Hunter Session 31

Previous: Hunter Session 30

The exhausted hunters returned from the construction site with the seriously injured Randy and the comatose Saria. Charlotte wanted to get help for both of them right away, but Melba pointed out that if they did, it would give away the fact that they'd been on the hunt that night despite their earlier refusal to help, and might lead to more problems with Kurt in the long run. Thus, Melba and Paladin patched Randy up as best as they could with Rejuvenate, and a harried Chet agreed to look after Saria. Unfortunately, this meant that Chet and Saria would not be able to come along to Montana as they'd previously planned to do. Randy asked if he could invite Leslie instead, and the rest of the group agreed. Arie crawled out of whatever hole he'd been hiding in for the past few days just in time to claim the sixth ticket the hunters intended to buy.

Early on Saturday morning, Arie, Charlotte, Leslie, Melba, Paladin, and Randy left for the airport and Whitefish, Montana. By afternoon they'd arrived and were checking into their room at the Grouse Mountain Lodge. (It turned out to be one large room with two double beds and a fold-out couch, which would certainly pose some interesting challenges for the couples in the group who were looking for private time.) They spent the rest of the day renting an SUV and driving it around town looking for areas of high supernatural activity. Aside from one or two vampires and blood slaves and a ghost wandering around in an alleyway, Whitefish seemed for the most part to be devoid of monsters. "It'd be a nice place to retire," mused Randy, "but that's about it."

Everyone slept late on Sunday. After lunch, they drove to the apartment building that Melba and Charlotte had identified as Witness1's home. They parked outside the building, which was guarded by a bored-looking front desk attendant. The hunters conferred long enough to agree that it would look strange if all of them tried to enter. They sent Randy in to attempt to gain the desk worker's trust so they wouldn't have to break in. The rest of the group waited in the car while Randy entered the lobby, looked at the directory, and pretended to look confused. When the desk worker finally noticed and asked Randy if he could help him, Randy described Witness1 and asked if he lived in the building. The desk worker confirmed this, but also said Witness1 didn't really get any visitors or leave his apartment all that often. Randy claimed to be a former classmate who'd decided to visit his old friend while in town on vacation. The two men talked long enough for Randy to start getting to know the desk worker, but Randy left before he asked for access to the actual apartment in an attempt to avoid looking suspicious.

On Monday, Randy returned to Witness1's apartment building to make a second attempt at contacting the founder of Hunter-Net. This time, Melba had decided to accompany him over his protests. Fortunately, Randy sweet-talked the desk worker with surprising ease and convinced him to let them go up to the apartment even after Witness1 (or Kim, as the desk worker knew him) did not answer his doorbell. No one answered when Randy knocked on the apartment door. Melba listened closely and heard someone moving around inside, and demanded that they try harder to convince him to come out. The two of them started calling out for him, both as "Kim" and as "Witness1," but still got no response. Fed up, Melba announced, "We're hunters, too, and we need your help."

From inside came the reply: "I'm sorry, but I can't help you. I don't do that sort of thing anymore. You'd better be on your way now."

Annoyed, Melba fired off a huge monologue about how hard they'd worked to find Witness1 and how far they'd come. She got no response. Randy started trying to pass notes under the door incorporating hunter code to convince him that they were the real thing, but after a few of these "help us! No, go away!" exchanges, Witness1 blocked the gap under the door with a piece of wood so that they couldn't even pass notes anymore. When they waited for a few more minutes and nothing happened, Randy convinced her to leave and try again later on.

Melba wanted to go back to Witness1's apartment building right away on Tuesday, but Randy convinced her to give him a day to cool off. Instead, the hunters made the most of their vacation by hitting the ski slopes. Afterwards, Arie, Charlotte, Leslie, and Randy took a tour of a local microbrewery, then spent the evening investigating Whitefish, Montana's many fine bars. Melba and Paladin, not surprisingly, took advantage of the empty hotel room to take advantage of each other.

Wednesday morning proved somewhat unpleasant for Randy, who'd drunk more than his share the night before and was feeling more than a little hung over. Of course Arie decided this was the perfect time to seek revenge for the time Randy accidentally threw a prairie oyster in a ferociously hung-over Arie's eye. So Arie took off for the hotel bar to order a prairie oyster just for Randy. Randy, meanwhile, had managed to drag himself out of bed with the help of Leslie. Just then, Arie burst through the door screaming, "Wake up, motherfucker!" and threw the prairie oyster at Randy's face. Randy's split-second reaction was to activate Bluster in an attempt to redirect the flying booze. The good news was that he avoided getting any of the prairie oyster on him. The bad news was that his edge redirected it into Leslie's eyes. Mortified, Randy ushered Leslie into the bathroom to help her clean up. To this day, she has never suspected Randy's shameful secret.

