back in time and snatch you away, huh?
“Yah, I guess. Apparently he was on the scene with a cardiac unit when my dodgy ticker gave up. Otherwise I’d be dead.”
“But instead you’re Back to the Future!”
“And you’re Men in Tights.”
CSFB! looked down at his fluorescent orange and green smiley-faced costume. “I finally got that silly string idea I had to work out, although not quite like I thought it would. The Prof says it’s this stuff called Impossibilium, which is statistically absurd. He likes saying stuff like that.” Dreamcatcher looked thoughtfully and a bit wistfully at the leather-clad goth girl. “So what do we do now?”
Izzy considered this. “First we kiss, with tongues, and then we find somewhere quiet and shag the living daylights out of each other,” she proposed.
They kissed. With tongues. Eventually CSFB! pulled away. “This is just great, Iz, but I’m a superhero at the moment, and the Earth’s being invaded, well not Earth yet but this mystical belief-realm called Ausgard home of the exiled Norse Gods who were sent there when they honked off the Celestians who are these really huge robots and I climbed one once to attach these huge jump cables for Enty, so when…” Dream caught himself. And dragged his focus back. “What I mean is, my friends need me in the fight, so I gotta get back to them. But after that we’ll get some syrup and Rocky Road, find a tube train, and…”
Again CSFB! trailed off mid explanation. This time it was because he noticed that he was no longer near the rampaging hordes of the invading extradimensional Brainless Ones, or even in Ausgard any more. Around him were the sinister and ancient stone walls and metal doors of Herringcarp Asylum, the Hooded Hood’s stronghold.
“OK, Hoodpecker, send me back!” CSFB! demanded of the cowled crime-czar. “C’mon! I can’t fight you just now, I’ve got to finish off the Brainless Ones of the Dread Dormaggadon. The Legion have just set up one end of a closing-the-dimensional-passageway-they’re-breaking-through-through device and if somebody doesn’t do the same thing at the other end soon they’re all gonna be toasted!”
“Indeed,” acknowledged the Hooded Hood.
“Don’t make me force you, Hoodily.”
“I’m afraid you will not be rejoining your colleagues at the moment,” the cowled crime czar told Dream and Izzy. “I have a different purpose for you two, but the time is not yet quite right for that enterprise.”
“Like when Bill Shatner was going to star in a relaunched Trek series with that bald girl and Dekker but then the money guys got cold feet and…”
“Suffice to say,” the Hood interrupted impatiently, “that the Lair Legion will have to find it’s own solution to the dimension-realigning dilemma. I have prepared a room for the two of you, so you may renew your acquaintance whilst you await my commands. I’m sure that the orderlies can be prevailed upon to supply whatever… comestibles that reunion will require.”
“Send me back!” demanded CrazySugarFreakBoy!
“Way to piss the bad guy, dude,” Izzy approved.
“We could fight,” the Hooded Hood agreed as CSFB! rounded on him. “Of course, in that case my concentration might slip… and the subtle alteration I made which is keeping Ms Shapiro alive and which demands my constant maintenance might suffer.” He drew his grey mantle about him and narrowed his merciless green eyes. “Do I make myself clear?”
The Hooded Hood watched CrazySugarFreakBoy! and the girl retreat into the apartments he had reserved for them with the satisfaction of a master chess player who sees his opponent fall into a well-hidden trap. Let Dreamchaser Foxglove renew his affections for his lost love. Soon both the annoying juvenile and his mistress would belong to the Hood.

The Portal of Pretentiousness was whispering again. The Hooded Hood hated when it did that. He knew that the instrument did only what a mirror was supposed to do, reflect back what it saw in front of it, but the Hooded Hood disliked having his failures and old regrets dredged from his mind and replayed before him.
He angrily blurred away the image of the red-haired warrior queen and forced the Portal to focus on the Dark Tower of Dormaggadon, in the desolate Dreary Dimension. By now things should be hotting up over there.

