Gone Fishin’

Michael

On a sparkling clear cool late May afternoon on the mountain, as afternoon classes are getting underway, a fairly beat-up Buick drives into the St.-Germain School cul-de-sac, kicking up a load of road dust.

Mitch is having a PB&J with the kids and faculty at the courtyard picnic tables as the car pulls in. Mitch peers into the car and sees only one figure, the one driving. He's an older gentleman wearing outdoor gear, a light windbreaker, with a floppy fly-fisherman's bucket hat atop his head.

Pat Price emerges from the driver's seat. He goes to the back seat, pulls out a couple of spin rods, and hails Mitch.

"Hey kid, hope you don't mind my showing up unannounced," he says as he ambles over to Mitch's table. Pat takes a look at the school, the idyllic surroundings, and the schoolkids. "Wow. This is nice digs you've got here. I was hoping if you could tear yourself away from headmaster duties this afternoon," Pat says sotto voce, "we could hit the Lake. Called ahead and chartered a little skiff at Packers Bay. I usually do rivers," he taps his fly-covered hat, "but I figured the quiet of the lake could be good for us."

Jeff

Mitch holds eye contact with Pat, shouts "Mary-Lynn! Pat's here!"

She's in earshot but, like, just inside a bungalow or something.

"He says I have to go fishing," Mitch tells Mary-Lynn apologetically, once she's in view. (edited)

Michael

Pat looks bemused at Mitch's statement. "Hey, it's not like I'm layin' down the law or something here, partner, I just figured..." Pat stops (and Mitch can see his aura goes kinda soft and squishy and sentimental) as he sees Mary-Lynn, whom he probably hasn't had occasion to see in quite a few months. "Gosh, lookit this, the Schoolmarm herself!"

Mary-Lynn bats and rolls her eyes and smiles, saying, "Now now, Mr. Price, my proper title is 'Chief Administrator of the St.-Germain School.' Welcome to the magic mountain, Paddy!" Mary-Lynn gives Pat a hug. "Going fishing, huh? Well I hereby give the Headmaster the rest of the afternoon off; he's got no classes scheduled anyway. Go on, babe, it'll do you some good." Mary-Lynn kisses Mitch on the cheek and sends him on his way.

It's a bit of a ride down to Lake Shasta, which has the best trout fishing in Siskiyou County. "Might be a little early for 'em," Pat says, "but I've got my eye on rainbows today. Rainbows and maybe some early king salmon." Pat gets a faraway look in his eye at the thought of such a "hit" today. "Got a big container of dry ice in the back—benefits of still working at a lab, huh?—and a 24 of Coors. Should be a perfect afternoon, huh?" Pat gives Mitch a friendly slap on the back.

Mitch sees Pat's patter as his usual forced breaking-the-ice camaderie—Mitch saw it several times at SCANATE—but underneath Mitch can tell Pat's got a streak of nervousness hiding in that gregarious aura. Pat keeps the banter light and largely focused on Mitch's work at the school until the two of them get to the lakeside marina in Pat's Buick.

Jeff

"...so I guess that's why we end up talking about sitcoms so much," Mitch muses. "Sorry, man, that didn't really answer your question... we got a couple of actual no-fooling educators on staff, they handle the three-R business.

"But you coulda gotten this info with a phone call, you didn't hafta ply me with trout fantasies. What's on your mind, man?"

Michael

Pat and Mitch grab the cooler, the beers, the rods and the bait, put them onboard the skiff, and Pat unties the boat from the dock and the two men shove off to the deeper waters of Lake Shasta.

Addressing Mitch's question around why he drove all the way up here on a surprise visit while they're puttering to mid-lake out of Packers Bay, Pat simply says, "Oh well, you know, it just feels good to put some miles between me and SRI, or between me and the Tahoe house... or even Andy Capp's. You know, the places I'm well-known to habitually visit. 'Known haunts,' as my brother detectives might say."

The paranoia and suspicion, now that they're out on the lake, is much more evident in Pat's aura, like he was waiting for the distance and space to speak and even feel freely.

Pat cracks a Coors and patiently baits a hook while he's talking to Mitch. "You ever read any Charles Fort, Mitch? I have to imagine you have, given your pedigree. Hell, if I've heard of him..."

"Anyway, he had this all-encompassing theory about the Weird, right?" The hook between Pat's fingers pierces the worm with finality. Pat looks up at Mitch and recites the line from The Book of the Damned.

"'I think we're property.'"

Pat looks sadly at the worm he's just hooked. "Sorry. Just an idle thought. We're gods to the fish, you know? Just gets you thinking about the... the cyclicality of it all."

"So..." Pat says, casting out and sipping his beer. "...had any interesting visiting lecturers the past few weeks?"

Jeff

I Jeff am unsure but Mitch would understand immediately through nonverbal cues: by "visiting lecturers" is Pat imagining/referring to CIA/SANDMAN, legit aliens/ufos/demons, something like Comte or Ambrose Bierce, or...?

Also Mitch will roll analysis of Pat's aura, and check for history-b just in case, well before getting onto the water

>>SUCCESS by 1 (aura analysis)

>>>CRITICAL SUCCESS (Detect activation)

>>SUCCESS by 1 (Detect check)

>>SUCCESS by 4 (Detect analysis)

I think those all squeak by

Michael

There's no B clinging to him. And nothing untoward in his aura; health-wise, I would have to say that he's in a little bit worse shape physically than the last time Mitch saw him long enough to examine his aura (maybe a few months?), a little weaker of a heart, a little more kidney damage, maybe another 10 to 15 pounds. He's not been looking after himself, that's for sure.

As for his little comment... well, Marshall utilized Pat last month during the Patty Hearst case to try and zoom in on Colston Westbrook out in Pennsylvania and Pat had been working the Hearst case for the "SFPD and the Feds"... so maybe by "visiting lecturers" he means Patty and the Whole Illuminated Crew, Ambrose included?

Jeff

"We have some folks pass through, from time to time. Dan has a guitar, Dodd was a writer, Pete and I trade off being Bigfoot."

Michael

"I know you had the heiress up there at the school, Mitch. You and that girl Jo." Pat slowly, contemplatively turns 90º from facing Mitch, turning to his fishing rod and the water. He can't say this next bit to Mitch's face.

"I didn't meant to eavesdrop. I don't do that to my friends, Mitch; never, I swear. But the Feds and City police and Randy Hearst came back after that story in the paper about Patty maybe getting away from that desert shootout with DeFreeze and those shady Reagan guys. So I did what I could a few weeks ago, that week Nixon resigned. And I saw you and her and Jo sitting at that picnic table you were just eatin' a PB&J at. Just hanging out. Passing a reefer back and forth.

"So now you know the reason I came out here. I didn't snitch on you to the cops or the Hearsts, Mitch. I wouldn't do that to you. Or Mary-Lynn." That flush in his aura again; Mitch knows for sure now Pat's still carrying some kind of weird unresolved torch for his girlfriend; paternal or something more, Mitch can't tell. Pat turns back to Mitch now. "But now I got this information in my head, you see." He holds up his Coors-holding hand to his temple and taps it. "And I'm not entirely comfortable with it being there, given the kinds of people who were involved with SCANATE before your buddy Dr. Redgrave took over."

Jeff

"Hmm, yeah, that happened."

"You want 'Doctor Red' to wash you clean? I don't recommend that, me, I've never had trouble thinking I'd seen too much. Far from it, there's a reel missing... what are you getting at, man?"

Mitch isn't surprised that Pat thinks Mary-Lynn is hot; Mary-Lynn is hot. He doesn't feel particularly threatened, either, which is probably great for Pat's life expectancy.

Michael

"Okay, so, the plot actually thickens. The week after all this, a letter comes to SRI, addressed to me, marked SECRET. It's got an Air Force lieutenant general on the carbon copy, a guy who works openly at Langley, a couple of dudes from the Bureau of Mines, and it's from the President of a coal company in West Virginia. He's a Scientologist, he says in the letter, he experienced a great healing thanks to Dianetics tech, and he heard about me through the usual grapevine. He's also close with a lot of folks in Washington, the ones in the CC. He wants to take a sabbatical, name me the President of the company for a period of two years. 'Due to the radical changes in the global energy markets since last fall's crisis, American coal reserves are now more an essential factor in our national energy security than ever.' So he wants me to come out to West Virginia, and sit in an office in Huntington and zoom in on coal deposits. He's heard good things from the Agency about how good I am, how loyal I am. And it's clear from the big kahunas on the letter, this is less a job offer and more, like, a reassignment from SCANATE."

"I'm honest with them on the conference call, I tell them I gotta talk to the wife; she likes Tahoe and I think West Virginia, frankly, would be a step down for her. This Francis guy—David Francis—says well how about a half-mil a year, stock options in Princess Coal Company and other energy companies indexed to my psi hit rate, and a private jet of our very own. The wife can fly out to New York, Atlanta, Chicago, anywhere east of the Mississippi in an hour or two. And all I have to do is find coal for Uncle Sam for two years. I'd be set for the rest of my life and, more importantly, Ann would, after I'm gone. No more prospecting for real estate futures in the Valley."

"I took leave, told Hal and Russ I was going to go fishing for a week and think about it."

"So I guess what I'm asking Mitch, the missing reel, what I'm getting at, is... I'm afraid. I'm afraid the spooks are baiting a hook for me. That I'm their property." Pat sighs. "And I see what you're all doing, with fuckin' Patty Hearst, and my suspicions from way back about you being a mole at SRI are right. And what I'm asking you is if I can get under your protection. If I can come in from the cold. Defect. Whatever. If you're KGB, or with the men from Mars, I don't care. I just don't want to die down a hole in West Virginia when my usefulness is up."

"Mother Mary told me to trust the man with the cards."

Jeff

We're out on the water now right? Describe this rented skiff

Michael

A little wooden motorboat with outboard motor, could fit four pretty comfortably so Mitch is across from Pat who's on the opposite "bench." Pair of backup oars. A little can of gasoline. A couple of life preservers. The aforementioned cooler, beers, bait, and fishing rods.

Jeff

"You got some change on you?" Mitch holds out his hand expectantly.

Michael

Pat furrows his brow in dismay, but dutifully puts down his can of beer and goes into his pocket. He pulls out a small smattering of coins. "42 cents." A quarter, a dime, a nickel and two pennies. He hands them to Mitch.

Jeff

There's an empty Folgers can by the backup oars, because it's gauche to simply piss over the side of the boat. It's well-rinsed with lake water, of course. Mitch picks it up, tosses Price's coins in, rattles them around. He slams the can open-side-down on the bench next to him, removes it slowly to reveal the coins. From their relative positions and orientations, he divines Pat Price's fortunes.

Michael

(Too bad he didn't have six, we could've done I Ching)

(Maybe there's a sixth coin in the can)

Jeff

Sure, there could be.

Michael

(Okay, will sleep on this and reveal what the Oracles provide tomorrow morning.)

The sixth coin, the one at the bottom of the coffee can, was a foul and foreign Canadian 5-cent piece, Queen Elizabeth on one side, a beaver on the other. Since it's the only one distinctly different from the rest, Mitch uses it as the head of the line of six coins. There are more complicated ways to throw the I Ching using coins to get two hexagrams, Mitch knows from his skill in Occultism, one hexagram of which is commentary on the other, but fate provided six and Mitch wants a quick answer so he is just doing a simple unchanging heads=yáng/unbroken, tails=yīn/broken schema here. Building from the ground up, the hexagram comes out tails (Canadian nickel), tails (dime), heads (penny 1), heads (quarter), heads (US nickel), heads (penny 2). ䷠: Hexagram 33, "Mountain under heaven: the image of Retreat." Mitch remembers some various translations of 33 from I Chings he's read at head shops and hippie crash pads over the years. From John Blofeld's I Ching, the Book of Change, 1968, notes on 33:

This hexagram symbolizes mountains beneath the sky. The Superior Man, by keeping his distance from men of inferior character, avoids having to display wrath and preserves his dignity. [The component trigrams, symbolizing mountain and sky, indicate withdrawal to a solitary place when circumstances are unfavorable.]

From James Legge's 1882 The Yî king (Dover edition 1963), commentary section on 33:

Thun is the hexagram of the sixth month; the yin influence is represented by two weak lines, and has made good its footing in the year. The figure thus suggested to king Wăn the growth of small and unprincipled men in the state, before whose advance superior men were obliged to retire. This is the theme of his essay,--how, 'when small men multiply and increase in power, the necessity of the time requires superior men to withdraw before them.' Yet the auspice of Thun is not all bad. By firm correctness the threatened evil may be arrested to a small extent.

