James Thaddeus Lee Jr.
DOB 7/4/80
Known Aliases: Jimmy Trips, John Tycho, Jack Tycho, Jack Tesla,
Jesse Tesla, Jesse Truant.
Ht: 6'3" Wt: 165lbs Eyes: BL/BRN
Distinguishing Marks:
1. Tattoos:
Spiderweb, Left elbow.
Three guitar knobs, marked to eleven, left forearm (inside).
Flames, left wrist (outside).
Interstate 66 Sign, right forearm (inside).
Ronald Van Zandt (Bust), right bicep.
Confederate Flag and U.S. Flag, crossed, Left pectoral
James Marion Lee (Bust), 6/18/60-11/3/96, Right Shoulderblade
’ÄúTribal’Äù: Full Sleeve, Right Arm.
’ÄúTribal’Äù (Recognized as ’Äòveve’Äô ’Äì connections with Haitian mob?) :
Center Back.
2.
Scars include those consistent with puncture wounds, abrasions, and lacerations.
Description:
Junky.
Just an anomymous junky, wraith-thin and nearly
transparent. When he stands, he leans in place, and when he leans, he
positively slouches.
Lean and wiry, the blade of his silhouette cuts a
swath somewhere just above the six foot mark. He might weigh one seventy
soaking wet. Sickly and frail, this is a young man in dire need of a hot meal
and a good night's sleep. In another time and another place he would have
seemed consumptive. Today, the word that springs to mind is junky.
Close inspection, which is rare, shows a tattered
trucker's cap boasting a confederate flag, pulled low over blue-lensed knockoff
Fendi glasses. The hat's brim obscures his eyes and casts shadows of doubt over
that famous visage. But persistent study will reveal a disturbing parallel.
The face, beneath the hat and stubble, is Elvis's.
Elvis, that is, if Elvis were still twenty, and had spent the last ten years
supplementing his Atkins diet with intravenous narcotics. Beneath the ashen
pallor, his skin is dusky and ethnic. Along the line somewhere, an octaroon or
a seminole, maybe an islander or dominican, bred into his complexion.
There is something subtly horrifying about this
joke. It's not as though he looks like Elvis, but rather as though he wears
Elvis's face in some gruesome parody, some twisted homage to the dead and
bloated king.
Stubble obscures the lines of his sideburns, and
the ring in the corner of his lips distorts their line into a pale, sullen and
anemic sneer. Gold caps interrupt the decrepit sprawl of his twisted dentistry,
and jailhouse tattoos seethe up the tendons of his neck and across the back of
both his hands.
A grimy mechanic's jacket, oil stains patched
across its slate blue, has had its nametag torn off, an oval of discoloration
marking the absence. A single, blank white pin is a lone decoration in the
center of the discolored oval. The navy hood of an anonymous sweatshirt beneath
hangs about his nape.
A light plaid cowboy shirt underneath is open over
a flimsy cotton wifebeater, that lets the emaciated wasteland of his chest peek
through, a swarming field of ink that crawls up to the back of his neck. A
bulge over his sternum foreshadows dog tags - the punk rock gris gris. A
military satchel dangles offhandedly from his shoulder, and a wire trails from
its depths to the oversized headphones around his neck.
Dark, creased indigo jeans ride low on his hips,
selectively baggy in the way jeans become only after years of wear and
intermittent washing. Held up by a black snakeskin belt fastened with a
faux-ruby crucifix over his left hip, the jeans are sharply cuffed over black,
flatsoled Diesel shoes, and are decorated by a decade's cartography of stains
and fadings.
Jesse has "an extensive collection of nametags
and hairnets." At any given time, he may be working the graveyard shift at
a 24 Hour Fotolab, at a shady hole-in-the-wall video rental store, delivering
pizzas, or fixing cars of dubious origins. It would be nice to blame his Arcane
for his sporadic employment, but it's got more to do with his utter inability
to be anywhere on time, ever.
|
Tradition |
Dreamspeakers? |
Essence |
Questing |
|
|
|
Nature |
Visionary |
|
Cabal |
The Invisible College |
Demeanor |
Gallant |
|
Strength |
2 |
|
Charisma |
2 |
|
Perception |
3 |
|
Dexterity |
4* |
*Nimble |
Manipulation |
3 |
|
Intelligence |
3 |
|
Stamina |
2 |
|
Appearance |
1 |
*Cunning |
Wits |
4* |
|
Alertness |
2 |
Do |
1 |
Linguistics |
3* |
|
Awareness |
2 |
Drive |
3 |
Occult (Candomble) |
2 |
|
Athletics |
2 |
Melee |
1 |
|
|
|
Dodge |
1 |
Performance |
2 |
* - Languages: |
|
|
Streetwise |
3 |
Repair |
3 |
French |
|
|
Subterfuge |
3 |
|
|
Mandarin Chinese |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Portuguese |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Enochian |
|
|
Correspondence |
|
Avatar |
2 |
|
Entropy |
|
Arcane |
3 |
|
Forces |
2 |
Demesne |
1 |
|
Life |
|
Dream |
2 |
|
Matter |
1 |
|
|
|
Mind |
2 |
|
|
|
Prime |
|
Arete |
3 |
|
Spirit |
2 |
Willpower |
5 |
|
Time |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Repair Aptitude |
1 |
|
|
|
Oracular Ability |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Deranged |
2 |
|
|
|
Echoes |
3 |
|
|
|
Blacklisted |
2 |
Jesse Truant was born Horace Buford Jackson. He emerged from the
womb with a caul wrapped around his eyes to a decaying mansion in Louisiana. It
wasn't his caul. It belonged to his twin sister, who Jesse inadvertently
strangled in Utero. Judith was supposed to be the Mage.
