New chapter, whoooo! And I've got some more worldbuilding stuff for you guys, after the chapter! Happy viewing!
Upon entering his penthouse apartment in Howth, Dublin, and feeling the unmistakable vibration of his fairy communicator, Artemis Fowl sighed.
Of all the days for Holly to contact him…
He hung up his coat besides the door, carefully buffed his shoes on the plain mat before the door (he was hardly about to use a "welcome" mat – he knew better than to leave implicit invitations lying about with so many fairy criminals cursing his name), and strode across the penthouse floor even as he answered the call.
"Hello, Holly," he greeted, squashing the exhaustion for a later time. He would have plenty of time to collapse later, after whatever had come up underground had been rectified.
"Mud Boy." Her greeting was just as terse as he'd dreaded it would be, complete with an undertone of frustration. "Sorry to bother you right after the UN meeting, but we have a situation down here."
"Of course. I presume Foaly and the Commander are there as well?"
A snort in response – a sound easily translated, thanks to years of experience, as what do you think? Artemis allowed himself a small smirk but did not comment, instead settling down in his office chair and turning on his computer. He opened a drawer and fished around for a moment before removing a small, clear cable – a fiber optic, courtesy of Foaly – and plugged it into the laptop. The connection was near instantaneous, a window opening on the screen to reveal the images of a tense trio of familiar faces.
"Foaly," he said. "Commander Kelp."
"Fowl." Kelp nodded back, scowl lines in his brow deepening.
"Heya, Mud Boy." Foaly quipped. "How's the plotting going?"
"Well, I suppose. I've already cracked your newest encryption."
"What, already?! D'Arvit!"
Kelp grunted, even as Holly rolled her eyes at the exchange. "Focus, Foaly. You two can talk hacker tips all you want later."
"Right, right, sorry."
Artemis carefully folded his hands in front of him, fighting the urge to lean closer to the screen. "Well?"
Foaly started tapping furiously at a keyboard offscreen, and after several moments (and a few grumbling curses), several files in Gnommish popped up beside the window on his screen. He clicked on one, and several colorful graphs opened up.
"Ah. These are MagiScanner readings, yes?"
Another grunt in response, which Artemis took to be confirmation. He carefully scanned the graphs, blue eyes darting from column to column. He was familiar with the readings, at least somewhat – Foaly had recorded the results of the initial testing on his system, which, even after years of experience, he had yet to prevent him from gaining access to – but the magic currently displayed as data was just as much gibberish to him as Gnommish once had been, several different categorical readings jumping all over the spectrum with no recognizable patterns.
"And what precisely am I looking at, Foaly?"
Holly picked up on his tone, and began the narrative. "Several days ago, a Retrieval team sent to scout out the monster Underground came across these readings. After several fly-bys, we determined it to be most heavily concentrated in Hotland, specifically the Core, though we found several other hotspots scattered throughout the Ruins, Snowdin, and Waterfall, as well as the King's throne room and the Judgement Hall."
Artemis opened another file, which seemed to be a map of the Underground, with each hotspot marked with bright red cautionary symbols. The Core was one massive blip, covered corner to corner in scarlet.
"And?"
Kelphuffed. "And it's, by our current estimations, ten times more powerful than any other readings picked up in the Underground. Ten times, Fowl! That's dozens, maybe even a hundred times more powerful than Haven or Atlantis, impossibly powerful! We're talking something that could squash the Berserker Gate's human-killing wave like a bug!"
Which was an alarming thought. The magic a deranged Opal Koboi had been about to unleash would have wiped out every human on the planet's surface. And if this particular signature was found all over the Core… well, humans were struggling to get their hands on that technology, even now. If they somehow used that magic to find the People, then the already delicate political situation that the surface was struggling with would come crumbling down around their ears.
He studied the map again. Ruins, Snowdin, Waterfall, Core – hardly private locales, with hundreds of monsters capable of traveling there any time they so wished, and with no common characteristics, save the presence of monsters, that could explain the unusual energy.
I see. "You wish me to find the monster responsible for this magic."
The fairies nodded grimly. "Or information that could help track them down. I don't suppose you have any contacts that could shed some light on this…?"
Artemis considered this. Magic was still an unknown quantity to most humans, and what few monsters he had established a rapport with hadn't shown any signs of having more than an average knowledge of their magics, let alone something of this magnitude. Frisk wasn't likely to know either – they may have been the Ambassador, but they were human, just like himself, and even if they did possess the necessary knowledge, it would be rather suspicious of Anonymous to suddenly show an interest in magic when none had been shown previously.
"I do not currently have the means of identifying a possible suspect at this time," he admitted grudgingly. "I will keep an eye out, of course, but it may be some time..."
He paused as his sleep-deprived brain finally offered a relevant solution – the memory of a monster who had recently been hired by a research facility that he and his family had been funding for some time. A facility that he had already scheduled a tour for later that week.
He may have information for the fairies sooner than he'd thought.
Fidgeting in their hotel room, Frisk focused on their hands. Calm thoughts, happy thoughts… you're in your hotel room, no Reset, everybody's here, try not to think about what Undyne just said…
Crap. It hadn't worked. "She was a terrorist?"
