Lollipops!

I. Realization

Artemis Fowl the Second blinked. There was what looked suspiciously like a lollipop sitting innocently on his desk.

Something fluttered in the back of his mind – a brush of a memory in his subconscious – but it passed as quickly as it had come without him being even aware of it.

He grabbed a nearby towel and dried his hands before he spoke into his handheld radio.

"Butler." His gaze did not waver from the confection.

"Yes, Artemis?" his manservant replied instantly.

"Can you come up to my room for a moment?"

"Yes, Artemis."

Mere moments later, the door to his room opened without a sound – Butler had, true to form, re-greased and oiled every door hinge in the mansion to ensure silence – and there stood the towering figure of the bodyguard of the Fowl family. Artemis knew he shouldn't be, but he was always mildly impressed with the way that he never heard the giant of a man ascending the stairs or walking to his door. The man knew how to be quieter than a whisper. And that could be vital.

Butler came in with caution, as per his training, but Artemis was keen to notice that his firearm was absent from his grip. He must have already assessed the situation from just outside the door and decided that an immediate threat was not present, and thus, no reason for a gun.

"Artemis?" His beetle-black eyes swept over his charge, then scanned the room, stopping at each window and looking at them as well. The sky was dark; it was almost eleven.

"I assure you, there is nothing of risk to me in the room, Butler. I called you," the boy interrupted, sensing that the question 'then why did you call for me?' was about to leave his servant's lips, "merely to…verify something for me."

Butler remained expressionless and immobile, waiting for his instructions.

"There appears to be a lollipop on my desk." He almost gagged at the way he moved his lips and rolled his tongue when he said the word 'lollipop'. He would have to make sure not to say the word again.

The Eurasian man's eyebrow jutted up at that. "You hate lollipops."

There was that tug again, of something he knew once, before it dissipated once again.

"I do believe that I am quite aware of what foods I like and dislike, Butler," he said frostily. "I did not purchase the…candy for myself. Point in fact, I did not purchase that candy at all."

Artemis hated most candy simply on principle, most candy being too childish and juvenile for his taste.

Butler walked over to the desk indicated and frowned when he saw that there was, in fact, a lollipop resting on the surface. This situation was getting to be weird.

"Well?" Artemis questioned impatiently.

Butler nodded. Now…how to say the next sentence professionally? "There's a lollipop on your desk." Dammit.

Artemis frowned, and spoke aloud, "that removes the conclusion that I was merely hallucinating. Then that means the – it – is really there."

Butler just nodded. He didn't really know what would come out of his mouth if he opened it.

"Butler." His attention snapped back to his charge. "That thing was not on my desk before I went to use the bathroom a moment ago. When I came out, intent on claiming a towel from the extra stack I keep by the door, it was." His blue eyes bore into Butler's black.

Butler furrowed his brow, positively scowling. That meant that, in the approximate three minutes and forty-something seconds that it took Artemis to relieve himself and wash up…it was impossible. No one could get through every single one of his security measures without setting one off. And if any one was set off, Butler knew about it.

There was the proximity alarm one hundred meters outside of the main gate, and then another one hundred meters outside the main doors of the estate. There were cameras scanning every inch of space on the outside, and every room inside. There were a few extra alarms fixed up in the wine cellar – Artemis said he had a reason for it, but he seemed to doubt himself when he said that, and could give no further valid explanation. Butler just brushed it off as paranoia, a perfectly alright thing to have when you're in one of the richest families in the Eastern Hemisphere.

"So, one minute, it wasn't there, and the next, it was."

"It wasn't exactly one minute, but the point stands, yes. That is correct."

"Have you touched it?" he spoke sharply.

"Yes, Butler, I decided to touch something that, by all means, magically appeared in my room while I was occupied in the restroom," he said sarcastically, layering some ice into his voice. He glared at his manservant. "I am not stupid, Butler. I have not touched it."

"Good." Butler stood over the desk, eyes sweeping over the confectionary treat. Artemis stood a foot behind him, watching as his man-servant fulfilled his job requirements – a professional, taking over the situation as such.

