Studio Briefing

[Martin and Folly] print out the web page and abandon the books and newspapers before they leave the library, or so Folly thinks. She notices that one of the copies of the book has made it into the back seat of the car afterwards, although she didn't see Martin carrying it.

The little red convertible takes them to a neighborhood not far from downtown. Folly recognizes a little ethnic restaurant without a sign that Happenstance used to play occasionally. You got in by knocking twice; neighborhood people knew about it and other people stayed out of the neighborhood. It's that kind of neighborhood.

It's also a great place for an indie producer with street cred to maintain a studio.

Martin circles the block to survey the studio and find parking. It's in an older building, and the windows are barred with iron grilles. Anyone in the building would have a heck of a time getting out in a fire if they weren't near an exit.

The front door of the building is locked, but Martin borrows a hairpin from Folly and makes short work of the lock. Inside, there's a reception area that looks like it's not used very much with several awards on the wall. Then there's a hall with several offices along it. At the end of the hall are several doors that lead to the tracking rooms. Neither the red nor the green light is lit in any of them.

"I don't think he's here," Martin observes unnecessarily. "What next? If we're gonna wait, I can go get the book."

Folly rubs her thumb along her bottom lip as she thinks; after a second or two, she nods.

"Yeah, let's wait for a while. If we get bored, we can always try making phone calls."

Martin probably realizes that the probability of Folly getting bored in a recording studio is somewhat smaller than that of a child getting bored in a toy store.

And in fact, no sooner has she come to her decision than she adds, "I'm gonna go look around."

Martin throws Folly a ring of keys that he couldn't possibly have had a moment ago. They land in her outstretched hand.

Ah, memories. Folly grins.

Three tracking rooms and a separate mastering room, as well as equipment rooms. The A room is huge and dark.

Folly finds the light switch and flips it on. After a long glance around, she wanders the room slowly, humming to herself, listening to the way the sound moves in the space. It makes her feel giddy and a bit wistful.

The room is set up for a band. Interestingly, it looks like the drum booth and a second kit are mic'ed. Probably a trio, based on the number of "wombs". Soren always made a space in the tracking room for each player, that was just theirs. Syd used to make fun of it, until they recorded on a charity project and didn't have things Soren's way. Syd always said "Soren's charge of atmosphere" after that.

It looks like it's set up for something intimate. Guitar/Bass, Accoustic 12/Mando/Accoustic 6, drums. The remote is in here, so the engineer is playing as well as recording.

The control room is well equipped and set up for a band. 32 track digital and if the computers are any indication, tapeless digital at that. The last time you were in Texorami, this would have been a million dollar setup, if it was possible at all.

Folly lets out an excited expletive or two, but resists the urge to start poking around on the computers for tracks to listen to. If she accidentally messed anything up, Soren would be so pissed....

She snorts at the bitter irony: Like he's not already gonna be just a wee bit upset about the nine years of not hearing from her. And like anything on those computers will matter if he accepts the gig for Syd.

Still.... She leaves them alone for the time being and continues her illicit tour of the facilities.

In the equipment room, at the back, you see some beat up road cases with 'Happenstance' stenciled on the side.

Martin has found a recent issue of Modern Drummer to amuse himself with when Folly looks back in on him.

Folly considers settling down to wait with him -- but the siren call of those computers, and the promise of music recorded on them, is just too great. After flashing a grin at Martin to indicate she's still entertained (and unless he stops her), she heads back toward the control room.

The current project is blank, as if the board has been recently set up. There's a piece of paper on the control board with track labels and a date a few days from now marked "Die Giant Monster Die".

Folly notices on her second trip into the control room that her old violin case is on top of a cabinet behind the board.

Folly boots up the computers. Things have changed, but she quickly figures out how to get to the music. It's all made to seem like the old digital tape systems, which were made to seem like the analog tapes. Under "Active Projects" there are folders for a few bands, including Happenstance. The Happenstance folder has mostly tracks you worked on, mostly with Syd. Some of them are greatest hits kinds of tracks and some are tracks that never worked and never got released. Latest date & time stamps are about 4AM this morning. It's set up for listening through the reference monitors in the control room. All she'd have to do is press '>'

Folly queues up a track by "Vibrant Red Rat God", a band she's never heard of. It's a lush jazz-folk fusion song with both sax and fiddle. When Folly presses play, the faders and the effects/eq knobs all set themselves.

