thessalian (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thessalian) wrote2005-03-14 04:11 pm
thessalian) wrote2005-03-14 04:11 pm
Ghost in the Machine
Okay, this keyboard sucks arse but I'll try my damndest to do a decent write-up anyway.
The next morning, Kuo-Li woke up covered head to toe in pink fur, with big feet and long bunny ears. Paradox had punished him for all that Life magic by turning him into Harvey, basically -- big cartoon rabbit. (You can thank me later,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mapp.) He tried hiding in his room for the duration, but the Marwood-Egan twins outed him and his craving for carrots finally drove him downstairs. Meanwhile, Skank was trying to tell Michelle that she wasn't Kinfolk anymore. She took that rather better than he'd expected, mostly because if she ever did decide to have kids someday, she didn't want the chance of having them taken off her if they turned out to be Garou. At the same time, Lucius was talking to his sons and thankfully not botching it -- he told them that he would like it if they stayed with him and asked them if they had thought about what Traditions they were interested in. Remus went to learn the path of the Akashic Brotherhood at the feet of the big pink bunny while Romulus told Lucius that he'd had dreams that indicated past lives ... up to and including one where he was a madman who could remove his eyeballs and allow them to travel independently of him. This freaked everybody out but they didn't really have the time to deal with it right then -- there was far too much other stuff to look at. (They also didn't have time to deal with the fact that Susanna, incensed at Lucius' giving the Good Death to Jeremiah because he'd been turned Technocrat for all of a half-hour, stormed out and just never returned.)
Lucius has been racking up reasons for Skank to hit him; what he said to Molly last session, triggering the wards, that sort of thing. So Skank cornered Lucius and suggested a sort of extremely informal certamen -- fists only, no magic, no weapons, in an arena free of interference, winner's the last man conscious. Lucius would have preferred swords, but Skank didn't want to chance a lucky (or rather, unlucky) thrust killing someone. So, at Skank's request, Michelle went to talk to her Black Fury family out in Clapham and request the use of that place as an arena. They agreed, and off they went. The Furies seemed rather interested in how these mage males fought, and formed a nice little gladiatorial circle of wolf-form Garou for them to fight in. Lucius actually did some damage, blacking Skank's eye, but then swung badly, missed and knocked himself semi-conscious on Skank's steel-toes when he fell over. Then Skank head-butted him and that was it. Unfortunately, they had to leave in kind of a hurry because Luicus' chantry-mate Leanne, who was acting awfully childish for some reason, decided to try to pet a wolf-form Garou and it seemed sensible to just leave at that point.
Then they went to the Royal Free to try to make sure that Lucille was a) alive and b) Lucille. After getting past a really annoying reception kid, they discovered that she was both, but in something of a bad way. Skank spoke to her spirit (hovering around and being generally hacked off at the whole situation, seeing as Skank's magical botch was what landed her in the hospital to begin with) and asked if there was any way to get in touch with the Janissaries -- this was Kuo-Li's request, as he reasoned that they might be the only House in the Order of Hermes who might listen to sense about what really sparked off the impending Hermetic war. She said she knew a man who knew a man who knew a demon who knew a ... something or other, you get the idea. Her price was for someone to get the healing process going a little quicker. Kuo-Li couldn't do it but they sent for Lucius, who had been babysitting the oddly childish Leanne (she'd tied half his hair in cornrows and he'd let her to keep her busy. When Kuo-Li took over the babysitting, she pressed four buttons in the battle bus, got Kuo-Li caught in a seat release and then curled up on top of the folded seat and went to sleep). Lucius brought out the bones and then a candy striper named Emma turned up and tried to stop him -- apparently she knew something about the magics and what a Euthanatos using Life tended to mean. Skank reassured her and she let him get on with it. Matters improved and they got out while this Emma called for a doctor. Skank was not impressed with Kuo-Li when he found that Leanne had been pushing buttons on the bus.
Lucius went to his chantry house at the British Museum and discovered that House Shaea had taken it over and turned it into headquarters. He was not happy.
So when they got back to Chelsea, they had a few tasks to perform. First and foremost was to have a mental look at Molly, who'd been curled up in an unresponsive ball since the self-blame fit of the night before. Lucius tried to sense mind and found nothing. Then tried sense spirit and also found nothing. There was some serious concern at that point, so they checked the gallery. On one level, they saw Molly's body curled up in its ball on the sofa, and on another level they saw her in a room apparently walled with circuitry. This was, as you can imagine, worrying. When Kuo-Li checked up on Leanne, he discovered that she was mentally about seven years old, and got trapped in her seven-year-old mindscape for some hours when she turned him into a seven-year-old. He got out eventually by dint of having the Concentration merit but had no idea what to do about her.
