Comparing Notes
April 15, 1974 | Monday
Brant
Marshall tells one of the Special Ones to dial Archie so he can be conferenced in.
Michael
Just as everyone is sitting down to the conference table at Kearny Street and Archie and Sophie are being patched in via conference call, who should appear, recently flown in from the Mountain via SANDMAN-owned private Huey, but Mitchell.
(It's now about 7:30 pm Pacific Daylight Savings Time; yes, in 1974 the country tried DST for a whole year.)
Again: in the room are Marshall, Jocasta, Dave, Genevieve, Merrick, Mitch, and on the phone are Archie and Andrew in LA and Sophie in Livermore.
Leonard
Jocasta delivers her brief first.
"I'm still trying to run down Padden and Hall, but things are pretty hectic over at the FBI. Everyone's running around in a panic — and if that tells us anything, it's that this wasn't supposed to happen. It's out of their range of expected domestic terrorism, and that says something.
"Something else that set me off when I got to reading the files is that we've seen a few of the SLA guys before — Mitch, I don't know if you remember, at the Mansa concert? A little cluster of Maoist third-worlder types. Anyway, I remembered, and sketched them out, and sure enough, it's some of our ducks," she says, dropping her sketch, some on-the-scene photos/video stills, and whatever files on Cujo and Patty's other new friends she could pull. "Still no idea how this fits into the bigger picture, but it might make them a little easier to run down. I'm putting a request to my old unit to send over Remiro's file in case they've been keeping tabs on him.
"That's about all I've got. I can get a read on this as soon as we're done here," she says, taking the Bohemian Club pen in a gloved hand, "unless there's anything else you need me to do first."
Brant
“We’ll see,” Marshall says, startling a little as Mitch enters. “Yes, it is all still quit nebulous, Arch. I spoke with Jolly — this group that Hearst fell in with, that was a Company project, one of his. He’s trying to distance himself from it now but he got sloppy, and this thing’s off the leash now.” He pauses.
“Anyway, some of our bright minds here,” he gestures at David, “suggested that the ‘robbery’ was a feint, intended to cover something. If that’s the case we still don’t know what it is — what we’re being distracted away from — but Sophie was quite excited about another incident that happened today, a fire at the Bohemian Club.”
Marshall recounts what happened at the Club. Then: “So I have a boy keeping an eye out for this Merrill character, but the meme, Arch — that meme was old. I couldn’t believe that it was still there, 70 years later, preserved inside this … terrarium? It was potent, too, still — decades later, even after the original vector generation died. But then again what is time, really? Maybe the meme was retroactively inserted tomorrow.” He shrugs. (edited)
Rob
(Can Archie deduce anything more about Bierce's meme than what Marshall has already figured out? Like, does it use Anunnakki source code?)
Michael
Sure, Archie deserves his own Expert Skill (Memetics)-18 roll to analyze it. But the first thing Archie can tell, before he even starts breaking the quatrain down is yes, it does absolutely utilize source code.
Rob
>> SUCCESS by 11
Michael
All right. So all the stuff I said earlier when Marshall analyzed it, Archie would concur with: Power 10, archaic poetic style crucial to the delivery of the payload, plausible deniability that the poem is meant as an impetus to assassinating McKinley, but absolutely honed in on a psychologically-disturbed someone with an existing grudge. Essentially telling the memetic patsy: "If they can get Goebel, you can certainly get the President." Archie also senses an inherent sense of moral superiority on the part of the memeticist here. It's partly from the poetic voice, sure, but there's something in the source code that smacks of arrogance, of showing off at using a 50-pound sledgehammer to kill a fly. Not at all like the times Archie has dropped a Power 8-10 meme on the world and then hidden the power with redundant labyrinthine "blankets" for the ants to get lost on. This right here is brute strength, with a hint of snideness to it. It's just a stylistic flourish that Archie can sense—a faint signature, shall we say—that can be used to diagnose this memeticist's other work if it's found. We've no confirmation it's definitely Bierce who was the memeticist here—someone else could've added the juice to this poem before it went into the New York Journal back in February '01—but what Archie knows of Bierce's crotchety personality and reputation: if he was a memeticist, this style is how Archie would expect him to deliver his payloads.
Brant
Marshall gives Jocasta a silent gesture to "check the pen."
Leonard
Jocasta steps away from the table and finds a quiet empty office room. Slipping off her gloves and slipping into a meditative state, she holds the pen up and tries to pick up on its 'memories'.
