Unearthing a Den (Attn: Bodycount, Keys, Snow)

Snow looks at her packmates, momentarily satisfied. She moves to the oak tree in search of acorns.

Keys busts out laughing when Bodycount reminds her about one of her old boy-toys. She bats his hands away as she walks backwards towards the building. "Girl gotta mark her territory, you know? 'Sides, he'll have it to always remind him of de best two weeks he evah had. Not my fault he got tinkin' that it gave him de right to go all Chris Brown on me. Wolf or not, I ain't nobody's bitch."

"If we doan get dis done quick," she says, pointedly rubbing her stomach as she walks, "dere ain't gonna be a steakhouse open for us to go to, no matter how good we smell."

"With the amount of work we've got ahead of us tonight, I think you might have to settle for sausages and bacon, and maybe a plate of pancakes," says Snow, who has already gathered up a good pile of acorns and is working on gathering more. "But we'll grab something to eat before its too late.

"Pancakes." Keys snorts in disgust as she starts searching for acorns to make her own pile. "If I'm gonna pass up a steak for someting, it won't be for no pancake. Now if dey had a Waffle House out here, dat wouldn't be so bad.

Snow holds the end of her shirt out to make a basket and gathers the acorns up inside, then ferries them across the dry and cracked grounds to the mouth of the hole. She dumps them in a pile just outside it and waits for her packmates to do the same.

Once the pile is reasonably impressive, she takes a handful of the acorns and tosses each one into the hole so that some are further in than others and they form a trail from inside leading to the large pile outside of it.

"Now we wait," she says. "This could take all night, and it may not work at all. Bodycount, I want you to take up position across the grounds near the building where you can see the hole. Don't get too close, as I don't want you in any danger and I don't want you to frighten whatever's in there. If you see something, call me and I'll try to figure out what it is."

"Keys, I've got an extremely important job for you. Since you did such a good job finding this place, I want you to make an inventory of what we'll need to outfit it appropriately. Everything from electricity to beds for sleeping to food. You're going to be in charge of the den long-term, and I'll tell the others that you are allowed to assign them chores and duties to get things set up and to maintain the place."

"I am going to set about warding this place off from human intrusion. We don't want anyone wandering in uninvited, as that could get very bad for them. The sooner we get the wards up the better."

"Does that sound good to everyone? Any questions or additional concerns?"

Bodycount doesn't say much as they're gathering the acorns, just looks a bit dejected as it becomes increasingly clear to him that the writing on the wall says "Fast food, yet again".

When he suddenly and immediately gets assigned to guard duty as they're dumping the nuts in front of the cave, however, he speaks up in protest.

"Uh, what? What do you mean, 'now we wait, maybe all night'? What happened to 'getting food'?"

Snow sighs. But she knew he was right. They were hungry and needed something to eat.

"Alright, yeah," she says. "We'll get something to eat and then get back to work. And we should get something for Johnny, Breaker, and Wukong, too. Keys, can you look up something around here? Something close? We'll run out real fast."

Keys nods understanding of her assignment. She had already started the list, so it would be easy enough to do the complete work-up. She was right there with Bodycount, though, regarding eating. Skinny Snow may be able to live on air and intensity, but Keys was a teenage uratha with an appetite to match!

"Can I at least call de guys an' let 'em know we're settling in an' dey should bring dinner when dey come back? We got de grill in de van -- dey could stop at de store an get some steaks an' we can get Johnny grillin' up food for all of us," she asks hopefully.

Snow smiles. "That's a good idea. You can get directly in their voice mail, right? Call 'em and leave them a message or send a text. We'll let them do the dirty work of picking up the food."

Keys looks to Bodycount for his reaction to the new plan. "Steak, not Mikkey D's. An' we doan have to stop here. De guys can't be dat much longer with they're job. 'Specially once dey know dinner's waitin' on dem."

Bodycount nods and shrugs. "Yeah, if they can get hold of some real food, that would be great. Just as long as they're not going to stay out there all night."

He walks over to the tree and manages to find another handful of nuts, which he takes with him over to the place where he's been assigned to stand guard.

Sliding slowly down into a sitting position against the wall, he begins cracking the nuts between two stones and eating them while keeping an eye on the cave, occasionally letting his attention drift for a couple of seconds in order to throw pieces of nutshell at Keys.

Keys settles down and pulls her laptop out of her backpack. The site was perfect for the den, but she was going to have to tap into her personal wireless network rather than hack someone else's; one of the down sides to being so far away from other buildings.

She ignores the first few nutshells tossed at her, but after the third one she throws it back at him. "Watch it," she hisses at him, "or de next deed you can commemorate on dat pretty canvas of yours will be Bodycount's Great Latrine Cleaning!" She smirks mischievously.

Bodycount sighs, drops the acorn-cracking stone, crosses his arms, leans back against the wall and watches the damned cave ad the god-damned pile of acorns in front of it.

