Monday, October 1st, 2018

When Liz gets home, she texts the Cabal warning them about the potential end of the world tomorrow, and gives them the street to show up on. They all make tentative plans to show up but not until later in the day, so they can all get their own things done first. Liz decides to set up a lunch date with her mom in case it’s the last chance.

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2018

While none of the cabal members had especially sound sleep, Liz wakes up feeling surprisingly invigorated and ready to face the day. Maybe the buff woman was right about hot dogs with horseradish being good for you. But while her body might be in good shape, her mood isn’t as soon as she checks her phone and sees a text from Harvey:

Harvey What did you do?? Liz …is Jinx’s last name Cotton? Harvey Yes. Is your last name “walks away from active investigations”? Liz Uh…you wanna come over? Harvey Yes. We’ll be coming over.

Liz quickly texts the Cabal not to contact her for now and then deletes their texts from her phone. Harvey and Jinx show up, in uniform but at least without the sirens going. Liz explains that she walked away because the whole thing seemed not like a real investigation. Jinx responds by asking if she could talk to Liz in private, without Harvey around. Liz declines, which seems to put Jinx off considerably. Eventually she calls Dr. Kimslep and advises him of the situation before handing her phone to Liz. Even then, Liz puts Dr. Kimslep on speaker, wanting Harvey to be accountable. Dr. Kimslep responds by asking whether she really wanted it to be public knowledge what Spot did – specifically with relation to the “Erik” case. (How the fuck does he know that? It was just her and Erik on that street.)

This is finally enough to make Liz switch to private listening (leaving Harvey thoroughly confused on what Liz’s dog has to do with a murder investigation). Dr. Kimslep speaks very bluntly: the people gathering for Ragnarök are here to avenge Erik, Spot killed Erik, Liz owns spot, and all Dr. Kimslep has to do is tell them what Spot did and they’ll come after her. If she wants to avoid this outcome, come meet them at the same house they met outside yesterday (which he informs her is the “Meavis residence”). Liz counter-offers meeting them in the street and says she’ll be over sometime Ragnarök but no guarantees when. Kimslep begrudgingly agrees and asks her to hand the phone back to Jinx. She’s not really clear if he’ll try something or not, but Jinx and Harvey leave, anyway. Liz makes a point to shake only Jinx’s hand and then indicate to Lola it’s a “bad smell”. Lola’s not really trained in that way but it makes her feel better.

Graham, meanwhile, is positively salivating at the thought of being the one to photograph the end of the world. He decides he’s going to camp out on Bristlecone Lane all day, stopping only to buy a few more Polaroid cameras to hand out to the Cabal later. (They’ve been texting him pictures, but what’s he supposed to do with that digital shit?) When Liz texts him after her harrowing encounter, she tries a slapdash code of “Oh, where do you think would be a good place for me to photograph dogs for my page?”, to which Graham promptly responds “I’m at Ragnarök, just come here.” Turns out no one ever told Graham about cell phone surveillance; hopefully the cops here aren’t running a Stingray.

Liz meets up with Graham and tries to play it nonchalantly with her back to the house. She tells Graham they’re being watched and to watch out for Dr. Kimslep (who she doesn’t have a photo of, but roughly describes). Any further conversation is interrupted by the buff woman from yesterday, who is overjoyed to see that Liz came back and comes in for a full-bore embrace (Liz deflect to a side hug) but gently chastises her for not bringing a weapon more significant than her belt hatchet. Liz responds that she’s just going to get it now and heads out before Kimslep and gang can notice she’s with Graham.

Meanwhile, Anthony is once again just longboarding around town – he’s pretty uncomfortable with this end of the world business and can’t see how to help, so he’s just focusing on clearing his head. As he’s rolling through a more upscale part of town, he’s waylaid by a passing Mormon asking to talk about his soul, as per usual. As he tries to politely deflect off, the Mormon, desperate and confused, says “But I thought – with those eyes—”, which is all that Anthony needs to hear to pick up the pace and leave him in the dust. Why does this keep happening? Weird.

Levi is preparing for Ragnarök in his own way – getting that bread in case they take debit cards in the afterlife. It’s half-price admission day at Dingnaught Aquarium and he’s getting easy surge pricing ferrying people to and from there. His most memorable fares of the day are Marcus O’Leary and Dewey Foss, a couple of frat bros who are really, really pumped to be going to the aquarium. (But not a frat bro couple – Levi even implying it caused both to them to practically warp to opposite ends of the back seat.) They are insistent that they’re going to learn the “fighting styles” of the animals there – with Marcus focusing on sharks and Dewey on octopodes. That’s…probably not what the exhibits will be about, but Levi doesn’t rain on their parade and they tip well enough.

