Retirement Plans Up In Smoke
MutantsMichael — 4/8/25, 7:32 AM
Retirement Plans Up In Smoke
MutantsMichael — 4/8/25, 7:33 AM
@Dr. Cronk @Madness Dossier
MutantsMichael — 4/8/25, 8:13 AM
A follow-up on Beth Cole's/Control's aura, Beth Cole's physical shape, and other information Mitch would've gained from Aura Vision: Beth Cole's aura: Almost entirely subsumed by Control, even when she was nominally driving her own mind and body, her aura looks deeply traumatized. Her mind and soul seem like they were broken apart and put back together again, Mitch has to assume, by the Project (or the Secret School). On the mental health front, Mitch has to surmise she has dissociative identity disorder at the very least. Her method of coping with this mental and emotional scarring is to be perfectly businesslike, even when she is not directly channeling Control and acting as Their voice. Physically she's in peak condition; not physically strong by any means, but a perfectly healthy 25 year old woman. No evident foreign bodies, chips, or implants. As mentioned, she has great skill in NLP; Mitch wonders if it is her "emptiness" that allows her even greater facility with the Language than someone like Marshall. Other than the channeling of Control, she seemed to have no other "psi" abilities up, but Mitch would guess she could erect a Mind Block very easily if needed, again, given her particular cerebral architecture. Control's aura: As mentioned, it gives Mitch the same vibe as Roger's loa and Elizabeth Clare Prophet's channeling of Uriel. But as Mitch spends the next few seconds after Beth climbs back in her jeep committing the Control "fingerprint" to memory, it feels like the numinous ivory-white aura of Control had a... tripartite vibe to it, like three giant, blinding, overpowering lights whose constituent luminous auras bleed into one. Mitch's hunches, finely attuned to encountering powerful entities (like Irruptors) whose stage dressing is largely Bullshit, guesses that while these three constituent entities that comprise Control might have considerable psychic power behind them, underneath all that obfuscatory light are three ordinary human beings. It felt, on the whole, like an encounter meant to cow Mitch.
April 14, 2025
MutantsMichael — 4/14/25, 10:10 AM
Just a quick prompt to @Dr. Cronk to see what Mitch plans to do with himself after this unexpected visit from Control. Whatever the plans, whatever the latitude, whomever he contacts or doesn't, I'll move things along as best I can as soon as I can.
Dr. Cronk — 4/14/25, 11:42 AM
Right, okay, Mitch's agenda item remains neutralizing Dr Killinger. Spooky action at a distance isn't viable given his Owl-granted near-total immunity to scrying. What Mitch needs is information about when the villain is flying in one of his private jets shuttling from coast to coast.
[11:42 AM]
I find myself reluctant to use certain phrases despite the man being dead, for fear of echelons, which is maybe irrational or even superstition on my part.
[11:43 AM]
But look: he flies. He doesn't fly commercial. Flight paths are logged and registered. His cloak against scrying protects him personally, not the tank of fuel oil a dozen feet from his seat.
[11:44 AM]
In for a penny, in for a pound: Mitch goes inside, warms up his color television with the newfangled cable hookup, and flips through channels while meditating in an oracular fashion upon the optimal route towards success.
1
MutantsMichael — 4/14/25, 11:58 AM
(This is fantastic, Jeff... I have some ideas but now I need to do a bit more cable TV research... I'll have something for you tonight and will make the Oracle rolls secretly.)
April 15, 2025
MutantsMichael — 4/15/25, 11:30 AM
Thanks to the assiduous efforts of Archie's brother-in-law Tim's connections with Bob Magness of TeleCommunications, Inc., leader in the rapidly-growing cable industry west of the Mississippi (and equal thanks to the Project's funding of the St.-Germain School's material expansion), Mitch and Mary-Lynn's cottage, along with all the new geodesic classrooms being built right now, has a snazzy cable hookup. TV reception on the mountain has always been shaky, this far from the big broadcasting markets in Oregon and Northern California, so now Mitch, Mary-Lynn, the faculty and the kids can access up to 20 CHANNELS from the Bay Area, Sacramento, Chico, Eureka, and Reno/Carson City. In addition, there's a rarely-used local channel reserved for Mount Shasta town information, but it doesn't really ever have much in the way of live broadcasting as the local cable outlet is still getting its legs under it (and, let's be fair, essentially the St.-Germain School brought cable to the town of Mount Shasta, and the town frankly doesn't know what to do with it). The TCI cable guy, when he came to wire the cottage this summer, promised Mitch and Mary-Lynn that by next year, there would be all kinds of new national channels providing movies and live sports available, using the yet-to-be-launched Satcom satellite. Mitch takes the chunky Jerrold Electronics "clicker" box into his hand, unspools the cord to the beanbag situated in front of his and Mary-Lynn's TV, and begins to practice cable videomancy.
