The Jesters

“I know you’re thinking: ‘there's a sucker born every minute,’” my father was saying, “‘And I plan on finding every one of them…’"
However, before he could finish the sentence that I’m sure he had been planning for hours ahead of time while he wormed his way through the traffic that led to St. Vincent’s, I held up my hand and stopped him.
“Sorry, dad, I don’t have time for this. You see, in exactly thirty three seconds, that wall right over there is about to become as unstable as its going too for the next few weeks, so if you’ll excuse me, I really need to get going,” with that, I whipped around and hurled myself through the hectic, colliding molecules of oxygen and nitrogen that swirled and eddied through the thoughtless photons provided by the midday sun. I could just imagine my dear father’s face as he saw his son’s form dissolve away in front of him and as almost a shadow begin to flit just faster than the muscles of his eye could haul them around in his poor mortal head.
With only the occasional wisp of CO2 from one of the other inmates exhaled breaths to catch my flitting interest, I reached the wall in question with two point four seconds to spare. Those two and almost-a-half seemingly innocent and unquestioning bits of time dragged on forever into eternity as my father began to raise his arm in protest at my rather swift departure. Then, finally it happened, I could feel it. The various atoms and molecules in the wall seemed to warp and bend for a fraction of a second and I knew that it was done, many times the wiser than any of the poor wardens or even the inmates, many of whom were nearly on par with my level of thought. Wait, what am I saying? Those damned doctors must have been getting in my head again. No one’s as good as me, got that? No one. So if you ever happen to meet one as me in a dark ally in some dank city somewhere, just remember this warning and do everything that they tell you because if not, someone’s going to get hurt and it certainly won’t be someone like me.
Anyway, back to the past; so knowing that the wall was “fixed” as it was, I just nonchalantly leaned against it and promptly fell through seven feet of steel reinforced concrete. Light as air, they say, but don’t let those damn writers fool you, nothing is as light as air. When one can fade through solid matter one begins to appreciate the wonderful, thin quality of air even more. As those few feet between me and the free world parted like a slightly more solid version of the Red Sea, I realized suddenly that I had no idea what was just beyond the rude, confining wall. They had me heavily sedated as they had brought me here. Whatever they had used would have even killed a racehorse to put me under like that, but hey, it was fun while it lasted, no?
My head faded through the last few inches of concrete and there I was, breathing the free air of… god knows where. I felt as free as a bird, until the sensation that I was falling faster and faster became a stridently intrusive reality. Beyond the wall, it turned out, was a three hundred meter drop to relatively lethal rocks that were lapped at by a hungry sea. I immediately pitied the few of those that I had seen going over the wall in my few months in St. Vincent’s.
Nine point eight meters per second is fast. I know that it might not seem like it if you are merely jumping off of a small building, say, and you only just get up enough velocity to reach that speed before hitting the ground, but at one third of a kilometer, you have a good, long time to contemplate the precise physics of your body in motion before you hit whatever happens to be under you. Fortunately for me, for even my powers would have had a difficult time getting me out of that predicament alive, my father must have summoned the wardens as fast as his mortal legs could go, because whenever anyone else had gone over, they had never lifted a finger to stop them or save them, one of the reasons that I so despised the wardens, the other was obvious, they were the established authority of St. Vincent’s and everyone knows how well teenagers do with the established authority.
Anyway, before I could end my days spread-eagled on the rocks below, the molecules that were shooting by me as fast as ever, began to slow and…harden. Soon, my fall had slowed to almost nothing and I was suspended face down, looking the vicious, tiger-fang ocean square in the eye. Did I flinch? Of course not! How could anyone ask that question, I am indestructible, and even though the probability of me surviving the fall without any major injuries was almost imperceptibly tiny, there was still always that one little chance. It was then the I realized that the wardens had been the ones to interfere in my destiny. They had been the ones to stop the confrontation between me and the rocks below. Words cannot describe the anger that I felt then. They had robbed me of my chance for discovering how much punishment I could take after dropping three hundred meters onto solid stone! How could they, was the only thought that ran through my mind at the moment.
So, I twisted and whirled, gyrating my body at a significant percentage of the speed of light, forcing the sluggish, slothful air molecules to move around me once more. Finally, with a vicious twist, I tore myself from their grasp and felt the air begin to move around me once more, stirring my slick hair and gliding along the pores of my skin. God, it felt good. I could see the next few seconds in my almost dead-clear mind’s eye, the rocks racing to meet me as I fell even further. No more were the wardens attempting to stop me, no more were they trying to interfere with what was to be my glorious destiny at the end of a three hundred meter fall. It felt as good as the air to be that independent.
It was almost there, the next few seconds themselves were marching off into infinity, into the eons that lay ahead for this spot of stone directly below me that was at the moment spreading its arms…
They missed. Those damned arms of that damned stretch of beach missed me completely and to this day, they still have not found their mark. For as the moment of reckoning came on and on, faster and faster, I suddenly found myself in the arms of another person instead! Once again I was enraged, until I looked up and saw the grinning face of Longely beaming down at me. I could almost see the photons bouncing off of his perfectly groomed teeth. In fact, I could.
