"You should stick with your homid form to take pictures," Elton says.
"What about you?" you ask.
"Come back before dawn," he says. "I'll be waiting here." To your unasked question, Elton says: "Neither Stormcat nor I could reach the caern. It's 'mazed,' if you'll forgive my coining a term. Hobland, who also fought at the Battle of Graves Farm and who is an ordinary human, scouted the next day and found himself equally perplexed. But whatever happened to us might not affect an outsider."
"After this, want to grab a coffee and talk?" I think I sort of like Elton, even though he's a bit dour.
"You're just stalling. We should go together." It's like this Shadow Lord has a coating of dust over him he can't shake off.
"Did the Broad Brook Garou often work with humans?" That sounds helpful.
"How good is the cell access near the caern?" And (I don't want to ask) how fast can Elton rescue me?
"Are you sure you haven't been influenced or affected by whatever is out there?"
Next
"You've probably heard about the Three Families by now," he says.
"Go on," you say.
"Three human families moved here almost two hundred years ago with the first wave of Polish immigrants to this area: the Banickis, the Palyses, and the Lubasiks. Malachi Palys was a Silver Fang and Casimir Lubasik a human sorcerer. Their interactions spawned an entire philosophy that came to define the local Garou, who freely mixed Casimir's Catholic heresies and Malachi's Jewish mysticism with the more traditional spiritual beliefs you're no doubt familiar with.
"If you came here ten years ago and listened to the Silver Fangs, you'd learn that the Three Families gave the local Garou a continuity of tradition and access to human resources that let them thrive in their battle against the Wyrm. That was all rot. The Three Families were manipulators, proud beyond their station, who believed that they could dictate terms to Gaia's champions. Sometimes useful, yes, but they turned on us in the end. My tribe, the Shadow Lords, we were right to doubt them. But it was a hard way to be proven right in the end."
He shakes his head, then, as if not entirely convinced of the Shadow Lord position.
"And Hobland is one of them?" you ask.
"Yeah but he's alright," Elton says. "He learned bugger all yesterday but that's how it goes sometimes. Try to do better. I'll wait inside."
It's like Elton still can't quite shake the rust out of his joints. But you're eager to see what you can learn on the trails.
The woods are cold and it's already getting dark; your breath steams, but you're wearing basically all your clothes, which means you're warm. You have physical printouts of Elton's maps and you downloaded copies to your phone, so this shouldn't be too difficult, especially since it's just a preliminary scouting expedition. And of course, you've thought about what you want.
I need to learn more about what happened to Broad Brook, at the Battle of Graves Farm and before.
I want to find something that shakes Elton out of his funk and banishes his despair.
I'd love to stomp some Wyrm-spawn. I won't do anything reckless tonight, but maybe I can find and get rid of some fomori.
Next