[11:31 AM]
(results of Oracle in a bit)
Dr. Cronk — 4/15/25, 11:55 AM
Now that is a fucking clicker
MutantsMichael — 4/15/25, 11:56 AM
Not gonna lose it, that's for sure.
[11:59 AM]
[12:02 PM]
Looks like channel 12 in Chico is one of those little dual-network stations
MutantsMichael — 4/15/25, 12:03 PM
(Whoa! Eegah!)
In its early years, KHSL-TV produced a number of local programs. The Paul Bunyan Show was noteworthy for being the springboard for actor Richard Kiel for a year in 1963; in addition to hosting the children's show, he was channel 12's merchandising director.[18]
@Dr. Cronk
Now that is a fucking clicker
Leonard — 4/15/25, 12:21 PM
Onion headline: people now watching movies on device smaller than their parents' remote
MutantsMichael — 4/15/25, 12:36 PM
Oracle "card" 1. It's early Saturday morning so the programming as Mitch begins flipping channels is largely kiddie-oriented and dry public affairs stuff... Mitch tunes into the vibes on the Tube and looks for something to send his Oracular senses into. The first thing that does is a commercial for Braniff Airlines, which airs during a break in the Central Valley local agricultural affairs show Focus on Farming out of Sacramento's KXTV CBS affiliate Channel 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlK3bKxV88Q The Western Hemisphere, criss-crossed with airline routes... it hooks directly into Mitch's realization that Kissinger is well into the fourth month of his post-Nixon "shuttle diplomacy" in places all around the globe: in General Pinochet's Chile, in Cyprus in the aftermath of Turkey's invasion, between Israel and Syria and Egypt, negotiating Israel's post-Yom Kippur War retaking of territory with both countries. This commercial sets the tone and confirms Mitch's suspicion: if the man is gonna get got, it's going to happen outside the umbrella of safety provided by the welcoming, enveloping embrace of the wings of the Owl. (Or is it a Condor?) Which means it's going to happen outside that very same Western Hemisphere in the Braniff ad. (It's the final pull-out of that crane shot that makes Mitch realize They have the entirety of the Western Hemisphere under their watchful Eye.) The Owls have much (not all! but much, and every place the good Nobel laureate might visit in person; Henry's certainly not going to Havana anytime soon) of that hemisphere covered. Whether Owlish protection exists in a powerful bubble when the good doctor is visiting places outside the purview of the Providential Eye on the back of the dollar bill, Mitch isn't quite certain yet—he'll continue to look for a further sign as he flips channels—but the vibe he's getting is that it will certainly be easier for Mitch to scry and fry under those circumstances. And yes, the target is a VERY frequent flyer. ("Card" 2 to come.)
Braniff Boeing 727 Where We Fly Route Map TV Commercial 1974
MutantsMichael — 4/15/25, 12:59 PM
Oracle "card" 2. CLICK. Mitch catches a new episode of the Star Trek cartoon on KRON Channel 4, the NBC affiliate out of good old San Francisco. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI8lpNG19mY Mitch ends up watching the whole episode, but this clip gives you the gist. It revolves around a probationary Federation species, the Pandronians, who have sent an observer named Bem to accompany the "best captain" in Starfleet, James Tiberius Kirk, on a mission to a primitive planet. Long story short, Bem sabotages the observation of the "aborigines" in an attempt to see if the Federation can in fact handle first contact without their weapons or communicators. Bem's species are a "colony" creature, which means Bem can break himself apart to evade capture or violence. Basically a good old "Prime Directive" episode; plenty of those in the original series, Mitch well knows. Whether or not Mitch just ended up watching this because he's a Trek fan and it's new Trek, even if it's stiffly animated, he feels there's something vaguely oracular in the vibes of the narrative. Bem's status as not fully a member of the Federation gets Mitch thinking about all those swayable "non-aligned" nations Jocasta's been talking about. Bem testing Kirk's skills at diplomacy feels like a message to Mitch about Kissinger: if Mitch is going to get Kissinger—trap him, like Kirk and Spock are trapped in this clip—it will in a moment of weakness during a shuttle diplomacy stop where President Ford's Secretary of State/National Security Advisor is being tested by one of his diplomatic subjects. A world leader who is wily, able to dissemble, break apart and become something else, like Bem. There are obviously a few candidates for that among the many leaders that Kissinger has been meeting since Nixon's resignation in May, but Mitch also feels like there's at least one more message to be divined from this morning's televisual oracle, before the news bulletins about the death of President Nixon start swamping the network airwaves.
