The Field Team Digs Deeper
Michael
Field team discussing Agrigenics infiltration and Bernadette Fry tailing. I also want this thread to be available for any Agrigenics library research we might need to do: on Bernadette or Butler or hell, even the meditation pod.
Jeff
I guess we want to start by pulling or compiling dossiers on these names, esp Bernie.
But that's not Mitch's area of expertise.
So, time to Oracle. He'll go to the cafeteria and get one of each kind of little box of cereal they have there, then bring them back to the office and empty them into a single large bowl/bin/container, then close his eyes and stick his hand in and swirl it around, then pull out a big loose handful of mixed cereal, and dribble it out in a loose mandala on the desk in front of him, and he'll try to read that for signs and portents w/r/t this meditative brunette and who she is and what's behind her. Mitch wasn't expecting to be detected while Shasta-viewing, at all, and that's got him mildly spooked.
Michael
Interesting! Okay, I will do a set of Oracle rolls and get back to you with a cereal spread and interpretation sometime today. In the meantime, if anyone wanted to do more mundane Research on Bernadette and Butler, I will await a roll from someone (er, it's probably gonna be Jo). But I will also re-iterate the Bernadette records we got from SANDMAN sometime today as well. Should also remind Charley and Roger if they want to Renshaw new skills for the week, Monday after meetings would be a good time to do that. I figure the surveillance and field work will get started on Tuesday.
Mel
Charley approaches Jocasta about coming along. She’s under the impression Jo is going solo (she was unusually distracted during the meeting). “Ah Jo, I’d like to go with you. I’d like to see what I can find out about the B’s in the astral plane. I think it could be really helpful and I’d like the practice.”
(Anyone around can hear this conversation.)
Then adds. “ I won’t get in the way. I’ll just be asleep in your car.”
Leonard
Jocasta will start by going the boring route: some standard research on Dan, Chris Butler, Bernadette, and any of the other higher-ups at Agrigenics, particularly anyone she might be likely to encounter in her infiltration cover (about which see below). She'll also see if she can find out anything about their security, if there are blueprints of the building publicly available, and if Mitch has any insight about the layout or the physical or psychic nature of the place from his previous scrying attempt.
Second, she'll tell Charley she's totally on board with her coming along as long as she's safe and supervised in the car. She thinks it's a great idea to have her practice her astral perception, and she'll add that first, she wants Charley to seriously consider her offer to help guide her through this new aspect of her development and second, she's never in the way and is the equal of anyone on the team.
Third, she'll put heads together with the rest of the team about coordinating our efforts as much as possible: what we already know, what specifically we're looking for and hope to get out of the infiltration and surveillance, what she plans to do inside and how we can pull out if anything goes wrong, and what equipment we need to load for the mission. (She'll also mention, as a non-specific aside, that if they ever meet someone who might be a useful contact or a potential major actor in one of our missions, and she's not there, to palm something personal of theirs so she can do a psychometric read without having to be there.)
Finally, she'll plan her specific approach: a guided meditation the night before, aided by a good strong dose of LSD, followed by a session of knissomancy to see if fate reveals anything she should look out for. The next day, clean and fresh, we engineer whatever distraction for Bernadette that will keep her out of the office for enough time to get in there. She'll load up with some emergency supplies (walkie-talkie, ikoter, some kind of non-lethal weapon as well as a gun, maybe glyphs) and go in under her Mary Smith cover. A well-off, educated housewife with a rich defense-contractor husband who's done a lot of work overseas — who better to be involved in the kind of NGOs who might want to draw on the expertise of the kind of person who works for Agrigenics? She'll try to talk to a higher-up, possibly using an Empathy boost, someone in business development, and say hey, we're not headhunting, we don't want to steal your people away, we're just trying to find out what you're working on and who your most capable people are to help us out by maybe doing some side consulting for the NGO I work with, that does genetic modification of crops to provide nourishment in extreme weather conditions. Hopefully that will lead to Bernadette or someone similar, and if so, she'll try to see their files and get ahold of anything personal, even if it's a pencil or a business card or something else they touched, for a psychometric read. She won't try to break away and snoop, but she'll get the layout of the place if possible, do a tactical/strategic analysis, and see if there's any obvious weird vibes in the place. Otherwise she'll just be opportunistic, grab anything that seems to put out the right vibe, and see herself out, leaving a contact number that's just her phone at Livermore.
