2020-09-25 We Will Have Reached The Stars
We Will Have Reached The Stars
Location: Winters Retreat
Date and Time: September 25, 2020
Summary: A new member joins the Chantry
Mood Music: Hugo Kant "Come With Me"
There are visions and then there are Visions, and this evening at Winters Retreat, things seem to be getting stranger than normal. Sitting at the drafting table in her upstairs bedroom, Luu's mind is momentarily abducted, returning in time to see a car pulling into the driveway. There's a moment of pure wonderous processing before the need to act becomes overwhelming, and somewhat uncoordinated. Rushing to move, Luu trips over her own feet, stumbling loudly a few steps, but just barely managing to remain upright.
Barefoot and wearing Uniqlo and Nike basics with Celine frames, hair dyed cornflower blue, Luu rushes out of her room. There's a quick glance down the hall to see if Jinny has also noticed the strange goings-on, but no time to wait for confirmation. If her Chantrymate hadn't been alerted by High Strangeness or driveway lights, then Luu's ungraceful stomping is likely to do the trick. Remembering to slow down just enough to not take a spill, Luu heads down the staircase towards the front door in anticipation of whatever visitor they're about to receive.
And you may find yourself, living in a shotgun shack And you may find yourself in another part of the world And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"
That's something that Jinny is certainly asking herself at this moment in time. Moving haphazardly through the city is a relatively common thing for her, but she usually has permanence of vision when it happens. Moving from the train to the station to the club to here in as many blinks was somewhat unnerving but there are reasons for everything, comfort be damned. There was a reason she needed to be here, now. There was a reason her Avatar was telling her to hurry so, somehow, she hurried without knowing how she hurried, appearing in her room without remembering how she got there. There's a pull from the front of the house, like a magnet slowly growing closer to a bit of iron; not enough to move it just yet, but certainly enough to feel the effects. A compass needle will move, but won't move towards....that's what this feels like. She laughs, covering her mouth, eyes wide, as she comes to her senses, kneeling in the middle of her room, still dressed from her evening's excursion. Rising to her feet, Jinny runs towards her door, yanking it open almost at the same time Luu's running past, bare feet thundering on the carpeted floor like a drum, summoning another to the dance as the pair hurry down the stairs in their eagerness to see what has arrived on their doorstep. While Luu doesn't take a spill? Jinny does, nearly tumbling down the last few steps and ending up on hands and knees, pushing herself up and walking now, to the front door, reaching down to take Luu's hand in her paint-spattered one before reaching to turn the knob, to swing it open to greet whatever it is that has come.
Maybe it's aliens.
Jason threw up in their bushes a few times to get his head straight. He then remembered to turn off the lights on his inoffensive light blue Prius. After booting one more time, he even turned it off and retrieved his keys. He stopped to look at the car while stumbling up toward the front door. Once upon a time he'd had a Porsche. You could do a drive-by in a Porsche. Not that it was the first choice for a violence-mobile, but you could. He added the realization of how tame and utterly leashed his mode of transportation was to the general confusion of his character he was experiencing. He knew a few things, now: he had made some perspective based mistakes in his past, he was supposed to be at this location, and he needed a new car.
The Cultist's scruffy old Chucks chewed up the distance to the front door before he banged on it using the meaty edge of his palm. Jason didn't bother to check for a knocker or a doorbell. Those were ostentations for a less urgent time. To his credit, he did -stop- banging after a moment, rocked back onto his heels and crammed his fingers into his tweed jacket pockets to await the door's warden. "Oh. Hi." The magus murmured while looking between the women, when, to his surprise, the door opened far quicker than he'd have imagined. The place was big, he thought the owner would have needed a second to arrive. "...Uh. I'm supposed to be here." He insisted, cryptically, while reaching up to wipe his lips and beard on his sleeve in case he looked as disheveled as he actually did.
Glancing back as she hears Jinny's stumble, Luu almost runs heads first into the still closed door, but manages to stop herself just in time. Taking Jinny's hand, Luu isn't quite sure what to expect on the otherside of the Chantry door, but she knows that together they'll be ready for whatever. While part of her recognizes that Jinny actually turned the knob and opened the door, the sensation she has is as if it opened on it's own, revealing the somewhat dissheveled Ecstatic. The slightly familiar stranger causes her to smirk slightly, looking to Jinny before back to Rhode.
