Posted by The Hooded Hood curses the lack of an edit function. Read this one. on June 09, 2001 at 04:18:00:
In Reply to: #78: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour: A Divine Wind over Monstrous Island posted by The Hooded Hood reveals the plots of not one but two archvillains in this revelatory episode. So pay attention. on June 09, 2001 at 04:15:10:
#78: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour: A Divine Wind over Monstrous Island
Prologue One:
“Oh Sarah, that feels good. Ohhhh!” Joe Pepper moaned. Prologue Two:
“This art most disconcerting,” Donar admitted, swinging his enchanted
baseball bat Mjalcolm round his head one more time. “And CrazySugarFreakYouth!,
please do not continueth shouting ‘Strike’ each time yon dimensional
transportation rift doth not appear.” Prologue Three:
It wasn’t quite the moonlit walk she had in mind, but at least Ziles had a
bit of time alone with Fin Fang Foom for them to talk. “Here were are,” she
said. “The moon.” The Main Feature:
The enchanted baseball bat with the property of Donar sticker on it smashed
through the front wall of the Tokyo ganghouse at exactly the same moment that
Fin Fang Foom ripped off the roof. “Please, please, please don’t send me back,” Woopsa the elephant-headed
Rakshasa begged Visionary and Cheryl. “Please.” Dynamite Boy woke and was surprised that he had got to sleep at all. Jeremy
Wick seemed to have spent all night worrying about what to do. He was being
blackmailed by supervillains into joining their team, the Purveyors of Peril, to
save his family. On the other hand now he knew some of what the Hooded Hood was
up to and he knew it was his duty to do something to stop it. He had turned the
problem over and over in his mind but he still didn’t know what to do. Derek Foreman struggled back to consciousness in a comfortable room in Sydney
St Sylvain’s ancestral Tokyo mansion. Even through the painkillers he hurt a
lot. He found he couldn’t move his arms or legs because of the casts, and the
rest of him was covered in plaster and bandages as well. “What… what happened?”
he asked blearily. The Dark Knight communicated with the Lair Legion over a satellite link from
his Knightcave. Most of them knew that the urban legend had such an
installation. Few knew it was off-planet. “I’m speaking to you this way because
it’s the only way round a distraction effect surrounding the Earth,” he told
them. “If I came back before saying this I’d probably forget what I know, ignore
the effect, and carry on as usual.” “Hello? Anyone here?” Goldeneyed pushed open the door of the Banjooooo and
spiffy Detective Agency. “I don’t get it,” Chronic complained to Rottweiler and the Terrier. “I
thought the Purveyors of Peril was supposed to be big leagues. Why would the
Hooded Hood want us to steal this whole load of charity concert t-shirts?”
There was a rending of space time, and the black silhouette of Spacewarped
clawed his way from a time-space fissure into the hall of the Lair Mansion.
“Damn,” he complained, “There are some tricky time/space wards round this place.
How the hell did the interdimensional continuum get so screwed up round
here?” In Tokyo, the conference continued. “Aaaaaagh!” Nats announced to the world as he tried to outmanoeuvre a swarm
of two-foot-long dragonflies. “Aaaaaggghhhhh! Get ‘em off me!” “Finny! Finny!” CSFB! shouted in joy. “It’s on all the TVs! Great
news!” Next Episode: CSFB! fights Godzilla, the secret of Monstrous
Island, Exile’s choice, G-Eyed and dull thud chase t-shirt rustlers and
Lisette, Dynamite Boy’s murder mission, and an exciting urban renewal
opportunity for downtown Tokyo, all in Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World
Tour: The Revenge of the Return of the Creature from the Land That Time Never
Forgave Don’t miss it.
“You like
it?”
“Ohhh, yes. Do it again.”
“Well, I am a trained masseuse,” Dancer
answered, pressing her thumbs into her subject’s deltoid. “Your injuries are
healing nicely, Manny.”
