Back when I traded dial-up BBS handles for an ICQ UIN, I found myself prompted to create a username. I was heavily into White Wolf role playing games at the time, having recently graduated from AD&D 2nd Edition. Inside the White Wolf universe, a newly created vampire is called a Childe, and the creator vampire is called a Sire. As I was still pretty new, I decided to go by Childe.
Like the Skippy nickname, it stuck. And that’s… the rest of the story.
Ishmael stood on the sidewalk and stared at the traffic light. Green, yellow, red. Green, yellow, red. The proper pattern. But something was wrong.
Green, yellow, red. Green yellow, red. Green, yellow, red, blinking yellow. Midnight. Traffic was now officially thin enough to no longer require the more complex pattern of lights and behavior. At this hour of night, all that was needed was a simple pattern of caution and stop before you go. Still he stared at the scene above and ahead of him.
Ishmael tilted his head to the side, shifting his perspective ever so slightly. Cogs and gears ground, shifted, and churned in a slightly different layout. The light from a street light near the corner silhouetted a set of small cameras, each facing as if to measure traffic and detect whether the light needed to change. Those hadn’t been there yesterday. “This is bad.” The fingers of his right hand sought out and rubbed the cross pin on his shirt collar. Its strange warmth was always comforting to him.
Ishmael began his walk to one of his safe houses. After the attack on the club, the house owned by the pointy-eared war goddess wasn’t even close to safe. No, old patterns would serve him best in this situation. Moments ago, he had checked on the Beowulf cluster in the basement of the one-time-factory, one-time-warehouse, now loft building, and verified that it was in working order. Two NIC replacements and a rotation of IP addresses later, he had left by a completely different route than he had used to enter. He had come out the front door, after smiling warmly to an entering resident, and had come upon the changed street corner.
The last two weeks had seen a pattern that was unlikely to be disturbing to anyone but him. Warehouse after warehouse had reported missing electronic equipment. Radio Shack, Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, and even Vertex had reported missing inventory. None had filed a single insurance claim. None could find any record of the stock ever having been in the places that were reporting the missing items. No serial number tracking, no delivery slips, no electronic or paper trail at all. Ishmael stuffed his right hand back into his pocket and frowned.
These “technocracy” people seemed as subtle as a bar full of rampaging Brujah. However, with how pervasive they seemed to be, it was likely that he had faced those members that were much like the brutal Clan. The rest might be like the Ventrue or the Tremere, and that was bad for everyone. Especially that wizard. Order of Hermes. Anyone who knew the Tremere had to be bad for continued existence.
This wasn’t their style. Neither the Illuminati of the wizards nor those Kindred that had been in Lansing in the past were subtle enough for something like this. None had encroached upon territory that had always been his. Ishmael used the key to open the deadbolt, entered the mediocre apartment, and closed the door behind him. He locked the door, and checked every window and set of blinds, moving in a clockwise circuit. Nothing had been disturbed.
Ishmael entered the master bedroom, which contained a milk crate serving for a stand for a used iMac. The plastic had “$45” written on it in permanent marker, followed by “No Hard Drive”. He plugged the power cord into the wall. He plugged an ethernet cable into the computer and into a new-looking jack in the wall.
The newest gimmick to lease crappy apartments – free high speed internet access.
He grinned and pressed the power button. After a “bong” and a few moments, a large question mark blinked on the screen. He nodded to the machine, as if he understood it, and went into the kitchen. He pulled out the silverware drawer (built-in slots for forks, spoons, and knives – how helfpul) and reached in. He pulled out a CD that had been taped to the underside of the counter, and headed back into the bedroom. He slid the CD into the slot-loading drive, and smiled again as a penguin appeared on the screen.
It took him hours to gather the information and sort it manually. With this kind of situation, he couldn’t trust his aggregation and sorting algorithms. This kind of subtlety was inherently designed to fool systems of that nature. No, this required a tilting of the head and hours of satisfying work. And, oh, did it pay off.
