Episode 13: Soul Food

Nick VanZandt: So tell me more about the Promised Lands.

Emily Vasquez: Well, it’s Heaven and it’s Hell. And it’s both. It’s the most wonderful thing anyone’s ever seen. It’s like& a world of true freedom, freedom from the laws of science and magic! Freedom even from the bondage of one’s own body.

Nick VanZandt: What?

Dexter Tenchi: C’mon now. When freed from the constraint of physical matter, you don’t expect to still have that haircut? Or those clothes..?

Nick VanZandt: Umm&

Dexter Tenchi: After you Shift over, your soul no longer conforms to your body. Free of those constraints, you show what you truly are. You might be a bird. Or a robot. Or a monster, or a hero, or a God- or even an idea. I myself am a neural intelligence in an auto-robotic housing. My designation is Kintaro v3.3.

Nick VanZandt: What does that mean?

Emily Vasquez: He’s a robot.

Dexter Tenchi: Hey, I’m a program. I use the robot for convenience.

Nick VanZandt: And you?

Emily Vasquez: I& I’m a Nightmare.

Nick VanZandt: Is that like being an idea?

Fr. Srdjan Dragomir: She’s referring to her Soul Order. Her soul, or Deiform, falls into a certain category known as the Typhonians, or nightmares, as they are sometimes called. I myself am Dominion- an Archangel. Mr. Jackson is Karmic. Miss Tango is a Cerebral. Mr. Bronson is Bestial. Mr. Tenchi is Created. It’s personal.

Nick VanZandt: And what is a Soul Order?

Fr. Srdjan Dragomir: It’s a misnomer, actually. The souls of the masses are as varied and as infinite as the universe itself. However, it would be impossible to categorize such a thing, so the GODHEAD, when creating it’s Concentration Camps- divided up the Souls into twelve distinct Types. These categories spread to even the souls that had not been subjugated, and provided solidarity where there had been none before. So the new names and classifications stuck. Thus: the Soul Orders."

- From a Transcript of a discussion with Uriel (Fr. Srdjan Dragomir), Oubliette(Emily Vasquez), and Kintaro v.3.3 (Dexter Tenchi), 5/16/00

Kings’ Highway, Brooklyn, always seems to be the same quiet place in New York. If I had to live in the city, my first choices would be split between Kings Highway, Brooklyn, and Sunnyside, Queens, but both places hold far too many memories that I would place in the category of tragic. I had never gotten the chance to really enjoy either place on it’s own terms and in both cases it was now far too late. Everything that had gone down in either area was as irrevocable as death, and the unchangeable nature of the past is murder on the present. There is a statuesque melancholy to the chaos of the Brooklyn streets that is, was, and will always be there. It was there when my family was still alive.

I had come to his place time and time again as uncle after grandparent after aunt passed away, one after the next. Over the course of five years the Jaffes ceased to be part of Brooklyn. My aunt had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and now is a near-vegetable in a hospital in Belleville. We visit her there sometimes- I’m actually on my way there now. Of the remaining members of her lineage, no one is sure why we go at all. It’s not like she knows we’re there. All that’s left of a family that used to fill the overheated, sweet-potato-pie and motzah-ball scented apartments and argue over doctors and recipes is a quiet trinity of my father, my brother, and myself. We go to that drab room in that urine-scented building in Belleville where saints who really don’t earn enough money to do the kinds of things that they do try their very best to smile and say that she’s happy and that she smiled at them today, and we all know it’s a lie but that’s just part of the ritual. My brother and my father and I will then go in and try to match the occasionally-flailing latter-day cyborg husk with the woman who was my Aunt Rose, who made us Jell-O and talked in a high-pitched singsong voice about her plans for Passover.

I’ve never made the correlation, and I know that neither Josh nor my dad has either. But the only thing that feels worse that doing this daily-to-weekly ritual is not doing it.

