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Morning. Talked with Thomas in the park and learned that when Foxes have offspring, one of the parents--typically the kinfolk instead of the fox--dies. He claims he believes it's something that needs to be discussed with partners, but indicated that not all foxes believe or do so.
Evening. Val dropped by to chat, but I was indisposed by hot wings from lunch. (Fire in, fire out.) Suggested she come back tomorrow.
Morning. Really good talk with Val. She'd recently gone to see Nieve in order to use the bastet fetish--the Lucent Witness--which seems to act like a repository of information for mystic lore. (I would be lying if I said I didn't contemplate using it myself. But I suspect that might cause seriously awkward questions.) She shared what lore there is about mages that's circulating amongst the other shifters. She knew the names and specialties of the traditions, the Nephandi, the Mauraders, and the Technocracy. She also knew of the Spheres, though only in the vaguest of generalities. So now I had an idea as to what I could and could not share with her.
Furthermore, we talked about secrecy. She admitted she was sorry she'd talked about me before to other Corax, which'd prompted her long ago to alert me to not freak out if some young raven-born Corax dropped in on my houseboat to eyeball me as they passed through. I explained that my privacy means I won't have to worry about being attacked, for no known reason, by unknown forces. And that I'd had object on the houseboat that I'd have been pissed about if they'd ever gone missing. I pointed out that I didn't go around telling the garou and the other mages I knew that Corax are as alergic to gold as garou are to silver--and that while I would never use gold against Val, I knew there would be no similar guarantees once I let that knowledge out of the bag and began spreading it. I think she and I finally resolved a long-standing issue that'd been between us, and I know which made me not trust her anywhere near as much as I'd had in the past.
In fact, after our heart-to-heart discussion, I told her I was of none of the Traditions--the equivalent to the garou's ronin, though with less social stigmas than the garou place on that kind of thing because mages are nowhere near as socially.... ingrained.... as the garou's particular culture. I also shared that I was highly unusual as a mage because I dabbled in all nine of the spheres, not just the usual two, three, four, or five that mages from the Traditions tend to do. And how they tend to specialize more--and are thus typically more powerful than me. Although, honestly, I think I've gotten to be more powerful than the average mage--even the tradition mages--but it better protects these other mages if I lend them the illusion of greater strength and power than I wield.
Val mentioned how she suspected I was trading the bawn fruit to one or more other mages, and offered me two more trinkets from her recent depp-umbra travels: a plant clippng and some feathers from Pangea. (Nice!) I thanked her and then confirmed I'd traded for me new talisman that grants me access to the spirit world--and had also been working to secure a mentor. I explained he was so powerful that reality bent around him and he had to live in isolation. (I think he might be an archmage, actually. William is ludicrously powerful.) Val commented on how that level of magical ability sounded dangerous, and I explained that it was more like.... I you imagine a blanket on a bed as being reality, then a mage of my power is like putting a baseball on it. The blanket deforms slightly, but no harm is done. Reality bends and accomodates. William, however, I described as being like a bowling ball. Reality bends far more noticably around him--simply because he exists--but no harm comes to the blanket.
Val offered to let me meet Storm's-Shadow. I asked if my meeting him would result in the Shadow Lords knowing about me, and she said "no." (Makes sense: that raven spirit that was hanging around the tenement for a while with Flint didn't know about me despite Val knowing. She also asked about tagging along with Storm's-Shadow on thre trip Mouse, Salem and I are planning to take to Mount (St. Helens) Doom. I told her I'd check with Mouse.
Morning. Dropped by Edgewood, ran into Kitty, and she said there was something wrong with Danny (a Fianna kinfolk) who was having bad nightmares. I suggested she contact the Fianna and asked if she knew any. She said she did know one, but didn't like/trust him, so wasn't going to bring the matter to him. (WTF?) Then she asked if I would help and then promptly bitched about how the Walkers were never around, stuck up in their ivory tower, and didn't care about.... She was /clearly/ being irrational. I suggested to her that she ought to try not insulting people's tribes as a means of getting help, then went to leave. She pursued, getting more emotional and upset. I told her to back off and she didn't--kept coming. So I stood my ground, told her to stop, and back up those actions with some Mind magick to push her to obey. (Holy shit, it worked too!) Seriously. I thought she was about to lay hands on me or maybe even frenzy. She turned around, crying, and went back to the garage. I got the eff out of Dodge.
