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| Untold Tales of the
Abandoned Legion: The Perils of Lisa and Cobra and Sorceress and Cap and
HV and Troia and ManMan and Exile and G-Eyed and CSFB! and so
on Sunday, 10-Oct-1999 06:59:34
#24: Untold Tales of the Abandoned Legion: The Perils of Lisa and Cobra and Sorceress and Cap and HV and Troia and ManMan and Exile and G-Eyed and CSFB! and so on In last week’s PULSE POUNDING episode we saw: * the lovely Cobra bound in cruel bondage, about to be lowered into Baron Zemo’s punishment pit to face a Fate Worse Than Death at the hands and other appendages of the abominable… Appendage Man! * the stunning Sorceress trapped in a nightmare world at the sadistic whim of the diabolical Dream Demon who seeks to shred her very soul! * the enigmatic Hunter Victorious lashed helplessly in the vicious Dr Vishmar’s Mind Probe (“Not the Mind Probe” “Yes… the Mind Probe!”) * the brave and noble Cap facing torture and a major dentist’s bill in the interrogation chair of the Saturday morning villainish Baron Heinrich Wilheim Wolfgang Groppler Zemo himself! * Goldeneyed and ManMan about to face mortal peril in the form of seven hundred beautiful tanned Amazon women who need their help with a real estate problem. Hmm, perhaps that one hasn’t got the dramatic potential of some of the rest. On the other hand, Troia’ll kill them if they screw it up. * the caffeine-created CrazySugarFreakBoy! forced to save his alternate reality not-dead girlfriend from the devious machinations of the machiavellian cowled crime czar the hooded Hood, with only the ghost of the same girlfriend from the reality where she died in his past to help him! * the luscious lawyerly Lisa seeking to escape the tyrannous clutches of the international assassin Maximillian Deathspoon (once she can get out of that power-sapping chunky black collar and reclaims her bikini, of course)! In THIS epochal episode: CRINGE at the fate of the captive Cobra! MARVEL at the mystery of the sensual Sorceress’ hidden secret! CHEER as Lisa takes on the forces of Deathspoon Isle! GASP at the horrible fate of Troia 215! And more! Stay tuned! EPISODE 1: DWARF THROWING or LISA and the SWIMMING POOL OF DOOM Lisa threw the chunky inhibitor collar into the swimming pool and let Deathspoon’s snivelling dwarf servant have his Bermuda shorts back. Her powers of summonsing anybody she could name through space to her presence had not yet returned, but she felt she was about ready to attempt an escape from Deathspoon island. It had been a nice vacation but now it was time to get back to business. “There’s no way ofth the island,” the quivering dwarf babbled as she climbed back into her white Ursula Andress bikini. “The only way is to usthe the heliport, and that is guarded by the elite death thaquads out of the many men that my mather trains for supervillains worldwide.” “It’s not quite time to go yet,” Lisa agreed. “I found out what the link between old Spoony and the Hood is, even if I haven’t figured out yet why Ioldobaoth’s trying to hard to conceal it. Now I just need one more thing. Take me to that Goombah or whoever he is. That guy from the Observing Eye outfit that trained Deathspoon before he went bad.” Ten minutes later, Lisa stalked out onto the main platform of the helipad. Alone and unarmed she stared around her at the sixty armed men, the elite of Deathspoon’s army of psychopathic criminal scum. “Alright,” the first lady of the Lair Legion told them. “Let’s rock!” EPISODE 2: BEHIND DOOR No 1 or SORCERESS AND THE NIGHTMARE KNOCKERS “Spiders?” Sorceress called into the gloom of the foetid dungeon. “Is that the best you can do, Dream Demon? How did you ever build up a rep with tired old nightmares like this?” There was no answer. This was the latest in a series of scenarios which Baron Zemo’s most powerful minion had attempted to shatter the Sorceress with. She had petted the wolves before conjuring herself a rather fetching red hooded cloak. She had helped the Yeti trim their claws. She had chided the Demon for creating the snakes in an unsuitable herpetalogical environment. Scenario after scenario of the Dream Demon’s favourite horrors had washed over the Abandoned Legion’s resident magic-worker as if they were nothing more than… than dreams. “You know I’m going to find a way out of your dream maze,” Sorceress announced to the echoing shadows. “I’ll keep opening doors until I wake up, and then I’ll free my friends. You’re psychic toast, Dreamy.” The next door was an old wood panelled one which looked faintly familiar to Sorceress. She didn’t