MutantsMichael — 4/15/25, 1:36 PM
Oracle "card" 3. On KTVU-2, the independent station out of Oakland that has those kickass Saturday late-night Creature Features hosted by Bob Wilkins, Mitch catches the tail end of Garner Ted Armstrong's half-hour program of prophecy from the Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena, The World Tomorrow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garner_Ted_Armstrong Mitch is familiar with the chiliastic Christian preacher rap in general, being a good old boy from Alabama, but of course Armstrong's church, founded by Ted's daddy Herbert W. Armstrong, is a weird outlier, braiding strains of Seventh-Day Adventist and Jehovah's Witness theology, and primarily adheres to "British Israelism," the theory that Britain (and thus, the United States) are the home to the lost (white) tribes of Israel and will make biblical prophecy real as we approach the End Times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrongism In the final five minutes of the episode, Ted riles up the rubes in the viewing audience with talk of the recent Yom Kippur War and how it prefigures what the Armstrongites have been waiting for: the final battle at Megiddo. Images from the Worldwide Church of God's mail-order magazine, Good News, are overlaid on the TV as Ted Armstrong describes the order of Armageddon.
This battIe, to occur near Jerusalem (see Zech. 14: 1-4), is described in chapter 16 of the book of Revelation: "...The kings of the earth and of the whole world [are marshaled by the demon world]... into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon" (verses 12-16). For thousands of years, Megiddo has been a most strategic place, the very crossroads of the Middle East. These kings and their armies meet at Megiddo, then move south to the valley of Jehoshaphat (near Jerusalem) where the climactic battIe actually takes place. Now return to the eleventh chapter of Daniel. We have seen that the king of the north was Syria—until that nation was swallowed up by Rome and became part of the Roman Empire. From that time forth, the successive kings of the north were the successive leaders of the Roman Empire. We have also seen that the Roman Empire would have seven heads or revivals, beginning with Justinian in A.D. 554. The seventh (last) head of this Roman Empire is yet to arise - maybe sooner than we think! The Mussolini-HitIer kingdom was the sixth head of the beast. The next leader to unite the peoples of Europe will constitute the "beast" mentioned in Daniel and Revelation. He will also be the "king of the north" mentioned in Daniel 11:40-45.
Garner Ted Armstrong (February 9, 1930 – September 15, 2003) was an American evangelist and the son of Herbert W. Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God, at the time a Sabbatarian organization that taught observance of seventh-day Sabbath and annual Sabbath days based on Leviticus 23. Armstrong initially became recognized when he su...
Armstrongism refers to the teachings and doctrines of Herbert W. Armstrong while leader of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG). His teachings are professed by him and his followers to be the restored true Gospel of the Bible. Armstrong said they were revealed to him by God during his study of the Bible. The term Armstrongite is sometimes used to r...
[1:38 PM]
The next time Mitch flips channels, the face of the man he killed just under 12 hours ago, Richard Milhous Nixon, is on every other channel: all three networks have broken into the kiddie programming to tell the kids and their parents that Richard Nixon has died at his seaside estate in San Clemente, California.
MutantsMichael — 4/15/25, 3:13 PM
It's around this time that Mary-Lynn, sleepy-eyed after uncharacteristically sleeping in late on a Saturday morning, treads out to the living room of the cottage and sidles over behind Mitch on the beanbag chair, kissing him on the top of his head as he clicks through report after report of Nixon's death. Mary-Lynn sort of freezes behind Mitch, eyes following the tube, processing what the reports out of the network studios in New York are saying. "Jesus!" Mary-Lynn says in shock. "Oh well. I guess it makes sense. He didn't strike me as someone who'd have much to live for, once he lost what he spent his entire life tryin' to get." A pregnant pause, and then, "You want some coffee, babe?"
Dr. Cronk — 4/15/25, 5:47 PM
"Coffee's be great, yeah. I'm going to have to go up the mountain soon."
[5:53 PM]
So it seems the basic outline of the plan is viable: get him remotely via the fuel tank of the jet he's in while he's shuttling around. The television is pushing him away from his initial idea of making the play while Henry is flying from the east coast to the west, in favor of doing it while he's in Middle Eastern airspace. The timing is the tricky part. Maybe Pat could help with that, or maybe Mitch should see about roping Mary-Lynn into the scheme and utilizing their ersatz Serendipity 3, the "comically implausible coincidence" level.
