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           "Mulch, watch out! A civilian!" Holly Short exclaimed as the four-door police cruiser nearly collided with a pixie crossing the street. "And by the way, that was a stop sign you just ran."
            "Dear Frond, you are the worst backseat driver!" the dwarf grumbled, "and you aren't even in the back seat!"
            "Just because Trouble thinks my injuries haven't healed enough for active duty doesn't mean I can't drive!" the captain returned, crossing her arms over her seat's harness. "Really, sometimes I think he's more like a babysitter than a commander."
Mulch shrugged. "You don't like it? Then don't need babysitting."
            They reached the research facility in one piece, to the smug satisfaction of her partner. The building was a one story, white edifice with lots of windows and glass double doors to suggest an open and friendly atmosphere. However, Holly knew this seemingly humble compound most likely had tens of basements, some with containment fields to keep wandering eyes out, while others were built to keep experiments in.
Holly gave her name at the front desk, and the pixie working the front desk buzzed for a doctor to come show the two investigators around. A few minutes later, a gnome in a lab coat appeared from a lab down the hall. Like the building's exterior, the laboratory rooms had copious windows, all of which had the blinds drawn. Holly wondered why they bothered with windows at all.
            The gnome researcher, whose clip-on ID labelled "Randall," took them down a white-tiled hall to a carpeted computer lab on the first floor. He directed her to a computer where files she'd called for ahead of time had been drawn up for her. Then, with a nod of her head, Randall was dismissed, though his absence didn't give them much more privacy, with all of the security cameras in the room.
            "There," Mulch said, spraying the room's last security camera with a black aerosol spray. "Now we can be sure none of those creepy scientists are watching us."
            "What, are you uncomfortable, Mr. Diggums?" Holly asked, her smirk skewed by the way her cheek sat in her hand as she scrolled through data. Mulch harrumphed.
            "Well, yeah. Didn't they experiment on Abbott in this place? And anyway, these-- labs-- with their white-washed walls and blinding LED light bulbs.... it makes me feel like I'm being studied."
            "Well, they won't learn much." She snorted, and Mulch made a move to punch her in the shoulder for the insult, then reconsidered, digging in his pocket for one of the dozen granola bars he'd stolen from the precinct before they'd left.
After a silent hour of trawling through file after file of useless information, Holly sat back in her swivel chair and threw her arms up with a frustrated yell, waking her partner, who had long since finished his pilfered snacks and gotten bored.
            "Wha, didja find somethin?" he asked, his voice thick with sleep.
            "Just the opposite!" she proclaimed. "They had all the technical files on the experiments I needed to send to Artemis-- you know, synopses, debriefings, pitches to butter up investors, even some of their formulas-- but the specific case files aren't here at all!"
The day before, after sending Artemis all the information she could get on the results of the human cancer experiments, Holly had gotten a bit nostalgic. She had worked security detail shortly after her mother died. At that time seeing children, even human children, wasting away from a disease had really messed her up emotionally. Now that she had human friends, she wondered if any of the children had survived, and how they were doing. She mentioned this in passing to Mulch while comparing notes later that night, and he pointed out that one of those children would be a perfect target for Abbott's cancer cell hunting. That morning they raced right back to the labs to retrieve the data, only to find, now, that the files no longer existed.
           "Makes sense," Mulch said, picking his tombstone teeth with a rigid beard hair. "If I engaged in illegal activities with humans, I wouldn't want records of potential witnesses, either."
           "Ahh, but these are scientists, they keep everything for posterity," Holly replied, running her hands through her cropped, auburn hair. "Besides, no one knew about that project. I guess it was stupid to look on the server in the first place, where someone might stumble across it. But where--" suddenly, Holly shot up and ran out the door. Mulch, a couple seconds late on the draw, scooped up the jacket his partner had left and ran after her.
           When he caught up to her, she was interrogating Randall.
            "Where are the old files, the ones that are too top secret or too irrelevant to store on the main network?" she demanded. She wasn't holding him by the lapels yet, but her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides, itching to get more physical with the babbling doctor.