Yet again, he remembered something, from what felt like forever ago – yet he did not remember it. After all, nothing had happened.

Butler's beetle-black eyes stared hard at the candy, the desk, and the entirety of the back wall, digesting the information and attempting to form conclusions from such.

It certainly looked like a normal lollipop. Poisoned, perhaps? But if the perpetrator knew enough to slip into this room undetected, he – or she – should have enough information about their target to know that Artemis absolutely detested lollipops; even if they didn't know that fact, a well-informed assassin would not use sweets in the first place, given Artemis' personality. A fine example of English literature, maybe, a few bars of gold, certainly – though not before several extensive tests to satisfy his paranoia; but certainly not candy. And if someone was trying to kill the boy genius, why not just slip into the bathroom and kill him there? No, trying to kill the boy didn't make sense.

He picked it up. It weighed as much as a lollipop of its size should weigh. The stick was the normal pressed paper used, the candy swirled and colored like the rainbow, reds and yellows and blues mixing around the spiral.

Just a normal lollipop.

A small piece of paper was tied to the stick. He took a moment to look at the ragged piece of twine that was used; it was tied in a simple square knot – indicated that the person who tied it on was not just a run-of-the-day civilian, whose only experience with knots was with tying their shoes. They had at least rudimentary knowledge of knots, and generally, that went hand-in-hand with either working on construction or other occupations much like it, or working on a ship. Or someone who was in Cub Scouts at any point in their life.

He turned his attention to the paper. There was something written on it, but he ignored that for exactly one-half of a second while he instead inspected the paper. It was nothing special; just simple notebook paper, could be bought at any writing supplies store on the street. It had been ripped into a smaller size in order to fit it onto the stick; a whole sheet of paper would have been awkward, and folding it into a small size would have been extra work. As such, the paper was crumpled slightly in the corners. If he was better, he may have been able to determine the approximate size of the fingers or fist that had done the job. He mentally shrugged. Nothing he could do about that right now.

His eyes slid to the sentence printed on the small sheet.

Captain Holly Short stepped down the ramp of the shuttle, the visor already down on her LEP regulation-issued helmet. She really didn't want to deal with the populace right now, with their incessant badgering – as infrequent as it was these days. Normally, an LEP uniform got you swamped by Havenites. But not Holly; not as of late. No, these days, she was one of Haven's most popular officers. Rumor was, people were rooting for her to get promoted to major. The rumor had its positives, such as keeping annoyances a fair distance away out of respect for her possible accomplishment. The negatives, though…

She shook her head.

She didn't need a promotion any more than she needed to talk to someone right now. Right now, she just wanted to get home so she could take a shower and go to sleep; she was exhausted. And she wasn't even really sure why.

But, naturally, since she didn't want to talk to somebody, someone eventually had to call her name, wanting to talk to her.

"Holly?"

Well, at least it was a friend.

She sighed, raising the shield from in front of her eyes and turning to look at the face of Foaly the Centaur. "Yes, Foaly?" she asked, attempting to sound civil. She assumed her attempt failed, given the raised eyebrow that came of it.

"Where'd you go?"

"Had to perform the Ritual," Holly said easily. It wasn't a lie, after all.

But Foaly's eyebrow remained raised. If anything, it arched higher.

"That's all?"

"Of course it is," she replied.

Foaly stared at her for another moment before grunting – or was it a whinny? – and clopping back into his booth. Holly sighed, frustrated, but followed him all the same.

"I don't think I believe you, Holly," the centaur opened with as he seated himself in his specially-designed chair. His fingers flew over the keyboard in front of him, filling the room with a click-clack pattern. "In case you didn't notice, each helmet happens to have a tracking device attached. We got rid of the wrist-bracelet trackers after your first incident with the Mud Boy." No explanation was needed on who 'Mud Boy' referred to. "Though I'm sure you noticed that." He glanced back at her. "The signal broadcasting from your helmet told me that you spent about twenty minutes at your chosen site." He cleared his throat, and swiveled around so his whole body was facing her instead of just his head. "At site fifty-seven."

