Today I officially joined up with Straub's team.
According to the files he gave me, the creature Tom Yukimura spent his life searching for hunts among the northwestern mountains of the state. There's a handful of towns where it seems to hunt more regularly than elsewhere, and there is one town in particular a bit north of Tahoe that Tom came to believe was the heart of its territory just before he got locked away. Tom found a lot of odd deaths in the area like someone who was partially crushed in an accident and failed to scream for help despite the fact that the medical examiner swore he must have had at least four hours alive and conscious or a woman who hacked her neighbor to death with a cleaver over an argument they'd had nearly a decade ago. There were a lot of deaths like that, all odd enough to raise an eyebrow but not enough to hit any statistical red flags. But those were scattered across time and geography. The really troubling incidents were the times Tom believed the creature came out to hunt. The files included a long list of fatal accidents, fires, horrid murders, and other sources of suffering. After each one there was series of disappearances. Most of the bodies were never found, but those that were had all been mauled horribly. The police records suggest that most of the events only included four or five disappearances, but Tom was able to link seventeen disappearances to one of the events.
Those are the hard facts. Most of the stuff about deaths and disappearances can be confirmed with a little digging. Then there's the other stuff. For one thing, Tom believed that there are three signs when the creature starts seriously feeding: large flocks of sparrows including at least one which is white and grey, images of past victims, and the cave of the creature. The cave in particular is usually seen only in dreams or in distortions of some kind, but there were events during which people claimed to have found the actual dwelling place. Additionally, Tom believed that the creature was able to project its awareness into people whom it had called to darkness, animals, and conjured forms taken from the nightmares of its victims. He believed that it used these forms to do the actual hunting.
The really interesting thing is that (according to Tom) the monster's territory isn't just a place it happens to hunt; it actually haunts the land. That means that it shares a spiritual connection to the place, or (to put it more poetically) that the land is poisoned with its essence. If that's the case, we would do well to regard the town and its people with suspicion.
I shared this and an abundance of minor observations with the rest of the team when we met at a local Denny's. I also mentioned that I shared Straub's belief that the creature was an aberrant wendigo and pointed out the ways in which it fit the lore and the ways in which it deviated. Of course, wendigos don't really have any known silver bullets, so I wasn't able to deliver much good news. I did point out that we might be able to exploit the thing's connection to the land and that it could be vulnerable while it was inhabiting bodies other than its own. Not that I was able to say exactly how we could exploit those weaknesses if they really were weaknesses.
I was feeling kind of inadequate at the meeting.
There are three other members of the party. One is a scrawny, young, highly medicated psychic named Yosef Shadid. Another is a grandfatherly and roughly bear-shaped private investigator named Roland Fuentes whose ethnicity I would guess as Pacific Islander. The last member of the team is a katana-wielding huntress in her late twenties or early thirties named Michelle Yates. She also happens to be Tom Yukimura's last companion, and the only one who is generally regarded as his protege. From what I gathered, it's up to Yosef and myself to uncover and interpret the arcane details of the case while Roland takes the lead on human intelligence. Then when the fighting happens Roland is there to be the brawler while Michelle delivers more precise, critical strikes.
It seems like a good plan. In theory.
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