The track is good, and the lead singer reminds Folly of a singer she used to know who hung out at the Brew. He had some good bands, but he wasn't this good .

Folly closes her eyes and lets the sound wash over her, into her, through her. The fingers of her left hand instinctively follow the fiddle line as if memorizing it for later. Yeah, she finds herself thinking, I'll have to get a copy of this when it's done.

About two minutes into the song, there's a crash from the front of the studio. Martin's voice drifts in from the lobby. "Umm. .... Fol-ly?"

"Oh, shit --" Folly bolts from her chair and toward the lobby without even bothering to hit '||', calling, "Yeah, sweetie, I'm --"

She skids to a halt at the end of the hall and pokes her head into the lobby. "What happ--?"

The query dissolves into a high-pitched squeak, followed by a lot of swearing.

Martin has Soren stretched out on the floor of the lobby. There's an overturned planter with a large corn plant in it beside the two of them. From the look of the dirt all over Soren, he's just had a close and face-first encounter with the interior of the planter. Martin is kneeling beside him.

Soren has cut his hair short since Folly last saw him.

Folly rushes to Soren's other side and kneels, letting out an audible breath she didn't realize she was holding when she realizes he's not dead. Nimbly but gently, she brushes the dirt from his face, head, and neck, assessing the damage as she goes.

"He jumped me," Martin says, indignant and chagrined. "I didn't mean to throw him that hard."

"I know, sweetie," Folly says quietly; but when she looks up, her eyes are brimming with frustrated tears. She takes a deep, calming breath.

"Maybe you should go see if you can find some ice, or a first-aid kit, or, I dunno... a whole hell of a lot of alcohol, 'cos I think we're all gonna need it." She offers him a weak smile and wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand.

Martin starts to say something, decides against, and slinks off to the break room to find the requested supplies.

[Folly's] other hand hasn't left Soren's body. At the moment it rests over his heart, gently and casually as a lover's. Folly returns her attention to him with softly murmurred words of encouragement, coaxing him back to consciousness.

Soren's eyes open with a start. "I'm gonna go with my second guess, which is that I'm still alive."

Folly blinks, and then breaks into a wide grin. "What, you don't think you're going to a recording studio when you die?"

"I was hoping for an upgrade."

If he seems ready to hazard it, she offers him a hand up into a seated position.

"Right, you know the drill," she says.

The litany of questions upon regaining consciousness was a band tradition, used countless times for assessing impairment after alcohol- or stupidity-related blackouts -- or sometimes just for fun after particularly mind-addling gigs.

Folly runs through them solemnly, ritualistically, pausing after each for his answer:

"What's your name?"

"Soren R. Daniels."

"Where do you think you are?"

"On the floor of my own studio with my own dirt up my nose."

"What color is your underwear?"

"I don't wear underwear."

Yep, that'd be three-for-three.

Satisfied with the responses, Folly relaxes a little. "So, um -- Hi, Soren," she says, and her smile seems happy and awkward and sheepish all at once. "I'm really sorry about breaking in, but... we really wanted to talk to you."

"And I was guessing you were here because you wanted to help edit the tracks I'm mixing. So, who's this we--" Soren turns his head. "Well, well. If it isn't 'The Angel of Death'."

Martin is in the hallway. He shakes his head. "I'm not the Angel of Death, Soren. I'm just Amber's repo man." He tosses the first aid kit lightly to Folly. "Dad still wants his drums back, if you've got 'em."

Folly grabs the kit out of the air effortlessly and snaps it open. "He wants you back, too, for the most mind-blowing gig --"

She cuts off abruptly, realizing that the 'Dad' bit is probably news to Soren -- and Big Freaky News, at that. She looks at Soren, gauging his reaction, and asks, "Is there beer? 'Cos you're probably gonna want a beer for this." _And so am I._

Soren looks hurt. "This is a Pro studio. Of course there's beer."

Folly smiles. "Right. My bad."

He gets up and leads them to the office, where the fridge is behind a desk that Folly is sure is too neat to be Soren's. He pulls out three longnecks.

He looks at Martin as he offers him a beer. "'Dad', huh? I always figured that if Syd had done half of what he said, he'd have to be a hundred years old."

"Best guess is close to five, but after the first hundred, you stop counting," Martin says, accepting the bottle and taking a long pull from it. Martin is particularly hard to read right now; Folly can't tell easily whether he's doing it deliberately or reflexively.

