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#48: Untold Tales of the Substitute Lair Legion Saturday, 20-May-2000 18:25:03
#48: Untold Tales of the Substitute Lair Legion “I resigned, dammit.” The seared silhouette that was all that remained of Baron Zemo’s body gently smoked on the wall of Visionary’s devastated office. Nats, Cheryl, and Flapjack were picking themselves out of the rubble where the explosive teleporting Doom Tube of Dark Thugos had sent them all sprawling. The Tyrant of the Sol Empire had arrived, given his ultimatum about taking over the planet, vaporised Zemo with his Entropy Eyebeams, then departed as he had come. “I resigned.” The lights went off in the Lair Mansion, then winked back on as the emergency generators cut in. Visionary did not yet know that a six-mile radius circle of Paradopolis had just been teleported halfway across the galaxy in a slightly overenthusiastic attempt to kidnap the Lair Legion. The waters of Paradopolis bay churned as they rushed in to fill a three-mile deep canyon, leaving the Lair Island truly an island once more, its land bridge terminating at the edge of a deep ocean canyon. The world’s largest city had just become a marine biologist’s paradise. “I wrote a letter and everything,” Visionary continued, to nobody in particular. “Pull yourself together, man,” Nats demanded irritably. The courier for the Interdimensional Transportation Corporation had a hell of a headache from the events that had dominoed from his simple delivery of a package to Heinrich Zemo care of the Lair Mansion. He’d had no idea that the parcel was the focus box of Thugos’ transgalactic dimension-slipping, and that the whole thing was a trap for the Tyrant of the Sol Empire to eliminate a dangerous rival. “When a bad guy tells you he’s gonna conquer the planet next it’s probably time to send out warning messages to all the Lair Legion decoder rings or whatever they have.” “Comm badges,” Cheryl advised. “We used to use little credit card things designed by NTU-150, but they tended to catch fire. The comm badges explode as well, of course, but at least they’re not in your back pocket at the time.” “I just scrubbed that wall,” Flapjack, the Lair Legion’s hunchbacked retainer complained, looking at the Zemo stain. “I’d better get a mop and bucket…” “Leave it,” Nats commanded. “Thugos’ entropy beams may be reversible. We might be able to get Zemo back – but not if you bleach him off the paintwork.” “Do we really want Zemo back?” Cheryl asked reasonably. “I said leave it!”” Nats insisted. “I never wanted this job in the first place,” Visionary continued, opening a window and shooting a huge L-flare into the sky. “Er, I thought you said you had comm-badges?” checked Nats, puzzled. “We do,” Cheryl sighed. “The flare is to warn people that they need to switch the batteries on.” “How did you people survive Zemo for so long?” Nats wondered as Visionary hopped around and rolled on the floor to put out the flare-gun backblast flames in his hair. “It’s awfully dark on the mainland, master,” Flapjack noted, staring out towards where the city usually was. “Something is wrong,” Asil Ashling announced, having walked up from Visionary’s condo with baby Christopher Waltz in his arms. She gently handed the sleeping child to Nats and pointed out of the window. “I don’t remember Paradopolis reflecting stars before.” “It’s almost as if… as if the city wasn’t there any more,” frowned Cheryl. “Nobody ever listens to me,” Visionary complained. “Nobody is even bothering to answer their comm-badges.” “Visionary, dear…” Cheryl began to explain what was going on to her husband gently. There was a glopping sound from the direction of the baby. “Aahh!!!” gasped Nats, “I just had this uniform washed!” Meanwhile the leader (and only remaining Earthbound member of) the Lair Legion had just worked out what his wife was telling him. “I think I’m going to be sick too,” he admitted. “Greetings, people of Earth,” the creature in the shape of an Oriental mandarin who appeared in hologram form over every major city on the planet announced. “You may refer to me as the Devil Doctor, or simply as His Excellence the New Supreme Ruler of Earth.” Around the world people gathered in the streets and stared up at the giant image that glared imperiously down at them. “Whilst being an