Episode 20
Justice
After investigating the compound in Bemidji for the second time, Charlotte, Hakim, and Randy returned to the Twin Cities the next morning while the others spent the rest of the day up north to tie up loose ends. Charlotte, specifically, had returned because she’d promised Twitcher she’d meet with him that afternoon to explain the network. He seemed to understand it considerably better than he was letting on, and kept referring to “guardian babies” whenever he could (though Charlotte was almost certain there was no way he could know what it meant). When she checked the P.O. box for new postcards, she found something even more interesting: a note from Lisa on the bus, asking the group to attend their meeting the next night to resolve a dispute that Lisa and her people were apparently having with another group of hunters. When the rest of the group returned in the evening, Charlotte showed it to them, and they decided to send Arie and Randy along with her to find out what the problem was and do what they could to fix it.
With that, the group prepared to go to their respective homes to get some much-deserved sleep, Charlotte noticed that Twitcher was lying down on a couch in the lobby of the apartment building. She asked him where he lived, and he admitted (in his own roundabout Twitcher way) that he didn’t really have a house. The rest of the group was beyond shocked when she told him he could stay at her house, if he wanted to. Twitcher immediately jumped at the opportunity and spent his entire first night there flushing the toilet repeatedly “to see if the water would run out.”
Around that time, something significant also happened in Melba’s life. While she was talking to Paladin (who showed no signs of wanting to move out of her apartment anytime soon, though he’d long since recovered physically from the injuries he suffered in Canada), she decided it was high time that something happened with their relationship beyond a lot of talk, and kissed him. Afterwards, the first thing he said was, “Jeez, what took you so long?” It appeared that despite the weirdly ambiguous way in which Paladin seemed to approach their relationship, he wasn’t averse to the prospect, and Melba and Paladin had a good chance at actually making a life together.
Upon returning to Minneapolis, Randy also took it upon himself to check the "vampire mailbox" for any communication from Saigow. There was indeed a scroll there, saying that there were some hunters in north Minneapolis causing problems for Saigow's people and asking the group to take care of it. Randy made a mental note of it and told the group later, but they realized they would have to put it off while they resolved the situation with Lisa.
The next evening, Arie, Charlotte, and Randy went to the bus as planned. Once there, they saw all the members of Lisa’s group as well as Dana and Samantha (the latter of which Arie immediately began flirting with incessantly). Charlotte took charge of the situation and asked what the problem was. Lisa explained that for the past several weeks, her group had been investigating a series of murders committed against homeless people after reading about them in the newspaper and thinking there might be some sort of supernatural connection. Eventually, her group had found circumstantial evidence connecting the werewolf living in the alley by the U of M with several of the murders. That was enough for Lisa, who wanted to kill it as soon as possible. However, when Samantha heard about Lisa's intentions she had stepped in with her own opinion, and that was where the problem began. Samantha thought the werewolf in the alley was innocent, and that the murders had actually been committed by Charles Johnson, the werewolf who lived in her dorm. She had no concrete evidence to support this, just "a really bad feeling" about Charles. Still, her concerns had been enough to completely stall the process of Lisa's judgment, and she wanted Charlotte and her group to look into the situation and render a verdict of their own. Charlotte agreed to try, and to return with a decision in two nights. Immediately following the meeting, the group returned to the apartment building to explain things to Melba (who had decided to stay behind in order to avoid becoming associated with the others in case the network was somehow compromised). The group decided that the next day, Randy and Arie would go to the dorms to talk to Charles during the day, while the entire group would go to the alley that evening and try once more to make contact with the werewolf in the alley.
The next afternoon, Arie and Randy made their first stop Phil's dorm room, where Randy explained what was going on and asked him to take them to see Charles—that is, if he wanted to save his life. It didn't take Phil long to agree, and they were soon in Charles' dorm room and trying to get answers out of him without completely revealing Lisa's plans. Not surprisingly, Charles was more than a little defensive when two strangers began grilling him about murders, and he insisted he didn't even know about the killings, much less have anything to do with them. Randy wanted to believe him, but he just couldn't be sure, so he asked Arie to take a peek at his thoughts using Revelation. It revealed that Charles didn't appear to be lying about his lack of involvement. Arie and Randy thanked him and left—but before leaving campus, Arie stopped by Samantha and Dana's room to take them out to a coffee shop and begin fulfilling his end of his bet with Randy by organizing a date (with both of them) for the next night.
After Arie and Randy reported on what they'd learned, everyone was leaning toward Lisa's side of the argument. However, Charlotte and Randy insisted that they needed to try to see the other side as well. They went to the alley, where the other werewolf was waiting. Though they made many attempts to beg it to speak with them and went so far as to admit that if it didn't, there was a chance it could be killed, it only growled at the group and went slinking away down the alley. Though Charlotte and Randy still felt somewhat uncertain about Lisa's judgment, they had to agree that the werewolf in the alley was displaying rather suspicious behavior and decided they'd be siding with her the next night. While Arie went on his date and Charlotte and Randy spent time with Charlie, Melba carried out a plan she was just beginning to hatch. If they were actually going to take on the werewolf, she reasoned, and the stories she'd read on Hunter-Net were true, they would probably need a lot more firepower than anything their little group could provid—something along the lines of what another werewolf could dish out. So she sat down on a bench near the U and waited for Charles to come by on his nightly run. When he ran by, she flagged him down and asked to run with them. They began to talk and eventually got around to discussing the fact that he was a werewolf, she was a hunter (he kept referring to hunters as "vigilantes"), and she needed his help. Their conversation was long and involved, but in the end he agreed to help the group when they confronted the other werewolf—partially for the satisfaction of ridding the world of what they believed to be a very evil creature, but mostly for the glory.