Viv Returns

 

Viv's tour dates in August:

  • LA

  • Santa Fe

  • Denver

  • Austin

  • Madison

  • Ann Arbor

  • Columbus

  • Cambridge/Boston

  • NYC

  • Philadelphia

  • Washington DC

  • Toronto (WorldCon)

  • Portland,

  • Seattle

  • Vancouver

 

Michael

On the morning of Tuesday, September 4, Genevieve comes into the office bright and early, bearing two large twine-handled shopping bags. "Hello team!" she says brightly, bringing her bags into the conference area. Poking her head into cubicles, the library, and Archie's office area, she says, "Line up for your gifts brought back from the highways and byways of America and Canada, or at least the places where they actually read my books enough to justify a tour stop!"

Jeff

Mitch showed up at Livermore early today for some reason. He's mildly disappointed to see Viv, like he was hoping for someone else, but makes an effort not to show it.

Michael

"Magic man! You're first then, I guess." She digs into one of the bags and extracts a brown-paper-wrapped package about the size and shape of one of those new-fangled remote control doohickeys. "The gifts you are all about to receive came from one of three of my favorite places to shop: antique shops, rare bookstores, or witchy-type places. I found these in an antique place in Santa Fe early in the tour and as soon as I saw them something tugged at me, seeming to say, 'These belong to Mitch, and I've found them and am returning them to him.' Here you go, Mitch!" Viv says with a smile, seeming to ignore Mitch's tacit distance.

(the gift also is wrapped in a green bow)

Jeff

"Oh, okay." Mitch accepts the gift. "I brought in doughnuts, feel free." He indicates a box on the desk behind him.

Before opening the package Mitch will examine Viv's aura.

>> SUCCESS by 2

Michael

All right, so Mitch has had opportunity to examine Viv's aura several times since first meeting her. And at the outset of things it used to be a vast branching iridescent-gold tree grounding her to the earth and sending its tendrils out into the upper realms; after her not being a member of "the Club" anymore, those connections, especially to the upper realm, were in large part truncated and snipped: still vital and positive and nurturing and questing, but disconnected in some way.

But after a month away, Mitch can see her aura's connections to Earth and sky growing back. They are growing back different. Whereas before the filaments were gossamer-thin but multitudinous, now these connections are growing back more gnarled, uglier, but stronger, like a tree's roots trying to grasp for nutrients underneath concrete. There are scars, but the healing is making her soul more resilient and permanent, less transient.

Her physical health is as great for her age as it was when she left, and her mood is optimistic, joyous, and excited to see her comrades with whom she's been through so much... and full of anticipation, presumably about these gifts.

Upon opening:

 
 

Underneath the wrapping paper is a green leather eyeglass case; the leather is a little cracked and broken, but inside the case are an exquisite pair of vintage sunglasses from the 1930s (Mitch can tell these kind of things with Fashion Sense) in excellent condition. Not a pit or a scratch on them. The glass of the lenses is a pale green; the frames are amber. They kind of look like these, but the frames are a decidedly darker shade of amber.

"I also have something for Mary-Lynn, also vintage," Viv takes out a larger package—looks like some kind of clothing probably, also wrapped in plain paper with a green bow—"I'm pretty sure I got her size right. I hope you two kids enjoy; you both deserve to look and feel fabulous."

Jeff

"Wow, thanks."

Mitch does not try them on immediately.

Michael

(Gosh, I guess Fashion Sense would also let Mitch notice that Viv has a new hairstyle too.)

"So where is everyone? I'm guessing I probably need to get caught up on so much but mostly I just want to see everyone and say hi."

Jeff

(Mitch would like to get Jocasta to psychometrize the glasses but he doesn't want to make that request in front of Viv as it would be rude.)

Leonard

If it’s the 4th, Jocasta is probably holed away in the research area, finding more stuff to put on the Pepe Silvia board about OZYMANDIAS she’s making at home.

Michael

Viv will meander over with her bags of goodies. "Hi, Jocasta! I hope I'm not interrupting too much... I just wanted to bring you something I got for you on tour!" She's holding up a little square jewelry box with a yellow ribbon tied around it.

