#90: Untold Tales of the Purveyors of Peril: Reign of the Super-Villains

Posted by The Hooded Hood warns that this chapter involves nasty things happening, and assures you that some heroes were harmed during the making of this episode. on October 12, 2001 at 09:42:58:

#90: Untold Tales of the Purveyors of Peril: Reign of the Super-Villains

Previous chapters at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Character profiles at Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Villain profiles for Purveyors of Peril in #75: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion Who's Who Special Edition: The New Purveyors of Peril

Other useful things in Where's Where in the Parodyverse

People of the world, the society you previously knew has now ended. As of 11pm EST last night, the super-villain alliance known as the Purveyors of Peril have taken remote control of the planet’s biological and nuclear arsenals. These weapons of mass destruction will be detonated if any of the following ordinances are broken for any reason:

1. Association of former world governments, even down to local town assemblies, is forbidden. Any attempts to gather or organise will be punished severely.

2. All previous laws are repealed. There are no laws now in force. There are no rules of property or behaviour. A bounty is placed upon the heads of all former law-enforcement officials and military officers, and upon any remaining superheroes.

3. All prisons and mental institutions will be emptied immediately and their inmates given handguns upon release.

4. Purveyors of Peril and their local agents will be obeyed without question on penalty of gory death.

5. Any attempt to regain control of nuclear and biological arsenals will be punished by use of these weapons on local population centres.

Within the next few days local territories will be offered the opportunity to join a new world confederation which will restore the firm rule of law under new leadership. Those which do so will be protected from the excesses of an unregulated population. Choose wisely when you are offered salvation in the new order. You have been warned.

They were the dispossessed, the homeless, the addicts, the forgotten, and now they had license to do whatever they wanted as they stormed Beverly Hills and swarmed past perimeter walls and deserted security stations and fell upon those who had lived in comfort and luxury. Already the fires had started, and black fumes were spreading across the landscape in testimony of the truth that the most horrible things that can happen to humans are devised by other humans.
It was the dawn when Hollywood caught fire.
The occupant of 1225 Anaheim Way was awoken by the sound of a mob smashing through the picture windows downstairs. The intruders knew that she was rich, she was pretty, and she was alone. There was only one thing they didn’t know about her, in fact.
“Well, I hope you boys are going to apologise, then get a dustpan and broom and start tidying up the mess you caused,” Sersi of the Austernals warned them as she descended the stairs to her invaded lounge.
Their faces became lustful rictuses as they saw her, and then became pink snouts as she transformed them all to animals. “Pigs,” she said accurately.
For the first time she noticed the fires visible all across the valley beneath her house in the hills. “What on Earth is going on?” she puzzled. “And what’s that appalling smell?”
Then Gromm the Living Flatulence transformed himself into napalm and the house exploded in a massive fireball.
Sersi reeled in the blast, but before she could react to her surroundings destructing she was tangled in something she couldn’t break through and couldn’t transmute. She had a brief sense of childish giggling before a spacewarp opened beside her face and a solar flare seared through her. The release of the sun’s power briefly lit up the grey morning as the mile-long superheated plasma seared through the Heights, killing hundreds as fire a hundred times hotter than a volcano scorched some of the most expensive real estate on Earth.
Austernals can control their bodies by sheer willpower, which makes them effectively indestructible. Even now, blind and blackened by the heat (and still entangled in the wire which had endured the solar flare) Sersi was conscious of the pain. When the superheated air around her coalesced into diamond monofilaments, shredding her body still further she drew her will together to reform herself whole and ready to fight.
Something latched onto her consciousness, the fragment of pulped matter where she clung onto existence, and teleported it into a distant star. Then there was only bloody scorched meat, barely recognisable as once human.
“Payback is a bitch, isn’t it?” smirked the Suicide Blonde.
PsychoAcidPervGirl! retrieved her strangling wire and wiped it off while Gromm the Living Flatulence reformed. “We have what we came for,” she shrugged. “With access to genuine Austernal DNA and stuff our science boffins can find a way to neutralise the whole race so they can’t interfere. We got what we came for.”
Spacewarped transported the first fallen superhero’s corpse back to LA so the destruction of the Austernals could begin.

