2020-09-25 Before Midnight Tonight ...
Before Midnight Tonight ...
Location: Winters Retreat
Date and Time: September 25, 2020 Evening
Summary: Visions of stars
Mood Music: Hugo Kant "Before Midnight Tonight"
The earbuds he was wearing snaked past the salt and pepper in his beard and the creases on his face down to a phone that read “Hugo Kant.” The group had sampled a JFK speech and inserted it onto the electronic plick-plucking of something that sounded like a traditional Japanese shamisen. Another layer down was a reverberating electronic warble that threatened to dissolve his brain.
“BEFORE MIDNIGHT TONIGHT,” the president began. “WE WILL HAVE REACHED THE STARS.”
Oh. And there they were.
The starry skyline out above The Hills unfolded herself and made a skin to contain herself out of boundaries she easily could have transcended. She lifted a long elegant leg and transitioned into the size of Jason as he lay on the car’s hood.
“Hello, lover.”
He wrinkled his brow and went digging in his jacket for a blunt. This was a big change. Technically THC was synergistic with the chemical miracle occurring in his spinal column, but that defied the truth of the matter. The easing of the way, the smoothing of the sharp edges. A Man Called Rhode passed the smoking cigar paper to his avatar with a question; “Is that… what we are?” A note of critique. A tinge of resentment. He was down here doing the work and if and when they were going to fuck it’d be whenever she deigned to literally lower herself from the heavens.
The stars she’d stolen from the sky smiled smugly at him. It was a joke that he didn’t get, or a verbal trap he’d fallen for. Whichever, it was a frame of reference he hadn’t accessed yet, and, by her estimate, that made him small and adorable and mortal, and he knew that. Even as she inhaled a thick cloud of smoke she turned into a rumbling thunderhead above them. The valley below trembled and the first drops of rain streaked hot and sparkling through the night.
Story rolled off the hood of the car and to her ‘feet.’
“There’s someone you need to meet.” She insisted as she took a few steps back.
“Like, right now? I’m tripping assballs.” Story measured this counterargument judiciously. Either that or she waited for the rain to pick up in intensity, forcing Jason to huff his way off of the car hood and onto a pair of Chuck Taylor’s that were in desperate need of a mercy killing.
Nobody was more pliable than when the alternative was wet socks. Everything was a good idea when it was measured against the prospect of soggy toes in a freshly humid moment after a rainstorm. Likewise, it was a perfect watermark for liberation. Only the Enlightened could endure such a thing, or see a cause past it. Ergo, he was not tripping assballs. Or at least, not to the extent that she should have been thwarted.
“We should go for a drive.”
The door to the car opened and he was somewhen else. Through a spike of adrenaline he turned to look at the inside of the delivery van and then back toward the front of the ‘bank.’ When the Men in Black Suits came out of the front of the building, he reverted to a drill.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Tap.
Three to the center of mass and a headshot as a finale on the MiB’s cohort.
“Nice grouping, new guy.” Devon Dervish grabbed him by the scruff of his bullet proof vest and Gale piled in behind them. The van was moving before the doors were secured. A stack of hastily unbolted server drives sat in the middle of them, glimmering like a gold nugget.
The conveyor belt was moving, but he desperately tried to pump the brakes.
“We don’t win.” Jason tried to tell him, as if he just might have caught the whole scene at a point when a heartfelt apology might have saved his cabal.
“Nobody wins a war, Jason.” For a moment he thought it might have been Paul, but it was only the voice. The captive stars next to him weren’t his Story anymore, nor were they the great Legend himself. He found himself in a Prius, with a stranger, and that was new it wasn’t precisely something that hadn’t happened before.
“They did. A few hours later.” He contested as he watched the window wipers tap-tapping against their apogee and nadir.
“Not from their perspective.” Countered the entity. “Multiple dead agents, and they didn’t get all of you, they knew that much.” Jason didn’t bother emphasizing what a Pyrrhic victory saving him and losing both Paul Rhode and Devon Dervish in one night meant to the Cult, to the Traditions, and to New York. Anyone that knew that much must have known the thesis. “You stayed ahead of them again when they raided Melies. They never got Jessica.”
He’d never really considered it from that angle. Almost twenty years later, and he’d never really put himself in the leather Brooks Brothers of whomever had been calling the shots against them. “From their perspective, they crushed the two biggest, fattest, roaches in the nest, and spread their spawn all across the lower 48. Some are successful beyond your wildest dreams.” The entity hinted before continuing.
“The man that ran the operation against your father hasn’t handled anything bigger than a haunted house in the past fifteen years.” Jason shrugged faintly as he couldn’t bring himself to care all that much. If anything it felt good that he’d fucked one more MiB up. Albeit, unconventionally. His passenger was kind enough not to press him on that point, but did add; “He’s an alcoholic. Has to take Progenitor pills for his emphysema. On Tuesday he’ll shoot himself in the head.”
“Nobody wins a war, I guess.” He murmured, but even that concession wasn’t enough for the constellation. Now that he was this far, he could be lead further.
“The people that fight it don’t.”
