Updating early because I'm too eager haha! I have a few other chapters written out, ready to be edited, so I might update around once a week til I run out of those. Then I'll update whenever I can because school starts for me next week ugh. Love how I could've started this at the begining of summer but instead I spent all summer stalking celebrities on twitter. And I mean stalking in the most non-creepy way possible :-))))) FANGIRL AND PROUD.
Dedication: Those who start school soon or have started. Be strong; not everyone is as nice as us.
Artemis's POV
I looked at the door next to me and then quickly checked my watch. It was now 11:30 PM and Louisa had still not arrived. I looked around the ball room at the couples dancing as best they could. One person in a pair nearby tripped on his feet and nearly went tumbling to the polished wood floor. The instructors kept shouting out words of encouragement to such couples, comically enough as they acted like everyone's personal cheerleader complete with movements and the odd rhyme.
The old entrance door squeaked. I stumbled back into the wall to avoid being hit by the gigantic door. Louisa strolled into the room as if she were right on time and not a half hour late. She walked to the makeshift coat hook to the left of the door.
"Where have you been?" I said a touch angrily. "The dance lesson is nearly over."
Louisa took off her soaked rain hat and hung it. "The later I am, the less time I have to see you."
"Well then, you certainly must know that the grade for this is a shared." I deadpanned to keep my anger in check. "If you fail, then so do I."
She stared at me square in the face. "No shit, Sherlock," Louisa spat back. She turned her attention back to her rain coat. "One would think you'd die if you were to get one bad grade." She struggled with her rain slicker and muttered a curse.
I rolled my eyes and tapped my foot impatiently.
After a bit more struggling, Louisa managed to free herself from her wet raincoat. Today her costume-of-a-uniform was midnight blue with bits of silver. Her hair was clearly not on good terms with the rain; it was double the size yesterday because of the high humidity. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it were a wig.
The school had very loose rules for the uniform. It must be some shade of the school colors; green, white, and blue. And as long as you had the basics –skirt/pants, button-up shirt, tie, vest—you could wear whatever you felt like. The rules also stated no hair and makeup restrictions.
All these measures were "to ensure the students felt comfortable in their learning environment." All it really caused was girls trying to be more fashionable than each other to try to win the adoration of the popular jock boys. As one would think, this made many of the girls dress rather scantily with heavy makeup and boys very sloppy.
I stepped to an empty spot on the floor and Louisa followed. As she walked, she reached over her shoulder to her back and pulled a long silver ribbon from somewhere behind her. A few seconds later a pair of giant blue and silver fairy wings popped open with a shower of glitter.
I raised my eyebrow slightly. "Fairy wings?"
Louisa shook her wings and more glitter fell to the floor. "Lost a bet. I thought my friend wouldn't run around campus dressed as a disco queen but she somehow found the courage to do it. She's got some mean disco moves. But I lost," she said casually but you could still hear the annoyance of losing in her voice.
"Any other obvious things to point out and/or subsequent insults…?" She let question hang in the air just like some of the glitter that had yet to settle.
"No, I think I am done," I said taking a bit of pity on her for losing her bet. But only a bit. "For now," I amended my sentence.
The song playing ended and the instructor put another one on. It was a bit more fast-paced and jolly. Louisa sighed silently and put her arms out to dance. I mimicked her position and started dancing.
Now that I actually look at her costume wings, they look so like Holly's mechanical ones. Same dragon fly wings shape, same details, same… movements? It seemed as if Louisa's wings were beating slowly as we moved awkwardly across the floor.
"Are your wings mechanical?" I asked casually, if not slightly bored.
A swell in the music told us to twirl our partners. I had to curve my arm to keep from getting hit by Louisa's wings. As Louisa twirled, her hair flew up and her ears were visible. But they were a peculiar thing, her ears, for it seemed that in that moment they were pointed like a fairy's. She stopped spinning and came back to dancing. Pointed ears? On Louisa? No, it must have been my mind running wild; something my subconscious came up with; perhaps it was part of her bet. She's much too tall to be a fairy anyways.
"No," she replied. "I tried to do that once, though. Didn't work out too well. Gossamer and eyebrows catch fire very easily. Why do you ask?" I noticed she had a Boston accent when she pronounced gossamer as "gossamah."