“Yep. I’m even looking forward to getting Knifey
back,” ManMan agreed. “Banjooooo located the block of cement he was encased in
on the ocean bed after you improbably pinpointed it on the map.
Thanks.”
Sarah squatted down to face the wounded hero. “No. Thank you, Joe.
When we were caught by the Moustache, without our powers, I was…”
“It’s okay,
Shep. I was scared too.
“You kept me going, Joe. You saved me. You even
taught me something about myself that I didn’t know. Guess what, I am
Dancer.”
“Dancer, Sarah, no difference,” ManMan agreed. “Both annoyingly
perky, impossibly pushy, unendingly caring, and breathtakingly beautiful.”
He
hadn’t meant to say that. He hadn’t been thinking about how close Sarah’s lips
were, or how easy it would be to lean forward and kiss
them.
“Joe…”
“Sarah…”
“…Stacy.”
The moment passed. “Stacy,” ManMan
remembered. “Stacy Gwen.”
“Yep,” Dancer nodded. “You know you love her, Joe.
I was there when you… mentioned it to Troia. You will only really be happy with
her. In your heart you know it.”
“Yeah, I do actually. So we’re…
friends?”
“Best friends, Manny. And of course you’re my ex-hubby, but that
was just business, right?”
“Right.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
“Look, I’m really sorry about this,”
Elsqueevio, the Greek god of small waters told them again, wringing his hands.
“It’s just that I can’t let you leave Mount Olympus now that you know our
dreadful secret. So I’ve closed all the paths to the crossroads vortex.”
“I
spent all my childhood trapped on a dimensionally-separated island,” sighed
Troia. “Now you’re saying I’ll be spending the rest of my life on a
dimensionally-separated mountain?”
“Yo is thinking that there is to be no
need for quarelling. Yo is thinking that cute-Elsqueevio will be to be listening
to reason.”
“That’s right,” CSFB! agreed. “Look, one night all your major
gods vanished. We think the same might have happened in most of the other
old-time pantheons – well, the ones that didn’t get busted to
Australia.”
“Yon Celestians didst catch us unawares,” muttered Donar, “and
didst cunningly choose to attack ‘fore I wast born, which wast cheating.”
“Of
course. Your mother is the Earth-avatar Gail, which is why you alone can spend
very long on Middlegard,” Troia remembered. “All the rest of your pantheon are
confined to the Ausgardian section of the Mythlands.”
“Save mine half-breed
sibling Hoki and a few others of similar mixed blood, aye,” agreed the hemigod.
“But I shall not be confined on Olympus eating the kebabs of the gods for the
rest of mine days.”
“You have to let us go, Elsqueevio,” CrazySugarFreakBoy!
urged. “We can’t investigate the missing persons, er missing gods mystery unless
we can ger back to Earth.”
“You are knowing you can be trusting us,” Yo
promised. “Please? Prettying please? Prettying please with many
bunnies?”
“Oh, alright,” Elsqueevio sighed. “I’ve already roped your Lair
Legion friends into the problem. You can go if you promise to tell nobody about
the missing gods, not even them. But there is one more condition...”
“Thanks,” the shy dragon told her. “We don’t really have a
Lairjet equipped for these interplanetary hauls without wiring G-Eyed or
Mjalcolm up to the jump drives, so it was good of you to have Roboti bring your
little spaceship over for the mission.”
“Yes. Well I needed to renew my stock
of equipment anyway, and get a little bit of regenerator crème on my wounds. Are
you sure you don’t need some, Andy?”
“I’m recovering quite nicely without you
having to rub me,” the Makluan shuddered. “Dragons heal fast.”
“The doctors
said you should really be in bed,” Ziles pointed out.
“So did Meggan Foxxx,”
Finny winced, remembering that conversation about the Xnylonian exile.
“But it’s too long since DK checked in. We need to find out what the story
is.”
“And what about our story?” Ziles asked so quietly that Finny either did
not hear or pretended not to. “We haven’t discussed anything important since
that… incident with Galactivac.”
