“A Ride in the Rolls”
Michael
As the party of fourteen assembles outside in the SRI parking lot, the two hired cars drive up and Dave opens the door and ushers Shipi, Hannah, and Puharich into the Caddy. Roger, at the wheel of the Rolls, does the same for the Rolls. Meanwhile, SCANATE minus Mitch gets into Pat's big-ass car, as Hal's sportscar is too small for five and Russ drives a motorcycle. Before he gets into the driver's seat, Pat calls out to Mitch with a broad ironic grin on his face, "I gotta be my own chauffeur and the new kid gets to ride in the Rolls, huh?" Mary-Lynn gives a little wave "goodbye/see you there" to Mitch as Uri gets into the bugged Rolls with URIEL.
Brant
OK, once they’re on the road Marshall will give Jocasta the wink, her cue to give Uri the read, and simultaneously start talking to sort of distract him. “So, Uri — where’d you learn it? Just come naturally or did you have a mentor?”
Leonard
Jocasta will reach her hand out to shake Uri's while introducing herself. She'll try to trigger the psychometric read as soon as he makes contact.
Michael
Okay, just to make this a little more exciting, I'm going to have Leonard make the Psychometry roll for Jocasta, IQ-14. Keep in mind that what looks like a "success" on the dice may not work because of time penalties.
And I'm assuming Jeff will have his Detect and Aura Reading up for this scene as well?
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 3
Jeff
And I'm assuming Jeff will have his Detect and Aura Reading up for this scene as well?
Sure
Detect first
>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 4
>> DETECT … SUCCESS by 1
>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 1
Aura sight second
>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 9
>> DETECT … CRITICAL FAILURE
>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 4
Dang, crit fail on activating aura sight
Take a breath, try again
>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 1
>> DETECT … SUCCESS by 6
>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 4
Squeaked in on the second try (if I get a second try after a crit fail? I know I get this rule wrong more often than I get it right and I'm away from my books).
Michael
Dang, crit fail on activating aura sight
This is from GURPS Psionic Powers, which is the system we've been using for this campaign so far:
So Jeff, first give me a Will-16 roll to resolve the critical failure on Aura Reading and I think this set of circumstances ("the GM should find some special consequence to seriously inconvenience the psi") also makes a good time to give Mitch a new Corruption roll to see if he gains a new Disadvantage from Corruption. That roll would be Will minus (Corruption/10, round down) or Will-12. If you fail, you'll gain a one-point I-have-become-unto-the-Anunnaki-style Disadvantage-Quirk related to either Aura Reading, Uri Geller, or the Comte, or something related to any of the three. I figure the Comte stuff plus the overall ambient pressure makes for a good excuse for all this narratively!
Jeff
Will-16
>> SUCCESS by 8
Will-12
>> SUCCESS by 1
All right so Mitch gets a bad headache and sees spots, probably due to Uri Geller's evil magic
Michael
OK, once they’re on the road Marshall will give Jocasta the wink, her cue to give Uri the read, and simultaneously start talking to sort of distract him. “So, Uri — where’d you learn it? Just come naturally or did you have a mentor?”
Uri, a bit discomfited at the circumstances but still very very game to display his trademark performers' sangfroid in the face of a possible CIA interrogation, smirks at Marshall. "I, er, discovered it in my early teens. I was living in Cyprus, my mother had remarried a, uh, hôtelier, it was the first time in my life I was away from Israel. No one spoke Hebrew in Cyprus, of course, so my mother enrolled me in an English school. With the sons and daughters of diplomats and oil executives and military types, Brits left over after the end of the colony, you know.
In Jocasta's mind in the aftermath of the long-awaited handshake with Uri, a panoply of memories hits her, difficult for her subconscious, which usually does the job of selecting the single most important memory or emotional impression, to process. Uri's subconscious, for a putative psychic, is remarkably open to her psychometric reading—but Jo can only see back a few years. But that few years is a flurry of joy and pleasure and pride at his fame and success. Meeting Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, being on international television, all of the trips and successes on stages and in back rooms of power. But for most of those three years, always present is Andrija, directing Uri, pushing him, telling him that the ancient astronauts bestowed this power upon him and as such he has to help Andrija get the word out about them. Uri respects Andrija's belief in him but finds all this UFO stuff to be a harmless humbug; he humors Andrija.
Uri continues. "So there are many Greeks and many Turks there too, ordinary people who you must speak with on a daily basis at the newsstand or the barber or hotel supplier or what have you. So I begin learning all these languages all at once, just an assault of vocabulary and grammar, and I begin to... sense what is common behind it all. Greek and English and Turkish and a little bit of French and Arabic maybe here and there... and I find as I soak all this up like a sponge that my words... they end up having more power, if I concentrate. If I can get the rhythms right, the right word at the precise right moment, you know. Say to people what they want to hear but also when they want to hear it. I'm already enthused with stage magic, you know, and I find if I narrate what I say with this conviction and power, it becomes true in the audience's eyes."
Jo hears Uri's words explaining this, and even though Uri's childhood and adolescence is beyond the sight of her Psychometry, it feels like he is telling the truth, like all this happened without his knowing. But he's hiding something. Something that happened, that lurks over this tale of linguistic development, in his early early childhood. Something that's hidden even to Uri, deep in his most buried childhood memories. Jo can sense the residue of it from the handshake. Uri is in denial about it to even himself.
"Some have said Hebrew is the common matrix of all languages, of course. Medieval scholars, esotericists, Emperor Frederick's and King James IV of Scotland's experiments with the feral children, maybe you've heard of it," Uri says coolly. "If that were the case, every damned Sabra raised on Hebrew would have abilities like me and there would be no war, you know? We would just tell the Arabs to lay down their arms and they would!" Uri laughs, a little comfortably.
Leonard
Jocasta will give him a perfunctory smile, but say nothing. [Unless he's working some NLP juju on her and she needs to roll to resist, or something.] Once she's gotten as much out of the read as she can, she'll let go his hand and settle back, putting an ordinary amount of interest up towards his stories. But she'll make sure she gives Marshall an affirming nod and hold his eyes for a few moments, to communicate that the job is done and there's something to be discussed.
Brant
"That's a rare way of coming to it. What about the tricks with the spoons? Self-taught, or did someone show you how it was done?" Starting now, Marshall is going to — as subtly as possible — start attempting to lull Uri into a hypnotic state using NLP. He's going to keep asking questions, that is, using the questions as the medium for delivering the hypnotic payload.
Michael
(Cool, let me check what order we do these rolls in in the MD book)
Okay, it's Hypnotism first, Enthrallment skills later, but thanks to a bunch of circumstantial modifiers, Marshall's working with a big Effective Skill here. Base skill is 18, but thanks to your having researched and profiled him, it's another +2, and I'll also be assessing... some other bonuses I won't get into the specifics of. So you're rolling against at least Hypnotism-20 here.
And I roll Will+5. Corruption is of course available to you if you wish.
Brant
I think I'll make the roll without Corruption first, because I imagine — overrule me if I'm wrong — that if I sense things aren't working or whatever, I can keep trying and start ramping up the pressure using Corruption?
Michael
I think I've done Corruption spends both ways this game (fortune-in-the-middle/fortune-at-the-end) and the Corruption theme narratively works either way, so yeah, you can pile on Corruption after the fact if you like.
Brant
OK!
>> SUCCESS by 8
So success by at least 8.
Michael
Uri chuckles and interjects, "Oh doctor, you must realize that due to my abilities I am immune to attempts to hypnotize me. Andrija discovered this, all the scientists and parapsychologists who have tried have failed utterly," but as he says this, Marshall takes control of the conversation back from Uri, sensing Uri's resistance aided by his own skill at NLP, and keeps asking the questions in the rhythm that years of POW interrogations for Phoenix trained him to do, specifically homing in on Uri's skill with the spoons, and after a few repetitions of the word spoon, Uri gladly gives Marshall a précis of how he accomplishes the tricks through a mix of NLP, sleight-of-hand, substitutions, and intriguingly structurally-warped "plant" spoons provided by Andrija. Uri Geller is now hypnotized. But it was a close-run thing.
Brant
Marshall wraps an arm around Uri's shoulder. He lowers his voice. "Why the show? Why put on this act with the psychic powers, the UFOs, all that?"
Michael
A sweat breaks out on Uri's brow. He is definitely in trance but Marshall can tell Uri is currently dealing with his own blocks, his own closed-off portions of his mind.
"Andrija," Uri smiles (or grimaces), "he insists upon it. You should see this book he is writing about me, absolute nonsense. And yet, deep down … " Uri slowly brings his right hand to his heart. "Deep down, I too believe. Not that I have been made a psychic thanks to a superhuman alien computer intelligence named Hoova that wants mankind to join together as a species, for us to destroy our machines of war, and join the galactic community. This is rubbish. But that … something more is out there. Something we cannot touch. It is God, the Elohim, the higher presence, the brotherhood of man, whatever. I seek it, and as mad as Andrija seems, I do believe he is the key. He has done so much for me, he has given me so much fame, so much money. But I feel he holds secrets from me and Shipi."
Brant
"What do you know of Andrija? About him?"
Michael
"He has traveled the world looking for people like me the past 20 years. I assume, due to his background in medicine and his familiarity with intelligence methods, that he is or was CIA. He is the one who got publicity for D.G. Vinod in the Fifties, and the faith healer: the Brazilian psychic surgeon Arigó, the Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos … he … collects us, like the man who pins butterflies behind glass. Looking for the real thing for … the U.S. government? But it is publicity, the key to his life the past 20 years, he only wishes to get these people like us into the newspapers and the metaphysical periodicals and television and into the research institutes, like with Rhine at Duke and SRI. He has money. He has … connections. And he is a clever inventor. I do not know what his final agenda is. He seems to believe, sincerely. Perhaps that is all. He believes and he wants others to believe."
Brant
"Why the device in your tooth, Uri?"
Michael
"The one thing we needed help with from Andrija was the remote viewing. I could get … hints of what was sealed in the envelopes from watching them scribble or using my words to nudge them into revealing it, or having Shipi watch or cold-read the people who put the drawings into the envelopes, but in the end, the results were not impressive. I could barely match Ingo. So Andrija said, "Look. I have this prototype, transmitter-receiver, it is on a private frequency that travels through buildings extremely well, and it can be sensed by only you, you can use Morse code or feel the vibrations of the receiver in your skull. And so, with this, even when I am locked up in a Faraday cage or not anywhere near the people filling the envelopes, all I need is Andrija or Shipi having a bit of a peek, they will transmit what is inside to me very simply, and I know what they are drawing. It is … just another weapon in my arsenal." Despite this clear explanation, Marshall can tell Uri feels bad about this trickery. The NLP and legerdemain he feels like is his own skill, but this … this never would've happened without Andrija.
Brant
"Sleep now. When you hear me snap my fingers, you will wake up."
Michael
Uri nods off in trance, ready to be woken or further programmed. He'll easily be asleep for the rest of the Friday rush hour car ride into town.
Brant
"OK. My plan was to program him into forgetting how to do his tricks. That should, you know, neutralize whatever threat it is that he seems to pose. But Jocasta — what did you glean from him?" He pats himself down. "Anyone have a smoke I could borrow?"
Jeff
Mitch passes Marshall a cig. "He's resilient," he warns. "Don't underestimate his ability to bounce back."
Brant
Marshall takes it and lights it with the car lighter. He nods in agreement to Mitch's statement but says nothing.
Leonard
Jocasta lights her own and breaks down her vision. "He's having a great time," she adds. "Really enjoying himself, this one. It's … not a counter-indication that he's up to something sinister, but you usually don't get that from people involved in intelligence work. This is all kind of a lark to him."
She pauses and takes a long drag. "He's remarkably unguarded, and most of what he said to you, he really believes," she continues. "All I got about Puharich is that he really likes the guy and that he's going along with some of his wilder notions to keep him engaged. There's something else; his recent memories were an open book, but there's something farther back he's built barriers around, consciously or not. Maybe some kind of childhood trauma. But I couldn't get the shape of it."
Brant
"I got the same impression. There's something there, but it is too risky for me to make a run at it right now. I don't want to stumble over some tripwire and, well, you know. I'm going to bring him back up and see what I can do about his spoon-bending. All eyes on Andrija tonight, it would seem."
Marshall will whisper in Uri's ear: "Uri, nod if you can hear me."
Michael
He nods.
Brant
How confident is Marshall that Uri is actually hypnotized and not merely acting? Can you make a Detect Lies or Body Language roll or something to confirm?
Michael
Psychology makes the most sense to me, and it'll be a Psychology-23 roll (18 + 3 for Empathy + 2 for the bonuses from the research and profiling. And I'll roll it.
