[Oct. 11] [Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?] The Best Laid Plans

[rose-of-pollux.livejournal.com]

Title: The Best Laid Plans
Day/Theme: October 11; I feel about average
Series: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
Character: The Dying Informant (and company)
Rating: PG13

Will be cross-posted to my journal and the V.I.L.E. HQ fanfic forum.


Author’s note: this ficlit/scene is a fill-in to my Yu-Gi-Oh mystery trilogy; it takes place a day before the dinner party scene in Eine Mitternachtsstimme. I realize that it leaves off with several loose ends, but there’ll be other fill-ins that will brings things to a resolve. As always, the characters aren’t mine, and the story is.
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The Informant gave a tremendous yawn as he walked through the familiar alley. Jet-lagged after a trip to and from Cairo, he was looking forward to putting his feet up.

It was nearly midnight, and yet the city was abuzz with activity. Mrs. Pumpkinclanger’s Siamese cat meowed at him from an old crate, eating a fish.

“At least you’re doing well on your own…” he said, softly, entering the pass code to unlock the back door and entering into the darkened building. He looked up at Mrs. Pumpkinclanger’s darkened apartment building, wishing that she was there to yell at him for his late arrival. But she did not appear. “You want to come in? There’ll be a place at ACME Meow-Net for you to stay…”

The cat meowed, taking him up on the offer.

Locking the door behind him, he headed for ACME Meow-Net when he noticed a light coming from the mailroom down the corridor.

“Bro…?” he asked, aloud. It wasn’t like the Messenger to work late… But then again, the Messenger hadn’t been quite the same since a case had gone horribly wrong about a week ago.

People had been mysteriously disappearing all over the world. The Techie had driven himself crazy trying to find some sort of pattern or clues as to who could be behind it, but coming up with nothing; he usually spent long hours in his room in front of his laptop or somewhere in the Tech-Net lab, holding a staring match with the computer screen. The Messenger had to contend with a vast influx of mail, most of it pleas to help look for missing loved ones and correspondences from other branches of ACME and other law enforcement agencies. Meanwhile, the Informant and the Inspector had been sent out into the field repeatedly to find clues. And then the perpetrators dealt them a huge slap in the face—Mrs. Pumpkinclanger had been the next to vanish; her next-door disappearance had occurred nearly a week and a half ago. They had taken in her pet bird for safekeeping. The distraught cat had been running around all over Manhattan until she had returned to the alley with a small cache of fish.

A serious turn in the case had come the previous week when a call came through to ACME. A man named Valon, his voice laden with an Aussie accent, had called from Industrial Illusions headquarters in San Francisco. The somewhat eccentric company head, Maximillion Pegasus, had vanished—another victim of the mysterious disappearances.

“How many does that make…?” the Messenger had asked, slapping his forehead. “Man, they’re making us look like idiots…!”

“Thirty…” the Techie had moaned, staring at the random data points. “I can’t figure it out… There’s no pattern, no clues—nothing! Whoever’s behind this is making sure that they don’t leave any tracks for us to follow.”

“I say it’s shameful that they took our next door-neighbor so easily…” the Informant had said, furious.

“It’s a taunt if I ever saw one,” the Inspector had muttered. “But the question in… Who is ‘they’…?”

“It’s not Carmen’s style…” the Techie had said. “She’s more into things as opposed to people. I think we really can rule out V.I.L.E….”

“I’ll hopefully be able to find something out…” the Inspector had said. “I’ve been assigned to go to San Francisco to see if I can pick up anything. Anyone coming with me?”

“Love to, but can’t…” the Informant had yawned. “They’re sending me to Cairo in a couple days; we think we have our first break in the case. I’m supposed to meet a woman named Ishizu Ishtar, who might have an idea on what’s going on… And they want me here so that I can head over there immediately when she calls back.”

“And I’m stuck here trying to figure this out…” the Techie had sighed, staring glumly at the screen.

“And I’m bogged down in the mailroom…” the Messenger had replied, looking dolefully at the stacks of mail. “And for them to keep me here instead of sending me out into the field is saying something… Besides… I’m not so sure I’m keen on meeting the Fiancée from the Dark Lagoon again…”

“Oh, yeah… that Vulsor lady…” the Techie had said, with a flinch. “You mean she’s still insistent on marrying you?”

“Uh-huh…” the Messenger had replied. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or freaked out…”

The four agents had exchanged glances.

