Post By J. Jonah Jerkson Member Since: Fri Nov 19, 2004 Posts: 140	In Reply To End times attributions from... the Hooded Hood
Subj: Cathode and Jason, and Beth Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 08:55:14 pm EST (Viewed 750 times)	Reply Subj: Untold Tales of the Normalverse #357: The Grey Horizons - Complete Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2016 at 05:31:54 am EST (Viewed 61 times)
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Previous Post Untold Tales of the Normalverse #357: The Grey Horizons Previously: Untold Tales of the Parodyverse #356: The Sky Is Falling Part Eight: The Hooded Hood and the Council of Archvillains Part Nine: Hallie and the Mundane Flood Part Ten: Lee Bookman and the Overdue Fines Part Eleven: Lara Night and the Harbingers of Armageddon Part Twelve: Vinnie de Soth and the Neccessary Sacrifices Part ThIrteen: Magweed and Griffin and the Grown-Up Decisions Part Fourteen: Marie Murchison and the Da Visionary Code Profiles of The Council of Archvillains (spoilers for chapter 8) Other cast descriptions in Who's Who in the Parodyverse Place descriptions in Where's Where in the Parodyverse Over 1000 previous stories at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom *** 8. The Hooded Hood and the Council of Archvillains Note: This scene takes place after JJJ’s tie ins The Baroness #68 and The Baroness #69     The impossible mirror shimmered and reflected Elizabeth von Zemo into a comfortable armchair. “Ah,” she sighed. “And you couldn’t do that when a meteorite was hurtling down at Schloss Shreckhausen two hours ago, Ioldabaoth?”     â€œI could,” the Hooded Hood responded from a larger chair that resembled but was not quite a throne. “I felt it would support you more to allow you to demonstrate your resourcefulness and escape destruction without intervention.”     A cup of tea had always been on a small table beside the Baroness’ seat. She sipped it. “Very considerate. Where is Cathode?”     â€œYour new assistant? She is down in the minions’ area with VelcroVixen, Clockwatcher, Browning, Davidowicz, Cacciatore, and the rest.”     From that list of henchpeople, Elizabeth drew conclusions about the guest list. “You have been calling in your peers,” she noted.     â€œIndeed.”     Suddenly there had always been a ring of armchairs around the Victorian fireplace, each supplied with its own archvillain. Elizabeth knew most of them: Magenta St Evil, the diabolical Dr Moo, Boss Deadeyes, Jethro Screwdriver, Thighmaster… “What the devil is he doing here? Was there a filing error?”     There were two others whom she had not met, but she recognised Asteroth De Soth from her files on the sorcerous clan. The other, a gaunt grey hairless creature with pointed ears and prominent teeth, eluded identification.     â€œI say! I’m here because I’m a major archvillain!” Thighmaster objected to the Baroness’ outburst. “Quite major. You can check my website!”     â€œPerhaps introductions are in order?” the Hooded Hood suggested.     â€œShall we go around the room and wear nametags?” Dr Moo asked facetiously.     â€œMost of us know Daio from her many unsuccessful schemes involving cows,” Magenta St Evil noted acidly.     â€œAt least they know me,” the bovine baddie countered. “You ruled Candia for like, five minutes and then vanished? Applying make-up for several years, I assume.”     â€œDr Moo and Magenta St Evil,” the Hooded Hood indicated. “The doctor seeks to bring all life under her biological control. She enjoys laboratories and tormenting the inferior. Ms St Evil would prefer to rewrite the Parodyverse as a 1990s comic book. Her favourite movie is Batman v Superman colon the Dawn of Justice.” He passed on. “Mr Carlton-Thomas is better known in his pocket European nation as the Thighmaster, for reasons best known to him. Despite his territory covering less area than the island of Manhattan, he has proved one of the most persistent of the age’s criminal operators.”     â€œExactly,” Thighmaster agreed. “And I once nuked France.”     â€œBecause Mumphrey Wilton told you to,” Elizabeth von Zemo sniffed.     â€œAnd what did he ask you to do, dear?” Magenta asked with a raised brow and a smirk.     â€œMr Screwdriver is one of the principal brokers facilitating underworld hiring of superhuman assets,” the Hood continued. “Many of you have done business with him, either to acquire minions or to sell on spoils of your endeavours and finance future operations. He is managing agent for many mercenary metahuman assets.”     Most of the people in the armchairs had cups of Earl Grey but Jethro raised a martini to the room.     â€œMr Ventredi controls most of Gothametropolis now,” the cowled crime czar noted, “and in consequence the majority of the Eastern American seaboard’s criminal activities. He holds much of the territory previously dominated by Mr Flask and a number of assets that were never in the Lynchpin’s territory.”     Boss Deadeyes lifted a neat scotch. “Elizabeth, Magenta, Daio. Lovely to see you ladies again. And all together, which promises to be better.”     â€œEspecially if we can get a mud bath,” Thighmaster enthused. “Ding dong!”     â€œPerhaps you just sit there and we let you live?” Dr Moo advised the ruler of Borovia.     â€œSome of you will not yet have encountered Magister de Soth,” the Hood observed. “This is de Soth senior, of course; many of you will have tripped across his infamous offspring.”     â€œVinnie’s father?” Deadeyes chuckled. “You need to get that boy in hand.”     â€œI also have a list of complaints to pass on,” the Baroness assured the clan leader of House de Soth.     â€œSave them for someone who cares,” Asteroth told her. “I’m only here to listen to what the Hooded Hood has to say. Few of the rest of you interest me.” He glared across at the red-eyed nosferatu. “I wouldn’t have stepped through that mirror at all if I’d know he was going to be here.”     â€œYesss,” agreed Vrykolakas the elder vampire. “I can sssmell your fear asss strongly asss your blood.” He sipped at a chalice of something thick and crimson.     â€œElder Vrykolakas is here at the request of Mr Ventredi,” the cowled crime czar intervened. “I have accepted him to the meeting under my peace, even though I intend to destroy him at some future opportunity for the part he played in the suffering of a… a colleague of mine. That vengeance will come later. The feud between the sorcerous Houses and the enclave of Vampire Elders must also wait.”     Elizabeth von Zemo felt an uncomfortable prickle along her spine as she recalled that it was she and her unalive grandfather who had first ejected Laurie Leyton’s spirit from her body, making it possible for the girl to be reincarnated as an amnesiac inmate of the Victorian Herringcarp Asylum. If the Hood was seeking redress for wrongs done to the ghost he had befriended in one of his murky, bloody origins then things might get very nasty eventually.     â€œMr de Soth is here representing the majority of the sorcerous Great Houses,” the hosting archvillain explained.     â€œI’m here on behalf of Clans de Soth, Harrow, Incantatrix, Coriomundi, Rouge, Ananké, and the Morgolath. The Darknesses went their own way as usual. Additionally I’m holding a proxy for the Jagganath rakshasa dynasty and a few independents like Morgosa le Fey, Daimon Soulshredder, and Baroness Morbo. I should mention that I am currently suspended from the Inner Circle of the Heck Fire Club and that it’s Black King Simonides Slaughter declined to attend this gathering.”     â€œGood riddance,” Magenta St Evil muttered audibly. She looked round as people heard her and added, “What? He’s lousy in bed. No imagination whatsoever. You’d think three hundred years would give him time to pick up a few refinements but no, not ‘Three Thrusts Simonides’.”     â€œNoted,” said Dr Moo in a tone like that often adopted by the Hooded Hood.     â€œI say!” drawled Thighmaster.     Screwdriver made a note in his personal organiser.     â€œI am alssso presssent on behalf of a conssssortium,” Vrykolakas announced. “I represent not only the Families of the night-children but alssso the Sssshapeshifter’s Guild and many of the Ghoul Collegesss, and a sssegment of the earthbound Dark Fey who do not wisssh to bow to the Sssseelie Queene yet fear more the Unsssseelie King.”     â€œWhat a power supper you have assembled, Ioldabaoth,” the Baroness admired. “Almost everyone I’d have expected and a couple of interesting new choices. And Thighmaster.”     â€œA number of invited attendees elected to decline,” the Hooded Hood revealed. “A few did not trust me or others who might be here. Some preferred different means of addressing or avoiding the current situation. The Word of Logos has apparently long prepared for such eventuality, albeit to survive not prevent it. Blackbird calculated that he is unlikely to be affected. Certain individuals and organisations have already assumed deep cover.”     â€œWhat about Master Machine and his Machine Shop?” Screwdriver suggested. “I have information that they are very much concerned by… developing circumstances. Or Peter von Doom? Or BALD?”     â€œMaster Machine has a history of random and purposeless assaults on humans that I find distasteful. As for the others, well, I am attempting some level of quality control.”     â€œYet Thighmaster is here,” Magenta pointed out.     â€œAnd you,” added Dr Moo.     â€œWell, I for one would like to hear what Mr Winkelweald is offering,” Boss Deadeyes announced. “I assume we all do, or we wouldn’t have walked into the parley by consent. So why don’t we pipe down and hear what the man has to say, huh?”     â€œAn excellent idea,” the Baroness approved. “If only I was a registered voter in GMY you might have my vote to be the new Mayor.”     â€œThanks, doll. I’ll send you a button. But right now we all got to work out what the hell’s happening to the world, and the guy in the grey cloak is our best chance for that.”     The Master of Herringcarp nodded acknowledgement of Ventredi’s prompting. “Many of you will have noted that various fundamental aspects of the rules governing the Parodyverse are changing,” he began. “This includes certain physical constants and dimensional alignments. Planar travel and by corollary teleportation, faster-than-light movement, supernatural and psychic generation of matter and energy, and a wide range of techniques and powers reliant on those connections are no longer available.”     â€œWe all came here through your Portal of Pretentiousness,” Asteroth de Soth objected. “Your Faerie Queene ex is still holding her steading gates open to accept suckers.”     â€œThe Mythlandssss are closssest of all the realmssss to the mundane plane,” Vrykolakas instructed the occultist in tones that suggested a senior mage should know this. “Faerie hassss power to maintain contactsss for a few hoursss more before the gap widensss too much. The Portal of Pretensssiousness is a primal artefact. It will be amonggssst the last of the means of travel to be closssed.”     â€œThat tallies with my assessment too,” the Hood agreed. “What we’re seeing now is only the first manifestation of the new situation.”     â€œAre those changes what are terminating the sentient robots?” Screwdriver enquired. Robot fights and killing machine resales were a significant line of his balance sheet.     â€œIndeed. Amongst the changes in what we must term ‘the rules’ of the Parodyverse are some spiritual ones. Those appear to be affecting the very ability of artificial intelligences to truly think, to be self-aware. Some machines are catastrophically crashing. Others are becoming mere automatons. A few are going rogue and causing significant harm before they terminate. Disembodied artificial intelligences are likewise affected, and as with the dimensional effects there will be a cascading ripple of consequences as the new rules bed in.”     â€œWithin twenty four hours or so it will start affecting human-personalitied hybrid creatures also,” Dr Moo reported. “My own rodent laboratory assistant included. A related but different process will likely disable and eventually cause end-of-life of most clones, bioengineered creations, alchemical revivications, and general blasphemies of science. That is a lot of work to lose. Something must be done.”     â€œSo many of our foes are helpless, stripped of their super-powers, ripe for destruction,” calculated Magenta St Evil.     â€œIndeed,” agreed the cowled crime czar. “You will not harm them.”     â€œWhaaaat?” drawled Thighmaster. “But now we can…”     â€œThere are larger issues. We will need heroes while we have them,” intoned the Hooded Hood.     â€œWhile we have them?” Deadeyes noted.     â€œIndeed. If the paradigm changes continue then the Parodyverse will shift on the multiversal probability curve. It will become, for want of a better term, normal. All super-powers will cease. Fantastic creatures will die or revert to mundane analogies. Pantheons of gods and devils and extraplanar entities will be cut off from interacting with the physical universe and will eventually diminish, wither, and perish. Even so-called weird science will not be possible.”     â€œI had a report that the SPUD helicarrier was grounded for serious technical overhaul,” Screwdriver remembered.     â€œThe science that can keep something so large in the air requires certain universal constants and effects,” the Baroness calculated.     â€œIs this why my nuclear toaster-oven is malfunctioning?” demanded Thighmaster.     Dr Moo rubbed her face worriedly. “So the metahuman genome would be eliminated. People with powers would lose them – or demise if those powers were keeping them alive. Goodbye cyborgs, mutates, Abhumans, Raccoon People, Detonator Hippos, annoying Sea Monkeys, the whole wonderful zoo!”     Screwdriver narrowed his eyes. “It’s not too bad,” he considered. “Think about it: the balance in power in a world where there’s suddenly no superhumans, no aliens to bother us, no ridiculous gadgets or impossible magic. Think about what people who are prepared for that could accomplish.” He failed to hide an anticipatory smile.     Boss Deadeyes scowled. “Yeah, well some of us are only still kicking because of an eighty year old deal brokered by him.” He gestured to Vrykolakas. “I’m guessing the warranty don’t cover this one.”     The nosferatu nodded solemnly. “If thissss phenomenon isss not averted then all must ssselect between worldssss. Even deitiessss will have to decide between fleeing to their realmsss or remaining here as mortalsss alone.”     â€œWelcome to the Normalverse,” Thighmaster reflected gloomily. “That doesn’t sound like any fun.”     â€œWithout the mad technology you hide behind, conventional forces could roll over your little fiefdom in about half a day,” Magenta St Evil assessed. “Less if supplied with the right intel,” she added thoughtfully.     â€œWhat about the Triumvirate?” Moo asked suddenly. “The great cosmic Offices: Shaper of Worlds, Chronicler of Stories, Destroyer of Tales. Isn’t it their job to prevent this kind of thing from happening? I swear, if my little sister is slacking off again with boys…”     The Hooded Hood, who was amongst those with whom Lisa had previously slacked off, cut in. “Recent events in the Parodyverse have seriously interrupted the work of the Offices. Even before the Parody War and the desolation of the Conceptual Plane there were a succession of reality disruptions, each of which took its toll. The Parody Master’s campaign destroyed many elder artefacts, including most of the instruments used by the Minor Offices as well as those who wielded them. Few have yet been replaced.”     â€œAnd then there was that Moderator plot and the Void Scholar’s gambit,” the Baroness adduced. “And then Dark Thugos’ masterplan to fracture the Wonderwall around the Parodyverse. Cosmic real estate has taken a terrible beating.”     â€œIt is a fixer upper,” Magenta admitted.     â€œEven some demon realms have proved vulnerable,” Asteroth observed quietly.     â€œAren’t there also Celestian Space Robots?” Thighmaster complained. “Aren’t they supposed to be, like, the janitors who fix up the universe and clean spills?”     â€œThose are still offline,” Magenta reported. “And still nobody will look at my redesign suggestions. They don’t even have energy blades. Or pouches.”     â€œI thought the instability was all your doing,” Dr Moo admitted to the Hooded Hood. “You know, eliminate the sheriffs so you can take what you want.”     â€œSome of it was,” admitted the cowled crime czar. “Some effort was required to draw out and neutralise the Carnifex, for example. However, the current situation is not of my making. I will stay it if I can.”     â€œLet’s cut to the chase, ladies an’ gents,” Deadeyes insisted. “Who is behind this? Who do we need to rub out?”     Now the Hooded Hood frowned. “That remains unknown, Mr Ventredi. There are indicators, however. A prophetess I once arranged for has perceived a ‘returning enemy’, so this is someone of whom we have previously heard or may have encountered. That limits the field.     â€œYou have suspicions,” Moo observed.     â€œAlways. At the moment I am cognisant of events occurring at the rim of Mutter’s Spiral and around the Dead Galaxy.”     â€œWhere you have gathered your massive armada of space pirates to conquer empires,” the Baroness accused the Hood.     â€œMany of the worlds that have now joined the Tyrant’s Alliance elected to do so of their own will,” the cowled crime czar noted. “Others were included to prevent them becoming a nuisance.”     â€œWhat does this outer-space Mars stuff have to do with anything?” Deadeyes wanted to know.     â€œThere was a power-vaccum after the Parody Master fell,” the Baroness briefed him. “The old galactic empires were wrecked. There was a chance for new conquest. The Hooded Hood took it. How many ships and worlds do you have out there now, Ioldabaoth?”     â€œNineteen hundred and thirty-eight civilisations, three hundred and eleven thousand. four hundred and seventy-one civilised planets, an armada a little over twelve million vessels strong,” reported the archvillain. “And some useful alliances and trade agreements. I hope it will be enough.”     â€œEnough for what?” boggled Thighmaster. He hoped it wasn’t to conquer Borovia.     â€œTo counter the opposition, Mr Carlton-Thomas. Another power has also arisen – or perhaps we should term it ‘returned’ – in the time since the Parody War ended.”     â€œI thought Dark Thugos and his New Pantheon were crossed off,” Screwdriver mentioned.     â€œThere is also the Cult of the Apostate. Belief in the entity has spread like wildfire across the devastated worlds left by the Parody Master. Whole empires have dedicated themselves to him, to await his ultimate incarnation.”     â€œThe Apostate?” Dr Moo snorted. “Alternate Visionary?”     â€œThe being of immense power that the Legionnaire mascot was created to keep out of existence,” de Soth corrected her. “When Visionary is erased, the Apostate may return in his full power as never before.” The sorcerer frowned. “What becomes of a possibly fake man when all creation is normalised?”     â€œAre the effects of these changes universal, then?” Magenta St Evil wanted to know. “Or is it only confined to Earth?”     â€œWe could launch Visionary off into space,” Elizabeth von Zemo considered. “Perhaps we should anyway, as a precaution?”     â€œThe new changes began here on Earth and are radiating out at around a thousand times the speed of light,” the Hooded Hood detailed. “Even so, it will be months before they affect the brewing conflict on the other side of this galaxy.”     â€œThey believe the Aposssstate is imminent?” Vrykolakas enquired.     â€œThey believe that his return will be the day after tomorrow,” warned Ioldabaoth Winkelweald. “Then there will be war.”     â€œThe Apostate is an old enemy returned,” Dr Moo admitted. “And an annoying one. What if we just shoot Visionary and retain his corpse?”     â€œThat should be tested,” the Baroness agreed.     â€œIf we whack him then his superhero buddies will have something to say about it,” Deadeyes cautioned.”     â€œHis ex-superhero buddies, you mean,” Thighmaster pointed out.     â€œThere will be no unilateral aggression against Visionary or the Lair Legion,” the Hood commanded. “There is a deeper game here. Apostate may be part of it, but not, I deem, the root.” He cradled his fingertips. “Fascinating…”     â€œSo what are we supposed to do?” the Baroness challenged. “Go home and pack a bag for normaltown? Not that some of us have homes right now.”     â€œChoissses must be made,” Vrykolakas insisted. “Sssome of us attended becaussse you ssstill have the meansss of escaping thisss disaster.”     â€œAnd we want to compare your price with Mab’s, or the Bogeyman’s, or the Hell Lords’,” Asteroth added.     The Hood looked up. “I will evacuate you, if you wish. Or I can slide you into a retcon where you will be preserved until continuity is restored – if it is restored. I have already arranged a number of such provisions. In short, I can shift you and yours out of disaster’s way before the Portal’s power is exhausted. There is no charge.”     â€œNo charge?” Deadeyes echoed. “Winkelweald, you’re not dealing with chumps here…”     â€œHe said it. He means it,” the Baroness understood. “This isn’t one of his schemes. So he won’t profit from it, or profiteer. That would spoil his satisfaction at his eventual victory. He wants to triumph despite, not because of, what’s happening now.”     â€œYou’ll just let us… vanish?” Thighmaster checked. “Evacuate offworld or.. or to some place where this isn’t happening? Um, can you do all Borovia?”     â€œFreeze frozen for preservation,” de Soth snorted. “I’ll take a trip to one of the deep Myth planes but not to retcon-land.”     â€œAs you elect,” the Hooded Hood told him. “I trust you will make your preparations in haste. The situation has escalated. The Nexus of Unreality has begun its migration cycle.”     Vrykolakas hissed. “Isss that what it isss? That psssychic sssscrreching that will not ceassse?”     â€œThe Nexus?” the Baroness asked. She glanced at Moo for technical support. “Couldn’t that transfer be cause of the other effects? After all, its presence on Earth provoked pretty much all the other weirdness we now take for granted. It made us ‘the focus planet’ of the Parodyverse.”     â€œI do not yet have enough information to be sure,” the Hood admitted. “I may have to consult with… others.”     â€œI bet Mumphrey is already there,” Elizabeth von Zemo smirked.     â€œThere was trouble with the Nexus a while back,” de Soth observed. “My… Vincent interfered when it was being harnessed to weaponise ghosts. Then there was a mystery where the President’s plane went down…”     â€œI dealt with that,” the Hooded Hood answered curtly. It had been his teddy bear that had caused it and the subsequent major dimensional tangle that had almost shredded the Parodyverse. “In retrospect it may have been an early warning signal of what is happening to the Nexus now.”     â€œWhere is the Nexus going?” Magenta demanded. “Who is stealing it?”     â€œIt is not going anywhere,” the cowled crime czar told her. “It will not endure a migration. The rules have changed. It too is dying.”     Thighmaster held his hand up. “Well I say we scarper off now before the curtain comes down. Just let me grab a toothbrush and, er, some private collectable materials I have safely stored, and then let’s scoot!”     â€œI don’t see the point in leaving,” considered Justus Screwdriver. “I have no super powers to lose. With my organisation and infrastructure I’d say I’m well positioned for this altered world to come. Better than almost anyone. It all sounds fine to me.”     