Background Aspect: Walk With The Animals, Talk With The Animals
Superseded by “Inhuman Means Subhuman”
Jenny has known she was going to be a veterinarian since she was five and a half, and nothing was going to get in her way. Nothing could. Straight A’s through school and into college before landing a coveted slot at a top-tier veterinary school. Thing hit a snag during the third year of veterinary college, though.
Term papers would be lost as computers mysteriously fried themselves and sensitive diagnostic instruments would report inaccurate results whenever she used them. It was the influence of her slowly-awakening magical talent, but Jenny didn’t know that – and neither did the school. After a frustrating semester and a half she was kicked out, with the school citing the lack of completion of the required supervised examinations. The fact that none of this was Jenny’s fault, nor anything she could even hope to explain, just made it even more infuriating and confusing.
With her dreams shattered, Jenny went into a deep funk for a few months, finally snapping out of it when she landed a job as a night animal caretaker at the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans. It wasn’t her dream job, but at least she could still work with animals and try to figure out what had happened with her life. Computers and anything more detailed than a X-Ray were still a no-go, but she could work with that.
And no matter how badly injured the animals were, she could work real miracles. Jenny wasn’t even consciously aware of what was happening until one of the baby rhinoceroses tripped in their pen and fell on a fallen branch. By the time she got to the pen, alerted by the cries of the parents, the rhinoceros was nearly gone. It was hopeless, pointless to even attempt help with the parents so nearby and agitated and the baby so obviously on the verge of death, but Jenny tried it anyway.
And the rhinoceros held on, despite the impossible injuries. Long enough for Jenny to remove the branch and bring it to the veterinary area, get it a blood infusion and carefully stitch it back together. Jenny knew there was no way that she could have possibly done that – the baby stopped breathing for minutes at a time, and it should have been dead of oxygen deprivation if nothing else, but there she was: a little woozy, sure, but alive.
That was more than strange enough, but it was even weirder when she put her hand on the mama’s back after returning the baby. It wasn’t like hearing thoughts, and it wasn’t like getting what the animal was feeling, but it was some weird half-mixture of the two.
Jenny didn’t sleep much that night. Was any of that real? Had she finally lost it?
She took up a weekend job at one of the animal shelters in the area, just to try and see what’d happened. It hadn’t been a fluke – whatever she’d done could be repeated. Cats run over by cars, dogs brutally mangled and then left on the side of the road by the illegal dog-fighting rings… if it hadn’t been too long, if the body wasn’t cool, she could save them. This was better than being a vet – she could help so many more animals this way than she ever could have before!
Invoke to: Assist an animal in some way or demonstrate anatomical knowledge; understand an animal better (motivations, drives)
Compel to: Focus on a wounded animal to the exclusion of more pressing matters, like whatever hurt it in the first place
Invoke to: Purge the Xeno
Compel to: Go for the throat in any dealings with otherwise inhuman characters, even to your own detriment.
Rising Conflict: Healing The Sick, Healing The Dead
It all changed with Donald. A slightly goofy middle-aged guy working as the night watchman, he’d been sweet on Jenny in a harmless sort of way. They’d shared donuts and coffee to pass the time between rounds, got to talking about their families and lives. She’d carefully left out some of the new parts of her life, especially this weird power she seemed to have now, but talking to him always made her feel better about what had happened. He’d lost his wife and kids in a car accident a few years ago and could be pretty depressed, too, but having Jenny around seemed to cheer him up as well. So when Donald didn’t show up for work one day, Jenny drove by his place to find out what’d happened.
She found him out back, with a revolver in his hand and a hole in the back of neck. The note on the table said “I’m sorry”, but Jenny knew it was okay. She could fix this. She could fix him. That’s what her strange ability was for. But no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t. There was too much damage, far too much damage for her to repair.
And Donald wouldn’t stop screaming. Screaming in pain, in blind agony. For hours, as she tried to fix the damage. None of the animals she’d helped had ever been like this, and… he just wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t just the screaming, either; she could feel some echo of his pain, slamming into her again and again as she worked.
Jenny had to give up in the end, leaving his… life energy, or soul, or something else – Jenny wasn’t sure what – to flee his shattered body. Then she went home and cried for a week. If only she’d been more skilled at using her power – if only she could have kept him going a little while longer, been better with her scalpel, maybe she could have saved him. Could have kept him alive, brought him back from the dead.
If only she’d been smarter and stronger, she could have saved her friend.
