The Nine Kilo Quart Jar

Dorothy works as a property manager, the middle (wo)man between landlord and tenant. At the outset of Covid-19's layoffs, certain tenants sought reprieve from rent payments. Dorothy had rebuked these requests by noting that said tenants were on JobSeeker, which the Department of Very Bad Ideas had recently doubled. If they could afford rent before, they certainly could now. (Unlike some of us, who struggle to navigate centrelink's bureaucracy  and do not qualify for JobKeeper because their employer is owned by Dubai. Just saying, it is fair enough that government supports disaster stricken farmers, but nobody asks if said farms are owned by a Canadian Public Service Pension Fund.)

Dorothy is an avid baker and cook. When public sentiment anticipated an apocalyptic scenario where the new currency was shit-tickets, Dorothy did not panic buy but did turn her culinary eye towards preserving. She pulled out her Ball Blue Book and Ball Canning Jars. The recipe for Beans - Boston Baked calls for dried navy beans, salt pork, onions, brown sugar, salt, dry mustard and molasses.

Unable to receive visitors who could comment on the state of her kitchen, or her mental health, Dorothy grew a little obsessive with this project. She consulted other cookbooks, a few grimoires, improvised her own recipe and improved upon it. Electricity was cut so she burned Slut Root in a hole dug in the backyard, using her common-sense as tinder. Lightning strikes cast silhouettes of her hands, like monstrous spiders on the walls. She used tweezers to Tetris nine kilograms of beans and pork into a single quart jar. (For those Googling quart-to-kilo conversation rates: no, this is not possible by currently accepted laws of reality and Dorothy knows that she will never be able to pull this off again.)

Two months passed and fervour numbed, covid became begrudged chore. Restrictions came, restrictions passed. Many first face-mask adopters, privy to special internet information, sensed the change in fashion and dropped said masks when it became a legal requirement, revealing the smug grins of perpetual edge-lords. Dorothy decided to trade the nine-kilo-quart-jar and so sought out Saperavi and Pedro.

Pedro is a rogue skybax (Quetzalcoatlus skybax) and Saperavi is his designated driver. Word on the street (or, rather, cafes, workplace lunchrooms, yu-gi-oh tournaments) is that Saperavi is looking to offload a lot of sunstones after a misunderstanding a few weeks back, seen here in flashback...

Saperavi: "You said two dozen sunstones."

The client: "Those are sunstones."

"Those are not fucking sunstones."

"They shoot red light, heal with blue. Fucking. Sun. Stones."

At which point Pedro lifted a wing to reveal a first aid kit and Saperavi slapped a revolver onto the table: "Do they power the machinery of Dinotopia?"

"Uh, they might?"

"Where did you get these sunstones?"

Shouting frustrated: "The yellow tower. Above the veil. You know, the mountain of light."

Mutually dawning realisations prompted silence from Saperavi and the client. Pedro took the opportunity to chug a litre of Jim Beam.

The client: "I don't have anything else to pay -"

"Get out."

(Back to the present which is still in the past but still about two months after the opening paragraph.) One of Dorothy's tenants had found hydroponic equipment in their rental property's back shed and wanted the equipment gone. Dorothy had personally attended to the tenant's request but neglected to keep proper records of the equipment's disposal into her closet. Saperavi readily gave Dorothy two sunstones in exchange for the nine-kilo-quart-jar. Dorothy installed the sunstones as solar-charged closet lamps.

So now word on the street (or, rather, discord servers, poker nights, politically incorrect high teas) is that Saperavi is looking to offload a quart jar that contains nine kilos of Boston baked beans. She pilots Pedro interstate to a pub, where she sips lemonade and he hydrates with stout.

Cops accost the duo: "We've heard reports of a pterodactyl flying over locked-down state borders."

Saperavi deflects this with angry squint: "Racist."

Another hour of stout before Nathan approaches the smugglers. Since first blogged about, Nathan has stopped day drinking  and found (taxed) work at another pizza shop, delivering to a different patch of suburbia where about half of the residents, who otherwise lead stock-standard lives, belong to a localised cult. Mystical events around the area established the benign cult eight years ago and its adherents abide by some weird practices - once or twice some years, the stars, planets, clouds and satellites align to present a symbol which only the cultists' cognitive bias recognises, a religious sign that obligates the eating the baked bean pizza.

None of Nathan's co-workers can predict when these nights will occur but they are a lucrative frenzy, yet not lucrative enough to dedicate metre-cubes of space to store the otherwise pointless cans. The out-of-the-blue-or-rather-black supermarket runs, sheepishly emptying shelves into trolleys, is Nathan's role and he is sick of this. He has decided to pre-emptively System D this shit, use his off-the-books side hustle to benefit his taxed employment. He purchases the nine-kilo-quart-jar from Saperavi.

Nathan pays Saperavi with a copy of the latest edition of his contact grimoire. In his spare time, Nathan has been bathing 40 kilos of tempeh in hydrochloric acid in sacrificial rituals that summon one dark lord or another. A large red portal would open on the floor, out of which the personal assistant to the relevant dark lord would climb a ladder: a Dave, an Erin, a Morgan, always with resting-bitch-face that expected to disappoint.

The personal assistant would usually say: "Sorry, my dark lord is not seeing clients at the moment and is booked for the foreseeable future."

But Nathan would go: "I was actually hoping that you could help me."

"Oh." A curious eyebrow usually raised. "Really?"

Nathan has been compiling the details of these personal assistants into the aforementioned contact grimoire which opens easier channels, such as email or phone, to those wishing to deal with dark offices. Such methods also make the personal assistant's work easier, therefore more likely to slip the informed inquirer into an opening in their dark lord's schedule.