Author's Note:

So, we'll touch base with Darcy for one last time, and then we're off to follow Sarah and her friends for two chapters. Why? Because the arcs are all set on a collision course. Whoo.

'-

To Grateful Reader: Thanks for reading and welcome aboard! Unfortunately, the odds of me updating faster than my planned schedule is very low. Not unless I somehow get twenty reviews in a row and a bunch of new readers. Basically something that would guilt me or tempt me.

To Giada:

- (Ch 37's review): You've been to Tesla's old home in Croatia? Damn. I'm green with envy here. I'm also glad to hear that the desperation of Fimbulwinter gets across. It's pretty critical at this point. Darcy is still going to walk around even more in the first half of this chapter, though. And I definitely enjoyed sneaking in the changes Jane impressed in the people around her, because she's going to be out of the story for (at least) the foreseeable five chapters after this.

- (Ch 20's review): Yay, you've reread the story all the way to chapter 20! Yeah, I've only recently realised that the greater arcs of the story and the one thousand and one little hints and clues I slipped in weren't that useful for people who read episodically. Darn. I'm glad that you have the opportunity to see the bigger picture and the Chekov Guns of the plot, though.

- (Ch 21's review): Wow, you're closer than I expected. Yeah, there are a lot of things Loki didn't expect. He's going to meet some of those problems some 3-5 chapters from this one.

'-

XXXVIII. The Lost Sister (Ghosted)

Darcy's chat with Bragi on Tyr and Tyr's son. Thornton Lewis had accidentally looked into the rabbit hole and saw the upside-down world. He is trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Tony has an unexpected visitor.

'-

As night wore on during the feast, Darcy had time to think to herself between all the introductions that Bragi was helping her make. Vethrfölnir had returned to the side of his liege lord, the Lawgiver. Darcy also took the opportunity to observe the High King of the Elves from her vantage point.

"Hmm, I didn't know that Tyr is rather popular too," Darcy commented.

"He is a high king, Darcy. Many people would be interested to talk to him." Bragi answered.

"Well, sure. Odin and Frey are also intimidating, but they're not as off-putting as he is, y'know? How do you say it..." she paused. "He's just…"

Inhuman.

Darcy stopped herself from uttering something that might sound like an insult. Yet she couldn't find any other word for it. Oh, Odin was pretty scary with his eyepatch over one eye and in his kingly armour, but she can consider him like a kick-ass general and she's set. If there's an army that needed obliterating, she wouldn't think twice about reporting to him. He just looks supremely competent that way. Frey was less martial than Odin, but his charisma wasn't any less. She could see the ease in which he held the attention of more than ten people at once, somehow keeping track of everyone's words and conversations. He looked as unapproachable as any Hollywood star (or a president), but if push comes to shove and she had to talk with him, she could too.

Tyr, however, radiated something else. She saw that conversations with him tended to be quite short. The people involved usually ended up turning to either Veth or a redheaded elf she didn't know. Then, they'd ended up redirected to other wise-looking people that she suspected to be Tyr's cabinet. All of them looked a lot more…people-like, than Tyr. Neither Veth nor the redhead stopped anyone from talking to Tyr—they were really just there to guide people. Yet once they've talked a few sentences with him, they didn't try to do it again.

They never did.

People just lose the nerve to talk to him for long. Around him and his two aides was a clear space some nine feet across. She suspected that meeting his gaze was like staring into a bottomless abyss. Or a crack in reality in human form.

"He's a little overwhelming, isn't he?" Bragi finally said after seeing that Darcy was too stupefied going to say anything.

She nodded. "…yeah. Let's stick with 'overwhelming'. Overwhelming is good."

"He keeps his distance from most people as Lawgiver and Lord of Justice." Bragi said.

"I'm…pretty sure if it was a random someone who's the lord of justice, they wouldn't manage being a tenth as uncanny as he is." Darcy said. "Um, no offence meant."

Bragi smiled a little. "And none taken. You might find it amusing to know that people are still glad that he represented Alfheim this time. Those seeking his conversations are still more than double the number who sought for conversations with the usual head of Alfheim's contingent."

