Ghost-Witch of Hoodoo Range
April 19, 1974 | Friday
Michael
Jocasta wakes up on Friday morning with the dawn. Her body and mind and guts are wrung out and exhausted from the unexpected acid flashback; when she wakes and looks 'round the alley she kipped in overnight, she sees her vision clear, her five senses un-synesthetized, and her mind relatively lucid. But the first thing I'll need her to do is give me a typical Observation-18 roll as she peers down the alleyway to Haight Street and gets her bearings.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 7
Michael
Jo listens out for the sound of early morning traffic, either motorized or foot, on Haight Street and hears nothing. It's literally too quiet. After spending a half-minute slumped against the wall of the alleyway, she realizes that there is nobody out there.
Leonard
"What the fuck?" she hisses under her breath, propping herself against the cool rough stone. "Am I still..." But she knows she's not tripping. The tingle at the back of her neck that creeps outward when she's on LSD has turned into a warning chill.
"Nngh. Get it together, Menos." Staying flat as the combat instincts kick in, she checks to make sure she still has the Cosmo and peers around like she's clearing a room for shooters: up, down, around the corners, across the street. She tries to see any sign of life — or any sign of what happened to it.
Michael
Jo's package of Patricia's stuff is right where Jo stashed it. Then she checks her surroundings as completely as she can, which means going to the edge of the alleyway to peer down Haight street to the west and east.
When Jo gets to the mouth of the alley, she finds herself looking at a thoroughfare in an abandoned, ruined city. Not merely abandoned and in ruins, but, by the looks of the overgrown weeds and trees, the bewildering array of tattered billboards and storefronts, the futuristic-looking cars and trucks turning to rust in their parking spots, and the smattering of human skeletons lying on the sidewalks and inside the smashed storefronts, a city that has been left to go to seed for a decade or more, resolutely not the same city she fell asleep in last night.
Competing deep-seated instincts flare up in Jo. First a reflexive Fright Check at 17 (rule of 14 applies as always). Then, due to the overwhelming surreality and unreality of this environment, Jo's Combat Reflexes can allow her a snap Meditation-18 check to gather herself and really closely analyze where she is, whether she is under the influence of someone or something, and most importantly what in the hell might be happening here.
Leonard
Fright Check
>> SUCCESS by 6
Meditation.
>> SUCCESS by 6
Michael
Jocasta remains calm and breathes, moving easily into a meditative state. She's not tripping, she's not hallucinating, her self-knowledge of her metabolism and consciousness is sure of that... but she realizes that she may still be sleeping, and dreaming. Or otherwise entangled in the spirit world, the Astral or noösphere or what have you. Jo's Spirit Empathy isn't necessarily pinging right now, but that's not surprising considering she's only been able to sense the liminal entities that straddle the line between our reality and theirs. Wherever Jo is right now, whether physically asleep or zoned out in a spirit trance, she is deep in a "dream"... a dream belonging to someone else, she can vaguely sense.
Which means with her body control techniques complementing her meditative mind, she could try to shake herself loose out of REM sleep, wake up, avoid the horrors of this post-apocalyptic San Francisco (which are, admittedly, giving her the serious nightmare creeps), but that would also punt her out of what this astral environment might be trying to convey to her. If anything.
(Jo can try to manipulate this assumed dream environment with Dreaming defaulting to Will minus 6 or 13, and can always try to wake up with Body Control-13, but she's also capable of exploring this ruined, abandoned city if she wishes.)
Leonard
Hmmm. She's going to peer out of the alley and walk slowly along the street, scanning the horizon first to see if she can see the Transamerica Tower — or where it should be — on the skyline. She'll also see if she can see anything else, based on her knowledge of the City, that doesn't look like the City. If there's anything small she can pick up — especially a newspaper, a magazine, or something with information on it — she'll pocket it.
Once she's out on the street, if she's not attacked or something immediately perilous, she's going to attempt to vibe herself into the Dreaming.
>> SUCCESS by 2
Michael
The city looks very different than it did when Jocasta fell asleep. Many more skyscrapers— dozens—now crowd around the eastern end of the City. But the Transamerica Pyramid is still there. Crumbling, yes, but still sticking like a rude acupuncture needle out of the myriad dozens of other glass and concrete towers around Telegraph Hill, the Embarcadero, and Chinatown.
