Baron Zemo's Lair. - Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The BZL Files

Baron Zemo's Lair

Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The BZL Files
Sunday, 04-Jul-1999 11:29:21
195.92.194.72 writes:

NOVEMBER 2, 10:21am
BAJA DESERT, CALIFORNIA

The two FBI agents stared down into the crater and speculated on what had happened.
“A gas explosion, perhaps?” the redheaded female agent suggested. “Some kind of terrorist attack that destroyed a whole motel complex?”
“Why won’t you admit the truth, Mully?” her partner cajoled. “I mean, c’mon, this is classic alien abduction on a, a hotellic scale.”
“Everything’s aliens with you, isn’t it, Scullder?” the woman argued back. “Toast pops out a bit burned, alien microwave experiments. Nothing good on TV, alien brain control plots.”
“Then how would you realistically explain the disappearance of a whole motel, leaving a perfectly formed hemisphere of sheared smooth rock where it one was, and nothing else expect a few items of outsize womens lingerie blowing around with the tumbleweed?”
“I don’t know,” Mully admitted. “But I’ll have convinced myself of something by the end of the episode.”
“The truth is out there,” Sculder warned her.
Then the spooky theme music started.

OCTOBER 31, 11:58pm
SACRED TEMPLE OF LUGOSA, ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS

“Na-ka-ka-lajermaaa Ia! Ia! Ia!” echoed through Dreamchaser Foxglove’s head as he came back to consciousness. Without his silly suit he had proved no match for a horde of torch-wielding cultists armed with remarkably specific tranquilliser guns. He tried to leap to his feet but found that being chained to an altar rather put a stop to that.
“Hatty? Are you there?” he asked. “Only I’m all tied up on this big stone slab like mom was in Cheerleader Babes of the Temple of Tentacles and I really don’t want what happened to her to happen to me. I didn’t pack any Vaseline for one thing.”
“I’m here,” Hatman admitted, but he sounded really subdued.
“Are you okay?” Dream asked. “I heal kinda fast, but if they beat you into unconsciousness as well…”
“They didn’t knock me out,” Hatman answered. “I’m sorry, CSFB! I surrendered.”
“Hey, no problem, Hatty! I know the scenario. The chief bad guy grabs my unconscious form, pokes a death-ray to my head and says, ‘Stop fighting now, hero-man, or the kid gets it,’ right?”
“It wasn’t like that,” the many-hatted (but currently unchapeaued) legionnaire told his friend. “The truth is… well, they were prepared for us. Tranq darts to cancel out the sugar-products that give you your abilities and take you down, and for me… well, they snatched my Steelers hat off and pushed a French beret onto my head. I had no choice. I surrendered immediately.” Hatman felt ashamed, even though it was evident that somebody knew exactly how to use his own power to gain powers based upon the headgear he wore against him.
The chanting was getting louder. The two captive heroes could see the flicker of torches approaching. Somewhere in the background the bell on the Miscatonic U. tower was tolling midnight.
“Hey, you can’t kill us yet,” CSFB! complained to the approaching high priest of the cultists. “You haven’t explained the plot or anything!” The two heroes had travelled to Arkham,. Massachusetts to investigate the academic career of Paradopolis’ founding father, Wilbur Parody, a man who seemed remarkably well informed about the existence of superheroes despite having died a century ago. So far they had only managed to get caught by servitors of Things which Man Was Not Meant to Know.
“You will die to protect a great secret,” the high priest promised them.
“A great and secret secret,” added acolyte number two.
“We only wanted to do a little library research,” Hatman objected. “We’re, um, we’re doing a school project on Wilbur Parody, and we wanted to know a bit about his time as a student here, back in the 1840’s.”
“Silence, interloper!” commanded acolyte number two. “None may speak the name of our revered founder!”
The high priest gave an angry little hiss. “Way to go, Mortimer! Give away the secret name of our secret founder, why don’t you?”
“Well what about you?” Mortimer objected. “You just gave my name away to the ritual sacrifices. At least I haven’t blabbed the big secret.”
“What big secret?” asked Hatman.
“About Wilbur’s secret workshop hidden beneath a plague pit on the outskirts of Paradopolis, where his greatest work awaits the time when the stars are right,” answered Mortimer. “Damn!”
“You stupid boy!” the High Priest muttered, clipping Mortimer on the ear.
“Sorry dad,” Mortimer squeaked. “But they are going to die anyway. We are going to drop them into the pit for the Shamblers in the Sewage?”
“That’s not the point, lad. If you’re ever going to make something of yourself in this man’s cult you’ve got to learn to hold your own tongue as well as other people’s. You’ll be blurting out the address next.”
“1198 Twenty-seventh Street, in Dullard’s Grove,” answered Mortimer by reflex. “Damn.”
“Wait a minute,” Hatman frowned. “That’s Visionary and Cheryl’s address!”
“You know too much!” the High priest screeched, reaching for a big lever. “Now you must die!”
“Oboy!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! enthused. “This is so cool! Next you’ll be gloating about how you knew we were coming and just how to capture us.”
“That little secret we can reveal,” smirked the cultist. “We had out information directly from your so-called leader. Your coming, and the way to defeat you, were both foretold by Jarvis.”
And Hatman and CSFB! toppled down into the foetid well-shaft, to face the Shamblers below.

