Charley’s Nightmare
Michael
Friday, June 29, 1973. Around 5:30 am. Charley sleeps. In her dream, she is walking through a misty hallway. Its walls, ceiling, and floor are made of what looks like solid gold. It's cold, and the air is thin. Charley's stride feels longer, taller, more confident, and when she rounds the corner of this hallway and begins to feel fresh cold air hit her face through an open archway, she sees why: mounted on the hallway wall near this archway is a full-length, old-fashioned silvered mirror; in the reflection: Charley can see her reflection vaguely but those coke-bottle glasses and bob haircut and quirky clothes: Charley sees that in this dream she is Genevieve.
As Charley walks out of the archway into the cold outdoors, she sees that she is in a bowl-shaped concavity at the pinnacle of a tall mountain, like a little amphitheater. At the center of the bowl is a weird, precarious set of five very tall stilt-like chairs — the legs are 10 feet tall! — set around a similarly tall table, all made of a weird plastic-marble like substance. Sitting in the five chairs are: Zeb, Mitch, Andrew Krane, an old woman, and a young, long-haired man. They are all typing on old-timey typewriters; they all wear delicate golden crowns. "Look who it is!" Zeb says. Andrew says, muttering while typing furiously, "She'll survive this rewrite. She always does."
“It is the card which registers the accomplishment of the great work of transformation in answer to the summons of the Supernal — which summons is heard and answered from within.”
— A.E. White, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
As the five of them type away, misty iridescent wisps of particles begin to ooze from the typewriters where the paper should be. The old woman suddenly yells, "Glory to the Ascended Masters, Glory to the Seventh Ray, Glory to the Authors of the World!" Andrew sighs, rubs his temples, says, "Will you please. I'm trying to concentrate." The rainbow wisps drift down on an eddy of cold mountain air to Charley/Genevieve's nose and she breathes the tiny spores in; it feels, synesthetically somehow, like reading a novel.
Charley in Viv's body walks up closer to the feet of Mitch's giant chair, the only person she trusts in this dream. She looks up pleadingly at Mitch, and says, "What is going on here?" but Charley realizes suddenly she's saying it not in English but in Romano-British, the pidgin tongue of her past life as a member of King Arthur's retinue. Charley looks down at her hands and arms and they are now a man's, clad in leather armor, a sword and axe strapped to his belt. "Now now, Charley," Mitch says. "Your Uncle Mitch has some very important work to do. I have to dislodge the balloon before it bursts, and put one of the better [tails/tales] in its place. Could be honey, could be piss. No one knows. But any world that I'm welcome to is better than the one I come from." Mitch puts a Tarot card — Judgement — into the typewriter's platen and continues typing.
Suddenly Charley is at Long Meg and Her Daughters, and she is no longer Genevieve or Arthur's knight, but instead young Charlie Ransom, hale and healthy and alive, the same age he was the night he died. Charley/Charlie looks to the main stone, and sees Archie is crucified on Long Meg with golden spikes, blood running down his eyes, wrists, and feet. One of Joseph Smith's Golden Plates marks his head like a halo where "INRI" would be on a crucifix. Hobo Stan, Enki, the Ransom Kid, and the Dragon Queen are at Archie's feet, casting lots for Archie's seamless Mormon Temple Garment (which also looks a bit like the swimsuit Archie put on to go into the sensory deprivation tanks at GRAIL TABLE), the Ransom Gang's puppety arms awkwardly scooping up the bone dice.
The rest of the Ransoms — Melanie, Eddie, and Jane — lie dead in the stone circle, their eyes picked out by crows. Jane's body lies on its back, staring eyeless up at the noonday sun; but upon further examination Jane is actually still alive, her eye sockets empty and bloody, and she is mumbling, "I thought I'd be safe. Oh Heavenly Father Oannes, I thought you'd protect me if I did your bidding." And Morgan le Fay is here, and she looks like Charley's birth mom but nine feet tall, with great black iridescent raven's wings rising above her graceful bare shoulders. "Wake up, dear heart. A new world is coming, and you and your Kings are powerless to stop it."
And with that, Charley wakes up in full fright. Fright check at a -2 (13). I'll then need you to make another roll, but Fright check first.
Mel
(Oh my god!)
>>>> SUCCESS by 2
Michael
All right. That's good. Now I need you to make a Stress Atavism check to see if you wake up in a past life. Succeed on a 12 or less.
Mel
>>>> SUCCESS by 3
Michael
Also good. Charley never seems to be bothered by any of this Weird shit. Of course feel free to roleplay how freaked out she is, but she's not suffering from psychological breaks or involuntarily channeling a past life now.
Mel
Charley lies in bed with the seraph's words "powerless to stop it" still echoing in her mind. "Oh yeah?" she says mockingly and quickly gets out of bed.
(So, I'm going to just move things along here. Basically Charley has had enough of being the victim of her nightmares and does her best to capture it and use it for her own purposes. So, she arms herself with paper and crayon to get it all down in black and color. Then she will look for a copy of the Book of Mormon and will try and get it back to her room without anyone noticing what she has in her possession. (a roll?) Too many question she wants to avoid for now. Then she would read it in her room until it would be time for breakfast. On the drive to Livermore she would take it out of her backpack and continue to read it. And not finding everything she's looking for she starts to question Archie.)
Michael
If you want to give me a Stealth roll, that's fine Mel.
>>>> SUCCESS by 2
Mel
So in the car probably about half way to work Charley inquires, “Dad. Ah, can you tell me about Joseph Smith and the Golden Plates? Mom said something about the plates are the Bible?”
