Baron Zemo's Lair. - Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Killingworld

Baron Zemo's Lair

Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Killingworld
Saturday, 26-Jun-1999 08:57:22
195.92.194.108 writes:

The hunchbacked assistant lurched through the video arcade leading his master’s two distinguished guests past the youth of today spending the allowances of tomorrow. Even as he brought Baron Zemo and the diabolical Doctor Moo towards the change booth it occurred to Flapjack that his new employer wasn’t half as classy as his old one. The Hooded Hood, for example, had not based his operations out of a cheezy amusement joint in Sheepshag, New Zealand.
“Hey, you’ve arrived!” Flapjack’s new employer called out, putting down his double thick milkshake and rising from the complicated lash-up of video monitors and games consoles in the arcade’s operators area. “Want a fry?”
“You are Maul?” Zemo demanded, looking contemptuously at the young man with the ponytail of red hair and the Elton John spectacles. “I was expecting to meet a master of the Dark Side of the Force.”
“Nah. You’re thinking of Maul. I’m Mall – y’know, like the shopping precinct. I am a master of death and destruction, though.”
Moo ran a finger over the dust behind the monitors. “Really?” she said dryly.
“Sure. That’s why I want to join the Major Villains’ Club. I figure I’m ready for my shot at the big time. I mean, its not like you don’t have a vacancy since the Hooded Hood vanished.”
“Did you see the body?” Zemo challenged him.
Moo took Mall’s application form out of a document case. Pushing a pile of CDs off one of the chairs she sat down and went through the CV. “Let’s see. You are an top line assassin, operating an underground traps complex full of amusing but deadly toys.”
“Killingworld,” Mall smiled. “They’ll die laughing.”
“You thought up that tag all by yourself?” Zemo asked, unimpressed.
“We have a lot of competition for the Major Villains’s Club, you know,” Moo warned Mall. “Just this week we have a second interview for Pierson’s Porter.”
“You only like him because he bribed you with a sunset,” Zemo complained.
“Look, he blew up the moon for an opening act!” the lactose geneticist argued back. “Anyway, he’s not the only applicant. There’s Brackets, for example.”
“He talks big, but I’ve not seen anything to back it up yet,” Zemo shrugged dismissively. “Let him come back when he’s taken over a continent, minimum, that’s what I say. If he’s another loser he can join the Scourge.”
“I am a member of the Scourge of the BZL,” Moo coldly reminded him
“Not that we need any more Club members anyway,” the Baron went on quickly. “Not with all these evil hero duplicates proliferating all over the place. I’m thinking of siccing the union on them about demarcation. Do I suddenly stop conquering the planet to save a cat from a tree? No. So why should they suddenly stop in the middle of fighting evil to kill people and stuff? I wrote a strong letter to Jarvis but he just handed it to his secretary Vibby to write back a reply. And I didn’t understand half the words in that.”
The conversation was interrupted by Flapjack’s return. “Excuse me, master,” he cringed, “but I need another roll of quarters for change.” His last employer hadn’t overspent on the headquarters budget and been reduced to running a video-game arcade to cover the cost of the laser cannons.
Of course, that was one reason why Mall wanted to join the Major Villains’ Club. It conferred an automatic 15% discount on all weapons of mass destruction. And the newsletter was a hoot.
“Look, I am a top villain,” the acnied assassin insisted. He hit return on a nearby keyboard to open up the secret complex at the back of the booth. A series of large back-projection units flickered into life and the glass hostage-tubes lit up to reveal their, well, their hostages. “Behold…” he told them, gesturing one sequin-jacketed arm to the images on the screens, “The end of the Lair Legion!”
Zemo and Moo looked. Each monitor showed one of the current Legionnaires trapped somewhere inside Mall’s Killingworld.
“Is that the new lineup then?” Moo wondered, looking at the eleven heroes who were now the Parodyverse’s last, best hope. It was a depressing thought. “Needs more women.”
“I dunno,” Mall answered, uncertainly. “I mean, that Lisa’s a lot of woman. She is a babe.”
Moo felt that once again she was being discriminated against on the grounds that her sister didn’t have a cow’s head.
The screens showed the relative predicaments of several of the Lair Legion. Banjoooo was up against the Microwave Muppets, who were using their energy blasts to try and dry out the giant sea-monkey. Banjoooo was more concerned about the effect all these energy bolts might have on any potential future relationship with Elyse.
