Previous Post Vinnie De Soth and the War of the Hells [The author would like to apologise to anyone not versed in Parodyverse history since this story won’t make any sense at all to them. Those who insist on being in on it are referred to Who's Who in the Parodyverse. The rest of you should just run far, far away now.] ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So, let me get this straight,” sighed Vinnie de Soth. “Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises was contracted to deliver a birthday card. To Hell. Specifically to the bit of the infernal abyss ruled by your ex-delivery boy Nats. Except that region’s blockaded because he’s become the white sheep of the infernal hell-lords so the message got bounced to Comic-Book Limbo, where, since the card was the only thing that actually existed in a reality of deleted and forgotten concepts it became a votive object of excised members of the Apostate’s worship cult. That led to religious wars with wiped-from-reality Parody Cultists using refitted Disco Hitler zombies as shock troops who raided the card and carried it away to use in a ritual to break out into the Negativity Zone.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Right so far,” winced Amy Aston.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“However, the Negativity Zone had wards placed upon it by its Lord Anihillatus which meant that instead the occult energies were reflected back into the Nexus of Unreality, temporarily turning its guardian Crapsack into America’s Next Top Supermodel and leading to an entire mini-series where Fashion Accessory goes to war with Kim Kardashian. Meanwhile the occult-digitised greetings card sprayed its contents across the time/space continuum, provoking forty-second century resistance fighters to overthrow the tyrannical Wang the Conqueror and set him on his inevitable trek back to the current era to battle the Lair Legion.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s a little bit more complicated than that, but if you want to summarise…” conceded Al B. Harper.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“However, since that future has now been retconned the card was automatically transferred into both the to-do pile of the Destroyer of Worlds, where it was pulped under the weight of Lisa’s address book, and to the alert red-watch file of the Celestian Space Robots, prompting them to review their planetary destruction protocols for Earth and begin a cycle of organic cleansing that will remove all life on Earth sometime in the next 36 hours.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nearer twenty-four,” noted Miss Framlicker. “We’re filing an appeal.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And the ghost of the Lisa-crushed card gained sentience in the Amalgamated Deathrealms of the Retired Pantheons and resurrected the Byrne to try and blow up the moon again – why?”     Cody Harper shrugged. “Something to do?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Something to do with a vast voidy thing floating towards the Parodyverse to get Liu Xi, I think,” Kara clarified. “I’d need to go check my notes. But anyway, the Moon Public Library put a stop to that. No jumped-up printed matter’s going to get the better of them.”     Vinnie rubbed his forehead. “Okay. That explains the infernal civil war, the restructuring of the Spawning Grounds of the Hero Feeders, the whole thing where Ham-Boy lost his pants on national television, the personification of Kink’s Pregnancy Gun into the new supervillain Unexpected Complication and Vizh’s subsequent difficulties, the unexpected stop of the Chronicler of Stories that resulted in that plague of black-coffee-drinking My Little Ponies and the consequent turf war with the steroidal Pokéballs, the sudden urge of several hundred thousand minor paranormal entities to decamp from Earth’s arcanosphere and Camellia of the Fey’s consequent difficulty in recruiting for her destruction-of-all-non-magical-earthforms plot, and possibly why I’m developing a splitting migraine. What it doesn’t explain is why you folks at EEE now want to shoot me through your dimensional portal at a moment when frankly I’d prefer to be laying down in a darkened room.”     The Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises staff smiled at the young jobbing occultist. It was like being surrounded by technically-minded wolves.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We need someone with your unique skillset and character profile,” Al B. explained.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Knows about spooky stuff and is gullible,” Kara clarified helpfully.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And is cheap,” Miss Framlicker added cautiously.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And expendable,” Kara continued.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, don’t help any more, sis,” Cody advised her.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What do you need me to do?” Vinnie asked nervously. “And how cheap do I have to be.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not Kara cheap,” Cody assured him. “Just, y’know, save-the-world on a budget.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“They’re making this sound complicated,” Amy interrupted impatiently. “All we need you to do, Vinnie, is to go and deliver the original card to its original destination. We’ve reconstructed Nats’ letter from across time and space and seventeen different dimensions and now all you have to do is take it to him and we’ll have fulfilled our contract.”     Vinnie frowned. “Didn’t your first attempt kind of… bounce? And fragment the letter across the Parodyverse, causing untold havoc?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s why we’re not sending ManMan,” Miss Framlicker explained. “Heck, if we were going to be that reckless we might as well catapult spiffy in there and be done with it.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’ve calculated that an occult-sensitive sentience could navigate the arcane barriers round Nats’ hell-realm with a 73.8% chance of success,” Al B. assured Vinnie. “You were very nearly our first choice.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Really?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes, After Citizen Z, Tanner, Gunther, Sorceress, Urthula, Balefire, Vizh’s raven…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Wait a minute. Balefire’s not even in the Parodyverse any more!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And yet,” said Kara.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We really need you to do this, Vinnie,” Dr Harper admitted. “We do have a contract to meet.”     Vinnie folded his arms. “You know what? No. Just no. I’m fed up of being the nice guy. Find some other patsy to toss through your weird science portal. I’m going home.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why?” wondered Kara. “I mean, you basically live alone in a cupboard, right? Just asking.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sorcerers don’t care about material things,” the jobbing occultist answered defensively. “Really.”     Miss Framlicker looked a little uncomfortable. “Ye-es. I’m afraid Alaric’s right, Vincent. You see, when he says we’re under contract to deliver…”     Alarm bells went off in the acting sorcerer supreme’s head. “Not a contract written in blood, by any chance? Something involving intangible forfeits for failure to deliver?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nah, nothing like that,” scorned Cody. “Give me some credit for being able to read legalese. No, this is a bit more like… um… well it turns out that if we don’t deliver, Earth becomes the property of the Maladictean Empire.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The who now?”     Kara pointed to the galactic chart on the wall of EEE’s firehouse headquarters. “Don’t you even turn up to Hatman’s Lair Legion strategy briefings? You’ve heard of the Parody War, right? Big interplanetary thing that rocked the whole Parodyverse?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes. I was there. That was when I…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Save it for the flashback,” Kara advised. Vinnie would have objected except she had a very tight-fitting sci-fi jumpsuit with a zip down the front. Emphasis was on the down. “So when the Parody Master got taken out there was a power void. The Shee-Yar, the Skree, the Skunks weren’t any of them in a position to take advantage. So in Sector Alpha out here this planet rose to dominance. We call it Apokalyspe.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dark Thugos’ homeworld,” Vinnie shuddered.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah. That’s where a New Pantheon’s rising,” Kara grumbled with the tones of one who had not been invited to a really cool party.     Cody pointed to Sector Beta. “Over here are a warrior race called the Chakauri. We don’t know much about them yet but apparently they’re very popular right now and they’re tight with Hoki, Ausgardian God of Bad Stuff. Donar’s on it.”     Miss Framlicker tapped Sector Gamma. “And here are the Maladicteans. They’ve risen from obscurity very quickly, through conquest and alliance – and because they have the last working Dimensional Dreadnaught, the Cruel Deceiver on their side.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Captain Kahn’s clearly found some other power source to replace its original Because-the-Parody-Master-Wants-It drives,” Al B. observed. “So the last planet-shattering mega-spaceship is on Team Maladictus.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So the Maladicteans seemed like a good thing,” Miss Framlicker went on. “They were keeping out the Trade Alliance, which isn’t as nice as their marketing might make them appear, holding back Apokalypsian and Chakauri aggression, and committing less reported inhuman rights abuses per billion population than any of the others. Ideal place for us to establish a subspace dimensional gate to.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“In retrospect we should have had somebody other than Arnie J. Armbruster check the small print,” Amy Aston admitted.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You sold them Earth?” Vinnie asked. “Can you legally do that?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“In Maladictean law we can,” Cody winced.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And if we’d only known that we could have go so much more,” complained Kara.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But, we were able to renegotiate with their Tyrant Emperor,” Miss Framlicker went on brightly. “He agreed it was all a misunderstanding and confirmed he would cancel the deal if we just did a couple of little errands for him.