The Fantastic Adventures of Elena and Mario, part 1 (NWS-ish)

[nadiathesaint]

Yeah, that's right, things have gotten so slow this week at work that I actually started writing Nadia's adventure story out.

Title: The Fantastic Adventures of Elena and Mario
Characters: At the moment, counterparts to Nadia, Veronica, Sydney, Marty, Xander, and Walter have been mentioned.
Warnings: NWS-ish, despite the fact that I wrote it at work. I've also made it a point not to correct any spelling or grammar mistakes, as this is, in theory, written by a non-native speaker just for the hell of it.

Part 1, in which we are introduced to the heroine, her job, and her great romance

Elena, the youngest of a family of four, almost all of whom had been adopted, had always been an odd sort of girl. While Vivian and Salome, her older sisters, invited her to play dolls with them, the dolls were invariably placed into horrible, life or death situations that they'd need all their wits to get out of. Eventually, Vivian and Salome stopped asking her to play, and she spent most of her time playing war games with Morton, her older brother, though he was always trying to make her be a nurse and stay behind in the fort to handle the wounded.

At which point, of course, the fort would be attacked and Elena would hide in the kitchen cupboard until the opportune moment to strike back, despite being overwhelmingly out numbered by the bad guy.

Morton eventually stopped asking her to play, as well, and Elena found solace in her childhood friend, a young boy from down the road named Alan, who didn't share her ideas of fun, but was at the very least willing to humor her when her ideas got too death-defying and huge for her brother and sisters to handle.

As she grew older, they had all hoped she'd outgrow her childish fascination with death, imprisonment, and escaping both. She didn't. She learned only to be more subtle about it, losing herself in spy novels and occasionally daring to shop lift something from the local market. Dolls and toy guns gave way to make ups and clothing and boys, but late at night, when the rest of her family had gone to sleep, Elena would lie awake and picture those boys being abducted by terrorists or forming guerilla brigades and welcoming her as their intellectual and physical equal (if not superior) in the fight against the bad guy of the evening.

These fantasies, and, at times, a cucumber, got her through her lonely adolescent years, when the boys were far too meek for her to ever consider taking one of them out.

Once she'd left school, Elena tried police work, first, but found it didn't suit her. There was too much corruption and not enough car chases. So, when men from a branch of a local detective agency got involved in one particularly boring case, Elena immediately began pestering them.

Soon enough, they allowed her to be their police contact.

Soon after that, they asked her to join.

The next thing Elena knew, she was winging around the world with her new, private company, working a sort of freelance espionage, willing to gather information for the highest bidder.

But, here, too, there was too much corruption. Though she did get her fill of car chases.

So she branched out, leaving the detective agency and forming her own business, a one woman freelance affair, where the clientele was asked not only to pony up the money, but to offer up credentials about their own businesses and affairs to make sure they were on the level. As a result, Elena had a small, but very loyal set of clients, and was able to settle down comfortably and send her siblings great, expensive presents on the holidays.

Still, in the evenings when she turned off her light and lay in her bed in her fabulous apartment, she thought back on those adolescent fantasies (and the cucumber), and grow wistful. For while she was doing what she'd always wanted to do, see the world, sneak around, rescue good guys and stop bad guys, there was something missing.

The dashing rogue who would accompany her.

Or, possibly, roguette.

It was on a routine job in Paris that she finally found her rogue, her roguette, and her new favorite cucumber. It was the rogue that she met first. She didn't know it at the time, of course, that he would become the great fling of her life. When she first met him, Mario seemed nothing more than a road block, and obstacle to over come to get the information that was desperately needed by her client, a non-profit organization that provided free medication and education to the starving orphans of Uzbekistan.

And, in fact, that was exactly what he was, when she first met him.

She was chasing down her contact on the back of an overfed camel she'd had to "borrow" from a local zoo, speeding it on with cries of "Ya!" and "Faster!" in her native Spanish, in hopes of encouraging the normal sedentary beast to speed up after the contact, who was about a hundred feet ahead in a rickshaw driven by a small, but surprisingly quick Parisian youth, when Mario stepped out into the roadway from the sidewalk directly in front of her.