Hatman and Goldeneyed were in the Space Invaders chamber. Every few seconds a green-glowing spaceship flew overhead and showered formations of neon computer-generated insects upon the Legionnaires. “So there’s an anti-teleportation grid in effect?” Hatman checked, his Kojak skin-cap doubling up for the Sigourney Weaver Aliens3 effect.
“Yeah, but there’s nothing stopping me blasting these suckers to high score, coach” G-eyed replied. He was overreacting to try and impress his designated League mentor.
“Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! did not appear to be shrieking for assistance or begging for mercy. He appeared to be bouncing around the Clones Room with glee, taking on robot versions of every Spider-man variant that has ever existed – something over thirty of them at last count. He was learning that with great power comes great fun.
Lisa was up against the self-replicating, fully-functional Ticklebots. By a cunning use of nanotechnology these eminently male robots reproduced themselves at an alarming rate, so that as Lisa… defeated… one of them another was always ready to take its place. However, the Ticklebots were already onto emergency reserve power and had sent urgent e-mail messages out for more nanites ASAP.
“They were investigating the disappearance of Rocket Racoon,” Mall explained to his guests. “It was easy to plant false clues to lead them here.”
“RR vanishes. Sersi gone,” Moo shrugged. “Obvious conclusion.”
“Show us what you have in store for them,” Zemo demanded, glaring at the video screens where the Lair Legion struggled. “Show me Jarvis.”
Mall punched the keyboard to reveal the butler reeling down the anti-gravity helter-skelter, skilfully twisting and turning to avoid the razor blades. “Don’t worry, those little knives are just meant as a distraction. The big test comes when he reaches the fork in the tube. Time to deploy a hostage.” The glass cylinder containing the inert form of DarkHwk (inside an energy dampening field which was rendering him completely inactive) dropped through the floor and barrelled into position in the Killingworld below.
“When Jarv sees his comrade being lowered towards the shredder he’s bound to choose the right hand fork to save him,” Mall explained. “But that’s the trap, and it drops ol’ butler-boy right into the Blender Room – and that’s all she wrote.”
“Indeed,” Zemo responded, watching as Jarvis spotted DarkHwk descending to the vast spinning blades and deliberately chose to careen down the other tube and let him die. It was clear to the Baron that another stern letter was in order.
“No! He can’t do that!” complained Mall as DarkHwk’s cylinder crumpled beneath the turbine blades and the ex-hostage vanished from view. “He had to save him!”
Moo shook her head sadly. The assassin had a lot to learn about the quality of the Parodyverse’s heroes. She idly glanced across at another screen but recoiled screaming, “My eyes! My eyes!”
Mall and Zemo swing around to see a ten foot high back-projected close up of Starseed’s hairy naked butt on screen.
“What the hell…?” the Baron snarled, shielding his face from the sludge-covered heroic rear end.
Starseed struggled in a bed of mud, using his Gaaaahhhhh! blasts to shield himself from the strange little leeches which kept clamping onto his body and had already dissolved his costume. He was just getting cross when three women wrestlers dropped into the pit and began to grapple with him. The mission improved from there.
“It was meant to be for Sersi,” grumbled Mall, in response to strange looks from Zemo and Moo. “A dissolving-clothes-wrestling-in-mud-laced-with-contact-aphrodisiacs scenario would have been far more interesting then. As it is…”
“How many members of the Lair Legion would you say there are in this new line-up?” Baron Zemo asked the Major Villains’ Club candidate.
“Eleven,” Mall promptly answered, with scarcely a glance at Cheryl’s latest press release. “Jarvis, Lisa, NTU-150, Fin Fang Foom, Dark Knight, Donar, Banjooo, Hatman, CrazySugarFreakBoy!, Starseed, and the newby Goldeneyed. But they’re trying to get the Scarlet Melissa and Tina to join. It’s a kind of equal opportunities thing. Or else they just want more babes around.”
“And how many of these eleven do you have in your Killerworld?” Zemo continued.
“All of them. And DarkHwk, and Space Ghost, and Action Figure as hostages. Plus one really special hostage who’s going to rock their world when they find out.”
“And how many of these eleven do you have track of on your monitors at the moment?” the Baron went on, his purple mask hiding his smirk or satisfaction.
“All of… hey, where’s Dark Knight? He’s supposed to be trapped in the Custard Factory!”
Zemo and Moo exchanged glances. They recognised the first symptoms of Unravelling Masterplan Syndrome.
“And what’s NTU-150 doing with my Killer Klown Droid? He isn’t authorised to plug that stuff into my hardware! And where the hell is Fin Fang Foom? How can a thirty-foot high dragon escape from my Tribute to the Jetsons Gallery?”
