((3pts))
Sorry everyone. It might be that we've been wasting a lot of time down here, but I don't think so. No more floaty, abstract nonsense now; it's time to start getting down to serious work. We've been been blundering around in the dark on this end, but now things are finally starting to fall into place. Most of our problems have ended up presenting their own solutions. Arcadia was not a waste of time, but it might be now if they hadn't kicked me out of the orrery. I've had my work cut out for me trying to convince June and the rest of the staff here that we should be focusing our attention elsewhere, but slowly I'm making them understand. June was intent on finding some way to sever the connection between Mundus and Arcadia, so that the abductions would permanently cease. We had a long heart-to-heart about our priorities. It's not as if we're in any position to launch a mad scheme like that right now.
What we need to find out now is, how right are you, Chris? I mean about what you said a while back, about how our perceiving the medium is supposed to change it. I didn't believe you, but now I think I do. It was supposed to be an idiotic myth spread by plebs who didn't understand quantum physics, but then there's Arcadia. It shouldn't be hard for any of us to believe that maybe this world isn't the real one, but just something floating on a bed of consciousness. If that's true, we have two... very theoretical options. We could try to follow in the footsteps of the Atlanteans; we hunt down whatever it is that will allow us to gain complete control of reality. If someone can do that, what would cthullu and his horde matter? We could shut them out of existence; Terra-Firma is the world, and maybe from a position like that we could we could make this world what it was supposed to be, into a place where truth exists and what is done cannot be undone.
But honestly I don't have any idea what I'm talking about. I mean I don't have very many ideas, not in any meaningful way. I wouldn't even know where to start on a hunt for this 'universal remote'. It really seems like something we should leave to the people who’ve been at this for longer than us. I'm sure if it can be done, Armitage and the divers orders of magi are well on their way to success. I write to him frequently, but he never writes back. So... option two... the realistic option, the one we really need to work together on right now... is to get the hell out. We gather together... as many of the people we care about as we can, and we find some lifeboat, some ark, and we LEAVE. I don't know where but HERE we're vulnerable. Even without this invasion it'd be much too dangerous to stay here, eventually the flux will corrupt our histories until we cease to exist. Of course this all depends... on just how right you are, Chris. I don't know how we'll escape, but it must be possible. Perhaps only in death. But if that's the case I trust we'll all be dead pretty soon. I'd rather go out fighting.
So at the moment we're kind of riding on a wave of euphoria; a taste of things to come, I hope. Like I've... talked... about before, the Council is... polarizing, over competing ideologies. I'll confess up 'till now it's been lots of politics, little magic. But we're all sick of the paralysis; there was never enough consensus to actually achieve anything so most of us opted to go our separate ways. As far as I can tell it's becoming a madhouse from one end of the country to the other, which is bad news and good news for us. I've never had this much money before, but at least now I have some idea what to do with it. The gents and I have carved out a territory of our own in the catacombs below Arkham; it's a better hide-out than I could have hoped for. There's a lot of space, and a lot of ways in and out, even a hall wide enough to use as a parking garage. Actually the place is so deep we haven’t seen the end of it. We think it might lead all the way down to the giant caves. You know the ones. It's not something we like to think about much less talk about. Eventually we'll have to explore, but for now we've barricaded off as many of the deep roads as we could find, and laid down hundreds of noisy, explosive rune-traps and cheap surveillance cameras. There are about thirty of us down here not counting the wolves, but they don't stick around. Not sure what to call ourselves yet, or this place. It's bad luck to start acting like something we're not, so for now it's just 'US', just 'WE' and 'HERE'. Nearly everyone has been able to quit their day-job if they had one, and the ones that didn't can still stay in town and focus on what's most important. That's how things are, for now.
One last thing before I change the subject. We've been trying to get into contact with whoever we think could be sympathetic. There's been some limited dialogue with Chieron, and thankfully none at all with the US government. A while back we had a little unexpected exchange with the Church of Scientology. The last thing their wire-less operator said to us when we... hesitantly... asked about helping each other out, they said “Keep out! Shut up! You're blocking my signal! I'm working Miskatonic!” But then about a month ago they actually contacted us, several times over ephemeral Marconi frequencies. They said they'd been preparing for this 'apocalypse' for decades now, building fortresses, bunkers, stockpiling everything. They said they knew I was here, knew about the five of us, knew about what happened off the coast of Innsmouth, what we'd all been up to since then, and that yes an 'alliance' of sorts sounded like a splendid idea. At the moment we're still waiting for them to pay us a visit and inspect our 'facilities'. We've discussed the possibility of them setting up some of their own offices down here so long as we promise to never bring up religion. I'm hoping the mess doesn't put them off. My gut say we can trust them, more than Chieron at least, though I still hope none of us end up pissing off Chieron if we can help it.
