Previous Post Dancer #47: “And how exactly did Rabito get trapped in the crawlspace behind Al’s experimental multiplanar chocolate fountain?” Yuki Shiro, cyborg private eye: Hello. I’m Yuki Shiro, cyborg private eye, and also security advisor here at Parody Island, home of the world famous Lair Legion. You’ve seen me before on such adventures as the Parody War, the Moderator Saga, and that last one that went on for ages and ages where we all wore fur bikinis. Lee Bookman, the Librarian for the Moon Public Library (which is a Public Library on the Moon): I’m Lee Bookman, Librarian for the Moon Public Library. I do not wear a fur bikini. Yuki Shiro: That’s not what CrazySugarFreakBoy! said in his interview with Parodiopolis Today. Then again, he claimed to have a ten inch… Lee Bookman: I have the issue on file. It required much better editing. A bit like CrazySugarFreakBoy! Anyhow, that’s not the reason that we are here today. Shall we get on and tell the people why we are here today breaking the fourth wall? Yuki Shiro: Because we’ve already broken all the others? Who thought it would be good therapy to invite the Yurt round to Yo’s Thankgiving Party Bunny Hunt anyway? And how exactly did Rabito get trapped in the crawlspace behind Al’s experimental multiplanar chocolate fountain? Lee Bookman: I don’t know. When you’ve finished the security report I’ll file a copy. Using tongs. Maybe Rabito was looking for Hatman, who seems to have gone very quiet recently and probably needs all his friends to e-mail him in some kind of co-ordinated campaign? Anyhow, shall we get on now with our prologue explanations, because otherwise this chapter’s just going to go on and on forever, and its not like we get the number of replies an Untold Tales does. Yuki Shiro: Point. Also, people are really only tuning in to find out more about Dark Thugos’ guest appearance in the series. Dark Thugos staying with Dancer’s friend, Vizh’s adopted sister waitress Sarah Shepherdson is comedy gold. Otherwise the series would be back to a long stream of sexual misunderstandings between characters who should really be out there having major crimefighting action adventures. Lee Bookman: Or reading. Yuki Shiro: So I guess I’ll summarise the main characters in what will probably get filed under “Why our rebuilding and redecoration budget has taken yet another major hit and has now spent up the allocation for 2077, and why Vizh is probably going to get an insurance premium on his Pinto that will pay off the American national debt.” Lee Bookman: Actually it will be filed under GTYH/299485-399459/ER877-Apple. Naturally. Yuki Shiro: Whatever. So there’s mild-mannered waitress Sarah Shepherdson, newly-appointed manager of the Bean and Donut coffee bar in central Parodiopolis, and her new roomie Dark Thugos, an intergalactic tyrant and the former cosmic Destroyer of Tales. She’s a hard-partying theatrical wannabee and he’s a planet-slaughtering gravel-faced Slightly New God with entropy eyebeams that can phase anything out of existence. Lee Bookman: Almost anything. Al seems pretty sure that the scatter destruction in Vizh’s former kitchen was only partly caused when the toaster went critical. The rest appears to be what happens when entropy eyebeams bounce off Lisa’s indestructible cat. Yuki Shiro: We’ll know for sure when the detox is finished and the radiation scrubber robots have finished their work. And when somebody can coax the proton rifle off Amber St Clare now she’s seen the paperwork this has caused. Lee Bookman: That would be a fine job for CrazySugarFreakBoy! Just saying. Yuki Shiro: So, we have Shep and we have Thugos. And then we have Rudi Tortolini, Shep’s date, who she says is possibly the perfect man for her, the One she’s always been looking for. Lee Bookman: This would be Rudi Travolta Tortolini, 23, unemployed plasterer and bathroom grouter from Dullard’s Corner, whose records indicate three juvenile offences of shoplifting, two adult offences of indecent exposure in a public place and one of theft of underwear from a clothes line, who currently owes approximated $32,455 on a variety of maxxed out credit cards, and whose online handles are SlugJumper, Sexcreeper335, PantiMan, and Bopkis_Booboobod? Yuki Shiro: That one, yes. It’s not often that she dates somebody that nice. But now we have to summarise Vizh’s family. Lee Bookman: We have to explain Vizh’s family to the folks at home? There’s absolutely no way this is going to be just a prologue. We don’t have to explain Caphans do we, because that would be a mini-series just in itself. Another mini-series, that is. Yuki Shiro: But at least people read stories with green-skinned nubile alien slave girls in them. And leave replies. Lee Bookman: Let’s just cover the basics. Which really means not the Caphans, where the basics are pretty much left uncovered at all times. Yuki Shiro: You know, as ways of explaining the plot to newbie readers this prologue really really sucks. I can see why footnotes are so popular. Anyway, Vizh lives in this transplanar lighthouse on a corner of Parody Island where the LL hang out. Lee Bookman: But no way as much as CSFB! claims. Yuki Shiro: I’m really not doing the research on that. Maybe Uhuna. Anyhow, Vizh has these two kids, Magweed and Griffin, by a Caphan we’re not describing right now even though it would probably boost readership and by the Legion’s resident artificial intelligence computer sentience Hallie. Vizh somehow, by some wildly improbable series of events, somehow got to score with Miiri and knocked