The Drop
Michael
Jocasta does a brush-by of the pre-arranged SLA drop spot after she takes BART back from Berkeley, big folder full of Patricia's research materials and the vintage issue of Cosmopolitan in hand. The pre-arranged time for the SLA to drop something today after the in-house meeting was 12:30 pm, so she's just in time to watch the wastepaper basket at the intersection of the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park. Sitting on a bench, holding the folder tightly as if it were a bomb, Jocasta proceeds to feel a little bit of the Fear and paranoia set in as she watches the pedestrians, lunch breakers, and long-in-the-tooth hippies in both parks with an eagle eye. Observation-19.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 7
Michael
Jocasta, tense and coiled, cases the crowd around the wastebasket, following as many individual pedestrians' trajectories as she can at one time. From behind her, to the east, she sees Willie Wolf, in square drag (rumpled beige sportsjacket and tie, sunglasses, hair combed and pulled into a ponytail, leather satchel in his right hand) walking up to the basket with a rolled-up newspaper under his arm. As he pulls the newspaper out with his left hand to throw it into the dead drop, Jocasta needs to give me a HT-9 roll.
Leonard
>> CRITICAL FAILURE
Uggggggvgh
Nice knowing you
Michael
Suddenly, without warning, Jocasta is in the midst of what she is able to identify in the split-second before it hits as a serious acid flashback. Jo has no idea why or how it happened now specifically—she's on her usual regimen of various Project- and otherwise-supplied drugs but it's too late to think about that no o o o o w
The colors explode around Jo. The greenery of the park, the beiges and greys of the businessmens' and -womens' coats and jackets, the steely slate grey of the sky goes liquid mercury, an overwhelming swirl of synesthetic noise and color and clamor. Jo tries to keep her eye square on the drop, but as she follows the newspaper into the bin, time seems to markedly slow down. The newspaper, presumably with her next SLA meetup instructions written on them, suddenly folds in its fall from Willie's hands and turns into a medieval-looking vellum scroll, its trajectory into the wastebasket blazing in an aura of deep, wine-scarlet red, streaked with yellowish color and light from the sheepskin itself. Jo stands up warily to stride over as confidently as she can towards the basket to retrieve the scroll. The waste bin pulses with eerie red-purple light.
Out of her peripheral vision as she stands, Jo sees in the underbrush near a nearby tree, a trio of tiny, foot-tall slightly demonic-looking gnomes with pointy red hats, flushed, apple-cheeked red faces, and squat bodies whose trunks leave trails of red and black hypercubes behind them. One of them smiles at Jocasta and says in what Jocasta knows not to be English but can understand anyway, "This part's a bitch, but things will be better soon. Better go get the scroll. Everything depends on it. Under Aldebaran's Crimson Eye. We will meet again." The lead gnome of the three makes a swirling motion with its hand, like it's swirling an invisible goblet of wine.
Fright Check-14, Rule of 13 applies.
Leonard
>> FAILURE by 1
Lordy lord
Michael
Well, it's only technically a failure by 1. Let's roll on the Fright Check results table, 3d6+1, please.
Leonard
>> 3d6+1 … 14
Michael
14, 15 – Lose 1d FP, and take 1d seconds of stunning as per 10.
(You can roll both of those if you like.)
Leonard
>> 1d6 … 3
>> 1d6 … 1
Michael
First of all, Jo is at 8 out of 11 Fatigue Points, which might come into play.
Okay so after that second of automatic stun, Jocasta needs to rally herself out of the stun. That roll is Will minus the original penalty to the Fright Check, which is seven. So basically this means Jo needs to roll Will-12 until she succeeds. Every failed roll is another second of stun.
I'll narrate what happens depending on how long it lasts.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 5
Michael
Okay, so Jo does not end up stunned for longer than a second.
Which means, in the midst of these intense hallucinations, she can look and see and act but with the proviso that she is going to be tripping, thanks to the 18 on the HT roll, for seven hours. (Pasting in the Hallucinating condition below; before every roll you'll need to roll Will-19 to avoid a -5 penalty and instead incur the much more minor -2 to your skill rolls.)
