#340: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion Protocols: Clear and Present Danger Go to Part One: The New Broom Go to Part Two: The Seven Go to Part Three: Pity the Innocents Go to Part Four: Traps and Costs Previously: After the costly destruction of the Carnifex, which left Hatman powerless, the Librarian brain-dead, and Rabid Wolf dead, CrazySugarFreakBoy! assumed the mantle of leadership of the Lair Legion. At a controversial press conference he announced his intention to expand the team to include almost every superhero in the world, to initiate an aggressive campaign against crime and injustice anywhere on the globe, and to begin with an assault on Aryan Ideal’s Pogroms of Pride, a domestic white supremacist movement.     These shock, unconsulted announcements have caused much debate and concern within the team and beyond it. It has led some of the shadowy forces behind the world order to conclude that the time has come to activate “The Lair Legion Protocols”. Those requiring a catchup on wider recent events are referred to On the Parodyverse Since the Parody War The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse ***     The AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter touched down on the landing strip east of the Lair Mansion. General Terrence “No Nickname” Hodgkiss jumped onto the tarmac and strode over to the delegation that awaited him. One government liaison officer, one former presidential advisor on metahuman affairs, and one detonator hippo security officer watched him approach.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sir,” Amber St Claire began as the five-star officer marched in, “welcome to Parody Island. We have…”     General Hodgkiss stalked straight past her making a deadline for the big house. “Walk with me,” he growled.     Amber and Garrick hurried to keep up. Sergeant MacHarridan paused, adjusted his sporran, scratched his backside, and ambled slowly after.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We have an orientation briefing prepared for you, sir,” Special Agent Garrick told the Lair Legion’s new Senior Liaison Chief. “We’ve scheduled a presentation and induction for…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Where’s Foxglove?” demanded Hodgkiss. “Where’s that little pissant calls himself leader of this bunch of prima-donna malcontents?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is this about the press conference this afternoon?” Amber asked nervously. “I can assure you that CrazySugarFreakBoy! misspoke and there is no intention to declare unilateral war against rogue nations such as Sybia or Spango without full UN resolution support.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s about everything,” snapped the General. “It’s about how half a dozen freaks led by some imbecile in tight fluorescent diapers can try and hold the world to ransom ‘cause they got the power to blow it up.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So somebody’s still reading my memos in the new administration,” Garrick said, relieved. “Er, don’t go through the front door yet, General, until Sergeant MacHarridan’s programmed your bio-profile in. Those stunulators can disintegrate flesh.”     Hodgkiss glowered. “We considered Cuba a threat to security because it was armed and dangerous fifty miles off our borders. This here island’s five hundred yards off our biggest city and it’s packed with bizarre technology, nukeler reactors, monsters, magics, and a parcel of the most unstable personalities on the planet.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“A collection of heroes who have saved this world time and time again,” Amber corrected him. “Sir.”     The General turned on her. “Maybe you were at a different press briefing earlier today, St Clare,” he shouted. “Maybe you missed the new leader of this Lair Legion – and what the hell is a Lair Legion anyway, the name makes as much damned sense as the people in it – their leader announcing to the world that he was drafting in hundreds more metahuman freakshows and granting them absolute power to do whatever they liked wherever they want regardless of laws or politics or diplomacy or even common sense, with no oversight, no checks and balances, nothing. Did you miss that, little girl?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“She was there,” Garrick intervened. “Sir, we’ve pleased there’s going to be a process for handling this situation, to help back us off from…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ll handle it all right,” Hodgkiss thundered. “I’ll tear that Foxglove fruit a new hole and kick him so hard his nuts will land in China!” He turned to the approaching Sergeant MacHarridan. “Now get me into this mansion before I order a full military occupation and have the whole damn place bulldozered for a landfill!”     He stormed inside hunting the leader’s office.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, this is going to go well,” sighed Amber St Clare. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So what are we doing again?” asked Goldeneyed. The newly-returned teleporting crimefighter tugged his new black leather jacket down and peered around the crowded bar of I-666.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’re getting back in the game,” Alcheman told him. “We’ve not chased villains for a long time. We need to get the basics down again.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And this is a supervillain bar?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No. This is a bar where strange things have been happening. More than vanishing wallets. Vanishing underwear.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s not unusual in a bar either. Depends on the bar.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Vanishing people.”     G-Eyed considered. “That’s a bit worse. But how do you know about this place?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I subscribe to a new clipping agency. Over the last four months eleven people have disappeared. Eleven police investigations have been quietly shelved afterwards. There have been four hundred and sixty-one reports of stolen wallets or credit cards, three hundred plus lost watches, seven reports of stolen underwear – while the person was wearing it.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m thinking maybe not everyone wanted to report that.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Exactly. And there’s sixty-one missing shoes and boots.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sixty-one? Who steals one shoe?”     Alcheman nodded. “But what really made this seem like a good mystery to look into are the reports that the woman in charge can make people do what she says just by talking to them. Like some kind of super-hypnosis. She asked the police not to investigate and they stopped.”     G-Eyed looked around. The bar was little more than a roadside shack. It catered to bikers and truckers, with a few local boys playing pool in the back. An old-fashioned juke box hammered out 60s songs. A waitress in a tank top and cut-offs delivered a pitcher of beer to a nearby table.     It occurred to Bry Kats that perhaps it would have been best to unmask for this kind of research mission; but by then Alcheman was already speaking to the bar girl.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Excuse me,” he said to her. “I’m wondering if you can help me Miss…” he checked her name tag, “Chlamydia?”     The waitress growled at him. “I’m working bar. You want to talk to Holly or Willow, over at that table there.” She looked the masked man up and down. “Or wait till I get off after midnight.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We just want to ask a few questions,” G-Eyed added. He pointed to his mask and all-over black combat suit. “We’re superheroes. I’m Goldeneyed. You might have heard of me?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m not from round here,” sniffed Chlamydia. “But if you’re here doing official stuff I guess you should talk to Profanity.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Profanity? She’s the boss?” guessed Goldeneyed.     The barmaid nodded. “Go through that door there marked Do Not Enter and turn left.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You don’t happen to know anything about missing underwear, do you?” Alcheman asked. Michael Wooster wasn’t very well versed in speaking with the Chlamydias of the world.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“See me after midnight,” she told him with a wink. “Bring sixty bucks.”     Goldeneyed hooked Alcheman’s arm and directed him to the inner door. “We’ve got to work on our investigation techniques. If we’re getting back in the game we need to be able to do this stuff much slicker.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Maybe next time we don’t walk in with full superhero gear and say we’re here to find criminals?” Alcheman speculated. “But I went to a lot of trouble to re-establish my secret ID.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What, you’re secretly the scion of a rich and prominent Paradopolis old money family going out by night to fight crime in the city you love?” snorted G-Eyed. “How much of a cliché would that be?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Er, yes,” Michael Wooster answered uncomfortably. “That would be silly, wouldn’t it?”     He pushed through the door to the lobby behind. Behind a bead curtain to the right came the strains of Centerfold and some very heavy breathing. To the left was a closed door. The card thumbtacked to it said, “Mistress Profanity: Ay me, how many perils doe enfold the righteous man, to make him daily fall!”     Alcheman recognised the quote. “Edmund Spencer. I wouldn’t have expected too much knowledge of an Elizabethan poet here.” He knocked on the door.