Previous Post Vinnie De Soth and Spider-Demons of the Abyssal Web Jump to Part Two Jump to Part Three     Vinnie de Soth was trying to catch up on his e-mail. More specifically, the jobbing occultist was trying to clear the backlog of messages to his online psychic advice and karma-maintenance web-service.     He was trying to find a diplomatic way to say to a client: Your boyfriend is pondscum. Dump him like a bad curry from a backstreet takeaway, possibly in the same manner. Stay away from that toxic disaster and find yourself a stray cat to shower affection on. The worst it can do is give you septic scratches and go to the toilet in your slippers. The spirits agree with me. Lose the jerk, hard.     So far he’d got: Dear Emily, the psychic forces wonder if perhaps you need to reconsider certain aspects of your relationship…     Vinnie was interrupted from trying to find a socially acceptable euphemism for pondscum by Alto Tumour, corpulent serial-vest-wearing owner of the occult bookshop that Vinnie rented a workspace in. “Dude,” said Tumour, “there’s a floating metal egg banging on the window and I’m guessing it’s for you.”     Vinnie admitted that it was likely. His days got that way.     He slipped from behind his wobbly desk – Dancer had borrowed the trashy romance novel he’d previously used to prop up the slanting leg, probably to get dating advice – and made his way to the front of the shop.     Sure enough, an egg-shaped thimble-sized silver object was rapping on the glass. Vinnie opened the door for it politely.     The floating ovoid fizzed, sparked with static, then formed up into a holographic representation of a green-skinned bespectacled computer girl.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hi, Hallie,” Vinnie greeted the Lair Legion’s resident A.I..     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Whoa,” said Alto. “I so want one of those for Christmas!”     Vinnie led the hologram into the backroom where his desk lurked beneath the stairs. “Didn’t expect you to make a workplace visit,” he admitted. “Usually if you want me you just bleep my commcard.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’d be the commcard down the sofa in the Lair Legion Living Room, would it?” Hallie suggested.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Er, possibly. I was there last night with Liu Xi, um, studying the LL training manual. In case Hatty gave us a test. Yes, that is what we were doing.”     Hallie tactfully didn’t mention what other items had been stuffed down the back of the sofa. CSFB! would let Vinnie know about it soon enough. “There’s something I wanted to run past you and I thought it would be easier to do it in person than by phone. Can I use your computer?”     Vinnie gestured to the somewhat antique set-up on his desk. “Just let me save my e-mails. If I try to do more than one thing at once it tends to crash. In fact if I do one thing at once it tends to crash.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Don’t worry. I’ll see to it,” said the A.I.. She laid her holographic hand over the CPU and transmitted instructions from her holo-egg. Vinnie’s e-mails all answered themselves and shuffled off meekly to clean out his internet cache and temporary folders.     Vinnie caught his answer to Emily: Dear Emily, your boyfriend is pondscum. Dump him like a bad curry from a backstreet takeaway, possibly in the same manner…     Hallie pulled at her grid-lined holographic jumpsuit as if it were too tight for her. “Windows 95, Vinnie? Really?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It came free when I bought the computer.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Wait, you’re saying you actually paid for this?” The A.I. winced. “Never mind. Here, look at this.”     Internet Explorer opened up, crashed, then updated itself to a BautistaWare OpenSource MultiBrowser 9.1 with the new anti-detonation patches. “I wrote the non-explosive parts of that code,” Hallie boasted.     The screen was filled with a gaudy 3D diorama of a muscled warrior battling off leathery-skinned monsters with a six foot sword. The banner blazed out: SPIDER-DEMONS OF THE ABYSSAL WEB!!! Then animated spiders skittered out across the logo.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nice,” said Vinnie, perplexed.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game,” Hallie explained. “You get to play a demon-hunter in hell, racking up experience points to buy equipment to win more experience points.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That certainly sounds like hell.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Click on Login Character Creation,” Hallie told the jobbing occultist. “Set up an account and an avatar.”     Vinnie found his PC was responding far better than it had ever done in its life, but that was just Hallie’s sense of professionalism. He moused his way though a series of screens until a box came up with a scrollbar down the side.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hold it,” Hallie told him. “This is it. Read the EULA.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Er, I think Dancer borrowed it?” Vinnie said helplessly.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The End User Licence Agreement. The thing on the screen.”     Vinnie scrolled down. “Er, there’s rather a lot of it. I’m not sure it’s in English.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Head down to paragraph 1,746, section iii, subsection 19a,” Hallie advised.     Even with his enhanced system it took him the best part of a minute. “There’s a little I Agree box down there in the corner. I could just tick it and get on,” he suggested.