Disclaimer: The Secret World and all associated characters, settings, and situations are the property of Funcom and Electronic Arts. All use of them here is purely for entertainment purposes, without permission or intention to profit.

Dame Julia's Mission

Saturday, November 4, 12:30pm
Agartha, the Hollow Earth

When the light fades, I find myself standing once more in the golden glow of Agartha. A flat branch as thick as I am tall is beneath my feet (and beneath that a drop I'm better off not contemplating). Behind me is the wooden arch that frames the Kingsmouth portal, and just ten feet away is the smartly-uniformed figure of the Conductor, seemingly just starting to walk away. He pauses in mid-step and turns back toward me. "Back already, wot?" he remarks. "You've had a brief journey indeed!"

"It felt like a lifetime!" I say. "It's hard to believe it was only been a few days..."

"Two days and eighteen hours, to the minute," says the Conductor, consulting his brass pocketwatch. "Looks like you're in a bit of a hurry now, though."

I nod. "My brother's in trouble," I say. "I need to get back to London immediately!"

"No time to lose, then!" says the Conductor, snapping his watch shut smartly. He puts a hand on my shoulder, directing me to a large hole in the branch, about five feet across. The hole is filled with a blue-white translucent plane of energy, looking like a cross between the surface of a pool and a forcefield from Star Trek. He steps out onto it first. It supports his weight entirely, not even reacting to it, and holding him up as steadily as if it were solid concrete. He guides me out onto the energy pool with him. "Just stand here, in the center, and concentrate on the portal you need to reach," he says. "In a moment, the anima pool will align with you, and then the merest step will whisk you directly to your destination."

He steps back, off of the pool of energy, leaving me in the center. I square my shoulders and concentrate. I think of home first, in Colorado, but I shake my head before the image can fully form. I don't even know if that's where Micah is. To help him, I need information—information I'm sure Richard Sonnac will provide. I picture his office, London, the golden portal in the Eldwic Underground. A dark whirlpool-like distortion forms in the air in front of me, in the direction I sense leads back to the London portal. I start to step toward it, and before I can even complete the motion, I find myself suddenly flying, wind rushing past my ears as I hurtle along the branch past several other portals and one of the giant mechanical Custodians. Before I even have time to wonder how this is possible or even try to control my flight, the sound of rushing wind suddenly stops. I find myself standing perfectly still at the center of another energy pool, this one in front of a different portal. Peering through the portal, I see an old subway station, completely overgrown with twisting vines. A fallen sign, nearly covered in greenery, reads: Eldwic Underground Station. This is it! I turn to give the Conductor my thanks, but he's nowhere near me. I finally spot him almost a hundred yards away, a tiny figure standing way down on one of Agartha's twisting golden branches. I wave at him with both hands over my head. He waves back. It's the best thanks I can offer, and it'll have to do. I step through the portal and leave Agartha behind.

I push past the vines around the portal and climb the stairs, back up to the Eldwych Market. The makeshift marketplace is fairly crowded, with two or three customers clustered around each stall. Some of the customers wear the garish red, black, and white uniforms of Templar guards, but most are in everyday street clothes. One figure is hunched over in a long dark jacket with his hood pulled up to completely conceal his face. He doesn't pay me any mind though, and neither do any of the other shoppers. Apparently a gun-toting Templar staggering up the stairs from Agartha is too common a sight around here to merit much attention. For the moment, I'm grateful. I want to get to Sonnac as quickly as possible, and I don't feel like stopping to explain myself to anyone.

I walk quickly down the cobblestone streets, past bustling shops, parked cars, and pedestrians. It feels odd being back in a normal, living city again, surrounded by ordinary people going about their business. I keep having to remind myself I'm somewhere safe, thousands of miles from the zombies and Draug of Solomon Island. Still, when a big man steps out of a store suddenly and bumps into me, I have to fight the instinct to reach for a weapon to defend myself. The man mutters, "Sorry, miss," before going on his way. I silently chide myself for being paranoid and almost drawing a weapon on an innocent guy just minding his own business. Maybe I need some time away from the Secret War to calm down before I'm really ready to return to civilized life. Unfortunately, with the Draug only a few days away from hatching on Solomon Island, and whatever this latest development is calling me away to London, time is the one thing I don't seem to have.

Before long, I reach Temple Hall. One of the red-uniformed guards stops me at the cordon. "You, there! You're Miss Warden, right? Sonnac's new favorite?" he says.

I nod, though this is the first I've heard of me having attained favorite status.

The guard gestures me inside. "This way. They're already waiting for you!"

