Return to Mage PageCharacter Sheet: Jennifer Conway
Appearance
Prelude
Journal Entries:
Name: Jennifer Conway
Player: Russell Wallace
E-mail Address: manorsof@iol.ie
Chronicle: Santa Cruz/Mage
Essence: Questing
Nature: Visionary
Demeanor: Caregiver
Tradition: Orphan
Mentor: None
Cabal: None
ATTRIBUTES:
Physical: Strength-2, Dexterity-2, Stamina-2
Social: Charisma-3, Manipulation-2, Appearance-3
Mental: Perception-3, Intelligence-4, Wits-3
ABILITIES:
Talents: Alertness-2, Awareness-2, Dodge-1, Intuition-3, Streetwise-1
Skills: Drive-2, Research-2, Technology-3
Knowledge: Computer-3, Enigmas-3, Investigation-1, Law-1, Linguistics-2 (French, Spanish), Medicine-1, Science-2
SPHERES:
Correspondence-3, Life-3
Backgrounds: Arcane-3, Dream-4
Arete-4
Willpower-8
Quintessence-0
Paradox-0
Foci: Not required for first 3 Spheres
Appearance
A bit over 5'7", of average build. Fair hair, usually cut to shoulder length, and blue eyes. Attractive in a way that would be more likely described as cute than stunning, and smiles more often than she frowns. 18 years old. Usually dresses casually: T-shirt, shorts and runners.
History:
Jenny was born in London and raised by foster parents after her parents died in a motorway accident when she was too young to remember them. She always had a vague feeling that there should be something more to life than the normal routines people lived by - indeed that there *was*, it was just a matter of when she was going to find it. In school, she got involved with a fringe crowd who were interested in goth music and technology, and found an interest in and aptitude for computer hacking.
She was persuaded to take part in a creative plan for using computer technology to improve one's finances. The good news was, it worked - lots of money in everyone's pocket, with no possibility of anyone getting hurt - it's not like American Express Corporation couldn't afford it. The bad news was, the police don't quite see eye to eye with the participants on this matter, and the people tracing the perpetrators were better and more determined than had been quite planned for. A vacation seemed to be in order, and Jenny always did want to see sunny California.
Monday, July 24th, 1995 10:58 p.m.
A cool breeze would have made the night perfect.
It wasn't that Jenny didnt like warm weather. Certainly it was rarely this good in England. But variety was nice, and it had been hot without a break for the short time she'd been in Santa Cruz. The coast road was quiet, the only sounds the hum of the engine and the faint wash of surf on the shore below. There was no moon in the sky, nothing visible except the road illuminated by the headlights in front of her and the dark expanse of the ocean to the left. It felt like the rest of the world had receded to infinity, leaving her and the car suspended in a bubble of time on an endlessly repeating loop of road. Which suited Jennys mood fine. It wasn't far back into town now, but she'd needed to go somewhere this evening where there was solitude, to get her thoughts in order.
She was on holiday, in a manner of speaking. A holiday which might turn out to be unusually long. The money-making scheme had been well planned and well executed - and it had worked. Technically it was theft, but she didn't put it in the same league as robbery; nobody had been hurt, and it wasn't as if the American Express Corporation couldn't afford it. The corporation didn't quite see it that way, predictably enough - what hadn't been predictable was that the investigator they'd put on the culprits trail would be so damn good. Even better than I am, Jenny
had had to admit to herself, if to nobody else.
It still seemed to her that there was no way she and her friends could be traced, that they'd been too thorough for that. The data links had been run through four different countries, and carefully erased afterwards. But if she was wrong having the police turn up at the door with a warrant for her arrest would be a very bad way to find out. Well, it would be nice to see sunny California. She'd come back when it was definitely safe. Whenever that turned out to be.
Meanwhile, she was having a good time, at least now with most of the settling-in taken care of. Remember to see about buying a car tomorrow. You really need one around here, and no point paying rental fees indefinitely. Something reasonably cheap second-hand will do.