To Mitch, this hexagram could mean one of two things, even though the overall vibe of "retreat to the mountain to avoid the machinations of lesser men in the state" thing is pretty clear.

1. Pat comes in from the cold right now; URIEL makes him disappear, SCANATE and by extension the people behind Princess Coal Company lose out on a precious psychic resource (and Pat escapes what he feels is his inevitable fate to get killed by the CIA).

2. Pat does not perform the Retreat right this minute; we follow the intimations of the first two yin lines and make sure he does not flee right away: "hurrying away would only aggravate the evil and danger of the time." He is instead lashed to URIEL using the yellow oxhide, "a powerful will," and he acts as an asset inside the Conspiracy. Mitch's new Owl-vision is tingling at the convergence of military, government, and private industry in Pat's letter. The Owls want Pat. And the question becomes whether we save him now or use him as an inside man, then pull him out.

Jeff

Mitch stares at the coins for a few seconds, the I Ching unspooling unbidden in his mind. Then he looks up and towards Price, or towards the far shore beyond him. Eyes unfocused, speaking in Price's direction, rather than to him.

"The question of what we owe one another is a central one in moral philosophy. What obligations are entailed by existing, by sharing a society with people. What are you owed, what are you entitled to, what am I cheating you of, if I fail to deliver it? What mechanisms exist to sanction me for failing to honor your uncashed check?"

You might think Mitch pauses for a response here, but you'd be wrong. If Price tried to speak Mitch simply talks over him, deaf to whatever Price tries to get out.

"What is owed to a fictional character? To an ersatz copy of an extremely minor historical figure? A man who, in truth, was certainly either self-deluding or a con artist? 'Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards.'

"It's like playing a game with a small child — a complicated cooperative board game, little wooden cubes and tiles and rolling dice to see where the robber goes — and he sees a bad result and wants something else to have happened instead. You can say sure, set the die to something else, who cares? Or you can say, do you want to play the game or not? Because what you're suggesting is not playing the game, per se, it's playing with the game. Pretending to play. And that's fine too, if you want to do it, but you could just award yourself a million points and declare yourself the winner, if that's what you want to do."

Again, Mitch is facing Price, but talking to himself.

"It depends on what kind of play you want to be performing, and so long as you're aware of what you're doing and everybody involved is on the same page there's no wrong answer. In improv, theater games, there's nothing stopping you from just calling a mulligan on a scene and trying it over again. Except you figure out pretty quick that doing a bad scene a second time doesn't make it better, just makes it a bad scene that you spent more time on.

"So my choices are one, indulge the token's stated request, which is costless for me, except that it takes the token out of play. Token might have been out of play anyhow, from my perspective…but I just got reminded that another player did use the token, a little, in a minor and nondeterminative capacity. So there is some small cost involved, I guess.

"Or two, I draft the token, put it at uncertain risk, in hopes of unclear reward. It's not what the token wants, or would want, if a game piece could experience or express a preference. The story of me abusing a token in this way, that's a story that's not super flattering to me. But it does keep the token in play, and maybe that's the greater good—service to the larger narrative.

"The actual historical figure, you look him up and see he was 'active' for at least a few years past this point. So moving the token off the board now, that's a little temblor stemming from the plays we've already made. Not immensely significant either way. Significant to the token, or it would be, if the token really existed and had preferences to express. But, you know, it's just a notional playing piece.

"Which gets us back to the real meat of the question: do I pretend the token has autonomy to respect, wishes to honor, or do I declare myself a figure beyond it, unheeding of its supposed best interests?"

Mitch snaps back to the here and now. "The cards...uh, the coins say we can get you out, sure. I'll talk to people, get the ball rolling. The details aren't my bag, 'that's not my department,' said the war criminal."

Michael

Pat's no dummy. He's seen Mitch "go away" before when confronting what one of his divinations tells him, and it's clear Pat's cottoned to what this meta-narrative Mitch has just spun to himself entails. Well, more or less.

"'What we owe one another.'" Pat speaks that part of Mitch's monologue out loud, considers it. "Are you trying to tell me that if I was to run away into your hands... that would be me getting off easy? I've been in this deep with spooks and weirdos, what's a little more, right?"

"Fact is, ever since Uri bought it, I've been feeling a huge sense of foreboding, Mitch. Like I don't have much longer. Like there's a bullet out there with my name on it. I've had some weird dreams, premonitions... usually my remote viewing doesn't involve me and my life—'I don't eavesdrop on friends,' hah—" Pat scoffs. "But lately it has been. A hollow in West Virginia... there's a storm in the air and I'm talking to Jo, telling her I'm already dead; a shitty motel room in Las Vegas... I just got the brush-by in a casino with a tiny needle and my heart's seizing up and I'm dying, crying out for Ann."

"You say what's an 'ersatz' life worth... well, what's a good death worth? One where I make up for my sins, for my Hamlet act back when I was a cop and a councilman, of a middle age always hustling and looking to score. Patriotism, what's that worth? I don't know anymore."

"Mostly I just wanted you to know I think I'm on your side. Whatever side that is. If getting out free and clear now is gonna put my... my karma at risk," Pat makes a kind of sour face at the idea of karma but he's also openly admitting the possibility after Mitch's Oracle, "I don't look forward to an eternity wandering around appearing as a psychic ghost to folks, you know? That sounds like Hell."

Jeff

"I don't believe in Hell. Doesn't make sense, as a thing. And it's definitely something you wouldn't...don't need to worry about.

"We may be talking cross purposes a little bit, man. You worry you're gonna get an unwelcome house call, you ask me to prevent that, I say, yeah, I'll pass the request to the right people, who can handle it."

Michael

Pat nods. "All right. That's fair enough. Thanks, Mitch. You do what you gotta, I'll lay low, wait for word from you. Ann's headed back to Los Angeles; she's got a nursing gig there, and family. I can keep an eye on her from anywhere, and I haven't seen anything violent in her future at all. I guess it's good I never talked about her much at work." "How about you? You doing all right?" The slightest bit of concern about Mitch seeing Pat as "unreal" is starting to break through the fog of selfish fear and paranoia in Pat's aura.

Jeff

"I can't complain. I shouldn't complain, anyway." Mitch shrugs. "Look at me, look at my life. Everything going to hell around me, the house on fire, and I've got kids to worry about."

Michael

Pat can't help but react a little oddly to that, both facially and aura-wise, but it fades quickly as he realizes, "Oh, oh. The kids at the school, right. That gets me thinking, you and the little lady ever gonna tie the knot? Have a couple of kids? Or is marriage still an outdated institution to your generation?"

Jeff

"I dunno, man. We haven't talked about it. I gotta admit I felt a little weird dragging her out here and putting her in charge of...it was less of me getting her buy-in in advance of springing everything on her, more of me being like, here's how I see it going down, what do you say? Maybe that doesn't make a difference, but maybe it does."

Michael

"You ask this old man, she looks ten times happier at that school than when she was singin' for drunk horny businessmen at the Airport Hilton and coming into SRI three times a week to hang out with a bunch of crazy old weirdos."

Jeff

"I wouldn't say y'all were all crazy."

Michael

Pat rolls his eyes. "Christ, they got this new one in the bullpen now, Russell brought her in. German lady, Hella Hammid. Came over here before the war, escaped the Nazis. Apparently she was some big-shot fashion photographer in the '50s, involved with that whole Black Mountain College scene out East. Esalen. Alternative education, New Age. Lefty artsy type. Dottier than Ingo. But she's been viewing the sites before Russ even gets the coordinates out of the random number generator. She doesn't often get the, uh, temporally pertinent info like I do, but her hit rate is phenomenal."

"Ingo's Ingo. Hal's been working on trying to get to more psychic conferences, writing papers with our results. But a lot of that data sort of went by the wayside once Uri died. James Randi has been writing articles anywhere and everywhere calling Uri a fraud, thinks the motorcycle death was a suicide. Randi doesn't know shit. Uri never had a conscience about being a con man, certainly not conscience enough to off himself."

"And Russ says Puharich hasn't answered his phone in months. So you can imagine that the possibilities for another Prague-type conference for Hal and Russ in '75 don't look so great. Part of the reason why I was considering the job offer, honestly. They shut down Engelbart's computer lab in our building, and we're probably next. Well, I guess it's 'we' were, now I've made my choice."

Pat sort of realizes at this point he may never see Russ, Hal, Ingo, or Hella again now.

Pat's getting more voluble now that he's on his third beer, with not a nibble on the line.

Jeff

"Yeah, I dunno. I got my hands full here." Mitch considers trying to magick up a salmon, but decides it's not necessary. "So I haven't been...I don't have a timeline in mind, but I'm not overly concerned that we're in an every-second-counts situation, here."

Michael

"I'll say no to the job, then. Wait for the high sign from you." Pat looks out at the middle of the lake as the afternoon sun hangs low in the west. "You know, I was hoping we'd catch something out here. Or... at least see something."

"Did I ever talk to you about Mount Hayes in Alaska? I arr-vee'd it once back when I was first really practicing, like in '71 or something. I saw this underground base staffed by tall blue aliens, working alongside normal-looking humans in uniforms, a fleet of silvery UFOs in a big docking bay. The sight of it kinda turned me a little nutty for a few weeks." Pat wipes some sweat off his brow.

"Ingo says you shouldn't go looking for saucers, because the aliens have their own psychics and remote viewers, and if they spot you, your soul's in danger. They can move souls around, Ingo says."

"You ever see anything weird inside Mount Shasta, Mitch?"

Jeff

"Yeah."

Then let's go ahead and say Pat gets that salmon he's been after, that should distract

Michael

>>SUCCESS by 9 (Fishing)

(As I read about Chinook salmon I realize landing one feels a bit like an Extended Contest; they're big fish and usually put up a pretty good fight. And Pat's off to a good start. So I have to let him philosophize a bit more as he struggles with the line.)

"Ah shit," Pat grunts, "what am I doing here." Pat's aura is dully scrambled with beer, it's now swung far along to melancholy from his previous desperate talkativeness. Pat Price is definitely a sad drunk. He's got a strong hand on the rod and is slowly, stutteringly drawing the line in, but Mitch can tell there's sadness and shame and guilt in his heart right now. Whether it's about the fish, feeling its life struggle on his line, or about all the spontaneous confessions he's just spilled to Mitch, Mitch isn't sure. Something Pat would ordinarily be taking joy and pride in is turning to ashes in his hands.

The three-footer that lands on the deck a minute or so later is a beauty, it looks in great shape, neatly hooked, suitable for mounting. And Pat just kind of looks at it flopping around, hesitant to take its life.

"Christ, MJ. What's wrong with me?" Pat holds his left hand up to his forehead and rubs his temple.

Jeff

"It's okay, man. This is a lot to deal with."

Michael

Pat grabs the net with one hand (he's begging for a heart attack, Mitch's aura sight seems to suggest) and lifts and dumps the king salmon back overboard while it's still struggling for oxygen in the terror-filled World Above. "Fuck it," Pat says as he watches the fish disappear back into the depths. "Fuck it. We just about done here?" Pat wipes a tear from his eye out of Mitch's sight, as he is turning around to get the outboard started.

Jeff

"It's okay, man," Mitch repeats.

Lenticular clouds are forming over the mountain but it's a clear day, bright sunshine. If you look in the right direction you might see a big bird of prey circling a ways off, doing that stiff-winged thing where you think it might be a kite or a small plane or something, hanging seemingly motionless in the air for five, six, seven seconds.

"There's a guy who lives in the mountain, or on it. He's not a real guy, but he acts like one. Likes to pretend he's the Comte St-Germain. I named my school after him to try to divert away some mystic mojo. He's got no more claim to being St-Germain than I do, or Pete does, is my thinking. He wants me to kill my evil twin from the bad-guys dimension, but I want to kill him instead, and leave my evil twin to Jocasta to take care of. We make it through this story without me and my evil twin being in the same room at the same time, I'll call that a win.

"There are tunnels of gold inside the mountain. You go in them, you come out someplace else, or you could. Man goes up the mountain, he ends up someplace else. But the thing's a honey trap. Either there are bad aliens who put it there to stop us from reaching the good aliens, or else you can't make a magic mountain without UFOs and serene blue assholes sneaking in.

"How long til you gotta head back? You got time for an overnighter?"

Mitch is inviting Pat Price to ascend Mount Shasta with him.

Michael

(As with Brant's scene request, we can start the ascent tomorrow. FANTASTIC.)

