Posted by The Hooded Hood heaves a sigh of relief having finally managed to bring the proliferating plotlines of this supposedly short world-tour series back to a managable number in... on July 28, 2001 at 05:35:03:
#86: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: All Together Now Part Two - Death, Fate, War and Other Minor Problems
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Sometimes, on the bad
nights, the dream would come. On those nights, Carl Bastion, the champion archer
known of Trickshot, would wake with a scream on his lips, tangled in
sweat-knotted sheets. And then he would stay awake until dawn, when his hands
would stop trembling. “What… what was that?” Dancer gasped, opening her eyes to find herself
sprawled in some prickly bush. “I thought I…” The lightning started in the mists of chaos beyond time, where ancient
energies heave and burn. It arced down through the higher dimensions, gathering
force as it seared towards its target. It burst into reality as bright as
creation and earthed itself with power to crack a moon. “Where are we?” wondered Ziles as the Dark Knight led her deeper and deeper
into the labyrinth of cellars beneath the virtual mansion that had been built to
contain the residual essence of the old abandoned gods. The voice in his head woke Jeremy Wick from a heavy sleep. “Attend me,
cretin,” it said. “Hi there,” the Sorceress smiled down at Woopsa, the Rakshasa towel
boy. “Alright,” said Dancer. “I’ve unravelled your word-puzzle from before, about
us thinking through how we lost our powers. We know it was Psicho playing with
our minds to make us think we didn’t have them. Trickshot got us past the fake
deaths thing and with our powers we’re winning in the running battle against the
mind-controlled dinosaurs. Now would you please tell us what is really
going on?” “You know,” shouted Dreamcatcher Foxglove (a.k.a. CrazySugarFreakBoy a.k.a
the wired wonder), “I’ve never attacked a villain’s stronghold with three
hundred stampeding mastodons before. It’s pretty good fun.” “But… I don’t want to be the Supreme Conceptual entity of the retired
pantheons,” wailed Woopsa the Rakshasa. Behind the door in the deepest cellar of the conceptual retirement home of
the gods in the realms beyond death waited three women. One was young and
attractive, the second was middle-aged and maternal, and the third was very old
indeed and glared at the world through one good eye. When the Parodyverse first began, for whatever mysterious reasons such a
bizarre place might have been designed, it was usurped. Just as certain kinds of
wasp lay their eggs unsuspected in the living flesh of other organisms, so
creatures so alien to the reality we know that even the laws of time and physics
mean nothing to them elected to spawn in the fresh new multiverse which was
borning. These creatures became known to mad poets and haunted scholars much
later as the Fairly Great Old Ones, and in any chart of how the various powers
of the Parodyverse interact they are on a different page of a different book
altogether. And their bit is written in blood, and the words squirm as you look
at them. Ziles and the Dark Knight hurried to rejoin the little knot of heroes
clustered around Woopsa just as Exile channelled the divine force of the
combined pantheons back in their heyday which had once been used to bind a
terrible enemy forever. A pure white beam of light burst from him, leaving him
weak and gasping. Valeria held him so he wouldn’t fall. The brilliant streak
burned into Donar as the Ausgardian slowly died. The Finishing Touch rose up from his former prison, smacking away the Lair
Legion with kinetic bursts which scattered them over a mile across the heaving
landscape. As Trickshot and Troia were separated from the vicinity of Hatman
they fell foul of Psicho’s malevolent influence. “Fight each other to the
death,” he commanded. Next time:The world tour has definitely got as far as the Savage
Park, and the main tourist attraction has got to be the LL vs Psicho and
Blaaargh! But don’t forget that Australian countdown to world domination by
genetic mutation, or to book your tickets for the Save the Parodopolis Variety
Theatre Benefit Concert, with special guest stars the Purveyors of Peril. The
penultimate arc of the world tour begins next time, with Untold Tales of the
Lair Legion World Tour Gardening Special.
He never told anyone about the dream. It didn’t fit the
comfortable protective persona he wrapped around himself like a shield from a
cruel world. He was a proud man, a self made man, one of the few
non-super-powered heroes who could call themselves Lair Legionnaires. He could
not bear his team-mates’ pity.
