Ello again loves!

Honestly, I hadn't planned on posting this chapter until tomorrow, but I have a doctor's appointment in the morning, and I wouldn't get to post this until after that! So, since I'm feeling compassionate, I shall post this now! So NOT looking forward to the doctor...they're going to tell me I'm fat and then steal my blood for blood tests. I'm not allowed to eat anymore, which sucks, because I've been hungry for hours. Fun stuff, I know. No worries though, thoughts of writing again for you awesome readers will get me through the scarring experience! Anyway...

I still lack that little piece of paper that tells me I own Inception. Nope, I own no part of it, I'm just an obsessed fan. I own everything that wasn't in Inception though! ALL MINE! (Yea. I'm just a little tired. Blame my need to write this fanfiction)

Read on!

To much pent up anger flowing through me, I rode to a shooting range, where I all but demolished the prearranged targets set up. Feeling considerably better, I headed to Design with Rendition, where I hoped to find Snow. I wasn't disappointed, discovering her in own personal design room, where she came up with new ideas and templates. Currently, she was working on a dragon. It was quite simple, though gracefully intricate at the same time.

"My life is hell," I grumbled, sitting in a chair across the table from her.

"What happened?" Snow queried, not looking up from her design.

"My brother," I huffed, pulling a sheet of blank paper to me and starting to doodle absently. I felt Snow's surprise as she glanced at me.

"Does he seriously want you to come back? After everything that happened?" she asked.

"Yea. He's got himself a new team and everything," I couldn't help but throw out there.

"What are they like?"

"I don't know, I barely met them. Better then the others, I can tell you that," I said with a half shrug.

"I doubt that's hard to come by," I heard the smirk in Snow's words, and I almost snickered.

"You'd like the forger. He has an accent. And he looks like he doesn't give a damn about following the rules of dreaming," I looked up to gauge her reaction. Snow smirked broadly, shooting me a joking glare.

"Assuming makes an ass out of you and me," she put the old metaphor out there, making me laugh.

"I'm not assuming. I'm presuming," I challenged her.

"No fair, you're a walking thesaurus," she rolled her eyes. "Well, you're a walking everything actually. Translator, dictionary, everything that makes me resent you. Damn your overrider brilliance," she griped.

"You love me," I scoffed. Snow pointedly focused on her design. A grin adorned my face until I looked down at what I had been drawing. The beginnings of a building plan looked back at me. More specifically, a casino labyrinth. Quickly, I crunched the paper in my fingers, refusing to look at the idea that had been simmering in my head for longer then I cared to admit. A small glance up told me that Snow was scrutinizing my movements.

"You're not thinking of going back," she stated, sounding genuinely appalled. "After all the horrible things that happened because of dreaming, you seriously want to?"

"Of course not!" I nearly shouted at her, making Snow flinch slightly away from me. I took a ragged breath, supposedly to calm myself. It didn't work. Instead, I pushed myself to my feet. "Walk," I grumbled as an explanation, leaving the room and storming from the studio. I set off randomly down a street, ready to walk until I felt like stopping. Which I doubted would come any time soon.

~o~

Nearly ready to break something, Cobb rose to his feet, beginning to pace in agitation. His euphoria in interesting Airika in the job had died down in the hours that followed, mostly after he had called it quits for the evening. His mind no longer full of plans, the memories from so many years previous rushed back to him. Cobb knew things had changed, he no longer blamed Airika for what had happened. In fact, all he really wanted was to make it up to her. He had accused her, did his best to bring his own sister crashing down.

The new guilt plagued him, which was why he was currently waiting. Cobb knew he needed to tell someone about his murky past, someone had to know. What better person then someone who already knew more then he had ever considered telling anyone else? The long-awaited knock finally sounded at the door.

"Ari. Thank god," Cobb groaned as he threw the door open. Ariadne, being Ariadne, didn't question at once. Didn't demand to know what was going on. Didn't even say anything. All she did was wrap her arms around him tightly, and Cobb felt himself fill with thankfulness. He hugged her back, relishing in the support she provided. "Come on in," he stepped back after a moment, gesturing inside his house.

"Are you alright?" Ariadne asked, once they were seated in his living room. Her eyes were wide, innocently questioning.