Michael
Okay, given that this pen likely has a young life (being a simple ballpoint and all), was in the hotel room a few hours ago when the fire broke out, and that's the event we're currently interested in, Jo suffers no time penalty to her IQ-16 roll to sense the emotions or events this pen bore witness to. Corruption is, as always with psychic powers, an option.
Leonard
Let's try it straight for a moment, I feel sympathy for this young and innocent writing utensil and don't want to see it corrupted
>> SUCCESS by 6
Michael
This pen that was lying in the Sterling Suite at the time of the fire has had some powerful emotions rub off on it, right in the time frame of the fire. The first is a sort of yearning regret, a powerful anxiety-creating pain, a feeling as if everything has gone wrong and it needs to be righted and that without right and direct action, nothing ever will be righted. In smaller amounts underlying that regretful yearning, are two weaker, but older, emotions acting as a backdrop or a canvas for that intense pointed regret: anger and guilt. Jo can't get a handle at all on who or what impressed these emotions on the pen, but she's pretty sure the pen got soaked in them by accident. It's not like this pen was owned or used by someone expressing these feelings. These emotions were just in the room at the time of the fire, but Jo can't get a fix on whom to attribute them to.
Leonard
All right, she'll carry that back to Marshall, emphasizing that whoever was in there was feeling emotions powerful enough to suffuse something they probably didn't even touch with them. She'll say she can juice another read by digging down into enemy territory, that's his call — but she doubts, since it didn't have a personal connection to them, that she'll be able to pin down a precise ID.
Rob
Archie, not knowing Jo has left with the pen, relays the above info about the McKinley meme: "Well, golly. This is a powerful meme, loaded with Anunnakki techniques and making no effort to hide it. And it's not a small intervention in our history, is it? If this little ditty killed McKinley, put Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, goodness knows what else..." "Did Beirce write it? Do we think he was one of theirs... or ours? Wasn't Hearst connected to John Wilkie's old SAO? I think I do want to talk to Beirce after all. Maybe I'll have to fly up to Shasta."
"As for the rest of it: so DeFreeze and his Symbionic Army are one of Jolly's projects gone off the reservation. Does that mean Ozymandias, or just the Company? But that seven-headed snake, the Mansa connection, that smells to me like the Kings. Maybe it's like ALLOCHTHON again: the other side taking advantage of our side's screw-ups." "Normally I'd say we're just at the stage where we need more intel. We've got enough to know something's fishy, but nothing actionable. But the Hearst girl: she's a ticking clock. Not to get too far into the weeds with the memetic work we're planning in L.A., but if the pretty blond daughter of California's first family could be radicalized but then healthily reintegrated into her family, well, let's just say that's a memetic structure we could work with. If she's murdered by black militants, or gunned down by the FBI..." He trails off. (edited)
Brant
"Sophie, are you on the line?"
Michael
"Yes, Marshall, I'm here."
Brant
"What can you tell me about McKinley's assassin? It's been a while since my last American history seminar. He was ... an anarchist? If I'm remembering correctly?"
Michael
"Yes, Czolgosz was an anarchist who moved in that direction after being gradually radicalized out of mainstream socialist organizations and unions, if you believe the historical record. Many historians assert that he listened to Emma Goldman in Cleveland in spring of 1901 and that set him on the path that led him to Buffalo and a date with McKinley some months later. That time frame does match up with the Bierce poem, and the New York Journal would have had at least some distribution outside the East Coast. Of course all Czolgosz would have needed is to hear one speaker approvingly quote the meme for it to sink in. Czolgosz wasn't well-liked among his socialist or anarchist compatriots. Came off abrasive, socially inept, a loner with grudges rather than a reliable comrade. Sounds a bit like our recent spate of assassins in America, doesn't he?"
"Hearst's motivations and actions are a fair bit murkier. Now, Archie is right; Hearst's and Pulitzer's newspapers were suborned by John Wilkie during the Spanish-American War to whip up support among their readers in the Eastern Establishment for a foreign war, and you have to imagine that memetics were a big part of that. Why else would American schoolchildren still all be taught 'Remember the Maine!', right? But Hearst himself... he hated McKinley, and also wasn't afraid to play vague footsie with anarchist sentiments in his newspapers around the time of McKinley's assassination, as this poem—and countless other stories—demonstrate. Now some of that was doubtlessly an 'Anything to sell a newspaper,' 'give the unwashed what they want' sort of cynical populism. But I wonder, would Hearst have the gall, the will to load a memetic pistol and cast it out there for a loner anarchist to pick up and shoot the President of the United States? Did Hearst and his staff learn memetics in service of the U.S. government in 1898 and then point it back at McKinley three years later? I'm not sure; honestly, that doesn't seem to hold together as a theory of the crime for me."
