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Untold Tales of the Lair Legion and their Amazing Non-Super Friends: The Gallery of Pain Monday, 03-Jan-2000 10:15:15
#35: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion and their Amazing Non-Super Friends: The Gallery of Pain In a room of the White House that didn’t exist, the Hooded Hood continued his greatest experiment. “Good evening, lady and gentlemen. I trust you are in excruciating agonies?” “Go to hell,” snarled the diabolical Dr Moo. Her clothing stuck to her with sweat after almost twenty-four hours strapped into the pain-inducer, and her usual cow mask was missing so that the Hood could observe the exact moment when her hate-filled defiance broke. “He’s been there and done that,” Pierson’s Porter pointed out, gritting his teeth and telling himself that his superior alien systems would not, must not, succumb to the pain now being channelled through them. “I’m going to have to devise something much nastier for this human who has dared to offend me!” “You may wrack our flesh, villain, but you’ll never break our spirits,” Cap pointed out, still testing the strength of his own shackles. “We will be free, and we shall put an end to your tyranny, if it takes a thousand years.” “I shall be sure to watch for that then,” the Hooded Hood answered mildly. “I just called in to give you an update on the rest of my experiment.” He noted on his pad that so far three of his four subjects were reacting as expected, with defiance in their own way; Moo with hatred, PP with arrogance, and Cap with valour. As for the fourth prisoner… “No words from you, Mr Bloom?” the cowled crime-czar asked the limp shape of Hunter Victorious. The young hero hung heavily in his pain shackles and hadn’t stirred at the grey-mantled villain’s arrival. “Defibrillate?” HV offered helpfully. “Extirpation? Olfactory endoplasm? What words would you like? I’m just hanging here waiting for you to explain the plot.” He glanced up at the Hooded Hood. “You are going to explain the plot to us, aren’t you?” “Of course he is,” Moo spat. “The whole point about what he’s doing to us is to make us into some kind of jury on his grand experiment. This bioelectrical stimulation of our pain sensors is just to concentrate us as he wants us. But the whole thing’s pointless if he doesn’t tell us what’s going on outside.” “Very true, doctor,” the Hood admitted. “I have come to give you an update on the four main areas of the test to date.” “Tell us about Zemo, Winkelweald,” Pierson’s Porter commanded. “Tell us how one hate-filled man can bring down an empire.” The cowled crime-czar’s glowing green eyes flashed. “Ah, Zemo,” he breathed… “Hello, Visionary. How are you doing today?” the Dreamkiller asked through his muzzle, pressing one hand flat against the heavy-duty security glass of his inescapable prison cell. “Hello Dream. Not so good,” the janitor admitted to one of the most dangerous killers in the government Safe complex, their superhero penitentiary. “Cheryl’s getting married to Governor Apostate in about eight hours, and I can’t see why she should do that.” “She’s wrong for him,” Dream agreed, “Like Jean Grey with Wolverine, it’s an interesting what-if but we all know she belongs with Scott forever. So who does Cheryl belong with forever, Visionary?” Vizh shrugged. “It’s her decision, isn’t it? She doesn’t even know I’m alive.” If it seemed strange to him to be receiving relationship counselling from the multiple-murdering cannibal that had slaughtered and eaten both mother and sister it didn’t occur to him just then. Visionary had always had difficulty believing that the CrazySugarFreakKiller had ever really done that, even though Dream had confessed everything to a shocked and disgusted court. “Then perhaps it’s time she should, like in The Graduate, where you could go to the wedding and hammer your hands on the window and sing Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson?” Visionary paused. “I, um, I need to ask you something even more important, Dream. Something you’re not going to like. Can I?” “What do you mean?” the Dreamkiller frowned. He had been known to do seriously embarrassing things requiring major bowel surgery to psychiatrists who probed too deeply into his feelings about his mother and sister. Vizh swallowed. “Those memories of what you did, that… stuff… with your family… Did you ever consider that it might not have really happened? I mean, not been you?” Suddenly the CrazySugarFreakKiller seemed far darker and more dangerous. “I relive it all in nightmares every night, Visionary,” he snarled. “Sometimes their ghosts visit me to revile me for what I did. Suh-sometimes I know I don’t deserve to go on living. But I’m not the sort of guy who’d use fantasy to deny what’s happened in real life – to escape it, yes, but not to pretend I didn’t d-do stuff.” The janitor remembered what he had just been told, and persisted with the fantastic argument. “But what if there was a… a… some kind of experiment, to see how much it would take to destroy you, how far you’d have to go before you stopped being you? And that even events in your past could be moulded and altered to help torment you?” Dream considered this. “That’d be great,” he admitted. “Because then all I’d have to do is escape, discover the truth, find out what really happened, confront the villain behind it all, kill him and get my true life back. But it’s not like that, is it?” “Well,” Visionary ventured, “do