Janice XVI: "... Is That They Never End"
The world shifts all around them. While the immediate area still has the table and the seat and the television, the walls fold away. They're replaced by tall grey trees topped with grey leaves. Mist rises out from the leaf-mould covered ground. Despite the height of the trees, though, she can just about see a cavern roof far, far overhead. Janice can't see or feel Chris anymore. The air tastes of autumn and oncoming snow.
She's in a strange liminal world as she talks to her past self, to Ami. She's very close to a death she - they - died once already. Her heartbeat feels weak. Janice sincerely hopes that's just a measure of her inner meditative focus as she explains things and hopes that this will help establish common ground with the dead woman.
"And that's about it," she says with a sigh. "You're dead. My past life. You died in the early eighties, and it's now 2016. I tried to contact you when I was younger and it left me with nightmares for years. Nightmares about… about how we died. You went down into a Nephandic pit and… and fought to the very last."
"I'm sorry," Ami says. Her shoulders slump.
"You're sorry?" That's completely unexpected. Janice doesn't know what to say.
"I marked myself with Do Not Revive. I thought my memories would die with me." She shakes her head. "I didn't want to burden anyone else with them. Has… has it been bad for you?"
"A decade of nightmares," Janice says softly. "Dreams of killing. Dreams of… dreams of the place you died."
"I'm sorry."
It's all wrong. She's spent years trying to cope with the horrors her past life has shown her - and on top of that, she found out they were a Technocratic murderer. Before that, she had thought it a monster - maybe a werewolf.But now she's talking to her, it's a sorrowful, very human woman.
"The Union probably has my backups still in some dusty archive, but," Ami continues, pinching the bridge of her nose, "well, they seem to have respected that. I mean, hmm - well, I have no idea how reincarnation works with revival. But from the dates you mentioned, you were born the same day I died. So I suppose I really didn't want to come back." She shakes her head. "Oh! I wonder if that's why successful revival rates drop precipitously after a few days. I don't know. I feel brain degradation is a much… cleaner explanation."
There are fewer tears than she might have thought. Less rage, either. That's putting Janice on edge. She knows Ami was a Technocratic assassin. "You seem surprisingly… at ease with being a past-life," she says.
"I think I would have seen things differently when I was still alive," Ami says, with a wry smile. "But I
feel dead. You know? Well, no, you don't know. I couldn't explain it. But yeah. I don't think I ever died before. Other people I know flatlined and needed crash-kits, but I'm super-bad at dying. Good at lying on the floor until my body fixed up the lost limb, but bad at dying. And I remember everything now.""
"Remember everything?" Janice asks, slightly confused. Technocrats shouldn't be so… utterly willing to accept this kind of thing. She was expecting a tearful denial that she was dead. Maybe some kind of rage directed at the Traditions for stealing her… her mind backup or something. Not this kind of easy attitude.
Ami taps her fingers against the inside of the glass of the television. "Everything. Even things I don't ever remember remembering. I remember things from when I was tiny that I've never remembered. Like the first time I was stung by a hornet. I wasn't even two then."
"So you remember the spider that lived outside your window," Janice begins.
"That's Blade Runner. And that would be a false memory. I'm not a construct"
"Wait, that came out in…"
"1982."
"Oh. Right."
Sitting back, Ami crosses her legs. "Well, thank you for getting in touch. Being dead… it feels lighter. I'm not sure how to explain it - like I had a cold, but now I can breathe cleanly, or I was wearing training weights and now they've been taken off."
"Huh?"
"Yeah, those are terrible metaphors. Sorry, can't explain it. And it's been thirty years. The issues and the worries feel so much less pressing. So… how do I go about being a past life? Can I get a drink in here?"
"Uh…"
"I haven't had a drink in thirty years. I want to see what modern food is like. Have we managed to roll pod food yet?"
"No."
"Oh, thank
fuck. That stuff never tastes right and people keep on pushing it. Sure, it's compact and great for missions, but I wouldn't want to eat it every day."
