A/N: High school and college beat up my muse and left her in a coma for the past two months. Sorry about that. This chapter is meant to tie a lot of things back together.
Artemis Fowl: The Book of Ages
The Glass Shard
Minerva Paradizo's Apartment, Quartier des Invalides, Paris
Minerva looked up from her laptop and saw Artemis' mismatched eyes fixed on her face. Both seemed to be calculating- judging each of her movements with cold, precise logic. He was suspicious of her, and giving her the same look Holly nearly always did.
'He has every right to be suspicious!' she thought to herself.
"I…" she began, when a shiver suddenly ran down her body. But Artemis didn't look away, and after taking a breath, Minerva pressed on.
"I don't know how much you know about demons," she said. 'Or about me,' she added in her mind. "But back when I was younger, and Hybras was still in Limbo… I tried to catch a demon." The woman gave a weak laugh. "I failed miserably."
"What happened?" asked Artemis, his voice tense.
'He isn't even surprised…' thought the blonde, biting her lip slightly, 'Mon Dieu, what does he know?' Then another thought: 'What did I do in his world?'
Minerva looked at the teen from the corner of her eye, then quickly looked away.
"I couldn't catch a demon as it was phasing in and out of this world, so I gave up for a while. But then I found a way to force a demon to stay in phase with this world." Her voice suddenly dropped down to a near-whisper. "Accidents happened."
She saw Artemis wrinkle his brow from the corner of her eye and breathed a heavy breath.
"Please…" she said, her voice surprisingly sincere, and almost desperate, "I don't… expect you to understand. Just… listen… I'll start from the beginning."
Ten Years Ago
Eleven year-old Minerva Paradizo looked at the headline in disgust. It took her a little less than ten seconds to read through the article associated with it, and when she finished, her expression flashed to a dark scowl.
Some American research team had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for teleporting a few grains of sand across a room.
'Sand!'
Minerva gritted her teeth. If she had her way, she'd have captured a being that teleported across from another dimension. But no, she'd missed her chance, and according to her calculations, the next wave of demon appearances wouldn't be for another five decades. She would be an old woman by then, and nobody would recognize her true genius.
"Entanglement!" She spat the word out as if it were some explicative. She could see Billy Kong watching her pace from the corner of the room, carefully guarding his expression. "Any idiot with the right lab can make a quantum copy."
"Child's play compared to dimensional transport!" she muttered.
But over the next two days, Minerva read the set of studies that had contributed to the teleportation experiment. Ten years of work by eight universities, and nearly all of most important information absorbed by the young girl in those two days.
She didn't like it, but even Minerva gave grudging respect where it was due.
Billy Kong eyed the young blonde girl warily as she threw herself back into research.
He knew she was smart, but in his world, certificates, degrees, honors and medals didn't matter where things counted. All the recognition in the world wasn't worth one ounce of street-sense and in his opinion, the young Paradizo wouldn't survive a week out in the streets without her father and her money.
But he stayed. He had to- and it was fairy good pay considering what he did. For the money, the Paradizos were worth his time.
For the next few weeks, Kong stalked the premises of the Paradizo Chateau with his usual professional, but bored manner, and kept half an eye out for Minerva and her little brother, exactly like he was paid to (well, maybe not the being bored part).
He knew something was happening though. Minerva had been working unusually hard lately, barely coming out for meals, and seemingly too busy to even be irritable. That part was the oddest. She didn't even say anything when her brother Beau ran outside her room with a milk mustache plastered on his upper lip, yelling about dropping a chocolate truffle into his glass of milk.
Kong was the first person Beau found, and the Taiwanese man found himself rolling his eyes as he stretched his patience explaining to the boy that he could drink the glass of milk to make the chocolate magically reappear.
All of this happened right outside Minerva's bedroom, and she didn't say a single word. She probably didn't even notice.
About a month later, Minerva began wearing jewelry.
