Posted by Is there anybody out there? The Hooded Hood attempts to break the Trappist curse upon the board by presenting the next bit of this Untold Tales arc. Let's hear from you, folks. on August 19, 2001 at 17:18:38:
#87: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour in the Savage Park (but also featuring a little trip to Herringcarp Asylum on the side): Thought and Word and Deed
Note: Those wondering
who the vast cast that thrust themselves into these stories might be can find
the answers in the Who's Who in
the Parodyverse. Also of interest may be its sister volume, the Where's
Where in the Parodyverse Previous chapters of the story are mostly at the Hooded Hood's Homepage of
Doom, depending on how recently I’ve got round to updating the thing. The
JBH in exile plotline is currently being chronicled by Amazing Guy in the JBH
series, and the problems which the Hood caused Jack Rabbit are likewise being
examined in the Jack Rabbit series. Finally, the surprise guest star who meets
De Brown Streak near the end of this issue is exactly who he seems to be. How
could I omit him?
HH
Part One: The
Battle
”Hoooooooooooooooogggggaaaaaaaaaaa!” Once the Deviate Lords were amongst the most powerful entities on the planet.
It took the entire Abhuman race and many of their servitor species to defeat
these terrible scourges, and at a cost which the Abhumans could never afford
again. The six surviving Deviate Lords were imprisoned far and wide, for the
Abhumans knew that they could never bind them again should they ever break
free. “Ah, there you are, Woopsa,” Roni Y Avis called, stepping into the Raskshasa
towel boy’s new office without bothering to knock. “I have a few things for you
to do.” Part Two: After the Battle
Herringcarp Asylum for the Criminally Insane stood on a small outcropping of
granite jutting westwards into the Atlantic Ocean on the storm-tossed coast of
upstate Gothametropolis.- at least sometimes. To most people it seemed to be a
modern, clinical, perhaps impersonal medical facility, staffed by psychiatrist
to superheroes Dr Maximillian Valium and his dedicated staff. Seventy-three
“guests” were treated in the white-walled building of glass and aluminum. “Aw, yuck. Get a room, guys!” complained Trickshot as the Lair Legion and
their friends were reunited under the lush canopy of the Savage Park and Cheryl
found her way into Visionary’s arms and Sorceress flew to Hatman. “So this lake is safe to swim in?” Cheryl checked. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Dancer asked Troia 215 as they sat astride the necks
of some kind of giant quadruped lizards and looked across the tropical terrain
to the glistening ice-peaks that ringed the land. “Ho, fell reptilian felon, thou thinkest that because thou hast mine head in
thy teeth that I art at a disadvantage. But the son of Oldman needeth not his
head to do battle, and I shalt smite thee right mightily and hath thee for
lunch.” “What do you intend to do with the Celestians, Hood?” Fin Fang Foom demanded.
It never occurred to him for a moment that the cowled crime czar would not find
some way of attacking the almost-indestructible maintenance servitors of the
Parodyverse. The technical people had been checking over the ruins of Psicho’s fortress
and tinkering with the big red London bus for quite a long time, and as far as
Visionary could see they only wanted him around so he could make them look smart
when he didn’t understand a word they were talking about. “OK,” he admitted, “I
followed that last explanation up to the first word. I got as far as
‘The’.” “Tonight’s the night, eh?” Jeremy Wick gushed excitedly. “The big Save the
Paradopolis Variety Theatre Benefit Concert.” He stood on the scaffolding stage
erected in Off-Centre Park, looked out over Goat Meadow, and called out “Hello,
Paradopolis!” Joshua Clement toppled backwards into the shelving of the store-room, falling
heavily and sending boxes and stacks spilling everywhere. His assailant gave him
no chance to recover, dragging him up by the shirt and hitting him again and
again. “Fight back,” the man snarled. “Fight, damn you!” The Hooded Hood unleashed his retconning powers upon the hapless heroes, to
ensure that Fin Fang Foom and the Dark Knight were unable to return to the Lair
Legion in time to make any use of the information they had discovered. This was
no spontaneous alteration of the past but rather one of Ioldobaoth Winkelweald’s
carefully crafted moral and ethical knots, featuring the return of the Dark
Knight’s dead wife, the destruction of the Makluan homeworld by Galactivac the
Living Death that Sucks, the new identity of the Devil Doctor, the potential
destruction of the parallel universe where Finny had been trained as a superhero
in his youth, the confrontation between DK and the Enemy to discover the secret
of the Void Spectre, and a range of other fascinating diversions. There was no
way that the Dark Knight’s recent recreating by the Chronicler of Stories could
save him from this. Next episode: The Lair Legion visits Oz (so all suggestions from
Donar and Messenger as quickly as possible, please) and find more archvillain
plots than they could possibly dream of. That dangerous terrorist De Brown
Streak teams up with that dangerous vigilante Messenger. And there’s a new
headache for the Mayor of New Gothametropolis York, whoever that might be. It’s
the beginning of the end, and other portentous rhetoric in a similar vein. Don’t
miss it, or the one after will make even less sense.
