04-Janace meets Levi

Janace let the horse lope along. She had been letting it set its own pace for the few days since leaving the town near where Carl and Yori lived. That municipality was devoid of most large non-industrial vehicles and support infrastructure by its own choice, as were many others around the country, and world. So the horse was the best way in and out, unless you wanted to constrain yourself to mass transit.

Janace rode along the horse trail into the equestrian thru fare and into a stabling and corral area. Janace sensed the animals here outnumbered the people, by an order of magnitude, give or take a few. She had acquired this horse in another city, rode it to the town outside of which Yori and Carl lived, and then here to Sangelo.

Technically she was still some distance from the city proper, but Sangelo was a ‘Hub City,’ having the equestrian and other stabling areas and road access, as well as the more technological means of travel of ground and air craft. Were it on the coast it would probably have a port as well, but as it was well inland on a non-navigable river, it was only a landed hub. The non-technical muni- was south and east of Sangelo, with the technical highways and railways following the river to the northwest, and on separate commerce arteries southwest and east.

Janace traded Boulder and his tack in for a deposit and then got on the mass-transit train for the Transport Hub, and its district, where she was to meet Jochquin in three days.

Since the fight in the park, Janace had kept her senses on a higher level of awareness. By this she counted and kept a passing tab on all around her. As such she counted three dozen people get on the elevated train with her leaving the Equestrian Center. Just over half of them were locals who had lunch on their minds. The majority of the rest were travelers like herself with a few bags in tow, and showers in the immediate future. Two separate individuals were interested in Janace, despite their attempts to appear otherwise.

As the company had used indirect means of following people in the past, double- and triple-deep bribed non-combatants, Janace figured that was still in effect. It followed the rules of surveillance: Never be seen, or be the only thing seen. In this case without a more in-depth scan that would attract attention, the use of dupes fell into ‘always be seen,’ while ‘never being seen.’ It did confirm to Janace that she was being kept track of. Which was more important to her than exactly who was doing so.

By the Hub, one of the people following her had departed to her own business. Others had boarded. Janace disembarked at the Hub, and looked for the hotel that Jochquin had recommended. It was not a specific building, as a franchise that was at hubs like this around the world. Shortly she found it and found that Jochquin had already arranged both of their stays and rooms. The people following Janace had traded off, so she was certain that dupes were in order. As such, she was less likely to be a target in the busyness of the main areas of the Hub.

Her room was little more than a cell in a honeycomb. The bed chamber was big enough for the bunk, and little more. Below was a storage chamber for whatever personal effects she had along. Larger storage areas were available for greater sized or quantity of goods. The bath house had common bath area, private locker booths, private and public showers, and all the complimentary towels you could need. Laundry facilities and a gymnasium were attached. A common room allowed for other rest and recreation. Food was not provided, nor discouraged, as there were eating places all though out the hub.

As she settled in and got herself cleaned up and her washables laundered, Janace counted a company of mercenaries, twice that number of businessmen, a handful of iterant salesmen, and the equivalent of a platoon of youth and older people backpacking through the area, all staying in the same hotel. That was just in her area. In the adjoining area were roughnecks of assorted employ. Beyond was a larger area where couples were able to get shared bunks.

One common attitude of all here, particularly the mercenaries, was no one gave more than cursory notice to odd shaped baggage, and all cases were kept closed save for designated areas. There was even a crew who had well used and cared for saddles.

Janace put most of her clothes and other goods in to the laundry and went to the gym to work out some soreness and see about getting in a practice fight. She was rewarded in this by going a few rounds with some of the female merc’s. She and several others watched a display of a few people training with live-steel swords. Afterwards she relaxed in one of the spa pools, before finally going to dinner.

As much as the spa and gym relaxed Janace, she preferred to be out of doors, or where drinks were served. When she was younger, Janace liked to go to taverns and stir up trouble. She dressed as a wench, and got a little bit juiced up, enough to get attention, and get away with being as offensive as she felt. But she never actually finished her first drink. As she matured, this behavior diminished.

By preference, Janace dresses perfectly modest, if enough like a tavern wench to occasionally be mistaken for one. In certain circumstances, she is still an unmitigated flirt, and elsewhere the body hugging clothes don’t get in the way when casting. As a sorceress, Janace throw magic and energy around as casually as she flirts. As a psi-witch she is as brutal in combat as the fiercest of warriors

Her fiery red hair takes on more of the hues of a fire as she uses her powers, with gradations in the color all around. She just lets it fly in all directions in response to her using energy. She also trims it regularly. The color changes stay, while working their way along the length.

