“Not exactly how I wanted to end the season,” Jackson said. “And there was this super annoying guy that kept popping up that didn’t help things.”
Jackson proceeded to tell his grandma about Vega. Jane listened and waited for Jackson to finish before giving her two cents.
“Well, maybe you’re looking at it the wrong way,” Jane said. “If he didn’t try to sell you something, he may really be of some help.”
“Briggs didn’t seem to think so,” Jackson said. “But then again, he’s probably the most cynical person I know.”
“Oh, he doesn’t seem that way at all,” Jane said. “So, what did you decide to do?”
Jackson looked up from dousing the last of his fries in Freddy’s Fantastic Fry Sauce. “About what?”
“About Asena,” Jane said, pointing to the living room, where the Lyote was asleep in front of the couch. “I don’t know much about taming, but I think the man has a point. You may want to look into making her stronger before the playoffs, if you can. Wouldn’t an extra edge be helpful?”
“Since when did you turn into the Djinn raising expert?” Jackson joked. Two years ago, Jane had absolutely refused to let Jackson have anything to do with taming. Now here she was threatening to ruin the diet of his two Djinn with junk food and giving Jackson tips of training Asena.
“I couldn’t live with your mother all those years and not pick up on a few things,” Jane said with a wink. “I would at least think you’d want to learn all you can about when and how Asena evolves before the playoffs. After all, the evolution of that blue alien changed the battle against you.”
Jackson was so taken aback and lost in thought that he didn’t even bother to correct his grandma about her description of the Glauco.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” he said after a few moments. “Lyotes are endangered Djinn and have been for almost a hundred years. It’s not like there’s information about them just lying around to be researched.”
“For such a bright young man, you can be a real dummy sometimes you know that?” Jane said, her voice oddly stern. “Where do you think your Asena came from? There’s boxes of leftover research in our storage unit — didn’t the thought ever cross your mind that your mother might know a thing or two about Lyotes?”
“I thought you sold off all her research.”
“Her finished publications, yes,” Jane said. “But her actual handwritten raw research material is all still packed away.”
The next morning, Jackson woke up early out of habit from his time on the road. He tossed and turned, trying to sleep for another hour or so, but Scrappy and Asena were up too. Resigned, he rubbed his eyes and pulled on a pair of gym shorts and a wrinkled t-shirt he found in the back of his dresser. He hadn’t bothered to unpack yet.
“Well, since everyone’s awake I guess we might as well get something done.”
After breakfast and a short active recovery workout for Scrappy and Asena, Jackson pedaled his bike across town to the small storage unit that held all of the stuff the Hunts couldn’t fit into their downsized apartment. He didn’t bother to call Kay — he figured she would want to spend the day with her family. Briggs, he doubted, was awake or even sober, and Fiona hadn’t ever responded to his inquiry about an ice cream run. Jane had to go to work at the greenhouse, leaving Jackson to dig through the piles of his mother’s research alone. The prospect didn’t bother him, though. Somehow, it felt like a task suited for Jackson and his two Djinn.
After a brief visit with the owner of the storage units (Jackson found he’d achieved small town celebrity status along with Fiona, at least in Tyle), Jackson entered the digital code and waited as the air compressed doors slid apart, revealing a small, five-by-five foot storage room. On one side, Jackson found a box of old toys. He smiled as he pulled out a plastic Eskiflurr action figure and pushed the button on its back that made the little ice fox wag its tail. Asena sniffed the Eskiflurr and turned away, apparently jealous.
“It’s okay, girl,” Jackson laughed, tossing the toy back in the box. “You’re even better than a real-life version, anyway.”
While Jackson sorted through boxes of data cards, paper notebooks, and every other conceivable method to capture research, Asena sat in the door way of the storage shed, basking in the sun. Scrappy hopped around, pecking at worms and grass he found between the tire tracks of the lane next to the storage shed. Jackson soon realized the task before him would take far longer than a day. In fact, he didn’t know if he could possibly get through everything in his three weeks home.
