Operation: URIEL

"And these are the names of the holy angels who watch. URIEL, one of the holy angels, who is over the world and over Tartarus."

Book of Enoch, 1:20

Just as Uriel was God's all-seeing eye on the Garden of Eden, so are the members of Operation URIEL the eyes of Project SANDMAN on the fecund Aquarian gardens of 1970s California. But that choice of Uriel as namesake—whom Milton's Adversary tricked into revealing the location of Eden, after all—is a double-edged sword. Members of URIEL who have passed through its office over the past half-decade have wondered if the codename for the project was chosen as an outright warning to the project team:

Beware the friendly stranger who seeks to ingratiate himself with the archangels who guard the divine secrets of paradise. That stranger may be Satan himself.

SEVEN IS A SACRED NUMBER

"It is not impossible that the idea of the seven holy angels before the throne of God and the seven other wicked spirits, more wicked than the unclean spirit, is a reminiscence of the seven Igighs and the seven Anunnaki of the Babylonians."

Paul Carus, The Open Court

⋉ PRELIM CONCEPTS + CHARGEN

Leonard

She's basically a warrior-monk type assigned to an early, Vietnam-era version of Col. Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion. Originally from Northern California and starting out as a drugged-out hippie type, her increasing feminism and radicalization led her down the path of discovering utopianism, martial arts and self-defense, communitarianism, and anti-colonialism -- basically, her path diverged between New Age mysticism and self-discovery and extreme left-wing revolutionary violence. So she has that blend of commando skills, psychic tendencies, and universal acceptance of the weird, but she's also pretty fucked up: government-controlled experiments to try and activate her latent mental powers left her unstable and prone to spells of disassociation, and her own experiments in self-actualization through the use of drugs makes her brain cut in and out at unfortunate moments. She's also got a conflicting world-view insofar as she has the optimism of the Human Potential Movement, but she's also seen some shit and her memory won't let her forget the depths of perversion and horror humans are capable of. So essentially a kind of New Age ninja/New Earth Army type, but prematurely burned out.

Brant

Marshall Redgrave, a radical psychiatrist and "spiritual adviser," sort of blended Eugene Landy and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He's a shaggy-haired white guy who wears tinted sunglasses and open-necked kurtas with Buddhist prayer beads around his neck. Recruited by CIA out of Stanford Medicine, sent to Vietnam in the '60s, ostensibly to act as a sort of commissar but in reality to study the psychological impact of the war on American service members. His credentials and insights eventually brought him to the attention of Project SANDMAN, who gave him license to explore the application of fringe psychiatric practices on "damaged goods" (i.e. traumatized soldiers). Enamored of Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation and the ability of certain Buddhist monks to meditate through incredible pain and privation, Redgrave's studies ultimately led him to various esoteric Buddhist traditions, even going so far as to make contact with certain nearly-forgotten monastic orders deep in the Vietnamese and Cambodian jungle. Redgrave was pulled out of Vietnam in 1970 along with numerous other SANDMAN-affiliated intelligence assets -- fallout from the disastrous Cambodian invasion and increasing public pressure back in the States to wind down the war. Over the last five years he has developed a bizarre and largely unethical psychiatric method that blends elements of Mahayana Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation, the Human Potential Movement, and an early version of EST.

Jeff

He was drafted in 1965 and before that he graduated high school, class of '64, which would mean he must have been born in 1945 or 1946. Let's say 1971 our boy is recruited into SANDMAN by one of the handlers in LA, he's on the ground at some kind of bad situation the details of which I don't know enough about how the Red King's offensives work to describe. Before that he was working as a studio musician, most of the tracks on The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees have him on guitar, that was the album that tracked. Summer of 1968 he surfaced in one of the caves in the back of Frank Zappa's house, the Laurel Canyon lodge, with no clear memory of the last six months. He remembers injections he was told were vitamins that hit him like heroin, being strapped into some kind of chair, having his worst memories from junior high school getting relentlessly reviewed and evaluated by a two-headed serpent woman, flying in the back of a cargo plane, getting told that he would get some kind of off-the-books cash bonus for agreeing to be a test subject for an Army doctor in Saigon, watching a bunch of Disney movies on really lousy prints with garbled sound, feeling the most hung over he'd ever felt in his life, sipping coffee in an outdoor cafe in some little French village with Audrey Hepburn, getting kicked a bunch by an old man (who was also his grandmother) who made sure he was tied down first... he remembers a lot of things from November of 1967 to June of 1968, but none of it makes any sense.

