#79: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour: The Revenge of the Return of the Creature from the Land That Time Never Forgave

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Posted by Monsters on the loose, creatures on the prowl, and a journey into mystery for the Lair Legion in this latest installment by... the Hooded Hood on June 15, 2001 at 16:11:33:

#79: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour: The Revenge of the Return of the Creature from the Land That Time Never Forgave

It was two hundred feet tall, it crushed buildings with its tail, and it was making its way towards the Ginza in downtown Tokyo leaving an insurance agent’s nightmare behind it. When the army tried to stop the giant reptile it melted whole tanks with gobbets of searing fire and left a trail of wrecked ordinance and shattered troops. Above it flew a giant moth, whose wingspan was sufficient to shade the reptilian marauder below, and which fired lightning from its antennae. Covering its back was a two-headed winged creature which liquefied buildings with a stunning sonic attack.
Terrified citizens fled in the monsters’ wake crying things like “Help!” “Save us” and “Not again!”
The Minion watched in satisfaction as the three Celestially-powered attackers wreaked havoc, and he continued placing the nuclear weapons liberated from the late Magnetic Techbird at key points round the battlefield.
The Lair Legion would be here soon.

“Ouch,” Nats said. He tried to move but something heavy was laying on top of him. It felt like Ziles; or rather like Ziles would feel if she weighed around thirty stone.
“Don’t move,” the Xnylonian exile warned him. “We’re under a lot of rubble. If we shift we could bring the whole lot down on top of us.”
“What happened?” Nats tried to remember. “Where’s Hatty?”
“He’s on top of me,” Ziles reported. “As that monster fired at us he pulled on a miner’s cap and tried to dig us a safety trench. Then the thing stomped on us, and if Jay hadn’t shielded us with his Steelers cap we’d all be dead now. But Hat’s unconscious and we were smashed down into the trench.”
“We’re not in a trench now,” Nats said, trying to make sense of the gloom around him. “It’s more like some kind of cave.”
“The ground collapsed beneath us. We’re in some of those old tunnels I detected earlier,” answered Ziles. “And we’re trapped. I hate being confined.”
“We’ve got to wake Hatty up,” Nats decided. “Have you any way of reviving him?”
“If I could move I could try my cerebral stimulator to try and get him awake. Then he could use his, um, I don’t know, holding-caves-up hat to free us from this mess.”
There was a skitter of movement along the tunnel, and it was suddenly unpleasantly clear to Nats that this tunnel had been chewed and burrowed.
“Let’s go with that plan,” he suggested. “Now.”

“There are a few things you don’t know about Valeria of Carfax,” the Hooded Hold told Derek Foreman. The hero known as Exile lay strapped to his hospital bed, victim of injuries so severe that he would probably be crippled for life. “And what you don’t know can hurt you.”
“Is she in trouble?” Exile worried. “Does she need my help?”
“I don’t think it is for me to reveal secrets her family have maintained for countless generations,” the cowled crime-czar answered. “However, it may help you to decide upon my offer if you know that she has been rescued from her… exile here to become Queen of the Dreary Dimension.”
“That prince guy who beat me up like this is going to marry her? Why would she do that?”
“Destiny,” the Hooded Hood answered. “Ancient prophesy about how the Dreary Dimension would be saved in its final days by the sacrifice of the Keeper of the Secret Chalice, the beloved of the ruler of the realm.”
“Sacrifice? What do you mean, sacrifice?”
“Oh, the usual. Horrible death to save millions of lives. Do you doubt for a moment that Valeria would not surrender herself to preserve her people?”
If Exile could move he would have shuddered. “No,” he admitted. “She always knew it would come to this, didn’t she? That one day she would have to go back?”
“She had two possible futures,” the Hood explained. “If she had been despoiled and ruined by the one who enslaved her, then it would have to be her daughter who became the Queen of Destiny. If she remained a maiden then she would face the role herself.”
Exile remembered a few nights ago, and how Valeria had come to him to sing the songs of her people and ask him to remember her. “I’ve got to get to her. To save her.”
“At the cost of dooming all her race?” the Hood asked sceptically. “And they call me a villain.”
“There’s got to be another way,” Derek insisted. “I’ll find it.”
“From your life support unit?” the cowled crime-czar observed. He turned to leave and then paused. “Or are you asking me to intervene in this matter?”
Exile caught his breath. “I… I’m asking you, damn it. What do you want?”
The Hood allowed himself a little smile. Since he had brought the warrant of summoning to Valeria, had directed Prince Maggador to claim her, had even arranged for her to be sent to Exile in the first place, he felt his plans were panning out nicely. “I thought you would never ask,” he replied.

