Baron Zemo's Lair. - Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The House of Weird Tales, or Something Fairly Wicked This Way Comes

Baron Zemo's Lair

Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The House of Weird Tales, or Something Fairly Wicked This Way Comes
Wednesday, 30-Jun-1999 11:16:07
195.92.194.44 writes:

Greetings, horror hunters, and welcome to the House of Weird Tales. I am your gruesome guide through the nightmare lands, and you may know me as… the Hooded Hood. Tonight we shall feast our gruesome appetites on the narrative of what happens when hapless heroes meddle with forces they do not ken. With any luck we shall manage to contravene all of the Comic Book Code rules which sank EC comics, except possibly the one about sex with animals.
It is Halloween in the Parodyverse, and for two weeks the Lair Legion has been struggling to deal with an epidemic of sidekicks which have been inflicted on them as the result of an obscure but curiously specific law written by Wilbur Parody, founder of Paradopolis, in the last century (for archive readers, that’s the nineteenth century we’re talking about here). The ever-interesting Lisa is currently investigating this, with the assistance of the reality-hopping Goldeneyed. So far the heroes have not realised that a small retcon – that’s a retrospective change in established story continuity for those of you not familiar with comicspeak – to change an ancient ledger is a very minor feat for one such as I. Still, if heroes caught on to the plots as quickly as the reader there would be far less adventure stories in the world, wouldn’t there? And I am supposed to be erased from reality, so I suppose the gullible amongst them might assume that I won’t be coming back. But enough of Banjooooo.
Suffice to say that it is a dark night, and it will be getting story later. For now let us enjoy the rising tension and clammy warmth before the thunder breaks, and speculate on the identity of the man with the briefcase and trenchcoat who is standing in the lamplight outside the mansion of the Lair Legion waiting for all hell to break loose.
Enough introduction. Let us begin observing unpleasant things happen to the characters. Do not adjust your terminals. Come with me to the twilight world of… the Parody Zone.

FX: Do-de-do-do Do-de-do-do…

“I don’t see why I have to do this,” Starseed complained. He had already tried using his Gaaahhh! Powers to get the slime up off the carpet, and the new floorboards would be coming out of his allowance. Now he was reduced to using a mop and bucket to get the terrible green stains off the rug. And he felt that Jarvis was being very unfair about it.
“It was Space Ghost’s vomit all over it,” Fin Fang Foom pointed out. “And he is your sidekick, so you’re responsible for him. Look on the bright side, at least this stuff came out of the more acceptable end.”
“SG is not my sidekick,” Starseed scowled. He threw his cleaning cloth into the mop bucket as a gesture of rebellion. “I never asked for him to be my sidekick. I don’t even want a sidekick. I’m quite content with Gaaaahhhh! acolytes.”
“I still think you’d better clean up,” Foomy advised. “Jarvis hasn’t been his usual sunny self recently. Lisa reckons it’s marital troubles. He canned Messenger just for killing that guy…”
“I hardly think SG upchucking on the rug and me not soaking it up is in the same class as murder,” Starseed argued.
“I, um, I guess you haven’t seen the little momento in the fishtank then,” FFF answered diplomatically.
And the storm brewed.

The etheric beam locator circuitry finally found the current path it had been searching for and earthed itself through NTU-150’s fingers. “Yeow!” the technologist of the Lair Legion shrieked, sucking his hand.
“Are you alright?” Tina asked, shuffling in with an icepack on her forehead.
“Yeah, Static buildup. It’s making every device in the lab go screwy. And since Zebulon got on this sidekick kick he’s too good to help me get any of the equipment de-gaussed.”
“I thought DarkHwk was also supposed to lab assist you?”
“Yeah, but I think the static buildup’s affecting him too. Last I saw he was stuck to the Van der Graph generator in lab three and couldn’t peel himself off.” Then NTU-150 rather belatedly noticed that his beloved was pressing a cold compress to her head. “Uh, do you have a headache or something?”
Tina bit back the cutting response and allowed a small shudder to creep up her spine. “Yes. I haven’t had a migraine like this since we all got dropped on the Abyssal Plane of Hell a while back.”
“Perhaps you should lie down for a while?” NTU asked anxiously. He didn’t like problems he couldn’t fix, especially when Tina had the problems.
“Yeah,” Tina considered. “I’ll do that. See you later. Perhaps I’ll feel better when I’m cuddled up with my hot water bottle and my old Chucky doll.”