The amazing thing was that the Underground was still running. It was as if the maelstrom which was sweeping the world was too big for the controllers of London’s tube system to comprehend. So while the city above burned, while rioters looted indiscriminately and frightened mobs warred for food and weapons, the trains shuttled people away from the chaos, or perhaps spread it to the suburbs.
There were far less people on the trains in to London than those leaving, so Asil Ashling was able to find a corner seat in the front carriage and huddle miserably on the smelly bench. She clutched her shoulder and pressed her hand on the wound to try and slow the bleeding. She hoped that the train would come in to Waterloo station before her pursuers caught up with her.
The trains taking passengers away from the stricken capital were packed beyond capacity with terrified people fleeing the city, but the incoming tube held only a few people who had to get to Waterloo station to chance for a train that would get them home to safety – assuming there was safety anywhere in this world which had suddenly become so unpredictable. Asil was able to clearly see the panic at the far end of the compartment as the connecting door opened and the two hunters loped in. The first woman to scream was slashed down by a fast, terrible claw.
It was Rottweiler and the Terrier. Once they had been one person, a human security guard. That was before the gene-splicing that had endowed fierce canine instincts and abilities upon the resultant creature. Terrier was a miniature cloned offspring of Rottweiler, and the two acted with one instinct. Both enjoyed the chase, both enjoyed the rending of the prey at the end of the chase.
Asil rose and fled for the rear of the train. The carriage swayed as it negotiated a curve and then there was a blur of lights which indicated they had reached a station. The hunters scented their prey’s fear and raced after her. They covered half the distance between themselves and Asil in the time she managed to get the emergency control to open the doors so she could fall out onto the platform. As Asil raced for the escalator they were only a few steps behind her.
The gunshot wound to the head surprised Rottweiler, sending him sprawling backwards in a bloody heap. The Terrier turned at leaped at the new attacker but caught a second shotgun cartridge in the stomach.
Asil controlled her panic and recognised her rescuer. “I-Inspector Gallowglass!”
“You called me to meet you here, didn’t you?” the Scotland Yard policeman grumped.
“Mumphrey always said to call you if there was trouble,” the cloned girl explained. “I can’t reach him, the international communications system is down, and I’m being hunted by the Purveyors of Peril.”
“Not by these two any more.”
As if in spite of the Inspector’s words, Rottweiler sat up, his bloody muzzle already healed of the previous damage.
“Damn!” Gallowglass snarled, firing again. “We can’t stop them. We’d better get out of here.”
“Where?” Asil demanded. “Where is safe? It’s the end of the world.”
“Miss Ashling, we’re an old country. We have had a long time to prepare. Centuries. This way, please.”

