Orichalcum Universe: The Unity Awakens...

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

I'd like to read more of Aradel's and Zadatherion's actions during this time period, preferably from their points of view rather than the Unity's.

As you wish...

LATER.

Let us look at the matter from the point of view of the opponents of
the Unity. In essence, even though Zadatharion did not know exactly
who or what it was he was fighting, he had recognized that someone or
something was out there, working against him. While he continued his
ongoing efforts to deal with this, he assigned Aradel to work quietly
to discern just exactly who or what it was they were fighting. With
the aid and support her personal Paladins, Aradel began an attempt to
carry out this mission around A.D. 1470, during the final stages of
the Wars of the Roses. Aradel began her work in England, recognizing
even as her own sovereign had done, that the mysterious opponent was
stoking these dynastic conflicts. The search soon expanded far beyond
England, however.

Aradel traveled to Constantinople in disguise, and explored the city,
fallen only decades before to the rising power of the Ottoman Empire.
There she encountered agents hired by the Unity, though they did not
have enough knowledge to reveal the true state of affairs when she
interrogated them. She also encountered agents who were more than
mere hirelings, psionically potent and possessed of knowledge and
skill beyond anything that the mortals of the time and place could be
expected to possess. These agents might have been able to shed more
light on the matter at hand, but for a tendency to die on capture.

Around the year A.D. 1500, Aradel found herself once more back in
Constantinople, trying to track down and capture some high-level
agents of their mysterious enemy, who were themselves seeking to
obtain something that local stories spoke as a treasure of the Ottoman
caliphate. Exactly what it was they sought was not quite clear to
Aradel, the stories seemed contradictory, but the name was common to
all of them, and it would have translated into modern-day English as
something like ‘the Sultan’s Tear’.

Exactly what the Sultan’s Tear might be, the stories did not say with
consistency. Some spoke of a key, or a map. Others said the Sultan’s
Tear was some sort of work of art, or sculpture, or book. All the
stories had a few elements in common, however, speaking of the
tremendous value of the item, and some sort of curse than always
followed it. Though it was usually said to have been in the
possession of the conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmet the Great, who
had died in 1481. The exact circumstances of the that death remained
in some dispute in 1500, and his son and successor Bayezid the Second
was thought to not possess the Sultan’s Tear. Indeed, by some
accounts his servants were themselves seeking for it, though it was
not clear that even the current Sultan knew much in detail about this
mysterious item. The rumors were confusing and contradictory.

It was during this period of confusion that Aradel finally managed to
determine that they were up against a collective psychic entity. She
determined this when she finally managed to capture and ‘isolate’ a
group of enemy agents, who turned out to include a ‘component’ of the
Unity. When she probed the minds of the enemy personnel
telepathically, she learned much about the organization of the enemy.
When she probed the mind of the component, she learned nothing of use,
since it had no separate mind of its own. This did not keep Aradel
from recognizing what sort of entity it was, however.

Naturally, her mind immediately flashed back across the millennia to
the Unity, which she had spared nary a thought for in thousands of
years. However, she hoped at first, and mostly believed, that she was
dealing with a new collective. It was only after about fifty years
that she finally learned enough to understand that she really was
dealing with the original collective, somehow back in the world after
over six millennia.

She immediately sent word to Zadatharion, who was just finally getting
unsnarled from the internal confusion in Cyllellia, and its complicated
Mesoamerican side-effects, at the time. To say that Zadatharion was
horrified is to understate the matter, like Aradel he had thought the
Unity a long-ceased problem of the Antediluvian World. Learning
that this terrible enemy, who had played such a huge role in the destruction
of the ancient civilizations of the Antediluvian, still lived came as a
terrible shock and a source of great fear and anxiety.

They still did not know whether the Unity had endured throughout the
ages in secret, or somehow returned to trouble the Earth, though
Zadatharion leaned toward the latter, doubting that the Unity would
have lain undiscovered for so long if it was an active force in the
world. If this was true, Zadatharion was faced with the added
frustration of knowing that had they discovered the truth sooner, they
might well have been able to destroy the collective monster before it grew
too large to easily deal with. That opportunity was now long past.

For the Unity was spread across Europe, in small groups well-hidden
from detection. While it would very probably have been possible to
track down and destroy many such, the chances of getting enough of the
total to seriously imperil the survival of the Unity appeared to be
near zero. Some would be deeply hidden, against the possibility of
just such an assault. Further, the collateral damage of such as an
effort among the mortals would not have been minor. The Unity could
make any such effort even more expensive in those terms by deliberate
effort, which was another argument against open action at that time.

Instead of open warfare, Zadatharion recognized that a subtler, long-
term approach was necessary. To that end, he ordered that the various
physical and paraphysical defenses of Cyllellia be extensively
upgraded and reviewed, and further, that action in the outside world
by Avatars and their mortal atlantican subjects be extensively
curtailed, as a precaution against the spies and observations of the
Unity. [1]

In the meantime, he himself, Aradel, and a few others began a
concerted effort to discover everything they could about the modern
incarnation of the Unity, and its activities, with a view toward its
final destruction.

MORE LATER.


[1] The term ‘atlantican’ refers to the H. atlanticus mortal
population of Cyllellia.

[Johnny1A.2]

NOTE: At the time I created this family, I had no idea that there was a store known as Barrington-Shaw. The name is coincidental.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

The House of Barrington-Shaw...

The story that begins with the reawakening of the Unity now requires that
we examine a particular family. To begin with, let us consider the founders
of the Barrington-Shaw family, Ruth and Daniel Barrington-Shaw.

NOTE: This character sheet is based on a slightly-modified GURPS 3e.