The girl had never really been interested in such things before, always more or less dismissing them as just necessities of being upper-class. She never wore jewelry around the house before, that much, Kong was sure of.
But the bodyguard noticed that Minerva seemed to only care about bracelets.
It was always four thin, silver bracelets- two on each wrist- and no other accessories or makeup. Billy Kong was no fashion expert, but even he thought that was a tad odd. He shrugged it off though. Minerva was, after all, a preteen girl. It must have been one of those stages (even geniuses must have had them).
Two years later, Minerva became a teenager. And the odd events became magic.
Eight Years Ago
It was early on a Saturday morning when everything changed.
"Mr. Kong, get in here!" yelled an excited voice from the bodyguard's cell phone.
The man sighed. "Coming, mademoiselle."
Billy Kong trudged out to the Paradizo grounds with his hands in his pockets and a scowl on his face. The girl was playing mad scientist again, and he couldn't do anything but go along with it.
A large white tent about the size of decent workroom had been set up on the grounds where Minerva had stored an inordinate amount of electronic equipment and silver coils. She told her father that she was working on a new type of radio transmission system.
The bodyguard took one look at the tent and snorted. If Minerva was working on a radio, then Billy Kong was a lovable Irish schoolteacher.
But it wasn't some strange contraption that Minerva showed Kong as he lifted the tent's flap and entered. It was the television.
"I hadn't realized they were still this organized," she was saying over the voice of a reporter on a live news channel.
Billy Kong stared at the screen as images of what looked like an oddly proportioned child took a podium in some kind of hall. The child wore simple white robes with gold trim, and folded her hands neatly in front of her. But the expression she wore chilled even Kong. Her face had no wrinkles, but the way she looked at the camera made it seem like she was some sort of stern, ancient woman who had seen far, far too much. And all of that wrapped in a tiny little body.
"My name is Councilor Vinyáya," she paused and almost cracked a smile, "I come in peace."
"What movie is this?" asked Kong in a bored tone as the Vinyáya person began talking about fairies and elves and something about the Earth's crust.
Minerva smiled.
"Not a movie, Mr. Kong. The People have finally decided to reveal themselves." She picked up the remote control and flicked through several channels, all of which were either showing the same video or had pundits talking about magic of all things. More than one channel flashed an image of an Irish leprechaun in a green suit and top hat onto the screen.
Billy Kong learned about leprechauns for the first time that day. He also learned about LEP Recon for the first time that day.
Suffice to say that by that evening Kong's mind was slightly… blown.
Minerva Paradizo knew about fairies. That fact could hardly be surprising- one did not go about trying to find the missing Eighth Family without finding out about the other seven.
She decided though, that by the time she found out about the People, it wasn't worth the effort of trying to gain something purely from that. Judging from her initial reading of reports, fairies were being seen aboveground almost consistently now, and they would soon reveal themselves anyhow. A demon was a different story.
"You seemed upset the last time I stopped working on the demon calculations," she said the next day, giving her bodyguard a sideways glance as she led them through the grounds.
The man grunted, and Minerva saw a flash of metal in his left palm- a short knife, half hidden in his dark sleeve. Kong was on edge today. He had been like this ever since a few hours after hearing about the fairies' appearance aboveground. For the first few hours, he just didn't believe it.
The girl nodded at Kong's hand.
"Can you get that silver-plated?" she asked.
The bodyguard furrowed his brow for a moment.
"Silver?" he asked, "What, some kind of fairy ward? That why you're wearing all those bracelets?"
Minerva smirked and shook her head slightly.
"A ward, no. But something very powerful in another way."
They reached the covered workspace and Minerva lifted a heavy tent flap to enter. The inside was lit up by harsh halogen lights. Several monitors still lined one end of the room, but this time, she wasn't interested in those. She headed for a large, thin, silvery film that hung like a painting near one side of the tent.
