Resolving Point 12
Michael
The existing team at Point 12 has largely based themselves thus far out of the New York side of Lake Champlain; it's closer to the epicenter of the Point 12 subduction zone, and there is more wilderness for Project operatives to take advantage of: specifically on Valcour Island, which has historically been the site of private homes but which the State of New York has been slowly purchasing land upon to add it to the overall Adirondack State Parks for the enjoyment of the public; recently, ecologists have been lobbying the state to make it a conservation area instead. So the island contains a mix of public and private land: there's a Coast Guard station there as well as various historic sites from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, and the historic Bluff Point Lighthouse. Since the subduction readings have gotten weaker, the Valcour Island teams have remained but as a skeleton crew. Monday morning SEAL team divers have seen nothing unusual under the surface near the Point 12 epicenter.
By the time Marshall, Jocasta, and Dave arrive from New Mexico, Hilary arrives from Huntsville, and Mitch arrives from Mississippi, it's around noon Eastern on Monday. A Telex package is waiting from Livermore at Point 12 HQ at the Valcour Island Coast Guard station, with Sophie's bullet points on the local history and folklore that she was able to dig up since last night.
Pre-European colonization human settlement around Lake Champlain split between Mohawk of the Iroquois Confederacy on the west (present-day New York) side, and Abenaki on the east (present-day Vermont) side. The Mohawk and the Lake itself were considered the "doorkeepers"/"door" into the Iroquois Confederacy.
French settlement first, then English, and of course the area was a battleground during the Seven Years'/French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812
Local myths: the most well-known is likely that of "Champ," a serpentine lake monster (much like Scotland's Nessie); local legend say the first white man to sight it was Samuel de Champlain himself.
The Abenaki called it Gitaskog, a great horned serpent. Mundane explanations for the monster include the giant lake sturgeon who, before European colonization, were rumored to be quite large; their long needle-like jaw would explain the "horn."
Sightings grew more frequent in the 19th century with increased traffic on the Lake. In 1873 there was a "flap" of sightings, railroad crews, steamship captains, and local law enforcement all said to have seen Champ that summer. News had traveled so far that P.T. Barnum himself even offered $50,000 for the hide of the great beast.
Also of note from the aftermath of the 1873 flap is the utopian community that settled on Valcour Island the year afterward (see attached graphic).
One local myth, often repeated by white folklorists but largely unknown and unbelieved by the Abenaki and Mohawk oral traditions, was that of Bulwagga, an "Indian princess" who lived near the lake. The princess was sought after by two suitors and after Bulwagga made her decision, the rejected suitor was overcome by a jealous rage. The scorned suitor struck Bulwagga on the shores of the lake, knocking her into the water where she then drowned. Realizing the horror of his actions, the suitor followed after her and jumped into the bay while holding heavy stones to sink into the deep. The legend ends with the angry fates transforming him into a lake monster, forever seeking Bulwagga through his unrequited love. The most frequent site of Champ sightings historically have been at the very south end of Lake Champlain, at Bulwagga Bay.
Sophie's interpretation:
Of important note is that a very similar mythcycle can be observed at Point 1, vis-á-vis the tale of Anola and Altama and the legend of the "Singing River." In analyzing these memetics, I see several commonalities: a geographic area seen as a conflict zone between two tribes divided by a body of water; a forbidden contact in the form of an unauthorized "betrothal" or "marriage" between these tribes; bodies of water and drowning as the method of death as a result of the contact between two "tribes." The memetics here, to my mind, are clear. These white American versions of "Indian" myths are simultaneously expressions of cultural guilt and shame for white settlement while also being historical echoes of earlier population and ontological tensions that go back much further than European contact. I believe they tell an older story of mass disappearance, in some sense necessarily voluntary, after a disastrous "first contact" or "betrothal" between "tribes." The drowning motif heavily implies kulullû involvement. Comparing these to other memetic mythcycles around mass Indian disappearances—the Anasazi in the Southwest in particular—I believe these are cultural memetic memories of native American populations either being wiped out or taken, alive or dead (given Charley's experiences at Kincaid Mounds and Mitch's at White Cemetery), by the Red Kings.
Sophie adds that she cannot discern for certain whether these myths she found in the literature were retrocreated recently or not, but if Mitch were to find some physical artifact of the mythcycle locally, he could check it for History B energy Annunaki influence.
Brant
Alright. After introducing himself to the skeleton crew, it’s time for Step One: Mitch Deployment. Mitch: do your thing.
Michael
(I should add you all have access to Coast Guard vessels run by SANDMAN if you need to get out on the open water at any point from the Valcour Island Point 12 HQ.)
Here on Valcour Island, Mitch can certainly give me a preliminary Detect scan, pointed out to the shallows of the western end of the Lake, if he wishes. Dave lingers around the Coast Guard dock, having a smoke, while Hilary is reading the Sophie package on shore. As he reads the material Sophie's gathered and sent to the team, Hilary will say to Jocasta, whom he's really just only met formally today, "You've likely worked with Miss Edelstein longer than I did; I only spent a month or two as her colleague... she really possesses an incredible analytic mind, don't you think?"
Jeff
Sure, okay.
>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 0
>> DETECT … SUCCESS by 7
>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 5
Brant
Marshall sticks reasonably close to Mitch, leaving Hilary with Jocasta.