And there was the problem. When Trickshot
remembered joining the Lair Legion he recalled fighting alongside Lisa, Jarvis,
NTU-150 and many of the other early members; but they did not remember him, for
that was in another world. That reality had been shredded, and everybody Carl
Bastion had ever known or loved, everything he had ever achieved, was gone. He
alone had survived to take the place of the long-murdered Trickshot of the
reality where he now lived, to pick up a life almost disturbingly similar to the
one had had once enjoyed. Except for the dreams, and the bad nights.
But now
the nightmare was happening a second time, and it was real. Trickshot stood over
the headless corpse of Legion deputy leader Hatman, surrounded by enemies who
had slain his team and now were coming for him. He fired his last shaft high
into the air in tribute to his fallen comrades – Troia, CrazySugarFreakBoy!,
Dancer, ManMan, and to those innocents who should never have been caught up in
this battle – Cheryl, Flapjack, Meggan Foxxx. He fired with his eyes closed,
like some ragged, tear-blinded zen archer. “Right,” he challenged. “Take me if
you can.”
Psicho, the Murderous Thought chuckled. The Deviant Lord had been
imprisoned for many lifetimes at immense cost, but now the personified evil
psionic energy was free and it intended to release its four still-bound
brethren, starting with the one buried here in the Austernal dinosaur garden
known as Savage Park. To that end it had used its mind-bending abilities to
arrange this situation. It was most amused.
It crammed itself into one of the
little reptilian carnivores’ tiny minds so it could enjoy the finish personally.
It wanted to taste this arrogant, broken, human’s flesh, feel his skull cave
beneath the jaws of the raptor. It stepped forward so it could taste the fear in
the mortal’s dying thoughts. It drank in…
…confidence?
The final arrow
toppled downwards and embedded itself into the skull of the raptor carrying
Psicho. The murderous thought screamed and struggled to disentangle itself from
the dying creature.
“Gotcha!” shouted Trickshot.
Then the ground rippled
and the archer found himself on his knees vomiting.
“I saw you die,” Hatman agreed.
“And I felt myself…”
“Mom!” CrazySugarfreakBoy! called, scrambling to his
feet and running over to Meggan Foxxx. “Are you okay?”
“Sure am, hon,” the
redhead answered, pulling herself painfully to her feet. “But I thought we were
goners. What happened to all those monsters that were ripping me to bits?” She
didn’t look ripped to bits, although her muscles screamed and ached. “That was
worse than happy hour at the Déja Vu Review Bar.”
“We’re all alive?” Flapjack
puzzled. “How? I mean, I was digested.”
“Woopsa’s missing,” Troia noticed.
“But look!” She pointed back to where the Lair Legion’s dimension-hopping red
double decker bus leaned next to the tree where Trickshot had skidded it to a
halt. “I thought that got trod on by that dinosaur?”
“We all saw that,”
Cheryl reasoned. “But then we all saw ourselves get killed too. Then again, we
are chasing a creature called Psicho, the Murderous Thought.”
“He was playing
with our minds!” CSFB! realised. “None of that dino stuff was actually real. We
just thought it was.”
“This one dinosaur was real enough,” Trickshot noted,
nudging the arrow-slain raptor with his foot. “I think Psicho was riding its
mind when it went, but I don’t think I killed the bastard.”
“He had us pretty
much beaten,” noted Hatman. “I think he was coming in for the kill.”
“Well
now he’s got me miffed,” ManMan admitted. “If we had out powers back…”
“You
could use the proportional strength of a man to sort him out?” Knifey asked
scornfully.
“Knifey? You can talk?” Joe (ManMan) Pepper gasped.
“If you
haven’t figured that out in the year and a bit we’ve been together you’re even
dumber than I thought, kid,” the sentient blade shot back.
“But… when our
powers went you fell silent,” Dancer protested. “That’s what he
means.”
“Nope. I’ve been screaming my not-literal head off while you folks
have been lying on the ground moaning,” Knifey replied. “I guess Psicho was just
controlling all your sensory input.”