“Excuse me madam and sir,” Roboti reported.
“I believe that is the Dark Knight’s ship over there on the surface. And over
there and over there. And over there.”
“It is the Knightjet,” Finny scowled.
“But it’s supposed to be indestructible. As indestructible as the power of the
Chronicler of Stories can make it.”
“I’ll take us down for a closer look,”
Ziles promised, dancing her hands over the ship’s controls. “And I’m cloaking
the vessel, just in case.”
Finny and Ziles both turned in surprise as the
airlock hissed open. “Don’t bother,” the blood-smeared, emaciated Dark Knight
told them. “Just get us out of here quickly. We have to talk.”
“Knock, knock,” Trickshot called, blowing
open the front door with a blast arrow. “It’s a raid.”
Three dozen grey-clad
Left Hand ninjas immediately sprang up from the sewers to defend their
headquarters.
“Eeeew!” complained Troia, spearing the lead assassin into the
one behind him. “Don’t touch me with those smelly gloves.”
“Yo is thinking
that it is to be fun fencing against cute Ninjas,” Yo laughed as s/he vaulted
his/her way through the seething mass to pin the grand master to the
wall.
“You fools! You don’t know what you’re up against here!” the grand
master warned, red in the face at this affront to his dignity.
“So why don’t
you tell us,” Fin Fang Foom warned him. “We know that the tech that neutralised
Magentic Techbird’s restraints and led to the incident in Geneva came from a
now-defunct B.A.L.D. base, but the money that paid B.A.L.D. came from here. Now
we want to know who gave the orders.”
“Mecha-samuri…. Transform!”
Suddenly
every car in the parking lot reared up, shifted its shape, and turned into a
killer robot.
“Aaaaw no,” Trickshot objected as the Pepsi machine turned into
a Destructorcon. “I hate it when this happens. He twanged an EMP arrow into the
device. “I prefer the real thing anyway.”
“Robotic marauders, I shalt smite
thee into scrap!” Donar shouted, disappearing under a dog-pile of
robots.
“Troia, assist the Ausgardian,” Finny called out. “I’ll deal with,
er, with that bunch of robots that seem to be linking up into a really big
robot.”
The Amazon administrator ripped a power cable from the wall and
plunged it into the heap of robots pounding on the hemigod. “Er, you are immune
to electric, right Donar?” she asked rather belatedly.
“Would someone please
work out the blasted shutdown codes for these things,” Trickshot shouted. “And
stop ‘em playing their theme tune.”
“Yo is thinking that this nice grand
master is to be knowing the shutdown codes,” Yo suggested, waving the
unfortunate crimelord by his ankle. “Is to be telling please.”
“I am
grand-master of the Left Hand,” the villain shouted. “No torment will force me
to divulge… no… don’t tickle me! Don’t tickle me!!”
A few moments later the
robots were shut down and returned to being rather dented automobiles. Finny
stamped them flat anyway.
“My thanks for thy timely… rescue, milady,” the
gently-smoking Donar told Troia.
The Amazon administrator turned her back on
the hemigod and crossed her arms. “Don’t mention it. I’m not speaking to you
anyway,” she told him, and stalked off.
“Buh… buh…” Donar puzzled. “What did
I do?”
“Yo is thinking you had better to be finding out,” Yo suggested with a
chuckle.
None of the Lair Legion noticed the two big-eyed twin girls slipping
out of the ruined HQ.
Row upon row of Japanese youths stood and fed their
money into row upon row of gaming machines. Amongst the Western-dressed
youngsters were sober, suit-wearing salarymen, respectable housewives, even a
few pensioners feeding the gaming devices. Beyond that the hall was filled with
the bleep and clatter of countless video games as a throng of customers wrestled
with electronic adversaries to win points and prizes.
