*Explodes out of the Void with a screech * I'M ALIVE!
Sorry it took so long for me to get this chapter done for you, guys. Inspiration has been lacking, and my current classes have HUGE workloads. FUN workloads, at least, but still huge. It might be best to assume that each new chapter is going to take a while, considering the pattern that's been developing with weeks between updates…
(On another note, something a little different from the norm – song recommendation! I found this song on YouTube a few days ago that I've been listening to non-stop, and I wanna share it! It's called Godhunter, by Aviators. Give it a listen!)
"Alright, Lieutenant. Keep your eyes peeled – we don't know when these humans are gonna make a move again, and the last thing we want is to be caught off guard when O'Reilly storms in."
There was a tense affirmative from the other end of the line, and with a sigh, Holly flicked off her com unit. She scanned the office around her once, more out of habit than anything else, then leaned back in the armchair she was sitting in, a grimace drawing her lips taut.
It had been two days since the attack on those monsters and their human friends. Two days since Holly had commandeered Artemis's Anonymous account to name-drop the motel that the escaped gunmen were hiding at, along with their room number, names, and credit card numbers just for good measure. (Artemis had been sardonically amused at her thoroughness, and had commented that maybe she should create an Anonymous account of her own if she was going to keep secretly contacting human law enforcement.) Two days since all four of the shooters had been apprehended by a squad of Dublin police officers, locked up in cells and interrogated with every technique short of torture, only for the police… and later Holly herself, when she snuck in to try to mesmerize the answers out of the perps… to not find out a single thing about the men's leader.
The humans had been keeping at the interrogations, but Holly didn't have any hopes for them finding anything. If a fairy with plenty of magic running through her veins couldn't mesmerize the answers out of them, then that simply meant that they had next to no information in their heads to begin with. By the looks of things, these gunmen hadn't even had to be mesmerized to agree to take this little "job" of theirs – and apparently, they had volunteered.
Holly hadn't thought much about it since Humanity's Resurgence had started making a move, but in retrospect, she really shouldn't have been surprised that not all of the humans in the organization were mesmerized goons. Some humans feared what they didn't understand, and when they didn't fear it, they hated it. And this was exactly the kind of group that would attract humans like those like flies to amber, and people like those probably wouldn't need to be mesmerized into doing O'Reilly's will.
The captain's thought process was interrupted by the sound of the lock on the apartment door clicking as a key was turned in the slot, and she immediately switched on her shield. This may have been Artemis's apartment, and therefore one of the safest places for a fairy to crash on the surface, but that didn't mean that other people couldn't get ahold of a key.
Thankfully, it was Artemis himself, looking more than a little tired, who stepped through the door, and not some random human, and so as soon as the door was shut and locked, Holly let herself shimmer back into the visible spectrum.
"Hey, Mud Boy," she greeted. "Rough day?"
Artemis nodded, hanging his house key around his neck and tucking it under the collar of his shirt. "Unfortunately, the world does not stand still for those in the middle of dealing with an impending catastrophe, and I had a meeting with a few other UN representatives to attend."
"Makes me wonder why you bothered trying for the position in the first place," Holly snarked.
The Irishman sniffed. "Trust me, I wonder that sometimes as well. For all the position has earned me some prestige and resources that make helping the People avoid notice less complicated, it doesn't leave me with much time to actively help the People when they are in peril. I'm considering stepping down once the next election comes around." He took off his jacket and hung it on a hook by the door, and then strode across the room to retrieve his laptop from his desk. "Has Foaly had any luck on the information gathering front?"
Holly shook her head. "I don't know – he hasn't contacted us with anything to do with Humanity's Resurgence for days now."f
Well, not with information at least. He had called Holly once, a couple days ago, to cackle about the Ambassador calling Humanity's Resurgence HuRg of all things. Considering how mature Frisk was most of the time, the frankly childish acronym had caught her off guard… though she had to admit it had been funny, once she'd gotten over her exasperation at Foaly breaking his self-imposed radio silence for something so minor. Still, that wasn't something Artemis would be interested in hearing about, so no point in mentioning it.
Artemis hmmed, his brow furrowing as he flipped open his laptop and turned it on. "That's… rather worrying, actually. Normally he would not have so much trouble finding information on a human – the last time it was even remotely as difficult for him as it is now was when we were dealing with Minerva*, and that hardly turned out well."
