Subject: Re: IC: Wolves Glen Pub From: Jeff Huo Organization: Denizens of the Wolverine White Coat Ghetto Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.storyteller In article <4a9bb5ce52lb@argonet.co.uk>, lb@argonet.co.uk says... > In article , > Jeff Huo wrote: > > In article <4a9aa9d7f7lb@argonet.co.uk>, lb@argonet.co.uk > > says... > > > In article , > > > Jeff Huo wrote: > > > > > My hab is right near our shop on Central > > > > Square on Mass Av. -- almost perfectly > > > > centered between the Old Campus > > > > surrounding the Yard, the East campus > > > > along the Charles River and Vassar Street, > > > > and the medical campus on Longwood to the > > > > south across the river. " > > > > "A great location if you have something > > > that the students want. > > > Alex smiles. "Yes, it is --although we > > can't claim credit for picking the > > location; the shop's been there for a > > long time." > > "That's the best kind of shop. But you > haven't mentioned what you sell." Alex smiles, unzipping her academic robe slightly so she can reach into the inside of the suit she wears underneath. She pulls out a small, thin silvery metal case about the size and half the thickness of a pack of cigarettes. She muses on it for a second, holding it with one hand, then with her thumb toggles a inset stud on the side of the case. With a quiet the edge of a business-card shaped piece of paper pops out the end. She pulls it out and hands it to Alan. It isn't paper --it's something with the feel of parchment, but as tough as Kevlar. It is in fact a business card, but an exquisitely beautifully done one, illuminated in the fashion of old Medieval manuscripts, yet with detailed realistic line drawings. On the left of the card, an beautiful enchantress in richly ornamented robes stands on a rock amidst the waves, a harp cocked in her right hand, her left raised into the air, a small dragon the size of an eagle perched on it; her gaze is focused up there. On the right of the card, a cute anthrophomorphic furry female kitten lies on a rug on her belly, her chin in her hands, reading a comic book, amidst a pile of other books, toys and the like surrounding her. The view is from above and the front, so that we can see the large glasses and whiskers on her feline nose, her tail with its tuft of fur at the end swinging gently back and forth, a cup of something hot set down besides her. She is dressed causally, in contrast to the enchantress: midriffs, cut-off jeans, socks, a pencil stuck behind one ear. Along the edge, a detailed series of celtic knots intertwine; in each of the corners, a tiny circle icon, each different: stylized representations of the four classic Elements: a flame, of a crashing ocean wave, of a blowing gust of wind, a majestic oak tree. And in the middle, the name of the shop, two latin words, in bold, elegant calligraphic script, followed below by neat smaller type: ------------------------------------- REI MEMORANDI since 1921 Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror Books, Comics, Games, Toys and Magic Adalet Cemile and Roxanne Leung Proprietors -------------------------------------- On the back of the card is a map to the shop, rendered in old pirate-treasure -map style, complete with compass rose guarded by mermaids and a baroque X marks the spot, as well as various contact info and shop hours. Alex smiles. "Actually, there's four of us who co-own the shop --Elena Delgado and I are the two unlisted...but then, it's Adalet and Roxanne whom everyone wants to see..." Alex places her business card case back into her suit as she muses, "Now, there's a story --a lot of stories-- all wrapped into one..." "Rei Memorandi has been around now for well over a century; it had a reputation as one of the best bookstores in Boston-- in New England-- long before I was even born --even before Victor and Adrianne were born-- I get ahead of myself," Alex apologizes. "In the beginning it was not known as Rei Memorandi, although it was in the same wide shopfront on Central Square. The first owner was named Issac Rathskeller who, like many others, had fled the European Confederation when the Communists swept to power. He made his way across the Concordat, eventually coming to Boston, where he opened a bookstore. Between his natural scholarship --he had been a professor of humanities back in Europe-- his warm, friendly nature, and his excellent location, his store prospered..." "The location, aye! Sandwitched between the three major campuses of Cambridge-West, where thousands of the Concordat's best scholars worked and lived, and with five other colleges in walking distance, it was perhaps the highest concentration of college educated people perhaps in the entire Concordat. All of which greatly appreciated a man who could find the rarest of books, discuss the most