"Do you like that term? 'Warper'?"

[hazlogs]

It is currently 17:50 Pacific Time on Wed Jun 5 2019.

Currently in Saint Claire, it is partly sunny. The temperature is 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius). The wind is currently coming in from the south at 10 mph. The barometric pressure reading is 30.01 and steady, and the relative humidity is 58 percent. The dewpoint is 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius.) For more detail, see: http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=98501

Currently the moon is in the waxing New (Ragabash) Moon phase (19% full).

Edgewood House: Downstairs

The front door leads into a small mudroom; coats are hanging on hooks. It opens into the spacious, well lit living room, with several battered old couches arranged into a sort of conversation pit facing the fireplace, a table in the center of them. There are a few chairs, some straight-backed, some plush and comfortable, arranged to make secondary conversation areas, with little end tables placed in strategic locations. There's a notable absence of either breakable objects, or elaborate electrical equipment such as televisions. The walls, painted an increasingly dingy white, have some sweeping dark fabric prints on them, but no paintings or posters. A steep, uncarpeted staircase leads up to the second floor. There are several doors that lead out to other sections of the house, as well. (+view for details)

"So long as you're holding them at arm's length," Slug says, making a swinging motion with his arm. "It's fine. It isn't as if I particularly trust random strangers 'in the know' either, not even shifters. And shifters would be less likely to turn me into a science fair."
Slug shrugs.
"But then again, maybe not. Anyone who had the power to catch a Garou would probably also have the sense to leave it alone. It'd be like trying to catch lightning in a bottle, only the rest of the storm might notice if the lightning is missing."
He scratches at his cheeks, peering curiously at all the cocoaing going on at the counter.

"Frankly, if you captured a supernatural anything, and you don't have a series of emergency backups in place, you're simply asking for trouble. The safest course of action is to kill it. But dead things don't yield anywhere near as much information." The mage moves the spiced cocoa he's been making off the stove's burner so it can cool a bit. The rich scent fills the kitchen and wafts into other rooms. "That sounds brutal and ugly," he observes of his own comments. "But it's probably true in most instances." He offers, "The warper who first discovered me and told me what I was and helped to train me a bit initially? He had captured a quetzlcoatl-like creature. Not entirely spirit and not entirely of the physical plane. Kind of like the garou, honestly. He'd frozen it in place, immobile, for years. It eventually came into my possession, and I was able to free it with some assistance from our friendly neighborhood Corax. And Silvertip escorted it back to its home." He adds, "I hope it's doing well." Then he adds, "Over the years, I did notice that it was moving. Fractions of an inch every few months or so. Entropy is almost always irresistable."

Huxley lets himself in the front door, his expression pensive, drawn inward. He pulls down his hood and unzips his jacket, then pauses in the act of taking it off as the murmur of conversation and the smell of spiced cocoa reach him. Stepping lightly, he moves toward the kitchen, sneakered feet making almost no sound. He's not /trying/ to be sneaky; the quiet, unobtrusive movement is just ingrained, a habit learned over a lifetime.

This pale young man looks rather sickly. He's thin to the point of gauntness and completely hairless, with hollow cheeks and watery blue eyes surrounded by bruised-looking sockets. A sharp, beaklike nose protrudes boldly out from his face, making him look even more thin and narrow. In age he's probably around twenty, though it's hard to tell for certain, and in height he's nothing special, maybe a few inches under six feet tall.

He wears a black long-sleeved shirt made of light cotton, slim fit black jeans, and plain black canvas sneakers. He also has a fitted black jacket for when he's outside; it comes down just past his narrow hips and has a hood, which he usually wears up to cover his bald scalp.

"It isn't surprising that someone would do that- I'm sure Garou have done things along those lines. Studied. Maybe I would, if I had any kind of ability or... I dunno. Talent for it?"
Slug moves on over to the counter, drifting with the slowness of smoke circulating through the air around a thinker's head.
"Even the dead could tell you interesting things, with the right abilities. But there must be a reason why, say, Banes don't even tend to take over dead things. They can keep the most twisted creatures going, but dead flesh..."
Slug shrugs, frowns. Looks down at the countertop and lets his eye wander toward the cocoa again. "Can't even just be a matter of it being too hard for them, for too little payoff. Must be more complicated than that. Kind of wonder what would happen, if you did bind a spirit to a body. I'm sure someone knows."

