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Untold Fairy Tales: Bluebeard’s Tower and Other Nursery Stories Sunday, 23-Jan-2000 16:06:40
#37: Untold Fairy Tales: Bluebeard’s Tower and Other Nursery Stories There is an old and bloody fairy tale in which the heroine is left alone by her new-wedded lord in his ancient castle. As he leaves on mysterious business he bequeaths her all the keys of the fastness, but warns her on her life not to enter once certain door in one particular tower. Overcome with curiosity the heroine disobeys him, cutting her fingers on the key as she opens the forbidden room. Inside she finds the tortured remains of all her husband’s previous wives, each of whom has given way to the same curiosity. And by the blood she has shed he will know that she too has broken his commands… The best fairy tales are designed to send children screaming under the bedclothes, and a jolly good thing that is too. Lisa Waltz, first lady of the Lair Legion, made her way along the darkened corridors of the White House which the Hooded Hood had annexed as his centre of operations since he had retconned the Parodyverse so that all world governments had ceded absolute power to him. She was not too surprised when the elegant plastered walls of the residence designed by James Hoban for John Adams gave way to the dark weathered granite of Herringcarp Asylum. It was very like the Hood to keep his home close to him, and he had been known to take Herringcarp wandering with him before. Again the advocatrix attempted to use her summoning power, the mysterious gift she had of effectively subpoenaing someone into her presence. In this case she augmented her ability with the power of the Shaper of the Worlds, one of three cosmic offices which the Hood had usurped, the one he had bestowed upon her. However, the caveats he had placed to curtail her using that power against him cut in, and none of the people Lisa called to herself attended her summonses. At least that told her that they were tied up in the Hood’s plans somehow. But with Moo there was at least a twitch. Moo, Lisa’s eviller, older sister. There was something when the first lady of the Lair Legion called to her, some echo which was leading Lisa away from the safe, pleasant environment of the Executive Mansion and into the twisting, endless corridors of gothic Herringcarp. And then there was the door. All the other barriers had fallen aside as Lisa had turned her power upon them, but this ancient iron barrier resisted her power, as solid in its rust-crusted frame as it ever was. That was how Lisa knew that it was important. The Hood had forbidden her to enter by curtailing her power to do so. But the cowled crime-czar was away, attending to some mysterious business… Lisa concentrated again, and her disreputable ginger tomcat materialised in her arms. It dropped the unidentified (hopefully rodent) limb it was chewing on and purred against her. “I think there might be milk behind that door,” Lisa told the indestructible feline. There are all kinds of stories which adults have used to terrify children into obedience. That some have now fallen into disuse may account for much of the troubles caused by today’s youth. Take for example the story of Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones, the butcher who used to buy up bad boys and girls from their parents, drag them screaming back to his shop, take out his huge cleaver and… Well, you know the rest; if not consciously then in some red race memory passed down through the terror of your great great grandparent. When finally the law caught up with old Rawhead and he died dangling from a yew tree gibbet for the birds to pick at everybody thought it was over – until the rope rotted through and the grisly carcass picked himself up and dragged himself off into the shadows looking once again for children who did not eat all their vegetables. But the old stories don’t tell what was waiting for Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones as he limped his carrion-flesh into the darkness; of the grey-mantled figure with the green glowing eyes who had an exciting job opportunity for the nightmare, who returned his cleaver to him and swathed him in shadow and named him Deathwalker, and who later granted him the stolen cosmic office of Destroyer of Tales. This, then, was the Deathwalker who had always attended the Hooded Hood in the shadows, from long before the cowled crime-czar had ever thought to create him, and who was now his enforcer, hunting down the lesser cosmic office holders and eliminating them. Severing people’s life-stories was nothing new to old Rawhead, and the cuts he carved off people’s souls were even jucier than the hanks he had once hacked from their bodies. Sir Mumphrey Wilton was pottering over the begonias in his greenhouse