â€œI ssshall recommend migration for now,” Vrykolakas agreed. “The sssshadow-brood ssshall ssslumber and return.”     â€œWe’ll probably head out if your offer proves good, Winkelweald,” de Soth confirmed. “Somewhere different to where the blood parasites slink off to.”     â€œRun off then, punks,” Antony Ventredi told them. “Not me. Nobody pushes me off my turf without I stand and fight ‘em.”     â€œI agree with the sentiment if not the demotic,” the Baroness responded. “Somebody ruined my perfectly good world conquest. Somebody is going to pay.”     â€œIt’s a unique research opportunity,” the diabolical Dr Moo cackled. “Moo-hah-hah-hah!”     â€œMust she do that?” Magenta St Evil snarled. “I’ll stay and fight, but on the strict condition that Daio stops making those noises.”     â€œThen we are resolved,” the Hooded Hood concluded. “Let us make disposition for what evacuations are required. There will be a recess and the remainder of us may then discuss further steps. Good evening.” ***     Magenta St Evil looked around the Herringcarp Asylum chamber with which she had been provided. “No matter what décor he adds, every room here always looks like a cell,” she observed to herself.     She activated her brooch, which somehow shielded her from every detection and monitoring that the ancient asylum could employ.     â€œIt’s me,” she spoke through the amulet. “I’m in. I know what he’s doing. He doesn’t suspect a thing. None of them do.” She chuckled wickedly. “I am right behind him, sir.” *** 9. Hallie and the Mundane Flood     â€œYou can do this, Hallie,” the image of Hallie insisted. “You were one of the first A.I.s on Earth, a Heuristic Artificial Life Learning Intelligence Entity. You broke your programming about killing the Lair Legion and you became their friend. You have saved the world. You have two mostly-human children. You have a… a Visionary. You are the best known sentient computer system on the planet. Everyone depends on you.”     Hallie dismissed the hologram she had pre-set to trigger and remind her of her responsibilities. “Sometimes I am such a bitch to myself,” she muttered. “I have pre-set nag schedules.”     I am going to die. The truth broke through her internal monologue and threatened to trigger off human fear and emotion responses left over from the dead woman’s engrams she had been built around. Whatever aspect of the Parodyverse that allowed machines and software to think like people is vanishing. Soon I’ll be nothing but lifeless code again.     â€œStop that,” she scolded herself. “This isn’t helping. You’re not going to feel sorry for yourself while your friends are in trouble, lost, hurt, maybe even dead. So A.I. up and deal with it!”     She flitted her attention back to the conference in the Legion Meeting Room under the watchful portraits of the team’s founders. Her entire abyss of existential self-doubt had taken less than a quarter of a nanosecond.     â€œWe’ve had to ground the LairJets,” she reported. “The vibratium baffles are no longer reliable and there’s a chance they could explode in mid-air.” She caught Visionary’s expression across the LL conference table. “A greater chance than usual that they could explode in mid-air,” she corrected herself. “In fact anything that we generally term Enty-tech or Al B.ware or Zemo-tech or any of the other weird science gadgets that we’ve come to rely upon are now prone to spot failure anywhere beyond Parody Island.”     â€œThings are still normal here,” Liu Xi added. “Or at least, still weird. I can touch the elements again. It’s like sight returning after being struck blind. And deaf. And dumb.”     â€œWe can access most of the local equivalents of sub-space and ultra-space and corposant fire and so on,” Goldeneyed revealed, “but only that part of those places inside the envelope of Celestian power that shrouds the Mansion and Island. The barrier that the Space Robots once set around this place when the Black Celestian slumbered under it usually prevents unauthorised teleportation and dimension-shifting. Right now that’s keeping our local dimensional ecosystem from collapsing like the rest of the Earth.”     Ham-Boy created a string of sausages just to be sure. “Is here the only place this is still working? What about other protected locations like the Moon Public Library or, dare I mention it, Herringcarp Asylum?”     â€œWe still haven’t been able to get a signal through to D.D. at the MPL,” Yuki replied. “We’re starting to get continuous glitches in the Lair Satellites. Without the trans-light real-time feed to Mare Ingenii that the Librarian set up, we have no way of bouncing a radio signal to the dark side of Luna.”     â€œI can’t contact Herringcarp either,” Citizen Z announced. “It may be that the Hood has raised the level of his defences. He may even have shifted the whole Asylum elsewhere, as he has done sometimes before at times of crisis. Or… well, even he isn’t infallible.”     â€œWhat about our absent people?” Visionary wanted to know. “Do we have any idea where they all are?”     Hatman had the data. “We’ve not heard in from Mumph and Asil since they arrived in Louisiana. If he hadn’t put a “Offices business” flag on his mission we’d have sent in backup by now.”     â€œThere’s definitely something wrong with the Nexus of Unreality,” G-Eyed insisted. “I could try and ‘port over there…”     â€œRestrain your martyr complex, Bry,” some aspect of CZ told him sharply; maybe all aspects of her. “This isn’t the time for grand gestures. Yet.”     â€œNats is trying to make arrangements for the safety of his Ghost Taxis,” Hallie explained. “The Shoggoth is over there now with Ebony. “I think the comms was already failing because it sounded like she said the Shoggoth was eating them. We have an ETG for Donar and Yo, heading back from Badripoor with an update on the Faerie situation evidently.     â€œETG?” Ham-Boy checked.     â€œEstimated time of goat.”     â€œSo teleportation doesn’t work but flying goats do,” noted Silicone Sally. “That sounds about right.”     â€œDifferent aspects of the probability curve are shifting at different rates,” Al B. Harper insisted. He had scrawled calculations all over his part of the meeting table and was elbowing HB aside to gain more workspace. “At first I thought that the paradigm shift at the Nexus of Unreality was responsible but now I see that was just another link in the consequence chain. This requires further coffee.”     â€œAnd CrazySugarFreakBoy!?” Vizh checked.     â€œHis mom is flying in,” Hatman answered gravely. “She says she’s going to try and get him to reconstitute by focussing on his comic and porn collections. Apparently she and April have some kind of protocol worked out. We may be better not knowing.”     â€œSo you don’t think Dream is… gone?” Silicone Sally checked. “What about the Baroness?”     â€œI checked her castle site,” ManMan reported. “It went boom.”     â€œI don’t think that would take out Beth von Zemo,” Visionary decided. “We’re just not that lucky.”     â€œShe’s also a prime suspect,” Hallie pointed out. “All of this happened just before that meteor strike. Then suddenly we have dying vampires and failing portals and… and an issue with robots and A.I.s. It’s not coincidence.”     â€œEEE tried putting a call through to Lisa,” Knifey mentioned. “Even to her premium number. The recorded message was instructive but it didn’t have anything to say about the immediate situation.”     â€œQuoth can’t contact the Ravens of Destiny either,” Vizh added. “Not since that last communication between Nevermore and Sir Mumphrey about the Swamp. And Symmetry has our number blocked.”     â€œI’ve put out calls to all sentient robots,” Hallie briefed. “I’ve told them to get here, to the Lair Mansion, or to make themselves known to their local authorities so they can be shipped here. But a lot of them won’t come. They remember last time, when my virtual reality world was sabotaged and so many died. And a lot don’t trust their governments to not exploit them if they identify themselves.”     â€œThe same is true of our call to the mutate community,” Hatman added. “The MLA says it’s because they’re afraid they’ll end up in internment camps or pressed into military service. But if they don’t come forward when their mutations fail then some of them will die from it.”     â€œHas Vespiir foreseen anything?” Vinnie wondered. “Has anybody located Chiaki Bushido?”     â€œNobody can communicate that well with Vesp since her implanted translator tech failed,” Visionary admitted. “FA and Kerry have a few words of Caphan, but we’ll need to get Miiri back from the Shoggoth’s Lemurian sanctuary if we want a real dialogue.”     â€œDon’t you speak Caphan?” G-Eyed objected to the possibly-fake leader of the Lair Legion. “Didn't you have nine Caphan pleasure slaves?”     â€œHe didn’t have them,” Hallie insisted. “Well, only one of them, and that was later on when he wasn’t their legal-on-Caph owner, so it’s not as squicky as it might have been.”     â€œUm, most of the words I learned from them aren’t that applicable to our present situation,” Vizh confessed.     â€œYou mean we’re not at an orgy,” Liu Xi understood. “I’ve contacted some friends of the Psychic Samurai. They might be able to get word through.”     Yuki had another problem. “Hallie, can you pull up the situation globe from the operations room?”     The A.I. switched in the holographic representation of Earth with its coloured symbols denoting problem areas of interest to the Lair Legion. The orange dots were ongoing special situation areas, like the Savage Park, the Wastelands, Badripoor, Monstrous Island, the ruins of Arachknight City, and Herringcarp Asylum. Red dots depicted clear and present dangers; one pinged now over the Wookiegetlucky Swamp but there were no others.     â€œHere’s what I don’t understand,” the team’s cyborg P.I. and tactical specialist argued. “SPUD’s carrier is down. Most of the world’s superheroes are out of action. Why aren’t there more trouble spots? Where are the would-be dictators invading their neighbours? Where are the coups and riots? Heck, where are all the bank robberies?”     â€œReported crime rates have actually fallen,” Hallie compiled.     â€œWell, our sensors and warning systems are degraded,” Al B. pointed out. “And of course, supervillains must be suffering the same power outages that the enhanced heroes are.”     â€œWe need to set up some contingencies for trouble anyhow,” Hatman decided. “We can’t count on this grace period to last. We have some procedures sketched out after the time when the whole LL vanished off into the Stitchlands. Amber and I can contact Dan Drury and get things moving.”     â€œThat sounds like paperwork I wouldn’t want to handle – I mean a situation that is very suited for your organisational abilities,” Vizh said and hastily corrected. Hallie could tell that Visionary was worried about her.     â€œThe Shoggoth can still access his Lost Continent?” G-Eyed realised. “How?”     â€œThe Shoggoth’s dimensions don’t really conform to the rest of Parodyverse physics,” Al B. admitted. “It’s very irritating.”     â€œEven that link will go eventually if we can’t reverse this,” Liu Xi advised. “If this continues, even the Shoggoth won’t be able to survive here. He’ll have to retreat to Lemuria, which is an aspect of our world that he separated off as a refuge for some slaves he rescued.”     â€œThe LL has been there,” Visionary reminded her. “It was before your time. I had a heart attack.”     â€œAre we any further on working out who is behind this?” Sally demanded. “Or even why? I could really clobber someone right now – before my body sets into inflexible silicone cement and I die from solidified organs, I mean.”     â€œWe are still collating reports and trying to contact resources,” Hallie admitted. “Vinnie is going to risk seeing the Abyssal Greye of the Scholar-Ghouls Under Gothametropolis. G-Eyed will try reaching out to the Sea Monkeys. Uhuna will see if the Abhuman Great Relief has any insights.”     Someone could take an Uber to Herringcarp Asylum,” ManMan suggested. “Icallnotme!”     â€œI’ll go,” Citizen Z offered. “Even if I can’t stay as Laurie on the journey there, Beth can get me to the doorstep. I’m pretty sure I can take it from there.”     â€œI guess, um, I guess I’ll back you up, then,” Ham-Boy offered, swallowing hard.     â€œAll of you be careful, then,” Visionary told them. “Use conventional phones if your comm-cards fail. Use ground cars instead of LairJets. Take packed lunches. Um, maybe not that last one.”     â€œThey’ll be fine,” Hallie assured the worried team leader. “We will all be fine.” ***     â€œI’m not worried,” Hallie assured Fleabot.     â€œThen stop deactivating your facial feedback software and tell me again,” the micro-robot challenged her.     â€œI don’t have time to be worried. I have a job to do. Presumably you have some use somewhere as well.”     â€œYou’re right to be worried. It’d be insane not to be worried. I’m worried. You saw the report on Tandi?”     â€œI did the report on Tandi. She’s completely inert with no way to reboot her.”     â€œSo why is Joan Henry still moving, able to haul her back here?”     â€œThe Intuition Interface that allows us to make the jump to sentience is still capable of holding on to self-awareness until it encounters an error, when it "reboots" and reloads. Kind of how a web browser caches things until it closes or something changes. Any new reboot now causes systems death.”     â€œAnd robot ghosts. Which I ain’t ‘fraid of no.” The little flea-shaped robot looked around the computer lab nervously.     â€œGhosts are not usually able to access the Mansion,” Hallie assured him. “But right now our Lair Banshee is calling them here.”     Fleabot’s metallic antenna-brows rose. “Because she has also gone insane?”     â€œBecause they soon won’t be able to exist anywhere else. And if those phantom images of sentient robots fade to nothing then there is no way we can ever restore them to their bodies if we find a way to fix the bigger problem.”     â€œI thought Detonator Hippos here were bad enough.”     â€œSergeant MacAllistair has invited every one of his brothers-in-arms to take refuge on Parody Island.”     â€œSo we need to lock up the booze!”     â€œWe’re also expecting the Racoon People.”     â€œAnd we need to lock up the women!”     â€œAnd possibly the Sea Monkeys.”     â€œSo we need to… find ways not to point and snigger.” Fleabot frowned. “This island’s going to get awfully crowded. I hope you don’t expect me to shrink them all down to manageable size because I wouldn’t have anything like enough size-changing particles even at the best of times and this…”     Hallie raised a finger for quiet and cocked her head as she accepted other data input. “The Shoggoth and Nats are back. Now you’ll see how we hope to deal with this.” ***     â€œWhy is it always a pain chair, and why is it always me in the pain chair?” Goldeneyed demanded.     â€œKarma?” Nats suggested. “The universal sense of humour hasn’t been revoked yet?”     â€œIt isn’t a pain chair,” Al B. Harper insisted. “Pain is only a side effect. This helps us to channel your dimension-folding superpowers in a more competent and effective way.”     â€œHey!” G-Eyed objected.     â€œLiu Xi will act as a filter to modulate your energies. Hallie will monitor the signal and warn her of any fine adjustments that are required.”     â€œIt would be very helpful if you would scream in the key of F sharp,” the Shoggoth advised Goldeneyed. “Pushing a gateway through to the Sanctuary in Lemuria will require scolding a number of dimensions rather severely.”     â€œThat’s what this gizmo is?” Fleabot asked Hallie. “A gateway to a Lost Continent out of history?”     â€œThat’s the plan,” the LL’s resident A.I. agreed. “Even Parody Island won’t resist the effects altering the Parodyverse forever. None of the people we’ve granted temporary asylum to will survive if they stay here. So we’re evacuating them.”     â€œFor now,” Silicone Sally insisted. “Don’t think we won’t be working on a solution while we’re lounging on the beach in that tropical paradise, because we will.”     â€œEveryone is going?” Fleabot blinked.     â€œAll the most vulnerable to this change. All the supernatural creatures who want to escape. The Abhuman-modified hybrid species who couldn’t survive the changes here. Some mutates whose powers keep them alive. All the robots we can find, including the inert ones.”     â€œI hope to be able to inject their souls back into their shells once we have them in a proper set of dimensions like Lemuria,” the Manga Shoggoth gurgled. “Soon would be good. I cannot keep then undigested for long.”     Fleabot’s head swivelled round. “Wait, all robots? Including me?”     â€œYou would already terminate if you went off the island,” Al B. assured him.     â€œYou go with the rest,” Hallie insisted.     â€œI’m powering up the arch,” Ebony called out warning. “Bry, brace yourself.”     â€œThere’s a schedule for evacuation,” Amber St Clare, the Legion’s administrator promised. “We’ll shift people through as fast as we can. We hope to have everyone out within twelve hours, before the gate collapses.”     â€œExplodes,” Al B. corrected her absently.     â€œI’ll go through and start liaising with the Shoggoth’s people on the other side,” Sally told Ebony. She had already put on her string bikini.     â€œRemember to leave the undead transfers until Lemuria reaches night cycle,” Liu Xi reminded her.     â€œI’m going to make sure there’s no hold-ups in line,” Nats announced. “Who’d have thought that working for a delivery agency would help save the world one day?”     The Shoggoth flowed around the machinery. The portal screeched it’s start-up cycle. Ebony etched the eldritch runes. G-Eyed supplied the additional sound effects.     â€œWe go through last, right?” Fleabot said to Hallie.     â€œYou do,” she answered him.     â€œWhen are you going?”     The A.I. hesitated. “I’m not. I’m staying here. With my children. With Vizh. To help.”     â€œIsn’t that suicide?”     â€œNot if we can solve the problem in time. You know we always do.”     â€œAnd if we don’t with this one?”     â€œThen I’m staying here. With my children and Vizh. To help.” ***     â€œI could order you to go,” Vizh said.     â€œI’m green but not Caphan,” Hallie replied.     â€œI’m leader of the Lair Legion, dammit! I have a nameplate on my desk.”     â€œI’m not in the Lair Legion. I just help them out.”     â€œYou could… you could take Mags and Griff with you. Visit Miiri.”     â€œAnd never be able to get back? The children deserve a life in this world.”     â€œEven when it’s a Normalverse? When their mother died here?” Visionary hadn’t meant to sound that severe. This wasn’t the first woman he’d cared about who had sacrificed herself for the greater good.     â€œI’m hoping to avoid that. Look, Vizh, our intel-gathering capacity is already crippled. It’s only because I’m filtering and assembling it that we’re getting any useful data at all. Without me you might as well just sit by the letterbox and hope someone mails you the solution.”     â€œI would prefer that to you staying here and just… fading out.”     Hallie regarded the possibly-fake man. “Do you believe I have free will?” she challenged him.     â€œYes, of course. You’re real, dammit. I just want to keep you that way.”     â€œSo I have the right to choose to risk my life to do something worthwhile? To save my friends or my world?”     â€œYou’re not saving my hairline. Hallie…”     â€œAnswer the questions. Am I a free entity, capable and allowed to make her own hard choices, deserving of support and recognition for the decisions that I make?”     Vizh stuck his hands in his pockets. “Yes,” he mumbled.     â€œAre you going to help save the Parodyverse with me?”     â€œIt looks like it.”     â€œAre you doing to kiss me now?”     â€œYes.”     He reached to embrace the collection of wire-guide force-fields and bitmap co-ordinates that were Hallie’s hard-light hologram form, but what he held in his arms was so much more than that. She perceived the lip contact differently from him but it set receptors shimmering through her brain patterns, triggering hundreds of deep-coded inexplicable fractal responses. The input cascade was uncontrollable and wonderful.     She filed it with every other kiss he had ever given her, to store for as long as she had memory and life, to play back in the worst times when she needed it most.     The Lair Legion Operations Room hologram console flared to life without being programmed. Hallie checked that it wasn’t some kind of side effect of a really good kiss. She’d installed internet firewalls to prevent accidental uploading of private physical messaging routines with Visionary. A second time.     This was different. It wasn’t her.     It was an entirely different kind of message.     â€œâ€¦quaquam Par…” said the figure who temporarily replaced the holographic situation globe. “…must be then or…” and concluded, “…end of the Parodyverse!”     The image exploded into random pixels and was gone.     â€œThat was Lee. The Librarian,” Visionary recognised. “The ex-Librarian who died.”     â€œIt was Lee Bookman,” Hallie agreed, hastily spurring diagnostics through the system. “Lee Bookman with a warning. About the end of the Parodyverse.” *** 10. Lee Bookman and the Overdue Fines A quick worried note: I wrote this chapter a few days ago, before L! posted his story “The Call” (now available just up the board). The events here aren’t really compatible with the way that story unfolds and I don’t see a way to reconcile them or easily rewrite them. After a bit of consideration I decided that the best thing to do is to just post this anyway. It’s the Parodyverse. We’ll find a way to mesh the different versions when they’re fully told. This section is also amended since first posting to relect concerns that L! raised about the story. Thanks to L! for information, input, and a bit of A.L.F.red’s dialogue for this section.     â€œHello? Hello, can you help us? This is the space cruiser Velvet Whisper Xnylonian Registry number 8274 Bingo Satin on a standard reconnaissance flight. We have lost primary ion drives. Secondary kinetic impellors are failing. We require immediate safe harbour under licence agreement with the Intergalactic Order of Libraries, with reference to catalogue pass #Unslaugh Trevelis Kantissarian 79993744-623 Vimini. Hello?”     â€œApproaching vessel, this is D.D., operating system of the Moon Public Library, based on Luna, primary natural satellite of the third planet in the Sol star system of the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way. This facility is no longer affiliated with the Intergalactic Order of Librarians and operates under independent trust charter, but we do recognise IOL memberships and planetary reciprocity treaties. I am sending you co-ordinates for an emergency landing on our facility’s Docking Platform Ovid. Once you come within range we can use tractor beams to guide you safely in.”     David Bookman hefted the Librarian’s jacket on his shoulders and checked the monitors. “That ship has heavy stealth shielding,” he noted to D.D. and A.L.F.red as the Velvet Whisper veered around to respond to the signal that had finally reached it. Faster-than-light comms were jammed right now and the vessel was two light-minutes out from the Main Rotunda of the Moon Public Library.     â€œIt’s Xnylonian,” D.D. pointed out to the rookie Librarian. “All of their ships are stealth-active. It’s a cultural thing.”     â€œThey use tricky force fields too,” A.L.F.red added. “Nothing I can’t smash through with the right weapons.”     â€œLet them land,” David told the Library’s erratic and dangerously-modified defence robot. “Don’t destroy them unless they turn out to be hostile. Don’t accidentally shoot any of them to see if they’re hostile.”     