She knew enough about engines to make sure a dealer wasn't trying to cheat her with a machine that'd breathe its last gasp halfway down the street. Preferably one with an open top like this one, though. There was something so pleasant about driving up the Pacific coast with the warm wind blowing through your hair. It reminded her of - Jenny frowned thoughtfully. What did it remind her of? She'd never done this before, but there was an elusive feeling that she had, something familiar yet unknown, like a half-remembered dream. Such memories can sometimes be recaptured, but rarely by forcing them.
She let her attention drift, keeping an eye on the road. But a nagging voice in the back of her mind kept telling her she'd forgotten something, and there came faintly that spine-tingling feeling of excitement that means something important is about to happen. Excitement, but oddly, no fear; she felt as if she could reassure herself that there was no real need to be afraid.
Jenny was starting to wonder why she should find it odd that there was no need for fear when the other car appeared around the next bend, in the wrong lane, travelling at more than seventy miles an hour.
She spun the wheel desperately to the left, trying to get out of the other vehicles path. It was almost enough. The front bumpers of both cars collided; only a glancing blow, but at a combined speed of well over a hundred miles an hour. Jennys car went into a wild spin, and was spinning still as it sailed over the edge of the cliff, where the Pacific Ocean washe'd upon the beach a hundred feet below.
In the space between one heartbeat and the next, time hung suspended. Land and sea and sky still revolved around the car, but the revolution did not happen - it simply was. The universe arched over her head in all its glory, and she saw the oxygen atoms in their giddy swirl around her, the paths traced by photons from distant galaxies that had emitted them before the Earth was born, the shape of space that governed motion. She understood that energy and distance were derived quantities, truly no more fundamental than market price. For an eternal moment she perceived, but could not comprehend, the true nature and purpose of the cosmos itself.
There was something she perceived she could do; something she had almost forgotten was important. Faster than thought, unhurried as though the heat-death of the universe were the only deadline, she reached into the infinite sea of possibilities and selected one. The one in which, instead of plummeting to her death over the ocean, she was sitting quietly at the edge of the road.
Then the infinite universe came crashing down on her head like a falling cathedral. The car impacted the surf unheard as Jenny bent over and threw up seemingly everything she'd eaten since her plane left Heathrow Airport.
Tuesday, July 25th, 1995 9:15 a.m.
Light.
Sunlight, to be more exact. Shining in through the bedroom window in the time-honored fashion.
Jenny blinked, yawned, stretched and sat up. It had been a long night. Fortunately, a passing truck driver had given her a lift back to town. Leaving it until next morning to notify the police had been a very tempting idea - but strictly speaking, one was supposed to report accidents like that immediately, and getting on the bad side of the Santa Cruz police probably wasn't such a great idea. Theyd been cool, but not unsympathetic. Not much hope of tracing the joyrider, of course. Registration number? Sorry, officer, I didn't have much leisure time for making notes. Comments about how lucky she was to be alive.
She smiled. No shit, Sherlock. Of course, where did luck end and destiny begin? She wasn't normally a great believer in destiny, fate or anything like that. Certainly not in higher beings. Yet there had been that feeling of deja vu.
One of the officers had chastized her for not wearing a seat belt. Yes, officer, I'll make sure to wear one in future. She had been last night, of course, but her story about having jumped clear at the last moment would seem more plausible with that detail amended. And she'd have had to take care of it anyway; someone might investigate the wreck, and if they found the drivers side seat belt still closed, there would have been some very, very awkward questions. Unfastening it from the top of the cliff hadn't been easy, but she'd managed it, and it had proved the event hadn't been a one-off fluke; whatever powers she had were at least partly under conscious control.
Powers. She hugged herself delightedly. Its true. Its really true. I'm psychic.
Time to start thinking about that. Shower. Clothes. Breakfast. Coffee. And thoughts.
As a child, Jenny had been called dreamy more than once by her foster-parents and teachers. But nobody had ever called her slow on the uptake. And once you started with the basic premise, there were things that followed from that with inexorable logic.
Logically, there must be other people in the world with psychic powers. She couldn't be the only one. So why wasn't their existence public knowledge? There were charlatans in plenty around, but anyone who could do what she did last night could prove the fact very easily. There shouldn't still be room for debate. Unless those with true powers chose not to reveal themselves. And that led to the question, why not?