"You see, Kong, only seven fairy Families showed themselves yesterday," said Minerva as she walked carefully around the area right in front of the film.
The section of floor that she avoided looked like it was a square steel plate. Minerva chuckled mentally. If only it were that easy.
"It turns out, in fact, that the demons I had been looking for years ago were the last Family- the hidden Family of fairies. They're so old, I think even the People themselves have relegated them to myth."
"We know they are not," stated Kong flatly. Minerva noted his tone. They had been over this many times, but now demon should take on a new meaning. The world was now known to have fairies. Fairy with guns, for heaven's sake!
It would be easy to use Kong now. He had told her during the last time they tried to catch a demon that he had a vendetta against them for killing his brother. The girl nearly smirked. Oh, Kong wasn't the brightest person in the world, but he was useful.
"We were at demon appearances twice," continued Minerva, "and both times we couldn't catch one." She shot him a hard look before reaching a hand behind the film. "This time, I made one come to us."
She flicked a switch, lighting up the film from behind and shutting the tent's main lights off at the same time. She heard Billy Kong suck in gasp of air.
The film now appeared dark, with tiny white specks scattered across its surface like a hastily-done spray painting job. Nearly dead center though, a bright concentration of specks appeared in what was clearly a shape of some sort. It was a figure, a bit more than a head shorter than Minerva herself.
A squat head was capped with what looked almost like short horns, and a thick torso branched out into almost disproportionately muscular-looking arms and legs. Though it was barely a shadow of a figure, and no expression could be seen on its face, it still managed to look angry. A tail snaked off to one side, curling up at the end as if in annoyance. What fingers could be made out were curled, and two pointed ears stuck out stiffly like daggers.
"Yaoguai…" whispered Kong.
"These demons appear randomly," he turned sharply to Minerva, "How did you summon… this?"
"This is an afterimage," explained the girl, gesturing towards the film, "A demon did in fact appear in this room, but disappeared far too quickly for any camera to catch it. The image is from a characteristic gamma ray burst that comes from dimensional transport that forms on this particular type of film." She tapped her foot against metal plate on the ground. "Silver, Mr. Kong, is a dimensional anchor. I managed to hold the demon here just long enough for the radiation to affect the film."
"You can control their appearances now?" asked Kong, not bothering to hide his disbelief.
Minerva's smile would have made a James Bond villain proud.
"Almost, Mr. Kong… almost."
"Whatever you're doing," said the bodyguard quickly, "can you expand it? Make it more effective?"
The girl was almost surprised at his enthusiasm.
"That's the plan."
Seven Years Ago
'The plan' turned out to be a bit more convoluted than Billy Kong would have expected.
It was no less than a year after the official appearance of the People that Kong was practically glowing with a sheen of sweat, leaning on a shovel in the pounding midday sun of the Gobi Desert.
Wrinkling his nose, the man whipped off his soaked white shirt and dabbed at his forehead as a fourteen year-old girl thrust a tall metal staff into the hole he just dug.
"That's the last of them," announced Minerva, proudly. "Good job, Mr. Kong."
Kong nodded without responding. He'd much prefer a bottle of cold water than a compliment right now. His canteen always ran empty far too quickly out here.
As if reading his mind, Minerva unclipped a long metal container from behind her belt and tossed it over to him. The cold from the container shocked Kong's hands for an instant, but he unscrewed the cap and drank greedily, finishing the water in seconds. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and smiled at the girl gratefully.
Minerva simply nodded.
"Let's head back. We'll fire up the transmitters immediately."
The 'transmitters,' as Kong had learned over the course of the past year, were actually 'matter-wave function modifiers'. The fact that he bothered to learn this, and the fact that he understood how they worked (if only in the absolute vaguest sense) showed just how much time he had spent with Minerva while she planned to find the last fairy Family.
