#top ten reasons i don't have a driver's license yet:

[wordswithkittywitch]

The Story of Sandwich Guy

For those of you who do not know, I am the mistress of Gold Key in the Barony of Stonemarche in the SCA. For those of you who really don't know, I go to medieval reenacting events, bringing a large assortment of pre-seventeenth-century clothing and loan it out to people so that everyone who comes to the event can be wearing a reasonable attempt at garb, whether they own any or not. It's fun, I get to make a lot of people happy as they rediscover the simple joy of dressing up like knights and princesses (note, they aren't knights and princesses, those are actual ranks in the SCA which one hardly gets at their first event) and I also get to take direct action when people show up without garb, which always has annoyed me.

Now, the largest event in the Barony is Birka. It takes place over a weekend and a couple hundred people attend. A surprising amount of those people are people who haven't even heard of the SCA but saw that there was an event going on in the Expo center and thought twenty bucks for a weekend was a good deal. Often a family or a group of friends all come in together and I'll be helping five people at the same time. Sometimes more than one family at once. So I tend to be very busy the entire time, helping people find outfits and keeping the area tidy. Most of the tidying comes in the form of hanging up the clothes people changed out of so they don't have to carry it, I know how many pieces haven't been returned yet, and they are guaranteed to come back with the loaner garb.

I mention this so that you have some idea of my state of mind when, in the middle of the day, during one of these rushes, a man comes in and asks for help. He had brought his own garb, as had his wife, but unfortunately his wife spilled something on the chemise and had to run up to the hotel room and wash it out. He assured me the chemise was fine, just soaking wet and she was waiting in the hotel room for him to come up with a new one so she could get dressed again. This is fine, this is what Gold Key is there for. I have signs hanging on the wall that explain Gold Key is free to anyone who lost, damaged, or otherwise does not have garb.

The trouble is, he has nothing to trade for the chemise. The wet chemise is hanging in the hotel room being cleaned. She didn't bring mundanes to the event, and he certainly didn't bring them down with him. In the past people have left their hotel keys or driver's licenses, but he had to leave the hotel after this. I asked if he had anything on him he could leave as collateral.

He holds up half a sub, rolled in paper and plastic.

"I really want this sandwich. It's precious to me. I'll come back for it by the end of the day." he promises.

I have three other people I need to help at this point, I'm stressed, and I don't know what to do. For some reason, what I did do was accept the sandwich, give him the chemise, and put the sandwich on the bottom of the coat rack next to a purse that had been left for the same reason. I remind him that the room locks up at ten and he'll need to bring back the chemise by the end of the day, retrieving his sandwich.

The day goes on, I'm kept busy, and I don't think about sandwich guy until about nine-forty-five, when I look over to the rack of checked garments, and there is just a choli that had that morning been worn by one of the skinniest four-year-olds I've ever seen in my life, despite the fact it was made to fit her mother. The mother had wanted to dress her child up as a bellydancer and take her to the hafla but the top was proving pretty much impossible for the kid to wear, and she ended up leaving it in exchange for a tie-front gown I have only ever seen fit an infant before. This kid was tiny. I wonder about both someone taking a toddler to a dance party that ends at ten P. M. and someone who leaves a sandwich in a coat check, not to mention how early I needed to get up the next morning. The hafla ends, the child returns the gown, and the other people in the room promise me that they will lock it when they leave, and if the sandwich guy came back, they would return his sandwich.

The next morning I arrive to take down Gold Key.

The sandwich is still there.

The sandwich has been sitting, unrefrigerated, on a coat rack, in a conference room, in a hotel, for what was closing in on twenty-four hours.

This distresses me, but I have three racks of clothing to sort into used and clean; two clothing racks to disassemble, twelve bins to fill with clothing, load into my sister's car, drive to a storage locker, lock up for the year, and two trash-bag sized bags of laundry to take home. I do not have time to eat lunch, much less worry about someone else's.

Finally, the man returns with the chemise. I pick up the sandwich. I extend it towards him.

"Here's your sandwich." I say.

"I do not want it."

