Yo, everyone - I apologise for the long wait. In my defence, I had a concert and a fair bit of coursework to do. Thanks for the reviews, and I agree - I'm definitely going to change the title. I may keep changing it in the future if I feel it's still unfitting. I also finally checked my email and realised a lot of people have added this to their alerts - which is encouraging! Thanks again.
Here's chapter 4!
Most of the characters belong to Eoin Colfer, and he's triple awesome for answering my questions on AskEoinAnything! I'm certainly going to wear elf ears and play 'Complex' out on the streets for money!
Holly secured her helmet, lowering the visor.
"Foaly," she spoke into the helmet mike, "turn off these stupid start-up holograms. I don't need to be reminded that my ears are being flattened in headgear."
"Why?" came the response. "They're aesthetically pleasing – should put you in a good mood for the duration of the shuttle flight, anyway. It's a psychological thing – you wouldn't understand."
"What I understand is that next time I put on this thing, I won't see a single letter."
"Fine, fine," Foaly grumbled. There was a beep, and the offending text vanished.
She examined the shuttle in front of her, walking around it. It was dull. She'd flown better – lots better – but this run-of-the-mill piece of scrap material would do, since it was the only one that had finished refuelling.
"Not much fuel in this, either," she muttered.
"Don't worry. You'll make it. Probably." Foaly reassured.
Holly shrugged and got inside, strapping herself to the seat. Thankfully, the craft had enough space for her to be able to extend her legs fully. She'd been in one of the smaller ones before, and it had been no pleasant experience.
Lowering her visor for a second, she spoke into the ring communicator. "I'm on my way up, Mud Boy. Stay alive until then."
"I'll attempt to," came the dry reply. "And Foaly?"
"I'm already on my way to meet Qwan and No. 1," butted in Foaly through her helmet earpiece. "Hey, that rhymes."
"Good. Establish a connection with us once you get there, assuming Holly's flight is short."
"Was that a joke?" Holly asked. "A surname joke, from Artemis Fowl?"
"I don't make jokes," Artemis replied, his voice not betraying a hint otherwise. "Butler and I will be at the co-ordinates I sent you. If we aren't, then you can safely assume something has gone terribly wrong."
"Which it probably will." Holly closed the visor and shut off communications in her helmet, starting the shuttle. There was a whoosh of air as the top clamped shut over her, and her seat lowered slightly. Then she was off, overtaking the speed limit in mere seconds.
Foaly clopped through the entrance of the café, holding a small bag containing all the resources he had collected that were related to ancient language, and various photographs of the symbols Artemis had sent him. The café was, like all Haven cafés, quite busy at this time in the morning, and there was a deterring queue behind the counter. Foaly had never been a patient centaur, so he decided to ignore the overpowering smell of sim-coffee and focus on finding No.1 and Qwan.
He spotted Qwan first – the old warlock was stood up indignantly, trying to get the attention of someone behind the counter. No. 1 was right next to him, apparently trying to calm him down.
Foaly made his way over to their table, grinning. "What's wrong, Qwan?"
Qwan glanced at him, "It's about time you arrived. And the people here are ridiculous. I'm a warlock; I did not spend thousands of years as a stone sculpture to have to wait for even longer at the back of a queue!"
Foaly sat down. "That can't be fun."
"It's not, believe me," said No. 1. "Qwan was about another minute away from turning the gnome at the counter into stone."
Qwan laughed. "I was kidding about that. Although, that would have been funny."
No. 1 winced. "So how have you been, Foaly?"
"Not bad," Foaly shrugged, sliding the folder onto the table. "The usual – designing and redesigning. You know how Trouble can get."
"What's that?" Qwan grunted, pointing unceremoniously at the case.
"This," Foaly said, nodding at it, "is a folder, containing some very important information, along with a couple of other tiny bits which I might need a little help in." He coughed.
Qwan raised a finger. "So you need help?"
"I didn't say that!" Foaly glared. "Actually, Artemis needs help. He just asked me to ask you. I'm just the messenger here."
No. 1 looked puzzled. "But why didn't you just … help him yourself?"
"Anyway," Foaly said loudly, opening up the folder. "Before I show you, I should probably tell you that Artemis and Butler were attacked yesterday." He showed them the image he'd got from the surveillance camera.
"Are they OK?" No. 1 asked, peering at the image. "Do they need healing, or…?"