In a far-distant but equally storm-threatened gothic castle, the diabolical Dr Moo, the world’s foremost genetic terrorist, was taking a long-distance call from Cheryl, the Lair Legion’s PR person and wife to occasional legionnaire Visionary. For those who don’t know, Moo is Lisa’s sister. The way to tell the difference is that one’s a vicious, sinister bitch-queen who’d flay your nuts off for fun and stomp them into the ground with her high heels if you annoy her, and the other one’s the evil one.
“Hello, Cheryl,” Moo said amiably. “Haven’t seen you since the Jarvis benefit. How’s things?”
“This isn’t a social call,” Cheryl replied in somewhat clipped tones. “It’s more by nature of a complaint.”
“The Oregon school-milk thing was just an experiment,” Moo answered defensively. “Most of the body hair will grow back and some of the children will find tails a real advantage in later life.”
“Er, no, I didn’t mean that, although thanks for the clarification,” Cheryl answered uncertainly. “I wanted to have a word with you about Asil.”
“Asil? Oh, you mean the clone variant I did of Lisa because nobody else could be bothered to go and look for your husband whatisname when he was lost in the cornfields? So I just did a designer colne with a find whatisname imperative. That one?”
“That one,” Cheryl agreed, her voice deadly calm. “The one who has decided that her one role in life is to follow my husband around and attend to his needs. The one who now believed she is his sidekick, the Visionary Vixens.”
There was a bovine chortle on the line. “She’s one of a group who really call themselves the Visionary Vixens?”
“No,” Cheryl snarled. “She is all of the group. It seems she’s managed to clone herself. There were eight Asils at last count and more to follow. And they all want to follow my husband around and they all want to be his sidekick and if you ask me they’re wanting to be friends with him in a way that Batman and Robin never were in any code-approved book I ever saw.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Moo assured her. “They’ll soon see that Visionary’s not worth mooning over. And they’ll all die pretty soon anyway, from clone fatigue. Built in redundancy. Ask Ben Reilly.”
Cheryl was not very happy about hearing that the man she loved was ‘not worth mooning over’, but she was even less happy when Moo added, “Got to go, another Zemette incident brewing. I’ll send an invoice for the extra clones. Bye.”
More than one storm was brewing, in a strictly technical sense.