"As for Bierce, one senses from the historical record that he didn't care much for anarchism, socialism or communism at all, and he didn't think much of the Establishment alternatives either. Bierce personally was definitely more an unsophisticated, misanthropic, 'plague on both your houses' sort. Hearst had Bierce hit the railroad trusts before the Spanish-American War: more anti-corporate populism. Bierce's personal motives to prime an assassin to kill McKinley seem even thinner. But Hearst showed Bierce fierce loyalty in the aftermath of the controversy over the poem and the assorted rabblerousing; Hearst lost his society connections, his political career, but he kept Bierce in his stable well into Theodore Roosevelt's second term. That tells me that Bierce was valuable to him; maybe Bierce was the only memeticist—or the only talented memeticist—in the Hearst stable. Remember, the Duncorne Foundation had only discovered the existence of History B a few years before all this happened; memetics as we know them today are radically different than what Wilkie and his boys were playing around with at the turn of the century."
Jeff
Mitch clears his throat before speaking. "If you want to fly up there and talk to him, sure. Just handle him with tongs. He says he's dying, which he is, and he was the Enemy's prisoner or pet for decades, and he escaped because of the Bomb, and now he's here to 'help.' I don't know how much of that is even a lie, or is meaningful enough to be true or false. It's just kind of nonsense noise, you know? But he's got kind of a sad old war criminal vibe, sure. He intuited some idea of SANDMAN when I mentioned I had friends I was going to tell about him, which lines up with him having been a Duncorne memeticist I guess."
Michael
(Viv might have something to say, but NPCs take second banana to PCs, so she'll be ready to leap in with a couple of questions if the narrative space allows.)
(And Andy, in LA sitting next to Archie, can't seem to control himself with all this talk about THE ACTUAL AMBROSE BIERCE actually being ALIVE AND ABLE TO ENGAGE IN CONVERSATION; his notepad is festooned with notes to himself and to Archie about the things we could ask him about his stories, his well-worn narrative tropes about subjective time and death, etc. etc. No one has said out loud here on the conference call that Bierce is also Illuminated but it's almost kind of like Andrew knows on some level.)
Leonard
“Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, a 70-year-old meme, trouble at the Bohemian Club, a Hearst causing chaos,” Jocasta muses. “The time is, uh, out of joint…again.”
Michael
Sophie—the new, altogether more insouciant Sophie, it must be said—chuckles on the other end of the phone line and attempts to inject some levity to the proceedings. "That's two Shakespeare quotations in the past few minutes, team; we're obviously on very serious and dire ground."
“Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, a 70-year-old meme, trouble at the Bohemian Club, a Hearst causing chaos,” Jocasta muses. “The time is, uh, out of joint…again.” (edited)
Viv picks up on this. "The Hearst family thread is powerfully symbolic and resonant. Before her abduction, Patricia was a society girl, a debutante, a good citizen, an art student, scion of San Francisco royalty: but in a mere few weeks she has evidently been turned into an insurgent, a guerilla, a leftist ideologue." "And her grandfather—who 'played footsie' with anarchists and socialists, as Sophie points out—gradually became an archconservative: an isolationist, an anti-internationalist, an enemy of socialism, of the New Deal, of any and all hints of progressive politics, and near the end of his active career in publishing, an out-and-out Hitler-lover." Viv takes a sip of tea. "So they're both mercurial, liminal figures, this grandfather and granddaughter, who've both swapped sides in the greater political struggle. They're also both powerful personalities each with their own media megaphone. They're linked by fate, geography, action, and, importantly, given what I've learned of the Enemy's predilections, linked by blood. If pieces have been moved into place here and now—and I use the passive voice here advisedly—they've been moved there in a conscious awareness of the history and echoes thereof involved."
Brant
“I’m sorry — I was spaced out. Can we get back to this thing with … Ambrose Bierce being alive, at Shasta? I know this isn’t the first rodeo for any of us but I feel that’s a point we shouldn’t just gloss over. Mitch, you’re saying he just … showed up? There was no irruption? History B energy?”
