Mitch Sees
Michael
Okay Jeff, you mentioned it first so if you three are going to use SANDMAN resources to get a background dossier on Dan from Concord you get to roll the Patron-15 roll. BUT! If you decide to use Padden and Hall, Leonard can roll Contacts-9 for them today. Up to you all.
Jeff
I can't think of a reason not to use SANDMAN resources; it's fully in the remit of URIEL's mission & I don't think there's been any discussion of keeping the Agrigenics investigation secret from Granite Peak.
>> SUCCESS by 1
Michael
The license plate and address is enough to get back from the central SANDMAN database (tied into various federal law enforcement and educational databases just coming online in the past couple of years) a hit on a young man living at that address in Concord:
Daniel Adam Miller, DOB 5/27/52, rising undergraduate senior at UC Davis majoring in pre-law with a minor in environmental sciences. Academic records show a 3.3 GPA with courses relatively evenly distributed among business law and history, agricultural sciences, and core curriculum requirements; the pre-law courses are mostly A's. Parents Richard (dentist) and Judy (homemaker/part-time real estate agent), younger siblings Rebecca (born 1959) and David (born 1963). No criminal record, press clippings show him as a National Honor Society recipient at Concord High (class of '70), member of track team. Federal tax records show he has been working for Agrigenics, Inc. in Vacaville since March of 1973, first part-time during the school year and full-time over the summer. Position described as "legal department clerk: licensing and patents." No criminal record, no records with law enforcement or domestic (counter)intelligence.
(Should note that in 1973, the idea of doing a professional internship, summer or otherwise, was pretty rare and was reserved for real go-getters who were dedicated to getting a foot in the door of their chosen field; this must mean that Dan came into Agrigenics with a real desire to work in some kind of bioscience/agricultural business law, which again would have been a fairly specialized field in 1973.)
Jeff
"He's younger than I figured." Mitch had thought Dan was his own age, about. "How'd he score the job, you think? Through some mentor prof at Davis?"
Michael
(I should comment at this point now that we know who the "grassroots organization" is—basically, as far as we know at this point, solely a Dan eager to make connections with some kind of whistleblower—his flyer with its misspellings and overall fevered sort of verbiage does stand out as being a bit unusual. Dan's a college student, educated, looking to go to law school. Why does the flyer have that whiff of bedlam about it? Honestly if anyone wanted to give me a Psychology roll—Roger would get a +2 to this since he's the only one who's spoken to him in person—feel free.)
Leonard
[Assuming Jocasta has already told the fellas the results of her Agrigenics research and her subsequent vision of who we now can safely assume was Dan]
>> SUCCESS by 4
So I think with the bonus that would be a success by 4.
Michael
Yeah! Jocasta listens to the Roger Agent 00/Dan conversation (if we were eavesdropping by mic, assume standard operating procedure we're recording somewhere too), re-reads the flyer, checks out the Dan dossier, and reconsiders her Psychometric read on the flyer from a few days ago. Jo thinks Dan wrote the text for the flyer while in an altered mental state from what he saw in the basement at Agrigenics … probably the day of or only a couple or few days after. Obviously, trauma very slowly fades from the conscious mind and sinks into the subconscious depending on the severity, and the trauma as implied by the emotional bouquet left on a photocopy of what was presumably an "original" flyer was still quite strong, hidden in the words and elisions and overall frenzy of the words... so Jo's thinking that the flyer was less meant as "adaptive coloration" meant to attract "fellow" conspiratorial loonies to the Castro Village Bowl, but as an authentic, desperate cry for help.
Bill
Roger will agree: it definitely felt like Dan was honestly looking for help, while terrified of who might come for him. Just being the lone guy-- if someone was baiting a trap for us, wouldn't they work harder to make it look like there was really a group, and not just one lone loon? But he can't speak to what Mitch was feeling about him; he doesn't get the destiny angle. Why he pinned his hopes so firmly on Castro Bowling, that's a mystery Roger doesn't get.
Roger will also silently give more prayers of thanks to Agent 00 for doing the mirroring thing: going with the graduate student cover was a good call, given it sets them as fellow students. He may need to deepen that cover. Speaking of which, he needs some help picking a plausible lab as the cover, and setting up reception to answer to it. That number he gave was one of the cover-use ones. "Hello, this is the XXX Lab. Oh, John the lab assistant? Yeah, I can take a message for him, but just to call you back."
Leonard
Jocasta suggests using her phone as the dummy for the lab, as she routinely fields calls with fake identities through it. "I can't speak of what Mitch got out of him either," she says. "There's always something behind the curtain when he pulls on it, though. What's our next step? Should we focus just on Dan, or start to plan an infiltration of Agrigenics? Most of our arrows seem to be pointing to that basement so far."