Baron Zemo was discovering the terrible truths that all fathers of daughters have to learn. He might be the world’s most dangerous would-be-conqueror, last, most terrible survivor of the sinister Third Reich, but he still couldn’t stop his newly-cloned offspring and self-proclaimed sidekick Imke Ilsa Zemo (Zemette to her friends) from filling the lab with half-eaten pizza trays and deafening the castle with the tunes of popular crooners. However, Zemo was comforting himself by preparing a long list of musical entertainers who would be first up against the wall when he ruled the world.
The Scourge of the BZL, Zemo’s in-house super-villain squadron, were reacting in several different ways to the new addition to the Zemo household. Pegasus had lent Zemette her nail varnish but the young Contessa had chosen to apply it to her toenails all by herself. Venom offered to rend the annoying child limb from limb, and was somewhat abashed when she casually hurled six concealed knives borrowed from Cobra and pinned him to the dinner table. The Grim Reaper sulked. Jam taught her new and interesting words which hadn’t been on Zemo’s Learning Machines. Uatu watched her, until he got personally threatened by a Zemo was just beginning to learn that there are some reflexes which are impossible to restrain. The Late Great Donald Blake burst into a hot blush whenever Zemette walked into the room, and the Man Who Wasn’t There didn’t because he wasn’t. And Imke herself seemed to be developing a rather passionate crush on Wonderbooster until Zemo sent him on a mission to find and destroy an entirely mythical superhero that he made up just to keep the ionic felon out of the way.
“She’s young and genetically unstable,” the diabolical Dr Moo comforted the archvillain. “She’ll grow out of it. Well, either that or her genetic template will degrade and she’ll collapse in a pile of goo. But either way it’s a short tem problem.”
Zemo frowned. Even Moo hadn’t been herself since the sidekick plague began. She’d taken to carrying a Polish lab rat called Davidowski around with her on her shoulder, and Zemo was convinced it was always staring at him. “That’s not the point. The point is that archvillains with daughters are traditionally in a lot of trouble. I know how this works. The daughters always fall in love with one of the heroes and betray their father to his doom. Look at Ra’s al Ghul, or Ming the Merciless…”
“Heinrich, you worry too much. Before you know it she’ll be out there oppressing the peasants and violating human rights with the best of them.” Moo’s comforting words were interrupted by the tolling of the castle doorbell. “Who could that be at this time of night?” she wondered.
“I’ll get it,” Zemette called, streaking past before anybody could react. She dropped the drawbridge, opened the portcullis, powered down the defence grid, locked off the pit traps, and threw open the door. “Hi guys!”
The bunch of young people outside shouted in unison, “Trick or treat!”
Zemo nearly had an apoplexy. “Trick or treat! What do they think this is?”
“It‘s an old custom, Heinrich,” Moo explained. “It’s Hallow’een. Kids go round to houses and get candy and favours or else they play tricks on the mean householders.”
“Tricks? I’ll show them tricks. I’ve got a really funny one with my rabid robohounds that’ll have them screaming!”
“Hey dad, keep the fuddy noise down, huh?” Zemette called back to the lab. “I’m just going to hang with my friends, ‘kay?”
“Friends?” Zemo was instantly on the alert. His little Imke was less than two weeks old. Where the hell had she got friends from? He dived to the door to look at the odd bunch in Hallow’een costumes.
No, not Hallow’een costumes. Superhero costumes.
“Superheroes!” he snarled.
“Be cool, dude,” Wormlad, Fin Fang Foom’s apprentice, advised the frothing Baron. “It’s out night off.”
“Besides,” his sister Wormbait explained, “we’re not really interested in getting into your anachronistic kind of old-style powerplay. When we fight evil, we fight real evil, with issues and stuff, like global warming…”
“Yeah, or cool stuff like druglords,” agreed Hat Kid, from behind a Double McWhoppa with Extra Onion.
“Nazis are yesterday,” agreed Lisette, “although marginally cool from a fashion statement point of view.”
“What!” shouted Zemo. “Why you little…”
“Don’t slice, dad,” Zemette advised him. “Look, we’re just heading to where the action is for a while.”
The lad in the formal eveningwear stepped forward. Zemo couldn’t help but notice that his arm and neck were in a cast. “Please don’t worry, Baron. I can assure you that your daughter will be in the best of care and that we will ensure that no harm comes to her,” L’il Buttie, the junior Jarvis promised him politely.
Zemo couldn’t help asking. “What happened to you?”
“Oh, Mr Jarvis was kind enough to take me on patrol with him a few night ago. Unfortunately, due entirely to my own clumsiness I’m sure, Mr Jarvis inadvertently pushed me off a high ledge resulting in a series of fractures and breaks which necessitated a modicum of plaster casting. I hope to be fit enough to return to my duties as Mr Jarvis’ sidekick as soon as possible, perhaps in time for that mission he mentioned near the high voltage cables.”
“So, Zemette, you comin’ or stayin’ home with the relics?” Zemette asked. “We were gonna slouch down the mall, maybe hook up with the New Battlers. E-Mail will be there.”
“Hey, I’m in,” the Contessa assured them. “Bye parent. Don’t wait up.”
Zemo exchanged a desperate glance at Moo, but the cow-headed scientist shrugged helplessly. The Baron finally fell back on the last resort of fathers everywhere. “Be back before midnight,” he warned.