“Okay,” sighed Visionary, “where are we? This place looks kind of like Salvador Dali, M.E. Escher, and Fritz Lang got together to design a city, then got Jack Kirby to draw it.”
“And where’s the bus?” Amy Racecar added, crossly.
“Last reading I got we were caught up in a massive temporal nexus then got hit by a foreshock wave of a massive multidimensional transfer,” Miss Framlicker reported.
Only physicist Al B. Harper understood a word she was saying. “I’m guessing there was a trap set for us when we tried to return to Paradopolis. That was the time-field thingie. But then there was a huge disturbance in local space, kind of like, oh, I don’t know, say the Celestian Space Robots materialising in the city, and their carrier signal interacted with the trap, and threw us waaay of course.”
“That might be the how,” acknowledged Cheryl, pulling herself to her feet and admiring the silvery towers that stretched quite literally to infinity, “but that still doesn’t tell us where we are.”
“We’re in the home of the Celestians,” Mumphrey explained, trying to sound casual. “Their base of operations, don’t you know?”
“We are?” ManMan gasped. “Cool. Hey, Knifey, hear that? We’re…”
“Yes, I heard,” the sentient weapon answered tersely. “Now shut up and stop talking to me.”
“Why?” ManMan puzzled. Knifey made no reply.
“Yo is thinking it is very being pretty here,” Yo suggested, watching a series of continent-sized gears rotated far below them.
“And very dangerous,” Mumphrey added. He looked around and seemed disappointed. “Hmph. No guide this time. Must be because we came by another route.”
“This time?” Lisette noted. “You’ve been here before? Here, Space Robot HQ?”
“Hmmm. Well, yes,” admitted the eccentric Englishman. “Most of you have too, although you probably don’t remember. It was one of those temporal anomaly doodads. Best not to think about it.” [Note: Mumphrey’s previous adventure in the City of the Celestians can be found in The Journal of Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Asil’s Diaries, Extract Twenty-Six In which Sir Mumphrey Wilton and Baron Heinrich Zemo meet unexpected guides and go treasure-hunting in the city of the Celestians and The Journal of Sir Mumphrey, Extract Twenty-SevenIn which the battle to control the universe is resolved, and everybody joins in the big fight at the end of the adventure]
“Why is it so dangerous?” Meggan wondered.
“Can’t you feel the power here?” Valeria shuddered, hugging herself.
“Do the wrong thing, pull the wrong lever, and you could rewrite the Parodyverse,” Al B. realised.
“Don’t touch anything,” Cheryl said firmly to Vizh.
“Same goes for you too,” Lisette added, grabbing Flapjack as the hunchback tried to sidle off.
“But women would be even more fun if they had four breasts each,” complained the Lair Legion’s major domo.
“Not if you’re dead,” Lisette pointed out very firmly.
“If this is Celestian City, then we must be translated into spiritual analogues of ourselves,” Miss Framlicker suggested. “That’s why the bus didn’t come along. It doesn’t have any sense of self.”
“Well I think it’s an evil bugger of a vehicle,” muttered ManMan; but he was still puzzling over the undertone of fear in Knifey’s voice.
“So what are we to be doing next?” Yo wondered, looking around with the eager face of a natural tourist.
“Well,” Al B. winced, “I guess we try and stop the Hooded Hood from taking over the Parodyverse.”

Professor Manyarms dropped the battered and bleeding body of the Australian Prime Minister on the floor. Then he paused and deliberately shattered the fallen leader’s kneecaps; because he could. “Well I guess that settles the question of who rules this pathetic country,” he sneered, glaring round at the pale frightened Parliament he and his comrades had invaded. “I believe you were instructed not to assemble?”
“We don’t give in to terrorists. We won’t…” began the Leader of the Opposition. He was cut off short as Gamona killed him with a deft flick of her left hand.
“Any more heroes?” the alien assassin asked. There were no takers.
“I think there might actually be another one, as a matter of fact,” Huntmaster suggested, appearing in a teleportation flash courtesy of his companion Spacewarped. “It seems as though the ever-irritating SPUD intelligence agency infiltrated a spy to try and determine what the Australian government knew about New Tomorrow Enterprise’s little venture down in the Swamps, the placee our Lair Legion friends have just dropped a volcano on.”
“So?” shrugged Manyarms.
“So this little lady is well worth the hunting. Her name is Natalia Veronica Lesya Romanza, and she used to be the wife of Carl Bastion, Trickshot.”
“And she is in Sydney?” Gamona asked.
“Probably in this very building,” the Huntmaster noted. “We can always use another incentive to lure the Lair Legion into our clever trap.”
“Well, I was looking forward to demolishing that eyesore Opera House,” Professor Manyarms shrugged, “but I suppose business comes first. Let’s find her and hurt her.”
Huntmaster grinned. “Let the hunt begin.”