Mefrothto, Prince of Fibs, ruler of the brimstone plains of Heck, overlord of pain and seducer of the innocent, loomed high over Visionary before the Dark Throne of Dormaggadon. His fiery eyes flashed as he recognised the possibly fake man who had brought so much grief and trouble to the lower realms after their last meeting. Pit fields were still patching up the damage caused by the rampage of the gamma-spawned Yurt.
“So,” Visionary tried, “how have you been?”
“Vizh!” Falcon called out from the place behind the Throne where he and his fellow captives floated in shackles of energy awaiting a slow and painful death, “Tell me that the rest of the Legion is right behind you, with Donar, Starseed, and Fin Fang Foom on the point.”
The prince of fibs looked hard into Visionary’s eyes. “Yes,” the demon encouraged the human. “Tell him that.”
“Just me, I’m afraid,” Visionary answered with absolute honesty. Especially about that afraid part.
“What wantest thou here, mortal?” the Dread Dormaggadon demanded, his voice booming around the vast throne room, proving that iron halls have excellent villain acoustics.
Visionary concentrated on not fainting. “Well, I was sort of hoping I might convince you not to invade Earth any more. If I asked nicely.”
“Mine infinite legions march irresistibly to crush all that is and you durst ask me to relent?”
“Well, why not?” Visionary answered, warming to his subject. “I mean, what exactly do you plan on doing with the Earth once you’ve conquered it? I mean the day after. You’ve just conquered the world, just destroyed all of creation. What do you do next?”
“Go to Disneyland?” ManMan suggested.
Troia shushed him. “Don’t interrupt the fake guy when he’s on a roll,” she hissed. “Now that fire-head’s distracted we can escape.”
“An excellent idea,” Exile agreed, “and once we can get over the fact that we’re held in bonds of mystical energy, all we’ll have to do is beat off two cosmic baddies and find a way back to our own world and we’re all set.”
“Right,” Troia agreed. “So let’s do it. You said it yourself… bonds of mystical energy. You know anyone whose whole damn superpower is about manipulating energy, Exile?”
“Well yeah, normal energy fine. Electricity, radiation, heat, you name it. But this is mystical energy, and it’s not the same.”
“So try, man,” Falcon urged him.
Exile took a deep breath. “This is going to hurt,” he warned them.
“Only you,” ManMan comforted him.
Meanwhile Dormaggadon was struggling with the Visionary’s radical approach to stemming interdimensional invasion. “Do? I won’t do anything. I shall render the worlds you know as bleak and barren as these dreary wastes I rule over, and then I shall be revenged upon those who exiled me here lo those many cycles ago.”
Mefrothto caught his glance. “Are you referring to me? I was only one of the jury, Maggie. You should never have honked off Jove. And somebody has to do the job.”
“All those who penned me here will suffer,” Dormaggadon promised. “You and those pathetic pantheons who had the strength to banish me here once, but not again. Those wenches on Amazon Isle who set their queen to prevent me from my last escape, she whose death-screams still echo around the highest naves of my tower…”
“Hey! That’s my mom!” Troia objected. “You are so much cosmic toast, matchstick-mouth!”
“None shall escape the wrath and vengeance of the Dread Dormaggadon!” the Drear lord promised.
“Yes, I see,” replied Mefrothto casually. “And the fact that you are once again being manipulated doesn’t matter?”
“Manipulated?”
“By the Hooded Hood, I think,” Visionary chimed in, happy to dump an archvillain in the doo-doo. “He seems to have set in motion the events that displaced Amazon Isle and allowed you to break out, and you can bet it wasn’t because he wanted you as the new ruler of all that he surveys.”
“The Hood appeared to me,” Dormaggadon remembered. “He convinced me to destroy the mythrealms first before I conquered the material universe.”
Mefrothto tutted. “And you fell for it? You opened the cthonic door in the middle of a heavily-armed spoiling-for-war bunch of Ausgardians who could hold back even your numberless hordes for days before they were overcome?”
Dormaggadon’s flame-face twitched. “I had… tactical reasons.”
“You fool!” the prince of fibs scorned. “Who do you think it was who absconded with your Portal of Pretentiousness during your last escape attempt, while you were preoccupied with destroying the Amazon Rigantona?”
“The Hooded Hood? He stole the one item I claimed in compensation for my exile, my one solace in my lonely watch?”
“Sounds right,” Visionary admitted. “Yeah, HH ripped off your TV.”
Dormaggadon started screaming then, and the Dark Tower shook with his oaths for many minutes.