Soren hands the second to Folly and takes a drink from the third. "Five hundred, huh? Lied just a little bit on his driver's license, did he? Next question: what the hell are you people?"

"That's a good one," says Martin, "and if I figure it out I'll be sure to let you know. Folly keeps calling us immortal superheroes. But I think I better let her make the explanations," he adds, looking over at her.

"Right. Yeah." Folly smiles at Martin, but it's a wide-eyed, overwhelmed kind of smile. She's had five years to think about this conversation, and yet she's at a loss for where to start. To buy some time and sort her thoughts, she settles herself onto the desk cross-legged and takes a long drink from her beer.

After a pause during which she contemplates the inside of her beer bottle as if it contained all the secrets of the universe, she takes a deep breath, looks at Soren, and just starts talking with no particular plan in mind.

"Right. What we are. 'We' -- and yes, it's rumored I'm one, too -- are the descendents of the late King Oberon of Amber. Remember how when anyone would ask Syd where he was from, his usual response was, 'You can't get there from here'? Well, that's Amber. And you can't get there from here." Folly grins wryly.

"I'm still a little fuzzy on some of the details, because there's this ritual we're all supposed to go through that... I dunno, solidifies our power or something, and I haven't done it yet -- anyhow, Amber is s'posed to be the source of all Order, of all that is Real, and everything else is just a shadow or a reflection of it. And the children of Oberon have the power to traverse the Shadows, to move from world to world through the infinitude of possibility, and to manipulate the probabilities around them. But again, that's only after you've gone through this ritual thingie, so I really only know the theory. But... well, you've seen Syd do it. It's why we always had van keys no matter how many times we thought we'd lost them, and why the books never quite came out right."

Folly's expression clouds, and she takes another deep breath, another pull from the bottle. "So, yeah, Syd," she continues. "At five-hundred-ish, he's the youngest of Oberon's sons. The eldest is... millenia old, I think. Unless something kills them, they apparently live forever. And they're strong and fast and observant and... well, superheroes, basically."

She hesitates, realizes she's wandering off down a tangent, and takes another swig.

Once she's collected the scattered threads of her thoughts, she sets off in a more definite direction. Her words come out too quickly, as if she's trying to spit out the story without thinking about it too hard. "So, five years ago, when Martin came and found me and took me to Amber, Syd was on the opposite side of... the universe? Reality? Shadow? Anyhow, he was away in this place called Chaos with most of his siblings, fighting a war -- in part because one of his brothers was a megalomaniac who wanted to destroy the world, and -- wow, I never realized how improbable it sounds when you say it out loud.... Anyhow, Syd was away until three weeks ago. And in the meantime the old king had died and those of us in the family who remained in Amber were trying to keep the city together... well, that's kind of a long story, but in the end, three weeks ago, Syd came home from the war, and he'd somehow got himself made King. King Random the First. Yes, that's his real name, don't ask me what his parents were thinking."

Folly pauses again and looks at Soren, really looks at him, for the first time since she started her explanation. "That's why we're here. He wants us to talk you into being his bard." The corner of her mouth quirks up into a hint of a smile. "Probably because you'd look so good in tights."

"You had me until the tights bit. I was leaning towards the Celebrity Rehab Clinic. Now I'm just trying to figure out if whatever you've got is contagious. Let's go over the high points, again, just to see if I missed any."

Soren starts ticking off items on his fingers until he runs out of them. "Syd Chance, my former bandmate, is really named Random. I believe that. I always thought he made up that story that it was short for 'Siddartha'. He's about 500 years old, the youngest immortal super-powered being in his immediate family. He always said he had a lot of brothers, but that they were pricks, so I can believe that. You really want me to believe he was super-observant? 'Cause, I remember what he was like, you know."

Martin snorts, but does not interrupt Soren.

Folly smirks. "No, he --" she begins, but then blinks, clamps her mouth shut and stares into her beer bottle again, letting her hair fall into her face. It doesn't quite conceal the color rising in her cheeks, though.

She looks at Soren through her hair and gestures for him to keep going.

Soren raises both his eyebrows and grins slightly. It's unclear if he knows where Folly was going, but he's clearly both amused and more at ease after Folly's near-comment.

"He came from a magic kingdom and returned there to fight a war with his brother, who wanted to destroy the world. His magical son," he raises his beer at Martin, "fetched you because you're his...what, cousin?"

