Jo and Charley at Point 9
Monday, October 8, 1973.
Michael
Jocasta and Charley: Point 9 (epicenter 37° 7' 4.7634" N, 89° 13' 19.668" W, Mounds Precinct, Ill., roughly 10 miles north of Cairo, Ill.): In their briefing, it becomes clear why the computer assigned Charley and Jo to this site. The esmologist in charge of the Point 9 team, a brittle-ly polite, white middle-aged Southern woman named Mildred Wilcox, says there are certain "psychosocial and esmological sensitivities" we need to work around when it comes to this part of southern Illinois/Missouri/Kentucky. And specifically that has to do with the mass movement among whites in this area over the past few years to essentially pogrom the Black population of Cairo out of town. Mildred has her own theories about why the irruption happened here—she does, in fact, mention the pre-Columbian mounds as having a profound psychic effect on the white population here over the past couple of centuries—but she also thinks it happened here because of the psychic violence of the past few years in Cairo. Mildred says, quite bluntly, "They've been lynching n-----s here for the past hundred years or more and whatever you might think about that personally, it generates the kind of belief energy the other side drools over. The good people of Cairo are a feast for the Kings." Mildred doesn't mention the historic floods of 1927 but one of the other historian-esmologists on the team does.
So the computer assigned, shall we say, the least esmologically "stimulating" Sandmen to this mission. There are a lot of women in this group; probably half of the two dozen on the team. But it's an all-white squad, and Jo and Charley can't help but notice an awful lot of them are blond and blue-eyed. "Now," Mildred says, "just because y'all have 'adaptive camouflage' doesn't mean you can traipse around Cairo and environs willy-nilly. They're not gonna love outsiders or hippie-types much either," which Jo can't help but feel is a direct reference to her and a couple of the younger, more hip-looking women on the Point 9 team. "But we do need to walk among them, to get a sense of what people are feeling and thinking, whether this irruption is already walking among the people of Cairo and working, gnawing on their xenophobia." Point 9 will be working out of a Holiday Inn in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, about 15 miles away from the epicenter and 20 from Cairo; Mildred wants her team insulated from the bad vibes on their off-time. But Charley and Jo are going to be asked to survey three specific locations, as are the other psis on the squad, in this order of priority. 1) The epicenter, 2) Cairo itself (this may take more than a single day) and 3) the mounds at Mounds, Illinois and the Kincaid site over in Pope County, Illinois. "I don't want to accentuate too much the attention to the mounds," Mildred says, "but I just got a feelin' about them that I want confirmed or denied in the first 72 hours."
Leonard
Have we been provided with a cover story as to who we are and why we are in Cairo? Or do we need to provide that ourselves? If we’re going to draw out info from the locals we’re going to need to overcome the typical small town suspicion of strangers, even ones with the ‘right’ skin color.
Michael
If Jo brings that up to the Point 9 team, I would imagine Mildred and the other esmologists and memeticists would want to work with and consult each individual agent to provide a cover that best suits their individual profiles. So I would say, Jo and Charley can consult with the esmologists and the Project's forgers and paperhangers can produce good cover both documentary and disguise/costume-wise. (OOC what this means is that if Jo/Leonard has an idea for a good cover from this preliminary briefing, we can see with an Esmology or Expert Skill (Memetics) skill roll from the braintrust how effective it might be.) We've got the ability to research local news and happenings here if we want to concoct a story with local memetic resonance.
I guess we could justify a quick Research-14 roll among the local news sources from the computer lab if Jo needs some ideas.
Leonard
[Okay. This is long and probably overcomplicated, but (a) that's Jo!, and (b) hopefully it will give us some direction to start this particular part of the mission. She also wants to check in with Charley, get her thoughts, see what she wants to do and how it plays into what Jocasta plans to do, and so on, but she'll wait until the morning of Tuesday the 9th to do that if that's okay with Mel. This is all stuff she's going to do the evening and night of the 8th, after the debriefing.]
After some initial trepidation ("Oh, good, a chance to sit in a car and do recon in a whole different state!"), Jocasta starts to warm up to the mission. Despite Mildred's brusque manner and the implications about her being out of place, Jocasta at least thinks a female CO might treat her a little more seriously, and this is, well, real intel work, the stuff the Army trained her for before everything got Really Weird. Getting out in the field, fitting in with the local population, developing some human intelligence — that's what she did in Vietnam, and it was the last time she really felt in control of what she was doing. Parts of her brain that have seemed like they were in a long sleep are beginning to wake up, refreshed and ready. She's bursting with ideas.
