Jailhouse Rock
Oct. 3rd, 2004 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianImmediately following Skank's revelations to the rest of the group, there was some stress, and Carl and Lucius went straight off to mentor-letters. Skank, not really having a contact to his mentor, went to speak to some of his other contacts instead, and found that a complete space-cadette named Dwight was going to be passing through Lampeter in the next week, on his regular 'holding pattern' through the UK. He also had some conversation with Molly and Dawn, the most helpful parts of which were when Dawn showed him the evil hot-spots of South Wales and when Molly told him how to summon Leyse, which is the name of the spirit who protected them in the Swansea School and then helped Molly travel in spirit into Bokugo through the barriers Lucinda had set up. So after helping Molly with a rite to summon one of the handmaidens of Bast and giving her the idea that she might want to try learning how to use Forces to let her fly, all Skank could do after that was wait.
Meanwhile, the Ecstatics had a plan. With their combined abilities in Time, they were able to time-scry; couldn't see over distances because I don't think any of my people (bar Kuo-Li now) has enough Correspondence to read a map, but were able to see back to a given point if they were in the right space. They chose Dawn's room, because they wanted to find out what had happened to Brenna and Hoshikuro. When Dawn heard about this, she decided to help out. First thing she did was show Skank where to find the right kind of drugs to act as focus for such an act (Synth-DxR 16, though Chloe had cooked up a batch of stuff that did the trick with less hangover). Then she insisted that Skank and Lucius be there; the idea was that Dawn would link the Ecstatics with Skank, who would project what they were seeing, and Lucius would act as a witness and a Life Mage should the drugs have unforseen effects. What they saw was the following: Brenna and Hoshikuro tending to Dawn during her seriously bad tree-spirit-related Paradox mauling, arguing as per usual, when they heard a voice that Skank recognised from the other room -- it's either Roger or Robert or something, he doesn't know, but he calls him The Creature because he's one of Violet Scheherazade's little flunkies. The Creature attracted Hoshikuro's attention, who went into the other room to find out who the hell this was, and then it all went very quiet. Brenna went to check it out, and the group could just see through the doorway enough to see The Creature whack Brenna and throw her semi-conscious body through a Correspondence portal. Then Dawn broke the link with a massive headache, Skank was severely muzzy in the head and E and Chloe, still feeling the effects of their respective drugs (and a Paradox-emphasised hangover later), basically were stuck as puddles of human for the rest of the day. At which point E had a vision -- the puppy she'd tried to juggle during Skank's big-arsed Spirit-rote coming up to her, barking in welcome and tugging on her boot, apparently trying to lead her towards nearby forest area. Perched in the trees were two ravens (Huginn and Munnin; E's very much into the Norse thing, as will be seen later). Then she drifted away again, but she retained enough to know that this was a portent.
After Skank recovered from his own hangover and explained the need to go to Lampeter to meet up with his contact, he went up to his room prior to going to do some work on the Battle Bus. He found a note on the door telling him, in Molly's handwriting, to go down to the front lawn. He went, mostly because he was on his way to the bus anyway, and saw a sign staked to the lawn -- "Look up and watch out for updrafts". At which point, he hears the pitter-patter of little feet and a badly-assembled hang-glider takes off from the roof of the Stack. She actually managed some altitude, but something went wrong with the hang-glider and she wound up crashing into a tree. He ignored that, but had to stick around anyway, because E had a lot she needed to say.