The Jacksons were an
old Verbena family, and Judith's conception had all the right portents. Only
Jesse's prenatal clumsiness prevented her from being the newest witch in a
succession unbroken since long before the war. His mother, at the time of his
birth, was in a locked ward for dementia. No one ever spoke of his father to
him, but Jesse guessed he was a Seminole, since his mother's geneology was on
display, and didn't explain Jesse's complexion.
The house was
gigantic, room after room of rotting, waterlogged books and wallpaper lazily
forming arabesques on the wall. Skeletal great aunts lorded over dinners each
evening, and an array of silent, ancient servants trailed after the boy. He
later suspected the servants might have already been dead. It was an old
plantation house, sinking slowly into the swamps, and Jesse was the young
master. His Aunts, while clearly old French blood, had long ago lapsed into
Creole, so Jesse grew up speaking patois. After all, apart from his three
strange aunts and the sountless mute servants, Jesse didn't have a lot of
people to talk to.
He did, however, have a puppy.
A pale and anemic boy heir to a decaying fortune, and to a family
history with more than just skeletons, he was frequently absent from school.
Brain fever, the notes to the principal said. The town left him alone. They
heard about his birth, and their mothers told them quietly to stay out of the
boy's way. The county, however, took a dimmer view of things. Jesse was
constantly in fights, when he wasn't rocking autistically in his seat, or
refusing to touch a book that hadn't already been read.
When he was seven, the
county Sheriff drove him home from school and stood on the wet planks of the
veranda, chewing Jesse's great aunt Hyacinth out for negligence. Six minutes
after the Sheriff’Äôs speech was over, he was peeling out in terror, never to
return. Jesse was officially home schooled from that day on.
Jesse had always heard voices. He figured it was just the house.
And his dreams, well... everyone dreams of the same place, night after night,
don't they? Jesse dreamt of the castle, on the hill, with the oceans around it.
And the door with the puzzle that locked it. So, at age eight and a half, Jesse
solved the puzzle. Inside the door was a polished marble atrium with an ivory
fountain and a young girl, floating in a nightgown, supported by the cord
around her neck. Her name was Judith. She'd been waiting for him.
As Jesse explored the castle in his dreams, Judith taught him how
to navigate it. There were visitors - spirits and gods, forgotten and unborn,
who came to socialize, to politick, or to snoop. Nobody told him whose castle
it was. Early training for a lifetime of gate crashing. At dinner, Aunt
Hyacinth would nonchalantly ask, "What's the Marquis wearing this
season?" or, "Do tell Mr. Carrefour I say hello, won't you,
dear?" Jesse thought this was normal. He hadn't left the estate in two
years. The days he roamed the woods with his dog, or sat indoors and tried to
pry waterlogged pages apart. He often failed. He was eighteen before he found
out that Doc Eon escaped from the Hollow Earth and the clutches of its hexapod
denizens.
At nine years old, his Aunt informed him that he was going to
inherit the family ring. Matter of factly. Between soup and crab legs.
Somewhere, a male heir had died.
"Be a dear and wear a suit saturday." Judith told him to be
careful. Judith had never liked his Aunt, but Jesse just assumed it had nothing
to do with him. Nothing else ever seemed to. So, Friday night, Jesse learned
how to tie a tie. And Saturday morning, he put a suit on. That night they
killed him.
Hyacinth etched his secret name on a bullet, Muriel stood him in
front of the coffin - he hadn't figured out what was coming next - and Laetitia
shot him between the eyes. He woke up in a coffin. Judith was sitting on his
chest. He could feel the bullet under his skin, lodged against his skull.
"They're going to feed you to the gods," she says. "It's why
they never die." Jesse had other plans.
He opened the coffin and sat up in the antechamber of the dream
castle. Someone handed him a drink. He stepped out of the coffin and picked his
way through the weird polygonal twister game going on, and followed Judith out
the front door. It took a month to find Legba, get an audience, and work a
bargain. Jesse traded his name for the name of the locks binding his wrists in
the other world. Bum deal, but nine year olds don't haggle well under pressure.
Judith said he could have gotten the same thing for the name of his dog, but
she always found something to bitch about.
He woke up in a coffin, again. He whispered the name of the lock,
and felt the tumblers twist and click. He sat up. He was in the basement.
They'd killed his dog. Memories are a bit fuzzy, from here on out. Jesse has
made lots of deals and sold a lot of his memories. He doesn't know where most
of his tattoos are from. He doesn't think he always had this face on. He
remembers watching the fire eat his house, remembers his Aunts screaming, and
remembers the flashing sirens, and how long it took them to navigate the
flooding driveway.
