Orion's Belch

From Artemis's Files

By FairyHunter

The other day I was rooting through Artemis's files—a chuckle or two from the readers of this column ranking slightly higher than my own well-being or, in fact, simply being—and, out of all the things I found, aside from some embarrassing baby pictures he had attempted to hide from the general public for various reasons, the document that I have published below is the most detrimental to Artemis's reputation.

Especially when one takes into consideration all the little hearts that have been scribbled between lines and in the margins…

Summary: Gemmalina, geneticist. Gemmalina, love of Artemis's life. Gemmalina, empress of Earth. A Mary-Sue parody. Litmus Test score: 79. [FH: The meaning of the two latter lines is unclear. It is obvious that there is a complex code involved; the best scientific minds of the age are trying to crack it as we speak.]

Gemmalina's Exploits and Exploitations

The tragic life of Gemmalina Anna Fey Pelagia Hedwig Cristalski began when she was born with two differently colored eyes. One eye (the left one, if you must know) was sprinkled with bits of sapphire, emerald, amber, gold, and ruby and the other was the translucent purple of amethyst. Her first words were questions about her uniquely hued eyes, and the first thing she read once she'd learned how to read was an essay on the polygenic nature of eye color, which rather confirmed her life's direction: she'd been set down as a geneticist since the age of two, when she was being taught her alphabet, and on her first attempt at reciting it, she managed only A, C, G, and T.

Gemmalina had been nearly an orphan most of her life—her parents had been in jail for as long as she could remember (each of their eyes were stunning colors, too, and distinctive features never bode well for wanted criminals)—and, unfortunately, she had been an actual orphan for the remainder of it. Her adoptive parents, American ambassadors, were killed in a government-funded car crash when they were on a diplomacy mission in Nigeria. Gemmalina could only cry and watch as her adoptive parents—not endowed with Gemmalina's apparent immunity from car crashes—died a bloody, sorrowful, morbid, horrible, slow death during which they had time to appoint Gemmalina their successor and heir.

Gemmalina sobbed and sobbed, but she knew deep down in her heart that tears could only bring them back to life if she used said tears as fuel for a cloning machine. In their honor, she got a tattoo on her head of her adoptive mother's DNA, because what is the inheritance of genes compared to the inheritance of generous amounts of money and power? Then, she embarked on a mission to raise her adoptive parents from the dead as previously specified, starting with getting a degree in genetics.

Before the car crash, Gemmalina's hair had been naturally glow-in-the-dark pink, streaked with natural infrared and ultraviolet highlights, and naturally tinted with natural jade green speckles, naturally. Now, though, Gemmalina had no hair, because the Nigerian assassins had ingeniously infected her with cancer, so she had to undergo chemotherapy. Luckily, she never had any of the usual chemo-induced symptoms of nausea or loss of appetite, because she had yet another unique medical condition (besides her natural immunity to car crashes, that is), which caused the cells lining her stomach not to divide on Saturdays—the day when she always had her treatment. In fact, this medical condition was known as Gemmalina's Awful Affliction, named after its discoverer and bearer, obviously.

By the time she had turned the age of twelve, she had driven mad a whopping one thousand psychiatrists and doctors that had tried to study her, had purposely sent the planet into a cross-species war (for one thing, it kept humans from fighting other humans, and for another, because she had always hated whales), and had finished mapping of the human genome as a project for one her college classes (all on her own, and with several corrections for the numerous errors that were made by those idiot scientists, probably the same ones she'd driven mad with her brilliance). Bored, she looked for a more complex species whose genome she might map. Having jailed parents finally came in handy; Gemmalina visited their prison cells and asked about the whispers that had been circulating about Artemis Fowl and his alleged fairies.

These rumors were confirmed by the immoral, but obviously trustworthy, inmates. She swiftly set off to follow in Artemis's footsteps and capture a fairy—or perhaps Artemis, in order to blackmail him for one. She decided upon kidnapping Artemis, since the rumors had said nothing about where the fairies were, and, besides, when else would Gemmalina get a chance to severely outdo all the half-baked Sues to whom Fowl Manor was Mecca? She would show them all that their feeble attempts to get past the gates, their five-times-a-day hormonal prayers to a vampire, their ludicrous claims of having higher IQs than Gemmalina, were all quite unsophisticated ways of becoming the youngest female human commander of the LEP and single-handedly breaking into Fowl Manor.