MutantsMichael changed the channel name: [I9] Gone Climbin', Mount Shasta, Calif., Thu May 23 1974 — 6/30/24, 9:00 AM

Now mountain climbing is a young fit man's game, even in the relatively clement season of May. So Mitch will definitely be needing to aid Pat's hike here. I feel like Mitch's Teaching-15 skill is of most use here, so if you want to roll that to start, we'll see how well Pat takes in the basic lessons of climbing the mountain. And of course, Jeff, I understand that if there needs to be banter and preparation for the top of the mountain on the way, we can RP that throughout the mountain climbing process. I will say that Pat is game, his aura does show a little bit of trepidation but he figures he needs to prove himself to the young man here, pay back his trust and offer to get him out of his current situation. To Pat, it's a macho thing, but also a spiritual thing, as have been most of his interactions with Mitch.

Jeff

>>SUCCESS by 4

Michael

Pat's a good pupil. He learns to keep his mouth shut and to take the ascent as easy as he can. The two of you have lucked out on weather; another partly-cloudy, gorgeous day at around 5,000 feet at basecamp. Above the tree line of the mountain is still frosty, but the trails are clear of ice and snow for the most part up to that point and Mitch and Pat make good time up the southwest "Avalanche Gulch" trail favored by John Muir and most novice-to-intermediate climbers for a spring climb.

Mitch is able to keep a good close eye on Pat's fitness as they go. But it's definitely going to end up a two-day trip, so the tent and bags on Mitch's back will give them somewhere to bivouac close to the summit. Mitch will also be able to tell when they get to that "magic zone" at about 10,000 feet where Mitch can tune into his remote viewing abilities/the Shasta noösphere more easily. You know, what Mitch used to conceive of as "the Comte Zone." They'll likely hit that elevation by mid-afternoon Thursday.

Jeff

"I gotta warn you, Pat, there's a better-than-zero chance that the guy I mentioned before is gonna hassle us. He's not a real guy, he acts like he is, calls himself St-Germain. You'll know him if you see him. Anything he says is weird truth-colored bull hockey."

Michael

Pat, huffing and puffing, grunts his assent. "You know, yesterday, after I mentioned Mount Hayes, when you mentioned the tunnels of gold... You know what I saw when I remote-viewed your little school while I was looking for Patty Hearst and moved my eye to the inside of the infamous Mount Shasta, last refuge of the Lemurians, home to the Ascended Masters?"

"Nothin'. A big fat goose egg. Some caves and some lava tubes and some old Indian sites and that was about it."

Pat leans in conspiratorially as Mitch gives him a hand up the next ledge, speaking in an exaggeratedly quiet (and maybe a little bit oxygen-deprived) fashion to Mitch. "But that's not the way it looked when those two lady reporters—the ones who wrote that book about commie psychics—came in and asked me to arr-vee it back in January last year."

Jeff

"Yeah. The Beehives." Mitch squints at the sour memory, tries to recall the weird almost-revelation he'd felt about the mountain on that first trip, the honey trap of it.

Michael

"What I saw that day was just... such a confusing, meaningless mish-mash of people and images and, er, 'vibes'—like a loud rock concert but in my head—but so so many of the images had the Ascended Masters at the top. How in the hell did Madame Blavatsky create such a powerful mythology, Mitch? Do you think she was might have been right in some little way? Or was she just that good at telling seekers what they wanted to hear?"

"Anyway, I didn't see anything that day for, ha, the 'Beehives' that seemed in any way actionable, but I told them that metaphysically the mountain was clearly a mess; too many competing belief systems, too many stories, and the AM at the top, loving the chaos. And then the older one, Sharon? Sheila? She said, 'Don't worry, we're sending a janitor there to clean it up.' That mean anything to you?"

Jeff

"I met a janitor once, called him Matt after...a dumb joke. Didn't seem like he worked for the Beehives at the time, but who knows? Everybody's working for someone.

"About theosophy? Hold that thought til we get to the summit."

Absolutely since the Redgrave gambit URIEL has checked up on the Beehives and their role in the OZY structure. Were they OZY insiders or mere 'useful idiots' like Kate?

Michael

"Coat-draggers" for sure at least; they were assigned to a) get spending on psychic programs up by demonstrating the "self-evident" threat of Communist bloc programs, and b) recruit psychics by any means necessary and help them develop their powers. Their overall level of awareness of the CWG's operations appears to have been at Mystic Kate level but with an added Security Clearance of knowing that a catastrophe was coming and having ontological boltholes along with an army of Sandmen with psychic potential would be advantageous to fighting against the upcoming catastrophe. To be blithe and jokey about it, they weren't on the Bunker List but it's not like they were wholly unaware Bunkers Were Being Planned in some vague way.

Jeff

Coat-draggers, that's the idiom I was trying to recall

Michael

On the Complicity Scale, greater than Kate, lesser than Dr. Haynes

"Yeah, you got it," Pat says. "Lord knows I have some questions... maybe we can get answers without having to run into your Ascended Master bullshit artist."

"I think I mentioned a while back, I worked bunco for a while in Burbank. Con artists," Pat says, thinking of the general occult reputation of the Comte, at least among non-believers. "And I saw my share of occult con artists, too. Small-time fortune tellers, mostly. Extortionists masquerading as gurus. So many of them running around Europe in the 18th century. And in California in the 20th." Hilarious that this man who seems so attuned to "occult con artists" spent serious time with a pair of electrified cans in his hands getting himself audited.

Jeff

"You've read up on St-Germain?"

Michael

"Eh, I only know the broad strokes. Dyer, violinist, alchemist, immortal. Got idolized as homo hermeticus by the late 19th century. Waxed mustache, big eyes... short curly beard, surrounded by a nimbus of indigo light."

Jeff

"That's...beyond most people's ken." Mitch is more bemused than anything, he wouldn't have expected Price to have done even the basic topical readings. But he's not interested in demaning Price name five of St-Germain's albums, or anything.

Michael

"Well, you pick up stuff when you're in the middle of this world, you know?" Pat gets up hesitantly to a convenient ledge for a canteen break and has a seat on a rock. No cigarette, just a long draw of water. "So is the trick here the more you know about this guy, the more you talk about him, the more likely he is to appear at the summit? Do you want me to try and remote-view it before we get there, see what the situation is?" I would say Pat doesn't know much about how Mitch has honed his own RV abilities since the autumn; Pat probably still figures he is the better of the two when it comes to remote viewing specifically, but now we're right on the verge of hitting 10,000 feet, very close to the zone where Mitch can operate his scrying eye globally without suffering any penalties.

Jeff

Mitch shrugs at Pat's question re feeding the troll. "Your guess is as good as mine. But seeing him, or not seeing him, isn't going to change anything."

Michael

A nod from Pat. "Lead on, then." (Jeff, you tell me when you're ready for Summit Time... we can wind the clock forward as needed.)

Jeff

Yeah I think we've reached that

Michael

This is Mitch's... third trip to the summit, right? The first one with Pete, the second one with Archie, Viv, and Mary-Lynn.

In any event, Pat's slower than all his past hiking partners, so it's going to be Friday early morning when Mitch and Pat make it up there. Mitch's mind has felt clearer, more expansive, more open as he and Pat passed the 10,000-foot mark last night. No strange dreams overnight in the tent but a feeling of being rested; Pat, too, looks better than yesterday, like getting acclimated to the elevation has given him a new spring in his step. The summit looks the same as it has the past couple of trips, no Comte waiting for Mitch on a rock, no nasty surprises of any other kind either. Pat takes in the view with an aura of gratitude; he's done his share of mountain-climbing in Alaska in his younger days but the bowl of the valley below, the sunrise coming up over the misty forests in the east... he's awestruck. "Hell of a view, kid. Hell of a view." The summit is wind-whipped and quiet. Mitch's natural senses don't give him an impression anyone else is up here with them. Preternatural senses, well, he can always give me a roll for those.

Jeff

Mitch has half decided that Comte won't show himself at all, for fear of Mitch trying to kill him by wishing him dead.

>>SUCCESS by 2 (Detect activation)

>>SUCCESS by 1 (Detect check)

>>SUCCESS by 3 (Detect analysis)

If things are quiet Mitch's first move will be meditation, trying to be receptive to the mountain's signals

Michael

Let's do it. Pat will sit across in the closest his pudgy middle-aged body can get to lotus and do the same.

As far as the History B Detection goes, Mitch notes a lingering film, a mildewy patina, to reality up here. There's just kind of an extremely low-level residue of B up here; Mitch would put it down to a long-lived quantum interposition with the Comte's waveform or just the déjà vu of being up here again for the third time physically remembering the Comte's seeming omnipresence (and the I've-lost-count amount of times Mitch has been here in dreams or daydreams).

>>SUCCESS by 4 (Pat’s Meditation)

Brant

A grad student with a nervous voice speaks into a microphone handed to him by a Special One. “So these powers that gurus have, I mean, are you saying they’re real? Levitation, miracle cures?” Marshall smiles indulgently. “Yes, you ask about siddhis. In the West we think of siddhis as magic — we have an unsophisticated understanding of the true scope of the human mind. But siddhis are simply an expression of the degree to which an awakened mind can create its own world. I have met men who can work siddhis. But the problem with siddhis is that they are an expression of one’s will — tools and toys. Once you can perform a siddhi, you shouldn’t need to anymore, because you’ll have understood that playing with this layer of reality is like being a brilliant expressionist painter who colors in children’s coloring books to show off at parties. The only people who are impressed are the children.”

Jeff

Mitch is also mildly surprised Pat's meditation skill is as high as that but hey:

>>SUCCESS by 5

Michael

(I like how the meta/personal subtext of this trip is Mitch learning more about Pat's inner life and being mildly surprised )

With both men in a meditative state, Mitch's Aura Sight and Detect gain a little bit of power, of range, of clarity. The Comte is here, but in a severely decohered state; in a way, he is that filmy History B residue spread around the mountaintop here. If Roger's encounter with the Comte on the roof of the San Jose Airport Hilton—where the Comte was only able to tentatively "tune in" with the help of the kulullû—was the Comte 'stuck between stations,' this remnant of the Comte here on the mountain summit is a ghost image, left on the TV tube for a few seconds after you shut it off.

Pat mumbles out of the corner of his mouth, almost too low to hear, "Mitch. He's pissed. He is not here, and he is pissed about it."

Jeff

"Fuck this guy, man."

Michael

"Do you want me to RV around our perimeter, make sure we're not about to meet anything unexpected?" Pat pauses, feeling himself slip out of a meditative mindset. "I feel stupid saying this out loud where he can probably hear us."

Jeff

"What's he gonna do?" Mitch says, dismissing that concern. He can tell Pat is eager to use his psychic clairvoyance though and doesn't want to stop him.

Mitch himself is still focused on Detect, I think. Has his gambit with the name of the school been so successful already that Comte can't materialize the way he has in the past?

Michael

Pat gets back into breathing and focusing on nothing at all and quickly steps up his psychic awareness; Mitch sees Pat's aura working a wave of golden light outwards across the summit and beyond. "Hold on," Pat says. "There's still a lot of junk around here to sort through." On that question about the Comte, I think a Hidden Lore (History B)-16 roll would suit that better than Mount Shasta Hidden Lore; these are more ontological questions of existence/non-existence rather than the history of Shasta myth... but I wouldn't count out some Shasta Lore follow-up rolls, possibly.

Jeff

>>CRITICAL SUCCESS

Michael

Jeff, if you don't mind, I will need some time to ponder a crit here

Jeff

No worries

Michael

But "What's he gonna do?" does seem to be the operative word here.

Well, phrase.

Upon first analysis using his knowledge of History B lore, Shasta lore, ontological-philosophical illumination, and plain old occultist history, it seems clear to Mitch that the Comte has lost a good deal of his noöspheric influence on Mount Shasta, as a concept associated with the mountain. Now, Pat's knowledge of the basics of the Comte's story is evidence that the Comte has not begun to be forgotten or uncreated out in the wider world. But from what Mitch knows about the Comte's "nature," such as it is, the Comte used to be able to materialize here easily. And now, after the combination of events of URIEL rejecting his blandishments on the mountaintop last summer and the conscious intent of Mitch trying to turn him into a memory rather than a living symbol of the Ascended Masters, the Comte is in retreat here. The belief energies keeping him as a regular feature of Mount Shasta have been disrupted. Now, obviously the Comte is not "dead" per se, nor is he completely disassociated from the mountain, but if Mitch were to put a number of 90, 95% on the factor of the Comte's separation from the mountain, he'd be pretty satsfied with that estimate. It would take a cadre of dedicated believers much time to reassert the quintessential Hermetic Man as the chohan of the Seventh Ray here.

