Holly's first priority was to contact the Butlers, Domovoi and Juliet. She contacted the bodyguard first, but he didn't answer. She left him a message explaining what happened and then contacted Juliet, who was more likely to be awake as she was in America.

"Hey fairy girl," Juliet chirped happily through the speaker, though Holly had to cut the mood short.

"Juliet, Artemis is missing. We need you in Ireland immediately."

There was a pause. "I'm on the next flight," Juliet said, hanging up.

Holly allowed herself some relief as she hung up the phone. At the least the brother/sister duo would be back together. Butler would be awake in a few hours come daylight and Juliet would arrive at Fowl Manor at roughly the same time.

The elf captain's second objective was to visit an old friend. His offices had been relocated. No long was "Diggums Investigations" housed in a one story building that used to be a real estate agency. Now, it was a clean, two story building carved out of limestone. This was presumably so that the dwarf didn't have to walk down the street if he wanted a snack; he could just take a bite out of the wall.

Holly couldn't help but be impressed. In the three years she'd gone, Mulch had turned a dinky private business into a popular resource for the rich with cheating wives and the police who needed somebody who could bend the rules. He'd even gotten a new partner, Doo Da Day, who was a sort of brother in arms with Mulch; both had been career criminals before they'd become friends with the law. And they'd been surprisingly good at fighting crime. Holly couldn't help but wonder if she'd been holding the dwarf back somehow when she'd been his partner.

A bell above the door rung as Holly stepped through and Doo Da Day, an impish looking pixie, skidded to a stop on his way down from the second floor.

"Mulch!" he called back up the stairs. "We've got Holly!"

Holly could hear the dwarf scurrying across the floor to the stairs. Day wisely made it all the way down the stone stairs by the time Mulch came bounding down, practically leaping at Holly and wrapping her in a hug.

"Holly! Gods, I've missed you! How are you? How's Foaly? How's Arty?"

Holly would never admit it, but she was just as happy to see Mulch as he was to see her. The two had become strange friends; they had both fought for and against Artemis Fowl on multiple occasions. They had unintentionally become brothers in arms.

It hurt Holly to push the hairy, stinky creature away from her. "Actually, Artemis is the reason I'm here."

"Of course he is." Mulch smiled ruefully. "So, what does the mudboy need us to do this time? Steal a spaceship? Take a bite out of an annoying school teacher? Give him romantic advice?"

"He's traveled through time."

Mulch's beard hair curled. "It's gotta be more than that. He's done it before."

"We think he tried to use magic," Holly explained. "It backfired. And now we think he's just bouncing around the time stream. Foaly's trying to trace the quantum energy now."

"Since when does a mudboy have magic?" Day asked, his thin eyebrows shooting to the top of his considerable forehead. Holly explained about stealing magic in the time stream. Mulch whistled, impressed.

"Sneaky little bastard," he muttered. "So, what do you need us to do?"

"Firstly, I need you to get into the LEP and steal my equipment. I'm not supposed to go above ground, so the commander will get suspicious if he sees me with them."

The two former thieves sniggered. "Shouldn't be too hard to slip past old Trouble," Mulch chuckled. "Good guy, but couldn't smell a stinkworm if you held it underneath his nose. C'mon Holly, give me a challenge."

Holly cocked an eyebrow. "Alright; I need you to track down Opal Koboi."

Both dwarf and pixie stared at her like she'd gone mad. The infamous fairy had tried to take over the world and murder every single one of them. Twice.

"What the hell for?" Mulch asked. "She's probably dead anyway, Holly. She went down in a metal ship."

"True," Holly conceded, "but I want you to look anyway."

"But why?" Day asked, incredulously.

"We need to cover all of our bases," Holly explained. "It's possible that this could be some form of sabotage. And the only person we know who means Artemis harm and is smart enough to do this is Koboi. We need to eliminate her as a possibility."

The dwarf frowned, not entirely convinced. "Okay…" he said trailing off. "We'll see what we can dig up."

"Can't promise nothing, though," Day chimed in, almost too quickly. Holly got the feeling that this is what they often told their clients.

After a goodbye hug to Mulch, Holly took out her mobile phone.

"Foaly, I need an update." She took off down the street to her apartment building.

"I went over the Fowl Manor security cameras from later in the evening," Foaly explained and Holly heard tapping sounds as the centaur ran his fingers along his keyboard. "Looks like Artemis woke up in the middle of the night and tried to perform the ritual in his backyard."

Holly nearly stopped dead at that. She had never considered a human trying to perform the ritual; it had never been done.

"And that's what started it?" she guessed.

"Near as I can tell. After that, Artemis starts thrashing, he seizes up and then…" More tapping of the keyboard. "He kind of fades out."

"What?" It was all Holly could say; she was saving her breath for running.

"Just what I said," Foaly repeated. "He just dissolves off the lawn. It wasn't instantaneous like normal time travel. It's like a dissolve transition in a movie."

Holly made it to her apartment and immediately got busy making a pot of coffee. Artemis had sent her a modified roaster and a packet of beans last month. She needed to do something. Anything. She'd go insane if she sat down now.

