#345: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: More Candidates Go to Part Five: The Last Thing That Went Through His Head Go to Part Six: Prisoner: Cell Block X Go to Part Seven: Ghost Story Go to Part Eight: Hunting Season Go to Footnotes Previously: CrazySugarFreakBoy! has announced the new line-up of the Lair Legion – and Visionary as it’s new chair. This is news to Visionary. And the new line-up. And the government.     Now it’s just a matter of telling the lucky heroes that they’re on the team. Simple, really. The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse *** 5. The Last Thing That Went Through His Head     The bullet hit Hatman right in the middle of his temple and sent him toppling back onto Elli Copper. The GMY Foundation’s young pro-bono lawyer fell backwards with the bulk of Jay Boaz on top of her, covered in his blood.     “Shooter!” shouted Natalia Romanza, Agent of SPUD, into her ear-ring comm-link to the helicarrier above. “Protocol Kennedy. Now now now!” She dived at the side of the old Foundation building and ran up it using her particle-attraction gloves and boots. The shot had come from up there.     On board the high-tech flying aircraft carrier technicians lit up the ground below with concentrated particle scans, high intensity cameras with face recognition software, anti-teleportation fields and a host of other diagnostics and countermeasures.     The crowd that had gathered at the Foundation scattered screaming. Judgement Jones, the building janitor, jostled his way to where armoured SPUD agents were lifting Hatman off Eli. “As you alright, Miss Copper?” he demanded urgently.     “They shot Jay! They shot Jay!”     Contessa Natalia vaulted over the lip of the roof and landed in a cat-crouch to look for enemies. “Talk to me, boys,” she told the helicarrier.     “Cloaking field active at your five o’clock,” came the reply over her ear-ring. “Retreating fast.”     “Kill the field.”     “It’s a tricky one.”     “Be trickier.”     There was a fizzing of static and HuntingJustice Deathmarrow crackled into view.     “Not bad,” noted the assassin-for-hire. “I’m going to have to ask Factor X for my money back.”     “Maybe in twenty-to-twenty-five years,” suggested the Contessa. She somersaulted away from the rapid-fire proton gun that HJDM manifested – the biomorphed killer could generate weaponry at will – then returned fire with her own wrist-mounted taser darts.     Judge helped the SPUD operatives keep the crowd back while a medic examined Hatman. Elli had the capped crusader’s blood all over her white blouse. “Is he going to be all right?” she demanded in a terrified whisper.     “He’s dead,” replied the medic. “I’m sorry. The shot penetrated the skull and mashed the brain. Death was instantaneous.”     On the carrier new problems were appearing on the threat board. “Sir!” the chief diagnostics technician called to watch command, “we’ve identified half a dozen other high-technology signatures that were concealed with masking technology. The nearest one is twenty feet from Hatman.”     Watch command called it in to security on the ground. Two SPUD troopers turned their weapons to the crowd. “Excuse me, sir. You in the big coat. Hold it there!”     The big coat turned round and the big hat came off. What was underneath wasn’t even shaped very much like a human. Black metal and sharp edges tore out of the concealing clothing and Mean Machine flexed his razor blades. “You got me, fleshies,” he grated at them with metallic menace. “I guess it’s a fair cop.”     The helicarrier threat board lit up red. “Sir, we have a confirmed rogue robot from the Machine Shop down there! We’re reading Mean Machine, and that means the other five signatures are likely Machine Shop too. We’re…”     Then all the signals from the ground went dead. Media Machine could control broadcasts.     “I want troops on the ground and cars in the air now!” shouted watch command. “Scramble everything!”     Mean Machine was still in communication with his team. “They made me, boys,” he reported with anticipation. “I was just confirming that Boaz was a kill so’s we could all go home when they spotted me in the crowd.”     “So now we get out of here the wet way,” replied Fitness Machine. “Let’s give these fleshies something to cry about.”     “What about the heroes?” worried Sewing Machine, ratcheting her needle guns to wide-spread.     “They’re too busy fighting their government,” replied Karaoke Machine with a giggle, “Besides, Media’s imposing a blackout. Right lover? Yeah yeah yeah!”     “Right,” the slick telegenic communications robot confirmed. “I’d say we have time to send humanity a real message. And then we still pick up a participation fee as the Losers’ backup from Mayor Klein.”     “Sounds good,” approved Weighing Machine. “I’ll start by bringing that helicarrier down onto the city with an ultra-gravitic pulse. And then I’ll squaaarrrrkkk!”     “Weighing?” called Fitness Machine. “Your signal’s dropped out.”     “Yeah, so’s his CPU,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! told the Machine Shop over their private frequency. “And I have bad news about the heroes all being tied up. Wanna guess what it is?” ***         The mission had gone wrong. A simple assassination had turned into a full-scale war with SPUD. Now CrazySugarFreakBoy! was on the scene as well, adding to the chaos.     “Get out of there,” called Fitness Machine. “Nobody’s paying us to off that geek today.”     “This one’s a freebie,” promised Mean Machine, slashing at the wired wonder with his multi-jointed steel blades. “I can’t stand this guy.”     CSFB! bounced away, dumped Sewing Machine into Karaoke Machine to blunt both their assaults, then caromed back into Mean. “Is that why you never call, never write?” he asked the killer robot. “I thought it was just that you were so busy at the office.”     Mean Machine hacked away at where the champion of chaos had been. “You can bounce around as much as you like,” he warned CSFB!. “I only need to tag you once.”     “Once is the problem, though,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! grinned. “I mean, Mean, every time I jump away I pound some of your guys. Ooops, that’s me dropping Answerphone Machine into the sewers.”     “Media Machine,” came the annoyed clarification from below the pavement.     “And now I’m silly-stringing Karaoke to you so if he uses his sonic attack he’ll blow your arm off first.”     “Kill you!” shouted Mean Machine, going into a frenzy.     Fitness Machine kicked Dream into a wall and caught him with a straight-arm punch as he rebounded back. “I just got word from Master Machine,” the dexterous athletedroid announced. “He says we can kill this one to send a message.”     “Better call for reinforcements then,” Dream warned them.     Fax Machine teleported in with Adding Machine, Popcorn Machine, and Smoke Machine.     “We did,” said Fitness.     “It’s CrazySugarFreakBoy! He has known weaknesses,” Adding noted dispassionately. “Popcorn, fire on the crowd.” ***     The SPUD stretcher-bearers had retreated into their shuttle to help protect the incarcerated League of Losers. The perimeter guards were scattered trying to evacuate the crowd. It was left to Judge and Elli to drag Hatman’s body back to the shelter of the Foundation lobby.     “It felt wrong to just leave him lying out there,” Elli explained to the puffing janitor.     “Yes, well, before this is over there’ll be a sight more lying like him,” predicted Judge. “Look, they’ve forced CrazySugarFreakBoy! to protect the crowd so now they’ve caught him with sonic blasts and exploding cornballs. They’ve got that one that belches fumes pushing the SPUD soldiers away. Everybody else is piled on to the hero.”     “Where’s reinforcements?” cried Elli. “The lair Legion? Why don’t they come?”     “They’ve blocked all calls fer help,” Judge guessed. “Even that big flying ship up there’s in trouble after whatever that Adding Machine did to it.”     “They’re going to kill CrazySugarFreakBoy!”     “Looks like.”     “We have to do something!”     “We’d be dead the minute we stepped into that.”     Elli looked down at Hatman, his forehead bloody and sundered, his face corpse pale. The wound was ugly and raw. Elli plucked Jay Boaz’ traditional Hatman cap out of his waistband, shook it out, and laid it gently upon his head.     “We so need a hero now,” she wept.     Hatman’s eyes snapped open. ***     The battle between HuntingJustice DeathMarrow and Natalia Romanza had been fast and furious, but finally a gut-kick and a nerve punch had taken HJDM down. The Contessa ruthlessly dislocated her target’s neck to keep her pacified.     “You’re going to pay for what you did to Jay,” the vengeful spy promised the assassin. “So is your employer. And you are going to tell me who hired you to do this, comrade, I promise you that.”     “It was Pelopia of Order,” answered HuntingJustice DeathMarrow without hesitation. “On behalf of the Word of Logos. They wanted that known.”     Natalia frowned. “Jay Boaz was formerly the champion of Order,” she objected. “Why would the Emissary of Order arrange his murder?”     HJDM laughed. “Murder? Who said it was murder?”     “The bullet you put into his brain was the clue.”     “Of course I put a bullet in his brain. How else could I deliver back the Serious Matter that he’d lost? The Serious Matter that makes him Hatman.” ***     “Jay?” Elli Copper scrabbled away from the former corpse on her backside.     “Yep,” agreed the capped crusader. He sat up. “Explanations later, I think. Right now it looks like Dream needs my help. The brave and the bold.”     “You wus dead,” objected Judgement Jupiter.     “I was laced with Serious Matter that makes me take on the aspect of whatever cap I wear, and then Elli put my Hatman hat on me. So now I’m restored and I have to go kick some Machine Shop butt. Back soon.” Jay Boaz pulled off his regular hat; his forehead was unscarred. He selected his Dynamos hat and jumped into the fray with an electromagnetic pulse for openers. ***     Sewing Machine hammered a series of toxic needles to pin CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s arm to the pavement so that the wired wonder couldn’t avoid the incoming blade barrage that was Mean Machine. Dream made an impossible twist aside, disorienting Mean with a series of fizz-bang explosions, but his escape attempt was thwarted by a series of popcorn blasts right in his face.     “Any last words, fleshy?” mocked Media Machine as Karaoke turned her mixmaster array to liquefy.     CSFB! blinked up through the smoke, gasping for breath. “Oh yeah…” the sucrose-powered superhero told the Machine Shop. “Always. How about… hi Hatty?”     “Hi H…?” Karoke Machine puzzled right before Hatman scrapped her.     “Hi Dream,” called back the capped crusader. He pulled off his ear-muffs and switched to his Hurricanes cap to clear Mean and Sewing away from his partner in crimefighting, then went in close with his Steelers hat.     CSFB! tore his arm loose and bounded after his friend to ram rocket fuel soda pop down Media Machine’s throat.     Natalia Romanza dropped down on Smoke Machine from above and attached something small and metallic from her hip-pouches. The fume-generating robot crackled once then fell over.     “This has gone bad!” Fitness Machine recognised. “Fax, get us out of here.”     But Fax Machine had been Hatman’s next target. “What, you think we haven’t practiced this before?” asked Jay Boaz.     “And also that we aren’t the coolest baddie-bashers in the history of the Parodyverse,” jazzed CrazySugarFreakBoy!. He leaped towards Hatman. Jay donned his genuine Babe Ruth cap and batted his friend right into Fitness and Popcorn. “Yeeeeh-hah!” commented the wired wonder.     “You can’t stop us, fleshy heroes!” warned Adding Machine. “The odds are so much against you that… urrrrrrrrkkkzzzzz!”     “Check your sums again,” advised Hatman, pulling off his Dancer headband. “Nice shoes though.”     Sewing Machine turned towards the injured SPUD men and the remaining trapped crowd. “Back off or they all die!” warned the angry robot.     The sudden spray of combat candy and silly string knocked the machine off balance. Hatman literally flew through the assailant in his Torpedoes hat.     That left Mean Machine at bay. The sadistic instrument of mass murder turned and pounded up the steps of the Foundation towards Elli and Judge, either to make them hostages or simply to kill them for pleasure.     “Manoeuvre Nine!” called Hatman to CSFB, pulling on his Jerry Coleman hat to anchor his partner. Dream hurled himself forward leaving a ribbon of silly string attached to Hatty and looped himself round Mean Machine. Hatman slipped into his Uganda Cranes cap and hoisted the robot up and away from its victims with inches to spare.     “You think that’ll stop me?” shouted the livid Mean Machine, spitting oil, struggling loose. “You think anything you two fleshies have got can stop me?”     “Hard to say,” Hatman shrugged, whiplashing the robot high into the air. “Guess we’ll leave it to the helicarrier then.”     The SPUD helicarrier systems were back online without interference from Weighing Machine and Adding Machine. Weapons designed to battle a dimensional dreadnaught auto-locked on the airborne Mean Machine and fired.     CSFB! and Hatman high-fived as the robot was blown to a scatter of machine parts.     “That’s sent a message all right,” agreed Natalia Romanza. ***     “So you weren’t dead?” checked Elli as the clean-up continued. “This ruined blood-soaked blouse was just an illusion?”     “I think I was,” Jay Boaz judged, “right up to the point where you put my Hatman cap back on me. But then the Serious Matter I’d been shot with activated and transformed me to what I usually am.”     “It’s a superhero thing,” CSFB! explained to the boggled lawyer. “We do this sometimes.”     “It’s not a trick I could pull off again,” Hatman warned.     “Who’d think I’d have to thank the Word of Logos for getting my buddy back?” Dreamcatcher grinned. “Of course, I’ll still have to defeat Wordy and all his nefarious plans.”     “Why does the Word want me back, I wonder?” speculated Jay worriedly.     Judge looked at the restored capped crusader with equal concern. “Now that you’re all superheroey again does that mean you’ll be goin’ back to the Lair Legion and abandoning the Foundation, Mr Boaz?”     “Hatster, you have to come back,” CSFB! told Jay. “I totally already announced it and Vizh is gonna need someone to be Training Officer for the six newbies. It’ll be great!”     “I’ll be there for the Legion,” agreed Hatman. “But I’ll be there for the Foundation too, Judge, Elli. I don’t take my commitments lightly. I’ll even move in here when we’ve got a room sorted out. We’re going to clean up the mess and make things better than ever so the world’s a safe, fair place.”     “That’s… good,” smiled Elli Copper. “Are you talking about the Foundation or the Lair Legion?”     Hatman just grinned.      *** 6. Prisoner: Cell Block X     “No?” said Yuki. “What do you mean, no?”     Chief Warden Randolph Morgensten tossed the sheaf of paperwork back across the desk at the purple-haired cyborg P.I. The sheets scattered over the floor. “I mean no, you can’t withdraw the prisoner. Not gonna happen.”     “Can you actually read? Did you see the government stamps on the Terminus Team discharge forms?”     Morgensten sneered. “Any of Barriere’s liberal rehab scheme that touches on this Federal Metahuman Containment Facility is at the Governor’s discretion. The Safe’s got all kinds of special exemptions to allow us to properly incarcerate the supervillain scum we have to hole up here. We don’t need due process. We’re allowed cruel and unusual. Civil rights stop outside the door but the dregs of society stay locked inside.”     That sounded suspiciously well rehearsed. Yuki glared at the corpulent new warden of the world’s foremost supervillain prison. “You’re subject to checks and balances same as anyone else. Except me. I’ve got papers here for the release of Svetlana Rezilyant and I’m not leaving without her.”     Now Morgensten shrugged. “Then enjoy your stay. We got plenty of guys down in the locks and racks who’d be happy to shack up with a cute wind-up bed toy – when they’re tired of Silicone Sally, I guess. But all my prisoners stay put. Every one.”     Yuki frowned. “You’ve put her in general population? In mixed gen pop?”     “First concern here at the Safe is how to keep nine hundred metahuman freaks from walking across the water to GMY or Paradopolis and murdering folks. Everything’s designed with that in mind first. Power neutralisers, energy dampeners, teleport blockers, the works. Mundane security’s better than any max security jail on Earth and that’s before we use the esoteric stuff. Whether a perpetrator has a pee-pee or not comes way down on my list of concerns.”     “But not on hers,” growled Yuki. “You can’t just throw her in there with those bastards and…”     “Listen, pinkie, that murderess tortured and slaughtered good agents and left their kids fatherless. She plotted nuclear terrorism on a school – a school – in our nation’s capital. She took money from one of the worst terrorists on the planet to do it. As far as I’m concerned she can rot in here and I hope every con in the place violates her… civil rights.”     Yuki got back in Morgensten’s face. “That person is accused but not convicted of those crimes. She’s not been to trial. The evidence against her hasn’t been tested – and everything about it is ringing alarm bells in my head. And to lock her up here – in Baroness von Zemo’s prison, given the history between Silicone Sally and Big Bad Beth – might as well be a death sentence.”     “She had a presidential pardon and she still plotted against her country. Far as I’m concerned a death sentence is too good for her.”     “Well you don’t get to decide that, Warden Morgensten, and I’m here to take her away from your pathetic little empire so she can get some proper justice.”     Morgensten snorted. “What, because your fruity Technicolor hero friend had a spazzy-fit on TV and announced Silicone Sally on the Lair Legion line-up? Why not add Elvis and Mickey Mouse while he’s at it.”     “We already had ManMan and we don’t have a good history with Big M,” Yuki answered. “But the paperwork you need’s across your floor. I’m taking Sally out of here now and you can cry about it all you want later.”     Morgensten touched a button on his desk and four fully-primed Sentinoid battle-drones glided into the room. “Nobody tells me what to do in my prison, pinkie. Get out now or stay and wish you hadn’t. Last warning.”     Yuki looked at the four top-range metahuman suppression systems. She was in a facility designed to defeat and restrain any super-powered combatant, amidst a whole array of devices intended to de-power and confine or even kill aggressor metahumans. The odds of winning were next to nothing.     Yuki loved a challenge. ***     “No?” said Officer Kedgley. “Are you sure?”     “Yes,” glared Svetlana Rezilyant. “I won’t do that. Go do it to yourself and all your buddies here.”     The prison staff seemed amused by her resistance. “Your choice, fresh meat,” Kedgely told her. “But we’re your only protection against the inmates out in gen pop. It’d have been nice to know you while you still looked like your centrefold spread. While you’ve got teeth and no facial cuts and stuff.” He leaned over the security-shackled prisoner. “Last chance.”     Silicone Sally told him about his mother’s habits and got a cuff across the face.     “Give her to the scum,” hissed Kedgely.     Sally was roughly hauled to her feet and marched through a series of security gates. The last opened up onto the ground floor of a massive hall with caged balconies. Twenty bolted-down trestle tables along centre of the room were just being cleared of the evening meal. Three hundred inmates noted the new prisoner’s arrival with interest.     Silicone Sally suppressed a shudder. Beth von Zemo’s revenge was a cruel thing indeed.     “Get to know your fellow cons,” chuckled Kedgely. “When you’ve had enough come begging to us at the gate.”     Silicone Sally tried to think of a snappy comeback. The sick feeling in her stomach choked off her words.     The gate slammed shut behind her. The guards hadn’t even removed her wrist restraints.     A dozen cons peeled away from a larger group and ranged around Sally like wolves. “Well now…” began Sledgehammer.     “Don’t,” Sally warned him. “Don’t even start. Get away from me before I kill you.”     “Yeah,” snorted the Drooler. “Like you aren’t wearing that power-dampening collar same as all of us. Like you won’t look good wearing only that power-dampening collar.”     “I might not be able to kill you right away,” admitted Sally, “but I’ll still kill you.”     Cro-Magnum leaned in close. He smelled of five-to-twenty of not showering. “I like a feisty one,” he leered. “I like…”     “Oh please! Please tell me you didn’t just call her feisty!”     The convicts looked round to see the previous latest inmate shaking his head. “Butt out, Clement,” warned Sledgehammer, “While you still got a butt.”     Randolph J Clement slipped in under Cro-Magnum’s armpit, waving his hand to keep the smell at bay as he ducked past. He planted himself between the cons and Sally. “Hi, Sally. I’m the Mutate Liberation Army, also known as RJ or Randy. Welcome to the Safe. These are the guys who beat me up earlier and are about to do it again.”     Sally couldn’t help but return his outrageous smile. Even covered in bruises and contusions he was better to look at that the cons cornering her. “Good to meet you, RJ. Next time let’s pick a better nightclub.”     “Yeah,” agreed the MLA. “They let anybody in here. You don’t even need a shirt.” He gestured to Cro-Magnum. “I don’t think he can actually operate a shirt.”     “Get the hell out of here, mutate,” warned Sledgehammer. “before I have the Drooler bite your pecker off and eat it.”     “I don’t think he could manage it all in one sitting,” Randy answered. “And it’d still be three times the size of yours.”     Sledgehammer punched the MLA in the face. The MLA ducked aside so the bully’s fist smashed into the concrete wall behind.     “I wasn’t kidding,” Silicone Sally warned the cons. “Walk away now or you are all dead men.”     “Yeah, listen,” RJ talked fast. “All of this, this cliché, you think this isn’t just what the Warden wants? Morgensten likes to make us into animals, worse than beasts. He wants us to fight and rut and hurt each other for his amusement. You wanna give him that satisfaction?”     “No,” said the Drooler, looking at Sally’s ample form and her straining prison shirt, “I wanna…”     “We don’t have to play his game. We can be better than that, man. You can be better than that.”     Just then the prison video systems burst into life. It was a repeat of the day’s news.     “And in a startling conference this morning CrazySugarFreakBoy! announced his proposed new line-up of the Lair Legion,” said the commentator. “Here’s the footage from the lawn of the Lair Mansion.”     The picture focussed on the wired wonder. “And so, without any more delay, I’m proud to announce the next line-up of the world’s greatest, coolest, full-of-win, collectable, in-continuity, never-Bendised all-awesome superhero team, our very own Lair Legion. Our new roster’s gonna be me, Yuki, Donar, Vizh, G-Eyed, Al B. Harper, Manga Shoggoth, Liu Xi Xian, Vinnie de Soth, Silicone Sally…”     The rest was drowned out by the roar of the whole general population turning towards the new inmate.     “Crap,” said the MLA. ***     The Sentinoids towered over Yuki.     “Know what I suspect?” the cyborg P.I. told Morgensten. “I think you’re a shape-shifting Skunk. A big ol’ green alien spudly disguised as the real prison governor.”     “What?” blinked the fat chief warden.     “Sure, all the signs are there. Lack of proper procedure. Less-than-able intellectual capacity. Blubbery jowls where the shape-shifting was a bit sloppy. I’m afraid I’m going to have to confine you till I can call in experts with anal probes, Morgensten.”     “You’re insane!”     “Well, a Skunk would say that, wouldn’t he? Or are you a Hero Feeder? Or a Space Fandom? Either way I’m going to have to take you down.”     “The Safe is equipped with sensors able to detect all of those things,” growled the Chief Warden. “You’re just making this up in some pathetic attempt to cause trouble.”     “I’m telling you for the record why I’m going to have to take you down,” Yuki Shiro explained. “It’s Vizh’s first day on the job as leader of the LL. This’ll make the paperwork slightly less difficult for him.”     “What paperwork?”     “The paperwork about what I’m about to do now.” Yuki shifted suddenly and tossed the first Sentinoid into the second. “This stuff.”     “Take her!” shouted Morgensten. “Take her now!”     Yuki kicked his desk across the room to send the governor crashing down.     The two fallen sentinoids began to rise. Yuki triggered a cross-communication between their command-and-control systems sending them twitching back to the floor as each pilot’s mental interface suddenly operated both suits. The other two enforcer exo-skeletons lurched forward.     Yuki knew that their on-board response computers would have adapted already to prevent that trick working again. She back-flipped over to where Morgansten was gasping to his feet, seized the fat chief warden, and hurled him into the arms of another sentinoid.     It was as she’d hoped. The sentinoid’s over-ride programming prevented it from inadvertently harming prison staff, and especially the governor. The system froze for a moment as the automated systems warred with its pilot’s commands. Yuki toppled it forwards to pin Morgansten beneath it and further confuse its logic circuits.     The final sentinoid adapted to Yuki’s speed and dexterity and caught her by the neck. Yuki increased her speed and dexterity by the 5% she’d been holding back and snapped off one of the machine’s fingers before it was able to immobilise her.     “Hold still now or I’ll EMP you to death,” warned the Sentinoid’s pilot.     Yuki hurled the severed finger across the room with absolute precision. ***     “This was a bad time for you to make a new friend, wasn’t it?” Silicone Sally admitted. She and the MLA were backed up to the wall as half the inmates of general population clustered round them.     “Hey, Lair Legion,” called Sledgehammer, “we got some payback for ya.”     “This isn’t really how I expected my day to go,” admitted Randy Clement, “but on the bright side they were going to hospitalise me for something sooner or later anyhow. I’d rather it was this than an argument over soap.”     Sally launched a kick at the first inmate to lunge at her. She caught Drooler right in the groin and he folded over with a satisfying whimper. “I’m a total bitch when I’m cornered,” she warned gen pop. “Last chance.”     From the gateway she could hear Officer Kedgley snickering.     “Okay, this is going to hurt,” admitted the MLA.     Sledgehammer’s fist caught him in the belly and folded him over. Cro-Magnum slapped Sally backwards and Brutacus and Massacre pinned her down.     Sally felt her collar click as the power-suppression device turned off. Three floors above a Sentinoid’s finger had been hurled with precision accuracy at the Governor’s defence control board.     And the best thing was, only Sally’s collar had been deactivated.     “Alright,” Silicone Sally grinned. “Game on!”     She swelled like a balloon, hurling back her attackers long enough to morph her plastic shape out of her wrist-cuffs, then flexed her fingers so each one wrapped round the throat of one of her adversaries.     In the background Kedgely raced for the escape alarm.     “I warned you all what would happen,” Sally announced as other inmates fled away from the angry morphing villainess. She hoisted Sledgehammer, CroMagnum, Massacre, Brutacus and the others in fingers become nooses. “I told you I’d kill you!”     Sledgehammer and the others were turning purple.     “Maybe not kill you right off, though,” Sally hissed. “I could slither inside you and do quite a bit of damage. Tear you up from the inside out. Seems like turnaround to me.”     The doors at the far end of the hall opened and half a dozen Sentinoids appeared to subdue the escaping prisoner.     “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything!” shouted Silicone Sally. At the quote for Nietzsche’s ‘The Antichrist’ the hidden programming introduced by Baroness von Zemo kicked in and toppled the armoured guards to uselessness. Sally only pretended to be a brainless bimbo around the Baroness. “Now where were we, boys?”     Cro-Magnum lost bowel control as he was asphyxiated.     “Sally, wait!” The MLA limped to his feet, clutching his belly. “Don’t kill them. Don’t let the Man win! Don’t play Morgensten’s game and become the animal he wants to make you!”     “You know what he was going to let these bastards do to me!”     “Even that’s not as bad as making you do it to yourself,” R.J. pleaded. “You said you weren’t guilty of what they put you here for. You’re not murderer – yet. So don’t become one. Don’t let them make you one.”     Silicone Sally relaxed her grip on the choked felons.     “Of course, I don’t mind of you beat the crap out of them,” the MLA amended.     Officer Kedgely and his colleagues burst into gen pop with their power suppression rifles. Sally hurled the prisoners at them.     “Time you ran,” suggested Randy.     “Time we both got out of here,” agreed Silicone Sally.     The MLA indicated his collar. “My powers are still shut down. A flexible chick can maybe escape somehow through ducts and stuff, but if you try and take me you’ve no chance. Just get out of here, Sally. At least I’ve done my good deed for the day, okay?”     “You’re dead if you stay here,” judged the flexible felon. “Hold on. Do each of these collars get set for our individual powers?”     “Yeah. It’s state of the art. Why?”     Sally slipped her hand down between Randy’s collar and his skin, insulating him from its effect.     “Okay, that’s pretty cool,” admitted the MLA, shifting both of them to super-speed. “Let’s go.”     Office Kedgely almost had enough time to draw in breath before Sally and the MLA were over him. Automated defences set to react to escape were too slow to stop a flexible felon moving as fast as the speed of sound.     