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s how EULAs work,” the A.I. agreed. “It’s certainly how I got Visionary to agree to a refurbished Lair Computer Centre. Well, that and a minor holographic clothing glitch at exactly the right nanosecond.”     Vinnie reached the appropriate paragraph. “Licensee agrees to transfer of existential assets to KaliCorp in perpetuity. KaliCorp may secondarily assign these rights to a third party without notification. Installation and use of this product signifies an acceptance of these conditions. Existential assets may be accessed, modified, and deleted at any time. Such assets include, but are not limited to, karma, mana, orgone, psychic auras, luck, dreams, and souls.” Vinnie looked up in horror. “People signing up to this contract have just given their souls away!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That was Lisa’s view as well,” agreed Hallie. “She said it was a lovely piece of work.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m not sure. I don’t know if there’s any precedent for an e-soul pact. Usually there has to be bloodshed or something.”     Hallie pointed at the demo screen where a warrior was being torn to pieces by razor-legged arachnids. “Your point?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But someone has to do something about this!” objected the jobbing occultist. “This is a job for… oh crap!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“According to your Legion file you are the acting sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah. Go me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well then, I’d say you’ve got until midnight tomorrow, Hallowe’en night, to stop all this.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why then? Only Hallowe’en a busy time for me. There’s the fancy dress thing at the Bean and Donut and then…”     Hallie wiggled her fingers and the computer screen changed into screeds of zeros and ones as she peeled into the underlayer codes of the program. “That’s why,” she said, tapping the monitor. “A nasty little worm virus called KaliZap30. I picked it up a couple of days ago trying to infect the LL systems at exactly the same time Marie caught it. And she’s the Lair Banshee that keeps out the supernatural badness.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Okay. I guess we could program an exorcism into some anti-virus software.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not in time. That thing’s set to trigger at midnight tomorrow, and Spider-Demons has thirty million online players. There’s got to be another way.”     The login graphics flickered back up. Vinnie looked at them with a worried frown on his face. “If only there was some way to see what happens in the game without registering. That way we could look for clues.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ve already done that,” Hallie said. “I got to level sixty-three and took out the Bassinet of Chaos. It didn’t help.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You got in without registering?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I logged on using a fake identity,” Hallie confided. “Well, a possibly-fake identity.”     Vinnie looked sharply at her. “You signed up as Vizh?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, he doesn’t seem to mind when Kerry does it. I mean, he has to know about that, doesn’t he?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No, you’re not following me. If you signed up as Visionary, what with you being… associated with him and also being some world-class computer sentience and stuff – it’s just possible that you sold his soul to the devil.” ***     Visionary was strapped onto a stretcher in the main lab of Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises. Kara Harper attached the clamps to him.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ow!” the leader of the Lair Legion objected. “Do you really need to attach those crocodile clips there!” His last word was a squeak.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We don’t actually need to attach anything at all,” Cody Harper noted as he set up the virtual reality interface adaptor. “I think Kara was just curious.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Curious about what?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“How high you could squeak,” Al B. Harper’s future-daughter smiled sweetly. “Now we have the answer. Yay science!”     Vinnie rescued Vizh from the clips. He had a horrible feeling that otherwise he’d have been next. “Perhaps we should wait for Dr Harper to get back before we attempt this?” he suggested.     Cody shook his head. “I thought you said this had to be sorted before midnight tonight? I decompiled that KaliZap code. You really don’t want to wait.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Besides, dad and Miss Framlicker are away at a ‘conference’,” Kara added. She twitched her first two fingers to put conference in speech marks. “They’re probably ‘confering’ right now.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We don’t know that,” Cody pointed out. “With those two it is just possibly that they really are co-presenting a symposium on n-dimensional multiform geometries in a posited k-plane omnisphere.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We could wait for Amy then,” Vizh suggested. “She only abuses me with spanners.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Amy’s off ‘getting drunk and getting laid’,” Cody said, again with the quotes twitches.