Fans Fiction The New Adventures of Lady C: The Stolen Wellington, part 1 by Samantha Stanley & Harriet Chamberlain

 

The new adventures of Lady C. – A contribution to the stories created by S. Florence

The Stolen Wellington. Part 1 

Written by Samantha Stanley & Harriet Chamberlain

 

Lady Christina de Souza, 98th in line to the throne of England (Thankyou Megan Markle ), not the Queen's favourite relative, owner of the de Souza manor, a fleeting companion of the time travelling alien known as "The Doctor" and notorious jewel thief "The Lucky Cat" had just about recovered from losing her entire family at the battle of canary wharf in 2007, and had just about recovered from not only meeting an alien on a bus, travelling to another planet with him on the bus, but saving the lives of those on the bus with her and the entire planet of Earth whilst losing her prized stolen possession to date, king Athlestan's golden chalice and had just about recovered her father's lost fortune ( thanks to his gambling habit) by stealing whatever she could get her hands on, selling it on the black market and restoring the manor, ( well one room, her bedroom. The rest of the manor was falling apart as all her money and her loot went into the secret vault hidden in the depths of the manors wine cellar and the very expensive and slightly alien tech security measures) it's butler John Cook, his strange cousin and stable hand Hugo Halliwell and his knackered pony Clip-Clop, back to all its former glory thus throwing herself, the aristocratic side of her at least, back into the limelight, back into the public eye and back into the Queen's bad books. No one knew her alter ego and what she had done and sacrificed to bring her family home back from the dead and no one ever would, except John Cook, his cousin Hugo and quite possibly the Queen who eyed her suspiciously whenever she saw her and made constant references to the Maneki Neko, Lady C's calling card, to see if she flinched and revealed her true identity.

Recovering from all that whilst maintaining a Lady like stature took a lot of effort, a few glasses of gin and the odd wild fling with an unsuspecting married member of her social circle, just so she could experience the thrill of excitement that stealing gave her, without having to steal anything as other people's husbands didn't count as she technically wasn't stealing, she was borrowing and she always gave them back!

   It was fair to say that life had settled down considerably since that awful day during the battle when she had lost her parents and younger sister Lady Monica. She had tried to look for them of course but where do you start when there is only an end to a war, and no beginning? It had been 13 years now and she was older, none the wiser but a lot richer and still not in favour by the Queen. She did have a happy life though, or that's what she at least told herself every morning, so imagine her surprise when she had come home one evening after stealing a painting supposedly painted by Van Gogh yet looked alarmingly like an exploding TARDIS, for a client who went by the name of Professor Song, ( Quite obviously made up but as long as she paid up, Lady C didn't care what her clients called themselves, yet she was intrigued to meet the Professor as she was sure the painting must be something to do with the Doctor.) and found her dead sister, Lady Monica Georgia de Souza (named after her father's grandmother) sitting in her dining room, eating her pizza and drinking her beer that had been laid out for her by her butler like he did after every heist, sitting on her chaise lounge as though she hadn't of been dead all this time. In fact, she was very much alive!

   There had been shouting, tears and tantrums, mainly from Hugo who had insisted that Monica was a ghost back from the dead to reclaim her shoe collection he had hoarded the day she had "died" and when he had been sedated by John Cook and taken back to the stable, he shared with Clip Clop (his choice) Monica and Christina had started shouting at each other. "Where have you been? I thought you were dead! Why didn't you come looking for me? Stop drinking all my beer!" This went on until the early hours of the next morning until both women had fallen asleep on the chaise lounge out of pure exhaustion. Cook had woken them at 5am and sent them to bed. It was now 10am, Lady C had been awake for hours, had her breakfast in bed and was reading the newspaper as the headline was screaming at her about an art heist from the London museum. She would stay exactly where she was until Monica came in and apologised for being alive and in the meantime, she googled her, trying as she had so often done before to find some traces of her family but the searches had turned up nothing. This time though she had a different name. Bella Roseau, a secret identity Monica had been using these past 12 years to keep herself hidden. It would seem she had learned something from Christina after all.

   It took Monica a long, long time to get back to sleep once Cook had woken them in the early hours. Obviously being back so late last night, and being dead for so long that 90% of her stuff was in storage and her old room is full of dust, her furniture covered in a cloth hiding Monica expensive style underneath. Being back home was just what she needed at this time, all the stuff that she had been through since changing her name and living off whatever she could get was difficult to her. She had tried her best to be independent for the first time in her life, and since what happened in Canary Wharf, she couldn’t have gone home for a long time even if she wanted to.