you remember ever meeting… the Hooded Hood?” “The Hood? Big time boss of the world?” Dream laughed. “Now that is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. The Hooded Hood made me murder my family?” “I think so,” Visionary admitted. He couldn’t ignore what the man in the purple mask had said. He couldn’t accept a world where Cheryl was wed in just a few hours to the Hood’s trusted lieutenant the Apostate. “You believe it?” the Dreamkiller smiled. “Yes.” “Then open my cell and we’ll go get him.” Visionary froze. “Your cell? Let you free?” CrazySugarFreakKiller held out his manacled hands to Vizh. “Hey, either the Hood’s behind this and I’m really an innocent hero caught up in events designed to shatter him as part of a nefarious revenge plot, or I’m a lethal cannibal fetish-murderer holed up for life after slaughtering everyone he ever knew. You can’t have it both ways. So are you going to let me out?” “I don’t know the lock combination,” Visionary mumbled, his mind screaming with terror at the choices it had to make. “Six three seven one nought nought four,” the photographically memoried prisoner told him. “So what’s it going to be, Visionary-man?” “Cheryl, my dear,” the Apostate gently scolded his assistant administrator. “You know that it’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride in her wedding dress before the wedding.” “Yes… I have thought of a way to avoid that bad luck,” Cheryl mumbled feebly. “I, er, I’ve been thinking about us, Apostate. About the future of us.” “So have I,” smirked the governor of the Safe. “Especially the bit of the future that involves our wedding night. I have purchased a variety of appliances…” “I don’t think so,” the woman in the bridal gown told him. “Don’t be so closed-minded, my dear,” the Apostate chided her. “It will be my pleasure to introduce you to…” “I mean, I don’t think there’s going to be a wedding,” Cheryl clarified. “I don’t think I love you.” The Apostate seemed to have difficulty comprehending this. “What? How can you not love me? I’m powerful, favoured of the Hooded Hood himself. I’m rich beyond count. My next duty after this miserable prison is likely to be ruling a country. I’ve got my eye on Spain. I get everything I want. And I want you.” So fervent was the Apostate’s declaration that Cheryl almost found herself changing her mind and agreeing with him. The Apostate could do that to people. Then she felt the sheet of paper in her hand and gripped it tight for strength. “I don’t love you,” she repeated. “You have all kinds of amazing qualities, Apostate, but you lack some things that I’ve got to have in a husband. Compassion. Kindness. Gentleness. Silliness.” “Silliness?!” screamed the Apostate. “Of what value is stupidity?” He frowned more, his face suffused with red anger. “Somebody has got to you, Cheryl. Somebody has been trying to seduce you, has wormed their way into your favour and shattered your obedience to me! Who is it? Who?” It hadn’t consciously occurred to Cheryl until that moment that there really was someone else. Then with a guilty stab she realised whose drawing of her she was clutching. The picture she had taken from a lowly janitor earlier, the man who always had time to listen to her, who was never mean or cruel, who saw good even in murderers; the man who had drawn her from memory and had shown her things about herself that she’d never suspected in a few lines of ink. Apostate saw the realisations run through her mind. He strode forward and tore the paper from her hand. The drawing was signed. “Visionary!” The governor had hated that insipid, small, man ever since he had transferred here, ever since somebody had jokingly (and finally, as it turned out) pointed out a resemblance between the senior administrator and the janitor. And now this worm had seduced the Apostate’s bride. Well the Apostate had ways of fixing that. The Apostate had the authority to execute traitors to the Hood’s regime. Cheryl saw it in his face. “No!” she gasped. “He hasn’t done anything. He doesn’t even know. You mustn’t hurt him.” The Apostate grinned now. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. “And what would you do to save him, my dear reluctant bride?” Cheryl had a sinking feeling that she’d just run out of options. Then the dagger appeared at the Apostate’s neck. “How would it be if I don’t slit your throat like the weasel you are and we call it quits?” suggested Cobra reasonably. “Em, hello,” Visionary told the pale and somewhat amazed Cheryl. “It’s a jailbreak I’m afraid. As you can see, I’ve released Dream, Space Ghost, Magnetic Techbird, and Cobra. This is Baron Zemo. We’re getting out of here and overthrowing the Hooded Hood.” “We have liberated your wench as you insisted,” the Baron snarled. “Now we must escape from this maximum security area.” “I shall make them regret ever daring to confine Magnetic Techbird!” Magnetic Techbird promised. “It’s soooo cool when you refer to yourself in the third person,” Space Ghost admired. “Space Ghost really loves that.” He glanced over to Cheryl. “Nice dress. Bar mitzvah?” “You shall regret your insolence in daring to raise a hand against the Apostate,” the governor of the Safe threatened the woman with the knife at his throat. “We need you as a hostage,” the serpent woman hissed back. “We don’t necessarily need you with vocal chords.” “Foolish woman. There is no escape from the Safe. Already my crack escape suppression team will be alerted to your attempt and