realise until she opened it that it came from Covenant Manse, the house where she had grown up. Too late she found herself back in the familiar hall of her childhood. The other gambits had all been feints, ploys of the Dream Demon while he dredged this up. The familiar distant tapping came from then attic. “Don’t go, Whitney,” the old lady in the rocking chair advised Sorceress. “Hagatha,” the girl recognised the white haired, gaunt witch who had tutored her in her youth. “Hagatha Darkness.” “Don’t answer the knocking,” the old woman repeated. Sorceress looked up the stairs towards the attic. She could almost feel the presence up there beckoning her. “I have to go though, don’t I?” she answered. “Only one door will get me out of this dream world to save my friends. And you just know the Dream Demon’s going to make it that door.” “Once you open that particular room I can’t make what you’ll let out go back again,” Hagatha warned. “It’s only a dream,” Sorceress protested. But even as she spoke she knew that it didn’t matter. Once that door was open, everything would be changed. The knocking persisted. The mystic legionnaire found herself marching up the steps one by one in time to its rhythm. “Alright, Dream Demon, I admit it, I’m scared now,” she confessed as her unwilling feet led her along old dark corridors towards the attic stair. “But I’ll open the damn door if I have to, and then you’ll be sorry.” The nightmare seemed to gloat at her. “You don’t know what you’re doing here,” Sorceress warned. “Hagatha, my grandmother, she managed to close that thing behind the door when she was as young as I am now; but it cost her. Mother never developed her gifts because she saw what it had done to Hagatha. I learned to shape the magics of the Earth free from the taint that had stained my family line for so many generations before. But that thing in the attic is still powerful, more powerful than ever… more powerful than you. The knocking was louder now, and the silent mockery of the Dream Demon seemed petty and far away. The Sorceress resisted the temptation to press herself full length against the door and kiss it. She was excited as well as terrified. The thing behind the door knew she was there, knew her better than she knew herself; knew she was going to release it. “Dream Demon, don’t make me do this. I’ll destroy you for this!” Sorceress’ hand was on the doorhandle. She twisted the knob. The door opened easily for a portal sealed shut for so very long. The Dream Demon screamed as it was shattered into a million fragments as the long-bound attic denizen burst forth to claim its Sorceress. EPISODE 3: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE or TROIA and the BULLDOZERS OF BLOOD Troia decided at the last minute that throwing herself in front of the bulldozers was not going to work in preventing the property developers from demolishing the sacred Amazon temple of Covenant. She elected instead to spear the foreman of the demolition team to the floor in front of the advancing caterpillar tracks, which seemed to be an altogether more effective technique. “Way to cause a major lawsuit,” Exile muttered as Troia disappeared under the advance of Roni Y Avis’ legal team. “Look man,” he said to the millionaire spam inventor himself, “you gotta understand that these Amazons didn’t know what they were signing when you put that contract to develop their paradise island in front of them.” “They signed. That’s all that matters,” Avis replied to the young superhero. “This is a prime Mediterranean leisure resort now. A few casinos, a golf course, a private runway, some franchise fast food, a good escort agency, and this place could be Rio, Monte, and Ibiza all rolled into one. I estimate half a million tourists in year one alone, with a massive gross.” “It’s gross alright,” Exile objected. The vulturelike Mr Sneek or Sneek, Grabbit, and Thuggery, Avis legal representatives crept over to join them. “I have spoken with her majesty Queen Titania,” he reported. “In exchange for forbearing from insisting on the death sentence clause for her young niece Troia’s interference with our lawful possession of the asset formerly known as Amazon isle and henceforth to be styled AvisworldTM she has conceded to all our demands regarding indentured servitude of her warrior amazons.” “That’s not fair!” objected Exile. “They know how to fight extradimensional demons and stuff but they have no resistance to slimy lawyers and exploitative entrepreneurs like you. But we’ll stop you! You’ll see!” “No surrender!” Troia shouted from beneath a pile of security