The battle-cry of Caveguy, Lord of
the Savage Park, echoed from the leafy primal canopy to the very ring of
ice-mountains that rimmed the fantastic land that time forgot. Grazing dinosaurs
looked up in grassy glades. Small squeaky mammals scuttled for their holes. A
herd of mastodon trumpeted in response. A skinny guy in a toga lost his footing
and fell over backwards into some plesiosaur poop.
“Aw crap,” Elsqueevio,
Greek god of small waters, complained – accurately, as it turned out. “And this
was a new toga.”
“At least you had a soft landing,” the Manga Shoggoth
comforted him, bubbling out of the swamp to stare at the newcomer.
Elsqueevio
didn’t really like the servitor of the ancient elder blasphemies, but on the
other hand he needed information. “What’s going on, then?” he demanded. “Are the
Lair Legion dead yet?”
“Well, some human imbecile has set free one of the
Deviate Lords from his imprisonment in the Ape City of Vesalia,” the Shoggoth
began.
“Psicho, the Murderous Thought,” Elsqueevio shuddered. “He was freed
by a Minion of Peter von Doom’s.”
“Whatever. And this Deviate Lord is now
trying to collect the set, starting by freeing Blaargh, the Finishing Touch who
has been buried here in the Savage Park ever since the end of the Abhuman
Wars.”
“The Legion is taking on two of them?” Elsqueevio worried. “Oh I knew
something really bad would happen if I sent them his way. But then again,
something bad would have happened if I didn’t.”
The Manga Shoggoth politely
grew a pseudopod and gestured to a comfortable grassy bank. “Take a seat,” he
advised. “You can watch the fate of the human race get decided from here.”
Psicho the Murderous Thought was the first Devate Lord to be released.
His first action was to head to the Savage Park, the fantastic Antarctic
prehistoric environment where dinosaurs walked the Earth, which was also the
prison of his brother Blaargh the Finishing Touch. Now the ultimate genetic
personifications of the powers of the mind and of kinetic energy were both free,
and a world awaited their conquest.
Except for the humans. Before the young
Homo Sapiens had been nothing more than terrified witnesses to legendary
struggles. In the millennia of the Deviates’ imprisonment they had become
something more; a damn sight stroppier at least.
“Okay, we have to say this
once for form’s sake,” Fin Fang Foom announced to them. Finny wasn’t technically
a human, being more in the way of a shapeshifting alien dragon, but his mind was
that of the Earthling Andy Dean so he gets by on a technicality. “Lie down on
the floor and be arrested quietly and returned to your places of imprisonment.
Or we can do it the hard way.”
Psicho chuckled in the heroes’ minds. “And
that is?”
“My way,” the Dark Knight promised.
“C’mon,” Dancer urged the
Deviate Lords. “Why on Earth do you want to rule the planet, anyway? I mean,
what would you do with it when you got it? Redecorate? Clean up TV? Bring back
Crystal Pepsi? What?”
Blaargh the Finishing Touch was not one for small talk.
Instead he heaved a quarter mile of topsoil in a tidal wave of debris down on
the heroes.
Exile vaporised it. “The hard way it is then,” he noted.
There
was a bright flash of light and suddenly Goldeneyed was clinging onto the rocky
carapace of the giant Deviate Lord. He’d taken Ziles and ManMan with him. The
Elvis impersonator jammed Knifey hard through the kinetic shell which protected
the monster, not knowing that this was supposed to be impossible. Knifey didn’t
think this was the time to mention it either.
Blaargh went crazy, screaming
in anger and tossing ManMan and G-Eyed away then catching them with a force
blast that hammered them towards high Earth orbit. Goldeneyed desperately
grabbed his comrade and did a blind teleport out over the ocean so they both
impacted with lung-emptying force into freezing Arctic waters.
Somehow Ziles
held on, dextrously twisting her body to keep her fingerhold on the gashed
shell. She just had time to inject some concentrated Relaxor Crème into the
wound before she too was hurled away.
