zg_shadows | Choose your own Zeitgeist adventure! (Reply)

London. It stretches out beneath your little flat, muddy-grey in the dusk, the water moving sluggishly in odd whorls and ripples, like the fins of monsters moving beneath.

You've been here for over two years now, and in that time it's gone from bad to worse. You lost your girlfriend to the T-Virus. Half of your friends died in Camden. The university library flooded, and though the librarians worked round the clock to make sure few books were lost, nobody can find anything among the chaos of those that were saved.

Some people would have switched universities by now, but not you. And it's not just the paperwork, either; it would feel too much like failure. And you're too proud to give in.

But at times like tonight, looking out over the receding water, feeling the cold and damp rising into your barely-furnished flat... well, that just means it's time to get out for a bit.

You should go to the pub.

Or maybe study for tomorrow's exam.

"So I failed," you say with an uncaring demeanour. "That's cos I have a life." What red-blooded male could resist bragging about such a marathon, especially when the absence of the other participant allows for a bit of creative leeway? Who could resist the chance to brag that you're not only cleverer than them, you have more fun, too?

Someone who wants to keep their friends, that's who. Your attempts to justify your behaviour to yourself by convincing yourself that fun really is more important than study. result in a lot more failing marks. One by one, each of your friends learns better than to let you lead them astray.

After defiantly and dramatically failing your final exams, you wash up in a particularly dodgy pub, more than three sheets to the wind, slurring the story to the pretty barmaid in the drunken delusion that your self-identification as a sex god makes you irresistably attractive.

If the barmaid isn't interested in the story, however, some of the patrons are. After a long night's male bonding and an almost poetic description of your original lay, they're even more keen to find her again than you are. And what's more, they let you into the secret of a few substances that will guarantee a second night even better than the first.

They work, too. You slip one into the barmaid's drink, and she's sore and aching by the time she goes to work the next evening, with a smile on her face.

You run out of your supply without finding the first woman, but you don't really care about that anymore. These magic pills make any night memorable. They're more expensive than you can really afford, but your friends are willing to give you a discount if you're willing to save them some trouble by reselling for them. That's fine. Over time, you stop even needing them, which is worth even a few inconvenient side effects...

Two years later you are walking home from a deal, whistling a jaunty tune, when you are set upon by one of the packs of wild dogs that are rumoured to roam London's streets. Oddly, even as the lead dog tears out your throat, you are trying to place something familiar about its eyes.

You mutter something socially acceptable and then pretend to see someone you know in the further corner of the bar and back away. She grunts and turns back to the door, obviously dismissing you from her mind as you step away.

That's almost insulting.

You end up in the far corner, about as far away from the scrum at the bar as you can get. This is in the old smoking section, and still smells of stale cigarettes. The only other person in this corner is a shy-seeming girl; after talking to her a while, she tells you that she was one of the Camden survivors; she was indoors when the sandstorm hit, and now she's trying to get over her fear of going out. You have a lot of things in common; most of them the deaths of people you have cared for.

As the pub starts to close up, she gives you her phone number, and over the next few months you spend a lot of time with her. Neither of you is quite ready for a relationship; both of you could do with a friend.

It's Camden, of course, that's hardest for her. And when she finally decides she's ready to go back, you go with her.

You'd spent some time in Camden before the sandstorm. The new Camden is the same, but... different. More. You wander the stalls of bright and unusual clothes, toss pennies to the street magicians, become almost high with the buzz of wonder in the atmosphere.

You spend some time watching a woman paint a mural of swirling butterflies on the wall, intersecting perfectly at the eye of the storm in a set of clashing colours that seems to sum up everything you've been feeling.

As she packs up her brushes you step forward to talk to her.

But your friend tugs at your sleeve, and you move on.

The pub's packed. It usually is, these days; everyone's drawn in by the light and warmth and cheer. Especially those whose electricity hasn't been restored yet.

There's a woman by the bar with a clear space around her. She's beautiful, with a kind of movie-star beauty, but there's nothing movie-star about either the solid muscle that moves beneath her shirt as she lifts her drink, or the hair hacked off in a straight line at the back of her neck.

