Not Too Late
Michael
Jeff and Rob, I'm gonna set up a channel for you two... don't feel obligated by any means (perhaps I'm being a little selfish here wanting a scene) but if there is anything in-character you two want to discuss on the hour-forty flight from Burbank to Weed, feel free.
Rob
"So, did you catch the Dodgers and the Giants yesterday?"
Jeff
"What? Jeez, no. Why would...did you?"
Rob
"Well, I mean, I had the radio on." Archie shrugs, settles in for the flight.
Michael
If there's no further small talk due on the flight, I may just zoom ahead to touchdown at Weed Airfield.
Dave Rocco picks Mitch and Archie up at Weed Airport. He himself is due to report to Marshall in the morning in San Francisco, but he figured it would be best if he escorted these VIPs back to the St.-Germain School. During the 20 minute drive through the very dark landscape between Weed and the town of Mount Shasta, Dave gives Archie and Mitch a sitrep at what's been going on on the mountain since Tuesday.
"Things have been relatively quiet since I got up here," Dave says, Archie in the passenger seat and Mitch in the back. "Mary-Lynn has been taking care of the Old Man," Dave says about Ambrose, "and he's been pretty quiet. Mary-Lynn's also been keeping him from getting any visitors; she said it was one of her 'hunches' but also I think she's been doing it because the Old Man needs his rest. He's not getting any better and he's been sleeping a lot."
"The kid who drove up here on Tuesday, Miller, he's been helping out around the school. Planting stuff with the students in the community garden, doing laundry and dishes and helping prep meals. The other kid, the skinny one, Peter... he's been a little more squirrelly. I'm sure he wants to get in there and get more face-to-face time with the Old Man, but Mary-Lynn's been trying to keep him occupied. Other than that everything has been going smoothly, the other teachers have been teaching, the kids haven't been too bothered by any of this the past few days, even that kid Hilton has been..."
At that moment, on the darkened main drag of the town of Mount Shasta, out from the shadows staggers an elderly, wild-haired, skinny and feeble figure in a nightgown, covered in dirt from head to toe. She struggles to hold two sparkling blue translucent objects, one under each arm. The objects are identical in size and shape, about same as a small moving box: 20 inches by 20 inches by 10 inches. They immediately set off Mitch's Detect (History B) powerfully; Mitch can of course try to zone in and analyze the objects' power with Detect. The figure is Nola van Valer, somehow up and walking around a mile or two from her cottage, Mitch realizes as her eyes eerily reflect the headlights of the St.-Germain School's Jeep, and Dave swerves to avoid her sudden lunge into the road. Fright Checks for each of Mitch and Archie, Rule of 14, and Dave will try to keep calm, swerve safely and not hit her.
Michael
Dave’s Fright Check:
>> SUCCESS by 5
Drive-16.
>> SUCCESS by 9
Dave keeps cool, swerves the car away from the old woman and her cargo, and pulls calmly into a parking lot on the quiet Mt. Shasta Boulevard business district.
Jeff
>> SUCCESS by 2
Rob
>> SUCCESS by 4
Michael
Nola sort of collapses in the middle of the street; Mitch sees that her aura is disordered, confused; her fatigue and health both putting her very very close to collapse. As she falls to her knees and collapses to the road surface, the two blue translucent solids she was carrying tumble a few feet away from her like an oddly misshapen pair of dice, their sapphire interiors glinting uncannily in the sodium lights lining North Mount Shasta Boulevard. Dave scans the area for eye-wits, sees none, and motions to Mitch to help Nola into the back seat of the Wagoneer. (Of course if Mitch wants to do any deeper analysis or healing of Nola, or any analysis of the two weird "cubes," he should feel free to roll.)
Jeff
Mitch is out of the car before it's come to a complete stop, running to Nola. He analyzes her aura as he approaches.
>> SUCCESS by 1
grr, well, not a failure
detecting history-b takes only a second, so he'll do that before moving on with Nola to act on his diagnosis. Can he confirm that these "dice" are the things that he sensed buried in her yard?
>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 8
>> DETECT … SUCCESS by 4
>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 6
detecting history-b takes only a second, so he'll do that before moving on with Nola to act on his diagnosis. Can he confirm that these "dice" are the things that he sensed buried in her yard?
Michael
Nola's aura does not have any hitchhikers or parasites on it. Her emotional state is, as I mentioned earlier, highly disordered, confused, frightened: in a state of absolute panic. She is at 2 HP out of 8 and 1 FP out of 8. Her legs, which under previous aura-observed circumstances had been far too weak to allow her to walk for very long, do seem to be operating under some kind of temporary "extra effort under extreme duress/mom lifts up car to save her kid" adrenaline rush, which is fading now. There is dirt under her fingernails and Mitch can surmise from the state of her hands that she had been digging in earth for some time with her bare hands.
