WEREWOLF: West Virginia, Wyld & Wonderful

[Josh]

Paul offered him a small, noncommittal smile. He recognized a fellow smooth talker in action, and of course that begged the eternal question: 'what is his game?'

Because there was always a game. He marked Samir down as one to watch. They might get along just fine, if their purposes roughly coincided. If not, keep friends close and enemies closer.

Owl and Rat had history, and so did their respective tribes. Some Striders were still full of angst over losing their homeland to the leeches a long time back. Hopefully Samir wasn't one of the ones who was hung up over that.

[rhoenix]

Samir looked at each individual as they were introduced, taking special notice to "Joe" when he talked. A small smile crept across his face, his eyebrow raising with interest. "The pleasure is mine as well. What an interesting accent you have, Joe. I must say, I am intrigued. I have been to a very many places in the world, and I do not think I can recognize where that is from. We shall have to speak at some point on from where you hail, that I might familiarize myself with it."

Sees-Faces-In-Stars, in the guise of "Joe-Smith", stopped himself from narrowing his eyes. Here was one who was a downpouring of fine sand; of little words, little subtleties, and little nuances. And like places with many sands, was treacherous to cross or ford. Chimaera often has competition from Owl in the department of secrets, and so too it seemed to be here.

"Joe-Smith" kept his body language and face calm and his breathing slow, as he would if he were meditating under the moonlight on a glacier back home. In a few ways, he was. "I am still learning Eng-lich, so I am honored by your intrigue. I am from places near Tibet."

Chimaera and Owl sometimes left signs to one another for when one crosses another's path, for both explored where few others could cross. They were not friends, but not enemies either - and that was not a bad way to be in these times.

[General Havoc]

Concerns about the relative allegiances of various tribal totems could not be further from Sophie's mind at the moment. She'd heard of the Striders of course, but never seen one in person. Stories were mixed, of course, which was only to be expected, given the part of the world the Striders were from and their habit of popping up literally everywhere, especially where they weren't wanted. She had seen more than one less-than-complementary reference towards "Sand-flea-ridden, homeless mutts" on a web-board somewhere from some less-than-openminded Glasswalker. Likely the same ones that would have regarded her as a mule and everyone else here as technophobic barbarians. Fuck 'em.

"Good to meet you too," she said to Samir, trying to sound friendly. No use pissing Owl's children off on her first time meeting them. She thought about identifying her clan, but she figured that the bluetooth earpiece, the laptop bag, and the AR glasses mounted atop the bill of her baseball cap would probably do that for her.

"What brings you all the way out here?" she asked. Obviously Striders went wherever they wanted, but that didn't mean there wasn't a reason. Maybe he'd share it and maybe he wouldn't, but of all people, she'd expect a Strider to understand the virtues of looking for more information. They were the only clan that did it as much as the Glasswalkers, after all, albeit with different methods.

[Hotfoot]

Samir nods to "Joe", smiling. "Ah, Tibet. I have only travelled past there briefly, but it was quite an interesting time. Sadly I did not have time to sightsee, but such is the way of things," he turned to Sophie and raised an eyebrow briefly, his smile ever on his face.

"An excellent question, to which there are many answers. The first of which is obvious, I was helping our good Doctor Tennant obtain an item which he desired, and in return he has bestowed upon me things of value to me. The second, the simple dodge, which is that I was travelling in the company of my very extended family and I just happened to be in the area as a result. Then, of course, there is simple wanderlust. The desire to be places that I have not been before, or simply to be elsewhere from where I was. These all are true in their own way, but as with anything, it is the measures of their truth that matter most. Perhaps the truth that matters most is that among my many loves, and oh I have many, books and the knowledge within them are perhaps one of my greatest. I suspect much is the same of you, yes?" He gestured vaguely to the variety of technology Sophie was wearing, and no doubt carrying. "With all that, you could probably store and read twice the number of books I have seen in my entire life. More, no doubt, I do not keep up with these things as often as perhaps I should. Marvelous things, those devices, but I am hopeless at using them myself. Perhaps, when you are done here, we could sit, talk, and you could show me what sort of fascinating things you can do with these devices of yours." His voice became slightly more serious as he gazed into Sophie's eyes, his face now clearly focused. No more was he glancing about or bouncing from topic to topic, but rather he was watching her quite closely, having moved towards her slowly while he was talking to her, but staying far enough from her to give her some space.

