Chapter 8
-------------------------------------------
It hadn't been his lucky day.
To be sure, if one asked Mr. Drake Anderson on any given day how that 'luck' thing was working out for him, they might have received much the same answer.
Still, as far as severely bad luck went, this day was shaping up to take the proverbial cake. The proverb of the cake had always been one of Drake's favourites, although it always left him oddly hungry…
It wasn't bad enough that he had flown to London in a tearing hurry at Joker's request, been paired up with Agent Paper – and worse, a commonly known traitor, which no one else seemed to care about – to protect some coffee-making idiot.
Or that now he had an intense craving for a cup of coffee.
Or that his hands were still shaking from his ten cups of earlier that day.
It wasn't even bad enough that, once he had arrived in London and rushed to the Library, they had proceeded to sit around, drinking coffee, and watching the stupidest bit of drama to exist in recent years, unfolding between that same coffee-making idiot, and Joker, and Joker's secretary until finally, he, Drake, had taken the initiative to point out that they could just as easily wait for the I-Jin to make their move outside of Joker's office.
Thus far, the highlight of his day had been wandering the streets aimlessly, humming "The Streets of London", and looking for something nice for his kid.
Naturally, being the highlight, it hadn't lasted.
No sooner had he finished humming the first verse, when he wheeled about abruptly at the sound of a wildly maniacal – and remarkably echoey – laugh.
"What the hell is this?" he demanded in something close to a whine as his eyes lit on the tall, thin man, face covered by a white half-mask and the rest of him covered by obscenely dressy and pretentious opera clothes and a billowy cape.
Even more curious was the crowd of women, old, young, and otherwise, surrounding the man and watching in shiny-eyed adoration as he ranted – in a pretty nice voice, Drake had to admit – about various nonsensical things.
The gruff pottery-dude drew near, intending to ask one of the fascinated young women what was going on, when the sound of a car horn from several feet away, at the other end of the conveniently-placed vacant lot, caught his attention.
"Drake!" a familiar voice called from the back-right-side window of the Lexus.
"Yeah, hi," Drake called back amid a lot of grumbling as he made his way over. "So, what the hell's going on? I-Jin?"
"We believe so," Joker replied grimly before frowning slightly. "Although, what purpose this man is to serve, I cannot say. I have contacted Agent Paper and Miss Deep, and they should be here any—"
"Mr. Joker!" Joe interjected frantically.
Drake and Joker both glanced absently in his direction…
…and then stared in bewilderment and consternation at the curious sight of Joe attempting (unsuccessfully) to tackle Wendy to the gravel that covered the ground, and keep her there.
Nothing daunted by the weight of a scrawny young man pressing her facedown into a bed of pebbles, she was trying (with marginally more success) to squirm away and crawl toward the crown of women surrounding the masked man.
Joker bristled.
"Joe, if you can't restrain yourself in public, I shudder to consider the sort of injuries you're going to sustain by the end of Friday evening. She isn't as easygoing as she seems, you know."
"Must…flock…adoringly...around…man…with…pretty…voice," Wendy added helpfully, staring ahead as though in a trance and trying absently to kick Joe away.
"She's doing it again," Joe explained.
"Why me?" Drake muttered, reflecting that he should simply have a tee-shirt made with this slogan, as he spent more time in the average day asking it than not.
The urge to ask the unanswerable out of his system, Drake stalked over to the pair sprawled out on the ground, picked them up one at a time, tucked each under one arm, and stalked back to the car.
"Lock the door," he suggested, glancing over his shoulder at Joker as he slammed the passenger door shut behind him.
"Er…you and Joe are next to the locks," Joker pointed out rather vaguely as Wendy tried to climb over his lap to get to the door closest to the masked man.
"Must…hear…angel…singing…"
"Right," Drake grumbled, flipping the power lock. Then he turned to glare at the blond girl pouting pointedly at him. "What the hell are you doing, anyway?"
"Did you notice the rest of the crowd?" Joker asked, sweeping an agitated hand over his hair as Wendy tried to chew through the door handle. "Don't make me belt you in," he said warningly.
"Yeah; a bunch of women," Drake shrugged, and then stared incredulously at Joker as something sunk in. "Don't tell me this guy can hypnotize women with his voice!"
"He is modelled after The Phantom of the Opera," Joker explained.
Drake smirked.
"Well, they say that only the weak-minded can be hypnotized."
"Which quite explains why women succumb to it," Joker finished.
The two enjoyed a lengthy chuckle at this, which was cut abruptly short as three hundred women turned from the masked man long enough to hurl three hundred purses at the vehicle, at great velocity.
"Look, I'll take the guy on before someone gets hurt," Drake said briskly.
"I'll come help!" a voice piped up.
Three men turned to glare at Wendy.