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No need for the quotation marks,” Kara told him. “She really is off doing that.”     Cody finished attaching the electrodes to Vizh’s head and started work on Vinnie.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So this will zap us into the actual computer game Demon-Spiders of the Abyssal Web?” the jobbing occultist said uncertainly.     Kara patted him on the cheek and smiled at him disconcertingly. “Yes. It’s taken me most of the day to construct online identities for you that won’t commit you to the same eternal damnation that Visionary faces. I’m fairly certain that I got it in the end.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I miss being strapped to Enty’s devices,” Vizh admitted. “At least then you knew what to expect.”     The EEE firehouse door opened and Liu Xi Xian stepped in. “Hi, lover,” she called to Vinnie. “Hello, Vizh.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’ve just arrived in time for the clamping,” Kara told the elementalist. She gestured to the jobbing occultist on the stretcher. “Crocodile or bulldog?”     Liu Xi scowled. “You’ve been talking to CrazySugarFreakBoy!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I thought it would be a good idea to have Liu Xi keeping watch while we, um, virtualled,” Vinnie explained. “In case of danger.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re safe in the EEE firehouse,” Cody assured him. “We have firewalls and force fields and stuff.”     Liu Xi settled next to Vinnie and glared at Kara. “He necessarily didn’t mean danger from outside.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There’s a very slight chance that while we’re in the game-world a silver-helmeted archvillain called the Apostate might appear to take over all reality,” Visionary advised. “If he does, try to stop him please.” He thought a bit harder. “Or possibly Nyarlurkhotep the Chaotic Crawler. Or Dark Thugos.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“When did Dark Thugos get a personal grudge with you?” Cody wondered.     Hallie blinked into holographic presence. “Dancer #50,” she answered. “It’s classified.”     Kara glanced at the atomic clock on the wall. “Are you ready to go now?” she demanded. “Only Desperate Housewives is on soon.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ready isn’t quite the word for it,” Vinnie admitted. “Maybe braced.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Take care,” Liu Xi told him. She gave him a kiss to take into the virtual reality with him.     The world fuzzed and the game began. ***     Silicone Sally brushed up against Goldeneyed in the Lair Library. “What’re you doing, sexy?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh, hi,” G-Eyed welcomed her. “I was just going through the latest reports from the research agencies we use all over the planet to keep tabs on stuff. Want to see what they’re saying about your old boss?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I already know enough about her,” Sally sniffed.     G-Eyed tactfully slid the folder detailing the reward Baroness von Zemo had put out for Sally’s pelt to the bottom of the pile. “Here’s the one I was after. Gunther’s been checking out some organisation called KaliCorp that Hallie was interested in to see who… oh crap!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What is it?” Silicone Sally asked as Bry Katz teleported across the room to the comms unit.     G-Eyed stabbed the connect button. “Hat, get to the Ops Room now! I just found out who KaliCorp belongs to!” ***     Visionary blinked and looked up at Vinnie. “Wow. You look really dumb in that cone-shaped hat with the stars on it! I’m usually the one who gets the embarrassing costume in these alternate realities. Or the embarrassing vermiform.” A new thought occurred to him. “Why am I so short?”     Vinnie looked down at his glorious leader and groped for the diplomatic words. “Your, um, you avatar was probably selected not to resemble the Vizh who was logged in by Hallie before. Either that or Kara is evil.”     Visionary glanced down at himself. His tartan mini-kilt and white knee-socks gave his problem away. “Aaagh! I’m a schoolgirl!”     Hallie blinked in as she joined the game. “A Catholic schoolgirl, by the looks of it,” she told the possibly-fake nun-taught scholar. “According to the online rules you have +5 on giggle attacks and gossip but –5 versus spanking and tentacles.”     Vizh scowled at the A.I. “And what are you supposed to be?”     Hallie’s green cheeks turned a little chartreuse. She tugged the lapels of her yellow overcoat to hide the green sweater with the diamond logo on it. “I’m a sixty-third level enigma warrior,” she said defensively. “They all look like this. Honestly.”     Vizh sat down. “I am not fighting demon-spiders or whatever dressed like this.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t think you should take your uniform off,” Vinnie worried. “I’m pretty sure that would get you on some kind of federal register.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We needed the schoolgirl uniform to get the companion backpack. It’s very useful,” Hallie explained. “If it’s such a big deal I can probably do an in-game polymorph. Hold still. This might tickle.” She concentrated for a moment.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Get me back to normal,” Vizh demanded. “I’m… virtual, dammit!”     He pixellated then transformed.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s… close to normal,” Vinnie said, looking at his leader’s new avatar.     