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Do we knock?” G-Eyed checked. “Do superheroes knock when they’re in full mask and costume?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Enter freely,” came the reply from within.     Alcheman transmuted the air around his ears into wax and went inside.     A beautiful woman sat in profile to them at a cluttered desk; but as she turned the heroes could see that half her face was covered by a porcelain mask painted to mirror the unconcealed half. Her left arm was somehow misshapen too, and she wore a velvet glove.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Goldeneyed and Alcheman”, said Camellia of the Fay. “Step into my parlour.” ***     Visionary put the telephone down and backed away. The angry red lights beside the keypad indicated another seventy-one calls on hold. “Okay, chalk up one more death threat and three more applications to join the team,” he called over to Dancer. “This was not the time for Hallie to go off the grid. She’s so good at multi-tasking this stuff.”     Donar wasn’t bothered by people shouting at him down the wire. “Heilsa small shrieking mortal,” he said to his caller. “Please holdeth whiles I connect thee with another loud whining pestilence, that thou mayest complain at each other for the nonce.” He laid the two phone receivers microphone to microphone and went back to his Cheetos.     Sarah Shepherdson, the Probability Dancer, tried to finish off her own phone call. “No sir, I don’t think we’ll be able to come and deal with your neighbour any time soon, although it does sound as though he really should be trimming his hedge back. No, we can’t deputise you as Flame Thower Garden Avenger. At least prolly not. Let me talk to the boss and get back to you. Goodbye.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Didn’t we used to fight crime?” Nats objected. “I pretty much remember battling the Scourge and the Purveyors and stuff. Back before Dream’s press conference.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s nice that so many people want to talk to you,” Icy cheered them up. The walking snowman was still helping out around the Lair Mansion. CSFB! had invited him to join the team. “Although I do not understand all the words they use when they ring you up.”     Vizh looked down at the red-lighted telephone switchboard. “Is there some kind of private line out of here? Something we can use to dial for pizza? We should really have a dedicated pizza hotline.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Maybe this one?” Dancer indicated, finding a slim black phone beneath a pile of angry e-mail printouts.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Usual orders?” Bill Reed asked, dialling. “And coffee maybe? I sense this is going to be a long night.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Before we work out a strategy for dealing with the Aryan Ideal’s Pogroms of Purity tomorrow?” asked Vizh.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I wast thinking that mayhap we shouldst go in there and smiteth them,” offered Donar. “It worketh for me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“A long night before Yuki stops screaming at CSFB!” predicted Nats. “Oh, hi, can we make an order for delivery please? And let me just say before we start that I have the highest regard for the fine calling of delivery boys everywhere, so…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I have written down a list of words I did not understand from those phone calls,” Icy mentioned. “Perhaps you could explain them to me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m thinking we might have to have an emergency training session now in the Lair Swimming Pool,” Dancer suggested. “There’ll still be angry people wanting to shout at us tomorrow. Maybe we need some essential orientation in the Lair Sauna and Lair Jacuzzi too.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And without Hatty around who’s going to bust our chops for eating pizza in the water?” Vizh brightened. “Hurry up with that order, Bill, so we can… Bill?”     Nats was gripping the black phone with white knuckles. “Er right. Yes, well, I can see why you couldn’t get a pizza order to us right away. Yes, and why this is a special phone. No, we can manage without the pepperoni. Thank you very much, Mr President.” ***     Yuki Shiro slammed her hands down on the comics-covered desk of the new leader of the Lair Legion. “This won't work. I come up with the half-assed plans and the leader shoots me down. It's not my job to tell the boss he's crazy! One of us has to hold back the other and I'm damned if I'm gonna let you be the one that gets the fun part! Why can't you be sensible like Hatty? I hate that you're forcing me to be the grown up!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Careful, that’s a Moench/Gulacy Master of Kung Fu,” Dreamcatcher Foxglove answered, retrieving the valuable issue from beneath the cyborg P.I.’s clenched fist.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you listening to me? Is there anybody at home in there?”          Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, I’m listening. Are you getting that we’re not playing by their rules any more? This is a new era for the LL. For LL: International!”     Yuki balled her fists but kept her temper – barely. “Do you even remember Special Resolution 1066? Less than two years ago the government was coming after us, after our friends and families. We were virtually at war with them! We were outlawed, with the whole world hunting us down. Do you remember that?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I remember that half the people leading the hunt were mind-controlled by alien Obedience Brands and the other half were bad guys trying to hand this planet to the Parody Master!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Do you also remember how close they came to taking us down? Or to forcing us to become the bad guys, killing soldiers and cops in self defence? Do you realise how much you’re scaring people right now, CrazySugarFreakBoy!? Do you want it all to happen again, but this time because we need to be taken down?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Look, we’re just making the world right at last. That’s what heroes do. We fix problems. We fight evil. We save people.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This isn’t a comic book, Dream!” Yuki shouted.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then it should be!” CSFB! shouted back. “C’mon. You tell me, are you really happy that after everything we’ve done, all the battles, everyone we’ve lost, we’re still in a world where whole countries are run by supervillains? Where Justus Screwdriver can sit on his luxury cruise liner and laugh at legal attempts to get him in court? Where Factor X can sell weapons of mass destruction and the Church of the Apostate can brainwash kids and HERPES can blackmail nations with threats of terrorism? Are you?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No I’m not. But I’m also not dumb enough to think I can fix all that in twenty-two pages of artwork and some adverts. You want to take down bad guys? I’m there. More risky the better. But what you’re doing isn’t the way. You can’t save a world that doesn’t want saving.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sure we can. Watch!”     Yuki crushed a chair to matchwood and tossed it across the room. “You’re not listening! Look, you announced on national TV today that we’re going after Aryan Ideal, Karl Braun, and his Pogroms of Purity in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. You think that by the time we get there there won’t be an army of lawyers with restraining orders? Or that if we do actually get into their compounds there’ll be a shred of evidence left to prosecute them of anything?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think that if we rattle Braun he’ll push back and then we can settle this.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And we have a plan, do we?” Yuki challenged. “We’ve done a proper analysis of the risks and come up with options for the best way to take down a guy who’s reportedly got Mr Epitome-level physical abilities?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I can take Braun.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What you can take…” Yuki began, but was interrupted by Flapjack lurking into the office.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I thought you should know there’s a loud five-star general waiting for you in the meeting room,” the Lair butler told them. “A General Buttkiss or someone.” ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Silicone” Sally Rezylant had been on the run before. It was an occupational hazard for a career supervillain. But that was before she’d gone to work for her college alumni Beth Sweetwater Dewdrop von Zemo, before she’d assisted the Baroness to infiltrate the Lair Legion, before she’d spent months in the team’s presence using her flexible form to disguise herself as Beth’s Citizen Z costume. That was before she’d chosen to fight alongside the LL against the Parody Master and had survived a trip with them to the Stitchlands of Comic-Book Limbo.     It was before she started to wonder if there was a place for her with the heroes.     There’d been a Presidential pardon somewhere too, for her efforts in saving the world at least twice. Sally kept it framed on her apartment wall.     