“Aw, c’mon man. How can you be mad at me for two whole weeks? I didn’t fill out that application for you to be my sidekick, honest,” Banjooooo tried to placate the irate spiffy.
“Aw, c’mon man.. How can you be mad at me for two whole weeks? I didn’t fill out that application form to replace you with all the Asils,” Visionary tried to placate the irate Fleabot.
“Kindly tell Mr Visionary that who he chooses to be his sidekick is entirely his own affair,” Fleabot instructed spiffy. “Kindly tell him that I am very sorry I do not come equipped with sixteen mammary glands and the ability to de-age myself to illegality, but I’m sure he will be very happy with his new partnership.”
“Kindly tell Mr Banjoooo that he can go stick his head in a pig for all I care,” the fern-wielder requested of the micro-robot. “”Point out that he is, as per my contract insists I say every ten minutes, holy sphincter clearly a genius, but that he’s also the sorriest slime that ever evolved from a sewer bed and that I hope he shrivels up and dies.”
The tense atmosphere was interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell. Since everybody was sitting in vexed silence with their arms crossed in front of them it was left to Space Ghost to stagger over to the front door and see who was there. On his third attempt he got the key into the lock and opened it up. “You!” he slurred. “I loooooovvvvveee you!”
“Who is it?” Visionary asked.
“Could be anyone,” Banjooooo estimated. Space Ghost got affectionate when he was intoxicated, which basically made him the friendliest man on the planet.
“Why not get your sidekicks to find out?” Fleabot asked nastily.
“That’s it, I’m outta here!” Visionary announced. “I’ve had it with trying to be reasonable about this. I’m grabbing a shower then going to bed.”
“Who is it at the door?” spiffy asked, his curiosity overcoming his sulk.
“Hello, cute friendlings of the Lair Legion!” the thought-being at the door greeted. “It is I, Yo, come to show you a trick and then give you a treat. I have to be brought copies of my host body’s doctoral thesis for everybody to be reading.”
“I don’t think you’ve quite got the hang of this Hallowe’en custom yet,” Cheryl advised him/her. “Still, thanks for the thesis, I’ll, um, save it for later.”
“Is good. I have come to be picking up sidekick to be having adventures upon. Is notified to me by postal delivery that Visi-friend is now to be official Yo-companion designated Yo-Ho-Ho. Is come on yellow paper with stamp so is to be true.”
“Another mysterious sidekick proclamation,” Banjooooo exclaimed.
“Not too mysterious, this one,” frowned Cheryl. “Isn’t it printed up in Fleabot’s typeface?”
“Yo sees that Legion-friends have been decorating,” Yo added to fill the awkward silence that followed. “Yo isn’t sure if Yo likes it.”
This drew the Lair’s attention to the blood trickling down the rec. room wall.

It was nine-forty by the big clock on the tower of the Miskatonic University when Hatman and CrazySugarFreakBoy got off the bus in Arkham town square. “Wow, it’s good to be back,” CSFB! – or perhaps we have to call him Dreamcatcher Foxglove at the moment, since he and Hatman are in civilian identities – declared, breathing deep of the sea-tanged air of the old Massachusetts town.
“You know this place?” Hatman asked, looking round the deserted square and watching the last bus out vanish as quickly as it could past the Starry Wisdom Masonic hall and accelerate away.
“Sure. My aunt Olivia, mom’s sister, teaches psychology here. We’ve had lots of cool adventures fighting the things Which Are Not Meant To Be and other sorts of monster with capital letters and apostrophes and no vowels.”
Hatman wondered if it was too late to rethink this silver-age buddies partnership thing. “So do you think she might be able to get us into the library, to check on Wilbur Parody’s academic record from his student days here? Only the entire town seems to be deserted.”
“Of course it is. Only an idiot or a maniac cultist would venture out on the streets of Arkham on the night of All-Hallows’ Eve.”
“And we’re not cultists, right?”
“Right… Oh.”
“And those guys with robes and pitchforks and blazing torches would be?”

