"Benson. Manhattan SVU," Olivia shouted over the rain, which was now steadily drumming on her umbrella.
"Wow, you guys got here fast," the security guard smiled, holding the door for Olivia as she closed the umbrella and stepped inside. The building bore a sign reading "NYU: Physics Department".
"Yeah, we were in the neighborhood," Elliott added, coming up behind the guard and catching the door just in time.
They were standing in a long, sterile-looking hallway with white walls and recess lighting running along either side. There were rows of wooden doors on either side. The only thing that differentiated them was the sign by each door, denoting a lab number and its purpose.
A throng of men and women in uniform, along with a few in blouses and lab coats, were gathered around a door about halfway down the hall. Benson and Stabler followed the guard to the door and peered in. Amid the din of hushed voices talking and assessing the crime scene, something caught Benson's ear. It was crying. A child crying.
"She's why we called you guys in," the guard said, motioning to the child, who was crying in the corner. Her eyes were fixed on the body in the center of the room. Lying just beneath an odd, spherical object with several intersecting rings around it was the body of a man, likely in his mid-30s. He was facedown in a pool of blood.
"Why is she still in here?" Benson growled, "You couldn't bother getting her out of the room with the dead body in it?"
"We tried," a guy in a suit, likely homicide, looked up, "three of us. We even had a female who was on patrol try. She bit, kicked, and hit of us. We thought it would be better to call you guys and leave her til you got here."
"This your crime scene?" Elliott looked at him.
"Yeah, but kids are your thing."
Olivia made her way into the corner. She squatted down and peered into the little girl's dark brown eyes.
"Hi, my name's Olivia. What's yours?" She asked in a sugary tone.
The little girl's lower lip trembled. She managed to squeak out, "Nina," before bursting into tears once more.
Olivia reached out to embrace her, but the tearful child shouted, "No!"
"It's all right. I'm not going to make you go anywhere you don't want to."
"I want my Daddy," Nina cried and went willingly into Olivia's arms. As she did, something hard bumped against Olivia's chest. She looked down and noticed that Nina was holding something tight in her arms. She looked helplessly over at Elliott, who was chatting with one of the officers.
"What happened to this guy?" He asked, looking down on the body lying prone on the floor. His face was gone, a cavern of red in a pool of blood.
"I can't tell," the homicide guy who had claimed the crime scene insisted, "it's like the impact of an explosion, but localized to the face. Explain that one to me."
Elliott looked up at the weird spherical object. "What is this thing anyway?"
The cop looked up. "Beats me. This lab is a physics lab of some sort, but it belongs exclusively to this guy, Dr. Dennis Alvarez. People from the physics department have been chomping at the bit to get us out of here. Said his research is top secret."
He nodded toward the door, where a man in a blouse and lab coat with a reddening face was arguing with a police officer.
Elliott's eyes met Olivia's.
"Who the hell brings a kid to a top-secret physics lab?"
Back in the squad room, Elliott and Olivia were seated with Nina in one of the interview rooms. Cragen had offered his office, thinking it might be more inviting, but when Nina saw the baseball on his desk, she burst into tears. Elliott took her down the hall, showed her the "funny" two-way mirror, and Nina had decided to go into the interview room and inspect the mirror from that side. The door was open. Olivia insisted it stay that way, so Nina knew she had a way out.
"Now, Nina, I know that this is very difficult, but I wonder if you could tell me what you remember about what happened to your daddy?"
Nina started to tremble. She lowered her head and shook it.
"It's all right, you don't have to tell us if you're not ready."
"What about that thing?" Elliott asked, pointing to the object Nina had been clinging to. It was a rectangular stone with an oval at its center on each side.
"My daddy gave it to me," Nina said, still looking down.
"What is it?"
"I dunno."
"May I see it?" Olivia held out her hand. Nina reluctantly pushed it across the table to her. Olivia turned it and noticed there was a little blood on it. She motioned to Elliott. He nodded.
"Hey Nina, would you like Elliott to take you downstairs to get you something to eat?"
