Fic: The Unexpected Univille Telecommunication Phenomenon (Middleman/Warehouse 13)
Title: The Unexpected Univille Telecommunication Phenomenon
Fandom: The Middleman/Warehouse 13
Written for: rarewomen
Recipient's name:
angel_negra
Rating: Teen
Pairing/Characters: Wendy Watson/Lacey Thornfield, Ida, Leena, Claudia Donovan
Word Count: 5500
Notes: Thanks to
st_aurafina for the beta and to the rarewomen mods for running this awesome fest!
Summary: When Lacey wins a grant to bring confronfrontational spoken-word performance art to small towns around America, the mere mention of Univille sets off Ida's alarms. Wendy Watson is ready to discover the secrets of Univille and maybe even finally get to attend one of Lacey's performances.
The illegal sublet Wendy shares with another young, photogenic artist, happily
"They're he-re!" Performance artist Lacey Thornfield waved a piece of paper in front of her visual artist roommate, Wendy Watson.
"That's not a 'they', that's a 'that'," Wendy corrected, flopping down on their recently re-upholstered sofa and reached for her boot zips.
Lacey made a sympathetic noise and yanked a boot off, throwing it into the Shoe Pile with the extreme accuracy of long practice. She pulled a sharp bit of metal out of the sole of the second before sending it to join the other shoes. "Sorry, Dub Dub. I know you need to rid yourself of workday irritations before you can release your artistic spirit and sense of unbridled joy." She put the metal fragment in her Art Pile (One Man's Junk Division) and waited for Wendy to be ready.
"I need to release my toes, then I'm all good." She wriggled her feet. "Aaaaaah. I had to literally get my foot in the door this morning and it all was downhill from there." She didn't mention that it was because mutant cyborg crickets had taken over the Middle HQ in an attempt to infiltrate world governments. Luckily, they were terrible at securing their exits. She'd have to retrieve that scrap of metal from Lacey later - it would be a waste of a hard day's stomping if any survived.
"Okay, ready?" Lacey couldn't hold it any longer. "I've been awarded a grant! An Emperor Norton Arts for America Touring Grant!"
"OMZ, awesome!" Wendy leapt to her feet and hugged her, hoping that Lacey would overlook the "Z". Her brain had been sort of stuck on Z for Zuul since she and the Middleman accidentally fell into another dimension and found that Ghostbusters had been at least partially documentary.
"Yeah! They want me to travel to seven tragically art-free American towns and introduce them to the world of confrontational spoken-word performance art!" Lacey lowered her voice. "And they pay me for it."
Lacey's ambivalence towards money was a long-standing tension in their roommate-ship, if not their friendship. Lacey's small income tended to go on fines resulting from her chosen artform, and art supplies, whereas Wendy's went on rent, food, bills, underwear and, admittedly, art supplies. This grant was a big deal. Lacey had put a lot of work into the application - so had Wendy, Noser and even evil Pip who conveniently owned a digital camcorder - and Wendy hoped it would bring the worlds of paid employment and artistic political protest closer together for Lacey, as the bizarre things she saw in her worklife had for her.
"Lacey, that's so great! Where are they sending you? Are you allowed to bring a friend?"
Lacey screwed up her face. "I don't think so. I'll have to work out how to set up without you and Noser. Unless you can come to, um, Univille, South Dakota with me?"
Wendy's watch buzzed. "Oh damn, sorry, it's work."
Lacey waved a hand. "Take the call, Dub Dub! Maybe you can bribe them into sending you to Univille!"
Wendy ducked upstairs to her studio to see Ida's grumpy robot face peering up at her from the watch.
"What took you so long? Had to stub out your doobie?"
Wendy rolled her eyes. "19 seconds is practically a record for me. You should be proud. What's up?"
"Someone in your vicinity said Un-a-ville."
"What? No, she didn't. Lacey said 'U-ni-ville'"
"So she can't pronounce it right, doesn't mean she didn't say it. Any time someone says Univille in proximity to certain events, places or persons - such as a Middleman in training - I get an alert. Feels like someone pulling out an eyebrow hair, if you want to know why I'm so unusually cranky."
"You're not unusually cranky, Ida. This is normal for you. What's up with Univille, then?"
"Beats me. I'm just programmed with an alert. You're supposedly doing the work around here."
Middleman training to the fore, Wendy spotted an opening. "Lacey's travelling there soon. It'd be the perfect cover if I went with her as her roadie."
Ida's expression clearly said, "Pull the other one, it's got electrified bells on it that will give you a painful shock while I laugh," but all she said was, "Check it with the Middleman. There's nothing strange in the records that I can find, and I've got access to everything."
Rapid City, SD, slowly
The Middleman may have approved Wendy's trip, but he certainly didn't approve the use of the Middlejet, so Wendy was on the plane with Lacey. Well, not with Lacey as such: Lacey's grant included a business-class ticket, even if it did involve four transfers on the way to South Dakota, while Ida's peculiar sense of - Wendy hesitated to call it humour - had stuck Wendy in an astonishingly tiny seat by the bathroom. Wendy had been in a lot of planes over the years, and she'd never been unlucky enough to find a seat too cramped for her short legs, but Ida had certainly succeeded. In every single plane on their route. By the time they made it to Rapid City, South Dakota, Wendy was a furious ball of under-caffeinated, crumpled rage. She needed twenty rounds of Gutwrencher 3 to even start to unwind, and her console was over a thousand miles away.
"Oh, sweetie!" Lacey flew across the mostly empty terminal, crochet jacket flapping, to throw her arms around Wendy. "You should have let me swap with you at Cleveland!" She dug her fingers into Wendy's shoulder blades, massaging the cramps out.
Wendy started to feel better immediately. It was only a bad seat and Ida's idea of fun: at least she hadn't had to fly the plane herself and be unexpectedly ejected above the dread Mexican pyramid of Itzilichlitlichlitzl. "Don't worry about it. You would have been even more squashed in there." And why should Lacey suffer the whims of a cranky robot?
"Okay." Lacey frowned. "But you have to let me finish this massage later."
"Deal."
"Lacey Thornfield and guest?" A tiny, wizened old man crept towards them, holding up a handmade sign that read "Univille welcomes Lacey Thornfield!"
"That's me!" Lacey beamed at him and he grinned back.
"Been a long time since we had an artist visiting, Ms Thornfield. There's nothing more exciting here these days than a concrete plant and the IRS facility, so I hope you've brought some excitement with you."
Lacey looked thrilled. "I live for excitement! This is my friend Wendy Watson. She's a visual artist, but I'm a confrontational spoken word performer."
Wendy thought the old man might be shocked or confused at that, but instead he looked even more delighted as he led them over to the luggage collection area.
"Well, that'll shake them up at the Historical Society! I'm Elmer Bulmer, pleased to meet you."
"What a great name! Have there been Bulmers here for a long time, Elmer?"
