Owner	Pose
Stephen Strange	New York has been restless for a while now. Ever since Brainiac literally stole Bushwick, there's been something ... off about the whole city. At first it seemed just like the local mood was low, but in the last few days it has become more palpable. As though an undercurrent of corruption runs through the whole thing. Drunken brawls have turned bloodier and more violent. The murder rate has increased. There's been several hit and runs. It's, well, bad. The most noticeable thing now is the strange energy in the air. As though it comes from somewhere else, reaching out with invisible threads into the great beyond. They crisscross the city, stretching every which way, but the most prominent one - the most powerful, it seems - wends through Morningside Heights, southward along the western side of the Manhattan Island.
Sara Pezzini	Not everyone is sensitive to the strangeness that heats the air in through the city. Most New Yorkers, especially those living on the edge of the missing borough walk around in a state of shock. Those sensible to the undercurrent of violence that laces the city manifest it in different ways: loss of sleep, a haunting feeling of loss, and a vague sense of imminent danger. Crime statistics have NYPD on alert across all the precincts in the city. The mayor's office is setting fire to the police commissioner who, in turn, rails at the precinct captains who, in their turn, have detectives of every ilk out on the streets trying to get ahead of the criminals. Everyone in homicide has dark circles under their eyes and are overeating sweets trying to compensate for working too hard on too little sleep. It's a double whammy for Sara. The Witchblade is restless. She finds herself rubbing the wrist where the silver bars of a bracelet set with a large blood-red stone embrace it. On loan to the Manhattan 26th, she has been sent out because of her reputation for dealing with the weird. Needing to get out of the office where she is cohabiting a loaner desk, she is out on the street walking Morningside, the Witchblade urging her on to some unknown destination.
Stephen Strange	The streets themselves seem inhabited, as though something long gone has returned to find someone strange and new living in the house they abandoned. Here and there, out of the corner of one's eyes, are strange sights. A man dressed in the sort of polyester leisure suit that hasn't been in vogue since the Seventies, stepping off the street and into a fluorescent-lit doorway - he's gone upon second look. An old yellow cab from the grimy, seedy days of Old Manhattan rolls past with Scott McKenzie's 'San Francisco' warbling out through the open window. It is as though something old has risen to the surface, with a thin veneer of the new and modern laid across it. The phone booths have been gone for years, extinct with the advent of the cellular phone. It's strange, then, that on one grimy-lit corner there stands one that is heavily graffitied. The door is slightly ajar, and the putrid scent of garbage and bodily fluids emanates from within. The phone directory has been torn and shredded, dangling heavily from a chain a few inches over the concrete floor. Inside, the phone rings.
Sara Pezzini	Nobody but the canniest criminal would mark Sara for a cop even then she can pass unnoticed in plain clothes. She is too young, dresses like an up and comer in a mid-sized law firm, too pretty though she wears little makeup, and her clothes are understated business attire - black on black today with flat shoes that she can run in if necessary. Learning to let the Witchblade lead her continues to be a struggle. Trusting it enough to clear her mind and walk in a meditative sense of awareness does not come easily. Today, its voice is imperative dragging her past glimpses of strangeness that she notes with a detective's accuracy, but she doesn't process consciously. Almost she walks by the phone booth; the phone startles her a pace sideways, nearly tangling her with a bouffant coiffed woman walking a poodle on a rhinestone lead. She glances left then right, searching for someone who might be waiting for the call. Seeing no one, nose wrinkled at the odor; she edges toward the phone booth, something she hasn't seen except in movies, and lifts the heavy receiver with two fingers and brings it to her ear.
Stephen Strange	"I've been really tryin', baby ... breakin' up is hard to do ... okay, go go go." The voice on the other end of the phone is no single voice but three. Three, distinct voices in song that seem to blend into one another. Music from different eras, but strangely repurposed as though to create some sort of piecemeal whole. "Sara, you're the poet in my heart ... " croons Stevie Nicks through the headset, accompanied by strumming guitars in the background. "Help! I need ... " the Beatles, cut off once again for Stevie Nicks to repeat, "Sara ... " Outside, a group of three men in Civil War union blues march down the street as though they belong there, rifles shouldered, before turning into a darkened alleyway and vanishing.
Sara Pezzini	The hairs on the back of Sara's neck stand up as her eyes widen. She looks at the receiver like it's a mobile phone and has an image that will explain the prank. The Witchblade pulses, it stings ready to unfold at the slightest provocation. Unwilling to touch the phone to her ear, Sara holds it at a distance, hyper-alert, looking up and down the street for the kids that must be laughing their asses off at her bewilderment. The bracelet, known sometimes as 'The Balance', knows better. The Civil War uniforms don't register at first glance. The second has her hanging out the booth, loathe to drop the phone but wanting to follow arms carrying soldier on a city street where openly wearing guns is illegal. The guns win out and she sets out for the soldiers who vanish.
Stephen Strange	"Lights up on Washington Heights," the music on the other end of the phone calls as Sara lets the receiver drop, fading away. Should she turn back now, the phone booth at the corner is no longer there. Instead there is only a sign advertising the latest season of 'America's Top Superhero'. As Sara winds the corner the soldiers stepped around, there is nothing there. Just a long stretch of dark alleyway, strewn with trash and dumpsters. On the road, an old Cadillac Sixty Special in robin's egg blue rolls past, the lights momentarily lighting up the darkened alleyway. Every surface of it, viewed in the brief moment of light from the car, has writing scrawled across it. The grounds. The dumpsters, The fire escape. The individual bricks in the walls. All of them say the same thing in different handwriting and everything from paint to charcoal to blood: 'Lights up on Washington Heights.' Looking again once the light has passed, the writing is no longer there.
Sara Pezzini	The voice on the phone, Sara turns back to look for it and winces when she sees that it is gone, whispered words that float back to the surface of her conscious when she sees the words emblazoned on the old car. Heart racing she holds her forehead, massaging it to keep the panic down, trying to put the string of temporal non sequiturs into some coherent whole. The bracelet begins to unfold into a gauntlet. She looks with alarm up and down the alley, the light like a theatre spot is no longer lit and the message is gone. "Washington Heights," she whispers aloud, and backs out of the alley to head in the direction that she clearly has been sent to investigate.