“Alright Lair Legion!” Fin Fang Foom called to the team, swooping down to intercept the rampaging monsters, “Let’s go!”
The screaming crowds scattered from the Makluan. “Aieeee!!! Gojira!!! Run!!!”
“Dammit, I'm not going to stomp you people - come back here and be saved!”
The citizens of Tokyo did not seem convinced.
“Try shifting your shape into a giant metal robot and seeing if that helps,” ManMan advised the irritated dragon.
“This is chaos!” Sorceress shouted over the screaming crowds. “Okay, I’ll take Dancer and Yo and try and get these gas mains shut off and these fires damped down before things get worse. Then the rest of you can deal with that big monster.”
“Monsters!” yelled CSFB! happily. He pointed to the other gargantuans which were rising over the skyline.
“Yo is thinking this is not being good.”
“Man, I wish I’d brought my chupacabras super-pet now,” Dreamcatcher Foxglove told the world.
“See? Things could be worse,” encouraged ManMan.
“Yo is right,” Dancer agreed. “C’mon, we have to help these poor people.”
“Hey Troia-babe! You and me ready to take on the big moth?” Trickshot challenged.
“You have a death wish?” the Amazon administrator demanded as the irritating archer fired a pulley arrow high into the air to hitch onto the lightning moth.
“What, ya don’t think we can take a two hundred foot monster?”
“You called me babe.”
“Hail, two-headed marauder from the netherpits!” Donar called to the third rubbery giant that was sliming its way towards a nearby hospital. “Prepare to receive the smiting of the ungodly on thy strangely unrealistic lumpy carcass. Let the monster-slaying begin for the nonce!”

“Uh oh,” worried freelance physicist Al B. Harper. “Suddenly I don’t think that we’re in Kansas any more.”
“We weren’t in Kansas before,” Lair Legion engineer Amy Racecar complained. “We were racing towards the emergency panel in the Lair Mansion to warn the LL about what you’d discovered about the stuff going off with the Celestians.”
“OK. It was more a figure of speech. What I meant to say was ‘uh oh, suddenly I don’t think we’re in the Lair Mansion moving at a fraction of our normal speed due to the timespace manipulations of a villain known as Spacewarped who made it take over a year for me to get from the front door to the Lair lavatory’.”
“Fine,” breathed Amy. “Just so we’re clear.”
“And I’m not the wicked witch of the West,” VelcroVixen added for clarity. “If you two helpless captives would care to tremble in this direction we have a horrible fate awaiting you.”
“There’s no place like home…” Al B. noted.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” screamed Miss Framlicker.
“It’s okay, dear. We’re here now,” Cheryl assured the Interdimensional Transportation Corporation scientist. “We’ve arrived at Kaibutisu Kojima, Monstrous Island.”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
“What have I done now?” worried Visionary. “I didn’t say anything.”
“I suspect that Miss Framlicker is a little disturbed by my dimension-shifting to bring us to this place,” the Manga Shoggoth explained. “Apparently she knows just enough about trans-dimensional metaphysics to understand a little of how we got here.”
“Yes,” gasped the frightened scientist. “You… it… they… and the coathangers…”
Cheryl patted Miss Framlicker on the shoulder and looked around. “Well, we’re here now, however we got here. We’d better try and find Hatman and the others.”
“They can not be far,” the Shoggoth estimated. “How much trouble can three mortals get into on an island of genetically-modified giant life-forms?”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Visionary contributed as the glow-snails attacked.