Rob

I think my guy will be an Applied Anthropologist / Esmologist. It sounds like we have a good assortment of heads and freaks on the team, so I'm hoping to play a bit of a square for contrast, a suit to balance out all the dungarees, if you will. Not necessarily a fragile professor, but older, more big picture, than some of the characters sketched out so far. A fairly high-level esmologist, interested in manipulating society at the macro level. Probably higher security clearance than the rest of you dirty hippies. I still like "fucked-up Jim Henson" as a starting point (if only for the metaphorical resonance of puppeteering) but I will mix him in with some Don Draper, make him older and squarer. Born around 1930, a Korea vet, runs into some brainwashing over there (Mike knows how much I love The Manchurian Candidate). Comes back from Korea, makes weirdly compelling puppet shows for kids' TV and kids' TV ads. Sells a lot of breakfast cereal, gets deep into the subliminal ad wars, especially the manipulation of children and young people. By 1973 he's in his 40s and has been in SANDMAN for some time. He's clean cut and votes for Nixon, but he's not clueless about the counterculture - he's been working to channel it, co-opt it, squish that memetic toothpaste back into the tube for 10 years at least. If Golden/Indigo Children are indeed a thing in this game, he may have been working with them too. Thinks SANDMAN might be better off to give up the whole baby boom generation as a lost cause and focus on these 70s babies coming up. (Also, his puppets talk to him.)

Bill

I'm building a Cheval, and a generally useful team player so someone in this motley crew has his head screwed on straight and can Take Care of Business ("TCB", the secret sacred acronym of Elvis). Roger Martin is a loyal foot soldier, a useful tool, not just for Project SANDMAN, but for the gods themselves, or whatever those deep entities are behind the veil that meddle with/for humanity. But he'll be damned if he doesn't get something out it. Roger is the generally useful agent -- Green Beret trained, wheelman, engineer, demolitions. And as a Black man, used to a society assuming he's just there to serve (or destroy). But he's not a servant, not a paladin or blindly loyal believer-- he's working for the Man, but getting paid, dammit! He wants his quid quo pro. His and his ancestors' relationship with his gods has always been transactional, and he expects the gods, and the Project, to pay up. So shrink his head, or have Papa Legba ride him like a horse, but he's getting his. Decked out in beautiful suits, driving beautiful cars, he's embracing the materialism and showing everyone Black is Beautiful. Solid.

MITCH ASKS:

"Do you think human nature bends inevitably towards fascism?"

Archie

"Well, first of all, I think it's more important to keep asking the question than to have an answer, if that makes any sense. But the other thing I decided was this:" Archie and Mitch are standing next to each other, both facing the yard, Archie's family and friends and all the food and drink and patriotic-kitsch decorations. In Archie's mind this is an antifa stronghold, just as Mitch said. He claps a hand on Mitch's shoulder, a rare gesture from him. "MJ — Mitch — it is time for you to find yourself a nice girl."

CHARLEY

"I don't know? But if so, I don't think we would be here. I mean, the Ontoclysm happened because people are so much more than that. Captain Kirk says, 'To be human is to be complex. You can't avoid a little ugliness — from within — and from without.'"

Genevieve

"Adorno, and others, identified a spectrum of nine characteristics of the authoritarian personality, that is someone not overtly fascistic or necessarily bigoted but with a personality predisposed to support fascism should it arise. Three traits are of particular interest to our work: conventionalism, which adheres rigidly to middle class values of the in-group; anti-intraception, which resists and even detests the subjective, imaginative, and tender-minded; and stereotypy, which is a disposition to rigid categorical thinking.

My pedagogy serves as an inoculation against authoritarian indoctrination and a methodology which resists recuperation. It urges that through enchantment we are able to become queer, nimble, creative, inter-subjective and imaginative, tender-minded, and open-hearted. This inversion of traits is capable of eating the edges of fascistic territories. My work seeks to cultivate consciousness so vast that people become immune to blind adherence to structuralized norms and capable of navigating the complexities of power. We aim to be so wild, so queer, and abnormal in our approach that fascism cannot consume what we produce because it is incapable of parsing it. This is how we become capable of deterritorializing the fascist death spiral at the brink of total collapse, through an alchemizing effort that take the ill fit of the monstrous and reads it as information that allows us to move into new shapes with it, remediating and regenerating as we go. Every unnecessary violence, every injustice, and every unrest is a shadow speaking."

