Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Back in her cubicle, Amanda searched the internet for any evidence of Lugh's new identity. A search Brigid had tasked her with last week. She focused on the highest auspices of power both in London and England as a whole, which included past transcripts and footage from shows like BBC Newsnight. When Amanda asked Brigid what feature she should look for, she mentioned only one thing: someone who appeared to be too good to be true.
She was surprised by the easy access he had accessing these classified government websites. A diminutive co-worker approached across from Amanda’s chair as she was typing. He was no more than five feet tall with help from his black dress shoes. The man wore a plaid tie with a white dress shirt and dark brown slacks. His bleached blonde hair flowed in a wavy manner down to his shirt collar.
“Hi there.” The co-worker introduced to the busy Amanda. His English had a touch of Italian as he spoke.
“Hey,” Amanda said back, ignoring the man he was thought was just a random stranger.
“So, you’re the new guy from America?” the short man asked, leaning on the side of the cubicle entrance. “How do you like it here?”
Amanda stopped typing and turned to face the man. “It’s alright,” she uttered before returning to his work.
She thought this would signal the interrupter to leave him be, and stop the subtle chatter/fliration. But the guy stood there, quietly smiling without a care in the world. “So, what kind of hobbies do you have,” the man asked, moving his shoulder off of the cubicle wall. “Football, 'Real Housewives,' Cricket perhaps? Or maybe you’re into more mental excursions like reading or crosswords.”
“That’s enough, Sprig,” Jar’Ed barked, emerging from the hallway. “You still have to finish the feature on the English Olympic football team. Now, get back to work.”
“Aye, sir.”
Amanda watched Sprig walk away, shooting an irritated look back at Jar'Ed. There was a strange bulge on the back of the man's dress shirt. “Who was that guy?” she asked.
“He’s Sprig. He’s one of our original staff writers,” Jar’Ed replied, stepping closer. “He was one of the first to cover EPL matches for the paper. He also did radio work for Tottenham back in the ‘70s before they found about his 'condition'.”
“His 'condition'.” Amanda stood up. She then subtly pointed to Sprig’s back before he disappeared from view. “You’re talking about the big lump on his back, right?”
“That isn’t a lump, Amanda. Those are his wings,” Jar’Ed stated matter of factly. “He’s a fae, or fairy as they’re more readily referred as these days.”
“Really?” Amanda took the information in briefly before sitting down. “That explains, somewhat, why he was so chatty to me. Probably not that many of them left in the world, huh?”
“Yes. The number of fae on Earth aren’t as great as they once were,” said the Australian god. “They left for Avalon centuries earlier after the Dagda’s decree.”
“So why did he stay?” Amanda asked.
“The football, of course,” Jar’Ed chuckled. He stepped inside Amanda’s cubicle and peered over Amanda’s shoulder at the computer screen. “So, have you found anything of substance about Lugh?”
“Nothing yet. Though there was one thing that caught my eye.” Amanda said.
“What was it?”
“It was on the Prime Minister’s website,” Amanda replied, sliding her chair toward the desk. “It’s probably nothing though.”
“Let me take a look!”
Jar’Ed went down on one knee to look at the screen as Amanda leaned toward the laptop and typed on the keyboard. After a few minutes searching, Ms. Duncan pulled up the profile of Lucas Pearson. The webpage detailed parts of the man’s identity including his basic workplace picture. It also had a section that detailed the man’s job description, staff for Prime Minister Temple, along with his prior experience.
“I found the profile this morning going through the staff pages,” Amanda said, scrolling the page down as Jar’Ed looked on. “On the surface, this Pearson guy looks like any other government employee. But I took a closer look at his picture and something stood out for me.”
He moved the mouse up and zoomed in on Lugh’s employee picture, focusing squarely on his eyes. “I've never seen eyes that shade of blue at any point in my entire life.”
“That proves nothing,” Jar’Ed said examining the photograph. “The shade of blue is fascinating, I admit. But it can easily be explained as a mutation in human DNA, something shared with a percentage of humankind.”
