NaNoWriMo day 14- Moone flashbacks

13,844, I think, after today's word count. That's almost 9,500 words behind. Which means I need to write about 600 more words a day to make sure I've got a full wordcount by the end (this is rounding up twice, of course.) I actually plan on doing twice that (rounding up yet again); something about the prospect of doing 3,000 words a day is like, yeah okay I can live with that and be rad. I didn't get that many today, of course; I'm 500 under (rounding yadda yadda,) and I'm very very tired after writing all this, but, eh, that's the idea isn't it, to force comfort zones, or whatever.

And besides, if I fail this stretch, I'll still have gotten the actual NaNoWriMo official word count by a long shot.



tryin'a incorporate more locational cues into my aimless character soul-searches
Moone was talking to Pontifex about this issue, how naked he felt being safe. It was on the outskirts of a city, hiking out to hide out in the foreman's office of a construction site (abandoned for the weather??) instead of pitching a tent for the night for once. This was a prime location for him to be jumped by a ghoul, or a warlock with a grudge, but nothing came out of the shadows, and nothing continued to come out of the shadows, and Moone knew that nothing would come out of any of the shadows perpetually, as long as they were there, which only made the suspense paradoxically worse. It seemed wrong, being without it. Unnerving, and as uncomfortable and unnatural as going around with only one lung.

Moone mentioned this as he pried a mildew-smelling plywood slat from the fence, to poke through to the other side where a chain-link fence awaited.

"Your problem is you've always been defining yourself based off of your exterior circumstances," said the Pontifex, ducking through a gap where the chain-link fence had cut off a little at the bottom. "You need to figure out who you are, Moone." Why did the Pontifex always seem to have such insight into these things, cutting to the core of Moone's psychology? His questions were never probing; when speaking, it was always as if he had well-mulled the issue out in his mind. Saying the right thing always, even in circumstances where it would have been impossible for him to have considered it beforehand; even on issues that he had learned about only a sentence or two prior,  he continued with alacrity the conversation with the insight and clarity of a well-articulate scholar on the exact subject. "You need to figure out who you are, Moone." 

Only, Moone realized as he pushed through the door into the shack-like office where they would be weathering the night, maybe Pontifex didn't really have all the answers; he treated the solution as though it were the simplest thing in the world, when in reality the knowledge for Moone of who he was by himself was a tricky thing to pin down. What is identity, without connections? Is identity in history? If so, then Moone was at a loss, as his entire pre-supernatural history, his life before any of it had entered into his life, was a hazy mythology, and wouldn't work as a guidepost at all.

When Moone was a boy, he went into this, house, with his brother, and he didn't remember exactly what happened, only that it was significant somehow. He remembered so much else though, the way the dim lights made everything look like an old sepia photograph, the distinctive way the impossibly (though probably not supernaturally) elaborate Edwardian wallpaper peeled off of the walls, the way that the cramped corridor seemed oppressive even to his seven-year old self, and his ten-year old brother. Visiting trailers like this one always reminded Moone of that house. 

The bizarre ratio of hall width to hall height, the way interior doors smacked against the outside wall if you opened them all the way. Moone remembered looking out the window, and seeing trees, and something made of stone- a well? a church?, and there were buildings all around, yes, and the wide road, rounded bulging convex so that rainwater would slide right off of it and into the gutters. Leaping over the gutters on the way to approach the house... A sliding door within... had it been in the closet? Moone seemed to recall that whatever had transpired had made the newspaper, given him slight infamy, or fifteen-minute fame, but looking back into the records Moone couldn't find anything. Another secret. 

Maybe it was his brain trying to reconstruct something else entirely; Moone didn't think it was a metaphor for child abuse or molestation but of course there wasn't a way to be sure on that either. Sometimes, on nights when his mind raced and refused to stay still, an odd thought would pop into his head and trigger some other detail, or else he would try to reconstruct the memory unbidden, just another puzzle he had to work out. Had the circus been in town? Could that have played into it? 