            "Y-you need special clearance for that--"
            "Tell me!" the captain ordered.
"W-w-well, I would," he said, becoming indignant, "but you aren't quali--"
Holly grabbed the gnome's lab coat and slammed him into the blinded windows. "Listen to me very carefully," she hissed, as the receptionist at the front desk looked on in fear, "the security of this building may have already been compromised, so I don't have time to play rank games."
            "This-- this is police brutality!" Randall squeaked.
Holly sneered. "I'm off-duty."

        The file room was located in the third of fifteen basements, at the end of a hallway that looked more like the psych ward in a horror film than a clean and kosher research facility.
        "Who did your interior decorating? Hannibal Lecter?" Mulch asked as they reached the last room's wrought iron door. Randall only sniffed as he swiped his employee pass through the scanner above the door handle.
        Haven had long outgrown file cabinets, but this untouched storage room had the next worst thing: rows and rows of motherboards. Holly coughed when their presence disturbed the decades of dust coating every surface.
        "Good luck," Randall said, but the grin on his face meant the exact opposite as he slammed the heavy metal door shut behind him, leaving Holly and Mulch alone in a gymnasium full of blinking dials.
       "Great,"Mulch groaned. "I'm going to have to work now, aren't I?"
        "It looks like each of these interfaces are individually contained," Holly said, covering her mouth and nose with one hand. She checked between two of the two-metre-tall blocks of computer chips and wiring for any connection between the mainframes. "It looks like we'll have to go through each of them one at a time." Her partner groaned, but Holly ignored him and wiped off one of the interface's touch screens with her sleeve, causing the sleepy computer to blink to life. "Good news is, each of these represents a year, so we just have to find the five years the research took place in and search those files."
        "Oh, goodie."
        The pair walked up and down the unmarked isles, periodically activating a display screen to see what year they were on.
        "1980, we're getting close!" Holly said, pinching the bridge of her nose to hold back a sneeze. "The files we're looking for should be just around the cor--ner..."
        "Looks like we were beat to the punch," Mulch observed.
        A masked fairy-- an elf, by the looks of him-- pulled a stick drive from the 1995 interface's USB outlet and put it in his pocket. Then, he pulled off the front access panel and started pulling wires.
        "He's trying to delete the evidence-- Hey!" Holly's exclamation startled the thief, but instead of surrendering like she always hoped they would, he fled, clipping the button on his cargo pants pocket as he ran.
        "You check the motherboard's history for last accessed data!" Holly yelled at Mulch, sprinting after the culprit. However, before she even reached the damaged interface, the machine he'd been using exploded, throwing Holly backward and reducing the interface to rubble.
        "Holly, are you alright?" Mulch asked, extending a hand to help his friend up. As the dust cleared, the alarms began, blaring sirens and flashing lights inhibiting her already ringing senses.
        "No!" she shouted over the noise. "He got away! Come on," she stumbled forward, falling shakily to her knees in the middle of the wreckage. "We need to find the memory circuit. It'll be about a foot-square flat chip that looks like a--"
        "--brain?" the dwarf, who had joined her in her search, held up a smoking piece of grey circuitry that, though bent grotesquely out of shape, still had noticeably brain-like squiggle patterns on the surface.
        "Great." Holly said. "Hopefully Foaly can get something from that!"
        Holly and Mulch ran back down the hall of locked metal doors to the elevator, only to find it had been shut down, most likely when the alarm system was activated. The stairway door was likewise locked.
        "This is how that weasel must have escaped," Holly growled, "and he made sure we couldn't follow him." They both stared at the door for a moment, bruised and extremely irritated, before Mulch said,
        "I've got an idea-- hand me that fire hydrant over there?"
        "It's not going to break through the door," she informed him, though she unhooked the red canister and handed it to him anyway. "These doors are made of reenforced steel."
         "Well then," Mulch gave her a tombstone grin, "It's a good thing I'm not trying to break down the door." Then, with one mighty swing, he buried the fire hydrant six inches into the dry wall.

         Victoria found Charlie in the kitchen, helping a very tolerant Butler with the dishes.