But that was before a raid on her home had uncovered toxic nuclear materials for a dirty bomb and plans to detonate it in a Washington school; before Sally had been dragged overseas for off-the-books interrogation by the Office of Paranormal Security; before she’d been forced to run away just to avoid being shot when it was believed she’d escaped. The former Presidential favour just meant that government forces were even more eager to see her fried in an electric chair.     The chemistry accident that had transformed Sally into a pliable being of silicone polymers allowed her to conceal herself well. Since escaping the OPS facility in Mexico she’d travelled as luggage, as a hand-glider, as a beach-ball, and since she defaulted to a zaftig redhead as a grateful hitch-hiker. Somehow the forces of the law were always only a step behind her. As soon as she stopped to rest the helicopters and black cars caught up with her again.     Sally had slipped through a minor border point folded onto the underside of a chicken truck and now she really needed a bath. She peeled away from the vehicle as soon as it was out of sight of the guard station and cut cross-country, using her extendible limbs to make great strides over the badlands before morning. Her navigation was good and she was able to bounce aboard the 2.19 express train from Monterrey to San Antonio and settle in a luggage car.     In the darkness Silicone Sally was able to rest for the first time since her desperate escape almost twenty hours before. She rubbed her hands through her hair and wondered how she’d got into this mess.     The answer was easy. It had to be Beth von Zemo. The Baroness hadn’t taken Sally’s defection lightly and she wasn’t known for her forgiving qualities. A von Zemo would have all the right connections to have fissionable materials planted in Sally’s rooms, to arrange the deaths of a couple of special agents that investigated. She’d know exactly who to tip-off for maximum outrage. Beth would be able to get someone like Tech Spectre to freelance even against OPS and set Sally on the run.     Sally didn’t want to know what the Baroness had planned for her next. She was sure this was only the start.     The flexible felon considered her options. She could turn herself in again, but she was convinced by now that Beth would have fixed any chance she might have of a fair trial. She could travel to Shloss Shrekhausen, the Baroness’ castle, and beg for mercy. She was sure that would amuse Baron Otto, Beth’s unalive grandfather. She could try to disappear.     She wondered for a moment if she should try and contact the Lair Legion. CrazySugarFreakBoy! or Dancer might believe her when she said she was innocent. Then she dismissed the idea; nobody was that dumb.     A great wave of exhaustion came over Sally. It was two days now since she’d been able to consume the liquid rubber she used to regenerate herself and she’d used her plastic powers extensively. She wondered how much longer she could go on.     At least I’m on a moving train, she thought. They can’t find me here.     The neural dagger slammed into her neck, sending her into spaghetti spasms on the floor of the luggage car.     A lithe dark figure loomed over her, masked, with an extendible quarterstaff. Beth recognised the costume. It was a variant of the one she’d spent months simulating.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Got you at last, you bitch,” said Citizen Z. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We got a lot to talk about,” General Hodgekiss snarled. He paced up and down at one end of the Lair Meeting room and glared at the Legionnaires he’d assembled in the room.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What the General means,” offered Amber St Clare, “is that we need to get to know each other better, learn to get on in a productive, helpful way.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, I’m an Aries,” said Dancer. “I like sushi and hot-tubbing.” It didn’t lighten the tension in the room.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s not what the General means,” growled Hodgekiss. “What he means is that you heroes have screwed the pooch and need slapping back into line ‘fore I have to have you all lined up and shot.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Go oneth then,” glowered Donar. “Slappeth me.”     CSFB! twisted his Gawker Goggles to X-ray to see how bunched up Hodgekiss’ shorts were. “Yeah, slappeth him, generalissimo. We need to get the walls redecorated anyway.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Um, maybe we should listen to what the man who knows nuclear launch codes has to say before we go any further?” ventured Visionary.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’re not all here,” Nats told the General. “We’ve got a field team away looking for, um, a lost firehouse.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’d be the guys who stole a SPUD helicarrier, would it?” Hodgekiss asked.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’d be the guys who borrowed one,” Yuki Shiro corrected him, “The one that Al B. designed for them and that was built with Bautista patents owned by the Lair Legion.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Plus, Drury wouldn’t have let them go if he wasn’t cool with it,” CSFB! pointed out. “I got to know him pretty well when he was banging my mom.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Don’t start me on that liberal, arrogant, weak-kneed sonofabitch,” the General barked. “I’m here to sort you jerkweeds out. Drury’s for another day.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I wouldst like to see thee ‘deal’ with Drury,” rumbled Donar. “Mayhap in a dark alley someplace.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Shut up an’ pay attention, fleapelt,” Hodgekiss snapped at the hemigod. “Serious people are talking at you!”     Seeing that the Legion were about to react negatively to Hodgekiss’ aggressive attitude Amber stepped in. “There’s been a lot of discussion about the Legion’s latest… direction… and this meeting is to look at some of the feedback. To have a proper dialogue.” She appealed to the heroes. “Please?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sure, go ahead,” agreed Visionary. “I don’t suppose there’s also pizza on the agenda? We had some trouble ordering out earlier.”     Herbert Garrick got to his feet and opened a folder. “This is the result of a series of high-level meetings and think-tanks designed to allow you to keep your special clearances and security privileges. We’ve decided that it’s no longer appropriate that the Legion elects its own roster. I’ve brought along the names of the seven members we’re going to authorise. The rest of you can go.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What?” Nats exploded. “What kind of crap is that?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The kind that your government says is law, spandex boy!” warned General Hodgekiss. “You think we’re not ready to seize your assets, shut you down, and haul your asses into the Safe if you don’t play ball? Try me.”     CSFB! sprayed a line of silly string and jerked the paper from Garrick’s hand to read the membership list. “Lessee then. Hmm. Well I’m out. Big surprise.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who’s there?” asked Dancer. “How can there just be seven?”     Yuki read out the list. “Hmm. Hatman’s still in charge according to this, even without his powers, but he gets Bautistamax battle armour and becomes Hatted Patriot. And then there’s me, Dancer, Nats, G-Eyed…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Goldeneyed!” objected Nats. “Why that…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We need to consider ethnic minorities,” explained Garrick.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But Bry’s not…”     Yuki continued with the list. “…Ham-Boy and Jingo Belle!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“They’re not even members!” objected Nats.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ham-Boy has completed the Junior Lair Legion training programme,” Visionary pointed out. “He’s one of only two heroes to make it that far. If he wanted onto the roster I’d endorse it. But I don’t support a limited membership picked by someone outside the team. It was bad enough that time that Jarvis decided to pare the group down to ten and cut Donar. We still have lightning scorches in the Games Room.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yon Jarvis wast just sore becauseth I whuppéd his ass at yon Nintendo,” Donar opined.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Jo Simon’s a real sweetheart,” considered CSFB! “but I don’t think she’s ready for the Lair Legion.” He grinned at the list. “Good job it’s all just bulls&$£ anyhow, because that’s not the way it works.”     Nats glowered at the new team leader with mild irritation. “The way it works is that we have elections and decide on a new leader and a new roster, but we seem to have jumped right over that to plans to create a worldwide nepotism network of CrazySugarFreakBuddies!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We can talk about all that privately,” said Dancer. “Right now General, you need to realise that the Legion can’t operate the way you want it to, with all that outside interference. You can’t do art by committee. That really doesn’t work.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s the way it works now,” Hodgekiss insisted. He glared at CSFB! “And no overgrown adolescent pansyboy geek-faced hyperactive retard is going to get in the way.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You think? ‘Cause I don’t see any way a fat-ass loudmouthed bad-breathed pigdirt-dumb tree-up-his-ass armchair general is going to stop me.”     Yuki leaned back in her chair and propped her feet up on the meeting table. “You were right, Vizh,” she admitted. “We should definitely have brought in pizza for the show.