Imbibing the Sacred Plant
Michael
(Rob, Stone isn't going to last long in this scene: at a 2-point Disad he really can't do more than nudge you. So please excuse my saying just a couple of things in his voice before Archie trips. Like Agent 00, Stoney is a bit of a ham and can't resist a bon mot.)
Terence presents a tray with another gorgeous piece of fabric tapestry from the East laid over it. On it are several piles of dried mushrooms measured out into gram dosages. Terence says after Viv and Archie/Stone come back from the kitchen, "Ev and I collected these a little while back out in the country. Cultivation in vitro has proven … frustratingly impossible thus far for my brother and me. But we've gotten very good at gathering wild. The truest gift of the mushroom is that it is truly everywhere on the globe, if you know where to look. The dosage I would recommend for inexperienced travelers is a couple of grams, Archie." He gestures to two piles of mushrooms set aside for Archie.
Archie-as-Stone says, "And for the experienced ones?"
Terence hems and haws for a moment, "Well, I don't want to put that kind of idea in your head, Archie, this is a first time for you and we want it to be as gentle and welcoming as possible … " Archie-as-Stone looks at Terence, smiles, and takes two piles of two grams. "Let's just say I'm eating for two," Stone's voice says. A smirk passes over Archie's face.
Terence's loquaciousness fades from the room as all five of the psychonauts begin going deeper into the experience. He only offers an occasional word of emotional encouragement, "We all sit in a circle of trust in this room, a place of holy safety and understanding. Our love for each other and the web of beings we are part of offer up their support and wisdom. As feelings become ideas become words, I encourage and welcome your experiences into the circle so that they may be reflected back and transformed into holy truth and light." The three URIEL members notice Terence's spirituality traipses back and forth across hippie New Age and mystical Catholicism in both cadence and content.
Jocasta
Michael
The boss man, doing magic mushrooms. Will miracles never cease. As Terence comes around with the tray with different dosages sorted by weight (he doesn't need to give Jo that much instruction on what to take), Jo decides to take a modest 2 grams so she can look after Archie. (Hey, that new Sense of Duty, there's an in-game reason for it!)
A gentle trip, that sounds good after all the intensity involved in the acid-addled connection with 1961 Price and the big trip Jo did in her apartment with the Environments LP. (Funnily enough, Terence, after handing out the mushrooms, goes to the hi-fi and puts on Environments 3's Side B, "Dusk at New Hope, PA," a recording of a sunset hour in the back woods of Pennsylvania.) And Jocasta, in 15 minutes or so, sinks into her trip.
For the first time ever, Jo can see auras. She can see Terence's, wild and deep and ANCIENT, like a forever branching tree-brain, ultragreen and also heavy and pendulous. It hangs over him like a burden. Ev's aura is gorgeous: royal purple and gold but slim, a wisp of a thing compared to Terence's huge globe. And Genevieve's, as exceptional if not more so than Ev's and Terence's, iridescent like an abalone shell, with a … multi-dimensionality to it that's hard to express in words. A matrix. That's what Genevieve's aura looks like. A switchboard of cubes that are plugged in not only to every person in this room, but every person she's ever met, known, or loved. Jo's eyes begin misting up.
Over Archie is a storm-grey bird of prey. The kind you'd see on the insignia of an old bank or, gargoyle-like, hanging over an ancient cathedral. It's not threatening, but it is protecting Archie. Intent upon it. But it hovers over Archie's own aura, which looks like a spinning golden egg or disc, bouncing and playing and full of wonder and delight. Two impulses within the boss man: one that envelops him like a storm cloud, and one, child-like, that gambols full of play and hope at his heart. More misty eyes.
Leonard
Jocasta relaxes into the high, but doesn't completely surrender to it. Her sense of responsibility for Archie and Viv, and her curiosity about both Terence's ideas and this newfound ability to sense auras stimulates her enough to want to try and steer the ship just a little bit. She's not willing to take on any corruption -- she wouldn't dream of tainting this experience -- but she's going to try to push the aura-sight a bit. Based on what she's picked up from Mitch and read in the literature, she'll first see if there's any hint of ill health or sickness in any of them, and then any suggestion of (the presence of, not the knowledge of, or half the room would be glowing like a lava flow) History B. If she can't pick it up any further, though, she'll just ease back into feeling the flow and tend to any negative reaction anyone has, especially Archie. What a strange life, she thinks, having lost so many who were her family only to find this beautiful, broken, brave, and wild one instead.