I hurry after him into Sonnac's office. Richard Sonnac is there, seated behind his mahogany desk, his fountain pen fairly flying over a stack of crisp pages with a blue lion symbol on the letterhead. An older woman is there too, with tired eyes and a time-worn face framed by short gray hair—but there is some fire to her. The woman stands ramrod straight, like a soldier on the parade grounds, and she wears a version of the red-white-and-black Templar uniform accented with silver embroidery and accessorized with what is clearly the shoulder-piece of a suit of medieval plate armor. As I enter she's standing by the fireplace, staring into the flames with her hands clasped behind her back, but the moment the guard closes the door behind me, she turns on her heel and fixes me with a stern look. "Miss Warden, I presume?"

I nod. "Yes, Mrs...?" I wait for a name.

The woman doesn't give me one, but instead says. "It's Dame, but never mind about who I am. You'd do well to worry a little more about yourself! Your posture, for instance. Quite sloppy! And your dress—well good, heavens, child what are you wearing?!"

I brush off my blood and mud splattered army coat. "Um, sorry, but there was a bit of a zombie apocalypse going on. I came in what I had."

"No excuse!" says the woman. "And don't think I don't understand war! I was fighting the Secret War before you born, and I've been in a good many more open conflicts besides. If you're to be a soldier of the Templars, you must take care how you present yourself. No proper army ever neglected its own uniform! Everything you do reflects on this great organization—to say nothing of how it reflects on you—and that reflection is conveyed by more than simply killing monsters! It's conveyed in everything! How you dress, how you carry yourself...I mean, who are you, when people see you? Are you anyone at all?" She shakes her head. "And your punctuality! I'll have you know it's been over half an hour we've been standing here waiting since you sent those artifacts through. The end of the world waits for no one, and neither can the Templars!"

"I came as fast as I could!" I insist.

Sonnac clears his throat, setting his pen down. "With all due respect, Dame Julia, I'm sure the delay was not intentional. Agartha travel is an inexact science, after all. And it did give us time to have the artifacts analyzed by Gladstone."

Dame Julia harrumphs. "Small difference that that made!" she declares. "There's nothing to them at all! Just pieces of a locking ward, that's all!"

"Still, you were good to bring them to us," Sonnac reassures me. "And I do hope you don't think of it as pilfering. We do not pilfer: we valorise. We shall certainly do better than tossing these ancient items in some forgotten cellar."

"Knowing the Illuminati, there's a better than even chance they belong to us anyway," says Dame Julia. "And I suppose it's good practice for you. I expect this will not be the last Illuminati code you'll have to break!" She makes a small motion with the fingers of one hand, as if brushing lint off her uniform. "That's neither here nor there, though. Let us get to the point!"

"Is my brother alright?" I interject, unable to hold the question in any longer.

"He is," Sonnac says quickly. "I'm sorry if my message concerned you, but your brother isn't in any danger at present. Quite the opposite, in fact: we've been presented with an opportunity to help protect him from any future harm."

"How?" I ask.

"We'll get to that in a moment," says Dame Julia. "Events on that miserable New England island have been moving rather quickly. The time for reconnaissance is over. We will not be caught skulking about with an army of Draug at the gates! And it goes without saying that we cannot trust the Illuminati to handle this. We're recalling more experienced agents from hotspots all over the world, and we're sending them in to clean up the place—or at least, we will send them, as soon as the Council of Venice can be made to see reason!"

"Solomon Island is too close to the core of Illuminati territory for us to deploy such a heavy force without causing an incident," says Sonnac. "Fortunately, the Council of Venice has been...persuaded that the threat is real enough to justify calling an emergency session—a rare occurrence, even in these days. I have the dubious privilege of coordinating our presentation." He gestures to the paperwork covering his desk. "I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that if we play our cards right, we can convince the Council that our intervention on Solomon Island is necessary: and then the Illuminati will have to let us clean up the island."

"That's where you and your brother come in," says Dame Julia. "Incredible as it seems, you've managed quite a coup in researching the Draug—both of you have. I've received word from the boys in R&D that the data you sent us from your little excursion into the harbor has given them fresh insight into Draug behavior."

I blink, confused. "But I didn't send you any report," I say.

"Technically true. Miss Yako reported for you," says Sonnac. "While you were solving the Illuminati's riddles, Miss Yako retired to the church, which we have under observation thanks to your efforts. There she made a very detailed report to her superiors using an old astral cipher, one our cryptologists were able to crack half a decade ago. We suspect she did this intentionally—though why the Dragon would want us to have this information is anyone's guess."