Sally and the MLA got almost to the outer perimeter before Yuki caught them. ***     “No,” said Yuki Shiro. “That’s as far as you go.”     Silicone Sally assumed a defensive posture, ready for attack from the cyborg P.I. “I can take you if I have to,” she warned.     “You really can’t,” Yuki promised. “Maybe if I trained you for a while, but…”     “Hey, if anybody has to take the pretty babe in the leather jacket I volunteer,” R.J. enthused. “Hi, I’m the Mutate Liberation Army. Call me Randy.”     “Call me in five years when you’ve started shaving,” retorted Yuki. “Let me guess, related to Josh Clement?”     “His cousin. And I’ve inherited all his powers. How did you know?”     “I’m a fabulous detective. Stand down, R.J. I can’t let you escape from the Safe.”     “I’m not going back there,” Sally warned Yuki. “I was framed. They’ll kill me – eventually.”     “Yeah, I agree,” said Yuki. “But there’s an alternative. Pending a proper independent review of the evidence and a fair trial you could sign onto the Terminus Team programme and act in the public good as a licensed superhero.”     “Terminus Team?” snorted Silicone Sally. “The Deathwatch Detail? Those losers?”     “Lair Legion,” offered the team’s deputy field leader. “The big leagues. We take on the major stuff the rest can’t handle. The Parody Master. The Hooded Hood. Dark Thugos.” She glanced over at Sally. “Baroness von Zemo.”     “Or I could go back to the Safe and get to replay every bad prison-girl movie since 1971,” considered Sally. “Suicide missions with the LL or snuff movies here. Like I even get a choice.”     “You already made a choice,” Randy told her. “Back there, when you didn’t kill those guys. Although you could maybe have chosen to pound them just a little harder. You did the right thing, and that makes you Legion.” He looked over to Yuki and attempted a charming split-lipped smile. “I don’t suppose there’s room for another member on your team, is there? Or maybe some space in your diary for dinner and a club?”     “Down, kid,” Yuki advised him. “Sally’s ready for the big leagues. You’re strictly jun…” She caught her breath. “Yeah, I know just where to put you,” she chuckled. “You ever thought about a college education?”     The siren sounds changed to warn that the nerve-gases were being released and the Safe remote confinement drones were weapons free. Nano-proofed pressure seals and force fields slammed into place. “I don’t think any of us are going anywhere,” worried Silicone Sally.     Yuki raised an eyebrow. “Like the Legion didn’t make sure when this place was refitted that we couldn’t get out of here if we had to. After SR 1066? With Harper, Hallie and me around? You think Beth von Zemo’s got overrides? Try this: Initiate Protocol Wotta Revolting Development! Clearcode: With great power must come great responsibility.”     The Safe section where Yuki stood cycled down to passive mode. A wall-hatch opened and delivered three steaming-hot lattés.     Yuki sipped hers. “So, you in?”     Silicone Sally took the proffered paper cup. “I’m in.” *** 7. Ghost Story     Overseer Chavez had a reputation for being a real hardass. He slammed into Biolab 3 in a foul mood, waving the readout datapad that had provoked his temper.     “What the hell is wrong now, people? We’re four hours behind schedule. Four hours. Again. What is it this time? Nanoplasma programming cascade? Gene-sequencer alignment coil diffraction? Windows Vista lockout? Or did the damn coffee machine just break down and you decided you didn’t mind getting executed for being late with Baroness von Zemo’s hyper-ebola order?”     A dozen scientists and technicians in B.A.L.D. rubber shell suits, lacking the traditional full-head beekeeper’s mask but complete with high-tech pocket protectors, stood and stared silently at their angry supervisor.     “We have a contract, people. We have a deadline. As in, if we don’t deliver the contract on the agreed schedule we will all be dead. If the Baroness doesn’t kill us for not delivering her sentient flesh-eating bacillus in time for the supermodels award ceremony then MODEM will. We are B.A.L.D. - Blatant Anarchists Loving Destruction – and we sell our science genius wherever it will weaken the government of the world to prepare for our inevitable global dominance. We do not stop to gossip about talent shows, soap operas, or what went wrong between Brad and Angelina. We do not even speculate about Rochford here’s strange facial mole, although we may need to dissect his face later in the interests of science. We press on, reliable, inspired, forging a new future by our genius and – why are you people all staring at me like that?”     The roomful of evil scientists remained motionless. Overseer Chavez felt something very cold and sharp prick into his neck.     “They’re not staring at you,” Citizen Z told the overseer. “They’re staring at me.”     Chavez felt a chill scurry down his spine. At the periphery of his vision a ragged purple and black cape fluttered in an unperceived wind.     Technician Lugg raised a trembling finger and pointed at the intruder. “Dude, you got a superhero behind you,” he advised Overseer Chavez unnecessarily.     Citizen Z’s hand was cool. It felt colder as it took the tech-pad out of Chavez’s hand.     “Talk to me,” CZ urged in low, menacing tones. “Beth von Zemo hired your research unit to make her new bio-toys. Stuff she couldn’t source from the diabolical Dr Moo because Moo still has a few ethics. Talk me through what she wanted.”     “You can’t get away with this,” Overseer Chavez told the intruder. “Already our advanced detection systems will have warned of your arrival. Our advanced defence countermeasures will destroy you. BRAWLER warriors. Dreadbots. Pain drones. The product of a decade of genius, distilled into one assault suite of lethal brilliance focussed upon your destruction.”     Technician Lugg winced but held his finger up again. “Yeah, she made us turn that off,” he admitted.     The knifepoint squirmed to prick Chavez’s flesh. “You are wrong,” Citizen Z advised. “I’m not a superhero. Superheroes have codes. Morals. Restrictions. Most don’t kill. Most won’t torture. I’m a vigilante, on a mission of vengeance. I want to see every last one of you dead and damned.”     Such was Citizen Z’s presence that she held the whole room frozen. Her masked face somehow projected icy rage and mercilessness. The shadows were deep wherever she stood.     “In all your ‘decade of genius’ did you ever invent a neural knife?” Citizen Z asked Overseer Chavez. “A weapon forged from psychically sensitive metal that could transmit the mental agonies of one person into another?”     “Er… no,” swallowed the overseer. Swallowing was a bad move. The blade-point pricked him and a trickle of blood rolled down to his collar.     “You couldn’t. It’s mystical as well as scientific. Spiritual. It channels the concentrated madness of an ancient asylum into the unprepared mind of a mere brief human. At full power it doesn’t just burn out the neurons of the brain, leaving behind a drooling idiot, it brands all that insanity and torment permanently into the psyche, sealing the victim into his own living hell. So I’ll ask again, for the last time, what are you doing for the Baroness here in Smedjebacken, Sweden, in B.A.L.D. lab three?”     The knife suddenly seemed red hot. Chavez hastened to answer. “We’re preparing a virus. It turns humans into, er, diseased rotting mind-slaves. And also a parasite that makes other people more… suggestible. And a new breed of servitor drones that can adapt to then copy the powers of any metahuman they encounter.”     “Yeah, that’ll be awesome,” approved Technicial Lugg before he remembered where he was.     “The codes to get me into the sealed areas so I can destroy them?” demanded CZ.     “We don’t have the codes,” argued Chavez. “Only MODEM has the access passes to the deeper facility areas. We run things from up here. We can’t… aaaaaghhh!”     “That was the knife part of my neural knife,” Citizen Z explained. “But ears can be sewn back on. Want to try the neural part, for which there’s no possible fix?”     Overseer Chavez explained the backdoor systems that would get the phantom avenger into the deeper levels of the manufacturing complex.     “Are you, like, going to kill us all now?” worried Lugg.     Citizen Z considered it. “I’m just going to hurt you all very much,” she decided. “You’re going to have a long sleep with some very bad dreams, and when you finally wake up you may want to consider new career choices.”     And then she hurt them. ***     The B.A.L.D. manufacturing facility had state-of-the-art perimeter defences and one of the world’s most sophisticated computer counterassault systems.     “Oh please,” said Al B. Harper as he deactivated it. He planted a small text file as a rootkit that would offer useful critique for the programmers when they came to find out how their systems had crashed.     Once he’d taken control of the first and second tier systems he was able to tap the monitor feeds and examine the complex. All the guards in the upper compound were unconcious. A quick scan suggested they’d had a neural shock that had temporarily neutralised their higher brain functions. Likewise the techhies in labs one to four were out. Defence systems on the lower manufacturing plant were offline.     Al B. thumbed his Lair Legion communicard. “Looks like the satellite sensors were right,” he told Hallie. “Citizen Z’s here.”     It hadn’t been easy to set up a worldwide detection grid for the unique biopsychic signature of the phantom avenger. The archscientist felt justifiably pleased. He reprogrammed the B.A.L.D. bioweapons console to make him a cup of coffee.     “I’m going inside,” Al B. warned Hallie. “The base is constructed of transmission-blocking materials so I’ll be out of touch. CZ’s headed down deep to the automated manufacturing levels, presumably to put a stop to whatever B.A.L.D. was constructing here.”     “An order for Beth von Zemo according to the datalogs you just squirted over to me,” Hallie judged. “I’m shunting the data over to your kids for them to look at but I don’t think there’s anything here that’ll stand up in court against the Baroness.”     “Is there ever?” sighed Al B. “Who else could take over the planet then sue us for stopping her?”     “The Baroness is a mission for another day,” Hallie advised. “Today you’re making contact with Citizen Z.”     “Yep. And I’m going in.” ***     Citizen Z dropped down through a service hatch and landed on a grill gantry in the automated assembly plant. Lurid red light flooded the vast space, filling the dusty gloom with unexpected shadows.     Shadows no longer frightened Citizen Z.     There were remote weapons platforms here, not tied in with the main defence grid. CZ somersaulted over the balcony to land of the first of them as it hovered closer to analyse her. She cored its main processor out with her blade, sent it spinning down to explode into the second platform behind it, then extended her combat stave to hook onto the third drone and avoid a plummet into the bio-vats below.     Citizen Z judged her performance as she took down the defences. She no longer remembered how she’d developed her physical combat skills but the moves came to her easily. The body she occupied was naturally limber and becoming moreso. Her neural discharge discs worked as effectively on programmed technology as on living beings. Her energy levels were good, lodged as she was in her possessed mortal host; she could escape Herringcarp Asylum for extended amounts of time as long as she was paired with the comatose Bethany Shellett.     As she dropped down to the assembly level she judged that so far her performance was satisfactory.     There were remote-controlled BRAWLER suits ahead and a refitted Technopolitian combat tripod but by now she was ready for them.     When the last of the B.A.L.D. defences were destroyed Citizen Z passed towards the main control area where she could end the Baroness’ lethal equipment order. She found a black man in a white lab coat finishing his latte macchiato.     “Hello,” said Al B. Harper. “And thank you.”     Citizen Z hefted her battle stave. Wisps of ectoplasm drifted from its metal tips. “Thank me for what?” she demanded.     “Well, it’s taken me some time to work out when you were Citizen Z and when it was Beth von Zemo and Silicone Sally and when it was someone else entirely,” Al B. Harper admitted. “But once I determined that you had a parapsychic component I was able to figure it. You’re the CZ who turned up at the end of the Baroness’ world coup and saved Magweed, Griffin, and Sam from HAGGIE. You’re the one that was around when we were off in the Stitchworlds.”     “And you claim to be the real Al B. Harper.” Citizen Z was sceptical.     “Want me to prove Fermat’s last theorem for you? Listen, I know you’ve got some major mad-on at Beth von Zemo – Lee pulled the records before he… The Librarian discovered that the original, male, Citizen Z was murdered by Baron Heinrich Zemo in world war II. You’ve clearly got this whole revenge thing going on with the house of Zemo, but there’s more to life than revenge. Want a coffee?”     “I do not drink… coffee,” answered Citizen Z.     “You’re one complex tangled parapsychic event, that’s for sure,” the archscientist admitted. “I haven’t seen reading this dense since I did a scan on the Lair Banshee.”     The battle-stave oriented on Al B. “You’re a better last defence than I expected,” Citizen Z told him. “More imaginative than B.A.L.D. usually is. But you won’t stop me from destroying those monstrosities.”     Al B. put down his mug. “Yeah, about that. I’ve been going through these computer files for Big Beth’s order and there’s something that doesn’t make sense…”     Citizen Z lunged at him. The archscientist yelped and fell backwards off his chair.     Citizen Z plunged her stave into the main hard drive of the manufacturing facility and unleashed madness into it.     Things began to explode.     “I really wish you hadn’t done that,” said Al B. Harper.     Giant monitor screens lit up all around the room, each projecting the face of Baroness von Zemo.     “Well now,” said the Baroness, “if you’re hearing this, ‘Citizen Z’, it’ll be because you were stupid enough to walk into my trap. You’ll be learning that the bioweapons order wasn’t my real contract with B.A.L.D. What I actually commissioned was a means of containing and destroying you.”     “And that’s why I wish you hadn’t done that,” Al B. noted. “Like I said, there was something about the files…”     “I have no idea who you are or what you want,” Beth von Zemo went on. “If I was interested enough to find out I’d be interested enough to kill you personally rather than contract it tp others. But I’m a busy woman, so I’ve outsourced your death to B.A.L.D. They’ve turned that whole manufactury into a death trap – psi-suppressors, arcane mines, subatomic causal strings, logic verification lances, ectoplasmic confinement mesh – everything one needs to dissect a ghost or whatever you are.”     Al B. stared at his scanner. “Ooh, yeah. Now that’s more like it. Very smart.”     