“Hey there, Soggy, what the hell you think you’re doing jumpin’ off a cliff like that! You might have torn those nice prison clothes you have on,” the grin continued.
He hit the rocks and rebounded gracefully, sending both of us soaring up and away into the cobalt blue sky.
I straightened my clothes as much as was possible in his iron grip and said, brilliantly, I may add, “It’s not a prison, it’s a hospital.”
“Ha!” he snorted, “Right, and I suppose that all those rows of razor-wire on the walls are for decoration, huh?”
“Of course,” I retorted, “it’s New Age, very chic.”
He grinned even wider and straitened his course, heading for the city.
We arrived home late, but only because Lonnie made us stop and freak out a group of idiot pot-head mortal teens. By the time we arrived back at the apartment, my grin was as big as Lonnie’s and those kids would never touch a joint ever again.
When I had changed from the “hospital” clothes, which were so drab that they were practically monatomic, into something more usual, Lonnie already had the wheel out and spinning on the kitchen table.
“Jesus, Lon, I just got out of rehab, not again!” I said, laying on the sarcasm as heavily as any Old Century comedian.
“Come on, Soggy, this is the perfect thing to get you back to usual ASAP.” He replied flicking the wheel again and making it spin even faster.
Now, maybe for any of you non-Jesters reading this, I should clarify. Our wheel is a holographic projection that had the names of every major funds-holding building within a one-night’s flight. We used a hologram because it was the only way we could fit all those names and also, light was the only thing that we could move fast enough to make the results completely random. We developed the wheel after too many months of just choosing our targets. We both liked the randomness that it created, we liked to put our lives in the hands of destiny. It was on one such of these destiny-runs, as we like to call them that I got careless and let myself be incarcerated in the lovely “retreat house” of St. Vincent’s for those Jesters who get too old and too slow. I, however was neither of those and was not going to let myself be cut down in my prime.
So, as our custom goes, the one who spins the wheel is forced to let the other stop it and find out what the target is to be. So, I slowly put my finger out, bringing it closer and closer to the wheel, and finally I took the plunge, stabbing my finger into the hotly flowing surge of photons. Slowly, they began to swim and coalesce, processing my decision and putting it into words. The letters appeared one after the other, spelling out…s…t…v…i…n… Need I go on? Yes, the damn thing, under the shaping hands of fate had decided to send me and my partner in crime against the facility where I had been previously held.
I started laughing and Lonnie joined in. It was perfect, we ourselves, to of the best Jesters in the city would have had a hard time planning such a perfect piece of irony. Eventually the feelings settled and we sat down to plan the attack.
The next day, as per our customs once again, we began. I came in hard from the left of the gate and Lonnie chose the right. We always did frontal assaults, as to maximize the skill and power needed to finish the job. We hit our targets simultaneously. I the left door, and Lonnie the right. I felt the atoms in the metal buckle and crack, sear and burn under the enormous pressure that we built up against the suffering material of the gate. It exploded inward, and we both made sure that the particles of dust and debris thrown up by the blast swirled around our bodies impressively as it began to settle. We didn’t give it a chance. I dove into the cloud and flashed between the individual bits of sand and dirt, not wanting to get my newly pressed suit dirty…yet. Lonnie, I knew had gone the opposite direction, and I knew by the yells of the wardens that they had spotted him. A group of them rounded the corner as I reached the door to the inner vaults. They rushed me, disturbing the tranquil air of the beautiful summer day. I could see the smell the droplets of sweat that flew from their body as they raced to attack me. Then there was the first swing of a weapon. I decided to show them what a Jester could do. I could feel the upset wake of air of the rod’s progress and faded that part of my body. The baton passed through me as if I were fog and hit the solid ground hard, with a crack and a grunt of pain from the wielder. The next few wardens, I made short work of, paying back each of them for the problems that they had caused me during my incarceration.
As soon as they were disposed of, Lonnie appeared at my side.
“Ready?” He asked.
“Done.” I replied and pushed the door to the inner vaults of St. Vincent’s open. There it was, the supercomputer that housed all of the assets of the wealthy hospital. I quickly walked up to it, Lonnie covering my back. I pulled out my own personal cred-card and slid it into the slot.
No, I thought as the felt the beginning of the end, I should have expected it after my escape, they beefed up security. The air around me was hardening fast and I could sense the wardens as they came thundering down the hallways. In seconds I couldn’t move a muscle, the air around me so hard that no amount of twisting and writhing on my part would free me. I could just see Lonnie out of the corner of my eye. He had a wry smile on his face and I knew that he was loving the irony as much as I was. He winked and me, grinned even more broadly, and flicked a salute before turning and fading through the left wall.
Damn, I thought, as the wardens closed in and arrested me, again. However, as they were taking me out of the vaults, I remembered the look in Lonnie’s eye and brushed my hand ever so slightly into the wall that he had left through. There, a few inches into the wall, was a date, scrawled quickly onto the face of a single piece of sand in the concrete. That wall I had jumped out of yesterday would be getting a little bit thinner in a few days. I mimicked Lonnie’s grin and flicked him back a salute in my head, grateful to have teamed up with a Jester as skillful as he was.