#PUBLIC CONVO WITH GECKO TIME

[you-know-what-a-majority-vote-is]

Hey Gecko is that all or are there any other yttd characters that you wanna see

[throughtheglassdarkly]

Missing Pieces, part 8

Welcome back. When last you were here, Bella went all murder-hobo and I drew some dicks. Onward.

So once we determined that Bella wasn’t going to immediately collapse into a lifeless puddle of goo, we decided to leave a note for the spymaster of the Knights of the Widow’s Walk. It took me a minute to come up with the right wording, but I eventually settled on this:

“Dear Sir and/or Madam Spymaster:

We have located the loyalist, who is a former associate of Buck’s, and have determined she is working with several Fetches and a pair of non-Court affiliated changelings. One of the Fetches is dead and the other is in our possession. Please advise as to how you wish to proceed.

Love and kisses,

Derek, pledged courtier of the Autumn Court”

With that taken care of, we all went our separate ways, leaving Day’s Fetch in his care. The next couple of days were quiet. A little too quiet. I realized after about three days that we hadn’t heard anything from Bella and she wasn’t answering any texts or calls. Pam, Yova, and I decided to go pay her a visit (Day was having a little too much fun tormenting his Fetch). I made tres leches cake and Pam worked up a world-class guilt trip.

Before we sought Bella out, Yova suggested that we Facebook stalk the Fetch as much as possible to get an idea of what we might be dealing with in the fallout. The Fetch seemed to keep most of the personal stuff on its Facebook on friend lock, but did have some public things, like its work with the university. We couldn’t help noticing that in some of the photos it was with a very tall, handsome dude with short dark hair. The comments all identified him as “Carlos <3 <3 <3”. We could see there were a couple of worried comments on the Fetch’s page in the last couple of days, but since most of the page was private, we couldn’t see anything more than that.

So the three of us traipsed over to Bella’s apartment. Nobody answered and there wasn’t the sound of anyone inside. The next logical step was her workplace, a magic shop that also sold tons of incense and crystals and new age crap for all your Wicca needs. When we got into the place, I was bracing for a huge waft of patchouli, but thankfully the dominant smell was cinnamon, due to the giant stack of cinnamon brooms near the entry. The Professor Trelawney clone who owned the place greeted us and asked how she could help us. When we told her that we were some friends of Bella’s and hadn’t been able to get a hold of her, she told us that Bella had asked for some time off. “And I was very worried about her, something about her aura seemed much darker than usual,” she said. Yova discreetly indicated that there’d been a death in the family and Professor Fauxlawney nodded sagely. She gave us a healing crystal and asked us to bring it to Bella. She was also pretty obviously anxious for us to buy something. Pam and Yova picked out some incense. And I wasn’t going to buy anything. I really wasn’t.

She had geodes. They were so shiny.

Now, lest you think that Bella was in some absolutely horrendous danger, I’ll cut that off at the pass. She was perfectly fine. Physically. Physically, she was perfectly fine. She was staying in a Spring Court safe house alongside Duke Lamington, the Chatelaine who was Mistress Lilly’s second in command. And as it turns out, Bella had not had a good couple of days. She was on autopilot more than anything and wasn’t processing things anywhere nearly as quickly as she could have been. She didn’t remember how she got from one place to another and was having really unpleasant memories of Arcadia, like Amberleigh’s coldness and Lamashtu screaming in her face.

Fortunately, Duke Lamington is a very decent dude and he was giving her some space and letting her try to work through it himself. He did check in on her and on the morning we went looking for her, Bella said that he sat down and told her that he hadn’t experienced it himself, but that he’d heard how jarring and unpleasant confronting a Fetch is. “And I can’t help but notice you’re missing a bit of the exuberance which caught our Court’s attention in the first place,” he told her. He asked if she wanted him to call us, but she wasn’t really in the mood.

Knowing a losing battle when he saw one, Sir Duke asked her what she would like to do and if she would like to go out and have some fun. “Yeah, but I don’t want to do what you do for fun. I don’t wanna go to The Container Store or Bed, Bath and Beyond,” Bella snarked. “There is nothing wrong with Bed, Bath and Beyond except their exorbitant prices,” Duke Lamington said. Despite her being horribly insulting, he told her that he’d arrange for her to have some fun that evening.

Bella told me later that she’d been curious about what Duke Lamington did in the Spring Court and asked him if he could show her what he usually did. He seemed surprised, but went off to get his computer. When he brought it back, he had each and every Excel spreadsheet open. “People want to think the Spring Court is all frivolities and careless pastimes, but there is effort that goes into organizing and maintaining this Court and that falls to me,” he said. Bella was goggle-eyed at how many details he had organized and just started scrolling through the spreadsheets. He told her that they were in the process of planning the Spring Fling, the Court’s inaugural party. “If you want to throw a truly good party you one, spare no expense, and two, arrange everything months in advance so you can book the best venue and hire the best band and arrange for the best caterer and make sure everything goes according to plan.”