On-screen Beth sniffed. “Anyway, I have a rather nice dinner awaiting me. Do have a long and excruciating destruction. Goodbye.”     Around the complex various remote devices hummed to life.     “A trap,” hissed Citizen Z, “and I walked into it! I know her! I know how tricky she is! And I still walked into it.”     “Happens to the best of us,” Dr Harper comforted her. “Er, do you think we could maybe escape from here now? Only anything calibrated to rip you to spiritual shreds will work just fine on me as well.”     The first wave of psi-shielded killbots came in. Citizen Z took them down with combat skills alone. “If you really are the Legionnaire Al B. Harper then you’d better think of an escape,” CZ demanded.     “I need more information,” the archscientist demanded. “Who are you? What are you? What’s your feud with the Baroness? What powers do you have that she’s prepared counters for?”     “I’m…” Citizen Z fended off the next wave of killbots. They’d learned from previous set. These were smarter and faster. “I’m a mystery.”     “I need to know. Without data I have nothing to work on.”     CZ caught her breath after the second assault. “I’m undead,” she admitted. “I was murdered by Beth and now I’m back. I can channel some pain and madness I experienced through the psychic metal of my equipment. I can possess willing subjects or weak-minded people for a time and operate in their bodies. I’m in a borrowed form right now. When I’m a ghost I can only be solid for a few minutes before I have to evaporate away and… be recharged.”     “You have a Citizen Z suit.”     “Beth von Zemo had a number of them made, for when Silicone Sally couldn’t assume the form. She had a whole arsenal designed to fit into it. I took one and modified it, personalised it. I’ve suffused her kit with my neural traumas so now it’s half-scientific, half-mystic.”     She had to break off then. The third wave of killbots dropped upon her with matter-rippers and ectoplasmic lashes, attacking on the physical and psychic planes at the same time.     Citizen Z fought well, but it was evident to Al B. Harper that she wasn’t going to win this one.     He had to think fast. Fortunately he was Al B. Harper. “Okay, CZ, this trap was designed to destroy you, but I think I know how to beat it. You’re going to have to trust me.”     “I don’t trust anyone anymore.”     “Then you’ll have to start or you’ll really be dead.”     The killbots closed in on Citizen Z, co-ordinating for their final assault.     “What do I have to do?” CZ demanded.     “You said you were possessing that body. Jump into mine.”     “What?”     “Come to me. Those drones are set to eliminate you, but I’m betting Beth or B.A.L.D. or both will want your remains for autopsy. When they sense you’re no longer in that flesh they might stop their attack.”     “And attack you instead.”     “Only if you’re in charge in here. And believe me, that’s not going to happen. Now jump!”     “If I leave this flesh it will be helpless. She’s my friend.”     “They’re not locked onto her flesh, they’re locked on to your sentience. Come on!”     “I don’t trust anybody.”     “You’ll need to learn to trust your fellow Legionnaires when you’ve joined us. Now’s the time to start.”     “I’m not joining the…”     “Jump!”     Citizen Z made her decision. She slipped out of Bethany Shellett’s comatose form, allowing the body to crumple onto the grating, and hurled herself into Al B. Harper’s mind.     “Wow, it’s big in here!” ***     “Simple,” said Al B. “Once the system sensed you were gone it went on to the next phase, the clean up and diagnostics. There are soul-catchers installed here like the ones on the Parody Master’s prison planet. They’re supposed to retain your ghostly essence and then the Baroness can interrogate your physical host or your captured spirit at her leisure.”     “Nice,” spat Citizen Z as she reinhabited her best friend’s body.     Al B. had reset the whole system now the attack was over. He’d even triggered the self-destruction countdown to provide Smedjebacken with a new crater for snowboarding. “I’m not sure of the ethics of you using someone’s vacant body for a vehicle,” he told CZ.     “Then it’s a good job it’s none of your damn business.”     “But it will be, after you’ve joined the Legion. And if you think I’m bothered about it wait till you meet Visionary or Mumphrey. Or the Shoggoth.”     “I’m not joining your Legion,” Citizen Z insisted. “It… wouldn’t be a good idea.”     “It’s been foreseen, if you believe in Caphan prophetesses. Or CrazySugarFreakBoy! press conferences. Besides, hasn’t today illustrated how it’s better to have someone at your back? And don’t you want to use whatever… afterlife you have for more than just revenge? Aren’t you just a little bit juiced at the idea of being with the world’s foremost superteam?”     Citizen Z turned her back on Al. “I don’t want to hurt the Legion. I don’t want to let them down, or betray them, or destroy them.”     “Same here,” the archscientist agreed. “I still joined.”     “There’s information you don’t have.”     “Are you secretly Baroness von Zemo infiltrating us to take over the planet?”     “No.”     “Then we’ll work the rest out later. Give us a chance.”     CZ wavered. “You’re not the ones who need the chance,” she confessed.     “Then take a chance,” Al B. advised her. “You have to trust someone, sometime. Trust us.”     Citizen Z, timelost Amnesia of Herringcarp Asylum, memory-wiped superhero sidekick Laurie Leyton, hesitated. She could summon her z-wing flyer and disappear. She could continue her remorseless vendetta against her murderer. She could return to the accusing darkness of Herringcarp Asylum.     She could be a Legionnaire. *** 8. Hunting Season     Fitz the Barnstorming Monkey power dived LairJet Four down towards the WallyWorld car-park. At the last moment, with an excited “Eeek”, he barrelled the vehicle round, avoided the top of a camper van by a good four inches, and neatly flopped the $35 million dollar aircraft into a coach-sized parking space.     Visionary opened his eyes and checked that his stomach was where it should be rather than where his brain was reporting it was, sixty miles back. He was rethinking his equal opportunities hiring practices.     Fitz ooked with satisfaction. That was one motorist out there who’d know better than to try and cut in and use a superhero-only designated parking spot.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Um, thank you?” Vizh managed as he pulled on his yellow coat (he’d managed to unpick the stitching on the little yellow crown epaulettes that had mysteriously been added since his last encounter with Fashion Accessory and he’d had Hallie remove the improved technology padding that Al B. had seen fit to add for his supposed protection). He got to the exit ramp without puking and made his way down into the crowded car-park of Goth Haven’s biggest megastore. “Maybe I should have driven up in the Pinto? I was only trying to avoid the traffic.”     He was mildly surprised to discover that the Goth Haven WallyWorld actually had superhero-only parking, next to the mother and toddler spaces and the reserved-for-disabled spots. Goth Haven took their superheroes seriously.     He recognised the rust-brown shape of the Ham Scooter in the adjacent bay and hurried to get to his meeting on time.     Ham-Boy sat in the WallyWorld cafeteria, dressed in his full superhero outfit, including the diamond-mask Ham Cowl that protected his identity from fellow WallyWorld co-workers who would otherwise recognise him as part-time stock-boy Fred Harris. He sipped on a raspberry WallySlushee and waved to catch Visionary’s attention – as if he needed to wave.     The possibly-fake-man-turned-Lair-Legion-chairman threaded his way through the crowded eating space, avoiding shoppers with trays and trolleys. He sat down across the cheap plastic table from HB and accepted the foam cup his ex-student pushed over to him.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I didn’t know what kind of slushee you liked, so I went with banana,” Ham-Boy told him.     Visionary accepted the drink and tentatively tried it. He could use a bit of cold-related headfreeze after the incidents of today. Becoming leader of the world’s premiere superteam hadn’t been on his to-do calendar.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Thanks for meeting with me, HB,” he began. “You’ve probably guessed what this is all about.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The insurance claim?” Ham-Boy asked nervously. “If Kerry says it was an accident then I’m sure…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not the insurance claim,” Vizh assured him. “What insurance claim? Never mind. If I spend my time investigating every possibly Kerry-related incident I’ll never finish up. Haven’t you see a news today, Ham-Boy? CSFB!’s news conference announcement?”     Fred Harris shook his cowl. “All the TVs are out in the electrical goods department. Mr Fillimore’s going wild. It might be a cable problem. There’s some kind of local weather phenomenon or something causing a local radio blackout too.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ah. Well then, you missed… there was something CrazySugarFreakBoy! announced that caused a lot of interest.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“More interesting than declaring war on the entire supervillain community and promising to take them all down?” Ham-Boy wondered. That had been CSFB!’s previous press conference and had started the cascade of incidents that had propelled Visionary back to the hot seat.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Maybe,” conceded Vizh. “Listen, do you ever think about where your superhero career should go next, now you’ve graduated from the Junior Legion Training Programme?”     Fred thought he understood. “Ah. Kerry and FA sent you. Look, it’s great that I’m invited to go live with them in Disaster House or whatever they call that frat place of theirs but I don’t want to transfer my credits to Paradopolis U. Besides, like you said, I graduated from the Juniors. It’d feel like retaking school again.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You did graduate,” agreed Visionary. “You and Glory are the only two alumni of the programme so far and…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Any word on Glory yet?” Ham-Boy interrupted him. “It’s been months since she went off to find Mr Epitome.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not so far,” Vizh admitted. “And when the Destroyer of Tales can’t locate or summons missing persons I get to worrying. But Lisa says their stories aren’t finished yet, so we’re still holding out hope. But today I’m here to talk about you, HB.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It would be great to hang out with the guys again. I’ve missed them. But they’ve already tried to convince me. My second-best ham-cowl is scorched all up the back. And even if FA and Kerry will be wandering around the frat house all the time without any.. er, in a relaxed manner, it still seems like a step backwards for me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes, well that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about,” Vizh hurried on. “Thing is, you may know that there’s a new Junior on the programme, the Caphan girl Vespiir? The seeress who foresaw the coming of Galactivac to Caph and was exiled to Earth? Anyway, she had a vision about the next Lair Legion line-up, and it turns out that she saw…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Excuse me,” a high-pitched voice interrupted, giggling. “But did you superheroes order a horrible death?”     Visionary and Ham-Boy turned round to see a man pointing a strange off-white firearm at them. Vizh frowned. “Isn’t that Gloo-Gun’s gloo-gun?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes!” hissed the man in oyster spandex brandishing the weapon at them. “And I am… GlooGun II!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And I…” added another man in a similar costume, “am Gloo-Gun III.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And you thought out that ordering a horrible death remark beforehand, did you?” asked Ham-Boy. “And that was the best you could come up with?”     Visionary sneaked a hand into his coat pocket and thumbed his comm-card. Something was jamming it, just like all the communications signals across Goth Haven.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And now we shall destroy the newest Legionnaire,” squeaked Gloo-Gun II, “and claim the ten million dollars!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The newest Legionnaire?” puzzled Ham-Boy. “Visionary’s been around for pretty much ever in the team. He was there at the start.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s true,” agreed the possibly-fake founder. “Although Jarvis wouldn’t list me on the starting roster because…” He paused in mid-sentence. “Let’s just say there’s a reason I never dissed HB about his Ham Cowl and leave it at that.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What’s wrong with my Ham-Cowl?” Ham-Boy wondered. “This is the unscorched one.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“He is not the newest Legionnaire, world’s meatiest hero!” Gloo-Gun III squealed. “You are!”     Ham-Boy’s jaw dropped. He was almost too shocked to use his Meat Vision power to generate meat products to cause the supervillains weapons to be blocked up with minced offal.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m in the Legion?” he asked Vizh.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“If you say yes. I’m the new kind-of leader and I’m putting together the new roster. There’s a Ham-Chair at the big table if you want it.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Can I hit these Gloo-Guns before I decide?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sure. Try manoeuvre eight.”     Ham-Boy flattened two surprised supervillains with his tray.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m trying to contact Hallie,” Vizh frowned, “contact anyone. We’re being jammed.”     Ham-Boy rose and looked around the packed cafeteria. “My Ham-Sense is tingling. That could mean there’s more Gloo-Guns still out there. We’d better get away from public space where people could get hurt.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And just like that you passed the LL entrance interview,” Visionary approved. “Yeah, I’ve got a LairJet in the parking lot.”     There was a big explosion in car park Pink 7 where $35m of LairJet had previously stood. In the WallyWorld pets section Fitz the Barnstorming Monkey shrieked in rage and tore up a brochure on the care of tortoises.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Definitely more bad guys,” Ham-Boy nodded. He carefully placed his used drinks carton in the disposal bin provided, laid his cracked tray on the pile beside it, and headed out of the café. “C’mon, Teach.”     Visionary followed, peering through the glass at the bio-engineered bovine that was grinding the flaming remnants of his vehicle into pieces. “Musk Ox is going to get a bill for that,” he warned. “He might be able to tear aircraft apart with his bare hands but wait until he faces Mrs Sleppingheimer, the Lair Accountant.”     