NAME: Ruth Barrington
HEIGHT: 5’5”
WEIGHT: 115 lbs.
HAIR: Brown
EYES: Brown

IQ 14
DX 09
ST 09
HR 12

ADVANTAGES
Alertness [2]
Charisma [2]
Common Sense
Disease Resistance
Empathy
Fearlessness
Status [-3, thief]
Strong Will
Wealth [Poor]

Allies and Ally Group(s}
['The City Mice, medium group, individually modest]
Patron(s)
['Daniel Shaw', very powerful, appears often]

DISADVANTAGES
Code of Honor [thief]
Compulsive Behavior [stealing for fun]
Lecherous [1/3]
Sense of Duty [children]
Stubbornness


Enemies
[The Unity, very powerful, appears seldom, secret, controls
minions]

QUIRKS
1. Jealous of attractive females
2. Fears thunderstorms
3. Sleepy-headed
4. Hates the aristocracy
5. Show-off

PSIONICS
Antipsi [LATENT]
Psychokinesis Power 3

SKILLS
Area Knowledge [London 15]
Carousing 13
Cooking 15
Fast-talk 14
Knife 11
Lip Reading 13
Lockpicking 15
Riding 10
Shadowing 14
Streetwise 16

Ruth Barrington is a thief in Elisabethan London. At the time of this
character sheet (~1588), she is 17 years old, and has been supporting
herself as a thief, part of a small time gang called 'the City Mice' since she
was 13. She's very intelligent, but not particularly well-educated and
illiterate (which was not unusual for the place and time). Her mother is dead
at that time, she never knew her father, even her 'family name' was taken out
of thin air, just because she liked the sound of it.

She’s slightly clumsy, and not terribly strong, as her stats indicate. However,
she’s healthy and full of energy, and knows how to compensate for her
shortcomings. At the tender age of 17, she’s become the second in command
of the City Mice, and she’s quite good at avoiding the authorities and (just as
important) evading angry shopkeepers, merchants, and residents!

She has no idea that she is psychokinetic, her grasp of her power is purely
instinctive, she just knows that things ‘happen’ occasionally that work to her
advantage. Unbeknownst to her, she has the potential to train her psychokinetic
talent up to a considerably stronger level.

Elisabethan London was, by modern standards, a crude, dangerous, primitive,
and drunken place, and at the age of 17 Ruth is both somewhat jaded and much
more experienced than she would be in a later time. Though she has refrained
from turning to prostitution to survive, she is by no means shocked by it. Not a
virgin by any means, she has, almost miraculously in her environment, managed
to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

In appearance she is relatively plain...but full of life and energy. Her charisma and
enthusiasm for life tend to offset her appearance, men find her far more appealing
than she thinks they ‘ought’ to, given her face and features, and she is somewhat
jealous of women she believes to be more comely than herself.

She is street smart and careful, and she has to be, because the penalties for her
crimes, in Elisabethan times, are almost unthinkably brutal by modern standards.
She shares the common hatred of the ruling class that permeates much of her social
class and niche, which will be ironic given her future life. [1]

MORE LATER.

[1] In time, she will become the wife of a viscount, mother of the
'Barrington-Shaw' aristocratic line.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

REAL NAME: Kavarades
PUBLIC NAME: 'Daniel Shaw'
HEIGHT: 5'11'
WEIGHT: 180 pounds (varies)
HAIR: Dark brown
EYES: Blue

IQ 15
DX 15
ST 15
HT 14

ADVANTAGES
Animal Empathy
Appearance [Handsome]
Wealth [Very Wealthy]
Status 5 [titled noble]
Charisma [1]
Danger Sense
Empathy
Intuition
Literate
Longevity
Strong Will [2]
Unusual Background [ H. sapiens atlanticus, Cyllellian, former Paladin
of Aradel]

ALLIES/ALLY GROUPS
Ruth Barrington [capable normal, 75 points, appears often]
Viscount’s Guards [medium-sized group, competent normals, appear
often]

PATRON(s)
Aradel [immensely powerful, unusual resources, unusual reach, demands
duties, appears rarely]

DISADVANTAGES
Code of Honor [Paladins of Aradel]
Cursed [Atlantean Curse]
Exiled
High-functioning semi-alcoholic
Impulsive
Lecherous [mild]
One Eye (covered with patch)
Phobia [thallasophobia, mild, oceans only]
Secret [potentially lethal]
Sense of Duty [children]
Sense of Duty [England]

ENEMIES
The Unity [very powerful, secret, appears rarely]
Calathis [very powerful (1000+ points), appears rarely]
Others [variety of players, significant collectively]

QUIRKS
1. Early riser, always awake before dawn
2. Always carries a small dagger
3. Prefers to pay debts in silver
4. Keeps dogs
5. Rarely tells or ‘gets’ jokes.

PSIONIC POWERS
Antipsi 12
Biopsionics 12
ESP 13**
Psychokinesis 14
Telepathy 13*
Teleportation 4

*All skills other than Telesend/Telereceive/Telescan operate at a 75%
range reduction.
** ESP Power is Fickle.

(Plus 50 points of associated skills)

SKILLS:

Animal Handling 15
Area Knowledge [Asia, 13, Cyllellia 16, England 15, Europe 14, London
14]
Axe 14
Bow 15
Brawling 17
Broadsword 16
Cooking 15
Crossbow 16
Dancing 14
Detect Lies 14
Diplomacy 15
Escape 14
Fast-Talk 15
Fencing 15
First Aid 17
Fishing 14
Guns/TL4 15
Hidden Lore [London 13, World History 13, Flux knowledge 10]
History 16
Knife 16
Languages [Atlantean/Cyllellian 16, English (Elisabethan) 16, French,
German and Spanish at 15, Chinese 14]
Leadership 14
Lockpicking 15
Mathematics 15
Mechanic [wagon and related] 14
Navigation 14
Politics 14
Riding 16
Savoir-Faire 15
Shield 15
Spear 14
Staff 14
Stealth 15
Streetwise 15
Survival [Forest 13, Mountains 12]
Tactics 14
Teamster 16
Tracking 14
Unarmed Combat [Atlantean] 16
Veterinary 18
Writing 15

Altogether, ‘Daniel Shaw’ is over a nine hundred point character, though
most of this is because of the high level and broad range of psionic Power
(over 500 points even with Limitations). At the time these stats are for
(~1560 A.D.) ‘Shaw’ is well over 200 years old, though between his natural
long lifespan and psionic life extension, he appears to be no more than a
healthy and vigorous 40.

At one time, he was a member of Aradel’s Paladins, and he was one of the
most powerful and skilled of that group. He retains many connections to
them, though he is formally ‘retired’ and even technically exiled from
Cyllellia, because of his decision to marry a ‘normal’ mortal, an English girl
named Ruth Barrington. [1]

MORE LATER.


