(no subject)

[gone_byebye]

September 1st, 2004
Mid-Afternoon
14 North Moore Street, Manhattan

A door opened in the side of the old Hook and Ladder No. 8 building, and two men stepped out. "Looks like home," Ray said, looking up with a slightly disgruntled expression at the huge ad for Keymaster Cologne painted on the side of a nearby building. "Welcome to New York City, sir. Pardon the smell- while we do have a police stable across the street from us, most of what's hitting your nostrils right now is the wonderful scent of burning petroleum, which we use to power our primary means of transportation. If you'll just step right this way..."

Comments

[not-oswald.livejournal.com]

"The radical drop in spiritual prevalence across the planet since the Elizabethan period's been a topic of discussion for scholars in the field for some time, yes," Egon acknowledges. "There've been a number of theories put forth to explain why the available data look the way they do, but none of them entirely explain how it happened. I have some trouble believing that it could be entirely due to shifts in human beliefs alone; if it were solely a matter of what the majority of human beings believed possible, the entire world would be inundated by Chinese and Indian spirit beings even now. Has the process already begun in your time, or are you inquiring about it for your own reference's sake?"

[ilducasaggio.livejournal.com]

Prospero shakes his head. "You've touched upon the crux of it, Ser Spengler--there were sufficient sprites and pixies and hobgoblins of the hill for me to study happily till the end of my natural days, in my youth, and they did not diminish in quantity nor quality, I presume, after I passed out of that realm. Furthermore, I am reminded that there are certain wonders and marvels that exist independent of mortal belief that should survive, and yet do not. Simplicity, as Ser Stantz recalled to my attention earlier, is a powerful fierce force, even if it has no natural composition of which to speak, and simplicity dictates that if creatures which required mortal belief for sustenance and those which did not alike no longer inhabit your time in the profundity which they did mine, something--or someone--must have driven then hence.

"As I say, I recall quite vividly the presence of fae and gnome alike. They were hardly scarce. Whatever incident transpired to dam up the flow of the supernatural and those creatures that are qualified as such, therefore, must have come about after I left. A window of four centuries' time. A mere mote in the eye, when we consider beings immortal and spells of epic duration."

[not-oswald.livejournal.com]

A small gleam touches Egon's eyes; this is the kind of conversation he rarely gets around the Firehouse. Oh, there's Ray, but it isn't really the same when you and the person you're talking to think so closely alike that you don't even need to use complete sentences to communicate.

"Indeed," he says, looking around for a place to sit and finding only Janine's chair and the edge of her desk. The chair is offered to Prospero; Egon perches on the edge of the desk, and Ray on Ecto's hood. "We've never been able to pinpoint the true beginning of the waning, mostly because the records that've been handed down to us since that time aren't anything like complete. Some of the purges that occurred in the more paranoid governments and churches over the course of those years destroyed completely irreplaceable knowledge to a degree that nearly matches the fate of the library at Alexandria. By the time the English colonies were founded on this continent in earnest, though, supernatural activity had definitely dropped off- the so-called 'witch trials' at Salem were almost universally acknowledged within five years as the result of cynical manipulation of local beliefs about the nature of witchcraft, nothing more than a grab for the 'guilty' parties' lands and properties. That was 1692. The colonial records sent back to England make no mention of successful finds of supernatural beings, either. If spirit activity was still as prevalent as you say during your time, then we have a window of less than a century in which the balance was critically tipped."

[ilducasaggio.livejournal.com]

Prospero takes the seat, then listens eagerly as Egon elaborates. "A century," he says, more than a little shocked, when Egon's done. "Some of the greater bindings require as much, invocations handed down from father to son to grandson and so on down the line. A mere pittance." He leans back, then, and tilts his head, as though he were working a particularly irritating cavity at the back of his mouth. "--Ahh, forgive me for digressing, but, witch trials?" There's definitely...something, lurking beneath the surface of Prospero's even, civilized tone.

[not-oswald.livejournal.com]

Ray leans back on Ecto's hood, knowing the sound of a coiled spring when he heard it.

Possibly from two directions; the glitter in Egon's eyes has taken on a distinctly ugly cast. "Salem, Massachusetts. From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft; dozens languished in jail for months without trials until the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts subsided. All of it was touched off in February of that year, when a girl named Betty Parris developed what your time called the falling sickness- epilepsy- and other girls of her age started developing similar symptoms. At the time the religious leaders of the colony thought it was the Christian Devil at work through the hands of an African slave woman named Tituba. When the affected girls started accusing people in the colony of having sent specters to attack them, the hunt widened, and the accusations flew. The whole village took to accusing anyone who had slighted them of being in league with the powers of darkness. It wasn't until autumn of 1692 that the standards of evidence were strengthened, requiring that real proof and not mere claims of spectral visitation or the 'touch test' from the accused be admitted in the courts. Once that happened, the trials stopped, and by spring of 1693, all the accused and convicted left alive were released from prison unconditionally."

"It was nothing but religious fanaticism, personal greed, and neighborhood envy all wrapped up under the guise of belief in witchcraft, and before the century turned, it was admitted to be so. And people ask me why I have very little faith in this country's so-called Puritan roots."

