Hi, people!
Long time no see (or read, in this case). Sorry! You can now all go and flame me because of my laziness. =P
Without further ado, please welcome Captain Holly Short of the LEP on board to this story!
Holly Short, LEPrecon officer, opened her eyes, feeling calm and at peace with the world. Then the memory of the incidents of the past two weeks flooded her mind and, her peace shattered, turned and buried her face into her blanket.
That stupid perp of mine's going to pay! Holly thought angrily. The mission in Hamburg was going well, all was under control, but then the perp just had to freak and seek asylum with the Mud people! Now, instead being congratulated on a successful mission with hints of more missions in the future, Holly had to deal with an investigation by Internal Affairs, tunnel duty until the investigation was over and until she was cleared AND her record will be tarnished forever, which meant that any missions that came through would be passed to someone else.
Holly wallowed a little in self-pity before stumbling into the shower. Nothing could beat a hot shower when she needed to relax and calm down. And she would definitely need peace to face yet another day filled with officials asking her the same questions and eight hours of monitoring an empty tunnel in some forsaken part under the Earth. Or maybe she'd get lucky and Root will switch her to Traffic. It was infinitely more preferable to listen to insults than staring into a dusty tunnel. But whatever she did, Holly vowed to do perfectly. She would not let the stupid members in Internal Affairs have any reason to kick her off the team.
Holly sat in the Cham pod, monitoring the scans coming from sensors in the tunnel. She glanced at the clock. Yes! Two more minutes before I can go home, Holly thought, wishing that something, anything, would happen to break up the monotony.
Almost immediately after the thought formed in her head, a summons from Root came through. Well, technically it was not a summons, but Root always makes his notes sound like one.
Captain Holly Short,
Report to my office immediately.
Commander Julius Root
Holly frowned. Root never called his officers off-duty unless it was an emergency… What happened? She groaned as a thought entered her head. It couldn't be that Internal Affairs wanted yet another testimony from her, could it?
Or, Holly thought with dawning horror, have they condemned me already? Are they going to kick me off the force?
"Hey, Lieutenant Bug, Root wants me to go to his office," she called to the sprite hovering behind her, trying to repress the tremors threatening to quaver her voice She could not be seen out of control. "You take charge of this place, okay? Our shift is nearly over anyway."
Without waiting for a reply, Holly walked to the police vehicle and drove to Haven. She strode into the LEP headquarters purposefully, or at least she thought she was. In reality, she was hurrying, walking faster and faster until she was practically running by the time she got to Root's office. Holly stopped abruptly in front of a door adorned with a metal plate, engraved with the words 'Julius Root, Commander', and, flattening her crew cut nervously, she knocked the door.
A brusque voice sounded from within the chamber. "Come in."
Holly closed the door gently behind her as she entered, wondering if the commander always sounded so rough. Julius Root, a beetroot of a fairy, his signature cigar clamped between his teeth, looked up from the screens on his desk.
"Ah, Holly. Take a seat." He gestured to one of the seats opposite him. Holly sat. Her pulse sounded like Foaly's hooves when he danced, her mouth suddenly very dry. She opened her mouth to speak, but Root started talking before her voice could utter a sound.
"Holly, I know you must be thinking why I called you here so urgently. The results of the Hamburg investigation has come out," Root said in an almost gentle voice. He reached for the screen nearest Holly and turned it around.
For a moment, Holly's brain could not register the words written on the page, but the moment passed and she scanned the screen.
Dear Captain Holly Short, We have reached the end of the investigation blah blah blah… Due to the evidence blah blah blah… From our inquiries we have…
How much rubbish do these people write before they actually tell me the results? Wait… here it is.
…you are hereby cleared of all charges. Best regards, Romulus Birch, Sicily Seed…
You are hereby cleared of all charges. Relief flooded through Holly, and she looked up, smiling. For a fleeting second Holly thought Root was smiling too, if it had been there at all and not just a hallucination created from her relief. At least her commander's complexion wasn't as red as usual.
"So, Holly. You're now cleared of everything. I will take you off tunnel-duty and put you back to Recon."
"Yes, sir." Holly's elation was evident in her voice.
"But," Root continued, ignoring Holly's interruption, "You must be prepared to accept that you won't be getting as many missions as you did before, just in case this happens again. In fact, you might be lucky if you get even one every year."
Holly nodded. She had expected that. The only way to fully clear her name was to prove to the world that she was more than capable to finish missions successfully.
Root gestured to the door. "You can go now, Captain. Report here tomorrow before your shift."
"Yes, sir. Good day, sir." Holly rose and exited the room, euphoria etched into her every movement.