obscure books at length, let anyone browse for as long as they liked, welcomed children of all ages with a hug." "He developed two particular special interests; he was a major fan of fantasy, and a collector of comics; two generes that were unknown to him in his old country but that he discovered here. In time they became an increasingly large part of his business...book readings, book signings, fireside chats, many of the now-familiar things an author does, he pioneered. Asimov, Tolkien, Bradbury, Clark, Heinlein, L'Engle and many, many, more-- the great masters of the art were on a first-name basis with Issac..." "All good things must come to an end, of course." "In 1960, a developer sought to buy out the tenants of Central Square for a project he wanted to run. He couldn't get Issac to budge no matter what he offered, so then he tried to harass Issac into oblivion. Court case after court case, filing after filing, Issac was no longer young, nor was he rich, and soon, despite the business the store took in and the fanatical support of his clients, the shop was in trouble." "That's when Victor and Adrianne O'Brien stepped in," Alex smiles. "Victor was a banker. Adrianne was a lawyer. They had met at Cambridge-West, fallen in love, married. Victor went to work for one of the large brokerage-houses and Adrianne became a property and finance lawyer, and they both prospered." "They both were also closet fantasy and comic book addicts," Alex smiles. "Naturally, they became frequent customers of Issac's shop..." "When Issac's troubles became public knowledge, the two of them took it upon themselves to organize the resistance. Adrianne began representing Issac in court --and she was a brilliant attorney who quickly, and almost single-handedly, beat the developer's minions back to square one. Victor similarly slashed through the thicket of contracts, liens, deeds and other mess that had grown to entangle Issac and their beloved shop." "But the developer redoubled his efforts --especially since now Issac's shop represented the last major piece of territory he did not own in Central Square, and he was willing to spend great deals of cash to hire an army of minion lawyers, accountants, and politicians to push his case. Redoubled his efforts, for the developer's empire was built on very shaky financial territory, and unless the Central Square project --and the loans it would serve collateral for-- came through, his empire would collapse. While Victor and Adrianne had been fighting for Issac on their spare time, soon the strain forced them to choose between their day jobs and their true love..." Alex smiles. "And so off into the unknown Victor and Adrianne plunged together, leaving behind the security of their professional lives to live out their dreams." "Liquidating their assets, selling their home, and cars, moving into the apartment over the shop and pulling off some really, *really* clever financing and legal tricks, they pulled together a little over half the money needed, and raised the rest from the wide circle of friends and loyal customers, to finally put the entire shop and the land it sat on firmly in Issac's hands, sealing the place from the developer's hands once and for all." "In truth," Alex smiles, "Victor and Adrianne could probably have raised the entire sum easily, perhaps many times over, from the many patrons of the store...but in their hearts, I would say, they wanted to be beholden to noone but themselves. Perhaps they already, even then, had an understanding with Issac, for Issac was no longer young and had no children --having lost his beloved wife long before in the old country, in the chaos that had caused him to flee." Alex then looks grim. "In sheer desperation, the Developer turned to an overseas organized crime organization to get money to keep his empire afloat...and to borrow some muscle to 'convince' Issac to change his mind..." Alex is quiet with fury. She takes a sip of her cocoa before continuing. "Noone has any idea how it got so badly out of control. The suspicion after the fact was that the goons sent had been experimenting with the new street drug PCP before the hit...and thus got totally out of control." "Even the Syndicate would not have allowed things to go as far as they did... if for no other reason than the outcome." "Adrianne was given the chance to run. She refused, and had bravely tried to fight off Issac's attackers. She too probably would have died if Victor had not happened to return to the shop when he did. Victor had won the Army Cross during the war, and his anger could have melted steel. Which is probably why he *still* managed to kill four of the attackers and hold off the rest until the Police arrived even after having been shot twice at close range..." "Victor never walked again and Adrianne could never have