So, because I didn't finish yesterday's prompts, I'm going to finish them now and then continue with today's prompt.

Here was the paragraph I was finishing yesterday:

We're within Chapter 2

That was when Janice realized she was no longer wearing a Rice-ist polo-necked tee shirt and black slacks. Instead, her legs were covered in images that were neither tattoo, nor were...
and now, the continuation...
nor were her body's natural skin tones... Her body was not the body she was used to. It had, for one thing, these... images on its legs - Roots, bark, soil, green and brown and hints of autumn leaf colors and the sunset's orange glow. Her legs also felt stronger than she expected her body to feel. And her arms as well. Her whole person, she felt, was built to run and crawl and climb and leap and spin and lift and crush and pull. Her face felt odd, as if there were extra pieces to it. She realized suddenly that she could feel in minute detail the exact points where each hair follicle grew and those fine hairs could tell the strength and direction of the wind.
The little person standing before her asked, "where did you come from?" and, unbidden, her voice answered, "I've always been here." Cryptic... and, a lie, she could tell, also, in a deeper sense, a not-lie. Janice was familiar with Chibera; she'd always been here in a sense, but this was an evasion of the detail the kid was asking about. Also, where did that answer come from? Not her conscious brain, certainly.

"I am Jan, arbiter-candidate of the World Tree, and as the World Tree is always and is all, I have been everywhere always. But more specifically, I came from there," and Janice pointed to the treeline on a hill half a kilometer away, outside the town.

I guess that explains some things, Janice thought, but she was disturbed by this inability to control her own voice or arms.
"I am Jan. I am Jan. I am Jan." Janice repeated over and over aloud, growing more insistent, louder, in higher and higher pitches, until finally, her voice cracked and "I am Jan" came out as a whisper.
The child took a step backwards. "Jan." The kid said.
I am Janice thought Janice.
"I am Janice" spoke the voice that Janice did not think belonged to her, and yet came from her body.

---

Philip turned the sign to closed. Janice swopped a mop across the already-clean tile.
"I know I'm taking this more seriously than I should, and I'm sorry," Philip's voice wheedled even when he was speaking reasonably, sincerely, and vulnerably.
Janice kept swopping the mop head across the same part of the floor. Back and forth, back and forth. And then she stopped. She looked up. "Philip." She said. that's Philip she thought. he's my boss, and I am mopping the floor with him. Ha. No. It's not a game.
"Janice, you've been mopping that part of the floor for 15 minutes. I know you're upset with me for assigning homework, and I've come to the conclusion that you're right. Minimum wage demands minimum effort." Philip had a gleam in his eye that Janice had come to expect meant he had an idea that only a Fast Food Assistant Manager could have.
"Philip." Janice new she was still on autopilot, but she was still here and present. She could control her voice and body if she wanted to, she was sure. She just didn't want to particularly participate in being an eighteen year old who had a fast food job.
"Hear me out. There's a BONUS for the management team that sells the most avocado bowls this summer. Why avocado bowls you ask?" It was apparent to Janice that he had been rehearsing this schtick for a while. "Because Wisconsin doesn't love mashed avocado on their rice yet. So it's a challenge, and will have less to do with total sales than with proving our salesmanship! And we're going to do it. But why should you care, you ask? Why indeed! I am suddenly familiar with the 'providing incentive' portion of the training program because that's what I did on break, was watch training videos from years past that they didn't think were relevant for a mere assistant manager, but I have gumption, dad-gum it!"
Philip was working himself up to an idea. He was afraid of the idea, Janice concluded. She thought she knew what the idea was, and that it wasn't particularly fearsome or out of the box, but poor Philip must not have explicit approval for-

"A $1 bonus for every avocado bowl you sell. Avocabowl, FYI is the new branding. Not great. Maybe with your creative writing skills, you can come up with something better and then we can take it to Sandy. Is $1 too much? Oh god. You shouldn't know how large our margins are. But yeah, they can handle that."

***

Chapter 3

"Here is a woman living her passion every day. Why was it always impossible for you to see?" Janice's mom pointed at her computer screen, at a picture of Frida Kahlo.

"She's dead, mom. She WAS living her passion every day, maybe, and then she died." Janice was too tired for her mom's expectations.
"That's not the- This is an image of a woman living her passion. You have always been blind to art, and too fixated on technical details." Mom scrolled to a painting, then clicked open another tab. "And this, look, you were always a little too into your games, but see, I know how to take a screenshot, and I can see that you still have an eye for composition." She pointed to an elf rendered in 256 colors.

"Mom, maybe I'm living my passion." Janice knew where this would take the conversation, but she was hoping, hoping hoping that she could make it to the backyard screen door before-

"Video games are NOT a passion. They are, at best, a past-time, but they benefit no one." Janice's Mom's voice took on a growl that always reminded Janice of an angry, irrational orc.