Nina sat silent for a moment. Then, as if on cue, her stomach growled. She looked up at Elliott.
"Do you have cheeseburgers here?"
He smiled. "We have a shop next door that sells them, yeah."
"Okay."
Nina slowly rose. She reached for the object.
"Actually, I was going to clean this off while you guys were getting something to eat," Olivia said, gently resting a hand on the top of it. "It'll be right here when you get back."
Nina hesitated for a second. "You're gonna make sure no one takes it?"
Olivia held up a pinky. "Pinky promise."
Nina hooked her pinky with Olivia's and got up from the table. She took Elliott's hand, but kept glancing back at Olivia. Olivia followed them out and only once they disappeared into the elevator did Olivia go back for the object. It was heavier than she expected.
"What is that?" Munch leaned closer as he watched Olivia, several minutes later, put on a pair of gloves and take out a Q-tip.
"Evidence."
"So why isn't it in an evidence locker?"
"She seems pretty attached to this thing," Olivia said, trying to extract whatever blood she could with the Q-tip.
"Yet she walked out the door and left it with you?" Fin eyed her suspiciously.
"I think she trusts me."
"Fair enough, but that still leaves the question of what that thing is?" Munch pressed.
"It's the 'Orb of Time'," a voice called from the entrance to the squad room. The trio looked up in surprise to see a man with pale-grey, almost white, skin. The black hair he had was slicked back and pairs of identical scars - no, ridges - ran up the sides of his face.
"Where'd he come from?" Fin squinted, noticing the hallway beyond the man had gone silent.
"No one told me the circus was in town," Munch quipped in a low voice.
"C-can we help you?" Olivia asked, finally rising to her feet. The man wore a bulky outfit, almost like...armor? A spacesuit? Some combination of the two? She couldn't make sense of it. How did he make his way up here wearing something like that?
"Yes. You can give me the Orb and the child."
"I-I'm sorry, but this is evidence. Who are you?"
"Give me the Orb," the man pressed, firmer this time.
"The lady told you no," Fin stood up and took a step toward him, "Don't be so pushy, it's not a good look."
"Apparently you didn't get the memo that Halloween's over, pal. Lose the mask and hit the road," Munch chimed in.
The man unholstered a weapon, an odd gun of some sort, and pointed it at Olivia. "The Orb and the girl, or your life. It's your choice."
The elevator dinged and out stepped Elliott and Nina. Elliott was holding a drink in one hand and Nina's hand in the other. Nina was holding a bag in one hand. When she saw the man, she shrieked and squeezed Elliott's hand tighter. He pushed her behind him.
"Nina, go back to the elevator."
"Elliott, I'm scared," Nina whimpered.
"It's all right. Go downstairs, I'll come meet you in a minute."
But it was too late. The man had rounded on Elliott and Nina and now had his weapon trained on the two of them.
"Odds aren't in your favor, man. Just put the gun away," Fin said, reaching for his own weapon.
"Odds?" The man scoffed. "You want to talk about odds? This weapon could wipe all of you from existence with one hit. But here I am, trying to be nice. To let you 21st century primitive humans live out your measly lives."
"'Primitive!?" Munch rolled his eyes, "you really are hung up on the alien bit."
"What the hell is going on out here?" Cragen stepped out of his office, looking from the man to the detectives seated with "The Orb".
Everything happened in rapid succession after that. Fin fired his weapon, the man fired his at Olivia, who held up the object he referred to as "The Orb" to block the hit. In that instant, the Orb began to glow, so bright no one could look directly at it. As the light from it began to fill the room, time seemed to reverse by a few seconds. Fin's bullet returned to his gun and the man's luminescent weapon was as if it had never fired. Yet they were all conscious of it. They had all seen it.
The man lifted his weapon to fire again. Elliott charged into the squad room, his gun drawn. He fired, but the man dodged, leaping over a desk and charging right for the little girl. The orb began to glow again and this time, the light swallowed all of them whole.
When the light faded, the squad room was silent, save the steady rhythm of the falling rain.