Our envoys wake up at their respective hosts' homes. Kat Jameson gets up and shovels Deputy Patti Frears' driveway, while Kayla Vanderhoeven does her morning yoga (Britt Lepus sleeps until the last possible second). Over with the boys, Tristan St. Cyr undertakes his morning skin and hair-care regimen (leaving the bathroom smelling floral), while Nicholas Failor does whatever odd jobs around the house he can find that need doing.
Sheriff Parker Horne gets a phone call, which ends with "we'll be right there." He tells the envoys that Ryan Faber, the pastor of Moose Pass Community Church, just called and said that he saw a bear last night outside his house. He texts Patti, and everyone meets up at the church.
Pastor Faber meets them and explains what happened - about 2AM he was awakened by a noise outside his window. He shined a flashlight at it, and saw...a bear? Faber says "bear," but is clearly not certain about that. He then says that it let out an unearthly shriek, nothing like what he thought bears did, and the shriek scared him enough that he backed away and hid. When he got up in the morning he found claw marks on the siding and called the sheriff.
Britt takes Faber aside and talks with him, and he expands a little. He doesn't actually think this thing was a bear, but he has no idea what else it could be. Its face looked too flat, almost...human? And the scream it made...he tells Britt that when he was very young, the power went out in his house and in the deathly silence, a wolf howled near his house. The existential terror he felt at that sound was similar (though much less intense, ultimately) than whatever happened last night.
The other envoys walk around the house to look at the claw marks. Nicholas can tell right away that they aren't from a bear - the pattern is more like what a human would make, if a human had immense hands and claws. Following its tracks back is going to be difficult because of the fresh snowfall, but of course Nicholas has other options.
He activates his Postcognition discipline, and sees last night. He sees the creature - there's no other word for it - pull itself out of the nearby lake and walk toward the church. It doesn't seem to be actually going to the church deliberately, though, at least not at first. It sniffs the air as though looking for something, and then sniffs the ground and growls in frustration. And then it walks over to the church, still sniffing, until the light hits its face. It snarls and lets out a scream, and even in the vision the scream is enough to chill Nicholas' blood.
Nicholas relates all this to the other envoys (and Britt starts making her way over to them). Tristan finds where the creature was sniffing at the ground and senses the Unknown. There's a brief flash of color (when he senses the Unknown, he sees the world in black and white, but things touched by the Unknown show up in color) at the church, but nothing stays, and who knows if the snow is "in color" anyway? He's about to give this up, but then he notices that his own hand flashes color, just for a second.
They move over to the lake. Kat can't find any evidence here; she pokes the water with a stick but comes away with nothing but a wet stick. If they want to check the other bank, they'll have to hike or drive north a ways, cross a bridge, then head back - the water isn't terribly deep but it's far too cold to swim and even at this narrow point in the lake it's too wide to ford any other way. The envoys regroup and talk about their next move.
They could go to the other side of the lake, but they aren't sure what that will tell them. They plot out where Gary Golden's cabin is relative to where they are now, and it's up the mountain to the east. If the creature came down from the mountain, it would have arrive more or less near the far side of the lake from the church. But what was it looking for? And why is Tristan's hand showing Unknown signs?
Tristan does some quick checking into the SAVE archives and learns that if he was actually being affected by some discipline of the Evil Way, he'd likely know it or have some other sign. But if the creature had his scent somehow and then lost it, that might account for it (and that he saw the thing in his laptop screen last night). The envoys ultimately decide to go up the mountain and look in on Gary's cabin, since they know something happened there. The sheriff and his deputy agree and go with them.
They drive up the mountain road as far as they can, till they get to the massive fallen tree. They walk around it, resulting in some minor injuries (twisted ankles, pulled muscles) from some of them, but they also check the base of the tree to see what happened. Nicholas realizes that the ground beneath the root structure has been dug out to the point that the tree overbalanced in one direction and fell, and is contemplating this when the ground gives way beneath Kat's feet and she slides into the hole ("FUCK").
Parker and Patti, while the envoys are looking at this, decide to keep heading up the mountain. The envoys admonish them to be careful and go slow, but they want to see if Gary is still there and if he needs help. There's some brief consideration to one of the envoys going with them, but they decide to hang back.
There's nothing threatening down there, though. The others help her out and Nicholas drops down there just to look around. He finds a collapsed tunnel - the soil loose enough to dig out a bit, but no way can he follow it back. But it looks like something tunneled in, dug out the roots enough to topple the tree, and then tunneled back out. That means not only is thing strong enough to move all this frozen earth, but it's smart enough to know how to do it in order to fell a tree and block a road.
The party keeps heading up, and shortly they hear a terrifying scream. It's not the horrific supernatural shriek that Nicholas heard in the vision, but a human scream of fear. And then they see Patti running down the mountain in a blind panic.
They try to yell and get her to slow down, but she trips and goes careening head over heels down the mountainside. Kat tries to catch her, but misses, and she flies by her and slams, back first, into a tree with a sickening crunch. Kat runs over and tries to use her Heal discipline, but when she touches Patti's side she feels something like a sack of gravel moving. She realizes that Patti's ribs are crushed and her breath is just a series of crackles and pops. She takes three more breaths, and then stops.