"How the information got from you to us is immaterial," says Julia, again making another dismissive flicking motion. "What matters is that you collected it, and we have it! As expected, the Draug reproductive cycle is as vile as the Draug themselves, but combined with the other data we've collected from that miserable rock it gives us a very good idea what the overall course of a Draug invasion might look like. Hopefully in time, it will give us an edge over these creatures. It may not be enough to save the townsfolk of Kingsmouth, no, but one cannot win every skirmish. And if your brother's information is correct, this is going to be a long war."

"According to the information Micah compiled, the Draug are organized into nine distinct clans," Sonnac explains. "One clan, code-named Haugbui, is small but very powerful, residing deep in the Sargasso Sea and wielding influence over all the other clans. The eight remaining clans are normally scattered around the globe in isolated areas, each controlled independently by their own Draug lord, like the creature you killed today."

I shudder at the thought. "You mean there's eight more of those things out there, with Draug armies of their own? Eight more potential disasters like Kingsmouth, just waiting to happen?"

"Precisely," says Dame Julia. "And at the moment we have no idea where any of them are! We've scoured their usual haunts, and they are not where they're supposed to be! All we know for sure is that since you killed the lord of the Feigr clan, another Draug lord from another clan has taken its place. We've no idea which one that may be, though I suspect the Haugbui. That leaves seven clans totally unaccounted for, and presents two very disturbing possibilities for their whereabouts. The first possibility is that they are, as we speak, preparing themselves to strike at other isolated communities and targets across the globe. The second and far more troubling possibility is that they have all gone to Solomon Island, and that they're after something far more horrible than simple procreation—something the Illuminati have buried there, perhaps. If it's worth them risking everything to obtain it, then whatever it is must be kept from them at all costs!" She crosses her arms. "Whatever those other clans are up to, our response must be the same: a heightened alert on all our coasts, and a swift, decisive victory over the Draug forces that have already been deployed!"

"Our best chance of convincing the Council to back us on this is to show them our research directly, preferably from the source," says Sonnac. "That's where Micah comes in. Your brother is an extraordinarily gifted young man, Chris. It was his information, and the way he organized ours, that allowed us to see this crisis in time. If the Council could see his information—and see him—then they'll be much more likely to decide in our favor."

"You want my brother to testify before this secret Council?" I shake my head automatically. "He's just fifteen!"

"He's also now one of the world's foremost experts on the Draug—though admittedly with how little we knew of them just a few days ago, that doesn't take much," says Sonnac. "Nevertheless, I understand your concern. Events have been moving very rapidly indeed. But I do want you to be aware that there is a benefit to your family in all this. The Council of Venice takes the task of protecting its expert witnesses very seriously. If they call on Micah Warden to testify, your entire family will be sheltered from further harassment by the Illuminati. It's not perfect, but it's our best chance to protect him."

I sigh and look down at my mud-stained shoes. I know this is something Micah would want. He would leap at the chance if it was offered to him. I'm still reluctant to get him any more involved in the Secret World than I have to, but if it'll protect him from the likes of Kirsten Geary... I take a deep breath and meet Sonnac's gaze. "Okay, what do you need me to do?"

"Quite simply, we need you to go home and bring your brother to us," says Sonnac. "If possible, bring your father as well."

I swallow, remembering that my Dad and I aren't on great terms right now.

"It sounds simple, but it will be quite the bother," says Dame Julia. She begins ticking points off with her gnarled fingers. "First of all, you can't use Agartha to reach them, as the Illuminati have all the nearest entrances booby-trapped. Even if you could, you wouldn't be able to bring them back that way, because with no anima powers of their own, they simply cannot use an Agartha portal to travel. That means there's just no alternative: you'll have to fly to America!"

"Fly as in, on a Templar plane, or..." I hesitate, not knowing whether or not independent flight is a legitimate anima superpower I should have access to, or else if it's something else the Templars can provide by other means. Given everything else that's turned out to be real over the past few weeks, people flying through the air on their own doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

Dame Julia shakes her head though. "I'm afraid it's much more mundane than that. You'll be flying coach. We've arranged tickets for you with British Airways."

"A commercial flight?" I adjust my glasses. "Weird, I thought the Illuminati would just stop me at customs or security if I used a commercial flight to get home." I can't imagine a crooked TSA agent or customs official would be any harder to buy off than Officer Cole was.

"Oh, they'll stop you, search you, and question you alright," says Sonnac, "but they know better than to detain you or prevent you from retrieving your family. For one, I've already informed the Council of Venice to expect your brother as an expert witness. They will be watching him. As for you, there is a sort of gentleman's agreement between the cabals which stipulates that agents of one cabal may take peaceful personal journeys through the territory of another cabal, so long as they are unarmed, keep out of sensitive areas, and cause no trouble during their trip."