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Weren’t we all supposed to go off and fight crime or something?” Dancer pointed out. “Maybe we can go back to shouting at each other after that?”     Nats nodded. “Yeah. And then we’ll have Al B. and the Shoggoth and Hallie back to join in. So we can really get the volume.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I hast a way to shorten yon meeting,” Donar offered. “Well, Mjalcolm doth have.”     Icy the Snowman stuck his head around the door. “I heard some nasty shouting,” he said, “so I rang back that nice pizza man Bill was talking to and asked him to send us a delivery after all.” ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That didn’t go very well,” Herbert Garrick said to General Hodgekiss when the last of the Legion has left the meeting room. “I could have told you that…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re yesterday’s man, Garrick,” the General interrupted him. “Your woolly soft handling of these freaks has got us into this mess. Stand down. You’re relieved. I’ll take it from here.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But I can…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re out. Don’t waste my time. Go back to your crocheting or whatever it is you do. Go wrote your has-been memoirs. Leave nailing down the weirdos to me.”     Garrick shot his successor a murderous look and walked out.     Hodgekiss opened a secure communicator. “Looks like its going to go down,” he reported to his superiors. “Looks like it’ll have to be done the hard way.” ***     East of Lake Coeur D’Alene, about twenty miles off I-90 towards Mica, Idaho a dirt trail ran into forested hills. Behind steel security gates and an electrified compound fence was the estate of the Pogroms of Purity, a charity registered for the purpose of improving the spiritual, moral and social wellbeing of young people. Youngsters recruited to the programme were given discipline and direction, a sense of personal pride, and six hours a day of combat weapons training.     Over four hundred people dwelled on the compound, which included three farms, a timber yard, a sawmill, and two full-sized shooting ranges. The property was protected by state of the art security to prevent unauthorised visitors – or unauthorised leavers. The central complex was constructed of interconnected cement buildings with twelve foot thick walls, designed to survive the coming fall of civilisation and the end times beyond.     Everybody who lived on the estate was white. Occasional visitors of colour arrived in unmarked vans but the were never seen again.     Karl Braun, Director of the Pogroms of Purity, was also the controversial superhero Aryan Ideal. The liberal press had labelled him a fascist, a racist, a super-powered bully. He preferred to describe himself as a patriot who wasn’t afraid to speak against the rot that was gnawing the heart out of America. He had the highest capture rate of black and Hispanic felons of any metahuman law enforcer anywhere. No prosecution for use of excessive force had ever been successful. Any rumours of sexual abuse of female malefactors were quashed by the Pogroms’ active legal defence team.     The LairJet landed just outside the Pogrom compound, near where a knot of police vehicles were gathered around the main gate surrounded by an army of press trucks.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Please, not another press conference,” Dancer begged CrazySugarFreakBoy! “I think the switchboard would melt down.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And also I will break your legs,” added Yuki Shiro. She frowned at the sensor logs from their high-altitude flyover of the compound.     Visionary was in the co-pilot’s seat next to the cyborg PI, also reviewing the data. “Hallie does this so much better,” he said wistfully. “All I’ve got is fuzzy lines everywhere.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But we still love you,” Icy told him.     Yuki knew what the possibly-fake man meant. “It’s not you. This time. The compound’s got some high-end sensor baffles operating. We knew they’d been buying stuff in from BALD and Factor X.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Another reason to add to the list of why to take them down,” argued CSFB!     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We could mayhap whompeth yon stuff?” suggested Donar. “Mayhap some measure of carnage for the nonce?”     Yuki tapped a purple-painted fingernail on the monitor screen. “That’s what they’re trying to hide. Surface to air missiles. If we’d gotten much closer they’d had a lock on the LairJet.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s got to be illegal,” Dancer said. “At least that’s what I keep telling Kerry.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s why we’re not dropping the LairJet on them, boys and girls,” CSFB! explained. “We’re doing this the old school way, through the front gate, through the front door. Right through the front door.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And due process?” sighed Yuki.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“All we need to do is find some WMDs and we’re good,” the wired wonder replied. “Dubya taught us that.”     Visionary rubbed his forehead. “I really wonder if…”     He was interrupted by a knocking on the hull of the LairJet. Icy helpfully poked his head out of the exit hatch. “Hello?”     The Country Sheriff looked up at the walking talking snowman with bafflement. “Uh, yeah. I need to talk to… well, someone who’s not got a carrot for a nose,” he said.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s very carrotist,” objected Icy.     CrazySugarFreakBoy! bounded over the lawman’s head and somersaulted to a halt behind him. “I did not shoot the deputy,” he said. “Your friendly neighbourhood CrazySugarFreakBoy! at your service!”     The officer looked back into the LairJet. “You got anybody else?” he asked hopefully.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Heilsa, guardian of the law!” greeted Donar.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Maybe I’ll talk to the snowman.”     Dancer poked her head round the door. “Sorry, officer. We’re still getting organised here. What can we do for you?”     The Sheriff pushed his cap back. “Well, you could maybe explain to me whose dumbass idea it was to come down here and threaten these Pogrom guys like this?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’d be my dumbass idea, Roscoe,” CSFB! told him. “because, y’know, I figured that maybe it was time someone got off their lard ass and did something about a bunch of tight-sphinctered hatemongers getting away with literal murder down here while the law turned a blind eye and ate donuts.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah?” shot back the sheriff, “And you didn’t maybe think that going on national TV and announcing you were gonna do an illegal raid today on some paranoid survivalist nutjob compound wasn’t going to make them go completely Waco and shack up in their HQ with enough armaments to start a war, then?”     Yuki frowned. “They what?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I thought they’d be doing the lawyer thing,” Vizh worried. “I was keeping my hands in my coat pockets so I couldn’t be served with anything.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So they locked themselves in their holes and won’t come out to play,” CSFB! shrugged. “Big whoop! So Donar takes the walls down.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“They’ve got around forty kids in there!” the sheriff shouted in his face. “You &*$^%£ morons have scared them into their bunker and now they’re locked away with kids, pregnant women, and three hundred plus social misfit retards with who knows what kinds of heavy weaponry! This is not a *%$*£ game!”     CrazySugarFreakboy! sobered. “They’ve got kids in there?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“They holdeth hostages?” Donar growled.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But that’s not nice!” objected Icy.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“They live there,” the sheriff said. “Whole families following Braun’s big agenda. You might not think much of ‘em but these guys really believe. And now we’ve got a full-blown situation. They’ve got the whole place wired with explosives. They’ve got the children in Semtex jackets and they’re just waiting for you to go in after them. That’s what you’ve managed to do so far today, big-league superheroes that you are.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well crappeth,” said Donar. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Camellia of the Fay,” Goldeneyed recognised Profanity. “Don’t try the faerie glamour stuff on me. I’m trained.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m sure,” said the belle dame sans merci. “Should I just surrender now?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You know this woman?” Alcheman asked Bry Katz.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“If it is Camellia,” G-Eyed said. “She wasn’t quite as… damaged when she ran the Willow nightclub and sold soul-stealing drugs to her patrons, back before she stole Vizh’s daughter into fairyland.”     Camellia hissed. “That little…” She caught her temper. “I was injured, as so many of my kind has been by your kind.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Her kind?” Alcheman still wasn’t quite in the picture. The earplugs weren’t helping.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Camellia’s a big fairy. I mean she’s this uber-powerful being from the Many Coloured Land or something. Which means that this dive must be the new Willow and she’s starting back in business again. Don’t eat the table snacks.”     