Friday Night Jams
Xisuma knows something is different about tonight when he packs up his guitar and Gordon's still there.
Gordon doesn't stay to chat often. Sometimes he'll go to the bar on the corner and get a beer but as he's fond of pointing out "I'm OLD, I need my beauty sleep!"
Xisuma doesn't actually know how old Gordon is but he certainly doesn't play like it. The man could drum circles around some of the very best in the scene. He'd claimed his education was all high school marching and X can hear it in how he tickles the snare and rolls a beat but ask him for improv and you'd find your heart in a rhythm that should kill you, if not for how it rolls endlessly on.
"Hey, X," Gordon calls as the younger man lifts his case. "You headed for the bus?"
"Yeah, long day tomorrow."
"I'll walk with you," Gordon says, stuffing his sticks in his back pocket. The kit belongs to the church but Gordon always has his own sticks.
"Don't you have a car?"
"A man's gotta help save the planet sometimes!" Gordon says and Xisuma laughs, waiting for the other man to catch up. They step into the cool evening, an exspanse of closed convenience stores and twenty four hour laundry mats casting dim glow over the cracked pavement. It's the ass-end of Hermiton but that's how Xisuma likes it- a once a month jam with others who just want to make music with no strings attached.
He has far too many strings to think about on a daily basis.
As they walk, Gordon figits. He's a fidgiter by nature, so X isn't too concerned. When they approach the bus terminal, though, Gordon says, "X?" Soft, serious.
Gordon isn't a serious man. He has a new story every time someone asks him how he lost his eye. He once spent ten minutes setting up a bucket prank on their rock pianist. Xisuma doesn't think he's ever seen Gordon with anything less than six o'clock shadow.
So the warning bells- another part of Xisuma's too many strings- are clanging as he says, painfully casually, "Yeah?"
"If I told you I needed help with something that didn't have anything to do with jams, what would you say?"
"I suppose I'd ask what it was you needed help with," Xisuma says, already wondering what kind of access Gordon is looking for, who he's working for, whether he was always working for them.
"Okay, valid," Gordon says. "if I- extrapolated- and said it might put you out of a job, what about then?"
Xisuma turns, one hand already swiping across Gordon who is gone and he is already feeling sick, wondering what he's going to do, how he's going to explain this to Lich, how they are going to sigh and say how inevitable it was.
the next moment he is in his own void.
Which should be impossible.
Xisuma looks around, at the comforting black-purple dark where he can store information in streams of song and code that whisper unending until he needs one, a single string.
Then his guitar case disappears.
Gordon is suddenly beside him, panting a little. He puts his head down, holds up a finger at the bewildered Xisuma.
"Had- to hide your axe," he pants, "so I popped home- left it in my office. Damn it I liked that chair, X, you'd better hope it's still on the street."
"What is happening?" Xisuma asks because no one enters his voids without permission, without conveyance, he is Voidwalker and these are his paths.
"A work meeting," Gordon says. "So, how much do you like your boss?"
-three days ago-
"SON OF A BITCH!"
"Skizz?" Tango asks, concerned. Cub frowns up at Mr. House. "What's the issue?" He asks. "The idea is sound."
"Yeah I know," Skizz says, staring at the screen. "but I know that guy."
"...he isn't a field hero how would you know him?"
"He's the guitar player for my monthly jam band at the Church of the Holy Block! We've been playing together for like SIX YEARS"
"You're shitting me," Tango says. Skizz shakes his head. "I am not! That's X, he's got the ghost face sticker on his axe, he shreds, dude, it's amazing- you're telling me X is VOIDWALKER?!"
"I imagine he'll have much the same thing to say about Gordon," Cub says conversationally. Tango begins humming 'it's a small world after all'.
Skizz whacks him over the head.
-
"So," The Goat says lightly as he puts another card on the pile, "do you think the conversation is going well?"
Tango shrugs. "Skizz is a people guy. If he can't talk X around no one can."
"Assuming Voidwalker doesn't turn him into a string of gibberish and hide him in the junk code of his void," Zed points out.
"Yeah there's that." Tango says. "But if he does Impulse kills him and then we waste a loop. Go fish."
"How are all of you this calm?" Grian demands from his perch near a window, where he's monitoring Gem's patrol. "I mean if this goes sideWAAA-!"
"Sorry, G," Skizz says as he sticks his head through the vertical slit in the world that has just opened between window and card table. "Nice going, X, directly in! Can you do that with any coordinates?"
"Just about." Xisuma peers out of the slit beside Skizz. "Hello, Cub. I have some questions."
"I might have some answers," Cub says easily. Then, "Go fish, by the way."
"This game is stupid." The Goat mutters.
"I've always been more of a rummy guy myself," Xisuma says as he and Skizz step out of the cut in reality, which closes seamlessly behind them. "Now, before I get my guitar back- what's this about ruining the Life Games?"
