The Houdini Tape
Michael
Giving you all some room to examine the Houdini Cassette in the day or two we have it before Granite Peak comes to collect it after Marshall submits his after-action report.
Jeff
Sure. So as soon as is reasonably practical Mitch will knock on the open door of Charley's lab space. "Hey, you got a second? We have this tape that maybe has Houdini on it. Figured you were the, uh, person to ask about it." He holds up the reel.
"He might have snuck off already, I dunno."
"The demon was pretty irate about the whole thing. Houdini getting away. Left us holding the bag." Mitch glances over his shoulder to confirm Marshall is there.
Brant
He is, all reassuring smiles and cigarettes.
Mel
Charley’s eyes go wide and she snatches the tape from Mitch. “Really?! OK, let me run some tests.”
Michael
(I will just remind everyone this is a standard traditional audiocassette, format-wise.)
(quick GIS for "audio cassette 1973" and it looks the part)
So if Charley plays the cassette it will give that same eerie harsh needly sound, which Charley, thanks to her many technical skills and technopathic abilities, can immediately identify as data. Tons of it. The first step will be to analyze the data, because obviously it's encoded somehow and Charley will need to figure out how. There's a couple of ways she can do this. The old-fashioned way that involves no psychic abilities would be to write a program that can do data analysis (a Computer Programming roll) and then use her natural skill at Cryptography to interpolate the data. But this would be fairly time-consuming using the computers on hand at Livermore, despite their being cutting-edge. Charley could also use her cyberpsi abilities: this would entail a Data Retrieval roll and then a Binary Translation technique roll to decrypt it. Now, these skills are lower than the technical skills above, but since Charley has time she can get the "take extra time" related +5 bonus to each of these rolls. It will still take less time than the old-fashioned way above.
(Just saw your roll results, Mel, I'm going to put your findings in a DM)
Oh, uh … Fright check when you get a chance, Mel. (walks off laughing in a menacing fashion)
Mel
>>>> CRITICAL SUCCESS
Michael
CRITICAL SUCCESS!
Charley is cool as.
After about 10 or 15 minutes of silently communing with the cassette tape, eyes closed, Charley's eyes open — suddenly, but not violently or in a panic — and she says quietly, "Yes. What an interesting life you’ve had, Ehrich."
Jeff
Mitch is briefly elated that Houdini made it out, but he covers it quick.
Brant
Marshall raises an eyebrow.
Mel
"I don’t understand … " Charley says. "Is this their doing?”
(after a pause of about 10 or 15 seconds)
“Congratulations! Oh, it’s too bad Bess missed your reveal. She tried so hard to reach you.”
Charley smiles at Mitch and Marshall and says, “Houdini wants me to thank you for him.”
Jeff
"Huh, well, I'd say happy to help, but … " Mitch glances over at Marshall. "To be honest I think we're lucky to be alive, so … " He shrugs.
Mel
Charley is surprised that Mitch isn’t more enthusiastic upon receiving this message and wonders if he fully understands how momentous this is. But she asks, “Risking one’s life for the cause for a fellow agent, isn’t that worth the risk?”
Jeff
Mitch twitches beneath his laconic affect. "Can he hear me? I mean, I'm thrilled he made it out, don't get me wrong. I wasn't clear on if we were helping him at all, at the time. Suddenly had the bull breathing fire down our necks."
Brant
Marshall chimes in from the corner: "Did he know, Charley? Like, what would happen to us?"
Mel
"He says that your assistance in his trick was instrumental to his escape, and you performed your parts beautifully. And that although this existence isn't ideal, he is happy not to be dispersed anymore, to have more of his memories. He knew the bull-man who killed his body would do everything it could to destroy his consciousness too."
"So yes, he knew his days were numbered unless he engineered some kind of escape. It was risky due to the damage to the barrier between worlds, but he also didn't want his presence to aggravate that pinhole any longer. The eventual reality shard taking this form is … inconvenient, to be sure. He'd assumed there'd be some opportunity thanks to the closing of the leak that might afford him an escape from his existence as a distributed waveform."
Brant
Can I try to make some kind of roll to see if that sounds like con-man bull shit? I’ll take a penalty recognizing that it’s being interpreted thru a creepy cyborg child.
Michael
Yeah, I'll roll Detect Lies for you, one sec
Brant
Like I find the phrase “engineered some kind of escape” pretty damn suspicious.
Michael
So yeah, you weren't able to actually hear Houdini's data-spirit saying these things to accurately judge their verisimilitude, so there is a penalty here to Marshall's ability. What Marshall finds … interesting, shall we say, in Charley's relay of Houdini's assessment of the whole Stanley Hotel episode is how readily Houdini admits to having no real plan to preserve himself after he managed to escape the attentions of the kusarikku. If the pinhole was closed thanks to you and Mitch, his consciousness might be either trapped or obliterated by its removal. What he was doing in engineering this escape was clearly risky. The odds that anything of Houdini would remain behind — an impression or a presence or a haunting — was minimal. But the reverberations caused by the reality temblor on Saturday night ended up putting a reality shard into play, and Houdini saw an amazing opportunity in Rogo's audiotape: a medium onto which all his memories and self could be recorded. Much like the escapes that Houdini didn't have complete control over the planning of in his life, he ended up having to improvise.
There is one thing that is clear here, and that's Houdini confessing essentially to having used Mitch and Marshall and put them into the position of … well, useful dupes. It's a long tradition in stage magic, of course: you find people — either in the audience or ones who have been carefully recruited — who are authorities. The audience's belief in these authorities can help cushion and cloak and distract the audience the sleight-of-hand that you get up to. All those elements that Mitch and Marshall brought together — the props, the seance-goers, and the belief that came with them — helped Houdini slip free. But that does mean that Houdini kind of played you two.
I'm being too glib of course. Suffice to say Marshall does believe that Houdini was essentially improvising this past weekend.
Brant
Interesting.
Marshall will ASL to Mitch, "The bastard played us."
Mel
Does Charley catch that?
Michael
Unless Marshall's hiding his signing from Charley.
Brant
Marshall isn't hiding it, Charley could plainly see it if she was looking.
Mel
Charley would like to build a body for Houdini. And in her mind's eye, she starts drawing up plans.
Charley will ask Sophie, to put in a request with Granite Peak, that she keep the cassette in her lab for now.
Jeff
Mitch will broach the possibility of making a duplicate or dummy tape and giving it to Granite Peak, unless somebody stops him.
Michael
Well, here's the thing about the possibility of doing that, and one that Mitch himself can figure out: they will be able to tell at Granite Peak if the particular cassette we hand over is not in fact a reality shard. That might not be a negative, of course; one could certainly make a case to Granite Peak that the History B energies of the shard faded after being removed from the subduction zone. It happens with some reality shards. But it might raise eyebrows.
Below is something only Charley would know given her cyberpsi analysis of the tape so far: And Charley also knows that there is no way that a mundane cassette could hold all the data that is on the reality shard cassette. What would happen if you … dubbed Houdini? Well, that's a tough question to answer. There would be, theoretically, enormous gaps. Charley's not even sure if it would be physically possible in any meaningful way or what data the resulting dubbed tape might contain.
Mel
"I don't think creating a copy is the way to go, Mitch. But what if, through some serendipity they lost any real interest in acquiring it?"
Brant
Marshall agrees with Charley: “Granite Peak has people who can suss these things out. If we give them a dupe or a decoy someone will realize it. They have their own uhh … ‘Charleys’ there. And we don’t want someone tugging at this thread, y’know?”
But Marshall will say nothing about Charley putting in a request to keep the tape — if she does that actually works out even better for him and Mitch because it keeps the only “witness” to their escapades in-house and signals that GP may not care about them enough to follow up / trust Charley, which is a useful fact to know.
Michael
So what's Charley's request going to consist of? Asking the Peak to let Charley keep the cassette for "further study"?
Mel
Yes, unless someone thinks differently. And Charley, was hinting that Mitch may want to use his serendipity power but that might be ill-advised.
Michael
I would say since the outcome of this request affects him directly given the intimate connection between the reality shard and Mitch and Marshall's actions, Mitch could certainly try to "juice" our official channels request with Serendipity.
The way it will work is that depending on how Mitch, Marshall, and Charley discuss phrasing the request, that will determine what skill or skills aid Sophie's Administration roll.
So here's what I'm thinking for a roll. A couple of opportunities for teamwork here. Charley could surely concoct a technobabble-filled excuse for why the tape shouldn't be relocated to Granite Peak, whether it has to do with Livermore's specific lab setup being better for analysis—here's where a reference to the ongoing study of Beth-El could be useful too—and I am sure that Marshall could use his skills to help Charley craft that (Propaganda, probably). If Mitch wanted to give the communication a little bit of a push with Serendipity, in that the wheels of bureaucracy at the Peak just end up grinding really slowly for processing this object, that's fine too. You guys just let me know who wants to do what and I'll set up the chain of rolls to culminate in Sophie's Administration request.
(y'know, I hadn't considered how Marshall would conceptualize Houdini's being stuck as a waveform/in a cassette vis-a-vis Buddhism)
Brant
Marshall is torn about how helpful he wants to be vis a vis Charley in the Houdini Tape. On the one hand, he would like to keep the Tape at Livermore if possible, for the reasons already stated (fewer prying eyes, keeping a witness under wraps, etc.). On the other hand he is SUPER PISSED at Houdini and would kind of like to send him to Granite Peak which, given Marshall's experience there, he believes would be profoundly unpleasant for that asshole.
I think if Charley asks Marshall for help with the paperwork / pitch, he would, but he isn't going to volunteer anything.
Mel
Charley has noticed the lack of love Marshall has for Houdini. So, apart from trying to get some help from Mitch, she’ll write it up and have Sophie, look it over before it goes out.
Michael
Sounds good. Give me a roll of your new Physics (Paraphysics) skill, Mel. Offering some form of technobabble having to do with Livermore's laser and magnetic research labs sounds best to me.
Mel
Sure! Any kind of time bonus here?
Michael
Actually, time is of the essence since they're likely to send the team tomorrow so you don't have much time to give it much of a first draft/second draft thing with Sophie. Your success or failure on this roll will either give a bonus or penalty to Sophie's Admin roll.
So failure isn't total failure. It just makes Charley's ideas harder for Sophie to translate into admin-speak.
>>>> SUCCESS
Nice!
Now Administration 19 (17 + 1 for Charley's aid, +1 for Security Rank)
>>>> CRITICAL SUCCESS
Okay.
I have some thoughts on how this can unfold.
But the upshot is, it's an amazing result. Sophie's/Charley's request to keep the cassette indefinitely will be approved and most importantly not followed up upon.
Here's where the idea of using Mitch's Serendipity gets interesting.
Like, the coup de grace here that would provide the most benefit for URIEL with respect to the Colorado/Houdini mission would be what, exactly.
Or, actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the most benefit for Mitch specifically and URIEL secondarily.