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Sylvia makes her way to school.  Crossing the last street on her way to campus she doesn't notice the sound of the approaching car, or notice the other kids as they suddenly rush in every direction.  She's worried about Donnie, and it's absorbed her in her own little world.

OOC: Sylvia needs to make a Reflex Save DC 14 and a Fate Roll (just a d20 roll).

Reflex Save (1d20+2=10) (http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/1471685/)

Fate Roll (1d20=20) (http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/1471686/)

Suddenly Sylvia is stopped cold.  Arms are around her chest and she's spun to the side.  Then there is the most horrendous sound she's ever heard.  A twisting of metal and shattering of glass with an intensity that it snuffs out all other sound and all she can hear is the thoughts around her.  Thoughts of panic and terror.  She can see a girl laying on the ground in front of her, where she fell trying to escape the speeding car.  Speeding car?  Sylvia isn't able to fully grapple that concept, for a fraction of a second, then it becomes perfectly clear as she sees metal begin to slowly wrap around her on both sides.  But, it's not her, it's the person who has his arms wrapped around her.  For a fraction of a second longer the metal continues it's slow movement, then stops.  Bits of metal and glass tumble past her and harmlessly bounce past the girl on the ground.  Her eyes have grown wide with fear, and amazement.  For a moment she is awash with a feeling of being totally safe from harm. 

When time goes back to normal, John shifts his body, pulling it from the wreckage of the car.  He sets Sylvia down gently and lets her go.  "Are you okay?"  he says, turning you to look into your eyes.  It's strange, his voice is calm, but his head is awash or worries and insecurities.  "Sylvia?  Talk to me."

It's a strange thing.  Her mouth opens.  Her throat moves drily through the effort to speak.  But the words do not come out.  They stick.  It's shock, she acknowledges, and on cue she starts shivering.  What just happened?  What are you doing here?  And with the speed of thought she seeks out the driver of the car.

The car has an impressive U shape in it's front end.  the airbag has deployed and the driver is stunned, but very much alive behind the wheel.  Seeing that Sylvia is not altogether there John puts his jacket around her in an attempt to warm her and then goes to check on the other girl.  "I got a call from the Oracle.  He said I needed to get here.  I didn't think I was gonna make it."  He begins to quietly ask the girl how she is, but Sylvia is more interested in the thoughts running through the driver's mind.  Must kill Sylvia Avery-Vaughn.  Over and over the imperative goes, like a mantra.

Shock helps her lose her inhibitions about boring further into the driver's brain.  Who planted this crude imperative?

Sylvia is able to find the tampering.  The day her Torrance met mentally, Torrance found a subject and gave him the drive, with instructions to let it build and build until he felt compelled to kill her.

Sylvia can see the emotions of those around her.  She can see John's pure concern for the girl on the street, the girl's brittle fear, and the prurient alertness of the onlookers.  And with curious detachment she can also see the rising red tinge of something she belatedly recognizes as her own anger.  No, not anger.  This is rage, not for herself but for every one of Torrance's victims, including the driver with the broken will in the broken car.

She fixes him.  That's her first step.  She reaches into his brain and eases away the tortured, artificial madness Torrance inflicted.

Cell phones in hand, calls were made to 911.  Sylvia's subconsciously listening to the thoughts around her now, like one might listen to conversations in a hallway.  Camera phones snap pictures of the twisted car, but she's slightly surprised to discover no one took a picture of it when John was planted in it, with his arms around Sylvia.  They're more drawn to the wreckage, and the image it represents to them.  Even the girl on the ground that John has moved to the curb is only dimly aware that John was the reason the car didn't hit her, and even that awareness is being washed away by the fading adrenaline surge of the moment.  People tend to believe what's easy and ignore things that don't fit their world view.  Smith had said that more than once, and Sylvia was starting to see it first hand.

Her work in the boys head done Sylvia is being summoned back to that world of solid matter by that warmth again, like an inferno in the chil of December.  Seeping into her and gently shaking her, and that sound.  Her name, someone saying her name.  "Sylvia!"  It's John, and that concern that pours out of him like a fire hose is directed to her.  "Hey, come back.  I need some acknowledgment you're ok."  Sylvia realizes the warmth is him.  He's warmer than other people, and he's looking her up and down, and she can sense that he's looking through her, at her bones and internal organs.  "Nothing's broken.  Are you in there?"

"I'm all right."  This time her lips and tongue obey her, even if the words sound a little shaky and windless.  "Thank you," she tells him.  Her face is a mask of calm, and she even pushes him a little.  She nudges him toward the reassurance he seems to want.  "I should go.  I'm already too late."

Sylvia's phone rings. It's Colin.

Sylvia brings the phone to her ear.  She doesn't have any ready greeting, so there's a long, staticky silence, punctuated by the sound of passing traffic and approaching sirens.

