Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
Yeah neither do I, Please explain it this to us non american people.
The Lost Files (C:TL/Dresden Files) (CK2-ish)
- Thread starter The Laurent
- Start date
- Pronouns
- They/Them
It'll also kill the joke and then resurrect it and then bring it back to death like we're Doctor Frankenstein, but here we go.
Now to note, this seems ironic if you're post-2008, but this was in 1998, and to be frank, nobody could have believed that Obama or even *a* black person would be president for a generation. But here's an excerpt of an article by Toni Morrison (the female african-american writer):
"African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us."
In this schema, Bill Clinton isn't "black" necessarily because he plays saxophone, it's that he comes from a powerless background, and that there was thus a certain affinity between how far he'd come and yet here he was, the Republicans attempting to dig up anything and everything they could to destroy him, and the way, in her view, even successful African-Americans faced immense pressure. It's thus creating an affinity not so much on 'he acts like a stereotype' than 'He comes from a poor background' as it were, almost.
And this affinity does sort of exist, and no doubt Clinton's a better fit for it than saying, I dunno, Reagan who thinly veiled racist carictures to get into office, but post-Obama it looks a little weird to our eyes, because of the way history has turned.
You can actually see the same thing with gay rights. Like, tell ANYONE from 2000 or the 90s that gay marriage will be around and you WILL, in America, watch them blow you off.
Even activists.
Hell, speaking on that topic, let me inform you that in many states, sodomy is still a crime and will be for THREE MORE YEARS (2003, Lawrence v. Texas).
Like, I know this is going to feel like cold-water when I'm trying to explain a joke, but legally, in Missouri, if Jason Smiles dates another man, he's a criminal. Criminal scum to be arrested and locked in jail and possibly roughed up by the cops.
...I'm admitting, setting this in 2000 is actually a pretty good way of making things darker, cause holy shit.
Either way, King Stoneguts' own point relies on a sort of gentle mockery of that argument above, combined with at least a different understanding of the structure of such things, combined with at least enough fondness (or whatever his equivalent is) that he can be relieved that the world hasn't so changed.
Wait until he sees the next President.
*******
Yeah, I know the gay thing wasn't directly relevant, but considering at least one member of your prophet circle is gay, and that if he had sex with another consenting boy of his age he'd literally, by the laws as they stand now, be as criminal as some carjacker.
...the past is a foreign country, sometime.
Also, it wasn't illegal in Kansas City because of a 1999 decision (because law is weird sometime) and the laws were also especially anti-gay because unlike some laws, they explicitly made it about gay sex rather than some sort of 'it's about non-procreative sex' dodge.
Being honest, those who have read Jim Butcher's works, that might help explain a lot of the slightly uncomfortable sexual politics of some of his stuff (the gay stereotypes, the painful lecture in Cold Days, etc.)
He spent most of his life growing up in a state where being gay was illegal (in 1999, the part of the state he was in had it decriminalized...by court, which means it's quite likely that voters would have voted to keep it in place.)
*****
Final clarification. I'm FROM Missouri. I live within, what, dozens of miles of Jim Butcher.
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Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
Whow. That makes sense and i learned a new thing about USA.It'll also kill the joke and then resurrect it and then bring it back to death like we're Doctor Frankenstein, but here we go.
Now to note, this seems ironic if you're post-2008, but this was in 1998, and to be frank, nobody could have believed that Obama or even *a* black person would be president for a generation. But here's an excerpt of an article by Toni Morrison (the female african-american writer):
"African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us."
In this schema, Bill Clinton isn't "black" necessarily because he plays saxophone, it's that he comes from a powerless background, and that there was thus a certain affinity between how far he'd come and yet here he was, the Republicans attempting to dig up anything and everything they could to destroy him, and the way, in her view, even successful African-Americans faced immense pressure. It's thus creating an affinity not so much on 'he acts like a stereotype' than 'He comes from a poor background' as it were, almost.
And this affinity does sort of exist, and no doubt Clinton's a better fit for it than saying, I dunno, Reagan who thinly veiled racist carictures to get into office, but post-Obama it looks a little weird to our eyes, because of the way history has turned.
You can actually see the same thing with gay rights. Like, tell ANYONE from 2000 or the 90s that gay marriage will be around and you WILL, in America, watch them blow you off.
Even activists.
Hell, speaking on that topic, let me inform you that in many states, sodomy is still a crime and will be for THREE MORE YEARS (2003, Lawrence v. Texas).
Like, I know this is going to feel like cold-water when I'm trying to explain a joke, but legally, in Missouri, if Jason Smiles dates another man, he's a criminal. Criminal scum to be arrested and locked in jail and possibly roughed up by the cops.
...I'm admitting, setting this in 2000 is actually a pretty good way of making things darker, cause holy shit.
Either way, King Stoneguts' own point relies on a sort of gentle mockery of that argument above, combined with at least a different understanding of the structure of such things, combined with at least enough fondness (or whatever his equivalent is) that he can be relieved that the world hasn't so changed.
Wait until he sees the next President.
*******
Yeah, I know the gay thing wasn't directly relevant, but considering at least one member of your prophet circle is gay, and that if he had sex with another consenting boy of his age he'd literally, by the laws as they stand now, be as criminal as some carjacker.
...the past is a foreign country, sometime.
Also, it wasn't illegal in Kansas City because of a 1999 decision (because law is weird sometime) and the laws were also especially anti-gay because unlike some laws, they explicitly made it about gay sex rather than some sort of 'it's about non-procreative sex' dodge.
Being honest, those who have read Jim Butcher's works, that might help explain a lot of the slightly uncomfortable sexual politics of some of his stuff (the gay stereotypes, the painful lecture in Cold Days, etc.)
He spent most of his life growing up in a state where being gay was illegal (in 1999, the part of the state he was in had it decriminalized...by court, which means it's quite likely that voters would have voted to keep it in place.)
*****
Final clarification. I'm FROM Missouri. I live within, what, dozens of miles of Jim Butcher.
Still despite it being rather dark I liked it.
Espacially when I thought unbidden and unironically "wow black humor."
Then realised the pun. Damn it brain.
hmm, with that kind of evidence, my first fear until my allies reported similar issues would be memory modification.
also, given the criteria we know so far about being shifted over, then any changeling with cross-species supernatural contacts probably dragged a bunch of them over in the reality hop. I suspect The Laurent will be excluding them, but if not then things get a fuckton more complicated
also, given the criteria we know so far about being shifted over, then any changeling with cross-species supernatural contacts probably dragged a bunch of them over in the reality hop. I suspect The Laurent will be excluding them, but if not then things get a fuckton more complicated
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Vote closes tomorrow afternoon/evening.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Alright, five or so more hours until the vote closes!
Arkatekt
Harbinger of Shitluck
Current Tally
Vote Tally : The Lost Files (C:TL/Dresden Files) (CK2-ish) | Page 20 | Sufficient Velocity
##### NetTally 1.5.11
[X] Check on her Prophet Circle.
No. of Votes: 17
[X] Search into the potential changes related to the hypothesized reality warp, including to current events, city politics, history or other areas.
No. of Votes: 3
Total No. of Voters: 20
Vote Tally : The Lost Files (C:TL/Dresden Files) (CK2-ish) | Page 20 | Sufficient Velocity
##### NetTally 1.5.11
[X] Check on her Prophet Circle.
No. of Votes: 17
[X] Search into the potential changes related to the hypothesized reality warp, including to current events, city politics, history or other areas.
No. of Votes: 3
Total No. of Voters: 20
It's one of her titles.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Vote is now closed! Too bad I didn't reach the 21 I got before! Ah well.
Update is on Monday.
The next update won't have a vote, but Turn 1 will be out by Wednesday, I swear.
Now to work on XP for End of an Era and then get started on 'A Dream of Translation'.
Art, Science, Dream.
(The other options were 'A History of Translation', 'The Politics of Translation' and 'The Magic of Translation.')
Edit: Also, just finished my reread of Grave Peril for this Quest. Next is Summer Knight.
Edit2: Updated the front page.
Update is on Monday.
The next update won't have a vote, but Turn 1 will be out by Wednesday, I swear.
Now to work on XP for End of an Era and then get started on 'A Dream of Translation'.
Art, Science, Dream.
(The other options were 'A History of Translation', 'The Politics of Translation' and 'The Magic of Translation.')
Edit: Also, just finished my reread of Grave Peril for this Quest. Next is Summer Knight.
Edit2: Updated the front page.
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- Location
- Dreiländereck
Obligatory.
Now a few scattershot thoughts on the update. I wanted to do that earlier already but... uh, look at my ramblings.
Does that mean that Cora has a casual Batmobil?
Ok I am pretty sure that the street signs would be seen by a perceptive human but all together it is nice to see these investigative skills in action.
Also according to the dice Cora was missing quite a few things. Now I am curious what.
Nice to see her being self-critical and questioning herself, I guess it would be easy for her or others to think Cora being 'infallible'.
Now I want to see that logo, and yeah, I guess both worlds are only superficially similiar.
Sorry Jonathan, we didn't choose the Tale Lore attainment, but look we are a cool, creepy necromancer instead.
And again investgation, methodically testing her hypothesis. I like that aspect of Cora already.
Ok, here is the superhuman composure, nice. I think other people might be a little bit more stressed at such possibilities.
Here I began to laugh. I think I will repeat myself a few times but the ghost familiars are great.
I ask myself, if Cora can pose as some kind of ectomancer among Dresdenverse supernaturals if it suits her or if they could instantly call the bluff?
