On her signal, I threw the red stone to the floor of my home and watched in amazement and more than a little concern as we were engulfed by two gigantic blasts of red and orange flame.
I felt the wrenching twist of being moved suddenly from one place to another. As we arrived at our new location, the flames that had been licking at my clothing were snuffed out by an even stronger force of nature, the wind and rain of Hurricane Katrina.
You see, given her method of rapid transit from place to place, Ravyn USUALLY has the courtesy to use outdoor venues for her comings and goings. Apparently the domiciles of her (Un)Dead friends don’t receive such courtesy...but I digress. We arrived in the backyard of a modest looking, narrow, two story home that was enclosed by a high wooden fence (for the moment anyway) and was marked by a trio of large rocks that formed a sizable triangle in which we arrived.
The winds were howling fiercely, knocking Ravyn to her knees before I could catch her, and drenching us with water before the all of the smoke even had a chance to clear from our slightly smouldering clothing. “Damn, you must go through a lot of clothes travelling this way.” I had to shout over the wind for her to hear me.
Her likely smartass reply was lost to the winds as I helped her back to her feet and grabbed her backpack from her so that she could walk in the gale force winds. She pointed to the back of the house, and started staggering that way.
I had a much easier time dealing with the winds, so I shielded her as best as I could. We made it to the back wall of the house, which was marked by a couple of boarded up windows, another larger boarded up area that was likely a sliding glass door normally, and a solid-looking door that was covered by another contraption that looked like it belonged more in a prison than on a home, a sort of screen door made of reinforced wrought iron bars.
The semi-shelter of the back wall offered some measure of protection from the driving winds, allowing me to yell into her ear, “Do you want me to force open one of these doors?”
She shook her head and used one of her hands to indicate that we settle here for a moment, and yelled back, “SHE’LL...BE...HERE...IN...A BIT...BE...PATIENT!”
True to her word, a few minutes later, the wooden door was opened from the inside and then the iron gate contraption was flung outward, allowing us to scurry inside before we had even had a chance to see our rescuer.
As I scrambled inside the door, a booming voice called out, “YOU RAISED IN A BARN, BOY? CLOSE THE GATE AND THE DOOR BEHIND YOU!”
I reached back out and grabbed the gate, clanging it shut quickly. I then leaned into the door to get it shut again, all before I saw the person behind the voice.
I turned to see Ravyn embracing a taller, very robust woman of African descent with short cropped, greying hair and a weathered looking face. She engulfed the smaller Ravyn in a matronly hug.
Even with the doors now closed, the sounds of wind, water and debris crashing around outside was deafening.
The woman looked up from Ravyn and actually looked at me for the first time. Her eyes narrowed a bit at first as she studied me in the dim light of her lantern lit kitchen, “And just what have you dragged in from the storm, my little Ravyn?”
The soggy, bedraggled Ravyn responded, “This is Agent Rusty Bones, he’s the one I was telling you about last week.”
“Ah yes. Now tell me, what brings you down to see me in this mess?”
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
The Fyre Storm
“A Voudoun Priestess? Are you sure we can trust her?”
Ravyn gave me a withering look, “She’s a long time friend and a fellow Caster. Don’t let your experience with Papa Locks, Drake or any of his other flunkies poison your impression of Casters. Voudoun is not evil, no more than your use of the Shadow is evil.”
“I know that bastard Papa Locks was evil, and the thing inside me that gives me the ability to use the Shadow in the way that I do is evil. I’m not so sure I’m not heading down that path myself...”
Her face lost all hint of jocularity as she turned to face me, reaching up to grab each of my shoulders. She pulled me down to her level before speaking. “You listen to me, Rusty Bones. You are not evil, unless you allow yourself to become evil. All of us have the capacity for great Good and great Evil within, we all carry the seeds of our own destruction, our own vices, we are all human. But it is not the basest of our impulses that define who you are inside, it is the things you do-- your actions, your words, and the heart and soul behind those things that are the true measure of your Humanity. It is the assistance that you give others when you could easily turn away from them, the needed words of encouragement or even of rebuke that you give to a person in need of them that define who you truly are.”
“Then what do you call what I did to Daniel then?”
“Unfortunate, a bit misguided, well OK, maybe a lot misguided, but as far as I can tell, you’ve done what you did to him for understandable reasons. It is certainly not the way I would have approached the problem, nor is it the way I would’ve wanted you to approach it either, but what’s done is done and we need to make sure that we save that baby girl and her mother from Drake and his minions so that the...sacrifices...of that man aren’t in vain.”
I pulled away and tried to step around her, “So are you saying that the ends justifies the means?”
Ravyn wasn’t having any of my evasiveness. “Don’t start putting words in my mouth, bub. I didn’t say any such thing as ‘the ends justify the means.’” Her eyes were flashing orange and red now. “What I DID say was that what you have already done to get this information is already done, and if you want to make those actions, terrible as they were, in any way honorable and worthy, we are going to have to move our asses and save that child and her mother, if we can. So that means you are going to have stop wringing those cold, dead hands of yours about what you’ve done to that man and trust me when I tell you I know a friend and an ally in that area that we need to get to as soon as possible.”
With those last words practically erupting from her mouth, she reached down and grabbed her backpack. She slung it into place in one easy motion before reaching into a pocket of her jeans and pulling out two small red stones.
She handed one over to me, asking, “Do you need anything before we get moving?”
I took the offered stone in one palm. I looked myself over real quick, both blades were in place. I saw my collapsible baton sitting next to my computer, so I grabbed it and clicked it into my familiar wrist sheath. I looked back over at her. “I guess I’m ready.”
“Good. Get over here. When you see me drop this stone, you need to do the same thing with yours, I’ll need the extra energy to bring you along.”
“OK.”
She glanced around one last time at my less than neat domicile, muttering something about being dead not helping my domestic skills and said in a louder voice, “OK, I’ll do my best not to burn this sty down as we go. Ready?”
Ravyn gave me a withering look, “She’s a long time friend and a fellow Caster. Don’t let your experience with Papa Locks, Drake or any of his other flunkies poison your impression of Casters. Voudoun is not evil, no more than your use of the Shadow is evil.”
“I know that bastard Papa Locks was evil, and the thing inside me that gives me the ability to use the Shadow in the way that I do is evil. I’m not so sure I’m not heading down that path myself...”
Her face lost all hint of jocularity as she turned to face me, reaching up to grab each of my shoulders. She pulled me down to her level before speaking. “You listen to me, Rusty Bones. You are not evil, unless you allow yourself to become evil. All of us have the capacity for great Good and great Evil within, we all carry the seeds of our own destruction, our own vices, we are all human. But it is not the basest of our impulses that define who you are inside, it is the things you do-- your actions, your words, and the heart and soul behind those things that are the true measure of your Humanity. It is the assistance that you give others when you could easily turn away from them, the needed words of encouragement or even of rebuke that you give to a person in need of them that define who you truly are.”
“Then what do you call what I did to Daniel then?”
“Unfortunate, a bit misguided, well OK, maybe a lot misguided, but as far as I can tell, you’ve done what you did to him for understandable reasons. It is certainly not the way I would have approached the problem, nor is it the way I would’ve wanted you to approach it either, but what’s done is done and we need to make sure that we save that baby girl and her mother from Drake and his minions so that the...sacrifices...of that man aren’t in vain.”
I pulled away and tried to step around her, “So are you saying that the ends justifies the means?”
Ravyn wasn’t having any of my evasiveness. “Don’t start putting words in my mouth, bub. I didn’t say any such thing as ‘the ends justify the means.’” Her eyes were flashing orange and red now. “What I DID say was that what you have already done to get this information is already done, and if you want to make those actions, terrible as they were, in any way honorable and worthy, we are going to have to move our asses and save that child and her mother, if we can. So that means you are going to have stop wringing those cold, dead hands of yours about what you’ve done to that man and trust me when I tell you I know a friend and an ally in that area that we need to get to as soon as possible.”
With those last words practically erupting from her mouth, she reached down and grabbed her backpack. She slung it into place in one easy motion before reaching into a pocket of her jeans and pulling out two small red stones.
She handed one over to me, asking, “Do you need anything before we get moving?”
