Genia

I don't know... The SF lets you hold a bit of an Idiot Ball, and that bothers me.

Chapter XXXII
In Which The Writing Appears On The Wall

We tiptoed across the brief distance to the temple itself slowly, trying to edge around pools of light from stray flashlights and remain against the skyline as little as possible. The entrance to the temple, now clear of guards, seemed invitingly dim and large, cavernous and concealing.

“Didn’t we say we wanted to talk to the archaeologist?” I asked when we were clustered again, leaning against the stone of the temple walls. “This is probably not our way.”

“I want to look at and for the relics, first.” Lorenzo poked his head cautiously around the wall before answering as quietly as possible. “If they are here, we shall take possession of them… that would make sense. If not, then we shall see whether this temple really has a depository of magical items or not. That would make sense too. Besides, if their archaeologist is obsessive… well, we will have gotten lucky.”

“And possession is nine tenths of the law anyway,” Rostov smirked. “Let’s go possess stuff.”

The entrance into the dig was formed into a tunnel supported by narrow wooden beams imported in from Baghdad or Samarra. It sloped gently downwards, and was equipped, at this late hour, with one or two rather faded lights hanging off of the central beam. Otherwise our little team had to make do with advancing by feel, to mitigate which contingency Garent took point together with Rostov.

Occasionally, along the length of the tunnel, there were spaced guards, by ones or twos. A rather foolish arrangement; none of them ever had enough time to make noise to alert the other pairs, as they were apparently supposed to. Sometimes, Victor darted in with his strange daggers – I made a mental note to ask about them later, if such a later presented itself – and did the work in seconds. Sometimes Garent, apparently feeling humanitarian inclinations, put the guards to sleep long enough for Rostov to club them over the head with the butt of his rifle.

Within the temple itself the tunnel split into several branches, leading off into gloom.

“Whoa,” Victor looked around with interest, momentarily proving us light by holding a large fireball afloat over his hand, “it’s a labyrinth down here.”

“It’s a ziggurat,” I murmured drily. “It’s in the job description.”

“Wow, you sound like you’re enjoying yourself.” He seemed justifiably surly. I was taking out my nerves on him. Though sarcasm was certainly an habitual form of humour on my part, my tension showed.

“Ziggurats. I hate ziggurats.” I tugged at the strap on my shoulder and grimaced. “It’s always ziggurats, and I just know something bad is going to happen.”

“Hehe, well, at least it’s a step up from our usual thing.” There is nothing more horrifying than a softly whispered pun. They disguise themselves in the form of a profound statement and thus infiltrate your brain from within. It is much better, so much better, when they are shouted or spoken out loud. Your defence mechanisms kick in and provide a suitable blockade against their onslaught.

Victor is one of the worst punsters in the world, and he was whispering very quietly.

“Unworthy,” I groaned, and was shushed by several masculine voiced – all hissing very loudly.

The tunnel curved and expanded into a room. It was mostly excavated, though piles of dirt by the walls indicated the potential for more refined work. It was almost completely dark. It was not surprising that the diggers had not left lights simply burning all night on the dig site, of course; not only was it wasteful of electricity, but strong light could be extremely damaging to any remains one hoped to find – it bleached old written parchments, exposed fragile ceramics and elevated the temperature of barely surviving paints. Considering the atrocious way in which the dig was led looking from the outside, I would not have been too astounded if, during the day, works on the inside were led in daylight glow, but I could hope that someone had the sense to use redlight, or at least dim the lamps.

Frowning, I stared around, into the blackness which coiled along the walls. The place seemed empty; as empty as every other ruined chamber we crossed. It had neither people nor artifacts. I sighed, and leaned momentarily on the wall to catch my breath.

My fingers found the markings of their own volition. I gasped and threw open my bag, where I had stashesd – together with my medic’s supplies – some additional items Rostov, in his paranoia, kindly offered. Including a flashlight. I flipped it on, and held it up.

“Sofia, what the hell are you doing?” Wordlessly, I turned and shone it on the wall behind me, then on every wall in turn. There were arrested gasps. The entirety of the room, every little it of the walls, was covered with faded cuneiform. We were all staring at them as though we found a treasure. Sadly, though, the treasure seemed much too worn to read easily in the light of a single torch.

Lorenzo was looking around, utterly engrossed in the writing, trying to make out as much as possible, but it was simply to much, in too poor an environment. Weeks go into the deciphering of a single inscription eroded with age and damage. We had perhaps a few minutes. I wished at least for a high resolution camera. Instead, my eye fell on a sheaf of papers.

“Convenient!” I grabbed it, waving the stack triumphantly. “My goodness. Someone’s a lousy record-keeper.”

Lorenzo held out his hand, and I handed it to him, smiling. The rest of the ensemble brought their heads together to better peer over his shoulder.

There was a small, subtle noise, a slight rustle of moving earth. I frowned. There were all sorts of possibilities; rats, distant tremours, even slides that were entirely natural. I’d hear them all… Paranoia is an unhealthy trait. But paranoia seems to be the whole point of sneaking, and that’s what we were doing.

“Guys…” I said urgently.

“Wait. This is what we came here for. Another minute and…”

I heard the soft scuffling again. “Ssh.”

“What?”

“Sh!”

I sidled back slowly, edging towards where the walls met in a corner. The soft grinding of earth came a little more obviously now, and out a little to my right and back – where the room changed into another dugout tunnel – there was a slight thump.

This time, everyone else heard it, as well. There was massive freezing and clapping hands to mouths to silence breathing. Lorenzo rapidly stuffed the papers in his capacious pockets. In the head of every single person there now was the single thought: uh oh. We needed to move, away from here and into a different room. I grabbed Garent by the sleeve and pushed him off into the tunnel exit furthest away from the sounds. I prodded Victor into moving after him, and nudged Rostov and Lorenzo to follow.

Suddenly the room was bathed in light.

After the hour odd spent in the dark, the sudden flare of a large spotlight was almost unbearable. I whimpered and threw my hand over my eyes almost instinctively, drawing my head into my shoulders.

It was a reflexive reaction. There was nothing I could do for it beyond some preternatural abilities which I did not, and still do not, possess. The light hurt and blinded, and my body reacted in the only way it knew, protecting my eyes from damage. Sadly, though, my body was not exactly in the know on the matter of rapidly escaping into tunnels, nor was it up to date on the idea that being the last person in the room meant that I should not, under any circumstances, freeze.

By the time my mind overrode my body, several seconds later, and I opened my eyes before attempting to dodge after everybody else into the tunnel. Luckily for me, and for the rest of this particular history, I’d done it in that order. If I had moved with my eyes closed, the rifle leveled neatly into my face would have blown my head into little pieces.

“Ah ah, I think not.”

I turned around silently, to examine the neat line of 5th Coolum soldiers staring at me. A veritable firing squad, which I thought quite high class for the normal modus operandi I could expect. I was, to say the least, singularly disadvantaged with no place to run to and nowhere to maneuver. Which is, of course, the point of firing squads in the first place. “Tell your friends to come out of the tunnel now.”

The man who issued the amused command was… grandfatherly. Slightly overweight drooping, with a good-uncle’s face and clever eyes. My brain immediately snapped into high gear with warnings of serious danger. I realize that this is an untypical reaction; this was not a face to intimidate. Most people, perhaps, would have dismissed the man, expected a more military type in this organization which prides itself so much on its Ubermenschen, but I am notoriously atypical, and a meter-sixty, besides. It is the mild, pleasant, unprepossessing ones who scare me to death.

I stared at the man for a while, constructing his biography and motivations. Sixtyish, florid, large, with a decent taste and a German accent. Born, I mused, at the tail end of the War; a plethora of motivation there.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said mildly, staring up the barrel into the face of a young and rather blank fellow. Of course I was terrified. But, as it were, I was the most expendable member of our team (perhaps I was even a burden) and I never betrayed anyone to his death before. I was not about to start now.

“Come, be reasonable.” The man smiled at me. “I just want to talk to one of your friends. A small chat; a sort of professional courtesy.”

I rolled my eyes, but lacked the time to give a proper repartee. Garent, and then Rostov and Vic ducked out into the light, Lorenzo on their heels. I curbed a mental monologue of curses; this was not the note on which I wished to end my existence.

“The hell!” Rostov said, stunned, for a change into almost-speechlessness. “It’s Auer!”

Lorenzo whirled, an expression of astonishment painted on his face as openly as I have rarely seen anything there. Clearly, the appearance of a dead man was not in his contingency plans.

“I thought the guy was dead,” Garent muttered to me under his breath.

“Astonishing, so did I.” I moved aside a little to let Lorenzo through so that he could face his… comrade? Ally? Enemy? “Considering the blown up house.”

“Must’ve done it to destroy evidence,” Rostov said sourly. “I told Lorenzo we should watch that man.”

Garent’s eyes lit on me with an expression of incredulous joy as he silently – after all there were guns aimed at us – reveled in his moment of pure victory. “I will,” he murmured, “cherish this moment for the rest of my life.”

“Yes, yes,” I hissed under my breath. “Now quiet.”

“Ah, Mondavi. A gutten tag,” Auer said jovially in German. “What a surrprise!"

We are right there, on the main Virtue SG thread. So is SCORPIO, and a couple others. The themes are set out in plain sight, but it tends to require a little research to dig further into what SGs do or don't do.

[ QUOTE ]

Blueside? I had to stop counting the "heroes for a heroic league of spandex heroes of america", every single variety of schoolgirl anime cat girl and enough ninja clans to make you think everone in Japan is a ninja or atleast a decendant of one.


[/ QUOTE ]

Well, I run a (what I consider) realistic supergroup, With very little in the way of heroics and, very notably, no spandex at all. Though I confess to having a few wide-eyed idealists in our ranks.

They are around. A little harder to find than the other type, to be sure, but they certainly exist.

[ QUOTE ]


I must say from my life long journey I have noticed the people who say to other I hate drama are usually the ones starting it.