Jeff
(Shoot, did I never roll Detect? No, no, I must have tried it but rolled an 18. Yes, yes of course. Lousy 18.)
Michael
(It was during the live sesh, I'd need to check the recording.)
(So yeah, "exposed to" rather than "made out of")
Brant
(Ooh, word, see I forgot that because I haven’t done a transcript! Marshall’s question stands though because I’d like to hear Mitch elaborate on that situation.)
Michael
(And if Mitch had happened to take one last glance at old Dod with Detect and Aura Sight before hopping in the 'copter, he'd have noted practically zero History B energy still clinging to him several hours after his arrival)
Jeff
"I mean, I guess, yeah. Shasta spat him out, is what it felt like to me. He'd been in the Enemy's draw but not of the Enemy's draw, you know? I'm not saying I think he's on the side of the angels, I haven't got the hint line to judge that. Him being involved with TR's rise to power is news to me, so, uh.... To answer your question, I don't know."
Brant
“OK, so this is definitely one of ours. Ours specifically. We need to approach it from two angles: compliance and inquiry. Get this situation under control promptly while making sure we ask the right questions. I think we need to move fast on this Hearst thing — it’s our best direct lead so far and it is an emergent situation that is fucking — sorry Arch — with the informational landscape. Arch, if you can loan us Jocasta I think we should have her and Mitch on that. They can probably run Hearst down faster than anyone — the Feds, certainly, and we need to beat them there.”
Michael
Andy speaks up from LA, "I just wanted to ask, since it's likely going to end up as my assignment... what about the Jack London adaptation that Robert Redford wants to do? Do we think its popping up in my view today is connected with Bierce and Hearst and Sterling?"
Rob
Archie chuckles, a very gentle version of "bless your heart". "I think it's safe to assume that's connected, even if we can't see the strings yet. We don't run into many pure coincidences in this work." (At this point he's already asked Marshall to find Andy an in with Redford or Roeg, right?) Mostly to Andy, though others can weigh in: "There may be an opportunity there for some memetic work, but more importantly, others may have already had the same idea. So we'll want to know who's attached to the project and who it brings out of the woodwork."
To Marshall: "Yes, finding Hearst is a top priority. By all means, put Jocasta and Mitch on it."
"Do we know if there are any Sandmen in the Bohemian Club? Now, or historically? Any connections higher up the line we can pull for intel?" (I'm assuming the Clampers are too middle class to have any Bohemians among them or vice versa?)
Michael
To Marshall: "Yes, finding Hearst is a top priority. By all means, put Jocasta and Mitch on it."
"Do we know if there are any Sandmen in the Bohemian Club?
Now this is an interesting possibility. It's a clear call for Archie, maybe after the conference call, to do a little research and give us a Savoir-Faire (Corporate America)-16 roll. Because just off the cuff, Archie knows that the Bohemian Club really is, these days anyway, a club for the wealthiest and most forbidding peaks of American corporate life, at least in the Bay Area. While theoretically it is possible that there are some double Bohemians/Sandmen, it seems more likely that the Bohemians are the kind of folks that the Project leans on, subverts and suborns, uses as cutouts, etc. When it comes to the Clampers, while Archie has sort of dropped off their radar and vice versa in the past few months (Archie is still a probationary member; things got kind of busy there in the summer and fall of '73, and now of course with the commuting back and forth, there's never enough time!), when it comes to knowing secret California/Bay Area history, especially when it comes to the original small-b bohemians and their capital-B successors, getting back in their good graces/checking up on what they're up to would make a lot of sense in connection to current events. Recall that the Clampers had had interest in putting up some reminders of the Montgomery Block at the Transamerica Pyramid (remember Pisco Punch, Intermission 3?). And they did seemingly know about Emperor Norton, seemingly even before Mitch retrocreated him.
Jeff
Mitch, Jo, and Marshall (and Viv?) are all in the same room, right? Mitch will give Jo a nonverbal ASL signal of "do we want to discuss how freaky/magical/divinatory we're going to get with this manhunt on this call, or wait to discuss it in a few minutes?"
Michael
(It's Mitch, Jo, Marshall, Viv, Merrick, and Dave.)
Rob
(Archie doesn't bring it up if you don't but by all means: get freaky.)