ancient and powerful being with my own agendas, I have recently struck an alliance with the tyrant of the Sol Empire, Dark Thugos, who is responsible for the disappearance of your city of Paradopolis which many of you will just have seen flashed on your TV screens. The alien stormtroopers who will be here in three days time to take control of the planet also belong to him.” In a pristine monochrome office Pelopia Book turned to her billionaire businessman father. “What do we do, sir?” she asked him. “We cannot allow the world to be overrun in this manner!” “Patience, daughter,” Mr Book commended her. “Our time will come. The Makluan refugee meddles in affairs he does not full understand. Return to your studies. This affair is not our concern.” “My part of the bargain,” the Devil Doctor’s image continued, “was to agree to rule this miserable mudball on his behalf for a period of slightly less than ten years, which is how long we estimate it will take to slowly and painfully ritually slaughter every living creature on your biosphere. It will be a pleasant few years for me, paying off the scores I have accumulated over the hundreds of years since my vessel crash-landed on your pathetic, sorry little world.” “What do we tell the President on line one, sir?” an operative of SPUD, the Super-menace Principal Undercover Directorate asked its Director, Dan Drury. “Tell him ter play with his cigar. We got ourselves a problem here,” Drury shot back, scowling at the giant image on his screens. “Now I realise that many of you will seek to put up a resistance of some kind,” the Devil Doctor noted to the whole world. “However, I am a biochemist of some note. I have therefore prepared a global blanketing of designer Obedience Spores, gene-spliced to make all humans docile, obedient, and lacking the will to resist – much like Home Shopping Channel viewers. Those of you who are gawping up at my image and watching me now are being most helpful by exposing yourselves to the invisible spore shower. The rest of your world will succumb within the next twenty-four hours or so.” The Lynchpin of Crime stood on his Gothametropolis skyscraper balcony, watching the hologram hover over the dark waters where Paradopolis had once filled the skyline. He would have ordered the Devil Doctor’s destruction, but suddenly he felt as if he might as well not bother. Better to do as the master commanded, really… “We will discuss my worship, the rota of virgin sacrifices, the vast mountain of gold you will raise to me and so on later,” the Oriental ruler of the world announced. “For now, please continue enjoying your last day of freedom. After that, the pleasures will be all mine.” In the shadows of Arachknight City one man disagreed. “We’ll see about that, villain,” Fetish Lad vowed. He reached for his nipple clamps and vanished into the night. “This place has bio-filters, right?” Nats checked with Visionary. “Tell me the Lair Mansion has bio-filters.” “I don’t know where the manual is,” the possibly fake man answered. “We, um, we might have a toaster.” “We have to assume that the rest of the team is lost with Paradopolis,” reasoned Cheryl. “It’s going to be up to us to stop the Devil Doctor and Dark Thugos.” “Does that mean you’re going to wear that cat-outfit?” Vizh asked hopefully. Every cloud had a silver lining. “Maybe later,” Cheryl conceded with a secret smile. “We’ve gotta do something!” Nats insisted. “We’ve gotta stop this from happening!” “Do not panic,” Asil assured him. “We have the Great Man to lead us.” “We do?” questioned Nats? “Where? Who?” “Why Visionary, of course,” Asil explained. Ever since she had first been cloned from Lisa’s toenail clippings Asil had believed absolutely in the possibly fake man’s perfection. “He is the man who will save our planet.” “Er…” the Great Man replied. “Aaaagghh!” Nats contributed. “We’d better start by trying to contact the reserve members,” Cheryl suggested. “And anyone else anyone thinks could help.” “I know just who to call,” Asil promised, and picked up the phone. “How bad is it?” Drury asked his best agent. “Bad,” Contessa Natalia Romanza admitted. “We’re airtight here in the SPUD helicarrier, and there are a few C&C centres around that are protected from germ warfare that’ll not succumb, but if the Devil Doctor’s Obedience Spores work as advertised