NOVEMBER 1, 12:21am
LAIR LEGION MANSION, PARADOPOLIS SOUND, PARADOPOLIS

Let’s set a little mood here. There’s a storm outside. The main power generator’s blown and none of the back-ups are working (and the warranty doesn’t cover ectoplasm damage) so the Legion are walking about with those oversized torches that send sharp beams of light over spooky dark corners. In the background spiffy’s talking to somebody on a mobile phone. And the king of the sea monkeys has an important question for the cigarette-smoking visitor who’s just turned up:
“How can the Lair Mansion be haunted?” Banjooooo objected. “For that matter, how can one of us be possessed?”
“Hey,” objected Visionary, fresh from his shower incident, “Stuff like that happens. Innocent people sitting around in cornfields just get possessed by fundamental evil for no reason.” The possibly fake man glanced venomously over at spiffy, but the fern-symbiote was deeply engrossed in a phone call he had just taken and hurried out shortly afterwards almost dragging his coat on as he went.
“Is that what this is about?” Fleabot the micro-robot asked. “You pick the Visionary Vixens over me as sidekicks because I didn’t stop you getting possessed back during that Hooded Hood thing?”
“They are not my sidekicks!” Visionary objected.
“Then what are they exactly?” Cheryl demanded.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Fin Fang Foom pointed out. “We have what appears to be blood oozing down the mansion walls, body parts appearing at random in fish tanks, and bizarre knocking noises behind the woodwork…”
“Um, the knocking noises are probably my new mansion auto-maintenance system,” NTU-150 admitted. “There are still a few bugs.”
“Then why didn’t you iron them out before the system went active?” wondered Starseed.
“No, what I mean is there are still a few bugs behind the walls, and my micro-auto-maintainbots are fighting with them,” Enty clarified.
“That’s copyright infringement, that is,” Fleabot argued. “First there are all these alternate evil legionnaires. Then it’s the backwards legionnaires. Now its clones and sidekicks. Well I’m the microrobot in this Parodyverse, and I’m going to have a word with those so-called micro-auto-maintbots! Enough is enough!” And he hopped away.
“So back to this haunted mansion thing…” Foomy tried desperately.
Con Johnstantine leaned against the wall and took another drag on his cigarette. “Thought you’d get back to the demon infestation eventually,” he shrugged. “Cause, one of you ‘as a motive to keep us off the topic, being possessed and everything.”
The legionnaires looked at one another, trying to guess which of them might be the source of evil. Assembled were Fin Fang Foom, Starseed, NTU-150, Tina, DarkHwk, Yo, Visionary, Cheryl, and the now-sleeping Space Ghost.
“Yo is for one not sure that Yo is believing Johnstantine-person. Yo thinks is being Johnstantine not heard of before,” the thought being from the Yo-planet noted.
“I’ve been around,” the arrogant and shadowy Englishman smirked. “Ask Lisa.”
“Lisa’s not here just now,” Foom replied. “I think we’d all like an answer to Yo’s suspicions. How do we know you aren’t some supervillain just setting up some nefarious trap?”
Johnstantine held out his arms to show that he wasn’t carrying any death rays. “Notice the lack of spandex? The absence of pointless and really stupid superhero name? The channelling of testosterone to appropriate purposes only?”
“I can’t read his mind,” Tina reported. It was probably just as well. She looked very cute there in her pyjamas and (Yo-provided) bunny slippers.
“’Cause not, darlin’. I hang around with all kinds of weird people with mind-readin’ powers. If I can’t bluff them I’m dead. It’s a survival trait, not being mindread.”
“I don’t like it,” Tina told the others.
“Of cause, you might not like it because you’re the possessed one,” Johnstantine pointed out.
“Look, assuming you are who you say you are, what makes you think the house is haunted and we’re possessed?” Starseed demanded. “Um, apart from the blood and the body parts and stuff?”
“Well, whadd’ya expect on Hallowe’en night when you’ve stirred up the spirit of ol’ Wilbur Parody?” Con replied. “I mean, you must have known the history of the house when you chose to take over the old Parody mansion as your HQ?”
There was an awkward silence.
“Ah, well that’s the snag,” DarkHwk realised. “You see, it gets a bit complicated. Originally the mansion wasn’t here, it was off Middle Park in Paradopolis Center. Then there was this big snafu where everything got blown up, the whole city…”
“And New Parody City got built,” shuddered Foom. “We had this really sucky LAir Fortress flying around, a bit like the SPUD helicarrier…”
“And then the moon got broken,” Banjoooo continued, “and there was all kinds of other bad stuff…”
“And Yo here and the Yo-people did some kind of reality reboot which put Paradopolis back the way it was and put the mansion here,” went on Cheryl . “And as far as everybody else knows, it’s always been here even when other continuity clearly stated it wasn’t.”
Then Yo dropped the bombshell. “Yo did all the things cute-friends say except one. Yo and the Yo-people wasn’t to be putting the mansion here.”