[1] For information about Aradel's Paladins, see: http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=73000

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The House of Barrington-Shaw is an aristocratic family in England in
the Orichalcum Universe, bearing a number of minor titles along with a
viscountcy dating back to Elisabethan times. The appearance of the
family is superficially mundane, but in fact the family hides a number
of interesting secrets going all the way back to the roots of the family,
around the time of the Spanish Armada, and the founding couple
who began the line, Daniel Alvin Shaw and his bride, Ruth Barrington.

To begin with, there was no such person as ‘Daniel Alvin Shaw’, the
identity was a pure fiction, used as a legend by an expatriate of
Cyllellia and former Paladin of Aradel by the name of Kavarides. This
individual came to be in England at that time in part because he was
carrying out a mission for his mistress, working against her enemies
in London as the realm prepared for the coming attack from Catholic
Spain. It was a dangerous and uncertain time.

During this period, while working in England, Kavarides happened
through a chain of rather improbable misadventures to meet a young
thief by the name of Ruth Barrington, who at the age of 17 managed to
successfully (albeit briefly) con a man two centuries older and vastly
more experienced than herself. She certainly had no idea what she was
becoming involved in by stealing from ‘Daniel Shaw’, however.

Purely without any intention on her part, along with some silver and
valuable properties, Barrington stole a box containing documents
Kavarides could not permit to be released. He would probably simply
have written off money or ordinary property as the penalty for his own
carelessness, the information in the documents was quite another
matter. Further, he was not the only person seeking those documents.
Quite without realizing it, Barrington had enmeshed herself in plots
and counterplots spanning Europe.

Barrington found herself pursued not only by the man she had robbed
(not the first such by any stretch), but also by agents of various other
groups and individuals. She narrowly survived several attempts on her
life, and eventually escaped a particularly nasty fate sheerly by the
good luck that Kavarides caught up to her just before another set of
pursuers, employed by the collective known as the Unity, also caught
up with the her. Had this not been the case, Ruth would have met a
very unpleasant fate. While the Unity was indifferent to individual
welfare, cold but not intentionally cruel, its employees were not always
so dispassionate and disciplined.

By that point Barrington, increasingly driven by panic, had managed to
flee as far as Scotland, and what followed was two of the most
terrifying weeks of her life as she and ‘Daniel Shaw’ sought to evade
a dozen men, ruthless, well-trained, and psionically capable, in a
chase across some of the more remote parts of the Highlands. At the
end of that period, they were captured, only to be rescued by several
other Paladins arriving to assist Kavarides, and it was at this time
that the Paladins discovered that, along with their mystery enemy that
they had been dealing with for over a century, there was another
organization hiding even more deeply in the shadows. [1]

By the time Kavarides and his tormentor/protectee managed to get back
to London, the Armada Crisis was rising toward its culmination.
Kavarides more or less ‘drafted’ Ruth Barrington to assist him in his own
work, and given the alternative of the legal penalty for her offenses,
this was definitely the better option from her point of view. Over the
course of 1588 and 1589, throughout the Armada Crisis and the
aftermath, Kavarides and Barrington worked in secret against both sets
of Aradel’s enemies.

It would occupy too much space to go into intricate detail of everything that
was going on in England in 1588, both openly and in secret. Suffice it to say
that Kavarides and his semi-willing assistant played a major, albeit secret,
role in the upset English victory over the Spanish fleet, as well as quietly
working to bring about the defeat of both the Unity’s forces and the new
mystery-group they had discovered. In the course of all this, Aradel herself
arrived and took the field, and even with the addition of her vast power and
experience, bringing about what they could consider an acceptable outcome
was no easy matter.

In all this, even as she became more closely tied to Kavarides and Aradel’s
people, Barrington did not fully realize just how strange the people she
was now involved with were. She had no suspicion of ‘Daniel Shaw’s true
age until more than ten years after she first met him, and she knew Aradel as
a woman by the name of ‘Lucille’. Still, she became more and more
accustomed to the strangeness, and Kavarides took it upon himself to see to
the education of his young draftee assistant.

MORE LATER.


[1]The ‘mystery enemy’ was of course the reborn Unity, though none of
them knew that in 1587. The other organization they now discovered to
exist was...we shall see.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

It has been said that no one can entirely predict what the heart will desire.
This is not entirely true, but sometimes surprising things do happen. Given
how they came to meet, and how different they were, what happened
between Ruth ‘Barrington’ and Kavarides was by no means to be expected.

Kavarides was over two hundred years old, Ruth Barrington was less than
thirty by the time it happened. Kavarides was educated to a level well
beyond that of the most educated sages of the Europe of the Sixteenth
Century, Ruth Barrington only learned to read and write in her own native
language when she was twenty-four years old. Kavarides was psionically
powerful, an experienced traveller and warrior and agent. Ruth was a semi-
reformed thief from the less reputable reaches of Elisabethan London.

Yet they came to love each other sufficiently that Ruth was willing to remake
her entire life to spend it with him, and Kavarides was prepared to give up
rank, status, and position in his own society to be with the young woman he
had first met when she robbed his home. In doing so, he was giving up more
than just position and power, he was giving up a retirement to a place far more
comfortable than he could ever hope to find in the outside world, and he was
giving up access to the sort of massed psychic power that could extend his own
lifespan for quite a long period into the future. [1]

Had he remained in his former society, Kavarides could have potentially lived
another two centuries or so. Instead, he chose to trade that for the opportunity
to spend the rest of a ‘normal’ span of life with Ruth Barrington. In both
appearance and biological status, he was approximately forty years of age, though
he had lived far longer than that. Absent the psionic power available in Cyllellia,
he would have little if any more time than any other man of forty in good health
in that place and time.

Aradel, when Kavarides asked her permission to resign from her service, and
marry a mortal, was no little surprised. Still, when she perceived that he was
set in his intent, she granted the permission to him, with certain stipulations
and conditions attached. She granted him his freedom from her service, certainly,
and in light of the exceptional (even by the standards of the Paladins) service
he had provided to her, she arranged for a sort of ‘severance pay’ in lieu of the
reward he would have received had he ‘retired’ in Cyllellia.

It was a matter remarked upon then and since that the monarchs of the Tudor
Dynasty were always somewhat reluctant to grant knighthood and peerages.
Elisabeth the First was no exception to this tight-fisted tendency, she created
very few new hereditary peerages through her long reign.

Now, though, Aradel prevailed upon the Queen, through indirect means, to
create ‘Daniel Shaw’ as a new viscount, with a modest but prosperous set of
attached lands. By this point both ‘Daniel Shaw’ and Ruth Barrington had
false trails over their pasts quite sufficient to make them plausible. Thus it
was that the English peerage was joined by a member of different subspecies
of human, and the (mostly) former thief who despised the ruling class became
the lady of a viscount.

This was done out of sincere respect and gratitude on the part of Aradel, but
even so this was no a not a pure motive. She genuinely did wish to reward
Kavarides for many decades of faithful and effective service, but she also saw
the value of a family in the English peerage to which she had strong, albeit
secret, ties. Though she had granted him his freedom from her service, it
was in a way that left him with certain obligations towards her.

For his part, Kavarides was a faithful man by his nature. He still retained a
considerable loyalty to Aradel, but it was his nature to give loyalty when
appropriate, and Queen Elisabeth, though she did not know the true nature of
her new viscount, certainly had his loyalty. As Kavarides saw it, by accepting
his peerage, he took on an obligation of loyalty toward both Elisabeth herself
and his adopted nation. [2]

Two years after their marriage, Ruth gave birth to Walter Barrington-Shaw,
heir to the family title, and after another two years she mothered identical-
twin daughters, Sarah and Mary Barrington-Shaw. Then, after another year,
Ruth gave birth to another pair of twin daughters, Virginia and Anne Barrington-
Shaw. After that there were no more pregnancies, though attempts continued. [3]

Lady Ruth Barrington-Shaw died in 1749, at the age of seventy-nine. Her
husband predeceased her by two years, dying in 1747 not of old age but of
accident. This left their son Walter as the new Viscount Barrington-Shaw,
at the age of forty-eight. [4]

MORE LATER.


[1] It was a routine matter in Cyllellia for the psychically potent
atlanticus humans to use gestalts to boost each others’ ability in
the psionic life extension process.

[2] In GURPS terms, he picked up a ‘sense of duty’ toward both
Elisabeth I and England as a nation.

[3] Five healthy children for a sapiens sapiens/sapiens atlanticus
pairing is actually quite unusual, since the two subspecies tend to
have cross-fertility problems, and Ruth was no longer young, especially by
the standards of Elisabethan England.

[4] Between native health and his personal psionic power, ‘Daniel
Shaw’ might easily have lived another ten-thirty years.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Walter Henry Barrington-Shaw, born in 1601, second Viscount Shaw, was
a very unusual man in many ways by the standards of early Seventeenth
Century England. By all outside appearances he was a typical aristocrat of
his station and time, but in his privacy he was quite unlike his peers (or his
Peers, for that matter). Among other exceptional things about the second
Viscount Shaw was that he was a powerful psion, at least by the standards
of the human race outside Cyllellia.

For one thing, he was in possession of a great amount of knowledge that had
to be kept very secret from the general public of the place and time. For
another thing, he was possessed of a significant psionic talent that emerged at
an early age, and which his parents, especially his father, very secretly,
encouraged. This was both a useful ability, and a dangerous secret, because
in the seventeenth century anyone displaying any unusual or ‘supernatural’
ability, or even who seemed too ‘different’, could be in very grave danger of
allegations of witchcraft, or worse.

Still, his abilities were carefully trained and honed, first by his father, and
later with the assistance of a far abler and more skillful teacher, Aradel
herself. In order to be able to associate with the descendents of her former
Paladin, Aradel created a series of identities as a ‘cousin’ of the primary
Barrington-Shaw line. At this time, she used the pseudonym Mary Shaw,
and in this guise she began training young Walter when he was only eleven
years old. Her training began in 1611, by 1620 Water Barrington-Shaw was
a proficient telepath and psychokinetic, almost as strong as his father in both
abilities, and showing a talent for extrasensory perception that surpassed that
of his father. This last came as something of a surprise, given his mixed
ancestry. Still, Aradel honed and refined it to a fine edge.

At this time, England was changing. Elisabeth the First died in 1603, leaving
no acknowledged offspring, and the English crown passed to her cousin James
the Sixth of Scotland by pre-arrangement. This was less controversial than it
might have been, after decades of relative peace under the popular Elisabeth,
the population was in much relieved that the succession was peaceful. Still,
James was of the Stuart Dynasty of Scotland, and brought with him a
fundamentally different view of monarchical status and rights and duties than
had become prevalent in England since the end of the Wars of the Roses.

By long-standing, though often disputed, tradition, the monarch of England
was not viewed as the sole authority in the realm. The aristocracy,
embodied in the House of Lords, and the gentry and townsmen, embodied by
representation in the House of Commons, had long asserted rights against the
Crown. Some English monarchs had indeed asserted their theoretical right to
absolute power, but the other estates of the realm had never acknowledged
these claims without reservation, and at times had even violently resisted them.

James, for his part, asserted that the monarch carried rank and authority by the
direct grant of God, and that the monarch was of necessity the source of
law, rather than a creature of the law. This represented a serious potential line
of schism between the new king and the parliament, but in practice James I, as
King of England, proved to be a far more pragmatic ruler than his theoretical
assertions would have indicated.

This was fortunate, because England in the early Seventeenth Century was a
complex place, politically. If Elisabeth had been broadly popular, indeed
almost revered in her later decades, this had provided only a surface illusion
of calm. Beneath the placid surface, post-Armada England was developing
a variety of potentially dangerous fracture zones, along various lines of
religious, economic, and political dissent.

The long dispute between ‘Catholic England’ and ‘Protestant England’
that had so dominated the politics and dynastic maneuvers of the
Sixteenth Century was for the most part settled by this time, Catholicism
had been defeated and England was firmly in the Protestant camp. However,
the term ‘Protestant’ covered a wide variety of positions, not all of which
were compatible. The religious settlement that James inherited from Queen
Elisabeth was based on an established Church of England, which regarded
the monarch, rather than the Pope, as the highest Earthly representative of
God, and which had a somewhat ‘streamlined’ version of doctrine, but
which otherwise retained many elements of Catholicism, complete to
carrying over much of the formal Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The monasteries were long broken by the early Seventeenth Century, but
the bishops remained in England, and the Church of England was closely
integrated to the State of England. Though this appeared heretical and
radical to the Catholics, to the harder-core version of Protestant it looked
all too much like Catholicism.