She turns around as you approach, and looks at you assessingly. "Buy me a drink?" she suggests, and the feral glint in her eye is like a shock of electricity at the base of your spine.

The sensible thing, you realise, would be to escape now.

Or, suggests a small, daredevil voice at the back of your mind, you could buy her a drink. (Don't worry, this is work-safe!)

You return to Camden a number of times over the next few months. Both you and your friend - who gradually, imperceptibly, becomes your girlfriend - love the place. More than once you even consider trying to help out with the Camden Rejuvenation Trust, but nobody ever seems to be around when you feel the impulse, and after thinking about it you decide that you don't have anything to offer except an ability to write bad poetry, and that's hardly likely to be in short supply.

The rest of London lurches from crisis to crisis, and your girlfriend becomes ever more nervous, ever more unwilling to set foot outside your door. You stick it out long enough to get your degree, but after that you both decide that enough is enough; better to be a live rat than a dead human going down with the sinking ship.

It's raining again as you take your seats near the front of the crowded coach out of London. There's a lot of your life in this city, and it feels strange to leave it all behind. But you turn to your girlfriend and she gives you a small, hopeful smile, and you know you're making the right decision.

The engine throbs to life and you set off, out from the rain clouds, into the light.

You study all hours until the final exams, and you feel you have a right to be proud of your 2:1, in the circumstances.

Or at least, that's how you feel until you find out how close you got to a first.

With a first, you could have applied for a PhD at Oxbridge. With a first, the academic world would have unfurled before you like the petals of a rose. But you don't have a first. That single, failing mark... and that damn woman who made it happen.

You send off your PhD applications anyway, with glowing letters of recommendation from your tutors, but it all seems a little flat in the post-Finals apathy. Even in the heat of summer your flat is cold and damp; there are rumours that the winter flooding penetrated so thoroughly that the mould will never go away. You feel the need to get out of the place, to somewhere with space, and sunlight, and blue skies.

And on Hampstead Heath, as the clouds that parted briefly return to cover the sun and veil the sky with rain, you see the woman again.

You're not sure at first, but when you shout the name she gave you she turns around, and it's hard to mistake that profile, that hair. She pauses, watching you assessingly as you run towards her, and the decision about what to do when you reach her is taken away from you as she boots you in the solar plexus.

As you struggle for breath, everything that has gone wrong in the last three years seems to crystallise into a single wave of fury, and your vision goes red.

You come to yourself again to find yourself pinned to the ground by a monstrous wolf-creature. Even as you draw breath to scream it turns back into a woman, but no matter how you scrabble for freedom she doesn't let you up.

Finally another man arrives, wearing a hat.

"All yours, Michael," she says as she stands up. You take advantage of the moment to try to run, but her finger stabs you somewhere beneath the ribs and you are on the grass again. The man sighs, then drops into a crouch before you and begins to explain.

Your academic career is, of course, fucked. You're never quite sure how Kayd manages to do his PhD; you only know that you can't.

Instead of reading stories of battles of old you fight your own, and they're a damn sight less fun as London continues its dance into destruction. You're tired all the time, running from fire to fire, from fight to fight, behind Jamie and Grey Fur and Sulien. And then behind Grey Fur and Sulien. And then behind Sulien alone. And by the time Sulien too dies, ripped apart in front of you, you're too tired even to care that you're next.

The night that follows is lost in an exhausted haze. Only fragments bubble up from some deep part of your memory over the next few days. A perfume that recalls her scent; a snapshot vision of her in the sodium light; a song that you think you dreamed she was humming as she left.

You fail the next day's exam, of course. Your mind was never really on the paper.

You've never failed an exam before. And when your friends, used to you acing tests while they struggle in your wake, ask you about the change, you prevaricate, caught between the urge to boast and the desire not to admit that you did anything so stupid.

"I don't need any help," she says. "If you want me to take you to the Trust, you can clean up those brushes for me first."