Cameras. Lenses. Coax cable, antenna wire, ethernet cable. Low light cameras, zooming cameras, DV cameras. Circuit boards, computer motherboards, resisters, capacitors, webcams, TV in and out cards… the “missing” equipment was nearly enough to set up a low-grade visual network that could spy effectively on an entire city the size of Lansing. Worse yet, most of the model numbers were unique, or at least inconsistent. Nearly impossible to trace, and each node in the network, each camera, each data-processing hub, everything… it would all be custom. Impossible to trace. On top of all of this, legislation had been shoved through City Council to install a network of camera-responsive lights, like they had in Detroit and its suburbs, at the major intersections of the city. The paperwork was all in perfect order, and had come upon absolutely zero resistance from anyone.
Brilliant.
But the patterns, oh God in heaven, the patterns. Ishmael set the keyboard on the floor. The growth patterns from each central hub were altered by geography, but once that factor was removed, each pattern was a synthetic version of a biological growth curve. An artificial attempt at organic growth. It was breathtaking. It was beautiful. It was the most dangerous thing that Ishmael had ever seen.
Someone in the city was as good as he was; had skills that rivaled his own. It was possible, even likely, that his recent activity had drawn this challenger. No! Conflict only ended one life, and let the other live. Conflict solved nothing! A quiet stirring of rage from deep within Ishmael made him stop and think. Old patterns would serve him best.
Lay low. Do not allow contact. Do not contact anyone. Let the danger pass. After all, as long as no one thought he was a danger, no one would spend the effort to end his life. And without that, he would live forever.
Lay low. Let the danger pass.
So, I went and got my head shaved today. It was a whim that seemed like it needed to be put to action. I think, once the initial shock wears off, most people are more surprised by me actually changing something without a whole lot of reason attached than they are with the act itself.
It has been confirmed that the 4GB SD card needs to be formatted with FAT32, and so will not work with my older iPaq. However, the 2GB cards can be formatted with FAT16, so my plan is still a go. The battery arrived the day that I was griping about it, and has been installed. It’s working wonderfully. So is the extra battery that came with the PCMCIA sleeve, which arrived the day after the battery. The wireless card is on its way. My Frankenstein project is almost complete. I haven’t been able to actually pull shit like this together in a while, so I’m getting pretty giddy. And here I was all ready for the usual “nothing will work together the way that you want it to” usual state of affairs.
Lucky me. :)
I’ve got a new piece of LARP fiction up at
I’ve got a video game proposal and DJ bio to write next, and I’ve become unblocked, thanks to
Also, I owe five people snippets of fiction from a meme a while back. I haven’t forgotten, and I think I have something to write. You may have to huddle to get the entire story, though. :)
Here’s some more flavor fiction about my Mage LARP character. This was originally posted on 30 Jun 2006.
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Matthew ran his hands through his hair – now cut much closer to his skull. He put his hat back on, and looked at the therapist’s door. Waiting for his appointment always made him nervous, but today was the worst. Today, he had been assigned the task of telling her what he wanted. Simple thing, right? Answer the question, “What do you want?”
Even so, he had taken strengths from reaching that point. Math had never really been a Hollower. He had been taken in, and had returned their loyalty, but their bickering and posturing and cattiness had never sat right. No matter how well he fit into goth culture, Math had defined himself far more in regard to his nerdiness than any actual romantic qualities. Oh, sure, he’d risked his life daily in the lion’s den, as he’d spied on Iteration X, but he’d done it simply because that was the only way that he’d known how to contribute. Truth be told, the structure, money, coffee, and benefits of being in the system had been something that he’d really liked. After all that had happened to him and his friends, recently, if he were still Math, there was a very good chance… no, a certainty that he would have chosen the safety of the Technocracy over the constant peril of being a Hollower in Detroit. There was too much danger, too much pain, and too much fear.
The only factor that might have kept Math out of the Big T’s ranks was Lori. She had spied on It.X, as he had. She had been in his building, and had developed this… crush on Math that just wasn’t explainable. She was smarter than him, stronger than him, and faster than him. The only thing that he had seemed to have that she lacked was a remorse when it came to killing. Until recently, anyway. Maybe that’s why she’d disappeared on him.