Ok I think nobody can really hide something from you Cora. But Jonathan is keeping it together really well, and if anything he just disappeared in front of his friend in the WoD. So uh, I know we will most likely(definetly) never know the answer to this (at least not now) but what just happend to the WoD?
Self justifications, I think that is a nice touch of humanity for Cora.
Again I need to give Jonathan probs for keeping it together and being constructive under such circumstances. Especially if he sees the likely phonebook changes among his other friends.
No matter if storm, highwater or dimensional shift you will go to school young man, are we clear?
Batcave intensifies.
Never underestimate the janitor, also I must say that again I like Cora's analytical approach to the situation.
"Mooom, stop emabarassing me."
Ok, that is heartwarming no way around that. I guess there are a few neurological and psychological ramifications for never having nightmares and eternal easy sleep, but I can't think of any at the moment. Also, really sweet.
Warehouse mirror meet Chancellor Cora, Cora meet mirror. I like the description of process of the contract and I guess that by the rite ups alone, the Mirror contracts are among my favourites.
Cora meet ectomancer(?), ectomancer miss Cora by a few minutes as we later learn.
Great minds think alike. Now I ask myself what kind of interactions did Jacques, as a ghost with a long and storied history, have with sin-eaters and geists in the past.
Also I like the glimpses we get of Cora's occult knowledge and analysis in the following few paragraphs.
This is the patient virtue in action I think, no hasty decision with possible drawbacks if not all other resources have been exhausted yet. Or just experience.
Somehow this gave me flashbacks to 96 Hours.
I don't know who you are.
I don't know what you want.
If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money.
But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career.
Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.
If you let my daughter (son in Cora's case) go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
And Cora makes Sherlock Holmes proud, and Batman.
Also our Autumn Queen could very well be a horror movie monster. It was even the perfect set up.
Wizard lady, Lilly, convinces her friend the nightguard to allow her to use the warehouse he works in to summon the ghosts of the angry dead to lay them to rest. Maybe she felt a disturbance beforehand or she observed a cumulation of ghost related "accidents".
It is deepest night, her friend the nightguard forgets to lock the door when he makes his round and our wizard slips in, performs her ritual.
After some time some ghosts appear even, but she doesn't get the answers she wanted. The restless dead either can't or wont give her the information she needs. So the sorceress nonetheless performs the rite of sin-eating to allow these ghosts at long last to rest. Dismayed Lilly packs her things before the nightguard returns and leaves.
But she isn't alone, or shortly after she leaves we see the arrival of a presence. Cold wind begins to blow and scattered leaves dance in the air. The lights flicker and dim and from one moment to the next a woman stands in the courtyard. The shadows seem to hug her, her face is always in the dark and there is something wrong with her hands and the way she moves... and her everything. The shadowwoman slips into the warehouse accompanied by two ghosts, an unnervingly cheerful child and a bloodsoaked man. The woman goes straight to the mirror, talks to it, demands to see what happened, and the mirror obeys. She finds the rests of the ritual ingredients our heroine the sorceress left behind.
But then she is disturbed by a sound, the nightguard has returned and calls for his friend.
The woman slips through the closed door and hides in the shadows.
The nightguard feels that something isn't right, he feels a chill that cuts to the very bones, the light of his flshlight is dimmer than before, flickers even. Then from one moment to the next the shadowwoman stands before him, we get a second to see her face. It is as pale as a corpse with dead, blue lips and black, unblinking eyes. He doesn't even have time to scream.
Sorry for that. So lets finish this.
I will say it again, Jacques and Jeanne are great.
Our first look at Mayor Booster, he seems to have a high presence, judging by his voice. And yeah, a third of his contacts disappeared, all in all two thirds of his mortal network unraveled. That must hurt.
Fortunately there didn't seem to be any animosity, he knows Cora's strengths, trusts her judgement. Maybe they don't get each other but they see eye to eye and that as all we need for the moment.
Our first look at Maggie, maybe not the same presence as Mayor Booster, but essentially the same as by him except a few little notes.
I had the impression that Cora and Maggie don't see eye to eye the same way as with Mayor Booster. The two seem to have their differences in how they go about the defense of the Freehold. But they have a functioning work place relationship nontheless.
Also the sentence with the PhD, I must shamefully admit that I have underestimated Maggie. She seems to be something like the changeling equivalent of one Klitschkos then. Worldclass boxer and a PhD in sportmedicine.
Our first ingame look at King Stoneguts, I like him.
So of course Cora's closest ally among the seasonal monarchs gets the information of what happened first.
Also the two of them work like a well oiled machine. Also I don't know, there is something about their dialogue, the formality of it I guess, is that a result of the high composure of both Cora and Stoneguts or of his politeness virtue?
It is also nice to know that Jonathan and Stoneguts seem to like each other. Is Stoneguts something of a father figure for Jonathan?
So uh, here are my thoughts while reading this so. I hope it is readable and not too much rambling.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
And take a second bonus point! @Wellhello
Also, updated the front-page with a few numbers. I'm still trying to think of psuedo-mechanics that won't be used except to generally represent the capacities of the Freehold.
'Token Level' is my vague attempt to answer, 'What's the highest level of Token the Freehold could get on quick notice.' Like, 'Quick, we need a Token to do X, scramble the bat signals!' what could they get. By this metric, there's no freehold in the world that could have a Token Level of 5, because each five-dot Token takes time and effort to find, let alone, say, Token Level 5'
5' is stuff like Asha's sword, and other legendary Tokens that still cost 5 but can mostly only be gotten via the power of plot. Like, in theory if one loses a five-dot Token there might be tokens that have a similar sort of power, though none, of course, exactly the same.
A 5' dot token is 'Whelp, you've lost it, you're fucked.' There's no sword in the world like the Ashwood Blade.
Edit: Example of another 5' dot Token. The Cauldron of rebirth. Put the corpse of anyone who died in the last 72 hours (I mean, they have to leave a corpse, of course) and they are brought back to life.
The drawback is that the user will always be able to smell and see the decay of the corpse on the body of the living, so they take a -2 penalty to all social interactions with them...but you're literally being fucking Voodoo Cauldron Jesus. So, yeah. I mean, there are a bunch of dangerous sorts hunting down the Cauldron and ready to kill you for it...but surely it's worth it!
Also, updated the front-page with a few numbers. I'm still trying to think of psuedo-mechanics that won't be used except to generally represent the capacities of the Freehold.
'Token Level' is my vague attempt to answer, 'What's the highest level of Token the Freehold could get on quick notice.' Like, 'Quick, we need a Token to do X, scramble the bat signals!' what could they get. By this metric, there's no freehold in the world that could have a Token Level of 5, because each five-dot Token takes time and effort to find, let alone, say, Token Level 5'
5' is stuff like Asha's sword, and other legendary Tokens that still cost 5 but can mostly only be gotten via the power of plot. Like, in theory if one loses a five-dot Token there might be tokens that have a similar sort of power, though none, of course, exactly the same.
A 5' dot token is 'Whelp, you've lost it, you're fucked.' There's no sword in the world like the Ashwood Blade.
Edit: Example of another 5' dot Token. The Cauldron of rebirth. Put the corpse of anyone who died in the last 72 hours (I mean, they have to leave a corpse, of course) and they are brought back to life.
The drawback is that the user will always be able to smell and see the decay of the corpse on the body of the living, so they take a -2 penalty to all social interactions with them...but you're literally being fucking Voodoo Cauldron Jesus. So, yeah. I mean, there are a bunch of dangerous sorts hunting down the Cauldron and ready to kill you for it...but surely it's worth it!
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Ardion Prosili
An (im)Perfect Cell
You know what you must do
Bother him until he joins your tabletop group!
You can play fun games like Murder the Wizards' Loved Ones Because You Can't Kill Him (AKA DnD 3.x edition), Everything is Trying To Kill You and Don't Rest Your Head
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
You know what you must do
Bother him until he joins your tabletop group!
Pft. Engage him in a Pokemon Battle. We know he plays. Or used to, at least.
Ardion Prosili
An (im)Perfect Cell
YOU FOOL! Summoning those demons will attract YHVH's Heavenly Host! There'll be a demon vs angel war, a battle of Law vs Chaos over the fate of millions of souls!
We can't go there, that's SMT country
Hedgespun cars should be available if desired.
Special features would be trickier.
I could also see say....a Token car key, which when used on any car, gives it some special modes.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Of course, you chose not to have major Tokens or do any Hedgespinning yourself, which also means Cora lacks a lot of the contacts that would trivially get her stuff like that.
I say trivially in the 'I need this in five hours.' Sure, with time, she could probably get any one individual thing she needed, but hey.
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
I forgot to ask;
Will we able to buy in things like tokens and hedgespinning skills later with XP? Or is that it for this character?
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
Well, I'm probably not going to be doing XP in a 'tallying it up' sense, but at the end of some periods I might give choices. Like, after the first month of being in charge, to vote for things like.
[] Raise X Skill to Y.
[] Gain 3-4 new Contracts.
[] Buy More Tokens, etc, etc
And other things that are relevant to what's going on. Like raising Politics after a whole month of doing complex politics, or a season where it became clear that the character's level of politics wasn't good enough.
But I'm not going to have there be down-in-the-weeds, nitty gritty XP by XP buying.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Plus in individual segments you'll be left controlling people who aren't them.
Prologue/Turn 0--The Dream of Translation
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Prologue/Turn 0--The Dream of Translation
This is how the world works. They tell her the truth and she lies to them. Oh, what kind of lies? All kinds. She smiled that slight smile that seems to unnerve people and made sure that ultimately they don't know the true depths of her power, nor their own. She pulled strings and levers for them, saved their lives while they stood in front of her unaware, and asked for their help even when she didn't need to, because the lie that she wanted to tell them, it's the same lie they wanted to believe: that they are valuable, that their lives are struggling towards some larger meaning, that there is, at the end of the rainbow, a pot of gold, a meaningful life. A plan.
