undergrounds | A Daily Mail Exclusive [open/closed]

#herodog trended in the UK for a grand total of forty-eight hours in early March, long enough to spark several articles about the incident in various local tabloids and newspapers, a fifteen minute segment about it on BBC Breakfast (complete with an animal behaviour expert), and two @herodog and @londonherodog Twitter parody accounts. Then the world turned and the sensation died down and few people remembered Maria Mitchell's little brush with fame.

Except Maria herself, of course.

She had been at a low point, but the hero dog ended all that when it dragged her off the tracks and away from danger after she'd drunkenly fallen off the platform, right in the path of an oncoming Circle Line train. The dog had done more than save her life, she'd tell her friends. It had given her purpose, a reason to stop drinking and start living.

She became obsessed with finding the London Hero Dog. If she could find it and thank it, or--well, they obviously shared a bond so maybe she could give it somewhere to live for the rest of its life! Right! The universe was telling her she was meant to adopt this dog.

She just had to find it first. And maybe look at some cell phone video she'd drunkenly recorded later that night...

i - No Good Deed Goes Unpunished (18 April - Open to Previous CR)

Simon's phone has been ringing at odd hours since Friday. He's taken to just ignoring the calls, since the number is usually blocked and whoever it is must not want to reach him that badly because they don't leave voicemails or a callback number.

But today is a bit different, because today he gets a text message. It's...huh, who would be sending him a video? This is all really--

Simon pales visibly.

"Oh shit. Oh shitting fucking Jesus Christ."

He hands his phone to his companion. The video is about five seconds long, showing a white dog that blurs and then suddenly isn't a white dog anymore. The only other message is a hashtag: #herodog

ii - How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? (21 April - Open to Hillingdon House)

Hillingdon House. Simon's heard of it, of course; he's reasonably well-versed in supernatural politics these days and as a shapeshifter he know that Hillingdon House ought to be his spiritual home. Had things been different and Sylvia Redbright not scooped him up and put him in her school back when he'd been a confused teenager with brand new powers, he probably would have ended up here. Shapeshifters from Hillingdon had been some of his first contacts within the supernatural community; Redbright had just gotten to him first.

But he'd never actually been here until today.

He takes a deep breath. What he's about to do is unsanctioned, potentially suicidal. He's probably just a couple of steps away from ending up a statue in the Night Council chambers, but he will definitely end up a statue in the Night Council chambers if he is the reason that the entire supernatural community ends up being exposed to the normal human one.

Simon doesn't know how Maria--he knows the woman's name now--found out about him, but Maria knows and she's threatening to go to the press about it. The Daily Mail would probably pay thousands for an exclusive on the witches and vampires and shapeshifters and everything else who currently inhabit London. They'd have a field day with it.

"How do I place a bounty?" he asks, approaching a likely-looking person.

iii - The Statute of Secrecy (29 April - Closed to Guardians)

"I've got a stalker," Simon says, and it's meant to be a joke but it's anything but. He looks even more exhausted than usual.

"I saved one person and suddenly I've got a 'hero dog' groupie."

He laughs hollowly. "She's trying to blackmail me into being her boyfriend. Says she'll expose me if I don't."

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"I don't know." Simon looks pale and shaky.

"The last time this happened...the person tried to kill me. And my parents."

"Does this happen to you often?" Natasha asks, then half shakes her head, raising a hand to wave away the question. That's not really her business, and it's not really the matter at hand.

"They haven't gone public with it, so there must be something they want from you more than they want to be famous for coming forward with a dark, grainy phone video of something no one will believe when they see anyway."

Simon laughs hollowly. "Once before. I'm adopted; evidently my biological family isn't particularly fond of having a shapeshifter 'freak' for a grandson." It's been less than three months since his encounter with his grandfather. The physical scars are starting to fade, but the emotional ones will never go away. One of the reasons he's thrown himself into all of this work is so that he doesn't have to spent too much time alone with his thoughts and memories of that night.

"I hope you're right." Somehow, he doesn't seem too convinced. Images of his parents' living room covered in blood, his biological grandfather's corpse on the floor, keep flashing in front of his eyes.