Root watched her go, and once the door clicked shut after her, allowed himself a small chuckle. Holly's child-like happiness was so infectious he had nearly smiled in public. Imagine the ridicule if he was caught smiling all because one of his captains were cleared from all charges! He would never recover from the shame. The last time he had smiled was so long ago Root doubted anyone remembered the occasion.
But Holly getting cleared was worth the potential embarrassment. Her record, before Hamburg, boasted of a hundred percent success rate. Not even Trouble could match that, and his reputation was well known throughout the Fairy world.
Root smiled. The whole fairy world was watching the first female Recon captain's every move, and even though the Hamburg affair was blamed on her, Root knew for a fact that Holly had done everything correctly, and that the failure was because a perp had freaked at the last minute, convinced that they were going to die at the Mud Men's hands. If it weren't for Holly's quick thinking and timely action, they may well be in the hands of the Mud Men with an interspecies war on the horizon. But Root, although respected, could not convince a whole panel of conservatives of her innocence. He doubted Holly knew just how relieved he was when he knew that she was cleared. The loss of her intuition and strong sense of justice would be a sorry day for the LEP. With that thought, Root turned back to his screens.
Back home, Holly peeled off her uniform, changing into a trusty t-shirt-and-pyjama-pants combo before collapsing on the couch. The last and only time Holly had felt this happy was the first time she had been cleared to fly above ground, and the fresh, sweet air had rushed past her, flooding her lungs, the silvery light of the moon giving the beautiful landscape a mystical quality.
Holly shifted on her couch, settling back into the soft cushions of the seat. Something dug into her lower back. She shifted again, but the thing was still there. Holly slipped her hand into the crack between the back and the seat of the couch, searching for anything stuck in the crack.
There was nothing. Satisfied, she sat back down again only to feel the thing digging into her back again. Shoving her hand back into the gap, Holly felt around, but she could only feel empty air. What was wrong with this thing? Maybe it was getting old. Even if there was something there, it would have moved by now due to her meddling, right? Holly gingerly settled back into the cushions.
For a few minutes, there was nothing making bruises on Holly's back, but slowly she became aware of an uncomfortable lump poking her back. Holly growled and, turning to face the couch, knelt on the floor and lifted off the seat cushion. There was nothing there… except a miniscule black thing jammed at an awkward angle at the very back.
Holly took it out, replacing the cushion absentmindedly. She stared at the black -shaped object. It was the bottom of an Omnitool. Her mother's Omnitool had always been missing a bottom, and she had finally found it. Not that she could put it back to its proper home, since the Omnitool had disappeared from her locker three weeks ago.
Holly turned the T-shaped bottom in her hands. This was the only bit left of her mother's Omnitool now. Something near the bottom of the T caught the light, flashing it into Holly's eyes.
"Huh? What is there to reflect off on this thing?" Holly muttered to herself.
She drew the end of the T closer to her eyes, where the black had chipped off to reveal a silvery inside. Holly knew for a fact that the insides of Omnitool bottoms were not silver. Hadn't she cracked open thousands, hundreds of thousands of T's just like these when she checked Omnitools for smuggled drugs?
Holly began to scratch at the paint. Soon a USB-like protuberance emerged from within the black paint. Holly frowned. USBs have not been made for over thirty years now. The last batch had been discontinued when she had turned fifty. Only antique collectors bought and sold them now.
Holly padded over to her computer and switched it on, plugging the USB into the hub on the computer. She was lucky that her computer was one of the older models, since the newer versions only consisted of a touch-screen monitor. She waited a few seconds, then, as the computer logged her on automatically, she opened up the USB screen.
There was only one file on it, labelled 'Holly'. She frowned. Who would go to all that trouble to install a USB into her Omnitool bottom and then put one video on it? Feeling apprehensive, she clicked on it, and the video began to play.
First, a desk. Incidentally, the desk that the computer was sitting on now. Then a fairy comes and sits in front of the camera, her long auburn hair hiding her face. She sweeps her hair back, and Holly's mother looks back at her daughter, more than thirty years separating the two. Hazel eye meets hazel eye, and Holly's mother begins to speak.
"Holly." She pauses. "I don't really know where to begin. Maybe I should just say this outright. Yes, I think that's a good idea." She takes a deep breath, closing her eyes. She opens her eyes. "Holly, you have a sister."
Holly paused the video.
I have a sister?
It was shocking enough to suddenly see her mother again, and even more shocking to find out that she had a sister.
Mechanically, her finger pressed 'Play' again and the image unfroze. Coral Short gave an apologetic laugh and ran her hand through her long auburn hair.
"Now that I've said that, it's a lot more comfortable talking about it. I've been hiding it for twenty years, and even though that's like the blink of an eye compared to fairy life spans, I guess it still builds up habits that are hard to break.