The architecture of the presumably-newer buildings is like nothing Jo has ever seen—modernist glass mixed with neoclassical whimsy—but memories of these buildings somehow exist and persist in Jo's dreaming mind. The golden glow of the Shasta tunnels alights in Jocasta's peripheral vision as she remembers the fragmentary bits of her life in the year 2016, vouchsafed to her by the "testing" she endured under the mountain. What were those kids' names, the disciples of Reinhardt who tried to slice her up? Libby... and Paul, was it?
As Jo moves east down Haight to get a better view of this post-calamity city, she finds herself in a space where Buena Vista Park has essentially grown out of its confines; the grasses, saplings, and brush have recolonized the east end of the Haight, re-wilding this space at the heart of the San Francisco peninsula. It's almost beautiful. A black-tailed jackrabbit peers quizzically out of the underbrush at Jocasta suddenly; its eyes widening at her presence, it prepares to dash away from this large ungainly intruder.
Two rolls here: Naturalist-16 and Tracking-18.
Leonard
Naturalist.
>> SUCCESS by 4
Tracking.
>> SUCCESS by 10
Betsy and Peter, her mind, or something in her mind, reminds her. Never forget those fuckers. She briefly wonders if they exist in this (or some other) reality since she snuffed out their Svengali, but it's an ugly and intrusive thought in a dangerous situation. She decides to focus on the mysterious Lepus.
Michael
As Jocasta crosses the last of the uncracked pavement to what is now New Buena Vista Park, treading carefully to look for the paths of animals (and, possibly, other humans; surely she can't be the last woman on Earth), she's able to estimate from plant growth and spread that the world has been untamed for at least a decade, possibly more. The wet, cool mediterranean climate has ensured that the green spaces of the city encroach upon the paved areas; Jo can swear she can hear water, flowing, under the streets; old rivers and streams reborn with the disappearance of man. The formerly-ornamental live oaks are flourishing, smaller animals having spread their acorns throughout the old park, new shoots and saplings growing wild and twisted, crowded amongst the remainders of the cracked pathways.
The little jackrabbit has gone to ground and in following its path, Jo looks for the tracks of other animals; she can see the hoofed marks of passing of larger leaf-and-grub-eating ungulates—deer, maybe boar—having made their way back into the city. It's amazing how quickly all this—life, mankind, civilization—could just be wiped clean from the Earth given the right... push. Jocasta hasn't thought about the Red Kings once yet in this dream, she realizes. No belief energy to sustain them, in a posthuman world, she realizes.
In the brush, Jo suddenly spots the tracks of a larger mammal, a bipedal one, leading clumsily up the hill into the center of the park. The tracks seem to be foot-shaped, but with a weird geometric treadmark. The stride and gait marks indicate an adult man, wearing crude shoes fashioned from the remnants of a rubber tire. The tracks lead to the center of the park, where the elevation is highest, and on a clear day like this morning, you could see both Bay bridges; Jo's not sure if she has the heart to see what's happened to the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges over the last ten years of disrepair. But the field houses and sheds and shacks at the center of the park... they'd likely make for good shelter. If there's another human being here, that's a likely spot.
Leonard
Jocasta feels a rush of mixed emotions as she clambers up the hill. There's an elation at seeing the city she's lived in her whole life so utterly transformed — more than once when she was a kid, hiking Mt. Tam or looking across the bay from the Headlands, she'd be overwhelmed by the natural beauty of her surroundings and wonder what it looked like when only the Miwok lived there, or even before that — balanced by a creeping dread of what must have happened to empty it out so completely. She realizes how liberating it is to not think about the enemy, and that great relief that comes from the dreamer's knowledge that they are in a dream; and she wonders briefly if the waters rushing below the pavement are still home to the Great Underwater Panther, or if he too has vanished without anyone to feed him or feed off of him. Duty tugs at her, too, those bonds forged by discipline and togetherness, and gives her focus and purpose, but for a moment — a brief one, yes, but one so powerful that it chases almost everything else out of her mind, from her responsibility to URIEL to her strange bond with Patricia — she thinks: What if I just stayed here, in this dream? What if this empty world is the one place I truly belong?
