Tuesday, October 3rd, 2018

After what they just witnessed, everyone needs a bit of distance to process things. Levi does send a text out to make sure no one died and gets simple responses, but that’s all the communication that goes on. Anthony is especially taciturn, answering if he’s alive with a single “yeah.”

Wednesday, October 4th, 2018

The next morning, Levi gets a message from Sydney Taylor. Mick’s post of the details of The Ragnablock Party on It’s a Living included a bit about Spot. Since Levi posted those emotive field diagrams earlier, it’s not exactly hard for group members to put two and two together and link Levi with Spot. But here, for the first time, she actually reveals something personal – she has a friend who lives in Strefburg who was actually the one who told her what those emotive field diagrams were. The idea of Sydney having someone she takes questions to is kind of a strange phenomena for Levi to consider. But apparently, she could learn more with access to the living, breathing Spot, and Sydney got permission to share her address. Are they interested?

After a quick confirmation with the Cabal, they decide to follow the lead but meet up in the flesh beforehand to make sure they’re all on the same page. Well, all but one – Anthony has locked himself in his room, not wanting to pursue this shadow stuff any further. He’s seen direct evidence of the shadow stealing killing someone – and even if it’s only killed Avatar’s so far, who knows what happens if that kind of force gets turned on Adam? Would a second dose of it finish the job and kill him? It’s an impossible situation where he doesn’t want to go forward without knowing more, but doesn’t want to take the risks to learn more. In the end the others can’t do anything for him but hope he snaps out of it.

The location given by Sydney is “Quaritch Consulting and Rare Books”, so they elect to meet up in the nearby Northwest Park and swap notes. Graham takes the chance to pass out those cameras he bought, so they can take non-digital photos when needed. Levi did the sensible thing and got his car window fixed. (He also stayed at a hotel for some replacement mojo. His hair is much nicer than usual.) He also lets them know that Mick ended up posting details about the Ragnablock Party in It’s A Living, meaning that Spot’s capabilities are now a bit more widely known. Liz got some Avatar tips (and a cell number) from Irina, along with a bit more of that powerful horseradish. As for Graham – well, as soon as they see him, it’s clear he’s been through a lot. His left eye is bloodshot and his face is bruised. What happened?

Graham’s sob story begins like this: he was working with Jinx and Dr. Kimslep to get rid of the bodies. Jinx decided she would stage some sort of fake death for Harvey, since a dead cop can’t exactly just disappear, while Alison and Trep’s corpses could just be hidden away. Graham doesn’t have a lot of experience burying dead bodies, but he knows of a place to use – The Rat’s Nest, which no one but Stiff should be able to find and which has freezers to put them in. But when they got there, they found the back ways of the recycling center booby-trapped by…Red. Apparently Stiff wasn’t kidding when he said Red was the smartest dog he’d ever met. Graham faces a barrage of incredulity from the Cabal and has to reaffirm a few times that yes, he’s really talking about the dog and yes, he’s sure the dog’s the one who set them and yes, that’s what got his face messed up (“It was a can full of rocks. Well, there were a lot of cans full of rocks, the bruise is just from the one that hit me.”) The dog appeared to have at least a basic understanding of spoken language and seemed to respond to a one bark for yes two bark for no system. They caught her in one of her own pit traps, but she apparently tunneled out and escaped. He at least got an aura portrait of Red before she snuck away – while the others can’t see anything beyond a regular dog picture, he tells them that Red’s aura seems to have some of the same hallmarks as the other Avatars did, although to a lesser degree. The analogy he draws is that human years are to dog years as the auras of the Warrior Avatars are to Red’s.

But there’s more to Graham’s Night Out than just getting Kevin McAllister’ed by a dog. When he finally made it to the Rat’s Nest, he ran in to Stiff, who also got owned by one of Red’s traps. He had to drag himself in, his injuries overwhelming his normal reticence to go back to that place. Stiff was happy to see that some progress is being made to “find Rat’s killer” – now that Graham knows how likely it is that Spot did it, this is an awkward topic to navigate – and he also offered to help with medical care if there’s a below-board injury that can’t go somewhere public. As far as Graham could tell, Stiff actually knows his stuff.

But after that spot of good news, two more pieces of bad news. First off, the security guard Maria – who had already been suspicious of the Cabal, and who crucially had recorded their names – apparently found them mid-disposal and was killed as part of the coverup. Graham says it quickly and without emotion, but it’s still doesn’t sit well with anyone – killing someone who’s innocent just to keep a lid on things is a pretty grotesque line to have crossed.