[Cynical Cat]

This Samir could spare with the best of them. If he was Garou the stereotypical guess would be Silent Strider but Alex was a big city boy and the child of a Sept Leader. He had met black Get of Fenris and blond Stargazers. Best to let Samir talk and reveal more about himself that way. Especially since and Sophie looked ready to start dancing. Verbally, of course.

[LadyTevar]

"Tibet, eh?" Dr Tennent asked with raised eyebrow. "Spent some time there once, very nice people. None named Joe Smith, but I assume that's a nom de guerre?" He had taken the package from Michael's hands and was now unwrapping it on the table. "Ah... that is perfect..." the little man said, holding up a set of small vacuum tubes that glowed with their own light. Which was odd, as they were not attached to a visible power source. "This is exactly what I was hoping for. I assume they're one-use only?"

Michael nodded. "Yeah, doc, sorry. One shot and they're back where they came from."

"Well, that is a shame, but that is to be expected. Laws are Laws, you know." Dr. Tennent replied. "Now, if the young man with the map tube, Alexander, was it? If he would be so kind, I have the 1800s map of the Kanawha Valley's Adena structures like you asked, Michael. A shame most of them were knocked down and plowed over, not even a proper study of the Artifacts! You haven't picked an easy task, my boy."

Michael's eyes were all on the rolled up map, and it was clear his fingers were just itching to unroll it right there, but he was attempting to play it cool. "Nothing's ever easy, Doc. Who knows, maybe something's left down there. What of the other package?"

"The oth.... OH! Oh! yes. That." Doctor Tennent gently set the package of glowing vac-tubes down and pulled a small pouch from out of his pocket. "In theory, this should draw the contaminates into a single ball, purifying the contents left behind. You shouldn't need the whole package, but it will depend on the circumference you're wishing to cover." At this point the Doctor eyed all of the young people before him. "I am going to wish you all luck. Contaminations of this magnitude are disturbing, to say the least. I will continue to refine the solution until it can be used internally without harm to the ingestor. At this point the contaminate particles are quite energetic when they separate from the base material."

Michael's eyes were slightly glossy from the wealth of multisylable words, but he covered well "Ok, everyone get that? No ingesting of the powder."

[General Havoc]

What Samir's game was, Sophie could not fathom. That he had one was unquestionable, and not knowing what it was made her uncomfortable in a way she did not like in the slightest. As it was, she had to fight off the urge to slip on her OHMD and bring up an AR overlay, any overlay, just to feel the re-assurance of the myriad tech spirits flowing invisibly about her, like a suit of electronic armor. As it was, she settled for smiling and sliding her smartphone into her hand, casually glancing at it as though checking the time, confident that, if nothing else, Samir had no idea what it could actually tell her.

"Books only say what they're told to," she said. "One story, no changes, black and white. Nothing wrong with that, of course." She lifted her eyes from the glowing screen and smiled as disarmingly as she could.

"But I use my tech for more than just storage," she said. "Anyone can read the world if they look carefully enough, but I'd rather rewrite it. And they help me do that. If you're looking to figure out how to do the same, then I'm afraid you'll need more than a Kindle, but maybe I can show you a trick or two...

It HAD been a while since she'd gotten the chance to hack something after all...

The discussion elsewhere in the room attracted her attention as the talk turned to contaminate particles and energetic reactions from base materials. Only now did she think back and replay the rest of the conversation in her mind, and determined that something was going on here it might be worth knowing about.

"Just what contaminates are we being asked to clean up that we need something like this?" she asked. Maybe this wasn't the time or place, but two years of being run around on little information in pursuit of God-knew-what had left her with little patience for those who wanted her to "find communion with her own answers" or some other damned thing.

[Josh]

On the one hand, a fucking idealist with big ideas about changing the world, the worst kind of 'get your own pack killed' type.

On the other hand, the Walker did seem to know something about all that gobbledygook, which could come in very handy down the road when the inevitable hitches developed in whatever brilliant scheme was being cooked up and they would all be running for their lives.

Paul cast a casual glance over the others, mentally calculating which ones were the most likely to be easily outrun.

[LadyTevar]

Michael looked over at Sophie. "Remember? Big Chemical Spill? Reason why you're Here, and not There?"

[General Havoc]

"I know about the chemical spill," she said. "But 'chemical spill' covers a lot of ground. What are we dealing with here? Arsenic? Mercury? Plutonium? Or something more exotic than that."

This was like telling a group of werewolf warriors that they had to go kill "enemies" and expecting them to leave it at that. Just because most wolves had no use for science didn't mean she was among them.