“And could easily do it again,”
shuddered Cheryl, coming out from examining the bus. “Assuming what we’re seeing
now is real, the power-drain that’s immobilising the bus is actual. We can’t get
that thing going until we find and neutralise the dampening field.”
“But if
we can hear Knifey, we can probably use our powers,” Hatman reasoned. “Hold on.”
He pulled out a Jets cap and rocketed into the skies. “Yes!” he exalted. “We’re
back in the game.”
“We died,” Troia 215 reminded him. “If that thing gets to
us again…”
“He won’t,” Hatman said determinedly. “I think I can protect us,
at least for a little while. But I won’t be able to use any other powers.” He
folded his jets cap away and pulled out another hat.
“What’s that one?”
Dancer wondered.
“It’s his Thinking Cap,” CSFB! explained. “I guess he’s
concentrating on shielding us from the Murderous Thought.”
“So what’s the
plan?” Troia wondered. “Do we look for Woopsa, or that Caveguy, or the Murderous
Thought, or what?”
“My guess?” ManMan suggested, hastily backing towards the
others, “we deal with all these possessed dinosaurs for real this time.”
It sounded something
like SKREEEEE-THAKKKKAAA-DOOOOOOMMMMM!
The energy pounded into the Groper out
of Grossness, the pandimensional entity from beyond the Parodyverse that writhed
through timespace like a parasite. It seared away two dozen impossibly long
prehensile tentacles, forcing the laws of physics onto a creature which had
never yet obeyed them. There was a smell like rotting universes and a screech
that echoed in the brains of psychics five realities away.
Great
Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu squirmed in agony at the attack, and lashed back at the source
of the pain: a humanoid hemigod who dared raise elemental forces against the
gatekeeper of the Great Fairly Old Ones. The Groper spawned three thousand new
appendages, each one twisting through a different sub-dimensional path, and
slashed not only at Donar but at the very reality he existed in, seeking to
shred god and god’s existence at once.
From the cosmic distance that the
retired pantheons watched the conflict it was as if red gashes of poisoned pain
simple tore themselves across the storm-hemigod’s flesh.
“Now that’s
entertainment,” breathed Roni Y Avis. He turned round to the Lair Legionnaires
present to gloat that he had pitted their champion against an impossible
opponent, but he could find none of them.
“Where did they go?” he asked the
Hooded Hood.
The Hood was gone too.
“Looking for
something they don’t want us to find,” DK answered tersely. “Getting to it while
everybody’s watching Donar getting slaughtered.”
“What?” the Xnylonian
wondered. “What is it?”
The Dark Knight found the concealed latch and
triggered the secret panel that revealed a door carved with ancient runes of
binding. The door reeked of being a portal, and the runes twisted and squirmed
as Ziles looked at them. “I’d guess this is it,” DK suggested.
“And what’s
behind it?”
“I don’t know, but it something they really wanted to keep in. So
open it and let’s find out.”
“Wha? Whoosat?”
“Ah, the homo sapiens at its most
lucid. How refreshing.”
“Who… who are you?”
“I think the question you
should be asking, ineffectual youth, is who are you?”
“Er… I know who I am.
Jeremy Wick, student. Part-time intern helping at the Save the Paradopolis
Variety Theatre concert, at least until this weekend when it happens.”
“Prize
idiot,” the voice added. “You remember nothing of your little… experience with
Dr Hammond Sterr, or of becoming the pointlessly heroic Dynamite Boy? Not even
the telekinetic frogs?”
“Er, am I now officially insane?” Jimmy Wick worried,
“or do I have to confess all of this to a psychiatrist first?”
“You do
remember Dynamite Boy? Being Dynamite Boy?”
“He was in the papers,” DB
recalled. “But… I’d know if I was him, right?”
“And you would recall if your
fellow roadies were actually dull thud, De Brown Streak, and Chronic, of
course.”
“Sure. Wouldn’t I?”
“We’ll talk again,” the disembodied voice
sighed. “When I’ve marshalled enough patience to tolerate you again.”
“Wait!
Who… what are you?”
“You may call me… the Supreme Interference,” said the
voice in Jimmy’s head.