Cora considered that planning the future was a fools' game. Many people shared this view, but there were others who would have disagreed with her. But she had the advantage of being able to dream of the past and the future, to see into it and even decide it using magic, and to have possessed for years an entire circle of people devoted to just such a task. So it was a reasoned, intelligent, correct conclusion when she said that planning the future didn't work and that at most all of this was less a guarentee and more of an edge.
But as King Stoneguts had told her, almost jovially, "When you're laying on the ground in a pool of your own blood and vomit, and some rude person above you has a baseball bat, then even the edge of a razor starts to look good."
King Stoneguts took advantage where he could, it was what made him so impressive to watch at work. He stooped to conquer.
They thought they were either the center of everything that Cora Graves, spooky Autumn Queen of Changelings did, or that they were so inconsequential, her power so vast, that they mattered little, and might as well get what advantage they could get out of following her.
None of them knew, not fully, that she pitied many of them, liked some of them, sometimes even humored them. It wasn't something she could show. At least, she had to choose what to show, choose how they viewed her. Keep her nature hidden in the half shadows, where she worked best.
They were not Jonathan, they were not even Jeanne and Jacques. They certainly weren't Stoneguts.
They were hers.
*****
Jason "Smiles" opened on the first knock. Cora looked him over, took him in with a few careful, easy sweeps of her eyes. Jason didn't speak, as if afraid he'd interrupt her, until she said, "I was going to check if you were doing well. Something has happened."
The apartment was hers, and she paid his rent. The young man was almost eighteen, and thus by all accounts was in no way emancipated and could be taken up by the cops, but she had the matter well in hand. He wasn't handsome, not really. He had bad acne and more than that the look of someone who had grown up rather faster than they planned on, and the scars around his mouth might have unnerved those who didn't know the world. People who weren't Cora.
He was terrified of her, a fact that amused her considering that so far, other than her form and a half-dozen meetings, he had not seen what she could truly do. "I had dreams," he said, "T-the type of dreams you usually watch."
She watched him, carefully waiting for him to continue. The boy sometimes expected her to prompt him, to provide him questions and answers, and on any other day they might have stood there for a dozen seconds longer before he worked his nerve up, but she'd had a brief moment to glance at the room beyond. Magazines of dubious content, a television she'd bought him, a couch. Everything as it should be.
And then there was the fact that the entire apartment was soaked with fear, fear so strong it stopped being glamour and started being an Abstraction itself. And mixed in were bad dreams, and likely other abstractions she'd have to take a closer look to see.
What mattered is that she'd seen people scared to death whose immediate vicinity wasn't so soaked with fear.
He must be terrified, holding it all in, she thought, and stepped forward, "It's okay, you can tell me, whatever it is."
"There was a woman. Brownish skin, beautiful, and then there was a scrawny young man, older than me," he began, and then he said, "And they looked at me and I felt, I dunno, I was…"
His shoulders were shaking, and Cora moved forward, placed a hand on his shoulder to steady him.
"I was angry, but I was aroused, and neither of those made sense. And I saw...last night, someone died, but it was someone that didn't die," he said, "Someone that hadn't died. Someone that didn't exist."
Cora didn't want to tell him about the translation hypothesis, and she knew that her own dreams might have been just as confusing if she had been in the grip of a prophetic dream. To suddenly have every single prophecy ripped from your grasp and changed, every single vision of the future--
All of those people in the Freehold whose future she had read, to make sure that there were no large problems coming down the pike, that she could alter events, steer the world, they were no doubt now cast free and loose, disaster looming over them.
It made her want to go now and start looking.
She hated not knowing, she hated being helpless.
She liked having power, she loved her magic, she loved what it allowed her to do. And in front of her was a scared teenager, who could have been her own son, on the verge of a breakdown.
But that was what magic was for. A part of her was hungry. She'd spent glamour, and she could regain it by just soaking in that terror. The richest kind. But Jason was hers, and she held his shoulder tighter and said, "There is no reason to be afraid, Jason. I am here, and I am figuring this out. There was likely some sort of dimensional transportation going on, I suspect," she said, knowing that it was the glamour that was really helping, that her words weren't truly that reassuring, "And so there may be problems, but I am still here, and so are you. That means we are winning."
He nodded, looking a little uncertain, but the fear was no longer all but dripping from his pores, and he said, "The others, have you checked on them?"
"I'm going to. What I need you to do is write down some of what you saw. I know that working out the details is hard, so just write everything, every single detail, and soon. You have probably forgotten some of it, but that doesn't matter. After that, try to get some rest. Call me if another dream comes," Cora said, a little briskly.
She'd helped him, but there were six other people to help, and information to process.
Jason "Smiles", Mind Reader and gay outcast.
******
"I had a dream about a man, he was standing right like that," Mrs. Adams said. The woman looking tired, though her kitchen had little fear in it. Mrs. Adams always changed her mind each time about how to treat Cora, at least in part because, as with Jason, her powers didn't work well on the monarch. So sometimes she was too friendly, and sometimes distant and polite.
This time she was matter-of-fact, closing her eyes as she said, "He had a bad shave, and looked perhaps thirty, maybe a little more. Wiry hair. He looked angry, and he kept on snapping his fingers, again and again. He wouldn't stop, like he was keeping time, in fact, like it was some poet's convention or something. And there was another man near him. Or, not near him. Coming near him."
Mrs. Adams paused for a long moment, and then walked over to the fridge. It opened up, flooding the dark room with bright light and pulling out a wine bottle. It looked for a moment like she was going to drink from it, but instead she gestured with it. "He was holding something like this, but when he turned it upside down, something poured out, and began to form into something big, and dangerous. And then I woke up."
Cora gave a curt nod, filing the information away for later.
"Now, would you like a drink?" Mrs. Adams asked.
Cora could resist temptation, any temptation, the same way some people breathed. However, a glass of wine would help, not least because she had at least one last thing to check.
The wine was dark, and not of a vintage she loved, but she muttered "In Vito Vertias" as she drank it. One of the Talecrafting principles only a fool wouldn't learn.
"I thought you were going to look into the past tonight?" Cora asked.
"I...changed--" Mrs. Adams began, and then choked on the wine, coughing and spluttering it up onto her nice floors. Those who tried to lie when In Vito Veritas was activated would find any wine they drank going down the wrong pipe, inevitably. Unless they spent Glamour to slip through the net.
"I…" she stared at Cora, who looked back at her without blinking. "I did, but I saw the same man, the one with the bad shave, only he was the same age, and--" she trailed off, "Not possible. He was in a graveyard, and then he wasn't. It was like…" she trailed off, "Like reading the last page of a romance novel and finding out it was the first page too. I didn't want to tell you because it means something is wrong, doesn't it? That my visions are going? In my, my old age?"
"No. It means that there is something supernatural going on," Cora said, patiently, "That is all. You don't need to worry so much."
"I know all of the others are more useful to you or you've worked with them longer, and I just--" Mrs. Adams began, and now there was the note of panic, "Because in my dreams I was told--"
"Nothing of consequence," Cora said, voice not raising even a single degree. And yet Mrs. Adams shuddered, as would be expected. There were times to be kind and soft and gentle, now wasn't one. Now was a time to be blunt. "I trust you, Mrs. Adams, implicitly. And that trust runs so far that I would not betray you or cast you aside."
There was a small pause, and she decided not to say the truth. That she wasn't the woman's husband, that she wouldn't discard her, and that the woman's fears, repeated again and again that yet another person who had helped pull them back together would disappear, were not only irrational, but mildly irritating. Yet Cora understood them.
Thirty years of marriage, a child put through college, all of it as a housewife, and she'd had to hear her husband lie to her face and say that he loved her when he could feel his aura saying differently, right before he went out to see a hooker. Right before he eventually walked out and never came back.
Cora wouldn't abandon her, not like that, and Wanda needed to believe it, needed to stop doubting. For her own sake, and for the sake of Cora not having to repeat the same conversation over and over again.
Mrs. Wanda Adams, Aura Reader and divorced housewife.
*****
Augusta came to her, actually, Eva at her side, right outside of Mrs. Adam's suburban house. It was surprising enough that Cora even blinked when she saw it, the determined way Augusta was half carrying Eva.
Cora kept the worry from her face as she looked the pair over. Augusta was a plain woman in her early thirties, and of all of them, she was the one who had guessed what Cora would do, of course she had. Cora allowed a faint smile to slip through the death mask that was her face.
Eva was a short, blonde woman who under normal circumstances was the closest to guessing at Cora's soul, just as Augusta came closest to guessing at her mind. But now she looked out of it, mumbling, and Cora stepped forward. "What happened to her?"
"She called me, told me the world wasn't working right," Augusta said.
"Of course it isn't," Cora shot back, voice level, "Wise of her to notice."
"I noticed as well," Augusta said, "Half of my targets were gone."
It was amazing, how the small things could surprise you as much as the big things. Cora knew what had caused it, but the more important thing was that Augusta was going after the Clairvoyance target list on her own. It was a surprisingly proactive move.
Eva muttered, "Chancellor. Chancellor. There are seven gates and seven seals, yet the Buddha rests on mountains high and treacherous and--"
Cora looked at Augusta and said, "Her apartment, is her roommate still there?"
"No," Augusta said, sounding almost baffled. "What does it matter?"
Mind and soul.
Eva's lover was gone, the man perhaps never existing in the first place.