Pat mumbles something, halfway back into his meditative reverie after wanting to "scan the perimeter," about chakras, strangely enough. Mitch can tell Pat's using his remote viewing abilities, most likely directed inside the mountain instead of around it. "The interior of the mountain is... well, it's not empty: emptiness suggests a void, a removal of something. It's more like a conduit opened up again, full of potential. A wellspring for the earth's energies. The root chakra, open. A starting point."

After being within meditative space and pondering the near-total removal of Comte's infection of the mountain's mythology, Mitch considers Pat's vision of an interior of the mountain free of the various mythcycles—the Lemurians, the dero, the ancient-yet-technologically-advanced cities, the UFOs, the Anunnaki's golden-halled testing centers—and thinks of the mountain's interior instead as a root chakra for the planet. It's all metaphors, of course, but Pat is onto something. Mitch isn't actively using his own remote viewing but the Illuminated sense, the sense that that "lot of junk" Pat sensed surrounding the mountain is being flushed away from inside the mountain, with the Comte's influence being scrubbed clean, is solid.

The Annunaki have used the immense power of this unique place on the planetary energetic grid to manifest all kinds of things from within the mountain meant to solidify their presence on the planet. A man named Alpha Leonis, a.k.a. in old Vera's eyes "the Master Jesus." A cult prophetess, successor to Guy Ballard, and her American mystical-exceptionalist followers. A missing misanthropic Bohemian-adjacent writer, long-believed lost in the Mexican Revolution. Stoney regaled URIEL with his tales of what Shasta was like on Earth-Krane—a "pit of vipers," an Atlantean beachhead, a honeypot for mystic seekers, a place where MARPA agents are posssessed by Atlanteans; Mitch would bet that whatever world you end up in, Shasta is a nexus of this kind of esoteric belief, that it creates or changes things and people to muddy the metaphysical waters. But Mitch's efforts so far have given the mountain a new kind of clarity, to a large degree have cleared away the engrams long clustered around it, and freed its interior of the uncannyness laid upon it over the past near-century since A Dweller on Two Planets kicked this whole memetic mythcycle off.

Also: a root chakra hints at six others that need to be cleared, but the root chakra would need to be cleared first. Viv would probably say something about this being a symbol of the effort to fulfill the most basic levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: the physiological, nourishment, shelter, rest, peace.

Jeff

"We are all connected, present-day, present-time. Where are the sister-sites? There must be seven in all, with--and--if this is Muladhara."

Mitch is focusing his own mind on a different question though: how to complete this well-underway purification and cleansing process on this site, this mountain.

Michael

Probably time for that Hidden Lore (Mount Shasta Lore)-16 roll. (Base skill 14 + 2 for the History B crit).

Jeff

>>SUCCESS by 5

Michael

Who or what might be preserving a faint, vague, tentative lifeline for the Comte here at Shasta? His dominant presence in the Shasta Ascended Master memeplex has been created over the past few generations by the organizations and individuals who revere him, who have placed him in a central position in their mythos. But many of these organizations and individuals have no connection to Shasta per se. To be a candidate for the phenomenon keeping the... greasy film of Comte de St. Germain alive here on the mountaintop, the lifeline would need to consist of an individual or organization still believing he is the chohan of the Seventh Ray and who knows this mountain is a seat of great power where the Comte could be contacted.

As Mitch is pondering this, the answer already half-formed in his mind, Pat speaks up, seemingly now completely out of his meditative state and remote viewing. He lets out a low impressed whistle and a seeming non-sequitur. "Jeez. That's a couple thousand people." Pat takes a sip from his canteen and says to Mitch, "What do you know about a big gathering with fancy pavilions and a couple thousand mostly young people, down there, at the campsite on that lake across town?" Mitch can identify Pat's pointing southwest as probably talking about Lake Siskiyou, which has a very well-appointed campsite that could conceivably host a festival with attendance of a couple thousand people. "It didn't appear strongly in most futures, but I saw one. Not very far off; fashions and hairstyles looked pretty contemporary. Couldn't get a look-see inside the tents. Something was blocking me. But there were a lot of banners and paintings around the campsite. Of Christ, and of your man."

It doesn't describe any past event Mitch can recall hearing about since he moved up here, but the ability to put together a group that large, dedicated to St. Germain, and to have active measures against scrying, gets Mitch thinking naturally of Elizabeth Clare Prophet.

Jeff

My recollection is that Roger approached ECP to recruit her as an unwitting asset? Mitch will probably want to talk to him about this development, see if he can flex influence over her and shift her group's beliefs away from St-Germain.

Is there a chance Mitch can ride Pat's coattails and see what Pat sees, with his help? If so Mitch would like to try that. If not, hmm, I dunno. Seems like a waste to come up here and not try to remote view, but it's not obvious to me what it would be helpful to see.

Michael

(I think we could make that work, actually. If Pat and Mitch have some verbal back and forth, Pat taking the lead on remote viewing first and then Mitch attempting to follow along, then maybe have Mitch hopscotch to the next set of narrative-pertinent target coordinates using Serendipity and/or Illuminated... I could see us wrapping up this summit visit with a cool little two-hander scrying montage.)

(Pat and Mitch both succeeded on their Meditation rolls, so I think they can maybe move in concert/share impressions scry-wise.)

So I think to get things started it would be a Clairvoyance-13 roll. That's a 10-minute attempt.

Jeff

>>CRITICAL FAILURE

Dang

Michael

Sadly, 17 is a crit fail on a 13.

Will-17 (as Pat sensed what Mitch was up to and did a Leadership roll to aid) please.

As Pat attempts to get into the same zone as Mitch, he senses something bothering Mitch. Maybe it was the frustrating incompleteness of the Comte's removal from Mount Shasta. Maybe it was the altitude, or keeping an eye on Pat's aura health the whole way up here. But as Mitch tried to connect psychically with Pat and ride along on his remote viewing session, something went wrong. Pat's aware of it, and is trying to make sure Mitch doesn't lose more than his concentration here. "Hey, buddy... easy there."

>>SUCCESS by 1 (Pat Leadership roll)

Jeff

>>SUCCESS by 3 (Will)

>>SUCCESS by 9 (Uncontrollable Pyrokinesis)

Michael

In his attempt to connect with Pat's remote viewing, Mitch found himself unable to hook on to Pat's free-ranging tour around the mountain and town of Mount Shasta. And in that moment of inattention, something else hooked into Mitch's wizard eye. A voice surfaces in Mitch's head, a familiar voice coming from somewhere, out there, in the ether. "It does not matter what you do to me here, mon collègue. My memory. J'existe toujours. Wherever seekers look to the heavens for inspiration, wherever they express their Promethean desire to go beyond what is merely human, eh? It is you who are mortal." And as Mitch tries to see from where the Comte might be sending these taunting words, he sees, quite appropriately, everywhere on Earth where the Comte is in someone's head. In an occult librarie at 3, Rue de la Manticore, in Paris. In a metaphysical study group in Des Moines, Iowa. In, yes, a Summit Lighthouse beachside meditation in Malibu. A few miles east-southeast of there, in a cheap paperback being read by Leonard Nimoy, poolside. In an afternoon poetry reading by a radical collective in Mexico City. It's an overwhelming maelstrom of everything from mild curiosity to fanatical belief and it overwhelms Mitch's consciousness. Fright Check, Rule of 14, and Mitch is on his own on this one.

Jeff

>>SUCCESS by 4

Michael

Mitch handles his glimpse of the horror of the true totality of the Comte Function easily. This glimpse also makes it all the more clear that the Comte can no longer manifest freely here; amongst all the places he is abroad in the land, Mitch can now feel that anger Pat was talking about earlier. Mitch senses a botch like his would ordinarily give the Comte a window on which to fully manifest. But all he is now is a faint voice in Mitch's head, already fading. Pat sees Mitch tense up then relax a little, and asks, "What's the story, Mitch? Want me to close my eye? I hope I'm not attracting unwanted attention up here..."

Jeff

"Far from it, man, you helped me out here. I forget sometimes I can't do everything on my own. I appreciate that, I do."

Michael

"You're right about one thing," Pat says as he brushes off his jeans and gives Mitch a hand up. "That guy is a prick." "He acts like he doesn't want back 'in,' but yeah, he's lying," Pat says. "Trying to take comfort in all the people who still vouch for him, who still ride for him, but all he really wants is to have the run of this mountain again."

"Anyone spends time showing you how dearly they're loved and respected, that means deep down they're insecure and worried about losing it all."

Jeff

"My assumption has been that he's a hermit crab, an interloper who found the 'St-Germain' identity and took it over. Maybe he's got some fuller claim to it than I realized, I dunno. Doesn't really matter in the long run."

Michael

Pat sighs. "Yeah. But if you're the most recent guy to wear the crown... you're the king, doesn't matter how you ultimately got a hold of it."

"A lot of this stuff is happening on a higher wavelength than I'm used to, Mitch. Past and future, here and there... I feel confident about my mastery of those. But this is getting into Teilhardt de Chardin territory. Or Jung, maybe. I wonder if humanity on some level needs a Comte de St. Germain." Pat pauses, holds up his hands, "I'm not saying I agree! But one of his historical qualities was... him just up and claiming to be... whichever great occult figure in a past life. The Theosophists carried on that tradition. According to them he's Plato, he's Roger Bacon, he's Francis Bacon..." Pat kind of trails off, a little unsure of the implications of what he's saying. Occultism-14.

Jeff

>>FAILURE by 2

Shrug

Michael

(Bad rolls blocking us... the fuckin Comte does not want his depths plumbed at this juncture, I guess)

Pat sizes Mitch up, sensing his frustration. "It'd be easy to just say, 'Oh, you're the better man and that means you'll win out,' but we both know that's not true. These kind of frauds usually are pretty good at telling people what they want to hear, showing them what they want to see." Pat thinks for a moment. "But I also know that hubris ends up getting paid back. I always thought Uri would live into old age, protected by that goddam aura of invincibility of his... but the minute you think you're immortal, fate usually intervenes... with a sense of humor at that."

"Whoever this guy is, whatever power he has, whichever believers he's rooked... he's not doing the stuff that you're doing." A hand on Mitch's shoulder. "You can live with yourself, trying to make those kids' lives better. He's out there begging for prayers, for worship, for the belief he feeds off of. Whatever his agenda is for you, he doesn't deserve any more of your time or attention. You're the king of this mountain, least as far as I can see."

Pat then recalls Mitch's comment about how "sometimes I can't do everything on my own." He says, "Now, if you want to work more on your remote viewing while we're up here where the veil is pretty thin, on a different set of targets, that I'm more than happy to help with. Let's have some food, maybe a sip out of that flask, relax, take a break, try again in a bit."

Jeff

"That sounds good." Early lunch, enjoy the view for a while.

Michael

"Let's try to move on this at the same time, same target," Pat says after a break to get back some of the fatigue both remote viewers experienced. "Where are we going this time?"

Jeff

"Let's be fancy. Trinity, let's see if we can reach the Trinity site."

Michael

Pat's eyes widen; Mitch can see his aura get hit with a sudden shock of trepidation. "Well," he says, his aura calming slowly, "it's not like I'm gonna get blinded by the blast if I chance upon it. Could be interesting. Let's give it a whirl."

(So let's have Mitch aid Pat on the remote viewing, and we'll each start again with a Meditation roll to get Pat and Mitch on the same wavelength. So the rolls for Mitch would be:

Meditation-17
then Clairvoyance-13

I realize Mitch's Clairvoyance doesn't give him the associated Psychometry/Precognition to find the "most important moment" in a given location's history, but if the two of you are working together Mitch will be able to see the extra information provided by Pat's RV.)

Jeff

>>CRITICAL SUCCESS (Meditation)

>>FAILURE (Clairvoyance)

Dang!

Michael

Okay, so the Meditation was a critical success: that'll keep Mitch nice and calm during the first failed roll. The Clairvoyance was a mere normal failure, so you can try again in 10 more minutes.

Jeff

>>SUCCESS by 3

Michael

At SCANATE, Pat has traditionally taken somewhere in the neighborhood of five or so minutes to make the connection with his remote viewing target, and then longer—usually between a few and 30 minutes—to move around observing physical details for the purposes of carefully reporting back. Pat stays in a meditative state of mind as long as Mitch needs to "hook into" Pat's remote viewing eye. When Mitch lets his gaze zoom south to White Sands Proving Ground, he first gets an image of how the site looks today, with a focus on the National Historic Landmark marker—the uncanny, cobbled-together black pyramidal obelisk, so reminiscent of the spire-steeple of the Transamerica Building—sitting in the late May desert sunshine.

Detect (History B) rolls please.

