The Hooded Hood presents this gory tale of gruesome goings-on, with the warning that this episode contains gratuitous nudity and references to Buffy the Vampire Slayer

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ Parodyverse ] [ FAQ ]

Posted by Untold Hallowe’en Tales of the Lair Legion: The Bride of Shabba’dhabba’Dhu and Other Tragedies: Hallowe'en I - The Shower Scene on October 29, 2000 at 09:28:29:


Untold Hallowe’en Tales of the Lair Legion: The Bride of Shabba’dhabba’Dhu and Other Tragedies

Hallowe’en One: The Shower Scene

Bryan Katz, aka Goldeneyed, wiped the shampoo from his eyes and discovered there was a woman in the shower with him. She was pale, with lustrous black hair and sad eyes. She wore a tattered white nightdress with a bloodstain at the breast. And she was quite transparent.
“Gah!” Bry gasped as he saw her gliding towards him. As she approached him the shower water turned icy cold.
More by instinct than by planning, Goldeneyed teleported himself away from the creature that every sense he possessed was warning him was wrong, alien, a danger to his sanity and to his soul. He vanished in a flash of golden light.
And appeared in the kitchen of the Lair Mansion.
“Agh!” spluttered Amy Racecar, the team’s mechanical consultant, spraying a mouthful of cornflakes across the breakfast table.
“Good morning Bry,” Troia said to him, looking up from the pumpkin she was carving for tonight’s party to regard the naked soapy man who was dripping on the tiles. “Nice to see you.”
Goldeneyed realised that it was customary to wear clothes when the Lair Mansion kitchen was occupied with breakfasters.
“Nice to see you up in the morning, too,” grinned Lisette, the Lair Legion’s legal advisor and Bry’s sometimes-girlfriend.
“Agh!” Goldeneyed blushed. Again acting by instinct he teleported the nearest clothes he could find onto him. They belonged to his cousin Rick Foreman, Exile, and Exile was wearing them at the time.
“Agh!” Exile responded. He reacted by using his energy-controlling powers to dissolve the molecular bonds of the stolen clothes, effectively evaporating them off Bry, and by willing his own psycho-sensitive costume into existence.
“Here,” Ziles advised Goldeneyed, “Use this.” She appraised him carefully before selecting a middle-sized soup ladle and handing it to him to cover his nakedness. “This is clearly an Earth custom of the season which has not been explained to me yet.”
Goldeneyed took refuge behind the freezer. “There’s… there’s a girl in my shower!” he stammered.
“I get that problem as well,” Fin Fang Foom admitted, “but I keep changing the locks and waiting to bathe until Lania’s out shopping.”
“You never complained before, Bry” Lisette pointed out.
“I mean, there’s a ghost of a girl in my shower!” Goldeneyed warned them.
Troia peered round the corner of the fridge. “Oh,” she sniffed, looking down “That’s your excuse is it?”
“Agh!” Bry cried again and vanished in a golden flash.
“Well that’s me off breakfast,” grumbled Trickshot.

“A supernatural manifestation in the Lair Mansion, breaching our security,” the Dark Knight worried. “Given the sort of problems we’ve had at the Mansion on other Hallowe’ens we have to take this seriously.”
“Should I cancel the party?” Hatman wondered. “I mean, if we’re about to have an incursion of loathsome things that man was not meant to know…”
“Sounds like the ideal time to have the League of Regulars and the Abandoned Legion over,” Trickshot snorted. “Has anyone got ManMan’s address?”
“I don’t know why everyone’s taking this so seriously,” the Sorceress shrugged, sitting in the window-seat and watching the distant ocean. “It’s not like she hasn’t always haunted the place.”
“What?” Finny gasped. “You knew about her?”
“It was a ghost?” Goldeneyed also gasped. “I real, live, er dead, genuine ghost?”
“Hey, it’s not the weirdest thing we’ve seen today, buddy,” snickered Trickshot.
“Excellent!” enthused CrazySugarFreakBoy. “It’s these sort of traditions that make the difference between being like the Avengers or being like X-Force.”
“Why didn’t you tell us the mansion was haunted, Whitney?” Nats demanded. “I mean, we could have called in the Ghostbusters or someone.”
“She’s been here much longer than we have,” the Sorceress told them, “and it’s her home too. She’s sort of sad and very distant, but it’s all she’s got left now. Usually she keeps out of the way, but on the other hand we did build those new bathrooms where the old main corridor used to be the last time we had to rebuild the interior.”
“I’m sorry we didn’t include the spectre’s input at the planning stage,” Foom growled.
“And you never thought to mention this psychic security risk?” the Dark Knight objected.
“Hey, what’s wrong with a ghost visiting?” challenged CrazySugarFreakBoy. “Anyway, this one’s got squatters rights.”
“The spirits of the past should be revered and honoured,” Troia agreed, crossing her Amazon wristbands.
“Aye verily,” Donar Oldmanson added. “Unless they be foul effluents of evil, of course. Then they must be smited most grievously.
Fin Fang Foom sighed as another day as leader of the Lair Legion began. “What does she want? Who is she?”
“I don’t know who she is,” Whitney admitted. “She doesn’t really communicate, but there’s a sense of loss and sorrow about her. She’s sentient at some level, because she keened all night when Jarvis died if only you were psychic enough to hear it. Tina had a terrible headache. Even my grandmother, Hagatha, never found out who she really was back when the League of Improbable Gentlemen were here over a century ago.”
“So basically you’re saying she’s always walked through my shower and she’s always going to walk through my shower,” Goldeneyed said worriedly.
“I’m saying that something must have disturbed her, and we have to find out what we can do to comfort her,” the Sorceress suggested.
“You want us to do social work for a phantom,” Hatty noted.
Whitney smiled at him, “I knew you’d be gentleman enough to offer, Jay my darling.”