Michael
It's a really faint echo of Anunnaki influence but Mitch can sense it, even from here. The maps show the estimated epicenter of Point 12 about a mile due east in the Lake. The entire zone is just sort of the faintest hint on the wind, but Mitch knows for sure whatever's keeping the subduction zone open despite the EM reversal frequencies is underwater. Mitch doesn't detect any active entities or reality shards, but he's not sure if that's due to distance or not. Finally, the "bouquet" of the subduction zone—what weakened this area in the first place—is one of death. No one worshipped Them here per se; instead, a sacrifice of blood opportunistically brought Them bubbling up out of the shallows. That's about it from this distance.
Leonard
Some things never change, Jocasta thinks as the men go off and leave her with the boffin. "Oh, yeah, Sophie's a real pip," she says in response to Postel. "She's a regular Hedy Lamarr. Match me, doc," she adds, fishing a cigarette out of her purse.
Mitch
Mitch squints at the water longer than he really needs to, then shakes his head. "We need to get a little closer." He gestures towards one of the Coast Guard boats, then turns back towards Jo and Hil.
Brant
Marshall nods. “Menos, with us. Dave, stay here with Hilary.” Marshall snaps his fingers and gestures for the SEAL team. “On board. Be prepared to dive.”
Leonard
"Whoops. Rain check on that smoke break, doc. I read one of your monographs in school, you know. Let's catch up and talk about the interpretatio romana."
Jeff
I assumed Hil was coming with, but I'm not going to argue the point
Brant
If we need his input we’ll radio shore. Until we make sure it’s safe I wanna keep him out of harm’s way.
Michael
Hilary, who'd emptied his jacket pocket of pipe, tobacco pouch, and matchbox, was all ready to gallantly light Jocasta's Virginia Slim, but he accepts his role onshore with quiet diffidence. "Oh, of course, my dear. We'll chat later. Safe sailing, all of you."
The SEALs, in their disguises of Coast Guard uniforms, get the patrol boat ready to shove off. The vessel has already been loaded up with dive equipment, weaponry, explosives, surveillance equipment, SANDMAN gadgets, ikoters: all the tricks of the trade. To any autumn boaters out there on the lake, it'll look like a routine Coast Guard buoy repair operation thanks to a decoy buoy and two dedicated team members playing the role of Coast Guard squaddies. But given it's a weekday in the middle of October, the SANDMAN SEALs aren't expecting many witnesses anyway.
It's a very quick 5-minute putter out to the putative epicenter of Point 12. The sky is partly cloudy and the water fairly clear. The foliage back on shore at Valcour is blazing red and gold, a gorgeous autumnal backdrop. The SEAL technical support staff monitoring the vessel's radar get no pings underwater; no evidence of physical irruption or weird architecture is extant. The SANDMAN SEAL team commander, Lt. Walter Nash, consults with Marshall. "Eyewitness recon the order of the day, sir? My dive team can be in the water in five minutes. We've got a specialist who can dive with an underwater video camera hookup if needed."
Brant
Marshall nods in a way that says, “Video? Impressive.” Then to Mitch: “You first — picking up anything?”
While they wait for Mitch to work his magic, Marshall makes eye contact with Jocasta and signals that she should get armed.
Leonard
Jocasta dutifully loads up with her usual panoply, as well as some marine gear: a few concussion grenades, a knife, and a speargun. She relaxes her mind into a state of blank readiness.
Jeff
>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 3
>> DETECT … FAILURE by 3
1 FP spent
>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 1
>> DETECT … SUCCESS by 0
>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 8
Good number where it counts
Michael
Out on the water, Mitch can feel the subduction zone much more easily, but there is something here blocking him, a deep-rooted trauma that prevents him from getting a better idea of the flavor the first time he concentrates on it. He tries again, and this time excels at divining the nature of the subduction zone and what had powered it and is currently powering it.
Mitch can sense the remnants of a clash of two big memetic systems having to do with life, sustenance, social organization, and death here. It's not easy for Mitch's Detect to actually register ancient long-dead memetic residue as an Anunnaki phenomenon, so the memes must have been incredibly strong: societally foundational, really. Of course, he doesn't have Psychometry like Ms. Menos, so he can't figure out the order of events or what the nature of the memetic (and eventually martial and physical) conflict was. But Mitch is sure that once everything was said and done, the Anunnaki won.
The reason why the subduction zone is here out on the water rather than on an island in Lake Champlain or onshore is because this is where the Anunnaki took their prizes. Some dead souls... and some still alive, into the waters. Mitch guesses, or maybe even knows that at the bottom of the lake all the SEALs are going to find is canoes and skeletons of whoever lost the battle for memetic supremacy here.
As to what's keeping the tiny subduction zone alive, it's the remnants abroad of the cultural memory of this conflict. Again, Mitch's Detect doesn't give him historical data or impressions, but Mitch would surmise the reasons that all the post-colonization French and Mohawk and French and English and English and American battles happened here isn't solely because of the "door-to-the-Iroquois-Confederacy" geography (although that's a big factor!). It's that there are these bad vibes in the area and periodically they demand blood. Or fear/belief, in the form of the sightings of lake monsters. There hasn't been a UFO or Champ sighting or a conflict between Native and white man here yet since the original subduction event a couple of weeks ago, but Mitch bets just one of those would likely be enough to get the zone throbbing again.
To close it for good? Mitch needs to know more about what happened to create it in the first place; hard historical data and not romantic fables about "Indian princesses" created by white men. If anything, the tale of poor Princess Bulwagga has kept the potentiality for subduction here open. Unless, as Sophie hinted, the recent subduction retrocreated the tale of the princess and her metamorphosing frog-monster suitor. But the effect is essentially the same: this story papers over the truth, and the truth needs to be found and the dead under the waves properly laid to rest, rescued from the Kings.
