Story [Necroscope] Three Days of the Toucan (OTP Challenge - COMPLETE)

Three Days of the Toucan​

OTP (One True Pairing) Challenge​

Summary: CC (commandeered character) Mary Formal inserted into events created by author Brian Lumley for his book Vampire World 3: Bloodwars.
Challenge requirements: “phobia” and “something vino veritas (with alcohol comes truth) or something like that.”
Protagonist: Mary Formal, Arcateenian shapeshifter (Torchwood) hiding out on Earth since Victorian Georgian times.
Agency: E-Branch, British intelligence agency, staffed by psi-powered individuals.
Disclaimer: Characters and situations created by author Brian Lumley.




First Day of the Toucan

Mary Formal rolled out of the double-sized bed, still wrapped in the flowery quilt, but the bed was really a futon, a barely-off-the-floor Japanese construct, so she did not even manage to roll a full revolution before her padded shoulder hit the carpet.

Shedding the quilt and struggling like an alien arachnid to rise, a tangle of straight arms locked at the elbow and kicking bent legs, she reckoned that the Far East nation that had spawned the futon, probably didn’t get arthritis; because if they did, she was certain that they would knock that **** on the head, and get some normal beds.

Getting to the bedroom wall, so that she could press up against it to use it as leverage, she slid up into a standing position, and caught her breath, then padded barefoot out towards the living room of the cramped little South London flat that E-Branch, a sort of British Secret Service, had arranged for her, catching sight of Minnie Mouse’ blue and white polka dot skirt on the front of her sleeveless Disney-themed nightdress in a full length mirror that leaned against the wall at an angle.

She had no idea how to get it to hang on a wall, so had just leaned it and forgotten about that task.

Mary checks out her new digs​

The bedroom was bright with the mid-morning grey light, though there was a possibility that the greyness was caused by the unwashed grey net curtains, no heavier drapes to draw shut at night.
She wasn’t worried about gawkers spying her at night though, reasoning that they would have to bunny-hop across the nearby railway lines on too-tall ladders. Even if they saw something they shouldn’t, they’d take the secret to an InterCity-trained grave.

As a shape-shifting alien refugee hiding out on Earth since Victorian times, some aspects of human endeavor were still unfamiliar to her, such as, say, binoculars.

The living room was dominated by a single tan velour armchair, and a colour television, both situated directly opposite each other, with top-loading video recorder, or VCR if she was feeling trendy, underneath, straddled by some sort of miniature table, on which the tv sat, as if surveying its rectangular empire.

Mary plucked a video case off the nearby wall unit, dropped to her knees before the VCR, the coarse carpet fibres scratching at her knees, and with practised steps, hit the VCR’s power button, then Eject, which raised part of the topside, enough to slide the black videotape into the waiting receptacle.

Pressing Eject again, which would retract the tape, and start playing automatically, she scuttled back to the armchair, and climbed up into it, crossing her legs on the seat, and pulled a thick bath towel that she kept there, over herself for warmth.
“I know.” She admitted aloud, purely to herself. “I should have brought the duvet.”

After a few moments of listening to the VCR’s patient tape whirring, she realised that she had not turned the TV on.


Second Day of the Toucan.


The previous day had been a day off, a day away from the monotony of office work, though it was what she had signed up to, to stay out of prison.

Today though, she was going to work, so after rolling off the futon; shedding the slightly damp, and definitely in need of a wash, quilt; and renegotiating her way up the bedroom wall, which was hell on the wall, and on her Supergirl tee, the garment now stretched and sagging a bit further down her right thigh than the other, she stepped to the foot of her bed, to the wheeled frame of chrome piping that – Doh! Clothes rack!, she smiled in relief, remembering what the drokking thing was called.

Hangars scraped softly over the top bar as she pushed them left or right, looking for something to wear.

She had discovered non-iron fashion a few years ago, and not looked back. She had also networked a bit with the staff and management of the London hotel whose entire top floor had been given over to the E-Branch headquarters. All the hotel’s guest rooms had something called a clothes press, that she could use whenever she felt like it.
In return, she sometimes moonlighted there as an emergency maid, turning down beds or cleaning rooms, all to help cement the liaison between E-Branch and the hotel, though of course, the latter had no true idea of who their penthouse tenants were. They probably thought they were a commercial enterprise of some type.

Mary ended up pairing a chunky lemon-coloured wool sweater with a grey knee-length full skirt that had several folds and was a fair bit wider at the knee-level hem, than the elasticated waist. She didn’t have the dexterity to bother with rear zips on her tops or skirts, for even with a lifespan far beyond that of her human peers, it was far too short to be bothering with those subtle, tiny and almost concealed zips that seemed to be a thing in UK female fashion.

Because her commute, the journey to and from work, was going to involve overground trains, and the usually hellishly crowded London Underground, where it was all too easy to get your toes stepped on, she added knee-boots and a belted mackintosh in the same tan colour, grabbed an umbrella bearing the colours and logo of a building society that she didn’t even belong to, and headed out, for the Annoying Walk.

The Annoying Walk was a triangular route that she had to take, to get to the railway station that sat literally metres from her front door, on the other side of a chainlink fence.
Instead, she had to take the pathway out of her estate (collection of residential buildings) to the main road, turn right onto the shallow incline of a hill, walk up that several hundred metres it felt like – psychologically it felt like miles, some days – then turn right again, to reach the same station.
Knowing that she could, if she wanted to risk revealing her secret to the world, change back to her natural form and float over the blasted fence, made it all the worse.

The Arcateenian, for that was her species, or if that was too many syllables, Arcan would do; blended in with the other commuters, men and women, single or in small grouped clusters, streaming up the hill, converging on the station.

Queue-forming was jokingly referred to as a national pastime in Britain, so everyone naturally formed silent, patient lines to go through the ticket barriers before descending grey worn steps down to the platform that served the trains going into London, Mary squeezing to the front of the packed platform, finding herself one of the few not holding a splay of newsprint between their raised hands, trying to control and read vast unruly pages of rectangular inked paper, while the winds that always seemed stronger and colder on platforms, flapped the unsecured edges.

She busied herself idly gazing up and down tracks for some sign of the kindling that would be all that was left of a fast train encountering her hypothetical bunny-hopping ladder pervs.

An eight-carriage, dark blue-liveried train slowed to a stop before her, and she went and found herself a window seat, crossing her legs and nestling her cheek on the wall bordering the frame, watching the landscape go by for the abbreviated first leg of her commute.

Several stops later, she disembarked at an elevated station called Balham, that offered views down onto a couple parallel streets, and which also had steps down to the ground level where you could exit, or a few steps further on, an entrance to her closest Underground station, also called Balham, where an escalator took you down to a further two platforms, one north into London, and one south towards Tooting.

Silent, smelly – with unidentifiable industrial smells, body odour, perfumery, and fast breakfast food – and claustrophobic, this transport link sped her under the city streets and under the River Thames, the latter feat continuing to blow her mind, to an Underground station near to where she worked.

Using the Underground at other times of the day or week, was great, and she preferred to slow travel by bus, but it was the enforced trips to and from work at the morning or evening rush hours that sapped the life.