when Deathwalker came for him. At his approach the sunshine weakened to a pale watery light, the flowers wilted as if under a sudden frost, and the very air turned foul and rancid. The eccentric Englishman turned round and remembered a terror he had not felt since his nursery days a century and a half ago. “Who’s there?” he called out, and his voice didn’t sound as confident as he meant it to. “Death,” answered Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones. “Don’t think so,” rallied the knight. “Met her once, and she was quite charmin’. A lady. Didn’t need any of these Hallowe’en tricks to try and get respect either, I can tell you.” Deathwalker sucked himself free of the shadows and stalked towards his prey. “Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity, I bring you doom.” “Hmp. Not today thank you,” Mumphrey answered, hoisting a garden-spade of manure at the intruder and vaulting over a pile of plant-pots with a dexterity that belied his age and rotundity. “If I need doom delivering I’ll leave a note for the milkman.” “Little office-holder, you cannot escape me. You cannot deny me. I am greater than you, and your power is nothing next to mine,” warned Deathwalker. “Oh, I’d never underestimate the importance of good timing,” snuffled Mumph, pushing a stud on the ornate and very special pocketwatch he wore on his waistcoat. So far the pocketwatch had protected him and his greenhouse from the Hooded Hood’s universal ret-con but there was virtually no chronal charge left in it now; certainly not enough to think about taking on one of the Triumverate. “You cannot defeat me,” Deathwalker declared. “Too true,” agreed the Englishman. “What about him?” Despite himself, Deathwalker glanced over his shoulder where Mumph was looking. And then the creature of fear and murder felt a momentary twinge of horror himself as he saw a figure looming out of the shadows –his shadows – behind him. The Dark Chronicler had come for Deathwalker. “By the ancient rules, by right and conscience, I challenge thee for thy office, Destroyer of Tales,” DC declared. “Yield or battle to the death.” “Now that,” Mumphrey pointed out triumphantly, “is good timing.” Then there’s the story of the two orphaned children who are sent into the wilderness by a cruel step-parent to die. These Babes in the Wood eventually lie down to sleep beneath an old oak tree and the birds of the forest, taking care of them, cover their frozen little bodies with a blanket of leaves. There’s also usually an old witch in this story, and in the original versions the listeners go “aaaw” when the poor kiddies die, and children learn that running off into the forest is a stupid thing to do. spiffy and Troia-215 were sent into deep space aboard the Skree Imperial Forces Fifth Fleet Flagship by their natural father the Hooded Hood, to complete a diplomatic treaty with the tricky and unpredictable otherdimensional aliens the Nebulus. There they fell into the trap set by the wicked witch of the story, the Nebulus agent known as Lo-Chi, who was actually plotting to destroy their father. The last we heard of that was when spacefaring adventurers Starseed and Avatar turned up to the rescue, then Lo-Chi inexplicably turned into the grotesquely powerful Parody Master and blew up the Skree Battlefleet. All of it. This was hardly the Happily Ever After that Troia had been hoping for. Troia had not known for long that she was the Hooded Hood’s daughter. In some ways the landslide of events which had culminated in the Hood restructuring the Parodyverse to his liking had begun by her innocent family history research. She had eventually discovered that her twin brother was none other than the sometimes-Legionnaire, fern-wielding spiffy, and had met him again for the first time since they discovered their siblinghood in this reconstructed scenario where they were the royal family of the cowled crime-czar’s dynasty. It may occur to experienced Untold Tales readers that it could therefore be said that the Hood’s conquest of all reality was in fact spiffy’s fault. Whether Troia had known her brother for long or not, no matter how much of a surprise it might have been to be the only Amazon who actually had a brother, Troia was even more surprised to discover that at the moment where the great starship exploded she instinctively dived to protect her unconscious sibling. The tide of nuclear energy from the exploding stardrives hammered across space, shredding the mighty spaceships into shreds of torn metal no bigger than a finger. At the centre of the holocaust the Parody Master laughed. “Murderer!” Starseed shouted, recoalescing his own purple-black Gaaah! energy form. “You will pay for your deeds before this day is through!” “You survived?” the Parody Master noted. “Most impressive. You have been practising, haven’t