See, that morning, she'd heard scratching on the door and "yip-yip-yip-yip-whine". Sure enough, there was the puppy she'd taken such a fondness to; it licked E's face, then tugged on her boot and led the way she'd been shown before. They wound up near the very spot where Molly tried conjuring up spirits for the first time, and there E met her Avatar, who takes the form of Odin. Odin told her that she could not interfere with what she was about to see, but that she had to pay attention. The puppy, meanwhile, had crossed the river to join up with a group of dogs; one was huge, a likely mastiff-husky-timberwolf cross, while the others were mangy but muscled. Junkyard dogs, much like the name of her former cabal. And with them was a small dog with a furry tail -- a grey fox. As E watched, the other dogs ripped the grey fox to pieces; the puppy growled and started to move forward but the huge mastiff cross held the puppy back. After the ripping was done, a group of Alsatians (police dogs, essentially) turned up and herded the others away, at which point the big one grabbed the puppy by the scruff and literally threw her into the river just before the Alsatians got him, too. E was told, as the puppy came back to her, that this was a representational thing, and that while justice had to be done, it had to be done right. In short, the innocent should not pay for the actions of the guilty. And whatever she did to stop this, it had to be without violence ... and with that, Odin took her axe away. Then he buggered off. This was a fairly obvious bit of representational theatre -- her mentor was a huge grizzled man named Fang, and his former cabal had once killed a Virtual Adept who called himself Grey Fox when they found out who had really caused the Bug. However, it did take E awhile to cotton on; but this is E. Eventually, with help, she worked out that her trip north to Skank's contact would serve two purposes -- to get Skank's info, and to help her mentor out of the predicament he was in.
Anyway, as Skank's in the process of listening to E burble about this, Molly comes up to him and tugs on his sleeve. He turned to look at her ... and saw both her arms and collar-bones covered with Enochian symbols, a Norse rune carved into each of her palms and a funny scar across one side of her forehead. He asked her where he got those and when she says, "The tree?", gave her 'that look'. She ran inside to clean up the mess, and Skank, knowing that E is something of a tattoo artist, just glared at her as she finished her story. He did notice a new tattoo on her -- a serial number tattooed on her forehead -- but that was the least of the weird stuff he was noticing. Kuo-Li was dressed as the Fool from the standard Rider-Waite tarot deck. Carl was wearing a sandwich board with Enochian writing on it -- so small and close together that Skank didn't stand a chance in hell of reading it. Chloe was being shadowed by a mousy woman in calf-length skirt, cardigan and tinted glasses. No one else seemed to know what he was talking about, and it was starting to drive him a little bit buggy. Eventually, Skank gave up trying to get straight answers from anybody and went back to his bus, and was interrupted again by a cry of, "Hey, Wild-Man!" He looked out and saw Michelle dismounting from her horse -- and saw a large knife stuck in her back to the hilt, and a lot of blood. He couldn't remove it, though he did try, and started Michelle rather badly as she told him that she was going out to the factory because a couple of Llandeilo wives were complaining that there husbands hadn't come home for a couple of days. She assumed they were on some kind of bender but she and Richard (approaching from the other direction) were going to go check it out. She told Skank to lay off whatever the Ecstatics were feeding him and rode away.
It got dumber. Skank confronted E about "tattooing a little kid" and she said, "I didn't do anything!", at which point I forced to add, "That you remember..." given the sheer magnitude of the high she was on the night before. Chloe didn't help when she said, "I'm sure E wouldn't do anything that Molly didn't ask her to" and there was nearly a fist-fight. Lucius was hiding from all of this, and Jeremiah was out with a migraine (Simson begged off due to family committments at the last minute), so it was Skank telling Kuo-Li to get out of the conspicuousness-gear, referring to the woman with Chloe as "Edna" and noticing, to his intense dismay, that there were little things of his missing on the bus -- little nasties he never really liked messing with in the first place, but still. So he searched the rest of the house and found that the box o' evil shit was also missing. Everyone else told him it was still there, but he wouldn't listen because "you're all messing with my head". Then, to make matters worse, Michelle turned up again, still with the knife but now looking awful -- and with a riderless horse beside her. She kept talking to 'Richard'. Then again, so did everyone else.