will be moving in to neutralise you!” “Escape suppression team?” Zemo questioned Visionary sharply. “Hey cool!” CrazySugarFreakKiller! enthused. “We’re going to take on Proctology!” “Visionary is devoted to Cheryl, and for some reason she seems to like him too,” Dr Moo snarled at the Hooded Hood. “Did you really think any scenario you could devise would keep them apart?” “I could conceive of a few,” the Hood admitted, “but the point here isn’t to do that. We’re trying to determine how far Zemo will go to defeat me, and how far Visionary is willing to become like Zemo to allow that to happen.” “Visionary is a good man,” Cap told the villain. “He will never compromise.” “We shall see,” smiled the cowled crime-czar. “Now let us consider some… family matters.” “So, uh… any special duties to being your brother?” spiffy asked tentatively. He still couldn’t believe that the stunning Amazon redhead sitting on the couch next to him was his twin sister. “Just the usual,” Troia shrugged. “You have to buy me presents and look after me generally, iron my t-shirts, keep out of my life otherwise, and do everything I tell you.” “Oh.” Spiffy considered this further. “Should I go and break ManMan’s kneecaps for laying a finger on you?” “No,” the amazon administrator answered firmly, and then added with a certain degree of chagrin, “He hasn’t really laid a finger on me.” “I see. Should I break his kneecaps if he does?” “Sure,” Troia agreed. “As long as you’re consistent when I date with Donar as well.” “Erk, um, well, I don’t want to be a heavy kind of brother, trying to make your decisions for you.” “Fine,” Troia said brightly. “That’s settled then.” “So,” spiffy began again, trying hard to sustain some kind of conversation that didn’t involve a six-foot Amazon war-spear puncturing him. “You’re an Amazon.” “That’s right.” The fern-wielder thought about this. “So, um… you know lots of other hot, single Amazon chicks, right?” “Yes. And not one of them would consent to date you,” Troia sweetly told him. She was starting to like being a sister. “Anyway, enough small talk. How are we going to bring down the Hooded Hood?” “Listen, Lo-Chi,” spiffy told the ambassador of the extradimensional alien Nebulus, “I never liked you when you were Jarvis’ ex-wife trying to kill us all in revenge for the death of your brother. I liked you less when you turned out to be an alien constructing an elaborate deception to turn the Parodyverse into some slave-warrior breeding ground which cost Jarvis his life to stop. And frankly, you’re not endearing yourself to me right now, either.” The sloe-eyed exotic beauty leaned back in her chair aboard the Skree Fifth Imperial Battle Division flagship and yawned. “I can live without your regard, fern-wielding buffoon,” she responded. “I have already said that the Nebulus require a face-to-face meeting with the Hood to agree a non-aggression treaty. His half-grown, ignorant children are hardly of interest to us.” “Oh yeah?” shot back Troia, her knuckles white on an Amazon war spear that wasn’t entirely ceremonial, “The Hood saves his personal audiences for people who are important.. You might call it a non-aggression treaty, we know it’s actually a surrender so that our dad doesn’t come and kick your butts!” “It is a conditional treaty,” Lo-Chi corrected. “And do not think that the Nebulus are unaware of the reasons you are so eager for me to divulge the command codes of our warfleet and bioweapons, stripling.” “What do you mean?” worried spiffy. Lo-Chi cradled her arms behind her head. “The Nebulus are very well informed. We know that you two have been allowed to retain memories of the reality-that-was before the Hooded Hood’s primacy because of his weak and misplaced familial affection. And we know that as loyal ‘heroes’ of the lost Lair Legion you feel obliged to turn against your father and seek his downfall. But to do that you need tools, weapons, and there are no parallels to the tools and weapons available to the Nebulus. Should we surrender our codes to you, you would seek to turn our strength against your father, seeking our mutual destruction.” Spiffy and Troia exchanged worried looks Damn, she’s good. “What… what makes you think that?” Troia demanded. “Oh, you were discussing it in your quarters earlier,” Lo-Chi casually explained. “By now our nanotechnology should have completely rewritten your ship’s command computers. You see, we’re not quite ready for surrender yet.” “Oops,” worried Troia. “Nasty things, those Nebulus nanobots,” spiffy admitted. “I saw a lot of them in my visit to the Nebulan Nexus. They can make Nebulus synthezoids like the people claiming to be from Shangri-La, they can take over computer systems, and they have a very distinct energy signature.” “An energy signature?” Troia puzzled. “Can’t your fern absorb energy, brother?” “As a matter of fact, sister, I seem to recall that it can,” spiffy answered, concentrating. The unique alien energies pulsing through the billions of nanobots was easy to latch onto. The lights went out all across the Skree flagship. So did life support and artificial gravity. “Ah,” fretted spiffy. Troia somehow managed a zero-G somersault and floated across the room towards where she thought Lo-Chi was. Unfortunately, Lo-Chi had been doing this sort of thing considerably longer and wasn’t there. There was a crunching sound. “That was your brother being rendered unconscious,” Lo-Chi explained in the darkness. “Hmm, I see his fern operates