CANONICAL GROUND RULES: This fic was conceived as a follow-up to The Prisoner's Dilemma. It's rotten timing; as of this writing, the fourth mainline Benedict Society book is coming out within the month; but I have a hunch that the fourth book will be considerably less conclusive and conducive than the third, so I'd better start this now. So: The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Perilous Journey, The Prisoner's Dilemma and The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict are all canonical as far as this fic is concerned, while Riddle of Ages will be summarily ignored even though it's probably going to be good.
As in the Benedict books themselves, this story will assume the reader is unfamiliar with the universe.
As to Death Note: unless and until AU conditions obtain, the anime and the manga are both canonical where possible, with a judgment call between them when they're not. With regard to LABB, A and B are canonical characters, but none of the things we learn about Mello are canonical, because the things we learn about Mello in LABB simply don't make any sense.
This story will assume the reader is familiar with Death Note.
Reynie Muldoon poured a little more bottled water into his hair at the last turning home. The air in Stonetown was as miserably hot as only August could make it, probably because it was still August. It didn't seem proper, somehow, for school to begin before the weather had turned halfway cool, but then going there for the past week had seemed proper, and the time of year had no bearing on why it wasn't.
"All in all, I think the girls had the right of it," he admitted.
Sticky Washington, who had been ever more painfully keeping himself from saying anything on their journey back, immediately nodded with vigor. He had been sweating a little, and not because of the muggy air. Sticky was all right in the heat; it was nerves that were his downfall, and Reynie's polite silence had inadvertently made him anxious that the experiment would go on.
There had been a logic to their return. After all, that they had ceased attending Stonetown Upper to go under the creatively hand-cobbled tutelage of Mr. Benedict and his staff had been not a choice but a security measure. Now that the security measure had outlived its purpose, it had seemed only natural to return to business as usual.
"How I ever could have come to regard the geologic slowness of that curriculum as anything but an utter waste of time-" Sticky blurted.
"I don't remember them being quite that nasty last time we tried," Reynie put in, so that Sticky, who (being capable of pointing out all the errors and oversimplifications in the textbooks) had got the brunt of that nastiness, didn't have to.
"It's as though they held the Calhoun rat experiment with special focus on the effects of the pituitary gland!"
"And it can't even be deliberate," said Reynie, who had seriously considered the possibility. "What use can that ugly chaos be to anyone? Even the Institute..."
But even with its dark purpose discovered, its operators disbanded or incarcerated, its central machine destroyed, Curtain's Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened (L.I.V.E.) was not the sort of thing that ought to be mentioned over the course of ordinary bellyaching.
"There wasn't anything to solve, either, the whole week," Reynie resumed after a brief and uncomfortable pause. "If I'd asked Ms. Calthorpe or Mr. Weil to set me something to solve, I don't think they'd have the faintest idea how to go about it. Never mind how many puzzles there really are in history, and science. There is Mr. Larsson, but..."
"But math isn't what you were looking for, either." Sticky (who was, himself, perfectly content to solve difficult math problems) nodded owlishly as they turned their backs to the New House and entered the yard across the street. Of the many approaches to Mr. Benedict's house, it still felt odd at times to take the open and direct one. But that was where every teacher but Amma lived.
"Shame about those renovations to the central air. I could use an icebox for a basement right now." Reynie mopped his brow on the front stoop as Sticky gave three good raps with the knocker.
No one came to the door.
"There must be a conference going on upstairs," said Reynie. "Can't imagine why else Number Two wouldn't be here."
Number Two, a severe woman whose wardrobe and complexion resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned yellow pencil, had lately been freed from any necessity to act as Mr. Benedict's minder, and had promptly gone on to turn her attention toward minding the whole household.
Sticky said nothing, but scratched nervously above his ear where his glasses had once sat. The Benedict Society had seen more than its share of unannounced crisis.
They both turned in abrupt alarm at the sound of two feet hitting the pavement behind them.
"Look who's decided to pop in for the weekend!" It was Kate Wetherall, red bucket swinging, yellow hair distinctly windswept, and her face pink with the triumph of a task well done. The boys instinctively looked up and, sure enough, saw a rope's end dangling some four feet above their heads.
"Let me guess," said Reynie, disappointed in his error. "Number Two wasn't answering the door on account of chasing after you."
"If she were, she'd have caught me." Kate blew some stray hairs away from her eyes. "Set ol' Pencilla to take care of someone-"
Sticky cleared his throat. "We, um, agreed. Not to give her grief about her name."
"Ah, well, she can't hear us anyway," said Kate blithely. "She's in a conference."