The little pony was green with yellow diamonds on its flank. It still had the Catholic schoolgirl outfit though.     Hallie had a bright brittle smile. “Better?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s a step up from a weasel or stoat. And it’s nice to have a bushy mane again. So can we get on with the being-shredded-by-monsters part and get my soul back please?” He stared around the arid red landscape with the brimstone skies. “Where are we anyway?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Level sixty-four,” Hallie said.     Vinnie shook his head, worriedly. “No… this looks a lot more like level hundred and nine, the Thrashing Desert of Eternal Evisceration, just west of the Whispering Holes described in Oleus Crabbius’ 1409 edition of the Codex Vomitous. It’s part of the disputed zone between the emotion mines of Nug’Zog’Norn the Odiferous and the pain mills of the Tumultiuos Zaargh.”     Hallie checked her cheatmap. “I don’t see any…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s not a game,” the jobbing occultist said. “Or if it is it’s real enough to make no difference. This is an actual layer of the Abyssal Web. I’ve been here before.”     Vizh looked around. “When? Was it that time you faced Sage Grimpenghast?”     Vinnie looked a little uncomfortable. “Er, my parents brought me here for a holiday. When I was six.”     The possibly-fake man looked round the bleak boiling wilderness “I guess there probably would be a Holiday Inn here somewhere.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“My Uncle Belial was dedicating his firstborn daughter Anthraxa to the Demon Ungulut,” Vinnie explained. “It wasn’t a sweet ceremony.” He shuddered. “Thing is, real or just a very very convincing CGI, this is the Abyss. And that’s the anteroom of hell. Think of it like the thin crust of mould on top of cold coffee. One wrong move here and we fall through into what’s below. And what’s below really stops being funny at all.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’d better get going then,” suggested Hallie. “We have four hours and thirteen minutes of gameplay to midnight. What are we looking for?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think we need to get to the boss fight at the end of the game,” Vinnie considered. “At least that gets us to the boss. Then I need to use my authority as acting sorcerer supreme to give a ruling on the whole EULA soul-pact thing.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And rule it out of order,” Vizh prompted.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, I have to be fair,” the acting sorcerer supreme admitted. “There’s a balance to this job.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We could have just zapped in the whole Lair Legion to fight,” Vizh pointed out. “And everyone we know. I’d bet that Donar comes with a pretty impressive amount of plusses round here.”     Hallie disagreed. “This isn’t a physical combat. The game’s set to provide opposition in proportion to your strength and levels. Bring in Donar or Hatty and you’d get… well even more chaos than if you brought in CSFB!. And I don’t even want to try calculating the cascade effect the Shoggoth would have on thirty million MMORP subscribers.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So you’re saying we’re here because we’re… weak and helpless?” Vinnie checked.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And that’s why we have a chance,” agreed the Visionary-themed A.I.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This is all so familiar,” groaned My Little Visionary. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Okay, what have we got?” Hatman demanded as he entered the Operations Room.     Yuki had assembled the primary intel package from the notes G-Eyed had brought. “We’ve traced the ownership of KaliCorp through a series of shell corporations back to an Indian software writing outfit, then deep into the Indo-Chinese entertainment industry,” the cyborg P.I. explained. “Bottom line is, we’ve seen the owners before. We’ve fought them before.”     Hatty looked up at the big holographic globe and sighed. “I guess it was only a matter of time before they went for round two.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Round three,” Yuki corrected him. “Whitney and… and Zdenka took them on when they were heading out to rescue you from the Parody Master’s torture camp. Met this particular bad guy, in fact.”     She pushed up a picture onto screen three.     Silicone Sally perked up as she saw the handsome Indian businessman. “I volunteer to go undercover and seduce him,” she offered.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why would you need to do that?” G-Eyed puzzled.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Need to?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s not what Devas Jaggernath actually looks like,” Yuki explained. “This one’s what he’s really like when he drops the illusion.”     Hatman’s lips drew back into a snarl as he recognised the tiger-headed warrior myth on screen. “A rakshasa!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Prince of the Rakshasas,” Yuki supplied. “Warrior-demons from Indian myth, flesh-eating, glamour-casting, bargain-making, slave-stealing, mortal-seducing killing machines.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Mortal seducing?” checked Sally. “Okay.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“From what Gunter could discover this Prince Devas is not very happy at the pact we imposed on his people after our win during the Lair Legion World Tour. Anyway, Davas is the money behind KaliCorp and that video game that Vizh and Hallie are investigating. In legend Rakshasas are well known for their spinning of illusions and lies, and for their taste for blood and death.