[/ QUOTE ]

Um... Yeah.

I especially draw your attention to this quote:

[ QUOTE ]

Some call Dis Continuity in their personal canon when they feel that their time has been wasted after a pointlessly tragic or improperly set-up Shoot The Shaggy Dog or Downer Ending that relies on Character Derailment, Diabolus Ex Machina, or an Outer Limits Twist to pull off. If the Snicket Warning Label offers them a way out, they'll take it. This group will readily admit that art is free to be emotional, even depressing, but only if it is done sufficiently well. After all, while realistic emotion can make a good work great, needless angst makes a mediocre work terrible: It's pretty much generally agreed that cheaply won tears are annoying, and all too often it's a cute dog that needlessly suffers so the author can make a point.


[/ QUOTE ]

Not to mention...

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Those of us who enjoy some aspect of realism in our superhero stories haven't been convinced by now, and you probably aren't going to be the extra-special person to do it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Similarly, not everyone is convinced that "realism" equates to pessimism, grittiness, emo & angst, and lack of hope. Calling the other styles of play silly and childish doesn't do much work, either.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am not sure how "realism" got equated with emo and angst. I hate emo and angst. If I ever write angst, I will shoot myself in the hand and break my keyboard in half.

Realism is realism. Good things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people. Occasionally, good things happen to good people.

...

I must say I am partial to pessimism, though.

[ QUOTE ]

I also get annoyed when people think we haven't all heard the "It's a superhero game, there's laser eyes, it can't be realistic!" argument before. News flash, kids: you aren't saying anything a hundred plus people haven't already said, and they probably said it better than you did. Those of us who enjoy some aspect of realism in our superhero stories haven't been convinced by now, and you probably aren't going to be the extra-special person to do it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hence:

[ QUOTE ]

I have heard this argument so many times... It never holds water, one way or another.

[/ QUOTE ]

P.S.: To the OP. There are, indeed, such supergroups. I have one, for instance.

I have heard this argument so many times... It never holds water, one way or another.

There is such a thing as R"eality", and that has a defined meaning - unless we ever find positive proof for alternate realities, of course - which is this everyday world in which I sit and type down a response to a game forum in a game where people engage in a sort of structured storytelling.

Then there's "realism", which is a different animal alltogether.

[ QUOTE ]

In literature realism refers to verisimilitude of narrative (whether or not a story is believable) or to verisimilitude of characterization (whether or not the characters are believable). Verisimilitude was introduced in literature when - in the latter half of the second millenium - the novel replaced the romance as primary literary genre. [Jan 2007]


[/ QUOTE ]

Granted, a great many people see comics and sci-fi as the modern heirs to the mideival romance - and the genre of lack of verisimilitude - but that issue of whether one can, and should, write realistic science fiction, realistic fantasy and realistic comics is under debate, not decided to the negative.

The big issues are verisimilitude of characterization - that is, a portrayal of a personality which is believable and grounded within concepts we know - and consistency of story - for instance, no Deus ex Machina or ungrounded leaps out of nowhere. The portrayal of reality whic, while it has fantastic elements, is full ofits own flaws, gritty and unidealised is also a major factor in the establishment of realism.

And for those who want the tl;dr version: So what if it's a comic? it can be a good, realistic comic.

[ QUOTE ]

i honestly hope the OP does post here again to clarify what he meant, because i really am interested in what constitutes realistic in a setting that routinely has extradimensional invasions and zombie attacks while fighting off gangs that fly around and shoot various sorts of blasts at you.


[/ QUOTE ]

It's not nearly as hard to achieve as all that, you know, and not nearly as much an oxymoron.

But, hey, if I dare actually go into a coherent discussion of realism as relevant to the setting, someone's bound to bludgeon me over not having a sense of humour.

... I don't see why the question deserves the ridicule it gets.

I am not altogether sure what you perceive as realistic; is it a less genre oriented group? A more generic, not-themed one? A less black-and-white hero one?

I do think an elaboration would help people answer.

Chapter XXXI
In Which A Clever Plan Is Brought Into Motion

The walk took less than I anticipated but, as quickly became obvious from the faces of the men, much longer than they’d had patience for. There was little I could do to accommodate them, however; while I do not per se limp, I tend to lack the necessary balance and coordination required to negotiate difficult terrain. My natural lack of skill in such matters (I’ve never been a mountain goat) was augmented by injuries. I am seldom in pain and generally, in a city or over short distances, can negotiate my way quite adequately. Here, however, I needed every scrap of attention dedicated to the road and to finding ground that was stable enough. I stumbled through the walk, barely keeping my feet.

Occasionally, I saw both Garent and Lorenzo cast worried looks my way.

Rostov has chosen his position well, though and things got marginally easier as we finally hit his starting point. The ground evened out from a slope into something more resembling even terrain. From here on out, all the way into the camp and the temple, the incline was at a slight upwards angle – much more easily negotiable in the dark than a descent would have been, for which I was thankful.

“When the sun goes down, people will be returning to their tents,” Lorenzo murmured, watching the climax of activity as the workday neared its end. “If we skirt the campfires and the main masses of people, we should be fine until the temple.”

We shrugged. It seemed a rather obvious thing to say. Just as it was obvious that no matter the commotion Rostov’s men would stage, there would be guards by the temple itself. The 5th Column knew we were coming, after all, and it would need to be completely without wits – a tendency this specific group has, unfortunately, not displayed so far – not to take appropriate precautions.

Just as it was obvious what our cue to depart was.

The darkened sky on the other side of the dig lit orange. I counted mentally, got to one, and covered my ears a fraction of a second before the air exploded with noise. Alarm klaxons started howling all over the camp, and the tent city erupted momentarily with frightened Iraqis and outraged soldiers.

I clipped the umbrella to the strap of my bag at the shoulder, tying it off for additional safety to the bottom of the bag as well. Then gripped Lorenzo’s swordstick, and bounced a few times on the balls of my feet to see that nothing rattled or came loose.

“Yep,” Rostov said with deep satisfaction. “Time to go.”

Lorenzo nodded and moved forward. Until then, he was almost preternaturally quiet, even for his saturnine self. Just as he was busy assessing my physical condition out of the corner of his eye, I was preoccupied spying on his psychological makeup in the same way. Considering his history, he is likely to be as allergic to deserts as I am to atomic reactors. He was more allergic to public displays of weakness, though, so I held my peace until a more opportune moment could arise. That won’t be until quite a while, and by then old flashbacks will have become largely irrelevant, but I had no way of knowing that then.

Lorenzo held out a hand, murmured something too quiet even for me to hear, and a dark, thick mist started rising all about us in clumps, creating an illusion of black storm clouds. It settled, slowly, into a familiar gray veil, and the world around us grew even darker than it was. I examined the mist critically; it seemed awfully thin, which I noted.

“I don’t want to use too much magic. This can’t be detected, and it can’t set off anything if we get too close. Even so, by the time we get to the temple itself I will be dropping this.”

Which meant that we – or rather, they, because this has never been my purview even in better days – would have to take out guards. Possible small pockets of mayhem might ensue. The mist was a handy crutch for such circumstances; anyone dragged into it simply disappeared, vanished form the eye. We’d used the mist occasionally before and, though I in general don’t approve of magic in all its forms, I am entirely willing to contemplate practical uses for it when necessary. Lorenzo and I are similar in that regard, as well.

We moved out silently. Not because we were such great experts in stealth, because while we are none of us new to the game and its rules, we tend to rely on a different kind of stealth – and not because we were naturally inclined – we had, among other things, a man with a limp and a woman who needed a cane – but, simply, because the only people who could now see us were mages as skilled as Lorenzo. That we considered unlikely, as they are few and far between. A hundred and fourty years of expertise are not easy to come by, not even in this crazy day and age.

The tent city was not, in fact, vast. Merely somewhat spread out. The Columnists, ignorant as they were of local politics, apparently hired their workers off of two rather inimical clans, embroiled in, if not quite a blood feud, then certainly not friendly. Or so we inferred, being unable to understand the conversations particularly well.

“What,” Victor grinned at us, “you don’t know Arabic?”

I shrugged. “It’s a bit low on my list, frankly. I started with Hindo-Europeans. I know the grammar of course – after all, it’s just a Semitic with some quirks – but even if I did study it, which I didn’t, this would still be beyond me. The dialect seems pretty bad.”

“It is,” Lorenzo affirmed, staring beyond the cloud of mist.

“And about as far from literary Arabic as you can get. They teach you to read newspapers, out in the “European” hemispheres, not actually speak with the natives.”

“What about you, Language-whiz eidetic memory person?” Garent quirked an eyebrow at Lorenzo.

“Classical Arabic. Not modern.”

“Oh. Of course it is.”

“Come on, Sofia,” Rostov looked around. “Leave the linguistics lesson for later.”

“Sorry,” I murmured, “I do get carried away, and this seems to be soundproof.”

“Not soundproof enough.”

You had to give the Column credit for not senselessly throwing the entirety of their workforce into the fray of the excitement we could overhear on the other end of the camp, thus turning them into unwilling, angry and incapable cannon fodder. They were mostly huddled in their tents, or around one or two fires, sometimes, cradling rifles in their laps cautiously. We skirted around them, sticking to darker corners and large boulders, with Rostov leading the way and Lorenzo holding Vic by the metaphorical collar to keep him from speeding and darting through with a supersonic boom.

The trip through tentland passed without much incident, indicating to us that there were no mages with the group of 5th Column at all. Lorenzo and Rostov started to relax.

“Or they could all be in the temple,” Garent blew their soap bubble.

“Quiet everyone. We’re here.”

We were. The mound of the archaeological dig – pardon, the mound of what should have been an archaeological dig – was looking in front of us, pieces of brick and stone poking out of the dirt occasionally. There were intermittent bits where the walls of what had once been a ziggurat rose smoothly from the wreckage, and there were parts, much larger, where the walls were scattered in a shower of stone fragments. There was an entrance into the mound itself, dug out painstakingly in one of the slopes. Around the hole, two guards with rifles loitered, looking alert and angry.

