Uploading this a little early for you guys, since I'm going to be otherwise occupied tomorrow!
And guys guys guys listen there's an Artemis Fowl movie that's going to be coming out this summer, and THERE'S A TRAILER FOR IT OUT NOW. AND IT IS EPIC. I ORDER THEE TO GO WATCH IT NOW AND BE AMAZED AT IT'S EPICNESS (while praying along with me that Disney doesn't fuck this up like they fucked up Black Cauldron. Fingers crossed, everyone.)
Ten days. It had been ten days since the parley at the Fowl Estate, and things were almost distressingly normal.
Following their frankly somewhat unnerving foray on the manor's grounds, Frisk's days had quickly gone back to normal, if you discounted the contingency of guards provided by the local police that followed them around almost everywhere in public. They'd gone to several political meetings (assuring the people present there that yes, Frisk and the monsters were fine, thank you for your concern, don't worry, everything's on schedule still), and had begun assisting with the fostering program that was thankfully ready to put into action. They helped monsters move out of their homes in segregated communities and into the homes of the human families that had volunteered to take them in, smoothed over misunderstandings and awkward moments, and by the end of that week four monster families had been situated in formerly human-only communities and were getting used to their new neighborhood.
If it weren't for the fairies, Frisk might have thought that the kidnapping and the subsequent rescue-slash-second abduction had never happened. As it was, though, the fairies were definitely there and, in a surprising show of consideration for a species that had apparently had no qualms about rooting through people's very private memories (yes, they were still more than a little upset about that, and for once Frisk wasn't feeling particularly forgiving), would sometimes shimmer into existence somewhere where Frisk or their little group of monsters could see them and give them a brief nod before disappearing again.
Frisk almost wished they wouldn't, willingness to show they were abiding by their own terms or not. If all they had was Flowey's mutterings whenever a fairy was nearby, it would be easier to pretend that the kidnapping and the events following it had just been a figment of their imagination. Unfortunately, though, Frisk couldn't afford to forget any of it. Not their abduction, not the man who'd done the interrogating after said abduction, and most certainly not the fact that the fairies and their human allies had access to one of their best-kept secrets. There were far too many things at stake – and the silence on behalf of both HuRg and the fairies was starting to get… unnerving.
On the one hand, silence on both accounts was probably a good thing. Silence on HuRg's behalf meant that no one had been attacked and that the group was laying low, at least for now. Silence on behalf of the fairies meant that they were, in theory, abiding by the deal that they'd made with Frisk and Toriel, and only watching them when they were out in public where none of the fairies seemed willing to show even a glimmer of their person to people not already in the know.
But, on the other hand, silence could also mean that something big was coming. The calm before a storm. Silence on HuRg's behalf? An attack in the making, perhaps, or another abduction plan… or maybe something much, much worse. Frisk had met many, many people like their interrogator over the course of the Resets – extremists like O'Reilly (whom one of the fairies had, when Frisk had asked, confirmed that the man's name was indeed O'Reilly), extremists that had a reason for their own personal philosophies, rarely gave up just because of what amounted to a tiny setback. And O'Reilly utterly loathed the monsters – they'd been able to see it in his eyes. One way or another, he would be making a move against the monsters.
And once he does… how on Earth can you stop someone who can literally force anyone in the world to hurt you?
Which brought up their second pressing concern. The fairies, and Artemis Fowl.
So far, the fairies had kept to their agreement. Flowey hadn't caught a single sliver of vibration inside their hotel room, and save for the fairies that appeared briefly enough to show the monsters they were there before disappearing, Frisk had hardly seen hide or hair of any of them.
Ordinarily, this wouldn't have worried them – if anything, it might have even reassured them, to see that the fairies were keeping their word despite everything they'd done. But these were no ordinary circumstances. After all, before now, no-one had ever found out about the Resets except the people that already knew or that Frisk wanted to know, and there was a good reason for that. The last thing they wanted was to give someone else leverage that they could hold over Frisk's head and cause trouble for the monsters… and Artemis Fowl had gotten that leverage and passed it on to the fairies as well. They'd half-expected to get a threatening email or phone call from the Irishman, and had been so terrified of actually receiving one that they'd had a small heart attack every time their phone or email notifications went off. But, instead of incriminating emails or calls, Frisk had gotten nothing from Artemis Fowl, or any of the fairies they'd already been introduced to.