“I don’t like this,” Exile complained for the eleventh time. “Every time we come here we end up neck-deep in cosmic trouble and stuff. And we end up owing him a favour. Every time. Last time I ended up ruling an alien plane.”
“We’re just looking for a little guidance,” Nats shrugged. “I deliver stuff here all the time. Xander’s a nice guy, and he tips real well.” He thought about that for a while. “Never in cash though,” he qualified himself, “but if he tells you who’s going to run at the dogtrack you’d better put some money on it.”
“And you always win?” Trickshot asked interestedly.
“Well, noooo…” Nats admitted, “but it’s always interesting.”
The bell was still missing from atop the door to Xander the Improbable’s Clock Repair and Plumbing Emporium (“We fix leaks of water, gas, and extradimensional matter, and service clocks and dimensional anomalies – prices on application”). However, the rubber duck in its place quacked when the opening door squeezed it; things often make a noise when caught under pressure.
“Put it on the table and I’ll fetch a fire extinguisher,” Xander told Nats, “Oh, no, that’s next week isn’t it? And you haven’t picked up your burden yet either.”
“My, um, my burden?” Nats asked nervously.
“Don’t worry about that now,” the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse advised him. “There’ll be plenty of time to worry when it happens.”
“See!” Exile told him. “I warned you. Huge cosmic disasters.” He grinned then, “I’m so glad it’s you this time, Nats.”
“Gee, thanks,” Bill Reed answered.
“Never mind,” Xander comforted him. “Wait until Exile gets his new job. And then he’s got that problem with the Lady of Shalandalor and the Hidden Chalice. That should wipe the smirk from his face. I can’t help you today, by the way.”
“What?” Exile asked, somewhat distracted by Xander’s comments. “You can’t help us with what?”
“With your ghost problem,” the eccentric mage replied. “That is why you’re wasting my time isn’t it? There’s some things it’s best not to probe into, and this is one of them. My advice to you – for free this time – is to go home and get a different shower cubicle somewhere else.”
“But why?” asked Trickshot.
“Because otherwise people will start to avoid Goldeneyed, and it’s bad enough having a malodorous Messenger running about without having another unwashed superhero.”
“I mean why is it too dangerous?” the annoying archer persisted.
Xander smiled enigmatically.

“Why couldn’t you have brought Troia along with you?” Hatman demanded. “Or Ziles? Or CrazySugarFreakBoy? Or Trickshot? Or anybody but me?”
“Because I like spending time with you, Jay,” Whitney Darkness smiled brightly, linking her arm with her boyfriend’s. “And I hardly ever get to visit home any more.”
“She hates me,” Jay Boaz protested. “She’s always hated me. She keeps trying to get me killed.”
“That’s just her way of showing that she cares,” Whitney replied. “My grandmother doesn’t really hate you. She’s just… testing you.”
“No,” the stiff old matriarch who appeared at the top of the long staircase of Covenant House contradicted her granddaughter. “Actually Mr Boaz is right. I do hate him. Welcome to Covenant House, Jay. Enter freely and of your own will.”
Hatman winced. “We’ve come to ask about the ghost at the Lair Mansion, Miss Darkness,” he explained. And in no way to be rended body and soul by the forces of darkness dredged from the deepest pits of hell he managed not to add.
“Ah,” the old lady noted. “Which one?”

