Sorry for taking so long to update, guys, college workloads are a son of a b****. I've got three classes I've got to work on this term. THREE. However, I'll still hopefully have enough time to actually work on chapters for you guys!
Alright, the last chapter to suggest a name for the series has passed – so now it's time to vote if you haven't already! Feel free to vote for any one of these titles below! (And again, thank you to the people who've already voted!)
The Magic of Souls (1)
Tales of Monsters, Humans, and Fairies (1)
Fairies and Monsters Gone Fowl (5)
Stories About Fairies, Monsters, and Two Bizarre Humans
Fairytales (8)
Temporal Dynamics for the Magically Inclined (5)
Okay Flowey, Stop Traumatizing the Fairies (4)
Underground Fairies
A Fairy Strange Crossover
(Looks like Fairies and Monsters Gone Fowl is catching up, and so is Okay Flowey!)
LEPRecon was a notoriously dangerous career, no matter where you were on the planet. In the Lower Elements, Recon officers were the first responders, the fairies sent in to determine whether a simple Traffic officer or a Retrieval assault team was needed to resolve the situation. On the surface, Recon officers were the ones sent to track down rogue fairies and, in the rare cases where humans caught glimpses of a fairy, the ones sent in to determine said human's defenses and how dangerous it might be for a larger team of officers to be sent in. As a result, Recon casualties were incredibly high, and many of the officers that survived for long enough soon began to hate their jobs almost as much as they loved being able to fly through fresh surface air.
They also tended to become justifiably paranoid, and this was very true for the two Recon officers sent to investigate the warehouse where the monster's Ambassador might be being held captive. After getting their assignment (and after having cussed out their commander when the coms had been shut off, for assigning them what could very well be the most dangerous job for a Recon fairy since before the Crash), they'd double-checked absolutely every piece of equipment on their person, from their anti-shield visor filters to their com units to the airtight seals on their helmets to keep the sound in. Only when the two fairies were completely, utterly certain that their equipment wouldn't malfunction, beep, or do anything else to put them in danger while investigating a warehouse possibly full of violent human extremists, did they move in – even then, though, they were none too happy about it.
"I did not sign up for this troll dung."
The older of the two fairies, a sprite Lieutenant who had joined Recon shortly after the infamous Captain Holly Short had been reassigned permanently to Section Eight, rolled her eyes. Her partner for this particular mission had been extremely vocal in his protests since the moment they'd reached the surface, and her patience was wearing extremely thin by now.
"Private, will you shut up?" She snapped. "I get it, already – you don't want to do this. Guess what? I don't either. But this has the potential to be the worst disaster since the Techno Crash, and like it or not we're here now, so just shut your Frond-damned mouth."
The other officer shut up, thank Frond, and the sprite turned her attention fully back to the warehouse window in front of her. One careful application of the omni-tool in her hand had the window neatly unlocked and swinging open on thankfully silent hinges, and the two fairies were flitting inside as silently as a pair of ghosts.
The warehouse was a large one, a sprawling concrete building that was a veritable maze of hallways and rooms tucked into a relatively remote corner of the city that hadn't seen any substantial use in at least nine months. According to the files that their technical support had managed to get ahold of, the building belonged to one of the smaller shipping companies that operated out of the Dublin docks – and since it had been used too recently to be abandoned, the security systems were still theoretically online.
The very first thing the two fairies did was locate a video cable, and attach one of their fiber-optics to it. A brief minute later, and their technical support contacted them via their coms.
"Alright," the fairy said, "there's good news and bad news, Lieutenant. Good news is that although the security system here is pretty good, for human tech, it looks like a number of the cameras are offline for some reason, possibly for maintenance, so if you need to unshield for whatever reason, there's a lot of blind spots for you to take advantage of."
"And the bad news?"
"A lot of the cameras are offline. Those blind spots in human security are blind spots for me as well, so I won't be able to tell if there's a human there or not. And it looks like there're at least a dozen humans in the building right now, maybe more. If you're not careful enough..."
The Lieutenant groaned and muttered a few curses under her breath. "Of course… just our luck. Please tell me there are enough cameras online to get a layout of the building, at least?"
"Don't need the cameras for that." The techie sounded just barely shy of proud. "I've got the building schematics right here."
"Well, that's something, at least… got any clues to where a human prisoner might be being kept?"
A light tapping of fingers on keys echoed over the speakers for a few moments.
"Well, there're a few rooms with stationary guards you can check out. Two on the ground floor – one on the east side of the building, one in the north-west corner – and one not too far from where you are now, actually. Just head to left, take a couple of right turns, and you're there."