I took the offered stone in one palm. I looked myself over real quick, both blades were in place. I saw my collapsible baton sitting next to my computer, so I grabbed it and clicked it into my familiar wrist sheath. I looked back over at her. “I guess I’m ready.”
“Good. Get over here. When you see me drop this stone, you need to do the same thing with yours, I’ll need the extra energy to bring you along.”
“OK.”
She glanced around one last time at my less than neat domicile, muttering something about being dead not helping my domestic skills and said in a louder voice, “OK, I’ll do my best not to burn this sty down as we go. Ready?”
Friday, November 25, 2005
The Gathering Storm
“Hey lemme see that thing, I’m getting some flashes of memory just watching you thumb through it.”
Ravyn looked up from the little address book, gave me a stern look with one eye arched in challenge, “All right, but don’t you try anything funny. You’ll really see me get mad if you go anywhere without me!”
I held up my hands in mock surrender. “Hey OK, I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“Perhaps you are coming to your senses, about time!” She tossed the book over to me, and pretended to look back to her backpack in the doorway, but I could see how tense she remained. She was watching me like...well, a raven!
“Besides,” I added, “I don’t think any woman in her right mind would come along with me anydamnwhere, especially with a young baby. Having you along could help ease her mind about me.”
“Look bub, I’m not coming along to be anyone’s babysitter. I’m coming because I have no doubt you’re going to step into a situation that is far bigger than you realize. If that poor woman and her baby are going to have any chance in this, someone with some sense needs to keep you out of trouble!”
As soon as the book was in my hand, a rush of memories flooded to the front of my mind. Without really looking at the book or its pages, I let my fingers do the walking. They stopped at ‘J’. I looked down and saw a scribbled notation that was much easier to decipher since I could now ‘remember’ writing it, it read:
“Alexa Jackson, born 05/03/2005, Charity Hospital, New Orleans, 7lbs 6 oz.
Naomi cell, (504) 555-3376--looking for $$ for bills--$5,000?”
Excited, I looked up, “Ravyn, I found a note about when the baby was born, and a cell phone number for the mother. We might be in luck after all.”
She came over to see for herself and commented, “Looks like she was in need of some money as well, didn’t you say these guys were paying her money for this?”
“Yeah, but that all kind of stopped when we took down their organization. Daniel said that all of the other women who were impregnated either miscarried or aborted the babies once the funds stopped. Only this woman, Naomi Jackson, carried hers to term. Shit, this is weird, I can hear her voice, and even remember her face, from his memories of dealing with her. He stayed in contact with her even after we stranded him in Canada.”
“Well, that should help us to recognize her when we go down there to get her. Do any of your stolen memories have an actual address? I doubt that she is still at the hospital after nearly four months.”
“No, I’m not coming up with anything other than some PO Box that he remembered sending some checks to help her out. But we could try calling this number.”
“If the phones are still working, you mean, the edge of the hurricane is hitting the area right now.”
That jolted me back to the immediacy of the problem, although there was still something niggling at the back of my mind, like some half-formed memory trying to surface, but not quite making it yet. “Hey, wait! It’s a cell phone according to the note, I’ll bet the Bureau can track the location of that phone, if it is on!”
I rushed past Ravyn, the book still open to that page in my hand. I went back into my media room and sat down at the computer monitor that was still on. I signed onto the Bureau remote network and clicked on the icon that opened the tracking system for cellphones. It was a relatively new program, so I had to fumble around with it for a few minutes.
Ravyn was standing behind me, watching over my shoulder. “You see, this is why I don’t carry one of those things. I couldn’t stand the thought of knowing that the government could track my location by clicking on a program like that.”
“Well, it’s not exactly open for just anyone to rummage through you know...”
She patted my shoulder, “Oh, yeah, they just let their zombie agents have it on their home computers. I’m real comforted. No thanks!”
“Hey now, I do happen to have a pretty high level clearance. Zulu made sure of that.”
“Oh yeah, I could see how he might be able to swing that. Still, I’d rather not be so...traceable.”
I couldn’t resist a jab of my own, “Yeah, I can see how important stealth is to someone who flies around on a giant flaming bird and who comes and goes with the bang and flash of a bomb going off.”
I was rewarded for my humor by a slap upside the head...which, I was almost satisfied to note, hurt her more than it did me.
As she was nursing her bruised fingers, I punched the number into the program, hit the Search button.
In a matter of thirty seconds, a map of New Orleans appeared on the screen with a blinking cursor in the heart of the city noting the location of the phone. A note flashed at the top of the screen, showing the date of the last request for this number...if I had had any hairs on the back of my neck, they would have been standing up...the logon ID on the last search done for this number, just done earlier today showed ‘DKampmann’-Drake.
“Fuck me, Drake knows where she is as well.”
“How does he still access to this system, wasn’t he kicked out of the Bureau?”
I could hear the worry in her voice as she asked that. “I don’t know, perhaps they forgot to suspend his access when they booted him out of the Bureau.”
“Now I am REALLY glad I don’t own one of those damn things!”
“Yeah, but now we really have to get moving. Damn, I’ve never been to New Orleans, so I can’t really use the Shadow to get there.”
“I know a place we can go, it’s actually fairly close to the blinking dot too. We have an ally down there, I’m sure she’ll welcome us, she’s a fellow Caster, a Voudoun Priestess named T’tubah.”
Ravyn looked up from the little address book, gave me a stern look with one eye arched in challenge, “All right, but don’t you try anything funny. You’ll really see me get mad if you go anywhere without me!”
I held up my hands in mock surrender. “Hey OK, I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“Perhaps you are coming to your senses, about time!” She tossed the book over to me, and pretended to look back to her backpack in the doorway, but I could see how tense she remained. She was watching me like...well, a raven!
“Besides,” I added, “I don’t think any woman in her right mind would come along with me anydamnwhere, especially with a young baby. Having you along could help ease her mind about me.”
“Look bub, I’m not coming along to be anyone’s babysitter. I’m coming because I have no doubt you’re going to step into a situation that is far bigger than you realize. If that poor woman and her baby are going to have any chance in this, someone with some sense needs to keep you out of trouble!”
As soon as the book was in my hand, a rush of memories flooded to the front of my mind. Without really looking at the book or its pages, I let my fingers do the walking. They stopped at ‘J’. I looked down and saw a scribbled notation that was much easier to decipher since I could now ‘remember’ writing it, it read:
“Alexa Jackson, born 05/03/2005, Charity Hospital, New Orleans, 7lbs 6 oz.
Naomi cell, (504) 555-3376--looking for $$ for bills--$5,000?”
Excited, I looked up, “Ravyn, I found a note about when the baby was born, and a cell phone number for the mother. We might be in luck after all.”
She came over to see for herself and commented, “Looks like she was in need of some money as well, didn’t you say these guys were paying her money for this?”
“Yeah, but that all kind of stopped when we took down their organization. Daniel said that all of the other women who were impregnated either miscarried or aborted the babies once the funds stopped. Only this woman, Naomi Jackson, carried hers to term. Shit, this is weird, I can hear her voice, and even remember her face, from his memories of dealing with her. He stayed in contact with her even after we stranded him in Canada.”
“Well, that should help us to recognize her when we go down there to get her. Do any of your stolen memories have an actual address? I doubt that she is still at the hospital after nearly four months.”
“No, I’m not coming up with anything other than some PO Box that he remembered sending some checks to help her out. But we could try calling this number.”
“If the phones are still working, you mean, the edge of the hurricane is hitting the area right now.”
That jolted me back to the immediacy of the problem, although there was still something niggling at the back of my mind, like some half-formed memory trying to surface, but not quite making it yet. “Hey, wait! It’s a cell phone according to the note, I’ll bet the Bureau can track the location of that phone, if it is on!”
I rushed past Ravyn, the book still open to that page in my hand. I went back into my media room and sat down at the computer monitor that was still on. I signed onto the Bureau remote network and clicked on the icon that opened the tracking system for cellphones. It was a relatively new program, so I had to fumble around with it for a few minutes.
Ravyn was standing behind me, watching over my shoulder. “You see, this is why I don’t carry one of those things. I couldn’t stand the thought of knowing that the government could track my location by clicking on a program like that.”