Now it's story-time. I hope Darrel's paying attention.
You guys remember that fancy pea-shooter I picked up? Really skinny bolt-action rifle that never worked? Well I never tried it back then, but there wasn't any ammunition it could take. And you remember I talked about Logosh, right? Basically we've got a small pack of werewolves to come out here with us when we headed for the hills. They found a... lush spirit locus in the middle of the big abandoned train-yard at the east edge of town. One of the long tunnels opens up right onto it, so that kind of sealed the deal for them. A couple are tribe-less, including Logosh, but the other three are part of the 'Iron Masters' clan and apparently sympathetic to 'the cause'. None of them live on-site, I think for the most part they stick near the old switch-yard. Sometimes I think they make their way down to depths of the chasm to hunt. Anyway, a few days ago we discovered that during the night there was another pack that was bigger, scoping us out. On the cameras we thought we counted about six to eight individuals, about two covering all our surface exits, big, tough. They were keeping their distance but I think Darrel knows how we felt. For a few hours we couldn't allow anyone in or out; the gentlemen and non-gentlemen we had outside we told to make for the edge of town opposite the train-yard and stay put.
Darrel, I don't think you'll be too surprised what we decided to do next. We thought that the best thing to do is to think like a werewolf. “Prey waits” so we were going to attack first. Logosh (who isn't the pack leader, I should mention. Honestly he's like the runt of the litter. Reminds me of someone) was the only one of 'our' wolves we could get in contact with, but he said they were all having a tense standoff with some interlopers at the locus in the old switch-yard. I told 'em we'd be on our way and they should wait. It was then I turned around and noticed that the rifle on its mount was glowing. Parts of it. All the metallic parts had turned the color of harsh moonlight, and in places there were lines of glowing runic characters I'd never seen before. There wasn't time to examine it, but without much thought I took it off the wall, slung it over my back and dashed off. So then about two dozen of us were booking it as fast as we could down the long tunnel. It's dark and full of garbage, old cars and piles of scrap metal. I notice that even though it's very dark, and the rifle seems to be lit very bright, it doesn't illuminate anything even up close. It's the only 'weapon' I've brought, but I figure with this many of us one gun isn't going to make much difference. A few of us are mages, and a few of us have some experience.
Near its the passage widens, and most of the junk and and litter is piled to the sides. A toppled old boxcar and the gaping exit are all we can really see when we shine our flashlights ahead. We didn't make any attempt to be quiet getting there, so I hoped some of the brutes staking us out had heard us and came that way. We outnumbered them so the thing to do was to beat them decisively, show them we were dangerous and territorial. I think we all hoped they'd try to attack us at the mouth of the tunnel just before the top of the ramp so we could meet them in a wall. As it is we echelon-ed up, I hung back, and we advanced carefully towards the dimly floodlit opening. Around that part of town intermittent machine-gun fire is an almost expected sound, so we weren't TOO worried about calling attention. We got lucky. Almost silently one of them dropped from the ceiling and started charging right for us. It was so fast for a moment I didn't think anyone would get a chance to attack. We'd already hesitated for a moment not knowing whether this was an enemy or a friend. But everyone was springing into action as fast as they could, kneeling, taking aim, brandishing staves.
With nothing else to do I instantly took a small reflexive step back and went through the motions of loading the gun. I brought it up to eye-level so I could look down the iron-sights and held the butt to my right shoulder. Momently there were spasmic, sickening pulses of yellow light and a satanic roar of gunfire. It looked like the silhouette of another werewolf was bounding around the corner on the left side. Meanwhile the first of the brutes looked like it suddenly understood it'd made a mistake and was skidding to a halt while being absolutely drenched in led and plasma. It's worth noting none of us were carrying silver ammunition; we can't afford it anymore. I don't know if you've noticed but silver is going for five thousand dollars an ounce right now, and climbing. All 'deez vampuhs and werewoos n' shit. Anyway, I didn't really take careful aim. I didn't expect anything to happen. I pointed the stupidly long lithe barrel in the general direction of the new shadow, and I pulled the trigger. And I won't sugarcoat it anymore, what happened was... it like a dense, radiant bolt of pure moonlight. Not a beam like a laser, but a bolt, like plasma. The sound of firing was half way between a chirp and a bark, and loud enough to drown out everything else for half a moment. There was almost no recoil, but it scared the trousers off me anyway and I almost dropped it. The shot went wide but for a moment it clearly illuminated everything around.