Protestantism, in some strains, could be looked at as an impulse or drive for
simplification. The belief was strong in many Protestants of the age that
Catholicism was a corruption, or at best a distraction, from the core elements
of Christian faith, the desire arose to recapture what was perceived as the
original, simple, and basic ‘pure’ form of Christianity. This urge to recapture
a ‘pure’ and unalloyed faith led to the emergence of the Puritan movement.

The Puritans had emerged as a social and political and religious force in the
later part of the reign of Queen Elisabeth, but their dispute with the Church
of England and the standing political order remained relatively muted in her
time, in part by the fact that it was still developing and in part by the reverence
she commanded. In the time of James, however, this dispute reached maturity
and emerged into public dissent.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The Puritans, of course, were by no means a monolithic group, there
were many different points of view among them, and they pursued
differing goals. Some merely wanted to reshape, or 'purify' the
Church of England, eliminating much of the hierarchy, or redefining
the roles of the members of that hierarchy. Others wanted to abolish
the Church of England entirely, creating various models of independent
local church under elected elders. Still others sought to go beyond
changing the church to a goal of changing English society. Though
mostly unified by their hostility to Catholicism, the Puritans were
often hostile to each other as well.

Even as Walter was growing up, and being trained by Aradel in her
guise as ‘Cousin Mary’, his father was working with Aradel in an
attempt to encourage peace between Catholic and Protestant in Europe.
This was a vast effort, coordinated by Zadatharion and Aradel on a
continent-wide scale, ‘Daniel Shaw’ was just of many people working as
part of the plan. As the first Viscount Shaw, Daniel Shaw worked
quietly but assiduously behind the scenes to blunt the hard-line
counsels of the fire-eaters and to encourage diplomatic efforts to
keep the post-Armada peace.

Unfortunately, events had a momentum of their own, and the Unity was
working in the opposite direction, and along the grain of events
rather than against as were the peacemakers. In the middle of the
Seventeenth Century, the Unity was able to push things over the edge,
and the Thirty Years War began in Europe.

When this happened, the goal of Kavarides/Daniel changed, from simply
preventing the war as part of the larger effort organized by his
former liege-lady, to minimizing its impact on England. In this his
goals and hers were still coincident, if not the same, because once
the Thirty Years War ignited in earnest, Aradel turned her attention
to the task of keeping as much as possible of Europe out of the
fighting. If they could not put our the fire, she and Zadatharion hoped
at least to contain the disaster.

The politics of that time (the 1620s) were complex. King James the
First, often at odds with Parliament and thus often short of cash, sought a
marriage alliance for his son Charles with Spain via the daughter of
King Phillip of Spain, the Infanta Maria Anna. This plan was a source of
high controversy in both England and Spain, because Spain remained
Catholic, as indeed was the Infanta, while Charles was at least nominally a
Protestant. The dowry of such a union would have provided James with
useful monies, which he badly needed because of his limited domestic
resources and a brewing problem in Bohemia.

In essence, the daughter of James I had married a Bohemian prince by the
name of Frederick. In one of the early explosions of the Thirty Years War,
Protestants in Bohemia had rebelled against the authority of the Holy
Roman Emperor, raising the standard of James’ son-in-law, and James
desired to send troops in support, but lacked the necessary monies to
do so. The proposed dowry from a marriage between his son and the
daughter of Phillip IV of Spain would perhaps have made this possible,
but Parliament objected [i]strenuously[/] to this idea when he presented it.

James called upon Parliament for funds for an expedition in assistance
of his son-in-law, but they voted totally inadequate sums and proposed
war against Spain and harsher treatment of Catholics domestically,
rather then an acceptance of the proposed marriage alliance.

The behind-the-scenes maneuvering was just as complex as the public
issues. The Spanish had no wish to provide James with money via
a dowry to wage war against Catholics in Bohemia, and so they dragged
out the marriage negotiations. The Infanta herself was deeply averse
to marriage to a Protestant like Charles, and the Spanish intended
eventually to make conversion to Catholicism a condition of any such
marriage. In this, they were encouraged by Aradel’s proxies amid the
Spanish Court, because they knew it would be a barrier to the plan.

In the meantime, back in England, the pro-Catholic faction led by the
aristocratic Howard family sought to press for the marriage, while the
Protestants pushed for war with Spain. As Viscount Shaw, Kavarides
worked both to oppose the vote of money for war in Bohemia, and to
discourage both the pressure for war against Spain and the movement
toward marriage alliance with Spain. In both cases, the goal was to
keep England out of the fighting in Continental Europe, insofar as
that was possible. The pursuit of this goal required some occasionally
baroque political maneuvers.

Kavarides had been firmly loyal to Elisabeth I, and he was loyal as
well to James I, though less personally so. He had little difficulty
in reconciling his loyalty to his adopted homeland’s ruler and his
work against the plans of that ruler, because he believed that little
good would come to either England or its monarch in getting involved
in the fighting in Germany, on either side, and he comprehended that
adding more troops to the conflagration would do little but to spread
the flames.

As it happened, not long after the collapse of the proposed Spanish
marriage alliance, King James died, and Charles inherited the Crown.
Though the marriage with the daughter of the Spanish King had not
worked out, King Charles nevertheless married a Catholic, Henrietta
Maria of France. Though Charles himself did not convert to
Catholicism in this union, it was nevertheless sufficient to alienate
much of the Puritan and Protestant faction in England, creating an
inauspicious beginning for a new reign.

Like his father, Charles was a theoretical absolutist and a believer in
the principle of Royal Divine Right, but unlike James, this was not
leavened by much sense of political pragmatism. Further, he had a
certain talent for placing incompetent individuals in positions of
executive power. War with Spain followed hard upon the coronation of
Charles, and also with Catholic France after Charles failed to carry
out secret agreements made conditional upon his marriage to the French
princess.

War with Catholics suited the temper of the Protestants in England,
but paying for that war was quite something else again. Parliament
disputed with Charles over both strategy and tactics. There was a very
considerable school of opinion in Parliament that the English war effort
should be focused on the Spanish possessions in the New World, while
Charles himself was more of a mind to intervene in the steady ongoing
bloodbath on the Continent. Successive military failure in these
efforts did much to undercut Charles in his disputes with Parliament,
who at the same time were increasingly minded to assert their supposed
independent authority, a subject that was itself a source of dispute.