Jeff

>>SUCCESS by 6 (Activate)

>>SUCCESS by 2 (Sense)

>>SUCCESS by 6 (Analysis)

Michael

The zone around the obelisk and ground zero is extremely thin between Histories A and B. Mitch senses this inherent weakness in the barrier between histories to be very pronounced in an irregular, roughly two-mile radius around the landmark site. Near the southeastern edge of this ragged zone is the McDonald ranch house, where the Trinity "gadget" was put through its final assembly prior to detonation. The thin-ness starts to get thicker very quickly at around that two-mile mark.

It would be very easy to peek behind the curtain here; in fact, given the success of Mitch's analysis roll, it would take no effort at all for Mitch push aside the vague, weak barrier between History A and B to see what lies beyond.

As Mitch can sense what Pat senses, so too can Pat sense what Mitch does. Of course, Pat doesn't interpret the thin-ness here as History B per se, just an unfortunate, unwelcome, vertiginous wrinkle in the fabric of local reality. He sticks with Mitch's remote viewing eye at this point, taking in Mitch's present-day vision and not leaving it behind for past or future.

On the horizon, a half-mile or so north from the test site obelisk, Pat's acute remote viewing vision sees a herd of twenty or so of these:

"Jeez," Pat says. "What in the world..."

Jeff

Well, let's examine what lies behind the curtain, then

Michael

Underneath the blank white expanse of White Sands, the rough-hewn obelisk, the patches of scrub and the glittering pebbles of trinitite, bubbling under the visions of the herd of weird pronghorn antelope and the surprisngly-minimal fencing around Ground Zero, Mitch peels back reality.

The pebbles of trinitite lying here and there in the sands of Ground Zero shimmer in Mitch's scrying eye, and are sudddenly replaced by larger shards and spheres of glassy rock, pinkish instead of the green of the solidified fused liquid sanddrops that rained down on Trinity in 1945. All around Mitch, in that same great irregular circle about four miles across, are countless pieces of pink-red crystalline debris, peppering the white gypsum on the History B side of the divide. Near Ground Zero they form a near-unbroken glassy pink sheen on the face of the desert and in the crater. It is beyond question right now upon Mitch seeing this that the Trinity explosion had an equally destructive effect on both sides of the reality divide.

Mitch senses nothing living here at Ground Zero, neither plant, nor animal, nor human, nor Irruptor: nothing radiating its own "being of History B" energy, just a blasted, empty expanse of desert with hundreds of thousands of tons of crystalline shards scattered around. But as Mitch gets closer to the edges of that rough two-mile radius, more and more elements of pink crystal appear more and more intact, and Mitch can tell from the remains that these were once structures made of the pink crystal. The thick foundations of a few toppled towers are evident here, with archways that once held doors, openings that once were windows. Other materials start to appear inside the half-ruined buildings at roughly the one-and-a-half mile mark: scorched and tattered fabrics dusted with white sand, half-melted metallic objects and occasional bits of wood that may have been furniture of some kind... and bones. Lots and lots of bones; hundreds upon hundreds of skeletons. The vast majority of them human, but every now and again a much larger figure, a seeming mix of human and animal bones: a heavy-jawed, fanged leonine skull; a giant human torso with a horned skull and heavy, thick leg bones; a bird-wingèd and -talonèd human skeleton with a shattered, chitinous tail covered in dust.

Pat's eyes on top of Mount Shasta go wide.

>>SUCCESS by 2 (Fright Check)

(No need for a Fright Check for Mitch.)

Pat's blood runs cold, but he stays calm and hangs in with Mitch's wizard eye.

Jeff

Mitch reflects on this.

"Seems almost real, doesn't it? But ask yourself how and why the site would be left untouched for all these years. Things so committed to ritual, abandoning the remains of the dead without honor or funeral rite."

Michael

Pat does a quick inhale through his teeth, still trying to grapple with the "reality" of all this. "R-radioactivity?" Pat doesn't seem so sure of himself on this one, given that he doesn't really know anything at all about the aforementioned "things so committed to ritual."

Jeff

"There are ways around that. But then it wouldn't be so picturesque."

Michael

"So there's more than meets the eye here, and they don't mind us looking at it," Pat says, again unaware of who "they" might be, but taking cues from Mitch that it's another ineffable power/player taking the two of them for a ride, just like the Comte. "So do we go deeper? Should I try to take over and look at the most important moment? I still think it's going to be the Bomb. And if I do... well, hell, which side should I be looking at?"

Hidden Lore (History B)-16, please.

Jeff

>>SUCCESS by 8

Michael

There are certainly a lot of different ways Mitch could be interpreting these sights. Going off his past strong suppositions that History B manifestations within subduction zones are opportunistic and virus-like do indeed lead Mitch to think he and Pat are being led down a primrose path, a kind of It's A Small World exhibition of the Kings' great city being annihilated by History A humanity's first experiment with harnessing of the basic power of the universe. Again, none of what Mitch is seeing right now is in any way "real"; it exists as a weird kind of quantum potentiality, which Pat is probably beginning now to comprehend and appreciate more deeply, considering how many times he's seen alternate possible futures in his remote viewing.

Mitch thinks about his personal encounters with Irruptor psychology, such as it is, how quickly they slot into human roles but with their own unique set of programming dictating their actions. "Drive Frank insane enough to bury a bunch of kids alive." "Finish off Houdini, for good this time no matter what." "Throw a hot jazz party to help re-enact Roscoe's blood sacrifice." If Mitch and Pat are being fed this series of images, it's to send a message: one of implied complicity on their part, one of guilt: "look what your people did to us, and to so many of our innocent humans as well." Any SANDMAN taisher worth their salt could have seen this display over the past 29 years at White Sands Proving Ground, the irradiated crystal-strewn grounds fairly shouting "You did this!" to the American military-industrial complex's true masters.

Does that mean the events that led to this Anunnaki diorama dedicated to History A's brutality and nuclear complicity are a lie? If this History B peek is all essentially staged, then Mitch and Pat are probably better served seeing what's interesting (and "true") that happened on our side of the reality divide. Mitch has no doubt we'd see something interesting if Pat went psychometric-precognitive on the History B side, which could be cracked and analyzed and pored over for the truth within, certainly. But the meaning behind it wouldn't be a straightforward ride.

Jeff

"Nah, man. We know what happened here. Happened there, I mean. And the 'other side' doesn't really matter, it's not real. This side isn't real either," Mitch quickly amends, "but it's less not-real than over there. Kind of. It doesn't matter."

Here's a question: can we remote-view the land of the dead? Mitch's vague understanding is that there's some kind of city of dead prisoners being forced to dream of Babylonian demons from outside time, and that this city exists more than the History-B ruins at Trinity. But Mitch and Pat might not have the right perceptual equipment.

Michael

Pat has not exhibited, as of yet anyway, any ability to Medium into the zone of reality that includes the dead, or to sense or communicate within the zones where their wavelengths overlap with ours. If Charley were here on the summit right now and able to hook into both of your perceptions, she could try to do what she did at Pascagoula on the Astral plane. Roger, too, has had some success of late, since ALLOCHTHON, with being open and receptive to spirits and ghosts as a channeler. But I feel like Pat and Mitch do lack that perceptual equipment as currently constituted.

If there is a layer to all you're seeing on the History B side that has been actively hidden underneath this rather showy disaster zone, dead dreamers of the Annunaki or no, Pat (who has the better Clairvoyance score, certainly) could try to press further, concentrate, and attempt to break through said mind block and/or shielding. All it would take is concentration and another roll on his part.

Jeff

Yeah altitude only gets you so far

But if there's another direction to explore in this maze of twisty passages all alike then sure let's try it

Michael

Pat nods at Mitch, and tries to break through any mind blocks or mind shields or other defensive anti-remote viewer contingencies. It's not like he hasn't had to do this before while snooping around Soviet sites that were suspiciously tough to see on first glance.

Mitch feels, through his aura and his sharing the remote viewing window, Pat's effort in trying to see if there is something more to this scene in History B. And both Pat and Mitch can sense that there is. But the barrier to seeing further, past this ruined city, is dramatically powerful. It doesn't bite back at Pat and Mitch; it feels more like dashing oneself against a 10-foot high brick wall with one's forehead to try and catch a peek at what's behind it. Pivoting off of Mitch's earlier Hidden Lore roll, Mitch guesses there is a šedu-level intelligence, actively on-site, actively blocking what is now-undoubtedly nearby or under the ruined city.

Pat grunts with effort. "Man. That is locked down tight. There's something there, though."

There's a pause, pregnant with the possibility of an unknowable alien intelligence blasting the hell out of Pat's mind, and Pat says, "I'm going to duck out of... whatever this side of things is. I want to see what the site on our side wants me to see. I don't like where this is leading us."

Pat detaches from Mitch's Detect (History B) vision and flips the remote viewing sight back to today at the Trinity Site. He then lets his remote viewing take him to the most important moment at the site... and oddly, it's not the 1945 morning that Everything Changed. In fact it's a more picayune moment about a decade before the atomic bomb was a reality, before this pristine land was littered with trinitite, sinister monuments, or imported oryxes.

A '31 Model-A Ford, half-covered in a layer of white dust, pulls up to the unremarkable patch of scrubland that will one day be Ground Zero. There are four people in the vehicle; a man driving and woman up front, and two men in the back. The man and woman up front both look to be in their fifties; the man older than the woman. They wear somewhat outrageous fashions for the mid-'30s; the man is in a white safari-type suit; the woman in a fancy lace dress totally unsuited for these conditions and as she pops out of the passenger seat, she opens a parasol. Occultism/Hidden Lore (Mount Shasta Lore)-14 roll for Mitch here.

The man in the right back seat who opened the door for Miss Parasol looks to be in his thirties; he wears a very straitlaced, sober business suit and a dark fedora. He looks vaguely familiar to Mitch but not in a way he can put his finger on. Mitch notes a Masonic ring on his hand.

Out of the left rear door strides a man who looks exactly like Mitch except maybe a few years older (and a couple dozen pounds heavier). He has a short-ish beard, already going grey (or maybe that's the desert dust collecting in it), wears a rough-hewn work shirt and denim dungarees, and a pair of dark amber-framed, green-lensed sunglasses. He smiles and lets out a booming laugh. "Now, George," he says to the suited man, "didn't I tell you this was gonna be a trick?"

The older couple toddle over to the point where ground zero will one day be and uneasily get on their knees in the white dust to pray. "Glorious St.-Germain," the older man says, a dry croak in his voice, "you have led us to the axis mundi, the place upon which the Ascended Masters established their Powerhouse. Pray guide our next steps."

George rolls his eyes at the two out of their vision and sidles up next to Younger Alpha Leonis. "Is it here, Reg?" he asks AL.

Alpha Leonis closes his eyes and smiles. "Oh, it's here, Agent K-17," he says, irony dripping in his voice. "Why don't you shut those two off so we can dig proper-like." Alpha Leonis goes to the back of the Ford to get out a couple of shovels.

George/K-17 walks over to stand in front of the old couple and gets down to their level while they pray. He says to them, "I... I.... I AM the Mighty Director of the Hidden Secret Service, Agent K-17! You have made it to the planetary chakra and I am here to bathe you in my... my Electronic Presence." It is clear that George is a very skilled hypnotist. AL laughs at how poor George is at making up theosophical twaddle and hands him a shovel. The two men dig while the older man and woman stare at George, their eyes pooling tears of joy. [pause, more later after Mitch's roll and/or Mitch and Pat conferring on this scene]

Jeff

Whaaaaaat?

>>CRITICAL SUCCESS

Michael

Oh yeah, Mitch thinks, that's Guy and Edna Ballard, founders of the I AM Movement. They had some branch out in Santa Fe in the thirties, and Edna moved there after Guy died. What's more, Mitch is pretty damn sure that George guy is a proto-SANDMAN. Generally, Pat seems nonplussed so he just keeps his gaze on 1935.

There's a few minutes of tough digging, and then George holds up a hand to stop "Reg." George sees something lying in the white dust.

"Oh... this is... what is this?" George takes off his hat, mops the sweat from his brow with his pocket handkerchief; the sweat isn't all from the heat. It's a delicate pink crystal, glowing with its own light, about seven or eight inches long, with regular prism-like sides, like a long piece of quartz.

"Godfre?" Alpha Leonis says in a deep basso profundo voice to the hypnotized Guy Ballard. "What do you reckon?" AL takes the crystal from George's hands and shows it to Guy and Edna.

"A relic of old Atlantis, a power battery of the Fourth Root Race, discarded upon their arrival on these shores, my Lord and Master." Edna says to Alpha Leonis's question. Guy adds, "These white sands were created by the retreat of the Diluvial waters that covered the globe 12,000 years ago; this is all selenite left behind by that great climatic shift, my Master Jesus."

