Chapter Text
It wouldn’t make sense if she were comfortable in the Loop. She was a South Side girl born and bred, and this was well outside of her home turf. Hell, she was barely used to tourists wielding cameras and the lack of vacant lots. She didn’t belong here; it wasn’t supposed to feel natural.
Deep down, though, she knew that didn’t entirely explain the faint buzzing in the back of her skull, or her innate reluctance to come downtown. She’d known that it would’ve made her research a lot easier if she’d just gone straight to Harold Washington Library, but she’d been putting it off, bouncing around the South Side from small public library to small public library, trying to trace the mythologies of gods who were somehow able to die, as well as the strange, demigodly beings called Scions, and the legends of Chicago itself.
Unsurprisingly, though, she’d eventually found herself unable to continue without physically hauling herself to the main branch, so she’d finally cleared her schedule and hopped on the green line. It was strange, though; as soon as she’d passed Adams and Wabash, she’d felt the hair on the back of her neck start standing up. It felt kind of like the Scions, but much older - like decades and decades of Scions stacked on top of each other. It was unsettling, but not nearly as bad as the weird itching sensation that had settled inside her head shortly after she’d walked into the library and booked a study room with Kay’s old library card.
She slammed her current book shut, frustrated. For the main branch of the Chicago Public Library, they sure didn’t have much of what she was looking for. Admittedly, she wasn’t entirely sure what exactly she was looking for, but rulebooks for some kind of roleplaying game weren’t remotely helpful. Everything she could find went over the same basic stories again and again, with the tiniest variations. No matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t find anything she didn’t already know. She rubbed her forehead. It was probably time to call it a day; she wasn’t going to find anything out like this. Well, not here, anyway.
Leaving the stack of books on the table, she walked out of the library, determined to track down the source of the irritating feeling. She followed the tracks west, feeling them thrum with some kind of supernatural power. It wasn’t a threat, though; she could tell. She was considerably less sure about the other feeling.
It got stronger and stronger as she walked, until she hit Wells and realized it had lessened a bit. So she hung a right and kept walking, feeling it buzz inside her skull, increasing until she passed Jackson. She doubled back, wondering if it was the Fed building (Kay had never really trusted banks either), but then she happened to look up and realized that it wasn’t that at all.
Maybe going crazy was a process. Maybe it started with hearing weird voices in your room and ended with being scared out of your mind by a statue. Maybe she’d finally lost it, and it was time to run wild and howl at the moon.
She had the running part down, anyway. She made it three blocks past the river before she dared to look back.