I Remember It
Michael
As Elsie Whitaker seems not at all surprised to see these two women invading her home and trying to hustle her out of bed—and, indeed, in her half-asleep liminal state, seems to welcome them as "George" and "Jack," Jocasta takes stock of the past 5-10 minutes coming into town: seeing glimpses of weirdness outside the window, like the torches (and half-seen be-toga'd figures, if I didn't mention them in the live session) at the Forest Theater and the brief glimpse of pagan deer heads, smeared in blood, in the gardens of the old Sterling cottage, and the dream-like acquiescence that Elsie seems to have towards what would ordinarily be a pretty horrifying home invasion. I'd like Jo to give me a Hidden Lore (History B)-15 roll (I have assessed a -2 penalty for Reasons).
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 8
Michael
Those flashes of various weird pagan artsy tableaux that Jocasta caught while driving the van through the sleepy streets of Carmel-by-the-Sea seemed to resemble the thematic psychic illusory "projections" that Patricia has been producing while Jocasta's been running Patricia and mind-melding with her the past few days. But this time, Jocasta can sense with the vague help of both her psychic link with Patricia and her Psychometry, that there is a historical quotient to those visions as well: a psychic imprint that was left here in Carmel thanks to intense group belief.
The one instance from her Sandman career that these visions in Carmel have reminded Jocasta the most vividly of is her visions at and having to do with Downer Ranch: a locus of intense, traumatic, historical belief in something or someone that have left behind an ontological residue, one that Patricia was able to amplify and focus, albeit briefly, to produce a visible effect.
Leonard
Jocasta is going to try her best to access Jack’s spirit and talk directly both to it and to Patricia and Elsie.
“I feel the power of this place…no, that’s wrong. I remember it. Like I would remember a jewel in a crown.
But there is so much to do before the crown can be restored. It is not safe to linger. George, Elsie, please hurry: Ambrose is waiting for us.”
Michael
Jo catches with her Empathic/psychic connection with Patricia her absolute shock at this statement about Ambrose being alive. Patricia can't control her physical reaction either; she does a quick gape-mouthed double-take at Jo at this information. But it's Elsie who first says something in her half-asleep, half-enchanted state. She blushes, and stumbles out the words, "Oh. Oh! Grumpy old Ambrose has re-incarnated as well? Despite everything, I've missed him and his razor-sharp wits, so much. He always was so encouraging of my... my literary pretentions."
After a pause to process this and to wipe away a tear, Elsie continues, "He's going to have a real laugh at the two of you being girls, though! Remember... remember that time he was due to come down to Carmel and George, your Carrie, and Laura, had to rush to put skirts on over their bloomers at the beach, so frightened they were of Ambrose being scandalized by our pagan ways down here by the sea?" Elsie laughs.
"What about... what about Marty? Has... has anyone found him yet?" Elsie says with a combined sense of longing and resignation. With her Empathy, Jo can tell that while Elsie still loves her dead husband, it is not the passionate lifelong love of missing a soul mate, more the cautious, distant caretaker's love of an ex-spouse for a sick, dying man. She is thrown back to her youth amongst the Bohemians thinking of Ambrose and talking to "George" and "Jack," but when it comes to Xavier, she can only remember the man she nursed in his dissipated old age and dying.
Leonard
Jo guesses, even in her heightened state, that this is no time for sheer bluff. “I don’t know, Elsie. I wish I did. But I know you can feel that the barriers are thin now, the walls are porous like they were then. And you know at times like that, anything is possible.”
Michael
Fast-Talk-15, please.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 6
[Also, if there’s time — which is fine if there isn’t, her main focus is on getting them to LA — is it possible for Jo to do an Occultism roll here? She doesn’t want to learn anything in depth but she’s curious to know if all the ritual trappings seem like their goal is protection — keeping people out — or confinement — keeping Elise in. Or something else.]
Michael
Jo guesses, even in her heightened state, that this is no time for sheer bluff. “I don’t know, Elsie. I wish I did. But I know you can feel that the barriers are thin now, the walls are porous like they were then. And you know at times like that, anything is possible.”