[5:54 PM]
That's a trick with strong diminishing returns though, a powerful symbol you don't want to overuse it
1
Dr. Cronk — 4/15/25, 5:56 PM
And is there some way to loop in Jocasta?
1
Leonard — 4/15/25, 5:56 PM
[LOL I was just kidding, you don't actually have to get her involved if you don't want]
@Dr. Cronk
And is there some way to loop in Jocasta?
MutantsMichael — 4/15/25, 6:16 PM
Oh, absolutely.
MutantsMichael — 4/15/25, 9:36 PM
Should make clear all our "lairs" at this point are outfitted with secure phone lines. Whatever Charley left with us before December plus whatever tinkering the Phreak has gotten up to since his Irruption.
April 17, 2025
@Dr. Cronk
So it seems the basic outline of the plan is viable: get him remotely via the fuel tank of the jet he's in while he's shuttling around. The television is pushing him away from his initial idea of making the play while Henry is flying from the east coast to the west, in favor of doing it while he's in Middle Eastern airspace. The timing is the tricky part. Maybe Pat could help with that, or maybe Mitch should see about roping Mary-Lynn into the scheme and utilizing their ersatz Serendipity 3, the "comically implausible coincidence" level.
MutantsMichael — 4/17/25, 6:12 AM
Jocasta is definitely someone with international spying experience. So is Sophie, plus Sophie's an expert in the Middle East.
Dr. Cronk — 4/17/25, 11:52 AM
Having mulled this over, yeah. Mitch will wait until the time is right, then call Jo up. "I want to know exactly when Henry is wheels-up over the Levant. Timing it right is critical."
May 4, 2025
MutantsMichael — 5/4/25, 6:56 PM
Jeff, I have something we can do in the interim while we're waiting for Jocasta to be able to pick up the phone at the bookstore. A scene with Pat. I want to flesh out his whole thing as we move into Killinger, because I wager he's going to be involved tangentially too.
May 5, 2025
Dr. Cronk — 5/5/25, 10:46 AM
Ok, sure.
1
May 6, 2025
@Dr. Cronk
Ok, sure.
MutantsMichael — 5/6/25, 8:40 AM
A few hours after Beth Cole rumbles down the mountain in her Jeep and Mitch has envisioned the Right Place to incinerate the Secretary of State/National Security Adviser, good old Pat Price ambles down from the guest cottage (the very one Ambrose Bierce died in nearly six months ago) where he's been staying off and on between secret trips to Tahoe (to fish and check on his property from a distance; he's been adhering to tradecraft rules and staying in a motel on the Nevada side of the lake) and LA (to see his wife Ann). Obviously he just traveled to Dallas last weekend to assist URIEL in Operation CANNABIS along with Patricia Hearst (who also bivouacs at the St.-Germain when necessary) Pat's kept up a fairly rigorous RV effort (remote viewing, not recreational vehicle, heh) over the summer, in a mostly defensive posture; i.e., making sure prying eyes, either from human remote viewers or otherwise, aren't looking to prey on the school. After Pat and Mitch's trip up the mountain in May when Mitch and he both confirmed the Comte's weakening hold on Shasta and peered back at George Estabrooks, Alpha Leonis, and the Ballards at White Sands and Mitch scorched his double, Pat has been keeping an eye out for the Comte trying to return and for any of his former associates trying to look at the school. An ex-cop working security? Talk about a cliché. Pat knocks on Mitch and Mary-Lynn's cottage door; if Mitch is available, Pat will gesture that the two men should take a nice long walk to chat, outside the earshot of students and school staff. "So I woke up about an hour before dawn this morning; couldn't sleep. Had a bad, funny feeling. Decided to send my eyes out and around the school. Saw that young lady in the Jeep. Cute little thing. A little severe, maybe." Pat's usual roving eye for cute young chicks still grates at Mitch, a year-plus after first meeting him. "Anyway. I figured she was with your... group so I kept myself inside the cottage. But I watched her. She drove down the mountain to the little airport you're always flying off from. And she walked into a small jet that had the same... block on it as the Bohemian Club in 'Frisco. Thought you'd want to know." Pat looks a little abashed, as he does every time his powers fail him. "Obviously I've got no idea where the jet went after that but I guess I could RV the Weed airport's flight logs if you needed to..."