Janace grew up the seventh daughter, and eleventh child in a tavern/inn, in a large low-tech city. As such she learned how to handle herself in one, and handle her liquor. As a young girl, her power began to blossom at the same time as her body. Her first psionic tantrum was her last night in the bar.

Her mother wanted to send her to a convent. Her father to a wizard college. Janace did neither. She went off with her mother’s brother, he being a wizard. He got her in a girl’s school for Talents. They saw to her formal training. They also ruined her toward normal boring men, by the few men there being so boring themselves.

Janace does not want to be boring.

Approaching mid-life, Janace has never had a lover. She just has not encountered the right man to settle down with, or for. Before leaving the school, she met and dated Jochquin. Because of her skills, he later recruited her for the team where she met Carl, Yori, Brian, and two others.

Now, Janace went out into the Hub complex. She had noted several people paying a bit more than normal notice to her in the gym and pool area. She put on a skirt and blouse, taking care to put on some tights/trunks under the skirt. She carried a small scrip on her belt but otherwise carried nothing. She first stopped in a tavern and got a small drink and a salad. As she ate she marked three more points of attention. She still got the same vibe, of being paid interest, rather than the thugs themselves. Janace figured it was time to see what traps they had, and what she needed to do to spring it. Fortunately she had been practicing and reviewing her spells and psionics as the horse had brought her along.

Scanning around as she left the tavern, she found the least occupied park in the Hub and went to it. This park was on top of part of the train terminal and near the executive wing of the air terminal. There were some shade trees and benches, and it was discretely far enough away from anything to have very many bystanders, the security of the place was thin here, and there were very few visible people here just now. Janace found a bench in the open halfway between two rows of trees. As she looked it over, she figured this would be a good place for an ambush, and sat down. She smirked as she realized she had forgotten to draw a target to hang on her back.

Janace did not wait long. She sensed the full crew before they were all in place, or so she thought.

One shot at her with a dart, from behind the tree to her left. She let it hit her shields at her neck, and held it against them as she slumped slightly. Before too long a medic cart showed up, with two official looking medics.

Janace listened to them as they approached. They sounded professional, but not for the medic uniforms they wore. Mostly they sounded board. She would fix that, momentarily. The cart approached from her right, and stopped just past the bench on her left. The men got off the cart and moved to approach her, rather than retrieve any medical gear. Janace’s turn.

Both medics were hit by the psionic equivalent of a large man at full speed. They both went horizontal and landed on their backs, gasping for air.

Janace stood up and stepped over to the closer man, a bit older than her, and straddling him, she grabbed his shirt and pulled him up a bit. “Who sent you, and what do they want with me?”

Before the man could even get the air to begin to answer, the dart-sniper tried again. Janace was functioning on a different level; she caught the dart with her left hand and threw it back with a magic assist, hitting that guy just beside his throat, the soporific in the dart putting him out of the fight.

The two medics had enough time now to get their air. The one to Janace’s right got up and drew combat syringe, essentially a needle thin knife with a fluid container and plunger. The one she still had a hand on, tried to break her hold and get free, dragging Janace forward a step. The one to her right tried to stab her with the syringe as she moved forward.

She let go of the one below her and backhanded the one behind to her right, adding a bit of psionic energy to the hit and sent him three times his height away, to tumble over himself on the pavement and grass, the syringe to fly further away and stick itself in the turf. The one below scooted out from under her as Janace turned back to him and switched to a magic spell and smashed him into the pavement, knocking him senseless as he tried to deploy his combat syringe.

Janace’s senses lit up as the rest of the team mobilized around to close in and try to take her down. This perimeter team was all plain clothes, and closing at a run. As she sized them up Janace realized that one of who she had tagged as part of the team was not, and was attacking the team members, as they worked their way in to her.

Janace turned away from that interloper and faced the ones coming from the other direction, working in a clockwise direction. First she drew on some of her more creative magic. One woman who was in her jogging clothes, armed with a tazer, was suddenly wearing her birthday suit and tripping over her clothes all bunched around her ankles. A business man who had produced a sub-machine gun caught the first dart that had been fired at Janace in his chest, at the same time he found he was holding a large angry rodent with sharp teeth and needle claws. The next man found himself suddenly running through the air right into the branches of a tree. The forth one was close enough to Janace to get a psionic enhanced punch in the gut and tumbled across the pavement and turn back to where he had started, his weapon sailing across the park as he went.

