“Hang On,” Jason Said
a rainy, thundery night- we had the wrong mutagens
- “How long can you go without sleep?”
- eating pasta barehanded
- if you call out his name
Tune in next time part 542 Click Here for Earlier Installments
“Hang on,” Jason said, still staring at his thumb. “I think a little of the color did come off.”
Arlo squawked as the Tessabot wrenched his foot upwards so she could study the tattoo on the sole. “At higher magnification, multiple layers are apparent. The underlying design does appear to be a real tattoo, with a durable marker of some kind used to apply the lyrics over it. The original tattoo is also writing of some kind, but tiny.”
“You’re hallucinating,” Arlo grunted. “It’s just the wedding rap lyrics.”
“Tessa,” I interjected, “tell us what it says.”
She emitted a descending warble that ended with what was unmistakably, “cha-cha-cha.” She cleared her throat. “A direct translation from Low Svenborgian might not be possible. To summarize, it’s a fable concerning a sort of genie. They say that if you call out his name thrice while eating pasta barehanded he will appear and grant you seven half-wishes.”
“This has to be a coded message,” I muttered. From the shifty looks both Jason and Arlo threw me, I knew I had muttered too loud.
But Tessa nodded. She asked me, “How long can you go without sleep?”
“Never made it more than four days. Why?”
“She wants the half-wishes for herself!” Arlo snarled. “Don’t listen to her.”
I shook my head at him. I looked to Tessa and waited.
“It’s not a message,” she said. “It’s a key to something stored in my memory, something that should now be fully accessible to me but I guess we had the wrong mutagens in the lab the night they were encrypting that data. It must have been a rainy, thundery night.” She stared into the middle distance, still hanging onto Arlo’s ankle. “Anyway, there is still a chance to unlock it if I can sync up with someone’s alpha waves, which is easier to do when you’re sufficiently sleep-deprived.”
bonus points for using them in reverse order