Here is the newest LARP-text! More about the LARP at the festival can be found here.
Moina Mathers almost choked on her café au lait when she saw the front page of Le Monde trumpet the sensational news – the Swede August Strindberg had invented an ether-radiumpan which was said to revolutionize both train and shipping traffic and thereby establish Sweden as the new Great Power in Europe. She browsed the newspaper feverishly until she found the article the heading referred to. It said that he had developed a prototype which was to be unveiled in a town called Gävle in the presence of their majesties. Moina gasped for breath… How dared he? This crooked swine! The jerk! So her theatre friend’s claims had been right, Strindberg had stolen from them!
While she hurriedly dressed up, Moira called for her housemaid to get her a droshky. She promised the cab driver a high cumshaw if he took her to the Ahathoor temple as fast as possible. Once there, she rushed down the stairs, through the halls, to the furthest room, where there were many of William Woodman’s long-forgotten manuscripts, translations, and sketches of weird constructions had been put aside ever since his death. It was the very same room that the Mathers had benevolently left to Strindberg in order for him to undertake his alchemic experiments some years ago. She unlocked Woodman’s coffer and found it empty; not a single piece of paper left. Strindberg had rifled them!
How dared he?! Them, who had shown him their greatest confidence. How many had he not cheated on! When Moira heard the rumours some month ago, she refused admittance contemptuously. That their sympathiser Strindberg could have done something like this was unthinkable. But now it was clear that he had manipulated Samuel and Moira to believe that he intended to join The Golden Dawn and work for its global dominance, but actually he must have been after their secrets.
But Strindberg had had the best recommendations from her circle of aquaintances. Why, it had even been her own brother, the philosopher and Nobel laureate Heri Bergson, who had introduced him to her. It was with embarrassment‘s blush burning on her cheeks that she remebered her own initial enthusiasm. How she showed this brother in art her sketches of revelations from the alfterworld; how he hadn‘t admired them and claimed to find great wisdom in them? He wandered around for hours on end and explored every corner of the temple and expressed his admiration for Moira’s interior design and her sophisticated decorations.
Soon Strindberg participated with great enthusiasm in their esoteric rites by which her husband, being a medium, communicated their
late brother William Woodman’s wisdom in cryptic messages that only she, Moira, in her position as a seeress was able to interpret. But one fine day, Strindberg didn’t show up to their ritual as had been his habit, and some time later they learnt that he had left for home. They received a letter a short time after in which he regretted that he had been forced to interrupt his visit to Paris due to a mental illness, and in which he furthermore reaffirmed his admiration for Golden Dawn’s noble cause. Moira stamped her neat foot and swore by the gods that she would take revenge. What Strindberg didn’t know was that she had been given esoteric and dark powers by the Order’s spiritual sponsors that enabled her to let people vanish in bright daylight without leaving the slightest trace behind…