â€œAaw.”     â€œOvid is our last free landing pad,” D.D. reported. “I don’t think we have time to generate any additional ones in the present circumstances.”     â€œYou’d better send them the standard caution,” David reminded her.     D.D. contacted the Whisper again. “8274 Bingo Satin, please be advised that this facility is preparing to enter Lockdown Mode Three, which will fold the installation and all visitors in it into a null-time n-dimensional stasis to protect the library from the ongoing changes affecting local timespace. Many of our card holders and a number of passing interplanetary vessels have chosen to take refuge here with us. If you land here you may have to join us in lockdown or remain unaided on the moon’s surface. We estimate three hours sixteen minutes to lockdown initiation.”     David stuck his hands into his coat pockets. “I bet my father would have sorted this out differently,” he grumbled. “He would have worked out what was happening, confronted the baddie, and he’d be writing up index cards about it by now.”     â€œWe do not compare Librarians,” D.D. assured him.     â€œWe just silently judge them,” A.L.F.red contributed.     â€œYou were the designated back-up Librarian before we split from IOL. Dr Blargelslarch and the Board of Trustees agreed that you were the best candidate to hold the position of Acting Librarian now, David,” D.D. went on. “You are progressing with your training very well considering we can’t exactly put you through the standard IOL course since they want to shut us down. You’re doing all you can under the present circumstances to safeguard the collection and to look after our patrons.”     â€œThe Xnylonians are docking. Weapons are locked on,” A.L.F.red noted.     â€œGuide them to Reading Room Dylan,” David suggested. “Have the automated systems check on their ship’s drive problems. Chances are it’ll be the same abstract metal failures as all the rest, but let’s be through. If we can fix ‘em up then do it.”     â€œIt’ll take a while to configure our maintenance remotes to even see the Xnylonian systems,” D.D. warned. “I’ll dig through the archive we have of their most popular refraction codes and…” The Library’s artificial intelligence broke off as a rather quiet and discreet alarm signal went off. “Dimensional breach in Stack von Goethe! I can’t get a good reading. Systems are degraded because of current problems. All I’m getting is gibberish!”     â€œIntruders!” A.L.F.red extruded a number of percussion cannons from his robotic shell and turned to respond. “I’ll restrain them with minimum lethal force,” he promised.     â€œLet’s find out who it is and what they want first,” David insisted. “D.D., work on how this phenomenon bypassed our intrusion shields. This is not a good time for our defences to be compromised.”     A.L.F.red moved across the main reading floor of the Library’s large central dome. Readers scattered out of his way. The Library was more crowded than usual. As D.D. had said, many of those who held library cards had claimed their right to visit the secure facility during the current cosmic turbulence, before the transit doors had failed. Others had arrived by their own means. It just meant more people to hastily get out of the security robot’s way.     â€œUse the stairs,” David Bookman called to A.L.F.red. The Library’s systems were mostly coping for now with the recent alterations to the Parodyverse’s indices of reality but there had been spot system failures. This was not the time to get trapped in an elevator.     The security robot jumped over the stair-well railing and dropped three floors to the lobby outside Stack von Goethe. He kicked open the door into the huge dark book repository and charged through. “Don’t move! Surrender and die!”     He flew back out again and smacked into the opposite wall.     David hastened down to him, grabbing the nearest fire extinguisher to use as a probably-futile weapon against whoever could do that to the Library’s primary combat system.     A.L.F.red rose from his undignified wall-dent and reoriented his weapons. “Right, I’m now shielding myself against psychokinetic pushes,” he warned. “I come in peace. Prepare to be obliterated!”     â€œHold off,” David commanded him. “Who’s in there? Identify yourself!”     â€œUm, hi!” came a woman’s voice with an accent that the Librarian couldn’t place. “We come in peace, honestly. I mean real peace, not A.L.F.red peace.”     â€œWe’re Nats from the Lair Legion and Princess Uhunalura of the Abhumans,” a less-calm male voice with a North American twang added. “We come in peace, yeah, but if that flaming robot comes at me again all the shielding in the world won’t stop me from exploding him.”     â€œTheir voice prints match records,” A.L.F.red admitted reluctantly. “We should rip out their vocal chords for verification.”     â€œYou can come out,” David called to the intruders. “We’ll need to properly identify you. How did you manage to get here?”     The two unauthorised visitors appeared at the doorway. Nats was a young man in a canvas jacket with Ghost Taxi Co. logos on the shoulders. Uhuna wore a tight-fitting gold outfit and elaborate black hairbands holding back long orange tresses. The Abhuman princess was cupping a blob of black ooze in her hands.     â€œThe Manga Shoggoth used a chymeric gate to scare the dimensions into letting us through,” Uhuna explained. “I think it was harder than he expected, because this is all that’s left of the bit of him he sent with us.”     The inert Shoggoth-goo seeped between her fingers onto the tile floor.     â€œInitial scans suggest they might be telling the truth,” A.L.F.red conceded reluctantly. “I’ll need to take fingers to the lab to be completely certain.”     â€œYou’re the new Librarian, Lee Bookman’s secret kid, right?” Nats asked David. “There’s got to be a story there.”     The young man shook his head. “I’m not the Librarian, not really. Just a place holder. But I still want to know what you’re doing in the Library.”     Nats hefted a rucksack off his back and showed the contents. “We need to ask you about this. Does it make any sense to you?”     â€œYou’d better come upstairs,” David said. “We’re getting the Library ready for a major lockdown so things are a bit hectic, but for this we’ll find some capacity.” He checked his wrist monitor. “We’ll need to head back via Reading Room Dylan. We have other guests who actually called ahead.”     â€œFaster-than-light comms are down on Earth,” Nats complained. “You guys don’t have a regular phone number.”     â€œFTL comms are out everywhere within an area of about three light years and expanding fast. Come on.”     Nats and Uhuna followed the Acting Librarian back upstairs, trailed by a suspicious and twitchy A.L.F.red. Uhuna waved across the rotunda at D.D.’s avatar hologram at the main desk.     The doors to the secure Reading Room recognised David and admitted him to where the Xnylonian refugees awaited passing. It would be a more complicated procedure than usual as Xnylonians were naturally gifted at avoiding scans.     The mission’s leader came forward to shake David’s hand. “Thank you for allowing us harbour. In the name of Queen Ziles, we…”     David didn’t touch the Xnylonian. “It’s the correct local custom,” he explained, “but ladies first.” He stepped aside so that Uhuna could come forward.     Every Abhuman had a different genetic gift. Uhunalura Amalandriana Excelsior!’s ability was to sense and shift physical conditions between people. She could move a cold or a broken bone from one subject to another, or even store it inside her own karmic field for a while without harm to transfer on later. A necessary prerequisite for her power was to be able to sense ailments and genetic anomalies in others.     â€œYou are not Xnylonian,” Uhuna observed. “You have been genetically macromorphed into your current shape. Also, you have eczema where heavy armour has been rubbing your sensitive areas.”     â€œGotcha!” A.L.F.red yelled, slamming the impostor away from the princess and down onto the reading table.     The other eight faux-Xnylonians shimmered back to their usual forms, tall combat-armoured warriors in faintly antique-looking uniforms, wielding long metal energy lances.     â€œMaterial Centurions!” David yelled. “D.D., reset the Library passwords again immediately. Random changeword: Popinjay!”     Nats had no idea who Material Centurions were but they were trying to grab him and Uhuna and they didn’t look friendly. He grunted at the more-than-expected-effort of slamming them back. His attempted pyrokinetic burst failed entirely.     A.L.F.red was quite happy to launch a series of robot-to-Centurion missiles that slapped right into their enhanced combat chestplates and did stroppy things to their operating systems. Smooth deadly battle armour seized as different command-and-control systems fell out with each other.     David vaulted a book-trolley and reached the auxiliary defence controls. The Material Centurions twitched as they were suddenly inundated with billions of index request verifications from the Library’s catalogue systems. The intruders shivered as their minds failed to cope with such a sudden influx of data. They fell over.     â€œMore of these bozos!” A.L.F.red raged. “I say we toss them out through air lock McCaffrey and see how they adapt to Mare Ingenii without their life support.”     Nats held up a hand. “Um, who are they?”     â€œThese are Material Centurions, sort of the enforcers of the Intergalactic Order of Librarians. Call them the radical wing of the fines collection service. They’re not very happy that my father and the Lunar Public Library broke away without authorisation when the IOL was taken over by the Parody Master, or that we have an entire copy of the Main Catalogue of the Grand Repository here outside their control, or that we set up independently and made a go of it. D.D., we have more M.C.s here for collection.”     The Library’s A.I. generated her hologram there. “We have no way of sending this batch back with a note declining the IOL’s demands,” she pointed out. “We’ll have to archive them and take them into lockdown with us.”     â€œOr introduce ‘em to Airlock MacCaffrey,” A.L.F.red muttered. “Every few days, the library is open for business as usual, a Material Centurion sneaks in under the guise of an average library patron, approaches the reference desk to talk with one of the androids that contain a fraction of D.D.'s intelligence. They try and serve her with some the paperwork that requires us to surrender the MPL to IOL control. D.D. refuses, the Material Centurions get uppity, I clean their clocks. We boot them back home with their sorry tails between their legs. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. I keep saying we should just send back parts of them!”     â€œI guess their latest attempt got kind of interrupted by the ongoing problem,” David considered. He turned back to Nats and Uhuna. “Sorry, guys. This wasn’t what you got spit through dimensions by a Shoggoth for.”     â€œThat was the chymeric gate?” D.D. understood. “No wonder our analysis systems are hiding.”     â€œWait until you see what they brought.”     Nats opened his satchel again and produced a thick stack of 6x9” glossy photographs. “We thought maybe Lee Bookman had redecorated the File Room and we hadn’t noticed before, but Hallie swears this writing wasn’t on the walls yesterday.”     â€œIt just appeared?” David puzzled. “Why?”     â€œWe were kind of hoping you’d tell us,” Uhuna pointed out, “and that it might help us with our current situation.”     D.D. identified the script at once. “That’s base 32 computer code, the same stuff I’m written in. Library code. I think… let me just check some secured files… yes, those are reactivation over-rides. For one of our pieces of apparatus.”     A.L.F.red checked the writing and sighed. “Him.”     â€œHim?” Nats asked.     â€œLee’s personal assistant module, XJ-8. He insisted on calling it Shawn.”     â€œTransport the unit here from archive,” D.D. told A.L.F.red.     The Library’s origami-like matter reconstructors quickly produced a machine that resembled an egg-shaped high-tech coffee pot. “That was in the File Room when the Librarian worked there,” Nats recognised. “We thought this was Lee Bookman’s ashtray or something.”     â€œAre it’s batteries run out?” Uhuna wondered. “It stopped working when Lee… went off.”     â€œSince he bought the farm, you mean?” A.L.F.red asked with his usual subtlety. “Pushed up the daisies? Cashed in his chips? Took a trip to Cemetaryville?”     â€œYes,” Uhuna frowned. “Since he died a hero.”     â€œThe JX unit was programmed to shut down when Lee died,” D.D. explained. “A.L.F.red brought it back here to file with the rest of Lee’s stuff. But now… the data you photographed on your walls appears to be the Librarian’s unlock code to revive Shawn.”     â€œThe writing appeared after something… weird happened on Parody Island a couple of hours ago.”     â€œWell, it is Parody Island,” D.D. suggested.     â€œYeah,” Nats agreed with a sigh. “A hologram ghost of your deceased Librarian hardly even pings the meter. But we had one, and it seems like it might be relevant to the stuff that’s happening right now. Hallie sent this recording of it.”     David placed the memory stick into a data reader and replayed his father’s appearance.     â€œâ€¦quaquam Par…” D.D. repeated the phantom Bookman’s words. “That is almost certainly a disrupted fragment of the Latin phrase Nequaquam Parody, ‘the parody should not exist’. It is written on the tomb of Visionatus Improbablus beneath the Lair Mansion.”     Nats shuddered visibly. “We have not had good experiences down there,” he admitted.     â€œThere is more written on that door,” Uhuna remembered.     D.D. had the text available from Lee’s original scans. “Post CCCLXX Annos Paterbo - when 370 years have passed,”     â€œAnd how old is the tomb?” Nats enquired.     â€œThe writing is estimated to be around three hundred and seventy years old,” D.D. reported.     â€œGreat. So it wasn’t a grave, it was a countdown warning. We need to get back to the LL with this information. Our Shoggoth-phone is busted.”     A.L.F.red snorted. “Good luck with that. We lost the transit doors hours ago, and all the space craft here are grounded too now. Short of a giant cannon we’re really out of ways to get you back.”     â€œBut I have a business to run,” Nats objected.     â€œAnd that Roswell girl there to look after,” Uhuna cut in.     â€œWe could risk the Galactibus,” David suggested.     â€œWithout working relativity frisson dampeners?” D.D. asked. “It would take you about three days to Earth using old-fashioned hydrocarbon rocket fuel boosters.”     â€œUm… can we get some message back to Hallie at least?” the flying phenomenon checked, sidling round the minefield of Uhuna versus Roswell.     â€œWe can bounce something using an old-style radio signal,” David suggested. “And you’re welcome to join us in lockdown. In fact I don’t think you really have any other option. I’m still not sure why you received restart codes for this, um, Shawn device, though.”     â€œThe Mansion’s systems picked up a flare of energy in the File Room when Lee was making his sudden appearance,” Nats explained. “People have been thinking the File Room was haunted for quite a while. Maybe now is when we’re supposed to boot up Lee’s toaster and see what’s cooking?”     D.D. looked up quickly. “The File Room has been active?”     â€œIs that significant?” David asked.     â€œYeah,” A.L.F.red admitted. He rapped the top of Shawn’s dome. “If this annoying little gimmick is supposed to get rebooted then it means that Bookman – I mean proper Bookman, not you kid – is probably still doing stuff even if he is also pushing up daisies. It’s gotta be one of the Librarian’s deep contingency programs.”     â€œIs there any way to be sure?” Uhuna wondered.     David gestured around. “This is the Moon Public Library. XJ-8 is an integral part of its system. If there’s any place anywhere that can read his drives it’s here. D.D., will you…?”     â€œOf course,” the A.I. agreed. “I’m reading his filelog. Looks like he was ordered to pre-set some data sifting back when Lee was alive. There was some interaction with the Lair Legion archive space. I can’t tell what it was, but petabytes of data was evaluated.”     â€œIs there any way to get that info?” wondered Nats.     â€œMaybe, if I reboot this equipment. Initiating activation procedures now: Hey Shawn, wake up!”     The XJ unit flared with rim-lights. Another hologram of Lee Bookman blossomed into vision.     â€œIt was all predicted in the tomb under Parody Island,” the image of the Librarian warned. “The Improbable College placed it there as a last chance to avert the triumph of their enemies. Nequaquam Parody indeed! If this is to be stopped it must be then, not now. Visionary and the rest must be sent back there, even though it is a suicide mission. Otherwise this will mean the end of the Parodyverse!”     The hologram burst into static scatters. Shawn powered down again.     â€œAh,” Nats said after a breath. “One of those messages.”     â€œâ€˜Stopped then, not now,’ suggests time travel is required,” D.D, pointed out. “As of yesterday, time travel became impossible.”     â€œMaybe the Shoggoth…?” Uhuna suggested.     David Bookman ran the calculations through the library systems. “Well, the best I can say is that the molecules making up your bodies might end up spread across the past,” he offered. “It’s not something I would recommend.”     â€œTwo hours to lockdown,” D.D. mentioned. “I’ll see about getting this information to the Lair Mansion at least. Maybe Lee made some other arrangement for Visionary’s suicide mission?”     â€œWow,” Nats considered. “I guess it’s true. Vizh’s life really does suck!”     â€œNot for much longer, though,” A.L.F.red consoled him. *** 11. Lara Night and the Harbingers of Armageddon This chapter takes place after Jason’s tie-in “Rapid Development”.     Lara Night appeared in the cold hard vacuum of outer space.     A moment before she had been at the Lair Mansion. There had been a flash of green light as the Portal of Pretentiousness had opened around her, its dark mirrored surface sucking her in and spilling her across the Parodyverse to emerge a galaxy away around 91 million miles from the gas giant Amazadi A.     Before the shock and chill of absolute cold could kill her, she instinctively shifted to a form of pure energy to survive.     Then someone shot her. A charged particle lance jabbed through her torso from behind. It felt like coherent leptons and it stung like hell. A body not composed of sentient plasma would have been shredded to subatomic particles.     Lara swung about and saw the starship that had targeted her. She deflected the hundred and thirty-one other energy lances that seared towards her from the unfamiliar ship and commanded the lepton bolts to bend back at their point of origin.     There was a dazzling flare as the pulses clashed against and then overcame the ship’s shields. The shots smashed back into projector cannons, slagging the powerful machinery, rocking the whole ship so it tumbled off course.     Lara took fire from another quarter. Three more vessels had locked on to her.     â€œOh, for goodness’ sake!” she would have cried out if vacuum had supported it or if her energy form took breath to speak.     She saw now that there must be hundreds of space ships around her, blasting hell out of each other as they wove and dove at appreciable fractions of light speed. Only the enhanced perceptions of her energy form allowed the elemental to follow what was happening through the relativistic speed distortion.     This time Lara was more careful in her response. She didn’t want to kill anyone until she knew what was happening. She drained power from one vessel and jabbed it to overload systems on the other two.     Another barrage of attacks, from a different range of weapons, slammed at her from all sides. She fought back, scarcely keeping up with the computer-aided high-speed assaults and manoeuvring. Evidently somebody’s fleet systems had flagged her as a priority threat. Her assailants were piling on.     It hurt.     Lara wondered if the Hooded Hood’s Portal had shunted her here to die. It looked like an ideal way to accomplish it. Even Lara’s energy form was growing exhausted and incoherent. What energy she could absorb from the assaults was used as quickly to counter others.     She tried to make sense of the situation. Just stay alive she told herself, concentrating on surviving the next minute, the next five minutes, an hour. There was no let up, no time to prepare an escape, no chance to evade or recoup.     She lost track of time, but six hours passed.     A radio wave bounced into her, about the only incoming energy that wasn’t designed to rip her to pieces. “Hi, there. Over this way,” it said.     She analysed the direction and spotted a tiny craft that was more bizarre than even the wide array of other combatants in this endless dogfight. It appeared to be made of bronze, with extendible particle sails like a Wright Brothers glider and visible gearing mechanisms that utilised springs and cogs. The only energy source it appeared to be using was kinetic and potential; it was powered by clockwork.     It was the best and only offer Lara had received.     She flared towards it, threading the bulks of spaceships she had disabled or damaged. The odd vessel was almost immobile compared to the fast-moving combatant crafts. It was presumably surviving because it had no radiant energy signature for warship threat assessment programs to lock on to when there were so many more important targets.     She couldn’t lead the attackers back to it. Lara peeled off an energy manifestation resembling her own profile, that would spoof attack systems, and spawned it off at near light-speed through the duelling armadas. She damped down her own signature as low as she could manage while retaining a noncorporeal form and allowed her attackers to hare off after the shiny target.     It wouldn’t fool them for long, but if she could find sanctuary and assume human flesh again she would disappear from their sensors.     She struggled over to the craft. A hatch sprang oven – there were actual springs – and admitted her to a very cramped cupboard-sized airlock where she had to fold her knees to her chest to fit. A hiss of pressured air later she was inside the ship. She gratefully dropped her energy shape; it was exhausting to maintain for that long under combat conditions. It was only when she changed back that Lara realised how exhausted she had been.     She was in a cramped green-lit interior about the size of an average bathroom. The walls were of bevelled brass, angled and polished, with reinforcing struts further breaking up the chamber. Beneath grille decking and behind wall spaces were large cogwheels operating delicate ratchets; the spaceship ticked.     A large white rat in a lab coat pointed a whirring diagnostic device at her. “Lara Night,” she confirmed. “Class one energy manipulator, dimensional émigré, self-confessed superhero. Sometimes termed an elemental in the literature, although I don’t have an adequate scientific definition of the term to comment.”     â€œShe uses energy too? That’s how she heard my radio signal?” a young human woman in a bright blue uniform asked. “That’s pretty useful!” She reached over and helped Lara to her feet. “Mind your head, the roof’s pretty low in here. Hi, I’m Catherine Simmons. Cath. Cathode, now.”     â€œYou have powers based on my genetic template,” Lara sensed. “How?”     â€œHer boss is Baroness von Zemo,” a handsome man in a pinstriped two-piece suit explained. “That’s some big science whiz who likes to do experiments on cute chicks.”     