On Continuity and Fall of the Malakim

A quick note about my general style which hopefully you’ve noticed, because otherwise I’ve been badly inconsistent.

A GameMaster is a Balseraph, and in one sense I mean that. The entire story is a construct of internal logic. Once something is established in play I will avoid changing it to avoid the (cognitive) dissonance. When I said “(the Dark Man) has no Destiny” I decided to stick by it. At that point, in my notebook, he was a Shedite of Baal. That had to change because Shedim have destiny and there was no good reason a Master of Destiny couldn’t read it. So I rewrote the Dark Man, gave him a new name and new background to fit the few sketchy details you had at “Release the Bats”*. Actually I like the new version better—he’s darker, and more in line with my personal background.

Why change so much background? You don’t see my notebooks, but you do see what’s on the page. I think it’s fairer for one person—me—to have to shift things than to ask all of you to do it. Real Life comes first, players are real people, and your feelings matter. Don’t be shy of reminding me that.

That said a dear MIB sent me a copy of Fall of the Malakim and I’ve had some decisions to make. Ignore the whole thing? No. Methariel in one of his posts noted that Los Angeles is where a Malakite supposedly fell, so that plot can’t be ignored. I could write a wholly different version, but why? FotM is the story Methariel knows and I’m betting other players know it too. In some form, it has to intersect with Mile Higher Club.

FotM was published in 1998, and as a native of the Los Angeles area I noticed some changes since then. To start with there’s a map of the area with drive times on it, and a note that they are approximations. In 2007 we have online driving directions—I use Yahoo—and it gives accurate drive times for good traffic from one point to another. The map is useful and there really aren’t many changes (the 210 freeway now goes to San Bernardino) that will touch the game at all. So for MHC where drive times are an issue:

Use Yahoo Driving Directions for drive time.

Double it—I do not jest—for any drive involving a major street or freeway for the hours of 7:30-9:30 am inbound, and 4:30- 6:30 pm outbound. That’s rush hour here. For Ofanim resonance or a good driver with a motorcycle, make that time and a half rather than double for any check digit other than 6 or 1. **

But the story of FotM itself creates some problems. For one it leads into an Apocalypse, which I have no intention of using. I prefer a more discreet scale to stories. For another that would mean I’d be running the whole Revelations cycle and retconning four whole books, which I won’t. But “the place where the Malakite supposedly fell” can’t be ignored.

So here’s what happened, in Mile Higher Club continuity:

Some time in 1999 angels the world over heard Gabriel’s trumpet, or what certainly sounded like it. Lots of people were worried about the year 2000 and so its significance was felt to have something to do with that. So far anyway nothing has come of it. The world didn’t end. The trumpet didn’t sound again, and in retrospect folks are wondering if that’s what they heard at all. Maybe Gabriel has truly gone mad.

(Your GM is going to have to decide what exactly happened…gets out notebook and eraser)

There was a Maximilian, a Malakite in Los Angeles. The details however are the stuff of urban legend, the kind of thing you’d need a celestial Snopes to sort out. Your characters will believe or disbelieve anything or everything regarding that story as it suits you. The sex tape, the construct, the idea that David would put a Malakite in such a compromising position, the existence of any of the NPC’s in that book—all akin to alligators in the sewer. Could have happened, no one is sure, and most folks figure it’s just a morality tale.

A couple of things though are fact (within MHC). There was a purge. In 1999 all angels in Los Angeles were systematically slaughtered—either celestially, or corporeally with enough Trauma to lose all sense of the past. Demons claim it was only angels who were killed and not any Fallen, but demons lie. They also claim that some mysterious power killed all the angels, but history suggests otherwise.

After Laurence’s forces were driven from Los Angeles in the 1940’s, the few angels to take up residence there had to make themselves known to the demons or face a gruesome death. Demons in L.A. know a hundred ways to turn dissonance into soul-fatal feedback loops, or at least the older ones do. So an angel is sent to LA and checks in with the local demon-in-charge, who then “initiated” him. This “initiation” was designed to humiliate the angel and stick him with a dissonance or two, but it was also to help the demons keep track of him. The purge of 1999 would have been very simple. The angels were outnumbered and their locations on record. Eli’s Watts Tower tether was destroyed in the 1994 earthquake (though the Towers themselves were only damaged), the only refuge they might have had left in the city proper. A little coordination from Baal’s camp to synchronize the killings would be all that was necessary.

Since the year 2000 angels who reside in LA don’t check in with demons in any formal way. After a time, particularly if you use Songs, some of them will notice your presence but may be inclined to tolerate it for various reasons. Maybe they don’t think you’re having much of an impact. Maybe they think they can use you or corrupt you. Maybe they just kind of like you, the way Michael likes Baal in a sense. The point is no one person knows how many angels are in LA or who they are. Rina-el, being the information central in this town, has a very good idea but she may have missed one. The purge could not happen again unless there really is a ‘mysterious power’ behind it.

Eli has quietly built a tether in a soul food restaurant in Watts. It’s fairly inconspicuous, not near any obvious Creation. Marc attempted to build a tether in Pasadena at the Equator coffeehouse but was run out by Mammon. He’s made a couple of other tries, and word on the street is he is now operating out of an ice-cream truck. Michael’s still got Death Valley but that’s too far from the city to do much good. Novalis has been eyeing Griffith Park, but the recent fires have been a huge setback and she’s now trying to interest Jordi in the Arboretum, though he is balking at the proximity to the Santa Anita horse racetrack.

Laurence still chafes at his defeat. Nybbas and Malphas, once godlike in this town, are somewhat diminished in recent years. Others…your GM has some more decisions to make in that notebook…

* I have retroactively given ‘episode’ names to the chat sessions. The first one, where the angel summoning ritual took place, is “Release the Bats”. Ryuki’s suite scene is now named “Dragon’s Lair”, and the encounter with the Corps is “The Dogs of War”.

**I’ve fudged this slightly in the past for effect. From the Blue Dog to the LAX suites where you met Ryuki I used Fairfax to LAX. Fairfax is a big street so I took an average, 14 minutes. It was arguably rush hour, the streets were only arguably the ones affected by rush hour, but you had Corat navigating. I figured 14 minutes was fair.

A tutela by canon takes 15 minutes to construct—one more than the drive time. Ryuki was making a modified tutela (modified add a couple minutes) but he’d probably rehearsed it many times and is very bright (cancel out the modification time). In order to finish the work before you got there, he was probably reaching for the chalk the minute he heard ‘Seraph’ and began the ritual preparation while he was on the phone with Corat! Still, there was that one minute short, shaving off a few seconds for you folks to finish the conversation and get in the car. In character that’s why he spent the Essence to activate it after you got there—he’d run out of time. It’s possible that he was just deciding whether to use the spell at all and wanted to feel you all out first. Out of character I just thought it put a nice ‘bang’ into the scene.