From what Kong knew, the French prodigy had taken the idea that the teleportation scientists had used- the very same ones she had been so annoyed to see win the Nobel prize years ago- to make a quantum 'copy' of a particular atom or molecule and destroyed the original. It wasn't teleportation in the traditional science fiction sense, but the important thing was that it worked- for very, very small objects at least.
Building on that work, Minerva had found a way to match the quantum resonance of silver with the patterns of other dimensions using electrical charges that realigned atomic spins. Silver was already known to fix wayward matter to a single dimension, and now, the rods attracted whatever materials they were tuned to.
Minerva Paradizo had created a Hybras magnet.
If the island wasn't set to land for another five decades, she would pull it to her now.
Their camp was pitched two miles away on a dark-red ridge alongside several other tents.
Minerva had actually come to this part of the Gobi on the pretense of joining an archeological dig with a group from the University of Hong Kong. This desert was a treasure trove for paleontologists, holding the world's most diverse fossil specimens found to date, so clearly, if Minerva even mentioned that she wanted to go fossil-hunting, then it took little persuasion for her father to pull a few strings to let her come here. With a guardian, of course.
She knew that if her plan succeeded, quite a few of the area's precious fossils would be destroyed. But sometimes, science demanded sacrifice, and pulling a demon island from another dimension would certainly be worth crushing a few bones.
Minerva nodded at the Chinese professor who led this particular expedition, who just rounded the other side of the ridge with a heavy pick resting against his shoulder. He gave her a polite nod back, but it wasn't hard to tell that he wasn't exactly comfortable with the idea of escorting a fourteen-year-old girl to and from the Gobi desert, especially one who kept on disappearing off with only her bodyguard rather than staying with the group.
The girl dusted off a low rock and sat gingerly on its hot surface before pulling out a pair of binoculars. She knew she looked more than a little ridiculous at the moment. Light brown pants and shirt with as many pockets as the manufacturer could fit onto their surfaces, a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of large mirrored sunglasses- she could imagine that she probably looked like a walking ad for one of those pathetic children's dinosaur shows.
Minerva Paradizo most certainly did not learn science from a children's show.
She stared intent back at direction they had just come from, adjusting the focus with a finger while sweeping back and forth slowly.
There.
She found the set of concentric silver poles half-buried in the desert- over sixty poles in all. It took them most of yesterday and that entire day to position them properly. When she set the silver atoms into the right spins, the whole area would become a dimensional attraction field, pulling all of Hybras back to Earth, fifty years ahead of schedule.
It would be quite a show. And Minerva for one, didn't care who saw it first- she had all the proof lined up that she was the one who brought the demons in from Limbo.
She made a mental note of the spot and set down her binoculars. She gave her bodyguard a slight nod, and they returned to the relative shade of one of the tarp overhangs the paleontology team had set up.
A voice suddenly spoke up behind her.
"Beware, child, for you may succeed."
Minerva snapped her head backward, and narrowed her eyes. But there was nobody there.
It was a harsh, gravelly voice that spoke in precise, carefully articulated French. Of the entire group there, only she and Kong spoke the language though- and it was certainly not Kong.
"Did you say something?" asked the bodyguard, turning to her and giving her a questioning look.
Minerva shook her head without speaking. That was strange. She shrugged and ignored it.
Kong scowled and squatted next to his trunk to pull out an already-assembled and silenced handgun.
In other circumstances, Minerva might have laughed and made a werewolf joke: the gun was loaded with rubber bullets tipped with silver. But the bullets had been her idea.
The hot desert wind blew into the overhang, but it sounded like somebody was sighing.
"Let's get started," said the girl.
Now it was Kong who looked through binoculars, as Minerva fired up a dusty Toughbook laptop and pulled up a program she had written herself. The screen looked almost like an old analog radio tuner, as a thin red line began slowly pushing its way though a spectrum of numbers.
The line moved sluggishly, almost standing still except when observed closely- completely unsuited to Minerva's excited state. But she couldn't risk going too quickly.
