Genia

Well, we're not a steampunk SG...

...but we do have a strong time and dimension travel subcurrent. If you gentlemen (and presumably ladies) decide not to go with an SG of your own, look us up. Or if you do, look us up for random RP. We are always happy to meet the more old fashioned crowd.

Can you read Asterix not in French?

All right, all right, so I read it in Hebrew first, but still...

Oh. You misunderstand. I grew up on this and some of this... we-ell and a little bit of that.

But not these.

That's right. I am a CoH player and the only comics I read were some Alan Moore stuff. And Asterix.

*bows and departs offstage*

Chapter LV
In Which A Show Is Staged

I had last seen Auer in the dark, blinded by a bright spotlight. The sunlight had not been charitable to the man. He was still pudgy and flabby and elderly, his hair shining grayly with sweat. In the sun, he looked drooping, as though his skin has become a few sizes too big for his body, and the wrinkles deepened. Even so, he was far from laughable.

He strode out into the square determinedly, escorted by a pair of tall Columnists, with more tall, helmeted shapes following suit. The Warwolf stood at attention together with his contingent, and Auer nodded to him cordially. I wondered how the soldiers managed to swallow the unprepossessing academic; I had had trouble enough commanding respect even when I could summon fire on a whim, as Sofia Rabinovich the 'hero', not to mention in my persona as Dr. Rabinovich, PhD. Auer appeared to have little trouble. Perhaps due to the deference the huge Warwolf regarded him with.

There was something almost... canine, I thought, in the huge beast's stance. Auer was clearly the pack leader.

Auer, just as the rest of the soldiers, was not dressed to blend in. He had, apparently, felt no necessity to cater to the local style of kilts and shawls which, considering his physique, was perhaps for the best. It did, however, tell me something surprising; Auer was not a fool, and that he did not care about historical anachronisms and continuity told me... something.

People were gathering in the square now. Or rather, I reconsidered when several more soldiers strode in, rifles held loosely in their hands, were gathered. I counted bodies rapidly; it was not an easy task, as the mass of uniformed men kept shifting about, extra people coming in, some leaving. I could not make heads or tails of the precise forces but, even so, one thing was potently clear – we could not hope to engage this force directly, we simply hadn't the ammunition for it. Our only hope was stealth.

“You two,” Auer commanded crisply, “make them form some sort of square around here. We cannot have a mob.”

Two soldiers detached themselves from the contingent, walking back and forth along the gathering lines of people, for all the world like police at a mess event or a celebrity showing. The Akkadians displayed no more inclination than the common American to hang back and keep order.

“Have the generator set up in the corner farthest out; we want as few people as possible to see what it is.”

The Warwolf nodded, growled a sort of acknowledgment, and loped off, returning shortly, followed by a boxy aggregate on wheels.

Behind the wheeled machine came a small, thin figure.

I frowned. The person lugging the generator together with the huge Warwolf was much shorter and smaller than the run of the mill Columnist. He wore no helmet, and there was a shack of wild hair sprouting from his – or her – head. The person did, however, wear the uniform. I couldn't make out facial features – he was turned the wrong way, and the light angle was poor – but I did note with amusement that the small figure had had to roll up the sleeves of the tight shirt and wad them at the cuffs to leave the hands free.

I stared at this new addition to the ranks fixedly. Could this be...? The suspicions were making me breathe shallowly and lose any minimal grip I had on conversations.

It was hopeless. I could no more make out definitely from where I stood than I could hope to pounce Auer and throttle him. The latter was not in my plans, but the former had to be accomplished, even if some risks were to be taken trying.

I scooted out of my corner slowly, sidling inside the crowds. I lost track of Auer and his Warwolf and soldiers, the low murmurs of the silent crowds obscuring their speech entirely. Cautiously, I edged through ranks of men and women, dodging where I could and gently pushing through where I couldn't, until I made my way to the southern end of the square and ducked out of the crowds at the corner of the temple's walls.

The generator was now right before my eyes.

It was a makeshift construct. I was never the expert on technology my husband is, but even I could tell that it would be, compared to the generators I was used to from home, low-power and finicky. It was a jumble of parts; the magnet was suspended over the wooden frame with rods wrapped in isolating material, and the spool of copper was wrapped on a hollowed-out wooden cylinder. Somebody was running about behind the generator, stretching out wires and clamping down metal switches.

Auer and his Warwolf were walking over, as well, ready, it appeared, to inspect the generator. Just as they approached, the tangle of wires suddenly and surprisingly – as though of its won free will – sorted itself out, and the small figure of the technician darted out to stand before them.

I gasped inaudibly. Victor Kushan was thinner even than I remembered him, and looked almost as sallow as Auer.

We'd hoped, quietly and out of Rostov's hearing, that Victor had been gathered by the 5th Column as a hostage. A presumably valuable prisoner. The alternatives – any that we could think of in our petty, pessimistic minds – were all worse: that he would starve attempting to survive in the wild; that he would be killed by angry natives, unable to cross the language barriers; that – whether worst or best I could not tell – he would be killed by the Column outright, shot on sight.

Apparently Auer realized the potential of his young hostage, and did him the favour of keeping him alive and useful.

It did not appear, however, that the Column was doing him any unrequited favours. There was a livid bruise on his face, and he was walking a little stiffly, even when he ran around – not at his usual eye-blurring speed, of course, but rather awkwardly and quite detectibly – as though his ribs hurt.

“... they are at it again!” I heard Auer comment indignantly as they approached. “You must make your men stop this nonsense. The boy is the most useful asset we have.”

The Warwolf growled lowly, clearly displeased.

I was not much pleased myself, though for reasons different than the wolf's – whatever these were. That Victor had proven an asset to the Column was not altogether surprising, but that he was so willingly – even eagerly, I scanned his face closely under hooded eyelids – helping them in their task was... unfortunate. Their task, I thought vaguely, their uniform, their goals? I couldn't know. Not from this distance, and not in so short a time. Psychologically, Victor was certainly prone to suffering the effects of prolonged loneliness and alienation. If Auer had been smart – and I could see he had been – Victor was a plum ripe for the picking.

“Mister Kushan,” Auer was polite and formal, with a note of almost patronizing parenthood. “Is the generator ready?”

“Yeah, you bet! I got it all right here and I only need a minute to hook it up.”

“We are bringing out the prisoners now, Mister Kushan,” Auer gestured at the vast doors of the temple. “Please be sure that the generator is ready when they – and I – appear.”