"He's not the usual representative of Alfheim?" Darcy asked.

What she managed to stop herself from blurting out was, there's someone creepier than him?

"No. For every two out of three Allthings, he usually has more important things to watch over and he sends his son in his stead." Bragi answered.

"His son must be pretty creepy," Darcy blurted out.

At Bragi's surprised look she took a deep sigh and decided to put down her mug of mead before she said any other stupid stuff. She rubbed her eyes. "Oh God, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have said that, should I?"

Bragi chuckled. "Not to most people, I suppose, but it is not as if they would disagree with you in their hearts. Yet unlike Tyr's natural charisma, his son's…unusual aura is a side effect of the task and responsibility he had taken into his own. He bears his position with the grave disposition it required and the pressure it exerted to his surroundings is a testament to how well he had embodied it."

No offence to Tyr or his son, that sounds like a sucky job. It's like smelling of meth all the time because you run a meth lab. Or walking around with people running away from you because you're a waste collector who can't even change clothes to give people a different impression. She thought she knew what happened too, considering the current unexpected tension between the Aesir and Vanir.

"The job becomes him and he becomes the job, eh?"

"Unfortunately, yes, it's one of those difficult callings one can never leave. His sense of responsibility is exactly like his father's, though, and he will not leave it."

Darcy couldn't help but wonder why Bragi sounded exceedingly careful in his description. Alright, she thought. You've made me curious enough. I'll bite.

"Who is he, and what does he do anyway?"

Bragi's smile had a touch of mystery within. "Why, he is the Erlkönig of course."

Darcy thought she could feel a passing chill even when the wind wasn't blowing around them, and for some reason her mind came up with a pale figure on an even paler horse. Perhaps it was just something she'd seen on a tapestry earlier. The taller trees in the garden cast shadows from the lanterns hung on them, the dark lines stretched long over the balcony and on the floor. She thought she saw the profile of a man with stag horns on his head. She thought she heard the baying of hounds far, far away. Darcy unconsciously took a step back.

No, that can't be it. That must be my imagination. It must be.

To her surprise, Bragi had called one of the wait staff standing unobtrusively to the side. He gave a warm mug to Darcy.

"Drink this. It's ginger ale. It would make you feel warmer and better." He did not proffer any other explanation, but she was thankful enough. Another look at the shadows of trees only resulted in branches and more branches. Darcy couldn't help but let out a thin laughter of relief.

"I think I'm imagining things." She said.

Bragi shook his head. "No, you're not."

She heard that wrong. She must have heard that wrong, right? Right?

"What?"

"No one had become a land-bound, a spirit-bound in at least a thousand years, and possibly even longer than that. Do you remember when I said something to that tune?" Bragi quietly asked. She could only nod in return. He was still smiling but this time it was an expression of inestimable sadness.

"Once there were elders among the elves that were exceedingly learned and clever. They have had Justice as their High King then, and they are resolute to maintain the greatness of Alfheim against the younger realms." Bragi began. "They thought that if one of them could become the Death That Stalks Abroad, they could convince him not to choose among them, or to miss them for a few more years. Thus, they approached their crown prince. The prince is wise enough for his centuries to know the responsibility he will take on, and yet he is still young enough to miss the father he'd had."

Bragi shook his head. "Is it any wonder that he agreed?"

"Missed his father?" Darcy thought with surprise. She glanced back into the hall. No matter how scary Tyr was, he was still pretty there. He was a lot more there than a good chunk of the other elves.

"His father that had not also been the Eagle and Justice Eternal." Bragi answered.

The answer rolled in Darcy's mind, raising several possibilities as it went, raising her heartache for Tyr's son.

"You…don't stay as yourself after a land-binding?" Darcy asked.

"When a person takes on another being into themselves, is it any wonder when the personalities start to absorb each other? When two become one, would it still be the same as either of its old halves?"

The shadows of the branches seemed to stand in stark relief to Darcy.

"It is better than death, true, but it is not without its costs."

"And what happened to the elders?" Darcy asked.

