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This message #96: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The Nightmare Scenario was posted by The Hooded Hood dips into controversy and continuity to offer up this worst case option on Saturday, January 12, 2002 at 07:32.
Author’s Note: I usually hold that a story shouldn’t need additional explanations or excuses, but since the tale here sets out to address some dangling threads of continuity, I suppose I’d better remind people of what has gone before.
In Untold Tales of the Lair Legion World Tour we established that Rick Foreman, Exile, made a deal with the sinister Destroyer of Tales, Dark Thugos. Exile traded his future in exchange for being able to rush to the rescue of his ladyfriend Valeria of Carfax. He also made a second deal with the Hooded Hood, allowing the Hood to borrow his powers for twenty-four hours at some point in the future.
Exile’s truncated future was chronicled by his creator himself, who outlined Exile’s decline into a supernatural vigilante engine of vengeance and his apparent death (for example in
Exile #28). Rick has apparently decided that this wasn’t the direction to take the character and has suggested that the stories be ignored. I hope he’ll forgive me for taking the liberty of using them as raw material here.
Messenger has undergone some serious adventures recently, and some of these have involved the Lair Legion, including a storyline in which they were captured and assumed dead. Messenger himself died at the end of his battle with Mr Lucifer and Puritan, and the story presented below slightly predates the tale of Messy’s return from the grave.
The Dark Knight also had an unpleasant (and currently unresolved) encounter, in which he met a corrupted manifestation of what may have been his murdered wife.
After the World Tour ended, Donar declared his interest in Troia 215. This was mostly chronicled in the
Donar/Dancer Special Editions #3-11, and then latterly in Cheryl’s part of the recent Round Robin series,
”I feel pretty, oh so pretty…”, which outlines Donar’s attempts to enter the Amazon Olympic games at Troia’s request. We hear more of this incident herein.
In accordance with the stated intents of their authors, Trickshot and CrazySugarFreakBoy! are absent for this tale, each involved in adventures to be chronicled by their respective creators. Nats is also tied up at this point in time as he finally resolves what all those dreams about a stick are about and gains the alien Psychostave, as depicted in Nats’ own series of late.
A number of other traumatic events have recently stricken the Lair Legion, as detailed in the writings of Finny, Nats, Amazing Guy, spiffy, and others. Suffice to say that it’s been a rough few months for the team.
Finally, folks may remember a survey I posted six or seven months back wherein I sought guidance from people about the direction various characters should go. I’ve tried to incorporate as much of the feedback as possible in my stories since then, and this episode more or less completes the things I determined to do based upon what was suggested at the time. Thank you for your contributions.
All of which brings us to this tale, which is a story about beginnings and endings, about what we hope for and what we get, and about why the details are important.
#96: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: The Nightmare Scenario
Six months passed.
Fin Fang Foom sat in the Lair Legion Conference Room and stared at the empty chairs in the darkness.
“Hi,” NTU-150 called, poking his head round the door. “Have the lights fused again? I swear it was only a reverse sine-feedback loop in the…”
“The lights are fine. I just wanted the dark.”
“Ah. Sorry,” Enty sighed. “The funeral.”
“Yes. The funeral,” said the Makluan quietly. “The latest funeral.”
Jamie Bautista slipped into the room and sat down beside the leader of the Lair Legion. “It’s never easy, Finny.”
“It’s getting harder, Enty,” Finny whispered. “Every test takes us closer to destruction than the last. Jarvis, Darkhwk, Messy, and now Exile. In the last year we’ve been damn near killed a dozen times, hospitalised, kidnapped, tortured, declared dead…”
“And we saved the world,” Jamie reminded him. “That’s the job. That’s why we first sat round this table.”
Foom nodded. “It doesn’t make it any easier, though. Now I find myself lying awake every night worrying about what I should have done, should be doing, should remember to do tomorrow, so that nobody else dies.”
“Sounds like you need a break.”
“It’s not going to happen, Enty. Hatman’s kind of… distracted right now, what with the difficulty he’s having with Whitney. Trickshot’s on extended leave. Troia’s on Amazon Isle. CSFB!’s training his Goofball Gauntlet. Nats is missing somewhere looking for some damn stick he keeps dreaming about or something. Even DK is pretty preoccupied since he encountered somebody claiming to be his dead w… somebody he once knew who was murdered long ago. I really appreciate you taking some time to pinch-hit while we’ve been short-staffed, but I can’t afford to let up right now.”
“You still have a strong team. Donar, Goldeneyed, and Dancer could handle a lot.”
“Dancer’s only around because she’s worried about me and the others. She’s not really into all this super-crime-fighting.”
“She’s still here when it counts, though.” Enty reminded his friend. He paused. “Nobody is blaming you, Finny. Exile’s death was nobody’s fault.”