The faerie lady looked at Goldeneyed with disdain. “You little mortals with your petty superstitions. You have no idea what is really going on here, do you.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Some kind of shoe-smuggling operation?” G-Eyed guessed.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You have charm and glamour powers,” Alcheman surmised. “You’re using them to re-establish a power base. You’ve charmed customers, charmed police to overlook the occasional missing person or strange incident…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I have come to reclaim what is ours, human,” Camellia announced. “For too long mortals have denied us our world, destroyed our future. Where once we reigned in brook and forest and lake and sea and mountain now humans drive us to extinction. You fill the world with iron and smoke and invisible rays that slaughter us by the thousands. We have retreated and retreated, into myth and legend, and still you diminish us. Enough.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What, you’re the Fairy Liberation Army?” scoffed G-Eyed. “The game’s up, Mistress Profanity. It’s the cold iron handcuffs for you.”     Camellia raised her good eyebrow. “The game? The game just begins, Bryan Katz.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hey, I have a secret ID here! Semi-secret anyhow. Secret-ish.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m surprised you’re still even here to play the game,” the belle dame continued. “Given that your own past has been destroyed. You did know that while you were away the timelines were changed so that your ultimate grandparents never met? The Celestian Madonna never mated with the Fernbiote so you and your cousins were never born. You’re an anomaly now. I imagine that soon you’ll just cease to exist.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m what? Wait…”     Camellia turned to Alcheman. “And you, bearing the curse Ivan Strode tattooed upon you…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“A curse?” Micheal Wooster objected. “No, these tattoos give me my powers, allow me to…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“A man who shouldn’t exist and a man who’ll destroy everything seek to stop the rightful vengeance of the Unseelie Court? You have no conception of what you’ve stumbled across, do you?”     Goldeneyed looked around. “First guess is a pixie underwear-stealing ring.”     Camellia’s laugh was cold as any Ice Queen. “This bar is but one, one of many. As you mortals have taken from us so we will take everything from you. Profanity has been busy, you see. Alliances with the Lycanthropes Guild, with the Blood Thirsters, with the Abyssal Ghoul Lords. Gathering together of the dispossessed, wounded, hate-filled remnants of the old peoples. Awakening of the deep trolls and the barrow wights and the banshees and the nighthaunts. Do you have any idea how much resentment they have stored up against your race over the millennia?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m guessing quite a bit,” ventured Alcheman. “And look, I don’t want to dismiss any legitimate concerns they might want to raise about their treatment. But we’re on the trail of missing people as well as missing lingerie and footwear and we can’t allow your actions to go uninvestigated or unpunished any longer.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Really?” hissed Camellia. “So you’ll be calling for help will you?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We don’t need back-up,” G-Eyed warned her. “We’re here to take you down.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And take me where?” wondered the witch-queen. “After all, it’s not like you’re still on Earth.”     There was an unholy note of triumph in her voice. Alcheman pulled aside the window blind. A seething black nothing roiled outside.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’ve shifted all right,” G-Eyed confirmed. “We’re… somewhere.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The Unseelie Court,” Camellia boasted. “All the remnants denied faerie, the rotting remains forced to starve and perish on your befouled iron world. All united under their new Dark Lady and ready to retake Eden.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That doesn’t sound like the sort of thing heroes should allow,” noted Alcheman.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Welcome to my parlour,” quoted Camellia of the Fay, “said the spider to the flies.” ***     Silicone Sally woke in chains. It wasn’t a first. “Power-neutralising dampner shackles,” she noted, straining at her bonds. “Again. Do they just sell this stuff at Wal-Mart now?”     She was still on the night train. Citizen Z squatted in the shadows across from her. “That’s not just leftover Technopolitian junk or Parody Master castoffs, Resilyant. Those are Grade-A restraint and pain gyves from the personal arsenal of Elizabeth von Zemo. They’re specifically designed to restrain you.”     Sally struggled with her bonds. The technology inside them was interfering with her pliable body, preventing her from shifting its composition. It was like being paralysed. “So the Baroness can’t lever her load into a CZ costume herself any more and she’s sending out hired help to finish me off?” she scorned.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t work for that bitch,” snarled Citizen Z. She’d added a short ragged cape to the purple, black and dark red ensemble and it twitched as if the wind was blowing even though there was no wind. “I just use her stuff.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re doing her work for her right now,” Sally argued. “She’s set me up, framed me for something I didn’t do…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well boo hoo,” responded CZ. “I’m more concerned with that you did do.”     Sally tried to shift herself to a sitting position. Her captor knew her business and had fastened the bonds so they didn’t allow it. “Can we cut to the part where you tell me what your damage is? The spooky stuff’s getting real old real fast.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sure,” agreed Citizen Z. “Right after we do the bit where I use the pain inducers in your cuffs on setting five for three minutes.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hey, now waiiiiaaaahhhhhhhhhhhggghhh!!!”     The woman in the shadows watched Silicone Sally twitch and scream in agony for the allotted time.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Now we can talk,” she said at last.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You…” Sally Resilyant told her captor what she thought of her.     CZ shrugged. “I’ve been called worse. Anyway, that pain charge disrupted your physiology enough that the tracking nanites the Baroness seeded you with will be scrambled for a while. I don’t want the authorities homing in on you while I’m conducting my interrogation.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Tracking what now? You’re saying Beth planted bugs on me?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“In you, at a molecular level. Along with the over-ride chemistry to kill you if you turned on her. I guess she doesn’t want you dead yet.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re saying the government’s hunting me down by tracing the transmitters the Baroness stitched into my DNA. That means she’s given them the frequencies!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s certainly how I found you,” agreed Citizen Z. “Weren’t you wondering how they were following you so well?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And you wanted to find me to play bondage Barbie and gloat or what?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I wanted to find you before Beth von Zemo did things so bad to you that anything I came up with wouldn’t matter. I wanted to get my revenge first.”     Sally suppressed a shudder. There was such hatred in her captor’s voice. “Who are you, then? Are you the CZ who turned up to save those kids of Visionary’s from HAGGIE? The one who was around fighting the Purveyors of Peril while we were all off in the Stitchlands?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Mostly. But I’m also the one who’s here to bring you to justice for murder, Svetlana Resilyant. My murder.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Um… yours? You might not have noticed, honey, but you’re not dead.”     Citizen Z leaned in close. “But I am. I’m just borrowing this body. Possessing it. Before I was just projecting a tulpa psychic thoughtform but this is better. I can keep this up for as long as I need now and I don’t need the occult help of the Asylum where I died.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You were in a loony bin. Big surprise.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I was in the loony bin. I was slaughtered in Herringcarp Asylum. Then it decided that it wanted a ghost like the Lair Mansion has and it decided to keep me around. Then I made a bargain with Ioldabaoth Winkelweald. And here I am now. Care to guess who I was?”     Sally shook her head. “I’ve never murdered anyone. There’s been a few fair fights but…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I was Laurie Leyton. I was captured by you, brought to the Baroness for psychic mind-dissection so she could fool people into thinking Citizen Z was me not her, and then my amnesiac, broken form was traded to demons by Baron Otto. I don’t remember how I turned up in the torture pits at Herringcarp – don’t really remember anything about Laurie’s life before that except what I’ve been told – but I know who sent me there. Baroness von Zemo. And you.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I… I didn’t mean to.” Silicone Sally wasn’t used to terror. “I didn’t know.