Jeff
“I guess on balance Dan’s rich personal backstory isn’t worth delving into, probably,” Mitch muses. “The idea that he was waiting to make contact with us, like he’d been set up to be someone’s cutout there at the bowling alley … that idea isn’t going away after a good night’s sleep. But I might be wrong about it, I’m wrong a lot. And there’s nothing for it but to move forward, eyes open and wide awake, which we were gonna do anyway … Anyhow, I was thinking I could try, you know, seeing into the basement. Like I did up on the summit of Shasta.
“I’ve been working on it this week! A little. I can see from my bedroom to the driveway. Couldn’t get from my bedroom to the top of Shasta, or the canyon, or here, but last night I lay in bed and I could see into the park by my house. Almost a mile.”
Mitch shrugs. “It’s pretty exhausting, so I haven’t played with it a whole lot, but, hey.”
Bill
Roger adds: “Well, man, if you need to be close, and have a guardian, I’m happy to drive you. I’ll survey the outside while you get, uh, eyes on the inside. You should have a guardian before you do this stuff, ya know? At least draw a chalk circle around your bed next time…”
Roger makes a note to himself to get some protection around Mitch’s place. Start with four iron stakes around the corners of the building… gotta call that guy who sells surplus railroad supplies.
Michael
So the area around the cube-shaped Agrigenics HQ is undeveloped, flat land—probably former farmland—500 yards or so from the two-lane spur I-505 and about a mile or so north of the main drag and residential zones of Vacaville proper. Not a lot of cover for a vehicle, although there is a highway truck stop off the 505 about a half-mile away. The Agrigenics parking lot itself is vast, about half-full in the mid-afternoon of Friday, August 10, and, upon first glance, un-fenced/un-secured. [Secret Observation checks for Mitch and Roger] There is security at the main entrance behind the glass of the lobby, an unmarked vehicle that does circuits of the outer ring of the parking lot, and what look like closed circuit cameras on the front and loading dock areas of the building. After a quick drive-by, Roger and Mitch figure it would be best for Mitch to use his Clairvoyance from somewhere a little further off; the truck stop parking lot is well within Mitch's sea level-level Clairvoyance.
That's Clairvoyance-12 to you, Jeff, whenever you're ready.
Jeff
>> SUCCESS by 2
Just the one die roll for this one, right?
Michael
Yes, that opens your eyes at a distance, then it's more skill rolls to move your remote eye around.
Mitch closes his eyes in the back seat of the car, the sound of the interstate traffic and big rigs backing up fading from his conscious mind as he opens his remote eye on what he believes is the basement of the Agrigenics HQ. Mitch's remote senses reveal a... very odd chamber. The ambient lighting is very low, but Mitch can see what feels like a 15-foot diameter chamber, a capsule almost, with a single person sitting in lotus position on the... oddly pliant, deep-fabric'd floor of the chamber. The floor looks like it's moving; for a minute Mitch wonders if he is experiencing some kind of sensory hallucination but in fact it looks like the surface of the chamber is a big... waterbed. The figure "meditating" in the chamber looks like a woman, in her 20s, with big frizzy brown hair, round glasses, wearing overalls with a tie-dye shirt underneath. Her eyes are closed. (Figure in this photo not representative of her, of course, but the chamber is identical to what you see here.)
Jeff
Okay remind me how this works or tell for the first time I forget: can Mitch move what I'm gonna call his scrying sensor, because we all remember D&D, can Mitch move his sensor around? Does he have an astral body he can walk with? Can he focus his perception on individual details, ie look this lady over more closely? Can he see auras or detect history b through the sensor? Aura sight is strictly tied to line of sight, Detect iirc is not
Anyway obvs Mitch is getting as much info as he can, quick as Canby. If there's an obvious exit and he can move through it then he will... after examine everything he can
Michael
Okay remind me how this works or tell for the first time I forget: can Mitch move what I'm gonna call his scrying sensor, because we all remember D&D, can Mitch move his sensor around? Does he have an astral body he can walk with? Can he focus his perception on individual details, ie look this lady over more closely? Can he see auras or detect history b through the sensor? Aura sight is strictly tied to line of sight, Detect iirc is not
Clairsentience says it acts as your own sight, so any powers you can use through line of sight can be used, and so that would include Detect (History B). Each move, it seems, is a skill roll, but given you're operating at level 11 (2000 yards) at sea level it's a very large Move. That -5 penalty is something I hadn't figured on during your initial remote viewing attempt but figure on your first chance at scrying somewhere unseen, you're always taking max Extra Time to negate it whenever necessary and possible (an additional 30 minutes). So you can do Aura Sight and Detect (History B) on the meditation chamber and the young woman, just one set of rolls for both. And obviously keeping track of Fatigue Points, Mitch is down to 4/10 right now.
