“Okay” Fleabot said warily, “What’s this all about?”

Visionary smiled. “Poster Yo has been gone a while, and I promised her I’d do a little something to introduce her to the whole family.”

Fleabot looked over Vizh and Hallie. “So... where are the kids?”

The virtual woman made a face. “We felt that they shouldn’t be breaking the fourth wall until they’re a little older” she argued. “There are a lot of weirdos out there.”

“Of course. Out there. So you’re going to introduce them... how?”

Visionary shrugged. “I thought I’d just do a quick summary of their backstory.”

“A-heh. No, seriously... How did you plan on catching her up to speed?”

The Regular frowned. “It’s not all that convoluted.”

“Right. Why don’t you get started then? I’m going to go make some popcorn if we’re going to settle in for the long haul.”

“It’s not that convoluted, dammit!” Visionary called after him, but to no avail. He scowled, but decided to proceed anyway. “Okay, where to start?”

“You would probably need to begin with how you knocked up an alien pleasure slave” Hallie noted flatly.

“Oh. Um, right. Okay. Did I mention recently that that wasn’t even in one of my stories? I mean, okay, the revelation of the pregnancy was in The Heart of Darkness, but the whole sex with Miiri part was totally a Hooded Hood plot!”

“Really? That’s what you’re going with?”

“It was! Literally a Hooded Hood plot!” Visionary objected. “He created the scantily clad Caphan women and dropped them in my lap...” He noticed the raised holographic eyebrow and hastily rephrased. “Er, that is, he entrusted them to my care. I’m the one who wrote all those stories about how I didn’t take advantage of the situation at all!”

“That would include the story where they all modeled bathing suits for you?”

“Um...”

“I’m not missing anything juicy am I?” Fleabot called out from the kitchen. “Only I thought I’d take the time to pop the kernels on the stove... they taste so much better that way.”

“You don’t even eat anything!” Visionary yelled back.

“Just be sure not to finish up before I get back. How far along are you now?”

“He’s just getting to the conception” Hallie supplied helpfully.

“Oh. Well, at least we know that that part was probably pretty brief.”

“Hey!” Visionary objected.

Hallie leveled a steady gaze at him. “Did you want to draw that part out then?”

The possibly fake man didn’t need to ponder it for long. “So, uh... in a Hooded Hood written story, Miiri exercised her new-found freedom to choose to um... thank me. And I was totally not in any relationship at the time, something that I feel needs to be stressed.”

“Noted” Hallie allowed with a tight smile. “It's only fair. Let’s jump forward to the part where you were cursed, and your heart was rotting from the inside. For brevity's sake”

“Aheh... right” Visionary agreed. “Anyway, there was this big adventure with me dueling this Caphan hero and Lemuria and the Shaggoth and Nega-Bombs and such while at home Hallie and Fleabot fought with some ghouls under the mansion and stopped a guy from the past from killing me through mystical means. The end result of all that was that I kind of had a massive coronary, and this undying evil named Nyarlurkhotep took up residence in my heart to use me as a vessel for his rebirth or something.”

“Do you guys like butter on your popcorn?” Fleabot hollered. “I’m thinking of churning some.”

“Okay, so it’s a little convoluted!” Visionary growled back. He sighed then continued. “So anyway, it was in this story that Miiri’s pregnancy is revealed while I’m out having misadventures and dealing with the Kerry situation... you remember Dancer’s younger sister?”

“Sarah is Dancer? I’m not supposed to know that, am I?” Hallie asked.

“Try not to remember it when we get back in continuity then” Visionary suggested. “Anyway, Kerry had been living as my ward, and Social Services was going to take her away from me for a variety of reasons.”

“One of which was that you were a pervert.”

“Unfounded, totally trumped up reasons.”

“Of course.”

“Anyway, during the course of my misadventures, I ended up on a kind of mistaken blind date with a party ghoul named Ursula...”

“Amazing how that happens.”