The table edge cracked under the dragon’s claw. “Tell that to Valeria, Jamie. You saw her at the memorial, weeping like her world had ended. Hell, I suppose it has.”
“I saw Ziles and Dancer and Sorceress looking after her.”
“She’s supposed to… I don’t know… She deserved a happy ending after everything she’s been through. I’ve never seen anybody love anybody like she loved Derek. They should have been together and had a long, happy life.”
“The world isn’t full of happy ever afters,” Enty answered sadly. “Love doesn’t conquer all.”
“Exile traded his happy ending to Thugos the Destroyer of Tales to save Valeria from the Dreary Dimension. How can we blame him for turning into that… that black thing that he was just before he died?”
“We can’t. And we can’t blame ourselves either, Finny. Really.”
Foom snorted and forced himself to get back to business. “I suppose we should consider a new line-up for the team, bring us up to full strength again.”
“It’s the way we do it, Finny.”
“It’s the right way,” agreed the dragon
“Am I supposed to gasp as you loom out of the shadows like that and wet my pants?” Commissioner Graham asked as the Dark Knight appeared at the crime scene.
“Whatever you enjoy,” the urban legend growled, striding over the police tape to inspect the bodies. “What happened?”
“At first glance it seems as though the woman of the household got up in the middle of the night, went downstairs to get a kitchen knife, butchered her family and then stabbed herself,” the commissioner scowled.
“Another one?” the Dark Knight shook his head. “This is the fifth similar case this week. No sign of illegal entry, clear fingerprints, perfect evidence. I don’t like it.”
“Would you boys mind not liking it over on the other side of the room?” Ziles asked, stepping forward with a sensor probe. “I need to take a few readings here and… ah, I thought so.”
“What?” DK demanded.
“The chemical balance in this woman’s brain. It’s the same as what I detected down at the morgue on the other murderers. This woman was asleep when she killed herself.”
“Asleep,” objected Graham. “You’re claiming she murdered her family while she was sleepwalking?”
“Yes,” answered Ziles defiantly. “That is exactly what I think.”
“Well?” Whitney Darkness asked Jay Boaz as they met on the waterfront overlooking the Paradopolis Sound. “Have you thought about it?”
“I’ve thought about nothing else,” Hatman answered. For once he was not dressed in what he thought of as his working clothes, his superhero costume, and he was without headgear of any kind. “I just don’t know what to do.”
“Look,” the Sorceress told him, taking his hands in hers. “I love you. You know I do. And I know you’ve loved me for as long as we’ve known each other. But that’s not enough.”
“I know,” Jay agreed. “You want a future. A home. A family.”
“Not right now,” Whitney assured him. “I’m not getting broody, even though I suppose in a sense I’m the product of thousands of years of honing the perfect witch-breeding organism. It’s just that there’s so much more to life than patrolling for evil with the Lair Legion. I need to know that someday I’ll come first, just for a little while.”
“That’s the point, Whit. You know I’d never lie to you. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to turn my back on people who need me. I told you how I accidentally got injected with drugs containing this Serious Matter stuff. It was supposed to turn me into some cold, terrible instrument of Order, but somehow I managed to stay me and do the right things whenever I could. How can I turn my back on my responsibilities?”
Whitney turned away. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this, Jay. I’m not really a superhero. I’m a Sorceress. Anything I can do comes from being one with the powers of the natural and the supernatural. It’s like… you’re a cop and I’m a priestess. It’s not an easy match.”
“You were in the Abandoned Legion long before you joined the LL,” Hatman pointed out.
“The AL was different,” Sorceress answered. “Not so formal and organised. They didn’t get into adventures every ten minutes, and they didn’t have a massive rogues gallery queuing up to take them out, and they… I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Whitney, you needed a vacation. We’ve taken a vacation. It’s been wonderful, just you and me and the surf and the sea. But we can’t hide forever.”
The Sorceress looked out across the bay to Parody Island where the Lair Mansion stood. “What if I said I wasn’t coming back? What if I asked you to stay with me instead?” Her long blonde hair flared in the wind as she turned back to Jay. “What if you had to choose?”
“Hello everyone. This meeting will come to order,” spiffy called to the crowd assembled in the Bean and Donut Coffee Bar.
“Can I just check that everyone has a drink, first?” Dancer asked. “Er, I promised my waitress friend Sarah that I’d make sure everyone was made welcome,” she added carefully.
“Believe me, this is Damn Fine Coffee,” Al B. Harper assured her.
“I could use another crueller, though,” dull thud suggested. Shep tossed one over.
“First of all I’d like to thank Dancer for inviting us all here,” announced spiffy, “And for getting the appropriate police amnesties, of course.”
“How did you manage that, exactly?” De Brown Streak wondered.
“Oh, you know,” Sarah Shepherdson shrugged. “Improbably.” By not asking she didn’t add.
“Why exactly are we here?” Chronic asked, slouching in a booth with his feet on the table. “I’m not doing another of your damn charity promotional videos.”