[ilducasaggio.livejournal.com]

Prospero's quiet for a while. He makes to lean forward against his staff, but, when he realizes he doesn't have it in hand, he settles for bracing his elbows against his thighs and setting his chin to rest atop his knuckles.

"There was a witch I knew, once," be says, at some length, "dark and terrible and full of the spite of the sea. I made war with her, and then with the goddess she served. It cost me no little amount of myself to emerge, triumphant, implacable and swift in rage as she was. She could command the moon to dance a jig upon its perch in the sky, and there were bindings given to her that were never recorded in aught my books and tomes. This is a witch, aye, not some girl-child still making calf-eyes at pretty young boys.

"To think that--mmm, no, I cannot say that I do not understand, as accusations of the wasting disease are bandied about and deployed for similarly perverse ends in the cities to the north and the west. Men will do terrible things for a choice tract of land or a room with a view of some fine mountain range. Sin remains contagious, it would seem--solely amidst those who would proclaim against its dissemination."

[not-oswald.livejournal.com]

Egon nods, once.

"No true witch would've stooped to such petty, idiotic feats as the people of Salem believed. It's worth noting that when the leader of the Salem idiocy was replaced on order of the colonial governor, he claimed he'd been removed just as he was on the verge of ridding the colony of witches completely. And that the preacher most keenly responsible for whipping up the hysteria in the congregation never once apologized or admitted that he might possibly have been in error, either. Charming, isn't it?"

Ray coughs lightly. "Uh, Spengs... can we save the dissertation on human fallibility for later? We're here for a reason."

"Given that the events of Salem revealed a level of ignorance of the true nature of witchcraft that could only come from years without any kind of exposure to the real thing, this is still relevant." He slides his glasses up his nose a little further. "Let's allow a twenty-year time gap between the trials and the last possible incidence of real witchcraft in either colonial America or England; that's about enough time for pure ignorance to have overwhelmed any youthful exposure the witch hunters may have had to the truth. 1672 becomes our barrier year."

[ilducasaggio.livejournal.com]

The topic of prejudice and human sin is indeed interesting, and certainly Egon's an engaging conversational partner, but Ray's right--they came here with a clear purpose in mind.

"A barrier, yes, as I had said to Master Ray previously. However, I should like to amend that 1672 and thereabouts is perhaps not when such a thing were constructed, but rather, the upper threshold, against which it becomes unfeasible that it should have gone up any later. I departed from this realm for the place in-between in the year 1603, and by certes, the art was strong enough to propel me to the end of all days when I left. Therefore, we must consider a gap of some sixty-nine years, give or take."

[not-oswald.livejournal.com]

"By 'barrier year' I meant the last year possible in which the change in existence could've been accomplished. Sorry I wasn't clear enough there." Egon leans back on the desk and starts rooting around in one of the drawers as he speaks. "Which leaves us, as you said, with sixty-nine years at the very most in which to work. Ray, I still have that copy of Spates you gave me, but I haven't figured out the index yet."

"You've gotta be kidding me. You?"

"The index is nine hundred pages long."

"Point."

Egon looks to Prospero and notes, "Ray brought back a book from Milliways that was as close to up-to-date as it's possible to get when you're standing at the end of all days, as you put it. It's the last printed edition of one of our preferred reference volumes, the Spates Catalog of Otherworldly Denizens and Designations. Unfortunately, it's over twenty-two thousand pages long. It would most likely be easier to search for evidence of the drop-off we're looking for in our other books, or in some of the books in the parapsychology, history, and anthropology departments of the local universities, and work backwards from there."

[ilducasaggio.livejournal.com]

"Ahh, of course, of course." A smile gentles Prospero's face. "It has, mmm, it has been some time since I engaged in theory that challenged me so; I imagine that I am somewhat addled by disuse, so please, mmm, forgive my miscomprehension."

He gawks, then, as Egon describes the book in question. "I am in accord," he says, a little dazedly, "that perhaps it should not be the primary resource in our inquiry. Were we in my own native time, I would conjure up an information elemental and set it to the task of scouring that behemoth tome for pertinent information, but I rather suspect that there are precious few of those remaining, if any at all. Let us turn page, then--though I suggest that before we start in earnest, we draft an outline of what precisely qualifies as indication of a waning of ambient thaumic energies. And, if this is indeed a worldwide phenomena, perhaps we'd also best be on the look-out for cross-references with non-European cultures and civilizations."

[not-oswald.livejournal.com]

"Nothing to forgive," says Egon. "The fault was mine. Dr. Stantz and I understand each other well enough that we rarely have to use complete sentences when discussing abstract concepts. It's more efficient for us, but a sloppy speech habit when someone else is involved."

The corners of his mouth twitch in the closest he ever gets to a smile. "If information elementals exist, they've probably been pressed into electronic service somewhere. Not that I would mind having access to such a spirit. For now, though, the library's upstairs; I can get us access to Columbia's full collection with two phone calls. I don't suppose there's any chance you read the Chinese language? The Museum of the Chinese in the Americas maintains a much bigger collection of books and lore than the general public ever knows about, and they're nearby."