Kavarides found himself increasingly torn between both conflicting
loyalties and conflicting goals. No matter what he did or did not do,
it appeared that all roads led to war. His sense of personal honor
made him loyal to the Stuart Dynasty, but at the same time his
personal opinion of Charles the First was anything but positive.
Furthermore, he was aging, no longer possessed of the vast combined
psychic power of his fellow Atlanticans in Cyllellia, his mortality
was rapidly catching up with him in the late 1620s.

In 1629, matters became both better and worse. Tensions between the
monarch and legislature reached such a pitch of distrust and
resentment that Charles dismissed parliament, and refused to summon it
again for nearly a decade, choosing instead to rule directly by virtue
of his personal authority. By ancient English legal tradition and statute
law, this was at least technically legitimate, though it was widely seen as
insolent and arrogant, and some called it tyrannical.

For Kavarides, it was both a relief and a new problem. With Parliament
dismissed, Charles was freed from Protestant pressure sufficiently to make
peace with both Spain and France, a long-standing goal that was coincident
with Kavarides’ wishes. On the other hand, with Parliament dismissed, his
ability to influence events as a general thing was greatly reduced, and the
tensions that had led to the dismissal had not gone away, they were merely
inflamed the actions of the monarch.

Unable to legally impose new taxes without Parliamentary consent,
Charles now mined old laws for legal authority to raise funds, digging
out statutes and ordinances dating back as much as four centuries in
his quest for money. Again, he was acting with technical legality,
but the resentments generated by his violations of the spirit of the
law and disregard of centuries of custom built up steadily. Matters
were soon exacerbated by the efforts on the part of Archbishop Laud,
Charles’ appointee as day-to-day head of the Church of England, to
enforce religious conformity on Puritan and Anglican alike,
culminating in a effort to force the same pattern of governance on the
still-separate Scottish state and Church.

In those times, England and Scotland shared a common monarch in
Charles, but retained separate legal structures, separate legislatures,
and separate established Churches. The details of the religious disputes
in Scotland were different than those in England, but the essence was
similar, and the effort to enforce a common form of worship in Scotland
ended in armed revolt. Charles, hamstrung by lack of financing, was
forced to concede to the rebels, and then to summon Parliament for the
first time in eleven years in 1640.


MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Parliament met briefly, and voted some monies to attempt to regain control
of the rebellious bishops of Scotland, but also attempted to address the
various other long-standing disputes with the King. A Parliamentary election
went largely against Charles, and the legislature was dismissed again shortly
after it was called together.

Kavarides, for his part, was filled with a deep foreboding by this point.
‘Daniel Shaw’ was centuries old, with a great deal of experience with
people, and he could practically feel disaster brewing in his adopted
country. Both monarch and Parliament seemed to be bent on courses that
could not be reconciled, and Kavarides began to fear that England had largely
avoided the disastrous war on the Continent only to find itself on the verge
of domestic catastrophe.

New hostilities broke out with the Scottish Covenanters, who rapidly proved
victorious against the royal forces, forcing the King to once more summon
Parliament before the end of 1640. Kavarides’ premonitions of disaster,
though based more in personal experience and mundane cognition than in any
sort of psychic precognition, were nonetheless about to prove all too valid.

In 1640, matters took a nasty turn. Pressed by desperation for money to deal
with the ongoing rebellion in Scotland, plus the other problems besetting him
on all sides, Charles was forced to convene yet another Parliament. This was
the beginning of the 'Long Parliament', which immediately picked up the
grievances and resistance displayed by the brief 'Short Parliament' that Charles
had dismissed not long earlier.

To compress many complex and heated disputes into a few words, the Puritan
based ‘Parliamentarian’ faction immediately began taking steps to entrench
Parliamentary power against that of the Crown, including laws to forbid the
Crown from dismissing Parliament against the collective will of that body, and
laws to allow for the assembly of Parliament in the absence of a royal summons.
These were rather radical steps by the standards of the time, and now Charles
and the Parliamentary faction began to maneuver against each other.

In 1641, the Parliamentarians struck at Charles through one of his retainers,
one Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. Instead of striking via criminal
allegations, the Parliamentarians utilized an ancient legal tool known as a
‘bill of attainder’, which bypassed requirements of proof, but also required
the assent of Charles, who angrily refused...at first. However, Wentworth
himself wrote the king and granted him leave to sign the bill, stating that he
was prepared to accept death if it would head off the brewing confrontations
between the major factions. Charles was reluctant to sign the bill, but the
situation was tight and dangerous for all concerned, and in the end he signed
the bill of attainder and Wentworth was shortly executed.

The execution intended to enable compromise produced exactly the opposite
result. Ireland, where Wentworth had governed, rose in rebellion at the news
of the execution, triggering still further dispute between kind and parliament
over the raising of an army for the suppression of this revolt. Fundamentally,
the disputes between crown and parliament were insoluble by debate,
neither was prepared to compromise on any of the core disputes, and those
core disputes were simply intractable.

In January of 1642, Charles made an effort to arrest the leaders of the
parliamentary faction, backed up by a force of several hundred soldiers.
Word of the effort had leaked, the leaders had fled, and Parliament openly
defied the monarch. Shortly thereafter Charles and his core retinue retreated
from London, in fear for their personal safety and that of their kin, and a
correspondence between the disputants failed to resolve any of the issues.
Over the course of the summer months of 1642, England polarized, as various
towns, regions, and institutions lined up behind the embattled monarch or the
radical parliamentary party and their disparate allies.

Kavarides and Ruth watched these developments in dismay. The effort to
keep England out of the Thirty Years’ War on the Continent had mostly
succeeded, only for the realm to descend rapidly toward what looked to be a
violent domestic dispute. Kavarides nervously debated which side, if either,
he should take, his personal honor made him loyal to England, but did that
mean supporting the king, the parliament, or neither? The Cyllellian was not
able to settle on any good answer as 1642 drew toward a close.

Violence broke out in September, ending in an immediate but not decisive
royalist victory. It was this point that Kavarides threw his support to Charles,
concluding that this represented the best hope of a quick victory and end
to the war. This seemed like a reasonable assessment of the matter at that
time, because in much of the early stage of the war, the royalists did have
the advantage in terms of both military power and ‘legitimacy’.

