GAME THREE:  PANDA SANDWICHES AND FIELD TRIPS

So we killed our evil doubles. We quested for personal understanding. We went to Mecca. The dust has settled and we’re ready to move on to the next phase.

Except that there’s this other guy. Seems we suddenly feel “incomplete”. We’re missing one of our circle.

So Eric is a guy living his life and doing his thing, when he tries to pursue a story(?). In any event he winds up in a situation where he is walking right into a trap set for him by his duplicate. We consider how to contact him from the Caribbean island upon which we are. We don’t have enough miracle points to just gate there. Instead we create a minor miracle, manufacturing a cell phone that appears next to him, ringing. He doesn’t answer it. Eventually he notices the text message on it and relents, picking it up. We try to warn him he’s in trouble and to get out of there. As he is disputing what we have to say, someone takes a shot at him. Eric tries to run over an assailant who looks just like him. When he fails, he flees. What happens next is a chase scene, including a call to the police that gets a patrolman killed when he tries to pull over evil(er) Eric, who pulls a gun and shoots him.

Police seem to think Eric is involved and take him into custody. During that time in custody they interrogate. We show up on the scene and former G-man, Kasper, decides to adopt his old personae as we impersonate feds. Tech-boy Maiko hacks into the system and sets up orders to transfer the prisoner. Before we get there the duplicate tries to drive the cops out of the building by setting off a bomb out front. It doesn’t do much damage but puts everyone on alert in the station. We show up and Kasper bullies the cops into releasing Eric into custody and we make for our black SUV when suddenly a screech of tires announces the presence of Eric’s double. There’s an exchange of gunfire and the double drives off in a hail of gunfire.

We introduce ourselves and try to explain what’s going on to an only semi-receptive Eric. Not sure how we eventually convinced him to help us trap and extinguish his dupe, but we do so eventually by luring him to an isolated area and ambushing him with gunfire. When he finally expires, Eric now has half his soul.

His quest, improvised by committee, involves going to San Francisco (home of the great quake), meeting a lighthouse keeper and preventing a quake through use of a miracle.

Then we need to get him to Mecca. Instead, we decide to conspire to create a miracle in which there is a doorway to the black stone which he can reach through and touch the rock. Works well, without all the voyaging.

So we’ve been having other dreams. These are dreams of places. Naturally as dreams have guided us properly so far, we decide to visit these places. Only issue really is that after the first one we had nowhere to go but down.

DEN OF INEQUITY

We go to the Bahamas, where we travel to a Cliffside house overlooking a cove. It seems the folks therein recognize and welcome Aaron. This place that he has dreams of is like if you took the Playboy Mansion, in the 70’s, and moved it offshore so that it was totally lawless. Many from the crew are swept up in the hedonism. We spend several days there, with Maiko spending much of that in a private room with his computer, which I suspect is a fetish of some kind; Women only turn him on if they’re on a computer screen.

SPOOKYWORLD

The next is voted on by the group as a decided step down, though Gabriel would vote otherwise. We travel to New Orleans, catch some coaches to tour the city and end the tour by getting off at the outskirts of town. There we pursue a road and at mile marker 13 we find a covered bridge, a la sleepy hollow. On the other side is a lonely stretch of road with The Blue Bead (roadhouse), a scary cornfield with scarecrow, and a crossroads. Johnson’s Folly it’s called. Inside are revelers who are pleased to see guests and who have a good time. Gabriel sits in with the band. A mysterious individual is spied but no one knows what to make of him. Later we go out to the crossroads to meet said individual; the caretaker of the realm, Papa Legba, who is of considerable power and to whom we pay a tribute of smoke and Jamaican rum. Fortunately comedy boy does not offend Papa Legba. Still, a good time is had inside the roadhouse, though everyone is creeped out outside.

CHURCH OF LAUGHS
We hit Ireland and trek via scooters to an old church, which it appears is the front for a comedy club. Kasper performs and a good time is had by all.

