DRAFT Run log for 980811

Major Events:

• The Demons Say "Whee!"

A World Without Ritalin

Cassandra is aware that the stone box covering the dagger that has been held down by various people - first Malachai, then [???], then nobody, and currently Neville - is no longer moving erratically - it has an ordered pattern to its movements.

She tells Ilk. Ilk worries that the Helgram squad might have snuck the dagger out from under the box. Cassandra goes over to relieve Neville from the box. He backs off, after a brief exchange of words.

Darhyse asks Cassandra if she can kill that one. "Maybe." "She said maybe! She never says maybe!" Darhyse enthuses. Cassandra rests Darhyse on the top of the box. Darhyse's point flows over the box and sinks into the floor.

Ilk wanders over and chats with Cassandra about the situation. Darhyse talks with Cassandra. They try to determine if the dagger is still in the box, but have no clue. Ilk doesn't sense any hunger. Cassandra tries to sense hunger, and fails as well. Darhyse offers to check under the box. "Ilk? What would the dagger do to Darhyse?" "Eat her soul." "Don't check under the box!"

One of Cassandra's bodyguards approaches her. The instant that Cassandra moves from the box, the assassin interposes himself between her and the box. Cassandra removes Darhyse, and moves away. Celeste joins Cassandra and Ilk, and the three discuss the minimum safe distance from the box. They continue to back up, until Cassandra interposes the Begman ambassador between herself and the box, complementing him on his jacket.

The assassin looks around, places a hand on the box, places another hand near the box, and lifts the box. He disappears, along with the box.

Cassandra calls over another assassin. Cassandra and Celeste snipe at him. Ilk interposes, and tells the assassin that they needed to know if the threat was under the box when it disappeared - if it wasn't, it is probably still in the room, and is therefore still a threat.

The assassin disappears, then reappears. He's holding the box. It's empty. He says that they found traces of anti-life in it. Ilk deconjures the box, and as he does so, notices that someone has taken it apart on a molecular level, examined it, and rebuilt it almost exactly the way it was before.

Celeste tries to sense anti-life in the room. Norton is a big one. The Sith is not anti-life, but her dark-saber is. Celeste can't scan her grandmother, hitting a block against someone specifically scanning her for anti-life. That's it. Celeste pointedly looks at Cassandra's belt. Cassandra shields her dark-saber against Celeste.

Jean has been really fascinated by Clarissa. She keeps changing colors. There are waves passing over her like the skies over Chaos, colored blue, purple, skin color, white, and occasional flashes of pink.

Cassandra dismisses her ambassador, who promises to have his tailor deliver a jacket to the princess. Ilk, Cassandra, and Celeste head over towards Clarissa.

Ilk recognizes the blue color as Clarissa's trademark, and asks Celeste if she can feed the blue. Celeste looks at it, and confirms the signature. Ilk looks for outside influence, and doesn't find anything. He asks Celeste to look, and she finds a variable outflux of power. There is an outgoing signature of nobody with whom she is familiar. If this was a message, the period would have to contain the data, instead of the signal itself. Osric checks his psychic detection device, and discovers that the outflux is made of the power that he was detecting invading the Fringe.

Cassandra can tell that there is a complex regularity behind the colors flowing across Clarissa. She can tell that purple is winning.

Celeste tries to find the part of the multi-variable signature that is Clarissa's, and boosts it. Cassandra sees the battle change to blue winning. But on some basic Force level, whatever is causing the blue to win really bothers her.

Ilk reaches into shadow for power, aiming towards Darkover. Celeste starts drawing power from the local shadow, and notices that the area here is really rich, especially in this room. It seems to be definitely helping her. Ilk feeds power to Celeste.

Cassandra - "Celeste? What is the blue?"
Celeste - "That's my grandmother's signature. Why?"
Cassandra - "There's something fundamentally disturbing about it."
Celeste - "There's something fundamentally disturbing about my grandmother."

Jean prime notices that the pink is getting bigger. He inches back a bit. He feels something move behind him, as if it was a small rodent, or just maybe, a bunny. The Logrus Jean looks, and sees a bunny sneaking up behind Jean prime. Jean prime turns around and stops looking at Clarissa. Neither Jean can see the bunny now.

Cassandra trumps Celeste to share her feelings about the situation. Celeste notices that there is something very strange about this trump contact, as if there was a glass plate between them. She's never seen this behavior before. Celeste reaches out and pings the glass, and the contact drops.

Ilk looks at Clarissa and the bunny at the same time by forming sensory organs on the back of his head. He doesn't see a bunny, but senses the floor becoming more and more Real around him.