“What are we doing here
exactly?” the Sorceress asked CrazySugarFreakBoy! She didn’t like being jostled,
and the next man to deliberately brush up against her was going to get a new
career as some kind of root vegetable. “I thought we were making contact with
someone who could help us with the case, not get a high score on… on whatever
that thing you’re doing is.”
“Megatechnotenchizoid-zapper III,” CSFB!
answered. “It’s the last word in shoot-em-up gender bender ninja
tentacle-dodging games, with quadraphonic sound and accelerated 3-D
hypergraphics. And at the moment I’m on level a hundred and three with eleven
and a half million points. At next level I get to battle the Overdemon and
descend into the eleven electro-hells to grab the soulcrystals.”
“I’m happy
for you. But the case?” I’m starting to sound like Jay, Whitney worried.
“I’m
working on it, honest,” Dreamcatcher Foxglove promised. “You’re a mystic, right.
Look around you with your witch’s eyes.”
Sorceress did as she was asked,
staring again at the row upon row of gamers feeding their addiction and pouring
their money and their attention into the machines. “It’s… it like a ritual,”
Whitney realised. “A temple, almost. Worship. Communion and sacrifice and
reward.”
“Right,” CSFB! agreed as he aced level hundred and four and saved
the doujinshi babes from a fate worse than death. “So there’s got to be a way of
harnessing all that power, right?”
“Yes,” Sorceress breathed. “And the way to
harness the energies of a room full of computer gamblers is to…”
The high
score siren went off above Dreamcatcher Foxglove’s head. “Yesss!” he hissed.
“Blasted the Black Mandarin and released the Celestial Dragon.”
Whitney
looked at the video screen. The colourful graphics had twisted away and now she
was staring into a deep, terrible tunnel that extended far away from this
reality and off into distant and terrible realms.
“Er Dream, did you intend
to open a Cthonic portal?” Sorceress checked. “Only usually I’d want to spend,
say, three weeks preparing circles of protection.”
“Nah, it’s cool,” CSFB!
grinned. “He told me this was a good way to summon him.”
And the Manga
Shoggoth bubbled up from the screen and reared before them. “Hi there,” he told
the screaming, panicking customers.
“We’ve been through this
before,” Cheryl told the minor demon that had stowed away in the Lair bus. “We
can’t keep you. We don’t have house room. It’s bad enough with all the
rabbits.”
“And besides,” added Flapjack, “You’re a total loser. You make
Frog-Man look cool.”
“Of course, we could use a good butler,” Cheryl
scowled.
“Getting your drink now, madame,” Flapjack assured her and limped
off at an accelerated gait.
“What I want to know is why you’re elephant
headed and all the other rakshasa are tiger-headed,” Visionary asked
Woopsa.
“Oh sure. Start making racist remarks,” the towel-boy pouted. Then he
went back to his original theme. “Please let me stay. Please please please
please please?”
Whatever Cheryl had been going to say next was interrupted by
a call from Miss Framlicker. “Come quickly,” she called. “Exile’s waking up.”
So he
went down for breakfast.
Around the kitchen his mom was fixing his lunchbox
for school. Dad was getting his coat on ready for work and saying his goodbyes
to Jimmy’s little brother. It was a friendly, happy scene – except for one
detail.
“Have some toast,” Hellfrazier suggested to DB. “Your mother does
rather good toast.”
“What… what are you doing here?” Jimmy gasped.
“Eating
toast,” the demonic amalgam of Pinhead and Kelsey Grammar answered.
“Good
morning Jimmy,” Mrs Wick smiled at her son. “Did you sleep well.”
“More toast
please,” Hellfrazier instructed the woman. “Butter both sides. That way
whichever way I drop it I know what will happen.”
As if there wasn’t a
red-eyed needle-pierced demon at her breakfast bar Mrs Wick obligingly slotted
another round of bread into the toaster.
“What are you doing to her? To all
of them?” DB demanded.
“You want me to stop mentally clouding their minds?”
Hellfrazier offered. “That would be fun too.”
