The Baroness, Part 57
Tributes

“Shrike , well, you just can’t pigeonhole him as a villain. I’ve never met anybody who had more potential to be a complex character and who nevertheless spent his time acting out as a thug. Except when Dancer’s around, he’s a man who aspires to be pure id. But when he gets that id in gear and lets a woman know he’s all man, well, let’s just say that he can really make you feel like a woman, if you know what I mean. It’s just a dammed shame that afterwards, instead of some afterglow, he goes all macho and starts telling you at the top of his voice what a stud he is and what kinds of things he wants to do to you next. After that, you want to sling the guy into an acid bath and then get yourself into the rubber cleaning vat for a week.”

(Silicone) Sally Rezilyant, former Ph.D. candidate in psychology, University of Michigan

“Jenni and Trudi Wooster? No comment. My lawyers have filed lawsuits against those two nincom – defendants. Off the record? Not a word. But a well-connected source might tell you that I got to know them quite well on an accidental excursion together, and I’ve never found a more self-centered, scatter-brained, superficial, stupefyingly uninformed and vapid pair of minxes. They make Picardy Pikes look like Sir Isaiah Berlin.”

    Baroness Elizabeth Zemo, former Empress of Earth and currently at large

“Agnes. What a marvelous word, even if it isn’t German. Agnes. It conjures up restraint, propriety, duty, wealth and position. All the things that I want to degrade her from. And she loves it! She loves me! A fate neither written in the stars or in the blood of untermenschen, but as clear and inevitable as the rise of the Third Reich. Agnes Wooster, my own, my life, er, my un-life, my heart. And now to be taken from me. I shall have my revenge, I swear it!”

    Baron Ottokar Zemo, former live Nazi and necromancer, currently un-alive

“I didn’t see much of Alcheman until after the Parody War, when the Baroness’s staff was let go. After a few weeks, when I realized I couldn’t get back to Austria, I joined a self-defense unit in Pierce Heights that was trying to keep the riff-raff from GMY and the Safe out of our neighborhood. I met Alcheman there, and soon realized from my work at the Schloss that he was Frau Agnes’ son. He’s too inexperienced to be an effective hero and his basic optimism allows him to be easily deceived. But he’s loyal, determined and sometimes imaginative. I hope we’ll work together again.”

    Franz, former major-domo of Schloss Schreckhausen

“Mr. Epitome. Harrumph. Of the pestilent mass of those so-called ‘heroes,’ he’s far and away the finest. One of the few who has any sense of the proper, constitutional order of things. I remember the time when one of those mountebanks was about to arrest one of my reporters, and Epitome buzzed in and made whoever it was take his mutated hands off my man. “Freedom of the press can be obnoxious,” he said, “but it is the cornerstone of our democracy.” Also leaked us a bunch of stories from the OPS, ha ha, making SPUD look like a bunch of yahoos. And then SPUD started leaking to us, in self-defense. Good stuff. Ran the circulation up by 20,000. But we’re talking about Epitome here, right? Too straight a man to be true. We’ve never found out anything about his family other than that rumor that his brother was an alky, and of course that weaver woman he fell in love with, but who’s too insipid to get more than a half column in the women’s section. We have some interesting stuff about his connections with sort of cloudy, grey influences, but we never found the right hook to hang it on. Now, if what you say is true, we never will. I’ll miss the big guy, even if he did protect that insect Goldeneyed. If he wasn’t a Marine he should have been.”

    J. Jonah Jerkson, former Marine, current editor and publisher of the Daily Trombone and VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

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