We hid behind a portable toilet’s flimsy, plastic wall, clustering together. “I am going to drop our veil now,” Lorenzo said softly. “Someone had better take care of the guards before they begin shooting.”

“Ooh, can I? Can I?” Vic bounced on the soles of his feet, flicking an all-too-bright flame between his fingers as though he were a fire-eater on stage.

“No, I don’t think so,” Lorenzo shook his head. “You have an unhealthy penchant for overreacting. I would like that mountain to remain standing, if you don’t mind.”

Victor sulked. “I wouldn’t use fire for that, look!” He held up empty hands. After a second they were no longer empty. He was holding on to two slim knives, made of, as far as I could see, shadow and nothing much else. “It’ll take no time.”

“Oh, very well.” Lorenzo sighed, raised his hand, and then brought it down. The world suddenly became clearer, the edges of everything sharper and more distinct. Around the little corner of shadow in which we huddled the light of the waning moon and stars became marginally brighter. We pressed together silently, and stopped breathing.

Victor looked around, then crept slowly to the edge of the shed. Peering from behind the corner, he stared around attentively enough to satisfy even my paranoid leanings, then sprinted off. At first he was still visible, running softly in the direction completely opposite the guards, then his outlines blurred and he vanished altogether.

There was a slight whoosh of air as Victor reversed tracks and flew past us, then two almost inaudible little wet sounds from the distance and the sound of two bodies hitting the ground. At that, the group stirred. A second later, Victor appeared around the corner again, wiping his hands and smiling beatifically. “There, it’s done.”

Almost automatically, we arranged ourselves in a sort of line; Rostov edged forward, carefully sliding his rifle off his shoulder. After him came Lorenzo with a gun with a silencer – not entirely proof against detection, but considerably better than Rostov’s large gun would be – and me with my inherently silent bag of medications. Garent and Vic, still holding onto his magical daggers, brought up the rear.

“Okay,” I breathed, “let’s go.”

Chapter XXX
In Which A Clever Plan Is Hatched

“We seem to have a little problem,” I observed caustically, looking out to the obviously excavated dig site behind Rostov’s shoulder.

“What problem’s that?”

“Oh, the several hundred people that seem to occupy the place might be worth consideration,” I replied airily, and waved my hand in a vague gesture towards the abomination that was the site of the ancient temple of Shubat Anshar.

“I think, madam, that the problem isn’t as great as you make it out to be.” Lorenzo peered outside the rolled-down window intently, counting something off under his breath. “Most of the people down there are native workers of some sort, not 5th Columnists. They should not present much resistance.”

I half-groaned. “But what are you going to do about the execrable way they led this dig?” The absence of any sort of archaeological grid felt rather like a personal offense. If you are about to meddle with artifacts and attempt to launch some nefarious, probably devastating plan – because the 5th Column couldn’t figure on ay other sort of plan – then at least you should do it right. I have a healthy respect for the evil in the hearts of men; I feel much less inclined to respect a fool who didn’t study up on his methodology. “Your search for artifacts is doomed; if they left the relics in situ I’ll eat my nonexistent hat, and then take a bite of yours!”

He smiled wryly. “A valid point. I hope they have at least one archaeologist with them. Someone who can take charge of the relics, if not be in charge of the dig itself. It would expedite things tremendously if we could have a chat with him. Or them.”

“We could go ask.” Rostov’s grin was positively wolfish, and his hand rested enthusiastically on the steering wheel. Victor echoed the smile. Even Garent looked moderately eager. I sighed. In this sort of company, I often feel as though I am that person in cartoons who latches on to someone’s shirt collar, and spends the next thirty seconds tenaciously holding on while the rabbit – or roadrunner, I smirked, eyeing Victor covertly – dashed over thee face of a cliff. I keep expecting them to look down, discover they are standing on air, scream theatrically and hit the ground in a shower of sparks.

“For us to ask anyone anything, we need to be alive.”

“Don’t worry, Sofia,” Garent comforted me in his usual manner. “I can’t die, and I’m the only one who matters.”

A wave of groans, snickers and disgusted silences followed suit.

“Mister Ward’s attempt at humour aside,” Lorenzo – he of the disgusted silence – mused, “Madam Rabinovich has a point---“

“I have a point,” I said, a little more dryly than I intended. “Astounding.”

“-- though not quite in the way she meant it.” It was my turn to be ignored. “A large, explosive fight might put the artifacts at risk, and we do want them intact. Also,” he pointed out to Rostov, “you might not have considered this, but there might be a potential cache of magical items underneath our feet. Becoming embroiled in a large magical battle might be the equivalent to setting off a ton of nitroglycerine right over a nuclear reactor.”

I confess, the notion that we might be standing on top of the magical equivalent of Chernobyl did not occur to me. I shivered, not in response to the chill of the air conditioner, and mentally dodged a flashback. I am… allergic to nuclear reactors.

My husband and I were mere university graduates when the Chernobyl reactor had divested itself of all its useful parts in order to fund the dinner parties of some of its officials. Unluckily, though, we were university graduates with an internship in Nuclear Physics – or at least my husband was. They say that, in the meltdown, relatively few suffered direct consequences. You wouldn’t know it if you were one of these, though. Of my husband’s co-workers who were on shift, perhaps one in ten still lives today; one in five had not survived the week.

As for us, let’s just say that we have grown weary to the bone of medial treatments, hospitals and doctors, and leave it be.

“That,” Garent said, snapping me out of my moment of irrelevant contemplation, “would be bad.”

“It would.”

“But, of course, you have a plan.” He is of the opinion that Lorenzo always has a plan. To an extent, I can’t say he is far wrong, though I’ve seen occasions where the pre-planning stage was about as long as it took him to open his mouth. Garent, suspecting as he does a similar eventuality, is usually quite unimpressed.

“I do.” Lorenzo turned to Rostov. “When is your company due here, Mister Kushan?”

“In,” he checked his GPS/locator combinations, where two or three dots moved slowly across a stylized map of the area, “about three, four hours. I told them to be slow and careful, though, so they’re trading off speed for silence.”

“That is fine. We should withdraw a little ways back, to make sure that no wandering patrols see us, and then wait for your troops to arrive. If we are lucky, their arrival will coincide with nightfall.”

“And then we sneak in?” Victor asked eagerly.

“Exactly so. We sneak in.”

Nightfall, and Rostov’s little army, caught up with us at about the same time. Darkness comes very swiftly in the desert; one moment there is daylight, five minutes later everything is rapidly fading into night. It is surprising to those unfamiliar with the subtropical latitudes, and Victor and Garent were both confused and slightly surprised when the overbearing heat – and my constant nagging for everyone to drink – faded into chill that forced us to shrug into our coats within the small confines of the APC. Lorenzo, Rostov and I each had our experiences with deserts and were quickly making preparations as soon as the sun sloped westward.

“What are you doing?”

I was busy rapidly going through my pre-battle routine. These days, it consisted mainly of checking my medical supplies. I was hiding underneath my umbrella – put to a convenient use as a temporary shade – wrapping a large bandage around my hand, uncoiling it from the wad in which it was previously crumpled and into a neat cylinder, fastened by a clip.

“Checking my bag. I don’t want to have to hunt around and look at bottle labels if something happens.”

“Are you actually taking this with you?” Vic was eyeing the bag – which is big enough to have taken about half the space in my suitcase, and appropriately heavy, stuffed as it is with glassware and liquids – with chagrin. “Why?”

“Because if something happens,” I told him patiently – Vic always is a trial to my patience, all the more when he is being not only hyperactive, but also hyperactive and blithe – “I will need this.”

“We’re all supers! – well, except you – and we have magic,” he held out his hand, and I felt the beginning of his life-stealing healing, the slight nausea and vertigo, before he quickly broke it off. “See?”

“I do see,” I said, continuing to sort bottles by size in their special padded pocket.

“At least you could let me put it up my sleeve,” Garent suggested mildly. “I already keep one bag in there.”

I blinked. “Since when?”

“Since you get all upset about my being blasé. I carry it around so you don’t have to worry.”

I considered. The idea had its tempting sides. For instance, there was the small – or rather, not so small – matter of the bag’s weight. It weighed at least a few kilograms. In fact, I would be carrying, of my own free will, and without coercion, more weight than anyone else in the group except Rostov, who was cleaning and putting together a rifle. Lorenzo and Victor had pistols, but they, as well as Garent, usually fought empty-handed. It was cumbersome, and not especially stealthy. I will further be burdened by my general inability to move about fast, or well.

“No,” I rejected the idea finally, with a not-insignificant degree of reluctance. “If something happens to you, I want the bag available, not stuck in a pocket dimension.” Garent shrugged and accepted defeat.

“Are you all set?” Rostov, who finished putting together his rifle and was eyeing the sun impatiently, “I want to use the rest of the sunlight to get to a better starting point, without the car.”

I grimaced “How long of a trek is that going to be?”

“We have about an hour of sunlight, give or take. By the time it sets the rest of the guys will be in position and wrecking havoc like we agreed, and I want to be over there,” he pointed to a narrow passage between two mountains, hidden from the excavation by several large rock formations. “It’s nice and hidden, and on the opposite end from where they will be coming in. Even if they are discovered before they were supposed to, the rear isn’t likely to be searched.”

Which made a good deal of sense. Rostov is not an amateur in this sort of thing, and I nodded more or less complacently, accepting the notion that by the time we finished our trek I would likely be worn into wretchedness, and sizzling from sunburn besides. Unless… I turned to Lorenzo.

“Do you happen to have your swordstick packed?”

“I do, madam. Why?”

