Operation Glitterberries
Chapter 05: Information Gathering
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Disclaimer: Daria and associated characters are owned by MTV and Viacom. This is fan fiction written for entertainment only. No money or other negotiable currency or goods have been exchanged.
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After leaving the motel the first priority of Melody was to get some new clothes, something a little harder due to the early hour. So early on a Sunday morning the only shop that would be open was Payday, and that particular warehouse had an abundance of cameras. But there was a small window of opportunity for going there, even if she was operating on a tight schedule, the morning news were still sparse about the specifics on the events of yesterday but the latest news already included a very rough description of her, and the longer she stayed the way she was the longer her odds were getting.
So she asked for directions to the first person she saw on the street and then took the appropriate bus. On the way to the bus stop she threw pieces of the disassembled tranq gun, it was too much of a liability to keep. Once she arrived she went to the back of the store and threw the last pieces of the rifle and her remaining clothes, minus the green jacket to the garbage container in the back.
Then with a much lighter load she entered the store and bought some sturdy jeans, a skort, and a skirt that reached to the knee; a couple of t-shirts, blouses, sweaters, caps and sports bras, one in a bright color an another in a darker shade of each; also a pair of tennis shoes and another of comfortable penny loafers; and finally one blue backpack and a pink suitcase to replace the duffel bag, which had become uncomfortably noticeable. Additionally she got a small flashlight and both matches and a lighter, darkness was an ally of convenience after all.
Curious about such purchases and having enough time in his hands with the shop being virtually empty in account of the hour the cashier couldn't help but to ask.
"Got a lot of clothes there, wardrobe malfunction?"
Brushing aside his attempt of humor Melody just put an annoyed face, which came way too naturally for her, and answered. "Came here with my dad to a business trip, and just my luck, guess which suitcase the airline lost? Being on these clothes since yesterday." Then she paid and left.
Once she was out of sight from the cashier she did a straight line to the bathroom and changed her skirt for jeans and put her dark sweater over the orange t-shirt. She took off her boots and instead decided to start breaking in the tennis shoes. Complementing her outlook she tied her hair into a simple ponytail and put a cap over it.
Now that her immediate safety concerns were resolved then she could went to take a bite in the nearest dinner, with a little bit of luck they would have the news tuned. Maybe later she would try her luck finding a cybercafé open on Sunday.
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On the county of Oakwood the manhunt to capture Daria Morgendorffer was stumbling into one problem after another.
When captain Abrams had woken up in the hospital after being hit with a tranquilizer dart with enough juice to put a doped up football player or a mild mannered gorilla to sleep for a few hours hooked to the kinds of devices that until now he had only seen in some of his more battered passengers through the years he had at the beginning being unable to remember just what had happened or how did he got there, but then, when under the gentle coaching of a police detective he was able to remember bit by bit.
"And after you were airborne what happened?"
"We flew back towards the heliport. The patients were being loud, but as far as hallucinating junkies go they were pretty peaceful, even when counting that the guy took the six of us to bring down. They were talking about unicorns and ponies for god's sake!"
"And what about the other one, Daria Morgendorffer?"
"Well, she was more than a little irritated when we arrived, but she gave me the impression that she was on top of the situation from the start."
"Can you describe her please?"
"Yes, she is a young girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, brunette, with big black cumbersome glasses, and eyes… eyes… I can't remember her eyes, sorry."
"No problem, how was she dressed?"
"Green jacket, skirt and boots, black boots."
The officer took his radio and repeated the description, then continued. "Did your EMT checked her?"
"Yeah, after she complained from her ribs Miles examined her, they were bruised from a bad fall, and he rubbed some gel on her for the pain, the plan was to get her some x-rays later. Other than that she was quite sane, if that's what you're implying."
"I'm sorry but I need to ask."
"Yeah I know, and she was really tired, she fell asleep as soon as we leave was a small miracle. I should have realized that something was wrong when she slept in the middle of a flying nuthouse."
"So then you flew for over an hour with no incident whatsoever and then she woke up, did she gave any sign of unnatural behavior?"
"No, the first clue that something was wrong was when I saw her stabbing Miles with a dart."
"How did she got access to those darts, for that matter, why was she in the back. Isn't it standard procedure for the EMT to fly with his patients?"