“Order!” called spiffy.
“Another biscotti?” suggested Al. B. Shep managed to drop it right in his laté so it splashed out onto his pants.
“The reason Dancer asked you all here tonight – and asked me to come and talk to you too – is because she thinks the Lair Legion needs some help.”
“I’ve seen how they function,” Chronic admitted. “They need all the help they can get. Especially Donut. Serious, professional help.”
“I’ve had a sort of tip-off that something nasty is afoot,” Dancer explained to her friends. “We have to do something about it.”
“Why don’t you just talk that ManMan dork into doing this whatever it is?” Chronic bitched. “He’s usually dumb enough to take on these jobs for you.”
“Manny’s out of town with Stacy” snapped Dancer, “so I had to go with whatever I could find.”
“Excuse me,” said Visionary worriedly, “but I thought I retired. I wrote a note and everything. Several notes.”
“In crayon,” snickered Fleabot, Vizh’s robotic-insect companion.
Everybody ignored Visionary’s objections, so there was no change there.
There was a crashing sound from the back room. “Oh no,” Dancer winced. “Space Ghost has found the taramasalata again. Explain what’s worrying me, spiffster. I’ll be right back. With a mop.”
“I ask thee, if thy woman didst command thee to enter yon female beauty pageant and Olympiad, wouldst thou not endure a painful bikini-waxing for her sake?” Donar demanded, hammering Dung Beetle back into the Unpossible Man and catching Demon Fish on the backswing.
“Dude, is this the time and place to discuss this?” Goldeneyed asked, avoiding a lunge from the Man With two Chins and teleporting Devo into the blast radius of the Human Grenade.
Donar contritely belted man-Hamster through a wall. “Ah. Thou meanst thou ist still in mourning for thine fallen coz. Mine apologies.”
“No. I just mean talking about all that dressing up as an Amazon stuff Troia made you do is creepy,” Bry Katz protested. To emphasise the point he slammed oaf’s head against Sgt Snail’s indestructible shell.
“Fear not, brave G-Eyed one. Twas naught kinkyeth. Besides, yon gusset of mine swimsuit didst prove inadequate to the restraining of mine godly manhood in the presence of so many Amazon beauties, and the ruse wast discovered. Twas most obvious to all that I wert an imposter.” Donar smirked a little as he proved to the Gunsman that Ausgardians were bulletproof.”
“And that’s why Troia’s taking a break on Amazon Isle and sending back your flowers doused with napalm?” surmised Bry, dropping a roof on the human grenade., .
“Aye,” admitted Donar, absently smacking Unpossible Man even though he was already unconscious. “It art most vexing.”
“Look, heroes, we surrender, alright?” Sgt Snail, leader of the sewer-dwelling Outcasts begged. “We don’t mind the violence, but please stop talking about your bloody love lives, alright? We give in!”
“Leaving?” Fin Fang Foom asked, aghast. “You can’t leave. I mean, you can, but…”
“I love her, Finny,” Hatman said miserably. “And a relationship has to be about giving as well as taking. You must have realised that it might come to this.”
“And what happens if the Resolution War suddenly explodes?”
“You have my pager number. I’m sorry, man, but… Whit has to come first. We all have to grow up sometime.”
Hatman closed the door on the stricken Makluan and walked down the hallway.
“How did he take it?” Whitney Darkness asked him as he joined her in her room. Jay noticed that she had already packed most of her things.
“Oh, pretty well considering. He didn’t roast me to a cinder.”
Sorceress hugged her lover sympathetically. “Poor Hat. I know leaving the Lair Legion is a tough break for you. It’s your personal nightmare.”
“It’s worth it for you, Whitney. Really.” Maybe he could quieten down the screaming conscience which cried to him in the voices of innocent victims he wouldn’t be there to save. “I mean it, Whit.”
“Liar,” the Sorceress told him fondly, and slid the sacrificial knife into his back.
“Valeria? Hey, Val, are you in here?”
“I’m here,” the former slave-girl admitted from the gloom of Fin Fang Foom’s darkened apartment. “I just didn’t see the point of turning the lights on.”
Ziles’ eyes adjusted to the gloom so she could see Valeria huddled on the sofa. “Are you okay?”
“Oh sure, Ziles. And I really appreciate you letting me stay with you for a while after… well, after. Don’t worry about me. Lisette came to check up on me earlier.”
“Well that’s nice,” Ziles said carefully, because there was a brittle edge to the usually calm polite tones of the girl from the Dreary Dimension. “I’ve spent all day out with DK looking into a series of sleepwalking murders. DK worked out that all the victims were former employees of some energy company called ZOXXON and he’s gone to see them. Donar and G-Eyed bagged a bunch of Outcasts who were running some kind of drug for the same firm. Maybe there’s a link.”