"No, you won't," Drake snapped. "Tie her down or something, would you, Joker? And Joe, quit bleeding on the upholstery!"
"Sorry," Joe said sheepishly, clamping a hand over his gushing nose.
"Oh, and Drake?" Joker called, looking up from his task of thoroughly entangling Wendy in the safety belts as Drake started from the car.
"Yeah?"
"While I don't feel especially inclined to at the moment either, see if you can capture this man alive. He might prove useful."
"Right," Drake grumbled, bidding a sad farewell to his delightful images of venting his full aggravation on this caped fruit.
"Hey! Show-tune boy!" he barked as he drew nearer the man and began elbowing his way through the crowd of utterly unheeding women.
The man fell silent mid-rant and scrutinized Drake carefully.
"And who might you be, monsieur?"
"La Drake," he replied flatly. "Erik, wasn't it? The Phantom of the Opera?"
"Oh, you know of me, monsieur!"
"Yeah, I know of you," Drake grumbled. "I also know of how hard I'll punch you if you call me 'monsieur' again."
"I do not believe you should find me such an easy target as you expect," Erik chuckled. "Monsieur."
"Gragh!" Drake grunted incoherently, throwing himself forward at Erik, who stepped fluidly aside.
However, he didn't step quite 'aside' enough, and thus Drake caught his left arm by one shoulder and lifted him neatly into the air.
Unfortunately for Mister Drake, as this was the first time this maneuver had ever worked, he had no idea where to go from here, and so, after thirty seconds of awkwardly holding Erik up in the air, he set him down, feeling bitterly that this made a very lame ending to a very cool move.
To vent his frustration, he grabbed the other man's collar and delivered several punches to the side of his head.
"Oh, no!" three hundred horrified women squealed together. "Our poor Erik!"
"Do not worry about me, my angels of music," Erik called rather less smoothly than he might have, had he not being jolted around by the fist repeatedly knocking against his ear.
"Oh, brother," Drake muttered, his faint nausea at all the shiny-eyes causing him to abandon his tight hold on Erik's collar.
"Ah! You abandon caution, monsieur," Erik proclaimed as he twisted away, "and that shall be your downfall!"
Drake saw red. Not just the red satin lining of the Phantom's cape. A bright, angry, shimmering red that clouded vision and sanity.
"Don't. Call. Me. Monsieur," he ground out, charging the other man again.
His shoulder once again connected, and the two fell to the ground heavily, where a grapple occurred as each tried to get a firm hold on the other's throat.
"Don't hurt our Erik!" one girl wailed.
"Like Hell!" Drake grunted, trying to twist out of the Phantom's surprisingly strong grip and delivering a few more solid punches to the man's stomach.
The surprise of our unlucky hero must only be imagined when a pair of hands, clearly not Erik's, closed over the back of his shirt and dragged him from the ground.
"Don't. Hurt. Our. Erik," a vaguely familiar voice said, trying for menace, but achieving only overwhelming cuteness that Drake, in his agitated state, did not notice.
"Agent Paper," he sighed. "It got you, too, huh?"
"Man's…voice…so…pretty," Yomiko sighed happily, releasing Drake and skipping over to join the crowd of women surrounding Erik, who had dusted himself off and began to rant, this time about boorish American men who looked down on those smarter and more cultured than themselves.
"Yomiko!" another feminine voice, this one slightly deeper, called frantically. "Come back! I have a book for you!"
"Oh, it's you," Drake noted flatly as Nancy slowed to a stop at his side. "Why the Hell didn't that caped freak hypnotize you?"
"My theory is that it has something to do with my being an I-Jin like him," Nancy replied absently, trying vainly to attract Yomiko's attention by pretending to read and immensely enjoy the book in her hand. "Of course, it could have something to do with the fact that my being here at all breaks all laws of logic and continuity, thus creating a force field of bad writing that somehow protects me from his mind control. Either that, or I just have taste in men."
"Miss Deep! Agent Paper! Have you reached the site of the I-Jin attack yet?" Joker's voice came through Nancy's earphone.
Nancy sighed, putting a hand to her forehead.
"You're parked twenty feet away, Joker. I can see you from here. Joe's grinning and waving at us right now."
"Oh, so he is," Joker chuckled, before shifting back into business-like cool. "What is the situation?"
"I-Jin? Young women flocked around him?" Nancy said, slightly annoyed. "You've been watching this longer than we have."
"Er, right. However, perhaps you could clear this up for me: why is Yomiko staring up at our Phantom with shiny-eyes?"
"He's hypnotized her, too," Nancy explained through gritted teeth, glaring daggers at the caped man.
"No fair! Why does Yomiko get to flock adoringly to the Angel of Music, and I don't?" a female voice demanded plaintively in the background.
"Oh, hush, Wendy," Joker grumbled. "And stop wriggling like that. I'm not going to untie you, and you're making Joe's nose bleed all over the place."