Diversity was human nature. Inevitably at least some psychics would want to publicly demonstrate their abilities. Which meant something was stopping them.
And for that something to have done such a thorough job, it must be very powerful. Powerful, yet itself secret. Which meant a conspiracy. Following Occams Razor, she wasn't going to postulate nonhuman entities unless and until human action wasn't sufficient to explain the facts. So there was a conspiracy - secret government agencies perhaps, or a secret society - to suppress the use of psychic powers. Whether by converting their possessors, or brainwashing them, or imprisoning them - or a more final method - was as yet unknown. And that meant she herself was potentially in danger.
Jenny smiled wryly. Great. I come here to make sure the corporation security and the police dont get me, and now I find I could maybe end up having a global conspiracy after me. If I'm not careful.
Fortunately, she knew how to be careful. It didn't exactly take a genius to figure out that doing anything visible in public was a no-no. But strength is safety and knowledge is strength. She needed to find out more. There were always ways of finding out things without being traced, if you knew how. Even people who didn't use computers left some sort of a trail these days. Time to start searching.
Oh, yeah I suppose first Id better explain to the rental company what their car is doing in the Pacific Ocean.
Wednesday, July 26th, 1995 12:42 a.m.
The rental company had been surprisingly understanding. Well, the car was insured, after all. More comments about how lucky she was to be alive.
The search had been interesting. With a delicious sense of justified paranoia, she'd run her link to the news databases through sites in Australia, Germany, Chile and UCLA. Links to a few other places too. And a fresh look at some of her old files, and memories of things she'd been told, things spoken quietly in a private corner, or via encrypted communication from a few people she knew on the net only by their handles. Things filed away for future reference because they hadn't made sense at the time. And now she was certain the global conspiracy whose existence she'd deduced from first principles was a reality. Not of much more than that, not yet. It was a fact of life that a lot of the really important information was only informative when you knew how to read between the lines, and here she didn't know how. As yet.
Jenny frowned as she looked about. The walk on the beach had helped get her thoughts settled, and she was heading back to where the car she'd bought today was parked. Not quite by the same route she'd come down, but that shouldn't have been a problem. Unfortunately, the transition between neighborhoods that weren't great and ones that were very, very bad seemed to be a lot more abrupt here than it was in London, and the place she'd wandered into was clearly in the second category. Groups of teenagers with what were obviously gang color badges, hanging around on street corners, were eyeing her in a way that spelled Trouble in neon letters ten feet tall. She didn't fit in here, and this clearly wasn't a place it was safe to not fit in.
She calculated quickly. All very well to worry about the Tabula Rasa coming after her, but the world was still as full as ever of mundane problems. The shortest and most reliable way out of here was back to the beach. Time to take it. She looped round a block so as not to be obviously retreating (rule number one: don't let the sods think you're worried about them) and started back in that direction. Back up the street, half a dozen guys who had been eyeing her looked at one another, communicated something to each other with quiet words and gestures, piled into an old Lincoln that looked like it had been through the wars - literally - and drove off.
Jenny hadn't exactly spent her life on the streets, but she'd been in rough company enough times to know the difference between trouble on the horizon and trouble rapidly approaching. Crap. They're going to be back. Hopefully I'll be out of here before they are. A quick calculation persuaded her that visibly hurrying would probably have another lot down on her before she got near the beach. Steady walk it was.
Two blocks from relative safety, her time ran out. The Lincoln announced its presence with the crashing noise of the local music even before it emerged from around a corner ahead. Grinning faces leered out the window at her. They knew she knew what they were about, and didn't care.
Probably adds to the thrill for fuckers like that, she thought grimly, estimating positions, distances and speeds. Not a prayer. Well, the beach was out. Other options?
There was an obvious one, of course.
Yeah. Teleport out from under the noses of these sods. And everyone else in the vicinity. Right after you prove there's a global conspiracy to suppress psychics. Brilliant idea.