The other bad news is of a more personal nature. Graham once again blacked out and had a vision that seemed to sap some his vitality. In this one, he was watching a pair of hands hold a photograph of the same woman he saw before. He heard sobbing, and two words: “No. Please.” Then two shadowy hands loomed in to view, one holding a silver fountain pen. It stabbed the eyes of the photo – and Graham snapped into alertness, his left eye pink with blood. Apparently this link does more than visions, and it wasn’t a one-off fluke.

After taking a bit of time to process all of the new questions, they decide to take the plunge and see if this new person might have answers instead of more questions for a change. When they arrive into Quaritch Consulting and Rare Books, their noses are assaulted with the smell of books, stacked to such a degree they have to walk single-file over the threshold. They’re greeted by a rapid fire barrage of questions from Aster Tenebron, who’s beside herself with the chance to investigate the “danger dog” she’s heard about from Sydney. (This enthusiasm slightly diminishes when she learns that the “danger dog” is in fact a “murder dog”, but Aster’s enthusiasm diminishing is like the sun being obscured by sun spots: theoretically detectable to an expert, but not noticeable to the naked eye.) She also gets a detective moment when she deduces that they met beforehand at Northwest Park, the only park nearby to have real soil and not just wood chips. (Proving this had no real material gain, but felt good.) When Graham asks to take her picture with no real context, Aster keeps up her streak of correct hypotheses by refusing on the grounds that Graham is a likely Camuraturge (and this enrages him – does everyone but him know the formal name of this stuff?)

Aster has a book about biohacking named The Body and the Spirit: An Introductory Primer. While her understanding is nowhere near enough to practice it – biohacking is a notoriously finicky and detailed field that demands deep mastery – she figures that between the emotive field diagrams, the book, and Spot, she can probably struggle through and figure something out. According to the Body and the Spirit, you need three things to construct an emotive field diagram: an understanding of the target’s biology, an understanding of their emotional reactions to stimuli, and a quantitative understanding of the magick you’re trying to bind to the target. Quantitatively understanding magick is not Aster’s forte – it seems spooky to even be able to do it – but if she can get the other two factors and come up with an educated guess on the sort of magick that was bound, she can focus on trying to reverse-engineer just the parts that would confirm or deny her theory.

Biology first. Unfortunately, the measurements include some rather invasive ones – pupil dilation in bright light, tongue length when pulled, that sort of thing. Liz is running interference and keeping Spot calm so Aster can measure safely. Graham is watching Le Chien Est Inquiet closely for any signs of trouble. Aster, always looking for clues, asks why Graham is staring so intently at a seemingly static photograph. Graham beings to deliver a condescending explanation – and Aster’s shadow, which she’s been trying to keep under control, decides to lunge menacingly at Graham to put him in his place a bit.

Graham, startled, hops back a step and draws his camera in a Mexican standoff that would be incomprehensible to passersby. The others look on with interest at Aster’s shadow, surprised but not startled. (Liz briefly thinks about being startled, before figuring she’s going to have to get used to this sort of thing as a newly minted Avatar.) Eventually, they manage to deescalate, and Graham explains the details in a more respectful tone. He also notices from the picture that Spot’s aura/shadow seems to be scared of Aster. Given that Spot’s shadow murdered the Greatest Among Warriors (twice!), this puts her in a pretty scary place on the occult hierarchy. Aster, meanwhile, is wrestling between annoyance at her shadow acting up and pride that it’s apparently intimidated Spot.

The emotional reactions were the part Aster was dreading the most – The Body and the Spirit has hundreds of pages about how to provide certain extreme stimuli and look for micro expressions that reveal the depth of feeling, all in a desperate attempt to approach something roughly like a numeric understanding. But with Le Chien Est Inquiet, they can just pick a single emotion (they wisely go for “happiness” in the form of some doggie treats), and have Graham read off measurements of the aura. Magick: it just lets you cheat at tests sometimes! (Graham fondly recalls his college days.)

After that, it’s time to guess at the spell. After her own study of it, Aster has intimate familiarity with the ritual that embodies your emotions in the form of your shadow, Call From the Duat. Presumably it’s similarly responsible for Spot. But Call from the Duat has four “forms” depending on what the shadow is being called to do – Fight, Serve, Learn, or Steal. Was Spot’s called to Fight, like her? Maybe, although the behavior seems to be a little different as she grills the others for more details. Her shadow attacks seem to be motivated partly by its own caprice, and don’t really have a link with the targets emotional state. While trying to dredge up clues, Liz mentions the symbol they found in the Rat’s Nest, and texts Anthony asking him to send a picture. Anthony yells at her over text a bit – digging in to this stuff is exactly the wrong reaction, in his view – but he does send the photo along. The symbol isn’t the same as the one Aster used, but it seems definitely related – more evidence that one of the other strains of Call From the Duat is responsible. Aster decides to assume that Spot’s shadow was called from the Duat to Steal, and to work her math on the diagram accordingly. (She doesn’t know how to cast the other versions herself, but with the basic structure, she figures she can identify one versus the other.)