Lucius decided that it would be a good idea to have a seven-year-old speak to a seven-year-old and tried to call out Serena. However, he messed up and went on a past life meditation. He discovered that back in the Prohibition era, he'd been a Euthie bookie/assassin type working for the Mafia (name of Pietro -- I needed something Italian and it just sort of fit). He was after one of Kuo-Li's former incarnations; a G-man of the old school. Still stuck in the past life of the assassin, Lucius went downstairs, played very nicely cool for awhile, then came very close to skewering Kuo-Li through the neck with a kitchen knife. Thankfully, Kuo-Li just saw it coming and only took a lethal rather than getting killed, and there was a brief scuffle before Lucius regained his senses. Whoopsie. Apparently, the Pietro/Enforcer end of days ended in a mutual kill.
In the end, they turned to Tannerbox to get info about Molly but at first all Skank could find was something about "the Firewall Project" and then he screwed up and Tannerbox locked him out completely -- the Awakened computer was apparently in a bit of a sulk about being used by people other than Molly. So Skank, desperate for answers by now, brought Molly upstairs and summoned Leyse (glowy protective spirit thing from way back in Llandeilo). She told him that Molly had not done this to herself and that there was time to help her, but not much. That was all Skank apparently wanted to know.
There was also some past life stuff that should be addressed. Kuo-Li went meditative first and discovered that he had once been Ezric, the mentor of Lucius' mentor who had been killed by Lucius' former incarnation as a fomor. Oddly, the idea of having once been Euthanatos disturbed him a lot more than the concept of having been killed by a fomor. Then they convinced Skank to have a go at past life meditation, but he didn't exactly see former incarnation in the "times long past" sense. Instead, he saw an image of his life before he was Skank Fetish -- when he was just your average guy instead of the tough-arse urban primitive. What he saw was himself at that time, sitting in a university common room sort of place, surrounded by wreckage, blood and body parts. He believes, as do the others, that he saw this because it links in somehow with the fomori. No one knows for sure.
Next day, Skank checked up on a large gold coin he'd found on him after leaving the Royal Free the day before. It turned out to be some sort of spiritual walkie-talkie that Emma'd left him so she could tell him what was going on with his friends. Apparently, Emily was asking for him when they weren't doping her up (they thought her rapid-fire communication was shock). He put that on the "to do later" list and went back to Tannerbox. When he talked it into working for him, he looked up the Firewall Project and found out what the Technocracy was trying to do to Molly -- if the drugs and the hypnosis didn't help her free herself from deviancy, they decided to simply filter her eidolon to remove some of the more inherent deviancies. In short, they were going to change Molly from the avatar out. Frightening concept for all concerned, particularly those for whom reincarnation via avatar is one of the main points of paradigm. They found out where she was, who was in charge of the project and decided to go on a mass rescue mission to a converted shopping centre in Hatfield, where the project was based.
To that end, they started in Elephant and Castle for weaponry. After a lot of comedy and a request for a date with Lucius from a blonde Son of Ether named Esther, they came away with three things -- a device to allow them access into the building somehow, some piece of apparatus upon which they could download Molly's avatar and upload it back into her body, and a prototype ... well, gun's such a limiting word. It was sort of a double-edged weapon, being both a plasma cannon and a tweaked shotgun firing rounds of sulphuric acid instead of the traditional shot. Nasty little piece of weaponry. Skank was terribly pleased. Lucius and Kuo-Li, who'd been with the numbers people, were just confused.
Next stop was the Royal Free to talk with Emily. (Vague amusingness -- the reception desk was manned by a little old lady who was irritatingly slow and pissed them all off until Kuo-Li tried Mind magic, filled her head with concepts she didn't understand just by talking, caused a cerebral embolism and basically gave the poor OAP the Good Death. He's still traumatised...) When Skank managed to make her understand that they were on a schedule, Emily said, as slowly as she can, "Beep is gathering an army and marching on House Flambeau". So much for "impending"; if he succeeds, there is going to be all out war among the Hermetics for sure. They spoke to Lucille, who was awake and talking and really pissed off about what Beep was trying to do, and then took off, leaving the Thig women in the hands of Emma. (She's apparently a Dreamspeaker.)