"Have you been able to figure out where he's going?" She spilled half the beans on the floor of her kitchen.

"Unfortunately, no." Foaly ran the explanation in his head, trying to figure out how best to explain it. "The thing is, well, this is a completely new case of time travel. The execution is different, the source of the anomaly is unknown. Everything about this situation is unknown. We don't even have a model to explore it. We could make one when Hybras was around because we had more than one example. Demons were popping up everywhere, from and to one location. We could time them, make an algorithm out of it. With this one, we have no examples to follow. I can't trace it."

"So, Artemis is hurtling through time going gods know where and all you can tell is that we can't tell anything. Great." Foaly heard a sip on the other end.

"Are you drinking coffee…" he checked his watch, "… at five o clock in the morning?"

"No," Holly said, taking another gulp. "Shut up." Her ears twitched. Coffee can have a very strong effect on somebody as small as a fairy.

"Holly, have you gotten any sleep tonight?"

"No." Another sip.

"Holly, put the coffee down and go to sleep if you still can."

Holly was silent for a while as she paced the floor of her living room.

"Have you even thought about what you're going to do?" the centaur asked. That made Holly stop.

"What do you mean? I'm going to help Artemis."

"Yes, but do you know how?" Foaly sounded almost pleading. "Think about it Holly. You can't get into the timeline. And even if you could you have no idea where to start looking. You called the Butlers. What are they supposed to do? Do you think Artemis has a time machine in the Manor's basement? You sent Mulch and Day looking for Opal Koboi; what should they do if they find her?"

Holly scowled to stop her lip from trembling. "I'm covering all my bases."

Foaly countered, "You're grasping at straws."

Holly slumped on to the couch, feeling like she was going to cry. Foaly was right; she had no plan. She had no idea what to do. She only knew one thing:

"It can't end like this Foaly," she said, nearly crying. "We've been through too much. It doesn't end with Artemis stranded out of time and me living the rest of my life without him. I can't just sit here and do nothing."

"You've got more people than yourself on this Holly," Foaly reminded her. "People who also have a friend on the line."

"But—"

"Go to sleep. I'll call you if anything turns up."

"Promise?"

"Do I ever lie?"

Holly closed the phone and lay on to her couch. She didn't feel like going to sleep, especially with the caffeine in her brain. She used her magic to help relax her brain, a sort of pleasant humming that acted like a massage. She leaned back, shut her eyes and drifted off.

She dreamt that she was in an ambulance. A group of paramedics leaned over her, watching her with concerned eyes.

"He's awake," one of them said. "Or at least he's conscious."

Holly looked around her, raising her left hand to her face. It was covered in a cast and something was burned into her fingers.

"Easy." The paramedic on her left put his hand on the cast, pushing it down to the portable bed. "You have a broken rib. Try not to move. Nod if you understand that."

Holly nodded.

"What's your name, kiddo?" the man on her right asked as he put a drip into her arm.

"Artemis," she heard herself say. Her voice sounded thin and far away.

"Do you know where you are, Artemis?" the one on the left asked.

"Manhattan," she said. Her head lulled to the side and she could smell the iron of blood.

"Goddammit," the medic swore as she faded from the dream. "That eye is bleeding again."

Holly awoke to the sound of a knock at her door. She whipped around to see an envelope slipped under her door.

She quickly jumped over the sofa and threw open the door, catching a glimpse of a figure running a corner at the other end of the hall.

"Hey!" Holly took off after them, just in time to see him walk out the lobby door.

"Stop!" She shouted. "LEP!"

The streets were packed with people and the soft glow of the illuminating cave crystals wasn't enough to help her spot her runner.

She went back to her apartment and tore open the letter. There was only one slip of paper and on that slip of paper were two words.

1998

-Artemis

Holly frantically dug the envelope out of the trash and checked the stamp date. 1998.

Holly's heart leapt. For the first time since Fowl disappeared, she had a plan forming in her mind.

She whipped out her cell phone and checked the time. 13:04. There were several messages from both the Butlers, asking where she was and where Artemis had gone. Instead of calling them, however, she dialed the number of Minerva Paradiso. If it took one genius to get himself into trouble it would take another to get him out of it.

AN: First of all, thanks for the people who are enjoying the fic so far. I'm having fun writing it and it's nice to know that people like my work.

Secondly, I need to address something about Opal Koboi. At the end of the fourth book, the Opal Deception, she was taken in by LEP authorities. However, for the purposes of this adventure, I've retconned it so that she was never found after she crashed in the field of an Italian woman. This will come into significant play later. Or at least it should if I don't completely forget about it later. I'm coming up with these chapters on the fly; it's sort of a creative writing exercise.

Thirdly, even though so far I've uploaded one of these daily (I write the chapters quickly to keep up the momentum) I'm not sure how long I can keep up that work ethic. Even when not in school I have responsibilities to attend to. And I suspect having this many chapters is giving my readers burn out just as much as me. A new chapter will come tomorrow, but then expect them to start coming more weekly.

Thanks again for reading. God bless!