â€œHer Excellency makes a habit of collecting superhuman genetic material, Miss Night,” a conservatively-dressed man in neat British tweeds told her. He produced a clothes brush and dusted the crumpled visitor down. “I understand that Miss Simmons is expected to replace Miss Rezilyant as the Baroness’ principal henchperson.”     â€œWhich is a huge waste of Miss Simmons,” the handsome man grinned. He eyed Lara’s shapely blondeness with obvious admiration. “Speaking of, why haven’t you ever tried to arrest me, honey?”     â€œThere should be proper introductions later,” the clockwork ship itself added in fussy, agitated tones. “In brief, Miss Night you are speaking with Davidowicz, associate and laboratory manager for the diabolical Dr Moo, Cathode, newly-serving her Excellency Baroness Elizabeth von Zemo, Mr Browning, manservant to the Thighmaster, and Mr Emilio Cacciatore, primary enforcer for Mr Antony ‘’Boss Deadeyes,’ Ventredi. The woman lurking directly behind you with the poisoned dagger is Miss Vicki Vee, who operates as a metahuman mercenary under the soubriquet VelcroVixen.”     Lara whirled round, realising that the supervillain had been exactly positioned to cut her throat had she tried to attack her rescuers.     VelcroVixen blew her a kiss. “Behave yourself, superhero. We’re all in the same boat. Literally.”     â€œI am Albert Hazlewood,” the spaceship explained. “In the employ of the Hooded Hood I am sometimes known as Clockwatcher. I recently gained an aptitude for transforming myself into clockwork-powered devices. It has proved quite useful in our current situation.”     â€œOur current situation appears to be in the middle of a space war,” Lara noted.     â€œSmart girl!” Cacciatore approved. “And while Albert here can provide us with a temporary ship to keep us alive he don’t got much in the way of umph when it comes to pushing us out of harm’s way.”     â€œI can generate electrons to power a drive,” Cathode contributed, “but with only one source of an energy stream it is almost impossible to navigate. Now that you’re here we can actually manoeuvre away from this.”     â€œIs that why I’m here?” asked the elemental. “I’m not that fond of the Hooded Hood just snatching me away and dropping me into hard vacuum.”     â€œThe Portal of Pretentiousness is not at its best,” Clockwatcher apologised. “That is presumably why our own transportation to our destination fell somewhat… short.”     â€œThere was an ambush,” VelcroVixen snarled. “Just as the Hood opened the Portal, that bitch Magenta St Evil stabbed him in the back. Don’t know why, or with what, but it sure must have hurt the boss.”     â€œIt’s true that the Portal transfer was significantly disrupted,” Davidowicz confirmed. “The best scientific way I can classify it is was KaZZap-blap-Blooie! And then somebody screaming ‘Aaaargh’. Which might have been me.”     â€œLooks like this Magenta dame was a no-good double-crosser,” Cacciatore explained. “And she done got us, the dirty rat!”     â€œHey!” objected Davidowicz. “Less rodentist hate-speech. Some of us are very sanitary because we know germs can kill. Oh yes…”     â€œWe don’t know if the archvillains got out of the ambush or not,” VelcroVixen admitted. “So I need to achieve our intended destination to co-ordinate the Purveyors of Peril when they deploy.”     â€œThe Purveyors are back!” Lara felt that should perhaps have been the lead.     â€œCan we update while we avoid the big space war?” Cathode asked plaintively.     â€œIf you grab hold of the contacts behind you they will connect you to the ion impellers,” Davidowicz instructed them. “Imagine you’re pushing a cart along using to fire hoses. This isn’t much different.”     Lara and Cath took their places and started to manoeuvre the ship away from the battlefield.     â€œWhat’s the conflict about?” Lara Night asked when she was confident they were properly underway.     â€œThe Tyrant of the Dead Galaxy is taking on the Cult of the Apostate,” Browning explained. “Both enjoy quite extensive space forces with few good manners between them.”     VV offered the background. “The Tyrant is the Hooded Hood, of course. The Apostate is this spooky messiah-type dude who wants to prevent all fun in the Parodyverse. By ruling it. He got booted out of reality when he tried it before, and Visionary of all people got written in to the place he’d otherwise occupy. Sort of like a seat-holder. Or a bung.”     Cacciatore took over the account. “Except these guys in their flying saucers think this Apostate is coming back real soon. So all the planets they’ve taken over are pretty gussied up to spread the word. Evidently the more people who believe in this mook the more powerful he gets.”     â€œAnd the Hood is stepping his people up to stop ‘em,” Davidowicz continued. “So suddenly we’re in a remake of Star Wars and I can feel George Lucas’ hand up my backside.”     â€œI suspect that despite whatever assault Miss St Evil perpetrated, Mr Winkelweald recognised that we were in trouble and recruited the person best suited to assist us, Miss Night,” Browning advised. “I’m sure we’re all very sorry for the inconvenience.”     â€œWe’ll table that discussion for when people aren’t shooting at us,” Lara promised. “What were you supposed to be doing out here before the Portal was disrupted?”     â€œThe Purveyors of Peril have been deployed galactically before,” Vicki Vee explained. “You won’t believe the fee scales! This time we’re going against the random rabid metahumans who have pledged themselves to the glory of the Apostate. Assuming I can ever get to the team. I do not want Brass Monkey leading them in again.”     â€œVelcroVixen was supposed to help the Purveyors attack the Cultists’ main Mobile Battle Temple,” Cathode explained to Lara. “That’s kind of their Death Star, I guess. Emilio and I were supposed to help out with that.”     â€œEmilio?” Lara probed.     Cath glanced across at the revived hoodlum in the sharp suit and blushed. “Um, we were meant to take down the shield generators so that the sciency people could do their sciency stuff.”     â€œThere was an intention to exploit some kind of command and control flaw that links the Battle Temple with other Apostate vessels for mutual self-destruction,” Browning clarified.     â€œVia their Martyrdom Circuits,” Clockwatcher felt it necessary to add. “Certain amendments were made to their programs the last time the Hooded Hood lured the Apostate into manifesting.”     â€œAlways wondered why I had to chain up that Sister Bartok dude,” VelcroVixen admitted. “I don’t usually ask for a reason, though.”     Clockwatcher requested some course alterations from the energy providers that steered him through the war zone.     â€œWon’t that take us right past the biggest cluster of cult ships?” Cathode worried; and then whispered to Lara, “How do you stop that static feedback thing from making you all kind of… y’know, excited downstairs?”     â€œYou copy my powers and now you want dating tips?” Lara asked the young woman.     â€œI didn’t exactly do it. I answered an ad for engineering graduates who wanted bright new opportunities in electrical power management. I’m thinking now I should have read the small print before the Baroness strapped me to her machines. But about the static feedback, because honestly it’s a bit embarrassing and I think I’m sending Emilio the wrong signals.”     Lara pointed to the circular portholes with the engraved Roman numeral dials on them. “We’re aiming right at the densest collection of alien warships in the battle. Do you really want to worry about a spiv in a suit?”     â€œWell, I probably won’t be able to worry later.”     â€œCould one of you ape-related gossips channel a few volts into this communicator array?” Davidowicz called impatiently. “Honestly, neutering your entire species would really improve your work ethic.”     â€œThose bad guys are getting real close,” Cacciatore noticed. “Is there any way to get me and my .45s outside where I can shoot without me getting all froze and exploded? ‘Cause I have this little knack that anything I shoot I kill. Never tried it on a flying saucer before.”     â€œYour weapons would not work in vacuum and the speed of the bullets would be trivial compared to the fractions of light speed at which everything else is travelling,” Clockwatcher warned him.     â€œBut try it anyhow,” VelcroVixen encouraged the hoodlum. “We need a laugh right now.”     â€œI believe the power requirements you requested are connected now, Miss Davidowicz” Browning reported. “And may I say what a delightful pedicure you have, Miss Night. It was a genuine pleasure attaching electrode clips to your toes.”     â€œWhy do we need a radio right now?” Cacciatore asked. “I can wait for the baseball scores.”     â€œWe’re not going to surrender,” VelcroVixen warned. “Don’t make me kill you all without getting a contract first.”     â€œHardly, Miss Vee,” Browning promised.     â€œWe’ve been noticed,” Lara warned. “They’re surrounding us. Let me go out there again and I’ll try and hold them off…”     â€œNot necessary,” Davidowicz declared. She spoke into the radio. “Yoo-hoo! Here we are! Come and get us.”     â€œAnother double-cross!” Cacciatore snarled. His guns were in his hands before he even seemed to move.     â€œWait!” Cathode cried. “Can’t you sense that?”     Lara was ahead of the neophyte energy manipulator. She had already sensed where the call had gone and who had received it.     The cult ships were vast. The dimensional dreadnaught Cruel Deceiver was vaster. The city-sized engine of disruption dropped out of subspace directly above the good ship Clockwatcher. It was less than ten feet above.     â€œEeep!” Cathode shrieked. “Not tingly now. Uncomfortably wet.”     â€œIt may be that the Baroness modified your psyche to give out too much information,” Browning observed.     â€œWe led those mooks into an ambush,” Cacciatore understood. “Now we’re talking!”     The dimensional dreadnaught opened fire.     A force-screen bubble from the underside of the Deceiver scooped Clockwatcher inside before the whole quadrant of space about the massive flagship was filled with transnuclear fire, reducing everything there to free-floating sub-atomic particles.     Albert Hazlewood gasped, unflexed, and toppled onto his bottom in his human form again. “Oh, it feels good not to have vents any more,” he admitted to the henchmen scattered around him.     An ensign was waiting in the collection bay. “This way please,” he instructed the newcomers. “The captain wants you on the bridge.”     Lara considered energy-shifting away now. She’d not chosen to come to Amazadi, not asked to be included in some epic space war, not consented to be dragged into a Hooded Hood plot. But she was still quite weak from her efforts and she couldn’t sense either her home plane or a clear route back to Earth. Even the Lair Mansion and the beacon of Visionary’s lighthouse were obscured.     She accompanied the others to the control centre of the Dreadnaught. She noticed by reflex that the ship’s systems were insulated against outside energy manipulation. And the power that flowed through those conduits was immense, sufficient that any attempt to channel it would certainly burn out the energy-wielder who attempted it.     She remembered that the Dimensional Dreadnaughts had once been powered by the will of the Parody Master. This last surviving one had a different source but it was no less intense; indeed, it might even be more so.     Davidowicz was ahead of her. She pocketed a portable narrative sensor with a glum satisfaction. “The Hooded Hood has assembled the Insanity Stones. Oh dear.”     Lara had seen starship bridges before. This one was bigger than average, with an actual bridge for the command staff to work on over the main chamber, and a prevalence of lurid red combat lighting.     Dozens of screens flickered with images of the battle outside. The tide of this particular encounter had turned, with the Tyrant’s flotilla pushing the opposition back.     The captain’s chair swivelled round and a lean, prematurely-grey man rose from it to greet his visitors. “Welcome aboard,” he said. “I’m Kahn Vaantagion Khaur, commanding the dimensional dreadnaught Cruel Deceiver and admiral of the fleet for the Empire of the Dead Galaxy. You are the special operations personnel from Earth?”     â€œYes,” VelcroVixen agreed. “And one hitch-hiking superhero who admittedly helped us out of a tight spot and may therefore live. I might even buy her a drink. Is the boss here?”     â€œNot yet. I take it you were delayed.”     â€œYou could say that,” Davidowicz snarled. “Any word from the Hood or Dr Moo? Or any of the less important villains?”     â€œNothing,” Kahn admitted. “So we head on regardless. We prosecute this war to win. My vengeance will fetch a premium here!”     â€œAre the Purveyors aboard?” VV demanded. “Have they killed anyone they shouldn’t yet?”     â€œThey’re ready to disembark when the Grand Temple Ship arrives; which it will soon, to my thinking, before we roll up this whole section of the quadrant.”     â€œWe’ll need to get things set up in the laboratories before that,” Browning considered. “All must be in readiness when Thighmaster, Dr Moo, and the Baroness arrive to crack the Martyrdom Code.”     â€œIf they arrive,” Cathode worried.     Vicki Vee pointed to the new energy-wielder and Cacciatore. “You and you with me.” She looked at Lara. “You too if you think you can handle it.”     Klaxons sounded before Lara could pick an answer. “Grand Battle Temple has arrived!” a watch-stander reported. “Cult forces are rallying to it. Incoming message to us.”     â€œOn screen,” Kahn commanded.     A charismatic face filled the viewers. He smiled a little with restrained modesty covering an absolute belief in his superiority. “Sinners,” he began, “you have been led into error. You oppose the rightful destiny of this Parodyverse. You must amend your ways and swear allegiance to the true path.”     â€œHe’s… very convincing,” Cacciatore gasped.     â€œHe makes my head hurt,” Cathode whimpered.     â€œCome to me. Serve me,” the face on the screen offered and demanded. “All your doubts will vanish. All your questions shall be stilled. In obedience comes peace.” His smile widened. “Follow me. I am the Apostate, and all of creation shall be mine.”     And across the Tyrant’s fleet, many people heard his words and knew it to be true.     â€œKill the unbelievers, my faithful,” the Apostate ordered. “Let no sinner endure.”     Most of the bridge crew on the Cruel Deceiver turned round to kill Captain Kahn and the heretics from Earth. *** 12. Vinnie de Soth and the Necessary Sacrifices     Chiaki Bushido flinched away from something that wasn’t there. “Sorry,” she muttered through gritted teeth. “I saw where someone is going to be walking tomorrow. I couldn’t filter it out.”     â€œAre you able to manage?” Vinnie asked her worriedly. “I thought your telepathic future-visions might fade once we got you off Parody Island.”     â€œI can manage,” the Psychic Samurai insisted. “I refuse to remain helpless in your Lair Sanatorium while others fight. Beside, it may help to know if the visions I saw of this place were real or more of the chaff that is affecting my perceptions.”     This place was St Antony’s Cathedral, the grand, gothic 1830s edifice that overlooked the northern edge of Off-Central Park. By night it was locked up and left to shadows – and to Chiaki and Vinnie.     â€œAre you sensing anything now?” the jobbing occultist whispered.     â€œI’m sensing everything. It’s too much – past and present and future all cluttered together as timelines mutate. Nothing that will help us to determine if there really is something wrong here. If what I saw makes any sense.”     â€œA gruesome murder and exsanguination,” Vinnie recalled, “But a different person in the vision each time, with no other details changed. Always bloody. Always here, by night.”     â€œYes. I can’t see the killer. Only the architecture. And a sense of… wrongness. Madness. Long pent-up obsession finally loosed.” The Psychic Samurai shuddered as another version of the event seared through her mind, almost overwhelming her senses. She forced herself to loose her grip on the handle of her sword. “It may be a false impression. I rarely see things like this. It might be allegory. It might be a side-effect of everything else that is happening.”     â€œYou were right to check it. You were right to pull me in,” Vinnie confirmed. “I’m more bothered that you can’t sense any futures at all after the next two days.” He glanced at the samurai. “Okay, you’re not looking good, Chiaki. I’ve never seen you lose your balance before. Why don’t you stay here by the door while I investigate?”     â€œI could still kill you nineteen different ways with one finger. Let’s go.”     They ventured down the long aisle through the darkened nave. Only pale lights from the city outside filtered through stained glass windows. Chimerae on lintels and clouds of rood-screen angels seemed to watch the intruders pass.     â€œWe are not alone,” Chiaki warned quietly.     â€œYou can sense someone?”     â€œI can hear someone breathing. Roughly. Ragged. Near the sanctuary, I think.”     â€œHe’s breathing. In my line of work that’s a good sign.”     â€œKeep walking down to the front in that clumsy attempting-stealth manner while I take a different route.     Vinnie pouted but continued to edge forward. He reached the front pews before he spotted drops of blood on the floor tiles.     He muttered some words and then looked up with eyes searching for things that did not register to usual mortal vision. Certain items in the sanctuary actually became clearer: the high table, a couple of statues, the water inside the font. As he squinted more he could sense rather than see the pulse of natural energies that squirted along the cathedral’s meridian. St Antony’s had been deliberately positioned on one of Paradopolis’ five primary leys. It was a place of power.     The beads of blood quivered and rolled across the floor away from him. He couldn’t see how. It was as if the very floor was flexing to shift them.     â€œRight,” he called out loud, “Whoever is hiding here had better stop messing about and come out. Otherwise I call the National Enquirer.”     The blood-drops vanished down a floor-set heating grate. A woman’s body sprawled near by.     Vinnie hastened over. The victim lay on her chest, one arm still clutching a neatly-folded altar-cloth. Blood dripped from a nasty head wound and trickled slowly along an uncanny path to the grating.     Vinnie put his foot in the way of the red stream. The rivulet diverted round it.     The altar cloth shone slightly in Vinnie’s arcane sight. He appropriated it and used it to mop up the flow. He didn’t fancy feeding anything right now.     He realised that the girl was still breathing. He found a pulse. He turned her over very gently. He recognised her.     â€œRuby!”     Ruby Waver was an ex-starlet associate of the Lair Legion. She’d written a lurid account of her brief relationship with Nats that had almost ruined him. When she finally reformed she had found good works as a staff member at Mr Lye’s Laundry of Doom, one of the mysteries of the Parodyverse.     Her being here like this betrayed that something was gone very, very wrong.     The floor tiles shifted and closed around Vinnie’s ankles, locking him in place.     The jobbing occultist looked around, trying to spot any Saaiitaii manifestation that could project its spiritual sentience into pottery. Entities of that kind were rare and hard to exorcise.     The front pew flowed up into a humanoid shape.     Saaiitaii manifestations could only ever possess one form of matter. Either Vinnie faced two such horrors – and he’d never heard of them co-operating – or this was something else. “Um, is there any chance you have a manifesto leaflet or something outlining your intentions and objectives?” he asked the shape.     It made a mistake: it answered. “You think to oppose me? I’ve heard of you, de Soth. I’ve been briefed. You can stop me no more than the girl or the wolf did.”     So Ruby hadn’t been alone. Her lycanthropic workmate Tanner was involved too.     The wooden thing gestured to the rear of the sanctuary. Altar candles flared to life to reveal the elder werewolf pinned onto the crucifix. Heavy nails fasted not only wrists and ankles but every part of his body to the man-sized cross. Long spikes protruded from his mouth, eyes, and heart where they had been jammed to pacify him.     Vinnie knew of old that a Celtic druid curse prevented Tanner from dying whatever his injuries; except that magic itself was fading now, so perhaps that curse was less potent than before?     The werewolf did not move. He did not breathe.     Vinnie looked back at the manifestation in wood. “‘The girl’ is called Ruby. You could at least be polite about people whose blood you’re stealing.”     â€œWhy? She matters little. Only her death is important.”     â€œI disagree.” He looked down at the alter-cloth that Ruby had brought. “She was delivering for the Laundry of Doom?” At this time of night, to a locked church. That made no sense.     â€œThe Laundry? It has been revoked,” the spirit spat. “It should never have been allowed into my city! Now it is undone!”     â€œYour city?” Vinnie tried to work out who might make that claim. There were plenty of candidates. He tried to recognise the wooden face on the animated pew with the kneeling-stool wig.     â€œIt was, before I was confined away from here. Now I have returned to that which I set.”     Vinnie was reading the turbulence in the ley streams now. “Not this again?” he scorned. “Yes, Paradopolis is a junction for supernatural energies because of the Elder Being asleep underneath and the proximity of Parody Island. And, actually, because of old the founders of Gothametropolis pushed a lot of psychic crap over here out of their way. But really, prodding one of the ley nodes of a city that’s grown this big and complex is only going to cause traffic snarls.”     The shape clenched hymn-book hands. “You think this is the first such rite I have conducted here? You believe this is the only place? The Great Work has been proceeding for a very long time.”     He’d done this before? Here? Chiaki had seen several murders, all done the same. They hadn’t been variant futures. They were actual pasts.     â€œWell the Great Work is going to have to shut the hell up for a bit while I get ‘the girl’ to an ER room. Then you can tell me what the hell you are and I’ll find a way of seeing you stopped.”     â€œYou believe you can stop me?”     â€œI didn’t say that.”     Vinnie took a step back as Chiaki brought her katana round in a precise swipe at the entity’s wooden head. The Masamune blade cut through as if it had sliced paper.     The severed head fell to the floor, shrieking oaths. Vinnie picked up the blessed altar cloth that had been returned from the Laundry of Doom and wrapped it round the wooden lump. Since Ruby’s blood was on it anyway he dropped a spot of sympathetic affinity in there too. “Get him, Ruby. Give him a psychic kicking!”     The head made a last surprised gasp and went silent.     Chiaki had been able to stop the creature, but now she dropped to her knees. “This wasn’t his first,” she sensed. “He’s done this before. Here. Elsewhere. Five places, I think. Multiple times at each location. Always murdering sensitives. The bones are hidden below.” She gasped. “That’s why I was confused here, even beyond the current crisis. I wasn’t seeing one murder. I was seeing several, all the same.”     Vinnie noticed that the altar cloth was slowly charring. “That won’t hold him long. Hold on…”     He dropped the swathed head into the font.     