Off they went to Hatfield and worked out what the device to gain them access to the building was supposed to do -- it accessed the building's security system and just downloaded all the general access codes into their brains. They gained access, skulked around ... and then Lucius tripped up and knocked over a bunch of cubicle walls on the admin floor. When a secretarial type turned up and looked long and hard at Skank's Enochian tattoos, they grabbed her and had a whispered conversation about what to do, at which point they noticed that the woman wasn't struggling. They were a little confused but dragged her into what turned out to be a conference room. Apparently, this Kate was a member of the Celestial Chorus trying to get some data on, among other things, the situation in Rome. When they told her why they were there, she got very annoyed and told them to do whatever they had to do in twenty minutes, because after that she was going to get the place razed to the ground.
They eventually found the labs etcetera and went to open doors. Out came one of the scientists they knew were on the Firewall Project, so they grabbed her and told her to lead them to where they needed to go. She indicated a door, got shoved through said door ... and into an empty room. The fact that Skank had shoved her away, and thus freed her mouth, allowed her to scream, and then she got her head beaten in. Lucius tried Entropy, botched and peeked into the MiB coffee lounge. They eventually decided to try the door that the scientist came out of and found the other project operative working away while MiBs came to investigate the insanity in the complex. The other scientist (Dr Armitrading) had locked down the computer as soon as he heard strangers enter -- if someone got the password wrong just once, the entire computer would just format-C and Molly would, most likely, be lost. So they were going to torture the password out of him but Lucius' medical knowledge failed him and he shoved a light sabre through Dr Armitrading's heart. Skank grabbed the departing spirit and tried to torture him by sending Molly's Sully-thing spirit friend to eat him from the feet up. He was missing below the knees and nearly breaking when Lucius decided to use Entropy and Spirit to show Dr Armitrading the Abyss, botched and sent their last source of info to Oblivion. Whoops. Thankfully, Skank has a Destiny and seems to need Molly to fulfil it, because who should turn up but Ajahn, who'd apparently been liaising with the Chorister. He got the password on the first try, they downloaded Molly and got the hell out of there before the entire building got the Prime sucked out of it and ceased to exist.
Skank's gun was making sounds suggestive of overload, so he chucked it out the window and there was mass *boom* that should have taken out most of Enfield. However, while it had looked like there was groundfire, there was now none, and no loss of life. They picked the gun back up and are now very, very confused. But at least they have Molly back, Leanne's apparently stopped acting like a child and has most of her magical ability back, and all they really have to worry about are Jodi Blake, fomori, vampires and war among the Hermetics...
My interview today went well. 89 wpm with 99.8% accuracy, and I was pacing myself a bit. I rock. I should be employed again soon. Yay!
The next morning, Kuo-Li woke up covered head to toe in pink fur, with big feet and long bunny ears. Paradox had punished him for all that Life magic by turning him into Harvey, basically -- big cartoon rabbit. (You can thank me later,
mapp.) He tried hiding in his room for the duration, but the Marwood-Egan twins outed him and his craving for carrots finally drove him downstairs. Meanwhile, Skank was trying to tell Michelle that she wasn't Kinfolk anymore. She took that rather better than he'd expected, mostly because if she ever did decide to have kids someday, she didn't want the chance of having them taken off her if they turned out to be Garou. At the same time, Lucius was talking to his sons and thankfully not botching it -- he told them that he would like it if they stayed with him and asked them if they had thought about what Traditions they were interested in. Remus went to learn the path of the Akashic Brotherhood at the feet of the big pink bunny while Romulus told Lucius that he'd had dreams that indicated past lives ... up to and including one where he was a madman who could remove his eyeballs and allow them to travel independently of him. This freaked everybody out but they didn't really have the time to deal with it right then -- there was far too much other stuff to look at. (They also didn't have time to deal with the fact that Susanna, incensed at Lucius' giving the Good Death to Jeremiah because he'd been turned Technocrat for all of a half-hour, stormed out and just never returned.)Lucius has been racking up reasons for Skank to hit him; what he said to Molly last session, triggering the wards, that sort of thing. So Skank cornered Lucius and suggested a sort of extremely informal certamen -- fists only, no magic, no weapons, in an arena free of interference, winner's the last man conscious. Lucius would have preferred swords, but Skank didn't want to chance a lucky (or rather, unlucky) thrust killing someone. So, at Skank's request, Michelle went to talk to her Black Fury family out in Clapham and request the use of that place as an arena. They agreed, and off they went. The Furies seemed rather interested in how these mage males fought, and formed a nice little gladiatorial circle of wolf-form Garou for them to fight in. Lucius actually did some damage, blacking Skank's eye, but then swung badly, missed and knocked himself semi-conscious on Skank's steel-toes when he fell over. Then Skank head-butted him and that was it. Unfortunately, they had to leave in kind of a hurry because Luicus' chantry-mate Leanne, who was acting awfully childish for some reason, decided to try to pet a wolf-form Garou and it seemed sensible to just leave at that point.
