The Girl, the Janitor, the Wizard, and the Raven
Michael
Roger lays Charley down gently in a pine bower away from the cavern entrance and close by to the rock that Jocasta chose as an observation post when she reconnoitered the cavern area. Charley's evening has been long, tiring, and full of experiences she's never had before. Unsurprisingly, Charley dreams.
In the dream, Charley sits in an English? Irish? Avalonian? forest glade in front of a fidchell board set on a marble pedestal similar in style and color to the Mt. Shasta Council Room's tables and thrones. The fidchell game is on about a foot by foot game board, but it's not simply a flat surface: it's a three-dimensional space full of floating game squares that seems to stretch into another pitch-black-limned-with-neon-purple sort of grid dimension inside the flat surface of the game board. Charley looks into it and gets a little nauseated, like she's carsick. It's weird to feel pukey in a dream. Sitting opposite her, playing the black pieces, is Mitch. He's dressed like Gandalf, with a floppy wizard's hat and a knarled wooden walking stick; he's got a big bushy white beard and long hair and looks to be about fifty years older. Charley is dressed in her Granite Peak greys again, the big "C" stenciled on its back. She's also five years old again.
(Jeff and Mel: Seeing as how Mitch is sleeping right now at the top of the mountain due to intense fatigue, Mitch and Charley are both here in this dream, with each other, sharing this dreamscape.)
Jeff
"We don't have a lot of time. You okay, Jack? I mean, Charlie — Melanie — Charley."
Mel
“Hi Mitch. You look like Gandalf.”
“Is this a dream?”
“Fidchell … I always liked this game.”
Jeff
"I feel like Gandalf. Careworn … Uh, yeah, we're dreaming. This world is exactly as unreal as the one where we're camping." Mitch shrugs. "So am I winning or are you? I don't know this game at all." He gestures to the miasma of pieces between them. "Any of this mean anything, or is it just background, just what we're looking at while we talk about Telos?"
Mel
(Can Charley/Owain assess the board to determine the state of play?)
Michael
In the land of dreams — or maybe more precisely this land of dreams — Charley feels closer and more connected with Owain than in her waking hours. It's like she has more free access to the memories and lifetime of Arthur's knight and thus Charley bends her attention to the weird three-dimensional game of fidchell and how the pieces are laid out between white and black. Charley can give me an IQ-15 roll (simulating both Owain's Games skill in fidchell and his skill in TL 2+1 Esmology/Memetics).
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 5
Michael
Charley/Owain examines the game board and the first thing is, of course, the fact that there are now multiple layers to the board, all connected through a series of invisible (but not insensible) connections between the layers. Owain remembers the fidchell board of old, that it represented the surface of the Earth and the pieces represented the knights who would be summoned to Arthur's side from all over the Earth to fight the crows and Arthur's sister Morgan. This weird multi-dimensional board shows multiple Earths. Or multiple possible Earths; there's still one board on top that represents the actual material world.
Suddenly, Charley and Mitch hear a loud clanking sound, the same sound Charley heard down in the Garage. And this creaking and banging of gearwork, machinery causes some of the 3-D fidchell board's surfaces to shift. One subsidiary board slips away off into the abyss and disappears along with its pieces; another tilts at 90 degree angles to the other boards. The white and black pieces remain somehow on their proper squares, but the connections between the top board and this perpendicular board shift as well. Something has changed the geometry of the playing surface, made the crowds of believers in History A and B relate to each other in different proportions and directions. The game pieces — the people remaining on the ground — haven't changed, but their relationships to each other have.
Mitch and Charley look up from the board and see in the clearing about 30 feet away from them, a man sitting at an old wooden rolling office chair, sitting before a series of sheet-metal clad control panels, bristling with levers, tiny lights, switches, and dials. The man is clad in what looks like an old-fashioned janitor's or workman's uniform; a dusty grey-brown, with a front pocket in which Charley and Mitch can see pens. The man is late-middle-aged, white, has a growth of a few days of mostly grey stubble, messy short hair, and a round face capped off with round glasses.
"Hi," he says, standing up and brushing himself off.
Mel
“Hi!” Charley with some surprise. “Do I know you?”
Michael
"No, we never ended up meeting," the Janitor says to Charley. "I'm just here to put a bow on things and you two seemed like the best ones to chat with." He looks to Mitch and the hint of a smile appears at the corner of his mouth. "Everything's all right, I just want to make sure that you're all okay with things proceeding from here on out the hard way."
Jeff
"So far it's been the easy way?" Mitch raises an eyebrow. "I just wanted to go camping, man, I thought we were gonna be doing a whole other thing."