Blaargh struggled for a moment to
maintain his consciousness and keep his tactile shields in place. At that
instant Fin Fang Foom loosed nuclear fire over the creature, searing the rocky
outer shell and superheating the strange internal organs which made up the
Deviate Lord. Blaargh screeched again and hammered Finny two hundred yards down
through bedrock.
“That has got to hurt,” Nats noted, flying an interference
pattern to divert Blaargh’s attention from the stunned Makluan. He even managed
to get the Finishing Touch to spray one wild blast in the direction of
Psicho.
“You can’t avoid me forever,” Blaargh warned him. “Especially if I
rob you of all forward motion.”
“Oops,” worried the flying phenomenon as he
suddenly became the dropping-like-a-brick phenomenon.
He seemed to take a
long time to fall, and somehow the eccentric old Englishman Sir Mumphrey Wilton
was there to catch him. Well, at least Mumphrey arranged for Visionary to be
underneath Nats as he landed, although that may not have been the actual
plan.
Blaargh turned to vaporise the little grouping before it could annoy
him again. Yet another interrrupting human pinned his foot to the floor with a
spear. “Hey!” Troia shouted. “Do you know what a set-up is?”
“A set
up?”
“Yeah,” the Amazon administrator called back as she rolled aside to
avoid a kinetic bolt that cut a trough two inches wide and a quarter of a mile
deep into the bedrock. She pointed over Blaargh’s shoulder. “That’s a
set-up.”
Blaargh looked around. Donar’s enchanted baseball bat with a nail in
it screamed into his face.
“Idiots!” the Finishing Touch snarled. “I am the
personification of kinetic energy. Blows cannot hurt me.”
Donar took this as
a personal challenge. “Really? We shalt see, caitiff. We shalt see.”
Across
the clearing Psicho the Murderous Thought closed off the connection between his
adversaries’ brainstem and central nervous systems.
“Yo is thinking that is
not being a nice thing to do,” Yo, the pure thought being from Yo-Planet chided.
“and Yo is thinking that Yo cannot to be being allowing it.”
Psicho was
distracted as the plants of the jungle snaked out to coil around his physical
form. They had no minds for him to influence, even though he could sense a
subtle intelligence behind them. “What is this?” he demanded.
“Human nature?”
the Sorceress suggested, continuing her incantations.
The mind-controlled
dinosaurs rushed forwards but were engaged by Hatman, Exile, and Trickshot.
Caveguy insisted on wrestling one.
“What’s the matter?” the Dark Knight
demanded, appearing as if from nowhere and hurling three razor-sharp
Knightarangs into Psicho’s skull, “Not used to people who can think back at
you?”
“I think he’s getting feedback from Yo,” Dancer speculated,
cartwheeling across the clearing to avoid a pterodactyl attack. “What are the
chances of that?”
“Blaargh!” Psicho shouted psychically. “This is futile. End
this!”
In the cluster of con-combatants sheltering in the treeline, Sir
Mumphrey fiddled with his temporal pocketwatch and delayed the lethal slam of
kinetic energy that would flatten every living creature in the Savage Park,
arranging instead for it to reappear seconds later in the spot in space where
the planet Earth had been. That one manoeuvre exhausted the chronal charge on
his timepiece.
Puzzled by that failure and off balance from the renewed
attacks of thunder hemigod and Makluan wyrm, Blaargh unleashed a second pulse
which simply robbed all present of any physical movement.
And just like that,
the battle seemed over.
The new CEO and Supreme Conceptual Deity of the Amalgamated Pantheons
looked up from his comic book. “That’s Mr Woopsa, Avis,” he answered
unexpectedly.
“Er, alright. Mr Woopsa.” The entrepreneur tried again. “I have
some papers you have to sign.”
“Actually, I don’t have to sign anything,”
Woopsa answered.
“What? Who do you think you are?”
The elephant-headed
Rakshasa rose from his desk, and suddenly he didn’t look half as funny anymore.
“I think I’m the inheritor of the vestigial power of pantheons that were old
when humans were painting on cave walls with burned sticks. I think I’m the
guardian of secrets and concepts that you have tried to abuse and exploit. I
think I’m the rightful inheritor of responsibility and power beyond measure. And
I think I’m giving you a count of ten to start running.”
“Now look here,” the
hook-handed entrepreneur objected.
“One.”
“I’ve invested a lot in this
sca… er, business deal.”
“Two.”
“And I have backers, who will want to see
their investment returned.”
“Three.”
“And… and I could help you.
Really.”
“Four.”