“I’d like to borrow it, please. I want to keep my umbrella as a shade, unless we have to be especially sneaky now…” I glanced at Rostov questioningly, and he shook his head, confirming my assumptions. Sneaking around with five people is hard at best, impossible at worst; we would use the distance from the site as our cover. “And besides, it’s a good idea to have some sort of weapon on me, regardless of my skill with it.”

“Certainly, madam. I should have thought of it myself.” Lorenzo walked over to the abandoned APC, and dug through the rear compartment’s assortment of bags, boxes and suitcases, coming out with his long, dark sword-cane. The slim wooden shaft was wrapped in cloth and tied, never used. He handed it to me, hilt-first.

I nodded my thanks, and carefully tested the catch mechanism, retrieved the cover and hefted my bag to my shoulder with a weary sigh. Then we were off.

Chapter XXIX
In Which What Once Was Lost Now Is Found

We set up camp a little ways off, in a valley between two craggy hills which was no different from any other valley and any other couple of craggy hills in the entire land of what had, once, been the Fertile Crescent. The camp, by necessity and preference was rather simple; we clustered around the headlights of the APC and the men hauled out and opened a single one of the crates we managed to gather. The GPS locator, when activated, gave a neat map, dotted almost in a straight line, directed away from us towards Baghdad; the trajectory which the plane flew after it ditched its passengers. We’d picked them up as we went, distancing ourselves from the dead men that had brought down our plane.

Tents were pitched and sleeping bags extracted to make use of what little time we – or rather, everybody else (I glared at Garent for a second and received an innocent look in return) – had to rest and prepare for tomorrow. I supplemented my coat with a sleeping bag; the desert chill was decidedly unfriendly. After about an hour or so we finally settled down, and dragged forward the first, sacrificial, box of food. Rostov provided the Bunsen burner, and Victor provided the flame for it.

I was, obviously, expected to provide dinner.

I sat back to watch the spectacle. The covert glances flying my way were quite eloquent and, for a while, I amused myself by blithely ignoring them. When they turned into overt grumbling on certain sides, I excused myself from the makeshift campfire and absconded to go read a book in the dim of the small car light. Occasionally, I stole a peek at the men twirling around the box of provisions, probably contemplating sandwiches. I finished a chapter lazily before Garent caught up with me and my intentions, taking upon himself the chore Lorenzo was much too polite to assume.

“It’s not very like you.”

“What isn’t?” I pretended innocence.

“You’re the sort of person who is more likely to be running around putting everything in place than just sitting around waiting for someone to do stuff for you. What are you waiting for?”

“I’m waiting for them to ask.”

“What? Why?”

“A matter of principle, Garent,” I explained patiently. It was obvious, really, and it had to be done, though I couldn’t say that the notion of upsetting every single other member of our part appealed to me greatly. “If I take up the camp chores as a self-evident thing I put myself in the role of the servant out of sheer duty… and I’d really rather not deal with that.”

“And if we ask, what difference could it make?”

“Oh if they ask it’s a favour. Both sides recognize it as a favour and, of course, I am more than willing to do favours to people.”

“Well, Rostov is making dinner, and he sent me to tell you that you should come eat.”

I pelted out of my seat, hitting my head on the roof of the car and staring out, wide-eyed. “Rostov can cook?!”

Apparently, he can. I have never been much of a cook, though I can certainly prepare food that is edible, occasionally tasty and at least mildly interesting – especially if I have a recipe at hand. Mostly, though, I was happy to wash the dishes after our designated cook. Read; my husband. Who is also capable of preparing decent food that is mildly interesting if he has a recipe. Rostov, however, apparently is capable of actually cooking – a term which I assign to people who can make me ask for seconds – and seems to derive outright enjoyment from the process.

I was happy that the night hid back my always-excessive blushing, and sidled in to help whatever arcane processes were ongoing at the time with the simple menial tasks of vegetable peeling and pot stirring. I would, perhaps, be overly suspicious if I report that during the process I’ve occasionally encountered a gloating pair of eyes or two. After the meal was eaten, the dishes put away – at my insistence – cleaned, we settled down to catch what little time we had left before sunrise.

“And someone’d better stay up and watch, because maybe our friendly neighbourhood missile vans weren’t all on their own out here,” Rostov noted.

“I’ll do it.” I waved my book up. “Finish my book by sunrise.”

“You sure?”

“I am decidedly not tired.”

“But what if…?”

“Rostov,” I said tiredly. “My ears are quite good. If I hear someone or something approaching, I’ll wake you up. That is the point of leaving a guard, isn’t it? The guard doesn’t have to be competent; merely awake.”

He flipped open a sleeping bag and dragged it away from the light. “Okay. But don’t fall asleep. We don’t want to be here until midday. Things get kind of hot in deserts around then.”

I waved him off lazily, and settled into my book to while the hours away till dawn.

The sky began brightening, in an absolute quiet that did not even remotely indicate being shattered by anything other than the assortment of snores rising from our little camp, about three hours later. I folded my book, stuck it in a coat pocket, and went to watch the sun rise over the desert in what little privacy I had left.

Sunrise in the desert always struck me as one of the most eerily gorgeous sights available on this planet, and that holds especially true to such inherently ugly deserts as the craggy hill land of Iraq and Syria. Where in the daylight they appear merely blinding – the limestone wreaks havoc on my eyes – in the early hours they seem almost lunar, and the contrasts between shadows and light give them a sort of alien beauty. I sat for a while, until the sun finally painted gold the mountains to the west, then went to wake up the others.

After a brief period of frenetic activity during which we made tea – or coffee, for those of us more inclined to that drug – and supervised the loading of items into the vehicle (I found myself repacking the stacks of equipment in the back at least twice,, each time clearing space for one or two more items) we decamped, leaving behind nothing more than a few scattered paper wraps, and an empty beer bottle. I’ve no idea – and neither does anybody else – where the beer bottle had appeared from, and what it was doing there, but it is a universal law of camping that at least one glass bottle must remain behind and the universe was not about to let us off the hook for the mere absence of glassware in our luggage.

“Mileh Tharthar is due east of us,” Rostov informed, staring at his GPS. “That’s where you said we wanted to go, right?”

“Unless you had other ideas since then,” Garent added, looking at Lorenzo with his best blank expression.

“None occur.”

I still have no idea what it is with those two, but they appear to have an absolute talent for getting on each other’s nerves. My astonishment stems not so much from the fact that they have that tendency – two people who are so alike in some of their more annoying qualities are bound to find each other a pest – but that a similar reaction does not occur between either one of them and other people who, looking objectively, are equally alike as well. For instance, myself.

Lorenzo and I are similar to the point of being scary.

“I do want to point out, gentlemen,” I decided to intervene and cut the next argument short, “that dropping out plane from under us seems to be a fairly good indication that we’re close. Iraq is a large place. The size of… Oh…”

“California,” Rostov supplied, probably quite precisely.

“—right, California. And yet we neatly speared ourselves on the needle in the haystack, so to speak. I think that nails down our search area pretty neatly.”

“The point being?”

“The point being that we should find them, and find them pretty soon.”

We did. Though not quite as soon as I’d hoped. Not soon enough, in any event, to spare us the long hours of bouncing about in an off-road vehicle. The SAM battery – with a significant range in and of itself, capable as it was of shooting down a high-flying cargo plane – was driven a ways off the dig site. Wisely, objectively speaking, as a means to ensure secrecy. Thus it was close to noon when Rostov noticed, and pointed out to us unenhanced humans, the thin column of dust on the horizon.

At first we thought that it was smoke but Vic, our only active pyrokinetic, dispelled that notion quickly. “Nope. Not smoke. I could tell you if it was smoke. And maybe I could, like, choke some people with it while we get closer.”

“An excavation of this magnitude would generate a significant amount of dust,” Lorenzo leaned out the window curiously, peering in that direction. “Slow down a bit further, Mister Kushan. We wouldn’t want to approach this with engines loud enough to wake the dead.”

Rostov dropped the speed down a notch, and the APC crawled along slowly, sneaking around the edge of the ridge as though it were a rather large, clumsy cat. Its nose poked out onto the edge of the ravine, and the interior was filled with a rather indignant, communal gasp.

There was a large, mostly excavated trench. Within it, disregarding proper archaeological procedure, the ruins of the temple rose undisturbed and unmarked. Pillars fell over each other and halves of walls rose out. Stones were tossed around in heaps and doorway markings erased. A large bulldozer – I almost squealed indignantly – was circling around the perimeter.

And there were uniformed men everywhere.

[ QUOTE ]
I'm looking forward to seeing different writing styles, and the potential for RP hooligans.

I'm not looking forward to reading in metric, or u's in my colors. Or having to read aluminum as ah-loo-minnie-um.

[/ QUOTE ]

I hope you weren't reading my stuff, then.

Chapter XXVIII
In Which Dreams Are Contemplated And Ground Is Discovered

I do not, as a matter of course, actually dream much. I have occasional snippets of surrealistic, almost artistic landscapes – a flurry of sensations and colours which, together with a fleeting sense of deep horror, constitute my dreaming state – but they are random. All in all, I don’t recall my dreams. It has always been my assumption that this is a sort of defence my mind affects in order to ensure my sanity; I must dream in order to retain it, but my mind will be damned if it allows me to swim in my own dreams while awake, as well.

That was why I was rather surprised at the vividness of this current dream – and the unusual nature of it. For one, it was not a nightmare, a rather exceptional occurrence in my experience. For another, it was among the oddest I have yet seen; we were slowly, calmly, dropping from a flying plane, over a dark, moonlit desert. I am generally not fond of falling dreams, and my stomach protested accordingly, but I did not, to my disembodied astonishment, feel much unease.

The cold wind brought me into complete wakefulness with a rather rude, and entirely literal, slap on the face.

I spent a quarter of a second surveying my rather inscrutable (it was, as mentioned, dark) surroundings, attempting to achieve balance between what my disbelieving eyes were telling me and what my ears were firmly asserting, and screamed.

“Madam!” Lorenzo reached out and grabbed my shoulder. “We are quite safe.”