Samuel, well, he’d die long before he’d ever join the Technocracy. Or the Traditions, for that matter. He was from a long line of mystics. His family had taught its children, through many generations, to Awaken, much like many Traditions did with their Acolytes. His wife had been an Orphan; she’d popped without training or tutors, and had burned herself out in the process. She had been a beautiful, brilliant woman. We had wanted children since the wedding. Something was wrong; no matter how much we tried, we couldn’t get pregnant. The universe heard us, though, and it wasn’t long after we purchased our first house that children – those who were in need of help, both conventional and mystical – began to find us. Many were abused, homeless, or hungry. So many had felt driven from the homes of their birth. It took only two years for us to have so many children on our hands that we needed to hire help of the Awakened variety. It was a natural progression to establishing the first orphanage. And each time that we moved, leaving a fully functional orphanage behind us, it would start all over again. My calling, my… Samuel’s job in the world was handed to him on a silver platter. Even through the Technocracy attacks and Tradition recruitment drives – there was little difference – his children were kept safe, and allowed to come to whatever the universe had in store for them in a place that was home.
Then Samuel came to Detroit, and the miraculous happened. Without medicine and without magic, they were going to have a baby. A little girl, whose sleeping Avatar was as brilliant and fiery as her mother’s. They raised her, after building a house on top of a curious Shallowing into the world of the dead. In all the time that Samuel raised his little girl, no local children came knocking on the door. Oh, he wondered if it was because of the Shallowing, or Iteration X, and sometimes he felt a bit guilty for those that surely needed his help, but at his core, he was simply grateful for Susie. This was a sign, he would often say to himself. This was a sign that Detroit was different. It would be foolish, still, to reach out to the Tradition chantries. Neither the Choristers nor the Euthanatoi would do anything but meddle, as far as Samuel was concerned. The Hollowers were an option, but with Lori among one of their cliques, well… she hadn’t seen him since she’d left the orphanage out east, and she was seemingly clueless about her look-alike who was living in her old room.
Samuel had decided to reach out as a sleeper would. He tried to use his money and influence, not to mention his reputation as a philanthropist, to slowly fight those that were far more evil than the Technocracy – the Sabbat and the Black Spiral Dancers. Detroit didn’t end up being as different as Samuel had hoped, and he’d been killed for his trouble. As had his wife. Susie would have been dead, too, if it wasn’t for Soundwave, Lori, Lisa, and Math showing up and trying to help. After that, his memories were only from Math until their patterns had been joined. He had stumbled and flailed while trying to reach that perceived platform of “fatherhood” that he so worshipped in Susie’s memories of Samuel. He had never felt that what had been inside him had been enough. And that feeling of inadequacy had found its way into his current incarnation, so to speak.
The Technocracy, Iteration X if he were naming names, plowed through the meager defenses that had surrounded the orphanage. They had immediately and successfully disabled everyone in the house, and had rounded them up. They had placed some sort of mind control device on his head and forced him to shoot his best friend in the face; though somehow Soundwave had escaped. They had forced him to shoot Susie as well, though he couldn’t remember any blood, only a flash of light. The two boys, though. He had definitely splattered -their- brains all over the wall. And then he had done the same to Joy. He had blacked out, then. When he had come to, the blood had been gone. The gore had been cleaned up. The bodies had been disposed of. All of his computers and devices had been taken, including the time machine. He had been left. He hadn’t been important enough to take for interrogation, or to be killed with his family.
Lori had been important to them. As had Luna. That’s why they’d put that implant in him – the one that had never been there in the first place. So, they’d left him there, more alone than he’d ever been, and waited for him to contact the last person that he really cared about. He’d remarked to the therapist about the irony involved in feeling so very stereotypically sorry for himself, and claiming not to be a Hollower. And even though he’d rebuilt a rig that would make a Virtual Adept proud, and even though he had been visited by Lori in the night, and even though she had helped train him to shoot, he still felt a wall between them.