The elephant-headed myth jumped up in surprise, banging his head on the
overhanging oil lamp and then falling off his pallet onto the floor. “Ouch! I
mean… well, ouch really.”
Whitney helped him back up. “Are you alright now?”
she asked him kindly.
“Er… maybe. Am I dead? I seem to remember lots of
things with teeth coming at me.” He peered hopefully at the Sorceress. “Are you
my eternal reward?”
“I don’t think you’ve been that good,” Whitney Darkness
told him. “Anyway, you’re not dead. We just snatched you out of reality and
brought you here because we need your help.”
“So I wasn’t, er, in any way
eaten by mind-controlled dinosaurs?”
Sorceress frowned. “No, you weren’t. Are
you saying… are you saying that Jay and the others are in some kind of
trouble?”
Woopsa explained briefly about the power-dampening field and Psicho
the Murderous Thought’s attempts to massacre the Lair Legion.
“So that’s what
the Hood was threatening,” shivered Whitney. “Oh Jay…” A thought occurred. “That
must be why Elsqueevio was so bothered about that bargain he made with Hat to
send the Lair Legion after Psicho. He knew what would happen!”
“Don’t get
distracted, daughter,” Xander advised her. “The Hood will just be setting up a
contingency plan, so that if by some strange chance Donar does triumph over
Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu there will be a bargain to be struck to have the Lair Legion’s
deaths retconned.”
“Deaths?” gasped Sorceress. “The Hood could retcon
that?”
“No,” Xander answered. “There are some things we can’t allow him to
meddle with. We would certainly not accept his bargain and trade the network we
are setting up here for a few mortal heroes. Would we?”
“Speak for yourself,
father,” spat Whitney. “I’d do anything to save Jay.”
“Not yet,” breathed
Xander quietly. Then he said, “In this case he has to save himself if he can.
Helping at this point would be no help at all. Our job is to prepare that lesser
rakshasha to be the new Chairperson and Supreme Conceptual Entity of the retired
Amalgamated Pantheons”
The Manga Shoggoth sighed. “Alright, if only to make sure this
rather pleasant Park doesn’t get chewed up any worse than it is already. I try
not to interfere, but when arrogant Deviates start digging up my back
garden…”
“So what is the story?” Troia demanded. She was a bit nonplussed
dealing with an entity who oozed politely when she stabbed it with her
spear.
“You recall what the Versalians told you about the war between the
Abhumans and the Deviates?” the Shoggoth replied. “All the Deviates were
eventually destroyed or bound, although the Abhumans paid a terrible price for
their victory – but that’s another story. Amongst the bound were the six Deviate
Lords, each of whom was placed in a different prison.”
“Aa, Vision of Death,
F’Lurgh, the Taste of Defeat, Great Rukkus, the Sound of Doom, Gromm the Living
Flatulence, Blaaargh the Finishing Touch, and our current problem Psicho the
Murderous Thought,” Hatman footnoted. As always he had done his
homework.
“Although Gromm the Living Flatulence escaped,” ManMan
noted.
“No. The Gromm you know is from an alternate reality,” corrected the
Manga Shoggoth “This reality’s Gromm remains imprisoned, or he’d have tried to
free his fellows as Psicho is doing.”
“So one of the Deviate Lords must be
imprisoned here,” surmised Cheryl.
“Blaaargh, I believe,” the Shoggoth
clarified. “As I recall, it has complete control over all things tactile. He is
the absolutely insane master of touch.”
“Sounds like some’a the customers at
my place of work,” noted Meggan Foxxx.
“All men are slime,” Dancer added by
reflex.
“We have to stop Psicho now,” Hatman worried. “One incredibly
powerful Deviate Lord is tough enough, without him forming a team.”
“If only
communications worked here we could find out if CSFB! and Tricky have found any
clues that might suggest where the prison is and what this Murderous Thought
thing is up to,” sighed Dancer. “They could be in trouble and we’d never know
it.”
“This is CrazySugarFreakBoy! and Trickshot that we’re talking about,”
commented Knifey. “Of course they’re in trouble.”
