Fletcher searched Valkyrie's fridge, and, finding nothing, did her shopping. He noticed the living room floor getting covered in crumbs since he ate in there, and he vacuumed it. For good measure he washed the sheets and made all the beds.

He checked the clock and teleported to the airport, texting her quickly.

Fifteen minutes later, he texted again, and again, finally calling her.

At 9:45 AM, he called Skulduggery Pleasant to tell him something important.

#

Ms. Cellany worked from home, having bifurcated said home into two parts. The right was the office, the left was the house, and they were connected by a wide hallway.

As Skulduggery sat in said hallway in a rather comfy cloth armchair, he mused that the whole house was rather like an H, with a driveway in front and a well-tended garden in back. The therapist was there now, walking with one of her patients. He took the opportunity to observe her from afar, because meshing her description with their first dialogue would be distracting.

She looked average, even through the slightly tinted glass. Brown hair, rectangular glasses. Her make-up wasn't visible from this far away, which was a blessing, and her slim, gangly form was contained by a rather modest green 3/4 length top and black slacks. He couldn't see her shoes.

Looking up, Skulduggery marveled at the shortness of that paragraph. The readers probably had a very good idea of what she looked like, it didn't involve any flashing colors, and it was less than 60 words long (or four lines in Microsoft Word). Impressive. It even included a negative adjective and refrained from saying "her boobs were like the Baby Bear's Rocking Chair- Not too big, not too small, just right!"

Skulduggery checked the watch I suddenly decided he has and discovered that it was his turn for therapy. For reference purposes that time is 9:00 AM. I'm not all that sure why he scheduled this spur-of-the-moment meeting in the same timeslot as going to get Valkyrie, but maybe he wanted Fletcher to do something interesting for once, or give the Auth a chance to write some romance that actually has canon basis.

The door to the garden swung open and Michelle's voice was audible for the first time. Its clarity struck Skulduggery- as opposed to Mary Sue ramblings and awkward syntax, she actually spoke like a person.

"-But I guess you'll have to wait and find out. Maybe she isn't all you think she'll be, or you aren't all she thinks you'll be. Give it a while."

Well, when I say that she speaks like a person, I mean that she speaks like a teenager. What did you expect, when the writer is a teenager herself? She's not Joss Whedon, even if she is influenced by him and that's why her dialogue is the way it is.

"How long is a while?" The neurotic-looking man asked, glancing at the Family Guy episode where Brian spends the entire episode 'waiting until the time was right' to sleep with his girlfriend but takes too long, ending with the girl leaving him.

"Uh. Probably a week or two? Don't move in or anything." Michelle giggled. "Make sure you can tell me all about it, and don't try to hide your furry little problem from her. That's always bad. She already knows, right?"

The man cringed.

"Oh. Make sure to tell her. To her face, mind you. Don't text it, because that's just rude and there is the chance that she might not know how to text you back." Ms. Cellany opened the door for him. "See you next week?"

The man hesitated. "Yeah. I'll call if... sooner. Yeah."

"Yeah," Michelle agreed."

"Yeah." He chuckled as he left. Before the door even swung closed, Michelle turned her back and glanced up and down the hallway, gliding right over Skulduggery. She frowned slightly.

Skulduggery helped her out by standing up and walking over to her. Her peripherals were excellent and her face lit up with understanding. "Oh! A facade!* I thought you wouldn't get one for a few chapters, to make the integration with the new book more believable."

Skulduggery shrugged. "I guess I've had it for a few weeks. Long enough for Valkyrie to tell me it's creepy for me to smile all the time and for me to train myself to actually have recognizable emotions on my face, instead of looking like the Joker."

"What, was your hair green before it was red?" Michelle asked.

"No, it was black. Before that it was brown."

"How many times have you switched so far?"

"Pick a number under seven."

Michelle smirked slightly. "Let's go with six. I remember-" she faltered for a moment, but regained herself. "A friend of mine had nearly twenty before she settled on a face she liked."

Skulduggery caught the way her body language closed up, arms crossing as if to ward off a chill while her eyes darted to the side. "What happened to her?"

"Caught in an explosion. It really wasn't pretty. Aaaaaanyways, office or garden?"

The skeleton's currently grey eyes stared at her. Almost as abrupt as the change of topic was the change in the way she held herself- now it was shoulders broad, hand on hip, and a gesture. Bold, self-confident movements.

"Odd," Skulduggery said.

"What is?"

"That you're letting me choose."

If Michelle suspected him of lying, it didn't show on her face. "It isn't really all that weird. I have either an office or a garden. Some people prefer the office because it's warmer and I have one of those bed-couch things, and some people prefer the garden because running around in the rain is fun for them."

Skulduggery had already seen the garden. "Office, then."

She gestured behind him, and Skulduggery noticed as she moved off the carpet between the adjacent doors that the shoes she wore tapped on the tile. He looked down curiously at demure black flats and the hem of her glass-covered pants.

"I need to get these fitted," Michelle admitted to his unspoken 'Are her pants really that long and if so why did she walk around in the bushes with them on?' "They're new, and they really didn't look this long in the store. I guess I misjudged how tall I am. Did you know you have a tell?"

He guessed that suddenly changing topics were a norm in the business of Michelle Cellany. "A tell?"

"When you lie."

He hadn't known. Possibly a side-effect of the facade. "What is it?"

She laughed, covering her mouth as if to shelter the low sound. "Do you really think I'm telling you? Half of what I do in this office is going to be psychological torture, especially for someone with a past like yours, so I figure I might as well get you guessing now."