I recognized, quickly and unhesitantly, the trappings to a scam. Even if Auer had not set himself up as a god, he had been shooting high and, perhaps, hitting higher. Victor darted off at a sort of awkward jog and I felt momentary pity towards him, tangling in the endless copper wires, stumbling on the rough cobblestones, unused still to the new slowness of movement.

Auer strode off, disappearing behind the generator and out of sight. The Warwolf shrugged his massive shoulders, glared at Victor – who grinned back impudently – and stalked off to menace occasional passers-by.

A moment later the temple doors swung out once again.

Vic darted, and the light of a projector suddenly sprang to life, illuminating the square – already bright and washed with sunlight – still further, vanishing all shadows entirely. The people around backed instinctively, and I reminded myself, just in time, to follow suit and cower together with them.

The doors revealed a long line of men, shackled together. They strode out, pursued by the customary rifle butts, and stood blinking in the immense light. The projector was directed right in their faces. The crowd, silent and obedient, neither cheered nor jeered these men – mostly men; I saw a woman sobbing silently at the end of the long tether.

There was a massive, unanimous, vastly impressive cocking of rifles. The click reverberated along the square, resounding on the walls. Then, out of the sole remaining shadows by the generator – right next to me, I noted, pressing slightly back – Auer materialized out of a cloud of smoke.

Lorenzo would be impressed, I thought to myself, regarding the theatre of special effects and cunning psychology. Say what you will about Auer, he was a showman, and he put on a superior sort of entertainment.

He strode past me, seeming to be taller and grander than he really was in the brilliant light. And then, just for a moment, as though in slow motion, something pulled at his attention. He halted his advance, swung on his heel silently, and turned around.

And then Auer's gaze met my eyes.

Oh, shush.

To wit:

My husabnd - CompSci and Mathematics - hasn't been unemployed since high school, gets an excellent salary and promotions.
Me - Linguistics major, CogSci and Philosophy of Science minor (nine languages and counting).... unemployed.

*CRASH*

Oy. I did not want to get into this discussion.

But having walked around the entire holiday with replies in my brain, I suppose I am doomed.

Honestly, this is nto an unknown situation and, as such, doesn't present much of a dilemma to me. We've had plenty of cases in our good ole' Real Life where people have messed up human minds in the name of Utopia. We know these instruments as propaganda, misinformation, brainwashing...

Having lived part of my life in a still-communist Russia - although already in its death-throes- and recalling that period of me as a child, I can safely say that this sort of propaganda is damn effective. And it's always for the good of the world.One does nto have to be a mage, or a Xavier. it is sufficient to be the Creel Committee, or Edward Bernays.

Sure, someone is always liable to pipe up and say "oh no! propaganda in the name of good is different!" bu I say bosh; this is someone, anyone at all, enacting a cavalier decision to determine the good and bad for everybody else without even consulting them much. You've just gift-wrapped your freedom of choice and handed it to some anoymous Other wrapped with blue ribbon.

If the problem then degenerates - in this specific issue - to the matter of one brain vs. many, it's easy enough to resolve by shooting the guy with a revolver, thus avoiding the issue of psychic meddling alltogether. I am fairly confident that my extremely rational character, if faced with someone who is determined to become a future tirant by imposing mind control onthe entire population of the globe, wouldn't hesitate for very long.

...

As for what philosophy majors do, we ahve a joke running arund the university:
A Science major asks why.
An Engineering major asks how.
An Economics major asks how much.
A philosophy major asks: "Would you like fries with that?"

They say, in Russian, that "an attempt is not a trial". (It's a pune - or play on worrds).

If it works, it works, and you will have benefited from the get-go. If it doesn't, then nothing horrible happened. Nobody's planning on spamming hate-maill in your inbox.

Oh, I apologize.

Click on the link in my signature for further information about the SG and the RP concept, as well as links to our website.

Your first character, Epilepsy, and your anti-villain, might fit into our SG/VG. We are almost specifically geared towards casual players and people who have a lot of other activities.

"They will try again. Somewhere, sometime, someone will think that they can make people... better.

I aim to misbehave."

-Mal Raynolds, Serenity

You'd think a hero would be named 'Chessed' instead

You're welcome to poke into our SG. We're always looking for scientists.

Chapter LIII
In Which A Shopping Trip Is Under Way

The market of Shubat Anshar was a teeming sort of place. I found myself cringing in horror from a mass of pushing, yelling, adamant humanity, all elbows and knees and braying donkeys and huge baskets and wheeled wooden platforms.

The place reeked of rotting fish, salted pungent meats, overripe fruit and vegetables sitting too long in the sun, and the pervasive odour of sweat wafting from thousands of hot, moderately unwashed, extremely unperfumed bodies. Markets in their old-fashioned, Mediterranean form are places with which I have a complex love-hate relationship – wavering between the pricing of obscure delicacies and the penchant to quench an impulse to hide in a dark corner – even in modern times. This corner of chaos was, for me, a nightmarish encounter.

‘My’ merchant had long since swerved into one of the narrow, smelly alleys off of the main plaza. I sheltered in the wide shadow of the ziggurat itself and tried to visually get a grip on present circumstances.

The Akkadians did not use coinage, although their system of trade was as punctiliously set as any modern economy. Though the base unit in the Middle East has, since even earlier antiquity been the silver shekel – a word basically meaning nothing more complex than ’weight’ – the majority of trade among the simpler people in the market did not see much in the way of silver pass from hand to hand. People used small amounts of copper – the penny to the silver dollar, I smirked to myself – or measures of barley and fish, all carefully laid out on the scales, product to product.

I wished I could pick up conversation. The hum of people was, aside from a word here, a sentence there, almost entirely incomprehensible. Without the chatter of people I could not – having no basis for comparison – assess accurately the city, its mood, and how it deviated from normal.

The people around me did not, in fact, seem more scared than one would expect a complicated, loud crowd at a marketplace to be. This was a population resilient to the whims of petty tyrants. Even such basic liberties as the code of Hammurabi were many centuries in the future. But that could also, indicate a sort of benevolent dictatorship on Auer’s part. So long as no one rebelled – and why should they, really? Up till a certain point in history the general population on the whole did not see itself as affected by the civic affairs of the states they presumably lived in – he could maintain a distant approach. Perhaps I considered, Auer would not wish to interfere in history.

