Previous Post #324: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Going Down Go straight to the new bit for 23rd January Go straight to the new bit for 24th January Go straight to the concluding bit What has gone before: This story is the continuation from Untold Daily Tales of the Lair Legion versus [Spoiler Villain You Won’t Be Able to Guess]. For those too lazy to click the link there’s a summary blacked out below. Highlight it to read it: Secret Service courier Francis Cornhill vanished while on camera alone in an elevator. He was carrying vital documents regarding the ongoing investigation into the mysterious Shadow Cabinet conspiracy. The Legion’s investigations led them to many other mysterious elevator-related incidents over the last couple of years. Hatman and CSFB! had a first-hand incident when their clothes and equipment vanished off their backs as they travelled in one such lift. Al B. and the Shoggoth’s attempts to replicate the strange phenomenon brought them a lift-carload of nuns, but not their habits. Now Yuki’s brain has similarly disappeared, leaving her cyborg body in automatic defence mode – about to kill the nearest possible assailant, who is unfortunately the Librarian. Previous chapters at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom. Descriptions of cast at Who's Who in the Parodyverse. Locations explained in Where's Where in the Parodyverse. ***     The high speed elevator in the Eversure Mutual life Assurance Company Tower in Nebraska twisted in an unusual manner, then halted. A translucent gelid mass seeped in between the crack in the car door and through the ventilation ducts.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Greetings, mortal entities,” the Manga Shoggoth bade them cheerfully, his dripping biomass bubbling as he spoke. Globs of the loathsome elder being plopped onto the floor but quickly squirmed back to the primary biomass. “There is no need for rapid respiration or reptilian hind-brain fight or flee responses.”     The thirty or so office workers in the lift began to scream and panic.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nor is there need to jettison excess organic matter previously reserved for biochemical biological functions,” advised the Shoggoth. “People could slip on that.”     A desperate woman flung herself at the elevator doors and bounced back, half-stunned.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You will be encouraged to know that I am now patrolling to ensure that no transient transdimensional effects or multi-planar entities affect your elevator travelling experience,” comforted the frothing mass of protoplasm. “In fact to aid your four-dimensional transmigration via this primitive mechanical cube I have made some improvements. When the doors open you will find that it has delivered you right to your home.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Our home?” gibbered a senior accounts executive (claims and rejections). “Which home? We all live in different homes!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I have thought of that,” the Shoggoth assured him. “I have managed to twist together the dimensions in each of your respective domiciles so that they are all now interlinked and coterminous. There is no need to thank me.”     The lift doors opened. People screamed some more. The Shoggoth bleeped.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Excuse me,” he told the cowering office workers. “My colleagues in the Lair Legion are attempting to contact me via quaint little radio waves. That part of the electromagnetic spectrum always tastes a bit like pickled onions.”     The people in the elevator fled from the goo-covered car into the Escheresque tangle of their homes.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m afraid I will have to go,” the Shoggoth called after them. “There is a Lair Emergency in a different elevator car.” He wracked his mind for the appropriate human nicety. “But may I say what lovely gardens you have in your bathrooms?”     Then he shrunk himself down to a blob of matter the size of a thumbnail and shifted somewhere else. ***     Al B. Harper brought the LairJet down right on top of the Croque D’Or Casino and Hotel but Mr Epitome had already leaped from the moving aircraft and was heading downstairs before the vehicle had even shut come in to land.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Status?” he demanded over his comm-link to the Lair Legion’s artificial intelligence Hallie.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Three minutes since Yuki and Lee’s comm-cards somehow teleported from GMY to the new location. No response from either of them, although that could be a scrambling side-effect of the dimensional shift on the cards themselves.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But definite energies like the ones we’ve been tracking in the elevator incidents,” Al added. “Get down there fast!”     Mr Epitome ripped the roof security door off with one hand and hurtled down the service stairs. He didn’t bother with the thirteen flights of steps. Instead he just vaulted over the balcony and dropped.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Third elevator on your left,” Hallie advised him.     Epitome seized the doors and tore them open.     Yuki Shiro stared at him in astonishment, her eyes wide and slightly alarmed. “Well,” she said breathlessly, “after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!”     The paragon of power blinked and looked over at the Librarian. Lee Bookman was sitting on the floor massaging his neck. Livid bruises were already forming where the cyborg P.I. had previously gripped him.