He wouldn't have even remembered anything, had some hobgoblin or leprechaun not decided to rub his face in the memory years later, expose a raw nerve, one of his worst fears, some form of infamy to him. The entire thing may have been a dream, then, because that's the way the memory came once the pixie had said that, as though it had reminded Moone of a dream the night before. So maybe it may well have. Moone had many such memories, and they didn't all mean anything. Memories that didn't fit into his life, memories maybe picked up from some other person entirely, perhaps as some obscure part of his defensive mechanism- imp tries to bring up some shameful aspect of Moone's past, Moone could point out that it hadn't happened to him at all. But with all the regrets later on that he would experience after his awakening as a being desirable to magical mischief, this didn't seem like an answer at all. But his past was real, it did happen, even if it didn't make much sense after the fact.

The swans, and the well, and the lake...

~~

Maybe Moone was so intrigued by the thought of growing close to the Pontifex for that reason: Pontifex represented the last vestige of danger, which was a world that at least Moone was comfortable in. Being out all alone, bad things could happen at any moment, which was normal for him of course but the truly disturbing implication beyond that was that he would have no control over how the story ended when they did. He would be able to exercise token control, perhaps, decisions could be made; but the consequences to anything would be a cypher. Looking at Pontifex, looking at his memories of Cloud and Gef and Lovecraft, Moone knew that the idea of not being able to choose one's consequences was a warm blanket to some people. The winds of providence blowing where they pleased, and if the little dinghy marooned, one did the best one could, and would be comfortable in that fact.

This thought was what kept Moone from the temptation to untangle his boon from around his bane: existentially, it was a heavy burden, being in complete control of his destiny, and being without it, far above the going without getting attacked, felt like a tremendous weight had been taken off of him, that he hadn't known he had. He felt weightless. He felt liberated. Like all his life he had been a fish, swimming around in the aquarium of some county hospital's reception room somewhere without knowing it, and now he was a full-grown man with long legs and the whole world at his doorstep, and he would get lost of course but it was all out of his hands.

flashback to a djinni gauge (WIP)

This is the story of how Moone, an officer of foreign intelligence, came to know the identity, signs and countersigns of a domestic deep cover operative: it was some time in the mid 1980s, Moone in the Middle East to recruit a djinn for use in the Tetragrammaton's attempt to counter the . Out of the entire djinn culture, Moone had selected to turn an expert in the djinn science of [ballooning??] [common characteristics of asset recruitment.]

Moone and his cutout at the time, a mannish being calling himself SEAMUS, made their way through the dust and traffic of the city, squinting in the late afternoon sun. Ducking behind a psychedelically painted dump truck that had been marked with the signal and parked specifically at the edge of the city, [use the same doobly magic Unwin uses to time travel to Babel, probably has something to do with stepping through a pool of water, RESEARCH] and they found themselves on the edge of a different city entirely, on the borders of the human city behind them.

The buildings were completely different here, in the realm of the Djinn. Created more than a thousand years before man was, according to Muslim theology, their architecture had evolved in completely different ways from human architecture, not to mention the more than a millenium of scientific advancement they must have had. The city here was smokeless fire, twisting upwards defying gravity and ever-shifting- but there was a pattern behind everything, you would notice if you were used to it, and once Moone and SEAMUS had decoded the haphazard way that the buildings were numbered (the street names and numbers on the other hand being organized and easy to navigate) they could make their way to the rendezvous location, the djinn equivalent of an opium den.

Djinn society was very much like human culture, with its religions and superstitions and own packets of supernatural communities hidden from the djinn-mundane world. This plane was a popular place to lie low for angels and demons on their way between planes, as well, though Djinns themselves are mortal beings; Moone made sure to keep an eye out for any demons (or even angels) with scores to settle with him. 

The realm is a fire world parallel to our own, made out of energy instead of matter, bound to a plane just adjacent to ours, a separate plane but still technically the same dimension. Like the Urdu that the locals spoke here, a register of Hindi, linguistically distinct enough and spoken in its own locations but mutually intelligible. This realm was similarly more a register or gauge of the natural world than anything supernatural, though that term was relative when dealing with djinn.

