Freshman Fifth and Sixth Week

Altclair is Naomi's campaign, set at the college of Altclair, which is somewhere in Minnesota. Think Pamela Dean's Tam Lin or GURPS Illuminati IOU. Other source material (that Naomi's not familiar with) might include Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and most of Charles de Lint. Players are me (Justin Thorne), Josh (Michael Conaway), and Manny (Jim Gaffney).

From the Desk of Justin Thorne:

Fifth Week

I'm not sure what to do. Rashid came back, only it's not Rashid.

I had not planned to put certain things in writing, but under the circumstances, I think I'd better.

Rashid Ali, my roommmate, is a Palestinian from Jordan. I like and respect him. He is almost certainly involved with terrorists, and is quite probably one himself.

Evidence? Dubious if it'd stand up in court, as he's quite careful. When we had to rescue Delilah from 13th century Mongolia, he supplied the (thankfully unused) firearms - including machine guns - and what training anyone had time for. At that poor excuse of a New Year's Eve party, I believe he was armed. I never saw a weapon, however; I merely noted the blocking: He positioned himself in the shadows, holding his glass with his -left- hand. (1) His right hand was in a pocket, and he had a clear line of sight to anyone in the room. Fortunately, he also had a level head, which is more than I could say for myself that night.

He requested that I not take his photo. Rashid is a devout Muslim, and there is a passage in the Koran that can be interpreted as forbidding photographs of people, as a kind of graven image. This was his stated reason. Also, knowing what I am, he'd be well within his rights not to want me taking photos of him. But a lack of photos also obscures the question of identity.

Other evidence? The Utterly Unauthorized Gazette. All copies of that have my question to Rashid about whether I should cut the paragraph about how we had weapons. The postal mages have a copy of that, but I think are unlikely to do anything with the information.

And, finally, the fact that the man who came back from Jordan is not the man who left.

He's quite polite, and he was as open with me as he felt he could be. Rashid, he explained, is laying low in Jordan. The Jordanian government does not quite see eye to eye with him.

Rashid Mark II was sent so that Rashid Mark I's spot wouldn't be wasted. He claims that all Arabs look alike to us dumb Westerners, so no one will know the difference. The scary thing is that he appears to be correct.

Sure, I know. Jim, Michael, and Helen figured it out. And that's it -- apparently, even the professors have no clue. I did tell Jennifer, so that she could warn Jido, but otherwise, I've kept my mouth shut. Rashid Mark II advised me that if I spread the news, I would probably not be believed and I would certainly come to some harm. I suppose this could have been construed as a threat, but I believe that it was merely a warning.

He gave me an address for Rashid Mark I, cautioning me about the censors, and said he'll deliver the photos of the dancing furniture in person, since we don't want to draw attention to Rashid Mark I. (2)

So much for the facts. Options include:

-- Tell the FBI, or, more productively, Immigration. Maybe if we did that at once. Too late now, I think - all the tracks will be covered. And I'm not sure that we want to start trouble for Rashid - the original, I mean.

-- Ask Rashid Mark II to answer questions on the carpet. He probably knows about it, and he might conceivably be willing to do so. But I don't think that it would prove anything except that he believed what he said.

-- Ask Ken, who speaks Arabic, to go to the MidEast to find out what's going on. Totally insane, especially since I don't want to tell him what little I know.

-- Ask the Postal Mages to help me circumvent the censors. I do not wish to press my luck there unless I have a clear idea of what that will accomplish, and even then, I am not at all sure that the Postal Mages want to spend time on such a mundane matter.

Helen said that I need to know what I want to accomplish before I decide what to do. She's correct, so I'm holding out for more information. Meanwhile, I'm putting a copy of this, sketches or both Rashids, and hair and fingerprints from Rashid Mark II into the box. (3)

Sixth Week Or, the Circus -- and Dicey -- Come to Town, and the Gargoyles Tell Us More

Dramatis Personae

• Daniel Case - my AD (4)
• Dicey Tillerman - Maker, specializing in boats
• Ash Wednesday - arranged for Dicey to get in contact with me. Mage, Michael's teacher
• Delilah Morgan - Michael's girlfriend
• Helen Abernathy - my girlfriend
• Ken Maravitch - Math major, but almost a Philosophy major
• Jennifer Corbet - mage and sensitive
• Matt Denkla - Theater major, looking for a double bed for his play
• Donna - second floor RA, possessor of a double bed

The good news is that I have refrained, so far, from driving my cast and crew crazy. The bad news is that the cast is driving -me- crazy!