Jeff
"Okay, wow." Mitch takes a breath before he tries to explain. "This is where they sunk the bodies. Skeletons and sunk boats, down there, the victims they disposed of beneath the waters afterwards. It all lines up with Sophie's analysis. We can pull them up and... I dunno what laying them to rest properly would look like... Anyway, just to be clear, I'm not picking up on any actual irruptors, not at the moment anyway. Left to its own devices the spot will probably start spawning lake monsters and frog demons and new local legends stretching backwards into history. Best to get everything up into the sunlight and air. Which, for the record, goes against my native instinct that burial-at-sea is a legit burial and it's intrinsically disrespectful to exhume the dead from underwater tombs. Seems to be what's needed here, though, I guess. Lesser of two evils."
Brant
"Hm." Marshall rubs his chin, forgetting he doesn't have a beard anymore. "Well, what is respectful to us might not be wholly consonant with the traditions of the people down there. You," he looks at the SEAL team lead, "take your men down there and get a visual on what you can, make sure we're not missing anything." Once they're busy getting in the water, Marshall turns back to Mitch and Jocasta.
"We can figure out how to 'lay them to rest,' as you put it. I'll have Hilary and whoever seems suitable in the local crew do some research on local Indian funerary rites. Maybe there's a tribe nearby, or a community of local indigenous people. I can spin a meme that some fishermen pulled up skeletal remains or arrowheads or what-have-you, turn it into a whole 'returning the honored dead to their people' thing. Shouldn't be hard."
After thinking silently for a moment. "Jocasta, what did you do to meet the Underwater Panther? Could you do it again, here? Not necessarily right now, but tonight?"
Leonard
Archaeology.
>> SUCCESS by 5
"I dosed and he came to me. In a vision, although it may have been a dream. There's usually no difference," Jo replies. "I think I can commune with him again; we have unfinished business. I could even probably reach him more easily down there, although it would be, uh, a bit perilous."
She pauses thoughtfully, something she hasn't done much lately, in the way you do when you're trying to remember some important detail from a long-ago dream. "Have them be careful down there, Marshall. Don't let them touch anything unless it's under our supervision. The Iroquois didn't fear death, but they hated it; they had very precise rituals for burying the dead. I think we have to bring them up and bury them properly, respectfully, on land — maybe even with relics of their lives if the locals will give them to us. The mishipeshu, when he first saw me, called me a grave robber. He understands what the whites are to his subjects. I don't know how he'll react, because he is fed by both the drowned and the buried; we could be stealing from Peter to pay Paul in his eyes. But I'll find out."
She gazes down into the water with that dead stare she's cultivated of late. "After I do, though, I want to help with the burial. I owe him a service, at the very least. And if I can touch the bones...well, it may not do any good. Especially if I'm right in suspecting they date back even further than the Haudenosaunee. I may be conflating thoughts from last mission, but remember that the Kings are supposed to have spread agriculture as a way of demonstrating their bounty, and the OZY … the working group were trying to figure out ways to feed their little mineshaft club. The confederacy was post-agricultural, and we may be seeing the results of an early incursion in North America by the old firm.
"Regardless, we need to bury the remains in a way that satisfies the Panther and the locals. And I don't think we should be too quiet about it. I'm beginning to think that the key to changing the game is breaking the old covenants of silence and selective belief."
Brant
“Would it be the Panther, though? Here? Or would it be … Champ? Sorry, I don’t know how these things work.”
Leonard
"Only one way to find out, right? Put me in, coach."
Brant
“Alright. Make it happen — let me know if you want me or Mitch there with you.” Marshall will also have whoever is in charge of the radio communicate to the SEAL team Jocasta’s caution about not touching anything they find down there.
Leonard
Jocasta goes to the topside crew and tells them she's going to need to go down into the water, as deep as she can go. She'll also tell them -- assuming they're clued in enough to what we're doing that they won't be completely flipped out by the request -- that she isn't especially skilled at SCUBA diving and will be somewhat impaired on the dive, so they should be ready to pull her up at a pre-arranged signal.
Jocasta will quietly dose in an out-of-the-way corner of the patrol boat, and meditate with great focus over the half-hour or so that it takes for the acid to kick in. She'll be trying as best she can to establish a state of openness and communication with the Underwater Panther -- or to whatever his local equivalents or servants might be -- that she intends to enter the waters, see to it that the remains of the people are given a proper burial, and make whatever payment or sacrifice is needed for his/their cooperation and insight.
[I'll make whatever rolls are needed before this, and then she'll drop into the dark waters of Lake Champlain.]
Michael
(Hey, I just remembered … Jo's got Telesend. But it needs prep time.)
Leonard
[Also, Jo is definitely willing to try Telesend, but it'd be at least at a -6 penalty. We'll see how it goes, she doesn't object to taking the extra time.]
Michael
Okay, let's do this right, with the acid first. Let's see how much it affects Jo and for how long. Leonard, roll HT minus 2 (which is a 9 with Fit) and we shall see how long the trip affects her (if at all). Seems important given you're going to be doing some untrained SCUBA diving.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 1
Michael
Jocasta's pulse is steady and strong as the SEAL gives her the quick 15-minute express SCUBA course and fits her as best he can for a dive. Now we're going to make a couple of other rolls as Jo gets ready to go overboard. I'm going to roll your SCUBA roll (IQ minus 5) secretly and then you're going to give me a Meditation-15 roll (penalized because, well, you're in a SCUBA suit and on acid) before you get to the bottom. Remember, the waters are fairly shallow here; bottom is between 15 and 20 feet down here, so you'll have some benefits safety-wise.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 6
Jeff
"I'm a little worried about Jo," Mitch says to Marshall, as he watches her drop acid and then attempt to SCUBA dive for the very first time. "I was thinking maybe inviting her up to Shasta for a weekend after we're done with all this. I'm sure Jiyu would … well, she'd say something."