"Take this sandwich away." I insist, more than a little stressed at this point. He took the sandwich. I assume he threw it away, but I do not care. All I care about is that the sandwich was no longer my problem.

I will no longer be accepting perishable items as collateral for Gold Key.

[canaryrecords]

According to George Katsaros’s WWII draft registration, he was born April 3, 1898 in Trikala in western Thessaly, Greece. He arrived through Ellis Island alone on October 20, 1913, and his declared age at the time was 17, which would have meant he was born in 1896-7. His brother Harry (whose also WWII card as well as a 1930 border crossing document also give Thessaly as his place of birth) had preceded him and settled in the Detroit area. Their parents’ names were Kristos (Gustos) and Zoe.

Much of the information about Katsaros’ life that has circulated for decades, drawn from stories he told in the 1980s and 90s when he was an old man, including that he was born ten years earlier on the island of Amorgos with the surname Theologitis appears to be false. For reasons we haven’t ascertained, Katsaros was by then an untrustworthy narrator of his own life. Two serious studies of his biography and music have been undertaken - one in Greek by Panagiotis Kounadis (which, unfortunately, I have not been able to read because of the language barrier) and another in English by Steve Frangos. The interviews conducted by Frangos in 1985 (available through the site of the State Library and Archives of Florida) and that articles Frangos subsequently wrote based on on those interviews are an invaluable resource on Katsaros’s self-mythology and some of what follows in drawn from them.

Katsaros’s memories of his life were often highly detailed and therefore more or less verifiable. There are some vast craters in his narrative and some apparent fantastic invention. It seems reasonable to suppose that he is telling the truth that he was playing at a cafe called the Zapeion in New York around early 1917 when he had an opportunity to go to San Francisco to play at the Minerva and Acropolis Cafes, both on Folsom Street. The Minerva at the time widely promoted its family-friendly French dinners and 30 cent vegetarian lunches while, around the same time, being under close scrutiny by the police for underworld activity, resulting in the 1919 withdrawal of its liquor license after a fire and a drugging-and-theft incident there made the news in quick succession. Police found the cafe in violation of the wartime prohibition act.

Katsaros named no less than 16 towns in California where he played during the period 1917-18 and another dozen in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana, and Nevada in 1918-19. Performing a wide array of traditional Greek (and some Armenian) folk songs for audiences of agricultural workers, port workers, and miners, he spoke in generalities of this period, but the fact that he names specific venues (the Parthenon and the Aphrodite in Salt Lake City, for instance) and some bandmates, including cymbalom players Frank Gazis, who later recorded with violinist Demetrios Poggis, and Spiros Stamos, who later recorded for the Greek Record Company in Chicago, gives credence to his story. He bragged of earning $50 ($750 now) a night, often playing almost continuously from 7PM to 2AM. By 1920, he says, he was back east, playing at the Kentron Restaurant at 1018 Locust Street in Philadelphia. His claim of having been called to sign a 5 year contract with Victor Records in 1919 seems to be fabricated or at least unverifiable, as were his descriptions of a tours to Mumbai, India (via Australia, Burma, Singapore, and other locations) or his assertion of a 1924 trip to Algeria, Tunis, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa. "My records, they went all over the world," he said. "From every place in the United States and South America and Europe [...] they pay me and I take a boat and I go. Playing for the big concerrts. I play for the churches, for the rich people." But he hadn't actually made any records yet.

We can be sure of two significant events in the Summer of 1927. On June 6 and 16, he made his first recordings for Victor across the bridge from Philadelphia in Camden, New Jersey, resulting in his first issued disc, a 12” with the zeibekiko “Elleniki Apolausis (Greek Pleasure)” on one side and “A Kakoorga Eli (Cruel Hearted Elli)” on the flip. And then, at 29 years old, he married a 20 year old woman named Ouranea (b. Dec. 25 1907; d. April 28, 1984). Years later, she told a newspaper that she was the niece of Theodoros Pangelos who had become President of Greece in April 1925 in the aftermath of a coup, only to be deposed August 1926 in a counter-coup.