He saw a few things fast. Terrified people stuffed into shipping containers, covered with filth and trampling on those who’d passed in transit. He saw the skinhead leader of a biker gang shoot a man for fun then laugh. He didn’t know what a Black Spiral Dancer was, but he saw, the image of their den matron pregnant again and swollen like a mole rat with the already-fighting malformed creatures she’d soon give birth to in a pool of toxic sludge in the Jersey pine barrens. He saw the thing Daan Mueller had called Jormungandr starved and tearing the flesh from it’s own tail, and he puked from regret and hopelessness and despair.
The stars-not-in-the-sky were Story again. He flopped back against the back of his seat and stared at her askance. Jason wasn’t sure if he was asking for an explanation, or mercy, or confirmation that everything he’d seen had just happened. She pointed past him, toward the house the car had come to a stop at, past it’s gate to the warm glow of the porch light. “You look like you could use a glass of water. And a towel.” He swallowed dryly, and didn’t look back. He could feel the warmth of the starlight fall of of him, and knew he’d have to take the next steps alone.
Sitting at the drafting table in her room at the Chantry, Luu spaces out staring at the stars. When she blinks, the stars are in different places, the constellations no longer arranged the way they were countless thousands of years ago. With the frequency this happens to her, one might think she might anticipate this change, might realize the stars she was staring at before were much younger than today’s stars. Maybe she should, but she doesn’t and besides, this time when she blinks it’s a little different.
Things are much brighter, the night sky tripartite, and it’s hard to tell exactly which three night skies are before her. Pasts? Presents? Futures? Those aren’t really questions she can answer yet, and besides, she has other questions to ask, and better answers to give. How many countless stars in the sky? How many countless stars in these skies?
In order to count, Luu begins to constellate. What was there to be seen before gives way to a sea of new Triangles. All the light from the stars make the waves, the beautiful blue of a nice sunny day in the Bermuda Triangle. As the Triangles begin to swirl to the tides of the lunar pull, Luu notices something she wouldn’t have seen without all this light.
Hideous sea serpents swim against the currents, trying to consume the new constellations and each other. It doesn’t seem like a good day at the beach for a young constellation, but that’s just because people underestimate the power of youth mode. As the serpents thrash, the Triangles begin an effortless synchronized swimming routine.
The stars dance effortlessly around the blackholes in a cosmic ballet. The Triangles move into each other, but they do not destroy each other, they transform each other. Arranging themselves into Platonic Solids, the Triangles shift into a higher dimension, something that the black holes can not even begin to comprehend. They clearly do not understand the difference between good attention and bad attention, and Luu has better things to do than validate their temper tantrums.
The Triangle is the building block for all geometry, and Luu paints them into ever higher dimensions. A seven dimensional hyperbolic Aphrodite is born from the foam of the Abyss. Her eyes remain dead, like captured black holes. Not a problem, easy fix, apple of my eye. Count to three. … 2 … 3.
Golden Apples fly forward, one landing right on her forehead. As the other two hit the black holes, the bites make a loud crunch. From one eye om’s Athena, and from the other eye mu’s Hera. The three Goddesses eye each other, and it looks like it’s about to get ugly over that apple, but that was one story, and this is another.
Clapping no hands three times, Luu reminds the Goddesses they’re here on her time, and they’ve got a job to do. Below the moon, the Goddesses begin to dress themselves in the fine new clothes that Luu has designed for them. As they begin to walk the runway, their third eyes open and begin to release different color butterflies, and the other designers become green over how stunningly Luu’s fashion recycles black holes into the new black. The thunderous applause of one hand clapping forms two lightning bolts.
This time, when Luu blinks, the catwalk is now the Chantry’s driveway, a car just pulling in with its headlights on. I guess that makes three.
The darkness welcomed her into its embrace. If one knew where to look, where to go in the city, finding silence was entirely possible, but where she was? There was nothing like that. Clinging to the back of a Metro Rail car, watching stations flash by at breakneck speeds, listening to the rattling of wheels, the echo of the brakes squealing and the polite announcements from the announcement informing the passengers that were there at that assigned hour what station they happened to be in. This was the last train of the evening and, while it was easier and perhaps a bit safer to ride inside the carriage, choosing a seat on the back gantry to watch the world recede away as the train zipped along the tracks gave a person a remarkably different view. After all, finding places where few feet had trod was hard in a city of millions, and even harder were places where eyes could see but feet could not go, and discovering how to get there? That was the trick. With an Avatar that was the embodiment of Humanity’s desire for exploration and discovery, it was a lot easier than one might think.
Doing this was a meditation for Jinny, to ride the rails with a bag of spray cans clattering at her side, taking note of spots that haven’t been touched or needed a bit more touching up, letting her city lead her where she needed to go. It always started the same; Jinny closed her eyes and rested her head against the train, reading runes written in rainbows in the darkness in ever changing scripts, trying to make sense of the interconnecting geometries that faded in and out of of the darkness, and using those geometries to direct her art. Listening to the murmurs of her Avatar as she promised discoveries to be found if she only would go around that next bend. That next curve. If she would only keep moving. This trance may last a second, a minute, or it may last a cycle of the subway, but when she comes back to herself, she often finds herself somewhere else, and not always in the material world.