Folly nods. "Something like, yeah." With one hand, she pushes her hair back out of her face.

"Anyway, you don't have superpowers yet, but you will. In recognition of his manifest destiny, Syd was made King of everything. Now he wants his drums back."

He finishes his beer and gets another from the fridge.

"Did I miss any of the highlights? This sounds like the plot of a bad fantasy novel. Your publisher will make you rework the 'wants his drums' part from the end."

"Aww, but that's the best part!" Folly squeaks in mock-protest. "Some of the rest of it I could've done without, y'know?"

Only then does Folly realize that she completely failed to mention at least one rather major plot-point. She bites her lip and downs the rest of her beer in one go, then looks to Martin almost as if seeking guidance.

Martin's hand goes to his pocket and he gives a questioning twitch of the eyebrows to Folly. After a moment, he draws out his Trump deck, which he tosses casually to Folly.

Folly catches it, finds the card she wants, and turns back to Soren. "Wanna see a pretty picture?" she asks, holding up what looks like a playing card depicting Syd dressed like he's going to a Renaissance Festival or something. "It all kinda looks like something out of a bad fantasy novel, too, complete with the castles and the riding around on horses and the no electricity. But it's not so bad."

"So, um. What about those? Syd had a set like that, he got really pissed when Trick picked 'em up at a poker game. Ash and I thought they were both drunk. Syd never really was a belligerent drunk, though."

"No, you're right, but these...." Folly chews thoughtfully on her bottom lip as she works out how to explain it. "...are Trumps. They would've been extremely difficult to replace, because they... they've got.... Well, they're really hard to make and so you can't just conjure them up like with mundane items. They... kinda... form a link, I guess, with whoever or whatever is pictured, so you can use them to communicate. Sorta like a psychic hotline, but without the phone tolls." She grins, then adds a little more seriously, "It was how he kept in touch with his family."

"Is there one of you? Or won't that happen until you get your powers?"

Martin says, "She was supposed to have one made already, but it didn't happen in the rush."

Folly pauses and glances down at the card. "I'd show you how it works, but I'm not sure he's free to answer right now, and no one else is s'posed to know where we are. I'm not even sure if V--"

She winces slightly and bites her bottom lip again.

"Uh, I guess I sort of left out the part where he got married."

"I've thought that would've taken a shotgun."

Martin leans against the wall, expressionless. He clearly has nothing to say in this part of the proceedings.

Folly looks at Soren in silence for a long moment, as if waiting for him to get it. She does not look at Martin, but then she doesn't need to: she is hyperaware of his presence, and of his silence.

If Soren gets it, he's gonna make you say it.

After the space of a few breaths, she says, "I - I'm telling this story badly. I think I need another beer." She holds out her empty to Soren.

Soren swaps it out for a full one, taking another for himself.

Martin sets his now-empty bottle on top of a nearby credenza and folds his arms across his chest.

Soren offers a fresh beer to Martin and Martin shakes his head.

Folly takes a long swig, sets the bottle beside her on the desk, and immediately picks it up again, as if she's having trouble figuring out what to do with her hands.

"Right," she says after a moment. "Syd. Syd is about five-hundred-something, Martin is... maybe half that." Folly glances at Martin, not so much for verification as to give him the chance to interrupt, or tell her to stop. It's as much his story as hers, after all -- moreso, even. But she knows even before she looks at him that she's on her own for this one.

Martin's expression has gone completely flat. It probably betrays nothing to Soren, but everything to Folly.

Her bottom lip twitches slightly with some repressed emotion; but she returns her gaze to Soren and continues, as dispassionately as she can manage, "Martin's mother took her own life not long after he was born. His grandmother Moire blames Syd, who... hadn't stuck around even that long." She eyes her beer, but sets it aside again.

Soren's eyes get a little bit wider at this, but he has not other physical reaction.

"So, not very long after Syd left Texorami -- we're talking on the order of days or weeks, if I've got the story right -- he ended up back in Rebma. Martin's birthplace. Where Moire is Queen. And Moire, who was still just a wee bit pissed at him, gave Syd a choice: marry a woman of her choosing, or die. So." Folly shrugs.

"So he got married to Vialle because he had to, and stayed married to her because... well, I'm not entirely clear on that part. I asked him if he was happy, and he didn't exactly give me a straight answer. But on the other hand...." Folly's eyes flit briefly to Martin again. "Well. Anyway. I expect I'll be having a long talk with him in the near future."