we’re going to be outnumbered about ten million to one by this time tomorrow.” “What have we got on the perp?” The Widow shrugged. “Not much. He’s apparently the other survivor of the Makluan starship crash that Fin Fang Foom came to Earth in, and he’s also a dragon, older, bigger, meaner, and more experienced than Foom is. He’s an expert scientist, specialising in mutations, poisons, virii. And recreational dissection. He’s served by a fanatically loyal Si-Fan assassin sect. His favourite colour is green. His favourite shape is being a Chinese mandarin. His favourite food is human, in a light red wine sauce.” Natalia’s ‘not much’ was more than any dossier Drury had ever seen had on the villain. “This wuz a real bad time for Falcon to go missin’” the SPUD director complained. “’An all the replacements we got lines up fer him have probably gone with Paradopolis.” “So what do we do?” the Widow asked. Drury considered, then sighed. “Get me Erskine Blofish’s phone number,” he instructed. “Morning, Visionary old chap!” Sir Mumphrey Wilton greeted the leader of the Lair Legion. “Nice day to save the planet and whatnot, hmm?” “Mumphrey!” Cheryl smiled as the tweedy old waistcoated Englishman folded his umbrella and placed it by the door of the Lair Mansion. “I should have known that you’d be the first person Asil rang!” “Always happy to help out in a spot, your grace, don’t’y’know?” the perfect gentleman smiled. “Understand we’ve got a spot of bother with a planetary take-over, an advancing alien armada, and that nasty Thugos cove?” “That’s one way of putting it, yes,” Nats snarled. “Now if only some useful people turn up we could start eliminating the opposition.” “Do not be rude to Sir Mumphrey,” Asil warned. Only she of those present knew that the Englishman was the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity, able to manipulate time itself. “He is almost as great a man as Visionary.” “I’ll buy that,” snorted Nats. The headache just kept getting worse. “How did you manage to get here so quickly?” Visionary puzzled. “I thought you were in London when Asil called you twenty minutes ago.” “Freak tailwinds, probably,” Mumphrey said evasively. “I took the liberty of calling a few other chaps and a chapess, by the way. Hope you don’t mind?” he didn’t add that he’d used his pocketwatch’s time-twisting properties so he could telephone them all several hours ago. “Any kind of help would be useful just now,” Cheryl admitted. “Things are getting complicated since Paradopolis became the worlds largest yacht basin.” “Well I have to admit that a flood that big is certainly out of my league,” the dapper fellow in the Greek robes admitted as he followed Mumphrey through the door. “I’m the god of small waters you know. Elsqueevio’s the name.” “Oh good. A god of small waters,” Nats mumbled. “Hooga!” “And a short hairy guy with a big club,” Nats amended himself, “Ah,” Elsqueevio explained, “This is my associate, Caveguy.” “Hooga!” Caveguy declared again. “The Lord of the Savage Park has a limited vocabulary,” Mumphrey admitted, “but he’s a solid chap in a fight.” “And I love the size of his club,” Melanie Hastings, a.k.a. porn star Meggan Foxxx, a.k.a.CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s mom admitted, joining the assembly. “Thanks for inviting me to th’ party, Mumph, hon. This’ll help me keep my mind off my missin' little boy.” “My pleasure, madame,” the whiskered gent smiled. He craned to look out through the door. “But we should be expecting one more guest.” “A god of small waters, a one-word Neanderthal, a strip queen, and an old guy,” Nats growled. “Can it get any better than this?” Meggan gave the Interdimensional Transportation Corporation courier a curious look. Outside there was a slurping sucking sound as of something slick and wet and slime-rimed being dragged over barnacle-studded cliffs. A heavily-coated man with a scarf swathed across his face and a big fur shapka walked through the door. “Greetings, brief mortals,” he bade them. The Manga Shoggoth had arrived. “There’s another man out there too,” Asil pointed out. “I could see his nipple-clamps gleaming in the moonlight.” “He’ll join us when he’s ready,” Xander the Improbable commented, surprising everyone as he emerged from the Lair kitchen with a half-eaten bacon and egg sandwich in one