After a couple of hours of frenzied pencilwork, two things become clear. First, her theory was correct – Spot’s shadow was definitely Called from the Duat to Steal. Second, the symbol that Anthony sent is not the symbol for the Steal variant of the ritual – the numbers stop making sense if she tries to include that symbol in the insane calculus she’s following from The Body and the Spirit. Which means, by process of elimination, it’s Learn or it’s Serve.

Milestone achieved: Learned that Spot’s shadow was Called from the Duat to Steal, and gained more context on the various forms of that ritual. +26% to the objective.

Well, now they’ve got a name to Spot’s power, although they don’t have the details on that variant of Call from the Duat so they still aren’t totally sure how to prevent Spot attacks. When brainstorming next steps, Liz mentions the second-hand knowledge she got from Anthony about the “Book of Ma’at” that Billy Worthinham said would protect him from the shadows that plague his every step. Aster squirms a little bit at this, and under pressure reveals the truth: the Book of Ma’at is in her possession at this very moment. Manningvoy and Charcleau contracted her to appraise the importance of the book while they tell Billy it’s being held up in customs – if it’s valuable enough, they’ll keep it for themselves and just pay the insurance to Billy. Having her deadbeat dad reappear to her life so abruptly – while doing sleazy and unethical things to hurt her friend, no less – sets Liz off a bit, and for a moment it looks like Spot’s shadow is going to attack. Graham, with his early warning system, hastily re-directs her to look at a cool picture of a duck he took. Everyone agrees the duck is cool.

Aster, knowing the symbol to look for, riffles through the book and finds it. The symbol appears to be a symbol of submission to the religious class, who are represented by an ostrich feather. More interesting is a bit of commentary she finds tucked away into a corner. It’s a reflection on how the priests can be sure those they are punishing deserve to be punished, and while the answer is mostly “priests are perfect”, there’s also a stray remark that to even be vulnerable to their punishment means that you have sinned against Leg-of-Fire – ergo all recipients of the shadowy punishment deserve it.

When Aster mentions Leg-of-Fire, Liz interjects that she remembers Seth talking about that. She starts texting a question to Irina asking if she can reach Seth, and to tell him they think they have a book of Ma’at, which they believe him to be interested in. Aster responds by saying that, from what she’s heard of Seth, she’d rather not put a target on her back – a thought she finishes expressing immediately after Liz sends the text. Irina responds that Seth will meet them tomorrow, 3:33 PM, at the scene of Trep’s death. Seth really doesn’t seem like the person who will take rescheduling kindly, so now they have a deadline.

Aster, not surprisingly, forwards the plan to read her way out of the problem. Finish the study of the Book of Ma’at by midday tomorrow, hand the book off to Manningvoy and Charcleau, then go to Seth and say “yes, we have information that Manningvoy and Charcleau have a genuine Book of Ma’at.” Liz is all in favor because there’s a chance that this plan results in her dad being cut in half with a scimitar. Levi decides to defer to their decision, and Graham actually absconds entirely – he has an appointment with Jinx to do some unspecified business.

Step one of the plan is making sure the hand-off will work out logistically. Liz decides to leverage her connection with Antoine Charcleau and gives him a call. He’s initially happy to talk to her, but somewhat put out by her half-baked explanation of why she’s intervening on behalf of Aster Tenebron, someone he hasn’t met personally (Charles handled the negotiations) and who he had no idea she was connected to. Eventually, Liz just puts the phone in front of Aster, who’s not happy about being put on the spot but manages to salvage the situation with a sob story about how she’s so busy and she already had the book finished, so she was hoping Liz could handle it while she worked on something else. Charcleau believes this a little more, but is dying to know what sort of “other work” could occupy such an esoteric specialist as Aster. She manages to defer answering this one too – she’s not mentally prepared for a bald-faced lie, but neither can she really explain the sort of books on her pile – but only by tacitly agreeing (ie, saying nothing against enthusiastic offers) to meet him with Liz on his yacht when her works slows down. But they arrange a pickup of the book and her assessment of it at 2:30 PM the next day.