I wandered around the market slowly, keeping out of the way of irate men with heavy loads. At least in one realm I had been entirely right; nobody looked at me twice. Occasional glances and raised eyebrows at my looks were present but aside from that I more or less blended into the crowd – a slightly taller than average woman with a slightly older face and a slightly bizarre tendency to hide her hair.

The stall selling little glass trinkets and beads as well as a few carefully placed perfume bottles of opaque, dirty glass was actually a little shop, with walls of stone and a roof made of beams and thatch and mud, leaning almost against the wall of the immense temple itself. It was placed between shops of like value, crammed in the middle of a row of counters presenting copper, silver and bead jewelry, and sacks of pungent spices. The man behind the counter was strong and prosperously corpulent, obviously well-fed compared to the peasants and petty traders, and in possession of a large proportion of his teeth.

After a certain amount of observation, I advanced upon his shop purposefully, and hovered expectantly in his line-of-sight until the image finally resolved. He barked something at me which, by the tone and context, was an irate variation on ‘what do you want?’.

I glanced about quickly and, not noticing any 5th Columnists about, drew the glass bottles out of my pouch.

I put them down on the counter, and held the trader’s gaze with a smile. His face was arrested. Imagine yourselves, for a moment, that someone’d just showed up at a used car dealership with a flying saucer. Hold the image firmly in your mind, and, while it is fresh in your imagination, apply it to glass. He picked up the small pill bottles with thick fingers, weighed them on his palm, then used a nail to flick at them. He weighed and measured them and, finally, conceded to give me his offer, grunting something which I eventually parsed as “two shekel.”

I laughed in his face.

“Kama?” I couldn’t help inquire with overt astonishment, and added to myself mentally ‘not in my life!’ before countering with “arbaa.” That wasn’t Akkadian, and it drew a frown of discomfort from the man, but I knew it was close enough. As much as I wanted to limit my communications with the natives – after all, the Hebrew I was using was not invented yet – the notion of selling prime glass so cheap grated on me horribly.

The bargaining session which ensued was fit for a silent film classic. The merchant balked as I played the primadona by gathering my merchandise and intending to march away and we both in general behaved like little children having a tantrum. The civilized notion of set prices, I confess, has much to say for itself by cutting this specific idea of supply and demand out of the loop. In the end, the merchant sighed heavily, and pulled out his large balance scales.

The market went deathly silent.

It was like a wave rippling along the place behind my turned back. Every gaggle of voices, every little activity, every tinkle of glass, clack of hooves, grating of wheels, ceased instantaneously as though cut with a knife. I turned around rapidly, seeing people prod each other with faces contorted with fear, and the crowds melted into the stonework.

I could not have believed that thousands of people could simply disappear like that yet the marketplace emptied almost magically. The wave of fear struck from the temple outward.

My merchant, scales still in hand, gulped, his rosy, tanned face going gray and flabby, and drew back into his stall with the alacrity of a much thinner man. I moved out and looked about me, confused. Then I saw it.

A wall slab opened slowly, majestically, in the side of the temple away from the main gates. I would not have seen it if I were not standing alone in a depopulated market, and, entirely by accident, looking directly at the corner of the temple furthest from the populace. Nonetheless, I felt sure that, somehow, with a sense of self-preservation born from life under many petty, arbitrary rulers, the denizens of the city knew instinctively that something was coming at them.

I looked around me frantically, searching for shelter and could not find any. ‘My’ glass merchant had conveniently slammed a thick wooden door in my face. From inside, I could hear him muttering what sound like fervent prayers. I darted off towards the nearest alley when a female hand reached out from one of the tiny, dingy shops littering the crannies too despised by the important traders, and pulled me behind a smelly, half-torn curtain.

Inside, I huddled with two more women, and a gaggle of children, as the sound of metal and well-shoed footsteps pounded across the street. I moved closer to the curtain, shaking off the concerned hand of the woman behind me, and peered out through the folds.

A Warwolf and three more soldiers, bearing large ultra-modern rifles, marched in stride along the marketplace. The Warwolf’s face was expressionless, devoid of canine joy or wrath, and the bug-eyed helmets of the soldiers behind him were equally unrevealing. The set of their shoulders, however, indicated a sort of relaxation that people worried about being shot with a bronze-tipped arrow in the back wouldn’t display.

The 5th marched through rapidly, stopping here and there only occasionally to peer inside shops, obviously on a surveillance mission. The stalls into which they peered erupted momentarily with fearful exclamations though – to their credit, or perhaps to Auer’s, no further carnage ensued.

The Warwolf poked his head into the shop of the glass merchant. There was a tinkling, and an indignant cry. The fat man stormed out, face red and arms waving. The Warwolf stared down at him, and growled, grabbing him by his tunic and lifting him up in the air. Then he motioned with his free arm – Warwolf throats were not well-suited to commands, I thought with wry amusement – and the soldiers marched in to the store. There was the sound of a massive amount of glass shattering and breaking and crumbling as the 5th Columnists searched the place and the Warwolf held up the choking, twitching man. Then they marched out, flinging the door shut behind them.

The Warwolf eyed the man in his fist thoughtfully, then dropped him down. The merchant groaned, and lay immobile.

The soldiers laughed behind their helmets. One of them prodded the man with the tip of what was obviously a painful jab to the ribs. Then the entire squad cleared out.

Slowly, hesitantly, people started poking their heads out of their hiding-holes. Two of the glass-trader’s neighbours dragged him away and sat him up, half-panting half-sobbing, in the shade.

As soon as the heavy, booted footsteps of the 5th soldiers receded, I escaped the women and their wailing, upset children. I flung back the curtain, drew down my scarf and, huddled in the shadow of buildings and straw roofs, rapidly followed the disappearing patrol. The men and the wolf took their time scanning through the market, occasionally going into random shops, obviously in search of hidden weapons, instigators of disorder, and time travelers. After about a half hour, however, the marketplace appeared clear.

We – the 5th leading, me following silently behind – have arrived in the main square. The booths and stalls and shops ranged all about the place, but it itself remained clear except for rapidly moving shoppers. Now that the 5th appeared, they, too, have largely disappeared, choosing prudent caution over curiousity. Obviously, the inhabitants of the city were already more than familiar both with the intimidating Warwolf and the Column’s automatic weapons. The square itself, as appropriate, lay right before the main entrance to the temple of Shubat Anshar with its large, carved doors. The place was guarded by four more soldiers, lounging about, who waved at the patrol lazily.

One of the soldiers lifted a radio speaker to his lips while another carefully extracted and activated the transmitter – the 5th, too, appeared to be in short supply for batteries – and the soldier spoke into it briefly.