you?” “Gaaaahhhh!” screamed Starseed, burning down towards a Parody Master that seemed to have the same mocking speech patterns as Lo-Chi herself. The Gah! Master knew that the Parody Master was no exactly an individual, more like a force which possessed people to do its work, imprinting on them the power and personality of a cosmic deity whose real function in the Parodyverse had never truly been defined. The Parody Master whom the Lair Legion had originally encountered, the one they had met most often since, was actually an agent of the Nebulus dipped in the mysterious celestial source. Somehow Lo-Chi had now taken the Parody Master’s mantle upon herself, and that made this the toughest solo fight Starseed had ever been in. The Parody Master grabbed the incoming hero, passed a billion watts through him to keep him quiet for a while, then hurled him at light speed towards the heart of the nearest star. A molecule-thick sword bit into the Parody Master’s neck, neatly slicing her head from her body. “Ouch,” the Parody Master said, reattaching her missing skull. She turned to see her former minion, Avatar, the one she (in another incarnation) had exiled from her service and forced to become sentient and human. She further recalled that Avatar had suffered that fate after an abortive attempt on his part to stop the Hooded Hood during that cosmic cube business, and that the Hood had promised revenge upon the Parody Master’s servitor. Now Avatar and his former commander faced each other in the wreckage-strewn void, each intent on the other’s death; the Parody Master gave the Hood a few grudging marks for long range planning. “I am no longer your mindless creature,” Avatar warned. “I have learned many things since last we met. I know about friendship, and pizza, and Pokemon, and why it is wrong to decimate galaxies. I will not allow you to harm my friends.” “What you haven’t learned,” the Parody Master sneered, “is that your power is still insignificant compared to mine! I created you, I can unpick you back to the raw chaos from which you were formed.” And she reached out and began shattering the weak force bonds which held the atoms of Avatar’s body together. “I have also…” declared Avatar, through gritted teeth, “also learned the value… of teamwork!” Then Starseed slammed into the Parody Master with the momentum of a comet. Troia opened her eyes and discovered that she was alive. Then she shut them again, in case seeing that she and spiffy were floating unprotected in deep space a few yards from where Starseed, Avatar, and the Parody Master were unleashing forces designed to crack apart universes might undo the spell that was keeping her from vacuum death. When she eventually got fed up of that she began to test why she and spiffy were still breathing. She found herself in an invisible five-foot sphere of force which shimmered slightly as she pressed against it. And she found herself looking at the strange plant which was attached to her brother’s head. “You’re doing this, aren’t you?” she asked the fern. “Protecting us? He might be unconscious but you’re still looking out for him, and you can make force-fields and deflect energy and crap like that, yes?” The fern did not answer. “Okay,” acknowledged Troia. “Don’t feel you have to be chatty. Just carry on… whatever it is you’re doing to keep a bubble of warm, breathable atmosphere round us while I figure a way out of this.” She winced as an accelerated proton discharge propelled Avatar right past her sphere, leaving a bright livid streak of disrupted causality in its wake. The Amazon administrator wondered what to do next. She’d heard that plants made oxygen, so she might not suffocate. But she was starting to have an urge for the bathroom. She decided to wake up spiffy. “C’mon bro,” she called to him, rousing him from unconsciousness by the time-honoured sibling method of hitting him repeatedly across the face. “Wake up and save the universe.” “Again?” moaned the fern-wielder. “Aaaggghhh! What’s happenin’?” “Well,” Troia summarised, “We’re floating dead in space in your fern’s force-field. Avatar and Starseed are getting their butts kicked in a battle which uses all sorts of forces and things that they’re having to invent new colours to express, and as soon as the Parody Master finishes with them, then she’s going after us.” “I think I’ll just go back into unconsciousness, if that’s alright with you,” spiffy suggested. “No way,” Troia asserted. “No point having a brother if you can’t dump the awkward situations on him to get you out of, is there?” spiffy winced. He could feel the fern straining to maintain the bubble against the vast destructive energies which were winging about out there. He gave it about three minutes. “What happened to Lo-Chi?” he wondered. Troia 215 frowned. “I kind of think that is Lo-Chi in the Parody