think you’ll find our request to be more important than a soap opera,” said Rob.
“You say that with such indifference, but Giselle came back from the dead again. This is serious business!” said Bora.
“Dude, calm down. You’re on speakerphone.”
“Is Kate Beckinsale standing nearby?”
“No.”
“Then it matters not.” It then sounded as though Bora held the phone away from himself for a moment, and he shut off his television using voice command. After bringing the phone back to his ear he said, “What can I do for you fellows?”
Andrew tucked the model of the panther-like Deaf Prowler under his arm and walked up to the speaker. “We’re in need of a man with an accordion,” he said.
“Accordion? This must be a big job.”
Indeed, though there were those who scoffed at it, the accordion was one of the most powerful instruments known to musiciankind (along with the ukulele and kazoo). More than once had Bora’s accordion been used to get Tally Hall out of a bind. One such incident was when Joe, Rob, and Zubin’s singing had attracted some Deafcaps. Not only was Bora able to singlehandedly ward off the aliens with his accordion, but he was also able to soothe everyone’s posttraumatic stress from the ordeal by playing a polka ditty.
“Put me on a projector,” Bora said, and Rob consented, finding a port on Coz’s keyboard to place his jPhone. As it clicked into place, light rays from the phone’s small screen scurried together to form the hologram of Bora Karaca, a man around the same age as the Tallies who had dark curly hair, five-o-clock shadow, and some kind of visual impairment. He was taking a pair of thick-rimmed glasses out of his shirt pocket as he simultaneously put his own jPhone into a hologram port.
“This is about Casey isn’t it?” he said casually once his glasses were on.
“How did you — ?”
“Don’t ever doubt my ability to find things out,” Bora said darkly.
Andrew crossed his arms in an unimpressed manner — the manner in which keyboardists tend to react to everything other musicians say. “Are we the only ones ever in the dark about these things?” he said.
“It’s not that we’re in the dark,” said Joe. “It’s just that everyone else is in the light.” (Joe was very philosophical, i.e. a lot of the things he said were confusing.) “Speaking of which,” Joe continued, “I’ll just bet Al knows what we’re doing this very minute, and it won’t be long ‘til he takes a teleporter here to stop us.”
“Ew, I hate teleporters,” said Bora. “I prefer planes.”
“Yeah,” Coz said, “always comfortable.”
“Don’t encourage him,” said Zubin, suddenly straightening himself up in his seat. “We had to suck it up and teleport here. Don’t you dare take a plane.”
“You know, Zubin,” Bora said as his hologram strolled around the room, “you can be a real jerk when you haven’t had your coffee.”
“I did have my coffee.”
“Did I say coffee? What I meant to say was you can be a real jerk when you breathe.”
“Just around friends,” Zubin said, relaxing back into a slumped posture and not worried at all about getting a bad back later in life. “I only insult the people I really like or the people I can’t stand. You guys are on the positive end of the spectrum. Most of the time,” he added under his breath.