“...and she took me to the Willow nightclub owned by fairy drug lord Camellia Le Fey where things kind of came to a head. Basically, a bunch of the subplots converged, most of the characters involved showed up, and, um... Camellia’s nightclub kind of blew up. Possibly shifted dimensions and then blew up. She wasn’t a big fan of mine.”

“Amazing how often that happens as well” Hallie noted, not as unkindly.

Visionary nodded. “Anyway, before things went quite that far, she took interest in Miiri, on account of her carrying an unborn child. I guess Fairies have a thing about messing with children...” he noted darkly.

Hallie grew grim. “I liked the earlier part of this story better” she decided.

“Camellia cursed Miiri’s womb with her magic. The child she was carrying was damaged and would not be able to survive... and so we hatched a desperate plan and with the help of Dr. Moo and some crazy science, we were able to digitize the child and Hallie carried her to term as a surrogate mother.”

“It was the only way to try and repair the genetic damage that had been done” Hallie noted. “Her little code was so frayed and falling apart... and there was so much of it, far more than we calculated. I barely was able to hold onto it all... even with the extra computational power of the Celestians.” She paused. “I wasn’t able to do it perfectly.”

They both fell silent for a moment before Visionary continued. “When little Naari... that was the name she was given by Miiri... It means “most beloved in all the world”. When little Naari was actually fully brought into the world, she was heavily scarred and withered on her left side. This was a dark part of the story... we almost didn’t make it through that. It appeared that Naari had not survived the birth.”

“It was a lie” Hallie spat. “That bitch Camellia had stolen our child. We hit back... hard. But we were too late. Naari had already been spirited away to the Mythlands where Camellia intended to raise her as a puppet to overthrow the Faerie Queene. Her unusual heritage made her a match for the prophesied conditions necessary for a successor.” Her eyes blazed. “But she was our little girl.”

“Which is to say, we went after her” Visionary supplied needlessly.

“Okay, so where are we now?” Fleabot asked, appearing while somehow carrying a large bowl of buttered popcorn.

“The Mythlands” Hallie supplied.

“Oo! The fun part” the miniscule robot approved. “Have you talked about Magweed yet? You should really set that part up.”

“It’s hard to know where to place that chronologically, since... you know” Visionary noted.

“Well, since I brought it up, we may as well dig into it” Fleabot said. “Deep in a hidden, enchanted woods within the Mythlands, a young girl lived with her “Auntie”. Auntie was a frightening, monstrous thing in the guise of a harmless old lady... but Magweed knew better than to cross her. For one thing, she kept ravening Gothemanders as pets... twisted, hate-filled lizards that prowled the woods. She was being held there on orders from her Fairy Godmother, a cold but beautiful woman who visited once each year, looking for some sign within the girl that had yet to show itself.”

“He’s good at this storytelling thing, isn’t he?” Visionary noted.

Hallie shrugged. “He was dating Quoth... I’m pretty sure you need to lay out some good narration to turn her head.”

Fleabot ignored them and continued. “Magweed’s only solace was in the harmless animals that made the woods their home, overlooked as unimportant by Auntie and her dark Godmother. Magweed befriended the creatures of the forest, and she was loved as the beautiful fairy princess she was raised to be. Magweed also had a secret ally, known only to her... her imaginary friend Griffin. With his sharp eagle eyes and his swift wings, he could go places and see things that she could not. He could report back to her, and watch out for her. No one else could see or hear him, or detect him at all.

Griffin knew some troubling things about Auntie and Magweed’s Godmother. He knew that Magweed wasn’t the first child to be raised in those woods as a potential Fairy Princess. He knew about that dark cellar under the house, where those stolen children had gone and never returned after failing to develop into suitable candidates. And he knew that the Godmother was returning with rumors of another stolen child, with the child’s parents in pursuit. He knew that Magweed was running out of time.”

Visionary was happily munching on the popcorn, enthralled.

“You should probably cover the Parody War now” Hallie suggested.

The fake man swallowed. “Right, okay...” He tapped his chin. “Well, basically the Parody Master came back and started this big war.”

