The Last Coffee Shop

Prologue: Like Tomorrow Doesn't Exist

The first time the boy died, he drowned. He was declared dead by the self-taught medics of the catacombs beneath the city that used to be known as La Ville-Lumière(1). It had been centuries since a light burned in the city, since such a brightly illuminated target was an early casualty of one of the many wars. 

As above, so below; it was now a city of death.

So it was fitting that in the halls of the sightless dead, the dancing boy met his brutal fate. He was a skinny, teenaged mongrel on the day he was beaten to pulp and tossed into the slow-moving sewage channel. A bag of fresh bones to join the soup of waste and garbage on the road to nowhere.

Unhindered, the body drifted for a bit, until it hit a pile of mushy bones that had tumbled out of the walls. There it stuck, dipping and twisting against the bank of garbage and silt.

Only empty sockets and centuries of ashes witnessed the moment when the boy, most surprisingly, un-died. It was an uncomfortable experience, involving the purging of a gallon or so of putrid water from his lungs. The water was possibly more lethal than the beating. Only time would tell.

Some time later, the boy opened his eyes and saw nothing. He was in pain, but as soon as his eyes adjusted to the total darkness, he recognized the last thing he'd seen before they smashed his face into the ground. The walls, paved in skulls, and the floor, brown with the dust of bones that had crumbled over centuries, were as familiar to the boy as his own hands. 

Despite the thorough beating, the boy realized he was still alive in the catacombs. The other option was that the afterlife was a continuation of the bone-drenched tunnels he'd grown up in.

Either way, the silver-tongued boy once known as Garou, burlesque dancer and petty thief extraordinaire, was not going to spit in the face of fortune. His would-be murderers had left him for dead: bruised, bleeding, and half-drowned. It had been retaliation long overdue, for the many trinkets Garou had stolen from the notorious Fantum Gang. The Fantums(2) ruled the subterranean haunt of death and half-lives, keeping all its miserable inhabitants in adequate fear and misery.

But now he had found his way out. No one was looking for a dead boy. So Garou followed the secret passage to the upworld, stole a gas mask from a corpse, and walked forgotten streets until he found a starship illegal and stupid enough to have docked in the Ville sans Lumière(3).

On that starship, Garou did what any sensible person would: he reinvented himself. Shy, socially awkward, illiterate Garou died in the charnel river; the fabulous Jupiter Jive left the burnt remains of the planet once known as Ithir(4) on a smuggling freighter bound for the new frontier.

It would be twelve years before Jupiter (formerly Garou) died a second time. Over the following three years, he would die thirty-two times. And in 48 hours, Jupiter would die for the thirty-fifth time. Every time, he wondered if it was the last. Every time, he had reawakened in some godforsaken pit or ditch, with his ankle cuff blinking coordinates to his crew. He never quite remembered the dying, but he knew the signs that heralded it. It was always at the "full moon" phase of his home planet's lunar cycle.

At this moment, he guessed it was about 48 hours from death number thirty-five, and as Jupiter Jive perused the foam at the bottom of his mug, he wondered if this time he would stay dead.

Despite his peculiar condition(5), Jupiter Jive had it pretty good. In fact, for the past three years, he'd had nothing but good luck and good health. Treasure fell into his lap, he hadn't even caught a cold or sniffle, and it was impossible for him to get drunk (he had performed extensive tests).

Though he wasn't galactically infamous for his brains (rather, a devastating smile, snake hips, and incredible style), one of Jupiter's many secrets was his intellect. He was smart enough to connect his three years of extraordinary luck (and miraculous lack of hangovers) to his three years of lunar death cycles. After extensive research, Jupiter decided to accept the obvious: somewhere in his treasure trove of wrongfully borrowed plunder, there was a cursed artifact that wanted to go home.