Chapter 1: A Discovery in the New World
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Ines narrowed her eyes suspiciously at the woman before her, hand twitching angrily around the little derringer concealed in her pocket. Her thumb caressed the intricate carvings on the gun's handle while her eyes resumed rolling around the one-room shack she'd been inhabiting for what felt like a forever restlessly, never quite settling on any one thing as she listened to the artificially spicy-smelling intruder prattle on excitedly about obscure rumors being substantiated.
"It's just so amazing to be here! It's so amazing that you're, y'know, real," she gushed, "Of course it was extremely hard to believe when Director Pham- she's the director of our Board of Historical Investigations-presented us with the first inkling of your existence." She paused to take in some air, seemingly oblivious to the increasing tenseness stiffening Ines' shoulders, or the minuscule flexing of the muscles in her jaw. "I mean, drunken accounts of a woman so strong she could rip rail lines apart by herself from soldiers who participated in General Sherman's march to the sea? Totally unbelievable! That is," she leaned forwards toward Ines conspiratorially, her curly hair brushing against her brown cheeks, "Until you start connecting rumors to enlistment forms and enlistment forms to censuses and censuses to people who just so happen to pop up in towns and cities and on boat rosters with no known history." She leaned back into her chair, a savvy gleam in her dark brown eyes.
Ines' hand clenched violently around the stock of the derringer, finger curling lightly around the trigger. This woman- this 'Agent Cassidy Brown'- was infuriating her. All the work she'd put in to be untraceable, unnoticeable, thrown back in her face after she didn't know how many years, and to think, there were even more complete strangers who knew of her existence besides the one sitting so irritatingly close across from her. Setting her eyebrows into a dark glare, Ines straightened to her full height in the wicker chair she was occupying. "Get out of my bayou." It was thickly accented and barely above a furious mutter, but the threat was conveyed effectively enough. "Y'all ain't wanted 'round here." She waited for Cassidy to make a move; to get up and walk out her front door and never return, but the woman just wormed a bit further back into the tattered velvet armchair she had commandeered and smiled thinly.
"I'm afraid i'm under direct orders not to leave what we know as Spanish Labyrinth Bayou without you, Ines." Cassidy rested her elbows on the arms of the Miss Lecuyér, clasping her hands in front of her tacitly, all traces of her exuberantly friendly demeanor gone in favor of a negotiator's blank visage. "That gives you two options. You either pack up house and get on the boat yourself, or I administer an elephant dose of tranquilizer, have my little assistants carry you to the boat, pack up your things, and we leave anyway." She let that sink in, watching Ines weigh her chances of winning in this situation, eyes lingering a bit too long on the broad expanse of the mestiza's shoulders before snapping back to her face. Eyes widening in shock, Cassidy resisted the urge to flatten herself to the back of the chair out of fear, completely floored by what was happening in front of her.
"Ya can just try it ma'am- see how far ya and y'all's 'elephant's dose' get before I tear y'all to shreds and feed ya to the gators." Forget infuriated, Ines was utterly incensed- how dare some arrogant upstarts come into her home, acting like they knew more about her than she did, like they knew more about what was best for her. "Git gone with your uppity selves." It was completely laughable that they thought that a large dose of some sedative would put her under quickly enough that they wouldn't be harmed in the process.
Cassidy whipped out her walky-talky and fumbled with the buttons before warbling the order to fire the tranq dart into it, eyes bugging as the entire shack rattled violently on its foundations, floorboards and ceiling beams warping around the woman who was unaware that she and the chair she was sitting in were hovering an inch off the floor.
"How dare you take airs with me- how dare you?" Ines stood up, her chair slamming into the wall six feet behind her and remaining pinned there by some unseen force, her braid writhing as if alive. "I'm perfectly fine and happy bein' here by m'self not harmin' nobody and you sashay in all chessy like- like you own the place and start demandin' things of me? How dare you!" The dusty paintings and other miscellany decorating the shack flew up into the air now too, whirling in a deadly vortex around her and Cassidy. Even though Ines had only just raised her voice to a normal speaking volume, it rang through her ramshackle home as if she were screaming.
"Just take the fucking shot already, Landry!" Cassidy shrieked, finally cringing backwards as Ines stalked towards her, a bloodcurdling scowl stretched across her scarred face. "For christ's sake, take the shot!" Cassidy swung out of the chair, ducking behind the old thing and using it as a shield, backing up constantly even as it started to shred in her hands, Ines just getting closer and closer, much to her discomfort.
Ines got fifteen, then ten, then five steps away from Cassidy before a sudden pain bloomed in her neck and everything seemed to jerk to a sudden halt. Clumsily, she felt her neck for any foreign objects, tugging something cylindrical out of the flesh when she found it and struggling to focus on the unnaturally orange plume that decorated it on the opposite end of the needle. The little silver tube fell from her fingers and clattered to the floor, rolling away as she fell to her hands and knees. Shaking her head to try and clear it, Ines marveled offhandedly at how quickly she was being incapacitated, the shack stilling and all the odds and ends that had previously been flying around crashing to the floor with assorted clangs and shatters. This wasn't anything like what she'd been expecting- this felt even stronger than the myriad of times she'd overdosed on morphine, trying to get the same feeling as when she'd first taken it. Her muscles were shaking, increasingly unable to support her weight. Whatever an elephant was, Ines thought, it must've been freakishly large, possibly even bigger than a bear.