"Right." The Lieutenant turned to her partner. "Private, you go there first and then head for the north-west room on the bottom floor. I'll check out the room to the east."
She set off at a slow pace, walking quietly on the balls of her feet rather than flying. Though she would have preferred to use her wings, there was enough dust on the ground that the air displacement from might be noticed by human cameras or human eyes that might come wandering around the corner – and the last thing she wanted was for a human to get suspicious enough to try shooting at her. Her wings were flesh and blood, not metal – one shot and she would be down for the count.
The first room the Private had gone to scout out turned out to be some sort of storage room – there were boxes of food and medical supplies, according to him, but not much else despite the armed guard. Several minutes later, just as the Lieutenant was rounding the corner and finally found a staircase going down, he contacted her again, sounding a little breathless.
"Lieutenant, there's an entire room full of weapons down here!"
"What?"
"Weapons! Lots of them! Handguns, at least a couple of sniper rifles… I swear there's a machine gun in the corner over there… there's enough stuff in here to arm all these humans to the teeth!" The fairy sounded downright frantic.
"Calm down, Private. Don't give them a reason to use any of those weapons on you, and you'll be fine."
"Easy for you to say! You're not the one in an armory right now!"
The sprite sighed and was sorely tempted to unseal her helmet just so she could slap a hand to her forehead. Seriously, what was with all the nervous fairies nowadays? Once upon a time, the LEP was chock-full of no-nonsense, experienced officers – now it seemed all they had were these lily-livered elflings that were scared of their own damn shadows.
She wisely didn't say this out loud. After all, their technical support was technically one of these elflings, and he might very well take offense – and where would that leave her?
"Calm down, Private. I'm almost at the third room. We might get lucky, and find the Ambassador in here – and if we do, then all we have to do is stick around long enough to figure out the guard shifts and who all is in here."
"Like our luck is that good. We got stuck with this job, didn't we?"
"Resign from Recon when we get home, then, if you're so scared."
Silence was her only response, and the sprite rolled her eyes before moving on.
The room on the east of the ground floor was, according to the building schematics now being broadcasted to her helmet feed, nothing more than a broom closet. It was small, very small, without any real decent storage space and probably lacking severely in the furniture category as well – she wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't even a shelf in there. All in all, it wasn't a room you'd expect to have two armed guards watching over – nor a room you'd expect to apparently have three camera feeds fixed on. There were no blind spots anywhere near that door – complete camera coverage.
More than a little suspicious.
What was also more than a little suspicious was the angry-looking human emerging from the room as she arrived. He didn't look anything special – average build, brown hair, slightly redder skin than what was normal but not much else to set him apart.
But his expression… well, it could've given the patented Fowl glare, which she'd only ever seen once in her entire life, a real run for its money in a Most Terrifying Glare on the Planet contest.
The door to the room was swinging shut behind him, and by the looks of it, he hadn't locked it. There were two guards right there, one of them already approaching the door to close it all the way, and there was no camera inside the room to give her a clue of what might be inside.
So she did what any reasonable female Recon officer would do – she quickly attached the quick-acting sedative pads in one of her suit pockets to the backs of their necks before they could do anything, asked the techie to put the three cameras watching the door into a loop for a few minutes, and slipped inside the cell.
After their disastrous attempt at information-gathering, Frisk had gone back to the silent treatment when the wizard returned to their cell. They didn't speak a word, didn't even look at the man, and wouldn't have listened to him either if they hadn't been craning their ears for any sign of when he was considering going after monsters.
He'd visited their little cell twice more, now, and they could tell that he was becoming incredibly impatient. They didn't know how much longer he could wait before he carried out his threat to kill monsters, and they hadn't been able to come up with a way to escape, either. They were tied up far too tightly, the guards outside were too alert for them to sneak past them even if they had been able to move, and above all else, there was nothing in the room they could use to end the current timeline and LOAD.
They were more than a little frantic by now, to put it lightly. It was only a matter of time before the wizard decided enough was enough and started dusting people, and they had no way of warning anyone. None.
So the door to their cell apparently swinging open on its own, without the guards having noticed, was a welcome distraction.
Frisk blinked and squinted at the door. There was absolutely nothing there.
… Chara?
The ghost was quiet for several long moments, before finally speaking up.
*There's someone watching us. It almost feels like when we were on the Fowl estate, in the library…
Someone watching us. Someone we can't see.