"Yes, it is procedure, but we were flying full, and he wouldn't have enough room to work, so we left there Daria, she demonstrated early that she was able to control them without resorting to physical contact, and also that a familiar face would keep them calm. As for the darts, I guess that the ranger left their toy gun there and forgot to tell us about it."
Once more after telling to the people in the other side about searching for a rifle in the helicopter the cop prodded the pilot to keep talking. "After she took down Miles, what did she do?"
"She put another dart in my neck and threaten to kill me, and she did with the kind of voices I used to hear from the hardcore guys of the army, the ones that preferred knifes. Then when I tried to talk her down she started saying nonsense about Hanoi and Air America. 'Nam stuff, well before my time and I'm damn sure way before hers."
"Did she sound angry when she told you that?"
"No. Well she was angry, but not in the way you mean, she didn't scream or raged, she was cold as a gravestone, and she was meaning every word. But she was crazy non the less, saying stuff about Migs and how they would blow us if I called home. At that point I was about to land as she demanded…"
"Why did you surrendered to her demands?"
"She could kill us all at any time with a little prick, at least in the ground I could turn to the back seat without falling. And damn glad I did, when she did prick me I…"
"What happened then?"
"I don't know, I remember diving to the ground and then nothing. I have no idea how did we land…"
The interview continued from a while, but after that they upgraded the alert from a missing person probably in shock, to a violent and probably hallucinating girl of indeterminate age and build, to a paranoid brunette armed with a tranq gun with an unknown amount of darts and dressed in a skirt and green jacket.
It was too late anyway, by that time, Daria has already skip town, and for that matter the county frontier. To make a bad situation much worse, the sheriff of Oakwood had rude and blatantly mocked his counterpart in the county of Lawndale about the embarrassing defeat of the Lions. The sheriff of Oakwood was professional enough to apologize before asking to expand the APB for Daria Morgendorffer to the county of Lawndale. Regrettably, the commissioner of Lawndale was the proud father of a senior in the team and he wasn't as amused nor as willing to left bygones be bygones, so he denied the petition claiming that her last known location was well apart from the county line and therefore not his problem.
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The doctors at the local hospital had their own set of problems, the main one being that returning the Morgendorffer family to sanity proved to be harder than expected.
When they arrived the day before, with multiple lacerations both from the attempts to restrain them and their struggles to escape from their own restrains both before and after the crash, dehydrated, and most important of all, with a severe intoxication from an unknown hallucinogen they had given them a large quantity of liquids after they performed an stomach plump, and they filled them with laxatives and diuretics.
Other than keeping the orderlies busy during the night changing their diapers, no way were they going to release them from their bindings after the fiasco in the helicopter, the measure didn't have any noticeable effect on their symptoms. The blood test performed for the most common hallucinogens came out negative, and broader blood tests would take days, even weeks to get any useful answer unless they had an idea of what to look for.
Their break finally came when early in the morning the resident botanist for the Oakwood National Park called with the correct species of plant, as well as the name of the specific toxins that were produced by the bush and its berries. The resident hematologist just had to take a look to his medical encyclopedia and then at their chart and booked the Hemodialysis machine for the three of them.
Due to the low amount of berries she ate in proportion to her body weight Helen was the first one to recuperate her sanity, more or less in the afternoon of Sunday.
"Ugh… My head hurts." She could hear after that a buzz and then she felt how someone forcing her eye open. Then a bright light followed.
"Okay, the pupil is no longer dilated. Miss, can you tell me your name?"
"Helen Morgendorffer, where am I?"
"You're on the Oakwood General Hospital, you suffered a serious case of food poisoning, and I need to ask you a few questions."
It was then when she realized that she was hooked to a I.V. drip, and more important, that she couldn't move her hands and the reason why. "Why am I cuffed? I demand to be released immediately!"
"Miss Morgendorffer, you are restrained for your own protection as well as ours. Once you respond a few simple questions I will release you, so please be patient. Now do you understand?"
"Yes, but I still want to know who in the world did a food poisoning led to me being strapped to the bed, and if the answer is not good enough I will sue this hospital in general and you in particular until you don't have a penny in your name anymore!"
