LogThe City Never Sleeps-Jason-15

Game log for the 2024/05/06 session of AW:The City Never Sleeps, as taken by Jason

Frost is working on a plan with Jones and Aurora to get Jones into the Spire, whence he can meet many other Joneses. Initially their goal is to get close to the Spire but not so close that they encounter the Jones patrols, then park in a garage. They end up at a service station with a garage and lift, and park in there. Frost looks for a pattern in the patrols, and notices that they are singular and don't generally interact. They tend to get close and then reverse course. She also notices that one of the buildings across the street, a large mixed office / apartment sort of place, has sheered to the left. Each floor is still level, but each one is a little left of the floor beneath it. She then helps Jones tie a few rags around his arms, and tells Aurora that if approached by a Jones without the rags, she should leave immediately and get out.

Jones asks how Frost plans to get in, and she produces a piece of chalk. She tries drawing a door. When she turns the knob, a Jones steps out. Our Jones tries to shove him back through the door. He gets shot for his pains, but does shove his doppleganger back through the door. The other Jones betrays no sign of recognition as our Jones slams the door in his face. Unusually, the door does not turn back into a brick wall once closed. Frost decides that they need to go through, and she and Jones stack up on it. As soon as Frost cracks the door, the Jones on each side opens fire on the other, with Frost pitching in. Since Frost had barely cracked the door, and our Jones had a better chance to prepare, and our Jones had an asssault rifle but the other Jones had a pistol, it's a very short firefight that ends with the other Jones down and gurgling. Our Jones searches the body, finds nothing of any great interest, and opens his brain to see how the greater Jones collective is responding to the loss of a member. He has a sense of vague awareness, connected yet unconnected.

Frost checks her new whereabouts. It's a short hallway that ends in a door. She thinks any gunfire will surely attract attention, and when they step through the door at the end of the hallway, they come out of the elevator machinery room. They go into the elevator and press one of the buttons for the fourteenth floor. Frost tells Jones to be ready for incoming, and when the doors open, he pies the corridor in both directions, checking for hostiles. Seeing none, he starts checking to see if he can find the token furnished room. Finding it, they enter, closing and locking the door behind them. Frost blocks the door with furniture just to be sure.

At street level, Aurora sees furtive movement on the street. A Jones with a shotgun and no rags is coming toward her. She jumps into her car, peels out, and exits in the direction other than she came, and gets away before the Jones has a shot. Another Jones steps into the street in front of her, forcing her to swerve. Every time she tries to cut back toward the Spire, another Jones turns up. Eventually she pulls up a bit away from the Spire to see if she can lie low and let the number of Joneses die down. After a bit, she opens her brain, to see what the connection between the Joneses is. She has a memory of being in an alley, half behind a dumpster, looking down. Occasionally she sees a Jones cross the mouth of the alley, near the street. Then another one crosses, but is farther away. The next one who crosses is even farther away. The alley is stretching. It starts to get dark. She looks in her rear view mirror and sees a black void. She creeps forward down the alley. The dumpster is getting farther away, faster than the car is creeping. She guns the engine.

In the apartment, Jones finds a mug shot of Twiggy, and they both raid the fridge. Frost looks at the pictures on the wall, and sees one of Knell, in the audience at a concert. She takes it down, takes the photo out of the frame, folds in, and tucks it into a pouch. Meanwhile, Jones, afflicted with a sense that he has been here before, opens his brain, wondering when he was last here. He rememembers opening the door with a key, clearing it with a handgun, and then leaving, locking the door behind him. The view out the window at that time was of nighttime, which Jones finds very weird. He wakes up and tells Frost that the Joneses have a key to the room. He tries to figure out where Elizabeth Winstead might be, and realizes she's through a door that wasn't there before. They step through, and they're in a hospital room, with beeping going on. They both recognize the beeping noise. They start discussing waking her up, and then a nurse walks in, does a double-take, and tells them they can't be in there. Frost immediately shoots her. That turns Frost toward the hallway door of the room, and sees a suit-clad Jones standing there. The room suddenly stretches, and they're back in the apartment, feeling very confused. In the background, the TV was on, with someone who looked just like Skip Skeevy reporting.