“Let’s just hope
the LL saw that flare arrow I put up, and don’t figure it for another of
Psicho’s games,” Carl Bastion (a.k.a. Trickshot, a.k.a. the irritating archer)
answered, clinging on to his was stegosaurus with some difficulty. “But we
couldn’t let the bad guy dig up whatever it was he’s got all those
mind-controlled cavemen to work on, could we?”
“Hooga!” agreed Caveguy, who
was according to some sources now the Lord of the Savage Park, and who had
provided the cavalry. He alone had managed to resist Psicho’s psionic domination
by the twin expedients of being very thick and of hitting himself on the head
with his club every time he felt he might be succumbing. When he had finally
decided that CSFB! and Trickshot were not more illusions by hurling rocks at
them until their language got creative enough to defy a mere illusion he had
happily summoned his jungle allies and pledged them and his major concussion to
the cause.
Psicho had commanded its mind-slaves to hack out a clearing and
ring it with a stockade made from the fallen timber. Inside that it had
commenced its mining operation, and had now uncovered the Abhuman’s prison which
contains its fellow Deviate Lord, the Finishing Touch. What Psicho had not
included in its calculation was the effect of three hundred hairy pachyderms
impacting with the outer defences at twenty miles per hour.
“Waaaa-hoooo!”
CrazySugarFreakBoy! shouted, leaping off his mammoth and tangling a
brachiosaurus in silly string before loosing some flying saucer fizz-bombs to
add to the chaos. “Okay folks, it’s Independence Day!”
“Hooga!” Caveguy
amplified, directing the herd towards a rather neat grass hut which was clearly
the most likely base of operations.
Trickshot steered his own reptilian steed
by the simple expedient of stabbing an arrow into it to help it decide which way
to go. While CSFB! and Caveguy were creating chaos – a task for which they were
so well fitted – the irritating archer took the time to work out where best to
place his explosive shafts to bring down the mine-working and rebury the Abhuman
prison.
He had his shot all lined up when his arms and legs
dissolved.
“It’s not real!” he told himself. Behind him the rampaging
mammoths all seemed to halt simultaneously and turn towards him. “Nice try,
Psicho,” Carl Bastion snarled, “but you don’t catch me twice.”
Then the
mammoths trampled him, since they were now under the Murderous Thought’s
control.
“And now you are mine too!” a sly, terrible multiple voice in
Trickshot’s head announced. The archer found he couldn’t move. “You hurt me
earlier,” the voice told him, “ and so I’m going to kill you one dendron at a
time.”
“At least that won’t take long in his case,” ManMan
noted.
Trickshot felt the pressure ease from his skull as Hatman appeared
with his Thinking Cap. The Lair Legion had arrived at last.
“Hooga!” shouted
Caveguy.
“Exactly,” agreed CSFB! “Butt-kicking for Deviates time.”
“We owe
you for making us think we’d died earlier,” Troia warned the Murderous Thought.
“And while you’re a hotshot psi and you’re controlling those mammoths and
cave-people and so on you can’t control us. And I’m coming for
you!”
Psicho was indeed a mere shadowy blur of a gangly humanoid, and no
match for the physical might of the Lair Legion.
So he channelled all his
energy into one powerful wake-up call and the ground shook as Blaaargh, the
Finishing Touch, awoke from his ages-long sleep.
“Too bad,” Xander the Improbable told
him unsympathetically. “It’s that or go back to being eaten by
dinosaurs.”
“That’s another thing. You have to help them…” Woopsa
wailed.
“I can agree with that one, father,” Sorceress admitted. “It’s not
the ideal team line-up to take on a world-class psionic that Hat’s
got.”
“Rubbish,” the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse snorted
dismissively. “They have some of the strongest wills you could hope to find,
like Cheryl and Meggan and Knifey. And of course CrazySugarFreakBoy’s
subconscious is their ace-in-the-hole. Besides, the domino effect is already
happening.” And enigmatically he refused to say any more on the matter.
“But
why do I have to be a deity?” Woopsa worried.