Shaking her head and recalling the 'reality' of the dream, she peers into the middle distance and continues the long walk uphill. Good thing you keep in shape, her mind tells her, absurdly. Making sure to follow the signs of this possible human remainder as closely as possible, she also lets her consciousness drift overhead, her dream mind floating above her dream body, testing the limits of the dreaming. Tendrils of thought snake out from her like strands from the Medusa, and she thinks: Someone is always here, in the dreams. Dreams are where the separation from the world of men and the world of spirits is the thinnest; they are where something is always trying to speak to you -- whether it's your own mind, or other seekers and seers, or your distant friends and family, or God, or the universal vibration. Who is reaching out to me here? Who knows I am here?
As her two eyes follow the trail of the man with Goodyear radials on his feet, her third eye casts about this strange new reality for anyone she recognizes. Is Mitch here? He seemed to intrude on her mind mere seconds ago. Is it Archie or Marshall? Is one of Roger's loas here? Someone else from the URIEL universe — or their ghost? She doesn't feel haunted by the glare of her...[her mind discreetly edits out the word 'victims']...of her past the way she sometimes does, but someone must be here. Someone must have brought her here, or is trying to bring her back. She stoops down and touches the clean earth, scrambling up the hill almost on all fours, as the moon's huntress must have done so long ago in ancient Hellas, when this patch of land was as empty as it is now. She watches, and she listens.
Michael
Near one of the outbuildings atop the park's hill Jo can see a male figure moving, tentatively, to peer over the cliffside at something he's heard. Apparently not seeing Jocasta, he moves away back towards what looks like a more-or-less cultivated garden. The man is indeed wearing tire-tread shoes, tied with what look like vines, and a mix of animal skins and salvaged fashions from the Before Times. He looks to be a little older than Jocasta, his Caucasian skin thoroughly weathered and tanned, long hair going grey at the temples and forehead's hairline. His face, even at this distance, is oddly familiar to Jo (roll IQ-12); its a broad, big-mouthed, big-eyed, big-chinned face—but not unattractive, its overall effect landing somewhere between Robert Redford and Jack Kennedy. He's managed to crudely shave his facial hair and hack at his thick, long hair so he must have a blade of some kind. He walks with the help of an oaken staff, which has been carved and primitively polished; its pronounced size, especially the bulbous knot at the top, makes Jo think it's not just to help him walk but is his de facto weapon for knocking out prey animals.
"Well, then," the man says from the hilltop to no one in particular in a loud, almost old-school patrician San Francisco accent, "if you're going to skulk around my demesne you should do me the good manners of introducing yourself, now shouldn't you?"
Leonard
>> FAILURE by 2
Michael
The man's facial familiarity nags at Jocasta.
Leonard
“Just a dreamer, sir,” Jo says. “You seem familiar to me but damned if I can say why. I knew this city once, or I think I did; are you its sole caretaker now?”
Michael
"Perhaps you were one of my students at Berkeley, before... before all this," the man says, gesturing with his staff at the park (and, implied, the city behind him) with a broad smile from atop the hill. "I was called James Howard Smith, back then. Professor of English literature." Smith peers down at Jo, noting her (relatively) neat clothes and lack of signs of having fended for herself for a decade in the wild. "You look to be about the right age, anyway. You seem to have come through the past ten years looking none the worse for wear!" His diction and manner seem archaic even to Jocasta, who herself hails from a time well in this man's past.
"Come, come up. Mind the path; I'm sure as talented a tracker and survivalist as yourself will be able to avoid the traps. Not that I get many visitors here at all. The remaining refugees have considered the city a disease-filled charnel house for years now. With a... few exceptions, of course." He glances over his shoulder at the vine-choked towers of the central part of San Francisco.
Leonard
"My last ten years haven't been easy, but I think they were easier than yours," Jo says, stepping gingerly. "I came here from...somewhere else. A different City, in a different time, a different history. Mine still stands, if on shakier ground than it once did."
She peers out at the grasping towers of downtown, now being pulled back down by the reclaiming Earth. "I missed the pleasure of your teaching during my time at Berkeley," she says, that old edge of respectful flattery in her voice. "Maybe I can make up for that now. I'm not sure when I'll be called back to my version of reality, but until then, why don't you treat me like a first-year student and give me the freshman version of what happened in yours?"