By June 24, 1928, George and Oura were in Michigan, where George’s brother Harry lived, for the birth of their first daughter Arete (Rita). During the onset and and deepening of the Great Depression four more children arrived there near Detroit - Steve (Jan. 13, 1930), Cleopatria (ca. 1933), James (ca. 1934), and Paul (April 23, 1936.) Parallel to the growth of their family, George made approximately annual trips to New Jersey, New York City, and Chicago to record. His memory in 1985 of the number of sides he made during that period is pretty close to the facts: 18 for Columbia and 36 for Victor, he said. In fact, he released 8 on Columbia and 33 for Victor as well as an additional 20 or so for Victor that were rejected and unissued. At present, we have evidence of one concert during that period, a fundraiser for the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform under the auspices of a Greek organization in Detroit on December 1, 1931 along with a Greek soprano and pianist. A photo given by Katsaros to the researcher Pangiotis Kounadis in 1987 apparently depicts him with a friend in the early 1930s in Birmingham, England.

His reputation as a seminal force in the development of rebetika, the music of the Greek underworld, based on certain of his 1920s and 30s discs is only part of the story of what he did. The vast majority of what he recorded were his own compositions and many of them spoke plainly of the nightlife, of an empathic eye for modern women, a wicked confidence as a gambler, a powerful appetite for hashish, rough companions, and the hustling all of it entails. He also recorded songs that were comedic or deeply pathetic, as often in tango rhythms or with similarities to American songsters like Jimmie Rogers or Mexican conjunto as they were to the zeibekiko rhythms and quasi-Turkish tonalities of the rebetika demimonde that grew in Athens at the same time. Playing a spruce-topped Martin parlor guitar made in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, his songs were straight-shooting, deeply honest, and totally syncretic of his experience as a Greek-American. There is nothing Hellenistically “purist” about Katsaros’s records, but they are adamantly pure in their relationship to his own sense of himself. That is what made him so unique and, perhaps, what made him one of the very, very few Greek performers to have been able to continue to record at all during the 1930s in the U.S. The 1929 stock market crash had simply ended the recording careers of most the Greek-American performers on records, including for instance Marika Papagika, (with whom Katsaros said he worked in the 30s on the road and characterized as a "very very lovely singer and a very very good person") or made their performances feel like remnants of the “old world." It was Katsaros’ singular approach to his instrument and his plain-talking songwriting, as in his exhortation of Herbert Hoover at the end of his Depression ballad “With Pockets Empty” or his lament for the sick “Mother, I Have Tuberculosis [Consumption]” that gave his records such legs that they were regularly repressed, year after year into the 1940s.

Katsaros claimed to have recorded another 24 sides for Decca in the 1930s-40s, but we have no evidence of those having been released. We know that he made about 10 sides for the Gary, Indiana independent label Grecophone and then in the 1940s about six sides for the New York Metropolitan label (related to Adjin Asllan’s Balkan label) and four or more for Standard (run by Tetos Demetriades, who had previously been the head of the Foreign division of Victor in the 1930s and had championed Katsaros then).

In 1940 his family of seven was living in Wayne, Michigan in a heavily Polish neighborhood along with a 51 year old boarder, who, like George, was making $1,900 ($35,000 today) a year working six days a week as a switchman for the Grand Trunk Railroad between Six Mile and Nine Mile of Detroit. The census that year also counted them at another house in Tarpon Springs, Florida where a "John Katsaros" is listed as the head of the household was working as a driver. Katsaros spent the Summer of 1943 playing hotels in the Catskills - the Monte Carlo, the Olympia, and the Sunset. Performing was lucrative enough that he and Oura got their picture in the Detroit Free Press that November for having bought a total of $842 in War Bonds (about $12,500 today), and his occupation was mentioned as “nightclub performer.” But on February 7, 1945, they divorced. He was 46; she was 37. A few years earlier the German occupying forces in Athens had killed his mother for having hidden two American servicemen. Her house was burned. George’s sister Sophia survived and later emigrated to the U.S.

By 1950, he was living in Brighton, Massachusetts at 100 Washington Street. On his way home just before 5 in the morning in November, 1952 Katsaros was robbed at gunpoint. The two muggers grabbed $150 in small bills from his inner jacket pocket but, he said, neglected to check his pants, where he had another $2,000 in cash.