But today was a bright, cheerful, beautiful Sunday. The three of us had gathered (along with the recovering Nichole, who was boring me to tears with her stories of her budding romance with Nicholas Van Zandt) to clean out my Aunt’s apartment. Our bellies were filled with Roast Beef sandwiches from a place called Brennan and Carr, a restaurant that had been feeding my dad since his own childhood.

"You know what you should make a game about?" My father asked in his habitual bemused tone. He asked the question at least twice a week.

"What’s that?" I asked between chews.

"Rather than having the&uh..characters in the game use arbitrary numbers for their stats, they should have specific genomic codes. It’s what determines who’s faster and who’s stronger in real life. "

Josh, Nikki, and I looked at each other and blinked. He had done it again. My father is a former Senior Research Fellow at Hoerchst who is now working as a Polymer Physics Professor at Rutgers Newark. His most recent coup is somehow having convinced the scientific community in general and his colleagues in particular of his expertise in the field of biotechnology and biochemistry apparently completely by accident. He’s nightmarishly smart in ways that I’m not sure even qualify him as human, with a mind like a steel trap and a love for sardonic debate that would leave Dennis Miller asking for directions to the mens’ room. Needless to say all of the collaborated to keep me on my toes throughout my childhood. The last thing a rotten kid needs is a guy who combines Holmes’s gift for observation with Batman’s knack for criminal forensics. I rarely got away with much, although not for lack of trying.

Once again, unfortunately, a light-hearted suggestion he had made flew over my head, the arced back and got stuck in my brain. To be honest, the idea of some simplified stat system based on any code, genomic, genetic, or secret decoder ring, really appealed to me. I considered carefully between chews.

"There’s a categorization of characters that takes place at the genetic level. That’s what the Soul Orders are- twelve distinct categories of souls based on similar traits that the GODHEAD used to group souls for their concentration camps."

"I see."

The statement had gone as far of his head as his had gone over mine. As we ate the rest of the meal I considered the Soul Orders of the Last Exodus.

If the Realms of Eden were borne of disappointment with this world’s outstanding lack of the fantastic, the Souls were borne of a similar disappointment with the frailty and inability of the human body.

When the Last Exodus was young, even before I had decided to work in the religious angle that so neatly tied it all together, I had the idea for a game where the players are simple, ordinary people here on Earth who could shift over to some other world where they were fantastic things like dragons and warlocks and cyborgs. That way, there would be the chance to do all of the sneaky, nihilistic conspiracy stuff while on Earth, while still getting the chance to wile out and fly a burning spaceship through a couple of buildings while casting spells and chucking ninja stars (or whatever floats your boat spectacular-wise) without having to cover your tracks. In my case, I was a big fan of the WoD/In Nomine/Unknown armies vein of games but was always disappointed by the lack of good dogfights you could get into. I have been a fan of big, fast, flying things with guns going at it for quite some time.

Essentially, it was all part of my "modern-day multigenre" plan. As I have stated, I wanted to set a game in the modern age, and I knew that horror was done (pardon the pun)to death, superheroes didn’t quite fit what I had wanted to do, and sci-fi seemed just a bit too limiting. I wanted to just sit the players down and say "okay, invent something. Be whatever the hell you want."

When it came time to figure out how to do this in The Last Exodus, frankly, I had been stumped for a while. The human/Earth part of LE had nearly written itself- The Millennium Religions and their apostles came as naturally as they could. I had also realized that this bizarre, fantastic "second half" could be the soul. After a fairly serous amount of research, I had learned that there was only a scant few things souls had in common:

1: They don’t die. At least, not often.

2: They are important. As the seat of someone’s spiritual being and essence of their personality, they make great bargaining chips that just shouldn’t be used.

