Hunter Session 22

Previous: Hunter Session 21

Everyone was exhausted after fighting and killing the werewolf in the alley, but of course their work was not done. Several days after the battle, they received four postcards in the P.O. box covered in strange symbols. They looked like they incorporated hunter code (for example, one looked like a combination of the Judge and Avenger symbols), but no one knew what they meant. Somewhat nervous, the group agreed it would be a bad idea to meet these people alone, and decided that Melba and Paladin would go together to meet two of them, and Charlotte and Randy would meet the other two. At the meetings, it turned out that three of the four subjects were guardians: Shirley, Oscar, and Cassius, to be exact. (When this was revealed, the group was perplexed to note that the symbols suddenly made sense - they all meant "Guardian," in the same way that the combination Avenger/Innocent symbol first discovered by Marta and applied to Chet and Saria did.) The fourth was Kirby, Shirley's son; he claimed to be a hunter, but since he also used a strange symbol no one could be quite sure exactly what he really was. Ultimately, the group walked away from these meetings with more questions than they'd arrived with, but they could at least be relatively certain that these strange new creatures were on their side of the struggle. (Summarizer's note: I'm not sure if this is an error in the summaries or an inconsistency from the game itself, because we actually already knew these NPCs were guardians based on Hunter Session 12. Maybe it was just that the guardians didn't realize our characters were the ones behind the network and the P.O. box? Regardless, we double know they're guardians now, I guess!)

The next two weeks passed uneventfully. Melba threw herself wholeheartedly into her new project of restarting Hunter-Net; at this point, she was wading through archived posts from the old, defunct network, trying to figure out what went wrong that caused it to shut down as well as where she could find Witness1 (the original Hunter-Net's creator) to get his advice on the project. She made little progress on the first goal, but managed the truly amazing feat of tracing Witness1 to an apartment building somewhere in Montana by picking up on context clues about the weather in his posts. Arie and Paladin also finally got to meet the guardians' group of hunters (there were four of them) when they turned in postcards and officially joined the network. Also, Melba's apartment was commandeered by Kai and about 20 of his friends, who showed up unannounced one night and decided to have a party, much to her annoyance.

In the meantime, Charlotte began to investigate the strange evidence of monsters' handiwork she had collected over the course of the previous months. She devoted much of her time to dissecting the alien fetus she had recovered from the compound under Target but found it very difficult to understand. Not only did the creature appear human but possess a nervous system and organs entirely different from what one would expect, its bones seemed to be made of a metallic substance and its DNA contained two entirely unfamiliar chemicals. Confused, Charlotte described her findings to Jonas and asked him if he knew any other hunters who could offer her more insight. He told her about Kurt Bennen, a friend of his from college who lived in North Dakota and was working along many of the same lines. Charlotte called Kurt and explained her situation, and he invited her to visit him so they could pool their knowledge.

A day later, Charlotte arrived at Kurt's house to discover that it was a vaguely creepy, fortified compound in the middle of nowhere. But things didn't get really disturbing until they entered his basement lab to take a look at the scary alien fetus. There, Charlotte was horrified to discover three vivisected human bodies (Kurt said they were shapeshifters he was researching) and a disassembled vampire pinned to the wall with all of its parts neatly labelled and diagrammed (later she would learn it was still alive). Charlotte managed to hide her disgust and terror long enough to talk about her findings and compare them with Kurt's own (she actually learned a lot of very useful information about her specimen as well as about vampires), then drove back to Minneapolis as fast as she could. Though shaken up, she had to admit that if she ever wanted to learn more, she would not hesitate to talk to Kurt again.

Things were developing on the romantic front for all four of the hunters. Randy continued getting to know Leslie. Arie took Dana and Samantha out again, bringing two babies along with him this time in the hopes of impressing them and claiming that all six babies belonged to Charlotte. When he returned, Saria berated him for putting the babies in the backseat of his Humm-Vee without car seats. Melba and Paladin went on their second official date. It had been planned by Paladin and involved a long, cold walk around Bde Maka Ska, and was deemed nowhere near as fun as the date Melba had planned. Still, it was the thought that counted, and they enjoyed each other's company as always. Charlotte and Charlie, who were on "baby duty" every evening, began to spend more and more time together. Their deepening connection was noted by the rest of the group. Arie was disgusted, Melba just didn't understand it, and Randy never missed an opportunity to tease Charlie about it, but none of them interfered.

Toward the beginning of February, a date rolled around that Charlotte and Randy had been waiting for: opening night of the play Charlie had been working on for months (Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," in which he played Malvolio). Charlotte, Melba, Paladin, and Randy attended the play, where (Randy observed) they were pretty much the only living people in the entire audience (vampires made up the whole cast, too). As the show was ending, Charlotte was in the lobby when she saw Haji walking out the door. She hurried backstage to warn Charlie, and he replied, "I know. He shook my hand."