Slug's frame is tall and lanky, somewhere in the neighborhood of six feet tall and just under two hundred pounds... But it's hard to really pin down the particulars. His semi-loose, dull orange hoodie hides much of his body and breaks up his frame, hiding the outline of his body. The hood is almost always up, and he takes pains to use it to obfuscate as much of his face as possible... And it isn't hard to see why. The right side of this young man's tan face has been torn up something awful. Deep troughs of keloid tissue run from just beneath his wild black bangs, across his high cheek, and terminate somewhere on his slender, stubbled jaw. It's hard to tell when he's got his yellow sunglasses on, but not both of his blue eyes move. It's likely the right one is severely damaged in some way, or false.

Beneath the hoodie's neckline, one might get a flash of the white tank beneath, especially on a hot day. The zipper on his hoodie has been rubbed with grit and dirt to take the shine out of it, and so has every other bit of metal on him, from hoodie right on down to his black zip-up boots. His jeans are significantly tighter than his hoodie, and often stained with something or another. On his hands he wears a pair of black fingerless gloves, something cheap and throw-away.

Brings-the-Pack opens a cupboard and pulls out one mug (that reads "There's a chance this is wine"), a second mug ("Coffee makes me poop"), and looks to the newcomer. "Hot chocolate?" the robed, DEET-scented figure inquires before addressing something the Gnawer said. "Possibly there being an existing spirit in the body helps to facilitate the taking over of it. There might need to be something present in order to corrupt it. Spirits are not my area of expertise, but that is an interesting question. I'm curious about the answer, but there's no way I could support or condone that kind of experimentation."

Imagine a mysterious, robed and hooded Jedi from Star Wars. That's very nearly what's before you.

This figure stands at a mundane height of about five-and-a-half feet tall. The simple, dark, earth-brown robe looks as if it came straight out of Qui-Gon Jinn's wardrobe, ready to be used on a Star Wars movie set. The large hood, draped amply over an unseen head, throws shadows over the wearer's facial features, masking his (her?) identity--even in daylight. The voice tends to be masculine though, with a peculiarly sensual feline purr as an accent.

The Star Wars attire ends at the robes, though the rest of the figure's matching charcoal-grey wardrobe speaks of a certain functionality geared for fluidity of motion: cotton jogging pants, cotton t-shirt, fingerless tactical gloves, and Puma crosstrainer sneakers--all popular gear with parkour enthusiasts. There's a pungent scent of recently applied DEET coming from his clothing that utterly overwhelms any other notable scents.

Huxley sniffs, maybe at the smell of the cocoa, maybe at the reek of DEET from the mysterious robed figure, maybe at the combination of both. Curiosity wins out over caution -- though Slug gets as much an odd look as Brings -- as he nods, joining the pair. "Have we met?" He directs the question at Brings.

"I can see how it would be... unsavory, but if the spirit was willing and the body- available, I don't see it being particularly weird. We use bones all the time- if the bone still has meat on it, what difference does it make?" Slug waves a hand. "Not that it matters to me. Someone's already done it. I'm just curious if they wrote down the answer. I have better things to do with my time than try binding a Pattern-Spider to a pork chop."
He eyes the mug a little, as if checking to see if there's any cocoa in it, or, perhaps, wondering which he'll get. Then he turns, nods at Huxley, and looks on expectantly.

Brings-the-Pack pulls a third mug out ("They're not swear words, they're sentence enhancers") and pours the spiced hot chocolate into the three mugs. "Help yourselves." Apparently it's a pick-your-mug situation, as he moves to take the soiled pan to the sink to rinse it out before it gets icky. "I'd be interested in what you find out, if you find something out." The shadowed face looks towards Huxley and responds, "I brought you here earlier, but I looked like a cougar at the time. Brings-the-Pack," he offers again, as it's been a while and he's not been around. "Warper and ally of the sept." He runs the tap and swirls the water around in the pan.

"Ah," says Huxley, remembering. He hangs back a bit, not making a move to take one of the mugs just yet. He peers at Brings and asks, in a tone of honest curiosity, "Do you like that term? 'Warper'?"

Slug waits, perhaps owing to the fact that he was just talking about experimenting with the dead. It would, after all, be rude, to put possibly necromantic hands near somebody's food without giving them first dibs. But after a polite window elapses, he takes one, and sips, standing bodily away from it.

Brings-the-Pack selects the "Coffee makes me poop" mug. "I understand it's supposed to be offensive, but I rather like the sound of it. And it's not exactly inaccurate, either. Although I'd be cautious using the word around any other mages you might encounter. I've met a few who take great offense."