“Maybe,” Valeria didn’t seem interested. Since Rick Foreman had faced his nemesis Reject, undergone his bizarre metamorphosis, turned rogue, and then died, she didn’t seem to care about anything.
“What did you and Lisette do then?” Ziles asked, trying to be bright. “When did she leave?”
“She didn’t leave,” Valeria said, pointing behind the sofa. “She’s behind there?”
“Behind there?” the Xnylonian puzzled. “Why is she there?”
“That’s where I put her after I stabbed her,” Valeria explained, plunging her knife into Ziles’ chest. “Like this.”
Ziles moved just a fraction too slowly to save her life. She reached for the Regenerator Crème that might yet save her but Valeria snatched it from her hands and watched as she bled onto the carpet. “Sorry, Ziles,” she said sadly.
“Oh, don’t worry about it, my darling,” Exile told her, emerging from the shadows. “Death is only the beginning.”
“I warned you,” the Dark Knight told Montiver Hole, CEO of ZOXXON. “I warned you long ago that if I ever had to come back here you would wish you had never been born.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Hole stammered as the Dark Knight dropped the command and control helmet of the last of ZOXXON’s cyber-guards on the Chairman’s desk. “Really. It wasn’t my idea.”
“Psychotropic narcotics that open the sleeping mind to outside control,” the Dark Knight glowered. “Murder by sleepwalkers. And then you close down the trail by slipping the stuff to innocents via the Outcasts and having former project workers murdered by their nearest and dearest far from the project. Very clever. Very nasty.”
“I mean it!” screeched Hole, leaning as far back as his executive chair would allow him. “We had no choice. You don’t know what it’s like! It’s hell!”
“I know hell,” the Dark Knight promised.
“No,” a bitter female voice behind him proclaimed. “No, you don’t know it like I do.”
The Dark Knight swung round to find the person he loved the most in the world, the person who had been ripped from his life many years ago, the person he had recently seen returned corrupted and evil. Too late he also saw the knife.
The fallen Legion rose up one by one, the light in their eyes swallowed by absolute darkness. Then they made their way back home to the Lair Mansion where Sorceress and Hatman were waiting to let them in. And Exile saw that it was good.
“Aaaagh!” screamed Al. B Harper as he was whisked over the lethal electric fence by a tornado-force wind generated by De Brown Streak.
“Quiet,” DBS chided him, taking the fence at a running jump and getting a soft landing on dull thud. “This is supposed to be a stealth mission.”
“I still don’t understand how the hell I got talked into this,” complained Chronic disgustedly, picking himself up and dusting himself down.
“Because Dancer can be very persuasive,” noted thuddy ruefully, heaving Josh Clement off him roughly. “She just smiles and suggests we break into a top-secret ZOXXON research facility and it all seems so logical while she’s plying us wi’ free coffee. And then you’re out in the fog with a mutant athlete using you as a trampoline.”
“Don’t complain. Some people can’t get a date at all,” Al B. snickered. “Well Dancer was right about one thing. I’m getting some very usual readings on my portable delta-wave counter.”
“Uh-oh!” warned Chronic. “Obscure technobabble alert!”
“Well, don’t knock it if it explains why the hell we’re here,” DBS suggested. “What’s going on, Al?”
The scientist frowned at his meter and glanced around the fogbound complex. “There’s something generating electromagnetic pulses in a harmonic rhythm at the same wavelength as humans use for their R.E.M. cycle.”
“Easy listening rubbish,” muttered dull thud.
“That’s Rapid Eye Movement, the sleep condition in which we dream,” Al B. sighed. “Something in this complex is putting out… sleep waves.”
“Oooh. Spooky wicked!” mocked Chronic. “Why did Dancer want us to check out this place again anyway? Are we looking for nasty nightmares.”
Something old and dark and very sinister chuckled in the fog, and two slitted red eyes opened and glared at the intruders. “Oh no,” it told them in tones like the tearing of flesh. “They’re looking for you.”
“Bryan.”
“Laurie? I thought it was your day off. What are you doing back at the Lair Mansion?”
“Oh, I was bored and I thought I’d kill my boyfriend. Goodbye.”
“Er, you were on the active roster more recently than I was,” spiffy observed to Visionary nervously. “Why don’t you ring the doorbell?”
Even the possibly-fake man knew that ringing the Lair Mansion’s bell was a potentially lethal business given the reactions of the non-lethal stunners to sinister intruders such as the mailman and girl-scout cookie sellers. “Because I’m not that stupid,” Vizh answered.
“But you are expendable,” Fleabot comforted him. “Not that spiffy isn’t, of course.”
“Why don’t we go in through th’ kitchen door?” asked Space Ghost. “I usually leave it unlocked so when I lose my pants I don’ need a key to get back in.”
Visionary and spiffy exchanged glances. “We may have isolated how one of the highest-security areas on the planet gets invaded twice a week on average,” spiffy noted.
