Chapter 12:
(10/06/01)
The cabal spent the next day doing a little sightseeing and returning to the Aztec ruins they had visited the day before. They hoped to either find out why the vampires avoided the ruins at night or get some more information from the archeologists while their supervisors’ backs were turned. They were totally unsuccessful in accomplishing the first goal, but accomplished the second by relentlessly hounding one archeologist until he had no choice but to talk although his supervisors were glaring at him. He said that he’d known and worked with both Jonathan and Maria May, but that they had left the site without a trace almost a year earlier and that no one knew where they’d gone. He said he didn’t think anyone else would tell them anything different. However, he ended the conversation by saying, “If I were you, I wouldn’t come back here at night. And I certainly wouldn’t look in the air shafts.” Of course, the cabal took that to mean there was something interesting there, and decided to come back that evening to check it out (and to stay safe from the vampires).
In the interim, the cabal went to a nearby restaurant for dinner. During the meal, Gabriel told Jennifer to order him a margarita and pour it in the floppy drive of her Trinary deck. A little skeptical, she nonetheless agreed. Of course, the drive immediately began to smoke and spark, and Gabriel laughed at her gullibility. She retorted with, “Note to self: No sex for Gabriel,” an idea that seemed to disturb him greatly. Then, acting on a suggestion from Ripple, she began dressing him up in a variety of humiliating outfits, all of which he found some way to make blatantly sexual. The rest of the cabal got grossed out and moved to different tables. In the end, Jennifer and her computer ended up eating dinner alone.
After sundown, the cabal returned to the Aztec ruins. Jennifer used Correspondence to map the air shafts and the interior of the temple, and Christie cast a Forces effect to lower everyone gently into one large room at the bottom. The room seemed to be a library of sorts, with a number of ancient documents depicting what appeared to be an ancient Aztec magical ritual that used human sacrifice to gain massive amounts of Quintessence (in short, Nephandic to the core). Bria also found two very interesting items: her father’s comb and a note written in her mother’s handwriting. Then, the cabal noticed a set of stairs leading down even further and decided, of course, to take them.
The cabal bottomed out in another huge room that was entirely empty except for a young Japanese boy, who was sitting in the middle of the room and smiling at the cabal. He addressed all the cabal members by name and introduced himself as Seko Soujiro. He said that the cabal had just missed seeing Bria’s parents, who had been there that very morning. It seemed that when his employers, a massive Tokyo-based company called the Fujito Corporation, had learned how close the cabal was getting, they’d had to move Jonathan and Maria to Japan as quickly as possible. Naturally, Bria was furious and demanded to know why she couldn’t see her parents. Seko said his employers forbade it, but that if she went to Japan she would be able to be reunited with them eventually. After taunting the cabal for a bit longer, he disappeared. Dejected, the cabal left the temple, got on the airplane, and returned to the chantry in Aminus, planning to leave for Japan within a few weeks.
Back at the chantry, Ripple approached Marcus to discuss her unborn child. Her close call in Mexico, and the knowledge that her situation would probably not get any safer anytime soon, made her worried for the baby’s safety. She asked Marcus to use his magic to speed up her gestation period so she could give birth within the next few days. Marcus agreed and did the ritual that very day. It seemed to go off without a hitch. Ripple gave birth to a healthy baby boy, which she named Chance Marcus Larson, and the cabal spent the next day cooing over him and congratulating the new mother. Wan did notice that the baby’s Mind pattern seemed to be unusually developed, especially for an infant, but thought it better not to mention anything.
No one knew it right away, but something had gone terribly wrong with Marcus’ magic. Rather than have Ripple bear the brunt of the resulting backlash, he exerted all his willpower to have it bend back on him. The rest of the cabal discovered this later that day, when Gabriel returned from visiting Marcus in the basement and seemed terribly shaken up. Jennifer asked what was wrong, and after she couldn’t get a straight answer out of him she decided to go see for herself. In the basement, Jennifer discovered Marcus in his full, rotting, mostly dead, lich-like glory, without the benefit of the illusory human appearance he’d always kept up before. Marcus had entered a serious Quiet and become convinced that he was fully human again. Horrified, Jennifer spread the word to the rest of the cabal, who were similarly without a clue as to how to handle this.
Things only got stranger from there on out. The next morning, Ripple brought Chance down to breakfast only to discover that he’d somehow aged almost ten years overnight. Even weirder, he seemed to be a near-complete clone of Marcus, to the point of even possessing a piece of his Avatar—when the two were in close proximity, they both got incredibly stronger. By the end of that day, Chance’s aging had stopped at around 21 or so. Ripple began trying to teach him about magic, but his knowledge seemed to be even greater than hers. In fact, the only considerable gap in his education was that he had no conception of why the Nephandi were evil. However many times Ripple tried to explain it to him, he insisted that “a universe that can’t protect itself from them doesn’t deserve to exist, anyway.”
Of course, Ripple freaked out. She spent the next day taking Chance around the city to parks, art museums, and concerts. When he asked her why, she said, “So I can show you what you want to destroy.” Chance seemed perplexed by that and said he didn’t want to destroy anything; he simply wanted to give the Nephandi their fair shot at winning the Ascension War, too. Ripple let him know that she still thought he was wrong, but realized that at this point there was very little she could do to change his mind. Chance then announced that he had decided not to stay with the cabal, since he would rather try to strike out on his own and make his own way in the world. Ripple was immensely saddened by this, but agreed to let him go. Ripple and Chance said their good-byes, and he promised to return later to let her know what he’d been doing. Upon Ripple’s return (alone) to the chantry, everyone else comforted her, but was secretly more than a little frightened by Chance and the prospect that he could become a powerful and dangerous enemy.