Ham-Boy led the way into Sporting Goods. It was the easiest route to a main exit.     A dozen ten-foot high stitched-together golems in exotic lingerie blocked their way.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Vizh?” HB called. The Juniors handbook hadn’t had a section on this.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’d say sausages,” replied his old teacher. It was a snap judgement. The creations shambled forward but were suddenly entangled with each other and the nearby sports racks by long chains of bratwurst. As they shuffled in they managed to pull the bicycle and canoe displays down on top of themselves.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh boy. Somebody’s really going to have to work overtime on this clean-up,” worried Ham-Boy.     Visionary checked the fancy cross-stitching that held the golems together, then inspected the motivator boxes that crackled at the top of their spines. “Dr Spankenstein creations,” he noted. “I think I’ll need to sic EEE on him again.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What have they got to do with these Gloo-Guns though?” puzzled Ham-Boy.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No more than Bovus 18 out there trashing my ride has,” Vizh judged. “But they did mention a ten million dollar bounty on the newest Legionnaire.”     Ham-Boy winced. “I didn’t even say I’d join yet. Why me? What have I done?”     Vizh ran through the Men’s Shoes section behind Ham-Boy, trying to keep up. “Well, I’d say that Dream’s threats on the criminal powerbases has upset the delicate détente that usually exists and keeps heroes and villains from total war. They want to show that they’re not intimidated by his threats so they’re having you slaughtered to send a message.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why me?”     Vizh suddenly felt old. That has always been his question; but now he was in charge and Ham-Boy’s life depended on him.     He heard the whine as the assassin socks spun into life and oriented their poison darts.     Ham-Boy reacted in time, burying the whole sock counter in a wave of frozen turkeys. The heroes raced away, leaving Argh!Yle, Evillest of Socks, pinned and swearing beneath a 40lb roaster.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I wish I hadn’t done that,” HB admitted as they raced into Women’s Underwear. “Those big Meat Vision productions take a lot out of me. I can’t keep doing that magnitude of meat creation.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Fight smart,” agreed Visionary. “Remember that you can control prepared meat products as well as create them.”     Ham-Boy nodded. “I just feel… so… sleepy…” he admitted as he began to sway on his feet.     Visionary swing round and snapped a hastily-grabbed garter-belt into the face of Morphea, Mistress of Sleep. As she blinked he pinched HB hard. “Watch out. Morphea always works with…”     Ghostface appeared out of nowhere and grabbed Ham-Boy. The Human Tractor stomped forwards to take down Vizh.     Ghostface toppled as a deep-frozen turkey impacted with the back of his skull. Visionary skittered aside so that the Human Tractor would slide on a sudden floor-covering of minced beef and crash into a display of feminine hygiene products.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Keep going!” the possibly-fake man called.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not that way,” HB! shouted back, listening to his Ham-Sense. “Down here.”     Vizh changed course to follow him, thwarting Jean-Pierre, the villain with all the powers of the French nation, who had prepared an ambush by the perfume counter.     Instead they were bracketed with exploding acid-filled balloons courtesy of a grubby-looking drunken clown. “They said Uncle Bob was all washed up…” he slurred, “but I’ll show ‘em. I’ll show ‘em all!” He reached out and decapitated a shop dummy, vomited, then passed out.     Ham-Boy kept on running.     A store announcer spoke over the tannoy. “The management of WallyWorld would like to apologise to customers for the inconvenience of this supervillain attack. Staff to cleanup on aisles 14, 15, 17, and 34 please. Have a nice day.”     Spring-Loaded Man came out of the Hardware section and caught Ham-Boy in the midriff, winding Fred Harris and crashing him down into a selection of power tools. Vizh rushed forward, found a BautistaMax 8000 sander and rammed it down the attacking villain’s pants. His long experience with Bautista products guaranteed a painful electrical discharge within seconds and he wasn’t disappointed.     The running fight moved on into the Plant Department. That was where the flowers began to twist and grow with terrifying speed to capture then choke the heroes.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Grow, my darlings!” called the Florist. “Grow and twine and tighten and blossom!”     Ham-Boy sent in a spray of chops, driving back the Florist for a moment.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Stop it!” shrieked the white-coated horticulturalist, “I’m a vegan!”     Visionary dived across at the most expensive flower he could find. “Back off, Florist!” he called, “or the orchid gets it!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Brutes!” hissed the Florist just before Ham-Boy’s fist impacted.     Vizh and HB raced on into the Toys section. “Do we have a plan?” Ham-Boy wondered. “Other than not dying, I mean?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Get away from the public, hope we can get some of the baddies chasing us to take out each other, and get to the lavatories,” Visionary suggested.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The lavatories?” Ham-Boy understood the sudden urge to use the toilet during an intense battle. Many otherwise very dramatic one-piece superhero costumes had failed in that one regard.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You have a secret identity. These guys don’t know you from Adam if you take your Ham-Cowl off. You could just walk away safely.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“They know you, though.” Ham-Boy pointed to the remaindered rack of Sea-Strike Visionary dolls that squeaked ‘I’m real, daggit’ if you poked their bellies, or in fact if you just walked near them. “I can’t leave the boss man to face a massive supervillain attack on my first day at work.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So you’ll join?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well if I do I’m not leaving you on my first day at work. Besides, these villains are attacking my city. I’m not going to run away from them. I need to take them down.”     Visionary grinned. “Okay then, HB. In that case we keep them occupied until back-up gets here. Hallie’s bound to be monitoring my comm-channel. As soon as it was blocked she’d be calling in back-up. We just need to keep the bad guys busy till the Legion lines up.”     Ham-Boy looked around WallyWorld. “Then we need to go that way,” he decided.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What’s that way?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The meat counter.”     They made it to Fresh Meats with nothing worse than a brief encounter with a pair of Killer Mimes who didn’t mime umbrellas in time to ward off the hail of veal. By now the superstore was much emptier, with only the most persistent bargain hunters seeking to take advantage of the relative quiet.     Even they sank to their knees, weakened and helpless, as Musk Ox strode by. The huge brute’s pheromones had that effect. He made his way straight towards ham-Boy, shrugging off the storm of meat products that pelted him.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re fine with the little people,” growled Bovus 18. “You’re in the big leagues now.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not yet,” replied Visionary, “but he’s thinking about it. Now, HB!”     As Bovus opened his mouth to retort, Ham-Boy generated sloppy ground beef and gravy in the marauder’s maw. Musk Ox choked as the tide of meat flooded his throat.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is that beef you’re ramming down him?” wondered Vizh. “Is that cannibalism?”     Musk Ox struggled for air, clutching his throat. He staggered forwards to crush his adversary. Ham-Boy kept just out of his reach. It took over five minutes before the huge mutated bovine finally dropped unconscious.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Did I just… win that?” swallowed Ham-Boy, surprised to be alive.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes, you did very well,” agreed a bald man in a long trenchcoat who stepped over Bovis 18’s carcass and smiled unsettlingly. Things moved beneath his coat even before he pulled it open and revealed himself to be the Milton Freebish, appalling Appendage Man. “It’s good to have a last victory.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Uh oh,” said Vizh.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Appendage Man. We did him in class. He’s not good, right?” remembered HB.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Actually, I was going uh-oh at Atomic Bumpkin over there,” admitted Visionary. “And Razor Ballerina. And that smell can only be…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Gromm, the Living Flatulence,” agreed the arch-Deviate personification of stench, swirling into a sickly green humanoid silhouette. “Which do you prefer, cyanide or phosgene?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Killeth,” said Clonar.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Any last words, Ham-Boy?” wondered Appendage Man. “Usually they’re something like, ‘No, please, don’t poke that up there!’”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Think there’ll be a bonus fer doing that there Visionary too?” wondered Atomic Bumpkin. “Only ah got to shop for ma’s birthday soon.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Visionary should die too,” agreed Minky Kovkolski, gently twirling and slicing any object that her tutu brushed against. “He should die bleeding. He should die screaming?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Killeth,” said Clonar.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Um…” worried Ham-Boy as they were surrounded.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And last words, Visionary? It’s your turn to say them now,” noted a youthful exuberant happy voice.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Most verily,” agreed another, deeper speaker with a thick Ausgardian accent.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Four words is traditional,” noted a smooth female speaker with a slight Asian lilt.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hey, I came back from the dead to hear this,” added a Canadian voice, “so make it good.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And I just want to see if Gromm gives me gas,” bubbled a different, disturbing speaker.     Visionary smiled like a wolf. “Lair Legion, Line Up,” he said.     Ham-Boy looked around. He didn’t recognise everybody who’d surrounded the villains, but there sure seemed an awful lot of them.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Aw cr-“ began Atomic Bumpkin. *** Next Time: How does the new Legion get on together? How will they work as a team? How could anything possibly go wrong? Why not just send them on a field trip team-building exercise and see what happens? Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #346: Deep Down, coming soon. Images by Visionary (thanks) *** And Now, Returning To Their Former Glory… the Footnotes! Some Notes on Silicone Sally (from correspondence with JJJ): Where and how did she grow up? Svetlana Rezilyant was born in Commieslavia not too far from the Yurt's village to a local damsel and a visiting Russian engineer. She still speaks Commislavian and presumably will be able to converse with the Yurt. At age 4 her father returned and settled down with her mother, and at age 11 he got permission to emigrate to the U.S. Svetlana, now Sally, spent her adolescence in the famous Russian community of Blackpool Beach, Parodiopolis (a copy of the real Brighton Beach, Brooklyn) (or should it be GMY?) and obtained a scholarship to Parodiopolis Polytechnical University. As one would expect from a daughter of the Blackpool Beach environment, she's somewhat of a party animal, not terribly concerned with conventional ethics and has easily shifting loyalties. She continued with graduate studies in polymer chemistry at the University of Michigan, where she was acquainted with Beth Zemo in the psychology department. Sally, however, did not become well acquainted with Beth until Beth began her career as villain. What are her powers? Sally's body has been entirely transformed into a high-tech silicone rubber. She can stretch to about 10 times her normal length, so she can reach her arms about 30 feet. At full stretch, toes to fingertips high above her head, she's about 85 feet long and is capable of stretching upwards almost 10 stories. She has gained strength to be able to support and extend her body, so effectively her muscles are about 50 times as strong as a normal person's, although they are ill-adapted to lifting large weights. Instead, she can stretch and sling herself and moderate weights of about 200 lb. For example, if she were stretched down from the eighth floor to ground level, she could bungee up a 200 lb man and perhaps up to a 250 lb man without danger of snapping. Sally is highly resilient and can resist high powered rifle bullets. Her melting point is over 500 degrees F. and her freezing point is approximately -60 degrees F. However, she becomes slow and loses stretchiness progressively below 32 degrees F. and becomes seriously impaired at -10 degrees F. She resists most chemicals, including acids other than HF, but can be dissolved easily by acetone. Baron Otto did this once, as you recall, traumatizing her. Sally will shy from any organic solvents, even those she can withstand, such as rubbing alcohol. When it comes to ethyl alcohol, however, she is a true Russian. Like most comic rubber people, she is undifferentiated internally and thus can be stretched, flattened, and compressed without harm to her organs. Sally's shape, however, is conserved. She can liquefy with the help of benign solvents, but it takes at least a day to do so. She did so shortly after she discovered her powers and changed her somewhat potato-like birth form into the voluptuous siren she now is. Sally can be inflated but hates it. Sally is unaffected by nicotine, pot, coke or most other recreational drugs -- or prescriptions either. She's not susceptible to communicable illnesses. Sonics don't affect her except at ultra-high energies. Sally eats normal food but tries to drink at least a pint of liquid silicone rubber daily and often more to maintain herself. She heals quickly after drinking the rubber and can regenerate lost parts with sufficient intake and some minerals. While fighting, she can't reattach lost body parts; she's vulnerable to