Sold to Franz Ferdinand

Explanations.

This was not how I'd imagined my Saturday morning going. It's barely even been two hours and I already have a new family. Well, I hope they'll treat me like family.

A normal day in my life would look like this: wake up at an ungodly hour (either at four in the morning or four in the afternoon, no inbetween), have a fight with my mum, eat cigarette butts for breakfast (not actually, I just chew on them), have another fight with my mum, think about leaving the house, enjoy the parklife, feed the pigeons (and I sometimes feed the sparrows too, it gives me a sense of enormous well-being... where is this going?), come back, fight with mum...

God, life's relentless.

But all of that is about to change.

Just as Alex claps his hands together, Audrey signals for me to follow her. I don't know if I can trust anyone except her, frankly. Men are strange.

I comply and follow her down the hallway, to a set of shadowy stairs probably leading to a basement. Dunno, but a basement is the last place I want to go just after being bought by someone. Except for Luton, that would probably be a worse place to go. Or anywhere in France.

"Please don't make me go down there," I plead, "it's dark and scary and I don't like it."

Audrey chuckles and reaches for something on the wall that makes a clicky sound. Suddenly I can see there's room at the end of the stairs, because the stairs have lit up!

"Oh, that's so cool! What kind of technology is that? We didn't have that stuff at my house, wow!"

She looks at me, a sad smile across her face.

"That's called a lamp. With a lightswitch. Flick, flick." she says while flicking the switch, making the staircase alternate between light and dark.

"So cool."

I get gently pushed towards the stairs as Audrey shakes her head behind me. As I'm walking down the stairs, careful not to misplace my steps as I have a fear of falling down stairs, I think about what might happen once I reach the bottom.

There's quite a few possibilities: I might get killed, or worse, forced to listen to music I dislike; Some kind of satanic ritual, probably being inspired by some idiotic show on the telly; Or, maybe, just maybe, it'll be a surprise party for my birthday two months ago, showing that my mother actually does care for me.

What do I even bother, the first two are way more likely than the last.

My breathing falters a bit as I go down the last few steps and I see shadows, moving about, out of my peripherals.

As I finally reach the basement floor (I had to be really careful with my steps because I hate stairs!!! Escalators are even scarier!!!!!!) I see a faint yet ominous light at the other end of the room, as well as a silhouette of one of those spinny chairs. The chair slowly gets turned towards me, my previous suspicions confirmed, but I still can't see shit 'cause the light is behind the chair. Whoever is in the chair is smart enough to notice this and grabs the source of light, placing it on the table between the two of us. It's Paul! The one and only Paul! Drummerman! Paul!

"Y/N. We've been expecting you," he says scarily and intimidatingly, stroking one of three cats in his lap. "My name's Paul! How are you adjusting to your new situation? I understand if this all seems a bit strange. It is strange, really."

Phew, this man is nice. I reply without hesitating, "Better than could be expected, I'd presume. Also, why am I here???"

"We'll get to that immediately, we've kept you in the dark long enough. Figuratively and literally. ALEX, TURN THE FUCKING LIGHT ON, YOU FU-"

"Shut up, dickhead," Alex interjects, turning on the light.

"Anyway. Let's talk."

Paul goes on to explain to me why I got adopted and pretty much kidnapped and why I am currently in the basement of a rather large mansion. Apparently, Franz Ferdinand recently got themselves into quite the predicament. You see, when people make money, the big bad government wants some of that money back, to use for the "benefit of the public". This also happens with people having power over other people who make money for the power-having people: they must give part of their earnings to the people in power. Franz Ferdinand were working, without their knowledge, actually, for some random company called Vagen. Not to be confused with the German word Wagen, although the pronunciation is quite similar.

Apparently, the Vagen people (if there even are multiple people) weren't being paid by FF. At all.

Apparently, the Vagen "people" didn't like that very much. But alas, instead of taking FF to court like any other normal company would, they started spreading slanderous rumours about them to local newspapers. Which in turn gained access to bigger newspapers. Which in turn led to the rumours becoming a well-known "fact" about the band:

Franz Ferdinand lip-syncs every single one of their performances.

Now, any Franz Ferdinand Fan would see this is simply not true. Literally impossible.

But, the general media, of course, believed this like... like how religious people believe in their religion. Maybe a bit less radically. They slurped this so-called hot gossip up like college students their instant noodles.

This can be quite dangerous to any band. Well, Milli Vanilli wouldn't have cared, but true musicians such as these (mostly) Scottish people do in fact care about this kind of stuff.

In short: they no pay who they gotta pay and now fake rumours about them!

* * *

"So," I hesitantly said, "you're basically trying to save your reputation from lip-syncing allegations made by this weird company with a German-sounding name?"

"Yeah," answers Paul.

"I understand that, but where does my kidnapping come into play to help you guys against these horrible allegations?"

"Well," says Dino, "y'know your Instagram page?"

I nod agreeingly.

"So, like you have quite a few followers. Most of which like music, I'd presume. We thought you might know ways to publicly state that we are not, in fact, lip-syncing our songs."

"And also," adds Alex, "we saw your police files and we thought you'd make a good spy ninja secret-agent combo, yeah?"

Oh god. Not the police files.

"Erm... for what would, uhm, my... my background with the law help?" I ask, feeling like I just got punched in the throat. Rather lightly, luckily. Please don't let them know about the weetabix incident.

"Dunno it just seems obvious that a criminal could help us with criminal acts and-," says Alex.

"Alex!" interrupts Audrey, "We've talked about this! Look, Y/N, we just know that you know a thing or two about the band, and that you'd be loyal to us, for some reason. So, we thought, why not try and get you on our side? You could help with positive publicity on your social media, as well as help during, well, there's no other way to say this, missions against those Vagen scum."

"Oh cool. Yeah, all right, I'm fine with that."

"Wait, really?" states Paul. That was much easier than expected, he thought, I could've convinced them with the cats as a reward if they hadn't agreed.

"I mean, what else is there to do? I've already been bought, 'n' all that..."

"Yeah... makes sense really. Look, make yourself at home somewhere that isn't the basement, a closet is fine by us, as long as you're happy. We'll be meeting here everyday for the foreseeable future at around eleven in the morning, so just enjoy your free time right now!"

"Thanks. Right. Well... I'll be off then. See ya 'round."

I give the three cats on Paul's lap each a pat on their cute little heads, turn around and head up the stairs as Julian not-so-sneakily follows me up.

Maybe this won't be too bad.