Marshall

"Yes, I think it does. Because that's how they programmed us, you know? There is something in people that struggles with the directionless of our existence, the constant change, the apparent meaninglessness of it all — that anxiety manifests in a yearning to be controlled, guided, protected. Fascism. But I also believe human nature is malleable. That we do not have to be the way we are. The Gautama Buddha ascended, after all."

Mitch

"Can we talk about this in about three minutes? I'm trying to do a thing!"

Roger

"Well, not much to say there. It's a no, brother. I don't think you can say human nature bends towards anything one thing at all, really. OK, right, everybody at some point want shit to be simple, and fascism, sure, that promises to make it simple. But it can't be nothing but a lie, always. Nothing's simple with people, not unless you put some serious blinders on."

"Here's the thing with making things simple: the complex people stuff, it doesn't go away. You can't make a perfect law everybody will obey, because there's always somebody different. You go trying to bend them to fit, or pretend they don't exist, or hell just go killing them off, and resistance will arise. Hell, even if you had all the magic in the world to kill them off, wipe their brains, change their bodies ... you just gonna find some other intolerable difference in those left, and it starts all over again. Say there's only black and white, and kill all the black, and you'll start seeing black in the white that remains ... "

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"Yes. Our masters put it in your brains. Our masters put everything in your brains."

Charley's Past Lives

—

Charley Helix's ability to recall and re-experience past lives was studied extensively by Dr. Ian Stevenson during her time in the INDIGO Program at Granite Peak. Since her assignment to URIEL, she has manifested the following past lives.

☍ Jack Parsons

Charley recalled her life and death as famed rocket engineer and occultist John "Jack" Whiteside Parsons in her initial meeting with Genevieve Abeille at the Mental Research Institute.

⚭ Léontine

"Everyone knows ... but few understand ... the bonds placed on you from birth... when you are female.... and poor. Did many of us support the Commune? Yes. We wanted liberty just as much, if not more than the men."

Léontine shuts her eyes tight as she continues. "Oh! I see them! The Versaillais fill the streets ... and the people ... hide ... some cheer!? I hear someone shout pétroleuse! A woman screaming, then a shot! Those on the street scatter!"

"I was at the Roberts house with the milk. But they wouldn't let me in!! And across the street they have Mari they, they were beating her! She wasn't part of the Commune! And then, they shot her?! I had nowhere to go. I started to run with the milk-can, as a kind of shield. I ran past several distracted soldiers and nearly made it through Parc Monceau before more shouts of pétroleuse and then another rifle blast that shook my body!"

"I dropped the milk-can as I fell, calling for my mama ... The last thing I remember was the milk pooling around me, then my blood. You ask who betrayed me? It was the rat ... who eats her young. It was Paris! Paris!! Who betrayed my sisters ... and me."

☋ Charlie Ransom

Charley appears to have lived the tragically brief life of Archie and Melanie Ransom's son, Charlie, who died in 1965.

☌ Owain Mab Urien

Charley flashed back to her life as Owain, son of Urien, King of Rheged, and the witch Morgan le Fay. He served Arthur in his wars against the Red King and his army of Saxons. As Charley recounted to the members of URIEL:

Everything depended on this battle, it was our last chance to finally free ourselves. Arthur knew we needed help but he didn't call on great armies to try and match the Saxons. No, wisely he called upon great warriors form distant lands. Great strategists from Greece, Norway and Shangri-La. Then a great board was set and he had me play against him knowing my mother would send her ravens. And together we reworked the game until Arthur broke the chess pieces and thereby breaking the Red King's enchantment.

META // characterization in live sessions

ROB'S SUGGESTIONS + THOUGHTS:

1. HOLD IDEAS LOOSELY

I like to think of all the backstory I've written as potential, not actual. It's pinned on a cork board in the writer's room, but it's not real, it's not canon, until it has appeared on screen. Maybe after we start playing, Archie starts acting protective or paternal towards Jocasta. And suddenly I decide it would be cooler if it was his daughter who died, rather than his son, and he's projecting memories of her onto Jocasta. Much better to make that change on the fly than feel hamstrung by something I wrote six weeks ago.

2. WHAT DO I WANT FROM YOU?

I said above that Archie's backstory isn't canon until it appears on screen, but the truth is it won't really be canon, in a satisfying way, until the other players engage with it.