“Everything’s clear. We’re ready for you, sir.”

Uh oh.

I drew back further, tucking my bag of bronze and occasional silver slivers deep under the long, fringed poncho of a local dweller, huddling in on myself in the corner in a stance that attempted to make me almost invisible against the stone and fluttering cloth behind which I concealed myself.

Just in time it appeared, because the vast doors of the temple slowly swung out.

It seemed that Auer was about to have a meeting.

Yesod as in the kabbalistic sephira? What sort of background does the character have? I am curious.

Also, welcome and enjoy the game.

Chapter LII
In Which Jewels and Farm Animals Provide A Disguise

This would not be the first time that I would be spying in a city in the past. Time travel, ironically, became almost a routine vacation of sorts for me, and, at this point in my life, I think I entirely lost the ability to be amazed. Nonetheless, some things would be different.

I will admit; I was nervous.

I have never gone this entirely alone. I have always had at least one another person – someone I could trust entirely – to watch my back, prevent foolish slipups and, let’s be sincere, provide the raw power that I always lacked. Even when I played the brains of the outfit, it remained to somebody else to be the brawn. Now I had none of these things, and the absence was worrisome to me. That worry was what I turned into my ultimate disguise; it is easy to shuffle and look small when you are frightened, and I looked very small.

The biggest worry was the unknown. What would I be walking into? Would I somehow, by my mere appearance, break an unwritten, or proscribed, law? If I stand out, the result will most likely be immediate capture. And we could not afford that. I hated leaving the men behind – hated, most of all, leaving Garent behind… Nonetheless, the information was necessary, and we all knew it.

The only thing by way of safety I had on me was one of Rostov’s small knives. Even so, we all knew that, if I pulled it, I’d already lost.

Shubat Anshar is a city of mud and dust. The Ancients, having just escaped nature’s perils, and discovered the notion of civilization, haven’t gotten the memo regarding the building of gardens and central parks, and were perfectly content to let themselves live in what, to the modern man, would be dreary uniformity. The Sumerians were big on uniformity. The city looked like an American middling town without the little amenities of suburbia. The place was stretched on a grid of squares and rectangles, compartmentalized neatly. The city’s wall was low and thick stone – presumably, they had no one to be afraid of – hugged on one side by a dirty, almost sluggish outshoot of the Euphrates, and behind it the poor people’s dwelling huddled in a mass or dirt and reeds.

I edged through the little alleyways that served the poor quarter as streets, avoiding as much as possible rivers of some unidentifiable liquids I could only guess at the origins of, and stepping busily around flocks of dirty, almost naked children. Poor areas have not seemed to change in hot-climate countries for countless millennia, only the housing had improved. These people lived in shacks that the wolf from the children’s tale could, quite literally, huff and puff at.

All around me there was a bubble – or perhaps a Babel – of conversation. The words floated in midair, and dissipated into nothingness. English was a distraction. I blinked and shifted; the babble gained sudden structure, verbs and nouns and prepositions and affixes falling neatly into place. I still caught no more than a word in ten in the rapid stream. But the sentences were no longer random.

First task on my personal list, together with mapping out the city’s quarters and roads, was to find the marketplace. Which was easier said than done.

Getting out of the poorest quarters, such as they were, did not constitute a problem. I navigated between screeching children and hassled women with reed baskets towards the wall of Shubat Anshar proper, and passed through the open gate. On the inside of the gate, lounging in the shadow of the walls, were two 5th Column soldiers, helmets staring with bug-like indifference at the oncoming traffic.

I ducked my head, and drew my makeshift scarf over my forehead, hiding the pale skin and atypical face. Lorenzo said I look like a Semite; actually, I don’t – I look like a semi-Semite, nobody else in this city, except for the faces hidden under the helmet, had my wide, prominent cheekbones and wide forehead. I stood out, though not sufficiently to draw more than fleeting glances.

The soldiers were checking people at the gate. At the moment, they were occupied with a tall, lean man in his middle age, coming into the city with a donkey heavily burdened with sacks. He looked dusty and even I could figure out that he has arrived from far away. I sidled towards the wall, lurking in the shadows, pretending to tie up the broken string of my sandal, and watched the proceedings. The soldiers, incautious in this time and place, spoke to each other openly.

“This one got no necklace.”

“Berg says Auer says he stays in.” the second soldier poked his head from behind a shabby, wooden gate, holding up a tag of some sort in one hand, and a gun in the other. The traveller’s eyes widened in horror as he examined the new thing, and found it not at all to his liking. “You get his name, write it down. I can’t wrap my head around this language of theirs.”

“Sure, sure,” the soldier removed his bug-eyed helmet. Underneath, he was quite young – thus, it seemed, was his facility with languages. He peered at the traveler oddly. “Nibu u’shum abak,” he intoned, trying to put the emphasis exactly where it did not belong.

Okay. I smirked to myself. At least I was not completely out of my wits as yet; name and last name. And, I thought to myself smugly, the little linguist got the possessive suffixes wrong.

Linguistic musings aside, I considered, watching the man give his name, the name of his father and the name of his kin as well as his business (tamkaru – a merchant, unless I completely misplaced my roots, a fact which went right past the soldiers’ head) and bewilderedly watched as the two carefully wrote it down on a piece of office stationery.

I frowned. It would be foolish in the extreme to get all the way here, and be caught at the gate like an idiot because I did not possess whatever token the Fifth used as a sort of improvised pass for the illiterate. I fumbled in the pouch under my shawl. A few trinkets, strings of copper and beads meant to serve as hair ornaments, and, yes! A long necklace of much finer make than a woman of my apparent stature could hope to own, braided silver.

I put it on, and tied the ends carefully, feeling strangely comforted by the metal on my neck. Before leaving to the city, I had removed and left my own necklace, the small, delicate silver work and the pearl pendant were much too anachronistic. But I had worn it for many years and it became almost a replacement for a wedding ring – an article that I as an EMT, considered much too unsafe – and I felt oddly exposed without it.

Now I had my pass but, nonetheless, I felt it preferable to avoid being inspected by curious soldiers from the future. A single misstep, a glimmer of understanding, a smile or too forward a look, would be sufficient to expose me entirely.

I looked around. The street, coming to the gate, was emptying rapidly. There was the unfortunate traveler, still marooned with the soldiers at the gate, a befuddled expression warring with fear on his face as his incomprehension of these barbarians gave way to cautious dread. There were some women carrying baskets – they would not do, they were much too short, and seemed much too friendly. A stranger couldn’t slip through the group without standing out.