“Why would anyone want to steal half a million Save the Paradopolis Variety Theatre Concert T-Shirts anyway?” Goldeneyed asked impatiently as he followed dull thud into yet another seedy Gothametropolis bar. Since he had agreed to help the concert roadie in exchange for assistance in finding the missing Lisette, G-Eyed had found himself in a countless number of increasingly grungy dives, but this one was a contender for the sort of slimepit where life on Earth might have first evolved.
“Somebody who didn’t want the Paradopolis Variety Theatre saved?” thud asked. “Or a gang of international t-shirt fetishists?”
Goldeneyed continued his part in the information gathering operation, which was to stop the grungy Scotsman from getting pounded into the ground every time somebody said to him, “Ere. You lookin’ at my pint?”
“This doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere though,” G-Eyed pointed out. “I mean, you ask them about t-shirts, they tell you to f*ck off, and then we pick another random person and let them tell you the same thing.”
dull thud shrugged. “They may be telling me to f*ck off, but meanwhile the telepathic giant tapeworm in my intestinal tract is picking valuable information from their brains and guiding us to the next person in this complicated theft chain..”
Bry Katz stopped and stared at his partner in detection with an appalled horror. “You claim you have a giant telepathic tapeworm in your body?”
“Doesn’t everyone? Cressida says hello, by the way.”
“Look, I think I’d better be going. I’m really worried about my friend Laurie and I need to…”
“Cressida also knows a bit about that,” dull thud admitted. “Seems she was into lost causes like saving the Paradopolis Variety Theatre.”
That brought Bry up short. “Well yeah, she was… is,” he admitted. “So what?”
“So when those guys I’ve been questioning about the heist were thinking about how they knew where the t-shirts were stored, they were thinking about a girl in leathers who led them to the warehouse.”
“No,” G-Eyed protested. “That doesn’t make any sense. If Lisette was supporting the concert, then why would…? WHY AM I LISTENING TO A GUY WHO CLAIMS TO HAVE A TELEPATHIC TAPEWORM?”
“There’s more,” thud admitted. “She was accompanied by some super-villains. One of them had a wicked-looking black guitar.”
Exile looked up sharply. “What?”
“That’s what I thought,” dull thud admitted, “but it wasn’t Bros. They have enough to answer for anyway”
“Chronic,” snarled Goldeneyed. “What hold has that nasty little snotball got over her?”
“I dunno,” thud answered. “But I know where to look for him.”
“Then let’s go,” G-Eyed demanded.
That was when the barfight started. “Y’ said Bros!” an angry Australian accused dull thud hitting him over the head with a chair which Cressida transmuted into a feather pillow at the last moment.
Things might have got nasty had the slot machine suddenly exploded, showering the room with dollars and making all the combatants scramble over to pick up the unexpected jackpot.
“This way, guys!” Dynamite Boy called to G-Eyed and dull thud.
The investigators made their hurried exits after Jeremy Wick. “DB!” G-Eyed recognised. “I haven’t seen you since we were fighting on that prison planet.”
“Prison planet, right. And he’s sceptical about my tapeworm,” muttered dull thud.
“Well I was just in the neighbourhood and I heard you were looking for some stolen t-shirts, so I figured I’d help out,” Dynamite Boy lied. Meanwhile he was worrying about when and how he should murder Goldeneyed to save the lives of his family and friends.