"Marshmallows, right? What happened with that?"
Michael
"Three visits to the mountain, O Wizard, and this was the most meaningful of all of them," the Janitor says to Mitch. "Good epic mystical journeys always happen in threes, and besides, your Weirdness Magnet guaranteed you'd be here for the alignment this weekend." The Janitor breathes in slightly and sets his expression to a neutral one, all while saying, "You should see Jiyu before you go, though."
Then, broadly to both Mitch and Charley, he says, "Consistently you've all refused to use reality-shifting to accomplish your aims. And that's fine! You all always have a free choice." The Janitor comes out from behind the control panels and leans on them. "But that's not what your predecessors chose." He gestures at the glade and the horizon beyond, and Charley swears she can hear a flock of crows off in the distance somewhere, and the sound of a clashing army.
"They saw what it would take to build a world they wanted the old-fashioned way — slow, inexorable changing of minds, the infusion of belief in rebellion over hundreds of years and dozens of generations — and they decided to, well, flip the game board." He remains at a distance from Charley and Mitch but gestures generally at the tesseract game board. "They used esmology and memetics to assemble their army of bold and brave knights to fight the Tuatha Dé Danann but it was only with the Sword given to them by the Lady of the Lake that they were able to cut through all the cables, re-tie them and engineer a crucial fluxpoint, and send them packing."
"I understand that your morals prevent you from taking control of the levers and pulling them. I admire it! In an … abstract way. It's enough to make a cosmological personification of ontological entropy nod in sober respect," the Janitor says. "But the path you're choosing … it's the more difficult one. Without a new Ontoclysm, the world you are trying to create will be messy, uncertain … it will likely hang in the balance long after your personal timelines are terminated, even if you do succeed. That does not mean you can't make some real change, of course, and stop or more likely slow the runaway train you're on right now. You just need to know the right moves to make, the right paths to choose. That, unfortunately, isn't really the kind of thing I can help you with. I only run the machines here." He pats the control panel once, and tries to smile again, failing.
Jeff
"It's hard to build consensus for any but the most conservative path. Nobody wants to be the jerk who runs roughshod over everyone. Tie goes to the status quo."
Michael
"'Running roughshod,' yes. That is what They like to do, isn't it? Make big splashes. Craftily engineer events and happenings and meetings and departures in a way that rips an unmanageable hole in things. But true consensus, not manipulation … that's much, much harder. Right now, your nation has a whole lot of people who don't like the way History A has turned out, don't you? They're dissidents, unsatisfied with World-As-It-Is. Full of war, conflict, slavery, hatred. Easy prey for Them, who are offering if nothing else a world without all that." He hums a couple of bars from Mansa's "Muddy Funk."
"But if you oppress these dissidents, beat them into submission, control their minds with bad TV and their souls with little green pieces of paper with pyramids on them … well, you're just as bad as Them, aren't you? All roads inexorably lead to the vast and trunkless statue in the desert."
"Again, these kind of specifics really aren't my province. I have maintenance and operation of the Machine to worry about. But I certainly don't envy you your task."
Jeff
"Sure, man." Mitch gives an indulgent chuckle. "You like Oz, right 'Charley'? This here is the Wizard."
Mel
Charley shrugs and says, to no one in particular. “There’s has to be a way to win for good. To keep Them forever in check. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think there was a way. That’s why I keep coming back.”
And more like her five year old self says, “This game is broken. I don’t want to play anymore.”
Jeff
"Oh, hey, we should get full credit for this whole thing, I've been asked to pass along."
Michael
The Janitor speaks to Charley, in a measured but by no means condescending manner. "I remember someone once asked of a game they didn't know the rules to, 'How do you win this game, anyway?' and the reply was 'There's no winning, it's like life. You don't win at life.'"
"Could you keep the Anunnakku in check forever by pulling the right series of levers? Of course you could! It could be done here, with the right inputs," the Janitor says gesturing at the control panels, "or if you got enough Illuminated in the right place at the right time. But of course you run into that 'running roughshod over people' thing again with either solution. Maybe with the Illuminated option you have access to a little more creative nuance but hey, have you ever tried to get seven people to agree on something as serious as crafting a new world? I know, stupid question, now that I think about it."
Mel
Charley switches her train of thought. “How does your machine work?”