At Jo's saying "the barriers are thin now, the walls are porous," she senses Patricia's shock at the Ambrose revelation subside considerably. Patricia, despite having the initial knee-jerk reaction that Jocasta had been hiding things from her, now accepts that with "Jack" around, Jo might just now know more than her and she'll have to deal with this new imbalance with generosity and grace, because it also seems clear now to Patricia that she and Jo are united in their goals.
(Jo also notes that Patricia has a mean streak of suspicion, maybe even paranoia, but whether that's because of Patricia's experiences over the last couple months or because Patricia is picking up as much of Jo's personality as Jo is of Patricia's, Jo isn't sure.
"Anything is possible," Patricia repeats, portentously, like the voice on the SLA audio communique. "It all ends..." Patricia smiles, "and begins, in Los Angeles," she says, as if reading Jo's mind.
And yes, analyzing the ritual trappings definitely could use an Occultism-19 roll.
(We could even drive by Sterling's and the Forest Theater again on the way out of town so Jo can get another vibe check.)
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 3
[and yeah, she’ll do another drive past the theater]
@Leonard
[and yeah, she’ll do another drive past the theater]
[Also, if there’s time — which is fine if there isn’t, her main focus is on getting them to LA — is it possible for Jo to do an Occultism roll here? She doesn’t want to learn anything in depth but she’s curious to know if all the ritual trappings seem like their goal is protection — keeping people out — or confinement — keeping Elise in. Or something else.]
Michael
Elsie eagerly piles into the back of the van with Jo's and Patty's help, sitting on the opposite side of the back of the van from the Seconal-slumbering Bill and Emily. Elsie sits on a couch cushion between a couple of garbage bags filled with some SLA personal effects and a foot locker filled with ammunition. In her housecoat, Elsie shivers as she tries to settle in for the long drive to Los Angeles.
On the way back out of town Jocasta decides to slow down deliberately at Sterling's house and then at the Forest Theater to catch another look at the mysterious visions she'd glimpsed on their way in. Unfortunately she can see these apparitions no more clearly even with considerably more time to inspect them; they seem like blurry figments in Jocasta's keen vision.
The deer (and cow) skulls in the trees of Sterling's cottage garden are lit by torchlight, daubed in blood, but Jocasta can see no traditional occult rhyme or reason to the use of the skulls; neither apotropaic nor a magic circle meant to entrap. But this time 'round Jo sees there is also a stone altar at Sterling's garden of skulls, and that triggers a memory in Jocasta from one of her Classics courses in college. Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, Jocasta thinks. Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter to Artemis at the behest of the oracle Calchas. Iphigenia cried out to the Goddess by the end of the play to accept her as sacrifice to ensure Agamemnon's (and her putative husband Achilles's) success in setting sail for the Trojan War.
ἑλίσσετ᾽ ἀμφὶ ναὸν
ἀμφὶ βωμὸν Ἄρτεμιν,
τὰν ἄνασσαν Ἄρτεμιν,
τὰν μάκαιραν: ὡς ἐμοῖσιν, εἰ χρεών,
αἵμασι θύμασί τε
θέσφατ᾽ ἐξαλείψω.
Dance to Artemis
queen Artemis the blessèd
around her shrine and altar
for by the blood of my sacrifice
I will blot out the oracle
if it must be.
In some versions of the tale, Iphigenia was replaced by a sacrificial deer at the last minute. (The deer skulls were what reminded Jocasta of Euripides, once she saw the altar.) But Jocasta knows that was a later interpolation, meant to blunt the impact of the sacrifice to Artemis. Were Sterling and his art colony perpetrating human sacrifice here to try and bring Bohemia back? The same kinds of deaths that the Anunnaki demand to begin the process of a reality temblor?
As Jo drives slowly past the Forest Theater, in the torchlight she can see the vague, wavery figures of the be-toga'd dancers having fallen from dance to ritual copulation. Just like at Downer Ranch. Death and life, Jocasta thinks. They sought some way to duplicate the same configuration of lifelines that came about in the old timeline, to help bring it back. This explains why the Downer Ranch couplings were as rigorously assigned and scheduled as they were. They also sought to bring back a lost timeline, the one that would have ended with...