[LadyTevar]

"Ah, so your technology did not keep up with the news since January?" Doctor Tennant asked, beating Michael to the reply. He turned to Sophie, straightening up on his crutches and clearly going into Professor Mode.

"The chemical spill occurred 4 months ago, at a facility storing 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol. It's a chemical used to 'clean' coal in a process I will not go into. But the chemical, which is called MCHM for short, smells like licorace and had -never- been tested for its effects on the human body. The spill site was up-river of the intake valve for the West Virginia American Water Company, which supplies water to nine different counties around Charleston. For over a week, none of those counties had potable water, as it was hazardous to cook, clean, or bathe in. Even the hospitals were on water restrictions, and the indicent was declared a Federal Emergency."

Michael broke into the lecture at this point. "We've been doing what we can, but that 'chemical' was a little tougher than we expected. We had to start where it was weakest and work our way back to the source. That's why we called for help from Outside."

"Hmph," Doctor Tennant snorted. "If we had more cooperation 'Outside', as you put it, this world would not be in the shape it's in. 'Stand Together, or Die Alone'." The older man gave a heavy sigh. "Too many have chose to 'Die Alone', and it's only hurt us in the long run."

[Josh]

Something about the statement pricked at Paul. "There's plenty of 'em that've died together, too," he said, his damaged throat turning it into a somewhat raspy growl. "The problem with comin' together behind 'one dream' is that everywhere you turn somebody's got a dream to sell."

He turned away from the conversation, reflexively tamping down the anger that had prompted him to speak before it spread, before he crushed this little man with his high-minded talk and unscarred flesh. Paul'd known plenty of believers, fought by their side, listened to their last breaths rattle out of their bodies and howled dirges at their passing.

Sometimes they'd even died trying to do something worth a fuck. That maybe made it a bit easier to live with.

[General Havoc]

Of course she'd heard of the spill last January, but she'd assumed that they'd been called out for some fresh catastrophe, not the residue of this one. She assumed this because, as usual, people weren't telling her a goddamn thing and then getting lippy about the fact that she consequently didn't know anything. Two years of people mouthing off about how scandalous it was that she had a Gmail account and a smartphone, and now this guy wanted to give her flak for not reading his mind?

All right, if that's how he wanted to play...

Sophie said nothing overtly, did nothing but casually slide the tablet out of her backpack and idly slide her finger over it, looking like nothing but another college freshman bored by some lecture from a professor whose subject didn't interest her. But anyone who knew Sophie well knew what tended to happen whenever she reached for L-CARS. Sophie drawing this tablet out tended to be a precursor to a massive series of unidentified security breaches on every computer system within the county.

This guy wanted to cast aspersions on her ignorance? Well fine then. There was an easy way to abate that...

... or apparently not. She hadn't counted on him having no phone at all, not even a basic cell, no access point whatsoever. She would have to widen her scope a bit.

Fortunately that was entirely possible.

[Hotfoot]

Samir smirked as Sophie fell into her element, watching her carefully as he moved closer. "May I? I rarely get to see such things in action when in the hands of someone capable. All too often we are running in different directions and that is quite the shame." He watched her handling her devices and smiling and grinned back, "Re-write the world? That is an interesting choice of words. My father often said that those that write the books have influence over the world, for we can only know what they have written."

At the mention of the spill, Samir raised an eyebrow. "A chemical spill? Most terrible, I don't believe I heard much about it besides that it happened, but you are ecologists? Is the university here helping with studying the effects on the land, or are you now engaging in trying to repair the damage?"

Quickly, he noticed the change in Sophie's demeanor, and saw her pull out another piece of technology. When she did so, he pretended he saw nothing, but continued to watch quietly when he could sneak a glance.

[Cynical Cat]

Alex arched his right eyebrow as he wait for Sophie to hack up a storm. Just because she wasn't an Ahroun didn't mean she lacked sharp teeth.

[rhoenix]

"Joe Smith," having become used to Sophie engaging in her distinct sort of techno-wizardry, hid a smile at the sight of her deliberately giving Samir only half her attention. Yes, he thought, this might just make for interesting times, as he leaned against the wall, getting comfortable.

[LadyTevar]

Doctor Tennant looked to Paul with sorriful eyes. "And you sir, are very right. You'll find, however, that I share a lot more of your dream than most of my colleagues outside the state."