They could deal with the silence from HuRg. After all, they had a basic idea of what they wanted already, and what lengths they were willing to go to get it. But the fairies? They didn't know if the silence was just them digesting the information, if it was them scheming to kill them, or whether or not they were just planning on ignoring their experiences. And without knowing what they wanted, or what they were going to do…
Frisk shivered where they were sitting on the floor next to where their laptop was charging and glanced nervously out the window.
I wish they would just do something already, they thought, miserably.
*Hey! Don't jinx us!
Frisk took a second look at their earlier thought and winced. Chara was absolutely right – what had they been thinking, thinking something like that? Their luck was already horrid, they didn't need to call down their dubious karma on their head!
Then there was a flicker of heat haze outside, on the fire escape, and Frisk realized with a sinking heart that they already had.
"Hello?" They said.
The haze shimmered for a moment, and then a small humanoid shape was settling into reality as if it had always been there. A small green and familiar humanoid shape, wings folding neatly behind her and worried eyes peering at them through a raised visor.
"Hello, Ambassador," Lieutenant Crane greeted them softly.
Frisk hesitated, then gave her a careful nod. The fairy reached up and pulled off her helmet, tucking it under one arm and nervously brushing a strand of pale hair behind one ear.
"Can… Can I come in?"
"Why?" The word came out a bit more sharply than Frisk intended it to, and the green-skinned woman winced, putting up her hands in a gesture of surrender – revealing, Frisk couldn't help but notice with a touch of surprise, that the lady's weapons belt was empty. She didn't have a single gun or baton with her, not a one.
"I just… can I talk to you? And Her Majesty, if she's here?"
Toriel was, in fact, in the bathroom, removing fur from the drain after taking a shower. Frisk narrowed their eyes at the fairy distrustfully.
Chara?
The ghost was silent for several long moments.
*… She's clean.
"Mom," Frisk called, after another moment, "we've got a visitor…"
Toriel emerged from the bathroom in a purple bathrobe, looking puzzled. When the monster saw the fairy standing awkwardly outside the window, the confusion was replaced with distaste.
"Oh."
Crane flinched. Toriel studied her for a moment, then sighed.
"Is this an urgent matter?"
The sprite shook her head mutely.
"Then allow me to get dressed first if you would. Please let her in, Frisk – we wouldn't want someone spotting her from below."
By the time the Queen of Monsters had exited the bathroom again in her usual attire, Crane had settled, kneeling, on the floor several arms-lengths away from where Frisk was still sitting, shoulders hunched and eyes averted in a sheepish expression. Toriel sank down to join her adopted child, and, when the awkward silence got a little too much for Frisk to handle, they finally spoke.
"Mom, this is… Lieutenant Crane, right?"
The fairy nodded, finally taking her eyes off the floor and meeting Toriel's gaze. "Lieutenant Ivy Crane, Your Majesty."
"You are one of the fairies that broke Frisk out of the cell they were being kept in, then. And one of the ones that escorted them to Tara for their… mind-wipe."
The last word was positively dripping with disdain, and if Frisk hadn't still felt distinctly wary at finally having a fairy actually physically here and here to talk, they might have felt sorry for the emerald-hued officer.
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Why are you here?"
Crane sucked in a deep breath, then straightened, squaring her shoulders and visibly bracing herself, as if expecting to be hit. "I'm here to apologize, Your Majesty. To you and to Frisk."
"An apology has already been made to us," Toriel said, frigidly.
"By Fowl, not by a fairy. It's… it's not fair to hide behind a human when it's partially my fault that this happened in the first place. If I hadn't followed my orders and helped bring you back to Tara… you might not have been wiped at all."
Another deep breath and the Lieutenant leaned forward into a bow. "So, as a member of the LEPrecon unit, I want to officially apologize to both of you for my part in this whole mess of a situation."
Silence reigned for what felt like an eternity. Then, Chara whispered quietly in the back of Frisk's head, and Frisk straightened, frowning.
"Do you actually mean that?" They asked, then added, a touch bitterly, "After all, hasn't the mind-wipe been standard procedure for centuries?"
"It has," she confirmed quietly, without lifting her head, "but that doesn't mean that everyone thinks it's right. The idea's never sat well with me at all… if I'd had a choice in the matter, I would have preferred we negotiate with you right from the get-go, rather than erase our encounter and then call it a day. But… well, you said it. It's been done for centuries – no human can be allowed to know of the People."
"Then why hasn't Artemis Fowl been mind-wiped?" Frisk snapped. "Last I checked, he still has his memories! Has had them for years, if what he said is true!"