Jocasta suddenly remembers a snippet of one of Pat Price's reports to Marshall when Pat was asked to scry Downer Ranch. After seeing the Ranch in its heyday, Pat added a footnote: "Possibility of missed alternate present where ranch was continued throughout the past 50-plus years, I can vaguely see it open to present-day hippies, etc. with updated versions of the quack treatments from ca. 1900."
As Jo drives up the hill to take Patricia, Elsie, Bill and Emily out of the haunted seaside colony of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Patricia/Fancy says, "Echoes. Lethal mists whose writhing vapors make dim augury. Don't worry. We'll get it right... this time." She puts a reassuring hand on Jocasta's shoulder.
The sun comes up over the mountains as Jocasta drives into the outskirts of Santa Barbara. It's a gorgeous spring morning in Southern California, and Bill and Emily now just beginning to stir in the back seat (evidently they haven't seen the old lady sleeping across from them yet).
Patricia uses this opportunity to speak to Jocasta, quietly, at a near-whisper. "I am not sure if the safehouse will be the right place for Elsie, and we do need her for... our final act of revolution. I want to hear more about Ambrose, but before we get that straight... you said you have a place of your own in LA? Can you stash Elsie there for a couple of nights, make sure she's comfortable and safe, and explain to her this is all about making George's wishes come true? I think she remembers the way you and I do, but only vaguely. As a woman, they didn't admit her to the inner circle... 'before' or 'after'." Patricia pauses, almost quizzically, after saying this. "Whatever those words might truly mean."
Leonard
"Don't worry, comrade. I have a safe place for her. For you, too, if you need it," Jo says, charging it as much as she can without actually saying anything that she will protect Patricia from the abuse she's receiving from Cinque and the other men. "I wasn't lying about Ambrose, or of the walls between reality, between one history and another, becoming thin. He has come back to us as sure as I'm sitting here, Fancy. I don't know how or why, or for how long. But he's here, and you'll see him soon."
She looks out over the beautiful hills of Santa Barbara, remembering a childhood trip here from another life. "Be careful with them, though," she says, referring to but not looking at Bill and Emily. "They don't know or understand yet, not fully. Not like we do."
Michael
"It's all right," Patricia says in Tania mode, "they're loyal comrades. I believe they will be loyal, when it counts." What's left unsaid in Tania's assessment of the Harrises is everything about Nancy and Cinque and Willie Wolfe, about the SLA members who are or who might have been threats to Tania. With a soulful, pleading look, Fancy comes back to the surface. "What do you think it will look like once we've gotten back what was taken from us, Jocasta? I have these faint impressions from George's poetry, but they all seem so incomplete. And I'm not sure what's metaphor and what's literal. I think of every terrible thing I despise about this world, and then think of its opposite, and that's how I picture Bohemia. What about you?"
Leonard
"I don't really know. I never thought much about it," Jocasta says, cracking the window of the van and finally lighting a cigarette, even if it's a stale old B&H from a crumpled pouch she'd found. "I also was...I learned that imagining a perfect future, a utopia, could be something used to control you. To keep your head in the clouds so you don't see what's..."
She fights a sudden wave of doubting her own intentions. "I guess the best I could put it is, a world where nobody has to do what we're doing."
Michael
"No one feels they have the ability to be a revolutionary until history puts them in a place to do it, that's what all my... reading and instruction has taught me. This is a job we can lay down once we've pushed the world into the place it was always meant to be. The fascists won't be able to stop us once that happens; the change will come suddenly and inexorably, once the masses are activated."
"We do need to do the work, though, and it won't be easy, and it might require some more bloodshed and violence. But if we have Ambrose it will come easier." At a stoplight in Santa Barbara, Patricia takes Jocasta by the right hand, urgently, getting Jo to look at her for the duration of the red light. (Not sure if Jo's wearing gloves or not, Leonard, your call.)
"So you now have to tell me. In what form have you seen Ambrose and where can he be found? And how will you get him to Los Angeles?"