Depending on how the action goes, she might suggest later black-bagging someone for her or Marshall to use a Mind Probe on.
Michael
Leonard, might as well give me a Research-14 roll now and we'll see how much info Jo can dig up.
Leonard
>>>> SUCCESS by 3
Michael
Further research on Bernadette Fry:
As mentioned in the video session the other night, she's 25 years of age. She graduated from Berkeley in 1969 with a degree in sociology. No criminal or arrest record. Her tax records indicate that the past fourteen months she has received a (handsome) paycheck from Agrigenics, Inc. Her address is 1031 West A Street in Dixon, which by the town plans looks like the oldest part of town: lots of rambling Victorians. Now that Jocasta has a handle on her address and her undergraduate career, a lot more opens up to her this time around.
The address: Tax records show that four other individuals live at 1031 West A and have their names on the property: all between the ages of 21 and 26, all male, all also have paychecks (most of them much less handsomely compensated than Miss Fry's) from Agrigenics. Jo's instincts, before she even looks up these other individuals, is that these five kids are the core of "Beale Farms," such as it was before it was obtained by Agrigenics. And as she uses Social Security numbers to track down draft and educational records for these other four tenants of Bernadette's house, she finds William Andrews, 26, a marketing graduate from UC Davis; Thaddeus Markham, 23, an agricultural sciences graduate from UC Davis; Ross Evert, 22, a chemistry major from UC Berkeley; and Stephen Chun, 21, a biological sciences major from UC Davis. Again, no legal problems, no protest records, all duly registered with Selective Service. William Andrews also has a law degree from USF and has passed the California bar.
The incorporation records for Beale Farms also finally came back from Sacramento: they date back to spring of '72 and have everyone but Chun's names on them. Beale Farms became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Agrigenics in November of 1972.
Marshall had also asked Jo to track down who owns the old Beale ranch: it's Bernadette again. She paid cash for the land back in January of '72. She's the only one on that deed.
When Jo looks for records of Bernadette as an undergraduate she finds one in the microfiche of the Berkeley student paper: a quote from her on humanities and social science student reactions to the release of Stanford University's Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb in May 1968. "Says Junior Bernadette Fry, Sociology '69, 'These are warnings we need to take deadly seriously. There is no way that our current level of waste and gluttony and energy expenditure is acceptable; the minute the rest of the world adopts American lifestyles, life on our planet will cease to exist in any meaningful way.'"
Further research on the Agrigenics building:
Even using our usual law enforcement cut-out channels to find out about the layout and plans for the Agrigenics building, we've not gotten anything back from Vacaville's city hall yet. Partly this could be because it's a small town with at this point only a paucity of big business HQs and other commercial enterprises on its outskirts near the highway... but Jo's feelers are tingling, and she thinks that whatever plans she gets are gonna be bowdlerized. Agrigenics is a big player in Vacaville, it hires hundreds and has brought revenue into town; Jo guesses the town does whatever they say, and if they say "make the building plans hard for other municipal agencies to find," well, they'll probably do it.
Mitch's description of the building's basement level and its pod (and the lobby), of course, is a fertile source of intelligence; clearly Agrigenics is using closed-circuit TV cameras and live guards watching those monitors to keep an eye on the approaches to their property. The pod, well, I'm gonna say that Jo does find the article about the McDonald's pod (in game-inspiration) and how it was very popular with businesses in '71 and '72: Pulgram and his Associated Space Design in Atlanta ended up designing a few more identical meditation pod systems for businesses across the country, especially in California.
Not much more on Butler than what Jo found out here:
So trying to find any info on Bernadette in the trade mags comes up empty, but it's pretty clear that the "Butler" mentioned by Marshall is one Christopher Butler, head of public relations at Agrigenics since at least 1970. He appears in a couple of the articles Jo referred to over the past couple of days giving a quote here and there about Agrigenics's domestic plans now that their good works in the Third World are more on the back burner. One interesting quote from 1971: "There is no reason why Americans cannot share in the bounty we've provided to struggling developing nations. These advancements will serve all of mankind in the years to come. American farmers deserve the very best technology, whether that's tractors and fertilizers or seeds and hybrids. We'll be here for them."