“Well, it’s not exactly open for just anyone to rummage through you know...”
She patted my shoulder, “Oh, yeah, they just let their zombie agents have it on their home computers. I’m real comforted. No thanks!”
“Hey now, I do happen to have a pretty high level clearance. Zulu made sure of that.”
“Oh yeah, I could see how he might be able to swing that. Still, I’d rather not be so...traceable.”
I couldn’t resist a jab of my own, “Yeah, I can see how important stealth is to someone who flies around on a giant flaming bird and who comes and goes with the bang and flash of a bomb going off.”
I was rewarded for my humor by a slap upside the head...which, I was almost satisfied to note, hurt her more than it did me.
As she was nursing her bruised fingers, I punched the number into the program, hit the Search button.
In a matter of thirty seconds, a map of New Orleans appeared on the screen with a blinking cursor in the heart of the city noting the location of the phone. A note flashed at the top of the screen, showing the date of the last request for this number...if I had had any hairs on the back of my neck, they would have been standing up...the logon ID on the last search done for this number, just done earlier today showed ‘DKampmann’-Drake.
“Fuck me, Drake knows where she is as well.”
“How does he still access to this system, wasn’t he kicked out of the Bureau?”
I could hear the worry in her voice as she asked that. “I don’t know, perhaps they forgot to suspend his access when they booted him out of the Bureau.”
“Now I am REALLY glad I don’t own one of those damn things!”
“Yeah, but now we really have to get moving. Damn, I’ve never been to New Orleans, so I can’t really use the Shadow to get there.”
“I know a place we can go, it’s actually fairly close to the blinking dot too. We have an ally down there, I’m sure she’ll welcome us, she’s a fellow Caster, a Voudoun Priestess named T’tubah.”
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Soup Interrupted
That had been the plan anyway.
Pretty much as soon as I settled down to my meditation and started trying to piece the puzzle of another man’s memories back together, I was interrupted by what sounded like an explosion in the next room.
I was up in an instant, reaching for the Witchbane Blades and moving to the door, ready to face whoever had dared to intrude into my home.
There was nothing I could have done to prepare for what I faced (or rather who I faced) when I threw door open.
An enraged Ravyn was standing on the other side of that door, eyes ablaze, hands on hips, hair all askew, and tendrils of smoke curling off every surface...she was literally smokin’ hot! A rather haphazardly packed backpack was laying on the ground behind her, apparently she was going on a trip as well...
As soon as she saw me lower my guard with the blades, she was in my face, sputtering mad.
“Just who do you think you are, Mister?”
She advanced, pushing me back from the doorway.
“And what right do you THINK you have to come to my home and drop off a barely conscious man with a busted jaw and the memories of a pimple faced teenager and just disappear like that?”
Her smoking finger was waving right under my nose.
“And what in Goddess’ Good Green Earth do you think you are doing dropping off THAT man in particular?...”
Her questions, her glare and her fury pushed me further back into the meditation room. She kept advancing as she threw out more questions that she apparently wasn’t going to wait for an answer to...
“And just who do you think you are that you can drop by like that, and not even stay to say hello to your own daughter?”
I was now backed up to the far wall, with nowhere else to retreat to...
“You better not be thinking of going off on another one of your half-cocked adventures without telling anyone again! Well if you are going to stand there mute, like a damn zombie, I’m going have to cook the answers out of you!”
“Hold on Ravyn, I can’t answer any of these questions if you don’t give me a chance to speak!”
“Well, your lips are flapping, so apparently the Cat has let go of your tongue, don’t stop now!”
“OK, OK. First of all, I’m sorry to drop by like that with Daniel.”
“Daniel? Since when are you on a first name basis with...that man or any of his accomplices?”
“Shit, I didn’t even know his first name until I took his memories from him...”
“You TOOK his memories? How did you do that?”
“Darling, are you going to give me a chance to...”
“Don’t you ‘darling’ me! Just stick to the facts! Tell me what the Hades you’ve been up to, don’t leave anything out, and don’t stop until I tell you to!”
So, pinned up against the back wall of my own meditation room, I told her the whole story of how I got the call from Daniel and what he told me, all of the way up to my abduction, the mind rape, and the need to find out more information about the daughter I just learned I had. The tale lasted a good twenty minutes, but good to her word, she didn’t back down until she was satisfied.
As soon as I got to the part about dropping Daniel off at her home and rushing off to find out more information about the looming hurricane and New Orleans, she backed away and started pacing.
“So you were going to try and piece together this man’s...Daniel’s...memories and race off to New Orleans to rescue this child and her mother from the stupid hurricane? Do you even know her address?”
“Well, I was hoping I would find it in his memories, at least I was before you barged in here.”
“Did you even search him for maybe an address book like this?” She had reached into her back pocket and pulled out a small, black leather address book.
I was stunned. I never did check him for anything in his pockets. “Son of a ...”
“What is it about being a zombie, did you forget everything about being a cop?”
“No...I was just caught up in...”
“You were just caught up by your new found magickal abilities. Just like a newbie. You discover a cool new ability and suddenly forget that you can do things conventionally. You have a lot to learn, Rusty.”
“So let me see that book, maybe the mother’s full name and address will be in there...”
“Not so fast, buster. Don’t you get any ideas about finding that address and disappearing into those shadows of yours. If WE find the address, WE will go and see if we can’t find this alleged daughter of yours and get her and her mother to safety, if they need it.”
Pretty much as soon as I settled down to my meditation and started trying to piece the puzzle of another man’s memories back together, I was interrupted by what sounded like an explosion in the next room.
I was up in an instant, reaching for the Witchbane Blades and moving to the door, ready to face whoever had dared to intrude into my home.
There was nothing I could have done to prepare for what I faced (or rather who I faced) when I threw door open.
An enraged Ravyn was standing on the other side of that door, eyes ablaze, hands on hips, hair all askew, and tendrils of smoke curling off every surface...she was literally smokin’ hot! A rather haphazardly packed backpack was laying on the ground behind her, apparently she was going on a trip as well...
As soon as she saw me lower my guard with the blades, she was in my face, sputtering mad.
“Just who do you think you are, Mister?”
She advanced, pushing me back from the doorway.
“And what right do you THINK you have to come to my home and drop off a barely conscious man with a busted jaw and the memories of a pimple faced teenager and just disappear like that?”
Her smoking finger was waving right under my nose.
“And what in Goddess’ Good Green Earth do you think you are doing dropping off THAT man in particular?...”
Her questions, her glare and her fury pushed me further back into the meditation room. She kept advancing as she threw out more questions that she apparently wasn’t going to wait for an answer to...
“And just who do you think you are that you can drop by like that, and not even stay to say hello to your own daughter?”
I was now backed up to the far wall, with nowhere else to retreat to...
“You better not be thinking of going off on another one of your half-cocked adventures without telling anyone again! Well if you are going to stand there mute, like a damn zombie, I’m going have to cook the answers out of you!”
“Hold on Ravyn, I can’t answer any of these questions if you don’t give me a chance to speak!”
“Well, your lips are flapping, so apparently the Cat has let go of your tongue, don’t stop now!”
“OK, OK. First of all, I’m sorry to drop by like that with Daniel.”
“Daniel? Since when are you on a first name basis with...that man or any of his accomplices?”
“Shit, I didn’t even know his first name until I took his memories from him...”
“You TOOK his memories? How did you do that?”
“Darling, are you going to give me a chance to...”
“Don’t you ‘darling’ me! Just stick to the facts! Tell me what the Hades you’ve been up to, don’t leave anything out, and don’t stop until I tell you to!”
So, pinned up against the back wall of my own meditation room, I told her the whole story of how I got the call from Daniel and what he told me, all of the way up to my abduction, the mind rape, and the need to find out more information about the daughter I just learned I had. The tale lasted a good twenty minutes, but good to her word, she didn’t back down until she was satisfied.
As soon as I got to the part about dropping Daniel off at her home and rushing off to find out more information about the looming hurricane and New Orleans, she backed away and started pacing.
“So you were going to try and piece together this man’s...Daniel’s...memories and race off to New Orleans to rescue this child and her mother from the stupid hurricane? Do you even know her address?”
“Well, I was hoping I would find it in his memories, at least I was before you barged in here.”
