Episode 19
Children
Life went back to being as normal as it gets for hunters after Arie got out of the hospital. Spring semester classes at the U of M began, so Charlotte went back to work and Melba started her classes. Melba also began taking steps to make a long-time plan into reality: a return visit to the compound, both to glean more information about what had gone on there and to take care of her last favor to Hakim by bringing him along. (She’d already given him the basic-laws-of-physics-defying copy of the Encyclopedia Magica that Marta had taken out of the compound the first time to take care of one of the favors.) The group had discussed this idea and agreed to go in on Friday, and were all involved in making their own special preparations.
On Thursday morning, Charlotte got a mysterious phone call from Patron4, the same person who’d alerted her to Randy’s predicament several weeks earlier. This time, he told her that she might want to pay a visit to the hospital, because there was something there she might be interested in. He offered no further information, but by this time Charlotte knew better than to doubt the usefulness of his information. After her last class, she stopped by the apartment building to see if anyone else wanted to come along. But before she could get inside the building, she noticed something strange: a tall, incredibly skinny Middle Eastern man with huge eyes wearing a brown trenchcoat and fedora and sitting on a bench outside the apartment building, wearing a lost expression on his face. Curious, she approached him and asked him what he wanted. After responding with an extremely exaggerated startle response, he said he was looking for the place to drop off a postcard. He showed it to her, and she saw it had the network information on it. It gave the man’s handle as Twitcher and said he was a Defender. Charlotte showed Twitcher the P.O. box, then started to head upstairs.
It only took her a minute to realize that Twitcher was following her. She asked him what he was doing, and he replied, “What are you doing?” She said she was going to visit some friends, and he asked if he could come along. Charlotte didn’t see any harm in introducing the others to another hunter, so she said that he could. They went to Arie and Randy’s apartment, picking up Paladin on the way, who soon found himself agreeing to give Twitcher a job working at the front desk of the building. At the apartment, Randy was just confused and Arie was immediately suspicious of Twitcher. He pulled Charlotte aside into his burnt-out kitchen and proceeded to ream her out (in whispers) for letting “this weirdo” get close to the group. From the living room, Twitcher shouted, “I’m not a weirdo.” He had somehow heard Arie whispering in the other room, and made out his words over the deafening noise of the music that was always playing in his apartment! Arie grudgingly admitted that those kind of powers of perception could be useful and agreed to let Twitcher tag along for the time being—not that there was any way they could’ve convinced him to stay behind, since he’d also overheard Charlotte saying they were going to the hospital.
When Arie, Charlotte, Paladin, Randy, and Twitcher pulled up to the hospital, nothing seemed out of the ordinary except the presence of a TV station van in the parking lot. So the hunters began scouring the hospital in search of a camera crew, with Randy being the first to find them, on the second floor outside the maternity ward. He asked one of the sound guys what was going on, and he explained that the station was doing a “human interest story” on six babies, ranging in age from one to six months, who had recently been abandoned one by one by their parents at the hospital. The babies’ future had seemed bleak until, in an amazing act of benevolence, a large corporation had agreed to effectively adopt them, becoming responsible for their upbringing and all the costs that entailed. This immediately sent up red flags for Randy, especially considering that the guardians were supposed to reincarnate and six of them had recently been killed. He pushed through the crowd and used Discern on the babies—and discovered, hardly to his surprise, that they looked the same as Chet and Saria.
By now, the rest of the group was wondering what was going on, and Randy was left with the problem of how to reveal this information to the rest of the group without letting Twitcher in on the secret. (Following Charlotte’s rather negative reaction to the legend of the guardians, the group had decided not to tell anyone else about the guardians unless they were absolutely sure they trusted them—a category which Twitcher certainly did not fit.) Randy wrote the words “Guardian Babies” on a piece of paper and began passing it around to the others surreptitiously, hoping Twitcher wouldn’t notice. It was actually working quite well until the paper came to Charlotte, who couldn’t believe what she was seeing and let out a yelp. Of course, Twitcher heard and started demanding to know what was going on.
Charlotte passed the paper off to Arie and started trying to convince him it was nothing, but he didn’t believe her for a minute and started trying to grab the paper away from Arie. However, Twitcher had incredibly short arms, and Arie was able to hold it out of his reach with very little effort. Angry, Arie looked Twitcher in the eye and said, “Dude, you’re one nosy little fuck.” Before anyone had a chance to react, Twitcher’s foot shot out (faster than any of them had ever seen any human move) and nailed Arie in the crotch. Arie immediately passed out from the pain. Twitcher picked up the paper and started asking a lot of questions about guardian babies, which no one answered because they were too busy tending to Arie (who was fine, if incredibly humiliated). The group decided it was time to get out of the hospital before anything worse happened and headed back to the apartment building.