Logrus Jean tells Dworkin that there is a bunny over there. "I don't see one. Should there be one there?" "Yes." There is now a six-foot tall bunny standing in place of an ambassador. Jean is not mollified. Dworkin asks if her can put the ambassador back, and Jean agrees. Dworkin turns the ambassador back, but seems to have forgotten entirely what he looked like. One of his arms is longer than the other, and his head isn't on quite straight. Jean tells Dworkin that they're fixing Clarissa, but something seems to be wrong.

Dworkin - "Who's Clarissa?"
Jean - "The chick on the floor."

Dworkin insists that people should be fixed on beds, not the floor.

Cassandra feeds Celeste her impression of the situation through the glass wall. It doesn't make any sense to Celeste.

Ilk expresses his misgivings about the situation.

Ilk looks at the purple - it's not Faerie. Celeste looks - it's very familiar. And she doesn't know where he is. Celeste asks for help.

[A brain the size of a planet, and now it has a moon. _That_'s not a moon!]

Cassandra writes out a contract for the thing that took over someone and tried to take over the universe and and hands it to Celeste.

Ilk asks Osric to raise a shield around Celeste, Cassandra, and Clarissa. The shield goes up. All of Celeste's external sources are cut off, with the exception of Cassandra. She stops drawing from them. Jean can no longer see bunnies. Ilk no longer feels order intruding on his personal space. The shield goes down. The resumption of the power flow hits Celeste like a hammer. The bunny is back.

Celeste checks out the purple signature more thoroughly. The two signatures composing the purple are doing the equivalent of mating. She starts trying to rip them apart.

Osric shields Clarissa. The wrongness that Cassandra feels goes away. Celeste trumps Cassandra, and the glass wall is gone.

Celeste trumps Brand, pushing enough power into it to burn through the Amber trump block, but not enough to burn out Brand's brain. She reaches him, sort of. She thinks. He's oscillating between two states, neither of which are familiar to her - absolute joy and absolute depression. When he is in the ecstatic state, he is sure that she is not trumping him because she is with him, and when he is in the depressive state, he is sure that all of his family is dead. She can tell that the mood swings are being imposed upon him from the outside.

Celeste turns to Ilk and asks him to feed her more power. She tries to shield Brand from whatever is feeding that influence into him. She gains a glimpse of his surroundings. It looks like he is in a doctor's examining room, filled with lots of odd implements. The sky outside looks like the sky over Chaos. The connection goes away - someone just noticed it and closed it down. She reopens it, hard.

Ilk starts feeling drained. Dworkin starts walking directly towards Celeste. Cassandra notices that Celeste is stealing all of the life from the room. Cassandra taps her, points out what she is doing, and tells her to stop. Celeste stops. Dworkin continues walking towards her.

Ilk and Jean ask Celeste what is going on. She explains that someone is influencing Brand, melding his power with something else, and using it to attack Clarissa. Celeste casts an illusion of the room she saw. Ilk recognizes it as a standard room in the Torturers' Guild, and says so.

Jean suggests that she go to Chaos and deal with it from there.

Celeste hands Jean a trump of himself. Jean starts to trump himself, but Celeste stops him.

Dworkin is just about in Celeste's face. There is a Logrus Jean trailing after him, carrying the Chaosian juggling balls. Dworkin does not look pleased. He continues to stamp his way over to her. She fails to react. Dworkin looks her up and down, slaps her across the face, steals her power pool, and stamps back to the other side of the room. "How dare you..."

Jean prime passes off the trump of himself to Logrus Jean, who follows Dworkin back across the room.

Celeste complains about Dworkin's behavior. Ilk tries to convince her that she was lucky to get off that easily, and mostly fails.

Celeste, Cassandra, and Ilk discuss the ramifications of staging the rescue of someone from the Torturers' Guild. It is decided that courtesy is the best approach. Celeste starts going over to the Helgramite Etiquette Guild representative. Ilk stops her by pointing out that they are allied with the white force currently attacking Clarissa and the nasty-bad that Clarissa was fighting in her tower.

Sandy Jean walks over to an Etiquette Guild member on grand tour and tugs on his sleeve. The guild-member looks down and bows to Jean as the child of an Old Lord. "How do you ask the Torturers Guild who dropped off someone at the guild?" The member advises Jean to ask the guild master or guild second for a current contract, or check with archives for past contracts.

Celeste discovers that she needs to go to the front desk of the Torturers' Guild in order to get an appointment. She is not okay about this.

Cassandra explains to one of her bodyguards that if she doesn't get this bit of information she will be in intense personal danger. The bodyguard looks horrified that Cassandra considers that bit of information to be so important to her safety, but, reluctant to contradict her, he disappears.

