Springfield America
From DevilshireWiki
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 James Roday as Springfield America | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Springfield 'Ringo' America is an identity-shattering shaman on the run from his Benefactors.
Contents |
Background
I think it'd probably be best if I made this snappy. If I dwell too long on the details, think too much about the finer points, if I let myself drift off into the unnecessary nonsense of the tale I'm intending to tell, then it distinctly increases the likelihood that I'll slip and forget when I am. It's pretty frustrating, to remember things that haven't happened yet. For a while I tried to tell myself that I was thinking right and everyone else was just limited in the way their memories work, but when it's the world versus you, you just can't be right.
I have no idea what my name is. Though I do remember the first name I gave myself. Vinny Beech. From the moment of my escape I recognized the importance of associating myself with something not me, something very not human. All a part of blurring my psychic image. The less I am me, the less of me can be detected. It's a little frightening. For all the protection I give myself, I wonder if I might not be losing what little of who I am I had for myself to begin with.
Vinny Beech. That was the first name I ever used. Since then I've gone from place to place, shedding names like snakes shed skins, but instead of leaving behind a deeply resonant piece of myself, I took on more shields, more identities of others. I have to fracture who I am. I have to blur along those edges. Since then I've been Telly Hill. Clark County. Calvin Alberta. Since I fled Vegas, I've been Springfield America. I've never taken a name that broke me so much. People think that Springfield is a very common city name, but there's actually only thirty four of them. Thirty four cracks in my traceable identity. I once knew a guy who called himself Fairview Earth. He cracked so much he fell into himself. Haven't seen him since. It's an object lesson, people.
My childhood was much like anyone else's. I was called the brother by the faceless people who owned me. I grew up in a series of boxes, each as long in every direction as my height plus a foot. When I'd outgrow a box, I'd be moved, while asleep, to another one. The walls of the boxes were covered with glyphs, runes, cards, charts, images. Occult symbols that danced when seen from the corner of my eye, but weren't there when looked at straight on. Tarot cards with pictures that were more than paintings, drawings, the gods themselves locked in ink and paper. The makeup of the boxes would change periodically. Sometimes between glances. Every box had a screen, some buttons and some holes. Through the screen I was taught to read and speak, at night the Emperor and the Empress came to me and taught me about the meanings of the things on the walls. The only direct human contact I had for many years was with a girl. She was younger than I, and as they called her the sister, I had to assume that meant she was my sister. So, yeah, a childhood much like anyone else.
At one point the screens changed from simple education to tests. It came to a point where I had to work for my prizes, prove myself to eat or sleep. Sometimes days would pass when I would not be allowed to rest between the buzzings of the latest questioning. Always over the lessons taught to me by the people living in my walls. The strange little man with the dog, always walking too close to the edge of the cliff. The juggler, with absolute coordination and understanding. The lost man with the lantern. Each with different lessons, and it was demanded that I remember them all.
Soon my visits with my sister became dependent on my performance in these tests.
One year I grew nearly a foot fairly quickly. At the same time, my voice grew cracked and the World started looking pretty tempting. I had no idea what puberty was at the time, but my handlers recognized it when they saw it. In addition to my tests, I was routinely subjected to what one of the faceless men called the Edison Medicine. Shock therapy. Pinholes were drilled into my skull and needles pushed into my head. I know now that they were attempting to rewire certain circuits in my brain.
The constant exposure to the occult, the drumming of it into my recognition of self, making it more a part of my identity than my name, and now the realigning of the magic sensitive nodes in the human brain. I grew up in a wizard's equivalent of a Skinner box, designed to provoke a response. To create- I don't know what they intended to create. A walking diving rod. A cruel magnet for magical energy. I can see them both being possible now. They set the dominoes well enough, though like the computer that designs its replacement, I think I could build a better me. If I ever wanted to. Though God I never would, I never would.