By the time they'd made it to Elmer's truck and loaded in Lacey's luggage, Lacey had started extracting the entire history of Univille from her new friend. While Lacey seemed fascinated, Wendy couldn't hear anything that might indicate why Univille triggered Ida's alert. As far as Elmer's history was concerned, the most exciting thing about the town was that it had never technically been incorporated. Elmer had lived there his whole life except for a year in the Pacific at the tail-end of WWII: he seemed to be completely open and happily chatty about the tiniest details and yet Wendy picked up nothing odd whatsoever. Well, maybe Elmer didn't know about it, or Univille had memory-altering drugs in the water supply. Stranger things had happened.
Elmer was still talking as they drove across the dullest scenery Wendy had ever seen in her life. He'd got from the town's founding to about 1920 by now. "And after the IRS was done moving in, my daddy told me, they closed down the railway line for good. Things got a lot quieter around here without that train passing through."
Wendy sighed. It was going to take every scrap of artistic vision Lacey had to create a confrontational spoken word performance out of the thrilling story of Univille.
Coffee Shop, Univille, SD, sunnily
Despite a magnificent massage from Lacey that left Wendy feeling better than she had before she got on the plane, Univille was not impressing Wendy. After some pre-dawn surveillance disguised as a morning run, she'd spent all morning with Lacey. It seemed the best way to meet people, as Lacey had set up an interview station in the coffee shop, and Wendy could be there monitoring the camera that Lacey had somehow persuaded Pip to lend to her. Lacey was chatting with - it seemed to Wendy - every single resident of Univille and recording everyone who gave permission. It wasn't difficult to find people: apparently Lacey's new friend Elmer had told everyone about her arrival, and novelty was thin on the ground in Univille.
"Oh, you're staying at the Grand Hotel? It's a bit old-fashioned - you'd love the bed and breakfast," an old woman was telling Lacey. "But it's all full of the IRS people! Poor Leena mustn't have had another booking in years."
"You wouldn't believe the government cutbacks! My whole life in the post office and they retired me! Plenty of money to run that IRS warehouse though. Shouldn't it all be computerised these days?"
A pink-haired barista gave Wendy the only interesting moment of the morning. "Yeah, so I knew this guy Todd who worked at the hardware for like, six months? Then he hooked up with the younger IRS chick and then he, like, got kicked out of town."
Wendy checked for information on Todd of Univille in some excitement, but the HEYDAR immediately reported the most boring possible result: Todd had been in witness protection until he blew his cover over a girl - indeed, one of the IRS staff, Claudia Donovan - and had to be relocated. Wendy was about to die of acute boredom syndrome any moment, in a sad little place where the prime gossip was about the IRS. Worse, Ida would be downright gleeful that Wendy couldn't find anything.
"Done!" Lacey jumped to her feet and Wendy switched off the camera.
"Do you need me this afternoon before the performance?" Wendy asked her. "I'm going to take a look around this place, see if there's something worth painting."
"Oh, Dub Dub, I'm sorry you're so bored! Univille is a great place for my art, but I can't say there's much here visually."
"I brought a few tubes of paint, but I'm not feeling inspired. Don't apologise, though, there's got to be something interesting around here. What time do you need me to help with set-up?"
"They said dinner's at six, so after that, I guess?" Lacey leaned down to kiss Wendy on the top of her head. "Don't find any international crises that need solving, okay? This is meant to be a break for you."
"Okay," Wendy lied guiltily. "See you at the hotel!"
The rest of Univille was proving as bland as the parts Wendy had already seen, but something about its very ordinariness was starting to make Wendy's brain itch. She ducked behind some trees at the bottom of a small hill and pulled out a very special pair of yellow-tinted glasses.
"Ida, you read me? Start a scan, will you?"
Ida's voice crackled out of Wendy's watch. "For what? Tumbleweeds?"
"Weirdness! Anything that trips your Univille alert!"
"That? I switched it off once you got there. Itches worse than corrosive salt damage in the nether regions."
"That's more than I ever wanted to hear about your nether regions, Ida." Wendy turned slowly in a circle, giving Ida a good view through the glasses.
"Hmmph. I'm not picking up anything weird as such…"
"Define 'as such?'"
"Imagine the town as one of your drug-addled painting extravaganzas."
Wendy shed her yellow glasses in outrage. "You watch me paint?"
"Once was enough, honeybunch. So, if the local energy readings are a painting, there's a big bright purple splotch at the house across the road from you, a few more little spatters around and about and, just outside the frame, out at that IRS warehouse, someone threw the entire bucket of paint at the wall."
"Ida, your metaphors suck harder than the cruel vacuum of space. The one we fought last week, not space in general."
"That's the thanks I get for trying to explain things in your language, dropout." Ida cut the connection and Wendy was left to sputter at her blank watch.
"I didn't know they had put phones in watches yet," said a woman's voice, and Wendy glanced up to see the speaker, a young woman in a floral tunic, smiling as she walked towards Wendy across the lawn of the nearby house that Ida had singled out. The sign at the front of the property read "Leena's Bed and Breakfast, Welcome."
Wendy quickly pulled her sleeve down, wondering how the woman had seen her behind the trees. "Uh, it's a prototype. Sorry, I'm not really meant to be using it."
"Oh, you're one of the visiting artists! Weren't you meeting with the historical society this afternoon?"
"That's Lacey - I'm the sexy assistant."
"It's very nice of you to come all this way to help your friend. You have a lovely aura - I don't see many so kaleidoscopic as yours." She laughed. "To be fair, we don't see a lot of travellers here in Univille, so when I saw an unfamiliar aura glowing over here I had to come down and say hello. I'm Leena."
"Hi, I'm Wendy Watson." Aura reading was one of those annoying concepts that spanned the gap between "harmless crackpot" and "mystical mind-controlling genius with evil mood rings", but since the energy readings were coming from Leena's house, Wendy could at least hope for the latter. . "Univille seems like a strange place to run a bed and breakfast if there aren't many tourists."
Leena waved a hand. "It's been here for a long time. There used to be stagecoaches, and after that, a railway. Univille's quite a busy place, at times."
"I guess it must have been."
Another voice floated down from Leena's house. "Leena! Have you flipped the breaker switch yet?" IRS agent Claudia Donovan - the Witness Protection cover-breaker - was on the porch, a bundle of wires in one hand, which she quickly hid behind the doorframe when she noticed Wendy watching.
"Sorry, Claudia, I was just talking to a visiting artist!" Leena turned back to smile at Wendy. "Claudia's the IT person. Sometimes the wiring in these old houses can't take modern computing."
"Uh huh." Wendy's suspicions were piling up like a pile of digital zombie corpses in the universally panned and banned Gutwrencher 1.
Leena started up the hill towards her house. "We'll see you tonight at the performance, I hope!"
"You're coming along?"
"Sure! It's been a long time since we had an artist in Univille!" Leena vanished around the side of the house. If they were coming to see the performance, maybe Wendy would be able to sneak back and check out the house. Now that she had signs of possible Middlebusiness afoot, Wendy headed for the Grand Hotel with a spring in her step. Ida was going to learn that no cramped plane ride or strained painting metaphor could get in Wendy Watson's way.
Grand Hotel, Univille, SD, duskily
"Hey, Lacey, what's up?"