children. Issac...did not survive, and the city mourned him. Issac had had many, many friends in Boston and at Cambridge-West...including many in the Judiciary, the Police, and New Scotland Yard. Nobody had dared imagine that the developer would stoop as far, or that such violence could happen in the Concordat, or such brutality could be visited. In fairness, the Syndicate itself probably had no idea this was going to happen, nor would they have allowed such a thing. Especially given that the shock, horror and anger triggered a response that was swift and total." "The Syndicate had spent several decades trying to infiltrate the Concordat --a hard thing, as one might imagine, with the Inci everywhere. The fact they had even had mild success spoke volumes of their ability to play the subtle cat-and-mouse game with the Concordat's powers. But the sheer, massive scale of the attention focused by Issac's brutal death evaporated the Syndicate's meticulously laid cover like ice being hit by a river of pure hydrogen plasma. The few people who were on the take were so badly revulsed they turned coat, and noone was particularly interested in listening to the excuses that the goons were not acting on orders when they went too far. The whole Syndicate was pretty much anihilated and the developer arrested, tried, and hanged in short order." Alex looks sad. "In pace resquisat." She takes a deep breath. "But life does go on, and the shop was at least still in caring hands...just in time for the next generation of fantasy authors, comic book artists, and eager readers to surge on in in the late '60s and early '70s..." Alex smiles. "Like myself and my friends." "Rei Memorandi --such Issac had renamed his shop when Victor and Adrianne had finally won it for him-- Rei Memorandi was a labor of love for the O'Briens, and it showed. When I first started at Cambridge-West in '68 with Roxanne, Elena and Adalet, it didn't take me long, fantasy addict that I am, to find my way there and become a loyal fan-- all of us, actually." "In fact," she smiles gently, "one could say, we loved the old shop so much, we bought the place." "A story in itself, that --begins actually with Adalet," Alex says, pulling from her shoulder-case a thin black unit which unfolds into a lap-top computer. Alex relates the story as she fires up the laptop and boots up an electronic scrapbook... "Adalet, Elena, Roxanne and I met in the Figments, became fast friends, and after second year we lived on the Yard together," she explains. "Roxanne was doing her own thing, but the rest of us were bio people." "Adalet's thing was studying the biology of thermophile bacteria -- bacteria that live in near-boiling heat tempatures. Their ability to live in such extreme conditions is fairly curious, and she as a scientist spent her time trying to understand how they were capable of doing so, what moleclular adaptations made it possible." Alex frowns. "To say the least, this wasn't exactly a hot field of science. Adalet was facinated by the topic, but it was a perpetual struggle to get it funded. I mean, Elena faced a lot of *active* opposition in trying to fund her work --nobody was willing to accept Elena's ideas about prions for years and years!-- but at least Elena was also a physican, and could make a decent --good, actually-- living elsewise. Adalet literally had to live hand and mouth, spending her own salary on reagents, sometimes, and depending on us --who were more than happy to help-- for a place to live and even a ride about town." "Then one day she had this *idea*." "In the course of her molecular studies, she had discovered that, among the adaptations the thermophile bacteria used was a polymerase that did not denature under even extreme tempatures. Tempatures that would denature most other DNA, let alone proteins. One night, on the way to a camping trip with the four of us, she suddenly had a brilliant idea --if you had a polymerase that could survive high tempatures, you could use that polymerase to do something neat..." "You could heat genomic DNA to high tempatures --like 94 deg. C-- until the strands separated...drop the tempature suddenly in the presence of an excess of short complimentary DNA sequences --primers, starting points-- and let the primers link onto the genomic DNA. Bring the tempature back up to a happy medium, and let the polymerase --which has survived all these tempature shifts with ease-- copy the DNA starting at the primers until the old strand was copied. Reheat up to 94 to separate the new strands from the old. Chill again, to let the primers bind onto the now separated strands, new *and* old.. repeat, repeat, repeat." "In short, with a high-tempature polymerase, you could *copy* DNA." Alex grins evily. "Adalet had brainstormed Recursive Polymerase Amplification --RPA." "It didn't take more than a few weeks