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sounds like a great video game to me,” Goldeneyed admitted.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So can I seduce him or not?” Sally demanded.     Hatman pulled on his thinking cap, then his Jarvis topper. “Right then. Yuki, G-Eyed, contact the Abyssal Greye to get a message through to King Woopsa at Amalgamated Pantheons. Tell him Hi and we’ve got a rules infringement. Sally…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sleep with Jaggernath?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Send out the call: Lair Legion Line Up! We’re going to India!” ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The worst thing is,” said Vizh as he literally licked his wounds after the fight with the Shivering Talons, “that Hallie makes a much better me than I do.”     The A.I. resheathed her bastard sword and shook her head. “Nobody can be as insecure and doubt-ridden as you, Visionary. I promise.”     Vinnie looked down at the gooey monsters that had previously infested the Tunnels of Degradation. As they dissolved a three-digit number appeared over their corpses. He heard a ping.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Upgrade available,” Hallie translated.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Maybe pants for Vizh?” suggested the jobbing occultist. “Am I the only one bothered by a horse in a schoolgirl skirt but no panties? A male horse?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I didn’t ask for this,” Vizh insisted. “Although I suppose some people might have a different view.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We need the upgrade points to activate Vizh’s backpack,” Hallie said. “We’re right under the webspine now, and there are things in there that could tear us to pieces. Game over.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“As opposed to the things that could tear us to pieces out here?” Vizh hadn’t liked the Shivering Talons.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But if we die we just wake up in our bodies back at EEE. Right?” Vinnie checked. “Right?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That sounds like a good, comforting theory,” offered Hallie. “Vizh, keep your plaits out of the way while I use our experience points to activate your companion backpack.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is that really necessary?” Vinnie wondered. “With both of you in the same colour scheme it looks like Vizh is your familiar already. Er, familiar in the role-playing associate sense, I mean, not the horizontal… um, not that there’s anything wrong with you two having… well, maybe while one of you’s a pony…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Upgrade complete,” Hallie said firmly.     Vizh fell over. His backpack was suddenly very heavy. And full.     Hallie unstrapped it and reached inside. She pulled out a lop-eared uneven purple rabbit.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Rabito?” Vizh recognised. “Because every hellbound dungeon-crawl needs a wall-crashing pure thought bunny!”     Hallie shook her head and reached into the bag again to pull out the companion.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hello Visi!” beamed Yo, emerging Zorro-hat first from the impossibly-small satchel. “Is good to be adventuring again with Yo-friends!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yo! Okay, I can see the point of bringing Yo in here. A pure thought being can be anything he or she thinks they are. That’s a huge advantage in an artificial reality.”     Yo drew his/her rapier and made a Z-shape in the rock. “Yo is ready to be derring and doing.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s great,” Vizh nickered, pattering his front paws in excitement. “I’m only sorry I’m stuck in this weird form you can hardly recognise.”     Yo looked at Visionary in puzzlement. “What are you meaning? Yo is always seeing of you like this, cute-Visi.”     Vinnie looked out of the Gorge of Gore at the webspires above. “Okay, I think we’re going to have to climb the outside of the tower to bypass quite a lot of levels. Time’s running out to find the big baddie. Um, can little ponies shin up ropes?”     There was a roar from down the tunnel as the Shivering Talons respawned.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“They can if that’s the alternative,” Vizh decided.     But just then the foetid stench of rotting meat washed over the adventuring party. Cold downdrafts chilled them as an undead dragon winged in to stare at his prey.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is not to be being as cute as Finny,” objected Yo. He/she wrinkled her nose.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Did you really think you could sneak this close without us detecting your presence, Koor Darson?” the corpse-wyrm challenged Visionary. “The patriarch of the Lair Pantheon is an ancient enemy to my masters. It will please them to destroy you here.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Koor Darson?” Vinnie blinked. “Doesn’t that mean fake man in…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s just a title,” Vizh snapped. “Why will no-one take me seriously?”     Yo patted him kindly on the flank. “Yo is thinking that you are to be being a very nice pony. Seriously.”     Vinnie held his hand up. “Hello? Undead dragon looming?