   Staying in one of the guest room for the night, Monica lay on her back staring up at the ceiling above her; she had a lot of work to do to make it up to her sister. She knew it wouldn’t be easy, and if it was the other way around, she didn’t think that she would ever forgive Christina. But lucky for Monica, Christina was probably a tiny bit more forgiving…. And I really mean a tiny bit. Monica checked her phone and saw it wasn’t a ridiculous time to get up and go see Christina. Throwing on a silk dressing gown from the suitcase she brought back with her she slipped out the room and walked towards her sister’s room. It’s strange how everything is exactly the same as how they left it but just run down. All the fancy art the family used to collect still filled the walls of the hallway, the massive chandelier above her head still bright, just full of cobwebs. There was only a certain amount of cleaning that Cook could have done and it wasn’t fair to leave him behind to look after it all, but Monica didn’t think that her sister would ever walk away from this place, especially after her family had died, but she did.

   Knocking lightly and pushing open Christina’s bedroom door, she walked in ready to grovel. Monica was so close to walking in jumping onto the bed next to her sister and getting under the duvet like she used to but she stopped herself knowing it wouldn’t be welcome. Not just yet anyway.

   “So…. What would make this a bit better?” Mon went to awkwardly sit on the edge of the bed but instead chose to walk away and sit on the chair on the other side of the room. “I mean, you know I can’t cook. And that hasn’t got any better since I’ve been away. But I could try? Would that help?” Mon took quick notice of Christina scrolling on her phone.    “Anything interesting about me?” Mon questioned, that used to be what she would ask her sister back in the day before everything went wrong, and that was because Mon was used to going out getting completely drunk, making a fool of herself and probably ending up on the front page of some tabloid doing something she probably shouldn’t. Since she had died Mon did spend some time looking online about herself wishing she would relive the life she used to have, but how could she come back from the dead? Christina would probably be able to know, she knew everything. “Anyway, so I was thinking, how much of my stuff you still have? I mean you must have kept some right?” Mon shrugged; Christina did not look impressed. “Are you ok?”

   Trying to ignore her sister wouldn't be an easy task. Monica was far too "In your face" to be placed on a back burner somewhere or ghosted just to prove a point, but it had to be said that although Christina was over the moon that her sister wasn't dead after all, she was furious with her for lying to her and leaving her with the mess of planning her entire family’s funerals.... not something anyone should have to do. Cook helped of course, Hugo didn't but that was Hugo and that was another thing, how she was going to convince him to give Monica back her shoe collection, she did not know, especially as he had grown rather worryingly attached to a bright red pair of Jimmy Choo's in her absence.

   As she sat cautiously on her bed, Christina carried on searching the news feed on her phone in the pretence she was far too busy to be listening to her sister's pitiful attempts at an apology for not being dead, but something caught her eye and very quickly, a devious if not hilarious plan began to form in her mind that would indeed allow Monica to make it up to her on a grand scale.

   Placing her phone on her bed, she sighed heavily, acting wounded and heartbroken as she mentally put the finishing touches to her master plan. Reaching over the night stand, she grabbed a small bell and rang it a few times in an attempt to get Cook to bring her a morning cup of tea. She waited a few seconds, rang it again, huffed impatiently and then bellowed..."COOK......TEA!" at the top of her lungs just as the butler came hurrying through the door carrying a tea tray with a startled looking Hugo behind him carry a breakfast tray and a piece of her toast in his mouth.

   "Sorry mi' Lady, 'ad to stop Hugo nicking yer sausages, yer know what he's like round pork. Morning Miss Monica, brought yer usual, bloody Mary with a twist and a Ryvita"

Placing the trays down and cuffing Hugo round the head so the toast shot from his mouth, Cook left the room dragging his slightly backward cousin with him.

   Christina finally spoke to Monica, trying to sound authoritative yet sounding more like an excited child at Christmas.

   "All your belongings are in storage, by storage I mean in the stable with Clip-Clop. I did try and save some things but Hugo insists you left them to him in your will which we never found and I was too upset to contest it or argue with him, besides, he's been wearing most of your dresses on a daily basis so I doubt you'll want any of it back"

   Taking a sip of tea, she let her plan unravel like a soft coiled ribbon that had gently fallen to the floor.