As Jo looks into her hands, she sees the copy of Cosmo from 1907 has also changed into a pulsing red-aura'd vellum scroll. And as she looks back to the garbage bin, she sees a middle-aged-to-elderly three-piece-suit-wearing bespectacled businessman type walking along and finishing a red apple, getting ready to toss its core in the bin. But before he does, he looks down and sees the newspaper in there, makes an impressed "huh, how about that, free newspaper!" face, and grabs the newspaper out of the trash, dropping the apple in there after it. As soon as the newspaper touches the older gent's hands, it stops glowing so urgently and turns back into a newspaper in Jocasta's beleaguered acid-tripping eyes.
Leonard
Jocasta tries to walk straight over to the guy, but with enough quickness that she weaves a little. She's completely out of her head but trying desperately to keep it together.
"Hey. Hey mister. Could, can I have that paper? I'll give you a buck for it." She fishes around in her pocket and briefly wonders where she left her car keys. Or her car.
Michael
Will-19, and then either Diplomacy-12 if you're successful or Diplomacy-9 if you're not.
Leonard
Will-19.
>> SUCCESS by 6
Diplomacy-12.
>> FAILURE by 5
Haaaar Jesus Christ
Michael
"Oh, a whole dollar?" the man says, dripping with sarcasm. "Do I look like the kind of man who needs a dollar from the likes of you? I've likely made a hundred of those, just standing here speaking with you," he says, gesturing at Jo's proffered dollar. The man's energy is off-putting, arrogant, and condescending; it's like a bucket of ice water on Jocasta's unexpected trip: bad, bad vibes. "And net another fifteen cents by being quick to see an opportunity!" He smiles, toting his new-found paper gaily. "Habeas ut nanctu's, as Plautus wrote about wives in his play about the three coins."
"Probably better if I give you a few bucks." While holding the folded-up Chronicle in his left hand, he digs in his right-hand pocket for a few dollars. "Get yourself cleaned up, young lady, a hot meal. My God, scavenging in trash cans in broad daylight, that is no way for a girl as fair as yourself to be spending her days." He "graciously" holds three crumpled dollars in his hand for Jo.
Leonard
Without a second’s hesitation, she’s going to grab at the newspaper and run.
Michael
Grabbing
You can grab something a foe is holding, like a weapon. To do so, you must have an empty hand (but some weapons, such as whips, can also grab). Make an attack using DX or a grappling skill, with the usual penalty to hit the hand (-4). Your opponent defends normally. If you hit, you’ve grabbed hold of your foe’s weapon. On subsequent turns, you may try to wrest it from him. Each attempt is a full-turn maneuver. Roll a Regular Contest of ST. If you win, you take his weapon away. If you lose, you lose your grip on his weapon.
Step 1: Attack So you'll need to make a Will-19 roll again thanks to the acid flashback. A success means you'll use Judo-12, a failure means Judo-9. And he'll get his Dodge.
I should remind you that you now have the blessed compact with Underwater Panther; if you want to invoke Blessed, you can raise your Judo score by 1d. Jo, under this strong influence of acid and in a moment of extremis in her deep field assignment, feels like Underwater Panther is close, reachable, and importantly okay with her channeling him for this task.
Meanwhile, from the bushes, Jo can hear the gnomes giggling.
Leonard
Yeah let’s do this. I been bringing that guy a lot of hands.
Will-19.
>> SUCCESS by 7
Michael
Okay, now you can roll 1d6 to see how much better your Judo gets.
Leonard
>> 1d6 … 4
Michael
Nice, now you can roll against Judo-16. I'll roll Dodge.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 2
Good grief
MutantsMichael
Dodge-5.
>> FAILURE by 9
Jo has a hold on the newspaper. Now to rip it violently out of the old man's hands. Strength vs. Strength. ST-11.
Leonard
>> FAILURE by 2
Michael
>> SUCCESS by 3
Oh my God
All right, so, the commando with Combat Reflexes has initiative in a new round. But I can tell you that by his body language, the old man is bracing to get away from you, crazy slightly-older hippie lady. He's not gonna be able to outrun you, but now there's a dozen or so witnesses watching you fight this man over a discarded newspaper (while high on an acid flashback).