And then we can worry about moving etc.
Jeff
Ok
Aura sight first
>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 6
>> DETECT … SUCCESS by 7
>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 0
Whew
Detect History-B second
>> ACTIVATE … SUCCESS by 4
>> DETECT … SUCCESS by 5
>> ANALYZE … SUCCESS by 5
Ok no additional FP spent
Michael
weird rolls wow
Okay, Aura Sight first. The young woman's aura is peaceful, placid, and focused. She is meditating; Mitch can tell by both her aura and the physical/neurological information his Aura Sight provides. As Mitch delves a little deeper to analyze things, he feels like the meditation has a purpose beyond its, heh, GURPS-rules role as a way to clear one's mind and ruminate on a moral dilemma. The meditation is providing focus for some kind of mental defense. Mitch can feel it extending out from her aura through the area of the chamber. The defense doesn't involve protecting herself or preventing people from reading her mind or peeking at her, because, well, here Mitch is in the Agrigenics meditation pod with her. But she is focusing to defend or protect something. Mitch isn't sure what. The Detect (History B) catches a pretty enduring whiff of History B taint on this woman. No active effects, no glyphs or possession or reality shards or anything like that, she's just been around/exposed to enough History B belief or energy to have it well-worn into her. If Mitch used Detect (History B) on the street and caught this level of taint, he'd think she was a cultist or believer of some kind, or maybe someone who is on a day-to-day basis exposed to the energies of a subduction zone. If you'd like to try to move out of the door of the pod, that's a simple Clairvoyance roll and I'm assuming with Extra Time you'll cancel out the -5 so that's another Clairvoyance-12.
Jeff
Worth a try
>> FAILURE by 4
Dang
What happens? My excuse for not knowing how my own powers work is, I'm sick
Michael
I'm checking the "Costs Fatigue" Limitation right now and I think I have it figured out: since your Clairsentience ability can be used "as long as you like" once it's activated, I don't think you need to pay more FP to move around. But it does feel like one failure would penalize your subsequent attempt to move (as per Skill rolls) by a -1.
Jeff
So I can retry but at a cumulative -1 to skill per failure until I either succeed or crit fail?
Michael
That's right. And every new repositioning of your Eye is a fresh Clairvoyance skill roll.
Jeff
If I successfully move, does the -X penalty carry to the next sensor relocation?
Michael
But hey, no Fatigue costs, that's pretty damn good.
If I successfully move, does the -X penalty carry to the next sensor relocation?
I would say no, no carry-over of penalties when you try a new scrying POV. You reposition and sort of re-gather your senses for the next move.
Jeff
Yeah, it's eating clock time like a motherfucker but Mitch has all day
Okay then, Clairvoyance-11
>> SUCCESS by 1
He's at, what, 10+30+30 minutes on the clock?
Plus a few seconds of aura seeing and detecting, that rounds to zero though
He should buy Roger lunch after
Or dinner depending
Michael
Yes, with the various Extra Times that sounds right. 10 to prep, 30 to try and move out of the chamber the first time and fail, and then a precisely 15-minute-long period to try again (offsetting the -5, you succeeded by 1, so 15x1 minutes were needed). So you'll be in the chamber with Mystery Woman for 45 minutes trying to move. She remains there in meditation the entire time. As Mitch tries to move his perspective to leave the meditation chamber after a long hour of trying, he finally feels like he can begin to see what's just outside the door. It's definitely a twisty little hallway, he can barely see the furry-wallpapered modernist contours of it; it's like a continuation of this plush meditation chamber. As Mitch tries to push through the wall and get a better look, he bumps up against some kind of barrier. He can't move his eye. Mitch's awareness is still in the meditation chamber, and he's able to see the woman clearly still. The woman smirks. Fright Check, pass on a 13 or less.
Jeff
>> SUCCESS by 4
Michael
Mitch is not fearful.
If these people have a psychic guard on-duty 24/7 then we are going to need bigger glyphs
Michael
Are you going to try another 30 minutes of concentration to fully make it through the barrier, see if Mystery Woman stays in here throughout?
Jeff
I guess so, yeah. Can I get a better sense of what I'm up against?
Bill
Ok, Roger is starting to get worried just based on time taken. He’s just watching still. But if Mitch’s body has been reacting oddly, after 1.5 hours, he may try to intervene. At least to check pulse, etc. If that creates negatives, he’ll be sorry, and lunch will be on him.
Michael
I guess so, yeah. Can I get a better sense of what I'm up against?
Can you give me an Occultism-14?
