[The Grid] Chatper 1: Hardwired

BA: burn 2 temp wp, one for the roll and one because you missed it before. It's a little harder to force yourself to overcome fears that have overcome you recently.


Erin (by dint of being the only one to roll the dice) starts poking at the rocks, somewhat nervously. She manages to uncover some ants, but they just scurry away. No other vermin appear.


Underneath the cairn or perhaps at its center is a small golden rock. It looks something like pyrite, (fools gold) except it doesn't have the overt crystalline structure. A little basic experimentation reveals the following.


Touching it is nasty. It results in a sharp shock leaving a tiny burn on your finger, and muscle spasms up through your arm for a few seconds. (If you're wearing a watch, it just stopped.) That shock is conducted though diminished by rocks, ie touching a rock that's touching the gold rock is mildly unpleasant. It's clearly not an electrical phenomenon given the way it ignores conductivity. Stepping back, it's possible to trace a line of staticy intensity running from the stone to the next cairn, and generally around to ascertain the rough box they make. You guys all walked through them before without noticing, but if you go slow and feel for it, you can tell where they are. Wiggling the thing via a stick informs you the lines move in reaction, but a little delayed.


Inside, Hank and Malcom head down to the small detention center. This police station being quite small, the cells are normally reserved for drunk-in-publics or temporary detention. There are four of them, lining a short hallway closed off with cinderblocks and bullet proof glass. Several people are inside.


Two are obviously prisoners, and one is obviously dead. There's a hole in his forehead, and he's slumped in a limp heap. Brain matter and gore is slowly trickling down the wall above him. The second is terrified, looking askance between the corpse and the room's other occupants. You can see his lips moving frantically, in what appears to be a desperate prayer. Both he and the dead man are in cells.


The room's other occupants are black suited figures that could be twins to the gent Malcom fought a few hours ago. They have yanked open the dead man's cell door and begin calmly arraying him on the floor. Once he is positioned to their satisfaction, one produces a large saucer of some black and green alloy of metals and places it carefully over the deceased's heart. Then they wait.


Nothing happens. The dead guy doesn't get deader. After a few moments, they adjust the saucer and wait some more.
 
Erin Hagens


Erin thinks very hard about Stonehenge, pyramids in Egypt and in Mexico, and other such odd sites where earth and rock have been carefully arranged to create mystical effects. At least, so the various tomes of mythology, fairy tales and occultist trash she greedily devoured as an adolescent claimed. She thinks about a building covered in cobwebs, about roiling masses of insects where there should be people going about their business. And she thinks about a suspiciously untouched Marauder.


Aloud, she says, "Guys, I think we've found whatever is turning this place into Mirkwood. The question is: do we wreck it and risk the consequences...or not?"
 
From one brand of strange to another. Hank ignores his first two impulses, say something, and or run. What stopped him wasn't the brain matter abstract impression, it was that he was about to be staring down the business end of the men in suites that the others had told him about. In a rare flash of cleverness, Hank quickly glances about to see if there is any button or console to operate the cell doors, or if he is gonna have to rush in to slam it shut and hope he doesn't get a bullet in his teeth. He is really praying for the former.
 
Malcolm blanched as he went through the insects, and then stopped short as he saw more Suits. More of them, dammit? "Relax, I've seen these guys before. Pretty hardwired, almost. First rule of business, don't attack, and they won't shoot you." He whispered over to Hank. "Saying things they don't expect helps to."
 
Patrick O'Connell


"And to think this time yesterday my biggest concern was the tide," Patrick mutters, shaking his head a little. "If this is the doing of these bozos, I'm all for throwing a monkey wrench in the works. Or an actual monkey even better, but we seem to be fresh out of those," he quips, trying to lighten the mood just a little. "But seriously...yeah, I say we do this."

for the delay, been a tough week.
 