to put together the requisite experiments to prove this would work and write it up for Transactions... and when the rest of the world found out about this better mousetrap they beat a wide, broad path to Adalet's door." "A few more years of inventing variations on the theme and a passel of patents later, Adalet was a rich, rich, *rich* woman. Poetic justice, really, that the woman whose work everybody ignored had found, within it, a mountain of gold...our friend who couldn't afford a car before now could easily by entire car *dealerships*." Alex flips the laptop around until the screen faces Alan; in it, a picture of four women posing for the camera, chamagne glasses in hand, three wearing academic dress: Alex, an Arabic woman who one presumes is Adalet, and a Hispanic woman who is probably Elena. The fourth is a ravishingly beautiful Chinese woman who is probably Roxanne. In the picture, Adalet alone wears a wreath around her neck, identical to the wreath Alex is wearing in the Pub. The picture is captioned "Adalet's Induction, Royal Academy of Sciences, February 21st, 1993, Westminster Hall, London." "That's Adalet in the middle," Alex confirms, pointing out the wreath-wearing Indian woman. "Appropos, that," she says with quiet pride in her friend. "Adalet retired soon after RPA and its variants took off --she'd been burned out by the trials of all the years previous, and whatever love she had had for the science long choked out of her...now, no longer needing to stay in science to make her living --indeed, now no longer having to make a living at all-- she chose to leave the future to others and pursue other things," Alex smiles, clearly approving. "Like drawing," Alex says, "a hobby both she and Roxanne shared. They each had different styles, but Adalet was the better storyteller. And when she retired in '83 she had plenty of time to indulge that...together with Roxanne, they had a lot of fun..." "Oh, Roxanne!" Alex exclaims. "Now *there's* another story..." "I mentioned earlier Roxanne didn't do bio like the other three of us did. She was always... different," she smiles. "See, Roxanne did well in school-- indeed, at Cambridge she did the best of all of us, and none of us were slouches. But her heart wasn't really there, although she certainly enjoyed the Art History and Theatre classes she was taking...she was there at Cambridge-West because her parents had demanded it. If it were up to her, she would be off, making magic..." "Because that is what she did." "Roxanne first started picking up magic tricks when she was ten from her father, who had slight-of hand and illusionism as hobbies. Kept his hands nimble, the old surgeon used to explain. Perhaps if he had known his daughter would be so enraptured, he might not have been so willing...or maybe he would have?" Alex muses. "Whatever it was, Roxanne quickly mastered --and then far surpassed-- her father in skill. She devoured every book and source she could find. Other master magicians, charmed by this wonderful little girl, took her in and taught her. She became, at 14, the youngest magician ever admitted into the Royal Society of Magicians, Conjurers and Illlusionists. Magic wasn't *real* of course, but even if it was all smoke, mirrors and distraction, you could still leave an audience stunned...and Roxanne loved that." "Didn't hurt she was growing into a bombshell, herself," Alex grins wickedly. "By the time she was 17, she had her own show on weekends just off Broadway that packed them in--billed herself as just "Roxanne", and all of New England knew exactly who that was. Her parents, however, did not approve, and the struggles between them were...not pleasant. They insisted that she go to college and get a *real* job, so to speak, telling her that no serious student could waste so much time on magic..." "So Roxanne got herself admitted to Cambridge at Boston, just to show them up," Alex smiles. "I mean, with her grades, her scores and her personality, even *Cambridge* wasn't all that much of a reach for her..." "Needless to say, getting into the most elite college in the Western Concordat...and then graduating Summa Cum Laude...shut her parents up. I think they were stunned -- happily stunned, but stunned neverless." "That having been gotten out of the way," Alex laughs, "Roxanne dove right back into magic...Broadway became farviewer specials...and soon Roxanne was a household name. Stunts like making the RMS Carapathia disappear from New York and reappear in Portsmouth or jumping from the bottom to the top of the Empire State Building in one leap --every one knew --she *told* people-- it was all an illusion, but even if you *know* there's a trick somewhere it's still no less stunning when it's done!" "Needless to say, Roxanne became quite famous and wealthy herself, and eventually, tired of the long haul of