“Keep screaming,” Ziles advised Nats. “They don’t seem to like high-frequency sonics.”
“Yeah, that’s why I was doing it,” the flying phenomenon answered, kicking back other of the countless hungry four-foot cockroaches that skittered down the tunnel behind them. “This passage had better get us somewhere soon. This is worse than going to my fridge in the middle of the night.”
“According to my sensors we’re almost at the second unaccountable reading I got. That’s the one that wasn’t a hundred feet tall and breathing radioactive fire.”
“Uuunh,” groaned Hatman, slowly regaining consciousness. “What hit me?”
“That would be the sensor reading that was a hundred feet tall and breathing radioactive fire,” Ziles advised him. “You wouldn’t happen to have a pest-control officer’s hat in that dimensional pocket thingie of yours would you?”
“Any time in the next three seconds would be good,” Nats suggested.
“I don’t think we’d like the cyanide gas if I did that,” Hatty suggested. “Let me try something else. He pulled out his Con Ed hat. “Be ready to catch me. This one really takes it out of me.” Then he transformed himself into 100,000 volts of dancing lightning and burned his way down the tunnel behind them, searing mutant insects as he went.
Ziles would have been impressed if the ground hadn’t crumbled under her again just then spilling her down into the humming darkness below.

The Dark Knight ignored the screaming pain in his slowly-regenerating body and forced another fifty press-ups. He didn’t bother to turn as he heard the footsteps echoing through his usually-deserted Pluto base. He already knew who it was. “Well?” he demanded of the Chronicler of Stories.
“I’ve repaired the Knightjet,” CoS reported. “Made a few improvements even. Try not to bend it on Celestians again.”
“Only if they get in my way,” the urban legend responded. “What about the rest?”
“I can’t confirm or deny what you think the Hood is up to,” the Chronicler told his alternate self. “You know the rules.”
“Actually no, I forgot them when I stopped being you,” DK corrected him. “Part of the stuff that a former cosmic office-holder isn’t allowed to keep after retirement. Can you at least arrange for me and the LL to remember what we’ve learned so far when I get back to Earth?”
“That’s fine,” CoS agreed. “The nonremembering effect gets weaker the more people remember. Now you’ve pointed out the unaccountable disappearance of three arch-villains to the LL they’ll be able to keep that in mind.”
“Plus the disappearance of most of the old pantheons that Donar, Troia, CSFB! and Yo aren’t supposed to tell us about,” DK added. “That’s got to be tied in too. Somebody’s clearing the board ready for a big play.”
“I can’t comment on that,” the Chronicler of Stories judged. “I just came to sort out your Knightjet. Try not to die again. It’s starting to push even my power levels to bring you back, and each time I lose a little bit of you.”
“Dying is part of the job,” the Dark Knight scowled, “but next time I’ll try and make sure it’s other people doing the dying.”

In the ruins of central Tokyo Fin Fang Foom and a large mutated fire-breathing dinosaur which could no longer be named on Japanese TV for copyright reasons wrestled with each other. ManMan was also involved in the battle, in that he got to avoid two wildly lashing tails which were bringing down skyscrapers all around him.
“There are days when I rather feel that I’m a little out of my league, you know,” the Elvis impersonator complained to his talking knife. Over to the west Donar was engaged in a lightning-vs-sonics battle with a two-headed creature which had just swallowed an ambulance. A little further towards the burning Ginza Yo and Dancer were executing the most improbable rescues of fleeing schoolchildren while Sorceress struggled with her control of elemental forces to damp down the flames which threatened to consume the whole city. Overhead Trickshot was trying to ride a giant moth and avoid being stabbed by Troia all at once.
“Aw, don’t worry about that, Manny!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! told him, bouncing down to grab him out of the way of a toppling power pylon. “We have the most important job. We get to look for the twins.”
“The twins?”
“Yeah, you know. There are always a pair of identical Japanese schoolgirls controlling these things. I figure we find them, maybe date them, and the monsters just wander home.”
“Saving the world by dating schoolgirls,” Knifey chuckled. “That’s a very CSFB! solution.”
ManMan looked at the seething tide of panicked humanity milling around the combat zone. “Exactly which identical schoolgirls?” he asked Dream. All of the screaming girls present were dressed in similar sailor suits.
CSFB! grinned. “We’ve gotta start a process of elimination,” he replied.

