Mitch and Marshall Get Drinks
Jeff
"All right, all right." Mitch sits across from Marshall at a booth in a bar Monday night, pitcher of beer, cigarettes in ashtrays, divey by Marshall's standards. Maybe the same place they had their after-action conversation, about the St. Francis job.
Tarot cards shuffled. "So, the Librarian." Mitch considers. "She's been having a bad time, at least last time we saw her. Might want to pull Justice for her, reverse it, call that the starting point. But that might be forcing something."
Instead he just flips over four cards. "This is her...this is how she's been...this is where she's headed...this is what it means."
Michael
(Cool. Will give it some thought and get you some cards ASAP)
left to right: this is her, this is how she's been, this is where she's headed, this is what it means (confirming that all the cards were drawn reversed from Mitch's perspective)
Brant
Marshall sips his beer.
Jeff
Strongly tempted to switch seats with Marshall.
Screw it
"Hold on, somebody's being funny."
As he rotates the whole reading about a C2 axis, Mitch snickers a little to himself. "See, once you decide there's a somebody, it's not hard to go from there to somebody messing with you. An intelligence behind the seeming coincidence. If it was all random noise there wouldn't be anything to interpret, would there...?" Now the cards are arrayed as he wants them.
"Start with the nine of wands. That's a lot of sticks! Our girl has got a bunch of sticks, she's laid them out in a fence, she's standing by with another one in case one of her sticks breaks. That's who she is: a preparer, a setter-up and mender of fences."
"She's from the Devil, well, shit. There's no positive spin to put on this one. The Devil is one of the Enemy cards. She's been scarred by the Enemy...but we knew that."
Mitch pauses just long enough to decide he's not going to take a longer pause and sip his beer. "Where she's headed...check Jimmy Three-Swords here. You can't fight with three swords. Definitely you can't fight with five. Jimmy Three-Swords, looking all smug, because he remembered to show up with plenty of swords, and the poor saps over there forgot theirs. But Jimmy's not sharing. Jimmy did the reading, he did the prep, but instead of passing out swords so everybody gets one, he's hoarding them. Three for himself, which is too many to even hold, and two extra that he's just left laying on the ground to rust. There's such a thing as being overprepared, and there's definitely such a thing as over-compartmentalizing your intel."
"Where does that leave you? It leaves you clutching your coins, terrified someone's going to steal them. You've got one under each foot, one in your hands, and one balanced on your head like you're daring somebody to try to take it. And it's too much. It's too much for one person."
"So, sure. She's ready to mend fences, but she's scarred by experience and now she's hoarding her swords and standing on her coins."
Brant
“So, wait. You can just do that? Rotate them and read them in a different … way?” Marshall sips his beer. “I mean I guess it makes sense, that she would come back more guarded. Especially after how I treated her. But why even allow her back? Assuming they didn’t catch her — didn’t figure out she was playing them. She must be part of Ozzy’s plan for us, a factor in their equation, whatever, for them to send her back. But even then — she’s not part of the C’s plan. Because she’s not in the club. Unless she comes back and is in the club?”
Jeff
"Who's gonna stop me?"
"And you've got to remember, C's standing way back. C has a full field of view. Everything is either part of C's plan, or else C knows about it and is shaping events around it, which is basically the same thing. I think."
Mitch looks around uneasily. "I'm still getting used to the idea of being able to talk about it, about C, like this. I remember when I talked to Jiyu about C for the first time, I was worried that the whole thing might just seize up and stop, if I tugged at the man behind the curtain."
Michael
(So just so I can interject a little with the (secret) results of Mitch's "feelers" insofar as the detect omen and interpretation aspects of the Oracle ability/roll:)
Mitch does feel like his instinct to "flip the game board" after receiving this quite perversely four-cards-Reversed reading was the right thing to do. The phrase Become the ruling body, dude! passes through Mitch's beer-clouded head for a moment, then passes.