independently, even when he’s not awake. Looks like I’ll have to kill him.” “Nooo!” screamed Troia. Then there was light, as the bulkhead burst asunder and a man of purple energy seethed through the rend. “Gaaaahhhh!!” Starseed shouted. “Put the weed-boy down and face me, traitoress!” “We have been tracking the Nebulus for some time and across a variety of Hooded Hood-altered realities,” Avatar explained from the hole in the wall. “Now it appears that we have finally located their principal operative.” Lo-Chi hurled spiffy aside so that he could gently bounce face-first off the ceiling and turned to the Gah! Master and the featureless grey artificial life-form wielding the molecule-thick Avasword. “Congratulations,” she spat at the newly-arrived heroes. “I was saving this trap for when the Hooded Hood came to investigate the death of his children, but now I’ll have to activate it prematurely.” By the time she’d pressed the secret stud on her battle-armour, she’d been transformed into the all-powerful manifestation known only as the Parody Master. Troia swore once before the starship exploded. “All goes well with the Nebulus,” the Hooded Hood reported. “Now let’s see how Xander’s rescue squad are getting on.” “You know about that?” HV groaned, dismayed. “I am the Hooded Hood,” the cowled crime-czar pointed out. Derek Foreman stood under an alien sky and watched black orchids bloom in the light of an alien moon. It had surprised him to find beauty amongst the brutal cruelty of the Dreary Dimension ruled for so long by the tyrant he had accidentally replaced, but there was a savage splendour about the realm of exile at the very edge of the Parodyverse which was beginning to creep into the young man’s soul. “There you are,” Bry Katz declared, passing out onto the floral balcony of the Dark Tower which loomed over the vastnesses of the Dreamy Dimension. “I thought you’d probably slipped off somewhere to think through the things we need to sort out.” “I’m just a bit overwhelmed, that’s all,” Exile admitted. “Who’d have thought that my TV remote control ignoring me would have led to all of this?” Goldeneyed shrugged, then wished he hadn’t as the plaster holding his ribs in place registered its objections. The palace healers had done quite a good job of accelerating the repair of wounds that the two heroes had sustained defending the realm, but they couldn’t replace the benefits of time. “So what’s the verdict, cuz? What are you going to do?” “What can I do?” Derek despaired. “She can’t go back to her people because of some stupid cultural taboo, and I can hardly keep her as a slave can I? Besides, half the court wants her dead because she saved us from the late Grand Vizier’s plot!” “I was thinking about the Hooded Hood having taken over the time/space continuum, and how we’re supposed to be the last, best hope for stopping him; but we can talk about Valeria as well,” G-Eyed acknowledged wryly. “Oh, well, I was thinking about that stuff as well,” Exile agreed hurriedly, “I was just making sure none of the detailed little stuff got forgotten, you know?” Actually there was a very searing image in his mind of the girl who had been sent to him as his first due tribute as Dread Lord of the Dimension of Exile, as she had been at the moment when the danger had passed, when she had chosen to use the instrument of assassination given her by the treacherous Vizier to save rather than slay Derek. As the Magna Shoggoth gently digested the villain and Xander had fussed around bluffing troops into surrender, Valeria had haltingly confessed her part in the plot to Exile, G-Eyed, and Yo. Then she had cast her eyes down to the ground and braced herself, and with a sick realisation Derek had understood that she fully expected him to hurt her now, to punish her or even kill her for what she had contemplated. He hadn’t, of course. What he wanted to do just then was to tell her how much he admired her courage and appreciated her faith, because she had literally risked everything to save him and his companions. Instead he had blushed and limped off to help Xander with the armies. “Details are important,” G-Eyed agreed neutrally, bringing his cousin out of his reminiscence. Exile eyed Bryan suspiciously. “It’s not what you think, you know,” he told the black-clad adventurer. “It’s not like I lo… have feelings for her. I just want to make sure she’s going to be okay when we have to move out with Xander and the Shoggoth.” “Uh huh,” Goldeneyed replied. “Look, I’ll see you inside, okay?” he had to get out of Derek’s sight before the big grin he was stifling broke free. Once inside the tower again he allowed himself a sly chuckle. “Poor ol’ Derek’s got it bad this time,” he observed. “Or got it good,” Xander the Improbable interrupted. “It depends on your perspective.” “I didn’t know you were there,” G-Eyed jumped, turning to see the red-robed Master of the Mystic Crafts and his current companion the ameboid Manga Shoggoth descending the staircase. “Take your visit to my shop, for example,” the mage went on. “I told your cousin to go home to resolve his problems. He interpreted that as meaning that island where he lives. I was warning him that he would need to come to this realm where he’s now bound as Master to get to grips with the situation.” “You arranged for him to become the dimensional lord, though,” the Manga Shoggoth bubbled. “It’s not like you gave the human much choice.” “Oh, don’t worry,” Xander smiled wickedly, “He gets a