Meanwhile, back home, George and Oura’s eldest child was in the papers. Having been drafted in 1949 to the Korean war, he’d been called back for another year of service as an enlisted infantryman in 1950. On February 12, 1951 he was captured and held as a prisoner of war until August 1953. He was 23 years old when he was reunited with his mother and siblings, living at 2961 Hanley St in Hamtramck, Michigan, including his younger brother James who had also served in Korea. Every member of the family is mentioned in the press notices of his joyful return except for his father.

Katsaros worked in the late 50s in Chicago in Boston at the Club Zara at 475 Tremont St. According to researcher Amy E. Smith, the Club Zara might have had mob ties. On May 6, 1960, 25 days of police surveillance a resulted in the dispersal of a crowd of 300 people at midnight and the arrest of seven women (five of them dancers in their 20s) and five men (including the maitre d, the manager, and an Armenian singer) under charges of “participating in or contributing to an immoral show.” Whether Katsaros was present that night or was even still working there at the time, we don't know. He said in 1985 that he’d been one of its cofounders and took credit for hiring the club’s first bellydancer “Morocco.” The trial that resulted from the raid was a media circus, and all but one of those arrested was fined between $200 and $1500. Four of the dancers were given 3 to 6 months in prison. One dancer lost custody of her eight year old daughter. The club lost its liquor license. The District Attorney told the press “This is filth, real filth. It’s about time we get rid of that show.” If they’d been looking for evidence of underaged employees or other illegal activities, the catalyst for the raid was when one dancer’s bra straps snapped.

Whether or not Katsaros was still in Boston when the raid happened, by about 1962 he’d moved to Holiday, Florida near Tarpon Springs, a town founded in the 16th century as a Greek sponge fishing village. Through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, he performed sporadically at Greek community events and restaurants, often with the accordion player John Gianaros whom he’d known since the 40s back in New York. Katsaros was getting old with several lifetimes’ worth of experiences and songs in the head, still covered in a thick pile of of kinky hair that he kept vainly under a net at home.

When a new generation of Greeks got hip to the 1920s-30s material of the old dope-smoking hipsters, they found him there in Florida. At 80-something years old, he wanted to know where the money was. In 1985, he asked Steve Frangos about how to collect royalties on his recordings from 50 years earlier or how to get a new record deal. In 1988, he traveled to Greece to perform and gave interviews. His old music was reissued. In March 1995, he was flown again to Greece to be honored by the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs at a widely-broadcast concert and spoke and played for his countrymen (now available on YouTube).

When he died at home in Holiday, having outlived practically everyone who could have remembered him, on June 22, 1997 at the age of 99, newspapers around the world told an incredible story about 109 year old badass, a walking antique, who had been everywhere and done everything. Among them, the researcher Aydin Chaloupka noticed a mention in the Pappas Press that Katsaros had a birth certificate from Amorgos for one Yiorgos Theologitis born in 1888 that he'd had authenticated and showed visitors, letting them make copies of it. The story he told that his last name Katsaros was a stage name referring to his his hair ("katsaros" means "kinky" or "curly" in Greek) might hold true if his brother, a grocer in Detroit, didn't share the same name.

Why would Katsaros lie about his date and place of birth and go the trouble of obtaining someone else's birth certificate? We can only speculate, but it is not out of the question that there was something in his life that he did not want to catch up with him even as he attained some notoriety in the late 1980s. Perhaps is was the family he left behind in Detroit in the mid-40s. Perhaps it was the authorities for something he'd done (or felt he'd done) wrong. Perhaps it was some of the underworld characters he'd crossed paths with in the course of his career. Maybe the birth certificate was an insurance policy so that, if someone knocked on his door, he could say "you've got the wrong guy. I'm not George Katsaros, born 1897 in Thessaly. I'm Yiorgos Theologitis, born 1888 on Amorgos." Plausible deniability.

Something is true. But George Katsaros was probably not the person who would have told you.

[im-an-anxious-wreck]

Memories Aren't Important... Right?