Yes, she really is very easy-going for a Technocratic murderer, Janice decides. And in itself, that's weird - because Janice gets told by other lazier people that she's too intense and that she really needs to take a break. But from what she's read about reincarnation, the basic nature of a soul changes little from life to life - and she certainly doesn't think she's secretly like that. Which means that Ami must be more like her than she's letting on. As she thinks about what the other woman has said, she begins to suspect she's being diverted by someone who's using the playful attitude as a shield.
Well, maybe she can try getting her past self drunk to get her to open up a bit. Focussing hard, she recalls one of those strangely nice things that Luke brews up. It's sort of a bit like a fruit wine, but kicks like a mule once it goes down. They normally drink it by the shotglass. Naturally, she dreams up a small wine glass of it for Ami.
"Hmm." The other woman raises the glass. "Cheers!" She takes a sip, and her eyebrows rise. "Wow. Strong, but this is good!" Her past life raises her eyebrows at her. "Are you trying to get me drunk? Because you'll need to buy me dinner first if you want to get me into bed." She takes another sip. "Although I suppose I've been in bed with you all your life." Another sip. "So, would it be incest or mastubation to sleep with your own past life?"
"That's not a question I've ever considered," Janice says. Lies, if she is to be quite honest, but in her defence the only time that conversation had come up she had been a) in her twenties, b) drunk as a lord, and c) surrounded by Ecstatics.
"Honestly, me neither, until I became one," says Ami. "I don't even believe in reincarnation. Actually, are you sure I'm a past life? I might be your family spirit."
"Excuse me?"
"I was brought up practicing Shinto," she says, gesturing with her wine glass. "I haven't really followed it in years… well, I mean, years before I died… but I mean, if I died, I don't think I would reincarnate. Even by your doctrine as a Traditionalist, if I don't believe in it, it shouldn't happen, correct?"
"I believe in reincarnation," Janice points out.
"Perhaps, but I don't - and as the alleged reincarnate, don't I get a say in the matter? After all, when the alleged reincarnation happened, shouldn't it have been me and my beliefs determining my fate?"
"You know a lot about Traditionalist beliefs," Janice says, leaning in slightly. "Isn't that 'wrongthought'?"
"Please, it's a Nu-Woo thing to just glue words together. Well, or a German thing." Ami shrugs. "I was Damage Control, and one of my main roles was to work on the containment of biohazards. I'd go to jungles, hunt down monsters, that sort of thing. That meant I'd spend a lot of time cut off from central comms. I had to learn how to talk to people on the other side and interpret their RD descriptions of things because… well, try getting some suited data analyst to leave their air-conditioned office and get their white shirt dirty." She shrugs again. "I picked up a lot about how you guys operate and how you talk to each other."
"Hmm." Janice sniffs. There's a faint scent on the air. What Ami is saying doesn't smell like a lie - but there's a hint of deceit. She's being mislead in some way. "Sounds like you have quite an unusual background. How old are… were you?"
"What's there to say?" Ami says, with a sigh. "I was born in '34. I don't think there was much unusual about my childhood. Except it was in Nagasaki."
"Oh."
"Yes. 'Oh' indeed." She shakes her head. "My family died from the bomb, and I nearly died from the burns and then again from the radiation poisoning and then again from infections and… well, I didn't die when I should have. Several times." She laughs humorlessly. "I'm good at that. Though given I'm dead now, perhaps that shouldn't be something I say anymore."
"I'm sorry," Janice says, and means it.
Ami gives a weary one-shouldered shrug. "It's just how things happened. Now, I was a 'medical miracle' and that drew the attention of the Technocracy. They realised that I'd manifested genius, so they took me away to the US and got me top-end medical treatment. New lungs, new skin, all kinds of things that took very well to my irradiated genome."
"So they turned you into a weapon?"
"What, no!" Ami looks her straight in the eye. "I chose this. They actually wanted me to go into FACADE with an eye to working in Japan, but I wanted Damage Control. It was brightly coloured and they were heroic and of course, it was just past the Second World War which meant that Damage Control were the good guys, hunting down Nazi remnants and make the world better." She pauses, scrutinising Janice. "You don't look like you agree. Oh. Has Damage Control gone even further down the black combat gear path?"