So part of my job as a player is to engage with each of the other PC stories, and showcase what's cool about them and push them in interesting ways and basically get into their shit as they get into mine.

We also want to avoid the (common) scenario where Mike gets super engaged with each of our backstories and individual mysteries and he's sweating like a motherfucker to basically run five or six simultaneous games, one for each of us, that the rest of us don't really engage with.

My group has tried lots of different tools to help with this, and all kinds of games have all kinds of relationship mechanics, but probably the simplest/most powerful one we've ever used is this:

We talk about how the characters relate to each other, and for each PC-PC relationship (or at least each one we want to foreground) we ask the question:

"What does [my PC] want from [your PC], and why can't they have it?"

What my group has found, in multiple games, is that "What I want from you" is much more useful than just "what I think of you" -- you know, those matrices that say Clan Ventrue feels disdain towards Clan Gangrel but condescension towards Clan Tremere -- because it's active, you can use it immediately in play, it immediately suggests scenes. And "why can't I have it" gives both sides of the relationship something to do.

It could be something concrete: you have the McGuffin I need to avenge my father. It could be psychological: you remind me of my dead daughter, so I want to protect you (but you're a First Earth Battalion bad-ass who doesn't want protecting). It can be simple - it's good if it's simple:

I want respect, love, forgiveness, revenge.

It's worked really well for us, and if we want active interpersonal play in our game, I highly recommend it. I think we got the idea from DramaSystem, but we do it now for most games, and even when we don't do it, before a session I will often brainstorm on my own what my PC currently wants from each other PC.

3. DESIGNATED SPOTLIGHT EPISODES

4. THINKING ABOUT SITUATION AS WELL AS SETTING (WHAT THE OLD FORGE-HEADS USED TO CALL KICKERS) - GIVEN ALL OUR CRAZY BACKSTORY, WHY IS THE TV SHOW ABOUT THESE CHARACTERS SET NOW?

BUT WHY NOW?

I can also answer this question, which is that as many of you read in the Madness Dossier PDF, SANDMAN is going through arguably its most tumultuous period since WWII right now, with Irruptor agents, moles, and traitors being discovered throughout the organization and the kulullû exposing all the mind games and social engineering and MK-ULTRA type atrocities that SANDMAN's catspaws in the CIA, academia, the media, and the military-industrial complex have been perpetrating to "keep us safe" from History B. So we turn our attention to the fairly idyllic oasis of California (where maybe the lines between SANDMAN and its left-ish occult contacts are a little thinner) at a moment where people are going to be forced to make some hard decisions about which side they're on.

I do believe that given SANDMAN "control staff and personnel computers constantly mix and match personnel with missions, often assigning cross-training or advisory roles for little or no justification ... to prevent the Project from becoming predictable" (MD9) that some if not all of you have floated in and out of URIEL between '71 and '73.

N.B. I may every now and again introduce "old friends," fellow Sandmen NPCs from past missions who are stopping off in the Bay Area to help with a particular investigation or mission. URIEL is an umbrella for all operations having to do with the California occult underground and thus it can enfold quite a bit of turnover.

Papa Legba, premier esprit,
Ouvre la porte!
Vos enfants attendent.
Ouvre la porte!

Papa Legba, aide de l'humanité
Ouvre la voie donc je peux passer!
Bon rhum et tabac je vous donne!
Mon corps je vous donne!

Papa Legba, Saint Pierre
Ouvre la voie pour moi,
Ouvre la porte,
Ouvre la voie!

Je suis là!
Regarde moi
à l'heure du danger!
Ne m'abandonne pas!
Et je te donnerai la richesse de la terre!

Papa Legba, Elegua,
Ouvre la voie pour moi!

Papa Legba, first among spirits,
Open the door!
Your children are waiting.
Open the door!

Papa Legba, help of humanity,
Open the Way so I may pass!
I give you good rum and tobacco!
I give you my very body!

Papa Legba, Saint Peter,
Open the Way for me,
Open the door,
Open the Way!

Here I am!
Look for me
in the hour of peril!
Do not forsake me!
And I will give you the riches of the earth!

Papa Legba, Elegua,
Open the Way for me!

"After a moment he said: 'Legba, then, is to be invoked in conjunction with a prayer to some other spirit. But here he's invoked alone. Twice.'

'A third time in succession — that's pretty familiar magical routine. He may give attention, and do something else beside open gates.'"

