Previous Post The Moderator Saga #16: Meanwhile…     The LairJet wobbled a little as it come in to land. For a moment it sheared sideways and looked like it was going to clip the wall of the stable block, but then it came under control and managed a fairly smooth setdown on the croquet lawn.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Bravo!” applauded Sir Mumphrey Wilton, watching anxiously from the terrace. “That’s actually a better landing than the Legion manage around fifty percent of the time.”     Samantha Featherstone sat back in the pilot’s chair and let out a deep breath. Piloting a real Lairjet was very different from the simulator, and it was the fourteen-year old’s first real try. She conscientiously did the post-flight checks and shutdown and activated the rear entrance hatch so her grandfather could join her aboard the vessel.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Samantha!” he called as he came aboard. “You’re all right, old thing?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I am,” the teenaged girl agreed. “Nobody else is. You have no idea how glad I was that you returned my call.”     This morning, when Samantha Featherstone had woken up at the Lair Mansion, everybody had gone. The whole Mansion was empty, deserted. The city of Paradopolis beyond Lair Island was likewise unpopulated.     There was nothing on TV except a few automated shopping channels on repeater loops. There was no reply from Hallie. There was no response from the Lunar Public Library. Even the Carnifax wasn’t responding to his distress beacon; maybe he was busy on another world again.     It had taken Samantha the better part of half an hour to bypass the Legion’s security on the Operations Room, but it’s not like she and Magweed and Griffin hadn’t discussed it before and planned it through. From there she was able to check the monitor logs and find that the entire population of the planet, including any animal life-form bigger than a spider, had vanished at exactly midnight EST.     And after that Samantha’s first call had been her grandfather’s Legion comm-card.     Now they were united again at Wilton Manor in Wendel’s hallow, Shropshire, England, possibly the last two people on Earth.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’ve worked out what’s happened, haven’t you?” she checked with Mumphrey.     The old man patted his waistcoat where he kept the Chronometer of Infinity. “Of course, m’dear. A Hooded hood retcon by the looks of it. I set the pocketwatch long ago to temporally suspend the effects of any high-grade retcon on me from that bounder. Looks like the rest of the world’s been affected though. In fact, this version of Earth only exists now so we have somewhere to stand.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And I was protected the same way,” Sam surmised. “Anyone else?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The gift given to cosmic office-holders to protect their immediate family from cosmic threats is rather specific,” Mumphrey admitted. “And as you know it has its limits. But this time it seems to have kept you from vanishing, what?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“How long can you keep resisting the shift?” Samantha worried. “Won’t the cumulative weight of reality start to overcome the energies of the Chronometer on a rising curve?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hmph. Very likely. For the moment I’m backing up the Chronometer with the other tools of my office to keep us from being absorbed into the retcon. We need to investigate what’s going on and find out what that cowled cad’s plan is.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Plans,” corrected Sam. “There’ll be more than one of them.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Very good.” Sir Mumphrey looked at his younger grand-daughter with approval. “You can stay here at the Manor and be safe if you’d prefer?”     They both burst out laughing.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Jolly good,” the eccentric Englishman declared. “Well then, in that case I expect we’d best pull in the consultancy we require before the Instruments of the keeper of Chronologies get overwhelmed.” He opened the back of his watch fob and thumbed a rarely-used stud. “You know I’ve always wanted to say this,” he admitted. “I summons Lisa Waltz.” ***     It was dark on the west coast of North America. Heavy breakers crashed on the rocky shoreline where the first lady of the Lair Legion set down the LairJet on a bleak promontory. Below them the natural bay sprawled away in the darkness. The night was only interrupted by the occasional flare of lights where the ghost memory of a highway or railway track or neighbourhood broke through the narrative turbulence.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This is a spooky place,” admitted Samantha Featherstone.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s a place of endings, alright,” agreed Lisa Waltz, joining Mumph and Sam outside the LairJet. The wind whipped at their coats as they looked over the desolate landscape that had once been ArachKnight City. “The Narrative bomb went off about a mile that way,” Lisa told them. “I was able to divert all the people it wiped from the Parodyverse to their happy endings, but it scoured clean everything for a hundred and fifty miles in every direction, reset as if there’d never been anybody living here.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And that makes it a place of beginnings as well,” noted the svelte pale figure waiting for them in the shadows. “Which makes it my department, Lisa dear.”     Mumphrey recognised that voice. “Symmetry of Synchronicity!” he growled.     The new Shaper of Worlds stalked towards them, her black heels clicking on the rock, her midnight hair tightly coiled in a severe bun, her thin perfect shape poured into a black Gucci two-piece. “Hello, Mumphrey my hated foe. Hello little Samantha. How you’ve grown.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hello Symmetry,” replied Sam. “Still playing the same tired old games, then? I thought you were supposed to be about new stuff these days?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Zing,” called Lisa. As the newly-appointed Destroyer of Tales, one of the three great cosmic office holders along with the Shaper and the Chronicler of Stories, she had evolved a hearty dislike for Symmetry of Synchronicity. “You’re not needed here, Shaper. Why don’t you go off and dye your roots black or something?