"Either he's having trouble or he's been leaving it to his techies," Holly agreed, "and either way, that doesn't exactly bode well."
As if to refute her statement, her com unit beeped, alerting her to a call coming in on Foaly's line. Holly blinked, then answered the call.
"Going to crow more about the Ambassador's immature nickname for Humanity's Resurgance again, Foaly?" Holly said. "Because if you are, I'm muting you."
Artemis raised an eyebrow at her, but didn't ask the question obviously on the tip of his tongue. On the other end of the line, Foaly made a sound somewhere between a huff and a snicker.
"If only, Holly, if only. No, I've finally got some information on Mr. Luis O'Reilly to share with you and the Mud Boy, if he's there."
"Yup, he's here," Holly confirmed.
"Good. Tell him to plug in his fiber optic, I've got some files to share."
Holly rolled her eyes – as if Artemis couldn't hear Foaly, what with him having a police communicator now – and nodded to the Mud Boy, whose lips quirked up at the corners in a subtle smile. And who had already plugged in the fiber optic.
"I already have it plugged in, Foaly," he said "And I must say, you've been loosing your touch if it took you twelve days to track down this man."
At this point, Foaly would have normally whinnied something about being unappreciated or some friends you are, but this time… he didn't sound the least bit insulted. In fact, when he spoke again, he was uncharacteristically serious – and with good reason, because the words that came out of his mouth had Holly sitting bolt upright in alarm.
"Either I'm losing my touch, or there's a human out there with technology almost on par with that of the People that isn't Artemis."
"What?" Holly blurted.
"I thought the People are at least several decades ahead of humans, technologically speaking?" Artemis said, frowning.
"We are," Foaly confirmed. "But that's only humanity as a whole, not individual humans. You're proof of that enough, Fowl – how many times have you upgraded that laptop of yours so you can keep up with me? All it takes is one human being ahead of the rest… and while me and the techies down here were looking for info, we kept stumbling across firewalls, anti-virus programs, all kinds of defenses that took ages for us to get through, much longer than it should have - if I hadn't known better, I'd swear that some of those programs were practically alive. And considering that most of these programs were hiding information that was definitely very private, very personal information… I'd say it's someone O'Reilly knows, and not just coincidence."
"And you don't have any idea of who this person could be?"
"Not a one," the centaur confirmed, and Holly could practically hear the scowl in his voice. "I thought I managed to track down an IP address for one of them – it was being actively updated as I was trying to hack it – but it turned out to be a false lead. Whoever this person is, they're good."
"Perhaps I should try my hand at tracking them down?" Artemis suggested.
"Don't think we have the time for that, Mud Boy. Besides, we got other things to worry about – like the info I found on O'Reilly, for instance." Several files popped up on Artemis's laptop, and he opened them in quick succession, frowning at the documents. Foaly began to summarize what he'd found as the files were opened, sounding, surprisingly, even more serious than he had before.
"Our terrorist friend was born in upperstate New York to your average American family – two parents, younger sibling he hasn't talked to in years, yada-yada, all that fun stuff - as Luis Rivera. Gets married at 22 to Mary Heinsworth, they move to the Mt. Ebott area two years later, and a year after that they have a kid – a daughter, Diana – and they all live together as a nice, idyllic family for fourteen years." The centaur grimaced. "Then, a couple months after Diana's fourteenth birthday, she goes missing. The local police search for her, but they can't find anything. No signs of a kidnapping, no body – it's like she just up and disappeared off the face of the planet. They don't even know if she's dead or not. Mrs. Rivera moves on, after a couple of years, but O'Reilly doesn't, and eventually their marriage falls apart. Mary stays in the Ebott area, O'Reilly moves overseas to Dublin and changes his last name to his mother's maiden name in the process. He lives a more or less normal life for some years, save for the occasional vacation with a suspiciously unspecified destination and making weekly visits to local psychiatrists and therapists."
"And then the monsters surface," Artemis said, quietly, "and with them, they bring the bodies of six children that fell into the Underground and were killed. And one of them is Diana."