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We were attacked,” the Librarian reported. His voice was hoarse. “Our assailant lured us into an elevator and I believe he has teleported Yuki’s brain out of her body.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I can’t explain myself, sir,” Yuki told Epitome, “because I’m not myself, you see.”     Dominic Clancy turned his x-ray vision onto the cyborg Legionnaire. The heavy lead-laced shielding that protected the only organic portion of Yuki was now missing, as was the organ it protected.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Without an organic control, Yuki’s onboard computers executed their emergency defence program,” Lee went on. “Which appears to be throttle the nearest person. Typical of Yuki, really. Remind me to thank Harper for listening to her.”     Yuki frowned in puzzlement. “I think I should understand that better, if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“She’s not trying to kill you now, though,” Epitome observed.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No,” agreed Lee. “I had to save myself, so I used my Librarian gifts to overwrite her emergency operating system with a volume I was temporarily storing in my mind.”     Yuki looked from Lee to Dom. “But I don’t want to go amongst mad people!” she objected.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Lewis Carroll,” clarified the Librarian. “Right now she’s Alice.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Alice?” frowned Epitome. “Alice in Wonderland?”     Yuki looked up as she heard her name, then gave a little curtsey. “Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I?”     Al B. Harper raced through the stairwell doors and skidded to a halt in front of the wrecked elevator. “Is everybody okay?” he demanded. “What’s happening?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I'll try if I know all the things I used to know,” Yuki suggested earnestly. “Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is--oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn't signify: let's try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome--no, that's all wrong, I'm certain! I must have been changed for Mabel!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There’s been another elevator incident,” sighed Mr Epitome, rubbing his temples. “Yuki’s been switched for Alice in Wonderland.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It was that or the Marquis de Sade,” the Librarian defended himself. “Could things get any worse right now?”     The Manga Shoggoth bubbled out of the walls. “What does ‘inferred liability damage suit’ mean?” he asked interestedly.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Curiouser and curioser,” said Yuki. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Okay, remind we where we are again,” asked Hatman as he waded through the thick seeping mist, “and of why we shouldn’t burn Hagatha Darkness at the stake.”     CrazySugarFreakBoy! was rather more used to mystical vision-quests so he wasn’t as spooked out by the psychic landscape. “We’re wandering an astral realm homing in on our missing gear,” he explained. “My Silly Suit and your Hatility Belt are both infused with our auras, so Haggie’s projecting our consciousnesses out of our bodies to find wherever our stuff is.”     Dark shady shapes stirred in the fog. “And the not burning her part?” Jay Boaz swallowed.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Don’t worry, o glorious leader,” CSFB! grinned. “Sure, there are psychic predators around, but don’t forget I’m dragging along a huge amount of uncontrolled kinetic poltergeists as a side-effect of not having my gear to control my Impossibilitium-formed bod, so it’s good to give the little guys something to do.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ah well. Now I feel much better.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Besides, it’s not far now. Can’t you feel the tug? Kind of like when your girlfriend…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I sense we should go that way,!” Hatman interjected hastily. “In silence.”     The capped crusader and the wired wonder pressed on through the fog, then emerged into a large underground chamber. The vaulted barrel roof was of old brick, the floor was covered with rotted rush matting. The huge room itself was packed high with all kinds of random articles, mostly junk but with a few expensive things abandoned amongst the detritus.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is this a normal part of a vision quest?” wondered Hatman, peering at the old coke machine and the headless shop dummies piled around it.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The words ‘normal’ and ‘vision quest’ don’t usually go together in a sentence,” grinned CSFB!. “C’mon, there’s a light over there.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And the sound of an elevator,” added Hatman. He reached down for a hat from his belt and discovered that he was vision-questing naked. He realised that Dream was unclad as well. “What is it about this adventure that keeps on sending us around nude?” he complained.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Astral forms and stuff,” shrugged CSFB! “But really, I think it’s the Parodyverse’s way of saying we need more women in the LL. Then they can get the nude gigs and everybody’s happy. I really miss Troia.”     Jay Boaz determinedly turned his eyes on the distant light and pressed forward. He found a small partly-cleared area by one wall of the chamber, where a bank of ancient elevators opened beside a jumble of cluttered desks. A greasy-haired mulatto man in a string vest jumped up from his armchair in alarm, staring wildly at the intruders.