"No," Cobb answered honestly.

"You're guilty about something, I can tell. What? Is it Mal again?" she asked, touching his arm lightly. "I thought you were over that,"

Cobb shook his head. "I am. This is different,"

"Is it about your sister?" Ariadne asked sympathetically. In reply to Cobb's questioning gaze, she grinned. "Eames called me. Reminisced about her yelling at you for at least an hour,"

Feeling a small grin creep onto his face, Cobb nodded. "Yea. Ari, there is so much shit in my past, and you're the only person who knows even a little bit of it. And if you're willing to listen, there's more,"

Ariadne's face was enough for him. It plainly said to tell her anything he wanted. With a sigh, Cobb finally began to tell the story he had buried away for years.

"Before I met you. Before I met Eames or Arthur. Before I even met Mal. It was just me and Airika. We wanted to be the best at dreaming and extraction, she was probably one of the first true overriders, and we were convinced that we would be unbeatable with the right team. We didn't really have the ideal team we wanted, save for one. There was another girl. Jenna. She was Airika's best friend, and my fiancee," Cobb paused here, listening to Ariadne's predicable inhale of shock. He opened his mouth to continue, but choked on the jumble of words that couldn't organize themselves.

"You never mentioned a Jenna. Where is she?" Ariadne tried to help him out with a question.

"Jenna was murdered," Cobb replied bluntly.

"Who killed her?" Ariadne squeaked, sounding frightened of the answer.

"I don't know!" Cobb yelled in frustration, finally breaking out of the grasp of composure he had. "Though at that time, I was convinced it had been Airika. I thought my own sister had killed my fiancee,"

"Why?" Ariadne murmured, actually looking horrified.

"Because Airika, as well as an overrider, is a trained assassin,"

~o~

"The Ethics of Killing," I read aloud. Hours after I had left her studio, Snow finally tracked me down. Neither of us said anything about what had happened before. It was all in the past. Now, we were pursuing a bookstore.

"That's an abortion book," Snow rolled her eyes.

"The irony still stands," I waved the book at her before setting it back down.

"How about The Morality of Happiness?" Snow held up another book. I huffed, unable to come up with a good retort.

"Enough with Oxford. I've lost a few brain cells just reading these titles," I glared at the shelves. Snow giggled, and we moved away, heading deeper into the books. I felt myself zone slightly, barely taking in the section I stood in. Snow had wandered away into the art books, leaving me alone. Eventually, I felt myself stop in front of a set of shelves. Slowly, my focus cleared. I found myself surrounded by architecture books, looking straight at a book of casino designs. Suppressing the urge to scream, I couldn't stop my hand as it pulled the large book off the shelf. As I flipped through it, plans, photographs, drawings, site maps, and designs seemed to jump out at me, specifics being the only things I saw. I realized I was putting everything together, forming the perfect plan in my head. I jerked myself into rationality, slamming the book shut. I tumbled out of the architecture as quickly as possible, determined to act completely normally as I found Snow pouring over art designs.

~o~

Later that night, I couldn't help my unyielding curiosity, logging into one of my numerous email accounts, the one that I was sure could be found most easily if I was electronically searched. I was right, there was a single unread email, from an email address that had today's date as the recipient name. I giggled, new curiosity overtaking me that concerned the point man's thoroughness. After a quick check on the email address, I found that it traced to a hotel in New Zealand, that apparently was quite profitable, though I was quite certain no such hotel existed.

Still smirking, I opened the email, and was greeted to no sort of message, only an audio file attachment. Slipping the huge, noise eliminating headphones that lay next to me over my head, I clicked on the file. Instantly Dutch words exploded into my ears. Taken slightly off guard, I paused and rewound the tape, opening a blank word document. I translated the answers as they were spoken, coming up with a jumble of words after the tape finally finished. I took the time to separate the questions out, fixing slight grammatical errors, just because they annoyed me. I sent the document back to the address, following the lead of not leaving a message along with it. Not that I had anything to say anyway. I had all the intentions of deleting the document, but my own insufferable interest spurred me to actually read the words. Most of it was a whole lot of unusable waste, though one sentence made me pause.