"Syl, please talk to me. I need to hear your voice. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," she says.  "John kept the car from hitting me.  He's fine, too," she adds, glancing at the natural-born hero who does his best to keep the civilian casualty calm.

"I think... we should get somewhere. Take a breath, talk a bit, have a chocolate. I'm sure at school they'll understand, considering what we just survived."

"I can't, Colin."  Sylvia sounds so adult, as if dealing with attempted murder is just part of her job.  "I have something to do.  I'll find you afterward, but this is important, and I've let it go too long."

Colin immediately starts worrying.

"Syl, you shouldn't do anything right now. We should stay together. Donnie will want to see you. The same thing just happened to him and Sammy too. Sylvia, please, listen to me. Don't face her alone. We're together in this. We'll deal with her together. Don't go alone."

"Torrance is harmless," Sylvia says.  "She's been deactivated."  The word has a brutal edge.  She hangs up and, in the middle of throngs of observers, disappears.

The phone rings again. And again. And again. Then it gives up.

[Cassie's been hooba sick over the past three days.  But now she's back!  New and improved with solid food!]

Ten minutes after the attack, Sylvia can see her plan glittering in front of her like the fragments of a broken windshield.  She'll go to Torrance.  She'll bore into her brain like drilling into an egg and plant a sliver of poison into its fetid yolk.  Then, if anything remains of Torrance in her coma-ridden state, sleep will offer no surcease.  Nightmare and madness will bloom through her head, and every day will become a screaming hell of impotent terror.

It feels like justice.

Still, when Donnie's message flashes on her phone, she glances down, and it gives her pause.  It's hard to suppress this swirling, rare anger that circles around her like a kind of mottled, crimson thundercloud.  She can feel it, like an independent entity urging her onward.  When she thinks about Torrance, lightning strikes her.  When she thinks about what she's going to do to Torrance, sweet, cool absolution rains down.  She could do this one thing, and then for the rest of her days she would never have to wrestle with inhibitory morality again.

Sylvia has no guide, no destiny.  She has only the black-eyed conviction that people are evil and wretched and that something has got to be done.

She stops on the sidewalk and presses the cold phone against her forehead, squeezes her eyes shut, and shuts the storm windows of her mind.  What do I do?  Do I let her get away with it?  Do I let them all get away with it?  What am I good for?  How do I protect the people around me?  Who's worth protecting?  How do I stop them from doing these evil things?  How do I stop myself?

She stands there for a while, oblivious to the world while it remains oblivious of her, and when she opens her eyes again, she feels something like calm.  She goes to the hospital to talk to Torrance Shipman.

The hospital is a busy place, and no one notices the lone teen age girl walking the hall.  It's becoming second nature for Sylvia to walk through places and not be seen.  Torrance is in a private room, an her chart says that she's under observation, but her tests haven't indicated anything is wrong.  The doctor's notes suggest she's over extended her self and possibly suffering from exhaustion.

The handful of daisies in Sylvia's hand, bought with the last of her Christmas money, smells like a funeral, and there's something sepulchral about the bandages that wrap Torrance's shaven skull.  Under those hospital sheets, with the make-up wiped from her face, she looks innocent--just another casualty of the unidentified and unexplained.  Sylvia almost feels sorry for her, but she knows what Torrance has done.

She stands at the siderail of the bed and looks down into that face with its bruised, baby-chicken eyes.  She listens.  Is Torrance there?

There is the running torrent of thoughts that run through everyone's mind when they're asleep.  It's a bubbling up of things from the subconscious that sounds like a television is on in the next room as Sylvia opens her mental senses.

Sylvia digs deeper.  Alas, poor Yorick.  I knew him, Horatio.

As she sinks into Torrance's head, she pulls her thoughts around her like a pall and begins to whisper, To-o-or-rance, probing for something more cohesive than the muddled, thrashing pieces of a broken sleep.

"You did this to me, didn't you?"  It's coherent, and loud.  It lacks the echoing quality of a mind backed up by telepathy however.  "You give them back."

You give them ba-ack, Sylvia sing-songs in mockery.  It's not her habit, but she wants to rile Torrance up and disrupt her composure if she has any.  Please.  As if I've got them in a shoebox at the back of my closet.  Why do you deserve them?

Oh, so that's the game?  Ok, now that I understand the rules.  Her eyes open and she's looking at Sylvia.  "You better make sure you play to win, because you've taken the only thing that gave me any joy.  So I'm going to do the same to you."  She reaches over and pushes the call button.

"I haven't taken anything from you," Sylvia says, and it's true.  "You're the one who's killed off all your friends and manipulated everyone around you.  And I think it's time you paid the price.  I'm going to the cops.  I'm telling them everything."

She slaps her daisy bouquet on the bed and leaves.