“Did you even search him for maybe an address book like this?” She had reached into her back pocket and pulled out a small, black leather address book.
I was stunned. I never did check him for anything in his pockets. “Son of a ...”
“What is it about being a zombie, did you forget everything about being a cop?”
“No...I was just caught up in...”
“You were just caught up by your new found magickal abilities. Just like a newbie. You discover a cool new ability and suddenly forget that you can do things conventionally. You have a lot to learn, Rusty.”
“So let me see that book, maybe the mother’s full name and address will be in there...”
“Not so fast, buster. Don’t you get any ideas about finding that address and disappearing into those shadows of yours. If WE find the address, WE will go and see if we can’t find this alleged daughter of yours and get her and her mother to safety, if they need it.”
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Memory Soup...Part 1
As soon as I saw that Ravyn had things under control with Dr. Geek-- and that she wasn’t gonna toss his befuddled ass out into the street-- I slipped into a dark closet and back through the Shadow to my home. I would have to deal with how much trouble I was in with Ravyn later.
I didn’t give much thought to asking for any more help from Ravyn at the moment. This was something I had to do alone.
I knew my daughter’s name was Alexa, and that she had been born in May in New Orleans. I also knew that her mother was a former exotic dancer in Vegas who was originally from New Orleans. Her first name (Naomi) and her face (very exotic and rather beautiful) appeared in his thoughts prominently, but her last name didn’t. For being a scientist, Daniel Bernstein’s thoughts were pretty fractured and chaotic. (The more I worked with his memories, the harder time I had referring to him by my nickname for him. I had never known his first name before.)
So, if I was going to actually locate my daughter and her mother, I was going to have to mine through this chaotic jumble of another man’s memories to come up with as many clues as possible.
That is one significant problem with discovering that I had new powers and abilities on the fly. I had no idea on how to sort through and make sense of all of those fragmented thoughts and memories, and I wasn’t sure how time I might actually have to figure it out. What I wouldn’t give for a Google function for my own mind!
When I got home, though, I went straight to the small TV I keep in the place and turned it on to see how damned close that storm was and to see how big it was. The news reports were not very encouraging. They were looping constant images of that monster of swirling clouds making a bee-line for New Orleans. At that time, she was a Category Three hurricane and was looking to get worse. The predicted landfall was expected to be in the next two days...not much time indeed.
Next I moved over to my new computer, a shiny, new, top-of-the-line Apple iMac, and did some quick research on New Orleans and how prepared the place miught be for the Hell that was descending upon it...not very damned encouraging either.
I sat back for a moment and tried to skim through the morass of memory fragments to see if anything would surface easily...but no luck. I was going to have to do this shit the hard way, as usual.
I got up from the computer, leaving it running and still connected to the web. I left the TV on as well and walked back into the recesses of my new home, to the place I had set up to my new place for meditation and contemplation, the Dark Room.
I closed the specially modified door behind me, cutting off all noise and light from the rest of the house. This place was as close as I could make it to be like the Shadow World, dark and silent.
I laid down on the mat in the middle of the floor, and drew my Will deep inside. It was time to sift through this Memory Soup and find out everything I could before I left for the Big Easy.
I didn’t give much thought to asking for any more help from Ravyn at the moment. This was something I had to do alone.
I knew my daughter’s name was Alexa, and that she had been born in May in New Orleans. I also knew that her mother was a former exotic dancer in Vegas who was originally from New Orleans. Her first name (Naomi) and her face (very exotic and rather beautiful) appeared in his thoughts prominently, but her last name didn’t. For being a scientist, Daniel Bernstein’s thoughts were pretty fractured and chaotic. (The more I worked with his memories, the harder time I had referring to him by my nickname for him. I had never known his first name before.)
So, if I was going to actually locate my daughter and her mother, I was going to have to mine through this chaotic jumble of another man’s memories to come up with as many clues as possible.
That is one significant problem with discovering that I had new powers and abilities on the fly. I had no idea on how to sort through and make sense of all of those fragmented thoughts and memories, and I wasn’t sure how time I might actually have to figure it out. What I wouldn’t give for a Google function for my own mind!
When I got home, though, I went straight to the small TV I keep in the place and turned it on to see how damned close that storm was and to see how big it was. The news reports were not very encouraging. They were looping constant images of that monster of swirling clouds making a bee-line for New Orleans. At that time, she was a Category Three hurricane and was looking to get worse. The predicted landfall was expected to be in the next two days...not much time indeed.
Next I moved over to my new computer, a shiny, new, top-of-the-line Apple iMac, and did some quick research on New Orleans and how prepared the place miught be for the Hell that was descending upon it...not very damned encouraging either.
I sat back for a moment and tried to skim through the morass of memory fragments to see if anything would surface easily...but no luck. I was going to have to do this shit the hard way, as usual.
I got up from the computer, leaving it running and still connected to the web. I left the TV on as well and walked back into the recesses of my new home, to the place I had set up to my new place for meditation and contemplation, the Dark Room.
I closed the specially modified door behind me, cutting off all noise and light from the rest of the house. This place was as close as I could make it to be like the Shadow World, dark and silent.
I laid down on the mat in the middle of the floor, and drew my Will deep inside. It was time to sift through this Memory Soup and find out everything I could before I left for the Big Easy.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Confessions-Finale...The Rape of Dr. Geek
I stood over the prone form of Dr. Geek. I didn’t know at the time, but he had not been as broken as I had assumed. He had purposely made the choice to push my buttons, to make me lash out at him. Subconsciously, he had hoped that I would kill him, but quickly.
So how the Hell do I know this now? Well, this is where I must confess my sins. I raped him.
I really don’t know any other way to describe what I did to him, other than...rape.
As a cop, I would not have classified what I did as rape, since the crime I perpetrated on him didn’t involve any sexual intercourse. Sex is not something that is physically possible for me. But I raped him in ways that are far more intimate, far more damaging than any physical act ever could be.
OK, I know this is sounding more than a little weird, so let me give you a little background, which draws upon some of the other stuff I have been posting about previously.
One of the most interesting things that I learned from the Merlin was that not all Worlds are created equally, and each World has a different, and often unique effect on the magickal talents of strangers who visit it.
One of the reasons I felt so comfortable in this bizarre world of Shadow was that I felt a flowing energy here, a sense of power, that dwarfed anything I had ever felt back on the ol’ Earth. When I was in this place for any period of time, I found myself rejuvenated and energized to such an extent that I didn’t need to do that stupid flush and gush of the fluids in my veins anymore. A brief visit here and I was good for several days.
I also found that my ability to manipulate and work with the substance of Shadow was greatly enhanced in this place. So, when I looked down at his unconscious form, I remembered the time that the shadowy remnants of Ma Grendel inside me had healed my own injuries, repairing broken bones and fixing scars. I thought that maybe I could try doing the same thing for Dr. Geek, repair the broken jaw and get him conscious again so I could continue the questioning.
So I knelt down and put my hand against the badly swollen part of chin where I had broken the jawbone when I hit him. I gathered some strings of energy and extended them by force of will into his body, looking to repair, at least superficially, the damage my fist had done.
Instead of heading for the shattered bone in the jaw, my tendrils of Shadow reached toward his brain. I began to get images in my own mind of memories that could only be his...especially the ones of what seemed to be a caricature of my face with glowing red eyes and a twisted grin as he watched me strike him....
I recoiled instantly, drawing my power from him as I realized what was happening. I was able to see some of his memories, even get snatches of his thoughts as the blow was coming towards him....
I sat back, rocked to my very core at what I had just discovered. Then I began to realize the possibilities that such a power gave me in getting this damned interrogation over! If I could directly access his memories, I would get the best possible information with little chance of him tricking me in any way...
So that was how I justified the mindfuck...after all there supposedly was a child of mine in danger...and he was laying there unconscious...well, like I said, that was how I justified my actions at the time. Nevermind the fact that I was still pissed at him for making me go through all of this shit in the first damn place.
I put my hand back down on his head, although this time I avoided the broken jaw, and went straight for the temple. I was tentative, probing carefully, at first. My mind was flooded with fractals of his memories, at first in a chaotic, rushing jumble that made no sense. As I became more adept at identifying and digesting the memory fragments, I began to piece together a far more complete picture of this genetic project he had been explaining. Indeed, I began to get a much more complete picture of his whole relationship to Drake and the Omega Prjoect as a whole.