Chiaki forced herself up to check on Ruby and Tanner. “I can’t tell if he is even alive,” she admitted. “Help me get him down.”     â€œHe’s pretty much transfixed,” Vinnie pointed out. “And if he is feeling a bit more human than usual, pulling him off those nails won’t really help him. Call 911 for a trauma team.”     The font began to steam.     â€œHe’s an uppity one, isn’t he?” Vinnie grumbled. “I don’t see how a spirit can be that powerful here. What’s his affinity? Where’s he drawing power from? How is he manifesting in such a wide range of materials, from the architecture of the cathedral itself?”     â€œI don’t know,” Chiaki admitted. “But… this may sound ridiculous but… I think he was locked in Herringcarp Asylum. He has that… stench. That smell of madness.”     Vinnie passed Chiaki his comm-card. “See if you can get that working. Talk to Hallie or Amber. We need medics here to care for Tanner, and then see if anyone can patch through to Ham-Boy and CZ at Herringcarp. Maybe ask the Hooded Hood about… houseguests. Escaped ones. I’ll try and stabilise Ruby.”     The Psychic Samurai was able to make the failing communications web work on audio only. “Ham-Boy and Citizen Z report that there’s nothing at upstate GMY but the modern Herringcarp Mental Wellness Facility, a nice airy building with lovely sea views. CZ is trying to find a way sideways through the defensive retcon to reach the Hood’s real base of operations.”     Vinnie spotted the pulsing veins appearing in the marble of the baptism font. “We can’t afford to wait,” he decided. He fished out the wrapped wooded head and tossed it to Chiaki. “We need to go. That won’t hold it for too long and Ruby needs help. Tanner would want us to leave him here and see to her.”     â€œWe do need to get Ms Waver to a hospital.”     â€œWe need to get Ms Waver to a night nurse!” ***     â€œThat’s a very kind offer,” Grace O’Mercy, head trauma nurse on the graveyard shift at the Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital told Vinnie de Soth, “but I won’t be going to the Shoggoth’s theme park with the Ghouls and Detonator Hippos. Nor will I be joining Elder Vrykolakas’ evacuation, or answering the calls of Faerie. I’m required at my post right here.”     â€œAnd when the curse keeping vampires going is all used up?”     â€œThen I’ll work on a suntan.” The nurse treated Vinnie to a rare twinkly smile. “I never thought I’d be happy to have time-of-the-month cramps again, but I have some right now.”     â€œYou’re not dying,” Chiaki understood. “You’re living!”     â€œWell, I’ve very rarely drunk human blood from an actual person,” Grace pointed out. “Ethical reasons. And never by my own choice. Mac thinks I’m just reverting to the nearest mundane analogue for my condition. For most nosferatu that’s dead. For me it’s… requiring tampons.”     A junior doctor emerged from behind a privacy curtain where he had been examining Ruby Waver. He nodded to Chiaki and Vinnie and favoured Grace with a hope-you-might-date-me-one-day smile. “I’ve stitched and packed the head wound,” he reported. “She took a nasty knock. We’ll need to do CAT scans to check for brain damage. In any case, she’s not waking up any time soon.”     â€œI’ll see to the police incident notifications, Dr Mullet,” the night nurse promised.     â€œHank,” Dr Mullet urged her. “Please, call me Hank.”     â€œRight you are, Hank. I’ll just deal with these visitors, shall I?”     Call-me-Hank reluctantly departed. Grace turned back to Chiaki and Vinnie. “What’s Ruby doing like that? What happened to Tanner? Who did it?”     â€œNot sure,” Vinnie admitted, “but here’s his head. Or rather here’s a chunk of wood that he projected his consciousness into and is now struggling to get out of. That’s why we brought him here.”     â€œYou want him to escape into a hospital full of sick people?”     Vinnie shook his head. “PMH is protected. Everyone knows that - well, everyone in the occult community. Even though it’s a public building, vampires can’t enter without invitation. Zombies get turned to dust. Demons bounce. I’m not saying people are totally safe here, especially right now, but the defences will keep this guy’s master from calling him back while we figure out what’s happening.”     â€œYou believe this entity has a master?” Chiaki asked.     â€œOh sure. He wasn’t made into this thing by accident, but he was having to use multiple rituals to trigger off the leys, so he’s not good enough to shift to this by himself. He’s a minion.”     â€œCan we take him somewhere that there are less people?” Grace insisted. “The morgue?”     â€œWon’t that just give him material for a new host?” the Psychic Samurai worried.     Vinnie shook his head. “This isn’t a corpse-dweller. He’s more into architecture.”     â€œHave there been other assaults lately with similar head wounds?” Chiaki asked Grace.     The night nurse turned back to a desk admissions computer. “Hold on. Hmm, yes actually. An old man three nights back was found in critical condition with ‘mugging injuries’ out back of the Paradopolis Variety Theatre. He was DOA. And the duty pathologist was asked to examine a body found in an alley not far from City Hall.”     Vinnie bared his teeth. “Damn. Five locations, you said Chiaki? Five!”     â€œWhy does that matter?” Grace enquired.     â€œWay back when the city was being erected, civil constructions were built on five special sites of power that would act as amplifiers to turn the whole of Parodiopolis into a psychic conductor: the Cathedral, City Hall, the Grand Opera – which became the Variety Theatre, the Municipal Library, and the old rail terminal where Parody Plaza now stands. A pentagram to control the elder creature that sleeps below: Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu, the Groper Out of Grossness. But that plot was busted a long time ago. Marie died in it. That’s how she became the Lair Banshee.”     Chiaki winced as another set of potential futures spiked into her head. “We need to move,” she insisted. “To the basement morgue.” As Grace and Vinnie rushed after her she asked, “Why is this called the Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital?”     â€œI guess you’re not from round here,” Vinnie realised. “Phantomhawk was one of the first of what we now call superheroes. He died saving the city. His legacy fund built a state-of-the-art new medical facility on the spot where he fell.”     â€œA protected facility.”     â€œNamed after a supernatural feathery-winged guy who smote evil, yeah,” Vinnie observed. “Nobody really knows.” He thought for a moment. “Not long after that, Messenger first appeared.”     They reached the morgue. Grace waved at the assistant. “Hey, Beryl. We need to borrow one of the autopsy rooms for some research for a while. You didn’t see anything, okay?”     â€œOkay, Grace. If it gets spooky try not to get stuff one the walls again.”     Vinnie was puzzled. “They know who you are?”     â€œSenior department nurse at GMH’s E.R. late shift, that’s who I am,” the vampiric health care worker told him. “You’d be amazed at the stuff we have to cope with. Well, maybe not you, but most folks. Who ya gonna call?”     They passed into the white-tiled examination room. Chiaki laid the linen-wrapped wooden head on the cutting table. “How do you want to play this?” she asked Vinnie.     â€œThat holy-water-soaked altar-cloth won’t baffle our boy for long now. He’ll overcome it, then reach out to manifest through the local building fabric.”     â€œHe may be difficult to subdue a second time,” Chiaki warned. “Last time I caught him by surprise, severed his connection with the materials around him. He may take precautions against that.”     â€œIf he tries to snag this building he won’t like it.” Vinnie was often diffident and shy when he wasn’t working. Right now he seemed confident and dangerous. “Grace, I’ll need a psychiatric detention form, the ones you use for involuntary hold orders on people with mental health problems.”     â€œYou can’t lock a wooden head in a psych ward,” Grace objected. “Except perhaps Herringcarp.     â€œYeah. Except Herringcarp.”     Chiaki handed Vinnie back his LL commcard. He hadn’t realised she’d borrowed it again. “ManMan checked Mr Li’s Laundry,” she reported. “There’s nothing there, just a paper on the door with some strange runes on it and empty warehouse space behind.”     Vinnie winced. “Damn. Anything that can neutralise Mr Li and his staff is very bad news.”          â€œI had Hallie run a check on missing persons and suspected crimes near the five landmark sites you mentioned. She’s found twenty-three possible incidents associated with those places in the last six weeks. No bodies, though.”     â€œI think the ones that were found escaped before the were finished off. An entity that can warp building materials would have no problem burying corpses under structures.”     â€œPerhaps I deserve a recap?” Grace O’Mercy suggested. She listened as Chiaki tersely briefed her on the visions that had led to the interrupted attack on Ruby Waver and the peculiar nature of the assailant. “Yes, I deserved that,” she sighed.     The altar cloth burned away. The wooden head detonated into fragments. The metal dissecting table twisted to scrap. Floor tiles morphed into human shape – and screamed.     â€œYeah. He doesn’t enjoy being the fabric of PMH,” Vinnie confirmed. “If I’m right, he’ll like this less.”     He took the psychiatric form from Grace, scribbled a name on it, and slapped it on the writhing ceramic monster. “You are bound, buster,” the jobbing occultist declared. “Just like in life.”     The floor snapped back to previous shape. Where it had retreated, a translucent form shivered in foetal position. The hospital paperwork had somehow become a restraining strait-jacket.     â€œHe has been like this before,” Chiaki sensed. This close to the ghost all the other nauseating future-visions were drowned out. “He spent many years incarcerated. At Herringcarp, a long time ago. More than a century since. They shot electricity into his head. They cut into his brain. At last he died.”     â€œYes, Herringcarp wasn’t a shining enlightened model of mental health care even before it became the Hooded Hood’s man-lair,” Grace admitted.     â€œThe spirit said he’d been sent from the city, from the place where he had affinity,” Vinnie noted.     Chiaki could see more. “When he died he was… claimed. A pact from his younger days. He became… what we saw. He was…”     â€œAn architect?” Vinnie asked. “Check the name on the form.”     Grace bent and looked. “Leyland Reed. I’ve heard that name…”     â€œHe was once Marie Murchison’s fiancée. In 1860 he gave her up to a cult who wanted to make her the bride of Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu.”     â€œSo not a nice man, then.”     â€œA mad man, driven insane by exposure to the secrets of the Fairly Great Old Ones. But before that he designed and built many landmarks of old Parodiopolis.”     â€œCity Hall, St Antony’s, the Variety Theatre, the Library, and the Railway Station,” Chiaki surmised. “He was the one who designed the city-sized occult summoning pentagram.”     â€œAnd in death he gained the ability to clothe himself in the fabric of the buildings he created. That’s why I brought him to PMH. This place was built long after Reed’s time on a site of power that has nothing to do with him or his leys.”     â€œHe’s suffering,” Grace noted. “Even if he’s become a phantom killer we can’t leave him like that.”     â€œI’ll load him into an official GMH lidded bedpan and get him back to the Lair Mansion shortly,” Vinnie promised. “Right now I need to know who picked up his contract when old Mayor Wilbur Parody had finished with him. Who made him into… this, and sent him out to re-activate the Elder God prodders?”     â€œIs this – him, his atrocities - to do with the other things that are happening now?” Chiaki wondered. “Why else would my visions lead me to this particular horror?”     Vinnie slapped his forehead. “Wait! All of what’s happening… Of all the changes to the Parodyverse, the one creature with us who is hardest to affect is surely the Manga Shoggoth. He ignores most of the laws of reality anyway. And he’s pretty powerful to us, a major asset. But compared to the creatures who made him, the Fairly Great Old Ones he rebelled against and escaped from, he’s very small. If someone wanted to include the Shoggoth in changes, they’d need some major juice.”     â€œFGOO juice?” Grace suggested.     Chiaki frowned. “Then this is another aspect of whatever is being done to the Parodyverse. Like the different physics, and the curse-nullifiers against the undead? This is part of a plan.”     â€œWhy don’t you ask me?” the ghost of Leyland Reed enquired; except it wasn’t Reed who spoke.     The spirit was possessed.     â€œLeyland’s puppet master?” Vinnie asked. “Any chance of a name?”     â€œNames have power… Vincent Arcanus Greymalkin de Soth. You, on the other hand, have very little, acting sorcerer supreme.”     â€œOuch. I’m crushed. I’m worried now that you won’t tell me your evil plan.”     â€œHardly evil, little sorcerer. Tell me, would you sacrifice ten lives to save a billion?”     â€œI wouldn’t do that kind of math.”     â€œThen you are already a failure. What about sacrificing a billion lives… to prevent the inevitable awakening and triumph of the Fairly Great Old Ones?”     Chiaki saw Vinnie’s body language change. The jobbing occultist looked shocked. Afraid. “Vinnie…?”     â€œThe FGOOs are asleep,” Vinnie replied, “despite idiots with giant pentagrams trying to be alarm clocks.”     â€œThey will not slumber forever. And when they wake all of history will be wiped away. What price is not worth paying to prevent that insane horror.”     The jobbing occultist shook his head. “You’re saying… a Normalverse doesn’t have Fairly Great Old Ones. It is forever safe from them. Thousands, millions, die because of the changes, but all of time and space are saved.”     â€œYes. The losses are trivial compared to the gains.”     â€œYour boy Leyland wasn’t charging up the leys to wake up the Groper Out of Grossness. It’s the opposite: an exorcism!”     â€œYes.”     â€œThat would take an insane amount of juice. Parody Master-like levels of it.”     â€œYes.”     â€œAnd with Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu would go all the Fairly Great Old Ones, carved from existence. And the Shoggoth with them.”     â€œYes.”     â€œAnd his dimension of Lemuria?” Chiaki asked.     â€œYes,” the voice using Reed’s ghostly lips confirmed. “Will you oppose me on this, de Soth? Dare you? What true sorcerer supreme would baulk at cleansing away the Elder Gods?”     Chiaki realised that Vinnie was thinking about it. “You can’t be seriously considering it,” she told him. “This thing talking to us, whatever it is, is evil. Evil and dangerous.”     â€œMore dangerous than the Fairly Great Old Ones?” Vinnie asked in a quiet voice. “Than a cancer eating through the Parodyverse that will inevitably kill it one day?”     â€œI know about cancer treatments,” Grace interjected. “And I know about quality of life. There’s a balance. But I also know you have to trust the doctor.” She gestured to Reed’s phantom. “I don’t trust him.”     â€œOther beings of potential and power have joined me, de Soth,” the voice revealed. “Think of it as a Final Coalition to save the Parodyverse. Soon I will be the only one who can grant the exceptional and the extraordinary. So will you ally yourself and save the universe? Or will you settle for mundanity and death?”     â€œVinnie!” Chiaki could see two futures clearly now. In one of them Vinnie accepted the voice, abandoned the Legion, and joined in the making of the Normalverse. In the other he turned the voice down and a moment later Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital and everyone in it was destroyed.     â€œVin?” Grace was worried too now.     Vinnie made his choice. *** 13. Magweed and Griffin and the Grown-Up Decisions     â€œJust to be clear,” insisted Visionary, “my children are not going to a hostile fantasy plane to overthrow the Faerie Queene. Not even if you and Yo go along to help them.”     Donar stroked his beard. “You art distressed that you art banished from Faerie and cannot go forth to the smiting. ‘Tis a pity, but we shalt bring thee back the skulls of thine enemies for you to quaff from.”     â€œWe already have enough ways of jamming the dishwasher,” Hallie told the hemigod of thunder. “The answer is ‘No’. We are responsible parents. We do not send our children off to commit coups.”     â€œYo is explaining of naughty scheme of Fairying Queene to be taking of advantage of many people?” Yo checked. The pure thought being could do pretty much anything s/he thought s/he could, but s/he didn’t think her English was that good. “Is to be stopping of her ways by putting of cute-Maggy on Faerie Throne.”     â€œIs to not be – I mean it isn’t,” Vizh countered. “Don’t look at me like that Yo. Stop showing me Rabito. Stop waving his paw at me. I mean it. No taking our kids on amazing adventures in fantasy realms.”     â€œBut you hast other great deeds ahead of thee,” Donar encouraged the possibly-fake man. “Yon message from the Librarian sayeth thou has a glorious last stand coming. Or going, since it hath evidently happened in the past. If ye art having the fun of dying in glorious triumph three hundred and seventy years since, letting thy children reave and sunder the Many Coloured Land for the nonce art only fair.”     â€œVisionary is not travelling to the past to die either,” Hallie declared sharply. “Yes, Vizh, I know what I argued about free will when I decided to stay here rather than retreat to Lemuria. Now shut up and do what I say.”      “Visi should not be dying. But Yo is thinking maybe he can be coming with us all to Faerie if we are to be disguising him properly. Cute-Visi has always enjoyed to be a weasel…” ***     â€œThey’ll be at that for hours,” Magweed whispered. “They’re not even at the part where Yo suggests group hugging yet.”     â€œSo it’s up to us,” her brother Griffin agreed. “After all, we grew up in Faerie. We have dual citizenship.”     Samantha Featherstone nodded. “You were right to call me. I’m not sure I approve of a fairy-tale world – it doesn’t seem very sensible to me – but if you’re determined to head there I’m not letting you go without me.”     â€œI’ll leave a note,” Griffin decided. “If I put it on the fire extinguisher they’ll spot it as soon as Kerry calls.”     â€œWe can still set the Lighthouse to open a steading gate for a little while yet,” Magweed estimated. “I don’t know why the grown-ups think it’s so difficult. It’s like the myth-gates want to open for us.”     Sam checked her utility belt. “How bad do you think the translation effect into Faerie will be? I hope some of this stuff I’ve brought survives being altered to its mediaeval fantasy equivalent.”     â€œIt has been quite a while since Mags and I were allowed in the Mythlands,” Griffin admitted. “We don’t really know what to expect when we shift back there. Especially now that Faerie is drifting even further from the Iron World.”     â€œThey’re hugging,” Sam spotted. “This is the time to make our move.”     The youngsters slipped from the Lair Mansion and crossed the island to the old lighthouse that clung to the southern shore. The ancient edifice was actually a dimensional beacon with instrumentation to alter its aspect into a number of different planes of existence. Mostly Visionary used the mechanism as a place to hang his laundry.     â€œEveryone take station,” Magweed called to her Mouse Guard. “You guys will need to keep adjusting the dials when we’re there because the gate will be a bit wobbly.”     Griffin examined the control. “Um, this might be a bit of a one-way system right now,” he warned. “Maybe we’ll be able to adjust things from the other side to allow for return journeys?”     â€œIf we find Zebulon he will probably fix it,” Mags considered. “He likes to take things apart. And sometimes reassemble them.”     â€œOnce we get to Faerie, is there a plan for overthrowing the regime of the most powerful supernatural entity there?” Samantha asked with interest.     â€œSure,” Griffin promised her. “We brought you along to think of it.”     The Lighthouse lamp flashed once and the tower shifted. ***     The landscape was covered in snow. Ice hung from trees like Christmas decorations. The ground was frozen.     â€œShe knows that I am here,” Magweed could tell. “Mab, I mean. She can sense me. She’s not happy.”     â€œBecause you are her planned replacement,” Sam understood. “She’s not keen on planned obsolescence.”     â€œPlanned by her enemy Camellia, the Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Griffin pointed out. “It didn’t work out well for Camellia or Auntie but you can see why Mab might be a bit alarmed.”     â€œAlarmed as in, ‘Oh, I dropped my wand in surprise’ or as in ‘Here is an army of three million elves to stomp you out of existence?’” Sam wondered.     Mags thought about it. “Probably number two, or nastier.”     â€œThen we need to get a move on. I know time is short here but…” Sir Mumphrey’s niece looked down at herself. “Why am I in a Dark Knight costume? Well, a Dark Knight costume redesigned by a Renfair leatherworker?”     â€œYou did take those training lessons from DK,” Griffin pointed out.     â€œBut I also took lessons from Champagne, Countess Romanza, Hatman, CSFB!, Miiri, Yuki…,” the Dim Knightette objected. “Hmm, I suppose costume-wise it could have been a lot worse. But Maggie only got that fairy-tale princess dress and you just look the same.”     Griffin looked down at himself. “I do?” He still had his school clothes on.     â€œThis isn’t really me,” Magweed objected. “I’m not really the tinsel and glitter kind of Fairy Princess. Not anymore, if I ever was. But it seems to make the land happy so I’ll stick with it for now.” She looked around the winter wonderland. “But not forever…”     â€œWell I’m changing,” Griffin grinned. “Watch this!”     And then he was a gryphon – ten feet long, body and hind legs of a lion, head, foreclaws and wings of an eagle, combination of the kings of animals and birds, sacred guardian of the divine and the royal.     â€œGah!” gasped Samantha veering back. “A little warning before you transmute into beasts of myth, Griffin!”     Magweed clapped. “Oh Griff! I always knew that’s what you really looked like!”     â€œHe’s a were-gryphon now?” Sam boggled. “I hope you can change back, young man, because otherwise you’re not getting through the door.”     Griffin’s wingspan covered the width of the circular lighthouse room. He flexed his talons and was a boy again. “I’ve got to try and remember how I do that when we get home. Then, after the five years we get grounded for, I can try flying there.”     â€œWell I suppose it helps that we have one strategic aerial combat asset,” Sam decided. “How many gryphons does Queen Mab have?”     â€œThe rest of them,” Magweed predicted. “We really need backup. Hold on, here!” She scooped up the scruffy ginger tomcat who was dozing atop the warm pile of washing draped across the dimensional instruments. “Okay, let’s go.”     â€œIs that really fair on Mab?” Griffin wondered. The cat had been imbued with the power of the Celestians and was effectively indestructible; or it had been until the current crisis.     â€œEvery good fairy story has an animal character,” Mags insisted.     â€œHe’s not exactly Puss-in-Boots,” Griff pointed out. “More Puss-With-Claws.”     â€œLisa says he’s an old softie really.”     â€œLisa is Destroyer of Tales, the cosmic-officer who ends all things,” Samantha reminded them.     