To start, Jackson uploaded all of the information from the data cards into his holo-watch. Thanks to how old the data cards were, he had to install a special piece of software on his holo-watch, but after thirty minutes or so, the watch was able to read the cards no problem. Before he went through the digital information, however, he decided to at least take a peek at the stack of notebooks. That proved to be the hardest part of all.
Jessica Hunt seemed to fill old-fashioned field journals with no rhyme or reason. A few pages went by date, some went by trip, and some were organized by the specific Djinn she’d been studying at the time. That was without considering her handwriting, which ranged from “passable” to illegible, or the shorthand and jargon she used that he knew he’d have to look up later. Jackson doubted his mom had ever been able to keep all of the information straight, let alone glean any insights from it. After an hour or so passed, he tossed one of the notebooks back into the box and fell back on the cement floor, exasperated.
Asena padded over to him and nuzzled against his head. “This is going to take forever,” Jackson said. The Lyote whined and licked at her tamer’s face. “Okay, not forever, but you might as well get comfortable. We’re going to be here awhile.”
Jackson abandoned the field journals and started sifting through the data cards using his holo-watch’s search function. The results for Lyote were few and far between and always in passing about something else, such as Djinn protection laws or the wide variety of Fire-Elemental Djinn attacks. Frustrated, Jackson went back to sifting through the field journals.
“There’s got to be something in here,” he muttered as he scanned page after page, finding nothing.
At last, exasperated, hungry, and ready to spend the beautiful summer day not huddled in a storage unit, Jackson whistled for Asena and Scrappy and locked up. On the walk home, he considered taking all of the field journals to the local library, where they could conduct a scan of the pages into a searchable index that could then be transferred to a data card. He held a slim hope that he’d missed some reference buried within the pages of a guidebook studying the mating habits of Swinprum or some other obscure tome.
Then again, there was the risk that the transfer process wouldn’t be able to read some of his mother’s handwriting, thereby making the search function pointless.
“How can there be nothing?” he asked Asena as he rode his bike lazily down a path by the river. “Grandma said mom had been studying Lyotes before she disappeared and she mentioned in —”
A thought struck Jackson and he paused in mid-pedal, almost falling sideways off his bike. He threw out his foot to catch himself and it landed on Asena’s tail. She let out a sharp bark and struck him with a mild fireball that left scorch marks on his shirt, but Jackson just patted out the small flames with his free hand — he’d suffered far worse from Asena.
“I can’t believe I forgot about that!”
A moment later, Jackson was back on his bike, pumping his legs furiously for home.
Chapter Six
Jackson skidded to a halt on the small front lawn of the apartment building. Without even bothering to put up the kickstand on his bike, he jumped clear and ran straight for the front door. Asena managed to slide in right behind him before it closed. Scrappy, on the other hand had to bank at the last moment to avoid flying straight through the glass door. While Jackson and Asena thumped around the corner and into the front door of the un
it, the Scoundrook hovered outside Jackson’s window, buffeting the glass in between irritated caws.
Notebook in hand, Jackson yanked the window open, then retreated to his bed, completely ignoring Scrappy’s cackling beratement.
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before,” Jackson said. The field journal in his hand had been inside the secret vault Jackson had found back at their old house across town. The contents of the vault, hidden behind a picture in his mom’s study, changed Jackson’s life forever. The Djinn ring, which had been intended as a gift for Jackson’s twelfth birthday before his mother disappeared, had contained Asena. That gift alone was one of the most amazing parts of Jessica Hunt’s legacy. Jackson hoped the other two items, a tattered field journal and the birthday card Jackson now pored over on the edge of his bed, would be just as valuable and life-changing. Jackson’s breath caught in his chest when he got to the part that had stirred his memory of the items in the first place:
It’s a Lyote — a rare breed that’s only found around the volcanoes of Lombardia. In fact —
Jackson smiled again at the rest of the sentence. Jessica had scribbled it out to head off a long Djinnology lecture, but now Jackson wished she would have finished the thought:
it was originally discovered two hundred years ago while Okay, you’re 12. You obviously don’t care about when or where it came from, or the work I put in classifying and studying it. Point is, she’s a special Djinn, and she’ll serve you well if you treat her right.
