Episode 15
Complication
The next few days were, in many ways, the calm before the storm as everyone waited nervously for the meeting with Saigow to arrive. Still trying to overcome her ghetto heritage, Melba asked Saria to take her shopping at the Mall of America, where she bought a new, preppier wardrobe to go along with her recently transformed hairstyle. Meanwhile, Arie and Randy nursed raging hangovers from the abortive drinking contest with Chet. Randy’s attempt to ease Arie’s pounding headache with a prairie oyster (vodka and Tabasco sauce poured over a raw egg, with salt and pepper added to taste) became a spectacular failure when Randy accidentally spilled the disgusting beverage all over Arie’s bed, where it remains to this day.
After recovering from the hangover, Arie decided the time had come for him to learn more about blowing stuff up. He spent some time with a few friends who lived in a rural area outside the Cities, who gave him some pointers and showed him a neat trick involving dynamite and remote-control cars. The next day, Arie decided to put their suggestions into action by testing out some of Will’s leftover C-4—in his kitchen. Of course, he obliterated that entire area of his apartment, to Randy’s incredulous disgust (though Arie didn’t seem to care, and Randy got used to having a crater for a kitchen before too long). The group also got first-hand experience with one of Randy’s more unusual habits when they learned he didn’t actually own any clothing; rather, every few days he went to a clothing store, bought an entirely new outfit, and threw the old one away. This led to much speculation about Randy’s as-yet-undisclosed financial situation.
Several nights later, Arie, Charlotte, Melba, and Paladin went to Chino Latino to meet with Saigow. He was accompanied by Haji and an unfamiliar Asian vampire whom he introduced as Tsao Lo. After a lot of small talk, Saigow finally got down to business: The vampires who had tried to abduct Charlie and Randy, and whom the hunters had fought off, were (no surprise here) Saigow’s people. Saigow said that one of his people (the one sent through the back window by Melba’s ward) had been very seriously injured, and that he took this as a break in the past. After reassuring Saigow that they wanted to maintain the pact and certainly did not desire an out-and-out war between vampires and hunters, the group pointed out that their actions had been in self-defense. To this, Saigow replied that Randy had not been a part of their group at the time, so it wasn’t really their business. The group replied they had to stick up for their own kind, just as vampires looked out for one another.
After going around in circles like this for a long time, Saigow made an offer. He would be willing to forget the slight suffered to his people and reinstate the pact as before if the hunters would allow his people to question one of their number, effectively giving him the knowledge to fight hunters if they ever attacked his people again. Not wanting to make a decision without everyone’s input, they asked Saigow for a few more days to discuss his offer with the rest of their group, and another meeting at which they would finalize the deal—a meeting at which Haji would not be present, since he made Melba and some of the others extremely uncomfortable. Saigow agreed, and the group set the next meeting for a few days later.
Back at the apartment building, Randy met up with Charlie (who brought Charlotte a white rose and thanked her for a lovely evening, thereby revealing Friday night’s events to everyone and ensuring that Randy would continue to tease his friend about the date for the rest of his natural life) and everyone retreated to Melba’s apartment to discuss their next move. The group soon agreed that Saigow’s offer was unacceptable because of the danger, both to the individual giving the information and all the hunters whose cover might be blown if their abilities suddenly became known. (Arie offered to talk to the vampires, an offer which the group kept in mind for entirely different reasons.) After much discussion, the group decided that at their next meeting, they would use Haji’s unauthorized attack several weeks earlier as a bargaining chip to point out that the vampires had broken the pact first, then make their ultimate goal to get Saigow to simply reinstate the pact as it had been, seeing as how there were transgressions on both sides of the conflict.
The group also discussed really putting into practice an idea they’d been considering for quite some time: the idea of restarting Hunter-Net, which had been permanently shut down a few years earlier for reasons that were still not totally clear. With Saigow seemingly assuming that their circle of influence was much larger than the six hunters they actually knew personally, they knew the time had come to get a little more organized in order to really make a difference against the monsters. Melba and Charlotte decided to focus on the technical aspect of setting up the network, while Arie and Randy volunteered to start looking for hunters all around the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and getting them together. Paladin also suggested that the group start out by making a physical network before transporting it to the Internet, and that the apartment building would be a very secure place to put together some P.O. boxes where hunters could exchange messages. After agreeing to start in earnest the next day, Melba went to sleep and Charlotte and Charlie watched “Masterpiece Theatre” in Arie and Randy’s apartment.
The next day, Melba checked out a large amount of computer books and began scouring the remains of Hunter-Net for any pertinent information. Meanwhile, Arie, Charlotte, and Randy began wandering the streets of the city, looking for hunter code symbols or other signs of an imbued community they hadn’t seen before. They came up empty until afternoon, when they stopped at a Dairy Queen for ice cream and a break to reconsider their plan of attack. While walking to their table, they caught a whiff of something rotten in one corner of the restaurant. But they couldn’t see anything obviously decaying there, just a perky college-age girl and an older man talking at a table. Turning on second sight and Discern, Randy realized that the girl was a hunter and the man was a zombie. Curious, they waited for about 20 minutes until the man went away and the girl took out a notebook and began writing in it. Then Randy sat down and began talking to her while the others looked on. He tried to clue her in to his hunter nature by drawing the symbol for “allies” on a napkin and getting her to notice it. It took her a minute to catch on, but when she did, she seemed delighted to have finally met some other hunters.
Randy called the others over to the table and introduced them to her. The girl, whose name was Leslie Charleston, was an Innocent. She was a senior psychology student at the U of M (she’d actually taken one of Charlotte’s classes before and would be taking another when school started in a few weeks, though the two didn’t recognize each other at first). Her zombie friend’s name was Old John, and he was one of many creatures she had regular contact with and was slowly trying to make harmless to humans. Naturally, Randy liked her right away. Apparently the feeling was mutual, because when he asked her to go to a movie with him that night, she accepted immediately.
After sundown, Arie, Charlie, Charlotte, Leslie, and Randy went to the Lagoon to see a movie as planned. Unfortunately for Arie, they picked a French movie with subtitles which Arie’s illiteracy didn’t permit him to read. Feeling very much the fifth wheel, Arie tried to compensate by picking up a random single woman in the audience. Not surprisingly, she rejected his advances, and he left the theatre to go home and get stinking drunk yet again. The others, however, had a very pleasant night and returned home feeling that even if their first day of putting together the network had demonstrated how hard the project would be to complete, at least they had good friends to see them through.