JT's Tale

Take a superhero whose powers center around healing, transformation, and the shaping of flesh. Batter him into semi-insenibility and drop him into Chaos' Rim. People in such distress often call out to their mothers or fathers. This superhero was Puck, and he was created ectoplastically by Tom Noon. Puck wished intensely that Tom were there, knew vaguely that Tom wasn't, and recalls thinking, as if it were some sort of key, "Thomas means Twin." Apparently, his flesh-shaping powers reached out into Chaos' Rim and produced Tom.

Or a Tom. This person supplied the first aid and the lucidity that Puck couldn't give himself, and a few hours later they were both on the Chaos Roads, deep in discussion of what the heck had happened. By the time they reached the Dreamtime, the new Tom had taken the name Jacob Thomas Noon, later shortened to "Jacob" or "JT." "Jacob" because the name means "successor."

JT stayed in the Dreamtime for a while, getting used to existing, to worlds, to people. Before moving on, Puck placed him in good company -- Chris Marlowe, who was amused by the sudden production of this new fellow who looked exactly like his old friend Tom. After a few months, Chris took JT to Hellene, got him a cosmetic mutation for black hair so he was no longer identical to Tom, and began his education in earnest.

JT started with scraps of memories and skills. He had some telepathy and some Life-Sense, some medical skill and some psychosomatic patharchy. Chris added to this, notably Second Sight, Dicing, Levitation, and Glamour, but JT turned out to be best at telepathy.

After a couple of years (for JT -- the time was scattered and twisted for most others), passing from mentor to mentor and commuting between Hellene and Vinyagaerond, JT was a budding young wizard, excelling in telepathy of all sorts, and very sound in First- and Second-Order Glamour. Around this time, the itchy feet so prevalent in the New Blood and in the Noon Line (as Chris began to call it) struck JT. He made preparations and, with the quixotic blessings of Uncle Chris, Aunt Lorelei, and Aunt Daewen on his head, headed down the Chaos Roads to the Dreamtime and beyond.

JT passed through the Dreamtime and out the other side, into the Dream World -- which, in his opinion, is a loose shaping cast on Chaos' Rim by the collective dreaming of mortal life. Put another way, it is the collective unconscious made tangible.

You meet interesting people in the Dreaming. There are dreamers, of course, generally bemused and transient. More impressive are the archetypes and stereotypes, the exagerated figures of dream. JT had a suitable quantity of adventure coping with these, since, unlike almost any other human in the Dreaming, he could not escape by waking; he was there bodily.

And there are fays. He went knowing that there are fay colonies in the Dreaming, but he did not particularly seek them out. He first encountered them in the form of, well, call them incubi or night-hags. They used nightmares to torture extra energy out of dreamers.

Until then, JT had not given a lot of thought to ethical issues, but he felt moved to get rid of these night-hags as a public service. In the process, he met and joined forces with more beneficent fays of the Dreaming. He had become involved in the doings of Mayapore and Phane, two of the fay Dream-Nations.

Eventually (it would be very hard to say how long), JT set up a residence in Phane, where he often acted as an emissary for a Phanean elven lord, Lorethel. Not only does he travel to other dream-realms on Lorethel's behalf, he also travels out of the Dreaming, into Faerie and the mundane worlds. JT also has residences in Vinyagaerond, Lanthil, Earth, and Hellene.

JT's default occupation in the Dreaming is dream-ranger. Because of him, many people scattered through space and time have fewer nightmares than they otherwise would, and a certain amount of field psychotherapy.

When he is in the waking world, if he is not on a diplomatic mission, JT is usually visiting family or getting educated -- activities which tend to be the same thing for him. So far, he has not managed to catch up to Grandfather, i.e. Tom. JT is curious to meet Tom, because he knows that, in many ways, he is Tom's Shadow, in the Jungian sense. In another way, he is Tom's Self.

Shadow-image or not, JT continues the Noon Line's tradition of rescuing things, like his super-hero father and world-saving grandfather. His first act was rescuing Puck, after all, and he puts in time as a dream-ranger, hunting nightmares.

JT started out as Puck's idea of Tom. Although Puck is very like Tom, he arose from Tom's emotional needs and is himself freer with emotional expression than Tom. So, even though Tom has a definite sentimental side, Puck thinks of himself as the sentimental one of the pair. JT, shaped by this attitude, is rather markedly UNsentimental, clearly more so than Tom.

Perhaps resulting from this, or perhaps resulting from JT's need to individuate himself, there are other differences between Tom and his grandclone:

• Tom is squeamish about falling out of temporal sequence. JT just cuts his memory to suit his time and carries on.

• Tom is worried about retaining his humanity and fears falling into fayness. The categories "human" and "fay" are much less important to JT than the category "New Blood."

• Tom (and Puck) tend to be somewhat anxiously courteous. JT tends to be abrupt.