Keys feels bad when she sees Bodycount sulking. She was staying outside so she could see both him and Snow if something happened, but she figured she could do that from where he was sitting. She got up and moved over to sit against the wall next to him. She dimmed her laptop screen as far as it would go and called up the Google satellite map. As she copied it over to Photoshop, she nudged him and whispered "Hey, BC, you had a chance to run about more dan I did. Where you wanna put de dogs?"

She'll talk quietly with her packmate as she draws a rough layout of the building over the satellite photo, waiting for something to get bold enough to come out of the cave.

Bodycount places an arm around Keys' shoulders, seeming to lighten up a bit at the company.

"Well, at first we'll just stash the cages in the garage, and keep them in there when they're not getting exercized, is what I'm thinking. I need to go and buy some wire tomorrow, though, so I can get started on fixing that fence. Once the fence and the cave is sorted, they can just roam the grounds as long as the weather doesn't turn bad, unless any of them need to get separated from the rest for some reason. I'll want to build a shed for them up against the garage eventually, but the fence is a bigger priority right now."

"If you want the dogs to roam free we may not be able to work out a deal with any sort of squirrel spirits, if that's what they are," says Snow as she walks up to the two of them. She has been walking the grounds again and returned with frustrated look on her face. "I suppose that's ok. I'll just have to keep that in the back of my mind when dealing with them."

"On a different note, I don't think the wards will work on an area this large," she admits. "I could do the building, but it seems pretty pointless at that point."

Bodycount looks up. "That sounds like even more reason to let the dogs roam free."

"Perhaps on both accounts," Snow agrees.

Without moving from the companionable comfort of Bodycount's embrace, Keys listens while adding more detail to the layout of the den. "Once we get de fence fixed, de dogs be good enough for wards 'gainst people, even our People. As for spirits, well, we can't be letting mutts do all our work for us, can we?"

"We could turn one of de rooms downstairs into a kennel, den give dem a way to go outside when dey want to. Doggie doors or someting." She looks up at Snow.

"You know, we could just toss a smoke bomb down de hole, see what come out."

"Let's just try the acorns first," says Snow, "though if you're impatient there is another way. We could walk over to a less blighted area and ask a different spirit what it is that claims this space. That is, if the two of you are up to negotiating for information."

Bodycount looks surprised, pondering it for a moment before shaking his head, looking into Snow's eyes.

"If we are...oh, hell no, screw that! I know you and the Boss used to talk to spirits that way sometimes, but it always felt really wrong to me. I prefer you being you. So if the choice here is between watching a pile of acorns all night or watching your body get borrowed by some lowlife spirit, and to top it off, ask favors from it while it's doing that..."

He looks back towards the cave, shaking his head. "I'll watch the acorns," he concludes.

"Why not just call one here?" She looks up at Bodycount before turning to Snow. "Ain't got to go sharin' bodies or noting. If it gets dis done sooner, I could pay de price. Can't have de alpha weakened when we ain't got no locus settled yet, so it can't be you."

Snow frowns at Bodycount's description of her ability. "Its not sharing bodies. The spirits just speak through my voice. They remain safely on the other side and never touch me at all. But that's fine."

"Anyway, Keys is right," she says, and she kneels down so that she's not towering above the others. She puts her hand on Key's knee and looks at her warmly, in stark contrast to their confrontation from moments before. "Maybe you should be the Ithaeur, since the answer is so obvious and I didn't think of it."

"We will summon a squirrel. You can do the summoning. Something small, but intelligent enough to know the area. Maybe it will be from the hole itself, or maybe it won't. But it should know, either way."

"Before you do that, I will draw a binding circle to hold it here. When you summon the squirrel, I will howl the final words of binding. And it won't be able to escape until it tells us what we want to know."

"Yeah, well, I prefer your voice being yours, too," Bodycount replies stubbornly, keeping quiet as the plan changes into one of summoning a spirit. He refocuses his attention on the pile of acorns.

Snow rises and walks over to a clear, flat patch of earth that can't be seen from the street and isn't too near to the hole. She walks the area, back and forth, examining the space, measuring in her head, and then counting paces.

She pulls from her waist her long, wicked looking ritual dagger that curves like the fang of some prehistoric predator. The dark metal seems made of the stuff of shadows itself, and it barely reflects the lights of the city or the pale glow of the crescent moon. Still, it has a faint, sickly green undertone that you know is due to the spiritual poison imbued into the blade itself when it was forged.

Slicing her finger with the long cutting edge, she coats the blade with a veneer of her own blood before her wound quickly closes up before your eyes. She grows larger and more muscular as she assumes her dalu form, kneels down, and stabs violently into the earth.