"Yes," Janice says. "Super-human constructs dressed up as black-ops killers, kicking down doors and shooting people - that's what Damage Control means today." She pauses. "I worked on the same side as one recently. A beautiful killing machine. Like a murder-doll made in the shape of a woman."
Ami screws her face up. "Yuck. Well, that bastard Li will be happy. Oh, you probably wouldn't know the name, but back in the seventies and eighties, he was a young turk who I had a rather personal rivalry with who-"
"I think I know the name. He's now in charge of the Progenitors," Janice says, trying to remember what she does from reading things on TradWiki.
"Shit. That smug self-righteous Chinese bastard in charge? Of the entire Administration? What the hell happened that he got that much influence?" Ami pauses. "Oh, right, the Avatar Storm thing you mentioned? Yeah, I can see that. Take away everything in space, and that means Li's pet killer force can basically just launch a coup. You can't trust constructs. They'll just do what they're told to."
"I know," Janice agrees. "I've always felt that. It's… they haven't been built to be people first. They don't have childhoods, and that's…"
"... what makes you a person. I know, right? I'm me because of the events that made me - you can't just fill up a mind with injected false memories and… and expect them to be a sane normal human being" Ami smiles. "You know, you really don't sound like a blood-soaked witch. I've told you mine, so what's your background?"
Janice shrugs. "Not very unusual. Fairly well-off family, I was training to be a psychiatric nurse when one of the patients was… weird. He killed himself, and wrote messages all over the walls in his blood. I had a breakdown after that because… well, I was the one who found him and I couldn't get them out of my head, and… I Awakened."
It's just registering that Ami diverted her with a tragic story of a childhood. Was that even true? It didn't feel like she was lying - but Janice herself can fool those kind of tricks. Surely an assassin has better ways of covering up.
Though the thing about the Li man leading the Progenitors was real. Janice is sure about
that bit. For one, it was un-prompted information.
"Fairly standard for a RD-induced stress-based Genius eruption," Ami says agreeably. "I'm surprised we didn't pick you up."
Janice nods. "I guess I slipped through the net," she says thoughtfully.
"Do you ever wonder what would have happened if we'd picked you up?"
"Sometimes."
"With a background like that? Progenitor or Ivory Tower psychologist," Ami says immediately. "Possibly Void Engineer as an outside thing, as they also look for 'ships councillor' positions." She grins. "The last one sounds fun. I went into space a few times and worked with them back in the fifties."
Janice folds her arms, as the wind howls overhead. "It's not going to work, you know," she says softly. "I've had better double agents than you try to make me doubt myself."
Ami looks genuinely puzzled, and that alone makes Janice suspicious because it's just a little
too perfect. "I'm dead. I guess I quit the Technocracy," she says. "I'm on your side on the grounds that… look, either I'm some kind of family spirit or you're really my future life. Either way, you getting killed is bad for me. I'm not trying to talk you into changing sides."
"Really."
"Really!" Ami runs her hands through her short hair. "Though… you said you worked with a DC construct. That… doesn't sound common."
"It's not very common, no," Janic agrees. "We were in the Spy's Demise, being attacked by something that wanted to kill all of us there and-"
One eyebrow raises. "The Demise still exists?" Ami asks.
"... not any more."
"Oh." Ami cups her empty drink in both hands. "I mean, I guess we were trying to destroy it because it was a core recruiting house for the Adepts, but before that… I saw it when it wasn't a bar. Before the Virtual Adepts left. It was… interesting." She looks Janice in the eye. "I suppose I had a bit of sympathy for the Adepts. Some of their ideas were good. They just couldn't be reasonable and compromise."
"Mmm," Janice says noncommittally. "They tell things differently."
"Of course they do. I wonder, how many Adepts from before the split have you met? I certainly noticed that the newer breed, the ones who didn't remember how things used to be, were much more violent and even more arrogant. And they were pretty arrogant before!"
"True," Janice admits. She's getting a hang of Ami's patter now. Selene… heh, Selene would say she has the soul of a willow. She bends in the wind, diverts everything around her, always seems to spring back. Ami wants her to commiserate about Virtual Adept arrogance - and boy, there's a lot of that - and then she's probably going to divert things again away from the Progenitors as she talks about the Adepts back when they were Technocrats and all the time she's going to be open and tell lies made out of true statements.