Michael
At this, the Janitor actually full-on smiles for the first time ever in this conversation, a pleased, warm, amused smile. "I had a feeling you might ask that if you'd made it down to the Control Room. Sadly, for your purposes, the levers and buttons and dials aren't actually 'machinery' as you'd conceive of it. They're merely the symbolic representation in your reality of the energy borrowings and expenditures required to change an observer's path along a series of junctured Einstein-Rosen bridges that can transform and adjust the level of Everettian quantum coherence/decoherence in that observer's localized universe. They look like this — or would have looked like this if you'd made it to the Control Room — for the same reason Irruptors look like beastmen to your eyes when they intrude on your timeline: neuroprogramming meant to hide the true workings of the universe from your eyes. But of course you're beginning to see beyond those illusions, aren't you? You got out of the golden maze using 'machinery' very similar to this."
Mel
“Why is it changing? Will there be another opportunity to get to the control room in History A sometime soon?”
Michael
"The Control Room intersects with your reality at certain planetary chakras at certain regular intervals of time. I am not able to tell you when and where. I'm … part of the machinery; I don't drive it around its route."
Mel
“Oh. Are you human?”
Michael
The Janitor looks conspiratorially at Mitch with another smile as if to say, "Can you get a load of this little girl?" and says to Charley, again, sincerely and not condescendingly, "Oh no. Most definitely not."
Mel
“Oh. Well, is it possible you can operate the machine for us? You know if we just told you what we wanted? I mean if we wanted to do that? Because I would have gone down there if we hadn’t ran out of time.”
Jeff
Mitch frowns. "He's as human as you are." Then he sighs. "I feel like we're talking cross-purposes with this control room, Edward Everett Hortonian Condensate stuff."
Mel
“I think we need to make our own control room.”
Michael
"Well, you certainly could try. It almost worked for Rich and Carl."
Jeff
"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." Mitch looks around expectantly.
Michael
(If you're looking to change the dreaming environment, that's a Dreaming roll, which defaults to Will minus 6, but I will give you a +1 for the Zork reference. Dreaming-11 if that is Mitch's intention. )
>> SUCCESS by 3
Mitch and Charley find themselves standing in an open field, west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. The fidchell table, control panel, and Janitor are nowhere to be seen.
Jeff
"The dam controls are … let's say northeast of here." Mitch starts tramping through the meadow. His feet get all wet from dew, up to his calves.
Mel
Charley says excitedly, “Are we going to the control room Mitch!?”
“Do you want me to try and get us there?”
Jeff
Mitch says:
“
”
He coughs. "Sorry. I mean, yeah. Yeah."
Mel
“Okay let’s go! It’s down in the mountain at the end of a helix shaped concrete structure!” Charley closes her already closed eyes and thinks of where it should be.
Michael
If Charley and Mitch are going to head off on their quest, I will have Charley eventually roll Will-9 but it will take some time for them to reach the dream's equivalent of the Control Room, so I will give you all a chance to chat some more.
The dream landscape remains that sun-dappled green Avalon-like idyll as Mitch and Charley march, in the manner of adventurers before them, to the distant mountains to reach the deep mines and the goal of their quest. The wizard, the old soul, and the open road.
Jeff
"If we see Ken on the road, we kill Ken, agreed?"
Mel
“The operator guy was kinda nice.”
“Okay … Jo and Roger killed the Frog-man.”
“You know I really thought we were just going to go camping.”
Jeff
"Heh, yeah, me too. Me too."
Mel
“I blame Viv.”
“Are you a hotdog man or burger man?”
“I’m a hotdog girl.”
“Are you going to marry Mary-Lynn?”
“Did Big Foot Pete ever see Big Foot?”
“I hear you’re a fan of Columbo.”
“I prefer Get Smart.”
“Oh, Maxwell Smart. Heheh.”
Jeff
"Barbara Felden is cute. I dunno. Nah. Yes. I don't have the brainpower to have an opinion about Columbo right now, though. Probably I like it. I've definitely been keeping up with it."
"See though the thing about consensus is that nobody wants to be rude and everybody wants things to move forward and so we all sort of linger. Plus people have different levels of availability and it wouldn't be fair to penalize folks busy working for a living. I mean, I — any of us, really — I could be all, zeppelins now! Zeppelins being the traditional shibboleth. But nobody signed up for zeppelin time."
"I wouldn't say this is a problem to solve, it's just the nature of the beast. We've been trucking along fine, no reason to rock the boat, you dig?"
Mel
“Yeah, Barbara Felden is cute.”
“We can’t rock much in a dream, Mitch.”
Jeff
“
”
Mel
Charley hums her own tune.
Michael
Okay, Mel, give me a Dreaming-9 roll when you can and I'll narrate what happens when Gandalf and Frodo Fizban and Tasslehoff Mitch and Charley get to the end of their road.
