Chapter Eleven: Much Shorter In Real Life
Dorothea was cold, and damp from snow-melt, and scared, and upside-down. There was also a distinct possibility that she would die with teeth fuzzier than dishes that haven't been washed for eight years. Fuzzier than the Petri dishes her class had used in their bacteria study last year. Fuzzier than. . .
The thing lifted Dorothea a bit higher and she got a proper look at its tusks.
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPMMMMMMMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
The creature stopped and growled softly, stunned. It had never before heard such a loud noise coming from such small food. Had its brain been larger than a shelled peanut, it would have ignored Dorothea's siren scream and Dorothea's story would have ended about here. As it was, the beast dropped her and started searching for a quieter meal.
Winded, Dorothea stopped screaming.
The thing looked down. It saw a young, juicy human female lying on the ground and picked her up.
"BBBLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODDDYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTTTTTAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Butler reloaded his weapon, but Dorothea was hanging in the way of all of the beast's possibly tender parts and shooting it anywhere else would be about as useful as cutting down a tree with a herring.
As he ran to get a better attack point, a bolt of light blue light burst out of thin air and hit the troll on the back of its neck. Enraged, it threw Dorothea aside and spun to meet its attacker. From her viewpoint of flying through the air Dorothea saw three more, brighter bolts hit the thing. She rather thought that they looked like flying light sabers. Then she blacked out.
And woke up again. Some sort of instinctual defence mechanism ordered her to get up and run far, far away from the great big ugly smelly mound of tusks and dreadlocks that was lying on the ground barely three metres away.
"Hello." She looked around to see who had spoken. Apparently, no one had. Or that was what it looked like.
"Uh. . . hi." Dorothea managed to gasp. "Are. . . are you my conscience?"
"Yes, Dory. I am your conscience. We haven't spoken in a while." There was a lengthy pause.
"You know, that was kind of scary how I just randomly said something from a movie and you kept on with the quote. Who are you?" He- it sounded like a guy, anyway- couldn't possibly be one of her normal head-voices. They were all female, and only ever quoted from art films or the Matrix. That was quite strange, as Dorothea had only seen the Matrix once and had fallen asleep halfway through.
"I'm. . .What? Oh, crap. See ya later, Dot."
"But I can't!" Dorothea whined loudly. A bit too loudly, in fact. Both Artemis and Butler were sending strange looks at this mad girl talking to someone they couldn't see. Then again, Dorothea acting slightly crazy wasn't the most unusual thing that had happened lately.
There was still the matter of the unconscious . . . thing . . . lying on the lawn.
Then it disappeared, too.
Dorothea made various surprised-and-my-tongue-isn't-working noises as her mind worked around this sudden lack of enormous tusky beasts. Another part of her mind was trying to tell the first bit of her mind that hey, this is good, you're not being killed any more, life is sweet, isn't your butt numb from sitting on the freaking snow like a stunned fish?
Fish don't sit on snow, the first bit replied.
Mexican walking fish do.
No they don't. There isn't any snow in Mexico.
Yes there is.
Have you been to Mexico?
No. Have you?
No.
Then let's just live under the delusion that Mexico is filled with strange little fish with legs and colourful sombreros.
That sit on snow.
Right.
All right, whatever. Hey, my butt is pretty cold. Maybe I should stand up before my body heat makes the snow melt and the water makes my pj's go see-through, like what happens with school blouses.
OK. Good idea.
Dorothea was about to bring her anti-clothing-transparency plan of action into operation when the invisible voice-person spoke again.
"Greetings, mortal!" It boomed. Dorothea thought she heard a background whisperer mumble something unprintable. "I am your saviour, born of the earth and sky, my life's work to rescue fair damsels from monstrous . . ."
"Yeah, what is that thing?" Dorothea wasn't impressed by melodramatic announcements of demi-godliness. They got boring after three years of listening to her school principal's motivational speeches. "It's like, um, some type of mutated elephant-Chihuahua. You know, all mental like a Chihuahua. Um, how they're all psycho and agro and all.
"Um, who are you?"
The voice was silent. Dorothea felt her guts start playing Let's Give Dorothea Nervous Tummy Knots. Maybe the voice was some type of alien being and she had scared it away from Earth with her hair. Or her teeth. Probably her teeth.
She stood up and felt her head knock onto something hard. "Aw, what?"
This was all getting rather disturbing. Land of crazy people this place may be, but Dorothea had no intention of joining the giggling masses. At least, she had no intention of admitting it to herself.
"O. . . K. . ." she began. "I'm just going over he-aaargh no, this way," the flustered girl stammered as she moved carefully around so that she was looking at a stone wall. If she couldn't see the invisible voice, it didn't exist. "Um. . ."
"Oh, she-et."
As the voice proclaimed those words of wisdom, something thudded onto the snow behind Dorothea. It made quite a small noise, so she deduced that it was smaller than the, er, other thing. Which also did not exist. Of course.
After a few minutes the ghost of a kitten of curiosity began clawing at the very edge of her mind. Pretty soon it had become a stringy, mangy-looking feral panther and Dorothea had to, simply had to just peek behind herself. It wasn't as if she would see anything, it was invisible, wasn't . . . it?
She looked over her shoulder.
She then turned back, took a few deep breaths, and looked again. There was no denying what she saw; after all, it's never been scientifically proven that unbrushed teeth are hallucinogens. Standing behind Dorothea was someone very, very short.