I ducked between two men leading laden mules; both were about my height, with large, disheveled, oiled beards and long hair tumbling darkly onto bare backs. The mules and their sacks seemed reluctant to go into the gate, and one of the men was tugging at the rope of his mule, yelling a string of offences of which I caught maybe one word out of twenty. They and the mob gathered around them stumbled along slowly, and I drifted unnoticed through the guarded gate.

Inside the walls, the atmosphere and look of the city changed drastically. If it weren’t for the construction of the houses and the material, I mgiht’ve thought I was in the financial district of New York.

The Sumerians, and the Akkadians after them, in an atypical move to the dwellers of the Middle East, liked their streets and their houses and their squares entirely straight. The houses were laid out in dried brick – not nearly as efficient as its modern, baked counterpart but, I figured, in the heat of the Fertile Crescent it was bound to do – and the streets were wide enough to accommodate carts.

The citizens, too, had become much neater, their clothes upgrading from a shade of indescribable brown into something that looked considerably more off-white. Now came the hard part; Akkadian cities were notoriously compartmentalized, each district specializing in its own, particular occupation. Most of the administrative work, temple duties and even some of the workshops would be located at the ziggurat, but if I wanted to pawn off my modern glass bottles, I would need to look for merchants.

I lifted my eyes up, scanning the horizon.

The ziggurat in all its ancient glory was the first thing I saw in front of my eyes. It stood out, huge and tall and somehow more massive than reality should permit, against the blue sky.

Last I’d seen it, it was drawn faintly against a ragged, desert sunset, its structure crumbled and, while still clearly recognizable, lacking entirely in its former impressive outlines. Now it stood starkly against the bright light of day, and sloped up…. And up… and up….

I stared at it with the hatred of an old enemy and the wonder of a village girl first time in the big city. There is something about ziggurats; say what you will about the ancients’ culture, civilization, or institutions, they understood what impresses people, and used it to the hilt. The ziggurat drove it home, above the mud huts and the clay brick houses and the narrow streets, that the gods, whoever they were, were not to be trifled with. Nor should the people sitting in the temple.

Right now, that was the 5th Column, which made this sentiment truer than ever before.

Just one more thing for me to pay attention to. But first,, I had to find the market.

Rationally, it would be located close to the temple, perhaps at a large plaza. Yet, despite the square nature of the city, I could foresee a long and tiring trek looking through streets and access ways.

I had no mood for that sort of chase. Instead I looked about me again, spotting the unfortunate merchant, holding to a necklace and a tag in one hand, and to his donkey in the other. He would be bound for the marketplace, or, at the least, to the merchants’ district.

I nodded to myself and followed suit.

There are a lot of them around. Virtue is the big Roleplaying server on the American side, and Union houses the RPers on the European end. I suggest looking in the individual servers' forums; they are more likely to have a list of SGs. I know Virtue does.

Chapter L
In Which Preparations Are Made, and Robbery Is Practiced

“This is it?”

I held up the offending garment by my fingertips, and stared at the fluttering fringes despondently. The natives of the period, both male and female, rich and poor, wore essentially the same style of garment; a wraparound skirt with a large amount of artistic curls, and a shawl – a sort of poncho – to cover the upper body. Artistically sprinkled with a large variety of fringes.

“Hey, I got it off some pretty rich lady,” Rostov smirked. “Had her own donkey and everything. Don’t scoff.”

“Am I permitted to at least shake the vermin out of it, or am I supposed to keep the company for authenticity?” I inquired sweetly, beating the skirt vigorously against a tree trunk. Bits and pieces of twig, dirt and other things I didn’t wish to contemplate fell out of the thick cloth and wafted in a cloud.

“Is it really that bad?” Garent was peering sightlessly at me from under his tree. He singled the place out as more or less his own since we made camp, and I could tell he felt more comfortable with something solid at his back.

“Yes. You should see this,” I was forced to laugh almost despite myself, “You’ll have nightmares for weeks.”

I brought the skirt over to him, and draped it on his knees, unable to contain a smirk. Garent ran his hands over it, fingers snagging over the tufts. The skirt was about ankle length for the woman from whom it was taken – knee-length for me – made of undyed linen, and bunched all over with the typical, Sumerian decorative rings of rounded cloth, reminiscent of oiled, sleeked sheep wool. The impression was as if a little girl had decided to sew a ball dress, but couldn’t figure out that ruffles went all the way through, and had simply tucked them onto the straight cloth in circles.

“Wow, you’re kidding, this isn’t real.” Garent was grinning horribly.

I grumbled.

“Oh man, I want a picture for future reference. Please tell me someone has a working cell phone with a camera. Please.”

“Sadist,” I informed him, grabbing the skirt from his lap with finality and pulling it away. I wrapped the skirt carefully, pinning it into place with the long, sharp bronze pins that were lodged in its waist, and draped the poncho-shawl around my shoulders without removing my blouse from underneath. The edges were just long enough to conceal my rolled-up sleeves and, while ancient Mesopotamia was a fairly hygienic land where people understood the notion of bathing regularly (more or less) I refused to put another woman’s rarely-washed garment over my bare torso.

I used my own wide, brown skirt to wrap my hair. Sumerian women did not wear head covers regularly; they coiled their long hair around their heads in braids, and wore ornaments. Even the poorest woman would have beads, maybe cheap trinkets, over her hairdo. The scarf would make me stand out, but blond braids would be even worse.

When I was finished with the complicated process of winding up my long hair and tying it away, I stepped out uncomfortable to face the men’s scrutiny. Rostov looked like he was about to laugh. Lorenzo looked on disapprovingly.

I cringed. I’ve never been a good-looking woman, and I did not deny that. The only looks I’ve drawn from men were dismissive ones; even my husband had, first, looked at me like that. The only way to deal with this circumstance was to allow myself to turn into a frump, or to compensate with clothing that was meticulous, tailored and classical. It was a measure of my pride, perhaps, that I’ve chosen the second method. Sometimes, I sincerely wondered what certain specific people thought of my appearance. Most of the time, I even more sincerely didn’t want to know.

Right now, I desperately wanted to escape the scrutinizing glances.

I made myself go through my farewells slowly, instead of simply dashing off into the sunrise.

