[Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen] Patient 4: The Vacant Stare

Out of Character (OOC):

Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition

Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen

Story: The Asylum

Chapter 3 – Scene 6 "The Vacant Stare"

Storyteller: Jerad Sayler

North Dakota State Hospital 

Patient Case Study #5 The Vacant Stare

The following is an excerpt is from an active play-by-post Story Plot starring Chimera (Hannah Nyland), Jack Bismuth (Alex Van Belkum), & Eos (Jerad Sayler). The Story is called The Asylum and involves the supernatural badness of the Jamestown State Hospital in Jamestown, North Dakota. Now that the Malus Loci is closed and several months has gone by, Chimera shifts her attention to some of the peripheral oddities at the NDSH. She sends her familiar Azazel to interface with STARK, a highly advanced magically created Virtual Intelligence, to plum the depths of the hospital records looking for anything odd.

Azazel: Boss, while were you were chasing Seers I've noted a few unusual cases we might want to look into.  The next one on the priority list reeks of the supernatural and I recommend we look into this next.

Patient: Jesus Emilio Alvarado
Attending Physician: Dr. Preston Cates

Case Number: BG-0414
Date Entered: 23 Oct 2012

Description & History

Fifteen years ago, Jesus Emilio Alvarado was once a small business owner in Brownsville, Texas. He had a wife, Esperanza, two children, Antonio and Amelia and a prosperous hardware business consisting of two stores, and he was about to open a third. However, in that same year Jesus went missing and wasn’t to be seen again until 10 years ago. During those five years, the man who was Jesus Emilio Alvarado was subjected to unimaginable terrors, leaving a severely disturbed and damaged person in his place. One of the primary causes for confusion with this case is our inability
to account for Jesus during the five-year span. Though the details are  a bit spotty, the previously mentioned memory regression therapy has met with some success and this story, according to Alvarado, is what happened.

Jesus Emilio Alvarado left his family to travel across the border to arrange a new wholesaler for his business in Tampico, Mexico. After displaying his passport to border patrol at Matamoros, Alvarado stopped at a slightly out-of-the-way café for refreshment before continuing south. It was at this café that Alvarado encountered his abuser-to-be, a woman Jesus knows only by the name “La Santisima Muerte” — the name of a patron saint revered by the cultic practitioners of Brujeria, or Mexican shamanic witchcraft. After serving him a cup of coffee, the woman returned with three large men who subdued Jesus when he attempted to go to his car. It was at this point, that Alvarado’s story turns into a nightmare.

After being transported, blindfolded, in the flatbed of an old truck, the woman from the café and her three assistants unloaded Alvarado into a decrepit ranch-style house. Inside, Jesus was stripped, shaved, handcuffed and then locked in a closet without food or water for several days. 

Once this period of isolation was over, Alvarado, believed to be mostly delirious at this point, witnessed the ritual murder of a teenage boy — a fate that Alvarado assumed would be his own. The killing involved skinning the boy alive at the foot of a crude altar atop of which sat a cauldron filled with all manner of bones and odd protrusions of wood. During the moment of the boy’s final bloodcurdling scream, the woman called “La Santisima Muerte” cut off his head with a machete and offered it to the cauldron, requesting protection and power. Over the next several months, Alvarado witnessed six more of these murders, which varied in their torture methods but always ended with a prayer and offering to the cauldron. 

After what Alvarado experienced as years, he was taken to the altar and restrained there. While being beaten with palm fronds as some kind of symbolic act, he claims he was invaded by a tortured spirit — most likely Alvarado’s rationale for a schizophrenic breakdown brought on by the sustained terror and anxiety of his experience. He claims that when the so called spirit filled him, the man named Jesus Emilio Alvarado ceased to be “as if held underwater by a dark hand, unable to speak, or breath. Only fear. Only fear.” Alvarado claims that this ritual was conducted every night for a span of time he has no concept of.