For a few seconds I was convinced it was broken. When it fired I FELT the barrel snap and front half dangling. I wasn't surprised since I'd gotten it so cheaply, and I didn't even feel much regret since even though I knew it worked that didn't make it any more practical. But then I noticed something in the dim light. The barrel hadn't fractured, where it came apart was actually a hinged expansion joint! I simply hadn't ever payed it enough attention. The obvious thing to do was to see if I could fold it back or take it off without breaking it. When I drew it back the end of the barrel clicked into a small cavity just in front of the trigger. It was like a sawed-off shotgun. A bolt-action, sawed-off shotgun. Thinks got a bit worse after that. The lead werewolf collapsed and was crawling desperately to get away, but then our friends showed up. In a few more seconds there was almost a ball of misshapen wolves wrestling, growling and yelping together at the mouth of the tunnel. Most of us realized that there wasn't anything we could do to help at that point, since we couldn't tell one side from the other. A few kept spraying for a bit, but that wouldn't really be enough to hurt them. I could only hope that our wolves were the bulk, or that the strangers would turn on us so we could recognize them. We kept our lights on them so they wouldn’t forget we were close by. Instead the scuffle carried on for another twenty seconds and suddenly broke up, and the wolves chased each other out into the yard. I saw an opportunity to test the rifle again and stepped over to what might have become a corpse though it was still twitching. When I pulled the trigger at close to point blank I regretted it. When the brute's neck and jaw disintegrated a lot of us ended up needing a bath.
Whole affair didn't last longer than a minute. The packs chased each other straight across the switch-yard and into the forest, but it was never possible to tell who was who. Two of the spies seemed to be covering the retreat in human form with a pair of Kalashnikovs, but in another moment they were booking it out of there. We don't think anyone else died. None of ours was badly hurt. It's also worth noting that none of us ever suffered from the lunacy at any point, even though not all of us are magi. That's definitely something to celebrate, I think. Now we know things really wont ever be the same again, which is good, obviously.
Now, do any of you happen to know Morse code? It's actually pretty easy to pick up on if you don't, and it's easy to get hold of software that can translate it for you. There's really no reason most of us shouldn't be in contact with one another more than once a month. Like I've said before, what we ought to do is get back together, but if that's not possible we can still try to work as a team. As it turns out, simple, analogue technology is much easier to enchant than anything digital, and an old-style Marconi wireless radio imbued with force magic has access to hundreds of thousands of frequencies unavailable to mundane equipment, as well as effectively infinite range. You can apply cipher after cipher to encode the signal, and a 'language' like Morse is easy to rearrange every few weeks. You guys let me know what you think. Lizzie, Ricky, Darrel, it'd be great to have any and all of you back here for a visit, or keeps for that matter. We could really use you. The catacombs down are something we can't ignore forever. They just go down, and down, and down, spiraling around a huge waterfall. It's disturbing, the architecture looks like something from old, old Europe,and there are bookshelves, rotted furniture, chandeliers. But it doesn't look like it was ever actually meant to be lived in. To me it looks like a... caricature, somehow.
All three of you know more than a little something about spirits and the dearly departed, and that's what I'd expect to find down there. We'd really like to install some iron gates for safety's sake, but that'll be an expensive project. For the moment I'm hoping we can ward them off with symbolism and a stiff upper lip, but not forever. Lizzie one of your little death-gates would be a very welcome sight down here. I could send you the exact coordinates if you need them. I'm sure all of you can take a little break from your jet-setting, globetrotting lifestyles to have a get-together. You're welcome too, Chris. If you're ever in the valley let me know. I'll recognize you.
“We're in 2012, we've come a long way since prehistoric times, surely we're mature enough as a species to see further than our plain old human body.”
Not as a species, no, sorry. How much time do you spend with humans? No.
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