The bodyguard comes back looking disgusted. "He wasn't delivered. He checked in himself." Cassandra relays the bad news to Celeste.

Cassandra - "We've spoken to the guild."
Celeste - "Good."
Cassandra - "He seems to have delivered himself."
Celeste - "What? He put himself there? Why?"

A gentleman appears at Celeste's elbow, hands her a piece of paper, and blends back into the shadows. The paper is the transcript it is of a conversation. It's a conversation of Brand with Brand, telling them that they need to torture him until he is him again. He apparently killed two members of the Torturers Guild trying to escape from himself.

Jean peers under Celeste's shoulder and reads the transcript. Celeste hands it to Cassandra, who reads it and then passes it to Ilk. Ilk reads it, then suggests that they simply visit Brand and try to fix him or isolate him from that influence directly, making him himself again, and satisfying the conditions of the contract. Celeste expresses surprise that the Torturers Guild would allow visitation rights to one of their subjects.

The Demons Say "Whee!"

Jean experiments with budding into the baby mattresses. He can only bud into them at the time of their birth or death, and he has problems killing them without damaging the bodies. Jean asks Ilk to tell him how to brain-burn things, but Ilk advises him to not attempt mental contact with possibly hostile entities without considerable study first.

Jean asks Ilk if the demons have brains. Ilk Logrus-pulls a demon from the sea surrounding them, husks it, and passes the brain, which was formerly hidden inside an armored torso, to sandy Jean. Sandy Jean deems the brains to be not very nutritious, but edible.

Sandy Jean asks Ilk to come pick him up from the store with the mattresses. Ilk asks Jean where he is, but Jean doesn't know. Ilk asks asks Jean for landmarks. Mattress Jean wanders around for a bit, then spots Kolvir.

Ilk only finds one Jean. There is a shop that is heavily laced with Corwin's Pattern next to the Jean. Ilk notices a few other buildings that are tainted with Amber's Pattern in Amber city, but none of them are that thoroughly impregnated with Pattern. Ilk tells Sandy Corwin that there is a building in Amber city laced with his Pattern, and Corwin expresses surprise - he is the only person to have walked his Pattern, and he doesn't remember having done it.

Jean tells Ilk that there are more Jeans around, and Ilk tells Jean to have them leave the building - he doesn't want to try to burn through that much Pattern from this distance. The rest of the Jeans leave the store, and Ilk spots them. Jean specifies destinations for the mattress-derived Jeans. Ilk drops off two human-shaped Jeans in the entranceway to the Dancers' Guild, and brings the rest to the grand tour. Four humanoid shapes and forty tiny mattresses appear on the boat.

Thirty of the mattresses jump off the side and start eating the brains of demons. It takes three or four brains before they reach full size and litter - the demons aren't very nutritious.

Ilk seeds the rapidly multiplying mattress Jeans around Chaos, meticulously covering the areas around the opposing Houses. While seeding the area around Helgram, Ilk notices a Logrus-barrier that seems to be an alarm designed to warn them if he penetrated it. Ilk seeds Jean around the ward; Jean buds inwards. Ilk warns Jean to act like the other demons until the time is right.

The two Jeans in the Dancers' Guild start heading towards their rooms. Jean starts parallel-processing the process of learning shapeshifting across all of the mattress bodies.

Ilk on grand tour warns Ilk at House Cara and Ilk in Amber that mattress Jean is spreading rapidly. Ilk at House Cara starts tracking the walls he encountered that were made by someone else, and discovers that they lead from ways to ways, as if a high-powered Logrus user decided that walls would be the best way to move around Chaos. The paths lead to the council chambers, to Suhuy's place, and to the Logrus. Ilk sends the signature to the other Ilks for Suhuy's inspection when he resumes contact.

It's Raining Gwen?

The group is looking at Clarissa. Osric looks startled, looks up, drops his shield, and waves his sensing instrument over her. There is a white phantasmagora that seems to be hovering above Clarissa's body, being struck by blue lightning and occasionally by pink lightning. Cassandra can tell that the pink lightning is making it slightly smaller with each strike.

Ilk starts feeding the power that he has been accumulating into a small Sign of the Logrus, in the hopes that it will be harder for an order-based entity to steal.

When Osric's shield went down, Jean saw ten or twelve bunnies. Ilk saw part of the power that he is feeding into the Sign become Pattern-based. Cassandra's feeling of fundamentally wrong is coming back powerfully. Ilk hopes that this is similar to Jenoir's trap in Chaos, and ignores the Pattern-ness feeling. No boom happens.

--EORun--