Ten years ago, the farmhouse was located and raided by Mexican Police and American Border Patrol as part of an initiative to locate safehouses for those seeking to immigrate illegally and locations of staged human trafficking into the country. It was only by lucky coincidence that the Matamoros farmhouse was uncovered. In addition to the remains of more than 22 ritual sacrifices, authorities rescued Jesus Alvarado, whom they found wandering in circles in a nearby field when the raid occurred. After two days of researching Alvarado’s identity, authorities notified his family of his rescue, and, after a silent, frightened reunion with a family he could no longer recognize, Jesus was taken to Centro Estatal de Salud Mental, a Mental Hospital in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Within a few months, however, the Centro Estatal de Salud Mental — which was already suffering significant overcrowding — received a request from researchers at the North Dakota State Hospital to transfer Mr. Alvarado to NDSH. Because the researchers (who's names I have been unable to find) were studying the ritual child abuse and the Satanic Panic phenomenon, they wished to make comparisons between his experiences and those of individuals who claimed to have been ritually abused by cults. The necessary bureaucratic arrangements were made, and Alvarado was transferred to Jamesown, where he has remained since.

Memory regression therapy has been proven to be unreliable, as the mind is just as likely to create memories as it is to remember severely repressed memories, making it impossible to know if he is telling the truth about the severity of his treatment in captivity.  Out of curiosity, I looked for any results generated by Jesus's first doctors and their study into memory and Satanic Cults but was unable to find anything in the hospital archives. 

Clearly the stories about his possession are either the result of repeated memory regression therapy sessions overwriting any true memories with fanciful ones or the trauma of his experience causing formed the stories of demonic possession as a defense mechanism.  Possession is sometime used as an excuse to rationalize personal behavior when someone does horrible things or was forced to participate in deviant behavior the person harbors deep shame and guilt over.

Treatments and Results

Jesus Emilio Alvarado is a sporadic catatonic, occasionally breaking from his malaise to become barely functional. His language skills are generally nonexistent, and his awareness of his surroundings is likewise severely limited.  We aren't even sure how well his English is because the results of the trauma make it impossible to get a clear assessment on his cognitive capabilities. 

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Only under the effects of deep hypnosis is the man who was once Alvarado able to communicate with those outside of his mental prison. During these times, his eyes widen as if distracted by something in the room that is gradually growing in prominence, and his face gradually but steadily transforms into a mask of horror. At the climax of this transformation, Jesus will let out a very disconcerting and shrill scream and continues until his throat is so stripped he can make no more sound. During the scream, however, his  hands slash at his own chest, ripping at the skin, as if trying to release something that he feels is trapped inside his own body (Jesus has experienced severe injury and infection due to this seizure-like behavior and self-injury). Nonetheless, outside of hypnosis, he shows no anxiety related to what appears to be a post-traumatic condition and is generally quite docile.

Care Plan
Alvarado is perhaps one of the most tragic cases of our current patients, having had his mental disorders inflicted on him through traumatic, systematic torture both psychological and physical rather than naturally occurring deterioration due to a pre-existing condition. Mercifully, he has little-to no recollection of what he’s lost. Nonetheless, his recovery seems unlikely.

However, there are certainly things we can learn from Alvarado insofar as dissociative disorders. Though his case and recovery over the last decade may seem bleak, we’re sure that further testing and experimentation with Jesus’s hypnosis therapy could result in progress with less severe cases.  

It should be noted that after three years of institutionalization, his wife filed for divorce and remarried. He is occasionally visited by his now adult children, however its been three years since their last visit.

Azazel: Cults of Saint Death (Santa Muerte) are very common nowadays, especially in Mexico and along the US Mexican Border. We've seen evidence of mages associated with the cults in San Antonio and also in San Diego.

Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (Spanish for Our Lady of the Holy Death) or, colloquially, Santa Muerte (Holy Death), is a female deity (or folk saint depending on school of thought) in Mexican folk religion, particularly Folk Catholicism, venerated primarily in Mexico and the Southwestern United States. A personification of death, she is associated with healing, protection, and safe delivery to the afterlife by her devotees. Despite condemnation by the Catholic Church, her cult has become prominent in the 2000s and 2010s, as a continuation of the Aztec goddess of death Mictecacihuatl or Mictlancihuatl (Nahuatl for "Lady of the Dead") clad according to Spanish iconography.