“…”
“Five.”
Roni Y Avis clutched his filofax and
fled. Woopsa looked over to the shadows beyond his desk.
“Very good indeed,”
applauded Xander the Improbable. “I think I can safely leave you here to handle
to retired pantheons. I’d better be getting back. I’ve got a Celestian invasion
to deal with, and then I need to make some plans for the end of the
world.”
“Well thanks for everything,” Woopsa answered. “Er… How do you plan
for the end of the world?”
“Cancel the milk,” Xander answered, vanishing into
the darkness.
The battle seemed over. Then CrazySugarFreakBoy! dropped
out of the trees and onto Psicho’s shoulders. “Hi!” he grinned. “You’re probably
wondering who I am and why I’m not affected by that kinetic restraint stuff.
Well basically, I’m the exception to the rule.”
Psicho reached out and found
he was now facing a mind with no psychic defences. Unlike the grim mental walls
of the Dark Knight or the studied occult disciplines of the Sorceress, or Yo’s
fervent belief-barrier, or even the steely Serious Matter walls of Hatman’s
Thinking Cap, this human was gloriously, vulnerably, open.
Psicho reached in
to shred him.
And Five million comic book heroes fought back.
The
Murderous Thought recoiled as eidetic memories of every plot in every comic this
man-child had ever read, every book, every movie, every cartoon all replaying to
demand his attention. And the theme of almost every one of them was: the bad guy
loses in the end.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. There was something else.
Something there at the back of this CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s mind, that
Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove had seen and remembered; that had become part of
him.
There was a door, a cupboard door. And it was opening. And the thing
inside, the terrible, ancient, infinite thing, was emerging. The
anti-thought.
“Hey, it’s a party!” slurred the Space Ghost, leaping from
CSFB’s memory into Psicho’s mind.
The Murderous Thought screamed. Then the
Deviate Lord called Psicho discorporated as his thoughts were scattered beyond
regathering.
“Pussy,” smirked CrazySugarFreakBoy! “And I hadn’t even got onto
the porn.”
Psicho’s death-scream staggered Blaargh, and the Finishing Touch’s
kinetic embargo momentarily weakened.
“Sorry about this, Manny,” G-Eyed said
as he reached to touch his ice-coated comrade, “but it’s all I can think
of.”
There was a flash of interdimensional energies and Goldeneyed shifted
ManMan inside the Deviate.
“Aaaagh!” Joe Pepper screamed. “Where am
I?”
“Inside Blaargh?” Knifey suggested helpfully.
“Aaaaaaagghh! How do I
get out?”
“Well,” Knifey went on patiently. “Do you see the sharp pointy
thing in your hand that’s talking to you…?”
The combined Lair Legion was
hammering at Blaargh by now, using weapon and claw and fire-breath and worse to
keep him back. But it was Joe Pepper panicking his way through a series of vital
internal organs that finally brought the beast low.
“Nice move, Goldeneyed,”
the Dark Knight approved as the Deviate Lord finally fell and Exile and Nats
helped pry ManMan from the corpse. “You might want to start running
now.”
“Whew!” Sorceress gasped, flopping into Hatman’s arms. “I’m pooped. How
about we do the next bit of this world tour thing in Tahiti?”
“Don’t relax,”
Finny told his weary comrades. “These two perps may be down, but there’s plenty
more for the LL to do before it’s over.”
“Oh,” Ziles sighed resignedly.
“Joy.”
But
some people found their way past that façade, and when they drove across the
thin ribbon of highway they discovered the black gothic edifice that had once
been, the insane institution designed by Leyland Reed to some disturbing
specifications that had led him to end his own life within its grim walls. This
Herringcarp Asylum, with its deep cellars stained with old blood and its barred
windows to mouldy padded cells was the special home of one reality-twisting
inmate who had made it his own.
“Good evening,” the Hooded Hood bade, gliding
into the Director’s Office with no other warning and discovering the Dark Knight
rummaging through his desk.
The Dark Knight reacted instantly, hurling a
razor-sharp knightarang at the cowled crime-czar’s throat. It vanished from
existence before it could reach the Hood, but the distraction was enough for the
Knight himself to vault the table and lunge at his enemy’s throat. It would take
two seconds before the Hood discovered that the newly-reborn Dark Knight was
still partly protected by the recreation energies of the Shaper of Worlds and
therefore partially resistant to retconning, and in two seconds the archvillain
would be dead.
