To Butterfly: I've been trying to give this story as much of a "London feel" as possible. Anne's dialogue in particular is full of Irish slang.
To StarDaPanda225: We shall see… :D
"Are you getting dressed up just for me?" Felix furrowed his brows – that was stupid. "They say girls take longer to get ready…" He shook his head; he had no desire to lose his head! "You know, I prefer seeing you in either a mechanized battle suit or nothing." Okay, that one was hilariously inappropriate under the circumstances. "Are you ready to go, Fer Maiden?" he finally asked, foregoing all attempts at flirting and pushing off the wall he'd been leaning against, trying to stay out of her way as she moved around the suit in the small workshop. Barkk flitted around the suit behind her, watching Bri work.
"Just about there," Bri replied, sliding into the suit and activating the sequence to close the back. "This wouldn't have taken so long if I'd had time to run the diagnostics last night before we went back to the flat," she pointed out as the motor came to life and she turned around.
"Can you honestly say you wouldn't have made a mistake if you'd tried to do it last night?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. "Because the Tower of London would beg to differ!"
"Yeah, well, you'd be stressed out, too, if your best friend was missing," she retorted heatedly. "Are you going to transform, or what?"
"We'll get her back!" Barkk chirped encouragingly, flying over to Iron Maiden and phasing her paw partway through one of Iron Maiden's arms.
"Sorry." Iron Maiden let out a breath, sounding mechanical through the helmet. "It's been a long day."
"I get it," Felix told her before transforming. "I get the guilt – believe me. And I get the recriminations. I want to get this guy and save your flatmate, too. But I don't want to watch you push yourself to the brink, either." He patted her arm. "We're in this together, right, partner?"
She nodded. "You and me, Pup." The workshop door closed automatically behind them, and Iron Maiden scooped him up under the armpits. "This will be faster," she told him, jumping into the air a moment before her jetpack activated.
As they skimmed over the housetops back toward the Maughan Library in the gloom, darting in and out of the fogbanks left behind by the day's rain, the Hound couldn't help remembering the night before when he had been the one carrying her back to the workshop to get her suit; now the tables had turned on him. It was a strange sensation to be carried through the air with no control over where he was or where he went. But he had trusted Iron Maiden before; he could trust her even more now. Less than two minutes later Iron Maiden set them down in front of the library's main entrance.
"How do we get in?" he asked, looking around anxiously. "Just smash the door in?"
She hummed pensively. "I suppose I could blast the door with my cannon," she replied slowly, "but that would probably be overkill. And besides, what if we're wrong?" She raised her right hand and pointed her finger at the space between the doors. A thin wire extruded from the fingertip, and she wiggled it in the space until the lock bar disengaged. Carefully she pulled the door open and led the way inside.
"So are you enough of a nerd to develop that just to get in some more study time?" the Hound asked, raising an eyebrow at her.
"What? No," she scoffed. "I… may have added it so I could sneak into the Engineering building to work late on my projects," she admitted sheepishly.
"Nerd." He clutched his leash tightly as Iron Maiden turned right down the long interior hallway, the headlamp built into her helmet providing the only illumination. With his miraculous-enhanced vision he could make out doorways leading into darkened rooms on either side, doors behind which anything could be lurking. Too faint for ordinary hearing, mice scampered through the walls. Iron Maiden stopped abruptly just before the end of the hallway and turned into a wide open room with rounded walls. Together they walked over to the far side of the room, where one of the table lamps was still turned on – this must have been the source of the light they had seen from outside. "Is this it?" he asked, pulling the chain to turn off the light.
Nothing happened.
"Huh." Iron Maiden stared at the lamp for a long minute. "This lamp has always been a little weird," she commented eventually. "I kept meaning to pull it apart and check the connections, but I just never did." She cocked her helmet to the side and turned a slow circuit to examine the whole room. "The EM is wrong. The lamp isn't even connected to any switches in here."
"Didn't you say Anne heard something downstairs?" asked the Hound. "Could there be a connection there?"
"The wire does go down through the floor," she reported, kneeling to trace it with her finger. Briskly she strode out of the room, the Hound hustling to keep up with her. "We were in the cafe when she heard it, so we should check there first."
The doorway next to the round room opened into a stairwell, and Iron Maiden jumped over the railing, using her jetpack to halt her descent a meter from the floor. The Hound dropped over the side and landed in a crouch, leash already up and spinning to his side. Through the walls he could still hear the sound of mice scurrying along, and under that a slow rhythmic pulse that could have been the library's dehumidifying system. Iron Maiden left the stairwell and walked down the hallway to the cafeteria room that took up half of one side of the lower ground floor. She turned around slowly, her helmet whirring as she scanned the room. "Nothing."
The Hound closed his eyes, steadied his breathing, and focused on his hearing. The sound of Iron Maiden's suit was almost deafening in the silence; he tuned it out. The scurrying inside the walls was still there; he tuned that out, too. And below it all he could hear rustling sounds coming through the vents, almost as if something were being moved by a breath of wind. "I hear something," he finally reported, opening his eyes. He dropped to his hands and knees next to the closest vent and looked, but he could see nothing. Even right next to it, he didn't feel any air moving. "A pity we don't have Multiplice with us: she could probably fit through the vents to investigate this for us."
