Cathal's Journal

19^th Juvax 45

So I'm sitting down to catchup on this the morning after the Balls. Breafast is over and there is an arrangement in place for Charlie to start to teach us how to Shadowwalk on the 21st. Apparently she wants to attend the last day of the Expo, and given the reactions of a number of parties I observed at the Expo Ball in particular I possibly understand why. The reations of the You-Tubers and other streamer does confirm that she is indeed the face of Dysjunction in the video.

I should also mention that Caitlin has now also returned to her own room, after spending the night with me. I still haven't worked out what this means in terms of my relationship with Liliana, although everything else that has happened is likely going to change things completely. I can perhaps use this as an excuse meaning I don't really have to tell her about anything else.

One other thing I learned at the Expo ball in particular is that whilst most of the rest of us were sleeping or practicing raising the Pattern Charlie was at the Expo as if nothing had happened leaving her totally exhausted the day before. I can only assume that instead of spending time here she went somewhere else to recuperate. At a guess I would have to assume this would have been Elysium .

I should probably properly return to the subject of the two balls now, first the Expo Ball and then the Carnelian Ball, whilst both being similar were different at the same time. I've never been to such an event before and didn't know what to expect at all. We'd been told previously that we'd be  expected to dance, something which Caitlin had confirmed when I asked her. What I hadn't expected at all that firstly we'd be announced when we arrived at the ball and secondly there would be what are called dance cards which formalise who you dance with at a given point in the ball.

Now our announcment at the two balls were different as were those of a number of a members of the family. At the Expo ball we were just announced as VIP Guests of Miss Codelia Chan, whilst at the Carnelian Ball our titles as Prince/Princesses of the Royal House of Amber were used. This led to some interesting revalations. Firstly Cordelia's husband, Prince Fredizkhankt,who we'd not met or seen to date was there. He is apparently the Archduke and ruler of the Abyss Realm of Quinqohkt. Charlie has a number of titles including Marchioness of the same Realm. I cannot at the moment comprehend what this may all mean but she is a half-blood of some description, and most of that description is completely unknown. Cordelia has a vast array of titles which we already knew from when she introduced herself at that first meeting in the libray following our arrival here.

Both Cordelia and Madison appeared to be accompanied by bodyguards at both balls, and all were dressed in the same cerimonial armour as her body guard at the opening ceremony had been. Since there appears to be a reserve of these somewhere the question is where? They are obviously not Mizzurian Security Personel as we've seen at and around the Expo, which bring me to another observation, there were no convention center personel at the Expo, only Mizzurian personel.

Charile was initially unaccompanied at the Expo Ball, but wasn't at the Carnelian Ball, and neither was she at breakfast this morning. Given the way the pair were behaving I would guess its a relationship that has been on-going for a couple of years.

Is there anything else I need to say about the Balls, possibly not, but I should probably say something about the Carnelian party. It seems that this is a regualar occurance at the Balls which occur at Christmas/New Year, in the late spring, and in the late summer. Actually I should probably say something further about the Balls. It seems that one of their primary purpose was to reward both all of the Mizzurian Personel involved in the launch of the Black Shadow consoles and the Disjunction MMO, and to reward all the You-Tubers, and other streamers involved. I still can't see how simple NDA's could avoid any form of leak relating to either.

Anyway, to return to the subject of the party. It appears that the roof top swimming pool is open as part of the Party. Generally as the evening wears on and certainly after approximately 10pm  there is a general drift of the younger contingent to the swimming pool, where there is both a bar and a club scene vibe, including what I woudl guess are a couple of bouncers on the roof access to keep those thoguht too young to attend from participating. It certainly gets to be adults only as the night wears on and clothing starts to become optional. Making out in public also appears to be acceptable behaviour should that be your thing, and it seems that amongst Charlie and her cohort of friends it is.

Is there anything else I should mention. A couple of things perhaps. Firstly whislt everyone else, and I have to admit myself included stripped off to go into the pool Joanna chose to weara swim suit and took a certain degree of stick for it. She'd have done better just to go in in her underwear as a number of the other girls did, although some later removed it. The other thing is possibly more significant, although I don't really know. Charlie's initial arrival on the first morning was obviously uncomfortable for Natsuki, and she's been quieter than usual since, except for the incident during the excursion where she jumped out of the MTV to get the Bearer bonds. As the evening wore on she appeared to be spending more and more of her time with Kassidy, much as I ended up doing with Caitlin. I'm pretty sure she left the party with him. Anyway, she appeared to have regained some of her spark at breakfast this morning, almost as if she'd made some sort of decision or come to some sort of conclusion.

What the rest of the day holds I've no real idea.