Michael
Everyone glows with health, although as Jo pans her eyes across skinny Terence and Ev, Jo wonders (in an echo of her own departed mother's voice) if they're both eating all right. And the vibes in the room History B-wise are, well, Jo hasn't felt this distant from History B and the mere possibility of it for a very long time. Jo usually trips alone, or while on assignment: doing it socially in a circle like this is a completely different experience for her. Whatever Terence is doing, it's like Viv's narrative magic and Roger's loa: it's a human experience untainted by the Red Kings. Perhaps the endogenous DMT is an innate human capability to Anunnaki gave to us, but Terence's desire to use this gift is to make humanity and the Earth whole.
Jocasta notices after Archie returns from the deepest part of his trip that the bird has dissipated into grey-blue smoke.
Archie
Michael
After Stoney puts on his magickal libertine's show of machismo with Terence, he chuckles wryly in Archie's head. "It feels good, doesn't it? To do what you feel like, to call forth your will to power. Don't worry, I'm going away now. This is your initiation and I am only here to open the doorway, ha ha, to carry you over the threshold. What you experience from here onwards is for you. It is my gift. To you."
The first 15 minutes or so of the trip as Terence puts on an LP of background sounds and the pot smokers pass that big pipe around is a waiting game. Archie feels like saying, after the crunchy earthy fragments of the mushrooms are washed down with some water, this doesn't seem like very much, heck, even that swig of rum he had on the Fourth had a more immediate effect than this …
And then Archie can begin to feel a grinding inside himself. Like there were … little cogs fitted into his heart and stomach and guts that are just waking up for the first time in decades. Like that time he was on his Mormon mission in Peru and got food poisoning. Was it food poisoning? He saw some pretty wild things that night and …
a a a a a h h h h h
Archie flashes back in memory to that night in 1947. Out there every day tramping up and down the backroads of Peru and Chile, often depending on the kindness of Catholic missions and priests against their better judgement, Elder Ransom and Elder Norton preached the news of the Latter-Day Saints in broken Spanish. Tom Norton was a good kid, Archie thinks to himself in 1973. I wonder whatever happened to him. But yes. It was that night around the campfire with those tanned, leather-faced natives that Archie and Tom took a healthy portion of their offering, a bubbling stew that tasted weirdly astringent: neither Archie nor Tom had anything to compare it to, but if they did they might call it a very strong herbal tea.
ROB — Well, Archie's instinct here is to Act Perfectly Normal. So after sitting silently for some time, when the flashback hits, he blurts out to Terence and Ev, "South America! Where did you say you were, in South America? Oh, that's right, La Chorerra. Is that Brazil? I did, ah, mission work in Chile and Peru. Gosh, I was younger than you are now. Just a kid. But that's how we do it. Mission. Work. It's a funny word, isn't it? Mission. What are we on now, mission five?" He's sweating, wondering if that's just the heat of the apartment. He loosens his tie.
MICHAEL — "Colombia. The Northwestern Amazon, highlands, jungles, and plateaus. Stunning waterfalls, the kind that take your breath away when you sit and watch them. La Chorrera is a hop, skip and a jump over the Putumayo River from Peru. Fascinating." Terence looks deeply into Archie's eyes.
"My goodness, Archie, that must have been something. Right after the war, yes? An endless sense of hope and goodwill, like we'd beaten back the tide of a cruel and devastating machine birthed by modernity, and there you are. Shoes shined, tie straight, marching through the Andes like... victorious America made flesh. I can't even imagine some of the reactions you got," Terence chuckles, "I know Ev and Dennis and I raised a lot of eyebrows ourselves with our long hair and hash pipes... but ultimately didn't we both go down there looking for wisdom? Did you … did you find any there?"
ROB — "Wisdom? I don't know... that was... like another life. I'd forgotten... locked that up for so long." It shows in Archie's face: he's feeling that melancholy, scared, holy feeling now. A connection occurs to him, and he looks around the room for Viv.
"Andrew's mistaken, Genevieve. About the British cover. You need the flying saucer on the cover, and the word Atlantis. That's the brand. That juxtaposition. That's why the second cover didn't sell so well: no saucer."