Along with the other drones, her fellow commuters, Mary trudged along tiled tunnels where she and other citizens had sheltered from German bombs during the Second World War, ascended burnished steel and rubber moving staircases, escalators, which took them up towards gratefully sighted natural light, and allowed them to disperse onto the surrounding roadways, heading to places of employment or study.

Tall, close-together buildings rose on either sides of cramped roads, giving each route a cluttered, Death Star Trench sort of feel.
She strode confidently along the road that at the far end, her several storey hotel would be. She was relatively secure, an agent within the British security establishment-

“Oh frag.” She halted on the curb of the T-junction, staring across to the front of the hotel, where the Jam Sandwich was parked before the pillar-flanked front entrance, from the angle, she guessed the right front wheel was on the pavement. “Why are they here?”

To be continued...

 

...continued.

Jam Sandwich was another name for that kind of white cop (police) car, with horizontal red and yellow stripes bisecting the top and bottom halves across the doors and flanks.

Some wag had noticed that the colour scheme resembled two metaphorical slices of white bread, with the layers of butter and strawberry jam.

Two years before, she had been caught by the police whilst trying to procure a live human heart, from the live human that she had taken into a back alley, and she had come to the attention of E-Branch, who had recruited and trained her in all manner of wierd stuff, the purpose of which had not become clear till they had sat her down, and revealed what she had somehow failed to twig during two-and-a-half centuries on this paltry planet.

Vampires were real, and came from a parallel world called Starside.

She was still wary around the Rozzers, as the cops were sometimes called in the North of the country, and one of the reasons that she did not go about vaulting that fence at the station, apart from snagging her skirts on it, was that her handler had warned her that SO10 ("Ess-Oh Ten"), a police unit specialising in covert surveillance, were keeping an eye on her.

Were they here for her? She had been mostly careful with her monthly feeds.

Eschewing the front entrance, she crossed the road to the far end of the hotel’s front and turned into the alleyway where the dustbin truck reversed on Tuesday mornings, stepping round to the back, glad that she had worn her boots rather than heels or sandals.
Her apprehension increased upon spying blue-and-white plastic Police tape flapping where it was stretched between available posts in the area where the large grey bins were collected, each taller than herself, on three big wheels.

Sitting beside one of the establishment’s rear doors, she found a single forlorn-looking Woman Police Constable sitting on a high stool that she recognised as being from the hotel’s bar. She wore a bulky black windcheater and skirt, the latter draped over knees and the sides of the stool. Black nylons and laced sensible shoes, completed the ensemble. The woman gripped a plain white plastic bag on her lap with black-gloved fingers.
Her head was adorned with one of their odd hats with the short upturned wings on either side, and a band of black-and-white chequered squares going round the front, above the abbreviated peak.

“Hello Miss.” The WPC nodded, obviously glad of a bit of company. “Should you be back here?”

“Yesssss.” Mary confirmed carefully, standing well back from the officer, outside the police tape. “I work on the top floor. Has something happened?” Even as the words left her mouth, it sounded like a stupid question. Police car, police person, police tape. Of course something had happened.

In spite of all this, including the damp, debris and rubbish strewn area that she stood in, hands jammed into the pockets of her mack’, her own mood brightened.
The rozzers, or at least this one, were not after her. If they were, they ought to know what she looked like.

“I’m not quite sure, Miss.” The young officer admitted. “Normally I would be taking the names of everyone who came past me, and making sure they donned paper suits and plastic booties so as to not contaminate evidence. There would be multiple vehicles, detectives, SOCOs (Scenes Of Crime Officers), the lot.”

The E-Branch employee had no idea what a ‘socko’ was, but was happy to fact-find by letting her fellow public servant ramble. She briefly toyed with telling her that she was an U.N.C.L.E. agent, but decided better of it.

The policewoman continued, “Instead, none of them are here. Just me, and I have been told to hand out the plastic footwear to anyone going to the top floor.”

Now the Arcan frowned, stepping back to cast her gaze up the building’s rear facade. “Whatever for?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, Miss.”

Formal lowered her gaze and looked pointedly at the tape stretched across her path. “So can I come through?”

“Are you going to the top floor?”

“Yes. I work there, you see.”

The WPC nodded her permission, making no move to budge from her perch. “Sure. Just lift the tape and duck under it.”

Mary pulled her left hand out of its pocket and froze, looking at the half-closed palm, then half-turning to glance out to the main road. She swore softly.

“What’s the matter?”

“Left my umbrella on the train.”

The officer shrugged sympathetically. “It happens. British Rail operates a good lost property unit though. If you can tell them what time train you were travelling on, and where it was going, they should be able to re-unite you with it.”

Mary lifted the tape and ducked under as instructed, joining the copper at the door. “Not a good sign though. Can my day get any worse?”

The policewoman slid two items from the bag, like flat-packed nappies being drawn from their package, seeming to gain dimensions and shape once in the open. As she held them towards the Arcan, they seemed like opaque plastic versions of the elasticated hair net used by some workers in the food or electronics industries, where a stray hair getting into the product would be catastrophic.
“In my line of work, putting these on before going into a building, would be considered a red flag as regards how your day is going to go.”

To be continued...

 

* * * *
E-Branch

The elasticated shower cap booties stretched over the bottom of her boots, Mary observed a bit of a smell to the air, a saltiness mixed with that of past-their-best seafood, as the card-operated lift ascended to the top floor, which then hit her in the face the moment the gold-metalled doors slid aside, and she stepped out.

There was a squishy feel and sound underfoot, making her look down to see water bubbling out of the sodden olive-coloured carpet where her foot pressed into the material.

The lift sealed behind her.

Her colleagues still moved back and forth like nothing was strange, up and down the corridor with files, or intent with purpose. At least they had the same thing on their feet, and someone had the decency to skid a bit on the wet carpet, having to lean heavily against the wall.

She did not budge from her position. She normally kept her head down, not asserting herself among the people who had conscripted her into their service, but this was different. “What in the Original Light happened here?” She called out. “Did someone leave a tap on?”

One of the espers stopped to face her, grinning madly about something. “Hey Mary. Nathan brought Zek in!”

Who the **** is Nathan? She thought, frowning to herself. The other name she of course recognised, and she had only ever encountered it on one person. “Zek Foenor? She’s in Romania.” She referred to the orphanage that E-Branch operated out in that Communist country, and where she had spent her first assignment upon graduating from The Farm, the agency’s training facility up in Cambridge.

“Not any more. Check the dining hall.” He turned and went on his way, leaving her to frown and stomp carefully towards the dining area. The booties seemed designed to aquaplane across the water-engorged flooring, so she was having to be careful with her footing, making sure to press down with each step.

Arriving at the double doors of the dining area, a dinner-tray sized circle of frosted glass high on both partitions, she pushed one open and stepped inside, pausing as she found three occupants inside.

The room was dominated by two sets of two tables pushed together, supporting two apparently unconscious forms covered by blankets.

She was facing them from the foot-end of their tables, so just saw the equivalent of two beached whales, with their heads barely visible at the far end from her.