hand, “And now you’re all here we’d better get on with overthrowing an intergalactic empire. I charge time and a half for intergalactic empire overthrowing, by the way.” Less than twelve hours after the disappearance of Paradopolis and the release of the Obedience Spore the governments of every country in the world except Italy had surrendered their authority to the Devil Doctor. Italy would have done so too but nobody could work out who was actually in charge just now. Obedient troops were escorting obedient world leaders away to special detention camps. Obedient populations listened obediently to their televisions and radios to be told what to do to please their new master. And after the Devil Doctor eschewed his mandarin form for the ease of his massive draconic true shape and smashed the front off the White House so he could curl in comfort, people obediently began to pile the contents of Fort Knox around him to make a suitable bed. Pockets of resistance still held out. Akiko Masamune, the Yakuza leader, managed to resist the Obedience Spore through sheer willpower, and had to be arrested from her Hong Kong stronghold by force and an international peacekeeping team. The ionically-composed Wonderbooster was immune to the spore, but pretended he wasn’t for an easy life. A shady Englishman in a trench coat was reportedly going round demanding favours of an obedient population, and managed to convince an arresting army sent for him to do unspeakable things to themselves with their rifle-points. And at Covenant House overlooking the rough Atlantic coastline, Hagatha Darkness ignored the whole thing and went on working on the complex and elaborate voodoo doll she was creating for another storyline completely. It was a small image but came with a huge variety of headgear. High in the Himalayas, in the forbidden city of the Abhumans, the genetically-modified creatures discovered that while the Obedience Spore didn’t render them obedient it did trigger off a terrible allergic reaction, and all of them went to bed sneezing and itching. Even higher in the secret outback city of the Austernals none of them even noticed the Obedience Spore, and might have come forth and tried to save the planet if they hadn’t been formed into a Hive Mind at the time to consider the knotty issue of whether to purchase French or English mustard next time they went shopping. And then there was this: “Hey, Dragon-Boy! Lissen up, this is Dan Drury talkin’ atcha! Yer a lizard-lovin’ snake-smoochin’ reptile-ruttin’ yahoo an’ we’re gonna take you down like Madonna’s underwear! See you forgot that some of us live in air-controlled environments, like us guys in SPUD. We got the best air-filterin’ technology on the planet, on account’a my cigars. Now we didn’t have enough of our people safe to launch a full attack on you in our aircars, but I got to thinkin’ that we’re not the only ultra-paranoid folks on the block. So I went an’ called in the opposition and lent them some of our toys. Say hello to the joint SPUD/BALD taskforce, dinobreath!” “Makluan, this is Blofish, Supreme Commander of the Blatant Anarchists League of Destruction,” a second voice boomed over the aircar speakers. “My old foe Drury is correct in that he has indeed recruited BALD operatives to pilot his unoccupied assault vehicles. However, I can spot a winning side when I see one, so what Drury doesn’t know is that I am willing to join with you, great master of the Earth, and destroy SPUD once and for all on your behalf, using their own equipment.” “Dan Drury again, ya big worm. Like I didn’t think baldie there would turn sides at the first opportunity. Whut Blofish don’t know is that we set all’a the kit we leant ‘im with self-destruct buttons. See I figgured that he’d do what he has done, bringing the equipment over ta surrender to you. Then all I gotta do is push this button an…” There was a series of devastating explosions as the SPUD vehicles detonated, taking the BALD operatives with them. The White House lawn became the White House crater. The Devil Doctor reeled as many of the blasts came too close for comfort, roaring in anger as shrapnel bounced off his hide. “So there,” chuckled Drury, bringing the helicarrier down from the clouds for the kill. “You bastard…” Blofish squeaked over the radio link. “You treacherous…” “Later,” Drury