OCTOBER 31 1890
THE PARODY MANSION, PARADOPOLIS SOUND, NEW PARADOPOLIS

“Wilbur Parody lives here?” Lisa gasped. “But this is just like our mansion. In fact is is our mansion.”
“There are a few changes in our day,” Goldeneyed spotted. The reality-hopping hero was just recovering now from the massive strain of an actual time-jump. “For example, that placard saying this place was built on the site of the old Indian burial ground has gone.”
A cowled servant opened the door and looked Lisa up and down. “Ah. The entertainment. You should have come round to the servant’s entrance.”
“I am not the entertainment,” Lisa scowled. Her Legion uniform had been attracting strange looks ever since she came back to this time period. She was starting to think that the leather fetishwear had been a mistake for this trip. “Well, I could be, perhaps. Take me to Mr Parody.”
The servant looked Goldeneyed up and down. “And him?”
“He’s the monkey,” Lisa explained.
Goldeneyed followed the first lady of the Lair Legion into the old house. “Hey, if I’m the monkey doesn’t that make you the org…”
“Don’t go there.”
By 1890, Wilbur Parody, the founder of the great city that eventually became Paradopolis, was an old and wizened man. A lifetime of civic duty and private debauchery had left him a wheezing shell – a sad warning to Lisa herself. Even now, however, he was attended by six young ladies in outfits which made Lisa’s look modest. Goldeneyed didn’t know which way to look – first.
There were also a few cultists scattered around the room for added effect. Lisa hoped they were awaiting a virgin sacrifice.
“Mr Parody,” Lisa called as she saw the object of their quest. “We’ve come a long way to find you.”
“Indeed you have, according to my sources,” the old man wheezed. “All the way from the end of the twentieth century.”
“Hey, you shouldn’t know that,” Goldeneyed objected. “Lisa, he shouldn’t know that!”
“You wish to learn how I knew to place such specific paragraphs in my Laws and Ordinances to begin the sidekick epidemic, and the clauses on superhero costuming that have not yet been discovered in the time-period you have hailed from,” Wilbur told them. “I know in the same way that I know that Hatman and CrazySugarFreakBoy! Have journeyed to Arkham seeking information on me there and will encounter the successors of my cultists here, and how I know that Jarvis and Melissa will encounter the Lurkers Behind in California.”
“Who the hell are you?” Lisa demanded. “You’re no ordinary property-tycoon-mayor-legislator-millionaire-cultist.”
“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,” sneered the founder of Paradopolis. “And now you must die.”
“That’s what you think,” Goldeneyed retorted. “You might know about superheroes, but I’ll bet you’ve never fought one!”
Parody shrugged and gestured for the demon he had conjured to step out from the shadows. “I don’t intend to start fighting superheroes now, not at my age. Oddhorn, rend them. I’ve shut down their superpowers.”
Lisa and Goldeneyed found to their horror that this was true.
Oddhorn chuckled and decided to start on Lisa.
Lisa’s cat took a dislike to Oddhorn and went for the satanic groin in a screeching ginger ball of claws and fangs.
“Run!” Lisa shouted to her companion, ducking round one cultist and proving that those costume spikes had some purpose on the next.
Goldeneyed pelted after her whilst the demon discovered how hard it was to fight an indestructible cat. “Which way out of here?” he asked. “I don’t recall all these tunnels running under our mansion.”
And an old man with white hair and a staff stepped out of the shadows. “This way,” he instructed them.
Goldeneyed swivelled round to face this new threat, but Lisa laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. “It’s alright,” she told the new Legionnaire. “That’s a friend. We can trust him, well probably trust him. I think that’s Hollywood V.”

Back in the main chamber old Wilbur Parody allowed himself a wicked chuckle. “Did I play the part well enough, master?” he asked.
“Most adequately, my minion,” the Latvian tones echoed their reply within his mind.

NOVEMBER 1, 12:50am
LAIR LEGION MANSION, PARADOPOLIS SOUND, PARADOPOLIS

“Splitting up into pairs and searching the mansion for monsters,” Fin Fang Foom complained. “I don’t like it. I’ve seen this on Scooby Doo.”
“Well,” Banjoooo admitted, “we had to find out what’s going on, and that meant a search. And if one of us is under outside influence then it makes sense for none of us to be alone.”
“Yeah. I’ve been trying to work out who that could be. If Jarv was here I’d have him pinned to the wall right now. I mean, he’s been acting screwy ever since his wedding. Or maybe spiffy. Hey, the guy was dead, and we don’t know for sure that it’s really him that, um, came back, do we? And he did hurry off without a word just as that Johnstantine guy arrived.
“I’m more bothered about the fact that we’ve never noticed these cellars before,” Banjoooo admitted. “Or the tunnels and caverns underneath them.”
Both the usually-vast heroes had shrunk down to human size to fit through the labyrinth of strange passageways carved with unsettling bas-reliefs (has anyone ever written about a settling bas relief?). Foomy had used his shape-shifting powers to assume a draconic humanoid form. Banjooooo had used… Pym particles, yeah, that’s it, he’d used Pym particles. Never left his place without them.
Then the two heroes found a door which they hadn’t seen before. There was a light coming from under the crack.
“We’d better check it out,” gulped Banjooooo. Sea monkeys are superstitious things at heart. “I’ll act as rearguard.”
“So will I,” agreed Foomy. But eventually the Makluan agreed to turn the handle and look inside.
A young woman in pink and purple hurled herself into his arms. “My hero!” she called. “Save me from my evil father!”
Hence Fin Fang Foom met the Contessa Imke Ilsa Zemo – Zemette to her friends.