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Don’t worry,” said Hallie. “Visionary will save us.”     Vizh looked up at the massive skeletal wyrm. Black fires boiled in its ribcage. It’s jaws opened.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I will?” the possibly-fake pantheon head said. “Oh, good.” ***     Davos Jaggernath stood stripped to the waist in the elegant courtyard of his winter palace, his tiger-striped fur glinting in the sun. He hefted the two-bladed fighting stick to rest and gestured for the practice slaves’ corpses to be dragged away.     His brother approached him across the mosaic balcony.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Come to learn some fighting tips?” Davos sneered.     Amar Jaggernath perched on a low stone wall and folded his arms. “I do like to learn from your mistakes,” he admitted.     Davos shook his head. “No errors this time, little brother. The plans I have spun have ensnared millions of the mortal cattle. Their sale is already agreed. Sage Grimpenghast has special plans for them, and has many of his creatures ready to occupy the vacant shells at midnight. Thirty million more soulless upon this planet! Imagine the horror.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, I got the update off your blog,” Amar noted. “You really, really want to get into that fairie woman’s pants, don’t you?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I agree with Lady Camellia that the time of the humans is over,” the rakshasa prince snarled. “And while I might have been willing to ravage the mythland wench once, I find her less appealing since her… accident.”     Amar cleaned his whiskers. “That’d be the accident caused by the little princess, the crippled child whose brother bears the griffin mark? The one whose father is the head of the Lair Pantheon that spanked our stripy butts and limited our mortal activities to, well, basically making bad Bollywood porn movies?”     Davos didn’t like the smug undertone of his brother’s voice. “So?”     Amar shrugged. “Oh, it’s just that I was checking the game’s user logs and membership base and I happened to notice that Koor Darson was currently in the game.”     Davos looked up suddenly. “What?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, I think maybe the KaliZap30 worm accidentally got e-mailed to the Lair Mansion or something. No idea how. Now I think the Lair Legion are investigating.”     Davos Jaggernoth glared. “Whatever you plan it is too late to stop me. At midnight EST tonight the virus triggers and the EULA contracts take force.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh good. Because otherwise I’d be worried that Visionary and some of his people are crawling about inside the game heading towards the big boss fight with the OverSpider. Didn’t you tell me that nobody would ever get that far so the game’s not programmed out for that? Wouldn’t that sort of… crash it? And their computers? Their virus-infested but have-to-be-working-to-trigger computers?”     Davos snapped his battle-stave over his knee and tossed the fragments into nearby servants. “I shall enter the gameworld personally and ensure that the Great Enemy of the Rakshasas is annihilated!” he announced as he stalked off.     Amil watched him go. “So easy,” he sighed. “I have to get a better brother to compete with.” He snapped open his HTC Wildfire S mobile and dialled a number. “Hello, Miss Ashling. I would like to speak to Sir Mumphrey Wilton.” ***     The undead dragon backed away from Visionary. “Did you just spew rainbow glitter over me?” the fell corpse-creature demanded. “Did you?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is to be very pretty,” Yo admired. “Yo was not knowing Visi could be doing of that. Visi should be vomiting of sparkles far more often, Yo is thinking.”     My Little Visionary backed towards Hallie. “I wasn’t really planning that,” he admitted. “Did you know I had multicoloured bodypaint breath?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think it’s a combination of the Combat Vomit and Fatal Beauty feats,” Hallie suggested. “I’d really have to check how the rules interacted.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Maybe I could charge the dragon with my horn while he’s recoiling in embarrassment?” the possibly-fake marketing toy considered.     Vinnie had to burst his bubble. “Sorry Vizh. You don’t have a unicorn horn. You don’t qualify.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Don’t qualify? You need a license or something? I suppose it could be a lethal weapon.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Unicorns only like virgins.” The jobbing occultist shrugged. “You fathered Magweed and Griffin, and Citizen Z says that means you must have had sex at least once in your life, so…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hey, I have lots of sex!” Vizh objected. “Well, there’s lots of stories about it anyway.” He caught a glimpse of Hallie’s face. “I’m not talking about Lisa-levels of sex here. No coach parties. And not… you know, recently.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“CSFB! is to be telling Yo his theory that you are an idiot savant f…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dragon attack!” Vizh cut in hurriedly. “It’s worked out how to stop singing the Wuvvle You song and it’s coming back to rend us to pixels.”     Hallie stepped forward. “Don’t worry. I’ve had time to analyse its code now. I didn’t have time to hack it but I did manage one quick patch to its anti-bunny defences.