The Product of Revenge
Game: Rites of Vengeance
More Info: RPG Geek Entry
My Teacher & The Location
He was just a connection to me at first. I was there for the package. I nodded to his musings, to let him think I was listening. Then I took what was mine and left for the long drive back to civilization.
He was thin, as can be expected from someone in the business of cooking. Older looking than his years, and strange of movement. His clothes were a mix of discarded items he stole from the Goodwill dropbox. Long dirty blonde curly hair held behind him with a series of rubber bands, giving it the look of a braid. He probably did this to protect his hair, his product, or both as he cooked. And he cooked constantly in his little isolated hut in the back of his forgotten sliver of Alaskan land. No neighbors to complain of the chemical smells that poured out, souring the fresh northern air.
But after everything in my life came crashing down, I started listening more as he sat at his computer. First thing to catch my ear was the GCP. It stood for the Global Consciousness Project. A crazy but real project that has found a connection between world events that grab everyone’s attention and disturbances in the measured randomness of random number generators. The day the two towers fell in New York, the randomness stopped being random.
“I run the same project here, on my land. That’s why I make this stuff,” he said, holding up the package I had come to buy. “It amplifies my ability to affect probability a million-fold. Maybe a billion.”
“Technomancy?” I ask. I got that word from a roleplaying game, Mage: The Ascension, that I had read in the 90s, but never played.
He smiled at that. Ugh, his teeth. “Yeah… I thought there was more to you than that snake you ride.”
Then he grew serious. “You take what I take. Have you seen anything… unusual?”
“Other than my house magically becoming empty?!” I blurted. The product has a raw, jagged edge that cuts inside and out. He reached out to soothe me, and I recoiled from his possible touch. The product does that to me, also.
“Ok, ok. But no, I mean do you see anything in the corners?”
I sat with that question. I knew exactly what that meant. On the internet, people that don’t sleep, like me… “They call them ‘shadow people,’ right?”
He just nodded at me for a good minute before blurting, “Let me teach you some stuff,” and turning to his computer. The first thing he showed me was a video recorded on one of the many cameras on his property.
I moved in with him soon after seeing the video and other recorded experiments he had conducted. Not planned, but the drive home and the emptiness there distracted me from learning. I left the empty house with my laptop and work equipment and headed south to his small ranch. The extreme weather in Fishhook was nearly unbearable, but the product kept me warm. But a coldness in my blood would not go away ever since I saw that video…
Of the demon.
One
9♣: You keep seeing your anger’s target in your vision’s periphery. What do they look like? How does this make you feel?
- Pull from the tower. ⊕
K♦: The Teacher grows more wild-eyed and unstable every day. If The Ritual’s strain breaks them, what do you fear they will do?
- Do not discard this card. Place it on the table.
4♦: The Teacher tells you about another time they performed The Ritual. What went wrong? What price did The Demon exact?
Q♥: Something in your preparations went wrong — what?
5♥: The Ritual demands absolute faith. What are your doubts?
- Pull from the tower. ⊕
4♥: You dream of The Ritual. Does it work? If not, what happens?
For weeks I poured over his notes and “experiments.” And we consumed more and more of his product.
“It’s almost right; it’s almost time,” he kept telling me.
One afternoon, I was looking around his empty stable and must have passed but stayed physically awake—like a blacked-out drunk still on his feet. The difference is I remember what happened. I started seeing my children in the “corners” where I had before seen human-shaped shadows while taking his product. My family, like the shadows, would disappear if I looked their way. It was a cruel game my mind played.
And then I hallucinated (I realized later) us performing the ritual he had been slowly leading up to. The person that stole my family from me was consumed by the demon in the video. My family came back. I rushed to greet them. I reached out to my children and the hallucination ceased. My teacher stood there just outside the stable.
I was confused. I looked back to where we had initiated the ritual but only saw the empty stable.
“You okay?”
“I… sure, yeah,” I muttered, still adjusting to reality versus the dream I was having. “Why do you have a stable, all this equipment, but no horse.”
“When I summoned the demon, I couldn’t control it. I gave it my horse, so it’d go back to… wherever. But next time, I know I can control it.”
After weeks of him tweaking (pun intended) the mixture, he made a batch that got us both sick.
“We’re ready to start the ritual,” he told me.