Rottweiler and the Terrier almost caught up with Asil and Gallowglass at Piccadilly Circus, but the rioting mobs got in the way and parted too slowly when the mutated human/canine hybrids began killing people. Asil was having trouble keeping up. Her earlier close encounter with the monsters had left her bleeding.
“Where are we going?” she gasped as the Inspector dragged her down yet another of the hundreds of mediaeval alleys that hide behind London’s main thoroughfares.
“The safest place in London,” Gallowglass answered. “At least if you’re loyal to the Crown.”
“Parliament?” Asil puzzled. “We’re going to Westminster?”
“I said loyal to the crown, Miss Ashling. Besides, last I heard these Purveyors of Peril were invading the Mother of Parliaments, and so they’ll be finding troubles of their own there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t really know,” Gallowglass admitted. “Not my department. We left that bit to Mister Smartarse Smoothy Johnstantine, apparently.”

“’Ello, darlings. If you’re looking for the honourable members they’ve run off on their honourable legs,” Con Johnstantine told Velcro Vixen and Polypheme-1 as they burst into the House of Commons. “Still, if it’s a spot of dinner and clubbing you’re looking for, I know a few good places.”
“Who are you, man?” Polypheme demanded.
“Me?” the trench-coated troublemaker shrugged. “I’m the bloke what could cure you of being a lesbian. Just give us a chance, luv.”
“He’s Con Johnstantine,” VelcroVixen grimaced. “And actually he’s probably not boasting. Shame we’re going to have to kill you now, Con.”
“And I don’t think I introduced my oppo here,” Johnstantine continued. “VV, meet Rodney the Patronising Git.”
“Are these really supposed to be the varsity of supervillains?” Rodney asked scathingly. “Who did you sleep with to get on the team? Or who didn’t you sleep with?”
And so the battle begun.

“What do you mean I can’t get a phone call through to the States? I happen to be the King of the Sea Monkeys you know!”
“I’m sorry sir, but all lines are down.”
“But I have to get through to Elyse and tell her I’ve completed the third task of courtship! I’ve only got nine more to go before… Hello? Hello? Operator?”
The telephones had gone dead just as the hotel lights had gone out. In fact a quick look from the balcony showed that the whole of Rio had been plunged into darkness. It looked rather beautiful by moonlight.
There was a knock on the door. “What?” Banjooooo asked rather irritably. The wounds he had taken from his battle with the Conceptual Worm earlier were still itching, and for some reason in the middle of the battle he had developed extra super-powers, which was usually the sign that some cosmic force was at work, stimulating his Celestial-bred ability to genetically adapt to deal with galaxy-class threats. The Conceptual Worm wasn’t really that, being only the third in a series of rites he had to complete before he could take a human bride and breed the next generation of Sea Monkeys, and the sudden manifestation of an ability to turn intangible down his left side had left him rather nauseous.
“Room service,” the maid called, carrying a silver candelabra and placing it beside the bed.
“What’s going on out there?” Banjooooo wondered. “Are there often power blackouts in Rio? I was trying to phone.”
“I don’t know, sir,” the maid admitted. “I’m just here to service you.” And then she squirmed out of her black uniform dress and dropped it to the floor.
“What?” Banjooooo spluttered. “No. I mean, I’m engaged. I didn’t order… What are you doing with that candlestick?”
It was a relief that the supervillains burst through the window at that moment. Appendage Man diverted his attention between wrapping the Sea Monkey in a dozen crushing limbs and seizing the unresisting girl on the bed, but the Voodoo Vicar pressed pins into a miniature replica of Banjooooo crippling him with pain and Hellfrasier plunged his hand right into the hero’s chest. It was but a moment’s work to rip out the Sea Monkey’s heart.
“Tastes like chicken,” was Hellfrasier’s verdict.
Across the city, Dr Loveray continued to send out the rays which destroyed all inhibition across the whole of Rio and took careful note of the effects his grand experiment might have. He wanted to know how long it would take for a whole city to sex themselves to death.