They went around the back and let themselves in through the kitchen door.
“Did it used to be this foggy in here?” spiffy asked worriedly, looking around the mist-filled halls.
“Only when Lisa cooked breakfast,” Vizh admitted.
“There’s something nasty around,” warned Space Ghost, fumbling for his Spank Ray.
“Well, we are near the LL’s fridge,” noted Visionary.
spiffy shuddered sympathetically and guiltily. “I think I left some salami in there before I moved to the Mayor’s mansion,” he admitted.
Space Ghost was so scared he was almost sober. “No,. listen. There’s something in here. Something’s got in! Something…”
He went down with the knife in his back.
“Oops,” apologised Ziles. “I was aiming at his neck.”
Then the Lair Legion attacked.
The low wailing began somewhere in the subharmonic range and as it developed became a sobbing shriek that set the windows rattling and shattered wineglasses. Birds ten miles away changed their migration habits to avoid it. It filled the mansion, echoing and re-echoing from the chambers and corridors, setting up complex counterpoints as it reverberated through forgotten halls which weren’t supposed to be there.
The banshee of the Lair Mansion howled.
“What the hell is that?” NTU-150 demanded, checking to see whether the noise was coming from his body-armour. It had been known to make rude sounds at inopportune moments before.
“Tis Milady Marie Murcheson, yon ghost who doth oftentimes haunteth this domicile,” Donar explained, putting down his boar sandwich (one boar, two loaves of bread, and a little mustard). “She wast murdered here most foully many years past, and now her mournful keen doth herald disaster and death for one of our fellowship.” [For Marie’s story, see Untold Tales #60, #61, #62, and #63]
“We have a ghost?” Enty didn’t like the supernatural. “Why doesn’t anyone tell me these things?”
“We hast a ghost who art most agitated. I hadst wondered why she hadst not yet wailed o’er the death of young Exileth.”
“I’m not picking her screams up on audio.” NTU-150 observed. “I’m just hearing them in my head.”
“Something art most terribly wrong,” Donar warned. “We must…”
Then a powerful unseen force gripped him and smashed his head against Enty’s armoured helmet with such force that both were shattered. The two Legionnaires toppled bleeding to the floor.
Hatman entered, removing his Skulls cap, and carefully got out his midnight-dark knife.
“I don’t suppose you could break a lifetime’s rule and do something useful, could you?” shouted spiffy at Visionary as the fern-wielder warded off flying cutlery sent to prune him by Sorceress. Fleabot had grown to his giant flea size and was in battle with Ziles.
“Like what?” Vizh worried, looking at the fallen Space Ghost. “I mean, I’m really open to suggestions.”
Fleabot made one, but it was anatomically impossible.
“There must be something you can do!” spiffy demanded, trying to avoid the cutlery that wanted to give him a serious pruning. “Dancer must have sent you with us for some reason.”
“I believe she said I was a ‘diversionary tactic’” admitted the possibly fake man.
Just then the Dark Knight slit his throat with a dagger of darkness and put him out of his misery.
“You’re running out of playing pieces, sorcerer,” the man in the night-coloured mantle told Xander the Improbable, master of the mystic crafts, as the crumpled forms of De Brown Streak, dull thud, Chronic, and Al B. Harper were dumped in front of them. They were heaped beside Montiver Hole, the fallen Chief Executive of ZOXXON Industries. ZOXXON’s attempts to create a new designer drug may have opened the gateway for this takeover, but things were well out of the rapacious multinational’s control by now.
“You’re a good chess player,” Xander conceded. He didn’t mention that he, on the other hand, was a champion at tiddlywinks.
When the banshee howling began, Fin Fang Foom threw off his depression and sprang into action. As he threw back the door of the Meeting Hall he was hurled back into the room and sent sprawling over the long polished table.
The Makluan shapechanger ignored the steaming sear in the middle of his chest and rose up to meet the intruder who had somehow baffled every warning alarm on the Lair Mansion except for poor dead Marie. In the confined space of the Meeting Hall he couldn’t transform to his true, full-sized draconic shape without collapsing the building around him, so he had to fight in his half-dragon humanoid form.
Then he saw his attacker. “Exile?”
“What a bummer, eh?” the energy-manipulating dark herald admitted, hitting Finny with a hundred thousand volts of direct current. “Sometimes even when you see the body the hero comes back to life. Or the villain.”
“What are you doing?” the dragon gasped, still reluctant to fight back against his former teammate despite the excruciating burns. “Is this what Dark Thugos did to you?”
Exile gestured again and the temperature around the Makluan rose by a thousand degrees. “I traded my future to save Valeria. I was born to be a champion of life. Others were allowed to make me an angel of death. So I came back and brought the gift to all my friends.”
“C’mon,” argued Finny, trying to rise despite the pain. He knew he had a duty to turn Rick Foreman from the path he had taken. “You don’t want to do this. We’re your friends. Val loves you.”