The Hooded Hood laughed for almost as long. “Priceless,” he told himself. “It couldn’t have worked out better if I’d planned it. Oh wait – I did!”
And laughing again at his own little joke he directed the Portal towards the remainder of the Lair Legion.

“Are you crazy?” Starseed redundantly asked the Dark Knight. “They’ll kill each other before they fight the Brainless Ones.
“Hey, at least he’s got a plan that doesn’t involve hurling my wallet at the bad guys,” Hatman pointed out. “First you let Messenger go and now you rip off my seven dollars. You’re going on my list.”
“Yo sees no reasoning why cute elvens and cute dwarvsies cannot be friends and be going off to fight nasty uncute Brainlessing Ones together in unisonimity.”
“Yeah, but that’s because you’re Yo,” DarkHwk explained. “These guys are like tribal enemies to each other. Put them on the same battlefield and they’ll charge straight at each other and plough through anything in their way to get there.”
“Of course!” Banjooooo sussed. “And that’s what DK’s counting on, isn’t it? We do a sort of two-pronged attack. Put the dwarves on one side, put the elves on the other…”
“…Send a challenge to each leader from the other, perhaps a contest to see who can flatten the most Brainless Ones and get to the middle of the battlefield first,” spiffy caught up with the idea. “Can I write the challenges? Can I?”
“And then the pizza guys attack with three-day old linguini and the Chinese delivery boys chip in with the old Sushi surprise,” Space Ghost concluded, operating on a different channel of reality as usual.
“It might just work,” Starseed admitted. “But the main flaw is that for a pincer movement like that to be effective the Brainless Ones would have to be charging head on between the two forces. We’d need a third contingent to bear the brunt of the enemy charge until the dwarves and the elves could fall on them.”
The Dark Knight almost smiled.
“Aw no!” Banjooooo groaned.
Hatty fumbled for his undertaker’s hat.

The great wyrm Fin Fang Foom swept down on the battlefield just in time to break the latest charge of the Brainless Ones on the emplacement of the Lair Legion. It was a timely rescue, since Starseed had just gone down under a pile of marauders, and Hatman was struggling with a pair of Dormaggadon’s gargantuan war machines. Foomy slagged one of the devices, giving Hatty a chance to drag on his Casey Jones hat and slam into the second with the force of a runaway locomotive. Then the Makluan slashed one massive wing across the dogpile atop the Gah! Master, allowing Starseed a chance to take breath and shout once again.
“Very impressive,” the girl perched between the dragon’s shoulderblades whispered. “And very effective.” Once again the Brainless Ones were falling back in confusion, preparing for the next wave of invasion.
“What’s going on,” Finny demanded. “There are armies of rabid dwarves to the east chanting songs about gold and shredding elves, and there are hordes of elves to the west composing free-verse poetry about the stupidity of dwarves, but both of them are actually attacking Brainless Ones.”
“Hey, there’s a reason DK is tactical advisor of the LL,” Banjooooo reminded the Makluan.
“But I composed the challenges,” smirked spiffy.
Meanwhile Yo got down to the important business. “Yo is wondering who is being your charming companion, cute Finny-dragon.”
As the dark-haired lass slid down from his neck Fin Fang Foom introduced the damsel he had rescued. “Folks, this is Moira. Moira, this is spiffy, Banjooooo, Yo, Space Ghost…”
But SG was already running away screaming. Nobody took much notice.
“…DarkHwk, Hatman, Starseed, and…”
“And the Dark Knight,” Moira finished for Finny. “Yes, I know.”
The urban legend suddenly felt as if someone had walked over his grave.