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Of course I’m needed here,” Symmetry scorned. “This is the beginning of something big.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And you’re in charge of beginnings now,” muttered Mumphrey. “I should have known.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So big that we’re in danger of being wiped out ourselves,” Lisa pointed out. “Something’s been called out from this raw mass of narrative possibility, this causal radiation where the Narrative Bomb detonated. Someone’s been threading fragments of worlds together, collecting people and things. And now they’ve…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Now they’ve fallen foul of the Hooded Hood,” Symmetry noted. She began to stroll down one of the phantom streets towards ground zero, so the others had to follow her. In this case the Shaper of World’s perceptions were more acute than those of the Destroyer of Tales. “Or rather of one of his contingencies. He’s isolated the problem for us, encapsulated it where it can be dealt with in ways that cause the minimum harm.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“In ways that don’t interfere with his ongoing plots, you mean,” challenged Samantha.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So sweet,” Symmetry commented, barely glancing at the child.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes, I’m sensing what Ioldabaoth did now,” Lisa admitted. Around her the facades of night-lit shops briefly phased in then vanished to oblivion once more. “He’s fast forwarded the plot to the ending. And that makes it my domain.”     Sir Mumphrey checked the charge on his pocketwatch. Even boosted a millionfold by the other instruments of his office - Fountain Pen of Causality, Inverness Cape of Singularity, and the Cane of Destiny – his temporal energies were running alarmingly low. “Ladies,” he interjected, “I don’t wish to hurry you, but once my Chronometer is exhausted then we’ll all be swept into the new reality. Who knows what snares our adversaries might have prepared even for the greater cosmic office-holders there, what? Best we work out quickly what’s to be done and how to smite the ungodly.” He glanced at Symmetry. “The other ungodly,” he clarified.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This is a Hooded Hood trap,” Samantha reasoned, “but for whom? The Hood always leaves a loophole to give the heroes a chance if we can just find it.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No victory over the heroes if they do not have the chance of success,” reminisced Symmetry of Synchronicity. “They must know that they have failed, be crushed by their own inadequacies. Such sentimental claptrap.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It sounds much better when it’s said in a Latvian accent,” Lisa Waltz reminisced as well. “Well, everything does.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So what do we do?” Samantha challenged. “We have this big well of untamed narrative energy that the villain came out of. We’ve got two-thirds of the Triumvirate of Greater Cosmic Office Holders. We’ve got granddad, who is still my first choice for the sorting-things-out team if I’m being honest. So how do we fix things and get everybody back where they belong?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dashed good question,” agreed Sir Mumphrey. “Where is young Burch? I’d have expected the Chronicler of Stories to show up here as well, don’t you know?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“If he’s not here,” Lisa answered, “it probably means he’s there, wherever all the people have gone. Which means he’ll be doing what his job is, which is affecting things in the middle. He’ll probably just change one or two little things, prompt a hero to do the right thing at the right time, divert the story in a tiny way to shape a different ending.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Or he might just be sulking again,” suggested Symmetry.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Or that,” conceded Lisa. “A hangover is also possible.”     Around them the ghost-image of a high bejewelled city of crystal spires briefly shimmered in then faded back to darkness.     The Chronometer made a warning chime. “Time’s running out,” Mumphrey warned.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes,” agreed Symmetry with a tight little smile on her corpse-pale lips.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You want us to fail!” Samantha realised. “You’re not here to help. You’re here to stop us! You like whatever’s happened to the world and you want it to carry on.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“A world where my enemies are reduced to mere pawns, slaves at the whim of a mad Moderator? Where heroes suffer horror and nightmare and slow degrading deaths? Now why would I wish to see the stories turn that way, I wonder?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Okay,” Lisa sighed. “I’ve gotta go take my colleague out behind the woodshed and give her a whupping. And not in the usual way I do behind the woodsheds. Mumph, you fix things and I’ll keep the frigid bitch off your back, okay?”     Symmetry turned on the amorous advocatrix. “As if you could stop me.”     Lisa rolled her sleeves up and grinned. “As if you need that hair any more.”     There was a complicated visual effect, a tearing sound, and the two women vanished.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hmph,” frowned Sir Mumphrey. “I trust Ms Waltz will put all those years of practicing dirty wrestling moves to good use.”     The Chronometer chimed again, deeper and louder.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Grandfather?” Samantha prompted.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What? Oh yes. The retcon. The Hooded Blighter’s plan, and the baddies who are doin’ whatever they’re doin’ wherever they’re doing it.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What can we do to stop them?” Sam Featherstone demanded.     Mumphrey studied his temporal pocketwatch, stared again at the ghost city flickering around him, peered hard at the spot where the Narrative Bomb had detonated. “Well,” he suggested. “How about this?” *** Continued… *** Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2008 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2008 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.