“No, no don’t do that,” Jimmy
Wick conceded. “What do you want?”
“Toast,” the diabolical psychiatrist
answered. “And to remind you where your loyalties lie these days, of course, and
what might happen if they waver. I could make your mom do much worse things than
make toast.”
“You leave my family alone!” threatened Dynamite Boy.
“As
long as you are loyal, they are safe,” Hellfrazier assured him. “And luckily you
have a chance to prove your loyalty and reassure us all.” The unwelcome
breakfast guest handed over an envelope. “This is who you have to kill,” he
instructed Dynamite Boy.
“We were hoping you could tell us, pal,” ManMan suggested.
Exile recognised the blurry people gathered round his bed: Visionary,
Cheryl, Dancer, ManMan, Meggan Foxxx and Miss Framlicker. “I don’t… wait a
minute! Valeria!” He tried to sit up and his whole body was wracked with
scorching pain.
“Don’t even try to move,” Miss Framlicker warned him. “You
have a hundred and ninety-one major and minor broken bones and fractures, an
injured kidney, a ruptured spleen, and ninety percent flesh contusions. The
medics reinflated your collapsed lung, but on the whole it might be better to
rest for a day or two.”
“There was a man in armour… golden armour,” Exile
remembered. “He was in my room. Valeria was gone. He was there and… he hit
me.”
“He used some kind of power-suppressing device,” Dancer explained.
“We’ve sent it to Enty for analysis.”
“Whoever it was beat you up very
professionally,” ManMan commented.
“Oh good. I’d hate to get pounded on by an
amateur,” Exile spat.
“What Joe means is that he knew just what he was
doing,” Cheryl explained gently. “He knew how to hurt you without killing you.
But Derek, you should know that your pelvis is shattered and your spine is
damaged. Even with years of operations and therapy there’s only a thirty percent
chance you’ll ever be able to walk again.”
Derek closed his eyes. “Val,” he
moaned. “Where is she?”
“As far as I can tell the dimensional gateway that
opened in your room came from the Dreary Dimension,” Miss Framlicker explained.
“There’s a good chance she’s gone back home.”
“I… I talked to Xander, Derek,”
Dancer added. “He told me a few things about Valeria. Apparently she had to go
home. It was part of her destiny. She went of her own free will.”
“No. She
wouldn’t…”
“Hon, I know this is real tough on you,” Meggan told the
energy-manipulating adventurer. “But you’ve gotta face facts. She left you. She
chose. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve got to go after her.”
“How?” Miss Framlicker
challenged. “Assuming you were ambulatory, which isn’t likely this decade, I’ve
scanned for the Dreary Dimension but it’s completely closed off, possibly not
even there at all. ITC couldn’t get you there, Exile.”
“We are really, really
sorry, Exy. Really,” Visionary summarised awkwardly. “We’ll, um, we’ll let you
get some rest.”
“Do you want me to stay for a while?” Dancer asked, but Exile
gestured her away with his two working fingers.
“Valeria,” Derek Forman
moaned when he was alone at last. Alone. Crippled. Useless. “Somehow I’ll find
you… get to you… Whatever it takes.”
“Whatever?” asked the grey-cowled figure
in the corner. He came forward and his eyes glowed greenly in the darkness.
“Then we have much to discuss, Derek Foreman…”
“What’s he saying?” Troia asked. “And
isn’t that Knightcave spooky?”
“Pay attention,” advised the Manga Shoggoth,
seated at (and on and under) the table with the rest of them. “The distraction
effect he spoke of is already working upon you.”
“What distraction effect?”
snorted Trickshot.
The Dark Knight sighed. This was going to be a long
session.
“Tell us what you’ve found out so far, DK,” Finny prompted.
“Very
well. I think we’re caught up in two separate plots here, with two separate
masterminds.”
“Cool,” grinned CSFB!
