Ep 1: Dead Powers Rising 1 Preview
It was Saturday afternoon and Janna, to her greatest displeasure, was still at school.
She’d been on-campus without other students around before, of course, so the empty corridors weren’t a new sight for her. But when she would’ve normally been sabotaging classrooms or ‘improving’ the mascot statue out front, she was instead under the watchful eye of the school janitor as they scrubbed down the halls, scoured bathrooms, cleaned desks, and generally did dozens of other things that Janna would’ve normally rather caused than repaired.
She was still wearing her charm around her neck, as an ever-present reminder of why she was stuck doing labor to begin with. She’d tried using it on Skullnick, her sister, Marco, and even her best friend Jackie Lynn Thomas, to no avail. Whatever it had done had, apparently, been a one time thing.
Still, it never hurt to keep trying…
She’d been left to clean a girls’ bathroom, while her overseer cleaned the boys’. It was a blessing in disguise - thinking so intently about the necklace helped her avoid scarring herself by having to think about what she was actually doing.
The Janitor entered with his mop and bucket as Janna finished her own room (having learned quickly that it was better to do the job fast). She could hardly smell anything but bleach, which was completely for the better.
The janitor nodded in approval, but didn’t smile. He never smiled. “Next,” he only said.
Janna sighed deeply. It was now or never! ...Again.
She held her necklace up and looked the older man dead in the eyes. “Actually, I want you to let me go early,” she ordered, and the Janitor didn’t so much as blink.
“I’m sure,” he said. “Come on, we’ve got the entire cafeteria to do next.”
“I need you to let me leave.” Janna raised her voice slightly. The effect was noticeable in the otherwise-quiet bathroom.
The Janitor sighed and dropped his bucket, then turned back around. “Listen kid.” He said. “You don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be watching you. But you’ve caused as many of my headaches as the rest of the school combined. Deal with it.”
Then he left, and Janna gathered her supplies before following. It was all she could do to keep her teeth from grinding in frustration as she did.
The worst part of the experiment, she’d decided, was that she couldn’t be totally sure that the charm had actually worked to begin with. Marco had definitely acted like something happened, which was why he’d chased her so determinedly - but she hadn’t felt the effects herself… and as time went on and her failures mounted, the sparkle in her memory had started to seem less and less obvious.
So if it was magic, it wasn’t working. But did real magic just run out? The necklace had sat in a dusty crypt for hundreds of years - would its batteries go dead like that? Maybe it wasn’t really magic… but if it wasn’t, why had Marco acted the way he had?
Only worsening this problem was that Marco himself was doing everything he could to avoid talking about ‘that.’ Any time Janna brought it up to him (which was basically every opportunity she could), he either changed the subject or else quickly walked away.
This was, in itself, not a new phenomenon - topics garnering similar reactions included Marco’s overly obvious crush on her best friend, and a few of the more embarrassing favors he’d asked of Janna over the years. Topping the list was, of course, the myriad of pressure points surrounding his ‘safe-kid’ reputation, the most famously well-known being when he’d decided a bicycle helmet had been an appropriate just-in-case for an after-P.E. shower.
Still, having it applied to information she so desperately needed to confirm was maddening.
At this impasse, she joined the janitor in the cafeteria as they began stacking tables, picking up stray trash, and mopping floors. She reached for her phone to check the time, and found it flashing a low-battery icon. Setting her jaw, she decided that the necklace must be going through something similar - it had a dead magic battery… somehow. A charging session was in order.
If I can’t charge it tomorrow, she decided, I’ll give it up. I mean, if it actually was magic, there’d be other magic stuff out there, right?
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