If Sophie is coming back from THROWAWAY holding and hoarding all her secrets, just as she did when she left, then she's literally trapped in this secretive, miserly posture both coming and going. Ultimately, it doesn't matter which way you read this reading because it's all about stasis. Which means she's either coming back tight-lipped about her mission (to anyone but Charley, one would assume, since Sophie left on this solo mission equally triggered by her memories of Reinhardt and her desire to do right by Charley's mom) or she's coming back completely turned by SANDMAN/OZYMANDIAS. One would not expect for her to suddenly see the Rooster House (which, remember, she left before Roger put it together) and decide to unburden herself the minute her 90-day "rehab" is up. But Mitch is sure and reassured of least of one thing from this reading; she is coming back.
Brant
Marshall is quiet for a bit after that. When he resumes talking he’s adjusted his cadence and mannerism; Mitch has seen this before, the whole NLP schtick. He talks and the patrons nearby lose whatever interest they may have had in this strange duo.
(Enthrallment: Sway Emotion. Emotion = disinterested)
“I think that’s the thing with you. You have this direct line to something with the coincidences and the cards. But it’s one-way. You can pick up the receiver and something tells you a piece of the plan. You talk back, sometimes, but you don’t get a response. Maybe it can’t hear you. Or maybe it can, and it doesn’t care? Or maybe it can, and it can’t do anything about it? Anyway, this is real Jesus-in-Gethsemane shit. I’m sure you’ve thought of it already, good boy like yourself from Alabama.”
Marshall pulls out a cigarette case and pops out a joint. He offers one to Mitch. After an exhale: “But here’s the kicker. With you, it’s not a hypothetical — you do have a direct line to something, and this something — C, whatever we call it — it can show you a glimpse of the plan. But it doesn’t seem like it can make you follow the plan. You — us — always choose to follow whatever bit of the plan it deigns to toss your way. But I don’t think, after Shasta, that the plan is written in stone. Maybe that’s what happened with Abeille. Maybe what happened with her, it wasn’t part of the plan. Originally. Then the plan changed, and she wasn’t in the club anymore.”
Michael
(If you want to roll for the Enthrall/Sway Emotion check, Brant: Public Speaking-22 and then Enthrallment (Sway Emotions)-18.)
Brant
Public Speaking-22.
>> SUCCESS by 11
Enthrallment (Sway Emotions)-18.
>> SUCCESS by 7
Michael
The crowd at this bar isn't succeeding Will rolls by 8.
Brant
That’s why Mitch and Marshall come here.
Jeff
"One of the rules of being in the club is, you don't act against the interests of the club. Remember that? Not, you can't act. Not, you mustn't act. Just, you don't. It doesn't happen. Whatever choices you choose to make, they're the choices C wants you to make..." Mitch trails off, shakes his head, annoyed. "Except that still doesn't make sense, because then why bother with it, if it's all a shadow-play? I feel like we've talked about this before. I know I've thought about this before. It goes in circles, trying to understand what their motives are, what they want and why. We're fundamentally in the same boat as we were, as we would have been if there wasn't a God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ineffably knowing how we're going to utilize our free will.
"I hate the going-in-circles but I gotta say being able to talk about it out loud feels liberating. I should ask Jiyu what she thinks."
Brant
"If it is a shadow-play," Marshall exhales a billow of marijuana smoke, which rises up his face like he's breathing fire, "who is to say all the shadows are being played by the same person?" He chuckles. "Jayne used to say, 'Monotheism was the mistake.' I always liked that. Clever kid ... Maybe we're all just the puppets of the gods, and the one you're stuck with, you just don't like him very much. Ha. Anyway, who's Jiyu?"
Jeff
"One of my Shasta friends. I mentioned her at some point, didn't I? When I was telling everybody about the Comte. She's the head of the zen abbey there. The Beehives introduced us. I visited her a few times now, most recently last month on the way back after our camping trip. Wise lady. Have I really not mentioned her?"
Brant
"Oh — right, I believe you have. I just hadn't clocked her. How's she doing?"
Jeff
"Better."