“I thought the same thing when I first saw it,” Amanda conceded. “But look at the date he was hired.”
She scrolled down the webpage, reaching the section labeled ‘Hired On’ a few moments later. “April 16th. That’s twenty four hours after the Chelsea explosion. This guy’s either hideously lucky or not of this world.”
Jar’Ed nodded, studying the screen for a couple of more seconds before standing back up. “It is not the silver bullet we were hoping for. But it is something that is definitely worth further examination. Make sure you get this to Ghede straight away before she leaves.”
“Yes, sir.”
Amanda got out of his chair after sending the document out to the printers. “Wait, Jar’Ed,” she said. “There’s one thing I’ve been curious about ever since I was a kid.”
“What is it?”
“I imagine you’ve been to Avalon a lot,” Jar’Ed nodded. “What is it like up there?”
Jar’Ed pondered for a few moments. “Well, I—I cannot really describe it in words to you. You have to see it for yourself to truly comprehend just how beautiful it is. It can be quite overwhelming if you’re not careful.”
“So, is that what happened to this Lugh guy?” Amanda prodded further. “He just got overwhelmed by it all and went supervillain?”
Jar’Ed’s expression turned to stone. “He was a good man who lost his way, Ms. Duncan. Hardly a unique phenomenon amongst the various designs of life.”
***
Five minutes later, Amanda waited patiently in front of the office’s Hewlett Packard Inkjet printer. She watched as each individual page fell out onto the plastic gray bed. All she could think about was Lucas Pearson’s face and how Jar’Ed became completely cold the moment she started to talk about him. It was almost as if he had stumbled on to something she wasn’t meant to know.
The last of the four printed pages showed Lucas' smiling face. She picked them up and quickly made his way to Ghede’s office. The closer Ms. Duncan got, the more she started to hear a host of sounds filling his ears. At first, it was metal chains grinding on a bed of rocks. Then there came the sound of small children singing in unison Mexican songs that honor the dead. It didn’t take him long to figure out the source of these sounds.
“Boo!”
Amanda jumped. Ghede laughed as she stepped in front of him, patting him with the butt of her cane. “My apologies, Halfling. I couldn’t resist!”
“What the hell’s a Halfling?” Amanda asked, regaining her composure.
“It is someone who is part human and part god,” Ghede replied. “You may be more familiar with the term by its Gaelic name, Páistí.”
“Why not just call it Páistí?”
“The same reason one species has over thirty translations of the word ‘love,’” she picked the pack of papers from Amanda’s hand, examining each one. “Good work. I’ll see you after I get back from Valencia.”
“Can I come with you, Ghede?” Amanda asked. “I did spend over a week getting that for you.”
Ghede turned around and straightened the collar of her black shirt. “First of all, though I respect your spirit, I think you would be more of a liability to me than an asset. And secondly, you have training in twenty minutes in the Boardroom.”
“Training?”
Amanda watched as she faded into a ghostly mist and disappeared into an air conditioning grate. She wondered what kind of training would await him. Maybe it was just some rules to study or tests he’d have to take. That wouldn’t be too bad, she thought.
***
She stepped into the Boardroom twenty minutes later. The only pieces of furniture inside were a couple of stools positioned together in one corner. The room as a whole resembled the interior of a karate dojo with its cold white walls, full body mirror, and soft leather flooring. At an opposite corner of the room sat a small cache of weapons.
“Hello,” Amanda called out, standing in the middle of the room. “Anyone in here?”
The door opened a few moments later, and in stepped the Titan-like Chabe. He was dressed in a pair of pants and a white buttoned up shirt that didn’t look too tight on his form. He walked up to his young associate.
“Welcome to the Boardroom, Ms. Duncan,” Chabe uttered in a voice that echoed throughout the small room. “This is where you will learn to unleash the power within you. Or die trying.”
“I didn’t fly across the Atlantic to be made into a ninja, Chabe.”