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 1
Michael
When Mitch and Charley feel the dreamscape allowing them to come to the "end" of Charley's quest for the control room, they find themselves in that inimitable dream-logic way having gone on a lengthy, weeks-long quest that's taken them from the lush greenery of the beginning of the dream to a landscape much more rugged and much more obviously that of Northern California. And, indeed, as they approach a cave entrance that looks remarkably like the one that Charley is sleeping in front of right now in the waking world, it's clear that they've reached the end of their quest, the entrance to the mines that delved too greedily and too deep. Charley wonders what might happen should she re-enter the same halls and Garage she was just physically in. It's all very recursive and infinite-loop-seeming, recapitulating the spiral structure of the Garage itself.
But she doesn't have to consider it, because standing in front of the cavern entrance is Charley's mother.
She wears a solar-insignia-emblazoned white robe and seems initially shocked to see Charley and Mitch.
"What … where am I. Lily? Is that you?"
She then looks at Mitch for a good long time and furrows her brow. "What … what?" A look of horror slowly overcomes her visage.
Jeff
Mitch tosses his hands up defensively. "Whoa whoa whoa! This isn't what it looks like. I'm not who I look like. What's your mailing address, do you know your mailing address? Anything to help find you. Mailing address?"
Mel
Charley runs to embrace her mother. “Mama!”
Michael
"Oh, Lily!" Agent RAVEN at first holds her arms out to catch Charley but then she looks rather woozy at Mitch's comments. She squints her eyes shut and stumbles a bit, trying to find her bearings as best she can as Charley runs up. "Not one of these again. I can't remember. I don't want to remember!"
Mel
I’m going to give Mitch space here to help. I think at this moment Charley is just wanting to hug her mother.
Jeff
"Something, anything, lady!" Is this a situation where I could roll Fast Talk-14 to elicit some kind of informative response re RAVEN's current location?
Michael
Yeah, definitely!
Jeff
>> SUCCESS by 8
Michael
"Address? Address??!" RAVEN begins weeping while holding Charley. "Why are you with him, sweetie, do they have you? Have they taken you too?"
She seems very reluctant to trust Mitch here in this dream, but Mitch's approach in keeping RAVEN/Andrea off-kilter by asking for her address has revealed one thing: RAVEN/Andrea assumes that Charley/Lily has been taken by whomever has her in her waking life.
Mel
“I’m in California. This is Mitch, he’s my friend! But Mitch has an evil twin. Where are you? Who has you mama!?!”
Michael
"Evil … twin," RAVEN looks at Mitch again, this time with less fear in her eyes. "I was … riding horses. With Theresa. Theresa and I. Rehab. The ranch. In my … in my brain." She reaches up to her head, her long, straight, jet-black hair now revealed to be a wig. She takes it off and you both see a giant scar zig-zagging across her skull. "The horses. The cowboy. On the license plates of their trucks. The guns on the trucks. The cowboys." Her speech becomes disorganized, devolving into disconnected syllables and phonemes, pure glossolalia, like she's re-experiencing the brain surgery that was obviously committed on her. Fright checks both of you. For Mitch, pass on a 13 or less. For Charley, pass on a 9 or less.
Jeff
>> FAILURE by 2
Mel
>> FAILURE by 1
Michael
Mitch will roll 3d6+2 for Fright Check table results. Charley will roll 3d6+1. Both of you wake up in your respective campsites at about 4:30 am.
And I'll apply the Fright Checks to both of you on waking. In addition, Charley will be dealing with the Nightmares critical penalty (-1 FP, -1 to all skill and Perception checks on Sunday).
Jeff
>> 3d6+2 = 12
Jeff
Sorry, I read "I'll apply the Fright Checks to both of you on waking" as "don't roll it yourself here and now"
Michael
Oh no worries! I should've been clearer (Mel, when you get back, you can roll 3d6+1). So this is 12:
12 – Lose your lunch. Treat this as retching for (25 - HT) seconds, and then roll vs. HT each second to recover; see Incapacitating Conditions (p. 428). Depending on the circumstances, this may be merely inconvenient, or humiliating.
But I don't feel Mitch would be necessarily nauseated by that scene; it definitely feels more like a Charley reaction. But any likewise incapacitation upon waking — sleep paralysis, a fugue state, uncontrollable screaming — that seems reasonable to you would be fine with me.
Mechanically, Mitch will be in that state for at least 15 seconds.
Mel
>> 3d6+1 = 6
Michael
6, 7 – Stunned for one second. Every second after that, roll vs. unmodified Will to snap out of it.
So Charley will wake up frozen for a second or two.