Cassidy huffed out a sigh of relief when Ines finally slammed face-first into the worn floorboards. Radioing in the all-clear for the other members of her team, she shifted the wreckage of the velvet chair aside with her foot and crept carefully up to their sleeping mark.
As their first order of business they carried Ines out of her shack and onto the main boat they had come in, laying her down onto her back carefully. The only things not destroyed by Ines' violent outburst were an old steamer trunk which wouldn't move no matter how hard they tried to shift it and some grimy bottles swinging by ropes from the moss laden tree branches. An odd, oppressive feeling settled over the group as they made their way back to their respective boats, the trees casting creepy shadows like outstretched fingers across the water.
Cassidy shivered impulsively despite the humid air- the sooner they all got out of there the better.
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Ines' eyes snapped open, and she was immediately beset by the uncomfortable feeling that she was many miles from the ocean. She'd been away from the ocean before of course, but never this far, and always voluntarily. As it was, she was in a strange cot, in a strange room, in a strange building, possibly in a strange country, and she was angry, worried, sick to her stomach, and most of all her back ached something fierce.
A small, rapid movement from the corner of her eye caught her attention, and she moved her eye to directly face the source. Her pupil focused immediately on a ring of glowing green lights trapped in a tube, the tube being attached to an arm that was bolted to the stone wall. A furrowed eyebrow prompted the lights to blink, the tube making a strange kind of noise she'd never heard before as it shifted slightly to line up perfectly with her eyes.
"Please, don't be alarmed," the tube said, voice cool and soothing.
Ines sat bolt upright, whole torso facing the strange object now. It started to speak again, and Ines shrieked, reflexively yanking the thing out of the wall with her magic and crushing it. She wanted out of there immediately. Looking around quickly, she noted that the only opening in the room was the heavy steel door that looked like it belonged more on an ironclad then set into a wall. Ines nodded resolutely to herself- after all, ironclads had never stopped her before, so why should it intimidate her now? Getting up, she paced the few steps to the back wall and turned back to face the door, getting into a sprinting position before launching straight at it. She rammed her shoulder into the door with all the force of a charging bull, skidding to a stop just outside of the ruined doorframe as the steel slab slammed into the wall behind it, caving it in slightly. Rolling her shoulder to pop it back into place, Ines took off sprinting again down the hallway, making turns to get her to where she felt the closest collection of living plants.
Unfortunately for her, it turned out to be an office area that was positively choked with greenery, the center of the veritable forest being a pale brunette woman who barely spared her a glance before going back to furiously pressing buttons on the strange plank in front of her. There was the sound of a large crash on the opposite end of the room, both Ines and the woman snapping their heads to the source to see who it could be.
"Stop right there, buddy!" There, standing in the wreckage of a floor-to-ceiling window, was a rather athletic-looking, tanned, blond male. He picked his way through the shattered glass towards them, an almost unnoticeable amount of swagger in his shoulders as he got into a fighting stance.
Ines didn't miss the way in which he deliberately placed himself between her and the woman sitting at the desk.
The brunette- Brooks, Anna Claire, the nametag she was forced to wear read- made a sound that was half a sob and half a groan of pain and rubbed her eyes from underneath her reading glasses. "Not today, not him," grabbing her thermos, she knocked back a huge swig of her favorite tea (New Mexico X-Treme Stress Relief) like an addict and tried to ignore the obnoxiously loud man behind her to the best of her ability. Which was hard to do when he and the other woman in the room decided to engage in hand-to-hand combat like they were at fucking Renaissance Times or something. She ducked her head at the sound of ceramic flowerpots breaking, irritation fueling the angry throbs of pain at her temples. Spinning around huffily at the next crash, she fixed the both of them with a glare that could peel paint. "Lay off my fucking plants, you dillweeds! They help me relax!" She was thoroughly ignored, the two continuing to punch each other with wild abandon, completely oblivious to the leaves their shoes were turning into a pulpy mess. Fed up, she rose from her swivel chair and carefully edged into the blond jerk's blind side.
Ines looked at the exasperated woman who was sneaking up behind the blond man in confusion, the woman just holding a finger to her lips before kicking him in the groin.
He stumbled for half a second before steadying himself, turning to the woman with a petulant-looking pout. "Agent Brooks, I'm just doing my job! Why'd you kick me like that?" His tone was just as petulant as his expression. The childishness in his demeanor covered up the slight sag in his shoulders from Agent Brooks' apparent rejection rather nicely, though.
"Not near my computer you're not, jackass. I've been working on this for a month and a half! Take Xena here and scram!" Anna Claire huffed as he lunged at the woman he had been fighting and put her in a headlock, waving her hand in a shooing manner as he frog marched 'Xena' away, a congenial farewell on his lips. Plopping back down in her chair, she blushed and put a hand to her cheek. Alfred had looked at her! Like, dead on too! Amie was so going to hear about this.