Leonard
Jo signals back: "Let 'er rip"
Jeff
"Can everyone on the call please pick a playing card? Just imagine a playing card... okay, now, who picked the eight of diamonds? Anybody?"
Inverarity used
/roll
Brant
>> 1d52 … 44
Marshall flips his card around to show Mitch: “Jack of Hearts.”
Leonard
>> 1d4 … 3
Clubs.
>> 1d13 … 12
Queen.
Jeff
(Mitch will, as/if necessary, use Serendipity. If that wasn't obvious.)
Rob
(not being a Serendipitymancer myself and not knowing what Mitch is thinking, I feel it's more for the GM or the Dice Golem to say who among us was thinking of the 8 of diamonds)
Michael
Blank looks and head-shaking at the table in San Francisco from Dave, Genevieve, and Merrick; none of them were thinking about the eight of diamonds. On the squawk box on the conference room table, Mitch (and the rest of the San Francisco team) hear, after a pregnant pause after Mitch's card, Andrew going, "Dammit Mitch, how do you do that?"
Jeff
"What did you have for breakfast, Andy?"
Mitch holds up his hands as he waits for the answer.
Michael
"Uh.... granola and raspberries in plain yogurt. Cup of coffee." Andy is now hanging over the conference call mic in Los Angeles; Archie can see the concerned, intent look on his face.
Jeff
Mitch counts on his fingers as Andy speaks. "Fifteen," he says. "Or sixteen. Does uh count?"
There are maps in the conference room, of a variety of sizes and types and locations. Mitch picks one up as if at random, a Rand-McNally folding motorist's street map of the Bay Area.
It's divided into squares for reference, A-F along the top and 1-6 top to bottom. Mitch starts in the upper left and counts left to right. "C3. Or C4."
(Mitch might have been using an inset, or it might be some similar specialty map, don't feel obliged to have to deal with C3 on that map being wholly empty but for Alcatraz or something)
(The goal was for Mitch to do something that contributes to the find-Patty effort without obviating others' contributions)
Michael
Squares C3 and C4 encompass a quadrangle bordered roughly by Geary Boulevard on the north, Starnyan Street and Golden Gate Park on its west, Divisadero Street on the east, and Market Street for part of its south side. This quadrangle includes the neighborhood of Anza Vista, the Panhandle, nearly all of the Haight-Ashbury, and the campus of the University of San Francisco. So if "uh" doesn't count, it's somewhere in the northern half of this quadrangle. If it does, it's in the Haight. As Mitch looks down at this area, Dave lights up a fresh cigarette, takes a pull, and taps into the ashtray. A stray flaming bit of cigarette ash burns a hole down in Ingleside, like at around B14, near San Francisco State and Brooks Park. Dave bats out the bits of stray ash on the table. "Shit. Sorry." (Ash hole circled in dark red.) (edited)
(Pardon my using a public utility map from 1967 but it had the right vibes)
Brant
“OK, open floor: what does everyone know about this area. Jump in with what you have.” (Marshall is basically asking anyone with Local Area Knowledge to roll).
Leonard
Jocasta has lived in the Bay Area all her life
[and has a high LAK score...]
>> SUCCESS by 10
[Not sure if that's a crit but it's an MoS of at least 10]
Michael
Rolling for Viv.
>> SUCCESS by 0
Rolling for Dave.
>> SUCCESS by 4
Rolling for Andy.
