Missing in Action
- Somewhere after Retrieval heads back to Haven and Holly gets abducted, Foaly calls Root into his office with an alert.
- The alert is that they lost contact with Holly, so Foaly runs through the video feed of Holly's flight up until the part where she drops her helmet. We know what happened after that, so you know exactly what they're listening to.
- Several things stand out to Root and Foaly: (1) Holly drew her weapon; (2) the creepy voice knows way too much about fairies; and (3) the mesmer doesn't work.
- Because the video cuts out after that, Root hesitates to take any action… until Foaly slows down the video and blows up the image of the first hypodermic dart flying past the helmet's camera.
- Then Root orders Recon and Retrieval out after Holly, and shows a little favoritism (or insanity?) by even putting himself back on active duty.
- Jump back to Artemis, who is dismantling Holly's high-tech gear as Butler drives them home; he's learning way too much about fairy inventions for everyone's comfort.
- He scans her wrist and realizes it's a locator and the fairies are probably tracking her whereabouts.
- We don't know what it is yet, but Artemis definitely comes up with some sort of evil plan.
- Meanwhile, Root is suiting up in his old uniform that doesn't really fit around his gut anymore, and blaming the newfangled gadgets for it.
- The moonlight is running out, so Root bumps a tourist group from the line at the surface transportation flares, and snags a way better shuttle than Holly got.
- He also shuts down all transportation to the surface, making some tourists extremely unhappy.
- Foaly uses his position as the only person who can run all the fairy technology to mock Root's flabby belly, then Root gets into a brand-new titanium pod and heads up to the surface.
- Artemis does something Artemis-y (that's a word, right?) to Holly's locator and puts a buttonhole camera inside. Cue dastardly plan music.
- Artemis asks Butler to provide a two-minute diversion for some plan that involves being at the docks, so Butler goes into classic diversion mode and starts a Three Stooges-style brawl with some dock workers after insulting them and their mothers.
- He leaves the unconscious workers for the Customs people to find and heads back to the car to find Artemis.
- Strangely, Artemis doesn't tell Butler why he needed the diversion, and Butler doesn't mind.
- Root runs into the mess he created on the surface by stopping all the shuttles back underground, and ruins some more tourists' days—what is it with this guy and vacations?
- Root puts a full evacuation into effect, stating that the Mud People have made an overly hostile act. These are war preparations, people.
- Skip over to Holly, who is waking up in the lingering fog of the tranquilizer and trying to remember what happened.
- Juliet looms over her, sporting her own pair of mirrored sunglasses and talking a lot of nonsense that would confuse Holly on a good day.
- Holly finally finds out the name of her kidnapper and instantly gets the bad omen shivers.
- She tries to sweet-talk Juliet into parting with her sunglasses so she can mesmerize her, but finds out that underneath all the bubbly blondeness, Juliet isn't a fool.
- Holly resorts to good old-fashioned threats and Juliet just laughs—apparently she went through the same training as Butler and is incredibly dangerous.
- There's a little bit of foreshadowing again here as Holly notices something digging into her ankle and starts forming a plan.
- While Holly's waking up, Root is flying over Dublin tracking her locator dot and berating Foaly for not updating the map of Dublin since 1875.
- Foaly links up to a satellite and gets a Google Earth kind of image for Root, and sees that Holly's location is offshore in a ship of some kind.
- The ship has a high lead content, so Foaly can't give Root a blueprint and is sending him in blind. Strangely, the old-school Root is totally okay with this.
- The ship turns out to be a rusty whaler, so Root has to trudge through the smell of blood and soap and blubber, using only the infrared filter on his helmet.
- Root fires on some rats to get them to stay away, and follows Holly's locator dot to an icy, unlocked room.
- Though Root is shielded, his breath shows up in clouds because of the temperature of the room, and he immediately hears a voice upon entering.
- After what is probably the creepiest conversation of Root's life, the disembodied voice tells him to look closely at the package it left.
- Predictably, the package is a bomb, and it's the first gift from Artemis Fowl the Second—Artemis cuts the timing a little close though, and Root barely makes it out of the ship before it blows up, leaving him to flee back to Haven.
- Root gets on the radio to Foaly and demands every bit of information he can find about one Artemis Fowl.