Skip Skeevy, meanwhile, is looking for evidence of The Change. He decides to go to Gus' Getaway and ask for an interview with Twiggy. Before giving the maestro'd his chance at self-promotion, he has some hard questions. Knell's there too. Skip wonders what he should be on the lookout for, but can't find the thing. He keeps getting distracted, trying to spot the thing he should be looking out for. Skip starts out asking Twiggy about the show, but Knell answers, while the boss goes to get something from the hallway. Twiggy doesn't come back.

Twiggy instead goes to visit MacWillard and tells him about the recording of the meeting in Shelley's. Mac stops to take a deep look at Twiggy and concludes, after a brief conversation, that while Twiggy is badly confused and perhaps a little addled by his hormones, he does really want to do something good for the world. They end up going to see Shelley, and when Twiggy doesn't get to the point fast enough, Mac jumps in and tells her that her office was bugged and somebody is selling the recordings. She asks if they know who had the placed bugged, and Twiggy reveals that it was Thomas. That's a shock to her. Because Thomas is popular, and she's newly in charge, she can't afford to turn against him. She tells Twiggy she'll owe him a favor if he can get that recording locked down.

Back at the Getaway, Skip gets a sneak preview of Knell's next tune, which he's still tinkering with, and that impromptu concert totally wrecks Suplex's recordings. After a while, Twiggy comes back, and leaves Suplex with Knell while he speaks privately with the owner. Once they're in private, Twiggy asks if they're on the record, and before answering, Skip asks if he has anything worth taking it off the record. As a pro, he always has a mic, and he wants Twiggy to comment on the recording from Starbucks.

In the Spire, Jones opines that they should wake Elizabeth Winstead up. Frost suspects it can't be done, or at least not on that side. Jones opens his brain again to see if Ms Winstead exists in this world. In the resulting vision, it's dark, a close place, and he's squatting huddled in a corner. There are clothes above him, and he has a binky in one hand and Mr Hoppy in the other. In the distance, there's the sound of thunder. Frost makes a new door and tries to make it lead to Aurora. The door works and they pop right out onto the street in front of her layup. Aurora sees another Jones comes around the corner, maybe a hundred yards out, peels out, and parks where her Jeep is between the two of them and incoming fire. Frost gets aboard without trouble, but Jones catches a round as he gets in. They get the heck out of there, with Jones delivering suppression fire.

Twiggy goes to Shelley to let her know that Skip has the story and is going to run it. She might be able to lean on him to pitch it a certain way, or she could have him killed. She tells him that if he handles Thomas, she'll handle Skip.

Shelley goes to visit MacWillard at the Steak-n-Shake and asks him to let the Mayor know that Skip Skeevy has the story. Mac warns her that the Mayor strikes him as the kind of guy who will say "don't bring me problems, bring my solutions," but he'll go, if she can have someone give him a lift. On his way out of town, with Cantwell driving him in an F-150, he passes Aurora, Frost, and Jones. They honk and pull Mac over, and he agrees to let them give him a ride downtown, so they can talk on the way. Frost and Jones think other-world-Jones might be there to kill the patient, in which case the world would end.

They arrive at Shaq Towers and head up the stairs. The tower security system shows Jones, Frost, and Mac coming up the stairs. 20 flights later, they ring the bell, and Mac convinces Suplex that if they don't talk to Mac, they're going to be not-talking with Jones and Frost. Suplex eventually lets Mac in alone, while Frost and Jones wait in the stairwell. Mac tries and fails to convince Skip that the story must never go out. Meanwhile, a floor lower, Jones goes into the machinery room under the studio and opens fire. Skip gets up to go into the studio, but Mac just jumps in front of him and stands in his way. Skip, frustrated, tells Mac that he can't keep the secret from the people. Mac disagrees.