They locked him up. Lockdown, psychward, restraints - the whole nine
yards. Nobody mentioned that the bodies were decomposed before the fire
started. Maybe nobody noticed. Jesse was shipped to a Knoxville facility,
pumped full of drugs and rolled over twice a day to prevent bedsores. The
Halidol made everything cloudy and made it easy for the boy to sleep sixteen to
twenty two hours a day. He spent a lot of time with Judith that year.
Then, paperwork was lost.
Case histories dissappeared.
The innocent boy, medicated and sleeping, didn't show any signs of
instability. A new director forged
a case history, and put John Doe up for adoption. He was ten. His
new parents called him Cricket when he was good, and James Theddeus Lee Junior
when he wasn't.
Cricket's momma was a waitress at a roadhouse outside Hope Springs. Back in the seventies, before real
estate, it was the only place for miles around, so all the boys would come by
after the dirt-road county races.
Betsy married the boy who won all the races. She and Jimmy Lee got hitched in January, while she could still
fit into her wedding dress. Jimmy
Junior was adopted six months later, when the tests after the miscarriage
showed momma could never bear children.
Cricket's dad worked at the Quality Petroleum Plant, fixing
trucks. He raced on the weekends,
and never lost. Growing up,
Cricket was a celebrity - his house was full of trophies, and everyone always
wanted to know what his dad was doing in the garage on weekends - what's he
gonna race this time?
When Cricket was eleven, his father blew out a tire at ninety and
ended up in traction for the better part of the year. He never raced again.
But he worked on everyone's cars still, and while he wasn't the town
hero anymore, he always said that he never crossed a finish line behind another
man.
Cricket's first car came on his fourteenth birthday, along with a
free tow from the junkyard. His
dad never paid for a thing after that - it was up to Cricket to lift crates at
the five and dime to buy parts.
What his dad did do was teach him what every piece was named, and what
it wanted to do. Cricket dropped
out of school after the eighth grade.
By the time he was sixteen, he was winning races. Not all of them. But enough to get served in bars, and
to get thrown out of strip clubs.
Dad got laid off after missing work. Turns out it was cancer - half dad's buddies shared his
symptoms. But workers comp
turned down the claims, and it was less than a year of Wild Turkey Chemotherapy
before Jimmy Lee, Sr. was buried by his son.
Mom had to go back to work, and took a job as a cashier at
Wal-Mart.
Cricket tried working, but all he wanted to do was work on
cars. He'd gotten really good at
it. Better'n his dad.
Skeeter Peterson was sort of a local legend. From running weed through the back
roads in the sixties to running heroin in the nineties, he was the best way to
get from Texas to Chicago without using an interstate. He also kept violent crime out of the
county, made sure the bikers behaved, and whupped any local boys he found out
were dabbling in his product.
Cricket started running drugs for Skeeter when he was seventeen.
Cricket had always been an odd kid. But now, with his days to himself, he got odder. After school Cricket'd still go
drinking at the sump with his friends.
But he'd spend all day taking a carburator apart and asking the pieces
where they wanted to go. He
started changing the radio station from PowerRock 90.3 FM down into the low
frequencies of the AM Bands. If
he'd known who Wolfman Jack had been, he might have thought it odd he was still
broadcasting. But to Cricket it
was all just great rock and roll.
A year went by. Then two.
Sherriff Dougie Barnes had known Cricket all his life. Dougie was even there when Jimmy met
Betsy, and never stopped kicking himself for not asking her out first. When Skeeter's boys got themselves
arrested, Cricket was already two states away. He drove out through Texas, saw the Grand Canyon, then spent
a couple weeks in the desert, waiting until the night was quiet before opening
it up and seeing how fast he could take her on a straight away.
Indiana is where the carnivals go in the off-season. It's the crossroads of america, and
it's home to the Indy 500. No wonder Cricket went there looking for work, and
small wonder he got hired on by a carnival. Overhaul the rides, keep the trucks working, room board,
three squares and gas money.
In Atlanta, Jesse met Skinny Pete, a semi-notorious grifter, and
was put to work. Apprenticed to Pete, Jesse would 'rope' targets in, finding
new victims for Pete's con games and guiding them back to Pete for fleecing.
Jesse took a ten percent cut, but he learned the art of the con.
He knew he was crazy. The voices were too loud. He kept seeing the
future out of the corner of his eye. Judith was hounding his dreams. Dead movie
stars spoke to him at two in the morning, sometimes from movies they weren't
even in. Everything around him turned into a portent when he looked. So he
drank a lot. He didn't dream when he was passed out.
But, being a short-con
specialist, being drunk doesn't help. He ended up in the Orleans Parish Prison
for running the gold brick, drunk, against an undercover narcotics officer on
Bourbon Street.
Voodoo Eddie was a Brazilian gambler in for a three to five on a
grand theft auto. He was also an Dreamspeaker who practised Capoeria with his
body and Candomble with his soul. Chance, fate, or something Jesse never
figured out put them in the same cell. Eddie saw Jesse convulse as his
cigarette ash fell and spelled out the name of a mob enforcer who Jesse didn't
know was set up to be shivved that night.