Erin Hagens


"All right," Erin breathes, conscious she may be doing a thing as stupid as yelling battle cries during an ambush, "let's do it, then." With a sharp stick, she begins to pry apart and scatter the cairns, paying special attention to the pyrite-looking things at the heart.


Fool's gold. Ha.
 
Kase also went about taking apart the cairns, although he was also eyeing the iron pyrite. He used to collect it when he went camping with his family years ago. It looked like iron pyrite, barring one or two differences from his past experiences. This was made clear when he picked up a piece, jumping at the sudden electric shock. It reminded him of static electricity, only slightly worse.
 
Outside Erin and Kase poke the rocks while Patrick stands watch. It's anticlimactic for all the tension. The cairns themselves don't seem to react at all to being dismantled, but the pyrite does. When Erin whacks hers with the stick, there's a hard, unpleasant jolt that hits the stick, and it warps and burns. The shock that hits her is much more unpleasant than before, and burns her fingers. Kase happens to poke his rock a few seconds later, and gets a hit just as nasty.


Then they both fall over unconscious, and Patrick stands alone in the police yard, feeling VERY out of place. A couple people glance over, and Pat just sort of waves back. He gets a couple of really awkward looks in return. Erin and Kase lay supine.


Inside Hank and Malcom are talking about what to do when the dead guy twitches. He spasms. His chest leaps upwards towards the ceiling, and feet kick spasticly at the floor. The two suits watch him curiously, and in unison reach down to press the body against the floor. It starts thrashing.


"This is not according to protocol," observes one.


"Sterlize the second target now?"


"Unknown."


They both do that ear cupping gesture Malcom is familiar with and wait, holding the dead man down.

Arynne, Stormy, Stamina + Resistence diff 2, failure means you take a bashing level, a botch turns it lethal. Then both roll Essence + Integrity.


Hank and Malcom, Perception + Occult
 
Hank watches intently as the suites go about their business, deeply interested; His worldly studies brought him to dabbling in the arcane, but his Faith always kept them at arms length.


But when he sees the suites cup their ears, he sees his chance, and puts his curiosity aside for the moment. He takes a quick sharp breath and then hauls towards the cell and attempts to slam the door shut. If successful, he then runs back to the corridor, to take shelter behind the wall, in case the men in black draw their fire arms.

4d10 → [4,9,5,7] 2 sux
 
Outside


As his two companions fall, Patrick hurries forwards, checking first Erin, then Kase for a pulse, then - feeling a bit helpless - glaring at the pyrite cairn cores.


"Alright, if you want to play it that way, have at ye," he mutters, looking about to see if the witnesses are still staring, before reaching for his gun...

Since he would have retreived it before they had to ditch the Challenger, of coure.


Anyway, checking over Erin and Case, hmm:


Int+Medicine, 4d10 → 7,3,2,8 = 1 success
 
Inside the door slams shut. The two guys snap their heads up, and level their weapons at the door but don't shoot. Hank and Malcom are safe behind a wall, peeking around at a mirror. The two suits peer around, and they look straight at you in the mirror. But their gazes slide off without a trace of recognition, and the two continue searching around. It's almost like they can't see your reflections. They don't release the dead guy though. He's still kicking.


Some noise starts flitting around the edges of Hank's hearing though. It's like footsteps or distant wings. He glances around, but doesn't see the cause of it. (Presuming you spend a half second concentrating on it) After a bit, he does separate the sounds into two distinct categories, neither of which seem to have a noticeable cause. One is two distinct sets of footsteps, running. The footsteps are kind of familiar. The second noise is spiders. Lots and lots of spiders. Spiders everywhere, and they're coming on fast, but never getting any closer. That might be what the footsteps are running away from.


Malcom hears none of this, but does notice Hank's distraction. The lumberjack seems spaced out and is looking around absently.