“Fin Fang Foom?” Moo pondered. “That’s the shapechanging dragon, isn’t it? Hmm. Puzzler.”
“Donar! Where’s Donar?” Mall shrieked, frantically taping on his keyboard. Finally he was able to get a playback on the departure of the hemi-god. There was Donar, breaking open Space Ghost’s hostage tube. “I needs must goeth and can tarry here no more. A crisis of the gods doth sore afflict me, and thus must I begonneth. Take ye sacred Mjalcolm and deliver this most puissant weapon into the care of fairest Lisa, that yon maiden might be his guardian until I returneth. And now… farewell!”
Donar vanished in a blinding flash of Ausgardian energy, in complete defiance of Mall’s anti-teleportation grid. Donar had a special Ausgardian salute for power-inhibiting technology grids.
Space Ghost dropped Mjalcolm on his foot.
“Look further on the tape,” Moo pointed out, scrolling the images forward to show Space ghost staggering into the chamber where Starseed struggled.
“I’m here to reshcue you, ol’ buddy, ol’ pal,” the pantless wonder promised his Gaaahhh Master friend, currently the other pantsless wonder.
“No. You. Aren’t,” Starseed insisted. “Oh look, the door has accidentally closed on us both, trapping us in this mud pit with these lethal wrestling amazons. Damn!”
“No! They’re not playing right!” Mall shouted as he watched Lisa toss aside the last of the burned out Ticklebots and go off to rescue Meggan Foxxxx, CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s stripper mom (sometimes known – by CSFB! anyway – as Action Figure). “She can’t rescue her, Meggan’s there to lead that bouncing geek into the lethal electro-web!”
On the adjacent screen another outrage was occurring. “I thought DarkHwk was just diced in those turbo fans,” Moo reflected. “So what’s he doing releasing Banjoooo?”
“Simple,” Zemo reasoned. He knew the Legion pretty well by now. “In the microsecond between the turbines shattering the hostage tube and slicing the hero the dampening field was nullified, so DarkHwk’s crystal protected him as it usually does and he passed through the shredder without harm. Pretty basic when you think about it.”
“Oh, there’s Foomy,” Moo noticed, pointing to where the Makluan had shattered through the wall to the Space Invaders chamber and was providing cover whilst Goldeneyed and Hatman made good their exit. Looks like they’re heading towards a team up with Lisa and CSFB!” The monitors squawked with happy chatter from Dreamchaser Foxglove about reunited silver age partnerships as he met with the Man in the Hat.
“This won’t help them,” Mall promised. “I can still send in the Flaming Furbies.” At a single keyboard stroke he inundated the Legionnaires with blazing furry animals all telling them how they were the Legion’s special friends.
“Aaaw, cute,” Meggan said just before executing a high-kick that sent her assailant ricocheting off the roof. She hadn’t spent twenty years in all those seedy dance joints for nothing.
Banjoooo and DarkHwk arrived just as Mall sent in the Spawns.
“That should deal with them,” Mall promised as the Legion fell back under the sheer Imageness of it all. Feeling that he wasn’t making quite the impression on his villainous guests that he had hoped for, the acnied assassin flicked the switch on the side of his spectacles that made the LEDs shimmer and then activated the two-way monitor so he could address his victims personally. “This is you nemesis speaking…” he began.
“Zemo?” Lisa answered, puzzled by the higher-pitched voice. “You’ve finally admitted about the pink and purple costume and have had the op?”
“Your other nemesis…”
“The Parody Master? Nah, he wouldn’t go for something like this,” Banjooooo considered.
“No, I mean a new, different nemesis.”
“Ah, that explains it,” FFF agreed. “I thought it wasn’t a nemesis who’d, uh, nemesised us before.”
“I’m pretty sure I’d remember seeing those spectacles before,” Hatman admitted.
“Wow! And I thought my new team used to have pretty lame costumes,” CSFB! exclaimed, looking at the sequin-suited villain on the monitor screen.
“Ah crap!” Goldeneyed swore. “My first proper battle as a full Legionnaire and I have to go up against this guy. Thanks for ruining my debut, sphincter-boy!”
“I said, I am your nemesis! I am Mall! You are all trapped in my Killerworld, helpless to my mercy and subject to my every whim, where every piece of technology is at my command SQUARRRRTTT!” Mall’s face vanished as the monitor shorted out when Dark Knight dropped from the shadows and grabbed the assassin in a tight neck-lock.