Alpha Leonis smiles conspiratorially at George. "Well," Alpha Leonis says to Guy and Edna, "I guess we're fortunate your old friend President Hoover made this a national park a couple of days before that dastardly old Franklin Delano Rosenfeld took office, eh?"

George says in a low voice to AL, "It's a good story, though. Definitely gets them off the true trail of it." George goes back to the car and grabs a state-of-the-art Leica camera and begins taking snaps of the area. Alpha Leonis says, "Well, don't you know, K-17? All stories are equally real."

Alpha Leonis winks... not at George or at poor old Guy and Edna.... but at Pat and Mitch observing this in the sky.

Fright Check, Rule of 14.

(Pat succeeds on his Fright Check and is able to keep the window open)

Jeff

>>FAILURE by 2 (Fright Check)

>>SUCCESS by 2 (Uncontrollable Pyrokinesis)

Hm, I wonder if Mitch can immolate "Reg" in 193X through this link.

Is "George" some version of the Comte?

Michael

Not visually, no. Want to hit him with an Aura Sight after.... you give me a 3d6+3 roll for the Fright Check?

Jeff

>>15 on Fright Check table

Michael

Well, 15 is at the top level of short-term effects (lose Fatigue and stun). Since this trigger is definitely Weird in our campaign's sense, I'm going to consult the Madness Dossier Fright Check table for possibilities here. Homicidal Mania seems appropriate. To resist this urge, Mitch would need to make a Self-Control roll of 12 or less.

So if Mitch fails, voluntarily or otherwise, the Self-Control roll, Mitch for 3d6 seconds will want to light this son of a bitch on fire forty years in the past. This kind of rank smug meta-awareness out of his double temporarily defies any worries about temporal causality or doing the Comte's bidding by assassinating Alpha Leonis or anything like that.

So the question I have been trying to research is... just how the hell do I penalize a roll like this?

If I were to use the penalties in time and space in the Psychometry description and the Size and Speed/Range Tables respectively, it would be something like: Psychometry: -5 (between 30 and 300 years ago) Range Table: -36 (for 1,000 miles) Now one has to assume that both Pat and Mitch's Clairvoyance completely mitigates any Range penalties since you and Pat have, essentially, already bought off this penalty with the range your powers are able to reach. But I still feel like the effort here should be considerable given the circumstances and stakes. So what I'm thinking is I'll compound the -5 temporal penalty with the maximum circumstantial penalty of "Impossible: -10." So if you think this is reasonable, this would take your Pyrokinesis-16 down to Pyrokinesis-1, which means that Corruption would be necessary to create such a temporal paradox. And of course there's no guarantee that your activation roll would get past his Will since it's Contested. What do you think, O Illuminatus?

1. Dr. Cronk — 7/17/24, 12:53 PM

   I think it leads to the question of whether accepting Corruption is a conscious decision made by the player or by the character

2. [12:54 PM]

   If Mitch is overwhelmed by a desire to murder, then he would accept the large amount of Corruption needed to make it happen

3. [12:54 PM]

   I Jeff am less of a fan of that plan

   1

4. [12:56 PM]

   That is, Mitch has failed the roll to resist the desire to burn "Reg" by whatever means are mechanically available to him. But that doesn't require me to spend meta-currency to enable this

5. MutantsMichael — 7/17/24, 12:56 PM

   Well actually you do still have that Self-Control roll to make, past the Fright Check failure.

6. [12:56 PM]

   So he could avoid these paradoxes and compulsions altogether maybe

7. Dr. Cronk — 7/17/24, 12:57 PM

   Okay there's another backstop roll in place to prevent me from suffering the intolerable loss of total control over my character's choices? I should roll that before I get too deep in the weeds here

   1

8. Dr. Cronk used

   roll

   Dice GolemAPP — 7/17/24, 12:57 PM

   @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6 the topic is moot on a 12-: (3+6+6) = 15

9. Dr. Cronk — 7/17/24, 12:58 PM

   Well dang

10. MutantsMichael — 7/17/24, 12:59 PM

    So yeah, it comes down now to either 1) a near-guaranteed miss on a Pyrokinesis psi roll sans Corruption, or 2) your choice as player to take on some Corruption to help mitigate the possibility of a crippling crit fail. (edited)

11. Dr. Cronk — 7/17/24, 1:00 PM

    Normally I would be like "let's let Mitch do what he wants" but I think killing Al in 1935 has potential catastrophic outcomes

12. MutantsMichael — 7/17/24, 1:01 PM

    On the other hand, I see endgame hoving into sight, Jeff, I see Weird Shit on the horizon and this could be the first tippie-top of said Weird Shit peeking over the water

13. Dr. Cronk — 7/17/24, 1:01 PM

    It's the "what if the game seizes up and just stops" that Mitch was so worried about back in his conversation with Jiyu re the fictional nature of reality, all those years ago

    1

14. [1:02 PM]

    I'm gonna mull on this a while

15. MutantsMichael — 7/17/24, 1:02 PM

    Yes! A good plan. I can work on Jo's knissomancy for a bit.

16. Dr. Cronk — 7/17/24, 1:02 PM

    Maybe not a good sign that my phones autocorrect wanted to sub "kill" for "mull" there

    1

17. MutantsMichael — 7/17/24, 2:02 PM

    length of Homicidal Mania is 3d6 seconds, btw

18. Dr. Cronk — 7/17/24, 7:30 PM

    So that's what 18 Corruption to boost his effective Pyrokinesis-1 to Pyrokinesis-19? Or, no, it's a contested roll so if he rolls a 3 and I roll a 17 and his Will is, let's say 25, so that would be a success by 22, and if I need to succeed by 23 if I roll a 17, that means I need an effective skill of 40, so, 39 points of Corruption.

    1

    1

    1

19. [7:30 PM]

    Mitch is going to have to take an Odious Personal Habit of constantly grumbling about how none of this matters nothing is real we're all in a damn simulation anyway

20. MutantsMichael — 7/17/24, 7:35 PM

    Yeah, you want to be able to get past any kind of Will or psi resistance, of course

21. MutantsMichael — 7/17/24, 8:00 PM

    It occurs to me that Pat has been very quiet as we've watched and listened to this foursome at White Sands in 1935. And that's fine; he wouldn't necessarily blanch when seeing a near-identical twin of Mitch's back in time, given that Mitch just told Pat about him the other day while fishing. So Pat would also remember Mitch's words, "[The Comte] wants me to kill my evil twin from the bad-guys dimension, but I want to kill him instead, and leave my evil twin to Jocasta to take care of. We make it through this story without me and my evil twin being in the same room at the same time, I'll call that a win."

22. Dr. Cronk — 7/17/24, 8:12 PM

    Well if he's gonna sever the connection before I can deal fourteen points of damage to Al's brain per second for up to ten seconds (iirc) then I suppose Mitch will be grateful after his homicidal mania wears off but in the meantime Mitch would be standing there with a full head of steam and a cop who just thwarted his desire

23. MutantsMichael — 7/17/24, 8:13 PM

    That is a good point.

24. [8:16 PM]

    I suppose with the description of Uncontrollable Appetite (Murder), which is part of Homicidal Mania, that Mitch would get a second Self-Control roll to resist turning the Pyro on Pat, but at 10, not 12.

25. July 18, 2024

26. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 7:11 AM

    So. Is Mitch going to turn on Pyrokinesis with 39 points of Corruption to try to burn young Alpha Leonis?

27. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 8:56 AM

    That is what I said yes

    1

28. @Dr. Cronk

    That is what I said yes

    MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 9:26 AM

    All right, let's do it. First you'll need to roll to activate on a 14 or less.

29. [9:27 AM]

    Then it'll be Pyrokinesis-40.

30. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/18/24, 9:33 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (4+4+3) = 11

31. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 9:33 AM

    Whew

32. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/18/24, 9:33 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (5+6+3) = 14

33. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 9:33 AM

    Success by 26, not great

34. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 9:33 AM

    Okay, so that's success by 26.

35. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 9:50 AM

    As Mitch reaches out through Pat's remote viewing channel to 1935 in order to agitate the molecules of Alpha Leonis and cause him to spontaneously combust, Mitch's innate senses of Aura Sight and Detect (History B) kick in, even amidst the mania that Alpha Leonis's smug awareness of their remote viewing has triggered in Mitch. First off: the crystal in Alpha Leonis's hand is indeed a reality shard, Mitch can tell; Edna's belief it was a "power battery" isn't quite correct, but Mitch can tell its purpose is to hold, store, and/or channel psychic energy. So naturally, as tiny flames begin to break out on and around Alpha Leonis, Mitch's next instinct is to look at Alpha Leonis's aura for psychic activation. Mitch can sense Alpha Leonis's nature as a creature of History B clear as day with Detect. In AL's aura, Mitch sees similarities to his own, especially on the physical level; genetically, Mitch can tell, the two of them are indeed essentially identical. Mitch considers all the hints that the Comte has dropped over the past year or so about Mitch's "destiny" to assassinate Alpha Leonis, how Mitch is uniquely suited to do so, and a scan of Alpha Leonis's body doesn't show that he's especially vulnerable to fire, psychically-induced or otherwise. But on the psychic level, Alpha Leonis (1935 version)'s active psionic abilities are remarkably... inchoate to Mitch's aura sight. It seems as though those regions of the human brain, mutated and trained by the Anunnaki millennia ago to activate humanity's psychic potential (if you believe such a history), are all also full of potential in Alpha Leonis's brain. But they haven't been trained to the end of, say, psychokinesis or telepathy or past-life awareness or psychometry or remote viewing. They exist as a blank template, one which Mitch can tell is currently being written as the pyrokinesis breaks out in full all over Alpha Leonis's body. George staggers backwards in shock, Leica still in hand, snapping away one blurry shot for posterity of Alpha Leonis in flames; Guy and Edna are still hypnotized and staring into the desert, awaiting the next words of Agent K-17. Alpha Leonis isn't saying anything, but he holds the History B crystal up to the sky, from the place where he perceives Mitch and Pat watching him. The flames are licking up around him and burning him, but Alpha Leonis's latent psychic ability and the reality shard seem to be grounding him somehow, giving him some but not total protection from the effects of the pyrokinesis. Mitch can tell with Aura Sight that AL has taken 6 HP of damage out of his normal healthy 14 HP maximum: the young Alpha Leonis is extremely physically fit. But he is in pain, and is being harmed, even with the protection of the reality shard and his cerebral matrix adjusting to give him Psychic Resistance. "Mitch," Pat says out loud in 1974, "what are you doing?" He isn't closing the remote viewing window but he is trying to get Mitch to talk to him. Next round.

36. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 10:01 AM

    If I'm doing this I'm going all in so

37. [10:03 AM]

    As I understand the rules, Mitch can maintain his pyrokinesis and roll his skill, once per second of game time. How long does it take Pat to react and question Mitch? How long does it take him to get that sentence out of his mouth?

    1

38. [10:04 AM]

    As Mitch continues to ignite "Reg" do we need to spend more Corruption or does the boost cast through?

39. [10:04 AM]

    Regardless it happens very quickly

40. [10:05 AM]

    We should roll the 3d6 for how many seconds it takes Mitch to work through this homicidal mania

41. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 10:08 AM

    I was trying to get a second (or two)'s worth of words out of Pat's mouth, quick as he could. You're right, all that above happened in a single second, including the flashes in Mitch's head of AL's aura, nature, the reality shard, etc. We really should find out how long the mania lasts as well, do you want to roll 3d6 for seconds? It does seem, yes, that each second of application will require a skill roll (the Activation roll for Mitch's Limitation has already been made) since it's a distinct attack and each roll will require the Corruption to be spent, and a new Will resistance roll to be made by AL. Alpha Leonis's action last round was to activate the reality shard.

42. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 10:16 AM

    Play to find out

43. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/18/24, 10:16 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (5+4+2) = 11

44. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 10:17 AM

    Okay, so 11 seconds of homicidal mania?

45. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 10:17 AM

    10 more!

46. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/18/24, 10:18 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6 another pyro 40 roll assuming that's called for: (1+5+1) = 7

    1

47. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 10:22 AM

    Iirc from Mitch's meeting with the Comte atop Mount Shasta, he can talk and burn at the same time. "One sec." Gritted teeth, obvious agitation.