When everyone was awake and moving, a good old-fashioned hunter argument began. Though everyone agreed that they needed to be persistent with Witness1, they disagreed on the best way to go about it. Melba felt that they'd come too far and worked too hard to take "no" for an answer, and favored either breaking down his door until he'd accept his role as a leader of the imbued, or staying in Whitefish until he agreed to help. Charlotte, on the other hand, pointed out that Witness1 was much more powerful and experienced than they were, and that other hunters probably did this to him all the time (or at least they had in the past). He probably went to Whitefish and took such pains to hide himself in order to avoid that kind of attention, so maybe they'd need to take a different tack than the inexperienced group of hunters seeking aid from the great master. She also wondered about his prolonged absence from the hunt and the sudden disappearance of Hunter-Net - could it be that he'd been compromised by some sort of supernatural force, which would render their intervention not only pointless but dangerous as well? Charlotte wasn't suggesting that they give up, but that they might have to be prepared to accept defeat rather than go to extreme measures to secure Witness1's help (since they'd also been managing all right on their own). Besides, she said, they couldn't afford to spend longer than a week in Whitefish with her classes starting again on Monday. And what about the others' jobs, and the fact that Kurt was at this very moment in Minneapolis, and no doubt causing all sorts of trouble within the hunter community that they'd worked so hard to create? Though the discussion (as usual) ended without a consensus being reached, the reminder of the mess they'd left behind forced all the hunters to admit that their time in Montana was running out.

More than a little frustrated with each other, the group went their separate ways for the afternoon to try to cool off. Arie tried to persuade Melba and Paladin to come snowboarding with him, but they refused; however, Leslie and Randy agreed to come along. Charlotte planned to go shopping for a few hours, but "a few hours" quickly turned into "all day" when she returned mid-afternoon to find Melba and Paladin going at it in the upstairs bedroom. When Arie returned from snowboarding, however, he was not similarly sensitive. He realized what was going on, but rather than giving them privacy he elected to sit down in the living room area and start watching TV. He urged them to continue, saying, "It's okay, guys, you don't have to stop on account of me. We all have our needs." A few hours later, he attempted to climb into bed with them, and was immediately kicked out. That night, Charlotte went out drinking with Arie and some of the drug dealer friends he'd made in Whitefish (he was trying to expand his business), mostly to shut him up since he'd spent most of the trip saying she was too uptight to know how to have fun. However, Arie failed at his self-imposed mission to get Charlotte stoned as well as drunk, probably because he was trying to sneak them to her by putting shrooms in the bottom of her martini glass.

On Thursday, Melba sent Randy back to the apartment building to try to find out more about Witness1 by talking to the front desk attendant. Randy managed to learn a little more about Kim, such as the fact that his only visitor was an attractive young woman who seemed to come and go as she pleased and apparently had a key to the apartment. The desk attendant wasn't sure of her relationship to Witness1, however, or whether or not she had actually moved in with him. When Arie heard this, he got fed up with the lack of progress and decided once again to take matters into his own hands. He told the rest of the group that he was going to take the car and go to meet some friends, then drove to the apartment building instead.

Arie managed to bluff his way past the front desk attendant and up to Witness1's door. A lot of pounding on the door, swearing, and making idle threats did nothing to draw him out, however. Arie decided to pass him a note explaining that they were hunters and what they wanted, but that plan hit a snag because Arie was, of course, illiterate. Undaunted, he resorted to hunter code, borrowing a piece of paper from the front desk and slipping a note under the door that had the symbols for "imbued" and "danger." Witness1 then passed him a response: a directional symbol pointing toward a drawing of a staircase. Arie took this to mean that there was a dangerous monster in the staircase, and took off running to vanquish the threat. After he'd run up and down the stairs a few times, he figured out that the note actually meant "go away." Angry, Arie returned and passed Witness1 a note with the symbol for "bystander," because he meant to call Witness1 a coward for refusing to help. Witness1 took this to mean that Arie was a bystander, took pity on him, and asked him to explain his situation and he'd see what he could do. Arie managed to retain the presence of mind to say that he wasn't the only one involved, and that he'd better bring his friends along because they were better at explaining everything. Witness1 seemed uncertain about this, but told Arie to bring them by the next morning so he could hear the whole story and decide what to do.