the road, she too retired. But between the shows, she indulged many hobbies, drawing among them, together with Adalet, who had been pretty much doodling to her heart's content since '83." Alex smiles. "The rest? Well... when SANDMAN came out and showed the world that comics could tell a deep, philosophical story and that there was a market for such things...Roxanne knew a few people at DC Comics and convinced Adalet to show them some of the work Adalet and Roxanne had been working on for the past ten years..." "What Adalet and Roxanne had been working on, of course, was GLORIA MUNDI." "And the rest --including sweeping virtually every award offered in SF, Fantasy and Comics-- is history." " *That's* one reason why we put Adalet and Roxanne's name on the shop's cards." "Which leads us back to the beginning... Adrianne and Victor had saved the store once before. But they were not immortal... and when they died suddenly, together peacefully passing in their sleep from this world in '98, it was discovered the shop was in big, big trouble." "Rei Memorandi had been a labor of love... which meant that, given a choice between making a buck and sharing the magic, they took a loss. Not much, only a little at a time, and they had quite a bit of money themselves...but over thirty years, those losses added up." "They were determined to have a huge selection, rather than just the best sellers...they gave discounts freely to those who couldn't afford the exhorbinant fees often demanded. They let people browse freely, as had Issac before, and sometimes this resulted in stolen or damaged goods. They would go out of their way to order rare items and sell them back at cost --or even tiny losses, at times. They were generous, kind and wonderful --to the point where they were bleeding, ever so slowly, to death. It wasn't that they were reckless or stupid-- with their backgrounds, they knew *exactly* what was happening. It was just that to run a profit in our modern world would have required them to show a ruthlessness that was unacceptable to them. And as long as they could hold on while still making Rei Memorandi a place of magic..." "Rei Memorandi was a labor of love. How does one put an audit on that? How can," Alex puts wistfully, "you put a price on the joy of a little girl's face when you tell her the big cuddly bear her family can't possibly afford is all hers, on the House?" "No, they weren't stupid --in their Will, they had set out a plan by which the assets of Rei Memorandi would be sold and auctioned to cover the debts, and even with a little extra left over that they intended to be given to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The land, after all, right in the heart of Boston, would be worth much, and many of the unique items in the store themselves quite valuable..." "But like *hell* we were going to let our Rei Memorandi get chopped up and sold away!" Alex says with passion. "The Four muskeeteers had come to Boston together in the fall of '68...and we never left. It was natural for us fangirls to fall in love with Rei Memorandi, like many others...but not all fangirls had Roxanne's --or far more so, Adalet's money." "RPA was --is-- the cornerstone of modern molecular biology," she explains. "By the time the patents ran out, the royalties were one thing...the IPO stock she had gained from many biotech firms in lieu of licensing fees were another. She had enough money for a dozen liftimes, *easy*. The debts that were nearly insurmountable for the O'Briens Adalet could clear with a single check she could handwrite right on the spot. And that's exactly what Adalet did, without even really thinking about it --marched right into the creditors court and bought it all, lock, stock and barrel --and signing all four of our names to the deed." "That was more than thirty years ago," Alex laughs, "and how we ended up living every fan-girl's dream --having the biggest names in the Art drop by for coffee, and sharing the love with the next generation -- and their children, and their grandchildren beyond...hosting author chats, LARPs, the CBLDF and ConcordCon's administrative headquarters...we like to think Issac, Victor and Adrianne are still watching over us from the stacks, and we'd like to think they're happy with the way we've carried on..." Alex smiles. "There is no 'Happily Ever After' in this world except that which we are determined to make for ourselves; no magick other than the joy which we each bring to others through generosity, kindness, passion and love..." "Those are magick enough to make life worth living." - Alex -- Jeff Huo | jeff@spundreams.net.nospam (remove nospam) U. Michigan Med | http://www.spundreams.net/~jeff New to the group? Welcome! Please visit http://www.pepin.demon.co.uk/wolves/ IC Character sheets at http://www.spundreams.net/~jeff/wgpatum.html