monomolecular blades, torches and liquid gases (liquid nitrogen freezes her brittle). She can recover when thawed. How did she get her powers? The usual stupid lab accident coinciding with strange radiation emitted from a mad science experiment in the adjoining physics building at U. Mich. What does she look like? Unstretched, Sally is 5 feet 9 inches, shoulder-length stretchable hair (although she can't wilfully control it), 35D-22-35. She can switch her coloring from pale blonde hair, pink lips and pale white skin to a translucent state at will, but not otherwise. She has a jaded smile and a saucy wit. How does she talk? Mostly standard American English, similar to Janet Van Dyne. Sally is more cynical and less a victim of circumstance than the Wasp; she has few regrets and adores her new life. Perhaps think of a wise-cracking heroine from a movie, but Sally is not a Lisa duplicate (I have to think harder how to differentiate them). . When drunk or under high stress, Sally's Slavic heritage comes out and she is variably boisterous, morose, belligerent or seductive, with a pronounced Russian accent when drunk. Who are her friends/enemies/romances/family etc? Her father died a few years ago in a drunken brawl in Blackpool Beach, where her mother still lives in a small flat a block from the boardwalk. Sally sends cash regularly and stops by about once a month when she can. I'm leaving siblings open for now. She has family in Commislavia and near St. Petersburg who she's never met. Blackpool Beach romances tended to be superficial and short-lived and Sally has never committed herself to anyone. Like Lisa, she's promiscuous but unlike Lisa there's no underlying cruelty. Sally's motto is "Girls just want to have fun." Sally has four or five hunky men on her string at a time and generally stays with them rather than doing one night stands, but if she spies someone better, she'll go after him and then drop a guy. She's very straight. Sally flirts, makes jokes and expects ribbing about her libido but won't try to seduce a teammate unless she wants to add him to her string. What's her life story so far? See above and The Baroness stories. Any do’s and don’t’s about writing her? Sally is very much a situational ethics person. She does what she thinks will benefit her, with some attention to not ruining her relationships with the team (or earlier, Beth). As you've already written, she looks out for herself first. She has no particular qualms about killing if the percentages are in her favor, and doesn't agonize over her decisions. She's impulsive but rarely stupid; she has good intuitions and rarely goes too far. When she gets drunk, however, inhibitions dissolve and she's any or all of the personas mentioned at "how does she talk?" Let her get drunk occasionally, but I don't want it to become a frequent character trait or a frequent topic of conversation among the team. (An occasional reference is fine.) She's well aware of that vulnerability. She's suspicious of the new Citizen Z. Some Notes on Ham-Boy (from correspondence with L!): First off some background information which may or may not answer some of your questions: Ham-Boy's real name is Fredrick Hogarth Harris but most of the time is just called Fred Harris. He was born to a Janis & Allan Harris. Fred grew up in the family farm in Piney Oaks, Iowa. Allan Harris is currently assumed Dead. Janis lives on the farm with her second husband, Jordan Smith (Fred's mom is currently known as Janis Harris-Smith). The old barn on the property was the first headquarters of Ham-Boy. Janis knows about her son's heroic activities. I never established if Jordan knew or not (I'm sort of leaning on that he does not). It's been mentioned in a story or two Ham-Boy did become part of a still unnamed team comprising all of Super Heroes who worked within the Iowa state boarders. In my mind I consider this team to be extremely short lived. No members beyond Ham-Boy were ever mentioned. An Agent Johnson has been seen & is come how connected to the team. In Piney Oaks, there is a Museum devoted to Ham-Boy since his earliest appearance were at in Piney Oaks. It's not a big thing like the Flash Museum, but a small/medium sized building on Piney Oaks's main street. I do think the town would have a billboard at the city limits similar to what Smallville use to have: Welcome to Piney Oaks, Iowa. Home of Ham-Boy! Fred currently lives in Goth Haven. He has 2 jobs besides being Ham-Boy. Job #1: He is the Lighthouse Keeper of the Blue Steel* Memorial Lighthouse which is on Robinson Island in Goth Haven Harbor. This is also where he lives & under the lighthouse is The Meat Locker, the secret headquarters of Ham-Boy. Job #2: He is the In-Store DJ for the Goth Haven location of the mammoth multinational conglomerate known as Wally World. It was established in a story that Fred came to Goth haven to attend Goth Haven University but I never went into that really in any story & it's a few years since I've said that Fred has either graduated or is about too. Graduate in what? I don't know. * Blue Steel was a World War II era super hero who during the Mid 1950's died saving the city of Goth Haven from an Alien attack. The Aliens were later identified as being part of the Skunk confederacy. Ham-Boy's main means of transportation is cherry red Vespa known as The Ham-Scooter. Nicknames Ham-Boy has picked up: HB, Hammy, The Earth's Meatiest Hero, The Protector of Pork, The Meaty Might & a other nicknames of that sort. A few villain or two has called him Spam-Boy. What are his powers? He has 3 main powers: 1. Ham-Sense: This tells him that is danger is his relative area, this could be anywhere from right behind him to a few blocks away. He feels it a slight burning sensation. 2. Meat Vision: When he stares at something a short period of time Meat appears. He does control what type of meat appears. 3. Meat Control: If there is meat that has been butchered/processed in some way he can control the meat to do his biding. Ham-Boy can not control Meat in it's natural form i.e. He can't throw a Cow at someone but he could throw Hamburger patties, Steaks, etc. at someone. How did he get his powers? This currently unrevealed as I'm not exactly sure how he came to gain these powers. I'm leaning sort toward him being a Mutant since in the back of my mind I want to connect HB's powers somehow with his Father. Plus, this fits in with what has already be established in my mind if not at least in a story: Fred's fraternal Grandfather Hogarth Albert "Al" Harris fought in World War II. Here is where the name "Ham-Boy" first appeared. Al's helmet was always covered in mud & with the mesh netting it gave the helmet the look of a Ham. So, Al's commanding officer started to call Al Ham-Boy. The name stuck & Al was called that through the rest of the War. Also, Al lived in Goth Haven after the war. He meet his wife there, they got married. Shortly there after the two of them left the big city to return to Al's hometown of Piney Oaks, Iowa. What does he look like? Caucasian Male. 6 ft. tall. 170ish pounds. Brownish Blond hair. Hazel eyes. His costume consists of The Ham-Cowl, a brown mask with a diamond pattern on it. The top cut off to show his brown hair. The rest of his uniform is dark grey cargo pants, leather lace up combat boots, a black sweater & a leather jacket with a yellow H on the back. He use to have a jacket with an H on the front & back, but not the H is only on the back. Around his waist is his "Hamtitlity" belt with link sausage lasso. How does he talk? Well... I'd say like he's from the Mid-West/Middle America. But I can't since I don't really know what they sound like. If you want to get right down to it: He sounds like me since I don't really know how to right anyone else. Who are his friends/enemies/romances etc? A friend from back home in Piney Oaks was Elizabeth "Betty" Stevens, she's his childhood best friend & a cousin of Jasper Stevens (Kid Produce) but I'm not sure that KP is even a usable character in the present day Parodyverse, even in this somewhat tangential way. Other people Fred would count as Friends would be his fellow Lair legion Jr. teammates. Another person that has been established as more of a contact but could be a friend is Detective Jack Squat, who with his "all seeing eye dog" Beauaguard have helped HB out a few times. As for Villains, there were 2 groups that oppose Ham-Boy: - The Disgruntles, a team of HB foes who are a bit angry that they keep loosing to Ham-Boy. Their lineup include such villains as The Evil Captain Crunch (Team Leader), Dr. Peacock, Auntie Freeze, Kitty Boom Boom & Grammar. - Another group is the group known as E.C.O.L.I. who as lead by The Patriarch. With in E.C.O.L.I. there a small group known as The Grave Diggers. Their lineup include such villains as a Russian assassin by the name of The Grey Death, a man who can turn into rocks by the name of Boulder, a Mistress of Magik by the name of Enchantra & a set of triplets known as Threesome. Other Villians include: The Pilgrim Commando, Abra Cadaver, Timeline, Baron Wasteland, Cliché, Mega Byte, Rolland Stone, To-Fu, The Veggie Nation & Bennifer. If you want I can offer up further in anyone you want. As for romances: Ham-Boy's never really had any. Maybe some flirting with a few girls not nothing beyond that. What's his life story so far? That's not a lot. I've sort of lost track of Ham-Boy sometime ago, maybe after the Moderator Saga. I don't know where he's been. So, my thought is to write a story to kind of give people & myself a heads up of where Ham-Boy has been since the MS unless I've missed a story appearance or two then the story would fill in the time between then & now. Also, in a story (be it from me or you) I think that Visionary should ask Ham-Boy to be apart of the main team. They have a built up relationship (Teacher/Student) & plus he's the one Legionnaire Ham-Boy actually knows. Any do’s and don’t’s about writing him? Ham-Boy doesn't swear, none of my characters swear. With Ham-Boy there harshest words you'd get out his is maybe "Crap". I'm not sure I've but this is a story or not but I think when HB is talking to people he respects, he'd refer to them as Mr., Miss, Mrs. or by some other title. He'd do this with even with Super Hero Codename. This came about because I think that it was be with in HB's character to call Visionary Mr. Visionary so this would extend to the rest of the Legion: Mr. Librarian/Mr. Bookman, Mr. Hatman, Mr. Harper/Dr. Harper, Miss Shiro, Mr. Shoggoth, etc. I think that Ham-Boy were to meet Mumph he'd first call him Mr. Wilton, then be corrected & call him Sir Mumphrey even if he was told it was ok to him Mumph Mumph. Finally, do you want him to remain Ham-Boy now he's graduated to the LL or is he going to change his name to Ham-Guy or something? I've written 1 story set in the future & in that future he continues to use the "Ham-Boy" name but he's like in his late 30's. I did that partly because I couldn't come up with another name I liked. Ham-Man didn't really have the same ring as Ham-Boy does. So, until I come up with a better name He will remain Ham-Boy. If there is anything else you want to know about, just email me back & try to answer to your questions. Some Material on Citizen Z: (from a reply by HH) I'm working on the theory that CZ still reacts and feels as she did as Laurie even though she doesn't remember why, but that's all overlaid with what she does remember of her ordeals. Laurie started life as a trailer park girl with little future. Offered a deal by the Hooded Hood she became one of the generation of "New Battlers", with the attitude and abuse that entailed. Despite an unhealthy relationship with Battler's leader E-Male she "got out" long before Samantha Bonnington and then interned with Lisa. She had a complicated and tempestuous relationship with Goldeneyed that culminated in the birth of a child whom she was convinced to give up to the Order of the Observing Eye and who has never been found since. After her split from G-Eyed because of her choice regarding her child she became very depressed. This led to her drug addiction, to prostitution, and to her exploitation in porn movies. After she was saved from a starring role in a superheroine snuff movie she slowly recovered with the help of her room-mate, Beth Shellett (who was subsequently revealed to be Commissioner Graham's estranged daughter, and who G-Eyed once intended to marry). She confronted E-Male and was horribly disfigured and nearly died; later she was healed by Princess Uhuna and killed E-Male. Laurie was betrayed when she was deceived into a relationship with Blackhearted, an alternate dimension version of G-Eyed whom she assumed to be the real thing. Thereafter she was captured by Baroness von Zemo, who mined her memories to be able to pass as Laurie to infiltrate the Lair Legion as Citizen Z during the Parody War. Laurie herself was sold to demons and her fate was unknown. As Amnesia she somehow ended up in the past as an inmate of Herringcarp Asylum. There she met various aspects of the Hooded Hood before they came together to form the present archvillain; in particular she became the lover of the cruel Marquis de Herringcarp. She was last seen captured by the sinister Herringcarp inquisition and her fate from that point is still untold (probably until Hallowe'en). A ghost version of Amnesia has haunted Herringcarp since but has only become active, aware, and able to project beyond the boundaries of the site in the last couple of years. Amnesia appears to have an uneasy and unpleasant relationship with the Asylum and a complicated detente with its principal inmate, the Hooded Hood. The cowled crime czar's plans for Amnesia may be different from those the Asylum has. So Laurie has often been willing to use "new school" methods superheroing from her earliest days. She's certainly been willing to use lethal force against those who have done her wrong. She's learned to be distrustful, to avoid "crutches" be they drugs, teams, or people. Every time she's had a "good" break in her life it's turned sour and hurt her. I'd suggest that's why she's in some ways the opposite of CSFB!. After all, he's had similar experiences but has ended up with a loving family, many friends, public popularity, respect, self-confidence etc. He's the poster child for bouncing back. And More Info Would Be Good Dept: The materials some folks have provided on the new LL members are more comprehensive and useful than some stuff I’ve got on characters who’ve been there for years. I’d be happy if anybody felt the need to update the public domain guidelines on their own creations, perhaps by answering the following questions: Where and how did s/he grow up? What are his/her powers? How did s/he get her powers? What does s/he look like? How does s/he talk? Who are his/her friends/enemies/romances/family etc? What's his/her life story so far? Any do’s and don’t’s about writing him/her? (For example, Shep doesn’t want Dancer killing people and Jay doesn’t want Hatty sleeping around) *** Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2010 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2010 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