As Graham continues his vigil, he sees Jinx putting some traffic cones on the end of the street as more people file in. It seems like a mix of bemused locals and some real heavies who stick out like sore thumbs. One man is practically a giant and is carrying a no-shit scimitar; there’s a small Indian woman who’s built like a tank and is obsessively putting on and taking off brass knuckles; and then there’s a smug man with a shit eating grin who’s dressed in what appears to be a British safari costume complete with machete.

Eventually, Jinx comes to his end of the street and asks him exactly what he’s doing. His excitement at the photo opportunity overwhelms his traditional caution and he blurts out that he’s here for Ragnarök. By tipping his hand as a member of the underground, Jinx is easily able to ID him as a Camuraturge. The twin threats of “exposure” and “gun” are enough to get Graham to go where Liz wouldn’t – into the Meavis residence. While Jinx and Dr. Kimslep are there, it’s actually the preppy teen girl Liz saw yesterday who seems to be running the show. She says her name is Alison – “at least as far as you’re concerned” – and that she and Dr. Kimslep are working to try to keep the magick happenings under wraps. They seem truly frightened about the possibility of Ragnarök and they give Graham the classic you’re-with-us-or-you’re-against-us speech. Graham is ideologically sympathetic to the idea of concealment and happy to say “with us”, especially when she mentions they’ll attempt to compensate for any charges expended.

They give Graham a mission to try to profile the people who look the strongest there, because “it really matters who wins and who loses here”. There’s also the matter of collateral – Graham took a photo of Jinx before she made herself known as a member of the underground. They know that they can’t take the photo without tabooing him, and he’s promised not to photograph any of them again, but they still need something on him in case things sour between them. So they record the details on his ID – and thankfully, whatever expertise they have, it’s not enough for them to see through “Zachary Dulear”. He walks out unscathed, and on his way out notices a terrified looking old woman working on some sort of arts and crafts project.

Liz has a delightful pancake brunch with her mother where no one is threatened with murder at all. Wait, I lied. When Liz mentions “boy troubles” in an attempt to get a heavier duty axe from her mom, she happily obliges and then mentions “A lot of people around here are hippies who believe in reincarnation, so you just tell him that if he crosses you he might come back as a tree and I’ll kill him after you do.” Liz leaves the brunch with some leftover pancakes and also an enormous felling axe.

Finally, the hour grows nearer and the Cabal start to converge on the small street where the end of the world was promised. Graham decides his best play is to not explicitly acknowledge that he knows any of them as they come in – he’s sure Alison and Dr. Kimslep are still watching him, and it’s best not to let them know they’re together, even if it means he’ll never get to pass out those Polaroid cameras. He just keeps taking pictures and keeping an eye on things. Apparently the old woman was working on a sign that says “The Ragnablöck Party”. It’s not really a convincing coverup, but better than nothing.

Anthony arrives on the scene with some hot dogs to cook, along with mustard – no matter what Liz says about waking up strong, he ain’t eating no damn horseradish and that’s final. He is gently chided by the muscular woman, but she shares the grill with him all the same. A lifetime of cooking for siblings had made him pretty proficient on the grill, and his hotdogs are generally acclaimed by the gathered people.

Levi, meanwhile, is taking one more fare from the Aquarium before heading out. He’s dismayed to see it’s Marcus and Dewey from earlier – but goes to full on befuddled when the destination they give is the exact street he was told to head to after. Not only that, but they explicitly say they’re heading for Ragnarök after a long day of marine combat surveillance. They seem pretty pumped! Levi decides to drop them off, then drive his car around the corner before walking back up himself.

When Liz shows up with the axe and Spot, she’s set upon immediately by the strong woman and by Alison running out of the house. The former appreciates Liz’s choice of weapon; the latter asking her to come inside the house and talk. When Liz again refuses, she turns to the strong woman in frustration and asks, “Irina-” (and here Liz realizes how strange it is to have never asked this woman her name, and how annoying it would be for a hypothetical transcriber of the events of her life) “- everyone is here to avenge Erik, RIGHT?”, “Yes”, “And if they found his killer, they could skip all of this and just kill them, RIGHT-” you get it. Basically a one-sided conversation going over the same things Dr. Kimslep threatened on the phone and aimed directly at Liz. (And one new fact does come up: if the person who killed Erik’s killer was “not a warrior”, then it would be up to someone else to kill whoever killed the killer. What a violent sentence!) When this also does not sway her to come inside, Alison walks over to Graham and mutters “Unless you’ve got some sort of Camuraturge trick to handle this, I’m going to kill that fucking dog.”