"Apparently so," comes Luu response to the arrival of guest occurring for reasons beyond any of their present understanding. "Come in," she says with a gesture of her back into the Chantry, her tone friendly and beginning to relax into the new normal, whatever it might end up being. Taking a couple steps back and to the side, Luu makes way for the entrance of this evening's guest.
While the owner would have needed more than a second to arrive, spectral visions and headlights in an otherwise darkened driveway do get the attention of the residents of the house rather quickly. With Luu stepping right, Jinny steps left, allowing their guest unobstructed access to the quiet of the house, a glance out to make sure the car in the driveway is off and that the headlights are off (it is, and they are). "Yes." she says, looking to Luu. "We think you probably are. Supposed to be here, I mean." she adds almost as an afterthought, closing the door once he's through.
From a vent facing the front door, a cloth-covered shape watches with gleaming black eyes, impossible to see from where they stand but, right now, there's something more important to worry about. Jinny glances to Luu, her eyes widening for a second before she tilts her head towards the guy. The implication? What do we do /now?/
Jason waited half a moment with a sort of reverent pause before crossing the threshold, as if it represented a greater commitment or challenge than he was prepared to undertake unbraced. His fingers traced over the door on his way past. Apparently, the combination of his other senses wasn't enough to take the place in without tactile imput to lend that last little bit of credibility he needed to be sure this was really happening. Past the threshold, he paused to turn in place and take the blur of light, motion and new environment in. He stumble-stepped through his words as he tried to explain. "JFK was telling me I need to go to space, then my Avatar showed up and told me I need to get over my dad's death. Then someone I don't know showed me a bunch of irradiated werewolves fucking, and told me I needed to meet someone here."
The Cultist looked between the two of them, either hoping that they understood, or could explain what he'd just said to him. What Jinny said seemed to land home, so he nodded a few times. His higher processing landed a few times like a needle on a skipping record and finally he worked out; "This isn't just your home, is it? It's a Chantry."
Listening to Rhode's description of what brought him here this evening, Luu doesn't seem to question it for a minute. It's not what she experienced, but it might as well have been. "Yeah I had been kinda spacing out looking at the stars," Luu begins to respond, "and then they did something weird, but not the weird thing they usually do. No this was more like -- " There's a pause as Luu thinks how to explain, and finally offers, " -- well there were lots of stars, but they were in the sea, but it wasn't the sea, but there were like sea monsters and then I was dealing with the Prejudice of Paris Fashion Week, and -- yeah, maybe I should just say JFK and irradiated werewolved fucking." A beat before she adds, "Sorry about your pops."
Looking to Jinny, Luu gives her look as if to say 'I don't know what we do now, but we still gotta do it.' Then a nod is given to Rhode, as Luu says, "It was my home, and then sort of some Visions made it into Chantry, but we're only just getting there." Another glance is given to Jinny, before Luu gives Jason a sheepish look as she admits, "This is still kinda new to us as well, but it's like totally the kinda new we couldn't ignore." Looking the new arrival over, Luu says, "You look like you could use some water, or maybe some wine, or maybe both." That said, Luu does a quick barefoot spin and begins to walk towards the kitchen, calling back, "Well, welcome to Wayak'il Ts'onot náak'Chi'ha."
"Yes..." Jinny says, nodding. "It is a Chantry. A little one, sure, but it's ours and...well..." Another glance to Luu. "Apparently whatever hand of fate pushed Luu and I together has decided that we need at least one more to join the fun and merriment." She steps back as he steps in, the light from the lamp in the main hall bathing them all in cool white light, the place cozy and welcoming to Rhode, even if he had never set foot in here before today. "We all had a vision. Our own little parts of it ended up pulling other parts in. I was wondering what that big pile of furry moaning was, and why JFK was bouncing around in my head like the chorus of some 90's techno banger but, now I see...or at least have a better idea of what's going on."
That's not to say that they have a really good idea of what to do at this point. They're welcoming, certainly, but there's no pomp and circumstance, no music or flowing speeches, and no feast of welcome. "We've got some crackers and fruit if you're hungry." Jinny offers, walking backwards into the living room after Luu, keeping an eye on Rhode as she goes before turning on her foot and walking a bit further afield. "And welcome. We hope you stay a while."
"It's okay, it was a long time ago." He insisted to Luu, raising his voice to follow her into the kitchen. "...'Crats got him outside the Village. I think the point she was trying to make was, like..." He rubbed his head. "I don't know. It wasn't that I should have kept fighting. More like..." He looked around the kitchen after he'd found his feet following in that direction, if for no reason other than not to be yelling irreverently in this new sacred space. "...The War didn't end that day, even if it did for me." He'd been laying low ever since. For far too long and too thoroughly, given how long he'd been without a Chantry or Cabal. "Also maybe that we shouldn't have been fighting the Crats? Or... not the way we were?"
He scowled when he said that out loud. Of course they were supposed to be fighting the 'Crats, and if anything was wrong with the way that they were doing it, of course it was that they hadn't taken more of them down when his entire social network collapsed. "It was confusing." He admitted flatly. "The next thing is here, though. She's not usually so specific about shit like that."
Indeed, what came next? "Wine would be awesome." That was a good place to start. "Not sure if I'm ready for solid food yet. Gotta give that a minute." He explained to Jinny while he shrugged out of his damp jacket and slung it over the back of the nearest chair as if in response to her invitation to stay.
Making her way back from the kitchen, Luu carries two-thirds of a bottle of red wine along with two wine glasses. "For Jinny and I," Luu begins to explain as she makes her way over to a seat, "we've only really known The Traditions under The New Horizon Council. Everything else, we've had to learn through others." Taking a seat, she begins to pour the wine, as she continues to say, "Which maybe like makes us young and naive, but it's also made us like totally students of history. It seemed to us that this cycle kept repeating, a new tyranny forming in response to the old tyranny. Perhaps that's just the way that it goes, in which case this is just a vicious cycle of hubris and we're fighting for survival."
Handing a wine glass to Rhode, Luu lifts her own as if to acknowledge a toast before she takes a sip. "Now maybe for some that's the best they can hope for," she continues to explain of the situation, without explaining why Jinny is not being offered a wine glass of her own. "I don't think that's a good attitude," she notes, as if knowing that will fix it, before continuing, "I think it also misses how close the whole thing came to an end. I don't mean the end of the twentieth century, though surely that was fucked. I mean the middle of the twentieth century. That strain of Nephandic corruption? That doesn't just get to that point. The more we looked for that corruption, the more hidden it seemed, and the more we came to the conclusion that it was that rot that was the biggest issue we faced."
Jinny seems okay without a wine glass, sitting down in one of the seats next to Luu, tucking her bare feet beneath her as she sits, her arms outstretched on the arms, listening to Luu explain the story of why and the concept of Wayak'il Ts'onot náak'Chi'ha. "To put it into simpler terms, it's like two gangs fighting with each other. One gang kills someone from the other gang, so they need to get revenge. And then that act needs to be avenged, and so on, and so on, until the entire universe is caught up in a maelstrom of destruction. What Luu and I are trying....what Wayak'il Ts'onot náak'Chi'ha is based on, is the middle path."
"I was a little too late for most of it myself. I awoke in 2002, buy by then Balador was a memory and Doissotep was lost. It felt like the end. The ones of us that were still around, still on this side of the Storm, they were all out for revenge. Everybody'd lost someone at that point." He tried to explain an elusive, far off zeitgeist to the two who'd never met it. It took him a moment of looking at his wine glass, with thoughts of those times in his head to discern if he had anything to toast about. It seemed with great intentional effort, he was able to raise it in salute with Luu, if of nothing other than the hope that what he was signing on for (indeed, he already had,) wasn't naive optimism.
"So we're going to try something different." He followed Jinny's words with a few shallow nods. "I'm guessing not by walking into City Hall to offer the Blackhats the peace pipe?" He didn't question her assertion that they were destroying each other, even if he did seem to be trying to get a better idea of what this middle path looked like in action. He had his own piled bodies, friends and foes both, to attest to that.
As Rhode describes his early experiences, Luu listens respectfully, certain of the realness of the tragic events he described. "I don't think they'd accept it," Luu notes softly, "at least not in their present state, but we can't think that to be their eternal state. The Traditions have come around Technomancy, but I don't know if it's the whole lesson to take from the Union. They're successful not because of their technology or their surveillance, but because they were of us to the Sleepers. It's something The Traditions seemed to have forgotten, but it's also something the Union seems to have forgotten as well, and that gives us a small window to work with. There's possibilities there, but if we fail, it's not going to be the Union that succeeds. No, that'll just be the ash pile of history, and one I don't see a Phoenix rising from."
