by Joel Stewart
Davis seemed to not notice the glare. “He says he’s stuck in traffic, but I’ll bet it is just a cover to get a few more minutes alone with his woman.” He said laughing.
“I wouldn’t let Cliff hear you call her that.” Jesse replied. He decided he might as well act friendly. “He is so awkward when it comes to her.”
“Heh, you’re right about that one.” Davis agreed. “They have known each other since they were kids. I don't understand why he just doesn’t tell her how he feels.”
“Yeah. Falling into the friend zone is always an ill w-omen.” Jesse said with his ‘I just made a bad pun’ smirk on his face.
Davis stared at Jesse with a blank expression on his face. The brief confusion soon turned to hostility. “I almost thought about laughing at that one,” Davis said dryly. “Even if you started hitting the gym with me I don’t think a woman would be able to look past your taste in humor.”
Jesse glared at Davis trying to think of a retort. It was just a joke you idiot, he thought. Before he could put his response into words the tension was interrupted by Cliff and Alex as they walked through the door. “Sorry we’re late!” Cliff said as they took a seat around the table. “We got invited to Grandma Lena’s for dinner.”
“Well if you got us a free meal then we can excuse you being late.” Jesse chided, deciding to forget about the last comment Davis made. “How is Grandma Lena doing anyway? I haven’t seen her in a few weeks. You know, I think we are the only people that ever visit her. She is so old I bet most of her lifelong friends are gone by now.”
“I’m not sure if I want to go.” Cliff responded. “Something is not right with that old woman.”
Davis and Jesse looked at Cliff with quizzical looks on their faces. Cliff relayed to them everything that had happened that morning, much to their astonishment. “And she said, ‘do you think Denoria will fall’?” Davis clarified at the end.
“I know, it’s weird right?” Alex interjected before Cliff could respond. “I get this eerie feeling that she is hiding something. Something big!”
“Maybe she lures weary travelers there with the promise of food, but when they arrive they are surprised to find themselves the lunch! Cooked in the caves behind the run-down shack!” Cliff jested to lighten the mood. He used his epic storyteller voice that he knew would be a hit with Jesse.
“I’m hungry to know the conclusion of that story,” Jesse said with a straight face and then a devious smirk.
Cliff chuckled and tried to add to the pun chain, “It was a tense meat–ing . . .”
“Seriously Cliff, don’t encourage him.” Davis butt in. He never got the comedic value of puns. “This is some serious stuff you just laid on us.”
“What?” Cliff said with an innocent expression and a shrug. “Funny is funny! It doesn’t matter how dire things are, good humor should always be appreciated.”
“You are the only one that ever finds him funny.” Davis said agitated. “Alex, am I right?”
“Don’t put me in the middle of this, most of the time I don’t even realize he is making a joke!” Alex replied.
“My point exactly.” Davis concluded with satisfaction.
“I find it funny, and I really don’t think that is ever going to change. Besides, Jesse’s mind is just geared that way, he is a freak of humor!” Cliff defended.
“It’s true.” Jesse said with a shrug, “When there is a joke to be said, I just regurgitate it.” Jesse gave his smirk again but everyone at the table including Cliff had missed the joke. He sagged his shoulders in a resigned manner.
The blond waitress came up to the table. She was the owner’s daughter and had served them more meals in the last two years than Cliff had cooked in his life. She looked over the table with a smile, this group always left great tips. “Should I just order your regulars?” she asked as she put the drinks she knew they would order on the table. Davis and Cliff nodded.
“I’d like to order something a little different today,” Jesse said with a smile. He had been feeling a little desperate lately and had always thought the waitress was attractive. “I’d like to order my regular with a side of your phone number. If you will let me, I’ll take your order tomorrow night.”
Jesse’s advance seemed to lighten the mood at the table much more than his joke. Cliff did his best not to bust out laughing. Jesse had taken on a falsely confident look and his voice sounded like it was forced to use a deeper tone than usual. Davis was looking proud and Alex was looking back at the waitress expectantly—she loved this kind of stuff!