Another attempt to grab it would need to start from scratch with the Judo-16 vs. Dodge roll and then ST vs. ST again.
Leonard
Nah, she’s gonna cut her losses. She’s going to run away to the nearest alley and sit with this insane flashback until she’s on more steady footing. She’s freaked out by these gnomes. Once her head is a little clearer she’ll try to Telesend to Patricia.
What a disaster!
Michael
As Jocasta's heart rate and respiration finally cease spiking in this alleyway two blocks south of the park on Haight Street, she feels the Panther close to her but ebbing away now, having bonded with her as she tried to snatch the drop instructions out of the old man's hand. "You hesitated." Panther licks its chops verrrrrry close to Jocasta's ear. She can feel the tickle of its purr and its whiskers, the heat of its fur, the smell of copper on its breath. "That man should have come to me, blood spilled on the wet earth. He is... fit to be fed to me." Spirit Empathy-16 (not penalized by acid, obviously).
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 6
Michael
Jocasta knows what kind of sacrifices Underwater Panther has gotten used to since their bond was established. In the old stories, of course, it was the shortsighted and greedy whom the Panther drowned and dissolved in its veins, the rivers and lakes. Thieves of copper. Servants of the Thunderbird. In her service, Jo has rendered this as allowing her to sacrifice the selfish, greedy servants and remnants of OZYMANDIAS.
Jo's acid-enhanced connection with Underwater Panther right now tells her that the man who intercepted her dead drop from Cujo is kin to the types of men she's been sending to their watery graves, to feed the Panther.
Jo looks down at the Patricia packet in her hands. It's still a vellum scroll, limned in wine-red light. But the newspaper turned from another magic scroll to a newspaper once the old man touched it. As if his very presence negated, stole the connection between Patricia and Jocasta.
"Capture his face. Remember it." The Underwater Panther's voice fades lower and quieter, leaving for deeper levels of reality. "We will retrieve him when the hunting is better." Jo is alone now, watching young people perambulate on Haight Street at the mouth of the alleyway. No gnomes from Sterling's poem, no Underwater Panther.
Leonard
"I know. I know. I will remember and he will be yours," Jocasta mutters, her head filled with noise and chaos, the bad trip that may be past sins or may be...something else.
"And more like him, I'd guess. But not now, hungry cat. Not today. I can't. I can't. If I don't reach them, I may not..." She drifts off for a moment, trying to clear her brain of the gauze and flak. She's never wanted a joint more in her life.
"I have to get a message to them, or you're going to have to find someone else to feed you."
Michael
"Your... state should help you reach her. She is... she is a dreamer. She lives inside the dream now." Underwater Panther's voice finally dissipates and fades for good, its Blessing leaving Jo's fast-twitch muscle fibers and fine motor skills, turning Jo from huntress to her ordinary self again. Jo feels the effects of the acid more acutely now; here in the alleyway she is free from the liminal spirits that assaulted her senses. The vibrations off of Haight Street at the mouth of the alley feel vital, but somehow tainted, as if the dreams that died here seven years ago have metastasized into a long-suffering civic poison. No dreams live here now, other than dreams of commerce, of a nostalgia reified.
Jocasta uses both Underwater Panther's words, her encounter with Sterling's "crafty gnomes," and most importantly the copy of Cosmopolitan and the xeroxes from Patricia's apartment to establish a new telepathic connection with Patricia.
(The acid and Patty's stuff will give Jo a bonus to Telesend which will mitigate and surpass the spatial and relational distance penalties between the two of you, so you can roll Meditation-18 and then Telesend-17 this time around.)
Leonard
Meditation-18.
>> SUCCESS by 10
Telesend-17.
>> SUCCESS by 9
Michael
(not sure if I got it in me to get into Patty's head tonight, Leonard, but we'll see)
Leonard
[No worries, get to it whenever you want, feel free to play out the staff meeting first. I'll just put in what she's going to communicate.] "Someone took the message at the drop. Someone is closing in, forces bigger than the cops or feds. I'm going to stay at a bench near the post office at Haight and Clayton all night. Tomorrow our ride will come. Tomorrow we will be free. Be ready, Patricia."