Dr. Cronk — 5/6/25, 9:33 AM
Mitch is scowling, but not because he cares about tracking Beth Cole's jet. "Dang. I hadn't thought of that, them being able to 'ward' vehicles like that. I assumed the Club protections were a one-off kind of thing. I'm not always the brightest bulb, Pat.
[9:35 AM]
"Can you, I dunno... I guess it's a question of, how much of an outlay of resources is it to set up that kind of anti-remote-viewing-thinger? The basement of Agrigenics, that thing was huge, room-sized, way too big to fit on a puddlejumper.
[9:36 AM]
"I was going to say, can you, like, try looking into place where they might or might not have guards up, and we can try to evaluate how common or rare the guards are, but I'm just thinking out loud, that's a plan with some pretty obvious drawbacks.
[9:38 AM]
"Ugh. Need to think about that." Mitch stares off into space and then speaks again, possibly cutting off Pat if he had something to say once Mitch was done monologuing. "Don't worry about Beth Cole. She's a high-value asset for them, they would want to keep her as shielded as practical while still letting her out to play."
@Dr. Cronk
"Can you, I dunno... I guess it's a question of, how much of an outlay of resources is it to set up that kind of anti-remote-viewing-thinger? The basement of Agrigenics, that thing was huge, room-sized, way too big to fit on a puddlejumper.
MutantsMichael — 5/6/25, 9:51 AM
Pat ponders all this for a good long while, breathing in the mountain air. He taps out a Winston and offers Mitch one, and lights it for him if he accepts. "So, while I was at SRI, there were obviously a lot of theories around 'anti-RV.' First of all, yes, an active psychic can extend their own mind in order to block remote viewing, if they're strong enough and have enough stamina. But also, that's an active measure, right? It requires the expenditure of mental energy, and requires the psychic to be ever-present and engaged. That's time-consuming and everyone's gotta sleep sometime. But given an important enough installation, there's ways to have 24/7 psychic protection. Russ and Hal and the CIA boys at SCANATE believed that some of the Soviet sites had staffed up to do that. I never bought it, personally." "Because there's another way to block remote viewing, and Hal and Russ were never quite as convinced of it as I was... but I was the guy with his ass on the line peeking at these places, so I think I have more credence here. And I think it has to do with geometry. Architecture, whatever you want to call it. You know I had a lot of success with viewing those Soviet sites the CIA wanted us to peep at, but that was fuckin' hard work! It took hours just to get a brief glimpse and even then, my hit rate was, admittedly, pretty shitty. Every one of those sites had, for lack of a better word, 'weird' architecture involved on-site. The missile silo with those huge weird metal tubes sticking out of the ground, right-angle 'cranes' sitting there not building anything. Buildings that didn't look quite right, so the subconscious remote-viewing mind kind of... slipped off them, couldn't make sense of them. It's like camouflage, or that 'dazzle' patterning that warships used back in World War I. You create a labyrinth, essentially, and it becomes a trap for the prying mind. I think this Bohemian blockage is like that, there's some kind of... vortex that the mind gets caught in, extremely convincing, and then eventually you're so relieved to be rid of it that the RV session ends. Just a theory, of course... but after two examples of it, that's what I'd wager is going on." "But of course the Bohemian Club and a Lear jet aren't comparable architecturally... so maybe there's some kind of geometry involved. Something we can't immediately perceive."
Dr. Cronk — 5/6/25, 8:10 PM
Mitch nods like this is, while not something he already knew, something entirely aligned with his understanding of the universe. "If I was remaking the universe for me and my friends to rule forever, I'd want to have all kinds of cheaty little secrets, ways to circumvent or thwart or, ideally, co-opt whatever bullshit tricks my enemies might try to pull on me.
[8:11 PM]
"These are the guys who were like, 'death? no thanks! I'll just eat the soul and inhabit the body of whatever loyal dupe I can trick into thinking letting me in is the path to real ultimate power,' after all.
[8:11 PM]
"They wouldn't need it to be easy or simple, because they've cheated in all the resources they could ever want. So we've got that going for us, at least."
[8:15 PM]
Mitch smokes meditatively. "And yeah, you're right, they'd have to work within the same framework we have, more or less. If they got too fancy with it, they'd just open themselves up to attack from different angles... I dunno, man. I'm thinking too high-level at the moment. You think the doctor always flies in the same private jet, that he's had altered and prepared for his protection, or you think the warding is embodied in something physical he can have his underlings move and set up for him easily?"
@Dr. Cronk
Mitch smokes meditatively. "And yeah, you're right, they'd have to work within the same framework we have, more or less. If they got too fancy with it, they'd just open themselves up to attack from different angles... I dunno, man. I'm thinking too high-level at the moment. You think the doctor always flies in the same private jet, that he's had altered and prepared for his protection, or you think the warding is embodied in something physical he can have his underlings move and set up for him easily?"