The group had agreed that Friday was the last day they could afford to take in persuading Witness1 to help. Thus, they were pleasantly surprised when Arie remembered that he'd managed to secure an invitation for them to talk to the very person they'd come to meet. The entire group made their nervous way to the apartment building, where they proceeded once again to have a talk with Witness1 through the closed door. Things were looking bleak for the hunters until they brought up two essential pieces of information that had previously gone unmentioned: First, Randy mentioned the existence of Hope (otherwise known as the hunter bible), which even the dispassionate Witness1 could not resist wanting to look at. Second, Charlotte told Witness1 about the disk Twitcher had given them before he died and how they received it. Soon, the hunters heard the sound of many deadbolts and locks being released, and Witness1 opened the door and let them in.

Inside the apartment were Witness1 and an attractive young woman matching the description that the desk attendant had given to Randy. Witness1 identified her as Shaker, a fellow hunter who'd been helping him out since she moved to the area. Witness1 told them that Hunter-Net had shut down abruptly due to an extremely destructive virus - apparently of supernatural origin - that had bypassed the protections he'd set up and wreaked havoc. He'd been forced to shut the site down temporarily to keep the data from being destroyed, but he never intended it to become a permanent measure. Witness1 had figured out a way to immerse his entire consciousness into the network to try to strike at the virus at its source. But when he entered the network and tried to strike at the virus (which manifested as an enormous, dragon-like serpent) with his hunter powers, something went wrong. His powers didn't work, the serpent beat him within an inch of his life, and he fled from the network and hasn't been back (or on the hunt) yet. Witness1 seemed to have lost all faith in his own ability to lead the imbued community, and no one could convince him to try again.

Of course, Arie immediately wanted to jump into the network and try to take on the virus head-to-head, but the others weren't so sure. If the virus had been powerful enough to cripple Witness1's faith in himself, how much worse could it do to them? Also, the fact that they wouldn't be able to take any weapons into the network with them would make it somewhat more difficult to fight the virus head-on. Charlotte decided that some investigation was in order first. She asked Witness1 to show her the room where he kept the Hunter-Net servers that were infected with the virus, hoping to use Discern and Pinpoint to learn more about it. The weakness Charlotte discovered was too vague to be very useful, but the information about its lair told her something fascinating. Apparently, the person who had made the virus and ruined the network in the first place was indeed a supernatural. It was Haji!

That settled it for the entire group. They'd taken too much crap from Haji already to let this continue. Everyone asked Witness1 (who seemed relieved that someone else was going to try to solve his problem for him) to help get them into the network - except Leslie, that is, who didn't really want anything to do with a search-and-destroy mission however necessary it might have been. Witness1 threw together a bizarre setup involving old-fashioned computers, joysticks, and duct tape, and soon everyone was inside Hunter-Net (which appeared from this perspective to be a ruined city). Everyone armed themselves with pieces of wreckage and debris, then began stalking the virus through the deserted streets. Before long, the group entered a large open space that had once been a plaza and saw the virus (in the form of a large serpent, just as Witness1 had said) emerging from between the collapsed buildings. It saw the hunters and hissed, and the fight began.

The battle proceeded pretty much as always, which is to say that Melba and Paladin set up Wards, Randy Blustered, Charlotte hit the enemy with various pointy objects, and Arie got the crap kicked out of him. In fact, Arie was injured so badly that under most circumstances he would have died, but instead he just got kicked out of the network with a splitting headache. Arie tried to focus and re-enter...but before he could, he noticed that blood was beginning to drip from the electrical sockets, and that a keyboard was beginning to inch across the countertops and wind its cord around Melba's neck. Arie paused just long enough to throttle the demon keyboard before it could start strangling Melba, then jacked back in. From then on, the battle went somewhat better, as Arie was able to hold the serpent's jaws shut with Demand while Charlotte finished it off with Cleave. Triumphant, the hunters left the network just in time to disentangle themselves from the various electrical cords and peripherals that had intended to cause them serious bodily harm.

Witness1 looked at the network and pronounced it clean, then started running the program Twitcher had given to Charlotte and announced that, given time, it would be able to repair all the damage the virus had caused. Hunter-Net was, for all intents and purposes, as good as new; it just needed people to inhabit it. Witness1 was so pleased with the group's accomplishment that he said he was willing to resume his position as administrator of the network and a leader of the imbued. However, it would take a lot of work to get things back to the level they once were at, and a secure place to work. Melba and Paladin suggested the apartment building in Minneapolis as a new home for both the Hunter-Net servers and Witness1, and he agreed. The next day, the group checked out of their hotel and prepared to return to their home, triumphant, with Witness1 and Shaker in tow...but also a little concerned with what Kurt might have been doing in their absence.

Next: Hunter Session 32