Ahead and to her left, a seated, older-looking woman in a grey cardigan over a white blouse, and a circlet of pearls around her neck, watched over the pair.

Formal did not know why the woman dressed in such an old person way, unless she did it not to look out of place.
Some of the espers, people with special mental powers, claimed that their gifts were curses, and Anne-Marie English, the woman before her, was the only person where she believed that very readily.

“Hey, Anne.” She nodded at the watcher, who smiled her lined face up at her.

“Good morning, Mary.”

English was an eco-path, her ‘trick’ was to be in tune to the health of the entire planet Earth. Biologically, Mary understood her to be in her young Twenties, and if Earth was still a pristine wilderness, free of pollution, perhaps she would still look that way, but that was not anywhere close to the situation. Any bit of pollution, or environmental damage, created a bit of damage on her, a canker here, a wart there.

What the drokk use she would be in a war against vampires, she had no idea, but there were plenty of other uses for her skills, so that was fine.

“What the hell happened here? What happened to the carpets?”

“Have you been read in on the Necroscope files?” Anne-Marie looked at her.

“Of course. Necroscope Harry Keogh, lots of special powers. Not been around a while.”

The woman stroked the out-of-sight head of the nearest sleeper. “Nathan here is Harry’s grandson, and we just found out that he inherited Harry’s greatest power.”

“What, deadspeak?” Keogh could reputedly hear the thoughts of the deceased, and converse with them. According to the files, until he had made first contact, the "Great Majority", as they referred to themselves, had been individually alone, but he had somehow given them the ability to network with other dead people even at great distances, within days creating a potentially global community. In turn, they had loved Harry to death, but not, it seemed, Undeath. They had shunned him when he had gotten tainted with vampirism.

Anne-Marie smiled. “Nope. Better.”

“Better than deadsp-..., no way, you mean the...the teleport thing? The Moebius Continuum.” Incredulous, Mary went over to join her, pulling up a chair to sit beside her, the moulded orange plastic creaking under her weight.

The woman continued to stroke Nathan’s head. “Nathan wasn’t able to use the continuum before. But yesterday, he and Zek were ambushed while on a mission in the Med’. Some fishing village. They were forced to jump into the water, but the bad guys had divers in the water, and attacked them there too. Ben felt Zek drowning.”

“How?” Far as Formal knew, the only Ben on staff with psi-powers was her superior, Ben Trask, and his Power was not telepathy. If anything, it made him a human lie detector.

Anne-Marie shrugged, her smile showing teeth as it expanded into as much of a grin as her cracked lips allowed. The delight reached her eyes, which was a good sign.
“Nathan used the Continuum to bring both of them straight here. We sedated them and made them comfortable. Ian Goodly sensed what was about to happen, and got me onto my desk in time for my shoes not to get ruined.”

There was a vital piece missing, which Mary was slowly catching up on. She pointed and looked down at the flooring, only to find that there was no carpet in the dining room, only scuffed and dirty linoleum, and re-aimed her digit towards the doors. “You mean that that’s the Mediterranean?”

“Well, not all of it, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“I imagine the hotel is not best pleased. Apart from what went down the lift shaft, I don’t know if the floor directly beneath us had anything come through their ceiling.”

Both girls looked up as he doors swung open, and the bald E-Branch leader leaned in to look at them. He looked positively chipper, to Mary’s trained eye.
“Ah Toucan, he greeted, impersonally using her callsign as he always did; "-you are in. Right, you are Facilities, today.”

“Hi Boss. I am always Facilities.”

“Are you?” He shrugged, and indicated the carpeting. “This stuff isn’t drying, so I want you to take it all up, get rid of it, then get onto either Central Office or carpet suppliers, and get us some new ones laid down.”

“Well, they won’t dry by themselves, will they? You have to...” Mary’s voice trailed off as she realised she had no idea how to dry carpets. “Am I supervising, or am I doing it myself?”

Trask jabbed a finger towards the unconscious pair. “Zek and Nathan’s mission got compromised, and we almost lost two agents. I have all hands on deck and cannot spare anyone to help you. Maybe when things calm down.”

Formal stood up and tried to relay confidence. “Don’t worry, Boss. I’m on it.”

She hoped that Trask would say something complimentary, but instead he just drew back out of sight, leaving them alone.
Mary turned to ask Anne-Marie if she wanted a hot drink when she caught the movement of the door, and spotted her superior’s return. “And mop up any excess water.”

“Of course, Sir. That goes without saying.”

* * * *
Twenty-five minutes later...

Agent Formal had changed into the starched grey shift frock that was the maids’ uniform in the hotel beneath them, and re-donned the plastic booties.

She was alone at the end of one of the corridors, standing in a doorway and gazing down at the wet floor cover, far from the Ops Centre where her peers, well technically, Anne-Marie English’s peers; her seniors, either by longevity in the job, experience, or the fact that apart from the technicians and computer people, she was the only one here without mind powers of some type. Her attributes lay in other areas.

“Learn something new every day.” She murmured. The frequency could be challenged, she felt, but today she was going to learn how easy it was going to be to lay a carpet. “Hens make all that fuss about eggs. They have no idea.”

The blonde Arcan had never been inclined to study the ceiling before, but now she did, raising her chin and eyeing the little peaks of white paint that looked like it had been teased patiently by someone who either loved his job, or was paid by the hour.

But it was not the artistry that she was looking for, but some sign of rectangular gaps in the ceiling.

During her first years on Earth, in Victorian England, there had been woefully mis-advertised red-bricked shelters for the poor and the homeless, called “Work houses”.
Inside, in return for food and shelter, there were several industrial activities that needed doing, such as pressing carpets within square pits. A giant overhead press came down and flattened the carpet, though the workhouse operators, through what she suspected to be misguided attention to perfection, insisted that child humans scuttle across the colourful squares of fabric, getting rid of creases before the presses came down, and of course having to hop over the sides of the pit before the press came down and trapped them.

This was hundreds of years before someone invented the STOP button.

To be continued...

 

Third Day of the Toucan


Mary reclined back in the tan leather office chair, within the dimly lit office, sandwiched between the big wooden desk, it’s vast surface like the flight deck of a rectangular aircraft carrier, and the venetian-blinded window behind her.

She was resting her eyes for a few moments before her next phone call.

The previous day had been mostly, to use the Romanian descriptive, o, lupta cutit murdar ud (a messy, soggy knife fight), or at least it had once she had been introduced to the Stanley Knife, and educated in the art of slicing up filthy water-engorged carpets into manageable swatches.

But that had only come after she had tried to roll the corridor flooring all the way along the hallway, the cylinder of fabric fully two metres in height before her progress had been stopped by a radiator set into the wall.

Nathan, by then awake, had put his new-found teleporting ability to use, beaming E-Branch colleagues between the Ops Room and the loos, though both times, the passengers’ bladders never made it, something about the Mobius Continuum – the weightless, infinite otherwhere of stygian blackness where the newest Necroscope went when he disappeared – making them wet their pants if they were already inclined to go.

