Jocasta Takes the Ride
Michael
Monday, July 9, 1973. Evening. When Jo gets home from Livermore, she takes an extra strong dose of LSD and tries to plumb the depths of her unconsciousness. Leonard, when you have a chance, give me a Meditation roll. I'll give you a +2 to your skill for the acid and assorted other "equipment" bonuses (putting on one of the Environments LPs as background, incense, etc.), so that's Meditation-16. Also, given the importance of hallucinogens in the coming scenes, thought it might be handy to have this close to hand:
Most of these drugs are taken orally and require about 20 minutes to work. Make a HT-2 roll to resist. On a failure, the user starts hallucinating (see Incapacitating Conditions, p. 428). This lasts for hours equal to the margin of failure. After that time, the user may roll vs. HT-2 once per hour to shake off the drug’s influence. Hallucinating: You can try to act, but you must roll vs. Will before each success roll. On a success, you merely suffer 2d seconds of disorientation. This gives -2 on success rolls. On a failure, you actually hallucinate for 1d minutes. In this case, the penalty is -5. The GM is free to specify the details of your hallucinations, which need not be visual. On a critical failure, you “freak out” for 3d minutes. You might do anything! The GM rolls 3d: the higher the roll, the more dangerous your action
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 2
(Good thing she had that bonus!)
Michael
Hey, it would have just been barely a success without it! Jocasta lets her mind go, and about 20 minutes into her meditation, the acid kicks in. Uh, give me a HT-2 roll (8 or less).
Leonard
Worth noting at this point that Jocasta has the Fit advantage. It's a little vague as to whether it would apply in this situation (do drugs count as poison?), so I'll let that be your call.
Michael
Hah, yes indeed. So 9 or less. LSD falls under the "etc."
Leonard
Does it ever.
>> 3d6 … 12
Yurgh, rolled a 12. This is going to be an exciting adventure full of Trademark Jocasta Dice Rolls, I can tell already.
Michael
🎶 A three-hour trip.
🎶 A three-hour trip.
As the acid kicks in, Jocasta puts forth into the universe the request, "Make a path for me," rotating in her brain over and over, in concert with her even, low breathing. As the visuals begin to come forth, they take the form of green-blue aqua waves, baroque curlique things, like a Peter Max painting set underwater. In that first hour of the experience, Jocasta finds himself curling up involuntarily into the fetal position, nestled in an aqueous rotating pulsing whooshing womb (we'll say Jo had on the "The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore" at 16 rpm in the background).
He whooshes across the sea, this seated Emperor, his grey conservative haircut blowing in the wind and speed. But when he gets close enough, Jo can see-sense the smile on his face. Jo doesn't know him, but on some level she knows who he is. He's an archetype, he's an energy, he's every weird commanding officer she had in the Natural Guard, every dad like Archie who tried his best in a terrible situation, every figure of authority who shrugged and said, "Well, we can try to do things differently and more justly buuuuut it might be tough." Is he an embodied symbol of Jo's own animus, her male side, her desire to be daddy to herself? No time for Jung. The Emperor speaks inside Jo's mind, right astride her third eye.
It's like a home made of seaweed and fiddleheads and curling tendrils of love and decay. The smell, ancient and sea-like and bloody, wafts across her nostrils, making Jo's eyes go wide.
Jocasta weeps. For her lost mother, for the baby she is now and ever was (and will be again one day, Jo realizes), and for the baby poor Lily was, inside her mother Andrea's womb, placed there, torn from the bardo so soon after dying so young in the backseat of Daddy's car on the streets of Los Angeles that terrible night, the police sirens and lights and ambulance no good, no good, no good.
A n d r e a, Jo thinks to herself in slow-motion, curving her potentiation and awareness into the center of herself. Charlily’s mother's name was aaaaannnnnddreeeeaaaaaa ...