"So you really intend to..." Skulduggery struggled to find the verb. "Therapise? Is that it?"

"Well, you're paying me to do it, so I may as well provide you with therapy."

"What about the card?" Skulduggery asked, absentmindedly noticing that they were floating through a page of white and white text (or purple and black text) without any background information to prove otherwise.

The color scheme had changed from the blue-and-green of the lobby to warmer colors, such as many shades of brown and dark reds. The carpet was dark enough that the grass Michelle was slowly leaving behind her wouldn't stain, and the windows were mostly shuttered.

The office space was rather small, though, when compared to the length of the lobby and the presumed size of the house area. A rather lopsided H, then. Or perhaps an h.

Or a q, if the street closed the top...

Skulduggery noticed Michelle staring at him, her hand a closed door. "That's creepy," she said.

"What is?"

"The way you were grinning."

Skulduggery's eyebrows rose with a moment of concentration."I was grinning?"

"That is somehow even more creepy."

"What is?"

"That you didn't know you were smiling!" She paused. "Also, it's kind of throwing me off."

"What is?"

"That's the third time you've said that."

"You were explaining how I was throwing you off without touching you in any way that might be misconstrued as 'throwing', or even 'pushing'."

Michelle chuckled, smiling slightly. "I'm an adept. I read people, the signals they send, and your signals are all weird. Now that I think about it, you probably weren't nearly as surprised as your eyebrows said you were. Maybe you were skeptical, but can't do this." She raised a single eyebrow at him.

Skulduggery raised both of his at her in return.

"See! (Also, that was a visual gag, discouraged in literature.) You definitely need some practice. In the meantime, don't be surprised if I react oddly to your face."

"To my face?"

"Stop asking questions in incomplete sentences, it's getting repetitive."

"Well, this is a satire."

"Smashing the fourth wall into bits is also getting old."

"No it's not. It's one of the selling-points for this fic."

Michelle snickered.

Skulduggery remembered how to frown. "What?"

"You just look so shocked every time you try to look skeptical. It's all kinds of amusing."

The detective didn't like people laughing at him. It struck him all of a sudden that she was being quite rude to him... no, that wasn't it. She was acting far too friendly towards him.

He wasn't sure if he wanted her as a friend. "You're the one who said I needed practice."

There was far more force behind his voice than he had meant. It took her a moment to recover, so in the meantime she opened the door.

In contrast to the dark, lightless room they were in (I'm not entirely sure why this room even exists, actually, or why the lobby exists, when she could just have her clients in her home...) the office's shutters were open and the colors tended towards cream, outlined with dark woods and colorful fabrics.

She did indeed have one of those reclining couch things, as well as the same comfy chairs from the lobby. He chose one of the chairs, and to his surprise, she lay down on the couch, staring at the ceiling.

"So why did you come for therapy, anyway?"

"On your business card, there was a message."

"From one of your friends?" Michelle asked.

She didn't know. Some other, mysterious individual had told him not to tell Auth.

"Yes, I guess."

Michelle scoffed. "'You guess'? You might as well tell me that you don't know who wrote it if you're going to use uncertain language."

For a moment he wanted to smack her for being right.

"But for what it's worth, you actually do need therapy."

Skulduggery felt himself stiffen, coiled like a snake to either snap at her or crumple like rice-paper in the rain.

She continued, and it occurred to him that she looked tense as well, because she knew that her next words could be the prologue to serious damage to her person. "You're angry, right? Just like before, but different now. It comes on and off like a hose, and you can't stop it. Other people have helped you, but it's only a matter of time before you do something everyone will regret, and there's enough distance between you and everyone around you, enough secrets, that you're not sure you can tell them about this. But they see it anyway, and it scares them."

She paused for a few seconds, raising her head to look at him. He had crumpled slightly, but a wall of steel wound between him and her. She was smart. Possibly smarter than him, in a different way, in a way that he had no defense against.

To do her job, she would need him to open up to him. If he did, she could seek out his heart and kill it, or she could make him whole.

(She also seemed to spout metaphors and similes whenever she appeared on the page to an extent that made him wonder when he stepped into an Anne Rice novel. Or perhaps Twilight, but the writer likes to think that her metaphors aren't that horrible, obvious, and terrible.)

Michelle waited while he considered, slowly retracting his claws. "You're right. Right on every point."

A smile of self-satisfaction flashed across her face long enough for Skulduggery to want to punch it off of her, before softening into an actual smile. "For a moment, I thought that I had breathed my last."

"If you had been holding your breath, you might have. It took me long enough." Skulduggery checked his watch. "I know we were running on fanfic time, but 9:45? It really took me about 35 minutes to-"

His phone rang. His omnipresent creepy smile sunk from his face for perhaps the first time since the eyebrow conversation, which meant that he was grinning at Michelle the whole time he was considering whether or not to kill her.

A/N: HAHAHA, oh God. I think I might have nightmares about that last line. See what I do for you guys?

One of those things that I do is that this chapter is longer than the others, by about a thousand words! Yaaaay! I'm going to try and make this a constant, instead of doing what happens in my other stories: The first chapter is the longest and it all goes downhill. Unless you like that or something. I know I don't. It doesn't let me do anything with the chapter other than make a few jokes.

In other news, I'm thinking of a name for a villain. She is going to be Japanese and her name has to be some pun with "death". (Remember, if it has "Shi" in it, or is written with "Four", that will count.) The person that comes up with the best Deathsue name will win a prize.

Their name, right here in the fic.

Or I might list all entries and let you vote. In the case that there may be NO entries, here is MY entry:

Shiyuri Shinkawa, for extra alliterative appeal.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN.