The Atlantean Cultural
Mission Plaque

On this site, December 1969, the Republic of Atlantis established under the auspices of the Free City of Yerba Buena (formerly San Francisco) — its first cultural mission to the United States — in honor of all who fell in the Battle of Berkeley. To a new understanding between Atlantis and the youth of America. Venceremos!

Immediately below this inscription was the same or similar commemoration but written in a Greek-looking alphabet that is presumed to be “Atlantean.”

At Marshall’s direction, Roger and Jo removed the plaque from the Hotel. Jo later delivered it to Livermore, along with Andrew Krane.

Physically installed into the edifice of a structure (maximum ground-level square footage equal to the ground floor of the old building of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco), the Plaque provides everyone inside the building with 4 points of an “omni-appropriate” Savoir-Faire skill. These recipients/users of Savoir-Faire will not experience any of the usual penalties to Savoir-Faire as a skill (for instance, from Low Empathy, Clueless, Oblivious, etc.). For instance, if an IQ-14 individual is speaking with someone from High Society inside the building, they will become conversant in the practices of the upper classes and have an effective Savoir Faire (High Society)-16 skill.

The spirit of the Atlantean Cultural Mission is not without its drawbacks; the Mission is a place of confrontation with Atlantis’s American opposition, and thus not only do recipients of the Savoir-Faire not have the ability to use it as an Influence roll, individuals who evoke the Mission’s power will find themselves treating anyone they use the power on as a suspicious enemy, functionally a half-strength version of Paranoia for 1d hours while inside the building (most people react to them at -1, they react at -2 to strangers and anyone they might have a Reaction penalty against will be at 1.5x the usual Reaction penalty).

Specific Study (both this and the RFK ‘72 Posters): Charley can see clearly the origin of these posters; they come from Earth-Krane. A group of clean-cut young Kennedy boosters, real go-getters, received the poster design from the President's re-election campaign, the Team to Re-Elect Kennedy (TREK), and ran off a bunch of these posters in October '72 to aid the prospects of the President in what the *less* clean-cut kids in town still called "Occupied Yerba Buena" (San Francisco). As hinted at by Stoney, northern California was a real battleground in the years following Atlantis's rebirth: not only political, but military. By Election Day 1972, the city of San Francisco had been "liberated" by U.S. forces, but even with the support of the tradition city fathers in business and finance and MARPA settling in for a lengthy counterinsurgency, it's clear these posters did not curry favor with the Atlantis-aligned magical youth of the Bay Area.

But among the "silent majority" of San Franciscans, those who believed that the Atlanteans went WAY too far in overthrowing American cultural norms during their roughly two-year occupation of "Yerba Buena" after the Battle of Berkeley—the paganism, the outré sex and psychedelic drugs, the psychic hive-mind orientation activities, the teaching of magic to everyone willing to join the Atlantean movement—these posters were a sign of hope. Of normality returning to everyday life. Of RFK's exceptional ability to balance the new reality of magic being in Americans' lives again while not interfering with other esteemed American traditions: traditions like democracy, capitalism, private property, and so forth. This is why the messages on the posters received and stored such intense belief energy, energy that enables users of the posters to "consume" them and gain skills in realpolitik, in persuasion, in American magic. Just one of the ways mass production met thaumaturgy in Robert Kennedy's/Sebastian Stone's America. Is it against the spirit of free democracy? Maybe a little, but hey, '72 was a close one in California, with the vote being split almost perfectly in thirds between RFK, Republican Robert Taft Jr. (strong in Orange County and Silicon Valley), and third-party People's/Venceremos Party candidate and Atlantean stalking-horse Jane Fonda (who turned 35 right before Inauguration Day on the winter solstice of '72, qualifiying her for President!) and her VP candidate Benjamin Spock. Every little bit of magical oomph helps.

The energies around the plaque, however, are very different from that of the posters. This was placed on the St. Francis when Atlanteans took over the building and made it into a cultural embassy, and so it's overlaid with bespoke Atlantean magic rather than American mass-produced magic. The plaque allowed for peaceful exchange of ideas and philosophies within the walls of Earth-Krane's St. Francis building, but much like cultural exchange with the Soviet Union or communist bloc in our timeline, the people inside the building will remain fundamentally wary of anyone with an agenda truly opposed to their own. Essentially the plaque allows for visitors to be tested for their loyalties, allowing Atlantis to recruit the likely and weed out the wary.

The posters and the plaque do still contain a minor, dirty tinge of History B; after all, Rich and Carl were given the keys to Earth-Krane thanks to Anunnaki glyphics used with the particle accelerator, and theoretically it was the reality temblor that retrocreated these objects before the temblor actually happened on Friday, June 29 at 11:15 am. And Charley wonders after spending so much time with these objects, if it's a case of again of some force among the Anunnaki sliding these objects into existence—one (batch) American, one Atlantean—to show how magic, no matter the source, can be tainted by Anunnaki efforts. Sadly that's all the Specific Study gives her on both of these.