[M20] Far from any Road, Part One: A Mirror Darkly

[truemane]

[M20] FAR FROM ANY ROAD
PART ONE: A Mirror, Darkly

Haduin sat all day in the street outside the gates of the temple.
His student called out, 'Master, master why don't you enter?'
Haduin looked up, confused. "Enter? It is you who is outside."

]

The city of Jacksonville, Florida is a very strange place.

First of all, it is huge, but empty. It is the largest city in North America by a fair margin, the population doesn't even break the top ten. The result is a vast creeping tumour of a city sprawling into the forest and swamps without end but, once outside the downtown core, it seems almost entirely like windswept space with isolated pockets of humanity dotted here and there.

Second, it is chaotic: a patchwork of neighbourhoods, suburbs, and townships swept up and annexed into a single ill-fitting and dysfunctional amalgamation of communities.

Third, it is divided and insular. The downtown core contains almost all of the industry of the commerce, and yet is rife with poverty and crime. The wealthy rural communities provide the tax base that is overwhelmingly consumed by the urban centre.

Fourth, beneath the mundane surface, it is a place of deep magic, of powerful convictions, and of multiple competing paradigms that can flip and shift from block to block, street to street, sometimes house to house. There are magical communities in Jacksonville dating from before colonization, and there are cabals that rolled into town last year, all of them deeply separated by tradition and paradigm and geography.

Jacksonville is placid on the surface, but the air is always prickling with tension. Every sunny day is pregnant with menace like a viper sunning itself on a rock. Every cool summer breeze carries the hint of blood and fear. There always seems to be screams, gunshots, crashes, drifting through the air from far far away.

Picture this now: a lonely street lined with vacant lots and shuttered storefronts, meandering through the deepest reaches of Jacksonville where the sprawl breaks against the dark verdant wedge of bayou between Oakleaf and Middleberg. It is the dog days of summer and the heat chokes the city in a suffocating fog. The street is dark and empty in the wee hours of the morning. But in that darkness: a bloom of light. Set back from the road, atop a small hill, a ragged sagging dive bar. It is a sad beacon in an ocean of silence. A bare half-dozen patrons sit within, nursing drinks and greasy foods in sullen silence.

All of creation brims with wonder. It is both the triumph and the tragedy and of the human experience that we blind ourselves to it with the mundanity of the everyday. These six or seven men are about to stand witness to something wondrous, something so unprecedented it is basically impossible.

Like a million dice all coming up six, like a third-stringer pitching back-to-back no-hitters for a week, like someone winning every lottery in the state on the same day, like a million monkeys sitting down to a million typewriters and each and every of them instantly producing the complete works of Shakespeare.

They will see but they will not understand. They will know but they will not learn.

With the creak of wood long-since swollen out of its frame, the door opens...

Spoiler

Show

It took a long, long time to get here, but welcome to Far From Any Road! In your opening post, please let us know what it looked like when you were waylaid and trapped here. Where you were headed, why it was important, what coincidences dropped you here. You may, if you wish, have already tried and failed to leave, but this scene is assumed to be the moment when you realized you're trapped, looked up, and this was seemingly the only light for miles.

A note on the setting: while I will be keeping the main features intact, I plan to playing very fast and loose with the specific layout and geography of Jacksonville, to make the story what we need. Feel free to play equally fast and loose when you need to.

Any questions, you know where I am.

[ShadowImmor]

Tai entered the bar. His red and yellow robes flowing around him, with one arm out to allow him to keep cool. He looks around the bar and sighs. Another stop on this apparently never ending journey out of the city of Jacksonville.

He sits at the bar, and in heavily accented English asks for a glass of water. The barkeep brings it over and the monk sits down at the bar and begins drinking. Thinking back to the how he got stuck here.

The barkeep notices his look, that comes across as partly exasperated and partly down on his luck.

"What's up fella?"

The monk looks up.

"My bus... broke down. I am trying to get to my friends' funeral... but with no bus to take me. Makes for difficult journey." He sighs. "I need to get out of this town, but there is no way." He rubs his bald head for a moment, sipping his water. "It feels like I am trapped here. No escape, but I do not yet understand why. After the first bus broke down, the replacement driver got ill. Then the next driver simply didn't turn up. No trains, only buses. But it was last bus, and now it's not running. So I am here. Waiting a night and a day before I try to leave tomorrow."

He takes a deep breath as if steadying himself.

"Is not a good time. I must help my friends move back into samsara, otherwise they will be lost."

The monk looks saddened, but says no more for now.

[Continental Op]

Adrian Lewis was typically a patient man, but this day would have tried anyone. Twelve hours previously, with news that his chantry was in danger from outside (and supernatural) forces, Adrian booked the first flight back from Italy to the Vermont countryside where his cabal resided. A change-over in Atlanta was necessary, perhaps even expected. What was NOT expected was the plane diverting to Jacksonville (how was the plane even closer to Jacksonville than Atlanta?!) because of another passenger's illness. Then the flight was cancelled, with no reason given; then no other flights were available anywhere close to Vermont.

Adrian tried to call Miranda, the second-in-command, but her phone went straight to voicemail. The landline at the chantry was more ominous, with its steady, jarring pulse of a busy (or out of order?) phone. This was intolerable. Once Adrian Lewis makes a decision, he wants to see it done and rarely deviates from plan. Only once in recent memory had he been stymied in such a way.

Adrian's evening brightened when he found a private plane for rent, at another runway located just outside of Jacksonville. But then on the way, his Uber driver's car sputtered and died. Adrian clenched first his fist, then his jaw in frustration. "This should NOT be happening to me," he thought. "God grant me patience," he whispered to himself, as the hapless Uber driver tried to restart his vehicle.

Adrian could see God's...or something darker's...will in play. He looked outside the vehicle, and saw the sole light of the bar. "You will not be able to start your vehicle," he told the driver in his startlingly deep and rich voice. "But I will be in that bar if you do."

Adrian then briskly left the sputtering Ford Focus and walked to the bar door, stepping into the light of the tavern and surveying its inhabitants like a warlord sizing up his band before a battle. Or maybe more like a king trying to find the fly in his soup. Adrian--with his crisp, three-piece grey suit and manicured beard--clearly was not a regular patron of such an establishment. But then again, neither was the monk with his red and yellow robes.

Adrian walks up to the monk and clears his throat to get the monk's attention. "Are you the reason I am here and apparently cannot leave?"