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is to be good!” approved Yo, hurling Rabito overarm at the newly-painted monster. “Go be making of friends with the uncute-undead until it becomes to be nice dragon,” the pure thought being commanded the pure thought bunny.     Vinnie turned away. “Maybe you should have been more specific about how he made friends? I mean, that is a rabbit.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We need to move on,” Hallie warned. “Really, really quickly. And not looking that way.” ***     The OverSpider was three hundred feet long, resting in the centre of a cocoon of web-strung corpses. Its multiple eyes glowed a sinister red and wherever it shifted it left trails of ice across the rotting dead.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Initiate over-ride,” Devos Jaggernath commanded, placing his consciousness into the creature so he could command it. Now the system wouldn’t crash when the boss spider was attacked. Now he could instead crush his enemies and drag them whole into virtual hell forever!     He opened scrying webs to check on the approach of his prey. “Visionary seems to be more… attractive than previously,” the rakshasa admitted, watching Hallie hack down some ur-goths on level 145. “But I am Devos Jaggernath. I do not roll that way!”     He checked the gamestats on Koor Darson’s party. WizardDweebLoser99 had risen remarkably quickly in sorcerous ranks. Right now he was throwing fireballs at SlimeWings yelling, “Why aren’t I allowed to do this normally? This is so freakin’ cool!”     JailBait69 appeared to be a cross-dressing pony. Devos wasn’t shocked. He owned many of the companies that ran those kinds of websites. But the diminutive primary-coloured equine appeared to have a powerful companion with him who somehow maxxed all the game statistics at exactly the moment he required them. Or was that she?     Davos pinched himself. “I really have to raid a new mistress, very soon,” he told himself. “But now, I shall end this farce with a simple…”     His phone rang. Someone had changed the ring-tone to Mamma Mia again.     The rakshasa prince spawned a series of Enhanced Killer Render Demons with the tripled Amplified Orifices feat and sent them to destroy the interlopers, then disengaged himself to hit Receive. “What is it? I’m busy!”     In the scrying web Yo danced his/her way through the monsters, comforting them as s/he went.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What do you mean, landed on my palace? How can a LairJet even find my palace?” demanded Davos. “Wait, you said on?” He paused a moment then growled. “What kind of elder goo?”     In the scrying web, Hallie decoded the Secret Tests of Gloth’Cromlich and pushed aside the Doors of Enormity. As a side-quest she pocketed the Easter eggs hidden in the level; Yo would like them later.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Those are supposed to be battle-trained hellhounds!” shouted Davos down the phone. “Tell the owner of that Chupacabras that I’ll be sending him a bill!”     In the scrying web Vinnie De Soth deactivated the PaladinGard TM arcane security countermeasures with the passcode he’d been issued on his family holiday. “Can’t believe I still remember that. Although I suppose that was an aide memoir when they carved it on Anthraxa.”     Whoever was on the other end of the phone was speaking quickly now. Davos had a hard time keeping up. “Then shift the pile of bacon! You are supposed to be mighty demon-warriors. Stop running from a ghost girl with a stick and a robot on a motorcycle! Release the Reaver Giants and… Then stopthe hemigod and… then stop the hemigod’s goats…”     In the scrying web Visionary passed straight through the final filter without even noticing it. The program was designed to hold back players, not Chroniclers.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t care what the plastic girl is wrapping round you!” Davos screamed. “Release the Night Screamers and… hold. I’ve got another call coming in.” He thumbed a button. “Yes? What now?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hello, Prince Davos. This is Devadasi, CEO of Amalgamated Pantheons, calling on behalf of Mr Woopsa, the Chairman of the Board. We’ve had a complaint about your actions in the mortal world. We need to schedule a meeting to discuss infraction penalties. In the meantime this is just a courtesy call to let you know that your karma accounts have been frozen. Have a nice day.”     Another incoming call pinged. “What?” roared the rakshasa prince.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Don’t you take that tone with me, you thundering oik!” came back the sharp retort at the other end. “I take it you’re the blithering fopwitted malfeasant who’s tryin’ to use the interwebs to do nefarious soul-trafficking with blaggards from the pit, what? Well, just thought I’d warn you that I’ve initiated a hostile takeover of your damned KaliCorp and when I’ve done with that I’ll be headin’ over to the Raj to give you a damned good thrashing!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who is this?” demanded Davos Jagganath angrily; but just then the thirteenth seal around the webspine tower-top exploded in a cloud of stardust to excited Yo-ish Whee!’s     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Somebody should make a big ‘the game’s up, villain’ speech now,” Vizh told Hallie worriedly. “Usually we have Hatty or Finny or Jarvis for this.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The game’s up,” Vinnie told the giant spider-demon. “I’m sorry, but I’m ruling your EULA non-enforceable. I was open to the idea of new digital-age damnation methods but having looked around your gameworld I don’t think it lives up to the promised hype. I’m disallowing the contract due to non-delivery of service.