Ines shifted uncomfortably in the mystery man's grip, dumbfounded that he could so easily hold her. Was he- "You uh, are you like- like me?" That was stupid of her to ask- he had to be. If anything he felt way more powerful than she ever had in her entire life, so much so that she could tell just how much he was holding back or else run the risk ripping her arms completely off.
"What? Jeez, Agent Brown sure wasn't kidding when she said you couldn't really tell what you were saying." Her accent was so thick, and her muttering didn't help him to try and decipher what she'd said at all. "Could you maybe speak up a little?" Alfred leaned in a bit more, hoping to hear her more clearly this time.
"Nevermind- it uh, it ain't important." Ines really had nothing to say to him, she realized, so she just decided to stay quiet and observe where they went. They turned this way and that, all of the hallways and doors freakishly unremarkable and bland. What weirded her out the most had to be the carpet. It looked like they'd gone and shaved it- what kind of crazy people shaved their carpets? They stopped their trek suddenly at one of the many doors, the man swiping something in a silver box and carefully nudging it open with his hip when it made a noise. Inside was a long table with about a dozen chairs around it, the man leading her to the one furthest from the door, which had closed and appeared to be locked by the same mechanism as in the hallway.
"I'm gonna trust you not to do anything dumb while we wait for Director Pham and Agent Brown to show up, okay?" Alfred smiled awkwardly when she just glanced at him, going back to counting the number of dots on the ceiling tiles or whatever she was doing a few seconds later. Okay, creepy. The analog clock hanging on the wall was the only thing filling the silence between them, its incessant ticking counting the seconds until someone came to facilitate conversation. He couldn't even hear her breathing, it was like she was dead or something. He shivered to himself, jumping slightly when the door issued another beep.
"The cavalry has arrived, Mr. Jones." Cassidy swept into the room with a theatrical level of pomp, holding the door open for the Director to walk through.
Ines turned her head slowly to look at the person who spoke so familiarly, flying out of her seat immediately when she saw who it was. "You! What have you done," she jabbed her pointer finger in Cassidy's direction, rage seeping into her expression. "Why did you take me away from the sea?" Cassidy just froze, a half-startled smile on her face. "Answer me!" A new woman coughed, getting Ines' attention. She was short, shorter than Agent Brown, and her shiny black hair was trimmed neatly in a style Ines had never seen before. Ines marveled at how impossibly petite and graceful she was, and suddenly felt altogether too bulky and obtrusive- her skin too, was flawless, its pale olive complexion unmarred by any previous or current wounds. She was, in a word, exquisite.
"My name is Pham Minh, and I am the one who gave the order to bring you here." Minh would have been lying if she'd told anyone that she wasn't intimidated by Ines. To have all the fury of someone who was five inches taller and who outweighed you by at least thirty pounds focused solely on you? Terrifying. One glance at Mr. Jones assuaged most of those fears however. He was there to control Ines and keep her from lashing out like she had in her shack. "Please, have a seat. We have many things to discuss, yes?" The tension in the room eased a bit when Ines retook her seat, and Minh decided to capitalize and start her explanation. "You were brought here because your very existence revolutionizes the way we think about people like you and Mr. Jones here." Minh paused, trying to read Ines' expression, which had gone curiously slack. "He represents a nation- this nation. The United States of America. You however, are an enigma to us." Minh was starting to get creeped out by Ines' glassy expression. "You cannot be France or Spain, or even the Cherokee Nation or any other Native American Nation, because we know who and where those people are." Was it just her, or was the room beginning to get much colder? She rubbed her arm to try and warm it. "To make a long story short, you will be living with Mr. Jones until further notice- I hope that does not bother you too greatly?" This was extremely uncomfortable, and she did not regret trying to end the conversation early in the least.
"You have a death about you," Ines said vacantly, eyes focused not just on Minh but also the air around the woman, looking for any other abnormalities. "It isn't yours, however." She watched as Minh excused herself from the room, practically bolting from view, and wondered what she'd done wrong.
"Yikes Mr. Jones, got a real charmer of a new roommate there, doncha?" Cassidy wheezed out between snorts of laughter, her mocha nose crinkling with mirth. "I wonder what Agent Brooks will think of this?" The sly gleam that was a constant in Cassidy's eyes was back as she side-eyed Alfred, gauging his reaction. "Ran her way awful fast when you heard which way Ines here was turning, huh?" She chortled.
Alfred shot Cassidy a dirty look and rolled his eyes. "Shut up, Agent Brown." He turned back to Ines, the barest hint of shell pink flushing his ears. "Anyway, i'm Alfred- Alfred F. Jones. I guess we're gonna have to start getting along better, yeah?" He smiled his usual smile and shook her hand.
Ines clasped his hand in kind, a bit dazzled by Alfred's thousand-watt grin. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad, she mused. Travel had always been a passion of hers, after all.