Martin remains silent. His expression has relaxed only fractionally, but he meets Folly's gaze.

"The point is, everybody else thinks he's happy -- they all talk about how his marriage has really matured him and shit. And since he wasn't in Amber when I got there, for me to see for myself, I figured he might --" She pauses, picks up the bottle again, and starts picking at the label with her thumbnail. "-- he might need to ask me to leave when he got back. And I didn't want everyone watching to see whether he would. So I kind of failed to mention to anyone but a very few people that I used to know him. I'm sure a lot of the family has already figured it out by now, though, and the rest will soon enough, especially when --"

She blinks and looks up at Soren again. "I mean, if. If you go. Y'know?" She looks hopeful and apologetic at the same time.

"If I go." He looks from Martin to Folly and back. He finishes his beer and drops bottle on the desk where it rolls noisily to a stop. "Follow me," he says, walking around the desk and out the door, not looking back to see if they are following.

Martin looks at Folly and, assuming she gets up and follows, so does he.

Folly cocks an eyebrow, shrugs, and silently slides off the desk to follow.

For a moment she falls into step beside Martin and lays her hand lightly against his arm. It is meant to be comforting, but he can feel the tension in her fingers.

Soren goes to the Main tracking room and turns on the lights. "First we jam."

For Folly, his words are a banquet to a starving man. A slow smile spreads across her face as her tension redirects itself toward her favorite outlet.

[Soren] picks up a small console and starts pressing buttons on it. "Drums?" he asks Martin.

"Not my thing," says the blond, eyeing a rack of electric guitars.

"Suit yourself," says Soren, as he sits at the drum kit.

Martin looks up several guitars before settling on a long fretless 10-string instrument that looks like a modified high-tech guitar. Soren presses a button on his console and Martin is accompanying himself on bass and lead at the same time.

There's a rack of acoustic stringed hollow body instruments at the obvious third position. Mandolin, Octave Mandolin, 6 and 12 string guitars. Everything has one or two pickups and there is an instrument mic as well as a vocal mic, which is set for someone of Soren's height.

By habit so deeply ingrained it has become ritual, Folly's fingers flit to her ears, throat, wrists and pockets, seeking out and eliminating possible sources of extraneous noise. She kicks off her shoes -- another old studio habit -- and lowers the vocal mic without a second thought.

Choosing an instrument takes a bit longer; but after a moment's consideration, she settles on the 6-string. She gets its feel with a quick, complicated little finger exercise that Soren recognizes as the same one she always used for tuning.

There are cans by each mic. Martin has his on; Soren's are around his neck.

Folly grabs hers as well. But before she puts them on, she looks from Soren to Martin and back again. "Got anything in mind?" she asks.

She's bouncing on her bare toes like a tightly wound spring, full of barely suppressed energy.

"Checking to see if you're really you." Soren grins back.

As she ponders the arsenal of Folly-esque musical eccentricities she might inflict on Soren to prove her identity, Folly's eyes glint with wicked glee. She cracks her knuckles extravagently in good-natured acceptance of the challenge.

"Interesting that yon lad is on both sides of the rhythm/melody divide," he says, looking at Martin's choice of instrument.

Folly smiles. "Rhythm guitarist," she says fondly.

He's about to put the headphones over his ears when he stops and says, "You've got the guitar, you pick the first one, I'm being a drummer, I don't have to know the tune."

"Right," Folly replies. "All you've gotta do is count to seven." She grins, sticks out the tip of her tongue, and puts on her headphones.

"I'll try not to be off by more than one."

She casually plucks a half-dozen chords in rapid succession, laying out a basic progression. She makes eye contact with Martin and quirks an eyebrow to make sure he's ready, then does the same for Soren.

Then, "Five six seven--"

She lays down several bars of a plaintive, arpeggiated guitar line, modulating between major and minor. She repeats the figure a couple of times while Martin and Soren settle into the groove.

Then she closes her eyes and in a breathless almost-whisper begins:

"Too long have I been scattered on the wind,
A tattered echo best unremembered,
The spark of a poem dissolved into embers
That drifts in the dreams of abandoned friends."

The guitar traces a haunted, ethereal outline, joined a few bars later by a deeper, earthier line. Folly's voice grows earthier, too, hinting at sex and sweat, as she continues:

"Too long have I been cocooned inside my skin,
Afraid the shape of my own breath
Would spell another little death
For the very souls I want to let in."

