Chapter 39: Jasi

39

Askauri did not look forward to the conversation he was to have with his son, Bealz. There was a hollow sense of shame and loss swelling within his heart that he had been unprepared to confront.

For more than ten years, he had been a parent in only the most abstract sense. He had spent so much time dreaming of holding his son, being with him, but in reality, had no idea what that was really to look like.

How do you walk into a person's life after so many years of absence? How does that person's life fit in with your own? These questions had no answer as Askauri trudged back to the Angstrom Hotel and Residential Towers.

What he did know is that prison broke a man. It took away all that he was, grinds it up and re-forms him into the preferred image of the state. Even the most leonine, the wildest, most dangerous of prisoners found their conformity somewhere within the concrete belly of the beast.

Askauri's thoughts were heavy as he walked through the Angstrom's lobby, rode the private elevator up to his suites and entered into the vestibule. He was so lost to his thoughts he didn't notice that the hotel's basic wards and security protocols had been broken.

Still trying to think of what to say, still coming up with nothing but a blank, he opens the door expecting to find his son despondent, angry, in the least.

Instead, upon entering the room he tenses up at the completely unexpected sight and sound of Bealz doubled-over, caught in the grips of side-splitting laughter.

A tall, caramel complected man stands by the wet bar, sipping from a snifter filled with an amber colored liquid. His suit, his affectations, his mannerisms, were impeccable. He was busy regaling Bealz with an amusing anecdote from he and Askauri's past:

“...So, me and Askauri left these chick's house, but neither of us knew where the hell we were or where the hell we were even supposed to be going, right? But we managed to get to this little funky bodega a couple blocks over and all they had were these nasty looking five pound bags of chicken leg quarters.

“Now, remember, I'm blitzed out of my mind, and I'm looking at these drippy ass chicken legs and I'm like, 'Yo! Dude, this is a bag full of right legs! How you gon' have a bag full of nothing but right legs? This is that shit I've been telling you about, Askauri. It's them, the Kings. It's a conspiracy. Where all the left legs at? Huh? Where are all of the left legs, man?”

Askauri, shocked silent by the unexpected visitor, finally interrupts, “What the hell?”

Turning to greet him, a huge smile breaking across his face, the stranger calls out, “Askauri, my man!”

“Jasi?”

“None other, brother.”

Jasi Kupele had been one of Askauri's oldest and dearest friends.

Askauri attacks him immediately, hurling a dagger of light at the man's heart.

Kupele manages to move, stepping back a half second in time and just to the side.

Still casually swirling a snifter topped off with a healthy portion of the Angstrom's best single malt, Kupele says easily, “Dude, I almost spilled my Macallan.”

Unamused, Askauri drops another shard of light into the palm of his hand, “I'm in no mood for your bullshit, Jasi.”

Bealz is shocked speechless. This was his father in a different light. Askauri hummed with power, with rage.

“I've only been free for a moment and already my son's life has been threatened and I've had to fight off a team of assassins. And now I walk in on you? After all of these years? Alone with my child?”

“Dad,” Bealz interjects. “He was just telling me a story.”

Askauri is unconvinced. His time incarcerated had left him with a greater penchant for acting first and sorting out the differences later. He raised the dagger of light, “You need to tell me something, Jasi. I'm not going to ask again...?”

At that moment, Askauri's mystically conjured blade flickers, dims and sputters out of existence.

“What the fuck?”

“Yeah,” Jasi says easily. “You have been gone awhile, haven't you, Askauri?”

Askauri recognizes the coding that was now disrupting his power. It was nearly identical, if not more elegant, than the signal triggered by Peppin. Askauri, looking around, could now feel and pinpoint its pulse emanating from several power dampening devices embedded throughout the suite.

“They installed those things in most all of the Kings' properties. Most of the new buildings being constructed by the reggies, too,” Jasi explains.

“C'mon, man. You think I'd come up in here and let you kill me before I even had the chance to say hello?”

Jasi Kupele was once Askauri's most trusted friend and associate, and this is taking into account that the man was one of the most accomplished covert operatives working out of two different worlds.

Askauri is in no mood for any of this. “Do you think these trinkets mean anything to me?” he asks, flaring out his mantle. He burns out the dampeners with an electrical pop and flash. A couple of them catch a-fire, emitting wisps of heated, circuity smoke.

An alarm blares immediately. Bealz is completely distressed, looking with panic from his father to the strange man and back.

He had spent a good portion of the last several days being completely pissed at his dad. All fantasy of some super cool dude was lost to the frantic realities intruding on their reunion. The man who stood before him now, though, was hard. Hardened. He emanated nausea inducing waves of energy, of power, that caused Bealz's eyes to sting and water.

This was his father, and he frightened him.

“Dad?”

“Your son, Askauri,” Jasi points out. “You don't want to do this in front of your son.”

A hotel security team at that moment descends upon them, materializing between the potential combatants. They are armed with more of the power dampening devices, Askauri can see the unusual energy patterns of these weapons. He can see that they are much more powerful than what he'd encountered so far.

He could only guess at just how powerful these devices could potentially be if paired with one of the more powerful gemstones. In the hands of a more powerful adept, these weapons could be dialed up into a WMD .

“Excuse me Lord,” the head of the security team broaches. “But there is a strict non-aggression clause in the Amended Treaty Agreements. You'll have to draw down your Aura or we will be forced to engage.”

Things had truly changed. Askauri withdraws his mantle and dismisses the men from his presence, “All of you, get out. I'll speak with management about this later. Right now, get out.”

“We just need to make certain that...” the captain of the guard attempts to continue.

“Get out, now!”

Something in Askauri's demeanor convinces the man to stand down. He is still in need of a signature, a transferred impression from Askauri's brand, in order to cover the damages, but they soon leave with no further provocation.

Walking to the wet bar and pouring himself a drink, Askauri turns to look at the man, the cause of all the fuss. Jasi Kupele. He and Askauri had known each other since they were both children, early enrollees of the Long Plains' Military Academies. They were natural companions, each being much younger than their fellow cadets.

They bonded over heated PlayStation sparring sessions and smuggled back issues of Black Tail magazine. Their skills were to take them in different directions, but they remained close, with Kupele serving as Askauri's trusted adviser and acting as his eyes and ears in places best kept at a distance.

Over the course of his incarceration, Askauri had maintained somewhat of a line of communication with some of his officers, his family, his mother, when most necessary. Jo-Mel was an expert at, amongst other things, infiltration, and she would find a variety of innovative, stealthy means of interaction.

Most often posing as a prison guard., she had managed to copy an employee's credentials and had used a minor working to wear her face from time to time.

Jasi was one of his more valuable sources of information, allowing him to at least maintain some type of connection to the outside world, to the goings on back in the Royal Courts, here on Earth, with his son. But Jasi had vanished around four years ago. He'd simply left his post behind, stopped reporting to Jo-Mel, who, with all of her vaunted tracking abilities, could not locate him.

And now, here he stood before Askauri as if all was well.

But it wasn't. Jasi had a heartbreaking story to tell.