"What about Barkk?" Iron Maiden suggested.
He nodded. "Barkk, Ears up." A tan light covered him, and Barkk materialized directly in front of his face. Quickly he fished a package of dried beef out of his pocket and held a piece up for her to eat. As she bit off tiny chunks, he quickly explained what they needed her to do. "I don't like being de-transformed when we're looking for the Ripper," he finished, shivering, "but this might be our best bet."
"You can count on me, Felix!" Barkk assured him, wagging her tail excitedly and licking his palm. "I'll be back sooner than you can blink!" With that she phased directly through the floor and disappeared into the ventilation shaft.
Felix stared at the floor quietly, holding his breath.
"It's sweet that she's so affectionate," Iron Maiden observed, opening her helmet.
He smiled fondly. "It is rather difficult to be lonely when you have a Kwami around," he agreed, straightening up next to her.
Bri hummed pensively. "That is… nice," she admitted. "It's nice to have someone for company."
"We'll get her back," he assured her firmly. "You aren't alone." He smirked. "But in the meantime do you need me to lick your hand and wag my tail for you?"
She gave him a deadpan look. "Cute."
He took her gauntleted hand in his own and held it up to his lips. "I mean it: you aren't alone in this. Whatever happens, I've got your back."
She nodded. "Thanks, Pup." Her lips turned down in a frown as she turned away to examine a vending machine against the near wall. A heavy sigh escaped her lips.
Felix watched her closely. It didn't take a mind reader to realize that she was still imagining all those terrible possibilities. "So are you interested in any sports, mon Fer?" he asked.
She blinked and turned on him in surprise. "I played football growing up. My papa is a big fan of Saint-Germain; he brought me to a game a couple years ago." She smiled wistfully. "We sat in the upper deck, and all the people down below looked like ants."
Felix hummed. "You really can see everything from up there, can't you?"
"You've been?"
He nodded. "Once, last month." He let out a snort. "I wasn't there with your father, but I was there with his partner!"
She raised an eyebrow. "Was the stadium still standing when you were done?"
"Despite our best efforts, yes!" he joked, eliciting a tentative smile from Bri.
Barkk floated out of the wall next to them at that moment, and Felix turned to find the Kwami with an unaccustomed serious look in her eyes. "I found them," she reported breathlessly before turning to fly out of the cafe, waving urgently for them to follow. "They're below the round room. But we have to hurry!"
Felix's footsteps pounded along the tiles behind Iron Maiden, following the Kwami out of the cafe and down the hallway back to the stairwell. No sooner had they entered the stairwell than the Kwami phased into the wall directly below the stairs around knee height. Even with his normal hearing, Felix could hear a mechanical crunching noise as a section of the floor shifted and a trapdoor dropped open. Barkk emerged from the wall and flew down into the opening, followed by Iron Maiden and Felix. Unlike the rest of the library, the stairs down which they climbed were of rough-hewn stone, worn smooth by centuries of use. The walls around them were of similar stone, smoothed down by countless hands brushing against them over the years, dust clinging to the uneven edges after sitting so long in disuse and without air. No lights were visible apart from the beam coming from Iron Maiden's headlamp; the darkness seemed to close in behind Felix as they descended lower into the earth. Just when he thought they couldn't go any lower, finally his feet found level ground – hard-packed earth.
"What is this place?" he whispered, placing his hand on Iron Maiden's shoulder for guidance as he followed right behind her down the tight corridor.
"I–I don't know," she whispered back. "It's old, whatever it is…" She paused as her light settled on the stone wall to one side, illuminating an image of what appeared to be a woman in front of a tree holding a basin. "I–I recognize this," Iron Maiden murmured. "I'm pretty sure I saw it in one of Anne's books. I think it might be either Celtic or Pictish."
"That would probably make it older than London itself," Felix commented, eyes wide in surprise. He fell silent as voices echoed down the hallway. Beyond Iron Maiden he could just make out flickering orange light emanating from somewhere around the corner. Iron Maiden jerked forward, but Felix grabbed her tightly and pulled her back. Putting his lips as close to her helmet as he could, he hissed, "We have to be careful – we can't spook them!"
"But–"
"Shh!" Cautiously they made their way down the hallway, the light growing brighter with each step. At last Iron Maiden turned off her headlamp as they halted to the side of a doorway barely larger than Iron Maiden herself. Felix poked his head around the corner over her shoulder.
They looked into a large circular room with an earthen floor and uncut stone walls, about as large around as the room in the library directly above them, with wooden torches set in sconces built into the walls to provide the light. A massive pyre of freshly-cut wood stood in the centre of the room, taking up most of the space. Swirling patterns of a dark reddish-brown were visible in the dirt around and beneath the pyre. What could only be human body parts ringed the pyre. The Ripper himself stood to one side of the room within the ring of organs, holding a torch and looking up at something in the centre of the pyre. And in the middle of the pyre, tied to a wooden post, was Anne.