“Valeria? She was the first one I killed.” laughed Exile, hitting the dragon now with hard radiation. “Then Val killed Lisette, and Lisette killed Bry, and now virtually all my old buddies are enslaved to me in death. Look.”
Fin Fang Foom saw the bloody corpses of his friends and teammates walking into the room: Ziles, Hatman, Sorceress, Donar, Goldeneyed, Visionary, spiffy, Space Ghost, Lisette, Valeria. Then he felt a blade sliding effortlessly though the scales between his wings. “Boo,” hissed the dead Dark Knight.
Dying, Foom backwinged his best friend away and rose up. Even now he couldn’t bring himself to unleash the nuclear fire of his own draconic breath, flame which would cleanse the room of most of these shambling, laughing corpses.
“My worst nightmares came true,” Exile boasted. “So it seemed only fair to come back and grant others the same blessing.”
“Your worst nightmare is losing the thing most precious to you, Andy,” Ziles told the bleeding dragon. How could a knife of shadow be so terribly cold and sharp? “That’s the Lair Legion. You have failed, as leader, as teammate, as friend. Now your beloved Legion will wage one last battle, against humanity itself.”
“No!” Finny choked, thinking about the damage his team could do if they chose to war on the Earth.
“Thus is the ideal of the super-powered hero destroyed forever,” Hatman announced. “Once the world’s most prominent heroes have slaughtered their millions, who will ever trust the dream of a hero ever again?"
“So do ideals die,” announced the Sorceress.
“But first,” promised Exile, “you die and join my team.”
De Brown Streak was woken by the wriggling of maggots against his flesh, and found himself held by bonds of darkness that squirmed around him like living things, sapping his strength, draining his life.
“Last time I do Dancer a favour,” he muttered, looking blearily at his comrades who were similarly hanging spread-eagled before a midnight-black throne.
“Yes, Dancer,” the pale man on the throne pondered. “I am especially looking forward to meeting her again.”
“Have you any idea who this dweeb is?” Chronic asked from his own life-sucking bonds.
“I feel as though I should know him,” dull thud admitted, “like I’ve seen him before.”
“He’s the source of that energy pulse I detected,” Al B. Harper told them.
“You have all seen him before, in your darkest dreams,” Xander the Improbably told them. He was sitting opposite the throne in a patched but comfortable old armchair. “Dancer knows him as Frightmare, and he is the embodiment of nightmares.” [We’re dredging really obscure continuity corners here, from Dancer #2: Attack of the Giant Killer Turnip]
“Aren’t you the sorcerer supreme?” pointed out DBS. “Shouldn’t you be spanking his butt?”
“Oh no,” the master of the mystic crafts corrected. “I only have to see that his butt is spanked.”
“Besides,” sneered Frightmare, Lord of Dark Dreams, “He would need to use magic spells to battle me, and so far in his career the so-called Sorcerer Supreme has shown little talent for such use of power.”
“Magic isn’t about power. Spells aren’t pretty special effects lightshows,” muttered Xander.
“Then what is it about?” demanded Chronic exasperatedly.
The master of the mystic crafts smiled nastily. “Winning.”
Frightmare chuckled in the shadow. “Do you really think I don’t know about your pathetic hidden card, Xander? Your secret playing piece?” He gestured and one corner of the ZOXXON factory was illuminated with a sickly green glow, showing where Dancer was creeping up on the villain.
“Oh. Hi,” she said weakly. “Just popped into see if you’d reconsider your plans for slaughtering all my friends. And, um, taking over the Earth and stuff.”
“I don’t want to take over your Earth,” snorted Frightmare. “Please. What would I do with it? It is already my food source, a rich farm of juicy nightmares you oh-so-creative people prepare for me. This is just an opportunity for a little… fine tuning.”
“What do you mean?” Al B. Harper wondered.
“He found a way to manifest through ZOXXON’s new psychoactive designer drug,” Xander summarised. “Then he did a deal with Dark Thugos to be allowed to end a few stories. He dredged up the worst nightmares of some of the Lair Legion and gradually shaped reality to make them happen. Exile became an angel of death. The Dark Knight’s wife returned as his enemy. Hatman had to choose between duty and love. That kind of thing. Once he’d established a few footholds he could go for grosser nightmares of betrayal and murder. And then he could do whatever he wanted to the Lair Legion.”
“But why?” Dancer asked. “What’s the point?”
“The point is to kill a dream,” answered Frightmare, his black eyes burning with excitement. “Dreams die hard, but when the world’s principal heroes turn on those who believed in them and slaughter them by the millions I will have finally laid to rest that heroic ideal your people cling to.”
“That is pretty nasty,” admitted Chronic.
Dancer looked round at her four captured comrades and then back at the powerful thing of darkness on the throne. “Alright,” she told him in a slightly quavery voice. “You have one last chance to surrender and undo what you’ve done.”
