Hunter Session 09

Previous: Hunter Session 08

After resolving the problem with the supernatural bear at the construction site and getting their names cleared, the hunters were somewhat unsure of what steps to take next. Arie and Will were continuing with their lives as before, but Melba decided to make some changes. She moved out of her mom's house and got her own apartment in Paladin's building, cut off her dreadlocks, and found a job waiting tables at an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood. During this time, she also got to know Paladin better, and learned that one of the many things they shared was a desire to maintain a normal life outside of the hunt. One thing led to another, and soon he'd talked her into going on a date with him. The date itself was cut short when they started a snowball fight and Paladin's old knee injury flared up. However, they agreed to do it again sometime.

Marta also knew exactly what she wanted to do next. Since she'd been kicked out of school following the murder charges and couldn't return until the spring semester began, she took a part-time job at the front desk in the apartment building for extra money and took advantage of her free time to investigate the mystery of the guardians. Darla learned of Marta's quest and told her about a special collection at the public library that might have the information she was looking for. Darla took Marta to a strange room in the basement of the Uptown Library, where Marta found a huge amount of books that seemed like they might be helpful. She checked out a few of them, but hit a brick wall when she found that a number of them (including one particularly interesting-looking one called the Dictionary Magica) were written in a language she couldn't understand. So Marta looked at the check-out cards in the backs of the books she’d already found and started cross-referencing the names of people who’d checked out the books before her. (Summarizer's note: in case you didn't already know that we played this game in 2001...) In this way she hoped to find someone who knew the language and could teach it to her. Eventually, Marta found three names that kept cropping up over and over: Brian Johnson, Heather Kashi, and Benjamin Carlson.

Marta took the books home and began reading them, finding some intriguing information in the process. Specifically, the legend of the guardians was connected to an obscure nomadic tribe called the Hebedites who lived in the Middle East around 1500 BCE. The guardians had been sent to the Hebedites by their gods with the mission of protecting and helping the tribe in all areas of their lives. There had been twelve guardians, each with areas of control that corresponded roughly to the twelve signs of the zodiac. However, after many centuries of peaceful and harmonious existence, a number of the guardians became corrupt and began to use their power for evil and selfish ends instead of for protection. Only three of them - the guardians corresponding to Scorpio, Virgo, and Gemini - remained faithful, and were killed by the other nine. As punishment, the gods stripped the surviving guardians of their powers, took away their ability to reincarnate and thus perpetuate themselves through the generations, and scattered the Hebedites.

From all of this, Marta (and Melba, with whom she'd been sharing her research) drew the conclusion that Chet and Saria were not hunters but newly reincarnated guardians. Chet was Scorpio and Saria was Virgo (she gathered this because of their birthdays). The lobster-scorpion who had saved her from Cameron had been Chet, because each of the guardians had "battle forms" and Scorpio's looked very much like what she had seen. It seemed as thought history was repeating itself, with the other guardians (like Cameron, Talc, Sarn, and Blak) becoming corrupt again and trying to bring Chet and Saria over to their side.

Marta also tried to contact the other people who'd checked out the books. Brian Johnson didn't know anything, but Heather Kashi was an interesting case. When Marta looked up her phone number and called it, she heard from two women named Wendy and Heather who claimed to know Chet and Saria and also to have a lot of information on hunters in general. They were willing to set up a meeting to talk. The hunters made plans to meet them at Chino Latino in a few days.

The last name on the list, Benjamin Carlson, also yielded some interesting information. He was a professor of classics at the University of Minnesota who was intrigued by Marta’s interest in the Hebedites. He told her that he couldn't give her too many specifics on the tribe, but that he knew another professor, Hakim il-Batin, who could. Marta contacted Hakim and explained her search, and he replied, "Well, if you'll come to see me I could take you back, if you want." Marta wasn't entirely sure what he meant by that, but she agreed to meet him at noon the next day.

During all this, Arie was bored out of his mind. To pass the time, he started sitting at the front desk all day with Darla even though Paladin wasn't paying him for it. One day, he noticed three stray cats that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere wandering around in the lobby. Darla thought the cats were cute and started playing with them, but warning bells went off for Melba when she noticed that the cats looked "wrong" to second sight. Melba took her concern to Paladin, but she phrased her concern rather poorly ("I looked at those cats with second sight, and they were not human!" "They're cats, Melba. Of course they're not human.") and most everyone dismissed it.

Meanwhile, Arie took the cats up to his apartment and tried to feed them some shrooms. They wouldn't eat them at first, so he cooked the shrooms into a pot of Rice-A-Roni which they immediately puked up onto his carpet. Annoyed, he went downstairs to yell at Darla about the mess that "her" cats had made, but when he took her up to the apartment the cats were gone. Arie was confused, Darla was convinced he'd just been tripping, and Melba was left with the unshakable feeling that something dangerous was going on.

Next: Hunter Session 10