She'd had this argument with her mom a thousand times, and her mom never seemed to tire of it. Consumption vs. creation, interactive art vs. static art. Benefits of productivity in a world overwhelmed by content. It didn't matter to Janice anymore, but saying that the once she had tried it had sent her mom into a tizzy from which there seemed to be no return. Only after a weekend apart, had their tone returned to normalcy, and that had not been a fun weekend apart for Janice. She had no idea if her mom suffered from specific worries and guilt, or if her feels about the tiff had been subsumed by the general overall worry that she carried with her throughout life.

And so, Janice mustered her best "this is not merely appeasement" face, and said, "I'm 18, Mom. I'm finding myself. I'll be going off to college soon, and I'll be exposed to all kinds of new experiences and-" Janice stopped. Her mother's face confused her. It wasn't sad or angry or peaceful. It was just... crumpled. "Mom?"

---

Jan fled. The city had all begun paying too much attention to her. Great pronouncements of personal status were definitely not something she was used to doing, and they certainly seemed like things she wouldn't be doing again. There was a sense that People Should Not Know in Jan's brain, and she figured that was a good thing to have feelings about. Jan wasn't entirely sure if she was supposed to feel accustomed to being alone if she was to be the one to interpret the behaviors of the bipedal creatures for the understanding of the rooted creatures and pass along the judgement of the latter on the former for them to learn from and amend their ways towards, but she was hopeful that Aloof was an admirable quality in an arbiter for the World Tree.
NO NO NO NO NO Jan felt desperate. And then angry. DAMNIT, Telepath. NO right back at you

Janice was startled. Did this Jan hear her?
Hello?" asked Janice in the same way she'd ask herself a question.

Jan paused and waited for several minutes just past the line of trees that separated inside the forest from outside the forest.

Hello?" Janice thought again and again and again.

---

"When you were a child, I wanted you to be like your daddy." Janice's mom lay, her whole body as crumpled as her face had been, on the couch. When she spoke, it was as if she were just remembering how in that moment.
"I need to call 911," Janice rose smoothly from where she was kneeling and pulled her cell phone from her pocket as she heard sirens in the distance.
"911, what's your emergency?" A woman's voice with a slight southern drawl, as if she'd moved from Georgia as a 5 year old, and her parents had never lost their accents, answered.
"I think my mommy's had a stroke," Janice wasn't entirely sure why she'd adopted that particular term of endearment, but something in her brain had made her not herself as a child, but rather what she imagined an adult who'd had normal parents as a child would revert to in a stressful situation where she thought her mom was going to die.
"What's the address?" Janice gave her "Mommy's" address. There was a pause on the other end. "...ambulances are already en route. Janice? You called us less than 3 minutes ago. Has something changed?"
The sirens were right outside. Janice turned and-

---

For https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-380-5-minute-freewrite-sunday-prompt-sponge

Jan opened her eyes. She felt this presence now, before anything even happened differently. She'd become alert to the telepath's intrusion on her. "Soak it all in, Telepath. Go ahead." Jan opened her mind to the World Tree, hoping, planning - no- clearing her mind so that the telepath would get deep and get trapped in the depths of the network of living creatures that was even hard to navigate with a guide.

She tried not to think about her plan, but the best she was able to do was to think about a different plan that was very similar.
Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. I am not a sponge. Hi. Hi. Hi. Janice repeated herself from the moment she realized her mother was no longer in the room with her. She did this as minutes became hours. Until, even being a bodiless consciousness, or, well, having a body? She wasn't sure how to think of herself, but, even being as she was, she grew exhausted and drifted off to sleep.

There, at the center what she knew was a dream was a great tree. It reminded her a little of the Baobab trees in the illustrations from her copy of The Little Prince. It also reminded her of Discworld, a little. The idea that a whole world lay on the back of something else. Turtles all the way down she thought, as the dream pointed out to her that the world in which the roots of this tree lay was not made of earth, but rather of other roots that seemed at once both to be individual plants separate from the great tree and the same as the great tree.

And then she realized that she was not looking at the tree, she was feeling the tree, not with her hands, but with some other sense that she hadn't used before. She was the tree. She was one of those individual trees that was also just a part of the great tree. No, not even... or, yes, even, but she wasn't all of the tree that was her. There, that part of her was a root system, and that was as much hers as it was the great trees, but above that, a part of her trunk forked, and that other fork forked again and again, and that part was not entirely her except insomuch as all of the trees were her and she was them. She had a branch on her own trunk that wasn't entirely her either. In fact, it was becoming clear to her that even what she thought of as her wasn't really staying in one place on this root system that she thought of as hers.

A branch waved at her. She felt this with this new sense, and along with that branch's movement, she understood it. The movement wasn't important. The movement was a symptom of a set of chemicals... no, this was a dream, it didn't matter how it worked. I'm not dead she thought back at it, because that was the question the impulse had asked. Something about whether it should conserve its energy for a more vigorous growth, whether this part of her was ready to accept sunlight or or or.

And then she felt Jan. There was a part of the tree that was her and was also Jan.