Michael
Appealing to Smith's professorial vanity (along with probing at the real meaning behind the dream with the exertion of her will through lucid dreaming) seems to shift this dreamspace open. Jocasta can feel the fabric of the dream open to her.
In Smith's eyes there is a doleful wonder at Jo's announcement that she comes from a different story. "That is what it is all about, isn't it? Stories. Why would someone write a story in which 99.9% of the human race died suddenly from a virulent disease, a scarlet plague?" Smith looks up to the bright April sky as if to plead to heaven.
"I can remember when the first undergraduate showed signs of the disease, her face turning bright red over the course of a single lecture. And then the collapse that followed, within only a few days. Jet travel spread the germ, and one by one all the cities of the world... lost contact. I was immune, as were rare others. The fight out of the mad city into the countryside was... harrowing. I swore off my fellow man as brutes, workers settling long-simmering social scores with their so-called 'betters.' But the next few years taught me... the meaning of the idea that man is a social animal. I fled to the Sierras, found an abandoned hotel, lived like a king while the canned food lasted... but man cannot live on beans alone." Smith's archaic tone flits in and out, as if he cannot quite decide which story he is in or who wrote him.
"But when I returned, down through the Sacramento and Livermore and San Joaquin Valleys, I saw the rudiments of society reasserting themselves. Those who once toiled for the Oligarchy now oppressed their once-superiors. And me, a chameleon, somewhere in the middle, able to recognize the wealthy who'd fled to their villas, their bunkers, now in chains, but not admitting to the new feudal rulers that I essentially used to serve the Oligarchy by making more of this class in their universities."
"So I came here. Pondering my life, alone in the ruins of the City I once loved, craving the creature comforts it used to deliver to my door. As if my life, and all the horrors I'd witnessed, all that class revenge, were a crude... object lesson for someone dwelling on some higher plane."
Jocasta's lucid dreaming, and her mention of being from a different history entirely, has seemed to get Smith to realize dimly that he is a fictional character. And to Jocasta suddenly, it all spins to life in her mind, the conversation she had with Viv at Archie and Melanie's Christmas party about Jack London. One of his lesser-known, shorter, speculative works, The Scarlet Plague. About a professor escorting his grandchildren through the aftermath of a plague in the year 2073, sixty years after the world shuddered through a near-extinction of man. Jo must be meeting Smith about the year 2023, 2024 in his story. And Smith himself... putting aside the comparisons to JFK or Robert Redford, Jo realizes that he looks a lot like the photos of Jack London that Jo has seen; most recently in the frontispiece of the copy of The Star-Rover that Sophie sent around from UCLA on Monday.
Leonard
Jo sits down on the cool grass, looking out over the ruined city, out into the churning waters of the bay, seeing those sights that she's seen almost every day of her life. They look somehow different here, but familiar at the same time — like an artful interpretation.
"That sounds horrific, professor, and I know more than a little about horror," she says, an unexpected softness in her voice. "I am sorry that you had to experience that...and that it happened in your reality and not in mine doesn't make it any less real." She speaks haltingly, as if she's trying to figure out what she means as she says it. "My training isn't in literature, you see. It's in psychology. So when you ask me why someone would write a story like that..."
She thinks back to the uptick in movies and books about apocalyptic futures back in her History. "I think in your discipline, there are a lot of reasons why. Cautionary tales. Warnings. Attempts to reframe the problems of the moment as a vision of the future. Even just...entertainment, though why anyone would be entertained by the end of the world is beyond me. But in mine, there's a different answer."
Jocasta runs her fingers through the unchecked vegetation and thinks about Smith's craving for creature comforts; when she went to sleep her clothes reeked and her throat and eyes were raw from nonstop smoking, but now she feels like she'd kill one of the few survivors of the scarlet plague if it somehow got her a cigarette. "When people feel helpless, when they're struggling or seeing others struggle against vast forces beyond their control, they want...a do-over. They want a clean slate. They imagine the world wiped of the corruption and vanity and cruelty that has made it what it is. They want a new Eden, free of the consequences of sin, where the only threat is their own weakness and the occasional predatory animal, even in human form. In a story, it's of little consequence -- a harmless gesture towards imagining something different. But in the real world, whatever that is, some people will move Heaven and Earth to make it true, and however good their intentions, they slowly forget that to clean that slate means erasing untold lives and deepening the suffering they tell themselves they're healing."