NOVEMBER 1, 12.55am
LISA’S LAW OFFICES, PARADOPOLIS

spiffy nearly died of a coronary getting there so fast but when there was an emergency has was not one to stint of his every effort. He burst into the room and nearly died of disappointment.
Almost all the new sidekicks were there. Wormlad and Hat Kid were downing brews in one corner. Wormbait was sitting on the windowsill worrying about the vehicle emissions of the cars which passed below. The New Battlers - E-Male, Yo-ling, Fashion Accessory, Thunderstroke, and Boy Wonder – were present, although their supposed leader, the fabulous Frog-Man was absent. L’il Buttie politely took spiffy’s coat as he entered. And Lisette watched the fern-boy with her legs up on Lisa’s desk.
“I… you.. there was…” spiffy gasped.
“Poor spiffy,” Lisette pouted. “Don’t tell me you actually bought that story about Fashion Accessory and I being unable to decide which micro-bikinis to buy and insisting that you come at once and make the decision for us?”
“Of… of course not,” spiffy answered. “Only a real doofus would fall for something like that.”
“We have a far more serious matter to put to you,” Wormlad told him. “We need to know your opinion on something.”
E-Male stepped forward. “There are some of us who believe that the… shall we call them the old guard? - have had their day. In fact, we are embarrassed to be heroes in the same Parodyverse with them.”
“Just look at them, these so-called heroes,” Lisette frowned, “Geysering around, making us ashamed to be associated with them.”
“They spend all their time ineffectually fighting costumed morons when they could be tackling big world issues and making this planet a place of peace and beauty,” Wormbait added.
“But we can be doing so much better,” asserted Yo-ling. “We can be to making that world is.”
“So what we want to know is,” Boy Wonder challenged the fern-wielder, “are you with us in taking down the Lair Legion or against us?”
“Um, well,” spiffy stammered, calculating the odds of him taking on ten super-powered rebellious sidekicks, “there’s certainly room for dialogue on both sides…”
“Wrong answer, spiff-boy,” Fashion Accessory told him. “Game over.”
“Before the fern-wielder could react L’il Buttie had hit him with some kind of defoliant. Even as his fern screamed in agony spiffy was under attack from Thunderstroke, E-Male, and Wormlad. Then they just kept pounding on him. “Wait… “ he gasped, “…I’n not Jarvis… not even Dark Knight… you can’t…”
They kept on hitting him. “Hey, we’re the next generation of the Lair Legion,” Lisette told him. “We can do whatever we like.”

NOVEMBER 1, 1.31am
LAIR LEGION MANSION, PARADOPOLIS SOUND, PARADOPOLIS

Fleabot worked his way through the ducting until he found the micro-maintenance-bots. They had cornered a cockroach and were electrocuting it to death. “Brothers!” he greeted them. “I come in peace. And I thought I’d talk to you about the joys of unionisation.”
The microbots turned their glowing green eyes upon him. “INTRUDER,” they classified him. “ERADICATE.”

“I’m sure I heard a screaming coming from these ducts,” DarkHwk told Yo. “A sort of strange tinny sound, like a tiny radiophonic speaker being mangled.”
“Yo is worried by what is to be happening here. Yo is not liking this tricking and treating,” Yo shuddered. “Yo thinks this is not like happy place.” What worried the thought being most of all was that something was thwarting his attempts to make the mansion into a happier place. Yo’s one attempt to conjure up a purple thought bunny had ended with something green and tentacled crawling away down a toilet pan. At least everyone hoped it had crawled away.
“I’m getting some kind of screwy energy readings,” reported DarkHwk, “but I can’t quite pinpoint what they are. They seem to be coming from behind this mysterious mirror-like portal that I’ve never noticed before but I’ve no idea if…” The armour-clad android stopped in mid-sentence as his mind caught up with his mouth and focussed some attention on the ten foot by fifteen foot mirror that seemed such a prominent feature of the second sub-basement. Now that he thought about it he remembered that he’d walked past this thing dozens of times and never thought it odd before.
“Yo wonders if this has to be something doing with spooky things?” Yo considered, just before the tentacles from behind the glass flicked out and dragged them both through.

