From news@Orb.Nashua.NH.US Sun Jul 7 02:12:48 1996 Return-Path: news@Orb.Nashua.NH.US To: kjc@apocalypse.org From: Majordomo@Orb.Nashua.NH.US Subject: Majordomo file: list 'apdi' file '1520' Reply-To: Majordomo@Orb.Nashua.NH.US Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Date: Sun, 07 Jul 1996 02:05:40 -0400 Sender: news@Orb.Nashua.NH.US -- Path: orb!leggy.zk3.dec.com!jac.zko.dec.com!pa.dec.com!decwrl!sdd.hp.com!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!news.pop.psu.edu!news.cac.psu.edu!newsserver.jvnc.net!igor.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!kjc From: kjc@aramis.rutgers.edu (Kelly J. Cooper) Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Subject: [HA] Preparations Message-ID: Date: 6 Jun 94 07:26:51 GMT Organization: Psychology @ Rutgers University Lines: 381 Xref: orb alt.pub.dragons-inn:1520 ADMIN: Some brief comments by me, because we're so random about posting (almost exclusively my fault, that). This post takes place in the fall. Kardia has recently realized, after breaking a major curse afflicting Dasham, acting Supreme ArchMage of the Generican Mage Guild, that she has the capacity for normal magic (not just curse-breaking). Additionally, Jameson has just pointed out that it is possible for the Weaver to get back to her home-world, either with help from Jameson or possibly from the 'kan. If you're interested in relatively recent posts leading up to this one, drop me a line and I'll forward them to you. Look for more [HA] as the summer picks up. SECONDLY, I have recently MOVED. Physically as well as net-wise (to New Hampshire from New Jersey -- hence my delays in posting). kjc@cs.rutgers.edu will continue to work, but my main addresses will change shortly to kjc@asylum.sf.ca.us (Cambridge, not California) and kjc@morchella.ftp.com. --- "In a crisis, we cut away what we don't need any more, in the good times, we find our way, we find our way back home..." --World Entertainment War "I think twinkle is a nice word. So's viridian. I once knew a lady who had an imaginary fish." -Delerium, Brief Lives -*- Jameson led Kardia through the leaf-covered and chilly streets of Generica, down out of Merchant's Hill and, skirting Low Town, out near the docks where seafood restaurants held their own against sailor bars and cuddle clubs. Down an alley that was neither too dark nor brightly lit, Jameson ducked into a doorway that looked almost exactly like every other doorway they'd passed in the last fifteen minutes. Inside, the room was loosely packed with men of all shapes and sizes, but each with distinctly asian features. Jameson smiled cheerfully and was largely ignored. Leading Kardia between bodies and tables randomly scattered around the room, Jameson made her way to a particular long flat table with a heavily scarred wooden top, one of four in what was now obviously a restaurant of sorts. It was just above waist height and broad enough to allow room for patrons sitting in front of it to eat off the wooden blocks before them while still leaving enough space for the man standing on the other side to work with his tools to render slabs of raw fish into morsels and sea weed wrapped portions. He used a sharp knife, a wooden paddle, a bamboo mat and his hands. To one side of him was a heavy ceramic pot full of sticky white rice on low heat. On his other side was a small grill, coals flickering red and gray, where the skins of different fish crackled and chunks of eel were warmed and covered with a sweet sauce. Jameson inclined her head to the man and sat, indicating for Kardia to sit beside her. The man seemed to ignore her until a wooden block covered with a riot of colors abruptly appeared between the two women. As the chef rinsed his hands in water below their sight-line he muttered something that was definitely not Common. Jameson replied in the same language, speaking respectfully, but only received a glare for her words. She smiled sweetly, but was again ignored. "He said 'I will serve you because my people have better things to do' and I thanked him for his kindness. He disapproves of women rather strenuously." Jameson translated while pulling a pair of sticks from a pocket somewhere and going to work on the raw fish before them. "I heard him." Kardia said completely surprised, "That... that was perfect Nipponese, from my world. How strange." She drew out her own sticks from her pack with some wonder. Jameson smiled ruefully and apologized with a dip of her head. They made fast work of the first serving and their plate was whisked away as soon as it had been cleared. Another took its place almost immediately, but having taken the edge off their hunger, they ate this one at a more leisurely pace. Kardia laughed at the expression on Jameson's face as the Walker savored a particularly buttery soft piece of yellowtail. Swallowing, Jameson waggled a chopstick at her and threatened to coat her mucous membranes with wasabi powder. In mock horror, Kardia offered up her half of a salmon roll that contained something like avocado, but slightly sweeter. Accepting the bribe, Jameson offered two particularly succulent pieces of tuna as a conciliatory gesture. Contemplating a tobiko roll, Jameson said quietly, "I always appreciate the pre-industrial analogs. Not only do they lack pollution, but the fishies