For some reason Herringcarp Asylum for the Insane in upstate Gothametropolis was always shrouded in storms. Chronic looked at the rain pounding down the outside of the leaded window and frowned. “I hate storms. And thunder gods.”
“Still sore that the Lair Legion gave you the brush-off after you saved Troia?” De Brown Streak guessed. The sepia speedster was sprawled upon a Chesterfield sofa reading the Daily Trombone and making the occasional rude remark about J. James Jerkson’s editorial. DBS couldn’t believe that superheroes in general and Goldeneyed in particular were responsible for all industrial pollution in the North and East Rivers. “It’s no big deal. I was once a candidate for membership but they threw me out just because I betrayed them to the Enthrallress.”
“It’s just their holier-than-thou we-save-the-planet-three-times-a-day attitude, y’know?” Chronic complained.
“I heard you tried to kill the Amazon girl,” DBS noted. “I just tried to date Sorceress, but she can’t see past that big dork of a boyfriend of hers to know what’s really good for her.”
“I did kill Troia,” Chronic answered. “My guitar made me do it.”
“Right. Sure. So now you’ve joined the Purveyors of Peril for another crack at her?”
“Well, that and so the Hooded Hood would kind of not kill me. And for the money and the power and stuff, natch. I mean, it’s not like I want to be one of the good guys anyway.”
“Uh huh,” replied De Brown Streak. “So you’re not going to do anything to warn the heroes about the stuff the Hood has planned for them, and what they’re walking in to?”
“Of course not. Are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
“Yeah.”

“Hatman? Jay, is that you?” Cheryl sent Visionary down into the crater to help the dazed and scorched capped crusader.
“Yeah,” Hatty answered, staggering up to join Cheryl, Miss Framlicker, and the Manga Shoggoth. “We were chasing some sensor reading that Ziles found when I got separated by a landslide. Did you guys get attacked as well?”
“Only about a dozen times,” complained the still-frazzled Miss Framlicker. She was working on a way to blame Nats for all of this.
“They tasted like chicken,” the Manga Shoggoth amplified.
“Can you try and contact Ziles and Nats?” Vizh wondered.
Hatman activated his comm-unit but the background radiation made it impossible to get through. “We’ll have to find them the old fashioned way,” he sighed, pulling on his miners’ helmet once more.”

Although Ziles had fallen sixty feet she had landed upright and with no injury. Nats rushed down to check she was alright, and that motion was enough to activate the movement-sensitive glow-crystals and light up the chamber they had tumbled into.
It was a laboratory. It was a laboratory with crystalline walls and long sleek workbenches full of alien controls. On one side observation windows looked out over the side of the mountain and down over the lush mutated foliage of Monstrous Island. Beside them a dozen video screens tracked the movement of a dozen of the more interesting creatures on the island.
“What is this place?” Nats wondered.
“It’s similar to the Abhuman technology that the Lair Legion has encountered before,” Ziles noted. “I guess this confirms our theory that the Abhumans experimented here. We may have found where the missing Celestian machinery from the Moon’s Turquoise Area was brought.”
Nats couldn’t resist fiddling with the controls on the video. “Hey, look! It’s Banjooooo and the Sea Monkeys! And there’s some apes sitting in a library. And there’s the Racoon People. What are they doin… oh, that’s disgusting!”
Ziles was examining the other controls “I think all of those races were created by the Abhumans, weren’t they? I suspect they may have been engineered here, long ago.”
“And the Abhumans made all of those monsters out on the island too?”
“No. They were just naturally mutated over centuries by being near the Celestian machines.”
“Wow. And which of these is a Celestian machine?” Nats wondered.
“It isn’t here,” the Manga Shoggoth reported, dissolving a wall to gain access and leading Vizh, Cheryl, Hatman, and Miss Framlicker to join them. “It has been stolen.”