her up, but for plot reasons the twins had to be gestated in Hallie’s holographic womb. At the time it all seemed to make dramatic sense. Lee Bookman: What this means is that Magweed and Griffin have two mothers, a real alien one and a virtual one. And both of them are green. The children themselves are more chartreuse. A kind of fake green. Yuki Shiro: So, naturally, after they were kidnapped to faerie and grew up to the age of eleven if just a few short issues, they came to live with their pop in his transdimensional lighthouse, along with their adopted big sister Kerry, who has Dancer-like powers of probability twisting, except that all of Kerry’s twists involve things catching fire or exploding. Or sometimes catching fire and then exploding. Lee Bookman: And it’s not as if Kerry Shepherdson actually needed any powers to make things catch fire or explode. Yuki Shiro: So, on the night of what shall henceforth be called the “Why the hell did Vizh ever allow one of the LL’s most dangerous adversaries into his living room anyway, the doofus?” incident… Lee Bookman: Or GTYH/299485-399459/ER877-Apple. Yuki Shiro: On that night, Kerry happened to be visited by her boyfriend Danny Lyle, a supervillain with the ability to deny things happened, which is a really useful power to have when you’re dating somebody with protective male family members. Oh, and Danny’s the son of wicked archvillain the Hooded Hood, which used to be true of Dark Thugos as well before he got retconned in favour of Danny. We so need a continuity reboot in this Parodyverse. There have to be less than three people on the planet who can actually follow this stuff now! Lee Bookman: They just need to read more. And reply. They could start with GTPP/299485-391762/EJ922-Cupcake then progress on to GTPP/299499-391412/EY015-Chocolate Biscuit, and then maybe GTPQ/299297-391504/EJ851-Mouldy Breadroll. With the footnotes. Yuki Shiro: So, we have Vizh, Magweed, Griffin, Kerry, Danny, oh, and Mags and Griff’s friend Samantha Featherstone, Sir Mumphrey Wilton’s grand-daughter visiting the twins, on the night in question, when Sarah sends Dark Thugos around to be babysat by Vizh while Shep dates with Rudy. Vizh was a little hampered in saying no to this on account of his bathroom door having somehow been superglued shut while he was in there. And then a number of unfortunate events ensued. Lee Bookman: Only then? We’ve just spent a whole chapter referencing unfortunate events. We haven’t even explained the Bautistamatic Assault Toaster 5000. Yuki Shiro: Look, if we didn’t lose readers at the Rabito references they’re probably not going anywhere. Lee Bookman: Sad but true. So, folks at home, if you’ve made it this far you deserve to know the sad truth of the whole GTYH/299485-399459/ER877-Apple incident. So here’s the security camera footage of the aftermath. [Roll V/T] Hallie: Magweed, Griffin, I’d like to know exactly what happened here so I know what century you are grounded until. Magweed: It wasn’t our fault. You said we were too young to know about dating. Griffin: Although our other mother has supplied quite a few diagrams and stretching exercising in readiness for us getting The Talk. Hallie: Dating? What about dating? Who’s dating? What has Visionary done now? Samantha: Don’t worry. His breathing is regular and he was mostly shielded by the bathroom door. He’ll be just fine in a few hours, once Nats has prised him out of the toilet bowl. But we might want to find where Danny has gone before he destroys the world again. Hallie: Danny’s destroying the world again? Wasn’t twice in a row enough? Griffin: Well, technically he might just be destroying Dark Thugos, but the Earth could be collateral damage. It’s not going to come out of our allowance, is it? Magweed: It’s not like we set Kerry up on her date with Dark Thugos, after all. Hallie: ……… Samantha: It could be a lot worse. At least they’ve gone to the same nightclub where Sarah went with Rudy. Hallie: ……… Yuki: And that’s all we have time for this episode. Next time we report what actually happened and start to work up towards our big Dancer #50 issue, with special features and things. Maybe. Lee Bookman: Assuming people actually reply. And that would be issue GTYH/299489-399477/ER893-Kumquat. Yuki: I’m so out of here. [To be continued in #GTYH/299487-399462/ER871-Slightly Dodgy-Looking Canapé] Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2008 reserved by Sarah Shepherdson. 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 Sarah Shepherdson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

You make it sound like this stuff isn't straightforward and easy to follow...

Nice job using two characters who don't often get in on the wackiness of a Dancer story! Surely it can't be easy to file the records of the LL's adventures and cross reference all of them (just ask Ian,) so I'm not surprised at the case-file names. Either Legionnaire's versions of them.

Quite a bit happened between chapters this time! All of it sounds expensive. I don't even want to know what happened to the pinto. But I think I would like to find out why Kerry went on a date with Thugos, so please do hurry with the next chapter!

And on a side note, I apologize for not contributing anything to this... I'm totally exhausted from work, as we've been in cruch time for all of this last month, which means working 7 days a week, and late nights. On the plus side, that is all supposed to end in early December, so maybe I'll actually finish up last year's Christmas story to celebrate...