Brant
“Hm, yes. I personally would be reluctant to bring her back to that place, but what do I know?” He pats himself for a cigarette as the bubbles emerge to the water’s surface. “Her problem is a crisis of meaning. She doesn’t know how to make it — meaning, that is. Without that, she’ll always sort of flail. You see it in sex abuse victims, this sort of existential ennui mixed with anger at those who’ve harmed them and the universe writ large, unjust as it is. Without her money and her considerable gifts, she’d almost certainly be dead by now.”
Michael
In the cold of Lake Champlain, Jocasta feels oddly free. There is sensation, and pressure, and the novel feeling of breathing her oxygen through the SCUBA gear, but the overall effect is to make her head and soul feel quiet for the first time in a very long time. She slips into a meditative state, a receptive state, putting out vibes for the Underwater Panther to meet her, contact her, drown her; whatever the spirit wants is okay with her. If it all ended here, underneath the liquid canopy these crystalline waters, she'd be content. The cold becomes a keening but not entirely unpleasant tone in her ears thanks to her LSD-aided synesthetic mind; the sparkling sunshine feels like diamonds falling on bare skin, even though she's covered up in a loose wetsuit. It's nice down here. I could see why people could fall into the Panther's lair.
Jocasta does see some reed and mud-covered shapes at the bottom of the lake under the beam of her underwater diving light. There's no bones as far as she can see, but there are a couple of long lumps that definitely look canoe-like. There's no charnel ground here, no mass drowning as far as she can see, but … hmm, something feels off to Jo. Like she's floating into a giant set of jaws without seeing the teeth until it's too late and they've clamped down on her. Naturalist-15, please.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 8
Jeff
Mitch considers this as he takes a swig of bourbon from a flask. "I mean, I guess. Kind of a harsh way of putting it. The, uh... the world's dripping with meaning, but it can be hard to connect to it, sometimes.
"I just thought it'd be worth extending the invitation. It's my best thought, or at least, my first."
Brant
“Don’t let me dissuade you! It’s a fine idea. I’m wary of Shasta, is all. As a place. All of you came back from there … different.”
Marshall flags down one of the crew and asks for a cigarette and a light. After a long drag, he circles back to Mitch. “So I’ve always wanted to know: what does it feel like? The vibes you pick up, from Them? Is it like a … I don’t know, do things look different to you? Is it an — an innate revulsion? Like the smell of vomit or whatever?”
After another drag and exhale. “Or do you just … know?”
Michael
Jocasta expands her awareness away from the prospect of death and sacrifice for a moment to just embrace the vibes of the lake bed. It is much more shallow than she'd anticipated, which makes Jo wonder if at any point during any of the various climate changes throughout history, this was the shallows or even alluvial soil. Liminal areas, she remembers from her undergrad anthropology classes. Would make a lot more sense than taking a bunch of captives out here to be sacrificed. If the kulullu did come here to receive their gifts, they wouldn't have to waddle far. And that's when she sees it in the muck kicked up at the bottom of the lake bed. Going off the aerial recon photos from the first night of ALLOCHTHON, she can see the very tops of the pillars that rose up from the lake, an arc extending into the darkness and coming back around. A perfect circle. Impossible, or near-impossible, for it to be a natural landmark. The diameters of the pillars are nearly identical. From this distance, she can see what kind of material they're made out of, but if she were to get closer, she could see more about it, grab a sample … or maybe even touch them. Jo's also now sure that the Underwater Panther isn't coming, even with the acid, even with traipsing into his nominal domain. He could exist around the mounds, especially the specific one dedicated to him in Ohio, but this space is evil, tainted, cursed. Liminal not between the spirit world and History A but History B and History A.
Leonard
In for a penny, she thinks, and without further consideration, she swims towards the center point of the arc, feeling the cold rush of the water as she takes off a single neoprene glove.
Michael
Would you like to activate Psychometry with a single point of Corruption to open it up for further Corruption after the roll? If so, Psychometry-16.
Jeff
"Nah. I mean...nah. I want to be poetic and say it's sensory. Like if we were in a movie there'd be a special camera filter for looking through my eyes and seeing stuff with weird colors and tracks coming off it, purple gels on the lights and the people in lizard makeup, I don't know. What I get is, yeah, I just know. I know it the same way I know that the sky is gray or white or black or blue. You see a color, and your brain has to recognize that color and tell you what it is. It's like that, a trick of the brain. Like I'm seeing through an optical illusion, but it's not visual, it's just...everything."
Mitch takes another sip of bourbon. "Makes it easier to believe nothing is real and this world is an illusion, I tell you what."
"I forget sometimes that I haven't known Jo as long as I've known you. She's part of the team. You think she'd appreciate … I was going to say flowers but it sounds silly."
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 4
[Not a bad roll but I'll add whatever corruption it takes to make it worth the candle]
Michael
Okay, so that would be another 5 Corruption to get it into critical (actual vision) range.
Brant
Marshall listens with clear interest in Mitch's description. When Mitch says the thing about the flowers, he raises an eyebrow. "I'm sorry, what? Flowers?"
Michael
Jocasta swims over to the closest pillar, extends her bare, cold hand to it, and lays it on its flat top.