"What happens to us all, Darcy, even near-immortals and beings of considerable age. No matter how far they went, Death That Stalks Abroad will find them. No matter your pleas and bribes, Death will not be moved. Thus, in this way, they were all taken."

Some people were clacking wooden mugs the surface at the table closest to the doors to the balcony in a drinking game. Right at that moment, they sound eerily close to the canter of horse hooves.

Darcy took a deep breath and drank a bit more from her ginger ale.

"It will pass," Bragi said casually. Darcy froze.

"I'm sorry?"

"The chill. It's always worse the first time around," he answered. "That's why most people would rather not mention the Erlkönig at all. They just say 'Tyr's son' most of the time. Or the Stag."

Darcy almost spat out her ginger ale.

"You could've told me that before!"

He grinned, and Darcy thought that he'd be a perfectly impish Santa Claus. "But you'd miss out the experience of using a Name that goes beyond the current world. Besides, it's rather unbelievable unless you experience it first-hand, isn't it?"

Well, she really can't argue with that. Doesn't mean she'd stop pouting, though.

'-

Days before Darcy was assigned her surprise post the as de facto ambassador to Asgard and the Nine Realms, her brother had a different problem gnawing at his peace of mind.

Darcy wasn't online.

That in itself wasn't strange, he reminded himself. His sister had a surprisingly busy life, for someone who did not have a hard science degree and was a mere assistant to a physicist superstar. Both he and his sister always dropped in a line or several every once in a while, though. It was mainly to show that they were alive and fine while updating each other on what's going on in each other's life.

Thornton Lewis' attention strayed back to the chat icon next to his sister's username. Still offline.

He closed the book in his lap with a sigh, running a hand through brown hair the same shade as his sister's. It was a tale of the slow crumbling of the vaunted Prussian army, and how even Bismarck was shrewd enough to see the signs then. He'd been waiting for the book to come out for weeks, and yet it couldn't hold his attention right now. He set the book aside.

It's been two weeks, he thought.

Alright, they'd once spent a month without chatting with each other, and yet that month was marked by messages of 'not dead, lol', 'still not dead yet' and 'mid-terms is in two more weeks'. There were also more familiar ones to the tone of '18th – 19th century European History is killing meeee, help! Here's my syllabus. This quiz result also show how much I suck', along with the inevitable 'Did you have an actual girlfriend this time?'

Heck, he'd heard back from Sarah a week ago, no matter how brief or how bad her internet connection was in Central Asia. He'd done his best to discourage her from trying to go to Gulmira, but neither his actual sister nor his honorary one was any less stubborn than him. He had no idea why he even tried, but eh, points for effort. At least she'd listen to what he said she'd need to bring.

He turned his chair and opened another tab on his browser. Her Facebook page hadn't been updated for even longer. The last one was…wait, that was five months ago?

It stunned him.

It was almost half a lifetime away in social media terms. After all, Darcy had a habit of taking pictures of everything and uploading them to her accounts. Even when she was more privacy-conscious and didn't publicly post pics with geographic markers, there'd still be the public pictures of food, or pictures of her and Jane in the lab. There'd be the occasional latte art too, or her nail art, or random crochet projects if she wasn't too busy.

Just for comparison, he opened up Sarah's page. Photographs of sunrise over the desert. Long exposure shots of a crystal-clear sky full of stars. A coffee shop full of friends. Last updated a month ago.

And this was from a place where Sarah couldn't stop griping about how much more expensive the internet connection was.

What was Darcy up to?

Her last message didn't exactly put him at ease. He opened up the page of Stark Industries once more out of habit, trying to convince himself that his sister was fine. That she was living the fast life now, rubbing elbows with what amounted to physics superstars. He remembered with some pride that her boss's lab did have her own page, and it was placed on the same general area as Tony Stark and Bruce Banner's work. That was something, right? He navigated himself around the site.

Stark Industries à Stark Industries R&D à Science Labs à Personal Labs

Tony Stark – Bruce Banner – Jane Foster

One last click and he was there. Head of Lab, right, staff—he snorted. The staff had been non-existent and always changing, as far as he knew. What he saw this time was a proper list. Huh, they have a full complement of staff now? He took a closer look.