LEONARD — Jocasta giggles a bit reactively at the phrase “No saucer,” remembering something in her recent readings about how comic books with a monkey on the cover always sell better. Then she remembers her drive out to Oakland, and inhales deeply: "no saucer" wasn't a problem then.
Stretching her arms out to keep the circulation going, she speaks to Archie in what she hopes is a calm way. "You're doing great, Archie," she says. Don't fight wherever it's taking you; it won't get you anywhere we can't bring you home from." She peers a little through the haze, watching that big gray bird over him. "And don't shy away from those little observations! Even if it seems obvious...it may be something so obvious you never let yourself think about it before. That's where the truth is."
Leaning back against a pillow, she lets herself be subsumed by the ride again. Just as she starts to get lost in the pattern of one of Terence and Ev's rugs, she remembers something: She was going to talk to Genevieve. They were going to … talk. I wonder if she read my file yet, she thinks briefly, before watching the interplay of woven checks and stars.
ROB — Archie's touched by Jo's solicitude. But he is fighting the trip, a little, trying to be sure he remembers the multiplying list of significant-seeming connections he wants to be sure to remember. He takes care to use Jo's alias, and hopefully whispers to her alone: "Carolyn. The La Chorerra Strangler. He used a wire, right? A cord is a kind of wire. Maybe there is a connection after all. The wires in the building. We've got to keep track of these connections. So we can see the big picture. Terence's mission in Columbia, my time in Peru, flying saucers, Andrew's books."
LEONARD — Jo looks intensely into Archie's eyes, hoping to catch his full attention just for a moment. In a whisper that barely registers, she says, first in Danbe, then in English: "Remember. But don't speak."
Young Archie had been expounding upon the good news that Jesus brought to the Indians of North America and relating it to these folks, like the little salesman he learned to be on the floor of the ZCMI in high school. "So you see, this means that Jesus's message is meant for everyone, not just Elder Norton here and me," Archie says in basic Spanish. And at that moment back in 1947 Archie's eyes wheeled in his head, and one of the village elders says, "You were kind enough to share your God with us. Now we share our god with you." Tom begins clawing at the skin of his wrists but Archie keeps his wits, and looks to the distant Andes peak and sees... a glowing silvery disk, a real flying saucer, fly out of it, headed due north.
"They go to bring their own good news, a sacrifice, to bring sanity to your nation. You summoned them. You will meet them again in a place and time far from here. You will ask to be healed. And you will not understand that sometimes, the pain we experience is a message from the Earth and the gods, not that you must heal, but that you must go on living." None of this means anything to either '47 Archie or '73 Archie, but the memory had fled for a quarter-century, and it is here, now, with him, in this room.
As Archie and Terence are talking, Archie feels more of those grinding, pulsing, physical waves from the mushrooms go through him. The memories of the flying saucer and what Archie saw as he gazed at it, Elder Tom slumped over next to him, are intense and powerful. Back in '47, Archie saw something, a slender thread of fate that attached him to his own future: the family he'd have one day, the life stretching ahead of him at age 17 (I know his graduating this young is a bit of a sour note but I needed to do it for 1947 Reasons.) The experience left Elder Archibald feeling melancholy, scared, hopeful, and holy. Like an angel had visited him. How had he forgotten all these years? How had he closed himself to this? (Will-15 roll please.)
>>>> SUCCESS
The Will roll means Archie will retain these uncovered memories when the trip is over.
“Remember. But don't speak.”
Archie hears Jocasta perfectly fine, and he internalizes what she says (Is she … hypnotizing me? Archie says to himself with an internal chuckle, she can't possibly be worried I'd spill something here over this campfire, after all, we're all friends here, we can trust Terry and Eve and Babalon here completely and implicitly), but it sounds like Jo's an awful long way away now. Not like she's leaving, more like the room is … getting bigger. Not physically but … it's hard for Archie to conceptualize the feeling. It feels like something wants Archie to go to the corner of the room, and creep behind the vertex. He doesn't move—physically he's still dealing with the intense waves of clenching and breathing—but eventually effortlessly he does feel himself going away a litle bit. There's a little voice at the bottom of it all, it sounds … well, gosh, the voice sounds just like ol' Hobo Stan! But gravel-ier, less high-pitched, less of a caricature and more the accent of a mountain man born in 1870s Utah.