Huxley flashes teeth in a brief, rictus grin, breath coming out of him in a short, sardonic chuckle. "Yes, it usually rhymes with 'caern-destroying enemy scum', at least from my experience." And since Slug seems to have claimed last dibs, he takes the "There's a chance this is wine" mug.

"You just like it because it sounds sciency," Slug says. "Like how the ships move in Star Wars- warp jumping. That was the one with the bald guy, right? And the space station where all the aliens lived?"
He glances at the mugs of the others, as if he's only just now noticing that some have stuff written on them. "If I ever learn magic, I wanna be called a man of letters. Or something classy."

Brings-the-Pack nods once at Huxley. "Some do raid and destroy caerns. Some protect places of power. I'm one of the latter." He pauses to sip from the mug, unnatural shadows momentarily engulfing and obscuring the mug and the lettering as it rises to where one assumes his lips would presumably be. "I've called myself a number of things in the past. See'er," he says, the double syllable pronunciation distinguishing the term from 'seer.' "Jedi. Hollow One. I've kind of outgrown them all, though. Probably just 'mage' or 'wizard' these days." He asides to the Gnawer, "Some of that stuff exists. Not exactly the same as the TV shows, but similar."

Huxley observes Brings' trick with the mug with obvious and intent interest, then takes a sip from his own mug. Slug gets another look, though it's clear that all the sci-fi talk goes right past him.

"Nothing is ever exactly as it is on the TV," he says, looking at his cocoa. "Like werewolves. The TV ones are *way* hotter, even if their special effects kind of suck." He raises his mug to Huxley and Brings, grins. "Thanks for the chocolate. Take care, and come around more often, will you?" he suggests, edging toward the door.

"The real life werewolves are much scarier, for sure," the mage concurs with the Gnawer. "I'm going to try and get pulled away less, if possible. There are things I need to tend to locally, and that I've been neglecting. You take care out there."

Huxley simply lifts his mug in farewell to Slug; if anything the metis seems more cautious toward the Gnawer than the mage.

Brings-the-Pack has given himself a little distance from the newish-to-the-area garou, but not a great deal. Perhaps a distance he feels comfortable with. "So where are you from and what brings you here?" he asks of Huxley, but then prompts, "But vague answers if you're coming from a caern so you don't give me enough information to piece together where it might be located. I might be an ally of this sept, but I respect the privacy of others."

Huxley's lips split in another of those wide, toothy, almost skeletal grins. "It /was/ a caern, actually. One with a lot of very traditonal Garou with very traditional Garou thoughts. Especially thoughts about the... proper place, socially, for someone like myself." He takes a swallow of of the spiced, warm drink, his long thin fingers wrapped spiderlike around the irreverently-inscribed mug. "I mean, it would have been perfectly fine if I wanted to remain the lowest Cliath for the rest of my days, but I'm pretty sure that I'm better than that."

"Oh, you made a good move," the cougar-mage claims as he takes another sip of the spiced hot chocolate. He pauses, as if savoring the beverage, before resuming. "If it wasn't obvious already, this is a fairly liberal sept--from what I understand, having never been elsewhere to make that comparison from anything other than word of mouth. And...." He pauses here, choosing his words a bit more carefully. "Metis are welcome here and some, over time, have risen to leadership positions at the sept."

Huxley nods and then changes the subject. "Do you know anything about the tunnels under the caern?"

"I've been told to avoid them and that they are dangerous to venture into, so I've avoided them." The mage then adds, "They were not present earlier, prior to the arrival of the giant wasps that took over the caern and turned it into a hive. I've spent a good deal of time meditating at the caern's fire pit, and I have never seen anything come out of the tunnels, though I have occasionally seen a few garou venture into them, but I've never heard of any deaths or disappearances in connnection with the caverns." He considers a moment before adding, "If you intend to explore them, you should get one or two others ro go with you. Maybe an ahroun. Just in case."

Huxley's expression is quite serious as he listens, but his pale eyes never leave the mage. He sips his drink slowly. "Sandra attempted to interrogate Little Silvertip about her experiences there. Silvertip nearly frenzied when she wouldn't stop asking questions." He raises hairless brows.

"Something that upset Little Silvertip that much is something that merits extreme caution," the mage observes, apparently possessing some measure of respect for that particular Uktena. "She is a capable warrior who has seen--and fought--many things." He offers, "Perhaps if you were to offer to join her, should she be interested in venturing once again into the tunnels, she might look favorably upon you?"

"Perhaps," says the metis, though his tone suggests he doubts it. "Thanks for the warning." He raises his mug a little to the mage.