Archie at the Helm
Michael
Will kick things off here with the status report on the subduction zone collapse attempts.
As of noon, Saturday, October 13, 1973, the following subduction zones have collapsed with zero evidence of remaining History B energies after high-altitude EM bombardment:
Point 2 (near St. Joseph, Louisiana)
Point 4 (near Mountain City, Tennessee)
Point 10 (near Kelso, Tennessee; closed earlier this week after "defoliation")
Point 11 (near Whiteville, Tennessee)
The following subduction zones' intensity has weakened considerably since the high-altitude EM bombardment but low/minimal readings of History B energies are still evident:
Point 3 (near Elberton, Georgia)
Point 5 (near Cameron, West Virginia)
Point 6 (Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin)
Point 12 (Lake Champlain, New York)
The following subduction zones have weakened minimally or not weakened at all since the EM bombardment:
Point 1 (near Grand Bay, Alabama)
Point 7 (near Hartford, Ohio)
Point 8 (near Eaton, Ohio)
Point 9 (near Mounds, Illinois)
Okay, why don't we get the memeage out of the way first. First, the countermeme to "pay no attention to the Indian Mounds." Now you can defuse the meme in just Hilary's head one-on-one; that's just a Brainwashing-16 roll vs. Hilary's Will + the Power of the Indian Mound meme (Power 10). Pretty tough, but with enough Corruption and/or Extra Time, not impossible.
But! If you want to make Hilary patient zero for a contagious meme that will spread throughout ALLOCHTHON, that's different. Archie has the OZYMANDIAS meme dead to rights; he succeeded by 10 back when he detected it. We'd average that with a Propaganda-20 roll to see how powerful Archie's countermeme is. Again, difficult to beat Power 10 but not impossible. (Thankfully, countermemes cost half the Corruption of standard memes.) Then we'd let it loose in Huntsville and depending how much more powerful than the Indian Mound meme it is, it would slowly wend its way through ALLOCHTHON.
The second meme is the one to posthumously smear Anthony Reinhardt. Evaluating the SANDMAN audience feels like Psychology to me; quantifying the median Sandman/ALLOCHTHON staff reactions to rumors of treachery seems like something Archie would need to plumb individual psychologies for. And then crafting will be Propaganda again:
Psychology-19
Propaganda-20
Average those out for the max Power of the meme.
And then Archie would deploy with Politics-22 (assessing a +3 for Archie's Rank within ALLOCHTHON); Politics is expressly called out in the Madness Dossier core book as the way to "spread a rumor." Success gives you a +1 to the effective Power, a crit gives you a +2. Given the audience is Sandmen, a higher Power may make more sense to help get past their resistances.
(Rob, if you want to put off the memetics decisions for a while, I could definitely do the Hobo Stan conversation anytime you're ready.)
Rob
Let me start with the second meme, smearing Reinhardt and explaining Archie/URIEL's rise in ALLOCHTHON. I'm waffling on whether to do a countermeme re the native mounds. Not sure it particularly benefits us to reverse SANDMAN's neglect of the issue - just curing Hillary may be the way to go.
Psychology.
>> SUCCESS by 8
Propaganda.
>> SUCCESS by 10
Michael
Power 9, not bad.
Rob
OK, better deploy at Max Power ("that's the man whose name you'd love to touch, but you mustn't touch!") given the audience.
Politics.
>> SUCCESS by 8
Michael
Effective Power 10. That's 9 Corruption. We can set that to circulating at Huntsville. Given Archie now has a full-on ALLOCHTHON org chart thanks to the CWG files, he's able to release the meme at a few crucial linchpin spots within the operation. (edited)
Rob
who could've predicted that taking OZYMANDIAS' place in the org chart would incur Corruption
Michael
(Rob, you let me know what's next for Archie in Huntsville. Figure it's early afternoon Saturday at this point: Marshall is in the air headed to New Mexico and Mitch, Roger, and Charley are on the ground in Mississippi. We had discussed Archie talking with Hobo Stan, the Mormon Conspiracy, and a few other things.)
Rob
With the what-happened-to-Reinhardt meme deployed (Archie works on it Friday night so it's embedded in his, Gottlieb, and Mead's remarks in the big all hands' meeting Saturday morning), Archie devotes the rest of Saturday to actually running ALLOCHTHON, both running it and being seen running it. He is effusive in congratulating people for their successes in collapsing/weakening subduction zones, and presses for more information on the four points that have not improved. In addition to the meme, Archie's hope is that Actually Fighting the Enemy will be more satisfying (to non-CWG personnel) than just going through the motions in a controlled experiment; maybe he'll get a morale boost and some added loyalty from the non-Osmonds among them.