Further comments are in an e-mail I sent you.

...because nobody actually died. Except yet another Lairjet, maybe.

Although only mentioned briefly, it sounded like Liu Xi is fitting in ok and even seems to be contributing jokes. Nice short addition, now we just have to wait for the first New Lair Legion story.





I thought you had all the info you needed on mine, but here goes a short version in case...





Liu Xi Xian grew up in a small town in China, I don't remember the name offhand, before she was sold and taken to the U.S. to be trained as a bride-for-sale.

Chiaki Bushido is also from a small town in southern Japan called Fukuoka.

Yuki Shiro is from Paradopolis.

Lara was born in Los Angeles of another world.

Anna was born in SPUD's compound.





Liu Xi is an elementalist, and has power over the basic elements - Earth, Fire, Water, Wind, Metal, Sky, etc., plus she was born with a genetic predisposition to learn Void.

Lara is an elemental (similar word, different meaning) who has power over all electricity and energy. The difference is rather than simply controlling it, it's a part of her.

Chiaki's power comes without warning and is not very precise, but she's learned both not to depend on it, and also to use it very effectively.

Yuki was simply Dr. Albert B Harper's first foray into cybernetics after an accident left her original body crippled. Because of the materials used, she has approximately 3 times the strength she used to.

Anna was designed as a battle machine capable of acting autonomously and being first line of defense in case the Lair Legion goes completely rogue, or in case they are unavailable when a huge threat attacks Earth. She was designed by Dr. Lia Anne Paul to develop a conscience and therefore be able to make judgements about wrong or right entirely on her own. Her eyes contain hidden powerful lasers, her body has multiple redundant constantly charging power sources, and she was designed to be lightweight yet very strong. She is several times stronger than Yuki, but weighs less and has much finer control of her motor skills.





Liu Xi inherited hers through genetic birthright that skips generations.

Chiaki, nobody really knows.

Lara was given her power by a cosmic being of her own universe.

Anna and Yuki were built that way by human hands.





Liu Xi is Chinese, just over 5 feet tall with jet black hair down below her shoulders. She dresses somewhat sloppily most of the time, usually in worn jeans and tee-shirts. She does own some nice Chinese silk dresses bought for her by Yuki and Chiaki.

Chiaki is Japanese, slightly taller than Liu Xi, with well-trimmed shoulder length hair, and fashionable clothing. She wears boots a lot because she likes them. She also carries one of several swords that are matched to her clothing. She has money, and will often wear silk blouses or dresses.

Lara is blonde with medium long hair and nearly colorless eyes, about 5 and a half feet tall, and either ultra-casual or highly fashionable, depending on need and mood. She also has a black and white super-hero costume made for her by a friend - it has white stripes down each side, and black boots that match. The chest has a white half diamond at the top.

Yuki is about as tall as Lara, only with purple hair and eyes. She wears sleeveless and cutoff shirts and leather a lot, and also likes boots. Sometimes on a day off she might be wearing sweat pants and sweat shirt.

Anna took a while to develop her own style, but now she wears somewhat casual clothing matched to her long deep blue hair and eyes. She is about as tall as Liu Xi at around 5 feet, and very lightweight.





Liu Xi talks in a definite Asian accent and sometimes messes up words or concepts as she speaks - she doesn't quite have a full grasp of English yet. Sometimes she curses in Chinese if she's angry enough.

Chiaki speaks very purposefully and has a very slight accent, but she has a very good grasp of English.

Lara speaks confidently, but also a little nervously. She doesn't like speaking in public. At the same time, she's kind of a prankster and comedian, so she makes silly jokes sometimes.

Yuki will just talk, and give a running commentary of anything and everything going on around her. She talks very fast, and doesn't worry too much about grammar. But she can also be a very educated and convincing speaker.

Anna hardly speaks at all, but when she does, it's very soft and lacks self-confidence.





The answer to that for pretty much everyone but Lara and Chiaki is, it hasn't really happened yet. Or I didn't decide how to explain it yet.





That's going to take up way more space than can fit easily here.





Don't kill them or make them unusable, that's pretty much it.

A very fun running battle that introduces the last character onto the all new, all different Lair Legion. As I recall:

Visionary
CSFB!
Mumph
Hatman
Yuki
Al B
Donar
Manga Shoggoth
Goldeneyed
Vinnie De Soth
Liu Xi
Alcheman
Silicone Sally (nice set of character notes from JJJ)
Citizen Z (ditto on the character sketch)
Ham Boy (likewise on the sketching, both L!s and Vizh's)

Am I missing anyone? I still think Hallie should be on the roster, but that's Visionary's call, I suppose.

Looking forward to the team building retreat.

Thanks for all the input. Now you can post the stories you've been hoarding up.

Remind me to actually show the Lair Accountant sometime.




Next issue we'll need to start showing how all the interactions can work.







No reason not to get more background yet.













This is one that's really worthy of more story. We know so little of Yuki before her accident. She must have had family, friends, schoolmates, lovers. She was already a proficient investigator long before she got the metal and plastic - but how? Did she have a mentor? Enemies? Rivals? Why did she set up shop in GMY originally rather than Paradopolis?

Remind me if we ever found out her former name too.













She's also got a little experience of the occult and has managed to use ritual objects.






















In this case i think that's an important part of her mystique.






















And she's protective of her jackets.






















I tend to write Yuki as the most colloquial, most likely to use contractions and slang, and Chiaki as the most formal speaker.







Liu Xi's romance life has given us quite a lot of stories.







Indeed.







I generally try to make sure that Yuki acts instinctively, developing tactics on the fly as she reacts and enjoying the thrill of it all. Chiaki is even more intuitive but that gives her a better strategic overview - she would plan a fight in a way Yuki wouldn't ever bother to. Chiaki is more clasically "honorable"; Yuki's more willing the cheat.