First, and least, she'd like to do a quick Psychology roll on Mildred during the debrief. She's not necessarily suspicious, but Paranoid Jo hasn't left her completely: she really just wants to know if it seems like the CO is hiding anything, or feels more ill at ease than the situation warrants. She doesn't want to make a big deal out of it, just a normal situational read.
Second, some prep work. After some consideration, Jo decides to go with her Jill Kelley identity, and to pose herself as a visiting academic from the UK, in the area to do some historical research. She considers taking on a military role at first, but her experience with people like the locals tells her that while they admire the troops, women — outside of nursing and other support roles — are still too new and fraught for them to really develop a level of comfort where they'll open up to her. They don't really trust academics, either, but she's found that her fellow Americans, even the most chauvinistic, are disarmed by British accents. Her intention is to go out among them, under the guise of collecting information about broad social changes in the old Civil War-era border regions, and ask them three basic questions: How did things used to be here? Were they better or worse? What has changed? They're direct, straightforward, and put all the impetus on her interviewees to interpret as broadly or specifically as they like. This should set her up well to draw them out further, using psychology, basic humint cultivation tactics, and whatever else she can employ. She'll ask the documents department to smudge her Jill Kelley ID to reflect this.
She'll also pick out some clothes. She brought some of her plainest: simple shift dresses, dull long skirts and nondescript tops, cheap shoes. Nothing she'd really like to wear; nothing she'd have dared wear in the old days of impressing the ladies who lunch in her housewife days in the North Bay. But clothes that won't mark her as an outsider by class, style, or expense. She'll keep her hair in a nice plain bun and go easy on the makeup.
Moving on to the supply depot at Point 9, she'll request some pretty simple gear: one regular camera of the sort carried by a professional (albeit one of limited means) and a small, concealable spycam; a miniature recorder; a few notebooks and pens; a very small assortment of mopers; a silenced semi-automatic pistol; and an ikoter. She'd also like to see if it's possible to get a small folding survival rifle, something like an Air Force AR-7, with a scope, and a nice fall jacket that conceals a ballistic vest. If that's not possible, it's fine, and even if it is, they can stay behind in the motel until needed. (edited)
Next, she'll check in with the intel/library people and see if they have access to any local records. Her intention here is to study (probably a Research roll combined with Occultism) the local lore of the native tribes: brief histories of the mounds, the mythology and symbolism of the historic tribes, the post-colonial history of the region with particular reference to racial and religious violence or conflict. She has no precise goal here, she just wants to prepare in case she notices any unusual markers or indicators of occult activity native to the area. She'll then requisition a car and driver to take her out to near the largest mounds. There, she wants to just take a few photos and notes, and then get out just long enough to do a quick Naturalist roll. She won't climb the mounds, snoop, investigate, or anything that elaborate — not yet, anyway. She just wants to see if there's anything amiss with what should be the normal activities, appearances, and behaviors of the local flora and fauna. Finally (!), she'll have the driver take her back to the motel, and before turning in for the night, she'll try to quietly and stealthily climb up on the roof, take a strong dose of LSD, and just meditate while watching the skies. She might do an Intelligence Analysis roll to see if she can synthesize everything (if there is anything) she learned on the various jaunts today, but she really just wants to look up and see if the calming of her consciousness and the tamping down of her ego reveals anything unnatural, unusual, or, in particular, History-B-enigmatic. That should do it! After that she'll just hit the sack and meet with Charley in the morning.
Michael
Let me arrange Jo's rolls here.
Psychology-14 to analyze Mildred sounds good, and you can definitely do that now.
The cover identity sounds really good—SANDMAN can get you any academic credentials you might need for deeper work adjacent to academia—the closest college is Shawnee Community College in Cairo and the closest university is Southeast Missouri State University which just became a full-fledged university this year; there are also University of Illinois Agricultural Extension offices in Mounds, IL—but let's take note of Jo's Acting and Mimicry defaults just in case you come up against any hard cases in the field. Acting would be a 10 (IQ minus 5) and Mimicry is 9 (IQ minus 6). In a pinch I'm guessing Diplomacy-13 and Empathy will be helpful to bolster/substitute/smooth things over for these. The good thing about being in the field with a whole bunch of new populations to interact with is that Empathy's first impression ability suits everyone you meet.
