Case 13: Entry 2

I've finished my first day working with the Reynolds. The son has been moody all day long. He also stinks and has been craving lots and lots of meat. Basically it seems like he's going through puberty early, except for the howling and the fact that his nails are growing faster and thicker than usual. Naturally, I wanted to make sure we were actually on the right track, so I started with tossing a little zauberstaub around. The dust all landed right on the boy, and most of it went to the scars from the attack. So either this is lycanthropy or the spirit or warlock or whatever is causing the phenomenon is doing so without leaving any magical traces. Which is impossible. I think.

Anyway, the next step was to see if there was anything that would inhibit the condition. Wolfsbane, silver, and mistletoe all worked as inhibitors, but they also caused physical irritation. As far as I can tell, the level of damage to the child is directly proportional to the effect upon the wolf. This could mean that the wolf isn't a distinct spirit after all, or it could mean that it and the child are too closely interwoven for any such basic tactics to target one and not the other.

The only really promising result came about when I put the child in a circle. I used a design the Agency uncovered a while back to block out as much arcane energy as possible from the outside world. I tried another pinch of zauberstaub (damn, this is getting expensive) and only two discernible specks were able to get through. After thirty minutes or so the kid started to get better. His heart rate went down. he got less aggressive, and the hairs on the back of my neck stopped standing at attention. I'm pretty sure some of the body hair even disappeared. I'll never understand how that part of the change works. Anyway, it all seemed to be going well until about eleven minutes after I marked down that there was a noticeable change. At that point the traits are started to come back, with the additional change that he became nauseous and tired. I was reluctant to shut down the test, but when he fell out of his chair I figured it was time to break the circle. The whole may have ended poorly. but it's still good news in my opinion because it suggests the presence of an actual actual spirit that requires a flow of arcane energy for nourishment. The trouble is that if I'm right it also can feed directly on the child if it gets cut off from the natural currents it usually taps into.

After that I went back to research, and came up with mostly horrible news. Everything I've come up with suggests we need concrete and thick, metal doors to keep the wolf locked in during the change, and the family doesn't have anything like that. The garage might with enough silver and wolfsbane scattered around, but it could still get out if it really wanted to. It would just hurt really, really bad. I told the parents that I have some sedatives that can stop it from working up the nerve for that, but I neglected to mention that those sedatives are mostly opiates. The real trouble there is that I'm not sure  the amount of drugs needed to keep a werewolf calm during the change will actually be below the lethal dosage for a nine year-old kid. It could be that he'd die of an overdose the moment he changed back.

Oh, and lets not forget that other little tidbit I found in the research. Supposedly there are some ways to cure a werewolf, but they're all...let's just say they're impractical. The most common one is to kill whoever turned you and eat their heart. And according on account you have to do it on the night of the new moon, while another one says you have to do it the night before the full moon. But one thing all of them agree on is that you have to do it before the first change is complete. If we try it after the three night of lupine fun, then it won't work. According to the lore at least. My best guess is that this is the time that the curse is really settling into his spiritual/biological system, which would also explain the odd symptoms showing up during times when he's supposed to look like any other human.

Well, tomorrow's the big night. This is going to be all kinds of fun.

Case 13: Entry 1

I was going over my notes from previous cases yesterday and, being the idiot that I am, remarked to Nox that everything's been too boring. So far my cases had been split between hauntings, mild curses, people struggling with negligible magical talents, and people jumping perfectly normal shadows. They were all very procedural, a few paid extremely well, and none were challenging enough to demand more than five minutes of research. How horrible. So naturally I complain about it. You'd think a "supernatural expert" would know better than to jinx himself.

Okay. Rant finished.

This morning I got a call from a couple whose nine year-old son was bit by a werewolf. Apparently they were visiting relatives in the mountains and something came out of the woods only to run away a few seconds later upon hearing a truck horn. Of course, the parents didn't believe it was a werewolf attack at first. It was only after he started howling in his sleep that they decided to call me. Even though the moon is technically only completely full for a few seconds or so, it looks full for three nights. Most werewolf lore says that the change happens one night out of every month, but according to the parents the attack happened on the third night of the full moon rather than the middle one. Which means the change probably takes place for three consecutive months at a time. Which means we have two nights before the kid's first change.

As I see it, there are three big questions to answer. First, how much does it take to contain a werewolf during the change? Second, can a werewolf be subdued or tranquilized? Third, can a werewolf be cured?

I'll have to go through all the serious literature I've collected on werewolves for answers. Which isn't going to take long because even with all the Agency's resources the data pool is still absolutely minimal. Specific accounts are all short on details, and the lore often contradicts itself. The last time I looked at this subject I came up with four distinct werewolf myths. At least the weakness for silver is mostly universal. For the first question I can look for any indications of how strong the creature is (if memory serves, the answer is "really, really strong") and make a list of possible weaknesses. For the second and third questions I need to figure out if the wolf is a distinct spiritual entity living inside the person or simply an altered personality state. If it's a spirit, then I might be able to drive it out or put it to sleep. If not, I have no idea how to handle this.

Introduction

     Hi, my name is Jack Underhill. When I was sixteen I wrote and self-published a guide to worldbuilding for fantasy writers. The book was over five-hundred pages long, it featured full chapters for over eighty different supernatural creatures from cultures all over the world, it had a few more chapters in which I quickly went over the creatures that were less interesting or about whom less had been written, it had detailed descriptions of the different theories of magic used by various stories, it included quotes from books over lore going all the way back to Ancient Greece, and there was a section dedicated to analyzing bestselling fantasy novels through statistics to see what we could infer about the worlds they took place in. A few months later I got a letter from a Harvard professor telling me he wanted to use my book in his class, which was cool. A little later I got a meeting with the head of a top secret task force who offered me a job analyzing evidence of supernatural phenomenon, which was cooler.

     That was four years ago. I still get files from them every few weeks, but mostly I work as a supernatural expert. What that means is that when normal people get mixed up in something from the spooky side, I'm the one they call. If your house is haunted, I come and exorcise it. If your kid is actually a changeling, I explain to them what to expect and get them in touch with older person with some faerie blood in them. If you have something valuable and magical to sell, I call some people and arrange a trade. If you tussled with someone spooky and by some miracle you wound up being the one with a body to hide, I make the evidence disappear. If you tussled with someone spooky and now you're a ghost, I make the evidence reappear. It's not usually that drastic, though. It's usually very simple and even kind of boring. Usually...