To Anon: They are indeed a reference to Victor Hugo, though there's only a very minor connection between that reference and the story. You're actually the first to point that out!
To yellow 14: It's always the Eiffel Tower!
To Butterfly: It's one of them, but which one? And why?
To StarDaPanda225: We shall see…
Rena Rouge knelt over Le Tirreur, her knee on his chest, holding her flute to his neck. She glared down at him angrily. "You say the fate of our world is at stake, but you haven't given me any reason to trust you! Every time I see you, you are just trying to hurt people! Why is this time any different? How do I know the world won't end if we don't contact Hugo's people to come and pick up both him and this other alien?"
"Come on, Foxy," Le Tirreur groaned. "I don't want the world to end any more than you do. But how is contacting aliens supposed to not end the world?"
Rena Rouge scoffed. "You didn't see what I saw in the sewers," she told him. "Someone's been living rough down there, and they've been eating people!"
"How do you know it's not your pal?"
Rena Rouge shook her head. "I don't," she admitted. "But either way, I'd just as soon get them off the planet before anyone else ends up as lunch!"
His eyes narrowed in confusion for a moment before he lifted his head off the ground, raising an eyebrow dubiously. "And you're sure that's what's happening here?"
She drew back her flute to knock him over the head, but an orange blur from the other direction knocked her away from Le Tirreur. She tumbled off of him and rolled back up to her knees, glaring up at her attacker.
It was the other alien.
Le Tirreur took a wheezing breath and pushed himself up as Hugo charged across in pursuit of the other alien. Then Hugo looked at Le Tirreur and his eyes lit up. Le Tirreur groaned and held his baton firmly in one hand. "Fine, I was hoping for a chance at round two with you, anyways!" He spun his baton around in his hand and ducked the first punch from Hugo, dodging to his other side and striking the alien in the back of his arm. Hugo spun back around to face him, swinging his arm at Le Tirreur's head, but Le Tirreur leaned back out of the way, coiled his legs, and launched himself into Hugo's midsection in a tackle. Hugo stumbled backward off balance, dropped into a crouch, and threw Le Tirreur off of himself. Le Tirreur caught himself in a sprinter's stance, backing away to gain distance from Hugo.
"What's the situation, Pegasus?" Rena Rouge demanded, eyeing the orange-furred alien in front of her. She held her flute in a ready position, waiting for the alien to make the first move.
"I am attempting to reconfigure the transmitter, using my horseshoe as a new communicator device," came the immediate reply. "Estimate no more than one minute to complete."
The alien in front of Rena Rouge dropped one foot back into a stronger fighting stance as she copied the move. He clenched his fists in front of him and crouched, swaying slightly back and forth. She swung her flute at the alien's head, and he blocked the strike effortlessly with his forearm, redirecting the flute over his head and spinning around to elbow her in the chest. She sidestepped around the attack and ducked below his kick, raising both arms to block his follow-up kick and push him away. He rolled through her block into a back-flip, and she moved forward after him, aiming a punch at his head. The alien ducked and went to sweep her legs out from under her. Rena Rouge jumped over the leg-sweep.
The kick to her side came completely out of nowhere.
Rena Rouge stumbled backward, missed a step, and landed funny on her ankle. Holding her flute defensively in front of herself she looked around wildly for the source of the attack but saw nothing. The alien was in the process of jumping back up to his feet. Pegasus and Turing were still crouching over the damaged transmitter, working feverishly to attach his horseshoe to the side. Hugo and Le Tirreur were still exchanging blows, with Le Tirreur not holding back at all in his attacks while Hugo almost appeared to be toying with him. As she watched, Le Tirreur aimed a roundhouse kick at Hugo's head, and the alien pushed his foot away, unbalancing Le Tirreur. He landed awkwardly and stumbled backward a pace to regain his balance, and Hugo landed a kick to Le Tirreur's chest, knocking him to the ground. Le Tirreur rolled backward away from the advancing Hugo and surged to his feet, narrowly avoiding another kick. The sharp talons on Hugo's feet bit into the pavement where Le Tirreur had lain moments before.