Augusta wouldn't understand why it might matter. She came from a cold place, somehow, in her mind, that Cora also lived in, more often than not. It was the smartest place to be.
Eva was the one who believed that Cora had a soul.
Augusta believed that Cora was her mind.
"We'll take my car back. She can stay at my house as long as is needed," Cora said, then added, "She's the most powerful of the Circle, and therefore the most at risk."
"Understood, Chancellor Graves," Augusta said with a nod, "I should begin to scout out more about what has changed."
"No," Cora said, and this time she gave her true reasoning, "There are too many unknowns, and it is possible your powers will interact strangely with what has happened."
"What has happened?" Augusta asked.
"Need to know basis," Cora stated, knowing that Augusta would accept it.
Augusta Barnes, Clairvoyant and coldly intelligent spy, a woman worthy of respect and a soul empty enough of doubts and scruples that Cora had to admire it, and definitely used it to her advantage.
*****
People used each other. That was a fact of life, and so when she told Augusta that she needed Eva in the house to protect a valuable asset, she meant every word of it. Emotions weren't a weakness, but allowing them to override common sense was: but the truth was that protecting those who trusted her was common sense. Even if they were fools to do so.
She glanced down at the woman lying on the couch next to her. She was only half there, already planning the next step. That was four of them accounted for, and so far each of them had had a dream about the world they were now in. Dreams that didn't make sense unless it was a new world with new rules that confused and confounded their prophetic power.
Eva took a breath, and shuddered slightly, "Thank you," she said, "You're a good person."
People also said things like that to her, things that were patently untrue but that were also useful to allow them to go on believing. But Eva's conviction that Cora Graves was a good person, a genuinely good person, was strange enough that it always almost gave her a moment's pause. Almost.
"What did you see?" Cora asked, calmly, levelly.
"If you see the Buddha, kill him," Eva said, quietly, "I saw everything. East, there is something new, West there is something old. Too old. South, there is danger, and North, a cold hand around the heart of the world."
Cora thought about this and said, "Directional Courts?"
Eva shook her head, "N-no. Not...quite. I don't think"
East and West were of course both symbolic and actual, but of course only an idiot assumed that the images of a prophecy, especially such strong prophecies as Eva often had, would come clear and fast. So a problem from the east could be from New York or it could be from Hong Kong. The West could be New York, or Europe, or it could be Colorado, or it could be Honor, as with the Directional Courts. Honor was quite old, almost as old as betrayal and dishonor. Or it could be modernity, technology, but old technology. Or any number of a thousand things.
It had the feeling of a real prophecy. Of course, like any prophecy, half of it could be nonsense and the other half invalidated within the year, but it was something to work on, another detail, and as she had expected the moment she saw Eva, the woman had had the clearest vision so far. "What other details?"
"The word Bam, repeated again, scrawled clumsily again and again and again, across a door. The fire was warm in the room closest to the door but didn't warm anyone," Eva said, "You know how it is."
She knew the way the visions could be, just like dreams were. They made sense in the moment and you knew things without having any way to know them, but when one looked through them again the reason fled. It was why Cora liked to see other dreams, to ride them. Not only did it allow her to see pieces and fragments of the past, present and future at all times, and not just when the Wyrd sent her a dream, but when she was in a dream like that, she could take in all of the details and often pierce through the symbolism to get at the meaning far easier.
"And?"
"A light in the shape of Mrs. Adams," Eva said, "Walking towards the door."
A few more details, a few more guesses. A mystery, and a good one at that, one that wouldn't be solved with a single clue. It could be literal, it could be metaphorical. It could even speak to King Stoneguts, since the north was associated with cold. Mrs. Adams could be Mrs. Adams, or she could be something that was represented by Mrs. Adams, or somehow a prop for Eva's mind to try to understand what it was actually seeing.
She couldn't send her agents out in all directions, of course, but she could take a few suitable precautions and look up on a few matters.
She left Eva Thomas, Thaumaturge and buddhist trapped in a world of suffering, and moved to the next person.
*****
Layla Byrnes got a phone call, most of all because that was what she wanted. She wanted to believe she was important and independent and her powers mattered for their own sake, when she was still barely started on training, easily distracted, and had neither the power that meant that if Eva wanted to go out on her own she'd do well, nor the persistence that led Roy Taylor through decades of marginality, pursuing his art of dowsing as if it were the second most important thing in the world to him.
"Yes? What is it?" Layla asked, and Cora knew she was frowning.
"Did you have dreams? Something has come up," Cora said, curtly.
"Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. God, look, Chancellor. It's three-something in the flippin' morning, can't it wait?" Layla groused.
Cora spent a brief instant considering this. She liked Eva, she respected Augusta, she pitied Jason "Smiles" and she sympathized with Mrs. Adams.
None of these were emotions she felt for Layla, who was just warming up. The girl had to be carefully steered, made to think that she mattered in a way that was mildly irritating.
But no.
"You know I can't, Layla. If you wish, I could go there in person, right now. I could knock on the door and say, 'I am the spooky Cora Graves, and aren't you a freak like me, I need to talk to you.'"
Layla snorted, "Come on, do it then. You always do this, pushing me around, as if I'm fucking nothing, but you need me and the rest of the circle, or why would you be calling me right now in the morning. Call back later, you don't have the nerve."
Cora spoke before Layla could hang up. Her voice was cold, she allowed the edges of fake distant pleasantry to slip away, allowed just a little if the distaste she felt, just the barest hint, to creep up into her voice, "I have all the nerves in the world. You will speak to me now, and you will tell me what your dreams were tonight, and I will come over there if need be to convince you to do so, because we have entered another dimension, we've switched realities, and I need information from you and everyone else, but that's not power, Layla. Not power over me. Why do you think it is?"
Cora allowed herself to sound genuinely curious.
"W-what do you m-me--" Layla stuttered.
"Having something that I want provides very little power over me indeed. Rather the opposite. I can live without everything but knowledge, and I know how to acquire that," Cora took a breath, "You will tell me what you know, and we will pretend that you didn't try to hang up on me."
"Fine, whatever," Layla said, as if Cora couldn't almost taste her fear through the phone, "I saw people. Beautiful people, but underneath their skin there was something. But, but it was also as if they were St. Louis. Beautiful arches, and underneath, the rot. Corruption and power and death, and it's coming. No, it's here." Then Layla took a breath and said, "Like you. I almost thought it was a dream of you--"
Layla must have found bravery from somewhere. Perhaps she was pumping herself up with her magic. "A dream of some inhuman monster that pretends to be a human behind a pretty little mask. T-that's what I thought, that it was you, but it's not as bad. Less powerful. Your kind, you know, I've been reading about them. You scare people and steal away children and who knows what else. I know you're keeping it from the others, telling them lies, but I'm not a-a-afraid of you, and if I need your help, I won't for long. Once I'm a proper Biokinetic, I'm going to leave, and go far away, where monsters like your kind, that should all be dragged back where you freaks belong, aren't."
Layla was drunk.
Cora considered her words and searched her very depths for even the slightest flicker of outrage and then snuffed what little she found. A person like Layla had an opinion that not only didn't matter, but in its ignorance was almost an endorsement.
She didn't know that there were more Changelings out there than just this little city, she didn't know that Courts even existed, she was kept in the dark and Cora liked it that way, but perhaps she'd seen shapes in the dark that didn't exist. Perhaps she'd have to be educated. She didn't even know that the Hedge existed, thought that Cora just somehow translated, lived in monumental and astounding ignorance for a woman who had seen Cora's true form.
But now wasn't the time.
"Are you done?" Cora asked deeply bored and also almost to her destination, a minute later, after more of a drunken rant about how Cora and her kind were vile monsters that should be put down, "We shall talk about this another time. Have a nice night."
Likely it was just Dutch courage at three forty-three in the morning, and if she actually *was* setting herself up as an enemy--while, the fool, asking for lessons on how to use her powers--then Cora didn't need to deal with it now.
When she did, if she had to, she'd be proportional.
And if it did come down that Layla was so great of an enemy that she needed to die...well, the thought was so laughable that she merely filed a plan or three about just how to hide her body after execution and moved on to thinking on more important matters.
Layla Byrnes, Biokinetic, college student, and fool.
*****
Roy Taylor was crying when he opened the door, and as soon as he saw her he tried to slam it. Cora held out a hand and caught the door and then looked at him. Truly looked at him, as the Dragon looks and knows the depths of its prey's sorrow.
Oh.
"Your wife is gone," Cora said, "When did she disappear?"
Roy Taylor was an older black man, late forties, who had been roughed up by a life where he just wanted to use his special gift to help people and, it should be fair to note, get rich. He'd managed the first but not the second, and when Cora found him, his marriage was falling apart.
There was something special about the world of dreams, about Oneiromancy. She hadn't taken up the craft just because it was a path to power, though it was that as well. She'd seen what Roy Taylor was like, she'd seen enough of his dreams to know he loved his wife, that he dreamed of glory and of riches and of helping people. That, for all that he was often rude, he was a good person.
Was a good person in a way that Cora wasn't and didn't want to be. A fool, someone who stuck his neck out for people and risked his life to be spat on and called names that weren't appropriate.
Cora knew that he'd saved the lives of several children, found them when they were lost or even stolen away, and that for it he'd gotten nothing or even accusations that he'd 'lured them off' in order to 'find' them. Or that he was a child molester, or a criminal, because everyone knew middle-aged black men were criminals.
If Cora had actually possessed any faith in humanity as a whole, it would have been severely damaged by how life had treated Roy. And so she pitied him.
"How the hell did you--" Roy began and coughed, "Right, magic." He shook his head, teeth gritted in pain, hands still trembling..
Like all of the others in the Prophet's Circle, he didn't know even half of what she could do with magic. Even Eva could only guess, and that's how it was supposed to be. He just tended to assume it was all magic and not look too deeply at it. "What happened?"
"She must have. I thought she was happy, but her things are gone, all of them. I was just sleeping and then I had a dream--"
"What dream?" Cora asked, calmly.
"Fuck the dream! It was just a bunch of--listen, my wife's missing, and if you don't help me so help me god I'll--"[1]
It was instinct that led Cora to use Reading the Portents. He was on the verge of tears, broken up, and more than that, she knew him. He'd gotten this far in life on bluster and his wits and a sort of jaded optimism that buoyed him, but when King Stoneguts had referred him to her, had led the two to meet, it was because King Stoneguts had read the portents of this man he barely knew and saw that in one day just a few months after the Portent had been taken, his wife would divorce him and he would kill himself.
And Cora had saved him, saved him and never told him because she knew that he had his pride, respected it, for all that his power was not all that impressive on its own.
Finding lost objects, and even on rare occasions people, was nothing against the power of the Wyrd.
He looped it himself. He had clever hands. The details, the room, that was fuzzy, she hadn't looked deep enough, and she hadn't looked long enough to see the details. Even the rope was a guess, an insinuation in her mind, a way that her brain interpreted the data it was sent. It would be childishly easy for it to instead be a gun, or a bottle of poison.
What actually mattered was the fact that, if nothing major changed, in three months and nine days, Roy Taylor would successfully commit suicide.
That changed much, and Cora had a moment where she feared that he might have noticed the way her frown creased ever so slightly, her only concession to a roil of emotions springing up.
She couldn't tell Roy about his suicide, which meant…
She had to find a way to deceive him into mental health, because sending him to a therapist or using magic were both solutions that would backfire.
Luckily, she was good at manipulating people, especially if it was for their own good.
But now wasn't the time. "Listen, Roy--"
"Yes, Missus Graves?" Roy Taylor said, putting on a fake accent, his face contorted in rage, "I shore do love how the massa ain't even giving a--"
She didn't need another rant. She didn't want another rant. "I'm sorry. Something has happened that is outside my current control." Not outside of her total control, she knew she would master it, gain understanding of it. Use it to her advantage. "I don't think your wife left you."
"Then what?!" he yelled, roaring and turning towards his room, looking for something to throw. Potentially at her. He didn't have anger issues, not normally, but his pride, it was as inflexible as his principles, and he wasn't thinking.
"I think we've hopped reality."
"No, not possible," Roy said, tears in his eyes.
"I would not be saying it if I did not have strong evidence," Cora said, calmly, looking over the man. "It is far beyond the scope of your power, and potentially even mine[2], but this is what has happened."
"If that's happened, then she's gone, and if she's gone--" Roy said, the words adding to each other, one after another. He'd repeat it, again and again, she knew it. The words would dig and dig until they got through his stubbornness, his belief that suicide, that surrender, was less meaningful than continuing to struggle towards wealth and respect, towards making the world a better place.
She had to stop it. "Then we will cross that bridge when it is reached. We might have a way to get back," she said, "And either way, I need to know what you've seen. It might be vital to getting back, or dealing with this situation."
But she didn't know how, not at the moment. Put simply, dealing with grief was a long and complicated process, and there was no single way to work through it. All of that said, a therapist was the best bet, yet also the one he would reject, so the only way to proceed was to attempt to replicate the functions of therapy without the reality.
Which would take time and effort, and time she would be willing to spend, but at the moment she had neither the time nor the energy to begin the process, and he wasn't in the right frame of mind, either.
But she needed the dreams. The visions she knew he'd had.
"Places. That's all, places that are important. They might hold hidden things, they might be places to fight, they might be the home base of whatever did this to us," Roy Taylor shrugged, and then held out a hand, dark and lined with age and care, "But I'm not telling you. You're bigger than me, you're badder than me, but--" he was still shaking, but with grief, not with fear, "Terrify me now. Hit me with sorrow and anger and fear, but I'm not telling you. We trade. You help me find my wife, or you--"
He shook his head, "We trade. Now leave me alone."
Cora complied. This too was a matter for later.
Roy Taylor, Dowser, cynical idealist, loving husband. Suicide victim in three months and nine days.
******
The woman clung to her, her strong dark arms wrapped around Cora in a hug. She could see the veins, the strength hidden there, and Cora looked over Janet. Under normal circumstances she might have pushed Janet off, but again, there was the fear, and she could almost taste it. Wanted to taste it in fact. It wouldn't hurt to drink it in, yet she had more important things to deal with.
Like why there were almost a dozen ghosts hovering around outside of Janet's apartment.
"They're not gone, are they? But they can't get through the door," Janet muttered, quietly.
Can't get through--
Thresholds. Barriers. Why had the Sin-Eater woman done it at that particular location. It had to be something magical. Now, obvious answer was that there was some form of ley line or other magical vein of the earth connected to it, but what if--
Cora paused, running through the steps in her head. So, ghosts in this world couldn't get in. It was like the myths about vampires and invitations. It it was so, and certainly Janet was enticing to ghosts, they clustered as if they desperately wanted to get at her. Which was another thing that didn't make sense. Ghosts were bound by their Anchors, one or more points of significance that they couldn't leave. It could be a person, a place, an object, but there they were, far from their anchors.
Unless they didn't have anchors. Which meant the rules of ghosts were different, but the matter of the possibility that they couldn't enter somewhere without invitation raised more questions than it answered.
Was this a rule of magical metaphysics? Or just a rule specific to ghosts in this case? However, what if this rule applied to more than just ghosts. It could be the key to understanding the principles of this world, and whether the fundamental ones differed and how.
But for the moment, she asked, "They've been there the whole time? I've been to see the others."
"We're...we're somewhere new," Janet said, hugging Cora tighter, "I saw it."
"When you woke up, did you check the time? Was it almost ten?" Cora asked.
"No. I was sleeping early this time I woke at nine. I dreamed of a woman who was leading a line of those ghosts like that to a building, some sort of warehouse. She was waving a cross and wearing some sort of robe like one of those old magicians, and then she went inside and she ate food and--"
"What." Cora blinked, slowly. "What happened next?"
"I stayed up the whole time, and then suddenly at about 9:40 I passed out, and then when I woke up…"
Janet trailed off.
"I'm not sure whether I can drive them off, not unless you were already possessed," Cora said, "I could call Jeanne and have her come here."
"No. I want to...watch. So I can tell you the rules, so you can figure this out and fix everything." Janet clung closer to her.
Janet, Ghost-Ridden Woman, who believed in Cora more than anything else.
*****
She was almost late, she knew, as she entered the Hedge. 4:40 AM, two hours and change until sunrise, and she hurried through the Hedge, glancing at its familiar contours. She moved through it effortlessly, with easy grace, and then at last she stopped in front of a particular turn and held up a hand to push against a wall and then step through it.
Which left her in a broom closet of a shop owned by a Summer courtier, and from there she stumbled out and went down to the basement and counted bricks, until--there we go.
"Open," she commanded, imagining the bricks as being part of a door.
The second gate opened, and she stepped through to the meeting.
Season 1, Autumn 2000--
From Such Heights
*****
[1] This is a case where context matters. Roy Taylor is a person she pities and might even respect*, and so when he refuses to tell her information, she at least respects that he means it. When Layla refuses, on the other hand…
* ) I'm willing to actually talk more about this, if only because I didn't want to infodump too hard in the chapter her deep relationships (or not so deep) with each of them.
[2] This is called bald-faced lying to appear powerful in front of Roy. Damn right it's beyond anything she could even dream of doing, but it's better for him to think she's invincible than to think she's limited, in her view.
A/N: I can actually tell you voters more about her relationship with each of the Prophet Circle if you want, since it's a little complicated. Either way, I liked this chapter/update because in a way it's showing the other half.
The previous chapter *mostly* focused on her Virtues, with but a hint of her vices (some arrogance, some kindness (especially towards her son)) whereas this chapter focuses on her vices (her kindness but also arrogance) and yet also, I think, shows her deploying her patience and willingness to work through things, and she doesn't exactly come off the worse for giving into her vices.
It's all a matter of how you deploy them, because virtues are rarely enough.
This is how the world works. They tell her the truth and she lies to them. Oh, what kind of lies? All kinds. She smiled that slight smile that seems to unnerve people and made sure that ultimately they don't know the true depths of her power, nor their own. She pulled strings and levers for them, saved their lives while they stood in front of her unaware, and asked for their help even when she didn't need to, because the lie that she wanted to tell them, it's the same lie they wanted to believe: that they are valuable, that their lives are struggling towards some larger meaning, that there is, at the end of the rainbow, a pot of gold, a meaningful life. A plan.
Cora considered that planning the future was a fools' game. Many people shared this view, but there were others who would have disagreed with her. But she had the advantage of being able to dream of the past and the future, to see into it and even decide it using magic, and to have possessed for years an entire circle of people devoted to just such a task. So it was a reasoned, intelligent, correct conclusion when she said that planning the future didn't work and that at most all of this was less a guarentee and more of an edge.
But as King Stoneguts had told her, almost jovially, "When you're laying on the ground in a pool of your own blood and vomit, and some rude person above you has a baseball bat, then even the edge of a razor starts to look good."
King Stoneguts took advantage where he could, it was what made him so impressive to watch at work. He stooped to conquer.
They thought they were either the center of everything that Cora Graves, spooky Autumn Queen of Changelings did, or that they were so inconsequential, her power so vast, that they mattered little, and might as well get what advantage they could get out of following her.