Foaly shook his head. "Not at the moment, anyway. Holly's flown up to join them, so it should be fine."
A drowsy pixie bumped into their table hard, clearly not awake yet. Qwan seethed. "See what I mean? No respect!"
"Artemis managed to trace to a source on one of his attackers' mobile phones," Foaly continued. "The result was a word, or possibly sentence, written in a language that he couldn't name. Understandably, he then sent it to me, seeing as I'm his intellectual superior, and I know these things."
"But you couldn't figure it out, either," No. 1 nodded. "What I don't understand though, is why you'd ask us? Surely you know more about different languages?"
Foaly pointed at the folder. "I obviously did manage to figure out some information. The language in question is a fairy tongue; an ancient fairy tongue. It didn't match to anything in my database, though, and while I got a semi-match with a Dwarven language, I thought I might be better off asking–"
"–me," Qwan grinned. "Of course – I was around from long ago, after all. Well then, what are you waiting for?"
Foaly pulled out a copy of the text, enlarged and enhanced. He handed it to No. 1. "This is the exact text Artemis sent me; nothing about the symbols has been changed apart from their size.
No. 1 passed it to Qwan,
Qwan stared at it.
The warlock demon's face was obscured by the file, but after a minute passed, it became clear that something was wrong. His fingers tightened on it, and he went visibly still. A rune on the back of his hand began to glow slightly. There was a short, strained silence at the table.
"…Master?" No. 1 ventured.
No response.
"What happened?" Foaly asked. "Can you read it?"
"Bad," Qwan muttered at length, more to himself than in response. "Bad, bad, bad."
No. 1 glanced at him worriedly. "What's bad?"
"This!" Qwan slapped the image back on the table suddenly, surprising both of them. He pointed at it, as if Foaly could read it. "Do you understand what this means?"
When nobody replied, he went on. "Yes, I can read it. I wish I couldn't, but hey - that's what I get for being around all the way back then."
"Back when?" Foaly leant in, interested. Qwan had been able to decipher something he, Foaly, couldn't?
"The ancient times, of course. Back before the Battle of Taillte. The demon age." Qwan lowered his voice a little. If he'd had a mug of ale, he would have been hunched over it. "I can read this writing –it's in my native tongue. But it's not in my native tongue."
"What?"
"Me too," No. 1 said suddenly, his voice unintentionally layered with magic, from concentration. His gaze was fixed on the symbols, his eyes glowing slightly – as they did when the powerful young warlock subconsciously tapped into his naturally large energy reserves.
Foaly winced, clearing his head from the magical interference.
"Of course you can read it," Qwan nodded at No. 1. "It's in your blood, boy. And it's always been like it." The old demon got up, gathering up the folder and file into his arms and pushing his way through towards the exit. "We're going. We can't talk here – I don't trust the pixies anymore than I'd trust an army of Leon Abbots claiming to be peace missionaries from Hybrastery."
"Where else can we go?" Foaly raised his voice to be heard as he and No. 1 jumped up to follow Qwan. "And what did the text even say?"
As they strained through the crowd to spot the old warlock's small horns, No. 1 answered quietly. "I might be wrong here, but what I read was 'unidentifiable'.
Artemis drummed his fingers on the counter impatiently. "She needs to hurry up. Foaly can't have delayed the police for long, and the last thing we need is half a dozen police officers trying to assert inflated authority over a situation they can't handle."
Butler was leant against the wall, inspecting a cartridge pack. Of course, as a bodyguard he wasn't truly relaxing – it was more of a stance than a relaxed position. He shook his head at his young charge. "Artemis, it's barely been fifteen minutes. 16 and a half years old, and you have yet to learn to wait."
Artemis sighed. "Patience is useless where inefficiency is concerned."
It was fairly early in the morning. A little light streamed through from around the edges of the makeshift obstruction that posed as protection from outside.
They had seen little point in leaving and complicating Foaly's co-ordinate trackers, so they'd opted to wait the rest of the night out. Foaly had agreed that the best course of action would be to send a fully kitted-out Holly up to aid them, while he worked on the case below ground with Qwan and his imp apprentice, No. 1.
"Foaly did a good job," Artemis commented. "We barely experienced any trouble all night."
"That he did," Butler agreed. "Although having to depend on him probably isn't one of your favoured circumstances."
"Don't remind me. The first few hours were nail-biting," Artemis said drily.