Master’s armour, somehow. I think she somehow triggered herself to change to the P-M.” “Makes sense, actually,” spiff considered. “We know the Nebulus have the trick of summoning the Parody Master force to possess one of them. And sometimes the personality of the vessel stays around. We’ve fought Parody Masters that were lethal archvillains, the deadliest foe imaginable, and we’ve taken on clowns who we stumbling over their own cosmic discharges. And let’s face it, if anyone was going to keep their own personality and will it’d be Lo-Chi.” “So… what do we do about it?” the Amazon enquired. “There’s only one possible answer,” gulped spiffy. Far out on the edge of the battlefield a shimmering blob, much like water coalesced in a gravityless environment, wobbled its way towards the destruction. Starseed was on the ropes. He blearily dragged together the tattered streamers of his energy self and braced to endure another assault more powerful than the last. He ruefully noted that he had lasted longer against the Parody Master than anybody he’d ever heard of. Avatar was behind him, his Avatarmour ruptured far beyond its ability of mend in time for the next attack. The dimensional warrior was going to die knowing that he had learned enough in the short time of his exile to truly annoy his former commander. Then a metal-tipped wooden pole was pressed right through the Parody Master’s chest, just where her heart would have been if she had one. There was an Amazon at the other end of the spear. “Hi!” she smiled weakly as the Parody Master turned round to her. The blast of destructive force that was sent at her would have devastated a small moon. Troia’s smile widened. “Nope. Try again.” This blast would have taken down a fair-sized planet and made the invisible fern-wielder next to her gasp in pain. spiffy’s fern was able to absorb and redirect energy, and he had been gradually ramping it up, using the small echoes of the force bolts to become strong enough to deal with the force bolts themselves, and then gaining the ability to rechannel even these massive energies. He didn’t like the smell of smouldering foliage coming from his head, however. There was no time to test if the fern could handle another, yet more powerful blast. spiffy directed all his borrowed energy back into one point and hammered it to the spot on the Parody-master’s armour that approximated where Lo-Chi had activated the secret button on her own to commence the transformation. The Parody Master had no time to react as the energies went wild within her. It was Lo-Chi who exploded messily across the void, however. “Oh, yuck!” Troia winced. “spiffy stopped her?” Starseed gasped. “spiffy?” Then the Parody Master remanifested. “Or he didn’t stop her,” Avatar replied to Starseed. spiffy had gone. In his place, the dark menacing figure of the most powerful character in the Parodyverse glowered at Troia, Starseed, and Avatar. It spoke: “Um, hi guys! Has anyone got the first clue how I got in here?” Then the flowing ooze of the Manga Shoggoth enveloped them all, there was a flash of dimensional vortex, and they all found themselves in the Dreary Dimension. And let us not forget the classic tale of the princess being forced to wed the villain against her will, and of her rescue by the humble peasant lad… “Will you please stop humming Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson?” Cheryl demanded of the man who had dragged her away from her fiancée on her wedding day and was now dragging her along on the most serious jailbreak in the history of penal justice. “Sorry,” Visionary apologised. “It just feels so good to have you with me. It feels right.” Cheryl had to admit to herself that there was something… special… about the way her hand fitted into the janitor-turned-jailbreaker’s. But that story about the other dimension where they were heroes in a team called the Lair Legion couldn’t be true, could it? And if she didn’t believe in that, why was she fleeing a life of power and ease with this strange little man? “Did we have to bring the worst villains on the planet with us?” she questioned him. Visionary glanced at his Masters of Evil. CrazySugarFreakKiller!, Cobra, Space Ghost, and Magnetic Techbird did in fact represent four fifths of the varsity of deadly inmates at the Safe Penitentiary for Irredeemable Menaces. The fifth headliner was the Grim Reaper, and none of them was stupid enough to set him free for the jailbreak. “I have eliminated the electronic defences,” Magnetic Techbird reported. “I have also salvaged the components I require to rebuild my sonic carapace, thereby adding solid-sound constructs to my arsenal of liberty. All I need is some time to put them together.” He sounded calm enough for a mutant-rights protestor who was the last living mutant on Earth, Visionary told