“Of course we are not going to do that, Ms. Duncan.” The room shook with Chabe’s laughter. “All we are trying to do is free your mind of the little bit of excess weight holding you down.”
Amanda scoffed. “My mind’s already plenty light, thank you.”
“That should make this whole exercise relatively easy for you, then.”
“So, what are the weapons for?” she asked, watching Chabe cross to the cache of weapons.
“You mean these?” He placed a large hand atop the weapon rack. “These are not weapons.” The Spanish god picked up a battleaxe, uncorked the top of it like a bottle, and took a draught from the metal end.
“This is my secret stash of licors,” Chabe continued, dropping the empty cylinder on the floor. “Razor sharp, and absolutely delicious! I keep them among these weapons to make sure no one in the office steals a swig.”
Now Amanda was curious. “So, how is this ‘Training’ thing going to take place?” she asked, following Chabe as he started to leave the room.
With one of his claw-like hands gripping on the doorknob, he turned back to Amanda. “You will see soon enough.”
Amanda walked around the middle of the now silent room, mentally preparing for whatever would be thrown at her. She pictured how it might be a virtual reality setup. Or an alternate dimension that had massive beasts or aliens with large tentacles trying to attack him.
Inside the all-white room, the passing minutes felt like hours. In reality, only fifteen minutes had passed by during his guarded wait for the training to start. The tension built steadily higher and higher as he waited for something to happen. It reached a point that it wrapped inside Amanda’s brain. She became so preoccupied with it that she didn’t notice the temperature in the Boardroom rising steadily.
It reached sixty-five degrees after five minutes. It then went to seventy degrees five minutes later and up to eighty degrees after another five minutes. Her shirt started to feel a little steamy for the first time as the temperature inside reached the low nineties. The ceiling and the walls started to glisten. She started to stumble around the floor, breathing deeper with each succeeding second.
Ms. Duncan took three steps forward before she lost her balance and fell down. The room started shifting on a 90 degree angle. Amanda wiped a large pool of sweat that poured down her forehead, trying on all fours to keep a clear view of his surroundings. There was no doubt in her mind at this point: the training had begun.
Amanda crawled around the room, contemplating how to survive the sweltering heat as she took off her dress coat. She looked up with burning eyes at what she thought was an air conditioner vent in the ceiling. She stood up ran with a smile toward the unit with the energy of a kid in a toy store. After a couple of steps, the heat zapped the energy from Amanda’s body and she fell back down again.
Chabe and Brigid observed his progress from behind a two-way mirror next to the Boardroom.
“She is not looking too well, Cap’n,” he uttered shaking his head, watching Amanda writhe on the ground. “We’ve put her in far too early. Maybe in a few days she’ll be more up to it.”
“Give Ms. Duncan more time, Chabe,” Brigid replied with unflinching confidence. “You know as well as I that we need as much backup as we can against Lugh and whoever broke him out. Besides, I am certain she can and will rise to the occasion.”
A half-hour passed and the temperature inside the Boardroom reached well over one-hundred degrees. Amanda ripped off her blue buttoned up shirt that was drenched in sweat and threw it on the ground, revealing her bra. She hoped that the excess cool air would help cool him. When that didn’t work, Ms. Duncan took off her skirt, revealing her similarly simple panties in the hopes of achieving the same effect. All it did was leave her half naked and still boiling with sweat. Then, Amanda remembered something Chabe mentioned earlier.
“The Licor flasks!”
She ran over to the cache of weapons and picked up a medieval mace. She struggled for a few moments to rip the top off of it, stopping on occasion to catch her breath from exhaustion. After an extra minute, Ms. Duncan finally was able to rip the chain and spiked ball off. She dropped the ball down on the cushioned floor and lifted the wooden base up to her lips. Amanda started to imagine the variety of flavors that would soon come, but nothing came out of it.