"Okay, question number one. The first president of the U.S. was? …"
After a Q&A session an a physical that lasted for an eternity the doctor was satisfied by her level of sanity and even if he didn't release her yet he started responding her questions, "Helen, yesterday you ate some berries in the woods of Oakwood's park, those berries are a potent and persistent hallucinogen, it resisted the more common methods to detox so this morning we put you on dialysis to filtrate the toxins out of your body. That is the reason we have to keep you restrained until we are sure that you are in your full mental faculties."
"Poisoned berries? Dammit Jake you don't have to impress me with your foraging skills… Wait, what happened with Jake, and Daria and Quinn? Are they all right?"
"Quinn was also treated for the poisoning, but the dialysis and the diuretics we gave her during the night took a toll on her body and she is exhausted and a little dehydrated; right now we are letting her sleep it off. In the case of Jake he suffered a mild arrhythmia while hooked to the machine, so we stopped his treatment for the moment. Don't worry, if anything that's a blessing in disguise, the arrhythmia is a preexistent condition, and the best place for it to manifest is in the middle of a hospital. He'll need some medicament for it, and we're already injecting him with the same counter agent as yours to deal with the hallucinogen, it is going to be a slower process but in two or three days he'll be out of it."
"Oh thank god, but what about Daria?" Before the doctor could answer her question she did it herself. "Of course, she didn't eat the berries for breakfast; sometimes I wish I had that girl's common sense. Where is she? Is she with Jake? I need for her to get my cell, if I know Erik half as well as I do, he must be panicking by now."
"Miss Morgendorffer, I am sorry but your daughter Daria showed some delayed symptoms mid transport and she is missing since yesterday. The authorities are doing every…"
Helen couldn't believe her ears, "How can you be so incompetent as to miss my daughter! If something happens to her I swear I'm not going to stop until I can sent every person responsible of this screw up to jail for a hundred years each!"
She stopped her tirade when she saw someone appearing from a blind spot. She then realized that the person in question had badge clipped to his belt.
"Good afternoon Miss Morgendorffer, I'm Detective Eddie Brock, the officer in charge for the search for your daughter. I'm sorry to be blunt but right now we should be focusing in finding your daughter before she hurts anyone, including herself, and not in useless recriminations."
"Look, Daria's tongue might be a little too sharp in occasions, but she is unable to hurt a fly other than with words. Now can you tell me how did you loss her!"
"Your daughter attacked the orderly and the pilot of your Medevac in the middle of the air knocking them unconscious. It is a true miracle that the pilot managed to crash land the vessel at all. As soon as we realized something was wrong we started the search for the helicopter, but we didn't have any notice about the crash or any of you, daughter included, until a 911 call told us of the position of the crash. By the time we arrived she had tied the crew, one of them in an extremely painful manner."
"oh my god." Her voice almost lost itself on the sounds of the hospital.
"We do know that it was your daughter who called 911, we managed to match the voice of the person who reported the crash and her first call to report your intoxication. Does the name Melody Powers rings a bell?"
Caught by surprise by the out of the way question Helen was brought out of her stupor and answered sincerely. "No, I can't say I do, why do you ask?"
"Because that is the alias she gave to the dispatcher and we were hoping that it would give us at least a clue of her destination. Well, maybe she's going home. Can you tell us your address so we can send a unit to keep an eye?"
"Yes is 1111 Glen Oaks Lane, five minutes from the Lawndale Mall."
"God dammed! I was hoping that you were from Oakwood, right now the Lawndale Police Department has been stonewalling all of our attempts to expand the search of your daughter in their county."
"I see officer. I think I can help; could you please bring me a phone? Fair warning, the conversation is going to be a little long and from time to time I'll have to go in a tangent."
After that the staff managed to get a phone, and the doctor finally released one of her hands so that she could use the phone freely.
"Erik, no right now I don't know anything about the depositions. Listen to me, I have an emergency, a real one, and I need your help" …
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"It's a good thing to be left alone."
The members of the Lane family who were still living in Lawndale were basking in the sun outside Casa Lane with their sunglasses on and a glass of lemon soda on their hands, talking and relaxing after the hard job of waking up well after noon.