NOVEMBER 1, 1.38am
VISIONARY’S HOUSE, 1178 DULLARD’S GROVE, PARADOPOLIS SUBURBS

“This is really, really boring,” Asil 1 complained.
The other Asils agreed. “Really boring,” Asil 2 emphasised.
“When is he coming?” Asil 11 wondered.
“He’s got to come,” Asil 5 added.
“He will come,” Asil 1 assured her sisters. “All his stuff’s here.”
“But when?” Asil 6 demanded.
The Asils pondered the unfairness of fate. “Doesn’t he want a sidekick?” worried Asil 12.
The other Asils argued against this heresy. The original Asil had been created from Lisa’s generic template to seek out and return with Visionary. Since then she had cloned herself to be better able to look after the possibly fake man.
“Of course he wants us,” Asil 7 assured the others. “He will come. Then we will be his sidekicks forever.”
“Perhaps he won’t come,” Asil 9 fretted. “Perhaps SHE will keep him away forever.”
“Perhaps he will come, but too late,” Asil 10 added. “Perhaps we’ll have… gone… like Asil 3 did.”
“We won’t think about Asil 3,” Asil 4 shuddered. “She must just have been an unstable clone. We aren’t going to collapse into protoplasm.”
“Perhaps we should just kill HER,” Asil 6 suggested. “Then Visionary will love us.”
There was a knocking at the door. A shadowy figure waiting for the Asils to answer and then made his proposition. “I can help you get Visionary back home, and get rid of Cheryl permanently,” he promised. “Just sign here.”

NOVEMBER 1, 2.17am
LAIR LEGION MANSION, PARADOPOLIS SOUND, PARADOPOLIS

“I don’t like this,” NTU-150 complained. “I don’t like this one little bit. And if any harm comes to her...”
“Calm down, Enty,” Visionary advised him. “Mr Johnstantine has just placed Tina in a light hypnotic trance to amplify her telepathic powers. That way she will be able to scan the minds of all the people in the mansion and determine which one is under the influence of an extraplanar entity. And Mr Johnstantine has already assured us that the technique is perfectly safe.”
“That’s right, squire,” the blonde-headed Englishman smiled. Well, it’s safe enough for me, he silently qualified himself. Even so this was the nastiest job he’d been on since that business with the Bog-Thing. Who wants to go on adventures with an entity of sentient sewage?
“Just concentrate on getting the mansion’s systems back on-line,” Cheryl suggested. “You always feel better with a technical problem to solve. At least get us internal radio communications.”
“Yeah. I hate this split-up-and-die stuff,” Visionary confessed. “It’s always guys like me who get mangled up about a third of the way through the film and then the girl finds the corpse handing somewhere gruesome later on. Who do you think the possessed one is?”
“Well, it was you last time,” NTU-150 pointed out. “Perhaps fake people are easier to take over.”
“That fake stuff was never proved, dammit!” Visionary argued.
“It’s not Visionary,” Tina interrupted before Cheryl could intervene in the old, old argument. “I can see his mind, although I’m having to strain quite hard.”