“Uh . . .” The waitress stammered. She blushed a deep red before answering. “I’m flattered but I’m busy tomorrow night. Let me think about it.” She looked over at Alex, who was plainly disappointed in her answer, possibly more so than Jesse. “Did you want your regular as well?”
“Yes please,” Alex said reluctantly.
Davis slapped Jesse on the back as the waitress walked away. “Way to put yourself out there, buddy!” he whispered so the waitress wouldn’t hear. “If I was six years younger . . . and didn’t know that her father would kill me in one of the hundred different ways he knows, I would have asked her out too.”
Jesse frowned. “I didn’t think about that.” He whispered back. His back was throbbing from Davis’ss slap. But it was what Davis said that made his face go pale. “You don’t think he would do anything to me for just asking, right?”
Davis gave Jesse a serious look. “I doubt he would kill you for that . . . he might take off a limb or two at most.”
“Stop harassing him Davis!” Cliff said while laughing. “Jesse, that was the most awesome thing I have ever seen in my life.”
“I’m proud of you Jesse!” Alex followed, “Don’t give up, you’ll find the right girl!”
“Well it’s not like she said no.” Jesse defended. “She just needs to think about it.” All three of them looked at him as if to say, ‘Please don’t kid yourself.’ “Alright, alright, it is probably better for my health that she turned me down anyway.” He briefly glanced at Davis whose grin was splitting his face in half. Jesse had always thought that Davis’s smile was way too big for his face, which was saying something since his head was proportional to the rest of his body—huge. “Can we get back to the serious conversation now?”
“I never thought I would hear you say those words Jess, I’m honestly quite disappointed in you.” Cliff responded still laughing.
“OK,” Davis said with authority. “Tell me what we know and what we suspect.”
“We met Lena through a mechanical malfunction that no one was able to replicate.” Cliff started.
“She seems to have knowledge of history that we have all forgotten. I have tried on numerous occasions to fact check some of her historical recounts, but I have only found references to a few of them.” Alex added. “The references I did find were among the oldest documents known to exist, so the rest of the stories I suspect are true.”
“Her cooking is unnaturally delicious.” Jesse smiled as he thought about it. “And besides that, she lives on the most valuable piece of undeveloped real estate in Dengrin, yet only lives in a glorified shack.”
Cliff looked over at Alex—he almost did not want to say this part knowing how she felt about the Sanctum. “We suspect she is involved with the Sanctum in some way. Someone claiming to work for them called her commander and had a strange conversation where the destruction of Denoria was suggested.” Cliff pulled a small metal cube out of his pocket and put it on the table. “There are also these. You should check your cars, she put these on them during our last visit, said she did it so the gates would automatically open for us and she would not have to walk down the hill to open it every time.”
Davis frowned. “I know what that is, and it is not a remote gate opener. It is a GPS tracking signal.” Davis picked it up and looked it over for a minute before breaking it open. “And it is wired for remote data retrieval. Having this thing near Castle Dengrin is a serious security breach.”
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Davis put the device back on the table and Jesse quickly snatched it up. Jesse had a borderline genius level IQ and was the go-to guy for anything technology or science related. “This device stores the data and then downloads it automatically to some kind of system when it is within range. If the gate recognizes it then that is most likely where the data transfer takes place. I doubt there is much here since the data would have been dumped on your last visit, but if Davis or I have a similar device on our vehicles I can download the data and see what kind of information she is looking for.”
Davis looked intense—no one in the group had ever seen him look this serious or dangerous. “Can you reconfigure it to download information off of her systems since they are already linked? It would be great to get an idea of what we are dealing with.”
“I think I can, but the capacity on these are not very high. I could program each one to look for something specific, but a generic data dump would not work unless I could hook it up to an external hard drive.” Jesse responded.