There were red lights appearing all over NTU-150’s armour as it strained to maintain the device its owner had constructed. In fact there were red lights even where there weren’t LEDs which was particularly worrying. “Well,” Jaimie Bautista noted to himself, “I’ve never had the opportunity to observe the catastrophic detonation of my armour from this close before.
Goldeneyed tried not to scream as the dimensional energies rippled through him, channelled through the energies of Donar’s enchanted weapon Mjalcolm. G-Eyed could see what needed to be done now. In his abstracted, pain-wracked state he could perceive the warp and weft of reality spread out before him. He could see the tear which the shifting of Amazon Isle had caused. He could even see how to patch it. But it needed someone else there at the other side to hold the pleat together. All the young hero could do was hold on and hope that somebody would help him before he burned himself out.
“Verily, the son of Oldman doth struggle not to upchuck,” Donar warned his comrades. He held his enchanted pickaxe before him, sending a constant beam of force into the machineries hooked in to NTU-150’s battlesuit. “Yet will Donar standeth firm and not be a wet sissy like his brother.”
“It is hardly my fault if you don’t have the stamina and force of character to do the job, sibling,” Hoki, god of bloody-mindedness commented.
“This is very interesting,” Avatar, the former minion of the Parody Master and now a free-willed associate of the Lair Legion observed. “Donar is weakening, so he tricks his brother into mocking him to firm up his resolve.”
Hoki looked shocked and horrified that he might actually have been assisting.
Donar gave a low chuckle and felt a second wind coming on him.

Quite unbidden, the Portal of Pretentiousness shifted back to the Dark Tower, to the high vaulted roofs where the Amazon Queen’s screams still echoed. The Hooded Hood caught his breath and forced the image to turn elsewhere; anywhere else.
It might be significant that the mirror shimmered to show the first lady of the Lair Legion, Lisa Waltz.

“So you Observing Eye chaps are actually baddies?” Lisa questioned, stretching out on her sun-lounger in such a way as to ensure that any hetrosexual male in the multiverse was going to answer. The advocatrix was still an unwilling guest of the international assassin Deathspoon, but since his Caribbean island stronghold had an excellent swimming pool and waiter service Lisa was enduring her captivity with fortitude. Deathspoon was eager to ransom the first lady of the Lair Legion for the data which he believed the Abandoned Legion had stolen from his casino operations base. Strangely, Zemo who had currently captured the AL was of the opinion that Lisa had the all-important disc. If she did, she wasn’t concealing it on her person, that much was clear to even the casual observer.
“Of course we are not ‘baddies’, as you put it,” Gomtuu of the Ancient and Paradoxical order of the Observing Eye answered. “We merely play a complex role in the affairs of the multiverse. The trivialities of human definitions of good and evil hardly concern us. We are above such petty mortal things” But the ancient and paradoxical tutor of heroes was having a hard time keeping his eyes off the delicious Ms Waltz in her sunbathing attire.
“Well I’d have said that there isn’t much more important in life than whether someone’s a goodie or a baddie,” Lisa replied, wickedly handing him the tanning lotion and turning onto her front to undo her bikini strap. “I thought you were the people who found gifted children and raised them to be heroes – except for the girls who you send to Amazon Isle.”
Gomtuu had faced cosmic menaces and the manipulations of fiends of the pit, but he had never been up against Lisa and he found himself losing. “I… ah… that is, we of the Order are tasked with preparing heroes for a terrible day to come, of ensuring that champions are at had when that day arrives.”
Lisa guided his hand to her sun-warmed shoulders, holding her hair out of the way for him to oil her back. “So why are you here as a guest of Maximillian Deathspoon, who is hardly a good guy, is he?”
Gomtuu gulped. “There… there’s about to be one of the more significant tests of the heroes of the Parodyverse coming up, and it all starts here with Deathspoon.”
“So you just turned up and asked to sit by his swimming pool? A bit lower down the back, please.”
“Well, er, Deathspoon is one of our alumni, albeit something of a disappointment. Terrible waste of potential. Bit of a c--- up really. We took him out of timespace when he’d been abandoned by his parents and raised him as a hero. We had no idea who his parents really were. Bad blood will out."
Lisa was quick to catch on. “He’s the child of the Hooded Hood and Queen Rigantona, Troia’s long-lost brother?”
“It was the time-displacement that fooled us,” Gomtuuu said sheepishly.
“So the info SPUD had that said Deathspoon was linked to Troia was right,” Lisa noted. But she still had more information to pump out of the Observing Eye yet. “And this great menace that the champions are going to be needed to battle?”
“Ah, that is a closely guarded secret, known only to those who have access to the Forbidden Second Tome of Wilbur Parody,” lectured Gomtuu.
Lisa sat up suddenly and spectacularly. “Wilbur Parody wrote a second book of prophesy?” she demanded.
But the representative of the Order of the Observing Eye had fainted dead away.