None of them knew, not fully, that she pitied many of them, liked some of them, sometimes even humored them. It wasn't something she could show. At least, she had to choose what to show, choose how they viewed her. Keep her nature hidden in the half shadows, where she worked best.
They were not Jonathan, they were not even Jeanne and Jacques. They certainly weren't Stoneguts.
They were hers.
*****
Jason "Smiles" opened on the first knock. Cora looked him over, took him in with a few careful, easy sweeps of her eyes. Jason didn't speak, as if afraid he'd interrupt her, until she said, "I was going to check if you were doing well. Something has happened."
The apartment was hers, and she paid his rent. The young man was almost eighteen, and thus by all accounts was in no way emancipated and could be taken up by the cops, but she had the matter well in hand. He wasn't handsome, not really. He had bad acne and more than that the look of someone who had grown up rather faster than they planned on, and the scars around his mouth might have unnerved those who didn't know the world. People who weren't Cora.
He was terrified of her, a fact that amused her considering that so far, other than her form and a half-dozen meetings, he had not seen what she could truly do. "I had dreams," he said, "T-the type of dreams you usually watch."
She watched him, carefully waiting for him to continue. The boy sometimes expected her to prompt him, to provide him questions and answers, and on any other day they might have stood there for a dozen seconds longer before he worked his nerve up, but she'd had a brief moment to glance at the room beyond. Magazines of dubious content, a television she'd bought him, a couch. Everything as it should be.
And then there was the fact that the entire apartment was soaked with fear, fear so strong it stopped being glamour and started being an Abstraction itself. And mixed in were bad dreams, and likely other abstractions she'd have to take a closer look to see.
What mattered is that she'd seen people scared to death whose immediate vicinity wasn't so soaked with fear.
He must be terrified, holding it all in, she thought, and stepped forward, "It's okay, you can tell me, whatever it is."
"There was a woman. Brownish skin, beautiful, and then there was a scrawny young man, older than me," he began, and then he said, "And they looked at me and I felt, I dunno, I was…"
His shoulders were shaking, and Cora moved forward, placed a hand on his shoulder to steady him.
"I was angry, but I was aroused, and neither of those made sense. And I saw...last night, someone died, but it was someone that didn't die," he said, "Someone that hadn't died. Someone that didn't exist."
Cora didn't want to tell him about the translation hypothesis, and she knew that her own dreams might have been just as confusing if she had been in the grip of a prophetic dream. To suddenly have every single prophecy ripped from your grasp and changed, every single vision of the future--
All of those people in the Freehold whose future she had read, to make sure that there were no large problems coming down the pike, that she could alter events, steer the world, they were no doubt now cast free and loose, disaster looming over them.
It made her want to go now and start looking.
She hated not knowing, she hated being helpless.
She liked having power, she loved her magic, she loved what it allowed her to do. And in front of her was a scared teenager, who could have been her own son, on the verge of a breakdown.
But that was what magic was for. A part of her was hungry. She'd spent glamour, and she could regain it by just soaking in that terror. The richest kind. But Jason was hers, and she held his shoulder tighter and said, "There is no reason to be afraid, Jason. I am here, and I am figuring this out. There was likely some sort of dimensional transportation going on, I suspect," she said, knowing that it was the glamour that was really helping, that her words weren't truly that reassuring, "And so there may be problems, but I am still here, and so are you. That means we are winning."
He nodded, looking a little uncertain, but the fear was no longer all but dripping from his pores, and he said, "The others, have you checked on them?"
"I'm going to. What I need you to do is write down some of what you saw. I know that working out the details is hard, so just write everything, every single detail, and soon. You have probably forgotten some of it, but that doesn't matter. After that, try to get some rest. Call me if another dream comes," Cora said, a little briskly.
She'd helped him, but there were six other people to help, and information to process.
Jason "Smiles", Mind Reader and gay outcast.
******
"I had a dream about a man, he was standing right like that," Mrs. Adams said. The woman looking tired, though her kitchen had little fear in it. Mrs. Adams always changed her mind each time about how to treat Cora, at least in part because, as with Jason, her powers didn't work well on the monarch. So sometimes she was too friendly, and sometimes distant and polite.
This time she was matter-of-fact, closing her eyes as she said, "He had a bad shave, and looked perhaps thirty, maybe a little more. Wiry hair. He looked angry, and he kept on snapping his fingers, again and again. He wouldn't stop, like he was keeping time, in fact, like it was some poet's convention or something. And there was another man near him. Or, not near him. Coming near him."
Mrs. Adams paused for a long moment, and then walked over to the fridge. It opened up, flooding the dark room with bright light and pulling out a wine bottle. It looked for a moment like she was going to drink from it, but instead she gestured with it. "He was holding something like this, but when he turned it upside down, something poured out, and began to form into something big, and dangerous. And then I woke up."
Cora gave a curt nod, filing the information away for later.
"Now, would you like a drink?" Mrs. Adams asked.
Cora could resist temptation, any temptation, the same way some people breathed. However, a glass of wine would help, not least because she had at least one last thing to check.
The wine was dark, and not of a vintage she loved, but she muttered "In Vito Vertias" as she drank it. One of the Talecrafting principles only a fool wouldn't learn.
"I thought you were going to look into the past tonight?" Cora asked.
"I...changed--" Mrs. Adams began, and then choked on the wine, coughing and spluttering it up onto her nice floors. Those who tried to lie when In Vito Veritas was activated would find any wine they drank going down the wrong pipe, inevitably. Unless they spent Glamour to slip through the net.
"I…" she stared at Cora, who looked back at her without blinking. "I did, but I saw the same man, the one with the bad shave, only he was the same age, and--" she trailed off, "Not possible. He was in a graveyard, and then he wasn't. It was like…" she trailed off, "Like reading the last page of a romance novel and finding out it was the first page too. I didn't want to tell you because it means something is wrong, doesn't it? That my visions are going? In my, my old age?"
"No. It means that there is something supernatural going on," Cora said, patiently, "That is all. You don't need to worry so much."
"I know all of the others are more useful to you or you've worked with them longer, and I just--" Mrs. Adams began, and now there was the note of panic, "Because in my dreams I was told--"
"Nothing of consequence," Cora said, voice not raising even a single degree. And yet Mrs. Adams shuddered, as would be expected. There were times to be kind and soft and gentle, now wasn't one. Now was a time to be blunt. "I trust you, Mrs. Adams, implicitly. And that trust runs so far that I would not betray you or cast you aside."
There was a small pause, and she decided not to say the truth. That she wasn't the woman's husband, that she wouldn't discard her, and that the woman's fears, repeated again and again that yet another person who had helped pull them back together would disappear, were not only irrational, but mildly irritating. Yet Cora understood them.
Thirty years of marriage, a child put through college, all of it as a housewife, and she'd had to hear her husband lie to her face and say that he loved her when he could feel his aura saying differently, right before he went out to see a hooker. Right before he eventually walked out and never came back.
Cora wouldn't abandon her, not like that, and Wanda needed to believe it, needed to stop doubting. For her own sake, and for the sake of Cora not having to repeat the same conversation over and over again.
Mrs. Wanda Adams, Aura Reader and divorced housewife.
*****
Augusta came to her, actually, Eva at her side, right outside of Mrs. Adam's suburban house. It was surprising enough that Cora even blinked when she saw it, the determined way Augusta was half carrying Eva.
Cora kept the worry from her face as she looked the pair over. Augusta was a plain woman in her early thirties, and of all of them, she was the one who had guessed what Cora would do, of course she had. Cora allowed a faint smile to slip through the death mask that was her face.
Eva was a short, blonde woman who under normal circumstances was the closest to guessing at Cora's soul, just as Augusta came closest to guessing at her mind. But now she looked out of it, mumbling, and Cora stepped forward. "What happened to her?"
"She called me, told me the world wasn't working right," Augusta said.
"Of course it isn't," Cora shot back, voice level, "Wise of her to notice."
"I noticed as well," Augusta said, "Half of my targets were gone."
It was amazing, how the small things could surprise you as much as the big things. Cora knew what had caused it, but the more important thing was that Augusta was going after the Clairvoyance target list on her own. It was a surprisingly proactive move.
Eva muttered, "Chancellor. Chancellor. There are seven gates and seven seals, yet the Buddha rests on mountains high and treacherous and--"
Cora looked at Augusta and said, "Her apartment, is her roommate still there?"
"No," Augusta said, sounding almost baffled. "What does it matter?"
Mind and soul.
Eva's lover was gone, the man perhaps never existing in the first place.
Augusta wouldn't understand why it might matter. She came from a cold place, somehow, in her mind, that Cora also lived in, more often than not. It was the smartest place to be.
Eva was the one who believed that Cora had a soul.
Augusta believed that Cora was her mind.
"We'll take my car back. She can stay at my house as long as is needed," Cora said, then added, "She's the most powerful of the Circle, and therefore the most at risk."
"Understood, Chancellor Graves," Augusta said with a nod, "I should begin to scout out more about what has changed."
"No," Cora said, and this time she gave her true reasoning, "There are too many unknowns, and it is possible your powers will interact strangely with what has happened."
"What has happened?" Augusta asked.
"Need to know basis," Cora stated, knowing that Augusta would accept it.
Augusta Barnes, Clairvoyant and coldly intelligent spy, a woman worthy of respect and a soul empty enough of doubts and scruples that Cora had to admire it, and definitely used it to her advantage.