guards. “I think you two are trespassing,” Avis considered, gesturing to more thugs to assist in the summary ejection of Exile and the Lair Legion’s Amazon administrator. “Perhaps now would be a good time for you to be informed about our right to beat the crap out of illegal visitors?” “Or perhaps it’s time your lawyers met up with some opposition on their own terms?” Bry Katz called out triumphantly, appearing through the Interdimensional Transport Corporation’s teleportal with the best legal team he could muster given that Lisa’s law firm was lacking it’s principal Lisa. “Cousin!” Exile gasped in relief as he saw the approach of legal briefcases. “ManMan! And… Lisette?” EPISODE 4: A FAREWELL TO ARMS AND LEGS, or COBRA and the APPENDAGES OF ABOMINATION “So how’s it going down in the interrogation room?” Moo casually asked Pierson’s Porter, all the while never taking her own eyes off the monitor screen which showed the Punishment Pit where Cobra had been thrown. “A bit boring, actually,” the alien shrugged. “Dr Vishnar is using that primitive psychoscanner he came up with to try and probe that Hunter Victorious’ mind. It’s such a primitive device that he hasn’t even worked out that the mind he thinks he’s probing is a façade designed to protect the real personality behind it.” “Vishnar was a brilliant scientist during the last World War,” the diabolical Dr Moo considered, “but all that time in dry-freeze seems to have cooled his genius.” “I don’t see what was so clever about him in the first place,” PP sniffed. “After all, that synthezoid he created was hardly an overwhelming success, was it? I tried to tell him about the false mindscape he was probing with Hunter Victorious but he was too caught up in peering into what he thought were secret corners of his prisoner’s mind to listen. If I had used my own equipment we could have resolved the relationship between this neophyte adventurer and the ancient Hollywood V.” “That’s Vishnar for you. If he wasn’t an old Nazi drinking buddy of Zemo’s he’d have been liquidated years ago.” Pierson’s Porter turned his deliberately-average face towards the monitor screen. “What are you doing, beloved?” he enquired. “Monitoring the death of Cobra,” Moo explained clinically. “She betrayed Zemo, so he’s left her bound and helpless to the tender mercies of the Appendage Man.” “The new chap? All fleshy wobbly bits and can replicate new limbs and bits at will? Genetically engineered by the Devil Doctor to do nasty things to Fin Fang Foom?” “The same,” sighed Moo. “And a terrible muddle of a gene-splicing that oriental meddler made of it too. No wonder the subject is as unstable as an NTU-150 CD player.” PP continued to watch the screen. “Why does he keep repeating the same attack over and over?” he wondered. “Even handcuffed like that, Cobra can dislocate those two arms of his, kick him in the left-side groin, and duck under his… whatever that bit is. But he keeps coming at her again and again…” “The monitor is showing the same pictures again and again,” Moo realised. “Somehow the videotape’s gotten looped. What’s really going on down there? How the hell did even Cobra manage this?” She rushed out to summon assistance. PP remained behind to run a scanning device over the computer his honeymoon partner had been working on. “Ah,” he sighed to himself. “So that’s where Hunter Victorious projected his personality.” EPISODE 5: DAMNATION AND THE DAMSEL or HELL-SLAVES of the HOODED HOOD! Flapjack, the Hooded Hood's hunchbacked assistant – as opposed to Deathspoon's dwarven assistant – led CrazySugarFreakBoy! and Isabel Shapiro into his master's presence. For the record, the main difference between Flapjack and the lisping dwarf was that Flapjack would have had to be detached from a semi-nude Lisa with industrial lifting equipment, and there would have been far more video cameras involved. “I trust you… slept well?” intoned the cowled crime czar to his two reluctant guests. “You never told me you were going to use me in some plot to get at Dream, you smarmy hooded bastard!” Izzy shouted at him. The Hooded Hood quelled her with a glance, doing what many years of cruel persecution and abuse had never succeeded in doing. “I am guilty only of saving your life and returning you to your soul-mate, Ms Shapiro. If in return for the constant mental effort I am having to make to prevent reality from reverting to the course in which you are dead and rotted in your grave I ask a little co-operation surely that does not warrant your ill-mannered outburst?” “Oboy! He really is a good archvillain, isn’t