What Jocasta wants to do next: she'll do some research to see how the SRI parking lot is laid out. Specifically, she wants to see if there's a marked section where the VIPs (c-suite execs, directors, lead scientists/researchers) park. She doesn't need the names or anything, just if such a section exists.
After leaving Livermore for the day: she's going to stop at a drugstore and pick up some obvious distractions: a big, goofy pair of reading glasses and a short red wig. This is just in case she gets spotted and needs to go back into SRI for any reason in the future.
When she gets there, late in the afternoon but when there's still likely to be personnel working, she'll park the van far enough away that it won't be easily spotted. She'll do another brief, focused meditation, with the goal of being confident and open to where the path leads her.
After that, she'll take a strong-ish dose of mushrooms and start walking through the VIP parking area, if such a thing exists, and very briefly touch each car, doing a psychometric read on each. If any car yields a particularly noteworthy or unusual vision, she'll write down its license number and check who the plate belongs to later. If there is no such parking section, or if her attempts don't yield anything that seems relevant, she'll decamp back to the van, and when everyone goes home for the day, she'll put on standard night gear (black clothes, ski mask, etc.) and just do a quick tactical surveillance of the facility for future reference.
There's a couple other things she might do after this, but that's her main agenda.
So I see three rolls here. First is a roll to case the SRI campus, and while I think both Stealth and Shadowing could be used here (and might depending on how things go in the parking lot) I'm going to have you make a Tactics-14 roll, really more to get a sense of the campus's strong and weak points security-wise, etc.
The next roll will be the Meditation roll, this time only aided by a +1 for the mushrooms; no New Age LPs or quiet incense-filled apartment are available. So Meditation-15.
And then we'll do Psychometry, which I may abstract out a little bit considering you'll be doing multiple rolls while under the influence of psilocybin. So we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
For a government-employed think tank, SRI's overall security is pretty lax! The campus was laid right into a fairly thickly-settled suburban residential district. The front doors to the main SRI building have a pretty large set of parking lots laid on in a 180-degree arc from the front door. A circuit around the block in the van reveals a high chain-link fence—not barbed-wire-topped, Jo notes with interest—around the property but residential yards and side streets abut the SRI campus from several angles.
From the outside, SRI looks more like a newly-built-and-designed high school or community college than Livermore's very squared away, private security-riddled high-security campus. Sure, getting into the building requires some kind of new-fangled electronic ID—all the doors, including back doors to the main SRI building and various outbuildings Jo could see through the fence—seem to have these plastic swipe-card receptacles on them, but the parking lot itself isn't behind a security gate. Jo does notice closed-circuit cameras on the outside of the building peeking at all the front parking lots, though. The "VIP" section, such as it is, seems to be a set of reserved spots in a tucked away 50-or-so-spot side parking lot near one of the side entrances that seems to lead to the lab buildings (Jo can tell they're labs by the exhaust vents, large service entrances, etc. etc.). If she was going to try psychometry, it'd likely be with those cars, she thinks to herself as she gobbles some dried mushrooms and waits for the effects to hit.
Give me another HT-1 roll again, 9 or less to avoid hallucinations that might affect your skills in the upcoming scene. Obviously these hallucination penalties won't apply to Psychometry.
Missed it by 1. That's only an hour of really bad hallucinations! So with that in mind, if Jocasta still wants to head to the parking lot while tripping, in order to stay out of the view out of closed-circuit cameras and any passers-by, she'll first need to roll Will-15 to do it without being too badly affected by the hallucinations in the first hour.
Okay, Leonard. Can you give me two separate IQ rolls for Jo's Psychometry, no penalties, and I will roll your Stealth secretly at a 12: -2 for the shrooms, +1 for the Tactics roll.
The mushrooms come on a little weaker than last night's trip; whether that's a difference in potency or just Jocasta's neurotransmitters being a little fried, she's not sure. But before she even begins working the cars in the parking lot while trying to stay hidden and unobtrusive to observers, either eyewits or cameras, she gets a deep deep sense of Bad Vibes from the adjoining lab buildings. They loom larger-than-life in this altered state of mind for Jo, feeling like the heaviest negative energies encountered during her many Natural Guard and URIEL missions. Something bad is happening in that building. It's enough to put Jocasta in the frame of mind of a bad trip, but the effect is weak, hanging out in the pit of her stomach like a nagging suspicion.
