Atalanta part 9
Apr. 23rd, 2011 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drownedinlight So I finally got back to writing this today. And stuff happens!
“Hey Natalie,” she called into the back rooms. “I’m making a salad do you want one?” Silence filtered through her ears. “Natalie are you awake yet? Are you here even? Am I just talking to the apartment?” She walked slowly towards the bedrooms, her heart clenching tighter and beating louder as she moved towards Natalie’s room.
Someone knocked on the door.
Charlotte nearly jumped out of her skin, and stalked toward the door, opening it with a furious swing, like it had been the one to scare her.
“Hey,” Greer said holding up some take out cartons. “I hope you don’t mind but I brought some lunch and—” Charlotte swung the door, slamming it into frame, before stalking back into the apartment. “Charlotte what was that for?”
“Strike, get out of my apartment before I call this breaking and entering,” she said, not even looking over her shoulder to see that he hand entered. She strode into Natalie’s darkened room. No figure occupied the bed, and her computer was gone.
“What did you call me?” Greer asked from the doorway.
“Shut up and don’t come in,” Charlotte said. “Something is wrong here.”
“You’re roommate’s not home, so something’s wrong?” Greer asked. “Maybe she just went out or—”
“No, if she took her computer she was going to be out for a while, but she would have left a note or texted me and…” Charlotte searched the edge of the desk and held up a smart phone. “She left her phone. If she was going to be out for a while, she would have left a way for me to contact her.”
“All right, calm down,” Greer told her, “we’ll figure this out. Maybe she just went to work on something and didn’t want to be bothered. Check her desk for a note. Did you see anything anywhere else in the apartment?” Charlotte jerked her head from side to side.
“No, she would have left something like that on the counter or the table,” Charlotte said, “and there was nothing.” Charlotte turned to look back around the room, and noticed something fluttering in the window. She moved across the room, snatching it away from the pane, noticing the lack of a screen as she did. Her eyes scanned over the note, dropping almost as soon as they did.
“What?” Greer asked. “What does it say?” Charlotte handed him the note, trying to search some part of her memory. “To Atalanta: I found your little bug. Come to me or she will be squashed. And bring along the clever little boy who worships Nocturn. If you can find him, he might be some help. All the best—Maestro. Charlotte, we have to report this, the police will put out a call or something, and get Atalanta to go.”
“We don’t need to put out a call to the police,” Charlotte spat striding from the room. “I’m going to find that ass and squash him!” Greer grabbed her shoulders and forced her to look at him.
“Charlotte you are not thinking rationally. What could you do against a super villain like Maestro?” Charlotte turned to him and rolled her eyes.
“Either my mask is really good, or you need to get your eyes checked. Strike, I am Atalanta!” Greer stared at her blankly for a moment.
“You are Atalanta? Then what did we do last night?”
“You acted like a pompous ass in an alley way, after you helped me clean up a bank robbery,” she said, turning to pull her costume out of a secret compartment in the back of her closet.
“All right, all right, Charlotte, I believe you, but you still need to calm down,” Greer told her. “The way Maestro works is he gets you all riled up so that you don’t think straight, all right? We need to get the police over here, and give this note to them so they can get it out to the news stations.”
“But why? I am right here, and my best friend has been kidnapped by a super villain. I need to go help her!” Charlotte cried, tears jaggedly making their way down her cheeks. “She’s in this mess because she offered to hack for me, to try and find information about the people I found in the assassin’s layer.” She snatched at the tears, trying to get them off of her face. “I need to do this.”
“I know you do, and I will help you,” Greer said. “But right now, we need all of them to think that Atalanta is not Charlotte Oros. If we don’t create some kind of false trail, then everything leads right back to you.”
“All right,” she said, “what do we do?”
Hours later, they arrived at Strike’s apartment, Charlotte with duffle bag in hand.
“Do you do this sort of thing often?” she asked. “Not only did you convince the police that we had no idea why Natalie had been kidnapped, but that I shouldn’t be on my own, managing to sneak out my costume and gear in a pre-packed duffle bag.”