While Bella was looking over every single micromanagey detail that he had written down, he told her that he had the numbers portion done, but that they hadn’t yet considered a color scheme and asked if she had any considerations about colors or décor. Apparently last year was a hibiscus theme, which he thought was a little corny but Mistress Lilly insisted on. The year prior was ivy and white lilies (there are a lot of floral themes, apparently). The year that made him shudder in recollection was 1997: the year they did the surfer theme. When she heard that, Bella asked him how old he was and how long he’d been back. He didn’t answer her directly, but told her that wasn’t long after he made it back and that it was one of the things that made him realize how badly the Spring Court needed someone to help organize their ideas. Bella suggested a few ideas for the Spring Fling, like coral and cream fiesta and pink and green flamingos. Duke Lamington nixed the flamingos but agreed to run pink and green by Mistress Lilly. They spent the rest of the afternoon planning the party and hanging out, which Bella said was a nice contrast to her feeling like she was going to die.

Now at this point, Pam, Yova, and I had absolutely no idea any of this was going on. We were walking and talking, trying to go over Bella’s shopping habits as we made our way back to my apartment building. I was still carrying the cake or else I would have been staring at my geode the entire time. So shiny. I asked if we should try the Hot Topics in the area and Yova told me that apparently that wasn’t exactly Bella’s goth aesthetic. Pam was ready to put out an APB at this point.

Our convo got cut short when we got back to my and Yova’s apartment building. Buck was waiting outside at the bus stop, clearly looking for us. We approached and he waved awkwardly. He told us that someone had gone to pick up Day’s Fetch and that he was here for business. “So you got our note,” Yova said. “Oh, yeah. This guy,” he pointed at me, “he’s fucking good.” If it had come from anybody else on the planet, I might have taken the compliment. But being the petty bastard I am, I decided to just give him the cold stare. Yova invited Buck up to her place after I made it clear that he was not getting anywhere near my place without taking off his shoes. “No, no, Derek, your apartment’s been defiled enough in recent memory. But you are taking off your shoes,” she told Buck.

They made their way up right to Yova’s apartment and I stopped off at my place to drop the cake off in the fridge and pick up Paisley. I was not going to be without my attack gecko.

When I got up there, Buck clasped his hands behind his back and said, “So, business. Right. So, awkward, I know. I hear that Aurora is involved,” he said. We nodded. He took in a deep breath and said, “So what you gotta understand is what we were up to was survival. But the thing is if she’s thinking she can wriggle her way back into the good graces of whatever patron she’s found herself now, that’ll mitigate any of the damage done by our fuckup with you guys.” “So losing us did a blow to her reputation?” Yova asked. “Oh, yeah. She was working directly under Scáthach. You don’t piss off a Lady like that,” he said.

Pam delicately asked him, “You know that Scáthach isn’t any more, right?” His eyes got to be the size of Kennedy half-dollars and he said, “What? You’re fucking with me.” We told him the brief details about how she’d lost her title and her keep and her spear. He looked stunned for a few minutes before he got out, “Holy shit. Holy actual shit. Then… it means one of two things. Either clean slate or we got the problem of being attached to a fuck-up. And she’s gotta work three times as hard to pick herself up.”

He told us that he’d brought us a list of her previous places in the Hedge where she’d go when she needed to recuperate. We thought at first it was the Knights wanting us to do their work for them, but he told us he wasn’t there for the Knights, he was trying to give us some information to help us. “I don’t know what you guys got in mind as far as payback you want to do, but she’s obviously got your Fetches under her thumb, or at least two of them.” “She called them her babies,” Yova said. “Yeah, she… she does that,” he said, sounding a little creeped out. He told us he didn’t know if she made our Fetches herself, but if she didn’t, she got somebody to provide her with excellent quality building blocks.

Before he left, Yova asked Buck how he felt about Aurora. He said he missed the old life he had, but he wasn’t sure if he missed her or the illusion of power being a loyalist brought. “Don’t get me wrong, our lives sucked, but we weren’t you guys and that does something to you when you kind of hate the position you’re in,” he said. We asked if he wanted to help capture Aurora or seek some revenge. He said he didn’t want any part of it and wanted to put that behind him. He tossed a notepad to Pam and made his way to the door. As he walked out, I tossed over my shoulder, “Don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.”