The Hooded Hood allowed himself another secret chuckle. So they had fallen for the Deathspoon deception and the secret of his shameful son was still hidden.
But the thought of the child was enough to set the treacherous Portal of Pretentiousness shimmering with the one thing the Hooded Hood wanted to see least but needed to see the most:

“Going somewhere, Rigantona?” The suave Latvian accent of the Hooded Hood carried with it an edge of menace. It was clear that the former queen of the Amazons was indeed departing. It had been many months since she had donned her armour and hefted her spear, but now she was girded for war. Her fierce red hair was tied up in a tight plait with a small mace woven in at the end; just in case.
“You know where I’m going, Ioldobaoth. And you know why.”
“To save them? The Amazons? They turned their backs on you, cast you out when you needed them most,” the Hood reminded his guest.
“When I broke out most sacred law and dallied with a man? With you?” Rigantona defended her people. “Titania made the right decision. I’d have made the same judgement had it been any other warrior who transgressed the laws which have kept us at peace ever since we departed from Man’s World.”
“You would have left her destitute and pregnant in a strange land? You would have seen only the transgression and forgotten the centuries of patient service? Those Amazons conveniently failed to remember how you scaled Mount Olympus itself to make a covenant with your gods, to take the Amazons away from a patriarchal world where they could no longer survive and give them a place of honour as guardians of the interdimensional crossroads.”
Rigantona shuddered. “That was long ago. Gratitude doesn’t last forever.” And her eyes met the cowled crime-czar’s. He had found her when the Amazons had abandoned her. And he had cared for her, in his way. But there were greater duties upon her than a debt of thanks to Hooded Hood, however he might seek to twist things with his words.
“What about love?” the Hood wondered. “How long does love last?”
“Love is for men and women,” Rigantona answered. “Duty is for monarchs. And it is duty which compels me to act now to prevent the destruction of Amazon Isle.”
The cowled crime-czar disagreed. “If they couldn’t maintain their defences against the Lord of the Drear Dimension without you they shouldn’t have thrown you out,” he argued.
Rigantona was suddenly suspicious. “Wait a moment. Dread Dormaggadon’s surprise offensive was very well timed, wasn’t it?” she realised. “Almost as if he’d been tipped off, or was prepared for it. Before Titania had a chance to learn how the Chimes of Honour are manipulated, before she familiarised herself with the cosmic tides and the reality weft, the Dream Dimension exploits our weakness and establishes a beachhead on Amazon isle.”
“Indeed,” the Hood answered neutrally.
A terrible thought assailed the fallen Amazon. “The Hooded Hood has long sought that Portal of Portentiousness which lies within Dormaggadon’s realm. Did you betray my sisters – and your world – to gain the power you desire?” Then another nasty idea followed on. “Did you… was I seduced so that I would be disgraced and cast from Amazon Isle so that there would be a weakness to exploit?”
“No answer I give you will satisfy you about that,” the Hooded Hood answered gravely; but he looked pale.
A wail from one of the twins woke up the other. Rigantona was at their cradle in an instant, working her soothing spell on her children. Whatever the reason for their conception, she didn’t regret their birth; she would never regret them.
The Hooded Hood watched from the doorway as the fiercest warrior-woman of the Amazons gently coaxed her babies back to sleep, before leaving them forever to die in defence of the people who had rejected her.
Rigantona looked up at him. “Did you use your power to make me love you?” she asked.
“You mean, was it all a lie?” the Hood responded.
The woman pushed her hair back from her face. “I’m going soon, Ioldabaoth. You know I won’t be coming back. So just this once, this one single time, give me a straight answer. I know you do not lie, and I will believe you if you tell me without sophistry that you did not seek me out, win my love, sire these children, to further your motives of evil. Tell me if our love was real, or just another of your reality games?”
“Do you really believe I would set in motion a scenario which meant you had to go and die to stop Dormaggedon?”
“Ioldabaoth! A straight answer… please. You didn’t expect me to go and stop the Lord of the Drear Dimensions. You expected Amazon Isle to fall. Did you arrange it all?”
“I did not use my powers to make you love me,” the Hood answered. It seemed to cost him a great deal to speak so very plainly. “Archvillains never do anything for a single purpose, and there were many ulterior motives in my courtship of you. But every man who courts a woman has ulterior motives. There. A plain answer. Now a plain request. Do not go and do this. Don’t leave me.”
Rigantona understood all that was said and much that was not said by the cowled crime-czar. “It seems I never will get round to reforming you, as you corrupted me. You would have made a fine hero,” she told him, running her finger over the curve of his jaw. Then she suddenly turned away. “I’m going now to thwart Dormaggedon. If it’s your plan behind his invasion, I’m going to thwart you too, Ioldobaoth. Take care of the children.”
The Hooded Hood watched her go and there was nothing he could do to stop her.
For a long time he stood motionless, peering beyond this reality as the former Queen of the Amazons made her way to the dimensional nexus, navigating the strange currents of reality as only one with centuries of knowledge of them could. Titania could not yet guide her Amazons to the exact spot where the tear in reality had occurred, but Rigonata could. And once there, she sounded the horn to call her people to her. All she had to do now was to hold the breach until they arrived – against the Dread Dormaggadon and his countless armies.
The fight seemed endless, every blow in slow motion to the watching Hood. There in that extradimensional space where no alternate realities existed he was powerless to help her. But he watched as she stumbled once, twice, rose painfully a third time to see Dormaggadon himself looming over her.
And something tight and cold closed around his heart.
“Fearwalker,” the Hooded Hood called out, his green eyes flashing as he extended forth his power. “Attend me.”
The darkness coalesced until it was shaped much like a man. “Yes?” it said in a cultured but sinister whisper.
The Hood gestured at the twins. “Take them away. Take everything of hers away.”
“The lady is dead?” Fearwalker asked, more because it caused his master pain than because he was interested in the answer.
“She is gone forever,” the Hood answered. “She found that there were things more important than mere love. Now remove those children from my sight.”
“What shall I do with Rigantona’s things, lord? With her children?”
“You will never mention that name again, on pain of oblivion,” the Hood shouted. “Never! Never! NEVER!”

