Rachel and Tal left Yulia's apartment after freeing her from the thrall of the mysterious blue stones, which she got from the drug dealer Bobby Smiles. Rachel left her unspeakable servant behind in case anyone else showed up to come after Yulia, and the two occultists left to rejoin the rest of the cabal. They had a meeting to get to.
The meet was in South Hadley, at a tourist stop called Nash Dinosaur Tracks. The small shop and museum was full of stone slabs with fossilized dinosaur footprints. It was owned by a Brethren friendly and had some kind of magical defense that would hopefully keep the meet safe.
As the Bao Down truck rolled onto the property, DBD's head started to hurt. Not a headache, but a pain in his third eye, like something was stuck in it. The Forty Winks van was already there. Tanya, Corbin and Matt had made a ring of stones and started a small bonfire in the parking lot. The Courier Yancy Smoke was around back doing something or other. There were two other trucks expected: Milk and Honey the Jewish cheesecake truck, and Ice Man the ice cream truck.
Tanya asked Reba for help with a problem she had. The Ice Man truck was home to Derek Isodore, a 75 year old original Mak Attaxer and the closest thing she had to a real father. Derek was old, and the truck's captain, Raul the Mechanomancer, was taking care of him. Raul used his gadgets to make sure the old guy could move around and do stuff without needing help, but he didn't have a solution for long term health problems. With no possibility of getting health insurance or social security for his employees, there was a real possibility that Raul would go over to the Court to save the old guy's prostate. She couldn't begrudge Raul for looking for a solution, and didn't want to cause trouble for him by spreading the story to the wrong people. Reba knew someone who might be able to deal with the problem.
Rachel bought a little of Corbin's telekinetic power, in exchange for also taking on his oncoming baldness. She was confident she could flip it onto someone else before she lost any hair.
Matt gave DBD a mysterious package that he got from a gremlin. Inside was a chili pepper shaped like a wave bladed kris, so dark red it was purple. DBD took a bite and felt his adept powers increase. There was the same flash in his mystic vision as the last time he ate a mysterious chili given to him by Jim the gremlin, but it was different - like something was occluding his vision, preventing the signal from reaching him. He realized that the magick defenses at the meeting site were blocking some kind of transmission to or from him.
The Milk and Honey truck arrived. This was crewed by the Orthodox Katharomancer Judith Shemets, her son and daughter Sam and Ruth, and the oddly shaped Abe. The cabal knew that Judith did not like them, but her two kids were more resigned, rather than absorbing their mother's prejudice against Reform Jews. Rachel wasn't able to set up any deals with them before the last truck arrived: the Ice Man ice cream truck. On board were Raul the mechanomancer, Derek Isodore (who the cabal noticed wore an intricate web of snake shaped wire jewelry under his clothing) and June (who carried a backpack apparatus loaded with tanks of liquid oxygen).
With the gang all there, Yancy called the meeting to order, and turned things over to the Bao Down crew to introduce the first motion. The group explained the conflict with the police, the Colonel's Secret Cadre (who burned their own restaurant to frame the Brethren) and the secret of the pool rooms. Reba proposed that the group agree to aid one another in the coming struggle, to deal with the emerging issues and to stop the Court of the Burger queen from dividing and conquering them.
Judith was uninterested in being dragged into someone else's fight. She was here to fix the world with magick, not get dragged into battles over territory by troublemaking half-Hebrews. Raul wanted to help, but wasn't willing to put his crew in harm's way. Derek objected loudly to this, but Raul stood firm. Tanya was 100 percent on board, she was already fighting the Court anyway. With Bao Down and Forty Winks in favor, versus Milk and Honey and Ice Man opposed, the vote was deadlocked. Yancy was excited. He rarely got to officiate duels.
The aye-faction elected DBD as their champion, while Judith volunteered to fight for the nays. The combatants agreed that the duel would be to first blood, and both sides were allowed to buff up beforehand. Raul fit Judith with a bracelet of fine wires, which terminated in a long antenna that moved like a whip. Abe the artificial man offered to defend her, but she yelled at him to stay in the truck. She removed her tichel, under which she was shaved bald, eyebrows and all. Rachel prepared DBD for battle by moving a number of traits and items around.
- She gave DBD sight through her one eye, so he could spray his own eyes with the guaranteed casting spray and still see the battle.
- She gave DBD the Veil of Hakim, making him harder to hit, and transferred the leprosy to Reba (who volunteered)
- She bought DBD's heroin addiction so it wouldn't distract him, and avoided puking everywhere when she got the shakes
- She sold DBD some hardened notches from her stress meters, making him harder to disable with psychological attacks
With both participants prepared, Yancy gave the signal to begin the duel. DBD shoveled the rest of the purple pepper into his mouth and cast a spicy spell, making Judith's mouth taste the heat. Her spice tolerance was even lower than his, and her actions were impaired accordingly. That didn't stop her from casting a katharomancy spell against him, making his shirt seem indescribably filthy. She hoped to produce a stress check that would disable him until he removed it, but the psychological hardening he got from Rachel let him tank the mental damage. Judith pulled her squirt bottle and tried to burn him with a magickally enhanced cloud of bleach, but between the heat penalty and the Veil of Hakim she was too debuffed to hit. DBD ducked under the chlorine cloud and caught her in the stomach with a fist. She doubled over vomiting and Yancy declared the duel over. The ayes had prevailed.