choice in the end.” “At least he gets the girl,” grumped Goldeneyed. “How come I never get the sexy slavegirls in distress to rescue?” “Because the most significant woman in your life will be far more trouble,” Xander shot back. “Anyway, if you can possibly reign in your loins for a moment it’s time for you to get on with something heroic.” “Me?” “Well, I can hardly go undercover to rendezvous with the Lair Legion in the Hooded Hood’s trap, can I?” challenged the Manga Shoggoth. “It’s suicidally dangerous and devastatingly difficult,” Xander told the dimension-hopping hero. “So I naturally thought of you.” Valeria relaxed when the knocking on her door turned out to be Yo with a massive stack of file-boxes. “Oh, I thought you might be an execution squad,” she admitted. “Or Derek,” she added, as if that might actually be worse. “No. Yo is being Yo. And cute-Valeria is not to be worrying about hero-Exile being angry with Valeria. Valeria was being to be very brave and was saving of all of our lives against the uncute Yurt. Cute Derek is admiring your courage and appreciating your faith, but does not be able to say it because he is man all the time while Yo is only man some of the time like when Yo needs to reach high shelf or wants to write name in the snow.” The thought being manoeuvred the files onto a table in the temporary quarters assigned to the Dread Lord’s (theoretical) concubine. Valeria hugged tight the Lair Legion sweatshirt that Exile had given her and sighed. “I really don’t understand all of this. I keep waiting for him to revert to what I know he’s got to be. And he keeps… keeps making me like him.” Yo beamed. “That is to be being expected, sexy-Valeria. You were being given to Exile as slave, but Yo is thinking that soon it will be Exile who is slave to you.” At least if Yo gets Yo’s way, the romantic thought being didn’t add out loud. “In the meantime, Yo is needing Valeria’s help.” “What do you need?” the baffled slave girl asked. She wasn’t sure why she felt so safe and happy with the simple Yo-creature. After all, s/he was devastatingly powerful and bizarrely alien; but somehow Yo radiated an aura of happiness that made Valeria feel as though somehow things would turn out alright, against all odds. Yo believed they would. “Yo is now new Grand Temporary Vizier,” Yo explained, “and while Yo has the job, Yo has to some plans to make this Dreary Dimension more into a Happy Place. But Yo is needing someone who knows how things work here to be helping out with the details.” Yo unrolled the scrolls from the boxes, and suddenly Valeria understood that Yo was simple, not stupid. A stupid creature would not be laying plans to reorganise the entire social, economic, and political structure of a dimension, from the methods of farming and distribution of food to the criminal justice systems and methods of communication. But a simple one might actually expect to be able to pull it off. Valeria rolled up the sleeves of her overlarge pyjama jacket. “Let’s get to work,” she suggested. HV ignored the lancing pain searing through his muscles from the pain-inducers and shook his head. “Yo wouldn’t do that,” he argued to the cowled crime-czar who was watching the slave-girl and the thought being discussing the reshaping of a plane. “Yo’s never been like that.” “Yo has always cared about people,” Cap disagreed. “We’ve just never seen him/her in a situation where s/he’s the senior, most experienced hero before, and where there’s so much to be done.” “And as an entity of thought who can be as good at tasks as s/he believes s/he is, s/he is well suited to be an expert agrarian, draftsperson, architect, analyst, or whatever else is required,” Moo pointed out. “And that is the whole point of that part of the experiment, isn’t it Hood?” Pierson’s Porter grimaced. “You are pushing your subjects, seeing what they will do, what they will be, under unusual and extreme circumstances. You’re trying to settle a question in your mind, aren’t you?” “Perhaps,” conceded the Hooded Hood. “Let us examine our final cage of lab rats.” He turned his consciousness towards the war-torn pocket where he had dumped the remainder of his adversaries after stripping them of their super-powers and gazed intently as one of their company (one of the ones he had chosen to remove memories of a life before the war-zone) prepared to die by the orders of another. Red Cross worker Tina Calvarez stood between the mercenary guns and the three wounded children they were about to put out of their misery. "No!” she protested. "It’s not right! I won’t let you!” The safety locks came off the weapons and the rifles chambered their first rounds. Tina hugged the children and squeezed her eyes shut. “Sergeant, what is going on here?” Captain DarkHwk demanded, striding over to see what all the delay was about, his dark sleek battle-armour glinting in the frosty sunset. “A Red Cross worker is preventing us carrying out your orders, Captain,” the soldier told the leader of the military ground forces in the combat zone. “But she is not going to do so for much longer.” Tina opened one eye to see that the amulet-armoured tyrant had placed a fatherly arm over the sergeant’s shoulder. “She has done a very good job of preventing my orders being obeyed, don’t you think?” DarkHwk asked confidentially. “I mean, all I see is one brave if foolish girl shielding three wounded infants. How she could be responsible for there being three thousand people here in the