“I think things through,” Strike said. “You might want to eat something. There are protein shakes in the fridge, just leave some for me.” Charlotte did not want to eat—she wanted to crush everything in sight with her bare hands—but she knew she could not save any one without any energy. She rummaged through Strike’s fridge and found that pretty much all there was were protein shakes, but fixed one for herself, and drank it down slowly.
Strike came out of his room dressed in his costume, sans his jacket which he threw across his couch, and slid the top of his coffee table off, to reveal a large computer screen. “I’ve been tracking Maestro to a couple of locations,” he told her, as she moved toward the couch. She offered him the last half of her large protein shake which he accepted, and began to gulp down. In between gulps he added, “I think we can cross the ones which are a couple miles away from the city off, because I’m not sure he would have enough time to arrange for Natalie to be taken further, plus, if wanted you to come and find him, he wouldn’t make it that difficult.”
“He wouldn’t?” Charlotte asked. “Isn’t that kind of terrible villainy?” Strike snorted, and set the empty glass at the edge of the table screen.
“No, finding Maestro was always more of a game, kind of like Clue or something,” he explained. “It getting him and getting out that’s the difficult part.”
“How do you know all of this?” Charlotte asked. “I mean, it’s not exactly public information.”
“Well, with Nocturn inactive, I managed to secure some of the files on his computer, mostly just ones relating to theories about what should happen if he ever disappeared,” Strike said. “After that, his computer shut down and deleted it’s hard drive.”
“He’ll be pissed when he gets back,” Charlotte remarked.
“A guy like that was probably smart enough to send all of the information to a back up somewhere. You should probably go and get changed and I’ll see if I can’t figure out where exactly we’re heading.”
“I can change anytime, I want to know when you find something,” Charlotte insisted.
“And I will tell you,” Strike said. “But I think you’ll regret it if you can’t run out of the door at a moment’s notice. Or at least that’s the vibe I’m getting from you.” Strike took her hand and stroked her fingers. “I don’t know what you are going through right now, but I promise I am going to help you in every way I can to get her back, all right? Just let me do this.”
“All right,” she agreed, softly, standing, and grabbing her duffle from where she had dropped it by the kitchen. Charlotte walked to the bathroom, and dropped the duffle onto the toilette, after she lowered the seat. Digging in to the very bottom, she pulled out the Kevlar suit, her belt and her boots. She stripped off her jeans and blouse until she stood in her underwear. She reached around herself and unclasped her bra, but left the underpants as she pulled up the legs of her suit and then zipped it up her back. Charlotte shoved the duffle off of the toilet cover and sat to pull on her boots. As she began to lace them up, there was brief knock at the door, before Strike opened it just an inch,
“Are you descent?”
“Enough, what’s wrong?” she asked, as he opened the door wider.
“I got a hit,” he said, leading on the door way. “The trouble is, that was way too easy.”
“So it means he’s been watching you and he’s expecting us. We already knew the latter, and the former wasn’t that hard to guess,” she retorted tying off her first boot.
“But that also means he could be leading us down a false trail,” Strike argued.
“He’s not,” Charlotte said. “He might be leading us into a trap, but I don’t think it’s a false trail.”
“And what makes you so sure?” Strike asked.
“It was something that got said when I was in the assassin’s lair. Someone’s pulling strings behind the major villain operations. Someone’s looking for me, Strike; they want me alive and able to be experimented upon. They might even want you too, now that you’ve surfaced a little higher. It’s not a false trail, but we need to be really careful.” She tucked the laces of her second boot in behind the tongue, after she tied it off. Charlotte stood and clipped on her belt before she began applying the adhesive to her mask.
Strike watched her as she placed it on her face patting it down once she did. “You ready?” she asked.
“Ready when you are,” he said, straightening out his coat. Atalanta turned to him, mask in place,
“Then let’s go.”
Natalie awoke in an icy chamber. Her eyes were covered, but her hands were strapped to the arms of a metal chair, and her feet were tied down as well. Her brain felt like mush, or like she had cross medicated pain killers again.
“I see you are awake my little bug. I was beginning to think that perhaps the gas was too strong for you, or feared that I gave you too much. That can result in death, you know.” The voice was deep, the kind an opera star would have, and even in the cold room, it made Natalie shiver.
“Who are you, where am I?” she asked, her teeth chattering as they did.