Holly winced. Oh no…
"Yeah," Foaly agreed, scowling. "I don't think O'Reilly ever really got over Diana disappearing. After the international news broadcast that showed the dead kids, O'Reilly stops coming to his therapy sessions and starts disappearing for long periods of time, and is often seen with people with heavily anti-monster sentiments, including members of the recently formed Humanity's Resurgence. Then he vanishes completely, and Humanity's Resurgence starts going down the road of becoming the terrorists we all know and could really do without today."
Artemis frowned, steepling his fingers. "We need to tell Frisk about this..." he murmured.
"Judging by some of those memories I saw before I stopped looking through them, they probably already guessed something like that," Foaly pointed out. "They were asking questions about the kids when he was trying to interrogate them."
"They might not know for certain, however. This could at least give them confirmation."
"Should we really be telling them about this at all, though?" Holly protested. "They're just a..." She stopped before she could continue her sentence, and swallowed.
Just a kid, she'd been about to say. Except… they weren't just a kid. They were a kid who'd hiked their way through an underground kingdom of monsters all alone, befriended said monsters, and had come out of the Underground as their Ambassador – and they had to have already known about the kids that had fallen before them, otherwise they wouldn't have helped the monsters apologize for their actions in the first place. And that was without the time loops they seemed to have lived through being added into the equation. Frisk had both seen and maybe done a lot worse than seeing or hearing about a dead kid.
"D'Arvit," she muttered. "Okay. Lieutenant Crane's still on duty, I'll have her pass on the information if she gets the chance. Heck, I'll stop by myself to tell them if have to."
"That would probably be for the best," Artemis agreed grimly. "In the meantime… Foaly, do you have any idea where Humanity's Resurgence has set up shop, so to speak?"
"Not a one. Wish I could say otherwise, but…"
"Then we'll have to try tracking them down manually. Can you start looking into where O'Reilly was disappearing to before he went underground?"
"I haven't been able to find anything about those trips outside of Dublin," Foaly admitted. "They're encrypted by the same person that encrypted his files. But I can start trying to track him from that warehouse we found Frisk in, and see where we go from there."
"That will do for now. Let me know what you find. In the meantime… I'll see what I can find about this mysterious benefactor of O'Reilly's that hid his information so thoroughly. If nothing else, I might stumble across other encrypted files that could shed some light onto the situation."
"Yeah, yeah, good luck on that. If I couldn't manage it…"
As the now familiar bickering between the two businesses began (finally, something normal for once), Holly sealed her helmet to cut out the noise, and turned on the com unit again.
"Lieutenant Crane, it's Captain Short. I have some information we need to pass on to the Ambassador, if you have the time."
There was a moment of quiet… and when the Lieutenant answered back, she sounded more than a little stressed, and her next words had Holly rolling her eyes up towards the heavens and silently wondering just how many gods she'd angered in a previous lifetime to have all this troll dung dumped on her in such quick succession.
"Sorry Captain… but we have a bit of a situation here."
"Thanks, m'am, we'll make sure you're kept up to date about what's going on. Please be careful."
The door closed, and Frisk looked down at the paper in their hand and crossed off yet another name from the list.
"Alright," they muttered. "We're down to the last four people in this neighborhood, and the police are going around informing everyone else we've missed."
"Thank God," Flowey complained from where his pot was tucked against their chest. "I'm getting sick of seeing all those scared faces whenever you start talking. It was funny at first, but now it's getting boring."
There was a pointed cough, and Flowey froze, then slowly turned his head to look up at the disapproving face of Toriel – and several of their police escort. "Um. I plead the fifth?"
Chara snorted.
"We're in the wrong country for that, Flowey," Frisk muttered. They raised their voice. "Sorry about that. I did warn you guys that Flowey's not the nicest monster around…"
"He's always like this?" One of the officers asked, wrinkling her nose.
"He's usually like this," Frisk confirmed with a sheepish nod. "It's an, um, personal issue of his. He can be nice if he wants to, he just doesn't want to except under, er, extenuating circumstances."
"How extenuating, exactly?"
They winced. "Um…"
"Let's leave it at that for now, officers," Toriel interjected, finally turning her disapproving gaze from the nervous-looking flower monster. "If we were to begin talking about Flowey's myriad of bad habits, we would be here all day and need an alphabetized list. And I don't believe we have time for such things."