"And if it was?" Holly replied evenly. So what if she picked that site to complete the Ritual? It was as good as any of the other sixty-something sites left. Better than most, actually.

"The site," Foaly continued as if he had not heard her, "that you were originally kidnapped at. By the Mud Boy." He sighed. "Holly, you have got to stop agonizing about the fact that we mind-wiped them. I agree with you in the fact that he was just turning into a nice little human, as were the others, but it was what we had to do. And the fact that you use that particular site to reclaim your powers…it worries me. And it would worry Julius if he knew."

Holly didn't say anything.

"I had originally wanted to grab you and congratulate you for how well you've been doing on your missions as of late, eat some carrots, have a laugh before parting ways for a while. I would have left you to your business and not even bothered you about Fifty-seven," the genius said with a nod in her direction. "But then I noticed that your tracking device was disconnected just before you left your site. As was your video feed. And audio." His eyes stared into Holly's. "I couldn't find you until you ended up at Shuttle Point ninety-three, boarding the shuttle to ride back to Haven." He cleared his throat once more. "So wherever you went, you didn't want anyone to know you were going there. And as far as I can tell, there's only one place like that."

Holly mumbled something.

"Say what?"

"I said 'I had to give him something'." No explanation was needed on who 'him' was.

"He didn't see you, did he?"

"No, he didn't, Foaly. Neither did Butler. And all the cameras have been marked, including the ones they've put up in the last six months, and were pointed out very clearly on my display, so it was easy to avoid them."

Foaly 'hmmed' to himself. His hand opened a drawer and drew out a carrot, allowing him to chew on it while in thought.

"It isn't something that would trigger a total recall?"

Holly snorted. "Foaly, the only thing that would convince Artemis Fowl the Second that fairies exist, worked with him for a good year-and-a-half of his life, and are responsible for his mother being healthy, his father being alive, his bodyguard seeming considerably older than he appears, and his bodyguard's sister joining a United States wrestling team instead of being a severely unsatisfied but extremely quirky bodyguard, is Artemis Fowl the Second himself. I'm pretty sure that I'm in the clear."

The centaur finished off his carrot with a contented smack of his lips. He nodded. "True." He titled his head to the side for a moment, thinking again, before he looked back at her. "Why?"

Holly knew the full question without him asking it: 'why did you have to give him something? And why now, when you're doing so well for yourself? And what the hell is it?'

She smiled to herself and shrugged.

"Because…"

You've been a good boy.

Artemis groaned, putting his head into his hands. The clock on the wall stated that it was past three in the morning.

'You've been a good boy' was the message that had been attached to the lollipop.

What the hell did that mean? He'd 'been a good boy'? And for being such a thing, he gets a lollipop? That was absolutely one of the last things he would want as a reward, ranking right up there with public displays of affection, a birthday party, and a trip to Disney Land.

Artemis frowned, his brow furrowing.

And why did it sound familiar? 'You've been a good boy.' He felt like he'd heard something like that before.

When had he been a good boy, anyway? Sure, he supposed he hadn't been as cruel with his criminal activities as of late. He had been forging famous pieces of art, mostly. For some reason, he had been more attracted to works of the fanciful, ones that he'd never taken much notice of before; things like Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, William Etty's The Fairy of the Fountain, and the Irishman Francis Danby's The Wood-Nymph's Hymn to the Rising Sun. It was fascinating what some people would pay for such frivolous and uncultured works, some even more than the most famous DaVinci's or Monet's.

Some would say that sticking almost exclusively to forgery was good behavior, in comparison with his past behavior. Point in fact, he would say that that was good behavior, in comparison with his past behavior. So it could be possible that whoever left him this was merely pleased with the way he was turning out.

Although who such a person could be remained unknown.

It seemed logical that whoever left it was watching him closely, very closely, had invested a distinct personal interest in him and his going-ons. That also meant that they would have to be watching him close enough to know of his slightly-less-than-legal going ons, which was a matter of concern.