Okay so it's now learly in the morning of the 20th and another day is done.Caitlin is asleep or at least dozing. The topic of conversation at dinner last night was the forth coming Shadowwalking training trip. I don't recall who asked initiially what we needed but Charlie did make, in what seems to be her style, a blib remark about "just bring yourselves", alhtough it appears Joanne has asked Caitlin to get her the proverbial kitchen sink in terms of camping gear. Cordelia was for once more constructive suggesting that the only things required were decent wet weather gear and a weapon. Renn had previously asked about firearms. Cordelia's reply was both helpful and not, saying that there are far more shadows in which firearms don't work at all than those where they do, and even in those where they do, modern fireamrs don't necessarily work. For instance only Black powder weapons work in Carnelian.Its the reason that most Family members carry bladed melee weapons in Shadow.It sort of explains why Charlie insisted on bringing her sword with her on the Pattern demonstration excursion.

20^th Juvax 45

For the most part it has been a quiet day which I spent just working on bits and pieces from Cordelia's exercises. Caitlin, who I'd expected to be gone in the early hours hadn't and proceed to wake me up because she wanted to continue from where we'd left off last night. She also firmly put me in my place. As she put it, she might be here because its her job, and that includes having sex if that's what we want, but she's human like anybody else and that means she has her own wants and needs, which just sometime may include having her brains screwed out by somebody of her choice. She like most of he compartiots have Masters degrees, the exception being Xia Min who we know as Jade, who's a make up artist. They all choose to work at the Purple Dragon, the Night Club Cordelia sort of owns, because they like what they do, even if some of the customers can be a little gross, and for the most part it's easy money. Now her initial revalations served primarily to defalte my ego as it were, and whilst I could have forced her to leave if I'd really wanted to, she is very good at what she does and didn't leave until she'd got everything she wanted.

After that breakfast was shall we say rather boring although I got a sideways glance and something of a smile from Natsuki. Caitlin did later confirm that Natsuki had been tiring Kassidy out to the point he'd asked Coral for some help, and yes they did discuss amongst themsevles what was going on, but she wasn't any more forthcoming and I did persue the issue. I think Cordelia migh have had something to say if I had.

Rodri and Daniel did ask to see me late in the afternoon, both having finally acknoledged who they are and wanting to do something about acquiring some of the necessary basic skills for ensuring both their and everybody elses survival. Given that neither can control their reversion to their primary forms, its going to take some time and and environment where I can control things to allow them to learn, thus we need to plan a trip to Iceland as it has such an environment, dangerous but not actually overly life threatening.

Dinner was again quiet, even with Charlie back from the Expo, although it didn't go unnoticed that Joanne, or Raven as she likes to be called, was attempting once again to single handedly empty the Mansion's Wine cellar As dinner wound down Siobhan, unnoticed by the now somewhat drunk Joanne, indicated that everyone else should leave.

Most people it seems had other things to do, but Natsuki, Charlie, and myself found ourselves in the lounge, which may in hindsight have been a mistake. Unlike previouly where Natsuki had generally only drunk tea or soda, she decided to pour herself a whisky and soda, prompting a gibe from Charlie "So Kassidy has finally broken you out of your shell". She whirled and glared at her. Charlie responded with "this is neither the time nor the place to find out which one of us is actually better, although I daresay if I remained in human form you probably are, and currently you're probably not equipped for either myself nor Cathal in our demon forms, although he might have a cuddly large dog form you'd find entertaining.  Did you show Caitlin your doggy style form?" she shot me a sideways glance which of course provoked the response she was looking for  "No, and none of your business." She was laughing by this point. "Oh for fucks sake lighten up the pair of you. I know both of you left the party with your PAs and both of you have been behaving differently since then, which menas Natsuki has had her brains shagged out by Kassidy, and Cathal has shagged the brains out of Caitlin. One observation I will make is that humans have limited staying power, thus if you're going for it you're going to need two or three partners. Although Cathal has probably found this out already". I had started to say something then thought better of it causing another out break of laughter, even Natsuki had giggled.

She then said something of interest primarily to Natsuki. "One more thing whilst I'm on the subject. Should any complications arise from having your brains shagged out, just walk the Pattern, it causes the termination of any pregnancy under 16 weeks, which is a complication if you do actually want children."

This brought conversation to a halt at least temporarily before she said "Jesus, don't either of you do small talk? Do either of you not have any burning questions you need answers to? I've had a lifetime to get used to all this you two have had what, a couple of weeks local time."

I'd thought for a couple of minutes but Natsuki asked her question first "You say you've had a lifetime to get used to being who you are, do you know what you're going to do next, or even what we're supposed to be doing"

Charlie answer was to a degree as glib as ever "You mean beyond finishing my A-levels or teaching you all the basics of Shadowwalking, no not really. I want to go to university, although I'm not sure exactly what I want to study, art or maybe chemisty. After that I don't really know. A lot depends on whether my mother, grandfather, and Isla can work out what's wrong with Shadow and how to fix it. I'd like to go see Amber, assuming anything is left of it, but beyond that no not really. Where you all fit into the scheme of things I don't really know. I know that my mother and grandfather need to turn Carnelian into a sort of version of Amber, the hub of some sort of trade empire, and that that will require people who can traverse shadow, at least until Shadow Paths are established. So at a guess that's where all you come in."