Eddie started talking. He laid out the game, told Jesse to quit
drinking and listen to Judith. He even believed Jesse's dreams and called them
his desmesne. Once
Jesse sobered up enough, Eddie started teaching him the basic rhythms of
Capoeira, which coincidentally doubled as the rhythms for the daily Candomble
rituals. Jesse began to learn about the gods, old and new, how to call them and
how to serve them, and how to let them ride you for a night.
Jesse was already a Con Man when he met Eddie. Candomble was as
natural to him as could be. A quick study in deception, Jesse quickly took to
the acrobatics of this new, spiritual grift. Cons are a game, Magic is a grift,
and Candomble is a jogo. It all fit. At the same time, Eddie was shaping Jesse's
understanding of his dreams, and teaching him to listen to that same voice even
when he was awake. Soon, Judith
took Jesse into the castle and showed him new rooms. Jesse learned the names of
new spirits, ones that could do things for him, as opposed to showing him
things. Eddie called it a seeking. The next day, Jesse walked.
" I was dating a sylph named Hazel. She lived inside a
shade of blue. She came to a party to celebrate Viscomte Jandelbraas being
promoted from a euclidian to a non-euclidian manifestation. He'd been a torus.
Now he was something weirder - anyway, as ranks were measured, it was a step up
and I'd helped him with some gossip and intrigue, and she was at his party.
Then she started cheating on me with some Reichsbaron from the
outer realms. I was moody and pissy and too depressed to deal with sleep so I
woke up, despite the drugs. Jandelbraas still owed me one, so he helped get me
outside my room, or maybe just convinced or explained to me that I already was
outside, and I stole the custodian's clothes from his locker and walked off the
grounds and hitchhiked to Philly. Took me three hours to realize that I’ÄôˆÑˆ¥d
left my name inside. Never did see fit to go back after it."
Voodoo Eddie's old partner Skinny Hector swings down from Chicago
to pick Jesse up. Tells him Pete's in Joliette for passing counterfiet
twenties. Jesse, under the name Jimmy Trips, had gotten a name running short
cons with Pete. Hector needed a roper, so Jesse followed the Dominican grifter
on a slow tour up and down the east coast. Jesse posed as Hector's Valet, James
Turner. Hector posed as Cagoliostro. Between them, they fleeced the Occult
Bookstore and O.T.O. circuit for all they were worth.
Hector was a Santeria practising ex-Latin King from Chicago. Jesse
didn't know enough to ask what tradition he belonged to, but his Santeria was
as close to the Candomble Eddie'd taught Jesse as Spanish is to Portuguese -
you're not speaking the same language, but you understand each other. Most of
the differences are in the vowels. He had no use for the old gods Eddie had
taught Jesse, but Hector had a whole pantheon of street gods. Itax and Renid,
their names shining in neon reflection from darkened store windows. Little gods
who could do a favor or two, but were often gone within a week, consumed by
some larger concept, streams subsumed into a river.
Jesse picked up a lot from innuendos in conversation. Pieced
together with what Judith had to say on the nights Jesse was sober enough to dream,
he started to think he understood. Then they met a perfect pigeon - a mark with
a fat wallet who screamed gullible. Jesse twitched with excitement at the
prospect of taking him down. Hector shook his head. This wasn't, he said, a
mark to be played short and against the wall. This, Hector said, was Jesse's
chance to get a look at The Big Con.
Jesse and Hector roped the mark back to Hector's Insider. Benny
Jones had a back room in his baltimore bar, and was plugged into the occult circuit.
It was the perfect setting to take the mark for all he had, and send him home
for more. After the blow-off, when tensions cooled, Jesse was introduced to
Benny's protege, Penny Ante. Haloween night, Hector and Benny started talking,
and Jesse and Penny found themselves introduced to The Big Secret.
Jesse and Hector used Benny's bar as a safehouse to recuperate
between tours. Now, on the road, Hector trusted Jesse's con skills and
concentrated on teaching him Enochian, the better to run the short con against
the spirits of the sixth age. Then a gang of satanist bikers from Revere, MA
took a dislike to the grifters, and they had to bail out of Boston in a hurry.
Hector cashed Jesse
out, and high tailed it on a plane to Monaco. Jesse didn't have a passport.
Hell, he didn't even have a name. But he needed off the East Coast and didn't
want to bring the heat down to Benny's. Plus the reason the Satanists were so
pissed was sort of Jesse's fault and he was maybe a little embarassed. So he
hooked up with a rounder, and hitched a ride to Atlantic City. He had a head
for odds, and a mind for lies. So he worked Atlantic City until he made a roll,
then headed to Vegas before things got hot.
Vegas should have been a goldmine. Everyone wanted to believe, it
was like the money just walked itself into his pockets. But the dreams were
getting more urgent, and Jesse was getting paranoid. People kept watching him.
The casino's seemed to know what he was up to.
A greyhound bus to California later (and sixty three short-conned
dollars richer), Jesse met Eddie's old partner, Johnny Irish. Johnny was an
on-again, off-again member of the local Hermetic Chapter. An Irish mobster from
House Fortunae, Johnny's sigil was under censure as often as not. He told Jesse
that , the way Jimmy figured it, Candomble was basically Voodoo, so Jesse
should join the Verbena. Judith threw a fit then that night, and Jesse took the
hint. He said he didn't want to hang around any faggotbait witches. Johnny
introduced Jesse to Donatien Brandlethwaite and left for Flagstaff.