he?” CSFB! enthused to his goth-garbed girlfriend. “Before you tell us what you want from us are you going to explain the plot like when Doom captured Reed and the others and is about to launch his latest…” “Indeed I will,” the Hood agreed hastily. “My long term revenge against Dormaggadon, Lord of the Dreary Dimension, has proved effective. Troia, seeking her origins, set in motion Dormaggadon’s invasion of Ausgard. Mefrothto, the demonic Prince of Fibs, who is also on my list of entities to destroy, involved himself in the hopes of utilising the planar disturbances to launch his long cherished Hell on Earth programme. I confined myself to ensuring that when the irritatingly inept and charmingly noble heroes finally moved against Dormaggadon the right set of consequences occurred. Now Dormaggadon is destroyed, the Dreary Dimension has adopted a new overlord, and Mefrothto believes himself to have won the Game of Worlds and is preparing for the next full moon when his own ploys will come to fruition.” “Wow. Nobody can do exposition like an archvillain,” Dreamcatcher sighed. “What do you want us for?” Izzy scowled at the cowled crime-czar. “Why, to eliminate Mefrothto, of course,” the Hood replied. “Cool!” CSFB! gushed. “We get to go up against a Duke of Hell in the death-match of the century!” “The paths to Hell are open only to certain travellers,” the Hooded Hood reflected, turning to stare into the stygian depths of his mirrored Portal of Pretentiousness. “The visitor must have a guide, one who knows well the touch of despair and damnation – a local, to put it colloquially,” “You mean me?” Izzy shuddered. “I was dead. And I’ve had plenty of despair and damnation in my life.” “Last time I used the irritating spiffy as a conduit to send the heroes to the Pit,” the Hood recalled. “This time I have chosen you, child. You shall escort your stimulant-enthused friend into the realm of Mefrothto whilst the Prince of Fibs is busy preparing his Hell on Earth. And you shall retrieve for me a certain artefact which I require for my designs.” “And if we don’t?” demanded Izzy. She wanted to get the threat fully on the table. “Then my concentration wavers,” the Hooded Hood promised. “Nobody dies,” declared CrazySugarFreakBoy! determinedly. “We’ll do it.” The Hood gave them additional information and gestured to the red-tinged Portal. “Every epic hero must descend to the netherworld at some time in their story, figuratively or literally,” the archvillain mused. “It’s part of the archetype. See this as a dress rehearsal for when that moment comes to you, Dreamcatcher Foxglove.” “Rehearsal?” Dream queried, but it was too late. The swirling energies of the pan-dimensional vortex caught him and Izzy up. Another cold hand closed on his other fist and the voyagers were swept down into the nightmare reality of abyssal damnation. The Hood frowned. That had taken more energy than he had expected, almost as if another person had been shifted with Izzy and CSFB!; but his checks indicated that no other souls had passed through the Portal so he dismissed it. With a sideways glance to make sure that the robot presence that was covertly monitoring him was getting all of this he went on to prepare the next phase of his plan. EPISODE 6: THE DEADLY DEATH TRAPS OF BARON ZEMO “I ask you again,” Zemo said calmly, replacing the rather bloody rubber gloves with a new set and leaning over the torture chair once more, “what has become of the data which you and your colleagues stole from Deathspoon’s computers?”” “I’m not… going to talk…” spat Cap, trying to catch his breath after the electrode treatment, “…to a villain… wearing pink… fluffy… bits…” Zemo gave the testicular perforator another half-turn. “We are not amused,” he snarled. “My record for keeping a subject alive on the inquisition rack is eighteen days, eleven hours and twenty-one minutes. I am beginning to consider attempting to break my own record.” The castle security alarms began to shriek. Zemo sighed and reached for an intercom. “What is occurring?” he demanded. “Cobra has escaped,” Moo replied over the link. “Somehow she managed to ram Appendage Man’s appendages into other of his appendages, gimmick the video monitors, and get out of the escape-proof punishment cell.” “I see. Activate the Scourge, on search pattern Goering. Millennium Bug, charge up the security grids. Find the wench!” Millennium Bug flexed one interface cable into the computer console and the fortress was filled with the hum of energy weapons charging. The air shook with the first burst of thunder as a storm from nowhere broke