The camel, being a generally lazy beast with a decent sense of self-preservation, had ground to an immediate halt.

Elena, who was unused to riding a camel and was really rather wishing that there had been a car handy when the chase had begun, did not.

She flew over the camel's neck like a strange, flailing hawk, and landed right on top of Mario, who had just turned to watch the fleeing rickshaw with something like amusement on his face. They tumbled to the ground in an impressive tangle of limbs (it was almost as though, for a moment, Mario had two extra arms, but that was only thanks to his incredible speed and dexterity, something that Elena would later learn to greatly appreciate) even as the Parisian youth pulled the rickshaw and her contact around a corner and out of sight.

"You idiot," Elena had shouted in perfect French! "You complete and total moron, don't you know better than to walk into the road when there's a camel coming?"

Mario had not understood, and had only sat, rubbing his head, raising an eyebrow at her.

"You absolute fool, oh, you've ruined everything! Those poor, starving Uzbekistani orphans! Who will medicate and educate them now?!"

Mario's other eyebrow lifted, but still he said nothing.

It was not until later, when Elena had returned to her hotel room, still cursing the bumbling fool who wouldn't know a speeding camel from a pothole, that she'd realized that he'd been one of the most handsome bumbling fools she'd ever laid eyes on. She'd flopped back in her bed, the poor, starving orphans of Uzbekistan shuffling out of her mind on their poor, twig thin little legs, and thought back, trying to remember all the details of his fancy, tight fitting suit and what little she'd caught of his eyes behind his shaggy, dark hair. She'd just been recalling the elegance of his long fingers and considering finding a Parisian produce vendor when her window was bashed in from the outside, and droves of strange, pale, motheaten creatures poured into the room to take her hostage.

She was beheading the last of them when Mario himself arrived, swinging in on a length of wire that she would later learn was his trade mark, and giving her a single, impressed raised eyebrow upon viewing the remains of the army of undead that had attacked her.

"My," he'd said. "that's impressive."

"Not really," she said. "I've never seen these things before, but there's not much that cutting the heads off won't kill."

"You'd be surprised," was all he said, then he held out a hand, with those lovely, elegant fingers, towards her and beckoned.

It was then that she learned that, for all the vile, evil things perpetrated by man, there were nearly as many vile, evil things perpetrated by the undead, and that it was Mario's job, along with his undead partner, to stop them. She'd also learned that the undead's favorite meal was poor, sickly, uneducated starving Uzbekistani orphans, which was why she had been targeted for elimination.

Also, she learned, it was illegal to go barrelling through the Parisian streets on the back of an overfed camel while chasing after a rickshaw pulled by a small, but surprisingly speedy Parisian youth, which was a fact that surprised her, since she would have sworn that that precise situation could not have happened before, certainly not often enough that the government would feel they had to pass a ruling on the subject.

With the undead army dead on her hotel room floor, Mario's duties for the evening had been dispatched, and he'd found himself at great loose ends, with nothing at all to occupy his time with, as his undead partner was currently recovering from wounds sustained in the course of duty and was a completely annoying invalid when he was injured. So, after some consideration, Elena had decided to allow him to stay, on the condition that he helped her clean up the undead corpses and the broken glass, and find a suitable alibi for what had caused all the damage. She was pretty rich, these days, from her small, but loyal group of customers, but her youth as a poor, adopted child in a family of adopted children had left her rather thrifty, and if she could avoid paying for it, she would.

Mario agreed, and stood quietly by as she related the horrible tale of the enraged pidgeon that had come at her window, thinking her to be a rival pigeon and bent on her destruction, which had destroyed the window, and then, as the doorman left for the evening, he stepped up behind Elena, wrapping a well-fitted arm around her waist and drawing her backward to him to lay a kiss on the back of her neck.

She'd melted to him then and there, and they had retired quite quickly to the bed, where her old, beloved cucumber was soon forgotten for his large, perfectly formed zuccini.

To be continued as I continue to get very, very bored at work