Snow moves slowly, widdershins around an invisible circle that she makes real as she slashes and cuts at the ground with her blood soaked dagger. As the perplexing lines of the circle materialize, and Snow cuts complex glyphs that resemble the marks left by powerful claws in and around it, your mind begins to ache and resist that which you study too closely. Your eyes see the lines as smooth and unbroken, but your mind registers impossible angles and unfilled gaps that do not seem, and should not be, there. They almost seem to invite you to pass through them, as if they are doors or passageways through the circle. You know from discussing it with Snow in the past that they are really false leads and dead ends and spiritual traps intended to confuse the beings bound within the circle so that, try as they might, they will never escape it.

Snow sings as she works, the melody of the song like a mournful howl and the lyrics—in First Tongue—little more than gibberish to your ears. Though Bodycount and Keys do not know the song they cannot help but be carried along with it, for the ancient bans contained within affect them on a primal level and the whole barren quarry echoes with an eerie harmony.

Though the circle is complex, Snow completes it relatively quickly and fifteen minutes or so after she began she lets song trail off, studies the circle once, and in an almost trance-like state looks up at Bodycount and Keys.

"When the spirit is summoned and bound, there will be only three means by which it might be freed," she says aloud for Bodycount and Keys to hear. She is still speaking in the guttural First Tongue, but now her words are clear to them. Both of her packmates have seen her do this before and know it is part of the rite of binding. "The first is if I release it myself, through a command and a word of power spoken in the First Tongue of the spirits. The second is if this circle I have drawn becomes scuffed or damaged, though the spirit itself will not be able to accomplish this on its own. And the third method is if it reveals all that it knows about anything and everything that makes its home within that hole and about this patch of earth that we are claiming for our den. If it fulfills these obligations the binding will cease to hold it and it will be free."

Snow rises to her feet and looks to Keys. “When you are ready, collect the necessary chiminage and call your spirit into the circle. I will complete the binding as you complete your summoning.”

“No sense lettin’ all de acorns go to waste,” she says with a shrug as she closes her laptop and slips out from under Bodycount’s arm. Reaching into her backpack, she pulls out a small plastic bag containing a half-dozen marijuana cigarettes. “I am going to be so hungry when dis is done,” she mutters as she, too, takes on her near-human form. After lighting up and taking a few hits, she gets up and collects a sizable pile of acorns in her shirt. Focusing on summoning a squirrel spirit, Keys pulls out a leatherman and uses the knife to meticulously dig small holes all around the area. She then takes a hit from her joint, blows the smoke across an acorn while speaking the words "for you" in the First Tongue, then gently places the acorn in one of the holes and buries it, leaving the ground loosely packed. Sixteen acorns in sixteen holes over sixteen minutes.

after another 15 minutes of waiting, a squirrel spirit appears in front of you, digging out the nut.

As soon as the spirit appears Snow begins her howling song once again, half-chanting half-singing our the last notes of the binding rite before the spirit knows what is going on.

The spirit fumes and rages at the bonds that hold it.
First Tongue: "What do you want, Urdaga?"

Snow does not immediately respond to the spirit. Instead she walks to stand directly next to Keys, puts her hand on her packmate's shoulder, and leans into her, congratulating her on the successful summoning.

Then she turns to face the spirit.

"What we want is information" she says in First Tongue. "We are The Bloody. We have claimed this portion of the city as our own, and will dwell here and hunt here from here on out. You will see much of us in the future. Tell me your name, spirit, so I may address you appropriately."

The squirrel twitches and glares at her, its brown fur seeming to shift and blend with the dirt. "I am Hiding-Collector-of-Insects."

Snow nods. "Hiding-Collector-of-Insects, we want many things. But for now we are content with collecting information. We have sharp teeth, but we are also fair. You are bound in this circle, but we can release you at any time. In fact, you can release yourself, should you give us what we want. Should you give us information voluntarily and go beyond what is required, The Bloody will even pay you chimmenage for your service."

"Tell us of the spiritual landscape in Sacramento. Which choirs are ascendant? And what spirits dominate the land?"

(please always specify what language you are speaking in; no specifcation means english)
First Tongue :"I come from far away, near the great lake. There are no spirits here. The hisil is empty. They hearkened to the Pure's calls, and left their homes for new sights and sounds, new experiences amongst the fleshlings."

First tongue: "Empty?" asks Snow, the shock clear on her face. "Completely empty? But that's...impossible!"

Even as she says that, something big and primal and strong crosses some threshold, and Snow feels it in her core. Part of her wants to immediately take the war form and howl out into the night, but she resists doing so, knowing that to do so would reveal her fear for her packmates to see.

"What was that?" she asks, switching to English, in a voice that seems hollow and weak in comparison to that hungry thing that she feels instinctually.

First Tongue:"If the offer of chimminage is still available, I offer my opinion that perhaps the Pure did something to the spirit world here."