“Freaked out…” they had said, simultaneously.

“Well, you three keep at it,” the Inspector had said. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

But the Inspector never did call back. He had vanished himself. Valon had said that he had arrived and had been looking around Pegasus’ manor… but he did not return from there.

The Messenger had been the most affected by the Inspector’s disappearance. He blamed himself for it happening; of the other three, he had been the one who had had the chance to seize the opportunity to go to San Francisco, but had declined because of Aranea Vulsor. Perhaps, if he had gone, the Inspector wouldn’t have disappeared. And perhaps now he was working late to cope.

The Inspector’s disappearance had been weighing down the Informant’s heart when he went to Cairo. And although he didn’t vanish, the woman he had been supposed to meet with, Miss Ishtar, had vanished instead. The Informant had ended up meeting with her younger brother Marik for what little details he could find—something surrounding Anubis…

The Informant sighed, snapping back to reality. Taking the Siamese cat in his arms, he headed to the mailroom.

“Hey…” he said, softly, pausing at the door.

“You’re home…!” the Messenger exclaimed, relieved. Bogged down by more desk work, he had been unable to accompany the Informant, as well, and had been worried that the Informant would not return.

The Techie was there in the mailroom, keeping the Messenger company, and he looked relieved as well to see that the Informant was returned.

“How’d it go…?” he asked.

“Miss Ishtar vanished before I got there, so I spoke to her brother. He thinks it’s a ploy involving Anubis…” said the Informant. “But there’s time for that later. What’s going on over here?”

“Nothing…” the Techie said. “I’ve just about given up trying to find a pattern, so I’m here helping the Messenger sort through the incoming mail.”

“Want to help…?” the Messenger asked, with a wan smile.

“Sure,” the Informant said, with a grin. “I’m so jet-lagged, there won’t be any way I’m falling asleep.”

He sat down as he helped to sort the mail, putting his tired feet on the desk as he told them what few details he found out.

“And I saw Mrs. P’s cat out there, so I decided to invite her in…”

“Murowr…” the cat said, sensing that he was talking about her.

“That thing about Anubis doesn’t make sense…” said the Techie. “But maybe the random disappearances aren’t supposed to make sense, either. Maybe there isn’t a simple answer…”

“Lately, our cases never seem to have simple answers…” said the Messenger. “Ever since that Gettysburg case, things just got weirder and weirder…”

“Too true…” the Informant said. He paused as he came across a medium-sized box, addressed to the Messenger. “Hey, Bro… This one’s addressed to you personally…”

“Huh?” the Messenger replied, glancing at it. “Who’d send me anything? Oh, wait… It could be that yo-yo I ordered a while back…”

“You ordered another yo-yo?” asked the Techie, an amused smile working across his face. It had been the first time he had smiled since the Inspector had disappeared. “Don’t you have a half-dozen of them already?”

“Well, you never know—they come in handy all the time…” said the Messenger, with a shrug. A vestige of a smile appeared on his face, too. “Go ahead and open it, Infy.”

The Informant shook his head in amusement and opened the box. He recoiled upon seeing its contents, which caused him and the chair he was sitting on to topple backwards. The cat hissed, flying off of his lap and onto the table.

“What happened?” the Messenger asked, bewildered.

The Informant threw the box onto the table.

“It’s not your yo-yo; it’s a gift from your fiancée…” he said.

“A gift from…?” the Messenger began, but trailed off in disgust as a large Goliath bird-eating spider emerged from the box, a golden wedding band hanging from each of its eight legs. Mrs. Pumpkinclanger’s cat arched its back, hissing furiously at it.

“There’s a note…” said the Techie, taking the cat in his arms before she would have been bitten.

To my darling fiancé,
I thought I would send this friend of mine with some sample wedding bands that you might like. Let me know your choice, Darling!

“Let her know my choice…” the Messenger muttered, furiously. “I’ll let her know my choice; where’s the sixteen-ton weight? I’ll flatten that thing—rings and all…! That’ll tell her what my choice is…”

“Now wait a minute…” said the Informant. “Maybe we don’t need to go that far…”

“Hold on…” said the Techie, his eyes widening. “This could be the link we’ve been waiting for…!”

“What do you mean?” asked the Messenger, glaring at the arachnid.

“Think about it…” he said. “The Inspector went missing in San Francisco… And that’s where she lives, isn’t it? Maybe she might know something about this…!”