“Or else?”
“Or else,” the Probability Dancer warned Frightmare, “I’ll have to play my hidden card, my secret playing piece.”
Xander leaned back in his armchair and watched carefully. This was why he had called in a favour from Sarah Shepherdson in the first place.
“Take your best shot, little mortal,” challenged Frightmare.
“Any last words?” mocked Exile as Donar and NTU-150 held down the dying dragon so their commander could plunge the last dagger through his heart. “An admission of failure, perhaps?”
“Others will come after us to stand up for what’s right,” gasped Fin Fang Foom.
“Not if we have out way,” Exile leered. “This plan has been very well laid for long months, drawing strands from many other people’s plots, for only then could the Lair Legion be utterly destroyed in every way possible. No hero can stop us now.”
“Indeed,” agreed a Latverian voice from the darkness. “No hero can stop you.”
The dark Lair Legion turned to look on the grey-mantled form of the Hooded Hood.
“Fortunately, Dancer did not call upon a hero,” the cowled crime czar announced.
“My best shot?” Dancer breathed. “Right.” She stood in front of Frightmare and executed a perfect pirouette.
There was a bright golden flash and Goldeneyed appeared in front of Frightmare to kick him in the head.
There was a ripple as the Portal of Pretentiousness opened another time/space portal and the rest of the Lair Legion burst through. They were notably not dead.
“Lair Legion Line Up!” shouted spiffy, tackling the nearest nightmare. It appeared to feature genitalia in unusual places, but spiffy still kicked it in the nuts.
“Everyone pick a monster and take it to pieces,” Hatman called. “Lisette, Val, get Clement and the others down.”
“On it,” Laurie Leyton called back. A nightmare leaped out at her and she caught it with a stiletto heel. “Oh please. I did the facing nightmares thing back in Celestian City. You guys are amateurs compared to that.”
“How many of these nightmares are there?” Ziles worried, struggling against an unlikely creature glaring at her from inside a powder compact.
“How many horrors are there in the human psyche?” gloated Frightmare. “I don’t know how you managed to undo the destruction of these superheroes, Hooded Hood, but I do know you can’t keep it up forever.”
The Dark Knight found himself struggling with the person he loved most in all the world, the one he had lost long ago, and who was back now, corrupted beyond belief. “We never go out together anymore,” she told him, dislocating his shoulder.
“It started out about avenging you,” DK answered, “but it has become so much more. There are so many evils that need stopping. It seems selfish to cling onto just one crime to justify my holy war. This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.”
He fought back at last; but he was wrong about the hurt.
“Keep what up?” the Hooded Hood shrugged back at Frightmare. “I’m not using any retcon.” He sat down next to Xander on a granite chair which had now been waiting for him all along. “Good evening sorcerer.”
“Good evening archvillain. Very sneaky, by the way.”
Around them the Lair Legion and their comrades struggled, but the overwhelming tide of nightmares was beginning to tell and they were starting to be forced on the defensive.
“Since you insisted on involving me it seemed an appropriate gambit to utilise.”
“What are you two talking about?” screeched Frightmare, sliding Donar and Space Ghost into a sub-dimension of rabid Archers fans.
“This,” shouted Exile, appearing from behind Frightmare’s throne and punching him in the stomach.
Frightmare gestured to regain control over the dark angel of death he had created with Thugos’ permission.
Exile hit him again. “I don’t have any powers right now,” he explained as he pummelled the Lord of Nightmares. “Not my original energy powers, nor the extra ones you arranged for me to get through all that pact business. I once promised the Hooded Hood that he could borrow my metahuman gifts for twenty-four hours, and guess what? He just has done.”
“No!” objected Frightmare as Rick foreman broke his nose. “That’s cheating!”
“No,” the Hood contributed, watching the dimensional lord get beat up with admirable detachment. “When I decided I was calling in the loan from twenty-three hours ago, before your final attack began… that was cheating.”
“And since the angel of death stuff was what was causing all the other stuff, the black blades and the living nightmares and all that, the LL’s just fine, and I get to kick the shit out of you without needing any powers whatsoever,” Rick Foreman told the villain he was pummeling.
“In fact I think that’s how he is able to get past your pre-set anti-hero defences,” Xander observed helpfully.
Frightmare hadn’t ever been beaten up before. It hurt. He withdrew from the waking world and escaped back to his Realm of Nightmares.
Or didn’t, in fact. He was still in the ZOXXON factory, with this angry mortal hurting him worse and worse. And suddenly Xander was standing up and not smiling at all. Suddenly Xander didn’t look like a seedy mage in faded red robes at all.
“You didn’t ask for permission to leave,” the sorcerer supreme hissed. “I hate bad manners.”