She is a huntress of the Real People, the Dawn People. Proud and free, she has been accepted into the pack of mostly men who search for and kill moose and deer and bear. She knows how to throw the spear, how to set up the trap for beaver, for rabbit, how to smoke and dry the meat. One day, the elders tell her, she will want to be a mother, when this furious energy is finally expended, her masquerade of being a boy done, but she just laughs at them. At night, gazing at Grandmother Moon, she dreams of being a different woman, in a time and place so strange, surrounded by warrior men who belittle and use her, but even in this alien time, she just laughs. She needs prove nothing to no one. The proof is in the meat she brings home.
At the Western Gate, though, there is conflict. The Big Men of the west, the People of the Flint from across the lake. It's said they trade with demons, that they build big permanent longhouses, knock down trees and set up their plants all in rows instead of letting the bounty of the forest freely sustain them. More smoke than ever rose from a fire of the Real People has been emerging on the western horizon. They are greedy, the elders and the practitioners of medicine say. And that means they will come for us.
The warriors of the Real People are brave. But there are some among the Real People who remember the famines, the years where the snows left babes in their creches hungry. Why would we not accept such a boon from our goodly neighbors? Let us learn from them, they say. They are fat in winter and laughing in summer, while we know what winter tears feel like, cold on our faces. And bad feelings emerge around the campfires and the Real People fall to squabbling.
One day, she the huntress and about thirty of her fellow-huntsmen go to the shallows of the Lake to meet envoys from the other side. To find out what they really want. The Flint warriors are rich in wampum—this concept has had to be explained to her, that other peoples use shells and beads to trade for flint tools and other valuables. Why not just trade fish for berries, or deer meat for a leather belt? she remembers asking her grandmother as a child. Or go fish or hunt for yourself? Grandmother laughed and said, This, granddaughter, is the sickness they carry in their hearts. They have not protected themselves from greed. This is why we are the Real People and they are not. They do not remember things as we do, with our hearts. Their hearts are full of greed, so they leave a record of their ancestors and debts in the beads instead.
The envoys of the People of the Flint say there is a new way. And it will be so much more easy and painless to join with them than to persist in the wilderness. Come, they say, join us. The warriors of the Real People know not what their role would be in such a society. To be locked into one place, after roaming for all the years of their lives, would be to live like an animal caught in a trap. The Dawn men (and Jocasta) chant a war chant. And the representative of the Flint People says, "If this is how it must be, so be it." The Little Man on the Flint warrior's back stares into the Dawn warriors' hearts... and finds them wanting. As Jocasta turns to stone, she begins to realize that now she has never existed, her mother never had a daughter, she never learned the hunting ways as a child, she never became the woman warrior she was destined to become. She is nothing but a stone pillar now, a monument from another time and place taking her place, rooted here forever as a testament to the Dawn warriors' Refusal. Her people will never quite surrender to the infection, but the bravest of them all have been turned into this joke, this travesty, a circle of Stone Coats meant as a message for a time long after she has perished under the waters.
Leonard, two rolls, a Fright Check, success on a 13 or less and then a Hidden Lore (History B)-16 roll.
Jeff
Mitch shrugs. "I don't know. I don't know what would help. I just feel bad for her. She's having some trouble, what with all the trauma.")
Leonard
Fright Check.
>> SUCCESS by 3
Hidden Lore.
>> CRITICAL FAILURE
Michael
Oooh.
Leonard
[Always a disaster when I get too clever with the hashtags]
Michael
Well, it is getting a little bit panicky down here. Maybe on surface talking with the gang something can come out of this vision.
(SCUBA check succeeded by the way. )
Leonard
If there's anything from the towers that's broken off, a sample or a chip fragment or anything, she'll grab it, and then she tugs on the cable with the prearranged signal to pull her up.
Michael
Sample good. The SEALs go to the side of the cutter and begin helping Jocasta swim up towards the light. As Jo emerges from the water, the sun goes behind a cloud and a chill October wind blows over Marshall, Mitch, and the crew members.
Leonard
Jocasta sits down as quickly as she can, her breath short from the dive (and some residual panic). Though she overcame the fear, the revelatory vision has shaken her. She hands the fragment over to Mitch.
Michael
Detect (History B) rolls if you want, Mitch.
Leonard
"They were here," she says in a breathy bark. "They tried as hard as they could to make inroads here. They brought agriculture, accounting, permanent settlements — all the things the Confederation was known for, they got from them. The natives here … they were some of the only ones that resisted. For their troubles they were turned to stone. Stone pillars. That's what's down there. This is part of one of them. Another tribe used its magic to reduce their best warriors to … to that."
She gestures for her sketchbook and tries her best, with her mind still suffering from ego loss and disassociation, to draw the pillars and everything else she saw.
"I … lost it a little down there. The trip took me back and I pushed hard, I found myself as one of the warriors of the tribe, punished for resisting the gifts of the Red Kings. I didn't know who I was or where I was, and I lost some sense of what it all meant. I'm sorry, Marshall. I fucked up." She slams her fist against the hard steel hull of the cruiser.
Brant
Marshall crouches before Jocasta and puts his hands on her shoulders. In a compassionate, assuring voice he intones: "Shanti shanti, Jocasta. Be at peace. What you have done is remarkable." He'll infuse a little subtle NLP into his speech and mannerisms to help Jocasta steady herself.