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who the hell are you?” the string-vested slob demanded.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We could ask the same of you,” replied CSFB! “And where’s our stuff?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Burton Susenheimer,” recognised Hatman. “I’ve seen your file.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who the hell are you?” Susenheimer demanded again. “How did you get here? Why are you naked? And transparent?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hey, there’s our kit!” recognised CSFB!, leaping over hundreds of back issues of The Frontiersman and old TV guides towards the pile where his Silly Suit and Jay’s Hatility Belt were casually discarded under a rickety desk beneath a pile of nuns’ habits. “But damn, we’re intangible,” he added, finding he couldn’t pick anything up.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’re the Lair Legion, Susenheimer,” Hatman warned the mutate. “We’re here to question you about the disappearance of Francis Cornhill.”     The fat balding villain snorted derisively. “First off, I’m not Susenheimer now. Susenheimer died when the mutate-wipe event happened. I’m what was left behind, his consciousness imprinted on the machine he was manipulating at the time. I… am the Phantom Elevator!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Really?” Jay asked sceptically. “You chose that name voluntarily?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Um, Hatty,” worried Dream. “This metal container under my Silly Suit, it looks a lot like a brain compartment.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Secondly,” went on the Phantom Elevator, “you’re rather too late to help Cornhill now. The contract was to deliver him and his briefcase up to some very serious people. I diverted his elevator car to theirs and they were waiting for him. When you hire the Phantom Elevator you’re hiring the best.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And when I say brain compartment, I mean the brain compartment in Yuki’s cyborg body,” CSFB! persisted.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh yes, that was kind of funny,” the Phantom Elevator snickered. “But she’s no fun now I’ve got her. Just a kind of fancy paperweight. Perhaps I should have left the brain and taken the body? At least I could have had some fun with that.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yuki can’t live for long without her body’s life-support system,” Hatman said, his face darkening with rage. “Buddy, you’re going to stand down now, return the stuff you stole, and co-operate with us in finding the people who kidnapped Cornhill.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Or what?” sneered Susenheimer. “You’ll ghost me to death? Right here in my own pocket reality, where I’m god?” He picked up a remote control from a pile beside a dismantled TV set. “I’ve worked out what you are now, some kind of minor psychic projection. Next time at least send nude ghost chicks.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Next time we’re sending the whole Lair Legion to kick your ass,” promised CrazySugarFreakBoy!     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hmm, good luck with that,” mocked the Phantom Elevator. “Bearing in mind that I can control any elevator anywhere on the planet, shifting it from place to place, taking what I want from it, adding what I want to it. I could flay the flesh off every person riding an elevator. I could make them all appear in the same car, all at once, a half million people squashed intone tiny cube. I could do all kinds of nasty things. So maybe you losers should think again about messing with me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’ll not only mess with you,” Hatman warned him. “We’re going to bring you…”     The Phantom Elevator pressed his remote and ejected the intruders from his pocket dimension. “Bored of you now,” he told them. He turned and stared at the ancient lift shafts on the wall behind him. “Now where can I find a cute blonde co-ed who’s going to go down?” he speculated. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't.” Yuki Shiro entered the Lair Legion Committee Room and did a little twirl to show off the dress she’d borrowed from Marie Murcheson. It was a pale blue and it flared out to a hem just above the top of her knee-socks. “And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?” she concluded.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Now she’s dressing as Alice in Wonderland as well?” Al B. Harper sighed. “Yuki is so going to kill us when she gets back to her body.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think she looks quite pretty,” Asil Ashling argued. “And it is much better than the outfit Flapjack picked out for her.”     Hatman shuddered. “Can we all sit down so we can get on with the meeting?” he called. “Um, best to sit on a chair, Yuki, not on the Librarian. Best not to absorb the chair, Shoggoth.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It has a pleasing rugosity,” bubbled the Manga Shoggoth.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We’ve had better days, haven’t we?” sighed Lee Bookman, rubbing his forehead. He quickly reached out to stop his spectacles shimmying across the table towards CrazySugarFreakBoy!     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s true that this Phantom Elevator has damaged our effectiveness as a crimefighting entity,” agreed Mr Epitome, “but he poses a far greater threat in the longer term, if indeed he can project his influence to any elevator shaft anywhere on Earth.” He looked uncomfortable. “The report I made recommending the temporary shut-down of all federal elevator banks did not go down well. Herbert Garrick indulged in sarcasm.