Leonard

Jo smiles widely and stands up to greet Viv. With genuine sincerity, she says : “Viv, welcome back! It’s been too long. So much has happened. Too much! But we’ll get you caught up — tell me all about the tour. And thank you, this is lovely!” She takes the box and opens it, but she doesn’t take off her gloves. She won’t say anything about this unless Viv mentions it.

Michael

"So I had a signing and reading in Ann Arbor but I spent a day in Detroit—big Greek population there, you probably know—and I visited a neighborhood shop run by one of those old witchy yia yias from the old country. Amulets of protection, herbal remedies... Attic magic. Anyway, I went in thinking about finding something suitable for Princess Maurdunn of Atlantis herself." Jocasta brings forth the silver chain from the jewelry box and brings the pendant to eye level. It features a silver disc bearing a woman's face in profile wearing a wreath, a stylized bow and arrow by her head. "It's an ancient Macedonian tetradrachm coin, dedicated to the goddess Artemis and her manifestation as Artemis Tauropolis. That 'Tauropolis' might be a placename, but one of the interpretations of that epithet is 'tamer, rider, or huntress of bulls.' So of course I thought it was appropriate for you." Viv smiles broadly, obviously unaware of the vision of one of the Pruist women back seventy years ago calling out to Artemis for vengeance that Jo had a few weeks ago out in the fields near Downer Ranch.

Leonard

“Oh, Viv, honestly, it’s beautiful. Thanks so much. More relevant than you might think, too, given what’s happened lately.” She mounts it on a peg near where she’s working and looks at it admiringly, thinking about her father always saying he wanted to take her back to Greece one day. “You’re lucky — I think everyone is in the office today, except, uh, Roger, of course. You should check in with Arch and we can all chat.”

Michael

Viv arches an eyebrow at the "Roger, of course" comment but decides to leave it aside in favor of delivering more gifts. "All right then, in that case I suppose I have Archie, Marshall, and Charley left." She peeks at Archie's office (we could say Archie and Marshall are in 'murder-scene-meme-planning' mode in Archie's office right now) and seeing him/them busy, decides maybe to go visit Charley in the lab.

Genevieve knocks on the door of Charley's lab and peeks her head in if Charley doesn't respond. "Hi Charley!" Viv says, walking in and looking in authentic wonderment as always at all the equipment and computers (bolstered now, since Viv's been away, by items such as the radio that tunes into the URIEL Frequency). "I am back from my grueling book tour and I have something for you that I picked up while I was traveling!" She holds up a tiny brown-paper-wrapped package tied with a purple ribbon.

Jeff

While Viv is distracted talking to Charley, Mitch sidles up to Jo and sets the glasses in their case on the table in front of her. "Do you mind giving these the once-over?" he asks, quietly. "I'd appreciate it."

Leonard

Jocasta nods silently and puts them in her purse along with the coin, and walks over to the Rooster House.

Mel

Charley looks over her shoulder startled. “Ah! Oh, Viv! What?”

Michael

Viv hands Charley her gift. "I had the hardest time finding something for you, Charley. Not because I thought you'd be difficult to find a good gift for, but for the complete opposite reason: I could be sure that no matter what I got, you'd find something interesting and curious and wonder-full about it. So how could I possibly choose? Well, it got to the point where I was near the end of my trip, at WorldCon in Toronto this past weekend. And I got to talking to some of my science fiction writer friends, and they said I needed to visit this amazing booth on dealer's row: it was full of faerie magic!" As Charley opens the package, it reveals a tiny box, embossed with silver thread in a vaguely Celtic pattern. And opening the box, on a bed of white packing foam, is a bizarre looking crystal, red-brown, extending off in intersecting crosses in three dimensions, like a toy jack.

