Janice I: Unplugged
It's a cold January morning in New York. Slush from snow overnight has turned a dirty brown. The subways and the sewers are steaming. In Queens, a woman wearing dark glasses despite the dull overcast day gets off a bus, helped by another shorter woman. They take a circuitous route despite how the glasses-wearing woman has to pause for breath, and enter an alleyway, letting themselves in one of the side doors. Their path takes them downstairs, down into the basement of the apartment complex and then further down.
Down into a part of New York that the city has forgotten about. The buildings up above might have been built in the seventies, all blocky and grey and square, but they'd been built over a derelict art deco townhouse from the twenties.
In this basement under the basement, the overly large boiler room and utilities room of the townhouse has taken on new life. Literally. There are plants everywhere, being fed by sunlamps. Some of them are plants the cops would be quite interested to know about, but the people who are let in here aren't exactly the sort to be very friendly to institutional authority so it all works out.
Chris helps Janice to sit, fussing over her. She's a short Lebanese-American woman, with long glossy black hair. Her habitual long sleeves cover up the long self-inflicted scars on her arms, but once she removes her winter coat the tattoos which cover her torso can be seen poking out. "Maybe this was a bad idea," she worries out loud. "You shouldn't have been out and about. Not until you've built your strength up a bit more." She looks around. "Hey, Luke? Where's the coffee?"
A black man with long bleached-blonde dreadlocks pokes his head in the door. He's wearing lipstick and a satiny purple shirt. "They're over there in the corner," he says with a flap of his hand. "Trying something new and-" He trails away. "Oh! Janice!"
Weakly she lifts her left hand, and waves at him. "Hey, Luke."
He marches over, wrapping his big hands around her wrists. "You're… you're so thin," he says, before wrapping her up in a big, warm perfumed hug. "So glad to have you back."
"Yeah. I am." Janice removes her black glasses, to reveal bloodshot eyes. When she was a kid, everyone said that too much telly would make you go blind. Well, too long in VR certainly weakens the eyes. She's having problems with her pupils, which are too dilated and are letting in too much light. She gets splitting headaches outside.
"Well, we can't be having that," Luke says, marching over to some of the bushes. He plucks several herbs and fruit, and digs up some roots off a woody plant. Turning on the little electric cooker, he starts melting down a bar of dark chocolate, stirring the herbs into this. "We need to get some meat back on your bones."
"Not too fast," Janice says weakly. "I'm already pushing myself. Do it too much, and my body'll rebel."
"Don't you trust me?" Luke says, pouting. He grabs some juniper berries off a bush. "I'll fix you up good, trust me on that."
She smiles at him. Luke is a good friend. "Thanks."
"I'm so glad you're okay," he says, as he cooks up something which is half witch's brew and half hot chocolate with marshmallows. He doesn't believe that potions have to taste nasty. "We were so worried and then when Chris got the phone-call from your familiar… well. I feared the worst."
She slumps down. "It was too close," she says, admitting it for the first time. "Far too close."
Chris has plucked some of Luke's basement grown self-drying coffee, and has begun to grind it up with a mortar and pestle. She's not great with coffee, but he makes it easy with his special plants. "So," she says adding the water, then stripping off her hair ties to let out her hair. It moves on its own like living limbs, unless she keeps it bound down with rowan and silk ties, and sometimes tries to kill her if she doesn't use the special shampoo a friend of theirs brews up using chicken blood. It's the product of a curse from a Wu-Keng sorcerer who tried to sacrifice her to his demonic lords - an encounter which also left her with several of the self-inflicted scars on her arms as she spent her own lifeblood for power. "Where's the milk?"
She is directed to the milk.
"So," she says again, after adding milk and about four spoonfuls of sugar to her coffee. "Jan, you've been holding out on the full details. So what happened? Is the Digital Web falling apart or something? I mean, I don't use it as much as you, but still, I haven't touched it since you got trapped."
Luke glares at her. "Chris!"
"What! I want to know!" Chris flops down, curling up on a beanbag and letting her hair support the full weight of the mug. "Come on!"
"And do you want to know?" Janice asks Luke as he passes her the thing he's been preparing for her. She takes a sip. It's hot and bitter and rich, but her eyes do feel better now.
He flaps a hand at her. "Just glad to have you back."
"Liar," she says fondly.
"You know me too well, madame. Yeah, I'd like to know." He flops down, and lights up a hand-rolled cigarette. "And it'll do you good to get it off your shoulders. A burden shared is a burden lessened."
"Well." Janice sips again, and tries not to wince at the aftertaste.
"Too hot?"
"A bit hot," she says, trying not to hurt his feelings. She sighs. "Well, I guess… here goes."
She doesn't tell them everything. She doesn't lie, but she doesn't say everything. She doesn't mention the things she doesn't understand. She doesn't refer to the way she's feeling… a bit complicated about Donald, although she does call him a big huge fat jerk because he's all of those things - well, apart from fat. And there are some experiences she had in there which are too private, that no one who wasn't there would understand.
