Sophie’s Report on Rosebud
MutantsMichael — 6/30/24, 8:54 AM
So Sophie called Jocasta, Roger, and Genevieve over Memorial Day weekend to say she had something to present to them specifically, gleaned from FBI reports from the Rosebud Indian Reservation that were intercepted by the Project in their customary esmological data-mining of federal law enforcement agencies. "There was indeed a revived Ghost Dance gathering at Crow Dog Paradise this month," Sophie says by means of introduction, "and while the local Rosebud BIA officials and reservation police stayed clear, the Federal Bureau of Investigation decidedly did not. The Bureau tried to be sly and 'hands-off,' but apparently the temptation of gathering intel on American Indian Movement activities was too great." Sophie points to two piles of evidence on the table. One, a folder with telefaxed photos and an FBI surveillance flight report. The other, a reel-to-reel tape and accompanying transcript. She opens the folder first. "All right then. Exhibit A: the FBI spotter plane. The pilot and two agents flew low over the campground early in the day, on the day of the ritual, before the assemblage had headed up to the mesa for the sun dance. On their third flyover, the pilot reported seeing an unexpected flock of bald eagles—I believe the traditional term is a 'convocation'—swooping in the thermals above the Ghost Dance mesa. Several of the birds then dove into the engine of the spotter plane causing the plane to make an emergency landing three miles east of Rosebud Reservation. The pilot and two agents onboard sustained minor to moderate injuries in the crash landing." Sophie slides the photos and agent testimonials to Jo, who can pass along to Roger and Viv when she's done. Jocasta can give me a Naturalist-16 roll here, and if Roger has shown up, he can give me a Research/Soldier-13 roll. Genevieve is rolling Hidden Lore (Spirit Lore)-18.
Leonard — 6/30/24, 11:36 AM
"Fucking FBI," Jo mutters. "Always a steamroller when just steam will do," she says as she examines the photos in the folder.
Leonard used
roll
Dice GolemAPP — 6/30/24, 11:36 AM
@Leonard rolled
3d6#naturalist:(5+2+4)= 11@Leonard
"Fucking FBI," Jo mutters. "Always a steamroller when just steam will do," she says as she examines the photos in the folder.
MutantsMichael — 6/30/24, 12:24 PM
The bald eagle is extremely endangered. Decades of hunting thinning their ranks and years of DDT thinning their eggs' shells have left them a rare sight, even in the wildness of the Mountain West. For there to be a flock the size described in the eyewitness report, a convocation of hundreds... well, one like this hasn't been sighted in the West in a generation or two. This is a prodigy. Jo remembers the swirling mass of crows she saw in Cumbria, the ones that formed into a glyph, and shudders. Viv looks at the photo evidence of the birdstrikes on the Lockheed YO-3A's fuselage and single propeller, the mass of blood and flesh and feathers in stark black and white, and cries, quietly. "They... they sacrificed themselves," she says. "The eagle is the bravest spirit according to the Lakota. Eagle recognized the courage of the little girl who had clung to a treetop in order to survive the Flood unleashed by Unktehi, the water serpent. Eagle carried her to a high place and she went on to become the progenitor of the Lakota." "These eagles lived up to that esteem. They aid the Lakota still."
Leonard — 6/30/24, 1:20 PM
Jocasta reaches an empathetic arm over to Viv. She thinks about the 'experiments' some of the state's paranormal researchers have conducted on animals in the past: the Soviets with dogs, the Japanese with whales, our people with dolphins. Always either crude behavioralism or cramming some untested tech into their brains; never any respect or understanding that they aid mankind because of a spiritual bond. "They never would have asked Brother Eagle for such a powerful sacrifice if what they were doing wasn't important," she observes; this wasn't just the Lakota throwing off the feds to run cigarettes off the reservation. "What else have you got, Sophie?"
@Leonard
Jocasta reaches an empathetic arm over to Viv. She thinks about the 'experiments' some of the state's paranormal researchers have conducted on animals in the past: the Soviets with dogs, the Japanese with whales, our people with dolphins. Always either crude behavioralism or cramming some untested tech into their brains; never any respect or understanding that they aid mankind because of a spiritual bond. "They never would have asked Brother Eagle for such a powerful sacrifice if what they were doing wasn't important," she observes; this wasn't just the Lakota throwing off the feds to run cigarettes off the reservation. "What else have you got, Sophie?"