Manly Wade Wellman, "The Third Cry to Legba," Weird Tales

"Remember that the Tarot is a great and sacred arcanum; its abuse is an obscenity in the inner and a folly in the outer. It is intended for quite other purposes than to determine when the tall dark man will meet the fair rich widow."

Jack Parsons

WANT YOUR FORTUNE TOLD?

Mitch Hort carries with him a weathered deck of Tarot cards, which he is able to read and interpret with marked proficiency. (Ironically, 95 percent of Mitch's actual Tarot knowledge comes from the pamphlet that came with his set of cards). Back in the day, he would do readings for burnouts and dropouts in Laurel Canyon in exchange for pot, or a place to sleep.

⨇ FRANK DIGIUSEPPE DIES BY FIRE

This happened right after Frank DiGiuseppe's immolation, same day, later that morning or early afternoon at Livermore. Mitch wasn't precisely too bothered by his death, but still ... everything sort of ended quickly and he wanted to make sure there wasn't anything left behind by how quickly this whole thing ended. He did a spread in the library while Sophie worked on the after-action report; she's quick off the blocks when it comes to paperwork and reporting. A few boxes with Frank's personal effects taken from his apartment — his mini-library and the various glyphs he drew to "withdraw" money from local banks — were there on the table with Mitch. Sophie flipped on the radio; after all, Sophie listening to the radio was what led the team to Frank in the first place and Sophie's a big believer in Mitch's serendipitous abilities. She tuned into a pop station, the Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" came on. Mitch shuffled the cards.

Three card spread again, and whoa is it a doozy. The Devil, reversed. The Tower, reversed. And the Ace of Cups, upright.

All the connections hit Mitch in the face heads-up. Those two cards — the Devil and the Tower — were the ones pulled by a groupie the night before the Altamont disaster back in December '69. And the Ace of Cups was the name of one of the support acts at Altamont. The Ace of Cups' double meaning denoted the support act at Altamont and the mercy and plenitude of stopping Frank from burying a bus full of kids. With the Stones still on the radio — it's a "twofer Thursday" on the radio station Sophie's listening to and "Gimme Shelter" comes on, both these songs intimately linked with the Stones' disastrous concert three years ago ... Mitch felt like something linked Frank and Altamont.

⨊ HELLO CHARLEY

"Temperance, I'm sure you know the word," Mitch says, a little uneasy. Back in the cave he'd used Temperance a lot, but usually he'd put it down reversed, and tell the mark that the cards said they were engaged in a binge of hedonic indulgence, which would get a tell-me-something-I-don't-know laugh. Temperance upright was reserved for when he wanted the cards to tell someone they needed to chill out and cool down. Right now Mitch is looking at the solar symbol on the angel's forehead.

"Yes, OK? You're reading my fortune correct?" Charley is feeling like maybe this isn't how it's done.

Mitch is briefly nonplussed, as none of his usual scripts seem appropriate here.

"Sure. Yes."

He's unsure how much to explain, for so many reasons. "The first card, as I said, tells us who you are, which is to say, it's how the cards see you. For the purposes of this reading. The other three cards should be read in the context of this card. Temperance can mean lots of different things. Unity, say. Peace, rationality." He's watching Charley, trying to get a bead on when he says something that registers with her either as an apt description of some version of her self-image, or something truly well away from the mark.

"Enthusiasm plus discipline. Emotion plus logic. Ethicality plus tolerance. The angel is unisex, as you can see, and they're doing a little magic trick that's meant to impress us while quietly and inoffensively hovering a few inches off the ground."

"Oooh," Mitch coos, reflexively. "It's upside down."

"Is that bad?"

"When a card is upside down, all of its meaning is flipped, too. So it depends."

"The Queen of Pentacles usually symbolizes a powerful and wealthy woman, like, she's got a crown and a throne and she spends all her time cradling her giant novelty gold coin, right? Reversing it means the opposite of that, a woman poor in material wealth ... which implies a spiritual richness, especially in the context of the balance-and-moderation, uh, core card."

So, there's some lady in your past, she was poor in the sense that she lacked power and influence," Mitch tries. "She had to do what others ordered, she didn't call the shots. But she had something special, something internal, which is what the cards are trying to highlight to us, here and now."

"Hmm, maybe it's my Mother?"

