Thugos underestimated the narrative direction he'd have to overcome to try his scheme on the "prime" version of Earth. His plans were sound enough, but as with many major plotters he failed to account for other people's plans undercutting his. When you are as all-powerful as he has been accustomed to be then you don't notice what the "little people" are up to.




More on Liu Xi and her vast void-shift next issue, actually.

Back in the day when Grim Reaper the poster actually wrote about the Void Spectre etc., he made it clear that the void where that entity dwelled was deeply toxic, a place not just of nothingness but of evil. Think void with cancer. There was a big storyline where Earth's moon was infected and became a glowing red orb of evil threatening the world and was then destroyed, spawning horrors across the globe.

Unfortunately at that point GR stopped posting, so after a year or so I wrote a bit about the Void Spectre and Grim Reaper being retconned by the Hooded Hood, so the moon that's always been in the sky is not the moon of evil that presages the night of the Void Spectre but rather the moon on which the Librarian has his branch, the Skree left their Turqoiuse Area ruins, and the Observer has a summer home.

Confusingly, a much less powerful Substitute Grim Reaper appeared in a lot of early stories as a member of the Scourge of the BZL, Baron Zemo's recurring baddie group. With Hood-like arrogance I eventually wrote most of them out too, after poster-Zemo made it clear that he would prefer his character not to be featured any more (there was a nasty real-life conflict after he was pretty horrid to poster-Dancer and Lisa called him on it, and then he shut down the Baron Zemo's Lair board, which was when we were rebranded as the Parodyverse under other management). The Scourge cast survivor was Pegasus, also a poster character, who even made it into the Lair Legion for a while afterwards.

But back to the point: the Void Spectre's void is significantly different from the "standard" in-Parodyverse void that Liu Xi usually controls; and we've already established that even normal void is dangerous to manipulate. So next time's Untold Tales starts with Liu Xi needing to flush her system off the stuff she's just been handling and Vinnie's idea about how to do that.

I suppose a parallel is a hosepipe usually used to jet water instead funneling toxic waste.




I've commented somewhat on this in the reply thread we have below, although it might be smart to continue that discussion up here, I suppose.

Various PV heroes have established various mechansims by which their powers work. Being an obsessive linker I've often tried to find correlations in those mechanisms, which has led to mapping out some of the dimensional relationships in the Parodyverse.

Amazing Guy established that there was a "quantum strata below our reality" - he drew energy for his GL-like energy contructs from it and could use it for instantaneous travel over galactic distances (due to his cosmic awareness as a navigational aid). Goldeneyed uses a similar route for his standard teleportation, although his abilities allow his to use other routes too if he concentrates. Exile probably got his energy absorption and generation powers from the same place, with his ability effectively accessing that dimension as if it was a bank to pay into or draw out of. EEE use "sub-space" as one method of faster-than-light travel. I'm pretty comfortable with assuming these are all aspects of the same place/phenomenon.

Balefire drew "corpusant fire" from "the dimension of corpusant fire". That flame had spiritual and semi-sentient properties and probably comes from a different place, somewhere more out on the mystical rather than the SF axis of the Parodyverse.

There's a whole bunch of characters who mentally hook into force or who generate matter from nowhere (Ham-Boy's meat vision, Fashion Accessory's clothing manipulations, some of Hatman's energy manipulations, lots of shapeshifters from Rabid Wold to Fin Fang Foom, and dozens more). These powers all have two components: matter, energy, or force are drawn from or sent somewhere, and the person with the power controls it by mental effort.

That suggests not only one or more dimensional stores that these powers hook into but also a framework by which willpower can access it. Since the PV also has psionics - effectively thought turned to action - I assert that there is clearly a psionic interface method by which many superheroes and villains are able to draw upon their power sources.

This helps to explain all those plot-convenient "power-inhibitors". Presumably those handcuffs' primary function is to interfere with the psionic trigger that lets someone access their power. It's the equivalent of sticking a pencil between the hammer and the striker; the weapon is still fully loaded but the firing mechanism is thwarted.

There may be magical as well as psionic methods of accessing various extraplanar power sources too.

None of this might precisely describe what Lara does, at least on her home turf. In the PV she might well "plug in" to the local routes in the same way that a foreign tourist uses a voltage adaptor to get his shave working.




I also commented on that below, but in brief:

We've had plenty of examples of travellers from outside the Parodyverse dropping in to cause trouble, from the Byrne (a mostrous creature of retcon that predates even the Hooded Hood) and the Void Spectre to Killer Shrike and Keiko, as well as villains like Eddie the Imp and monsters like the Fairly Great Old Ones. We've also had characters leave the Parodyverse, notably for the "Dimension of Happy Endings" where various absent-poster characters got shuffled off after the Parody War. So its clear that between-multiversal travel is possible if not common.

Lara or anyone would only need to breach the Wonderwall to get out of narrative-driven universes into mundane "real" universes where physics dominate (and superheroes sadly don't exist).