"It's staurolite, but the faerie woman at the booth called it a 'fairy cross.' I know the stone as a grounding crystal, a protective stone. Usually they appear as X- or plus-sign-shaped crosses. This formation, with the crystals extending in all three dimensions, is the rarest of all. But she told me a story, that these crystals are the remnants of faeries leaving this world, this dimension, on their way back to... well, whatever parallel universe they come from. They wink out of our world, first in the fourth dimension, time, then in the third, then they shrink down to a line and then a point, leaving these behind in the earth. So you could say these are miniature fairy roads, the remnant of trods left as pinpricks in our world."


Jocasta nods silently and puts them in her purse along with the coin, and walks over to the Rooster House.

Michael

Okay, Jo... giving the sunglasses the ol' "once-over" in the Rooster House. I will tell you that the strongest vibes off these glasses are at an IQ minus 5, between 30 and 300 years ago, so that's an IQ-10 roll. I will offer Corruption as an option as always.

Mel

“Fairy roads? Inter dimensional? Fairies are inter dimensional beings? Wow, that makes sense! Are aliens and fairies the same?”

“I think we are all inter dimensional.”

Michael

"Oh boy," Viv says with barely-concealed glee, "I may have opened a Pandora's box here. Remind me to get your Uncle Andrew to lend you some of his UFO books, especially the one by Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia. That's his theory: aliens and faeries are the same sort of entity and they exist sideways to us dimensionally, not in outer space." And Charley does know the name Jacques Vallée, he's a computer guy, a network engineer who did some early work on ARCNET. In response to Charley's comment about us all being interdimensional, Viv says, "Well, that's the other reason why this stone called to me as a gift for you. It reminded me of your awarenesses and your senses of your own soul's path in transmigration, backwards in time, across lifetimes... and the awarenesses and senses that are yet forming in your mind's eye. There's always another layer to existence, you know? It just takes the time and effort to see it and unwrap it."

Mel

“You know. I think we are. What is this reality anyway?”

Leonard

Okay, Jo... giving the sunglasses the ol' "once-over" in the Rooster House. I will tell you that the strongest vibes off these glasses are at an IQ minus 5, between 30 and 300 years ago, so that's an IQ-10 roll. I will offer Corruption as an option as always.

Jocasta wants to do a read on both the glasses and the coin, but the glasses first. She clears her mind and meditates, trying to empty it of all distractions. Do not think of her, she tells herself. She is the ship, not the captain. Do not trust and do not doubt: simply see.. When she’s ready, she takes off her gloves and puts on the glasses. At the last moment, the little voice that has told her of late to eschew the ways of the enemy, to take on no more corruption.
This time she ignores it.

So, making this roll with 2 Corruption to boost:

>> SUCCESS by 7

Mel

“Vallee the computer scientist? Did he have an encounter?!”

Michael

Jocasta wants to do a read on both the glasses and the coin, but the glasses first. She clears her mind and meditates, trying to empty it of all distractions. Do not think of her, she tells herself. She is the ship, not the captain. Do not trust and do not doubt: simply see.. When she’s ready, she takes off her gloves and puts on the glasses. At the last moment, the little voice that has told her of late to eschew the ways of the enemy, to take on no more corruption. This time she ignores it.

The emotional charge Jocasta gets off these glasses—close to when they were first manufactured, sold, and worn she's guessing in the mid-'30s—is one of anticipation, excitement, pride, satisfaction... and great hubris. Whatever happened at that time, it was the culmination of the Wearer's long quest, an uncertain journey, a search with lots of dead-ends, disappointments, and cul-de-sacs, that finally resulted in finding the true center of the world, the axis mundi, upon which the Wearer would stand and move universes. (That was a success by 2; the Corruption expenditure got you a little more than just the pure emotional bouquet. To get to a critical success for this Psychometry attempt would require you to spend 6 more Corruption.)

“Vallee the computer scientist? Did he have an encounter?!”

"From what Andrew's told me, Vallée lived in real fairy country growing up in France, and as a trained astronomer he had witnessed UFOs first-hand in France back in the '50s. Andrew told me some story he'd read about Vallée working as an astronomer and discovering an unknown space object while tracking satellites in orbit but that the French government had come and stolen the tapes to cover it all up." Viv smiles. "Gets you wondering, doesn't it?"

