Quote from Mae on August 13, 2019, 11:16 pm

And we were getting along so famously too.

I stood in the wheat as he walked on the road. The foxtails tickled my cheeks and swayed over the frizzy curls in my hair.
"I guess this is goodbye after all." I shrugged and teased a thin-lipped smile. I could pretend to be dissuaded by the prowess of wheels and the purr of an engine. A Buick Riviera … Was there anything about this man that didn't beg painfully to be noticed? I thought finding him was easy enough before I saw the car. Now, I might as well notice his vanity plate as well and make the picture complete.

"You tell the Betines I said 'Hey!' Okay? Be good now, sugar." I flashed a smile and winked my eyes. No reason I should part with him on vinegar, after all, a girl's got more class than the average Jo. "Been nice talking to ya."

Quote from Adriana on August 14, 2019, 9:16 pm

I flashed a half hearted smile as I wholeheartedly drew my door closed.

The scene was compromised. This I knew from the moment I picked up the towel. I could have picked the lock and brushed out my footsteps-I had the tools- but then I wouldn't have gotten the answers I wanted. I'll admit, I was more braced to see Harvey than a member of my pack. I think it would have been a more pleasant and gratifying experience to have run into Harvey.

But the encounter answered a question that had been nagging at me since I started this mission. Before leaving, I drew open my glovebox and took out a pen and small notebook, quickly scribbling something into it, before setting it in the console. Then I drove off, making sure to spin the back wheels out so my tire tracks were clear as black rubber on sun bleached asphalt.

I began for Middlecrest. My first stop was a sandwich shop for a quick bite and a cup of coffee. My second stop was aptly scribbled in the notebook - a crude rendition of the map I'd lost. I didn't need it. I would begin for one of the spots dotted in the saddle of Middlecrest. It didn't matter which one, because I was no longer in this mission for the soul purpose of reaching all of the locations.

I drove into the roundabout parking of a the only acclaimed 5 star hotel anywhere in a two hundred mile radius. I nodded to the valet attendant, stepped out and gave his hand a firm shake. I collect a few key items from my vehicle and began down Richardson St towards Indigo. On the way over, I'd freshened up. There was no longer a scent of cigarette smoke or gunpowder.

I went East on Indigo and North on Sycamore and took a few more lefts and rights, walking a long distance and it was probably about six by the time I reached the next marked location.

Quote from Mae on August 15, 2019, 4:21 pm

I stayed in the wheat field as Mr. White Collar's pretty little car sped away. Behind his screeching tires the field got quiet fast, but the smell of smoke lingered. That was when I noticed another car sitting across the field. It was too far off for me to identify, but I'm pretty sure someone was there. I don't know if he was watching me or taking a roadside leisure, but I got a little closer to mother earth just in case. He stayed awhile, but I couldn't smell him for the direction of the wind. Then, he got in his car and drove west...

*******

The most inconspicuous spot on the map was a smudge, added almost as an afterthought at the edge of the paper. It was a location far off in the saddle between the Turbulence and Phantom Mountain ranges, and as it turned out, a location completely isolated from the road.

"Chaw! Chaw! Chaw!" The native birds cawed overhead.  No other sound traveled through the dense pine trees. Every step brought the crick-snap of a twig, or the crunch of the thick layer of pine needles underfoot. Aside from the occasional fern, the landscape was bereft of much foliage. Even so, a footpath was nowhere to be seen. The roads were far behind. A lot of elevation had already been climbed. Yet, there remained to be seen sight or scent of any human activity in the area.

Truthfully, the precise whereabouts of this location, in the middle of nowhere, would have been hard to find with a detailed topographical map - even the former map would have proved useless. Finding it, if it existed, might be more trouble than it is worth.

Quote from Adriana on August 19, 2019, 10:08 am

The evening chill was beginning to set in. It wasn't a miserable chill. Just nippy enough to keep me awake and alert. I was getting further from civilization with every step. I decided to wait a little longer before changing forms - I still had a couple of hours of daylight left at least - the sun wasn't completely down until about eight this time of the year. So long as there was a chance I may yet see a human, I would wait.

I presently had no idea what was at the end of this trail, although I would use the world "trail" in it's loose as possible sense. Subsequently, the word "end" was a little conspicuous as well, in relation to the former word.

To my dismay, I caught myself thinking about Tiffany. I couldn't remember at the moment which faction she belonged to or if I had met her previously. I may have seen her. Honestly, I wasn't sure. Faces were abstract to me, unless I made it a point to look at them and catalogue them somewhere in my mind. There was a folder for "important faces". All the rest were kind of just arbitrary blurs. This made my dreams extremely strange in that I very rarely saw faces in them. I almost always saw bodies moving absent of faces, or several bodies sharing one or two familiar faces. It is rather creepy. But faces are just an afterthought to the rest.

