Hi Pasta!!

I have a random question that popped up in my head the other day

Does Jane do the thread work in every city she's lived in? Like, does she ever do random jobs for anonymity purposes, ones that aren't linked to her abilities? I imagine it's much easier to track down a psychic than it is to find someone who has been working as a preschool teacher or someone working the front desk at a dentist office.

Again, just a shower thought that came to me during a reread🤣

Oooooh now this is a good question and it's not one I think will ever come up in a meaningful way in the fic so I feel free to answer it, too!

So she doesn't do exactly what she's doing in every city, no, although she often finds ways to use her threads to her benefit - I've mentioned before when she first hit Los Angeles as a teen, she got roped into a new-agey sort of shop, doing tarot like a very poorly paid trick pony - she'd use her thread abilities to make accurate enough predictions that she was worth keeping around. She pulled similar tricks in other cities early on (she's quite good at reading tarot now for others, ironically), and then on and off in various cities after, because it's hard to walk away from all the money on the table. The psychic business category alone is, if I remember my research correctly, around 90k businesses in the US, and makes about 2 billion annually. It's likely even bigger of a business in the TRT universe since the existence of enhanced people might encourage more people to go looking for psychics to help with their problems. That means billions and billions of dollars changing hands.

And money, as we know with her, is a big lure. BUT, as you said, yeah, she quickly figured out hey, I can't do this every time because that forms a pattern (which is bad). Some of it also depends on where she is - there might be way more (real or not) psychics around for her to hide amongst like in NYC, or there may be fewer. The latter cities are where she's more likely to find a different job - and she's not above faking her qualifications to get in, as long as it's a job she can actually do. She knows how to manage a store, she knows how to draw blood and so has done a round or two as a phlebotomist. Hell, she did construction under the table for a bit in Pittsburgh.

But she keeps coming back to psychic.

She's got a method for those cities now - there's a reason she's working alongside Maya, and why Maya's name is the big name on the business and hers is advertised by reputation only (hiding herself beneath two extra layers of names, essentially). There's a reason she targets specific kinds of rich - she wants the rich who are either smart enough to follow contracts (Wesley), or wary enough that they're worried about others stealing away their favorite psychic and so keep their mouths shut (or decide to hire her on at a high enough rate that she can work solely for them). And above all, her rule is to run before she gets too big. Essentially playing psychic is a tradeoff - a larger payday in exchange for a shorter timeframe in the city, as opposed to the slow and steady trickling of another job where she can stay longer. She's followed that rule for years now - either quiet jobs to take the heat off, or short bursts of psychic activity that make her a ton of money before she fades out and vanishes in 6 months to a year, finding a new name, and a new city.

Until New York City...

And until Matt...

Click go the dominoes.