MutantsMichael — 5/6/25, 8:46 PM
"Portable makes the most sense." Pat pauses for a bit, considers who "the doctor" might refer to if it's only been heretofore vaguely hinted-at. "Especially when you're doing government work; you can be traveling all kinds of ways, in any kind of vehicle. Wouldn't want to leave yourself exposed. We caught your boy in Dallas because the protection They offer their people is precise, not universal. Whatever it is probably lends enough protection to cover the man, along with a reasonable area around him. In Dallas it felt circumscribed by the building itself: architecture again, right? And if I know Trammell Crow, he had that Tower built to very exacting specifications. But if it's something you pick up and carry with you, that's going to necessarily cover a much smaller area, right? No permanent structures to anchor it to. The skin of the plane, maybe. Could use metal as a Faraday cage type thing... it would explain those big hollow metal gantries I had trouble seeing around in Semipalatinsk." "It almost feels like we're talking about something classically occult, like an amulet with a protective circle, doesn't it? Or a pattern or glyph applied onto the plane so a psychic gets lost in the labyrinth when they try to peek inside."
May 7, 2025
MutantsMichael — 5/7/25, 6:47 AM
Oh! @Dr. Cronk, Mitch can give me a Hidden Lore (History B)-16 roll after that, now that I'm thinking about it.
Dr. Cronk used
roll
Dice GolemAPP — 5/7/25, 9:21 AM
@Dr. Cronk rolled
3d6:(2+2+6)= 10Dr. Cronk — 5/7/25, 9:25 AM
"The limits are 'what we can comprehend,' not 'what science as we think we know it can explain,' or 'what somebody's crackpot theories demand.' In this world you and I live in, the real hard limit on what's possible is what we can imagine and understand. What we can visualize happening, regardless of whether we could rationalize it."
@Dr. Cronk
"The limits are 'what we can comprehend,' not 'what science as we think we know it can explain,' or 'what somebody's crackpot theories demand.' In this world you and I live in, the real hard limit on what's possible is what we can imagine and understand. What we can visualize happening, regardless of whether we could rationalize it."
MutantsMichael — 5/7/25, 12:19 PM
Mitch thinks back to those first briefings when he officially joined the Project after getting essentially evac'd from LA back in early '71, when he learned the names and numbers of all the Enemy's works and pomps. The Project training staff gave him a rundown on Glyphs 101 and Mitch remembers them saying that if a SANGUSH or GU.SHUB glyph was deployed on an area, it would protect a "roughly 8' x 8' space." Well, of course, even back then Mitch found that approximation infuriatingly vague, but pretty soon it slotted into all the facts he was forced to keep in his head about glyphs and Irruptors and eventually you get to the point where you're like, "yeah, all right, of course, an 8 by 8 foot space, that's just how the glyphs work." Mitch seems to know innately that the Owls can't break rules, they can only put together suites of abilities that allow them the benefits of their aforementioned immortality and social/magical bond of illuminated secrecy: "Obscure 20 (Scrying, Mind Reading, Aura Detection, Psionics; Always On)," the Apocalypse of History A called it. It feels, yes, like Pat swinging by and asking about what to do with an "invisible" plane was Serendipitous in thinking about wanting to Get Henry... it does feel like if Mitch wants the doctor's plane to have "mechanical trouble" taking off from Damascus, say, we'll need at least one team member on the ground in the Middle East to find and disrupt the source of the Owlish protection. After that, it should be a breeze to scry and fry at least the plane. (edited)
May 8, 2025
Dr. Cronk — 5/8/25, 10:22 PM
Tricky. The effort one would expend in sneaking aboard the plane and disabling its Magic Anti-Remote-Pyrokinesis Box seems roughly equivalent to the effort expended in sneaking aboard the plane and planting a bomb.
May 9, 2025
@Dr. Cronk
Tricky. The effort one would expend in sneaking aboard the plane and disabling its Magic Anti-Remote-Pyrokinesis Box seems roughly equivalent to the effort expended in sneaking aboard the plane and planting a bomb.
MutantsMichael — 5/9/25, 10:12 AM
True, but with the consideration that Owlish abjuration sabotage will likely be much more subtle than planting said explosive.
May 13, 2025
@Dr. Cronk
"The limits are 'what we can comprehend,' not 'what science as we think we know it can explain,' or 'what somebody's crackpot theories demand.' In this world you and I live in, the real hard limit on what's possible is what we can imagine and understand. What we can visualize happening, regardless of whether we could rationalize it."