around the castle. “Now what?” the Baron snarled. “Vishnar, why didn’t your weather monitoring systems alert us to this tempest?” Dr Vishnar looked up from the screens where he was probing images of Hunter Victorious’ (alleged) sixth birthday party and consulted the sensors. “It… it seems to be arcane in origin, Herr Baron” he reported. “It has a massive thaumaturgical signature, somewhere around the eleven hundred gigathaums range.” “You’re saying that there is a magical storm around my castle?” Zemo demanded. He swung round to the table where the Sorceress lay unmoving in Dream Demon-induced slumber. “Lobotomise her,” he ordered, as a safety precaution. “At once, Herr Baron,” Vishnar agreed, reaching for his surgical tools. “Keep… away from… her, Zemo,” Cap threatened from his torture bed, spitting bits of tooth at the villain. Zemo ignored him. The archvillain was more concerned that the lights had just gone out. With them went the sensors, the security grid, everything, despite all the safeguards he had built into his system. “Bug, what’s happening?” he demanded. But the Millennium Bug had just turned round and sent a powerful electrical charge from his own systems right through Dr Vishnar, leaving the Nazi scientist a twitching unconscious mass on the floor. “Not going according to plan, villain?” Millennium Bug spoke; but his voice was that of Hunter Victorious. “Of course!” Zemo realised. “There were reports that you had tactile control over natural forces. We strapped you into Vishnar’s memory probe and lanced lightning through your brain; so you gradually mastered it and used the link to infiltrate the castle computers. When Millennium Bug interfaced with the computers to activate the defence grids you leaped into his systems, effectively possessing him. Very clever.” Zemo was just a bit too quick on the uptake for HV’s liking. “Now you will release my friends and surrender,” Hunter Victorious warned the Baron. “Do you really think I had never prepared for the possibility of my retainers turning against me?” Zemo demanded. “Never prepared a failsafe for if they rebelled? Schadenfreude!” At the codeword Hunter Victorious felt Millennium Bug’s body closing down. He was catapulted back to his own restrained form, where he found himself slipping into unconsciousness. But Zemo couldn’t be allowed to win, he urged himself as the darkness surrounded him. Which just left Cobra. She came out of the darkness silently and bullet-fast, dagger in one hand sink plunger in the other, straight at Zemo’s back. She made it to within a foot of him before his personal force fields repelled her. “Ah, I wondered where you had got to,” Zemo gloated. “It would be fascinating to try my unarmed combat skills against your own, Christine, but I fear it would hardly be a fair trial under the circumstances. Cobra had not escaped Appendage Man unscathed. He usually-green costume was now a sticky crimson, and the serpentine adventuress herself was a mass of lesions and grazes. But the glint in her swollen eye suggested that she was far from finished with Heinrich Zemo. “One advantage of being an occasional part of the Scourge,” she hissed, “is knowing a few things about this place. Like your preferred force-field frequency!” And the hurled sink plunger bleeped as it hit the Baron’s protective screen and shorted it out with a dazzling flash. “Another advantage is that it means I placed a failsafe code upon you as I do all my minions,” Zemo answered. “speculum eviscerum. Cobra tried to carry on as her body betrayed her. She even got one hand to her enemy’s throat before toppling to the floor. “Game over,” promised the Baron. EPISODE 7: TEA AND TRUTHS IN THE WATCHMAKERS OF DESTINY or VISIONARY and the QUIET COMFY CHAT Visionary cautiously pushed open the door of the unusual little Plumbers and Watch-repairers’ shop in a dark alley at the edge of Paradopolis’ Hell’s Bathroom slums. The bell over the entrance fell off and fell onto a cushion that had been placed there for the express purpose of catching it. However, the cushion had been balanced on a see-saw plank, so when the weight of the bell raised the beam it nudged off a bowling ball which rolled across the floor and knocked over a lighted candelabra. The flames lit the fuse on a silvery model space rocket, which whizzed across the floor spewing firework sparks and careened into a pile of milk bottles. It was the sound of them falling over which alerted the shopkeeper to the presence of a visitor. “Ah, Visionary, you’re just in time,” Xander the Improbable called from the back room. “I’ve just