        "--And that's the time my Dad was a bodyguard for Hillary Clinton-- is Artemis ever that rude to people?"
        "Ahem!" Victoria cleared her throat, interrupting Charlie's anecdote. Butler and his unwanted helper both looked up at the same time, though while the apron-clad American was crestfallen at the new arrival, Butler's eyebrows raised from their normal flatlined expression in relief.
         "So, how was lunch?" Charlie asked, drying off a champagne flute and daintily placing it in the crystal cabinet above the toaster oven.
         Victoria sat down at the table island with a thud, twirling a peach blossom between her thumb and forefinger. "I hate you." Charlie laughed, and the redhead's faux frown melted into a semi-irritated smile. "What were you doing, anyway?"
         "Ah, helping Butler with the dishes," she replied a little to hastily, but the please-don't-ask look in her eyes told Victoria she'd be filled in later. "I know I was supposed to meet you, but I thought you and Artemis needed time to--" she grunted as she hefted a crock pot out of the lukewarm water and onto the drying pad. Butler watched her anxiously, worried she'd drop the ceramic pot "-- reconcile your differences. How did that go?"
         Victoria eyed Butler suspiciously for a moment, then shrugged. Even if he did report what she said to Artemis, it wouldn't be anything he didn't already guess. "I think I just inadvertently advocated for indentured servitude."
        "You're Artemis's slave now?" Charlie guffawed, picking up the now-dry crock pot to return it to the appropriate closet. "He's better than I thought--"
        "No, I'm not the slave."
        Now she almost dropped the crock pot as she swung around to gawk at her friend. Butler stared intently at the redhead for a second as well, then rolled his eyes and when back to washing. Artemis really did have a lot to learn about romance.
        Charlie quickly excused herself and the two friends raced back up to Victoria's bathroom, which swiftly becoming their fortress of solitude.
        "OK, spill." Charlie demanded, squirming on the plush floor mat.
        "Well, he gave me this," Victoria held up the peach blossom, "and when I looked up its definition, it meant 'I am your captive'."
        Her friend frowned and pursed her lips. "That's a little-- contrived, don't you think?"
         Victoria sighed. "I guess you had to be there. Anyway, what were you doing-- I mean, really doing while I was on my blind date?"
         She bit her bottom lip. "I was-- breaking into Artemis's office."
         "YOU WHAT?"
         "The last time I talked to him he was hiding something!" Charlie protested, "And I was right! Look!" She pulled up the files she had photographed on her iphone and thrust the device at her friend.
         "And ah--" Victoria rubbed the back of her neck uneasily as she flipped through the files "--what exactly am I supposed to be looking at?"
        "I don't know," she replied excitedly. "But I've seen it before-- you know, in that way that you remember you've seen a thing but don't know where or when?"
        "It looks like-- one of those weird fonts on the computer."
        "Yeah, but it's all hand written! Like a code."
        "We wrote in code a lot when we were kids," Victoria recalled, catching her friend's enthusiasm. "You think that could be where you remembered it from?"
         Charlie shrugged. "It's worth a try!"
         The friends spent the next hour going through every code they could find on the Internet, but nothing matched.
         "Maybe you just think you recognize it?" Victoria wondered aloud. "I mean, I'm getting a weird feeling about it too, like I've seen something similar before. Anyway, I have to go work on the mural. You coming with?"
         Charlie closed her laptop with a snap and fell back on the cream-white comforter. "Nah," she sighed. "I think I'm going to look some more. Besides, you don't need a bodyguard now that you and genius-boy are on the up and up." Victoria threw a pillow at her, but her friend's grin only grew. The artist rolled her eyes.
         "Fine, whatever. Do what you want." She pulled on her stained university jacket. "Have fun chasing geese."
         Charlie waited for the door to close behind her friend before jumping off the queen size bed and stuffing her iphone in her Aeropostale jacket. Victoria's usually right about this sort of thing, she admitted, but I can't deny what I-- sort of-- remember. So, one more sleuthing trip. If I don't find anything concrete, I'll give up on finding Fowl Junior's dirty little secret.