Afternoon. Ran into Val and Starcaller in the park. Mentioned the incident to Starcaller and suggested he have a talk with her about rage and not cornering/pursuing kin when they say they're afraid of a garou and trying to leave the area. He chalked it up to her being young and, kind of, just sort of blew it off. (Really? That casually? Make a note of that, Nick.)
Evening. Had a great talk with Mouse about the upcoming proposed trip to Mount St. Helens. Got Val cleared to tag along. Discussed what plans she had (none really), and we talked about how I might be able to use magic to find that ley-line out in WWNP again, then follow it for a while, then use a map overlay to see if it went to St. Helen's and roughly where we'd want to start looking for it--making a path to follow to the place where the new queen would be dropped off. If that fails, I can work an extended ritual to give us some luck so we just start looking in roughly the right place--if I can pull it off.
Mouse also mentioned how, if she is able to pull off the ritual to revive the caern, how she might want to later (in a year or so) attempt to turn the Harbor Park node/glade into a caern. It'd have to be an open one, like they apparently have in NYC's Central Park. (Really?) That led to me asking questions as to why if there could be an open caern in Central Park, why couldn't the garou here open up the caern to the likes of Val, the Bastet, kinfolk, and (maybe) mages. The answer is apparently that there's more traditionalist-types in charge of the caern here, and because it's in a remote spot and there's no need to have it open to the public, they don't want to because it affords them greater security/control.
Morning. I picked up the eyeball plant--making sure to cover it while moving it so it couldn't see where I'd been keeping it--loaded it into the car, and took it to let Val oogle it for a bit. Then I left town. Headed down to San Fran and the chantry there to see if anyone'd be interested in trading something for it. There was a Verbena who found it to be an interesting curiosity, but said he wasn't just going to sit around and 'water' it with tass once a month just to keep a vegetable thaumavore alive. Can't blame him, as I wanted to get it off my hands for precisely the same reason. Still, the guy did find it interesting enough to study for half a day. Then I let him suck the tass out of it, killing the plant. I got nothing but maybe a little goodwill out of that trip. That, and I didn't have to be the one who killed it.
Spent a long weekend in San Fran, just hanging out. (Even managed to hook up with an interesting gal one night at a swanky bar, but--definitely just a one night stand for both of us.) Made sure to go to the zoo one whole day. Watched the wolves a bit and eyeballed the tigers for a good three hours and got to talk to one of the zookeepers about them and their personalities. He said he'd worked with the cats in the exhibit for many, many years--and would never trust them enough to stick his pinkie in where they might get it. That he'd only ever touched them when they were sedated for procedures or dead. Damn, I'm a lucky dog. (Er, mage.) I got to pet one the week before--and it was a were-tiger, not just a regular tiger.
Over the weekend, got a couple voice mails from Val regarding Ex. Val tried tracking down the people who'd been experimenting on her, but no luck. She mentioned a group called DNA. (Never heard of them.) It made me think Technocracy. You just don't want to mess with those groups--at all. I'll have to have a chat with her about that sometime when we get a chance.
Morning. Decided to risk going back to Edgewood, which I'd avoided since the incident with Kitty. Ran into Urick (aka Fugly, the Glass Walker who used to be the safehouse guardian before he went to the Amazon, hooked up with Baukhain, and then came back here). We noticed Kitty in the back yard all hunkered down in the weeds and having a pity party. Urick picked her up, carried her back to the porch, (Quin joined us--he'd arrived on a horse who was pretty skittish) and gave her an "it's hard adjusting sometimes" speech. Kitty claimed I was angry at her. Personally, I'd go more with "afraid" than "angry." But now that I think about it a little bit, I am a little angry at her, too. I'll get over it eventually, but it's going to take a while before I'll really trust her to control her emotions again--and she's still not realized how dangerous she can be, even if she never intended to be dangerous.
