John Taylor's Powers (Hex and the City)

A psychenaut, an Outsider which completely wrecks the shit of everyone else in the Great Auction Hall, holds off on attacking John due to the nature of his being.

Jackie Schadenfreud had swollen up like a blowfish, blowing off all the silver buttons on his Nazi greatcoat. He giggled painfully, soaking up the emotions around him, force-fed on feelings beyond his appetite or capacity. Thick bloody tears ran down his pink cheeks as his eyes bulged in their sockets. His dog had already torn its own guts out. The Painted Ghoul ran up a swelling wall, scuttling like an oversized insect, trying to get away from emotions he usually inflicted only on others. Sweat was making his makeup run, and he wasn't smiling any more. Sandra Chance's magics were mostly useless, being concerned primarily with the dead, not elementals, but she was still fighting back. She stood proudly in a shimmering circle of protection, magnificently angry, forcing back the psychenaut intrusions by sheer force of will. She had an aboriginal pointing bone, and in whichever direction she trained it the animating forces were thrust out of the material world. But only for a while. They always came back.

The Lord of the Dance and the Dancing Queen, united again by the threat of a common enemy, beat out powerful harmonies on the heaving floor with their dancing feet. They danced their fury and their outrage out into the world, forcing back the invading presences. Their feet slammed down, hammering out marvellous rhythms, their every movement wonderfully graceful, their bodies radiating defiant humanity in the face of the inhuman. They had always danced their best when they danced together.

Deliverance Wilde stood inside a faerie ring, protected by her compact with the Unseeli Court, but helpless to do anything. She wrung her hands together, looking piteously about her.

And I stood alone, only marginally affected by the horrors around me, and reluctantly decided I'd have to do something.

I don't like actually having to do things. I like to keep what I can and can't do a mystery; it helps build my reputation. You can do more with a bad reputation than you can with any magic. Usually. But while the Psychenauts were holding back from me for the moment, perhaps confused by my nature, there was no guaranteeing how long that would last. -Hex and the City

John has a Banishing coin kept in one of the pockets of his jacket.

I knew what the problem was, and I thought I knew how to solve it, so once again it was up to me to haul everyone back from the gates of Hell. If I was wrong, the odds were I was going to die, in any number of really unpleasant ways; but I was used to that. Back when I worked with Carnacki the Ghost Finder, he'd used a charm of Banishing on a psychenaut, driving it out of a haunted funfair, and afterwards I pocketed the charm when he wasn't looking. He had loads of the things, and I had a feeling it might come in handy someday. I dug through the various mystical junk that accumulates in my pockets and finally hauled out a golden coin that came originally from the land of Nod. It had writing on it no-one could understand, and a face that was mostly worn away, but still subtly disturbing. I've never liked relying on such things, but needs must when the Outside is kicking down your door. If it didn't work, I could hardly go back to Carnacki and complain. Objects of power rarely come with warranties. -Hex and the City

It's powerful enough to banish the psychenaut attacking the Hall, sending it back to the Outside.

I held up the coin and spoke the activating Word of Power, and a terrible light radiated from the coin, too bright and piercing for merely human eyes. I had to turn my head away, and my hand holding the coin felt like it was on fire. The Banishing leapt out into the Hall, eager to be about its implacable business. It roared through the Hall, speaking words in a tongue older than Humanity, tearing the animating spirits out of the physical creation and forcing them back, down through the bottom of the world, back into the underpinnings of reality. The psyche-nauts were gone, and with them the overpowering emotions and debilitating fears. The walls and the floor and the ceiling grew still and solid again, and the wooden arms holding men and women fell apart into splinters. People looked slowly about them, daring to believe the worst might be over. -Hex and the City

John is, for reasons even he can't explain, largely unaffected by a higher-dimensional Outsider's presence that shows up and starts ruining the space around it.