So it’s a study party! Aster translates at warp speed while Liz tries to copy down what she’s saying and Levi gets coffee and generally just tries to keep Aster free of any distractions. It’s pretty quickly clear that this book is related to the 42 Negative Confessions – basically “Thou Shalt Not” type injunctions, each with an attendant assessor you’re supposed to proclaim your adherence to. Leg-of-fire wants you to avoid “eating your heart”; that is, letting yourself be governed too much by your emotions. It’s also clear that the book is chiefly about how to live by Ma’at, but it’s not laid out confession by confession or assessor by assessor – it’s a single, sprawling allegory, full of teachable moments within mini-fables and peppered with commentaries. Picking out only the Leg-of-Fire parts will be tricky, and Levi and Liz need to tap out and get some shuteye.

But Aster is feeling the deadline, and she has something they don’t – knowledge of the Scholar’s Cradle, a ritual to hone your mind and stave off exhaustion. She continues her work throughout the night. She gets maddeningly sidetracked by advice on how to refrain from debauching the wife of other men – it’s something the authors really, really care about and it has just enough similarities with the themes of restraining passion that Aster gets caught out on it more than once. Eventually, though, her persistence eats away at the false positives, and she finds all of the sections relating to Leg-of-Fire. The main takeaway is that you need to reflect on your emotions – not suppress them at all times, but replace them with a conscious knowledge of what they would make you do, and then train yourself to trust your mind’s understanding of your heart more than your heart itself. It’s not any sort of magick quick-fix, but it does appear to have some genuine insight into the human condition. Strangely, though, Aster can recognize the wisdom behind the words without being able to access it herself. “Use your self-concept to replace your self” are words she can understand the meaning of while seeing absolutely no way to make her brain think along those patterns. It’s like asking someone to flex their right kidney. You know about kidneys, and you know about flexing, but there’s no mental wiring that can make it happen. Still, even with the sour note of something she can’t quite internalize, Aster is basking in the triumph of a successful investigation – until she goes to stand up and nearly falls over. Ah. It’s morning now, and she took her time in the Cradle to the limit, so now she can barely walk as her legs are feeling the brunt of the exhaustion she magickly kept away from her mind. Well, it’s not like there’s a potential murderer she’ll have to run from later today or anything.

She posts to her group chat with the Cabal (they added her to a separate one from the one they had before, Aster being something of a probationary ally) and asks for more help transcribing before it’s time to turn the book in. Normally her impressive memory is enough, but the fact that she can’t personally act on the advice of Leg-of-Fire has her nervous – better to have a verbatim copy to share with others, in case they can derive more from it than she could. Levi is going to drive aimlessly in preparation for the meeting – right now, their best plan is to talk to Seth in Levi’s car, where Levi can use his powers to protect them if things go poorly. Graham has a wedding to photograph and can’t help at all. That leaves Liz, who agrees to help out, and further decides to leave Spot at the All Dogs are Good Shelter – while she’s normally kept him by her side for protection, she would be in danger if Charles was the one to collect the book and her emotions spiked in his presence. She has Anthony watch the dogs for her while she’s out.

Back at Quaritch, Liz is writing down the translations Aster provides her. Like Aster, she comprehends the words without being able to put them in to action. As more and more of the words are shared with her, Liz begins to wonder what the hell is going on with Seth. She’s heard him say Leg-of-Fire’s negative confession out loud – “Hail, Leg-of-Fire, I have not eaten my heart” – but the more she understands what that means, the more revulsion she feels as a newly minted Warrior. Because what being a Warrior means, more than anything else, is to dedicate yourself absolutely to your cause, to be an unbending oak devoid of compromise. How in the world could he possibly do that without eating his heart? Eating her heart is what had awakened Liz to the archetype in the first place – the absolute conviction that she must fight for those who cannot fight their own battles. Is it even possible to follow the archetype any other way?

Milestone achieved: Copied a translation of the Ma’at of Leg-of-Fire. +11% to the objective.

They managed to meet their deadline, and theoretically the plan is on – hand the book off to the firm, then pump some knowledge out of Seth in exchange for telling him where it is. But Liz can’t help but feel a heavy blanket of trepidation – the more she grows in to being a Warrior, the less she understands the Warrior they’re about to cross paths with once more.

Objective: Learn what it takes to be safe from Spot (local)

Progress: 83%

Experience Checks:

Occult Bibliographer (Aster): 55% → 60%

Content Creator (Liz): 59% → 64%