“Game over, Mall-rat,” the Dark Knight hissed.
Mall’s head fell off at the same time as the electric shock rendered the Lair Legion’s strategist unconscious.
Zemo and Moo looked down on the fallen hero and the decapitated Life Model Decoy. “Not bad,” the diabolical doctor considered. “Classic placement of the robot duplicate to fake out the hero.”
The real Mall stepped out from the shadows and kicked the Dark Knight. “Aw man, how the hell did he get so far without the defences stopping him? He’s not even got any proper powers. He’s the weakest one of them all.”
“How he got here is irrelevant, since he is now dealt with. I’d be more concerned about NTU-150 dismantling that wall panel and fiddling with Killerworld’s wiring,” Zemo advised, indicating the monitor where the Legion’s technologist was happily soldering.
“Hah! That’s what you think,” Mall crowed, stepping over the downed DK and his own robot replica to get to the control boards. “That circuitry was put there as a trap for NTU-150. So long as my core circuits remain integrated I can just destroy that armoured meddler at the bush of a button. Like so!”
Nothing happened. Mall desperately checked his fault boards. “Caustic fluid causing short circuits in conduit 47/alpha?” he puzzled. “Unidentified small mammalian lifeform present?”
“When you captured the Legion earlier,” Moo checked carefully, “she didn’t have a large, mangy cat with her did she?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. It ran away down one of the…”
“Cat piss on the wiring. Lethal to supervillain technology,” the geneticist warned.
There was a bright shower of sparks from the fusing teleport-inhibitor. Mall hurried over and patched in the emergency backup. “Whew! Can’t be too careful with that gizmo,” he noted. “This new LL lineup has got three teleporters of different sorts, Lisa to summon people, Goldeneyed dimension walking, and…”
“And Jarvis,” Jarvis snarled, stalking forward from the same shadows previously utilised by Dark Knight. “Jarvis who can teleport to anywhere he’s seen, even if it’s only on a video monitor with an adversary introducing himself during the gloating break!”
“This is going to be interesting,” Moo judged. “Don’t mind us, butler, we’re just observing at the moment. Think of us like Fin Fang Foom with Jami.”
“I surrender,” Mall stammered as the leader of the Lair Legion strode towards him, cosmic energies crackling round his fists.
“I quit,” Flapjack added, disgusted with the quality of his new villain. The Hooded Hood would be at his most lethal just now with the odds apparently all against him. This guy just crumpled.
“We’re going to have to turn down your membership, Mall,” Zemo told the assassin. “on the grounds of your being a pathetic wuss.”
“Who said you had the option of surrender?” Jarvis answered Mall, closing in for the kill.
Another set of minor equipment explosions denoted further offerings of an incontinent cat deep in the conduit ducting. Mall vanished with a life-saving flash of energy as he was summonsed to Lisa. Telling the Legion his name in his ill-fated broadcast was, in retrospect, another error.
“Gotcha!” Lisa proclaimed. She was now clutching Mjalcolm, retrieved from a muddy-but-happy Space Ghost and Starseed. Lisa had some interesting ideas about the uses a short-handled super-weapon could be used for, but she’d save those for later in private.
“Back!” Mall called as Hatman and Goldeneyed moved in on him. “I still have one last hostage – the most precious of all. And if you don’t surrender at once, he will die!”
The Legion paused.
“Time to get out of here,” Zemo judged. “Come on Moo. Let’s go interview that Brackets character.”
“Your time will come too, Zemo,” Jarvis warned, “but for now I’m going to go and murder that Mall guy. The Legion doesn’t negotiate with hostage-takers.”
“Is it me, or would you say that marriage is changing him?” Moo wondered as the butler stormed away to kill someone.
Back inside Killingworld, Mall was in a standoff with the Legionnaires. “You’re all big fans of the Avengers comic, right? Even based come of your own identities on them? Well that’s why I’ve got you over a barrel. I’ve taken hostage the man who writes them, the one who returned them to their former greatness. And if I don’t get what I want, he fries.”
“Oh no!” Gasped CrazySugarFreakBoy! clutching his mom in horror. “We can’t let him kill Kurt Busiek before we get to read the ending of Avengers Forever!”
“Kurt Busiek?” laughed Mall. “I don’t mean Kurt Busiek! I am talking about the one who had admitted to me that he is the best Avengers writer that ever lived. My hostage is none other than… Rob Liefield! Touch me and he dies!”
Mall went down under a scrum of attacking Legionnaires.

The Hooded Hood