Someone, in fact, who looked much shorter in real life than he did in photos.
"You!?" Dorothea gasped. Realising what she had just said, the startled girl amended: "I mean, 'You?' Because, ahah, it's not like I can- oh, drat- it's not like I can speak in italics, that's my sister y'know? Um. You'll know all about her, 'cos if you're who you look like then . . . this is a bit embarrassing really. . . You're quite short, aren't you? Er-"
The object of her mumblings rolled his eyes at Dorothea and began struggling with the apparatus strapped to his back. "Is that . . . all the . . . thanks I get?" he asked, bending over backwards so far that Dorothea's spine started aching in sympathy. "Here . . . can you . . . undo this buckle?"
Complying, Dorothea poked at the offending mechanism until it snapped open, grazing her fingers. "Aargh. Thank you for what?" Free of his artificial wings the miniature boy swung round with flashing eyes and intoned as his answer:
"Thank me for saving your life, dolt! For tearing you from the very jaws of Hell, risking life and limb that you may live in safety, and if these accursed wings hadn't played up you would have spent your life pining for your mystery rescuer, your knight of the skies, your . . ."
"OK, sure. Um. You really are short, you know? Really, very short. Uhh. Yeah." Dorothea's eyes wandered, looking at everything except the boy who was Jack. Her eyes glanced over Artemis. He was standing stock still, like a wax sculpture that someone had stolen from Madame Tussauds and set down in the snow outside Fowl Manor. His eyes were fixed on Jack. "So, um, what're you doing here?"
"I just told you, Dots," he replied, and pulled himself to his feet. Even standing, he wouldn't have reached Dorothea's waist. As it was, with her sitting on the snow, she only had to look up a few centimetres into his face. "Rescuing you from that troll, of course."
"Oh . . . Right." Dorothea was still a bit stunned. Troll? As in those things that lived under bridges? What was Jack doing here, fighting trolls and being invisible and when he wasn't being invisible, looking like a metre-tall 'Stargate' commando, exotic weapons included? And why . . . ?
As Dorothea pondered the meanings and causes of these strange occurrences, Artemis was gradually snapping out of his reverie. It was a pity that neither Dorothea nor Jack noticed this.
"Dorothea, do you have some type of small screwdriver? Or some Allen keys? Um . . . your earrings aren't magnetic, are they? Oh, chintz, she's going to kill me for this. . ." You see, obviously Jack had not come zooming down into the grounds of Fowl Manor by accident. He had, in fact, in the spur-of-the-moment type of thing which is to blame for so many disastrous, catastrophic and occasionally miraculous occurrences, cut class to ogle the home of- as the recorded warning on his helmet told him- the greatest ever threat to fairy kind. Just normal teenage behaviour.
"Er. . ." Dorothea's earrings were not only not of the magnetic sort; they were of the non-existent sort. Besides, her arm was hurting quite a bit by now and she wasn't really able to focus on anything else. Why did Jack want magnets anyway? It wasn't as though there were any fridges nearby. "Um, no. Sorry." Why was Jack so short, anyway? He didn't look as though he had dwarfism; he looked as though he had been sent by television onto one of those giant home theatre systems. It couldn't have been a proper TV, because he was still about a metre tall instead of really tiny like that squeaky guy on the movie. His hair was sort of red, so-
Dorothea abruptly forgot what she had been thinking about. Something about, unhh, red hair? What about red hair? Jack had red hai-
Jack had said something about magnets, hadn't he? "Um, no. Sorry." Why did he want magnets, anyway?
Something niggled at the back of her mind. Then it was squashed by the thought of fridges and stopped niggling.
"I do not suppose you would deign to introduce yourself, fairy?" There was something new in Artemis's voice; a hint of – triumph? "But of course, greetings would not be included in the LEPRecon training curriculum. Especially-" here his lips curled into that smile made famous by a certain aquatic predator "–especially not greetings directed towards the human who poses the greatest threat towards your civilisation since . . . shall we say, my last ventures?
I do not know what has brought you here, fairy, but whatever sentiments induced you to intervene right now shall not be repaid. Butler." At that signal, the mountainous Eurasian hurled a dull purple sphere at the ground between Jack's feet. An LED flashed on its surface and Jack dropped like a stone. He didn't move.
Dorothea screamed.
~ * * * ~
Dorothea woke up to the rather unpleasant sensation of a thousand Morris dancers jumping around inside her head. Ignoring the italicised thoughts of her semi-subconscious as they ranted about what they thought should be done with such folksy traditions, she tried to remember how she'd got to her bed after what had happened. . . had happened. . .
What had happened?
Something. . . something about snow. And red hair- fridges? That couldn't be right. Never mind. The TV was blaring in front of her, some American ad for GlitzGlozz (the lippy that everyone wears, dahling) ; she must have dropped off in front of it. Click. The screen faded into blackness-
Jack! The troll, the sphere, Artemis Fowl had remem- ICE CREAM-HITLER-GREEN-SCHOOL-BROKEN-PLUGS-ELECTRICAL OUTLET-TESLA-LIGHTNING-GLASS.
Dorothea shook her head, annoyed. She couldn't even remember what she'd watched last night. What a waste of an evening. Ah, well- it was almost half past nine, and breakfast beckoned.