Whilst this was somewhat similar to what Cordelia had been telling us in a roundabout manner, it did provide me a greater framework and context for my own question. "I pretty much know it was you who followed me after we got our Expo invites. I'm going to guess that you followed each of us. What I'd actually like to know is why and to what end?"

I had thought she might have got defensive about this and refused to answer, but she seemed more amused than anything. "In truth I dont know exactly why but I have a theory. To explain I need to set a little context. The Black Shadow console I have, like the ones in your rooms, is not equipped with the same AI as the ones supplied en-mass to the market on Mizzurian Earth. Whilst not of the same calibre as I understand things as say Zou-Yan or Kai-Cheng they are of significantly greater capability all the same. Now when I initially got my Black Shadow console the AIs were still in the learning development phase, and somebody or something caused Jei-Xin, the main Mizzurian AI on earth to upload some very basic details about each of you from Kai-Cheng's data store along with certain other data pertaining, vis you'd all been issued VIP tickets to the Expo by my mother as her personal guests. Aside from the data Jei-Xin had determined that this behaviour was completely contray to normal business paradigrams, which was the conclusion it was supposed to reach, given that Kai-Cheng was preventing all other access to the data. Having been sent your profiles, Jarvis, that's the AI on my console had then built profiles for each of you based on what information he could find on the Internet. As far as I can tell this had been an elaborate setup based on my likely response to such an event, vis I would investigate and attempt to find out what was going on. As my investigation progressed I came to suspect something else, that somebody had also altered Jarvis's programming as he became more and more fixated on me finding each of you."

She had then continued after a prompt about her theory "So yes, after some work I had managed to track all of you down, although I ended up having to search for versions of you that had Expo tickets since the tickets had been delivered by my Mother. The reflections of  you across neighbouring shadows didn't. Having tracked each of you down I then got close enough to be able to read your aura's with the Pattern."

I'd interupted at this point "Okay so you read our aura's but I don't see this fits into any theory about why you were setup to do this, assuming of course that you're not just making the whole thing up."

"No I'm not making this up. And no having read your aura's, at least the aura's of most of you I didn't have any sort of theory. It was Jarvis who allowed me to work out why my mother had tracked you all down by turning the data I gave him on its head and asking me about the things I hadn't told him about each of your abilities, which was about who'm one of your parents might have been. Once we'd worked out and confirmed that at least one of the parents of each of you had to be an Amberite then my mother's actions sort of made sense."

She'd held her hand up at this point to forestall any furhter interuptions. "Now in answer to your original question, who would benefit in any way shape or form from me finding out who you all were and why my mother had invited you to the Expo before the Expo. You may think the answer is me, because as you said that's where all the evidence points if you take it all at face value. Except, and you'll have to take it from me as it comes, I don't really give a rats arse about any of you currently, you're a problem that has been foisted on me by my mother. Apologies if that hurts your feelings but as we're all in a sharing mood I'm sharing."

Now anybody reading this is going to think "what the fuck, she's just insulted the pair of you and admitted that she doesn't give a damn about any of us" how come either of you still have anything to do with her and why did you even bother to stick around. Its a question you'd be correct in asking. The point is she was telling the complete truth without any form of deception, bells, whistles, or embellishments, no matter what the consequences may be. That in itself given everything we'd been through recently was like a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark sky.

"Okay I can't say no offense taken, but I can tell you're being completely honest at least in your statement in relation to all of us, so where does that leave you, us, in relation to your theory, and tommorow's excurion"

"I'll deal with the latter first as its easier. My mother has in effect given me a job to do. I may not like it, but as she's probably pointed out to all of you the Family is a business. It can benefit you or it can fuck you over if you don't pull your weight. I'm sure my mother, grandfather, and the rest of my Elders could find all sorts of interesting ways to make my life difficult or should I say more difficult, I don't really know on that score. Anyway, the upshot is I'm going to have to behave like an adult and do what I've been asked to do in a professional manner. You all need to learn to Shadowwalk so that's waht I'm going to teach you to do."

"That's the easy part to answer. The other part is just based on complete supposition based on stories my mother and grandfather have told, and if I'm being honest that supposition scares me shitless becuase its intevention or appreance usually means trouble. The only entity I can think of who would have been capable of manipulting events in this manner goes by the name of "The Serpant". Who or what it is I have no idea just that it exists and that it has manipulated events in the past through members of my family."

I don't think Natsuki appreciated exactly what Charlie had said when she made that statement. Cordelia has mentioned the Serpant a few times, and we were told when we went to ELysium, that the place hadn't existed until part way through the Rodian War when the Serpant had caused it to come into being. It was also one of the four entities that had been mentioned in connection with putting Rodian back in his prison. The books pulished under the name of Carl Corey had also made references to the Serpant, and my mothers memories also contianed refernces. In all cases where it's name is mentioned it spelt trouble.

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