The arpeggiated lines give way to denser textures, a harder edge. Folly moves with the music, at once feeling and shaping it, intimately aware of Martin and Soren and of their every move and note and beat. The pulse of the drum and the thump of the bass penetrate Folly's skin through the soles of her bare feet and wash through her like a drug, heightening her perceptions.

She raises her voice in a keening, open-throated wail:

"Is it kindness or cruelty, this returning?
We are ghosts made flesh to the immaterial.
Will this be an unburial,
Or a slow path to another burning?"

With her body, Folly signals a transition to a hard-rockin' 4/4. Over the established bass line, she shifts her chords to something with a decidedly more optimistic feel. Her voice is strong and clear:

"But whatever the risk, I will take it --
Whatever the blame, I will take it --

"For now I know the way Home
Lies not in the 'where' but the 'who'
And whatever else I must do
And wherever else I must roam,
I see the road to Home --
And I will take it."

Folly finishes the song on a glorious, wordless vocal line pulled from the depths of her soul, pouring all her joy and anguish and frustration and anticipation into physical release, urging the instruments into a barely-controlled climactic frenzy that breaks like waves over the final few pounded chords.

For several seconds of not-quite-silence, Folly feels the echoes of the music die away; she catches her breath and brushes a few strands of hair from her face.

Then she turns to Soren with a shit-eating grin on her face. "So, am I me, then?"

He only half answers. "One? You think after all this time I'm gonna settle for one? Not from immortal superheroes. My pick next."

He presses a button on the remote console and a drum track starts in the headphones. He looks at Martin, making sure he's got the beat. Soren punches in the keyboard tracks and stands up at a nearby vocal mic. Folly thinks he's playing a track Haven recorded. The beat is pretty simple and the melody on the keyboards is a rocked up version of a tune that was popular about 30 years ago. Brij had a recording of it in the attic. One of the other local bands used to cover it, but not like this.

Soren picks up an electric solidbody guitar and strums a few growling chords that would have made Ash proud. It's more aggressive than you're used to from Soren, musically, like he's trying to make a point. He stops the playback and looks up.

"I dream about Syd, you know. The homicidal little fink has haunted me for years. I wrote this last week, after I dreamed that someone tried to kill him."

Folly blinks, but readies her guitar.

Soren counts off the beat and cuts in the intro again.

"Are you ready Martin?" "Uh-huh"
"Folly?" "Yeah"
"Alright, then, let's go!"

"Oh it's been getting so hard
Living with the things you do to me
My dreams are getting so strange
I'd like to tell you everything I see.

"Oh I see a man at the back as a matter of fact
His eyes are as red as the sun
And the girl in the corner lets no one ignore her
Cause she thinks she's the passionate one....

"Oh Yeah! It was like lightning
Everybody was fighting
And the music was soothing
And they all started grooving...."

Soren sings the chorus and Folly guesses that he's writing the next verse as he goes along. Folly also suspects that unless things have really changed, this would be a radio smash if it ever got released. It's catchy. Soren's gotten better, if that's possible.

Martin's in on the chorus after the second verse, and he's playing with his eyes shut, on the bass strings. The outro to the piece is as clean as the rest of it. After the song ends, Soren takes off the guitar and looks at both Folly and Martin, his eyebrows raised.

Folly looks like she wants to say fifty things at once. She stares at Soren in something like awe for a long moment, almost-but-not-quite grinning, torn between being dazzled by the music and....

"I don't think she was actually trying to kill him, though," she finally says, as if this were the most normal response in the world to a great pop song. "Aside from that, though -- yeah, totally. And probably in that key, too."

Martin shakes his head with rueful affection.

Now she does grin outright. "Damn! If I were King, I'd want you for my bard, too...."

Soren slips off his guitar and sits down behind the drums again.

"I guess that makes it my turn," says Martin. He starts a bass line so classic that surely there must be a shadow of it in Texorami:

DUM DUM DUM, dum-DUM da-DUM
DUM DUM DUM, DA-DUM

He stops there, but Soren is already with him and playing the flourish to lead into the next part of the song. "Spoilsport," he says to Martin, who flashes him a grin in return.

Folly lets out a gleeful chuckle.