Jeff
Mitch studies Jo's aura
>> SUCCESS by 1
Taking extra time can push his effective skill and thus MoS up a bit but I'm away from my desk so unsure of the numbers
Michael
I think Mitch would be able to detect the remnants of Jo's psychometric contact with this proto-Abenaki warrior woman, not as a piggybacking soul or spirit but as, well, the remnants of her memories of life in Jo's actual brain. Some of these memories will live with her forever, obviously, but right now the psychometric iron is hot, if you will, and Mitch can see that set of memories fresh in Jo's mind. Her mental health is generally bad, and physically she had taxed herself underwater but is now coming back to baseline. Her emotions are those of loss, disappointment, and frustration but how much of that is the imprint of her psychometric memories and how much is just how Jo is feeling right now, Mitch isn't sure.
Jeff
Well, setting that aside, Mitch will indeed do a Detect as requested
>> ACTIVATE … CRITICAL FAILURE
Grr
1 FP spent (2 total in the scene, I don't think he's had time to get that first one back yet)
>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 7
>> DETECT … SUCCESS by 3
>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 4
Tolerable MoS
Michael
Okay, so this piece of stone is positively radioactive with History B. It definitely comes live and direct from The Other Side. It's not, like, literally a petrified proto-Abenaki warrior woman; there's not a hint of History A to it. (If Jo shared all the details of her vision, it seems to Mitch's mind that what Jo sensed at the end of the vision was this warrior woman being uncreated as a result of a place of concentrated Anunnaki power being summoned.)
In addition, Mitch can feel that the stone's substance is not just suffused with — ugh, "History B energy" — but something about its constitution is like a magnet to draw more History B influence to it. Dormant until triggered, it would await a crucial moment of belief or blood to expand the zone. When the CWG aircraft hit this thing with electromagnetic triggers, it opened up like a hungry Venus flytrap, rising from the shallows, gulping up every bit of that energy it could. During the week and change it was back below the waters, nothing too outrageous happened here, UFO sighting or otherwise, and so it remained mostly submerged. The reversal that we put into play via the CWG aircraft wasn't quite enough to make it vanish from history completely. This circle underwater is, if it's not too wild of Mitch to theorize like this, akin to those big parabolic dishes that the military uses to transmit and receive signals over microwaves. Mitch obviously wasn't in Britain for the GRAIL TABLE mission but he knows enough about what Jo and company saw over there at the stone circle to realize this is a similar situation. One has to imagine a similar solution to the one Archie called in at Long Meg — demolition or removal of the stones — could finally get the potential of this zone to wink back down to zero. At Long Meg of course there was a keystone at the center, which may or may not have been the spot where a šedu named Morrígan manifested — but neither the aircraft photos nor Jo saw a "central stone" like that down there.
Underwater is a really good place for The Bastards to generally hide stuff like this, Mitch realizes, especially if you surmise that further energy triggers could get kulullû to retrocreate around circles like this. Atlantis, Mu: as he thinks of sunken continents, the words "Little stones = kulullû, big stones = šedu?" floats through Mitch's mind for a moment, as if on a notepad, as the effect of his Detect begins to fade. Not that the pillars down there are small small, they're actually quite large … but the point stands: they describe a circle themselves and channel energy into expanding the zone. And what would serve Them better than the subtlety of a bunch of frogmen coming out of the waters to start cults or spread rumors about sea serpents to create a nice, long-lasting, shaky-as-hell subduction zone.
Jeff
Okay, so, if I am understanding correctly this is not a "pull artifacts up from the water, give those artifacts proper historiographic treatment" situation so much as a "drop explosives over the side of the boat" situation.
Hidden Lore (History-B).
>> CRITICAL SUCCESS
Michael
big ol' affirmative on that
Mitch's instincts also tell him that the Wisconsin team should be sending divers down to confirm the same.
Jeff
"I got this wrong," Mitch says out loud. "Jo found the truth. We do not want to get everything up into the sunlight. Big mistake. There's nothing to lay to rest, it's too late for them. What we need to do is pound those rocks into gravel. Dynamite. Depth charges? It's not that deep. And yeah, okay, sure man, they're going to find the same stuff out Lake Winnebago way."
Brant
Marshall gestures to the SEAL commander. "You heard the man. Destroy it."
Michael
The SEAL team spends the next half-hour doing what they learned to perfection in 'Nam: going underwater with cutting-edge explosives, analyzing the structures that need to be neutralized, and wiring them up. Marshall will likely need to do some back-of-the-envelope memetics to come up with a cover story for the people in the area hearing loud booms underwater (easy enough to say the buoy repair team out there saw a previously-unknown navigation hazard; it has the benefit of not even really being a lie) but that should be child's play. Getting a remote detonator in place so all this can be done from the comfort and camouflage of the Coast Guard station on Valcour is also on deck, so the whole process should take a little over an hour.
But if there's any conversation you three want to have while the SEALs are doing their thing, feel free.
Brant
Great. PCs can chat during that half-hour while the SEALs are getting shit ready, whatever Jeff and Leonard want. Marshall's plan once they're ready is to get back to shore, get Hilary up to speed, detonate from land, send the SEALs back out to get visual confirmation and send Mitch out on the boat one more time to do his thing, make sure it worked. Marshall, meanwhile, will start working up the cover story-meme with the help of the local team's esmologist; once that's ready, he'll instruct them to deploy it ASAP. He is also going to send a message to Wisconsin, cc'ing the command staff at Huntsville HQ, explaining what they found and advising them to do something similar (i.e., find the structure, destroy it). Figure that'll keep Marshall busy the rest of the afternoon.