Nicholas grabs his rifle and starts heading up, and everyone follows behind him. Britt tries to get everyone to fall back and figure out what to do, but Nicholas won't hear it - if Parker is still alive, he wants to save him. They plod up the mountain and arrive at the cabin, but see no immediate danger or sign of Parker. There's a big hole in the garage door, but no other obvious damage to the place.
Nicholas and Kat start heading around the side of the house, following the sheriff's footprints. Kayla goes up to the hole in the garage door and peeks in. Britt goes up on the front porch and looks in the window, and Tristan hangs back and senses the Unknown. The garage door flashes color, and he opens his mouth to warn Kayla, but she's already looking.
She sees a pile of dead animals inside. Not huge, just a deer carcass, some squirrels...but also a human hand jutting out of it. She stumbles backwards, terrified, spooked beyond what's rational for what she's seeing, unable to get the image of dead flesh from her head. Tristan runs over to comfort her and she sits down heavily in the snow, trying to calm herself.
Britt peers in the window and sees that the place is trashed. She touches the wall and uses Schematic, and realizes that there's a big hole in the living room floor, but doesn't notice anything else strange (no secret rooms or anything.
Around back, Nicholas rounds a corner and sees Sheriff Horne a split second before the sheriff raises his rifle. He calls out to him and the sheriff drops the barrel of the gun, but he's clearly panicked. He asks after Patti and Nicholas tells him that Patti didn't make it, she fell down the mountain and died from her injuries. Parker, furious, swears to kill "it", and asks if Nicholas knows where it is. He doesn't, of course, but they're going to look.
They head back around the house and regroup, and they decide to fall back, retrieve Patti's body, and figure out next steps. But they decide they probably should try and figure out whose hand is in the garage. They don't want to actually go in there, so Britt goes over and uses Hidden Hand to grab the...hand...and pull it toward her. She dislodges it, and it floats to her, but just before it gets there something reaches out of the shadows and grabs it.
Britt sees the hand grabbing it. It's unmistakably human, but huge, gnarled, with yellow claws and distended fingers. She screams and Nicholas fires a shot past her, striking the monster's hand and driving it back into the garage. Parker fires his rifle at the hole, but who knows if he hits anything. And something inside the garage screams, giving that same base, primordial horror that Faber described.
Kayla grabs Tristan and tries to pull him to safety. Britt moves along the side of the house away from the garage. Kat moves to the front door to see if she can get the drop on the creature. Nicholas fires another shot, but finds himself struck by sudden vertigo - the world goes askew and while he can still shoot straight, that's only because he's a freakishly good shot.
Tristan tries to get Kayla to stop and wait for the others, and then pitches forward as the vertigo hits him, too. Kat opens the front door and sees a big hole in the living room floor. She tosses a flare into it, and it illuminates the creature leaping at her.
The creature is still wearing part of a flannel shirt, but its bodily proportions are all wrong - the limbs are too long, the face is too wide. The scalp has stretched, leaving tufts of hair, and the canine teeth are elongated. She notices that its toes are long enough to grip the ground and push off, and it makes straight for her, claws first. It grabs her shoulders and digs its claws in, and she cries out in fear and pain. It tries to bite her and muscle memory kicks in, her knowledge of martial arts letting her free herself and push the thing back.
It's still coming, though, and snaps at her. Britt runs up, grabs Kat and pulls her back, and uses Hidden Hand again to push the creature. They both go tumbling out of the front door, but the creature moves faster than Britt expected. It pounces on her and bites, chewing through her flesh and soaking itself, her, and the ground in blood.
Kat pulls out her hatchet and strikes the thing in the back of the head with all the force she can muster. It doesn't kill it, but it cracks its skull open and it releases Britt, rolls around on the ground and tries to get up. Kayla stumbles over with Tristan and sprays a can of bear mace in its face, and Nicholas puts a bullet in its head. It flops once and lies still...and then changes, slowly, its face shrinking, its body shortening, until Gary Golden is lying there, dead.
The envoys take in this horror, and Kat tries to save Britt, but she's bleeding out. Parker, fortunately, has enough medical training to stop the bleeding (in addition to having no one on this team with any Protective disciplines, they have no one on the team with the Emergency Medic Edge!). Parker reloads his rifle and makes to go off into the woods to kill the creature that killed Gary, because obviously it wasn't Gary that did all this. Kayla manages to get him to stop a moment and rethink this plan, and Tristan uses Telepathic Empathy to help out. He feels the sheriff's psyche slip away like water down a drain as the sheriff goes deeper into shock. He sits down in the snow and just stares at Gary's body.
The envoys call for a life flight and give the GPS coordinates, but they're told it's going to be about an hour before the copter can get there. Nicholas builds a fire and moves Britt near it, and everything takes a breath. It's only about noon, but it feels like they've been awake much longer. And the next hour is likely to be the longest yet.
Also, Kat notes, they should really retrieve Patti's body.