   "I am going on a job later this evening" She passed her phone to her sister and pointed to the illuminated screen. "As you can see, Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington has resurfaced and its due to go on display for 1 week from tomorrow morning at the London art gallery, meaning it will be taken to the gallery overnight in preparation. I have quite a few contacts interested in this particular piece who are willing to pay a very large sum of money and you my dear undead sister, are going to help me get it.... tonight! I will go over the plans properly with you after breakfast and when we pull this off, you'll be able to restock your wardrobe and more, because you are going to be the one, who steals it for me!"

   There was a distinct smirk on Lady C's face as she unveiled her plans, mostly because of what she had planned for her sister and mostly because the thrill of a pending heist always made her extremely happy. Taking another sip of tea and plucking a sausage off her plate, she relaxed back into her pillows and waited for her sister to come to terms with the fate that awaited her.

 

To be continued…

Fans Fiction The Mystery of Mayhurst Manor, Part 1 by Sarah Cambridge

The week following Lady C’s discovery of her new Secret ID, The Night Bird, seemed to pass in a blur of phone calls to builders who hadn’t turned up to start the restoration work on the manor, but had received rather an earful of abuse from the not so refined Lady of the manor, who after questioning them several times as to, “Do you know who I am?” It turned out they did not, and so she had fired them before they had even begun which for them, was a blessing in disguise. Having received a large sum of money from the Sovereign grant issued by the Queen herself for the sole purpose of restoration, Lady C had tried in vain to hire the local tradesmen to start working for her asap, but little did she know that not one local tradesman would ever step foot in the manor again, not after the last time they were there when Lady C was away at her majesties pleasure and they were left to the rather unalluring charms of Hugo, John Cook’s very special cousin who had taken a fancy to anything covered in brick dust. This included all the builders, the van they travelled in and a cement mixer, so after one week of continuous advances, numerous vulgar suggestions and the site of Hugo in one of Lady C’s negligees, they could not stand it any longer and had left (run screaming) with the threat of a sexual harassment law suit ringing in Hugo’s ears!  Coincidently, or maybe not, this was the day Hugo left the manor and hopped on a mystery tour bus of London, never to be seen again!

   After several cups of tea and half a bottle of gin, Lady C decided that she’d call one of those places poor people go to when they had no money or means to make any.  A job centre apparently, which she found out after a quick google search. Maybe they could hire some needy and desperate workers to come and restore her beloved manor so she wouldn’t have to bother trawling through the internet in search of something that wasn’t going to be stolen to make her money and hopefully notoriously famous.

   It was a hard and arduous task talking to Janis at the Job centre. She had a very common tone to her voice yet seemed particularly up herself for someone who worked with layabouts all day. After a few questions, mostly about the pay, she did promise to try and get something sorted as soon as Kelly was back at work as she was on leave until a week next Tuesday and it wasn’t really her department as she worked on new claims and had only been at Kelly’s desk borrowing her stapler when the phone had rung so all she could do was take a message and leave it in Kelly’s in tray as her cover, which had been arranged by the job centre, had called in sick.

   Upon asking for the new would be employers name and upon hearing the title, “Lady” instead of Miss or Mrs,  sovereign grant instead of minimum wage, and Manor instead of council flat, Janis, who usually worked on the first floor dealing with the new claims of the recently unemployed and was only borrowing a stapler, suddenly decided to promote herself to Kelly’s position of Job finder general and promised to not only put the ad on the job centre website herself that very second, but would also spend the rest of the day looking through Kelly’s list of unemployed builders until she found a suitable candidate which she would ring with the intention of getting them out to the manor that very next day or her name wasn’t Janis Buckle, (although she pronounced it, B’Ouche, probably in the hopes of impressing the Lady Christina deSouza who she would now tell people down the Dog and Duck, was her new best friend. )

   Lady C thanked her and then tried to hang up, but Janis had intended to chatter on about how her aunt Gladys had once worked for a Lady Brown, Forsyth-Smith and did she know her? She eventually just hung up after her head started to hurt from Janis’ common accent and the withdrawal of gin!

   She would pass the rest of the day away, as it was still only 11am, but visiting her vault and cataloguing what she had left in the way of stolen goods after the Queen had tried to clear her out when the crap of being caught red handed had hit the fan.

   Lady C’s secret vault had lots of other secrets to it such as secrets floors and secret hidey holes that she prayed had remained secret from her majesty as that’s where she kept her most valuable of possessions. The things that were worth the most money to any greedy buying who would pay millions just to say they had possessed it.