All my love, Mom.
Reading the letter took him back to those first few wild months of taming, where he’d been frantically training Asena, working himself to exhaustion and near mania to save their house from the bank collector. The whole thing had backfired, but he’d learned some valuable lessons from the losses and bad decisions. They’d shaped him into the person and tamer he was now.
“Out of all the long diatribes you wrote, why did this one have to be the one that you cut short?” Jackson asked the memory of his deceased mother aloud.
Setting the birthday card aside, he picked up the field journal that had been in the safe all those years. He’d carried both the card and the notebook with him in his travel backpack ever since they’d lost the house, but he had never taken the time to study it in-depth. There had always been another battle to prepare for, more training to conduct or, in the rare spare moments, eating and sleeping to be done. Djinnology had been his mother’s life work, not his.
Now he was kicking himself for not checking sooner. From what little research was publicly available on Lyotes and entered into the Djinncyclopedia, Jackson knew Asena was reaching a critical level in her growth. He’d been pushing the thought from his mind throughout the season since she likely still had a few levels to go, but the Shakur fight made him realize he couldn’t ignore the problem for much longer. Not only had Ron’s evolved Loquatic proved to be the difference-maker in the battle, but the fact that Vega had shown up at the same time…
All signs seemed to be pointing to him working to evolve Asena, but in the back of his mind, he wasn’t so sure. Jackson looked down at Asena, who was playing with a chew toy — one of the few she hadn’t melted into a toxic lump of black rubber. Although she’d filled out from her juvenile puppy ears and oversized feet, she was still the same Djinn his mother had left for him. In some ways, Asena felt like Jessica Hunt’s most enduring legacy. Jackson didn’t know if he wanted to change that. Once she was evolved, there was no going back.
From his work at Sato and experience as a tamer, Jackson had seen the effects of evolution on dozens of Djinn. It wasn’t always the appearance alone that changed. Yes, they got an increase in core stats as well as a whole slew of potential attacks from an expanded move set, but sometimes, evolved Djinn experienced complete personality changes. In rare cases, tamers struggled to reconnect and maintain their Bond.
While Jackson’s own Djinn, Scrappy, had evolved from a Magglecaw to a Scoundrook during Training Camp a few months back, had successfully evolved without it destroying their Bond, he harbored an admittedly irrational concern that Asena’s evolution wouldn’t be as simple.
Asena noticed Jackson staring at her and abandoned her chew toy to give him a quizzical look. Jackson smiled at his Djinn. Even if he didn’t want to risk Asena evolving, there had to be ways he could make her stronger. It was another lesson learned at Sato — a few Djinn who remained in their Basic or Intermediate forms went on to be competitive at higher levels. But it was tough, and the process for increasing a Djinn’s stats past its natural cap were different in each case. He’d have to know which case Asena fell into before making a final decision.
“Okay…” Jackson said as he scanned the pages. Lyotes were only found around the volcanoes of Lombardia and were only discovered two hundred years ago. “That’s odd,” Jackson said aloud. “They’ve also been on the endangered Djinn list for almost a hundred years.” It only took a hundred years after their discovery for them to become endangered? He wondered why.
Jackson continued searching and found a number of small observations and quirks about Lyotes, but nothing really groundbreaking that Jackson hadn’t worked out for himself in the months spent with Asena. Apparently, Jessica had received a special research voucher that gave her permission to study the Lyotes in their natural habitat on Lombardia, although she never said if that’s where Asena had come from. He never found any sort of paperwork that seemed to give her permission to take one from the islands.