Mitch looks thoughtful. "Maybe? I mean, what's your mother like?" he asks as guilelessly as he can manage. "The cards seem to be implying she's firmly in the past tense, but I could be misunderstanding."

"My Mother ... My Mother died."

Mitch had expected this but he forgot about the part where he was going to have to say something afterwards.

She takes the card and turns it upright. And stars to get up.

Mitch is in the middle of a long swig of wild turkey, and the words he was composing in his head die on the vine. "Uh, okay, I see you're going ... that's your choice ... but are you sure you don't want to hear the other half of this?"

Mitch taps the third card. “This looks nice, right? This is your immediate future, where you’re going seen through the context of where you’ve been,” he taps the second card, which he has quietly already flipped back the way it was, “and who you are.” He taps the first one again, for unnecessary emphasis.

“The bower and the flowers suggest celebration, domesticity, like, is this a wedding? Maybe. I dunno if that’s meant to be a man and a woman, there in the blue and the green, or, no, blue and red. They’re waving those bouquets around like they just won some trophies. There’s definitely a triumphal element here, a reversal of fortune, especially in the context of the reversed queen. Maybe something good.”

“But it’s not all sunshine, I gotta warn you, there’s an element of enforced joviality to this card. You see the castle back there?” He points. “Its roof is red, the color of blood, and it’s a defensive fortification meant for wartime, even if it’s currently playing host to a maybe-wedding. There’s an undercurrent of danger, something below the surface. The cards are coming down more good than bad, but it’s a weal-and-woe situation, here.”

He moves to the fourth card without waiting for a reply from Charley, since he hasn’t been getting much from her. “The last card is the wrap-up, the what’s-it-all-about, the little orphan Annie of it all, okay? And this is a pretty positive card, I gotta say. Cups, for the cards, are pretty much always full of good things, like, uh, ice cream. So you’ve got ten ice cream sundaes lined up in a rainbow and a bunch of excited people pointing and talking about how much they’re gonna enjoy sharing the ice cream. Not just people, a family, Eisenhower’s America, you know? It’s not sure, like, nothing is ever sure, you can see the red roof is still there? But there’s some room for optimism, which is always nice to see."

⨵ MANSA, KING OF KINGS

Mitch placed five cards on the street map of the Eighth and Henry cul-de-sac where the concert will be. First, one where the URIEL van will be parked, doing surveillance and perhaps deploying infrasonics.

The Hierophant. "Here’s us.” He taps the Hierophant. “We’re large and in charge, we’ve got a chair and everything. The other side, not so much. Can’t even keep their cards right-side-up.”

Second, on stage, it's Moore. This card can also be used to represent Mansa; it represents the energy of all the performers who will be at the show and thus the center of attention.

Mitch intuits that the cards surrounding the actions the Hierophant have taken are all reversed, topsy-turvy: Moore's the opposite of celebrated ... the kusarikku is no longer satisfied and accomplished, and is somewhat subdued ... and the people of Oakland? Their once-determined fury, riding into battle, is diluted somewhat. All great.

Third, to the side of the stage, it's the kusarikku and the entire Anunnaki influence/"retrocreation" garbage; in many ways, this middle card is the center of the spread.

Fourth, the crowd: whether it's all folks from the neighborhood or Archie's meme works and a bunch of college kids come down from Berkeley for the day.

Finally, the new x-factor, the possibility of Soviet/Eastern bloc intelligence presence at the concert.

The Hierophant notices one other card that's upright, and that's the sneaky Seven of Swords. Making his way out of the gaily-bedecked camp with his spoils, and leaving some behind ... as a stake in the ground that he might return? A trap? Whatever the case, it's the only other presence on the board that shows confidence and initiative.

“But then there’s this fucker, in the red hat.” He indicates the seven of swords. “Thinks he’s so great, coming in and walking off with somebody else’s knives. And the fancy hat.”

“If there wasn’t some kind of, like, Red Army sniper or whatever? Then this card would be something else. It’s not a sniper, though, I don’t think. It’s something sneaky. The fox sneaking into the henhouse while the guard dogs are distracted preventing a Minotaur from eating Oakland.”

“What I’m getting is that the concern is a legit concern. Red Hat exists, Red Hat thinks he can pull something off. I dunno what that looks like. It doesn’t look like bringing out the bull, though. Red Hat is going for something else, a target of opportunity.”

“Something we left cooling on the windowsill for him.”