Pam looked in the notebook and saw a hefty list of locations in the Hedge and the mortal world with sporadically active trods we could use to get to and from those places. Yova asked what our thoughts were and I said that we obviously weren’t at full strength now, but that we needed to strike before she was able to recover too much. We agreed that we needed to let Day get his Fetch claimed and then grab him and in the meantime figure out just what the hell was going on with Bella.

Thankfully, during her time when she was considering joining the Spring Court, Yova got Duke Lamington’s phone number and she gave him a ring. He was polite as always and asked her how he could help. She told him that we didn’t know where Bella had gone and hoped he would have some idea, which is when we learned that she was safe and in the Spring Court’s care, though he did admit she wasn’t doing terribly well. Yova asked him if he could pass on the message to her that things were happening that had to do with the night Bella killed her Fetch. He agreed and put her on hold so he could ask Bella what she wanted to do. When he got back on, he said that Bella was being very vague and not paying a huge amount of attention.

Duke Lamington told Yova that he and Bella were going to go out that evening and Yova proposed he give her the location of where they were going so we could bump into them and see how Bella was. He agreed, then asked her if he could get her advice on where to take Bella. “This is a sort of lifestyle that I have absolutely no familiarity with. There was a 90s night at the local beer hall, would that be appropriate?” he asked.

When he asked this, Yova pulled the phone away from her ear and looked about as pained as I’ve ever seen her. She very quietly said, “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” I sat next to her with Paisley so she could cope.

Yova turned back to the phone and, with a look of abject agony on her face, asked, “What sort of thing did Bella ask for, specifically?” “Loud music and flashing lights, I did confirm the flashing lights,” Duke Lamington told her. Yova proposed that she act as the outsource for this and quickly called one of her Juilliard contacts, asking where the best place in Albany was for a rave. She managed to get the address of a rave that was held in an empty store area of one of the malls in town and passed that on to the Duke. He ran it by Bella and she said, “I can’t even see you at a rave. But yeah! Let’s do it!”

While all this was going on, I still had Paisley in my lap. I looked down to her and asked, “So, girl, you up for a rave?” She looked up at me with a quirked head. “Rave, uh. Loud music, flashing lights, lots of drugs?” I asked. She considered for a second and then, if I’ve ever seen a gecko shrug, that was it. She stayed home.

The next few hours we spent raiding Yova’s closet to try and get outfits for a rave. And yeah, yeah, I know what you’re going to say. I have club wear, I don’t have rave wear. I did not get the gay dancing gene. Bella also took Duke Lamington out for appropriate rave attire. He got a snazzy neon bow tie and suspenders. Yova also called Marigold and asked her if she wanted to meet us there. She jumped at it.

Bella and the Duke were the first ones to get to the rave, not long after it opened. He mostly was there to chaperone Bella, though he did do a little dancing to humor her. We got there about twenty minutes later and thankfully managed to spot the Duke quickly enough, with that neon blue bow tie. Bella actually seemed like she was doing much better; she was going through her usual Bellaisms. We made our way over and she waved at us, looking happy. “I didn’t know you guys were going to be here!” she said. Pam and Duke Lamington shared a look – we’d all heard him telling Bella that we were going to be coming along.

While Pam and I tried to figure out what was going on, Yova got a text that Marigold was there and Yova sent her a picture of what she was wearing. She made her way over to the bar, where Marigold was sitting, dressed in her normal Wednesday Addams getup and nursing a hot pink drink, looking delighted. Yova greeted her (with a nice kiss on the cheek – yes, I was watching) and told her she looked happy. “Oh, I am! This is fascinating!” Marigold told her, going on about all the social dynamics. Yova was looking positively charmed and warned her about taking anything from anyone who offered it. “I’m not that naïve,” Marigold scoffed, pulling out her bag. “Look, see, I have a whistle, and a can of mace, and this straw is supposed to change colors if you put it in a drink that has date rape drugs in it.” Bless that child.

Yova brought Marigold back over to where we were on the dance floor and we all greeted her. Pam told her how nice she looked and some of us proceeded to dance awkwardly (Duke Lamington doing the two-step, Pam doing a shimmy, Marigold swaying in place, me doing the cabbage patch) and others less awkwardly (Yova dancing around Marigold, Bella just having a good time).

But then. As we were dancing, both Yova and I spotted a couple of young women pushing their way through the crowd toward us, looking surprised and emotional. We pointed them out to the others and Bella quickly recognized them as old friends of hers. She turned, completely freaked out, and started making her way in the other direction. Yova, thankfully, reacted quickly. By picking me up and throwing me like a goddamn discus at them. They were pissed as hell at me and it stopped them from moving forward, but didn’t stop them from spotting Bella and they darted off through the crowd after her. Yova swooped in, picked me up, and started acting like a running back. I looked up at her and managed to get out, “When we get out of here… I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ ass.”