Lacey was lying across the larger of the mismatched beds in their room at the Grand Hotel, fiddling with the wires on her black dress with the twinkling lights, the same dress she'd worn for her "I Am City" piece. "The video file is finished, so if I can sort out these lights, everything's up! The historical society were really helpful - they said I could use anything from their collection for the performance."
Wendy looked at the bits and pieces spread across the room. Most of them she could identify as things Lacey had brought with her, but the odd one out was an old-fashioned telephone, the kind that looked like a long stick with a speaker fixed to it and a cup on a wire for the ear. "So you picked a telephone? Didn't they have, I don't know, some kind of secret wartime relics or something?"
Lacey pursed her lips in a fake pout. "The phone spoke to me, Dub Dub. Spontaneity is, like, my muse!" She struck a ridiculous pose and the lights on her dress flashed. "Oh, there we go! Ready! Did you find any inspiration out in Univille?"
"No, but I met a few people who are coming to the show tonight. You want to run through set-up with me? You'll have to do it all by yourself after tonight."
"You're right - I'll try to get it all done myself with you for backup, okay?"
"Sounds great!" Wendy smiled past the guilt again, having manipulated her best friend into not needing her to attend her performance. Again.
Town Hall, Univille, SD, confrontationally and performatively
The town hall was half full before Lacey had even started setting up, so Wendy and the ever-helpful Elmer Bulmer had to move people from their seats so they could set up Lacey's portable projector on a table in the right spot. Lacey managed to complete the stage set-up herself, and her big happy thumbs-up gesture to Wendy made Wendy feel even worse.
Leena and Claudia showed up in time to find seats towards the rear of the hall, along with a short, bearded man who Wendy's research identified as the head of the IRS office, Arthur Nielsen. Leena caught Wendy's eye and waved to her; Wendy waved back, trying not to let "I'm about to break into your house!" show in her aura. Apparently she was successful - or Leena was a crackpot after all - because Leena returned to her conversation with the IRS agents without a single suspicious look in Wendy's direction.
The house lights went down and Elmer Bulmer appeared at the microphone stand on the stage.
"Don't tap the mike, Elmer!" someone yelled from the audience, but Elmer did it anyway.
"Is this thing working? Hello?"
"Hello, Elmer!" the crowd replied in unison. If this is what they usually passed for entertainment in Univille, Wendy could see why the prospect of a confrontational spoken-word performance was so exciting for them.
"Good evening, everyone! I'm pleased to introduce travelling artist, Miss Lacey Thornfield, and her performance piece premiering right here in Univille, uh…" He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. "Here it is! Her performance piece, Comm-slash-unity!"
There was a strong round of applause as Elmer left the stage - Wendy joined in the applause because at least he wouldn't be tapping the microphone anymore - and Lacey entered, dressed in a baggy white muslin robe. The rest of the lights dimmed, she smiled, threw her arms out wide, and the muslin became a screen for the projector. Wendy had seen Lacey use this as visual accompaniment before, but it was always great to see Lacey's command over an audience.
Images began to play across Lacey's body, faces of the people of Univille recorded by Lacey that morning, and the crowd murmured in recognition.
"I don't know who they are. He got kicked out of town. The IRS rents that place, you'll never get a room. There's no money for my job; they made me retire." Lacey's powerful voice rang out across the hall, without the aid of the microphone. "My son doesn't call. The veterinarian moved to California and took her dog with her. Someone bought up the last of the Italian coffee."
Wendy saw Arthur Nielsen shift guiltily at that one.
Lacey cradled the antique telephone in her left arm. "South Dakota was once the most connected of the territories: the first territory to have a telephone line at all; the first to have a telephone exchange covering a whole city; Univille had more telephones per person than any other town in the country." She raised the receiver to her ear. "And today Univille talks about each other, but not to each other." She held the telephone out to the side as images projected onto her body again, people standing and leaving the coffee house, people looking sideways, an old lady leaning forward to whisper. "This is a town of secrets and pauses. This is a town where the truth cannot be spoken, but we speak around it, spiralling closer and closer, clinging to the edges and never daring to throw ourselves into the space we all see."
Wendy started to slink towards the back of the hall. No-one noticed, not even Leena, as everyone watched Lacey on stage.
The projector stopped and the stage was dark, then a single twinkling light appeared. Another followed, then another and another until Lacey's black dress, revealed as she shed the muslin robe, lit up the stage. She held the telephone in both hands now, outstretched towards the audience.
"Tonight we make our connections across the gap." Lacey paused, and everyone leaned forward. "I am community."
Tiny blue lights flew outwards from Lacey's hands, and Wendy paused in her sneaking. She thought for a moment that it was light from the projector, but they flew everywhere, hovering over every seat in the hall and then sinking down. A glowing dot landed on the top of each audience member's head and Wendy looked up warily to see one sinking slowly towards her.
"Get off!" she yelled, waving her arm at the light, and sprinted for the door. Wendy Watson wasn't about to be turned into some kind of zombie South Dakotan love-slave! The moment she got out of the hall and into the foyer, she glanced over her shoulder to see the light hadn't followed her: it was hovering in the doorway with a weirdly disappointed aura.
"Shoo!" she told it, and tried to go back through the doorway into the hall, but it dipped towards her again. Wendy stepped left; the glowing dot followed. She stepped right; it went with her. Damn. She could stay in the doorway and see the happenings inside, but the moment she set foot in the hall, she'd be as zombified as everyone else.
By now, everyone had a blue dot on their head and the entire hall was glowing a soft azure. Now that Wendy wasn't trying to escape, she could see that Lacey had a dot on her head too, and the telephone she held in her hands was lit up even more brightly .
Lacey smiled blissfully. "It's time to talk, everyone! Not about each other, but to each other, in a web of absolute trust and honesty. Let me start: I'm deeply and passionately in love with my roommate, Wendy Watson."
Wendy stared.
"Wendy, I know you're a straight girl and you have a boyfriend, and I respect that, but Tyler's up for a threesome if you are."
The audience applauded, and the pink-haired barista stood up in the front row. "I want to say that I really miss my friend Todd from the hardware, and I thought I was angry at that IRS chick for driving him out of town. But really, I'm angry that he never called me again. So sorry for giving you decaf every morning, IRS chick."
Applause rang out again, and Claudia Donovan stood up, despite Leena frantically tugging at her arm to make her sit down. "I forgive you! Thank you to my boss Artie for making me coffee when I was falling asleep by 10 a.m!"
Wendy shook off her shock: this was time to be professional. If Leena was tugging on Claudia's arm, that meant that Leena wasn't affected by the blue lights. Wendy took a step towards Leena, but the light hovering above the door swooped towards her head and she had to quickly duck back to safety.
"Leena!" Wendy stage-whispered from the doorway, trying to make the woman hear over Elmer Bulmer's confession that he broke his neighbour's window in 1935 and had been feeling guilty ever since.
Lacey directed her creepily beneficent grin at Wendy and the entire blue-lit audience turned as one to look at her. After a moment of silence, Wendy realised that they were waiting for her to contribute her truth. At least they weren't rushing over to drag her into the hall to be zombified. She could work with that.