“I’m going to try and barter off some of these glass bottles,” I sorted carefully through my bag of medications, piling out small heaps of colourful pills. “Small, brown glass bottles aren’t that much of an anachronistic stretch, and they’re probably expensive enough to buy half the empire.”

“We could do with more food,” Lorenzo agreed, “Just make sure you don’t trade anything with labels on it.”

I cast him a disdainful look, trying to figure out what to use for a pocket.

The poor woman Rostov and Lorenzo had robbed carried a pouch, I discovered after some search, on the inside of her shawl. There wasn’t much in it except some trinkets which, for all I know, were the woman’s entire worldly possessions. Not entirely likely, though; she traveled alone, and to find a woman unmarried in this society living the quality of life this one enjoyed would be impossible. More likely she was the wife of an artisan or a trader, for whom the garments on her back were not the sole property. So I hoped when I remembered to feel guilty.

The two of them took off with sunrise, while I – with occasional help from a slightly surly Garent – made breakfast from the remainder of the anachronistic coffee and two fish. I was fully content to leave the logistics of acquiring the necessary gear to the men.

Finally, I was settled. The sun stood only a little over the horizon – trapping a traveler in this fairly populated area did not take long, or require much effort – and I could take my time on the road, examining the place and the people as well as the roads in and out of the city. It was a good thing that I was always a fairly observant person; now my skills of observations would truly be tested. I rather hoped that they would not fail me amid the strangeness.

“Come on,” I told Garent, tugging him to his feet. “Let’s go take a walk.”

“What for?”

“You sit around too much. You haven’t even been around the camp. Come on. Up you get.”

“Oh, Great,” he grumbled. “Now I have an exercise maniac.”

I grinned and guided his hand to my elbow. Before grabbing it, he ran his fingers along my arm. “You feel like a sheep.”

“I feel exactly like a sheep,” I said emphatically, and added solemnly, “Baaah.”

We walked around the campsite in a tight circle, from the vineyard to our right over to the orchard on our left, over the small irrigation canal which, despite my warnings managed to soak Garent’s shoe in warm water and along the firepit where a small fire from breakfast still steamed and smoked. It would be useful for Garent to know the layout of the camp; even if he didn’t yet realize it himself, it made him more confident and considerably more able to run away, or otherwise simply manage on his own. Besides, the walking, useless though it seemed to him – like the little chores – shook him out of his sullen depression.

“You’ll watch out for Lorenzo for me while I’m gone, won’t you?” I asked once our short round was done.

“Me? Are you sure you’re talking to the right person?”

“Depends,” I frowned at him with a theatrically puzzled expression which, I hoped, leaked into my thoughts. “Is your name Garent?”

“I’m pretty sure it is.”

“Then I am definitely talking to the right person.” I grabbed his sleeve. “You’re not the only one for whom this is difficult. I leave things here in something of a disarray, in a manner of speaking, and… well…” I did not state the obvious caveat; that I might very well not come back, or not come back on time.

“You’ll keep an eye out, won’t you?”

Garent’s eyes narrowed, and he frowned deeply, looking uncomfortable. He cast a brief look in my direction, and shook his head to himself, as though his inability to read my expression bothered him for a change. Then his face smoothed out so rapidly I was almost uncertain I’d actually seen what I thought I’d seen. Something which he was not inclined to share.

I was not sure why, but, just as in an eerily similar conversation a few nights before, I appeared to have struck a chord of which I did not previously know. That’s always an issue with psychology; sometimes, you simply tread on a person’s sensitive spot, and after the explosion comes you simply stand there throwing your hands in the air asking yourself ‘what did I just do?”. I always seemed to have a gift with people’s feelings; not by sparing them, but by deciphering their small, hidden agendas, the root causes of their neuroses. I am a diagnostician, and I am good at it, but here even I was at a loss.

Sometimes it’s all just guessworok.

“Okay, Sofia, you got it,” Garent said wryly. “I’ll keep out all the eyes I have.”

Ten minutes later I was striding on the road to Shubat Anshar, the thin, almost papery, soles of a strange woman’s sandals making my feet ache.

Chapter XLIX
In Which A Man Takes The Road Less Traveled

So far, the past was making a really bad impression on me. Mostly it was dark, and quiet. It's been dark and quiet for the last two days. And that is pretty disconcerting when you're not used to it anymore. I mean, the last time I saw – well, didn't see – the world like that was when I was three years old, bumping into my mom's furniture and playing with toy hero figurines, but hey, we all have to grow out of our bad habits sometime, right?

I could do conversations okay; even though everything went like an echo in Sofia's head, I had no trouble telling who was saying what when. I guess now I know why she's a linguist, because people still came through as themselves even inside her head, accents and everything. It's not like she had to put on chat tags for my benefit. But, on the other hand, she wasn’t running a full out closed-caption commentary on everything with little notes like “birds chirping” in brackets. So aside from conversations everything was pretty boring.

I spent most of my time feeling mopey and tagging along, wanting to go home where I could actually do some good to anyone. I guess now I also know why Sofia's so big about competence and doing everything; being seen as a burden is the worst thing in the world, even if nobody will outright tell you so.

Anyway, for the last couple days we were riding. Riding sounds like fun, but turns out to be a pain. You sit in the saddle – or whatever the 5th substituted for it – and the horse walks along, making you dizzy with going up and down, and your leg muscles hurt from sitting on its back. I wound up riding with Rostov, which is kind of a dubious honour anyway, and half the time I was too far from Sofia to tell what she was thinking, and Rostov didn't bother to include me.

When that happens I really have no way to tell what's happening, and that makes me really nervous, because for all I know the 5th could ambush us and kill everybody and I wouldn't even know it until they shot me. A lot of the time I could only tell that we were going, or stopped, and that it was getting late because the air cooled a lot. I basically spent most of the time wishing quietly that I could go home.

On the evening of the second day of this, when we were supposed to be getting towards Anshar, I was so tired I couldn't find anybody's mind even if I tried. Sofia came to help me down; I didn't need to read her mind to tell it was her because she has really small hands with nails in terrible shape. Every time she holds my hand, I can feel the callous by the thumb nail. Rostov has paws like a bear. It's pretty amazing what sort of thing you pay attention to when you have essentially nothing to look at otherwise.