The Presence settled heavily into our world, spreading out in directions we couldn't even name; something Huge and Vast downloaded from a higher dimension. Its thoughts smashed into everyone's minds, as harsh and merciless as a spotlight, searching for the single significant thing that had brought it to this petty, limited place. It didn't take a genius to realise it must be looking for the chaos butterfly. The only truly unique thing at the auction. The psychenaut couldn't seem to locate it exactly for the moment, presumably because of the stasis field holding the butterfly temporarily outside of Time and Space. And so the Presence sank deeper into people's minds, forcing their very selves away in its search for knowledge. All around me people were crying out in pain and shock and horror, shrieking Get it out of me! Even the major players were on their knees, sobbing and shaking. The only one left mostly unaffected in the Hall was me, and I didn't want to think why. -Hex and the City

John uses his gift to find the magic word that collapses a temporal stasis field.

I lurched over to the glass display cases, forcing myself against the terrible pull of the gravity well, until finally I stood before the case holding the chaos butterfly. It hung there in its stasis field, such a small thing to hold such potential power. I reached out for the case, and Wilde cried out, afraid I was going to kill the butterfly, even after all its presence had brought about. I used my gift to find things, opening the third eye deep in my mind, my private eye, to locate the necessary Word of Power that would collapse the stasis field.

I said the Word, the field collapsed, and the butterfly disappeared, free at last to return to the moment in Space and Time from which it had been snatched. And as it moved on, it became just a butterfly again, no longer significant, no longer the first domino in any line of destiny. And so became ordinary again, of no importance to anyone at all. -Hex and the City

John keeps a sliver of a unicorn's horn under the lapel of his jacket.

There was a coat stand beside every table, a tall mahogany rococo effort, because none of the customers liked the idea of their coats and belongings being out of sight, where they might be tampered with by enemies. Paranoia is a way of life in the Nightside, and for many good reasons. I hung up my trench coat, after surreptitiously removing the sliver of unicorn horn from my lapel. I like to keep my little secrets to myself. It all helps build the reputation. -Hex and the City

He can use it to detect poisons.

I palmed my sliver of unicorn's horn, and surreptitiously tested both my food and Cathy's.

No trace of poison, said a snotty voice in my head. But the calories are off the scale, and it's far too salty. I thought we'd agreed you were going on a diet?

I put the sliver away. I hate chatty simulacra. Give them a steady job, and they think they're your mother. -Hex and the City

He's got a pair of "chaos dice" in the inner pocket of his jacket. When thrown, these dice negatively affect the probabilities of their intended target(s), causing everything to go wrong for them.

I pulled a pair of chaos dice from my coat's inner pocket and tossed them into the midst of the Reasonable Men; and suddenly everything that could go wrong for them did. Spells misfired, muscles spasmed, and they fell over each other like clowns. -Hex and the City

John resist's Walker's Voice, which was given to the latter by the Authorities who are far and away some of the most powerful beings in the Nightside.

Walker sat up straight, his old commanding arrogance suddenly back in place. He fixed me with a cold gaze, and said, Drop the case, John. His voice sounded in my head like thunder, a voice like God speaking to one of his prophets; the Voice of the Authorities, speaking through their servant Walker. They gave him the Voice that commands, that cannot be disregarded, so that he might enforce their wishes in all things. There are those who claim Walker once used his Voice to make a corpse in a mortuary sit up and answer his questions. His words reverberated in my head, filling my thoughts, pinning me in my seat like a butterfly transfixed on a pin.

And then everything on the table between us began to tremble and clatter. The cutlery and the plates jumped and bounced on the immaculate tablecloth. The table rocked back and forth, its legs slamming up and down with increasing force. The floor lurched, and the whole Dining Room shook and shuddered. People cried out and clung to their juddering tables. And then it all died slowly away, and the reverberations in my head disappeared with it. I rose easily to my feet and smiled down at the openly astonished Walker.

"How about that?" I said. "So much for His Master's Voice. Perhaps I am my mother's son after all." -Hex and the City

John owns a card given to him by Alex Morrisey, designed to open a portal that leads straight to Strangefellows, the latter's age-old bar.