MutantsMichael — 6/30/24, 1:44 PM
(Will just delay a tiny bit to see if @Bill B wants to roll/chime in—Bill, no obligation to engage at all, but I would have felt like a heel if I didn't at least make you aware of this scene.) (So Sophie can address a few more things on Exhibit A before moving onto Exhibit B.) "You won't be surprised to hear that as soon as the Project heard about this, they decided to take a closer look at the eagles, given what... given what happened back in England last year." Jocasta realizes it's a year this weekend since Sophie lost David. Sophie's new brain allows her to compartmentalize David better, given how her anger and guilt about GRAIL TABLE was a trigger for her glyph addiction... but Jo's Empathy tells her that Sophie is thinking about him. "They wanted to make sure the birds' minds, their magnetic sensing organs hadn't been affected by the Kings. So they did pathology on the dead bird tissue. The lab boffins said the birds were normal. Too normal. No evidence of any alteration to their magnetosensory tissue but more shockingly after toxicology reports were done, there was zero evidence of any environmental pollution in their tissue. Which is, if you compare to the average wild bald eagle specimen in America, completely impossible. They'd have to have been raised in hermetically sealed environments and then released, upon which they would immediately fly into the engines of this plane. None of that holds up under Occam's Razor to me." Sophie leaves unspoken the various implications of this information. "So let's accept these eagles... well, let's accept the possibility that it was important that whatever Leonard Crow Dog and his people were doing, they didn't want prying outsiders' eyes in the sky to see it. The plane first appeared hours before the Sun Dance was scheduled and the crash managed to ground the other FBI flights that were on the tarmac to possibly relieve them." "But that still leaves the ground, of course. Which leads us to Exhibit B."
July 1, 2024
MutantsMichael — 7/1/24, 9:48 AM
Sophie pushes the tape to the middle of the table but doesn't press play yet. "The Bureau sent two infiltrators into the Crow Dog camp to surveil the proceedings; there's very little cover out there, so they had to perch a mile off and use telescopic lenses and couldn't reliably get audio on the ritual from that distance, even with laser mics; the dust was kicking up on the mesa to cover things up. Anyway, let me introduce Agent Samuel Wills, 34, and Agent Lamar Mortensen, 29. Dressed in the height of "mod" undercover fashion if they were spotted; the Bureau cooked up a cover story that they were white hipsters wanting to get eyes on the ceremony for the reads of their alternative weekly in Madison, Wisconsin. Sloppy stuff; I'm assuming the Bureau didn't really care too much about the ramifications if they got caught peeking by one of Crow Dog's men." "Anyway, the overflights ended at around 10:30 Central Daylight Time; Wills and Mortensen got into position around the same time. They were watching from a distance dutifully for around an hour, then decided to try to move up a bit for photographs. And that's when... something happened." "Agent Mortensen is on indefinite leave. This tape and that transcript is a record of his debrief back at the Minneapolis Field Office. The questioner is a section chief at Minneapolis; the respondent is Lamar Mortensen." --- Q: So you and Agent Wills closed in on foot at around noon? A: The sun was high, I remember checking my watch but it had stopped at around 11:15. So had Sam's. So I assume it was noon. Q: You didn't keep your chronometers wound? A: I have no idea why our watches stopped. Doesn't it seem obvious considering what happened— Q: [interrupting] Okay, let's get to "what happened." You said you saw two females approaching on foot, one white, one native? A: I said nothing of the sort. I said we heard war whoops and calls in what I'm presuming is Lakota, and the sound of hundreds of hoofbeats, from somewhere behind our position. And then the rains came. Q: National Weather Service says there was no precipitation recorded in or around Rosebud within 24 hours of your time there. A: They saw our clothes, the mud on our shoes, Chief! When you picked us up..." Q: [interrupting again] Step by step, Lamar. Don't get ahead of the story. The women. Tell us about the women. A: The hoofbeats... I grew up on a ranch, I know what a herd of horses sound like. They weren't horses. The sound was like thunder. Like the earth was shaking. Sam says he didn't see them but I saw them. Q: Who? A: Not who, what. Buffalo. Thousands of head of buffalo. Wild, shaggy, followed by birds. Not ranched. Covered in dust and, increasingly, mud. The rains kept coming. Sam seemed like he was in a trance. Q: Sam seemed like he was in a trance? What about you? A: I was aware, Chief. I was aware for the first time in my gee-dee life. Q: The unsubs, Lamar, the women. You said they said something to you. A: They were like photo-negatives of each other. The dark woman in white. Horns made of shadow. The white woman in dark blue. Nebula blue. Like she was dressed in... in space. Q: Did you guard your water supply the entire time on the reservation, Agent Mortensen? A: I wasn't drugged. We weren't drugged. The white woman in darkness looked so familiar to me, like I'd met her before. The Indian woman in white... she scared me. She leveled such a gaze at me. Like... like mom." Q: What did she say to you, Agent Mortensen? A: Nothing. But the white woman said, "Why do ye join unto secret combinations? A new kingdom cometh. You will be left behind in outer darkness if ye do not change your ways." [crying is heard on the tape] Q: Pull yourself together, man. A: [5 second pause] Fuck you. [tape ends]
[9:48 AM]
Sophie says, "Agent Mortensen did not respond to further questioning. I'll give you three guesses which state the ranch he mentioned is in, which college in that state he graduated from in 1965. First two don't count."
