Note: Artemis Fowl belongs to Eoin Colfer. I do not own Artemis Fowl.

Crates stacked haphazardly in the hallway belied the magnificent decor that was the Fowl family's hallway. Suits of armour stood at attention throughout the length of the hallway. Five doors led off to other rooms. A massive chandelier was hanging from the ceiling, it's soft light casting a dull glow over the arguing inhabitants.

"Holly,"chided Artemis Fowl the Second. "I am perfectly willing to believe this grandiose tale that you have told me. As the evidence is corroborated by Butler and Juliet, as well as Foaly, I will not question anything, even if it seems too extreme. However, you are stubbornly refusing to see my point. I have returned from a state of hyperreal existence, and it is most probable that I have lost a large amount of, if not all of my scientific knowledge. Therefore," he gestured to the crates -"All this. It is vital that I regain all my scientific knowledge at once. Immediately. The world has no knowledge of the death of a five-toed Artemis Fowl, and I intend to keep it that way. As I have to be present in society as the scion of the Fowl empire, it would be just as well that I do not appear to be different from any of my previous appearances. "

Holly snorted. She was very proud of her snorts. She was also exactly two centimeters below the average height for a fairy, and had a Neutrino blaster strapped to her belt. She was a member of LEPrecon, the fairy police that kept the Mud People from gaining access to the tunnels below the Earth.

She was also the proud owner of the very latest LEP model FairyLight wings, a prototype designed by the conspiracy theorist/married/deranged/brilliant centaur Foaly, who was one of the most active fairies involved in the reconstruction of the human world after the great technology crash. He still insisted on wearing his brain-probe proof tinfoil hat in emergencies, only when his wife, Callabine wasn't around. Holly had never understood his tendencies for inventions that melded with decor, yet she was oddly glad to have wings that didn't feel like they were there at all. Foaly had snickered at her amazement on being wearing these wings for the first time. "Really, Holly. Of course they don't feel like wings. We're experimenting with a new ultrathin polymer that folds up on nervous stimulation and still provides the ability to generate enough lift. You being the most experienced major in the LEP have the right to fly these wings first. We'll be monitoring you remotely, of course. Wouldn't want these wings to crash."

Somehow Holly had found his story very hard to believe. She was still the highest ranked female in the force and Trouble Kelp had a very hard time believing her accusations about Lily Frond. "Didn't Commander Kelp want his lovely girlfriend to try these wings on first?" she had moaned. Foaly had suddenly looked very skittish and had pawed the ground nervously. "Heh...of course not. This has nothing to do with the fact that Frond's birthday is coming up and Kelp wants to gift these wings to her and he wants all the kinks to be ironed out-" At that point, Holly walked up to the centaur and slapped him. "Ow!" he protested. "What was that for?" "For involving me in these...ridiculous endeavors and not telling me!" At this, Foaly had suddenly snickered. "What was that?" said Holly, suspicious. Foaly had burst into laughter at that point and was quite unreachable for the rest of the meeting before finally taking off in a huff. Maybe Artemis could spoof the readings and Lily Frond would crash on her very first flight.

Back to the present, then. Artemis had lately begun to start all his conversations constantly referring to his nonexistence. Something had to be done about it before it got too annoying.

"Artemis," sighed Holly. "You are perfectly fine. No one in the Fowl family could enunciate that well and still make me believe that he has suddenly lost all of his knowledge."

Artemis raised his eyebrows. "All right," he said, picking up a book at random from one of the open crates. "I am going to give you the latest release of Developments in Physics. Foaly had recommended this series to me two years ago, and I was quite interested when it turned out that humans had figured out that one could easily override the quantum Hamiltonian if one had access to a form of energy that could potentially flow backwards in time. Magic, Holly," said Artemis, looking at her vacant expression.

Holly sighed. This Artemis had not lost a certain obnoxious ability to be the smartest person in the room and make others feel stupider by comparison. He was even able to shut Foaly up nowadays.

"As I said, magic. Fairies have a unique ability to heal wounds, and this process involves the recovery of cells belonging to the same body. Magical sparks can replenish liters of blood lost in a few minutes. Where does all of this blood come from? If you observe closely, it seems to flow from the spark itself. This journal contains a rather unique write-up saying that the amount of energy lost is still accessible and can be found if you look beyond the constraints of the conservation of energy principle. Physicists don't know that their tiniest observations cannot predict that the amount of energy lost may be extracted from the human world, which fairies do in the case of magic. Rather a smart point, because the writer in question is a marine biologist by profession. I suppose he got his case from the high amount of sea vessels that somehow vanished from their lockups, correct?"

Holly had the grace to blush. She had assisted with many of those operations in Ireland, and had personally phased many tourist and LEP submarines out of existence. Her achievement was all the more commendable owing to the fact that she had only used a Neutrino and some very creative thinking.

Artemis opened the required page and asked her to read some notes the author had made during his calculations. Holly could now hear the voice of Foaly in her head, yelling through her headset about how the calculations were so utterly wrong and inconceivable and how Artemis was a fool for not recognizing that the instant he had seen them and how could the Mud People degrade themselves more and-

"-he doesn't want to associate us ever again?" said Artemis, an amused twinkle in his eyes. "I presumed as much. You haven't received those wings as a gift, Holly. You are, in all probability, testing them for the LEP. Anyway, would you mind telling Foaly that the calculations are correct, it's just that he might not have considered the possibility of the Mud People being correct for once?"

