Dear people reading this thread in the future. This was Audioslavia's 1093rd forum post. It has been an honour to write with you all. Here's to 1093 more.
OOC disclaimer: This was posted in the WGPC RP thread too. It is getting posted here because it forms the backstory for this cycle's RP series. Also, because the WGPC post will receive no RP bonus, I don't feel like I'm being lazy by posting this here too, in it's slightly longer form.
Mo Jepsen winced as his arse buzzed along to Beethoven's
9th. The shock almost caused him to drop his spider plant. The shock almost caused him to bump into Oliver's old desk. The shock certainly did cause his laptop to slide from under his arm and fall onto the hardwood floor and spread itself across as wide a distance as possible, as if its multitude of state-of-the-art components had been plotting their escape ever since the day they were forced into the laptop case in that clean room four years previous. Mo stopped, carefully placed his spider plant and cardboard box onto Oliver's long-empty desk, sighed, counted to six, and fished his phone out of his back pocket.
No name for the caller. Unrecognised number. This could only be one person. This was it. This was the
other phone call that he had been dreading for weeks. Ordinarily he'd have had to hold his breath, count to ten and try not to die from the panic. As things stood, he merely gutlaughed a sad, 'why me' laugh and flabbered at the picture of the green phone. He stared at it before putting to his ear, as if he was half expecting it to emit a green toxic gas and suffocate him, sixties Batman style.
"Cattaneo" said the voice. "Sign Cattaneo"
"I'll call him"
"No. Go to him."
"But.."
"Go or no pay"
The phone went dead. Mo Jepsen sighed, counted to six, and realised he was in for a journey. Yeah, it was only three blocks away, but he'd be running circuits of the entire island inside his stomach all the way there.
Fired from his dream job and breaking one of the codes of an international racing competition on the same day. There was also a chance he was breaking some Nimbian law by being complicit to a foreign crime, but truth be told he didn't even know if there had been a crime at all. All he knew, in his role as 'guy who tells the Sheik the stuff that he's told to tell the sheik or he doesn't get paid', was that the result of the Nexus test would come to him, and he would pass it to the Sheik. He didn't know if the result was common knowledge yet or if the guy had been camping out at the
A.E.T.D. for days with a long range camera. Either way, he knew what he had to do.
As he left the offices of the
Kjelstad Mizmar newspaper it almost didn't occur to Mo that, not only was he was leaving them for the last time, but he was the last journalist out of there entirely. The newspaper had folded, if you'll pardon the pun, the week previous, and everyone had left but for the younger ones on the month-long, low-paid rolling contracts who had been tasked, for the next week and a half, with writing as much content as they physically could so that the newspaper could run in print for another fortnight, recouping a little of its losses in the process. It did occur to him that he was leaving his destroyed laptop on the floor of the offices, but he was sure there would be nothing incriminating in there.
He steadied the spider plant and the box in one arm and fumbled for his car keys with the other, thumbing the button as he found them and listening for the tell-take thunkitty-thunk of the doors unlocking. He nudged open the boot and put his belongings there, before kerchunking it closed with his arm and beeping the car back into the sleep mode with his thumb.
He turned to look at the building he'd be walking to. Well, part of it. To look at all of it without craning his neck he'd need to get back in his car and drive three quarters of a mile away. The
Burj Berg hadn't been built by Abdul Yamin, but it had been gleefully bought by him once
Hygolje had decided that a quarter-mile-high obsidian-and-gold monolith was not exactly the sort of image befitting a Big Oil company in the current geopolitical climate and had moved back to their old concrete bunker in Oljestaden. Abdul Yamin, who'd long coveted the tower, and who'd had a hand round the back of his sofa anyway searching for spare change with which to buy Hygolje outright, had bounced for joy when he realised he'd only need to buy the building, and so wouldn't have to overturn one of the marble
chaise longue looking for the other bajillion dollars. For him, a Big Oil company in a large, black tower wasn't a public relations nightmare but, instead, a sign of his final victory in the island's prize marrow measuring contest and a base to launch his various other operations. A hotel chain here, a casino there, a lobbying agency here, a WGPC Racing Team there, a department that oversaw the manipulation of newspapers here, a secret line to the
Kjelstad Mizmar there. Not that the newspaper had known anything about it, of course. It was Mo and Mo along who had been in the
'Sheik''s pocket, along with countless other people, most likely including the monosyllabic guy on the other end of that afternoon's phone call.