"Erm... right. OK," you say. She pushes a bottle of white spirit at you, and you look for something to pour it into. Your friend sighs, but stays with you as you wash the paint out of the bristles. After a few minutes she reaches for one of the brushes, obviously feeling that as she's here she ought to help, but the artist seems to have eyes in the back of her head, and stops her before she touches anything.

"That's his payment, not yours," she says incomprehensibly.

By this time you are convinced that the woman is insane, but it seems that she is at least insane and honest, as she leads you to the Trust headquarters.

Your shown into the waiting room, and after a while a man comes in. He glances over you both, and then his gaze fixes upon your increasingly long-suffering friend.

"Why don't you both come into my office for some tea," he invites you.

You wake up the next morning with only vague memories of what happened the previous day. At first you think the drink must have been spiked; but with your friend released from her long Forgetting, and your own increasing exposure to the Glamour that hard work is reinfusing into the very soul of Camden Town, you gradually come to understand the bright, wondrous, vicious dream of the Fae; well, as much as any mortal can.

You also come to understand that the dream is dying. Falling into nightmare, being tamed into a safe banality. There are few dreamers out there who aren't already the servants of another power; and although you are proud to be one of them, you alone cannot hold up the bright, fragile magic of Camden.

You and your friend - now your girlfriend - throw yourselves wholeheartedly into battle against the banality that has already claimed her once. You spend long hours covering Camden's walls in your literary efforts, while she walks more and more often into the Dreaming, bringing back stranger and stranger Chimerae, surrounding herself with them like a bulwark of unreality against the cold, dead world.

Two years after her reawakening you find her dead. You have barely long enough to mourn before the nightmare Chimera birthed from her unstable mind returns for you.

You're one of the lucky few. Your flat is on the same side of the river as the university. The tunnels under the Thames are still being pumped out, and some people are going to have difficult even getting to tomorrow's test, never mind passing it.

So there's every chance of your getting a few uninterrupted hours to search for the set texts.

The books that were rescued from the flooding aren't actually all jumbled up in a heap on the floor, but they may as well be. You move from shelf to double-stacked shelf, pushing aside the works of Keynes and Milgram and Aristotle with, if not a fine disregard, at least not quite the respect that they warrant, a lack of respect that becomes more and more marked as time wears on. You would think a library with this many books would have a copy of The Odyssey that was a bit easier to find...

The first you realise that you have spoken your frustration aloud is when a book appears over your shoulder, held in a pale hand.

"Is this what you are looking for?" an upper-class accent enquires.

It is, indeed, The Odyssey in the original Greek.

"Yes, thankyou," you say, slightly dazedly, and reach up for the book. Your hand touches hers and flinches away; she has only just come in from outside, and her fingers are freezing.

"You are a student of the classics?"

"Yes." You turn around to see her standing behind you, oddly still, her skin and hair looking bleached in the electric light. "Thankyou for that; I'm meant to have an exam on it tomorrow."

"It's an interesting text," she says, looking at you in a manner you don't quite understand. It doesn't matter, now; you know she's a kindred spirit.

"Yes," you agree, and squint at her slightly. "Are you one of the PhDs? I don't think I've seen you in the department."

"No, I'm visiting from elsewhere. My degree is in the Classics, but I'm mostly concentrating on folk tales these days. Dr Villiers." There is a moment's pause. "I imagine your studies have been badly disrupted by the flooding. If you like, I could go through the Odyssey with you?"

She's right, of course. Back in the first year you were predicted a first; now you'll be lucky to scrape a 2:1. Sure, nobody in your year will do any better, but that won't cut any ice with the PhD funding organisations.

You could do with some help.

But not, perhaps, from this strange academic you've never seen before, no matter how strangely attracted to her you feel.

"I'm afraid not," you say hurriedly. "Got an exam tomorrow. See you. Bye." And you saunter away with exaggerated nonchalance.

It's late by the time you get home; later than you'd wanted. But you're able to snatch a few hours of uneasy sleep, just enough to fuzz your head and leave you more exhausted than you were when you laid down your head. Still, the last-minute study seems to have saved your bacon, as The Odyssey is the major theme of the exam. You put your pen down at last with confidence that you've at least managed a 2:2, and talking about the exam afterwards reveals that you've once again done better than most of the rest of your class.