Natasha's lips twitch down at that, her expression gathering as she looks for an appropriate reaction. Family isn't something she's had that much experience with. At least not biological family. She supposes she can be sympathetic to his situation, but empathy is harder. She doesn't have access to that kind of experience, and she's not the kind of person to rush to conclusions... or to rush to emotional reaction to anything.

In the end, she abandons the effort.

"Focus on finding out what they want first. It might be bad, but at this point..." she shrugs. "You can always worry later if it turns out they're trying to pressure you to go public, but if they're out for money or favors, you can always convince them this doesn't end well for them."

She tips her head, saying it like being convincing is no problem at all.

Simon doesn't seem all that impressed with Natasha's answer. "Right. And how do I do that?" There are enough stories on the internet about crazed stalkers that even if it's wholly unrelated to his familial troubles he knows that there's a high likelihood they aren't going to back down just because he asks nicely.

In his panicked state, Simon can only see the worst of all possible outcomes. Natasha is a lot older than he is; maybe she doesn't quite understand the power of a Google search. Even if this mystery superfan only manages to convince the lowest supermarket tabloid that there are dog people running around London, his name and image will still be forever tied to that article. All anyone has to do is look for it.

"I just wanted to help that woman, not end up as a fucking hashtag. She would've gotten hit by a train if I hadn't."

And he'd been so pleased with his temporary fame.

"That'll fucking teach me."

"And you did the right thing by helping her." She says it evenly, without emphasis and without room to argue—a tone that makes the statement sound less like a moral opinion than an objective fact.

As for the rest of it...

"I can't tell you how to do that when you don't know who they are or what they want. It might be as easy as agreeing to a meeting. On the other hand, you might have to be persuasive. Either way, the worst that's going to happen is that they'll try to make good on their bluff and end up with a few pictures no one will believe in a tabloid people only read to scoff at. Maybe she sells the video to the kind of people who go looking for mermaids and yetis." She raises an eyebrow to show how intimidating she finds that particular outcome. "Not exactly the end of the world."

Simon shakes his head. "Maybe she does. And maybe it ends up on a website somewhere and twenty years down the line someone looks up Simon O'Neill and that's what pops up. Or maybe someone tied to the man who came to my house four months ago and then tied up and brutalized my parents for the crime of adopting a baby without anyone telling them that 'oh, by the way, this kid turns into a fucking dog so good luck with that' sees it and goes after the people I love again. It may not seem like the end of the world to you and maybe it isn't, but it feels very real to me."

No one seems to understand that.

"That's getting a little ahead of things," Natasha says, eyes fluttering briefly in surprise. "A lot can happen in twenty years."

She gives a sigh then. That's not a comforting response and she knows it, but comfort isn't the strongest bullet point in her skill lists.

"Listen, I'm sure it feels real." She leans a little closer, her body language offering something like solidarity. "And I'm not calling it irrational. You're dealing with the experiences you've had. Anxiety is a normal reaction, and you aren't going to stop yourself from feeling it because I say so.

"That doesn't mean you can let it drive. Sometimes you have to look at your feelings, and realize that it feels like the end of the world and that's okay... but rationally realize that the world is probably going to go right on spinning, and let your brain make the decisions instead of that queasy feeling in your stomach."

She softens that with a smile, her tone more amused as she adds: "Does your brain really believe that twenty years from now, someone's going to look you up and connect you to some blurry video of a skinny dog turning into a skinny kid?"

"Maybe not," Simon admits with a little laugh. He's still very much on edge, but Natasha's calm, rational approach is slowly bringing him out of panic mode.

"If an American man from Seattle that I've never heard of can hunt me down based on who my biological father was, someone who's actually seen me transform might be even more dangerous. Some hunters fucking hate shapeshifters, and I've got other biological relatives still in the States who would also gladly see me dead. My mum and dad nearly died because I was stupid and tried looking for my birth family using magic. I refuse to let that happen again."

Natasha is good at staying rational. She's glad to see him starting to calm down.

"Which is a good reason to be cautious," she tells him, careful not to dismiss his fear entirely. He shouldn't be too comfortable with having his picture floating around like that. "I'm just saying, don't borrow trouble. Find out what's going on, then go from there."

She adds then, on impulse, "And it's not like you have to deal with it on your own."

A Daily Mail Exclusive [open/closed]

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