Nano Day 15 - Trippin the Vortex - working title

[joegoda]

For Capi and the others, cuz it ain't done yet.


I didn't really want to go to Reno, for a variety of reasons. I wasn't sure I wanted to meet Angelina's brother. He was starting to bug me, as all of Angelina's family was. How did he get a full day ahead of me, when I've been driving almost constantly? Maybe he didn't stop when I took my break in Montrose? I didn't have an answer for that.

I was tempted to turn somewhere not near Reno and head North. Not that it would shake any one that had decided to follow me. Apparently I could be found regardless, or else they would just wait for me somewhere they knew I was going. I hate being predictable, though I knew that I was, and I know that I always will be. It's the sort of personality I am where, regardless of what I may do, I stay pretty much myself. And if you know me, then you can figure what I'll do given a set of circumstances. My best friends know that all they have to do to challenge me is to tell me that what I'm attempting is impossible. Frankly, I don't think the impossible exists in the realm of imagination. Merely the improbable. If it's impossible, then it should not be possible to imagine it.

It doesn't mean that something like your wildest imaginings would suddenly appear. I mean, they might, but it would be highly improbably for some of them, I would bet. And I suspect it would be a safe bet to bet.

Reno just seems to me to have a slightly nasty feel to it, and I've never been there. Just the image in my mind is enough. Yes, I'm running on preconceived ideas. I might be wrong. Somehow, though, every town I've been in that I didn't feel right about always proved me right. St. Louis is one of those towns. And there's a story there that isn't for here.

Granted, it has me curious, and I'd love to go there just to get a feel for the place. But I want to do it when I'm rested. I want to do it when I'm ready. And I want to do it when I'm not towing Sister Firestarter to meet her brother, the Traveling Wizard.

Right then, however, I was more concerned with getting to Winnemucca or Elko before it got too late. My bet was on Elko, though. It was just after three pm, and it was another six plus hours to Elko. Winnemucca was another two, maybe three hours after that. Well, it all depended on how tired I would be. Nine pm to Elko, eleven or so to Winnemucca. Why was I so hip on Winnemucca? Because of the name. Winnemucca just had the sort of sound that I just had to go see what it was all about. Elko... well, that just sounded like somewhere you get your tires changed and a cup of bad coffee. Names have power. Names have significance.

Oh yeah. And there was this invisible... thing behind me. That is something I would have to deal with eventually. Either that, or have whoever or whatever it was on my tail the whole way to Oregon. My suspicion was that it was the red car, or somebody similar. How did they get invisible? I didn't really care. I had theories, or hypothesis, but so what? That did not feed the bulldog.

Angelina had that concerned look on her face whenever I glanced at her, between watching the road and checking to see if the invisible man was behind us. Her want line was very deep and she looked to be in deep, deep concentration. She didn't even notice me watching her, and she always seemed to notice that. I couldn't tell if I was hurt or just worried.

This situation was just getting more and more strange. I was suspecting more and more that Angelina knew more than she was telling. And of course that's the way it is with everyone. We all have our secrets. I suspect her secrets were just a bit larger, deeper and weirder than mine. Maybe. I have some pretty weird secrets.

Angelina's secrets, though seemed to rely upon her family. She had a mother that could find her, and me, regardless of us not wanting to be found. The fact that she was capable of using a seeking eye from hundreds of miles away and use it to communicate was astounding to me. She was not your garden variety human being, her mother. And her father? What had she told me about him? That he was a tough business man who went a way for long periods of time and took her brothers along as muscle. If this was true, why had Daniel come looking for her? Why was he waiting in Las Vegas, New Mexico for her, when her father and, apparently, her mother thought she had been kidnapped. This was the beginning of the questions, with more that I didn't even know that I hadn't asked yet.

Who the hell were these people? What sort of game were they playing?

Damn magicians. I had a run in once, with a real magician. It was my second year in college and apparently I had pissed of some black wearing pre-goth. Pre-goth because it was before goth was cool, which tells how long ago it was. I probably pissed him off by talking to his girl or maybe his guy or who knows. I talked to everyone. I'm just that sort of person.