I gulped. “But we are…”

“Well, yes.”

“And I was…”

“You were,” Garent’s voice came, thready and barely audible, somewhere to my left. “It was kind of cute, actually.”

The snippets of memory snapped into place. Around me there was absolute darkness, the sound of rushing wind and the bobbing, white parachute canopies of the Kushans. Somewhere below me, barely visible, shining in the white moonlight, was the rocky terrain of the Iraqi desert. I groaned. Then I did the intelligent thing, and buried my head in Lorenzo’s coat.

Garent laughed. “I didn’t realize you don’t like heights.”

“I have nothing whatsoever against heights,” I grumbled, my panic mostly muffled by the thick wool. “It’s the splat and dying at the end that I object to.”

There was a thump, and then we hit the ground. Apparently, whatever spell Lorenzo used, while capping out speed – and playing, as it must have done, with our inertia, or kinetic energy, or some other physical component of a fall, did not make us quite weightless – or, indeed, inertialess – and we made a quite small but very significant crater in the middle of the soft ground, spraying about small rocks and dirt.

I rolled, hit my shoulder on something with far too many corners to live, and came to a stop in a more or less stationary heap. A moment of pain and disorientation and I was scrambling up into a sitting position. “Don Lorenzo!”

“Here, madam.” The response was slightly muffled, but not, apparently, particularly pained. “I am afraid I neglected to account for the wind factor. I can’t say I’ve ever fallen ten thousand meters, before.”

“Oh.” I sat, breathing shallowly, for a few seconds, alternating between panic and fury and in the end settled for “Ohgod.”

That, I decided, scrambling to my feet and dusting off sand and small rocks furiously, was enough of that. Retroactive panic, though natural, was completely useless. I had no limbs broken, not even, most likely, bruises to mark my small tumble. There was no detectable ball of fire in the shape of a plane on the horizon, and I was chock-full surrounded by males. All in all, I concluded, sufficient reason to forego hysteria.

Garent, who had landed softly and almost inaudibly immediately after our rather more spectacular descent, was looking around, frowning. “We should find Rostov and Vic.”

“We should,” I confirmed, holding up a finger. Then I pointed. “That way.”

“Are you sure?”

I gave a sideways, dry glance at Lorenzo, also preoccupied with dusting his coat. “Wind factor.”

The desert was not completely unnavigable in the light of the diminishing moon, though I was still happy that the terrain we happened to chance upon was comparatively flat; I did not relish the idea of mountain-climbing and valley-descending in the dark. I huddled in my coat for warmth and gripped my umbrella, trying to find a pace between ‘brisk’ and ‘ankle-killing’, and hoped that Rostov and Victor – and the supplies – didn’t land too far off. The longer we walked, the more I would lag behind; being the shortest member of any party was not an advantage. Limp or no, Lorenzo was quickly outpacing me, a result of having to take two steps for each of his.

“At least you’re not falling off your feet,” Garent pointed out when I muttered a half-voiced complaint.

“At least not. Which,” I issued drily, “brings me to the pertinent questions of how I came about to sleep through a plane crash in the first place.”

“Um…” Garent sounded faintly guilty.

“’Um’?” I inquired, my voice deceptively mild.

“You really did need the sleep.”

“A valid point,” I said in a tone that was considerably more frigid than the desert wind. “And friends who like and respect each other certainly do make a point to take care of each other. Friends tell friends to go to sleep. Friends don't put drugs in their friends' teacups. Okay?"

“Okay,” Garent didn’t sound terribly regretful, but he was at least mildly apologetic. “I’ll only drug your coffee from now on.”

“Sadly, our coffee supplies seem to have flown quite a ways off,” Lorenzo was blandly sarcastic, as always.

“We’ve been walking for a while… Are you sure this is the right wa—“

A string of rifle shots cut off whatever silly assumptions Garent was about to make.

We froze in place, three dark silhouettes outlined all-too-conveniently against a lighter sky. The night was ominously silent for a moment, then broke with a sharp whoosh, a crack and a burst of light.

“Parachute flare.” Lorenzo was rubbing his temple almost unconsciously while trying not to look directly at the foreboding red light in the sky. “A little too accurate for my taste.”

"Parachutes," I provided the obvious explanation, in the tone given usually to dictionary definitions. "Big. White. Obvious." Another grenade flashed, and a large fireball bloomed in the sky immediately in its wake. Victor, clearly, was having the time of his life. “I think we had better hurry up, don’t you?”

Lorenzo nodded and took a step forward. In one of the more mind-bending displays of magic, the space around him seemed to warp and his body distend and he somehow crossed a dozen meters with that step; in moments, he had walked over the hill and out of sight. Garent took off – literally, by lifting several meters off the ground and vanishing in a film of incongruous mist – after him, leaving me standing alone in the middle of the desert. I threw up my hands in exasperation and ran.

Rostov and Victor had long since managed to scramble out of their parachutes – by the expedient way of burning down one, and cutting the strings of the other – and were creating a distraction in the form of killing everything in sight. They also found cover, or perhaps the cover found them; with the plane drop, I am not exactly sure what order everything occurred in. In any case, they were perched behind a large vehicle which looked new but had a few dents in its sides. By the time that I arrived, clutching at my kidneys for dear life, the fight was practically over; Garent was uncertainly bouncing someone on a thin but concentrated stream of water, and Lorenzo was dusting off his hands in the middle of a rather wide circle of mutilated 5th Column soldiers in full gear and uniform.

Victor was wiping blood off of his shoulder with a rag, his shirt torn a little and dirty. He looked annoyed but, at this point, unharmed. Rostov was holding his arm a little too stiffly to his side and his manic grin was a tiny bit strained. I winced slightly. “Where’s my bag?”

“Back seat,” Victor waved to the car lazily.

“It should be with you,” I chided, sticking my head through a rolled-down window and fishing for the shoulder strap. “Not stuck somewhere almost entirely out of reach.” I held up my bag and rapidly flipped through it, basking in the ordered rows of medical supplies and small non-standard-issue items. “Let me see.”

“It’s no big deal, Sofia.”

“It maybe doesn’t hurt a great deal,” I snapped, curbing my irritation only at the very last minute, and then not very successfully, “but it’s still a problem and, may I remind you, you’re out of human fodder to heal yourself with. Unless you intend to use one of us; which is, under the circumstances, unadvisable. So hold out that hand.”

He did. It was not a significant injury, and his clamping down on the blood flow – trust Rostov to be sensible about loss of eye and limb – ensured that the danger, such as it was, was significantly lessened. He had his own means of regeneration and pain suppression, I gathered, which made what would otherwise be a muscle-tearing wound that requires several dozen stitches and a couple months of physical therapy into a disinfect and wrap-it-up business. I used a tourniquet nonetheless, to clean the area off of seeping blood, and take a better look at the actual tissue damage. “How many were there?”

“These were the guys who shot down our plane,” Victor was fiddling with a GPS locator, tracing the beacons tied to our crates of supplies and to the rest of our little army. “I guess they didn’t think we were gonna just land on top of them, because there weren’t that many.”

“See, that’s the SAMs they used to hit us over there. What’s left of them.” Rostov pointed. Or tried to; I yanked back his hand and hissed at him. The missiles themselves were sitting on the flatbed of an all-terrain jeep. At least, I assumed it was all-terrain, because it was here, in the middle of the desert, days away from any road. My ability to identify a vehicle is limited to general nouns such as ‘car’, bus’ and ‘van’ (sometimes confused with ‘truck’). This vehicle was especially unidentifiable as it was, evidently, the very thing Victor blew; the skeleton was blackened and occasionally sizzling, and the missile launcher installment lacked all its plastic parts.

I breathed relief that there was no missile sitting in the cradle at that point.

“So what’s our plan now, then?”

I lifted my head momentarily from busily turning Rostov’s arm into a thick wad of bandages. “I advise getting our food and water supply.”

“I’ve got them all right here!” Victor informed brightly.

“Then tonight we park here,” Lorenzo decided “gather our supplies and wait till morning. Then we head out to look for Shubat Anshar.” And look for a fight I thought, but didn’t comment. “Perhaps Victor can take the vehicle and gather up our supplies.”

“I’ll join him, if Sofia stops fussing over me for a minute,” Rostov said drily.

“Fine.” I dropped the remaining roll of bandaged back into my bag, and snipped the end with a pair of small scissors. “I only have one objection.”

“And what is that, madam?”

“Could we please move to somewhere without rotting bodies?”

You are not the only one. The characters appear to be rather blase about it themselves. Or so, at least, the part suggests.

Of course, the only character who hasn't completely overdosed on her own power is drugged into sleep - but, you know, when most of the crew can fly, how bad can a plane crash be?

I think that you will find, on the whole, this story to be somethiing of a dramatic deconstruction. Many of the moments which lend themselves to classic suspence or climactic resolutions are, for us, simply casual. (for a deconstructed drama moment, see Sofia's obvious disappointment with her armchair detection results). Others, which tend to present something of a backdrop, are quite important.

That's not to say that there won't be classic drama.... but, really, feeling guilty over not falling for what was not really meant as a cliffhanger is quite overkill.

Chapter XXV
In Which Deductions Are Made To The Background Noise Of Chagrin

Sofia was smug. Again.

They all do it with alarming regularity, actually, and it never really gets more tolerable. Yes, we get it, you’ve read everything on the planet that has pages and a bind – including, I bet, the phone book – but that doesn’t mean you need to give in to the urge of pretending to be Sherlock Holmes. I just knew that, in a moment, Sofia will go into a litany of deductions, with all the little clues and bits that every sensible person probably missed. There’s no reason to be smug about it.