told him absently, flicking off the receiver. “Got me a worm to step on just now.” “I’m getting readings on the dragon, Dan,” Natalia Romanza warned her Director. “He’s spreading his wings and looking pissed.” Then the Makluan moved. Nuclear fire seared the helicarrier, and then a massive powerful wing smashed into it, sending it spinning wildly. A second dragon-buffet hammered it to the ground. After that the Devil Doctor simply tore at it again and again, rending mental like paper with his powerful claws. “You will regret your insolence, Drury,” he warned the man he was shredding the vehicle to get at. “I shall make you did a million deaths for this.” “No!” a woman’s voice shrieked from across the remains of the lawn. “Don’t kill him! Please! I… I’ve brought you tribute!” The serpentine head of the Devil Doctor spun round to regard Meggan Foxxx. Drury’s occasional girlfriend trembled under his gaze but pushed forward the person she had with her, a tender child of perhaps fourteen years, swathed in a white gown with flowers in her hair. “I… I brought you a virgin sacrifice,” Meggan pleaded. “Take her. Let Drury live.” The Makluan ceased his assault on the fallen helicarrier for a moment and swung round to sniff at the child. “Hmmm,” he approved, “The scent of innocence. Delicious! You name, my victim?” “A-Asil,” the shivering girl answered. “Asil Ashling.” “Hi there,” Fetish Lad said politely to the Si-Fan assassin at the secret doorway to the Devil Doctor’s Honshu retreat. “Is this the place that called the plumbers?” The assassin looked at the unlikely bunch of people in overalls, and one in faded red robes. “You don’t look like plumbers to me,” he said suspiciously. Xander handed over his business card. “You don’t look like a plumber at all,” the assassin frowned, unreassured that the mage was carrying a sink plunger. “You look more like a wizard.” “Don’t get me started on the feng shui of central heating pipes,” Xander advised him. “Do you want working toilets or not?” “Very well,” the assassin conceded. “But you will remain together with your escort while you are here. You will speak of nothing you see here, on pain of the slow death of everyone in your families. And you will not charge time-and-a-half on your bill. Is that clear.” “Indeed,” Elsqueevio agreed. As god of small waters, ordaining the blockage in the secret lair’s plumbing systems in the first place had been a simple matter. “Hooga!” added Caveguy. “Why does that one carry a war-club?” the assassin asked suspiciously. “He’s the apprentice,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton explained. “It’s not a war club,” Cheryl assured the Si-Fan. “it’s um, it’s a four-fifths gripley. Left handed. “Now can we fix your plumbing or do we have to report to your bosses that they can’t use the can because of your dishonour?” Nats asked nastily. The assassin summoned a vast sumo to lead them to the stopcocks. “Hmmm,” Mumphrey considered as he examine the array of water pipes in the boiler room. “Time to render our escort unconscious, don’t you think?” The sumo was slightly slow on the uptake. Fetish Lad had rendered him unconscious and thong-strapped before the vast mountain of a wrestler had prised his face free from his mid-morning snack. “I… I don’t think I’ve ever seen body piercing used as an offensive combat technique before,” Elqueevio admitted. “Hooga!” Caveguy cringed in agreement. “Well, we’re in,” Mumph noted. “Now all we need to do is sabotage their systems, get to their laboratory, find the antidote to the Obedience Spore, and leave while they’re still trying to work out why their bally lavatories are explodin’, what? Standard plan number three. Never fails.” With Cheryl’s engineering experience, Elsqueevio’s command of small waters, and an arcane plumber on the team, the sabotage part wasn’t going to be hard. Cheryl had brought an NTU-Mac central processing unit to install in the Devil Doctor’s computers, just in case. “What are you doing?” shrieked a ninja who happened to spot the work in progress. “Caveguy, that man’s the founder of the Beaver Preservation Society,” Cheryl told the Neanderthal. “Get him.” “We’ve got things well in hand here,” Mumphrey noted, stepping round the frenzied melée on the boiler room floor. “Now Xander, Nats, um Fetish Lad, and I will wander down