Forest Week: If You go Down To The Woods Today… Part One     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sit-rep,” Hatman said gravely as he strode into the Operations Room at the Lair Mansion, pulling on his trademark baseball cap with its H-logo.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Emergency flag tripped eighty seconds ago,” reported Amber St Clare from the communications console. “Hallie’s on it now. Hallie?”     Hatman looked from the Legion’s government liaison to their resident artificial intelligence. The trim green-skinned hologram of the Mansion’s sentient computer program gestured to change the situation display globe to show a patch of national forest in New England. “At 19.22 the President’s plane was attacked in flight over this area. The internal assault alarm was triggered and then nothing. The plane’s not in the sky any more.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Do we have any readings to give us a clue?”     The Ops Room door whooshed open as archscientist Al B. Harper and CrazySugarFreakBoy! hurried in. “Did someone say readings?” Al asked. “I love readings.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There was a coded video feed going out from the cockpit,” Hallie replied. “I’m decrypting it now. I can give you the audio.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Put it onscreen, Uhura,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! commanded. “Then give nu-Spock some sugar.”     Here was a tweeting noise as Hallie broke through fifteen layers of top-secret signal encryption. Then the pilot’s voice rang over the speakers. “Aaagh! Koalas! Koala attack!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ve got video now too,” Hallie announced. Screen One was suddenly filled with an image of Airforce One’s cockpit, filled with rabid marsupials.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No!” gasped Al B. Harper, taking an involuntary step backwards. “Drop-bears!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ve got SPUD online now,” Amber called, announcing a link-up with the Super-menace Principal Undercover Directorate. “Colonel Dan Drury.”     Hatman stepped forward. “Drury, what have you got?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Bitch of a day, Boaz. First they’re tryin’ to replace me with some bald black guy an’ now the President’s plane dives into the wilderness. I’ve got a guy goin’ in to investigate.”     Yuki Shiro hurried into the room. The crisis was three minutes in and she’d been hitting bars for information in Paradopolis when the alarms had triggered. Her bike was parked outside the Ops Room. Half a dozen traffic cops were heading for therapy. “I’m up to speed,” the cyborg P.I. announced. She’d been following the Ops Room chatter on her internal communications array. “Who’s your agent?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The Pres of the USA’s missing,” Drury replied. “Who d’you think we’re gonna send?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Jack Bauer?” suggested CSFB!     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Patching the operative through now,” Hallie reported. “He’s para-diving into the area.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This is Silver Aegis entering the crash zone,” came back the bold confident tones of America’s apotheosis. “I can see a trail of broken trees. Looks like Air Force one is down.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“He’ll need backup,” Hatman decided. “Call the team.”     Nats hurried through the door. “Did someone say Lair Legion Line up?” he asked eagerly.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“They did now,” sighed Amber. She pushed the big red button to call the other members of the world’s greatest superteam.     In a disused library in Manitoba, Canada, Moon Public Librarian Lee Bookman triggered his automatic return transport to the Lunar Library so he could take his Galactibus shuttle down to Parody Island (he wasn’t allowed to use the digital data transferor for non-Library business).     In a shoe sale at Mimble’s Department Store mild-mannered waitress Sarah Shepherdson dropped the lady with whom she was competing for a set of discount sling-backed sandals with a neat neck chop, elbowed the guy behind her who was rubbing far too many body parts against her in the sale scrum, and made for the counter. The Probability Dancer was needed; just as soon as her footwear needs were satisfied.     In the shower at Visionary’s dimensionally-unstable lighthouse the possibly-fake associate member of the Lair Legion groped his way towards a towel. He hoped the bleeping was his LL comm-card rather than any kind of detonation countdown device, but given he had Kerry Shepherdson living in the tower it was an even chance. Of course, it could just as likely be the comm-card destruct mode warning. It was a shame the towel and his clothes had all been packed up while he showered and sent to deserving orphans in Africa. Still, at least the new bathroom livecam was working.     In a bucket in a cyclopean lair beneath the Mansion the Manga Shoggoth formed a rigid sandcastle shape where his gelid mass had frozen. “Mmm,” he considered. “Interesting, but it’s not going to replace universal heat death,” he judged. “Still, thank you Icy. I’m always open to new experiences.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Once you’ve gone slushee you never go back,” promised the visiting snowman. “Perhaps you need a carrot and some coal to really get the hang of it?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then I’ll be beloved of children everywhere,” anticipated the loathsome elder being. “Ho ho ho.”     The traumatising of the world’s youth was postponed by the summons to line up.     While CSFB! and Nats were prepping LairJets One and Two, Hatman and Yuki were interrogating Dr Harper. “Drop bears,” Yuki said, “There’s nothing in our files about them.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, there wouldn’t be,” Al B. warned. “Nasty little buggers. Their main power is to make people not believe in them. Half an hour after meeting them you won’t remember who chewed your arm off.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You seem to remember them,” Hatman pointed out.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m extremely clever,” explained the archscientist. “But what would make the drop bears swam at this time of year, and so far from home?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So the President might have been eaten?” Yuki worried. “Maybe it was the Republicans?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Silver Aegis here,” came in the voice of the perfect patriot Scott Scoggins over the SPUD linkup. “I’m at the crash site. No sign of the President. No bodies. We may have an abduction scenario. I’m checking the area.”     Hatman pulled on a communications headset. Suddenly he was as one with the entire comms system of the USA. “Okay,” called into his headset. “Ops team one is with me. That’s Dancer and the Shoggoth. We do primary crash location, check for clues. Team two’s with Dream, that’s Yuki and Nats. You find Silver Agent and hook up with him, keep on quartering the area. Lee, you’re research. Find out what we don’t believe about Drop Bears.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t believe we’ve got anything,” the Librarian replied. He paused as he considered what he’d said then added determinedly, “And that’s why they need to be indexed.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yep. Al, I want some way of us taking down the opposition, and maybe some idea of why they’re suddenly, er, dropping.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Don’t let them get their teeth into anything vital you might want to keep,” the archscientist advised.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Vizh, you’re on monitor duty.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Great,” replied the founding Legionnaire. “Do they have towels in the Ops Room?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Let’s go!” Hatman called. CSFB! was able to stifle Nats before he shouted anything out.     Visionary arrived in the Operations Room wearing Donar’s old dressing gown. It smelled of goats and had a flagon of beer in one pocket and a two-handed axe in the other. “The LairJets are away,” Hallie informed him. “Nice to see you. And I don’t just mean the u-tube file your students just uploaded.”     Marie Murcheson slipped into the Ops Room behind the possibly-fake man. “There’s another thing you probably need to know about,” she advised the support staff.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What did Flapjack do now?” demanded Amber St Clare. “Why haven’t you designed a Neutering Ray yet, Harper?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s not Flapjack,” Marie told them. “Nats’ bathroom is a swamp.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Tell me about it,” shuddered Hallie. “I think Kenny’s growing new kinds of fungus in his bathtub.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No,” clarified the mansion’s resident banshee. “I mean there’s a swamp in Nats’ bathroom. You open the door and there’s a thick boggy forest right there. Some kind of dimensional anomaly, I’m sensing.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ah,” Hallie understood. “Sounds like a job for Visionary.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Wait – what?” spluttered the possibly-fake man. Continued… The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse      Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2009 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2009 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.