⩙ MITCH FINDS A GIRL

Mary-Lynn looks at the cards, points at the Six of Pentacles, reversed. "So ... generosity reversed? That seems to tell me that SRI isn't gonna be very helpful? Maybe?" For the first time, Mary-Lynn seems tentative and unsure of herself. She makes direct eye contact with Mitch, looking for his interpretation.

"That's one way to look at it," Mitch says. "I mean, check it out: your typical act of charity, there's a guy giving money to somebody poor with a beige coat, right? But here, it's upside down. The money is falling out of the poor person's hands and up into the rich person, and the rich person isn't even catching it, it's falling all the way up to the extreme close-up of the camera. Meanwhile, richie rich has a nice set of scales he isn't even looking at, and there's this poor schmuck— " Mitch points to the kneeling figure in blue. "What're they waiting for? Nothing good is going to happen to them, they've been forgotten about. I'm looking at this and I'm not seeing malice, I'm seeing institutional incompetence."

"If it's not Richie's fault, whose fault is it? This dude." Mitch taps the King of Swords. "He's got some kind of plan, sitting there all smug with his chair and his crown, out in the middle of a field. He's got a lot of power, he'll lop your head off if he thinks he needs to, but he's just sitting there. He's not paying attention to the birds flying away, which, why even set your chair up in a field if not to look at the birds? Nah, this dude is clearly Mister Head Nerd in Charge at SRI, is what I'm seeing, and he thinks he's got it all under control but he's hanging out with a sharp sword and no clue that his scales-and-coins guys are messing it up so bad. Malice? Maybe a little. Maybe."

"And that all sounds pretty negative, but check this out." Mitch gestures to the two cards on the right. "Hanged Man, that's a funny one. You'd think that hanging by your ankle would be a dreadful ordeal, right, like, the dark night of the soul or something, but does this guy look like he's having a bad time? Nah. He knew what he signed up for and maybe it looks to the casual outside observer like he ought to be in bad straits, but he's fine. He's fine. Scott Free, you know? He could get out any time he wants, he's got that cool head-halo thing. He's just hanging out and having a time. And this! The Star!"

"This is one of my personal favorites, you know. She's got big hanged-man energy, chilling topless with her water pitchers. It's a pretty night, she's got a bird with her, she doesn't need clothes because she's hot as hell, and she knows what she's doing. Don't mind me, just pouring some water over here, that's what she's saying. Why is she pouring water? Because she feels like it. Letting it all hang out. Splashy-splashy. Having a good time. A good, low-key kind of time, doing what you feel. Groovy, that's what she is. She is, and I'm serious here, one groovy chick."

"So all in all, what does this say, these four together? Says SRI is chasing its own tail, they just don't know what they're looking for, can't spot a good thing when she shows up and draws houses for them, maybe there's a shadowy man-behind-the-curtain who thinks he knows more than he does, maybe that's just dumb Uncle Sugar throwing money in a hole. But it's not dangerous, really. Maybe a little stressful in parts. Don't mean to undersell the sense of risk associated with hanging from one ankle from a tree. But you got your halo and your water pitchers and you just hang in there, you'll be fine."

"That all sounds ... well, it sounds interesting to me. Reasonable. My own vibes are feeling copacetic; I don't hear any big or little voices telling me to bail out of the tests or anything. But I do feel like that Hanged Man," she points at him hanging out on his pole, "isn't a phase or a portion of the experience for me. I got a feeling I'm going to meet someone there. You know? Like how I felt I was gonna meet someone in line for a Big Mac? Your cards are giving me the same feeling, like I'm gonna meet someone there and they're the one who's gonna go through the Hanged Man stuff. Not an ordeal, per se, but ... someone who's up on a pole or a cross or a pedestal and I'm gonna learn from them." Mary-Lynn blinks and nods to herself. "No, I'm sure of it now. There's an older man who I'm going to meet and draw to me there and he's going to know his shit, A-to-Z."

"Huh." Mitch stares down at the Hanged Man. "Yeah. Yeah! You're right. You're a star, you're not splashing around and hanging by your ankles both. That's another guy, someone else who Richie Rich over there ought to be paying more attention to." He taps the kneeling figure in blue absently. "Same guy, I guess, lookit the shirt and the hair. Older, you think? Huh."

"You nailed it. And you're asking me if your gift is real ..."

THE FAULT, DEAR BRUTUS,
IS NOT IN OUR STARS
BUT IN OURSELVES.

“We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born.”

Carl Jung

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