The group was somewhat shaken up but decided it was just coincidence, and headed for a nearby restaurant to celebrate. But inside the restaurant was a nasty surprise: Haji, sitting at a table in the back. As soon as he noticed the group, he paid his check, got up, and left without saying a word. Everyone tried to forget about it, but it still put a damper on the evening. Things only got worse when Randy got up to go to the bathroom and, walking past the table where Haji had been sitting, noticed that he'd left a small scroll behind. After establishing that no one else was going to pick it up (not even the busboy), Randy went back to retrieve it. The scroll read simply, "It's been fun, but now the real game's afoot," and was signed only with a smiley face. No one knew quite what to make of it, and the evening came to a screeching halt as everyone retreated to their separate homes to worry.

Except Charlie, that is. He knew that Haji still wanted to kill him, so he told Charlotte that he didn't want to go back to his haven that night. She said he could stay at her house, and he gratefully accepted, offering to sleep on the couch. However, when they arrived at Charlotte's house, they discovered that Twitcher had spent the evening turning all of the furniture in her living room upside down (he was watching the History Channel upside down and commenting loudly, "Nothing ever happened except World War II! That's all there is in history!"). Unfazed, Charlie offered to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor of Charlotte's bedroom, but this arrangement proved unnecessary. Upstairs, one thing led to another and Charlie ended up spending the night in Charlotte's bed. The next morning, even some serious sleep deprivation and the discovery that Twitcher (thanks to his incredibly sharp senses) had heard all of the previous nights activities couldn't diminish her good mood.

While Charlotte taught her classes, Randy decided to check the vampire mailbox and make sure the group didn't need to follow up on Saigow's last request. There was a scroll in the box, but it was tied with a blue ribbon instead of the red ribbon with gold trim Saigow usually used to tie his scrolls - the same kind of blue ribbon, in fact, that Haji had used on the scroll the night before. Unrolling it (and noting that the handwriting matched the last one), Randy read its cryptic message: "The body is a temple, though it may not be a complete one." Perplexed, he showed it to Melba and everyone else he could think of who might have had some connection to the problem with Haji, but none of them could explain it.

That night, when Charlotte came to the apartment building for her turn to watch the babies, Melba dropped by to ask her if she knew anything about the scroll. She was surprised when Charlotte panicked completely and started grilling a very confused Charlie about whether the two of them had ever met before. Knowing a volatile situation when he saw one, Randy pulled Charlotte aside and asked her to explain what was going on, and she told him the whole story. Charlotte had been imbued when a vampire wandered into her lab at the university late one night. She'd defused the situation by figuring out that he needed blood and offering him some from the lab refrigerator. Afterwards, she'd struck up an uneasy friendship with the vampire, whose name was Temple. As Charlotte became increasingly curious about the scientific hows and whys of vampirism, Temple agreed to let her meet with some of his friends to see if they could answer her questions. But the meeting turned ugly, and only the well-timed intervention of Jonas, her mentor, had allowed Charlotte to escape while only losing her left arm to Temple. She had sworn that if she saw Temple again, she'd kill him. Now, thanks to the emotional events of the previous night and Haji's note, she'd jumped to the conclusion that Charlie and Temple were the same person. (By the way, Randy had absolutely no measurable reaction to the news that Charlotte had slept with Charlie.) Randy managed to calm her down and convince her that such a thing was unlikely as well as ridiculous. Charlotte eventually agreed, but was still disturbed by the fact that Haji somehow knew about her history with Temple, since only Jonas was aware of that part of her life.

Afterwards, Melba also decided to talk to Charlotte, both to hear the story she'd already told Randy and to try to work out the ideological differences that had set the two of them against each other since Charlotte had first joined the group. (Also, Melba's reaction to the news about Charlotte and Charlie was considerably more animated and vaguely disgusted, though she also made it clear there was no risk of her condemning what they had done.) Both women acknowledged they would probably never be able to work out all of their differences or agree completely on the goals and methods of the hunt, but they were able to agree on one thing: Temple had to be dealt with somehow, or Haji would find a way to make the entire group pay for Charlotte's past mistakes.

The next morning, Randy checked the mailbox again, this time dreading the scroll he would surely find. This scroll contained a message about family and home that made Melba think Haji might be planning to target her mother. Melba's mom appeared to be in no danger at the moment, but Melba knew she would have to do something to protect her. None of the hunters believed Haji's threats were empty.

Next: Hunter Session 23