I reached into another coat pocket and took out my special Club Membership Card. It was very special; Alex only had five made, to my knowledge. I tapped it thoughtfully against my chin, considering. They might be expecting me to use the Card ... or relying on me thinking that, so as to avoid me using it... but that way madness lies. Concentrate on the matter at hand. The Card was simple embossed pasteboard, a rich cream in colour, bearing the name of the bar in dark Gothic script, and beneath that the words YOU ARE HERE, in bloodred lettering. All I had to do was press my thumbprint against the scarlet lettering, and the magic stored in the Card would immediately transport me right into the bar. Zero travelling time, and the added advantage of bypassing the watched front door. (They couldn't know about the Card. Hardly anybody knew about the Card.) In the end, all that mattered was that Alex needed my help. So I pressed my thumb down firmly, and the Card activated.

It leapt out of my hand, so fast it practically burned my fingertips, and hung on the air in front of me, shimmering with unearthly light and throbbing with stored energies. Alex always believed in putting out for the full package.

The Card suddenly grew to the size of a door, and I pushed it open and walked through. And as quickly as that I was standing in Strangefellows bar. The door slammed shut behind me, and the Card was just a card in my hand again. -Hex and the City

Said card can also open a portal leading out of Strangefellows and exiting to any place of John's choosing. It can even bypass magical defenses in the process.

I used my Club Membership Card to contact my new companions, back in the Library. The card made itself into a door, and opened an aperture between the bar and the Research Section. Sinner peered curiously through the new opening.

"That's a good trick," he said mildly. "I didn't think anything could get past the Library's defences."

"This is powered by Merlin's magic," I said. "There aren't many places that can keep him out."

Sinner raised an eyebrow. "You do move in high circles, John." -Hex and the City

John uses his third eye to locate Herne the Hunter.

I reached inside my mind, concentrating in a way I could never explain to anyone, and powered up my gift. I could find anything, or anyone, if I just looked hard enough. My third eye opened deep in my mind, my private eye, and suddenly I could See all the Nightside at once, vast and full of life and death, like a playground wrapped in poison ivy, like the best present in the world studded with rusty nails. The neon-lit streets and squares flashed by beneath my searching gaze, giving me glimpses of Beings and creatures that are normally, thankfully, hidden from most people. There are many layers and levels to the Nightside, not all of them suitable for human comprehension. I hurried on, narrowing in on my target, until finally I saw a single ragged figure, mostly hidden inside a cardboard box already sodden from the falling rain. One gnarled hand protruded from the box, mutely requesting charity. People walked by without making eye contact. A great head covered by a grubby blanket slowly emerged from the box, turning slowly to look in my direction. Great jutting antlers protruded from under the blanket. Even in his fallen state, it seemed Herne could still tell when he was being watched. -Hex and the City

John uses his third eye to attempt to locate those who've been pursuing him his entire life. This time, the act of opening it causes him to mentally travel across time in order to find his enemies, who exist in an alternate future.

"Where do these things come from?" he said.

"I don't know," I said. "I've never known."

"Who sends them? Who are these enemies of yours?"

"I've never known who they are, either. No-one knows."

"Powers from the Nightside? From Outside, perhaps? Maybe even from other dimensions ..."

"I don't know!"

"Then why," said Sinner, calmly and reasonably, "don't you use your gift to track them down and identify them?"

I gaped at him blankly. The idea had honestly never occurred to me before. Unless I had considered it, but suppressed it, because it scared me so much. But now I'd seen the Harrowing defeated, now I was safe in Strangefellows, surrounded by good and powerful allies... I nodded, slowly, and opened my third eye.

This time, it was different. My gift granted me a Vision. I seemed to be a disembodied spirit, without face or form, wandering in a strange place. I drifted across a dark and devastated landscape, a place of ruins and rubble. It didn't take me long to recognise where and when I was. I had come again to a possible future for the Nightside, a silent and empty place I had experienced once before when I stumbled into a Timeslip. My Vision had brought me to the end of all things, the end of the Nightside and all civilisation.

An event I helped to bring about, or so an old dying friend had told me.

Everywhere I looked, the Nightside had been destroyed. The proud buildings had collapsed or been torn down, nothing left but cracked and broken walls, and piles of rubble. Smashed and abandoned vehicles choked the still streets. Nothing moved anywhere. The Nightside was a dead place. The light had a dark purple texture, as though bruised by what it saw and showed. In the far distance, broken buildings made stark silhouettes against the horizon. And up in the dark, dark sky there was no moon, and only a few dozen stars in all the night.