Nobody really gets high marks these days. There's a rumour that the tutors have a fill-in-the-blanks standard letter for extenuating circumstances.

That's the closest you ever come to failing an exam. As the floodwaters recede and the library gets straightened out, your studies pick up again. They become a refuge, in fact, from the horrid reality of London.

After your Finals, you spend a summer doing volunteer work at the British Museum while your PhD application is considered. In the old days such a thing would have been unthinkably difficult to arrange, but with water still being pumped out of the basement rooms and properly trained conservators going anywhere but London, the British Museum are pitifully glad for someone willing to lug around heavy items and let the few experts left concentrate on repairing the damage to valuable artifacts.

It's while working there that you become aware of the lift that only seems to be used by a few people. After a bit of research, you establish that none of them are staff.

After the ice storm that devastates North London, you realise, to your slight bemusement, that one of them is the world-respected doctor whose face has been so prominent on camera of late, Mark Welham. After a while, your curiosity finally overwhelms the natural caution that has kept you alive so long, and you ask him about it.

After a frustrating conversation frequently punctuated by cries of "Grr! Stupid geas! I'm sorry, I can't tell you that", he introduces you to some of his colleagues and you learn, with delighted fascination, of the true story of Osiris and the fragmented souls of his priests.

With just a little help from your friends you stay at the British Library, studying conservation, learning about the other supernatural creatures of London in your spare time. You've suffered enough at the hands of those who are destroying the city; you're determined that you're going to be one of the ones who helps fix it.

Until you find out that it is the very people you are trying to help that were responsible for the deaths of your friends in Camden.

The feeling of betrayal coils in your gut like white fire, and you go into some kind of a berserk fury. You come to with Mark and his friend Michael both pinning you to the floor, with looks of identical astonishment that drive you into hysterical laughter.

You feel the odd laughter bubbling inside you throughout the talk in which Michael explains to you that you, too, are a monster. Eventually you make him a promise to finish things up at the museum and make your way to Hampstead Heath, to be inducted into your new life.

They all go, leaving you to lock up, as you always do, as they have always trusted you to do. To close off and keep safe this thing that gives them power. That gives them the ability and right to destroy.

Wood and paper. Being a conservator is all about the wood and paper. The wood to pile in the centre of the floor, the paper to stuff into the smoke alarms.

You light your funeral pyre and commend your soul to the old gods, the ones you read about, the ones you half-believed in once, long before you encountered Osiris, begging them not to corrupt your soul with a tem-akh, begging them not to bring you back.

The old gods are true, truer than Osiris. They answer your prayer.

You study all night. She may be a folklorist these days, but it seems that Dr Villiers has forgotten nothing of Greek literature. When she lets slip that she studied at Oxford, this ceases to surprise you.

After a breakfast of coffee and more coffee, you ace the exam. The next night you're back hanging around the library, hoping to pick her brains some more.

By the middle of the first year of your PhD, you're spending half of each night studying martial arts in order to keep your body as healthy as your mind. You know now that Dr Villiers isn't human, but the combination of her mentorship and the distant promise of eternal life are too potent to resist.

And so it is that on a rainy night in February, five years later, you stand with your back to the river and let her cave in the back of your skull with a spade.

It might comfort you to know that she waits all night for you to emerge.

It might not.

"Erm, excuse me?" you begin.

"What." Her manner is not encouraging.

"What you just did... it's really beautiful," you tell her, cringing inside at the utter inanity of the statement.

"What do you want?" she asks, looking at you with an odd directness. You have the sudden feeling that you're in a situation with rules that you don't understand and mustn't break.

"Erm, nothing," you say as you back away.

But in the back of your head, the remnants of a magical, dreamlike day part your lips and although you mean to say goodbye, what actually emerges is, "You're with the Camden Rejuvenation Trust, aren't you? Is there anything I can do to help?"