Right. But there were alternatives. A block or so back, there'd been an alley she was pretty sure led somewhere. And this lot probably would prefer not to start anything in plain view, if not of cops or concerned citizens, then of people who might be members of a rival gang. She turned and headed back down the street, letting her pace speed up slightly. Her body wanted to make it more than slightly. She grimaced. Fight or flight reflex. Flight it is. But not just yet
The Lincoln followed her, slowly, the street vibrating with the volume of the music.
There was the alley. Now. The quick walk turned into a flat-out sprint in a time that would have made a sports trainer purse his lips in approval. The sound of opening doors, eager shouts in Spanish and running feet behind indicated her pursuers were still after her. Still, she'd gained precious seconds. The Lincoln's engine revved, then receded, along with its music. Probably going to try and cut me off. Better get out of here before they get the chance.
A wall was ahead; the alley split to run left and right. A quick glance showed nothing visible down the left branch, and a chain-link fence to the right, with a dimly illuminated field beyond. Maybe they're planning to cut me off down the left branch. But I think I can make it over that fence. There's bound to be some sort of hiding place in that field. To think was to act. She ran down the right-hand fork.
Nearly at the fence, her feet slipped out from under her, and she piled into something hard and cold with a loud, painful crash. Trash cans. Shakily, she stumbled to her feet, a stray thought at the back of her mind noting that she'd picked up some bruises that were probably going to hurt a fair bit tomorrow. Or later tonight, once the adrenalin wore off. She stepped forward, towards the fence, feeling the slippery stuff beneath her feet
Shit! The word was both apropos and in technical terms more or less correct. This place had clearly been used as a toilet facility on more than one occasion in the past - and gleeful, rapidly approaching, shouts in Spanish, no doubt drawn by the crash, made it very clear that it was too late to try the climb. Even if she made it over in time, the blasted security light would show her clearly on the other side, with no time to look for cover. She looked around desperately, already drawing a breath to start reaching for the clarity from last night, and to hell with the Tabula Rasa, she wasn't going to end up being gang-raped in some bloody alley because of them
Cover.
An old dumpster, lying on its side. Not great, but any port in a storm. She scurried inside, burrowing into the garbage. The smell was particularly vile, but compared to the stuff she realized was pretty much all over her already, it could hardly get any worse.
Loud footsteps. Stopping. Jenny held very still, breathing shallowly. Voices. Her A-level Spanish served her once again.
"Man, I'm sure she went down this way."
"Pew, it stinks!"
Jenny grimaced silently. No shit, Sherlock.
"Hey, something's moving in the weeds. She must've hopped the fence. I'll go get her. You guys go around the other way. Jose, you and Rico stay here to cover me and keep an eye out in case she's hiding."
Right. Good. Go. There's probably a rat or something over there.
Quietly, she wished the rat a long and ultimately successful set of evasive actions. The fence clinked, clinked, then there was the faint sound of feet landing on the ground.
"Do you see anything?"
There was a brief silence. Then things really started to get hairy.
It began with the sharp crack of a gunshot. Two. Three. Then a hideous, high-pitched scream. Which was cut off suddenly, though somehow, not quite suddenly enough to avoid its end being suggestive in an unspokenly horrible way.
"HECTOR!"
That came from one of the lads on this side.
Jenny moved her head slightly, very slightly, not enough to make a sound, not with all this noise anyway, they're paying attention somewhere else, no way they can hear me, but enough to give one eye a line of sight at the fence. At the two young men leaping at it, just as she herself had planned to do a minute, two minutes, ago.
Dogs. Three, four, five of them, on the other side, popping out of the weeds. German shepherds? Maybe. But there was something about them Jenny didn't like. Something the climbers didn't like, either. They jumped down. One of them pulled something metallic out of his jacket, pointed into the air and pulled the trigger. Jenny winced involuntarily at the noise. The dogs didn't bat an eyelid.
Jenny found herself thinking, Run. Run, you fools. Run while you still can. The guy must have had more testosterone than brain cells. Instead of running, he took aim at a dog and fired, twice. It twitched and went down. The others leaped at the fence, making a fair percentage of its height in that leap. Then, instead of falling back down as dogs do, they began to climb, their paws gripping the chain links.