"The Illuminati haven't a gentlemanly bone in their bodies, but they do know the value of strict reciprocity," says Dame Julia. "The last time they tried to detain one of our agents on a peaceable journey in America, we had six of their agents locked up in various dungeons around Europe within half an hour. They've not given us any serious trouble on the matter since!"

I don't know how I feel about going home and potentially meeting Kirsten Geary or one of her goons unarmed, but I suppose it's the only way. I just hope the Illuminati think as seriously about the repercussions of their actions as the Templars do. I square my shoulders. "So when do I leave?"

Sonnac smiles. "That's the spirit!" he says. He rises and crosses the room, handing me a computer printout with the British Airways logo emblazoned across the top. "This is your boarding pass. Your flight leaves at 2:40 pm, London time, from Heathrow Airport. Your passport and a selection of travel necessities will be waiting for you in your room at the Redcrosse Circus Apartments. You will, of course, need to leave your weapons and talismans there. I would advise you to also leave any valuable personal effects behind as well, in case the Illuminati confiscate anything. Reciprocal agreement or no, the Illuminati are fond of intimidation and petty theft."

I nod, mentally bracing myself for going into the lion's den...though compared to Kingsmouth I suppose it'll be nothing. Illuminati agents might try to intimidate me or confiscate my luggage, but they won't kill me—and I have died once already.

"Before you go, I need a moment with you, alone," says Dame Julia. She looks pointedly at Sonnac. He bows to her and wordlessly leaves the room.

She can order Sonnac out of his own office? I can't keep an expression of surprise from my face. I guess she wasn't kidding when she said she was his boss...and mine. I'm still not certain how I feel about that last part.

Dame Julia waits, arms crossed, until the door closes behind Sonnac. Then, she turns to me. "I've heard your about to rise in rank and become a full member of the Templars," she says. "That's all well and good, but I believe nothing of worth comes for free. In my day, rank and privilege among the Templars was a matter of who you were. You had to be something. You had to have family. You had to have blood—the sort of blood that meant something! Now those days are over, but don't think that means you're getting a free pass, young lady. Now what matters is what you can do, what you're willing to do. To rise in rank and become a true soldier of the Templars, you have to prove yourself!"

"I thought that was what I was doing on Solomon Island," I say, crossing my own arms.

Dame Julia wags her finger at me. "You'll never get anywhere with that attitude, young lady! If you want the support and resources of a full member of the Templars, you'll have to act like one. You have to show backbone and commitment! Fail to do that, and you may find yourself and your family cast aside once this little adventure is done. You'll find the Templars have no place for loose cannons in our ranks. Is that understood?"

I grit my teeth, uncomfortable being maneuvered into this, but feeling like I really have no choice. The Templars did save my life, more or less. I guess that means I owe them. "I understand," I say at last.

"Good," says Dame Julia. She brushes a bit of dust from the mantelpiece with her finger before turning back to me. "I have a mission for you, a test if you will. It is to be kept strictly confidential. It's above Sonnac's level and is to stay that way. No one else is to know about it, except the two of us and the Grand Masters, of course. If word of this mission and the disaster it's intended to prevent were to get out, it would be quite detrimental to our efforts to focus on the Draug crisis."

I uncross my arms, suddenly realizing that there's a lot more at stake here than just proving my loyalty to an organization. "What's going on?"

"Our sources have informed us that the Illuminati are trying to get their hands on something rather...Filthy," she says, with special emphasis on that last word. "I assume you know what that means."

I shudder at the mention of the Filth and nod.

"Good," says Dame Julia. "It goes without saying that we cannot allow this. Them simply possessing an artifact of the Filth would be problem enough, but according to our sources the Illuminati have the gall to actually trade for it in the open, in the middle of New York City, in close proximity to millions of unsuspecting civilians! The potential disaster they could unleash would make even Tokyo look like a pleasant dream by comparison."

"What do you need me to do?"

"What do you think, child?" says Dame Julia. "We need you to intercept the package. Make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands—which is to say, any hands at all but our own!"

"So I go to New York City instead of Denver?" I ask.