“He truly is a master storyteller” Fleabot noted, rolling his eyes. “Hard to imagine that all of his audience eventually wandered off.”

“Hush” Hallie chided him. “Brevity has its appeal too.”

“You think this still counts as brief?”

”As I was saying...” Visionary continued, “There was this huge war going on. I mean “epic”. I don’t want to even guess at how many issues of Untold Tales it encompassed. It raged all through creation, and the Lair Legion was stretched to the brink keeping the Parodyverse from being snuffed out. So, it was kind of a bad time to recruit teammates to ditch all of that, head to the Mythlands and chase down Camellia. I wasn’t really happy about it, but I eventually had to agree that getting Naari back probably didn’t benefit any of us much if the universe ceased to exist while we were doing so.”

“So we put together our own team to go after her” Hallie provided. “Vizh, myself, Miiri, Fleabot, Flapjack, Asil, Ruby Weaver-- Soceress’s cousin from way back... she had kind of betrayed the Legion and wrote a tell-all book filled with lies about us. She was something of a redemption case. Tanner, Ruby’s werewolf friend from the Laundromat where she works. George Gedney, a young man who had inherited Mumphrey’s pocket watch and cosmic office and had a thing for Asil. Oh, and complete bastard Con Johnstantine, the sleazy guy who is always sleeping with Vizh’s sister Dancer.”

“Sarah is Dancer?” Fleabot asked.

“We’re supposed to forget about that when we get back in continuity.”

“Oh. So you covered the part where Vizh got adopted by Dancer’s mom?”

Visionary paused. “Um. I think we forgot that. Anyway, that happened. It was part of some legal wranglings by Lisa to resolved that whleo mess with Kerry’s guardianship that I brought up a while back. So I’m technically a Shepherdson now, although Kerry insists that I not use the last name, or, you know... ever be seen around her. Sarah and Kerry are my sisters.”

“Not convoluted at all” Fleabot noted.

“Shut up.”

“I swear, if this summary goes extra chapters I will slap the two of you” Hallie threatened.

“Right. So our somewhat motley party headed through a portal to the Mythlands and had some really fun adventures. Fleabot turned into clockwork and had to be constantly wound. Hallie turned to flesh and wore a very interesting pixie outfit...”

“Says the man who had the furry loincloth” she muttered.

“The three of us and Flapjack got separated from the rest, and had our own misadventures while they got swept up in the Parody War conflict, which had spread all the way to the Mythlands by that point. There was a part where Hallie got turned into a centaur, and the bit with the nymphs...”

“Again, funny how “bits with nymphs” keep cropping up in your adventures” Hallie noted.

“You know, HH and I shared a lot of the writing of this story arc...”

“And did he write that part?”

“Um... moving on.”

“While all of that was going on, Griffin was planning an escape with Magweed” Fleabot supplied. “He led her through their enchanted forest to the edges of the dreaded Witchwood, where they were forbidden to go because the horrible witch who lived there was mortal enemies with Magweed’s Godmother. It was there, however, that Magweed had a change of heart... she was worried that a new child being kept by Auntie wouldn’t have a Griffin to look after her. She insisted that they needed to go back and rescue the new princess that Camellia was bringing. However, before they could resolve what to do, Zebulon the elf...”

“Remember him?” Visionary asked. “Short guy. Used to work for Santa until he held a bunch of us hostage in that Christmas story I always repost. He was in this story too, working for the Faerie Queene and ordered to assassinate Camellia’s would-be princess.”

“I could have grown and harvested the popcorn myself at this rate” Fleabot muttered. “So Zebulon shows up and fires a crossbow at Magweed at the same time the fearsome witch of the woods arrives and freezes all of the players (and crossbow bolts) in place with a spell.”

“All but Griffin, naturally, who runs to find help somewhere, somehow” Hallie supplied.