"Uh, I want to say that I met a nice woman named Leena today and she was very helpful." Wendy emphasised the last two words while frantically waggling her eyebrows at Leena.
The audience applauded and Lacey's attention moved on to someone else. Leena stood up, trying to pull Claudia with her, but her efforts were futile. Claudia, like everyone else but Wendy, was firmly seated and completely uninterested in moving. Instead, Leena climbed past her and ran over to Wendy.
"Why isn't it affecting you?" they both asked in unison.
Wendy answered first, pointing at the glowing light hovering by the door. "If I step inside the hall, it will!"
"Okay, okay, stay where you are, then. It's obviously the antique phone causing the problems."
"It's cursed? Yeah, okay, dealt with cursed items before." Wendy glared at Leena. "Wait a minute. You're distracting me: why isn't it affecting you, and how do you know about this kind of thing?"
Leena ducked her head apologetically. "Sorry. Look, do we really need to go into details? Let's say that I have experience dealing with unusual objects, and obviously you do, too."
"Damn right I do. There's enough secrets being spilled in this room for several lifetimes, so let's go for 'working relationship' and be done with it." She gave Leena her most powerful Wendy's Mom Side-eye. "As long as you're not causing the problem, that is."
Like most people, Leena crumbled under the side-eye. "No! Of course not! I want to help my friends. The only reason I can think of is that phones - or any kind of speech - aren't how I communicate important things anyway. I touch auras, and there's no device here connecting people in that way." She glanced at the crowd, who were now raptly listening to a long story about a post office. "And all their auras look like big brown buckets of sludge. It's horrible."
Wendy removed her belt buckle, opened it, and started assembling her Portable Micro Death Laser out of the pieces inside. If a harpoon could take out a cursed tuba, surely a laser would do the job on a telephone. "Right. So if I destroy the telephone, everyone should be fine."
"No, don't do that! If you shoot it, it will defend itself and that could make things much worse."
Come to think of it, Wendy was never sure that she had destroyed the tuba - maybe it was still lurking at the bottom of the ocean, in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. "What's the plan, then? I can't go in there, but you can."
"Claudia or Artie should have something on them that will help with the telephone, but I'll have to be right up close to use it. If the, um, cursed telephone tries to stop me, it's up to you to distract it."
"Got it! Okay, get going." Wendy clicked together the last parts of the Portable Micro Death Laser: she might have the chance to fire it after all!
Leena scurried into the hall retrieved a brightly-coloured satchel from by Claudia's feet. After a bit of rummaging, she held up what looked like a foil bag and waved it at Wendy in triumph. Wendy had no idea how that would stop the zombification, but Leena seemed confident, so Wendy was all for it.
Seeing Leena sneak down the side aisle, Wendy thought for a minute that the cursed telephone might not notice her until it was too late, but no such luck. As Leena reached the stairs that lead to the stage, foil bag at the ready, Lacey turned to face her, her eyes suddenly glowing like a kid from the Village of the Damned.
"Stop, Leena."
The entire audience stood up simultaneously and echoed Lacey's words. "Stop, Leena."
Wendy aimed her laser and zapped the ceiling directly above Lacey's head, causing plaster to shower all over the stage. "How about you stop, Lacey?"
Everyone turned around to look at Wendy, which was deeply unnerving, and Lacey smiled broadly. "Wendy Watson, my lovely Wendy Watson, come back to us! We all need to share!" She gestured, and the blue dot that had been hovering inside the door suddenly zoomed towards Wendy.
With reflexes born of Sensei Ping's special training, Wendy shot it. A terrible static screech rang through the theatre: it was loud enough for Wendy, but it must have been much worse for everyone in the connection, as they immediately broke from their threatening stance to double over and cover their ears in pain. Only Lacey fought it successfully and stayed upright, though her face contorted and Wendy had to consciously stop herself from running into the hall to help her.
Leena took the opportunity to dash up the steps and try to put her foil bag over the telephone in Lacey's hands, but Lacey shoved her and sent her sprawling on the floor.
"Leena!" yelled Claudia and Artie, both starting towards the stage despite the blue dots still in place on their heads, and Lacey stumbled in confusion. Wendy laughed with exhilaration: the audience didn't look so unified now. She looked around quickly and saw a vase filled with decorative glass pebbles; grabbing a handful, she started hurling the pebbles into the crowd, aiming low to prevent any serious injuries.
"Ow!" someone yelled.
"Frances! Are you all right?"
"What was that?"
"Are we under attack? Get the kids out!"
"Elmer Bulmer! This had better not be one of your practical jokes!"
As the unity of the audience dissolved, Lacey lost her footing and sat down on her butt right next to Leena, who promptly snatched the phone from her hands and shoved it into the foil bag. With a loud crackling noise and a bright flash of light, everyone suddenly dropped into their seats, and Lacey passed out. The blue dots winked out and left everybody looking around in confusion. Leena and Wendy stared at each other down the length of the hall for a moment, then Leena got up, hurried to the microphone and announced, "A round of applause for Lacey Thornfield, visiting artist!"
Applause rang out and Wendy could see everyone settling into the idea that they had just watched an avant-garde confrontational spoken-word performance piece. The sound of people clapping woke Lacey up immediately, of course. She also looked confused but quickly scrambled up to bow to the crowd and thank them. Wendy edged cautiously into the hall, but there was no light waiting to ambush her, and she could hurry all the way to the stage to hug Lacey as people began to pack up their things and wander off home.
"Lacey! That was great! I'm so glad I got to see it."
"I think I was really in the performance zone that time, Dub Dub!" Lacey blushed. "I think I'm having one of those did-I-say-that moments, though…did I tell you that I loved you?"
Wendy hugged her harder. "Yes, you did. Though…why were you were talking to Tyler about threesomes?"
"We talk about a lot of stuff, hanging out while we wait for you to come home."
"And I thought you were in love with Sexy Boss Man… I mean, my boss!"
Lacey stroked Wendy's hair. "Well, yeah, but Wendy, you know me. When have I ever loved just one thing?"
Wendy laughed and stretched up to kiss Lacey's cheek. She might not have found the great secret of Univille - Leena had given Wendy her trust, and that was a fair deal - but she had discovered something that was not only a lot more valuable, but something that would drive Ida insane when she used the privacy code to shut down the Real-Time Situation Recording with no sign of Tyler anywhere. In fact - with a thank you wave to Leena - she was going to do that right now, then kiss Lacey right on her smiling mouth.
"Code 86."
Middleman Headquarters, simultaneously
"Took you long enough," Ida muttered at the monitoring screen. "I guess all that dope really does dull the senses."
"Oh, don't be so grumpy," Mrs Frederic told her from across the desk, sipping at the coffee Ida had made to her exact specifications. "The day is saved, the girls won each other, and O2STK's first joint Warehouse-Middleman mission was a roaring success."
"Hmmph. And I thought you were calling yourself a Regent these days."
Mrs Frederic patted Ida's arm. "I do like it better than all those acronyms, my dear."
