a tornado with human eyes | Glowfic Constellation

The rain doesn't really stop, but eventually the lightning does. The clouds thin out enough that the sun can brighten the ground a little, through the wind and rain. The people with chainsaws all emerge from their darkened homes and start clearing the fallen trees from the roads. Generators come out of storage, and are carefully fueled and started by flashlight. Most Raymond winters have at least one bad snowstorm that knocks the power out for few days, so in the short term everyone knows what to do.

At the school, the adults send a scout to the doctor's office on Route 27, but it turns out its generator is faulty. They wind up sending Emily to the hospital in Parkland, half an hour away under ideal conditions, with two cars in convoy and a spare chainsaw.

Sophie will spend that time, and whatever more she can get before their parents come for them, making plans with her friends. They have to research magic, especially card-based magic. The internet probably won't be back for a while, so that'll have to happen at the library, with physical books and no Find button, ugh. Probably everything they read will be fake but they still have to try. They need to find out how to banish demons and ghosts; maybe the pastors will know something? They need to find out whether Otso's really OK. Someone should check on Jill, and see if she needs help with anything. And they all need to keep their ears open, talk to their friends and relatives, and follow up any weird funny stories they hear. This is going to involve going to their houses and talking to them because, again, no internet. And the three of them need to meet up again, let's say at the library at 10am tomorrow?

It's a lot. With luck they'll have this wrapped up before school gets started again.

You manage to cover all that before Carol's mother finds you.

Mary Poor

FINALLY!

Mary has been trapped in a school cafeteria for HOURS, her boys have eaten nothing but pancakes and they're bouncing off the walls, and on top of that her daughter can't be bothered to show even basic consideration for her mother. Well, she'll swallow it, because parenthood is about making sacrifices, but it's time Carol got off her lazy butt and helped out a little.

"Carol! THERE you are, I've been looking all over the school! Honestly, what were you THINKING, coming all the way up here?" No good ever comes of letting Carol answer questions like that, so she doesn't. "Get down to the cafeteria and help me round up your brothers, they finally cleared up the roads and we're going home."

Carol Poor

Sigh. But it's not that bad; Sophie and Joanna know her parents already. Maybe they know her mom a little too well; she's not as Like This around strangers. She doesn't say "I'll see you soon," or anything else that might be used against her later, she just waves to her friends and leaves.

Sophie and Joanna might as well leave too, then. They've hung out without Carol plenty of times, but right now it feels wrong.

It does.

Oh, hey, Frank was just thinking he should go find Sophie so they could leave!

"Hi, hon. Feeling better?"

Huh? Right, Carol's cover story. "Mostly now I'm just tired. I was hoping we could go home so I could lie down?"

Franklin Smith

"Just what I was thinking. Come on, I'll drive."

He really does have the best daughter in the world. Probably all the dads think that but the difference is, he's right.

There's a tree down in your yard, Sophie, but your house is un-crushed. Your neighbors, and the Merrils two doors down, only have some fallen branches.

Eep. Sophie completely forgot to worry about that! But finding out about it now doesn't change her fundamental plan to nap the Sunday afternoon away.

At first she's a little too wired. She keeps hearing the rain gurgle out of the gutters, or splash against the windowpane, and thinking she's under attack again.

But the human mind can't sustain that kind of vigilance for very long -- or at any rate, hers can't. As the hours slowly pass in her warm, dark room, she starts to accept the idea that she might have gotten away with it. It's too early to be sure but it'd make sense, right? Jill doesn't know where her house is. She trusts her friends completely. The only other person who knows her and saw her transformed was Pastor Reed. If he doesn't make the connection -- and why would he? -- she just might be in the clear. And even if he did notice something, how would the Juice Man find out about it? She's fine. For right now, at least, there's not more. Eventually that thought slides from "imaginable" to "plausible", and she sleeps right through dinner.

but-why-stop-there

~~Why~~

Nico spends the day collecting cards. The only thing now is speed: he has to gather the remaining 77 before their attention on him fades back to normal and he can't track them at long range. He, at least, doesn't need a chainsaw to clear fallen trees: at least for now he can blow them up with fire from the safety of his car. Or, wait, even better: if he calls a spirit of intellect into one can he just tell it to roll itself out of the way?

You can, and what's more, they do.

but-why-stop-there

Outstanding, let's do that then. It sounds faster than a chainsaw, and he needs the practice. He'll stick to time-bounded summonings like he did in the cabin; no need to have a bunch of logs rolling after him down the street.

He mostly stuck the cards up a little off of the road, but not too far; he had to get there to put them up himself, after all. How many can he find, and how long does it take?

The cards are mostly not where you left them, even the ones you carefully duct-taped and nailed to large trees. Some are under logs, or in rivers, or on peoples' lawns.

but-why-stop-there

~~Why did~~

He'll break and enter as much as he has to; at this point it just can't be helped. How many cards does he find?

It's still quite dark and rainy, and you don't think anyone spots you in their yards. At least, nobody comes running out at you with a shotgun, or anything like that.

Including the Five of Wands, you have 51 cards in your lead-lined box when the last thread of attention becomes too faint to follow.

The missing cards are the Ace, the Two, the Seven, the Ten, and the Knight of Cups, the Two, Nine, Ten, and Queen of Pentacles, the Two, Five, Six, Seven, Nine, Ten, and King of Swords, the Two and Eight of Wands, the Emperor, the Lovers, the Wheel of Fortune, the Hanged Man, Death, the Devil, the Tower, the Moon, and the Sun.

but-why-stop-there

Twenty seven cards left. Three times three times three.