The deeper I dug, the more resistance I began to feel from his consciousness. That is when the rape truly began.
He tried to resist, God help him, but Dr. Geek was no match for my Will at this point, not in this place, at this time and in his condition. Using a fraction of my Will I subdued his weaker, damaged will and forced that conscious part of him into a deep corner within his own mind. Using more brute force than I would now, I ripped whole sections of memories from his mind, not realizing entirely how much damage I was doing at that moment.
Once I found and took all of the information on my newborn daughter from him, and where he believed she was located, I understood how much danger she was in and knew that I had to finish this quickly. But once I had started this brutal process, I found I was unable to stop from reaching in and snatching nearly all of his memories from adulthood.
Once I got down to his high school years, I stopped, began pulling back. It was only as I was pulling back that I realized that the previously full compartments of his memory that I had been rumaging through were now empty...by taking them in the way that I had, I had been erasing them from his mind, or at least shattering them into unrecognizable bits.
I had just raped the man of over thirty years of his memories.
Of course I hadn’t really had time to digest and comprehend all of those memories at the moment, just the ones relating to my daughter and some of his conversations with Drake were all I really assimilated at that point. It was only later that I would come to understand all that I had taken from him...his lovers, his children, the passing of his parents, his research...all gone from his memory and now part of mine.
After the deed was done, I stood up. Looking down again at his prone form, I began to feel a strange kinship with this former foe...a sense of sympathy for the choices he had made in his adult life that had driven him to his ill-fated encounter with me on this night.
Yes, I must go to rescue my daughter from the grinding poverty she was now in and from the storm that was bearing down on the place where she was born, Hurricane Katrina was heading right for New Orleans, but I could take a moment to save what I could of this poor soul.
I reached down and picked up his limp form as easily as if he were a child. I gathered the Shadow about us and stepped from the World of Shadow to a place where I could take him for help.
Ravyn was less than pleased at being brought another refugee, especially someone she had considered an enemy, but when she saw the anguished look on my face as I carried him into the house, she took to issuing the orders to her students to take care of things...
So how the Hell do I know this now? Well, this is where I must confess my sins. I raped him.
I really don’t know any other way to describe what I did to him, other than...rape.
As a cop, I would not have classified what I did as rape, since the crime I perpetrated on him didn’t involve any sexual intercourse. Sex is not something that is physically possible for me. But I raped him in ways that are far more intimate, far more damaging than any physical act ever could be.
OK, I know this is sounding more than a little weird, so let me give you a little background, which draws upon some of the other stuff I have been posting about previously.
One of the most interesting things that I learned from the Merlin was that not all Worlds are created equally, and each World has a different, and often unique effect on the magickal talents of strangers who visit it.
One of the reasons I felt so comfortable in this bizarre world of Shadow was that I felt a flowing energy here, a sense of power, that dwarfed anything I had ever felt back on the ol’ Earth. When I was in this place for any period of time, I found myself rejuvenated and energized to such an extent that I didn’t need to do that stupid flush and gush of the fluids in my veins anymore. A brief visit here and I was good for several days.
I also found that my ability to manipulate and work with the substance of Shadow was greatly enhanced in this place. So, when I looked down at his unconscious form, I remembered the time that the shadowy remnants of Ma Grendel inside me had healed my own injuries, repairing broken bones and fixing scars. I thought that maybe I could try doing the same thing for Dr. Geek, repair the broken jaw and get him conscious again so I could continue the questioning.
So I knelt down and put my hand against the badly swollen part of chin where I had broken the jawbone when I hit him. I gathered some strings of energy and extended them by force of will into his body, looking to repair, at least superficially, the damage my fist had done.
Instead of heading for the shattered bone in the jaw, my tendrils of Shadow reached toward his brain. I began to get images in my own mind of memories that could only be his...especially the ones of what seemed to be a caricature of my face with glowing red eyes and a twisted grin as he watched me strike him....
I recoiled instantly, drawing my power from him as I realized what was happening. I was able to see some of his memories, even get snatches of his thoughts as the blow was coming towards him....
I sat back, rocked to my very core at what I had just discovered. Then I began to realize the possibilities that such a power gave me in getting this damned interrogation over! If I could directly access his memories, I would get the best possible information with little chance of him tricking me in any way...
So that was how I justified the mindfuck...after all there supposedly was a child of mine in danger...and he was laying there unconscious...well, like I said, that was how I justified my actions at the time. Nevermind the fact that I was still pissed at him for making me go through all of this shit in the first damn place.
I put my hand back down on his head, although this time I avoided the broken jaw, and went straight for the temple. I was tentative, probing carefully, at first. My mind was flooded with fractals of his memories, at first in a chaotic, rushing jumble that made no sense. As I became more adept at identifying and digesting the memory fragments, I began to piece together a far more complete picture of this genetic project he had been explaining. Indeed, I began to get a much more complete picture of his whole relationship to Drake and the Omega Prjoect as a whole.
The deeper I dug, the more resistance I began to feel from his consciousness. That is when the rape truly began.
He tried to resist, God help him, but Dr. Geek was no match for my Will at this point, not in this place, at this time and in his condition. Using a fraction of my Will I subdued his weaker, damaged will and forced that conscious part of him into a deep corner within his own mind. Using more brute force than I would now, I ripped whole sections of memories from his mind, not realizing entirely how much damage I was doing at that moment.
Once I found and took all of the information on my newborn daughter from him, and where he believed she was located, I understood how much danger she was in and knew that I had to finish this quickly. But once I had started this brutal process, I found I was unable to stop from reaching in and snatching nearly all of his memories from adulthood.
Once I got down to his high school years, I stopped, began pulling back. It was only as I was pulling back that I realized that the previously full compartments of his memory that I had been rumaging through were now empty...by taking them in the way that I had, I had been erasing them from his mind, or at least shattering them into unrecognizable bits.
I had just raped the man of over thirty years of his memories.
Of course I hadn’t really had time to digest and comprehend all of those memories at the moment, just the ones relating to my daughter and some of his conversations with Drake were all I really assimilated at that point. It was only later that I would come to understand all that I had taken from him...his lovers, his children, the passing of his parents, his research...all gone from his memory and now part of mine.
After the deed was done, I stood up. Looking down again at his prone form, I began to feel a strange kinship with this former foe...a sense of sympathy for the choices he had made in his adult life that had driven him to his ill-fated encounter with me on this night.
Yes, I must go to rescue my daughter from the grinding poverty she was now in and from the storm that was bearing down on the place where she was born, Hurricane Katrina was heading right for New Orleans, but I could take a moment to save what I could of this poor soul.
I reached down and picked up his limp form as easily as if he were a child. I gathered the Shadow about us and stepped from the World of Shadow to a place where I could take him for help.
Ravyn was less than pleased at being brought another refugee, especially someone she had considered an enemy, but when she saw the anguished look on my face as I carried him into the house, she took to issuing the orders to her students to take care of things...
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Confessions...Part 4
As a former cop who has done his fair share of interrogations, I have seen plenty of broken men. Despite all of the bravado that most men carry around with them, every man has a breaking point, a point at which the pain, the humiliation, the stress, the anger, or the fear they are feeling reduces them to a state of hopelessness that leaves them completely open and vulnerable. It is not a pretty sight.
I had Dr. Geek pegged all too well. He didn’t last more than an hour after the final glimmer from his last glowstick. He was curled up in a fetal position sobbing uncontrollably when I appeared next to him, pulling a small flashlight from my pocket and shining on it his pale, sweaty face.
“Get up.”
It took a moment for him to come out of that place of abject terror that his mind had retreated to. His eyes blinked reflexively as the light hit his eyes. “R..r...ru..rusty?”
“You know who it is. Get up on your feet.”
He scrambled clumsily to his knees at first, then haltingly to his feet. “Please help m...m...me.”
“This is your one chance to help yourself. I really don’t give a shit about what happens to you Dr. Bernstein, but you can earn a way back to the world you are familiar with, and a chance at life again.”