The therapist had asked him tough questions. Did he still love Lori? Had he really been in love, or had it been infatuation? What attachment did he have any more to the orphanage? Was he fit to guard the Shallowing in the cellar? Was he fit to guard the new node at the church? Why had he craved the blood of that Nephandus? Why was his only regret not seeing the man Gilguled before he pulled the trigger? Why did he still desire to end life?
What did he want?
Tough questions. While they had worked through his desire for revenge, and had established that there was no need to be a lonely martyr to protect whoever might love him, he was still unsure as to what he really wanted. Math would have wanted to go back to the way things had been before Midas showed his face in Detroit. Or, he’d want to chase down Soundwave. Or, he’d want to lose himself in Lori. All, when it came down to it, escapes from the world around him. Samuel would want to rebuild. He’d want to bring in a new staff, open the doors publicly, and seal off the Shallowing. He would want to do everything that was within his power to keep both orphanage and church safe. He would want to be a father again.
But what was it that he wanted?
He wanted to be calm again. He wanted to not flip out every time one of them went off and risked their life doing something incredibly stupid and dangerous. He wanted to care, but be able to let go. He wanted to help people, but still be assured in himself enough to not live in fear. He wanted to take the time to get to know who he really was.
“Mr. McNally?” He looked up and met the eyes of his therapist’s secretary. “She’s ready to see you now.”
He nodded and stood up. He opened the door to his therapist’s office, and sat down in his usual chair. He let himself relax as she asked the inevitable question.
“So, Matthew, what do you want?”
Here’s some more flavor fiction about my Mage LARP character. This was originally posted on 3 May 2006.
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A letter is left on the house’s kitchen table, with LORI printed across the envelope. Inside, it reads:
—
Tetu, the Ibis-beaked. Scribes, mathematicians, and those considered wise were associated with him in ancient Egypt. Has Hubris taken me? Have I, when the chips have fallen, buckled? I had a solid plan, and in the course of a night, I’m left with the options of picking the pieces of my plan up off the floor and putting it together, or saying “fuck it” and doing something entirely random. But there’s no such thing as a truly random function.
Sam, the new chick, and I went straight to the church. I wanted to use this oddity to my advantage. I was gonna sneak into the church and pop that fucker in the head. I wanted to execute him. I couldn’t think of anything else. It wasn’t even for retribution… the people he’d turned into brainless zombies in the Lab… I wasn’t even thinking about them. I had this craving to end his life. I lusted for his death.
It didn’t go quite as planned. Everybody followed us to the church. I was already inside, and trying to get inside this fucker’s inner sanctum, and Eric, Midas, Loki, Sam, and the new chick stormed the church. I think Prisanth was leading them, but I don’t know for sure. Loki somehow fucked with the dude, and all of the zombie guys in the church with me just dropped. I kicked in the door and ran down the stairs. Dude was on fire, trying to put himself out. Had to have been Loki. So, before anybody came down the stairs, I shot him. In the head. With the phosphorus rounds.
His head -exploded-.
But I couldn’t stop. I just kept pulling the trigger. Until his demon book reached out and clawed the shit out of me. Three times. Apparently, demon books aren’t susceptible to light wave modification fields.
Everyone was downstairs by then, and they destroyed the book. Sam took me to Joseph. Loki was there too, and he was in real bad shape. He was still somehow able to let Joseph see through the field to put the IV in and get me recovering. Eric and Prisanth came in and dropped a bomb on me – we, our avatars, reincarnate. With Nephandi, their Avatars are corrupted, so because I killed the dude, his evil demon avatar will get reborn into someone else. I’d fucked up, big time.
Things only got worse from there. Eric was able to help Loki and I with healing. He even chased away some fire paradox spirits that were trying to burn Loki alive. Midas gave him the ability to see them, and that was about the only useful thing he did the whole night, AFAIK.
The church has a node. A weak one, but it has one. Prisanth’s people are cleaning it, and they want to give it to us, instead of guarding it themselves. But, according to them, they’ve got to give it to a Cabal. Or clique, you know. So Midas fails brilliantly at explaining this to everybody but Eric and I, who are still at the hospital. He gets everybody pissed that the Traditions are once again patting us on the head, because Midas can’t seem to say two words without talking down to people.