Darkhwk punched the remote control one last time before he lost patience with it entirely and crushed it in his armoured fist. “Enty, have you been improving the TV programmer again?” he asked accusingly.
“Not recently,” NTU-150 admitted, looking up from his Trying to Work Out Why Every Damn Device in the Building Had Gone Screwy All At Once. “Although I did have a few ideas on how to get it to land a Lairjet as well…”
“It’s just that the TV is going weird. All the channels have the same thing on. I can’t get anything but I Love Lucy.”
“Hey, that’s not so unusual,” Enty shrugged.
“Noooo… it’s just that I don’t remember this episode, where Desi sacrifices Lucy to Beelzebub, that’s all.”
The conversation was interrupted by Tina’s scream as her beloved Chucky doll attempted to molest her.
And in the distance the first rumblings of thunder boomed across the horizon.

It was twenty to twelve on Hallowe’en Night and Lisa was standing in a deserted cemetery. This was not her idea of a good time. “Remind me why we’re here again?” she asked Goldeneyed.
“Because time travel is really tricky. If you really want me to pinpoint the exact timestream and location of old Wilbur Parody I’ve got to work back from here, where his mortal remains are,” Goldeneyed explained testily. He had been in a foul mood all day, ever since that newspaper reporter had tried to interview him and asked him what it was like being Frog-Man’s sidekick. And Frog-Man’s new book deal didn’t improve his temper either.
“There’s really nothing to worry about,” Dark Knight assured the first lady of the Lair Legion. “There are virtually no corpses left in this cemetery anyway. They all went walkabout in that zombie adventure that Messenger got us into.”
“Oh. That’s a great comfort,” Lisa answered, hugging her cat even tighter. So the only scary thing in the graveyard was probably the Dark Knight.
“I’ve pinpointed the thread,” G-eyed reported, his eyes glowing – well hell, you guess what colour, okay? “Now stay close. This is the trickiest kind of shift and I’ve never tried a jump like this before.”
“We’ve got to try it,” Lisa reminded him. “No way could old Wilbur Parody, the founder of Paradopolis, have foreseen the coming of superheroes so specifically as to have written the statutes which have brought about the sidekick plague. Somebody’s got to be tampering with time. So we need to get to Wilbur.”
The golden glow surrounded the trio and they disappeared with a whumph.
All except the Dark Knight, who realised too late that his former existence as the Chronicler of Stories evidently precluded him from journeys like this. He contented himself with melting into the shadows.

“Eeew! Gross!” Starseed judged, looking at the sticky red trickles on the rec. room wall that now formed the words THE LAIR LEGION WILL DARN SOCKS IN HELL.
“That’s what was wrong!” Tina exclaimed. “I was sensing something immensely evil and supernatural. A terrible presence, here inside the mansion itself.”
“That explains the severed fingers in the fishtank,” Foom reasoned. “And that gunk you’ve been cleaning up all evening wasn’t Space Ghost after a vindaloo after all, Starseed.”
“We’d better get everybody together,” NTU-150 decided. “Let’s see, we’ve got Yo, Banjoooo, spiffy, Cheryl, Tina, Fleabot, DarkHwk, SG, and Foomy. Who does that leave unaccounted?”
“What about Yo-ho-ho?” snickered Fleabot.
“Visionary!” Cheryl gasped.
“He went into the shower!” DarkHwk realised.

Cut to shot of Visionary through glazed glass screen of shower – hey, you were warned this wasn’t a comics code episode. He turns on the water. Point-of-view shot of the spray coming down onto the camera. Shot from outside the booth, panning in towards the shower curtain.