Foaly shut up in her head. Holly smirked as she heard the sound of his fingers busily running over his keyboard.

However, there was one flaw. Artemis had suddenly turned sheepish. "Artemis," she said. "You are lying to me about regaining your knowledge. You do not need any of these books. Why do you have them?"

"Holly, it isn't a matter of principle..." began Artemis. Holly help up one finger. "Stop. Let me guess. These books are mostly based on string theory and dimensional analysis...and you haven't read a book without completely perusing it yet...so you're analyzing dimensions? Why?"

"I don't know," said Artemis. "Just felt like it."

And as he walked away, slowly whistling, Holly realized that it was the first time she had heard Artemis Fowl phrase a sentence without a subject.

"Artemis," she said, flying after him. "Something is wrong with you. You have been shut up in your room for the past week, and Foaly hasn't been able to detect life inside it. What is going on?"

Artemis stopped. He turned around and shrugged, brushing his growing hair out of his eyes. He was really getting out of hand, noticed Holly. Someday, soon, she was going to give him a haircut. There would be more than a few lasers involved.

"It's because I haven't been there, Holly," he said. "It's true; Foaly can't detect life forms inside my rooms because there simply aren't any. I've given the room a Blue Rinse-" at this, Holly winced, because the Blue Rinse was a colloquial term form a solinium bomb that destroyed all life forms inside a concentrated radius and was usually contained by a time-stop-"before I've used it."

"What?" said Holly. "A Blue Rinse? Artemis, do you know how long that takes to clear up? At least twenty-four hours. And we haven't been getting any other readings from your room until yesterday, when these crates showed up. So either you found some way to immunize yourself to the Blue Rinse, which should be impossible by current technology, or you have prepared some form of extinction-level mass homicidal weapon that you tested on your room."

"And found some way to hide all traces of solinium from us," muttered Foaly in her ear. "The strongest element fairies have discovered in our attempts to advance."

Artemis sighed. "It is true that I have not left my room for the past week, Holly," he said. "Although I'm quite sure you wouldn't be able to if I gave you fifteen minutes. Five for Foaly. There are simply too many things of great interest and power in my room, and you would be quite happy to keep fiddling with them. Maybe upgrade that Omnitool of yours. You don't pick locks anymore, do you?" The Omnitool was a gift that Holly had received from her mother, Coral Short.

"As for the reason," continued Artemis brusquely. "There is no need for you to know for the moment. There should be an event that takes up your present time very soon. Good luck with that."

Not good. When Artemis Fowl specifically told you that your time was about to be occupied, you took him seriously.

"What?" hissed Holly. "You can't just say that and leave, Artemis! What kind of event is it? How many will be affected by it? Will anyone...die?"

Artemis spun around at her last words, a look of incredulity on his face. "Really, Holly?" he asked. "Do you still think so low of my clone that you expect him to kill people?" Holly took a step back. "I...didn't mean it like that, Artemis," she said. "I'm still getting used to this idea of you being a clone of the real Artemis. And since the day you've returned you've gone and shut yourself in your room for a week, somehow managed to override Foaly's communicators, and are now warning us of some...some machination that will in all probability cause us fairies to save Haven from a crisis again? Don't you think it's time you were finally open with us?"

No.

Artemis Fowl would never be open.

It wasn't in his nature.

But Holly had to try.

She was his friend.

His only friend, now that she thought about it.

"Hexana-Five."

Holly started. "What?" Artemis had reached up the top of the stairs now. "Tell Foaly Hexana-Five. He'll know what it means. Meanwhile a return pod will be arriving outside the mansion shortly. You'd best get ready."

"Hexana-Five?" gasped Foaly in her ear. "That was the old designation for...no. He wouldn't dare. He would never dare to let anything happen to it."

"What is Hexana-Five?" asked Holly, as she was sprinting towards the Fowl grounds. Her wings activated in mid-sprint and she soared through the air. The return pod, as promised, emerged with a slight pop out of the ground.

"Where did that come from?" hissed Foaly. "There were no scheduled return pods until an hour or so!" Holly didn't pause to bother about this statement as she checked the pod. LEP, all right. It has the insignia. The pod popped open with a small puff of air escaping and Holly jammed her tiny frame into it. Part of her should have been worried about how perfectly the pod fit, or how smoothly it ran, or how the monitors showed her that the pod was reaching speeds that exceeded the fairy tolerance limit but how she felt fine, but she payed attention to none of it. That was because the screaming had begun in her ear.

"Foaly?" she asked. "What's happening?'

"A practical joke." He sounded like he was snarling through his teeth. "Come back. Now."

Haven was in trouble. Again. Holly had begun to hear the screams of a city collapsing, fairies screaming, Trouble Kelp's booming voice shouting orders, the warning sirens sounding loudly through the fairy capital. She gripped the pod's controls tighter and accelerated down into the Earth. And she swore she heard Artemis' voice chuckling in her head, saying 'This might cut heavily into your vacation, Captain.'

"I don't like your idea of a joke Artemis," she muttered through gritted teeth.

"When this is over, I'm going to hunt you down and bash your skull so hard that Trouble Kelp rue the day he chose it as his name."