Outside Patrick crouches by the two unconscious people and applies first aid. Kase seems fine, though Erin looks like she's been through a shock. Minor burns to her hands and arms, nothing life threatening. Both are asleep and cannot be awoken. Now what's odd (-pause- Well, odder.) is that they're both having REM. You can see their eyeballs twitching under the lids. But they're out, deep, and normally people wake up from REM easily.


The disassembled cairns lie in tumbled piles, with the slight glimmer of fool's gold at the core. Pat notices the grass is wiggling. (Again, presuming you spend a couple seconds concentrating) What's happening is there are a couple of lines radiating from the pyrite nuggets towards other corners of the police yard. Grass is aligning with these lines like iron fillings falling into magnetic field lines. Farther away, where the other cairns are, the lines are static and stable. By the two broken cairns, the field lines are moving, rapidly shifting and twitching, and the grass flicks and twitches with them, trying to follow the subtle shifts of power. Sometimes the field lies shift outside, and then none of the passers-by notice the three of you. Sometimes they shift inwards, and that's when the pedestrains wonder what the 'ell the three of you are doing. You can drag the two sleepers further inside if you want.

Stormy, I didn't see the phobia updated on your character sheet. If I'm not just blind, please note it for specifics. If I am just blind, well, keep on keeping on.


Stormy and Arynne, I bet you two can figure out what your characters are doing in this post. (helpful smile) I'm waiting on a couple things, but I'll give you the specifics to reply to shortly.
 
Erin


A burning sky.


Sand stretches out everywhere, and far in the distance a point of stone rears up, terrible, a dark shape in the bright day. It is Mount L'heya'a, and the awful stair carved up it, ten thousand steps cut around and through the ancient weathered stone. Effortlessly her dreaming consciousness drifts up those stairs, sees the great desert of the Utmost South spreading out below her, a place of dread and unquenchable fires, where powers move than mortals cannot understand, and great incomprehensible voices speak secrets on the wind. She has no love for the desert; she yearns for the rainforests of her home. But no matter. She goes to her destiny at last, to find her fate.


They are there waiting for her, all of them: the priests and priestesses of the Unconquered Sun, clad in robes of quetzal feathers, their scales brushed with gold dust. As she approches, she drifts no longer -- she has a body, clad in the now-familiar obsidian armor. But she has no weapon, and a great anger burns in her heart.


I have come for what you owe me, she says. She has no idea from where the words come to her, but she speaks them as if they are her own, and the anger in them her own as well.


The high priest stands forward, holding up his empty, clawed hands. We have it not, he says. The evil ones, the slayers of our brothers, have taken it. You must win it yourself.


That was not in the pact, she says, and steps forward wrathfully


The high priest looks at her coolly and moves not an inch. You speak true. And so we give you something else that was not in the pact. Know, then, the name of the blade: that this is indeed Caledvwlch the Great, forged of these sands by the King of All Craftsmen a thousand years ago, and with a virtue set on it that the one who holds it shall achieve his dream and his right...
 
Kase was certain he'd died. For real this time. The poisonous fish that he'd encountered back home was his final fate, and that intervention by Bob and Athena was all but delaying the inevitable. But once his eyesight quit blurring, he found himself in a place that was decidedly NOT Heaven...or at least, Hell, or anything similar. That was probably because all he could see was grass. Knee-high grass as far as he could see, waving in the winds, on a clean blue noon sky.


It felt familiar. Like...home. More than the sand, cacti, and windmills ever did. Was this a part of the destiny that Bob and Athena were referring to? It had to be. It was the only way this would ever make sense to him.


As if guided by some unseen hand, he began to move forward, through the grassy plains and following the streams that sometimes wound past towards a shrine, like the Shinto ones in books about Japan he'd pull out if he had free time in the library. Once he passed through the archway, he felt his body began to shift, standing tall in light armor that covered his chest and shoulders. As he walked up the steps and into the temple, people began to crowd around him, mostly clad in robes of white and gold, though he also noted the females were wearing long red dresses and the males in blue leggings.


