A/N: I do this against my better judgement, which has taken quite a beating lately. Its surprising I have any judgement left, let alone the quality of it. So. If this goes absolutely nowhere, don't hate me. I fear burnout. It happens to the best of us, and I'm afraid it may shortly happen to the worst.

On the other hand, if it doesn't, the structure will be much like WLIIA was— ie., none at all. Have a nice day.

Title: The Further Adventures Of...

Description: The long anticipated, quite inebriated, nearly cremated, never sated, addle-pated, highly rated, Kiss-Me-Kate-ed, badly fated, widely-hated sequel to Whose Lair Is It Anyway. In which things blow up, children are born, haircuts are given, chaos ensues, and Patrick Raoul gets laid, which may or may not have something to do with the children that are born.

By Random Battlecry

With Appearances by the Usual Suspects and an Unnatural Cast of Characters

Currently beta-less, co-writerless, and accepting applications and suggestions of all sorts, though this doesn't exactly mean I will pay attention or even listen to them.

More notes in bold.

And italics.

Chapter One: An Inauspicious Beginning

The Tai

It wasn't a dark and stormy night.

It was rather dim and gloomy, however, and light precipitation pattered over the roof of the Opera Populaire, with the possibility of heavier rains later on, according to the weatherman. He was usually wrong, but since no one ever listened to him anyway, it didn't much matter. Inside the Opera House, the few performers that called it home (when they weren't calling it other, less-printable things) were settling down for the night.

Underneath, a figure stirred.

It was nighttime— the time his soul came alive.

This is not to say that he was dead during daylight hours.

Or that he was a vampire in any way.

It was a misguided attempt at being poetic, and it shan't happen again.

The figure stirred again.

He stirred once more.

He was stirring a pot.

The pot bubbled and boiled, and he crouched over it as though he were a witch, about to recite some arcane Edgar Allen Poe jingle, and it was a brew-up of newts and frogs legs (less unlikely than you might think, considering this was France). It wasn't, though.

It was his dinner.

He hadn't got much of an appetite, which, perhaps, helped to explain the reason for his skeletal thinness. His body was, as was mentioned not ten words ago, skeletally thin. Words cannot describe how skeletally thin he was— except, of course, for "skeletal" and "thin."

He wore black— pitch black.

His eyes were yellow— yellow as amber.

He wore a mask— a masklike mask. A masque. Because he was French. And we like to be correct about these things.

He was, in short, not Raoul de Chagny.

"Dang," said VictoriaTai from behind him.

He jumped, he whirled, he felt for his punjab— which, inexplicably, was not where he had left it.

Tori waved it at him.

"Looking for this?"

A wordless snarl escaped his lips, and he moved forward. Tori stood up straight and squared her shoulders.

"You will listen to me."

He stopped short and glared fury at her.

"You will listen to me, and you will do as I say," she said clearly, pushing her dark hair back from her face and blinking as a kamikaze gnat flew at her eyes.

Underneath the mask, his lips twisted.

"Why?" he bit out.

"Because," said VictoriaTai definitely, "that is the way it is Written. And please don't make me go into the spiel Random wrote about the power of fiction. It's a load of crap and I'd feel embarrassed. Even if its just you who'd hear me. I don't know why they sent me to get you anyway— I wanted to go for Patrick Raoul."

Something stirred in his brain, and the expression in the yellow eyes turned to horror.

Lips barely moving, he managed to choke out a few words.

"Whose— Lair—"

In spite of herself, Tori grinned.

"That's right," she said, almost kindly. "Now are you going to come quietly? Or do I have to use ear plugs?"

Thus was the first one captured.

The Bee

"I've been warning you."

Erik Destler looked up at her sullenly. "Have you."

"Yes. I said, if you don't get out of my basement, some fool is going to write a sequel, and hook you into it. I warned you that you wouldn't be able to escape."

He stood, staring down at the woman, anger blazing in his eyes. His voice was soft and refined when he spoke, however, and it was clear to see that, had he not been rather attached to her, he would have gotten very violent indeed.

"After all this time—"

"Its only been a month," said Honeybee, trying not to melt as he reached a hand to her chin and turned her face up to look at him.

"And you sheltered me. You kept me down here and fed me and clothed me—"

That was it. Clothes.

"You—" she said, and swallowed hard. "You owe me twenty dollars for those pants."

He stopped and stared at her. Money had clearly never entered his mind. They had a lucrative relationship as it stood, from his point of view— she paid for everything he needed, and he rewarded her with intelligent conversation, a touch from time to time.

"How am I supposed to get money?" he inquired, genuinely bewildered.

"Maybe, I dunno— get a job?"

Honeybee's sweet voice suddenly hardened into something Erik Destler had not heard before. He looked at her, bemused and still rather angry.

"A job?" he repeated. "You would tell me— me— to get— a job?"

His hand moved toward her throat, and the Bee said, grinning, "Listen to me."

He stopped dead.

"I did warn you."

Thus was the second one captured.

The Chat

Kay Erik, meanwhile, having some time ago gotten over the fact that Kay Christine had never come down to the lair after him, and had left him for the fop, and had apparently gotten bored with her husband and had a child with someone else entirely—

No, strike that.

That still rather irked him.

He brooded over it— something that Eriks are, by their very nature, surprisingly good at.

It was a dark and angsty sort of brood, the kind of brood that shows up unexpectedly on a winter day when the trees are bare and the snowbitten wind blows from the north— wait, I said no more of the poetic stuff, didn't I.

It was a bad mood.

He saw a cricket in front of him and stepped on it, squashing it ruthlessly between the flagstone floor and the sole of his highly-polished dress shoe.

"Dang," said Le Chat, jumping into his lap, "I wanted to play with that."

"Ayesha!" howled Kay Erik, trying to push her off— she avoided his hands and jumped onto the nearby mantel, where she hissed at him, rather peeved.

"I am not either!"

"Ayesha!"

"No Ayesha!"

Kay Erik stood up straight and glared wildly at her. He was breathing rather heavily.

"You're not Ayesha?"

"No! For heaven's sake, do I even look like Ayesha?"

"No, but—"

"Can Ayesha talk, hmm? Can Ayesha run a bar, I'd like to know?"

Kay Erik raised a hand to his face and clutched at his forehead underneath the mask.

"Wh— who are you and what are you doing here?"

"I," said Le Chat, "am Le Chat—" And she sat down and started licking her own shoulder.

Kay Erik blinked.

"And I am here," said Le Chat, carefully, then suddenly glared wickedly at him, and leapt onto his shoulder, "to capture you."

"What!" shouted Kay Erik, trying to get her off. But cats can cling like nobody's business when they want to, and Le Chat wanted to.

"You—" said Le Chat.

"Get off!"

"Will—"

Kay Erik performed a frenetic and undignified dance in a circle. Le Chat merely climbed onto his head.

"Listen—"

More actions. More violence. More Chat.

"To me," Chat finished.

Kay Erik stood stock still.

"God in heaven," he sobbed, "not again!"

Thus was the third one captured.

All over the world— well, alright, not exactly all over the world, but in certain parts of the world, to be sure— Eriks and Phantoms were being caught, enslaved with words, and hauled ruthlessly into the light of reality, brought to face the woman they had all learnt to loathe and fear—

Currently, she was in the shower.

So they had to wait.