"I was working in a bookstore right after I got recruited
for the Order. Not really interesting. I didn't fit in, I thought they were
full of shit, they suspended me for selling another student's foci for beer
money. One time, though, I tried to make the gods come and meet the other
students. I was trying to impress a girl. When I came to, all the color had
bled out of the world. Magister Donatien said it was a scourge visited on me
for my arrogance. He wanted me to write a paper about what I'd do differently.
What I'd learned. It took me two months to realize that nobody else walked
around seeing the world rot in front of their eyes. I thought it was like a TV,
and someone had just changed the channel. Anyway. I didn't write the paper.
Even with the scourge, and everything withering as I looked - if I ate enough
acid, the rotting looked like melting and the colors came back better than
before. So I failed my Paradox class.
I did meet this kid Pete Alghieri, though, and Pete was sort of
a badass. Showed me how to fix a walkman to make the static play the music of
the spheres. And taught me the horoscope game. Pick a horoscope at random. Tune
the walkman to the station that that planet broadcasts (Sucks to draw neptune -
AM stations don't have any treble reception in the cities) and read the
horoscope. That way, you retune your brain for the week until you play the game
again. Yeah. Donatien hated that, too."
. Jesse started working at the Crossed Rose, which was owned by his
Magister Donatien ex Criamon. He tried to join House Criamon, figuring that he
was weird and had tattoos, and that seemed to be all you needed. Besides,
sometimes he saw the future, too. Being the new kid, sullen and angry, he
wasn't very popular. He wasn't willing to commit to the Hermetic paradigm,
couldn't shake what Hector had taught him, or what Eddie had taught him before
that. Donatien, after watching Jesse for a week, knew he wouldn't work out
inside the Order.
"I basically
quit because they're wrong. They believe in commanding spirits. I think, well,
look: if some guy down the block is a badass and fucking with you, you don't do
pushups until you scare him. You just find a bigger badass, find out what he
wants, and make a deal. I knew I didn't have the juice to call anything heavy.
But the other kids didn't. So, in Certamen, I made like I was gonna call a
hippogriff. Classic Malandragem. Capoeria allows for dirty tricks. Certamen,
apparently, doesn't. Still - nowhere in the rules of that bullshit little
pokemon game does it say which spirits we're allowed to call for dueling. Is it
my fault I had a better phonebook than those other gimps?"
Donatien, while not knowing any Roda d'Oro, knew an old Sihing of the Wu Lung Tiger School who lived
in San Francisco's enormous Chinatown. William Li didn't really care what Jesse
said or thought, as long as Jesse showed the proper Ching (respect), and swept the floors every
morning. Pete, Donatien, and Johnny all banded together to convince Jesse to
keep his mouth shut. The Hermetics were happy to have him out of their hair,
Will didn't pay any attention to him or make any demands beyond swept floors,
and Jesse had an official Tradition.
Jesse committed
himself to his reading and studying. He quit his bookstore job. For rent, he
parlayed a bartending job into a deejaying gig under the name Kid Sinister. The
Hollow Ones call a Mage who uses the turntables a Vizard. So, being an upstart
Wu Lung apprentice, Jesse has titled himself the first Dragon Vizard. This leads
to a lot of jokes about heroin. Jesse met Hiro at a rave he was working, and
the two hit it off.
Algie got me to stick around, though, and when this son &
lumiere freak named Hiro showed up, shit started getting weird. We all sort of
stopped talking to the elders, because they were all hostile to each other, and
bitching about the storm, and talking about war this and ascension that. I, on
the other hand, knew a drumbeat that could summon the loas to the dancefloor. I
don't remember who it was that thought of putting a rave in an Orgone box. If
it was me, I must have had a different planet that week. Hiro says it was the
pigs, but I never listen to them. Right after they showed up, though, we made a
big Orgone collector, consecrated it to resonate at the frequency of Venus, and
built it inside a warehouse. Once the beat kicked in, and I added some
ultrabass NLP, pidgin enochian dialects that took the pain of dancing away,
people started getting really into it. Hiro and Algie were dead on and before
you knew it, the gods were on the dancefloor.
Jesse, Hiro and Pete moved into an old decrepit frathouse. Keene
appeared on the scene, and suddenly they had P.R. Keene could be their face to
the Traditions. Keene, after all, had his own sigil. He was a grownup.
Sihing Li despaired at the irreverence Jesse showed - his amnesia
made accurate geneology impossible, and his mental quirks meant he was
constantly inventing lineages for himself. But Li recognized that, in this
cultureless land, the old ways must adapt. So he let Jesse learn what he could,
and sought to teach the Capoerista what he could of the Kuei Lung Chuan
fighting style.
No Nan Wu in history has suffered such a loss of
face as Sihing Li, when his Sheng Shou Jesse returned with, not the traditional
jian of the ancestors, but a Katana. A replica. Of the Katana used by a Belgian
playing a Scotsman in a series of awful television movies. And Jesse insisted
on calling it his "ninja sword." Confucius, obviously, never dealt
with the Invisible College.