Something unidentifiable – was it hope? Fear? – gripped their chest like a vice. A fairy?
True, they may have considered the fairies a threat not too long ago – and they still could possibly be a threat, even if they weren't behind the assassins – but still. Someone the guards couldn't see, and that the wizard knew nothing about.
Someone who could warn the monsters.
Mind made up and fueled by determined desperation, Frisk opened their mouth.
"Hello?" They whispered.
There was no answer. Not in words. But there was definitely someone there if the sudden scuffling of extremely quiet footsteps headed back to the door was any indication.
"Wait!"
The footsteps paused.
"You're a fairy, right?" Their voice was trembling – and they were trying so, so hard not to let it show, but they couldn't help it. Don't leave, not yet, please!
No reply. Well, not at first. But the footsteps, after a few moments, came a little closer, and a bit of dust flew up in front of them.
"Can..." Frisk gulped. "Can you leave a message for… for the monsters? Or the police?" When the silence stretched on, they continued with quiet desperation. "I-I know you don't want to be seen. I don't know why, but you do, and I'm not going to ask you to show yourself! You can j-just leave a written message, or a flash drive or something! You don't have to show yourself!"
They swallowed and tried very hard not to notice the way their eyes were stinging. "Please. They're going to… they're going to kill monsters! Innocent people that never did anything to them! That can't happen, not now, so p-please – "
A light touch on their shoulder silenced them, and they stared up at where they hoped the fairy's face was with a pleading expression.
Please, they thought. Please, I know you've been trying to hide up until now, but please, I don't have anyone else to turn to!
And then – a voice. A woman's voice, very quiet and slightly mechanical sounding, like it was coming out through a speaker.
"I can't guarantee anything, Ambassador," it said softly. "But I'll see what I can do." A pause. "Try to hold on a little while longer, alright?"
And then the soft touch on their shoulder was gone, and the door was swinging shut with a soft click, locking behind the unseen intruder.
"Try to hold on a little while longer, alright?"
Frisk swallowed, and the something with a stranglehold on their chest was most definitely becoming something akin to hope.
"I'll try," they whispered. "I'll try."
Oh look, a competent LEP fairy that isn't Holly, Foaly, No. 1, Qwan, or Commander Kelp! Incredible! Amazing!
In all honesty, though, I needed to include a competent non-main-character fairy sometime, right? It just wouldn't be fair to the rest of the LEP to paint them all as spineless cowards, no matter how fun that would be!
… May or may not be tentatively considering having this sprite Lieutenant be a reoccurring character. Not sure yet.
And now for worldbuilding, based on more questions from Jack54311: "Is it possible for Chara to talk to anyone other than Frisk, or is it only Frisk as a result of their souls being tied together? I mean, they're a ghost, and so is Napstablook. Also, is there a difference between human ghosts and monster ghosts? How do they come to be?"
No, Chara is not able to talk to anyone other than Frisk as they are right now. Because human ghosts are pretty much nothing more than a soul, their capabilities of doing normal human things like picking up objects and talking are pretty limited. A really really STRONG ghost might manage to, say, whisper in someone's ear really quietly, or kick a pebble around, but without having a body of their own, they can't do much else. And Chara's soul, though stronger than most, is still damaged enough to put a damper on any attempts they might make to talk to someone on their own. The reason that Chara's able to talk to Frisk at all is because of the link between their two souls - without that link, Frisk wouldn't be able to hear Chara at all, even if they tried to talk. So in order to speak to anyone else at this point, Chara would need to possess Frisk's body and use their mouth to talk, which they generally only do if they view it as an emergency or unless Frisk offers (such as if they have a chocolate pastry or something that they want Chara to try.)
In this 'verse, the main difference between human ghosts and monster ghosts is that human ghosts are very much dead and monster ghosts are very much alive. Basically, monster ghosts like Blooky or Mettaton are monsters with characteristics similar to that of human ghosts, namely intangibility, flight, and the incapability of touching some normal matter unless it was made specifically for them to do so (like Blooky's ghost sandwich), whereas human ghosts are, well, dead human souls that are still lingering after their death. As for how each kind of ghost comes to be... well, monster ghosts are born, just like any other monster. So long as one of a monster pair trying for a child is a ghost monster, the child will have a good chance of being a ghost monster. Human ghosts are, well, dead humans whose souls refuse to move on to wherever human souls go after death, generally because they have unfinished business. In Chara's case, their unfinished business is getting the monsters their happy ending on the surface... which means they won't be moving on for a while, if at all. It depends on what Chara views as a "happy ending."