Urick comes across as a grizzled, war-mauled, gruff veteran--but I saw how he quickly took to soothing and nurturing Kitty. He's kind of a teddy bear underneath the surface. (Baukhain confirmed this later.) Just don't tell him he's a softie: I don't think that'd be wise.
Texting with Baukhain. She'd gotten told to leave Edgewood by a garou named Jacob--apparently a Child of Gaia--who made Kitty cry from what I understand. Good. Maybe Kitty'll start thinking critically and independently now that she's at odds with the views of people within her own tribe. Anyway, I picked Baukhain up, we went out for coffee, and talked about how to hook her up with Silvertip--the sept's Alpha--who I'd met once. I'd suggested that Val or Thomas could probably help hook her up with Silvertip, who lived out in the woods. Speak of the devil and Val turned up. I think, if Val recommends Baukhain to Silvertip, she's got high odds of being able to stay. She seemed really saddened at the possibility that she might have to leave Fugly behind. Guess they're still an item.
So. Higher levels of Mind magick? Where you can radically alter another person's sensory input? What they see, smell, taste, hear, and touch? Yeah. It also works REALLY WELL on yourself. Let me just say two things: (1) I can see why some mages become hermits and live alone, and (2) you can probably go blind doing that too much. I suspect, strongly, that the Cult of Ecstacy know allllll about that little trick. I have to admit that I did experiment with some sex-based applications of magic with a few partners in my late teens to mid twenties, but it /really/ doesn't hold a candle to the higher levels of Mind magic open to me now. I'm pretty sure I could make a person drop to the ground from pleasure almost instantly if I wanted. Vulgar, yeah. In more ways than one. Alllll kinds of coincidental applications, though! Dana... would so disapprove. But you know what? I bet, secretly, behind closed doors, she experimented too and never said anything about it. I bet a lot of mages do.
Evening. Val dropped by to chat, but I was indisposed by hot wings from lunch. (Fire in, fire out.) Suggested she come back tomorrow.
Morning. Really good talk with Val. She'd recently gone to see Nieve in order to use the bastet fetish--the Lucent Witness--which seems to act like a repository of information for mystic lore. (I would be lying if I said I didn't contemplate using it myself. But I suspect that might cause seriously awkward questions.) She shared what lore there is about mages that's circulating amongst the other shifters. She knew the names and specialties of the traditions, the Nephandi, the Mauraders, and the Technocracy. She also knew of the Spheres, though only in the vaguest of generalities. So now I had an idea as to what I could and could not share with her.
Furthermore, we talked about secrecy. She admitted she was sorry she'd talked about me before to other Corax, which'd prompted her long ago to alert me to not freak out if some young raven-born Corax dropped in on my houseboat to eyeball me as they passed through. I explained that my privacy means I won't have to worry about being attacked, for no known reason, by unknown forces. And that I'd had object on the houseboat that I'd have been pissed about if they'd ever gone missing. I pointed out that I didn't go around telling the garou and the other mages I knew that Corax are as alergic to gold as garou are to silver--and that while I would never use gold against Val, I knew there would be no similar guarantees once I let that knowledge out of the bag and began spreading it. I think she and I finally resolved a long-standing issue that'd been between us, and I know which made me not trust her anywhere near as much as I'd had in the past.
In fact, after our heart-to-heart discussion, I told her I was of none of the Traditions--the equivalent to the garou's ronin, though with less social stigmas than the garou place on that kind of thing because mages are nowhere near as socially.... ingrained.... as the garou's particular culture. I also shared that I was highly unusual as a mage because I dabbled in all nine of the spheres, not just the usual two, three, four, or five that mages from the Traditions tend to do. And how they tend to specialize more--and are thus typically more powerful than me. Although, honestly, I think I've gotten to be more powerful than the average mage--even the tradition mages--but it better protects these other mages if I lend them the illusion of greater strength and power than I wield.