Michael
Hypnotism-16, Jocasta.
Leonard
(Made by 5.)
Michael
Archie's eyes go wide. Jo can tell he is seeing some real hallucinations now.
Leonard
She'll scoot a little closer on the floor, just enough that he knows she's there. She knows how important the first real visions are. What are you seeing, Archie? she wonders to herself.
LEONARD — She repeats the phrase, a few times, in Danbe. "Remember. But don't speak." Fetching a little notebook out of her purse and a pencil, she continues, slowly: remember, but don't speak. The connections are there and we can see them now and look at them later," drawing a simple cartoon of herself, Viv, and Archie connected by an electric spark. "What we see here we can study there. As above, so below. Remember, but don't speak."
MICHAEL — "Archie. Everything is fine. You are a beautiful human soul in peace on this lovely planet and the mushrooms are showing you what they know you must see," Terence says softly and gently. "They love you and want you to feel harmony. Breathe through it."
ROB — Archie stares at Jo and Terence with blown pupils. To the extent that he's aware of these sweet and understanding people back here in this room, being so kind and generous to him, such lovely hosts, he's still trying to convince them that he's fine, he's fine, everything's perfectly normal, he doesn't want to seem strange or come off as rude. But: don't speak. So he just nods wildly and gasps for breath.
Michael
Archie is a little child again. He is sitting out in the Ashley National Forest, east of Salt Lake City and Provo, …
founded back in ought-eight by the ol' Bull Moose himself, Archibald: T.R., Theodore Roosevelt! One of the best, most thoughtful men ever to live in the White House! Did I ever tell ye about the time I shook the President's hand at the Union Pacific Depot?
"Yes Grandpa," 8-year-old Archibald Enoch Ransom dutifully says to his grampa around the campfire, a tin can full of beans simmering away.
Grandpa leans over the campfire and gives a conspiratorial whisper, filled with love and the longing of those who've passed to the Telestial Kingdom and beyond.
"I missed ye, kiddo. I'm here but I'm not here, if ye catch my drift. One of the lessons I always wanted to teach you, Archibald. How to appreciate things that are there and not there at the same time."
Rob
(Let's make it his maternal grandmother — no reason, just feels right) "Grandpa." Little Archie shakes his head, scolding. "How can something be there and not be there at the same time?"
Michael
“Aha!” he says in that high-pitched old prospector pitch of voice that Archie would tap into 20 some odd years later on that soundstage on Sunset Boulevard, tipping his tin cup of campfire coffee in recognition to his intelligent grandson. "That's a good first question to ask! Sounds like nonsense, don't it? You can't have a cup full of coffee, f'rinstance, and a cup empty o' coffee at the same time. But look." Grandpa dumps the rest of his cup of coffee into the fire.
"Now it's empty. But the full cup is still there. In your memory. In mine. And in the tapestry of the world woven by the Lord. That's history, Archibald. History is real. The past is a place, as real as what's happenin' right now 'round this campfire. Now that don't always mean history tells the truth. Or, as Joseph Smith found out, that the tale of history is always completely told. There are secrets out there, m'boy. You've heard me tell of them before."
"Now some of the fancy pants at the Temple in Salt Lake might not like the stories I tell, like how Cain wanders the Earth at this very moment, covered in his mark, a shaggy mane of hair. Or how Jesus and the Adversary are spirit brothers. But you know the reason why Lucifer became Satan, cursed be his name, is because he chose to rebel. Cain chose to slay his poor brother. Every choice creates a new history, a new story. But you know all this already, don't you Archibald?"
(Yes, Archie's granddad drinks coffee, and cusses, and chews tobaccy, and maybe even smokes a little of that wacky tobaccy as well. It could be something young Archie never internalized, his grandpa being a bit of an apostate, but this vision/set of memories makes it clear.)
Rob
"I guess I do," says adult Archie. "But … this is a good memory, Grandpa, camping with you. It's a blessing to feel that it's still real somehow. But some histories... they're better off buried, forgotten."