MutantsMichael — 5/13/25, 7:40 AM
"I honestly prefer that kind of explanation to the ones that Hal and Russ used to sling around. Excuse me if my rationalizations still carry some of their hopes that quantum physics or older theories of electromagnetism would explain everything. Or the theories of L. Ron Hubbard for that matter." Pat smiles. Pat hasn't talked much about Scientology since coming in from the cold, but Mitch feels Pat's mentioning it is important and noteworthy—not noteworthy enough to fully trigger Mitch's Illuminated vision, but somewhere in that ballpark. When Mitch first met the SCANATE crew, it was clear that Hal Puthoff was a Scieno true believer, Russ Targ was a hanger-on, and Pat wavered somewhere between authentic interest in LRH's theories of psychic powers and bald cynicism. It seems now, with the distance from SRI and from the CIA-connected spooks who haunted its halls, Pat's feelings about Scientology have cooled considerably. In the few fleeting times he's mentioned it, Pat has given Mitch the indication that he believes the whole kit and kaboodle—psychic research, Hubbard, the intelligence community—are one big Thing that wanted to corral and control all the psychics out there into service. It was that employment letter from the Princess Coal Company that brought Pat to the mountain, and Pat still obviously looks at the "bad guys" that Mitch has had him helping with as being the same kind of overarching conspiracy that he's been afraid of since then. It seems at least in his astute mind, the various cults and psychic investigative groups have all been in service to "Them."
Dr. Cronk — 5/13/25, 12:11 PM
"Times I feel we're bailing water out of a ship already sunk. Other times, I'm reminded of the story about the time traveller who steps on a butterfly in the cenozoic and messes up an election in his present. If we could travel back in time and make changes and those changes have dramatic, rippling effects, doesn't that imply that the choices we make in the here and now, all the changes we wreak in our idealism, have at least as dramatic effects on the future?"
May 15, 2025
@Dr. Cronk
"Times I feel we're bailing water out of a ship already sunk. Other times, I'm reminded of the story about the time traveller who steps on a butterfly in the cenozoic and messes up an election in his present. If we could travel back in time and make changes and those changes have dramatic, rippling effects, doesn't that imply that the choices we make in the here and now, all the changes we wreak in our idealism, have at least as dramatic effects on the future?"
MutantsMichael — 5/15/25, 6:33 AM
"I told you a while back, when I first came to the mountain to, ha, 'fish,'" Pat says after blasting urgently through his cigarette, "how I felt like I was heading down a path to my death. That, in some way, I'd already died and I was just playing out the string. Coming here took that burden off me. I don't think of myself as a soothsayer, even though my remote viewing puts me in that role sometimes when I least expect it. But yeah, I get those hints too, from what I've seen. That we're the ones writing the story now. It's strange, I think that's also why I've been thinking about SRI and Scientology recently. Like there's a chance to change things for the better there. It's the same feeling I got when they shut down Engelbart's ARC project... like we escaped some impending doom for the future, all being cooked up in the labs at Stanford." "I think I also mentioned how Uri's death was the first clue I had that something was changing behind the scenes," Pat says, seemingly oblivious to the fact it was Jo and URIEL who decided his number was up. "Doesn't it seem like Nixon died too soon too?"
May 16, 2025
Dr. Cronk — 5/16/25, 5:06 PM
Mitch just shakes his head at that one, and gives Price a long look.
May 19, 2025
@Dr. Cronk
Mitch just shakes his head at that one, and gives Price a long look.
MutantsMichael — 5/19/25, 8:25 AM
Mitch sees a flash of recognition, like the classic "idea" light bulb, sort of flash in Pat's aura as Mitch levels that look at Pat, and Pat quickly changes the subject in a genial "fair enough, we're not talking about that" kind of way. "Anyway, you point me where you need to. I'm here to help. If there's anything I or we together can look at that might help with the, uh, theoretical future, be my guest. Of course I could also end up seeing past or present if I arvee something, but there's always a chance I could catch a possible future. Same token, if you want to try and find out how They're dodging your vision when they're flying or driving around and how to circumvent it, I'm here for that too."
Dr. Cronk — 5/19/25, 12:53 PM
"I wouldn't want it all the time, but now and then it's nice for things to be simple." Mitch closes his eyes. He's out in the woods no more than a half-mile from the school, probably less than that, but he doesn't know more about his surroundings than that. He doesn't need to. It's fine.