“So what’re you saying…?” the Informant asked, his eyebrows arched. “Should the Messenger play along with her crazy idea and try to get some information out of her?”

“It might work!” the Techie said.

“You want me to what…?” the Messenger asked, staring at them.

“Well…” said the Informant, thinking twice. “Maybe we should think of something else…” They shouldn’t be so quick to ask the Messenger to do something like that…

“No…” said the Messenger, thinking it over. “No, you’re right…” He clenched a fist. “If it’ll help us find the Inspector, I’ll put up with her for as long as I have to.”

The Informant glanced at him.

“Are you sure, Bro?” he asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I can start putting things right…”

“You can’t possibly blame yourself for the Inspector’s disappearance…!” the Techie said, stunned. “He would never want that…!”

“Yeah, but…” The Messenger trailed off, with a sigh. “Remember how I said that everything started getting weird since the Gettysburg case? Well, it seems that I’ve messed up at least once in that case and the weird ones that followed. I didn’t believe you, Infy, about the ghost girls. I nearly handed over that amphibious shark to V.I.L.E. I wasn’t understanding about Patty. And then I got myself into this Vulsor mess when we tried to solve that mystery in her mansion… And now I wasn’t there for the Inspector.”

“But that wasn’t your fault!” the Informant said, as the Techie nodded, watching the spider crawl across the table. “Bro, you were the one who pulled us through all of those cases. Well, you pulled me through them, at least… You brought me back to this plane at Gettysburg. You saved me from V.I.L.E. during that shark fiasco. And as for Patty… Well, I needed a wake-up call, and you gave me one. And I don’t have to tell you how you saved my life more than once in Vulsor Hall.”

“Well… I suppose I lend a helping hand now and again…” the Messenger mused.

“A lot more than that…” the Techie promised.

“Murowr-rowr…” the cat said, as though she was agreeing.

“You know, I’m no teenage medium…” said the Informant. “But I have a vision of the future. You’re going to be the one who leads us into the case once we find a solid lead. And you’re going to be the one who finds the Inspector and everyone else who went missing. You’re going to be a hero…!”

“I like this vision…” the Messenger admitted, a wan smile on his face. “You don’t, by chance, see me getting a raise, do you?”

“Uh… sorry, the vision just got fuzzy.”

The Techie laughed aloud at this.

“I can settle for finding the Inspector…” the Messenger admitted. He definitely seemed closer to his normal self. “I just wish I could’ve done something from the beginning…”

“Like what, go with him…?” the Techie asked.

“You probably would’ve vanished, too…” said the Informant. “And where would Techie and I be? We’d be lost and floundering…”

“Oh, come on…”said the Messenger. “I know you’re just saying that; you don’t need me around all the time to be good detectives… But it’s nice to know that you’d prefer me to stick around.”

“Of course we do,” said the Techie.

“And we’re glad you do stick around…” said the Informant. There had been times, like during the Patty fiasco, that the Informant had thought either the Messenger would leave or try to get him to leave. But he did not; their friendship had endured. “And we hope you always will.”

The Messenger blinked, glancing at his surrogate brother in the eyes.

“Of course I will,” he promised.

The silence that followed was only halted by the cat meowing as she watched the spider crawl into the box.

“I’ll just randomly pick a ring and play along…” the Messenger said, closing the spider up in the box. “And we’ll find the Inspector soon… hopefully.”

“I’ll probably be sent out on assignment soon…” the Informant said. “How about you and Techie coming with me?”

“Well, I can work remotely,” said the Techie. “But will Scwhemphf let him go?”

“Oh, he will…” the Messenger said, with a smirk. “See, I’m only returning the rings to Miss Vulsor. This little creepy-crawly is going to make himself at home…” He took the box to the room several doors down: Schwemphf’s office. “…Right in here…”

“You wouldn’t…” said the Techie, his eyes widening as the Messenger coaxed the spider out of the box and under the door frame.

“He just did…!” the Informant said, in admiration.

“Tarantulas are harmless to humans…” the Messenger said. “But that doesn’t stop them from scaring the daylights out of them…!”

The Informant just looked to his quirky elder brother. He was returning to his old self bit by bit. And soon, hopefully, they’d be reunited with the Inspector, too.

In the meantime, though, things were going to be very interesting indeed the following morning.