Previous Post Untold Tales of the Senior Junior Lair Legion #355: The College Years Go straight to: Part One: Randy Clement and the Midnight Invitation Part Two: Vespiir of Earth and the Student Revels Part Three: Samantha Bonnington and the Bad Decisions Interval: Kara Harper and the Infernal Concert Part Four: Harlagaz Donarson and the Theological Dilemmas Part Five: Kerry Shepherdson and the Dead Man's Bargain Part Six: Danny Lyle and the Last Denial Epilogue: Visionary and the Unexpected Body Count Back issues at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Character descriptions in Who's Who in the Parodyverse *** From: Deputy Leader Goldeneyed [g_eyed@blackpower.com] To: Visionary [vizh@fakeman.co.us] Cc: The Lair Legion Subject: Expanding the Lair Legion Eventually So like I said at the briefing, guys, while Finny is MIA and I’m running the shop I think we need to consider expanding the team. I’m not totally against CSFB!s idea about inducting the Dallas Cheerleaders – he pointed out their incredible dexterity and flexibility – but I also have a threatening note from Dancer about “inducting airheaded bimbos whose fake boobs might pose an explosion hazard”. So for now I think we’ll go with our longer-term plan of growing our own next generation of superheroes. Yes, folks, we’re activating the Lair Legion Junior Training Programme! We can expect the first intake in the next week so we need to think fast about how to handle this – and who to appoint to look after them. From: Visionary [vizh@weasellover.com] To: Goldeneyed [g-eyed@blackpower.com] Subject: How Could You Do This To Me? Me? In charge of children? In charge of Kerry Shepherdson??? Lisa is behind this, isn’t she? I swear I just borrowed those batteries for the kitchen radio. How was I to know that meant she had to grab some of Enty’s experimental new power sources to activate her… apparatus. Fortunately most people thought the Lair Banshee was back, but Ms Waltz knows how to hold a grudge. That’s why she forged my volunteer letter, right? That’s why everybody voted me to be headmaster of this school thing. And not just any class – a self-absorbed California girl former-New Battler who can transmute any clothing, Donar’s kid who is just like him without the civilised refinements, and did I mention Kerry Shepherdson, the girl who set my slippers on fire while I was wearing them? And who else? spiffy? SPIFFY? No. I’ve done lots of humiliating, dangerous, horrible things for the Regulars and the Legion. I’ve used Enty-tech. I’ve been a weasel. I’ve had multi-part crossovers. And monitor duty. So much monitor duty. The line is here. This is the line. Here. No. From: Lisa [llw@leatherlawyers.com] To: Visionary [vizh@suckerforasobstory.org] Subject: Ha Ha! Enjoy your first day teaching class. Only three years until they go to college. Three years later… 1. Randy Clement and the Midnight Invitation     “When we let you stay here, what was the first rule we told you?” demanded Samantha Bonnington, the fabulous Fashion Accessory.     Randy J. Clement, the one-man Mutate Liberation Army, thought hard. “Don’t steal Harlagaz’s fridge snacks, as a fist through the brain-pan often offends?”     “Well yes, but try again,” Kerry Shepherdson, probability arsonist insisted.     “Don’t hit on Vespiir because she’s had enough of that kind of attention and frankly it’s just uncool?”     “It is considered a compliment on my homeworld, Caph,” the green-skinned seeress admitted, “but it becomes a bit tedious having to stab so many boys with my houri blade every day.” All Caphan girls were expected to defend themselves from raiders, even exiled ex-slaves who had been sent to Earth to study at Paradopolis University.     “The other first rule,” FA persisted. “Come on!”     “Leave the toilet seat down, and if Gaz has had a curry call Danny to come and deny the stench?”     “‘Tis but a compliment to the chef,” insisted Harlagaz Donarson, teenage-equivalent Ausgardian demihemigod of thunder.     “But dangerous in a student house where a probability-shifting pyromanic lives,” Danny Lyle pointed out. “That concentration of flammable gas could kill us all.” His hand was currently resting on that pyromaniac’s jean-clad derriere and his denial powers were stopping his fingers from igniting.     Randy – or RJ as his new housemates insisted on calling him – brushed a confused hand through his hair. “I’m sorry guys. There were a lot of first rules when I was dropped off here. There was the couch reservation rota and the fire extinguisher protocols and the pants-on-in-public areas restriction. And some really draconian no-hacking rules that I’m guessing weren’t made specifically for me. And a thing about houseplants.”     “We called him spiffy,” FA revealed. “We all have dark secrets. But there is one first rule we really need to emphasise above the other first rules.”     “Although it is quite possible nobody mentioned it until it suddenly became relevant,” Danny added reasonably.     R.J. frowned at the young woman visitor with whom he was enjoying his turn on the couch reservation rota. “Do you have any idea what they’re talking about? We’re not even at the no-pants stage yet.”     Kerry stuck her hands on her hips. “The rule is ‘No vampires invited into the house!’”     The girl in the low-cut crimson dress pouted a little. “I’m not a vampire. Entirely. Anyway, don’t be lifeist.”     “Not all undeadeth art evil,” Harlagaz had to admit. “‘Tis sooth that most draugr must be smitten forthwith, but yon Urthula Underess that did’st date Vinnie de Soth art passing hot for the nonce.”     “We do not mention the V-word,” Kerry insisted; there had been a whole thing where she and the jobbing occultist had succumbed to seduction pheromones.     “But Urthula is hot,” Danny conceded. He pointed to R.J.’s russet-haired couch mate. “You are not her.”     She snorted scornfully. “Of course not. Urthula is hundreds of years old. I’m eighteen.”     “And legal,” R.J. mentioned for the record. “A consenting adult. Who was consenting.”     “Perhaps we should mention that this has happened before?” Vespiir appealed to Danny.     “Oh, I reckon this isn’t the first ingénue who’s wrecked our couch with Randy Clement,” FA agreed. “Reupholstering is not my favourite power and it doesn’t cover springs. That’s why we now have a first rule about no more than four people on any one piece of furniture.”     “Vesp means it’s not the first time this kind of thing has happened with that particular couch-bunny,” Danny clarified. “Not even the first time tonight.”     Vespiir’s seeress powers, the ones that marked her as a witch on her home-planet because traditionally only males were supposed to receive such foresight, often let her remember when Denial’s powers had revised a recent event. “That girl came to the door before. Harlagaz answered. She asked if she could come in. Harlagaz put his tongue back into his mouth and said yes. We found them on that couch just as we find R.J. with her now. Danny denied it with his powers so that she was never allowed in.”     “Everyone knows where inviting vampires in leads to,” Samantha Bonnington insisted. “Underwired nightdresses are so out of fashion.”     The accused nosferatu looked puzzled. “I was here before? I think I’d have remembered the big Aussie. I know he would have remembered me.”     Danny squirmed a bit. “She was actually here twice. I answered the door the first time.”     “And you did not let her in,” Kerry told, not asked him.     “As if I would.”     “That isn’t actually a denial,” Vespiir pointed out. “You don’t lie to Kerry, or use your powers on her except in self-defence or to prevent holocaust. But you evade very well.”     “Like your dad,” FA pointed out to the leather-jacketed son of the Hooded Hood.     Danny held his hands up in surrender. “She charmed her way in, okay? Then I denied her. Literally. Honestly, Kes…” He broke off as his fingers sizzled. He had to stop his denials to apply a Denial.     “Is there a reason why I shouldn’t just turn you into a vamp-pyre right now?” Kerry challenged the intruder.     “Hey, she’s with me!” R.J. pointed out. “Okay, she may have charmed me to invite her across the threshold, thereby breaking another first rule that nobody thought of until it became suddenly relevant, but I don’t let my dates catch fire in anything but metaphorical ways.” He turned to the russet-haired girl. “Are you a vampire? And what’s your name?”     “Now he asks my name,” she sighed. “Men!” She disentangled herself from the couch and the boy and faced the accusing members of the Lair Legion’s Senior Junior Metahuman Training Programme. “I am Alotta Sarafista Lurkosa Hertzhog, Raugräfin of Badhexen… but mostly my friends call me Red Velvet.”     Kerry suggested some names that her enemies might call a sofa-stealing multiple-intruder. “You realise the couch rota wasn’t meant to be all one person, right?” she concluded.     FA just sniffed. “Red velvet? Really? With that complexion?”     “You did not come here only to test our couch or our mast… menfolk,” Vespiir discerned. “What was your true mission?”     “Before I deny you ever had access to… whatever you were accessing of R.J.’s,” Danny added.     “I didn’t come here to access him,” Velvet insisted. “He just sort of… persuaded me.”     “Thou seducest yon vampire chick?” Harlagaz admired. “Dude!”     “I’m not a vampire chick!” Velvet insisted. “Well, only on my father’s side. One of my fathers.”     Vespiir looked confused. “Did I miss something about how you Terrans procreate?” she whispered to FA, “Because I thought Miiri gave me a pretty complete orientation.”     “One father is customary,” Kerry admitted. “My niece and nephew have two mothers, but that was a massively complicated story. The unbelievable part was that Visionary was involved in any way.”     Red Velvet wasn’t interested in Kerry’s murky backstory. “It was occult, alright. My mother was a Chosen One, naturally, and so she was courted by a Vampire Count and a Werewolf Prince and… well there was magic and possibly the tiniest bit of sluttiness and…”     “You’re a half-werewolf half-vampire?” Danny checked.     “It’s more common than you’d expect. We’re the new cat-girls. For a while there everyone was dating a vampire and a werewolf at the same time. There’s a lot of puppies around who sparkle in strong daylight.”     “So you’re a dog,” FA concluded. “Or since you’re female, a…”     “Guest,” R.J. insisted. “However she was invited in, she’s now a guest. If we don’t have a first rule about being polite to visitors then we should have. Is there, I don’t know, some kind of system for proposing these first rules?”     “We hast ne’er needed one until the nonce,” Harlagaz admitted. “For the most part we doth just wait until something explodeth and then make up a rule to stop it explodething again.”     “Or we buy Kes ice-cream,” Danny confided.     Vespiir took charge. “Welcome to our tent, sister,” she bade the vampire-werewolf-couch ornament. “May your loins be fruitful. What embassage brings you to the House of Viisionary?”     “We are not affiliated with Dweeb Central,” Kerry insisted, “except in the sense of when credit card billing is required.”     “Oh, right,” Red Velvet remembered. “Yes. I brought invitations for you. They were tucked in my bra.”     “Over there,” R.J. offered helpfully.     Harlagaz recovered the discarded envelopes. “Tis writing of some sort,” he offered helpfully.     “Official invites,” FA recognised, “for the Alpha Alpha Alpha Freshman’s Ball, at their fabulous luxurious fraternity mansion.”     “You’re a Triple Alpha?” R.J. grinned. “Or is than an Alphette?”     “Hold on,” Kerry cautioned with a scowl. “We had a briefing on this. Yuki warned us about something. It was just before the radiator burst into flames.”     Vespiir always listened carefully to the instruction of her seniors, even during live-fire plumbing accidents. “Mistress Shiro said that the AAA fraternity and sorority were only fronts for some student training program. I believe she termed it ‘Young Heckfire’.”     “Them!” growled Harlagaz. “They durst crawl out of yon crater wherein we didst poundeth them and trouble us again?”     Randy Clement hadn’t even inherited his speed powers when the Juniors had competed against the next generation trainees of the sinister Heck-Fire Club in the Junior Superhero Trials. He had no idea how serious it had got. “What’s a Young Heckfire?” he asked naively.     “Well, Danny was,” Fashion Accessory pointed out. “That’s how we met him. He was on the bad-guy team.”     “It is not a bad-guy team,” Red Velvet insisted. “We are just a coalition of promising future world leaders, many of us sons and daughters of prominent people who happen to be members of the same gentleman’s club and who exhibit extraordinary characteristics. We are being tutored in the application of our gifts to be better suited for our roles tomorrow.”     “As long as those roles are ruling humanity,” Danny scorned.     Samantha filled Vespiir and R.J. in. “Alpha Dude, Black Princess, Blatant Genius, and don’t-mention-the-V-word’s little sister Privilege were the surviving students last we heard. Crapsack went waaaay off-piste to become, like, the guardian of the Nexus of Unreality in the Wookiegetlucky Swamp and a walking bio-disaster. Their leader Lord and Master helpfully dropped dead of a heart attack in the shower.”     “That could happen to anyone if they soap too vigorously,” Danny Lyle insisted. He had murdered Lord and Master to prevent him from going after Kerry. He had never confessed it to his girlfriend in any way he hadn’t afterwards Denied.     “Really? Soaping?” Gaz worried. He wasn’t sure if Ausgardians were meant to wash at all.     “Well now Young Heckfire has me, Red Velvet. But that’s not the point. You see, now that we are on campus and you are on campus, everyone expects us to be some kind of juvenile rivals. Student pranks, wacky stunts, dorm raids, all of that. It’s so 1980s. So we discussed it and we decided we should try a different way.”     “All out war,” Harlagaz anticipated. “Enter yon Thunderdome!”     “We’re going to be the leaders of tomorrow,” Velvet pushed on. “You people, well some of you might be the superheroes of tomorrow. The next generation of the Lair Legion.”     “We already were for a while, when the LL vanished,” Kerry insisted. “Then we got bumped back to kindergarten, except for Ham-Boy. Why does he get to play at the grown-up’s table? All he can do is put meatloaf on it.”     Velvet struggled forward. “The point is, do we have to be enemies now or is there a chance to put the past behind us? So you are invited to our party. Let’s see how things go from there.”     “I’d like to see where things go,” R.J. assured the russet-haired girl. “I’d like to see them go all the way.”     “Trap,” said Kerry. “Come on, how stupid does Young Heckfire think we are? Do they expect us to just walk up to their swanky campus frat-mansion and wait for them to make their move against us? Do they think we’re… FA, you’re already picking out a dress, aren’t you?”     “Well… it seems rude not to see what kind of a trap it is.”     “And I art picking out a weapon,” Harlagaz advised.     “I, um, I see us there,” Vespiir ventured. “The future can be changed, but then I get a terrible migraine, worse than discipline from Slavemistress Daava .”     “And I already have a date,” R.J. pointed out. He smiled tentatively at Velvet. “Um, must you suck my blood? I have other things available that you could…”     “Alright!” Kerry interrupted testily. “Alright, we’ll do the student thing and go to the campus party that is put on by our old enemies who want to see us destroyed. Fair enough? Is everybody happy now? Are we doomed enough?”     Danny said nothing. He wasn’t sure why, but this felt like a major junction in the events-tree of causality.     R.J. grinned. “So given that Velvet is only half-vampire does the first rule still apply? Or can we get back to my bit of the couch rota?” *** 2. Vespiir of Earth and the Student Revels     “I do not understand,” the exile of Caph admitted to her new tent-sisters. “We are summoned to revels at the fortress of our enemy. Why would I not wear my Caphan mesh and out-dazzle the slaves of our adversaries, demanding all their menfolk to look on me and despair?”     Fashion Accessory regarded the well-rounded green-skinned fantasy in her elegant golden chains, purple gauze, and perhaps three square inches of silk. “You might, um, over-dazzle. Here one Earth we sometimes go for a… less open attack.”     “Lady Miiri made some mention of this. How guile and subtlety could tease a lover into wild distraction without need even for lotions or gymnastics. This is how she became blessed with Lord Viisionary’s son and daughter, yes?”     “Lalalalalalalalalala!” Kerry blurted hastily. “Not hearing you. Burning the dendrons from my brain.”     “Kare doesn’t do well thinking about her adoptive brother in horizontal situations. Or, given it was Miiri, vertical or diagonal situations. Although really he wasn’t that bad when he was sixteen that time and we saw…”     “Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala!” Nearby cushions began to smoulder.     “Kerry does not wish to learn from the actions of her seniors?” Vespiir wondered. “I had hoped to know more of Lord Viisionary’s fabled prowess that enabled him to impregnate two women with the same children at the same time. What kind of position with Mistresses Miiri and Hallie would enable that, and how…?”     A mattress exploded in a shower of burning feathers. FA was stood ready to transmute them into flame-retardant NASA fabric. “Maybe discuss that with Teach directly, eh Vesp? But wait until I’m there and I can fetch him something to drink just before you present your list of technical questions. Meanwhile, let’s make sure you are properly kitted out for this Triple Alpha party trap.”     “I am too adorned? Perhaps if I omit the jewelled nipple cups?”     “It’s not going to be that kind of party,” Kerry insisted. “We’re just going along to show the Heckfires that we are not afraid of them even in their creepy luxurious mansion of, um, luxury. To face the enemy. Maybe to ignite them a little when they try something.”     “Another reason to keep the nipple cups on,” FA suggested. “We want to look the bad guys in the eye.”     “And we don’t want our guys tripping over furniture,” Kerry added sourly, envying the Caphan’s physique. Only a vicious outcast brand under the headband that Vespiir wore marred her perfect body.     “How about this?” Samantha suggested, transmuting Vespiir a form-fitting white minidress with silver accessories.     Vespiir admired herself in the mirror, blushing. “No veil?” she asked, as if that was a great scandal.     “We tend to cover other bits here on this part of Earth,” FA noted. “I can add one if you’d like.”     “No. I am here to learn your ways. My world is not ready to accept me. I must make a different home.” She frowned a little. “If we do not have veils to remove, how will anyone know when to begin the orgy?”     “I think we may need to go over the protocol of this mission again,” Kerry sighed. ***     “Okay,” grinned Danny Lyle. “Assume I went subvocal when I saw you three coming down the stairs but I retconned it because I’d look uncool. Assume I denied the drooling as well.”     Vespiir curtseyed to the boys. “Our appearance pleases you?”     “I’m all for it,” R.J. admitted. He has selected another of his endless collection of casual sportswear and a t-shirt that read Magnetic Techbird Lives! (Apply in my pants for details) “You know, I wasn’t sure about this whole Juniors student thing. It was a lot better than the alternative – supermax prison - but I felt bad about putting my crusade to liberate mutates everywhere on hold while I served out some kind of parole with you guys. Now I’m starting to think it could be… fun.”     “Just try to limit any fun you have with that skanky vampwolf to the exchange of usual body fluids,” Kerry cautioned him. “Remember we’re heading into a combat zone here. We just have to go differently equipped to a standard LL mission.”     “She keeps trying to get me to join the Juniors,” Danny confided in the Mutate Liberation Army. “And to sign up for classes. She’s so responsible these days.”     “You take that back, Danny Lyle!” the probability arsonist flared. “Take it back or…”     “So responsible,” FA snorted.     Harlagaz backed in from the kitchen. The beer keg strapped between his shoulder blades pushed the door open. A series of tubes connected the drum with a winged and horned drinking helmet. “Ho, boon comrades,” he greeted them. “I art ready to party!”     “This is a mission,” Kerry insisted, with a quelling glance at Danny for any accusations of maturity he might make.     “Verily. I hast equipped myself with the legendary Quaffing Helm of All-Puking. None shall match mine prowess at the swilling or the chundering. Let the heavens flinch at the conflict!”     “You can’t take that to the Triple Alpha mansion bash,” FA objected.     “Right,” R.J. agreed. “Booze-breath turns off the ladies. Spray vomiting is pretty much a deal-breaker.”     “I’m reconsidering your outfit choices, Gaz,” Kerry admitted, “if you could be sure to talk to Stacy Royale, Black Princess. A little chundering her way would be acceptable.”     “I mean he can’t go out wearing a silver-rimmed helmet with brown and bronze leathers and wristbands,” Samantha Bonnington clarified. “Hold on… fixed it.”     “Lord Gaz will challenge the masters of the enemy clan to different tests of endurance,” Vespiir understood. “Whilst we expose them as inadequate lovers, unable to match our skill and passion, and Lords R.J. and Danny render House Heeckfire’s pleasure women to blissful indolence, Lord Gaz will defeat them at the manly sport of the drinking duel.”     “That’s not the actual plan,” Danny admitted. “Have you ever been to a party that wasn’t an orgy, Vespiir?”     The Caphan frowned. “A party that wasn’t a party? I don’t understand.”     “It’s a translator implant glitch,” FA understood. “I’m not sure the Caphans have different words for ‘party’ and ‘orgy’. This is going to be a challenging night out.”     “But we shall meet the challenge and prevail by our arts and enthusiasm,” Vespiir promised her house-sisters. ***     For what Hatman has called “security reasons”, the Juniors had been installed in a private house on the edge of the Paradopolis U campus, a former fraternity lodge that had been shut down when its members had been exposed as cultists of Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu, the Groper Out of Grossness who slumbered in eternal flatulence under the roots of Paradopolis. Any remaining bad karma had been scared away – or possibly eaten – by the Manga Shoggoth who had summarily terminated the cult’s activities. Only certain wallpaper stains remained as legacy of the previous occupants, but most of the walls were scorched clean now.     Young Heckfire, associated with the prestigious Pierce Heights Heckfire Club, was significantly better funded. Their on-campus headquarters, a combined fraternity and sorority house for Alpha Alpha Alpha members, was a small mansion with private pool and tennis courts. Behind exclusivity-ensuring high railings and hired security, the glittering students of Triple Alpha enjoyed every luxury and privilege that money could buy.     “It has to burn,” Kerry muttered as the Juniors queued at the gate to present their invitations. “Natural justice demands it.”     “I thought the mission was to observe and maybe get in their faces, Kare,” FA reminded her pyromanic friend.     “But they built their place out of mostly wood!”     “Ho, security minions!” Harlagaz greeted the rent-a-cops. “Here art the keys to mine father’s goat chariot. Dost not ding it when thou parkest it, for I have still not paid off for the bodywork when I crashed it into yon Anvil Man for the nonce.”     “Best not to park it too close to anything edible either,” Denial advised the staff. “Not just foods. Anything wooden or metal too, really. Or flesh.”     Vespiir stepped forward. “We are invited here at the behest of Lady Alootta, the Red Velvet, who has bestowed upon us these warrants of greeting and safe conduct.” She proffered the documents to the presumed-eunuchs who guarded the gate. “We claim hospitality and offer comity in this domain of our enemies, and will repay kindness with honour and betrayal with vengeance; in the name of Lord Viisionary and the Clan of Legions.” She smiled comfortingly at the greeter and added confidentially, “That is a very realistic simulacrum concealed in your undergarment. May it bring joy to you and the eunuch you share it with.”     FA hastened the group onto the grounds. The mansion’s forecourt was festooned with lanterns around a temporary dancefloor. A DJ was presiding over the music mix.     “Those girls do not appear to have much training,” Vespiir judged professionally. “They do not understand how to co-ordinate their movements to match their lovers, to bring delight and arousal. They are just… jigging their arms about and shuffling their feet. Even those slaves locked in the penance cages display only rudimentary skills at proper display.”     “Well, the hired cage dancers are probably on minimum wage,” R.J. considered. He reflected further. “Someone should really go and liberate them.”     “There’s plenty of people about,” Danny noted. “If we’re going to be attacked it’s likely not going to be blatant. Too many witnesses.”     Harlagaz returned to the group. Nobody had noticed he was absent. “I hath added yon Ausgardian mead to the punch bowl,” he reported. “Granny Winterteeth’s Old Particular. Let the revels begin!”     R.J. looked worried. “Does that count as a first strike?” he asked the others.     “Borderline,” FA decided. “We didn’t actually start any of those fist fights.”     R.J. pocketed the cage dancers’ phone numbers he had collected while Fashion Accessory was speaking.     “There are more exclusive festivities occurring on that balcony of the fortress,” Vespiir noticed. “I believe that is Lady Red Velvet gesturing for us to find our way up to her. We should greet our hosts.”     “With nuclear fire,” Kerri muttered and followed the Caphan.     “We’ve come this far,” Samantha Bonnington decided. “Let’s go make sure that when the other shoe drops it is properly Miucchia Prada.” *** 3. Samantha Bonnington and the Bad Choices     “Hello, Miss Sammy.”     It only took three words to shatter Samantha Bonnington’s life. Again.     There had been a number of retcons in her nineteen-year span, most significant of which was probably her brief tenure as the Celestian Madonna, intended bride of the scheming Void Scholar, before someone else had always occupied that cosmic destiny. But long before that, a dissatisfied runaway thirteen-year-old had fled her parents’ divorce and had fallen into bad company.     And then she had encountered the Hooded Hood.     The cowled crime czar was constructing a scheme that required sidekicks for various members of the then-Lair Legion. He had a means by which a suitable human girl could receive a fraction of Austernal power and gain some of the matter-control abilities of the Legionnaire Sersi. Samantha took the deal.     She became Fashion Accessory, youngest and most precocious member of the ‘sidekicks’ who turned rogue as the New Battlers. After the Hood’s plots were done she remained with E-Male, Li’l Buttie, Worm-Boy, Boy Wonder, Thunderstroke and the rest. They were quite happy to exploit a young, naïve, out-of-her-depth wannabe. The videos they took were used to blackmail her later.     Except that when it mattered Samantha had made another choice, to not betray her real friends whatever future it cost her; and Kerry, Gaz, and the other Juniors had stood by her. The New Battlers were gone now, most dead, the last three imprisoned, and Fashion Accessory was free.     Or so she had thought until those three words.     Only one person called her that in those mocking-servile tones: the Apocalyspian survivor who had been forged to simulate the powers of the Jarvis Cosmic, the self-proclaimed Li’l Buttie.     Fashion Accessory turned on him, ready to fight.     The former Battler put a cocktail on her hand. “Good evening, miss. What a pleasure to meet you again in such a civilised setting.”     Kerry, Harlagaz, and Danny recognised their old foe immediately. R.J. and Vespiir were quick to understand that a threat had appeared.     “What are you doing here, butler-lite?” Kerry demanded. “Didn’t they lock you away forever in some corner of the Safe?”     “That was before my sterling service with Terminus Team and my expensive flotilla of Heckfire attorneys,” Li’l Buttie explained. His handsome smile had no warmth to it. “Most of my wrongdoings were as a minor. I have clearly reformed. Hence my pardon.”     “Pardon?” Harlagaz snarled. “Thou art a spawn of Granny Grimness’ weapons factory, sent to Earth to plague thy betters until we smitest thee right goodly forthwith!”     Their white evening-suited host sucked air in through his teeth. “An unwarranted assault upon a fellow student in front of so many spectators? That would be grounds to have you banned from campus, wouldn’t it? And I would have legitimate reason to defend myself, starting with a cosmic burst that would turn this entire quadrant of the city into a smoking crater.” He sipped his vermouth. “That would quite spoil our soirée. I personally selected the napkins.”     “You’re with Young Heckfire now,” Samantha understood, able to speak at last. “You?”     “It was the best offer around. I can’t go home. I failed Granny and she has little use for that, and as I understand it your grown-up sponsors recently tossed Dark Thugos into the Wonderwall around the Parodyverse. This seemed like a comfortable option. And I do know how to organise events that have some panache.”     “You also tried to kill us,” Danny Lyle reminded him.     “I’ve reformed. Ask my parole board and the Safe Governor who decided to pardon me.”         “They let you out?” R.J. objected. “All I did was fight for mutate rights and they tried to lock me away forever. You’re a murderer and you just walk free?”     “You might want to take a closer look at your bunkmates, MLA,” the junior butler sneered. “Miss Shepherdson there is a second-class herald of the world-destroying Galactivac. Alternate-reality Mr Lyle dominated whole realities and slaughtered billions, including plenty of versions of his smoking girlfriend; although I’m sure he denies it now. Harlagaz killed his first enemy before he could crawl. And little Miss Sammy there, I saw her rip the flesh off a girl she didn’t like and leave her to die.”     “FA saved us from you and your Battlers,” Kerry flared. “She flayed Wyrm-Girl into Wyrmfood because she was pushed too far by you and your old cronies. We know what you did to her! We know that…”     Danny pulled the angry Irish girl aside. “You’re right, Buttie,” he admitted. “We can be deadly. And yeah, an alternate me went very dark. He’s dead now and I’m still here. Think about that. Think about what that means if you try to hurt Kes or any of my friends. Think about how superheroes, even trainee ones, hold back because they have all sorts of moral codes about hurting people and collateral damage.” He leaned in to the newest Heckfire recruit and whispered. “Then think about me.”     The intense moment was interrupted by the arrival of L’il Buttie’s team-mates. “Daniel Lyle!” Black Princess called out, “Why did you never tell us?”     “Tell them what?” R.J. wondered.     “He’s the Hooded Hood’s kid, bro,” Alpha Dude answered. “If he’d just mentioned that when he was with us… he’d have been like royalty.”     “Although I am royalty,” Stacy Royale, Black Princess pointed out, “if ever Spango gives up that ridiculous republic nonsense and comes to its senses. Or if somebody makes it see sense. But honestly, Daniel, you should have told us. Your time with Young Heckfire could have been so much more…” She traced a hand over her silk party corset, “pleasant.”     “Pretty much why I kept quiet, Stace,” Danny replied.     “Fortunately he was able to deny the chlamydia,” Kerry interjected. Even anonymous, Danny had dated Stacy during his time with Young Heckfire.     Denial nodded to his other former classmates. “Jase… still living off your daddy’s senatorial chequebook and the superpowers he bought you? Rupe… didn’t you betray the team and try to go solo? Lucy, finally got the braces off, I see.”     Alpha Male, Blatant Genius, and Privilege each reacted in their own way. Jason Conner snorted, already quite happy with the modified punch that Harlagaz had spiked. Lucy de Soth glared daggers at Denial. Rupert van de Meer insisted on pedantic correction.     “Political manoeuvring and personal initiative are part of the curriculum in our training programme,” Blatant Genius insisted. “Yes, I was… penalised by White Empress for some ill-timed choices, but that was for failure not for the attempt.”     “She confiscated your mouthwash?” Fashion Accessory guessed, recovering somewhat from her shock with Buttie and returning to play offence.     R.J. stepped in. “Sure, there’s old bad history, I see that. I thought tonight was about trying to get past that? Right, Velvet?”     The vampire-werewolf spawn he had arranged to meet there agreed. “We all talked about this, Stacy. You said you’d make an effort.”     Kerry glowered past the MLA at her old foes. “Make an effort or explode, whichever,” she suggested.     “You think you can threaten us here?” sneered Blatant Genius.     “I couldst toss thee out through yon window first if it helpeth,” offered Harlagaz.     “We are here under peaceful contract,” Vespiir reminded everyone. “Must there be conflict? Did not Lady Alootta speak of a different way? Must there we war between our Clans?”     “We are very specifically instructed that there won’t be,” Alpha Dude reminded his classmates. He smiled hopefully towards the hot Caphan. “We didn’t bring you here to fight.”     “Then why?” FA demanded. “Don’t pretend we’re all going to be pals now. Especially not when you let Li’l Buttie into your club.”     “I’m turning over a new leaf,” the Apocalyspian butler promised. “I’m making a shiny new start with a new team who will overlook my sleazy past. Just like you did, Miss Sammy.”     “If you call her Sammy again I’m going to burn off your testicles,” Kerry told Buttie.     “What a shame I am completely fireproof, Miss Shepherdson.”     “What a shame I love a challenge, boyo!”     “If he is a domestic, should not his testicles have already been removed?” Vespiir enquired.     “Can’t hurt to make sure,” R.J. told her. He caught Red Velvet’s expression. “If we weren’t being nice. Which we are.”     “Yes,” agreed Stacy Royale. “Let us all be… nice.”     Fashion Accessory looked for trouble in the frat-mansion ballroom. What she was was lots of paparazzi. “Maybe this is still the 80s,” she murmured to herself. “Vesp, Black Princess is an illusionist. She can make us see things that aren’t there, or not see things that are. You’re a seeress. Can you spot if she’s doing that now?”     Vespiir frowned a little, in a very attractive way of course, and looked around with narrowed eyes.     Alpha Dude came up to Harlagaz. “You have a drinking hat.”     “Verily. Don’t you?”     “I’m gonna get one. Hey, Blat, can you design me a drinking hat like the Aussie Ausgardian has?”     “You will not call me Blat,” Blatant Genius insisted, “Nor will my talents be wasted on – urk.”     “Tis sometimes besteth to pinch them by yon neck until they cease to make annoying noises,” Gaz approved Alpha Dude’s action.     “We’re all a bit tense,” Red Velvet pointed out. “But look, this is a party. We should chill together, get past this dumb factional rivalry stuff. Randy and I have already made a start.”     “Yes, I had to burn the couch afterwards,” Kerry objected.     “We did decide it was time for a new beginning,” Stacy Royale admitted. “Something to define our new relationship here on campus.”     “Those ice sculptures are not what they seem to be,” Vespiir indicated to Fashion Accessory. “They are actually big machines against all the walls of this room, surrounding us. The bespectacled virgin with the annoying voice made them.” She indicated Blatant Genius. “There is also some kind of probability field operating, but not like the ones that Keerry uses to express herself creatively. This one has a different source, the nymph Privilege, and it is directed at inhibiting the denial powers of Lord Daanny.”     “Kare…!” Samantha warned.     “Now!” Black Princess shouted.     The machinery sparked to life.     So did Kerry Shepherdson.     Fashion Accessory’s Austernal sensitivity to the dance of matter and energy clicked in. She suddenly understood what Blatant Genius’ mechanisms were designed to do. They were dimensional shifters, set to transport certain targets’ clothing to a parallel dimension. Samantha could transmute material but she could not generate it from nothingness. If the Juniors’ apparel was teleported away, she could do nothing to prevent them all appearing naked before the gathered photographers. Privilege’s exception field could restrain Danny’s ability to deny the event long enough for online uploading of paparazzi scoops.     It was a different kind of trap in a different kind of battle.     FA couldn’t stop it. All she could do was shift her enemies’ attire to various costumes that might divert the paparazzi’s attention. She dug deep into her ability and vented her wrath.     Alpha Dude was suddenly dressed in Tim Curry’s Rocky Horror outfit, complete with make-up. Privilege was entirely enclosed in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume without eye-holes. Velvet found her signature material replaced by candyfloss. Blatant Genius was entirely enveloped by a person-sized paper bag strong enough that he could not fight his way out of it. Black Princess’ costume was abruptly made entirely of barbed wire.     Li’l Buttie resisted FA’s attempts to affect him. Matter control was only one of his cosmic abilities.     Kerry’s approach was far more direct. As the machines powered up they overheated then exploded into shrapnel. Fifty or so people in the room shrieked and ducked but the only people peppered with fragments were Alpha Dude, whose super-dense skin prevented all but the largest fragments from lodging in his buttocks, and Buttie, who didn’t notice.     The detonating machinery failed to disrobe its targets. Samantha was unsure why; Kerry’s temper was hair-trigger but this time the probability arsonist could not have been fast enough.     “We are fighting now?” Harlagaz understood. “Why dids’t no-one tell me?” He doffed his Quaffing Helm and swatted Alpha Dude with it.     Vespiir shrieked and covered her eyes. “Evil!” she called out.     “Yes they are, but this time they’ll be sorry,” Fashion Accessory promised. This attack had a familiar feel to it. It was the sort of humiliating trick that the New Battlers liked playing on her. She turned upon L’il Buttie.     Most of Young Heckfire were occupied. Blatant Genius was struggling to cut himself free from confinement. Privilege and Red Velvet were tangled together in a long curtain drape and spinning fast courtesy of the Mutate Liberation Army. Black Princess was squirming in pain as she tried to remove her new corset and underwear. Gaz was joyously pounding on Alpha Dude.     Li’l Buttie gestured with his fingertips. “Bring it on, little heroes. You have already lost.”     “Evil outside!” Vespiir clarified.     Beyond the ballroom and gallery there was pitch darkness and absolute silence. There was no light from the lanterns and spots around pool and dance floor and no party music or sounds. There was no glimmer from elsewhere in the campus or from Paradopolis beyond. The air had a stale, dead smell.     L’il Buttie chuckled. “I’ve won,” he smirked. “These Young Heckfire idiots were easy to manipulate. Royale agreed to the public shaming plan. Van Meer constructed the dimensional apparatus to perform it. De Soth suspended the natural laws and Lyle’s power so that the plan would work. I simply repurposed the devices and empowered them to extend the dimensional transfer field to bring you all to the place I desired.”     “The mansion’s been jumped elsewhere?” Kerry understood. “Meh. We were there when the whole of Badripoor got shifted.”     “And Ausgard hath vanished on several plot occasions for the nonce,” Harlagaz sniffed, then went back to planting fists in Alpha Dude’s face.     “The whole of Paradopolis went to another planet that one time,” R.J. remembered.     “I have done exactly what I set out to do!” L’il Buttie thundered. “I have returned home with gifts to earn my Granny’s forgiveness! How delighted she will be to bring the Juniors and Young Heckfire into her discipline pits! What new horrors shall she forge from your weak flesh to raise up Apocalyspe reborn?”     “You did say that betrayal was part of your course,” R.J. mentioned to the struggling paper bag.     “You transported us to Dark Thugos’ torture planet?” Kerry snarled. She’d heard her sister’s horror stories about that place.     “No,” Vespiir insisted. “That’s not where we are.”     “Of course it is,” L’il Buttie boasted. He reached out with his cosmic senses to verify it. He went pale.     “What did you do?” Black Princess hissed.     The crowd of partygoing students started to get scared. “Nobody’s panicking,” Danny denied. “Not yet, anyway.”     “This… this isn’t Apocalyspe,” L’il Buttie admitted. “How? The instruments were powered… the co-ordinates were set.”     “There was an exception to your co-ordinates,” Lucifera De Soth mentioned, carving her way out of her Turtle playsuit. “I arranged it, as is my… Privilege.”     “Yon Turtle wench didst backstab yon butler boy who didst delude yon barbed-wire hussy?” Harlagaz summarised. He punched Alpha Dude again. It was the simple alternative.     “And the barbed wire hussy tricked me,” Red Velvet insisted, misting out of her restraining carpet and not really caring about her dishabille when she formed up again. “I really thought we were trying to make friends, Randy. Sorry.”     “So where are we?” Kerry demanded. “I can’t sense any volcanic activity… or a planetary molten core…”     “She usually can?” Blatant Genius’ muffled voice came from his envelope. “Oh crap!”     “I can’t sense any solar burning… not even distant stars.”     “She can control…?”     “We don’t call her ‘firecracker’ for nothing,” Danny pointed out. “And we generally try not to annoy her. Oops.”     Kerry seemed quite distressed by what her senses were telling her. Vespiir was already ahead of her. “This is a place beyond the universe we know. This is the under-desert, the waste realm of runaways and outcasts, the desolation of the disobedient. They told me I would go here. They condemned me here.”     “Here where?” Fashion Accessory demanded urgently. She was getting scared too.     “I did a little deal for some real power,” Lucy De Soth revealed. “Buttie had a good plan to deliver juvenile super-powered fodder in exchange for a reward. I just changed the buyer.” She smiled a no-longer-braces-filled grin of utter malice. “Welcome to hell.” *** Interlude: Kara Harper and the Infernal Concert Note: This scene is preceded by Al B. Harper’s tie-in     “Nice piece,” the guy said.     Kara Harper, who had been bending over to attach an amp for the coming show, stood up and turned around. “You’d better have been talking about my guitar,” she warned.     “Yeah. The guitar. Sure, why not?”     Kara turned to heave the last bit of kit onto the stage where she and her new punk band were setting up outside the Triple Alpha frat house for tonight’s big party. Guests were already arriving, hitting the open bar and dancing to a frankly-overrated DJ. Her admirer lifted the heavy stack up to her one-handed, still balancing his own Stratocaster across his back. He didn’t look that strong.     “You’re not on the programme,” Kara pointed out.     “Nicest thing I’ve heard about me in a long time.” The guy grinned. His eyes were sunken into shadow and his long dark brown hair hadn’t seen a barber for years but he had a kind of cocaine-cool bad-boy look and he could have been an artist’s model for Gaiman’s Sandman.     “Are you one of the fraternity here?” Kara asked. She was new to the Triple Alphas.     The guitarist snorted. “Do I look like a dull pompous self-absorbed mummy’s boy?”     “You look like a road accident got addicted to heroin. Are you a guest, then? Or a gatecrasher?”     “Well, nobody invited me.” He winked at Kara. “Night’s still young, though.”     Kara patted him on one leather-dustered shoulder, “Word of advice, buster. I’m from hundreds of years into the future. Every line you’ve got that you think is fresh, it’s been tried on the girls in my era about a million times.     “Good to know. Since the human race doesn’t go extinct, I guess our lines must work.” He passed over the jack cables Kara was looking for.     “I’m working tonight,” she warned him. “You’re wasting your time in a target-rich environment.”     “I’m really not. I need to be right here.”     “You are not jamming.”     “More threshing, probably. But you go do your set, with your plastic play guitar.”     “This is a Yamaha Pacifica. It’s state of the art for this prehistoric period. That thing on your back is an antique. It probably uses clockwork.”     “Steve? Oh, he’s old, for sure. But he has souls.”     The rest of the band were coming onto the platform. “That Stacy Royale girl says if we want to get paid we should probably make some noise,” the drummer warned. “She was pretty mean about it.”     “But she’s hot,” Keyboards pointed out.     “Out of your league, Melanie,” Kara warned. “Maybe you should go annoy the Princess, Stratocaster?”     Chronic had vanished. ***     About half an hour later, the entire AAA mansion vanished.     “A phase-warp inversion contusion using non-Cartesian vector shifts,” Kara estimated.”     Half the crowd were too buzzed to notice the disappearance. Whatever was spiking the beer was doing its job. Many of the other guests seemed to think it was all part of the fun.     “Okay, I should probably call dad and tell him that Young Heckfire have dimension-warped off with the Juniors without paying me.”     “You may want to do a bit more math,” the pale guitarist mentioned. “And you might want to do it stood at least three paces to the left.”     “Why?” Kara demanded, but already her mind was processing the equations for the mass/energy teleport transfer and recognising that there had to be a backlash component of comparable density and power. And the likely co-ordinates for that were…     She skipped hastily to the left.     The Bodach Glas rose from a rift in the ground right where she’d been standing. In fact he rose to about ten feet high, not counting the antlers, and he swivelled his cow-skull head to look at her.     “Yeah, that’s about right,” Chronic said. He stepped between Kara and the hellspawn and waved at it. “It’s a private party,” he warned.     The Bodach Glas gathered up his power and prepared to manifest it by shredding the screaming partygoers that were failing to worship him.     “You worked out the frequencies he used to ride the transfer backlash here, yet, Shoulderpads?” Chronic asked Kara.     “Naturally. And if I only had a phase reversal infraduction loop and antitesla coil with a quantum point power source I could make him really wish he’d stayed at home. As it is, I didn’t even bring a purse.”     “Where would you put it?” the guitarist asked, admiring the performer’s white-leather straps outfit. “Anyway, you don’t need whatever it was you just said. Can you convert the wavelength to express it in octaves?”     “Base eight ascensions? Yes. Do I look like a simpleton?” Kara reeled off the chords.     Chronic unslung Steve from his back. The Bodach Glas swivelled his head round urgently. The guitar made an ominous sub-twang that promised really bad things were going to happen to somebody very soon.     “Told you there’d be threshing,” Chronic reminded Kara. “You may want to remove your panties and cover your ears.”     “What? Why?”     “It’s going to get loud, and then afterwards we can go somewhere quiet.”     Steve screamed out the music like an explosion in a sound effects department. The Bodach was smashed back as if he’d been hit by a truck. And the truck had been carrying ginsu knives. And all the ginsu knives had been heated by blowtorches.     “You know what’s coming here soon,” Chronic told the shattered demonspawn. “You know you don’t have permission to intrude right now. So you have only yourself to blame for this.”     He took it to the bridge.     When Kara opened her eyes and took her hands from her ears, the Bodach Glas was gone. The stage was a bent mass of scaffolding and wrecked equipment. The audience was on the floor, though a few of them were clapping in stunned response. Police sirens wailed in the distance.     “Who the hell are you?” Kara asked Chronic.     “A guy with a pick-up approach you haven’t heard of before. Can we get out of here now?”     “You came here to stop that thing?”     “Nah. The Lair Legion lives for stomping things that the Bodach. I just wiped him to spoil their fun.” He looked Kara up and down. “I came here to pick up you.”     “And you think that’ll do it, fighting an extraplanar entity?”     “I think maybe it gets me to the first drink stage. But you’ll have to buy, because I’m broke.”     “I didn’t get paid yet, either. My employers fled the dimension. And like you said, I have limited purse placement opportunities.”     Chronic pointed to Kara’s Yamaha and the Devil’s Guitar across his back. “We could always try busking?” *** 4. Harlagaz Donarson and the Theological Dilemmas     “Crapeth!” growled Harlagaz. He knew at once that he’d been dropped into the roots of the world tree, and specifically into the midden someone had dug there.     Right now the Young Heckfire mansion’s property values had significantly declined due to a bad neighbourhood. It was balanced on the thin crust of one of the aspects of hell, just above the real abyss from which there was no return and about which no jokes were possible.     Worse, the mansion had fallen complete with his best friends, their Heckfire enemies, and whatever campus denizens had been inside the building when the transfer apparatus had flared. Mortals who were undeserving of damnation were now imperilled in the realm of demons.     “More crapeth!” As an Ausgardian demihemigod, at least twenty-five percent of the responsibility for getting them out safely was on Harlagaz’ shoulders. Since he wasn’t really good at mathematics, he was going to have to take all the responsibility. It came with the lineage; it wasn’t all revelling, wenching, and chundering. Sometimes it was fighting the overwhelming hordes of hell.     “It is a significant burden, is it not?” asked Sage Grimpenghast, Teacher of Deceptions. The skull-capped musty infernal scholar was right behind Harlagaz’ left shoulder. Nobody else reacted to him; even R.J. Clement seemed to be hanging motionless in time. “Yes, Donarson, we speak now between the moments of eternity.”     Harlagaz was still clutching the battered Alpha Dude. Gaz turned to swat Grimpenghast with him.     Jason Conner exploded in a shower of maggots before he ever impacted on the Master of Ignorance. “Clever,” Grimpenghast considered. “You eliminated an enemy and discovered how little your fighting strength matters against me. Very efficient. Well done.”     “What? I didn’t not mean for yon Alpha Dude to get…”     “Oh, good intentions. Yes, we love them down here.”     “Letteth these mortals go, demon lord. They are not thine lawful prey.”     The Teacher of Ignorance looked around the room of partygoers. “You’d be surprised how many are. Disappointed, maybe. But since I did not bring them here, I am not responsible for their return.”     “They art in thine realm!”     “Trespassers will be devoured,” Grimpenghast mused. “The souls of those who die here might find their way out, I suppose. Eventually. After some unpleasantness. And of course, they will be less fitted for other destinations thereafter.” He inspected the melted remains of Blatant Genius’ transit machinery. “What a shame young Kerry did such a thorough job on your only means of escape.”     “I shalt not let you have them,” Harlagaz warned.     “I don’t need your permission, godling.” The demon lord looked the demihemigod up and down as if inspecting new property. “Can you imagine what you father will do when he learns you are here? Him and your mother and your grandfather? Do you think all of them will venture into the domain where absolute power is mine, to try and retrieve you? Will the Oldman transgress the cosmic laws and doom himself for your sake? Do you hope he will or won’t?”     “You will avaunt, ere I findeth means to pulpeth thee to the uttermost! If I do not prevail, there will be naught for mine kin to come for.”     Grimpenghast shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. Didn’t you pay attention in god school? Well, obviously not, look at you. Well, listen now, Donarson. There are things here that can hurt you, can cripple you, can kill you. Plenty of them. We have apparatus here to tear the wings off angels. If you die then your soul joins my collection, to be reclothed in spirit-flesh as often as I desire and to endure whatever I ordain; forever. In that you are no different to these brief humans. Except that as with all mighty souls, I can alter you a little with each new death. I can forge you into a mighty servant one day, powerful enough to meet and slay even your father.”     “That will not be happening. Cease this word-maze and fighteth me!”     “We are fighting, Harlagaz. You are just unarmed for it.” The Teacher of Deceptions pointed to the Juniors. “What about attempts to rescue them? The probability arsonist has many sponsors. Imagine how much the Lair Legion will dare to try and save her. The Caphan slave is beloved of the Emperor and Empress of her world. What might they attempt to redeem her from me, as is a master’s responsibility? And Lyle? Oh, the Hooded Hood reacted badly when his childhood teddy bear was held by a demon. What when his present son suffers my attentions?”     Harlagaz swung a fist at the demon lord. Across the room a random partygoer burst into pulp.     “Slow learner,” Grimpenghast understood. “I like that in an opponent. Try again.”     The young Ausgardian glowered at him. “Face me fairly, vile coward.”     “Fairly? Oh, you are in the wrong place. But I’ll tell you what, Harlagaz Donarson. If you grant your soul to me freely, in contract now, I will allow one of your friends to go free back to Earth. One of them, say the matter-weaver girl. Any of your choice except Kerry and Daniel. Sign on the dotted line and Samantha can go home.”     “I say thee nay.”     “You won’t save her? Is it because she never behaved with you as she does in your fantasies?”     “I wilt save her. I wilt save all of them. I wilt not play thy Hoki games and Hella bargains.” The young Ausgardian straightened up. “I art Harlagaz, son of Donar, son of the Oldman, of the warriors of Ausgard. I defy thee, musty demon, and I wilt not bow to thee nor surrender to thy maunderings.”     “So you condemn all your friends to your fate…” Grimpenghast began.     “I hast not finished talking,” Gaz interrupted back. “Bring on thy hordes, deceiver tempter. Bring them all. I swear by the Nine Worlds and all that I hold sacred to battle thee to mine last breath and then to fight thee beyond it. You shalt never have peace, never victory, and though it take all of time I shall make thee rue the moment thou didst stand against me and those I love. Now taketh thine offer and stuff it where the Middlinggard serpent sticks its head!” ***     “What’s happening,” demanded Black Princess. “Ouch. Get these barbs off me. I…. Eeeeeeeeehhh!” Stacy Royale had just had Alpha Male explode over her into a spray of maggots. Across the room another partygoer burst like a sack of blood.     The room descended into screaming chaos that Danny could not deny. There was a rush for the exit and the darkness outside.     R.J. was there first, sealing the door, carrying anyone fleeing for it back to the ballroom, then doing a hasty sweep to gather up the rest of the people inside the mansion; even the ones in various states of party-induced undress.     “Call me,” the MLA invited several of them.     “What is this?” Kerry questioned Privilege. “What did you do?”     “That wasn’t me,” Lucy De Soth assured her. “Complain to the new landlord.”     “I can’t deny us back to Earth,” Danny reported. “There’s a power here that’s almost overwhelming.”     “Evil,” Vespiir repeated. “I was warned.”     “Stop that, Vesp,” Fashion Accessory insisted. “Just because a bunch of ignorant fanatic old men think your gifts are bad doesn’t mean they are. There was a time people believed bell-bottoms were cool. Doesn’t make it so.”     “Who did that to Jason?” Blatant Genius gabbled. “Don’t kill me!”     “He was killed by demonic power,” Red Velvet sensed. “That other victim too. There was a spirit here.”     “Aye. ‘Twas yon malefactor Grimpenghast,” Harlagaz announced. “It appears we hath been shifted to his domain in the underworld.”     “We’re in hell?” L’il Buttie asked, his usual calm failing him. “Not Apocalypse? Actual hell?” He looked around. “There’s an actual hell?”     “Thousands of them,” Lucy told him. “I picked you out a good one.”     “And you are here with us,” Kerry pointed out. “So get us back before we spank your privileged little bottom!”     “I can’t be harmed, actually. It was part of the deal. Anything you try to do to me happens to someone else nearby.”     “That might be sooth,” Gaz confessed, looking at the pile of exploded student. “Best not to test it for the nonce.”     Danny looked out off the balcony. “We need more information about where we are. I mean geographically, not mythologically. Firecracker, can you…”     Kerry was never far off an explosion at the best of times. This wasn’t such a time. A section of ground five hundred yards from the transported mansion blew apart and became a raging bonfire.     By its light the Juniors saw endless forest and a black lake. “We’re at a teenage party in a house in the woods,” R.J. cringed. “And I’m the wisecracking womanising Black guy?”     “Hey!” one of the non-Triple Alpha non-Juniors partygoers shouted. “Will somebody please start making sense?”     “Don’t hold your breath,” Danny advised her. “Alright, Kare, what do you want us to do?”     “Me?” The probability arsonist flinched. “Well, um, we covered this in class, didn’t we? Just before spiffy’s fern got accidentally doused in napalm.”     “We doth fortify the edifice as best we might, take stock of resources, maketh civilians as safe as may be, and then discovereth a rescue plan,” Harlagaz remembered. He hadn’t realised he’d been paying attention, but then again right now he was more than usually focussed.     “We can do that,” R.J. agreed. “Okay, a few pointers before we go round the mansion shuttering it up and stuff. One, don’t split up. You will get chopped to pieces. Two, don’t pair off to have illicit sex, even if its with me. You will get chopped to pieces. Three, don’t open the doors to any unexpected loved ones or to children with black eyes. You will get chopped to pieces. Four, do not read anything from any metal-bound book. Five, do not put on any ancient amulets. Six, do not go out to swim in the lake. Seven – and I cannot emphasise this enough, do not say, ‘Whew, I think we’re safe for now’. Because you will be chopped to pieces! All clear? Good, let’s get on.”     “You seem to know how to handle this situation, Master Raandy,” Vespiir admired.     “He knows nothing,” L’il Buttie countered. The Apocalyspian butler shouldered his way forward again. “Listen, weak humans. The world you knew has gone. Now only might matters, and that makes me in charge. Do as I say and a few of you may survive to serve me. Defy me and…”     A glowing translucent sign appeared behind him, reading “Punch me off the balcony.” Black Princess had stopped vomiting.     Harlagaz punched L’il Buttie off the balcony as instructed, thus settling forever some debate about Ausgardian literacy levels.     “After him,” Blatant Genius demanded. “All of you, go get him!”     FA sealed Rupert van Meer in another thick paper bag, borrowing carpet for the purpose.     L’il Buttie rose to hover above the dark lake. “You think to oppose me, quarter-Ausgardian?” he sneered. “You have no conception of the kind of power I…”     Tentacles whipped up and dragged him under.     There was a burst of cosmic energy. The endless forest lit up red. Every window in the front of the mansion shattered, spraying people with jagged glass. “That didn’t happen,” Danny denied, restoring the glazing.     “Did you see when the light was bright?” Velvet called to the others. “There are creatures lurking amongst the trees. But they have no heat signature, no scent – and no blood!”     Buttie appeared out of the waters again, but was dragged back down. The lake frothed for a while. This time he did not emerge.     “No swimming,” R.J. emphasised.     Stacy Royale swallowed hard, swathed in the torn curtain that had previously restrained Privilege and Velvet. “Buttie was about the most powerful person amongst us,” she pointed out. “I’ve seen assessments that he could take out Harlagaz and maybe the rest of you all together. Something out there just… ate him!”     “Mine assessments art different,” grumbled Gaz. “But certes he art not back from yon dip. Danny Lyle wert right about the dangers of bathing.”     “Fort up,” Kerry ordered again. “Split into groups, one metahuman per team at least. Board this place up. You must have defences on this mansion, right, Princess?”     “Yes,” Privilege answered for her. “I omitted them from the transfer, both the electronic and arcane ones. Oh dear.”     “You are not a nice person,” Vespiir told the youngest De Soth.     “But I am now powerful enough to take on my oh-look-at-me-acting-sorcerer-supreme-still-can’t-afford-decent-jeans brother, however. That’ll be fun.”     “Yeah, Vinnie will spank you for us,” FA assessed. “Look, Lucy, I know what it’s like to be the youngest in a team of bastards. You could make some other choices.”     “Yes. That’s why picking this course is so satisfying.”     Vespiir looked at the sixteen-year-old sadly. “You are going to die,” she foresaw.     Lucy’s expression changed. “What, what are you talking about?”     “The future. I see it. I am sorry, sister. Farewell.”     “We wilt see to yon upstart Sothling forthwith,” Harlagaz insisted. “First we must protecteth those who art not in the struggle.”     “Have you a safe room or something where we can put people away from the fight?” R.J. asked Velvet.     “We have a dungeon,” the vampire-werewolf offered. “That’s pretty secure.”     The MLA took 0.3 of a second to check the area. “It might do,” he reported to the Juniors. “I suggest we get the non-combatants there.”     “I’m non-combatant,” Blatant Genius insisted.     “You stay with us, virgin,” FA told him.     “Get us on lockdown, whatever you have left,” Kerry told Young Heckfire. “Everybody who wants to live, head for the cellars with R.J. and Velvet. Rest of you, with me.”     “Um… is that quite how you wanted to say that?” Danny checked with his girlfriend. ***     An hour later, only the Juniors and Young Heckfire remained on vigil in the besieged frathouse mansion. “Where art the forces of deviltry?” Harlagaz asked Kerry as he rejoined her and Danny on the barbeque balcony.     “Still at the treeline,” Denial replied. “They don’t seem to like the light from Kes’ fires.”     “I can keep them back for a while,” the probability arsonist promised, “but there’s not a lot to burn here. Even the dirt is less flammable. I think this whole place might have been designed to limit my abilities.”     “There’s no point trying to hold out until morning, either. Kerry can’t sense a sun. There is no morning here.”     “We must needs discern a way from hence, then,” responded Gaz. “In every pact there must be a loophole. Tis cosmic law and narrative necessity.”     “Any luck getting Privilege to spill the details of her bargain with Sage Grimpenghast?” Danny wondered.     “Vespiir speaks with her. I shalt see how she art proceedething.”     The demihemigod made his way back into the ballroom. Black Princess had found a new bondage outfit to wear. She and Blatant Genius were conferring urgently in a corner. R.J. and Velvet were patrolling the mansion with FA as chaperone to prevent any certain-death clichés from accidentally occurring. Vespiir was sat talking to Lucy, but then Privilege rose up and walked way.     The Caphan exile didn’t rise. She just stayed there alone, clutching her arms.     “Well met, mine Lady Vespiir,” Gaz greeted her. “How goes your converse with the Sothling?”     Vespiir looked up with troubled eyes. “Her heart is black, Lord Gaz. Black as the night outside. What has her House done to her that one so young should be so dark?”     Harlagaz settled beside the worried Caphan. “I hast heard some bad stories of her kin. ‘Tis known that Vinnie de Soth hath disavowed them.”     “She’s not even the slightest bit repentant. She’s enjoying this.”     “But you saw that she would die.”     Vespiir snorted. “Everyone dies, Lord Gaz. I didn’t lie when I told her that. I never said I saw her imminent death.”     “Thou art more cunning than ye appear.”     “That is what my training taught me. You are strong in force. Slaves must find other ways to be strong.” The green-skinned girl shuddered. “The Elders predicted this for me. They cursed it on me, and their curses come true.”     “Good,” approved Harlagaz.     “Good?” Vespiir was surprised.     “You saideth it: everyone dies. Yet dids’t not yon Privilege understand thy prediction to refer to her now? If thine Elders cursed thee to this place, then in coming here thus hast thou not fulfilled that curse? Are you not now free from that doom? When we escapest art thou not clear thereafter?”     Vespiir swallowed. “You’re saying… this is the punishment I was sentenced to, but… it may not work out as the Elders intended?”     “They art but men. I art a demihemigod of thunder. I hast got seniority. I say this might yet be good. Mayhap thy being here may yet help us to save everyone?”     “How? I’m just… I mean, I’m not a great hero like you or Lord Raandy, or a lady of destiny like Keerry or Saamanatha. I have no fighting skills or terrible powers. I am but… Vespiir.”     Gaz patted her on the shoulder. “You are good, I deem, Lady Vespiir. And ye art here. Is’t that by evil’s plot or cosmic injustice? Or art thou exactly where thou art needest?” He leaned in and spoke low. “Think on’t. That way I needst not.”     “I will, my lord.”     “Mine friends and equals doth call me Gaz.”     “Very well… Gaz.”     “We shalt smite evil unto the farthest corners of Mostfarheim,” he promised her. “And part of our victory shall be thine.” ***     There was a heavy hammering on the front door. Darkness swathed the portico so that the visitor could not be seen.     “Buttie survived?” Black Princess asked disbelievingly.     “There are plenty of other options,” FA noted.     “Keep watch at all points!” Blatant Genius shrieked. “It might be a diversion!”     “What he said, but in a less girly voice,” Danny agreed.     “On that,” R.J. confirmed. He speeded away.     The knocking boomed again.     “Who answers it?” Velvet ventured.     “I do,” Harlagaz insisted.     “We flank him,” Kerry told Danny and FA. “Be ready.”     Gaz made his way to the entrance hall, flexed his shoulders, and opened the door.     “Hello, all,” said Lord and Master, whom Danny had killed almost two years before. “I’ve come to collect Kerry.” *** 5. Kerry Shepherdson and the Dead Man’s Bargain     Danny Lyle’s clothing caught fire. He Denied it so he didn’t get seared to ashes in a fiery pillar. Only the hardwood ceiling boards of the Heckfire mansion suffered.     Kerry looked appalled at her boyfriend and at Drugo Lodestone, her now-undead former tormentor. “I didn’t do that to you,” she promised Danny. “I went for him!”     “Oh, didn’t you get the memo?” Lord and Master mocked her. “Anything you do to me gets reflected onto Lyle or one your other friends. Maybe it works the other way round too, so please do feel free to head off for some smoochies with him.”     “Drugo?” Black Princess recognised. “You’re behind this? I knew it was too grown-up for Loser Lucy.”     “Oh, I’m the mastermind,” Privilege insisted. “He’s just the local hired help.”     “Well, he ended up in the right place,” Fashion Accessory admitted.     “I wert hoping for a few more pitchforks inserted in his orifices,” Harlagaz considered. “Still, the night is young.”     “Maybe hold off on that until we find a way to stop this whole passing-it-on-to-one-of-us deal, big guy?” Danny pleaded. “He’s got some big-time Grimpenghast-flavoured mojo behind him stopping me from denying that effect. For now.”     The MLA reappeared in a blur of reflective sportswear. “There were some insecty-vulture type creatures trying to sneak in through the service kitchen,” he reported. “I discouraged them. Who’s the rich dude with the ego problem?”     “I am Lord and Master,” Lodestone announced. “I led Young Heckfire. I would have led the Knights of Heckfire in due time. I was murdered by Danny Lyle. Now I have returned to have my due.”     “Danny didn’t kill you,” Kerry objected.     “‘Twas a disturbing shower accident,” Harlagaz insisted. “Personal hygiene ist dangerous.”     “You didn’t tell your little arsonist, Lyle? That you stole my life so you could pop her cherry? Go on, Denial. Deny it to her now.”     Danny was pale. Kerry looked at him. “D?”     “I killed him,” the Hooded Hood’s son confessed. “He was threatening to come back and do really bad things to you. I couldn’t protect you forever, not as long as he lived. So I…”     “You murdered him for me.”     “Dudeth!” Harlagaz approved.     “You murdered him and didn’t tell me.”     “I never actually lied about it as such. There were a few big denials I did that might have obscured it as a side effect but…”     “We always forget somehow that you’re not a Junior,” FA realised. “That you’re actually one of the bad guys.”     “He didst but protect Kerry by…” Gaz protested.     “He murdered someone because of me,” Kerry spat. “He thought that was what was best for me. Maybe even what I’d want. Certainly what he wanted for me. Danny got blood on his hands and then he put those hands all over me.”     Vespiir ventured forwards. “A good man will fight to protect his best-beloved, sister. Never doubt that Lord Daanny loves you very much. He would never seek to harm you.”     “There might be some cultural differences you’re not picking up, Vesp,” R.J. advised her. “However, having an ethics debate when the undead villain is waiting on the doorstep is epically bad timing.”     “Don’t let him in!” Blatant Genius whimpered. “Don’t let him touch us!”     Lord and Master’s power was psychotropic sweat that altered the moods of anyone it touched. He could evoke anything from abject fear to lethal rage. His favourite was uncontrollable lust. He’d tried that on Kerry once, and only Danny’s intervention had prevented a very sordid encounter.     “He’s not a vampire,” Red Velvet pointed out. “He doesn’t need an invitation. He’s just playing with us.”     “Not yet,” Lord and Master answered. “but soon. I have very detailed plans. I’ve been working on them for a long time. Some of you might even enjoy them – for a while.”     “You think I won’t kill you again?” Danny challenged him. “As many times as it takes?”     “I’m sure you’ll try. Enjoy your mass-murder spree. Just like your alternate-reality versions do.”     Kerry stuffed her complicated gashed feelings deep down into the cauldron of rage that always boiled right under her skin. “Just so we’re clear, you’re still scum and we’re still going to kick your arse, so cut short the gloating and let’s get on with us beating whatever you have planned.”     Lord and Master smirked. “The hot vampwolf was right, by the way. I don’t need any invitation. Even if I did, this place is my birthright anyway. The Heckians are mine. They were before, they will be again. I’m looking forward to having Stacy back under… my control, and I’m certainly anticipating meeting you, Velvet. I might even keep the Caphan slave on team for a while. But the really important point is, I’ve already been inside your house tonight.”     Blatant Genius looked around unhappily. “What? How?”     Privilege sniffed. “He knows the secret passages, Rupert. He was inside while you were still fighting you way out of your first paper bag.”     “It’s good to reach out and touch someone,” Drugo suggested. “Especially if that touch induces delayed psychotic rage.”     “We locked everyone safely in the dungeon cells!” Kerry realised. “People he might have pawed! R.J…”     The MLA sped off to prevent tragedy.     “He ran away before I could mention that I’d also coated the cell doorhandles,” Drugo noted. “Oh dear.”     “Get after him,” Kerry told FA and Gaz. “Be careful not to touch anything slimy.”     Samantha Bonningon morphed herself some shoulder-length evening gloves and designed Harlagaz some heavy-duty Gjarlenwolf-fur hunting mittens and they raced after Randy Clement.     “I may also have sweated into the punchbowl,” Lord and Master mentioned.     “A thousand eeews!” Black Princess cringed.     “And on the toilet seats.”     “And a million eeews more.”     “And on the inside of all the underwear in your room.”     “Okay, gross-out maximum!” Kerry interrupted him. “We get it. You’re powerful and sleazy and…”     The whole room suddenly became downtown Detroit’s warehouse district, down near the waterfront. Unfamiliar gangsters surged from the shadows, racing to grab Black Princess. Stacy screamed.     “She has lost control of her illusions!” Vespiir warned. “Now they control her.”     “Help her,” Danny called, trying to find his way through what was suddenly a long maze of regret-filled corridors crowded with disapproving Royale family members. “I’m not seeing this!”     Kerry rushed forward, trying to get past hundreds of images of people who were calling Stacy Royale bad names. Some of those people were Kerry herself. Everyone who had ever damaged Black Princess’ self-image swarmed round, laughing and belittling Young Heckfire’s alpha-girl.     “What are we seeing?” Blatant Genius demanded, trying to control his panic. “I thought Stacey was supposed to be royalty? Why are we seeing so much gangland grime?”     “She made up a better past for herself than her real one,” Danny called back. “She’s all about the illusions. Stace, where are you?”     “Right now?” Lord and Master called over the chaos. “She’s experiencing a lifetime of self-doubt and worthlessness. Should be funny.”     “She’s in the corner,” Vespiir saw suddenly. “She is clawing at her face with her nails.”     “Doesn’t matter,” Drugo snickered. “As long as she can use her illusions to make herself look good.”     “Something touched me!” Red Velvet called out. “Who touched me?”     “I imagine there’s quite a list,” Lord and Master mocked.     “Anyone who comes near me will die. Understand me on that! All of you. If you try to hurt me I will rip out your throats and drink your blood!”     “Lord Druuugo’s perspiration is making Lady Alootta paranoid,” Vespiir warned. “She is assuming some sort of half-animal form.”     “I want… I want to drink your blood, before any of you betray me again! You all despise me. You all want to destroy me!”     “Keep away from her,” Kerry warned, “I can’t see where you are in this illusion-crowd. I can’t see Lodestone!”     Vespiir jabbed an elbow back and caught Lord and Master in the stomach as he reached for her. She scored the back of his hand with her houri dagger and kicked him away. “Lord Druugo is here!”     “Right,” Kerry decided. She whirled on Lord and Master, kicked his legs from under him, and pinned him to the ground in a half-Nelson. She couldn’t hurt him without harming someone else. Nobody said anything about lock-holds.     Drugo laughed and spat on her. “Did I mention that my saliva works too? It makes doing tongues a whole lot more interesting.”     Kerry burned the gobbet off her.     “Too late,” her captive told her. “I’m your Lord and Master now.”     “You’re not,” Danny denied. “Kes, detonate him!”     “It’ll hurt someone else,” Kerry objected.     “I’ve got that. Finish him!”     Kerry allowed her fury to escape. The undead Heckian struggling beneath her exploded in a halo of surprised burning fragments.     So did Danny. ***     “Kare? Kare, are you with us?”     Someone was talking to Kerry. It sounded like Samantha Bonnington. Maybe it was her?     “Kare, please. You’re scaring me. Come back.”     