Okay. Marshall does note that Uri's trance state does seem to be a little bit lighter than might be expected. What this tells Marshall is that despite Uri's insistence that he is very very difficult to hypnotize, the opposite is actually true: he's been hypnotized many many times in his life and the trance state that Marshall has induced is at the moment only scratching the surface of the palimpsest that is Uri's memory and consciousness. Marshall's more sure than ever there are constructed blocks here, and that in order to break them down or shift them out of the way, Marshall would need to deploy NLP (specifically disabling any existing post-hypnotic suggestions with Enthrallment (Captivate) by constructing an alternate perceived narrative for Uri's life. But in order to construct an alternate narrative, Marshall would need to go deeper and find out the root of all this memory-and-consciousness-and-self image fuckery. Marshall's in agreement with Jocasta: it's most likely early trauma, from before Uri's parents separated, before young Uri moved to Cyprus.
(Crit success 6 on the die vs. Psychology-23.)
Leonard
Can I get anything off an Empathy roll? I won't try if it's not applicable, but Jocasta's doing all due diligence from here on out with both Uri and Puharich.
Brant
Marshall is going to try to push Uri into a deeper trance state by whispering Sanskrit mantras into his ear. (But I can pause on that 'till you've addressed Jo.)
Michael
Can I get anything off an Empathy roll? I won't try if it's not applicable, but Jocasta's doing all due diligence from here on out with both Uri and Puharich.
No problem. I will roll against your IQ secretly, one second.
Jocasta considers everything she's seen out of Uri in toto: his public appearances, his presence in Jo's psychometric vision, his words under hypnosis with Marshall. Jocasta feels Uri is a pawn, and that he's been a pawn for a lot of his life. He seems to be fated to serve as a handsomely-rewarded dupe and (as Jo so accurately said to Marshall) he's really enjoying that role. But something deep down tells Jocasta that Uri never really had a chance to be his own man. Jo feels Uri is being as truthful as he can be under the circumstances. He doesn't have the mettle to be a real spy, he's too superficial, too shallow.
Bill
Roger pipes up from the front: “If we want more access to Andrija, maybe find out from your puppet here when a good opportunity would be, or for him to make one. Arrange for a ride in the Rolls …”
Leonard
Jocasta will pretty much communicate this word for word to Marshall, who probably won't be surprised.
Brant
Marshall nods. Then he'll try pushing Uri into a deeper trance, whispering: "Om samprati hum samprati hum om prani dhana om shanti shanti shanti."
Michael
Okay, so we're going to treat this as an NLP attempt. Your operative skill replacing Public Speaking will be Interrogation-22 (I've assessed various bonuses) since this entire hypnosis has taken the form of a gentle (if insistent) interview.
And then after that we'll do the Captivate attempt, and I'll fold the results into the narrative.
Brant
Captivate to "delete" his memories about how to practice magic? Or is that a different roll?
Michael
The Captivate will be what you use to disassemble and sculpt his blocks and (possible) previous hypnotic triggers. We'll talk the Brain Hacking after this. You have to get in deep to be able to cut free the magic-practicing side of Uri. It's buried deep. With his trauma.
Brant
Oh boy.
Michael
He was a prodigy.
Like the infancy gospel of Jesus, he was doing miracles EARLY.
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 8
Another success by 8?
Michael
Okay, now you'll roll Enthrallment (Captivate)-16. Uri gets a -3 to his Will roll to resist this if you are using the source code here.
Brant
Which I super-duper am.
>> SUCCESS by 8
Man, 8 is my magic number.
Michael
Oh shit. That's a failed Will roll even without the -3.
Leonard
Uri shook.
Michael
Marshall ushers Uri through the past two years with Andrija. Very quickly Marshall discovers that at various moments throughout the past 24 months, Andrija has installed various codeword-triggered post-hypnotic suggestions in Uri. To get him to fly to Zurich on a whim. To get him to join Andrija at a psi conference. To get him to spread the good word about "The Nine" and the alien intelligence Hoova. But every time Uri helped Andrija, Andrija helped Uri in return. Got him a feature spot in a prominent Swiss newsweekly. Introduced him to some American paranormal researchers who needed funding by staging an impressive set of psi research results quickly. Made him a center of the international paranormal jet set, if there is such a thing.