At that time in my life, I was a fairly innocent, star watching, night walking dreamer who had barely scratched the concept of what an unfettered mind could do. Heck, I the most I had ever done was push clouds around and shove some rain to where it would do the most good, which was generally not on me. I even had a full head of hair. Yeah, I was just a kid.

I don't even know the name of the person that I ticked off. All I know is that one night, walking through the streets of Miami, where I was going to school at Miami A&M, I got the feeling I was being watched. It wasn't that good feeling of being watched, either. It was the sort of feeling you get when you know that there are worse things then teeth. There are things with teeth that know how to use them.

I do not believe in demons, as in demons from Hell. I don't even believe in Hell. I don't believe in the eternal, infernal damnation of my immortal soul by a God. I do believe that I can damn my own soul, and I do believe that humans can conjure up demons of their own creation.

And so, I found myself walking down the street, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck and the back of my... er... back standing on end. I felt myself grow very cold and I felt my feet wanting to run, run, run. The rest of my body decided that it would very simply not. Not move.

Yep, I was scared pretty much shitless. I think I could have handled a mugger, someone that was definitely human and someone that I could either sucker punch or run the heck away from. But this was worse than a human. This was just a feeling, pervasive and very, very scary.

That fear lasted just as long as it took the demon to jump out of the shadows at me. Forget the image of the red demon with the pitchfork and tail. This was black, midnight black cat black. Where there wasn't black, there was teeth and claws and eyes. It was as if a shadow decided to go on a midnight mauling.

And here's one of my weird secrets. There is more than one of me. I have, in the past, been diagnosed as having what is called a 'fragmented' personality. That means that, while I had multiple personalities, they were aware of each other and could even communicate with each other and my consciousness.

I had seven distinctive personalities, and whenever I needed the abilities of one over the other, I'd just let me, the me that is the everyday me, fade to the back seat and someone else could drive the body for a while.

Six of my personalities were defined by me as The writer, The actor, the old man, the woman, the warrior and the fool. All of them, combined, created me, the core personality. And there was a seventh. I called him Anger, because that is exactly what he was. The pure condensed anger of all that my screwed up life had deposited in me come to life.

It was about ten years later when all six of these personalities integrated and suddenly my mind became very quiet and very empty and very, very lonely. Of course, Anger was still around. For some reason, the other personalities didn't let Anger join them in the reindeer games of my mind. Consequently, I was very angry, for a very long time. To be honest, even once anger faded and I got control of my emotions, I could and still do feel him sitting very small, in a place I can't reach yet. Probably just as well. Some anger is a good thing used in the right places. I guess the best that could be said is that my anger and I came to an agreement.

But back then, back in college, faced with something incredibly frightening, my core disappeared and I became one of the other members came forward. It wasn't the warrior, there wasn't any sort of war or fighting that occurred. It was more... um... literary.

I did something with my mind, something that formed an image of a sigil in my mind. I had no idea, at that time, of what a sigil was. I had no idea what it was used for. I just know that I did it. I could feel it in my mind, a sort of reverse spiral, glowing white and hot in my brain. I could feel it as it reached out and snapped at the demon, wrapping itself around the demon and squeezing as hard as it could.

There wasn't much more to it. Just as suddenly as it started, it ended. The white hot image disappeared from my mind, and the demon in front of me popped out of existence. A quiet voice whispered in my mind telling me that what had happened was called a demon killer. It also told me that the one that had sent the demon against me was going to be visited by his own. And that was all the voice told me.

The quiet voice was my own, of course. The creator of the demon killer? I had no idea. Where the concept had come from? Also no idea. Rather frightening to think that I had that person inside of me, and was not even aware of it. Though I did have an idea where it had come from.

When I was a much smaller boy, about twelve, and having just moved from the corn fields of Indiana to the dry heat of Indian Country, I used to do my mediation out in a small wooded area nearby. I would go out there every day that it was possible to go, and I would sit, Zazen, which for me meant half Indian-style, with my legs crossed and one foot on top of one of my thighs. I would just sit and quiet my mind, reaching for the spot between the thoughts, and then reaching for the spot between the thoughts. It wasn't really concentrating on being there. It was being there and just being there a little bit more.