Somewhere along the lines I had gone from a carefree vagrant to someone who saw the world almost as a complex math problem. I memorized DNA codes and cells and how the brain is mapped, but faces eluded me. I knew how to make concoctions that could force the werewolf change. Currently, I was working on developing something with the opposite effect. That is, to prevent a werewolf from accessing their secondary form temporarily. That was a tricky one. I would have to develop it in a way that inhibits the brain function that's routed to the adrenal nodes that induce the change, as well as target the exact patterns that normally allow the change to happen, but do so whilst avoiding causing brain damage, and therein lied the challenge. Because the virus, from my studies thus far, is both genetically coded and also triggered by some kind of reaction, forcing it is one thing, because the body already has those routes mapped to activate it. Not much different from when your brain tricks you into thinking something's wrong and you go into fight of flight, or when your body releases oxytocin and calms you. It's a series of chemical reactions that allow your body to do something it's already programmed to do. So while the drug was still fairly new, it had been tested on Logan, and I was fairly pleased with the results. It still needed some polishing, however.

That was step one. Inhibiting those chemical reactions by use of a drug - say, using depression medication for example - not perfected, can have negative effects. Suppressing any body function tends to have what I look at as a either an implosion reaction or a delayed bomb reaction.  Implosion being what it sounds like - the body doesn't know what to do with the stored energy and it has a negative internal reaction... in the case of the werewolf change, being as intense as it is, that implosion would be considered eminent death. Or a delayed explosion reaction. Meaning that a werewolf who once had full control of the form, once being administered with the drug, may be inhibited from the change temporarily, but their next change may be far more violent, resulting in new aggression or death. Ergo... said concoction was in the early stages of development and would require possibly years and years of work before being perfected. Ergo, nobody knew I was working on the drug, and it was kept somewhere where I guarantee, it could never be found. Not without me.

Therefore, if I wasn't out in the field sleuthing, and if I wasn't attending Svalnaglas matters, I was by choice, locked in a basement like a mad scientist hunched over my papers. I wanted to know all there was to know. I wanted to know how to increase the survival rate of those newly infected with the virus. I wanted to know how genetics played into it. Maybe I was known by my peers as a good eye, a great ear and an amazing shot, but I hoped to someday be known by mankind and werewolf kind as the one who unlocked the secrets of the werewolf code. Anything that could be explained, would in time, be accepted. That was my endgame.

And with that trail of thought, Tiffany was out of my head, becoming another arbitrary face behind a wall of information and about two hundred thought trains. However, all of that had to be cleared away so I could make room for my surroundings.

I came back down to reality, and carefully examined where I was. Every tree, every scent, every sound was cataloged under “high priority”. I blinked away my thoughts and made sure my senses were clear for the task at hand. What was out here?

Quote from Indy on August 23, 2019, 8:19 pm

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. A poet said that, in 1922.  I do not believe he was one of ours. Or if he was, he knew how to keep a secret from the Svangalas.  And yet sometimes I’ve found two very different people can come to the same conclusion, as though some ideas are just so intrinsic that they will always be ultimately discovered.

And the woods that passed by us.. they were lovely, dark, and deep.  It surrounded us in every direction, and any trace of human civilization was a distant memory; I wondered if, somehow, the overgrowth would swallow our car we’d parked at the edge of the last road in. Even as we walked, it was as though things flitted just out of sight, as if behind a veil.  I inhaled the strange forest scents, but my senses could tell me nothing more than wanted to be known.  Even the map was of little guidance, as if what we sought must be found by feeling rather than logic alone.

Hardly scientific, I know, and perhaps my former academic advisor would have been disappointed.  However, I’d not known the man to appreciate the finer subtleties of life… such as observing his doctorate student was, without fail, never present in the lab on the nights of a full moon. But I digress.

I tilted my gaze upward, catching the corner of Tiffany’s eyes.

“Tiff?” I said in question, stopping.  There was nothing unusual in the pine needle and underbrush, but still I brought out the map again, eyeing the smudge on the map.  Nothing seemed familiar, but I thought, distantly, I could hear something far away.

I shook my head with a sigh, “Miles to go before we sleep…”

Quote from Mae on August 23, 2019, 9:38 pm

Crack! - Pop! The sound of my footfall and bubble-gum bursting coincided. Funny how the time gets away.

"Well," I said. I stopped and took a long look around."I'm not sure we're going to find anything out here, Ionone."

I would have called this goose hunt over hours ago, if not for meeting Mr. white Collar, and the feeling that whatever I was looking for would be long gone if I did.