So who could have kicked her?
She heard the wind whipping beside her face and lifted her flute just in time to block the blow. The alien who had been in front of her shimmered and disappeared, and a new one appeared to her right. She pushed his fist away with her flute and spun around to kick him in the chest. He dropped back a pace, planted his fist on the ground, and charged in a sprint. The air around him shimmered slightly. With a yell he swung his left fist at her, and she raised her own left arm to block the opposite side. His left fist connected with her and passed straight through, while the opposite one connected with her blocking arm. The alien gave her an indecipherable look and stepped back.
"I have no desire to fight you, Rena Rouge," the alien told her, ducking below her swinging flute and holding up his hands with the palms open and facing her. "In fact, I have been observing you for months to protect you."
Her heart stopped and she stared at him in shock, a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. "'Months'?" she repeated, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide in horror. All the times in the last several months that she had felt eyes on the back of her head, staring at her from the shadows – the Agreste investigation, Spring Break… she had thought she must be growing paranoid. But now… And some of those times, she had been a civilian, with Nino or her family! What kind of investigator did that make her, to not have known? How could she have allowed herself to be watch for months without looking into it further? That he had learned her identity wasn't even a question! What had he seen? What had he wanted to see? Her grip on the flute tightened involuntarily.
He nodded. "Do you remember the night you chased a van across the city and hid on a warehouse roof to observe the warehouse next door where the van had stopped?"
She stared silently, eyes narrowing, daring him to continue.
"You made a noise when you crossed to the other warehouse, and two men climbed onto the roof to investigate," he explained.
She set her mouth in a thin line, eyeing him suspiciously. "Of course I remember," she replied. "Hugo claimed he was the one who knocked those men out."
"If he was the one who did it," began the other alien, giving her an intense look, "then how would I know that there were two of them, and that they were struck in the back of the head? How would I know that the moment you saw them, you dove off the roof directly into the water to escape from them? It was after midnight and cloudy; no one could have seen what happened unless they were there."
Her jaw dropped open in horror. "So it was you?" she demanded, eyes flaring furiously. "You were the reason I felt eyes on me all the time for the last few months?"
The alien nodded mutely, eyes wide.
Rena Rouge felt swallowed down bile. "WHY? What would make you do something like that?" she yelled. "Why would you follow me? Watch me and my boyfriend? Why?" She glared at him and raised her fist to strike. "Why should I believe a word you say? If you did save me back then, why are you fighting us right now? Why didn't you say anything back then if that's the case? And who has been murdering people, if not you?"
"I suppose there is nothing I can say to make you believe me," the alien admitted, his ears laying flat against his head. He let out a breath, steeled himself, and stared hard at her pointing past her at the sky above Eiffel Tower. "But you need to know the truth before it's too late!"
At the base of the tower, Pegasus had just hit the button to bring the transmitter back online. "Just two minutes and we will be able to send the message," he reported. The laser on top of the transmitter made a small adjustment at the same moment that something appeared in the sky above the tower.
From the corner of her eye Rena Rouge could see that the alien had closed his eyes, an expression of extreme discomfort twisting up his face. But all her attention was drawn upward to the massive spaceship that dwarfed the Eiffel Tower. Colored pitch black but with green and brown stripes running down the sides, it had an angular prow and sweeping wings flaring up above its fuselage on either side. The protrusions emerging from the underside of the ship resembled nothing so much as missiles and cannons. The edges of the ship shimmered as it hovered in midair, making no move to land. Her eyes widened in shock. "That's supposed to be a supply ship?" she gasped, jaw hanging open.
From several meters away, Hugo pumped his fist in the air. "It worked!"
AN: Wednesday means another "Patrol Log"! However, the "Patrol Logs" don't happen concurrent with the main stories; they have relatively little connection to the timeline, though characters introduced in this story will eventually appear in "Patrol Logs."