debut: Elphaba

[no_good_deed]

"Fiyero?"

The word echoed around the room in a wholly unsettling way - this was not Kiamo Ko, nor was it any place Elphaba had ever seen before in her life. It had the cold, unsettling feel of some of the clockwork alleys she had peeked down in the Emerald City, but there was nothing green here. Well, except for her.

Pacing solved nothing, nor did her attempts to force her way past the invisible door trapping her inside. The words that usually sprang more or less fully-formed to her lips were shy here, refusing to issue forth no matter how hard she probed for them, and eventually she had to concede defeat. Tucking her knees to her chest she sat and waited, a deep and unsettling gnawing in the pit of her stomach. This had to be the work of the Wizard, she just knew it.

***

When she was suddenly transported out of the cell Elphaba thought at first that perhaps Glinda had found her, rescued her, but there was no sign of the bubbly blonde in the wide-open room where she was. More chicanery from the Wizard, then, most likely.

She hadn't gotten far in her investigations before a noise to one side startled her, and she turned to glare in its general direction, wary of tricks and illusions.

"Show yourself," she said flatly. "I know you're there."

Comments

[no_good_deed]

"Are 'they' often in the habit of doing things to people without their knowledge or permission?" she wanted to know, looking no more likely to follow him now than she had been before.

[highfunctioning]

Sherlock visibly bristled with the effort of keeping up his understanding facade.

"Actually, yes."

They kidnapped you and brought you through time, space, pocket dimensions, and a mile long Tesco queue for all you know, and THAT is the question you ask? Not what have they done to me?

[no_good_deed]

"And nobody has done anything about that?" Elphaba was growing more and more uncomfortable with the picture that was building here: a prison full of misfits treated as toys for some unseen, unknown force... it certainly sounded as if the Wizard had a hand in it, though she had seen displays of far more magic than he himself was capable of. "Why not?"

[highfunctioning]

There was something irritatingly close to heroic about her train of thought.

"Obviously it's because no one can." His mask was slipping, and he well knew it, but it hadn't gone off to great effect anyway.

[no_good_deed]

"Maybe you haven't been trying hard enough," she told him, chin raised as if she was squaring up for a fight. "What are you, anyway, some kind of doctor?" He hadn't introduced himself as one, but he certainly had the arrogance.

[highfunctioning]

"Hardly." Codes of ethics were never for him, though he naturally assumed he'd fare better in a surgery.

"I'm a scientist." And a consulting detective. Given the context, it seemed simpler, and if she wasn't coming back to the lab, lengthy explanations weren't in the cards.

[no_good_deed]

"Well, I don't know what kind of science you were doing that landed you here, but I don't want any part of it," she said archly.

[highfunctioning]

"And what were you doing?"

The fact that she assumed he was engaged in unsavoury enterprises was either a projection of her own guilt or a judgment call based on his behaviour, which he hardly felt merited this level of contempt.

[no_good_deed]

"Terrorizing all of Oz," Elphaba replied; if he didn't know (and she wasn't convinced he didn't) then he ought to, really. She wasn't there to make friends, after all. "I was organising and carrying out a campaign of terror across the country, and I thought I had escaped punishment. But obviously I haven't."

She had been stupid to think that, obviously. But she wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.