Sorceress forcibly pointed the
elephant-headed towel boy’s head to stare out of the window, where a many-angled
multi-dimensional tentacled entity was currently shredding Donar Oldmanson in a
battle watched by the Amalgamated Pantheons to determine who got to be new
Chairbeing of their consortium. “Because Donar has been fighting that… thing
there for over two hours to stop the retired gods for being exploited and
abused, abuse we can only prevent by getting you to take charge of them,”
Whitney explained through gritted teeth. “And I would be very very miffed if he
got ripped to pieces for nothing. Understand?”
The nasty cop nastier cop
routine worked. Woopsa nodded submissively.
“But why me?” he ventured at
last, watching as Donar vaporised another half-mile long cyclopean tendril only
to get sideswiped by three more. He could hear the bones breaking from
here.
“Because my first choice wasn’t available,” scowled Xander. “Visionary
decided to renounce his godhood after all the trouble I’d gone to to set him up
for this post. You were my back-up.”
“You wanted Vizh to do this?” Sorceress
asked incredulously.
“Oh yes. We can’t afford to have anyone competent or the
slightest bit effective in this position, after all,” answered the master of the
Mystic Crafts. “The objective here is to tie up all the remaining power so it
can’t be utilised any more, which incidentally thwarts that Avis reptile’s
corporate plans and prevents the Hooded Hood or anybody else from using the same
trick again.”
“But we can’t stop whatever he’s already used the combined
power of the pantheons for,” Whitney worried.
“You can’t stop him using it,”
Xander clarified. “But undoubtedly your Lair Legion will be trying to stop him
when he does use it.” He turned back to Woopsa. “Now, fill out these forms and
start practising your divine wrath.”
Woopsa glanced out of the window again
at the bloody pulp that used to be a viable hemigod of thunder. “But Donar’s
being massacred. I don’t know how he’s still even fighting.”
“Being too
stupid to know when they’re beaten has always worked well for the Ausgardians
before,” Xander noted. “Now the battle is in the hands of the fates.”
“Uh, hi,” said Ziles
nervously. “We, um, wondered if anyone might be in here. We were just…passing,
and thought, er, that all those locks and wards looked interesting. And then
they fell open as we were looking at them and your door accidentally got
unlocked. Really.”
“Welcome sister,” said the youngest, with a sweet
smile.
“Welcome daughter,” said the middle-aged one, with a maternal
smile.
“Welcome, meat,” said the oldest, with a smile that sent shudders
through the Xnylonian exile.
“So it’s you,” scowled the Dark Knight. “I might
have guessed they’d have to lock away the oldest goddesses of all for their
little plan to work.”
“Welcome, he who laces justice with terror,” said the
youngest.
“Welcome, he who forges tragedy to a weapon,” said the
second.
“Welcome, he who knows what the shadows hide,” said the third. “You
are on time.”
“Well I would be, wouldn’t I?” the Dark Knight scowled. “So why
did you let yourself get locked away while the old pantheons’ power was
abused?”
“DK, who are these people?” Ziles hissed.
“Everything has
a time, and fate unfolds through stories,” the youngest said.
“Destiny is
woven from choice, and many have had to choose,” the matron added.
“Besides,
I was absolutely fed up of all that weaving crap,” added the third, plonking
herself down in a battered armchair, pulling her boots off, and massaging her
warty and callused feet. “So we’ve been waiting for anyone brave enough to put
themselves in destiny’s path and dare to tempt the fates.”
“I can’t set you
free,” DK warned them. “My future was decided long ago when I took this path. I
know it’s grim end.”
Ziles realised everyone was looking at her. “What?” she
worried. “Have I got something in my teeth?”
“Tell them you free them,” the
Dark Knight instructed her.
“Why? The door’s open now.”
“Tell
them.”
Ziles shrugged. “You’re free, I guess,” she told them. Suddenly a
chill ran through her spine.
The maiden caressed Ziles’ cheek. “You have
sought fate and fate has marked you,” she promised.
The mother kissed Ziles’
other cheek. “You have freed destiny and destiny will seek you out,” she
warned.
The crone punched Ziles unexpectedly in the gut then patted her on
the head as she doubled over. “You have met the three who are one, and we shall
be taking a special interest, child,” she chuckled evilly. “Oh yes. We shall
definitely be looking in on you again.”