After that, Trask had forced her to unroll the carpet barrier, and Goodly, the gangly pre-cog future reader, and Geoff Smart, the rotund telepath, had introduced her to the very sharp knife with the triangular blade.

The computer room had been her favourite place, the carpet already pre-cut into rigid furry squares, suspended on a horizontal lattice that also supported thick black power cables, keeping both safe from the water that had instead flowed across the underfloor tiling. Mopping that out had been easy enough.

Now all the floors up here were bare grey concrete, worn with age, and desperate for her to arrange the delivery and laying – by professionals, she hoped – of new carpets.
And now that she had welcomed the existence of carpet squares to her bosom, she was going to do her damnedest to try that option first.

Leaning forward to sit up straight and planting her feet on the floor to pull herself closer to the desk, she flicked at the address cards of Broomhall’s rolodex, a way of storing contact details a bit more professional-looking than with a diary, and less chance of the pages falling out than a filofax.

She went through the C’s, looking for Central Office, the part of the British Government that supplied the offices of the Civil Service and various government agencies. And probably some Public stuff like police stations as well.

“I didn’t see that?!”

Mary looked up sharply towards the bright doorway several metres away at the far end of the office, but not at the sound of Ian’s voice, for people were allowed to talk here; it wasn’t a convent.
No, her attention had been attracted by the familiar sound of a strangled cry that had immediately preceded it.

Twelve poor sods a year, two-hundred-and-fifty years, people had reacted in lots of different, albeit quite abbreviated, ways to having her straightened fingers jabbing through their chests, and she had heard more than her share of strangled cries.

Apart from her then, there was nothing up here, the headquarters of an elite and secret government agency, that ought to cause that sort of sound.

Formal rose from the executive chair slowly and carefully, quietly as she could so that the roller wheels were not too noisy against the rock-hard floor.

“Dun dun, dun dun-” Couple bars of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. theme tune escaped her mouth before she realised and squelched the humming. Negotiating the desk corner, the sharp green pleats of her plaid miniskirt floated over the wood rather than risk getting damaged as she passed, the Arcan shaking her head sharply to dissipate her imagining of monochromed, fedora-wearing, THRUSH agents of the type that had invaded U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in the tv series' pilot, “Dammit Mary, this could be serious!”

The rubberised treads on the soles of her polished black combat boots allowed her to be stealth personified as she took long steps towards the doorway, arriving like she was doing a vertical press-up, palms and chest to the wall as she peered out into the corridor. Her eyes widened in surprise.

It was serious!

Two soldier-looking types with their backs to her, clad in grey paramilitary-type uniforms, were pressing Ian Goodly up against the opposite wall, and one was holding the serrated blade of a combat knife to the pre-cog’s throat while he looked back at them, eyes wide with fear.

She stepped behind them. To her she stepped, two or three paces. To Ian’s human eyes, it would look as if she suddenly appeared behind them.

Mary calmly put her right arm up and over between the soldiers, putting her right fingers and palm between the knife and Ian’s skin, and she did this so quick that the second soldier likely only registered the blonde woman’s presence when his mate's face rammed into the wall beside Ian’s right shoulder!

She let go of the first one’s head to snap a bare knee hard up into the second assailant’s ribs, lifting him off the floor and bending him over at the same time.

BBRRIIPP!! A stubby-nosed sub-machine gun (SMG) that she hadn't noticed, thundered half its clip into the floor between them, audibly expending themselves in the wall and ceiling.

With him still bent over, Formal stepped behind him, crotch to backside, and leaned over his back to cup a hand under his jaw to draw his head back with her, ready to snap his neck like she had been-

“Mary!” Goodly gasped from the wall. “Don’t kill him, they’re on our side!”

Releasing him, she raised both hands and stepped back a pace, flashing a shocked glance up at her shaken colleague. “Was this a drill? Nobody told me about any drill.”

“No, this wasn’t a drill.” The esper glared hard at the bent over trooper, who had his eyes tightly shut, even though he was still bent over with the SMG pointed down. “You probably did just save my life.”

“Oh.” She stepped in again, beside the soldier this time, and snapped her left elbow up and back while throwing her right fist down, karate-punching the intruder into the floor. According to her twenty-four month old combat knowledge, that somehow put her weight behind the blow. And...it seemed to work, the soldier settling on his knees and his misshapen face, maroon fluid leaching onto the grey floor.

“Oh ****!” Goodly blurted, pushing aside the unconscious soldier who was only still standing because his chin had hooked onto the pre-cog’s shoulder, grabbing her around the waist and launching them across the hall through the nearest doorway, as automatic gunfire whistled past them.

They sprawled on the floor, her body taking the brunt as she scraped onto the concrete first, keeping her chin on her chest to keep her head from striking it, and throwing both hands out to the side but still at forty-five degrees from her hips, the palms slapping hard at the surface to absorb some of the impact.

Ian landed on her a second later, then immediately rolled off to the side. “Stay here.” He ordered.

“But-” Her palms were stinging!

“Stay here. I’ll try to smooth things out with these ******** from CMI.”

CMI? She thought with a frown, wondering it was the guys with the microscopic submarine. She sat up but stayed put as ordered as he got to his feet and took a deep breath, stepping out into the corridor before she had a chance to tell him not to.
“I’m coming out.”

Formal winced, half-looking away as she expected to see his bullet-wrecked form fall across the doorway, but instead she heard an exchange of urgent voices from people trying to sound both calm and officious, whilst hiding how scared they all were:

“You did that in the wrong order.” An unfamiliar voice advised. “You’re supposed to say it first, and only when you are satisfied that we won’t shoot, do you step out.”

“Thanks. I’ll know for next time.” Ian retorted wryly.

“What happened to my men?”

“They threatened an E-Branch member, and were dealt with.” Goodly sounded like quite the authority, impressing her more than his previous statement, which had sounded like bravado. "You're men assaulted me in the corridor, but you will also pay for it. You're CMI, right? Well, you'll be dragged over some pretty hot coals for this."

At the sound of several unseen weapons being cocked in response, Formal decided this had gone far enough, quickly tucking one foot under her to leverage up into a kneeling position, then paused as Ian's silhouette silently showed her his palm. Hold.

 

I have not read Necroscope, nor am I familiar with Torchwood, but I have seen enough Mary in your other works to make this comment actually legible - or at least I hope so.

Is Mary in the 1980s? Her clothing would suggest so, so would grey curtains, because smoking indoors was still okay at that point. The rest seems more or less clear - she can't tech in this story. But why can't she get up?

She's definitely out of place in the modern world. And it's a curious experience, to say the least, to read her observations of the world as it is. It's, in a way, like this "Britain for beginners" type of a thing, until you scratch the surface and then you're like WTF. WTF IS GOING ON. IS SHE CLUELESS? A very interesting approach to everything, though she's been on Earth for hmmm, about 100 years.

Looking forward to see where the wine gets into play, who is the other half of the OTP and if her phobia is, simply, modern world.

 

I like it so far. I don't know anything about the fandom though and it still confuses me a bit. I'm intersted in how you will continue.