*****
People used each other. That was a fact of life, and so when she told Augusta that she needed Eva in the house to protect a valuable asset, she meant every word of it. Emotions weren't a weakness, but allowing them to override common sense was: but the truth was that protecting those who trusted her was common sense. Even if they were fools to do so.
She glanced down at the woman lying on the couch next to her. She was only half there, already planning the next step. That was four of them accounted for, and so far each of them had had a dream about the world they were now in. Dreams that didn't make sense unless it was a new world with new rules that confused and confounded their prophetic power.
Eva took a breath, and shuddered slightly, "Thank you," she said, "You're a good person."
People also said things like that to her, things that were patently untrue but that were also useful to allow them to go on believing. But Eva's conviction that Cora Graves was a good person, a genuinely good person, was strange enough that it always almost gave her a moment's pause. Almost.
"What did you see?" Cora asked, calmly, levelly.
"If you see the Buddha, kill him," Eva said, quietly, "I saw everything. East, there is something new, West there is something old. Too old. South, there is danger, and North, a cold hand around the heart of the world."
Cora thought about this and said, "Directional Courts?"
Eva shook her head, "N-no. Not...quite. I don't think"
East and West were of course both symbolic and actual, but of course only an idiot assumed that the images of a prophecy, especially such strong prophecies as Eva often had, would come clear and fast. So a problem from the east could be from New York or it could be from Hong Kong. The West could be New York, or Europe, or it could be Colorado, or it could be Honor, as with the Directional Courts. Honor was quite old, almost as old as betrayal and dishonor. Or it could be modernity, technology, but old technology. Or any number of a thousand things.
It had the feeling of a real prophecy. Of course, like any prophecy, half of it could be nonsense and the other half invalidated within the year, but it was something to work on, another detail, and as she had expected the moment she saw Eva, the woman had had the clearest vision so far. "What other details?"
"The word Bam, repeated again, scrawled clumsily again and again and again, across a door. The fire was warm in the room closest to the door but didn't warm anyone," Eva said, "You know how it is."
She knew the way the visions could be, just like dreams were. They made sense in the moment and you knew things without having any way to know them, but when one looked through them again the reason fled. It was why Cora liked to see other dreams, to ride them. Not only did it allow her to see pieces and fragments of the past, present and future at all times, and not just when the Wyrd sent her a dream, but when she was in a dream like that, she could take in all of the details and often pierce through the symbolism to get at the meaning far easier.
"And?"
"A light in the shape of Mrs. Adams," Eva said, "Walking towards the door."
A few more details, a few more guesses. A mystery, and a good one at that, one that wouldn't be solved with a single clue. It could be literal, it could be metaphorical. It could even speak to King Stoneguts, since the north was associated with cold. Mrs. Adams could be Mrs. Adams, or she could be something that was represented by Mrs. Adams, or somehow a prop for Eva's mind to try to understand what it was actually seeing.
She couldn't send her agents out in all directions, of course, but she could take a few suitable precautions and look up on a few matters.
She left Eva Thomas, Thaumaturge and buddhist trapped in a world of suffering, and moved to the next person.
*****
Layla Byrnes got a phone call, most of all because that was what she wanted. She wanted to believe she was important and independent and her powers mattered for their own sake, when she was still barely started on training, easily distracted, and had neither the power that meant that if Eva wanted to go out on her own she'd do well, nor the persistence that led Roy Taylor through decades of marginality, pursuing his art of dowsing as if it were the second most important thing in the world to him.
"Yes? What is it?" Layla asked, and Cora knew she was frowning.
"Did you have dreams? Something has come up," Cora said, curtly.
"Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. God, look, Chancellor. It's three-something in the flippin' morning, can't it wait?" Layla groused.
Cora spent a brief instant considering this. She liked Eva, she respected Augusta, she pitied Jason "Smiles" and she sympathized with Mrs. Adams.
None of these were emotions she felt for Layla, who was just warming up. The girl had to be carefully steered, made to think that she mattered in a way that was mildly irritating.
But no.
"You know I can't, Layla. If you wish, I could go there in person, right now. I could knock on the door and say, 'I am the spooky Cora Graves, and aren't you a freak like me, I need to talk to you.'"
Layla snorted, "Come on, do it then. You always do this, pushing me around, as if I'm fucking nothing, but you need me and the rest of the circle, or why would you be calling me right now in the morning. Call back later, you don't have the nerve."
Cora spoke before Layla could hang up. Her voice was cold, she allowed the edges of fake distant pleasantry to slip away, allowed just a little if the distaste she felt, just the barest hint, to creep up into her voice, "I have all the nerves in the world. You will speak to me now, and you will tell me what your dreams were tonight, and I will come over there if need be to convince you to do so, because we have entered another dimension, we've switched realities, and I need information from you and everyone else, but that's not power, Layla. Not power over me. Why do you think it is?"
Cora allowed herself to sound genuinely curious.
"W-what do you m-me--" Layla stuttered.
"Having something that I want provides very little power over me indeed. Rather the opposite. I can live without everything but knowledge, and I know how to acquire that," Cora took a breath, "You will tell me what you know, and we will pretend that you didn't try to hang up on me."
"Fine, whatever," Layla said, as if Cora couldn't almost taste her fear through the phone, "I saw people. Beautiful people, but underneath their skin there was something. But, but it was also as if they were St. Louis. Beautiful arches, and underneath, the rot. Corruption and power and death, and it's coming. No, it's here." Then Layla took a breath and said, "Like you. I almost thought it was a dream of you--"
Layla must have found bravery from somewhere. Perhaps she was pumping herself up with her magic. "A dream of some inhuman monster that pretends to be a human behind a pretty little mask. T-that's what I thought, that it was you, but it's not as bad. Less powerful. Your kind, you know, I've been reading about them. You scare people and steal away children and who knows what else. I know you're keeping it from the others, telling them lies, but I'm not a-a-afraid of you, and if I need your help, I won't for long. Once I'm a proper Biokinetic, I'm going to leave, and go far away, where monsters like your kind, that should all be dragged back where you freaks belong, aren't."
Layla was drunk.
Cora considered her words and searched her very depths for even the slightest flicker of outrage and then snuffed what little she found. A person like Layla had an opinion that not only didn't matter, but in its ignorance was almost an endorsement.
She didn't know that there were more Changelings out there than just this little city, she didn't know that Courts even existed, she was kept in the dark and Cora liked it that way, but perhaps she'd seen shapes in the dark that didn't exist. Perhaps she'd have to be educated. She didn't even know that the Hedge existed, thought that Cora just somehow translated, lived in monumental and astounding ignorance for a woman who had seen Cora's true form.
But now wasn't the time.
"Are you done?" Cora asked deeply bored and also almost to her destination, a minute later, after more of a drunken rant about how Cora and her kind were vile monsters that should be put down, "We shall talk about this another time. Have a nice night."
Likely it was just Dutch courage at three forty-three in the morning, and if she actually *was* setting herself up as an enemy--while, the fool, asking for lessons on how to use her powers--then Cora didn't need to deal with it now.
When she did, if she had to, she'd be proportional.
And if it did come down that Layla was so great of an enemy that she needed to die...well, the thought was so laughable that she merely filed a plan or three about just how to hide her body after execution and moved on to thinking on more important matters.
Layla Byrnes, Biokinetic, college student, and fool.
*****
Roy Taylor was crying when he opened the door, and as soon as he saw her he tried to slam it. Cora held out a hand and caught the door and then looked at him. Truly looked at him, as the Dragon looks and knows the depths of its prey's sorrow.
Oh.
"Your wife is gone," Cora said, "When did she disappear?"
Roy Taylor was an older black man, late forties, who had been roughed up by a life where he just wanted to use his special gift to help people and, it should be fair to note, get rich. He'd managed the first but not the second, and when Cora found him, his marriage was falling apart.
There was something special about the world of dreams, about Oneiromancy. She hadn't taken up the craft just because it was a path to power, though it was that as well. She'd seen what Roy Taylor was like, she'd seen enough of his dreams to know he loved his wife, that he dreamed of glory and of riches and of helping people. That, for all that he was often rude, he was a good person.
Was a good person in a way that Cora wasn't and didn't want to be. A fool, someone who stuck his neck out for people and risked his life to be spat on and called names that weren't appropriate.
Cora knew that he'd saved the lives of several children, found them when they were lost or even stolen away, and that for it he'd gotten nothing or even accusations that he'd 'lured them off' in order to 'find' them. Or that he was a child molester, or a criminal, because everyone knew middle-aged black men were criminals.
If Cora had actually possessed any faith in humanity as a whole, it would have been severely damaged by how life had treated Roy. And so she pitied him.
"How the hell did you--" Roy began and coughed, "Right, magic." He shook his head, teeth gritted in pain, hands still trembling..
Like all of the others in the Prophet's Circle, he didn't know even half of what she could do with magic. Even Eva could only guess, and that's how it was supposed to be. He just tended to assume it was all magic and not look too deeply at it. "What happened?"
"She must have. I thought she was happy, but her things are gone, all of them. I was just sleeping and then I had a dream--"
"What dream?" Cora asked, calmly.
"Fuck the dream! It was just a bunch of--listen, my wife's missing, and if you don't help me so help me god I'll--"[1]
It was instinct that led Cora to use Reading the Portents. He was on the verge of tears, broken up, and more than that, she knew him. He'd gotten this far in life on bluster and his wits and a sort of jaded optimism that buoyed him, but when King Stoneguts had referred him to her, had led the two to meet, it was because King Stoneguts had read the portents of this man he barely knew and saw that in one day just a few months after the Portent had been taken, his wife would divorce him and he would kill himself.
And Cora had saved him, saved him and never told him because she knew that he had his pride, respected it, for all that his power was not all that impressive on its own.