    1

48. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 10:23 AM

    (Will narrate the results of the Mitch/AL dynamics of round 2 a little later... I have made the Will resistance roll, the reality shard use roll, and decided on Pat's and George's actions. Hell, I can narrate Pat's action now actually.) Pat says, "This isn't what you wanted, Mitch!" But he's still not closing the remote viewing window. As Mitch glances over at Pat, there is total fear in his aura; the fear is directed at Mitch right now. Mitch surmises in this split-second that Pat is fearful if he closes the window, Mitch will burn him next.

49. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 10:36 AM

    Alpha Leonis burns even more; he takes another 6 HP of damage from the flames. The resistance is steady but Mitch judges that it will not be enough to protect him fully from injury. The crystal, Mitch can tell, is now full of psychic energy drawn from Mitch's psi power, from Alpha Leonis himself, and from the very landscape here, the subduction zone near the Annunaki's city of the Illuminated on the other side. Alpha Leonis, in the midst of his pain and the burning, attempts to wield the crystal's power against whichever mysterious demiurges from the future are spying upon him and/or making him burst into flames. Pat resists Alpha Leonis's attempt to close his remote viewing window using the reality shard, but it's not easy for Pat. He's expending more Fatigue in keeping the remote viewing open. George has taken off his coat and is running over to Alpha Leonis to try to help beat out the flames. He will be there by next round, Round 3. So it's now Round 3. There are a lot of factors that could snap Mitch off of his concentration on Alpha Leonis but none have stopped him yet.

50. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 10:38 AM

    If there's nothing external stopping him he doesn't stop

51. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/18/24, 10:39 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6 pyro 40: (3+1+3) = 7

    1

    1

52. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 10:42 AM

    All right, more rolls on this side, same as last round—Will resistance for AL, Reality Shard activation for AL, Will for Pat—one sec. (One thing I can say is that all that George's cover-stop-drop-and-roll will do is help mitigate the follow-on burning clothes damage, and that takes 10 seconds to register anyway. It won't act as any kind of protection for the Pyrokinesis itself in any way, but he will tackle AL this round while he's activating the crystal.)

53. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 10:45 AM

    George rolls an 18, crystal explodes in his face

54. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 10:49 AM

    Alpha Leonis suffers another 6 HP of damage, bringing him to -4 HP. He makes the HT consciousness roll so he is still conscious. His activation roll for the reality shard is again a success, but Pat's Will resistance roll keeps the remote viewing connection open. But now Pat is in a tough spot with respect to Fatigue Points; Mitch sees him drop to an exhausted state (<0 FP) and Pat will need next round to roll Will at the top of the round to successfully keep the window open. Likewise, Alpha Leonis will need to roll HT to stay conscious and try to use the reality shard yet again if Pat makes that Will roll. So Round 4. I'll start with the Will-14 roll for Pat to resist the fatigue.

55. [10:51 AM]

    Pat falls unconscious from the effort of keeping the remote viewing of White Sands 1935 open. Mitch's remote viewing awareness switches to the Trinity site at the current day, 1974, as a few oryxes curiously sniff the ground near the black Trinity marker.

56. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 10:52 AM

    Fucking oryxes

57. [10:52 AM]

    The source of all my woe

58. [10:53 AM]

    Burn motherfuckers

59. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/18/24, 10:53 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (5+2+6) = 13

60. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/18/24, 10:53 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6 I don't know how much corruption this calls for: (6+4+1) = 11

61. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 10:55 AM

    Yeah, you don't need to use Corruption anymore to bridge the gap in time, so one of the oryxes bursts into flame as it touches the black Trinity obelisk. The other oryxes scatter in fear as the aflame oryx gallops in raw animal panic away at top speed and eventually burns to death, the latest in the series of burnt offerings brought upon the white sands of Ground Zero. Mitch's Bloodlust and Hunger for Murder are sated in a handful of seconds as he cooks the oryx to perfection. Pat is unconscious and will be for another 40 minutes or so.

62. Dr. Cronk — 7/18/24, 10:58 AM

    Mitch needs a lie down too

    1

63. [10:59 AM]

    But actually he's gonna meditate on the question of how badly he fucked the game up. First thought is AL survived so he got magic burn-scar-removing healing at some point and everything ticks forwards just fine

64. [10:59 AM]

    Second thought is that first thought is hella motivated reasoning

65. MutantsMichael — 7/18/24, 11:00 AM

    I hate to get all meta, but this does sort of retroactively explain a bunch of stuff. Especially the Solaran fire.

66. [11:06 AM]

    There are also clues to run down on what happened in 1935... the identity of "George/K-17," Alpha Leonis's activity between '35 and the mid-'60s, Guy and Edna's involvement with proto-SANDMAN, and so on

67. July 19, 2024

68. @Dr. Cronk

    But actually he's gonna meditate on the question of how badly he fucked the game up. First thought is AL survived so he got magic burn-scar-removing healing at some point and everything ticks forwards just fine

    MutantsMichael — 7/19/24, 9:57 AM

    You can give me a Meditation-17 roll. As GURPS Characters states: "In addition, the GM may permit you to meditate on a particular moral dilemma. On a successful Meditation roll, the GM will “enlighten” you, providing a hint as to which course of action “feels” right."

69. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/19/24, 11:21 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (5+6+5) = 16

70. Dr. Cronk — 7/19/24, 11:21 AM

    Pshaw

    1

71. MutantsMichael — 7/19/24, 11:43 AM

    Now that Mitch has calmed down a little bit and (just barely) gotten his mind back into a meditative state without the pressure of remote viewing and/or changing history, his mind can take the time to sort out some of the things he's just glimpsed, sanity/Corruption damage notwithstanding. First, Mitch and Pat can work together with their remote viewing. Second, Pat's temporal vision can act as a two-way gateway with the past and psionic powers can be used through that gateway. Third, this combination of factors can change history. Mitch's Illuminated nature tells him, now that he's able to meditate on it and is not being driven to murder his double thanks to Paradox Madness, that had Alpha Leonis's life-line been snipped back there, it would have had massive, reality quake-level implications on the timeline. Mitch and Pat would have come back to a completely different world; or, at the very least, Mitch would have. There's only one Earth, and Mitch's Illuminated nature would have allowed him to remember the old timeline as well as the new one, as the test case of the Emperor Norton has shown, but the change would have retrocreated a new 39 years of history. The fact that Pat's remote viewing isn't merely a temporal TV screen but a temporal gateway is monstrously important and powerful. But the limitation built into his remote viewing—that he is often (not always!) driven to the "most important moment" in a place's history, leaves so much to chance. Mitch wonders if the fact that AL, George, and the Ballards at White Sands in 1935 was deemed "the most important moment" at Ground Zero, more important even than the history-rending Trinity test, is yet another paradox: whether Mitch's pyrokinesis made this the most important moment, or the mere unearthing of that reality shard was what made it so. Mitch is leaning toward the former. One more piece of data from Mitch's Illuminated awareness and from his Detect (History B), is that Mitch suspects that Irruptors bubble up at crucial moments in history, when many deaths occur or when belief is channeled, because there's an opportunity to capitalize on these vast changes. Sometimes History B nudges those circumstances into play over decades or centuries: Zeb teaching Moore who makes an album that Keiner makes a tapestry for, etc. etc. But sometimes they slip in unnoticed when mortals, Illuminated or no, make those changes. Like Ambrose guiding the Bohemians into creating Earth-Bohemia, or the Owls changing things back when that infection became terminal. Mitch is beginning to bet some of those Owls must have been Illuminated. It's at this moment that Jocasta's Telesend from ⁠[I9] Jocasta's Sketch, Intersec… , featuring the scorched Bohemian Grove, pops into Mitch's head, along with the friendly smiling bespectacled face of Fred H. Merrill. Who, yes, is the guy without a soul that warned Mitch off of poking into the Bohemian Club at the baseball diamond last month.

    1

72. July 23, 2024

73. Dr. Cronk — 7/23/24, 6:14 PM

    Does Mitch percieve/comprehend the source of this mystic vision?

74. MutantsMichael — 7/23/24, 6:24 PM

    There is nothing in the description of Telesend one way or the other that says Jocasta must reveal she is the person sending the message, but I'm sure she can choose to, so that's up to Leonard. From the impression I got from Leonard's description, it did seem like the message conveyed that Jo was sending it. As for the fact that the message is coming from a few days in the future, that could be considered a reverberation from the big temporal remote-view Pat just did (and of course Pat and Jo have their own psychometric connection from Mission 5, the vision Pat got of "St. Mary in the Pines" back in 1960.)

75. Leonard — 7/23/24, 6:58 PM

    Jocasta doesn't convey any information that she's the sender, but she does assume that Mitch will assume it's from her.

    2

76. Dr. Cronk — 7/23/24, 7:05 PM

    Okay. As soon as Mitch has sufficient FP to avoid passing out, he'll attempt to view this man, this "Merrill."

77. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/23/24, 7:06 PM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (1+3+5) = 9

78. July 24, 2024

79. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 7:03 AM

    Mitch reaches out once more with his clairvoyant senses while Pat recovers from his own strenuous remote-viewing session. The winds whip the top of Shasta as Mitch attempts to reach out to the man he met on the baseball diamond at USF last month. Mitch doesn't have an aura fingerprint to go off of, of course, and as Mitch lets his mind coast over the City, looking for Fred Merrill, he finds it's hard to get a bead on him. Ordinarily, if Mitch had at least met someone before, but didn't know where they were currently, there'd be a subconscious draw to them, especially if he had a general idea of where they were. But Mitch can't get a lock right now. He does find himself after the 10 minutes of concentration, interestingly, drawn to the Bohemian Club itself, on Taylor Street in San Francisco. Mitch doesn't know if Merrill himself is inside the Club in the middle of a random Thursday afternoon—certainly for a retired board member and CEO like Merrill, it's reasonable to think he might be—but when Mitch comes "face"-to-face with the "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" inscription on the facade of the building, he has a sensation similar to the one he remembers from trying to remote-view the Agrigenics headquarters when Bernadette was actively keeping Mitch inside the meditation pod/"spirit trap," except this sense of resistance seems to encompass the whole building. Mitch hears faintly, a fey, light, near-whisper of a voice reciting this quatrain, over and over again, as his remote-view window is locked into staring into the eyes of the owl on the Club's plaque: Weaving spiders, come not here. Hence, you long-legged spinners, hence. Beetles black, approach not near. Worm nor snail, do no offence. Detect (History B) activation/perceive/analysis rolls, please.

80. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 7:50 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (3+1+1) = 5

81. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 7:50 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (4+6+4) = 14

82. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 7:50 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (5+2+1) = 8

83. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 8:10 AM

    "Standing" outside the Bohemian Club, it's apparent there are active anti-psi countermeasures in the building, but that's not what tugs at Mitch's remote senses when he finally detaches a bit from the lullabye-voice that is constantly repeating First Fairy's lines from Act II, scene ii of A Midsummer Night's Dream. What Mitch senses is a nearby stable subduction zone, an area where a subduction occurred and then eventually settled back into History A "normality." And Mitch certainly has enough Area Knowledge of the City to know which stable subduction zone it is: the remnants of the June 1973 subduction event at the St. Francis Hotel. Just down there, Mitch's wizard eye peers, down Post Street across Mason, is Union Square and the old St. Francis building that was enveloped in a solid, powerful bubble of History B for about 14 hours eleven months ago. The night Mitch used the Mattock of Enlil and the belief energy bubbling out of History B to retro-(re?)create the Emperor Norton. Mitch can sense the "tidewaters" of the June event, the one that created the RFK '72 posters in a mile radius around the St. Francis a week before the event, really crashed forcefully against the walls of the 1933-built Bohemian Club here on Taylor. But now that Mitch has sensed the edges of the soft subduction zone nearby, it seems to Mitch as if the Club had been created as a redoubt against the tides of different histories possibly pulling on it. This place not only has anti-psi measures built in, but it's also meant to be a bulwark of and for History A. For a minute Mitch had wondered if his retrocreation of Emperor Norton set into play a series of events that led to the original, arists-'n'-journalists incarnation of the Bohemian Club coming into being, given the love of all the city's newspaper scribes had for the eccentric. But that's the kind of thinking about mucking about with history that will lead a fellow down the road to acute paranoia. Anyway, the upshot of this awareness is that there is likely some sacred geometry/architecture built into the Bohemian Club on Taylor, meant specifically to protect the members of the Club from the attentions of the Red Kings.

84. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 9:11 AM

    For a minute Mitch had wondered if his retrocreation of Emperor Norton set into play a series of events that led to the original, arists-'n'-journalists incarnation of the Bohemian Club coming into being, given the love of all the city's newspaper scribes had for the eccentric.

85. [9:12 AM]

    Yes, this sentence does indeed describe a thought I had just before reading this sentence.