Lorenzo, by the way, was looking sort of unhappy. His expression said ‘I should know this, and I should know this before you’. Which I have to admit I enjoyed briefly before checking to make sure I didn't have a similar look. I didn't. I wonder half the time how Sofia’s weirder friends (myself included) don’t just pile up and kill each other out of sheer competitiveness. The fact of the matter is that they don’t; in fact, they’re almost disgustingly loyal. Vic looked around with his usual ‘isn’t this exciting’ stare, completely unconcerned. He, just like many other people, pretty much got used to the annoying but, admittedly, handy, ability that the Rabinoviches and some of their friends had of pulling rabbits out of their sleeves.

You’d think that, as a mage, this would be my thing, but no, they usually did it much more prominently, though they used metaphorical rabbits. To counter the insubstantial nature of the rabbit (maybe) they made up with a flourish worthy of a big stage.

Rostov just smiled like he knew something the rest of us only started figuring out.

If I wasn’t so concentrated on trying to figure out what it was Sofia’s figured out, and of course on the prisoner, I probably should have paid attention to that look. But I dismissed it as simply Rostov being Rostov – he always looks like he was let in on God’s own joke – and said nothing.

In the end Lorenzo managed a pretty understated “Is that so?”

“Indeed,” Sofia said helpfully.

“And…?”

This was the point where, I thought, Sofia was likely to look up at Lorenzo, smile angelically, and tell him to ‘say please’. She didn’t. Instead, she dusted her skirt off slowly, and stared down at the prisoner. He was absentmindedly rubbing his kneecaps, but stopped and looked decidedly wary under Sofia’s gaze. “Gentlemen,” she said in that lecturing tone she used when she was about to give us a lesson, whether we wanted one or not, “meet… what is your name?”

The prisoner glowered.

“Meet Mr. Not-Saying-Anything. He is a super soldier, and he works for the 5th Column.”

The prisoner looked, for a second, before his face closed on itself again, like he was kicked.

There were communal groans.

“Oh. Of course there would be Nazis,” Rostov rolled his eyes and prodded the guy on the floor in his wounded shoulder. “When did we not have Nazis while you two were around?”

I had to admit in a slightly annoyed tone. “We do get a lot of them around you.” Which is true; Sofia – and Alex, and Lorenzo, now that I think about it – have a Thing for the Column, its sister and enemy, the Council, and all these wacky Nazis. They don’t just go out of their way to foil their plans. No, they take it to the realm of the deeply personal. They give it the hatred warranted only by History with a very large capital H.

“Sure!” Vic was nodding excitedly. “Come on guys! Don’t you ever watch any movies? We’re hunting for ancient artifacts, right? So there’s got to be Nazis.”

That chain of logic, although typically Vic-like, didn’t seem to pass either Sofia or Lorenzo. They both were grimacing visibly, a feat that should be recorded in its own special fact book. “Suppose, madam,” Lorenzo looked at Sofia wryly, “that you explain your reasoning?”

I gave Sofia my full attention. I was about to receive a lecture, and I wanted to be sure I could correctly answer any question if I was called on. My goal wasn't to impress the teacher, but my fellow classmates. Up until now my role has been very simple: Keep Sofia alive while she figures everything out. Things were slightly different now that our duo had become a five man band, and I wanted to be sure that the transition went smoothly.

My strategy for achieving this was to prove to Lorenzo that our team was a lot smarter than his.

“Very well.” She touched her ponytail briefly, presumably trying to put her thoughts into some sort of order so that we mere mortals could understand. “I’ve been running around with some vague… intuitions, since we landed in Paris.” And there it was. We were now going to hear every little bit of it whether we wanted to or not.

“I’ll start with my last hint,” Sofia said solemnly. “The paw-prints going into the office.”

“The dirty dog prints?” I blinked.

“Yes, but Bertram didn’t have a dog.”

“How can you tell?” Rostov was unconvinced. “He could just run off somewhere.”

“No doggie door,” Sofia counted on her fingers impatiently. “No bowls. No fur. Very purposeful steps. This doggie didn’t just lie around, he came straight into the office, from the trees. But, most importantly,” she smiled the thin smile she kept for when she wasn’t amused at all, “it was a foregone conclusion.”

“You see,” she explained, “the reason you gentlemen couldn’t connect the dog with the, ah, wolf… is because you didn’t see Benveniste’s body.”

Lorenzo’s mouth opened slightly. “Oh.”

“You merely heard that he was murdered brutally, by Circle of Thorns. You didn’t see the claw marks over the body. And even if you had, you might have thought that it was irrelevant. Garent, however, didn’t, and I believed him when he told me that Behemoths didn’t do it. The question looming large in my mind then was, of course, who did?”

“Someone who had claws and left dog prints on the floor,” said Lorenzo bleakly.

“And used guns and rifles. And,” she stared down at the soldier sitting at our feet, “had members who could give Rostov a challenge to drag into a room. Super soldiers. Enhanced humans. Someone who, I point out, felt it necessary to declare nothing, operating in complete secrecy. Someone with an agenda to stay low.”

“But… but…” Vic squinted. “They actually succeeded! They were effective!” That was a good point. These people killed off everyone we tried to get to, and did it before we got to them. Maybe we were still excusable, because we didn’t know who they were going to kill, but they also seemed to get ahead of Rostov and Lorenzo and they, presumably, had a list of names to begin with. It wasn’t like the Column we knew and loved to hate.

Sofia chuckled drily. “A splinter branch, I daresay.”

“That still does not answer every question we may have, however,” Lorenzo said. Sofia shrugged a little. She would never look disappointed, but I could tell she was a little let down by the complete indifference with which her moment of revelation was received. It’s not like she should have expected anything else, really.

“Yeah,” Rostov dug into his pocket, and was now playing with his old silver coin. “Knowing who is nice, but we also need to know what for, and how far they got.”

“The what for seems rather obvious,” Sofia shrugged. “They want to find the temple before you, and without competition. As for how far... we will simply have to ask.”

Everybody turned to look at the prisoner who was still sitting on the floor sullenly, holding his wounded shoulder.

“I won't tell you anything. You will lose and--”

“Yes, yes,” Sofia cut him off. Now that she finished her exposition, she was cold, and definitely not happy. “We will triumph, et cetera et cetera. Spare us the slogans, if you intend to cut short on the chatter.”

“There are all sorts of ways to make people talk,” said Rostov thoughtfully. “They all have something... ego, fear, maybe something else...”

I winced. “We're going to be here forever if we do it that way, Rostov. And it will also take us a long time to break all his bones, don't you think? We need to get out of here pretty quickly, before people come and find this body.”

“That is, indeed, an issue,” Lorenzo was playing with his gun, in the same way Rostov was playing with his coin. He was flipping it end over end casually, trying, I guess, to go for an aura of menace. It worked pretty well; Lorenzo is naturally scary, wears black, and can tear people's souls out through their ears. Sofia is the only person who not only isn't scared of him, but actually doesn't get why anybody else is. The prisoner, not being Sofia, didn't like the black-wearing guy and his gun, and it showed. He now took this one step further, and pointed the gun straight at the prisoner’s head. “As Mr. Ward pointed out, we need a quicker way.”

The prisoner was defiant. “I'll die before I talk!”

“Deal,” said Lorenzo. And shot him.

I could see this coming for miles. You really don't want to say something like that to a guy whose magical expertise is black magic in all its forms, and to another guy who likes trapping souls in snow globes. I wasn't going to take the bullet for him, though – he did just make a serious effort in taking Sofia's head off, and I didn't like that at all. Besides, what was I going to say? I needed a better excuse than 'shooting people is bad', in the present company.

I settled for giving Lorenzo very disappointed looks. They didn't help at all.

Lorenzo put away the smoking gun calmly, and stared down. Sofia was doing the same thing. She took a step back from the body, and watched it with a clinical expression. Lorenzo is a pretty good shot, it turns out, because the guy lost about half his head and was probably dead before he hit the floor. There was a lot of blood, which Sofia was avoiding, looking unhappy and grumbling about not having shoes on. Rostov caught his coin, and held it, Victor was standing completely still, with his mouth open. He shut it quickly, and spent a second figuring out if a mosquito flew in there.

“I suppose,” Sofia said calmly, after she retreated from the blood and sat down on a desk, “that I didn't need him alive after all.”

“An easy mistake to make under the circumstances, madam,” Lorenzo said placidly.

“Ask him, then.”

He did. Raising a soul is actually not as complicated as people think. It usually isn't done because of, essentially, this concept people have that is known as Good Manners. It's not nice to grab a guy who just died and is probably not particularly interested in saying anything to anyone anymore, and making him sit in a third degree. But, of course, in this case we didn't really care.

I was sort of hoping that Lorenzo would be able to use a stick and carrot approach with the guy's spirit, saying that he’d put him back if he answered nicely. But that doesn't happen with half the head missing. Besides, Lorenzo is the kind of person who wouldn't know what to do with a carrot – maybe he'll hit you over the head with it? He stood over the body, held out his hand, and everybody else started staring at the space above intently. I had to adjust things a little to see the ghost hovering there, looking indifferent and fuzzy.

“Now he'll tell us everything?” Vic looked interested.

“It doesn't work that way,” I told him smugly, displaying my knowledge in the area of summoning dead souls (which I never actually did, but I've read it in Black Magic for Dummies), “you have to be pretty specific in what you ask, and they tend to be really specific in how they answer.”

“For example,” said Rostov, “how many people were coming here?”

“Six.” The voice was hollow and flat.

“How many did you shoot?” I asked, curious.

“Six, including this one,” Vic said triumphantly. That settled that, then. At least we didn’t have to worry about snipers pulling a Tarzan out of a tree and dropping Sofia dead in her tracks. That did, however, raise the question of what happened to the werewolf. I guessed that he changed into human form for a short time – maybe to search through the desk – and was now as dead as everyone else.

“Where were you going next?” Sofia said quietly.

“To the dig.”

“The Shubat-Anshar dig,” Lorenzo wasn't actually asking a question but the ghost confirmed it with a nod anyway. Spirits are pretty literal. “Were you the first there?”