 

Disclaimer: specific exchanges between E-Branch and CMI taken from the Brian Lumley novel; the rest is mine.​

She settled back, monitoring her colleague through narrowed eyes.

She did not know who CMI were, but the strange voice sounded British. None of the British armed forces wore grey uniforms to her knowledge.

A figure stepped up beside Goodly and turned round so that they were shoulder-to-shoulder, and the corridor lighting caught enough of what passed for a face, for her to recognise it him as Paul Garvey, one of their telepaths. The mind-readers.

The poor human had been sliced up some years ago, by a serial-killing necromancer, named Johnny Found, and while the best surgeons in the country had rebuilt Paul's face, she didn't think the man would look out of place stalking the streets of Batman's home town.

Garvey grinned - she wished he hadn't - and announced, "He's wrong-footed, doesn't like being accused, can't do anything about it. They came to do a job and came too late."

Mary frowned internally. The two holding Ian had asked about Nathan and Trask, their boss. If they were who they were for, how could they be too late? There was no way down...oh. What if Nathan had beamed them both out?

"They have no more business here." Paul pressed. "Anything else would be right outside their jurisdiction. And this one is already worried about your threats."

Forget his threats, she thought fiercely at the unseen lead soldier, you want to worry about mine. Any of my people get hurt, we are going to ******* war.

"He cocked his gun to show how big and brave he is, but now he is worried that maybe we'll report him for that too. For in fact he's chicken crap!"

She really wished Garvey would quit needling this man, even if he could read his mind.

Although she could not yet see any more of the CMI people, the barrel of a sub-machine gun, the black tube punctured with several holes, tapped at Garvey's shirt-front, it's owner insisting, "You. Shut - your - face!"

"Or what? You'll murder me? And all the rest of us? This is E-Branch HQ. Don't you know everything you say and do here is recorded, including the fact that you wrecked the elevator's security system to get in? Not only you, but the people who sent you - you're all in the crap!"

Goodly's body language told her that he had mentally popped down to the lobby to collect a man-sized bucket of buttered popcorn, and was now just an observer.

Mary like-wise relaxed. Since it did not look like either operative were going to tap her in, she looked at each of her barely stinging palms, and blew on them.

Garvey had been smiling, but he chose that moment to quit that crap and scowled.

Oh, that is not a face made for scowling.

The sound of the safety being applied, was followed by the SMG retreating from sight, to be replaced by an ungloved hand holding towards Paul, a - of all things - a light-blue laminated card.

American Express?

As reading from a script, the unseen commando parroted, "This was a CMI operation. You are required by law not to reveal-"

"-Out!" Goodly snapped. "You and your gorillas, get your backsides out of here - now!"

He must have necked that popcorn. She watched as more of the CMI troops filed past the doorway and the G-Men - she smiled at her on-the-spot nickname for Goodly and Garvey - some of them collecting their casualties on the way to the lift.

Goodly, turning to watch them pass, had more to say, "Think about this. You are required, by a law that makes the Official Secrets Act look like a joke from a Christmas cracker, to forget you were even here! Why, you might even be persuaded to forget you were even born! Because for all you know, your boss - or even his boss - is fitting you all up for pre-frontal lobotomies right now."

A moment after her keen hearing detected the lift doors sliding shut, Goodly muttered, "We had them outnumbered."

"We had them everythinged! Not much brain-power there. And yet, if Nathan had been here, they had orders to take him. Or if they couldn't do that, to kill him."

"You got that out of their minds?"

"Yes." Garvey nodded. ""But just Nathan, which meant that I could afford to mouth off a bit. No big deal, for like I said, their leader was chicken crap.

“I have to report this.” Ian stopped being a silhouette long enough for Mary to see that his expression was grim, and he headed to the left, out of sight, followed by his fellow esper.

“Um, hello!” She called after them. “Can I come out now?”

* * * *

Mary had been busy after the soldiers left, mopping up or wiping down the blood left by the two troops she had beaten, then gone around collecting expended slugs from those fired SMGs, many many dozens of them, and then repairing the bullet-pitted surfaces of the floor and walls with her old mate, the Stanley Knife, and a white paste-like substance called Polyfilla.
Given how much notice she had taken off their ceiling before yesterday, she made an executive decision that it could go **** itself, and ignored it for now.

If Trask, wherever he was now, called her on it later, so be it.

She had returned to her temporary office and made two phone calls, one to Central Office, and one to Carpet World.

Both had given her more work to do, within the first seconds of their conversations, by asking for measurements of the floor plan.

This annoyed her. She had chosen today’s ensemble - the long-sleeved black top, and green tartan mini-kilt (both the in thing, and inspired by those young witches on The Craft) - as a reward for what she had had to do yesterday, and on the supposed stipulation that she wouldn’t have to be getting down on her knees again, today.

The phone rang.

She already had on the delicate arc of thin metal with microphone arm, sponge earmuffs, and a T-piece to clamp against the side of her head, that acted as a headset, making her feel like an air traffic controller.

“Agent Broomhall’s office.” She answered into the mouthpiece. “Toucan speaking. Who is calling, please?”

“Toucan? This is Kestrel.”

“Kestrel!”She smiled at the phone, recognising Broomhall's voice, and feeling more of an affinity with her fellow Agents, who were the support staff without special powers, than with her esper superiors. Her smile turned into a frown. “Where are you?”

He told her that he was up North, where E-Branch’s original director, Sir Keenan Gormley, was buried.

“Why?”

“I’m supposed to be meeting Nathan up here. He was coming up today, by his particular, um, methods.”

She caught on quickly; much quicker than usual, even she realised. “Oh, you mean...oh wait, he’s not with you?”

“Why would I be phoning if he was with me?!”

“Well, to be fair, you have not said why you were phoning.”

“You have not given me a chance to! Now, are you saying Nathan is not at E-Branch.”

“Some unit called CMI invaded, looking for Nathan and Trask. They were too late, so my guess is that Nathan beamed them both up.” She tried to cross her legs as she leaned in towards the phone, but found that the bottom of the desk impeded that action. It felt good having a little gossip.

“CMI? I thought they disbanded yonks ago.”

“Since that guano with the microscopic submarine in the scientist, right? Combined Miniaturised...something.”

The line went dead, and she spotted an index finger pressed to the part of the telephone that did that, and followed the finger up to its owner, Ian Goodly. “Who were you talking to?” He frowned down at her, which was pretty impressive, seeing how wide the desk was.

“Kestrel. Ben Broomhall. I would have eventually have gotten around to why he called, if you hadn’t interrupted me.” She shot back, wiping some hair out of her eyes. “What’s up?”

“Are you doing anything tonight?”

Formal paused, her mind blank for a moment. She tried to cover her surprise with a defensive retort to give herself a moment to think. “Driving you to Accident and Emergency to get your finger re-attached if you ever do that to me again.” She noted that the pre-cog’s demeanour looked drained and scared, which from his recovery earlier, she did not connect with their visitors, unless this was some delayed shock. “Are you okay, Ian?”

“I...I, um, I would like to take you to dinner.”

