You text Elton and get a response as you eat breakfast: he's coming over. He arrives in less than a half hour, just as you've finished cleaning up, dressed in his black frock coat against the blustery spring weather.
"Retrieving Melodie won't be easy," Elton says. "You know about the Three Families, right?"
"The Palyses, the Banickis, and the Lubasiks." While your initial experience with the Three Families was David Banicki and his horse torture-and-mutation factory, your subsequent encounters with Lucinda, Hobland, and Roscoe were much more agreeable.
"Correct," Elton says. "This strange alliance worked well for over a century, until…well, it's not her fault."
"Melodie?" you ask.
"She was the first Garou to emerge out of the Three Families," Elton says. "The result: political chaos. And then her sister, Harmonie, demonstrated her own supernatural talents, though she was technically only human. The Silver Fangs were always closer to the Three Families than the Shadow Lords, so when Melodie joined them, it shifted the balance of power at the Caern, helped the Families gain more control over the Garou. It was a disaster, though it wasn't Melodie's fault. Still, she blames herself."
"Wait, were the Three Families actually Catholic and Jewish? Didn't they notice that the spirit world is real and other people's religions were more accurate?"
"But how nuts were they? Everyone says that Silver Fangs are crazy freaks. Get to the freakshow! Flipper babies, Hapsberg jaws, that kind of thing."
"There was a fight over Melodie?" So much for the Litany offering a path to coexistence.
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"I'm afraid that your old pack may have exaggerated tales of Silver Fang madness," Elton says. "Tales of inbreeding and psychological dissipation may once have had some element of truth, but that was long ago. The leader of our Silver Fangs, Graynail, was in the Coast Guard before his First Change. He and a few others had distant familial connections to the Three Families, but if you're imagining a family tree that looks like the cables behind an old TV, I have to disappoint you."
"So they weren't crazy?" you say.
"Oh goodness, they were totally daft," Elton says. "But mostly because they were crackpot mystics who believed they were tasked by God with keeping humanity spiritually blind."
"But we know where Melodie is?" you ask.
Elton nods. "She fled when her family died," the theurge says. "North of here, little nowhere town called Ashfield. I've tried to do research online but there are almost no resources."
"That's bizarre," you say.
"There's something fishy going on up there," Elton says. "This is what happens when Garou aren't there to placate and support the spirits. Spirits get aggressive and strange, and everyone suffers. The smartest thing to do is just head up there, find out what's wrong with Melodie, and deal with it face to face. We can go right now if you like. It's not as if meticulous planning has ever helped us in the past."
"Great, let's go!"
"I don't want to rush into things. Give me a few days to conduct research."
"Not yet—I need to work and make sure my situation here is stable first."
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