Paramnesia

Paramnesia Chapter of Hypolethia
Chapter 2 of Secondary Intention
Chronology
← Previous	Next →
Adhesion	Autoscopy

In which guests are admitted, records are found, and Wotann’s oldest wound remembers otherwise.

What Happened

• The cabal, who still have not found a name for themselves, travelled to the Velvet Room in the southern edge of Fallon Heights. Due to the time of day – late Thursday afternoon – the club was not yet open but staff were present setting up. Vánagandr seemed slightly perturbed by this but continued. A knock on the door brought the attention of Toni, one of the door staff, who let them in.
  • Toni recognised Vánagandr and Kassandra and addressed them with their names (Arianna and Tara), and seemed to recognise something about Titania. She mostly seemed nonplussed as Vánagandr lead the others into the backroom and then deeper.
• The backrooms of the Velvet Room include a barely-used storeroom where Vánagandr sometimes does mundane but illicit business. A locked door there leads down into the older basements of the building, part of the nebulous boundary region where the Blackmouth Vaults brush close to the surface world. Down past archways blocked with brick and rusted steel plate, Vánagandr stopped at one particular sealed former door and took the cabal through the obstruction with a spell. On the other side lay her sanctum.
• After a brief discussion of the plan – to enter Vánagandr's Oneiros and then use it as a bridge into each of the others in turn, and there to search for signs of this intrusion and wrongness – and rules for safety within the hungry realm that was Vánagandr's soul, she wove a spell of binding and connection and lead them onto the astral journey.
  • Vánagandr took a token from each of the others – one of Titania's business cards, a random playing card from Kassandra, and Wotann's ritual knife made from the claw of some supernal beast – and bound them in red silk around her own forearm. Then lead them into her sacred space and into meditation within
• They arrived into the rain-soaked and neon-lit cityscape that was the outer boundaries of Vánagandr's Oneiros. Someone commented on the dullness of a rainy city being inside of a soul and what it might say about Vánagandr. She shrugged and lead the way toward the places of power, letting herself be driven by intention. The Concierge met them at the reception, judging them each in turn and confirming with exacting detail that they were simply guests.
• The attempt to reach the Archives were delayed by uncertainty along the way and the elevator door opened wrongly, swinging wide rather than sliding open. Beyond lay the grotesquely neglected interior of a trailer, stinking with waste and filth, distorted as if from a child's perspective and woven through with thorny vines. None of them recognised this place and the vines grew hungrily closer to them with each denial of memory, until the door was slammed hard enough the slice the vines that had intruded. The severed vines hit the floor with the sound of fists on flesh.
• The elevator reached the Contract Archive and key records were sought and found – the strongest moment of connection between Vánagandr and each of the others in turn, manifested as photographs perfect for attaching to an evidence wall.
• They descended via the freight elevator to the twisted loading yard/subway station of Midnight Transit. Wotann's Oneiros was the first to visit, on the back of his photograph was a ticket for one of the trains idling at the station. Departing on it, the train slowly stretched and compressed as the tunnel above gained texture, colour and light. The cabin became an army jeep with Wotann at the wheel and all three, besides Vánagandr, dressed in French Foreign Legion fatigues, rumbling along a rugged jungle road across rich red African earth. Eventually the jungle opened into a clearing with a sprawling European building woven through with a gargantuan tree whose branches reached into the heavens and whose roots spread out to the jungle all around, sampling and sorting and examining everything in order.
• Seeking the intrusion or irregularity, Titania cast a spell to shift the odds and lead them to what they sought with only a minor bite from Paradox as the cost of her magic. A thread of echoes, evidence, dream fragments, and lines from research paper leads them onto a path deeper into the jungle, through the night and on to a savannah and the sounds of gunfire.
• They see a memory well-known to Wotann. This is the night that his patrol was cut apart by some monstrous predator, leaving him as the only survivor and sparking the obsession that lead to his Awakening. But the memory is wrong. The creature – sinuous and black, monstrous and predatory in a way that feels familiar to Vánagandr without triggering recognition – hunts and cuts down a dozen men as if enjoying itself. Not like a predator seeking to feed or drive away an intruder, but like something simply seeking to cause pain and harm. And at the climax of the memory, where Wotann should see his miraculous survival, he instead sees the creature murder him and his body rise as another thing like it. Then the memory flickers and replays and this time it is as he remembers it. Survival with no explanation why.
  • The memory of living through the attack is the thing that feels like the intrusion.
• And one of the nearby trees, still stained red with ordure of a dead legionnaire, opens into a face like Wotann's own – Wotann's daimon reaching out from the great tree in the heart of his soul. It speaks to him with a measured, calm voice, commenting on the uncertainty of memory, that perhaps the first vision was an attempt to understand the unlikely survival that has haunted him. Survivors guilt woven with obsession and trauma.

Plot Developments & Facts Discovered

• Wotann has some prior experience with astral journeying, while Kassandra and Titania have none.
• There are signs of an intrusion in Wotann's Oneiros. A sense of wrongness about the memory of the event that started his path toward Awakening.
• Vánagandr maintains a small secure sanctum in the buried roots of the building housing the Velvet Room. She has made part of that sanctum into a demesne using a soul stone of her own creation.
• None of the cabal recognises the thorn-filled trailer. Vánagandr theorised it was one of the others memories creeping in through the binding that began the astral journey; she has her suspicions that it was Titania's memory but did not say anything.
  • Vánagandr was quietly unsettled by the fist-on-flesh sound of the vines hitting the floor, but also said nothing.

People Appearing (in order of appearance)

• Kassandra
• Titania
• Vánagandr
• Wotann
• Toni, bouncer at the Velvet Room
• The Concierge, obscured goetic entity within the Reception of Vánagandr's Oneiros.
• Faceless archivists, attending the Contract Archive.
• A sinister predatory entity, or the memory thereof.
• Wotann's daimon.

Locations

• The Velvet Room, not yet open for the evening.
  • Vánagandr's sanctum in the vaults beneath
• Vánagandr's Oneiros
  • Rain-streaked streets, the Reception, Contract Archive, and Midnight Transit.
  • A strange memory-realm of neglect and jagged thorns.
• Wotann's Oneiros

Notes

• Vánagandr's rules for the astral descent into her soul:
  • • Do not run.
    • Do not lie to the Room.
    • Do not give a name you cannot bear hearing.
    • Do not open service doors.
    • Do not follow anyone who looks like someone you lost.
    • If you become separated, find the nearest mirror and say: “I am a guest of Vánagandr.”