“No really, Ms Sylvain, you have an absolutely beautiful home here,” Woopsa the elephant-headed Rakshasa promised the retired superheroine known as the Fashion Fairy. “I love what you’ve done with the bamboo furniture.”
“Are you sure you’re a demon?” Sydney St Sylvain checked. “Only all the demons I met were more interested in rending and despoiling and less excited about feng shui and flower arranging.”
A rude personal comment about Woopsa was contributed by the hunchbacked Flapjack at the door to Ms Sylvain’s study. “Sorry to interrupt,” the Lair Legion’s butler told them, “but there’s an irate superhero at the door demanding to see Ms Sylvain. Says his name’s Somefire of some’tin. I was pretending not to understand his accent, because that makes him really mad. He says you’re contaminating his native soil by bringing American superheroes here to fight native Japanese monsters, demeaning his honour as befits a… well, I can’t translate those words.” Then he grinned nastily. “So I asked Ms Foxxx to go and chat with him while I found you”
Sydney sighed. “You’d better show him into the formal lounge while I go pick something suitably stern to wear to meet him. I suppose I’d better… ooh!”
“What’s wrong?” Woopsa worried as the Fashion Fairy went very pale and staggered. He caught her as she almost fell. Then his own arcane senses worked out what was happening. “Oh no. Call the Legion!” he shouted to Flapjack in a panicked voice. “Warn them that somebody has got Inquisition Iron and knows how to use it. Warn them that…”
But then the supervillains attacked and there was no time to warn anybody at all.

“There they are!” CSFB! shouted, dragging ManMan through the crowds. “Those two talking in a strangely-dubbed way and pushing buttons on that ultrasonic control box! It’s got to be the monster-controlling twins. And me without any Zima!”
“So what do we do?” ManMan worried.
“Distract them!” Knifey advised. “Oh girls!”
The twins looked up and their mouths became little surprised O’s.
“Elvis!” they shrieked.

“This way. Yo is thinking collapsing subways is not to be gooding place to be hiding just now, but Yo thinks you are to be being okay on this bus. Yo is thinking Yo is good bus driver. Minding the doors.”
“Are you okay, Sorceress?” Dancer worried. “Only you’re looking pretty pale.”
“I’ve never tried to manipulate a fire this big before,” Whitney Darkness admitted. Dancer noticed that smoke was rising from the Sorceress’ clothes. “It’s quite a challenge.”
“Well be careful. Jay would never forgive me if something happened to you.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t blame you if it was in the line of duty,” Whitney answered, and was surprised by how bitter that came out.
Another blast from another gas main going up distracted the women. “I’m onto it,” Dancer promised, skipping over the shrapnel to arrange another miraculous cut-off valve. “Hey, what’s this?”
Sorceress came over to examine the silvery object half-exposed by the latest detonation. “I don’t know,” she admitted, “but I don’t like the look of it. I think we might want to point this out to Finny.”

“Hey, Troia. You, me, a sauna, and no holds barred. Whadda ya say?”
“Gaaaaahhh!” the Amazon administrator screeched, plunging her spear at the annoying archer.
Trickshot hurled himself out of the way and the weapon instead squelched into one of the giant moth’s eyes. There was a terrible scream from the injured lepidoptera. “Heh. Does it every time,” gloated Trickshot. “Er, I think this thing’s coming down. You want to join me on my escape pulley arrow rope, your highness, or would ya prefer to plunge to yer death with the monster?”
Troia thought about it.

“Finny! Finny!”
The Makluan dragon spared a moment to turn from his cosmically-spawned dinosaur opponent and caught a hammerpunch to the snout. “I’m just a little busy right now,” he complained, falling back into the railway passenger terminal.
“Maybe so,” Dancer agreed, “but you might want to see this. Sorcy and I discovered a funny silver object buried in the battlefield. And when we looked we found there were eight of them, equally spaced around the centre of Tokyo.”
“I don’t know what they are,” Sorceress admitted, “but psychically they reek of death.”
The giant monster leaped into the air and hammered down onto Finny’s back; or would have done if Finny hadn’t shifted to human form and run out of the way. That rather puzzled the enemy.
“Damn! I know what they are,” Foom admitted. “I’ve seen these before. They’re the nuclear weapons Magnetic Techbird diverted from Paradopolis a year or so back. Nobody ever found what he did with them.”
“Well now we know,” worried Dancer. “Were they counting down last time you saw them?”