Michael
Grandpa looks thoughtful, holds his hand to his mouth. "What did that Indian fella tell you? 'The pain is a message that you gotta keep on living?' There's gonna be pain, kiddo. Sure as Shinola. That's how you know you're alive. Gotta take the bitter with the sweet. Otherwise we'd be a bunch of mechanical men, on a one-way track, with a bunch of bullies manning the levers. Nobody wants that."
Grandpa gets up from the campfire and stretches his legs, hears an owl in a nearby tree, has a chuckle over getting a little spooked by it. "This is a good memory, ain't it? I may have never gotten a chance to see you grow up," he says, taking out a bright green handkerchief and wiping his eyes and blowing his nose, "but I'm dang proud of you. You're doin' real well on this journey, Archibald. Just a little further now. It … it might not be pleasant, this last bit. It might confuse you a mite. But I'm here, and your friends are here, and while history might be real..." he says with a twinkle in his eye, "time sure as shit ain't."
At that Archie's vision shatters into a shower of multi-colored cubes, which giggle as they leap and gambol past him. Grandpa and Ashley National Park disintegrate, tossed to the winds like a completed jigsaw puzzle being flung off of a table.
In our world, Archie's eyes go wide.
Archie's throat is dry and cracked as he comes to, face down on his mahogany office desk. Too much bourbon again last night, he supposes. The wood is cold from his air conditioned office. He looks around at the memorabilia all over the walls: The Ransom Kid, Hobo Stan, Enki, and the Dragon Lady in cases behind glass; Variety stories and industry ads from his heyday:
"RANSOM DOES IT AGAIN"
"ANOTHER HIT GAME FROM RANSOM PRODS. TOPS DAYTIME NIELSENS … ”
The infamous TV Guide cover from 1978 with a big-headed Jack Davis caricature of Archie in a bright plaid wide-lapeled suit holding a skinny mic, "Is Archie Ransom Television's Dean of Bad Taste?"/subhed: "Has He Finally Gone Too Far With The Amateur Hour?" and the rest of the headlines from the late '70s and early '80s: 1982: "Ransom Goes Into Syndication: Boffo Deal To Supply New Cable Nets With Programming," 1984: "Ransom Productions To Start Satellite Net Of Its Own?" The words in the headlines whirl around Archie's hung over head. Archie's secretary knocks and walks right in in a tight leather skirt, jangly earrings and bracelets, echoing the sound of the omnipresent ringing in Archie's ears.
"Good morning, boss." She goes over to the side table, grabs a remote control doohickey, and turns on... a wall of TVs that Archie just noticed. 25 of them, in a 5 x 5 grid. Television shows blare from every screen: daytime programming, constant headline news, a whole station for weather! Even broadcasting from South America, Europe, Asia. Archie can't keep his eyes off the screens; they visually echo the wall of cubes he just saw—in fact, one of the screens looks like the cubes are flying around in there but it turns out it's just a commercial for some kind of … home computer.
"You all right, chief?" Rhonda the secretary asks him. "I can come back with the morning business later if you need me to."
Rob
"Remember. Don't speak." Archie looks around, kind of wildly. He understands this is some alternate life he's imagining or could have had: "Every choice creates a history." So he scans the office, a little frantically, for a picture of his family. Does he have a family here? And if so, who's in it?
Michael
There's a picture of Archie and a hot blonde 15 years (at least) his junior on the desk. No pictures of Melanie, Jane, Eddie, or Charley. He looks down at his wedding ring and it's different. Much heavier, much more garish than the simple band of white gold that Melanie put onto his finger in the Temple back in '51.
"You... you all right, Arch?" Rhonda says as he looks around frantically. "I can get you a drink or a bump if you need it."
Rob
Archie says, "Cain chose to slay his brother." He starts laughing at the wall of screens. Twenty-five television sets, doesn't that beat all.
Michael
"I'll... I'll come back later," Rhonda puts her hand gently on Archie's wedding-ring hand, "but I thought it was important to tell you... he's in jail again. I let the lawyer know. Here's the number, bail was set at $10,000." She hands Archie a pink phone memo with the number of the lawyer, the bail bondsman, and the address of the jail.
No note of who exactly is in jail. On some deep level Archie knows. But as in a dream, the fact is just out of his conscious reach.
