Probable Scenes: Jesse Hill

The 49 Café

The 49 Café is on Market near the intersection with Steuart. The swarm (Mark Wilford and one other swarm host, depending) met Jesse Hill regularly here so that the insect in Jesse could meld for a moment and share information with the Alcatraz swarm. Jesse sometimes wears an old army shirt or jacket. The others wear dark business suits.

The waitresses at the café do not know the name Jesse Hill, but they definitely remember Jesse and his “friends”, both their faces and their voices and simply the fact that they were very strange. They call them the zodiac men, because if anyone could be the zodiac, they could. If they connect Jesse to what the player characters ask about, they’ll say something like:

Handwritten letters are painted on a wide window: “49 CAFÉ”. In the doorway, colored strings, red, white, and blue hang down so that you have to push them aside to walk through. Inside, you can smell frying meat, bacon, sausages, and eggs, and an acrid smell of something burnt.

There are forty of the strings (shoestrings) hanging in the doorway, a reference to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. They can get breakfasts here, mostly eggs and ham or bacon or sausages, pancakes with syrup. The syrup bottles have a picture of a log cabin on them. The café is open from 6 AM to 4 PM. It’s a small café with a bar (for eating) in front of the kitchen and booths around the walls. There are two restrooms around the side (marked “bobs” and “joans”). The kitchen can be entered behind the bar or through a door near the restrooms.

If you want to try to imitate the swarm host’s voice, try lifting your tongue to the top of your month, and then pulling it backwards (arching it towards the back of your mouth). You’ll sound sort of like Alvin and the Chipmunks.

The waitress who talks to them about it (if anyone does) is Julia. The waitress that saw Jesse walk down Steuart is Sharon.

“Oh, my god. The zodiac men. They come in here in a black Cadillac, like tin soldiers or something. They don’t talk much, just order a coffee in that crazy voice, sit down, “Hot enough for you?” “Sure is, not even laughing at the joke [note: it’s an exceptionally cold August], then they just stare at each other, stare out the window, at each other, out the window, drink their coffee, just a few minutes, not even as if they wanted it, stand up and leave.”

“They don’t even say anything when they leave. Just walk out the door.”

“Black suits and army clothes. They’re either murderers or CIA.”

“The one, the soldier, he walks up the street, right, the others—the black guy and the white guy—they go any which way, or if they parked right out front get in their Cadillac and drive away.”

“Creepy as hell.”

“Like they haven’t had practice being human.”

“Two of them leave in that Cadillac. The other walks away.”

“I seen one of them go into that apartment building on Steuart.”

Why is it called the 49 Café? “Well, you know, it’s the gold rush. But we like to think of Highway 49 as the unknown crossroads, everyone knows about Highway 61, but nobody knows about 49. So we hung up the shoestrings. You want anything else?”

A ‘Murder Code’ Broken

The morning papers on Saturday, August 9, will carry the news that Donald Harden, a Salinas high school teacher, has solved the Zodiac cipher. They will print the solved version of the text in their newspapers.

Other news on the page is “Black Nationalist March Today”, about August Wey’s march to the end of Market Street, where he’ll give a speech today about his experiences in Washington.

Steuart Street

If they know that Jesse lives on Steuart but not where, there are two apartment complexes in the block north of Market, and three in the block south of Market. Depending on how they ask, they might be able to get the apartment manager to tell them that Jesse does (or does not, depending on the building) live her without any roll. On average, though, this is a very easy Charisma roll.

Confronting Jesse Hill

If they manage to track down Jesse Hill, they will likely decide to confront him in his Rose Field apartment before the assassination. This apartment is a big drop from his working class house in on Grand.

You walk to the end of Market Street. Steuart Street runs left and right. Ahead of you is a small park, and beyond it are warehouses, and beyond them ships in the bay. Large buildings line this side of Steuart Street north and south.

Jesse has a corner apartment. The swarm have rented the apartment next to Jesse’s apartment on the side facing the street. They occasionally let allies use it. Note that Jesse pretends that he doesn’t know the people in that apartment. The apartment manager knows that the same people have been renting it for a long time while letting others stay there; as long as they don’t cause trouble she doesn’t care. She doesn’t know that Jesse is connected with them.

The assassination

August Wey flies in from Washington, DC on Friday night. He will be surrounded by his people, giving commands and listening to reports until the speech. He and his followers will march up Market Street, where he will deliver a rousing speech on race, reform, and his time in DC from the open park at the end of Market with the bay behind him.

His speech is on Saturday afternoon, August 9. He will begin speaking at about 2:15 PM. A swarm-controlled (white) Jesse Hill will perform the hit, and will be released from the swarm after confessing—and implicating the U.S. government. Jesse is a Vietnam veteran who was been caught up in the Manson cult. The swarm has ensured that he’s been photographed near FBI offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. These photographs will be released after the assassination.