"Yeah, I got a new understanding of why the Wandering Lanes started to wander. It's for the rest of the family to never find them ever again. I think we should do that for next year's reunion."
"Nah, too much work, next year lest just leave the phone unhooked for the entire month."
"I like the way you think."
Then they went back to the poptarts they were eating from breakfast.
"So, what are you doing tonight?"
"I think that Jesse mentioned a gig at the Zon, see if it's still there."
"Loud, uncaring and distant patrons who doesn't give a damn about you either way. Good way of erasing this weekend from your mind, or at least your eardrums."
"I can still hear Uncle Max, I hope that goes away. Anyway, is Daria back yet?"
"No, if anything goes as planned she still has about eight hours more of torture before she either comes back or she gets on a killing rage. Still even with the additional torture time I'm confident that I'll win our little bet, there's no way that poor woodcraft and unlimited bathroom space can beat emotional trauma and insane and rude family members who number themselves in the dozens."
"Cool."
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Melody was drinking her coffee with a grimace, it had been fortunate enough to find a cybercafé which was open on Sundays, even if the coffee was one of the worst she had ever tasted. Why would they have the base of a professional Espresso Machine and put there a Mister Coffee that percolated as bad as a dirty sock?
Earlier in the morning she had a relaxing breakfast in which the only rumors she was able to hear about the crash were speculations about how the incompetents morons of Oakwood had managed to crash one of their own choppers on the middle of a bright clear day. Some of the theories brought a smile to her face, they were crazy, some even crazier than reality, and that was never an easy feat when reality was how terrorist were captured by a veteran agent undercover as a little teen a little less than half her age.
Afterwards she headed to a newsstand where she bought an assortment of newspapers as well as a couple of maps, one of them a simplified one for tourists with the more prominent landmarks as well as the directions from the sponsors' shops, and the other a full size vial map of city. The information given by the newspapers was confusing; the wide circulation national newspapers were still blissfully unaware of the events that had transpired during the previous day, which was disappointing but not unexpected at this point of time.
Curiously enough, the Lawndale Sun preferred to give in the first page a blow by blow account of the game between Oakwood's Pumas and Lawndale Lions; it had a photo of an helicopter buzzing the field and the subsequent headline of 'Cheaters!' posted, and was claiming that a chopper had distracted the lions when they were about to win the game. She realized that the article she was looking was in page eight and it had more thinly veiled insults to the rival town that real information. It even claimed that the same careless pilot who cheated on them was the one that fell from the sky as a form of divine punishment, a claim easily dismissed by reading the different registration numbers on the craft.
The one paper who had something closer to the truth was one called Sick, Sad World and in the beginning she thought it was a tabloid and only added it to her purchase due to the fact that it had a clear photo of the fallen helicopter on the first page. Inside there was a more or less complete account of the finding of the crash by another helicopter as well as a status update of the passengers, who were much to her relief in Oakwood's general hospital receiving treatment. The article also had a transcript of her 911 call as well as both her name and the alias she had for this mission and her most complete description to date, which thankfully was still outdated by now. The only point where it wasn't spot on was the fact that now she was considered crazy due to the ingestion of something called glitterberries, and that mistake could easily be attributed to the statements of the authorities. The rest of the articles were a little bit more unbelievable or grotesque, but she decided to keep an open mind, after all her own article was better written that the ones from the established and respected newspaper.
Then she had gone to one of the gyms promoted on the tourist map and filled in for a membership and paying two months in advance claiming to the manager that she wanted to get in shape to get a tennis player that had caught her eye, and that the only way she would commit to it was to pay it so that if she didn't come then the money for her allowance would be wasted. While she wanted to eventually get back to the shape she used to be, the real reason was to get access to a secure locker in a place where no one would think to search to let her suitcase with most of her clothes and gear.
She was currently investigating her own name, which was rare enough as to be able to confidently read past articles going back entire years and be fairly sure they were about her. Her notebook was already filled with random data from a more or less superficial research of both Jake and Helen Morgendorffer.
Jake was as common an American could be without falling too far in the stereotype, he had his own (humble) website for his job as a publicity consultant with an office in Halcyon Hills Corporate Park, in which he included some notes about the horrors of Buxton Ridge; I would have been more worried about him being a military hating extremist if not for the fact that once I worked with an alumnus, and the school was so bad that he preferred to sign three tours to Vietnam rather than ending his studies there, even after he lost the legs.