“No. There are many others. We will join them.” Sofia and Lorenzo exchanged a very worried look through the ghost's chest. I decided that Victor was my natural partner to do the same, and exchanged a worried look with him too. Rostov didn't do worried looks, so he got to be the odd man out.

“I suppose that's our cue,” Rostov shrugged and got up. “If we stick around, we’ll miss all those exciting things they do with microscopic brushes and shovels.” Sofia slid off the tabletop and edged around the small but significant blood pool in the middle of the floor. Everybody started moving at once, getting ready to leave. “How did you get here?”

“Rental, parked in front.”

“In front??”

“Please,” Sofia said acidly. “Don't pretend to be stupid. I know you too well for that. We all have our disguises; you run an exports and imports company. My disguise is that I am a five-foot-two, forty-year-old academic, and my car always parks in front.”

“Okay, well, we need to take apart these nice guns and put them somewhere quiet,” Rostov announced, “and we need to do it before the police shows up to find two dead bodies on the floor. Looks like we have more important things to do anyway.”

Sofia nodded, and looked at me. “Why don't you go help them out, Garent?”

“Me?” I blinked at her, it wasn't very like her; she knew perfectly well that I know nothing about guns. I could probably shoot one, if someone showed me how, but I never really even touched one, and I never needed them.

“Yes, you,” she was determined. “Now.”

Rostov, Vic and I looked at each other. Vic smirked. I hid a second wince. It made a certain amount of sense. “Come on, guys,” I told the other two, glancing at Lorenzo with sudden sympathy – Sofia is scary when she is upset, not in the 'suck your soul out' way, but in the much worse 'mother is unhappy' way – and walked out with Rostov and Victor following. The door closed behind our backs with an audible thump.

[u]PART III: … The Lone and Level Sands Stretch Far…[u]

Chapter XXIV
In Which A Reunion Goes Unexpectedly And Does Not End In Tears

I hate it when freaking out is not a viable option.

Which it most assuredly isn’t; most especially when someone aims a gun at your head. If the aforementioned gun is held by a good friend – a person whom you’ve chosen to trust (at least up until that point) and who knows you well – and if that person is accompanied by two more gun-toting gentlemen the satisfying, but ultimately fatal, notion of sinking your nails into his wrist really doesn’t beckon.

Instead I froze, staring around me with an emotion somewhere between hilarity and hysteria; I was, all told, much too close to the latter for comfort. In this moment of frozen tension, when options danced Irish dances in my head, the impression of the room and everything in it was almost astonishingly clear. I noticed, in the rush of adrenaline, the barrel of Lorenzo’s gun, and the pattern of light and shadow on the floor. My own silhouette was, much to my amusement, concealed by a square, large beam…

There was a soft ‘click’.

I shouted, “Garent, drop!” and fell straight forward onto my knees.

The air erupted with bullets. There was whistling. The windowpane shattered with a desperate tinkling sound, and a neat semicircle of lead buried itself a centimeter from my knee. I stared at it, the epiphany settling in in bursts of metaphoric light. Lorenzo fired his gun methodically once, and again, and the window groaned in protest a second time. On the other side of the room, the sound of automatic fire thwacking into wood as an entire magazine of bullets hit the wall and played a rapid counterpoint. Rostov whirled on his heel and stuck the barrel of an oversized pistol through the shuttered, glassless window, firing deliberately.

Behind me and to my right there was a brief thump as Garent’s knee hit the floor. Dropping his illusions and mist, he slapped a hand onto the ground, hard, and outside the ruined window there was the surprised exclamation of a man who had, suddenly and inexplicably, found himself shooting upward on a geyser of water.

The bullets stopped. In the back, the automatic fire became sporadic and erratic, then quieted completely. Rostov withdrew his gun.

Lorenzo grimaced in annoyance at his disrupted aim, and shifted slightly, firing again.

“Alive! Get him alive!” I prudently, with the help of Victor, edged further into the barricaded room.

Garent twisted around, and pulled his hand back, as if for a throw. Then he flung an icicle (though calling it such would mean renaming the entire Alps into “foothills”) which sped on the heels of Lorenzo’s bullet, leaving behind it a small vacuum, and the sort of not-noise made by supersonic planes. The spear of ice went like a knife through butter into the shattered windowpane. There was another shout, this time of shock and pain. I lifted my head slowly behind an overturned desk, and sneaked a glance at the window, where the figure of a man dangled from a tree limb, pinned by the shoulder with a giant, dripping icy stalactite.

“Damn it, Sofia,” Rostov grinned his shark-tooth grin at me from the back. “I was going to cook him for supper.”

“Fetch him, if you please, Rostov.” Lorenzo took the joke as he always did – stoically.

“And be sure he can talk when he gets here!” I added hastily, considering some of the less subtle but more convenient ways Rostov might contemplate in order to not burden us with a prisoner. They were numerous and, in the heat of the just-ended fight, quite graphic.

“You never let me have any fun.” The tall mercenary presented an artistically crestfallen face and slunk out of the room, shoulders drooping theatrically. I could hear him whistle to himself just beyond the door. The image remaining in my head was of a cat who’d pawed the cream, stalking the food dish.

Lorenzo leveled an irritated gaze at me. “Do you always do as you please in front of a loaded gun barrel, madam? I told you to stay still.”

“I knew you were not going to shoot me,” I explained the – in retrospect – obvious facts. “You weren’t even looking at me and, one should think, you would at least grant me the courtesy of looking me in the eye when you decide to do away with my inconvenient presence.”

“One should think,” he noted, somewhat drily. “Then perhaps you should have listened to me? Not,” he added as an afterthought, “that that was a realistic hope to entertain.”

“I would have,” I examined the pillar which had become my unwitting shelter critically, rather shocked, as an afterthought, at the slimness of it, “If you weren’t going to put a bullet through Garent’s head by accident. He was in your way, and you were so concentrated you never noticed him. You should just be happy neither of us tried something silly, like disarming you. It was rather called for, with you pointing a gun at my head.”

“I had utmost confidence in your good sense, madam.”

We stood, looking at each other awkwardly.

I broke the uncomfortable silence rather hesitantly. “I’m … glad to see you are safe, for a given definition of ‘safe’.”

“Naturally, madam. You shouldn’t concern yourself.” Lorenzo smiled wryly, looking at the wrecked room and the bloody corpse. “I do apologize for inconveniencing you, however. I hope your trip was not particularly strenuous… You don’t,” he allowed, after a brief consideration, “look well.”

I dedicated a long moment to studying the slightly frayed ends of my stockings. “Just the usual, nothing worth mentioning.”

There were a few more seconds of silence. Then a bullet whistled outside. Garent pointedly cleared his throat. “Um… guys? We still have a bit of a situation here. Could we finish this tearful reunion later?”

“Right.” I hastily retreated to the safety of inspecting Rostov’s medical supplies. Which he, naturally, didn't seem to have. Lorenzo found his refuge in sarcasm.

“I hope, madam, that we should not expect any further surprise visitors. Or did you bring an army?”

“No, what you see is what you get.” I glanced around, directing a rather pointed gaze to the late Bertram. “Don't you have a first aid kit?”

“No.” Victor stared at me with a vastly innocent face: the face of the truly uncomprehending and blissfully ignorant of any notion of concern. “Should we?”

“Yes!” I said, exasperated, contemplating how I was supposed to treat a man with (presumably) a hole in his shoulder from an ice spike, and came to no conclusions whatsoever.

“Why?”

I groaned, staring from one uncomprehending face to the next. Magicians. Magicians and their... tricks. Someday, completely without expecting it, they will find themselves failing to take some small, but necessary, precaution, and see their convenient house of cards collapse around them. And, if I have my way, I will be there – gloating.

Or so I thought.

I knelt to examine Bertram’s body while Garent and Victor, under Lorenzo’s direction, took apart the barricades and – as appropriate in all matters involving barricades – rebuilt them somewhere else, further out. I am, until this point, uncertain as to why they needed barricades in the first place or, for that matter, what use was served by moving them but I was told – by three of the four male members in the group – that this was how things were “done”. In a shoot out, just as in a small-scale revolution, one built barricades.

I didn’t need the dutiful examination I carried out on Bertram to tell me that he was very dead. There is an emptiness about dead people that is like a small Black Hole in the fabric of reality – a silence that oozes like oil on one’s fingertips. I could feel that oil from the opposite end of the room, and now I’ve bathed my hands in it… I shuddered slightly and leaned in closer to observe Bertram’s contorted face and the three bullet holes in his chest. Someone’d closed his eyes. “He was dead when you arrived.”

Lorenzo sighed. “For all intents and purposes.”

I did not bother with condolences, for which we had even less time than explanations. The door swung open and Rostov’s foot proceeded through, followed shortly by Rostov himself, in company with the gentleman with designs on my head – or at least on my torso and bits of my limbs. There was a momentary scuffle in the doorway as the prisoner – managing somehow to negate Rostov’s significant weight and bulk – struggled almost out of his hand. Rostov aided the man’s decisiveness with the convenient reminder of a gun barrel and marched him in by the scruff.

“Look, Sofia. He’s not even in pieces.” Rostov provided one of his trademark grins for emphasis. He must consider them disconcerting, to abuse them so heavily, but due to some quirk of upbringing, I routinely fail to pay attention to faces, and so the effect of this not-so-subtle intimidation is lost on me. Nonetheless, it was not lost on our esteemed guest; the latter’s eyes gyrated from one hostile face to the next, returning to rest on Rostov’s with an expression of tightly suppressed, sick horror.

I examined our newest acquisition. He was thirtyish, as best I could estimate (which wasn’t very reliable), tall and Scandinavian. He would not have attracted a second glance in a busy city street, though, being possessed of rather average features, a somewhat weak chin and a largish nose.

He was not – I sighed – dressed in a uniform of any sort. Instead he wore the standard attire for a male of the current generation that was not a businessman or a geek; jeans, t-shirt with the logo of some innocuous company I’ve never heard of and never will, and shoes that seemed deceptively common but which, upon closer examination, had soles built for a sportsman, or woodsman’s traction.