"Really though," I mused out loud, reflecting on our surroundings. "I'm not sure if this is work or leisure, sugar."

My daddy always did promise me a camping trip. He just never made good on it. Ever since I got out of high school, I figured I would find myself out here sooner or later. I liked the scenes and birds. I could almost forget I was out here for a reason... almost.

Quote from Indy on August 23, 2019, 10:04 pm

I did not reply immediately to Tiffany, but rather I watched the shifting foliage swaying in the gentle breeze.  My grandfather used to tell me that if you listened to the wind, it might tell you what you wished to know. I’m not sure that is true, and after listening in vain in my younger years to the whistle of the wind, I’d taken it metaphorically to mean you must pay good attention to the little details.  Unfortunately, the little details weren’t telling me much of anything at present.

I glanced back at Tiffany, musing once again that two very different people could independently often come to the same conclusion.  We weren’t doing much of anything, out here.  Reason dictated we ought turn around now, with the hope that Tiffany’s supervisors would be sympathetic about the impossible nature of the task.  But.. something else stayed me from it. Pride maybe, because a kitsune was not known to fail often.

I closed my eyes, considering.  The wind passed over me like cold breath, bringing with it scents from faraway.  Just the same green, earthy smells.  If I minded them long enough, I could possibly distinguish the kinds of trees, and flowers, and earth.

“No,” I said without any further reassurance than a hunch, “We’re close…”

“Perhaps we’ve been doing this wrong.  Perhaps we ought not be asking where the place on the map is, but where our little friend has gotten off to.  He would be easier to track”.

Quote from Adriana on August 25, 2019, 9:03 pm

I was looking for something different. It may have been like the first location, a shed in the midst of the woods-long abandoned. Or like the second, it may reveal itself as something loud albeit untouchable. The obvious is by its nature, harder to investigate.

But I was mostly unimportant. A cocky young city cop, sent on an investigation. Young and hungry, only to come up empty handed.

That's what it might look like. I know when I make a mess, and I own up to it. Sometimes, being a little messy gets you ahead in the game. Hunters like Harvey are only knee deep in our world. Not only the werewolf world, but the world I live in specifically. You sell and trade on the black market a little, you think you're a big shot in the crime world.

The kinds of people I know, own the black market, and Harvey was playing a very one sided game of cat and mouse. If  I dangle a little bait every now and then, he might react. When someone reacts to what they don't see, that's what I call opportunity.

I just had to wait for the reaction.

I walked further, changing my trajectory somewhat, keeping an eye on the orientation of the fading sun in the sky to avoid turning around completely, but never keeping a straight line.

Quote from Mae on September 5, 2019, 7:07 pm

The trouble with the sun, is that it never seems to pierce through the trunks of great trees. The trouble with great trees, is that they always cast deep dark shadows, especially when the sun sinks into the west.

With the sun went the light, and with the light went direction. Without direction, the forest was a maze that would go on forever. Aforetime mentioned, there were places in the wilderness around Pinerich that never saw the feet of men. The heights of Turbulence mountain were one such place, for the higher one climbed, the thicker the trees grew, the steeper the rocks became, the colder the night wind blew. Pinerich valley was well darkened before the shadows of a revolving world finally eclipsed that high place. Mankind was truly left behind, and the vastness of unexplored territory lay beyond.

*****

It was all an experiment to him. Add a little this to a little that, in just the right amount, and one might expect a clear reaction. But what if the substance was untested? What if the elements were raw? What if the amount was just a little … off? Well, that is what scientists are for - science itself knowing experiments go often awry.

*****

I've never been so glad to have thick scratchy nobs on my feet than when running through the forest on my hands. In truth, I always rather hated them. A girl does a lot to keep her hands soft and smooth, but no matter what I try there will always be that one night a month when oil and lotion don't do any good. If holding a pencil were easy, I might've had my homework in on time in elementary school, but it looks like no matter how old I get, I'll always stay out late and blame the dog when I come in next day.

Here I was, tromping through the woods like some animal. The strangest smells would catch me off-guard. Who wants to know that a raccoon has done his business nearby? Or that a skunk waddled through with her kits yesterday? I hated it. It was bad enough I had my head this low to the ground and was tripping over roots and twigs. Now I was smelling the cat's meow and the jackalope's galoot looking for some donkey's son.

"Alright, Ionone," I said, breaking from the chase. "I'm done. There isn't anything out here worth finding. But hey, sugar, it isn't all that bad! We can have a couple of stiff drinks when we get back into town."

… Then it won't matter who comes banging in wanting a confession for this goose hunt. I won't remember it anyway.