This entry was originally posted at http://lilacsigil.dreamwidth.org/86546.html - comments are welcome at either location.
Fandom: The Middleman/Warehouse 13
Written for: rarewomen
Recipient's name:
angel_negra
Rating: Teen
Pairing/Characters: Wendy Watson/Lacey Thornfield, Ida, Leena, Claudia Donovan
Word Count: 5500
Notes: Thanks to
st_aurafina for the beta and to the rarewomen mods for running this awesome fest!
Summary: When Lacey wins a grant to bring confronfrontational spoken-word performance art to small towns around America, the mere mention of Univille sets off Ida's alarms. Wendy Watson is ready to discover the secrets of Univille and maybe even finally get to attend one of Lacey's performances.
The illegal sublet Wendy shares with another young, photogenic artist, happily
"They're he-re!" Performance artist Lacey Thornfield waved a piece of paper in front of her visual artist roommate, Wendy Watson.
"That's not a 'they', that's a 'that'," Wendy corrected, flopping down on their recently re-upholstered sofa and reached for her boot zips.
Lacey made a sympathetic noise and yanked a boot off, throwing it into the Shoe Pile with the extreme accuracy of long practice. She pulled a sharp bit of metal out of the sole of the second before sending it to join the other shoes. "Sorry, Dub Dub. I know you need to rid yourself of workday irritations before you can release your artistic spirit and sense of unbridled joy." She put the metal fragment in her Art Pile (One Man's Junk Division) and waited for Wendy to be ready.
"I need to release my toes, then I'm all good." She wriggled her feet. "Aaaaaah. I had to literally get my foot in the door this morning and it all was downhill from there." She didn't mention that it was because mutant cyborg crickets had taken over the Middle HQ in an attempt to infiltrate world governments. Luckily, they were terrible at securing their exits. She'd have to retrieve that scrap of metal from Lacey later - it would be a waste of a hard day's stomping if any survived.
"Okay, ready?" Lacey couldn't hold it any longer. "I've been awarded a grant! An Emperor Norton Arts for America Touring Grant!"
"OMZ, awesome!" Wendy leapt to her feet and hugged her, hoping that Lacey would overlook the "Z". Her brain had been sort of stuck on Z for Zuul since she and the Middleman accidentally fell into another dimension and found that Ghostbusters had been at least partially documentary.
"Yeah! They want me to travel to seven tragically art-free American towns and introduce them to the world of confrontational spoken-word performance art!" Lacey lowered her voice. "And they pay me for it."
Lacey's ambivalence towards money was a long-standing tension in their roommate-ship, if not their friendship. Lacey's small income tended to go on fines resulting from her chosen artform, and art supplies, whereas Wendy's went on rent, food, bills, underwear and, admittedly, art supplies. This grant was a big deal. Lacey had put a lot of work into the application - so had Wendy, Noser and even evil Pip who conveniently owned a digital camcorder - and Wendy hoped it would bring the worlds of paid employment and artistic political protest closer together for Lacey, as the bizarre things she saw in her worklife had for her.
"Lacey, that's so great! Where are they sending you? Are you allowed to bring a friend?"
Lacey screwed up her face. "I don't think so. I'll have to work out how to set up without you and Noser. Unless you can come to, um, Univille, South Dakota with me?"
Wendy's watch buzzed. "Oh damn, sorry, it's work."
Lacey waved a hand. "Take the call, Dub Dub! Maybe you can bribe them into sending you to Univille!"
Wendy ducked upstairs to her studio to see Ida's grumpy robot face peering up at her from the watch.
"What took you so long? Had to stub out your doobie?"
Wendy rolled her eyes. "19 seconds is practically a record for me. You should be proud. What's up?"
"Someone in your vicinity said Un-a-ville."
"What? No, she didn't. Lacey said 'U-ni-ville'"
"So she can't pronounce it right, doesn't mean she didn't say it. Any time someone says Univille in proximity to certain events, places or persons - such as a Middleman in training - I get an alert. Feels like someone pulling out an eyebrow hair, if you want to know why I'm so unusually cranky."
"You're not unusually cranky, Ida. This is normal for you. What's up with Univille, then?"
"Beats me. I'm just programmed with an alert. You're supposedly doing the work around here."
Middleman training to the fore, Wendy spotted an opening. "Lacey's travelling there soon. It'd be the perfect cover if I went with her as her roadie."
Ida's expression clearly said, "Pull the other one, it's got electrified bells on it that will give you a painful shock while I laugh," but all she said was, "Check it with the Middleman. There's nothing strange in the records that I can find, and I've got access to everything."
Rapid City, SD, slowly
The Middleman may have approved Wendy's trip, but he certainly didn't approve the use of the Middlejet, so Wendy was on the plane with Lacey. Well, not with Lacey as such: Lacey's grant included a business-class ticket, even if it did involve four transfers on the way to South Dakota, while Ida's peculiar sense of - Wendy hesitated to call it humour - had stuck Wendy in an astonishingly tiny seat by the bathroom. Wendy had been in a lot of planes over the years, and she'd never been unlucky enough to find a seat too cramped for her short legs, but Ida had certainly succeeded. In every single plane on their route. By the time they made it to Rapid City, South Dakota, Wendy was a furious ball of under-caffeinated, crumpled rage. She needed twenty rounds of Gutwrencher 3 to even start to unwind, and her console was over a thousand miles away.
"Oh, sweetie!" Lacey flew across the mostly empty terminal, crochet jacket flapping, to throw her arms around Wendy. "You should have let me swap with you at Cleveland!" She dug her fingers into Wendy's shoulder blades, massaging the cramps out.
Wendy started to feel better immediately. It was only a bad seat and Ida's idea of fun: at least she hadn't had to fly the plane herself and be unexpectedly ejected above the dread Mexican pyramid of Itzilichlitlichlitzl. "Don't worry about it. You would have been even more squashed in there." And why should Lacey suffer the whims of a cranky robot?
"Okay." Lacey frowned. "But you have to let me finish this massage later."
"Deal."
"Lacey Thornfield and guest?" A tiny, wizened old man crept towards them, holding up a handmade sign that read "Univille welcomes Lacey Thornfield!"
"That's me!" Lacey beamed at him and he grinned back.
"Been a long time since we had an artist visiting, Ms Thornfield. There's nothing more exciting here these days than a concrete plant and the IRS facility, so I hope you've brought some excitement with you."
Lacey looked thrilled. "I live for excitement! This is my friend Wendy Watson. She's a visual artist, but I'm a confrontational spoken word performer."
Wendy thought the old man might be shocked or confused at that, but instead he looked even more delighted as he led them over to the luggage collection area.
"Well, that'll shake them up at the Historical Society! I'm Elmer Bulmer, pleased to meet you."
"What a great name! Have there been Bulmers here for a long time, Elmer?"