The laptop now sent signals to the transmitters connected to each rod, gradually putting the silver atoms through a whole host of spin configurations, until- at least in theory- they matched up to the state that Hybras was in, and snatched the island out of Limbo.
Minerva glanced quickly between the desert landscape and the screen as she felt sweat dripping slowly down the nape of her neck. Only seven seconds had gone by.
"Stop, child!"
Minerva nearly jumped out of her skin as a small, grey-clad figure appeared not a foot away from her legs. Suddenly, she felt even more sweat-drenched than before.
"Do not break the fragile peace!"
The girl suddenly blinked and cringed as two loud coughs issued from her right.
Two bullets buried themselves in the work table's leg with muffled clangs. The creature was gone.
She heard Billy Kong swearing in Taiwanese.
"That was a yaoguai! I almost had it!" he raged, his voice scratchy from dryness.
"You idiot!" Minerva shot back angrily, "Holster your damn weapon, you almost shot me!"
"I do not miss, mademoiselle…" said Kong through gritted teeth, his hands still harshly gripping the handgun.
"That was an imp," said the girl, her fists clenched and her voice quavering between resentment and excitement, "I told you they would appear first. They're harmless, no magic and no strength. Save your bullets for the real demons."
Kong scowled, and looked back at the desert. He still held the gun tightly in one hand.
Minerva's mind raced. It was working! The imp had appeared oddly far away from the rods, but no matter. Hybras would not miss the silver target.
She paid the imp's words no attention.
Her foot tapped impatiently as she fingered the silver bracelets on her wrists, all of them coated with her own perspiration. She brought the binoculars back to her eyes. For minutes, the scene remained unchanged, and her eyes were starting to ache from the reflected sunlight, even through the sunglasses.
She was almost ready to give her eyes a break when things started to appear. Not demons though.
They were yellow piles, barely perceptible in the desert sands. It was only when they became big enough to party obscure the bottom of the poles that Minerva was sure there was really something there.
"Those look like… boxes, Minerva," said Kong, the awe obvious in his voice, "Filled with… gold… jewels…"
Minerva thought for a moment, and then laughed harshly.
"Ha! What better place to hide your treasures than in another dimension! We must be sweeping the old warlocks' hidden troves clean- even pocket dimensions won't save their gold."
She turned to the Toughbook.
"We can stop this experiment right now and become absurdly rich!" she laughed again, "Starting again won't cost anything."
But as she reached to stop the transmitters, a large hand swatted her entire arm away.
Minerva looked up and glared at Billy Kong.
"What do you think you're doing!?"
"No," said Kong, oddly calm, "we continue. The demon colony is more important than any gold."
The girl seethed, but knew that right now, objecting was useless. She'd have Kong fired and ruined for this later.
It wasn't a minute later when somebody gave a loud shout outside.
"Gaosou! Hai goubeen ah! Tai ha!"
Minerva heard several voices conversing loudly nearby in Cantonese now. It didn't take an intimate knowledge of the language for her to figure out that somebody had seen the odd scene in the faraway dune.
She stepped out from under the overhang.
"I would not recommend going out there," she said firmly, in English.
The professor and several of the students looked at her strangely.
"Miss Paradizo," stammered the professor in Oxford-tinted English, "that- that looks like gold! And silver! In the sand dune!"
The others muttered in agreement.
"I know what it looks like," replied Minerva crossly, "But if you go out there right now," she nodded towards the general direction of the open desert, "You will not survive."
The man stared at her in bewilderment, even as two student completely ignored them, dropping their tools and heading for their Jeep. They didn't believe her. And why would they? She was just a teenager after all. They were the experienced ones.
Minerva heard Billy Kong coming up behind her, and thought he was going to talk some sense into the idiots. Instead, he bent down, whispering rapidly into her ear.
"Let them go," he said lowly, "only the fools would be killed if an island lands on them. We will not stop."