An uncomfortable feeling grew at the pit of his stomach and settled heavily.

Darcy wasn't there.

"Maybe it's an error," he muttered to no one in particular. Maybe he could refresh the page? Yes, he could do that. Maybe he'd been reading up late for too long again and his eyesight was slipping.

But no, his sister's name did not suddenly appear.

His stomach twisted. He picked up his phone, and tried calling Darcy. He didn't even get a dial tone. The phone was dead. It was ridiculous. She would've forgotten her wallet or her bag first before she'd forgotten to charge or carry her phone.

Thornton didn't care much to notice anything other than that it was still daylight before he started searching for the New York Stark Industries' phone number. He barely noticed the annoying voice mail he had to navigate for a while before he could talk with an actual person. By this time, he was off his chair and far more occupied pacing back and forth in his bedroom.

"This is Thornton Lewis and I'm trying to contact my sister. She's a staff in the New York office, I know, it's just that her phone seems to be dead right now and I've never really remembered her office phone number. We have a bit of a family emergency right now and I'm afraid I can't really wait a few hours…"

Well, it was an emergency in his mind. He needed to know that his sister was fine right now. He hadn't survived his two tours in Afghanistan by ignoring his instinct and he wasn't going to start now.

"Last I know, she's the assistant to Dr. Jane Foster. Yes, that Jane Foster. They go way back, you see; she entered Stark Industries at the same time as Dr. Foster did, together. It's Darcy, Darcy Lewis; Delta Alpha Romeo Charlie Yankee. Yes, that's right."

"…"

"Thank you. I'll wait."

The bedroom was starting to feel cramped so he walked out into the common areas of his apartment. He'd walked all the way to the door, to the bathroom door, to the kitchen door and back to the bedroom twice before the operator got back to him.

He stopped mid-step as the muscles in his body tensed.

I'm sorry Mr. Lewis, but perhaps there's been a mistake? We can find no one of that description in Dr. Foster's lab.

"Well, look it up the employee directory, then. She might've moved divisions."

Many more excruciating moments passed.

We have Darcy Lou and Doreen Louis…

He didn't hear the rest of the words, all the other people whose names might be similar enough to Darcy but still not her either. The numbness spreading inside him left him faltering to find any answer, any words. He automatically thanked her for her help and closed the phone without thinking, walking back to his room and his desk while almost kicking over his own waste paper trash can. His browser was still open. He started searching for Darcy Lewis on search engines on general principles.

Other Darcys of different last names and various Lewises came up from his search, but not his sister. Not even her Facebook page was on the first page. Neither did he find it on the second and third as he checked. There were no pages with her name from Stark Industries' site, not even when he tried to view the pages from Google's cached version (which functioned as a limited form of time machine for web pages, as one gets to see the page as it had been some time ago, not as it is right now). He decided to check something else before letting himself feel the brewing panic; he copied the address for Darcy's profile and logged out of Facebook. Then, he pasted the address.

This profile is restricted and not active, it said. Or something similar, he wouldn't know for sure, his attention span was shot to hell now.

Other people might've thought it was a mistake, that it wasn't right. That if he found more accurate keywords to use, he'd be able to find her.

Unfortunately, being someone who'd done intelligence work, he already had a vague idea of what happened.

Darcy had been ghosted.

'-

Several hours later, a belated meal and bath included, the picture that emerged still hadn't gotten much better. He'd tried all sorts of keywords on many search engines looking for Darcy Lewis. He started getting creative and remembering her high school and graduation year. No dice. His conclusion that she'd been ghosted held. He was trying to remember even more desperate digital tracks, trying to flag them down. Did his sister ever have a MySpace account? Livejournal? Didn't she have a blog when she was still in New Mexico with Dr. Foster?

What on earth are you involved with, Slugger?

Thornton thought he could relax knowing that his sister didn't really involve herself in anything dangerous. Last he checked, Jane Foster wasn't a nuclear physicist, and they were certainly not in weapons development. Now he blamed himself for not checking further. If she was working on a project he wasn't cleared for, would he know?

No, he wouldn't have.