"He was."
What?
"When he was thirteen years old," Crane continued, "almost two years after he first made contact with us*, his memories of the People were erased, and the wipe took." The fairy finally raised her head a little and gave Frisk a weak smile. "He got his memories back only six months later, and nobody ever tried to have him wiped again… though the idea did come up a few more times."
Frisk stared at her, wide-eyed, and Toriel shifted, warm eyes going cold as ice. "And why would the fairy people try to erase the memories of one of their own allies?"
*Yeah, why the actual fuck?
"He couldn't even be called an ally back then, Your Majesty." The officer's eyes lowered back down to her lap, where her hands had been folded carefully, one on top of the other. "The Artemis Fowl from back then wouldn't be someone you'd recognize today. He was far from an upstanding citizen – he was a criminal, a mastermind who was all too happy to exploit the fairies to get an edge over his opponents. He was a threat."
"… is that why you wiped me, too?" Frisk asked, quietly. "Because I was a threat?"
"You were wiped because you might become a threat if you knew about the People." The fairy's voice had turned bitter. "And because the Council was paranoid. They're scared. The last thing they want is a second Artemis Fowl after he caused so much trouble for them."
"… they're really that scared of humans?" The words slipped out of their mouth sounding… strangely meek. They hadn't meant to sound so meek, but… scared? Scared when they had those impressive weapons that could take down a bunch of humans easy-peasy, humans that couldn't see them?
"… there are, at most, only a million fairies alive today," Crane said. "Fairies can only have children once every twenty years. Most fairy weapons are non-lethal, and the few that aren't are either outlawed or too expensive to create in bulk. Fairies don't really fight amongst themselves. And our magic isn't unlimited. It takes years to train a good warlock, and fairies that don't pay for that training with scholarships, or get it as a member of the Lower Elements Police force, rarely have the gold needed to pay for that training. On the other hand..."
Her hands clenched into fists. "There are a little over six billion humans alive today. There were about seven billion before the Techno Crash. Humans breed like rabbits, and make lethal weaponry that probably made Opal Koboi drool with envy. And almost every country has some sort of militia to defend its citizens and fight wars with, and you humans have fought so many wars against each other for stupid things like race, skin color, and religion, that I don't really even really want keep count of them all."
The fairy finally straightened up fully, looking Frisk full in the face. "We're outnumbered and outgunned, and humanity is more violent than any fairy that's not a part of the goblin-dwarf turf war can ever hope to be. Can you really blame the Council for being scared?"
Silence. Frisk stared at the fairy, shocked, eyes wide as they digested this new information.
Outnumbered and outgunned… a million fairies with laser stun guns against billions of humans with bombs and missiles and biological weapons and nukes… Good God, just the thought of those odds made them feel sick to their stomach. Could they stand up to those kinds of odds? Could they stand up against billions of people with a million people or less at their back, stare down billions of gun barrels or bombs in a war? Could anyone?
*...Not without LOADing a couple hundred times, at least.
Chara's voice was grim, and Frisk gulped at the resonating absoluteness of the ghost's voice.
With those kinds of odds, the only way to win any kind of conflict would be to hide everything. Hide their people, hide their cities, hide their weaknesses to avoid them being exploited…
Just like we've been hiding knowledge about the monsters' souls.
Frisk had been hung up on the differences between what monsters would do and fairies would do ever since the mind-wipe, ever since the parley. The fairies hid and skulked about in the darkness – they'd never come out from underground like the monsters, intruded privacy in ways the monsters never could, even used their magic in ways that the monsters would never think of as right.
But could they really afford to judge them like that, when they doubted that even the nicest of monsters would remain so with the threat of potential extermination breathing down their neck every second of the day?
*Even Dad wouldn't hesitate with those sorts of odds. After all, humans are the worst kind of scum – if you hesitated, you'd die.
Chara's bitter words dragged them back into the present, and Frisk frowned.
"Does the Council really believe that humanity would do that…?" They asked Crane hesitantly. "While it's true humans can be violent, we're not all like that."
"You'd have to ask them about that, not me," the sprite said, grimacing. "I know that not all humans are like that. LEP sees more of the surface than your average civilian, and definitely sees more of it than the Council does. How can they know they're wrong unless they see it for themselves?"
Frisk opened their mouth – and then there was a soft beeping from Crane's helmet.
The fairy blinked, then quickly picked up the helmet and slotted it back onto her head. Most of her face disappeared behind the visor, leaving only her eyes visible as they narrowed.