So she's going to have to pin her down. Somehow.
"You're a surprise," she tells Ami, dreaming her up another drink.
"Thank you! I try not to be boring," the other woman says, raising her new glass.
"So, I contacted you, oh wise spirit, memory of who I once was-"
"Oh, don't be like that, we were getting on so well! Oh, I do have another question about you. I didn't get a very normal life, and… well, with the radiation damage and everything, I never got to have children. How about you?"
Another distraction. Janice ignores that. That's not something she's going to let herself be drawn into. "Please. I didn't contact you out of curiosity. I contacted you because I'm desperate. I was just lucky that you're… you, rather than the monster I thought you might be."
"I try not to be a monster," Ami says cheerfully. "And thank you for being so understanding about the fact that even though we are… were… uh, okay, having a problem with the tenses here, but you're a witch and I was a DC constable. Just because we spent our lives on different sides doesn't mean we can't be civil."
Gotcha. Inside her head - and isn't that a funny statement in a dreamworld? - Janice wants to dance out of joy. "But that's exactly the problem," she says. "Look. I don't like the Technocracy. I don't like its patriarchal hegemony. I don't like its neoliberal economics or its causal environmental damage. I don't like the way it pushes a model of gender equality where women have to act like men to get any respect. But," and this is hard to say, "things could be a lot worse. The current situation in New York City is… it's stable. We - the Traditions - don't do anything major to the Technocracy, and the Technocracy has called off the Pogrom. It's a war of words and ideas, not plasma guns and fireballs. Neither side has the resources to continue the war after 1999 happened.
"But hardliners don't get that. Both side's hardliners. I stumbled onto a conspiracy where a hardline breakaway faction of the Traditions - the Rogue Council - is planning something
big. Some of them are literally madmen who live in the sewers. They'll try to kill a lot of people. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. And there's a man in the Technocracy who knows what they're planning - and he's planning to let it happen, maybe even weakening the defences that could stop it. Because… because some kind of magic creature killed his parents when he was young and now he wants revenge by wiping out everything. Even when from what I've heard, the only Convention-leader who would want this is Professor Li. Warren Roth wants to restart the Ascension War. All for revenge."
Janice takes a deep breath. Her hands are shaking. A cold wind has picked up. "I need your help because I'm trying to find a way to stop both of them. I think I've talked the Golden Chalice into going after the Traditionalists, but… I have to stop him. I don't care about the hardliners. The people on our side who I care about are people like… like a young woman who was hurt badly by vampires and who just wants to kill all the undead. Or even the stick-in-the-mud conservative Verbena who live out in the countryside because they're a bunch of isolated idiots who can't handle modern things - and so don't hurt anyone. And yes, even the Technocratic moderates too. One of my exes is now a Syndicate Financier and he's an
utter jerk who left me, but he thinks he's doing things for the best.
"And I'm not sure the Technocracy is the real enemy, anyway. I told you about the Demise. The thing out there - it was… some alien god-like spirit. It wasn't anything people could make. It went after the place where the moderates share information, where people talk under the table and try to stop big misunderstandings. I think it wanted the place destroyed and everyone inside dead, Technocrat and Traditionalist alike. If there's a new war between us, that sort of spirit will benefit. Them or the Nephandi.
"In the end, I'm doing this because I believe in talking things over. I don't think murder solves problems - and I don't think anyone even a little bit good will benefit from a new war. Not the Traditions, not the Technocracy, and certainly not the Sleepers that my lunatics and your lunatics are willing to sacrifice."
"Such a pretty little speech," Ami says, and the chirpiness is gone. There's sorrow there, and bitterness, and the tatters of something Janice can't even identify. "Look at me, how innocent I am and how I think everything can be resolved by talking."
"I think we should try!" Janice retorts. "I think murder is an easy solution - and one death leads to another, until everyone's dead and no one wins!"
That one hits like a whipcrack. Ami actually visibly flinches, and the glass in the TV screen separating her from Janice cracks. "It'll end in blood," she says softly. "It always does. You say you want to 'stop' him. So you're going to kill him."