After that, she's going to wait an hour or so, make her call to the safe number at URIEL, tell them to have a van ready at 2PM tomorrow, and pop a modafinil. She'll stay up as long as it takes to get another message.
Michael
As she did in her knissomantic ritual of a few nights back, Jocasta is able to make a near-instant remote connection with Patricia on this Thursday afternoon. The acid in Jo's system is responsible for pushing Jocasta into a shared, crimson-tinged, Decadent curtain'd dreamspace to meet with Patricia again, the area of the collective unconscious that Charley would have called the Inner Astral, effortlessly, just as Underwater Panther surmised.
Jo now realizes that in Patricia's presence, as she was on Monday night virtually and on Wednesday afternoon in person, Jo is able to see overlaid on reality as Patricia sees the world, and realizes that during her in-person visit yesterday, Patricia was pushing a shared Empathic vision onto her. It's in this space of Telesending that Jo realizes that Patricia's room of her own, the late Victorian artists' salon as it appears right now, isn't even the small funky hippie flop that Jo had perceived it as during her in-person visit.
It's a closet.
In between the waves of heightened, acid-empowered awareness, Jo can see Patricia's self-image flashing back and forth between revolutionary commando, Decadent goddess of Fancy, and plain old Patty, but Jocasta can see past the superhuman charisma and brain-fogging illusory (am I sure they're illusory?, tripping Jo asks herself) projections that Patricia's traumatic experience in this closet at the hands of Cinque and the SLA and the memetic power of George Sterling's poetry have engendered in her. She's a girl in a closet. Scared, traumatized, but possessing a power unlocked in her by the lies drilled into her by DeFreeze... and by "A Wine of Wizardry." Competing memetics, Jocasta realizes. Patricia believes in many things right now, and it's left her surroundings in flux.
Jocasta's message to Patricia unfurls like a long fiery-red oriflamme banner into Patricia's waking consciousness. "Someone took the message at the drop. Someone is closing in, forces bigger than the cops or feds. I'm going to stay at a bench near the post office at Haight and Clayton all night. Tomorrow our ride will come. Tomorrow we will be free. Be ready, Patricia."
In the shared vision, Patricia smiles. "The note from Cinque and Kahjoh said very much the same thing. Our unit has been gathered and is ready. Your share of the revolutionary expropriation will be yours as soon as we reach Los Angeles... and when my Cosmopolitan is back in my hands. Our cadre will be ready for any forces, political or cosmic, who want to stop our next mission. The stakes are far too grave; we are all ready for death. To die to bring about the new world." Fancy reaches over to a crystal decanter of wine, pouring it into a ruby-studded goblet; underneath this scrim, Patty pours stale tap water from a plastic bottle into a tiny cup.
Jo is immediately tantalized by this mention of a "next mission" during which the SLA are apparently ready to die. Of course yesterday Cinque, Nancy "Fahizah" and Kahjoh were talking about "reigniting the struggle where it all started in '65," but Jocasta senses with Empathy that Patricia is talking about something different: or, perhaps like her overlapping personae of Tania and Fancy, Patricia's vision of the LA Mission includes both political and "cosmic" goals.
Leonard
"The fight is so much greater than you can imagine. I have your magazine, and the only share I require is in the new world we will build. Tell me where to go and we will leave this city and find safety and more," Jocasta says through the channels of her mind. As she sits, pulling her ragged Army coat close around her shoulders, a forgotten scrap of a Bible verse from her youth in the Maids of Athens: "...on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, 'All these things I will give You...'"
She shakes her head, a shiver overcoming her as the adrenaline starts to curdle in her blood.
Michael
"Three vans will be needed for the unit and its materiel," Tania says, slipping into revolutionary commando mode. "The Field Marshal says the terrain of Los Angeles will be easier for us to hide within, as a fish swims in the sea. The Field Marshal says we will be welcomed into the homes of the revolutionary proletariat in Compton or Watts. There are plenty of unused residences there that can act as our new revolutionary headquarters."