The Dark Knight blocked the door as
they made to leave. “And the current situation?” he demanded.
“Are you trying
to thwart us?” the three chorused.
Even the Dark Knight took an involuntary
step back as the three turned their gases upon him, and suddenly he knew he was
in more danger than he had been on the Celestian’s dissecting table. “Just to
remind you,” he answered, although each word cost him more than the last.
The
pressure abruptly faded. “We shall look to the warrior, and to his just reward,”
the youngest woman promised.
“We shall look to the gods, and to their fair
endings,” the matron agreed.
“We shall look to the conflict, and to bloody
vengeance and penury,” the terrible old crone vowed. Then they had
gone.
“I’m impressed,” Joshua Clement admitted once his nosebleed has
slowed to a sticky trickle. “I didn’t think any human being alive could bite
through a reinforced steel toecap.”
“It’s a gift,” the roadie currently known
as Dave (as opposed to dull thud) admitted. “Eat enough Glasgow curries
of a Saturday night and you’d be able t’chew through anything either. Besides,
the bastard shouldn’a have been trying t’kick ma teeth out!”
“And the
surgeons will probably be able to reattach his toe anyway,” Chronic added
comfortingly. “It’s amazing what medical science can do these days.”
Josh
dragged himself to his feet and helped pull dull thud from the floor.
“Well, thanks for you help, anyway,” he told the slowly-calming Scotsman.
“No
problem. Big Rancid Dwayne has been asking for a toe-severing ever since we
started working t’get the concert set up anyway. But why you had to pick a fight
with the biggest bouncer on the set eludes me.”
Josh looked guilty. “I, um, I
heard him making a nasty remark about a handicapped person, and I suggested to
him that he might want to choose his language a little more
carefully.”
dull thud stared at his comrade. “You what? You’re telling
me we got into a death-match with Big Rancid Dwayne because you felt PC all of a
sudden?”
“It’s not that,” sighed Josh. “But some things are important, and
you have to stand up for them because they’re right, whether they make you
popular or not. ‘All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men
do nothing’. Edmund Burke said that.”
“Well I’d have been a lot more
impressed if he’d been around here to help give Big Rancid Dwayne a kicking when
the trouble started,” dull thud noted of the eighteenth century reformer
and parliamentarian.
Chronic watched Josh and Dave go off to tend to their
wounds and worried. It wasn’t that he hadn’t joined in to help his friends,
although he wished now he had. It was worse than that. Chronic was trying to
work out why he had prompted Big Rancid Dwayne to make those remarks in the
first place, knowing they would set Josh Clement off.
“Maybe the devil made
me do it?” he muttered to himself. That didn’t sound as funny when he said it
out loud.
As Chronic worried about his behaviour his eye was drawn to
something gleaming behind a pile of packing cases. When he moved the debris
aside he was surprised to find a classic 1950’s Stratocaster abandoned and
covered with dust.
It felt right when Chronic pulled the strap over his
shoulder and made the guitar his own.
The Fairly Great Old Ones are only truly alive under certain
ill-understood cosmic conditions, when strange tides ebb and flow of which
humans and even gods know little. Once they ruled the Earth before humans were
little but a clever temporal novelty, and their blasphemous non-Euclidean cities
sang to the bleeding skies. Then the stars changed, and the Fairly Old Ones
departed and slept, leaving only their slave-race Shoggoth servitors as reminder
of their passing. One of their number, Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu, the Groper out of
Grossness, was bound by the Celestians as a watchdog for a great secret and sent
to sleep beneath the city now known as Paradopolis. But even now
Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu can dream, and it was his dreaming form that was currently
flaying the Ausgardian hemiod of thunder.
“Do thy worst, monstrosity,” Donar
shouted through gritted gums (the teeth having gone when his skull was
fractured, after his left arm was seared to the white bone but before his
ribcage was ripped open). “I can’t take thee yet.”
There were roughly nine
bones in Donar’s body which were not broken, and three of them were fractured.
At the fight’s end he was stretched spreadeagled between four of the creature’s
vast tentacles while Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu reached forward to uncoil his intestine.