It would not have taken an Albert Einstein, Jenny reflected in that strange crazily calm way people sometimes do in times like this, to figure out Something Very Bad was going on here. She mentally apologized to makers of bad horror movies as the two Hispanic lads completely failed to so figure, instead firing their guns as fast as they could pull the trigger into the climbing things. Two of the dog-things dropped away, but the others kept coming, on appendages Jenny finally noticed were indeed not purely paws. When the "dead" dog-thing emerged from the weeds and leaped for the fence, though, the humans finally got the message and fled down the alleyway as fast as their legs would carry them.
The lead pair of creatures hopped over the top of the fence and dashed down the alley, and Jenny actually found herself feeling sorry for the men who were trying to rape her a few minutes before. But a short time later, a young man and woman walked back to the fence (with no blood on their mouths), walked up to it with the creatures that had dropped back down on the other side just looking at them calmly, and spoke, if you could call it speaking.
The "man" sounded like he had a serious obstruction in his throat. Or like something else, something not human. "Chased 'em off like rabbits. I tell you, I forgot how hunting in the city's so much fun. After this is over, I'm going to have to take it up again, seriously. How 'bout one of you bring him over and we can have a little snack before we go out tonight." A word popped up in Jennys mind, refusing to be suppressed any more. It was a word that began with the letter "W".
The things on the other side could almost have been laughing. Yelps that had a quality a dog throat was never evolved to produce. Most of them, at least. One of them wasn't making any sound. That was the one that turned, disappeared into the weeds, and reappeared dragging the dead body of Hector, his throat torn out and the look of terror still visible on his face under the splashes of blood.
The rest of the pack closed in. Jenny figured she could probably do without seeing what happened next, and accordingly closed her eyes. A hideous sequence of crunching, tearing, chewing and cracking noises proved that her figuring had been entirely correct.
One noise was out of place. A sniff.
A sniff.
Oh, shit.
I'm not here. I'm somewhere else. Forget about me. I wouldn't be worth noticing even if I was here. Jenny held her breathing shallow, not making a sound, even as she started to reach for the clarity again. If these things knew she was here, the future could worry about itself.
"What is it?" A female voice.
"Nothing. Probably just a rat. Can't smell anything with all this shit. People really are disgusting sometimes." The male voice again.
"Well, we've got something better to eat than rats now. We'd better get some before it's all gone."
"Yeah, you're right. Hey, one of you toss us the liver. You like liver, don't you?"
There was an abrupt pause in the conversation. Jenny opened her eyes again. A figure appeared on the other side of the fence, something that looked like a man. It took Jenny a moment to realize what was wrong about him - the weeds didn't seem to be affected by his passage. The things on the other side looked up, one of them with a pink (Shut up!) length of something that looked like (Shut up!!!)
Fortunately, before Jenny had time to dwell on exactly what the long pink thing looked like, the man-thing spoke. "Hey, we cornered one! There's a pack of Fires got him cornered at Fox Park."
The man-thing on the near side of the fence nodded. "Let's go then. Steve, toss me that carcass. We'll stow it here for now and we can come back later to finish it off."
Something was passed over the fence. There were bumping sounds, and the man walked nearer, dragging something large. Then he slid the something into the dumpster, and Jenny came very near to screaming (Shut up!!! You're not an actress in a B-movie!) as she saw what was left of what had once been a human being. The contents of her stomach started sending quitting notice to her brain. Her brain busily occupied itself with sending a reply to the effect that said stomach contents were very definitely staying where they were. All of this enabled her to distract herself until the silence became long enough to convince her the things (the "W" word still hung in the back of her mind, seeing no point in forcing the issue at the moment) were gone.
Awkwardly, she climbed out of the dumpster, stepping carefully around the obstruction. Being careful not to slip in the, well, the shit. Yeah, the shit. That was something easier to deal with. Be careful not to slip in the shit. Yeah.
Jenny started to take a deep breath, then thought better of it. She leaned against the dumpster, trying to get her act together. What to do now?