With these "missions" came a tacit unspoken awareness on Uri's part that he was acting an instrument of Israeli/US intelligence. This was never the big thing for Uri, even though he'd dreamed of being a secret agent since he was a teenager in Cyprus and that Mossad agent on a mission to the Sudan stayed at his stepfather's hotel and Uri eavesdropped on them and ended up helping the agent with his dead drops … was … was that meeting orchestrated? Did it go that far back? Uri speaks to Marshall with tears in his eyes. "The day that … the day that Andrija reminded me of what I'd seen when I was two years old … the saucer hovering over Tel Aviv in December 1949, the beam of light that activated my brain's latent powers … "
No, Marshall says to himself as Uri spins this tale. That's bullshit. That's not what happened. That's a screen memory. That was PUT there.
"Uri," Marshall says, "This is a story someone's told you. This is not what really happened. What really happened, Uri. What really happened."
"I remember. I remember … the classroom."
"I was... four or five years old. They took us all from the kibbutz, all of us who'd scored well on the tests. Secret school. At night. Underground, in an old bunker. From … the 1948 war. They'd do things to us to make us forget. But we'd remember the important things. The … movies they showed us."
"I woke up one night after going to the secret school. I woke up in the classroom. My head was … locked into place and attached to it was... a television! I'd never even seen a television when I was six years old! And this giant heavy glass tube was … strapped to my face! The movies I was watching … in color! Men in robes in the desert … Biblical stories, they looked like, but like no Bible I'd heard of. They looked like the big American technicolor productions, the biblical epics. Speaking... some language. Sounds like Hebrew but it isn't. But it's … familiar. The stories, they sink into my mind. They are stories about … liberation. About following orders and being receptive to the messages of gods. I screamed, I tried to get the straps off of my head but my hands were strapped down too. A soldier came in and injected me with something … I passed out."
"Sometimes the stories were told, out loud, in Hebrew, by a woman. She was all in white, with a big white peaked head, and these dark, black eyes. I … I don't know if she was a woman, actually. But we trusted her. Our Teacher."
"She told us we were all fated for important things. That the time of the Ending was coming and that we would usher humanity to a better future. It would happen here in Israel because that's where the last battle would be. Megiddo. The saucers would come down from the sky to save us from destroying ourselves."
"I love her." The fire in Uri's eyes just … goes out. All his confidence, élan, sexiness, danger, parahuman oddity … just vanishes in a flash. Mitch's aura sight sees a new color flow through Uri's aura, a near-jet purple-black. All his NLP sparkle is gone.
Brant
“Uri, can you still hear me?”
Michael
"I can."
Brant
“After dinner tonight, you will suggest to Andrija that he ride with me back to the hotel. In the Rolls. Confirm you understand.”
Michael
"I understand. I will suggest Andrija ride back in the Rolls with you."
Brant
Marshall fishes a spoon out of his pocket. He holds it in front of Uri. “Uri, can you bend this spoon?”
Michael
He grabs the spoon and goes automatically into his patter, holding the spoon by its weakest spot, vibrating it back and forth and lining it up with Marshall and Jo's eyes as he would do with a close-in work. "And see, as you can see, the spoon is becoming plastic," but there's absolutely no NLP oomph behind it, and clearly Uri is in denial about this not working, maybe even functionally delusional, "Look, look! It's getting ready to snap off, the bowl of the spoon, yes?"
The spoon isn't bent.
Brant
Marshall smiles. He slides his arm out from around Uri. “Yes, Uri. I see. When I snap my fingers you will wake up and remember none of this conversation. If asked you will say only that we talked about classified things. Confirm you understand.”
Michael
"Of course. This is not to be remembered. But if anyone gets curious, I will say it is a classified conversation. This will be a very easy thing to say!" Uri shifts slightly out of hypnotic and into conversational mode there at the end as he realizes his lie will actually be true in a way.
Brant
Marshall snaps his fingers.
Michael
Uri looks at the spoon in his fingers and gives a knowing smirk to it. "Oh no, no, Miss Reinertson. You won't get me performing in this particular venue." He hands the spoon back to Jo with a flirtatious eye-glare. That doesn't have any oomph behind it anymore either.
Leonard
"Oh, well," Jocasta responds with an equally flirtatious and just as hollow laugh. "I had to try. How often does one get the chance to see a legend up close?" After a warm smile, she adds, coolly, "Better luck next time."