In the electronics room, Jones looks around and realizes that the rooftop is still a potential broadcast point, and also a likely potential escape point. Frost shoots out a window to get herself some exterior access, then looks out and sees a cable dangling from something above, maybe part of a window-washer mechanism. It's not in reach, though, she'd have to leap for it. She gets a boost from Jones, leaps for the cable, spins around it to control her momentum, and then her weight unlocks something, and it begins lifting her to the roof. She appears on the roof and makes eye contact with Suplex, who suddenly can't look away.

Skip, disgusted with MacWillard's bald-faced refusal to give any ground or acknowledge any value in telling the truth to the public, turns around and leaves. He runs into Jones in the hallway, who tells him to sit down. He tries to refuse, but Jones is... unyielding.

Frost walks over to Suplex' equipment and takes it away, then tells him they should go downstairs and talk. Suplex yields and Frost brings him down to the waiting room. Mac suggests that they need to take Skip and Suplex back to Shelley for judgement. They get to the Jeep, and the constant bickering soon forces Aurora to slam on the brakes and tell everyone to shut the hell up so she can drive. Mac has a sudden flash of being in a car wreck, hanging upside down in a seatbelt, seeing feet run up, and hearing someone saying, "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, hang on Ms Winston, help is on the way." Then he snaps out of it. Frost asks Aurora to drop her off at the highway, and then she goes to the Getaway.

Shelley gave Twiggy 2-barter to deal with Thomas, and puts the word out that he needs to find Thomas. Apple reports that he saw Thomas visiting Marley, and Marley is now with the Lollipop Guild. Lollipop comes right over to see him, and asks whether he's done any thinking about their last conversation. He tells her about the recording. She doesn't see it as a problem, but he maintains that if the story goes out to everyone, there's going to be chaos and rioting. He wants to release the truth in a controlled way. He's not there to kill Thomas, just to ensure a more responsible disclosure. She's willing to come with him to talk to Thomas. The traitorous guard still has his heart set on getting rich off his recording, but Twiggy explains that Skip doesn't need the tape, and once Skip's story gets out, the tape is going to be worthless. Thomas, frustrated, eventually caves. He returns to the Starbucks just as Aurora and her passengers turn up.

After conferring, Shelley decides to let Skip investigate what's really going on, but he can't publish anything without running it past her. Mac, to his amazement, realizes that while the journalist wouldn't cross the street to piss up Mac's ass if his guts were on fire, he intends to do the job he was hired to do. For his part, the doctor has decided that Skip is beneath contempt. Skip then hands over Thomas' recording, and admits that Thomas is with Lollipop. Shelley doesn't love that but decides to let it slide.

Frost goes to the Getaway, which is totally insecure now. She goes to Knell's dressing room, and finds a couple waifish groupies feeding him nachos. Knell tells her to take a seat, but instead she pulls out the photo she took from the Patient's apartment. Knell signs it and gives it back, but she tells him it's from the other world, and maybe it will inspire him. She leaves. The groupies find her scary. Knell's just confused. It's like she doesn't like music!

Frost goes home and thinks about Gumball. Jones goes to Frost's place and gets there just after Gumball arrived. Frost looks and doesn't see any obvious connection with Elizabeth Winstead, but she also looks like it's possible she's a child Elizabeth Winstead. Frost introduces Jones, who Gumball calls "Mr Big." Frost asks if she's ever heard Thunder. Jones explains that they want to rescue someone from a small room where you can hear thunder. Gumball knows where that is. It's a house in the suburbs. Frost expresses a desire to go there, but Gumball looks at Jones and says that might not be a good idea, because he's scary. He offers to tone it down, and Frost says it's important. Gumball asks if they need to go now, and when Frost says they could go when it's safe, Gumball says it's never safe. Frost says it's that kind of world. Gumball clarifies that the house isn't in our world, it's in a place where it's night. Since Frost still wants to go, Gumball grabs her chalk and draws a door.