Nero and the new chick form a clique for the express purpose of flipping people off. There was -another- new chick, and she stayed quiet. Sam stayed neutral. Eric and I formed a clique and accepted the church, because we were sick of sitting around with our thumbs up our asses. I’m thinking now, that with the basement of the house, taking on the responsibility of this node was more hasty than it was wise.
Prisanth keeps asking me why I associate with people I see as ineffectual, or people I don’t feel any tie to. I really don’t know. I don’t have an answer for him, other than a shrug and “they’re Hollowers.”
Midas has been declared Barabbi by the Traditions. He’s made a deal with a malevolent spirit, and apparently that’s a big old no-no. He knows what will happen if he doesn’t clean it up, but all he does is avoid it, and threaten people who bring it up. His son -is- Old Man Scratch, and they were wrong about his wife. Her avatar isn’t Marauder, it’s Nephandus. Like the dude with the book.
I cleaned up one mess, even though it was sloppy. Maybe I should clean up the other. Either way, I need to learn how to defend myself. I need you to teach me how to shoot and fight. I can’t protect anyone if I can’t protect myself.
Oh, some new info for you. A messenger from California brought some news. ItX has transferred some brass from New Mexico to Detroit. High-ranking paper-pushers. Efficiency experts. If you’re going after the Cabal that made me kill our family, be extra-careful. Also, there’s an unaffiliated team going around the city with sniper rifles, picking off supernaturals. It may be your family. So far, they’ve targeted vamps and wolvies, and so now those are fighting each other. Euthies and Choristers have also been targeted, but only the Choristers had casualties, I think. So, heads up.
I miss you. I need your help. This blood thirst won’t stop; won’t go away.
– Matthew Samuel McNally / Tetu
Here’s some more flavor fiction about my Mage LARP character. This was originally posted on 27 Apr 2006.
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They all said that he needed to move on. It wasn’t his fault. He’d been controlled. They had taken control of his mind. He’d been captured.
He was almost done sewing. One by one, the parts had been shipped in from all over the world. Laptop hard drives were a dime a dozen at mom and pop computer stores, so he’d just purchased a few locally. The heat and moisture transfer fabric – a new blend of polypropylene, the stuff they use in hardcore long underwear – had shipped first. He’d ordered a few yards of it from a winter camping company in Alaska.
The segmented and distributed motherboard, video card, wireless networking card, Bluetooth card, and I/O controllers had come from a start-up company in London run by some science fiction fans. The Bluetooth card had been sent from London to a very small, and very anonymous, company (hacker) in Indonesia. Its encryption chips had been replaced with a custom design, and this guy was -very- good at following specifications.
The fingertip-and-wrist keyboard had come from Japan. It was a small chip that attached to the interior of any metal wristwatch. As long as it was in contact with the wrist band, it could pick up the electrical signals and skin pulses that resulted from finger and wrist movements, and could translate that into input. He’d ordered the Bluetooth model, of course.
The heads-up display glasses had been tricky. He’d had to find a defunct military supplier that would be willing to ship anonymously in return for a great deal of money. That wasn’t the hard part. Sam knew quite a few of those, and she was almost overly-interested in making sure that Matthew was okay. This small favor wasn’t a big deal. It was his prescription. His eyesight wasn’t that poor, but the HUD required a nearly-flat surface to work properly. So, after a bit of extra investigation, he’d gotten some ultra-thin plastic lenses made to his prescription – the thinner the plastic, the less the curve, it seems – and shipped them to Russia.
All in all, he thought he’d have to wait for weeks instead of days. Luckily, money made things move quickly.
The lenses had just arrived, and the glasses had synced perfectly with the encrypted Bluetooth controller. Matthew tied off the last stitch in the ragged trench coat. That had come from the used section in the Army & Navy surplus store. Each component was sewed into a pouch of heat-transferring fabric. The ones that needed to be wired were connected with low-resistance insulated cabling. No one would suspect that when in range of each other, his watch, trench coat, and glasses were officially rated a supercomputer.