Invoke to: Assist someone in serious danger, especially mortal danger
Compel to: Tempt Jenny to break the 5th law in order to help/‘help’ someone.
Big Trouble In Little Audubon: You Can’t Stop Me, I Know What’s Right
When animals begin mysteriously vanishing from securely locked enclosures in the zoo, bound for some dark and dangerous ritual, Jenny Hirsch sets out to locate the culprit. But will Jenny succeed after she’s framed for the disappearances by a corrupt NOPD officer and the White Court Vampire administrator running the zoo?
Animals were going missing from their enclosures in the zoo, and Jenny was worried. It’d been kept out of the papers so far but there was something more, something wrong about the way they had vanished. They were there one moment and then the security cameras would go haywire for a few minutes, after which there’d be a missing animal. Even stranger, the whole place felt like it’d had the life sucked out of it. The other zookeepers noticed it, too – both the people and the animals were walking around listlessly, without real purpose. Once chattering crowds were quiet and depressed, just working through the motions. Enough was enough. Jenny set up a little camp in the zoo, where she could keep an eye on the cages. It came as something of a shock to Jenny when she saw the zoo’s new administrator calmly walk to one of the cages and unlock it before grabbing a strangely docile adolescent wolf and walking out.
It shouldn’t have even been possible for her to do that, but it gets worse. This one cop has been focusing on her, and she’s pretty sure he’s about to try and arrest her. And when that happens… well, Jenny isn’t sure. But she’s not going to just let them do this, no matter what.
It’s not right, and they’re not going to get away with it.
Invoke to: Defy an authority figure or resist social attacks
Compel to: Ignore advice or instructions
Shadow Chaser: Ingenue’s Intercession
Ever since Ada duSang returned to her family state three years ago, she has been hard at work trying to find a better life for the forgotten children of the Midnight Shadows. When several of the kids go missing, it’s up to Ada to take a dive into the New Orleans underworld and find them. But things get complicated as a pack of murderous ghouls show their teeth, and people begin to get hurt, as the young blood magus finds herself racing against the clock to unravel the mystery behind the disappearance of the Shades. (Transient People)
The old mansion that Jenny drove past every day on her way to work, with the roof torn off during Katrina and abandoned since, had always been creepy. Lately it’d gotten even worse, and Jenny could tell that something was… wrong about it. Something that danced on her nerves enough to make her pull over and take a look. So when Jenny spotted what she thought were two muggers struggling with a girl, she was more than ready to charge right in. The muggers turned out to be ghoul kidnappers trying to bring an inquisitive outsider to their master, but with Jenny’s help Ada fought them off. The Midnight Shadows had been captured, along with a bunch of other homeless kids, to be hosts in some horrible demonic possession. Jenny’s not entirely sure what’s going on, but she’ll do all she can to help… but can even the combined forces of Ada and Jenny hope to defeat the evil warlock behind it all?
Invoke to: Insert yourself into a situation, esp. when you don’t know what’s really happening
Compel to: Reveal some critical piece of knowledge to the wrong person, especially out of ignorance of magic and its rules
Protector of the Small: Apprenticed to a Four Feet Tall Fourth Grader
About halfway through fourth grade, Hugues noticed one of his classmates suddenly disappeared without a trace. It was a young girl he barely knew at all, but there was something about her sudden disappearance he didn’t quite seem to understand. He called up several “small folk” that lived in the school, and they gave him a trail to follow. The girl had been kidnapped by a troll, along with a couple other girls throughout the city, gathering them up for a great feast with many of the other trolls in the area.
Jenny had been happy to come in to the school for career day and teach the little kids all about working at the zoo and with animals, but when one of the kids vanished Jenny knew something was just… wrong. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling, but she knew the direction to head in. That was strange, but what was even weirder was the other kid who just took off after her; she’d noticed him during the class, and he was definitely not like the other kids. Way too mature, for one thing. The part where he decapitated a troll in the park with some kind of sword was another clue.
Whatever the kids story, he was good with that weapon. Jenny wasn’t capable of doing much to the trolls directly other than keeping them off her and the other kidnapped children, but it was enough to keep them from being eaten while Hugues methodically worked through the creatures.
And now he wants to teach me stuff about my abilities. Which is great, really. He knows so much more about this world than I do I can scarcely believe it. But it’s still kind of embarrassing to be listening to someone not old enough to use the big boy bathroom.
Invoke to: Assist Hughes or learn something new about magic
Compel to: Protect Hughes, as “Aunt Jenny” or otherwise