Leonard — 7/1/24, 6:10 PM
"Phew, yeah," Jocasta says, whistling low. "You ask a guy to show you something, and he actually does! That doesn't happen often, eh, Soph?" She shuffles through the folder. "No Lakota speakers on the recon team, after Wounded Knee. You know the head of the Minneapolis field office, Trimbach? He let his kid join the Wounded Knee seige team but he didn't include one native speaker. Even before Hoover the Bureau wasn't dumb enough to do that." What else?, she thinks. Cut the fat, eat the meat, as ol' Agent Cole used to say. "Okay, first order of business, let's kick this up to Archie. Add a note from me: 'Cowboys vs. Indians, who will win? We asked ourselves that for a hundred years. But what if cowboys and Indians join up? Who loses?" She attaches a quick, crude cartoon. "Next, Roger, what do you say? Ready to head back to Pine Ridge and meet with our man Leonard Crow Dog, introduce each other to some mysteries?" Before he even answers, she turns again to Sophie. "You're coming with me tonight. To the Mint. They're having a fundraiser and the best way to commemorate a bad breakup is to get completely loaded and hoot at cute boys on tricycles. Good work, Sophie."
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MutantsMichael — 7/1/24, 6:13 PM
(God you gotta love San Francisco)
July 2, 2024
MutantsMichael
Sophie says, "Agent Mortensen did not respond to further questioning. I'll give you three guesses which state the ranch he mentioned is in, which college in that state he graduated from in 1965. First two don't count."
MutantsMichael — 7/2/24, 7:33 AM
(I'm not sure Genevieve ever bent Archie's ear about any of the "Mormon" history/myth stuff; she wasn't really involved with Mission 8 at all, either the acid-revelation or the ancient American Jaredite "colonists" so Nebula Woman's words won't get a sudden shock of realization out of her—also I'm guessing Jo hasn't gone into detail with Viv about the parameters of her deal with Underwater Panther—but needless to say Viv is able to identify White Buffalo Calf Woman, and she'll share that stuff about her being the cultural figure who introduced visionary "technology" to the Lakota. And off her Spirit Lore, she can add this:) "The eagles protect the ritual in the skies, as White Buffalo Woman does on the ground. Jo, Roger, do you see the echoes of Wakíŋyaŋ—the Lakota thunderbird figure—in the mighty thundering of the bison herd's hooves and the echo of Unktehi, the underwater horned serpent, in the flood that unveiled the red clay used by the Lakota to make the sacred pipe." And Jo (and Roger, because he was there at Alligator Mound!) remembers how Underwater Panther told her about its endless rivalry with Thunderbird and how the rivalry's natural ebb and flow had been thrown out of balance by all those planes in the air. Underwater Panther got the bodies in the Mansfield UFO. The beginning of a redressing of that balance. But only a beginning.
Bill B — 7/2/24, 4:06 PM
Roger breaks out of his thoughts, and answers Jo: “We do need to talk to him, but we should be sure to be invited. Mucho diplomatically. If they’re really kicking up such a storm, this may be like History A sending envoys to History I. But we gotta at least look and make sure this doesn’t ‘trembor’ us all somewhere we don’t wanna go.”
MutantsMichael — 7/2/24, 4:30 PM
Genevieve asks Sophie, "Did SANDMAN do any follow-up at Rosebud, send a Mitch there to check the vibes, or are we the first Sandmen to really look into this?" Sophie says, "The Peak is aware, naturally, but it seems like they're ceding this set of phenomena to us to for follow-up. If the Project were concerned about this being an irruption, they would have ordered a taisher there for sure. I can't confidently say they haven't done so—given that Agent Mortensen is on leave, he'd be easy to visit, hypnotize, and quickly scan for Enemy influence—but there was no urgency around this pair of exhibits from the Peak, no orders to further investigate. Both the spy plane dossier and the Mortensen interview came to us from Esmology, so they've probably determined it's not likely this Native movement will add up to much, politically or ontologically." Viv says, "It's probably that continuing prejudice the bigwigs have about ancestor spirits. Archie mentioned to me that he thinks they still aren't factoring the existence of our beloved departed into their esmological equations, even after what happened to you all back in October. I'm not sure if that's bad or good for the Project, but it's good for us... and for the Lakota."