FA shouldn’t be scared. Kerry forced herself to glance around. Fashion Accessory was there. In the hallway, by the door to darkness. FA was talking to her about… something.     Gaz was speaking too. And Vespiir and R.J. None of it made sense.     Kerry knelt in Danny’s ashes, which were mixed with Drugo’s ashes, and she had killed both of them. Danny had murdered for her and now she had murdered him back.     Privilege was still there too. She said something and FA rounded on her, furious.     Kerry’s friends were still in trouble. They needed her. She had to help them. Which meant moving. Talking. Doing something.     “What…” she managed to say, “what happened in the cells?”     “I have a really fast metabolism,” R.J. told her. “For about three seconds I was psychotically horny. Then I went back to being just normally horny.”     “The people? The students who came for a night at a party…?”     “Yeah, Drugo had gotten to some of them. Nasty stuff, but I can also accelerate other people’s metabolisms if I try really hard. Yuki keeps making me practice that, even though it gives me a huge appetite after. Expect me to be a bit slower than usual until I find a fast food joint.”     “They’re okay?”     “As okay as you can get when you’re trapped in a schlock-horror movie,” FA promised. “And R.J. managed to defuse Velvet before she passed out too. Don’t ask how. But what about you, Kare? Are you… dealing?”     “With D-danny s-saving me again? Sure. I’m… I’ll think about that later. Did he get Lodestone?”     “Yon villain hath been destroyed for the nonce,” Harlagaz reported. “Howe’er, in this place, Sage Grimpenghast mayest incarnate him again, as often as he liketh.”     “And Danny?”     Gaz looked sober. It didn’t suit him. “He can’st incarnate Danny again also, as he may with all who pass from life in this realm.”     Vespiir looked up sharply. “Something sinister is creeping into this fortress through the attic,” she foresaw. “It has… I think they are tentacles, but it could be worse than that.”     “Excuseth me, Lady Kerry,” Harlagaz asked with unusual formality. “I must needs go and de-tentacle a monstrosity.”     “I’ll go with him,” R.J. offered. “That way one of us might live.”     Kerry stood up and brushed herself off. FA replaced her friend’s scorched party dress with the probability arsonist’s preferred cut-T and jeans. “I’m right here for you, Kare,” she promised.     “Sure. Until Drugo thinks of another way to come at me.”     Privilege nodded gleefully. “She’s got it. Lord and Master intends to kill you all off one by one. Then, when you’re all dead, he and his boss can keep bringing you back to kill you over and over in increasingly nasty ways. Lyle was only the first.”     “Shut up, you spoiled brat,” FA shouted. “And this is me calling you that! You think this is some sort of funny power game? That torture and death make you all grown up? You’re more pathetic than anyone here!”     “More than Stacy, whimpering tied up in the corner with her face all torn? Than Rupert, trying to pretend he hasn’t wet himself, too afraid to leave the room to change his pants? Than you, ‘Sammy’, so broken by your past that just seeing Buttie beat you back to being a thirteen-year-old victim? I’d have to be pretty pathetic to be that bad.”     Vespiir got between Lucy and Samantha. She looked deeply into Privilege’s eyes. “You have no friends,” she read. “No clan-sisters. No one to love. No one you have not turned your back on. No one to share your triumphs or support your griefs. You are quite alone. Poor Luucifera.”     “And you can shut up, Caphan outcast. I know what Drugo will set you to, and it will be everything you were promised by your religious leaders when…”     There was no point going on. Vespiir had turned away and headed back to Kerry. Lucy no longer interested her.     Harlagaz and the MLA returned. “Hey, we both lived,” R.J. called out. “Shocking plot twist!”     “Yon intruders art sushi forthwith,” Gaz reported. “What nexteth?”     Kerry looked up. “Next we do to Privilege what I did to Lodestone.”     “Blow her up?” FA checked.     “Restrain her. Don’t hurt her. Just tie her up and gag her.”     “Oh, sure!” Fashion Accessory transformed Privilege’s underwear into a full-body cast with a face-covering eyeless gimp mask and ball gag. Lucy de Soth could have excepted some of it had she not been simultaneously high-speed goosed by R.J. “We should have thought of that sooner,” F.A. approved.     “She’s a bit young for proper goosing,” Randy explained. “But I thought about it with the rest of you.”     “Yon Sothling ist out of the picture for the nonce,” Harlagaz accepted. “Yon Lord and Master mayset return to attempt his wiles, or some other horror might emerge to torment us. What shalt we do until we art called to arms?”     Kerry folded her arms. “We plan a way out of here.”     “Okay,” FA agreed. “How?”     Kerry pointed across the hall. “Only one person here dares to call himself ‘Blatant Genius’.” ***     “The dimensional apparatus is completely trashed,” Rupert van Meer reported, staring up at Kerry from the melted mess.     “Someone wants to teleport my clothing to another dimension, he better buy me dinner first,” she snapped. Then she remembered who had last denied her lingerie and her heart broke again.     “Al B. Harper or NTU-150 would have fixed this by now using a spoon,” Fashion Accessory challenged. “You have a whole workshop here. Anything money can buy.”     “And this computer sentience software,” R.J. added, poking round the lab. “What’s a FALLIE?”     He flicked a switch and a very busty green hologram purred, “Oh Rupie, you are so big and sexy…!”     Blatant Genius hastily killed the programme. “That is still in beta testing,” he blurted.     “Oh, I’m sure it is,” smirked FA. “Do you hide the program under your bed when you’re not using it?”     “I am trying to work here,” Rupert insisted. “How do you expect me to be brilliant with all these pointless distractions?”     “You really aren’t in Al B’s and Enty’s league, are you?” Kerry snorted. “Those guys don’t even start doing the really cutting-edge stuff until the mega-bomb’s counted down to five.”     “Those… hacks?” Blatant Genius scorned. “They are nothing… nothing compared to me! I can fix this! I can fix anything! You think I cannot generate a real-time ether tether to re-link this building with the matter universe? That I cannot shunt myself back there in a parallel plasma inversion?”     “I’m kind of doubting it so far, moist pants.”     Harlagaz and Vespiir returned from leaving sedated Stacy Royale and the exhausted Red Velvet in the care of the students in the holding cells. “I explained to Lady Staacy that disfigurement need not mean ruin,” the branded Caphan promised. “I do not know if she heard me.”     “How is yon lesser geek proceedething?” Gaz enquired.     “I have already determined that there was a failed matter transfer in a contrary direction to our original dimensional fall,” Blatant Genius insisted. “Some demonic entity ascended as we were dragged down. It has since been returned here. That leaves a trace-route. That creates an energy imbalance with potential for someone to escape.”     “He keeps talking in the singular,” FA noted.     “Because I am the most important one here,” Rupert insisted. “I cannot be lost to the world.”     “Wow, this is a change from ‘don’t hurt me’ Rupe and ‘change my underwear’ Rupe,” R.J. admitted.     Vespiir cocked her head. “Things are burrowing towards the cellars, near where the dungeons are.”     “Okay. Samantha and me,” Kerry decided. “Rest of you, keep him working. Maybe no more caffeine for him.”     The girls headed off towards the basement stairs.     “Can you tell me yet what happened with Danny and Drugo?” FA ventured.     Kerry shivered. “Best guess? Danny knew that Lord and Master would get me eventually if we didn’t shut him down. He almost got me right then. I felt it for a second, just before Danny denied it. Absolute submission, FA, very very scary. So D denied Drugo’s damage-shifting thing to give me a shot. Except Danny knew he couldn’t prevent the damage from transferring, so instead he denied that it only went to him. That let me blow up Drugo. I didn’t realise it would take Danny too. I didn’t know, FA!”     “Hey. It was Danny. He always has his reasons and he always does the thinking behind it. Besides, he’s come back from the dead before, right?”     “From the Happy Ending he got after he battled the Parody Master’s Avatar for me? The perfect Elysium that he gave up to come and die again here in Grimpenghast’s hell?”     “Kare, remember what Dancer said. You were Danny’s happy ending. Even if… and I’m not saying it is, but if this is Danny’s death, he had some time with you. You had more time with him. That matters, right?”     The probability arsonist sighed. “Look, I’ve made myself a bargain, okay. A dead man’s bargain. I put all of the jagged, conflicting, stupid feelings I have about D on a shelf for now. He saved me again and I honour that. Later, if we ever get the chance at a later, I’ll have to sort through that wreckage and… I don’t know. See what I can keep, maybe? For now the deal is, I deal with what’s in front of me. Or below me right now, I guess.”     “I’m just saying, we’ve seen some weird stuff. Maybe don’t give up until you hear it’s over from somebody we trust? Maybe not then?”     Kerry knew her best friend was trying to help her. She saved up her raging response for the burrowing demonites that tried to emerge into the mansion cellars.     “I thought there was no volcanic activity on this plane?” Samantha checked.     “There wasn’t before,” Kerry answered through bared teeth. “Rock boils.”     A screeching from the top of the house diverted them hastily back to the others.     As they mounted the stairs, Rupert van Meer’s head bounced down past them. ***     “We did’st only take our eyes off him for a second,” Harlagaz swore. “Twere whiles the bone-dragons wert tearing off the roof and I wast chastising them. Lady Vesp wast pointing out incoming to yon MLA for him to propel them to me.”     “None of us realised Lord Ruupert had picked up a large ray gun and run out to challenge them,” Vespiir added to the confession. “Not until we heard him shout at them about daring to disturb his work and then screaming for a very short time.”     “But we know why he did it now,” R.J. concluded. “See that sheen on some of Blatant Genius’ workshop tools? Want to bet that’s not sweat, shed to push someone to supreme overconfidence?”     “Drugo was here before Danny got him!” Kerry spat. “Damn, why didn’t we check that? Why am I always so bloody slow?”     FA shook her head. “You’re doing your best, Kare. We all are. We’ve never been in a situation like this before. This is new. And bad.”     “Don’t despair, tent-sister,” Vespiir pleaded. “Without you we are without hope!”     Kerry bit back a bitter rejoinder. It would have been like kicking a puppy. “Did Blatant Genius happen to finish his get-us-out-of-this gadget before he went kamikaze?”     “Assuming it worked like he was confident it would?” R.J. cautioned. “Maybe. Unfortunately none of us knows what it is, what it’s supposed to do, or how to operate it.”     “We are actually missing Hacker 9,” Samantha admitted. “This is hell.”     Kerry examined the assembly of tubes and coils with complete incomprehension. “So he didn’t write a manual before he charged a bone-dragon?”     “He didn’t even label the on switch,” R.J. apologised.     “Oh dear. It’s not going very well, is it?” Li’l Buttie asked from the doorway.     The Juniors reacted to the sudden intrusion. Buttie caught Harlagaz’ attack and slapped him through an expensive row of lab benches,     “Weren’t you dead?” Fashion Accessory accused the butler.     “Yes. Most unpleasant and it ruined my brogues. Now I’m back. On the winning team, too.” He nodded politely. “I’m here to conduct Miss Shepherdson to her Lord and Master. Regrettably Mr Lyle’s sacrifice did not buy her a very long respite from Mr Lodestone’s caresses. I am also instructed to slaughter Prince Harlagaz and am then permitted to claim Miss Sammy for personal recreational purposes.”     “And when I hast tied thee into a spine-snapping pretzel?” Gaz enquired.     “Then I shall repeat the duty until I am successful. You really haven’t understood how inevitable this all is, have you?”     “He can come back again and again until all our strength is gone,” Vespiir foresaw. “As each of us falls, our immortal essences will be trapped here, subject to the whim of the lord of this domain. Some may obey that owner. Those who resist will be punished again and again.”     “That is correct,” L’il Buttie agreed. “I see it as a career opportunity with some intriguing benefits.” He leered at FA.     Kerry shuddered. “I see it now. Where this is all going. How the game is rigged. Why you and Drugo and Privilege all think you can’t lose.”     “We can’t,” Buttie smirked. “That’s the joy of it. For us, not you, obviously.”     “No,” Kerry hissed. She raised her hands, palms upwards, fingers spread. “You think being down here in Grimpenghast’s land of horrors gives you infinite new chances to keep on being horrible? That all the bad things you’ve done before were just auditions for the big leagues down here? That there’s no justice? No way to stop you? Do you?”     The Juniors looked at Kerry in alarm. Her voice had taken on a deeper, older timbre and it burned in their ears. The hairs on their bodies began to stand up. Equipment around van Meer’s lab began to spark.     “Kare…” FA appealed.     “There’s fire,” Kerry insisted. “Its just deep under this little hell. So deep it is eternal and it is infinite. And Grimpenghast’s pathetic torture-bubble drifts atop it like a flake of ash not yet consumed. And he thinks he is master of this domain, as if it matters at all compared to the flames below.”     Kerry’s hair blew wild in an infernal updraft.     “I know fire. I call to it. It comes to me. I try to hold it away. Danny helps me. But you took Danny. So now let it come. From below. For it all.”     “W-wait…!” L’il Buttie stammered as the mansion began to shake, as the realm began to shake.     “Kerry Shepherdson,” Sage Grimpenghast called to her. “There is a deal to be made…”     “Go to Hell!” she told him.     “You cannot do this!” Buttie shrieked over the sound of flames.     “What are the chances?” she called back. “What do you think? Burn!!     The frail membrane that kept the comprehensible from the everlasting burned away. What was Below seared upwards in blinding, terrible glory. Grimpenghast’s realm detonated in cosmic pyrotechnics.     It blazed down into the abyss and was gone. *** 6: Danny Lyle and the Last Denial     Sage Grimpenghast formed new flesh from the fabric of his realm, moulded it into the appropriate shape, and inserted Danny Lyle’s soul into it.     “Ouch,” the newly incarnated acquisition gasped. “Stings.”     “Not compared to the range of hurts available in my repertoire, Mr Lyle,” the Teacher of Deceptions promised.     Danny stoop up and shoved his hands in pockets provided from the same abyssal matter as his flesh. “Oh no. You don’t get to play the cunning gentlemanly manipulator role in this conversation. My father has pretty much claimed that shtick as an archetype. You just come across as a second-rate Hooded Hood-wannabe when you call me ‘Mr Lyle’. Or ‘Daniel’, if you were considering that as your next go-to.”     