himself. Perhaps he’d got over the genocide of his people. “Some Sentinoid guards attempted to prevent me from retrieving my weaponry,” Cobra announced. “They will not do that again. Ever.” “You didn’t kill them, did you?” Vizh worried. “When I set you free, you promised…” “Relax, leader-man!” CrazySugarFreakKiller! grinned, bouncing back with his regained silly suit. “I made sure she only knocked them around a bit. We’re the good guys now, so we’ve got to start acting like them. It’s like that team at DC with all those convicts banding together for justice…” “You mean the Suicide Squad?” Space Ghost checked. “With the emphasis on suicide.” Cheryl sighed. “What I don’t understand is why all your equipment was left here anyway. Surely they should keep it somewhere that you can’t just reclaim it during a breakout?” “They were experimenting, trying to get my suit to work on some other prisoner,” CSFK! explained. “There’s a whole bunch of them down in the sanatorium.” “But mostly it’s the law of comic-book prisons,” Space Ghost leered. Cheryl didn’t like the way he was looking at her. “We have to review that no-killing thing,” Magnetic Techbird judged. “If we’re going to take on the whole planet to topple the Hooded Hood we can’t be hampered by the niceties.” “I said no killing,” Visionary insisted to one of the most powerful villains on the planet. He couldn’t believe he’d said it as soon as the words left his mouth.” “And I will listen to a powerless janitor because…?” MT wondered. “Because we gave our word,” Cobra warned; and suddenly there was a banana pointing in Magnetic Techbird’s direction. “And because he’s my friend,” CrazySugarFreakKiller! added. “And because we’re about to be attacked by Proctology!” Space Ghost pointed out. Now in the regular Parodyverse, Proctology was the name of a very minor group of villains who were once handed their heads by the Lair Legion despite the LL being led by spiffy; that’s how lame they were. Here they were the principal enforcers of the Hooded Hood’s will and had been somewhat souped-up. “You face the devastating power of Proctology!” the Living Statement announced, hurling the escaping prisoners backwards with the mere force of his proclamation. “How the hell did he…?” Cobra gasped, just before two hundred rabid pudus appeared around her. Pudu Lad gestured and they all attacked at once. “The murderers of my people!” snarled Magnetic Techbird. “I shall…” Then the giant starfish fell on him, it’s power-leaching suckers draining the electromagnetic powers of its victim and using them to again send the Masters of Evil spinning around the Safe compound. “A horse is a horse, that’s what you’ve got I’m undead now and so I rot But you’re still going to get got By maggoty Mr Ed,” the zombie TV talking horse sang as he galloped towards CrazySugarFreakKiller! “Cool!” CSFK! grinned. “Which leaves you to face Swingy, Master of the Swinging Arts!” Swingy, Master of the Swinging Arts announced to Visionary. “Use your powers! Give it your best shot.” “Er… powers?” Vizh answered. CSFK! bounced by and tangled Swingy in silly string. “Group battle plan A,” the Dreamkiller announced, “Everybody switch opponents one to the left.” Visionary thought about this and hurled himself into Star-Fish, allowing the giant echinoderm to absorb absolutely all his foremost qualities – powerlessness, haplessness, bafflement, and uselessness. Magnetic Techbird recovered and powered Star-Fish through the wall. Just as Cheryl was beginning to hope, the battle turned again. Powerful electrical bolts arced down from the skies, following the lines of magnetic force around Techbird and dropping the mutant villain like a Carpenters fan at a heavy metal concert. Cheryl squinted up into the prison searchlights and glimpsed a flying man dressed in the Canadian flag. The world’s most famous superhero had come to stop the riot. “Captain Canuck!” she breathed. “Malefactors, you are ordered to cease and desist!” the mook avenger boomed down at them (note: nobody in the regular Parodyverse of the Hood’s new version knows what a mook is, or why it needs avenging, but cutesy superhero nicknames have never had to make sense). Cobra hurled a pudu at him. “Hey, it’s Super-Angelimon-Buffalo-Jumping-Falc-Stone-Cold-Steel-Canadian!” cried Space Ghost. “I gotta get my autograph book. He could fill it all by himself!” “You dare mock the Parodyverse’s greatest hero!” roared Captain Canuck even as he stunned Cobra, pudus and all. “I guess sooooo!” Space Ghost admitted, even as he caught the Parodyverse’s greatest hero on the rear with his Spank Ray. Captain Canuck was propelled into Swingy, Master of the Swinging Arts, so that both were entangled in the silly string. Canuck burned himself free, but the electrical blasts put Swingy down for the count. “You cannot defeat Captain Canuck!” the