A feeling of wellness comes over Archie's frantic self, a comforting coldness trickling down his throat through his chest to his belly. He's calmer now, like God or his grandpa had his back, but he stopped believing in both of them ages ago. Archie knows there's a world outside this office but he's a little scared to explore it, of what he might find. But Archie ultimately, yes, possesses the choice to go out or to stay here.
Rob
He thanks Rhonda for the water and goes over to the Ransom Gang puppets under glass. Taps on the cases. Are they open-able? Any sense of any autonomous personalities there?
Michael
The only one he gets a buzz off of is Enki.
And they are openable.
Rob
Enki it is, then. Archie opens up the case, gently lifts out the puppet, puts it on his arm. Then he whistles the little tune by which the Ransom Gang traditionally "woke up" Enki.
Michael
Enki's dusty faceted plastic button eyes light up in that way only Archie (and some of the kids at home) was ever able to see.
"Zae a'aš?"
[what is it that] you desire?
(with the word "a'aš" conveying shades of meaning like, "a bad wish, a cursed wish"; Enki being snide from the outset.)
Rob
"Enki, my friend! It's been a long, long time. I've missed you!"
Michael
"Zae nu ane. Zae kur gu'e."
you [are] not him. you [are] not from here. ("gu'e" conveying "from this side")
"Zae … silim."
you [are] … healthy.
Rob
"What's that, Enki? You say you don't recognize me? Come on, old buddy. I know it's been a while, but it's me, your old pal, Archie!" He lowers his voice out of performer mode and tries to speak frankly. "Old friend: I could use your help with some, I guess you'd call it 'market research.' Do you remember how you helped me with the breakfast cereal, and the soda pop? I'm trying to crunch some numbers but the math is... messy. So many human variables. I know you see people differently, with your faceted eyes. I could use a little bit of your, ah, detachment."
Michael — Terence, Ev, Viv, and Jo can see Archie's mouth sort of mumble (maybe a mumbling voice appears to come out of the corner of the room—nice trick) but they can't comprehend anything of what Archie is vocalizing.
Leonard — "Might be time for some hydration, Terence," Jocasta suggests.
Michael — "Good idea, Carolyn." Terence comes over, puts his hand very gently around Archie's shoulder, and brings the glass of water up to Archie's mouth. "Breathe. And have a little sip of water, Arch. It'll do you good."
Rob — Archie drinks the water, slows down his breathing.
He whistles a little tune. Then says, "Zae a'aš?" without visibly moving his lips.
Michael — Terence's eyes widen as he whispers to Carolyn, "Glossolalia."
Leonard — "I told you," Jocasta says with as wry a smile as she can muster, "He's a big deal in the puppet world."
Rob — "Zae nu ane. Zae kur gu'e."
"Zae … silim."
More Sumerian. Archie starts laughing.
Michael
Rob, wanna give me an Esmology-23 roll? Base skill of 17, plus 2 for Enki, plus 2 for the research you, Jo, and Roger did, and plus 2 for the trip.
>>>> SUCCESS
"Zae a'aš šid kazuzu lal?" Zae a'aš sa dug usal? Igi gid."
Enki gestures with his dragon-snake head to the TV walls, the computer on Archie's desk.
"Udnamekam zae. Nim ĝir niĝin gukin. A ĝal gu'e? A ĝal gure u diĝir. Dagan gud immen hili, nim ĝir dub. ĝae nam. Udunita sikipa luKA'inima šušur. E ten. Išib zae ĝiri ul ten.
you wish to count the honey insects/bees [perform esmology]? you wish to know what will happen in the valley? look around you.
Enki gestures with his dragon-snake head to the TV walls, the computer on Archie's desk.
this is your future. lightning encircling the globe. helpful to your side? helpful to the gods [Anunnaki] as well. every one of you cattle thirsts for this luxury, the lightning tablets [televisions/computers]. I call it inevitable. the curly-haired magician was right. time is coming to an end. and your wizards will hurry it.
Rob
Archie pictures himself saying, "What's that, Enki? You say time is coming to an end? You say our wizards will only hurry it?" He starts laughing like a loon. But he tries to stay focused. "Is there anything we can do, can we, ah, steer the honey insects to keep the lightning tablets healthy? To protect this valley, to keep the, ah, 'gods' asleep?"
Michael
Enki does the muppet mouth wide-open thing at Archie's mention of keeping the lightning-tablets healthy.