evacuation zone when there should be none now, how she has managed to divert fuel, food, and transport from their assigned duties into the black market, how she has engineered a situation where I have to order the execution of all these refugees because I have no other way of clearing the ground as my orders dictate is really beyond me.” He turned to Tina. “Perhaps you could explain it?” “Your people fumbled the ball from the start,” Tina told him, almost savagely. She’d been working here for eight months now, ever since the massive evacuation had begun, back when the civil wars and the ethnic cleansings had proved too irritating to the Hooded Hood and he had ordered a peace be imposed, back when the value of the minerals beneath the ground had been recognised, and the need to strip the land of its population had been determined. “Inefficiency, corruption, and sheer stupidity. People shepherded into camps with no food or shelter or even blankets.” She looked around at the miserable people huddled in small groups under the watchful eyes of the cruel guards who had stripped them of anything of value. “And now you have to catch up for your inefficiency by mass murder.” DarkHwk closed his eyes behind his reflective faceplate. How had he come to this, he wondered. When he had first received the gift of the amulet he had been happy to be recruited into the Hood’s military forces, his mind packed with ideals about the Hood’s unification of the planet and grand design for universal peace. When had it all degenerated into genocide, with him as an instrument? “Captain, she was trying to lead these prisoners through the Freedom Pass into the settled territories outside the evacuation zone!” the soldier complained. DarkHwk was unhappy to have his guilt-trip interrupted by the trooper’s whines. “I see. So she was somehow motivating these pathetic shells of people to head in the direction they were supposed to go, and managing it without food, transport, or other resources, and you decided to stop them all and hold them here so we could instead shoot them? Is that correct?” “They had no chance of getting there,” the soldier objected. DarkHwk glanced at Tina to see if this was true. “One in twenty might have survived,” she admitted miserably. “There are wolves and bandits as well as the bitter cold and the lack of food and medicines. And there are your soldiers,” she added. The energies in DarkHwk’s mystical armour hummed harmoniously, and the arm around the soldier’s neck suddenly hooked across his throat. And then there was a purple-white flash and the soldier fell to the ground, his head utterly disintegrated. “Imbecile," DarkHwk told the corpse. Tina gasped to see death so brutal and close. For a wild moment she wanted to turn to somebody for support, felt there should be someone she could always rely on. But she couldn’t remember who; there was no such person, was there? “You may go,” DarkHwk told her. “Take your people and trek towards the Freedom Pass. They don’t have much of a chance, but as you say some might make it, which is more than they’ll get if we shoot them here. Take them and leave.” Th-thank you,” Tina trembled, as the realisation of her near escape, of all their near escapes, caught up with her. “When your soldiers caught us we had a little food, and some blankets…?” DarkHwk paused for a moment before replying. “I can send your people on with only my apologies,” he told the Red Cross woman. “I am so very sorry that it has come to this. It… it wasn’t meant to turn out like this.” I wasn’t meant to turn out like this he screamed internally. “Move them out before I change my mind.” The telltale red light inside the amulet-armoured man’s mask was flashing now. The Commander was summoning him. DarkHwk braced himself, shouted a few orders to facilitate Tina’s departure, and flew at full speed over the fourteen miles to the Relocation Camp where his superior officer based herself. He hated going there. The barbed-wire compound was almost empty now, having done its work; but he knew that the only place the refugees who had been brought there recently had been relocated was not in this world. The camp was burning. Relief soldiers were damping down the fires, dragging away the corpses of soldiers. DarkHwk spotted the distinctive silhouette of his Commanded angrily stalking through the bloody snow, still clad in her customary scanty battle-armour, hefting a massive gun in one hand and a serrated blade in the other. HuntingJustice DeathMarrow was in a foul temper. “What happened, sir?” the Captain asked her as he flew down. “Rebels,” HuntingJustice DeathMarrow spat. “They overwhelmed the guards and stole away the last of my prisoners.” She almost said toys, DarkHwk noticed. “They headed eastward, but somehow they’ve covered their tracks. I want you to take a force sufficient to search the whole area, find these terrorists, and bring their heads to me.” “Yes, sir,” DarkHwk agreed. “Er, by the way, I have granted permission for the refugees we took earlier today to make the trek over the Freedom Pass if they can survive it.” “Very well. Dismissed,” the Commander told him. She waited until her first officer had rocketed off in search of the rebels before sending the message countermanding his orders of safe passage for Tina’s band. “I believe we have the English Man and his group of experts in that area,” HuntingJustice DeathMarrow remembered. “This should give them a little bit of exercise.” Despite the thickening