Chapter 17:
(12/01/01)
Following dinner with Julie Ann, Saxon borrowed a large amount of money from Kenley and made a surprising announcement. He told the cabal that he’d grown tired of the constant action and danger that living with them provided, and that he felt as though he needed a slightly more settled lifestyle after all he’d already been through. So he’d made the decision to take Sadira with him (the two had been dating for several months) and move in with his friends the Crombeys, a family of Verbena who had their own chantry in the countryside outside of Aminus. Saddened but understanding, the rest of the cabal took him to the airport and said their tearful farewells to yet another one of their original members.
The next day, Jennifer, Michael, Ra Lei, and Ripple went to visit the Virtual Adept chantry they had learned about earlier. They came there prepared to trade their services for the information they needed, but their job turned out to be much easier. One of the Virtual Adepts was utterly fascinated by Jennifer’s unusual clothing, and she managed to trade her hideous polyester shirt (along with the clothing contributions of a few other cabal members) for a disk full of information on former Fujito Corporation employees. It seemed there were almost no employees who had ever left the corporation, and those who did usually died shortly thereafter—a fact that made the cabal even more suspicious of their employer.
After obtaining the information, the cabal split up once again. Michael, Ra Lei, and Wan continued following up on the leads about the corporation, while Bria, Christie, Jennifer, Kenley, and Ripple sallied forth into the Kumo’s lair in search of the stone of the dagger. As the four other women prepared for yet another magical commando raid, Ra Lei had a wonderful idea. From Bria, she borrowed Bria’s father’s note and her mother’s comb and used them to trace their location. After completing a lengthy but successful magical effect, she learned that Bria’s parents were being held in a sparsely guarded warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo. Unfortunately, when she went to inform the rest of the cabal of this fact, they had already left.
Quickly, Ra Lei sent out a Mind effect to the rest of the cabal, who were standing at the entrance to the Kumo’s lair deciding what to do. But as it reached them and they were just about to turn around and revise their plans, a trapdoor opened beneath them and they went sliding into its lair. There, the Kumo attacked them and managed to poison Bria and wrap it up in its silk. It dragged her through the wall and into the central chamber, where (Jennifer determined with a quick Correspondence scan) the stone was. As they made their way there, the spider attacked several more times and wrapped up Bria as well.
In the main chamber, Jennifer, Kenley, and Ripple encountered the Kumo again. Ripple smacked it with a Mind effect which seriously intimidated it and sent it scurrying off deeper into its lair. They took advantage of the pause to rescue Bria and Christie. However, they were presented with an interesting dilemma: There were four wiggling cocoons sitting in the middle of the lair. Kenley opened the first one and found a strange-looking little kid, who had saggy grey skin and appeared to be wearing hospital scrubs. The second cocoon contained Christie. The third contained a deformed creature which immediately attacked the cabal, and they had to fight and kill it. The fourth cocoon, of course, contained Bria.
After defeating the cocoon creature, the women turned their attention to the little kid. He said that his name was Takahashi, that he was nine and a half years old, and that he had come to the Kumo’s lair from someplace a very long way away. They got very little other information out of him. Intrigued (and, in Kenley’s case, feeling sorry for the little guy), the cabal offered to take him along until they found out where he was from and if his family (presuming he had one) wanted him back. Takahashi agreed, and the women used Correspondence to get everyone out of the Kumo’s lair before the monster returned.
Meanwhile, Ra Lei and Wan, with Julie Ann in tow, had been talking to some of the former Fujito Corporation employees the Virtual Adepts had introduced them to as Michael went off on his own to do mysterious things (an occurrence that had become more and more common over the preceding weeks). They had come up mostly empty for other helpful information and were feeling more than a little frustrated. As they walked back to the hotel, Julie Ann began loudly cursing the Fujito Corporation, saying, “You know, sometimes I wish the whole damn place would just go to hell.” No sooner had she said that than an explosion echoed across the city and a shock wave knocked everyone to the ground. Looking back, Ra Lei and Wan watched in horrified astonishment as the main headquarters of the Fujito Corporation collapsed into rubble. Immediately, they rushed back to the hotel to tell everyone else what had happened.
Back at the hotel, Takahashi immediately began taking apart phones, TVs, and other stray electronic equipment, commenting on how primitive it seemed compared to what he was used to. Learning about the big happenings at the Fujito Corporation, Ripple sent out a Mind message to Timber and convinced him to come hang out with the cabal for awhile, for company as much as for protection. Then, the cabal began arguing about whether or not to go after Bria’s parents in the warehouse; a few of the members, particularly Jennifer, were profoundly suspicious of the whole situation and worried that it might be a trap. But as they argued, Wan ran to the building, rescued Jonathan and Maria May, and brought them back to the hotel, where they had a tearful reunion with their daughter at long last.