At the end of a long work day, 8 pm or so, Archie will make a long distance phone call home, timed with the time difference to hopefully catch Melanie and both kids at home before dinner. (We've been away for a week, I think? This might be his first call home, the way people in 1973 doled out long distance calls.)
When that's done, Archie closes the door to whatever room he's commandeered as his office and takes out the puppets. He'll open up all the cases in case they want to talk to each other, but it's Hobo Stan he puts on his arm. This isn't the first Hobo Stan puppet, by any means; Archie has sewed him multiple felt-and-stuffing incarnations over the years, but he's still struck by how old this particular puppet is getting. He makes a mental note to mend his seams once he gets home to San Francisco. (He will forget.)
Then he clears his throat. "Hello? Hello, Stanley? It's me, Archie."
Michael
"Reverend." Stan's tone is curt and icy-cold; the gentle teasing he used to put into his nickname for the starched-collar, uptight Archie is gone. "Well. You've gotten yerself into one hell of a pickle here, haven't ye?"
Rob
Archie's a bit taken aback, tries to debate it. "I don't know about that. It's been a long couple of days, sure, but I think we're in better shape now than we were … golly, was that just yesterday morning?"
Michael
"Hmph." Stan does his usual spitting into an invisible spittoon trick without much of his usual élan. "Well yer just a reg'lar Pollyanna, ain't ye? Sittin' pretty in the catbird seat after yer buddy blows his gotdamn brains out and the other one, the girl, hits the bricks to get away from you. Sure, you're in better shape than you were yesterday, but ask yerself if that tells ye more about where y'are now or where you were."
"Anyway, I guess since you've got that new friend to talk to—that creepy gotdamn vulture—you only come to old Hobo Stan when you got a favor ye need to ask, eh? Well ask it then, if yer gonna. I got better places I c'n be."
Rob
"Well, yes. I'm sorry I've been so busy," Archie says sincerely. "I guess I have been talking to Stoney a bunch lately. I don't suppose the two of you are likely to see eye to eye on much, but it does take all kinds."
"Anyway, I'm not sure I have a favor to ask, just a question or two." Archie takes a second to think. He's not even sure what he's asking, he just knew he ought to talk to Stan. "Do you remember that bit we'd do on the old show, where you'd tell the kids the secret hobo names for things? And then we had to convince standards and practices they weren't secret cuss words!" He laughs at the memory.
"I guess I thought it was just made up, the hobo language. But apparently these fellows I work for-- or with--" (he's not certain) "are awful interested in it. What do you make of that?"
Michael
Stanley looks up at Archie, his bloodshot button eyes almost seeming to plead with him. It would take a lot to make a veteran hobo who's ridden the rails across all 48 states and seen it all in the process cry, but Archie can sense Stan's barely holding it together. His puppet face crumples into a frown and his voice chokes up audibly as he croaks, "You … you mean to tell me you never believed in the Secret Language of the Hoboes?"
Rob
(Aw, geez. )
Archie stammers. He realizes that he absolutely did believe in the Secret Language of the Hoboes, once. He believed it when his grandfather first told him about it, and when he used to tune in to Haywire Mac's radio show, and he definitely believed it when Hobo Stan first started talking to him, in the POW camp at Pyoktong. So when did he stop, or why did he say that?
"Oh, gosh, Stan, I didn't mean it like that! I just meant … I mean, it's secret for a reason, right? You have to be careful who you talk to about these things."
Michael
Stan swerves from sad to righteous in a snap. "Careful, sure, but the kiddies out there … they needed to know the lingo of the road, Arch! Those babes with their eyes all glued to their pitcher-boxes in their comfy living rooms … well, you cain't tell me they didn't deserve a better world than the one they ended up gettin'! That's why I gave 'em little snippets of it. To make 'em stronger, happier, healthier!"
The words of Enki from the mushroom trip echo down Archie's memories. "you must make the honey insects healthy. so they will not beg for the gods to return."
Rob
"Aha," says Archie when Hobo Stan waxes righteous, "who's the Reverend now, Reverend? You know a Freudian might say to look at us that you must be my id … but I've always thought you were my conscience. Remember when you refused to do those spots for Sharp Cereal with — with the Ransom Kid? How could I tell Ed Sharp that one puppet had objections and the others didn't?" Archie can't help reminiscing with Hobo Stan, he may be his oldest friend.
"Anyway, the Secret Language. It's 'healthier' because it's not Indo-European, is that it? It's not contaminated by the Red Kings? The people I'm working with want it, but we can't trust them. It may be safest, for both of us, if it just stays in your head. But could you teach it to someone else? Not just little snippets, but the whole thing?"
