Lauren

They kind of asked me to say a bit about myself and it’s not really very easy right now, because basically I’m pretty much bat shit crazy, and have been for the last month. Lord Jonathan had some really cool ideas, and I love what he’s done with the place, but – hey – he’s got a vicious streak a mile wide running through the middle of his creativity, and that little sting in the tail that he put into the Animus where the more powerful a mind you have, the longer the crazies last after you walk the thing has pretty much fucked me over good and proper – to use a phrase that Dad would shit a horse to hear me saying.

So – you know – I have managed to make some really cool shit while I’ve been letting the muse flow through me – in between trying to stop Spectre – my symbiotic Superhero body suit – from sloughing off a hundred little creations of her own – which kind of got a bit gross at one point when she actually managed to get my hands on another person and twisted a tendril into their guts to cause them to puke pretty much everything they’d eaten in about the last year all over us, which she then promptly extracted the genetic material from and sent her first offspring sloughing off down my arm and all over this chap who was still dry heaving – well – long story short – the first of Spectre’s offspring is now bouncing around the inside of a vacuum tank, with no sentience, because I was so surprised by it all that I never had chance to slap any sort of programming into it, and I’m still trying to figure out how to let Spectre get past her crazies – I guess I should have realised that if you take an artificial life form with you into a Logrus and something weird is going to happen – hell – I was one of Merlin’s girlfriends during the whole Frakir thing – so it’s not like the clues weren’t there.

Anyway – what am I supposed to be talking about – of yeah – that’s right – me. Well – I was born in who knows what year in Thelbane – but on St. James reckoning it would have been about 1949. At that point – Dad was thrashing his way through Mage college – so was Mom come to that – and the whole BFF thing was going on between them – made complicated by the fact that Dad’s crew actually was about five of them, and Mom was the token female in the bunch. I have a feeling that the night that they made me was kind of a first time thing for both of them – and it may well also have been one of those friendship shattering ‘big mistakes’ – either that or Mom has her own brand of brain fuck-ups – either way – she dropped out of college for about a year – telling the rest of Dad’s crew – and him for that matter – absolutely fuck all – and dumped me off as a babe in arms with her Hendrake relatives to be brought up.

So by the time I got to the stage where college was looming it was the middle of the swinging sixties, and we had quite a little rat pack of our own going on. It all revolved around Merlin, of course – considering what a dweeb he was it was amazing how he just made me gush all over the place – I’d already had to lay a serious stomping on one of my cousins who had her claws into him- I was just not a sharing type of girl back then – and there we were at college up to our necks at the cutting edge of techno-magical research at a time when the world we were on was on the brink of nuclear holocaust – and we had this really cool idea – why not build a computer that could run the world defences so that the people could make love – not war – without having to worry about all that shit? Of course – it would need to be able to think for itself – which was going to mean some serious blue sky work – and it would need a bunch of loyal servants to help it do the things that you just need a pair of hands to do – which was going to take another bunch of blue sky research – but – hey – we were young, in love, and sleep was for wimps – right?

So – a few months later – Merlin and me were in the bunker under Cheyenne Mountain, with Ghostwheel having just issued his ultimatum that if we didn’t hand over control of the entire military arsenals of the world to him in the next sixty minutes, he was going to do a simultaneous launch of all the U.S. and Russian ICBMs, thus effectively annihilating all life on the planet, and we came to the conclusion that we had perhaps lost control of our brainchild, and something drastic was going to have to be done to fix this mess. What it came down to was that one of us was going to have to mentally link with Ghostwheel, and dominate some sense back into the kid – and kind of when you think about it – it was a bit of a no-brainer who that was going to have to be – based on the fact that poor old Merlin has no brain that we are aware of in the psychic domination sense of the word – the poor fucker couldn’t even dominate his cup of coffee of a morning considering how often he ended up wearing it rather than drinking it – but anyway – that kind of meant it was going to be me. And it also kind of meant I was going to have to stay in there for a while, until Merlin figured out how to re-program Ghostwheel to not be such a complete fucking arsehole about this whole human freedom to blow itself to shit thing – so I was kind of going to have to use the prototype Superhero suit we had also been working on to keep my body alive while I was in gestalt with the infant supercomputer despot that we had proudly built. So I poured myself into Spectre, who is a really cool Superhero suit – even if I do say so myself – and that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Merlin got a hard-on you could hang an elephant from the first time he saw my sketches for Spectre’s design – and I plugged my brain into Ghostwheel, and started a long philosophical debate with a 2 month old super-genius about the nature of life, the universe, and free will, while a combination of a symbiotic relationship with Spectre and a bunch of feeding tubes that were connected to her kept my body alive until Merlin had fixed things.