Everything looked as though it had been dead for centuries, but I knew better. The last time I was here, in the Timeslip, this future's Razor Eddie had told me I had brought down the Nightside, and the world, in just eighty-two years. Wiped out civilisation and Humanity. And all because I'd insisted on finding out who my mother was. I'd sworn an oath to that Eddie, before I killed him as a mercy, that I would never let this future happen.

My Vision leapt suddenly forward, as though my gift had finally caught the scent of what it sought. I swooped across the broken landscape, shooting between the wrecked stumps of buildings, focussing in on one particular location. My final destination was a cracked crumbling house, nothing obviously different about it, but I knew that was where I had to be. It was where I would find my enemies. There was no light showing at any of the shuttered windows, but I could tell there was light and life inside. Hidden, barricaded against the dark. As I drifted towards the house, another piece of knowledge came to me. My Vision had brought me into a time some years previous to my , appearance in the Timeslip. Humanity was not all dead 1 here. Not yet. I drifted through the crumbling walls and on into a small, desperately defended inner room, lit only by flickering stumps of candles. And then, finally, I saw my enemies.

And I knew them.

My enemies were the last remaining major players of this future time, the last defenders of the Nightside, pooling their remaining power and working frantically together to try and destroy me in the Past, before I could do... whatever terrible thing it was that I had done. My Vision could only tell me so much. My enemies were trying to kill me in order to save the Nightside, and the world. -Hex and the City

John keeps a specially prepared piece of celery which, when consumed, purges poisons from his body. His unicorn horn sliver warns him of poisons that have entered his system, and he proceeds to eat the celery and restore himself to normal.

The blood-tinged mists were thinning out now, taking on the smells and tastes of all kinds of poisonous gasses.

That last development almost took me by surprise. The others weren't affected by the increasingly deadly mists, for their own various reasons, but the first I knew of the danger was when my head began to go all swimmy, and I couldn't seem to get my breath. My thoughts stuttered and repeated themselves, feeling increasingly far away, and then the voice of the unicorn's horn pin sounded loudly in my head.

Poison! Poison gasses, you idiot! Defend yourself! Eat the celery!

I thrust a numbing hand into an inside coat pocket, pulled out the piece of celery, and chewed on it. I always keep a piece handy, pre-prepared with all kinds of useful substances, for just such occasions as this. It tasted bitter as I chewed, but it cleared my head rapidly. It's an old trick but a good one, taught me long ago by a Travelling Doctor I met at the Hawk's Wind Bar & Grill. -Hex and the City

John carries salt for its magical uses. He can form a protective circle with it in the middle of combat.

I took a bag of salt from an inside pocket and sprinkled a wide circle around me. The dead couldn't cross the salt, so they circled round and round me, clawing clumsily with their empty hands, driven forward even as the salt forced them back. My heart pounded painfully fast as I turned around and around, constantly checking that the salt circle remained unbroken. -Hex and the City

John uses his gift to completely sever the Lamentation's control over its army of the dead, instantly cutting off all their connections to it at once and restoring it to its original form of two human beings. Consider the fact that the Lamentation's dead army consisted of every being to have ever committed suicide in the Nightside since the birth of the former. Yeah.

I fired up my gift, and my third eye, my private eye, opened deep in my mind, allowing me to find and identify the link between the dead and their master. My eyesight lurched, and suddenly I could See a tracework of glimmering silver lines, rising from the tops of the corpses' heads and trailing away back to the Lamentation in its cage; the strings by which it manipulated its puppets. And powered by my anger and outrage, it was the easiest thing in the world for me to reach out with my mind and sever all those silver cords in a single moment.

The dead froze where they stood, stopped in mid-movement and even mid-lunge. There was a new feeling in the Mausoleum, as though an endless tension had finally snapped. The Lamentation screamed, a horrible inhuman sound that rasped through the great hall like a saw through flesh. And one by one the dead bodies dropped to the floor and lay still, as their souls burst up out of them like incandescent stars, blasting out of their rotten husks, rising up and up, free at last. They blazed brightly in that dark place, then were gone, to wherever they should have gone long ago.