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You know, Messenger dropped him down a liftshaft once before,” the Librarian noted speculatively.     CSFB! cheered up. “Wait, you mean there’s still a chance the President could wind up in Bosnia in nothing but his jockey shorts?” Behind him the wall-portrait of spiffy jiggled in agreement.     Hatman leaned forward. “Thanks to our various lines of research we now know the name and nature of the adversary we’re up against. We know roughly how he gained his powers and roughly how they work. Question is, can we now find him and stop him?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And in the next four hours,” added the Librarian, “before Yuki’s emergency life-support to her brain-housing runs out of power.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It was much pleasanter at home,” agreed Yuki, “when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Do we really need to take her with us?” demanded Epitome.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I might need to do emergency reconnection of her brain casing,” Al B. Harper reasoned. “Plus, she has all the physical functions that Yuki usually has, if only we can get her to access them.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s another reason to take her along,” argued Asil. “Flapjack was also hoping to access some of her physical functions.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change,” Yuki sighed.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Can someone please shut her up?” Mr Epitome growled. “Couldn’t we reprogram her with something else now?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Best to leave well enough alone,” recommended Al B. “Better Alice than so many of the alternatives.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Flapjack has a list of requests,” Asil shuddered. “Who is Anais Nin?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So what do we do?” Hatman asked. “How do we go about finding and capturing this Phantom Elevator?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“He is cheating by using transient sub-planes,” complained the Shoggoth in aggrieved tones. Then his dribbling bits of protoplasm perked up, resisted the force puling them towards CSFB! and joined together again. “Of course, we could always create transient sub-sub planes,” he offered. “You don’t actually need this reality any more, do you?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Any other plans?” Hatman pressed on.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think there’s a way in,” Dr Harper posited. He dropped a pile of budget analysis reports from Amber St Clare on the table and indicated the sprawling marginal scribbling defacing the paperwork. “If we go back to Herringcarp, where Susenheimer had his accident, we might be able to recreate the original portal that he opened to whatever space it was that Hat and Dream visited. If we could just open an inverse-vector interstitial tunnel with a zero-point variance…”     Fortunately the archscientist had to slam his hand down on his research notes just then to stop CSFB!’s poltergeists scattering them across the room.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We need to be sure about this,” Mr Epitome warned. “So far this villain has made monkeys of the team every time we’ve encountered him. I mean more than usual.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I've often seen a cat without a grin,” agreed Yuki, “but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever say in my life!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Okay,” declared Hatman. “Here’s what we’ll do…” ***     The Phantom Elevator didn’t have a physical body anymore after the accident where he’d been using his powers to escape when the anti-mutate wave had gone off. He’d simply become a disembodied psionic sentience that could manifest only through elevator shafts and their mechanisms. His previous psychic control over machinery allowed him to do all kinds of weird and amazing things, and his self-image as the former Burton Susenheimer allowed him to sometimes picture himself as he once was in a physical workshop in an imaginary plane, but that was all.     However, his recent encounters with the Lair Legion had offered some intriguing new possibilities to the mercenary trickster.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hello there, Shadow Cabinet,” he said, using an emergency phone in a steel and glass elevator in Durban, Australia to dial into the Ghost Switchboard. “I hope you’re enjoying the hell out of whatever you wanted that fed guy for. But listen, I’ve got a request. An offer. Whatever.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Our business with you is transacted, Mr Susenheimer,” came back the quiet, almost whispered reply. “The funds are in your Caymans account.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, I know. Thanks. Receipt in the mail and all that. But I was wondering… How badly do you guys need the Lair Legion now? I mean all that stuff there used to be about not taking them out… That was before the war, right? They’re not still protected?”     There was a pause at the other end of the line, then the voice replied, “What are you proposing, Mr Susenheimer?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, the Hooded Hood’s dead and gone, right? He won’t be coming back? So nothing bad could happen to me there if I took out his pets? So if the Shadow Cabinet okays it as well… And you could protect me if the Hood was to… I could just make them all go away.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What are you proposing, Mr Susenheimer?” Exactly the same inflections as before.