Episode 9
Research
After resolving the problem with the supernatural bear at the construction site and getting their names cleared, the hunters were somewhat unsure as to what steps to take next. Arie and Will were continuing with their lives as usual, but Melba decided to make a few changes in her life. She moved out of her mom’s house and got an apartment in Paladin’s building, and found a job waiting tables at an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood. She even got rid of her beloved dreadlocks for a more socially acceptable hairstyle. During this time, she also got to know Paladin a little better, and learned that one of the many things they shared was a desire to maintain a normal life outside of the hunt. One thing led to another, and soon he’d talked her into going on a date with him. The date itself was cut somewhat short when they started a snowball fight and Paladin’s old knee injury flared up. However, they both agreed they’d like to do it again sometime.
Marta also knew exactly what she wanted to do next. Since she wouldn’t be able to return to school for a few more months, she decided to work at the front desk in the apartment building for extra money and to take advantage of her free time to try to solve the increasingly complex mystery of the guardians once and for all. Having exhausted the resources of her own library, though, she was somewhat at a loss for where to go from there. But when she told Darla about her plight, she said she knew a special section of the public library where Marta might be able to find the information she was looking for. Darla took Marta to a very strange room in the basement of the library in Uptown, where Marta found a huge amount of books that seemed like they might be helpful. She checked out a few of them, but hit a brick wall when she found that a number of them (including one particularly interesting-looking one called the Dictionary Magica) were written in a language she couldn’t understand. So Marta looked at the check-out cards in the backs of the books she’d already found and started cross-referencing the names of people who’d checked out the books before her. She hoped that by finding someone who had a strong interest in the books, she could get that person to teach her the language so she could learn more. Eventually, Marta found three names that kept cropping up over and over: Brian Johnson, Heather Kashi, and Benjamin Carlson.
Marta took the books home with her and began reading them, finding some intriguing information in the process. Specifically, the legend of the guardians had been connected to an obscure nomadic tribe called the Hebedites who lived in the Middle East in about 1500 B.C. The guardians had supposedly been given to the Hebedites by their gods with the mission of protecting and helping the tribe in all areas of their lives. There had been twelve of them, each with areas of control that corresponded roughly to the twelve signs of the zodiac. However, after many centuries of peaceful and harmonious existence, a number of the guardians became corrupt and began to use their power for evil and selfish ends instead of just protecting the Hebedites. Only three of them—the guardians corresponding to Scorpio, Virgo, and Gemini—had not been corrupted, but they were no match for the others. As punishment, the gods stripped the guardians of their powers, took away their ability to reincarnate and thus perpetuate themselves through the generations, and scattered the surviving Hebedites.
From all of this, Marta (and Melba, with whom she’d been sharing her research) drew the conclusion that Chet and Saria were not hunters but newly reincarnated guardians. Chet was Scorpio and Saria was Virgo (she gathered this because of their birthdays). The lobster-scorpion who had saved her from Cameron had been Chet, because each of the guardians had “battle forms” and Scorpio’s looked very much like what she had seen. And history was repeating itself—the other guardians, a group of which Cameron, Talc, Sarn, and Blak were members, had become corrupt again and were trying to bring Chet and Saria over to their side. Marta and Melba realized that their theory left many questions yet unanswered (such as why the guardians had suddenly begun reincarnating again, what the corrupt guardians hoped to accomplish, or how hunters fit into the entire picture), but it was a start.
Marta also began trying to get in contact with the people whose names she’d taken out of the books. Brian Johnson didn’t know anything, but Heather Kashi was an interesting case. When Marta looked up her phone number and called it, she heard from two women named Wendy and Heather who claimed to know Chet and Saria and also have a lot of information on the hunters themselves. They said they were willing to set up a meeting and talk about what they knew, if the hunters were willing to see them. After talking it over with the rest of the group, they agreed to meet at Chino Latino within a few days.
The last name on the list, Benjamin Carlson, also yielded some interesting information. He was a professor of classics at the University of Minnesota who was intrigued by Marta’s interest in the Hebedites. He told her that he couldn’t give her too many specifics on the tribe, but that he knew another professor, Hakim il-Batin, who could. Marta contacted Hakim and explained her search, and he replied, “Well, if you’ll come to see me I could take you back, if you want.” Marta wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but she agreed to meet with him at noon the next day, believing that whatever happened it would give her more insight into the nature of the guardians.
During all this, Arie was bored out of his mind. To pass the time, he started sitting at the front desk all day with Darla even though Paladin wasn’t paying him a penny to do it. One day, he was surprised to notice three stray cats that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere wandering around in the lobby. Darla thought they were cute and started playing with them, but Melba immediately became convinced that something was wrong with them. Looking at them with second sight, she noted that they didn’t show up as entirely inhuman, but they were still a little bit off from what a normal cat should look like. Melba took her concern to Paladin, but she phrased her concern rather poorly (“I looked at those cats with second sight, and they were not human!” “They’re cats, Melba. Of course they’re not human.”) and everyone essentially dismissed it.
Meanwhile, Arie took the cats up to his apartment and thought it would be funny to feed them some ‘shrooms. They wouldn’t eat them at first, so he cooked the ‘shrooms into a pot of Rice-A-Roni and gave it to the cats. They immediately puked it back up onto his carpet. Annoyed, he went downstairs to yell at Darla about the mess that “her” cats had made, but when he took her up to the apartment to see it they were gone. Arie was confused, Darla was convinced he’d just been tripping, and Melba was left with the unshakable feeling that something very wrong was going on…