There was a slight hiss from outside, quiet but easily heard in the tranquil morning. Butler tensed for a second, then remembered.
Artemis smiled in the general direction of the hiss. "It's 10:36, Holly – have we been speeding again?"
The blockage was shifted aside slightly, and a helmeted elf shimmered into view at the entrance of the comic-book shop. "I always speed, you know that."
She removed the helmet and grinned. Not much was different about Holly Short. Perhaps her chestnut-red hair stopped a couple of centimetres further down her head than it had used to, and her suit appeared a little more advanced, but otherwise, the elf was much the same.
She regarded Artemis with exaggerated disinterest. "Well… you've barely changed."
"Likewise," Artemis shot back.
Butler smiled good-naturedly. "Thank the heavens you came. I had a feeling things were about to go awry."
Holly activated her wings, and flew over to hug, or attempt to hug, Butler. It was like trying to hug a mountain. Impossible.
Butler pointed at her wings. "They look different. Has Foaly actually been working, then?"
Holly flew back down to the ground, nodding. "I know - it's incredible! They're about twice as power-efficient now, and at least three times as manoeuvrable. We used to just use reprogrammed DoubleDex, and that's probably the only reason Foaly upgraded them."
"Because they're Koboi-brand?"
"Obviously. He's paranoid about that too, you know. He made sure Trouble added triple the security to her cell - and he claims to be working on a 'Koboi-proof' system from scratch, just in case she escapes again."
Artemis stepped forward. "This is all very nice, but it's necessary that we leave right now. We can return to Fowl Manor, as I have already called ahead. It's important that we don't stay here a minute longer than we already have."
Butler picked up the dismantled Softnoses from the counter. To him they were like oversized water-pistols, except they shot lasers. "Alright. Transport-wise, I managed to arrange for a car - parked about two roads away. The keys will be in its pin-locked compartment; 23980."
"Good." Artemis glanced outside as the wail of a siren suddenly pierced the quiet of the shop. He turned back abruptly. "They're here."
Butler nodded. "They're here. Time to go."
And in less than four minutes, the comic-book shop was empty, with no discernible trace of anyone having taken refuge there for the night. Of course, the entire building was trashed, so this conclusion would be far from anyone's minds if they were searching it.
Two streets away, a teenager, his huge bodyguard and, less obviously, a shielded elf were inconspicuously making their way towards an armoured car. The dim morning provided a little cover; perhaps enough for the few passers-by not to dwell on the unlikely companions that were visible. Nobody wanted any trouble, especially since there were a couple of police cars patrolling the area.
One such passer-by, however - a man who couldn't have been older than twenty - stopped upon sight.
Artemis' gaze focused on him immediately, and he discovered that the man was looking at him, from afar, but in an extremely curious way. Pedestrians did not just stop in the middle of the pavement and stare, unless of course they recognised someone. And people who recognised Artemis Fowl did not just stop and stare, unless of course they happened to want to initiate a sparring match with Butler. Not likely.
"You see him?" Artemis muttered out of the corner of his mouth.
"Yes," came the whispered reply from Holly. "Is he -"
The man's hand went for his jacket.
Butler's hand moved quicker than the eye could see, and the man, or would-be assailant, collapsed to the floor with a dart in his leg.
Bang.
The man had still fired, somehow. The bullet wasn't even close, but Artemis' eyes widened. "Butler! The police!"
Holly obliged this time, firing two quick bursts of her Neutrino into the man's hand and chest. He slumped against the cold pavement, out for good. The gun clattered to the ground next to him.
"Go!"
A siren from behind. Artemis whipped round - a police car had already turned into the road behind them. Blue flashing lights filled the street, turning the situation over on itself and wringing out all of the order.
"The car!" Artemis sprinted forward, clinging onto Butler's arm in a fashion that meant he was more being dragged than he was actually running. "No- evidence," he panted as they were about to pass the incapacitated man on the pavement.
Butler didn't even pause as he bent down and heaved the body onto his back, maximising his momentum. A second later, he reached the car. Pulling the door open, he pushed Artemis into the back seat and dumped the unconscious body next to him.
Holly dived inside as Butler appeared in the front seat.
"Seatbelts," he grunted, and slammed on the accelerator, forcing the passengers in the back against their seats. "Or maybe not."
And they were off.
Bit shorter than the others... eh, but I didn't want to stretch anything. Review, I would like to know your opinions on this!