Living Statement avowed, and everyone present knew it was true. “Hey, but maybe you still can,” CSFK! guessed, grabbing the Living Statement and hurling him at the Canadian crimebuster. “I am being hurled at Captain Canuck!” the Living Statement noted, just before the bone-crunching impact. That left Space Ghost against undead Mr Ed. “Hey, you’ve really changed since your time in the A-Team!” the pantsless wonder noted as he dodged another charge. “That was Mr T, foo’” a voice came from nowhere. The voice distracted Mr Ed long enough for Space Ghost to crank his Spank Ray up to maximum. “Spaaaaaaaannnnk Raaaaaaayyyy!” he shouted as the impact on the rotting undead rear of the children’s equine entertainer exploded the rotting carcass into a thousand gobbets. “Wow, it’s a meaty treat for all the family!” Pudu Lad’s attack caught the triumphant Space Ghost entirely by surprise. “Noooo! Keep those rabid Pudus off me! I’m not wearing pants! Nooooooo!” “Oh yuck!” CrazySugarFreakKiller! scowled. “On the bright side, I’m really starting to think I have ben retconned to kill my family and friends rather than really doing it, because I’m pretty grossed out by what Space Ghostie just lost. Which means that my heart is pure and now I’ve got to go defeat the Hooded Hoodily and restore reality to where mom was not slaughtered and stuff. Yay!” He bounced Pudu Lad’s head off a wall before he succumbed to the mind control of the last of the combatants. “Not as bad a showing as I expected, Visionary,” the Apostate noted, stepping across the fallen figures on the battlefield. “You almost made it as far as the perimeter of the Safe. You even defeated Proctology and Canuck.” “Uh oh,” Cheryl shuddered as her jilted fiancée walked over to where she and Visionary were the last people standing. Apostate was wearing his steel mask, which was a sure sign that he was in a bad mood and somebody was going to get tortured to death. Visionary picked up one of Cobra’s discarded knives and held it to Captain Canuck’s throat. “Any nearer and the Canadian gets it,” he warned. “You know the Hood would be sore if he lost his pet enforcer.” “Die,” Apostate commanded the janitor. Visionary blinked. He was still alive. “You have five seconds to do as I say before I cut his throat,” he warned the man who had made his life miserable for as long as he could remember. “Four. Three…” The Apostate shrugged. “Go ahead,” he instructed. He was unhappy that this mortal was apparently immune to his power, but he could always strangle him the old fashioned way. He also knew that Canuck’s death might jeopardise his own position in the Hood’s hierarchy, but he believed that the frightened man in the yellow coat was bluffing. “Visionary, you can’t…” Cheryl cringed. “I’ve got no choice. Either we do what’s necessary to win this war or the whole Parodyverse loses,” Vizh answered. “Two… One…” Cheryl shut her eyes. “One… A half… a quarter…” Visionary went on. The knife dropped from his hand as he realised that he couldn’t do it. He didn’t have what it took to save the universe. Cheryl was so glad. The Apostate backhanded his opponent across the yard and strode forward for the kill. Nut the Apostate had lost count in the excitement of being able to destroy his hated rival. “A-hem,” Baron Zemo coughed politely. “I believe we need to resolve the top villain issue at this point.” The Apostate swung round. Zemo was in no way immune to his mental influence. “Suffer agony,” he ordered the masked monarch. “I think not,” Zemo snarled, concentrating his massive will to hold off the Apostate’s influence – for now. “Oh, very good,” the steel-masked tyrant admitted. “Not many people can hold out for as long as this. But I can feel you weakening.” Zemo faced down the Apostate. He forced the images he needed to come into the forefront of his mind where his adversary could easily pick them up. “Thank you for getting so distracted by Visionary and his wife that I could plunder your computer systems with ease to gain the command codes I need to destroy your Hooded master,” he told the Safe administrator. “Why else do you think I prompted this jailbreak?” “You think you are so very clever,” the Apostate answered, “but I shall render you a mindless, gibbering, incontinent idiot, and display you as a public sideshow for mockery and contempt. Children yet unborn will shudder at your fate.” Cheryl ran over to the fallen Visionary. “Are you alright?” “Wha’s going on?” her true love groaned as she cradled him. “Your friend in the purple mask is getting slaughtered by Apostate.” Visionary considered this. “Then he wants to get slaughtered,” he finally decided. “Your mental barriers are falling… falling…” the Apostate gloated at Zemo. “I must admit, you have done rather well, considering the way you entered this world. But you have never encountered