Jo lays hands on the wing mirror of a racing green beat-up mid-'60s Jaguar: a fixer-upper conspicuous in this parking lot, the car of a 30-something car nerd: perfect engineer bait. Jo gets a strong vibe off of it; a feeling of excitement, intrigue, pleasure, a job well done, and it's only a week or two old! Very promising feelings for such a dull, heavy place, but where do the mushrooms think they go? Jo wanders a bit more, staying out of the line of sight of the CCTV cameras as best she can. She finds her way to a big Buick. It's got a "Support Your Local Police Department" bumpersticker on it, as well as a Burbank PD parking sticker on the windshield. A cop's off-duty sled, and it's brimming over with vibes. Jocasta touches it, and she gets something closer to a true vision. It's still just impressions, half-formed memories, but there's a powerful force — emotional and psychic — behind it.
Jo flashes back into the Buick's emotional past and sees a vague blur of two men: one shorter, bespectacled, and matching the description, even in this vague a vision, of Hal Puthoff, one of the psychic program's two heads. And with him is a taller man, broad-shouldered, with silver hair. His face is ruddy and suntanned, his voice booming. Puthoff seems pleased as punch and is clapping the larger man on the back; all Jo can get is emotions off Puthoff but they match the bouquet found at the '66 Jag. The older, taller man, though. His soul is a placid pool, pure Zen cool. He smiles and shakes out a cigarette but he's also a little unnerved, reeling a little bit from what happened in the lab back there today. The older man commiserates with Puthoff for a moment, lights up and takes a puff, then looks directly at Jocasta as Jo can see and hear him clearly say to Puthoff: "Say Hal ... you wouldn't by any chance see that girl, a redhead, crouching down by my car over there?" quizzically as he points at the Buick. Puthoff's emotional aura goes from joy to confusion and fear as he seems to indicate to the older man that he sees nothing of the sort. Fright Check for Jo, rule of 14 (pass on a 13 or less).
That's a critical success on the Fright Check, so with that comes clarity, the mushroom trip seems to come to a premature crescendo as Jocasta realizes this man, the man with the off-duty cop Buick: has the psychic ability to see forward in time. As God as her witness, Jo knows, sure as anything she's ever been sure of, that that older man with Puthoff made real eye contact with her a week or two ago.
Jo is cool as a cucumber as she memorizes make, model, plate, and distinguishing marks on both the Jag and the Buick.
Rather than press her luck, Jocasta decides this is going to be more than enough of a lead for now. She’ll walk briskly back to the van, and head off someplace remote and quiet away from the city. Once she’s there, her agenda will be:
Make a quick sketch/map of the SRI campus, making note of the security features, exits, etc.
Jot down a note to run the plates on the Jag and the Buick
Do one more meditation session, this one unhurried and more focused, basically trying to synthesize everything she’s learned over the last few days into an actionable report to present back to the team at Livermore
Get some much-needed sleep
One more Meditation-14 roll then.
Wow, okay. As far as the events of the last 18 hours or so (Monday night through Tuesday afternoon), Jo's Monday evening trip was more profound, deeper, more affecting; but Tuesday in the SRI parking lot gave her a definite impression that SRI's program is not merely attracting weirdos and self-promoters. Whoever that older man was with Puthoff, he's the real deal, able to project his consciousness not only across space but across time. In Jo's experience with her psychometric abilities, she's never had this kind of direct two-way contact with someone across time, and given the fact the older man saw her in her crouch hiding behind his car, this wasn't just a random vision of Jo: it was him seeing her using Psychometry a week or two in the future. This would seem to be the most important development of the last 24 hours. Of course getting a hunch on Charley's mom's name is crucial, but the LSD trip was full of obfuscating factors, spiritual tinges, random data. But most importantly, the acid trip seemed to train and prepare Jo for the afternoon at SRI, teaching her on some level to reach out and make a connection. This experience in the parking lot was both the drugs and Jo's psychic power working in complete communion. In other words, she took what the Emperor cryptically said in her trip about hide and seek and did it.
In other words, the report back to URIEL should definitely contain the SRI stuff. Whether Jo wants to mention what precipitated it, the acid trip, which has far less in the way of actionable intelligence, well, that's up to Jo.