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And that makes it all right, does it, Sally?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No. But… look, I didn’t know what Beth was planning. Her ideas aren’t always that nasty. She didn’t used to be that ruthless back when we started. It was fun, before she turned so dark. It was… I’d never have let her do that if I’d known.”     Citizen Z pulled a neural dagger from her thigh-sheath. “Baron Heinrich Zemo killed the first Citizen Z, you know,” she explained, “just after World War II. The Baroness claimed the role by right of conquest. I’ve stolen it from her by right of vengeance. I stole all her CZ tech-toys too.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So I see. Um, that neural dagger can lobotomise people, you know.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But the best bit is, since I’m a psychic entity now, drawing on the twisted power of Herringcarp Asylum – a power that goes way, way down into the screaming abyssal dark, further than sanity, further than human fear, further than even the Hooded Hood knows for sure – I can empower these toys with all kinds of nasty karmic force. Enough to do to even a being of silicone what you let them do to Laurie Leyton.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I told you,” said Sally desperately, “I didn’t know! There’s only one thing I know that you don’t.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And what’s that?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I know that Baron Otto used these power-dampner shackles on me before, back when Beth gave me to him to be punished. That’s why I traded some personal services to Thighmaster’s right hand dude Browning for a bio-upgrade that allows me to neutralise these cuffs if I get enough time.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You what?”     Silicone Sally ballooned out of the shackles, hammering CZ away from her and out through the side of the luggage car.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Time to go,” the flexible felon decided, slithering herself out of the other side of the wagon. She could already hear the whirr of Citizen Z’s z-wing personal flyer somewhere behind her in the dark.     Silicone Sally hurled herself off the train and disappeared into the Texas darkness.     Citizen Z hunted her. ***     CrazySugarFreakBoy! stood in front of the cameras. Visionary hid.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Karl Braun is a cowardly, bullying, supremacist wussy,” the leader of the Lair Legion announced to the nation. “He and his punkass organisation are great at scaring black girls and mouthing off on the internet about how they’re better than everybody else ‘cause they got their heads shaved but as soon as the big boys come out to play they go lock themselves in their hole and strap explosives onto their kids. Their own kids. What, they don’t think buying seventeen guns for every person on that compound – and that’s just the licensed firearms – that’s not enough to protect them from the big bad superhero here to kick Braun’s ass? They don’t want anyone digging around, literally digging around in their compound to find the bodies? So-called Aryan Ideal’s too busy pissing his pants hiding behind children to come out here and get the spanking from me he’s so very much overdue?”     Icy looked worried. “Isn’t saying all of this on television going to make Mr Braun rather cross?”     Yuki nodded. “Aryan Ideal’s psyche profile says he’s got a short fuse. We’re hoping that means he’ll come out here to rip Dream’s head off, not that he’ll light the fuse on the kids.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ripping Dream’s head off,” mused Nats. “Yeah.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The question is can we get Aryan Ideal out of his bunker long enough for us to do the rescue thing?” worried Dancer. “I’m bending the probabilities but I can’t guarantee…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So yeah,” went on CSFB! “Aryan Ideal can kiss my brown hairy half-Native American ass cause he’s a loud-mouthed no-brained dickless…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Please tell me he isn’t dropping his pants on national television,” winced Visionary. “Not again.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Mel Gibson’s Braveheart has a lot to answer for,” replied Yuki.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Tis the ancient defiance of the warrior,” approved Donar. “Tis most refreshing for the nonce to hath clear leadership and a goodly whompage list.”     Yuki Shiro was watching the front door of the compound. “The door’s opening!” she reported. “It’s Braun. He’s gone for the bait!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Now, Dancer!” called Nats. “If you’re ever going to take a simple situation and make it much more complicated this is the time!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Only without anyone ending up in bed with anybody else or other hilarious mishaps,” Vizh added quickly and practically.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is this what we talked about?” Icy wondered.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You talked about how people end up accidentally sleeping with other people in Dancer plotlines?” the possibly fake man worried.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We talked about how I was supposed to start a blizzard for Prince Donar to make use of?” the snowman replied, puzzled. “But about that other…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes, blizzard now,” interrupted Yuki abruptly. “Please.”     Aryan Ideal stamped out of his bunker. Before the reinforced blast doors could close behind him a massive snowstorm clamped down over the whole region. Reporters in summer outfits hurried for the shelter of their broadcast vans as they were pelted with inch-round hailstones. The police on the barricade huddled down from the hurricane winds. Somewhere in the middle of the tempest Donar Oldmanson raised his enchanted baseball bat with a nail in it Mjalcolm and began to sing.     Dancer hand-jived along, and across the compound every fuse blew out. The detonation devices strapped to twenty-eight children simultaneously failed.     Nats caught telekinetic hold of the main compound doors and tore them way, sending them flying off into the blizzard.     Yuki powered up the LairJet and aimed it for the opening. If Karl Braun happened to be in the way she wasn’t too bothered.     The Lair Legion attacked. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Camellia of the Fay, a.k.a. Profanity, I’m placing you under citizens arrest on suspicion of kidnapping and murder of U.S. citizens,” Alcheman told the Belle Dame Sans Merci, in the Dark Lady’s place of power at the otherworldly Unseelie Court.     Goldeneyed looked worriedly at the shadows that surrounded them. “Dude, is this really the time?” he checked.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is there likely to be a later?” Michael Wooster shot back. “Besides, Camellia made a tactical error in bringing us to her demiplane or whatever it is.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“She did?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I did?” sneered Camellia. “Do please explain how, before my minions rend your souls for an eternity of humiliation and torment.”     Alcheman tapped the mystic tattoos on his biceps. “These symbols that Ivan Strode drew on me, you say you know what they are?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Better than you, foolish doomed mortal.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then you’ll know that the symbols at this end of the periodic table are ones I can’t usually use on Earth because…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You can do uranium?” Goldeneyed swallowed.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“All the actinoids and transactinides,” Alcheman noted. He pointed but didn’t touch the symbols on his arms. “Neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So?” scorned Camellia.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So he can blow himself up real good,” G-Eyed translated. “He can blow up him, and you, and this whole low-rent fairy place you’ve built up, and all these minions you’ve gathered. Blow you up and leave this ground glowing in the dark for about half a million years. And blow up me, which is a bit of a downside, but really since you’re not planning anything good for us, who cares?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m guessing faeries aren’t good at nuclear physics,” Alcheman said, “but I’m also guessing you can now see in my mind what would happen if I transformed into Einstinium, Fermium, Mendelevium…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You would destroy yourself,” hissed the Dark Lady.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m a hero.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You said that human pollutants and their invisible rays were doing bad things to fairies,” Goldeneyed remembered. “Imagine how bad Alcheman could make it here if he popped?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Imagine if I reave both your souls and leave you screaming for the rest of eternity, reckless fleshlings!” warned Camellia.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nobelium,” said Alcheman. “Lawrencium, Rutherfordium, dubnium, seaborgium, bohrium…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Or we could all just back off,” suggested G-Eyed. “Camellia, you just give back the people you stole. You can keep the underwear, I guess. Give us the folks and send us home and we’ll call it even for now.