There were only two things he could even possibly begin to connect to such a person: this lollipop, and, just maybe, mirrored contact lenses.

About half a year ago, he had discovered what appeared to be contact lenses in his eyes, with no memory of how they got there. Closer inspection had revealed them to have a clear, but reflective metal over where the pupil would be. It was a bit like wearing mirrored sunglasses, he supposed. Butler and Juliet had them as well. They had no memory of them either. Butler had taken them to a source he had in Limerick. Butler returned with news that, apparently, Butler himself had requested that they be made, even giving specific instructions on the composition of the lenses – with such detail given, Artemis could only conclude that he himself had relayed the information to Butler, who then told the source. Artemis had no memory of doing such a thing.

Apparently, the contacts had fallen out of their eyes because the material they were made of had oxidized and corroded, which in turn kept them from sticking to their eyes. If he had had them custom made, then he would have known that they would have fallen out after a short time, which meant that he had put them in just before they served whatever purpose that they were supposed to serve. But what purpose could mirrored contacts serve?

He had stopped actively thinking about them a few months ago, but now…now he had two things he could not explain. One was from himself, which he could not even remember, and the other from some mysterious persona. Perhaps the mirrored lenses were because, or somehow otherwise connected to the mysterious good-will-sender.

You've been a good boy.

And those strange symbols that followed the note! He felt like he knew them. Like how he knew Egyptian hieroglyphics, they seemed familiar, but he just couldn't place a word on them. The first was a square shape, with six small lines jutting out of each of its four sides. That was followed by an arrow, then a dot. After that was a spiral; three arms, spinning up and right, down and left. Then the square again, a messy triangle with circles on each point, a tear-drop shape, and a hexagon with lines inside the shape connecting the points together, crossing over each other in the center. It all ended with another dot.

He knew he'd seen those glyphs before. He'd fed them into his computer, he'd looked for matches among other languages. He'd manually searched the internet for something close to them. Manually! Honestly, he was acting so unlike his usual self, it was disconcerting.

He stared down at the paper once more – the lollipop sat to the side, out of the way.

The handwriting was definitely effeminate. Eighty-five…eighty-sex percent sure that whoever wrote it was female. They had taken their time, evident from the even, elegant strokes – which also leaned towards a female writer. Probably right handed, given the lack of the telltale smear of ink across the paper – created when the writer's hand rubs against freshly-inked words or letters. There wasn't any strong emotion being felt at the moment of writing the note: if they were angry, the letters would be grooved into the paper because of holding the pen hard against the paper, or the handwriting would be jerky and smeared. If they were sad or otherwise upset, the writing would be shaky, and there would be pauses every few letters, or after every word. But each word smoothly connected to the other, effortlessly joining the strokes of the pen.

The symbols were the only thing that didn't match. They were quick, precise, practiced. Like they had been done a thousand times before, and had become styled to their own handwriting. Like a signature.

He groaned again.

Even if he figured it was a woman's signature, it didn't help if he couldn't read it!

Almost growling, Artemis pushed himself away from his desk. He couldn't remember a point in his life where he'd been more frustrated, not even as a child.

Of course, it seemed that some points in his life were missing from his memory, so that claim now held a lot less weight than it originally seemed.

Artemis was always one who prided himself on his intellect, on being able to remember and analyze and reason out almost anything. It was what he was good at; it was what he did. And to have the knowledge that he didn't have all of his knowledge, that something that he knew had been taken from him – forcibly or otherwise – was absolutely maddening.

But he knew – he just knew – that the lollipop, the note attached to it, those symbols, the mirrored contacts, the fact that he had some sort of amnesia, the fact that Juliet and Butler had the same sort of memory loss…they were connected somehow. How, he didn't know. But they were definitely connected.

Artemis stood up from his chair. He needed to think. He needed someplace quiet. He looked around the room, noting the whirring of the computer most of all.

Someplace quieter.

He left his room.