Michael
I will have you give me just one Expert Skill (Memetics)-16 roll to analyze whether source code is even necessary in this situation: one thing Marshall's beginning to realize during ALLOCHTHON is that source code could give the Kings an "in" in some of these situations, that there are old memes, likely deployed by the Kings personally, that don't need to be disturbed, and maybe just garden-variety government disinfo might be enough in some cases. Also, Hilary will definitely be interested in the mineral sample and would welcome taking a look at it. (I've not forgotten that conversation I want to Hil to have with Marshall, btw.)
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 3
Michael
Yeah, if Marshall does think memetics are necessary for the cover story here, it would behoove him to go real light on it—Power 1 or 2, tops—but all things considered, Marshall thinks the best thing for Point 12 would be to quiet things down on the belief front as much as possible, especially with there being no extant UFO sightings around here. Point 1? That's a different point, cat's already out of the bag, there.
Brant
No memes unless necessary! A regular ol' government cover-up story is totes fine.
Michael
After the detonations hit — and there are a lot of them, but they're timed to be simultaneous so as not to prolong the process—both Mitch and the portable EM detectors get back out onto the water. Both the man and the machine concur: Point 12, she is closed. Mitch does collect the impression of some residual energy out where the ring once was buried but without the ring intact, there's no way it can act as an attractor anymore. Might not be a bad idea to have our frogmen go down there and collect and quarantine any bigger remnants of the stone. Hilary does have a look at the fragment he got from Marshall in his portable lab—nothing too too serious equipment-wise here — but Hil does have a look under a microscope at the stone's crystal structure—and he makes copious notes to share with Marshall after Marshall is done with his various admin tasks.
Leonard
At some point, Jocasta will try and get Padden and/or Hall on the phone.
Jeff
"Yeah!" Mitch cries, apropos of nothing. "Fuck that guy!"
Michael
"Right." Hilary turns around in his office chair after having consulted a few of the books on prehistoric Middle Eastern architecture and archeology he brought with him to New York, having looked at the stone fragment in his microscope and made his usual dutiful notes in longhand. "Let's talk pillars. Ahem." He says this first bit from memory. "'Very gorgeous are the descriptions given of Irem, the City of Pillars (as the Koran styles it) supposed to have been erected by Shedad, the latest despot of Ad, in the regions of Hadramaut, and which yet, after the annihilation of its tenants, remains entire, so Arabs say, invisible to ordinary eyes, but occasionally and at rare intervals, revealed to some heaven-favoured traveller.' Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition. My grandfather's gift to me as a lad. That entry, among many others, pointed my way in life, I fear."
Next, Hilary takes the 1880 Palmer translation of the Qur’ân and reads from a bookmarked page. "Hast thou not seen how thy Lord did with 'Âd?—with Iram of the columns? the like of which has not been created in the land? Who were outrageous in the land, and did multiply wickedness therein, and thy Lord poured out upon them the scourge of torment.' Allah doesn't like the people who built the City of the Pillars, it seems. Not only does he sweep them from the Earth, he makes it so the City was never created. The holy book given to the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him, by the Archangel Jibreel within two generations of the Ontoclysm, remember."
Then Hil takes out of his satchel a cheap Ballantine Books paperback of H.P. Lovecraft stories, The Doom That Came to Sarnath and Other Stories. "'Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I remembered how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were bare.'"
"This motif is a common one. The Allies in World War II found Irem, of course; a massive subduction zone in Arabia's Empty Quarter. SANDMAN cover stories over the years have directed curious eyes — the kinds of mountebank archaeologists who believe they will one day find the real location of Troy or Noah's Ark on Ararat, real scoundrels and fools, all — to Wadi Rum on the border with Jordan. But the Project found the real city. Bombed the 'life' right out of it, as I recall, in 1967, after a subduction event. I remember consulting on that operation, and getting some of the remnants back at my office in Oxford. I began to make connections with the survey work I'd done in Turkey in '63, at Göbekli Tepe. You won't have heard of this site, of course. It's top secret, even within SANDMAN itself, but … I find Project secrets cheaply-held after what we've been through the past 10 days."
"See, my work in Anatolia sees columns just like these. And this site in Turkey, it is not a proto-Sumerian colony. Radiocarbon dating puts them at six thousand years before we presume first contact with the Anunnaki in Mesopotamia. And materially? They have the same exact History B-resonant crystal structure as these pillars did. So you tell me, why would these structures exist in common among sites in the vast deserts of Arabia, in the plateaus of southeast Turkey, and beneath a bloody lake in upstate New York? And what does that mean for our commonly-accepted calendar of history before the Ontoclysm? They gnaw at me, these discrepancies. Perhaps they're meant to, perhaps the Kings seek to drive us mad looking for answers. There must be a pattern, though, I'm sure of it. A meaning behind it all, an important one for how we can fight the Kings more effectively." Hilary wipes his spectacles on his tie. "But I'm at a loss with this new information. And so … I bring it to you."
Jeff
"Yeah, you know what," Mitch says to Hil and Marshall. "That tears it. I'm leaving Al to Jo. Maybe that's somehow playing into his hands, but fuck, you got to fish or cut bait, am I right?" He pauses for a beat. "Anyway, yeah, I've been suspicious of the official timeline for a while now. It's a pretty story and it justifies all kinds of cool set-piece black-ops against an exciting background of international tensions but it kind of falls apart on close inspection, like it's a story made up to serve a particular purpose."
Michael
Hilary blinks blankly at Mitch, thinking through everything he just told the two of them. "Hang about... skepticism about the official timeline, which end do you mean? Their arrival, or the Ontoclysm? Or both?"
