A Hole in the World
Mandark landed on his rump again. He couldn't figure out HOW the two of them had managed to rip themselves from the freakish Arabian world, but he was grateful.
Dexter raised himself off of the gravel. Apparently the two of them were in a street. Streetlamps, thin and spindly, towered over the two boys, dumping light onto the street below. In the eerie light, Dexter's red hair resembled a shock of lightning.
"Maybe I died," Dexter hypothesized. "That would probably set off a reaction within my device. I made it so that I couldn't be mortally injured…"
"But now the question is… did you really die?" Mandark questioned as he observed that his clothes had gone back to normal. He choked on his words after noticing that his arms had grown as twig-like as the oppressive streetlamps. His legs were the same as his arms, and his head felt huge upon his body.
Mandark frantically looked at Dexter. His body had ballooned in size, but his legs were ridiculously thin. Mandark shook his head quickly, rattling his eyeballs in the process. He felt a pressure right between his eyes, and clutched his forehead in agony.
"Where are we?" Mandark managed to murmur.
Dexter's spectacles rose to the cluster of invasive lamps. "…The slums."
"The slums." Mandark gaped at Dexter. "Any other potentially life-threatening places in this stupid gadget?! And, while we're on that tangent, WHY would you PUT life-threatening locales in this stupid gadget?!"
Dexter
rolled his eyes. "Like I would tell you."
"If I'm going
to die, I'd like to know!" Mandark demanded just as cold metal
slammed against his forehead. He fell to the ground, unconscious.
Dexter tried to scream, but the assailant grabbed Dexter by his hair,
hoisted Mandark over their shoulder, and took off.
Dexter felt the wind blasting into his eyes – the attacker was running quite fast. Mandark's skeletal arms flailed about aimlessly, and Dexter had to feel some pity towards him, although it was Mandark's fault in the end.
The boys' attacker kicked open a rotting purple door on a bizarre-looking building. It was so peppered with bullet holes that the house resembled less of a building than a bunker. The floor was hard and frozen, something Dexter learned after the aggressor tossed him onto the ground. Mandark was given a destroyed couch.
"My God, this is not good…" the assailant muttered in a decidedly female voice. Dexter's eyes widened with shock as her face came into plain view.
He had to keep his voice from yelling out.
"I thought you were… someone else," the face of Ellen Rourke, blonde school prima donna and overall psychopath, cooed sympathetically. Ellen Rourke wasn't one for sympathy. She'd tried multiple times to ruin Nora's life, not to mention Natalie's, and Dee-Dee's; Ellen wasn't one for kindness, or selflessness, or anything similar to that. Seeing her so concerned about her misdeed was interesting to Dexter.
Mandark was breathing, but a trickle of blood ran down the bridge of his nose. Ellen put a grimy hand to her mouth. Dexter was taken aback once again – the Ellen he knew would never have a soiled hand, never mind one without a manicure. His own creation was shocking him.
Ellen immediately busied herself wiping Mandark's face down. Her limbs were as stick-like as Mandark's, and her thin frame looked completely emaciated, compared to Mandark's healthy one. In fact, Mandark looked downright attractive, lying there on the couch, breathing softly…
Dexter gulped down some spit. What on EARTH was that?! Now his resolve to leave the slums was even stronger. It bred dangerous thoughts.
Ellen shook some flecks of blood off of the back of her hand, sighing with relief. "At least he'll be all right." She turned to Dexter. "I'm really sorry… I thought your friend was Debu. He has the same color hair as her. I'm Ellen."
Dexter shook her dirty hand. "Dexter. That's Mandark."
Ellen nodded. "I'm surprised you had the nerve to walk around after dark. Everyone knows that Debu's on the loose."
"Debu." Dexter mulled it over in his head before realizing – of course. Nora Debussi. Debu, a portmanteau of her last name. "By on the loose…"
Ellen gaped at him.
"I'm not from this town. Mandark and I are trying to find a friend," Dexter quickly lied.
"Well, chances are if your friend is lost, Debu killed them," Ellen said emotionlessly. "She just escaped from the sanatorium a day or two ago, and she's been terrorizing the town since then. The police are baffled, but I'm not." Ellen's face soured as she tossed an automatic pistol onto a cluttered coffee table. "The Organization sees all."
"Very 1984."
Mandark had awoken, evidently, and was now staring, bleary-eyed, at a dim blue fluorescent bulb on the ceiling. His fingers twitched at random intervals. "You said your name was Ellen?"
"Ellen Rourke, member number 190-23 of the Organization," Ellen rattled off. "Are you a member?"
"I'm just looking for a friend," Mandark echoed, looking around the hopelessly battered home. "This Debu woman… how can you be so sure that she's murdering people?"
"The bodies," Ellen responded point-blank.
"Bodies?" Dexter and Mandark said together.
"Two men, a woman, and one so mutilated that we can't figure out what it was," Ellen explained coldly. "We need to find her so that this will end and everything will be moderately safe again."
"Moderately safe," Mandark murmured. "Yeah, okay…"
He interlaced his fingers, his spindly disjointed fingers, and looked at Dexter. Dexter looked back at him. They both stood simultaneously.
"Thank you, Miss Ellen, but we really need to find our friend," Dexter told her. Ellen's jaw dropped at least four inches. Mandark nodded.
"Now that we know about this killer… we figure finding her is our top priority," Mandark agreed. He shook Ellen's shaking hand, not looking at her wide, fearful eyes. Dexter, too, avoided her eyes – they were pained enough to convince anyone to stay, not run out into the streets. But both Dexter and Mandark could feel how imperative it was to find Nora.
As they walked out of Ellen's dilapidated shed of a house, they only had to look at each other to realize they were on the same page. Finding Nora might help them piece together the mystery of these worlds.
A/N: First off, many thanks to rachelprue for being my beta for this chapter, and hopefully the rest of the story. Her comments really cleaned up the writing. 3!
A/N 2: And now for a Very Special AN. I'd like to talk for a bit about Nora Debussi, since there's much confusion about her character all of a sudden. She is, and always will be, an original character I created in mid-2004 for the Dexter's Laboratory fandom, and was never in the television series. Since some new fanfic writers think she's canon (to which I'm all, really? My writing was that good?), I figured it was an issue that needed to be addressed. In the future, anyone wishing to use Nora in any of their stories should PM me for permission – I'll most likely give it to you, unless you're planning on writing a lemon.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Dexter's Lab, no way, no how.