“Hey!”
“What about the others?” Johnstantine asked. “The dragon? The sea monkey? The little guy of confused gender in the Zorro outfit? The guy dressed as a hood ornament?”
“No,” Tina sensed. “Nor is it Dark Knight, or Cheryl, or Starseed or Space Ghost – although not all the things SG is seeing have anything to do with the haunting. And it’s not the woman with Foomy either.”
Visionary and NTU-150 exchanged surprised glances which melted into smirks. Enty stopped smirking when the circuit boards in his hands exploded in a shower of carpet-igniting sparks. He activated his foam dispensers to deal with it and the chicken soup put the small fires out. “I’m having trouble establishing an uplink with the mansion’s computer grid,” he admitted. “I wish Zebulon was here. He’d know where I put the interface module.”
A nasty suspicion crossed Visionary’s mind. “Tina,” he asked carefully, “Is it NTU-150? The possessed one, I mean?” It occurred to him that a possessed armour-clad genius going around his own mansion wiping out allies was a very nasty scenario. For a moment he had a horrible premonition of having to go back in time and bring a bright and annoying young teenage Jaime forward to replace the NTU-150 before him.
“No, he’s fine,” Tina answered. And Visionary heaved a sigh of relief.
“That’s almost everyone,” Cheryl reasoned. “In fact, the only person we haven’t checked is…”
“Tina herself?” Con Johnstantine completed for her. “Yeah, I figured a sensitive like her would be a prime target for such nastiness, and there was that attack with the Chucky doll earlier. But it ain’t her.”
“How do you know?” Visionary demanded. NTU-150 was looking at his girlfriend with a striken gaze.
“’Cause if she was possessed then the demon would ‘ave made her say that it was in someone else. And she’s cleared everybody, so it’s probably not in her.”
“Can you wake her up now?” Entu asked anxiously.
“What, you don’t want the post-hypnotic suggestion about her whipping her clothes off when you say ‘Rosebud’ to ‘er?” Johnstantine grinned.
There was the sound of battle-armour powering up. “Now,” suggested NTU-150. Johnstantine complied.
“If it’s not Tina then who is it?” Cheryl puzzled. “We’ve scanned every sentient in the building.”
“Except Jonstantine,” Tina reminded them. “I never trusted him from the start.”
“If I could just get the computers back up,” Enty said. “If I could get Hallie to do a security sweep, see if there’s anyone else here, one of the sidekicks maybe…?”
“Who the hell’s Hallie?” Jonstantine asked.
“Lair Computer,” NTU-150 answered, still fiddling behind a service panel. “Artificial life form who is sometimes on-line around here when the story demands it. She’s been a bit erratic of late, but she’d be really useful just now because she can control all the mansion systems.”
“Artificial lifeform,” the Englishman repeated. “Sentient, is she?”
“Well, by some definitions. She was…”
Then the mansion’s self-defence systems turned on them, and they knew who was possessed.

