The Showdown, pt 5
Yes, it was a good time to flex his art
Previously: Astra fights her way to Crowley.
○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, Brooklyn
Yikes! Lenny ducked as the rifleman took a shot at him. Thankfully the man was soon overwhelmed due to a surge of leftists. Hm, where did that come from? Ah, some impressive wizardry by a tattoo’d Heathen in a Kali mask (who was she?). Lenny saw a Heathen next to her get wrenched in the face. And then the riot police arrived and were shooting rubber bullets. Hmm. From his vantage point atop the truck, Lenny judged that the violence had gotten a bit “OD.” Not that he was opposed to violence…it was just that once people got so conflictually embroiled, they were much harder to unshackle.
Yes, it was a good time to flex his art. What would make this situation utterly spectacular? Oh, he had it, yes, haha – that would be funny…yes!
St. Lenny put out the signal through the Mythos. His Heathens saw it as the Prince’s crest – two stag horns in the sky, luminous like a Bat Signal. Yes, it was time!
Across the skirmish, his Heathens lit fuses. Then, at the last moment, they tossed their flour-bombs into the air.
Both sides of the fray startled as white fog exploded outward all around them. Then the air was a thick white – perfect conditions for magic to take hold. The outer senses needed to be dulled for the inner senses to shine.
Into this powdery expanse, St. Lenny poured his art: First, he gathered mana from his Heathens in the crowd. Next, he found each side’s mental projection of the other. Then, like light through film, he extruded these projections into the space above their heads. Two titans took shape in the air, as massive as stormfronts.
Over the side of the police, there grew a flat nose with two nostrils. Then there were two floppy ears. And topping it off, a blue hat with a gleaming insignia. A big pig in a cop hat!
Across from it, over the leftists, a form sprouted whiskers and hair, and wore an hoodie emblazened with a sharp, red “A.” A nasty, dastardly anarchist rat! How about a few further embellishments? St. Lenny searched through further caricatures from the rightwing mind – haha, yes! – a totebag formed over the rat’s shoulder and a streak of pink-dyed hair sprouted between its ears. Finally, it began to twerk.
For a finishing touch, Lenny made them both flagbearers: the pig’s flag, black, white, and blue; the rat’s flagm every color of the rainbow, plus a communist sickle.
Members of both sides sounded in either merriment or outrage, depending which titan they were focusing on. Eventually it all turned into mutual taunting, which once again turned into mutual violence. But then something funny happened. As the leftists pressed forward, the giant rat squeaked and nipped at the pig. As the police smashed the leftists back, the pig squealed and smacked the rat with a nightstick. The two sides paused again, bewildered. The titans paused in kind.
No one could decide what to do. The situation was too absurd. St. Lenny clapped and rubbed his hands together in delight. A giggling spread throughout the Heathens in the crowd. The ones disguised as either side began to snort or squeak at one another from across the front line.
It was all going very splendidly, just as unplanned. And then the man got out of the black SUV.
The man climbed atop his vehicle, facing Lenny from the opposite side of the fray. He was covered in lots of little…spikes? The man waved. Hm. Lenny wondered if he knew this fellow. Rather than tire his eyes out, Lenny tuned into his Heathens to piece together a visual image. The man was blonde, brawny, and covered in lots of little cylinders. His eyes were an arrogant, penetrating blue. Oh dear! This man was IPO. Human Resources. But primarily this man was Alex Rakovsky, St. Lenny’s favorite enemy in the war for humanity’s soul.
Alexei Rakovsky was not like the other clippers. Yes, well, like all clippers he had a similarly idiotic obsession with control and optimization, and, yes, he was also was a remorseless psychopath, but at the same time he was…playful! And Lenny loved to play, even if his playdates with Alexei occasionally left him with a broken bone here or a nasty scar there. Things were about to get very playful–– Oh, but what was this now?
A third giant, unprovoked by St. Lenny’s magic, took form. It was luminous with four-paws and black-spots. A gargantuan hyena wearing a human mask, summoned by Alexei. Lenny was about to laugh – after all it was a good joke – when the hyena fixed its eyes on Lenny from behind its mask. The Heathens in the crowd also turned, dissolving their disguises.
Lenny found himself staring at a sea of masks. Uh oh.
—
Alexei smiled, waving at Lenny while re-prioritizing his objectives:
Astra: impel her toward next evolution (with the unwilling help of Crowley)
Human Resources: acquire new talent (he counted at least three targets, including Lenny)
Domestication: tame a new “demon” or two
If Alexei was lucky, he might accomplish all three objectives. If he was unlucky, well, he would learn a lot, as he always did from conflicts with Astra and Lenny. In particular, he was excited to learn the capabilities of his amplification suit. So he went to work, taking control of St. Lenny’s psychofaun (or––what would the Heathens call it––right: an “egregore”).
