Awakening XII

I pick myself up gingerly. The lockbox dug painfully into my side when I crashed. I think I'm bleeding a little bit! Ow. And if my ankle wasn't sprained after the last fall, it is now. I look around myself. The robed figures are entering the elevator now; one of them is walking (or gliding) over to the cabin. It's a good thing I'm not there. I hope he doesn't notice the missing kites.

I've landed in front of the small building that the robed ones came out of. There's no door, and the interior seems much less modern than the cabin. There's just one large room, about fifty seats in a semicircle around what looks like an altar. I walk towards it, wincing with every step. I hope that Roshan leads the robed ones a good chase. I need some time to recover from this latest fall. (My escape in a nutshell: I fall down a lot.)

The walls are bare, with the exception of a few double-triangle designs near the corners (one above the other, both pointing upwards), and the chairs are plastic junk. In the back of the altar, though, there's a compartment that holds five thick books. One of them has no title on the cover: inside, there is a hand-written THE RITES OF THE FREEMASONS.

That explains a lot.

The other four books are titled by year: 1948, 1962, 1988, 2005. I guess that they're some kind of chronicle of the freemasons' doings. I open up the oldest, and start skimming; listening closely all the while. If a robed one - a freemason, that is - snuck up on me while I'm reading, after all I went through to get this far, I'd be pretty embarrassed.

From the look of things, these guys are some sort of splinter group that broke off from the real Freemasons in 1948. That's why they started their chronicles then. They apparently discovered some kind of arcane power back in 1947, and when the main bunch of freemasons forbade the use of it on 'ethical grounds', they decided to form a secret society within the freemasons. A nested secret society. I can see why I hadn't heard of these guys before.

Hmm. Money, recruitment, more money, ritual... they didn't go for the 'grand chronicle' thing often in these books, so I'm summarizing. Um. These guys were pretty scared about the atomic bomb, but they weren't really convinced that bomb shelters would protect them. So they bought this office building and set out to build the ultimate, impregnable sanctum. The secret freemasons gathered... over forty people over a period of eight months - coming very close to being caught when a police officer pulled over one of their kidnappers with two victims in his trunk - and sacrificed them in a single night to summon a daimone.

These people are monsters.

They... um. Lost my place. Johannsen, ritual, ritual, daimone... they made the daimone (one of the most powerful of daimones, apparently) create that heart to both guard and power this sanctum-bubble dimension, and then they sent it inside. They apparently had intermittent contact with the freemasons inside the bubble. Time distorted oddly, and though it's been half a century since the daimone was summoned, the freemasons who went inside (who emerge from the heart at seemingly random intervals to get food and supplies) have experienced no more than a year's passing. Still, from what's recorded here of their experiences, the giant's story was accurate.

Why did they capture him? He didn't know. They don't say anything about it outright, but... oh! They refer to him as the bodhisattva. The freemasons, once they saw the strange effects of the 'bubble', had the bright idea of using it for other means than self-defense. They speculated that they might be able to roam about space-time in it, if they disconnected its tether to reality - the heart. The freemasons inside, though, worried that instead of becoming independent of reality, the bubble might just shrivel up and pop - with them inside. (To continue the analogy.) So they captured something which could roam space-time freely - the giant, the bodhisattva - and begged for time to study it. Their counterparts here in reality seem increasingly impatient with this, but... they've been waiting for six decades. Impatience is relative, I suppose.

And the Cells of Forgetting? They're mentioned a lot. Apparently, prisoners are treated with a drug that knocks them out for a while, and then... they're just left to rot. No food, nothing. The amnesia comes from the heart somehow sucking out memories and, eventually, life itself, from the prisoners. It feeds on death. When the freemasons didn't have intruders just walk into the building, they went out and kidnapped people. Otherwise the heart would turn on them.

And they don't know how to stop it. They're rich beyond belief - they steal from the real Freemasons! - but they still kill untold numbers of people because they don't know how to stop this monstrosity, and they're too afraid to be caught.

Well. I do. I'm going to stop them, and I'm going to stop it. First, I'm going to walk right into their throne room and force them to end this insanity - either by persuasion or force. I still have the Device, and turning these abominations into a room full of glowing statues suits me just fine. Then, either way, I'm going to smash that heart into a pile of pulp.

Then... then, I can try to figure out where I fit in, with the other Roshan... with Rebecca.

No time for that now. I walk out of the building, wincing only a little, and look at the sun. (Ow.) It looks like I've spent at least an hour reading - maybe more. The freemasons could return at any moment. There's no time to waste.

I finally know what I'm doing.