She looks into Smith's eyes, reading all the wonderment and suffering and gentleness and fear that is there. Her empathy practically throbs in her chest, even though she knows that he is as much a shadow in her dream as she is in his. "A few years ago -- my years, not yours — I saw a play. It was a student production by some Berkeley kids, it wasn't very good. It was right over there."
She points to a distant spot far off along the eastern shore. "It was about these two characters from Hamlet. And it was pretty clever despite the clunky staging. The whole idea, you see, was that these characters, to them, they were the main characters of the play, not Hamlet himself. And everything that happened in the play, it happened from their perspective, not his."
The dreamscape takes on a bright, colorful blur, and she thinks for a moment she might be waking, but it quickly fades back into its cool semi-familiarity. "My point is, we all go around thinking that we are the anchor of reality, and everyone else is a supporting character at best. It does not occur to us, or, if it does, seem important to us that other people think the same thing, any more than it serves the purpose of a writer to portray everyone in their stories as having equal footing, equal importance, equal inner lives. And, Professor, here we are, two phantoms from distant dreams intruding on each other's reality, and I'll tell you what I think: You can't save the world by rewriting it. The people you write out of it are as real as the characters an author doesn't bother to flesh out. You can only save it by taking it as it is, and making everyone in it recognize each others' truth. Not the truth of fact, but the truth of life."
Michael
Smith/London sits with that for a little while. Jo can sense the Author coming to the fore of this dream imago, subsuming his fictional alter ego. At the same time, Jocasta can still Empathically feel all Smith's trauma as a character forced to endure the fear and terror of the end times. Smith/London looks more closely at Jocasta, as if he is trying to figure out which world she comes from, and how that squares with his unique status as both a character and his author.
"It was my curse to... imagine the impossible, for George... for my Greek." A wistful look of love and adoration for his mentor crosses London's face. "For all of us. It was not lost on me the price any of us might pay if a revolution were to come. We enjoyed our privileges. We were Bohemians, after all, and our art allowed us a modicum of comfort. But George needed to know how. He asked me to imagine what the world would become if at the everlasting beck and call of a few plutocrats, and how we could overturn that order, overturn it in a way that would last, that would provide a true Bohemia, an artists' paradise..." London's lips disappear as he inhales sharply.
"In every future I saw, every future I wrote, I witnessed the power relations of master and slave abide and return. It was as if it were impossible for humanity to work in harmony with each other, as if we collectively craved the whip—or the chance to wield it—no matter our race or social class. Yes, George and I and the Crowd swept the masses—millions, billions of imaginary men, women, and children—into plague-pits, torture-chambers, mass slaughters at the hands of the Oligarchy's paid brutes: playing pieces with which we could quantify the Struggle and find a solution." London looks pleadingly to Jocasta, as if for absolution. "I have to believe it worked... if only for a little while."
"These broken worlds I created in pursuit of Bohemia? They now serve as my purgatory, my prison. And even they are not wholly mine anymore. This isn't the future I wrote about, it's... something more."
Leonard
"We don't have much time left here, Professor," Jocasta says. "I can feel it. Can you feel it? And I don't want our time to end, I don't want to leave you here. But my purgatory is calling me just as yours called you.
"I am part of another circle of those who seek to end the struggle of the old and the ugly. Not a band of Bohemians — we are from places more dark and savage — but your goals and ours are not so different. I think..."
Jocasta pauses and gathers her thoughts, knowing she is trying to justify something to herself, not to him. "I think we may have found a way out, a way to break that cycle. But I don't know. We may just be fooling ourselves. Chasing the same dead dream. I am a housewife who has been asked to be a god; it's a joke. But we have to try, just as you did.
"I cannot forgive you or absolve you any more than I can do so for myself. But I can tell you that...that my father loved you. And I loved my father. That's what we have, the echoes of memory of those we loved. We have that legacy if nothing else. But I can't give up. Tell me, please, and in the end, we, my friends and I, may lose and be trapped in whatever world we make. But we may win. And if we win, maybe there will be a victory for you as well. Tell me: How did you break the chains? And how were they forged again?"