to the labs and see what we can do about finding an antidote. Your grace, we’ll leave Elsqueevio and Cave-Chap to keep you safe here while you continue to play with their plumbin’.” “Better go without me,” Fetish Lad suggested, looking over Mumphrey’s shoulder. “I think I’d better stay and help fight the mutant spider-wolves that have just found us.” “Fair point, that man,” Mumphrey agreed. “C’mon Xander, Nats. Let’s find a way to stop this bally Obedience Spore, hmm?” Half a world away young Asil trembled as a reptilan head the size of a house came close to examine her. She tried to struggle but Meggan Foxx held her still. The older woman had bound her hands behind her back and was holding her tight by a rope around her neck. “You have pleased your master, whore,” the Devil Doctor told Meggan. “You may live.” “Thanks, hon,” Meggan replied. “So what are you goin’ to do with her?” “Devour her, metaphorically, spiritually, morally, and physically,” promised the wyrm “He’s going to do nothing!” Visionary announced, stepping out over the scorched battlefield,. his yellow coat billowing behind him. “He’s going to surrender now, or the Lair Legion will take him down. Step away from the girl, dragon, and prepare to be arrested!” “What?” the Makluan chuckled incredulously. “There is no Lair Legion, and you have no powers at all, fake man.” “I’m real, dammit. And I am the Lair Legion. And you have one minute to surrender.” “I’d do as he says,” Asil advised the Devil Doctor. “He is a Great Man.” “He is a fool,” the dragon replied. “Here is my answer.” Then he swallowed Visionary whole. Mumphrey, Xander, and Nats managed to slip through into the dark caverns which were the Devil Doctor’s laboratory through amazing luck in their timing. All the while Mumphrey absently toyed with his large pocketwatch, except for the occasion when he used it to bunt an assassin across the back of the headt. “We’re here,” the English gentleman noted as they gazed at the large glass vats, the bubbling vials of noxious potions, the severed pickled body parts and so on. “How do we spot the antidote, Xander?” “We don’t,” the eccentric master of the mystic crafts replied. “We need an expert scientist who understands how evil geniuses work.” “Aw great,” Nats complained. “I knew we’d forgot to pack something!” “Actually we didn’t,” Xander replied. “I have full confidence that Heinrich Zemo will be able to make some sense of this place.” “Zemo?” Nats scorned. “Zemo is smeared across Visionary’s wall back on Parody Island.” “His body is, yes,” the mage agreed. “But a master-villain like Zemo always has an escape route planned. In this case he used an old Tibetan mind-trick to place his consciousness into the nearest available body until such time as he could regain his own form.” “Cunning,” Mumphrey reluctantly admired. “But I was the nearest available body!” Nats objected. “Why do you think you’ve been so cranky and headachy today?” Xander asked. “Zemo, come forth!”” The expression on Bill Reed’s face altered at once, becoming slyer, sourer, and more sinister. “I am here, wizard,” a German-accented voice admitted. “But why should I help you save the world?” “Because it’s the decent thing to do, Zemo, dammit,” Mumphrey told him. “Because we’ll try and get Thugos to reverse his entropy beams and get your body back,” Xander suggested. Zemo/Nats considered this. Zemo couldn’t stay in this body for too long. The desire to consume large amounts of pizza was almost overwhelming. “Very well,” he agreed. “Let us look at the Devil Doctor’s notes, and then my brilliance will conceive a cure.” “You ate him!” Asil gasped. “You ate Visionary.” “I shall consume you too, my little virgin sacrifice,” the Devil Doctor promised. “Eventually.” “Uh-uh,” Meggan told the giant dragon. “I don’t think so, bud.” With a deft tug she freed Asil’s hands and then took up place in front of her. “You’re finished,” she told the wyrm. “Visionary did warn you.” “Visionary is even now digesting in my stomach,” the Devil Doctor pointed out. “Well, he would be,” Asil explained, “except for what he had for breakfast.” “For breakfast?” the dragon puzzled. “Yes,” Meggan agreed. “You have no idea how hard we had to bully him to make him eat the Manga Shoggoth.” “He ate… what?” “It’s a primal elder entity, a formless protoplasmic mass of variable