Judith cursed a blue streak in Yiddish, but didn't contest the issue further. Bao Down introduced two further motions: one to grind Tal's Catapsi ability by passing it around to the other food truck crews, and one to grind the Dirty Cop identity so that they could find a way to blackmail the corrupt cops chasing after them. Both of these passed, the second with even Judith voting in favor.
With voting concluded, the truck crews engaged in various conversation around the bonfire. A mestiza woman in a luxurious heavy coat and sturdy work boots emerged from the Nash Dino Center, carrying an impressive load of stone slabs on her shoulder. There was no indication that she'd been in the building in the first place, no lights or sound. She tried to just wave and walk past the crowd of Brethren occultists, but of course everyone wanted to talk to her. This was Genesis Peru, a well known friendly and owner of the Nash Dino Tracks site.
The Bao Down crew approached Raul, who was fussing over the bracelet he gave Judith. He gave them a demo of the bracelet's capabilities, showing how the snake shaped wire on the end could lash out to slice bits off a nearby treebranch. The group was impressed, and asked if they could commission some more serious hardware from him. Rachel offered him additional years of life expectancy in exchange, but he considered that a temporary solution to a long term problem. He wanted health insurance for his whole gang. Rachel agreed to sell him this, in exchange for a powered exoskeleton made from the snake shaped wires, like the one Raul made for the 75 year old Derek. In this way, she solved the problem Tanya had warned about, without revealing that anyone even knew or worried about Raul's potential betrayal. She also sold the already bald Raul the receding hairline she picked up from Corbin, in exchange for a single charge from a special order.
Reba made a deal with Judith's adult children, to emphasize that they were serious about providing mutual aid, even if their mother was a real bitch. They asked if they could get them more memory for an artificial person's brain, to help Abe stop forgetting things. Reba said they'd work on it, and they gave them a method to contact them through a Rabbi in Boston.
Rachel could see through the eye she had implanted in her Unspeakable Servant, guarding Yulia's apartment over in Marblehead. The creature projected text onto the eye, informing Rachel that he could hear people breaking into the apartment. Three thugs kicked in the door, armed with farm implements. Rachel used the pager she had given the Servant to send a message: reveal yourself. The Unspeakable Servant poured out of the silver bodysuit Rachel had disguised it in, terrifying the goons. One man ran away immediately, one woman stood stunned. The third hoodlum, carrying a rake, kept his wits. The Servant projected his words onto Rachel's donated eye as subtitles:
"We didn't know this was your operation, Lucky. We're sorry, we didn't know it was you!"
Then he ran away, dragging the stunned goon with him.
The mysterious attackers had confused Rachel's Unspeakable Servant for one owned by her mother, Lucretia "Lucky" Tudor. So either they had some bad information, or her mom was back in the game.
Reba helped Genesis Peru load the stone slabs into her pickup down the road. The rocks had dinosaur tracks on them, and Peru warned them not to touch the stone with their bare hands. They learned that GP was a local cliomancer who charged off local historic sites, and sometimes helped the Brethren out with procuring things.
As the other crews got ready to leave, the Bao Down crew got together and debated what to do next. They recalled that Yulia had described the little blue stones as a "Zahir", and further remembered that this wasn't the first item which they had heard described with reference to a Borges tale. The Veil of Hakim they bought from the Brahmin Occult Society also had a Borges connection. From this, they concluded that the BOS was probably the supplier of Bobby Smiles' occult stones.
As the Bao Down truck rolled away from Nash Dino Tracks, DBD felt the irritation to his forehead cease. He had a momentary vision of three people staring at him in confusion, before they panicked and threw a towel over his "face", cutting the connection. The group surmised that he was under magickal surveillance as a result of the peppers he'd eaten. Rachel purchased the memory from him to inspect it, and realized that one of the three observers was the same bearded, gimp masked Muslim she'd seen exiting the Brahman Occult Society clubhouse on her previous visit. So the spies were connected to the BOS somehow. DBD used random magick to shift his third eye from his forehead to his asshole, in hopes that this would dissuade the mysterious mages from spying on him further.
The gang had succeeded in building solidarity with the other Brethren food trucks in the region. They had a few ideas for what to do next. They wanted to:
- Cash in the existing eyeballs they were entitled to (two from Lindsey, one from Jonas the heroin addict) so that Rachel could make more Unspeakable Servants.
- Talk to Granny Ethel and get her take on some of the magickal phenomena the group had encountered.
- Figure out who was spying on them through DBD and the magick peppers.
- Take control of the Pool Rooms.
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