Julia shakes her head. "Sadly, we cannot be so straightforward. It would alert the Illuminati that we're onto them and jeopardize everything! They might relocate or reschedule the trade for an even more rash time or place, or whatever party is soulless enough to deal with the Illuminati might decide to sell the artifact into even more depraved hands." She begins to pace as she outlines her plan. "What you must do is you must follow through with Sonnac's mission to the letter. Fly out to visit your family. Retrieve Micah Warden and bring him here with your return airplane tickets to London. Sonnac did not overstate your brother's importance to our cause. More than that, however, retrieving him will put you in the perfect place to enter New York City undetected and interrupt the deal."

I glance down at the boarding pass, which does contain two return tickets for a grueling overnight flight from Denver to London, departing at 9:30pm and arriving at 1:30pm the next day. "There's no stop at New York on this, though," I say.

"Of course there isn't!" says Dame Julia. "It's not like the Illuminati would just let you get off in their backyard and stroll into the middle of one of their unsavory meetings. But the flight will pass quite near to New York City, close enough that if you use your Agartha Anchor while passing by the City, you'll enter the Hollow Earth at a point inside the Illuminati's defense perimeter. With luck, they won't even know you're there until you're already gone!"

"So, I need to keep my Agartha Anchor with me," I say.

Dame Julia shakes her head again. "Too risky. The Illuminati know very well that a plan like ours could use the anchor to circumvent their defenses. They'll not allow you to keep it. What they will allow is something far more mundane—something that the Illuminati, with their unhealthy obsession with smartphones and other newfangled devices, have all but forgotten the usefulness of: your send-box."

"You think they'll really let me keep it?" I say, a bit startled.

"I'm quite positive," says Dame Julia. "We've been using send-boxes to communicate with our agents in their territory for years now and they haven't caught on. So long as the key and the box are kept separate, the enchantment is too weak to register on their security devices. The boys in R&D say it shows up as a box with a simple dimensional charm on it, to make it slightly bigger on the inside—nothing for the Illuminati to bother with or fear. They'll let you keep it, so long as you don't raise a fuss about it and let them know it matters to you. Once you have it with you on the plane back to London, I'll be able to send your Agartha anchor and any other supplies you need directly to you through the send-box. Do you understand?"

I nod quickly.

"Then get to it!" she says, waving for me to leave. "Your flight leaves in less than two hours!"

Author's Note: I'd like to thank everyone for their patience as I got this up! I apologize for the delay. While I've already started work on the next chapter, getting this one polished and typed up took me longer than expected.

The pools mentioned early on in this chapter are a feature of Agartha in the game which allow players to quickly travel from one portal to another. At first I wasn't going to mention them, but seeing that the pools do feature in the second faction quest to a degree, I thought I'd go ahead and expose Chris to them, especially as they would come in handy for her situation right now.

On other Agartha notes, the parts about the Illuminati booby-trapping Agartha portals in the Colorado area and Dame Julia's plan to get Chris to New York...all that is made up. The Agartha portals part I think is semi-plausible given what we know about the game world. With as many Agartha portals as there are leading to Solomon Island alone, it stands to reason there would be at least a few providing access to Chris' home state. It also stands to reason that the Illuminati wouldn't want just anybody using portals inside their territory. But then with respect to the New York City portal...I'm actually pretty far from the game on this one. In the game the New York City, London, and Seoul portals are all located side by side next to a huge platform where players regularly congregate. In the game, using the Agartha anchor item teleports you to this platform, no matter where you originally came from. In fact I think all Agartha travel (excepting that done in special instanced quests) spawns the player at this platform. Probably this is more for gameplay and convenience reasons than for worldbuilding. It's also worth noting that none of the Cabals have any kind of security around their respective portals and agents from any of the factions can just waltz through their home portal and into somebody else's any time they please (of course going into faction-only areas of each cabal's home city is another matter—one does not merely walk into the Labyrinth, even if one is invited). Again, probably this is for convenience. Still a deliberate choice of portraying the catty cabals as ironically close to each other and familiar with one another can't be discounted. I decided to portray them as having portals in different parts of Agartha and cutting up the Hollow Earth into different territories in much the same way as they've divided the surface world. I also made up the idea that one's location in the surface world would impact their point of arrival in Agartha when using the anchor.

The meeting of the Council of Venice and the associated mission to retrieve Micah is something I made up, but also something I've been trying to build up to. Hopefully it wasn't too out-of-the-blue. Dame Julia's mission is the game's actual Into Darkness faction quest. I didn't have any real justification for having her keep Sonnac out of the loop on it, but it did seem to me a good reason to make Julia the main point of contact for the mission rather than Sonnac, and to fit with how much of a departure Into Darkness is from the rest of the Solomon Island quest line at this point. I hope that this and my characterization of Dame Julia is a good fit for the game.

With any luck, I'll be posting more soon!