Helen on the other hand seemed to be a higher level corporative lawyer and part of the firm of Vitale, Davis, Horowitz, Riordan, Schrecter, Schrecter, and Schrecter, with a specialty in work hazards. She had as part of her web page several of her successful cases, many of them which we could check on the news for independent confirmation of their resolution, usually with the phrase '…and they settled out of court for an undisclosed amount'. The most interesting part was that their office was only a couple of blocks away of the cybercafé.
When that was done she started investigating her own name to get a better outlook of her second life. Since the name itself wasn't too common she was able to easily sort the different results, and her life was certainly disconcerting.
Some of the first things she found where a series of articles about fashion from a school in Highland, Texas. The signature of them placed her as the Fashion Editor of the weekly publication. At the beginning she thought that maybe she had elected to put on herself pretty clothes for comfort, but she could see that all articles were highly critical of the vapid and inconsistent modes and the corresponding quest for popularity while accurately depicting the current trends in the world of fashion. The only other article she found was a signed apology for disrupting a presidential visit to the school, reading between the lines she could see that she had asked a few questions too hard for the man to properly answer, and that the school had forced the writer to do the open letter as a punishment.
For some reason she couldn't stop herself from thinking about a couple of moronic rednecks with huge deformed heads laughing and doing rude comments in front of the president; then she chastised herself, 'it is not the time to get whimsical, I got a job to do'
She then reviewed the addresses which had been posted within the year, finding fewer references, but just as important. The first one chronologically speaking was a note in the Lawndale Lowdown, the school's newspaper, where she and a Jane Lane had successfully completed the Self-Esteem curse at Lawndale High.
"Self-Esteem curse; must be a typo. And why did I end in that particular course?" She stopped muttering when a memory hit her by surprise.
"I just want to say how proud I am today. Knowing that I have self-esteem gives me even more self-esteem."
"On the other hand, having all of you know that I had low self-esteem makes me feel... kind of bad... like a big failure or something."
"I, uh, I want to go home."
She was smiling; she could felt it on her lips. The memory was a fond one even if the only thing she could recall was some sort of childish antic. Going back to her work she checked the other article mentioning her name. It was a simple list of the participants in a place called Café Lawndale for its first and last night of performances. It had a link to a Lawndale Sun article:
Café Lawndale closed until further notice.
School authorities have decided to close Lawndale's new young adult coffeehouse after its opening night somehow turned into an anti-communist rally. 'Some unscheduled propagandizing went on and the students reacted a little too favorably,' explained coffeehouse director Timothy O'Neill, a teacher at Lawndale High. Following a reading of some right-wing literature, several members of the football marched down North Avenue, intending to stone the Russian Embassy. Of course, there are no embassies in Lawndale. 'Teens are impressionable,' O'Neill said, 'and the last thing we want is to build a base of operations for political extremists.'
"At least the American young still got the right attitude, even if the school does not understand that."
Then she saw one little detail in the related articles of the school, one that made her hold back a series of expletives, claiming that the Café Lawndale would revert to its previous function as a cybercafé ' .com' which coincidentally was the name of her current location; and since she was investigating LHS as much as any other clue she would need to treat this place and her search as compromised, especially the last part.
So she went to the caretaker and paid her exact debt, resisting at last minute from adding a generous tip, a habit that was abnormal on teens and would draw more attention to herself. Once she was out of sight she took of her sweater and untied her hair so that she looked different enough to a casual observer and went towards Vitale, Davis, Horowitz, Riordan, Schrecter, Schrecter, and Schrecter, the closest office in her list.
The place was a seemingly normal building, but she could see from her vantage point in the street that at least someone was working in the third floor; also the position of the vigilance cameras and spotlights made it unpalatable to just get close and try to break in, either in daylight or at night. Resigning herself to letting this place for another day she took a cab after walking a few blocks so that she would not be easily tracked by someone looking in the cab company logs for pick ups in the nearby area. Her destination was Halcyon Hills Corporate Park, Building G (the L-shaped one), to pay a visit to Jake's office.
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