I'm going to hold off on the Research-14 roll until Mel has had her say, but that will happen before we leave Huntsville (we've got the computers there, after all), and of course the Naturalist and Intelligence Analysis rolls will only happen once you have some intel to analyze.
Leonard
Yeah given her lack of Acting and Mimic (and just on general principles), Jo plans to lean heavily on empathy, both the skill and the power, while out in the field (and she can pull out Psychology or Fast Talk if she needs to). As one of her old instructors said, you can learn ad much from a hostile as you can from a friendly, just in a different way.
Anyway:
>> SUCCESS by 8
Michael
Jo susses out Mrs. Wilcox pretty easily: Native Southerner. Accent seems mid-South: Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi or Alabama. Judging by her age, maybe she was Women's Army Corps or OSS in World War II. Maybe an intelligence analyst or in the propaganda section. For some reason Jo gets a vision of some of her friends from the 'ladies who lunch' who ended up in advertising: hard-drinking no-nonsense gals who had to keep their defenses up all the time in a boys' club. Smart, quick on her feet, a mordant ironic manner. But it's clear she's also monstrously racist.
She was trying everything, deploying every effort to not betray how she might tacitly agree with the "White Hats" and to put some of the blame for the irruption on white xenophobia... but the briefing document she's written up tells a different story: of unjustified Black rage since '67, of a former "social stability" sent into upheaval thanks to uppity ingrates. "The social matrix in Cairo was balanced and in equilibrium before the riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dayton, but the summer of 1967 put an end to that. Excessive and violent actions "on both sides" led us to a tipping point. The esmological patterns in Cairo today are deeply disturbed and vulnerable to Enemy infiltration and subornation." Jo even begins to wonder if the computer picked this very Aryan-looking field team... or if Mrs. Wilcox did personally.
Leonard
Figures the first conservative white lady I need to put at ease is the CO, Jo muses. She'll probably put a tail on me for being half Greek. She'll file this analysis away and make a point of paying attention to how the rest of the field team behaves, but for now, she'll just head over to get her gear and credentials in order (she'll go with Southeast Missouri State; the newness of it will lend credibility to the vagueness of the cover). She'll hold off on anything else until she can talk to Charley.
Mel
Charley would assist Research rolls if that is helpful … and would propose her cover being simply: Amy, a new kid in town. Exploring Cairo on bike making friends (hopefully) with the kids in the area, learning what she can from them. She thinks this will allow for all types of surveillance …
Michael
Any skills you might want to Renshaw? What are some good "local kid" type skills? Maybe Area Knowledge...
Mel
Yes, let’s start with bike riding
Michael
Oh yeah, hah. Maybe keep Karate for self-defense purposes.
Mel
Yes!
Michael
I know Area Knowledge doesn't fit the "new kid" profile but it's good to know more than the locals think you know.
Occultism-18 as aid to Jo's research.
>> SUCCESS by 8
With Charley having Renshawed some local knowledge, she can also aid Jocasta's Research roll. So Mel, if you want to roll Area Knowledge (Cairo and environs)-17, that roll will aid Leonard/Jocasta's Research-15 (given a +1 because of Jo's Occultism). Then with that Charley and Jo can go get a driver and check out the mounds.
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 3
Michael
Okay, so Leonard, give me a Research-16 roll when you get a chance.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 7
Michael
(Good. I need to do a little bit of lore research/refresh my memory on the two different local mound sites so I can present the Mound Tour to y'all properly but you might as well give me the Naturalist-16 (gave you a +1 for the Research and Area Knowledge) roll now, I can fold that naturalist info into the description.)
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 7
Michael
The upshot is that there are two clusters of pre-Columbian mounds close to the subduction zone. The first is right near the Point 9 epicenter, in the towns of Mounds and Mound City north of Cairo. Many of these original hills and mounds have been flattened, razed or destroyed by development over the last 150 years of white settlement; in large part all that remains are the names of the towns and a couple of hills vaguely remembered as once having once, long ago, been larger and taller. One of the remaining intact mounds is on private land, a farm.
The other mound site is a much larger multi-mound site up the Ohio River a ways on the border with Kentucky: the Kincaid Site. That one has a lot of literature written about it in archeological journals from the '30s and '40s and has been extensively studied and excavated. This Wikipedia entry is a good starter on that site in Kincaid:
Which site do you two want to start with?