Donar was being cunning. “Ho, monster. Herein I standeth. Swalloweth me if thou wishest!”
“Donar, no!” Troia shrieked from the distance. “I knew we should never have let him see that Disney Hercules film!”
The two headed monster flashed down to devour the hemigod of thunder.
But Donar had a different gambit in mind. Dropping from the sky like a stone he left the two heads to clash together where he had previously been. As the two monstrous foreheads cracked each other the twin monster lost its twin tempers. Each head began to bite at the other, and the whole beast plummeted from the skies since it could no longer agree on co-ordinating its wings.
“Fear not, milady,” Donar smirked. “I hast faced two headed Gjallergrims and Unferthoths many times. And I rejoice that thou ist now speakething to me once more.”
“I might speak to you again,” admitted the Amazon administrator. “As long as you smite Trickshot.”
“Urk,” spluttered the arrogant archer.

“Lair Legion, listen up. This is an emergency!” Fin Fang Foom broadcast across the team’s comm-badges.
“Of course it is,” Trickshot argued back. “Three flamin’ huge monsters are stompin’ Tokyo and Donar’s trying to stick his baseball bat in my skull!”
“That’s not the problem. We’ve been set up. There are eight nuclear bombs set to go off in less than two minutes. I want you to each grab one or more of them and get them to me, stat.”
“So we can have one really big nuclear explosion instead of eight little ones?” Troia puzzled.
“Do it!”

“No really,” CSFB! promised the twin monster-controlling schoolgirls. “It’s just like coke, only a bit different. Try it.”
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” ManMan complained.
“Try some more,” CSFB! urged. “I’m sure your boss Peter von Doom wouldn’t mind you having a little drink. I’ll, um, I’ll just hold this monster-controlling device, shall I?”

“This device can tune us in to any of Monstrous Island’s creatures,” Miss Framlicker reported, her hands flying over the crystal controls in the hidden laboratory. “There. That’s the thing at originally attacked you. Now it looks like it’s in Tokyo fighting the Lair Legion.”
“I’m more interested in the carrier wave signal that summoned it,” frowned Ziles. “We know that Peter von Doom sent a mission here. He must have implanted control devices in some of the biggest creatures so he could use them for his plans.”
“And I’m more worried about where he might have taken the Celestian genetic machinery, given the other parts of his plot,” Hatman scowled.
“You humans could use a little improvement,” Manga Shoggoth suggested. “I mean, you have a shocking lack of pseudopodia.”
“Is it me,” Visionary asked, “or is the ground trembling here?”
“This whole place seems tectonically unstable,” complained Nats.
“I hate to say it, but Visionary is right,” Ziles reported. “This is a major event. I think we might have triggered off a failsafe defence mechanism by coming in here. The whole island is sinking.”
“To the Lairjet!” Hatman decided. “Uh, Vizh, could you help me to clean off the windshield where the giant tortoise got… amorous?”

“Yo is wondering what is to be being the plan?” Yo wondered as s/he watched the eight nuclear devices count down past thirty seconds.
“Now I wrestle the big reptile,” Finny announced. “And while I do, you guys feed those bombs down it’s throat. Then CSFB! uses that monster-controller to get it to swallow.”
ManMan suppressed an off-colour remark.
“If any must swallow yon nuclear devices it shouldst be me,” Donar offered. “I canst take it.”
“The big dragon said feed ‘em to Godzilla there,” Dancer reminded them. “So let’s go, Legion!”
The dinosaur sure was hungry.

Epilogue One: Pieces of monster were splattered over half of Tokyo, but even now the biggest chunks were starting to crawl back towards the patch of sea where Monstrous Island had previously been. It seemed that the cosmic engineering of the Celestians built monsters to last. Cheryl was wishing it had been her that had been blown up by eight nuclear warheads, since then she wouldn’t have had to deal with the irate Japanese authorities who blamed the Lair Legion for them needing a new capital city.