Hadn't she given enough clues with her cryptic warnings? She knew he didn't have clearance for what weird stuff about Denver that she knew, or else she would've told him everything. Anyone close to Darcy would have agreed that she was the last thing from being secretive. Heck, he'd heard her complain about irregular periods to him more than once. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

She's out there somewhere. Don't panic Thornton, Darcy needs you to be calm for this.

After all, nobody would go through extreme lengths for someone who was already dead. He was quite sure she's not involved in anything criminal—she wasn't that stupid and she wouldn't enjoy a life on the run. Yet he knew more than most that there are parts of the government you don't want to cross, not even by accident. He'd have to ensure that he left no tracks on his computer now.

He sighed. Take it one step at a time.

He'll need to try all his contacts, beginning with the most obvious one. How ironic was it that Darcy was the one who got him a secure and encrypted email address, and now he'd be using it to find her?

Thornton sat down and wrote the first email (of many) that he would send that day.

Spike,

I think you need to get back to the States, and get in touch ASAP. We need to plan.

…

It had always been a joke between the three of them that Sarah was another sister of his, considering how often she and Darcy hung out together in their undergraduate days and the similarities between them. Now, he couldn't be gladder for it, because he knew Sarah would be no less feverish in her search for Darcy as he would. It also made him felt a lot less alone right now.

He just hoped she wouldn't do anything stupid.

'-

Halfway around the world, a rugged laptop customised for a dustier and rougher terrain beeped as an email came in.

From: historybuff -at- mailbox -dot- org

To: qspade -at- mailbox -dot- org

Spike,

I think you need to get back to the States, and get in touch ASAP. We need to plan.

Slugger's been Ghosted.

This is not a drill. I've spent a whole day trying to find any sort of remaining proof of existence online and I'm getting blanks everywhere. I suppose that's the point of being ghosted, isn't it? You're alive, but the system does not see you.

You're an Unperson now.

Yeah, I'm hoping I'm wrong too. Maybe there were never any pics of you guys in different debate competitions. Maybe I've been hallucinating picking you up from the airport that one time I also happened to be in SF for that occasion and that we didn't take pictures. Ha! As if. You don't have to tell me that. Shit, what project had she been working on? It's as if she's been working on the next-gen hydrogen bomb and had taken an unexpected holiday to North Korea! I didn't even know if they've made improvements to anything the Palantir offered to start modifying data on a massive scale. I can't stop thinking about the possibilities. Most of them don't look good.

Still, don't do anything stupid. I'd rather not lose a second sister, y'know? Tobes would also be sad.

- T

'-

It was another regular day.

Well, it was regular for him. You know, the sort of regular one where there's yet another idiot trying to invade earth and the Avengers and SHIELD are in a state of emergency? Yeah, that one. Tony didn't really pay attention to many things beside that. He'd just woken up after Maria kicked him out of the Command Room after he'd been there for 36 hour straight without sleep and forced him to take a break. He would've been fine. Come on, he'd been on code jams that were longer, mostly by drinking a lot of water and downing plenty of vitamin Cs.

Then Maria had to threaten to call Pepper and he knew when to cut his losses and pull a strategic withdrawal. He was dead to the world the moment his head hit the pillow.

Now, with an uncombed bedhead that didn't improve after his express shower, the random Grateful Dead t-shirt he snagged out of the closet and the closest trousers he could get his hands on, he looked more like a drifter than the founder of Stark Industries.

He really couldn't care less about how he looked, what with him being pulled off from the front lines, thanks to that bone scaffold that was being grown and implanted around his arc reactor. It's not as if he was going anywhere else.

(And no, he was not sulking. He was being realistic. There).

(He might be a tad disappointed to wake up late and miss seeing Pepper).

This was why when he entered his lab and saw the young woman over at the table, his only response was huh. It certainly didn't make him change his directions any – he walked straight over to her.

(Some part of him was still trying to make up the quota of attractive people he'd seen this morning as a pick-me-up—not seeing Pepper meant he had to work a lot harder than usual to fulfil that number).