The thoughts turn staccato, like the sunlight coming through the crossbeams of the Bay Bridge. Jocasta turns her head suddenly. Where is she? On a windswept seashore? Up near Mendocino? Why is her hi-fi sitting on a beach? What is that throne doing, floating, coming over the water? And who is seated in it? A figure. Old. Wise. Clad in a suit of dark blue like a soldier or a businessman or a cop. His eyes, thousands of yards out to sea, glow with the cold ozone blue-ness of a terrible lightning storm. And yet, surrounding him is a nimbus of Jupiter-energy: strong energy, daddy energy, the wind and howl after the storm that brings water and life to Mother Earth and Sea.
"Is this hide and go seek?" he says in a paternally-amused voice.
"In that case, I Found You. Do you want to chase me now?"
Leonard
Jocasta looks up at him, remembering how she looked up at her father when she was little, so tall and straight in the suits he wore to the office. "I ... I want to. But I'm afraid I'll lose you," she says.
Michael
"You know where to go to find me, precious one," the Father says.
"You had the right idea all along. You'll find me when I find you. My eyes see further than yours."
He smiles.
Leonard
She stares out at him, to the sea, and the rolling and crashing of the waves start to effect her, the way they always do. Their rhythms, soothing and sexual at the same time; their eternality, the way they have crashed against the same shores over and over for time immemorial, their sound that is ambient and inescapable. It comforts her but there is always a line of tension, the way there always is when humans confront nature in its rawest forms. She tries to let its persistence calm her instead of distract her.
Well, if this is the Emperor, a little voice whispers to her childlike mind, then make the best of him. He's seated upright; his head isn't underwater (unlike yours, Pisces, ha ha). So he can offer aid as well as wisdom. Which are you looking for, Jocasta? Which is she looking for?
Centering herself in her own physical space, but keeping her eyes trained on the Father and his seaborne throne, she reaches her right hand southwest, towards the city, where CharLily is sleeping or watching TV, and her left hand southwest, towards Livermore, where LilCharley spends her days. She sways a little. "I may be chasing you for a long time," she says quietly. "But what about her? What is her path? Protection?" She loosely flexes the fingers of her right hand. "Or power?" She clenches and unclenches her left hand in and out of a fist
Michael
The Emperor nods: this is less a conversation than a series of strong, overwhelming impulses inside Jocasta. He fractures into shards of light, limned in that same ozone-lightning blue. In a voice that sounds both like her father and like Marshall, Jocasta hears a distant whisper, faint but precise, the words sending a needle into her ear and a shiver up her spine:
"You can't 'save' Charley any more than you can 'save' a bodhisattva. She doesn't need saving. She's better than us, don't you see? She's the next step." In this moment, Jocasta feels unstuck in time and space, like the words were coming simultaneously from the Emperor's mouth and leaked from somewhere/when else.
The beach sinks away, and Jo sinks into a new set of sensory experiences: a chill wind, the smell of dry grass, fecund dirt, the sweet stink of animal manure. Jo feels flattened across what feels to her like a high-elevation plateau. Jocasta is the earth, dry and cracked and dusty. There are horses here. Two of them. Being led by two women. A mother and daughter? Sisters? Whatever it is, they both have dark wavy hair. Jocasta desperately wants to eavesdrop on what they're saying, but their faces are blurred like a photograph catching motion. Jocasta coughs, violent chills going down all four extremities. She wasn't supposed to see that, Jo feels.
But with these two moments of LSD-aided clairvoyance, Jo suddenly knows now what she needs to do to get intelligence on both Charley's problems and the SRI business. She needs to get into a position where they can sense her. Then, when mental contact is made, use Psychometry back on them. Given the challenges of doing Psychometry without an object, it might require Jo in the case of remote viewing to power herself up using Corruption. But the theory is sound: if the people at SRI can remotely view using psi powers at will, if the people who put the chip in Charley can receive their information at a distance, then what's stopping Jocasta from using that brief astral contact, that brief radio signal, to find out who they are right back at them. Hide and seek. Jocasta grabs a pen in her apartment and scribbles this down in the second hour of her trip.
