So we left off last time with the early stages of the building of the Cave of Secrets Sept. There was a moot and an adventure out in the nearby Cranberry Glades.
So we jump ahead a month and a half to early October 2011. Berry has quietly extricated himself, feeling that his path and the pack's weren't going to line up as well as he thought. And during the time jump, a new Garou has come into the area (Bryan's new character). His name is Wants-to-Know, and he's a lupus Ragabash Silent Strider drawn into the area by strange dreams of his own, and the stories, and someone telling him "Hey, there's a haunted Civil War graveyard in a swamp. You're a Silent Strider, you guys do ghost stuff, right? You should help with that." (At this point, because Bryan had forgotten to read the tribe book I loaned him, he and I had a chat about some of the stereotypes surrounding Silent Striders, like how spirits will sometimes look more favorably upon him if he plays up the Egyptian thing regardless of whether he's really Egyptian or not)
Wants-to-Know, even more so than a lot of lupus, is naturally very inquisitive and curious and has a tendency to ask questions much in the manner of a human child. I had Bryan bring him in as a Rank 2 character so he wouldn't be behind the rest of the pack (though as a Ragabash he might be slower ranking up as opposed to the rest over the long run). But because this character's got some experience under his belt we let him make up an adventure he'd had over time, so he regaled us with how he'd started up something of a local legend at a previous sept about a well-known Garou hero being in the area, and used that legend to intimidate a BSD pack into backing off.
So this Silent Strider, new to the area and interested in the cave and needing a pack, has joined up with the Sons of the Saga. And Åke, first thing, took him to a heavy metal concert to haze him (as that would be so drastically outside most lupus' experience even before getting to the sensory overload that there's basically no way he'd be able to enjoy it), which everyone else rightfully called stupid.
But anyhow, we were headed to early October. The sept is settling into routines and such. As I've mentioned before, Claudiu has become the Caller of the Wyld, Åke has become the Master of the Howl, and Jerry's been made a Guardian -- all perfectly cromulent sept positions for young, up-and-coming Garou. (I'm still sorting a few things out for Wants-to-Know, like which if any positions would be good for him). Sketches, the Theurge that helped out with a well-performed Rite of the Questing Stone when they pack was looking for Deborah, has finally turned up to cash in that favor.
She's been trying to get in contact with the spirit that runs things out at the Odd Fellows Lodge in town, but she can't get into the Umbral reflection of the building. When she tries stepping sideways directly, it just deposits her outside. Trying to enter the building in one side means she winds up going out the other. Jerry theorizes that some powerful spirit there is barring entry, perhaps as some sort of defensive measure. She doesn't know if she's somehow offended the spirits there but she asks if the Sons of the Saga can intervene on her behalf. They're all too eager, especially if it means possibly helping out the spirit in the Lodge building, who'd been friendly to them before.
So they went into town, went inside the physical lodge building, and stepped sideways. Rather than being ejected from the building, they wound up in a hallway. The hallway was lit by a single light on the wall, stretching into the darkness on either side. Behind them was a door leading outside. Claudiu opens the door and finds a rock and tosses it outside just to see what happens, only to see the ground collapse beneath it and reveal a sinkhole or a trench or something. Wants-to-Know and Jerry use their Gifts and Rites to try and find the spirit who 'runs' the lodge, but all it does is point to the spiritual mark on the back of Claudiu's hand that he got when he joined the lodge before.
He pokes at it with a finger and tries to activate it as if it were a talen, and the wall in front of them opens to reveal the bar that one normally finds within the Lodge building's Umbral reflection. It's populated by the usual spirits of human ennui that one might expect in a bar setting. When they ask around as to what's going on, the pack gets pointed towards the office where the registrar spirit is. They manage to get out of it that someone or something (it appears human, at least) has been 'probing' at the little self-contained realm of the Lodge building, from both sides of the Gauntlet. They set up a defensive perimeter (part of which is the trench that Claudiu found), and it's been out of that radius for at least a few hours. The spirit describes the sensation of the probing as something not unlike a Pattern Spider.
Claudiu and Jerry leave the building to poke around, leaving Åke and Wants-to-Know in the building to keep an eye on things. They manage to find some boot prints marking a spot where someone has been watching the building, and a piece of wadded up paper with mathematical scribblings on it. They debate the merits of waiting around for whomever it was to come back and, in their words, "werewolf the son of a bitch." (Yes, that's 'werewolf' used as a verb) Poking around, they manage to find a bit of a soft spot in the Gauntlet where they think the intruder came through, and then go back inside to try and figure out the paper.
Åke, calling upon some of his more intellectual ancestors for insight, can figure out that the equations on the paper represent some sort of advanced theoretical physics but that's the long and the short of it. (Which means, in their eyes, it can't possibly be a wizard or something) Åke suggests tracking down some of the scientists from the nearby radio telescope to see if they can decipher it. But in the short term, Claudiu wants to wait in the Lodge building until the intruder comes back to confront them.
And we left off there.
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