Artemis Fowl: The Cracked Reflection

Chapter Three: One more problem

Louise Bentley was quite different from Artemis Fowl. She lived in a normal sized house in England and wasn't particularly rich. She wasn't a "social reject" as she would describe him and didn't have any need for a bodyguard. But she was smart, and now she knew about the Fairy People.

Louise had been thirteen when her father, visiting a mental institute in Hamburg, had been blown up. He had gone back to Hamburg, the source of his madness trying to find a cure. It had been reported that the road outside their hotel and all the surrounding building had been destroyed in a bad gas leak that was ignited by a cigarette. But Louise knew better. She was convinced that her father had been killed because of the work he was doing. He had never really said what it was he was always researching, but one day it had him really excited, the next crazy and, a month later, dead.

Louise started by hacking into her father's computer but was startled when there was nothing there. She checked the history, and saw that there had been extensive files, but they had all been erased on the same day. But this, instead of putting her off, drove her on, more convincing her of her conspiracy theories. She checked her computer, her mother's computer, even her father's computer at work. Still nothing. Each time all files were deleted at the same time on the same day. But then a breakthrough.

Louise had been left at a friend of the families one night when her mother who had come back into her life after the death of her father, had to go to a business weekend in New York. Hacking on to her computer revealed many files the enemy had not noticed. They were all in the recycle bin but had been put there by the user, rather than this unknown adversary. What she found astounded her. For years her father had been investigating abnormalities, UFO sightings and reports of aliens and fairies, and he had become convinced that there was a single race responsible: a race of fairies. He had pages of proof and argument, and the more Louise read the deeper she believed anything she read there. She was empowered to do something, to alert someone. She read that these fairies had been messing with humans' lives for as long as there were humans to mess with. And she didn't like it.

She spent years gathering as much information on these creatures as possible, continuing her father's legacy. And then something terrible happened to the people around her and something that aided her immensely happened. She was sixteen when her drunken boyfriend had crashed a car he was driving into an oncoming truck. Neither had been wearing seatbelts and both were lucky to survive. But her boyfriend went into a coma, and Louise's eyes and brain had been damaged severely. In the operating theatre the doctors took the only choice they ad: rebuilding her eyes and the damaged part of her brain before it killed more of her.

They replaced her eyes with special cameras and her optic nerve wit shorter wire. When she came around, Louise's eyesight was a hundred times faster than any camera, a thousand times faster than the normal human eye. She could now literally watch the hovering flight of hummingbirds. And, as an added bonus, see through a fairy shield.

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