snowstorm, Tina managed to coax her ragged band along at perhaps a mile an hour. There were about two hundred of them when they left DarkHwk’s station, but although they had picked up two dozen stragglers on the way there were barely a hundred and fifty by the time Tina brought them to a halt for the night at a ruined wayside church. And every one that she had left behind screamed in Tina’s mind. She had managed to get most of the refugees settled, with the fitter ones caring for the invalids and a small fire set in the nave of the roofless chapel when the four men strode through the doorway. “Well well, what a terrible sight,” the impeccably dressed gentleman in the pinstripes tutted as he looked around the ragged bunch. “Here we come to tidy up the old church, and what do we find but a bunch of trespassers profaning the place.” “We can soon restore the place to its sanctity,” the dentist-masked, rubber-overalled man beside him chuckled. “After all, Captain DarkHwk’s orders giving safe passage to these objects has been revoked.” The third man settled his bulk and hefted a vast flame-thrower, it’s blazing tip pointed towards the now-scrambling for escape refugees. “Yes. Fire is so cleansing,” he grinned. “Bugger all this clever patter,” the fourth said, popping the top off a felt-tip pen. “Let’s do ‘em. Pretty ones against that wall, ugly ones over there. Everyone starts strippin’ their clothes off so I can get some good subjects chosen, and if any of you want ter beg for your lives, now’s the time to do it!” “You can’t do this!” Tina gasped, even as she knew with a sick realisation that they could, and that her protest had marked her as the first to die. “These people aren’t committing sacrilege. This house belongs to someone who was the first to welcome the destitute and the desperate.” English Man, Dr Teeth, Garbage Burner, and Marker Man all turned towards her. “Noooo! Please, I have money, let me live!” a man called from the crowd. He limped forwards, crouching in abasement. “And me!” screamed another, lurching forward arms outstretched. “Get back!” warned Garbage Burner, turning his flame thrower towards them. “One pathetic loser at a time!” “Okay!”, the first refugee agreed. “You be the first loser!” Then ManMan straightened up and slashed Knifey right across the fat man’s belly. The other members of the rebel resistance leaped into action. Throwing aside bandages and rags, the unpowered heroes dived out at the sadistic League of Losers. “A trap for us,” English Man enthused. “How splendid.” He hooked Donar’s legs from under him with the handle of his umbrella, kicked Mjalcom from the former hemigod of thunder’s grasp, and brought the razor-sharp point of the brolly down again to pin his adversary’s hand to the floor. He was distracted from killing Donar by the approach of Andrew Dean, Finny’s human form. English Man hurled his carnation at the incoming attacker and watched in amusement as it transformed into an airtight polythene wrapping around the rebel. Dr Teeth seized Banjoooo and injected something into the ex-sea monkey’s arm. “Don’t worry,” the demon dentist advised his victim. “It only paralyses you. It doesn’t dull the pain. You should offer me a very unusual dental set.” “One up on me, doc!” Trickshot admitted, rolling beneath the wide blast of flame from the injured Garbage Burner. “These arrows don’t paralyse, they kill, but they do hurt like hell. See?” Marker Man smacked Sorceress aside with a practised ease. “Down, gal. I’ll save you for later,” he promised. “You’re going to wish you’d never done that,” Hatman warned, trying to stand in such a way that he wouldn’t reopen the bullet wounds from his last encounter with the Hood’s forces. Sorceress had managed to staunch to flow of blood by bandaging him with her lingerie. It wasn’t exactly how he had fantasised about getting inside her underwear. But right now it was hero time, and the most heroic thing Jay could do right now was stand up. “Boyfriend? Husband? Brother?” Marker Man speculated, striding towards the obviously badly-injured defender. “I’m gonna let you watch!” Hatman took a step back at NTU-150’s signal. The half-machine hero might be crippled in this scenario, but he still understood engineering, and leverage, and gravity. As Hatty stepped away, Marker Man strode after him into the kill zone. Jaimie Bautista tugged on the bellrope with all his strength, hoping he had accurately calculated (in an instant) the vector forces at work here on the crumbling belltower, the striding villain, and the staggering hero. There was a cracking of mortar and then the heavy bronze bell slid from its high position and impacted on Marker Man with a sickening crunch. Donar pulled his hand free of the spike impaling it. It hurt like hell but lack of invulnerability had made absolutely no difference to the thunder god’s battle plan, which as usual was to hit things until they fell over or he did. Donar viewed decapitation as a minor flesh wound. Glancing round he saw that the wounded Garbage Burner had ManMan cornered in the sanctuary. Donar hefted Mjalcom and hurled it with three thousand years of practise at the back of the villain’s head. “Tis nothing,” Donar said, glancing up at the crucifix above the altar. “Professional courtesy.” ManMan took advantage of Garbage Burner receiving a pickaxe-hammer in the back of the skull to plunge Knifey through the assailant’s heart. It still felt strange to kill, he noted. “What… where did