are pretty much the same." She chewed thoughtfully for a few moments and finished, "I think reality leaks. Too many coincidences, you know?" Kardia grinned, "Like an entire language and social customs, that's a lot to swallow... yeah...." Jameson shook her head, "No, you can explain that away with travelers... and people who slip into the cracks and crevices and wake up in a different world entirely. But most of them don't bring whole species of fish or animals with them. Personalities often seem to conform to archetypes, with variation from individual to individual, but one eventually meets a leader, a visionary, a mysterious person, a spritual guide, a betrayer, a fool, a hunter..." Jameson trailed off, frowning slightly, "But plants and animals? I don't know about them, although I suppose they can accidently slip through space as easily as a person. Probably even more easily since they generally outnumber whatever's considered 'human' on a given world..." She stopped abruptly, catching herself and almost blushing, though the color didn't actually quite escape her collar-line. "My apologies. I am getting too... comfortable, I guess. Rambling on about such things and presuming upon your patience." Kardia quirked a grin, "S'okay. Just don't let it happen again." Jameson snorted and in the silence following they listened to the murmur of voices around them rising and falling. In a much more serious tone, Kardia began, "Going home..." and stopped. Jameson looked up and, seeing evidence of the Weaver's hesitance, waited silently and without pressure. Kardia frowned and pursed her lips as she contemplated the shiny baubles of flying fish roe. "I... hmmm... I'm not exactly sure I want to go home. It's more... more an obligation. If I can, I have to try and find out what happened to everyone..." She looked up and then grinned at Jameson's confused expression. "Maybe I'd better start at the beginning." "In the very beginning there were seven sons..." Kardia grinned, "Yeah... a big family, there were twelve of us, all together. Dad could afford it, he was the President and CEO of RolloMay, a company that was into high security cyberware. The motto of the company was `The Power that Keeps You Safe'" Kardia's smile went wry and she was silent for just a moment. "We were successful. Mostly through the discovery of a way to not only speed up neural transmission through molecular replacement, but how to couple that kind of tech with similar replacement of muscle tissue for strength and a balanced joint enforcement. On a singular scale, each of the improvements wasn't as spectacular as other companies; what we brought to the table was a way to balance the three so that they best took advantage of each other. "RolloMay gradually became very successful. Too successful in some ways." Kardia frowned slightly, "There was talk that the company should have acquired more debt, held less cash assets, basically made itself a less attractive target for takeover. But Dad was old fashioned, wanted to make sure that there was the basis for on-going funds for long-term research before embarking on a new push. "The problem was that most of his competition wasn't so old fashioned." Kardia bit her upper lip and took a deep breath. Letting the breath out she frowned up at Jameson, "I don't know what kinds of worlds you've been to... but in the one I come from the main influences, the main powers are all rooted in money or the ability to make money. Corporations can make stable environments for their employees simply because they have enough money to make it so, to hire the people to protect them, or to empower the people that are employed there to protect themselves with the base power of the corporation to back them up. The bigger the corporation, the larger and more solid the base of operations. "That doesn't mean that people aren't moral there, or that people aren't aware of what justice should be done. It's just that... sometimes one can't afford it. "Dad couldn't. We were small enough to be swallowed whole; but they gave him a different chance. They basically took all my brothers hostage. Not by taking them... but by changing them. They were changed into swans, and were allowed to be human every night, but during the day time, they were swans. They were changed in the middle of the complex with no visible tracing of the power that did it, and no way to track how it was done. They said that they could have killed my brothers as easily as change them and Dad was told to abdicate his power in the company or face having his sons murdered. "The police could do nothing. Our internal security force was stymied, and the members of our magical force resigned or simply disappeared. It was only at that change that we noticed that half our magical resources had been lured away to other companies. Of those that were left, three could do nothing, and the fourth..." Kardia frowned, "The fourth died trying to lift the curse." "So Dad abdicated. He did it because he now knew that he couldn't keep his family safe, much less the people that worked for him; and he knew that with someone else in the chair there wouldn't be as many doubts in the workforce as to their safety. "The whole family moved out into the forest. A few people came with us. Alistair..." Kardia stumbled over the