Jesse Hill will shoot Wey from his fourth-floor apartment at the end of Market. He’ll be 190 yards away firing at an unaware target. He’ll fire one double shot from his semi-automatic scoped M16 rifle for 2d8 damage. Bonuses: +1 high ground, +4 unaware target, +2 careful attempt, +5 skill. Penalties: -3 range (six range penalties, but the scope negates three of them), double shot –1. The total bonus is +8, which means that a roll of 19 or less will hit.

Jesse Hill: (Human: 1; Survival: 6; Move: 12; Attack: knife; Damage: 1d4+1; Defense: +1; Special Defense: slo-time; Magic Resistance: 3)

Free Insect: (Autumnal Swarm: 5; Survival: 20; Move: 16; Attack: mandible; Damage: d8; Defense: +5; Special Defense: slo-time; Magic Resistance: 3)

If Wey doesn’t drop, Hill will fire one more single shot for 1d8. By then, Wey will either crouch down or will be pulled down by his bodyguards if he’s somehow still survived.

Remember that if Wey is not surprised by the first shots, the second shot will not get the unaware bonus, and Hill won’t get the careful attempt bonus or scope bonus in any case, so a second shot will be either at +4 or +0, meaning that a roll of 15 or less (Wey is surprised) or 11 or less (Wey is not surprised) will hit. Remember that in conflict, Jesse’s skill bonus of +5 with the rifle won’t apply.

August Wey’s speech

August Wey will talk about his experience in Washington, DC, and the need for deep change within the system.

He speaks of a far-away place called Washington, and an inflexible system of government that is at war with its own people as well as with foreigners across a far ocean. He speaks of changing the system, but, he says,

“The system does not want to change. Here in our own California there are thousands upon thousands of people who draw their living from the prison system. They need prisons and prisoners. More and more of them every day. All the clerks, all the guards, all the bailiffs, all the merchants who sell to the prisons. They regard inmates as a natural resource from which they all draw their livelihood, and the crop they exploit the best are the black inmates.”

“When society’s institutions no longer serve the needs of the people, the institutions must be changed. We must change them. That is the American tradition: when we are tyrannized and our government answers cries for justice with more tyranny, it is our right and duty to abolish that government, to create a government that will extend justice impartially and humanely to all its citizens.”

“Stand up for liberty. Stand up for justice. Stand against death. We are set against a dying culture. Our change need not require bloodshed nor our revolution war, for the system is weak in the face of our conviction. We are life. We are the breath of the world. Our strength is strength that can change the course of history, a strength that can make a new society of cooperation, true freedom, and justice for all.”

He continues in that vein, exhorting the crowd to force the city to change, to force the state to change, and to force the nation to change. Apparently all of them can vote, and many of them are even eligible to become rulers.

If Jesse Hill is free to shoot, he’ll do so after “Stand against death”.

Jesse Hill: Riots

If August Wey is assassinated, a small portion of the crowd—several hundred peoples—will immediately riot back down Market Street. The police will try to bring things under control. That night, the weathermen will use a nail bomb at a police headquarters. This will trigger more riots on the part of whites, and will also cause the police to act more brutally against black rioters, which will in turn trigger more rioting. When the death angels begin hacking people with machetes in the night, all hell will break loose.

There will be minor rioting in Los Angeles until the Tate/La Bianca killings are discovered and assumed to be a retaliation for the Wey assassination. Rioting will spread across color boundaries here as well.

When Governor Reagan sends in the National Guard to both San Francisco and Los Angeles, any mistake on their part will be used to spread the riots to Fresno (California’s capital). Without assistance from the federal government, a lot of public officials will be killed, and it is very likely that the rioters will set up a new revolutionary government. The National Guard will then have to march back from San Francisco and Los Angeles to retake the capitol, leaving other riots behind them.

Rioting will also spread to New York City and Chicago pretty quickly, and to other major cities if those riots are not quickly put down. The weathermen and other groups primed by the swarm will commit racial crimes and try to instigate police crackdowns.

The federal government will be tied up in Washington, DC, where rioting will begin the night of the assassination. The weathermen will set more nail bombs in military facilities and state buildings, causing the federal government to declare martial law within the U.S. capitol. If the United States shows any weakness or likelihood of contracting inwards, revolutionary movements throughout the world will do their best to take advantage of it.

Some of this may be ameliorated if the player characters have removed some of the swarm’s chess pieces from the board. If Charles Manson is unavailable, for example, his followers will try to handle their part without him, but will likely bungle it. If the weathermen have been taken out of commission, or their bombs destroyed, San Francisco’s police won’t be quite as trigger-happy.