“Aw, man,” spiffy shuddered. “Taking a shower in the middle of a horror story! He is so the first person to be found beheaded.”
“We’ve got to get to him, to help him,” Cheryl demanded.
The first stoke of lightning lit the skies. The lights went off.
In the bathroom, Visionary screamed.

FX: Screech! Screech! Screech! Screech! (á la Psycho)

Visionary raced out of the bathroom into the midst of the assembled Legion clad only in a loofah. “Who the hell turned off the hot water unit?” he chattered.
Lightning flashed again. A rumble of thunder shook the mansion.
There was a heavy knocking at the door.

It was a quarter to eleven on Halloween night and Jarvis and Melissa were on a dark desert highway, pulling into the forecourt of a seedy motel. A flickering neon sign announced that they could check out any time they liked. The broken unlit part added, but they could never leave.
A bald, deformed reception clerk looked them up and down before calling a slutty maid to take the couples’ bags up to their room. “We so like having newlyweds here,” he leered.
“How did you know we…?” Melissa blushed.
“It’s a sixth sense, my dear,” he grinned at her. “Like a taste. The master will be delighted.”
“The master?” Jarvis checked, remembering the reason for their visit. “We’re here to see the owner of this place… a Professor Franklydont? The reclusive world-class historian specialising in the history of Paradopolis and it’s founder Wilbur Parody?”
“Seems like a strange place for a history genius to hang out,” Melissa shuddered.
“Professor Franklydont hangs out where he chooses, my pretty,” the desk clerk cackled. He jangled a bell. “The master will be with you shortly. He’s just fixing his makeup.”
Jarvis was signing in to the motel register. “I see you have a lot of other guests tonight,” he commented. “Having a convention?”
“More a sort of an unconvention,” the butler was told. “A reunion. A chance to dig up the past. Perhaps you’ll be able to join them for a drink.”
Outside there was the sound of many motor bikes approaching. Meanwhile Jarvis and Melissa were distracted by the appearance of their host in a stunning sequinned gown and evening gloves. “Well how d’you do? I see you’re waiting in antici…”

In a Grunge Bar somewhere in Paradopolis, the sidekicks waited until L’il Buttie and Thunderstroke got back with the drinks. “Thundy here was a great assistance,” the junior butler told his compatriots. “The gentleman at the bar was desirous of some proof of our age, but our almost-Ausgardian friend here managed to persuade him to let us have drinks in exchange for having a look at his hammer.”
“Yeah. Something like that,” Thunderstroke admitted. “In fact, I offered to let him see it real up close.”
“Wow. Major testosterone thrill,” Lisette spat dismissively. “Let’s cut the crap and get down to cases before the feebs wake up and want feeding again.”
“Absolutely,” Zemette agreed. “So, how are we going to get rid of the adult generation of superheroes once and for all?”

The man at the door of the Lair Mansion was a sort of crumpled, disreputable Sting lookalike, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and his hands deep in his trenchcoat pockets. “Watchyer, mates,” he bade them in an East-London accent. “Just thought I’d call in to add to yer troubles. Names Johnstantine. Con Johnstantine. I just dropped by to let you know that one of you is possessed by the Devil.”

And so we take out leave of the heroes for this episode. What’s that? Oh, the traditional unfunny pun that the narrator tells at the end of the story. Very well. Well, it looks as if the Legion is in a devil of mess, doesn’t it? I trust that will suffice? Anyway, there we must take out leave. Join us next episode wherein we will uncover the nature of the supernatural ills besetting the mansion, learn more of the extraordinary Wilbur Parody, and watch the unfolding agenda of the Sidekicks Alliance. All this plus a surprising guest appearance or two, and the next phase of a masterplan of such brilliance that modesty forbids the Hooded Hood from saying whose it is.
Join us next time or be evicerated, Legion readers.

The Hooded Hood, 36 today