Jeff
Mitch shrugs. "The whole story of it soup to nuts is barely coherent, is how I see it. What kind of story could explain everything that the evidence indicates happened here? The causation is all backwards and the further out from the Levant you go the less it hangs together.
Michael
"Yes!" Hilary says excitedly. "That's why I'm so badly shaken by this … echo 10,000 kilometers away from the red zone in Iraq. I said at the outset of this mission to Archibald that I was afraid my particular skills weren't to be useful in this land where manifestations of the other History are so much more thin on the ground, and so idiosyncratic when they do manifest. But here is a landscape artifact that recalls pre-Anunnaki sites in the Old World, directly and materially. It's puzzling, but it also feels important. I realize I shouldn't go on instinct and hunches — that's led many a paleohistorian to the crackpottery I mentioned earlier. But mostly I don't want this information to just get buried in a file at Granite Peak or Duncorne." Hil looks to Marshall.
Brant
Marshall rubs his eyes. “Well, Arch said something last week about how the past isn’t real. In that sense it hardly matters how coherent of a narrative we’re dealing with — it’s all a fiction anyway. The Upanishads teach that the world is both ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, and the only true thing is our interpretation of the information our senses perceive. ‘I am the mind that projects the world’, etc etc.” He sighs. “Write up your findings. Telex them to our Librarian at Livermore. Use my classified credentials — her eyes only. Thanks, Hil.”
Michael
Around 5:30 pm Eastern, word comes down the SANDMAN Telex system from Point 6, Lake Winnebago, that their taisher and divers were able to locate a similar set of truncated columns underneath the lakebed mud. Explosives were deployed and readings are now down to History A baseline. Nothing yet from Roger, Charley, and Morris at Point 1 in Misssissippi (although I suppose I should wait to say for sure, they might have made progress by 4:30 Central depending on how things go). And if Archie wants to send a message to the Point 12 team, he'll be back on base and in the ALLOCHTHON offices at Huntsville by around 5 Eastern/4 Central.
Leonard
Jocasta has been sitting on the deck of the cruiser as everyone else talks and makes decisions, slowly coming down from the LSD and staring off at the darkening waters of the lake and the graying vastness of the sky. She's positioned across and away from Mitch, but she suddenly starts talking as if he's standing right next to her.
"You know, Mitch, it's funny," she says, neither looking at him or speaking in his direction. "For a long time I didn't understand you when you talked about the Red Kings, and how they were one force competing among many, how they … didn't have a monopoly on not existing." She repeats the line as if she's saying a prayer she's said before but only now has come to believe.
"But the more of the enemy I see, the more I realize … it's not that they aren't real. It's not that they aren't dangerous. It's that they're less real and less dangerous than we think they are. Guys like Postel, they find these little inconsistencies, these seeming anomalies in the record, and that's normal in the field. No historian or anthropologist or archaeologist ever wants to admit this, but we know next to nothing about our own past beyond a certain point. It's mostly guesswork. And when we find these little bits and pieces that don't seem to fit in, or don't seem to make sense, we — because what am I, better or smarter than Hilary Postel? I'm nobody. But we're all in the same outfit. And when we find these little contradictions, we always, always assume that it's because the Enemy was — and somehow, therefore, is — bigger and stronger and more existentially threatening than we previously expected. We never assume it's a sign of chaos or chance or incoherence in the record. It's always that the Red Kings are more dangerous than we ever imagined.
"And do you know why? Well, for one thing, it's because we're a bunch of hammers, and the Anunnaki can't stop dropping nails. But mostly, it's because they built us that way. They designed our brains to credit them for everything, to see them behind every corner, to fill in blanks in a way that any empty space in the historical record is evidence of their work in the world. Isn't that brilliant? It's fucking genius, Mitch. It's … it's beautiful.
"And the fact that the people who have tasked themselves with defeating these monsters are the ones who exaggerate their threat the most is … I dunno if you ever spent any time doing intelligence work. One of the maddening ironies of it is that they train you to be skeptical of any information that makes the enemy seem stronger or more powerful than they really are, because the enemy actively shapes propaganda and puts out false narratives that boost their threat level, to their own benefit. But they also teach you to not discount a seeming contradiction or any evidence that doesn't fit the model, because that could be proof of some subversive new ploy by the enemy. So you walk around all the time, eyes and ears wide open, holding 'don't believe everything you learn' and 'believe everything you learn' in your head simultaneously. I've seen it for years, repeated over and over. It literally drives you crazy.
"And it's not that I don't think the Red Kings are truly dangerous. I've seen their bodycounts. I've seen peoples' brains and bodies torn to pieces by them. I've got … so much blood on my hands because of them. But the fact that they haven't been able to break through this supposed massive web of lies we made up to patch over their existence for, for over a thousand years … that with a tiny handful of enlightened types, we held them back practically forever? What should that tell us? I've read the files about what SANDMAN did during the War, and I won't deny the incredible sacrifice and heroism. But with all that going on, with shiploads of blood spilled every day for six years, they still couldn't gain a foothold? What does that mean? It's funny, right?"
"Anyway. Maybe it means that just like every collection of creeps and bullies and monsters you run into in this kind of work, they're feeding the smartest people in the room the same bullshit lie about how they can never be defeated and their ultimate victory is inevitable. And those smart people believe it, because it's their job to believe it, they were predisposed to believe it. But what's really true is … if we look close enough, through all the fog, we can really just blow them to hell. If we want to."
She laughs a funny kind of laugh, and leans her head against a life preserver, falling almost instantly into a light sleep.
Jeff
Mitch blinks. "Yeah! I...oh, you're asleep."