A junky raver Hiro knew from McDonalds was crashing on the couch.
The night she was overdosing and talking to her gods, Hiro and Jesse were
trying to find someone to buy this monkey they'd stolen from Pete's friend The
Brit. But the monkey had his own stash, and somehow they never got around to
it, and before you knew it, the Brit had a room in the house.
When it came time to train with Butterfly Swords, Jesse's
tape-handled machetes, at least, didn't come with certificates of
authenticities or signed celebrity headshots. Jesse's katana dissappeared right
around the time Hiro came back from Otakon with a Sailor Moon costume. Sihing
Li was quietly ecstatic.
Algie dissapeared. I think it was a girl. Or a guy. Maybe money,
too. Right after that, I figured out that the loas lived inside a television.
Joanie started hitting on me, but I think she knew my ex so I never let on I
noticed. But when I told Hiro, he grokked to it quick. Next rave, he was
projecting dead rock stars on the walls. And once the drugs kicked in - was
this the hippy's doing, or did he show up later? - once the drugs kicked in,
no-one noticed that the projections were dancing, too.
Magpie wore Peter Lorre one night when I'd just gotten this
great batch of ahayuasca roach carapaces off the local aborigines. So I hit a
vein and was on the couch when Lorre starts pitching scams. Next thing I
remember, I've got a tattoo all over my back, I don't have a shadow, and I
can't speak Spanish anymore. But now the gods can wear me, and now I'm swapping
favors left and right, brokering deals and I've got a new girlfriend and she's
a selkie and things are great. But Hiro claims we have to split because the
cops are coming again - I have to pack my records. Hiro is breaking down his
computers and the kid's tearing the televisions apart. We never move the pigs.
I try not to think about how they always get to the basement before us."
Finally, Jesse made the necessary breakthrough. It was using
Enochian, rather than Mandarin, and his 'Ancestors' were the past members of
the Invisible College, but Jesse managed to demonstrate his grasp of what he
calls NeuroLinguistic Programming. Li, glad to be rid of him, recognized him as
a member in good standing of the Li Hai, and let him go.
Lock up your
equations.
The decision to move came suddenly, and might not even have been
spoken of. One night, they passed out individually as usual, amidst whatever
they were doing. The next morning, they woke up and it was unanimous.
They started packing. They moved to Toronto. Eva was aghast.
Toronto, apparently, was not on her list of happening cities. She wouldn't be
caught dead there.
Jesse was left behind, when the Cabal moved, to try and convince
Eva. After a few weeks, Eva still refused, so Jesse left her flowers and snuck
away, hopping a train to Canada.
Toronto was a blur for Jesse. Endless nights in a Holiday Inn,
Compton appearing, then dissapearing. After he left, Jesse wandered after him,
tryiing to track the man. He got lost in a seemingly endless sprawl of tract
houses that were identical. He swears it was a Shard Realm. It may just have
been the suburbs.
After a month of sleeping in an identical series of garden sheds,
Jesse found his way back into city center. Coincidentally, this was about how long
it took for the pillbox of mescaline he'd swiped from Pobble to run out. On his
return, Jesse found that Compton was still gone, the College's two closest
allies had been murdered, and the local Tradition Mages had closed ranks
against the Invisible College.
The College
moved to some Vale somewhere.
Jesse got a call from home.
When Cricket found out his momma was sick, he drove hard. The highways opened up - traffic
parted around him. His car burned fear, chewing up distace
and spitting out speed. Country
roads that were broken up decades ago forked away, short-cuts dog-legging
through the penumbra were as familiar to him as the back roads around his
home. In the history of travel,
there have been few swifter homecomings.
But he wasn't soon enough.
Paradigm
Between Eddie's Candomble, Donatien's brief
attempts at Hermetic Tutelage filtered through the madness of House Criamon,
and what little he managed to glean from the Celestial Bureucracy of William
Li, Jesse learned a strange homebrew paradigm.
The spirits are everywhere and everything. They
include all sorts of things - a spirit is the life of an idea, a word given
form. Every word has a spirit. There are no snonyms. They don't have faces,
that's just how we interact with them. The world is a five dimensional crystal
vibrating in an eight dimensional fluid. When thoughts intersect our three
dimensional lattice, from outside the confines of spacetime, this is how they
appear.
"After appeasing the shih, a Wu Lung often
petitions the god whose portfolio contains the power that the Dragon Wizard
wishes to utilize. This can be as simple as a quick promise to a city god when
the Chi'n Ta wants to create a door to escape through or as elaborate as a huge
meal, money, and gifts given to persuade a Minister of Heaven to favor him with
thunderbolts, flight, or the secrets of life and death." (Dragons of the East, pg. 57)
We used to call them Angels. Then orixa, then lwas.
Now, they take the faces of celebrities and comic book characters. Fictional heros
and dead rock stars. Elementals, ghosts, and gods. They speak in the static of
television, wave from the reflection of neon light.
Watch a newspaper fold itself in the wind and it
will spell out your horoscope. If you use tarot cards right, the scenes they
show animate themselves and become mirrors, set at odd angles, that reflect
around the corners of time.