“The first plot starts with a few
disappearances we seem to have overlooked, rather like a while back everyone
overlooked the fact that fifteen of the world’s most dangerous supervillians
hadn’t been seen in their cells at the Safe confinement complex for about two
months.”
“Who have we overlooked?” Visionary wondered. “I used to be so good
at keeping track of birthdays.”
“Well, first there’s the fact that Zemo and
the Scourge are missing, including the castle and just about every secret base
the Baron ever had,” DK suggested.
“Pegasus didn’t mention anything about
it,” Troia noted, “but then again, she never said anything about why she wasn’t
with the Scourge any more.”
“Maybe we should contact her and ask?” suggested
Whitney.
“And does anybody remember that rather big city hall tower-block
that Pierson’s Porter erected? Or Paradopolis being moved twenty miles offshore
and becoming a police state?” DK prompted.
“Yes,” Finny scowled. “How could
we have forgotten that?”
“And… and one day it was all just back to normal,”
Trickshot realised. “And Porter was history.”
“There was also an… an Enemy
base on the Moon that I’ve been keeping quiet tabs on for a while,” continued
the Dark Knight. “It is also gone as if it was never there. And that
disappearance was significant enough for a Celestian to come and investigate,
which is how Amazing Guy and I ended up inside a Space Robot and scheduled for
dissection.”
“So there art many unaccounted-for and unnoticed
disappearances,” Donar summarised, staring significantly as Troia and Yo, and
then at Dreamcatcher Foxglove.
“Oh boy.” CrazySugarFreakBoy! began to grin.
“Oh, this is great!”
“It is?” Dancer asked. “It scares the spit out of
me.”
“Aw, c’mon. Major villains sprung from prison, key archbaddies taken out
of the picture, things no longer like they used to be… it’s got his fingerprints
all over it if you know where to look!”
“Who?” ManMan demanded. “Who are you
talking about.”
“The Hooded Hood,” DK, Finny, and CSFB! chorused
together.
Only one of them followed that up by shouting, “Yippeee!”
“I already asked that,” dull thud told him.
“But all I found was this sign.” He held up a placard that said ‘Out Kinging
and Mayorring’.
“This is terrible,” G-Eyed fretted.
“I know. There’s
only the one r in mayoring.”
“I mean, I need a detective bureau now. My
girlfriend has gone missing and I don’t know where to find her.”
“Oh yeah?
Well I’m missing about half a million t-shirts for the Save the Paradopolis
Variety Theatre benefit concert in the park and I was here first.”
“But I
have to track her down. I need to find her old New Battler teammates, see if
Fashion Accessory or Wyrmbait know where she might be.”
“The New Battlers. Oh
aye, I think I know where they are,” dull thud answered casually. “I
could even take you there. If you were helping me locate some missing t-shirts
on the way, that is.”
“That’s not relevant to the mission,” Gamona, the green-skinned
body-tattooed intergalactic assassin told him, sliding out from the rift behind
him. “We’re here to do a job. Let’s do it as efficiently as possible and
go.”
Polypheme-1 scrambled down to join the others. “Is that them?” she asked
scornfully, gesturing to where Amy Racecar and Al B. Harper were moving
infinitesimally slowly towards the emergency communications gear. “Why don’t we
just slaughter them here and leave them pinned to the wall as a warning to our
enemies?”
“Because that’s not the mission,” Gamona answered tersely. “We were
told to bring them. We bring them.”
“I could just keep slowing time around
them forever,” Spacewarped shrugged. “It took that physicist man about a year to
get this far with what he knew, and I could slow them down so much that it would
take them a millennium to reach the door.”
“We just take them and go,” Gamona
repeated. “Nothing fancy. Now.”
“The second plot appears to be
unrelated to the first,” Dark Knight continued. “We would never have stumbled
across it had it not been for the discovery of that pamphlet for villains on
coping with superheroes that prompted Foom to authorise this world
tour.”