"We will meet you at the Bayview Motel in Hunter's Point. Bring the vans in in stages, one every 20 minutes starting under cover of darkness at 11 pm Friday. By midnight our three drivers should be on the road south in a staggered departure pattern so as not to cause suspicion. We will break into three squads of three."
Jo knows Hunter's Point. It is a depressed area in the southeast of San Francisco, dominated by the port and the naval shipyard. It's far far away from the Panhandle and the Haight, but since World War II it is a predominantly Black, redlined neighborhood. Home of a minor Black rebellion back in '66. Similar to Compton and Long Beach down in LA. Cinque seems to think Black populations will keep them safe. On some level, Jo knows he's right.
"You are... you are of course welcome to join us in the struggle in Los Angeles, sister. A new start. What we're planning there is... is wondrous," Patricia says, as her clipped military diction as Tania shifts into the flowery prose-poetry of Fancy. Psychology-19.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 11
Michael
Jocasta is fairly certain that Patricia's identity has fractured under the dual pressures of a) exposure to the memetics in "A Wine of Wizardry," which created her "Fancy" persona, and b) whatever the SLA—and Jo is pretty sure that "SLA" here means "Cinque and Willie Wolfe"—did to her, which has made "Tania," a revolutionary comrade. It seemed at first like Patricia was using "Fancy" to escape from the trauma of the closet and Cinque's brainwashing, but Jo's hunch is that the Sterling memetics have given Patricia a separate agenda, one that pre-dated her kidnapping.
Jocasta assesses that Patricia herself, the curious, intelligent, liberal and open-minded art student/heiress, is still in there somewhere and still comes out occasionally when Patricia affects neither the artistic grandiosity of Fancy or the revolutionary grandiosity of Tania, but those moments are becoming less and less frequent.
Given her ability to push illusions and warp reality in a small space around herself, is Patricia a cheval and Fancy and Tania her loa? Well, that's not something Jo can necessarily confirm or deny. But the evidence—trauma, exposure to powerful memetics and a possible minor reality temblor on Monday—is suggestive.
Leonard
Jocasta takes in as much of this as she can, even as she struggles with the LSD hangover, the strange feelings of empathy she's having at the way her own path and the heiress' have both combined and diverged, and those goddamned gnomes. But, taking her lead from Patricia's shift in demeanor, she snaps into professional soldier mode.
"Understood, sister. I will contact my people immediately and follow your command. I have a safe house in the city should we need it, and access to tools to fight the pig oppressors, but for now, we focus on getting you out of here. The vans will arrive as ordered. I will be in your transport, to make sure you receive your package. Until then, be alert and aware, and remember that true liberation awaits."
She will end the psychic transmission and, after about an hour of observation to make sure she's not being watched too closely, she'll head to a pay phone and call into her URIEL line with the following message.
Three vans, staged in 20-minute intervals starting at 11PM Friday, Bayview Motel, Hunter's Point in the City. Older vehicles, separate routes to LA. Reliable operatives from the commando units to drive -- competent but quiet, select for counterculture appearance if possible. Provide with plausible cover. Not to interfere with SLA personnel unless attacked, and if attacked, maximum force response, no survivors. Concealed surveillance, audio and video if possible, in the vans, and make sure the drivers note drop locations, especially Tania - likely Watts or Compton squats. I will accompany and be dropped at the Reseda location [Jo's still-empty occult bookstore front]. Immediate debrief with M & A. SLA plans major action in Watts. Bring in Martin if available, very important. No further communication until then.
Jocasta hits the streets again, walking towards Golden Gate Park, tired beyond reason and desperate for sleep. Her mind is as fractured as Tania's, and she is nagged by a piercing doubt, ringing like a reference tone in her head, that she has forgotten something crucial, some critical detail that Archie and Marshall need to know. But she can't think straight about it. Once she finds a quiet spot, she takes another tab of LSD to feed the beast inside her, and lets oblivion take her.