On the way to the building, Mo stopped for an espresso. If there was one thing he preferred about Kjeligsted it was that they had adopted Padian coffee culture (stand at the bar, pay a single dollar for an espresso, drink it in forty seconds, waggle your eyebrows at the pretty clientel and try to avoid the scournful stare of the Gary Larson Woman behind the bar) rather than Catharan coffee culture (queue for half an hour, order a double-marshmallow mochadolphin, sit in the corner waggling your eyes at your wallet and try to avoid eye contact with literally every single one of the customers). Feeling suitably energized, he finally entered the ground floor of the
Burj Burg and traipsed uneasily up to the girl behind the counter. Five-seven, black hair, blue eyes, clingy white uniform, made up to be three pantones more caucasian than their features would have otherwise lead you to believe. This, he had been told, was the beginning and end of Yamin's uniform policy. The girl gave off an air of being your average bimbo until she opened her mouth and spoke a brand of English so crisp and clear it would shatter on contact with fog and leave no sign of its remnants. Mo's preconception was further ridiculed by her instant greeting of 'Good Afternoon Mr. Jepsen, you appear to be forty seconds later than we had anticipated' despite there having been no introduction and no way she could have known who he was except for the well-oiled machine behind her. The girl politely asked Mo to wait while she phoned through a request to 'upstairs' in Arabic and closed the browser on what looked to have been a French-language news website.
"Mr. Yamin will see you on the one hundredth floor, Mr. Jepsen"
"...Mr. Yamin himself?" asked Mo.
"Yes Mr. Jepsen"
Mo stopped himself from saying
well shittity fuck and instead nodded politely and made his way to the lift. He was pretty sure he heard the young lady speaking Basque on the phone, with no pauses or hesitations, as the doors closed behind him.
Mo looked around for floor 100 and found that the lift only went as far as 53. Shrugging, he pushed that and waited. The lift continued upwards, and upwards, and upwards. Mo noted that, where floor 8 should have been, there was instead a floor named '7b', and that floors nine and ten were instead monickered '8a' and '8b'. Thirteen and seventeen were absent.
The doors to floor fifty-three opened to reveal a large diagram on a 10-by-10 slate of marble, detailing the building's lift-plan. There was, indeed, no lift that went all the way up. He would need to take the green lift up to 80, a blue one up to 97 and, to his utter lack of surprise, a gold one up to the hundredth floor. Each lift lived up to its name. The green lift looked like it had been made by hollowing out a lift-sized emerald and sealing the scratches with mirrors, the blue lift was, to Mo's utter panic, a completely transparent one that operated
outside the building and the gold one appeared to have been willed into existence by God himself on the day that he invented Zsa Zsa Gabor and the Lambourghini. The final lift had also been decorated with women, each of which were five seven, blue-eyed, black-haired and wearing white. Two of them were conversing in Spanish, another two seemed to be talking in medieval Gaelic while a fifth was simply swiping through pages of the manual of a Link V6 WGPC engine on her iPad. The girl looked up at caught Mo staring. Mo turned back towards the door, which, of course, was a mirror, and so the girl managed to catch his eye again as she looked up. She smiled. She smiled the sort of smile that would have floored a charging rhino and forced it to consider diplomacy and the nature of its own brutality. Mo attempted a smile back, through one half of his mouth, and panicked for a second about exactly how he was going to talk to this girl when he was quite sure that, not only was she fifty times as clever as him, but that he had forgotten most of the words he knew but for 'nice' and 'hi'. He was interrupted by the doors opening to reveal a room so white it could have been the queue outside a tearoom. The only things that didn't seem to be white were the shadows of the funiture and the parts of the women that weren't obsfuscated by their white uniform. Oh, and Abdul Yamin's head, which was approaching through the glare.
"Mr. Jepsen, yes? Like the Carly Rae?" beamed the Sheik, winking a whole four times. Mo could manage only a short 'err' before Yamin continued.
"You have information for me?"
"Er, yes" said Mo, stuttering
"And it is?" asked Yamin, still smiling, cocking his head to one side. Behind him, one of the girls did the same thing, although Mo noticed she was holding out her phone and a stylus, about to make note of everything Mo had said. It occurred to Mo that she may even have already written down 'Er. Er. Yes'
"Cattaneo" said Mo, finally. "Cattaneo, sign Cattaneo"
"Splendid!" shrieked the shiek, who gave Mo what would have been a hearty pat on the shoulder if only he could have reached the man's shoulder. Abdul pulled a $100 dollar note out of his inside pocket and tucked it into Mo's jacket, winking four times again as he did so. Mo, who had never seen a $100 bill before, wondered quietly at whether it was an actual banknote or whether it was a symbol of what he was to be paid by whomever he was supposed to take money from for this trip. Suddenly, with a look of horror, the Shiek said 'oh, but no no no!' and whipped the money back out of Mo's jacket. Apologising, he replaced the $100 bill with a $500 one.