>> SUCCESS by 6
We can say most of this info comes from Jocasta with contributions from Viv and Andy where it seems fitting: Okay, so let's break C3-C4 down north-to-south, starting with Anza Vista: Anza Vista has some older, prewar apartment buildings, but the neighborhood was really built in the aftermath of World War II. It's mixed, medium-density residential (some triple-deckers, some larger apartment buildings) that was built to meet housing demand among the GI Generation returning home after the war. Fun fact: much of the district stands on the reclaimed land of the former Calvary Cemetery: the residents of the cemetery were packed up and re-interred out in Colma, California. It's still a working-to-middle-class neighborhood, mostly white, with a lot of its original purchasers still residing in the units they had built in the '40s and '50s. USF is a private Jesuit university, and its downtown campus grounds are crowded into a four-block area south of Golden Gate Avenue. The Panhandle sticks east out of Golden Gate Park, and the neighborhood surrounding the park is a transitional zone between the largely family-zoned Anza Vista to the north and the substantially younger and poorer Haight to the south. The park was almost demolished for a freeway overpass in the late '50s/early '60s but local activists banded together to save it and reduce the automobile traffic around it by turning two-ways into one-ways. The park has had its share of hippie squatters, rock concerts, and protests since it was saved in the mid-'60s. What more can be said in 1974 about the Haight? The hippies who came here between '65 to '67 from all over the country made the district into what it is today: a neighborhood full of packed apartment buildings, filled with young teenage newcomers to the city on one hand and casualties of the counterculture trip of seven years ago who managed to survive the worst of the speed and heroin waves to start families on the other. To the SFPD it's a, shall we say, very lightly policed neighborhood: the mentality since '67 has largely been "let them stew in it." Sure, the main drag of Haight Street has lots of fairly clean, touristy, ticky-tack hippie shoppes (and there are some adventurous middle-class folks looking to snatch up cheap residential real estate in the past couple of years), but the residential streets themselves are still pretty grim, all told. Not a bad candidate as somewhere for the SLA to have a stash or a safe house. The legacy residents who aren't "hip" are a fairly evenly-balanced mix of white, Black, and Asian (Filipino and Chinese-American). The neighborhood near Dave's ash scorch mark (if its happenstance seredipitously seems germane to this discussion), Ingleside, is another largely post-WWII planned neighborhood, like Anza Vista, but instead of a graveyard it's largely built on the bones of a 19th-century recreation area, including a hippodrome/race track. The neighborhood is squeezed between two public universities—San Francisco State and the City College of San Francisco. The residents are primarily white working-class—more GI generation folks, but a bit more Catholic and ethnic than Anza Vista—with a sizeable Black population. To wit: this neighborhood was the site of a cross-burning back in 1958 when a Black district attorney and his family moved in but he and his family stuck it out and eventually opened up the community. In fact, Jo now recalls that back in 1970 and 1971, there were two police station attacks— one in the Haight in '70 with a bomb, attributed to the Weathermen, one in Ingleside in '71 with guns and a dud bomb—attributed to the Black Liberation Army. Clearly both the Haight and Ingleside have seen their share of racial and political tensions violence the past five-plus years.
Brant
“Alright. I’d like to get some eyes on this area. But we know this group is armed and violent, and likely on high alert now. I’d like us to get to them before the Feds — Jocasta, I’m assigning you Mitch, David, and Merrick. Go loaded for bear and do what you can. If she’s there and you can bag her — or DeFreeze, or anyone who seems significant, really — do so and bring them to the Barn.”
Leonard
"On the case, doctor," Jo says. [What time of day is it? Jocasta has a plan for before she starts putting shoe leather on Vernon, but she doesn't want to let a whole day pass. If it's early, she'll try to do it before heading out, but if it's later, she'll do it overnight and hit the streets in the early to mid-afternoon tomorrow. I can also wait if we have to do any other in-game business.]
Michael
So it's right around 8 pm Pacific time right now. It's been a long day.
Leonard
Okay. That's actually better, for what she wants to do. Tonight, she'll head home and meditate right before dosing and try to open up her mind's eye as wide as possible. She'll set up a triad of incense cones and light them. Once she's deep into her trip, she's going to try to do...something with her mind-beyond-the mind. She doesn't know what, exactly. It's a little bit Empathy, a little bit of Oracular knissomancy, a combination long shot of Mind Probe and Telesend -- and a lot of her murky feelings of sympathy and attraction to this alienated woman of privilege. her obsession with hidden symbols and covert meanings, her recent determination to push herself a little too far, and especially her sense of responsibility for people having traumatic psychic experiences. She's going to try to send out a message. She doesn't expect it to succeed -- it's beyond anything she's tried before and beyond anything she thinks herself capable -- but she also thinks, well, we're working at another level now, with higher stakes, and even if my message doesn't succeed, she can see what the Eye shows her on her way to deliver it. Here is the message: Find me, Patti. I understand what you are going through better than anyone. Whatever it is you want, I can help you. Find me tomorrow. Then, when she gets up, she's going to deck herself out in a familiar uniform: a woman on the street, someone who used to be respectable and normal, but who has lost herself to drugs, loneliness, despair, and lack of direction. Someone who looks like she's just desperate enough to say yes to anyone who comes along, under whatever pretense, to tell her they know what she needs to do. She'll use whatever skills might be applicable (and call in some SANDMAN experts if necessary), but more than anything like Disguise or Acting, she's just going draw on the memory of a person she literally used to be. Once she's got the look right, she'll tell the higher-ups where she's going, but otherwise won't take anything -- no ID, no gear, no notebooks, nothing but a couple of doses of various drugs and maybe thirty bucks in small bills in her pocket and hit the streets, wandering wherever her mind pulls her, but roughly describing a walk around the burned circle, then crossing from the park to the Haight. She'll do this from midmorning until early evening or until something...happens.