As far as what djinn would consider supernatural, they worshipped the same gods as the human realm adjacent, but in many aspects the djinn society was alien enough to be dangerous. Though humans and djinn share religion and language and basic lifestyle structures, djinn had their own politics and nations and cultures, so human magic would work in unpredictable ways if they attempted it. The non-human superstitions the djinn had would alter the forces of magic in ways completely different to the ways the same magic would work on the human plane. It would be, risky, to use spells there, to say the least. 

A lot of sympathetic magic was based on the symbolic connotations any given object held, and there were different registers that sympathetic magic could be used in. Like a mathematical equation, the combined ingredients of a spell could work by the concomitance of the disparate ingredients, filtering out to encompass only the symbolic connotations that the ingredients shared in common- or it could be multiplicative, each of the symbolic connotations of a single ingredient playing part and those connotations compounding off of the connotations of the others. This magic was far more powerful, but far more volatile. 

The symbolic understandings of things being totally different in this djinn realm, the magic equipment they were using had to be used in some counterintuitive ways- and they had to use magical equipment, for the most part, since a human gun with human bullets can't kill a person whose body is made of flames. 

Although religion was the same, and a crucifix would mean the same thing, the fetishistic usage of such iconography wouldn't work here, because djinn beliefs on the power of images of holy objects had evolved differently. Even the old standby, cold iron, anathema to most supernatural creatures, couldn't work here; although it was indeed said to work against djinn, its physical properties prevented it from being transported through the Barzakh between human and djinn gauges. 

The djinn opium den was, surprisingly, unsurprising. A hidden basement underneath a Chinese Laundromat. It was bizarre how mundane everything was here; exoticism is merely a matter of perspective. Djinn are creatures of flame, but it's a smokeless flame, and the smoking here ~~~. Don't do drugs, kids. Unless you're literally made out of fire. In which case, hope that it's not because you spontaneously combusted after doing too many drugs.

A rounded table, large enough to fit four or five people around it; three sat here now. SEAMUS sat to Moone's right, close enough to feel his body heat even in a realm of fire (but it's a cold fire) in the afternoon sun. To Moone's left, a chair over, sat a djinn by the name of Syed, a Sikh wearing the traditional turban and banglet, his thick beard flowing into a massive bush at his chest and making his head look comically like a pear. Moone wondered why any djinn would choose any religion other than Islam, since that was basically the only religion to even preach of the existence of djinn, before realizing that he himself remained devotedly in the religion he was brought up in, and that if anything he should be the one converting to Islam. The djinn versions of religions probably taught of the doctrines pertaining to djinn, and didn't focus on human interest as much.

They sat for some time. Where was the contact? Moone felt something brushing up against his leg, underneath the table, and looked down at it. There was a cat here- of course there was a cat here, what other animal would have been able to slip in between gauges this easily. When djinn would present avatars in the human world, they would occasionally take zoomorphic forms, if they indeed chose to opt out of the default blank form itself, a generic human figure with a blank face and made out of licking blue flames.

and then they talk to the djinn (and like DOUBLE WIP)

There were rumors of something in West Virginia making scattered appearances throughout the 50s and 60s, the last appearance not too long before Moone was first recruited by his company. Djinn scientists had investigated but nothing of it was of the djinn realm, everything remaining strictly in the human plane, not affecting the djinn population there at all. But what had caused the djinn to investigate the occurances in the first place? They claimed that it was part of a djinn-human joint task investigative force, but digging deeper into it, the djinn claimed, it may have been a coverup. 

Unwin had given visions to a large segment of the local population, warning them of a coming catastrophe, which was actually caused by a djinn domestic terrorist organization.There was a deep-seated resentment of humans in the djinn community, once you peeled back the surface. Djinn were more powerful by far, but the physical access to earth was reserved for the lesser species of humans. The Silver Bridge collapsed on December 15, 1967. The Tet Offensive began the next year. Moone's first agent he recruited was a Vietnamese Dragon from South Vietnam, who had close familial contact with North Vietnamese supernatural government agents.