• Tom is religious. JT can hardly disbelieve in the supernatural, considering his background, but has no interest in the metaphysical politics that are the basis of human religion.

• Tom is blond and tends to be suntanned. He usually wears a mustache and sometimes a full beard. JT is black-haired, pale, and clean-shaven.

• Tom has never been much interested in building up his strength; he was always outclassed by Nazas and Acros, or in a hi-tech environment. JT, Mr. Mentality, is a lot more developed in musculature; he's had to fight nightmares hand-to-hand.

• In glamour and ectoplastics, Tom's default color is green. JT's default color is blue, tending to indigo.

JT has no particular interest in designing or understanding machines, but he appreciates a nifty gadget and owns a few.

JT is generally confident, but not in all things and everywhere. In particular, Nature tends to awe him. Not grand landscapes, necessarily, though those will do it, certainly. But JT springs from and lives in the act of mind creating shape. A vast, stable thing, indifferent to mind and stretching far beyond the limits of mind in size, detail, and unimaginability, gets his immediate respect. Mathematics can affect him the same way.

Recently, the facile fertility of the Dreaming has begun to pall on JT. He has taken to exploring the "ordered world," as he calls everything from Faerie to Hackensack, and to taking a greater interest in the affairs of the New Blood.

Perhaps because of his time in the Dreaming, JT has a high tolerance for or indifference to the grotesque. Here is a list of his traveling gear, giving some idea of his style:

• Nebbish servant: a Second-Order Glamour cast on a ball of bright red synthetic fiber. Activated, it unwinds into a loose string-sculpture of a somewhat blobby human figure, apparently made of neon tubing, faceless, with mittenlike hands. It does light housekeeping or guard duty. It is voiceless but can reply with an answer written on a white card in fluorescent red ink. Such things were popular in Phane, so JT made one for himself.

• Shadow horse: a Second-Order Glamour cast on a black walking stick. It looks like a black horse with two heads. And I mean black, as in featureless silhouette, except for the horseshoes, which are brass. As a stick, it has a double-horse-head finial and a brass tip. Such things were the standard mount for Lord Lorethel's knights, so JT was given one by Lorethel.

• Fang rifle: looks like a rifle with leather-upholstered stock, bayonette, and telescopic sight, made of something white by an injection molding process. On closer inspection, the white material appears to be ivory, the pale leather of the stock is warm to the touch and faintly pulsing, and there is a yellow, cat-like eye staring out the far end of the gunsight. Its trigger is clawlike and extracts a drop of blood at each firing, explaining the slight scars on JT's second and third fingers on the right hand. It fires no physical projectile, but targets suffer something like an electrical burn. It can stun or kill. The bayonette is just a sharpened end of the muzzle, and if you drive it into a body, you will hear sucking noises. The rifle also purrs or growls. Without orders, it only fires for JT, and assists his aim. It was a present from Daequend, Lorethel's captain of arms.

• Electric epee: a fencing-style epee, but blunted. It delivers a controllable shock and is, in essence, a long thin cattle prod. It was produced in the 24th century but the only thing psionic about it is the power source, which recharges my Maxwell effect -- a patch of cold air. It was a present from Chris, who thought it nicely complemented the fang rifle -- a hi-tech fantasy weapon to match the magical gun.

• Musclecycle: a sort of motorcycle. Like the fang rifle, it has an injection-molded look. On inspection, it appears to be almost entirely covered in black and dark red leather. Yes, warm and pulsing. The tires are black leather, too, with horny cleats that stick out farther when more traction is needed. The wheel spokes are few, thick and look like horn. The windscreen has panes around the edge suggesting the sections of an insect's wing. The handlebars are tipped with ox-like horns and can turn forward to gore. The headlamp is a silvery, cat-like eye. The thing moves silently, but sounds like a revving engine when it growls. It has no controls, but there's a gas-cap into which JT pours drinkables -- honey, milk, wine, blood, soup, etc. JT made it himself, dreaming it up in Phane.

• Rosary: JT's psi battery. It's 33 shiny black beads, each worth 10 psi points when charged. The charge is bound telepathy, in the form of some common prayer or mantra -- "Om, mani padme hum," the Paternoster, the Shema, the first precept of Tao, etc. (We said JT was irreligious, didn't we? Well, even people who are other people's shadows have unexpressed sides to their natures.) The beads are pleasantly nubbly to feel. At least, it's pleasant until you notice they are carved in convolutions, like cerebral hemispheres.

• Book: a computer and carryall. It's a thin book bound in pale leather. By now, you should be suspicious of leather around JT. This, too, is warm and pulsing. It's the same shade as JT's skin. Inside, many pages are Second-Order Glamour storage for the other things. Other pages bear funny little icons and connect to the magic-based AI that JT is slowly developing in the book. It will probably grow up into the kind of book that reads you. It, the musclecycle, and the fang rifle are all sentient, in animal ways. The other artifacts are not.

All in all, it's a good thing JT is handy with glamour.