Her dark hair was tied in a low ponytail. With faded jeans and cardigans, she could've been any of the tens of grad students and post-grad people he had in the tower. When she turned to him, her eyes struck him with their vividness. He was reminded of the National Geographic photograph of the Afghan Girl. What was her name again? Sharbat? Sharbat Gula? Something like that.

"Hi? And who are you?" Tony asked.

She smiled. With, she went from girl-next-door pretty into breath-taking. There was natural playfulness curved into that smile, into the open lines of her body language.

"Hi. Tony, is it? I've been waiting for you."

"Really?" Tony perked up.

Well, if the worst thing he did today was let down the expectations of a beautiful woman (unless she and Pepper was open for a threesome), the day could only look up from there.

"Yes. My name is Sarah.
You killed my sister.
Prepare to die."

She said all this cheerfully, but the glint in her eyes made Tony took an abrupt step back with her last phrase. There was a colder, diamond-hard self underneath.

"Whoa! Hold it right there, lady. I'm pretty sure I haven't killed anyone lately, especially not anyone's sister."

Was she crazy? Damn, all the hottest ones usually turn out that way. Could he alert anyone without—

"Please take a step forward from the desk Mr. Stark," came a bored tone. He turned to the side and saw a man with an unbuttoned long coat and a scarf covering the lower half of his face. From his slouch, Tony would've guessed he was at most a college kid. Tony was more concerned of whatever it was the kid had in his coat—it was in the way he seemed to curl forward, to obscure his front from sight a little further.

"Not that I have anything against you, but the emergency button's down there—I've checked. Anyway, let's keep this conversation civil and it'll stay that way."

"She just said she wanted to kill me!" Tony complained.

"Sarah, I thought you said we're not here to kill anyone?" Coat-and-scarf turned to Sarah.

The brunette was still smiling at Tony, still her pretty and charming self and he had no idea what she kept in the palm of her right hand either. "Well, not immediately, anyway. There are still things we need to find out, right? I promise that we'll have so much fun, Tony."

Tony's eyes strayed to the visitor card pinned to her chest.

It did say Sarah. Sarah Lewis.

She wagged a finger at Tony when she saw what he was looking at. "A ha! No, no sneaking, Tony. You only need to ask and I would've told you anyway."

"I'm pretty sure Darcy doesn't have a sister." Tony said.

She shrugged lightly. "It doesn't mean I'll trust you with my full name."

This wasn't looking good, and as much as he wanted to save himself, none of them had even flashed anything that looked like a weapon. Which makes them a lot safer…or a lot more prepared, considering Sarah's unnerving calm. He still had no fricking idea which one they are. Did anyone have a bomb anywhere? Maybe a suicide vest? But no, they couldn't have brought explosives in at all, what with the security in the entrance.

How did they even get into the Tower—

"Please, you two. Let him tell his story." Another young woman, this one with a headscarf, interrupted. She looked a lot more concerned than Sarah. "Mr. Stark, don't mind their words. We really did just come to talk, to find out about things."

Tony was having a hard time believing that he hadn't noticed yet another person in the room just because he was too focused on Sarah. Still, that seemed to be what had happened. Maybe she was sitting in the couch when I came in…

"I've told you what happened to Darcy," Sarah replied. "And there isn't a lot of people who can do that to her—not many people have the manpower and skills."

Now, most of her smile faded away and she stared straight at Tony.

Tony gaped. "Wait, what?"

This was a major coincidence—not.

"You can't all be talking about Darcy Lewis, are you? I'm pretty sure she's not dead; she's fine! I saw her off." Tony insisted.

"Oh, I know. Though it's interesting that you do know her by name," Sarah waved it away, as if she hadn't just threatened to kill him. She was sitting on the table with unparalleled ease. Her long legs stretched out with all the elegance of a femme fatale relaxing in the office of a private investigator. He had a feeling she was also as deadly.

"She wouldn't have been ghosted if she was dead. That would've just been another 'unexplainable accident'. It's just that 'you killed my sister' is a lot more impressive than 'you took Darcy away'. Got to keep the lines as they are."

"Ghosted? What the hell are you talking about, and what does it have to do with me?"