Michael
Hobo Stan looks at Archie blankly. "Indo-whooza-what's-it? It's the Secret Language of the Hoboes, Reverend! It comes from the Big Rock Candy Mountain. It's puuuure as a mountain spring, untainted by the squabbles of wicked rich men and unhassled by the imprecations of the railroad bulls! Yer grampa..." Stan clears his throat portentously, pantomiming taking off his (sewn-on) hobo cap, "may he rest in peace with his twelve wives on Planet Mars, he would've called it the Language of Adam, Pure and Undefiled. But that's just more Mormon hooey. This vernack-eler was the way we hoboes could ride the rails for free, forever. Any one of us of the Bindlestiff Brotherhood who makes it to the Mountain, well, that's proof enough right there that he's a righteous enough gent to learn the lingo."
Rob
"Planet Mars, right … " says Archie. "So you have to be pure of heart, okay, that makes sense. Could you teach it to an innocent? Say, a child? Or children?"
Michael
Stan says, "It's the reason I thought to drop them words on your kiddie show, Arch. Yeah, kids'd take to it like a duck to water. But we're not talking giving it to them once they're in the schoolhouse, y'see. If you wanted them to learn the language, and not just a few words like I was teachin' the young'uns, you'd need to get 'em started early — real early — give it to 'em with their mothers' milk. But the problem with that is the gaps in the... uh..." Stan sputters to a stop. "Say, Reverend. You ain't tryin' to pick my pocket right now, are you?" Stan sort of peers at Archie suspiciously. "Because if I am gonna be a schoolteacher, it's not gonna be for a bunch of … a bunch of Pinkertons."
Rob
"I would never sell you down the river like that, Stanley. But I am in a pickle, like you say. And I might have to run a little shell game." Archie sighs. "It seems like everybody — Marshall, Jocasta — wants to cut the Gordian knot, or cut and run. What if the only way out is through?"
Michael
(I'm intrigued as to what Archie's plans are, but we can end the scene on Archie whispering into Stan's ear and him doing the classic puppet/Looney Tunes bit of saying very conspicuously "Huh" and "Ya don't say?" very loudly every few seconds while listening to Archie)
Rob
First, when on the phone to Melanie before talking to Hobo Stan, he floated the idea of the Ransoms going back to Utah for Thanksgiving this year, seeing his family and hers. Just suggested it like it's no big thing, like Melanie doesn't try to get him to go every holiday and two times out of three Archie finds an excuse not to.
Second, after talking to Stan, he summons whoever they've got at ALLOCHTHON for admin stuff, travel arrangements. He wants a flight to New York first thing Monday morning, commercial not military, and a face-to-face that day with Frank Stanton. Mead (not Gottlieb) will be in charge at Huntsville while he's gone (along with Hilary Postel if Archie has the juice to make that happen). But Archie aims to be back in Huntsville that night if the flights allow it.
Michael
LOVE it.
On Sunday, Rob, we could do a quick consultation with Hilary on subduction-reduction progress, Indian mounds, etc. etc. before Archie heads to New York. Of course some of that might depend on how the Point 1 team is doing.
Rob
Yes, definitely. And Archie will take a crack at deprogramming Hillary. It sounds like doing it one-on-one (with Brainwashing) would be a lot tougher but could incur less corruption — how much time does "Extra Time" take?
Michael
I just remembered that Brainwashing rolls are a Regular Contest over time and you get one roll per day. So let's game this out:
Archie's Brainwashing is a 16, as mentioned above. Hilary's Will, I feel like 13 seems like a good number there, plus 10 from the Power of the OZYMANDIAS meme, so that would be vs. 23.
Now Archie can bring all kinds of bonuses to bear here if he wants to — while Extra Time might not be as effective, given it's a day for each Brainwashing attempt, I would argue that Archie is working with a fundamentally friendly subject, even if the meme itself is making Hilary stubbornly resist the facts about the Indian mounts that he once himself espoused. Archie knows the nature of the meme intimately, and has proof about the influence of the Indian mounds on subduction that he can bring to bear on this. But ultimately this isn't an argument or a debate, right? Brainwashing is, like, a bombardment of information, physical and intellectual stimuli (it doesn't have to be torture, of course), emotional appeals. I'd argue you could get some bonuses for roleplay here as well, and Corruption, as I mentioned, is always an option, as well as, uh, SANDMAN tech.
(Kind of funny to think about as well, but the Dragon Lady is, of course, a better Brainwasher than Archie is.)