Rob
"Oh, she did, did she?" Archie rolls his eyes a little, but affectionately. "Well, sort of. The Mormon faith has a number of important books, but the two most important are the Bible and the Book of Mormon. The Bible, that's the same Bible that other Christians believe in, the Old and New Testaments. And then the Book of Mormon is a third testament, revealed to Joseph Smith back in the 1800s."
"We're told that Smith received the Book of Mormon in the form of golden plates, engraved with the writings of ancient prophets. He found the plates buried in a hill near his farm in New York, and translated the writing into English, and what he copied down became the Book of Mormon."
"I hope you don't mind, your, ah, mom talking to you about this stuff. We haven't gone to church in a few years, and we probably haven't done a very good job of teaching Jane and Eddie about all that. But it's meaningful to her and she just wants to share it."
Mel
“No, I don’t mind. But ah, the Old Testament, ancient prophets … The plates. Don’t you think they are probably a reality shard? From what I’ve read here (gestures at the book in her lap) I’d say that’s a distinct possibility.”
Rob
"Well … you're very sharp, Charley. I've had that thought too, to be honest. After translating the golden plates - Joseph Smith said they were written in "Egyptian" but it wasn't any kind of Egyptian any Egyptologist would recognize - Smith said he gave them back to the angels, and nobody has seen them ever since. So some folks don't believe they ever existed. But if they were some kind of reality shard or retrocreation, that would explain a lot. "
"The Mormon church wasn't always as, ah, respectable as it is now. In its early days it was full of, I guess you'd call them seekers. People who thought the world ought to be different than it was, people who talked to angels, people impatient to build the kingdom of God right here on Earth. My grandfather was cut from that cloth, a bit. Not so different from a lot of younger folks today."
"Is that our Book of Mormon, from the downstairs study?" Archie laughs at that. "Melanie will be delighted you borrowed that."
Mel
“Ah huh. And, Joseph Smith was he a seeker?”
“And are you saying there is something wrong with seeking? With wanting things to be different?”
Rob
"Oh, I'm sure he was. Even before he found the plates, he was a bit of a magician. He had a magic stone that he used to find lost treasure. He had a funny name for it: the Urim and Thummim. That's what led him to the plates, I believe."
"No, no, there's nothing wrong with wanting things to be different. This country was founded by folks who wanted things to be different. You just have to be careful, is all. Seekers make easy marks — that is, it's easy for other people to take advantage of them. There was some of that in the early church too, I'm afraid. And of course, that's what the Red Kings do."
Mel
"A magic stone!? Really? Have we looked into Joseph Smith?! Was SANDMAN even around then?" Charley pauses wheels are spinning. "Geez. What did human beings do before we came along? I mean we're always saving them. How did they make it all those years without us?"
Rob
"No, SANDMAN wasn't around back then, but … I have to think there have always been people looking out for other people, spreading good messages to keep out the bad ones? … Of course, the Red Kings weren't so dangerous before there was mass communication. Bad ideas might infect one little village somewhere, but before TVs and radios and jet airplanes it was much harder for them to spread."
In the tradition of flailing dads everywhere, Archie changes tack. "Say, how are you feeling this morning? Everything good? When you first came down to breakfast I thought maybe you looked a little shaken up."
"Actually, that's not true. When you came down to breakfast, you looked just fine, our good old Charley Brown. But when I first woke up this morning, I had... a feeling? that maybe you would. Look shaken up."
Mel
Charley was about to jump in with both feet into the deep waters of THEOLOGY. But Archie's dad trick works, and they are now on to lighter topics. "I'm OK. I had another nightmare though."
Remembering images of death at Long Meg she says, "I don't think we should have taken Eddie to the hotel. I mean, we shouldn't bring the family to work; they could have been killed in Dufton!"
Rob
("Lighter topics.")
"Oh. Charley. You're worried about the family! I know Dufton was frightening. I'm so sorry that happened. I'm sorry they — you — I'm sorry everyone was so close to that. But … you can let worrying about the family be my job. I won't let anything happen to any of you." He says the last sentence seriously, but not with certainty — that is, he's not just brushing off her fears, but he is trying to reassure himself that it's true.
Mel
What can Charley say to such a well-intended promise? She would feel reassured that Archie and ALL of the adults have matters well in hand. But she already knows the sad truth. So it's quiet. She sets the New, New Testament aside and stares out the window. But she still has another question. So when they are nearly to their destination, she asks, "Dad, is there anything in 'The Book of Mormon' about the Seventh Ray or Father Oannes?"
Michael
So the Seventh Ray business doesn't ring a bell with Archie at all; sounds vaguely New-Agey but that's all he can conjure up. But Oannes … Oannes is straight out of Sumerian myth, the aquatic being that vouchsafed the secrets of technology to the ancient Sumerians. (A pretty clear synecdoche for — or maybe even the Red King that spawned? — the kulullû.)
Rob
OK, so Archie says to Charley basically the two sentences you've got here: sounds vaguely New Agey, aquatic being from Sumerian myth. "What … makes you ask that?"
Mel
"My dream. In it, an old woman was shouting about 'Glory to the Seventh Ray, and the Ascended Masters and Authors of the World'; she sat at a table with Mitch. And Father Oannes, a girl who was almost dead, said she thought she would be protected as one of his servants."
Rob
"This sounds like quite a dream. Poor girl! I guess we can ask Mitch if it rings any bells. And whenever I have questions about … occult stuff, I ask Sophie to look it up for me." (I guess Archie does have Google, in a way.) "But why did you think all this might be in the Book of Mormon?"
Mel
"Because one of Joseph Smith's plates was in my dream too."