“Not getting too far with Xander the Incomprehensible today?” grinned a sneaky Englishman in a grey trenchcoat. “Trying to dredge up information that he’s not willing to give?” Con Johnstantine was waiting for Exile, Trickshot, and Nats in the alleyway opposite Xander’s shop. His coat collar was turned up conspiratorially. “I know where you can get the help you need.”
Inside the emporium, Xander watched Johnstantine leak the information he wasn’t going to risk giving them directly, and ticked off another manipulation of the Lair Legion in a large, long ledger.

“Hi Izzy,” Dreamcatcher Foxglove bade his dead ex-girlfriend as she appeared in his room. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the final issue of Preacher.”
“Is it any good?” she asked.
“See for yourself,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! told her, passing the comic to the ghost girl (well, she was either a ghost or a figment of Dream’s imagination, or both, but she was probably his best friend except maybe Jay sometimes). “Listen, do you know anything about another ghost in the Lair Mansion?”
“Marie?” Izzy asked. “Pale, long hair, blood-stained nightie, flits about when no-one can see her?”
“That’d be her,” CSFB! considered. “Do you ever talk to her?”
“It’s not like that, Dream,” Izzy explained. “She’s… well, she’s far away from here, and yet bound to this place. I can’t really communicate with her any more than you can. I just know she’s unhappy that even after a hundred and forty years nobody’s avenged her death.”
“She was murdered?”
“Oh yeah. And all she wants is for you to find out whodunnit and bring them to justice.”

“Why me?” Troia objected. “Why do I have to talk to him? I don’t want to go near a guy my who my father intends to bestow me on to bear children!”
“I thought you kind of liked ManMan?” Goldeneyed shrugged. “Besides, you know his address.”
“You’re part of it, aren’t you? Part of the Hooded Hood’s plot to breed me with Joe. You’re one of his minions! Aren’t you? Admit it!”
“Troia, you’re being ridiculous,” G-Eyed told her. “The Hood has nothing to do with me. Well, okay, he did arrange for my origin, and for me getting zapped back to this time period, and for me being brought up by the Order of the Observing Eye and surviving the decimation of my generation of heroes in the Zemo massacre, but other than that…”
“Hood agent! Hood agent!”
Goldeneyed sighed and knocked on Joe Pepper’s door.
“Troia!” ManMan smiled. “You decided to talk to me again!”
“Trick or treat,” G-Eyed declared.
“We’ve come to ask Knifey a few questions, if you don’t mind, Mr Pepper,” sniffed the amazon administrator.