All psychofauna were basically the same. If you figured out what they wanted, and you could give the psychofauna what they wanted better than the next guy, then they would hand you their reigns. The interesting part was figuring out how to manipulate the specific structure of their belief systems.
Alexei had, of course, been tracking this particular psychofaun – the Heathens – since the early days of the Opening. The memetic maps created by another one of Alexei’s targets had been of great help in understanding these Heathens and their emerging Freedom movement. With great pleasure, Alexei thought how he would one day tame the whole Freedom movement and add it to his “goetia,” his growing collection of ”demons.” He loved learning little terms like this. He gathered them from the Heathens that he held in quarantine…or what he liked to call “the talent pen.” (Alexei had started inventing little terms of his own.)
Armed with knowledge, Alexei went ahead and tapped into the Heathens’ belief system. He probed its members amongst the crowd (many were disguised but their group had a distinct neural signature). Then he felt their psychofaun snap its attention toward him. Its members began to notice Alexei standing atop the SUV.
Hands balled into fists. He was a “turboclipper” after all. He tracked a beautiful bit of swarm behavior: without any top-down command, the Heathens were consciously adjusting their individual positions to prepare an assault. They would start with breaking the line of riot police and end with Alexei in their grasps. It was like watching an ant hive rally for battle.
But before their assault could form, Alexei cast their intentions into doubt: The Heathens were here to “re-enchant the world” – weren’t they? They wanted to make the world wild again with myths, magic, animal spirits etc etc. But wasn’t it a contradiction to swing this banner of freedom being while directed by some prince or saint?
Alexei asked the group mind: What could be less wild than to have St. Lenny standing over them, conducting them like a symphony? And, more, what if this battle between the Heathens and the so-called “Algorithm” was a distraction from the great game of directly enchanting reality now. Alexei could give the Heathens what they truly wanted: a realm of their own, total freedom, leaderless freedom. Alexei showed his hand: the promise was real! For now, the Heathens just needed to do one thing in exchange: liberate themselves from the maniacal sorcercer who kept them on a leash.
Normally this sort of thing would not have worked. Psychofauna had rigid category systems, so once you were identified as an enemy, they would tend to see all of your promises as untrustworthy – even if they were genuine. However, this was not a normal circumstance: Alexei had his special suit on.
The array of electrodes across Alexei’s scalp and body read his neurological activity. Then the cylinders across Alexei’s suit began to hum, amplifying his mind. Any resistance that the Heathens had to Alexei’s promise was overwritten by power of his suit’s signal.
And so the Heathen psychofaun accepted his offer.
As an homage to St. Lenny, his second most competent enemy, Alexei copied Lenny’s trick: a giant hyena with a human mask grew next to the other two hallucinatory goliaths. This one was synchronized to the actions of the Heathen swarm.
The hyena raised an accusing paw. The masks in the crowd raised accusing fingers, as if they were puppets on the hyena’s strings. The hyena growled down at Lenny. The Heathens booed him. Then the creature shook off its mask and lunged after him. Several dozen Heathens followed, abandoning the battle to hunt their former champion.
Alexei took a quick break from that to turn to other business: Astra and Crowley. He had given about 40% odds that the two would assault him directly. He’d been prepared for that, but it hadn’t happened. He supposed they were too smart to believe they had a chance against his suit and three inflamed psychofauna. So…where were they?
Alexei was already trained on both their neural signatures, so his suit should have little problem finding their signal amidst the noise, despite any disguises they might be wearing. He scanned the warring crowds – there was no sign of them. Alexei turned, orienting with suit and psi.
Now he picked up their neural signatures but didn’t see them anywhere. Oh: Alexei thought a command. His headset picked it up. It would disable any “invisibility spells” – as the Heathens would call it. (He and Astra had worked on triggering inattentional blindness a few days before they spread the Psi variant.) There: now Astra and Crowley appeared directly in Alexei’s line-of-sight, dodging between immobile vehicles.
Alexei took control of the two other mobs: the police and leftist factions. These two psychofauna were even easier to persuade. Alexei simply leaked the truth: these two individuals were responsible for the current state of the world. They had spent ten years engineering a retrovirus and one day spreading it all around the world. Any deaths of loved ones that had resulted, any losses of jobs due to inability to focus amidst the mental noise, any periods of mass psychosis, etc, were the fault of the woman with fading blue hair and the older guy next to her. The giant pig and rat floating above them aimed themselves toward Astra and Crowley’s fleeing forms.
Now fetch, Alexei commanded. The two beasts sprung forth. The two mobs were carried with them, now united in their anger toward a common enemy.
Astra and Crowley quit their dodging between cars to break into an open run.
Next release: The showdown comes to an end.