Holly stepped out of her shower, pink and pruney, wrapping a towel around her lithe form. Not bothering to towel-dry her hair – it was short enough that it didn't stay wet for long, easily dried by the warm air of her apartment – she walked out of the bathroom and through the door that led to her room.

Small, simple, and so very her, Holly's room wasn't the most interesting of sights. There were only a few items that stood out against the background of books, photos, awards, and nicknacks; predictably, a great number of those items could somehow be traced back to one Artemis Fowl. The Second, of course.

Nothing big, just small things; a pair of mirrored sunglasses (she'd filched a pair from him when he hadn't been looking), a white chess piece (the very first one he had captured when she played him for the first time; probably for the last time, too), a small replica of a medieval flail carved from the tusk of a troll (because as much as Butler did in Fowl Manor that day, she played her own part in taking down the beast), and a small, plastic, hollowed-out sphere (she had kept an acorn and a bit of dirt in there when they faced the Bwa' Kell and Opal Koboi; Artemis had been forced to use it when her finger was cut clean off). Her old Neutrino (and the model before that one, and the one before that one) also sat proudly on top of her dresser, scarred and battered, but still managing to shine.

They weren't much, but they always made her smile.

Her smile grew wider as she thought of the boy genius. She glanced over at the clock; almost four o'clock. Artemis was probably still up, agonizing over the note, going over hundreds of possibilities as to what it could mean, and who it was from, and why did they leave it?! She knew it was cruel in a way: Mud Boy wasn't going to sleep for days, until he'd went through every logical conclusion that his overinflated brain could come up with and eliminated every single one.

Holly's grin slipped off her lips at that thought – she would never be one of those conclusions. Because he didn't even know she existed. And he, getting into his human teenage years now, wasn't likely to ever consider magical creatures as a probability ever again.

She sighed. Damn.

Life was hard enough for her already, without a mud boy hovering at the forefront of her thoughts. She didn't need Mud Men clamoring for attention in her mind when everything she had should be on her duty as an officer of the Lower Elements Police.

She flopped on her bed and compromised with heart and head: duty out there, Mud Men in here. Duty when she was on duty, Mud Boy – Mud Man, soon – whenever else she felt like it. Like now, for instance.

Holly groaned as she stretched out across her lumpy mattress, her thoughts on a pale little billionaire and a certain candy store sweet. Her lips twitched. Artemis certainly didn't remember it anymore, but she certainly did. It was during their first encounter, when she had been kidnapped by the little brat.

She had just gotten her magic back, the LEP was sending a troll into the manor, and she was suiting up in full LEP gear (courtesy of the black ops team that Butler had incapacitated at the time). She had turned to him, grinned impishly (or is it elvishly?), and punched him; it was probably the first time he'd ever been punched. She was preparing to make like a dwarf and blow, what with a troll getting hand-delivered to the manor's front door and all, but not before making sure to send Fowl a cheeky grin and tell him to stay put. The boy had immediately opened his mouth – most likely for some witty retort – only for nothing to come out. She had only grinned wider, and felt that she had to say something else before she left.

So she had said, "That's right, Mud Boy. Playtime's over. Time for the professionals to take over. If you're a good boy, I'll buy you a lollipop when I come back."

His face changed from confusion and shock to indignation and frustration the moment the word 'lollipop' left her lips. And after she had started up her wings and shot into the air, ears perked up and equipment running hot, she heard the great Artemis Fowl the Second say with a whine, "I don't like lollipops."

As of late, Artemis had indeed been a 'good boy', as she had so eloquently put it. With that deal came the lollipop. He deserved it, after all.

Holly smiled.

Artemis Fowl the Second came out of his 'meditation room' at around six o'clock in the morning with a tape recorder in his hand. Anyone who knew Artemis knew that when he needed to plan something out or otherwise think especially hard on one thing, he went into the room and spoke out loud in a continuous stream of thought until he reached any amount of conclusions. One also knew that when he finished these sessions, he tended to walk out tired and hungry, but overall very satisfied with himself.