One day, a quiet sunny day when the clouds were fluffy and the wind was light and the smell of spring had just passed into the smell of summer, I was sitting quiet and just being. Out of the wood, and floating along the path toward me, was a small golden globe. It floated up to me and just sat there, hovering near.

Not even frightening, it was more just a curiosity. I reached out and let it float to my hand. I took it between my hands and just played with it, letting it shrink and grow as I will it to. At one point I even climbed inside of it's glow, just to see if I could. There was nothing to it, just a big or small globe made of nothing but golden light.

When it came time for me to go home, I took the globe and put it in the only place that seemed right to me. I simply absorbed it into me, and it seemed to slide right there as if it belonged there all the time, tucked neatly into my abdomen.

Now, there was, from that day forward, a change that came over me. It seemed the when I needed to know something, I knew it. When I needed a bit of energy to complete a deed, I was suddenly more energetic. And, I started to learn about levels of energy, the concepts behind karma and harmonic vibrations and the connectivity of everything that existed.

Come to think of it, it wasn't more than a few months later that I felt that 'hand of God' moment that I've already talked about. Huh. I never made that connection before.

Anyway, it wasn't until years later I found out that the globe was really the semi sentient repository of knowledge gathered for centuries by a group that called themselves the Guardians of Reality, a group that was dedicated to keeping what we simple humans call reality something sane. I've briefly mentioned them before, and I said I wouldn't say anything more about them. But this is where the globe came from.

It was passed to me because the previous owner had passed on. When a Guardian dies or ascends, their knowledge and experience joins the knowledge and experience already in the globe, which has become a part of them. Then, the globe detaches and goes looking for a suitable replacement. Not finding one, it found me. I was a suitable receptacle, which is very different than a suitable replacement, and I served until the globe found the person to whom it was supposed to go to.

It was a bit of a disappointment to learn that I wasn't a Guardian. Then again, I wasn't pure of heart, so that ruled me out right away. Also, I had no idea what the hell the thing was until AFTER it left me. That knowledge was the final gift of the globe. Lucky me. Still, while it was with me, it taught me a heck of a lot, and probably saved my bacon on more than one occasion. It was the globe that gave me the knowledge of how to make a demon killer. I reckon there's still untapped stuff I still haven't found out that I know, and I probably won't until I need it.

The story of the globe and who it eventually went to, and what all that is about is something that will probably go with me to my grave. Really. It's that important, and it's just that boring, as most truly important things are. You peel away the preconceived notions of what a thing is supposed to be, and really, it's just a drab job of keeping normal folks from finding out all the really insane things that are going one. The bummer part? No Guardian can be within three hundred miles or so of another, lest the two individualized and personal realities influence each other, thereby potentially causing as much damage as they were sworn to avoid in the first place. There's always a price, remember?

And what did that little back story have to do with me and my current position? Just this. I know that magic does in fact exist. I know that, contrary to my own personal feelings, it is not all parlor tricks and mirrors. I know that there are a very few, and I mean damn very few, people with large caliber mojo. The demon maker was a fluke, and probably a one trick pony. And because of that, they ended up very, very dead.

To use magic on a large scale you have to either be a person of incredible personal power, someone that call together a group of heavy hitters, or a God or Goddess. I use those terms very loosely. You have to understand, at a deep and fundamental level, the vibrations of the Universe and everything that it contains, and the interplay of those vibrations. Frankly, anyone that has the ability to toss a rock and have it melt into the ground... well, they might be a God. Maybe Shiva. More than likely Kali, though. She was a serious bitch. Shiva not only destroyed, he also created. Kali... well, Kali demanded blood sacrifices. Very icky.

At the time of my ride with Angelina, I was much older than those innocent days of walking down the streets of dear old Miami. I had seen stuff that should have turned my hair white, if I hadn't been bald. My life, from the time of the demon until the time I found myself on the road with Angelina being followed by an invisible something and traveling to the land of heavy hitters, had been largely living in avoidance of anything seriously connected to magic.

And so... there I was, having to deal with Wizards and Magicians and Lord knows what else. What you avoid, follows you, said the man.