size and consistency,” Asil footnoted. “And we owe it a wide screen 40 inch colour digital TV with picture-in-picture. Visionary ate it, so that when you swallowed him it could come back out, coating him in its protective form.” “See we figured that you were too tough to fight from the outside,” Meggan explained, “So we got an agent on the inside, so to speak. He’s in you right now, oozing about caustically, working out the vital organs, the squidgy internal stuff a Makluan really can’t do without.” “That’s ridiculous,” the Devil Doctor objected. “I cannot be harmed by any mere protoplasmic…” Then he fell over dead. Dan Drury had dragged himself from the SPUD helicarrier wreckage and now joined Asil and Meggan by the fallen dragon. “Nice goin’ babe,” he admired. “Thanks’ sweetie,” Meg answered. “Although really it was the Shoggoth and Vizh that turned the trick.” “Um, speaking of Visionary,” came a plaintive voice from the dead dragon’s inside. “Could somebody please cut me out of here? Please? Aaaghhhk!” It was twenty-four hours since Paradopolis had vanished, and the Devil Dragon had fallen. Zemo’s Obedience Spore antidote was being distributed, and gradually the world was going back to being a rebellious, rude, cantankerous place. The various irregular associates of the Lair Legion assembled with Dan Drury at the Lair Mansion to plan what to do next. “You guys do what you like,” Visionary told them. It had taken him three hours to get most of the dragon-stomach-slime from his hair. “I resigned. I quit, dammit!” “You saved the day, dear,” Cheryl assured him. “You all made me eat Shoggoth!” he complained. “It tasted like cardboard jello!” “I’m not to everyone’s taste,” bubbled the Manga Shoggoth. “And then he came out through my… orifices.” “I kept you from being digested, didn’t I?” the Shoggoth checked. “Enough of this irrelevance,” insisted Nats/Zemo. “Thugos’ war-fleet is a mere two days away from our world. He is aware of all our defence plans, has an overwhelming technological and numerical advantage, and has already weakened us with his destruction of Paradopolis and his Obedience Spore gambit. We must make firm plans if we wish to avoid my planet being rendered extinct of all life.” “I’m sure the world governments are cookin’ up some sort of plan,” Sir Mumphrey suggested. “Actually, no,” Drury conceded. “Y’see, the Devil Doctor pumped all the world leaders an’ such with massive quantities of his Obedience Spore to learn all they knew about our defence plans. It’ll be weeks before any of them are fit to do more than sign my equipment requisitions for a new helicarrier. We don’t actually have any world leaders just now.” “But the planet needs organising,” objected Fetish Lad. “Without an organised defence we will perish on the sacrifice-altars of Dark Thugos! We need a leader!” Asil looked up brightly. “Visionary could do it!” Cheryl choked on her coffee. “That’s preposterous,” Zemo/Nats exploded. “Actually, no,” admitted Dan Drury. “The public all saw on their TV sets how Visionary took on the Devil Doctor one-on-one and wiped him out. They don’t know squat about the Shoggoth thing. World opinion is that only one guy can lead us now.” “No,” Visionary said firmly. “Nononononononononononononono!” Xander grinned evilly. “So what’s the plan, o glorious leader?” he asked. “Nonononononononononononononononono!” “Hey, if he’s ruler of the world, does that mean I get a rise?” Flapjack asked opportunistically. Next issue: It’s back to Paradopolis, wherever that is, and a death-defying journey into the strange tunnels beneath the city. Join Lisa, Messy, G-Eyed, spiffy, Trickshot, Sorceress, and little Lisette as they probe the bowels of the Big Banana – eew! And one of these heroes will no longer be in the land of the living by the end of the episode. Join us same time, same channel (unless someone’s found a better board by then), next week, for Down Among the Dead Men Link to Amazing Guy's tie-in stories, Amazing Tales #10: Plots in Motion and Jack Rabbit, Second Series #6, Siblings- Separated! The mystery of the missing Paradopolis continues, from the Hooded Hood |
| #48: Untold Tales of the Substitute Lair Legion (The mystery of the missing Paradopolis continues, from the Hooded Hood) (20-May-2000 18:25:03) |
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