Mary straightened in the chair, staring up at him. “Really? At E-Branch?” She hurried to compose herself, and brushed a hand over her hair, aimlessly. It had been a long time since someone had asked her out. “Yes, yes, of course!”

Ian beamed down at her, visibly relaxing. “Straight from work okay, or do you need to go home and change?”

“Straight after work is fine.” She nodded sagely up at him, while grinning wildly to herself inside.

He shuffled out, leaving her to happily put her headset on, and select another carpet firm to call.

 

I can see where this is heading now... but eeek, poor Paul!

 

Note: Phobia will be mentioned here:​

After work

They went to Mingzhu’s, a Chinese establishment with black laquered tables and chairs, with accents running into the whites and reds both in interior decorations and plates.

They sat in a semi-circular booth out of sight of the street, but with a straight route to the kitchens without being too near to it.

Mary noted that Ian did not argue with her choice, or try to direct them to one of the square tables in the three rows from the front of the eatery, which led her to assume that he too had been through training at The Farm, up in Oxford.

He had let her sit first, then while they sipped their drinks, he regaled her with his knowledge on the Chinese.
Sipping at his Chinese Tsingtao beer, he explained, “The restaurant name, Mingzhu? Means ‘bright glow through the clouds at dawn’.”

Her eyebrows went up. “How on earth do you know that?”

He reached along the table and picked up one of the laminates. “Says here at the bottom of each menu page.”

She giggled and lightly swiped at his arm with the back of her hand. “Oh, you!” This caused him to echo her laughter, though it stopped abruptly, rather than tailing off naturally.

Formal was tempted to ask him what was wrong, but equally felt that the cause was obvious. He had been scared for his life just hours before. There was bound to be residual emotions.

“Look, you had a scare today,” She reminded, settling a pale hand over his on the table She felt it stiffen under hers, as if he was going to snatch his hand back, but then it relaxed. “-but you came through it. Very well, I thought.”

“Well, not as well as you. You just appeared behind them! Have you got the teleport thing too?”

“Hah, no!” Mary chuckled and leaned back in her chair, eyeing her wine glass. “I can just move fast when I want to.”

“Well, that will come in handy in the Fight.” They both knew against what, but that this was a public place. “And you will really have to step up with the E-Branch leadership gone.”

She frowned at the square-jawed esper. “What do you mean, are you guys going somewhere?”

“Th-this is my last night.” His voice started to waver, which she found more than a bit disconcerting. “Trask, myself, David Chung, possibly Nathan too; we’re going to be taken out before tomorrow night.”

“What, did I miss a memo?”

Goodly managed a wan smile, and used his free hand to tap a bent forefinger to his temple. “My Talent...my, my curse. It doesn’t see any future on Earth for the four of us.” A tear rolled freely from his right eye, catching the lighting as it fled down, and dropped into his beer, indistinguishable amongst the froth. “I’m not ready to die.”

“Well, nothing’s going to happen tonight; you’re with me. And if its those CMI freaks you are worried about, don’t worry, I can handle them.”

“I don’t know who it’ll be. Could be CMI. It was General Tsunov’s men who ambushed Nathan and Zek in the Mediterannean, so...oh, Tsunov-”

“-Is a Russian general, yes, I know.”

“-so after we’ve finished here, don’t worry, I’ll put you in a cab safely home.”

“And leave you on your own?” She lifted her hand off his and waved away the notion. “Yeah, drokk that noise.” She asserted. “I’m coming back to your place. We’ll lock you in the bathroom while I check and secure your house, make sure no-one is waiting for you.” She saw and misinterpreted his expression. “Don’t worry, I’ll sleep on your sofa.”

Ian looked relieved, though whether it was because she was volunteering to go with him, or because she was volunteering to go with him, was unclear. He adopted a bit of a honeyed tone. “I think we can find somewhere better that.”

“Yeah, but I try not to sleep in baths, much too hard. I don’t know how students do it.”

He stared across the table at her, silent while the arrived waiter put their food down.

The black-uniformed waiter, a friendly smile lighting up his demeanour, placing before her, a large white bowl heaped with white rice and diced meats and vegetables, and a much smaller bowl almost brimming with an already skinning brown gelatinous substance, or curry sauce to foodies.

In contrast, Ian had an empty white plate, a circular wooden box with a handle in the lid, and a miniature hollow metal box on legs, with very short candles inside, used to keep the heaped bowl of a sliced brown meat warm. There was also a receptacle with some kind of green-and-white vegetable in the leek family laid across it. Drokk it, they might have been leeks!

The moment the server’s back was turned, Ian leaned towards her and hissed, “I wasn’t thinking of letting you sleep in the bath!”

“Bun. Este decontată (Good. It’s settled).” She grinned and lifted the smaller bowl, pouring the contents liberally over her rice.

“Well, you are certainly not like typical girls.” Goodly observed.

“Oh, you thought I would go for a salad? Yeah, drokk that noise.”

“You are not even drizzling that.”

“What’s drizzling?” She put the bowl down and started to unwrap her cutlery from its red paper serviette.

“Well, it’s pouring, but daintily.”

The inference, that this man thought her capable of being dainty, made her happy. “Awww, thanks! Now, who are CMI, and what was that nonsense about them being on our side?” She looked on with interest as Ian lifted the lid off the wooden container, and peeled a very thin circle of white dough from the top of the pile within, lay it in the centre of the plate, used an ornately-decorated ceramic ladle to pour – “Now, this is drizzling.” – okay then, drizzle, a spicy-scented darker brown oily liquid, thinner than her sauce, over the dough.
He used the ladle’s flat bottom to spread it around.

“You ever heard the phrase, ‘who watches the watchers’?”

She nodded as he started to lay members of the leek family, Mr Leek, Mrs Leek, whatever, along with shreds of brown meat, which he identified as duck, along one side of the dough, then roll it into a rough cigar shape.

“That’ll never light.”

“You don’t light it; you eat it.” He balanced his handiwork between two fingers and waggled it. “This is what passes for a pancake in the Orient.”

Mary set about her own meal, chopping at the rice with a fork, tilling it like a farmer to make sure as much of the sauce as possible got a share of it.

“So, CMI is Combined Military Intelligence. And by ‘on our side’,I mean they are part of the suite of British security services.”

She nodded for him to continue, shovelling some food into her mouth, leaning forward over the table to stop anything falling onto her ebony-coloured top.

“Okay, they watch us, and presumably the other agencies, too. Five, Six, etc.” Those numbers referring to MI-5 (the Security Service), and the MI-6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) that had bankrolled her train trip from Istanbul, back in the Sixties; Ian had rolled another pancake and pointed one end towards her. “You are clearly a powerful individual. You proved it today, but you are under the authority of E-Branch. If we asked you to jump, you would ask, how high.”

“Well, I’m more likely to ask, ‘in these shoes’?”

They both chuckled, neither having to acknowledge that she would never try that with Ben Trask.

“My point is,” he continued, Adams Apple bouncing as he swallowed a bit of his second roll-up, “Nathan reports to no-one, and people in government, higher even than E-Branch, got a bit frightened about this uncontrolled Power running around.”

“’Porting around.”

