At the end of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the Frisby family move to their summer home in the forest. There we are told that Mrs. Frisby's neighbor in the summertime is a mouse named Janice. Janice has four children, like Mrs. Frisby. I read into the short passage the impression that relations between the two housemice are somewhat cold, with a "keeping up with the Jones'" dynamic between them. This is all the book has to say about this character (and of course she was completely absent from The Secret of NIMH). When I decided to write a movie sequel (drawing on book, movie, and assorted fan-fiction and essays), I decided that Mrs. Brisby needed a more sympathetic foil than the Shrew to work against, and I decided to use Janice for this purpose. The result was enough background materials for a whole army of sequels, prequels and inbetween-quels and rather than throw it away, I commit it here for my own reference and hopefully something to spark a better story from someone else.
Any story of animals in a human world must keep an eye on the humans, so I'll start with them. About the time that the Rats escaped from NIMH, Henry Fitzgibbon was trying to gain the attention of his rich and slowly dying uncle Peter. To do this he built a room onto the house and invited Peter's invalid mother Mabel to stay with them. Mabel, who did not reciprocate her son's fond feelings for her, had just fled from a squalid apartment in the city infested with rodents and was suffering from a mouse phobia. She brought her spoiled cat Dragon with her.
When Farmer Fitzgibbon made the addition to the house he had to move the barn. His wife forced him to use the opportunity to clean it out and repair the walls. The mice living in the barn had heard all of these plans being made. Their leaders chose to see the turn of events as an opportunity rather than as a crisis. They ensured that the mice who followed them made it through the move while their competitors, the rats and other traveling animals, were left locked outside. Taking advantage of the farmer's preoccupation, the mice carefully increased their share of the harvest, ushering in a mouse utopia. Superstitions and prejudices were abandoned, luxury and the arts flourished, and within a few years the mice were well on the way to forming a human-based civilization to rival those in the cities. The Barn Culture had the advantage over many city cultures in that a few of the leaders were free-thinkers capable of moving the mice in directions more suited to a rodent than to a primate. The world of the Barn had its great celebration each year at Midwinter. Midwinter started long before sunrise on Christmas day and lasted all through the day, since on this day alone the humans could be expected to stay out of the barn. There were only two problems with the Barn Culture: a weakness in morality and a breakdown in family bonds.
The mouse who would one day be Elizabeth Brisby was the youngest of a large family fathered by one of the freethinking leaders I just mentioned. Her mother left the day she was born, and her father refused to speak of her. Elizabeth was her father's favorite, for she was an extremely intelligent and witty mouse. From an early age she was the darling of society. She did not suffer fools gladly, and practically everyone was a fool in her eyes. She gained a following of those who liked seeing egos punctured. She formed most of her opinions on hearsay, and then refused to change them regardless of argument or evidence. She proclaimed the superiority of the Barn over the "Wilderness" and was proud of the fact that she would be capable of marrying a mouse that respected her feelings, yet it was clear to everyone but her that she was too strong-willed to ever marry. She had a habit, deemed odd by her friends, of sneaking off from time to time to be by herself, for she was secretly puzzled by the irrationality of the world and hoped that one day she might figure the problem out and then force the universe to behave properly.
Elizabeth's best friend was the future Janice Simmons. Janice's parents were not among the original founders of the colony, and were held in contempt as a result. Janice's father crumpled under the pressure and he returned to the pasture, but Janice's mother stuck it out and used a succession of husbands to climb up the social ladder. As a result, Janice was largely left to raise herself. Janice had a great respect for her mother, and like her had a fierce will. However, she was very unlike her mother in having little pride. For Janice, the early memories of the horrors of life in the Wilderness were made more vivid by the tranquility of life in the Barn, and Janice decided from an early age that she needed to be ready for anything that Life might throw at her. Practicality became the byword of her life. Most of the mice her age did not care to be around her, for she lacked a sense of humor. She was one of the few mice that realized that the Barn could not remain a secret from the humans for much longer, but like most of her opinions, she kept this foreboding to herself.
Elizabeth told everyone that she stayed around Janice on principle, as an attack on Popular Opinion. Actually, she respected Janice's ability to see the truth behind the illusions rampant in Barn culture. Janice had no idea why Elizabeth was always around, since Elizabeth spent most of her time demeaning Janice's intelligence in ways she thought Janice could not understand. She was somewhat dazzled by Elizabeth's brilliance, but believed that it was too obscured by her sarcastic attitude.