"But-"
The girl's objection was cut off as Kong grabbed her wrist and pulled her roughly back under the tarp. Soon, the two were the only ones remaining at the camp.
And the piles of gold continued to grow.
Kong opened his trunk and assembled another weapon, this one, a dart rifle. He was busy putting on the scope when a loud cracking sound ripped through the camp.
The gray-robed creature reappeared near the edge of the ridge, a deep hood covering its head and face. It pulled the hood back to reveal an old, wrinkled gray face beneath pointed ears and worn, blunted horns.
Minerva looked at the creature in front of her with fury, and it looked back with the passive glance of an old sage.
"What are you waiting for, Kong!?" challenged the teenaged girl, "Shoot it!"
Exactly why she was so angry at the imp, she couldn't tell. But she knew in her mind that it had to be anchored with silver before it disappeared again.
The creature muttered something under its breath and Minerva heard the thumping of a body against the ground right behind her. Sparing a single look back, the girl froze when she saw the unconscious form of Billy Kong lying on the hot desert sand. The Taiwanese bodyguard still had one hand gripping a long dart rifle, but his mirrored sunglasses lay at least ten feet away, half-buried in the sand.
Minerva's own hand jerked up against her own sunglasses, hastily holding them against her face.
"Don't go forward with this Minerva," warned the intruder in a voice that sounded like a rock being ground against a cheese grater, "You will only regret it."
The girl smirked and spun around.
"Try and stop me!" she challenged, grabbing the gun from Kong's hand and firing two shots in a flash. Sand exploded from the ground in front of her, but a second later, it cleared.
And there was nothing there but sand.
With her bodyguard out of commission, Minerva was just about the pause the transmitters. No need for gold to go to waste.
Her hand was not inches away from the keyboard with her shoulder exploded in pain and her entire body was knocked into the hot sand.
"I said, we are not stopping," grunted Kong as he slowly got back up. "Especially not now."
He waved the handgun at her. "Be glad I used the rubber bullets and not," he snarled as he gestured at the rifle on the ground.
Minerva's mind froze for a moment. This was not supposed to happen! She was supposed to be in control.
"Daddy will have you punished for this," growled the girl, realizing just how pathetic she sounded the moment the words left her mouth.
Kong laughed. "That pompous idiot can go to hell. I have demons to fight."
Present Time
"Pieces of Hybras appeared in the sky," whispered Minerva Paradizo.
Artemis stared at her in shock and disgust. The woman wrapped her arms around herself, even as she shuddered slightly.
The Irish teen suddenly took notice of her tan, something he hadn't paid attention to before.
'Must have been all that time spent in the desert,' he thought harshly.
"I miscalculated the attraction of the moon and the demons' lunar affinity," continued the professor. "Mr. Kong wouldn't leave when the island began falling out of the sky… I barely escaped in the last Jeep and called for help. Nobody knew that I was behind the Hybras landing."
She gave Artemis a tired look.
"I noticed you wear a fairy coin around your neck…" she said listlessly.
The Irish teen nodded without saying anything.
Minerva pulled a thin silver chain from under her shirt. It had been long enough so that it was always covered by her clothes, and the bauble that hung at one end was always hidden between her breasts.
"This is my reminder." She grimaced as she held up what looked like an ornamental crystal shard.
Artemis leaned in to look closely at the object. It was roughly cut glass, with barely visible veins of gold and black running through the interior. The shard was terribly beautiful, but somehow deeply disturbing.
It didn't take long for Artemis to realize why.
"Sand… becomes glass…" he said slowly, the words tasting bitter as he said them.
Minerva nodded a fraction of an inch and closed her eyes tightly, hiding the chain under her shirt again.
"Glass is molten silica." She turned her face away from him without opening her eyes. "Gold… was the demons' wealth… and black…"
She didn't finish the sentence.
After a moment, Artemis finished it for her.
"All life-forms are carbon-based."
A/N: She ain't no goody-two-shoes.