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No, we want the clothes and shoes too,” Alcheman demanded.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dude, if that’s what you’re into we can buy you some…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Faerie magic is sympathetic magic, right? In the legends. So if they have somebody’s intimate clothing or something they can extend their glamours to that person. Am I correct, Camellia?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You will obey me now, Michael,” La Belle Dame commanded. “Your will is no longer yours but mine. Pay homage to your Lady and despair!”     Alcheman forced his finger to the Fe symbol on his shoulder and transformed into a being of cold iron. “I don’t think so,” he said.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The people you stole,” G-Eyed demanded, “or Alcheman goes nuclear on your ass.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why those victims anyway?” the alchemical adventurer wondered. “Why not all the other people who visited Profanity’s bar?”     Camellia snorted. “Fools. Those were the humans who resisted. Of all those who ate my food and drank my spirits and are now under my control, those are the only ones that resisted. The rest are mine.” She waved her hands. “Now begone from my realm!”     G-Eyed’s eyes flashed. “Um, no,” he defied her. “Alcheman here can ‘splode real good. Once. I’m the master of teleportation. Nobody’s sending us anywhere unless I say so now. So make with the hostages.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hassium, meitnerium, darmstadtium, roentgenium, copernicum – I think copernicum would really sting…”     Camellia’s good eye narrowed. “Very well,” she hissed. “The survivors can go with you. And the purloined lien-items. But this is not over.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Survivors? You can count on this not being over,” G-Eyed promised her.     And it wasn’t.      ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ack!” said Vizh, ducking in the co-pilot’s seat of the LairJet. “Was the plan to actually drive the plane into the compound? Did I miss the bit where we levered a quarter-billion dollar aircraft inside the bad guys’ headquarters of doom?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s improvisation,” the cyborg P.I. grinned manically. “They had such nice wide entry doors and we’ve got Bill reinforcing our nose-cone so it seemed a great way to avoid those dinky sonic cannons and taser-guns they’ve peppered all around the entrance.”     Bill Reed, Nats, winced. “Telekinetically deflecting major impacts gives me a terrible headache, you know. Crashing through concrete walls is… oww!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hurry,” Dancer told Yuki. “The chances of those people not just shooting the hostages in the head is smaller every moment!”     The JairJet shuddered as something impacted from the side.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“They bought BRAWLER exoskeletons?” Yuki asked incredulously. “Turrets Inc. Mark IV combat hardware. The very best. Take the wheel, Vizh. I need to clear these people off my wings.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You want me to aim the LairJet through solid walls?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Solid walls in that direction,” Yuki clarified. “That’s where I’m picking up juvenile lifesigns.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I thought CSFB! was up top with Donar and Icy,” complained Nats. “I just ouch! Agh! Ouch again!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sorry,” said Visionary. “Another wall.”     The LairJet shook as the BRAWLERS tried to tear their way in. Yuki went out to ask them to stop. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ooh, look!” pointed Icy. “There are big gun-things coming up out of the ground all around the compound!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We knew they were hiding stuff behind their sensor-fuzz,” shrugged CSFB! Just freeze ‘em up and we’ll be good.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yon shattercannons sting for the nonce,” said Donar, “but they doth crush most satisfyingly when smitten.”     Visibility was down to two yards now. Aryan Ideal reached out from behind to grab CrazySugarFreakBoy! and twist his head off.     Dreamcatcher Foxglove avoided his grip and replied with a spray of silly string to the face. “Sorry, Karlie. You can’t creep up on a guy who’s got loser sense. I could feel you fifty yards off. That’s how big a fail you are.”     Aryan Ideal tossed a half dozen super-speed punches that CSFB! barely managed to avoid. “You talk big, half-breed,” he spat, “but when you stop bouncing about I’ll tear you a new ass.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’ll, you’d know all about asses, I guess,” CSFB! suggested.     The storm clamped down around them as Icy tried to freeze the compound defences. A distant happy shout suggested that Donar had encountered Braun’s BRAWLER backup squad.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nobody’s gonna save you this time,” Aryan Ideal told Dream. “Bounce all you want but you’re going down.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Like your sister does?” CSFB! mocked. “You really got all this wrong, Karlie. You’re here for the big mano-a-mano showdown, Rocky vs Mr T. I’m just keeping you busy and distracted so you can’t find your way back to your compound then ditching you to go do something important like rescue people.” He sprayed his adhesive silly string to tangle Aryan Ideal’s feet to the ground, dropped an exploding Rocket Fuel Soda bottle down the supremacist’s pants, kissed him on the lips, and bounded away into the snowstorm. “Bye!” ***     Citizen Z caught up with Silicone Sally at a gas station near Paint Rock off the I-83. Dawn was just smudging the sky and the whole place was deserted except for a tiny lit teller’s booth. Sally was just deciding whether to hit the till for some travelling money when the z-wing glided overhead.     Sally poured herself under some dumpsters but realised too late that there was nobody on the hovering board. By then Citizen Z had sprayed her with gasoline and was tossing in the thermite.     Silicone Sally swelled up, catapulting the trash skip at her pursuer. She sprang after it as a wide enveloping sheet to fold Citizen Z in smouldering rubber.     CZ defended herself using a dime-sized agony mine, sending Sally off her to struggle in the dirt. She launched a pair of neural darts to keep the shapechanger off balance then prepared her freon pellets. Frozen plastic shatters.     She didn’t expect Sally to twang the neural darts back at her. She avoided the first but the second caught her in the leg. Her host body faltered long enough for Sally to roll away and twist around a parked bike. Citizen Z barely dodged aside as the vehicle was snapped over at her. The bike hit the gas pump behind.     The clerk in the payment booth watched in horror as the first of the pumps exploded. He ducked as the fireball washed over his booth, then raced to get away before the station canopy came down on him.     Silicone Sally caught him up and hurled him to safety before he was crushed.     Citizen Z fired the freon pellets into her from behind.     Sally opened holes in her flexible body to let the shots pass straight through her without shattering then snapped her limbs outward to knock CZ off the z-wing she’d just remounted. The silicone supervillain ignored the pain from the neural dagger – possible as long as you could shift nerve clusters in a silicone fluid body – and enveloped her enemy in a thick amorphous sheet.     Citizen Z struggled for a while. Sally prevented her from reaching the various weapons and gadgets fastened to her costume. Sally knew exactly where they were all stowed.     Then Citizen Z fell still.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No point faking,” Sally told the undead avenger. “Why are you even following me anyhow? I didn’t mean any of the bad things that happened to you to happen to you. I’m sorry they did, but it wasn’t my fault. Not all my fault anyhow. And I was pardoned.”     Citizen Z felt cold under Sally’s plastic wrap. Then Sally felt cold; not freon-cold but soul cold.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I didn’t pardon you,” said Citizen Z. “I don’t pardon you.” But she said it with Sally’s lips.     Silicone Sally tried to protest but the spirit possessing her body commanded her to release the inert form it had been wearing up to now. Sally found herself slowly, sloppily, retreating from her hold over CZ’s previous host.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Get out of me!” Sally tried to scream.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Bet that’s the first time you’ve ever said that to anybody,” said the spirit that called herself Amnesia these days. She walked Sally over to check on the cowering counter clerk then frog-marched her over to the payphone. The first call was for a fire truck. The second was to OPS headquarters in Persephone, Virginia.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hello,” Sally heard her own voice say into the telephone receiver. She struggled but couldn’t find a way to stop Citizen Z’s control. “I’m Svetlana Rezilyant, a metahuman terrorist and accessory to murder. I’m currently at a gas station off I-83 deciding what atrocities to commit next. If you hurry you might just get here before I decide to kidnap anybody else for torture and slaughter. Have a nice day.”     And then Sally sat motionless beside the road watching the flames until the police cars arrived. ***     The LairJet stopped halfway through a major support wall, its momentum finally exhausted.