Typical PR flack type stuff.
Tax records show he gets paid damn well, more than Bernadette but not by much.
Leonard, let me know if there are gaps or areas of further interest you want to prod at.
So, time to Oracle. He'll go to the cafeteria and get one of each kind of little box of cereal they have there, then bring them back to the office and empty them into a single large bowl/bin/container, then close his eyes and stick his hand in and swirl it around, then pull out a big loose handful of mixed cereal, and dribble it out in a loose mandala on the desk in front of him, and he'll try to read that for signs and portents w/r/t this meditative brunette and who she is and what's behind her. Mitch wasn't expecting to be detected while Shasta-viewing, at all, and that's got him mildly spooked.
Mitch goes to the Livermore cafeteria's collection of tiny cereal boxes and buys seven or eight different varieties of them, and heads back to the URIEL offices to mix and read them.
Mitch ponders Bernadette's power as the cereal pours forth from his hand (I will show you fear in a handful of oats) and settles into a pattern. An orange star marshmallow from a box of Lucky Charms sits there, the only said marshmallow Charm to be included in this random handful of cereal. Mitch intuitively centers in on this as representing Bernadette. Surrounding her is a nimbus made of a handful of Sugar Smacks and Apple Jacks: the sugary cereals she's helping to market at Beale/Agrigenics, perhaps? And then, stretching back to the right in a very conspicuous line are a bunch of pebbly Grape Nuts and Total flakes: healthy cereals are, like, trying to get away from her, like a column of ants? Maybe not: that vague trail of cereal leads right to an "X" shaped piece of oat cereal from Lucky Charms, accompanied by a conspicuously grid-like set of Fruity Pebbles. There's also a Lucky Charms "bell" nearby. It looks like a farm, or maybe that's just the Tasty Acres imagery lodged in Mitch's brain. Are the healthy cereals leading back to the Beale Downer ranch? If that's the case, what does it mean that Bernadette is part of this company's efforts to market corn syrup to the kiddies (the Jacks and Smacks) while being connected to Beale Downer's health cult (the Nuts and Flakes) from 80 years ago? Mitch could probably wager a few guesses but since he was specifically pondering Bernadette's "power" when he performed this Oracle, it's clear that whatever she might know how to do, it's all thanks to Beale Downer. That's why her little company was/is named after him.
Bill
Roger prep: he’ll keep the Biology rench for now; could still come in handy on a farm. He would like to establish basic cover as an utility worker, including looking up power lines and transformers for Vacaville. He’s thinking after the tail of Fry to work, maybe he goes back, creates a minor power brownout, then has an excuse to be driving around in a van, checking on people’s houses.
Michael
a guided meditation the night before, aided by a good strong dose of LSD, followed by a session of knissomancy to see if fate reveals anything she should look out for.
In meditating, Jocasta takes all the information she's gleaned so far and once she clears her mind and gets into a calm, meditative state, the "energies" of this mission do seem to coalesce around Bernadette. But Jo goes a little deeper into herself, and realizes this woman—this girl, Jocasta thinks despite herself, pondering their nearly 10-year age gap—is being offered something by all these weird machinations. The college education in sociology, her beliefs (whatever they may end up precisely being), starting a health food company and then selling out to a giant corporation, having four men working with her or maybe even for her? Bernadette (and Jo in her meditation) feels power. The power of reach, the power to put a glyph on a breakfast cereal box and encourage the little brats to eat up, the power to make connections with a cult dead for more than a half-century. Jocasta slowly emerges from the meditation into the acid trip—bad vibes abound now, but also a heightened sense of Empathy, an Empathy without even having met Bernadette, that unnerves Jo.
