Chapter Five: An Unconventional Ensemble
Our latest caper sat perched on the edge of audacity, ready to tumble into the annals of Rydar's unruliest exploits. There, in The Vault, with the clatter of the city beyond our walls, Max and I planned our surreptitious machinations. The responses to our Gumtree ad for a "Kitchen Hand" had flooded in. While the inbox ticked with the mundane, it also concealed the exceptional, presenting us with the perfect front to apply our craft.
"Kitchen Hands or poetic anarchists?" Max mused, eyes flitting over the screen of the laptop that held the weight of our burgeoning scheme. The email address, bigtitinc@gmail.com, was now our conjurer's hat, from which we'd pull out more than just culinary assistants.
There it was, in the digital pile of applicants, the resume that nearly met its quietus—a document teeming with a backstory richer than the broths of Rydar. Jodrick, once the king of the DJ booth, his life now a tangle of tales spun in the darkest corners of Bangkok. I'd caught Max's hand mid-toss, unfolding the crumbled sheet. "Wait, Max—there's more to him than meets the eye," I urged, recognizing the artistry beneath the hedonistic surface.
The unmistakable grit of Jodrick Plinth, lined with the echos of a forgotten Fred Astaire, was precisely what we needed. A ghost from page twenty-two of "Big Tit Inc.," he was ripe for reinvigoration—not merely for the novelty but for the narrative he brought to our stage, the one we set against the sober backdrop of the House of Wassabi.
We reached out, offering him a sliver of our treasure to reengage his invaded spirit. "Ten grand should bring his rhythms to our ruse," I said, directing a tide of funds that would carry him from his sorrows to our strategic embrace.
Max watched, the faintest curve of a smile adorning his face as our forecasts unfurled into action. "And now for Dessert," he cackled. "We rally the one who turns rubber into ribald art."
Dusty's name was next, a name that rippled with the mirth of Melbourne and the gall of the gregarious. His hands, skilled in the profane sculptures of parades past, were our chosen brushes to paint the skies over the House of Wassabi with a floating forest of buoyant bravado.
"Could this balloonist become our balladeer of bawdy?" Max queried rhetorically, knowing all too well the answer was but a phone call away. "Dusty here – no request too salacious," came the rugged reply over the signal's crackle.
As the balloon plot thickened, an old nemesis skulked into view—a reminder of the unseen battle always brimming beneath the surface. Abdul, with his incendiary inclinations, lurked beyond our sight, his intentions as dark as the recesses from which he watched.
"We've danced this waltz before," murmured Max, a shadow flitting across his brow as he acknowledged the familiar staging of dread. Abdul was a vestige of my own haunted past, of my days as a purported backpacker amidst the turmoil of Betong.
"Recruit him, Max," I uttered with a tone half-hope, half-resignation, "a poet's place in our drama is assured—especially one so... explosive." Our orchestra was not yet complete, and Abdul, the poet turned pyromancer, was the dissonant chord we yearned to tame.
Langley's command crackled through the static of backchannels and espionage, a subtle reminder that the game we played was one of high stakes and higher powers. "Wasabism – dismantled by any means chosen," Langley had breathed into our clandestine counsel.
And so, we laid the groundwork for a rhapsody of rebellion, scored by the hands of exiled DJs, whimsical balloonists, and renegade poets. Our unseen battle would be etched in the annals of Big Tit Inc.'s grand escapades—an insurrection cloaked in the diaphanous veil of mockery. A tale of changing winds and changing regimes, and all the while, Max and I remained tethered to the eye of our tempest, the unseen warriors of The Vault, orchestrating the fall of the House of Wassabi.