I got a little nervous for a bit because I had no way of telling how high up I was. I was pretty sure the horses weren't that tall, but nobody likes just jumping off into what is, essentially, a dark pit, even if it turns out to be a really small dark pit. I hesitated until the toes of my shoe hit Sofia's arm a little below the shoulder. Sofia is very short – shorter than I am, and that doesn't happen often – so I knew I was fine. I slid off, and landed okay but then felt almost like I was seasick; all that day sitting on top of a swaying horse made my head spin. Sofia put an arm around my shoulders and walked me somewhere I could sit down, by a fire, I could feel the heat slowly rising as it took.

I’m pretty sure I drifted off to sleep until Sofia came to find me again.

It must've been some time, because I was a little less tired. I actually scraped up the effort to go hunting for her thoughts. Normally, Sofia is impossible to read; she dodges telepathy, it just sort of slides off of her. She really doesn't like the idea – which made me grateful that she would actually let me ride pretty much constantly in her head – and I think she actually needs to put in effort not to let it slide off of her. She was holding very still (metaphorically) for me, so I only needed four, maybe five tries to hunt her down.

“What's up?” I asked when I was sure I finally had her.

“Come have dinner,” she said.

I made a face, but obeyed anyway. The idea of food still seems gross to me, in a lot of ways, and the food was pretty bad. I mean, when we were in Paris Sofia took me out to a restaurant and I had some soup; it wasn't the height of my experience in Europe, but it was okay. This food just honestly wasn't tasty, though I couldn't blame Sofia. I guess, like so many things, tasty wasn't invented yet. And Sofia had to help me with the plate and the food, which was insanely embarrassing, but I ate anyway because now I would actually be affected by going hungry.

Apparently, I was still pretty tired because I kept losing the conversation.

I know there was a conversation of some sort, because I felt Sofia's hand move abruptly, like she was emphasizing a point, or debating, but I really couldn't tell you any more than that. This is the worst it's been, though, so I couldn't complain too much, even if I thought that complaining was a good idea in the first place. I ate the food quickly, trying not to taste it too much, and then everything faded away.

When I woke up again, everything was much, much colder, and felt very still. I'm not sure how to describe it because noise or quiet didn't really factor into it, but I could tell the difference anyway. It's how nobody around you is moving. I was pretty sure that it was night and most everybody was asleep. I, on the other hand, was wide awake, and really bored.

I poked out of Lorenzo’s heavy coat and carefully moved my hand forward until I met the wall.

Whoa, building. Sofia didn’t tell me anything about a building. Or maybe she did and I simply didn’t catch it. I wanted to look around a little more, but stopped myself just in time. I figured the others were asleep somewhere nearby, and getting an elbow to the face in the middle of your nice dream probably isn’t the nicest thing in the world.

Instead, I pulled Lorenzo’s coat around me from the cold, and slowly and carefully sat up in place. Then I sent my mind out, probing carefully.

Okay, here they were. I couldn’t tell exactly where they were in terms of space, but they were pretty close. I could get to both Sofia and Lorenzo from where I was sitting. And they were both asleep, and both dreaming. It’s a good thing I barely moved, because Sofia is an insanely light sleeper. The only way to prevent her from waking up from every tiny little noise is to cast a sleep spell on her, and I was notably short on them.

It was kind of funny that they even managed to coordinate their REM sleep.

I felt my fingers itch. They were both dreaming, and I knew I could peek into their dreams. I also knew that they would hang me upside down and cut off my ears one at a time, regardless of whether I was blind and pathetic or not, if I were to actually start rummaging in their psyche. Lorenzo would suck my soul out, and Sofia... Sofia was too scary to think about, really.

On the other hand I was seriously sensorily deprived. I haven’t been seeing anything for days, and dreams would have things in them. Shapes. Colors. Maybe sounds, though dreams usually tend to be visual only. All the things I couldn’t get out here. And, honestly I was seriously tempted.

After all, dreams are just stuff the subconscious sort of throws out to the garbage. It’s not like I was going to prod their deepest, darkest secrets, right?

I sat there for a bit, contemplating, then let my mind slide into Lorenzo’s dream.

Okay, sudden light hurt.

The moon hung in the sky indecisively, as though it were unsure of its direction. It was unnaturally large, and ominously close to Earth. Occasionally, it blurred along the edges of the dream and became smeared along the horizon. The entire place was full of dark shapes and nightly sounds, the whisper of trees that were not entirely trees, and critters that could not be identified in any world encyclopedia.

There was something distinctly odd about the place, and the feeling of deep discomfort it aroused in me, but I could not put my finger on what precisely it was. I decided to explore further.

I hovered, momentarily as indecisive as the moon, observing the empty space all about me uncertainly. Then my eye detected the dark opening of an underground tunnel, and my mind, tied now to the dream, confirmed the certainty that this was where I should be headed. I concentrated and advanced rapidly towards the opening, through it, and along the tunnels inside. The place was permeated with the sensation of loss; as though death had stalked these ominous ruins for centuries and so made them poetically, almost canonically appropriate for what was about to occur.

I froze in place. I had never had a thought like that in my life. I shook my head and the tunnels were suddenly just long tunnels leading to a central spot, slightly dark and a little damp.

Dreams are rarely concrete and discrete, with entirely realistic and meaningless matter filling the landscape; dreams are fraught with meaning and emotion, highly stylized like some avant-garde film, with some objects being blurry and unobservable and others rendered in magnificent detail. The rocks of the tunnel wall, for example, were almost impossible to make out and the cracks were faded. The strange brick that lined the floor, on the other hand, drew the eye to it with fine lines and vibrant, almost living color.

And… I was doing it again. The dream and Lorenzo’s impressions were clearly messing with my head. I was getting the kind of backlash that I hadn’t experienced in dreams for years; I seemed to be getting Lorenzo’s feelings, his poetic outlook (I hadn’t even realized he had one before). I even appeared to inherit his absurd, antiquated vocabulary! Maybe the dampening of my telepathy was also affecting my psionic defenses?

Bad news.

I took a deep breath and centered myself, then returned to floating down the tunnel. The brick floor, which I now recognized as Oranbegan in design, would randomly go hazy at branches, an obvious sign that those particular paths were unimportant to the dream at large. How convenient for Lorenzo to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for me.

But not convenient for anybody wanting to follow Lorenzo normally; the tunnel split at numerous points, twisted into weird labyrinthine contortions, and periodically opened up into large caverns full of Oranbegan ruins for people to get lost in. I hadn’t seen a single soul anywhere – Circle of Thorns or otherwise – and it was obvious that “getting lost” was exactly what Lorenzo wanted. He definitely didn’t want to be followed.

