05 Falling Stars: Chapter 1

Dream Haven Police Headquarters, Dream Haven, LA

Now

          Ellie considered the two men confronting her. She’d met one of them before, when he’d been assigned to a case of hers with potential terrorist connections. Back then, the FBI still got called in nearly as often as Homeland, maybe more; Homeland’s reach hadn’t extended and sunk into quite so many different fields, and it was still possible to work a case without having them breathe down the back of your neck.

          John Grady— Special Agent-In-Charge John Grady— was a thick fireplug of a man, six feet tall but unusually broad. He had quick, intelligent eyes and a mobile face that, for the most part, he covered with a beat-up cowboy hat, and she thought he might be as comfortable rustling horses as he was ferreting out hidden clues. She knew his demeanor to be mercurial— he could go from casual to caustic in the space of a heartbeat— but his actual nature seemed to be much more cautious.

          The big man with him was new to her; He made Grady seem almost dwarfish despite his size, standing half a foot taller and nearly as much wider than the senior agent. Actually, she wasn’t entirely sure that John <em>was</em> senior; the big, blond giant had lines on his face that made her increase her estimate of his age upwards by about a decade.

          She rose from her desk and extended her hand. “Gentlemen, what can I do for you?” she asked.

          John smiled. “Hi, Ellie,” he said, “may I introduce my partner, Special Agent Vassily Tupik?”

          She took the big man’s hand and, at the same time, doubled her estimate of his intelligence. He might look like Lennie from Steinbeck’s <em>Of Mice and Men,</em> but no one who worked his way up to special agent in the FBI was an idiot. The fact that he wore the mask so easily just meant that he was accustomed to being underestimated and, in fact, encouraged it.

          Tupik smiled and sat in one of the chairs Ellie indicated. “An interesting case came across my desk this morning,” he said. His voice was surprisingly light, not the rumbling bass his mass suggested, but a clear, fluting tenor. “Sadie Hawkins, age seven, was abducted from a crime scene. A few days later, she turned up in the care— under the protection of— celebrity superhero Sophia Storm. According to the case notes, you were the detective that made the call. Do you remember the case?”

          Ellie frowned. “That was years ago,” she said, her light accent softening her vowels in her consternation, “and it was wrapped up to the satisfaction of everyone except the bad guys. Why’re you digging it up again, now?”

          “Don’t get your back up, Ellie,” John warned. “Someone flagged it and sent it our way. If we can put it to bed with no fuss, we’ll do that.”

          “You better,” Ellie agreed, “that girl’s been through enough. No reason to get her worked up again.”

          Dammit, she thought, that was too much. Grady’s eyes snapped to her face and he studied her carefully for a moment before dropping his gaze again.

          “Why don’t you start with what you remember,” John said, leaning forward. Agent Tupik slumped back in his seat, apparently content to let John take the lead.

          Ellie tapped her fingers on her desk. “Okay,” she said at last, “you remember the South River Riot, a few years back? Right around the same time as this case, in fact?”

          “I read about it, sure,” John admitted, “although I was out of the state at the time.”

          Ellie shrugged. John was frequently on the road, as his job had him moving all over the country working as a troubleshooter not just for the regional director, but for the Bureau as a whole, whenever a case looked to involve metahumans. “This kind of all ties together,” Ellie said, and told him about the attack by Los Diablos del Muerte, their subsequent slaughter, and the riot at the prison.

          “By the time I came onto the scene,” she said, “Sadie was under the protection of someone I judged to be acting in her best interests, but there were enough… irregularities… that I decided to transfer her to a more stable environment.”

          “Yes…” John drawled, “but, see, your account gets a little vague, here. I don’t suppose you can remember anything that might not have made it into your official report, can you?”

          Ellie chuckled. “You know me pretty well, John,” she admitted. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to do a little horse-trading?”

          Tupik looked up, scowling, but John motioned him back with a wave of his hand. “Maybe,” he said, “what’s on your mind?”

          “This chica, Alessia Troisi…”

          “You mean <em>Doctor</em> Alessia Troisi?,” John asked, “The one ranked as something like the third wealthiest woman in the world in last year’s Forbes magazine? <em>That</em> Alessia Troisi?”

          Ellie smiled. “She was number eight, I think,” she murmured, then cleared her throat. “Yes, that one. A friend of mine says she’s been acting a little oddly. No, scratch that.” She paused and took a deep breath. “My friend thinks the faeries kidnapped her and left a fetch in her place.”

          John whistled through his teeth. “You don’t shoot low, do you?” he asked.

          Tupik shrugged. “It <em>is</em> in our… how would you say it? Our playground?”

          “Our baileywick,” John confirmed with a snort.

          “Yes. It is being reported—”

          “It better <em>not</em> be reported,” Ellie warned.

          “—as a kidnapping. Kidnappings are what we do, right?”

          “I think,” John said, “you’d better start at the beginning and tell us everything.”