86. [9:13 AM]

    Hmm. Okay. Mitch has a stable view here, right? It's not a brief glimpse, it's an ongoing perception, yes?

87. [9:14 AM]

    Assuming that's so, let's try casing the joint. Mitch will survey the exterior of the club as best he can, probing the limits of its protections, determining what its extent is, looking for any weak spots.

    1

88. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 9:14 AM

    Yes, outside the Club building Mitch's remote viewing seems stable and secure.

89. @Dr. Cronk

    Assuming that's so, let's try casing the joint. Mitch will survey the exterior of the club as best he can, probing the limits of its protections, determining what its extent is, looking for any weak spots.

    MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 9:15 AM

    Excellent. I'll roll Observation-18 secretly for you. And that should take maybe 5, 10 minutes.

90. [9:15 AM]

    (Will need to give you the results of the casing after taking J to work, so about an hour or so.)

91. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 10:43 AM

    Okay, so on the purely physical side of things, there is the main entrance at 624 Taylor Street. As Marshall described it, there is always a doorman and/or security at that entrance right on the inside. There is a side service entrance in Hobart Alley off of Taylor, a narrow alley with only enough room for a servant to take the garbage out. Mitch can see one of them new-fangled CCTV cameras trained on that door. There is a secondary entrance on Taylor that goes directly into the ground-floor ballroom; that door is also covered by CCTV. There is a big garage-style triple door on Post Street, probably for moving in large things like pianos, statuary, etc. No CCTV coverage there; it looks like it's rarely-used. Around the back of the building, there is an alleyway on Mason Street with a locked steel gate, and this alley is wide enough to give admittance for delivery vehicles to access the back of the Bohemian Club, where there is a sizeable loading dock and service entrance for catering and similar deliveries. This alleyway also services the Olympic Club on Post and the Marines' Memorial Club and Theatre on Sutter, all more or less contiguous on the Taylor-Post-Mason-Sutter block along with smaller businesses and a parking garage. The loading dock of the Bohemian Club has CCTV coverage as well: two cameras, one at either end. Now, on the metaphysical level, Mitch can sense a very faint pucker in History A up on the top floor of the Bohemian Club. Mitch cannot step inside the room through the window, which has its curtains and shades drawn, but it matches the physical location of the George Sterling Death Suite that experienced that weird fire back in April at the same time Patricia was shooting those civilians and Ambrose popped out of the mountain. It's weird, because as certain as Mitch was that this building was constructed to repel History B, it feels like in the Sterling Suite, behind those walls, there's an incipient potentiality of History B, inside the walls. It's very faint, and very small, this potentiality... but it has lingered long after whatever the manifestation was back in April.

92. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 10:56 AM

    Hmm

93. [10:57 AM]

    Is this something Mitch can do: light those drawn shades and curtains on fire, inside the room which has experienced fire recently once already? This is a two-part question: the first part is, is this within his capabilities just based on physical geography, and the second part is, is there an antispi effect that blocks his pyrokinesis from penetrating to the other side of that window?

94. [10:58 AM]

    If the answer to the first part of the two-part question is no, then Mitch will consider igniting the plaque which seems to be a nexus of antipsi shielding, just to confirm that it's hardened against his attack

95. @Dr. Cronk

    Is this something Mitch can do: light those drawn shades and curtains on fire, inside the room which has experienced fire recently once already? This is a two-part question: the first part is, is this within his capabilities just based on physical geography, and the second part is, is there an antispi effect that blocks his pyrokinesis from penetrating to the other side of that window?

    MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 11:37 AM

    Based purely on physical geography, yes: the window shade and curtains are visible from the street and thus theoretically combustible. Whether the anti-psi shielding will work to counter Mitch's Pyro just as it does his Clairvoyance will need to be tested in situ; i.e., he'll need to make a roll. One thing is for sure, Mitch can't move his current Clairvoyance activation past the walls and windows of the Bohemian Club into the Sterling Suite. Before he does that, though... give me a Hidden Lore (History B)-16 roll.

96. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 11:41 AM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (3+3+6) = 12

97. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 11:58 AM

    I think the one thing that might give Mitch a tiny bit of pause on using his Pyrokinesis at a target inside the Suite is knowing that there is some small lingering History B presence inside/leaking outside the Sterling Suite. How that could interact with his psi powers is... unpredictable. Just in pure terms of an event that might soften things up a bit more, a single use of a psi power is pretty minor; much less than a glyph or reality shard being used, and orders of magnitude less than human deaths or Anunnaki worship. If Mitch were to, perhaps, picture a table where one rolls three six-sided dice to determine if a minor temblor happens, a use of Pyrokinesis would likely push the probability much lower: safe on a 15 or less, say. But there is a slim chance it will open things up to History B/destabilize things inside the Suite a tad more. Likewise, a use of Pyrokinesis that doesn't trigger a subduction event might reveal more of the nature of the History B infection, allowing Mitch another, specific analysis roll. It also seems weird to Mitch on some level that there still is a pucker in reality here; if the Owls are so clued into the reality war that they can willfully harden their most important sites against both psi and History B, why has the Sterling Suite still got somewhat-unhealed scar tissue around it?

98. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 12:00 PM

    Yeah, I'm going to try it. Part of my reasoning here is that if worst comes to worst, the ensuing crisis will be the Owls' problem.

99. Dr. Cronk used

    roll

    Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 12:00 PM

    @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6 if the activation roll fails I believe I can just try again: (4+2+1) = 7

100. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 12:01 PM

     Before I roll Mitch's pyrokinesis skill roll though, what kind of modifiers are we looking at, here? If his effective skill is pushed too low he may as well take another bucket of Corruption.

101. [12:01 PM]

     Better if he doesn't need to, though

102. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 12:14 PM

     Well, let's look at it this way, and before I get into it, Corruption is obviously available here although the use of Corruption probably will bump up that imaginary roll on that imaginary reality temblor table... The curtains would usually get a roll against their HT as inanimate objects to resist the Pyro roll. Mitch figures if the anti-psi effect covers them, it will give them an effective boost to their physical toughness. Mitch does not know what magnitude that effective HT boost would be, but he figures given the outright failure of his Remote Viewing of Fred Merrill after a moderate success it could be anywhere from a +6 to +8, on up. So yeah, a big enough Corruption push might be able to overcome it, but what using Corruption here will do to the ontological ground is uncertain. Also, how is Mitch looking for Fatigue right now? Does his use of Clairvoyance still cost FP at 10,000+ feet?

103. Dr. Cronk

     Okay. As soon as Mitch has sufficient FP to avoid passing out, he'll attempt to view this man, this "Merrill."

     Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 12:19 PM

     Enough, I hope? His Clairvoyance does cost FP to activate, but Pyrokinesis doesn't

     1

104. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 12:20 PM

     Ah, right, cool then.

105. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 12:21 PM

     Hmm, so assuming the FP situation is such that he can do this at all, we're looking at something like, a) Quick Contest between Mitch's Pyro skill of 16 and the inanimate curtain's modified HT of 10 plus 6 or 8, followed by b) reality temblor check of a 15-.

106. [12:23 PM]

     Repeat until the curtain is on fire, which I think would require one successful use but one could plausibly argue as high as three successful uses, since Pyro 1 does so little damage (on the other hand, these curtains are either FC 1 or FC 2 depending on whether they're flame-retardant, and the Pyro treats them as if they were one FC lower, so if they're not flame-retardant they're basically greasy rags)

107. [12:24 PM]

     Boosting the Pyro skill with corruption would make Mitch more likely to win the Quick Contest, at the cost of making the temblor check roll more risky.

108. [12:24 PM]

     I'm not a statistician but I think I'm more likely to successfully roll under 15 three times in a row than roll under 9 once

109. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 12:25 PM

     Yeah, the Fatigue Points I think come into play if you need to reroll a failed roll on Pyrokinesis, every new attempt is at -1 and costs a single FP. (edited)

110. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 12:25 PM

     Hmm, yeah, failing the Quick Contest means a cumulative -1 penalty to future attempts

111. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 12:26 PM

     Mitch will be able to get an idea after that first roll how tough the psi resistance is.

112. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 12:26 PM

     On the other hand I should only need to succeed at approximately-a-coin-flip odds once

113. [12:27 PM]

     I could do more math but I've probably forgotten some significant factor already, let's try it.

114. Dr. Cronk used

     roll

     Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 12:27 PM

     @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (6+2+2) = 10

115. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 12:27 PM

     Success by six

116. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 12:29 PM

     The curtains do not catch on fire in that first second of concentration. Before Mitch tries again, please give me a new set of Detect (History B) rolls. Your power will activate on a 16 or less, you will sense History B on a 17 or less, and you will analyze successfully on a 16 or less (a +2 bonus across the board).

117. Dr. Cronk used

     roll

     Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 12:29 PM

     @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (3+6+3) = 12

118. Dr. Cronk used

     roll

     Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 12:29 PM

     @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (3+3+5) = 11

119. Dr. Cronk used

     roll

     Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 12:30 PM

     @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (6+6+5) = 17

120. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 12:30 PM

     Dang!!

121. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 12:37 PM

     Okay, well there is at least some information I can give you from the successful Sense roll. It's not "analyzable" but Mitch can at least sense the following: • During the split-second where Mitch was trying to probe and penetrate the Bohemian Club with his Pyrokinesis, he was able to tell there is a conscious, History B-infected entity still inside the Sterling Suite. More about the nature of this entity cannot be determined due to the failed analysis roll. • There is also a trail of old, faded History B energy leading from the window to a spot kitty-corner from the Bohemian Club, in front of a bar called The Owl Tree on the southwest corner of Taylor and Post. Mitch is able to see this trail (presumably) a month after it first manifested because it possessed Irruptor-level power; the trail stops on the street out there because the Irruptor was able to hide itself somehow after manifesting. Whatever happened with that fire last month, it did cause an Irruption. Again, any more info is impossible to glean thanks to the failed analysis roll.

122. [12:43 PM]

     (will likely be afk for a bit but there was also NO temblor or change in the subduction pucker)

123. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 1:02 PM

     Hmm so Mitch can't tell if he's tapping on an eggshell or a brick

124. [1:02 PM]

     May as well try it again?

125. Dr. Cronk used

     roll

     Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 1:03 PM

     @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6 pyro skill is 15 now: (2+3+2) = 7

126. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 1:03 PM

     Success by eight? Unless I misunderstood something

     1

127. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 3:05 PM

     Mitch feels that attempt got closer to igniting the shades and curtains, but still wasn't quite close enough. It's obviously doable and manageable without spending Corruption at Mitch's baseline ability, but it's getting harder and more tiring each time he tries.

128. [3:06 PM]

     Again, after this Pyro attempt, the subduction scar seems stable and there's no change in the incipient History B instability around the Sterling Suite.

129. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 3:14 PM

     My understanding of the math indicates I can give it at least one more shot, after which odds of success drop rapidly

130. Dr. Cronk used

     roll

     Dice GolemAPP — 7/24/24, 3:14 PM

     @Dr. Cronk rolled 3d6: (2+2+5) = 9

131. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 3:15 PM

     Success by five probably?

132. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 3:16 PM

     Third verse, same as the first two: no success on the Pyrokinesis, no problems with the subduction zone.

133. Dr. Cronk — 7/24/24, 3:20 PM

     That's probably as many bites at the apple as it's worth trying.

134. [3:21 PM]

     So there's two separate traces, one of an entity inside the building and one a month-old trail of an irruptor leaving the building?

135. MutantsMichael — 7/24/24, 3:21 PM

     That is correct.

136. July 27, 2024

137. MutantsMichael — 7/27/24, 9:27 AM

     It seems like it would be about this point where Pat would be coming out of his mandated 40 minutes' rest to get back up to 1 FP. (He'll still need more rest before you two can think about coming down off the mountain.) When he comes to full consciousness, he'll easily see Mitch is in yet another Clairvoyance session. "Haven't got enough of an eyeful yet, eh chief?" Pat says as he gets himself comfortable and opens up his pack to get a canteen and a snack.

138. July 31, 2024

139. MutantsMichael — 7/31/24, 3:13 PM

     (Jeff, given we're doing the live session tomorrow night, if you're good with the entire Pat-Mitch series of scenes fading to black here in advance of the in-person meeting of the Club, I am too.)

140. Dr. Cronk — 7/31/24, 6:00 PM

     Yeah, I didn't have anything else I wanted from the scene, I guess.

     1

141. MutantsMichael — 7/31/24, 6:03 PM

     We can always fill in Serendipitous details from what happened afterward during tomorrow night's session.

142. [6:03 PM]

     I anticipate a lot of playing with time, memory, and what happens when the cameras are off the final four missions