[12:54 PM]
"Did I ever tell you I used to think I knew the day and hour of my death?" he asks Pat.
[12:55 PM]
"Stroke of midnight, New Year's Eve, 1979. I dunno why I was so sure, I dunno when I started having the idea, Nixon was President I can tell you that much. And I guess at some point I started to doubt mystic revelations that just sort of backfilled in while I wasn't paying attention, and I became less certain."
[12:59 PM]
"Anyway. I wonder if your remote viewing can reach someplace I can't, even from the mountaintop. If I was planning on doing something explosive and revolutionary at a particular site, and that deed was going to involve a guy who was warded against peepers, but the guy isn't there now and after the event he won't be there in any meaningful way... I wonder if you could circumvent something, somehow. It would be necessary to know just where we were planning on lighting our candle, though."
@Dr. Cronk
"Anyway. I wonder if your remote viewing can reach someplace I can't, even from the mountaintop. If I was planning on doing something explosive and revolutionary at a particular site, and that deed was going to involve a guy who was warded against peepers, but the guy isn't there now and after the event he won't be there in any meaningful way... I wonder if you could circumvent something, somehow. It would be necessary to know just where we were planning on lighting our candle, though."
MutantsMichael — 5/19/25, 1:22 PM
Mitch sees Pat on the aura-level consider this, parts of his brain lighting up, considering the awe-ful temporal implications of what Mitch is suggesting. "Oh yeaaaah... okay, I think I see what you're getting at. Let's game this out. Any place you do something, uh, 'explosive and revolutionary'... that moment is going to probably end up being the most significant moment in that place's history. Even if I can't see him, we'll see the security forces panicking, the local fire brigade rushing in... the press rushing to call in the earth-shaking news that's about to cross the globe." "So... in effect I find out where that's going to be before you do it, you then have your physical coordinates, and then you just need the exact temporal ones. You'd still be firing blind because he and the immediate area around him would be warded against peepers... but with enough precision of time and place, you wouldn't need to see him specifically. You could catch him on the edge of your pyro-kay effect. I'd still need a general idea of the Subject's itinerary to be able to scan a sample of his likely haunts, but I'm guessing that's not too big an obstacle for you guys. Maybe we look specifically for places with, uh, combustible compounds that won't be covered by any vehicular shell of protection. Of course with that approach you could end up with a lot of collateral damage." "We'd better just hope the Subject doesn't only visit places where more important stuff happened in human history than him spontaneously bursting into flames." Hidden Lore (History B)-16, please.
Dr. Cronk used
roll
Dice GolemAPP — 5/19/25, 1:34 PM
@Dr. Cronk rolled
3d6:(5+4+5)= 14MutantsMichael — 5/19/25, 1:43 PM
So now Mitch gets thinking about the Oracle's conspicuous belief that Kissinger's going to get got in the Middle East somewhere: maybe near Megiddo, maybe not, who knows. Could there be a part of the world more laden with conspicuous historical events to distract Pat's temporal remote viewing? More importantly, that's (generally) where the Anunnaki set up shop with humanity 6,000 years ago! There's all kinds of shifting ontoclastic plates out there that are on far less solid ground than California, even with all the ontological fuckery that the Bohemian Club has been up to since (our) 1906. But honestly, maybe that's actually why the Oracle was so literally Biblically insistent on Kissinger being gotten on foreign ground. The Owls don't rule there; sure, they've got presumed allies on the ground in Israel, with its deep connections with U.S. defense and intelligence, but there's more room for possibility there, more room for a new history and ontology to break away and throw a wrench in the Owls' plans to control the entire globe. But it does get Mitch wondering if a conspicuous, historically-important blood sacrifice could awaken someone or something Red in the process... again, though, the one with the direct Middle East/History B experience in the URIEL bubble is Sophie.
May 26, 2025
MutantsMichael — 5/26/25, 8:42 AM
Mitch wouldn't put it past the Owls to deliberately place their important agents in locations where temporal vision would cloak their movements behind monumental events as a way of helping the already potent "Obscure" ability. But mostly it feels like on a narrative level, Kissinger being targeted by "terrorists" in Syria or Egypt or wherever makes more sense than him, say, spontaneously combusting in an LA hotel while entertaining a special guest or two who took him at his word that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."
July 7, 2025
MutantsMichael — 7/7/25, 7:51 AM
While we wait for Jocasta and Roger to finish their exploration of Another World, I'm more than willing to have a Mitch-Sophie phone conversation, or have Mitch fly Weed-to-Livermore to have a discussion in the Rooster House about his plans.