His eyes grew wide, sensing a glimmer of hope, a vital feature of this kind of questioning.
“However, if you fail to give me truthful answers to the questions I have, I will leave you here to die.”
The hope in eyes dimmed, just a little. Good, that was important too, that the hope was there, but in doubt.
“So, tell me, did you really take sperm from my body and use it to impregnate a woman?”
He looked away from the light in his eyes, briefly, glancing down at his feet, before looking back into the light, “Yes.”
“Did you create more than one using my sperm?”
“Yes, but only one woman carried the child to term. The others either miscarried or aborted once the funding dried up.”
“Why did you do this in the first place, wasn’t my Spirit and my dead fucking body enough for you bastards?”
He visibly winced at my tone, looked away briefly again, then haltingly answered. “It wasn’t my idea. Drake was convinced that you carried certain genetic traits that could be enhanced and developed, that certain of your genetic markers were on the verge of reaching the next level in human development, he believed...believes...that humanity is on the cusp of becoming a new species, and he wanted to see if he had identified those genes that would make that transition happen sooner. Since your markers were so clear, it was relatively easy to make a few alterations in the sperm we pulled from you to see if we could trigger the change....”
“That is some seriously sick logic. Did you do this to any of the other officers in the Omega Project?”
“It was tried, but the others before you didn’t have the best possible candidates for alteration, one other child survived to birth, but died shortly afterwards. The changes proved fatal.”
“How did you find women who agreed to this shit?”
“It wasn’t hard. Offer enough money to most people and they will do what you want them to. We advertised on certain websites and in certain newspapers, offering to do free genetic testing for certain hereditary diseases in women of childbearing age, and then used that to recruit potential mothers who had the right markers themselves. Then we merely had to offer to pay all of their living expenses and to pay a healthy stipend. We had more candidates than we could ever possibly use.”
“Why not do the same thing for male candidates? You’d get plenty of sperm donors, especially if you paid for it!”
“Oh, we did some testing on random male donors as well, but the program was becoming very expensive, so we had to select our subjects carefully. We had narrowed down the traits we needed to tweak to a few dozen possibilities, and you just happened to have more of them in the right places than any other subject we tested. You had the four sets of markers we wanted to test more than any others, and they matched up perfectly with four of our female subjects. That’s when the decision to...uh...obtain...the ...uh...necessary supply of sperm--”
“You son of a bitch!” I raised my arm as I was about to strike him, but something in the way he stood there, resigned to being hit, that stopped me, for the moment anyway. “You had me fucking killed for my goddamn sperm!?”
“Well, Drake made that decision. But, yes, part of the reason you were killed when you were was to harvest your sperm and begin the rather tedious process of preparing the sperm for implantation in each of the selected fem...”
I couldn’t hold back any more. The word ‘harvest’ being associated with my death and the extraction of my sperm was just too damned much. I struck him hard with my fist on the side of his face. He collapsed like a sack of potatoes at my feet. I cursed as I realized that I could have easily killed his ass. I put the flashlight down and rolled him onto his back, wiping away the blood seeping from inside his mouth and the quite possibly broken jaw. He was out cold, but he was still alive.
But, I was going to have to revive him in order to continue the questioning, I still needed to learn where this child was, and what danger she was supposedly in.
I did resolve though, for the thousandth time, to kill the bastard Drake...
I had Dr. Geek pegged all too well. He didn’t last more than an hour after the final glimmer from his last glowstick. He was curled up in a fetal position sobbing uncontrollably when I appeared next to him, pulling a small flashlight from my pocket and shining on it his pale, sweaty face.
“Get up.”
It took a moment for him to come out of that place of abject terror that his mind had retreated to. His eyes blinked reflexively as the light hit his eyes. “R..r...ru..rusty?”
“You know who it is. Get up on your feet.”
He scrambled clumsily to his knees at first, then haltingly to his feet. “Please help m...m...me.”
“This is your one chance to help yourself. I really don’t give a shit about what happens to you Dr. Bernstein, but you can earn a way back to the world you are familiar with, and a chance at life again.”
His eyes grew wide, sensing a glimmer of hope, a vital feature of this kind of questioning.
“However, if you fail to give me truthful answers to the questions I have, I will leave you here to die.”
The hope in eyes dimmed, just a little. Good, that was important too, that the hope was there, but in doubt.
“So, tell me, did you really take sperm from my body and use it to impregnate a woman?”
He looked away from the light in his eyes, briefly, glancing down at his feet, before looking back into the light, “Yes.”
“Did you create more than one using my sperm?”
“Yes, but only one woman carried the child to term. The others either miscarried or aborted once the funding dried up.”
“Why did you do this in the first place, wasn’t my Spirit and my dead fucking body enough for you bastards?”
He visibly winced at my tone, looked away briefly again, then haltingly answered. “It wasn’t my idea. Drake was convinced that you carried certain genetic traits that could be enhanced and developed, that certain of your genetic markers were on the verge of reaching the next level in human development, he believed...believes...that humanity is on the cusp of becoming a new species, and he wanted to see if he had identified those genes that would make that transition happen sooner. Since your markers were so clear, it was relatively easy to make a few alterations in the sperm we pulled from you to see if we could trigger the change....”
“That is some seriously sick logic. Did you do this to any of the other officers in the Omega Project?”
“It was tried, but the others before you didn’t have the best possible candidates for alteration, one other child survived to birth, but died shortly afterwards. The changes proved fatal.”
“How did you find women who agreed to this shit?”
“It wasn’t hard. Offer enough money to most people and they will do what you want them to. We advertised on certain websites and in certain newspapers, offering to do free genetic testing for certain hereditary diseases in women of childbearing age, and then used that to recruit potential mothers who had the right markers themselves. Then we merely had to offer to pay all of their living expenses and to pay a healthy stipend. We had more candidates than we could ever possibly use.”
“Why not do the same thing for male candidates? You’d get plenty of sperm donors, especially if you paid for it!”
“Oh, we did some testing on random male donors as well, but the program was becoming very expensive, so we had to select our subjects carefully. We had narrowed down the traits we needed to tweak to a few dozen possibilities, and you just happened to have more of them in the right places than any other subject we tested. You had the four sets of markers we wanted to test more than any others, and they matched up perfectly with four of our female subjects. That’s when the decision to...uh...obtain...the ...uh...necessary supply of sperm--”
“You son of a bitch!” I raised my arm as I was about to strike him, but something in the way he stood there, resigned to being hit, that stopped me, for the moment anyway. “You had me fucking killed for my goddamn sperm!?”
“Well, Drake made that decision. But, yes, part of the reason you were killed when you were was to harvest your sperm and begin the rather tedious process of preparing the sperm for implantation in each of the selected fem...”
I couldn’t hold back any more. The word ‘harvest’ being associated with my death and the extraction of my sperm was just too damned much. I struck him hard with my fist on the side of his face. He collapsed like a sack of potatoes at my feet. I cursed as I realized that I could have easily killed his ass. I put the flashlight down and rolled him onto his back, wiping away the blood seeping from inside his mouth and the quite possibly broken jaw. He was out cold, but he was still alive.
But, I was going to have to revive him in order to continue the questioning, I still needed to learn where this child was, and what danger she was supposedly in.
I did resolve though, for the thousandth time, to kill the bastard Drake...
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Confessions...Part 3
In addition to our primal fear of the Dark, there is another fear of ours that is as ancient as our species, the fear of being alone.
You see, humans are social creatures. While there have always been plenty of people that others would consider ‘anti-social’, even those people usually feel more comfortable with other like-minded people with them. Even chronic loners or ‘lone-wolf’ types who prefer to spend large chunks of their time by themselves can grow nervous and scared when isolation and loneliness is thrust upon them rather than being a state of their own choosing. That is why the threat of solitary confinement, or the ‘hole’ as it is often called, is one of the most valuable tools that prison adminstrators have to keep control of the most volatile prisoners.
Extremely rare is the man who can withstand strict solitary confinement with no human contact whatsoever for more than a few days without breaking down in some fashion.
We are hardwired as a species to seek out other humans, to communicate with each other through speech and body language, to feel the loving touch of other humans we care about, to find our place within the larger group with which we interact. This hardwiring begins when we are just infants, we fuss and cry until a familiar face comes to bestow coos and smiles, stroking of the cheek, and often a warm bottle or breast to quench our thirst and our hunger.