You don't even want to think about having done something that dim the night before an exam, never mind opening yourself up to the ridicule of the friends who have spent far too long suffering in your academic shadow. You nobly bear the concerned talks from your tutors without flinching, and return to your study, though the fail will always be an indelible mark on your academic record.

As your Finals draw near your marks are soaring back into the realms of the high 2:1 and you know, frustratedly, that anywhere but London you would be getting a first. This also seems to occur to your Greek tutor. As the first of your finals approaches, she offers to introduce you to a visiting academic who has offered to be your mentor, Dr Villiers.

You really ought to leap at the chance.

But as far as you know Dr Villiers is a folklorist, not a classicist, and you just don't have the time to take out from revision.

You study for a few hours and then leave. The cloud has cleared; it's cold, now. Very cold. Ice clings like scum to the edges of the floodwater, and there is a faint haze around the white disk of the moon. As you walk down a street lined with bare-limbed winter trees, they seem to catch the moon in the thin black web of their treetops. It's very beautiful.

You are not the only one looking at the moon tonight. Walking with your eyes on the sky, you almost trip over the man standing in the street, staring intently at the moon.

"Excuse me," you say.

"Why is it beautiful?" he asks.

"...uh?" you respond cleverly.

"Apologies," he says, his words oddly stilted. "Do you have a moment? I would like to ask you some questions."

You've lived in London long enough that you know better than to talk to random weirdos.

But this one seems harmless enough.

"Sure," you say, curious despite yourself.

"Thankyou." He gets out a notepad and pen. "Please define beauty."

Maybe he's just a mad philosophy professor. After the philosophy module you took last year, nothing about philosophers would surprise you. You start reciting as much as you remember of your final assessed essay.

He takes notes.

"The full moon? Why is that beautiful?" he asks.

"Err...." This one, you didn't study. You mutter something about atavistic fears and lights in the darkness. He listens politely, but you're fairly certain he can tell you're just making it up on the spot. "Why do you ask?" you finish, slightly desperately.

"I am trying to understand," he says with an odd precision. "Questioning and observation are both acceptable methods of acquiring data."

"Acquiring data?" you parrot. It's an odd form of words. You begin to feel uneasily that you are alone on a silent street with a madman.

"Yes. I am acquiring data on the nature of beauty. Also of morality. And belief."

"Um... laudable aims..." You're tired. It's cold. Your head is full to bursting with gods and giants and sorcery, and you want to go home and sleep.

"So you will be willing to assist with my research?" The strange man doesn't - quite - look eager.

"I, err, sure, sometime..."

You're not entirely certain how you end up in a place that looks like a mad scientist's wet dream, talking philosophy with someone who acts like a long-lost cousin to Data and Lore. You're really quite relieved to discover that his name is as normal as Russ, and this relief lasts for an entire month before you find out that it's actually an acronym.

Your interest in your studies wanes. You can't read about Circe and the swine without wondering whether your new friends could do the same trick, or even whether the entire Odyssey is a garbled tale of some long-dead mage's experiments with what you now know as the magics of 'Correspondance' and 'Time'.

Fundamentally, however, you're still a classicist, and the explanations of Russ and Leslie, about aether and electricity and animalian bipeds, make no sense to you. Instead, you find yourself drawn to the Order of Hermes, amid whose pentarams and Latin you feel entirely at home.

You start to learn the unwritten rules of reality, the rituals that will channel power as you desire; the first steps towards towards true mastery. You slip out of contact with Team Science; you never had much in common with them anyway.

And so it is as much a surprise to you as it is to the rest of the Order when Team Science bring a giant, part-spiritual spider to a meeting, Leslie guiding it proudly with one hand on its chitinous leg.

A giant chitinous spider in a medium-sized dungeon filled with people is an obvious accident waiting to happen, to anyone but Team Science. Nobody ever really figures out how Arachnotron Mark II manages to crush one of the attendees against the wall. Everyone, however, agrees that the instant and unanimous response of the Magi of London is, perhaps, a little excessive.

Fortunately, there is only one casualty.

Equally fortunately, at least your death is quick.