NOVEMBER 1, 2.31am
THE MOTEL AT THE END OF THE ROAD, BAJA DESERT, CALIFORNIA

Dr Franklydont was a corpulent figure with a taste for cheap pink womens housecoats. He minced down the stairs and introduced himself to Jarvis and Melissa, eyeing them up like prize pigs in a Kentucky raffle. “So you want to know about old Wilbur Parody, do you? He was a fascinating old rogue. You’d better step into the ballroom.”
“Tim, I don’t like this one little bit,” Melissa whispered to her new husband as they followed the fat transvestite and his smirking servant into a dark auditorium. “He makes me feel like I’m bathing in maggots.”
“Time for freshening up later, my dear,” the hunchbacked desk clerk promised her. She hadn’t realised he was so close behind her.
“Just bear up, ‘Lissie,” Jarvis encouraged her. He didn’t say that somehow since he had come to this place those terrible ruthless urges had left him, and that he missed them.
There were many people in the ballroom. They were dressed in a range of styles from formal eveningwear to net curtains. They watched from the gallery as Franklydont led the visitors into the middle of the room.
“I don’t see what this has to do with finding out about old man Parody,” Jarvis commented.
“Oh, it has everything to do with it,” the Professor promised. “That’s why we’re having our little annual gathering. That’s why we bother to come here at all.”
“I don’t understand,” puzzled Melissa. “Why are you here? Why is the foremost historian in the Parodyverse hiding out in a shabby desert motel with all these… strange people watching?”
“Ah, ‘Lissie,” moued Franklydont. “You have so much to learn and it will be a pleasure to teach you. For now let us just say that Wilbur Parody had reasons for building Paradopolis where it is, and that he needed some very special guardians for it, some heroes.”
“You’re saying that Parody wanted there to be a Lair Legion?” Jarvis said, incredulously. He had been there at the moment when the Parodyverse had been formed, and although he knew that it had spontaneously generated a real history he had not inkling of the importance of the man for whom the world’s greatest city was named.
“Of course. We revere his memory for that. And have you never wondered why your group has termed itself the Lair Legion?”
“I wondered that,” Melissa admitted. “I thought it might be explained in the archives NTU-150 hasn’t posted up yet.”
“Wilbur Parody needed stories. And stories need heroes. And heroes need places to protect. Stories are powerful.”
Jarvis wondered if the cosmic power was available to him just now. He was starting to feel as if he might need it. “So why does that make all of you gather here?”
“We gather wherever there are stories,” the Professor declared. “We hide in the background, leeching off a little of the power, just enough to keep us in the manner to which we have become accustomed. Old Wilbur created a very rich feeding trough for us when he set up the Lair Legion, you know.”
“You’re parasites?” Melissa recognised. “You don’t contribute to the Parodyverse. You simply… lurk?”
“Yes,” the deformed manservant crowed. “We are the Lurkers Behind.”
Professor Franklydont strutted round the two heroes. “Usually we are content to just feed a little bit off the events which go on here. But occasionally we allow ourselves a proper feast. And then characters are brought here, and we utterly consume them. Surely you have noticed how regulars inexplicably vanish from time to time?”
“You mean…?” Melissa gasped.
“They were delicious,” the manservant told her, smacking his lips.
“But not as delicious as you will be,” Franklydon’t anticipated. “My friends, I give you… Jarvis and Melissa!”
The Lurkers Behind lunged forward then to feed on their two hapless guests.
And Jarvis released the cosmic force within him.