* * * * *

Ranga's Camp

Time Uncertain

          She didn’t know how long it left her for. At some point, while Ranga’s goblin minions lashed her with fresh vigor, she lost consciousness. When her senses returned, painfully and stinging in flesh flayed raw, she could just see Ranga waddling back over to her through her puffy eyes. It kicked away a goblin that had been nibbling and slurping at a loose, bleeding flap of her skin.

          “Why do you fight?” it asked her. Ranga’s voice was calm, cajoling once again. “You have been gone so long. As many years as you’ve been in Ranga’s care, no one you knew could even remember you after so long.”

          “H-how long?” She asked, her voice shaky.

          Ranga waved the question away. “Even if they weren’t dead, their lives must surely have moved on by now. You would be right to be shocked if any of them even remembered your name, and no one could look at the broken thing you’ve become and possibly dream that you were the same strong woman who found her way here,”

          Not for the first time, she felt the pendant on her chest warm. It wasn’t uncomfortable; just the opposite, in fact. Ranga eyed her necklace warily.

          It reached up and tried to pull the pendant away from her, as it had several times in the past, but hissed and drew back as the heart-shaped ruby at the center flared with inner light, the flesh on the palm of its hand steaming and smoking as if it had been stuck into a fire.

          Ranga’s lip curled. “That won’t protect you forever,” it snarled. “Sooner or later, love will be forgotten… and then, you’ll belong to Ranga!”

* * * * *

Liberty Legal Offices, West End, Dream Haven, LA

Now

          Shae chewed on her lip, a bad habit she’d developed in high school and never broken. Why was this coming up now?

          She knew she had some skeletons in her closet, but nothing that could be proven.

          It was the timing that bothered her the most; there were precious few people who even knew she was considering running for office and even fewer who knew she’d progressed to planning her campaign.

          An attack like this— if it was an attack, and not just bad luck— was subtle and dangerous. She didn’t know who her adversary was, nor did she have any sense of what they hoped to gain at the end of this.

          She didn’t think it could be her primary political rival; his mind wasn’t bendy enough. It could be one of his aides or advisors, though. Worse, it might be some completely new enemy.

          She needed to know more, she decided, and that meant research. Right now, she had precious little to look into; she had a name of what appeared to be some sort of independent investigator working for the LSBSW.

          Good. She had a first target to look into. In the normal course of things, she would ask Network to dig into this guy and find out what he was hiding. Unfortunately, she’d lost her microbuds and, as she really didn’t see herself as a vigilante, she hadn’t replaced them. Failing that, she supposed the logical next step would be to talk to her brother, Luke, and see if he couldn’t put her in contact.

          She picked up her phone and dialed Luke; when his voicemail picked up, she left a short message and hung up.

          She considered a few minutes more. She decided she wasn’t going to get any more work done in here, as distracted as she was; she needed to take a more active role investigating this new threat.

          She looked up the address printed on Mr. James’card and programmed it into her phone’s mapfinder.

          Outside, the world was in that mystical time between when the sun sets and true dark falls, a sort of hazy twilight made even more mystical and foreboding by the heat shimmers rising off the pavement and the distant clouds approaching from the West, threatening thunder and rain.

          Shae shuttered her windows and closed and locked her door. She stripped to her skin and dropped her clothes on the floor, then opened up the small chest that held her costume. She’d brought the case over when she’d moved in, first thing. It was secured by a rather ingenious locking system; even though the lock was purely mechanical, it could only be locked or unlocked from inside the case. The layers of lead and gold foil inside the walls of the case made it impervious to most forms of metahuman visual scans, while the fine conductive mesh embedded in the case operated as a faraday cage when it was closed.

          She pulled the near-black bodysuit over her body, admiring how snugly it fit over her curves. With the seals secured, she had no exposed skin below her jaw. The fabric, itself, was remarkable stuff: it was lightweight and breathable, but tough enough resist cuts and punctures. In the event that she somehow <em>did</em> manage to damage the material, it could be repaired with a simple application of heat and pressure. About the only things it didn’t do worth a damn were filtering gas and regulating temperature.

          With the bodysuit in place, Shae reached for dark blue armor segments. These pieces were fitted over her body and attached to her suit by an ingenious mechanism that Shae didn’t fully understand, but which kept them from sliding around inconveniently, once attached. The armor was heavy and thick, with sufficient strength to stop most small arms and man-powered weapons. She’d had to make tradeoffs, preferring mobility over absolute protection, and so areas where she needed to be able to flex and bend had been left without a hard-shell covering.

          Finally, slipping the dark blue mask over her eyes, Shae allowed her powers to the surface, her physical body shifting until she was pure, glowing energy, bound by forces she could not understand into a solid light projection. She reduced her energy form’s density and visibility until she was barely more than a faintly glowing ball; then, fixing her destination firmly in mind, Will O Wisp blinked out.