"But somewhere along the line, Vallée got to thinking that UFO researchers should look less to aerospace science and engineering for explanations of the phenomenon and more to folklore and to the history of human interactions with the supernatural."

The emotional charge Jocasta gets off these glasses—close to when they were first manufactured, sold, and worn she's guessing in the mid-'30s—is one of anticipation, excitement, pride, satisfaction... and great hubris. Whatever happened at that time, it was the culmination of the Wearer's long quest, an uncertain journey, a search with lots of dead-ends, disappointments, and cul-de-sacs, that finally resulted in finding the true center of the world, the axis mundi, upon which the Wearer would stand and move universes. (That was a success by 2; the Corruption expenditure got you a little more than just the pure emotional bouquet. To get to a critical success for this Psychometry attempt would require you to spend 6 more Corruption.)

Leonard

Nah, I don’t want to get that deep in these things and I don’t reckon Mitch would want me to either. If possible, I want to do a quick Occultism roll and see if they trigger anything, but if not, I’ll move on to the coin.

Michael

(Give me Occultism-18 and then an IQ-9 roll for the Psychometry on the Artemis coin/amulet and I'll follow up tomorrow.)

Leonard

Occultism-18.

>> SUCCESS by 4

IQ-9 (Psychometry).

>> FAILURE by 3

Mel

"But somewhere along the line, Vallée got to thinking that UFO researchers should look less to aerospace science and engineering for explanations of the phenomenon and more to folklore and to the history of human interactions with the supernatural."

“Has Andrew met him?”

Michael

"I don't think Andrew ever has, no, but I know Vallée is one of those folks involved with Stanford Research Institute and the ARCNET project. I bet you could find an electronic mail address for him!"

Nah, I don’t want to get that deep in these things and I don’t reckon Mitch would want me to either. If possible, I want to do a quick Occultism roll and see if they trigger anything, but if not, I’ll move on to the coin.

Leonard

Can Jo give me a Hidden Lore (History B)-16 roll please?

>> SUCCESS by 4

Michael

I'm not sure if canonically Jo's ever touched a pre-Ontoclysm object before. Given the obstacles on a purely game-rule related basis, defeating that minus-6 modifier is a tall order. But Jo feels like she's getting a glimpse of the ontological uncertainty that underlies all of human history before 535 A.D., if not for the literal first time, then with a new clarity that has kind of shaken her. And it all boils down to "how exactly, if the Anunnaki ruled the Earth until that rebellion in 535, did all this ancient stuff get buried and dug up?" This is SANDMAN 101 stuff of course; everyone at the Peak or in SANDMAN training elsewhere gets the koan-like quantum archeological superposition of Histories A and B, but in this brief glimpse owing to the material reality of this coin pendant, Jo feels like she's gained a glimpse of who or what actually arranged for the "scrim" history to be put into place. The official SANDMAN line is that it was "the global human subconscious" that created all this detritus, but Jo now wonders... maybe it's something from Outside that did.

(Leonard, if you feel like Jo would need a Rule of 14 Fright Check here, I'm down.)

Leonard

>> SUCCESS by 6

The coin opens up to Jocasta a sense of its true "ancient-ness" on first handling. The coin is definitely an authentic Hellenistic-period-minted object. Jo senses a lingering, faint sense of both civic and religious pride on it from its origins; at least a few of the people who had this coin on their person as it changed hands were adherents to whatever or wherever (or whomever) Artemis Tauropolis was. There's a patina of the Greek witch in Detroit who mounted it on the pendant too, of her taking pride in turning an ancient object of commerce back into an object of faith again. But as Jo probes the ancient origins of the coin deeper, there's this strange feeling of... fakery. Like seeing a Wild West town on TV and suddenly realizing all the saloons and dry goods shops are just flat painted facades. Jo's eyes go wide as she tries to peek behind the curtain and sees a forceful, bright, shimmering cascade of multi-colored undulating cubes, like something she'd see on acid. Is history real? Did 150 B.C. actually exist in any real meaningful way? Are all these dug-up "historical" artifacts just essentially like what the fundamentalists believe about dinosaur bones? Can Jo give me a Hidden Lore (History B)-16 roll please?