I've never believed all suicides go to Hell. God has more mercy than that.

The last of the souls departed, and my Sight returned to normal. I looked about me. The blood-tinged mists were gone. Sinner and Pretty Poison and even Madman were staring around in a puzzled way. The dead were piled up all around us, and none of them so much as twitched. The oppressive atmosphere of despair and horror that had permeated the great hall was already fading away like a bad dream, because there was no longer anything here to be scared of. We looked down the empty hall at where the Lamentation had been. The black iron cage was already falling apart, the metal bars cracking and dissolving in showers of black rust. And lying at the bottom of the cage, under the criss-crossed bars, stripped of all power, a naked man and woman clutched each other desperately, weeping angry tears of shock and loss. No longer joined, no longer a Power, no longer that vicious old Being called the Lamentation. Whatever they had done to themselves, or caused to be done, it was over now. Must have been hard on them, to be just human again, after so long. I did think about killing them, but I had no reason to be merciful. I turned my back on them and nodded to my companions.

"Time we were going," I said. "I think we've learned all we're going to here."

"What about... them?" said Sinner.

"Wait till the word gets out," I said. "That they are human again, and defenceless. Then they'll learn what suffering really is. Lot of people in the Nightside have old unfinished business, for loved ones lost and enslaved." -Hex and the City

John uses his gift to find the Words of Power binding a demon to the human realm.

The dark shape stood up abruptly, and huffed and puffed itself up into a great hulking figure, taking up half the cavern, buzzing almost painfully loudly. It tried to pick up Madman with one huge black hand, but the flies just slipped harmlessly past him. The demon hesitated a moment and thrust a hand in my direction. The fingers extended, becoming shafts of flies rushing towards my face. They swept over me, trying to force their way into my mouth, nose, ears, and eyes. I panicked, flapping my hands wildly about my head while pressing my lips and eyelids firmly together, as the flies crawled over my face. And then to my astonishment they all leapt off me and retreated, apparently repulsed. The demon froze where it was, seemingly just as astonished as I was, and I seized the moment to summon up my gift. My inner eye snapped open, and it only took a moment for me to find and identify the Words of Power that bound the demon to this place. -Hex and the City

He's able to speak said Words, an act which should have destroyed his soul completely just from the sheer power involved, with little to no ill effects whatsoever.

I said the Words of Power. They arose from no human tongue, or even human sounds, and just to hear them said aloud would reduce most men to madness. I said the Words, slowly but distinctly, forcing them out syllable by syllable, and the terrible sound of them reverberated in my skull until I thought they'd blow my head apart. The demon screamed in thwarted rage, then was gone, taking with him his meat throne and his butcher's tools. All that remained was the sullen red glare, and the names of his victims traced on the cavern walls in their own blood.

Pretty Poison looked at me, taken aback. "How is it that you were able to speak those Words? The sheer power involved should have blasted the soul right out of your body."

"I have hidden depths," I said. My throat hurt. Where the meat throne had stood, there was now an opening in the cavern wall. "And so, it seems, has this place." -Hex and the City

The Lord of Thorns, despite his vast knowledge and power, finds John's nature as much of a mystery as anyone else does.

"So," I said. "Are we here for judgement?"

"No," said the Lord of Thorns. "You are welcome in this place, John Taylor."

I felt a great rush of tension flow out of me, but I didn't let him see that either. I looked at him narrowly. "Lot of people think I'm a threat to the existence of the Nightside. Are you saying they're wrong?"

"No. Just that you're a special case." And then he smiled, just a little. "And no; I don't know why. You're as much a mystery to me as you are to everyone else. And if you find that infuriating, think how it makes me feel." -Hex and the City

John's gift allows him to find a person's innate powers and shut them down in an instant.

She came at me with the other knife, and I reached deep inside myself, powered up my gift, opened up my third eye, and found within Bad Penny the magic that allowed her always to turn up unexpectedly. And it was the easiest thing in the world for me to shut down that magic and rip it right out of her, taking away her ability to turn up anywhere at all. She looked at me with horror as she lost her grip on the world and faded slowly and silently away, never to return.

I waved good-bye. I don't think I smiled. I don't like to think I might have smiled. -Hex and the City