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Through there!” Yuki pointed, hurling a broken BRAWLER in the right direction to clarify. The cyborg P.I.’s short-range sensors were better than those on the LairJet now that the jamming fields were back up.     Nats pyrokinetically detonated the last of the automated laser guns and followed her into the secure level of the Pogroms of Purity bunker.     Two dozen survivalists levelled guns at frightened children and some of their families. Another half dozen kids had knives held to their throats.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Any further and it’s a bloodbath,” promised the Pogrom’s Grand Wizard.     Dancer slid to a halt with the others. “I can maybe make all their guns misfire,” she warned her team-mates, “but I can’t make knives not be sharp.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Okay, hold on,” Visionary called out, holding his hands out in a placatory gesture. “Things are getting far too… far. I’m sure you guys don’t really want to hurt your children. And we don’t want them harmed either. We’ve got something to work with there, right?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I can maybe do two or three of the knives,” Nats told Yuki. “Say the three on the left there.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I can get another one,” the cyborg P.I. judged. “That leaves two.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m sure you’ve got legitimate grievances,” Vizh went on to the Grand Wizard. “Inconsiderate parking of a LairJet for one. Sorry about that. But right now we all need to take a breath and…” He paused.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And what?” demanded the Grand Wizard.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And wait for our backup to arrive,” answered the possibly-fake man, his delaying tactics complete.     At that moment CrazySugarFreakBoy! blurred into the Grand Wizard, tossed him away from the seven year old he was holding, and stamped down hard on the wrist that was holding the ka-bar. Mjalcolm smashed into another knifeman’s head and put him down.     Yuki moved in with precision skill to take down her designated adversary. Nats melted the knives of his targets. Dancer took care of the rest.     And the hostage situation was over.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And now the smiteage,” announced Donar.     Aryan Ideal thundered into the room too late to stop a general trouncing of his Pogroms of Purity.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Don’t worry, Karlie,” CSFB! told him, “your ass-kicking’s still here waiting for you.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Really?” snarled Karl Braun. “You think? You have no idea how many people you’ve pissed off, boy!”     He thumbed a button on his belt.     The walls of the hostage room flaked away, revealing sleek black apparatus behind them, with computer-targeted particle guns.     This wasn’t the same technology as the rest of the Pogroms’ cobbled collection of high-end assault weaponry. This was altogether more sophisticated. It hadn’t shown up on Yuki’s scanned. It had been insulated from Dancer’s probability-mangling. It was shielded from telekinetic damage. It hummed menacingly.     CrazySugarFreakBoy! dived for Aryan Ideal. Aryan Ideal thumbed the ‘activate’ button.     The entire room was criss-crossed with sickly green laserlight, quartering the area where the heroes were standing and jabbing into them with nerve-frying force. There was a high-pitched shriek as the cellular rewriter maxxed. Then it fell silent.     CrazySugarFreakBoy! had almost avoided the rays. He scrambled to his feet, slowly, clumsily. Braun hoisted him by the throat.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You really pissed people, half-breed,” Aryan Ideal told him. “That’s why they gave us this loaner. Next generation from that tech they used to get rid of mutate powers. Burns out the bit of your DNA that allows you powers. Takes away special abilities forever.” He snapped CSFB!’s left arm. “Specially designed with you Legion guys in mind, too, by some of the best brains on the planet and beyond. They know all about why you should be immune to this kind of zap and they took all that into account.” He snapped CSFB!’s right arm. “I guess you figured that.”     Yuki Shiro tried to rise. The Technopolitan interface that allowed her human brain to smoothly interface with a cyborg shell didn’t seem to be working right. She twitched and fell, spasming.     Nats rose too. Aryan Ideal slapped him down hard.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Now,” Karl Braun grinned, standing amidst the fallen former superheroes, “Now it gets nasty.” *** Next Issue: The depowered Legion vs Aryan Ideal! The end of Icy! Hatman vs the Fearsome Four! Ham-Boy vs the MLA! General Hodgekiss vs Herbert P. Garrick! Coming up in Untold Tales #341: No More Heroes Any More Yes, this chapter decided it wanted to be two chapters. Sorry. And no, I won’t tell you what MLA stands for. *** On the Parodyverse since the Parody War: When the Parody Master was destroyed, the being he was originally intended to protect the Parodyverse against was able to arrive. That was the Carnifex, a mega-powerful hunter and torturer who arranged for the whole Parodyverse to believe he was their greatest hero. He was sent by powers beyond the Parodyverse to destroy it so the Resolution War could never answer whatever question the Parodyverse was created to solve. To neutralise the great powers of the Parodyverse so he could do his job the Carnifex secretly set up a couple of major crises. First there was the attack by the Moderator, a conqueror from another timeline, aided by twisted versions of many of our heroes. Of these, Doorman, the evil Hatman, is still around. The Moderator turned out to be an alternate timeline version of Denial, the Hooded Hood’s son. He’d powered his conquests from thousands of tortured alternate-universe versions of Kerry Shepherdson. Our heroes eventually destroyed the Moderator, but Mr Epitome was lost when reality snapped back to normal. All of this story was told in the round robin The Moderator Saga. That episode led the Legion to worry about the regular world’s version of Danny Lyle. Attempts to detain him led to all kinds of conflict that was cut short when the Lair Mansion suddenly vanished with most of Earth’s heroes in it, along with the SPUD helicarrier. In the absence of the LL the supervillains made their move. Baroness von Zemo formed a new Lair Legion (secretly the Purveyors of Peril). The government also formed a new Lair Legion (actually the FMRC B-Team). Kerry, Harlagaz and Fashion Accessory also pulled together a new Lair Legion made up of Juniors and their friends. Kerry’s team bravely struggled on as the FMRC team were slaughtered and the Purveyors gradually took over the world. During this crisis the Shee-Yar, under their new emperor, invaded Earth. The Carnifex used this as an excuse to wipe out everyone in the entire Imperium, leaving ten thousand worlds dead. Meanwhile, the regular LL found themselves scattered in a strange series of fantasy lands. They eventually got back together and began to look for ways home. They learned that they were in a distant part of Comic-Book Limbo. The villain behind their capture was the mysterious Void Scholar, formerly known as Wang the Conqueror. Liu Xi Xian was revealed to be the ultimate granddaughter of Wang and the Celestian Madonna – Samantha Featherstone, Fashion Accessory! Wang had bred the line of Liu Xi’s ancestors to create the perfect void manipulator to further his plans. Now he intended to breed her with Danny Lyle. The real LL got back home just in time to aid the Juniors in a deadly battle against the Purveyors and Onslaughter. Danny and Liu Xi foiled the Void Scholar’s plots and prevented FA from being the Celestian Madonna (effectively meaning that Liu Xi shouldn’t really exist now). The Void Scholar swapped out all the population of Earth except for our heroes with Space Fandoms. The LL had to finally take him on and save everyone. After the Void Scholar had been defeated the Carnifex slaughtered him. All of this was in the Saving the Future series, the longest PV story ever done (96 parts including the tie-ins). When Ultizon returned to destroy all organic life on Earth the Carnifex teamed up with the LL to stop him. Hatman, Nats, and the Manga Shoggoth were seemingly killed in the battle. The Carnifex agreed to join and lead the Legion and invited them to dinner at his impregnable Esqualine Tower HQ, planning to kill them as his campaign to destroy the Parodyverse finally started. However, the Hooded Hood and Xander the Improbable intervened. Hatty and the other lost Legionnaires prevented the massacre of the LL’s families and friends. Sir Mumphrey and CSFB! led the regular team against the Carnifex. Eventually, at the cost of Rabid Wolf’s life (after she was revealed to be the Hood’s daughter) and the brain death of the Librarian, the Carnifex too was destroyed. In this battle (two days ago in PV time) Hatman lost his powers and stepped down as LL leader. CSFB! took charge but his plans for the team have alarmed half the world. A new LL line-up is about to be announced. The Juniors have moved out to start college, settling at Paradopolis U in Omega House. Meanwhile, the whole of the murdered Shee-Yar empire has returned as zombies because of Ausgardian necromancer Lord Slithis and now serve Dark Thugos. Thugos has some big plans. The Hooded Hood is angry at having to sacrifice Zdenka to stop the Carnifex and is planning something big. All of these things have been in recent issues of Untold Tales. And that’s it so far. *** 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.