Janace crescent-kicked the next one who approached, a woman about her size, and that woman’s momentum carried her into the side of the medical cart, where she piled up like a dropped rag doll. The last one approached as Janace turned to face him. She waved her hands as doing a spell, and he put his hands up in defense and started to skid. Instead of magic, she simply kneed him in the gut as he got to her, and threw him on the ground.

Janace looked around. The Interloper approached, breath huffing, having dispensed with three attackers on his way across the park. The men and women on the ground were in various states of consciousness and injury.

Janace stepped into the front of the medical cart, and picked up a radio mic, turned the unit on, and pressed its transmit button.

“Dispatch and security please.” Janace was not worried about the protocals.

A voice answered. “Go ahead.”

“One of your carts is up on the park above the train station. Looks like a group of hired thugs stole it and have had a bit of a fight. There appear to be multiple men and women with contusions, abrasions, lacerations, and assorted other blunt force trauma injuries. You will want to get someone up here quick to detain and treat them.” Janace finished and put the mic down.

“Top of the Train Station. Thank you.”

Janace turned as the radio paged and the same voice came on and called all available hands to her location. The man she had last laid hands on tried to get up. Janace pointed at his ankle and psionically pulled it hard and sent him crashing down on his chin, where he groaned and stopped moving.

Janace then turned to her earstwhile ally. He was appeared to her to be in his twenties, good shape, athletic without being overly bulky, and rubbing his hands and wrists to keep them from bruising. He was average height with dark hair and plain features.

“Thanks for the help. You look thirsty. Let me get you a drink.” Janace took the young man’s arm and walked away with this newcomer. Her senses stayed at a combat level.

Janace reached out to the jogger-woman, who had just begun to pick herself up. Her tazer was at the wrong angle, and went off into her thigh. Thirteen people in various states of awake and injury were left on the grass around the bench and two trees as Janace walked away, curious to learn about her potential ally.

Janace and Levi sat at a tall table in the bar section of a restaurant. Dinner Rush was starting, with the tables slowly filling with business class patrons. Janace’s senses were still at an alert level, and all the people here glowed. She could follow every order from its inception in the mind of the patron through the kitchen, and back to the table. Janace sipped at a frosty mug of the local beer, as she ate her meat, potatoes, and vegetables, while letting Levi do most of the talking. His own plate of diced meat and vegetables was getting steadily consumed even as he talked.

This Levi, he was a little younger that Janace had been when she had joined the party all those years ago. That put him a bit more than half her age now. His aura showed him sincere, his emotions were generally amused, but he felt on-edge; Janace felt he was similar to Jochquin, or how Yori had been when they adventured.

He had started by telling Janace that the old adversary of the group had been his grandfather. The intermediate generation, Levi’s father, was the oldest son who with some other of his siblings, had come to disapprove of their father, and had left before starting families of their own. When he had learned of his father’s death he had thrown a party, then started teaching Levi to replace his Aunt, the youngest daughter of the dead grandfather.

The will passed most of the estate and control of the company to the youngest daughter, or son, whichever proved more capable when they come of age, and it was held in trust until then. This had happened a few years ago. She first rebuilt the groundwork for creating Monsters and Beasts. But she was going in other directions with the medical and materials sub-companies, taking them in new magical and scientific directions.

She had consolidated her corporate power from the trust, other holders, and from her siblings that had held parts of the overall structure. The youngest brother, who could do magic, had disappeared. All the other older siblings were bought out, fired, or summarily ushered out of power.

Levi had been quietly poking around the edges, gathering publically available information from whatever obscure and trade-publications he could. His aunt was up to something. At a company level she was doing some strange things. It was not unprofitable, but definitely strange. Some R&D Facilities had been constructed in out of the way places. Some products had been shuffled around. She had good business savy, and the public face of the company was as bright and shiny as it could be. But it also had been getting involved in some less than savory activities. Like the goon squad that had come after Janace.

Janace turned the conversation to what and who Levi was himself.

He obliged in telling her about his capacities and training in various forms of combat. He had not served time in anybodies military, but his father had quietly sent him to training with as many schools and trainers in the theory and application of battle and espionage as he could. Coupled to this was as much business training as he could, primarily in information processing.

Over dessert Levi turned the conversation back to the company, and more of what he had learned from it. His Aunt was in charge, and had taken her father’s office, so Janace knew where that was. She had been hiring magic-users and talents for the medical and materials divisions, as well as sprinkling a few through the other divisions. He had found three new R&D facilities, under these divisions, all in proximity to her corporate headquarters. But these were not open to the public, so he had not been able to get in. As well, his father had explicitly told him not to ever reveal himself to his Aunt.

Janace had one last set of questions, but Levi did not yet know what his aunt wants with Janace specifically.