Finding lost objects, and even on rare occasions people, was nothing against the power of the Wyrd.
He looped it himself. He had clever hands. The details, the room, that was fuzzy, she hadn't looked deep enough, and she hadn't looked long enough to see the details. Even the rope was a guess, an insinuation in her mind, a way that her brain interpreted the data it was sent. It would be childishly easy for it to instead be a gun, or a bottle of poison.
What actually mattered was the fact that, if nothing major changed, in three months and nine days, Roy Taylor would successfully commit suicide.
That changed much, and Cora had a moment where she feared that he might have noticed the way her frown creased ever so slightly, her only concession to a roil of emotions springing up.
She couldn't tell Roy about his suicide, which meant…
She had to find a way to deceive him into mental health, because sending him to a therapist or using magic were both solutions that would backfire.
Luckily, she was good at manipulating people, especially if it was for their own good.
But now wasn't the time. "Listen, Roy--"
"Yes, Missus Graves?" Roy Taylor said, putting on a fake accent, his face contorted in rage, "I shore do love how the massa ain't even giving a--"
She didn't need another rant. She didn't want another rant. "I'm sorry. Something has happened that is outside my current control." Not outside of her total control, she knew she would master it, gain understanding of it. Use it to her advantage. "I don't think your wife left you."
"Then what?!" he yelled, roaring and turning towards his room, looking for something to throw. Potentially at her. He didn't have anger issues, not normally, but his pride, it was as inflexible as his principles, and he wasn't thinking.
"I think we've hopped reality."
"No, not possible," Roy said, tears in his eyes.
"I would not be saying it if I did not have strong evidence," Cora said, calmly, looking over the man. "It is far beyond the scope of your power, and potentially even mine[2], but this is what has happened."
"If that's happened, then she's gone, and if she's gone--" Roy said, the words adding to each other, one after another. He'd repeat it, again and again, she knew it. The words would dig and dig until they got through his stubbornness, his belief that suicide, that surrender, was less meaningful than continuing to struggle towards wealth and respect, towards making the world a better place.
She had to stop it. "Then we will cross that bridge when it is reached. We might have a way to get back," she said, "And either way, I need to know what you've seen. It might be vital to getting back, or dealing with this situation."
But she didn't know how, not at the moment. Put simply, dealing with grief was a long and complicated process, and there was no single way to work through it. All of that said, a therapist was the best bet, yet also the one he would reject, so the only way to proceed was to attempt to replicate the functions of therapy without the reality.
Which would take time and effort, and time she would be willing to spend, but at the moment she had neither the time nor the energy to begin the process, and he wasn't in the right frame of mind, either.
But she needed the dreams. The visions she knew he'd had.
"Places. That's all, places that are important. They might hold hidden things, they might be places to fight, they might be the home base of whatever did this to us," Roy Taylor shrugged, and then held out a hand, dark and lined with age and care, "But I'm not telling you. You're bigger than me, you're badder than me, but--" he was still shaking, but with grief, not with fear, "Terrify me now. Hit me with sorrow and anger and fear, but I'm not telling you. We trade. You help me find my wife, or you--"
He shook his head, "We trade. Now leave me alone."
Cora complied. This too was a matter for later.
Roy Taylor, Dowser, cynical idealist, loving husband. Suicide victim in three months and nine days.
******
The woman clung to her, her strong dark arms wrapped around Cora in a hug. She could see the veins, the strength hidden there, and Cora looked over Janet. Under normal circumstances she might have pushed Janet off, but again, there was the fear, and she could almost taste it. Wanted to taste it in fact. It wouldn't hurt to drink it in, yet she had more important things to deal with.
Like why there were almost a dozen ghosts hovering around outside of Janet's apartment.
"They're not gone, are they? But they can't get through the door," Janet muttered, quietly.
Can't get through--
Thresholds. Barriers. Why had the Sin-Eater woman done it at that particular location. It had to be something magical. Now, obvious answer was that there was some form of ley line or other magical vein of the earth connected to it, but what if--
Cora paused, running through the steps in her head. So, ghosts in this world couldn't get in. It was like the myths about vampires and invitations. It it was so, and certainly Janet was enticing to ghosts, they clustered as if they desperately wanted to get at her. Which was another thing that didn't make sense. Ghosts were bound by their Anchors, one or more points of significance that they couldn't leave. It could be a person, a place, an object, but there they were, far from their anchors.
Unless they didn't have anchors. Which meant the rules of ghosts were different, but the matter of the possibility that they couldn't enter somewhere without invitation raised more questions than it answered.
Was this a rule of magical metaphysics? Or just a rule specific to ghosts in this case? However, what if this rule applied to more than just ghosts. It could be the key to understanding the principles of this world, and whether the fundamental ones differed and how.
But for the moment, she asked, "They've been there the whole time? I've been to see the others."
"We're...we're somewhere new," Janet said, hugging Cora tighter, "I saw it."
"When you woke up, did you check the time? Was it almost ten?" Cora asked.
"No. I was sleeping early this time I woke at nine. I dreamed of a woman who was leading a line of those ghosts like that to a building, some sort of warehouse. She was waving a cross and wearing some sort of robe like one of those old magicians, and then she went inside and she ate food and--"
"What." Cora blinked, slowly. "What happened next?"
"I stayed up the whole time, and then suddenly at about 9:40 I passed out, and then when I woke up…"
Janet trailed off.
"I'm not sure whether I can drive them off, not unless you were already possessed," Cora said, "I could call Jeanne and have her come here."
"No. I want to...watch. So I can tell you the rules, so you can figure this out and fix everything." Janet clung closer to her.
Janet, Ghost-Ridden Woman, who believed in Cora more than anything else.
*****
She was almost late, she knew, as she entered the Hedge. 4:40 AM, two hours and change until sunrise, and she hurried through the Hedge, glancing at its familiar contours. She moved through it effortlessly, with easy grace, and then at last she stopped in front of a particular turn and held up a hand to push against a wall and then step through it.
Which left her in a broom closet of a shop owned by a Summer courtier, and from there she stumbled out and went down to the basement and counted bricks, until--there we go.
"Open," she commanded, imagining the bricks as being part of a door.
The second gate opened, and she stepped through to the meeting.
Season 1, Autumn 2000--
From Such Heights
*****
Notice Detail: 4 dice
Occult Perception: 1 success
Scent of the Harvest: 6 dice, 2 successes
Glamour at 12/20
Hook of Talecrafting: 3 successes
Glamour at 11/20
Intimidation: 3 successes
Socialize: 2 successes
Composure: 2 successes
Composure 2: 1 successes
Intelligence+Occult: 4 successes
Socialize: 0 successes
Intimidation: 5 successes
Composure 3: 4 successes
The Dragon Knows: 1 success
Glamour at 10/20
Socialize: 1 success
Empathy: 2 successes
Reading the Portents: 11 dice, 1 success. Huh, well, one is all you need.
Glamour at 8/20
Composure again: 2 successes
Persuasion: 1 success
Psychology thinking: 3 successes
Intelligence+Occult: 10 successes
Composure: 1 success.
Gate 1 (Wyrd Roll): 2 successes
Gate 2: 1 success.
Occult Perception: 1 success
Scent of the Harvest: 6 dice, 2 successes
Glamour at 12/20
Hook of Talecrafting: 3 successes
Glamour at 11/20
Intimidation: 3 successes
Socialize: 2 successes
Composure: 2 successes
Composure 2: 1 successes
Intelligence+Occult: 4 successes
Socialize: 0 successes
Intimidation: 5 successes
Composure 3: 4 successes
The Dragon Knows: 1 success
Glamour at 10/20
Socialize: 1 success
Empathy: 2 successes
Reading the Portents: 11 dice, 1 success. Huh, well, one is all you need.
Glamour at 8/20
Composure again: 2 successes
Persuasion: 1 success
Psychology thinking: 3 successes
Intelligence+Occult: 10 successes
Composure: 1 success.
Gate 1 (Wyrd Roll): 2 successes
Gate 2: 1 success.
[1] This is a case where context matters. Roy Taylor is a person she pities and might even respect*, and so when he refuses to tell her information, she at least respects that he means it. When Layla refuses, on the other hand…
* ) I'm willing to actually talk more about this, if only because I didn't want to infodump too hard in the chapter her deep relationships (or not so deep) with each of them.
[2] This is called bald-faced lying to appear powerful in front of Roy. Damn right it's beyond anything she could even dream of doing, but it's better for him to think she's invincible than to think she's limited, in her view.
A/N: I can actually tell you voters more about her relationship with each of the Prophet Circle if you want, since it's a little complicated. Either way, I liked this chapter/update because in a way it's showing the other half.
The previous chapter *mostly* focused on her Virtues, with but a hint of her vices (some arrogance, some kindness (especially towards her son)) whereas this chapter focuses on her vices (her kindness but also arrogance) and yet also, I think, shows her deploying her patience and willingness to work through things, and she doesn't exactly come off the worse for giving into her vices.
It's all a matter of how you deploy them, because virtues are rarely enough.
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- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I get leaving Layla ignorant to make it easier to manipulate her, but it barely seems like she's useful this way. I guess that's part of the point?
Just feels like if she's too minor to bother correcting her stupid opinions about changelings, then she's probably too minor to really serve as a useful source of intel. It's interesting to see how Cora looks to someone who's an "enemy", though, really kind of terrifying.
Just feels like if she's too minor to bother correcting her stupid opinions about changelings, then she's probably too minor to really serve as a useful source of intel. It's interesting to see how Cora looks to someone who's an "enemy", though, really kind of terrifying.