Sovereign

Entry 12: Sanders' Journal - 02/21

21st February

When I woke up this morning, I couldn’t remember my mother’s name. Sure I don’t remember a lot about her, except for the burn mark on the inside of my left arm from when I was little and she threw a curling iron at me. It has been one of the big gaps in my life, a little like a curious girl at the edge of a dirty pond. The surface of the water lapping the stone rimmed bank is calm and offers no hint to its depths and a replica with knitted brows stares back at me from within its depths, trying desperately to tell me something with lips that move soundlessly. She seems to want me to shed my clothes and take a dive, to find something settled on the pond’s muddy bed. I’m mortally afraid of what I will find down at the bottom if I ever do get the courage to slip into the water but I can’t seem to make myself step away from the edge.

Edwin and I have had a few sessions where I opened my mind to him and let him go spelunking, to see what he can find about her. All I had to offer him by way of link to guide him was the one thing that was concrete about her in my childhood, her name; Persepolis. I'm still not exactly sure it's hers, but it's all I have. When I woke, the question flashed before me like a pop quiz and I scoffed, then I tried to dredge up her name and all I got was silence. I lay in the roughened bed, eyes squeezed shut, concentrating hard, but it was useless. Eventually I got out of bed, tried to get ready for the Bunker; tried to immerse myself in routine to smother the panic that was beginning to build in my chest. Then it came, unbidden as I was squeezing toothpaste onto Norman’s brush, the one I had nicked when I came here, so I’d have something personal of his. This seems small, but I think of her everyday; she was the last thing on my mind before I slept, and I woke up and she was gone. It would have been different if I couldn’t remember at all that I had a mother, but the part of my memory where she occupied was still there, just now it was empty. It scared me Zoe, because any one of memories could go just like that, and we’d be left with holes that we knew were empty but couldn’t fill.

*sigh*

I got my hands on my first Esoteric mission report today.

Got my hands on is a bit of misdirection. I didn’t have to steal it or anything. Something is beginning to change in Raphael. He personally offered the report, I didn’t even know the report existed and technically it has nothing to do with the Incident (at least on the surface it doesn’t seem to). I have been reading it and understanding how the Esoteric division works. Basically, it works like a tiny country with only 57 inhabitants, or better still, one of those highly structured security outfits in dystopian novels that guard the last remain bastion of civilisation, keeping the sane in and the dangerous out. There are five divisions as far as I know; a Scout unit that’s basically a first responder to an ‘anomaly’ (that’s a word they throw around a lot here). They go in ascertain if it’s something the esoteric division should bother itself with. When that is determined, an affirmation unit then goes in. Now the Affirmation unit is easily the most peculiar of all five units, the group that give me the most pause. Among them is a woman called Magdalene Price. Blind, about this tall with silver chignon and something buried in her hair. From what I hear she’s blind, and the thing in her hair is some kind of rodent through which she sees. Seen her about twice now and both times, I feel like a fraud; as far as telepathy goes, she is the real deal.  There are four others like her, all part of the affirmation unit. Telepath mediums so nuanced in the art, they put them in one unit so they wouldn’t have to work with each other. Now the affirmation unit determines who gets the anomaly between the Conversion, Diplomacy and Containment units.

At this point is where the Esoteric Division gets really dystopian. The conversion unit’s main job is to ‘flip’ (a term borrowed from Cold War espionage) anomalies that might presently or potentially be of benefit to the Division or the CIA at large. A good number of the Esoteric Division’s employees were sourced this way. The Diplomacy unit serves to return errant anomalies that are at risk of causing harm but are not of any use to the Division back to their home pantheons. The Diplomacy unit is the reason most of the 21st century gods are back with their parent pantheons. The most recent Diplomacy success I heard from the levitating receptionist was Cerberus. The containment unit is the last line of defence or offense, depending on which side of the fight you’re on. They handle the anomalies the Division has deemed ‘irredeemable’ and handle these anomalies in three ways; exorcism, extermination or detainment. The report I was given chronicles one I had already written about to Langley. The one where Raphael got sent to the bleachers for most of the duration of the Pine Street incident due to injury.