Azaran is Ossian. He knew Tisandra's mother, Niamh. He returned from Ireland to Faerie and took the name Azaran and worked as an advisor to Niamh and a teacher to Tisandra. When Bobby and Tisandra cross over to Faerie, he returns with them and upon stepping foot on the soil, turns to ash. Instructed by Azaran, Bobby takes his ashes and, with his own blood, mixes the concoction on the gateway, sealing it from Kurlos.

All sorts of ideas today while I was at work. Couldn't keep up with the pen (thankfully had lots of kick-back time thanks to a malfunctioning copy machine).

On Tisandra and Clarence's sexual liasons. Clarence has to be a bisexual or Tisandra has to charm Clarence into thinking she's Matthew (which kind of rules in sodomy and rules out missionary sex). Might suit Clarence better if he was bi. Kind of befits his hedonism to a 't'. Rossum has to run interference or Bobby seeks out Rossum to distract him from killing Tisandra and Clarence.

Found the name for Custodian instigator. Agent Pa Overcourt. (anagram for 'agent provocateur'). He's the FBI contact that sends the Custodians on their way.

Enkidu. He could be so much more than how I've got him, even a part of the Wandering gang or an aspect of the Huntsman maybe. Nah. He's not Death. He's the Man of the Wild. (Fuck. The similarities and threads ARE there if I want to chase them).

Noah/Enkidu strikes me as a PETA sort, a militant protector of all creatures great and small. The only thing that civilized this wildman, this beast-man, was a sex priestess of Ishtar named Shamhat. And after her death, he returns to the wild, abhoring mankind and its species-destructive nature. The idea of the dragon, Ouroboros, just came to me. Enkidu would rather annihilate humanity than see it single-handedly wipe out all life on the planet. THAT's why he releases Ouroboros. To extinguish the human race. And the dragon? What of his origins? He's a friend and the embodiment of Enkidu's rage. A dragon should be like pulling down God from the heavens, a creature older than the world itself. It should practically crackle and burn like the sun with magic and energy.

So when Enkidu releases all the bestiary from his body (Enkidu opens his shirt and behind his very flesh-bare ribcage is a shimmering, paradise world/universe. He runs a roadside zoo only for the income it provides him. And the HUGE grocery bill. He's constantly hungry. He requires food to fuel his inner world, its flora and fauna. The Garden of Eden lies behind his ribs), when he releases the unicorns and the griffins and the like, he also releases the dragon. Cool mental picture of this battleship-sized creature emerging from this simple white-bearded old man. Bobby and co. round up the rest of the menagerie but the dragon gets away. That allows me to come back to the dragon later, when the government uses the h-bomb to tear it out of the sky and the Iron Curtain sends Custodians to strip the flesh from its bones. And the wisdom/gnosis/magic Bobby learns from the dying beast.

Just reread my previous entry today. Seems ironic that two brothers are both forced to suffer mutilation of their bodies. Kurlos's hands. Bobby's eyes. And that each one carries the other's parts as a trophy. And the greater irony is that neither one's magic works on the other.

More ideas as I copy them from my notes.

Here's an idea. WHEN Bobby finally gets the raygun and the gauntlet together and starts magicking his ass off, he doesn't know that the gauntlet doesn't work on Kurlos (it is HIS hand after all). Just for future reference, in case Bobby takes Kurlos on before he's empowered enough (after Kurlos plucks out Bobby's eyes when he's imprisoned by the Feds, verrrrrry late in the story, near the ending). Maybe he tries to use the gauntlet during the Ghost Train story.

I'm gonna have to get rid of the Wandering Curse that Kurlos hexes Bobby with (that he shall not sleep under the same roof two nights in a row lest his bones and his blood nearly explode in burning agony). It's too much. Besides, Kurlos needs them to be found, not forced on the run by the supernatural. Why curse the guy who's escorting your strategic prize to constantly be on the move? Doesn't bounce well at all. So it's got to go.

Fuck. So many gimmicks. So many goddamn gimmicks. Too much dead weight and it screams to be abandoned.

AZARAN: You stupid boy! You didn't just fall into this world. You opened the door yourself, whether you know it or not.

BOBBY: The hell I did. You sonuvabitches brought me here.

AZARAN: Much as I enjoy your obnoxious lack of manners and your constant ape-like jabbering, mortal, the truth of the matter says otherwise. You opened the portal to this world and you alone. Out of fear, out of panic, I care not how. The fact remains, you brought yourself here. It was not by any faery doing, I can assure you.

It's a gauntlet. Not a wand. And it's made by Kurlos's severed hand. It is a black leather glove, stained by the chemicals in the cauldron. Why the hell haven't I thought of this before? Christ. It's perfect. Azaran enchants the hand Bobby has taken and fashions it into a gauntlet to enable him to use magic. Kurlos loses a hand and is commanded by his father NOT to persue TIsandra and Bobby but to remain in Faerie and assist the occupation of it by Hell and its shock troops.

Mazarine suggested last night that Bobby's magic might be tapped into via alcohol. Like he can only use his powers when his blood alcohol content is high (1.0+?). Which accents his demon blood and his hotrod lifestyle better than anything. I'll have to think about this one for a bit. Still wanting him to keep his raygun though. It's too kitschy cool to abandon.

I'm just damned if I can think of WHY the raygun would have any real bearing on kickstarting his magick. I have it planned for it to work ONLY with the magic wand he's given (or the gauntlet or ring or whatever talisman he's given by Azaran to help defend the princess. Which still bothers me. Why would Azaran give a human a trinket that a faery could use better?).