name, went silent and then said softly, "He and I were married out there. I guess it was the first time I really saw him as a person..." At a look from Jameson she smiled, a little sadly, "He was the head of security and took the breaching of his security badly enough to resign and stay with us. He..." Kardia frowned a little, thinking something through, "In a way, he was the one the pointed me at the possibilities of stinging nettle. He told me the fairy tale of the other princess whose brothers had been changed, and, together, we researched the process for making stinging nettle into fabric. There was nothing to lose in trying it, or so we thought, so I did it." "Seven shirts for seven swans, made within the year, by a silent maker from stinging nettle. As with the original story, the deadline was insanely tight; and Sean, my youngest brother, was left with a wing for a right arm. Luckily, I did have the rest of the family and Alistair around to keep me safe while I did it... though the locals were leery of what they knew was a 'witch' in their midst. They did try something..." Kardia's mouth pinched tight for a moment, "But the family took care of them... and when they saw me destroying curses they actually brought some of their folks to me." "It was weird, in some ways. When I was working on those shirts, I never really thought through what would happen... it's only after what happened next I really realized the full consequences of breaking that batch of curses. "We broke the obvious hold over the family, that of the swan shapes on my brothers. But that hold was all that was keeping back the full weight of the ones that had wanted the takeover so badly." Kardia swallowed, "They let us have the company back for two years, long enough to make another breakthrough, and then they took the hard way in. They did a full and complete hostile takeover... so far as I know..." Kardia sighed, "Last I knew, Alistair was dead, my siblings fighting for their lives, and I don't even know what... what happened to..." her voice broke and dropped into a whisper, "I don't know what happened to anyone..." She closed her eyes and took a few breaths as the men around them studiously ignored the woman's tears and Jameson kept herself motionless. Kardia wiped them away and looked at them for a moment before shaking her head. Her expression stilled, "Looks like I really do need to go back and at least find out what happened. And, if possible, maybe bring whoever's left back here. Thing is that I think they stuffed me through a gate to here so that I couldn't help them anymore; and in all my life I'd never *heard* of the possibility of a gate." She rubbed the tears into her pants, took a sliver of the perfect yellowtail and ate it slowly, savoring it. Kardia sighed and thought a bit, "Travel between worlds in my world was thought impossible. Space travel had been proven to be too expensive, and while we knew that magic was a viable way of doing things, no one had ever even heard of punching ways to other worlds. I'd heard of going into the afterlife, or even going astral to find someone who was dead; but never other, real worlds." "As far as what I'd like to do once we get there. I'd really like to find out where everyone is. What's happened to them, and how we can bring them back. This place is so much nicer to live in, I'm sure that they would like to come here and just be safe. I'm pretty sure that the information about my family is on the systems of the PentaOps database, which might be accessible on the Matrix. They would probably track them..." "The only way I can think of doing that covertly enough would be through something in the local slang called 'shadowruns'. They're called that because they're usually down in the shadow of the megacorps and they're runs because they have to be swift strikes through the security because the corps are so big they could squash anything that moved too slow. We might be able to hire a decker to run through the computer Matrix, and get into their systems and find all this out... or something..." Jameson's chin was resting on her fist by the time Kardia had finished, and her eyes seemed both very intent and unfocused. She opened her mouth but it was a few moments before she actually spoke -- and then all that came out was a softly sighed "Oh my." She looked down at the chopsticks clenched tightly in her right hand and made a conscious effort to carefully open her fingers to put the sticks down on the countertop. The white and red ridges they left behind in her fingers smoothed themselves over in a moment and she looked up from her hands to Kardia's face. "I'm sorry. Words are... That sounds like it was, um, very painful." Seeing the hurt etched around Kardia's eyes and mouth Jameson became gently brisk, and turned to business matters. "The gateway. It could still be there. Some worlds have lots of connections to other worlds. Some don't. Picture it like a spider web, like dozens to hundreds of spider webs, each overlapping at the others' borders in three dimensions." The Walker interwove her fingers, then fanned them out. "And the center of each of the webs is a nexus, somewhat like this world, and points of overlapping threads are other worlds that it touches. Some are farther out and might only have their own reality