Of course, there was nothing wrong with anybody else. Skank had a short and relatively benign span of Quiet in which his sight got stuck on a particular level of the Umbral. Richard was there on the horse, and telling the group that the people in the Technocracy factory were dead -- apparently they'd all gone insane and killed each other off. There were a few survivors, but the shell-shocked peaceable ones were being slaughtered by the homicidally insane, and Michelle and Richard had killed those latter that they could find. They had apparently seen no survivors and rode away dispirited. They asked a few questions and went on their way, Michelle talking about having to get ready for a court date in Lampeter. Skank is going rather batshit by now -- the woman he's got a relationship with has a fucking knife in her back, his cabalmate's tatooed his apprentice, everyone's pretending like the evil shit hasn't gone walkies and his head's being utterly screwed with. So he goes back to fixing his bus, pretending this weird shit isn't happening. Eventually, he notices that the Weaving Tower looks kind of like a lighthouse and goes up to find out what's going on up there. Dawn, as she'd look in her 20s, basically tells him to calm down, hoped he'd been paying attention and counted down from five. And then ... normal. Quiet over. It was only a couple of hours game time, but I didn't really want him to go homicidally insane, and that's where he was headed.
Hint that there might be trouble in a Technocracy factory, they won't lift a finger. Tell them that there's corpses everywhere in a Technocracy factory, they'll fall all over themselves to go check it out. Skank, Lucius, Carl and, believe it or not, Chloe went off to the Technocracy factory to see what was going on there while Kuo-Li tried to talk to Susanna (Lucius had made the mistake of coaxing Susanna down for a cup of tea earlier; the former Technocrat took one look at the hung-over mages and ran like hell the moment Lucius would let her and was still scared witless of the lot of them when Kuo-Li spoke to her) and E went to meditate in the weed field. The ones who went to the factory found it full of gore and dead bodies ... and one soon-to-be-corpse, who Lucius tried to heal. No successes, so Lucius had just enough Life to tell him that there was nothing to be done, and the victim (a secretarial type) managed to look over his shoulder before she died, which was around the point where Lucius got hit in the head with a piece of metal. The combat didn't go very well -- Lucius got a couple of lethal before Skank finally shot the attacker. They decided to burn down the building and run like hell, except Lucius decided that he could burn it down himself with petrol and some matches. Unfortunately, it was a concrete building and the flame was pathetic. Skank, having at least a little cause to be coincidental at that point, blew the whole place sky-high. Surprisingly, he let Lucius take the credit.
Knowing they needed help with the legal system, Kuo-Li went to talk to Dawn next, asking where Brenna had hidden all the legal know-how books. Managed to make Dawn cry in the process, which is not like him but I suppose there was stress. Next step was two-part -- E going to Susanna and asking her for help, and Skank going to Michelle. Skank found Michelle in the shower (where she'd apparently been since she got home) and she invited him to join her. While that was *ahem* going on, E had the conversation with Susanna that started off with them reflexively insulting each other and ended with Susanna blurting out her past because straight-talk was the order of the day. Eventually, the conversation ended with Susanna saying that she knew someone in Lampeter who might be able to help, a guy named Dermot. Meanwhile, Skank was telling Susanna to watch her back, literally and figuratively, and learning a little bit about the post-Restart legal system. For one thing, the judges are blind so that they won't be swayed by the appearance of the people involved; the blinding seems to act as a sort of lie detector and a little more besides. Michelle was slated to go to court as an observer, and she made it quite clear that she could not be seen to know the group in any way, but offered a way of keeping in touch while they were there -- she's got Life and Matter and can essentially go from Uma Thurman to Julia Roberts with a little bit of blood and some herbs. Skank went back with what news he'd received, got some info from Lucius regarding Violet, and they all went to bed to prepare for the morning.
Oh, and at some point, Loofah and E's new puppy (a mongrel bitch that E's named Morrison) treed the Skanklet on top of the PerkyStand 2000. Skank tried to shoot it. Still not dead.
They drove to Lampeter the next morning, and Carl gave a little speech to Susanna about how he said all these things and it really sucked and she doesn't seem to want to talk to him and he doesn't blame her but could she look at these pictures he was given and find out who was in them? Great way to ask for a favour, but she did it, and saw a few people who she recognised -- someone named 'Donald' featured. Apparently, the pictures Carl's vampire friend Trish left for him were of a big Technocracy gathering and they had decided to do something she'd been speaking against almost since she was recruited -- going after another Tradition to wipe it out like they did the Adepts. Beyond that, nothing of note happened and the drive went without a hitch.