Epilogue Two: Peter von Doom screamed for a good long time when the Minion told him that his destroying-the-LL ploy had failed and that Monstrous Island had sunk. Even though he had already extracted the vital Celestian technology, PVD was annoyed that he had wasted so precious an asset for nothing.
He was even more upset when he found out where the Lair Legion were intending to go next.
Meanwhile, fifteen miles beneath the Earth’s surface, the half-blind dwarfish creature known only as the Hole Man chuckled and rubbed his hands together in glee as he admired his new possession, a lovely island absolutely crammed full of monsters.

Epilogue Three: The Lair Legion returned to the St Sylvain estate to discover the owner of that estate gone, kidnapped in some devious supervillain gambit. The perpetrators had left behind word that only CSFB! should follow the trail, and had further left some devious clues about the whereabouts of the kidnapped Fashion Fairy. [For more details on that see Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour Interlude: The Order of Order Makes Its Move by CrazySugarFreakBoy! himself, and the upcoming continuation serial.]

Epilogue Four: “How on Earth could you be fully recovered?” Miss Framlicker demanded of Derek Foreman. “You were nearly dead. You can’t be walking about.”
“Hey, I’m back, alright?” Exile snapped. “And I know for sure that Val’s in trouble in the Dreary Dimension. Now I need to go and rescue her.”
“I already told you, ITC can’t currently get you to…”
“I don’t need ITC. I have a way of getting there. But only if certain people agree to come with me.”
“What do you mean?” Hatman asked. “We’re already short-handed with your cousin disappearing off after his lost love and DK on the sick list. Then Donar wants to go off with Sorceress and Ziles on some extraplanar investigation he won’t explain. We can’t spare…”
“Jay,” Whitney told him. “Shut up.”
“Who do you need to help you, Derek?” Dancer wondered.
“Don’t ask me why, but I’ve gotta take Yo, Vizh, Nats, and Miss F. with me,” Exile told them. “And we’ve gotta go right now, or it’ll be too late.”
“Me?” Visionary winced. “I, er, I think Cheryl has errands for me.”
“Oh, you can go if Exile really needs you,” Cheryl assured her husband.
“Yo has not seen cute Dreary Dimension for too long,” Yo beamed.
“Isn’t the Dreary Dimension like, um, a place of no return?” Nats worried.
“So, it’s settled,” Exile said quickly, and used his energy-powers to trigger the dimensional beacon he had been provided with.
Exy, Vizh, Yo, Nats, and Miss Framlicker disappeared in a green flash.
“No discipline,” grumbled Hatman.
“Oh, don’t worry,” the Manga Shoggoth assured him. “I’m sure there will be enough of you to make good your promise to Elsqueevio to go to this Lost City of Vesalia. I’m looking forward to seeing the place again myself.”
The sound of an Elder Being chuckling was not a comforting one.

Next issue: After another little detour to Wakandybar courtesy of Amazing Guy’s Amazing Tales, the Lair Legion visit the Lost City of Vesalia as advertised, and take on the devious Sock Monkey. Meanwhile Donar, Sorceress and Ziles look for lost Pantheons, Exile, Nats, Vizh, Yo, and Miss Framlicker arrive in the Dreary Dimension had have some trouble at passport control, G-Eyed, dull thud and Dynamite Boy discover who stole the missing t-shirts but fail to work out the all-important why , and Al B. and Amy face a horrible fate, naturally. So be here for Untold Tales of the Lair Legion Monkeying Around.

Back issues at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Character descriptions at Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Cartographic data from Where's Where in the Parodyverse

NOTE: Both CrazySugarFreakBoy! and Amazing Guy made crossover references to this story at about this point. You may want to look at the following links:

Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour Interlude: The Order of Order Makes Its Move by CSFB!

Amazing Tales #31: Attack of the guys with gills, or, what's new Pantser-cat? by AG

UnAmazing Tales #32, Time of Rest. A normal day in the life of the JBH by AG

Amazing Tales #33, Battle of the Parodyverse All Stars! The LL vs. the JBH! by AG

Saving Gwen Stacy, Part One: An Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour Interlude by CSFB! (note that this story is still unfinished)

People might also want to check out Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Doom, the world war II saga currently running on the board, which also features a trip to the Lost City of Vesalia in chapters five and six.



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