Frisk nodded, and the whole group started down the street.
The last two days had been… busy, to say the least. The police had been working overtime all over the city, trying to track down O'Reilly or any of his fellow terrorists and minions. So far, none of them had had any luck. Attempting to track down any information on O'Reilly himself had fallen flat – apparently, someone, probably O'Reilly, had encrypted the files, and then put them behind layers and layers of firewalls that none of the police's technological consultants could break through. So instead, the police were having to go by word of mouth, and the search had slowed down to a crawl.
In light of all that… and the fact that Frisk felt they were at least partially responsible for this whole situation… they had volunteered to take some of the load off of the police's shoulders and warn some of the families involved in the fostering program about the danger they could very well be in.
They'd already been to eight other houses already. Eight houses that might be in the crosshairs of HuRg's impending extermination campaign. Eight houses full of innocent people that had never done anything wrong, just existed. Eight families who would probably be staying up tonight, paranoid and scared that a man with a gun would come breaking down their front door and shoot them dead.
All because of them.
*Okay, stop it right there, Frisk. Last I checked, it wasn't us attacking monsters minding their own business. Save the self-loathing for later.
They grimaced. Chara may have been right, but… they still couldn't help but think that this was at least partially their fault. If they'd been more careful, if they'd actually LOADed like they considered doing when in that cell under O'Reilly's metaphorical thumb…
*Then we'd probably end up in this whole mess all over again. No way a human like him would put off attacking monsters just to get ahold of little ol' us.
That was… unfortunately true. All that cold hate in O'Reilly's eyes would need an outlet eventually, regardless of how Frisk was actually involved in the situation. That didn't mean that they weren't at least a little bit to blame, if only because those families had lost their peace of mind because of them.
*Better scared than dead, right? Stop moping about it.
Frisk sighed, then tilted their head back to look up at the sky. It was reasonably clear, for once, few clouds and no sheets of rain or cold drizzle.
There were also no fairies in sight, which was expected but still a little unnerving. And that observation tugged their train of thought down a different track, something they weren't entirely happy about.
The fairies are actually trying to cooperate.
Well, Crane was, at least. And so was Captain Short, apparently, since those men holed up at the motel had been caught by evening thanks to another Anonymous email – just like she'd said she would. Frisk hadn't actually talked to any of the fairies since the negotiation at the fairy roses, so they had no idea if the others keeping an eye on them were doing the same as their commanding officer, but… regardless, at least some of them were trying.
And yet… for the first time in a long time, Frisk wasn't sure if their slowly budding trust was warranted.
Generally, if people wronged the monsters or Frisk themselves and tried to make it up to them later, Frisk was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt after a while. They might not trust them for a while, but they'd at least try to give them another chance, and they generally didn't feel any regret for doing so. But the fairies… for some reason trying to do the same for the fairies as they had always done – forgive but never forget – just didn't sit well with them. And for once, it had nothing to do with the monsters, and everything to do with Frisk themselves, because the whole reason they were so reluctant to trust them in the first place was because of that mind-wipe.
Holding a grudge of any sort was new for them. New and not something that they felt they should be doing, at that. Holding grudges had never gotten them anywhere in life, not before falling into the mountain and not afterward in any timeline, only made things harder for the monsters, in the long run, because it meant they didn't always think things through.
They knew that, intellectually, but … for once they couldn't help but hold onto their distaste. Despite what they now knew about the fairies, thanks to Crane's explanation, despite them helping the monsters now. And Frisk wasn't used to feeling something so selfish.
*For God's sake, Frisk, it's not selfish.
It is selfish! Frisk countered immediately. Hostility never gets us anywhere, and yet every time I even think about the fairies or talk to one, I just – it's not right.
*It's never hurt me any.
Says the ghost who's been holding a grudge against humanity for the last couple of centuries.
* . . .
Frisk grimaced again, and reached up to knead their forehead in the hopes of the pounding headache going away. This wasn't the first time that they'd argued with Chara about this little problem of theirs over the last forty-eight hours, but that wasn't making it any easier. They couldn't remember the last time they'd had a serious disagreement with the ghost taking up space in their head, and it was more than a little discombobulating.
Arguing isn't going to get us anywhere, they thought miserably. I know Chara doesn't see things the way I do, but… god, it's so frustrating.