Coat Guy cleared his throat.

"Well, there's also all the war you're supporting. It doesn't really draw a good picture of you when we take that into account," he said, without a trace of Sarah's lightness in his voice. "Maybe we should start from there, Sarah? With the blood he has in his hands?"

Sarah gazed at Tony, the intense green of her gaze weighing him on some unseen scale.

"What do you get it out of it?" Her voice was softer now, but Tony's frustration had piled up at this point.

"I have no idea of whatever the fuck it is you're talking about!"

Sarah shook her head, mild surprise in her expression. The more annoying part than that one was her pity. "You really don't know, do you? Do you actually know what people in your organisation are up to?"

It was the headscarf girl's turn to sigh.

"Let's just tell everything first. No harm in that, is there?"

Sarah sighed, but she did sit up at that. To Tony's surprise, the coat-guy and headscarf girl found themselves seats around her. The coat guy even brought him a chair. He sat down with a sense of unreality as Sarah leaned forward from the table she had appropriated.

"Alright Tony, make yourself comfortable and listen carefully, because I don't make a habit of telling my stories twice. Once upon a time, there was a girl who met with a like-minded soul and they swore they would change the way the world was ruled…"

'-

.

.

.

Author's Note:

Wait, why is Sarah here? Is it just because of Tory's email? (Of course not, but then, what else?) What the hell do they mean about Tony's blood-soaked hands? Well, that's what we're going to cover in the next two chapters, folks. This is just setting the stage.

There's also the question of who would want to ghost Darcy in the first place. Next update is next week unless I suddenly get into an accident, or something.

'-

Ghosted isn't a real term, as far as I know. It's just something I picked up from the cyberpunk genre. Considering how much weirdness is actually real life these days, I can't really say that it couldn't have happened at the present either…

Sarah's lines should be familiar to all Princess Bride fans, as she's certainly quoting that:

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya.
You killed my father.
Prepare to die."

If you haven't watched it, you should seriously consider doing so. It's a classic for a good reason.

'-

Glossary, Schmossary:

Erlkönig: (German) Literally 'Erlking', or 'Elf king'. If you were wondering why such a banal title has such creepy overtones, or why he's associated with Death That Stalks Abroad in this story, may I direct you to Goethe's poem Der Erlkönig (a quick online search will easily find it). The poem itself is based on German folklore about the "king of the fairies".

Mailbox -dot- org: is an actual provider of highly secure and private email addresses for personal use as well as businesses. Whatever they can encrypt, they will. One of the issues of encryption is when one party uses encryption and the other just decrypts their message and stores it in plaintext form. Encryption in this case is near useless. When you're using end-to-end encryption, however, it becomes truly robust. (Gaaah, FFNet indiscriminately eats up anything resembling a web or email address. I can't even use the words 'dot' or 'at' inside brackets before it gets eaten).

Palantir: (literature, Lord of the Rings) singular, plural form is Palantiri, also known as known as the Seeing-stones of which there are seven in total. A Palantir is spherical stone used for the purpose of communication with another of its kind in the world of Lord of the Rings. Not only that, even a single Palantir can be used for remote-viewing.

These days we use satellite and drones for that, which also has the benefit of not being limited in number to seven.

Palantir: (technology company), its complete name is Palantir Technologies, a privately held company that exists in real life that has not gone through an IPO (initial public offering) to sell it shares to the public. Seeing how successful it is already and how it doesn't have to create annual public reports due to it being a private company than a public one. Considering that its clients include NSA, DHS and FBI, odds are, it never would go public. The scrutiny of a public company would be uncomfortable for it. In Marvel 'Verse, I'm sure SHIELD is just another one of its clients.

As one can get from its prospectus, the company focuses on big data analysis and provides 'data integration'. 'discovery capabilities', 'information management' and 'secure collaboration' across its product offerings. A document leaked to TechCrunch, US spy agencies connect their databases across different departments for the first time using Palantir. As harmless and anodyne as these descriptions sound, I'm sure you could read between the lines as to what sort of services exactly this company deals in, especially when it also offers 'predictive analysis'.

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