and perhaps one other that touches it peripherally." She looked up at Kardia to confirm that the Weaver understood before continuing, "Now, on the next scale up, each of these bits of interconnected webbing are nodes themselves on much larger webs making up universes." Jameson successfully restrained herself from swinging her arms about dramatically. Tapping the countertop significantly, Jameson emphasized "_This_ world in particular touches a truly astronomical number of other places and thus tends to be important bit of territory in your basic interdimensional power struggle." Jameson's grin was cheerfully wry. "It also has a lot of solid reference points so you can reach out to other places. Er, the point being, even when a world doesn't have many connections, or even none at all, if you can locate it in relation to your world (or another known world), you can establish a link to it. And, it is very likely that your, er, abductors may have found it easier to open a connection and keep it open, then to punch through over and over." She squinted a moment. "In conclusion, I guess what I'm trying to explain is that n-space is sort of like a computer Matrix. And if you know the routing, you can send yourself like a packet. Too many hops, though, and you vanish in a puff of improbability. Except, unlike spider webs and computer matrices, those connections are a cross between a hole or tunnel in something that isn't there and a kind of drawing together of two places so that they touch and you can cross between them." She smiled, having finally completed the thought, then abruptly frowned with concern at Kardia. "Did that make any sense at all?" Kardia grinned at the Walker, "Kinda, but not really. A hole in nothing that draws two places together really doesn't sound like it should make that much common sense. I think I'm going to take it on faith and spider webs, that part made sense to me." Jameons grinned. "In any case, one thing is very likely -- and that is that I can probably work within this Matrix and be our Decker." She nodded once, firmly. Kardia thought a bit and nodded as well. They were quiet for a while, finishing the fish before them. Eventually, the Walker rubbed her thumb along her jawline and began speaking again, slowly this time, gradually warming to the subject, "So, getting there shouldn't be much of an issue. But once we're there, we may not be able to get back easily. From what you've said, opening a gate from that side will be harder than charming any three of the hydra's heads. So we may have to rely on the hope that they're keeping their gate established and open. Fortunately, that's something we can check on, from this side." She tapped a fingernail against her teeth, thinking. "We'll need credit and connections, at the very least. A reputation might help as well, depending upon what kind of profile we want to have. Going in through the front door or sneaking in the back and all that rot. Perhaps both at once, to be stereotypically sly. You know," Jameson's eyes focused on Kardia as she abruptly changed tones, "I'm quite simply not sneaky enough for this. At all. Planning, I can do. Contingency set-up halfway to the next universe and back again. Human psyche, response prediction, et cetera. But I just don't think secretively enough." She rubbed her forehead, "I guess I'm used to Bad Guys in Black Hats. We need a thief. A behind the scenes hustler. A person who thinks dangerously." Grey eyes met green and two voices said, "Errol." A small, shared smile of understanding, then Jameson continued, "As I said, I suspect I'll be able to Walk the Matrix. 'Raelf has offered to modify my deck and I've done it before -- it should be easier now. Remind me to think about wetware modifications. Won't due to have people see me sticking cyberjacks up my nose to make a connection." At Kardia's upraised eyebrow, Jameson flashed a brief grin. "You," Jameson looked pointedly at Kardia, "Definitely study up on Magic. We're going to need it. I will want to see through your eyes briefly, to get a fix on where you entered Nexus as well as coordinates for your world. Ah, stars. Assuming it wasn't a one-time opening, and that they're maintaining a stable gateway, who knows what's hanging about on either side. I'll also try to drum up any info I can, through various sources, about... Shadow? All worlds call themselves some variation of 'Terra' but that term, the 'Shadowrun' does stick in one's mind." She pulled at her lower lip, "And I think I'll clean up my deck. Maybe make some backups, in case of a mess." This time her smile didn't quite reach her eyes. Somehow, despite all their talking, they had managed to finish a third large helping of sushi. They stood to leave and Jameson leaned forward to leave a few very old looking coins on the table. She met the chef's eyes briefly and he gave her a strange and steady look while gathering up the coins. The Walker and the Weaver then made their way back outside into the late autumn air and, continuing to toss plans and ideas to and fro, ambled back toward the Lighthouse in the fading twilight. --- Copyright 1994 by Kelly J. Cooper and Phyllis Rostykus. Kardia is hers, Jameson is mine. All rights reserved. Kelly J. Cooper Liralen Li kjc@cs.rutgers.edu & li@inigo.data-io.com kjc@asylum.sf.ca.us