Viv says goodbye to Charley and then heads to Archie's office, hoping to catch Archie and Marshall at the same time. A knock on the door. "Gentlemen. Greetings from the wanderer come home to rest! Any chance you two would have a moment to accept some humble gifts from the road?"

Brant

"I'm telling you, Arch, the traffic around here is getting — " Marshall cuts himself off as he turns the corner into Archie's office. "Ah, Viv. Welcome back." Can I get a quick Body Language roll on her?

>> SUCCESS by 8

Michael

All right. I mean, outwardly, her body language is open, giving, generous, with no hint of tension. But Marshall can't help but detect inwardly some sort of indefinable quotient of uncertainty, hesitancy, that betrays itself despite Ms. Abeille's constant outward display of Flow and ease.

Both Archie's and Marshall's gifts are suspiciously book-shaped, with Marshall's, the smaller of the two, tied up with a red ribbon while Archie's, larger and flatter, has an orange ribbon.

Brant

Marshall glances to catch Archie's eye then takes a seat in one of the chairs across from his desk. "Sorry, I got here late -- are we doing a gift exchange today? I didn't get that memo."

Michael

Viv laughs. "Oh Marshall. Didn't anyone in your life ever go away on a trip and bring you back a nice souvenir?" She slides the package over to him and says in a stuffy officious voice, "Sorry I didn't submit the right form to initiate an unreciprocated gift bestowal in the office."

Marshall opens the gift and is presented with a book, as suspected. "So. Marshall. I'm sure you remember from your medical school days Schoenhof's Books in Harvard Square, that delightful little hole in the wall full of treasures, books from all over the world. It's always my top stop when I get back to Cambridge—I love chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Furatini, the owners—and I positively ransacked the psychology section this visit. There's some amazing, intriguing stuff happening right now—specifically and especially in France. The "kids" are killing their elders; even the formerly à la mode post-Freudians like Lacan are being ritually slain by hungry, radical upstarts. This book by a pair of radical therapists/philosophers at Paris VIII has had a lot of people buzzing in the foreign poststructuralist journals since it was published last year. I wouldn't expect to see it in English for quite a while, it's quite dense and, er, very French." Viv laughs. "I actually realize now that I don't know if you speak and read French but I imagine you could just, like, go into the tachistoscope closet and speed-learn it, right?" Viv smiles, handing Marshall this book, saying, "I know you've been trying to 'think different' lately and I have a feeling some of the ideas in here might help you in that."

Marshall examines the cover of this new weird psychological-philosophical tome from France.

 
 

Viv says goodbye to Charley and then heads to Archie's office, hoping to catch Archie and Marshall at the same time. A knock on the door. "Gentlemen. Greetings from the wanderer come home to rest! Any chance you two would have a moment to accept some humble gifts from the road?"

Rob

Archie looks up from the sordid occult murder suicide he and Marshall were to be discussing and beams with genuine warmth. "Why, it's the celebrated Genevieve Abeille! Come in, come in! How was the tour? What news of the reading public?" (edited)

Michael

"The tour was actually a pretty decent success, Archie! The publishers are happy, I met lots of wonderful lovely young people... and a few older ones too," she says with a twinkle in her eye. "I missed Charles and the kids and all of you, though!"

Brant

"Stanford, actually — for medical school. Harvard was undergrad." He adopts a sort of faux-conspiratorial, "we're all WASPS here, haha" tone: "I wanted to go to Columbia, actually, but my father would have none of it. But, yes, anyway, I do remember Schoenhof's. Thank you for the book. I admit I'm behind on my post-structuralist French metaphysics but if this spoke to you, well, it must mean something, right?"

Michael

"Oh, oops!" Viv actually blushes at her error. "Then you actually lived in the Square and probably got to know it far better than I did out in the wilds of Waltham." Smiling, she then presents Archie with his gift.