A mortal would have been long dead but Donar was too stupid to give up like
that. He tried to gum the tentacle that came too close to his broken
jaw.
Then fate took a hand.
There was a ripple in time/space as Sir
Mumphrey Wilton shifted in the party of Legionnaires that Fin Fan Foom was
gathering together. Along with Finny were Nats, Goldeneyed and Exile, with
former members Yo and Visionary and a number of hangers on including Al. B
Harper, Lisette, Valeria, Miss Framlicker, and Amy Racecar.
“What the hell is
that?” demanded Al B. Harper. As a physicist he recognised how many laws of
reality the Groper was breaking and he felt his grip on sanity slipping.
Miss
Framlicker saved him by kicking him in the balls and distracting him from the
scene.
“Donar!” Nats shouted. “We’ve gotta help him!”
Sorceress laid a
restraining hand on his shoulder. “We can’t help,” she warned him. “It’s a solo
combat. We can give him weaponry and supplies, but nothing else. All we can do
is watch him die.”
“Maybe,” snarled Fin Fang Foom. “Or get him some more
supplies.”
“What d’you mean?” Sir Mumphrey asked, noting the sly look in the
dragon’s reptilian eye.
“Well, we’ve just seen the Dreary Dimension restored
to the Mythlands, right?” reasoned Finny. “And all that divine energy that was
used to make it a prison for Dread Dormaggadon is gone, so there’s no more need
for the baddies to try and carve up the land to plunder the power. So my
question is…”
“Where did it go?” G-Eyed caught on. He looked questioningly at
Valeria.
“I put it in the only safe place I could temporarily store it,” she
admitted, and glanced at the energy-controlling Exile.
Everybody realised
that Exile had been very quiet for a while and he seemed to be sweating and
concentrating very hard. “I… I don’t think I can hold this much power much
longer,” he admitted. “I have to get rid of it.”
Whitney actually smiled.
“Donar’s over there,” she pointed out. “I think he could use a god transfusion.”
And then Donar was better.
Really better.
The rumble of thunder started a dozen realities away and
echoed like the crack of doom. Whole and hale once more, Donar shredded the
tentacles that held him and raised Mjalcolm as the gof-force shimmered around
him. “Ho, Groper, foul intruder from we knowest not what, ‘tis time for thee to
be smited for the nonce!” he called over the rising tempest.
Gods started to
duck. Roni Y. Avis was about to make good his escape when Woopsa sat on
him.
Sorceress would swear for ever afterwards that she heard Wagner playing
as Donar loosed his hammer to scream forward into Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu with the
force to break universes.
A dozen realities had mysterious Fortean falls of
sushi.
“What, again?” Trickshot complained; but he reached for
his bow as Troia raised her spear.
CrazySugarFreakBoy! somehow avoided the
blasts and vaulted high over the titan’s head carrying the best missile weapon
he could find at short notice. “Okay Manny, Fastball Special!” he shouted,
hurling the hapless Elvis impersonator down towards Blaaargh.
“Aaaaagh!”
responded Joe Pepper.
Between shouting death-threats at CSFB!, ManMan did
manage to make sure he landed on the creature Knifey first.
The Finishing
Touch screamed and batted him a quarter mile from the combat, where he laid and
bled gently.
The ground opened up beneath Cheryl and Dancer dropping them
into the lava below.
“Oh please,” Cheryl scorned at the Murderous Thought.
“That is geologically implausible. Ignore it, Dancer. He doesn’t have what it
takes to get into our minds.”
Psicho took that personally and turned the full
force of his power onto the goddess of HTML. And Cheryl thought back. What she
was thinking was roughly: “Yes?”
And that left Dancer free to
dance.
Something improbable happened as she warped causality with her
movements. There was a ripple and a flash.
“Ho, monsters! We hast thy
special-delivery right here!” Donar called out as the Lair Legion gated in via
Mumphrey’s Inverness Cape of Singularity.
“And I’m the guy to deliver it,”
Nats added, dropping the Dark Knight onto Psicho.
“This is more like it,”
Hatman approved. “As spiffy would say, Lair Legion line up”!”
Then the real
battle started.