I've noticed that Liu Xi doesn't use violence as a first resort but she will often use her powers rather than her personal skills as if she's avoiding revealing herself.

I try to balance Anna's naivite, confidence, lack of confidence in other things, expert database, and limited experience of "real life".

If I'm not careful Lara tends to devolve to "standard female superhero" dialogue and responses. I'll need to work on that.

Your welcome.




Yes. All 2 of them!

Yep, you collected the set there. There were a few more that didn't quite make the cut. At one point I was going to put all the Juniors in there. I thought about DK or Messenger. Vinnie and Mumph kept dropping out then getting back in. At one stage Vizh was out, replaced by Hallie. As you know I also considered Glory or Kaliban.

As for Hallie's absence, poster-Vizh wanted to stop her having a "happy ending" or things getting too domestic and cosy with LL-Vizh.




Fifteen's one of the largest regular line-ups we've had so I'm interested to find out how best to handle a core cast this big. It might lead to some different story structures.

Two more PV stories than I've got ready to go right now.

They are 2 stories I basically wrote a month or two & I don't have as many real life things preventing me from writing stories.

Kambyon. Kaliban is the Morlock who had a crush on Kitty Pryde and wound up one of Apocalypse's goons.









Yes, but most Untold Tales inevitably had a large cast, even if they weren't all 'official' Legionaires.

Actually show the Lair Accountant sometime.








I am kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop so to speak - because Liu Xi does have that barrier to fitting in that I mentioned. She's the youngest member of the team, and also the one with the most checkered history (not including Messenger, who left), so there may be some question among Legionnaires whether she deserves a spot.





It will come out eventually, I suppose, but Yuki has tried very hard to erase her past life. She believes herself to be reborn the day she got her new body. So there's a story-wise reason there's not much info - because Yuki doesn't want anyone to know.





It was mentioned once, Vicky Cameron figured it out. I'd have to look it up once I remember which of the hundreds of stories it could be in.





There's a very specific reason she learned that stuff. In the tales preceding her newly learned skills, multiple baddies managed to strip her of her elementalist power, making her helpless. She doesn't want to keep being helpless. Since she had a predisposition to magic being attached to her spirit, she took to additional magical training fairly easily.





Chiaki herself doesn't really know where she got her ability from or why. She just knows it's always been there. She also thinks she has it for some higher purpose, which is why she uses it for the force of good.





They're expensive!





That's about right.

There are two dimensions to Chiaki's speech - like most Japanese, she has a highly formal side, where she speaks very clearly, charismatically, always in charge. Then there's among friends, where she will speak more softly and talk more about how she feels and what she's afraid of. She's also possibly the only truly multilingual charismatic speaker (Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean).

What's funny is, Chiaki puts up a very brave front in the most dire of circumstances, but underneath that is a 5'3" young woman who relies on training but has no real super-powers to fight with, so she's usually terrified when her life's on the line. She believes her mild psychic tendency is a higher power trying to guide her and keep her alive, so she doesn't squander that gift by playing with it.





That's because she deserves some good luck after everything she's gone through recently.

Liu Xi is very serious about relationships. She bonded immediately with Vinnie, and she's very attached to him. If something happens to him, or he leaves, she'll be completely broken hearted and a wreck for quite a while. If something caused it, they'll be the source of endless burning wrath to the point where her friends will have to convince her to stop so she doesn't destroy herself in the process.

In shorthand, for the others:

Lara had one real relationship in her life - her ex-live-in-boyfriend back home, who was her first and is now engaged to someone else. She's unbelievably broken-hearted about it, but is trying to keep a brave front. Lara is a die-hard romantic, which is why she would never try to interfere with anyone else's relationship or potential relationship. She also becomes attached to people, and she's well aware of it, so she'll avoid a relationship with someone she believes will never be as into it as she is. Whenever her heart is broken, she tries to swallow her pride and hide it.

Yuki, like with everything else in her life, she has no vision of long-term at the moment. Most of her relationships are short-term flings, and it's amazing the one with Al B Harper lasted as long as it did. She gets into a relationship for the change of pace, and for the thrill. If her heart is broken, she seeks more excitement to make herself feel better.

Anna has absolutely no concept of relationships at the moment. She thinks she understands them, and she has experienced loss, but the distance she has had to keep from everyone in her life to this point has left her vulnerable. She's likely to someday tumble recklessly into love.

Chiaki has had short-term relationships before, but work and heavy travel has always doomed every one of them, so she never really fully gave herself to a relationship. Even when she briefly dated Hatman, she kept her distance a little, and she still feels that's what destroyed it - and she still regrets that (side note: Lara, after talking to Jay a lot, realized that he too keeps his distance in relationships, which is why she believes he's "not her type" - so the failure was really mutual). It might seem odd, but she's just as much at risk as Anna for falling recklessly in love with someone, if it's the right person. But if it fails, she's more likely to blame herself than react angrily.









Liu Xi is still stinging from a couple murders earlier in her life - and she takes what Chiaki told her, about repairing the damage through doing good, to heart. So she tries to use as non-lethal means as possible. She'll use her powers first because a) she also doesn't have confidence in her own fighting ability just yet, but she's learning; and b) because she doesn't have a strong grasp of English, she's not confident in her negotiation skills. That might reverse sharply if she was able to negotiate in Chinese.





Anna has a natural confidence because she's not quite as clumsy as most humans - once she knows how to do something, she's fairly sure she can do it. If she does fail it's harder for her to become injured than a human, and her memory is less prone to fault or failure.

She's also very curious, but she's afraid of doing things that may harm someone or bring bad publicity if she screws up. She's also absolutely terrified of dying, so mortal threats to her person would often result in her behaving like a scared child, without the encouragement of a friend.





I have a story I'm working on with Lara talking to the Hooded Hood, and the dialogue is a great example of what she does. She's kind of a smartass, but also somewhat serious. Somewhere in between Chiaki and Yuki - Lara is charismatic at times, but can't resist annoying the hell out of her enemies by poking fun at them.

The best way to figure out how she'd respond is to keep in mind that she's a retired formerly teen super-hero. She's jaded to most of the lameness of villains out there, so while they're threatening her she's rolling her eyes and poking fun. But then she also knows how to be serious and charismatic when she's really concentrating, and if she's cornered and the chips are down, she can be seriously violent and dangerous, too.

Well, maybe vegetarians and animal rights people would be upset about the vast amounts of meats being deployed in this story. Is it at least organically raised meat? There are a lot of potential public relations hazards with this job.

Of course, the actual hazards are pretty impressive too.

A fun recruitment scene, with the heroes on the move through the gauntlet of super villains and savings. It was a nice job of showing how Fred is ready for the big leagues while illustrating his unusual powers to their fullest. I also enjoyed Vizh's role in the story as the mentor.

A fun conclusion to a great chapter of character portraits! I'm really looking forward to seeing how everyone interrelates.

I liked the pairing of Ham-Boy and Visionary. Vizh proved why he was the instructor of the Juniors, and Ham-Boy showed why he graduated. I certainly didn't mind the Lair Legion showing up at the end for a big showdown with the assembled villains, should be fun!

The bios at the end are nice, though they cut out partway through on my screen; I lose it halfway through the Ham-Boy one.

~Hat~

Quote:

The bios at the end are nice, though they cut out partway through on my screen; I lose it halfway through the Ham-Boy one.

Quote:

Of course, the actual hazards are pretty impressive too.

A question nobody has ever looked at too closely is where does ham-Boy's meat come from. Does he generate it... internally? From the meat dimension?

Enquiring minds want to know. Well, Al B. anyhow.




Rhiannon asked me if this counted as a Purveyors of Peril group. My view is not; this was just a few Purveyors alumni taking freelance gigs. A proper Purveyors attack would usually have field leadership such as VelcroVixen and a major archvillain sponsor, most dangerously the Hooded Hood. It would be much more dangerous.

I'll try and do a proper Purveyors episode sometime to illustrate what I mean.




Each of these sections may read better when perused at one sitting, since together they're meant to illustrate the new team for cumulative effect.

One reason I'm sitting on the quite long sections of next issue that I've already written is to avoid such a sporadic scheduling of the next story.




That's next issue; at least it puts all the newbies together to interract while the oldies get to have their individual adventures to make up for not getting spotlight this time.

It's going to be a long chapter.

Oops.







I'm still getting the feel for how this large a cast will work out. I've just written a lengthy set of scenes wherein eight of the cast interact pretty much all the time. It'll take me a while to get those eight voices running simultaneously in my head.

Thanks.







There's a number of issues that we'll need to flesh out in the issues to come, and Liu Xi's history, heritage, and self-confidence are some of them.







That's what makes us readers want more.







It's the kind of info we really might need to use for dramatic effect someday. If an adversary can name her then he's a serious threat. You can be sure the Hooded Hood knows, for example.







Vinnie might say that a girl of her abilities and sensitivity dabbling with the occult is like putting a ballerina in a rugby match - her special nature makes her both adept but very vulnerable to the forces involved.







She needs to talk about those views sometime.







Indeed.










Noted.




Again, worth featuring in-story.










Excellent.
















Useful stuff.







Liu Xi also has longer-range powers is is more effective outside combat distance.










Noted.










There are a number of characters who I'd put down as having "default American speech" - G-Eyed, Vinnie, Vizh and CZ in the current line-up, for example. The challenge is ensuring their lines can be as distinguished as the trademark patois of Donar or Yo or Mumphrey.

At the very least, for the first time in her life her heritage and history isn't something for her to be afraid of anymore. Just the self-confidence.





It's really kind of useless information though. Yuki abandoned her previous life because she used to always play it safe. When she was almost killed, she realized she was wasting her life and wanted something more - and her new body gave her just the opportunity to do it.

So really, all reminding her of her old identity will do is make her angry. That's why Vicky Cameron, while she found out Yuki's identity, really didn't do much with it - Yuki used to be so boring, she broke no laws. The only interest Vicky had was to make sure the person who nearly killed her was prosecuted.





Liu Xi is kind of afraid of using powerful non-elemental magic because it doesn't feel right to her. Mostly she uses it when she's really in trouble. Otherwise, she might use some for decorative purposes or for fun if the spell seems benign enough, but that's just to keep herself in practice. Ironically, "fun" magic kind of fits her personality better than the deadly kind anyhow.





Chiaki has said a little about it here and there. The problem here is really that she doesn't understand it all that completely herself. For instance she doesn't even know if her sense is internal or from an outside source.





From time to time when Chiaki really pushes herself in a fight you can see her using the psychic sense, but very little as not to become dependent on it. Other times, you see her entirely guided by it (like during the Moderator saga, to avoid being caught).





It's all relative, really. Liu Xi *can* affect elements over a long distance, but she hasn't developed the imagination necessary to do so. She does *have* imagination, but there's a stark difference between daydreaming and trying to imagine where a glacier is somewhere in the Arctic to control its behavior. The simplest way she may learn that someday is if she has to stop an approaching threat from far away, and television and satellite may aid her well. She's a high-tech elementalist.

Lara Night might also be able to help her. She has learned how to turn being highly tuned to large changes or shifts in energy in an entire universe into imagination, so she can take some very educated guesses about what's happening, and sometimes where. Except that, while Lara can get there pretty quickly, she actually does have to go there to affect any change (one thing that clearly separates the scope of her abilities from, say, Faite). She's the missing piece of the puzzle that Liu Xi hasn't developed yet.





Lara's speech pattern is, I guess, somewhat modern. She'll use colloquialisms - because she's a media star back home, she stays on the cutting edge of speech trends at least casually. Basically, her speech is a much milder version of Vicky Cameron's, but she avoids using so much foul language (part of remembering she might always be recorded) and more fun and less angry. She has a lot of emotion to her speech among friends, so her tone varies widely depending on the general mood.

If she needs to speak in front of people she'll take on a more formal tone, and then she's very good at putting a sentence together. Lara is part actress, and can deliver lines convincingly in front of an audience any time she needs to.