"Anyway, the reason why I'm making this video is that I think you've got the right to know exactly what happened twenty years ago.
Coral took a deep breath and exhaled loudly, making the speakers crackle. The sudden static-like sounds woke Holly from her stupor.
What am I doing? She berated herself. This laser USB thing is unstable. I have to get it saved first, or who knows when it'll die? Holly transferred the file from the USB onto the computer hard drive. I have plenty of time to see it later, right?
The computer chimed to signify a successful transfer. Holly's cursor hovered over the icon, her finger trembling slightly. She rubbed her nose and felt liquid. Startled, she withdrew the finger and looked at it closely, then rubbed her upper lip. Unbelievable! A veteran of more than eight successful recons, and here she was, sweating at the sight of watching a harmless video her dead mother had made for her! Holly laughed nervously, and then, in the nature of a true Short, threw caution to the winds and pressed 'Play'.
"…happened twenty years ago. But more about that later." Coral ran her hand roughly through her hair again. "Let me start from the beginning.
"One-hundred and twenty-six years ago, I gave birth to your sister, Rowan." Which would mean that she'd be one-hundred and forty-six years old this year, thought Holly vaguely. "One glance at her and you could tell that she'd be a handful, she had so much spirit in her eyes. And during those first few years, let me tell you," Coral said, laughing, "I swear I grew a century older in the first ten years of your sister's life, she got into so many risky situations." Her expression grew sad. "A bit like you, actually, Holly.
"Even though she still got into trouble for doing something or other, she was a top student, and after she graduated with honours from uni, just like your father, you and me, she joined the LEP's environmental department. It's a more covert sector of the LEP, and only offered to people who got honours in environmental degrees like Rowan."
Holly nodded. She had heard rumours of an exclusive department in the LEP devoted to battling the damages the Mud People inflicted on the environment, but there never seemed to be actual proof of such a department. Until now.
"Your sister did heaps for her department," said Coral, "With her brains and her passion for the environment, plus her hatred for the humans that caused all these problems. Soon she was captain, then commander. And even when she was commander, she led a lot of missions herself. Because of her, the world above the ground was cleaner than it had been for decades.
"After a while, she realised that some of the billions of humans living on Earth actually cared about the environment, and, her hatred now less strong, she began to leave clues to those select few with enough power and money to actually impact the world about how to save the environment more effectively.
"When your sister first 'visited' one of the people on her list, she had come home a little awestruck of the human. From that night on, she began to visit them more than the others on her list. She never told me what she did on those visits, or who she was visiting, but after a while, I could tell that she was only visiting just this one person, since she seemed to glow every time she came back from those missions.
Coral sighed. "Then, one night, when I was watching some show, she came home and sat down. I could tell she was very nervous, but she didn't say anything, and after a while she went into her room.
"For the next few days, she acted strangely, and just as I'd decided to ask her about it, she sat me down one night before I went to work." Coral sighed again. "I still remember that so clearly. Just as if it had happened that yesterday.
"She sat there for a while, playing with the tablecloth. Then she spoke, her voice flat, her eyes not meeting mine.
" 'Mother.' Your sister only called me mother if something big had happened. 'Mother,' she said again, and then she took a deep breath and looked straight into my eyes. 'I've decided to become a human.'
"When she said that, I was stunned, Holly. I didn't know what to say. But Rowan took my silence as an invitation to say more, I think, and so she started to blurt out her story.
"'You know I've been secretly contacting some humans on my missions. Well, there's this one human called Adam McEwan. He's only sixteen in human terms, and that's really young, but he's got this maturity you usually see in older fairies. Old as in two or three-century old. I've been visiting him, giving him all these ideas, and he takes them seriously. You can tell that he really does care for his world, he's got enough money and power to do something about it, and he uses that much better than the rest of the human race, maybe even more than my kiddies back at the LEP. The McEwans have traditionally been an architectural family, and he's no different. He's already started designing his own buildings, and they're all environmentally friendly. Other than that, he's funny, smart, good-looking…'
"At that point, Holly, I stopped listening. My daughter had fallen in love with a human! A human barely out of his nappies! Maybe I was wrong to yell at her after that for falling in love, but I did anyway." Coral covered her face with her hands, her voice becoming muffled, indistinct.
"I yelled at her for falling for a human, the people who had driven us out of our natural homes. The people poisoning the Earth that we all lived on, that she was so passionately trying to save. She yelled back at me, telling me that not all people were like that, and no fairy could match Adam's concern and love for Nature. We fought loudly, wildly. Finally, I said coldly to her, 'If you leave through that door for that Mud Man, from now on, I only have one daughter.'