By the time they'd made it to Elmer's truck and loaded in Lacey's luggage, Lacey had started extracting the entire history of Univille from her new friend. While Lacey seemed fascinated, Wendy couldn't hear anything that might indicate why Univille triggered Ida's alert. As far as Elmer's history was concerned, the most exciting thing about the town was that it had never technically been incorporated. Elmer had lived there his whole life except for a year in the Pacific at the tail-end of WWII: he seemed to be completely open and happily chatty about the tiniest details and yet Wendy picked up nothing odd whatsoever. Well, maybe Elmer didn't know about it, or Univille had memory-altering drugs in the water supply. Stranger things had happened.
Elmer was still talking as they drove across the dullest scenery Wendy had ever seen in her life. He'd got from the town's founding to about 1920 by now. "And after the IRS was done moving in, my daddy told me, they closed down the railway line for good. Things got a lot quieter around here without that train passing through."
Wendy sighed. It was going to take every scrap of artistic vision Lacey had to create a confrontational spoken word performance out of the thrilling story of Univille.
Coffee Shop, Univille, SD, sunnily
Despite a magnificent massage from Lacey that left Wendy feeling better than she had before she got on the plane, Univille was not impressing Wendy. After some pre-dawn surveillance disguised as a morning run, she'd spent all morning with Lacey. It seemed the best way to meet people, as Lacey had set up an interview station in the coffee shop, and Wendy could be there monitoring the camera that Lacey had somehow persuaded Pip to lend to her. Lacey was chatting with - it seemed to Wendy - every single resident of Univille and recording everyone who gave permission. It wasn't difficult to find people: apparently Lacey's new friend Elmer had told everyone about her arrival, and novelty was thin on the ground in Univille.
"Oh, you're staying at the Grand Hotel? It's a bit old-fashioned - you'd love the bed and breakfast," an old woman was telling Lacey. "But it's all full of the IRS people! Poor Leena mustn't have had another booking in years."
"You wouldn't believe the government cutbacks! My whole life in the post office and they retired me! Plenty of money to run that IRS warehouse though. Shouldn't it all be computerised these days?"
A pink-haired barista gave Wendy the only interesting moment of the morning. "Yeah, so I knew this guy Todd who worked at the hardware for like, six months? Then he hooked up with the younger IRS chick and then he, like, got kicked out of town."
Wendy checked for information on Todd of Univille in some excitement, but the HEYDAR immediately reported the most boring possible result: Todd had been in witness protection until he blew his cover over a girl - indeed, one of the IRS staff, Claudia Donovan - and had to be relocated. Wendy was about to die of acute boredom syndrome any moment, in a sad little place where the prime gossip was about the IRS. Worse, Ida would be downright gleeful that Wendy couldn't find anything.
"Done!" Lacey jumped to her feet and Wendy switched off the camera.
"Do you need me this afternoon before the performance?" Wendy asked her. "I'm going to take a look around this place, see if there's something worth painting."
"Oh, Dub Dub, I'm sorry you're so bored! Univille is a great place for my art, but I can't say there's much here visually."
"I brought a few tubes of paint, but I'm not feeling inspired. Don't apologise, though, there's got to be something interesting around here. What time do you need me to help with set-up?"
"They said dinner's at six, so after that, I guess?" Lacey leaned down to kiss Wendy on the top of her head. "Don't find any international crises that need solving, okay? This is meant to be a break for you."
"Okay," Wendy lied guiltily. "See you at the hotel!"
The rest of Univille was proving as bland as the parts Wendy had already seen, but something about its very ordinariness was starting to make Wendy's brain itch. She ducked behind some trees at the bottom of a small hill and pulled out a very special pair of yellow-tinted glasses.
"Ida, you read me? Start a scan, will you?"
Ida's voice crackled out of Wendy's watch. "For what? Tumbleweeds?"
"Weirdness! Anything that trips your Univille alert!"
"That? I switched it off once you got there. Itches worse than corrosive salt damage in the nether regions."
"That's more than I ever wanted to hear about your nether regions, Ida." Wendy turned slowly in a circle, giving Ida a good view through the glasses.
"Hmmph. I'm not picking up anything weird as such…"
"Define 'as such?'"
"Imagine the town as one of your drug-addled painting extravaganzas."
Wendy shed her yellow glasses in outrage. "You watch me paint?"
"Once was enough, honeybunch. So, if the local energy readings are a painting, there's a big bright purple splotch at the house across the road from you, a few more little spatters around and about and, just outside the frame, out at that IRS warehouse, someone threw the entire bucket of paint at the wall."
"Ida, your metaphors suck harder than the cruel vacuum of space. The one we fought last week, not space in general."
"That's the thanks I get for trying to explain things in your language, dropout." Ida cut the connection and Wendy was left to sputter at her blank watch.
"I didn't know they had put phones in watches yet," said a woman's voice, and Wendy glanced up to see the speaker, a young woman in a floral tunic, smiling as she walked towards Wendy across the lawn of the nearby house that Ida had singled out. The sign at the front of the property read "Leena's Bed and Breakfast, Welcome."
Wendy quickly pulled her sleeve down, wondering how the woman had seen her behind the trees. "Uh, it's a prototype. Sorry, I'm not really meant to be using it."
"Oh, you're one of the visiting artists! Weren't you meeting with the historical society this afternoon?"
"That's Lacey - I'm the sexy assistant."
"It's very nice of you to come all this way to help your friend. You have a lovely aura - I don't see many so kaleidoscopic as yours." She laughed. "To be fair, we don't see a lot of travellers here in Univille, so when I saw an unfamiliar aura glowing over here I had to come down and say hello. I'm Leena."
"Hi, I'm Wendy Watson." Aura reading was one of those annoying concepts that spanned the gap between "harmless crackpot" and "mystical mind-controlling genius with evil mood rings", but since the energy readings were coming from Leena's house, Wendy could at least hope for the latter. . "Univille seems like a strange place to run a bed and breakfast if there aren't many tourists."
Leena waved a hand. "It's been here for a long time. There used to be stagecoaches, and after that, a railway. Univille's quite a busy place, at times."
"I guess it must have been."
Another voice floated down from Leena's house. "Leena! Have you flipped the breaker switch yet?" IRS agent Claudia Donovan - the Witness Protection cover-breaker - was on the porch, a bundle of wires in one hand, which she quickly hid behind the doorframe when she noticed Wendy watching.
"Sorry, Claudia, I was just talking to a visiting artist!" Leena turned back to smile at Wendy. "Claudia's the IT person. Sometimes the wiring in these old houses can't take modern computing."
"Uh huh." Wendy's suspicions were piling up like a pile of digital zombie corpses in the universally panned and banned Gutwrencher 1.
Leena started up the hill towards her house. "We'll see you tonight at the performance, I hope!"
"You're coming along?"
"Sure! It's been a long time since we had an artist in Univille!" Leena vanished around the side of the house. If they were coming to see the performance, maybe Wendy would be able to sneak back and check out the house. Now that she had signs of possible Middlebusiness afoot, Wendy headed for the Grand Hotel with a spring in her step. Ida was going to learn that no cramped plane ride or strained painting metaphor could get in Wendy Watson's way.
Grand Hotel, Univille, SD, duskily
"Hey, Lacey, what's up?"