“Very good,” the Hood approved from the far side of the room
to where he had been standing. “If I had tried to alter you so soon after your
regeneration it would have taken me too long, would it not? A most astute
strategy. What I pity I do my homework for these little confrontations. Now
before I depart and simply arrange for this room to have always been filled with
mustard gas why don’t you concede that you have been discovered and speak with
me like a civilised man, Mr Burch?”
“Burch isn’t real,” the urban legend
growled; but he relaxed his fighting stance slightly and furled himself in the
shadows near the door.
“You may as well let Mr Dean assume a more congenial
form as well,” the Hooded Hood suggested. “I’m sure he can’t be comfortable
masquerading as your jacket. It is my understanding that shapeshifting to such
extremes is tiring and a little painful for a Makluan.”
“Pain doesn’t
matter,” Fin Fang Foom declared as he morphed into his more familiar
humanoid-draconic shape.
“Of course it doesn’t,” agreed the cowled crime
czar. His eyes glowed greenly and the three of them were suddenly in the Hood’s
throne room. The archvillain took his seat and arched his fingers. “I’m
impressed that the two of you were able to penetrate my reality barriers to
burgle Herringcarp asylum,” he assured them. “There are few entities in the
Parodyverse that could accomplish such a thing. I assume you were seeking
information on my latest gambits?”
“We know what you’re up to, Hood,” Fin
Fang Foom told him, “We came to find out how to stop you.”
The Hooded Hood
considered this. “Then you must stop for tea,” he decided.
“Is not to
be feeling left out,” Yo suggested to the irritating archer, pouncing on him in
female form and mischievously sweeping him into his/her arms for a long deep
kiss.
“I’m feeling kind of left out too,” CrazySugarFreakBoy!
admitted.
“Uh, and me,” Nats added hopefully.
“And me,” Al B. Harper
agreed, just before Miss Framlicker drop-kicked him in the groin
again.
“Sorry,” she said to him. “I was trying to save your life again. My
mistake.”
“Y’know, I’m kind of sensing that you two might have met before,”
Amy Racecar admitted to Al B, watching the woman from the Interdimensional
Transportation Corporation stalk off to see about getting the Legion bus working
again.
“Not really,” squeaked Al B from his little bundle of misery on the
ground. “Only when we were engaged.”
Troia looked at the happy reunions.
Somehow Cheryl and Sorceress shone with happiness now they were reunited with
the men they loved. That must be nice, she thought with a little twinge.
“So,
big guy,” she said shyly to Donar. “Hi. Welcome back.”
“Thank you, milady
Troia,” the hemigod of thunder answered.
Then they stood apart from each
other awkwardly.
Across the clearing Dancer had caught up with Valeria and
Lisette. “Welcome back, you two. Nice wedding dress, Val. So you might be in the
family way, huh Laurie?” she asked excitedly.
“Maybe,” admitted the legal
secretary. “See, Bry and me got kind of zapped by Dr Loveray when we weren’t
expecting it and then…”
“I’ve not heard it called that before, kid,” Meggan
Foxxx admitted, “but I guess we’ve all been zapped by Dr Loveray a time or two.
When I met Dream’s father, that time under the desk in the C.O.’s office in that
Japanese military base…”
“There really was a villain called Dr Loveray,”
Dancer explained. “He had a, uh, a loveray. Really. He was really a bunch of
maggots. We thought he was dead but he turned up to threaten Sorceress and Hatty
recently.”
“I never did hear how that turned out,” Ziles noted. “Anyway, if
we can get the dimensional engines working on the bus again we can detour to my
spaceship and I can tell you in about three seconds with my scanners if Laurie
really is having a baby.”
“If you are,” asked Dancer, “what are you going to
do?”
“You know what Peter von Doom is attempting, of course,” the Hooded
Hood told his two guests.
“Assembling and distributing the technology
necessary to broadcast a planetwide mutation metamorphosis wave, transforming
the whole of life on Earth into super-powered mutates under his permanent mental
control,” DK replied, sipping his coffee now his portable toxin analyser had
declared it safe.
“You put us on his trail to distract us,” Finny added. “And
somehow you seem to have eliminated the Abandoned Legion and the JBH and a few
of the more active independents.”
“The Abandoned Legion has taken a short
holiday to the Skunk homeworld, where they will unfortunately be delayed dealing
with the civil war there. The JBH are undertaking a little test of worthiness to
appear on my list of enemies, and the survivors will return in due course to
face destruction at my hands. I have redeployed a few other potential nuisances
as well, and arranged for distractions to keep NTU-150 and Lisa from
interfering.”
