Hunter Session 24

Previous: Hunter Session 23

The next day began with Arie showing up at Dana and Samantha's dorm room and inviting them to hang out around campus. He took two of the babies along with him, wrapping them up in blankets and wedging them into the front seat of his GTO because he still lacked a car seat. Unfortunately for him, during her computer class Melba noticed him walking around with the babies and ran outside to chew him out and make him promise to buy car seats before he did anything else. Leaving the babies with Dana and Samantha, Arie drove to a nearby baby supply store only to get annoyed and leave after he learned how much the seats would cost. Disobeying Melba's instructions, he took the babies back to the apartment building and spent the rest of the day sulking.

Charlotte, however, could only think about the information James had given her. After teaching her classes, she immediately rushed to the apartment building to tell everyone about it. The rest of the group was understandably disturbed and felt they had to act immediately, though they didn't know exactly what to do. Melba pointed out that the group's first priority should be to get their personal items back so Haji would no longer have that power over them, but in order to do that they would have to figure out where he kept them. Fortunately, Arie's backpack still contained the tracking device that Will had put there about two months before when the group invaded the compound under Target, so they decided to follow that signal.

The blip from the tracking device led the group to a dilapidated house near Powderhorn Park with two old human men sitting on the front steps. The group decided not to investigate it right away, but since they were relatively close to Big Mike's repair shop (where Kai was employed) they decided to drop by and see if Kai or any of Melba's other friends knew anything about it. They identified the house as a really bad place to be spending time, but knew nothing specific about it. Most of the group went back to the apartment building, but Melba, Paladin, and Randy decided to stop by Melba's mom's house as long as they were in the neighborhood. At first glance, Melba's mom seemed perfectly fine - she was in a good mood and said she'd made a lot of new friends playing bingo at her church on Sunday nights. But Randy (whose second sight was still active) happened to glance at the house's windows and saw that they'd been replaced with panes that showed up as supernaturally affected and appeared to have eyes superimposed on them, watching the inside of the house. When asked, Melba's mom said some young punks had broken them and she'd had to replace them. But they didn't get really worried until they drove by the church on the way home and noticed that bingo took place on Tuesday nights, not Sundays. Melba was frightened for her mother, but knew this mystery would have to wait until after they finished dealing with Haji.

That night, Arie and Melba went to the hunter bus to ask for backup or at least information on the area around the house, while Charlotte watched the babies and Randy went to Charlotte's house to check up on James. Luckily for Arie and Melba, Steve the bus driver rose to the occasion and showed them an enormous collection of information he had collected on all sorts of supernatural activity throughout the Twin Cities. According to Steve, the vampires in the city were organized into two factions. Vampires like Saigow and Charlie were members of the first faction, which worked very hard to stay hidden. On the other hand, Haji and James belonged to the second faction, which behaved much more like traditionally monstrous vampires, was much more obvious, and seemed to live to cause chaos. The two sides were constantly in conflict, both with each other and internally. The run-down house was actually a place called the Pleasure Dome frequented by members of the second faction. Steve had investigated it about a year before (sneaking in unnoticed during one of the many parties held there) and discovered that the basement led to a network of tunnels leading between all of the houses on that block. The whole place was crawling with vampires. This was apparently where the hunters' personal items were being kept.

Meanwhile at Charlotte's house, Randy encountered a frightened Charlie and a chaotic situation. James was on a rampage through the basement, screaming incoherently and destroying anything he could get his hands on. Randy managed to calm him down just enough to establish that James was angry with Haji for forcing him to commit so many crimes, and that he wanted nothing more than revenge. Sensing an opportunity, Randy let James go get his gang together to confront Haji on the condition that he call Randy when they were getting ready to attack him.

When the group reconvened at the apartment building, it didn’t take them long to assemble a workable plan from the available information When James and his gang attacked Haji, the hunters would use the chaos that would certainly create as cover for them to sneak into the Pleasure Dome, recover or destroy their items, and sneak out before anyone knew they had been there. The only complications to this plan arose from other members of the group. Because of his intense desire to make Haji suffer for his crimes, Arie wanted to be in the park for the fight along with James and his gang. Charlotte and Melba eventually talked him out of this, arguing that they needed his fighting skills in case things went wrong in the house (though Arie secretly planned to slip away from the Pleasure Dome to find Haji as soon as things started to happen).

The second, and larger, problem stemmed from Randy's continued insistence on finding something redeemable in Haji, a position newly inspired by Leslie's actions when the group took on James. Naturally, the rest of the group disagreed, and made Randy promise not to do anything that would endanger everyone else's lives. However, Randy made secret plans of his own, by talking to Charlie and asking him to arrange a meeting with Haji, so that Randy could make one last attempt at redeeming him before James's faction arrived to kill him.

Next: Hunter Session 25