Hotline: Scour

<The Hiss/Spread is Infection/Stain>

<You can Cleanse/Scour>

Jesse didn’t think she would ever get used to these sudden jaunts to the Astral Plane or to the Board’s strange, resounding double-talk between her ears. This time, though, something was different. Jesse felt the floor she stood on, hard and smooth like marble or polished granite, under her feet. She looked down, saw that she was bare from head to toe, and reflexively covered herself. She moved to one of the walls, black and veined with gold, and looked around. She seemed to be at the base of a sort of staggered tower, and out in the distance was the inverted black pyramid of the Board. The Board was featureless and unchanging, but it always made Jesse feel watched, and right now the effect was more pronounced than usual.

<The Enemy/Teacher is Above/Ahead>

<You must Climb/Escalate to Demonstrate/Obliterate it>

Sure enough, a figure leaned over the edge of the tower’s roof, a golden mannequin-figure holding a jagged rectangular prism like a bullpup rifle. Jesse dodged around a corner. She knew that her clothes weren’t what protected her, but she still felt much more **** than usual. After a few minutes of cat-and-mouse, it became clear that Jesse needed to climb higher: she moved too fast for the astral construct to hit her, but she didn’t have an angle to strike back.

It was more of a chore than anything else, hopping between cube-cut chunks of astral rock to ascend the tower, made stranger by feeling the skin of her thigh or her stomach against the stone as she pulled herself over ledges. At the top of the tower, the golden mannequin-figure hid between jagged pillars. Jesse bolted towards it and, close enough to touch, extended a hand.

Jesse had used her powers up close before, but not like this. She could pack kinetic **** into a tight ball and explode it outward, blowing away whatever was in front of her. This new power was almost the opposite; it felt like pulverized glass, like a billion microscopic knives flooding out of her to abraide, to destroy and scrub away. It felt less like she was exerting a **** and more like she was trying to keep something on a leash. The effect on the astral construct was at first barely noticeable, some of the shimmering stone of its chest chipping and flaking away, but it expanded exponentially and in less than two seconds the figure was completely pulverized, not even dust remaining.

<Well Done/Played, Director>

Jesse was back in the Foundation. The bar of soap was somewhere else now, but still bound to her. The cloud of sand and dust raised by Jesse’s landing was only starting to settle, the figures of the Rangers a blur some distance away. The swirling sand tickled at her skin. She was still naked. Jesse bolted away, into the tunnels.

Jesse didn’t spend much time naked, all in all. It was limited to showers, mostly. Sometimes beds. She’d bathed in a lake once or twice, living out of her car on the outskirts of a state park. After Ordinary, she’d spent most of her life avoiding vulnerability wherever possible, making sure she was able to move at a moment’s notice. Even unobserved in the winding passageways of the Foundation, Jesse felt off-center and exposed. Strangely, she felt the least conscious of her own nudity when the Hiss attacked, when adrenaline and the muscle memory of combat overrode everything else. She always noticed again afterwards, though. The sand between her toes. A bead of sweat rolling down the small of her back and cooling in the open air. She needed a new set of clothes.

She remembered a set of office clothes arranged neatly on hangars in the Director’s Office, tucked away unobtrusively near its large double doors. They’d been Trench’s, presumably. Would they fit Jesse now? Was that how the Oldest House worked?

Jesse made up her mind: even ill-fitting clothes were better than nothing. The next time she found and took over a Control Point, she would teleport herself to the Executive Sector, use the passage from the Hotline Chamber to get into her office, and find something to wear. Almost all the surviving Bureau agents were keeping to the Central Executive offices, so this route would prevent her from being seen.

While Jesse had been aware of her nudity in the Foundation, the neat hallways and office blocks of the Executive Sector brought with them the sense of being naked somewhere she shouldn’t. There were no other agents to be found in these corridors, but Jesse found herself startling at her reflection in conference-room windows and glancing nervously into the unblinking eye of an overhead security camera. Surely there wasn’t anyone watching the feeds right now, but Jesse wouldn’t be surprised if there was some protocol in place to review the footage once the Hiss had been fully subdued, to reconstruct and learn from the incident. That would have to be a problem for another day.

Jesse made her way down the concrete passage from the Hotline Chamber to the Director’s Office, trailing a hand along the wall. When Jesse entered the office, she saw two things. The first was that the hangers she was looking for were gone from the rack near the door. The second was that standing next to the desk, efficiently packing a garment bag, was Emily Pope.