Jesse's paradigm involves naming. And the precise
motions that Eddie taught him are what Jesse considers a language. Do is a
means by which a Mage can write in space, with his body as a stylus. A form is
a word, a name, a rune. A kata is a phrase, a sigil, an incantation. To get
what you want is a question of deception and subterfuge, no matter what the
language or what the medium. Jesse sees no contradiction here.
"The Roda [d'Oro] work to blend Western
martial arts and belief systems with traditional Akashic methods. ... Akashic
Capoeristas apply Do to the capoeria fighting style, the Candomble reigion and
other aspects of Brazilian culture." (Guide to the Traditions, pg 124)
There is an economy of barter. After initial
contact, Jesse performs favors for the spirits, stockpiling goodwill. Then he
can call on them and they are obligated to return the favor. He engages in
weird ritualistic behavior (Like voodoo - drink rum and curse and smoke cheap
cigars and eat candy, and you get Papa Ghede's favors) to garner favor from
them, and then he spends these favors as needed. Speed Racer can teach you, for
a night, to drive like a maniac. Borges' librarian will read to you from all
the books never written. Batman will teach you to hide in the shadows and
dissapear.
Everyone knows about these spirits, everyone feels
them - Jesse just knows how to talk to them. If you speak their language,
everyone will hear you. Neurolinguistic Programming is what you call speaking
in the imperative tense of Enochian. In the linguistic field that is your mind,
you can construct golems - automata - dreamthings - that are every bit as
autonomous as a computer's subroutines. These are called cyclical prayers, zen
koans, or artificial intelligences. All they are are ideas given wing, thoughts
that you grow until they bud and flower and live on their own.
Foci
|
Correspondence |
Fluids, Distorting influences, Symbolic Links |
|
|
Entropy |
Tarot Cards, TV, Magazines, Cut Ups, Decay, Drugs |
|
|
Forces |
Candomble, Tattoos or Charms |
(unncecessary) |
|
Life |
Coral, Retrovirii, Drugs, Runes, Capoeira,
PseudoScientific Apparati |
|
|
Matter |
Alchemy, Playdoh, Sigils |
|
|
Mind |
Languages |
(unncecessary) |
|
Prime |
The Color Gold, Money, Water, Sigils, Big Red Soda Water |
|
|
Spirit |
TV, Radio, Cutups, Music, Candomble |
|
|
Time |
Tarot Cards, TV, Magazines, Cut Ups, Capoeira |
|
Notes
1. Capoeira:
"In Portuguese, the language
of Brazil, Capoeira is referred to as a jogo, or a game.
Capoeira is characterized by deceptive kicks, sweeps, trip-em-ups, head butts,
elbows and knees. Two players enter a circle of onlookers and participants,
known as a roda. At the head of the roda are musicians, fellow Capoeira
players, who play instruments specific to the art. There is the berimbau, an
primitive bowed instrument, played bya Mestre, or master of the art, whose
tempo dictates to the players what game they will play in the roda. The
berimbau is accompanied by the atabaque, a floor drum, and a pandeiro, a
Brazilian tambourine. The Mestre also leads the onlookers and fellow players in
songs that reflect the type of games being played within the roda.
Fast tempos dictate games where the players throw fast, powerful kicks and
blows at each other, along with movements reminiscent of the most acrobatic
gymnastics. Slower tempos dictate more dance like interaction, and more
deception between the two players. Lyrics to songs reflect the action. For
example, if one player is obviously losing his cool, the Mestre might sing a
traditional song about a bawling child who is crying. The lyrics serve to
remind the upset player that he is losing his cool, and hence emotional balance,
a key to good Capoeira play.
On it's deepest level, Capoeira transcends martial arts, music and ritual and
is a philosophical framework for approaching and interacting with the others
and the world at large. It is a deep and holistic art form that pushes the
practitioner to the proverbial limits - physically, mentally, emotionally and
spiritually."
(http://www.capoeira.com/planetcapoeira/popup/whatis.htm)
Some basics are here:
http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/usr/h96b/h9650297/cap-basics.html
2. Candomble:
"Derived from the Yoruba
people of West Africa, Candombl seeks harmony with nature. The religion is
organized around religious centres known as terreiros, which are usually led by
high priestesses, mes de santo (mother of saints) or priests, pais de santo (father
of saints). Followers worship a pantheon of orixs in an annual cycle,
like the liturgical cycle of the Catholic Church . . . In the religious
ceremonies, practitioners dress in the colours of the orixs and place food at
the altar before singing special songs and dancing precisely choreographed
steps to the sacred drums. The anthropomorphic nature of the orix allows an
intimate contact between believer and deity, and the highlight of the Candombl
ceremony is the epiphany, or possession, when the orix takes over the
believer's body."(http://www.ama.africatoday.com/candomble.htm)
3. Arcane Effect: Jesse is subtly
unnatural. The universe is trying to forget about him. Something about him has
the quality of dreams, forgotten on waking. When he lost his name, he lost his
face as well, emerging from the dream wearing the face of a young Elvis. It's
not attractive - it's a parody, Elvis the junky, the emaciated and bony horror
lurking in the closet. People naturally ignore junkies; it's hard to
concentrate long enough to realize you've seen his face before, and harder to
take the memory seriously.