It would be a mistake, though one often made in later centuries, to see the
English Civil War (which also involved extensive fighting in Scotland and
Ireland) as a battle between ‘aristocrat and commoner’. Not all of the
hereditary aristocrats supported Charles I, and indeed much of the support
for the royal cause was to be found in rural districts and among farmers and
other commoners, while the parliamentarians had much support from the cities
and the educated upper classes. Furthermore, many were caught between
both factions and endured great suffering from the abuses by both sides as
the factional armies moved and battled across the realm.

There is little need for a detailed overview of the period, for our purposes it
is sufficient to say that Kavarides chose the losing side, though he himself
died in an accident before this was completely clear. His son Walter became
the second Viscount Shaw, only to find himself on the losing side of a nasty
civil war, it was only because of the psionic abilities and secret connections
the family possessed that they came out of the entire business as well off as
they did. Matters could have been enormously worse.

The Barrington-Shaw family lost a substantial amount of their wealth, and
in the ensuing chaos of the early Commonwealth period, followed by the
personal rule of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, it was the policy of
Walter to ‘keep his head down’. This was certainly not cowardice, Walter
Barrington-Shaw was not by any means timid or a coward, but he knew
perfectly well that discretion was often the better part of valor.

When the Stuart Dynasty was restored, after the final failure and collapse
of the various attempts at government by the victorious parliamentarians,
the newly empowered monarch did not attempt to undo everything that had
been done since the execution of his father. Indeed, he could not do so,
but he did restore the properties of some of the supporters of the royalist side,
and return some of the positions that had been taken. The Barrington-Shaw
family benefited from all this, along with several other aristocratic families.

Walter Barrington-Shaw remained Viscount Shaw until his death in 1671.
Walter married his first wife Rebecca Tate in 1632, with whom he had three
daughters before her death in childbirth. He married his second wife Diana
Simms in 1662, and she gave birth to his son and heir James Barrington-Shaw
in 1663.

James Barrington-Shaw became the 3rd Viscount Shaw in 1671, as noted
above.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Charles Barrington-Shaw died in 1803, leaving two sons and seven
daughters. The oldest son, Brian, became the sixth Viscount Shaw at
the age of 29. Brian Barrington-Shaw was the oldest male offspring,
with one older sister, and he, unlike his father, had little interest
in his own psychic heritage or the esoteric lore available to the family.

Brian Barrington-Shaw had considerable psionic potential, but did little
to develop it, and indeed was more than slightly averse to the entire
concept. Many of those who knew him and knew of the family heritage
recognized that at heart, Brian Barrington-Shaw would have been much
happier if he and his family had been ‘normal’. Nevertheless, he was
not stupid and did not deceive himself about the possibility of actually
becoming a ‘normal’ family of the British aristocracy.

Brian would marry a ‘typical’ younger daughter of the aristocracy, and
their only child was Benjamin Barrington-Shaw, born in 1823. Brian
would die relatively young, in a duel with another member of the
aristocracy over (true) allegations of adultery, leaving Benjamin as the
seventh Viscount at age of sixteen, in 1839. Like his father, Benjamin
was not particularly interested or involved in the esoteric aspects of the
family history, opting instead to largely lead the life of a typical British
noble of the time and place.

(Some other members of the family not in the direct lines were not so
reticent, however, as with some other aristocratic families, the Barrington-
Shaw family seat was home to a wide variety of cousins, aunts, uncles,
nephews, nieces, and other kin, some of whom were interested in the
family legacy, and some of whom were not.)

Benjamin Barrington-Shaw was born in 1823, and married in 1845, only
to die in yet another duel in 1848. Since Benjamin had died childless,
the family title passed to Michael Barrington-Shaw, a first cousin, who
was then thirty years old and father of one child. Two years after becoming
the eighth Viscount Shaw, Michael sired Donald William Barrington-Shaw,
a figure about whom we shall have much more to say.

Michael fell into the mid-range of interest in the family legacies. He did
possess some limited psionic power which he practiced with within
limits, his main powers being ESP and telepathy at modest levels. His wife
was actually a distant cousin and fellow descendent of Kavarides,
possessed of modest psionic ability of her own, particularly a talent for
psychokinesis, though she only really used it for the occasional trick.

Michael and his wife Caroline would have four children after their eldest
son Lawrence and their second son Donald William, all of them daughters.
Michael died in 1893, outliving his wife by a year, leaving Lawrence as the
ninth Viscount Shaw, and their second son to play a notable, if little known,
role in the secret events of the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

NOTE: All the following is based on my modied version of GURPS 3e.

SIR DONALD WILLIAM BARRINGTON-SHAW...

NAME: (Sir) Donald William Barrington-Shaw (Born April 12th 1850)
HAIR: Gray
EYES: Blue
HEIGHT: 5'11"
WEIGHT: 205-220 pounds (varies)
SETTING: World War I and pre-War period

IQ 14
DX 08
ST 09
HT 08

ADVANTAGES:
Appearance [Handsome]
Wealth [Filthy Rich]
Status 3
Alertness (2)
Charisma (2)
Common Sense
Empathy
Language Talent (3)
Strong Will (2)
Unusual Background (trained by an Avatar, Atlantean ancestry, bred for
psi)
Security Clearance (3)

PATRON(s):
William Lloyd George
(appears rarely, very powerful, private)
Aradel
(appears rarely, very powerful, private, supplies unusual
training and knowledge)
Barrington-Shaw Family
(appears often, mildly influential)

ALLIES and ALLY GROUPS:
Special Group Seven (medium-sized group, resources, appears often)

DISADVANTAGES:
Age (65 years old in 1915)
Bad Sight (correctable with glasses)
Bad Hearing
Code of Honor (spymaster's)
Sense of Duty
England
Special Group 7
Secret(s)
psionic
head of SG-7
Unfit
Nightmares Lesser
Workaholic
Damaged Lungs (severe)


ENEMIES and ENEMY GROUPS:
The Unity
(very powerful, appears very rarely, does not know identity)
Karl Jurgensen 'the Marquis'
(powerful, appears occasionally, does not know identity)

QUIRKS:
1. Loathes 'idle rich'
2. Dog lover
3. Vegetarian (by necessity)
4. Fascinated by automobiles
5. Admirer of Bismarck

PSIONIC POWERS and SKILLS:
ANTPSI Power 10
Psi Static (14)
ESP Power 10
Clairvoyance (14)
Precognition (dream only) (13)
Danger Sense
PSYCHOKINESIS Power 7
TELEPATHY power 7
Telereceive (15)
Telesend (15)
Mental Blow (13)
Signature Sniffer (12)
Psi Sense (13)

NOTE: All the above psionic abilities suffer from a fickle limitation,
at 25%.