Sipping her wine, Luu takes a moment of thoughtful reflection, considering the immensity of the task before them. "When The Traditions first came together," Luu begins to explain, "they didn't have a lot in common. There are still great differences, but there are also commonalities. I think these are things The New Horizon Council seeks for us to rediscover in their encouraging of multi-Tradition Chantries, even if they don't know exactly what it is they expect us to rediscover. The simple idea, though, of recognizing the Divine within each other and seeking to act not as rulers, but as shepherds for the Sleepers?" A small shrug is given as she notes, "If there's a place to start, that seems like it."
"A first step. And in time, they'll take another. We'll not force them, or drag them, but simply show what is possible. What could be. What might be. What ascension might mean to them, their community, their city...." Jinny squeezes the armrests of her chair. "And no....while walking into city hall would be an option, I think we all know exactly how well that'd end up for us. We'd be too much of a treat to resist and, once assimilated or whatever they call it when the Technos do horrible things to people, our chapter would be at an end. So, yes. Something different. A path between conflict and capitulation. A narrow, treacherous path but, one that, if walked carefully, could lead to a much brighter Los Angeles."
"We went to war with the Akashics." Jason rummaged in his memory for his Mage-history. "...My people did, the group that would eventually split and form the Cult and the Order of Reason. Ethics versus Nichomachean Ethics. Basically the first thing that happened in Traditions history. Hell, in all of Magical history." He considered for a second before shifting his eyes to Jinny; "Kind of what you were talking about, right? Around and around in circles forever?"
He felt something _itch_ inside him, and looked positively sick for a moment.
He mistook it for the sickness he was shaking off, and didn't accept it as the philosophical revelation it was.
For the shortest moment Jason wasn't alone in his chair, and his counterpart was writhing under his skin as she grasped for a fresh narrative.
Rhode took a gulp of wine to even himself out and forced a swallow while calculating. "We stay careful, stay quiet, stay prudent, and fight the rot, not the fun-police?" He asked in-a-nutshell while glancing between the two of them.
"There are cycles," Luu notes of the course of history, "but there's also circling the drain. This is looking a lot like the latter to me. Which is horrific, but in a way it's the realization one needs to do something about it. In seeing the truth of this struggle, we also see our only way out of it, though it won't be easy." Quite the understatement, and the big gulp of wine Luu takes after making it seems to indicate she realizes this, but no one ever said it was going to be easy. "The way we figure it," Luu begins to say, "that coming right out and saying all of this? That puts a target on our back, more than there already is. So yeah, careful, quiet, and prudent. I'm not saying the Technocratic Union is not a problem, just that it's the mask that the real enemy is wearing right now. These Visions we've been given are a precious git, a seed we need to nurture here in Los Angeles, and with a little bit of hope and imagination, we might actually have a shot at a future." Jinny has reconnected.
"Breaking the ouroboros so it can move past the cycle its trapped in, so it can explore where it needs to explore, may not be possible. That's something both Luu and I have accepted. The thing is..." Jinny glances to Luu for a moment, reaching over to rest her hand atop the other woman's - the hand not holding the wine glass. "If we know the goal is improbable and learn what makes it so, then we are ready to overcome it. Our avatars, and our minds can do anything we put them towards, and our minds wouldn't put forward something completely impossible. So the only thing holding us back is...well...us. It's our turn on the stage. We've been called out to perform, and the entire first and second acts stretch out in front of us. We've just got to tell the story as we live it..." she blinks. "I just babbled there, didn't I?"
"I've been living like this a while. Trying to avoid the Union, trying to wake folks up or help them on their way when I can." His Youtube videos, his TED talks, his books and pilgrimages to the wild places. "I met Jeremiah Paendrag outside of New Orleans once. Asked him what I should do now that dad and everyone were gone. He told me that Ascension was a selfish process. To focus inward." He recounted. "...I thought that was the dumbest thing I ever heard a wise man say." He admitted. "I always thought that we should focus on bringing everyone with us when we go. Build a great society like the Etherites tried. Or like... the Summer of '69 that lasts forever." He struggled to wrap his head around what his own vision of victory would look like.
Jason shook his head emphatically 'no' to Jinny. "I grok it. I feel it. Something new's got to happen, or we hit the drain."
A pause.
"Okay, I'm in." He drained his glass in a gulp. "Which one's my room?" He asked as his beard split into a wide smile.