Okay, now he was certain this was the final destination. Here was his destiny. His true destiny. He'd spent enough time reading legends...now it was time to make his own.


As one, the shrinekeepers gestured towards the center building, where he could make out a figure sitting alone. Their faces showed little emotion outside of curiosity, but then again, it was all a hallucination anyway. So, he continued on, entering the house where a wizened old man was waiting for him. The man said nothing, pointing at the cushion next to him. Kase obliged.


"You come at last. It has been many a long year since your stories and music last graced our presence."


"I apologize," the words came out of Kase's mouth before he even knew he was saying them. "But my time is short, and cannot stay long. I have come for what is mine."


The wizened old man shook his head. "What you seek has long since been stolen. You come in a time of great darkness and deception. The evil ones seek you and the others. They fear your power, and will stop at nothing to have it removed."


The man pointed, as dark storm clouds had begun to gather on the edges of the horizon. Kase glanced over briefly before replying, "They will not have it. Show me the way."


The man lifted his eyes to the ceiling. "The way is clouded. I can show you, but what you will find at the end is unknown, even to our eyes. If you take this, your life and power may be forfeit. Are you still certain this is the path you wish to take? There is no return from this point."


"This was always my destiny," Kase replied simply, more certain of his place than he'd ever felt of anything. "Now, quickly."
 
The sound in Hank's ear is perplexing, he puts it on the back burner a bit, to better deal with the current predicament.


Hank's Texas Twang starts to come out a little bit as he speaks, that tends to happen under duress,


"Boys, I just wanna talk, thought I would level the playing field a little bit is all. I had a feelin' we could start this out amicably; My name is Hank, I'm a bit lost, and just saw an opportunity to help the helpless is all. How about yourselves?"
 
The two suits do not immediately respond. Malcom, with the benefit of a bit of past knowledge, thinks they're baffled by this divergence from expectations. After a bit they begin speaking to each other in fractured, reactionary phrases.


"Intruders should identify-"


"Correction, intruder's have."


Another short pause. More footsteps and the skittering of tiny claws coming from a sourceless point. One of the suits readjusts the knife in the twitching boy. Outside Patrick notices the lines in the grass shift, like they were yanked sideways. The corpse continues to fail to decompose into vermin.


"Hank: you should reveal yourself, so that we can discuss things," a suit mentions, and looks around. Once again his eyes slide right past you in the mirror. You have no problem noticing that his words are punctuated by lifting the hand cannon in a suspiciously ominous manner.


"Indeed," the other one agrees. "Tell us more than your name."


Names, names, names. There's something terribly important about names.


The other prisoner glances at you two. He's crouching behind the tiny toilet, which would barely slow a round down from those blasters. Still, he's doing what he can. That cell door is closed and locked. The boy looks around in fear, glancing once at the scene and then suddenly twitching. It looks like he's flashing his head around, looking for something he doesn't really expect to be there. The stress might be getting to him if he's hearing things. The stress is certainly getting to you, because the footsteps are getting louder, and the skitter of a thousand little legs is chasing them.


"Come here, Mr. Hank," one of the suits says in a sing-song. "We've got a surprise for you."
 
Malcolm had a strange thought come to him. One that could buy time, and potentially clear something up. At least, he could get something by asking. "No. Not unless I, Malcolm, can speak to Gottendammerung."
 
Patrick


Patrick scowls at the moving grass, shaking his head. Ley lines? he thinks, having heard of such things - in mythology books and quack tomes on the occult. But in real life?


Shaking his head, he goes to move the two sleepers further inside the field, wanting to avoid notice by the general public as much as possible - after holstering his gun. He can take a wild guess as to the purpose of the cairns now, and doesn't want to damage the 'field' further - yet.


Scowling, he stands guard over the fallen, dreaming two, and looks back to the police station. The what of what's happened here seems obvious to him - the why, well, that's still unclear. A few questions do boil up in his mind, though, but they're ones he can't answer without abandoining his post, watching the two unconsious companions - and that, he feels, is something he cannot do. To do so - that would be abandoning his duty, something inside him says; and something else says that that would be worse than death itself...