Reynie smiled in relief. "What about?"
"You boys in the New House," said Kate, shaking her head. "No idea what Constance and I have gone through since those renovations. Every possible way to eavesdrop on Mr. Benedict's office has been thought of, and worst of all? I asked Milligan if he was the one who did the thinking." Milligan was Kate's long-lost father and probably knew eavesdropping tricks even Kate had never thought of.
"And?"
"He didn't deny it! So," Kate concluded wistfully, "for want of a decent option, we've got to do the proper thing and wait for Mr. Benedict to tell us." And, with a swift seamless motion involving a compartment in her bucket, she unlocked the house door.
Down the corridor toward the kitchen, Reynie saw perched on a counter something that didn't tally with the account as he understood it: one of Moocho Brazo's famous peach pies, freshly cooled and untouched although Moocho himself had turned his back to it. "Where is Constance?"
"That, I should have mentioned," said Kate. "Search me, but she's at the conference in Mr. Benedict's office."
That was perplexing indeed. Constance Contraire was incorrigible, a five-year-old girl possessed of phenomenal genius but perfectly typical five-year-old desires. To top it off, she had recently manifested telepathic gifts which (excepting her power of suggestion, which made her violently ill) she had no desire whatever to limit. Reynie could not conceive a reason Mr. Benedict would have Constance at a private meeting but shut Kate out.
"Anyway," said Reynie, turning hastily away from the temptation of the pie, "we're not here because it's the weekend. We're letting everyone know we're here to stay, because the people here could lick any teacher the ninth grade at Stonetown Upper can muster."
Kate whooped. "Knew you'd see reason in the end!" It would have been churlish to point out that Kate had come by this faculty of reason by way of spending her childhood as an acrobat in a traveling circus. "Come on, let's see Mr. Benedict. I'm dying to hear what the meeting is about, but you can say your piece first, it's short and sweet enough."
As soon as Number Two opened the door, there was no more trouble in hearing what lay beyond. (An ordinary, hollow hardware-store door. And it occurred to Reynie that Mr. Benedict's office did need ventilation no matter what happened. He concluded that the anti-eavesdropping measures, though no doubt refined in scope, boiled down to one thing: Mr. Curtain's silencing technology.)
"...the opportunity is unparalleled," Mr. Benedict was telling Constance, "and I have you to thank for it at least twice over. There is, at least, that." He was dressed today in paisley mufti that made Reynie's head swim, but it was the seriousness of his demeanor that was worrisome.
It was further discomfort that Number Two, Milligan and Rhonda Kazembe made no motion to leave.
"Hey, Reynie!" called Constance over her shoulder before whipping back toward Mr. Benedict. "Dad, guess what! Reynie and Sticky have finally decided, after all these years!"
Mr. Benedict promptly put in a pair of earplugs, as had become his habit whenever his adoptive daughter elected to divulge facts that weren't hers to give.
She scowled at him, then shrugged and turned to the door with a conspiratorial smile, apparently deciding the next best thing was to tell Reynie and Sticky what she'd fished out of their minds.
"Rules and schools are tools for fools, right?"
Sticky smiled. "Referencing your early oeuvre, Constance?"
"Constance Contraire: The Terrible Twos." She grinned. "But the two-year-old poems were just so short, you could never make a book out of them. But my five-year-old poems are going to have a book with a spine. Guess what I'm on now?"
Reynie didn't have time to ask before he found the word villanelles projected into his mind.
"Sticky," he sighed, "what's a villanelle?"
"A form of poetry I... can't really imagine in Constance's style," said Sticky. "Do not go gentle into that good night, that's what a villanelle is."
"Well," said Constance, lifting her chin, "my latest villanelle is centered the phrases O, the painting is so tacky! and Only fit for used tabacky. The form is flawless, so you can't be a critic. And," she added, looking even more conspiratorial than she had previously, "I need to tell you about the one after that. I didn't mean for it to turn out this way when I chose, but it might actually have a pun on vill-"
"Constance," said Number Two sharply.
"Children," said Mr. Benedict. "Thank you for appearing so promptly; a rather urgent matter has just come up." At some point in their exchange his earplugs had evidently come out, but his voice was still rather more forceful than necessary.
"Sorry," whispered Constance, appearing genuinely abashed at whatever had run through Mr. Benedict's mind.
"Late last night," announced Mr. Benedict, "while comforting Constance in her night terrors, I was telephoned with an unsolicited job offer, an offer on behalf of Quillsh Wammy."
Heads turned automatically toward Sticky.