The warning sirens went off in the Kremlin before the Purveyors of Peril broke through perimeter security.
“This way please, Mr Bautista,” Colonel Grushov advised his VIP visitor. “We will have to conduct the trade agreement negotiations at some other time. This is a class one emergency. We will evacuate you to a place of safety.”
“What’s going on then?” Jamie wondered, seizing up his briefcase and taking it along with him.
“I don’t know, sir. However, that warning siren is quite clear. We have…”
“You!” a voice shouted from the end of the corridor.
“Chairman!” gulped Grushov as the leader of the Federation of Russian Republics strode down towards him. “You should be…”
Then the soviet soldier died as his Chairman stabbed him with a carving knife.
Jamie ran. He found a room and was slamming to door shut even as Indigo Impostor shifted shape and raced after him. It took a few moments for the Impostor to impersonate Hulk Hogan and kick the door in.
With long practise Jamie Bautista only needed a few moments. The briefcase flew open and the red and gold armour attached to the crippled industrialist’s arms and legs and torso. As the Impostor burst in a phased repulsor blast from NTU-150 caught him in the cheat and hurled him through the wall opposite.
Then NTU-150’s bionic right hand was sliced clean away from the rest of the armour.
“Very good, comrade,” the Razor Ballerina admitted, “but you have no defence against me. I can cut through anything.”
“Really?” Enty asked, trying but failing to back away from a spin that sliced across his vital chestplate. “Even power cables?” And he electrified the surface of his armour. As the third slice caught him the Ballerina spasmed and fell to the ground twitching.
Jamie started an urgent diagnostic cycle but his sensors shrieked to him about an opening spacial rift. He span round and released his chest pulse cannon at the opening. Spacewarped fell backwards, caught by surprise as he emerged from the vortex. His companion didn’t even notice the impact.
“Cyborg” Onslaughter called. “I’ve come to kill you.”
NTU-150’s threat warning computers were screaming at him even as the indestructible tyrant from another world dropped a quarter of the Kremlin on him and then started to get rough.

spiffy woke up in a coffin, with three thin, bone-white, wrinkled faces peering down at him. “Gah!” he gasped.
“Don’t disturb yourself, Mayor Hopkins,” one of the faces assured him, pushing him back down into the mahogany casket with a spindly hand that shouldn’t have been that strong. “We know how to look after the dead.”
spiffy realised that he was travelling in an old horse-drawn hearse, and his companions were clad as undertakers. “I… I was shot,” he remembered. Then he saw the red stuff all over his chest.
“Fake, I’m afraid,” the undertaker told him. “Mere paint pellets to simulate a proper assassination. We were very careful to specify that when we retained the services of the Confiscator.”
The ferned phenomenon recognised the name of one of the Parodyverse’s premiere if ageing assassins. “Why…?”
“We needed to get you away from the observation you were under,” he was told. “Since we have extensive experience of… necromantic accoutrements we felt this might be the best way. Your friend the Messenger was most upset however. I feel he may be severe in his chastisement of the Confiscator.”
“You’re kidnapping me?” spiffy worried. “It won’t work. Pretty much all the places I’m Mayor of have made clear that they have a zero co-operation stance for terrorism and extortion when I’m concerned.”
“You mean they won’t pay? And they call us ghouls. This isn’t a kidnapping, Mayor Hopkins. This is a rescue. The cities are in danger, and we require your assistance.”
“That sound bad. Er, I mean… Wait a minute! Ghouls?”
The undertakers bowed. “We are the Ghouls of Old Gothametropolis York,” their spokesundead explained politely. “I am the Abyssal Greye.”
“Aaaagh!”
“And we expect you to find a way of thwarting the machinations of your father, the Hooded Hood."
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”