anyone like me.” “I have, actually,” the Baron contradicted him. “I’ve met the real Apostate.” “What do you mean?” snarled the Apostate. “I mean the real thing, not this pale shadow that you are. The real Apostate who is nobody’s puppet, who is nobody’s fool. The real Apostate who would shred you like the shallow imitation you are.” “What’s happening now,” Visionary asked. “Well, Zemo seems to be goading the Apostate to kill him, and… erm, we appear to be becoming transparent.” “Oh,” replied Visionary. “Look into my mind now, so-called Apostate,” Zemo challenged. “Read the memories I have of your true template if you dare. Face the true Apostate and learn how hollow you are!” It was a challenge the Apostate could not resist. He plunged into the part of Zemo’s mind that the archvillain opened for him, probed the truth of the Baron’s taunts. A cold, steel-masked adversary judged him and found him wanting. “You have shamed my name,” the true Apostate accused. “Fake man.” The Hooded hood’s Apostate screamed once as his body was shredded in all directions. Zemo ignored his headache and allowed himself a small, sinister smile. So much for the Apostate. He drew his gun to eliminate the unconscious heroes and was mildly annoyed to find them all gone. He contented himself with slaughtering Proctology. Then he activated the remote codes to draw the Portal of Portentousness to him. The master of Herringcarp Asylum’s return home was heralded by a peal of thunder that shook the ancient lunatic house. Lisa turned guilty to see the cowled crime-czar silhouetted in the doorway of his Gallery of Pain. “I had to free them,” she blurted. “They were my friends and my sister!” “And now we are free you die!” Pierson’s Porter proclaimed, directing his TASP device at the Hooded Hood. “Hmm,” the Hood shrugged, and suddenly the four prisoners had never been released from their pain-inducers. The diabolical Dr Moo, PP, Cap, and Hunter Victorious still hung in agony as they had since the start of the archvillain’s twisted experiment. “So you disobeyed my edict, Lisa. I wondered if I could trust you.” “I thought I could trust you,” the advocatrix shot back. “You talk about bringing order and harmony to the multiverse, you spend all that effort reforming society for its own good, and then I find you have a secret room where you’re torturing my sister and these others!” “His torture means nothing, Lisa,” Cap proclaimed through gritted teeth. “He merely needs us to be… receptive, to be the jury for his debate with you.” “His debate?” Lisa puzzled. “You were arguing with him over whether he really needed to take over the Parodyverse, remember?” Moo snarled. “You must have hit a soft spot, because he’s retconned the whole Parodyverse as a kind of experiment to prove to you that he was needed.” “You did?” Lisa asked the cowled crime-czar? “Three experiments,” Hunter Victorious summarised, “each designed to prove that some part of the Hooded Hood’s worldview was right and yours was wrong. Each one to justify his actions in taking free will from mankind.” “Four, actually, “ the Hood answered. “But do go on. I am most interested in my jury’s observations.” “You can’t seriously expect us to co-operate,” Pierson’s Porter grimaced as yet more agony lanced through his alien nervous system. “Do it,” Moo instructed him. “This is important.” The last of the Puppeteers considered this. “Oh, very well,” he conceded. “First we had the little matter of Troia and what-his-name, the weed wearer, facing the Lo-Chi version of the Parody Master. That was to prove that the Hood’s family needed him.” “Except spiffy and Troia succeeded without the Hood’s intervention,” Cap pointed out. “Just as free men and women everywhere strive and triumph over impossible odds in spite of what cold logic might expect.” “Not only that,” HV smirked through his pain, “but spiffy has taken on the power of the Parody Master to challenge the Hooded Hood his father.” “How Star Wars,” Lisa commented. “Then there was the experiment about Visionary,” PP continued. “At first I thought it was some sickly test of true love, but it turned out to actually be about how far somebody would give up their true self to do what was expedient.” “CrazySugarFreakBoy! pushed to the brink of madness by memories of crimes he never did,” Moo commented. “That was quite a clever test. I wish I’d thought of it first.” “But mainly it was to see if a harmless man like Visionary could be made into a ruthless killer like Zemo,” Hunter Victorious noted. “And Visionary wouldn’t do it, despite everything,” Cap pointed out. “And so he lost, or would have if it wasn’t for the Baron,” PP pointed out. “But he stayed true to himself,” Cap persisted. “Not everyone is as corrupt and morally weak as the Hooded Hood thinks.” “Two down,” Lisa said to the Hood. “What were the