Lacey was lying across the larger of the mismatched beds in their room at the Grand Hotel, fiddling with the wires on her black dress with the twinkling lights, the same dress she'd worn for her "I Am City" piece. "The video file is finished, so if I can sort out these lights, everything's up! The historical society were really helpful - they said I could use anything from their collection for the performance."
Wendy looked at the bits and pieces spread across the room. Most of them she could identify as things Lacey had brought with her, but the odd one out was an old-fashioned telephone, the kind that looked like a long stick with a speaker fixed to it and a cup on a wire for the ear. "So you picked a telephone? Didn't they have, I don't know, some kind of secret wartime relics or something?"
Lacey pursed her lips in a fake pout. "The phone spoke to me, Dub Dub. Spontaneity is, like, my muse!" She struck a ridiculous pose and the lights on her dress flashed. "Oh, there we go! Ready! Did you find any inspiration out in Univille?"
"No, but I met a few people who are coming to the show tonight. You want to run through set-up with me? You'll have to do it all by yourself after tonight."
"You're right - I'll try to get it all done myself with you for backup, okay?"
"Sounds great!" Wendy smiled past the guilt again, having manipulated her best friend into not needing her to attend her performance. Again.
Town Hall, Univille, SD, confrontationally and performatively
The town hall was half full before Lacey had even started setting up, so Wendy and the ever-helpful Elmer Bulmer had to move people from their seats so they could set up Lacey's portable projector on a table in the right spot. Lacey managed to complete the stage set-up herself, and her big happy thumbs-up gesture to Wendy made Wendy feel even worse.
Leena and Claudia showed up in time to find seats towards the rear of the hall, along with a short, bearded man who Wendy's research identified as the head of the IRS office, Arthur Nielsen. Leena caught Wendy's eye and waved to her; Wendy waved back, trying not to let "I'm about to break into your house!" show in her aura. Apparently she was successful - or Leena was a crackpot after all - because Leena returned to her conversation with the IRS agents without a single suspicious look in Wendy's direction.
The house lights went down and Elmer Bulmer appeared at the microphone stand on the stage.
"Don't tap the mike, Elmer!" someone yelled from the audience, but Elmer did it anyway.
"Is this thing working? Hello?"
"Hello, Elmer!" the crowd replied in unison. If this is what they usually passed for entertainment in Univille, Wendy could see why the prospect of a confrontational spoken-word performance was so exciting for them.
"Good evening, everyone! I'm pleased to introduce travelling artist, Miss Lacey Thornfield, and her performance piece premiering right here in Univille, uh…" He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. "Here it is! Her performance piece, Comm-slash-unity!"
There was a strong round of applause as Elmer left the stage - Wendy joined in the applause because at least he wouldn't be tapping the microphone anymore - and Lacey entered, dressed in a baggy white muslin robe. The rest of the lights dimmed, she smiled, threw her arms out wide, and the muslin became a screen for the projector. Wendy had seen Lacey use this as visual accompaniment before, but it was always great to see Lacey's command over an audience.
Images began to play across Lacey's body, faces of the people of Univille recorded by Lacey that morning, and the crowd murmured in recognition.
"I don't know who they are. He got kicked out of town. The IRS rents that place, you'll never get a room. There's no money for my job; they made me retire." Lacey's powerful voice rang out across the hall, without the aid of the microphone. "My son doesn't call. The veterinarian moved to California and took her dog with her. Someone bought up the last of the Italian coffee."
Wendy saw Arthur Nielsen shift guiltily at that one.
Lacey cradled the antique telephone in her left arm. "South Dakota was once the most connected of the territories: the first territory to have a telephone line at all; the first to have a telephone exchange covering a whole city; Univille had more telephones per person than any other town in the country." She raised the receiver to her ear. "And today Univille talks about each other, but not to each other." She held the telephone out to the side as images projected onto her body again, people standing and leaving the coffee house, people looking sideways, an old lady leaning forward to whisper. "This is a town of secrets and pauses. This is a town where the truth cannot be spoken, but we speak around it, spiralling closer and closer, clinging to the edges and never daring to throw ourselves into the space we all see."
Wendy started to slink towards the back of the hall. No-one noticed, not even Leena, as everyone watched Lacey on stage.
The projector stopped and the stage was dark, then a single twinkling light appeared. Another followed, then another and another until Lacey's black dress, revealed as she shed the muslin robe, lit up the stage. She held the telephone in both hands now, outstretched towards the audience.
"Tonight we make our connections across the gap." Lacey paused, and everyone leaned forward. "I am community."
Tiny blue lights flew outwards from Lacey's hands, and Wendy paused in her sneaking. She thought for a moment that it was light from the projector, but they flew everywhere, hovering over every seat in the hall and then sinking down. A glowing dot landed on the top of each audience member's head and Wendy looked up warily to see one sinking slowly towards her.
"Get off!" she yelled, waving her arm at the light, and sprinted for the door. Wendy Watson wasn't about to be turned into some kind of zombie South Dakotan love-slave! The moment she got out of the hall and into the foyer, she glanced over her shoulder to see the light hadn't followed her: it was hovering in the doorway with a weirdly disappointed aura.
"Shoo!" she told it, and tried to go back through the doorway into the hall, but it dipped towards her again. Wendy stepped left; the glowing dot followed. She stepped right; it went with her. Damn. She could stay in the doorway and see the happenings inside, but the moment she set foot in the hall, she'd be as zombified as everyone else.
By now, everyone had a blue dot on their head and the entire hall was glowing a soft azure. Now that Wendy wasn't trying to escape, she could see that Lacey had a dot on her head too, and the telephone she held in her hands was lit up even more brightly .
Lacey smiled blissfully. "It's time to talk, everyone! Not about each other, but to each other, in a web of absolute trust and honesty. Let me start: I'm deeply and passionately in love with my roommate, Wendy Watson."
Wendy stared.
"Wendy, I know you're a straight girl and you have a boyfriend, and I respect that, but Tyler's up for a threesome if you are."
The audience applauded, and the pink-haired barista stood up in the front row. "I want to say that I really miss my friend Todd from the hardware, and I thought I was angry at that IRS chick for driving him out of town. But really, I'm angry that he never called me again. So sorry for giving you decaf every morning, IRS chick."
Applause rang out again, and Claudia Donovan stood up, despite Leena frantically tugging at her arm to make her sit down. "I forgive you! Thank you to my boss Artie for making me coffee when I was falling asleep by 10 a.m!"
Wendy shook off her shock: this was time to be professional. If Leena was tugging on Claudia's arm, that meant that Leena wasn't affected by the blue lights. Wendy took a step towards Leena, but the light hovering above the door swooped towards her head and she had to quickly duck back to safety.
"Leena!" Wendy stage-whispered from the doorway, trying to make the woman hear over Elmer Bulmer's confession that he broke his neighbour's window in 1935 and had been feeling guilty ever since.
Lacey directed her creepily beneficent grin at Wendy and the entire blue-lit audience turned as one to look at her. After a moment of silence, Wendy realised that they were waiting for her to contribute her truth. At least they weren't rushing over to drag her into the hall to be zombified. She could work with that.