Michael
Jocasta feels herself trying to hang onto control of the dream. Her willpower has gotten her this far, but she knows she's correct in her assessment; the time is running short. With every moment, the dreamscape slips through her fingers like sand. In fact, London himself seems to be lessening, receding; the London-Emanation that resides in the noösphere losing its hold on Smith's avatar, control defaulting to Smith, Smith's self-piteous professorial survivor schtick now taking back over. But with a winning, confident smile, the last of Jack London speaks in Smith's cultivated accent, once more telling a tale of Smith's travails after escaping the initial plague.
"In the world After," Smith drones self-importantly, "the survivors have taken the names of the old cities and counties, living much in the same way as the Native Americans of old. Ranging widely but adhering to tribal allegiances. The Santa Rosans. The Sacramen-tos. The Sonoma. The Palo-Altos. But there is one tribe, living here in the City, that is not comprised of plague survivors bound together by a chieftain-strongman."
Smith points to the northeast, down Market Street towards central San Francisco. "The Owl Tribe. They exist in All Worlds, all stories." Smith looks very seriously at Jocasta, an intensity in his eyes that she would call London rather than Smith. "You see? In every world, they write themselves the winners. Here they feast upon succulent meats, fed to them by adoring servants. The Oligarchs were impossibly wealthy and powerful and privileged, and even they could not survive the plague without a fall."
"But the Owl Tribe could. And did."
Smith clears his throat after that rather dramatic pronouncement. "If you'd chanced across them before me... well, who knows what might have happened."
Leonard
"I know them. I know them of old." She looks deeply again into his eyes, into London's eyes, or what remains of him, and reaches out to him. "Jack. Take my hand."
She's going to try to wake up, and, at the same time, grasp London's hand, and pull him back into her history with her as she wakes. She has no illusions it will succeed, but she's said that before. If Bierce made it over, maybe London can too; and our numbers are diminished. It's a time of gathering forces. If you want me to be a god, she thinks just before engaging all the will at her disposal and truly testing the porousness of the mortal world and the spirit world -- to who? to God? the Demiurge? the Other Self? to whoever might be listening -- then it's time for some miracles.
[Let me know if I need to make any rolls. If this works, and there's absolutely no reason it should, we'll deal with it; if not, Jocasta fully expects to wake up alone in that same muddy San Francisco alley, and that's fine.]
Michael
Yeah, I think this seems like a perfect opportunity for a Spirit Empathy-16 roll; to summon forth Jack London's literary legacy from the noösphere and somehow carry it into the waking world, you'll first need to do your best to "mind meld" with it, as the nerds at WesterCon might have put it. Being that Jocasta's in a liminal dreamspace right now, the London memeplex seems to qualify under her current Spirit Empathy specialization.
Also. Aheh. Need I mention that Corruption is available for this roll.
Leonard
[Disgraceful that you would suggest the possibility of Corruption while Jocasta attempts to forcibly snatch Jack London's spirit double from an alternate reality while sleeping in a dirty alleyway before engaging in a high-risk extraction of a psychic terrorist TBH]
[hell yeah let's juice it by 4]
>> SUCCESS by 4
[pfffft]
[let's see, what would I gotta do to get that to a crit? 6 more? 8 more? I'll do 6]
[big move, big corruption]
Michael
Jocasta channels her focus, concentration, and will one final time into manipulating this dreamscape and channeling it through the person of London/Smith. As she takes the Last Man's hand, Jo feels a surge of psychic power reverberate through her dream self.
In the split-second between dreaming and waking, a rush of memories, thoughts, emotions, stories pours into Jocasta's mind and soul. This hypnopompic/psychopompic moment literally feels like it lasts a lifetime to Jocasta; or, at least, the truncated forty years of Jack London's lifetime. My mother's spiritualist madness, my stepfather's clumsy care, my birth-father's cruel disdain, Jo thinks to herself, weeping in frustration at his/her life up to age 21. Time at the cannery, at sea, the panic of '93, Coxey's army, then back to high school and to Berkeley and to the Klondike... the realization that socialism and a strong, manly hand were the way to liberation from the chains of superstition and plutocratic oppression... and then, after being humiliated by not being able to afford Berkeley anymore, the day he stumbled into Coppa's and met his trusty boon companions. The Aztec. Dear Red Anna. Ambrose, old before his time. Gelett and his playful palaver. Yes, if we must, Mother-Girl Bess. And the stars in his eyes when he met his Greek. Love. So much love. It would win the day, make Bohemia real.