Michael stepped in before the Doctor could go off on another lecture. "Sorry, we thought Hattie would have filled ya'll in," he explained. "While the doc here is helping us, there's a lot more finger-pointing than there is finding solutions. What we needed was more muscle when we," Michael made a quick figure in the air -- the glyph for Garou, "go to the source of the spill and finish it off."

"As I said," Doctor Tennant broke in, "I made that powder to help remove the source of the contaminates that have been damaging people and the environment. I did not think it needed to be said what that source is." Above their heads, the Library Carillion rang out the half-hour. "But now, I have a class to prepare for, while you and young Michael need to get that powder back to Charleston." He gathered his items into a backpack and shrugged it on, balanced on his canes. "I wish you well in your hunting." He hobbled to the elevator, which happened to open just as he got to it. Once inside he turned around and looked at them. "Kill that thing."

[Josh]

"Well that was inspiring," Paul said as the doors closed. "What do we have, what do we know? Details would be good."

For what they'd be worth. Most of the time it meant only going in half blind, but that was better than being totally in the dark.

[General Havoc]

When in darkness, light a torch...

Sophie turned her full attention to her tablet, logging onto the campus wifi and reaching out across the infinite, invisible streams of tech spirits. They existed to find and transport information, and that was what she asked them to do. Every scrap of information on the chemical spill, every outraged blog post, every student hypothesis, every table of data left in a cloud drive by some UWV grad student, she would collate it all. If fingerpointing was all that had happened so far, it was because nobody had actually done anything, as usual, and the professor deciding that after five requests for information that he should still "not say" what the source of the contamination was was of little help. If he meant the Wyrm in general he should say so, and if he didn't, then she was getting very tired of being sent into the woods to kill something everyone else knew the identity of and thought it funny not to tell her.

Well that was his problem. They weren't in the woods now, and no professor of anything at an accredited university was without a presence online. If this guy thought that not carrying a smartphone was going to stop her, then he had another thing coming. Sophie could remotely connect to the NSA's Echelon servers from here. The campus firewall was not going to keep her out. With the touch of a couple buttons and a soundless invocation to Cockroach, she instructed her spirits to steal every scrap of data the University, the State, and the Federal Government itself had on the good Professor., every Email he had sent or received, every web page he had ever visited or listed his name, every paper he had written, contributed to, or acted as a member of the committee for. She asked them to give her everything, bank accounts, driver's licenses, birth certificates and tax returns. A genealogy straight from the LDS archives going back a dozen generations, a medical history that recorded everything down to the last immunization. If the spirits were willing, she would take a complete copy of the professor's entire life, without the slightest hint that she had ever done so, and decide at leisure what to do with it all.

One mocked a Glasswalker's lack of information at one's peril. It was akin to telling the Get they couldn't fight.

[General Havoc]

It was the same old story. Company is founded, company screws the locals, company fucks up and does something they can't cover, company burns its cover and starts over with the aid of a number of tax loopholes and bankruptcy protection. This much was an old story. Being involved in wyrm-spawned superfund disasters was perhaps less so, but not unheard of. They weren't all out here to take in the mountain sights after all.

She gave the professor a glowering look. Would it have been so difficult to answer her damn question? No, of course not, he had to play kick-the-nerd with her. Unfortunately, right now she had a much better target to play with. She'd deal with this officious douche later.

"I think I've got what I need here," she said, a statement that probably sounded cryptic to anyone that didn't know her, and an augury of imminent electronic unpleasantness to anyone that did. Technophobic rubes who pissed her off were one thing. Massive Wyrm-lacing corporations screwing everything in sight over were quite another.

She marshaled her legion of tech spirits, mustering them for a proper operation, and then she began.

The first step, as always, was information. Knowing what her enemy was would let her decide how to deal with it. And so with a few keystrokes and fingerswipes, she began placing requests for information from all manner of proxy servers and dummy identities for everything and sundry. A dead finance executive from Dallas, whose corporate identity account with his multinational bank had never gotten around to being deleted, asked for contact information for all of Lexycon's second-tier finance officials. A government cluster nominally belonging to the US Justice Department issued a 1,300 page immediate subpoena for documents relating to a merger from five years ago, perfectly routine save for a few probing requests secreted into page 871. A distributed botnet established a couple years before by a Chinese industrial espionage team, one that the Chinese still thought was under their control, initiated a root hack to slip into the company's servers and steal "technology", wyrm-tainted or otherwise. And so on it went, a series of information searching, swoops, and hacking attempts, each one different from the last.