“Lisa’s already distracted,” Finny pointed out. “She’s got
Christopher.”
“And your point would be…?”
“You distracted the LL too,”
accused the Dark Knight. “You sent us that pamphlet on how to defeat superheroes
that manipulated us into a world tour.”
“I thought you might not react
properly to me informing you by e-mail,” the Hood noted. “And your team needed
something of a break. Additionally I needed to pick off Exile and Goldeneyed,
making a deal with each of them to borrow their powers at some future point for
a twenty-four hour interval.”
“So you manipulated Lisette until G-Eyed had to
deal with you and you arranged for Valeria to be taken back to the Dreary
Dimension so that Exy had to cut a bargain,” deduced Foom.
“Oh, it goes back
further than that, at least to the time I enabled two ambitious men to
impregnate the three lovely Kumari sisters in the far future and therefore breed
Goldeneyed, Exile, and the Suicide Blonde. I went to a lot of trouble over
hundreds of years to ensure the correct genetic patterns so that the people
described in the Third Prophesies of Wilbur Parody would come into
being.”
“And we know that when just one of them remains, that one will
possess the powers of the others and be incredibly powerful,” the Dark Knight
remembered. “Or when one can borrow the powers of the others for twenty-four
hours, maybe?”
“That is my reasoning too,” the Hood conceded. “I need an
infinite power-source for a little experiment of mine, and the combined
abilities of the personifications of timespace, energy, and matter should do
it.”
“While we stop Peter von Doom for you?” Finny scowled.
“Whilst you
save the planet from a terrible fate, of course. That is what heroes do, is it
not?”
“We stop all villains,” the Dark Knight promised.
“Why did you
drip-feed us the information on von Doom, though?” the Makluan wondered. “You
could have stopped him yourself, or arranged for us to find out his full plot
much sooner. Instead we had to rely on a message from spiffy and the Abandoned
Legion about something that G-Eyed and some newbie heroes had done against the
League of Losers and New Tomorrow Enterprises, and add that to the evidence we
gathered from South Africa and Vesalia and everywhere else.”
“The timing of
your confrontation with von Doom is significant to me,” the Hooded Hood replied.
“Your team in the Savage Park were too late to prevent Psicho the Murderous
Thought from fulfilling his part of the bargain with Von Doom and imprinting the
mutagentic wave with the psionic obedience imperative that will mean the new
mutates will unquestioningly obey von Doom, but they will hopefully discover the
location of the recovered Celestian genetic device and thus be able to confront
von Doom before he triggers it in about eighteen hours or so.”
“And how does
him almost triggering that thing help you?” wondered the Dark Knight.
“Why as
you know to your recent cost, the Celestians tend to investigate when people
tamper with their equipment. The last time it was used the Abhumans were
punished by the Celestians by being confined into the Negativity Zone for
hundreds of years. My interest in von Doom’s plot is the summoning of the Space
Robots.”
“What do you want with a Space Robot, Hood?” demanded Fin Fang
Foom.
“Not one,” the Hood answered evilly. “All of them.”
“Hooga!” replied
Caveguy, Lord of the Savage Park. The Neanderthal had accidentally become the
ruler of the hidden Antarctic valley where dinosaurs yet roamed.
“Is that
Hooga yes or Hooga no?” Cheryl demanded of Caveguy’s interpreter, a somewhat
seedy minor Greek deity called Elsqueevio.
“It’s actually ‘Hooga now that
CSFB!, ManMan, and Nats have jumped in we’ll soon find out’,” the god of small
waters admitted. He had stayed with the Legionnaires in the Savage Park to
apologise for having to have opposed them in their recent godquest, and to thank
them for sorting out proper protection for the currently vacant Mount Olympus
through the new Supreme Conceptual Deity Woopsa.
Xander, who had also
inexplicably appeared in the Savage park long enough to confer with the Manga
Shoggoth and had then as quickly disappeared had only replied, “My bill’s in the
post.”
That same Manga Shoggoth was now watching the crystal lake expectantly
to see what would happen. “It is fascinating watching evolution at work,” he
noted.
“Hey, Whitney, are you and Hat coming in?” ManMan shouted. “The
water’s fine.”
“Jay’s too busy saving the world,” the Sorceress answered,
trying not to let any bitterness enter her voice. After all, saving the world
was a good thing, and everybody has to have their priorities right? Jay had been
with her for nearly five minutes before he had to go and be in charge
again.
“Can I have a word with you?” Goldeneyed asked the watching Shoggoth.