   As she wandered through the kitchen and through the cellar door, down the stone steps that led to the basement, she came to a stop outside the secret hidden door of the vault and froze in fear as she heard the familiar sounds of engines grinding to a halt just inside of the vault. It was with a heavy heart and several seconds of heavy breathing to calm herself, that she tapped in the code to open the door and made her way through, her heart sinking into her stomach as she saw the towering looming figure of the Tardis blaring its blue light across the vault as it spun slowly, flashing like the police light it was meant to be.

   The doctor had arrived and no doubt would try to take all her stuff back to their rightful owners as he often did every now and then and usually because taking it in the first place had somehow upset the laws of gravity or time or something else mundane and totally not worth her listening to when he lectured her.

   She was about to start yelling for the Doctor who as she suddenly remembered was now a woman, to show herself and explain how she had managed once more to get passed the highly technical doctor detecting security, she’d had fitted some years ago. Albeit it by the Doctor himself as he was back then, but on agreement that he wouldn’t break in if she didn’t steal anything that was considered alien. As she had not, he or she had no right being there! Before she could utter a word, she spotted what looked like an old man at the end of the vault’s passageway, looking carefully at one the bricks on the wall as he made some muffled puzzled exclamations about it which sounded a lot like Scottish.

   “It’s here, but not over there which makes me think that its just a small disturbance, yet it registered big enough for the Tardis to bring me here herself which is highly unusual”

   “WHO THE HELL ARE YOU!?” Lady C suddenly shouted, very annoyed that not only had the Doctor turned up unannounced yet again, but that she had brought a weird looking old man with her and was letting him wander about tapping bricks to his hearts content. She strode over to the Tardis and banged on the door still yelling. “Oi, LADY DOCTOR, GET OUT HERE IMMEDIATLY AND TELL ME WHATS GOING ON! I DO NOT APPROVE OF YOU INVITING YOUR FRIENDS INTO THE PRIVACY OF MY SECRET VAULT THANKYOU VERY MUCH! NOW, SHOW YOURSELF WOMAN!”

   The man at the end of the vault spun round as soon as she opened her mouth and rushed towards her, placing his hands gently on the Tardis doors as he looked highly concerned for it after it had been hammered on so ungraciously. “Woah, woah woah, what’s your problem? I’m only looking, you don’t usually hear me down here this time of day Christina, you’re usually still in bed. The Tardis brought me here because of the disturbance in time that seems to be secured within the walls of your vault. Nice locket by the way”, He said rather sharply, raising an eyebrow as he gestured towards a velvet silk lined box that contained the last known piece of jewellery once owned by the late Lady Jane Mayhurst which had disappeared shortly after her death. “I’ll be taking that back with me”

   Lady C listened in disbelief, her head turning from the man with the accusing eyebrows to the wall at the end of the vault and back again, and then started shouting once more. “WHO THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU AND WHERE IS THE DOCTOR?!”

   “I am the Doctor, what’s the matter with you? Why don’t you recognise me?” He stopped to think for a minute, his eyes narrowing as he put the missing pieces of the jigsaw into place in his mind. “Oh, my apologies, have you not seen this face before? I thought the Tardis might have given it away as to who I was though”

   Lady C screwed up her brow in confusion. Today hadn’t started well and wasn’t going to end well by all accounts, but she could probably relax a little knowing the strange man wasn’t a strange man at all, well he was but one she knew and trusted, although not to break into her vault it would seem. “You were a woman last time I saw you which I might add was only a few months ago. Surely you remember that? The wedding, the tiara, you bumbling in on one of my jobs as per usual being all sanctimonious, as per usual?”

   The Doctor shook his head and wandered off back to the brick wall to examine it again, talking casually over his shoulder as he went. “No, not really but then again I don’t tend to visit in terms of linear time lines. Good to know I’ll be a woman someday. I always fancied seeing how that would work out, no I think the last time I saw you was the night I visited you in jail, the first night if I remember and I was wearing that ridiculous bow tie. How long ago was that?”

   “5 years” Lady C replied, almost spitting the words at him as it was and always would be a sore point. It had confused her enough to know the Doctor could change his face when he wanted and confused her further to know he could change sex too, but knowing his visits weren’t in the same order for him as they were for her, added to the confusing and she began to scan the vault for her secret stash of gin. Grabbing the only bottle left from under one of the loose floorboards, she pulled it out and removed a very sticky note attached to it which read, “Soz, I drank yer wine Mrs Yer’Ladyship. I’ll get yer a new bottle from Tesco. Love Hugo” She grimaced slightly knowing Hugo had put his hands on her stuff after probably letting himself into the vault during the Queen’s raid, but beggars could not be choosers at this point so she un capped the gin and took a swig, hoping the slow lull of drunkenness would wash away the stress that the day would no doubt continue to bring.