Leonard
Jocasta is wearing gloves, and doesn’t take them off, but she lets Patricia clutch her hand and looks straight at her, trying to shed her normal defensive posture. “I haven’t seen him yet. He came to my people at Mount Shasta; it’s a place of power. We’ll visit him soon, but they tell me he’s there in the flesh, not just the spirit. You know that Jack is with me — just as Elsie does — but he’s more of a…presence right now, an emanation from the world they made. Much like George lives in you. We will have to figure out how and when he can come to us in the city, but I feel hopeful it can happen. All this isn’t happening by chance. Forces are gathering, on more sides than one or two.”
Michael
Patricia grips Jo's hand tightly, very tightly, upon hearing that forces are gathering. "The usurpers. The money men. The servants of Mammon. My father, and grandfather."
Leonard
"Yeah. Yeah, them, almost certainly. But not just them. There's more players, and more sides, than you can imagine, Patricia. One of the only things that keeps me going is the knowledge that we can win, that things can be different. Just keep your mind clear and your eyes open."
Michael
Patricia releases Jo's hand. "I trust you, Jack."
She stares blankly at Jo, shaking her head slightly. "Jocasta." (Going to delay for just a bit to see how Roger's scene plays out, and whether Van 3 actually beats Van 1 to the safehouse. Regardless, if Jo's agreed to take in Elsie at the bookstore in Reseda, I figure Jo can take her there either before or after moving the contents of Van 3 into the safehouse.)
It looks like regardless of what happens, Van 3 will get to LA first at around 7 am, then Van 2 at around 8 am, and finally Van 1 at around 9 am. So Jocasta heads to the safehouse address in Compton... Van 3 will probably get there right around daybreak, so there'll be some time for the three white kids to hustle into the house under some cover of morning darkness before too too many eyewits in the neighborhood notice the Invasion of the White Hippie Squatters. Leaving the dangerous shit in the van until Cinque gets there seems to be a standing order left with Bill as new second-in-command of the SLA; Jocasta will head back over tonight when it's dark out and help unload the van.
Upon waking up and seeing Elsie in the car, Patricia is evasive with Bill and Emily on exactly who this old lady is, but she does tell them and reassure them that she's going with Jocasta, and they seem to be okay with that explanation. Elsie remains asleep throughout the Santa Barbara-to-Compton-back-to-Reseda portion of the trip.
Before getting out of the van to hustle into the safehouse, Patricia says to Jocasta, "We'll talk more tonight. Real revolutionary strategy. And... you and I will talk further about Ambrose. Make sure Elsie is safe and comfortable; thank you again for trusting me tonight. Until tonight, comrade. ¡Venceremos!" And she gives Jocasta the Marxist-Leninist socialist embrace—three hugs on alternating shoulders and kisses on alternating cheeks—and then a passionate, aggressive, lingering fraternal (sororal?) kiss on the mouth.
Leonard
Jocasta, surprising herself, returns the kiss with boldness. But the moment it breaks, she's all business again, letting her military training quash the conflicting motivations fighting inside of her. "Until tonight, comrade. Be safe. And take this, if you need me."
She hands Patricia a scrap of paper with the phone number of the shop, grateful for her gloved hands, and heads back to the van. Driving across town, she reassures Elsie that all will become more clear soon, and, once they arrive, gets her as comfortable as possible, brings back some takeout, and makes sure she settles in before tending to other business.
First off, she calls her drop number at Livermore and at URIEL South to let everyone know that she's back and safe and that the cat's in the bag. She'll refrain from giving any other details but note that she's reachable at this number. Next, she takes a quick trip to her beach house and opens the shed out back, loading the van with her full panoply of armor, weapons, and gear -- and a few more rifles and pistols to boot. She'll also take a nice, long, hot shower, blessedly rinsing off the filth of days on the streets. Finally, she'll head back to the bookshop and meditate for a good hour or so; she's not really trying to learn anything or gain insight, just quell the warring voices inside her that are pulling her in different directions. Get your head on straight, Joey, she thinks; This is the absolute worst time to lose yourself. Her motivations are muddled to her, and she just wants the focus and sense of place that comes from meditative calm.
When enough time has passed, she'll check on Elsie again, then stroll down the street, find a pay phone, and call Archie.
Michael
(Cool, will wait for Rob to leaf through the Wheat Testament and get back to LA and we can run that scene. And I may have a little something for Elsie too, but that can happen after the Archie call maybe.)