“Such unoriginal questions for someone so brilliant at the hacking arts.” Natalie held her breath as she realized why exactly she had been kidnapped. ”Now little bug, I just want to let you know that no matter what you say, I will find out the answers to my questions soon enough. But I thought I would give you a chance to make it easy on yourself and tell me some so that I could maybe make you a little more comfortable.”
“And what questions would those be?”
“Why were you looking for me?” he asked. “And the others?”
“I was researching what the government hides from people,” Natalie retorted. “I just wanted some facts and figures.”
“Really, so you know nothing about Atalanta?” he asked, breathing right by her ear.
“The super chick on TV?” Natalie asked. “Why would I know anything about her?”
“Oh, I just came to the conclusion that perhaps you were working with her, and you were looking up information on our little crime ring to perhaps further her interests. But it appears I was wrong.”
“Yeah, okay, I wasn’t after you,” Natalie said. “And how would I know Atalanta?”
“I merely assumed she was your roommate.” Natalie’s heart hit the cold floor when she heard those words. “But I suppose if she were she would have walked into my trap hours ago. After all, what kind of friend would not immediately answer a cry for help? No, instead she called the police and slunk off to sleep with her boyfriend for the night. How pathetic, how do you stand her?”
“She’s a good cook,” Natalie chattered. It took a minute, but his laugh puffed out into the cold air.
“A good cook! Yes, I suppose that is an excellent reason to keep someone around! Well, it might not be her, but I still think you know who Atalanta is. Because it was no coincidence you began looking for us not to long after Fujimoto failed at retrieving her. So tell me, who is she?”
“Sorry, even if I did know I don’t think I would tell you,” Natalie said. “I mean, cold room, strange place, suspicious guy, not sure how much I can trust you.”
“Well, rats, you are such a pretty girl,” he said running his finger down the side of her face. “I was hoping to make this easy on you. But at least, as they say, freezing is the kindest way to die. I would try and stay awake if I was you, but after a few hours, it won’t matter anyway, and it looks like Atalanta is late to the party.”
Natalie heard the slam of a large door, and gripped the edges of the chair arms, praying for Charlotte’s Godspeed.
“Hey Natalie,” she called into the back rooms. “I’m making a salad do you want one?” Silence filtered through her ears. “Natalie are you awake yet? Are you here even? Am I just talking to the apartment?” She walked slowly towards the bedrooms, her heart clenching tighter and beating louder as she moved towards Natalie’s room.
Someone knocked on the door.
Charlotte nearly jumped out of her skin, and stalked toward the door, opening it with a furious swing, like it had been the one to scare her.
“Hey,” Greer said holding up some take out cartons. “I hope you don’t mind but I brought some lunch and—” Charlotte swung the door, slamming it into frame, before stalking back into the apartment. “Charlotte what was that for?”
“Strike, get out of my apartment before I call this breaking and entering,” she said, not even looking over her shoulder to see that he hand entered. She strode into Natalie’s darkened room. No figure occupied the bed, and her computer was gone.
“What did you call me?” Greer asked from the doorway.
“Shut up and don’t come in,” Charlotte said. “Something is wrong here.”
“You’re roommate’s not home, so something’s wrong?” Greer asked. “Maybe she just went out or—”
“No, if she took her computer she was going to be out for a while, but she would have left a note or texted me and…” Charlotte searched the edge of the desk and held up a smart phone. “She left her phone. If she was going to be out for a while, she would have left a way for me to contact her.”
“All right, calm down,” Greer told her, “we’ll figure this out. Maybe she just went to work on something and didn’t want to be bothered. Check her desk for a note. Did you see anything anywhere else in the apartment?” Charlotte jerked her head from side to side.
“No, she would have left something like that on the counter or the table,” Charlotte said, “and there was nothing.” Charlotte turned to look back around the room, and noticed something fluttering in the window. She moved across the room, snatching it away from the pane, noticing the lack of a screen as she did. Her eyes scanned over the note, dropping almost as soon as they did.
“What?” Greer asked. “What does it say?” Charlotte handed him the note, trying to search some part of her memory. “To Atalanta: I found your little bug. Come to me or she will be squashed. And bring along the clever little boy who worships Nocturn. If you can find him, he might be some help. All the best—Maestro. Charlotte, we have to report this, the police will put out a call or something, and get Atalanta to go.”