The Doctor eyed her over his shoulder but for once didn’t remark about her drinking, nor about her time in jail, even though it was he who had put her there. Instead he carried on tapping bricks whilst mumbling to himself about how strange it was.

   Lady C was about to ask him what the hell he was up to when he suddenly jumped backwards and yelled “HA! Found it!” He spun round and grabbed Lady C by the hand and pulled her to him, his eyebrows going crazy with his mixed emotions. “There was a temporal disturbance here, but it was confined to just one brick, but I now know what it is, it’s a doorway probably to another time or dimension or planet maybe, could even be a space craft. I found one just like it in an elevator once, but this one manifested by itself, right here in your vault. Shall we take a look and see where it goes?”

   Lady C was not in the slightest bit excited by the prospect of travelling through dimensional space with an alien. She had been there and done that with him many times before, and whilst it had always been adventurous and thrilling, she had only managed to escape with her life still in tact each time and she had begun to fear the Doctor each time he turned up to whisk her away somewhere new. Today was no exception.

   “Well you can if you want, but I very much doubt I’ll fit through that one brick even though I have lost a lot of weight recently, but if you think you can then be my guest. I’ll wait for you upstairs if its all the same with you?”

   The Doctor looked at her with confusion etched across his face and he totally ignored her request to stay behind and uttered “Nonsense” under his breath and still holding her hand tightly, he moved his other hand through the brick so that it disappeared and the temporal doorway around it began to spread to accommodate his body as he moved further through it.

Lady C was about to protest louder and tried to pull her hand free but before she could utter a single sound, she was stood in a completely different place, surrounded by cold, damp, dark shapes that omitted an awful smell of rotting flesh and worst of all, she had dropped the bottle of gin which was now spilling out all over her vault floor.

   “Where are we?” she whispered, unable to shout abuse at the doctor as the stink had got into her throat and was choking her whilst making her eyes sting. The doctor lifted his sonic screwdriver into the air and let it analyse the surroundings for a moment before he looked at its findings.

   “August 2012, think it’s a Friday although Tuesdays are very much like Fridays in terms of time travel. Norfolk, England. Christina, what was the last thing you thought of just before I pulled you through the doorway?”

   Lady C rolled her eyes and glared through the dark at the doctor, almost wanting to slap him if she thought she wouldn’t miss. “7 bloody years ago, and we’re still on earth? What kind of time travel is that? I could have probably managed that myself if I still had Captain hot stuffs vortex thingy. Hang on, 7 years? Good lord although I was at my best then. Maybe we can go and find me and tell me not to listen to a bloody word you tell me and maybe I wouldn’t have to go to prison!”

   It seemed like a great idea to be honest. Why wouldn’t she want to warn herself about the dismal future she had, but the doctor had other ideas and she uttered a small cry of surprise as his face suddenly became so close to hers, she could feel his breath on her skin. “Do nothing of the sort. If you change things here you have no clue to what kind of future you’ll be going back to, you should know the laws of time by now Christina, now tell me, what was the last thing you thought of?”

   There was anger in his voice and panic too which wasn’t like him but she was too freaked out by how close his face was to hers to start an argument with him at that point, but she would bring it up later and completely ignore him as she always did and send her past self a text message when he wasn’t looking.

   “Erm, about the pendant, I think. Just as you yanked me here against my will, I thought to myself, hide that bloody pendant whilst he’s gone” She had taken to pouting now in the vain attempt to make him feel sorry for her, but she remembered it was dark, so she stopped and whined instead. “There are no living descendants of Lady Mayhurst so what would it matter if I kept the damn thing? She was dead when I took it after all”

   The doctor flashed his sonic once more and checked the data. This time pulling Lady C along with him as he moved toward a stair case that led to a door which hopefully led outside.  “It matters” he growled angrily “because 1, its not yours and 2……” They climbed the staircase and the doctor pushed open the door. There was a surge of heat and a blanket of black smoke welcomed them, almost covering them and surely choking them to death if he hadn’t of slammed the door shut as quickly as he’d opened it on the crumbling wreck of what was once a magnificent building.

   “2…this is Mayhurst Manor and I think it’s on fire!”

To be continued…

Fans Fiction The New Adventures of Lady C: The New Identity by Sarah Cambridge

Never one for early retirement and certainly not one for letting something as trivial as a prison sentence get in her way,  Lady C was ready to pounce back into the underworld of daylight robbery as the notorious lucky cat, the world’s most renowned, famous and rather beautiful jewel thief, but considering it had been all of those things that had contributed in her failure to remain anonymous, she would pounce under a completely different name.