Chapter Ten • Virgil

Word count: 3123

MAI...R? chapter collection

First | Previous | Next

-

They had a brief argument discussion about who would drive Patton's van —Virgil won as Remus didn't have a license (for good reason, chaos certainly lived up to her chaos pronouns) and Logan was not the most reliable driver—, and finally set off.

They quickly arrived at the location that Janus had given him, although Virgil highly doubted that Janus had thought it would've been needed so very quickly.

It wasn't until Virgil had gotten to the door that he realised that he didn't have a key.

"Um, Logan, does one of your gadgets happen to have a lockpick?"

"Ah, that's a good idea. I just found a spare key to the other base."

"Wait, did y'all check your keyrings?" Remus asked, pulling out chaos' keyring and flipping through the three keys.

"Oh…"

"Ah, what an excellent idea," Logan admitted. "I hadn't thought of looking for the key alongside my house key, but that's probably what the extra key was."

Virgil was just barely able to catch Remus rolling his eyes. She tried one of the keys that didn't have a house printed on it. "Huh, well, it wasn't that one." Chaos tried the other one and cheered when the door swung open. "After you, gentlemen."

The first room was quite big as it was an open style plan, a couch and TV were to the right, and to the left was the kitchen/dining room section of it.

Down the hall were five doors. One lead to the bathroom; one was an art room with a beanbag in the corner —most likely for Remus—; an office —judging by the decorations (or rather, lack thereof) it was Janus'—; yet another room had a lot of soothing and relaxing things —lavender spray, a beanbag chair, blankets, its own AC unit, the desk even had some colouring books and coloured pencils—; and the last room had a desk with three monitors and a whole sewing corner.

There were also three superhero costumes on mannequins in another corner, one purple and black with a rather big stormcloud that had a bolt of lightning coming out of it on the chest; another was quite flowy and in green and black with a symbol of a silver crown that had eyeballs with green irises instead of jewels, the symbol was right above where the wearers heart would be, and draped across the chest of the costume, opposite to the symbol, right to left, was a sash made out of green, sparkly tulle; the last costume was black with yellow accents, and under one end of the capelet was a two headed snake symbol.

Janus' costume was the only one with gloves —in his typical lemon yellow, of course— as gloves made it more difficult for Virgil and Remus to control their powers. Sure, Virgil could still shoot lighting, but it was harder to direct where it should go, and he couldn't afford to lose any precision.

Wait, how did it know that's why Remus didn't have gloves either? Whether the knowledge was subconscious, or he was getting a bit of his memories back, it was difficult to tell.

Virgil's mask was a dark purple, Remus' was a deep green, and Janus' was just plain black. One of Janus' bowler hats sat on top of his mannequin's head.

Janus' superhero costume was so much like his usual attire that it was a wonder he hadn't been caught yet. Suspicion did seem to slide right off of him though, Virgil had seen it happen.

A strange thought hit Virgil; If they all worked together, then why did they have two separate bases?

Virgil frowned. "Yo, guys?"

"Yes?" Logan replied.

"Don't y'all think it's weird how all of Janus', Remus', and my stuff is here, and how absolutely none of Logan's, Patton's, or Roman's stuff is."

"Ah, Patton's, Roman's, and my 'stuff' —as you put it— are in the downtown base."

"Yeah, I know that. But don't you think it's weird how it's all perfectly separated? Like seriously, have y'all seen a single thing here of Logan's, Patton's, or Roman's?"

"Nope! Not a thing," Remus confirmed.

"Exactly! And Logan, did you see anything of ours or Janus' there?"

"Well… no, but I'm not sure what you're insinuating. Everything seems to just be very well organized. Furthermore, they did say that when Remus moved out of the dorm he shared with Roman, chaos met you and Janus when she moved in with the both of you, and Roman similarly when gold moved in with Patton and I."

"So?"

"So, you, Remus, and Janus were probably closer friends, and Roman, Patton, and myself were closer. It's most likely split this way because one, it couldn't all fit in one space alone, and two, was probably split the way it was based on closeness." Logan pulled out one of his gadgets and began to fiddle with it.

"That was pretty logical, Lo!" Remus declared. "But you missed one thing! There's a little hole in your explanation."