"I don't want to know," Nancy sighed. "Look, do you want us to take him alive, or can I kill him?"
"Hey, hey, hey, if I don't get to kill him, you sure as Hell can't," Drake broke in, miffed.
"Right," Nancy said flatly. "So, take him alive."
"Please," Joker said.
"Well, then. We'll just go do that. And you just keep watching from the safety and comfort of your car."
"This hasn't been your lucky day, either," Drake noted, shaking his head in perfect understanding as Nancy pointedly switched off the communicator and started toward the crowd.
"Don't get me started," Nancy grumbled.
"Monsieur, Mademoiselle," a voice called mistily from behind a lamp post.
Drake tensed immediately at the hated address, but Nancy put up a barring arm before he could attack, and both watched as a young woman stepped out into plain view.
"Who the Hell are you?" Drake asked bluntly.
"Who am I, Monsieur? I am called Cindy."
"Great, Cindy," Nancy said flatly. "Now, how about talking normally? I think this guy might snap if you call him 'Monsieur' again."
"Okay, fine," Cindy huffed, pouting slightly.
"Hold on," Nancy said, frowning. "I've seen you before."
Cindy blinked, then gazed searchingly at Nancy.
"Yeah, I guess I've seen you, too, now that I look at my predecessor's memories a little more carefully."
"Uh…predecessor?"
"Yeah," Cindy said sadly. "Mr. Ikkyu killed the whole scientist team when we got side-tracked talking about why King Arthur and Dracula would be bad choices for an assassin team."
"Aside from the fact that they don't exist," Drake said dryly.
Cindy grinned deviously.
"Ah! But as you see, that has not stopped me in the case of my darling Erik! I have, through immense cleverness, managed to create the perfect likeness of the most perfect man ever to be conceived by an author!"
"Oh, that's where I know you from," Nancy said, nodding thoughtfully. "You were the scientist who would always wander around singing show-tunes."
"Yeah," Cindy agreed sadly. "Truly, my calling was a life in musical theatre!"
"But you nobly gave it up to work as a scientist for an evil organization," Drake finished flatly.
"Who among us does not have a childhood dream unrealized?" Cindy asked, making dramatic arm gestures.
"Uh, yeah; that's great," Drake said, ducking just in time to avoid being hit by one flailing arm. "Now, why did you call us?"
"I have realized," Cindy began, obviously finding that melodrama suited her, "that there are some things best not tampered with. It seems that a man so perfect as my Phantom was never meant to exist. Perhaps it is best that he be defeated. And so, I will aid you in defeating him."
"Seemed pretty easy before," Drake shrugged.
"That's because you weren't playing fair!" Cindy shot back, glaring at him. "Nevertheless, there are a few things that you must take into consideration when doing battle with Erik. The first thing to remember is, 'your hand at the level of your eyes!'"
Nancy and Drake exchanged uneasy looks.
"Uh…and that means?" Nancy prompted.
"The Punjab Lasso," Cindy explained. "If you assume the position I have described, you may ward it off and keep yourself safe."
"Great. Thanks," Drake said flatly. "If that's all…"
"Just…try not to hurt him too much," Cindy implored, eyes growing teary. "I worked so hard on him!"
"That's a mental image that I frankly didn't want," Drake sighed, shaking his head.
"It must be nice to have the capability to make your perfect man, though," Nancy admitted with a shrug as the two began to push through the crowd of women.
"If I was gonna make the perfect man," Drake began before trailing off and glaring at Nancy, who was biting back a snicker. "Shut up. Seriously, you'd think she wouldn't have given her perfect man the ability to attract any other woman in the world."
"Cindy was never too bright," Nancy told him, her expression half-irritated and half-fondly-nostalgic. "Look, I'm going to go find Yomiko. I'll try to snap her out of his trance, and we'll be back to help you as soon as we can."
"Sure," Drake called as she began to push back through the crowd at a slightly different point, toward the pretty bespectacled dark-haired girl watching the Phantom adoringly about halfway from the back. "I think I can handle a musician."
"Ah! You return, Monsieur!" an aggravatingly familiar, aggravatingly pretty masculine voice proclaimed, cackling, as they pushed their way to the front of the crowd.
Drake balled his hands tightly into fists and uttered a severely annoyed growl.
"This really isn't my lucky day."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
End Notes: Oy. I think this chapter began to fall apart a little. It was fun to me, but I doubt anyone else'll like it much. Too much Wendy/Joker 'shippiness, too much Phantom of the Opera. Less ass-kickin'-Drake-action than I had hoped. Still, there's always next chapter. :o)
And if you did like this chapter, feel perfectly free to let me know. Or if you didn't. Tell me in detail exactly what you didn't like about it. I likes reviews. :o)