“What a coincidence,” Sorceress noted sourly. “I don’t suppose
somebody ret-conned that leaflet to fall into our hands, did they? To distract
us from their own plans and set us against a rival’s plots?”
“Probably,” Fin
Fang Foom hissed. “But now we deal with both schemes.”
CSFB!, would you
please stop repeating ‘this is great, this is great’ over and over again.
It’s getting on my nerves,” ManMan complained.
“But it is great, isn’t it?”
Dream grinned.
“It is good to see such primate enthusiasm,” suggested the
Manga Shoggoth.
“The second plot seems to be around bio-engineering,” Dark
Knight reported. “We know that Magnetic Techbird’s recent trial, escape, and
subsequent death were the trigger for implementing the Mutate Registration Act
in the USA and for similar legislation across much of the planet. That means the
compulsory registration of those born with genetic deviations or discovering
they have mutant abilities, and in cases where those abilities are deemed a
danger to society the compulsory genetic modification of that individual to
remove the deviation.”
“With a sixty percent success rate,” spat CSFB! “And
the rest left mindless or crippled or dead.”
“Dr Moo’s process is certainly
unperfected,” DK conceded. “So there is more funding and activity in
bio-engineering than ever before.”
“Find out who leads the field in biotech,”
Miss Framlicker suggested. “Who has a motive to profit from the increased
business.”
“Bautista Enterprises, Icarus Innovations, the New Tomorrow
Foundation, Red Right Hand, and Turrets Inc.,” the urban legend reeled off.
“Between them they control over eighty percent of the market share if we don’t
count the unregistered former-Soviet and Chinese installations. And Bautista and
probably Icarus aren’t dealing in anti-mutant tech.” He caught Finny’s indignant
glare. “Of course I checked,” he told the dragon. “Icarus might be manufacturing
some components, but if it does anything else I can’t find it from a solar
system away.”
“This is getting major,” Trickshot admitted. “Tell us again why
we’ve gotta drop all of this and go to a little patch of African jungle straight
after this, Sorcy.”
“Because we owe Elsqueevio a favour,” Whitney Darkness
answered coldly. “And Jay gave his word.”
“I think you may find some
interesting genetic conundrums when you get there anyway,” the Manga Shoggoth,
present to be their guide for that journey, promised. “Oh yes.”
The Dark
Knight brought the meeting back to the point. “We also know that Magnetic
Techbird’s exit was co-ordinated, that he was set up. Even before his escape Moo
was conducting genetic experiments in the UK with gene modification and
cloning.”
“The bonnacon,” shuddered ManMan.
“And somebody neutralised the
power-restraining harness on the Techbird,” Sorceress remembered.
“That was
B.A.L.D. technology, paid for with Japanese crime cartel money,” DK explained.
“That funding in turn came from North African slave dealings, and a connection
back to the Moustache’s operations in India.”
“I don’t like the sound of all
this,” frowned Dancer. “It sounds like the Rakshasas might be behind the whole
thing.”
“No, the Rakshasas just took their cut to allow it all to happen,”
Foom answered. “The thread is more complicated than that. Go on, DK.”
“The
same finance chain funded the work of the French Tourist Board,” the urban
legend revealed. “And if you recall, they had a merchandise distribution system
designed to get their tatty souvenir produce into every home on the
planet.”
“But we were to be stopping them,” Yo remembered. “Is not to be
threat too soon now, Yo thinks.”
“We dinted their operation, but far too late
in the day to make a difference,” DK judged. “Although we should be on the
lookout for a replacement or back-up distribution network.”
“I don’t like the
idea of an enemy having access to mutation and genetic control technology and a
method of getting small devices into every home on the planet,” Cheryl
admitted.
“Then there was all that radium mined in Morocco,” Knifey added.
“That must have been used to power something pretty big.”
“I’m still chasing
that lead,” DK explained. “The information on world mineral trade market
patterns from the Black Pantzer in Wakandybar might well prove helpful there.