Snow is still shaken by whatever it was that just happened, but the spirit was still there and couldn't be ignored. She takes a moment to collect herself again and addresses it.

First Tongue: "The offer of chimminage stands, and I have additional questions that can earn you more. But what might the Pure have done to drive nearly all the spirits across? It is unfathomable to me. Do you have a notion of what they did, or are you simply guessing?"

Keys was following the conversation between Snow and the squirrel spirit with difficulty - her grasp of the First Tongue was rudimentary at best, but it was good enough to understand the basics, and Snow's reaction. How could so many spirits have crossed over?

Then the furry-tailed little rat got greedy, asking for chimminage in exchange for a vague opinion about "something" "maybe" having been done by the Pure. Well no shit. Keys sneered at the little spirit.

"You know, crows eat squirrels," she says in the First Tongue, clearly referring to the pack's totem. "Answer Alpha's questions. More details. No maybes. No guesses. Or no chimminage."

First Tongue "Fine. I beleive that they did it. I don't know anything for sure. You got a theory and a qualification of the theory. Now give me my food."

All in First Tongue: "No, no, not yet. You stand to gain a considerable amount of chimminage here, if you play your cards right. I have more questions that need answering, and if you answer them well we might be willing to extend our chimminage to include a longer period of regular food. But you've got to give us good answers. Guesses aren't good enough."

"I take it that since you are not from around here you may not know this, but I will ask anyway. We are looking for a place of power with strong resonance and where the gauntlet is thin and we might cross over into the Shadow. Are you aware of such a place nearby? Can you sense one in close proximity? And if know of one or feel one, do you know what might claim it?"

First Tongue: "I do not know." It knows the rules know, and is keeping to them.

First tongue: "And you don't know what's in that hole, either, right?"

The spirit leans and peers over your shoulder. "Smells like a squirrel."

Snow smiles and presses her palms together, fingers lightly tapping against one another just in front of her lips.

(All Dialogue in First Tongue): "Yes, it does indeed. That's why we called you, to be frank. How about you do us a big favor and invite it to come out? We want to talk to it. If you do, and can convince it to come out, I promise we'll leave you and the squirrels near you a big pile of assorted nuts once a week for the next full cycle of the moon. You and they can then feast to your hearts content on nuts you probably can't normally get."

"As a sign of our good faith, I will even release you from your binding in advance of your attempt. If you refuse our offer, all you have to do is dematerialize and cross back into the Shadow. No aid, no nuts. But I suppose you have your freedom."

Snow hesitates a moment, then scuffs the binding circle she had worked so hard to create with the toe of her boot, breaking the hold on the spirit and releasing it. "Now tell me, what do you say?"

First Tongue: "Sure." Ahh greed, how effective it always is.

The squirrel spirit chitters, then moves off a distance away.

A giant squirrel, 4 feet tall at the shoulder, squeezes itself out of the cave, then another, and another.

Keys was generally unhappy with the squirrel's attitude, but controlled enough to let Snow do her thing. Then again, she'd be even unhappier if Sandy the Giant Talking Squirrel Spirit had taken up residence in that hole and they would have to go in and clear it in order to make this place a safe home. She really doubted Carrion-Crow would tolerate something that yummy that close for long, and hoped Snow wouldn't make some deal with the spirit or whatever was in the hole. Much better to get the little one to lure it out and deal with it now, in the open.

So Keys settled for skootching backwards to give the squirrel more room to move without feeling like it was about to become dinner.

Crap. More than one Sandy the Giant Talking Squirrel Spirit.

She looked up at Snow to see how she was going to handle this.

"Text Breaker," Snow says to Keys without turning away from the three oversized rodents. "Let him know we've got squirrels."

Then she takes on the dire wolf form, lowering on to four paws, and slowly approaches the giant creatures, knowing her packmates will follow her lead. She does not move to attack, but doesn't make any effort to hide her aggression toward them. She bares her teeth and raises her hackles and growls.

First Tongue: "We are The Bloody. We claim this territory as our own. You are on the wrong side. Return to the Shadow and you will have no trouble with us."

Keys' fingers fly over the keypad as she shoots off a quick text to Breaker (adding Johnny and Wukong just for good measure). No sooner does she hit "send" then she's following behind Snow (and presumably Bodycount), taking on the dire wolf form in preparation for a fight.

(Clarification: These are giant physical squirrels. They are not spirits. Move back to just when they exit the cave, unless you want to do the same thing).

When the squirrels exit the cave, the spirit squirrel yips and runs back even further.

Breaker, Johnny, and Wukong leave the van parked by the gate and quickly cover the ground between the gate and the building. Breaker looks over at Johnny, "Find a position from the outside that gives you the drop and take out anything that attacks one of us."

Breaker waves Wukong to follow him as he opens the door and runs inside. He allows himself a quick pause to judge everyone's position and evaluate the enemy.