Val mentioned how she suspected I was trading the bawn fruit to one or more other mages, and offered me two more trinkets from her recent depp-umbra travels: a plant clippng and some feathers from Pangea. (Nice!) I thanked her and then confirmed I'd traded for me new talisman that grants me access to the spirit world--and had also been working to secure a mentor. I explained he was so powerful that reality bent around him and he had to live in isolation. (I think he might be an archmage, actually. William is ludicrously powerful.) Val commented on how that level of magical ability sounded dangerous, and I explained that it was more like.... I you imagine a blanket on a bed as being reality, then a mage of my power is like putting a baseball on it. The blanket deforms slightly, but no harm is done. Reality bends and accomodates. William, however, I described as being like a bowling ball. Reality bends far more noticably around him--simply because he exists--but no harm comes to the blanket.
Val offered to let me meet Storm's-Shadow. I asked if my meeting him would result in the Shadow Lords knowing about me, and she said "no." (Makes sense: that raven spirit that was hanging around the tenement for a while with Flint didn't know about me despite Val knowing. She also asked about tagging along with Storm's-Shadow on thre trip Mouse, Salem and I are planning to take to Mount (St. Helens) Doom. I told her I'd check with Mouse.
Morning. Dropped by Edgewood, ran into Kitty, and she said there was something wrong with Danny (a Fianna kinfolk) who was having bad nightmares. I suggested she contact the Fianna and asked if she knew any. She said she did know one, but didn't like/trust him, so wasn't going to bring the matter to him. (WTF?) Then she asked if I would help and then promptly bitched about how the Walkers were never around, stuck up in their ivory tower, and didn't care about.... She was /clearly/ being irrational. I suggested to her that she ought to try not insulting people's tribes as a means of getting help, then went to leave. She pursued, getting more emotional and upset. I told her to back off and she didn't--kept coming. So I stood my ground, told her to stop, and back up those actions with some Mind magick to push her to obey. (Holy shit, it worked too!) Seriously. I thought she was about to lay hands on me or maybe even frenzy. She turned around, crying, and went back to the garage. I got the eff out of Dodge.
Afternoon. Ran into Val and Starcaller in the park. Mentioned the incident to Starcaller and suggested he have a talk with her about rage and not cornering/pursuing kin when they say they're afraid of a garou and trying to leave the area. He chalked it up to her being young and, kind of, just sort of blew it off. (Really? That casually? Make a note of that, Nick.)
Evening. Had a great talk with Mouse about the upcoming proposed trip to Mount St. Helens. Got Val cleared to tag along. Discussed what plans she had (none really), and we talked about how I might be able to use magic to find that ley-line out in WWNP again, then follow it for a while, then use a map overlay to see if it went to St. Helen's and roughly where we'd want to start looking for it--making a path to follow to the place where the new queen would be dropped off. If that fails, I can work an extended ritual to give us some luck so we just start looking in roughly the right place--if I can pull it off.
Mouse also mentioned how, if she is able to pull off the ritual to revive the caern, how she might want to later (in a year or so) attempt to turn the Harbor Park node/glade into a caern. It'd have to be an open one, like they apparently have in NYC's Central Park. (Really?) That led to me asking questions as to why if there could be an open caern in Central Park, why couldn't the garou here open up the caern to the likes of Val, the Bastet, kinfolk, and (maybe) mages. The answer is apparently that there's more traditionalist-types in charge of the caern here, and because it's in a remote spot and there's no need to have it open to the public, they don't want to because it affords them greater security/control.