And now, the final touch. Two pin-on buttons, seemingly innocuous, wired into the power supply of the coat. It was amazing, really, how much light two small metal circles could catch.
Matthew tried the coat on, and smiled slowly. He’d have to replace one of the interior pockets with a fabric holster, but that would come soon enough. His forehead itched, and he lightly touched the bandage. Wisdom had finally been granted to Matthew Samuel McNally. He understood, now, that they were right, there was nothing that he could have done to stop the break-in. Nothing to stop the shooting. The fault had not been his, nor the gun’s. The fault laid with the squad of Technocrats.
Wisdom dictated that in a place as dangerous as this, he must become proficient in defending himself. Then, and only then, could he defend and protect others. The first step had been beginning to re-build his foci. In this, Samuel’s old dictum of “staying below the radar” had been key. Matthew switched on the power to the unit, which was nearly silent, and scanned the bootup code as it streamed down his glasses.
The second step had been to acknowledge wisdom. He would no longer drown himself in the process of the mathematics, the coding, and the technology. They were tools to reach conclusions. It was in the conclusions, and the actions that followed those conclusions, and the lessons learned from those actions, in which wisdom lived. Matthew had taken an action, a painful action, and had learned from it.
Wisdom – Tetu.
Tetu. Matthew touched the bandage and smiled.
Here’s some more flavor fiction about my Mage LARP character. This was originally posted on 15 Feb 2006.
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Math grunted as he pushed the enormous gray metal box into its cubby-hole in the closet. He was sweating with effort, even without his (McNally’s) jacket or hat. He’d made a trip to a used computer store, and had come upon a wonderful stash of old-school server cases with hot-swappable SCSI hard drives attached to a RAID controller. Its only drawbacks were size and weight. It felt like it had been made from cast iron.
A few minutes worth of work would have Quicktime Pro up and ready to record any of the results of his time viewings. After that, it was a matter of dialing up the right spatial and temporal coordinates. Simplicity itself. Well, discounting all of the calculations of spatial and temporal fields generated by current running through certain alloys while spinning at a specified rate in a…. well, pretty simple anyway.
Math chuckled as he flipped the switch. How much would Joy pay to know a day in advance whether or not the children were going to sneak out of their rooms?
Our Mage ST used to really be into flavor posts – or fiction relating to your character between sessions – and so there have been a few about Math. This one was originally posted to the list on 27 Jan 2006.
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Math admired the craftsmanship of the lighter. The normal flame guard had a large-ish circle cut out of it on both sides, and that allowed the flame down and into the pipe when he inhaled. He had had no idea that Zippo made lighters specifically for pipes – or maybe McNally had modified this one. Either way, it was nifty. The edges of the cutout glowed a ruddy red when he lit the pipe, and that felt like home.
Finding the first few of the books that she had hidden took hours. When he had found the first one, she had clapped, jumped up and down, and given him huge hugs. Suddenly the world had been small, this success was enormous, and accomplishment was possible again. Math had found himself centered and reassured by the love of this little girl. For once, he let himself simply be a Dad, and Susie be a daughter. Just as all good things, this was not meant to last. Each book became progressively easier for Math to find. By the sixth book, it was getting obvious that he had found a pattern. After he’d found the last of the books, he’d stumbled upon a knife that she’d hidden in case anyone else broke in the house. Needless to say, Susie wasn’t happy with this discovery.
It wasn’t easy for Math to stay angry at and firm with Susie when he knew the dangers that she’d faced. Massive waves of guilt assaulted him, and it took most of his will to deny her the simplest of things. With Joy’s help, he managed it. She was amazing at discipline, and really quite crappy at having any fun. At least she was able to relax, now that she had help of her own.
Math puffed on the pipe, filling the den with the scent of tobacco and wild sage. He slowly cracked open an old, and quite large, book entitled The Accurate and Scientific Theorems behind H.G. Wells’ ‘Time Machine’. It was one of McNally’s books that Susie had hidden, and sounded like a fun project.