They found a place that Dwight was bound to be at -- 'pool hall' known as "The Crashpad" because the pool tables are usually used as tables or beds for those on dubious substances. Before they went in, Susanna -- dressed in complete slutgear, courtesy of the former occupant of her room -- broke into a house a few doors down and encountered Dermot. Dermot looks so utterly bland it's scary but is a complete stoner, and he's apparently some kind of lawyer (and is obviously really friendly with Susanna). She introduced the others around, naming Carl as "Marcus Brigstocke", and let E explain the situation. He offered to take the case despite the fact that it all sounded completely daft because of his knowledge of the Judges. He asked for some time to get showered and changed, so they went down to The Crashpad to chill out and see if they could find Dwight in the meantime.
Dwight showed reasonably quickly -- 6'5", skinny, pale, badly bleached hair, green sunglasses. Skank greeted him and there was much conversation involving the Skanklet, the golems of Skank's life and some various other things. What Skank didn't notice until the end, when he thought about it, is that Dwight used some Mind on him to find out the things he wouldn't talk about, like who he was shagging. He still doesn't know how much Dwight saw, but there was conversation about Violet, who's apparently holed up in London and no one asks questions about what she's doing -- Dwight tried and lost an ear; others tried, were taken into Violet's inner sanctum and were never seen again. Dermot turned up, got himself a few tokes and vanished, telling them they had 20 minutes before they were due in court. They hung around trying to find lunch, trying to find a pool table that wasn't taken up by stoned people and having a half-pint or so, and then took off for court. Lucius and Susanna had already left by then, and Chloe was cozying up to Dwight before you could blink.
Dermot put E in the witness box; the others took seats in an observation gallery. As promised, Michelle was there as an observer and announcer-type; she called in the Judges, who had their eyes gouged out as previously stated. Carl had his Prime-sight switched on and noticed that their eyes were glowing; nothing else, just the eyes. Fang (big burly grey-haired guy) and his companions (motley crew of misfits in prison greys) were also glowing. Michelle and the other Regulators in the room were hazy. The three Judges spent as much time looking at the 'audience' as they did the witness, and Dermot started the questioning. When Dermot asked, "Were you there when the murder of Michael Grey was committed?", and she answered "Yes", it became clear that she would also be facing execution if Fang was found guilty, since she'd just admitted to being at the scene. She told the truth about the situation as best she could and then they asked her a few very hard questions -- things like "Do you think that what these so-called Junkyard Dogs did was just?" and "If Mr Charles (Fang) is found guilty, and if you are also found as an accessory, what will you do?" She parroted Avatar-lesson at them, and they went away to deliberate for five minutes. When they came back, they announced that Evangeline Gallagher was free to go, as was Frederick 'Fang' Charles. The rest of the Junkyard Dogs went to execution, because they had actually killed 'Grey Fox'. One thing that E and Lucius both noticed as the Judges left was that the quietest Judge of them pointed his face at Michelle for a moment, then nodded to himself before he was led away. Apparently, someone has made a decision about her.
As they left, deciding to buy Fang a celebratory drink down at The Crashpad, they noticed that the entire place was surrounded with Regulators. Michelle, in her redhead guise, was waiting for them to explain that they could not go in there; it was being raided. Apparently, the law now thinks they're kidnappers -- something to do with Molly and Susanna. Michelle wasn't really explaining it very well, since Lucius told her at that point (as privately as he could) about the Judge. Actually, what he said was, "They know about you; I'd be careful". Michelle, remembering Skank's freak-out, asked him exactly what he'd seen and he told her as best he could. She sent them all off to an out-of-use Regulator barracks on the edge of town to spend the night, told them to try to leave when the traders were coming into the city (about 6:00 a.m.) and that she had to go or she'd be missed. So they went and most of them decided not to sleep. Kuo-Li did contact Molly to check on her -- she said that she didn't see anything, but that she wasn't just going to hide if anyone did come for her; "Not foom today, but foom tomorrow!" She also said something I don't know if the others caught, but I have to talk to Simson about later -- "Dawn isn't feeling very well".