"Uh, I want to say that I met a nice woman named Leena today and she was very helpful." Wendy emphasised the last two words while frantically waggling her eyebrows at Leena.
The audience applauded and Lacey's attention moved on to someone else. Leena stood up, trying to pull Claudia with her, but her efforts were futile. Claudia, like everyone else but Wendy, was firmly seated and completely uninterested in moving. Instead, Leena climbed past her and ran over to Wendy.
"Why isn't it affecting you?" they both asked in unison.
Wendy answered first, pointing at the glowing light hovering by the door. "If I step inside the hall, it will!"
"Okay, okay, stay where you are, then. It's obviously the antique phone causing the problems."
"It's cursed? Yeah, okay, dealt with cursed items before." Wendy glared at Leena. "Wait a minute. You're distracting me: why isn't it affecting you, and how do you know about this kind of thing?"
Leena ducked her head apologetically. "Sorry. Look, do we really need to go into details? Let's say that I have experience dealing with unusual objects, and obviously you do, too."
"Damn right I do. There's enough secrets being spilled in this room for several lifetimes, so let's go for 'working relationship' and be done with it." She gave Leena her most powerful Wendy's Mom Side-eye. "As long as you're not causing the problem, that is."
Like most people, Leena crumbled under the side-eye. "No! Of course not! I want to help my friends. The only reason I can think of is that phones - or any kind of speech - aren't how I communicate important things anyway. I touch auras, and there's no device here connecting people in that way." She glanced at the crowd, who were now raptly listening to a long story about a post office. "And all their auras look like big brown buckets of sludge. It's horrible."
Wendy removed her belt buckle, opened it, and started assembling her Portable Micro Death Laser out of the pieces inside. If a harpoon could take out a cursed tuba, surely a laser would do the job on a telephone. "Right. So if I destroy the telephone, everyone should be fine."
"No, don't do that! If you shoot it, it will defend itself and that could make things much worse."
Come to think of it, Wendy was never sure that she had destroyed the tuba - maybe it was still lurking at the bottom of the ocean, in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. "What's the plan, then? I can't go in there, but you can."
"Claudia or Artie should have something on them that will help with the telephone, but I'll have to be right up close to use it. If the, um, cursed telephone tries to stop me, it's up to you to distract it."
"Got it! Okay, get going." Wendy clicked together the last parts of the Portable Micro Death Laser: she might have the chance to fire it after all!
Leena scurried into the hall retrieved a brightly-coloured satchel from by Claudia's feet. After a bit of rummaging, she held up what looked like a foil bag and waved it at Wendy in triumph. Wendy had no idea how that would stop the zombification, but Leena seemed confident, so Wendy was all for it.
Seeing Leena sneak down the side aisle, Wendy thought for a minute that the cursed telephone might not notice her until it was too late, but no such luck. As Leena reached the stairs that lead to the stage, foil bag at the ready, Lacey turned to face her, her eyes suddenly glowing like a kid from the Village of the Damned.
"Stop, Leena."
The entire audience stood up simultaneously and echoed Lacey's words. "Stop, Leena."
Wendy aimed her laser and zapped the ceiling directly above Lacey's head, causing plaster to shower all over the stage. "How about you stop, Lacey?"
Everyone turned around to look at Wendy, which was deeply unnerving, and Lacey smiled broadly. "Wendy Watson, my lovely Wendy Watson, come back to us! We all need to share!" She gestured, and the blue dot that had been hovering inside the door suddenly zoomed towards Wendy.
With reflexes born of Sensei Ping's special training, Wendy shot it. A terrible static screech rang through the theatre: it was loud enough for Wendy, but it must have been much worse for everyone in the connection, as they immediately broke from their threatening stance to double over and cover their ears in pain. Only Lacey fought it successfully and stayed upright, though her face contorted and Wendy had to consciously stop herself from running into the hall to help her.
Leena took the opportunity to dash up the steps and try to put her foil bag over the telephone in Lacey's hands, but Lacey shoved her and sent her sprawling on the floor.
"Leena!" yelled Claudia and Artie, both starting towards the stage despite the blue dots still in place on their heads, and Lacey stumbled in confusion. Wendy laughed with exhilaration: the audience didn't look so unified now. She looked around quickly and saw a vase filled with decorative glass pebbles; grabbing a handful, she started hurling the pebbles into the crowd, aiming low to prevent any serious injuries.
"Ow!" someone yelled.
"Frances! Are you all right?"
"What was that?"
"Are we under attack? Get the kids out!"
"Elmer Bulmer! This had better not be one of your practical jokes!"
As the unity of the audience dissolved, Lacey lost her footing and sat down on her butt right next to Leena, who promptly snatched the phone from her hands and shoved it into the foil bag. With a loud crackling noise and a bright flash of light, everyone suddenly dropped into their seats, and Lacey passed out. The blue dots winked out and left everybody looking around in confusion. Leena and Wendy stared at each other down the length of the hall for a moment, then Leena got up, hurried to the microphone and announced, "A round of applause for Lacey Thornfield, visiting artist!"
Applause rang out and Wendy could see everyone settling into the idea that they had just watched an avant-garde confrontational spoken-word performance piece. The sound of people clapping woke Lacey up immediately, of course. She also looked confused but quickly scrambled up to bow to the crowd and thank them. Wendy edged cautiously into the hall, but there was no light waiting to ambush her, and she could hurry all the way to the stage to hug Lacey as people began to pack up their things and wander off home.
"Lacey! That was great! I'm so glad I got to see it."
"I think I was really in the performance zone that time, Dub Dub!" Lacey blushed. "I think I'm having one of those did-I-say-that moments, though…did I tell you that I loved you?"
Wendy hugged her harder. "Yes, you did. Though…why were you were talking to Tyler about threesomes?"
"We talk about a lot of stuff, hanging out while we wait for you to come home."
"And I thought you were in love with Sexy Boss Man… I mean, my boss!"
Lacey stroked Wendy's hair. "Well, yeah, but Wendy, you know me. When have I ever loved just one thing?"
Wendy laughed and stretched up to kiss Lacey's cheek. She might not have found the great secret of Univille - Leena had given Wendy her trust, and that was a fair deal - but she had discovered something that was not only a lot more valuable, but something that would drive Ida insane when she used the privacy code to shut down the Real-Time Situation Recording with no sign of Tyler anywhere. In fact - with a thank you wave to Leena - she was going to do that right now, then kiss Lacey right on her smiling mouth.
"Code 86."
Middleman Headquarters, simultaneously
"Took you long enough," Ida muttered at the monitoring screen. "I guess all that dope really does dull the senses."
"Oh, don't be so grumpy," Mrs Frederic told her from across the desk, sipping at the coffee Ida had made to her exact specifications. "The day is saved, the girls won each other, and O2STK's first joint Warehouse-Middleman mission was a roaring success."
"Hmmph. And I thought you were calling yourself a Regent these days."
Mrs Frederic patted Ida's arm. "I do like it better than all those acronyms, my dear."
This entry was originally posted at http://lilacsigil.dreamwidth.org/86546.html - comments are welcome at either location.