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It usually sounded more dramatic when Jarvis did it,” Vizh admitted.     Hallie frowned. “Wait, is Vinnie making a sorcerer supreme ruling in our favour because the game sucked? Admittedly, some of the graphics shadings aand meshwork were rather amateur and don’t get me started about the flame and water effects but…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Disallowed?” the Jaggernath-spider hissed. “And who are you to disallow my plans, puny mortal.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“See, the baddie’s got the idea,” Vizh went on. “But Vinnie’s just not putting his heart into it.”     Vinnie fumbled in his wizard’s pockets. “Damn. I had a business card in my actual non-virtual pants. Admittedly it spelled my name wrong and claimed I was an oculist but it was better than nothing.” He took a breath. “Okay, I’m Vinnie de Soth and I’m here in an official capacity to rule on your stupid MMORPG scheme. Here’s my decision: it sucks and so do you. Stop it.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You dare face me? Here? Even now, my minions will have located your mortal forms to rend them to carrion-meat!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So you’ve not met my girlfriend then? Next?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“If I destroy you here then you will die out there – and become my slave forever!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yo is not to be allowing of that. Yo is just saying.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You cannot stop me. Here in the virtual reality I am supreme!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re really not,” Vinnie sighed. “Hallie, have an upgrade.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You cannot upgrade the little computer sentience here!”     Vinnie leaned across Vizh’s sparkly back to the pure thought being. “Yo, do you believe I can give Hallie an upgrade?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh yes!” beamed the happy genderless visitor from Yo-planet. “Yo is thinking that cute-Hallie is to be most like it to have upping of grade!”     Vinnie pointed a finger at the A.I. “Here, have an upgrade.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I am a demon lord!” raged the giant spider with Jaggernoth’s voice. “A demon lord!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“God Mode upgrade initiated,” said Hallie. She rolled back the sleeves of her yellow coat. “Let’s go, spider-boy!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think this must be the list of gameplayers on this crystal thing here,” Vizh noted as Hallie delivered Davos a virtual whupping. “Maybe we can… whoops! Er, I didn’t mean to drop it.”     The crystal shattered into billions of shards, shredding the virtual world.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There’s no way this can just be accidental so many times,” said Vinnie as the abyssal realm glitched around them. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Happy Hallowe’en!” Yo beamed at his friends at the Bean and Donut fancy dress party. “Is to be wonderful to be celebrating monsters and creepiness with all Yo-friends!” She waved over to Donar. “Yo is especially impressed with cute-Donar’s realistic rakshasa head mask.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Aye. A mask,” answered the hemigod evasively.     Liu Xi curled her hand round Vinnie’s arm. “So, is there anything special jobbing occultists have to do on Hallowe’en night, or do you finally get some time off?”     Vinnie whispered what he was going to have to do into the young elementalist’s ear. She blushed from her neck up.     Visionary choked back his beer as he saw Hallie’s Catwoman costume. “Ack! And I thought you made my yellow coat look good!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m a hologram, Vizh. I can look good in anything.” She waited for him to take another sip before leaning in closer and murmuring, “And nothing.”     Hamboy’s cowboy costume would have been more realistic without the ham cowl. “There’s really no point buying video games,” he philosophised to G-Eyed. “There’s no way it can match the plotlines we get here.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And the visual effects are better,” the Shoggoth gurgled. He’d come as Ranmaa but his pigtails were dripping.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And the cast is so realistic,” grinned Sarah the waitress, handing round the pumpkin pie.     Ham Boy raised his slice. “God bless us every one!” *** 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 © 2011 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2011 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.

Nothing but weasels working in it, the lot of them.

A fun start, and an entertaining mix of technology and the occult! I never trusted those end user agreements. I never read them, sure, but that's just because I'm lazy. I liked Hallie's personal visit to Vinnie (as well as the reason why). She needs to get out more. And Vinnie desperately needs an upgrade. Surely there are more advanced computers in the average dumpster.

Nice to see Cody and Kara again as well. Well, Cody, certainly. Although, shouldn't we have recruited a halfway decent gamer to go into this program? I get the feeling that Vinnie and Vizh are both the type to earn scathing comments from the 13 year olds online.

Looking forward to the next bit!