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“See, the Legion’s got some interesting stuff. I haven’t yet worked out how to get into Hatman’s Hatility Belt but I’m getting close. And I think if CSFB! wasn’t alive any more I could tame his Silly Suit as well. And I was thinking… there’s this energy inside Mr Epitome, amazing stuff, that I could teleport out and into me. It’s really special, and with that, and the Silly Suit, and maybe some of Al B. Harper’s smarts, I could probably have a body again. A super-body.” He chuckled a little. “And then I could find a good use for that Yuki chick’s cyborg shell. Oh yeah!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You seek to eliminate the Lair Legion to strip them down for parts?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hey, I’ve been making monkeys of them ever since they crossed me. I’m the Phantom Elevator. They’ve no way of stopping me. No way of resisting me. All I need to do is trap a bunch of schoolkids in a shaft somewhere, swap them into a car in a burning buildingsomewhere, and wait for the heroes to come running. Then it’s just a matter of taking what I want. Like their internal organs.” He chuckled for a while. “Or their skeletons. It’d be pretty funny to see them flopping about without any bones.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You may initiate aggression against the Lair Legion,” replied the dry voice at the end of the ghost phone. The line went dead. Or more dead.     The Phantom Elevator punched the air. “Oh yeah! Divine Spark here I come! Watch out world. I’m outta the elevator and into your faces!”     His sensitivity to activity in lifts across the globe – all lifts across the globe – alerted him to his enemies’ latest piece of foolishness. “Oh boy,” he chuckled, flexing his imaginary fingers and cracking his imaginary knuckles, “Showtime!” ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“How sure are you that this is going to work?” demanded the Librarian. “Only the last time I got into one of these things Yuki tried to pull my head off.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh, I beg your pardon!” exclaimed Yuki with wide-eyed dismay.     Mr Epitome sighed.     The Lair Legion were gathered outside the original elevator car where Francis Cornhill had disappeared. Al B. Harper was attaching crocodile clip cable-ends to the doors. At the other end of the wires CrazySugarFreakBoy! was porting a massive backpack that sparked and steamed as various diodes and electrodes flashed and fizzed. Behind him Hatman was turning the cycle pedals that kept it operating.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Another red letter day for the Lair Legion, then,” sighed the Librarian. “We’re all going to die.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It proves nothing of the sort!” objected Yuki, scowling prettily. “Why, you don't even know what they're about!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is it too late to programme her with Emmanuelle?” CSFB! wheedled. “Please?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Let’s go,” Hatman ordered. “We have things to do. The clock’s ticking on the life support on Yuki’s brain.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Is the device fully wound up?” Al B. demanded. “Then into the car.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“All of us?” Mr Epitome objected. “What happened to back ups?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The anti-teleport generator only protects us within a very limited range, and if we’re in bodily contact,” the archscientist lectured. “but it can’t stop whatever else the Phantom Elevator decides to throw at us, and that’s why we need the muscle.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Just think of it as stuffing Dr Harper into a really big locker,” the Librarian offered helpfully.     Yuki looked doubtfully at the darkened metal box in the Memphis FBI headquarters.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s just like a rabbit hole,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! encouraged her. “Yuki, we’re gonna need you.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, I shan't go, at any rate. Besides, that's not a regular rule: you invented it just now.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Please help us,” Hatman asked. “Alice?” “Everybody says ‘come on!’ here,” pouted Yuki. “I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!”     Mr Epitome lost patience, grabbed the cyborg P.I., and hauled her into the car. She squeaked in surprise, said “`If you can't be civil, you'd better finish the story for yourself!” then punched him back into the wall.     The Legion were all inside. The car doors closed and it descended rapidly. The emergency speaker let out a wicked chuckle. “You folks are even dumber than I thought.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Susenheimer,” Hatman called, pulling on his Jets hat and rising to slow the car’s descent. “This is your last chance to surrender quietly.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh please,” scorned the Phantom Elevator, “You people have no idea who you’re up against. I don’t know how you survived this long against your enemies. Maybe all the good Legionnaires got killed off by the Parody Master?”     Mr Epitome hammered a fist through the wall of the elevator to try and slow the descent. His arm began to blister in the lava outside.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Secret headquarters of Baron Zemo,” the Phantom Elevator gloated. “He built this one under a volcano. The elevator shaft goes right through the magma. I’ve been saving this one.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Uh oh,” swallowed CSFB!     