Getting home wouldn't exactly be easy, not without being observed, but she could probably manage it. Without people seeing her covered in shit and, well, the red stuff. Blood, that was it. From well, from some trouble. Shit and blood. Not usual things to be covered in, those. She could probably manage it, though. Manage it, that is. Not to be seen. Probably not a good idea to be seen like this.
Jenny stopped, then took a deep breath through her mouth, and to hell with what the air smelled like. Ignorance was deadly, that was the problem. What you didn't know could kill you. And the (Werewolves) creatures had said where they were going. (Werewolves. Why don't you admit it?) Angrily, she batted the thought away for later. Fox Park, that was the place. She was pretty sure she could spy on there. But better be someplace safe while doing it. Cant watch two places at the same time. And someplace safe means not here. By the time I'd get home, whatever it was would probably be over.
Jenny nodded to herself. No witnesses here, at least, not now. She reached for the clarity. Time to watch from her apartment.
Wednesday, July 26th, 1995 1:16 a.m.
Jenny called an image of her apartment to mind, visualized its location in space relative to where she was, and focused her mind the way she'd done the previous night. The image steadied, the spatial relationship became clear, and she reached out to alter it...
And discovered just how complex a thing she'd done in that moment of stress. It was like trying to juggle a hundred balls at once, like trying to multiply a pair of thousand-digit numbers in her head. The countless threads of reality comprising the relationship of the locations swirled around her in a chaotic dance, shimmering and changing almost faster than she could perceive. She caught a section of the pattern, and immediately it slipped from her grasp, leaving her staring at the chain link fence and feeling slightly dizzy.
She tried again, focusing on the problem with all her concentration, reaching out to the threads and forcing them to stay in place. It worked for a moment, and then for every thread she caught, two more slid out of her control. A couple of seconds later she was looking at the fence again, feeling significantly dizzier. Her head hurt. She grimaced. Crap. Must have been beginner's luck that time. I think I'll need practice.
Jenny sighed and shook her head. Never mind. I'm not getting anywhere right now. Let's go back to conventional methods for the moment. She paused. Maybe I could just get a couple of blocks from here and then take a look at Fox Park? No, I don't know where it is and the map's in the car. Blast it.
She set off at a brisk walk, aiming for what she hoped would be the right direction to take her back to an area she recognized. Hopefully that'd be faster than trying to retrace her steps at this stage. There were more people on the streets than there would be at that time of night in London, and she got a number of strange looks, but every cloud has a silver lining: her appearance obviously convinced anyone thinking of bothering her to change their minds.
Eventually she found herself only a couple of blocks from her apartment... and, providentially, passing a liquor store that was still open, and had a row of city maps on display near the door. Unfortunately, she was under no illusions about the shopkeeper's
probable willingness to serve her. She gritted her teeth. To hell with it. I've had enough of this shit for one night.
The Pakistani shopkeeper, not unpredictably, started waving his hands and shouting abuse the moment Jenny stepped in the door. She picked up a map from the display, threw a ten-dollar bill at him, replied coolly, "Keep the change," and walked out.
She smiled to herself. Got to keep up the English reputation for stiff upper lips. It made her feel quite a bit better.
Jenny sighed with relief as she closed the apartment door behind her. At least none of the neighbors saw me. Now let's see if there's still anything to see in Fox Park.
She unfolded the map and searched quickly. Right. There it is, that direction.
She reached for the clarity... and it eluded her as a child's reflection in a pool eludes a clutching hand.
Jenny muttered a curse. Screw that for a game of soldiers. This is - not - going to fail on me. She reached out again, exerting all her will to make reality do her bidding - and this time, it did. Her viewpoint skimmed through the walls of the building and across the sodium-lit streets with breathtaking, glorious speed, like a dream of flying.
The park didn't take long to find. The fighting was obviously over, but half a dozen people were sitting around in various states of injury, snarling and snapping at each other.
People in a manner of speaking, at least. She recognized the two from near the dumpster, reading a small piece of paper and having a muttered conversation - it sounded like some sort of argument. She started moving her viewpoint closer - perhaps she could listen in on the discussion, maybe read what was on the paper - but it ended at the same moment. The woman stuffed the paper into a sack and tied the sack around her neck.