They're still not getting the blocking. (5) I told them not to worry about that, but to get off book Now. Daniel kept his mouth shut, so it's probably the right decision.

Dicey Tillerman came to campus. She's the Maker whom Ash contacted, and she can stay until the end of the quarter, when boat season begins in Maryland. (6)

She arrived not a moment too soon, as the train is nearly done. I managed to scare myself - it seems that I made a circus train, complete with elephants. How the elephants got \O\into my pajamas\o\ onto the train, I do not know. Dicey says that's nothing to the trapeze and its wiring, which is apparently quite difficult to get correctly, and we're talking full size. Miniature's got to be harder. And then there are the people. I am quite sure that I have no business making real people. Ash and Dicey say that they're (the train folks, not Ash and Dicey) just incredible simulations, not real. Ken says that this gets into interesting philosophical questions.

Meanwhile, Helen says that she and Delilah want to sneak into the Classics time machine. Destination: Ancient Mesopotamia, about 18,000 BC. Helen said she'd run the plan, whatever it is, by me for approval, and she agreed to give me plausible deniability. As far as -I- know, she's taking the train. (7)

On the gargoyle front, they want their magic back. Since they have none, Jennifer can't do much, so at the moment, it's photography. They can't do Morse code. It seems that Richard Lerner and Michael Grossman, who founded the college in the 1880s, did something to immobilize the gargoyles and drain them of their magic.

Jim and I got Daniel's input, although, as he said, he wasn't here then. But it seems that during that part of the century, you had, among the various social experiments, groups of intellectuals getting together to practice magic. This is partially why Altclair got started.

Jennifer will bring Ash up to date, and we'll see what we can learn. As Jim pointed out, there may be a good reason to keep the gargoyles as they are, but what I have learned so far is not sufficient. (8)

Matt's got a double bed on tap, though not Donna's. I asked him about the longevity. He told me to ask Daniel and leave him alone. My hypothesis is that he's somehow tapped into Daniel's fay-ness, or whatever it is that keeps him alive and unaging.

Footnotes

(1) A big no-no in Rashid's culture.

(2) No, the furniture does not literally dance. Matt Denkla had a budget of $600 for his play, Torch Song Trilogy, and spent $550 on a new piano. He plans to get away with this by borrowing furniture for the play from folks around campus. Justin, possibly the only person in the Theater Department who didn't give Matt grief over the piano, asked if Matt would mind if he used this as an excuse for another performance art piece. After all, if folks had to carry furniture to the Theater, it could dance, right? All you need is a bit of choreography, and someone to take pictures. Jim said that he didn't believe dancing furniture could look at all graceful.

(3) Oh boy, did the PCs get bit on this. Not telling the appropriate authorities was incredibly stupid.

(4) Assistant Director

(5) Jim wanted to know why it's called blocking.

(6) Dicey pointed out to Justin that anything he made was magical, even if he hadn't made it do anything strange. In other words, all of his photos are magical, even the ones where he was just snapping pictures to see how the camera worked.

This means, of course, that he's working magic when he directs, something which did not strike him as noteworthy, but which, Josh pointed out to Naomi and me, might make Wait Until Dark very interesting indeed.

It also meant that Justin decided not to try an experiment. In view of how happy Michael seemed to be when Ash switched his magic off, Justin had considered seeing if Ash could do the same thing for him, just to see what a few months as a more or less normal person would be like. However, as was pointed out, this would mean that Justin couldn't do anything creative, something he's not prepared to accept, and it might not even be possible for Ash to flip the off switch.

(7) Helen's an Anthropology major. Sincer her department is feuding with Classics, she can't use the time machine. Officially.

(8) Justin, deliberately talking over Daniel's head, pointed out to Jim that during the Middle Ages, knights went around killing all sorts of creatures that they thought were monsters, and some of them might not have been. Jim is a smart man, and he got the point, even though Justin was careful to mention neither dragons nor Jido, their friend who can turn into a dragon.