April 26, 2006
Waking up on April 25th of 2006, Artemis Fowl, for one of the first times in his life did not want to leave bed. He was exhausted by playing with the twin brothers that he had only just found out he had. Coming back from the time stream three years after he had entered it, his world had changed drastically. Using his ill-begotten magic to mesmerize parents into not questioning his whereabouts for the last three years, he was now tasked with taking care of his new brothers and being what seemed to be a normal boy. Artemis was bored out of his mind. The most exciting activities recently had been making Myles 'Dr. Primate', a doll that would talk back to him and praise him for his genius. He was reduced to searching the web in his free time, a considerable step down from saving the world. Now he knew what Holly had felt when she had left the LEP for becoming a private eye.
During his nightly online searches, he came across news reports of mass deaths in Europe. People found dead in their homes, no real explanation for it. Gasses in the house were normal, and there were no internal or external damages. The deaths had been extremely prominent in 1997 and 1998 but had come to a near standstill after May 2nd of 1998. For most people, it was a strange story, now nothing more than a folk tale. But Artemis knew better. Artemis knew that there were often hidden explanations for many things. He knew enough about that from his many encounters with fairies./p
Artemis, intrigued by these deaths, did a little digging. Around the same time the killings stopped, sightings of strange people wearing long robes began to appear across Europe. These spread the entire world, but were centered around the European Union. All sightings seemed to have the strange people celebrating something. Artemis(This being a day of many firsts) was confused about how something was so big that people around the world celebrated it, but no one had ever heard of the event. Other than these people, of course.
The first thing that came to Artemis' mind was a cult. A cult that was a prime suspect for the killings(As Artemis now imagined them). What were they celebrating, and why were the killings stopped then? Had the cult reached a number of 'sacrifices' to a deranged god? Or was the person or persons actually behind the murders stopped by their own cult, causing a celebration and reduction in killings? There were many possible explanations, but none explained the fact that not one news station had carried any story of this cult. Even these explanations were based on the fact that a cult was behind this. What if there were no cult at all? There was only one way to narrow down the answers. Artemis called Holly.