All this was fairly automatic, for it was the sort of thing Sophie had been doing since she first learned to type. Some of these approaches would probably fail, but there was nothing to link them together, no common thread to alert a probing security technician. It was merely reconnaissance, the better to enable her to decide exactly where and how she was going to utterly and remorselessly destroy this entire company. Someone with a more even temper, or merely a greater respect for the concept of due process, might have been tempted to leave the decision to destroy until after guilt had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But given that Sophie was the one orchestrating this operation, that much was pure conjecture. By the time she was done with this company, its entire board would be in jail for tax evasion, fraud, and child molestation (planted evidence or otherwise), its financial assets would be either drained dry or locked into escrow accounts for the next century and a half, and the DoJ would be initiating RICO proceedings into the entire organization after 'discovering' secret and previously-unsuspected connections to Russian mobsters, international terrorist organizations, and Mexican drug cartels.

Of course the company's holdings were another matter entirely, but then that's why they had a posse of pissed-off, nine-foot werewolves. It was also why she had a shotgun.

[Josh]

Paul watched the Walker bury herself in the glowing device. He had plenty of criticisms for the way the Walkers lived, hiding from the visceral reality of the world and attempting to bind it down with definitions and laws that squeezed the Wyld from all things so that Cockroach could scuttle through neat, organized, and sterile structures.

Half the time he felt they were already hopelessly lost in the webs of the Weaver.

The other half the time, he had to admit that it was handy having one around to get info that would otherwise have to be extracted through lengthy conversations that utilized hot coals and pruning shears as means of persuasion.

Of course if they needed that sort of information he would readily step forward. He waited for Sophie to emerge from her data trance.

[Cynical Cat]

"There's more than one way to make a man bleed," said Alex with a shark toothed smile.

[LadyTevar]

Michael sighed heavily. "Look, I'm sorry for the secrecy, but we don't like -others- to know that we're working with the Doc, and there's those who would really get bent outta shape if they knew. Outside of here, it's still Us versus Them, ya know?" He looked around at their faces, and realize, no, they didn't.

"Ah dammit.. Susan's gonna kill me.' he sighed, scratching his shaggy black hair. "Ok, since Hattie didn't tell you, the chemical had a nasty Bane infestation. We've got 'em all but the Mommy, who's hiding at the site. The Doc's distant Kin, and he's got gifts that lets him brew up potions like this," Michael shakes the pouch slightly. "But, since there's others out there who're after the Doc for his power, and who don't like us, we try to keep the meetings on the down-low."

"So, if the Doc's done his job, the powder pulls Mommy out of hiding, and we kill her before she births more babies. Got it? Any questions? Besides the fact I've no idea why Hattie and Susan refuse to talk straight with each other?"

[Josh]

"We need the geography we're going into, what else might stick in when we go after the mama bane, what we have on the mama bane so we can figure out what we do if the magic potion doesn't kill the mama bane, how we're going to get out if everything goes bad, what we're going to do if we do drop the mama bane and everything else in the neighborhood steps off on us."

Paul ticked off the requirements on his fingers as he spoke. Even those who leaned toward the wyld could appreciate some level of structure in life and death matters. "Build it from the ground up. Let's get our physical and umbral layouts, work on our routes in and out, work out what we know of what's in the neighborhood that's going to get pissy when we slide in. A bit of scoutin' is probably in order." He looked at Samir. "I'm up for that if you are."

[LadyTevar]

Sophie's web-spanning friends complied data, and sent it back to her, giving her all she ever needed to know on the spill and the Freedom Industries that owned it. As expected, the company was a shell that was bought and sold between the same five people, each one taking CEO position as the name changed. It had just changed names and CEOs again barely a month after the spill in an attempt to declare bankruptcy.

Oddly, for once, the WV State Courts were not buying it, and fighting to get them to pay up. That might be a chain to follow at another time.

Yet the real prize for Sophie was the lovely full-color satellite feed. In one-meter crispness, it showed Freedom Industries stretched out in a narrow triangle between narrow hillside road, and the Elk river. The spiders even helpfully pointed out the leak site -- from the two storage tanks furthest away from the office, the workshop, and out of view from any houses. A small dock extended out from the office and workshop area, where barges could be emptied and filled from the storage tanks. At the top of the mountainside, unreachable from the road, was Yeager Airport's south-facing runway, which would take an unlucky plane right into Elk River.

This site was as hidden and secluded as it could get for being in the middle of the largest city in the state.