Those spiritual journeys, brief as they often are, act as lightning-like catalysts for her paintings and sculptures. She would equate it to a muse dropping a taste of insight or inspiration that rippled into the real. A psychonaut might equate it to dropping Acid and seeing god in all their glory. A scholar might call it inspiration, so this would be a combination of all three. This is a lonely task, her explorations, due to the hours she needs to perform them. Late at night, in the dark, she almost never meets anyone on her journeys aside from the random spirit, so it’s a surprise that, when she opens her eyes after her latest trip, she finds herself on a bench in a sterile, white subway station. A subway station that she does not recognize as being a part of Los Angeles. She should know - she’s seen them all dozens of times over.
Jinny blinks and straightens, looking around, her gaze following the line of mannequins set up, as if they are waiting on a train, each dressed immaculately in garments she'd never seen before, or even conceived. She finally settles on the dark-skinned girl sitting on the bench opposite her, dressed in a simple pink dress. “You’ve taken a wrong turn to get here.” the girl says to Jinny, kicking her bare feet in time with the ticking of the clock mounted to the wall. “
“What? Jinny asks, standing, the little girl holding a fingertip to her lips, glancing over towards the tunnel to the east, the sound of the train starting to echo from the darkness.
She stands and dusts herself off, taking a step forward towards the tracks. “You should know by now, the journey of discovery will be much easier if you find companions. While going it alone is possible, with like minded friends, the discoveries will come that much faster. The sooner you find them, the better. After all, if it is Ascension you seek….” The rumbling of the approaching subway causes a hat to fall, causes a mannequin to topple. The girl is speaking louder now, a train’s headlights appearing in the darkness of the tunnel to the right. When did that get here?
She knows that tunnel. It's The Armageddon Tunnel. How in the world did she get here? Jinny frantically looks around in the yawning darkness surrounding her, the sterile white brightness replaced by blocks of dusty rock and suffocating darkness, the train screaming through the unfinished tunnel, thundering towards them both.
Somehow, the girl’s voice can be heard over it all and she steps around the toppling mannequins and into the gap between platforms, floating across to stand in front of Jinny, glowing with an internal light that is calming despite being the only source in this place. “You can’t do it alone, seeker.” She presses something into Jinny’s palm, imploring her. “Go home. She’s there. He’s coming. Others will come later, but for now, he is the next chapter.”
The train enters the tunnel, mannequins crushed, scattered like chaff in the wake, smashed to ribbons. Jinny finds herself entranced, the destruction hypnotic, the swirling shards causing her to flinch
“See you soon.” The girl says. And then she takes a step back and falls backwards into the oncoming train with a smile, her body vanishing in a puff of logic and mathematical fractals as the train flashes past in a roar, Jinny awakening as the one she’s riding slows in it to a stop in the yard.
Gripped tightly in her hand is a small, folded triangle of paper, like the ones traded in whispered secrets back and forth in class to share mysteries and gossip and magick and who liked who. As she turns it over, something imbedded in the paper glints. when she looks closer, writing is revealed in a shimmering silvery pencil that is slowly fading. Two simple words. ‘Aperta ‘Simul.’
Together Open.
She’s got to get home. She’s got to tell Luule This has to mean something.
The train yard she ended up in was thankfully near a club that was just letting out for the evening. The thunderstorm earlier had scared most of the club kids into staying home. A few were trying that latest batch of mushrooms discovered last month in an ancient Native burial ground and if you steep them with the right tea it’ll make your orgasms, like, amazing man, and you’ll be able to taste Purple and see sounds and understand the machinations of the universe to a degree that might make you go crazy if you try to grasp it. That’s not for Jinny, though. Her world is chaos and dreams and stories on the stage of reality already, the entire world swirling and bucking and bright with the infinite possibility of what may be. The streets she walked were alive and shimmering, the light trailing as she turned her head too quickly, her pulse pounding as her voice seemed too high as she sang along with a wordless song sung by the birds in the trees. She felt like she had taken something, but she hadn’t. She couldn’t have. This was something else entirely. A natural euphoria of some kind. She called out with her voice and a black car appeared, the conveyance drawn by a hundred horses whisking her off to her destination - a house a little more than a block from the Foreboding Jacobean. A distance easily walked.
“You should hurry.” The voice just behind her eyes told her as she arrived. “Half past the hour. He was led there and might be waiting. One step, then two, then three. Hurry, hurry. There’s exploring to be done.” Uncertain steps became more sure as the familiar became visible. A door, labeled Shoe Antechamber 4-B is pulled open and she finds herself standing outside of her room in the second floor of the Chantry, still dressed from her night's excursion. Her bag is left inside the door, along with half of a golden apple that she had picked up somewhere. The little paper triangle is tucked into her breast pocket while she moves through the house, seeking Luu, finding Luu, and carefully taking Luu's clean hand in her paint-spattered one.