   It hadn’t been her choice to adopt the name of the lucky cat. She had acquired it quite by accident some 10 or so years ago when she had first become notoriously famous after stealing King Athelstan’s solid gold cup worth 18 million pounds from the international gallery in London and flying a bus to another planet with an alien man known only as The Doctor. The police had nick named her after she had left her calling card, a small statue of the Maneki Neko aka the Japanese lucky cat, in place of Athelstan’s cup and the press had picked up on the name and had a field day plastering everywhere for all to see.  Coming up with something else just as catchy that would make her infamous as well as keeping her anonymous was going to take some thought.

   She wished Cook were here to help her, he often although not very, had a few good ideas and would have at least made her laugh as he always could. She sighed heavily, her sigh of loneliness echoing around the de Souza manor to signify her solitude. It was going to take some getting used to living here alone now, especially as before her incarceration there had been at least 8 or 9 friends and family living with her at some point.  She wondered where they all were, why none of them had visited her in prison and why none of them called now she was out especially after she had been photographed and tagged arriving at the royal wedding reception in Hello magazine. They all knew she was here yet none of them seemed to care. She even missed clip clop, a shabby knackered flea ridden old pony that belonged to Hugo, the slightly knackered flea ridden stable hand who was John Cook’s cousin. If prison had taught her anything it was never turn your back in the showers, and never reveal your identity or intentions to anyone. Trust no-one, not even yourself! – Especially after raiding the large stock of gin in the cellar.

   Bits of scrap paper adorned the kitchen floor. 2 hours after she had started Lady C still couldn’t come up with anything conspicuous yet catchy and she had mused over everything from Black Beauty as she wore a black cat suit and was rather beautiful, to Lady Cyanide so she could keep the Lady C option yet maintain an air of mystery and mayhem. Sadly, nothing really gave her the same excitement in the pit of her stomach feeling that the lucky cat had, but she summarised that it was because someone else had taken the time to look at her and her work in detail and do it for her, much like how her nickname Lady C had come about.  An old friend from way back, the alien man known only as The Doctor, couldn’t be bothered to keep calling her Lady Christina so he had shortened it to Lady C to save time, but she liked that, it humanised her from the mechanical world of her childhood that had stripped her of her true identity just to force her to live up to her title.

   Another 25 minutes passed, and the phone rang. It was a gangster known only as The Parasite, probably because like fleas and ticks he got on everyone’s nerves, and he was calling to make a deal on Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau which contained diamonds dating back to 1839, the tiara she had stolen a few weeks ago at the royal wedding. The conversation was strained as always between the two as they had no real time for each other and they hated doing business with each other purely because she always had what he wanted, and he always had the money to pay for it. She felt more like his private dealer than a spur of the moment cat burglar stealing thinks for the thrill of the high.

   “Ah the night bird, or is it jail bird now? You know why I’m calling I trust? I heard a tweet that the little birdy has something shiny for her nest that she wants to lose quickly”

He was as slimy sounding as he probably was in real life, not that she had ever met him, which meant she had to lay it on thick to get him to agree to a price as this was after all, her way back.

   “Long time no speak, charmed as always to make your acquaintance and you might be right, but only if the price is”

   “I will give you 20 thousand and not a penny more!”

   “You’ll give me 2 million and not a penny less or you can find someone else to infest, you’re not my only contact, you know how this works!”

   There was a lot of growling and words spoken in a foreign language that she assumed were of a very blue nature and silence for a few moments until the disgruntled voice grumbled something about being robbed himself and then agreed to have a courier sent to her within the hour to claim his prize and pay her demands.

   “You should reconsider the offer I set you years ago night bird and work for me. We could infest the world together you and I. Your skills and mine, we could make something magical happen”

   She heaved silently, gagging at the thought of being around someone so incredibly creepy and yet again very graciously declined his offer of a partnership and hung up before he could contest.

   The courier arrived as promised with a case of notes and she made him wait as she passed each one through a counter scanner which would show if the money was fake or not, and after what seemed like hours, she handed him the tiara and took the note from him the parasite had written for her.

   It read simply, “Night bird, one day you will sing for me.”

This time, instead of gagging, his words made her smile, not because it was from him or because what he had written was particularly nice, but because she realised as she screwed up the note and tossed it in the bin that she finally had her new ID and someone else had taken the time to do it for her.

   The night bird.