“Only Sorceress said you understood non-Euclidean science and stuff, and that
you might be able to help me with a little time-travel.”
“You have the
ability to shift through timespace already,” the bubbling protoplasm
answered.
“The Order of the Observing Eye blocked that power after I made a
little mistake in the ‘60’s,” G-Eyed confessed. “I think I may have been set up
though. Anyway, the only times I’ve been able to time-shift since are when I’ve
had some outside help, like when Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity combined her
powers with mine.”
“You do it every time you teleport,” the Shoggoth replied,
“Otherwise you would miss the planet which is hurtling at several hundred miles
per second through the void.” The creature grew some extra eyes to watch as Nats
was the first to discover the giant leeches in the lake. “I cannot assist you
with your rescue of the Shellett female from the fifteenth century,” he told Bry
Katz. “However, you may wish to discuss the situation with Sir Mumphrey Wilton
when he returns.”
“Mumph?” puzzled G-Eyed. “He’s a nice old buffer but I
really don’t know why Finny dragged him into this. I mean, it’s not like he has
any super-powers, is it?”
The Manga Shoggoth’s chuckling might have been
nothing more than his amusement as Man Man discovered the prehistoric electric
eels.
“Yeah.”
“It’s things
like this that make you realise how wonderful the world is, and why we have to
fight so hard to preserve it all.”
“Yeah.”
“And how lucky we are to get to
do such amazing things in such amazing places.”
“Yeah.”
Sarah Shepherdson
glanced across at the Amazon administrator.
“Is there something you want to
talk about, Troia?”
“Nope.”
“I still say we should have phoned out for Domino’s Pizza,” Flapjack
admitted as he watched Donar wrestle a tyrannosaurus.
“I think they’d have
some trouble delivering here,” Exile pointed out. “When that sort of thing
usually happens I think they contact ITC. And ITC send Nats.”
“And your point
is…?” smirked Flapjack.
“Thine breath stinketh worse than a Gjrugdingfroth of
Gjallerheim, but I am thine equal!” Donar shouted from inside the dinosaur’s
jaws.
“Y’know, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that man was
overcompensating for something,” Meggan pondered. “Ah, excuse me, boys. I’ve
gotta go pry some giant leeches of my l’il Dream.”
“I intend to reprogram them, of course. Then I shall eliminate
war, poverty, and crime and usher in a new golden age of peace and harmony under
my benevolent rule.”
“Could he do that, DK?” Finny checked.
“Reprogram
them?” the Dark Knight answered. “Oh sure, given the right power source and the
proper operating system stuff and about a billion kiloquads of computing
capacity and stuff. And a way of hacking in to their programs in the first
place.”
“It is amazing what one can do with a little preparation and some
divine influence,” suggested the Hood.
“The missing gods!” DK scowled.
“That’s why you gathered all that belief-energy together. It’s your focussing
method for that G-Eyed/Exile energy, right? And that just leaves the operating
system.”
“And you may recall from your exciting adventures last Hallowe’en
that Mr Parody was kind enough to construct such a system and call it
Paradopolis,” the Hooded Hood reminded them. “So it was just a matter of
restoring the old Paradopolis Variety Theatre to its former glory, finding a way
of attracting the Space Robots to Earth, and ensuring that no annoying
superheroes were around to interfere with my final ploy. Of course I will have
to conquer Paradopolis and portions of the planet to facilitate my gambit, but I
do not anticipate overwhelming problems in achieving that objective.”
“Except
us,” Finny warned.
“Ah, yes,” the Hooded Hood noted, focussing his glowing
green eyes on the intruders. “You.”
“We know how to overcome the dampening field around the Savage Park
in theory,” Miss Framlicker explained crossly. “And we’ve pretty conclusively
proved that it must have been part of the genetic control field the Austernals
used to set up a stable biosystem in this valley in the first place.”
“This
place had been here for millennia, yet it still manages to maintain thousands of
competing species that never lived together historically, in a valley that
should be frozen tundra not tropical rainforest,” Al B Harper explained. “So
there’s got to be some sort of causal inhibition field that stops technology
working and that keeps evolution from following a natural course.”
“If we can
isolate that field frequency enough to have Exile emit an energy-wage to
temporarily disrupt it then we could warp the bus out of here,” added Ziles.
“The problem is that none of our sensory instrumentation works here because of
the field.”
“Plus, I haven’t had a nice drink of coffee since I got here,”
Cheryl pointed out. “Be a dear, would you dear?”
