Case No. 001
A Study on the Pieces of Fate
Part I: The 8-Ball
Prepared by Midnight
Fate.
Bit of a complicated beast, truth be told. Free will, or just puppets on strings? It's a question that's gnawed at the best of them for eons. If every move we make is already written in the stars… then what's the point of it all? Why do we bother fighting for every last scrap of our dignity in this damn Coffee Trade when the outcome's been predetermined since before the first punch was even thrown? Then again, if fighting's what's been written for you, that's what you'll do. Ah, but that's the rub though, choice?
Fate's kicked the bucket, and we're holding the bits and bobs of Its bloody carcass to prove it.
Once upon a time—before any of us were even a twinkle in our old man's eye—there was this… thing… called Fate. Fate, from what we can piece together, was an Archon. One of them ancient pre-Universal beings that should've been proper immortal like. Well… I suppose It was, in a manner of speaking. Despite being well enough dead Its body ain't exactly turned to dust. Its lungs, heart, peepers, bones, sinew—all of it still pulses with the dead God's grip on what ought to have been.
What still ought to be.
Us lot, running this Cafe and Diner business, we've got quite the collection of Fate's tat, or what we reckon must be them. Ol' Jack's tasked me and my Cafe with sussing out where they all came from, in a hope to understand what each cosmic horror kitsch was when Fate was alive, and what they do now that Its dead. …As if we haven't got enough on our plates with the bloody Dark still breathing down our collars and now the Mangrove Syndicate… Still, I reckon our Cafe does have a right mixed bag of perspectives: a warlock, a vessel, a chosen son, a cryptid, an ourborian, a high demon, an angel, and… whatever the hell Indrid is supposed to be.
So, with all that in mind, I figured we'd start with the Piece that kicked off this whole mess—the 8-Ball. Daichi was, apparently, there when it was first discovered. I'll let him tell the tale.
Jericho
Damascus, 1538.
Memory is a… funny thing. Especially for us Ouroborians. It's like honey on a hot day, sweet, cloying, and a little too thin to really scoop up. I recall the air was thick with roasted coffee beans, sweet tobacco, and the heady rot of roses. Some dive in Damascus where the shadows never seemed to fall right. Long before the Ottomans carved their crescent into the city's flesh, this no-name hellhole served as a watering hole for mystics and miscreants alike. It was here, beneath intricately carved wooden beams and the soft glow of oil lamps, that many late nights and early mornings saw the convergence of the mundane and the miraculous. Scholars with their ink-stained fingers met with thieves speckled in soot and blood to exchange their illicit objects for far illicitier ideas.
One such thief went by the name Ibreez. And one such scholar went by the name Nasira.
Ibreez—what a joke. A prince in rags, a pauper in silks. He was a thief who fancied himself a luminary. The fool draped himself in violet cloaks that turned even the most well off a'yan's heads, with gold thread that snared light like a spider's web catches flies. Poor as a church mouse, but he dressed like a sultan to keep the Janissaries' eyes elsewhere. He started out peddling saffron and steel before finding his true calling in heresy and things that don't belong in this world. See, all his money, every akçe he earned, was spent for an hour of Shaykha Nasira's time. An expensive addiction.
Nasira al-Ghazani—mystic, visionary, and a prophetess of false signs. Her eyes once brown as rich fresh earth turned gray as storm clouds after peeking behind the curtain. She was one of the few who could see into the "Second Horizon." The Otherside. Her robes stank of clove, ash, and something sweeter than decay. She learned her craft from the whirling dervishes of Konya before winding up in a hidden courtyard by the Barada, which she turned into this particular den of iniquity. I suppose… It was the first of its kind, a place that one day would be called a Cafe.
Fate brought Ibreez and Nasira together—and they would be the ones to bring Fate together. Piece by piece. Forty years they hunted, these jokers, collecting eight Pieces of the dead God: an Occipital Lobe, a Vitreous Humor, a Uvula, a Fibula, a Cochlea, a Pineal Gland, a Pancreas, and a Pericardium. Each Piece of Fate was a sliver of a fragment of something that should never have died. And these dopes tried to bring Fate back to life. They sought to resurrect the Dead God that we—eh, never mind.
At the twilight of their thankfully short mortal lives, the two attempted a "Great Reassembly," an attempt to reconstitute the Pieces of Fate, to give predetermination a will and form again. They conflated one dead God with their presumed only God. It went poorly. The ritual failed, and both of their bodies were turned to ash and dust and a little bit of gold, and for a moment, it seemed the secret of the Pieces of Fate would die with them.
I happened to be passing by and while seven of the eight Pieces of Fate were once again lost, the Occipital Lobe remained. A cute little onyx toy, really. Shake it, get answers. The mundane form it takes reflects the mind of its holder—currently Jack Keel. But before Jack got his grubby hands on it, it was just a ball of inky darkness in which answers came to the surface from the back of the skull where possibility pools into vision.
The Serpent, Daichi
I have borne witness to the 8-Ball on scant occasions. Unlike the other Pieces of Fate held within the Cafe and Diner's control, the 8-Ball does not belong to the Cafe and Diner collectively. It belongs to Keel, and Keel alone. In every sighting, the object has remained in Keel's possession—clutched in his palm or nestled deep within his pocket. This proximity renders our study of it… impossible. Even if granted temporary custody, our understanding would remain but a shadow compared to Keel's profound communion with the thing.
The established knowledge of the 8-Ball suggests it distorts Fate's course through answers, offering guidance and knowledge on how to best avoid or redirect the expected path. It is not like the Lens, which merely reflects futures already written, nor the Pocket Watch, which permits traversal between Cycles of what has been or might still be. The 8-Ball instead offers clear and concise absolutes—yes, no, perhaps—or on occasion, impossibly precise indications of its query.
For that reason it is the most potent of the Pieces.
Its superficial simplicity belies a terrifying power: the absence of limitations. The Lens warps perception; the Watch is bound to alternate Cycles from our own. But the 8-Ball's knowledge operates on a scale commensurate with—and perhaps exceeding—the question asked of it. And Keel asks damn good questions.
Like the other Pieces of Fate, using the 8-Ball does have a cost, each query draws upon Keel's blood. Each shake, the 8-Ball rips trickles of vitality from Keel's hand, leaving his veins bruised and spiderwebbed after a long day of work. I've heard, in the early days of the Cafe and Diner, Bali was permitted to ask a question to no effect. This connection is uniquely Keel's. So... Only his blood can power the answers he seeks, and through his communion, he claims to see some "bigger picture." The course of Fate? Or something much older?
Julius
Caffeinated Report: POF-001
Fate is Unturnable from Athens to Stockholm—Well, Unturnable? Or Unified?
1 Word
Caffeinated Report: POF-002
More Major than Minor, One Less than the Floating Fated Die holds.
2 Words