As a cop, I found that many of my ‘customers’ that I dealt with, especially the most violent and desperate criminals, had been in some way cut off from the social fabric that the rest of us have built up. Either they had been abused as children by uncaring parents, who themselves may have been cast-off from society, or they had lost crucial jobs or suffered the loss of someone extremely close to them who mght even have kept them from committing the crimes that I was arresting them for.
The group dynamic is so strong that weak men can feel strong and powerful in the midst of a like-minded group, while a tremendously strong, independent man will often back down from a confrontation if he is alone and without a support network. This is why our culture reveres the solitary hero who does win a conflict with groups of small-minded villains. Almost all boys imagine themselves as being one of those solitary hero-types, while the reality is likely to be that they will grow up to become one of those followers in that group that gets defeated in all of those action movies.
Another thing I learned as a cop was that when you are interrogating a prisoner, it is often useful to use these primal fears that are inherent to almost all people to your best advantage. Indeed, if you wanted to get fast results, it was often necessry to compound the effects of one such fear by adding in others in measured doses. It was rare to find anyone who could resist such pressure for long. And when you found someone who could ignore such pressures, you had found yourself a real fucking sociopath, and likely as not, a serious suspect for any unsolved murders in the vicinity.
I knew Dr. Geek was not a sociopath. He was more or less a normal guy, your average Joe Blow scientist who was swept up in the potentialities of the research that Drake was willing to organize and fund. He was fascinated with-- and lacked any real understanding of the spirituality of-- the magick that the others like Papa Locks and El Diablito possessed. I am also sure he had no fucking clue about Drake’s true nature. But I was relatively sure that he did have some key knowledge about projects that Drake had started, perhaps without even involving the others in the group. Drake was sure to have secrets that he shared with each of his team members, making sure that each knew of projects and plans that the others didn’t. It was a perfect strategy to keep control of things, making sure that each team member felt he was special and in possession of knowledge that the others didn’t have access to.
I needed to find out what Dr. Geek knew about, and I needed to make sure that he was fully aware that his fate rested solely in my hands. I couldn’t take any chances that he would be willing to hold back even the smallest little detail of the secret stuff that Drake had entrusted him to do, and I needed to do it quickly.
That is why I dragged his ass to this place and compounded the various primal fears that most men carry deep inside--fear of the Dark, fear of being alone, and the real big one, the fear of Death. That is also why I created the story about the shadow creatures below and the flying things above that reacted to sound. I didn’t want him to have any possible outlets for his fears, he needed to believe that there was no possibility of escape, and there could be no outlet of emotional energy by screaming and throwing a tantrum. The glowsticks, with their limited light and their even more limited durations, served as a timing device that set into place a defined period of time in his mind where he had some small measure of security and safety. But the fact that he only had three of them to last him for an unknown duration of time was my way of forcing him to wrap his mind around the finality of his situation.
It was a cruel, evil torture inflicted upon a man who had no power to escape. It was also a very effective way of breaking down all of his resistance and his willpower within a few short hours.
Unfortunately for the small part of me that was still human and had sympathy for a fellow human in distress, it was also torture to watch a grown man come to the realizations that I needed him to come to and break down as they dawned upon him. It is not a pleasant sight to see such pain, such distress, such fear, come to fruition within such a short, concentrated time.
That is as close to a description of his ordeal as you are going to get in this space. I found no pleasure in his pain, and I don’t imagine that any of you would either.
My next post will detail our conversation after his ordeal, or at least as much of it as I will be able to reveal at this time...
You see, humans are social creatures. While there have always been plenty of people that others would consider ‘anti-social’, even those people usually feel more comfortable with other like-minded people with them. Even chronic loners or ‘lone-wolf’ types who prefer to spend large chunks of their time by themselves can grow nervous and scared when isolation and loneliness is thrust upon them rather than being a state of their own choosing. That is why the threat of solitary confinement, or the ‘hole’ as it is often called, is one of the most valuable tools that prison adminstrators have to keep control of the most volatile prisoners.
Extremely rare is the man who can withstand strict solitary confinement with no human contact whatsoever for more than a few days without breaking down in some fashion.
We are hardwired as a species to seek out other humans, to communicate with each other through speech and body language, to feel the loving touch of other humans we care about, to find our place within the larger group with which we interact. This hardwiring begins when we are just infants, we fuss and cry until a familiar face comes to bestow coos and smiles, stroking of the cheek, and often a warm bottle or breast to quench our thirst and our hunger.
As a cop, I found that many of my ‘customers’ that I dealt with, especially the most violent and desperate criminals, had been in some way cut off from the social fabric that the rest of us have built up. Either they had been abused as children by uncaring parents, who themselves may have been cast-off from society, or they had lost crucial jobs or suffered the loss of someone extremely close to them who mght even have kept them from committing the crimes that I was arresting them for.
The group dynamic is so strong that weak men can feel strong and powerful in the midst of a like-minded group, while a tremendously strong, independent man will often back down from a confrontation if he is alone and without a support network. This is why our culture reveres the solitary hero who does win a conflict with groups of small-minded villains. Almost all boys imagine themselves as being one of those solitary hero-types, while the reality is likely to be that they will grow up to become one of those followers in that group that gets defeated in all of those action movies.
Another thing I learned as a cop was that when you are interrogating a prisoner, it is often useful to use these primal fears that are inherent to almost all people to your best advantage. Indeed, if you wanted to get fast results, it was often necessry to compound the effects of one such fear by adding in others in measured doses. It was rare to find anyone who could resist such pressure for long. And when you found someone who could ignore such pressures, you had found yourself a real fucking sociopath, and likely as not, a serious suspect for any unsolved murders in the vicinity.
I knew Dr. Geek was not a sociopath. He was more or less a normal guy, your average Joe Blow scientist who was swept up in the potentialities of the research that Drake was willing to organize and fund. He was fascinated with-- and lacked any real understanding of the spirituality of-- the magick that the others like Papa Locks and El Diablito possessed. I am also sure he had no fucking clue about Drake’s true nature. But I was relatively sure that he did have some key knowledge about projects that Drake had started, perhaps without even involving the others in the group. Drake was sure to have secrets that he shared with each of his team members, making sure that each knew of projects and plans that the others didn’t. It was a perfect strategy to keep control of things, making sure that each team member felt he was special and in possession of knowledge that the others didn’t have access to.
I needed to find out what Dr. Geek knew about, and I needed to make sure that he was fully aware that his fate rested solely in my hands. I couldn’t take any chances that he would be willing to hold back even the smallest little detail of the secret stuff that Drake had entrusted him to do, and I needed to do it quickly.
That is why I dragged his ass to this place and compounded the various primal fears that most men carry deep inside--fear of the Dark, fear of being alone, and the real big one, the fear of Death. That is also why I created the story about the shadow creatures below and the flying things above that reacted to sound. I didn’t want him to have any possible outlets for his fears, he needed to believe that there was no possibility of escape, and there could be no outlet of emotional energy by screaming and throwing a tantrum. The glowsticks, with their limited light and their even more limited durations, served as a timing device that set into place a defined period of time in his mind where he had some small measure of security and safety. But the fact that he only had three of them to last him for an unknown duration of time was my way of forcing him to wrap his mind around the finality of his situation.
It was a cruel, evil torture inflicted upon a man who had no power to escape. It was also a very effective way of breaking down all of his resistance and his willpower within a few short hours.
Unfortunately for the small part of me that was still human and had sympathy for a fellow human in distress, it was also torture to watch a grown man come to the realizations that I needed him to come to and break down as they dawned upon him. It is not a pleasant sight to see such pain, such distress, such fear, come to fruition within such a short, concentrated time.
That is as close to a description of his ordeal as you are going to get in this space. I found no pleasure in his pain, and I don’t imagine that any of you would either.
My next post will detail our conversation after his ordeal, or at least as much of it as I will be able to reveal at this time...
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Confessions...Part 2
Our fear of the Dark is something that is so ancient, so primal, that it is an almost universal fear among humans. It must harken back to the days when our ancestors lived in caves or in small, rudimentary structures and gathered around the fire at night to keep the nocturnal predators, be they beast or other men, at bay.