“So where are we going?” Asil wondered. “Buckingham palace?”
“Buckingham Palace?” Inspector Gallowglass sneered. “Buck House is new. We’re going to the fortress of the Kings of Britain since before history started being written down. We’re headed for there,” he gestured. “The White Tower of London.”
“It’s just an old castle,” Asil pointed out. “A tourist place. These are super-villains, with super-powers.”
Gallowglass looked at her. “And do you really think this is the first time we’ve had these problems, in all the years of our nation? Believe me, the Tower is prepared.”
“The problem, of course, is reaching it,” Headcase suggested, emerging from the shadows and peeling off the flesh skullcap of the native Londoner he had used to pursue Gallowglass through the back-streets.
The Inspector brought up his shotgun and loosed both barrels at the macabre creature who had gained the ability to take on the traits of any human whose head he wore. It was too late. Headcase had already changed his gristly headwear.
“This is my souvenir of Senor Indestructablo,” he explained, shrugging off the bullets with a little giggle. “He was a South American hero who found he wasn’t as indestructible as he thought. But he was bulletproof alright.”
“Miss Ashling, run. I’ll hold this… thing off.”
“I’m not going to desert you inspector.”
“You said you had important information that Mumphrey needed. You have to stay alive to give it to him. Now run!”
Asil shot an anguished look at the policeman but found only determination in his wrinkled face. With a little sob she staggered off towards the grey walls of the Tower of London, the fortress of kings.
She was almost at the door before Rottweiler and the Terrier brought her down.
“It was a good hunt,” Rottweiler panted, dripping saliva onto her face. “But now’s the best part.”
“You’re going to kill me?”
“Eventually,” leered the killer.
“No,” Asil answered determinedly. “I think not.” And as the would-be murderers held her down they found her becoming younger.
“This won’t help,” Rottweiler told her. “Tender meat is better.” The terrier yelped his agreement.
Still Asil used her ability to control her age, bringing her back to childhood, to infancy, to being a mere baby.
“What are you doing?” Rottweiler demanded as she shrunk in size and became something red and indistinct.
Asil didn’t, couldn’t answer. Now she was less than a foetus, until with a tiny shimmer she was nothing at all. Asil Ashling was gone.

The Celestial Space Robots that had been used by the creators of the Parodyverse to construct and maintain it descended down on the glowing city as its arcane architecture harnessed stolen divine power sources to overwrite their programming. In the streets below citizens stood immobile, now subsumed into part of the massive machine that the city had become, shorn of their will, nothing more than components of a trap designed a century and a half earlier by civic founder Wilbur Parody.
In Off-Central Park the crowd gathered for the Save the Paradopolis Variety Theatre toppled to their knees as their mental energies were refocussed to activate the time/space puzzle box that was their home city. On stage one man surfed the apocalypse and cranked his guitar up to full volume.
Steve the guitar sang like a fallen angel, which wasn’t actually that big a stretch of metaphor given its origins, and Chronic took it to the bridge.
“What the hell is he doing?” dull thud worried, pressing his hands to his ears as all his stolen memories of who and what he really was came flooding back to him.
“Oh, so now we’re talking?” Cressida the telepathic tapeworm in his stomach answered. “Well, since you ask, as far as I can tell Chronic’s getting ready to fight the Space Robots.”
“He’s what?” snapped Messenger as thud shared this news. “I was there when the entire Lair Legion failed to dent one of these things.”
“Perhaps I could try a really big explosion?” ventured Dynamite Boy. Already the hypersonics from Steve were causing arc lights to blow out and glass to shatter in a two mile radius.
“Oh yes, more devastation would be a huge help,” De Brown Streak answered. “Look, we have to find the Hooded Hood and stop him. All this Purveyors of Peril taking over the world stuff is just a way of keeping us all distracted while he gets on with the real plan. We have to find him and take him down.”
“I like the way you think,” Messenger approved.
Now Steve was pumping out harmonics on the same cycles that send dogs into epileptic fits and make solid objects liquify, and Chronic was focussing it all into one tight beam.
“There’s an overwhelming imperative about that guitar,” Cressida warned dull thud. “It’s all about rebelling against the gods.”
“And the Celestians build gods,” thuddy noted.
Then Chronic pointed the guitar straight upwards and released all that sound and fury in one black burst that simmered through the skies and blasted a Space Robot two hundred miles inland.
Then the Celestians got cross.