The proceedings were interrupted by an uninvited visitor’s arrival in the cabal’s midst: Seko, who seemed very amused by the entire situation. He explained that the dagger had been a fake, a sham quest conducted by Ahreen and her fellow Nephandi within the Fujito Corporation as a method of gauging the abilities of the cabal (a ruse that, apparently, had worked very well). It had also been meant to distract them from the real plot at hand: an effort, by the Nephandi, to disseminate the ritual found in the Aztec temple through the Internet and make it possible for Nephandi everywhere to use it. It would have won them the Ascension War—that is, if Michael hadn’t made contact with Dante, the Seat of Correspondence and possibly the most powerful Virtual Adept in existence, who had seen through the ruse and included Michael in a team that had blown up the Fujito Corporation to stop the Nephandi. (A few cabal members, most notably Ripple, were outraged by this fact and the collateral loss of human life that had taken place as a result.)
Seko explained all of this, and more, quite calmly and helpfully to the cabal. However, he would not tell them how much Ahreen knew about the cabal, or how she planned to use it in the future. He then turned to Timber and added, “And your sex research has been terribly helpful. It taught us so much about pain thresholds that we’ll be using it to torture people for years to come.” Timber paled and immediately left the room at learning he had aided the Nephandi. Maria May’s terror at being confronted by Seko was also worth noting; when Bria scanned her mind, she learned that Seko had been torturing her mother for almost ten years, in ways far too horrible to contemplate. After making a few more idle threats (including the suggestion that he join the cabal), he left and suggested that the cabal do the same.
Shaken, the cabal prepared to leave Japan and return to Aminus. Julie Ann flirted a little more, then returned to wherever it is that Marauders hang out in between adventures. Jennifer, who had befriended Takahashi perhaps more quickly than anyone else, asked if he would like to come with the cabal and live with them in Oregon, and he agreed. On a less cheerful note, Ripple went to check up on Timber and make sure he was okay after hearing Seko’s revelations—and found him lying in his bathtub with both wrists slit. After returning to the hotel, she told no one what had happened, but demanded that everyone return home as soon as possible. They didn’t even need her prompting to agreed.
Back at the chantry in Aminus, things returned to as abnormal as ever in the cabal. Bria took her parents to visit her grandparents in Portland, and the entire May family was reunited for the first time in years. Her parents’ memories of their ordeal, unfortunately, proved so difficult to erase that Bria decided just to help them work through their traumas the old-fashioned way. Jennifer planted the people-headed tree, which immediately began to grow like a weed, in the backyard of the chantry and released her china dolls. Unfortunately, the china dolls turned on her and had to be put out of commision by none other than Marcus, who had finally returned from his lengthy journey totally free of Quiet—and human for real, this time, through means no one really understood. Word of the cabal’s exploits in Japan began to spread through the mage community, and they earned a certain amount of respect and renown for their role in thwarting the Nephandi’s latest diabolical plans. But if that was the case, why did everyone feel as though in so many respects, they had failed?
Takahashi settled in and soon befriended most of the cabal, becoming closest to Jennifer, Michael, and Ra Lei, who gave him computers and other fun things to take apart. (The three adults had also struck up a new, and somewhat unlikely, friendship.) Christie took Takahashi to see her mentor, Saelic Maelikian, thinking he might know something about the child’s origins or at least be interested in him. He seemed very interested indeed (and to know more about the child than he was letting on), and even gave Takahashi a bag of Double Stuff Oreos when he learned the child had never tasted food.
Meanwhile, the return to Aminus and relative normalcy gave Jennifer the chance to at long last begin serious work on a longtime pet project of hers: the search for Alan Turing, the founder of the Virtual Adepts. Although the official news on Turing was that he had died while creating the Digital Web, rumor had it that his Avatar still roamed cyberspace, and that finding him could mean access to all sorts of secrets and goodies that could even lead to a turning point in the Ascension War. With the help of Gabriel, Jennifer had gathered tremendous amounts of information on Turing and was beginning the process of sorting through it all to see what (if anything) was useful.
After awhile, Jennifer came across something very interesting: a message that seemed to be hard-wired into the code of the entire Digital Web. When translated from binary, it read “I LIVE” over and over again. The day after making this discovery, Jennifer came down to breakfast and saw Takahashi sitting at the table. Spontaneously, she caught a glimpse of his Mind pattern before the enormous barrier he had erected around it slammed shut, closing off his thoughts from all telepathic intrusion. In that glimpse, she caught a snatch of the same code she’d been studying—slightly different in some way, but the same basic idea. There would be no rest for the Awakened, it seemed…