NOVEMBER 1, 2.49am
LAIR LEGION MANSION, PARADOPOLIS SOUND, PARADOPOLIS

“Helloooooo! Ghooosties! I looooove you!” Space Ghost contributed to the search.
“Will you shut up!” Starseed snarled. The Supreme Gaaahhh was having trouble with his sidekick. Where the hell did SG keep getting the sauce from anyway?
There was another amusing “you don’t love me” dialogue which will be left to the readers imagination. Then Starseed led the search up into the crowded attics of the mansion. A large framed painting of Wilbur Parody seemed to be watching them.
“Is there any monsters up here?” Space Ghost whispered in that specially loud whisper that only drunks who have been told to be quiet can really master.
“No. Nothing here but dust and shadows and… Gaaahhhh!”
Starseed almost fell backwards down the ladder as the Dark Knight oozed out of the darkness. “I’ve found something,” he warned his comrades. “In the chimneybreast.”
“I thought you were with Lisa and Goldeneyed travelling back in time to see him,” Starseed objected, gesturing the Wilbur Parody’s picture and trying to slow his pulse rate down again.
“They went without me,” DK answered tersely. “I got back here and started doing a little research into the mansion mystery. This is what I found.”
Starseed angled his big flashlight on the broken wall which had once been a blocked off fireplace. Two mummified corpses were half-obscured with ancient spider-webs. “The ghosts of the Lair Mansion?” he wondered. Then he looked closer. He knew those bodies. “Lisa and Goldeneyed?” he gasped.
Behind him Space Ghost began being noisily sick.

NOVEMBER 2, 1.33pm
BAJA DESERT, CALIFORNIA

“Nothing happening here. Might as well bugger off home,” Mully decided.
“No chance of a quick shag then?” asked Sculder.
Behind them the smooth crater glistened in the sun and a lone peignoir flitted around in the desert breeze.

In next week’s exciting episode: Will Fin Fang Foom rescue the lovely Zemette from Castle Zemo? What has Hollywood V got to do with Wilbur Parody? Who’s Lisa’s hunky barbarian friend from an age undreamed of? Will spiffy finally lose his flower? How does one unpossess a computer? Is Jarvis dead again, and has he taken the lovely Melissa with him? Who will kill CSFB! first, the Cthulhic monster or Hatman? What is the secret of Visionary’s condo? Will Starseed ever get Space Ghost’s puke off his boots? And is the Hooded Hood actually going to appear in this story rather than just pull the strings behind the scenes? All this and more in a story we just had to call “The Secret History of the Parodyverse.” Catchy, eh?

The Hooded Hood, who would be interested to know if anyone can guess where this plot is actually going