They left the Mouse Guard to maintain the Lighthouse’s steading gate as long as possible and went out into the snow. ***     In the frozen forest there was a path. Along the path was a snowy clearing. In the clearing stood three full-length mirrors. Frost covered the silver rims and etched fractal patterns around the edge of the reflective surfaces.     â€œAh, here we go,” Magweed breathed. A cloud of steam billowed when she talked. “This will be the Test.”     â€œThe what?” Sam asked. “No, no. This will be the trap!”     â€œSame thing,” Griffin told her. “Look! There’s three of them and three of us. We each look into a mirror and have to deal with what we see reflected there. If was somehow overcome the trial of the revelation then we can go on to the next challenge.”     â€œIt’s traditional,” Mags added. “This place is all about tradition.”     â€œAnd I’m all about us not dying,” Samantha insisted. “I really cannot be doing with it. What happens if we just ignore the mirrors and carry on?”     Magweed asked the question of some passing sparrows. “Evidently we’ll trudge through the snow for a few hours and end up back here,” she discovered. “Possibly being chased by wolves.”     â€œFine. What happens if we don’t each look into a mirror? What if we all look in the same mirror?”     Magweed checked but the sparrows didn’t know the answer. “They say that’s not their department.”     â€œIt’s a good idea,” Griffin decided. “I think Queen Mab isn’t very big on teamwork. It wouldn’t occur to her that we might do this together. It might really confuse her mirrors.”     They held hands and looked into one of the reflections.     After a moment, Samantha asked, “What is my grandfather doing?” ***     â€œLokotowicz!” Sir Mumphrey Wilton roared. He strode out of the Louisiana guest house, the only building in the tiny swamp-side settlement not to be swept away by a hundred-foot high column of sewage mud, and confronted the monster who controlled the devastation. “You paltering feckless traitorous pestilent oik! Get down here and explain yourself, sirrah!”     The two people in the doorway behind the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity winced. Zania Chhabra was the new Keeper of the Boundaries and it was her barrier that has protected the house from the destruction that had swept away the rest of Bellecarre. She wasn’t sure that yelling at the mad Guardian of the Nexus of Unreality was the best strategy. Harlan Bull was the even-newer Dealer of the Deck of Destinies; the previous Dealer lay upstairs, choked on his own faeces controlled by the treacherous Crapsack.     â€œThat is one mighty huge stack of crap,” he admitted to Zania.     â€œSir Mumphrey appears to be telling it off,” she noted worriedly.     â€œYes. He does that," Asil warned the new cosmic office holders. “You'd be amazed how often it works.”     â€œWilton!” boomed the glutinous mass of detritus. “When I was told to destroy as many Office-Holders as I could and take their artefacts I really hoped you’d be one of them, you self-righteous old &£$*!”     â€œLadies present!” Mumphrey snapped back censoriously. “So you’re takin’ orders again, eh? Whose lackey are you this time?”     â€œNot the Triumvirate of Greater Offices,” Crapsack sneered. “They’re doomed now. Finished. Your time has passed, old man.”     Sir Mumphrey checked his pocketwatch. “No. Evidently not. And I’ll thank you and your sponsor to keep your damned hands off Lisa and the Chronicler. You can have Symmetry with my blessings and good riddance to her.”     â€œSymmetry is already ours,” the bog-monster gloated. “She gave us this beginning in exchange for her son being saved from hell. What but the power of a Great Office could thwart the other Great Offices? Now there will be a new Parodyverse where all those who thought themselves so special shall be nothing.”     â€œIsn’t Lady Symmetry of Synchronicity the Shaper of Worlds?” Zania checked urgently. “She’s supposed to launch off the great narratives that drive the Parodyverse?”     â€œThe what that who now?” Harlan had held his Deck for less than twenty minutes. Nobody had told him the Rules yet.     â€œShe is,” Mumphrey confirmed. “And she’s not supposed to be able to betray that office. Even Samhain couldn’t do that. Trust her to find a way!” He looked up at the wall of filth that was creeping to surround them. “So you and Symmetry are both pawns, eh? Can’t say as I’m surprised at you, Lokotowicz, but I thought Symmetry had more class.”     â€œWe are not pawns!” Crapsack raged. “We are partners!”     â€œYou keep telling yourself that, bud,” Harlan chimed in. He had no idea what was going on but he knew how to annoy people.     â€œSo Symmetry used you to disrupt the Nexus and cause trouble,” Mumphrey surmised, “As a rogue Great Office she could allow you permission to betray your Guardianship, I suppose. And then she set you like a watchdog to wait for us to come along and see what was wrong. Dashed treacherous. But poor maths, I’d say.”     Crapsack paused. “Maths?”     â€œSums, you divot! Two is more than one. There’s a reason it’s a Triumvirate. Two can always rein in a third an’ give her a spanking if they need to.”     Crapsack released a bubbling unpleasant laugh and a pungent stench that threatened to choke his adversaries. “Oh, Madame Symmetry has help to make it two and two. The Chronicler and Destroyer are going down!”     â€œHmph. Best we sort you out and head off to aid’ em then.” The eccentric Englishman checked his watch again, raised one eyebrow at what he saw, and added, “It’s all a matter of timing – and that’s what a Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity is about, m’dear.”     â€œI am suffused with the power of the dying Nexus,” Crapsack boomed. “I am empowered to destroy all of you little office-holders. None of you can stop me! So die, Wilton. Choke on shit and die!”     The wall of faeces broke through Zania’s border barrier, reduced Harlan’s chances to none, and washed down to engulf the eccentric Englishman. ***     â€œCrap!” gasped Griffin as the reflection released them. “Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry. Your grandfather…”     Samantha Featherstone shook her head. “That was the trap. I see that and despair. But I didn’t see it alone. We all did. We carry on. Next mirror.”     â€œWe might still be able to think of something…” Magweed offered desperately.     â€œNext. Mirror.”     They saw stars. ***     Lara Night downed the first rank of Dreadnaught crew that had just become fanatical adherents of the Apostate. There were many others.     VelcroVixen body-slammed one of Captain Kahn’s bodyguards who had gone over to Team Cultist. “What do we do?” she called out.     â€œIt appears that a significant proportion of personnel in this fleet have succumbed to the enemy’s call,” Browning noted. “This is most unfortunate.”     Clockwatcher unfurled into a multi-limbed clockwork spider killing machine and deterred the first weapons squad to storm the bridge. “Can we stop that transmission? Or is it already too late?”     â€œToo late,” Davidowicz estimated. “When the Apostate calls he can switch weak minds across to his side. When those weak minds have a millions-strong space armada to add to his existing millions-strong space armada, that is a bad thing.”     Cathode discharged herself into the next wave of new-fanatics, allowing Lara time to get a better tactical overview. “Have you internal defences against riot and mutiny?” Lara asked Kahn Vaantagion Khaur urgently. “If so, use them.”     â€œThat would pacify the fleet but also leave them drifting helpless in the field of war,” the admiral of the Black Galaxy armada objected.     â€œBetter that than have them teamed up with the Cult-ships against us.”     Captain Khan vented an oath and slapped an emergency control.     â€œI thought the Apostate couldn’t come back while Visionary was around?” VelcroVixen objected. “What did that little weasel do to lose himself this time?”     Davidowicz spoke words that had never been heard before. “It may not be Visionary’s fault. Earth is now enveloped in the new conditions of the Parodyverse. The provision that kept Apostate out of reality whilst a possibly-fake man held his place instead may no longer prevail.”     â€œCould all of this have been a plan to return the Apostate to lead his crusade?” Clockwatcher speculated.     â€œEither that or another move in an even bigger game,” Lara worried.     â€œJoin me now,” the Avatar called on every monitor screen. “Let us shape the future together.” The side of his Battle Temple opened and a platform extended out into space. The returned master of creation stood on it, heedless of the vacuum and radiation, arms outstretched in benevolent summoning.     â€œWhat if he gets the Purveyors on his side?” Cathode whispered to VV.     â€œIs there any way I can get a clear shot at him?” asked Emilio Cacciatore.     â€œThe Cult ships have stopped attacking,” Kahn warned. “They are moving in to board our helpless vessels.”     â€œCan we maybe go out there and fight this Apostate?” Cathode wondered. “We could shoot him with electric.”     â€œIt would be free plasma in space,” Lara instructed her. “I’m not liking our chances - or seeing a better alternative. If we can take Apostate down we might still win this.”     â€œThat is a very slim chance, Miss Night,” Clockwatcher considered. “But now that I am reflecting on the way events have unfolded, I believe my employer may have had a different idea.”     The Avatar gestured. The little group who opposed him on the bridge of the Cruel Deceiver were snatched up and teleported to him in the endless void of space.     He suspended their powers. He made no provision for their survival.     â€œWorship me,” he told them in their final seconds, “or die.” ***     â€œThat’s murder!” Griffin objected, jerking back from the looking glass. “That’s not fighting fair! That’s just murder!”     â€œAnother scenario where our enemies triumph,” Sam analysed. “The Faerie Queene wants us to give up. She’s playing you, Mags.”     â€œShe’s trying to upset me too. To make me angry,” the challenger said. “I bet she’s watching now. Maybe the whole Seelie Court is watching to see how helpless we are to stop any of this.”     â€œSo show them different, sis,” Griffin insisted. “Third mirror.” ***     â€œOther beings of potential and power have joined me, de Soth,” a possessed ghost warned the acting sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse. “Think of it as a Final Coalition to save the Parodyverse. Soon I will be the only one who can grant the exceptional and the extraordinary. So will you ally yourself and save the universe? Or will you settle for mundanity and death?”     â€œVinnie?” The Psychic Samurai sounded very nervous.     â€œVin?” Grace O’Mercy knew something was wrong. The jobbing occultist was on the verge of a decision that would doom them all whatever he decided.     Vinnie paused and stuck his hands in his pockets. “I can see right through you,” he told the phantom. “But now I think about it, you haven’t seen all the angles.” ***     â€œWhy is that nurse transparent?” Samantha asked Magweed and Griffin.     â€œVampires don’t usually reflect in mirrors,” Griff answered automatically. Sometime this kind of information just gushed to him. “Grace is halfway vampire right now, I think, so when we look at her reflection we can…”     Sam cut him off and snapped her fingers. “Right, well done. That’s it then. The plan.”     â€œHurray, the plan!” Magweed enthused. “What is the plan?”     â€œYou heard Sir Mumphrey. It’s a matter of timing. He told me that. You don’t think he’d call Crapsack ‘m’dear’, do you? No, he checked his Pocketwatch and he spoke to a Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity. A future one, me. because here Griff is the gryphon he might become and you’re a Faerie Queen-in potential and I’m… one day I’ll do grandfather’s job. Really, really well. And then…”     â€œThen we looked out at that space war,” Griffin caught on. “And that machine-man – his name is Albert Hazlewood, Clockwatcher, born Birmingham, England in nineteen… never mind. His best skill is assembling information from tiny clues and snippets. He’s the Hooded Hood’s archivist. And he said he was ‘reflecting’, emphasised the word, about unfolding events, and that the Hood might have an idea.”     Magweed turned to the last mirror. “And then Vinnie saw an angle that the baddies hadn’t seen!” she cried. A big smile crossed her face. “The best thing is, the Faerie Queene used all of this to trap us and now it’s going to be brilliant!”     â€œTurn the mirrors to reflect each other,” Sam called out. “Quickly!”     The children shifted the tall looking glasses.     â€œNow we just need to break through them,” Magweed declared. “But how… oh yes, I know.” She hugged the ginger cat. “Get the bad men,” she told it. “Fish supper later.” And she hurled him at a mirror.     â€œThe Hooded Hood used to date the Faerie Queene,” Griffin babbled on, unable to stop it now. “That’s probably when he did his retcon about these magic mirrors and replaced them with the Portal of Pretentiousness.”     The tomcat passed through the surface of a mirror, four sets of claws extended for the Apostate’s face. ***     The Apostate screamed and tried to detach nearly two stone of furious hair and sharp parts from his head - again. He was distracted by a vast wall of faeces that had been aimed somewhere else but crashed down over him instead. His own energy burst lanced through some pale mortal ghost, searing the indwelling spirit from it before it could destroy the building it had been in. That lethal hospital-shattering potential discharged instead through the nearest dimensional anomaly available, the Guardian of the Nexus of Unreality. Crapsack exploded.     In the overlapping reflections of the Portal of Pretentiousness, three dire situations crashed together and neutralised each other.     As the Battle Temple’s screens faltered from the energy release of a destroyed Nexus Guardian, Brass Monkey teleported the Purveyors of Peril over to activate the Martyrdom Protocols that would destroy the enemy fleet.     The Portal before Magweed, Griffin, and Sam was one again, a large black window onto infinity. It belched out people strained from the disasters around them: Lara Night, Clockwatcher, Browning, Davidowicz, VelcroVixen, Cacciatore, and Cathode; Vinnie de Soth, Chiaki Bushido, and Grace O’Mercy; Harlan Bull, Zania Chhabra, and Sir Mumphrey Wilton. And a rather malodorous cat.     As the newcomers variously gasped for air, blinked in surprise, drew their weapons, and polished their pocketwatch, the image in the black glass shifted again.     Now it showed archvillains preparing to traverse to the dimensional dreadnaught around Amazadi A. The Hooded Hood was there, with Dr Moo, Baroness von Zemo, Magenta St Evil, Thighmaster, and Boss Deadeyes.     â€œI have already retconned Barovia,” the cowled crime czar was assuring Romney Carlton-Thomas. Your own assistance before your craven flight is much appreciated.”     â€œI wish you would explain more about this mission we all need to accomplish,” the Baroness complained. “Some of us need to be house-hunting.”     Magenta positioned herself so she was right behind the Hooded Hood as he opened the Portal of Pretentiousness.     â€œI am shifting our primary minions now to prepare things for us,” the Hood intoned. “Now if you would all be so good as to accompany me…”     Magenta slapped a piece of paper between Ioldabaoth Winkelweald’s shoulder blades and pushed him through the Portal. The effect engulfed the others there too except for Magenta herself. The remaining Council of Archvillains vanished with him.     â€œYes!” she danced. “I did it! I got him! Me! I took out the Hooded Hood and there is nobody to stop me! Yay for me!”     She didn’t spot Citizen Z and Ham-Boy behind her.     The Portal rippled again and the Hooded Hood and those with him staggered out into Faerie to join the assembly.     The Portal became inert.     â€œWhat just happened?” Thighmaster panicked. “Browning? Browning!”     Deadeyes spotted Cacciatore. “And ideas?” he asked his hitman without much expectation of anything but the shrug he receieved back.     â€œData!” Moo snapped at Davidowicz. The rat handed back a sensor pad.     â€œData!” the Baroness called to Cathode.     â€œUm…” Catherine Simmons replied.     The Hooded Hood removed the paper from his back and examined it. “A specific compilation to prevent my access to variant outcomes in alternate realities,” he considered. “Magenta was sent in prepared to neutralise my powers and those of the Portal.”     â€œYou’re without your powers, sirrah?” Sir Mumphrey challenged the cowled crime czar. “Dash it! Would be unsporting to pot you on the snoot now, then.” He seemed disgusted.     Samantha ran over to him. “Grandfather! We solved the puzzle. You’re in Faerie and we’re overthrowing the Faerie Queene.”     â€œBecause of the fealty scam?” Vinnie checked. “Makes sense. But you don’t need to dethrone Mab for that. Just make a better offer.”     Magweed was interested. “Like what?” she asked.     â€œTo who?” Griffin added.     â€œYou young people came here via the Dimensional Lighthouse,” the Hooded Hood surmised. “It still retains a working steading gate for now? Then you can offer access to the Many Coloured Land through it. Mab does not command that entrance. You do. License those you approve to enter. Charge what you will for its use.”     Magweed felt Faerie shift. “Oops. The Queene heard that. She’s really mad.”     â€œI can sense her,” Chiaki Bushido agreed. She seemed insulated here from the screaming futures that had torn at her mind. She was herself again. “There is a terrible power, beautiful and ancient, and it does not like to be defied.” She blinked at Magweed. “But it shall be.”     â€œMab will abide by the rules,” the Hooded Hood insisted. “She has been beaten this time, at the very game she chose, and she must accept that defeat. Especially in the presence of the Keeper of the Borders and the Dealer of the Deck.”     â€œDid you arrange this, Ioldabaoth?” the Baroness demanded suspiciously.     â€œWhat, all of us away in Faerie beyond the immediate influence of our adversaries, able to pool resources and plan future action? How could I?”     â€œI’m making the offer about Faerie haven,” Magweed announced. “Griff, can you deliver it?”     â€œRight now I can,” agreed the boy, shifting and spreading his wings at last.     â€œThen hurry. The gate won’t hold for long and we have a lot of work to do!”     A sewage-coated ginger cat rubbed up against Vinnie’s leg and made friends. *** 14. Marie Murchison and the Da Visionary Code Previously: The Untold Tale of the Lair Mansion     It was almost dawn, a grey smudged morning over a dull listless ocean. Marie sat on a ledge of the Lair Mansion’s central tower and watched for the coming day.     Marie Murchison had been born in 1840 in New Parody City, the place that would become Parodiopolis and Paradopolis, yet the woman on the balcony was just twenty-two years old. Twenty of those years had been lived in genteel privilege just before her nation was torn apart by the conflicts of the American Civil War; but by the time of the War Between the States, Marie was dead, sacrificed in a rite intended to make her bride to an elder god. The marriage had been averted, but Marie had still passed from life, voiceless and helpless.     Only the location of her death had made a difference. Mayor Wilbur Parody had rebuilt the old colonial mansion on the island he had named after himself, across a narrow stretch of water to the larger island where stood the city he had founded. This had been the site of his attempts to control the ancient sleeping Shabba’Dhaaba’Dhu, the Groper Out of Grossness.     He had underestimated the site.     The Mansion was built on a Lair. Beneath it slept the Dreaming Celestian, one of the cosmic Space Robots that maintained the fabric of the Parodyverse. The power around the being formed its defences, protected the island. Sometimes it co-opted useful tools. That power salvaged Marie’s sundered, baffled soul and bound her to the Lair Mansion as its spectral banshee guardian.     Marie did not remember much of those long years of blurred half-slumber. Only death provoked her. She would wail to lament the passing of an occupant of the house, one of the League of Improbable Gentleman who met there after Wilbur Parody had fallen, one of the private residents who dwelled there through the twentieth century until the house was acquired as headquarters for a new team of what the world was calling superheroes. And she would scream when the dead who came with evil intent tried to breach her domain; she was a guardian spirit.     Two more years of life came later, after two remarkable resurrections that left her in human flesh as she had been more than a century before, before a second murder became her third death. But since then the Lair Banshee could think and act, speak though not touch, move small objects with her will in lieu of tangible hands. She could manifest anywhere on Parody Island and interact with the residents who had become her friends.     What she could not do was leave. The Mansion sustained her and bound her. Other ghosts might find refuge in Lost Lemuria. Marie was Lair Banshee to the end.     So she watched her last sunrise and counted herself blessed.     She heard Flapjack’s swearing long before the Mansion’s major domo heaved himself onto the balcony beside her.     â€œYou are limping more than usual,” she worried.     â€œSome transplant compatibility problems,” the hunchbacked butler dismissed her concern. “Us Carpathian Flapjacks believe in recycling. The current changes to the way things work is causing me the odd twinge. But I can still give you a hump.”     â€œBehave. You didn’t ouch yourself up all those stairs just to be crude at me.”     â€œYou don’t know how far I’d go to be crude. But you have a call. On the telephone, since the holo-comm-cards are down now. It’s Citizen Z.”     Flapjack held out the strange machine for her. Marie might have managed to levitate it with poltergeist activity but that tended to unsettle electronic devices. The butler pressed a pattern on its surface so it could hear her.      “Good morning. This is Marie Murchison speaking into the telephonic instrument.”     â€œZ here,” came back the reply in unsettling echoing multi-tones that left the Lair Banshee settled. “I’m still with Ham-Boy at Herringcarp.”     â€œYou found it, then.”     â€œNot really. Only the modern hospital desktop. And Magenta St Evil, who was in one of the treatment rooms in mid-gloat when Ham-Boy knee-tackled her. She claims to have beaten the Hooded Hood, dropped him into oblivion.”     Flapjack made a sound indicating the chances of that.     â€œShe further claimed association with whoever is behind our present problem, but when I encouraged her to speak…”     â€œYou mean when you stabbed her with psychic torment knives!” Ham-Boy’s voice cut in, cross because he had needed to be the conscientious one who stopped the torture.     â€œWhen I motivated her she went catatonic. Not her choice, I suspect.”     â€œWhat have you done with her now?” Marie wondered.     â€œNothing she did not deserve,” Citizen Z answered viciously.     â€œWe’re in a medical facility,” Ham-Boy explained more helpfully. “She’s being cared for under watch.”     It occurred to Marie to wonder why CZ was calling her about it, so she asked.     â€œThere’s more,” the supernatural avenger told her. “Vinnie forwarded some questions about an inmate in the old asylum back in the nineteenth century. The patient was Leyland Reed.”     Marie’s heart skipped. “Leyland? My Leyland? My fiancée?”     