“No, we’re not. We’re poisoned,” I snap back at him, rubbing my throat. My lymph nodes were so swollen that my words were a croak. He’d done more of his own product over the last weeks than I’d ever thought a human could consume. He was out of control. I feared he would kill us both with the next toxic batch.
“You have to trust me for the magic to work,” he said, forcing himself to speak calmly.
“This isn’t magic!” I yelled at him. “This is just—”
“THINK OF A CARD!” He yelled in my face. I recoiled. But I thought of a card. The Jack of Hearts came to mind first.
He picked up a red thumbtack from the desk near us and whipped his arm in a blur.
“OK, now tell me your card.”
I did.
His house looked like it belonged to a serial killer. Or someone trying to find a serial killer… every wall was covered in some random nonsense. I had seen so many insane things in that house, they all blended together and faded into the background. But when he walked across the room, I saw the corkboard where he had taped an entire deck of cards in rows and columns. He tapped one a couple of times, so I took a few steps through the trash on the floor to look closer. Then I saw the red thumbtack embedded in it. One step closer in the dim room and I saw which one.
J♥
Two
1d6 = 1
6♣: What retribution did you attempt before this desperate magic?
He forced us to take a break from using the product and nourish our bodies before doing the ritual.
“Lots of simple foods—no meat, no protein,” he explained.
“What, like purify our bodies like Buddhists?”
“No,” he smiled slightly. “We’ve been eating so little the past weeks that our stomachs can’t digest anything but sugar and starches. We mainly need electrolytes.” He tapped the side of his head—wait, when did he shave his head?
“Most people don’t understand electricity. Brain, computer… both run on electricity. That’s how this all works.”
I stood there trying to make sense of it. Probably with the look of a dog, head tilted.
“Just drink your Gatorade.”
After enough food came sleep. Feeling normal again brought back the urge to pull the photo from my wallet.
A side effect of the product was it hid away your emotions. But looking at my wife and three children brought waves of sadness and remorse. I bawled like a baby, racking sorrow doubling me over.
I loved my children like no other love I’d ever known. A parent understands this. My wife understood this, especially. That’s why she pushed me and prodded me and threatened to leave with the children. She wanted me to snap.
She wanted to destroy me. I just wanted to stop her from taking the only things that mattered to me.
As a result, she got the bruises she needed to make it happen.
How can anyone want to kill someone’s heart—a heart that beats for the same children you love?
All over something stupid like the product I use to work hard day and night and make a better life for them. She never appreciated all I did for them. They belong with me.
I’m going to get them back. We start the ritual tomorrow.
Three
1d6 = 4
A♥ ”The Awakening”: For the first time, a shiver of dark power passes through you: The Awakening, The Ritual’s true beginning. The Awakening
manifests bodily. How did this transformation feel? Do you feel stronger or more afraid? What manifests? Where does it appear?
Do not discard this card. Place it beside the tower with D6+4 totems on it.
1d6+4 = 10 TOTEMS
- Pull from the tower. ⊕
J♥: The Ritual demands you harm another. Can you?
- Pull from the tower. ⊕
3♥: Something about The Ritual is giving you pause? What? Can you overcome it?
- If the A♥ is on the table, pull from the tower. ⊕
Remove totem roll = NO
“Now we connect to Sycamore and play the Game of Life,” he proclaimed.
He had already explained to me the key to the technomancy ritual is the quantum computer named “Sycamore.” A quantum computer brought unimaginable processing power. But an old video game?
“It’s a cellular automaton.”
“No idea,” I admitted. The product we had ingested was starting to kick in. My hair follicles felt like they were crackling with electricity.
“Never mind. Put this on and sit down,” he said.
He helped me put on a headband with an LED headlight attached. I sat at the computer, which displayed a grey grid that reminded me of Minesweeper. He turned on the headlight, first to white light, then red. He flipped the headlight down, so the red light covered my face. I saw my red reflection on the computer screen next to the words, “John Conway’s Game of Life.”
I felt ridiculous. It hit me all at once that I’m the plaything of a psycho and I’ve been wasting weeks getting spun with a cook, failing to get my work done, and copping a huge habit I may not be able to break. A cold watery wave of panic swept over me.
“Focus on what you want. Push aside your doubts and expect to get it. This isn’t a wish. This is a demand.”
Visualizing my three little ones, I pushed through the negative voices in my head. I imagined looking out from the balcony of our home, down to the backyard where they are playing. I saw the tops of their heads as they played and my wife’s disapproving face pops into view.