Finally, the tunnel opened to a massive chamber – a large circular room with a domed ceiling that opened to a view of the night sky at the top. People stood frozen in tableau throughout it, all their attention focused on the large pillar of fire that rose from the center. As I flew up and over the crowd, I could see that fire rose from the center of what appeared to be a gigantic summoning circle. No, correction, a large circle seal which would imprison anything inside it. Or both? I’d never seen anything like it.

I looked at it with interest. It was magic on a serious scale. I never really did anything on that kind of scale, myself. I probably could, but I didn’t have the experience, and never had the need. I went in closer, to look at it, and saw that it was precise, very intricate work. The magic ring itself was made of weird liquids which were burning, creating a circle of fire a foot high. Inside it stood a pile of broken crates ornamented with a variety of spell components and small artifacts, and this pile was being completely immolated in the pillar of flame. The pillar, as well as the circle of fire, was frozen like the people, a single snapshot – an instant of time.

Obviously Lorenzo’s circle. But where was he?

Movement drew my eye. I flew around the circle, and found him standing on the edge of the magic ring, with one foot on each side and the flames licking his polished black shoes. In the dream he looked pretty much like he did in real life; he, like Sofia, appeared to be one of these people who see themselves pretty accurately, and represent themselves the same way in their dreams. He still had his fedora, something of a trademark piece of clothing, but his trenchcoat was replaced with an old style three-piece suit, the kind of thing Al Capone might wear. He held in one hand a large silver pistol similar to the one he had been given by Rostov, and in the other a long, pointy object – an Oranbegan spirit thorn – which was completely covered in blood. The dripping of the blood onto the floor was the movement I had seen.

Oookay… Creepy. And Lorenzo was, well, I can’t really say fuzzy, but hard to capture in my eye. Almost like he was both there and not there at the same time, like Schrodinger’s Cat. Or like the moon from the beginning of the dream. I looked up, to where the pillar of fire shot up through the hole in the domed ceiling, and saw that the night sky and the moon were both gone. Instead, the hole was filled with an eerie purple light and a darkness that sucked at my eyeballs. It emanated emptiness and fear, and a mindless terror started to pull at heart. I tore my eyes away.

And I suddenly knew where I was. I’d been told that Lorenzo had been trapped in some sort of Dungeon Dimension for the last seventy years, a place like that rift in the sky above, after Reverend Hale and his friends stopped him from some mad plot or another. This must be the point where he failed; where the people he had betrayed foiled his plans and inadvertently sent him to some kind of living hell. I could still feel the malevolent presence of the rift above, and realized that I’d never gotten a grasp of just how horrible a place it must have been, or how frightening. At least to Lorenzo.

I looked back at him and saw that his gaze, which was previously fixed on the spirit thorn in his hand, was now pointing forwards, into the crowd of people that surrounded him. The crowd itself had been ill defined when I had entered, more a feeling of a presence of people than any actual people itself. Just a nameless crowd of thousands – no, millions – that impossibly filled the chamber.

All the invisible masses I couldn’t say anything about were pressing close, but now I could make out individuals – people with detail and features. I didn’t know who a lot of them were but in the front was a guy in another old style suit who looked beat up, and there was another guy, who, even though he had the pallor of death and a gunshot in his head, stood and stared accusingly at Lorenzo. Next to him was Hale, without his hat. After that came a flurry of dead people. I didn’t recognize any of them, until I came to the very end.

I stopped. There were two people there whom I definitely recognized. The first was me. I had no idea how I was supposed to be there in the 1930s and dead, but I most certainly was a corpse, standing there and glaring. Next to me was Sofia. She stared with dead eyes, and there was a hole right through her heart, the blood dripped down her blouse. She was reaching out with blue fingers looking like she was trying to grab the circle.

Lorenzo’s big plan, I remember Sofia telling me, was to create a weapon that would kill off anything magic (including magic users). To free humanity. She didn’t entirely disapprove of the idea, she said at the time, just of the method. That’s why I was there, very dead. Sofia wasn’t magic, and shouldn’t be here, but I don’t think Lorenzo’s subconscious entirely figured it out. His head jammed it all together, all the important people who would die because of him.

And I was one of them now? Drat. I wasn’t sure how I liked that, I was always kind of a jerk to the guy.

The thing lasted maybe five more seconds, with Lorenzo looking, first at the thorn in his hand, then at the purple scary glow, his face tense with contemplation. Then he made up his mind, and turned around. The purple light suddenly shot down the column of fire, engulfing it completely and obscured Lorenzo. The circle shattered, the dead people disappeared, and the world fell melted away, leaving nothing but purple light and expanding darkness. For a second I saw weird patterns, things which I couldn’t follow with my eye without losing them entirely. Feelings of terror and dread engulfed me and I could feel the presence of… things hidden in the abyss. Things which pulsed with curiosity, hunger, malevolence, vengeance.

I could feel my control slipping, and knew that my mind would soon be overwhelmed by Lorenzo’s dream. I scrambled to hold onto my mental defenses, and pulled myself out of the dream entirely.

I found myself in the dark again, rattled and uneasy. The blanket on which I was sitting suddenly stirred. I quickly lay down and hid under my – Lorenzo’s – coat. I must’ve woken Lorenzo up by worsening his nightmare. Considering the movement, I woke Sofia up too. She would sit with Lorenzo, so that was okay.

The dream was symbolic, that was obvious. I didn’t know enough specifics about Lorenzo’s history to tell exactly in what way. I wished, almost, that Sofia were there (alive, obviously) to tell me who was who, and what was going on. Even so, I could figure some things out pretty easily.

I remembered Sofia telling me, way back at the beginning, that Lorenzo alone and out of his time was dangerous. “If you want to prevent him from pursuing his plans,” she said, “you must tie him to the world.”

I guess, in a weird way that’s exactly what he didn’t want, and that’s exactly what happened. It was weird to discover I was important enough a tie to have a face. Sofia, sure. But me?

I lay in the dark for a while, thinking, until I finally drifted into sleep again, and slept until Sofia came to shake me awake in the morning.

Sadly (or perhaps not so sadly, since I only play two characters) yes. I have had Ideas. And Ideas are frightening things.

In terms of groups, it usually helps if you define a little more of what you want; RP or not, VG or SG, and so on and so forth. Also there is a handy thread at the top part of the forums called Virtue SG directory which has details of several different SGs. You could look there.

Our VG is not quite heroes, but it is (sort of) heroic. You can poke at the VV page if you want.