Cliff did not have the depth of knowledge that Davis and Jesse had, but he knew how to put two and two together. “OK, since I don’t have a car then we probably have three devices to work with, assuming that Jesse and Davis are also tagged. Lena invited us to dinner, and I think we should take her up on it next week. That would give us some time to prepare. Two devices should be reprogrammed like you said and attached back to the proper cars. I think we should search for anything to do with the caves and this awakening we heard mentioned. The third we should wire to a hard drive and have installed on a car that will have ‘engine trouble’.” Cliff put the last two words in air quotes to emphasize that it would be fake engine trouble. “The driver moves to one of the other cars and we leave that one in place at the gate to download data.”
Davis nodded his head approvingly. “It’s a solid plan, I like it. I am going to check out the cave myself between now and then. If there is a security risk to Denoria involved here I want to know sooner rather than later.”
“What if you are caught?” Alex asked concerned.
The smell of their food interrupted the conversation before anyone even saw the waitress coming over. Lena’s cooking may have been the best, but this place was a close second. The waitress smiled at Jesse as she put his food in front him and dropped off a drink refill. Jesse began to sweat nervously, but neither of them said anything and she walked away back to the kitchen.
Davis took a big bite out of his Colossal Burger. The burger really did look colossal in anyone’s hand but that of Davis. Next to him it looked average size. “I once snuck into the imperial palace of Chengar without getting caught. I wouldn’t worry about me.”
Alex looked over at Cliff and mouthed “Who is this guy?” to him silently.
“Yeah . . .” Cliff cut in. “Remember Davis used to be Special Forces? Well I may not have mentioned that before his retirement he was actually our top operative.”
“Holy crap!” Jesse muttered in reverence. “I had no idea. What was it like?” As soon as the question left Jesse’s lips, Davis put his burger down, got up, and walked out of the restaurant. Cliff glared at Jesse. “What? What did I say?”
“He doesn’t talk about it, even to me.” Cliff said with a touch of sadness in his voice. “He got medically retired for PTSD, whatever happened on his last mission was pretty bad. Please don’t bring it up again.”
“He brought it up, I was just asking the inevitable question . . . but yeah, copy that.” Jesse said sadly. He never liked the guy, but his level of respect for him had just gone through the roof.
Davis came back inside and dropped two more magnetic boxes on the table. “Sorry about that, I should never have brought up Chengar. I don’t like to talk about my experiences, but I can’t just run away from them either. I’ll tell you some other time, I promise, but not today.” Davis picked up what was left of his burger and went back to work on it. Like nothing had happened.
“Well, it looks like I will be reconfiguring these while you investigate the caves.” Jesse said as he stuffed the three cubes in the pocket of his work vest. He had forgotten to take it off after his last bus tour.
“I am going to try to get Alden Foren to use his newfound governing circle powers to help us investigate Lena. They have access to more detailed land records and there might be something in their sealed files that could help us.” Alex added with a definitive nod.
Cliff looked up jealously. “You are getting to know Alden Foren well?” He asked as his heart sank.
“We have run into each other a few times at the castle cafeteria. I crashed a few meals my dad was having with him as well. He’s a smart guy!” She responded cheerfully. Alden Foren was one of thirteen members of the governing circle. The circle was made of six military, six civilians, and a seventh military who was appointed commander-in-chief by the six civilians. General Reminir was the current commander-in-chief, and his primary job was to advise and cast tie breaking votes. This did not happen often however, since the six civilians could override his vote if all six were unanimous.
The civilians were broken up into three pairs centered on specializations. The three specializations were technology, economy, and agriculture. Each pair was separated into a junior member and a legacy member. To get elected to the council as a junior member a candidate would have to be younger than thirty-five, and to be elected as a legacy member the candidate would have to be older than fifty.
This dynamic balanced the older and wiser politicians that were not as up to speed with newer innovations and more averse to change with a younger, up-and-coming professional in the field that had a fresh understanding of what needed to change. This current structure for the governing circle had been in place for over fifty years and had been wildly successful so far. Alden Foren was almost thirty years old and had been elected as the junior specialist in technology for the governing circle.