"Mr. Frost has had constant correspondence with an unknown benefactor, who has taken great interest in the idea of our company expansion,"

I stared at the sentence for minutes on end. I willed myself to get a grip. I didn't want any part of this. I didn't want to get involved. My sub-conscious whispered to me from the back of my head. You're already involved. With a huff of surrender, I dove into cyber-world, searching for this benefactor. When that golden document finally appeared on my screen, I couldn't help but laugh. Dom was in much deeper shit then I gave him credit for. And I doubted that he, or any of his team had any idea.

Now, I was most definitely involved.

~o~

Eight o' clock the following morning, I was standing outside the warehouse. I guess my ban on it didn't last long. I was laden with a backpack and a huge book tucked safely under my arm. The book was the same book on casinos I had been drawn to the day before. I had gone back as soon as the place had opened again, buying it despite my rational mind screaming at me to not. With a deep sigh, I entered the warehouse, finding the trio almost comically in the same positions I had seen them in before. Dom looked at me and grinned triumphantly.

"I'll help you," I mumbled, glancing from my brother to both Arthur and Eames in turn.

"What changed your mind?" Arthur was first to question. My eyes narrowed slightly, and I looked into his face.

"You haven't figured it out yet," I said it mostly to myself, more as a groan. I hated it when my worries came true.

"What?" Dom asked seriously.

"That Cobal is about to stab you guys in the back," I broke the words to them. Ringing silence met these words. "The 'unknown benefactor?' It's Cobal Engineering,"

~o~

"They want us out of the picture. Someone from Cobal is training Frost's sub-conscious to be nothing more then a killing machine. They want Frost to kill us, so they don't have to,"

"But its a dream! We can't die in a dream! We don't even have a sedative, we'll just wake up," Eames cut through Arthur's briefing. It was half an hour after I had gotten to the warehouse. In that short amount of time, both Arthur and I had used our combined cyber skills to unearth everything Cobal was planning. Actually, he did most of the unearthing, while I covered his tracks. I was best at that. It was an efficient set-up.

"Not necessarily," Arthur plowed over these words. "There is a point, in the instant before we wake up, where Frost will have the opportunity to be able to control the dream. If he succeeds, which he will, he can lock us in the dream. Once that stage is reached, we can be killed in the dream and not wake up. If we are dead in the dream for to long, and we don't wake up, that state will eventually cross over into reality. It's a slow process, but it will result in all of us being killed,"

"So we'll disappear. We know whats going on now, and Cobal will already know that we know what they're planning. We can escape, right now," Dom exclaimed.

"But that is the beauty of it," I actually grinned. "Cobal has no idea, I'm certain of it. On their records, Arthur's searching is a routine check by their computer moderator, to make sure no hackers have gotten in. Ironic, right?"

"Okay, you've lost me," Eames sat up from his somewhat slouched position. "Cobal has hired us for a phony job, with the intention of sneakily killing us instead. We just found out about this. Cobal still thinks that we're an innocent 'dream team' trying desperately to clear our names,"

"That's the basic idea, yes," Arthur affirmed.

"So why don't we just, as our darling extractor puts in, disappear? We can get out of this,"

"True. We could. But there's another option," I couldn't contain my grin. It was probably unhealthy how excited I was about this. "We could play innocent. Go into the dream, letting Cobal believe that we fell into their trap, and turn the dream around once we're in there. We don't let Frost get control, we don't get killed. We get Frost to spill everything he has on whoever wants us dead, get out and turn right around to get the upper hand on Cobal. You lose the price on your heads, and Cobal owes you big time for not shouting around about them,"

"So instead, we have to deal with a highly trained sub-conscious army, who are probably chanting about our deaths right now, and stop a skilled dreamer from doing his own little magic thing-a-ma-wiggle so he can kill us?" Eames questioned seriously.

"Yup," I popped the P as I spoke, leaning back in my chair.

"Remind me why we're better off then where we started," Eames wasn't grasping this.

"Because now, we have Airika," Arthur explained. Eames blinked. I rolled my eyes.

"Eames, do you have any idea what an overrider does?" I asked simply.

"You could refresh my memory," he muttered. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dom deep in thought. He was putting it all together.

"An overrider overrides things," I explained. Eames rolled his eyes.

"Thank you darling, that was so helpful," he drawled.