Late one Midwinter Elizabeth and Janice went off on an extensive foraging expedition together. Bad weather forced them to stay in a burrow all the next day. While they were gone, Great-Aunt Mabel wandered into the barn and had a heart attack on seeing so many mice in broad daylight. The doctor was called for, and his prognosis was grim: Mabel would have to spend the rest of her life in a rest home. Desperate to keep the goodwill of Uncle Paul, Farmer Fitzgibbons called an exterminator to come out the next day and gas the barn. The two mice returned to find everyone they knew dead.
Elizabeth was devastated by the loss of her father, but Janice immediately sprang to action. She sought out Patrick Simmons, a bachelor mouse she had heard about in her foraging expeditions, and before a month was through she had gotten him to propose to her. Elizabeth was made welcome in the newlyweds' home in the woods, and she never heard a word of complaint from Janice or Patrick (Patrick would have said a great deal if not restrained by his wife). Nevertheless, Elizabeth felt too strongly the reversal of her relations with Janice, and they parted with a great deal of bitterness on Elizabeth's part when spring came. Elizabeth made a home for herself in the roots of a half-dead tree, and it was there that Jonathan Brisby eventually found her.
Soon after Janice met Elizabeth, she noticed a very odd thing: things always happened the way Elizabeth expected them to go. It took a few discrete experiments, but eventually Janice was sure that Elizabeth had an unconscious control of the fabric of reality. This was a strong blow to Janice, comparable to the fictional version of the meeting of Salieri and Mozart. For Janice, Elizabeth with her numerous hang-ups and prejudices was the worst possible candidate for the role of goddess. The only thing keeping the world out of serious trouble was the fact that Elizabeth's strongest preconception was her essential aloofness from the world--this is what kept her from realizing her abilities.
Janice's reaction once she realized the truth about her friend was to try to find its cause. Her search came up empty. There were no unusual events in Elizabeth's life, nothing unusual about her father or even her missing mother. So in a leap of faith Janice decided that such abilities were innate in all living creatures. And so one day Janice mused on what she would do with her own super powers, if she had any. She wouldn't use them as much as Elizabeth did, that was for sure. Her best advantage would be if she alone knew what all animals were capable of. Best to restrict herself to a single, easy to conceal ability, and the best choice of these would be telepathy, because that way she could check the minds of those around her to see if they suspected her of anything.
Once she had this all figured out, she decided to use this ability she had assigned to herself, and to her astonishment she succeeded. One of the first people she "read" was her mother, and this led to a heartfelt reconciliation between the two. Janice's mother would spend the rest of her short life trying to make up for the neglect of her daughter. From this experience Janice learned the joy of altruism, and she worked diligently to reconcile many of the petty feuds that had afflicted the Barn. She had barely gotten started before the Extermination.
The Extermination was an event that taught Janice the limit to her abilities: some things happened too fast to react to, even for a psychic. Once she had read the minds of the Fitzgibbons', she learned forgiveness, and a certain sense of pity towards humans. From the humans she learned a lot about the wider world, but it was information that rarely did her much good. When she got married, she used her ability to learn psychology, which led to a quiet marriage and a brood of children that was successively more and more emotionally stable. Somewhere along the line Janice gave herself a photographic memory to keep track of everything she was reading in people's minds.
Janice as a character will be hard to get a handle on. She acts a little differently for each person she interacts with, to conform with their views of her and of the world. Because she can read everyone's deepest thought, she is capable of saying precisely the right thing at any moment, but she also knows from experience exactly how far she can go before anyone suspects what is going on. Actually, at the point where my story opens, everyone (including her children) suspect that something's going on with Janice (although the older ones are quite paranoid based on certain youthful memories), and she's getting bored enough to mess with their minds when she thinks she can get away with it. I'm not sure how much the reader should know about Janice: I could make it obvious from the beginning, I could keep them guessing throughout the story, or I could time it so that at least some readers figure things out just about at the end.
One note: Janice doesn't know too much about the Rats of NIMH. The moment she learned of their existence, she suspected that they were using powers like Elizabeth's and therefore could very easily tell if their minds were being read. This was in fact true for Nicodemus, but not for anyone else, even Jonathan.
There is a sort of comparison that can be made between Janice and Jonathan. Both are characters with power, and both of them tend to change their personalities to match who they're with. In Jonathan's case, his goal is to be liked, while in Janice's case, the goal is not to be noticed. Probably because of luck as much as anything else, Janice ends up living a life she is satisfied with, while Jonathan was always in a state of internal conflict. As my story stands now, Janice and the Jonathan soul-clone never meet. Maybe I should reconsider.