Then they went to the Royal Free to try to make sure that Lucille was a) alive and b) Lucille. After getting past a really annoying reception kid, they discovered that she was both, but in something of a bad way. Skank spoke to her spirit (hovering around and being generally hacked off at the whole situation, seeing as Skank's magical botch was what landed her in the hospital to begin with) and asked if there was any way to get in touch with the Janissaries -- this was Kuo-Li's request, as he reasoned that they might be the only House in the Order of Hermes who might listen to sense about what really sparked off the impending Hermetic war. She said she knew a man who knew a man who knew a demon who knew a ... something or other, you get the idea. Her price was for someone to get the healing process going a little quicker. Kuo-Li couldn't do it but they sent for Lucius, who had been babysitting the oddly childish Leanne (she'd tied half his hair in cornrows and he'd let her to keep her busy. When Kuo-Li took over the babysitting, she pressed four buttons in the battle bus, got Kuo-Li caught in a seat release and then curled up on top of the folded seat and went to sleep). Lucius brought out the bones and then a candy striper named Emma turned up and tried to stop him -- apparently she knew something about the magics and what a Euthanatos using Life tended to mean. Skank reassured her and she let him get on with it. Matters improved and they got out while this Emma called for a doctor. Skank was not impressed with Kuo-Li when he found that Leanne had been pushing buttons on the bus.
Lucius went to his chantry house at the British Museum and discovered that House Shaea had taken it over and turned it into headquarters. He was not happy.
So when they got back to Chelsea, they had a few tasks to perform. First and foremost was to have a mental look at Molly, who'd been curled up in an unresponsive ball since the self-blame fit of the night before. Lucius tried to sense mind and found nothing. Then tried sense spirit and also found nothing. There was some serious concern at that point, so they checked the gallery. On one level, they saw Molly's body curled up in its ball on the sofa, and on another level they saw her in a room apparently walled with circuitry. This was, as you can imagine, worrying. When Kuo-Li checked up on Leanne, he discovered that she was mentally about seven years old, and got trapped in her seven-year-old mindscape for some hours when she turned him into a seven-year-old. He got out eventually by dint of having the Concentration merit but had no idea what to do about her.
Lucius decided that it would be a good idea to have a seven-year-old speak to a seven-year-old and tried to call out Serena. However, he messed up and went on a past life meditation. He discovered that back in the Prohibition era, he'd been a Euthie bookie/assassin type working for the Mafia (name of Pietro -- I needed something Italian and it just sort of fit). He was after one of Kuo-Li's former incarnations; a G-man of the old school. Still stuck in the past life of the assassin, Lucius went downstairs, played very nicely cool for awhile, then came very close to skewering Kuo-Li through the neck with a kitchen knife. Thankfully, Kuo-Li just saw it coming and only took a lethal rather than getting killed, and there was a brief scuffle before Lucius regained his senses. Whoopsie. Apparently, the Pietro/Enforcer end of days ended in a mutual kill.
In the end, they turned to Tannerbox to get info about Molly but at first all Skank could find was something about "the Firewall Project" and then he screwed up and Tannerbox locked him out completely -- the Awakened computer was apparently in a bit of a sulk about being used by people other than Molly. So Skank, desperate for answers by now, brought Molly upstairs and summoned Leyse (glowy protective spirit thing from way back in Llandeilo). She told him that Molly had not done this to herself and that there was time to help her, but not much. That was all Skank apparently wanted to know.
There was also some past life stuff that should be addressed. Kuo-Li went meditative first and discovered that he had once been Ezric, the mentor of Lucius' mentor who had been killed by Lucius' former incarnation as a fomor. Oddly, the idea of having once been Euthanatos disturbed him a lot more than the concept of having been killed by a fomor. Then they convinced Skank to have a go at past life meditation, but he didn't exactly see former incarnation in the "times long past" sense. Instead, he saw an image of his life before he was Skank Fetish -- when he was just your average guy instead of the tough-arse urban primitive. What he saw was himself at that time, sitting in a university common room sort of place, surrounded by wreckage, blood and body parts. He believes, as do the others, that he saw this because it links in somehow with the fomori. No one knows for sure.
