I really need to set this blog in something other than what I've got it. Courier is a great typeface and all, but reading it, at least with this line length and leading, is just a pain. Something needs to change. And this gray background, yeesh! All would be made better larger, I think. Let's try that now and see.
So I'm not sure how cohesive any of the sentences are in today's writing; it's my first day using this tool called Write or Die, and it really does help with word count which is what matters at this stage, but I didn't really edit myself much, so there are a couple of repetitive parts, though I managed to minimize/make non-redundant, most of it.
do this!
Scene where a myth is suddenly remembered differently, tipping Pontifex off that somebody’s interfering in the Dreaming.
Who? Why? Whence the mythic discussion? How does this fit into the plot?
how the parthenon fits and some other stuff we could get to fit (Moone x Pontifex, Babylonian Brotherhood)
Athena, the goddess of intelligence and thus the profession of tradecraft.
Athena’s vow of chastity and thus the flight from Hephaestus at the conception of Erichthonius. Erichthonius was half-snake.
frettin' about the noc
Moone decided to take a walk and clear his head. It wasn't as though there were anything better to do, sit around in a cramped space and fret over everything that was going on. As if Pontifex being melancholy and volatile and possibly still working for foreign interests wasn't enough, now Moone was actually starting to form a trust bond with the man. There was already the Contract that they had between them, absolutely unbreakable. The very real possibility of the end of the world. Alright, maybe the end of the world was being hyperbolic. Empires had fallen before. People slaughtered, executed, whatever was in the minds of whoever would be after the NOC list. The Dreaded Eye. The open knowledge that the Necronomicon was out in the wind would curtail many of it potential uses, but there were still many others to be had. No spy would be burned or blacklisted, because the agencies knew not to trust if such a thing happened, but agents could still be tried for espionage and executed. Or just be targeted and taken down, with extreme prejudice, without even the benefit of a trial. And if no spy could be trusted to be burned, the agencies wouldn't know if they really did choose that moment to turn traitor, or reveal their true alliance. Plausibly deniable that they were being framed because of their identities having been leaked. Thus, from this point, no agency would be able to trust any of their agents.
Maybe the NOC list was already out, already in use by the hands of whatever entity would have use of it? They would know that Moone was a spook, and twist that knowledge against him. The entire thing could have been one elaborate ant farm, nothing real, everything staged for his benefit. And Pontifex was acting shifty; did he know something Moone didn't? But if it started here, how far back would it extend? There was the creeping doubt, always in the back of his mind, that there was no supernatural world, and why draw the line there, that there was no such thing as reality...
extracting the noc
The NOC list didn't look like much. It wasn't bound in human skin or anything, or if it was human skin, it wasn't the skin of a human face. The pages within were old, faded and worn, with foxing speckling the faded white pages. The book was relatively thick, though to Moone's understanding the book held more pages than its thickness suggested. There couldn't have been that many agents in the field, though, right? It being positioned here by the front door, [he learns here of the other portals on the seventh floor. Thirteen floors in total, the first and second floors open-air (mezzanine with balcony.) ] The book was at the center of an altar, candles flickering all around, bound by a star glyph painted in blood. The star itself had varying points depending on the angle it was viewed from, and if you tried to count the number of points you never got the same number twice. Unless you proceeded to count more times than would be sane of you, since the number of points was firmly countable, no more than 12... 15? 8. 4. 3. 7. Disturbingly, a one pointed star. It was probably a trick of the candlelight. The altar was in a pocket past the wall by the main entrance; this too was protected by a ward, a horse skull fittingly chosen. How to remove the book, though? Examining the binding glyph in closer detail, the fact of the number of points always shifting turned out to be a benefit. It could act as a sort of maze. One person observing the glyph, that person's partner extracting the book not looking at the binding glyph but being relayed instructions on how to proceed through, until they reached a wall, upon which the observer merely counted the number of points again, the walls of the glyph shifting around the extractor, making his way out as if going through a maze. Stepping over the non-point of the one-pointed star, with both partners trying hard not to think about it too hard. The partner ran the risk of being driven mad from the task, but the NOC list was extracted with no other fuss than that.
witch bottles
There, stowed away inside the brickwork of the wall, was a porcelain witch bottle, not unlike the phylactery Moone still had on his person. A witch bottle is a small bottle, made of glass or porcelain, that contains a few typical ingredients, and which is usually stowed away in walls or under floorboards to act as a ward against evil. Witch bottles were used as wards against evil, a form of apotropaic magic in use since before the Renaissance. The two typical components placed inside a witch bottle are a liquid ingredient and a solid ingredient; the bottle to bind a spell, the solid ingredient to trap it, and the liquid ingredient to drown it. The solid ingredient could have been anything, but the liquid ingredient would typically be wine, sea water, or the urine of the person the witch bottle was meant to protect. The idea behind their use was to capture bad vibes (if using urine, capture made using sympathetic magic,) trap the hex or curse inside the jar and allow it to get stabbed or shredded or smothered or tangled up, and let it drown to death. Ths worked, of course, as long as the magic was being used for the correct purpose. Warding a threshold is not a witch bottle's only use; they can be used generally in other forms of magic, as charms or catalysts. To have the person who rigged the witch jar be the one that the witch jar was being set up against the possibility of, that prospect was fraught with danger. Use the sympathetic magic of the witch jar against the person, invert the magic essentially. Flip it inside out. The person who set it up would even be able to replicate the aural signature of the person- or being- whose urine and hairs they were using. The one who had set up the witch bottle was MacBeth. And Moone knew exactly how he'd gotten hold of Gef's hairs and urine.
[Flashback that sets up the car, the motorbike, and has Gef piss over MacBeth in a humorous and awesome way.]
oh my gosh such a good song
Goodbye Horses by Q Lazzarus ran through his head. "No, no, no, no..."
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