Jackson remembered less about his mother than he would have liked, but he was positive she wasn’t the kind of person to illegally steal an endangered Djinn from a protected preserve.
He flipped through the last couple of pages, but found nothing that hinted at where Asena might have come from or anything specifically on the growth of Lyotes and their evolutionary process. Jackson came to the last page and turned it over.
The last page had only a couple lines written in hurried hand, probably Jessica jotting down a note in between catching flights or some other task. The lines said very little, but gave Jackson new hope.
For more information on Lyotes, see Research Archive 626 at Crevajo College, date filed by Dr. Jessica Hunt.
Jackson snapped the notebook shut and tossed it on his bed. It was almost like his mom had left the note for him to find in that very moment. He rolled over and swiped his holo-watch to connect it to the projector in his bedroom. Moments later, Jackson had the site for Crevajo College pulled up and was entering the archive number in the data system. As soon as the search completed, dozens of windows started popping up containing essays, data charts, sketches, photos, and 3D models of Lyotes.
“Well, team,” Jackson said to Asena and Scrappy, “Looks like we’ve got some reading to do.”
Morning turned into afternoon as Jackson continued sifting through the piles of information. He found much less than he hoped for, but had almost a page of notes typed up on a doc to show for his efforts. A knock came at the door and Jackson sat up on his bed, stretching his stiff back.
“Come in, Grandma!”
Instead of Jane, Kay appeared in the doorway. She immediately wrinkled her nose. “Dude, it smells terrible in here. Like…pizza rolls and boy. What have you been doing in here?”
“Oh! That reminds me!” Jackson reached over the edge of the bed for his plate of pizza rolls and came up empty. He shot Asena an accusatory look. “Those weren’t for you.”
The Lyote licked her chops in response.
“Look,” Kay said, stepping over the piles of dirty clothes spilling out of Jackson’s suitcase. “I’m not saying you don’t deserve a break for a few days, but I think you’ve gone a little bit off the rails.”
Jackson paused with a soda bottle hovering in front of his lips. “It hasn’t even been a day. And this is work!”
He proceeded to explain to Kay his research into Lyotes and what he’d learned so far. After filling her in on the details, Kay opened a window to vent the be
droom and then cleared a pile of clothes off of a chair so she could sit down.
“So you’re saying you’re going to evolve Asena, then?” Kay asked. “Remember what happened to that Broncolt at Sato?”
Jackson remembered. The thing had an adverse effect to evolution and the proceeding Pegasteed had been almost feral. The Satos bought it from the tamer and put it in part of their nonprofit Djinn Sanctuary Center, but as far as Jackson knew, it had never competed again.
“I’m thinking I don’t want to evolve her at this time,” Jackson said. “But I don’t want to pass up the opportunity, only for her to become unusable later in my career. That would be inexcusable.” He sighed and threw a pillow through the holographic screen projection. “I just wish there was more info out there.”
“Well, what have you learned so far?” Kay asked, scanning his doc.
“Lyotes are extremely rare, impossible to get to, and don’t evolve in the same way that many Djinn do. Like Scrappy. He evolved because he was within the level range and was in duress during my fight with Akamu. Most Djinn are like that. It also happened with the Glauco too during my last match. But Asena is apparently different.” Jackson said. “Nobody knows exactly how, but in addition to hitting the right level, they also have to be in a specific environment. I’m guessing that means on Lombardia Archipelago.”
“So then what’s the big deal?” Kay asked. “If you don’t want Asena to evolve then why go to all this trouble trying to find out how to do it?”
“I’m looking into every available option. I don’t want to regret not doing the research later,” Jackson said. “But that’s not all,” he continued, jabbing a finger at another bullet point of his notes. “She’s almost past her evolution window and could hit it before or during the playoffs if I continue with my normal training.” He pointed to a paragraph of text on the screen with the words Level 23 in bold.
Djinn Tamer - The Complete Bronze League Trilogy Page 57