I shook my head a little. "It just seemed as if they were moving." I said distractedly.
Louisa gave me a bored look. "We're moving. Of course my wings are gonna move." She scoffed and shook her head. "Poor disillusioned Artemis." She pronounced my name as "Ah-temis" because of her accent.
Again the music swelled to another crescendo. I put my arm up and out so Louisa could twirl. Her red hair flew around her and I could clearly see that her ears were indeed pointed.
When she came back I had to ask, "Are your earspointed by any chance?"
Louisa scowled. "Yes. They didn't make childhood very fun, I'll tell you that. Most kids thought I was Tinkerbell and always asked where Peter Pan was. And as I know you're probably curious, I got it from my mother."
Well," I shrugged. "You've got me curious now and anything is better than the rambling of the dance instructors; I learned of this dance a long time ago. Does your mother work here with your father?" I tried to sound bored but was somewhat glad at not to be arguing for once.
Louisa appeared sort of befuddled for a moment. "No, she doesn't. My father said she died when I was little. But he doesn't even have a picture of her come to think of it…" She slowed her dancing. Her eyes looked as if she were looking at another place, another person, another time.
"Wait. I do remember her. I do remember!" She seem shocked at her own remembrance, oddly. We used to live here, somewhere in deep the forest. There was a giant oak tree by a stream that bent around our house." Louisa stopped dancing and dropped her arms. "My mum and I used to always go outside during a full moon, at midnight for some reason… There were always little people there with us. They always came from Tara… or was it from underground?" Louisa's eyes got really wide. "Wait… not just people. They were The P-." In the middle of her last word, Louisa's eye rolled into her head and she collapsed to the floor.
The instructor turned off the music when he noticed Louisa had fallen. Some of the students around us also saw Louisa collapse and were coming over. Louisa shakily propped herself up on her elbows. She looked perplexed at the people gathering around her. She turned to look at me and stared right in my eyes with the elated expression of someone who has just remembered something important that had been haunting them.
"They were fairies!" I just barely heard her whisper excitedly to me. "They were the People!"
Soon after the instructor arrived, Louisa's arms gave up on her and she dropped to the hard floor with a thump, unconscious.
Fowl Manor
"I haven't invented anything like that; there's no need for that, really," Foaly said on the television.
I had contacted Foaly and Holly as soon as I got back home. Louisa knew many things about the People but the memories were repressed for some reason. I had asked Foaly if he had created some sort of device that could suppress one's memories.
"If we do have to get rid of some one's memories, you know we would just mesmerize or mind wipe them," Foaly stated what I already knew. "What exactly did this mud girl say?"
"Louisa, that's her name, said that the People lived underground and roughly described the Ritual. She even knew Tara has a Transport location!" I relayed.
The instructor had carried the unconscious Louisa to the nurse's office. She woke up a few hours later with an awful migraine and no memory of the incident but oddly craved acorns and chocolate.
"Hmm. It really doesn't sound like anything we have," Holly thought out loud. "Were her pupils ragged? She might have been mesmerized and was remembering what someone didn't want her to remember, though it's highly unlikely."
I shook my head. "No, her eyes were fine. She also claims not to remember anything that she said. Perhaps someone has been inventing things without your noticing," I suggested.
Foaly started to tap away on his keyboard and looked to another screen. "No one could be doing that without me noticing. I always know when those kinds of things happen. Always." He muttered quietly about permits and bad inventions to himself.
He turned back to Artemis and said, "Nothing like that's been invented. Underground or above. If you ask me, I think it's rather pointless. Why make someone forget something but still have the memory of it? Completely useless! And whoever made it, made it very badly if the person can still remember the memories."
Holly added, "And it couldn't have been a mind wipe gone wrong because the way the mind wipe works doesn't leave any trace of the memory, at least nothing comprehensible to the brain. As for where this girl got this information, I don't know." Holly exhaled sharply and continued. "We can only hope that she isn't faking about not remembering what she said and leave it at that; just another mud girl who knows nothing about us."
Les thoughts? Preferably in the form of a comment? Favorite/follows also appreciated :) I'd like to get more than 5 for the next chapter to go up :) On a side note, does anyone else write/read Artemis's parts in an Irish accent? Because whenever I write his part or when I finished the last book, I was speaking in an irish accent for hours haha xx