Jeff
>> FAILURE by 1
Michael
Mitch is not sure what precisely is blocking his being able to move his senses out of this chamber. First instinct is of course that it was the Mystery Woman's meditation practice but as I said above, it didn't keep him out of here in the first place. Could it be the chamber itself? The fact Mitch was able to get a glimpse of what's outside the door but couldn't move his perspective hints at this possible explanation: maybe the chamber isn't perfectly shielded. But if this is a chamber meant to keep psychic prying eyes out, it did a terrible job. Is it a spirit trap instead? Is such a thing even possible? Mitch does not know but given what he's learned at SCANATE, sure, maybe.
Jeff
Mitch has no mouth to speak with, right? Or even astral hands with which to make a rude astral gesture?
Michael
No, and no.
Jeff
Well, time passes, I guess.
Michael
Okay, +30 minutes (at most), trying again at Clairvoyance-12 this time since you succeeded on your own terms last time, just hit resistance.
So it's been … 55 minutes total at the beginning of this roll.
And Mitch's degree of success will tell us if it's another full half-hour or not.
Bill
Gotcha. So Roger isn't screwing it up by checking vitals quite yet …
Michael
Not quite yet, in fact the end of this roll (if it's a success by 0 or failure) puts him at 1:25 if he takes the full half-hour, right around when you were gonna check on him.
Jeff
>> SUCCESS by 3
Michael
After another few minutes the Mystery Woman makes her waterbed-unsteady way to the door of the meditation chamber. Her hour is apparently up. As she opens the door, she makes a gesture as if to say, "After you!" to Mitch, inviting him to move his eye out into the twisty hallway. Assuming Mitch decides to do so...
Mitch is able to move his perspective outside the meditation chamber, but finds himself in a narrow twisting hallway. But he can see around the corner of this short hallway to what looks like a control room for the meditation chamber. An Agrigenics employee is there, at the control panel/desk for the chamber's lighting and sound. As the Mystery Woman seems to say goodbye to the man at the desk (remember, Mitch cannot hear anything) and take a cassette tape from him which was presumably playing in the meditation chamber, she looks behind her to where Mitch's eye is floating, and opens the door out of this room beyond into what looks like a long underground corridor (all florescent lighting, no windows). She closes the door behind her: Mitch can try to follow her by sight with a minute's concentration with another Clairvoyance-12 roll now that he's seen the hallway beyond.
Jeff
I wanna poke them a little more
By which I mean I want to bake the electronics in the control panel
Activate Pyrokinesis 1, use Pyrokinesis 1 on the control panel:
>> SUCCESS by 9
>> SUCCESS by 7
Then, yes, follow the mystery brunette
Clairvoyance-12
>> SUCCESS by 2
I'll stop damaging it once alarms go off, I'm not trying to burn down the whole site (although I'm not trying not to)
Michael
Okay, yes, a fire does break out on the control panel of the meditation room and the attendant has to rush to get a nearby fire extinguisher to put it out. Meanwhile, at the end of the long hallway is an elevator, which the Mystery Woman pushes the up button to summon. Now, to move again into the elevator (a moving "vehicle," luckily), Mitch will need to ready another Clairvoyance-12 roll and trigger it when the inside of the elevator is revealed.
Jeff
So this level as near as I can see is an elevator access, hallway leading to antechamber, and meditation chamber? Are there other side doors? Fire stairs?
>> SUCCESS by 0
Michael
As Mitch's eye floats to the hallway's end and waits for the elevator with the Mystery Woman, he finds himself a little waiting area for the elevator, and off that area are two more hallways branching off to the left and right: at the outset of each of those corridors is a heavy steel door, leading presumably to the building's main stairwells. Looks like there are more doors down each of these hallways and doors at the end of each. That roll will allow you to enter the elevator with Mystery Woman and ride with her.
Jeff
Better to see a route out
In theory I can come back tomorrow and anyway the mystery brunette is a tantalizing mystery
Michael
Okay, so our Mystery Woman takes the elevator up to the lobby floor, and Mitch can see out of the basement elevator into the grand glass-enclosed lobby, a security desk, some funky modernist lobby furniture, and another bank of elevators that seem to go to the upper floors. If Mitch wants to try one more Clairvoyance-12 roll, he can pop his eye out to the parking lot and follow the Mystery Woman to her car, because out of the building and into the parking lot is where she's headed.
Jeff
>> FAILURE by 3
Oh well
Mitch can wake up and try to tell Roger to follow the car driven by the mysterious brunette when it leaves the employee lot
Michael
Since you're only a mile away, there's a shot if Mitch wakes up and Roger gets over to the access road for Agrigenics quickly enough, we could get … bingo.
Bill, give me a Driving-16 check. A success gets you a make, model, and license plate number for our Mystery Woman.
And Jeff, I think we will go forward to Monday in tonight's session, so if Mitch wants to do more remote viewing surveillance, we can do it in the aftermath of the all-hands.
Bill
>> SUCCESS by 3