Michael
(Wow, this is amazing, Leonard. You know, given we are going to be playing on Thursday night, maybe it would be a good idea for everyone to give me their plans for the next 24 hours of game time and I can set up and prep scenes for Thursday's session.)
Brant
Marshall wants Viv to keep up her vibe-investigation, following whatever trail she’s picked up to Oakland and Mansa. The next day, Marshall himself is going to try to contact Robert Redford again. And he’s going to send some of the Special Ones out to the Haight and to the area around the Bohemian Club to conduct some low-low-level surveillance (i.e., calling in if anything crazy happens at the Club, etc.).
Michael
(Okay, so really all I need to know is what Mitch and Archie will be up to overnight/the next day, and adjunct to that whether Jo will give Mitch/Dave/Merrick any orders for supporting her plans or otherwise, etc. Looking forward to Thursday night!) (And @Bill B, obviously you're welcome to join us, I have a cool scene in mind to reintroduce Roger to the narrative Thursday night and if not I can easily deploy it later this Mission.)
Leonard
Jo isn't giving anyone any orders at all. She's gonna tell Mitch and Marshall where she'll be, generally, and that's it.
Jeff
Hmm. Mitch doesn't want to interfere with what Jocasta has going, and his being on the scene with her would doubtless distort things. His guess is that the Ingleside burn hole is the actual SLA HQ, or an SLA HQ of some kind, and there's relevant activity in the vicinity of Haight-Ashbury. Jo seems to have that pretty well sewn up, so he'll tack instead to hanging out on the USF campus, looking for subversive activities like some kind of a narc.
Michael
Is Mitch going to put in some nighttime hours skulking about or start in the morning?
Leonard
If Mitch feels like Jocasta is stepping on his action, we can change tactics -- I know this is more of his jam and he's more likely to get immediate results with Serendipity than with whatever half-assed fishing with wishes that she's doing. I just assumed he would be busy with the Ambrose situation, but we can flip things if you'd prefer.
Jeff
Not at all! I def don't have a monopoly on mystic shit
Jeff
Is Mitch going to put in some nighttime hours skulking about or start in the morning?
Mitch will start in the morning.
Michael
Is Archie going to head up to the Mountain to visit the Man Out Of Time?
Rob
If he can get out of whatever he's doing in L.A., then yes, he wants to. (I guess connecting Andy to the Star Rover project is in motion, there's not much for Archie to do there yet) Is that something he can do in game time before tomorrow or should we do it in the live session?
Michael
On The Star Rover: I think depending on how long it takes Marshall to get hold of Bob R. or his agent or what have you, Andy can work with Marshall on the Redford Dossier and how to approach that siutation. And yeah, I'd like to have the Archie-Ambrose meeting in the live session Thursday. Archie can get up to Mitch's school by tomorrow morning.
Okay, I have now done all the necessary GM rolls to prep for tonight's session behind my virtual GM screen so I can kick straight into the action. Chronology should be:
Jocasta's sending out a message to Patricia (Mon 9 pm-ish at URIEL HQ)
Jo heads out into the streets the next morning, starting at Ingleside then heading north into the Haight (Tue 5 am-ish onwards)
Marshall calls Hollywood to inquire after Redford, sends the Special Ones out in the streets (Tue 9 am)
Viv heads back out into Oakland and to Berkeley if necessary (Tue 9 am)
Mitch narcs out at the USF campus (Tue 9 am onward)
Archie arrives at Mitch's school to speak with Brother Dod (Tue 11 am-ish)
Oh, and I had a general question for Archie-Marshall that applies to the general staff memetic/esmology braintrust in both SF and LA: do we want to try to design any memes to inject into the media in the aftermath of the Hearst shooting? I can definitely have URIEL house esmologists work up some projections overnight on what the reaction to the news is likely to result in, and maybe after Archie's done with Ambrose we can decide how we want to proceed memetically. I ask this because every time I look at the updated campaign map I realize that Kearny Street is LITERALLY right across the street from the Chronicle.