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Al, get the force field up,” commanded Hatman.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!'” objected Yuki as the lava began to seep into the car around Mr Epitome’s blocking arm.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The force-field, Al,” Hatty urged.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, I’m on it,” Dr Harper promised, fiddling with CSFB!s backpack. “But there’s a kind of problem.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“A problem?” demanded the Librarian sharply. “What kind of problem?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, you know how I shielded the equipment that shields us from the Elevator’s teleport effects?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“How should I know?” Yuki asked. “It's no business of mine.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It seems like the shielding around the power source for the equipment could have been a little bit better,” Al concluded.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“How much better?” grimaced Mr Epitome.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sufficiently good to prevent me from teleporting it away to me,” noted the Phantom Elevator. “Oh dear. And now all your fancy equipment can’t stop me doing terrible things to you.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You teleported Al’s power source out of my backpack and into your evil lair?” CrazySugarFreakBoy! asked. His face burst into a wide beaming grin. “Excellent!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Excellent?” puzzled the Phantom Elevator. “Are you mad?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It would be the only logical response to seeing the universe in its proper form,” advised the Manga Shoggoth as he bubbled out of the power core that had been transported to the Elevator’s transient psionic plane. “Hello.” ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Aaaaggh!” screamed the former Burton Susenheimer as the gelid monstrosity formed up before him. “Aaaaaagghhhhh!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That’s it,” the Shoggoth encouraged. “Chest and vocal exercises are considered very helpful in maintaining those fragile little bodies you humans insist on.”     The Elevator pulled himself together. “I’m a god here,” he snarled. “God!” He willed it and the Shoggoth was ejected to a shopping mall elevator bank in Nova Scotia.     The other fragments of Shoggoth biomass that had been shed previously each began to grow. “Although I have noticed that your species begins to neglect those exercises if their heads are removed from their remaining cellular unity,” he noted reflectively. “Perhaps you just need to practice more.”     The Phantom Elevator desperately shifted the new intruders each to some location across the globe.     More blobs of Shoggoth bled out. “You might also want to work on your psionic control of multiple targets at the same moment in your limited temporal dimension,” he advised. “Would it help if I subdivided your biomass several times so each could concentrate on a different task?”     The Elevator stifled a scream and hurled the last of the Shoggoth matter away.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’ll have to excuse me,” the loathsome elder being told him, popping back for a moment. “I have to be somewhen else.”     Susenheimer collapsed to his virtual floor, sweating and swearing.     Behind him the doors of the central elevator car pinged.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that,” Yuki Shiro confided to the Phantom Elevator.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Lair Legion, Line Up!” confided Hatman. ***     Epitome, Hatty, and Yuki managed to get out of the car before Susenheimer slammed the door shut and sent it plummeting to shatter down the Taipei 101 lift shaft in the tallest building in the world.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Did you get it?” Al B. demanded of Lee Bookman as they plummeted to their deaths. “Tell me you got it.”     The Librarian removed his fingers from the electronic push-button console plate of the futuristic elevator cage. “I have it,” he confirmed. “I know exactly where and when Cornhill was sent.”     Al B. pulled the secondary power source from his waistband and snapped it into the equipment strapped to CrazySugarFreakBoy! The complicated apparatus fired up immediately.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Boy, I love it when the bad guys underestimate us,” CSFB! snickered.     The Manga Shoggoth bubbled from the phial in the Librarian’s pocket and assumed a vaguely humanoid silhouette. “Is it time for us to ignore your silly laws of temporal physics now?” he asked hopefully.     The Librarian transferred co-ordinates into the device. Al B. pulled a big lever on the backpack’s control panel. CSFB! yelped then whoopeed as his excess chaos energies mixed in with the transportation field. “Did I mention it also travels in time?”     The car doors opened onto a dark underground holding area where four identical men in black were manhandling a captured FBI agent they’d just pulled from this very elevator car. A fifth man in black was holding a briefcase full of vital primary case documents.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Wah-hoo!” shrieked CSFB! as he shucked off the scientific equipment and bounced at the bad guys.     The Manga Shoggoth sniffed. “This is a very interesting secret base inside a virtual tesseract,” he noted, “but I can see how it could be improved.” And he went to work.