other tests?” “There’s the situation going down with the rest of the lair Legion right now,” indicated Moo. “The one where they’ve been trying to get those refugees to freedom.” “And have failed,” the Hooded Hood announced. With a sweep of his hand everyone in the Gallery of Pain was suddenly there to witness the finale… The heroes had fallen. The refugees clustered in a frightened miserable huddle surrounded by the guns of their executioners. Some of the Lair Legion were sprawled bloodily on the ground. Only Goldeneyed, Hatman, and Sorceress remained standing. HuntingJustice DeathMarrow held NTU-150 and Tina as additional hostages. “Kill them all,” the commander of the Hood’s forces ordered her minions. “Shall I stop her, Lisa?” the Hood asked quietly. Lisa shuddered and clutched her ginger cat. “No,” she breathed. “Don’t interfere.” “What?” HV gasped, shocked to the core. “Lisa, how can you…?” “Blood will out,” Moo boasted. The Hood stood passively as the soldiers hefted their weapons. “No!” The old man’s voice echoed over the snow-choked pass as he hobbled forward from the line of refugees. “No, this is not right!” “Mr Clavunka?” whispered Enty to Tina as the old man who had thanked them the night before took place between the heroes and the guns. “This is not right,” Mr Clavunka repeated. “They are good people, and they have stood up for us.” “Then die with them,” HuntingJustice DeathMarrow sneered. Then a second refugee broke ranks to join old man Clavunka. “Leave them alone!” A third ran forward, heedless of the guns. Then a fourth. And a fifth. And more. Many, many more. “Keep back,” G-Eyed warned them. “They’ll shoot you to get at us.” “There is no you and us,” Mr Clavunka suggested. “You once had powers and you fought as heroes. Here you were no different to us but you were still heroes. And if you can be heroes, we all can be heroes.” “We’ll still die,” Hatman warned. “But we will die heroes together. You did not abandon us. We will not abandon you” Mr Clavunka turned to HuntingJustice DeathMarrow. “Do your worst.” The bullets rattled out and things got bloody and terrible. Lisa shut her eyes and turned away. “Now you can stop it,” she told the Hooded Hood. “Undo it, Ioldobaoth. You’ve had the answer to your test. It wasn’t about whether the Lair Legion could be heroes without their powers. It was never about the Lair Legion, you never doubted them. This was about whether the normal, everyday people we work for were worthy of our heroism, wasn’t it? You expected them to be too frightened or mean or cowardly to be like the Legion. But you were wrong.” The Hood gestured to reset the battlefield. “Perhaps I was,” he admitted. Lisa touched his arm gently. “And if you were wrong about that, and about everybody becoming corrupt under the right circumstances, and about your family needing you to be all-powerful to save them, then isn’t it possible that you really didn’t need to take over the Parodyverse after all?” “The jury finds for Lisa,” Cap warned. “You have justified your conquest with spurious claims of higher purpose. We reject your claims.” Behind the Hooded Hood, Hatman and Sorceress shepherded refugees to the spot where G-Eyed painfully held open the rift to the Dreary Dimension under the frozen gaze of DeathMarrow’s troopers. For a moment it looked like the last fairy tale was going to be Beauty redeeming the Beast. “Very well,” the Hood conceded. “I did not need to do all of this.” There was an arctic chill in his voice. “I did not need to reorder the Parodyverse. It has all been for nothing, because humanity is more than it seems, and has a potential destiny greater than that I could assure it of. I am, in fact, the villain of the piece after all, and I have no reason to be here, nothing to contribute, no place in the grand design which at last becomes evident to me.” “Ioldobaoth, it’s not like that,.” Lisa breathed. “It is. I understand things now with a perfect, pristine clarity,” the Hooded Hood proclaimed. “Well, if the universe does not need me, I have no use for it either. So now, using the power vested in me, I shall destroy it utterly!” As the Hood spoke his eyes glowed with green fire. Corpusant lightning flickered over his body, illuminating the scene with a weird verdant glow. A wind came from nowhere, whipping at those present with icy claws. The sky darkened until the only light came from shroud of energies around the cowled crime-czar. “Ioldobaoth!” Lisa called. “Hood!” There was a sound like the end of infinity. Then there was nothing. Next episode: the conclusion.<>/b> The final chapter before the end from... the Hooded Hood. |
| Untold Fairy Tales: Bluebeard’s Tower and Other Nursery Stories (The final chapter before the end from... the Hooded Hood.) (23-Jan-2000 16:06:40) |
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