"Prolific inventor," Sticky obliged, "most notably of the Banana hardware and software system. He's also founded one hundred and seventy-two orphanages worldwide, or that was the figure in the 1999 article I happened to read." He paused. "I'm... not sure which of these fields contains the job offer."
"Wait," interrupted Reynie. "Was Stonetown Orphanage one of the one hundred and seventy-two?" It had been a threadbare and lonely home to him, but it had been his home for most of his life.
"I have a shrewd idea not," said Mr. Benedict, showing the first glimmer of his characteristic good humor. "You see, there was really only one possibility; the job offer was for an orphanage."
"You're a very fine inventor, sir," said Sticky stolidly.
"I am flattered, Sticky, but I'm a tinkerer only. All the best invention I've ever managed, I owe to my brother. Who, incidentally, graciously accepted the same compliment when I visited him last week."
"And when did Mr. Curtain ever say no to a compliment?" muttered Kate.
"Well, his yeses have been considerably less gracious in the past." Mr. Benedict cleared his throat by way of changing the subject. "I was asked, at any rate, to teach at an orphanage of Mr. Wammy's whose curriculum specializes in deduction. Forensics. Matters of criminal investigation generally."
And Reynie understood at once why Stonetown Orphanage could not have been one of Wammy's. If he had ever once heard of such an orphanage, he would have known. In fact, he would have demanded a transfer at once and he would probably be there at this very moment. Of course, if he had, he would never have met Miss Perumal, much less been adopted as her son. He would never have applied for the Mysterious Benedict Society, never have met Sticky or Kate or Constance, and, he supposed, Mr. Curtain would probably have taken over the world. But now, there was no danger of any of those things happening, and... and wasn't he an orphan, adopted or not? He could see himself...
He saw Mr. Benedict smile understandingly in his direction.
"It was an ideal scenario in many ways, except one: it would necessarily entail my residing across international waters."
Reynie felt a dull flush in his cheeks. His flight of fantasy had somehow missed out that he would be living, for the first time in three years, wholly apart from his friends.
"Alas, it was not my decision to make. You see, the headmaster, Mr. Ruvie, made the mistake of divulging certain sensitive details before I might make him aware of my newest daughter's abilities."
"How many people do you tell about my abilities?" demanded Constance. "Before they even ask?"
"Why, none whatsoever!" He broke at last into his familiar high-pitched dolphin barks of laughter. "But that indiscretion did ask for it, Constance, truly. And, children, this has put us all in a bind. Namely, I have no choice but to house Constance in Mr. Ruvie's orphanage. In other words, I could not, with any good sense, refrain from taking the position."
Reynie cleared his throat. "Sticky and I were here because we'd just come to the conclusion that we would rather be taught by you than by anyone. And... a whole school of investigation? We're the Mysterious Benedict Society! It's simple. We all get inducted."
"There is a complication," said Mr. Benedict gently. "Neither Sticky nor Kate is an orphan."
"That's all right," said Sticky quickly. "I'd actually rather not solve crimes for the rest of my life. Ultimately, I think I'd like to be... sort of a one-man library."
"That's called the Internet," said Constance.
"The Internet has gaps and it's wrong a lot of the time, and it barely explains the roots or the reasons of anything. I'd do better."
"Oh, I could see myself as an investigator," said Kate, "or a vigilante hero, or a zookeeper or a ballet dancer or a magician or, oh, lots of things... but whatever it is, I'd better be learning about it pretty close to that orphanage."
Milligan laughed. "Might have ripped the words straight from my head, Katie... only I wouldn't strike down astronaut out of hand."
"Agreed," said Sticky. "I can do without mystery. But never society. And I'd rather not be too far removed from Benedict, if I could."
"Didn't I tell you?" said Rhonda Kazembe with an impish grin.
Mr. Benedict covered his mouth, plainly bowled over by the mass compliment.
And by the time the sun rose again on England (unfortunately, that was the deepest watch of the night in Stonetown, but then suppertime had been reserved for pies and melons and special fizzed cider in the courtyard), Mr. Benedict and Constance, Rhonda Kazembe and Number Two, Sticky and the Washingtons, Kate and Milligan and Moocho Brazos, and Reynie and Miss Perumal and her mother, were all making arrangements with Roger Ruvie for residence in Winchester.
It was only then that Reynie thought to ask what was meant by Mr. Benedict's remark that he owed Constance the position twice over. The answer was simple: Mr. Benedict had, for most of his life, been vulnerable to narcoleptic spells whenever stricken by a strong surge of emotion. If Constance had not, by the most arduous telepathic exercise she had ever made, armed him against this condition, Roger Ruvie was of the opinion that his student body would have eaten Mr. Benedict alive.