brewed up. How do you take your tea?” Visionary decided that it was best to assume that the master of the mystic crafts always kept a second teacup ready, and that it was a lucky guess on the possibly fake man’s preferences on milk and sugar. “I didn’t really come here for a drink,” he began. “I came to ask you a few questions about what just happened.” “Ah,” Xander commented. “Well you see, the weight of the falling bell activated a fulcrum principle on the see-saw, which transmitted kinetic energy…” “I mean about Troia and Dormaggadon and all of that lot,” Visionary clarified. “It was you who sent Troia, ManMan and Exile to Amazon Isle on a delivery job. You knew that Falcon was following Troia for SPUD, hoping she would lead them to Deathspoon who’s associated with the brother she was searching for. That led to Amazon Isle losing it’s place blocking Dormaggadon’s conduit to Earth. So you effectively plotted the invasion of Earth,. dammit!” “Well reasoned,” Xander approved, sipping his tea. He suddenly remembered something, and poured a trickle into his saucer. Laying the dish on the table beside him he then fished in his pockets and pulled out a stone hamster which he set down before the saucer. “Harry can’t drink it any more, of course,” he explained to his mystified guest, “but he likes to pretend. Well reasoned indeed on the Troia/Dormaggadon thing. Deduced like a real leader of the Lair Legion!” “I’m not the Legion’s real leader, dammit!” objected Visionary, “I’m…” “The Legion’s fake leader?” Xander offered. “No, I…” Suddenly Vizh realised what the sorcerer supreme was doing. “This isn’t about me. It’s about what you manipulated Troia and the others into.” “Very well,” Xander sighed. He carefully laid a biscuit in the saucer next to Harry and went on. “The Hooded Hood was intent on triggering the invasion. There’s a whole lot more of that plot yet to unfold, as a matter of fact. He’d manipulated Troia by revealing a glimpse of her true parentage to her, knowing she’d want to find out the rest. It seemed best to just trigger events at the time it was most propitious to handle them, such as when the Lair Legion was in Ausgard to help out with the invasion. Think of it as the multiversal equivalent of lancing a blister before it bursts. Any more questions, Mr Visionary?” Visionary thought hard. He could only think of one more thing he wanted to know. EPISODE 8: BARGAINING POWER or LISETTE and the ATTORNEYS OF APOCALYPSE “Hey, this isn’t legal because it sucks so bad it blows.” Lisette delivered her weighty judicial opinion of the contract Roni Y Avis had signed with the Amazons with all the skill of legal secretaries everywhere. “I had hoped for a little more structured content than that,” ManMan admitted to Bry Katz (Goldeneyed). “Actually, I think she’s doing a pretty fair impression of Lisa,” G-Eyed was forced to admit. “Of course, she hasn’t seduced any judges yet, but other than that…” “Where is Lisa?” Exile asked urgently. “We’re supposed to be fielding a defence that can take on Avis’ legal muscle on its own turf, and so far it’s spiffy vs the Yurt all over again.” “Nobody knows,” Goldeneyed answered. “She went off on some mysterious mission and nobody knows how to find her. Hatman and spiffy have gone to ask Drury of SPUD about it.” “I’d give anything to have a decent lawyer here right now,” ManMan sighed as Lisette tried to assert that the contract was null and void on the grounds that “it was entirely uncool and so un-rad it was an anti-bohunk.” There was another flash as Mr Limpqvist of Interdimensional Transport phased in another visitor. “I understand you were seeking a locum advocate?” the distinguished looking man in the brilliant white suit suggested. “I have had extensive experience of disputes and I specialise in the letter of the contract. Perhaps you would care to retain my services?” “You know Lisa?” Troia wondered. “Doesn’t everybody?” the silver-haired gentleman answered. “I need Queen Titania to sign these ordinances at once. Miss, um 215, I require your mark here as Princess of Amazon Isle. Mr Pepper, would you be so good as to witness the signing by inscribing your name here. Thank you. Now, let us go and relieve Miss Lisette of the burden of embarrassing herself any further.” “Who is that dude?” Exile asked Goldeneyed. “I dunno,” G-Eyed admitted. “But he can’t make things worse right now, and anything’s better than Lisette. She’s cute but she’s no Perry Mason.” The silver haired advocate engaged Messers Sneek, Grabbit and Thuggery. “My clients absolutely recognise your right to the leasehold