"She looked at me and then she whirled and packed her stuff. I was still in the kitchen, but my anger was deflating, and I was already wishing I hadn't said those words. Who was I to tell my daughter who deserved her love? But it was too late. After Rowan had finished packing all her things, she stormed out and slammed the door behind her."
Coral wiped her face with her hands, and smiled shakily at Holly. "I haven't seen her since. Her disappearance was put down to equipment malfunction on a supposed mission she was going on somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, her equipment was acidified, and that was that.
"One more thing before I finish this. Holly, I know you're going to ask how come you didn't know about this. You didn't really know your sister anyway, since she had already started working in the LEP by the time you were born, and she came home late and went to work early. So, right after she had left, I went and shoved all her remaining belongings down into a flare chamber and then erased all memories of her from your mind. But I regret doing that now, and that's why I made this video, so that you know you have a sister, and if you choose, you can go find her. I know I'll never be able to see her again. I don't know if I can deal with seeing her, and even if I can, I doubt she'll look at me, let alone talk to me.
Coral seemed to droop; she looked as if she had aged a millennium in the space of a second. "Holly, I hope you don't hate me after seeing this. I've specially sealed it so that you can get this USB out only after I've died. Just know that I love you, and all that I've done was to protect you."
The screen went blank.
Holly stared at the screen, unable to believe what she had just heard. She had had a sister who her mother had erased from her memories, and who had run off to join the Mud race to become a Mud Man? This couldn't be true; it had to be a prank set by someone. But who would go to the lengths of writing a video in her mother's image, her mother's voice, then put it onto a USB that had been outdated a few decades ago, and could only be used on really old computers?
Holly took the USB out of the computer. Foaly would know if this was real. He knew every single technology that had been available to them for the past century, since he had invented most of it. He could tell her if it was authentic. Holly pocketed the USB, threw on a jacket and ran out of the door.
Foaly was just about to put the monitors on 'Automatic' and call it a day when Holly knocked on the window and let herself into the Op booth.
"Hey, Holly," Foaly greeted happily. "Why are you here? Your shift ended an hour ago!"
"Foaly," Holly replied in a tone which sobered Foaly up immediately, "I need to know what this is." She drew out the black USB and held it out. Foaly's eyes widened as he took the object from the elf.
"Holly, is this a laser USB? How did you get this? Why are you still using this? It's been outdated for two decades!"
Holly swallowed. "So you're sure this is a laser USB?"
"Of course I'm sure," said Foaly, snorting. "How could I not know it when it was me who got everyone off these things and onto the memory seeds, then moving them onto the…" The centaur trailed off, noticing that his audience wasn't listening to him. Holly was frowning, and she was biting her nail. Something was wrong. Holly never bit her nails.
Foaly gently put his hands on Holly's shoulders and turned her around so that she was facing him. "Holly, is everything alright?"
Holly, startled out of her daze, dropped her hand from her mouth, exclaiming a bit too shrilly, "Yeah, everything's OK."
She visibly gathered herself, asking her friend in a much calmer voice, "This is authentic? Not a fake?"
Foaly nodded, concerned. "This is the real thing. The bad thing about this piece of junk," he said, falling into his habit of lecturing people whenever he was nervous, "Is that once you put something on it, you can't delete it or change it. You can put a million things on it, but you can't get rid of it. This is like a mini external hard drive."
Holly was staring up at him in shock. Foaly stopped talking at once. Did he say something wrong?
Holly, still staring at him, said good-bye and walked off. Foaly watched her retreating back, and then began to set his computers on 'Automatic' to try take his mind off his worry for Holly.
Holly trudged back to her apartment, flopping back onto the couch. She lay down across the seats, and held up the USB, outlined against the light bulb on the ceiling. So this thing was authentic. And Foaly had said that anything, once put on it, couldn't be changed. So it really was her mother talking, and she really did have a sister.
She rolled onto her side, contemplating what she had seen and heard. She reached over and put the USB onto the coffee table, feeling a lot calmer than she did a while ago.
Maybe I should go find this sister of mine. Rowan, I think her name was. It's time I visited her.
Hiya people!
Hope that was ok :] Next chapter will be above ground again. But we will visit the People once in a while. X]
Hey, can someone explain to me what 'hits' are? On the story traffic page there are 'visitors' and there are 'hits'. What are they? What do they do? What's the point of them? Explain it to me please! I've been puzzling about it for a long long time...
Happy Hallowe'en! *makes ghostly noises*
Et-R
P.S. Hey, I just realised! All my lines in this A/N start with H except for my signature, and if you get rid of the P.S, this one does too! O.o