The Hooded Hood’s hand trailed down the cold glass of the Portal of Pretentiousness as the old images replayed themselves yet again. He could not remember how many times he had watched that one particular scene.
“Enough!” he chided himself. “Weakness is for lesser beings. I am… the Hooded Hood.” He braced himself and concentrated on the shimmering Portal once more. It was time for vengeance.

Xander the Improbable was slightly out of breath by the time he had hiked up to the guard post by the Dark Tower. The guards were minor orcspawn he noticed. Brainless Ones would have been much harder to deal with, but Brainless Ones were absolutely useless for any guard duty which required any discrimination about who could pass.
“Halt, who goes there?” the guard challenged.
“Depends on where there is really, doesn’t it?” the mage in the dusty red robes answered. “And what you define ‘go’ as meaning, of course. In fact, some days even the ‘who’ could take hours to ponder, don’t you think?”
The guards levelled their pointy sticks at the advancing master of the mystic crafts.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” Xander advised them. “After all, you know how this works. I’d hardly be sauntering into the Dread Dormaggadon’s fortress if I wasn’t terrible and puissant, would I? And in those kinds of stories, think about what always happens when the guards on the gate try and stop the archmage. Not a very good pension plan is it?”
“We… we have to stop you,” one of the orcspawn told him.
“Well, that’s up to you, of course. Or you might want to nip off for ten minutes and have a nice cup of tea. I promise not to mention it to Dormaggadon if I see him.”
The guards didn’t know what tea was, but it sounded preferable to being fried by an archmage. They slunk away trying to look as if that was part of their daily routine. Xander continued wandering towards the Dark Throneroom.