Martin lays down a different bass line, bluesy and growling, one that Folly's not so familiar with. He runs through it several times to let Folly and Soren get the feel for it and then launches into the lyrics:

"When you wake up in the morning and the light it hurts your head
The first thing you do when you get up out of bed
Is hit that street a-runnin' and try to beat the masses
And go get yourself some cheap sunglasses
Oh yeah ... oh yeah ... oh yeah!"

The song lets him motor with his left hand while playing some of the melody line with his right, Folly notices, especially the noodling around he does towards the end of the song.

"Damn," he says afterwards. "I'd forgotten how much I missed amplified bass."

"So what does that mean? Does Syd expect me to come in and convert a bunch of lute fans?"

"Hey," says Martin. "Don't mess with the lute players. Lord Rein will kick your ass."

Soren shrugs and pops open a beer from a nearby cooler. "I just wanna know what I'm getting into here. Anyone want one?"

"Over here," Folly says, setting aside her guitar. She isn't as thirsty as she feels she ought to be after all the rockin' out, but a beer still seems like a pretty good idea.

She pops it open, takes a swig, and wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist.

"Right," she says. "What you're getting into. First, yeah, we're talking all-acoustic, all-the-time. Learn to Love your Lute." She grins.

"The real problem with Amber's music right now, though," she continues, "is the factions. See, King Oberon's bard was Lord Rein, who is a traditionalist. Think four-hundred-year-old ballads and you'll kind of have the idea. But then there's also Barenthkov, who...."

Folly pauses, brow furrowed. "No, wait, I should back up and tell you how it started." She pauses again, mentally gathering together the important points.

"See, Rein is big buddies with Oberon's son Corwin, who is not the eldest but who nevertheless was considered Oberon's most likely heir. And Corwin had this gigantic rivalry with his next-oldest brother Eric, who apparently really wanted the throne but didn't think he'd ever get it because he was illegitimate. Long story.

"Anyway, not too long after Syd came to Texorami, as I understand it, Oberon disappeared. He did that sometimes, but he stayed gone longer than usual and people began to suspect he was dead. And Corwin had been gone for much, much longer -- hundreds of years. Everyone was sure he was dead. So Eric stepped up and took control, and kept control even after Corwin came back. Eric ended up being king for, what, about five years?" Folly glances at Martin for confirmation.

Martin nods, once.

Looking at Soren again, she continues, "And his bard -- you knew I was gonna come 'round to the point eventually, right? --" She grins. "His bard was this more avant garde guy called Barenthkov. Who is a colossal ass, but a good musician.

"I've heard that happens," says Soren.

"So, when I showed up in Amber, Eric had recently died, Oberon had shown up again briefly, most of Oberon's kids had gone to the other side of the universe to fight a war, and the Rein and Barenthkov factions in Amber maintained this rather obnoxious rivalry as they wondered which one would come out on top once the war was over."

Folly pauses again and smiles at Soren. "Which is why Syd decided to go with an outsider, y'know?"

"You know if I just disappear, Ash and Haven will never stop looking over their shoulders for when the Angel of Death is coming for them. You seen your mother's book?"

"Seen it, yeah," Folly says with a slight grimace. "I've not had the pleasure of reading it yet, though. We really just got here. Glanced at a copy in the library while we were trying to figure out how to find you."

She takes a contemplative sip of her beer. "So, yeah -- uh, how is everybody?"

"No new 'mysterious disappearances' to report, yet." he replies, drinking his beer.

"Heh heh," Folly chuckles. "Yeah, give it a few days."

Soren looks at her, his head cocked at a slight angle. He asks "You think it'll happen again?"

"Depends whether you decide to come with us -- and whether that counts as a 'mysterious disappearance', I s'pose...." she says.

"Right. I'll just ring my agent." Soren replies. "'Matt? Soren. Cancel all future gigs and tell my lawyer to sell the studio. No, I didn't join a cult. I'm going after Syd and Folly. No, I don't want to talk to your shrink. Matt? Matty, you there?' I don't think so."

Martin, who has been watching the two of them silently, cracks a grin at Soren's comment.

So does Folly. But she's got a mischievous gleam in her eye.

"And if those dipshits from the National Inquisitor have bugged my phone, it'll be about 15 minutes before they have another photographer on my ass. That, by the way, was who I thought you were when I saw you in the lobby. Sorry."

"S'ok," Martin says. "Sorry for dumping you in the dirt. I'm a bit touchy with that shoulder."

Soren carefully puts his empty down and pulls out a pair of brushes. "What's the next tune?"