Undead Monkeys

Not that long ago, I decided that I wanted an undead monkey for a pet.  A lot like the monkey from Pirates of the Caribbean.  But these guys are hell to get, because there's only one island in the middle of the Pacific that exports them.  Normally, it'd be easy to get a monkey from this island, but it's in the middle of a civil war, and each side created an embargo for the other.  

In other words, no monkey.  

I was trying to figure out a way to get a monkey, because I really want one, and a friend reminded me that this guy owes me from a thing with a Chinese woman and an elephant.  Because this story was a large part of my past (hell, it's the reason I have this name and face and life), I decided it was important to share.  

I was in Albania (doing work with cars for the Mafia) about three years ago, with my dad.  He wasn’t as much into the physical stuff, he preferred hacking, but the Mafia didn’t really trust a thirteen year old.  Anyway, we were driving through Albania, having just delivered a truckload of cars, when we pull over to get a bite to eat in Tirana, the capital of Albania.  This guy comes up to us while we’re eating, looking really nervous, and asks if he can sit down with us, just for a few minutes.  We were in a good mood, considering we’d just been paid a good deal of money, so we said sure, why not?  I mean really, this guy looked harmless.  What could possibly go wrong? 

So, it turns out that this guy jacked the shipment of cars we’d just delivered for another Mafia family.  He was running, having hidden the cars somewhere, he never told us where.  He assumed that an upstanding gentleman like my father with a cute, albeit odd, daughter such as myself would never be involved with the Mafia.  So, when we told him that those had been our cars, he started to freak out.  Before the police were called, we calmed him down, because we didn’t care what happened to the cars, now that we had been paid.  We asked this guy why he needed to steal those cars in the first place.  He said that he needed a good way to smuggle some cargo into another country. 

At this point, my dad was sort of out of his depth.  He mostly stole things, and changed deliveries.  The smuggling was more my area, so he left.  Now, it was just me and this guy, who said his name was John Smith.  Riiiiiight.  So, I told him my name was Sam Eyeam.  Yea, not that original, but whatever.  It got the job done.  I asked him what he was trying to smuggle and where. 

Smith said that he was smuggling papers.  Official documents, passports and the like, in and out of Korea.  Yea, Korea.  The north one.  Pretty big business.  So, me, having been in and out of Korea a few times, decided to help him out.  He brought me one of the cars, along with the pile of documents he had made. 

So, getting into Korea was no problem (it’s a lot easier than everyone makes it out to be…or at least, the way I take is) but somehow, the Mafia that I had been working for found out that I was helping Smith, so they were now gunning for the both of us.  Anyway, we get into North Korea, and it turns out that he had done this job to help pay for these passports and stuff to get a bunch of families OUT of North Korea.  So, we got them out (boy, was that fun) but now we’re on the run from the Mafia.  So Smith and I hightail it to France.  I spoke French pretty well, so it’s not like we were fumbling around with no way to survive.  Actually, we joined a circus.  THAT was fun.  I worked with animals, and Smith was a clown. 

THAT’s how I met the elephant.  Her name was Tiffy, the nicest elephant you’ll ever meet.  I got her to do tricks for the crowd, mostly standing up on various legs, but the really cool thing she could do was juggle with me.  Oh, the crowd loved it.  But she wasn’t treated very well backstage.  None of the animals were. 

I get word that there’s this guy in India that can help Tiffy, and I decide to steal her.  Smith comes with me, I said that he owed me because of the whole North Korea thing, and we steal Tiffy’s trailer.  Now we’ve got the Mafia and the French police after us.  Fun, right?  And the Mafia have a wide reach, so we needed to get Tiffy to India without being found.

We get a boat.  I load it with food for us and Tiffy, and we decide to sail around France (we were on the Northern side), around Spain, into the Mediterranean, and into the Black Sea, and drive from there to the Persian Gulf, avoiding any major war zones whenever possible.  So, we drove through Georgia and Azerbajain, and into Iran. Then, we went down to the Persian Gulf, and onto another boat. 

As it turns out, Tiffy had been pregnant.  I didn’t know this until the vet we had hired told me that she was giving birth.  A couple of hours later, we had a baby elephant. 

This presented a problem.  The guy in India said that he could take care of Tiffy, but not her baby.  Eventually, Smith got him to take the baby, who we named Sebastian.  

Don’t ask.

 

Now, I owed Smith a favor.  He put me in touch with a friend of his, another smuggler, and told me to solve his problem.  So, this guy lived in Japan, and his name was, weirdly enough, also John Smith!  Him, I call Smithy, because I like him better than the original Smith.  So, Smithy was having some trouble delivering some gems to a buyer, in Thailand.  I told him to put them into a bag, and shove the bag inside a melon, and get an elephant to eat the melon.  I’d been hanging around Tiffy long enough to know that she loved melons. 

Smithy didn’t exactly have an elephant on hand, so…yep, you guessed it.  He borrowed TIffy.  And when I say he borrowed Tiffy, I mean that he convinced me to take Tiffy to Thailand, and then meet him once nature had taken its course, and the gems were out of Tiffy’s digestive system.  It seriously didn’t take much time at all to get Tiffy to Japan, get her to eat the gems, and to get to Thailand. But that’s when I met this girl.  Nah, girl’s not the right word.  Woman.  She was travelling to Thailand to visit family, but she was originally from China.  She bonded with Tiffy immediately, and decided to stick with us on the way to our buyer, and then go to her family.  We got to where we were going, Tiffy delivered the goods, and we met Smithy.  

He fell in love with Piun Dao, and she him.  I’m not kidding.  Head over heels, bad romance movie, Romeo and Juliet with a happier ending in love.  They ended up getting married. 

So, summarizing, the guy who owes me is Smithy, and he owes me for introducing him to his wife and for lending him Tiffy to finish the job to let him go straight. 

As for the Mafia, they caught up with Smith, who pointed the finger at me and Smithy, and now him an Piun Dao are on the run.  I came here two and a half years ago, took over this identity, and have been Tegan  ever since.  I still get letters from Smithy every once in a while; he still thinks my name is Sam.  It’s actually really amusing.