Since the pre-Columbian era Mexican culture has maintained a certain reverence towards death, which can be seen in the widespread commemoration of the Day of the Dead. Santa Muerte generally appears as a skeletal female figure, clad in a long robe and holding one or more objects, usually a scythe and a globe. 

In the Mexican and U.S. press, the Santa Muerte cult is often associated with violence, criminality, and the illegal drug trade. She is a popular deity in prisons, both among inmates and staff, and shrines dedicated to her can be found in many cells.  Altars with images of Santa Muerte have been found in many drug houses in both Mexico and the United States.

In San Diego there is a small Nameless Order called The Ahijados de la Santism Muerte (Children of the Holy Death) a claim to have always been and they simply arrived in San Diego when an influx of Mexicans during the 1920s arrived in San Diego. They are a very peculiar order, deeply connected to their own culture and unwilling to maintain any kind of separation between their lives as mages and their human communities.

Members of the Order are bound together by the benevolence of Santisma Muerte. Many street vendors, taxi drivers, vendors of pirated merchandise, street people, prostitutes, pickpockets, petty drug traffickers and gang members. They also protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Mexicans, as they are outcasts.

The Ahijados are a large body, it’s assumed, considering the relatively few Mexican Awakened who join the Pentacle. The majority of Ahijados avoid the Pentacle preferring to tend to their local families and communities. Those who run up against the Pentacle tend to be those with strong criminal inclinations, those who are attempting to accrue temporal power or use magic openly. For every criminal Ahijado that the Pentacle interacts with there are a dozen more in the shadows.

There is no evidence that Jesus's victimization is linked to this Nameless Order in any way, it was worth noting that if we have questions about the worship of Santa Muere, we could always go try to ask some of the Order's membership about it in San Diego.

RESOLUTION:
Some basic Post-Life Regression allowed Chimera to witness the tribulations of Jesus in his time of captivity with the death cult.  He was used as a vessel for a powerful ghost claiming to be an avatar of Saint Death.  The process of witnessing human sacrifices, torture and captivity and repetitive possession wore his psyche down to virtually nothing.  Agency was stolen from Mr. Alvarado.

After investigating, Chimera also discovered that a strange entity was using Jesus as a sensory organ, possessing him because his past trauma made him a catatonic and very susceptible to possession.  She traced the mental link to a bizarre spirit-like entity that lives in the Shadow realm deep beneath the correctional facility and hospital groups.

It turned out that the entity was a Lare, a lesser Angel analog serving the God-Machine.  It turns out that it manages an Infrastructure that collects emotional resonance in an occult matrix and provides the output to other projects.  The Infrastructure and Lare have been in place for hundreds of years, worshipped as spiritual mounds to the natives of the day.  The Lare promotes heightened emotional states in all forms (good and bad) and seems to be responsible for the majority of spiritual resonance issues at this location.  It had ephemeral sensory organs (mostly eyes) within the walls of the shadow reflections and/or in the Twilight state.  It also looked for any opportunity to utilize staff and patients to sense and effect the emotional states of people on the grounds.  The poisoning of the location, wound and general status of Jamestown itself was very much influenced by this system.

With some very careful and clever planning, and leveraging the help of her mechanical servants and Reaper's knowledge and study of God-Machine technology, they managed to hack into the intelligence coding of the Lare and reprogrammed it with the directive to only promote positive and restorative emotional states.  They also managed to bestow some rudimentary empathy so that it could determine who and how to use its power on.  To support the drop of resonance input into the supported Logistical Infrastructure, she utilized the spirits of healing that had (thanks to her efforts) already had a beach head presence in the Shadow to act as supporting spirits for the Lare.  Her spirits will provide an extra check to insure the Lare doesn't make too many mistakes and act as sensors and supports for the Lare itself.

Over the following months the resonance of the grounds has drastically improved and the effects are carrying over into the Shadow as well.

Back to Jesus Emilio Alvarado, Chimera used her magical abilities to draw upon the mind of his past self (before the trauma) to restore the damage to his mind and psyche.  Since this spell was put in place Jesus has gained consciousness and is on a fast road to recovery.  While it will be difficult to pick up the threads of his previous life, he is at least given a chance...