Yova managed to stop one of the girls by running into her, but the other caught up with Bella and asked her what was going on and why she was acting the way she was. “And what is up with this look?” she asked. Bella tried to affect a Spanish accent, making like it was a case of mistaken identity. Around this time, the rest of us managed to catch up. “What is going on, is this cold feet or something?” Between Bella’s denials and Yova’s insistence that the girl was mistaken about who Bella was, she finally left, but was clearly unhappy about it.

We made our way outside the mall and Duke Lamington gently told Bella that she was going to have to deal with what happened with her Fetch. I realized that this was probably the time to let Bella know what she might be dealing with and I pulled the ring out of my pocket and handed it over to her. “What’s this?” she asked. “I found that in the pile of rags that was your Fetch the other night,” I said. She didn’t seem to be putting it together, but Yova reminded her that the girl mentioned getting a case of cold feet. Bella looked at the ring a minute longer, then put it in her pocket and stormed off, saying, “Not my problem!”

Duke Lamington told us that it wasn’t exactly the Spring Court’s place to deal with this, but he wished us luck. “I’ll go check on the little miss and make sure she gets home all right, whether it’s to her own place or our locale,” he said. He promised to let us know where Bella ended up. She ended up asking to go back to her own place and Duke Lamington escorted her there. She told me that when he dropped her off, he told her it was a pleasure hanging out with her and that it wasn’t often members of the Court sought him out. All together now: awwww.

That left me, Pam, Marigold, and Yova hanging outside the mall. Yova apologized to Marigold about the night ending prematurely. “Oh, no, it was fascinating!” she chirped again. She did stare through her glasses after the girl who was traipsing off and, getting a bit more serious, told us that we should be careful about the police in case she talked to them about what was going on with Bella. “I think we might have a bit of help with keeping that at bay, with Officer Break. Did she ever end up contacting you?” Yova asked. Marigold’s shoulders slumped a bit and she said, “Yes… yes, she did. And I was just about to call her back, but then Miss Stella dumped a pile of research projects on my desk.” “She’s good at that,” I said. “Yes, she is. You know, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t sleep,” Marigold said.

We ended up piling into Yova’s crappy pickup and dropped Marigold off at her apartment first. It wasn’t the best part of town, but her building looked nice. Yova then dropped Pam off and drove me back to our building. She parked the car, looked over at me and made a peace offering. “I’ve got a bottle of vodka and mixers upstairs.” “Deal.”

Now, that might have been the end of it. Except that when Pam got home, she could feel the aftereffects of Glamour. It wasn’t hostile or wrong, but she definitely could feel something. As she looked around her apartment, she saw a long, thin thorn pinning a parchment envelope to the wall. Mentally noting that she was going to have to spackle that later, she pulled out the thorn and opened the envelope, breaking a messy wax seal. Inside was a small note that read: “HEY KIDS, WE’RE BUSTIN OUT. -C P.S. TELL THE OLD MAN I’M GONNA PUNCH HIM.”

By this point, Yova and I were upstairs in her place. I was starting to put together some Moscow mules and she was trying to change out of her thigh highs. Pam called me and I picked up, saying, “Fallen Angels Abortion Clinic, you knock ‘em up, we knock ‘em down, we have a special on twins today, how may I direct your call?” Pam took a second to respond, then said, “I’m sorry, I think I have the wrong number,” and hung up. I cackled for a few seconds, then called her back.

“Oh, Derek. I think that somebody has your number,” she told me. “No, no, that was me,” I said. “He’s a shit on the phone!” Yova called from her closet. “So, what’s up?” I asked. “Well, I just got a note from Cassi. It said they’re breaking out,” she said. I felt my feathers spring up into full alert and I snapped my fingers to try and get Yova’s attention. “What? What is it?” she asked, leaning out of her closet dangerously. “THEY’RE BREAKING OUT!” I yelled. “OH SHI –” she yelled, losing her balance completely.

“Oh, that sounded painful,” Pam said. “Yeah, it was like watching a sequoia go down,” I said. “Uh, we’re going to – Yova, how long is it going to take you to change?” I asked. “Five minutes!” she said, contorting herself to try to get those damn thigh highs off. “Right. Um, we’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said. “I’m just going to change into something that’s not – this.” “I don’t know, Derek, I think Adrian would find that very fetching,” Yova said from the floor, pointing to my mesh shirt. “Shut up, Yova!” I yelled, darting for the door.

And so that brings our current story to a close. When next you come back, I’ll tell you all about the next fine kettle of fish we managed to get ourselves into. Until then, may your friends never use you as ballast for their Olympic tryouts.