The incense floats up from the stick (Jocasta tried to stay away from incense cones to not mix up the vibes of this reading with Mount Shasta) and an entire side of the incense stick, the one on top as it rests near-horizontally in the incense holder, burns rapidly. Little individual wisps, equal in size and volume, drift up from the top of the stick. The Three Collated Libomancy Texts say that equal drifts of incense mean "equal weapons"; for the Sumerian god-kings of old, this was a sign from their seers that an upcoming battle will be evenly matched, and Jocasta accepts that analysis given what happened to Mitch with Bernadette in the meditation pod: Mitch offered an offensive, Bernadette offered an equal and opposite counter-offensive. But Jo also thinks the configuration of wisps suggests a forest, a grove, a series of fields of growing crops all alike. Sure, a metaphor for Agrigenics' business but also a warning not to focus on Bernadette exclusively. Agrigenics itself is bad enough, full of greedy, shortsighted people with a different kind of power to Bernadette, but power nonetheless. Do not miss the forest for the trees, it seems to be clearly saying as the piney sharp rosemary-infused incense drifts up to Jo's LSD-enhanced olfactory senses. It's a scary forest, and there is danger around every burrow and copse. Jo should not expect to find many friendly faces within Agrigenics or Beale Farms for that matter.
Roger prep: he’ll keep the Biology rench for now; could still come in handy on a farm. He would like to establish basic cover as an utility worker, including looking up power lines and transformers for Vacaville. He’s thinking after the tail of Fry to work, maybe he goes back, creates a minor power brownout, then has an excuse to be driving around in a van, checking on people’s houses. (edited)
Bill, if you want to roll Patron-15 to see if you can get the cover materials done overnight, that would be great.
Bill
>>>> SUCCESS by 4
Mel
Charley asks a question to the group. “Do you think it’s possible to affect the physical plane from the Astral ? You know like a ghost does?”
Jeff
"Sure, why not? If a ghost can do it, why not?"
Brant
"Perhaps," Marshall says. When did he get here? "The Vedas and the Upanishads speak of innumerable planes of existence. Svargam and narakam — heaven and hell, roughly translated, though of course neither place is really like the heaven and hell that Christians believe in — and in the Scripture of the Account of the World, it says:
There are 8,000 continents surrounding the four continents of Earth. There is, moreover, a great sea surrounding those 8,000 continents. There is, moreover, a great diamond mountain range encircling that great sea. Beyond this great diamond mountain range is yet another great diamond mountain range. And between the two mountain ranges lies darkness. The sun and moon in the divine sky with their great power are unable to reach that darkness with their light. In that space between the two diamond mountain ranges there are eight major hells. Along with each major hell are sixteen smaller hells.
These planes are home to the gods and spirits — the daeva-lords, demons and others. Of course, most academics believe these stories are just cobbled together folk tales from time immemorial, syncretized into the teachings of the Buddha and the Vedas before Him. But all the stories agree that the daeva and their ilk can reach through — into — our plane, the material plane, jagat. Can a person do the same?" Marshall asks, rolling one of his mala bead necklaces in his hand. "Maybe. 'You are the mind that projects the world,' after all."
Mel
Charley nods in agreement to Mitch’s assessment. And Marshall we’ll his response left her floored. All she can muster in response is “Oh.” Then adds, “Any ideas of what to rench to help me learn to do that?”
Brant
“Can you meditate?”
Michael
(The possibility of Charley inadvertently following in the footsteps of Houdini in trying to learn how to disembody herself and Charley lampshading that by saying "like a ghost does" is pretty neat. )
So the plan, as Jo's laid out is
we're going to engineer a distraction to keep Bernadette away from Agrigenics long enough for Jo to get into the building without being noticed and
Jo will head into Agrigenics under her Mary Smith cover to talk to someone about consulting on the project of a fictitious Third World agriculture NGO and while inside try to gather intel using Empathy, access to Agrigenics files either overt or covert, and just plain eyeball detective work on the inside: soak up some vibes.
In the meantime, Charley wants to check out the Astral Plane near Bernadette (and Butler) if possible. Roger is all set with a Solano County lineman cover and vehicle, and Mitch is going to be there for support of Charley's projection/using his own skills and powers/being our ELINT guy (bugs, shotgun mikes, etc.).