Undyne scowled, slinging her arm over Alphys's shoulder even as the shorter monster started to look uneasy. "Pretty much. According to the guys who, uh, interviewed her - " In other words, interrogated. " - she claimed to be part of a group called Humanity's Resurgence."
Frisk scowled. That is the most stereotypical anti-monster organization name I've ever heard, in any timeline.
Undyne cackled at their expression. "I know, right? Cheesy as all hell!"
Toriel cleared her throat from beside Frisk.
"Er, I mean heck! I said heck!" She cleared her throat. "Anyway, up until a few months ago, they weren't really all that trouble – they were basically just an anti-monster rally with a name. Then one of them got the bright idea to bomb a warehouse belonging to a company hiring monsters, and they kept doing that sort of stuff. Nobody ever really got hurt – there was never anybody around when the bombs went off – but still, the squads have been keeping their eyes out."
"And now that one of them have attacked the mayor…?"
She shrugged. "They're officially terrorists now. The occasional homemade bomb we can handle. Assassination? Those punks are going down."
Well, wasn't that just lovely?
Toriel shifted, putting one hand on their shoulder in a gesture of comfort. "Are we in danger from them, now that we are here?"
This time it was Alphys who responded. "I-I don't think so. I m-mean, everybody knows you have diplomatic immunity now, so..."
*That won't stop them.
No, it most certainly wouldn't. Frisk had lost track of the number of runs where some organization got their hands on the Ambassador and tried to blackmail the monsters back into the Underground. It always ended poorly, with spilled blood and a Reset, and diplomatic immunity had never made a difference.
We can only hope it doesn't end like that this time.
They cleared their throat uncomfortably, then quickly changed the subject. "So, Alphys, how's work?"
The scientist brightened up considerably. "Oh, it's amazing! I'm working in Robotics, which is pretty familiar, but there's a lot of other apartments that sometimes call me in to help with programming and such, and some of the things they're working on I've never seen before! The Transportation Technology department has been working on a hydrogen-and-solar-powered car, maybe I can show it to you sometime –"
Frisk sighed in relief as the monster went off on her tangent. Good. They didn't need the monsters worrying about this right now. They'd think of something to do about this later, but for now, they'd much rather spend some stress-free time with their friends.
Well, looks like things are heating up! Artemis is finally getting called in, (and gee, I wonder which monster he's going to try to talk with? :3 ) and apparently the woman from last chapter was a terrorist? Wow. Frisk really has the worst of luck sometimes, don't they?
So, on my Archive of our Own account (yes I have one of those too) somebody asked me why the monsters' technology didn't seem to have been so severely affected by the Crash. Here was my reply:
Ah, good question! The way I think of it, SOME monster tech WAS affected by the Crash - but not much. The Koboi tech that was sold to human companies may have been there, BUT the only tech of hers that was affected by her whole "kill her younger self to cause nuclear time explosions" thing was the stuff created within the ... eight? Eight years between her younger self's age and her older self's. That means that anything from before that time wouldn't have been affected. And some of the monster tech looks a bit on the outdated side - I mean, look at the computer Alphys has on the first floor of the Lab! Big 'ole clunky box monitor, probably years old. And heck, look at Mettaton! He doesn't exactly look too advanced of a robot until he turns into his EX form! So yeah, the more outdated technology wouldn't have been affected by the Crash.
That being said, there probably was some tech down there that WAS affected - the stuff down in the True Lab in-game looks pretty damn advanced. So there were a FEW explosions here and there. But because the monsters aren't as reliant on technology as humans and fairies (sure they have TVs and stuff, but apart from the True Lab and the Core, you don't really see much technology lying around, do you?) and because that tech wasn't as abundant (because less of it had yet to be trashed), the explosions didn't do much damage, not as many lives were lost, and what technology they DID have wasn't set back nearly so much, the Crash didn't have nearly as much of an impact down in the Underground as it did for humanity and the Lower Elements.
There's also the whole matter of magic. It's implied during the initial encounter with Mettaton (I hesitate to call it a fight) that his mechanical body is made with both metal and MAGIC. That may not seem like a crucial detail, but if you think about it, that's basically saying that magic and machines can be FUSED, or at least used together. There's also yellow magic, which is something that you can only access in-game once Alphys has given you that super-duper-upgraded phone - a phone she upgrades in a ridiculously short period of time, so there's no way she just used a screwdriver or something. This all implies that monsters use magic in their technology as well as in just everyday life - and if Alphys could upgrade a phone (and include a JETPACK of all things) in a few brief seconds, she could probably repair some of the less damaged machines that went BOOM after the Crash pretty easily.
On another note, you notice that in the books, most fairy technology doesn't involve magic at all? I mean, there's the time stop and possibly the bio-bomb, but that's about it. They usually use tech INSTEAD of the magic, instead of finding ways to fuse them together, like the monsters have (which makes sense, their magic needs a Ritual to replenish, after all.) If you think about that, the odd fusion of magic and technology the monsters use has some serious advantages in the post-Crash world - it's probably way easier to repair, which means less time wasted repairing and more time making technological advances. Also, magic can produce energy, light, and heat, right? Which means they have something that POWERS their machines, too. Even if they didn't have the Core, their tech would probably still be more advanced than what a lot of humans had before the Crash!