Leonard
Jocasta, more than familiar with the ebbs and flows of an extended acid trip, gathers her wits enough to jot down a few notes in her sketchbook. She also writes, in a bold comic-book font at the top of the page, "ANDREA". The 'real' world begins to tug at her psychic sleeve; she thinks about writing more, but she's not ready to put the clock back on the wall yet.
She makes a brief attempt to sketch the two women she saw in her vision, using thick washes of ink to illustrate their dark wavy hair, but when she starts to draw their blurred faces, she gets spooked. The distorted motion is too real, and the idea of focusing enough to put it on paper gives her a bit of the Fear. What if the faces start moving on their own? What if they talk to her? She's not ready for that yet. She sets the sketchbook down, gets up off her lotus position on the floor, and has a cleansing stretch.
Padding slowly in bare feet across the hippie carpet that separates the living room from the kitchen, she draws a long swig of orange juice and glances over at her shabby, disorganized bookshelf. The spines pulse with life: colors bleed into each other, words throb and beat like a human heart, publisher's marks grow and shrink. Looks like reality doesn't want her back right away, either. She tugs a book out of a stack at random; it's one of her old textbooks, Rhine & Pratt's Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind. She opens to a page, also at random, (that little voice inside her that always sounds like a playful parent: There is no random, kid, and you know it):
She tries to read further, but it's no good: she can't focus. Everything on the page is crawling around like ants.
Don't fight where the trip takes you, she reminds herself. Instead, she settles back into lotus and tries a different tactic, hoping for one last stab at insight before she starts to come around and her brain un-short-circuits itself. She envisions the URIEL team like the stars in a constellation: Archie and Marshall at the center, radiating like a sun, turning slowly, with their two faces never seen at the same time: order and chaos, the laughter and tears of the comedy-and-tragedy theatre masks. Roger and Mitch are huge planets, Jupiter and Saturn, in their own orbits. Genevieve is everywhere and nowhere, a celestial Madonna, holding Charley. She is there too, but she can't see herself. She is a ghostly presence, watching and being watched. Something binds the stars and planets together: a navigator's line, a thin silken rope, the silver thread of fate? She can't quite see, but this is what draws her. She takes a close look at it with her mind's eye and lets her ego and desires fall away into the everyday noise of the world, letting the trip play itself out.
Michael
Into this cosmic vision, very different from the terrestrial and aquatic playgrounds of the early portion of the trip, Jo rises. That silvery line that runs through all the constellations, planets, even the holy maternal ink-black void Jo envisions as Viv and Charley, is strong and as Jo tries to peer at/hear/taste/touch it, she feels it is a fishing line, which then explodes into two dimensions—a fishing net. And then into three, and suddenly it is a fishnet bag meant to hold something close and tight. More womb energy, because outside of this now four-dimensional silvery network is something vast and unknowable and hungry and predatory. Jo can only see it as ... THE FUTURE. Not THE FUTURE of next week or next month or next year, but the world as it is when Charley is decades older than Jocasta is now. A momentary glimpse and memory and shudder at the realization that outside the cosmic playground she is in, Jocasta sees a floating image of David Wolf's face in repose, sideways, as if he is sleeping, his mind full of numbers and squares and Gregorian chants that try to warn the mighty URIEL that his Eye must be directed elsewhere, towards those who would unleash this fearful fanged Beast, THE FUTURE, on everyone.
More chills, more cold sweats. Jocasta reaches for her pencil and she can't find it as the GM calls for another HT-1 roll to see if this goes on for another hour.
Leonard
>> CRITICAL FAILURE
Michael
Right around the witching hour, 5 hours after dosing, Jocasta's senses begin to come back down to baseline. But that one hour … that was scary. (That crit failure will mean that I'll assess one round of Flashbacks if anything feels like it might trigger them in the near future.)