In other news, I still can't get my domain to work. Oh well, at least I do have the site up, though I understand it needs a few tweaks. And now it's very late and I've cooked and everything, so now's about the time I shower, come back to see the commentary about the write-up, and then go to bed. More work in the morning. Where did the weekend go?
Meanwhile, the Ecstatics had a plan. With their combined abilities in Time, they were able to time-scry; couldn't see over distances because I don't think any of my people (bar Kuo-Li now) has enough Correspondence to read a map, but were able to see back to a given point if they were in the right space. They chose Dawn's room, because they wanted to find out what had happened to Brenna and Hoshikuro. When Dawn heard about this, she decided to help out. First thing she did was show Skank where to find the right kind of drugs to act as focus for such an act (Synth-DxR 16, though Chloe had cooked up a batch of stuff that did the trick with less hangover). Then she insisted that Skank and Lucius be there; the idea was that Dawn would link the Ecstatics with Skank, who would project what they were seeing, and Lucius would act as a witness and a Life Mage should the drugs have unforseen effects. What they saw was the following: Brenna and Hoshikuro tending to Dawn during her seriously bad tree-spirit-related Paradox mauling, arguing as per usual, when they heard a voice that Skank recognised from the other room -- it's either Roger or Robert or something, he doesn't know, but he calls him The Creature because he's one of Violet Scheherazade's little flunkies. The Creature attracted Hoshikuro's attention, who went into the other room to find out who the hell this was, and then it all went very quiet. Brenna went to check it out, and the group could just see through the doorway enough to see The Creature whack Brenna and throw her semi-conscious body through a Correspondence portal. Then Dawn broke the link with a massive headache, Skank was severely muzzy in the head and E and Chloe, still feeling the effects of their respective drugs (and a Paradox-emphasised hangover later), basically were stuck as puddles of human for the rest of the day. At which point E had a vision -- the puppy she'd tried to juggle during Skank's big-arsed Spirit-rote coming up to her, barking in welcome and tugging on her boot, apparently trying to lead her towards nearby forest area. Perched in the trees were two ravens (Huginn and Munnin; E's very much into the Norse thing, as will be seen later). Then she drifted away again, but she retained enough to know that this was a portent.
After Skank recovered from his own hangover and explained the need to go to Lampeter to meet up with his contact, he went up to his room prior to going to do some work on the Battle Bus. He found a note on the door telling him, in Molly's handwriting, to go down to the front lawn. He went, mostly because he was on his way to the bus anyway, and saw a sign staked to the lawn -- "Look up and watch out for updrafts". At which point, he hears the pitter-patter of little feet and a badly-assembled hang-glider takes off from the roof of the Stack. She actually managed some altitude, but something went wrong with the hang-glider and she wound up crashing into a tree. He ignored that, but had to stick around anyway, because E had a lot she needed to say.
See, that morning, she'd heard scratching on the door and "yip-yip-yip-yip-whine". Sure enough, there was the puppy she'd taken such a fondness to; it licked E's face, then tugged on her boot and led the way she'd been shown before. They wound up near the very spot where Molly tried conjuring up spirits for the first time, and there E met her Avatar, who takes the form of Odin. Odin told her that she could not interfere with what she was about to see, but that she had to pay attention. The puppy, meanwhile, had crossed the river to join up with a group of dogs; one was huge, a likely mastiff-husky-timberwolf cross, while the others were mangy but muscled. Junkyard dogs, much like the name of her former cabal. And with them was a small dog with a furry tail -- a grey fox. As E watched, the other dogs ripped the grey fox to pieces; the puppy growled and started to move forward but the huge mastiff cross held the puppy back. After the ripping was done, a group of Alsatians (police dogs, essentially) turned up and herded the others away, at which point the big one grabbed the puppy by the scruff and literally threw her into the river just before the Alsatians got him, too. E was told, as the puppy came back to her, that this was a representational thing, and that while justice had to be done, it had to be done right. In short, the innocent should not pay for the actions of the guilty. And whatever she did to stop this, it had to be without violence ... and with that, Odin took her axe away. Then he buggered off. This was a fairly obvious bit of representational theatre -- her mentor was a huge grizzled man named Fang, and his former cabal had once killed a Virtual Adept who called himself Grey Fox when they found out who had really caused the Bug. However, it did take E awhile to cotton on; but this is E. Eventually, with help, she worked out that her trip north to Skank's contact would serve two purposes -- to get Skank's info, and to help her mentor out of the predicament he was in.