When you set up dominoes you need something to push them over. One day (morning? night? how was I to know?) I was given a battery of tests, physical and mental, then placed in a neutral room with my sister and one of the faceless men. She was placed in a large transparent box and water began to spill out onto her from above. The faceless man then set out abstract puzzles that made little sense. Almost randomly my working in one or another would cause the flow of water to decrease or increase. Even then I knew that I was being tasked with finishing some task or watch my sister drown. Now I understand, at least intellectually, that the puzzles were not meant to be solved. I was meant to see her die. I specify intellectually because even on an intellectual level, I recognize that I will never forgive myself emotionally.
I worked as fast as I could, but eventually I looked up and the water was near the top, the grate she could not push up past. Her cheeks puffed up and her legs and arms thrashed. The air came from her mouth and her nostrils, little bubbles eventually rolling out long after her last exhale. When she finally ceased motion, she stared. Stared at me. I realized that it was my fault. All my fault. If I had worked faster, if I had thought harder. The guilt was a physical thing and that guilt drew her fluttering little ghost into my receptive soul like a moth to a flame. With her ghost, all broken up and put back together, welded into my animus, my thaumaform, I broke.
There are a lot of things that get called ghosts. A resonant impression. A guilt echo. A stress shell. Any number of things, though they are rarely wandering souls. I absorbed something of all of them into myself that day, joining my living soul with the unseen world of the restless dead. The girl I thought of my sister becoming an antenna that bridged between myself and the shadow. Unfortunately, ghosts do not always exist in the same timeframes as do we. Ask a ghost a question and it may answer one you've not yet asked.
It took days, maybe weeks or months, to gather the parts of myself that I'd left in shambles rolling around the inside of my head. I paid attention to the sources of my food and water and what happened to my waste, my clothes. Several nights (or rather, cycles I refer to as night out of a sense of current habit) I attempted to feign sleep, but no matter how hard I fought to stay awake, I could not do so. Eventually the men who always seemed to be falling from their broken castle told me that it was because of a sound my brain couldn't hear, but that my ears could. It put me to sleep. That night I tore up the bottom of my shirt and pressed it into my ears. I pulled the juggling man off of my wall (I The Magician) and the kind falling men (XVI The Tower) and finally the old skin and bones man (XIII Death) and pressed them against my skin. When I rolled over to feign sleep, I could feel them burning where I had placed them.
One of the faceless men came to take away my previous day's clothes and empty food bowls. Though when I looked up, this faceless man had a face. The mask they normally wore was hanging around his neck and what I saw was a chinless, spotty man no larger than me and certainly not much older. With surety, change and renewal on my side, my acted against the boy. Halfway through I was moving more out of sheer thrilling panic than anything else. I had not intended to put my arm around his neck and I did not mean to cut off the flow of blood to the brain. I only knew that he was dead when I felt his ghost pull away from his body and be claimed by the dark reward of whatever comes next for those so mild in life that they leave behind no imprint of who they once were.
Taking the guy's mask and his clothes, I made my way through the entrance he used. My tiny world suddenly opened up into something much, much larger. Endless hallways, door-lined corridors. All I could do was to continue following signs that indicated an exit, keeping my mask on as I passed other people. Some masked, some not. By the time I reached the doors and saw that unimaginable wonder if the world outside, the alarms were going off and people were running around, looking, I can only imagine, for me. I pressed the Tower to the locked down door and let the little men do their thing. The sirens slowed to a stop, the lights went out and the door opened up into beautiful freedom.
Beautiful, terrible freedom. In this case, freedom meant finding myself in the middle of a warehouse park in South Pasadena. Having never experienced the outside world, never had any marker to go by, I made my way to the only landmark that meant anything to me. The ocean. By the time I passed out in the dry canals near Venice Beach, my feet were blistered and my eyes watering. The next day, as I washed myself off in the ocean, I took my name from the beach where I had been reborn.
For the next year and a half, Vinny Beech went from confused outsider to LA beach bum extraordinaire.