Logan frowned. "Really? What is it?"

"It can't entirely be based on closeness because then why aren't Roman and I in the same one?"

"Probably due to your excessive bickering," Logan said, semi-distracted by the gadget he was messing with.

Virgil snorted. "True."

"Ah, wait, that's actually what Janus said the reason was. You'd already rented your own place, and Remus and Roman can't practice fighting at the same time, as the amount of bickering and competing was just ridiculous."

Virgil felt his eyebrows furrow deeply as he looked at Logan in an odd mix of suspicion and confusion. "Uh, Lo? What was that?"

"What was what?"

"Yeah…" Remus agreed. "That was weird, even to me. Your eyes practically glazed over."

"Right, and… I don't mean this in a negative way, but I know that sometimes your tone of voice isn't… the most emotion filled, but it was like you were reading off of a script in the most monotone voice possible."

"Hm… that's odd, I'm not even sure what I said."

"That J-anus, Virgin, and I had already rented this place, and besides, Ro and I would've gotten too competitive and bickered too much to be able to like, train together."

"...Was that word for word?"

"Oh," Virgil said. "No, that was Remus like, embellishing it and putting it in chaos' own way… wait, Logan, what would you call a session of when two people are like, fighting each other, but just so they'll get better at it?"

"A training session, but I don't see how that's relevan—"

"When you were saying the thing you didn't remember saying, you said that 'Remus and Roman couldn't practice fighting at the same time', but you don't call it that, you'd say that they couldn't train…"

"Oh, shit," Remus muttered.

"So, what would that mean? Why won't it be my words? Where did I get them and why?"

"I… don't know."

Remus hummed. "Well, Janny said them to you… but that doesn't explain the rest."

"Yeah," Virgil agreed before rubbing his forehead. "Ugh, I'm getting a headache just thinking about it… heh, almost feels like I'm not supposed to find… um…"

"Yeah, like we aren't supposed to remember that… uhhh… what were we talking about?"

"I don't remember," Logan said, his voice just above a whisper.

Virgil made a noise of discontent. "Were… were we talking about something important? It felt important."

Logan admitted, sounding almost scared, "I don't know."

Remus blinked a few times, previously hazy eyes gaining focus again. "Well, guess whatever it was, wasn't too important, besides, maybe we'll think of it later."

Logan also seemed to snap out of… whatever that scared and confusionness was. "Just because something's important, doesn't mean that you can't forget it, but I do agree that we might think of it again later. We should return to the task at hand." He looked back at the gadget in his hand with an air of finality.

Virgil hesitated. Whatever it had been… he felt like he'd wanted— needed to know, but it'd slipped away quicker than a fleeting dream upon waking up.

"Ah-hah! This gadget can track things and it already has Patton's and Roman's suits in it!" Logan happily said.

"Ooh, what else can we track?" Remus asked.

"Well," Logan adjusted his mask, "It comes with what seems to be some little tracker disks, so that would mean it could track just about anything, given that I'd put one of these on the person or object first."

Virgil looked over Logan's shoulder and saw a golden crown symbol and a heart with glasses symbol ten miles away. It wasn't hard to extrapolate who each one belonged to. "...Why doesn't it have Jan's?"

Logan's eyebrows furrowed briefly. "I don't know, but he doesn't exactly seem like the type of person who would trust someone, especially one he merely tolerated, with that kind of information."

"True." Virgil paused. "Damn, I really hope they're all okay."

"And I as well."

"Yeah, me too. If Roman's hurt, I'm going to kick the bad guy's ass so fucking hard."

Virgil scoffed. "You'd do that anyway."

"Hah, yeah. Of course." His expression turned down right scary. "No one's allowed to mess with my brother but me."

…

After getting geared up, they finally arrived at the bad guy's base. Virgil parked close enough for a quick get away, but far enough that any goons on guard wouldn't be alerted.

Virgil stifled a groan. "A warehouse. Why is it always a warehouse?"

"Worse," Remus said, "It's a whole group of warehouses."

"Yo, Lo?"

"Remus giggled. "YOLO."