“Well,” I said cheerfully. “What language will it be?”

“None,” snapped our prisoner, struggling one last time for the sake of propriety to escape from Rostov's death-grip on his scruff. I noted the rather bland, American accent, and smiled.

“All right then. You can sit down and proceed with not-talking.”

The man scowled and remained standing. Rostov, with a single, well-placed, fluid motion, sliced his palm across the back of the prisoner's knees. The long body went down like a mast in a storm.

“Whoa!” Garent, until now more or less silent, threw up his hands in a defensively-assertive gesture. “We’re not pistol whipping this guy for the next hour, are we?”

“Come on, Garent, you know me,” Rostov patted the prisoner on the shoulder familiarly, and the latter flinched. “I can’t pistol-whip a fly.”

The younger generation in the form of Garent and Victor looked dismayed.

“So what was that?”

“Oh, that,” Rostov waved a leisurely hand in the air. “Private initiative. Sofia said she needed him to talk; she didn’t say anything about kneecaps.”

The man, groaning softly from the unexpected pain and the reverberation of the impact along his bleeding arm, glared up defiantly. “I won't tell you anything.”

“See? He won't tell us anything,” Garent pointed out. “So hurting him is beside the point, right?”

“As much as I may dislike the idea,” Lorenzo said in a slightly distant tone, examining the man before him with the look that a biologist levelled upon an especially rare specimen (about three seconds before the specimen was stuffed with wood shavings and put in formalin), “but we do need to know who he is.”

“Oh, that's not necessary,” I smiled at the assembly charmingly, then turned the smile onto the prisoner who, for some reason, flinched. “I can tell you who he is.”

Funny you should ask.

How about today?

*takes off her RPer hat, acquires the orthodox Jew one*

I am not a believer in inherited sin either. We tend to assume that each person individually is born free of the sins of their ancestors. However, there’s that little Bibleic notion of transferable “something”. Certainly it works on the national level. Though I think calling it “sin” would be wrong… Perhaps it ought to be called Transferable Responsibility?

And I do believe in transferable responsibility. I think that is because I view the change of generations as something profoundly continuous – perhaps almost irrationally so; I am answerable to previous generations. It is my responsibility to remember them, or to ensure their troubles weren’t in vain, or to correct their mistakes. I am also responsible to my future generations; I am responsible for teaching them what is right, for providing a past they can live with and look up to, for allowing them to live in a better world. Thus responsibility transfers where the concepts of sin and atonement might not.

I’ve read an interesting thing, a little while ago, regarding the interpretation of the passage “for I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; (Ex 20:5)” The passage and similar ones are of course hotly debated, but the specific interpretation I’ve in mind actually comes from a secular source.

A father with a young child pointed out that his child was very much inclined to ape the mannerisms of his parents – both the good and the bad. These habits and inclinations could become ingrained in him. The father realized, watching his son, how much he has to be wary of his behaviour so that it won’t affect his child’s adversely. One can view this passage in a similar light – not so much a threat as a statement of fact; what you and yours do affects how your children will come out. Be wary of what you do now, because it will be visited upon your progeny to the fourth generation.

Perhaps this interpretation could be inversed as well. If you want to make sure that you do not repeat the sins of your ancestors, you should acquire habits completely and radically opposite from theirs. Atonement to the fourth generation could be seen as precisely that – an inversion of your ancestors’ tendencies and habits, your responsibility to your sons and grandsons.

Or maybe it’s much simpler than that, and, at the same time, much more complex, and things work differently on the national scale? I don’t know. Probably both. Though it’s so fashionable to deny nationalism and national belonging these days that this argument might meet with considerable disfavour.

[ QUOTE ]

Most of my characters live in the moment. They are doing the best they can, right now, and will deal with the repercussions of any flaws in their strategy later.


[/ QUOTE ]

See now? This is an attitude utterly and completely alien to me – and, as a consequence, alien to my characters. Well, most of them. I believe I have one who lives for and in the moment, and she was immensely difficult for me. I am used to thinking in millennia, or perhaps feeling millennia would be a better term. That doesn’t mean personal responsibility doesn’t exist, though, but that does steal your ability to live for the moment, in the moment, without considering the past of future much.

When Neil Gaiman (who is a writer I appreciate a great deal) came to Israel for a convention, we went to one of his appearances. There he was talking about his impressions of Israel and said, among other interesting things, that Jerusalem astounded him by the, quite literally, palpable weight of time in it. I was surprised because until that point I thought that only those who grew up around Jerusalem, in the culture surrounding it, were prone to such statements, but, apparently – and much to my excitement – I was wrong. It seems that history can be detectable and felt, at least psychologically. I would find the lack of a weight like that to be profoundly disturbing.

This is one of those questions to which I find myself writing a response in Word due to typing overdose.

Like Mr. Grey before me, much of my characters’ motivation, makeup and personality is presented in some of the fiction I posted on this very board; same goes for my husband’s characters, who are rather a package deal (especially as one of them is the spouse of mine).

The answer, of course, is a definite yes. All our characters are direct products of the histories, environments and places from which they came. They have all been shaped by the world, perhaps considerably more so than they have shaped the world (though I believe at least with some of them that is an aspect as well). In fact, I think that it’s part of character realism – a part of writing and roleplaying which is very important to me – to assume that every person is, in his or her own way, a product of their culture, knowledge and experience. Sometimes they uphold that relationship, sometimes they defy it, but they are always in interplay.

Amusingly enough, perhaps due to my own background, most of my characters are immigrants, foreign citizens and temporary residents of various sorts; their culture is much vaguer, less bound to particular time and place and looking at the culture they are in as outsiders. That doesn’t mean they don’t carry their own country with the, to an extent, but the relationship is different. Our two main characters – Alexander and Sofia – are exactly that; they are Russian Jews who live in America. As such, they have always been outsiders from the main culture and atmosphere of the place where they live. Russia never wanted them; America never became their home. The Jewish side of things keeps them almost too in touch with history to really belong in the modern world as it is, and the fact that they are, frankly, pretty nerdy, doesn’t help the societal alienation.

Of course, that outsider status in and of itself is a driving force of personality; it affects the way in which they view their current home, the way they look at the society around them and the way they treat their friends and enemies.

Then there’s the third side of the triangle, who is not only an immigrant but is also a time traveler. Of course that fact must be reflected in his opinions and mannerisms. He was always a modern, enlightened, fairly unprejudiced man with progressive leanings and a broad education, widely traveled… but he was that in 1890… even in 1930, not in 2009. The idea of politically correct speech hasn’t gotten in the mail yet, neither has the idea of universalism that negates nationalism, globalization and post-modernism. This is a person who constantly finds himself entirely alone in the present-day world and considers it something of a nice place to visit, but he wouldn’t want to live there.

Hm. I am beginning to see a pattern. No wonder he gets along well with the other two.

As a point of sheer (dis)interest, politically correct, modern-oriented time travelers who react favourably to, for instance, the costumes many of our dear female heroes wear are a serious pet peeve of mine. I imagine every time traveler, if such a thing were possible, would be inherently an extremely lonely person who’s lost in the present day world, not so much in terms of technology, but precisely in terms of standard human interaction. Considering the gap that is usually present even between generations living in the same world (friendships between very young and much older people are rare), one shudders to imagine what a larger gap of centuries would be like.

So, to get back to the response to the original question; not only am I strongly advocating an influence of time place and upbringing on my characters, I consider it perhaps the most essential consideration when creating such a character – even before weaknesses and flaws, if only because upbringing and social conditioning often provides its own flaws. (as an example, my husband’s time traveler is completely unable to reveal emotion or in general slip off his mask having had Victorian reserve and stoicism hammered into him, and my character, being second generation Holocaust survivor, treats every Council member like a personal and monstrous enemy).

I bet that’s ore than you ever wanted to know.

[ QUOTE ]

It turns out he's descended from people who funded or otherwise supported the Third Reich. However, they had little to no idea what the government was actually doing at the time, feeling their support would keep them blissfully safe, so they maintained a state of ignorance until the Allied forces revealed the atrocities of the Holocaust. Upon realizing the scope of what their monetary support had helped bring about, Grigham's great grandfather fled the family in shame to America where he restarted his life as a laborer.

When Gordon came of age, his grandfather told him the truth about the family's history. Now, it's somewhat strange for me to have a character who feels he needs to help right the wrongs of his family's past, as I don't believe in "inherited sin," but this made a surprising amount of sense to me, that Gordon would try to do something to absolve himself of this horrid taint he suddenly felt.


[/ QUOTE ]

This fellow needs to meet Sofia. He really, really does. Though I am not at all certain whether she will help his sense of guilt or, on the contrary, augment it a thousandfold.

There is a not insignificant population of RPers on Pinnacle too. They sometimes congregate in Pocket D. But yes, Virtue is the largest RP server.

That last is true; my husband's Blaster, whose powers are (mostly) due to the Chernobyl plant accident, was initially rolled as a mutant. At least in all his rerolls that mistake has been corrected.

On the topic as a whole; I mostly play what works concept-wise, and, for some reason, I don't have many mages. Perhaps because I largely play psionicists of various kinds (which, in my book, go straight into Natural origins). I have a total of one magic-oriented character who is also magic-origin. My other character who can be considered as dabbling in magic - at least theoretically - is a Natural (and, frankly, barely has any powers at all).

In my experience people choose for concept. Magic-background concepts allow for all sorts of interesting background stories. not that Science and Mutation characters don't, but at least it's easier to come up with original stuff that way.

I also know some people who play only magic and Science because they don't want to buy their SOs in Founder's. Go figure.

It's at the top, displayed as a little circle with a stylized American flag image.

Well, we have a VG, and it's sort of Midnighter-based. Or at least Midnighter-affiliated. We do RP but, as a chunk of the population is European, are somewhat lacking in pie.