MOUNTAIN CLIMBING HELL

Friction, it seems, is just as much about people rubbing each other the wrong way as it is about physics. Toward that end, Eric’s venue is at Vesuvius in Italy, where we must make a long climb up a mountain then down into the center of the earth. His realm is the land-that-time-should-have-forgot, a steamy hot land of fail, where fail creatures skitter and stalk, fail physics fluctuate depending on how high up you are, and fail food is just a squish and cook away. AAA rates it below Tartarus and right above Cleveland.

THE ANTI-NARNIA

I think it was an early C.S. Lewis novel before he got his footing where they traveled to another world via the Janitor’s Closet doorway at a train station. I’m just glad it wasn’t a bathroom stall door, or the title of this e-mail would have been Pooping in Narnia. Phillip shows us the way but doesn’t go very far. Once we’re in there he seems freaked out by being there. Outside the building we entered into there are angels, demons, etc., wandering around as if it’s common to walk amongst each other. We leave because he wants to right now, feeling all oogie about the joint.

CHAOS LABS

Accessible via elevator in a high-rise, we get to Maiko’s office. Seems that the 100th floor is home to his office, cafeterias, and a whole lot of workaholics. We get to meet the infamous Genie (whom Kasper flirts with in an attempt to nail a female of some type/species in every chancel we visit. Seems that while the place is bustling full of activity, invention, and life, it also has a problem with its productivity in the form of random attacks by some chaotic virus that escaped from the labs and occasionally rears its ugly digits to ruin progress.

The general vote was that aside from each person’s own chancel, the visit to the Id was the best. And in the case of a few it was even better than their own chancel. I note that mine seems to be the only one with multiple exits to our world (though anything might be possible in a few of the less explored ones *cough phillip’s sigil cough*).

Having done the Worlds Tour, we discover (I believe through our newspaper clipping service which shall remain Genie) that there’s some strangeness in NY. First, someone shredded two paintings at the Met. No, not stole… shredded. Purloined surveillance reveals it to be a tiny homeless man of some sort. Also, something at a Panda. Of course who could blame them? I mean except when you get the fur stuck in your teeth.

We try to figure out who are interlopers are and where they are from. We use a miracle to create a device for detecting our type of activity; it would make Ghost Hunters cry. We use it to find that there are not one but two dots on the radar, and they lurk close by.

What ensues is a long chase that results in us tracking down what appears to be a being that’s a cross between Manson and a Sasquatch (the Mansquatch), and another that is troll like. The only one of us that seems to like them is Gabriel, but then he really likes the idea of them more than the reality. I now must plant a story about trolls living under NY bridges. They are here to offer their services to us. Funny though that they only did so after running from us for as long as they could. We ask them to leave and show them the door, which is good because any favor we’d have asked them would have required equal recompense.

We then decide it’s time to go to the real world.

So we pack in classic D&D fashion then cross the threshold at the WTC. There we are, in the real world. Instantly we are boosted in number of miracle points we got (from 1 in each category up to 5). Seems our world (Mundane Earth) is our attempt to capture the real world, which it seems is totally animistic (every single thing you see is alive, from objects and people, to forces like the gravity that’s clinging to our feet). This place is so much more vibrant because it’s literally alive, while ours is a facsimile, which has us wondering why we would ever leave.

ANCHORAGE

No, not the place. Some folks among us have selected an “anchor” (their vassal, though I shall use the term “herald” because it makes me more like Galactus). So far: Phillip has a friend (no real details on him). Kasper is in search of Paula Poundstone. Aaron has some kind of attorney to scum who he blames for something and has some underlying story about being screwed over by said lawyer. Maiko has solicited Bill Gates for something tawdry. Don’t recall what Eric was looking into. I’ve decided there are two modern forms of perpetuating mythology and superstition… Television and Newspaper… So Gabriel is considering a tabloid reporter (a la Weekly World News); I also have a second one in mind, which is funny because I suddenly went from 0 ideas to two in the space of typing this paragraph.