In the car, Arie, Paladin, and Randy had hit upon what they thought was a perfect plan: stealing the babies from the hospital and making Melba take care of all six of them. Charlotte was horrified by this suggestion and said that if the organization trying to regain control of them was so powerful, it would probably be a good idea to adopt the babies through more legal means unless they wanted things to get bloody. Plus, it wasn’t fair to saddle one person with all the child-care responsibilities—if the group got the guardian babies, they’d have to divide the work load more fairly. And of course, when Melba heard about their idea, she was equally adamant about following Charlotte’s plan—though Saria was all for taking care of them herself, until Chet talked her out of it. (It’s also worth noting that this is the only time Charlotte and Melba have ever agreed on anything.)
That was when Randy came up with a solution no one else could have seen. Somewhat sheepishly, he explained that his parents were incredibly wealthy and had been taking care of him financially for years. If he asked very nicely, he said, it was very possible he could get them to throw their money and influence around to see if the group could get custody of the children instead of the evil corporation who doubtless wanted to enslave and corrupt them again. The group seemed to think that was a good idea, so Randy gave his parents a call and said he wanted to talk to them. They said they’d send their private jet to Minneapolis right away to pick up their son and his friends.
That night, the jet arrived as promised and took Arie, Charlotte, Chet, Melba, Paladin, Randy, and Saria to Randy’s parents’ mansion on the East Coast. True to what Randy had promised, his parents did not ask too many questions about why he wanted custody of six orphaned babies, and soon agreed to “buy the kids” (as Arie put it) by effectively donating a new wing to the hospital. In exchange, Randy would not be receiving his customary allowance for a few months, but that seemed like a fair enough trade to him. The group spent the night at Randy’s parents’ house, then returned to the Twin Cities the next morning to pick up Hakim and embark for the compound as promised.
Several hours later, the group arrived in Bemidji to find Arie and Marta’s apartment untouched and reclaimed it for their homebase. They spent until nightfall preparing their equipment, then waited in the van while Arie made sure that he still had the right connections with the night crew that would let them into the stockroom. (He did.) When the group went in, the returning members vouched that nothing had changed since their last visit, and apparently no one else had been there. Upon reaching the third floor (with the sealed experiment chamber they hadn’t entered the last time), Charlotte put on the biohazard suit she’d “liberated” from the U of M biology department and entered the room. Inside, she found an ancient, nearly mummified corpse that appeared to have been vivisected, and some strange, small rocks sitting in a petri dish on a counter nearby. She took the rocks as well as some tissue samples from the corpse, but so far has been unable to learn anything from them except the fact that they are very, very old (and apparently from a time consistent with the era of the Hebedite civilization).
The group continued to move through the ruins of the compound, taking any books and papers they could salvage. Nothing out of the ordinary happened until they reached the level containing the library, the bees, and the room with the preserved bodies of the “failed” guardians. In the library, Arie decided he wanted to get a closer look at the bees’ habitat as well as take some of the books away with him, so he yanked one off the shelf. Immediately, enormous bees came swarming out of the hole left in the bookshelves, seeming incredibly pissed off. They began stinging Arie mercilessly. Melba threw up a Ward, which dissuaded them long enough for Randy to slam the door and order the rest of the group never to enter that room again. Everything came to a halt while Melba and Saria sat Arie down to yank an enormous bee stinger out of his arm. (Charlotte managed to get one of the gigantic bees, as well as a sample of their honeycombs, in the process.)
The next room, of course, contained the alien fetuses in formaldehyde. This was what both Charlotte and Hakim (who’d spent most of the trip wandering around the compound on his own, seemingly lost in thought) had come to see. Charlotte announced that she wanted to take one of the subjects back with her (to Melba’s utter disgust), and Randy agreed to help her. As they pondered the problem of how to get an alien baby out of a floor-to-ceiling glass tube without creating a huge mess in the process, Hakim rolled his eyes and shouted, “Hey Charlotte, look over there!” She looked, and Randy saw him draw a circle with his finger on the tube, reach through the glass, and remove a circular section of glass, creating a hole just big enough to remove the body. Hakim claimed to have “seen the hinges,” and Charlotte decided not to question it. The rest of the group’s explorations were relatively uneventful; Arie spent most of the time trying to solve the mystery of the disembodied children’s laughter on the living floor, but came no closer to finding its source this time than he had a month earlier. After several hours, the group emerged from the compound for what they hoped was the last time, not having found the answers they’d been searching for but with many new questions instead.