But we’re still missing some pieces of the puzzle, like why the Moustache
financed an exploration to Kaibutsu Shima, one of the obscure Ryukyu islands
south of the Japanese mainland. That’s what we have Hatman, Ziles, and Nats
checking up on out there.”
“I hope they’re okay,” Sorceress said.
“What
could possibly go wrong?” asked Vizh.
“Well,” the Manga Shoggoth translated,
“Kaibutsu Shima does mean Monstrous Island.”
“That’s it,
Nats,” Ziles called encouragingly. “Keep them occupied. I’m getting some good
reading here.
“Agh! They have stingers you know!”
“So what do we have,
Ziles?” Hatman asked, looking over her shoulder and wearing his professor’s
mortar board.
“Well there’s a lot of background radiation on the island.
Nothing harmful if we only stay a short while…”
“Nothing harmful except six
million giant dragonflies trying to eat me!” Nats contributed, diving and
swooping along the clifftop.
“But the frequencies are interesting. I’m
cross-checking them with HALLIE’s database right now… Hmm. I thought so. We’ve
seen this kind of radiation effect on bioforms before.”
“We have?” Hatty
puzzled. “Where?”
“Banjooooo, king of the Sea Monkeys,” Ziles noted, reading
the incoming data. “Rocket Racoon. Gromm, the Living Flatulence. Maximess.
Sersi.”
“Aaaaaaaaaagggggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!” contributed Nats.
“I wish he’d
keep quiet,” Ziles worried. “If he’s not careful he’s going to disturb the giant
lightning moths. Oh, there. I told you.”
“Ouch! Agh! Ow!”
“There’s only
one thing all those entities have in common,” Hatman frowned. “The Celestians
came and experimented on Earth. They created the Austernals and the Deviates,
like Sersi and Gromm. The ancient Skree used left-over Celestian technology in
the Turquoise Area of the Moon to create the Abhumans like Maximess, and the
Abhumans in turn used it to create other races like the Sea Monkeys and the
Racoon People.”
“And we’ve got exactly the same energy patterns here,” Ziles
noted. “Did you ever find out where the Abhumans conducted their experiments
with the machines they took from the Moon?”
“Down my shirt! Down my shirt!”
Nats screamed.
“Well, perhaps we know now,” Hatman speculated. “If those
mutating radiations are still present on this island, perhaps for hundreds of
years…”
“That explains why we have so many giant creatures, like that
tortoise we mistook for a small hill,” Ziles agreed. “Until it tried to mate
with our Lairjet.”
“Up my pants! Up my pants!”
“Excuse me a moment,” Hatty
said to Ziles, reaching into his dimensional pouch for a bee-keeper’s veil.
“I’ll be right back.”
“Ah thanks man,” Nats told the capped crusader after he
had been rescued. “I thank you, my bits thank you, with any luck Betty Grant
will thank you one day.”
“No problem. Just try not to irritate any more
lifeforms.”
“Aw man! Irritating lifeforms is my life!”
“I’m picking up
something else strange,” Ziles said, studying her sensors. “Two things,
actually. There’s something I can’t quite get a lock on deep in the tunnels
under the dormant volcano, and there’s a high-frequency infrasound pulse coming
from somewhere.”
The whole island shook.
“Also, an earthquake,” Nats
suggested.
The island shook again.
“Two earthquakes.” Nats corrected
himself.
The island shook a third time.
“Footsteps,” Hatman warned,
suddenly looking up. And up. And up.
The angry nuclear dinosaur screamed in
rage, looked down at the trio, and loosed its radioactive fire.
“What is it?” the dragon asked, looking up from a complicated case
chart he was studying with a puzzled-looking Visionary.
Vizh flicked on the
tube. “Giant monsters trampling central Tokyo,” the possibly fake man saw. “With
good visual effects for once.”
“And a CNN Live logo on the screen,” Finny
noticed. “It’s real?”
“Yes,” breathed CSFB! ecstatically. “We get to go fight
Godzilla.”