“We don’t need to put out a call to the police,” Charlotte spat striding from the room. “I’m going to find that ass and squash him!” Greer grabbed her shoulders and forced her to look at him.
“Charlotte you are not thinking rationally. What could you do against a super villain like Maestro?” Charlotte turned to him and rolled her eyes.
“Either my mask is really good, or you need to get your eyes checked. Strike, I am Atalanta!” Greer stared at her blankly for a moment.
“You are Atalanta? Then what did we do last night?”
“You acted like a pompous ass in an alley way, after you helped me clean up a bank robbery,” she said, turning to pull her costume out of a secret compartment in the back of her closet.
“All right, all right, Charlotte, I believe you, but you still need to calm down,” Greer told her. “The way Maestro works is he gets you all riled up so that you don’t think straight, all right? We need to get the police over here, and give this note to them so they can get it out to the news stations.”
“But why? I am right here, and my best friend has been kidnapped by a super villain. I need to go help her!” Charlotte cried, tears jaggedly making their way down her cheeks. “She’s in this mess because she offered to hack for me, to try and find information about the people I found in the assassin’s layer.” She snatched at the tears, trying to get them off of her face. “I need to do this.”
“I know you do, and I will help you,” Greer said. “But right now, we need all of them to think that Atalanta is not Charlotte Oros. If we don’t create some kind of false trail, then everything leads right back to you.”
“All right,” she said, “what do we do?”
Hours later, they arrived at Strike’s apartment, Charlotte with duffle bag in hand.
“Do you do this sort of thing often?” she asked. “Not only did you convince the police that we had no idea why Natalie had been kidnapped, but that I shouldn’t be on my own, managing to sneak out my costume and gear in a pre-packed duffle bag.”
“I think things through,” Strike said. “You might want to eat something. There are protein shakes in the fridge, just leave some for me.” Charlotte did not want to eat—she wanted to crush everything in sight with her bare hands—but she knew she could not save any one without any energy. She rummaged through Strike’s fridge and found that pretty much all there was were protein shakes, but fixed one for herself, and drank it down slowly.
Strike came out of his room dressed in his costume, sans his jacket which he threw across his couch, and slid the top of his coffee table off, to reveal a large computer screen. “I’ve been tracking Maestro to a couple of locations,” he told her, as she moved toward the couch. She offered him the last half of her large protein shake which he accepted, and began to gulp down. In between gulps he added, “I think we can cross the ones which are a couple miles away from the city off, because I’m not sure he would have enough time to arrange for Natalie to be taken further, plus, if wanted you to come and find him, he wouldn’t make it that difficult.”
“He wouldn’t?” Charlotte asked. “Isn’t that kind of terrible villainy?” Strike snorted, and set the empty glass at the edge of the table screen.
“No, finding Maestro was always more of a game, kind of like Clue or something,” he explained. “It getting him and getting out that’s the difficult part.”
“How do you know all of this?” Charlotte asked. “I mean, it’s not exactly public information.”
“Well, with Nocturn inactive, I managed to secure some of the files on his computer, mostly just ones relating to theories about what should happen if he ever disappeared,” Strike said. “After that, his computer shut down and deleted it’s hard drive.”
“He’ll be pissed when he gets back,” Charlotte remarked.
“A guy like that was probably smart enough to send all of the information to a back up somewhere. You should probably go and get changed and I’ll see if I can’t figure out where exactly we’re heading.”
“I can change anytime, I want to know when you find something,” Charlotte insisted.
“And I will tell you,” Strike said. “But I think you’ll regret it if you can’t run out of the door at a moment’s notice. Or at least that’s the vibe I’m getting from you.” Strike took her hand and stroked her fingers. “I don’t know what you are going through right now, but I promise I am going to help you in every way I can to get her back, all right? Just let me do this.”