"Nim ĝir dub silim?? O lil! Nu nim ĝir dub silim, nu hur. Kiĝiri neru dim. Kazuzu lal silim. Nenam anene namšita nu diĝir."
make the lightning-tablets healthy?? o fool! you cannot make them healthy. the ill road has been laid. you must make the honey insects healthy. so they will not beg for the gods to return.
On one of the TVs, Archie zones in on a commercial for a new NBC scifi action/adventure series. "Friday," the announcer says in an unctuous used car salesman voice, "on The Atlanteans, the Conspiracy sends their top hitman to take out the fugitive members of Operation Urizen … ”
[a quick-cut montage of scenes of some scruffy '80s action heroes who generally resemble the seven members of Operation URIEL hiding in an underground bunker while special effects of circular jets shoot laser beams at a crappy model of said bunker; picture the shuttlecraft fights from V the series]
" … while Elektra finds a man from her past working with the Conspiracy to create the [very Ernie Anderson-like voice here] ULTIMATE SOLDIER"
[A gorgeous late-20s/early-30s blonde actress … maybe even the one in Archie's picture? In a clinch with an eyepatch-wearing man in Army fatigues]
"You can't use Tibetan meditation techniques to... remove a man's soul to make him a killing machine, it's unholy, it's inhuman!" the actress fairly shouts.
"Based on the best-selling novels, The Atlanteans, 9 Eastern, 8 Central and Mountain Friday only on ennnn beeee seeeee [NBC tones]"
Enki says a single word to the commercial.
"Ki'uš."
garbage.
Rob
The ad distracts Archie from his esmological investigations. He takes in the rest of the office again. "Did I make a choice to end up here? It doesn't look very... wholesome... but who am I to judge?" Thinking: Maybe this Archie doesn't lie to his family every night. Maybe this life is more honest, at least. "Is this who I am, Enki?"
Michael
"Aš bala. Aš dili dus niĝdab." one [turn/change]. one single divergence is all that's required. Enki is saying that a single event, a single change made Archie into this man. But he's not forthcoming on what. He idly picks up the pink phone memo in his own mouth/Archie's hand and seems to peer at it. "A dib zae tukum," he says with his mouth full. it is nearly time for you to go.
Rob
Archie looks at the rest of the puppets under glass. "I'm glad you're all back together," he says, thinking even as he says it that it doesn't really make sense. His eyes fall last on the Ransom Kid. "I made mistakes. I could have done better, I know."
Michael
Archie's high-tech push-button office phone rings. One of many lighted buttons blinks.
Rob
With Enki's help, he answers.
Michael
"This is the LA County Jail, you have a collect call from a [network censor noise], will you accept?"
Laugh track.
Rob
His heart thuds, mouth goes dry. This suddenly feels like a violation. "Yes. I accept full responsibility."
Michael
As Archie turns around to the fourth wall, he sees a wall of those undulating, gamboling cubes again where the camera setups would be. They were the laugh track. And the studio audience. And Archie finds himself whooshing out of his own body to join them in watching Archie take the call. "Yes. Yes. Mmhmm. I see. Well, I suppose I'll be down to bail you the hell out. AGAIN." Enki then curses in Sumerian into the phone before Archie hangs up. Laugh track, applause. Fade to black. Fright Check. Rule of 14 (pass on a 13 or less).
>>>> SUCCESS
Archie zooms back from the corner of the room to see Terence and Jo keeping a close eye on him.
He feels more or less lucid.
Rob
Archie beams at these beautiful young people. "It's the darnedest thing," he says. "I was on another network."
Michael
Terence smiles. "My brother Dennis and I called the hallucinations we received when we took a concoction of mushrooms and smoked caapi 'vegetable television.' We watched it for hours. The patterns were never the same. Undulating pulsing screens of cubes and jeweled spheres."
"For a while we weren't sure if the cubes were entertaining us or we were entertaining them."
Leonard
Jocasta will enter trip-mom mode, getting up for a stretch, making sure everyone is hydrated, chatting with Viv and Ev to see if they're doing well. At some point, when things are more settled and Terence's attention is elsewhere, she'll quietly ask Archie how he's feeling and when he needs to get home. She'll add, even lower and in Danbe, "We'll talk, and we'll keep an eye on him, yes?"