“Yes, ‘porting.”

“If it was just running, that could be sorted just by tying his shoelaces together.”

The senior esper frowned. “But he’d notice, surely.” His mood and demeanour seemed to have recovered, knowing that she wasn’t going to leave him.

“Would he? Would he really?” Mary was just teasing; Keogh’s grandson had saved Zek’s life, so he was alright by her. “So someone sent those troops to neutralise our new necroscope. Don’t they know about the...the V-people?” She didn’t want to say ‘vampires’ aloud in the middle of the restaurant, and was reasonably confident that her dinner partner would not think she meant violinists. Hold on.

She paused, noting that his left hand was on triple duty, gesturing at her, preparing and rolling the pancakes, and picking them up for him to eat...so where was his other hand?

The sensation of cool flesh making planetfall on her knee was enough of a surprise to make her jump, and for him to snatch his hand back, looking crestfallen and mumbling apologies.

Formal reached for his retreating hand as it appeared topside, and guided it back under the table. “No, don’t worry about it. You’ve got the perfect excuse of thinking you are not going to see the sunrise, the recourse of mayfly and R.A.F. pilots. If I refuse, you’ll only make it a last request. I heard that all the time during all that Battle of Britain drama.”

Her remark distracted Ian from Operation Leg Caress. “From films.”

Mary’s face repeated the startled look in as many minutes! “Yes! From films! Ugh, too much wine.” She slid her wine flute to the unoccupied far edge of the table.

 

What an interesting cast of characters you have here! You've got some fascinating psi-powers among them. The idea of being able to speak to-- and network--the dead is creepily intriguing; equally intriguing is a method of teleport that takes a sizable chunk of your surroundings with you. And poor Anne-Marie

She must look like a hundred year old Weequay.

For such an extraordinary individual, Mary gets stuck with a hideously mundane task. I feel for her, having to deal with that mess. I enjoyed the historical detail about the carpet presses and also the Romanian "o, lupta cutit murdar ud (a messy, soggy knife fight)-- who knew there was a need for such a phrase! They give such a distinctive character to Mary's reflections and show the breadth of her experiences during her long life.

Ian certainly seems taken with her, but I wonder if he knows what he's getting into!

One of the best things about this challenge is how different all the entries are from each other, and yours is definitely an original take on the rom-com!

 

Note: the vino veritas stuff is here.​

Villa D’Goodly

“Hang on, hang on, hang on.” Ian insisted hurriedly, bustling out of the bedroom later that evening.

Only vaguely aware that she had been drooling, and completely unaware that there was a full roll of pink Andrex toilet paper placed under her lower jaw to catch it, Mary noticed that she was sitting up on the right side of a yellow-covered double bed, with not much idea of how she had gotten there.

She remembered that he had a sitting room, and even recalled parts of it, but what had happened to her earlier stated plan to spend the night on guard in one of the armchairs?

The Arcan peered at the open bedroom doorway through which he had disappeared, then looked around the room. Yup, Battle of Britain all over again. Only things missing were the flock wallpaper, and a fur-lined bomber jacket draped over a chair.

A squealing metal-on-metal sound attracted her attention back to the doorway. “What are you doing out there, Ian?”

“Bringing the world down here.”

His backside, fortunately in light blue pyjama bottoms, appeared first, and gave her something to concentrate on, and it eventually became clear that he was dragging something big along the carpet, eventually revealed to be a large bronze leaf globe that she remembered from the other room. The globe was shiny with the metal bas relief geographical features that denoted mountain ranges and coastal areas, and land masses. A wheeled frame of polished wood held it around the equator.

Her host had shown her where in the Mediterranean, that their friends had gotten ambushed, and then grown serious when he had pinpointed the area on the Russian continent where their Soviet counterparts had had their first base, Chateau Bronnitsky, though she had managed to raise a wan smile out of him by re-christening it Crater Bronnitsky due to the reports of Harry Keogh teleporting in one time with demolition charges, and blowing the place sky high.

Once the thing crossed from the hallway carpet to the bedroom one, Ian swapped ends and pushed it round the bed to his own side.

“How the hell you leave my ass in a fire-fight to go get the bar?.”

Still bent over as he guided the globe into position, Ian arched his eyebrows at her over the sphere’s upper curvature. “Mike, you have got to let me drive.”

Both E-Branchers grinned at the shared recognition that they were mangling quotes from last year’s summer blockbuster, Bad Boys, with Will Smith and the other fellow.

She had one last to play, leaning over to his side of the bed to pull a triangle of bedclothes aside for him. “If you don’t sit your lanky ass down right now, bottom line, I will knock you the frak out.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” He accepted her invitation and sat beside her, but he turned half away from her and started clinking glasses. “You’re probably wondering how you got into my bed.”

“The thought had occurred.”

“We had a nightcap. You had Corpse Reviver Number Two.”

“Didn’t revive me though, did it? By all accounts, it knocked me out.”

“Yeah, newsflash. Apparently you cannot hold your drink.”

She looked chagrined at the update. “Spill it, did I?”

Ian swung his legs under the sheets before answering, and settled four empty shot glasses into the elongated furrow between his own legs, pouring in a bit of Ribena, a well-known blackcurrant syrup to which water was normally added.

He gave each glass a gentle swirl to coat the insides with the liquid. He then poured generous slugs of Lillet, a French fortified wine; and Absinthe, both ingredients in the earlier nightcap. A wash of licqourice smell from the latter quickly filled the room.

“No. Well yes, that too.” He admitted, frowning down at her. “It actually means that you lose control of your inhibitions. In your case, you lost your dinner, and consciousness. The latter is how I why I carried you in here, and the former is why you are wearing my Red Dwarf t-shirt. You really enhance its sleepwear potential, I must say.”

She looked down, spying the taut black material stretched over her chest, and when she pinched the at the fabric further down and pulled it up so she could see, the glossy picture of the actors and series logo, upside-down to her, became visible.
“Thanks.”

Listening as he continued to advise that her top and skirt were in his washing machine, she expressed with just a raised eyebrow her surprise that he had gone from caution about touching her knee to being able to strip her to her undies.

“It didn’t feel right to leave you covered in congealed sick, and there is only so far that you can get with a box of Wet Ones.” Those were paper tissues packaged pre-moistened.

“Well, you certainly know how to make a case; I will grant you that.”

You woke up after I had carried you in here, and offered to tell me things about you that would blow my mind.

“Oh my goodness!” Mary stared at him, a hand to her mouth. “Wha-what did I say?”

“You went into a ditty about the Scarlet Pimpernel, but I managed to shut you up, to wait till I could bring the bar in. I got to hand it to four-year-olds everywhere; that la-la-la, I can’t hear you business really works. My future-sight added your name to its imminent dead pool, and I realised that if I passed on what I heard, someone would be coming for you too. Do historians have a militant wing?” Goodly put his fingers round the glass furthest from him, and passed it to her. “Here, get your laughing gear round this.”

Mary noted aloud that it looked easier to make than the Corpse Reviver.

“My own concoction, the Boris Dragosani.” He picked up the glass closest to him, and held it out to clink it against hers.