Graham is clever enough to not reveal that he knows anything about the dog, and asks innocently what she means. She responds that Spot has some sort of power to kill these people, and that having it in reserve would be useful but having Spot out in the wild would cause more problems than it solves. Graham responds that he’ll see what he can do and walks towards the group.

Meanwhile, Levi is chatting up Irina about her travels as a pretext while he uses his Viaturgy powers to determine where her pickup has been. He asks why she’s here, and she responds that she was called, because she’s “one of the strongest”. Then the conversation turns to what she does with her time, and her response is that she fights against “Tamers”. What’s a tamer? She starts to give the example of the people who drug up lions so old white people can take free shots at them—

—And Spot’s shadow starts to move.

It’s here, with everything on the line, that Graham suddenly realizes how bad his last picture of Spot was. Spot’s aura was cocking its head and looking right at him. It was reacting! Auras were a great way to see someone’s general emotional state, but what kind of aura looks at you? Whatever it was in the picture, it was different than a regular aura, and it cared a lot more about its surroundings. So an aura snapshot of Spot was a pointless thing to own. Spot and his surroundings, though —

Graham takes two giant steps backwards while drawing out his camera. Focus. This takes the big mojo, the power he got capturing Stiff’s grief. Give me Spot and the world around him. Let me have eyes on this.

Click.

As the Polaroid develops, his intuition is screaming at him that the emotional temperature of the conversation needs to be lowered. He loudly interjects into Irina’s conversation to talk about the relative merits of different hot dog toppings. He’s awkward as hell, but Levi catches on and does a much smoother job derailing his own talking point. Spot’s Shadow recedes.

At last the picture is ready. Graham looks at it and sees Spot’s aura – but not as a fixed moment in time; as a dynamic, moving thing. This is one of the big pictures – not one that has a moment fixed in time, but that shows the Truth, forever. And it’s got enough space around Spot that he can get an idea what his aura is up to as long as he’s looking at both it and Spot. Le Chien Est Inquiet, he’ll call it.

Milestone achieved: Took Le Chien Est Inquiet and realized that Spot’s power is at least in part linked to emotional outbursts in others. +13%

Meanwhile, Levi’s finished working his Viaturgy magick. Not the same level of flash, but he’s figured out that Irina was driving around Mt. Rainer National Park before bee-lining straight here with unnerving accuracy. Whatever “being called” means, it’s clearly accurate as hell.

Anthony is still at the grilling, talking to Marcus and Dewey. They’re asking his honest opinion on whether they should “squire” for someone else or fight for themselves. Anthony has a bit of a knack for seeing violent people are, and it’s clear that Marcus is a totally paper tiger. Dewey is a little better but still totally out of league with all of these monsters. Anthony (diplomatically) informs them as such, and they take it with surprising grace, deciding to bow out and thanking Anthony for potentially saving their lives. It’s clear to them they need a lot more experience, which means…checking out a lot more aquariums.

Irina is talking to Liz, trying to get her ready for Ragnarök (at this point, it’s less than an hour away). Irina asks what Liz is fighting for, and she doesn’t really have an answer, which disappoints Irina. Liz turns the question around, hoping to see what Irina is after. This gets her going about the lions again, and Graham catches Spot’s aura facing her in the picture before the shadows starts to move. Deflecting again, he proposes a toast to the associated people. He has to leave it vague, since he’s not sure exactly what’s happening, but he’s saved when he hits upon “To Erik” and all of the heavies assembled respond in kind. It’s a surreal feeling to see people with paper plates and plastic cups toast with such grave solemnity.

And Liz is going to be in the middle of it; Irina seems convinced that Liz will be her squire. It’s a lot to think about. And what’s her answer for “what are you fighting for?”, anyway?

So here’s Liz, stewing in nervous thought, holding a big fuckoff axe. When someone manages to get right next to her and tap her on the shoulder, can you blame her for a nervous reaction? Unfortunately, her nervous reaction is swinging her arm, and in her arm is her axe, and in front of her axe is Officer Cotton, chest neatly cut by the axe-head.

It’s not quite 10:13, but maybe the world’s ending a little early.

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

Progress: 31%

Experience Checks:

Sharp-Eyed (Anthony): 47% → 49%

Longboarder (Anthony, In Progress): 10% → 12%

Furtive (Graham): 34% → 39%