We're celebrating Klordny Week, Superboy!

Enemies again.

June 3
[Aberrant] The Pantheon (consisting, at this point, of the Apostle, the Apothecary, Bounty, the Confederate [filling in for Epoch], Geryon, ibn'Mahmoud, Leviathan, the Mathematician, Narcosis, Orzaiz, Scripture, Shrapnel, Sin-Eater, Swarm Queen and Synapse) meet in council at a hidden retreat hosted by the Count (they are brought in by Blinker, the only Terat with whom Orzaiz shares the location). Topics of discussion include a review of the various Teragen cliques, what precisely is going on with Project Utopia, and how to use Utopia's newly-revealed weaknesses against it.

Actually, this first day is/was mostly about "catching up with fellow Terats we haven't seen in months and meeting newcomers to the movement," as the count will describe it when he opens discussions tomorrow. Today's discussions have been mostly civil, but with tense undercurrents among the various cliques, according to Leviathan's epilogue to the second of two essays circulating among Terats at mid-year. (The first, by Santiago, covered the movement's history from N-Day to the Null Manifesto; de la Rocha takes it from the Halloween Surprise to the present.)

Synapse logs in and out of the meeting, as he is spending much of his time trying to persuade Saxon to join the Teragen.

I'm not sure where I got this impression; the evidence for it seems to have evaporated from my copy of Aberrant: Teragen, even though I swear I've found it on other readings.

Edit June 4: I've since realized wherein the evidentiary basis consists, and it's not much. (It'll be in tomorrow's posting.) We don't actually get datestamps for either day of Saxon's captivity, so in fact, it may already be over by the time the meeting starts.

( Here's what happens during it, anyway. )

In a communique to Director Thetis (double-encrypted, Navajo Daedalus 3), baseline Proteus agent Ruiz gives an overview of his interactions with two Utopian novas: engineer Dr. Piotr Enrikssen and someone referred to only as Cocharin.

Enrikssen's ever-expanding intellect needs new stimulation, and Ruiz suggests "the new games of chance from Hattori's pet project" as an option. Cocharin's on "a schedule that allows her to use her matter-transmutation abilities on a regular basis without any real quantum-bleeding or signs of stress." She's taking Slidergate in a Proteus-approved way, having "expressed worry as to what the 'rogues' might indeed try." He's working hard on being friendly to her, and "regular non-nova company... seems to break down any self-imposed feelings of 'being different.'"

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

January 11
[Aberrant] Team Tomorrow members Slider and Montoya-Bernal, with help from Landers' friend Bender, battle Nova Vigilance members Devian, Geryon, Leviathan and Swarm Queen on the steps of the UN. Both sides come away hurting and hating each other more. In the aftermath, Orzaiz, Santiago and Scripture call a meeting of the Pantheon (the leading lights of the Teragen) for June; until then, they request that no Terat do anything "rash" (like giving interviews or killing anyone).

But really, it only delayed the inevitable.

And so it begins...

1999
[Aberrant] [Pedro] Santiago, [Raoul] Orzaiz, and new recruits Marcel Delorimier (a French ultra-nationalist convinced of nova supremacy) and Caroline Fong (an Oxford-educated philosopher and business consultant) gather in Santiago, Chile. They will continue to meet every quarter or so for the next several years, joined by a few more like-minded novas every little while.

Great oaks from little acorns grow. And the next item is another example of that.

2000
[Aberrant] Thor Gundolfsson and Brian "Belial" Petford meet at Burning Man.

The counterculture event was starting to go mainstream by that point in TU history, but it hadn't quite been subsumed yet. Gundolfsson (né Letift Morgaanstern) and Petford met up in an orgy tent, shared "a few women and a lot of drugs," and went out into the desert to drop acid (six tabs each).

Gundolfsson, the relatively new jarl of Hagalz Hall (center of Norway's death-metal scene), saw the world consumed by fire, with demons flying everywhere. Five of those demons grabbed him, then beheaded and quartered him. When his blood struck the ground, it boiled into steam, steam that lifted his dismembered body higher.

Petford, the elfishly pale mystic and Lovecraftian, saw himself turn into a dark, towering figure, like Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, howling with mad joy at the capering hordes beneath him. He saw himself delivering Earth into the hands of the Great Old Ones whose soul and messenger he had become.

( But that was just the beginning. )