Virgil continued as if he hadn't heard Remus, "Is your tracker specific enough to know which warehouse they're in?"

Logan adjusted his mask. "Yes, but unfortunately they're not in the same one, and we still don't know where Janus is. Considering Patton and Roman are in different warehouses, unless proven otherwise, we must work under the presumption that Janus is in a different one as well."

They decided to start with the warehouses that Roman and Patton were in. Not only could it take a while to look through all the warehouses to find Janus, but they were hoping that Roman and Patton would be conscious and could help them fight.

They sneaked around the goon guards at the front gate by Remus using chaos' powers to construct a set of stairs over the tall, barbed fencing.

Roman's warehouse was closer than Patton's so they started there.

Virgil crept as close as he dared to the goon guards in front of the door to where Roman was being kept, well, at least where gold's tracker was. He took a quiet, quick breath and shot lightning out of his fingers, knocking the goon guards out instantly.

"Okay," Virgil whispered. "You ready?"

Remus gave a thumbs up and Logan nodded.

"Okay, here we go." Virgil slammed open the doors, quickly rushing in and dodging to the side to avoid the electric, blue energy bolts the goon guards almost immediately started shooting.

Remus knocked two down with one of her sparky, green-tinted, transparent tentacle constructs, and Virgil sent a few little bolts of lighting to knock them out.

Logan shot one goon guard down with one of his gadgets and managed to get close enough to kick the other one in the chest. As soon as Logan was out of the way, Virgil shocked the still conscious goon guard.

One last sweep of their surroundings made sure that all goon guards were incapacitated. For a brief second, Virgil panicked when he didn't immediately see Roman, but upon a closer look, he spotted Roman, tied up and unconscious, behind a crate in the corner.

"Roman!" Remus exclaimed, rushing over to chaos' brother's side. "Ro-bro, wake up. I swear to god, if you make me fight this bad dude and his little loyal sluts without you… I'll… I'll… ugh, you asshat. Just wake the fuck up already."

"I…" Virgil trailed off, but Remus and Logan had heard him and looked at him questionatively.

"Did you have an idea, Virgil?"

"Well, skipping past you calling the hired goons 'little loyal sluts'... yeah. Usually I just knock people out, but I thought… maybe I could do the opposite?"

"And you're sure you wouldn't accidentally cause Roman any brain damage?" Logan asked.

"Yeah," Remus agreed. " 'Cause as funny as that might be, I want Roman to at least be able to understand what I'm saying when I'm insulting gold."

"I… am ninety percent sure I wouldn't?"

"Ah, I see." Logan pursed his lips. "Perhaps it would be best to—"

"Oh! Wait, better idea!" Remus declared. "What if you just, at least to start, give him a little shock? What's it called, static electricity? You know, like the kind you get from a warm blanket in the dryer or a metal fridge."

Virgil asked, "You think that'd be enough to wake him?"

"Worth a shot!"

"Agreed. You two tend to Roman, I shall watch the door."

"What, for fun?" Remus joked.

Logan rolled his eyes as he turned and walked away, calling over his shoulder, "To keep watch for any enemies."

Virgil crouched down next to Roman's shoulder, bringing just the tiniest bit of electricity to his two extended fingers, and then quickly tapped Roman's cheek.

Roman groaned and scrunched gold's eyes tighter shut. "Elugh, whoever did that, your mom's a hoe."

Remus giggled. "Now now, Ro-bro, that's not a very nice thing to say to Virgie."

Roman's eyes flew open. "What? Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry, Howl's Moving Stormcloud!"

Virgil snorted. "Well, at least we know you're okay. And don't worry about it, Princey. To be fair, my mom's never really been in the picture, and I did just shock you with static electricity, so maybe it wasn't completely unwarranted."

"Oh, is that what that was?" Roman, with Remus' help, shakily sat up and Remus began to work on getting gold's restraints off. Roman looked around the mostly empty room and frowned. "Wait, where are we— Shit! Is Patton, Janus, and Logan okay?"

Virgil said, "Well, Logan's keeping watch right now, but Patton and Janus are being held elsewhere. We're gonna rescue them after we make sure you're okay."