"Archie." A mix of solemnity and playful mischief crosses Viv's face. "I had one night in New York City when I was on tour—oh, Marshall, my signing was actually right near Columbia!—and there was so much I could've done: a Broadway show, an avant-garde theater piece, any number of a hundred foreign films, looked up old friends. But there was a particular little venue I wanted to visit and I was not disappointed when I went there." She hands Archie a little "playbill" for the Bil Baird Marionette Theater in Greenwich Village. "I went down to the Village to see Bil Baird's puppet show." Bil Baird! The dean of American puppeteers! The man behind the "Lonely Goatherd" segment in The Sound of Music and dozens of TV shows, short films, educational programs, World's Fair exhibitions, and yes, TV commercials! Sometime rival to one Archibald Ransom at Ransom-Ogilvie in the early '60s, too. But Baird was always, if Archie is honest with himself, a tier above Archie on the exposure, expertise, and esteem scales back in the old days. From what Archie heard, he went a little... "funny" in the late '60s and retired to New York City to operate a little theater and teach young puppeteers. One more "creative" rejecting the "rat race."

"Archie, the... magic in that theater space, that's the only way I can describe it. Like entering the cave of a mystery cult. I... cried my heart out at the show that Bil and his apprentices put on. All these 20-something kids doing something out of the love of the art, and Bil with this big pleased grandpa smile on his face when the puppeteers took their bows." Viv wipes a tear from her eye. "I can't really convey it in words. It was magic. So I went over to Bil after the show; he had this twinkle in his eye as I introduced myself. Turns out he'd read my books, which was immensely flattering. I told him I had this friend back in San Francisco whom he might know by reputation... I mentioned your name and he lit up."

"I don't know, maybe you already have this book, but he had a copy at the theater and I bought it and got it signed for you. I hope the inscription touches you the way their performance touched me."

The inscription reads:

Archie, Imagine my surprise when Genevieve Abeille lets me know she knows you. I remember your early-'60s 'spots' very well and with a lot of fondness; so innovative and genuinely funny... and heartfelt! When I consider the future of the Brotherhood of which you and I are both a member—the next generation, all you 'kids' out there—I have to say it's in very good 'hands.' Ha ha. Look me up anytime you might be in New York! Would love to 'talk shop.' - Bil

Underneath the signature is a sketch of two of the goats from "The Lonely Goatherd" kneeling down and bowing, in the style of this sketch below.

Brant

Marshall crosses his legs and runs a hand through his hair, watching Archie. There's a subtle smirk on his lips.

Rob

As he's opening the gift and turning the book over in his hand, Archie's all cheery bonhomie. "Bil Baird! Well, I'll be! Isn't that something?" Then he reads the inscription, and is genuinely touched, gets a little choked up. "Oh. Oh my goodness. Why, this is lovely, Genevieve. This is just swell. I don't know what to say. Thank you." Then his eyes flick back to the work he's actually doing (Anunnaki glyphs to be embedded in faux-Satanic symbols painted in the blood of the innocent kids we just murdered? something like that) and he's expressionless for a while.

Michael

Also, inside each of the books Archie and Marshall received is a small slip of what looks and feels like SANDMAN-issue flash paper with a sketch inscribed on it, presumably by Viv, of a rooster, a house, and a question mark. When Archie and Marshall each stumble upon the flash paper, Viv says brightly, "I'm going to go get settled in, but it's so good to be back. Maybe we can all catch up later today! she says, with the slightest bit of non-source code "oomph" behind it, conveying a subtle message to reinforce the flash paper "code." She then leaves Archie's office.

So Viv would like to convene URIEL in the Rooster House at some point today... I won't rush it but if there's any post-gift giving stuff that needs to be done, y'all let me know.

Leonard

Jocasta will probably want to pull Mitch’s coat for a quick smoke break before the meeting.

Michael

(I'll also assume that Charley will strike while the iron is hot and look up Jacques Vallée on ARPANET)

The package with the blue ribbon, for Roger, remains in Viv's shopping bag.