“All right,” she agreed, softly, standing, and grabbing her duffle from where she had dropped it by the kitchen. Charlotte walked to the bathroom, and dropped the duffle onto the toilette, after she lowered the seat. Digging in to the very bottom, she pulled out the Kevlar suit, her belt and her boots. She stripped off her jeans and blouse until she stood in her underwear. She reached around herself and unclasped her bra, but left the underpants as she pulled up the legs of her suit and then zipped it up her back. Charlotte shoved the duffle off of the toilet cover and sat to pull on her boots. As she began to lace them up, there was brief knock at the door, before Strike opened it just an inch,
“Are you descent?”
“Enough, what’s wrong?” she asked, as he opened the door wider.
“I got a hit,” he said, leading on the door way. “The trouble is, that was way too easy.”
“So it means he’s been watching you and he’s expecting us. We already knew the latter, and the former wasn’t that hard to guess,” she retorted tying off her first boot.
“But that also means he could be leading us down a false trail,” Strike argued.
“He’s not,” Charlotte said. “He might be leading us into a trap, but I don’t think it’s a false trail.”
“And what makes you so sure?” Strike asked.
“It was something that got said when I was in the assassin’s lair. Someone’s pulling strings behind the major villain operations. Someone’s looking for me, Strike; they want me alive and able to be experimented upon. They might even want you too, now that you’ve surfaced a little higher. It’s not a false trail, but we need to be really careful.” She tucked the laces of her second boot in behind the tongue, after she tied it off. Charlotte stood and clipped on her belt before she began applying the adhesive to her mask.
Strike watched her as she placed it on her face patting it down once she did. “You ready?” she asked.
“Ready when you are,” he said, straightening out his coat. Atalanta turned to him, mask in place,
“Then let’s go.”
Natalie awoke in an icy chamber. Her eyes were covered, but her hands were strapped to the arms of a metal chair, and her feet were tied down as well. Her brain felt like mush, or like she had cross medicated pain killers again.
“I see you are awake my little bug. I was beginning to think that perhaps the gas was too strong for you, or feared that I gave you too much. That can result in death, you know.” The voice was deep, the kind an opera star would have, and even in the cold room, it made Natalie shiver.
“Who are you, where am I?” she asked, her teeth chattering as they did.
“Such unoriginal questions for someone so brilliant at the hacking arts.” Natalie held her breath as she realized why exactly she had been kidnapped. ”Now little bug, I just want to let you know that no matter what you say, I will find out the answers to my questions soon enough. But I thought I would give you a chance to make it easy on yourself and tell me some so that I could maybe make you a little more comfortable.”
“And what questions would those be?”
“Why were you looking for me?” he asked. “And the others?”
“I was researching what the government hides from people,” Natalie retorted. “I just wanted some facts and figures.”
“Really, so you know nothing about Atalanta?” he asked, breathing right by her ear.
“The super chick on TV?” Natalie asked. “Why would I know anything about her?”
“Oh, I just came to the conclusion that perhaps you were working with her, and you were looking up information on our little crime ring to perhaps further her interests. But it appears I was wrong.”
“Yeah, okay, I wasn’t after you,” Natalie said. “And how would I know Atalanta?”
“I merely assumed she was your roommate.” Natalie’s heart hit the cold floor when she heard those words. “But I suppose if she were she would have walked into my trap hours ago. After all, what kind of friend would not immediately answer a cry for help? No, instead she called the police and slunk off to sleep with her boyfriend for the night. How pathetic, how do you stand her?”
“She’s a good cook,” Natalie chattered. It took a minute, but his laugh puffed out into the cold air.
“A good cook! Yes, I suppose that is an excellent reason to keep someone around! Well, it might not be her, but I still think you know who Atalanta is. Because it was no coincidence you began looking for us not to long after Fujimoto failed at retrieving her. So tell me, who is she?”
“Sorry, even if I did know I don’t think I would tell you,” Natalie said. “I mean, cold room, strange place, suspicious guy, not sure how much I can trust you.”
“Well, rats, you are such a pretty girl,” he said running his finger down the side of her face. “I was hoping to make this easy on you. But at least, as they say, freezing is the kindest way to die. I would try and stay awake if I was you, but after a few hours, it won’t matter anyway, and it looks like Atalanta is late to the party.”
Natalie heard the slam of a large door, and gripped the edges of the chair arms, praying for Charlotte’s Godspeed.