Anyway, as Skank's in the process of listening to E burble about this, Molly comes up to him and tugs on his sleeve. He turned to look at her ... and saw both her arms and collar-bones covered with Enochian symbols, a Norse rune carved into each of her palms and a funny scar across one side of her forehead. He asked her where he got those and when she says, "The tree?", gave her 'that look'. She ran inside to clean up the mess, and Skank, knowing that E is something of a tattoo artist, just glared at her as she finished her story. He did notice a new tattoo on her -- a serial number tattooed on her forehead -- but that was the least of the weird stuff he was noticing. Kuo-Li was dressed as the Fool from the standard Rider-Waite tarot deck. Carl was wearing a sandwich board with Enochian writing on it -- so small and close together that Skank didn't stand a chance in hell of reading it. Chloe was being shadowed by a mousy woman in calf-length skirt, cardigan and tinted glasses. No one else seemed to know what he was talking about, and it was starting to drive him a little bit buggy. Eventually, Skank gave up trying to get straight answers from anybody and went back to his bus, and was interrupted again by a cry of, "Hey, Wild-Man!" He looked out and saw Michelle dismounting from her horse -- and saw a large knife stuck in her back to the hilt, and a lot of blood. He couldn't remove it, though he did try, and started Michelle rather badly as she told him that she was going out to the factory because a couple of Llandeilo wives were complaining that there husbands hadn't come home for a couple of days. She assumed they were on some kind of bender but she and Richard (approaching from the other direction) were going to go check it out. She told Skank to lay off whatever the Ecstatics were feeding him and rode away.
It got dumber. Skank confronted E about "tattooing a little kid" and she said, "I didn't do anything!", at which point I forced to add, "That you remember..." given the sheer magnitude of the high she was on the night before. Chloe didn't help when she said, "I'm sure E wouldn't do anything that Molly didn't ask her to" and there was nearly a fist-fight. Lucius was hiding from all of this, and Jeremiah was out with a migraine (Simson begged off due to family committments at the last minute), so it was Skank telling Kuo-Li to get out of the conspicuousness-gear, referring to the woman with Chloe as "Edna" and noticing, to his intense dismay, that there were little things of his missing on the bus -- little nasties he never really liked messing with in the first place, but still. So he searched the rest of the house and found that the box o' evil shit was also missing. Everyone else told him it was still there, but he wouldn't listen because "you're all messing with my head". Then, to make matters worse, Michelle turned up again, still with the knife but now looking awful -- and with a riderless horse beside her. She kept talking to 'Richard'. Then again, so did everyone else.
Of course, there was nothing wrong with anybody else. Skank had a short and relatively benign span of Quiet in which his sight got stuck on a particular level of the Umbral. Richard was there on the horse, and telling the group that the people in the Technocracy factory were dead -- apparently they'd all gone insane and killed each other off. There were a few survivors, but the shell-shocked peaceable ones were being slaughtered by the homicidally insane, and Michelle and Richard had killed those latter that they could find. They had apparently seen no survivors and rode away dispirited. They asked a few questions and went on their way, Michelle talking about having to get ready for a court date in Lampeter. Skank is going rather batshit by now -- the woman he's got a relationship with has a fucking knife in her back, his cabalmate's tatooed his apprentice, everyone's pretending like the evil shit hasn't gone walkies and his head's being utterly screwed with. So he goes back to fixing his bus, pretending this weird shit isn't happening. Eventually, he notices that the Weaving Tower looks kind of like a lighthouse and goes up to find out what's going on up there. Dawn, as she'd look in her 20s, basically tells him to calm down, hoped he'd been paying attention and counted down from five. And then ... normal. Quiet over. It was only a couple of hours game time, but I didn't really want him to go homicidally insane, and that's where he was headed.