Jocasta will probably want to pull Mitch’s coat for a quick smoke break before the meeting.

Jeff

Mitch follows Jo outside. Once they're away from the doors he lights up and asks "so what do you reckon?"

Leonard

Jocasta hands him the glasses case and tells him what she learned: worn by an ambitious man in the ‘30s, someone used to frustration and disappointment, who believed he had finally come to his Axis Mundi, his immovable place from which he would reshape the world. “I couldn’t get anything more specific out of them, I’m sorry to say,” she says regretfully. “Who knows, maybe they’re Himmler’s.” She takes out the coin and turns it over in her hand like she’s been ask to inspect it before a conjuring trick. “This one, though. She gave it to me — it’s an ancient Macedonian coin, pre-ontoclysm. And it feels…I mean, you know what they told us in training. But this feels…different, somehow. Like, they didn’t make this. But neither did we.” She lights a Slim and exhales a long and sharp line of smoke. “This seems like…maybe this comes from someone else. And that seems like your department.”

Jeff

"Hmm."

Mitch puts the glasses on and reads Jo's aura through them.

>> SUCCESS by 1

Michael

Jo has to admit as he dons them... those glasses look boss on Mitchell.

Jo's physical and soul health both look nominal. Leonard can speak more to Jo's general emotional state at the moment.

Leonard

Jocasta’s mindstate is very shaky at the moment: she obviously hasn’t slept in a while, and her emotions are a mix of a dark, blotchy green undertone of guilt, and a spotty reddish-orange from overwork and stress, with undertones of anger. (edited)

Jeff

"I don't know what they're playing for, with these gifts." Mitch adjusts the glasses but doesn't take them off.

Leonard

“Christ, me neither,” Jo says. “I don’t even know how to talk to her now. Maybe I’m just too in my own head about it. Anyway, you should keep those. They look good on you.”

Jeff

"Oh?" Mitch adjusts the glasses again, more self-consciously.

"The thing is, she...they...dammit. Having a hard time putting thoughts together." He's silent for a few seconds and then the words come out in a rush. "There's a, C for Cabal, okay, a cabal of entities outside of this framework of History-A and History-B and they influence things for reasons we don't know, and we--the club--we have their attention in particular, and Viv had their attention until suddenly she didn't. Maybe they were bored with her, maybe she did whatever they needed her to do, maybe something totally different. But now she's just in the same boat as...Mary-Lynn, or the Librarian, or Melanie Ransom, or Master Jiyu for that matter. She's another of their pawns, same as everybody, us included."

"So these gifts...it's like a red lab coat situation. You know that one? They put a red lab coat in the monkey house one day, just to see what the monkeys would do with it. A change for change's sake, and they observed the results. The one that got the red coat thought it was a punishment for not working hard enough, the one that didn't thought it must be a reward for working harder, and they both worked more as a result. You know that story?"

Brant

“I do.” Marshall walks up. He puts on his sunglasses and asks Mitch if he can spare a cig. “The difference with her, though — between her and everyone else you mentioned — is twofold: she was in the club and she is the byproduct of a retro-creation. If we are to believe the Comte, which, you know, grain of salt. But let’s say he’s telling the truth. She represents some sort of … quantum deviation that They engineered. And yet, she was in the club. So this cabal, the C, they are not just outside our time. They are outside our conflict, too. Or perhaps are they are orchestrating it. Either way, the gifts are strange. Hell, why would she think I can read French?” He hands Jocasta the book Viv bought him.

Jeff

Mitch examines Marshall's aura, through the glasses.

>> SUCCESS by 5

Michael

Again, Marshall's physical and spiritual health both look solid. Brant can speak to his emotional state.

Brant

Marshall’s aura, like most times Mitch observes it, is a radiation of words and symbols in various languages, including the words he just spoke. They emerge from the ether around his figure and evaporate over time, though a few occasionally reach out and caress Mitch and Jocasta before doing so. The biggest words that catch Mitch’s eye are SUSPICIOUS, ANNOYED, JONESING, and CURIOUS.