GENERAL:
Mind Shield (16)

SKILLS
Riding (4)
Play Piano (16)
Writing (16)
Swimming (9)
Guns TL5 (12)
Cooking (15)
Languages
English (17)
French (14)
Spanish (14)
German (14)
Russian (14)
Latin (classical) (14)

Telegraphy (14)
First Aid TL5 (12)
History (13)
Administration (14)
Area Knowledges
London (18)
England (16)
Paris (16)
Berlin (16)
Europe (16)
Diplomacy (14)
Fast Talk (14)
Leadership (15)
Savoir-Faire (16)
Detect Lies (16)
Interrogation (14)
Lockpicking (12)
Streetwise (12)
Chess (17)
Hidden Lore(s)
City Secrets: London (14), Paris (13), Berlin (13)

On the surface, Donald William Barrington-Shaw was the second son of
an English aristocrat, and thus more or less comfortably placed,
though he was not in line to inherit his father's titles. In his
youth, Barrington-Shaw was something of a hellion, roaming through
Europe and Britain's imperial possessions more or less partying and
playing. Nothing particularly unusual about him met the eye, but that
was partly a matter of family intent. What Barrington-Shaw did not
know was that his family ancestry included a significant amount of
Atlantean blood, and that from that ancestry he had derived a
potential for significant psychic power.

Barrington-Shaw was not 'let in' on the family secret until he was 25,
and when he was he was not entirely pleased with what he learned. It
seemed that the Barrington-Shaw family had been engaging in something
of a breeding exercise over the previous three centuries, almost from
the time that the family title had first been granted by Elisabeth I.
It was hardly the only consideration in their marriages, and many of
his ancestors had ignored the whole matter, but enough had engaged in
it to leave a mark on the family inheritance.

Also, he was introduced to the fact that there were beings in the
world who were far older and more powerful than most humans ever
suspected. As shocked as the 25 year old Barrington-Shaw was to
discover that the myth of Atlantis was not exactly a myth, and that
the hocus-pocus of psychic powers was not completely mythical either,
he was even more shocked to discover that there were individual, human-
seeming beings walking the Earth who were not just centuries old, not
just thousands of years old, but tens of thousands of years old...
and that in fact he had met one, the woman who he had always known as
'Cousin Lucille' or just 'Lucy'.

'Cousin Lucy' had never been around much, and when he learned the
truth Barrington-Shaw knew he should not have been surprised, she
didn't look even slightly like the rest of the family, and she always
seemed a little strange. He just had never suspected how strange
she really was, nor that she had been alive and walking the Earth
long before the construction of the Great Pyramid or even the city
of Jericho.

The need for extreme secrecy was heavily emphasized on the young
Barrington-Shaw, and he agreed to keep quiet, if only because telling
the truth might well have landed him in a madhouse, but after that he
showed even less tendency to remain close to the family estate in
Cheshire. He visited Egypt, the United States, and India, he roamed
across Europe on various tours, and generally made himself known as a
dissolute younger aristocrat.

At the age of 31, in 1881, Barrington-Shaw had a life-changing
experience of sorts, he was attending a weekend-party at a private
estate in France, a party where a respectable gentleman had no
business whatever being present, in the company of Priscilla Newcale,
a young woman of 24 who was a younger 'wild child' daughter of a
respectable family in the Suffolk gentry. She had even less business
being at that gathering than Barrington-Shaw did, but of course that
was part of the draw for the two rebellious scions of the upper class.

Priscilla was a dark-haired and spirited young woman, and for all
their pretenses of bored cynicism, she and Barrington-Shaw were in
love with each other. Barrington-Shaw's parents actually hoped the
two of them would take their relationship somewhere eventually,
Priscilla was not nearly as 'connected' as the Barrington-Shaw clan,
her family had no real titles per se, but by this point they'd have
been quite pleased to see their rebellious son settle down with a
commoner if that was what it took to keep him from disgracing the
family. She was at least of the gentry, and certainly intelligent and
attractive.

Unfortunately, both young people were stubbornly determined to resist
any pressure from their elders to do anything, and in fact both
delighted in defying conventions, both of their families and of polite
society, and this later tendency led them to tragedy on a dark and
rainy night in 1881.

The hosts of the gathering were known for scandalous behaviors in
public, and rumored to be up to worse in private, the rumors that
circulated about the goings on at their private parties were quite
lurid. This was part of the draw for the various aristocrats,
merchants, and other movers and shakers who sometimes attended them.
Young Priscilla and Barrington-Shaw were hardly naïfs, both had
sampled such temptations as opium and other drugs, and neither
hesitated to drink to excess, and Priscilla's parents would have been
horrified to know some of the men she had taken as lovers in her
youthful life. [1]

But somehow the pair always did seem to find their way back to each
other, and it was as a couple that they attended that raucous party on
a rural estate, not far from the southern coast of France. Both threw
themselves into the carousing eagerly. Barrington-Shaw won several
hundred pounds at various gambling games, Priscilla went riding during
the day with some of the other women at the gathering, and on a
Saturday night, at a masquerade ball, Donald and Priscilla met a
German merchant who was introduced to them as one Klaus Nagel, a
mild-seeming man with salt-and-pepper hair, a charming manner, and
an edge of something dangerous that worried Donald and appealed to
Priscilla. [2]

MORE LATER.


[1] Then as now, but even more so, societal expectations were
different for men and women, Barringon-Shaw's sleeping around was
simply not as scandalous as Priscilla's. Even among the aristocrats,
women were expected to wait until after giving birth to an heir before
considering any extra-marital adventures, and Priscilla's family were
of a more staid stock.

[2] In later years, Barrington-Shaw would learn that this man's
actually had many names, but Barrington-Shaw would know him by an
assigned moniker, 'the Marquis'. In fact, it was Barrington-Shaw who
assigned this identifier to him, as we shall see.