Such was not the case now. Not completely, anyway – tired, yes, hungry, absolutely, but he was in no way pleased with his progress. Or, to be more precise, his distinct lack of progress. He had been in there for two hours – two hours – and he was barely any further than he had been when he had went in.

Oh yes, he had made a few conclusions…but none of them concrete or revealing enough for him to do anything about. After all, there was nothing very concrete or revealing about memory loss.

Parts of his memory had somehow been manually erased; if it had been an accident and he was suffering from amnesia, Butler would have known about it and asked him about it. If it was amnesia due to an infection, parasite, or other anomaly in his brain, there would have been other symptoms which he or – if he managed to miss them – Butler would have taken notice of. But he still had no idea about how or why such a thing would be done, how especially. The technology required to delete memory was not unavailable to the public, but that was concentrated electrical pulses into the brain that wiped a whole life from them, not a few select moments. The technology needed to pinpoint memories and erase only those simply did not exist; he had invested a small amount into that particular project three years ago, and still he had no results.

Memory lost was proven to be a very delicate thing, and regaining them was usually a long and slow process. Unlike what movies and television showed time after time, one did not get their memory back in one enormous, climactic wave from a single stimulus. The mind was fragile, and that type of memory rush would be more likely to shut it down than reboot it. If memory was to be regained, if it could, if it was possible for the person in question, than it would be regained slowly, healing and remembering from small stimuli of all kinds; bits and pieces of a larger puzzle falling into place over months, years of time in order to complete a picture of a fully-healed mind.

The working stimuli could be anything, too: a sound or a smell, or any number of things seen, from the majestic and nostalgic sight of the rising moon to the familiar setting of putting a sugar cube into a cup of tea.

It was possible that he had just not received the correct jumble of stimuli needed to trigger a recall yet; he was not sure how long it had been since he'd lost his memories, after all. General estimation put it just over 6 months ago, anywhere between a few hours and a week before those mirrored contacts fell out of his eyes, but there was no way to pin it down to an exact time and date. One would think that, after six months, the chances of recall are slim to none, but there was still the fact that a stimulus had to be just right in order to trigger a lost memory; it wasn't that the stimulus had to be a perfect match to the original event in the memory, but something, somehow, had to align, had to fit, in order to bring about the recall. The established communities – both medical and psychological – were both still highly theoretical and hesitant in their answers to amnesia. Artemis could hardly claim to be more knowledgeable. Perhaps in a year or two, sure, but not at the moment.

His logical mind knew that the technology to erase specific portions of the human mind was not available to any human on the planet. It hadn't taken much effort to hack into the many militaries of the world, and secret services, and even less effort to hack into private companies' files. There were a number of people and places attempting to create such technology, some that had been for more than twenty years, but none had yet succeeded.

A small part of him, the last vestiges of his childhood, perhaps, spoke up again and reasoned that if the technology was not available to humans, perhaps it was created by something else. Something not human.

The same part had spoken up before, in his meditation room, but he had brushed it off as ridiculous then. Now…something made him stop, stop in the entrance hall with one foot on the stairs. His eyes were unfocused, staring at a suit of armor, dented beyond repair. He blinked and refocused as a thought trickled into his brain. It was…dented? That armor was an antique, and there'd never been a scratch on it before. His father had inherited it from his father, and it had always stood proudly where it was, a touch of the Fowl's vanity in its gleaming surface and a hint of the criminal side's malice in its shining medieval flail.

For just a moment, he saw blood on it.

The image disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving Artemis only more confused.

The small voice resurfaced, hinting at unknown answers, hinting at other things in the world that lay hidden just out of sight. Hidden just out of mind.

He had a hell of a mystery on his hands; from past experience, the best way to solve a mystery was to start with what you already knew. To start at the beginning.