So here's my suggestion. The team uses Tuesday purely for surveillance, specifically around Bernadette's routine with work: to find out when she leaves for work, what's happening at the house on A Street in Dixon (especially around her other presumed Beale Farms comrades), what route she takes to Vacaville, where she parks at Agrigenics, etc. etc. The highway rest stop would make a good long-range recon spot given how exposed the land is around Agrigenics: we'd use high-powered magnifiers instead of Mitch's remove viewing this time. The surveillance in Dixon will likely be a little dicier given how it's a small town; using the Solano County lineman van here for protective coloring will be essential. We could do a split here, with one set of folks keeping eyes on the house in Dixon and another on the Agrigenics HQ. (This also gives Charley the chance to Rench three full new skills at 4 points each over the course of Monday and Tuesday if she wants, and more time in general for prep.) Boring work, but a good foundation for the next bit...
So then on Wednesday depending on what that reveals, we take things to the next level: Jocasta infiltrates Agrigenics, Charley goes Astral, Roger uses his cover to black-bag and/or bug (if possible) the house on A Street in Dixon, etc. etc.
Bill
The Tuesday surveillance plan sounds good to the oft cautious Roger. He might take the opportunity to execute on the Dixon A Street and environs brown-out on Tuesday, leading to van sittings being justified, so he could settle into driving around and spying on the house from telephone poles.
Note: the brown-out plan is just a minor power flicker, with any interference immediately undone. Hopefully nothing PG&E would deeply investigate other than a quick check at the local transformer.
Leonard
Jocasta will suggest she not go with Roger to surveil Bernadette's house, on the off chance that Agrigenics has in-house cameras or something and she happens to spot Jo and put two and two together — unlikely, I know, but paranoia safety first. She agrees surveilling it is a good idea, though. She'll again mention that if the chance arises, she'd like to get a personal item of Bernadette's. She'd be happy to scout around Beale Farms or Agrigenics while he's busy with that. She will also share the results of her oracular vision, specifically emphasizing that (a) Bernadette is a powerful opponent we shouldn't underestimate, but also (b) Agrigenics generally is full of enemies and evils, and we're probably going to encounter strong resistance at every turn. (She considers mentioning that she feels a strong sense of empathy with Bernadette, but decides not to...for now.)
Mitch
It all seems reasonable.
We could break in to the A Street house during the day while nobody's home, plant some bugs, steal Bernie's hairbrush. Mitch could maybe Shasta-vision in and recon first if that's help (not sure it would, but it seems a safer remote-view target than Agrigenics HQ).
Michael
Okay, so Tuesday is:
Roger and Mitch to Dixon: doing a local Dixon-area brown-out (easy to justify in the dog days of summer), surveillance and B&E of A Street.
Jocasta to the site of the Downer Ranch and to Agrigenics doing surveillance and maybe Psychometry at one of the old ruined Downer Ranch buildings? Jo will by necessity be a bit more mobile on Tuesday so if she wants a cover vehicle, take one from the pool (Patron-15).
Charley can rench three new skills over late Monday and Tuesday (she already has Meditation as Uncle Marshall had suggested), so it's up to Mel what she wants to rench. Definitely let me know if you want to talk that over, Mel.
Mel
With Meditation (blending what she learns with the sonics). Astral Projection and Karate.
Michael
So Charley actually has Meditation already! And Astral Projection isn't something they'd have as a rench filmstrip. But let me propose these alternatives.
For Meditation, you take Dreaming. You don't have it yet as a skill, it could come in handy on the Astral, and, I mean, this is a skill that's quasi-paranormal that I could see SANDMAN training people in using high-speed learning. Lucid dreaming techniques, esoteric Freudian psychology, etc.
For Astral Projection, take Theology (Hinduism), between Marshall's little lecture and the origins of astral projection in Hindu tradition, this would act as a good skill to have in the Astral, I think. It covers, for instance, "cosmology." You are a yogi!
We're keeping Karate, though. That's amazing.
(A yogi who can project her mind only with the use of synthesized subsonics in a pair of top-quality headphones but hey, no one's perfect)
Mel
Perfect!
Michael
Cool, our yogi is outfitted now for the Wednesday surveillance and infiltration.
REN-SLOT_01: Dreaming-15
REN-SLOT_02: Theology (Hinduism)-15
REN-SLOT_03: Karate-13
lol, this seven-year-old might be able to knock a grown man unconscious with a chop, I fucking LOVE it, thank you Samuel Renshaw
Fun fact, "Karate Kid" debuted as a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes in the July, 1966 issue of Adventure Comics, which was likely on newsstands in May 1966, the month Charley was born.