...and so he stays. Watches. And guards.
 
Erin spends some time in Xanadu, wafting between varying dream states. She is hit with a fairly intent sensation of duality. It's a metaphysical ambivalence that is in no way akin to anything she's experienced in this life, but familiar. It's very familiar. It is not, however, terribly pleasant. There's the intense impression of something being seriously broken, yet unable to stop. It's like running on broken legs. You want to stop and let time and nature rebuild everything, but keep on. With each step things get worse.


Memories, one after another, hit her, but by now Erin's got the hang of memories. The flood of them is usual, familiar, and she's sure she can embrace it without losing herself. Finally she's beginning to get a sense of continuity of being though them. While the intensity of the memories is as overwhelming as always, without a doubt she's capable of remaining Erin in them, and observing things that have been recalled. There's no solution for the obvious dilemma of these not being her memories, of course. That's still a problem. Nor is there a solution to the old, 'I can't see or move because I'm overwhelmed with sensory impressions from my dead prior life.' That could get really inconvenient should shooting start up again. But she's maintained her sense of self. The two lesser difficulties will be solved later.


She also realizes that the key to her identities is her name. Names, names, names, chimes in the voices of old reason in a way that perfectly mimics a series of alien thoughts hitting Hank. It's almost like the words Hank is told by the grim suits filter through some weird connection based on a name that they both used to know and pool through Erin's soul, guided by her intuition.


Nah. Pure blind chance. You think it has something to do with Wayne Gretzky. He has a really silly name.


Kase is not so lucky. This is not unusual. There are few people Kase has been luckier than, and most of them got shot. For the last few days, life has been effectively dumping on the poor kid, and now, in a stunning continuity of direction, it does exactly that again.


While Erin managed to keep herself together, and can now start interacting with her memories as Erin, not as some shadow from the past, Kase cannot. He is yanked out of any sense of cognition by what is effectively a magical antenna set to 'body melting horror.' At the same time a blind, golden light catches him through the antenna and pulls with the irresistible force outwards. The antenna picks this up, and starts blasting pure unadulterated horror at the world. As Kase get's closer to the golden light, the horror gets worse, and he can feel his skin start to crawl. Literally crawl, with tiny, insectile legs. The golden light he's yearning for yearns right back, and they reach towards each other across a gulf, and as they stretch his lungs dissolve into centipedes and his liver to lice. He's still so far away, and the baleful encroaching horror is already killing him. They're still a million miles away, but he can only run two before the vileness ruptures him.

Also, include a Perception + Occult in your next post, please.


Patrick hangs out. This is kind of like watching a race on ESPN. Bear with me. ESPN usually follows the lead car, and occasionally cuts to any big name drivers who're hanging out in the pack, doing something interesting. They rarely ever follow the twenty seventh car, even if it and twenty eight are having a masterful duel for position. That's why watching races in person are more fun. Pat, who did fairly well on the circuit, all things considered, didn't have the stupid money necessary to buy a first place car, and so he stayed in the twenties. There was exactly one time that ESPN snapped in on him on all his glory, and that started the split second before he did a five-flip, 1080 crash that left the car, the stands, and (surprisingly) two fire extinguishers on fire. No one's quite sure how that worked.


Anyway, watching the footage later, Pat knew the exact moment things went bad was the exact moment he got screen time. Now, pulling guard detail, you're constantly wondering what heartbeat will be the moment ESPN cuts in on you, or even if it will at all. The second it does, things are going to get bad.


The shock of your phone ringing almost makes you lose your mind. It's somewhat louder than the deathstar explosion in your state of heightened tension. In reality, it's set to 'quiet.' Answering it, you hear Athena speaking. She skips all pleasantries.


"Pat, shoot the rock closest to Kase. He's about to die."
 
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