Three is a powerful number, one that turns up a lot in alchemy. The three souls. The three stages of the alchemical wedding. The three fundamental principles of Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt. In general three is the step beyond duality: the fruit of the interplay of opposites, say, or the hidden third choice beyond a false dichotomy. So three threes, occurring all at once like this, suggests...growth. Expansion. New things happening, in new places, to new people.

Considering everything that's happened today it's not a terribly subtle message. But the Tarot often isn't. In Nico's experience the hard thing isn't learning to read the cards, or to understand the powers behind them. What's hard is to accept the things they tell you.

but-why-stop-there

~~Why did you~~

He still has to think things through a little more. What are the cards trying to tell him?

Let this moment be defined by what it lacks. That's what he said, earlier, when he created the killing flood that went so bizarrely wrong. He didn't say it for any profound reason, but just because it felt right.

It still does. What else can he learn, from the things this moment lacks?

All four Twos are missing: no straightforward binaries allowed today. The Hanged Man, the card he most closely identifies with, is missing. The Sun is missing, just as it has been all morning. The Tower is missing, and that's really worrying, because that means it's somewhere else. The Tens of Cups and Pentacles, the most clearly family-oriented cards, both gone.

It all feels meaningful, but the actual meaning is, he has to admit, escaping him.

Maybe he's thinking about this the wrong way around. The cards are only missing from his point of view, after all. Another way to say it is that they've been dealt, sent out into southeastern New Hampshire. But even after some thought, that interpretation doesn't lead him anywhere either. There's such a thing as a twenty-seven card reading, but they place the cards in specific positions and specific relationships to one another; Nico can't interpret the missing cards as though they'd been drawn from a deck. Though whatever the exact interpretation, there are a lot more Swords out there than he'd be comfortable with, if he were a real citizen of New Hampshire. More than any other suit, in fact. Not a great sign. Whoever finds the Ten of Swords in his rain gutter is going to have a terrible afternoon; you don't need to be a master diviner to forecast that.

Yeah, he still can't shake the feeling that he should be able pull all this stuff into focus, and that it would all make beautiful sense if he did, but it's not happening. Time might help, or even just some sleep.

Well, he'll have opportunities to think about it. Adam did approve of his new plan, in the end, contingent on their not retrieving all the cards and so needing to hang around. It seems he'll have to execute it after all. Tonight, he thinks, should be the maximally dramatic moment, and it will give him time to brew up the potion he'll need. He's never done anything like this before -- probably no one has, at least on purpose -- but it doesn't seem all that difficult.

There's just one thing he has to do first.

but-why-stop-there

He'll dig out one of his older Tarot decks, a handpainted one from his experiments with abstract geometrical designs. As an attempt to shield his mind from the Archetypes they mostly failed, but in their way they're reasonably good symbols. Possibly no one in the world could read them but him; certainly nobody else is so closely connected to these particular images.

He'll spend a long time shuffling them: left hand, right hand, riffle, cut, repeat. While he's doing it he'll let the question he's been suppressing fill his mind, let it crowd out all the pains and exhaustions of this impossible day, let it shift and displace his carefully-maintained ego. "I" is a useful fiction, most of the time; right now he doesn't need it. He needs his mind and spirit in absolute calm, and conscious thought is mostly a distraction.

Gradually, gradually, the pond stills.

Watching himself from far away, he'll set the deck gently down on the car's dashboard.

Unwilled, his mouth moves. The air in the car trembles gently, in rhythm with the question in his heart.

"Why did you do this to me?"

His left hand reaches out to the Archetypes, and turns over six cards, in two groups of three.

Alchemy Facts!

We're using the Rider-Waite-Smith images here, so you don't have to learn Nico's bizarre symbolic scheme. Did you know: on the Ten of Pentacles, the pentacles are arranged into a representation of the Sephirot, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life? That symbol isn't shown anywhere else in the whole RWS pack! Thank you for subscribing to Alchemy Facts!

but-why-stop-there

The Tower (crushing reversal, certainty undone)

Hanged Man reversed (mystic, piercing the veil, the tree of life. Nico himself.)

Five of Wands reversed (the glowing woman, strife, combat)

Six of Swords (success following effort, knowledge attained through a journey, transition)

Ten of Pentacles (archway, boundary, the tree of life, mystic knowledge, a visitor bearing magical gifts, the divine power in everyday life, new incarnations, difficult family life)

Ace of Swords (revelation from the heavens, pierced illusions, clarity without viewpoint)

It's a hard spread, much harder than he usually gets. But after a little thought, Nico thinks he sees it. The first three cards are the past: the catastrophic upset of the ritual, himself hanging martyred right side up like Odin did for knowledge instead of upside down for perspective, and then finally his adversary. But the Five of Wands has an extra meaning in this context, doesn't it? He faced her, he beat her, and he didn't kill her, all just as he wanted. It's usually a sign of disorder and strife, but today it's a trophy, too.

The second three are the future: a spiritual crossing carrying some knowledge to win more, a gateway with a disordered family and magical stranger, and finally divine enlightenment.

It isn't exactly an answer to his question, but maybe his question sucked. Just because it was important to him doesn't mean it was worth asking. Or more likely it was an important question ill-formed. Why did We do this? What "this"? It hasn't finished happening yet. And when it does, you'll get what We promised you.

Now he needs to make a spiritual journey, away from the familiar into a strange environment. That's how he'll attain his revelation. That makes sense. He sits with it, breathing slowly, until his tension finally eases.

Carol Poor