Frustrating enough that when one of their police escort reached for her buzzing walkie-talkie, they barely registered it until the woman called for them to stop.
"Ambassador, we've got a situation. I think you need to hear this."
Frisk looked up, startled. "What?"
The woman flicked a switch on the device, and upped the volume several decibels – and Undyne's voice was echoing out of the tinny speaker.
"- one, come in! This is Undyne, at the shopping plaza at 2nd and Dunwich Street. HuRg's making a move, repeat, HuRg's finally making a move! Get all your asses over here now!"
Frisk practically felt their heart stop, and without thinking they grabbed the walkie-talkie from the policewoman.
"Undyne," they said urgently. "Undyne, it's Frisk, what's going on?"
"Oh, hey! Listen, sorry, but you need to stay out of this. We're not losing you to those losers again, NGAAAH!"
"Undyne," Frisk pleaded. "At least tell me what's going on, please."
"Okay, okay. Fine. As long as you promise not to run into here as soon as you hear. You're just as awesome as I am, but you're still a wimp, you're only going to get hurt."
They swallowed, throat dry.
"… I promise."
"You better keep that promise, wimp! We've got a credible bomb threat over here. One of my squad found one in the fountain, and the doors on some of the shops have been jammed and the people inside can't get out – and those things are primed to blow as soon as any of us try to open the doors!"
It felt like every breath was roaring in their ears through a long tunnel. And everything else was muffled, as if heard from far away through thick fog.
Bomb threat. Bombs, and people can't get away or be brought to safety.
This is… this is all my fault, again. People are going to die because of me.
They mutely handed the police officer her walkie talkie, and she immediately started barking orders over the airwaves. Frisk barely paid attention to any of it. Instead… instead, they looked down at Flowey.
People can't get in or out to get rid of the bombs… so what if we have someone go in that can?
"Oh no," Flowey said, seeing their expression. "Frisk, I don't want to get blown up! And I know almost nothing about how to get rid of bombs except for blowing them up! I am not tunneling in there!"
"Flowey," Frisk pleaded.
"What happens if HuRg finds out about me being involved, huh?" Flowey demanded. "Everybody probably knows I'm with you by now! Besides, I'm a monster, they'd just try to blow me up too!"
That was – that was true, damn it. HuRg would take one look at Flowey and they'd just see another monster to be killed, they wouldn't so much as hesitate. And they didn't want Flowey to die – they didn't want anybody to die, but unlike anybody else, Flowey would remember dying. They couldn't do that to him, but…
What do I do? What do I do?
A shimmer caught their attention, out of the corner of their eye. A slight heat haze outside one of the many windows lining the street, where there shouldn't have been a heat haze. And suddenly, Frisk remembered something very important.
This isn't like the other timelines. This time… this time it's not just me and the monsters. This time, the fairies are here too.
And selfish grudge or not… they might just be their best chance of getting those people that were going to die because of them out alive.
Everybody who saw the bit about O'Reilly having a kid that fell into Mt. Ebott coming from a mile away, raise your hands! (raises hand, then realizes she's the author so she doesn't count) So yeah, O'Reilly's daughter Diana was the yellow soul that fell into the Underground, and the most recent of the kids to fall other than Frisk themselves.
And Frisk, kiddo, holding a grudge is NOT selfish. Just don't do it as often as Chara does and you'll be fine, promise.
*"dealing with Minerva:" Minerva Paradizo was one of the antagonists of book 5 (technically, she shaped up a bit near the end). She was, at the time, a blonde 12-year old from France with an intellect equal to Artemis's own when he was 12. A regular juvenile mastermind, only with a more normal upbringing than Artemis (as in she wasn't raised to be a criminal). Also, someone that Artemis, who was in the middle of puberty at the time, kept thinking of as pretty, so there you go. Nothing actually happened between them romance-wise, and I think it's canon that Minerva has a boyfriend near the end of the series, but I figured that she and Artemis would keep in contact after he returned from Limbo (see previous notes), if only because the two of them are generally the smartest people in the room at a given point in time and they need decent conversation partners that can keep up with them. (Also, remember Artemis mentioning a contact in France when talking to Frisk at the gala in like chapter 14? He was talking about Minerva.)