“Well, thanks for getting us here, I guess,” Fin Fang Foom told the Manga Shoggoth. “Can I, um, can I buy you a drink or something?”
“I’m not that kind of protoplasm,” the Shoggoth answered. “I’ll just ooze over to the corner while you go reorder the Parodyverse or whatever you’re doing.”
“Thou hast been here before, young dragon?” Donar asked Fin Fang Foom, looking round the Bar at the Crossroads to the Multiverse, a drinking establishment for extraplanar entities..
“Yeah. But then it had, well, a lot less broken furniture,” Finny admitted.
“A bar fight here is most unusual,” the Dark Knight agreed. “Given the sort of clientele who frequent this place, sudden conflicts tend to end up decimating planes.”
“There art one stalwart fellow over yonder by the bar, who hast clearly been the victor of yon joyous conflict,” Donar pointed out. “Let us go and see if he can say what befell herein.”
“Yes,” agreed Ziles. “That guy in the white outfit without… without any pants on.”
“Hello!” Space Ghost slurred at the approaching Legionnaires. “I really loooooovvveee you!”
Fin Fang Foom reeled away from the alcohol fumes. “What the hell have you been drinking?” he winced.
The Pantsless Wonder considered this. “Everything,” he decided. “After all, this is my regular.”
“This is the Bar at the Centre of Everything,” the Dark Knight frowned. “Oh well, I suppose it explains how you manage to constantly sneak your alcohol supplies past the security net.”
“How is it that you wert victorious in this grievous conflict which hath marred the quaffing solitude of this cosmic tavern?” Donar wondered.
Space Ghost tried to focus his eyes on the room. “There was a fight?” he asked.
“Let’s just find the guy we’re looking for, the one that Johnstantine said could help us, and then go,” Finny suggested.
Ziles returned from chatting with the aggrieved bartender. “The guy we want is the same one who started the fight and then vanished as soon as people started hitting each other,” she reported.
“What was the fight about?” Finny was almost afraid to ask. “Some kind of obscure cosmic principle? Chaos versus order? Enthalpy vs Entropy? The question of Free Will.”
“Who was hotter, Buffy or Willow,” Ziles answered.
“Willow,” answered Finny automatically. “Er, so I’m told.” [For more reasoned, sensible debate on this issue, including DK’s views on “Buffy, Teenage Whore”, refer to the reply thread at the end of Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #20: Deathspoon]
“Verily, there are many hot women in yon undead-smiting programme,” Donar considered. “It hath taken me many months of study and I hast yet to make a clear decisioneth. Mine quest proceeds, howe’er.”
Ziles led Finny and DK over to the other man in the bar. “Uh-oh,” Finny muttered. “He’s wearing a trenchcoat. That always means trouble.”
“I wear a trenchcoat,” the Dark Knight pointed out.
“And?” the Makluan prompted.
“Hello, Lair Legion,” the trouble in a trenchcoat bade them.
“Are you the Paradox Stranger?” Ziles asked him.
“What?” exploded the Manga Shoggoth (almost literally) from his corner. “Him! I’d never have brought you here if I’d known you were seeking this troublemaker.”
“You know him,” DK surmised.
“Oh yeah,” growled the Shoggoth. “He’s got about a dozen origins, each one less believable than the last, and he got himself exiled from the Parodyverse for fiddling in the affairs of the Great Powers.”
Dark Knight, who was sometimes the Chronicler of Stories, began to remember.
“What didst thou do?” Donar asked the Stranger at the bar.
“He kept on setting up little pockets of history with versions of the Lair Legion in them, as sort of rehearsals for the coming Resolution War. Arthurian LL’s. Caveman LLs. Futuristic LLs. All those world war two heroes paralleling the modern heroes,” Manga Shoggoth accused.
“That was never proved,” the Paradox Stranger objected mildly. “Maybe I was framed.”
“Did you do it?” Ziles asked curiously. As an exile herself she quite liked this confident, cocky interferer.
“I have the right to remain silent,” he grinned.
“If only he’d use it,” snorted the Manga Shoggoth.
“The whole reason you’re here is because the mystery you’re investigating centres around a previous concatenation of heroes,” the Paradox Stranger explained. “That’s why Johnstantine referred you to me.”
“You can tell us what happened to get our mansion haunted?” Finny asked.
“I can send some of you back in time, sort of, to find out for yourselves,” the Stranger offered. “Your travellers would only be passengers in the bodies of their Victorian counterparts, however.”
“You can do that?” Ziles asked admiringly.
“Sweetie,” the Paradox Stranger promised her, “It’s already done.”
“Oh crappeth!” noted Donar.

“You’re back late,” Flapjack noted. “The party’s already started.”
“You haven’t noticed anything odd then?” Finny asked the hunchbacked major domo of the Lair Mansion, peering at the crowd of costumed revellers who CrazySugarFreakBoy! was organising to play Twister. Then the dragon sighed as he realised what he’d just said. This was, after all, the Lair Legion.
“Legionnaires suddenly dropping to the floor as if their minds had been cast a century and a half into the past, for example?” prompted the Dark Knight,
“Well, Lisa fainted earlier, but NTU-150 hit me when I tried to help by loosening her clothing,” Flapjack noted.
“He may just have saved thy life,” Donar opined.
“And then Vizh was a bit comatose, but we figured it was just, y’know, him.”
“How the heck can a fake man have an ancestor?” Ziles wondered
“And Nats fell over but I figured that was just because Dr Moo spiked the punchbowl.”
“We have got to review the procedure of inviting out archenemies to our social engagements,” DK suggested.
“And spiffy’s been a long time in the bathroom,” Flapjack told concluded, “but I’d assumed that, well, he’s a teenager, right?”
“Lisa, Vizh, Nats and spiffy,” Fin Fang Foom worried. “Didn’t the Stranger say there were seven people heading back in time?”

Coming in Hallowe’en II – The Tentacles Scene: Travel back with us to 1860 to follow the adventures of seven of the Parodyverse’s greatest heroes… well, seven of the Parodyverse’s heroes… well, seven people we know from the Parodyverse… as they discover more about the haunting of the Lair Mansion. Will the League of Improbable Gentlemen be able to stop these marauders from the future from destroying Parodiopolis as they know it? What is the sinister secret of Wilbur Parody (yes, he still has some more sinister secrets)? And how can the Lair Legion get the lavatory door open while spiffy won’t come out of the bathroom?

All but one of these questions may be answered in our next chilling episode, due on the Eve of All Hallows, October 31st.

Link to CSFB!'s CrazySugarHalloweenSpecial tie-in

Link to CSFB!'s Goofball Gauntlet Halloween Special tie-in

Follow Ups:


Post a Followup

Name:
E-Mail:

Subject:

Comments:

Optional Link URL:
Link Title:
Optional Image URL:

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ Parodyverse ] [ FAQ ]