Amanda shook the wooden flask violently over her mouth three times, hoping it would set loose whatever little droplets of liquid were still be hidden inside it. Finally, she threw the wooden flask in frustration down on the floor. She turned her head to the door, hoping to find the door to get out of there. But it disappeared. Ms. Duncan then ran to the glass windows and banged her fists on the glass. “Let me out! LET ME OUT!”
She continued hammering the glass another ten times, screaming at the top of her lungs. The strength in her arms and legs drained out with each preceding slam of her fist. When Amanda's legs could not hold any longer, she began to slide down the glass. As her head leaned away from the glass back down to the floor, Amanda started to accept the inevitability that this was the end of her story. Her only regret was that it looked like a pretty crappy story.
Suddenly, Amanda felt a gust of cool air hit her forehead. This must be what Heaven feels like the first time, she thought. Or wherever she had ended up. She opened her eyes soon to the realization that she was very much alive, only the room was getting cooler. Ms. Duncan smiled and slowly stood back up again, taking in the breeze that was enveloping the room. I did it, she thought. I survived!
The elation Amanda felt was short lived, however, as the room shifted from comfortably cooler to considerably colder. She began to shiver violently and his lungs filled with a choking cold that made breathing a struggle. A few seconds later, the considerable warmth returned. Then it would become colder again, then much hotter in steadily decreasing intervals. The sudden shifts in temperature were enough to drive Amanda on one knee to the ground in painful agony.
She racked her brain for any method left to overcome it. Nothing was coming to mind. Then, Amanda remembered something her father taught her as a kid whenever she felt overburdened by something. He would tell her one simple thing. “Take a few deep breaths and imagine a happy place.” Don’t have that much to lose, she thought.
Amanda closed his eyes and started breathing deeper and deeper; picturing her version of a happy place. In this case, it was herself as a child in Seattle playing on a seventy degree summer day. The sun shining, birds singing. Every little glint of warmth that she pictured from that day traveled the expanse of time back to his desperate self.
A couple of minutes passed before Ms. Duncan started to feel the effects of it. Her body, along with the rest of the room, had returned to some semblance of normalcy. The only exception was the dented glass and the weapon flasks that were scattered along the floor. Amanda cautiously smiled and let out a sigh of relief, rubbing the pain away from her hands. She did wish though that she came up with this idea before she ripped her clothes off.
As she picked his damp clothes off the floor, the door opened and Brigid’s voice filtered in. “Congratulations, Ms. Duncan.”
“Thank you,” Amanda answered, sweaty shirt in hand. She cleared his throat, embarrassed by his half-naked self. “How did you do that? Some type of elaborate magic spell?”
“We used a time control heating and cooling system,” she pointed to the vent, ignoring Amanda’s half nakedness. “It is normally used for the office on a daily basis, though we make use of it on occasion for training.”
“For some reason, I thought this was going to be some a big virtual simulation,” said Amanda. “Drop me in the middle of France or Spain surrounded by a horde of dragons or zombies.”
Brigid chuckled. “That’s ridiculous! Simulations are only for experienced personnel. And besides, everyone knows zombies are indigenous solely in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.”
Amanda nodded, steadily piecing together what happened in her mind. “So, this whole thing was a survival test. You control the temperature from a computer. Start hot, then cool, and back again over a period of time. All to see if I would give up or not.”
“You are close, Ms. Duncan.” The goddess walked a few steps closer to her new employee. “The program does test your survivability as well as how well you are able to withstand different climates. The test, however, ended roughly ten minutes ago, before the interval of hot and cold that you felt.”
Amanda wiped his forehead with his torn shirt. “So, all that I went through was...”
Brigid smiled and nodded.
She let out an exasperated sigh and picked up his torn pants legs. “So, how’d I do?”
“You did well, but this is not a test designed for you to pass or fail. This is only the first of many to come.”
She walked over to the door, her heels clicking lightly as she left the Boardroom. “A little advice— I would dress lighter for the occasion.”
Amanda thought about the additional training sessions to come. Thank the sweet Gods that this one was over.