Hint that there might be trouble in a Technocracy factory, they won't lift a finger. Tell them that there's corpses everywhere in a Technocracy factory, they'll fall all over themselves to go check it out. Skank, Lucius, Carl and, believe it or not, Chloe went off to the Technocracy factory to see what was going on there while Kuo-Li tried to talk to Susanna (Lucius had made the mistake of coaxing Susanna down for a cup of tea earlier; the former Technocrat took one look at the hung-over mages and ran like hell the moment Lucius would let her and was still scared witless of the lot of them when Kuo-Li spoke to her) and E went to meditate in the weed field. The ones who went to the factory found it full of gore and dead bodies ... and one soon-to-be-corpse, who Lucius tried to heal. No successes, so Lucius had just enough Life to tell him that there was nothing to be done, and the victim (a secretarial type) managed to look over his shoulder before she died, which was around the point where Lucius got hit in the head with a piece of metal. The combat didn't go very well -- Lucius got a couple of lethal before Skank finally shot the attacker. They decided to burn down the building and run like hell, except Lucius decided that he could burn it down himself with petrol and some matches. Unfortunately, it was a concrete building and the flame was pathetic. Skank, having at least a little cause to be coincidental at that point, blew the whole place sky-high. Surprisingly, he let Lucius take the credit.
Knowing they needed help with the legal system, Kuo-Li went to talk to Dawn next, asking where Brenna had hidden all the legal know-how books. Managed to make Dawn cry in the process, which is not like him but I suppose there was stress. Next step was two-part -- E going to Susanna and asking her for help, and Skank going to Michelle. Skank found Michelle in the shower (where she'd apparently been since she got home) and she invited him to join her. While that was *ahem* going on, E had the conversation with Susanna that started off with them reflexively insulting each other and ended with Susanna blurting out her past because straight-talk was the order of the day. Eventually, the conversation ended with Susanna saying that she knew someone in Lampeter who might be able to help, a guy named Dermot. Meanwhile, Skank was telling Susanna to watch her back, literally and figuratively, and learning a little bit about the post-Restart legal system. For one thing, the judges are blind so that they won't be swayed by the appearance of the people involved; the blinding seems to act as a sort of lie detector and a little more besides. Michelle was slated to go to court as an observer, and she made it quite clear that she could not be seen to know the group in any way, but offered a way of keeping in touch while they were there -- she's got Life and Matter and can essentially go from Uma Thurman to Julia Roberts with a little bit of blood and some herbs. Skank went back with what news he'd received, got some info from Lucius regarding Violet, and they all went to bed to prepare for the morning.
Oh, and at some point, Loofah and E's new puppy (a mongrel bitch that E's named Morrison) treed the Skanklet on top of the PerkyStand 2000. Skank tried to shoot it. Still not dead.
They drove to Lampeter the next morning, and Carl gave a little speech to Susanna about how he said all these things and it really sucked and she doesn't seem to want to talk to him and he doesn't blame her but could she look at these pictures he was given and find out who was in them? Great way to ask for a favour, but she did it, and saw a few people who she recognised -- someone named 'Donald' featured. Apparently, the pictures Carl's vampire friend Trish left for him were of a big Technocracy gathering and they had decided to do something she'd been speaking against almost since she was recruited -- going after another Tradition to wipe it out like they did the Adepts. Beyond that, nothing of note happened and the drive went without a hitch.