"Or he's going to kill me," Janice agrees. "There is power in blood - and in sacrifice. And to stop everyone - and everything - I care about being destroyed, I'm willing."
"What happened to 'I believe in talking things out'?" Ami says, lips curling up. Her eyes are heavy and sullen.
"But I do still believe in talking. And that's why I did this. I believe in it enough that I'm not going to do what I could do and just pull what I could from you. That'd make me a hypocrite," Janice says solidly. "Tit for tat. Bargaining. I'm not going to dishonour your memory or insult you or torture you by treating you as something I can pillage. We'll make a deal, a proper vow - and that'll hold both of us to it. You help me - and in return, I'll pay the price."
"I'm dead," Ami says quietly. "I can't help you. Even if I wanted to."
"So what? I'm a witch. This isn't the first time I've made a deal with a dead woman. And I keep to my deals."
So, Janice and Ami are going to come to an arrangement - of sorts. From a certain point of view, Janice is making a temporary spirit pact with her own past life. From another point of view, she's tapping directly into the raw power within the human soul. And from another point of view, she's using ancient Verbena magic through her own rather eclectic magical style, and hammering it into shape with her raw belief in the power of talking to people.
Is this a thing Sphere magic can do? Possibly not. It's certainly some distance away from anything that respectable Western Magical Tradition sorts like Hermetics and Technocrats can fit into their paradigms. But the Hermetic spheres don't explain everything - especially not for a self-taught Verbena witch who's picked up things from all over. It's certainly deep, dark magic that messes around with the roots of the sphere and the very boundaries of life and death.
These things have been balanced with reference to the pact system in Summoners, for Mage: the Awakening. I've taken out the Duration and Sanction elements because I'll resolve them based on the Boons and Costs.
To Bargain With Time and Death
Pick any number of boons. Each one comes with an associated cost.
[ ] As an infiltrator and honey-trap, Ami was a consummate manipulator in quite a different way from Janice. Combined, they're inhumanly good. Janice gets +4 Etiquette (bringing her to 8). Of course, to clutch a Technocrat so closely makes you one in a way. Janice cannot use non-Technocrat-OK focusses for Life and Mind.
[ ] There are secret Technocratic codes that Ami knew that will never have been invalidated, since the woman who knew them died. This gives Janice access to a one-use, high-level Technocratic override Control-level code. While their pact lasts, Ami will be able to roll contested Willpower to try to take control for short periods - though she will not be able to do so for a total of more than two hours a day or more than for a few minutes at a time, and can't use magic while she's in control.
[ ] The truth is a powerful weapon. Ami will tell Janice the truth about her and why she died (which also gives her +2 Technocratic Lore). The cost of such knowledge will make her a party to the sins of the past, though, imparting the full karmic weight of who she was - and if she thought she was caught up in bad luck before, things will just get worse.
[ ] The body can remember what the soul once knew - and to a Verbena, the flesh is very mutable indeed. Reincarnated transgenic elements lurk within Janice, granting her boosts to her strength, dexterity and stamina. But these memory-echoes of Technocracy augmentations come with their own cost - without a regular cocktail of specialised drugs, she'll start to choke on clean air as her body demands more oxygen than her unenhanced lungs can provide, which would eventually leave her bed bound.
[ ] A soul can take on another form it once knew. Janice gains temporary access to a Spirit Charm which lets her assume Ami's shape, and ensures that the world itself treats her as if she was the dead woman - because she is. Note that this does not include any enhancements, which may produce questions if the Technocracy gets a close look. She'll owe her past life a debt, though - one she can call on to pay off some of the tangled up fate that surrounds them.
[ ] There's a myth wrapped around her former self, a myth of doomed love and tragedy. Everything she loved died quickly when it was pure, or became sick and poisoned and wasted away - and she endured, never dying when she should. Her Awakening in nuclear fire taught her that. Janice can take that myth for herself, gaining her Legendary Stamina and may take an action to heal one bashing or lethal damage for the duration of this pact. To embrace that myth means taking the good and the bad, though. The same myth will settle on her, tainting her life and those she interacts with.
To avoid the usual "voting pile-on" option, you also have to vote for how many options to take.
[ ] How many?
(Also I'm kinda curious about said Truth)