Because of the way our eyes work, we feel particularly vulnerable in the dark. Our other senses heighten when we are in darkness, particularly our hearing and our sense of touch. Have you ever felt how sensitive your skin gets at night, when you are absolutely sure that feathery light touch is that of a spider crawling up your leg?
The blind find themselves living in a world of darkness all of the time, which is why the sighted often just shudder when they contemplate what would happen if they were to lose their vision.
Even as a child though, I was fascinated with the Dark. As a young man, I would often turn off all of the lights in my room and even cover up the slits beneath my door or around the window shades in order to make my room as pitch black as possible. I would then try to navigate through my room in that darkness, testing my balance and my memory of where things were.
As early as 5 years old, I would unplug the nightlights my parents would leave on at night, because having even a little light like that made it harder for me to fall asleep. That stuck with me all the through until my marriage. One of the great differences between my ex-wife and I was that she needed to have lights on at night, and often would leave the TV going all through the night, while I preferred to have it dark and silent. Eventually, the only compromise that could be made was for me to work the night shift often as I could trade for it from other officers. That way she could have the TV going and lights on while she drifted off into her fitfull sleep, and I could come home in the morning, and tape the shades shut like I did when I was a boy, and make the room as dark as possible while she was working in the house and the kids were at school.
Of course, when we went our separate ways, and I was a bachelor again, I was able to work whatever shift I liked, but I was so used to working the night shift at that point, and I had come to love the strange people you encounter as a cop at three or four in the morning, that I kept those hours for the most part.
My love of the dark even followed me into (un)death, especially in those early days when I was just trying out my newly animated body. I was able to pass as a normal person much easier in the dark of night.
But with the addition of aspects of Ma Grendel’s essence, my love for the Dark has now reached even deeper levels, making it all too predictable that I would feel most comfortable in near total darkness.
Despite my love for this place that I taken Dr. Bernstein to, I was very familiar with that primal fear that most people still harbored for the Dark, and figured to use that to its fullest effect on poor Dr. Geek.
It didn’t take all that long for him to find the wrapped glowsticks as the first one began to wane. I was curious to see if he would let the Darkness come now that he thought he was all alone.
I didn’t have to wait long. He had the second glowstick unwrapped and activated before it truly got dark enough for me to enjoy it again. Oh well, at least this would be over all that much sooner....
Because of the way our eyes work, we feel particularly vulnerable in the dark. Our other senses heighten when we are in darkness, particularly our hearing and our sense of touch. Have you ever felt how sensitive your skin gets at night, when you are absolutely sure that feathery light touch is that of a spider crawling up your leg?
The blind find themselves living in a world of darkness all of the time, which is why the sighted often just shudder when they contemplate what would happen if they were to lose their vision.
Even as a child though, I was fascinated with the Dark. As a young man, I would often turn off all of the lights in my room and even cover up the slits beneath my door or around the window shades in order to make my room as pitch black as possible. I would then try to navigate through my room in that darkness, testing my balance and my memory of where things were.
As early as 5 years old, I would unplug the nightlights my parents would leave on at night, because having even a little light like that made it harder for me to fall asleep. That stuck with me all the through until my marriage. One of the great differences between my ex-wife and I was that she needed to have lights on at night, and often would leave the TV going all through the night, while I preferred to have it dark and silent. Eventually, the only compromise that could be made was for me to work the night shift often as I could trade for it from other officers. That way she could have the TV going and lights on while she drifted off into her fitfull sleep, and I could come home in the morning, and tape the shades shut like I did when I was a boy, and make the room as dark as possible while she was working in the house and the kids were at school.
Of course, when we went our separate ways, and I was a bachelor again, I was able to work whatever shift I liked, but I was so used to working the night shift at that point, and I had come to love the strange people you encounter as a cop at three or four in the morning, that I kept those hours for the most part.
My love of the dark even followed me into (un)death, especially in those early days when I was just trying out my newly animated body. I was able to pass as a normal person much easier in the dark of night.
But with the addition of aspects of Ma Grendel’s essence, my love for the Dark has now reached even deeper levels, making it all too predictable that I would feel most comfortable in near total darkness.
Despite my love for this place that I taken Dr. Bernstein to, I was very familiar with that primal fear that most people still harbored for the Dark, and figured to use that to its fullest effect on poor Dr. Geek.
It didn’t take all that long for him to find the wrapped glowsticks as the first one began to wane. I was curious to see if he would let the Darkness come now that he thought he was all alone.
I didn’t have to wait long. He had the second glowstick unwrapped and activated before it truly got dark enough for me to enjoy it again. Oh well, at least this would be over all that much sooner....
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Confessions...Part 1
Looking back on how things have developed, it must be more than mere coincidence that I eneded up telling about the torture of Dr. Geek at this time of year.
We both ended up suffering more in our own damn minds than in any other way.
I apologize for the delay in these last few postings, but the self reflection needed to compose these posts, especially right around Samhain, has been beyond my ability to overcome. I think, however, that I have now turned a corner on that problem, and anticipate moving the story along nicely in the coming weeks.
So, back to our happy tale where I had left poor Dr. Geek to deal with some serious alone time and the illusion that there were critters out there ready to make a snack of him.
Of course, there was no real danger, since this particular Realm of Shadow was devoid of inhabitants. That was why I liked it so much, I didn’t have to worry about dealing with any stray beasties. This was a place of solitude, contemplation, of serenity...at least to monster like me.
In contemplating the use of this place for this particular interrogation, I had to consider my target. Dr. Bernstein was a very social person. In my recollections of him in his laboratory, he rarely worked alone. He was usually with at least one or two underlings and he was almost always chatting them up about some damn thing or another.
He was also a person who was completely devoid of any magickal abilities of his own, but was in awe of anyone who did possess those skills. He both loved and feared the very idea of magick.
Since this place was at the nexus of so many other worlds, it would have been foolish to try and hold anyone here who had even the least bit of magickal talent.
But that wasn’t a problem with Bernstein.
As I settled into my observational spot not too far away, I could see the poor bastard pull himself into a fetal position, cradling the meager light of the glowstick in his hands. He hadn’t even bothered to gather the other two glowsticks up yet. I noticed his shoulders shaking in what appeared to be wracking sobs. I almost felt sorry for him right there, but then I remembered how long I had been trapped in that damn Chakra, with no one to talk to, no way to know what the Hell was really going on. He had only been suffering for a few minutes, my torment lasted over a year. He could wait a little longer....
We both ended up suffering more in our own damn minds than in any other way.
I apologize for the delay in these last few postings, but the self reflection needed to compose these posts, especially right around Samhain, has been beyond my ability to overcome. I think, however, that I have now turned a corner on that problem, and anticipate moving the story along nicely in the coming weeks.
So, back to our happy tale where I had left poor Dr. Geek to deal with some serious alone time and the illusion that there were critters out there ready to make a snack of him.
Of course, there was no real danger, since this particular Realm of Shadow was devoid of inhabitants. That was why I liked it so much, I didn’t have to worry about dealing with any stray beasties. This was a place of solitude, contemplation, of serenity...at least to monster like me.
In contemplating the use of this place for this particular interrogation, I had to consider my target. Dr. Bernstein was a very social person. In my recollections of him in his laboratory, he rarely worked alone. He was usually with at least one or two underlings and he was almost always chatting them up about some damn thing or another.
He was also a person who was completely devoid of any magickal abilities of his own, but was in awe of anyone who did possess those skills. He both loved and feared the very idea of magick.
Since this place was at the nexus of so many other worlds, it would have been foolish to try and hold anyone here who had even the least bit of magickal talent.
But that wasn’t a problem with Bernstein.
As I settled into my observational spot not too far away, I could see the poor bastard pull himself into a fetal position, cradling the meager light of the glowstick in his hands. He hadn’t even bothered to gather the other two glowsticks up yet. I noticed his shoulders shaking in what appeared to be wracking sobs. I almost felt sorry for him right there, but then I remembered how long I had been trapped in that damn Chakra, with no one to talk to, no way to know what the Hell was really going on. He had only been suffering for a few minutes, my torment lasted over a year. He could wait a little longer....
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