The next summer after I'd fled LA was hit by a serious heat wave, so my group started going to the dollar theater during the day to get into AC for a couple of hours every day. Thus my introduction to the popular culture. Men and women on the big screen masking themselves without even realizing it, diluting their identity by being other people. No wonder so many of them would go on to have breakdowns or problems with substance abuse. Long after my friends stopped going, I kept it up. I started selling penny futures on the beach to my fellow freaks, which quickly became ten dollar futures to tourists. With that money, I began to invest in my new faith.
Life a voodoo houngan may have spilled rum on a machete and set it on fire to call up Ougou, I would match my own psychic resonance to that of dead but remembered celebrities, to call their attention. All magic is a natural working of the base archetypes through simple human understanding. Others had gods and symbols, I had the Walk of Fame. Others had temples, I had Mann's Chinese Theater. Others had holy books, I had Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine. Men like James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Harry Houdini became to me what Horus, Zeus and Verethragna were to others. And by making the memories of celebrity my gods, I was able to further fracture myself. When I wore a psychic mask of Errol Flynn, the nature of me was harder to discern.
Most of my money started going toward memorabilia. Autographs were fine, but if I could find something a star had worn, especially in a movie or a television show or a famous photograph, so much the better. These articles were as important to me as bird entrails to a augur, yerba buena to a bruja or veves to a santero. All lives fall into patterns and to me a man's life could be seen as the Fool or the Emperor, with that I could work my own magic and hide myself.
Eventually I got careless, one of their sniffers had caught my scent and I knew I had to leave the city. Leave or put my friends in jeopardy, leave or go back to the hell of captivity. Or die. Dying as fractured as I was, I'm not sure what kind of a ghost I'd make. Or if I'd just become a thousand little mes, disappearing with the first gust of wind. A horrible notion. So I ran.
In San Fransisco I was Telly Hill, telling fortunes in the slums of Haight-Ashbury, where foolish tourists would still go to see what was once a vital part of the city's culture. In Las Vegas I was Cal Alberta, first shilling on the strip and then doing part time work as a cooler for some of the lower end casinos on Fremont Street. A man with a fractured identity makes a good cooler, pulling all the pooled up potential from a hot table and taking it to central storage. There's a reason the powerful in Vegas are some of the most powerful in America. Running afoul of some of those powerful got me buried neck deep in the desert by a group of vampire gangsters who ran a half-dozen casinos on the strip.
Eventually I made it cross-country to Boston, where I was tied up for a few weeks by definite points in the future I remembered. Meeting Wentworth Moore and Marley Moore and sending them on their chase. Standing before the Remnant and having it devour my memories of Saint Louis, memories I no longer have and now wonder if they were from the past or the future.
I feel in my gut that I should keep on moving, even if leaving the country would require a reworking of my pantheon. But I know that there's another definite point coming up, some future event I can't see or remember, but I also know that I can't change. So I need to be in Devilshire, or I risk something worse than simple disillusion.
Personality
Ringo's the kind of guy who is hesitant to open up to most people, given his unusual handicap. Most of the time he comes across as easy going, but fairly distant. When he makes a friend, though, he is fiercely loyal toward that person and becomes unusually blind to their faults. Otherwise, though, he tries to avoid getting involved in much of anything, cos the nail that stands up gets hammered down.
Powers and Abilities
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Life as Ringo.
People
Wentworth Moore - Went's an okay guy who was dealt a shitty hand and he never even realized it.
Marley Moore - Marley is a huge jerk.
Leslie Whitcomb - She talks like John Dee and looks like David Bowie. Interesting!
Phillip Harget - Smart guy, but he's kind of a coward, so he's a really smart guy.
Louis Laroche - Phillip's boyfriend. A really nice guy who may or may not have similar problems to Ringo.
Scout Smith - She's trying to understand him. That's more than most people bother with.
Anna Bracha - She may be the gateway to a past he was meant to forget, but that hasn't prevented Ringo from seeking her out at every opportunity. Though friends and common sense have warned him to stay away, he just can't. Since his near-miss with the Wild Hunt, and despite a number of misunderstandings, their relationship has become something a little more defined.
Recent Events
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