you people come from?” Tina blurted as the violence unwound around her. “Later,” Sorceress promised, wiping the blood from her mouth. “It’s not over yet.” English Man noted the defeat of his comrades and decided on a tactical retreat. Fin Fang Foom was suffocating at his feet, Banjoooo was paralysed, Donar was beginning to stagger as the neurotoxins from the spike worked their way to his heart and brain. A couple of razor-tipped calling cards put Trickshot’s bow out of the fight. English Man raised his walking cane to demolish the back wall of the chapel, bringing it down on the cringing refugees. That should provide a suitable distraction for his departure. A razor letter sliced the cane in two. “You’re pretty good at fighting heroes without powers,” Messenger admitted as he dropped down in front of the leader of the League of Losers. “Now lets see how you do against a hero that doesn’t have powers anyway. By the way, sorry I’m late, but I was just dealing with that squad of mercenaries you left outside in case you needed backup.” Tina realised than that she had a chance of living to see another dawn. So did all her people. “Very stirring,” spat the diabolical Dr Moo. “So what do you expect to learn from all of this? That Donar’s too stupid to know when to stop fighting? Well evidenced. That Messenger’s psychotic in whatever arena you put him in? Known. That heroes will keep being heroes without their powers, because it’s the person not the power that makes the hero? Trite but true. But it all seems a lot of trouble to go to just to verify things we know already.” “It’s a bigger game than that,” PP discerned. “Everything, even this torture you’re pointlessly inflicting on us to try and break us, is part of some larger test, isn’t it Hood? And somehow we’re the jury.” “It’s about the nature of humanity,” Cap concluded. “It’s about whether we have the qualities that make us worthy to survive, to be free. He’s testing our collective character, trying to discover if we really are what we seem to be, if there actually is a core of decency and nobility in the human spirit.” “It’s even more than that,” Hunter Victorious accused. “I know what you’re doing now, Hood. I know why this experiment is so important to you. You’ve conquered the world, achieved all your objectives. You can set the world to rights as you see the right. But somewhere inside you is a little nagging doubt about whether you really needed to do any of this at all, or if you have somehow robbed humankind of a shining destiny in which they eventually get it right for themselves? Yes?” “An archvillain never has a single motive for his actions,” the cowled crime-czar answered. “But I’m right, aren’t I?” HV persisted. “This experiment is to find out whether the universe needs a Hooded Hood!” The Hood’s only reply was to crank up the pain-inducers a notch and watch as his prisoners writhed in agony in their cruel bonds. And away from the Gallery of Pain, Lisa Waltz turned to look at the shadows and said, “You can come out and talk to me, DK. I know you’re there.” “I’m the Dark Chronicler just now,” the urban legend who glided (from a different set of shadows to the one Lisa was looking at) told her. “Pardon my reticence. The last time you were with the Hood and you found me you betrayed me to capture and torture.” “Yes, sorry about that,” the advocatrix admitted. “I presume you’re plotting right now to reverse the Hood’s takeover of the multiverse?” “Someone has to do it,” the Dark Chronicler shrugged. “I need you to release to me the power of the Shaper of Worlds that the Hood has invested in you.” “I’m sorry DK, er DC, I can’t,” the first lady of the Lair Legion apologised. “Ioldabaoth – the Hooded Hood – has put some conditions on my usage of the power, and he can veto things he doesn’t approve of. Trying to transfer the office to you would only alert him that you’re still around.” She paused and then added, “Besides, I think you should let him do his experiment.” “What?” snarled the Dark Chronicler. “Have you the faintest idea what he is doing to people you call friends?” Lisa folded her arms across her chest. “Of course I know,” she scowled. “And I think I even know why. And that’s why you mustn’t stop him just yet, DK.” She turned to the man in the shadows and spoke to him quietly. “Look, you once told me that I was the LL’s standard, the flag around which it rallies. Do you still believe that?” “Yes I do,” admitted the urban legend. “Then do you trust me to know when that rallying should take place, and will you hold off until I tell you it’s the right time?” “But Zemo has plans…” Lisa looked the Dark Chronicler straight in the eyes. “Zemo’s way or my way?” she asked. The question hung in the air for a long time. Next issue: All the stuff that didn’t fit into this chapter, like the Lair Legion escorting a refugee train across the hostile Freedom Pass with HuntingJustice DeathMarrow and her brutal army of oppression on their tails, like G-Eyed desperate adventure, like Visionary’s Masters of Evil vs the notorious villains known only as Proctology, like Troia, spiffy, Starseed and Avatar against the Parody master – sure, right, they’re gonna ace that one – and the treacherous Lo-Chi. Stuff like that. It’ll have words in it and everything. It’s the penultimate Untold Tale. Don’t miss it. It's the first New Year offering from the festive Hooded Hood, so we'd better make it a long one |
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