Description
           "Mulch, watch out! A civilian!" Holly Short exclaimed as the four-door police cruiser nearly collided with a pixie crossing the street. "And by the way, that was a stop sign you just ran."
            "Dear Frond, you are the worst backseat driver!" the dwarf grumbled, "and you aren't even in the back seat!"
            "Just because Trouble thinks my injuries haven't healed enough for active duty doesn't mean I can't drive!" the captain returned, crossing her arms over her seat's harness. "Really, sometimes I think he's more like a babysitter than a commander."
Mulch shrugged. "You don't like it? Then don't need babysitting."
            They reached the research facility in one piece, to the smug satisfaction of her partner. The building was a one story, white edifice with lots of windows and glass double doors to suggest an open and friendly atmosphere. However, Holly knew this seemingly humble compound most likely had tens of basements, some with containment fields to keep wandering eyes out, while others were built to keep experiments in.
Holly gave her name at the front desk, and the pixie working the front desk buzzed for a doctor to come show the two investigators around. A few minutes later, a gnome in a lab coat appeared from a lab down the hall. Like the building's exterior, the laboratory rooms had copious windows, all of which had the blinds drawn. Holly wondered why they bothered with windows at all.
            The gnome researcher, whose clip-on ID labelled "Randall," took them down a white-tiled hall to a carpeted computer lab on the first floor. He directed her to a computer where files she'd called for ahead of time had been drawn up for her. Then, with a nod of her head, Randall was dismissed, though his absence didn't give them much more privacy, with all of the security cameras in the room.
            "There," Mulch said, spraying the room's last security camera with a black aerosol spray. "Now we can be sure none of those creepy scientists are watching us."
            "What, are you uncomfortable, Mr. Diggums?" Holly asked, her smirk skewed by the way her cheek sat in her hand as she scrolled through data. Mulch harrumphed.
            "Well, yeah. Didn't they experiment on Abbott in this place? And anyway, these-- labs-- with their white-washed walls and blinding LED light bulbs.... it makes me feel like I'm being studied."
            "Well, they won't learn much." She snorted, and Mulch made a move to punch her in the shoulder for the insult, then reconsidered, digging in his pocket for one of the dozen granola bars he'd stolen from the precinct before they'd left.
After a silent hour of trawling through file after file of useless information, Holly sat back in her swivel chair and threw her arms up with a frustrated yell, waking her partner, who had long since finished his pilfered snacks and gotten bored.
            "Wha, didja find somethin?" he asked, his voice thick with sleep.
            "Just the opposite!" she proclaimed. "They had all the technical files on the experiments I needed to send to Artemis-- you know, synopses, debriefings, pitches to butter up investors, even some of their formulas-- but the specific case files aren't here at all!"
The day before, after sending Artemis all the information she could get on the results of the human cancer experiments, Holly had gotten a bit nostalgic. She had worked security detail shortly after her mother died. At that time seeing children, even human children, wasting away from a disease had really messed her up emotionally. Now that she had human friends, she wondered if any of the children had survived, and how they were doing. She mentioned this in passing to Mulch while comparing notes later that night, and he pointed out that one of those children would be a perfect target for Abbott's cancer cell hunting. That morning they raced right back to the labs to retrieve the data, only to find, now, that the files no longer existed.
           "Makes sense," Mulch said, picking his tombstone teeth with a rigid beard hair. "If I engaged in illegal activities with humans, I wouldn't want records of potential witnesses, either."
           "Ahh, but these are scientists, they keep everything for posterity," Holly replied, running her hands through her cropped, auburn hair. "Besides, no one knew about that project. I guess it was stupid to look on the server in the first place, where someone might stumble across it. But where--" suddenly, Holly shot up and ran out the door. Mulch, a couple seconds late on the draw, scooped up the jacket his partner had left and ran after her.
           When he caught up to her, she was interrogating Randall.
            "Where are the old files, the ones that are too top secret or too irrelevant to store on the main network?" she demanded. She wasn't holding him by the lapels yet, but her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides, itching to get more physical with the babbling doctor.