Of course – what I didn’t know was that as soon as the crisis was averted – for that read ‘I was plugged into it all and had Ghostwheel pretty much psychically dominated into being entirely concerned with me, and oblivious to anything else’ – Merlin fucked off and cast a popular fiction spell over the whole mess, turning it into some cheesy Hollywood movie plot called ‘The Forbin Project’, and left me there to rot. Not that I was actually going to rot of course – I had a zillion tons worth of super computer hardware sitting in the middle of a natural forest full of raw material resources from which it could extract nutrients for me, and me being a decent shapeshifter anyway – and Spectre being a pretty cool shapeshifter too – we sat there for quite a while. Close to forty years – as it happens. As I have subsequently learned – somewhere in the intervening time Merlin got himself practically killed. And when he was finally gotten out of that mess he had pretty much forgotten me, and Ghostwheel – and pretty much everything else he had ever made too it seems. Also – somewhere along the line, Amber and Chaos decided to have the war to end all wars which resulted in a lot of the people I grew up with getting dead, and my Dad (who I never really knew) decided to fuck off somewhere else with another bloke he met – incidentally – Dad and this other bloke each married themselves one of a pair of sisters – hard luck Mom – and these two blokes decided to start all over again with a new Pattern and a new Logrus. Dad did the Logrus – the other bloke did the Pattern.

I was sort of not quite sure what I was going to do after a bunch of folks from Spec. Ops. discovered my secret base under Cheyenne Mountain, which apparently was right next door to another secret base under Cheyenne Mountain that they already knew about, and came and unplugged me from Ghostwheel – just in time to stop him hosing over the world for a second time as it happens – boy have they built a lot of really cool computer shit in the last forty years – which just made it so much easier for Ghostwheel to try and take over again this time – and anyway – then when we had Ghostwheel nearly back in his box the little bastard decides to set off the self distruct that we paranoid lot had put into him all those years ago. Wow – I really was a kick-ass Logrus master back then – wasn’t I? That’s the biggest fucking lump of Primal Chaos I’d ever conceived of gathered together in one place – and the one place was a rapidly decaying Pattern Sorcery bottle that Merlin had built, and I had coded an entropic dis-entanglement algorithm into it with a controllable duration half-life, and a fucking countdown to doom. It was in that enlightening moment as I realised that if I couldn’t un-program my anti-tamper system so that we could get that fucker out of there then me, them, the world, and about twenty seven nearby worlds were all going to evaporate into the primal nothingness from which Cornelius and the other original beings first crawled forth, that I also realised in no uncertain terms exactly what Spectre had been subsisting on for the last forty years, as I briefly lost control of both my bladder and bowels – yet nobody else in the room with me had the first clue what had happened. Yay for anal feeding probes is all I can say to that. Did I mention that I love my Superhero suit?

Anyway – I’m writing this, so obviously I did get the anti-tamper unpicked, and Merlin – who they had brought in as a consultant – turns out he’s living a fine life on St. James working his way through the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader squad – guess where his dick is never ever going again this side of doomsday – whoa – kind of got off the subject again – sorry – yes – Merlin – did his heroic quarterback dash to take my Primal Chaos bomb off to ‘somewhere safe’ in Shadow to blow up – that’s the thing with Primal Chaos – once you bring it forth it’s got to do it’s thing – you just can’t put that genie back in the bottle. End result – hole in Shadow at least twenty seven veils wide – and after a bit of time forgetting about it and hoping the hole would just go away – which obviously it didn’t – Lord Jonathan builds this amazing new world to plug the hole – and truth to tell – it’s exciting. None of us who have anything to do with Animus have even a century to our names – hell – I don’t count the forty years I spent strapped to a dentist’s chair with my brains plugged into a computer – so I’m the ripe of age of twenty – not even legal for my first alcoholic drink in some parts. But – this is really going to be special, and we’re going to make this place work – and we’re going to defend it against the arseholes who want to take it from us too – trust me on this – we’re not messing about here.

Animus is the future, and I am it’s Lead Defender.