Jocasta will take a few moments of continuing to hold the coin even after her psychic impressions have faded, passing it from hand to hand and clutching it like it’s a family heirloom. She’ll then turn to Mitch with a strangely serene smile and say, “Thanks.” Ignoring the pain in her arm, she hoists herself up off the floor and walks back over to Archie, Charley, and Vivian, holding the coin out in her open palm but respectfully waiting for a break in their conversation.
Archie brings Jocasta (and Charley, when she's ready) into the conversation with Viv. (I know Jo's wounded, but is she not still poisoned with scorpion venom? Or is she just toughing that out? I lost track somewhere along the line.)
To Jo: "Did you... get anything from that silver dollar?"
"Yeah, Archie, I got something." She holds it out and passes it to Archie gingerly, like she's afraid of breaking it.
"It's ... powerful, I think. We can use it. I'm not sure how, but it seems ... holy, almost." She'll give the rundown of everything she sensed in her reading.
"It feels alien, it's not something from our history, but it doesn't have the ... the rankness of History B. It doesn't have any tint of fear or malevolence that I've found in other reality shards. Maybe it's just telling me a story I wanted to hear, but this feels like ... a synthesis of the story we're trying to tell. Like this is a byproduct of some reality that diverged from the sheer opposition of us and them."
I'm not sure Archie wants to take the proffered coin, at least he hesitates a moment before touching it, but then he does take it and examines it, turns it over in his hand. "That's ... interesting ... the E Clampus Vitus fellows would love this, I'm sure ... but I still don't know how we can use it. I'm open to ideas from anyone." He's still holding the coin out so if anybody wants to take it they can -- he's definitely not claiming it.
Charley studies Archie as he addresses Viv; watching for signs of him granting her acceptance and standing in the group. Then somewhere between him quoting Thoreau and talking of the game and a cadre, her mind starts to drift, and she thinks, "Cadre, Quadrus, Square. Square is the answer to the spiral! Squares ... A game ..." Archie, the group, the hotel all fade to reveal a memory. The memory of a different game she played long ago when she was Arthur's Knight.
Charley shouts,
"Gwyddbwyll! Gwyddbwyll!!"
Then tugs excitedly at Archie's jacket and says:
"Ac yna y gwasgwys Arthur y werin eur a oed ar y clawr yny oedynt yn dwst oll, ac yd erchis Owein y Wers uab Reget gostwng y vaner. Ac yna y gostyghwyt ac y tagnouedwyt pob peth."
"Sweetie," Viv says with all the calm poise of someone who may have had young past life clients start speaking random foreign languages on the past, "you're going to have to give all us adult dummies a little hand with what you're saying. Unless someone on your team here is secretly a linguist I don't think any of us speak ... Uh, is that Welsh? Anglo-Saxon? Did you say ... Arthur? "
"Oh!? Sorry. I was saying that I remember King Arthur crushed the golden gwyddbwyllmen, ah chess pieces, that were on the board until they were completely dust, and Owein asked Gwres son of Rheged to lower the banner. And then it was lowered, and everything was at peace. I remember Arthur bringing together talented Knights from lands near and far for a battle no a game that defeated the Red King and saved us all!”
Charley is lost again in memory and time.
"Oh, wow, I love the Arthurian tales but I don't know this legend. I know of the Red Knight, whose mantle Perceval took up but ... The Red King?" Viv realizes she still doesn't know this remarkable young person's name. She stoops to Charley's level.
"You remember being there? Do you know who you were when you were there? What was happening? Who the Red King was? Also... What should I call you now?" A warm smile.
"I know it's not Jane."
Archie doesn't interpolate himself between Viv and Charley, but he is interested too.
"Chess pieces ... a game? Did Arthur play a game ... that defeated a Red King?" Does Charley seem scared/distressed by her vision (I mean, more scared/distressed than the immediate situation in the St. Francis would require) or just kind of lost in a vision?
Jocasta, still fascinated with the coin, is going to roll it over in her hands for a bit. She’s not really trying for a psychic read anymore as she is drawing on her SANDMAN training, her History B lore, and her occultist knowledge to see (a) if she can figure out a way to integrate it with the game and her role in it (or someone else’s) and (b) if she can figure out a way to use it against the enemy in a practical way.
To Viv, dreamily, "No, not Jane ... Charley. I was back with Arthur my true king. We were preparing for the Battle of Badon against the Red King's army of Saxons and against my mother Morgên y Dylwythen Deg, Morgan le Fay. I was Owain mab Urien, I mean son of Urien."
To Archie: "Yes, a game of chess ... 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."
If Viv is still crouching down next to Charley, Archie crouches down on Charley's other side of her, staring at her (Charley) with wonder and pride. "You really are ... remembering ... King Arthur ... and the Ontoclysm ... ?" He's believing it, or letting himself believe it, for the first time.
"Charley, you are a miracle."
Then he stands up and speaks to the whole URIEL team, including Viv (this may involve heading over to harsh the mellow in Mitch's corner).
"What Charley is remembering ... can it be the Ontoclysm? Did Arthur and his war band turn their fight against ... " (Archie drops his voice) "Morgan, and her ilk" (normal voice again) "into some kind of ritual game that shaped real events?"
"If we really are following in the footsteps of... humanity's liberators, that should give us heart, but also pause. We're at the epicenter of what threatens to be a major eimic event, and we're dealing with powerful esmological archetypes. Even if we succeed in defeating this irruption, small changes at this fracture point could have far reaching ripple effects." Archie looks at Mitch, and at Viv.
"I guess what I'm trying to say here is, remember that we are trying to put things back the way they belong. We haven't discussed, ah, changing the world, and we don't have clearance to do so."
Mitch has his hands in his pockets. In one of them, he's rubbing the face of the coin with his thumb. A couple of days ago Archie said that displacing History-B with History-C would be the wrong way to go about it, that it'd be going down the alphabet instead of up, that the highest and the best is to focus on pushing History-A towards whatever letters come before that.
Could Mitch put Joshua Norton in the history books? Give him a paragraph in the eighth grade social studies text, in chapter eleven on Westward Expansion and American Exceptionalism? Famous local legend, maybe there's an annual city holiday in SF where the banks are closed to commemorate a harmless street loony from a hundred years back?
"I hear you, Archie."
In the meantime, I'll try to flesh out some character names for the NPCs involved in the march to the Upper Floors and give at least Genevieve a key to the Atlanteans' personalities and Archie a key to the MARPAs.
So when Charley gets to the switchboard, she finds that all phone circuits to the outside are disconnected. It doesn't take her long to figure out that the switchboard itself is still working; the disconnect must have happened on the outside, to the hotel's entire telephone exchange. Internal calls should still work! And in fact, to test such Charley tries to raise the front desk number from the switchboard handset... and gets the tones of the song that Zeb sang (that Archie and Marshall have already heard). The tones of the music sound to Charley like Bell telephone touch-tone dialing tones but hijacked to play History B music.
So the important question becomes ... how to fix this? We need to be able to update Marshall and Sophie. Charley doesn't know where these tones are actually coming from; but they definitely have something to do with the increased weight of History B in the hotel building. What would it take to remove them? Well, with her psi ability I/O Tap Charley could try to find out the source of the tones. So if you want to try I/O Tap at 13, with the proviso that you can take extra time if you fail, that would be great.