"Thank you Mr. Jepsen!" said Abdul, finally, "and Call me Maybe!"
Mo returned to the lift to find, once more, the girl from before. She was stifling a chuckle.
"I'm not Carly Rae Jepsen's brother" said Mo, finally, noticing that he had actually been able to say three words to this girl without either of them being 'hi' or 'nice'.
"I know" said the girl. "I've met Carly Rae Jepsen's brother"
"Oh?" asked Mo
"She played Shiek Abdul's birthday party four years ago" said the girl. "Her brother is a, err, I think you'd say he is a Rasshøl"
"He's.. he's a what?"
"Pardon my French" said the girl, now a little aware that she might have offended Mo. Mo, if anything was confused.
"That was French? 'Rasshurl'?"
"Ah, er, no" said the girl, as the lift doors opened. They rounded the corner to the blue lift. "Rather, Rasshøl is a nordic word. I had assumed that..."
"Ah" said Mo, realizing, "No I, well, I don't have much of my father's language, I'm afraid"
"You have his hair, though" said the girl, smiling the rhino smile once more. She nodded at Mo's eyebrows, if such a thing were possible. Mo, indeed, had bright white facial hair despite the hair on top (and, though he'd never tell, down below) being as ginger a shade of ginger as you could get without resorting to throwing orange paint at a swan. It was a peculiar genetic mark that was especially at odds with his complexion, which he got from his mother's side of the family, who were the sort of family who would call a son Mohammad and insist he never touch a beer or a bacon sandwich in his life.
"Yes. Father's hair, mother's skin. She's from here. Dad was from Jansvej"
"Your mother's skin was that shade of red?" asked the girl, cheekily. Mo nodded. He did have a tendency to go red in the heat, or when he was in an enclosed space, or when he was near an attractive girl, or when he was feeling scared of heights, and especially when all four happened.
"It's the view from this lift"
"Oh" said the girl, "and here I was hoping you were blushing because you were talking to me"
"That's what I said" said Mo, instantly realising it was the absolute best thing he had ever said in his entire life. The doors opened, and the two parted from the glass lift.
"This is me" said the girl. "I work here. Well, the floor below. WGPC offices. The name's Tazz. Tazz Araji"
"Tazz?"
"It's short for Tamzeen. I prefer Tazz."
"I prefer Tazz too" said Mo, realizing he hadn't gone two-for-two on great things to say. Tazz had the good graces to offer a polite laugh.
"This is my card" said Tazz. "Call me, maybe?"
"I will, as long as you never quote Carly Rae Jepsen again" said Mo.
"No deal" said Tazz, smiling, departing, leaving via a plain green door. Mo couldn't help but grin to himself as he found his elevator back to the bottom. He found himself kicking himself that he hadn't asked Tazz why there was no floors 13 or 17, or why the 7b and 8bs, before realizing that that was a stupid thing to be annoyed about.
His arse chose that moment to buzz Beethoven once more. Mo fished the phone from his back pocket. A voice from the other end. A mainlander.
"Mo. Jeremy" said the voice. Mo frowned. Jeremy? Jeremy who? Jeremy Jensen-Fletcher? Maria Cattaneo's countrymate?
"Jeremy Jensen-Fletcher?" asked Mo
"No" said the voice. "The other Jeremy"
"What?" said Mo, confused. It took him a further second to place the man's accent. "Oh" said Mo. "Ohhhhhhh"
"Yep" said Jeremy. "That Jeremy. We need to talk. We noticed your laptop go offline earlier."
"You
what?"
"Oh, good, so that
was an accident" said Jeremy. "I thought you'd found our bug"
"Bug?"
"Yeah, I know, right, 'bug'? What bug? There was never a bug in your laptop of course, how
silly" said Jeremy. Mo felt like he may be being mocked. "All the same, we're going to meet up. We need to inspect your laptop for the bug that almost definitely isn't there"
"Well" said Mo, "It's in pieces on the office floor. Dropped it on my way out. You won't be able to get in, though."
"Oh... oh
please say that again" said Jeremy, "you don't think *I* can get into a locked building. Just you wait. Actually, no, just you watch. I'll meet you outside in ten minutes"
"Fine" said Mo, grimacing and hanging up. First he loses his journalism job, and now he's about to meet the world's most famous journalist? Either side of a Sheik Yamin sandwich with a Tazz dressing? This.. this was a weird day.