They cracked the thick glass vessels together and necked them in one, both shutting eyes and wincing.
“Drokk, that was harsh.” She turned away from him for a moment and coughed licqourice vapour into her fist. The name was apt, she reflected. A Soviet mind-spy and necromancer, Boris was arguably the first Wamphyri, or Great Vampire, that E-Branch had become aware off.

“Agreed.” Ian put the empty glass down and necked the next one.

“Hey, where’s mine?”

“I’m cutting you off. I like that t-shirt too much. Three of these, though, turns off my Sight-”

“What, it makes you blind? What’re you supposed to do, hit the Wamphyri with your guide dog?”

“My Special Sight, Mary. It turns that off. And guarantees that whatever secrets of the universe you tell me tonight, I won’t remember them in the morning.” With that, he threw back the third cocktail. “Frag me.” He put an arm over her shoulders and gently drew her in closer till the side of her head was nestling onto his chest, and giving her bottom a reassuring pat. “Right then, what was that guano about the Scarlet Pimpernel?”

END​

Ian Goodly hears Mary clomping down the stairs.​

---

Notes

The Absinthe recipe “Corpse Reviver No. 2” – created by a Sydney on the wattlebirdblog.com

The Absinthe recipe “Boris Dragosani” is named after a character created by author Brian Lumley.

The restaurant name, Mingzhu’s, and what it meant, are from a website of Chinese girl’s names.

The story is set in 1996, and the following websites were checked for that time
www.marieclaire.com - Best Fashion Moments for the 90s
imdb.com - Bad Boys film quotes

Her history - I have always maintained that Mary has been on Earth since Victorian Times, and that may still be the case, but during this, I calculated her Torchwood appearance year, 2005, minus the prescribed 250 years, and came to 1755. I wiki'd that decade, and got the French Revolution. Hence, Scarlet Pimpernel.

Google Translate used for the Romanian phrases.

 

Oops. It's interesting that Mary keeps so out of the way of people (or at least used to) that she doesn't always comprehend Earth technology. Working at a government-ish agency where she has to show up and pretend to be human every day does seem to be a trial for her. I'm kind of morbidly curious as to just how they keep her from, well, starving. Do they need that many assassinations? Not that she seems to be the oddest one there, with the ecopaths and teleporters all over the place...

So she was ironing everything up 'til then? I like these weird little hints about her life, even as I wonder how she avoided detection for as long as she did.

Nice to know that the pains of public transportation and navigating around a city are universal, even for Arcateenians apparently.

That's quite the job interview.

So, dead people resent vampires? Sounds legit... wait a minute.

Uh oh. And of course Mary's the one who ends up literally mopping up the ocean in there. Hope there weren't too many dead fish. Or other unpleasant things. They sure have a problem getting people to clean up at E-Branch. Seems like it was laundry for some other challenge fic. Starting to wonder if their janitors keep getting scared off by all this stuff!

That's a great phrase for a certain kind of day! Literal in this case, apparently.

So, she spent a lot of those years in hiding watching TV all day, didn't she?

It looks like there's something really strange going on with the supposedly-on-the-same-side agencies going after Mary's colleagues. Or maybe that's just because it's Tuesday? Her world is so strange sometimes that it's hard to tell...

Interesting to see that the threat to her coworkers has actually needled her into this kind of aggressive reaction. Mary is disconnected from the world, but she's fairly protective of these people. It would be entirely possible for her to not like them very much, considering that her work isn't exactly 100% voluntary. So it's an intriguing side to her personality.

I like the humorous personality/behavior details like this; they're fun to read.

It's awesome how everyday this is to them.

It's kind of cute (or is it scary?) how eager Mary is to go to dinner with Ian. Given earlier events, I'm guessing she normally sees actual acquaintances as "Friends, Not Food!" but I'm not completely sure on that. Still, she could use some time around someone who isn't telling her to clean up a kraken carcass or whatever it is this week.

Well, that's a fun psychic gift to have! I'm amused by Mary's later thoughts on the matter, as she almost seems to feel that he's overplaying his visions of doom in hopes of sympathy. (Though that could partly be that she's figuring there isn't as much danger as he thinks due to her being there as bodyguard. )

Well, I suppose a bachelor pad is a bachelor pad in any era. And Ian certainly seems to be behaving according to what Mary expects most of the time. I'm not entirely sure what kind of feelings she has for him. Physical probably, but other than that? It's hard to tell with her; she seems to keep everything very closely guarded.

Corpse Reviver Number Two is a great name, though somehow I feel like it might make a corpse rather than revive it!

The militant wing of historical studies, feared throughout the universe.

Congrats on finishing the story, very funny as usual!

Out of curiosity, I know there are three days -- but where is the toucan? Or is it a pun?

 

I am working on responses to the feedback, but the easiest to answer from my phone, is the title.

Based on this 1975 film Three Days of the Condor, where Robert Redford plays a CIA researcher working in a town house with a small team, and he pops out to get the lunch order. Returning about twenty minute later, he finds the place has been hit, all his colleagues slaughtered..

Quite surprised, and a bit pleased how this got almost universal notice amongst you. I definitely visualise her kneeling beside a pile of swatches and having to shut her eyes or lean away from dirty water splashing up into her face each time she attacked a bit of carpet, to make the pieces a more manageable size.

Teleporting via the Moebius continuum involves using complex numbers, learned by Deadspeak from deceased mathematician August Ferdinand Moebius to conjure a doorway that only the Necroscope sees. To the rest of us, he/she simply vanishes. The traveller steps into the Continuum, and has to conjure another door to arrive at the destination.
Creating a door underwater is what brought enough of the Mediterranean through to **** up their carpets.

Thank you all for commenting on it.

1990s. Researched a marieclaire.com website to get clues. The smoking thing, you cannot enforce that people cannot smoke inside their own homes, only with public places.

Why can't she get up? Futons are very low down, almost on the floor, and it can be difficult getting up without some sort of support or leverage.

I love this comment of yours.

The Torchwood episode that Mary featured in, had her mostly spending her time in hibernation of fifty years at a time, so between that, and existing at the edges of civilised society, my reasoning is that she would be ignorant of many advances in technology, unless someone sits her down to learn about that stuff.

Mary is actually assuming that the CM of the unexplained acronym, relates to the CMDF (Combined Miniaturised Defence Force) of the Fantastic Voyage thriller, and cartoon spinoff.

You are so right. But that is for the rest of the Vampire World 3 novel that this is based on. Outside the scope of this embellishment.

First six months after training, Mary got assigned to an E-Branch-run orphanage in Romania. In my canon, it is that time that introduces her to the first humans that she learns to care for, and Ian Goodly has always been welcoming of her.

Thank you. Glad you liked that!

If you want to read the vampire reveal, it is here.

Just listening to her side of the conversation, Ian heard her describing the classified events of the day, to an unknown person on the phone. He did not know that a fellow agent had called in. Yeah, I suppose he should have asked first.

She would have felt something upon waking, surely?

I can assure you that Ian Goodly was the perfect gentleman, and that nothing happened until after the credits rolled.