“What about this job?” Dixie said, holding her phone up for Cleo to see across the table. “Codename Braum. Doing an art gallery in Topeka.”
“Why would we subject ourselves to driving through Kansas?” Cleo asked, not looking up from her smash burger combo. She was not helping to search because a hamburger required two hands to eat and she didn’t want to get grease on her phone’s screen.
“Wait, Topeka is in Kansas?” Dixie asked. frowning.
“It’s the capital of Kansas, honey,” Cleo confirmed patiently. Then, curious, she asked, “Where did you think it was?”
“I don’t know.” Dixie’s face scrunched up, wondering that too. “Not Kansas. How valuable could the art from Kansas be?”
“Well, hold on,” Cleo said. She tilted her head to the side, considering. “With a name like Brahm, he might have more insight on the Kansas art scene than we’re giving him credit for. If he’s named for the composer, maybe he’s not a complete philistine. Perhaps there’s something special moving through there.”
“Yeah, well, it’s spelled like the ice cream store,” Dixie said around a mouthful of Frito pie. Cleo shot a disgusted glance her way. Dixie swallowed her food before continuing. “Maybe he’s just a goth kid and Dracula and Alucard were already taken.”
“There’s a remote possibility that it’s a Legend of Sleepy Hollow reference,” Cleo mused as she swirled a french fry around in the puddle of ketchup on her plate.
“Wasn’t Brom the bad guy in the movie?” Dixie asked.
“More than Ichabod himself?” Cleo asked. “The man was trying to marry the girl for her money.”
“You wouldn’t name yourself after the dickhead in the movie though, would you?”
“You might if you thought he was in the right,” Cleo pointed out. Then she shrugged. “Or if Ichabod had too many syllables to be used as a codename.”
“Okay, hold up,” Dixie said, chuckling at this turn in the conversation and waving her hands in front of her to halt this line of thinking. “We’re forgettin’ the important thing here.
“We can’t tell anything about what this guy knows about the art scene in Kansas by his name alone, ’cause he ain’t the one who woulda picked it. His controller did and that don’t do us shit. The only real thing we know about Braum is that he’s going to Kansas for art.”
“Keep looking then,” Cleo said. She took another bite of her burger.
This story was part of my 2019 TRL event.
“Say Cairo, Sable and the rest come across another member of this Syndicate known as Bram. You think “reference to Bram Stoker”, right?
Well, after a bit of conversating, they find out he was trying to call himself “Brom”, like Brom Bones from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, and now he’s all butthurt by the fact he can’t change that.
Nothing major, just thought it’d be a tad funny.”
– Paupers Run
—
“Ok, just realized you don’t pick your code names with Syndicate. Ok, here’s my revamp:
Brom wanted to go by, well Brom, and said so to whoever you talk to while becoming a part of The Syndicate. He got told that’s not how it works, and he’s thinking “Ugh, fine, whatever.”
Once his registration is done, The Syndicate picks Bram as his codename. He swears they did that on purpose.”
– Paupers Run
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