Flapjack heard the name. “The rat-bastard who handed you to the Cult of Lugosa to be sacrificed?”     â€œYou knew that he was incarcerated after that summoning went wrong?” Citizen Z checked. “That he spent the rest of his life in Herringcarp, right up to his death in 1904?”         Marie swallowed. “I heard something about it. I… avoided looking up details. Why is Vinnie interested in that?”     â€œNot sure. He was doing something urgent at Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital. Haven’t heard back from him yet. I just wondered if maybe you had any extra information about Leyland’s stay here. Seems not. I’m sorry if it dredged up difficult times.”     â€œYou’re at happy-Herringcarp?” Flapjack asked. “But you’re still able to manifest Amnesia-slash-Laurie?”     â€œYes. Why?”     â€œThen there’s got to be a way through to the real Asylum still open there.” Flapjack had henched for the Hooded Hood before becoming the Lair Mansion butler and still moonlighted there when the cowled crime czar needed extra lurching. “I bet you anything that Magenta was searching for it. If she thought she’d taken the Hood out she’d be hoping to loot his stuff – you know, Insanity Stones and the like.”     â€œHow do I get in, then?” CZ asked.     â€œHey, you’re the Spirit of Herringcarp. I’m just the guy who answered the door.” Flapjack turned to Marie. “You’re the Spirit of the Lair Mansion. Any tips?”     â€œI don’t really know how I know to be here or what I need to do,” Marie admitted. “It’s just… it is natural. Gravity.”     â€œI… I’ve spent quite a bit of time holding myself above Herringcarp,” Citizen Z confessed. “The Lair Mansion, it’s always felt benevolent, at least towards its Legion. The Asylum… not so much. It’s a place of madness and pain and I think it likes that. I think it wants me to like it too.”     HB understood. “You’re worried that if you let go to find Herringcarp then… it might find you.”     â€œYes. But I think I might have to try. I think we need to know what the Hood knows.”     â€œGood luck, Laurie,” Marie wished as the call ended.     Flapjack nodded. “Hunting in Herringcarp? She’ll need it.”     A shiver ran through the Lair Banshee. “Gravity,” she told the Legion’s major domo. “It can be scary when you’re afraid to fall.”     The hunchback beckoned. “Come off the tower, then.”     â€œNot what I mean, Flapjack. A drop can’t hurt a spectre. I mean a different sort of pull. There is a weight now, trying to suck me down. A growing darkness around me. Everything is fading to black and white. I’m fading.”     â€œYou are sustained by the island and by its house,” Flapjack assured her. “There’s been a house here for a very long time. One little blip in the way the Parodyverse works is nothing to it.”     â€œI’m trying to hold on. I’ll answer when the Island requires me for as long as I may. But the weight is… accumulating. When I do fall…”     â€œYou’re just feeling gloomy. Shall I fetch my amusingly-shaped potato collection?”     â€œI’m feeling now as though real death is very close,” Marie whispered. “And not just for me..” She rose abruptly. “There are things I should get on with. Duties.” She kissed Flapjack’s cheek, a ghost whisper of cold breath on his rough face. “Take care of yourself, my dear friend.” ***     â€œThanks for talking with me about this, Bry,” Marie told the Legionnaire called Goldeneyed. “I know you don’t like remembering your time in the cellar.”     â€œThe months I spent in agony during the Parody War, stuck in the doorway to the Celestian power under the Mansion, projecting the island’s defences out to cover the entire solar system?” the tousle-haired young adventurer asked. “Nah. It was a piece of cake, really. Anyway, you had to spend years haunting my bathroom, so you had it worse.”     The spot where Marie died had been remodelled in the modern Mansion. It had once led to G-Eyed having a very uncomfortable shower experience. “I can’t remember much about my previous time as a disembodied spirit,” the Lair Banshee owned.     â€œJust as well. I’m glad you weren’t aware of me in the bathroom. Or anything I did in the bathroom.”     Marie looked Bry over. “Are you recovered enough from powering the chymeric gate to Lemuria?” she asked. “That looked to hurt as well.”     â€œI only make it look that way to seem more heroic. Beth and Laurie were watching. Well, until they went off to do something more important.”     â€œI’m not sure I believe you. But still… I need to work some things out, and Hallie and Visionary are distracted because of their children.”     â€œAnd because Yo and Donar have suddenly become a pleasant European research scientist and an Australian backpacker, with no idea how they got here.”     â€œAnd no more word from Hatman and ManMan out in the field, or from EEE, or from CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s wife and mother about their progress.”     â€œVizh and Hallie managed to get through to their kids in Faerie by shouting at the Lighthouse, though, right?”     â€œAl B. says that the rift is now too unstable to risk passing anything else through, but communication will be possible for another half hour or so. After that, Faerie will be closed off like all the other planes. But many creatures have been drawn there by the grace of Magweed and will be safe for a while longer from whatever is happening here.”     â€œSo Mags and Griff are safe with the Hooded Hood, the Baroness, and Dr Moo,” Bry asked sceptically.     â€œAnd Samantha’s grandfather, who is not known for particularly tolerating the Hooded Hood. So are Asil and Vinnie and Chiaki and Lara. Besides, our unidentified adversary has neutralised the Hood’s power.”     â€œLike that’ll stop him. It’s probably part of his masterplan.” Goldeneyed’s entire life had been shaped through the Hooded Hood’s scheming.     The cowled crime czar made Marie nervous so she returned to her purpose. “I’ve been sifting Lee Bookman’s notes, the things he seemed to be researching when he set up contingencies in the File Room,” she began. “There’s some remarkable material on his desk. Even a history of the Parodyverse from before the Hooded Hood started his retcons.”     â€œWow. That must clarify a few things.”     â€œNot… noticeably. But my investigation has suddenly become a lot more urgent since Lee’s holo-ghost and his message. Now a couple of things about our present crisis have pointed towards some old history of this island. Between us, you and I know as much about it as anybody.”     Bry shuddered. “I’d been in the Lair Legion about five minutes when Lisa and I got tossed back through time, through all kinds of weird encounters set up by Hastings Vernal, one of the many avatars of HV through history, who turned out to be… Never mind. Yeah, we got sent back to when the Cult of Lugosa first occupied the island worshiping Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu, back in prehistory. We teamed up with the HairyHoneyBeserkerBarbarian, one of the many CrazySugarFreakChampions also dotted through the timeline…”     â€œThat’s another thing we need to understand,” Marie insisted. “Throughout history there have been various groups a bit like the Lair Legion, often centred on this house, often with characters very like the ones in the team. Like the Island kept on trying to create heroes, a Legion for the Lair.”     â€œYeah. There were the Knights Improbablar, the Improbable College, the League of Improbable Gentlemen, a bunch of others. Mumph was actually around for that last one. I think the Shoggoth might have been in one too. We should have asked before he retreated to Lemuria.”     Marie thought hard. “So if the Island wants a Legion, who wants to get rid of it?”     Bry scratched his head. “This is a bit above my pay grade, but… the Hooded Hood once claimed that there was a hidden purpose in the Parodyverse. A Secret. That it had actually been created to discover an answer to some question, to work it out like a living calculator. At some point that Secret was buried under the Mansion. Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu was either set to guard it, like a watchdog, or came to feed off it like a parasite. Maybe both. The Celestian Space Robots placed the Secret here, and they may have had a bit of a tiff over it. One of their number, the Dreaming Black Celestian, went to sleep here too, or may have been sent to sleep by his peers. The LL never really got to the bottom of that, on account of being too busy fighting for our lives.”     â€œSo somebody wants the Secret?”     â€œFor a while there everybody wanted the Secret. Most of our old rogues gallery at the time. Turns out to have been hidden in spiffy’s old Cosmic Cube, which the Black Celestian was basically cuddling and using to shape all reality as he dreamed. It all ended with Celestian Space Robots hovering over the major cities of Earth planning to obliterate the world, and Lisa and the Hood doing tricky things that hid the Secret someplace else that even they didn’t know about. And Jarvis died to save us.” Bry looked bleak. “Sorry. After all this time it still hurts to say that.”     â€œI remember, Bry,” Marie promised him. “I keened for him. That was what woke me after a long time dormant. That’s why you perceived me not long after. That and Con Johnstantine summoning ‘the Guardian of the Lair Mansion.’ She sighed. “The thing is, long before all this came to a head like that, before the Secret moved on, before the Cube was melted down by the Parody Master, before the Lair Legion ever existed, before European colonisation, before even the Native Americans roamed this land, there was still activity round this island.”     Bry nodded. “That’s what Lisa and I discovered, yeah. And tons of plans were laid around it, from demons like Mefrothto to time-travellers like Wang the Conqueror, from old Wilbur Parody to baffling HV. If we really need a proper chart we’ve got about twenty minutes to ‘port over to the Lighthouse, shout through that conduit, and ask the Hood.”     â€œLet’s not,” Marie said firmly. “Besides, I think Lee Bookman probably did the work for us. This File Room desk is covered in research into the island’s past, and particularly into its associations with the Knights Improbablar and the Confraternity of the Improbable College.”     Bry scratched his head. “So what do you need me for?” He eyed the high piles of volumes stacked around the Librarian’s work station. “I thought we booted Nats to the Moon to sort this lot out?”     â€œAnd he sent back that last message from the Library,” Marie confirmed. “Another clue that Lee must have set for us pointing to the tomb of Visionatus Improbablus.”     â€œWhich lurks right by the portal that used to connect to the chamber of the Dreaming Celestian and now goes straight to the raw power place where he banked his energies,” G-Eyed recalled. “My favourite place in the whole world, the pain doorway.”     â€œLee’s records indicate that the tomb was created in 1552, but the inscription on the tomb was only carved there three hundred and seventy years ago – he had Sir Mumphrey confirm it - which is important because the Latin inscription there reads ‘In 370 Years the Parody Should Not Exist.’”     â€œAnd now we’re basically transitioning from a Parodyverse to a Normalverse.”     â€œYes. The Improbable College probably discovered the tomb around 1700 or so, when it had already gained its graffiti. They believed it to be the resting place of the possibly-allegorical Visionatus, whose probably-fictional journey formed the basis of a popular pamphlet at the time and served as a call-to-arms for scholars, lunatics, and iconoclasts across Renaissance Europe to rebel against the established order. We don’t know what they found there or if they took things away.”     â€œThey didn’t put the inscription on there?”     â€œNo. Sir Mumphrey’s pocketwatch can discern exactly when things happened. That inscription is exactly warning us about today.”     â€œSo who visited it in-between?”     â€œLee suspected HV, whose incarnations were very active messing in history around that time, but nobody knows for sure. The tomb though, and any body it once contained, is actually late mediaeval.”     G-Eyed frowned. “From not long after Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two? The Knights Improbablar made it over here and started cluttering our cellars with mysterious tombs?”     â€œWell, according to the tract, Visionatus got to some pretty strange places before he ended up on Parody Island. Other times, other dimensions, other worlds.”     â€œBut he wasn’t real.”     He and Marie exchanged worried glances. “I’m not having another Jarvis,” Goldeneyed insisted. “We’re not sending Visionary back there to become this Visionatus.”     â€œLee warned that he had to go back there. In fact he said ‘they’ should go, ‘even if it was a suicide mission’. And Valeria’s prophecy said there was no ‘real chance’ to stop all this. But maybe a possibly-fake one?”     â€œAnd outside this expanding bubble of normalcy, the Apostate is already back. Damn.”     â€œWhoever that was that Vinnie, Chiaki, and Grace spoke with through Leyland’s spectre, he wasn’t content with just shutting down super-powers and chasing robots and supernatural creatures off Earth. He intends to eradicate them all.” Marie bit her lip. “I’ve put together as much as we know. I’ve tracked down everything Lee was looking at when he… left us.”     â€œSuspicious that he got taken out just as he was looking at this,” Bry muttered. “But don’t worry, Marie. Vizh can’t go off time travelling to his death, and nor can any of the rest of us. Time-travel has been revoked. Al B, is going insane trying to find new ways to break the universe but he’s baffled. We’ll just have to find out who’s behind this and stop him the old fashioned way, by punching him and making stuff blow up.”     â€œI suppose so. But I…”     Marie was interrupted by a tannoy call from Amber St Clare. “Everybody get to the Ops Room now. It’s started. There was a securities heist at a brokerage in Gothametropolis. Hatman and ManMan went in there. Hatty’s been shot.” ***     â€œHe’s not dead,” Marie assured the Legionnaires in the Operations Centre. “I’d know if he was. I think – I think I could still tell. Jay doesn’t feel gone any more than Dream does.”     â€œHe’s at GMY General now,” Yuki Shiro reported. “His Steelers cap stopped working for him at the wrong moment. He took two shots to the upper body from a sawn off shotgun. He’s in surgery. Manny’s keeping watch on him.”     â€œApril and Meggan couldn’t find any trace of CSFB!” G-Eyed reported. “The stuff they had prepared to try and get his Impossibilitum form to come back doesn’t seem to have worked. And now Jay’s Serious Matter seems to have failed.”     â€œJay, Dream, Donar, Yo,” Amber counted, “We had to ship off Sally and the Shoggoth, Fleabot, Sergeant MacHarridan, Nats, Uhuna… Sir Mumphrey, Vinnie, Lara, Chiaki stuck in Faerie.”     â€œOthers seem to have been sucked to the Mythlands too,” Liu Xi added. “Tanner and Ruby just vanished from PMH’s intensive care ward. I mean actually vanished in ‘a sparkly cloud of shiny dust, a beating of eagle wings, and a shower of tiny rainbow ponies’, according to the staff there.” She thought more about it. “I guess Tanner might survive in a place where his ‘curse’ can still operate. If Vinnie could have pulled him in he would have.”     â€œI wish I could get over to GMH and see what’s happening,” Yuki seethed. “Was this Hatty assault really just a robbery gone wrong, or something more? I need to see the scene!”     â€œIf you leave the Island you’re brain/body interface will fail,” Al B. warned her again. “You already had a close call when you encountered that anti-vampire-cure warding. Even that was enough to momentarily disrupt you. You should have gone with the robots into Lemuria.”     Yuki expressed her views on that option in terse terms.     Marie flushed at the unladylike language. “Excuse me, but I think I may have found more about what Leyland was doing.” The people who had been dragged to Faerie had been able to pass on what they had discovered through the dwindled portal back to the Lighthouse before it had finally failed. “I have a suspicion why he was using those five important sites again to manipulate the energies under Parodiopolis.”     â€œHe was trying to take down the Fairly Great Old Ones and eliminate the Shoggoth and Lemuria,” Liu Xi Xian noted. “Vinnie and Chiaki stopped him. For now.”     â€œI think it was more than that,” the Lair Banshee confessed. “After all, Mayor Parody set those sites up – had Leyland set them up – to collect energies and direct them all to Parody Island.”     â€œHe wasn’t the only one,” Hallie footnoted. “The Hooded Hood did it as a means of getting at the operating systems of the Celestian Space Robots.”     â€œOh, that was a bad one,” Visionary shuddered. “He used the power to slam down Apostate too, to lock him out of the Parodyverse. I got hit on the head a lot,” he added bitterly.     Al B. nodded. “The other sites were the generator. This place is the control unit. Or, using a different analogy, they were the hammer trying to bust open the Lair Mansion padlock. Marie is right. Those energies could have been gathered to direct at us here. The Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu thing was only part of the plan. The energy required to excise the Fairly Great Old Ones would be vast. Did he plan on stealing it from here?”     â€œOr did he have access to enough power to overcome even the reservoir left in this place,” Hallie worried.     â€œWe still don’t know the who,” Yuki objected. “Is it a he at all? Is it the Avatar or is he just an ally, like Madame Jikininki and Magenta St Evil? Who has the power and know-how for this?”     â€œWho could let Symmetry slip her bonds?” Liu Xi continued. “Who could back her up to thwart the rest of the Triumvirate?”     Visionary rubbed his forehead. There used to be less of it and more hairline before he’d joined the Lair Legion. “Look, we’ve done about as much damage control as we can now,” he pointed out. “We have no more ways to evacuate people – or get back anybody we evacuated. We’re clearly not at our best as a crimefighting force just now. We’ve saved everybody that can be saved and we’ve gathered about as much intel as we’re going to get, unless CZ manages to interrogate Herringcarp or Magenta St Evil wakes up. So now the only thing that’s left is for us to solve the big problem.”     â€œAnd how do we do that?” Yuki challenged. “I mean, yes, I’m for it. But so far we’ve only reacted, done damage control. How do we play offence?”     â€œI think…” Marie blurted, then felt shy.     â€œGo on,” Liu Xi encouraged her.     â€œWell… I don’t see any alternative now. I think we have to go under the Mansion, to the Tomb of Visionatus Improbablus. I can guide us there. I think we have to see it.”     â€œYou think that or you feel that?” Al B. pondered.     â€œI feel it. Like gravity. Like a countdown.”     â€œThen we’ll go,” Visionary decided. “But first, I am having a crueller.”     ***     There were caves under the Lair Mansion, carved or burrowed millennia before the rise of Homo Sapiens. They formed a labyrinth that baffled navigation except for those few who understood they rhythms of the geometry.     Marie and Hallie guided Visionary, Al B., Yuki, Liu Xi, and G-Eyed into the depths.     â€œI thought you made an easy trail down to the dimensional doorway, back when I was stuck there for so long,” Goldeneyed objected.     â€œWe did,” Liu Xi agreed. “Then the caves ate it.”     â€œThe Mansion didn’t even have cellars when we first moved in,” Visionary remembered. “Well, not that we knew of.”     â€œThe house likes to go back to its favourite layouts,” Marie apologised. “It likes a tower. It likes ornamental statuary. It likes rambling cellars and caves beneath. It sneaks them back when nobody is watching.”     They passed down further, through a chamber that had the bones of some giant prehistoric horror embedded in one wall. The Lair Banshee strained to remain opaque but knew she was betraying translucence as the explorers descended.     Yuki stumbled. “I’m fine,” she assured everyone. “Just a minor systems glitch. Nothing to worry about.”     Further on was an underground lake with disquieting ripples across it. Liu Xi started at it and shivered before passing on.     â€œI can’t sense the dimensional doorway any more,” Bry said after a while. “Either I’ve completely lost my ability to access multidimensional events or else it has gone.”     â€œNone of my instruments can detect it,” Al B. reported. He slapped a hand-held monitor against the wall. “I’m not sure the principles that they operate on are still valid.”     â€œThe enemy knows we are approaching the tomb,” Marie told them. “He is pressing his efforts.”     â€œHow w-would he k-know?” Hallie asked. Her hologrammatic form fuzzed for a moment. “Vizh?”     â€œHere, Hallie.”     â€œCan you carry me? My HED, I mean? D-d-d-don’t leave me.”     Visionary held out his hands. Hallie’s image vanished and the floating Hologram Emitter Drone that projected the A.I.’s form dropped into his palms. “I’ll never leave you,” he promised her.     â€œI can’t feel the elements,” Liu Xi whispered to Yuki. “It’s like being blind and deaf. It’s not me. It’s as if the elements are dying.”     Marie realised she could scarcely see her hand now, but the path to her destination was clearly visible.     â€œWe’re here,” she announced.     Across a low-roofed cavern was a carved lintel to a small chamber. The stone door was already ajar, revealing the sarcophagus within.     â€œDidididid I mention how much I hahahate this place?” Hallie asked through her HED’s speaker. She'd like it once, because of the infinite stories inscribed all over the interior walls. That had been before she had had her throat cut here in an attempt to destroy the past.     â€œI’m not that fond of the tomb myself,” Vizh assured her. “I mean, is that an ancestor’s tomb? A really big fan of mine’s? Or the obvious thing – where they laid me when I died?”     The interior of the tomb was lit. An eternal flame burned there in a small lamp that defied probabilities. The light shone on other items that had been packed around the yellow-coated corpse: a raven-feather quill, a matted clump of purple rabbit fur, a rusted Antikythera-like mechanism, a dusty ball the size of a small fist, a dried leaf rotted to brown flinders, and a stoppered stone bottle with crusted white mould around the cork.     â€œDNA tests on the body failed,” Al B. told the others. “It may not be a proper corpse at all.”     â€œFake, you mean?” G-Eyed blurted. “Sorry, Vizh. I mean, that body is looking good for five hundred years old. Not gooey at all or skeletony or…”     â€œYou can be quiet now, Bry,” Liu Xi assured him. She looked around carefully. “There’s something else here. Something that wasn’t here before.”     â€œIt all looks the same to me,” Visionary objected. “Unnecessarily spooky and disturbing.”     â€œS-s-s-she’s right,” Hallie crackled. “I know illusions. There’s somesomesomething…”     â€œThis whole place feels like a puzzle waiting to be solved,” mused Yuki. She turned away to look around to conceal being unable to make her left arm move.     â€œPower,” G-Eyed suddenly sensed. “Gah! Painful power.” He waved his hand at the far end of the room. The warning engraving faded away, revealing many more characters behind it. They too peeled back, a rapid cascade of narratives unfolding to reveal what was behind them.”     â€œNo HV put those there, hostile or helpful,” Marie suddenly understood. “Those were set there by a Librarian!”     The last of the characters twisted aside. Behind it was the doorway to the dimensional power-place that the Black Celestian had horded.     