"Lieutenant Crane online. What's going on?"
Whatever was being said on the other line, Frisk couldn't hear it, but they watched, heart pounding, as what little of the emerald skin they could see through the reflective black of the helmet turned a pale mint-green as blood rushed from the fairy's face.
"D'Arvit," Crane hissed. "Frisk, Your Majesty, you need to get to the hospital downtown fast."
"What?" Frisk squeaked.
"What has happened?" Toriel demanded.
The fairy's eyes narrowed to slits.
"Humanity's Resurgence," she said flatly. "There's been another attack."
If Frisk had been able to, they would have flown to the hospital. Unfortunately, the only set of wings they could possibly use belonged to Crane, and she wouldn't exactly be inconspicuous if she were to drop them off at the hospital's front door, and so Frisk had to make do with a hastily called cart. Their police guards had been all too happy to give them a ride, once Frisk had told them that a friend of theirs had gotten a call about an attack on a couple of monsters, and within an hour they were bursting into the hospital lobby.
"Frisk!"
A large shape covered in icy feathers slammed into them like a boulder falling on top of their head (something they'd, unfortunately, experienced a few times underground – cave-ins were not fun), and suddenly Frisk's arms were filled with blubbering Snowdrake.
"I heard you got attacked," they managed around a mouthful of frost.
"We came as quickly as we could," Toriel said urgently. "Are you two alright?"
Two humans and three monsters a pair of ice birds and… something similar to them but made of some sort of dripping white fluid? Crane had said, brow furrowing, The monsters are fine, but the human couple they were with, not so much. The terrorists had guns.
"We're fine, but Mr. and Mrs. Winnick are in surgery," Snowdrake's dad rumbled, hopping over and gently using a clawed foot to tug on one of his hysterical son's wings. "Son, let go, you're smothering them."
And then Frisk's armful of blubbering Snowdrake was gone, and they could breathe again.
*Dear God, thank you.
"What happened to them? The Winnicks?" Frisk asked, ignoring Chara's comment for the moment while making a mental note to reprimand them later. It was perfectly reasonable for Snowdrake to be upset, after all.
The couple stepped between them and the monsters, and they were hit several times when they refused to stand down. They should live, since hospitals have started using monster food.
"Shot," Mr. Drake said, breath hitching. "Several times. T-they stood between us and the bullets."
"They'll be okay," Frisk reassured him. "They'll be okay, Mr. Drake, I promise. Why did the shooters go after you two?"
The terrorists wore masks but… they were definitely members of Humanity's Resurgence. They're on the run for now - the dripping monster chased them off - but the human police are giving chase, and with any luck they'll be caught soon.
"They were looking for you, Frisk," Snowdrake warbled frantically. "They said – they said –"
Frisk, be careful. The men were looking for you – they said…
"They said to tell you," Mr. Drake said quietly, "that their boss had a message for you."
"Your time's up, Ambassador. I gave you a chance, and you wasted it. Now, all the murderers die."
… remember how I said last chapter that some things only get better after getting worse? *laughs nervously
Anyway, yeah, Crane finally has more screen time (yay!), and O'Reilly's finally making another move (boo!). Apparently, he's decided that the best way to do that is by declaring outright war on the monsters in Dublin. This is gonna SUCK for poor Frisk and Co.
*"Almost two years after he first made contact with us:" Artemis made first contact with the LEP, through Holly, on Christmas Eve the year he turned 12 years old. I looked up his birthday earlier this month (while doing research for Ignition) and it turns out it's on September 1st. That means that technically Artemis was only 12 for a couple months before the kidnapping in the first book. The second book starts when Artemis was 13, which means it had to have been at least ten months since the last book, and considering that Butler had to avoid a lot of tourists while in Paris in the second book, I can only assume that meant the weather was decently fair, so it was probably closer to 14 months from the end of book 1 to there, at the absolute minimum. Artemis was still 13 during the third book (so far as I know), and since Artemis Sr. was being fitted for a high-tech prosthetic limb (aka a very expensive and time-consuming one to make) at that point and prosthetic limbs take anywhere from 2-6 months for the patient to have them finally fitted, it's reasonable to guess that the events of book 3 take place about 19 months after Artemis kidnapped Holly. For the sake of this fanfic, that's the timeframe of those events. (Don't take my words as gospel though, I could very well be wrong in my calculations somewhere. Math is not my strong suit.)