The two sapphire half-cubes radiate History B energy extremely strongly. In the parlance of the Project, these two rectangular solids are Major pragmaclasts. As Mitch approaches them to scoop them up, he is first able to confirm that they are indeed the "object" he sensed buried in Nola's yard back during his first visit with Sheila and Lynn last March and then again on his second visit last August. As Mitch looks at them with his mundane sight, he sees deep within the translucent interior of one of the half-cubes, there is a cuneiform inscription etched within the material. Eight lines of cuneiform characters. In the interior of the other cube, Mitch also sees something, but it looks like a scrambling, moving array of cuneiform characters, constantly changing like the slots on a slot machine. It's a little disorienting to look at.
Mitch's decent Analysis roll seems to suggest to him that both of these sapphire boxes are "computers" of some kind. Like, whatever is happening inside both the solidly-inscribed and scramblingly-inscribed sapphire half-cubes could be called "computation," even though Mitch has no clue as to the nature or etiology of said computation. As Mitch examines the half-cubes lying on the pavement, he sees the edges extremely sharp; no machine could have milled their sides this perfectly. Helplessly, Mitch thinks of the Monoliths in the novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey and their perfectly-formed proportions:
When its dimensions were checked with great care, they were found to be in the exact ratio 1 to 4 to 9 - the squares of the first three integers. No one could suggest any plausible explanation for this, but it could hardly be a coincidence, for the proportions held to the limits of measurable accuracy. It was a chastening thought that the entire technology of Earth could not shape even an inert block, of any material, with such a fantastic degree of precision. In its way, this passive yet almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection was as impressive as any of TMA-1's other attributes.
And later, when Dave Bowman is "inside" the Monolith orbiting Saturn:
How obvious — how necessary — was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1:4:9! And how naive to have imagined that the series ended at this point, in only three dimensions!
Jeff
Sounds like it's safe to move her, Mitch will hustle
Michael
Yes, she can be supported and brought into the back seat of the Wagoneer. Dave's very anxious to get us back to the school đi đi mau with all this craziness going on.
Nola is semi-conscious, and as she sees Mitch's face, she breaks out in a smile, her wizened face bathed in deep blue light from the two reality shards. "I didn't think I'd make it to you. But the tablets brought me to you. When we buried them, you... he" (Mitch notes with interest this is the first time Nola has consciously differentiated between Mitch and Alpha Leonis) "told me I'd know when the time was right to bring them up out of the earth. I... I disinterred them because the signs are finally right. If they remained buried, with what is about to happen... there is a chance they would be lost forever. And I couldn't let that happen."
Archie peeks into the back seat and sees the cuneiform deep inside both of these "tablets." By sight he knows it is classical Sumerian but without Enki's help, he isn't yet able to read it. Archie sees eight lines of text in one tablet, five lines of text in the other. To Archie's eyes, both tablets' sets of cuneiform writing are stable, solid, not fungible, inscribed deeply into the interior of the tablet.
"The old Age of Pisces is dying," Nola says, "and the new Age of Aquarius is about to be born."
"Sirs?" Dave says to Archie and Mitch. "We are going back to the school?"
Jeff
I don't want to deny Rob a chance for input but I think so? Ol' Vera can be handled better back at the school, and Ambrose Bierce is still waiting
Anyway Mitch delays trying to lay hands on Ol' Vera while they're in a moving car
Michael
It's another ten minutes' drive to the School so if Mitch (or Archie) does want to talk to Nola we've got time.
Rob
Sorry for being slow on this, but I can't think of anything Archie would've done that Mitch didn't: get the old woman into the car, get the tablets into the car, maybe covered up from prying eyes before we arrive at the School. I don't think Archie's ever met Van Valer - would he know who she is through Mitch or do we have a file on her? Not sure how much Mitch has shared about his Shasta adventures. Certainly he looks to Mitch to take lead on any conversation with her.
Michael
I think Archie's knowledge of Nola would have come solely from Mitch's reports on her; when the Beehives took Mitch to Shasta after Mission One, they didn't give anyone a bead on whom they were actually going to go visit.
Jeff
Mitch attempts to make Nola comfortable to the best of his ability during the car trip. He'll say over his shoulder to Archie, "Family, you know? Jeez, I shoulda come by and seen her more often. I've been busy." Assuming Nola's state is such that it would be appropriate: "Vera, this is my boss, Archie Ransom."
I'm assuming Archie would have no trouble recognizing Nola in this context, based on Mitch's earlier statements.
(I also would like to assert that Mitch has visited Nola one to three times since he moved up to Shasta, maybe brought Mary-Lynn to meet her, but inarguably he hasn't been over to her place super regularly the way one might if one's elderly and increasingly infirm relation lives nearby.)
Jeff
Mitch attempts to make Nola comfortable to the best of his ability during the car trip. He'll say over his shoulder to Archie, "Family, you know? Jeez, I shoulda come by and seen her more often. I've been busy." Assuming Nola's state is such that it would be appropriate: "Vera, this is my boss, Archie Ransom."
Michael
"We're going to your school? You named it after him, didn't you? Even after your self-confessèd rivalry! I thought that was quite magnanimous of you, Master Je—." She stops herself from using that name from her "first" encounter with the "Ascended Master" fifty years ago as she looks squarely at Archie. "I am not too late, am I?" she asks both Archie and Mitch.