MutantsMichael — 7/2/24, 4:45 PM
Sophie will clear her throat ever-so-slightly at Viv's characteristic bluntness in saying the quiet part loud when it comes to the dearly departed. "Erm, I'm unsure if esmology will ever be able to admit the power of the souls of the dead, Genevieve. The 'Math,' as Marshall calls it, can represent the dynamics of mass human movements and even human tendencies of belief in action—even belief in the Enemy and all that follows—but adding the dead as a volitional motive force in an esmological calculation... well, it would require entirely rethinking the whole of the science of esmology." (edited)
Bill B — 7/2/24, 8:49 PM
Roger taps his temple. “Think differently. What’s science good for if it doesn’t expand itself now and then? Get some of those math/physics boffos on it.”
July 6, 2024
MutantsMichael — 7/6/24, 7:30 AM
Sophie thinks about this for a moment. "There's technically no obstacle to us inserting the dead as a factor into esmology now, other than our not knowing what the dead are capable of. You see, for every faction within an esmological calculation, one must have at least a solid theoretical understanding of the powers and leverage a given faction can bring to bear on the simulation's psychodynamics. The uncertainty around what the dead are capable of adds another set of variables, you see, another dimension of variables." Sophie thinks for a moment. "One could model it, I suppose, on how much power the living attribute to the dead. In cultures where belief in the abiding power of the dead is strong, this belief will empower the dead to have a greater physical and socio-psychological influence. We're getting back into ALLOCHTHON territory here, into the funerary practices at the mounds. I really need to brush up again on what you all discovered last October."
Leonard — 7/6/24, 11:01 AM
"We're getting close to something with that, I think," Jocasta adds. "The difference is, and I'm completely at sea with anything but the broadest contours of esmology, that the CWG and other SANDMAN projects have involved...harnessing the spirits, exploiting them. Using their energies as raw material to power something, capturing their essence in order to promise it to people deemed worthy or rewarded for allegiance, using their places of refuge as shelter or protection for the living -- but not all the living, just the ones who play ball. We need to think bigger -- think along the lines of freeing the spirits, liberating them to be in the world as a presence they way they were thought to be in the histories we were led to believe existed before...or, uh, parallel to, or..." She looks sidelong at Roger. "You know, Mitch stuff." She tries to refocus. "Maybe not completely liberate them into the fields of the living, giving them free rein. There are veils between ways of being for a reason. But...bring them closer. Make them accessible not just to us, but to everyone to whom they might be important. Make those veils as thin as the ones between us and the Enemy. And then the battle map doesn't just have two combatants on it; it has dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands. That moves us from mutually assured destruction to a balance of power, strategically."
MutantsMichael — 7/6/24, 11:19 AM
Viv looks at one of the ALLOCHTHON reports on the table, about the Pascagoula soul trap, and how the souls within were being used by the Kings to power the subduction zone there. "The Enemy are interfering with the natural ecology of souls," Viv says. "Returning to the Monad and then cyclically rejoining the joyful experience of life and love and experiencing... that's the fate of the soul, of all our souls. Our energy is neither created nor destroyed, but changed upon incarnation and dis-incarnation. When souls like these are freed," Viv points at the Point 1 report, "after having been exploited for so long, after having been tricked by the Kings... what do you think they will want to do with their freedom?" Viv seems to pose this to Sophie as an esmological question, to Jo as a strategic one, and to Roger as someone who experienced this in Mississippi, who's had les cousins de cimetière, the Gede, on his mind since ALLOCHTHON.
Bill B — 7/6/24, 7:31 PM
"The freed dead will want to do all kinds of things with their freedom... I'd guess most would want to move on, go back into the cycle." Roger's face falls. "But so many won't make it. They'll fall into another trap, some other form of slavery. There's Jim Crow on every plane."
[7:35 PM]
"Now many of the saints, the, uh, big spirits, are ferrymen of the dead-- what's that word?-- psychopomps. 'Harnessing the spirits, exploiting them'... that'd block off the roads as well. The living should have ways to talk to their dead, and the other way 'round. The saints should be intercessors, or at least able to be bargained with. But so many don't know to anymore."
Bill B — 7/6/24, 7:42 PM
"I think Sophie is onto something about belief around death. White people's death-- it's so sanitized. Hollow. Disconnected. They used to have spiritualists, Ouiji boards, all kinds of things, then folks like Houdini... probably other Sandmen... "debunked" it all. There's maybe something sinister in that."
MutantsMichael — 7/6/24, 7:54 PM
Viv nods and sighs deeply at that. "Roger, I could read you a litany of studies and papers about thanatophobia in the West. Especially, as you say, in the white Protestant West. That death-anxiety worms its way into all kinds of cultural and social norms. If helping Americans grow a more healthy and holistic relationship with death is part of the bigger plan, I would very much want to be involved. I think Alan would be a good person to talk to on this as well." Viv probably only has the vaguest awareness of our Houdini; maybe Charley told her about him at some point and she didn't make a value judgment on whether Charley was being strictly literal or not.