Beijing, which used to be known as Peking, was in flames. There hadn’t been that much resistance actually, but Commander Rox-Hoff, late of the Skree Imperial Star Corps liked to see some flames. It made the conquered sit up and pay attention.
“Is everything secured?” he asked Anvil Man as the walking tank returned from his bloody field encounter with the remnants of the massive Chinese People’s Army.
“Too easily for my tastes,” grumbled the armoured colossus. “Once I popped a few planes and a few tanks and then pulled the heads off a few generals the rest just came to attention and waited for my orders.”
“I felt that in such an intensely structured society it would be easy to gain control over the populace,” Rox-Hoff approved. “Eventually the entire planet will have to be trained to these levels of sheep-like obedience. Apparently things are not going so smoothly elsewhere.”
“That’s right,” Savagetooth growled, teleporting in with Spacewarped. “I just got back from Chicago, where th’ little scuts actually tried to organise their national guard against me.” The feral psychopath was covered in blood and gore but none of it was his. “I gave them something to cry about,” he grinned.
HuntingJustice DeathMarrow strode into the Winter Palace that Rox-Hoff had commandeered as his command post. “We have resistance strongpoints all across the planet. Dallas, Quebec, Liverpool, Bremen, Rome, Dublin, Wakandybar…”
“Resistance strongpoints are good,” Rox-Hoff explained. “We will allow them to grow for a while. Best to gather as many of the troublemakers as possible where they are easy to find. Then we nuke them.”
“I don’t like the idea of nuking ‘em,” Savagetooth complained. “Can’t taste the blood or hear the screams. I say we go in on the ground and shred ‘em one by one. Or hamstring ‘em and make ‘em watch while we do their families.”
HuntingJustice DeathMarrow handed a set of reports to Rox-Hoff. “We also have a good groundswell of support. There are an estimated quarter of a million people claiming loyalty to the new regime, or at least committing their atrocities in our name. There have been some remarkable acts of courage and nobility, but inevitably the darker side of human nature will win out.”
“Inevitably,” the Skree soldier agreed. “Have we not played out this scenario a hundred times in the Hood’s alternate realities?”
“Yeah, and if that’s accurate then we’ve gotta expect the Lair Legion to turn up any time now,” Anvil Man remembered. “I like this bit.”
“What, where they come up against a force which is their superior numerically, tactically, and in terms of power?” HuntingJustice DeathMarrow preened, “and then die one by one, knowing they have failed in their duty to protect mankind, and that in that failure they have doomed their world… to us?”
“Yeah, that part,” grinned Anvil Man.
“And the bit where they squeal like pigs as we kill ‘em,” added Savagetooth.
“That too.”
Rox-Hoff looked at his personal chronometer. It was nearly time for phase two. “Let them come,” he said.

Next issue: They Come It’s the Lair Legion vs the new Purveyors of Peril for all the marbles. Thrill as DK and Con Johnstantine team up to be scathing to VelcroVixen and her team of killers! Gasp as Exile struggles with his evil cousin (that’s Suicide Blonde, not G-Eyed) in the ruins of Beverly Hills! Shudder as Professor Manyarms reveals his sinister plans for Contessa Romanza and Bethany Shellett! Close your eyes as Dr Loveray turns Rio into one huge, seething sex-pit – okay, well more of a huge seething sex-pit – and only CSFB! and Sorceress can save the day! Boggle as Rox-Hoff’s world command centre comes under attack by a cross Canadian and a flying delivery boy! Tremble as Onslaughter takes on the most powerful Legionnaires and laughs as he breaks them! Swallow very hard as Visionary tries to fix the universe. Worry a great deal as spiffy and the Paradopolis Irregulars fight way out of their class as they invade Herringcarp Asylum. It’s really the clash of the titans next time in Untold Tales of the Lair Legion vs the New Purveyors of Peril – This Time It’s Too Important to be Personal.