of the land of Amazon Island,” he began. “What?!” Troia exploded. “However,” he added, “You will notice from these recently prepared laws that land grants here have a rather more narrow definition of Amazon Isle than elsewhere. You do indeed own the land, Mr Avis, and any space above it up to a half-inch from the land’s surface. Everything above that remains the property of the Amazons. You are trespassing, Mr Avis, and you are illegally breathing air which does not belong to you.” “Way to go!” ManMan cheered. “Hey, Avis, want me to pound you flat so you’ll not be breaking the law?” “We have a legal right to defend out land – or rather the air above it?” Queen Titania realised. “These men are the interlopers? Sisters, to arms!” “Now this is going to be a righteous ass kicking,” Lisette anticipated. “You solved it!” Troia marvelled at the silver-haired advocate. “It took you, like, thirty seconds. How can we ever thank you?” “For that matter, who are you?” Goldeneyed asked. “Oh, you can call me Prince Mefrothto,” the Duke of Hell told them with a nasty little laugh. “As for thanks, they’re not necessary. I already have my reward.” “Reward?” Exile asked, remembering those legal-looking papers that had just been signed. “Yes,” Mefrothto leered, proffering the contracts for inspection. “The princess of the Amazons has kindly consented to become my bride.” “The princess of the… hey, that’s me!” Troia realised. “Troia’s not marrying you, Prince of Fibs!” ManMan objected. G-Eyed thought he caught a strange undertone in the Elvis impersonator’s voice. “Oh but she is,” Mefrothto promised. “For that matter, if you read the small print that you countersigned, I believe you consented to be my bride also, Joseph Pepper.” “Oh wow,” breathed Exile uncomfortably. “A double wedding.” EPISODE 9: LAST STAND or LISA GIVES HER ALL -AGAIN Back to Lisa on the forecourt of the Deathspoon Island Helipad, a lone, helpless form facing the leering multitudes of the assassin’s nastiest death squads who, frankly, haven’t seen a woman that wasn’t printed on glossy paper since they started basic training. The first lady of the Lair Legion watched as they closed in on her. When she judged they were sufficiently clustered she finally spoke. It wasn’t a plea for mercy as the mercenaries had expected. What she actually said was: “I summons the Abandoned Legion to me!” She turned to the troops with a smirk and told them, “You are in so much trouble now.” Half a world away Cap was forced to watch in horror as Cobra, welded into her manacles to stop her picking them this time, was carried along the conveyor belt nearer and nearer to the buzz-saw. Zemo laughed over the rising tempest and checked that Moo was ready to do the necessary brain surgery on Sorceress to eliminate the occult storm. Then the Abandoned Legion vanished. The usual anti-teleportation field around Castle Zemo was down with the rest of the scrambled systems. The AL had escaped. Zemo said a bad word. Lisa also said a bad word as her rescue squad appeared around her. HV and Sorceress were unconscious. Cobra was so chained up there was hardly any of the serpentine adventuress visible, but what was had turned an ugly bruise colour. Cap tried his best to defend the advocatrix, making two steps towards the bad guys before he collapsed in a bloody pile. So Lisa reverted to her deepest, best instincts. She kneed the first mercenary to reach her, scattered the others with a burst from the first one’s pulse rifle, and called out, “I summons the Lair Legion. All of them!” The terrible nausea that this extreme use of her super-power brought on was somewhat offset for Lisa by the faces of the mercenaries mauling her as nine of the world’s top superheroes materialised to give them a right good seeing to. In our next gripping instalment: * WITNESS WITH AMAZEMENT a really brief battle between the Lair Legion and Deathspoon’s armies! * PLUG YOUR EARS as the LL give a frank and free assessment of their leader’s latest brilliant idea! * SCREAM IN HORROR as CSFB! And Izzy descend to the very depths of Hell! * GASP IN INCONTINENCE as Troia picks out a trousseau for her forthcoming nuptials! * and GIRD YOUR LOINS for the world’s nastiest villains launching their terrible ACTS OF AMBITION! Tune in next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel! Read previous installments at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom - if you dare! Here's the same thing again, only this time with the uncooperative HTML eliminated by... the Hooded Hood! |
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