4. Echoes: While, classically,
Jesse’Äôs ilk have soured milk, cast no reflection, and turned candles blue,
Jesse sours YooHoo and makes Coke go flat. His voice and image are nontransmissible : he can’Äôt use a
telephone, he can’Äôt record his voice, and he doesn’Äôt appear in
photographs.
5. Derangement: "Reagan's
Syndrome," as Daisy calls it - Jesse does not have the standard boundary
between his imagination and his memory. He recalls movies and books as though
he were inside them, and constantly tells stories of his past that are cobbled
together from rock lyrics, newspaper articles, and tabloids.
6. Blacklisted : Jesse's
fingerprints are those of Horace Jackson, escapee from a Knoxville psychward
and suspect in the murder-by-arson of his two Aunts. Who were, coincidentally,
valued and respected members of the Verbena, who would very much like to know
where Horace went. They are also the fingerprints of Jack Tycho, who never did
call his parole officer back in the Big Easy.
7. Enochian: While Jesse was only
a bona fide Hermetic for a week, his association with the other members of his
chantry, from Skinny Hector to Benny, to the other players, means that he has
learned Enochian, the lingua franca of The Invisible College. It does not carry
any of the mechanics that the Hermetic variant carries, it is merely an
important part of his paradigm.
|
Name |
Effect |
System |
|
Chirikitik |
Lesser servitor of communications
and messenger to the loa of the new city |
(Forces 2) Disrupt Service to a Cellphone. |
|
The word for 'Mirror', writ in mirror-image enochian under
an oilslick puddle in an alley |
... |
(Forces 2) Redirect the light, effectively making a double-mirror -
a doublebounce - so we're looking down at what's above us |
|
Orgone Collector This wonder is a collection of baffles and
collectors Jesse and Hiro built, with the help of whoever was around. Somehow,
miraculously, it worked. No-one knows why. When assembled, it It is portable
enough to set up in different locations, but takes time and energy to
assemble and dissassemble. |
Distills the energy of a
party into Tass, in the form of Big Red Soda Water leaking from an Air
Conditioning Duct somewhere on the premises. |
(Mind 2/Prime 3) |
|
Ophis Onesiskeros, Snakes of Dream and Shadow The snakes are called 'Kashmirs' by the houngans
who summon (from cauchemars) |
Living
shadow snakes, distillations of fear, are summoned forth from the shadows to
do the bidding of the summoner. The
summoning is vulgar. Difficulty 7. In shadows, the lack of visibility lowers
the difficulty to 6. Each
'damage level' of the summoning rote summons a single snake. The rote is an
instantaneous effect - the snakes remain until struck by light or until they
take damage, at which point they lose cohesion and merely become shadows
again. |
(Forces
2/Mind 2)* Forces
2 distils the shadow to the
necessary viscosity, Mind 2 gets the right vibrations of
fear oscillating through the tenebrous liquid for it to come alive. The snakes
divide the summoner's Manipulation + Occult between their
'soak', 'to-hit' and 'damage' pools. For initiative
purposes, they use the Mage's wits and have no dexterity, and cannot change
actions. Soaked with
WP vs 8, and any levels of 'damage' done drain from dice pools as formless,
numbing fear grips the target. This numbing is dispelled instantly on contact
with sunlight. *-
(Mind 3) or (Corr 2) works at a distance |
|
Batida O Iludir Breakbeat Atabaque Malandragem |
(Mind
1) These
rotes, based on the Do style of Capoeria, all use Mind 1 to begin autonomous
subprocesses. Since
a spirit is the life of an idea, Katas can become sentient: various parts of
the body each reciting their memorized speeches on motion independently. |
Left and Right hand attacks do not split
pool. A Dodge
is possible without splitting pools. After Dodging
a kick doesn't split pools. |
|
The Subtle Knife This may be one of the first Bata'a rotes. It's
certainly one of the first taught to any aspiring vodousite. |
Correspondence
allows action at a distance by the usual table. Forces
both applies the initial nudge, and determines the form of the final push. Time and
Entropy collude to insure the chain of coincidence. |
(Corr
2, Time 2, Entropy 1, Forces 2) Coincidental.
Difficulty
5. Damage is
from Forces, in whatever form the mage chooses. The time elapsed from
enaction to delivery is up to the Storyteller. However, once the chain of
probability is forged, the only way to break it is to destroy the link used
for the Correspondence portion of the rote. |
|
Hello My Name Is... The Technocracy might think that suits and shades
make you anonymous. That's because even they don't see the kid bringing them
their pizza. This rote goes so far under the radar, even the Men in Black
aren't hip to it yet. |
|
(Mind
2) Cast on a
nametag, this rote only functions if the nametag is worn with its associated
uniform. Successes add to the wearer's Arcane for the duration (Usually one eight
to twelve hour "shift") The nametag
serves as a focus for the rote, when 'Nobody' is written in enochian graffiti
on it. This rote is almost invariably coincidental. |
|
Hand Strike: |
Damage is 3 + successes |
|
Foot Strike: |
Damage: 4 + successes |
|
Hand and Foot Strikes may be combined with
a jumping attack. |
Difficulty and damage are both +1 |
|
Throw: |
Damage: 3+sucesses |
