Episode 5
Puzzle
Following the narrow escape from Martin Bowers’ apartment, Marta was devastated. She was disgusted by her own use of violence against the monster in the refrigerator and her inability to understand or help him. Talking to her aunt and to Darla had helped her somewhat to cope with what had happened, but she still felt terrible and wasn’t sure she ever wanted to go on “the hunt” again. No one in the group really knew what to do about it.
Meanwhile, Will was also disgusted, but for a different reason. Somehow, he’d manage to misplace two of his canisters of white phosphorus and was tearing the apartment to pieces looking for them. Since he didn’t have anything better to do, Arie offered to look around the halls and common areas of apartment building to see if he’d dropped them while he was moving in. While aimlessly wandering through the building, he got the distinct feeling he was being watched and decided to turn on his second sight. He was astonished to see a tiny fat man with wings, barely more than a foot high, slowly waddling down the hall. As Arie watched in amazement, it burped loudly and one of the missing canisters burst from its mouth and fell to the floor, leaving it much thinner than it had been before. Arie took out his gun and started chasing after it, yelling at the top of his lungs. It yelped, burped up the other canister, and flew through a wall.
Confused, Arie picked up the canisters of phosphorus and went to the front desk, where Darla was working. He asked her if she knew anything about the “fat little fairy” (inadvertently blurting out both his hunter nature and the fact that he was a drug dealer in the process) and she looked at him like he was crazy. On the way back, he heard the fairy laughing and suddenly discovered that the chain on his wallet was missing. (He found it later on in an entirely different part of the building.) Arie returned to the apartment, where Marta and Melba had discovered that the box they’d retrieved from Saigow’s was a puzzle of sorts and were trying to figure out how to open it. He gave the phosphorus back to Will, who was glad to see it, and tried to explain what had happened but just ended up sounding crazy. Giving up, he ate a few more ‘shrooms and sat back to watch Marta and Melba work on the box.
A few hours later, Arie happened to look over at the table where Will kept the half-completed gadgets he was always working on and the raw materials that went into them (along with ammunition, C-4, plastique, napalm, and the aforementioned white phosphorus). He could barely believe his eyes when he saw the fairy rise through the floor, waddle over to the table, and swallow Will’s specially modified wrench whole! Arie jumped up from the couch and screamed “It’s back!”, then drew his gun and took a potshot at the fairy. However, he missed it completely and the bullet hit one of the canisters of phosphorus instead. As the fairy sank back through the floor and everyone else dove for cover, the canister proceeded to discharge its contents all over the apartment, welding Will’s metal boxes of stuff shut and destroying the TV, the VCR, the computer, the entertainment center, the stereo, one of the futons, and a substantial portion of the walls and carpet. (Trying to apologize, Arie later went out and used his drug-dealing money to buy new and better everything for Chet and Saria’s apartment.)
While Saria cleaned compulsively and Chet, Melba, and Will freaked out at Arie for being so careless, Marta crept out of the room to look for the fairy on her own. After awhile she got the same feeling of being watched, turned on her second sight, and saw the fairy (with a shape in its stomach that looked suspiciously like Will’s wrench). It seemed very shy at first, but after she started talking to it she established that its name was Tank and that it liked shiny things, which was why it had been stealing the things it had. Marta couldn’t convince Tank to give Will’s wrench back, but it promised to consider it if she could find something to replace it with. Returning to the apartment, she spent the rest of the evening making little animals out of tinfoil and setting them near Will’s table with a sign that said “For Tank.” In the morning, several of the animals were gone and Will’s wrench had been returned to him. Marta explained what had happened, which had two very positive results. First, the others gained more respect for Marta’s methods, and second, Marta was able to get beyond her previous failures and keep on.
The next day, Marta and Melba began seriously working on the task of opening the box. First of all, getting it open required pressing buttons in the right order, which Melba eventually figured out. (When she opened it a tiny white grub-like thing attached itself to her finger and made her very sick. Saria had to heal her later on.) When they opened it, nine different-colored coins fell out, revealing empty holes (just the right size for the coins to go in) with words written on them. A little more research caused Marta and Melba to conclude that positioning the coins in the correct holes would open the box, and that the right order had something to do with the nine planets and their associations. It took them a few tries, but they eventually got it right and the box opened the rest of the way.
The box contained a lot of strange things (such as a bean, a white mouse with two scars on its back, and a tiny wooden rowboat), but the strangest of all were a small jade carving of a human head that talked and said its name was Sam, and a ghost named Frank MacIntyre who was his friend. The two of them played chess together (and beat Arie when he tried to join the game, though he later gave Sam a run for his money) and claimed not to know anything about Saigow or his dealings. Confused, they gave up on the box and its contents for the time being and went out to a movie to relax, where Darla infuriated Arie by spending the entire movie throwing popcorn and Milk Duds at him and eventually dousing him with her entire cup of Coke. Arie, of course, interpreted this as flirting and started flirting back, only to be completely rejected. Also, due to the sudden lack of sleeping space in Chet and Saria’s apartment, Will moved in with Arie, an arrangement that became permanent.
During this time, Melba and Paladin also began talking and getting to know one another. From their conversations, Melba learned that her group was actually the third group of hunters to be under the care of Chet and Saria. Like Melba’s group, the others had also found themselves in trouble and been provided with a place to hide out and be safe. Paladin, who was a relatively powerful Defender, had met them earlier and helped make the building into a very secure location. Paladin’s entire frat house had been imbued together in college, but he gave up the hunt after all of them died in battle. Now, he was taking care of Darla, the daughter of one of his friends, and doing what he could to help out other hunters without getting too involved again. This all seemed very good to Melba, until she asked what had become of the previous groups of hunters. He told her that all of them were dead—and that he’d had to help Chet and Saria kill them.