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Special Agent Cornhill?” said Lee Bookman to the somewhat agitated FBI courier who was scrabbling to retrieve his document bag, “We’re the Lair Legion. Can we offer you a lift home?” ***     Mr Epitome moved towards the paunchy criminal scrabbling away from him. “Burton Susenheimer, you are under arrest.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t think so,” snarled the Phantom Elevator, gesturing to evict the paragon of power from the chamber.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I do,” countered Hatman. The capped crusader had retrieved his Hatility Belt from the workbench where Susenheimer had been trying to pry it open and had pulled on his Thinking Cap. “Transient conceptual plane, correct?” he noted in Harvard tones. “Ergo dissociated intellectual reinforcement from any cognitive source is likely to offset your frankly ignorant attempts to extradite us from this v-space paradigm.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“`Pray don't trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,” begged Yuki, moving into the room and retrieving her brain-capsule.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It gets better,” Mr Epitome noted, “because from what I gather, this whole place is pretty much you. So if I slam my fist into the wall like this…”     The Phantom Elevator screamed.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Surrender, ignoramus,” Hatman called. “Or we will continue and expand our aggressive endeavours.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You still can’t win!” the Phantom Elevator spat. “I’ve got hostages. Thousands of hostages. How many people do you think are travelling by elevator right now, huh? How many can I snuff out with just a thought? Well?”     Mr Epitome paused, his fist still bunched to take out the floor.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I thought so,” mocked the Phantom Elevator. “Weak. Vulnerable.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Who cares for you?” shouted Yuki, bowling her brain-casing right at the physical manifestation of Susenheimer. “You're nothing but a pack of cards!”     The titanium-reinforced shell splattered Susenheimer’s head like a ripe tomato, sending the Phantom Elevator spinning backwards onto his own floor.     The virtual space quaked.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Crude but possibly effective,” owned Epitome. “At least for now. But can we keep him down?”     Hatman reached down into the gory mess and pulled Susenheimer’s bloody baseball cap from the remains. “I think I can shut him down,” answered the capped crusader as he jammed the virtual hat onto his cranium. ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I just thought you’d like to know,” Hatman told Edward Cromlyn, “We’re still alive. The Phantom Elevator is back to being human and safe in the Safe. We recovered the documents for the Shadow Cabinet space and shut down a very suspicious complex hidden inside a tesseract construct in Maine. Good guys win, bad guys lose. Enjoy your cell time. Bye.” ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I thought it was very ungrateful of those Men in Black,” the Shoggoth told Ebony in hurt tones. “I went to the trouble of redesigning their tesseract to have far more space and time and a few other useful dimensions and all they would do was gibber and explode. It was very disheartening.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, you never did have very good taste in curtains,” his high priestess told him honestly. “But at least you tried.” ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What do you think?” speculated the Librarian. “The baddies had set the base to self-destruct when we got there, so technically that made all the data in their systems endangered. And the Moon Public Library is all about preserving information for future generations, especially material that might be lost. So I had no choice really but to get D.D. to start uploading the stuff before it all went bang.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think you’re right,” agreed     Hallie, pulling on her virtual spectacles. “When we finally get this little lot decrypted it could be very interesting indeed.” ***     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Wake up, Yuki dear!” misquoted Al B Harper with a smile. “Why, what a long sleep you've had!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What happened?” demanded Yuki as Al B. reconnected her organic brain to her cyborg shell. “Why am I dressed like a Victorian schoolgirl? Why is CSFB! grinning? Why has he got a camera?” She paused to review a flash memory update, then flexed Harper aside. “Foxglove!” she thundered, racing after the wired wonder. “Get back here and die!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think you mean or die,” suggested the flattened archscientist.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I know what I mean!” the cyborg P.I. shouted back, vanishing down the corridor. “Foxgloooove!!” *** Next Issue: Caph is back! The Caphans go home (well some of them)! The Juniors come back! Vizh gets gainful employment (of a sort)! Oh, and Galactivac the Living Death that Sucks wants a word. That’s in UT#325: Untold Tales of the Parodyverse: On the Problems of the Modern Educational System, or School Rules (or whatever I end up calling it), coming sometime to a PVB near you! *** The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse 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.

...since your stories tend to have a lot of nudity in them.

I'm glad to see the team putting a plan together, and I do admit I'm enjoying the smaller cast. Couldn't Hallie interface with Yuki's body and "drive" until they get her brain back though?

~Hat~