I don’t quite remember where it had occurred to me that there really is no hard and fast precedent on what human souls look like and what they do. It’s implied that the resemble ghosts, and they tend to be mellow and screw around with harps and halos while never quite achieving angel status. This had actually always struck me as kind of lame. As long as I was reconfiguring Heaven from a bunch of clouds and some expensive gates to this vision of Las Vegas-meets Coruscant as designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Father Guido Sarducci, it was time for the human soul to get a serious overhaul. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. When we were creating our legends of heroes and villains and gods and monsters, we were talking about what we knew. The creators of these legends were subconsciously talking about their own souls locked within. Unfortunately, for the Edenic part of character creation, I had been working on totally exhaustive lists of potential character types, and getting nowhere.

It had been in a bathroom in Cape May, New Jersey where I had looked over the lists and noticed a possibility.

Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, Liches, Wights, Ghouls& These could all be grouped under one heading. I looked at the next list.

Dragons, Wyverns, Elves, Dwarves, Fairies, Griffons, Manticores, etcetera. Ditto. These guys all had something in common. By the time I was done, I was looking at a convenient dozen character types which could be extrapolated into just about any character I could think of.

1. The Beastial Order: Animals, lycanthropes, and anthropomorphs of all stripes.
2. The Cerebral Order: Personified thoughts and ideas (Think Gaiman’s "Endless" and you’re on the right track)
3. The Created Order: Anything that is &well&created by other Souls, from sentient computer programs to lumbering Golems.
4. The Dominion Order: Any religious game would have to pay special attention to Angels, fallen or otherwise.
5. The Elemental Order: Just how they sound, the Elementals are to matter what the Cerebrals are to thought.
6. The Enlightened Order: A tricky one, the Enlightened remain unchanged by passage to Eden. This is a blessing and a curse.
7. The Infernal Order: As with the Angels, Demons should get their own category.
8. The Karmic Order: Since there’s no such thing as an "ordinary guy" in Heaven, (save the Enlightened, who are extraordinary for being ordinary) "normal humans" are the kinds of people we make movies about. Guys like Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, or Prince Mordred.
9. The Outsider Order: How can human beings have alien souls? The invasion had to start somewhere.
10. The Noble Order: All manner of mystical creatures, the Noble order contains anything that would qualify as Fae, from Pixies to Dragons.
11. The Primordial Order: When Ahura Mazda shared a tiny piece of it’s essence with the leaders of Edenic society, it created a race of Gods that grouped into Pantheons that exist to this day.
12. The Typhonian Order: Not quite angel and not quite demon, the Typhonians are the monsters and mysteries that really make us fear death.

There is probably a Character Concept that won’t fit into at least one of these categories, but I’d be hard-pressed to figure what it is. (Feel free to take that as a friendly challenge- I’m curious what you guys will come up with!)

After we finished eating we made our way to my Aunt Rose’s apartment. What had seemed like it would be a miserable and daunting task rapidly shaped up to be interesting and far less hassle than we had anticipated, thanks to my Aunt’s penchant for a-place-for-everything-and-everything-in-it’s-place neatness. She and my Uncle had saved everything, and I mean EVERYTHING from the past fifty-odd years, since his discharge from the Navy after World War 2. I stared in amazement at playbills and football programs from the early fifties, and older. Although I wasn’t expecting it, I was placed face-to-face with exactly how much my creation was actually affecting my own spirituality (especially in light of my meeting with Nick), I think, for the better.

As one of the closets was emptied Nichole noticed a white box among the shoeboxes and pointed it out to me. I picked it up and dusted it off, opened it and noticed with a start the music and tiny dancing girl spinning in the miniature mirror. It was filled with ancient yellowed pieces of paper. I gently picked one up and unfolded it.

In a casual script it read:

"To Rose, The sweetest girl in the whole world: It looks like I won’t have to get any closer to Japan than this, and that is fine with me. Still, it will be a few months before I can get back to the U.S.A. I can’t wait for the day when our souls can finally be together, and we can hold each other again. "

I folded the paper back up and Nichole gave me a warm, gentle hug. In my mind’s eye I pictured those souls smiling because that day had come, and because they were stronger than these crummy human bodies.

Aunt Rose will be okay.