They found a place that Dwight was bound to be at -- 'pool hall' known as "The Crashpad" because the pool tables are usually used as tables or beds for those on dubious substances. Before they went in, Susanna -- dressed in complete slutgear, courtesy of the former occupant of her room -- broke into a house a few doors down and encountered Dermot. Dermot looks so utterly bland it's scary but is a complete stoner, and he's apparently some kind of lawyer (and is obviously really friendly with Susanna). She introduced the others around, naming Carl as "Marcus Brigstocke", and let E explain the situation. He offered to take the case despite the fact that it all sounded completely daft because of his knowledge of the Judges. He asked for some time to get showered and changed, so they went down to The Crashpad to chill out and see if they could find Dwight in the meantime.
Dwight showed reasonably quickly -- 6'5", skinny, pale, badly bleached hair, green sunglasses. Skank greeted him and there was much conversation involving the Skanklet, the golems of Skank's life and some various other things. What Skank didn't notice until the end, when he thought about it, is that Dwight used some Mind on him to find out the things he wouldn't talk about, like who he was shagging. He still doesn't know how much Dwight saw, but there was conversation about Violet, who's apparently holed up in London and no one asks questions about what she's doing -- Dwight tried and lost an ear; others tried, were taken into Violet's inner sanctum and were never seen again. Dermot turned up, got himself a few tokes and vanished, telling them they had 20 minutes before they were due in court. They hung around trying to find lunch, trying to find a pool table that wasn't taken up by stoned people and having a half-pint or so, and then took off for court. Lucius and Susanna had already left by then, and Chloe was cozying up to Dwight before you could blink.
Dermot put E in the witness box; the others took seats in an observation gallery. As promised, Michelle was there as an observer and announcer-type; she called in the Judges, who had their eyes gouged out as previously stated. Carl had his Prime-sight switched on and noticed that their eyes were glowing; nothing else, just the eyes. Fang (big burly grey-haired guy) and his companions (motley crew of misfits in prison greys) were also glowing. Michelle and the other Regulators in the room were hazy. The three Judges spent as much time looking at the 'audience' as they did the witness, and Dermot started the questioning. When Dermot asked, "Were you there when the murder of Michael Grey was committed?", and she answered "Yes", it became clear that she would also be facing execution if Fang was found guilty, since she'd just admitted to being at the scene. She told the truth about the situation as best she could and then they asked her a few very hard questions -- things like "Do you think that what these so-called Junkyard Dogs did was just?" and "If Mr Charles (Fang) is found guilty, and if you are also found as an accessory, what will you do?" She parroted Avatar-lesson at them, and they went away to deliberate for five minutes. When they came back, they announced that Evangeline Gallagher was free to go, as was Frederick 'Fang' Charles. The rest of the Junkyard Dogs went to execution, because they had actually killed 'Grey Fox'. One thing that E and Lucius both noticed as the Judges left was that the quietest Judge of them pointed his face at Michelle for a moment, then nodded to himself before he was led away. Apparently, someone has made a decision about her.
As they left, deciding to buy Fang a celebratory drink down at The Crashpad, they noticed that the entire place was surrounded with Regulators. Michelle, in her redhead guise, was waiting for them to explain that they could not go in there; it was being raided. Apparently, the law now thinks they're kidnappers -- something to do with Molly and Susanna. Michelle wasn't really explaining it very well, since Lucius told her at that point (as privately as he could) about the Judge. Actually, what he said was, "They know about you; I'd be careful". Michelle, remembering Skank's freak-out, asked him exactly what he'd seen and he told her as best he could. She sent them all off to an out-of-use Regulator barracks on the edge of town to spend the night, told them to try to leave when the traders were coming into the city (about 6:00 a.m.) and that she had to go or she'd be missed. So they went and most of them decided not to sleep. Kuo-Li did contact Molly to check on her -- she said that she didn't see anything, but that she wasn't just going to hide if anyone did come for her; "Not foom today, but foom tomorrow!" She also said something I don't know if the others caught, but I have to talk to Simson about later -- "Dawn isn't feeling very well".
In other news, I still can't get my domain to work. Oh well, at least I do have the site up, though I understand it needs a few tweaks. And now it's very late and I've cooked and everything, so now's about the time I shower, come back to see the commentary about the write-up, and then go to bed. More work in the morning. Where did the weekend go?