Dread Dormaggadon had stopped screaming, had gone through the dire oaths of vengeance phase, and now he wanted to kill somebody.
Visionary was stood right in front of him. “I think I should warn you that some people think I might be fake, and you might prefer to kill somebody who’s definitely real,” Vizh quickly said.
“I think you might want to consider seeking out the Hooded Hood and having words with him,” Mefrothto suggested.
“First I kill this quivering mortal, then I destroy that hooded manipulator,” Dormaggadon proclaimed, with a fine grasp on the methodology of tyranny.
What both Visionary and Mefrothto had seen but were not commenting on was Exile straining to neutralise the arcane energies of the spell-bonds which restrained the four captive heroes. And at last with an effort that wrenched him from consciousness he finally shattered the magical fetters. Troia and ManMan dropped deftly to the floor. Falcon caught Exile before he could crash down.
“About time you got round to rescuing me,” Knifey complained to ManMan as the hero pulled his sentient blade from the marble column where it had been embedded. “Now let’s see what it’s like to stab a dimensional lord made of flame.”
“Visionary’s keeping Dormaggadon busy,” ManMan answered. “We’ve got to find the dimensional nexus and disrupt it like Xander said.
“Like that swirly thing over the pit there?” Falcon suggested.
“Yeah, like that,” ManMan admitted. “And we have to plug the gap with out life-forces, like Troia’s mom did?”
“Well, we could start with Exile,” Falcon offered helpfully. ManMan wondered briefly if there was enough time for him to steal Exile’s costume before they sacrificed him.
“Been thinking about how to block the nexus,” Troia thought. “And I think I’ve found a better candidate.” Then she hefted her spear, screamed an Amazon battle-chant, and hurled it right into Dormaggadon’s back.
Dormaggadon, who had seized Visionary, and was about to investigate once and for all if the possibly fake man’s internal organs were organic or mechanical, was surprised when the Amazon-blessed spear pierced his back. Amazons had spent millennia working out blessings for weapons which would annoy Dormaggadon. “That’s it!” the lord of the Dreary Dimensions shouted. ”Everybody dies!”
And in twenty thousand possible realities Dormaggadon chose to send out waves of searing destructive power and vaporise his enemies. But in one he chose to attack physically, hurling Visionary aside and leaping towards Troia. And for some reason that singular possible future was the one that happened.
In forty thousand events that might have come next ManMan didn’t live to plunge Knifey into the Dread Lord’s throat, but in the one that occurred he somehow managed it.
In eighty thousand potential futures Falcon died before he could buffet Dormaggadon towards the shimmering nexus well, but in the one strand that prevailed the avian adventurer smashed into the Dread Drearlord and toppled him backwards into the dimensional vortex. And in every possibility thereafter there was a flash and sound effect to make Industrial Light and Magic give up and go home and the Dread Domaggadon discorporated in a burst of energy that allowed NTU-150, Donar, and G-Eyed to sear shut the passageway between the Dreary Dimension and the fields of Earth. People a dozen dimensions away saw and were startled by the detonation.
Nobody saw the grey-cowled figure in the high shadows of the Dark Tower’s apex who had manipulated the events reach out into the ether to pluck a tattered spirit from invisible chains and hold it close to him. “You are free,” he told the fading wisp. “Your work is done. You have saved the world and discharged your duties. Your people are free, by the hand of your own daughter. The Drear Lord is fallen.”
Ioldabaoth Winkelweald thought he felt a brush of soft fingers on his cheek, thought he heard the whisper of his name.
“I have set dimensions at war for you, Rigantona. I have plotted the death of cosmic beings, placed the whole of creation as stakes for the contest, set events in motion whose end even I cannot forsee. And it was all for you, to show what I was never really able to say. But now I hope you know.”
But the Queen of the Amazons was gone, beyond even the abilities of the Hooded Hood to perceive or recall. The archvillain was alone.
Down below Xander the Improbable shuffled into the Dark Throneroom. “Hello Troia, ManMan, Exile, Falcon. I see you delivered my package. Hello Visionary. Aren’t you supposed to be being pressured into becoming leader of the Lair Legion just about now?” Then he turned to Mefrothto. “Hello prince of fibs. Now to deal with you,” he promised.

Next time: One of those quiet sort of issues where the characters get a bit of downtime, except of course for Xander versus Mefrothto, Lisa who is prisoner of an international assassin, CrazySugarFreakBoy and Izzy who have to invade Hell, Fin Fang Foom who has to write a story for Moira, Troia 215 who has to deal with the invasion of Amazon Isle, and Exile who has a problem that we won’t give away in the next issue column. Oh, and the convention of super-villains mentioned last time gets underway, with special keynote speaker Heinrich Zemo.

Due around eight or so days from now.

The Hooded Hood