Artemis Fowl the Second had begun his infamous scheming at just over seven years of age. It had started small, like most things do: art forgery, hacking, minor thievery. Nothing that would result in someone wanting to erase part of his mind, he was quite certain of. It wasn't until his father went missing that he really started descending into the darker side of the law; illegal business transactions, successful heists on five of the biggest banks in Europe, and so on. Not activities befitting of any normal ten-year-old, but, then, Artemis was no normal boy back then. And he certainly wasn't a normal young man now.

If his criminal life coincided with this mind-wipe, then he had to meticulously comb through everything he'd done for the last four years.

In a sudden whirl of activity, Artemis strode quickly up the stairs, two at a time. In short time he was on the third floor, walking purposefully towards the room at the end of the hall. He slipped a key into the door's lock and stepped inside; four glowing computer monitors gave the space a soft and steady source of light. He ignored all of them, instead choosing to go one of two paintings hung upon the far wall. He unhooked it from the wall and set it on the floor with an audible thump before laying it face down – he didn't particularly like his great-great grandfather's self-portrait anyway – and easing the wax paper backing off. Nestled between two of the wooden crossbeams that stretched across the inside lay a small device no larger than his thumb.

He slipped the miniature hard drive from its place and held it loosely in his hand. He quickly stretched the sheet back over the back of the painting and secured it before re-hanging the painting on its proper space.

He sat down at the nearest computer and, with an easy flick of his wrist, plugged in the hard drive. Its standard security measures came up and he typed in the 23-character password, his fingers moving over the surface of the laptop like a pianists' over his piano. As soon as he passed through the security feature, another, one of his own design, popped up and blackened the screen behind it. It held four blank spaces, and it took a moment for Artemis to remember which one was for which purpose.

His eyes lingered in distaste on the final blank for just a moment before he was all business.

A quick tap of keys brought a light at the top of his computer to life – the indication that his microphone was currently active. In clear and clipped tones he said, "Artemis Fowl the Second." The first space was filled with his name as it was spoken, encoded to instead show dashes where each letter sat.

His fingers jumped over the keyboard, typing in his family motto – Aurum est Potestas, 'Gold is Power' – and watching as the second space filled with the eighteen dashes.

He opened a left-hand drawer on the desk he was seated at and reached his left hand inside. He tilted his hand up to rest it against the top of the drawer, sliding his thumb into a small notch and pressing it up to a square of plastic that pulsed red. The scanner quickly read his thumbprint and wirelessly sent the information – that it was a perfect match to the sole owner and user of the encrypted hard drive – to the computer in use. The third blank was filled.

Artemis tilted his lips towards the computer microphone once and cleared his throat, prepared to give the final code. It was the last of his security features; for the final password, a series of words had to be spoken in one exact sequence. If the sequence was not exact or if a word got garbled for one or another reason, access would be denied and the hard drive would lock itself for a full month before allowing a second attempt with two additional pre-set security features set up and the old passwords replaced for their alternatives. For the password, he had chosen four words that were ultimately extremely unlikely to be used in tandem, ones that were doubtful to end up together in even the most bizarre of conversations. "Turtle. Gold. Bedtime." He began saying the last word, but the 'L' didn't even fully pass his lips before he closed his mouth sharply as if trying to keep the word from escaping out of his throat. His lips thinned in disgust.

He had no idea what he had been thinking when he created this thing.

Artemis Fowl had to force his voice to remain impassive when he tried again, forcing the word out from his throat with only a thin layer of frost in his tone betraying his emotion.

"Lollipops."

He hated lollipops.

And now, for some reason, they were showing up everywhere.

The frown remained pasted across his features as the computer leapt into life, splaying three separate windows and a host of files across its screen. He opened one labeled for just under five years ago and began to peruse its contents with a single-mindedness so concentrated that only seven other people in the world could hope to claim anything like it; two of them being Chessmasters (Artemis had beaten one, and had not yet played the other), one a Buddhist monk, three specialists of martial arts (one of whom Butler knew personally), and the last a fifty-year-old musician out of France.

He would find out what had happened. He was Artemis Fowl the Second, a prodigy the likes the world had never seen before. He could conquer any challenge and beat any opponent. He would beat any opponent.

Even if it was himself.