            "Y-you need special clearance for that--"
            "Tell me!" the captain ordered.
"W-w-well, I would," he said, becoming indignant, "but you aren't quali--"
Holly grabbed the gnome's lab coat and slammed him into the blinded windows. "Listen to me very carefully," she hissed, as the receptionist at the front desk looked on in fear, "the security of this building may have already been compromised, so I don't have time to play rank games."
            "This-- this is police brutality!" Randall squeaked.
Holly sneered. "I'm off-duty."

        The file room was located in the third of fifteen basements, at the end of a hallway that looked more like the psych ward in a horror film than a clean and kosher research facility.
        "Who did your interior decorating? Hannibal Lecter?" Mulch asked as they reached the last room's wrought iron door. Randall only sniffed as he swiped his employee pass through the scanner above the door handle.
        Haven had long outgrown file cabinets, but this untouched storage room had the next worst thing: rows and rows of motherboards. Holly coughed when their presence disturbed the decades of dust coating every surface.
        "Good luck," Randall said, but the grin on his face meant the exact opposite as he slammed the heavy metal door shut behind him, leaving Holly and Mulch alone in a gymnasium full of blinking dials.
       "Great,"Mulch groaned. "I'm going to have to work now, aren't I?"
        "It looks like each of these interfaces are individually contained," Holly said, covering her mouth and nose with one hand. She checked between two of the two-metre-tall blocks of computer chips and wiring for any connection between the mainframes. "It looks like we'll have to go through each of them one at a time." Her partner groaned, but Holly ignored him and wiped off one of the interface's touch screens with her sleeve, causing the sleepy computer to blink to life. "Good news is, each of these represents a year, so we just have to find the five years the research took place in and search those files."
        "Oh, goodie."
        The pair walked up and down the unmarked isles, periodically activating a display screen to see what year they were on.
        "1980, we're getting close!" Holly said, pinching the bridge of her nose to hold back a sneeze. "The files we're looking for should be just around the cor--ner..."
        "Looks like we were beat to the punch," Mulch observed.
        A masked fairy-- an elf, by the looks of him-- pulled a stick drive from the 1995 interface's USB outlet and put it in his pocket. Then, he pulled off the front access panel and started pulling wires.
        "He's trying to delete the evidence-- Hey!" Holly's exclamation startled the thief, but instead of surrendering like she always hoped they would, he fled, clipping the button on his cargo pants pocket as he ran.
        "You check the motherboard's history for last accessed data!" Holly yelled at Mulch, sprinting after the culprit. However, before she even reached the damaged interface, the machine he'd been using exploded, throwing Holly backward and reducing the interface to rubble.
        "Holly, are you alright?" Mulch asked, extending a hand to help his friend up. As the dust cleared, the alarms began, blaring sirens and flashing lights inhibiting her already ringing senses.
        "No!" she shouted over the noise. "He got away! Come on," she stumbled forward, falling shakily to her knees in the middle of the wreckage. "We need to find the memory circuit. It'll be about a foot-square flat chip that looks like a--"
        "--brain?" the dwarf, who had joined her in her search, held up a smoking piece of grey circuitry that, though bent grotesquely out of shape, still had noticeably brain-like squiggle patterns on the surface.
        "Great." Holly said. "Hopefully Foaly can get something from that!"
        Holly and Mulch ran back down the hall of locked metal doors to the elevator, only to find it had been shut down, most likely when the alarm system was activated. The stairway door was likewise locked.
        "This is how that weasel must have escaped," Holly growled, "and he made sure we couldn't follow him." They both stared at the door for a moment, bruised and extremely irritated, before Mulch said,
        "I've got an idea-- hand me that fire hydrant over there?"
        "It's not going to break through the door," she informed him, though she unhooked the red canister and handed it to him anyway. "These doors are made of reenforced steel."
         "Well then," Mulch gave her a tombstone grin, "It's a good thing I'm not trying to break down the door." Then, with one mighty swing, he buried the fire hydrant six inches into the dry wall.

         Victoria found Charlie in the kitchen, helping a very tolerant Butler with the dishes.