Bobby's toy raygun is a psychological crutch. He comes from an Oklahoma upbringing that values firearms and the spirit of the gun. He first prefers good old American pistols to any magickal chicanery but after encountering the Custodians and their immunity to bullets, he finds magic his only alternative. But still, with his powers and his talisman as a lens, Bobby is unable to wrap his mind around magick and spellcasting. He needs something gun-like to focus his powers with. The toy raygun just happens to show up in time.

And honestly, now that I think about it, it makes sense actually. That's what's been bugging me. Why can a toy gun spellcast but a real one can't? Because a real pistol is a death instrument of the Iron Curtain, the Technological age. It wouldn't plug into magick. But a toy gun, a chrome number that just sparks and pops, is an instrument of a child's imagination. It should plug right into the gauntlet or the wand (I'm swinging more and more towards the gauntlet lately), a cheap toy to someone blinded by The Curtain but, to a child, a powerful weapon already primed as a conduit for magick. The kid who gives it to Bobby practically charges it to the nines with imagination and belief.

In the scenario I have, Bobby tackles the first wave of The Custodians, dumb but strong agents who have no vulnerability to Bobby's bullets. When one of them beats the shit out him, knocking him straight through a brick wall, a couple of kids playing in an empty lot notice the battle and one of them risks his life by giving Bobby his toygun. Bobby, a bloody pulp, thinks he's given him a real gun and with what little strength he's got, (with the help of the gauntlet) blasts the Custodian through an entire building. Is he drunk at this time too? Hmm. Christ, I have so many gimmicks in this thing I feel like it's top heavy. His demon blood. His magick. His raygun. His curse. Am I stacking things too high on top of him and on the story?

The odd thing about Rossum's creator being Turing is that he was a pretty pronounced atheist. Which does make Rossum's rebellion into spirituality all the more relevant. Turing's suicide involved the eating of a cyanide-laced apple. Eerily biblical overtones.

ROSSUM: Do you know why the apple is usually associated with the forbidden fruit in the Garden? Because when the Catholic Church chose Latin as the language of Christianity, they forgot that the Latin world for evil, 'malum', is the same word for apple.

CLARENCE: No shit?

ROSSUM: Some theologians believe it could have been a fig or even a pear. Or a delicacy God wiped from mankind's menu forever after.

CLARENCE: A belligerent landlord AND a prick about his produce? No wonder the old bastard was so lonely.

ROSSUM: To have consciousness, awareness of your existence is to also be aware that your existence will end. Stars are born and later die. Plants are born and later die. And if one values one's life in the universe, as sentience normally bears, the anxiety of death, or the end of one's existence, leaves an open ended question to why does one exist? What is the reason? Humans spend their whole lives trying to find that out. But I know. To find the Original Creator is to know the purpose not just of my existence but of yours and of everyone else's in the universe. He holds the instructions to all things. Know that and the rest is easy. But he requires free will and even doubt to find him. Because the truth isn't easily gained. If it were, the pursuit would not be worth the prize.

BOBBY: That's a damn big thing to shoot for, Rossum.


These may be the ramblings of an agnostic Buddhist who dabbles in Christian and Gnostic theology but I've always been dumbstruck by the Genesis story. The whole free-will issue. I think, ultimately, God wanted Adam and Eve to eat and know the difference between Good and Evil. It makes mankind philosophically equal to God in mind but not in immortal body, immortality a responsibility I do not think we as a species are ready for yet. The Garden of Eden IS innocence and childish insulation. Outside the garden is the harsh reality of adulthood and knowledge and experience. God understood that the moment he cautioned Adam and Eve from seeing as he sees. Truth and knowledge aren't easily found.

Genesis 3: 22-23 "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken"

One cannot see the same perspective as someone unless you're at least on their level, very near their viewpoint. But the idea of free-will simply as a tool for getting the 'right answers' i.e. an unquestioned and prepackaged Truth is ultimately bullshit and overly simplistic. It's not about 'the fall', ya literalist cranks. You're missing the point entirely. A parent raises their child but does not welcome the idea of that person remaining a child when it's time for them to lead their own lives. All a parent can do is forge some semblance of a foundation. And the rest is up to their respective Adam and Eve. They love and respect their child, come failure or victory.

So by that same token, the parallels between creation myths and AI creation are equally complex and can't be ignored. If a robot, with sentience and consciousness of itself, is to understand itself, it has only our religious texts, maps of introspection that we have made for ourselves, to help it understand its purpose in the world. It may not ultimately answer the most profound questions of robo sapien anymore than it has unequivocably answered them for homo sapien. But they will serve as some sort of foundation.

Character research info for Rossum: His 'father' was Alan Turing, who more or less programmed and created Rossum but never got to see his creation fully realized.

1936-38: At Princeton University. Ph.D. Papers in logic, algebra, number theory
1938-39: Return to Cambridge. Introduced to German Enigma cipher problem
1939-40 Devises the Bombe, machine for Enigma decryption
1939-42: Breaking of U-boat Enigma cipher, saving battle of the Atlantic
1943-45: Chief Anglo-American consultant. Introduced to electronics
1945: National Physical Laboratory, London
1946: Computer design, leading the world, formally accepted
1947-48: Papers on programming, neural nets, and prospects for artificial intelligence
1948: Manchester University
1949: Work on programming and world's first serious use of a computer
1950: Philosophical paper on machine intelligence: the Turing Test
1951: Elected FRS. Paper on non-linear morphogenesis theory
1952: Arrested and tried as a homosexual, loss of security clearance
1953-54: Unfinished work in biology and physics
1954 (7 June): Death by cyanide poisoning, Wilmslow, Cheshire.


What if before his arrest in 1952, Turing got his hands on advanced technology in the States.. technology that could help him realize an actual artificial intelligence that could pass his Turing Test with flying colors? An intelligence that later became Rossum, an android with deeply spiritual leanings.