â€œThat was down the hall!” Goldeneyed objected. “How did it sneak in here?”     â€œThere’s moremoremore,” Hallie insisted. “Harharharmonic refractions.”     â€œThe doorway was concealed by words,” Liu Xi translated. “Something else is concealed by vibrations – sounds.”     â€œWe have a Banshee,” Al B. pointed out. He coached Marie through a series of ascending scales.     The last concealment shattered like a wine glass at high C. Stretched across the dimensional entrance, drawing on its power, was something else.     G-Eyed blinked. “Is that the Portal of Pretentiousness?”     Hovering at the far end of the cramped sepulchre was the Hooded Hood’s sinister black mirror.     â€œHow did that thing get here?” Vizh demanded. Having it in his potential tomb felt like bad taste.”     â€œIt has been here for a long time,” Liu Xi sensed. “Waiting.” She reached out a hand and touched the dark glass before anyone could stop her.     A hand came through the mirror and grasped her wrist.     She pulled away in shock, dragging a figure through the looking glass as she shied away.     â€œUm, hi,” said Ham-Boy. He gave everyone a little wave and looked sheepish.     â€œDid I miss a chapter?” Yuki asked.     HB shook his head. “A paragraph or two, maybe. See, CZ found Herringcarp. I mean real Herringcarp. I’m not sure that was a good thing, because she went uber-spooky – uber-spookier - and seems to be operating on some kind of pre-programmed course. She summoned what she called ‘the last fragment of the Portal’ and pushed me through it. She seemed very urgent. So here I am.” He looked around. “Where am I?”     â€œI thought the Portal had been neutralised,” Liu Xi objected.     â€œThere’s a temporal twist to this version,” Al B. noted. The archscientist ran some calculations. “The Hood has been down here before, hasn’t he? Back during the Black Celestian events? I think this is a shadow of the Portal from then, not now. Clever workaround.”     â€œThe P-ppp-ortal can get to other times, can’t it?” Hallie declared. “Can it? I can’t r-remember now.”     Ham-Boy winced. “That’s what CZ needs me to tell you. That was what the small print you just saw twisting away was warning you about. Right now the Portal can’t shift you to the past. Or anywhere. Not bodily. But here in front of that dimensional energy reservoir, the Hood has somehow set it to transport people back into previous versions of people like themselves. At least I think that’s what CZ was saying. I was kind of trying not to go insane at the time.”     â€œWe experienced that body-jump time-stuff before,” G-Eyed remembered, “When we went back and met first met Marie. We were all occupying folks from 1860. Naturally, Nats jumped into the body of William, Leyland’s brother, who was eloping with his fiancée. Um, sorry Marie, but you were. Of course, this was before Nats eloped with Uhuna. And that thing where he vanished off with Regret.” Bry snorted. “I should kick Bill more.”     â€œLike that, then,” HB confirmed. “Except we won’t remember being us. At least not at first. So it might be a bit tricky sorting stuff out.”     â€œI can allow it to do that,” Marie sensed. “This isn’t the Portal’s place of power. It is mine. I have to… grant permission.” She looked grave. She pulsed in and out of vision as if in time with a secret heartbeat. “I have to be the Island’s channel, to send you to your… other times.”     â€œHold on,” Yuki objected. “The Hooded Hood set up his Portal of Plot-Arranging to send us to occupy past knock-offs of ourselves and he expects us to jump in there and do it?”     Bry sighed. “Let’s face it, we’re going to, right?”     â€œNot you,” Al B. warned him. “Or Liu Xi. You’re both atypically dimensionally superpositioned. G-Eyed wasn’t born in this time and Liu Xi was bred for the Vortex for many generations. It would be too dangerous to drop you in there now, both for you and for the Portal to sustain its very tenuous remaining link to the past.”     â€œBut the rest of us can go?” Vizh asked. “Yay. Can you two keep hold of Hallie for me, then?”     â€œI’m g-g-g-going with you,” the A.I. insisted. “I won’t leaveleave you e-e-e-ither.”     â€œMe too,” Yuki decided. “Neither of us can last much – much longer here anyhow. It’s getting – worse.”     â€œCZ thinks the Portal is set for more than one destination,” Ham-Boy reported. “We can’t tell where.”     Vizh straightened the collar of his yellow raincoat and slipped Hallie into his pocket. “Right then. Pretend that Mumph or Jarvis was here and made a really great speech about this. Or Finny made a grumpy one. Or Lisa made one that everyone was blushing about. And then let’s go.”     â€œThis transit will probably destroy your physical bodies,” Liu Xi warned.     â€œI needed to diet anyhow,” Visionary confessed.     Ham-Boy swallowed hard. “So do we… go?”     â€œSee you… earlier,” Al B. Harper told everyone and jumped into the Portal.     Yuki swore again and followed him.     Ham-Boy waved goodbye, held his nose as if he was jumping into a pond, and dived through.     â€œCome back,” G-Eyed told Visionary firmly.     Vizh nodded and stepped into the black mirror.     It vanished.     â€œIt is done,” Marie sighed, and faded into nothing.     And then the world was perfectly normal.      *** Next issue: The Lair Legion’s living history! The mystery plotters revealed! Justus Screwdriver strikes! Sarah of Dunboggie’s unexpected advice! The Faerie Queen vs the Council of Archvillains! The secret origin of Visionatus Improbablus! And yet again, the End of the Parodyverse as we know it! It’s all there in Untold Tales of the Yesterverse #358: The Dying Days, or Final Dates *** Who’s Who at the Council of Archvillains ["Poster characters" are indicated in deep sky blue] Asteroth De Soth is the head of the De Soth Cult, an interbred family of sorcerers and witches with links to the darker gods. Other family members include his wife Omerta, Uncle Belial, Golgotha, Thenody, Styxus, Scabeous, and the disinherited Vincent de Soth. One daughter, “Lucy” (Lucifera) , was enrolled in Young Heckfire but is currently missing assumed consumed in hell. Baroness Elizabeth Von Zemo (Her Excellency Baroness Elizabeth Sweetwater Dewdrop Zemo von Saxe-Lurkburg-Schreckhausen) is the grandniece of the infamous Baron Heinrich von Zemo and the granddaughter of his “unalive” but still-active older brother Baron Ottokar Attila Kublai Tamerlane von Zemo. Formerly a mild-mannered graduate student in psychology at the University of Michigan, she rapidly exploited the mad-scientific riches of her great-uncle’s papers and has since launched a number of schemes which have propelled her into the first ranks of villainy, including one temporarily-successful world takeover. In the guise of superhero Citizen Z (the second) she infiltrated the ranks of the Lair Legion and lived amongst them for many months, rising to be their Deputy Leader before being exposed. She recently experienced an extended retcon in which she was the wife of Sir Mumphrey Wilton, and which she recalls although normal history has been restored. More on the Baroness and Zemo cast summaries and additional information on Schloss Shreckhausen Boss Deadeyes (Antony Ventredi), a 1930s gang racketeer, has been raised from the dead and has reclaimed his place as “boss” of Gothametropolis York’s criminal underworld. He possesses the supernatural ability to kill with touch, but can delay the effect for as long as he likes. With his reanimated comrades-in-crime, dapper hit man Emilio Cacciatore, accountant Ishmael Levi, and nightclub singer Myra Mason, and with modern-day henchman Carlos “E-Razor” Kauffman, the Boss is seeking to reunite the fragmented GMY mobs. This has not made him popular with corrupt city Mayor Velma Klein and her allies who plot to destroy him. The diabolical Dr Moo (Daio), a cow-masked bio-engineer villainess with the ability to control dairy products, is actually Lisa's older sister. Dr Moo has a pet female rat lab assistant called Davidowicz who has manifested a number of human-like traits including the ability to take photographs and talk.More on Davidowicz The Hooded Hood is a resident at madness-infested Herringcarp Asylum, from which he plans his own domination of the multiverse. The Hood's power it to "retcon", a comics fan's usually derisive term for a comics writer who rewrites or writes off other older stories which don't suit his own artistic vision. The Hood can make small changes in past continuity to affect the present. The Hood is obsessed with forging the continuity of the Parodyverse into "a single pristine whole" which he controls, and with overcoming and destroying the powers that created the Parodyverse for their own ends and amusement. He never lies. The cowled crime czar has occasionally used minions, including the Purveyors of Peril and the now-defunct Fearwalker. His current main researcher and organiser is the fussy scholarly Clockwatcher (Alwin Hazlewood). The Hooded Hood worked his way through a list of major powers he needed to irritate as part of some grand celestial plan for multiversal domination, died to further his goals (twice), got better (twice), and continues to plot something complicated and cosmic. He has recently conquered and weaponised the Dead Galaxy for his own reasons. The Hood's complicated family includes at least four retconned offspring and two “current” children by Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity, the current Shaper of Worlds, including Denial (Danny Lyle). The Hooded Hood’s Writer’s Guide More on the Hooded Hood and the Purveyors of Peril Jethro Screwdriver is an underworld financier, although so far nobody has been able to pin any criminal charges on him. A prominent middleman for supervillain activity, he specialises in brokering mercenary hires and in back-end financing masterplans. He has clashed most with De Brown Streak. Magenta St Evil is a European crimelord with an obsession for transforming things into mid-90’s Image-style comic situation s– such as the time she transformed the LL into the Liefield Legion, a plot so hideous that Dancer had to marry ManMan to stop her. She has used her super-science and cosmic connections to try and transform the world into a post-apocalyptic wasteland to better suit her tastes, but has been constantly thwarted by her archenemy Dancer. She was briefly the ruler of the rogue alternative-Canada nation-state of Candia. Thighmaster, (Romney Carlton-Thomas) sovereign ruler of Bovoria, has come “within a gnat's wing of greatness on several occasions – ruling the Universe was a particular highlight” (press release quote) - but has been thwarted by his arch-nemesis, ManMan, each time. With his faithful manservant, Browning, the Thighmaster continues to plot his way into the annals of villain history! Vrykolakas is an elder consulting vampire or immense age and power. He remains behind-the-scenes, enforcing ancient pacts and continuing his necromantic studies. Amongst his other work he has arranged for Boss Deadeyes’ return from the grave and for Lisette’s removal into realms of horror after she suffered the Baroness’ prototype Reincarnation Engine. *** Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2016 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2016 to their creators. This is a work of parody. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works are in fair-use parody and do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. Any proceeds from this work are distributed to charity. 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. Unfortunately, I am extraordinarily pressed for time and can't comment properly on UT #357 either. Thanks for bringing back Beth as a properly arch science villain; Baroness #71 ended with an unauthorized HH retcon to reconcile the two story lines. I look forward to seeing how the HH will guide that motley group of egocentrics to participate in the rescue of the Parodyverse (or not). I need to apologize to Jason for treading on Lara Night's elemental turf. Cathode wasn't supposed to mimic Lara that closely, and I'd outlined some limitations that would have distinguished her. But, again, time was insufficient and you needed to go ahead. I'll work on adapting the character consistent with your story line but differentiated from Lara (which might have been done by February). As it happens, in your telling the normalizing wave hasn't reached the far side of the PVB, so Cathode's abilities haven't been impaired yet. After they are, but before the resolution of your story arc, I'll write a tie-in to the effect that her powers have been involuntarily/mystically/tech-glitched/something modified as a result of the hiatus. For now, continue with her as you have been. I had considered a plot line where Beth fights her way back from penury and failure, but there is no way I'll be able to write it for some months. I suggest that we treat her and most of her fortune as restored thanks to her trips through the Portal, save for the castle itself. She surely would have stashed caches of equipment and money as backstops. Please accept the thanks of all of us for once again providing all this holiday cheer. Best wishes. J. JONAH JERKSON Voice of the People
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Untold Tales of the Normalverse #357: The Grey Horizons - Complete · End times attributions from... the Hooded Hood · Thu Dec 15, 2016 at 05:31:54 am EST  More tasty desserts! · Anime Jason  · Wed Dec 21, 2016 at 10:45:15 am EST  In a lower calorie thread. · HH · Thu Dec 22, 2016 at 04:15:20 am EST  It's the thread-fast plan. · Anime Jason  · Thu Dec 22, 2016 at 10:41:50 am EST  Now in new flavours. · HH · Thu Dec 22, 2016 at 12:03:00 pm EST  I'll take strawberry. · Anime Jason  · Thu Dec 22, 2016 at 01:52:01 pm EST  (No actual strawberries are used in this strawberry product) · HH · Sun Dec 25, 2016 at 04:17:54 am EST  Re: I'll take strawberry. · Hazelnut Fairy · Thu Dec 22, 2016 at 11:35:06 pm EST  Strawberry might be busy that day. · HH · Sun Dec 25, 2016 at 04:21:10 am EST  Cathode and Jason, and Beth [Spoilers] · J. Jonah Jerkson · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 08:55:14 pm EST  Re: Cathode and Jason, and Beth [Spoilers] · Visionary  · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 09:04:02 pm EST  I say leave her poor for a bit [Spoilers] · Al B. Harper · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 05:23:59 am EST  I like the idea of Beth trying to "arch" on a shoe string budget too (no text) [Spoilers] · killer shrike · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 09:09:46 am EST  Cathode and Jason, and Beth walk into a bar... [Spoilers] · HH · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 02:49:50 am EST  That's quite a group. [Spoilers] · Anime Jason  · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 10:43:24 pm EST  Re: That's quite a group. [Spoilers] · HH · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 02:51:40 am EST  I had a hunch [Spoilers] · killer shrike · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 10:29:27 am EST  No, that's Flapjack [Spoilers] · HH · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 05:34:12 pm EST  Vish should know: once a Librarian always a Librarian! (no text) · L! · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 10:04:21 pm EST  Unless the IOL posts a restraining order. (no text) · HH · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 04:03:52 am EST  Another one? (no text) · L! · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 12:58:23 am EST  I'm a bit surprised [Spoilers] · killer shrike · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 06:21:49 pm EST  Re: I'm a bit surprised [Spoilers] · HH · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 07:29:57 pm EST  Nothing is quite so festive as a holiday dinner party. · Visionary  · Thu Dec 15, 2016 at 11:18:39 pm EST  There's always one guest with special dietary requirements. · HH · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 02:35:43 am EST  It's probably the smart thing to declare when Dr. Moo is at the table though. · Visionary  · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 12:42:43 pm EST  "People with lactose intolerance are clearly just not trying hard enough." - Tao of Moo · HH · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 08:02:05 pm EST  I don't know... I understand that it can be rather trying already... · Visionary  · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 07:52:50 pm EST  Nausea is the body's way of saying "try harder". · HH · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 03:28:19 am EST  The heaves give you a nice appreciation for just how hard your abdominal muscles can try with or without you. · Visionary  · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 08:53:50 pm EST  Our bodies are wonderful like that. · HH · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 10:44:30 pm EST  I'd trade it for killer abs. · Visionary  · Tue Dec 20, 2016 at 04:57:31 pm EST  Another excellent Parodyverse villain! · HH · Wed Dec 21, 2016 at 02:08:31 am EST  No Tom Black? (no text) · killer shrike · Thu Dec 15, 2016 at 04:39:48 pm EST  I decided that any first meeting between him and the Hood required more space. (no text) · HH did mention that some invtees had made alternate arrangements. · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 02:42:46 am EST  I also just realized Akiko Masamune was not present either. (no text) · killer shrike notes she's usually at these villainous get-to-gethers · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 06:10:15 pm EST  The current crisis hasn't yet thrown up much she might view as problems rather than opportunities. (no text) · HH · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 07:31:45 pm EST  And some thoughts on the supposed villain of the piece [Spoilers] · killer shrike · Thu Dec 15, 2016 at 07:18:59 pm EST  Well thought. [Spoilers] · HH · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 02:37:43 am EST  Yep. That's a council, all right. · Anime Jason  · Thu Dec 15, 2016 at 12:30:29 pm EST  It's the biggest association of baddies we've seen for some time. · HH · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 02:41:23 am EST  Better than second-biggest. · Anime Jason  · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 02:07:06 pm EST  Well, bigger than second-biggest anyway. · HH · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 08:40:53 pm EST  And this is the biggest one yet! · Anime Jason  · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 10:08:31 pm EST  It's not the size of your villain enclave, it's what you do with it. · HH · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 03:41:42 am EST  Most of it seems to be fleeing, though. · Anime Jason  · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 09:36:59 am EST  Only 1/3 of it. And there's 2/9 that welcomes it. · HH · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 05:56:47 pm EST  I was never good at math. · Anime Jason  · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 12:39:27 am EST  Hence computers. · HH · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 01:35:27 am EST  That's what I tell people (edited). · Anime Jason  · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 12:32:47 pm EST  So does Apple. · HH · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 04:49:11 pm EST  They're right, if they mean I don't have to do math. · Anime Jason  · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 10:21:24 pm EST  "Math is hard". · HH · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 03:17:10 am EST  No statement is more true. · Anime Jason  · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 12:11:23 pm EST  What about e=mc2? · HH · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 10:25:09 pm EST  That's only a theory. · Anime Jason  · Tue Dec 20, 2016 at 12:03:39 am EST  A = pi R squared · HH · Tue Dec 20, 2016 at 01:14:18 am EST  That's just tasty. · Anime Jason  · Tue Dec 20, 2016 at 10:59:09 am EST  Did you just make a pie pun? · HH · Tue Dec 20, 2016 at 03:40:58 pm EST  A rather crusty one, at that. · Anime Jason  · Tue Dec 20, 2016 at 05:14:46 pm EST  May you get your just desserts, then. · HH · Wed Dec 21, 2016 at 01:58:22 am EST  Well, well, well. · Al B. Harper · Thu Dec 15, 2016 at 07:29:03 am EST  What's the use of a well without a bucket? · As people in Yorkshire used to respond back in the 1960s to little HH · Thu Dec 15, 2016 at 12:04:17 pm EST  A convenient place to dispose of a dead body? · Al B. Harper · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 04:39:35 am EST  The correct answer, delivered in broad Yorkshire, is "Good enough t' drown thee in." · HH · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 06:06:27 am EST  Same result. · Al B. Harper · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 05:35:42 pm EST  Only different. · HH · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 07:52:08 pm EST  A dead body is a dead body - isn't it? · Al B. Harper has read too many UT to already know the answer to that. · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 09:22:18 pm EST  Yes, because it is dead. · HH · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 03:59:34 am EST  Unless there is a ghoul or zombie waiting down the well, then it might be undead dead. · Al B. Harper · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 10:35:34 pm EST  That's why there's no bucket, then. · HH · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 11:42:04 pm EST  So "Good enough t' undead thee in." ? · Al B. Harper · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 01:03:26 am EST  Is undead a legitimate verb? · HH · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 01:43:12 am EST  Since when have Tykes given a damn about correct grammar? · Al B. Harper · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 03:42:38 am EST  Yorkies? A true Yorkshireman is a Tyke. · HH · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 09:15:55 am EST  I almost wrote that. · Al B. Harper · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 06:16:19 pm EST  Too slow, old man. · HH · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 03:23:03 am EST  Darn it. · Al B. Harper · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 06:21:54 am EST  Or just replace it. · HH · Mon Dec 19, 2016 at 10:23:25 am EST  Replace what? · Al B. Harper · Tue Dec 20, 2016 at 07:04:18 pm EST  The thing that needs darning. · HH · Tue Dec 20, 2016 at 08:52:28 pm EST  My socks? · Al B. Harper · Wed Dec 21, 2016 at 04:13:31 am EST  I'm not checking. · HH · Wed Dec 21, 2016 at 09:36:31 am EST  Re: My socks? · Visionary  · Wed Dec 21, 2016 at 06:15:17 am EST  Auditions · HH · Wed Dec 21, 2016 at 09:29:21 am EST  Remembering UT#332 · Al B. Harper · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 05:41:00 am EST  What an excellent chart. · HH · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 06:22:02 am EST  Why thank you · Al B. Harper · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 05:48:19 pm EST  You are welcome · HH is so polite · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 07:34:35 pm EST  You are too kind. · Al B. Harper is also kind. · Fri Dec 16, 2016 at 09:35:46 pm EST  Re: You are too kind. · HH · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 04:03:17 am EST  Re: You are too kind. · Al B. Harper · Sat Dec 17, 2016 at 11:34:50 pm EST  Re: You are too kind. · HH · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 01:44:54 am EST  Re: You are too kind. · Al B. Harper · Sun Dec 18, 2016 at 03:45:04 am EST

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