“What he finds is us” Visionary said proudly. “Minus Flapjack and Fleabot, that is. Hallie and I find Auntie’s deserted cottage and investigate. In his desperation to contact help for Magweed, he finally manages to communicate with someone else. And that’s when the pieces all fall into place... Griffin isn’t Magweed’s imaginary friend, he’s her twin brother. And Magweed *is* Naari.”

“The curse that Camellia had placed on Miiri had damaged Naari’s left side, but it had all but destroyed the twin brother who had shared the womb with her” Hallie explained. “However, traces of him hung on and when Naari was digitized, Griffin was as well... that’s why there was so much more data than I expected! I didn’t know about him, and so he had no body to be redigitized, but he hung on nonetheless and stayed by Naari as a ghostly presence.”

“It wasn’t until he met us that he was able to finally become tangible and detectable again” Visionary said. “Only he wasn’t actually a griffin like the two of them imagined he was... he was just young boy of Magweed’s age. Due to the shifting of time between the Mythlands and the Parodyverse, they had lived for more than a decade in those woods in the short time it took for us to come after them.”

“We missed out on sharing so much of their childhood because that monster stole them from us” Hallie seethed.

“She gets hers in the end” Visionary noted. “Griffin led us back to the Witchwoods to rescue Magweed, but it turned out that the scary witch who lived there was none other than Whitney, our very own Sorceress. She helped fight off Auntie, who had been hunting after Magweed. However, we arrived just in time for the final showdown with Camellia herself. She took away the Godmotherly blessings she had given Magweed, and... the little princess weakened, and her left side took on the scarring that had befallen her as Naari” he stated sadly.

“Then, as a family, we took down that Faerie witch” the holographic woman said fiercely. “She lived, but her own magic consumed her and scarred her irreparably.”

“Karma’s a bitch” Fleabot observed.

“And, well, that’s the gist of it” Visionary said happily. “It took a while for everyone to get home again, and for the whole Parody War to resolve itself, but now we’re a family living together in a lighthouse that is usually on the cliffs of Parody Island just down a ways from the Lair Mansion. Although sometimes our Lighthouse wanders a bit. It’s...”

“Convoluted?” Fleabot asked mildly.

Visionary ignored him. “Maggie... that’s the name that Magweed Naari usually goes by, has to wear braces to help her with her weak side. She’s shy and doesn’t like to be the center of attention, but she’s still just as strong, resourceful and adventurous as she ever was as a fairy princess. She was given new Godmothers and new blessings to replace the one she lost... Sorceress, Dancer and Xander’s love interest Cleone gifted her with the kindness of small animals, natural luck and the ability to see a person’s true heart.”



“Griffin got Lisa as a Godmother” Fleabot stated. “So far, she hasn’t disclosed what he got gifted with. I certainly wouldn’t try to sue that boy, though.”

“Griffin has had a bit of trouble adjusting to being a flesh-and-blood boy rather than an imaginary Griffin. He remains fiercely loyal to his sister, however, and uses his ability to become intangible and undetectable to get into various degrees of trouble.”

“He spies like his surrogate mother” Fleabot translated.

“I do not spy.”

The other two diplomatically let that go.



“The two of them are thick as thieves with Samantha, Mumphrey’s granddaughter. I probably sleep better not knowing exactly what they get up to sometimes” Visionary said. “Honestly, considering that they’ve had to adjust to a new world, a new family... complete with two mothers, one Caphan and one digital, and all of the craziness that goes on with the Legion, I couldn’t be prouder of them... or happier overall.” He smiled at the truth of this statement.

“It actually is a pretty great phase of our lives” Hallie agreed, smiling herself.

“You certainly have gone a long way over the years” Fleabot noted. “Admittedly, most people don’t travel the route in the Married Man, Bachelor, then Family Man order, let alone with all the specific twists and turns you took, but then you were never one to take the conventional roads. I really don’t want to even contemplate how the family tree all works with the Caphan houses and your sisters and so on.” He shook his head. “Hey, speaking of which, while I was making popcorn did you cover the part where you and Dancer slept together?”

“Whoops, look at that... we’re out of time” Visionary said, closing the browser window promptly.