“Anyway. She wants to meet in the Rooster House. That’s why I’m here.”

Jeff

"She's not our enemy, she's not allied with the Enemy, and the Rooster House is no protection against them. So, sure. What else can we do, right?"

Brant

“Exactly.”

Leonard

“I have some thoughts about this, but they usually come to me when I’m on LSD. Anyway, we aren’t going to figure it out right now. Might as well meet with the Author,” Jocasta sighs.

Michael

Once Viv has a quorum in the Rooster House, she nods to herself and takes a deep breath. "I promise I won't do as much scene-setting as I did for each of your gifts. Very quickly: at my reading in Cambridge, there was an older, tweedy academic-looking fellow in the front row, not my usual audience. After the reading he comes up to have his book signed and says to me, 'I wonder, Ms. Abeille, after having caught up on the various fantastic worlds you've created in your books, what would happen if that there King should wake?'"

"I'm glad you all trained me in the various secret handshakes before I left, because I gave him the countersign. He was your former teammate. Dr. Hilary Postel."

"After the signing we got a coffee at Café Pamplona." Viv nods at Marshall at the mention of another Harvard Square haunt. "I asked him how he knew I was SANDMAN, much less URIEL, since I'd only been a member for, what, six weeks maybe? Not even fully trained. And he said quite coyly, 'My dear, I keep my ear to the grapevine for what's happening to my dear ex-colleagues. I can pull rank in the organization, you know.' I knew he was fundamentally bullshitting me but I continued to act the babe in the woods. And what I was able to tell from our brief interaction is that he seems inordinately concerned for all of you." Viv pauses. "All of us, I guess."

"He was generally very evasive but also very curious about the team, under the cover of just saying how much he was missing you all. I was cordial in return but didn't give him anything real. I just said everyone was doing just fine when I'd left and that you're all fine teammates. He seemed to concur with that, with not a little bit of melancholy in his heart and a great deal of anxiety in his voice. Again, I'm admittedly reading between the lines but my feeling is that given the way he talked about the Project, he's concerned about y-... our superiors being at odds with URIEL. Every time he mentioned SANDMAN... his body language, his tells... they were off the charts. He doesn't strike me as a good or skilled liar. Probably why he's working at a museum, huh?"

"Anyway. I think one of you, one of you who've worked with him, should try to establish contact, if only to find out what exactly has him so hot and bothered. It feels like he was trying to reach out, if very very inexpertly. Maybe he figured sending a message through me was the safest way to do it."

Brant

“Blech, Postel? If that fucking dork — on the literal other side of the country — is concerned for us we must be making bigger waves than we thought.”

Rob

"Hil Postel, well what do you know? I wouldn't call him a-- well, I always thought he was a good fellow, at least when I could understand a word he was saying. We didn't all have the benefit of an Ivy League education, ha ha." "I suppose we could reach out, though we'd have to expect that would be noticed. Best if we had a plausible reason to consult him, a question about Anatolian pot shards or something. Postel practically wrote the book on History B, its ancient history, I mean. Mitch, did you ever meet him? I know he left here well before Jocasta and Charley."

Jeff

"Didn't have the pleasure, I don't think."

Rob

"That's right. He left just before you came on board, just after Sophie. Gosh, you know the best person to make contact with Hilary? It would have been her! Those two hit it off like a house afire. She'd know just what to ask him as a cover, too -- the sort of question he could answer that our library couldn't." Archie shrugs. "But I guess we can cook something up."

Jeff

"The Librarian is supposed to be coming back at some point, isn't she? Or are we expected to simply forget about her and her leave of absence? Roger's on leave, too, and he's coming back."

Mitch looks slightly abashed, like he doesn't mean to be picking a fight and his words are coming out more pugnacious than he intended.

Brant

“I suspect it won’t be too long before we hear from Sophie again — if we are making waves, they’ll send her back to us sooner rather than later. But I have someone watching her apartment. So we’ll see.”

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