Jesse also looked jealous, but for a different reason. “Man, I would like to pick that guy’s brain. I was just reading an article written by him in Technology Today on robotic programing algorithms and the guy is a bonafide genius. I can’t believe you get to eat lunch with guys . . .” Jesse felt pain shoot up through his shin. He looked up and saw the dark look on Cliff’s face. Cliff had just kicked him in the shin! It took a moment for him to realize that he was talking up a guy that might be a potential alternate love interest for Alex, something that Cliff certainly did not want. “Uh anyway, chatting with him would probably be boring for you Alex, all that tech talk must be exhausting.”
“Actually, he is really interesting to talk to!” Alex countered obliviously. “His take on world events is fascinating. The only time he uses technobabble is when he is chatting about something specifically with my dad, but I usually leave when that starts up.”
Cliff looked like he had just been sucker punched in the gut. He felt that way too. He was almost done with his food but his appetite to finish the rest was gone. “Want to look into the Sanctum connection with me Alex?” he said with forced excitement. He had never thought he might be this close to losing her. “Maybe we can track down Arelia and verify the connection between the Sanctum and Lena.”
“Sure!” Alex squeaked. She looked far too excited. “I feel like a spy from the movies with all this cloak and dagger stuff!”
“Well, stop.” Davis said firmly while slamming the table. All the plates and cups jumped an inch in response to his massive hand. “If Denoria is in danger as we suspect, this isn’t a game and it sure as hell isn’t a movie! If there is real conspiracy here, we could be putting our lives in danger just by sticking our noses in it!” Davis looked around to see that the other patrons and the waitress were staring at him. Alex looked ashamed—it was apparent she never thought that this could be dangerous.
“Hey!” Cliff yelled in a whisper, not wanting any more attention from the rest of the restaurant. “Lay off! She was just excited that she might be able to make a difference. People like u
s see people like you and Alex’s father as heroes that use their lives to make a difference and keep us safe, we just don’t realize the sacrifices you make and the danger you put yourself in when you make that kind of commitment. Now this whole thing may amount to nothing and we may have just overheard half of a conversation out of context, or we may end up being heroes or martyrs. Being excited about the possibility of making a difference is not something we should be ashamed of!” Speaking in a normal volume voice again, Cliff added. “I’ll go with Alex to see what Alden has to say.”
Davis sat back and took a deep breath. “Yeah, you’re right. I just don’t want you to run into this blindly and end up dead. I can’t take any more dead friends.” The sadness in his eyes was apparent, so Alex got up and gave Davis a big hug. Davis tried to push her off for a moment but then just gave in. He looked like he might cry, but before a tear could form he gently pushed Alex away and looked over at Cliff. “I know you want to stay with Alex to protect her, but she will have better luck getting Alden to do what she wants without you there.” Cliff’s face sank—he knew Davis was right, but he did not want to send Alex into the hands of this genius alone.
“Don’t worry Cliff, I’ll be safe. And thanks for looking out for me Davis.” She said after Davis pushed her away. “How about we all have a campout tomorrow night in the castle? We can camp on top of my tower since the weather is supposed to be nice and catch each other up on what we have learned.”
“That’s a great idea!” Cliff responded trying to regain his enthusiasm. “I’ll bring the fuel for the fire and some marshmallows!”
“You can count me in,” Davis said. He sounded a little chipper as well. “I’ll be checking out the caves tonight so I should have something to report. I can also take you guys to the range this afternoon if you want to get in some practice shooting. I’ll provide the guns and ammo.”
“If this might get dangerous then that is a good idea. Count me in.” Cliff said quickly. And I might need something to take my mind off of Alex while she meets with Alden, he sighed for a reason that was not readily apparent to the group. “You should join us this time Jess, you never know when you might need to know how to handle a firearm.”