"Hah, I suppose it's my turn to be the damsel in distress."

Remus barked a laugh. "That's definitely you, Ro, Ro, Ro Your Boat."

"How are you feeling, Princey?"

Remus pulled the last of the rope off and Roman stretched.

"Ah, much better. And hmm, I think I feel okay. That beam they shot me with… knocked me out fast, but it doesn't feel like there's any residual side effects. I just feel like I woke up from a long nap."

"I'm glad."

"Good, Ro-briar-patch, 'cause we could… use your help fighting these little goonians or whatever ya wanna call them. Virgil didn't like my suggestion."

"Yeah, 'bad guy's little loyal sluts' isn't really what I'd use… just saying."

"Remus," Roman scolded tiredly.

"What! It was a good nickname to me! But anyway, going past my brilliant and creative naming, glad you're up for fighting because we still need to defeat Mr. Baddy, and rescue Patty-wacky and DJ-anus."

…

Watching Remus and Roman fight together was impressive, at least in Virgil's opinion. Jumping and ducking around each other like they were dancing, they worked in perfect tandemony, their red and green magic swirling through the air like a dancer's sheer scarfs.

A blue energy blast just missed Virgil and he was forcibly reminded that this was very much not a performance and was, in fact, a battle.

More anxiety pooled in his stomach as he took down another baddie. He really couldn't afford to get distracted.

"I'm going to check down this way!" Logan called, quickly dashing out of sight.

"Wh—" Roman sighed. "And he's already gone." Roman backhanded one goon guard and lifted another up with one of gold's constructs. "He doesn't even have any powers."

"And is still getting the hang of his gadgets!" Remus added.

"So you'd think that he'd wanna stay close to those of us who have powers—"

"But no!"

"Exactly! Like, please. Just go off, why don't you?"

Remus didn't turn his head to look at chaos' brother as she began to ask, "Should one of us follow h—"

"Watch out!" Roman cried, making Virgil and Remus turn to see what gold was talking about.

Virgil watched in shock as Remus didn't quite turn quick enough to see what Roman was warning her about. Then Virgil blinked and Roman was laying limply on the ground.

"Roman!" Remus shot out a construct at the three remaining goons, perhaps hitting them a bit stronger than necessary. Virgil couldn't blame him though.

Remus fell to his knees and gently checked over Roman. "Shit. Roman got hit with the knockout beam again, or at least I hope it's that one. Because if gold loses his memory defending me after I defended him from the last one, I'm going to lose my min— wait."

"What do you mean wait?! Is gold still okay?"

"Oh, yeah, he is. But I… I think I vaguely remember the fight with, oh what's his name?"

"Oh… well, I sure don't remember."

"Annie? Eraserhead? I don't know, or care!"

"Okay, so Roman jumping in front of this beam made you think of when you jumped in front of the memory beam?"

"Yeah… wait! Aren't we in combat? Well, enemy territory, at least."

"Oh, shit, we are. Also, shouldn't Logan be back now?"

"Fuck. He should be. Ugh, everything's going so fast." Remus hoisted Roman up, one arm under his knees and one supporting gold's neck, draping one of gold's arms over chaos' shoulder. "Let's go save Logan's ass."

"Shouldn't you go back to the car with Roman?" Virgil asked.

"I can still fight like this. It's a bit harder without my hands free, but I'll be fine."

"I— okay, just… be careful."

"I always am!"

"Okay, that's not even remotely true— okay, as soon as we're done fighting, we really need to have a conversation about talking in enemy territory."

"I— okay, fair, but have you consi—"

"Remus!" They both heard Logan cry from somewhere nearby.

"Here, give me Roman and go help Logan," Virgil said as he slid his arms under Roman in preparation to take gold from Remus.

Remus hesitated. "Are you sure?"

"Yes I'm sure." Virgil softened his voice. "I'll take good care of him. I promise."

"...Okay, I trust you." Remus gently passed Roman off to Virgil and dashed off.

A couple more bad guys rounded the corner from a different path then the one Remus ran towards, and Virgil zapped the goon guards before they'd even raised their guns.

-

Next