But yes, there are also a few things she doesn't mention because she's a veteran. She's been a witch for over a decade. And one of the thing you learn is how to keep well clear of trouble and whatever the fuck happened in the Demise is full of trouble. It's the kind of trouble that has too much attention from the kind of seriousface Etherites who are a little too close to the Void Engineers and the kind of seriousface Euthanatoi who can just about be told apart from the NWO if you squint. The Technocrats in the Demise were calling it an alien - and while old school Verbena are meant to insist that there's no such thing as aliens, just spirits… fuck that, there's totally aliens out there.
No one says that aliens can't know the secrets of life and head forth from their homeworlds to do what they will, for good or ill.
And some of the things in there could definitely pass as aliens. Like those fucking mind-eating metal worms that fused with people and dragged them offline. She's almost certain they were taking people over. And she's willing to bet that the people they grabbed have either gone mysteriously missing or they've gone 'mysteriously missing', depending on whether demonhunters got to them before they could vanish.
A month ago, she'd have been protesting that there had to be a way to save them. She's not prepared to take that risk now. Not if more of those slithering metal worms that have joined her nightmares are out there.
That's not the kind of trouble she wants - not for her, not for her friends.
"... well, once we got through the moon-bridge, I could follow my lifeline back to my body," Janice concludes. "I kept well clear of the 'Crats and made sure they weren't following me." She swirls the dregs. "I hope that's enough. Sykes is working for Jamelia Belltower now, and that woman is dangerous."
Something about the idea of going near the Grey Woman terrifies her more than feels right for a rational fear of elite Operatives. It feels too... personal. Janice is not sure why, but she listens to her gut.
But she does feel better after getting most of it out. And drinking the brew, of course. Her eyes don't hurt from the light, and she can see that her wrists have regained some weight. It's the power of natural herbs and home medicine.
Luke exhales a blue cloud. "Shit," he says, taking another drag. "I was worried about you, yeah. And shit was even worse than I thought."
Getting up, Chris goes to make herself another coffee. The electric lighting hums. "What do you reckon it was?" she asks.
Janice shakes her head. "Some kind of spirit of computers, or maybe an alien AI," she says. "I'm keeping well away. I… I don't want it going after me again."
"Yeah. Yeah. I can see that."
"So," Janice says. "Enough about me. What've I missed?"
She listens to them, but she finds herself drifting. Thinking about other things. One thing in particular. Something Chris mentions sends her mind darting off down other paths.
Maybe she can't cope with the lack of stress, she thinks darkly. Nothing's tried to kill her for at least a day. That's weird. She's not used to it. Her legs are shaking and she has a nervous twitch that won't go away until she calls on Artemis to give her the peace of the hunter.
"Dollar for your thoughts?" asks Chris, eyes half-lidded. She's noticed that Janice's mind has wandered. She checks her purse. "Well, okay, uh… fifty one, two... fifty six cents? Okay, wow, think you're going to have to cover my bus ride back, yeah? But you're tense an' all distracted. What's bugging you?"
Yes. We're back to ES Side Quests. In the case of this one, it's here to give people some fun with non-ex-Technocratic non-sneaky-dressing-in-black Traditionalists.
The default setting? Wow very shocking much amazing.
And thus as part of the vote, I'm going to demonstrate that I have in fact learned from the early votes of Sera Super Special Seductive Sneaky Spoileriffic Side Story, and present a better-handled "Choose your path for this side story" vote that does not, in fact, merely rely on vague imagery.
(Of course, some of the clues may in fact be lies, but that's always a risk.)
What is Janice thinking of?
[ ] The nightmares and how they're getting worse
Linked Background: Past Lives
Potential Factors: Progenitors, the High Umbra, Under the Table Contacts, Drugs
[ ] How Luke said they haven't heard anything from Josh - and how he'd said he was having problems with Knight Industries
Linked Background: Chantry
Potential Factors: Syndic Interference (Possibly From Roth), Going Up Against Someone With Echoes (Batman) And Finding Yourself Cast As A Themed Supervillain By Reality Itself
[ ] She went to the Demise that fateful night to find someone who might know the.., the thing (possibly the Thing) down in the subway network. She didn't find out enough.
Linked Background: Contacts
Potential Factors: That Inevitable Sewer Level, Biohorror, Vampires
[ ] DNA worries her. As does the fact that Chris has an on-and-off thing with a werewolf. And the fact that both of them seem to be after a sacred place she controlled right until she went AWOL due to being in a coma.
Linked Background: Node
Potential factors: Zombies, Werewolves and Mirrorshades, Oh My, Mirrorshade Zombies/Zombie Werewolves/Werewolf Mirrorshades optional
[ ] The Rogue Council is making noises about how the escapees from the Demise were "let go" by the Technocracy.
Linked Background: Status (Traditions)
Potential Factors: Balancing how you handle your own extremists, Arguing about Paradigms (knives optional)
