[Tayler's hands move in a sort of helpless gesticulation of distress. She doesn't want to talk about it any more than Jessica wants to hear about it, but she also knows that the woman needs this information now rather than later.]

It's a bit like... when a dog gets rabies. Normally sweet, well behaved house pet and then his brain goes to jelly and he gets vicious, bites and kills anything he can get his teeth into. It's like that. Not pretty.

[Her tone as she finishes is genuinely nauseated and perhaps Jessica can hear in her voice or see in the faraway look in her eyes that she's seen this first hand, been on the scene for the breakdown of consciousness of another person.]

It's hard to say really who or what they are, but there are a handful of them, two or three or four depending on the day, and nobody can really see them except maybe their acolytes and I haven't been daring enough yet to pretend to drink the koolaid to get behind enemy lines because I think they have some kind of mind control and I'm not about to go in until I'm sure I can come back out, right? But from what I can tell, they've got some serious magic, too, and the locals worship them as actual gods, as in part of their religion. Not that that means I think they're immortal or anything. Though I guess that's not impossible, we're kind of immortal now, too, in a way.