“OK,” he said. “Keep that in your head and click some grey squares. Make a pattern. Whatever comes to mind.”
I went with Jack of Hearts again. I drew a J and a heart shape.
“Click START.”
I did and the yellow blocks danced on the screen in patterns that moved around the screen. Then they started to settle. I saw three small shapes stabilize and stop moving. Then three blinking patterns stabilized.
“It’s like a cartoon image of what I just pictured,” I told him, my voice shaking. I pointed out the tops of their heads, the three small shapes. And the three blinking patterns formed my wife’s face.
“Yes, it’s working for you,” he said. “This is how it started for me. Not exactly, but—”
“What’s next,” I asked impatiently.
“Well, let’s take a break and—”
“NO!” I screamed as I turned to glare at him. I was huffing and puffing like I did that night I hit Janet.
He stared at me with shock, like he was afraid I was going to hit him.
I rubbed my eyes. Felt like I might have popped a blood vessel.
“Man, I… I gotta go cook.” He left jacketless out into the 20-degree night before I could respond.
I looked in the mirror, the red headlight still shining in my face. And somehow, I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. He taught me about the Kundalini, which translates from Sanskrit to “coiled snake.” He said its energy rests, dormant, coiled at the base of the spin. It lives in the red chakra—thus, the red light to call it forth.
I admired my new eyes in the mirror and felt exhilarated. AWAKENED. The pupils have elongated to an elliptical shape.
I’ve been riding the snake for weeks… Now I AM the snake.
The next morning, he returned without a word and showed me something on his phone. An obituary. It said that mathematician John Conway, the creator of the Game of Life, was dead.
“I did that,” I said plainly, and went back to running my Chaos Technomancy experiments…
Four
1d6 = 2
5♣: You have doubts about your path, is there anything your transgressor could do to make you abandon The Ritual? That they could do to give you peace?
- Pull from the tower. ⊕
K♠: The Demon senses your attempts at manipulation. How does it use its powers warning you to stop?
- Do not discard this card. Place it on the table.
Remove totem roll = NO
He had refused to give me more of the product until my eyes returned to normal. It never happened.
I stayed at the computer, eating box after box of candy, the only thing I could keep down. Eventually, the lack of sleep and desire for more product brought my emotions to the surface, like exposed nerve endings. I looked at the picture of my family again.
I don’t want to destroy Janet. I still love her. If only she would bring them back to me. But she won’t. My anger rises again. This is what has held me back—my feelings for her. There’s a part of me still clinging to a hopeless hope.
I make up my mind, and bring up the live GCP connection. I feed my anger and the desire to make her suffer and die and I see the point on the real-time graph rising. Probability is skewed off the charts. I hear a gasp from behind me.
“I’ve never seen it go that high,” he says—I’d forgotten he was even in the room.
“Dude, you need to stop whatever you’re doing.”
My breathing draws the serpent energy up, up higher. In through the nose, and out with a puff through my mouth. I’m building up for my strike at her. Across the wires, the wavelengths, I will crash reality down on her.
And then a shadow passes across my screen. The monitor goes black. Thunder rumbles outside, beyond the mountains.
Then quiet.
Then he whispers, “It’s coming.”
I smile to myself without turning to face him.
“GOOD.”
Five
1d6 = 5
A♣: How will you utilize The Demon’s powers to make your anger’s target suffer? What kind of curse or suffering do you wish to inflict as punishment for the tragedy?
- If The Teacher (Red Joker) is on the table, do not discard this card. Place it beside The Teacher. From now on when rolling to remove a totem, you succeed on a 5 or 6.
8♣: If The Demon offered peace instead of vengeance, would you accept? Could you?
If you could, remove a totem from The Awakening (A♥). Otherwise pull from the Tower. ⊗
GAME ENDS
Prologue
The cocky little shit bought it all. And then he actually bought it.
“It’s coming,” I whispered. And then WHACK! That was some cold-ass shit.
Hook, line, and sinker. The fake video off YouTube, the thumbtack trick, and the fake GCP page were just genius on my part, I must admit. The new age shit gets them every time. Stupid tweaker didn’t even try to look up the math guy—he died over a year ago.
I’m like the David Copperfield… no, no… the Ricky Jay of serial killers. But like the character he played in House of Games.
Fuck, that was sweet. Welp, time to go dig another hole under the stable.