Visionary knew his purpose
in life, so he flicked on the ring and found a kettle. Then he rediscovered that
no electrical power worked here. “Er, Amy,” he called. “Do you think I could
borrow your stomach for a moment?”
“Once we’ve got the bus operating we need
to locate the site where von Doom has relocated the stolen Celestial tech he
intends to use in his gene-bomb,” Hatman scowled. “We pick up Finny and DK then
we use the bus’ tracking systems to get there before the whole world gets
mutated.”
“And the clock is ticking,” Al B. worried. “But don’t forget that
the Hooded Hood intends to put his own nasty twist on this situation by using it
to have a go at the Celestian Space Robots themselves.” It had taken the
physicist over a year to deliver this warning to the Lair Legion; he wasn’t
going to let them overlook it.
“Finny and DK will deal with that,” Hatman
assured him. “I hope,” he added less assuringly.
“This is ridiculous,” Miss
Framlicker hissed as Visionary handed her coffee.
“Too many sugars?” Vizh
worried.
“Too many random variables for us to calculate the field strength of
the modulation wave covering the Savage Park, dear,” Cheryl clarified kindly.
“We’re having great difficulty working out how to drive the bus out of here and
get on with saving the world.”
“Oh,” Vizh shrugged. He’d just have had Finny
lift the whole vehicle out and fly it away from the dampening field, but he
assumed there must be some good reason nobody had suggested that.
“There’ll be nae concert if we don’t get these cables laid
down,” dull thud muttered (although right now everybody called him Davie,
because like his superhero comrades he had been memory-wiped of his heroic
identity and powers and was another cog in the Hooded Hood’s masterplan). “So if
ye’ve stopped being Michael bloody Jackson could you help me shift this coil?
It’s bad enough having him sitting around tuning his guitar all the time instead
of shifting his share.”
dull thud was glaring over to a stack of
crates where Chronic was fiddling with the Devil’s Guitar, a night-black
Stratocaster called Steve. “Sorry, can’t help,” Chronic smirked at them.
“Ingrowing toenail. Life at risk.”
“Y’know, I don’t think I’ve ever been into
the old Variety Theatre,” Jimmy considered, looking to the skyline south of the
park where the gothic old building loomed. “It’s been shut since I was born.
Strange to see how they’ve fixed it up and restored it, isn’t it?”
“And
where’s Josh got to with those cable clips?” thuddy complained.
Something inside
Josh snapped as the blows came harder and harder, and suddenly with a blur he
caught his attacker’s hand. Faster than could be seen he hammered a dozen
punches into the man’s midriff and hurled him back to the cabin wall.
At
dazzling speed De Brown Streak zipped forward to finish it. He stopped with
equally lightning reflexes as he realised his opponent was holding something
very sharp right against DBS’s jugular vein.
“Welcome back, Brown Streak,”
his attacker bade him. “We’ve got a lot to talk about. We have a lot in
common.”
The name Brown Streak seemed to light fireworks in Joshua Clement’s
mind; or maybe it was just the beating he had taken. He hadn’t yet noticed that
the bruises were almost healed by a metabolism working at a thousand times human
normal. “Where am…? No, never mind that, who the hell are you?”
The grizzled
man in the stained trenchcoat smiled nastily. “Me?” he replied. “I’m just a
Messenger.”
So on the whole it was a good job that Finny and DK
vanished the moment before the retcon hit them, really.
“What?” puzzled the
Hood. He didn’t like being taken off guard and he reached out with the
trans-probability perception which allowed him to know which strands of
causality to yank to accomplish his retcons, trying to find what had
happened.
It had happened in all the major and most of the minor alternate
timelines; certainly in all the ones he could afford to tamper with.
“Where
did they go?” How?” he hissed.
Then he caught it: the barest whiff of
temporal signature. The Dark Knight and the dragon had vanished through
time.
“My temporal barriers should have caught them,” the cowled crime-czar
scowled. Then he realised that the time-energy hadn’t been used to whip his
adversaries away. It had been used to keep them there, a few hours ahead of
their natural time zone. It was the expiration of those energies that had
allowed his guests to escape, and his temporal wards had been useless because no
energies had been used to make them vanish.
“The Chonometer of Infinity’s
temporal charge,” the Hooded Hood recognised at last. “Sir Mumphrey Wilton
helped them. Very neat. Very slick.”
Fin Fang Foom and the Dark Knight had
escaped with what they knew.
The Hooded Hood chuckled, delighted to have such
worthy adversaries, and went to make a few additional arrangements.
Note: This episode prompted a very funny follow-up from Donar, which may be perused here