Hunter Session 20

Previous: Hunter Session 19

After their excursion to the compound in Bemidji, Charlotte, Hakim, and Randy returned to the Twin Cities the next morning while the others spent the rest of the day up north to tie up loose ends. Charlotte returned because she'd promised Twitcher she'd meet with him that afternoon to explain the network. He seemed to understand it considerably better than he was letting on, and kept referring to "guardian babies" whenever he could (though Charlotte was almost certain there was no way he could know what that meant). When she checked the P.O. box for new postcards, she found a note from Lisa (the Judge from the bus), asking the group to attend their meeting the next night to resolve a dispute that Lisa and her people were apparently having with another group of hunters. When the rest of the group returned in the evening, Charlotte showed the note to them, and they decided to send Arie and Randy to the bus to find out what the problem was and do what they could to fix it.

As the group prepared to go to their respective homes to get some much-deserved sleep, Charlotte noticed Twitcher lying on a couch in the lobby of the apartment building. She asked him where he lived, and he admitted (in his own roundabout Twitcher way) that he didn't really have a house. To the other hunters' surprise, Charlotte told him he could stay at her house, if he wanted to. Twitcher immediately jumped at the opportunity and spent his entire first night there flushing the toilet repeatedly "to see if the water would run out."

The same night, while Melba was talking to Paladin (who showed no signs of wanting to move out of her apartment anytime soon, though he'd long since recovered physically from the injuries he suffered in Canada), she decided it was high time that something happened with their relationship beyond a lot of talk, and kissed him. Afterwards, the first thing he said was, "Jeez, what took you so long?" It appeared that despite the weirdly ambiguous way in which Paladin approached their relationship, he felt the same way about Melba as she felt about him.

Upon returning to Minneapolis, Randy also took it upon himself to check the "vampire mailbox" for any communication from Saigow. It contained a scroll that said some hunters in north Minneapolis were causing problems for Saigow's people and asked the group to handle it. Randy made a mental note to tell the others about this later, after they resolved the situation with Lisa.

The next evening, Arie and Randy went to the bus as planned, bringing Charlotte with them. Once there, they saw all the members of Lisa’s group as well as Dana and Samantha (the latter of which Arie immediately began flirting with incessantly). Charlotte took charge of the situation and asked what the problem was. Lisa explained that for the past several weeks, her group had been investigating the murders of homeless people which involved supernatural elements. Her group had found circumstantial evidence connecting the werewolf living in the alley by the University of Minnesota to several of the murders. Lisa wanted to kill the werewolf as soon as possible. However, word of Lisa's plans had gotten around to Samantha, who strongly objected. Samantha thought the werewolf in the alley was innocent, and that the murders had actually been committed by Charles Johnson, the werewolf who lived in her dorm. She had no concrete evidence to support this, just "a really bad feeling" about Charles. The two groups were at an impasse, and Lisa wanted Charlotte and her allies to look into the situation and render a verdict of their own. Charlotte agreed to try, and to return with a decision in two nights. Immediately following the meeting, the hunters returned to the apartment building to explain things to Melba (who had decided to stay behind in order to avoid becoming associated with the others in case the network was somehow compromised). The group decided that the next day, Randy and Arie would go to the dorms to talk to Charles during the day, while everyone would go to the alley that evening and try once more to make contact with the werewolf in the alley.

The next afternoon, Arie and Randy made their first stop Phil's dorm room, where Randy explained what was going on and asked him to take them to see Charles. Phil was eager to try to save Charles, and the three of them were soon in Charles' dorm room trying to get answers out of him without completely revealing Lisa's plans. Not surprisingly, Charles reacted defensively when two strangers began grilling him about murders. He insisted he didn't even know about the killings, much less have anything to do with them. Randy wanted to believe him and asked Arie to take a peek at Charles's thoughts using Revelation. The power revealed that Charles didn't appear to be lying about his lack of involvement. Arie and Randy thanked Charles and left. Before leaving campus, Arie stopped by Samantha and Dana's room to take them out to a coffee shop and begin fulfilling a bet he'd made with Randy by organizing a date (with both of them) for the next night.

After Arie and Randy reported on what they'd learned, everyone was leaning toward Lisa's side of the argument. However, Charlotte and Randy insisted that they needed to try to see the other side as well. They went to the alley, where the other werewolf was waiting. Though they made many attempts to beg it to speak with them, making it clear that its life might depend on it, the werewolf only growled at the group and slunk away down the alley. Charlotte and Randy still felt somewhat uncertain about Lisa's judgment, but they had to agree that the werewolf in the alley was acting suspiciously and decided to take her side the next night.

While Arie went on his date and Charlotte and Randy spent time with Charlie, Melba carried out another plan. If they were actually going to take on the werewolf, and if the stories she'd read on Hunter-Net about werewolves were true, she reasoned they would probably need a lot more firepower than anything their little group could provide - something along the lines of what another werewolf could dish out. So she sat down on a bench near the U and waited for Charles to come by on his nightly run. When he ran by, she flagged him down and asked to run with him. Charles and Melba began to talk and eventually got around to discussing the fact that he was a werewolf, she was a hunter (he kept referring to hunters as "vigilantes"), and she needed his help. Their conversation was long and involved, but in the end he agreed to help the group when they confronted the other werewolf - partially for the satisfaction of ridding the world of evil, but mostly for the glory.

Next: Hunter Session 21