Morning. I picked up the eyeball plant--making sure to cover it while moving it so it couldn't see where I'd been keeping it--loaded it into the car, and took it to let Val oogle it for a bit. Then I left town. Headed down to San Fran and the chantry there to see if anyone'd be interested in trading something for it. There was a Verbena who found it to be an interesting curiosity, but said he wasn't just going to sit around and 'water' it with tass once a month just to keep a vegetable thaumavore alive. Can't blame him, as I wanted to get it off my hands for precisely the same reason. Still, the guy did find it interesting enough to study for half a day. Then I let him suck the tass out of it, killing the plant. I got nothing but maybe a little goodwill out of that trip. That, and I didn't have to be the one who killed it.
Spent a long weekend in San Fran, just hanging out. (Even managed to hook up with an interesting gal one night at a swanky bar, but--definitely just a one night stand for both of us.) Made sure to go to the zoo one whole day. Watched the wolves a bit and eyeballed the tigers for a good three hours and got to talk to one of the zookeepers about them and their personalities. He said he'd worked with the cats in the exhibit for many, many years--and would never trust them enough to stick his pinkie in where they might get it. That he'd only ever touched them when they were sedated for procedures or dead. Damn, I'm a lucky dog. (Er, mage.) I got to pet one the week before--and it was a were-tiger, not just a regular tiger.
Over the weekend, got a couple voice mails from Val regarding Ex. Val tried tracking down the people who'd been experimenting on her, but no luck. She mentioned a group called DNA. (Never heard of them.) It made me think Technocracy. You just don't want to mess with those groups--at all. I'll have to have a chat with her about that sometime when we get a chance.
Morning. Decided to risk going back to Edgewood, which I'd avoided since the incident with Kitty. Ran into Urick (aka Fugly, the Glass Walker who used to be the safehouse guardian before he went to the Amazon, hooked up with Baukhain, and then came back here). We noticed Kitty in the back yard all hunkered down in the weeds and having a pity party. Urick picked her up, carried her back to the porch, (Quin joined us--he'd arrived on a horse who was pretty skittish) and gave her an "it's hard adjusting sometimes" speech. Kitty claimed I was angry at her. Personally, I'd go more with "afraid" than "angry." But now that I think about it a little bit, I am a little angry at her, too. I'll get over it eventually, but it's going to take a while before I'll really trust her to control her emotions again--and she's still not realized how dangerous she can be, even if she never intended to be dangerous.
Urick comes across as a grizzled, war-mauled, gruff veteran--but I saw how he quickly took to soothing and nurturing Kitty. He's kind of a teddy bear underneath the surface. (Baukhain confirmed this later.) Just don't tell him he's a softie: I don't think that'd be wise.
Texting with Baukhain. She'd gotten told to leave Edgewood by a garou named Jacob--apparently a Child of Gaia--who made Kitty cry from what I understand. Good. Maybe Kitty'll start thinking critically and independently now that she's at odds with the views of people within her own tribe. Anyway, I picked Baukhain up, we went out for coffee, and talked about how to hook her up with Silvertip--the sept's Alpha--who I'd met once. I'd suggested that Val or Thomas could probably help hook her up with Silvertip, who lived out in the woods. Speak of the devil and Val turned up. I think, if Val recommends Baukhain to Silvertip, she's got high odds of being able to stay. She seemed really saddened at the possibility that she might have to leave Fugly behind. Guess they're still an item.
So. Higher levels of Mind magick? Where you can radically alter another person's sensory input? What they see, smell, taste, hear, and touch? Yeah. It also works REALLY WELL on yourself. Let me just say two things: (1) I can see why some mages become hermits and live alone, and (2) you can probably go blind doing that too much. I suspect, strongly, that the Cult of Ecstacy know allllll about that little trick. I have to admit that I did experiment with some sex-based applications of magic with a few partners in my late teens to mid twenties, but it /really/ doesn't hold a candle to the higher levels of Mind magic open to me now. I'm pretty sure I could make a person drop to the ground from pleasure almost instantly if I wanted. Vulgar, yeah. In more ways than one. Alllll kinds of coincidental applications, though! Dana... would so disapprove. But you know what? I bet, secretly, behind closed doors, she experimented too and never said anything about it. I bet a lot of mages do.