And then, she single-handedly broke into Fowl Manor (her left hand, if you must know; she suffered an injury to her right hand when she was swimming across the Atlantic Ocean to get to Fowl Manor, though it hardly impaired her improvised housebreaking abilities at all), terminated Butler (with an excruciatingly complex plan involving an unabridged dictionary, tomato soup, and a jar of dirt), and dragged Artemis to her super secret base. After his relatively short grief over Butler's death—well, it's already happened twice before—Artemis went Stockholm Syndrome on her, perhaps because that is where her secret base is located.

Unfortunately for Artemis, she had more important things on her mind than puppy love. She did use his crush to take advantage of him, though, and he willingly led her straight to the fairies. In an adventurous jaunt into Haven, Gemmalina acquired some DNA samples from the fairies by impersonating the Tooth Human, the mythological being that replaced the fallen-out teeth of fairy children with a piece of candy to help rot out the remaining teeth.

Artemis then offered to help her with the analyses. Grudgingly, she allowed him to, and then realized that he's smarter than he had first seemed—although, this might be because he had appeared first smitten with grief, followed shortly by smitten with love. Sometimes, as they worked late into the morning, Artemis would speculate about kissing Gemmalina, with the Bunsen burners illuminating her scalp; usually, such imagination caused him to burn whatever piece of lab equipment he was holding, which, in turn, usually caused Gemmalina to illuminate with fury. He reckoned that this was close enough.

Presently, Artemis came somewhat back to his senses, and saw that Gemmalina was way too good for the likes of him. He bitterly discarded all of the love letters and poetry he had been planning to give her (but the pulping of an entire forest was not in vain, because he made sure to recycle every last sappily scribbled-on scrap of paper). He also gave a tiny bit of thought to the morality of the consequences of Gemmalina's actions towards the fairy race. Gemmalina soon persuaded him that science was more important than morals. "Scientists are cutthroat when they are on the verge of discovery, Fowl. See, we're all in it for the money and fame. Or, occasionally, the world domination."

And when she had wrapped up mapping the Gnommish genomes, she commenced work on a new-and-improved, super-genius species, of which she intended to create only one until it had taken over the world for her, upon which time she would delegate it to run one of her larger chocolate factories. Gemmalina brought it to life on her sixteenth birthday; she had made it more brilliant, stronger, and far more gullible. It looked exactly like her, however, for there is no way it could possibly look more beautiful. She motivated it to do her bidding by being the only person who could make another of the species, and by promising to make another such creature for the original to avoid extinction with once the Creature had fulfilled Gemmalina's every whim. So the Creature did, of course—after all, Gemmalina hadn't made it excessively gullible just to be able to play innumerable pranks on it.

Gemmalina then pulled a Victor Frankenstein and didn't make a second Creature anyway.

Altruistically, Artemis and Creature discovered true love (or perhaps Artemis just took advantage of Creature's gullible nature), joined forces, and liberated the world from Gemmalina's iron fist of dictatorship (that would be her left fist, remember). Creature delivered the final blow after a long, hard fight that was so peppered with backflips and off-the-ceiling dodges that a couple of stunt doubles were required. Her dying words were, "Artemis, if I told you I loved you, would you spare my life? No? Ah, well, even a lie was worth a try." The only attendees of the funeral were Artemis (whose fondness still lingered, despite his love for Creature, and despite Gemmalina's multiple betrayals, manipulations, and insults of him) and Gemmalina's parents (whom Gemmalina had freed from prison during her exceedingly brief reign as Supreme Tyrannical All-Powerful Queen, President, and Dictator of All Things Earthbound).

The end.

Next time on Gemmalina's Exploits and Exploitations: Artemis, fed up with Creature, clones Gemmalina from her remains (using Gemmalina's partially-built tear-powered cloning device)... and in the process uncovers that she is part-fairy (one-seventh, if you must know).

The author of the above passage is unknown, thank goodness. I will, however, continue to rifle through the desk drawers and closet cabinets in Fowl Manor, and perhaps I'll soon stumble upon the next installment of this highly historical account.

If not, I assure you, Artemis looks absolutely adorable in a frilly bonnet.