Exile continued to kick Frightmare. “This is for me dying. And this is for Val crying. And this…”
“Please…” Frightmare gasped. “Let me go…”
“Being a mage is about winning,” repeated Xander the Improbable. “Very well. Make amends, put things back to my satisfaction, and you may depart.”
“Well, you asked for my best shot, Frighty” noted Dancer.
There was an elastic snapping feel to reality for a moment and suddenly the ZOXXON factory was back to normal and devoid of nightmares.
Except when the Dark Knight spoke with Montiver Hole, of course.
“Well,” Valeria asked anxiously, “is he alright?”
Al B. Harper unclamped the various sensor probes from Rick Foreman’s body and shrugged. “He seems to be back to normal,” the scientist admitted. “No sign of those spooky angel of death powers. And he doesn’t appear to be dead.”
“Oh Rick!” Valeria sobbed, flying to Exile’s arms.
“Val,” he comforted her. “I’m so sorry.”
What they said next was private and personal.
“Father warned me that those death energies would have to go somewhere though,” Whitney Darkness warned. “That they might form some kind of… of Phantom.”
“Another thing to keep watch for,” sighed Jay Boaz. “Whit… we have to talk.”
“And I’d just like to thank everybody for dying so very nobly so I could bring in the bad guy to deal with the other baddie,” Dancer concluded.
“No problem,” dull thud muttered. “Anytime.”
“She got it all undone again,” spiffy pointed out. “At least you didn’t have to spend months in Hell, Nebraska.”
“Or be-eth a little girl,” Donar added helpfully.
“Shut up,” the ferned phenomenon told him.
Goldeneyed sipped his coffee and looked around at the friends gathered in the diner. “What amazes me is how you were able to pull off an amnesty for DBS, Dancer. And isn’t Chronic wanted for stuff too?”
“Ah, about that,” Sarah winced.
Suddenly the shop was illuminated by several thousand watts of halogen lamp. “You in the coffee shop!” came an amplified voice from outside. “This is the Falcon and a SPUD Sentinoid division demanding you come out with your hands up!”
De Brown Streak put down his croissant. “Ah,” he murmured. “Showtime.”
“How did you do it?” Fin Fang Foom demanded. “How did you live with the constant tension of knowing that every day could be the one where you screw up and your team doesn’t come home?”
“Well, mostly I just signed the papers Troia and Lisa put in front of me,” Vizh admitted to the weary dragon.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Finny snapped. He gestured to the portrait of Jarvis on the Meeting Hall wall. “I was talking to him.”
“Oh,” Visionary shrugged.
“DK has vanished again on one of his obsessive villain-hunts. Exile’s taking a short break to recover from being dead. Enty can’t stick around forever because he’s got a business empire to run. Hat and Sorcy are still discussing their future. G-Eyed is talking about going to Parody U. Goodness knows where Trickshot is now, but the damage bills keep coming in. And now we’re getting reports of a new Messenger copycat…”
Ziles popped her head round the door. “Sorry to interrupt,” she called, “but I just thought you’d like to know that Nats is back. And he has a stick. And Marie’s wailing has turned all the milk sour. Oh, and there’s a mutant rights riot in Paradopolis Plaza, and Donar has just thrown Mjalcolm at the SPUD helicarrier”
“Sounds like a pretty normal day,” Visionary suggested. “If I were you I’d disconnect the phone and play with the shredder.”
But that wasn’t the brooding dragon’s style. “Leave me,” he asked. “I’ve got some things to think on. About how to keep alive the heroic ideal, the dream of the Lair Legion.” He waited until Vizh had left him alone in the Meeting Hall. “Changes…” he pondered.
Afterword: As I proofread this chapter it occurred to me that I was taking even more liberties than usual with characters and situations posters generously lend me to play with. However, in compromise I have left things a little bit open, so that writers can salvage their plot lines if they wish to. We don’t learn in this story how much of the things happening to Exile or DK or others was of Frightmare’s design, and was therefore undone with the villain’s defeat and need not be addressed again, or whether he used actual existing events to base his nightmares upon. That is clearly for the posters to decide.
This story was also intended to provoke the long-postponed Lair Legion lineup debate. There’s no reason why the events of this story must trigger a reshuffling of membership, but if there is to be one there are ample narrative reasons summarised in this episode to justify virtually anybody leaving or joining. Perhaps people might want to express a view about whether the time has come for a lineup revision, and if so how such a thing might be discussed and determined on this occasion. The only thing I’d ask at this point is that somebody other than me writes the actual story that announces any changes.
For those who actually take their cross-series Parodyverse continuity seriously, this chapter more or less brings us up to date. AG’s Hallowe’en has passed. Untold Tales #95’s Christmas scenario is over. Messenger’s return is happening in the grim streets of Seedy Town even as the LL face their nightmares in the story above. So what happens next should be new and relatively unencumbered with the need to reference contemporary events. A clean slate.
So over to you.
HH
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