Next day, Skank checked up on a large gold coin he'd found on him after leaving the Royal Free the day before. It turned out to be some sort of spiritual walkie-talkie that Emma'd left him so she could tell him what was going on with his friends. Apparently, Emily was asking for him when they weren't doping her up (they thought her rapid-fire communication was shock). He put that on the "to do later" list and went back to Tannerbox. When he talked it into working for him, he looked up the Firewall Project and found out what the Technocracy was trying to do to Molly -- if the drugs and the hypnosis didn't help her free herself from deviancy, they decided to simply filter her eidolon to remove some of the more inherent deviancies. In short, they were going to change Molly from the avatar out. Frightening concept for all concerned, particularly those for whom reincarnation via avatar is one of the main points of paradigm. They found out where she was, who was in charge of the project and decided to go on a mass rescue mission to a converted shopping centre in Hatfield, where the project was based.
To that end, they started in Elephant and Castle for weaponry. After a lot of comedy and a request for a date with Lucius from a blonde Son of Ether named Esther, they came away with three things -- a device to allow them access into the building somehow, some piece of apparatus upon which they could download Molly's avatar and upload it back into her body, and a prototype ... well, gun's such a limiting word. It was sort of a double-edged weapon, being both a plasma cannon and a tweaked shotgun firing rounds of sulphuric acid instead of the traditional shot. Nasty little piece of weaponry. Skank was terribly pleased. Lucius and Kuo-Li, who'd been with the numbers people, were just confused.
Next stop was the Royal Free to talk with Emily. (Vague amusingness -- the reception desk was manned by a little old lady who was irritatingly slow and pissed them all off until Kuo-Li tried Mind magic, filled her head with concepts she didn't understand just by talking, caused a cerebral embolism and basically gave the poor OAP the Good Death. He's still traumatised...) When Skank managed to make her understand that they were on a schedule, Emily said, as slowly as she can, "Beep is gathering an army and marching on House Flambeau". So much for "impending"; if he succeeds, there is going to be all out war among the Hermetics for sure. They spoke to Lucille, who was awake and talking and really pissed off about what Beep was trying to do, and then took off, leaving the Thig women in the hands of Emma. (She's apparently a Dreamspeaker.)
Off they went to Hatfield and worked out what the device to gain them access to the building was supposed to do -- it accessed the building's security system and just downloaded all the general access codes into their brains. They gained access, skulked around ... and then Lucius tripped up and knocked over a bunch of cubicle walls on the admin floor. When a secretarial type turned up and looked long and hard at Skank's Enochian tattoos, they grabbed her and had a whispered conversation about what to do, at which point they noticed that the woman wasn't struggling. They were a little confused but dragged her into what turned out to be a conference room. Apparently, this Kate was a member of the Celestial Chorus trying to get some data on, among other things, the situation in Rome. When they told her why they were there, she got very annoyed and told them to do whatever they had to do in twenty minutes, because after that she was going to get the place razed to the ground.
They eventually found the labs etcetera and went to open doors. Out came one of the scientists they knew were on the Firewall Project, so they grabbed her and told her to lead them to where they needed to go. She indicated a door, got shoved through said door ... and into an empty room. The fact that Skank had shoved her away, and thus freed her mouth, allowed her to scream, and then she got her head beaten in. Lucius tried Entropy, botched and peeked into the MiB coffee lounge. They eventually decided to try the door that the scientist came out of and found the other project operative working away while MiBs came to investigate the insanity in the complex. The other scientist (Dr Armitrading) had locked down the computer as soon as he heard strangers enter -- if someone got the password wrong just once, the entire computer would just format-C and Molly would, most likely, be lost. So they were going to torture the password out of him but Lucius' medical knowledge failed him and he shoved a light sabre through Dr Armitrading's heart. Skank grabbed the departing spirit and tried to torture him by sending Molly's Sully-thing spirit friend to eat him from the feet up. He was missing below the knees and nearly breaking when Lucius decided to use Entropy and Spirit to show Dr Armitrading the Abyss, botched and sent their last source of info to Oblivion. Whoops. Thankfully, Skank has a Destiny and seems to need Molly to fulfil it, because who should turn up but Ajahn, who'd apparently been liaising with the Chorister. He got the password on the first try, they downloaded Molly and got the hell out of there before the entire building got the Prime sucked out of it and ceased to exist.
Skank's gun was making sounds suggestive of overload, so he chucked it out the window and there was mass *boom* that should have taken out most of Enfield. However, while it had looked like there was groundfire, there was now none, and no loss of life. They picked the gun back up and are now very, very confused. But at least they have Molly back, Leanne's apparently stopped acting like a child and has most of her magical ability back, and all they really have to worry about are Jodi Blake, fomori, vampires and war among the Hermetics...
My interview today went well. 89 wpm with 99.8% accuracy, and I was pacing myself a bit. I rock. I should be employed again soon. Yay!