by RyFT Brand
Jazz, Monster Collector in:
Broken
season one, episode seventeen
RyFT Brand
Copyright 2015
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to
persons living or dead are purely coincidental.
JAZZ, Monster Collector
Season One: Earth’s Lament
RyFT Brand
Episode-17
Broken
I was sitting at a small table, face propped against my hand and elbow resting on the tabletop, staring with half-lidded eyes at a big pickle jar full of a cloudy liquid. Every so often I’d flick my index finger off my thumb and let it plink against the side of the jar. Each flick rang the jar and sent one, two, or three, depending on how hard I’d hit it, specks of light soaring trough the goop. They looked like falling stars zooming through the atmosphere. And like meteors burning up, after a second the lights would fade out and leave the jar dark. Then I’d plink it again.
Someone came in the room and clicked on the light, forcing me to cover my eyes from the unexpected brightness.
“Jazz?” DJ, my right hand girl, said.
“Yeah,” I said sitting up and massaging my face. I blinked my eyes several times coaxing the lazy sods into focus.
“Hey, she’s in here,” DJ called into the narrow hallway. Her little voice echoed off the metal walls and I wondered who she was calling to.
She sat in the chair to my right and stared at the jar. “So, what are you going to do with it, now that… you know?” She paused as if considering her word choices then she said, “Now that you know what you know…you know?”
I slipped a sideways smile on. “Yeah, I know, but I don’t know.” I stared into the jar, searching for something that was there but that I couldn’t see. “What does one do with a jar full of souls? I can’t take it to the Wizards Council without incriminating myself further. Last thing I need right now is to get caught red handed with this thing and the enforcer corps are turning over sticks and stones searching for me, every one of them is vying to be the one to bring me in, dead or alive.”
“Not every one of them,” Inspector Samuels said as he entered the room, stepping over the oval shaped door frame. He walked up to my left side. “How are you, Cole?”
My head nodded absently. “About as well as could be expected considering I’ve been held up in this tin can for the better part of two months.”
“Tell me about it,” Parry, my secretary/ex-business partner said. He tripped over the high door frame as he entered and only just managed to keep from planting his face into the floor. He glared back at the opening. “I’ve been here longer than anyone, and I hate this place.” He wedged his in way in front of Samuels, forcing the much taller man to step back, sat down and vigorously rubbed his arms. “It’s damp, dingy, dirty, and really, really cramped. Don’t you think it’s cramped?”
Parry had many neuroses, but claustro was just about his favorite phobia.
Samuels chose to ignore Parry’s slight and settled in the chair across from me. He was dressed in black sweatpants and a matching shirt that was tight enough to show off his magically enriched muscle structure, gloves, skullcap, sunglasses, and a scarf that covered his lower face. “I get that this place needs to be concealed, but don’t you think the entrance is a little too much—and totally filthy?” He looked around the metal walls, the rows of pipes and the multi-colored valves. “What is this place; I mean what was it before?”
“You mean before it was our secret hideout?” DJ asked.
Parry’s normal slouch disappeared with the empowerment of possessing information that Samuels lacked. “It was a hidden chamber for the resistance movement that Jazz says happened even though it’s never mentioned in any records.”
“No, I know that, I mean what was it before that?” Samuels said, his voice muffled by the scarf.
Parry’s slouch returned.
“It was a submarine,” Uncle said as he walked in, having to duck his tall, lanky frame through the opening. “A kind of boat that traveled underwater.”
Samuels’s head turned around the room like he was trying to apply this new information to the structure. Uncle leaned against a shelf that functioned as a counter. He removed a beverage vessel from a pocket of his grease stained coveralls, popped the lid and took a swallow.
DJ turned in her chair to face him. “Don’t all water craft go underwater?”
“It’s before my time,” Uncle said. “Ask her.” The old, white-haired man allowed one finger to peel off the vessel and pointed at me, the spiky haired nineteen-year-old.
I wasn’t in much of a conversational mood, but I was surrounded. “In the time of the Earth we had lots of specialized ships, including submarines.”
“So,” Samuels said. “If this metal tube was for traveling underwater, why is it here, underground in the middle of Nittsburg?”
“That is a good question,” I said. I didn’t much like talking about Earth, too painful, and my brain was acting lethargic. Better to distract. “Parry, how about drinks for all of us?”
“Yeah,” Parry said with more enthusiasm than I had been prepared to receive. Parry was easily excited. He leapt up and out of the room, then was back again in mere moments. I have no idea how that clod managed without falling flat. He set four vessels of MirthMix7, a popular beverage on the conjoined worlds, on the table, and then sat staring at me expectantly.
Distraction failure.
I let my shoulders rise a bit. “It’s not all that interesting, actually. This neighborhood,” I pointed at the floor, “was built on top of Reserve Park Landfill.”
“Ohh, what’s that?” Parry asked, his eyes were wide with excited anticipation. He was probably expecting a story about a fight since most of my stories were about fights.
“A trash heap,” I said and watched Parry sip his drink in a failed attempt to conceal his disappointment.
“I have no idea what a navel submarine was doing in a landfill, but it was buried during the post Inter-dimensional war reconstruction.”
“Hostile Takeover,” Inspector Samuels corrected me with the official Mirthin propaganda.
I ignored him. “Anyway, the resistance, led by Uncle’s great grandfather, found the sub and, since it has no mallow powered equipment and is therefore magically untraceable, turned it into a hidden lair.”
“And now it’s hiding us,” DJ said then took a long sip of her beverage while looking directly at no one.
A cold silence fell over the room, and then Parry plastered a smile on his face. His brilliant teeth stood out bright against his mocha latte skin. “Well, at least we’re all together again.”
No one said anything, but Parry’s faux knit cap began to dance about on his head and flashes of brilliant light appeared from beneath it. “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” he said and yanked the cap off. A bright speck of light shot straight up into the air, circled the room three times, zigzagged between us, causing everyone seated at the table to duck and dodge, then it landed smack on my cheek, sending my head snapping back. I never understood how something so small could deliver such force. Moxie, the little flower fairy who had bound herself to me, outstretched her chubby arms and hugged my nose. Buzzing up and down, she applied liberal smoothes all over my face, sending me little magic charged tingles that had me bobbing my head and poking at her with my shoulders. Finally I snagged her like a fly from the air into my fist. “Calm down,” I said into my fist then gave my hand and really good shake.
Parry huffed at me, which I expected, and DJ said, “Jazz, please,” and shook her head in a disgusted man
ner, which I also expected. I didn’t care what Parry thought of me, but DJ, she’d always looked up to me, idolized me, hell, wanted to be me, but those days were over, my recent actions of revenge, death, and destruction had seen to that. But idolization can never last, especially when directed at the living because eventually the living always disappoint you, eventually let you down, which I also expected. I just didn’t expect it to hurt so much.
I opened my hand. Moxie was sat on her butt, legs outstretched and leaning back on her hands. Her head wobbled around, setting her blond curls bouncing, like she was still dizzy from the shakeup. When she looked up at me her chubby face beamed with a huge smile. Her double pairs of wings beat at a blur and she made a twisty-turny flight path for my face. I caught her by the hem of her little flower pedal dress and held her in place. Her wings beat faster, her chubby hands reached for me, and she gazed at me like a smitten puppy. No matter what I did, said, or how I behaved, nothing would diminish Moxie’s affections for me. But if I let her, she’d literally smother me with said affections.