"I'm not finished. Frost will have once change to take control of the dream. I can do it whenever the hell I please. An overrider can do whatever they want in the dream. Change it, control it, end it, pause it, lock it, anything. If I get control first, Frost can't,"

"Why?" Eames questioned. "Won't the little chance he has still be there while we're waking up?"

"No," I said simply. Eames raised an eyebrow.

"Understand this Eames. She's the best at what she does. If Airika gets control of the dream, it stays that way," my brother muttered simply. I felt myself shrug modestly.

"Okay. So what about the blood thirsty army?" Eames asked again.

"Christ Eames, being negative doesn't suit you," Arthur muttered exasperatedly.

"It's a legitimate question dearest, and I'd like it answered before we enter a suicide mission," Eames said evenly.

"My pinky finger is more dangerous then Frost will ever hope to be. We've got force covered," I said bluntly. Eames and Arthur looked at me curiously. Neither of them knew yet. Dom glanced at me quickly, obviously wondering if I was actually going to tell them. "I've been a specially trained assassin since I was eleven. All the kids my age were hoping for their Harry Potter letters that wouldn't come. In a way, I got mine," I fell silent, feeling the shocked stares bore into me.

"If this is going to work, you can't be the only one with that sort of knowledge and training," Dom unexpectedly said bluntly. I looked up at him as he got to his feet and started pacing.

"You want to be trained as an assassin?" I finally asked.

"And you're going to be the one to do it," he nodded as he looked at me. "You have to help us out here. The three of us, we can't go in there without at least a little knowledge,"

I got to my feet too, shaking my head. "No. Trust me Dom, you don't want to be an assassin! It's hell, your mind will never be the same, I guarantee you that,"

"I'm not asking you," he said bluntly. I blinked. I saw the certainty in his face, I couldn't sway him if I tried. I glanced behind me at Eames and Arthur.

"You're all seriously willing to give up whatever security and sanity you have?" I asked the group.

"Darling, I lost that years ago," Eames grinned for the first time. Arthur only gave me a small nod.

I looked at my brother. "Fine. First, I need stuffs,"

"Stuffs?" Dom smirked, mocking my plural usage.

"Yes, smart ass, stuffs," I stuck my tongue out at him.

"And where do you plan to get your stuffs? What kind of stuffs are you talking, anyway?" he questioned.

"I have to go see Erastus," I mumbled as a reply, already deep in thought.

"I hate him," Dom muttered, crossing his arms.

"You're mature," I said sarcastically, grinning anyway. "You don't have to come," I assured him easily when he continued to look ruffled.

"That's all the way in Antarctica, someone should go with you,"

"Why? Not for protection, surely," I nearly scoffed, but resisted the urge.

"No. Because if you don't come back, we have a better change of knowing why," Dom said unashamedly. For a moment, anger flared through me as I considered that he would actually believe I would skip out like that. Then I realized what he really meant. Kidnap.

"Alright fine. Who gets to suffer through thirty-six hours of grueling plane travel and layovers just to spend a few hours in a freezing cold blizzard before coming back?" I said this all so cheerily, that Dom just stared at me for a moment. "I'm being blunt," I informed him, finally sitting in my chair again.

"Me," Arthur announced, with an air that seemed determined to state this fact before someone else stated it for him. In reply to my glance, he shrugged. "That's what was going to happen anyway," he said. I nearly smirked.

"Sucks to be you," I couldn't help but sing-song obnoxiously.

"You're going too," Arthur said, almost defensively.

"Sure, but I've done it before,"

"How do you know I haven't?" Arthur challenged.

"If you had, you'd know what you just got yourself into," I resisted the urge to giggle at his expression, instead getting to my feet, beginning to move away from our gathering. "Bring a coat. Or ten,"

Holy moly. Antarctica trip next! Let me tell you, it's going to be a pretty awesome experience! Only I and my overly helpful friend have read chapter 3, and if I get a review or two, it'll be yours as well! And yes, that was my not so subtle way of begging you for reviews. They are my LIFE. Which is pathetic. But, I'm sure a few of you out there know what I mean!

So, maybe send me a letter of love? I scream really loudly when I see the Review Alert email. My house echos...A LOT. I trust your mind to put those two together. Interesting result, no?

Adieu,

Mio