The Master of Ignorance cradled his fingertips, then stopped and didn’t. “Do you comprehend your situation, mortal? You died here in my hell-realm. Your soul is my rightful property. I can clothe it in whatever flesh I choose, torture it in any way I elect, and repeat as often as I wish. You can never leave here, never escape, because your only physical form is drawn from my domain and your immortal spirit is tethered to this place. You exist only at my whim.”     “Well, thanks for the summary. I assume next up is either torment or a proposition. Maybe an either-or?”     “Indeed.”     Danny winced ruefully. “Another Hoodism. It’s hard, isn’t it, playing the classy sinister schemer without infringing copyright? I had to be acting-Hood for a while back in the Parody War, and I know how hard I had to work to keep my material fresh.”     “Your father is a mere mortal. I am a Lord of Hell.”     “Yeah,” Denial considered. “I hear that a lot. We all do, us mere mortals. ‘I’m a demon’, ‘I’m a god’, ‘I’m an ancient power from the dawn of time here to claim your lunch money’. I’m not buying it, Grimpenghast.”     “Not buying what?” the Teacher of Deceptions hissed.     “The ‘mere’ part. You see, I reckon if there were no gods, no angels, no demons, no Offices, there could still be people. We’d still be viable. We’d have stories. We’d keep going. But gods and demons, without humans to worship them or to feed off? Without us to remember them or define them? They’d be nothing.” Danny jabbed a finger towards his tormentor. “You’re not superior to us. You’re just a more sophisticated breed of parasite.”     “I am the being with absolute power over you… and your friends.”     “Really?” Danny asked sceptically. “You think so? Just because you did cosmic sums that you confused Gaz with, and calculated that if you got Privilege to bring us here you’d have legal title when we died? And then any friendly Great Power or concerned parent who tried to win us free would have to take you on with the laws of the Parodyverse ganging up against them? That was what you told Gaz to get him all focussed, yes?”     “It is true. When your father comes to seek your rescue…”     Danny looked around the antique study with its volumes of forbidden lore, inevitable astrolabe, and Italianate windows with a Boschian view of a nightmare kingdom beyond. He folded his arms. “Dad won’t come. He’ll reckon that any son of his that can’t beat you when you pull this isn’t worth keeping. He’s retconned children before. If I can’t stop you, it’ll turn out I was actually always Flapjack’s kid or something. The Hooded Hood won’t help me now. If he’s helped me at all it will have been years ago, in some weird obscure detail, maybe even before I knew who my father was. Maybe when he bumped me into Kes? Or when he left me the Portal of Pretentiousness to kill myself with? Point is, the Hood won’t come at you direct. He’ll come at you through me.”     “But you are now dead in my domain,” Grimpenghast pointed out smugly.     “Maybe. But FA survived the Void Scholar and being Celestian Madonna for a while. Harlagaz is the heir of Ausgard. Vespiir sees things even you can’t glimpse and she’s just starting to recognise what she can do. R.J. is… developing his address book. But all of them have been trained and supported and shaped by friends and family and mentors and heroes. All of them prepared for you. And then there’s Kerry.”     “Kerry? Yes, she now burns with despair, Mr Ly… Danie… mortal.”     “Now you’re pretending to be flustered to put me off my guard. Pride before the fall and all that. But I’m not proud, I’m confident. Pay attention, Sage Grimpenghast. You go against the Juniors, expect to get schooled. Kerry isn’t despairing, she’s fuming. Building up steam. Building up lava.”     Grimpenghast paused to regard Danny Lyle for a moment. “You are going to be a very fascinating long-term project, Daniel. Oh, I can foresee so many interesting exchanges as I transform you to be mine.”     “Not interested. Let my friends go. It’s your only warning.”     The demon lord chuckled fondly. “Oh, Daniel, I can see into human minds and hearts. Now I own your soul I can read you like a book.”     “That’s good,” Denial replied. “And a pretty fair analogy, I reckon. You see, as far as I can tell demons are simple. Pure. Pure evil, yes, but pretty Manichean. Yeah, I know words. But humans, we’re complicated. Messy. We can believe fifteen things at the same time, love and hate the same person, flit through a hundred ideas in a second, change our minds on a whim, juggle massive contradictions in character and motive and intentions and hardly even notice we’re doing it. Like being a book. You can read it, sure, but while you’re one on page we can be chapters away in a different plot altogether. So go on, read my mind, my heart, and my soul. What’s the headline?”     “You actually believe that you will save Kerry Shepherdson from me. How adorable.”     Denial shrugged. “You think you’ve won because you trapped us here, put one over on the benevolent powers of the universe. I think you lost because they let you do it.”     The Teacher of Deceptions chuckled. “Even now you attempt denial?”     “One of us does. It will be a ‘fascinating project’ to find out which, won’t it?”     Grimpenghast gestured. The Renaissance study melted to insects and the scene changed to Blatant Genius’ displaced laboratory, where Harlagaz, R.J., and Vespiir were trying to explain to Kerry and FA why the Young Heckfire scientist was missing his head.     “They can’t see us,” the Master of Ignorance told Danny. “We are here as spectators, but I perceive how your denials are still trying to save them. You just diverted Clements’ death onto van Meer, did you not?”     “Yep. I like R.J.”     “Your Kerry would not approve of your murders.”     “Yeah, well, I don’t always go for her taste in music. Or when she uses my shaver. So quid pro quo.”     “I could block your powers.”     “You won’t. You want to prove to me that they can’t save anyone. It’ll hurt me more that way.”     “I have already repaired L’il Buttie and Lord and Master to send against your friends. I have billions of other choices available after them. Shall we begin with the New Battlers? I have a selection: Lounge Lizard, Boy Wonder, two versions of E-Male…”     “Yeah, try that. The Juniors already took them out before.”     “Or something more personal in the shapes of beloved family?” Grimpenghast speculated.     “Tacky. Cliché. Pedestrian. Two thumbs down.”     In the lab, the Juniors were just concluding that they couldn’t use whatever device Blatant Genius has completed just before he was slaughtered. Outside, Lord and Master assembled demon minions and anointed them with his sweat of carnal desire. L’il Buttie flew through the mansion’s broken ceiling to locate his enemies again.     Danny denied that Lord and Master was exempt from the demonhorde’s insatiable lusts. That would keep Drugo busy and sore for a while. His attempts to deny that Buttie had brain functions skittered away uselessly from the butler’s cosmic presence.     Somewhere at the bottom of the cellar staircase, Rupert van Meer’s head came back to life and began to grow a terrible new body. In the ballroom, gobbets of Alpha Dude began to crawl together.     “Okay, I can’t deny all of that,” Danny admitted. “So Grimpenghast, why don’t you just make your offer? What’s your deal? What do you want from me?”     “Why Daniel, I don’t want any deal with you. That’s the point I wish to get across to that scheming, idealistic soul of yours. No bargain remains to be struck. You have nothing left to barter. What I want is your despair.” Grimpenghast leaned forward. “I’m a hungry sophisticated parasite, tasty mortal. And the best thing about devouring souls here is they always grow back for later.”     “Or you crap them out and swallow them again. You know what that makes you?”     L’il Buttie was at the door, confronting the Juniors. He swatted Harlagaz down, putting enough cosmic strength in to it to pound a tank flat. He suspended FA’s access to her Austernal transmutations and locked the air molecules around the MLA to prevent him from moving. He made his gloating entry speech.     Time froze. Grimpenghast had put the horror show on pause for additional gloating. “This is about to get rated for mature viewers only,” the Master of Deceits warned Danny. “I have made sure that the Apocalyspian atrocity cannot be denied.”     Danny explained in detail where Lord Grimpenghast could insert his Apocalyspian atrocity and at what angles. “So just get on with your demo,” Denial demanded in conclusion. “I’m done with your gloat-athon. Even with an eternity to spend down here this conversation is taking too long.”     “You have no comprehension of the suffering I can inflict on you for your insolence. What I shall now inflict upon Kerry and your companions.”     Danny nodded agreement. “That’s true. Because of Conservation of Torment.” He glared at the demon lord. “That’s what dad calls it anyhow. You know the concept? You can do horrible things to somebody, but if what you do is horrible enough then that somebody stops being themselves. They’re broken, and now you’re torturing something different, not the original being. So there are limits to what you can do to a person and them still be that person. Which means, yes, I have no comprehension of the suffering available for you to bestow. I literally can’t imagine it. And while you could inflict it on something that looked a bit like me you couldn’t actually get me with it. This me would be long gone.”     “An… interesting theorem,” the skull-capped demon scholar considered. “Contemplate, however, the possibility that each torture may broaden slightly the limits that your personality can endure. Each lesson can push a little further – to infinity, for eternity. Every time you reach your limit, and that sets a new limit for next time, world without end. That is hell.”     “And this conversation is the start of that torture? Feels like it.”     Time spooled on. Kerry faced off against L’il Buttie. Her fury broke loose. If the mansion shuddered it was because the world beneath it did.     “I still feel you trying to deny me, Daniel. You can sense when that will work. You know it is futile now. Watch, Denial,” Grimpenghast ordered. “Watch her fall.”     “Souls escape from your hell. Even demons, sometimes. It can be done.”     “Not by you, Daniel.”     “This is a bad place but it’s not the final one, is it? I can feel the… the gravity. There’s a… threshold. A last border. Something beyond the Parodyverse, beyond what we can comprehend this side of it. Nothing comes back from there. Even the souls you have migrate there one day, up or down.”     “That does not concern you, Daniel. Only your present situation and the doom of your friends.”     Danny looked up. “Ah, now that I deny. It does concern me, because it has to do with my friends and where they are. And do you know where that is, Grimp?”     “In hell, as my playthings.”     Danny shook his head. “Together. With me. Thanks for dragging me back here, sucker!” He dodged round Grimpenghast and made it as far as Kerry.     The Demon Lord revoked Danny’s body, killing him instantly.     Except it didn’t work.     “Important point you’re probably just now reading in my mind,” Denial told him. “I actually died a year and half ago, in the Parody War, killing the Avatar. And then Dancer maxxed out her powers to bring me back, so I Denied being dead and wandered home to Kerry. I’ve been Denying being dead ever since. I’m still Denying it right now.”     “You… deny death?”     “All the time, ever since then. To be with Kes.” He grinned wickedly at Grimpenghast. “Love overcoming death? Didn’t see that one coming, did you, sunshine?”     He reached for Kerry. She couldn’t see him or hear him. He grabbed her and kissed her anyway. “You don't lose.,” he denied. “You don’t let your friends down. You never let the bad guys win!”     Grimpenghast hurled Danny aside. The room smelled of brimstone. The air was hot and thick. Kerry’s eyes were hellfire red.     Something burned beneath the last border, and it heard the probability arsonist’s call.     “That’s my Kes!” Danny grinned, contented.     “Fool! She doesn’t know what she’s calling up! She will destroy everything!” shrieked Grimpenghast. He looked less like an effete scholar-monk now, more like a wizened shadow of knotted lies falling to ruin in infernal winds. “Kerry Shepherdson! There is a deal to be made…”     “Go to Hell!” Kerry told him at the same time Danny said it.     Then there were the fires of the Pit. ***     “D?” Kerry said, quietly. “Am I dead?”     “Best guess, no,” her boyfriend estimated.     “Are you?”     “Debatable.”     “We’re surrounded by flames.”     “Yep. You appear to have set fire to Grimpenghast’s hell. Kudos. One for the album.”     “Everything is seared away.”     “Not everything. You sometimes control your disasters, don’t you? Like when things explode and the shrapnel sometimes only hits the people you want it to hit. The flames flare where you want them to go.”     “At people who deserve it or where it would be funny,” the probability arsonist agreed.     “But always to protect people when it really matters. So, best I can deny it, you’re sort of holding back this hellfire plume you called. You’ve actually burned up an entire hell dimension but saved some of the people who were trapped here.”     R.J. streaked out of the inferno, literally hotfoot, and delivered the first of the students he was pulling from the collapsing mansion cellar. “Wholeplaceisgoingtoblazesnotafigureofspeech,” he garbled and zipped away again. Another forty-seven followed in the next nine seconds. They all seemed dazed, unable to comprehend what was going on or the flames that licked around them. “I don’t get why the blaze would burn some people instantly and not bother others,” Randy puzzled.     Vespiir dragged a singed Red Velvet from the wreckage. “This is special fire,” the seeress told them. “It consumed Black Princess instantly, and some of the other guests, but it hardly scorched Lady Alootta. When it touches me it only tickles, like a master using feathers for the d’sim t’vroth. Or maybe warm honey in a slow rach d’vash? Or silk streamers when…”     “Please explain more later. In detail, Maybe with diagrams,” R.J. pleaded. “For now we need to get these people out of here before we stop being feathered and honeyed and start being fried!”     “That’s not me stopping the flame burning,” Kerry admitted. “I think… well, this fire is only for some people. Bad people.”     “‘M going to have to work harder on that,” said Red Velvet muzzily. “Lat’r.”     “But… they say I am bad,” Vespiir confessed, her hand straying to the headband that covered her exile brand. “Why then am I not…?” Her eyes widened as she came to a conclusion. “Oh!”     Kerry looked around the rapidly dissolving mansion. “Next time I burn a plane away, remind me we’ll need somewhere to stand after. Where are FA and Gaz?”     R.J. had a hard time describing it. “Gaz was… he sort of grabbed some glowing things that had a different sort of light to the burning, and he just tossed them upwards, and there were these rainbow flashes and… He said it was his job, for the nonce, and that some brave souls had suffered enough.”     “Lady Saaamantha went to determine that our clan enemies were truly dead,” Vespiir reported. “She said that enough was enough and she wasn’t having L’il Buttie coming back again. She sounded very firm about it.”     “Don’t worry,” Danny assured the Juniors. “Buttie and Lodestone didn’t survive in any form.”     Harlagaz struggled out of the inferno hefting Blatant Genius’ device. It glowed and hummed now and a tangled thread of pure energy knotted round and round above it like a rapidly-spinning ball of glowing wool. “I hast brought yon instrument, which hast been activated by virtue of yon control panel expodething by mine Lady Kerry’s grace. ‘Tis doing something tingly to the nether regions.”     “Maybe hold it higher up your chest?” R.J. suggested.     “To the nether regions of hell,” the demihemigod clarified. “I perceive now tis like unto a grappling hook, wherein we might connect yon energy thread back unto the fields we know. If, um, we hadst a way of casting out yon line and a direction wherein to pointeth it.” He ended with a sheepish shrug.     FA appeared from the flames in a new outfit. “Sorry I’m late. It took me a while to decide on suitable boots to dance on Buttie’s ashes. Did somebody mention threads to be controlled? Because that’s basically my only power.”     “That way,” Vespiir pointed. “That is the way home.” She turned to Gaz. “I have a purpose! I had to be here!”     “Let’s go, then,” Kerry chivvied everyone. “I’m starting to get a little bit strained holding back the freaking fires of Hades!”     With Vespiir’s guidance and a lot of heaving from Harlagaz, Samantha shot the machine’s energy thread off through conceptual dimensions until it locked onto something.     “Is it a good something?” R.J. checked.     “I saw the brightest thing I could,” Vespiir promised. “It is Lord Viisionary’s Lighthouse.”     “I’ll anchor the cord as long as I can.” FA announced. “How can we get all these people up there?”     “With élan,” the MLA insisted. “I’ll climb up carrying them one at a time. Everybody line up in order of cuteness!”     Kerry grinned at Danny. “We’ll save everyone we can, proper LL-style. Vizh and Dream and the rest will be proud of us. The rest of the people, the ones the flames got… evidently weren’t very nice.” She cocked her head at the leather-jacketed rogue. “I notice you didn’t get burned up as a hopeless sinner.”     “No. There was a risk of that but I calculated we’d both probably hover above the grade curve. We do keep saving the world and stuff. It’s nice to know I’m not entirely irredeemable.”     “Something to aim for?”     Danny kissed Kerry. “We have to say goodbye now, Firecracker,” he told her.     “What? What d’ you mean?” The girl saw his expression. “What do you mean, Danny Lyle?”     “I mean I can’t come with you. The Happy Ending body I got was killed here. I can’t deny that. I can’t leave here.”     “This whole hell-plane art about to crash down into What Lieth Below,” Harlagaz warned. “You doth not want to be here for that.”     “There’s got to be a way out,” Kerry insisted fiercely. “We can get you a robot body. Or a hologram. Dweebionary had one for a while and was no lamer than usual. Or… a clone! Dr Moo can probably make one out of laundry lint.”     Danny shook his head. “Even if there was a way to get me new flesh somehow, my soul is tethered here. It can’t go up your fishing line. I’m sorry, Firecracker. I love you.”     “Damn you, Denial. You don’t just give in like this. Do something! Find a way.” Kerry turned to the Juniors. “Come on! Think! We have to come up with an idea. It doesn’t end like this!”     Fashion Accessory grabbed her frantic friend. “Kare, we’re almost out of time here. R.J.’s got everyone else out now. There’s just us. And this mansion – this whole world – isn’t going to resist the hellfire much longer. Even if it doesn’t burn us up, I don’t think we want the fall to whatever’s below.”     “Go then. I’m not leaving Danny.”     “You are” declared Denial.     Kerry punched him in the stomach. “No, I’m not. I love you too, so stay there wheezing and think of a plan. Because I’m not going if you don’t.”     “She is not,” agreed Vespiir, looking into the flames. “I see that. I see…” She turned to Harlagaz in shock.     “There art one slight chance,” the demihemigod considered, “but ‘twill require a great sacrifice and a grave duty. Naught will e’er be the same hereafter.”     Kerry grabbed Danny and dragged him to Gaz. “Do it! Whatever it is. Do it.”     “What she said,” Danny surrendered.     Harlagaz nodded. The fringes of his gjarlenwolf cape smouldered with sparks from the rising holocaust. He cracked his knuckled and took a deep breath.     He turned to Samantha. “I wilt require a ribbon.” *** Epilogue: Visionary and the Unexpected Body Count     The tractor trailer ran the red light at sixty miles an hour, braked too late, and smashed into the side of Visionary’s Pinto. The elderly car was flipped over seven times and exploded in a ball of flame. Its driver died instantly.     Visionary crawled from the wreckage, worried that there was a rather charred lump of meat burning up where he had been seated. “Um…”     A plump girl in a dress better suited to a thin girl held out her hand to help him stand. “Sorry about that,” she told him. “Did it sting?”     Vizh looked back at the blazing auto and at the waiting harbinger. “Tricia?” he checked. It had been a while since she had incarnated on Earth. She was supposed to have retired. “Temporary Death?”     “That’s me. I apologise for the car crash. I’ll fix your Pinto later, as best as I can. But according to the Rules I can only talk with you while you’re dead.”     “Temporarily dead?” Vizh checked hastily. “You being Temporary Death. Not He-Was-So-Mangled-He-Was-Gone-In-an-Instant-and-Never-Came-Back Death.”     “No promotion yet,” Tricia sighed regretfully. “Anyway, I can’t keep you temporarily dead for long or you’ll slip over into untemporarily dead, and that’s a whole other department.”     “Well, we wouldn’t want that. Why did you happen to kill me, then?”     The junior member of the Family of the Pointless sighed. “I owe the Hooded Hood a favour. Well, I owe Madame Symmetry, Shaper of Worlds, and Mistress Lisa, Destroyer of Worlds, favours. And they owe the Hood, for his help in that whole Moderator Saga thing.”     Visionary flinched. “That was a tough one. I still can’t decide who was to blame, spiffy or that punk Danny Lyle.”     “Well, an alternate version of Denial was the Moderator. Sorry, THE Moderator,” Tricia pointed out, “so on the whole I’d say it was alt-Danny. Danny actually helped solve the problem, if you remember. And then the evil version of Danny was erased and the day was saved. But not the future. That came next.”     “I’m not sure we have the time to do a full summary of those events,” Vizh worried. “Not if I’m hoping to be temporarily dead.”     “Oh, right, yes. Where was I? Oh yes, Moderator saga… Madame Symmetry… Lisa… the Hooded Hood calls in a favour for his input…” Temporary Death looked up cheerily. “That’s right! You have to come with me, please. We have work to do.”     “We do? Work for… the Hooded Hood? That doesn’t sound like something I would want to take part in.”     “But you did want a temporary death?”     “Maybe I could offer a slight assist. But I want the Pinto polished afterwards. And that ‘Honk if you think I’m fake’ sticker removed. What do I have to do?”     “We just need to take your transdimensional Lighthouse for a little spin, please. I have the co-ordinates for the time and space and relative dimensions. We can be there and back again before the fire services even prise your corpse from the smouldering wreckage.”     “Oh, good. Where are we going? And what for?”     “We’re going to a terminated timeline that never existed,” Tricia revealed. “And we are going to bring back the Moderator.”     Then she asked, “Why are you trying to climb back into that wreckage?” ***     “Yes,” Hallie answered emphatically. “You have a pulse. You are probably real, dammit.”     “But not dead?” Visionary checked. “Um, is the Pinto outside?”     The Lair Legion’s resident A.I. spent about a fifth of a nanosecond to check. “Yes. Sorry.”     “Alright. Now this next question might sound a little strange, but is there a major archvillain locked in my closet?”     Before Hallie could set a scan in the notoriously scan-resistant Lighthouse that mostly devoted its time between the fishing town of Willingham and the furthest promontory of Parody Island (depending on the tides), various dimensional incursion alarms screeched. Only the high water that established the Lighthouse to be in Willingham right now prevented the immediate manifestation of an urgent Lair Banshee.     An attractive young woman in a Hawaiian bikini fell on Visionary’s lap. “Er…” he said worriedly to Hallie.     Another girl in party dress dropped across the first one. And then a third.     “Visionary, what have you been up to?” Hallie demanded as the couch filled up with nubile students.     “Help! Can’t breathe… facing temporary death again!” the possibly-fake couch-owner gasped.     When the female party survivors has all been evacuated to Vizh’s living room the male ones started appearing. There was a level of panic amongst them and a sulphurous stench.     “Is this some new form of attack by flash mob?” Hallie wondered.     Vespiir appeared atop the pile and leaped off with lithe grace. Fashion Accessory followed, shifting the sofa’s weave to a tasteful abstract pattern. The MLA dropped down atop the maximum concentration of hot women. Kerry body-surfed after them and then Harlagaz dropped full on Vizh’s lap carrying a sparking device the size of a refrigerator.     The device exploded.     The broom closet burst open and Danny Lyle emerged.     “Aaah!” Vizh said, remaining under the partial cover of a soot-blackened Ausgardian. “THE Moderator! Lock up your origins! Kerry, get away from him!”     “Chill, teach,” FA advised Visionary. “We got this. Hi, Hallie. We rescued some people from hell. Can you do the paperwork?”     “Welcome to the House of Viisionary,” Vespiir bade the frantic partygoers formally. “Please remove your clothes if you so desire.”     “What she said,” R.J. agreed.     Vizh was still struggling out from under Harlagaz. “Kerry! Watch out! He’s the Moderator! He kills variants versions of you through all the dimensions!”     “No I’m not.” Danny denied. “Although it looks like I’ve been dropped into his old body, since he wasn’t in existence to use it. Nice one. Very handy.”     “Kerry, do not kiss the Moderator! Or Danny! Or whoever that it! Do not do that with your tongue! Do not put your hand there! Kerry Shepherdson, I shall tell your mother!”     “It’s okay,” Fashion Accessory calmed the Junior’s teacher. “It’s all legal now.”     “It was the only way to bring Lord Daanny’s soul from the nether realm where it was trapped,” Vespiir explained. “It had to be bound to another soul to be carried here.”     “Useful that you happened to have a spare bod for him, though,” R.J. admitted. “I call that planning ahead, boss-man. I don’t see why everyone says you’re a clueless loser.”     “Wait, what? They say…?” Another word percolated. “Legal?”     Harlagaz waved the white ribbon that FA had created. “Twas the only way I couldst cleave two souls together for the journey home. I handfasted them, by mine authority as a demihemigod.”     “Handfasted?” Hallie had every online dictionary in the world at her disposal. “Handfasted as in ‘a contract or covenant, especially of betrothal or marriage’? That handfasting?”     “It is an Earth custom,” Vespiir explained to Visionary, “wherein a lord and a lady exchange binding vows of mutual ownership.”     Harlagaz nodded. “Tis Ausgardian practice too, best performed whilst thine enemies lay slaughtered and their fastnesses burn. So really we didst it about right.”     Kerry peeled herself reluctantly off her not-dead not-boyfriend. “Yeah, sorry, big bro. I, um, I think we eloped. To hell.”     “Which caught fire,” R.J. offered helpfully.     “It’s evidently all legal in the State of Ausgard,” clarified Samantha, “Although later on Danny may have to torch your barns and steal your cattle.”     “Hold on…” Vizh struggled. “Handfasting is…”     “It’s a bit sudden, but I can’t deny this or I die,” Danny pointed out. “I’m just starting to suspect that my father might have had more to do with this than I gave him credit for. How did you get this new body for me?”     Visionary ignored the few hell-dazzled students who had accepted Vespiir’s permission to undress, the others that were screaming for priests, the sad collapse of a now-beautifully-upholstered piece of lounge furniture, and the demihemigod on his lap.     “This is so much worse than the return of the Moderator,” he groaned.     “You can be the one to tell my sister, Vizh,” Kerry promised him hastily. “And my brother. And Ma. And explain it all, that it wasn’t my fault or Danny’s fault or… look you can’t argue with metaphysics.”     “Or spell it,” Gaz added sagely.     “And make sure Ma knows that I’m not knocked up. We don’t need any more ‘hilarious misunderstandings’ like that. And tell everyone that gifts are okay. Anything from the advanced explosives catalogue.”     “It was a most interesting ceremony,” Vespiir confided, “although there was not time enough for Lord Daanny to perform sex with any of us because of the dimension collapsing.”     “I did whip up some tuxes and dresses for the occasion,” FA comforted her stunned teacher. “Strapless beaded A-line bridal gown with court train and half-veil for Kare, snazzy slim-cut numbers for me and Vesp with lace appliqué. They got a bit scorched by hellfire, though.”     “We defeated Sage Grimpenghast,” Danny offered. “He’s been annoying people for a long time, right? So nobody needs to start another big Danny-might-destroy-the-Parodyverse-shoot-him plot, right? Or blame me for accidentally having to sort of get hitched to Kes? Visionary? Mr V?”     “Are you sure I have a pulse?” Vizh checked with Hallie. *** Next Issue: The Baroness wishes to rule the world. ManMan wishes he could fly. The Manga Shoggoth wishes ghosts tasted better. And Yuki Shiro wishes she knew who killed a locked room full of vampires – before the undead elders unleash blood-vengeance on Paradopolis. Untold Tales of the Parodyverse #356: The Sky Is Falling starts day after tomorrow with “Elizabeth von Zemo and the Red Button”. *** Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2016 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2016 to their creators. This is a work of parody. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works are in fair-use parody and do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. Any proceeds from this work are distributed to charity. 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.

Never really thought about it but how I've personally defined Ham-Boy's powers I'm not sure he could "make" Meatloaf with his powers. Not even sure he could make the meat to put into a Meatloaf with his powers. The meat in the meatloaf is not processed enough to be available to Ham-Boy. Not even sure about Ham-Bpy's cooking ability.

But as I said tangential comments on a throw away line. I do look forward to what else you post.

Not sure if I'll get something out this december. It would be appropriate since I'm trying to get the cast of Chad & Ronnie to a Chrismahannaqwanza celebration. Maybe next year