Rob
So Archie's basically lucid, but I'm guessing still pretty dazed. It takes him a second to translate the Danbe, but he repeats it and agrees. "We'll talk … and we'll keep an eye … on him. Yes. Yes." He stares at Jocasta, trying to read her mental state. "Is that..." (meaning the trip) " … what it's like every time?"
Leonard
Jocasta can't stop herself: she lets out a joyful laugh, hoping that it comes across as delight rather than mockery. "Not always. There's lots of variance based on things like quality, potency, setting, even temperature. But remember, the 'that' was different for you than it was for me, or the rest of us." She glances over at Terence. "Our host may quibble with my metaphor, but I think this is something important to remember: People tend to think that a trip is the drug speaking to you, that whatever you experience is the drug talking. But I think it's more like a book. There's the writer, sure, and they're telling you a story, but there's also you, and you're reading it. And what you make of that story is what you bring to reading it as well as what it's telling you. It won't tell you anything you aren't able to hear."
Rob
Archie hugs her. "I hope you know I'm awfully proud of you."
Then: "What time is it?" If four hours have indeed gone by, he definitely ought to get home.
Michael
Indeed. I figured the excuse for Archie tonight was dinner and "drinks" with some old ad buddies in town on business
Leonard
"Terence, it was a pleasure, but I've got to go put the kids to bed," she smiles, indicating Archie and Genevieve. "We will absolutely be in touch … thanks so much for hosting, and for everything else."
"Let me drive you, chief," she says, her voice uncharacteristically sheepish as she turns to Archie. "You're probably still a little hazy. I can find my way home. I always do."
Viv
Michael
Genevieve has tripped alone and with others and tonight, after feeling deeply into Archie's web of connections and finding him primally wounded, she finds herself drifting into a comfortable lone space, away from the concerns of Operation URIEL, of Terence's youth making him impulsive and boundary-testing, from the patients she's going to have to hand off to new therapists at MRI next week, all the concerns of quotidian existence. Genevieve does what she usually does when she enjoys an entheogenic trip. Genevieve gets cosmic.
Terence's mushrooms are potent; poor Archie (Or Sebastian Stone? Viv wonders) taking twice the recommended dose is going to put him in some new and unexpected places. But Genevieve knows just where to go. Past her crown chakra, past the very tip of her aura, past the silver thread connecting her with the higher realms, and fully into her Higher Self.
That Higher Self has been among the stars for years now; the ideas for the Kinarchism series came from her first explorations into emanations and frequencies higher than ours. For Genevieve knows within her own paradigm what Mitch has posited about existence, what Andrew and Mitch bantered about at the Fourth of July about Flatland, what Roger glimpses through his deep rich relationship with his family, the loa, and what Jocasta glimpses scattershot with her own hallucinogen use. The universe is wider, deeper, and goes further and with more varying densities than any of us can easily perceive. And undergirding all that is love.
The monad which makes a more thorough appearance in her upcoming Book Two of the Kinarchist series has spoken to Genevieve, many times; sometimes in emotional urgings and aggregates, sometimes in signs only discernible after the journeying is over, and sometimes in light languages, arcane runes of blue-white neon light that seem imprinted and embossed on the literal fabric of reality itself. Tonight it is taking the form of a deep cosmic pattern from within Terence's lovely Persian rug, or at least that's the trigger for it. This feels like an old memory, a memory of being dispersed among many bodies (of water?), of splashing between the weavings of Fate to be the deep wellspring of wisdom that connects the web of life on Earth with the silvery patterns of stars and constellations and Gods and well beyond, to the everpresent Seventh Density where All are one. All worlds, all beings, all threads.
Genevieve insouciantly flips the page of reality and suddenly becomes the Lady in the Lake. Her hand holds forth the Sword, the symbol of cutting wit and wicked intelligence and righteous self-defense. She offers it to the knight who has come to entreat her. The sword is the Plan. The Plan will bring a broken enslaved Earth to a higher emanation. Does the Knight understand this? Will he take the mantle?
Arthur/Archie sees the Plan behind the blade, and nods in agreement. He accepts. Nimue/Vivane's hand flings the sword forth from the waters and it turns into a fidchell board when Arthur receives it. Owain/Charley standing next to him nods in recognition and relief.