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So we got him the weird metal he wanted out of the dimension of Corposant Fire and dropped a deep void buoy into the Transdimensional Vortex. Then all we had to do was send a birthday card to Nats and we were out,” Amy concluded.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And you never asked why an alien dictator – who actually describes himself as a Tyrant Emperor, by the way – might want to send a greetings message to Bill Reed?” Vinnie checked.     The EEE staff looked at each other uncomfortably. “Er, actually we did,” admitted Miss Framlicker. “We, um, identified the Tyrant Emperor all right, in the end.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Check the return address on the back of the envelope, dude,” warned Cody Harper.     Vinnie turned the simple card around and read: “Return to I. Winkelweald, Herringcarp Asylum, Upstate Gothametropolis, Earth, Parodyverse Prime. But… isn’t that the original name of…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The Hooded Hood!” supplied Kara. “And nobody here even thought to try offering me up to be his consort!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sis, you’re slutty,” Cody conceded, “but that guy has dated Lisa!”     Vinnie ignored the subsequent sibling slanging match and stared at the envelope. “So why does the Hood want to send Nats birthday greetings?”     Dr Harper took the question with considerable enthusiasm. “I’ve been asking the same thing myself. Of course, causing the origin of Wang the Conqueror, redeploying the Celestians, shifting the moon four inches to the left, wrecking Camellia’s plans, restructuring Comic-Book Limbo and the Amalgamated Deathlands, arranging for spiffy’s girlfriend to get pregnant, or embossing Ham-Boy on prime-time national television might have been what he was after, but with the cowled crime czar who can be sure? Sometimes he can be a little sneaky.”     Vinnie swallowed hard. “And you want me to go to hell to find out.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes please,” agreed Amy.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There are quite a few entities in that area who aren’t very fond of me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What’s different here?” wondered Kara.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And it’s Hallowe’en. This is my busy time.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then you won’t mind penalty clauses for later delivery,” Miss Framlicker suggested.     Vinnie sighed again. “I’ll need fifteen percent on top of my standard rate,” he insisted.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Basic standard rate and we won’t deduct the costs of the dimensional transit,” Miss F countered. “Or the coffee you just drank.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Okay.” Vinnie surrendered. “Before anything though, can anyone loan me a cigarette lighter?”     Amy handed one over. She didn’t smoke. She just liked fire.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This is a no smoking environment,” Cody cautioned. “Except for dad’s equipment, of course.”     Vinnie flicked the lighter and set fire to the card.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hey!” objected Amy. She raced to get a fire extinguisher.     It was too late. The envelope and its contents were ashes.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There you go,” Vinnie told EEE. “That letter’s gone straight to hell.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hold it folks,” Al B. halted his family and colleagues as they mobbed Vinnie de Soth. “Vin might have a point there. After all, he’s a major occult figure and the letter was properly addressed. I think he might have managed a conceptual delivery. Let me just develop an entirely new method of trans-cognitive meta-textual data to Platonic paradigm interface translation algorithm and I’ll be able to tell. So if gamma is the fundamental tangibility coefficient…”     Miss Framlicker turned crossly on Vinnie. “Now see what you’ve done? ManMan will be weeks scrubbing the calculations off the walls, floors and ceilings!”     Cody came to Vinnie’s rescue. “Hey, the dude did what we asked. Maybe even tossed a curve at the Hooded Hood. No way he foresaw that outcome, right? Right? Guys…?”     Vinnie went home. ***          Ã¢â‚¬Å“Bill?” frowned Uhunalura Amalandriana Excelsior!, Nats’ live-in sex princess, “Did you put this extra clause into the proposed truce treaty with Belaziel, Lord of the Moral Wastes and Vesperine, Lady of Torments? Only I can’t think how else it just slipped in there?”     Nats wandered over to look over his copy of the document that would prevent hell-wide warfare that might spill over into all the planes of the Parodyverse. “That’s not mine!” he objected. “It’s not even my handwriting! Who’d put such a thing in like that?”     Uhuna read the text out loud. “Best wishes for a happy time. Bill, isn’t saying something like that a mortal insult to a Demon Lord? Where could it possibly come from?”     On the borders of Nats’ kingdom the alarum bells started to ring.     The War of the Hells had just begun. *** Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2012 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2012 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.

Did you deliberately touch on as many characters and plots as you could?