Jenny started to wonder about the reason for this mode of transport as the woman took off running, and a possible explanation occurred to her at just about the moment the explanation was proven entirely correct. The woman's limbs began to stretch, adding inches to her height with every stride; her clothes somehow melted into her body as her skin sprouted fur and her body morphed into a hulking shape eight or nine feet tall. Jenny's expression might reasonably have been described as a gawk as the creature continued shifting, never breaking stride; with a smoothness worthy of Hollywood's best special effects studios, the creature hunched over, hands transforming into paws. A few seconds later, an ordinary looking wolf disappeared into the night, the sack still tied around its neck.
Jenny shifted her attention back to the main group in time to see another wolf arrive. She waited for the newcomer to make the transformation in reverse, but it merely ran up to one of the group - a creature Jenny didn't recognize; it had the appearance of a handsome woman - and growled something.
The female looked up. "They've found refuge - Klub Kulture. C'mon. Maybe it's time we finally taught those Magi what it's about."
Assent came in everything ranging from yaps to clear English: "Burn 'em out. We go!"
The female hopped on a motorbike, the rest of them piling into a Honda Civic and a Citroen. It was a vaguely incongruous sight. Whatever modes of transport Jenny might have imagined evil, man-eating werewolves using, the Honda Civic would not exactly have featured at the top of the list.
The female glanced up suddenly, looking around with a tense, watchful air. A male stuck his head out of a car window. "What is it? Hey, Glasswalker! What's up? Are we goin ta rumble or not?"
The female continued to look around for several seconds, then raised her forearm. "Somebody's watching us." She reached up with her other hand, almost as if to operate her digital watch - but it wasn't a watch. The forearm glittered dimly as the female punched buttons on it.
Werewolves with cyberware, Jenny mused briefly, were even more incongruous than werewolves driving Hondas.
"There's no one in the area. I don't know what it is, but I know we're being watched."
Well, you got that one right. But I don't think you can trace me.
Jenny waited, ready to drop the link the instant her assessment looked like proving incorrect.
"It's just your imagination. Hey, we know where the douche bags are hiding. Let's get 'em before the apes start waking up."
The female nodded and started up her bike.
Jenny let go of the mental link and grabbed the telephone directory.
The possible implications of the word Magi hadn't escaped her - but in truth her reaction was driven by instinct that dated back to the time when her ancestors first stood upright on the plains of Africa. The reaction of human beings facing an enemy that is not human.
She started flipping through pages. C... no, it sounds more like a K spelling. The guess proved correct. She picked up the phone and dialled.
There was only one ring when the phone picked up.
"FUCK YOU!" was screamed into Jenny's ear, and then there was a beep.
"Hello, could I speak to someone in charge, please? There's trouble heading your way."
The phone clicked and then a dial tone. She dialed again to make sure and got the same message.
She frowned in annoyance. "Idiots."
Jenney scanned the phone book. There was no fax number or any other way it seemed she could get a quick message to whoever might be there.
Quickly focusing her powers, she looked up the address and tried to scrye into what was happening at the club and in the general vicinity. She saw in her mind a blue building, rather nondescript, with a signboard above the central doorway reading "Closed for Renovation. FU Furbacks" When she tried to move in the building though, it was as though someone hit her face with a large club, driving her eyeballs back through her head to bounce off the back of her skull. The sensation soon spread through her head into a massive headache and her ears were ringing. When she spotted some stains on her blouse, she touched her nose to discover she had a nosebleed.
Then the phone rang.
"Hello."
A man's tinny voice spoke from the other end. "Hey doll, thanks for the warning. After this gig is over, Bitchy says you can come by the Klub for some free drinks. Any my name's Pony. I'm the bartender. You come see me."
Jennifer suggested that to Pony that when they pick up the phone in future, that they please check whether the caller is a friend or enemy before putting it down again.
"Hey! That is our friendly message. You don't want to hear our unfriendly message."
Touching her still bleeding nose, Jennifer wasn't certain that she already hadn't.
"Bye dollface." The phone clicked dead.
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