It's those emotions, the love and comfort and warmth of the Crowd that Jocasta feels first when she wakes up, body shivering from the chill and the acid having left her, in the alley before dawn—the real dawn—of Friday April 19th, 1974. The dream seemed to last so long, the company of Jack London, the sense of being him so persistent, that Jocasta isn't sure what she'll see if she looks 'round, half-expecting to see young Jack London materialized there—a tramp maybe, a young hobo—in the alley beside her.
But he's not. It's something much more profound and subtle; not as cut-and-dried as a ghost living inside her that she can consult and talk to, either. It's more like Jocasta has opened an active channel to all the contradictions and emotional turbulence inherent in Jack London's life and in his work. Jo can feel, as if her own, the emotional impulses that led to all the events and choices of Jack London's life. It's not every one of his memories writ literally, not every single word available eidetically from his ultra-prodigious corpus. It's more of a mood. Jocasta is reminded of her time underwater in Vermont back in October, how she scuba-dove for the very first time and found something in the muddy depths of Lake Champlain, brought it back to the light of day again, felt her psychometric kinship with the proto-Abenaki huntress across time and space. Or her diving into the past to connect with Pat Price at his lowest moment of despair. This experience feels so so similar, but is so much richer. It's not just the despair of Price or the fear of the hunter-girl. It's... everything Jack, in all its complicated emotional neediness, compensatory masculine energy and socialist fervor.
Does this emotional-empathetic imprint of Jack London's life and love have an agenda Jocasta can sense upon waking? It certainly does. Its initial curiosity wants to explore this future, to sense and learn everything it can about 1974, to understand if the "esmological" (Jo's word, not Jack's) Cassandra-like predictions George made him indulge in came true at all. Do we live under The Iron Heel of the bosses and capital? Did our Bohemia's failure mean all my predictions of the Oligarchy ruling America were self-fulfilling prophecies?
And then, the London Mood wants to somehow be reunited with his Greek. Jo's having asked London/Smith in the dream, "How did you break the chains? And how were they forged again?" has gotten Jack curious himself about what happened. And he knows George will have the answers. After all, he always did.
Fright Check, rule of 14.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 5
Michael
(In game terms, this means you have access to the London Mood indefinitely by rolling against Spirit Empathy; Jo's pulled it closer to the surface of the zeitgeist here, which means on some level Jo senses that Jack London's emotional universe is due a revival in popular culture; whether this was a retrocreated cause or an effect of the whole Redford movie thing is one of the metaphysical questions we can ponder when there isn't as much urgency in the moment. And I really want to accentuate the emotional component and quotient here; I wanted this to not be as simple as a ghost-imprint of London like Houdini who could talk to Jo, but instead, as Jo put it in the dream, a pulling-out of Jack's psychology, the intermixed streams of his parents' spiritualist tendencies, his mother not wanting him to be born, his seeking for love and acceptance in the Crowd and through socialism, his obsessions with manliness and strength while having an artist mind, etc. etc. \
Jack has a good wikipedia page with a lot of his life story and the emotional component, as does this New Yorker piece.
Jo and Jack, it must be said, have a LOT of parallels emotionally and developmentally
Leonard
Jocasta stands up, trying not to think about how her joints are cold and creaking. She pats her Army coat pocket for a pack of squares and comes up empty. Squinting into the morning sunrise, she walks tentatively out onto Haight Street, her new spiritual hitch-hiker in tow. Nothing to do now but wait: wait for a signal from the misfit revolutionaries, or wait for the vans to come to take her back down south.
She feels the wet, sick gurgle of corruption in her heart and soul, that (terrifyingly) familiar feeling of having opened the door wide to the Enemy in a blind attempt to defeat it. She squashes it down with the usual tool of denial, and, as London's psyche begins to retreat, she sees poor lost Patricia's face in her mind's eye. I've given up a lot for you, kid, and I feel like there's more still to come, she thinks, and wonders if old Jack thinks it too. I hope you're worth it.
Fumbling in her pockets, she wanders down Clayton towards a newsstand. Enough for coffee, not enough for smokes. Should have taken that suit-and-tie man's money after all, she thinks. Patting her other jacket pocket in a compulsive check that Patricia's Cosmo is still there, she finds a second magazine tucked behind it, one she didn't remember picking up.