        "--And that's the time my Dad was a bodyguard for Hillary Clinton-- is Artemis ever that rude to people?"
        "Ahem!" Victoria cleared her throat, interrupting Charlie's anecdote. Butler and his unwanted helper both looked up at the same time, though while the apron-clad American was crestfallen at the new arrival, Butler's eyebrows raised from their normal flatlined expression in relief.
         "So, how was lunch?" Charlie asked, drying off a champagne flute and daintily placing it in the crystal cabinet above the toaster oven.
         Victoria sat down at the table island with a thud, twirling a peach blossom between her thumb and forefinger. "I hate you." Charlie laughed, and the redhead's faux frown melted into a semi-irritated smile. "What were you doing, anyway?"
         "Ah, helping Butler with the dishes," she replied a little to hastily, but the please-don't-ask look in her eyes told Victoria she'd be filled in later. "I know I was supposed to meet you, but I thought you and Artemis needed time to--" she grunted as she hefted a crock pot out of the lukewarm water and onto the drying pad. Butler watched her anxiously, worried she'd drop the ceramic pot "-- reconcile your differences. How did that go?"
         Victoria eyed Butler suspiciously for a moment, then shrugged. Even if he did report what she said to Artemis, it wouldn't be anything he didn't already guess. "I think I just inadvertently advocated for indentured servitude."
        "You're Artemis's slave now?" Charlie guffawed, picking up the now-dry crock pot to return it to the appropriate closet. "He's better than I thought--"
        "No, I'm not the slave."
        Now she almost dropped the crock pot as she swung around to gawk at her friend. Butler stared intently at the redhead for a second as well, then rolled his eyes and when back to washing. Artemis really did have a lot to learn about romance.
        Charlie quickly excused herself and the two friends raced back up to Victoria's bathroom, which swiftly becoming their fortress of solitude.
        "OK, spill." Charlie demanded, squirming on the plush floor mat.
        "Well, he gave me this," Victoria held up the peach blossom, "and when I looked up its definition, it meant 'I am your captive'."
        Her friend frowned and pursed her lips. "That's a little-- contrived, don't you think?"
         Victoria sighed. "I guess you had to be there. Anyway, what were you doing-- I mean, really doing while I was on my blind date?"
         She bit her bottom lip. "I was-- breaking into Artemis's office."
         "YOU WHAT?"
         "The last time I talked to him he was hiding something!" Charlie protested, "And I was right! Look!" She pulled up the files she had photographed on her iphone and thrust the device at her friend.
         "And ah--" Victoria rubbed the back of her neck uneasily as she flipped through the files "--what exactly am I supposed to be looking at?"
        "I don't know," she replied excitedly. "But I've seen it before-- you know, in that way that you remember you've seen a thing but don't know where or when?"
        "It looks like-- one of those weird fonts on the computer."
        "Yeah, but it's all hand written! Like a code."
        "We wrote in code a lot when we were kids," Victoria recalled, catching her friend's enthusiasm. "You think that could be where you remembered it from?"
         Charlie shrugged. "It's worth a try!"
         The friends spent the next hour going through every code they could find on the Internet, but nothing matched.
         "Maybe you just think you recognize it?" Victoria wondered aloud. "I mean, I'm getting a weird feeling about it too, like I've seen something similar before. Anyway, I have to go work on the mural. You coming with?"
         Charlie closed her laptop with a snap and fell back on the cream-white comforter. "Nah," she sighed. "I think I'm going to look some more. Besides, you don't need a bodyguard now that you and genius-boy are on the up and up." Victoria threw a pillow at her, but her friend's grin only grew. The artist rolled her eyes.
         "Fine, whatever. Do what you want." She pulled on her stained university jacket. "Have fun chasing geese."
         Charlie waited for the door to close behind her friend before jumping off the queen size bed and stuffing her iphone in her Aeropostale jacket. Victoria's usually right about this sort of thing, she admitted, but I can't deny what I-- sort of-- remember. So, one more sleuthing trip. If I don't find anything concrete, I'll give up on finding Fowl Junior's dirty little secret.