The day after…
Wednesday, 18 May 2016 10:30![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trace_logs
18 May, 2016
The moon is in the waxing Gibbous (Galliard) Moon phase (79% full).
Trace has returned from a patrol of the bawn around the caern, and is sitting next to the fire pit, feeding not-quite-so-small sticks into the fire, his jacket on the ground next to him for the time being. Even now, the ahroun's anger is palpable, a muscle twitching in his jaw as he thinks quietly and a low growl that doesn't sound quite right to his homid form.
Settled on a log and looking pale is Alicia. She has stayed up all night, burning herself out on healing as much as she could. Tapped out, she has a slumped, drained look upon her face. Her hair is sticking out in a few places and her eyes are sunken in. Her hands are a bit twitchy as she wrings them together.
Upon arriving last night, Thane immediately crossed over and was missing a good portion of the night. When he finally did return, paled from blood loss and exhaustion, he explained the caern totems were helping spread word and keeping watch. Only then did he allow some of his grievous wounds to be healed and rested. Even now he's still exhausted but at least awake, having been up since early morning. In his Glabro form he steps down into the caern and makes his way for the fire, giving a faint grunt of acknowledgement to those present.
Trace looks up, and gives the sept Alpha a nod of acknowledgement, before looking over to Alicia for a moment, and then back down to the fire and adding another piece of wood as he speaks. He's quiet when he asks, "Have you gotten any rest?"
Rocking back and forth slowly, Alicia is blinking her eyes a few times here and there before her head snaps up at the sound of Trace's voice. "Huh? Rest? No. Not yet. I will later." At the sight of Thane, she pushes herself up on unsteady and tired legs. "We send any scouts out to investigate the fringes and see if they are deciding to push forward?"
"So far no signs of it," Thane says to Alicia, "But it may just be a matter of time. Attacking a safehouse is one thing. A direct assault on a caern is another. Here…" He rummages in his one pocket to pull out a small decorated medicine bag, "I'd removed it from Edgewood when we learned it might come under attack. It's a healing fetish. I had it secured with one of my tribe, so I had to go retrieve it. Use it between yourself and the other sept healers. It's nothing miraculous but it'll help and at least it didn't fall into their hands.
Trace drums his fingers on one knee, and nods. "We knew something was going to happen at Edgewood," Trace says, "and we left it nearly empty, and they took the chance." He shakes his head, and then continues. "I should have called for backup the moment I saw that door was open."
"Would not have mattered. They had an army waiting in the woods. They would have found someone on patrol if they didn't find someone at the house," Alicia says with a shrug of her shoulders. "An army. They were not going to sit there, bored and play with their cell phones while they waited. It was just luck on their part and bad luck on yours. Do not beat yourself up over it."
"Still," Thane says with a grit of his teeth. "To continue to remain at the house without alerting anyone risked lives needlessly. I saw Samantha come out of there. I have no idea why she was in there in the first place but she is damned fucking lucky she came out in one piece. I'm also particularly pissed off they continue to find ways to skulk about on our bawn. This place is too damn big for the few Garou we have watching it."
There is a moment of acknowledgement of what Thane says, before Trace shakes his head, and that low growl returns for just a moment, directed darkly at the ground beneath his feet. "Justin and I had asked Samantha to scout a bit closer, look in, see if she could see anything through the windows," Trace says, "and before we could stop her, she went in instead and then everything went to hell pretty quickly."
There is a slight snort from Alicia as she listens to Trace.
Thane curls back his lips and the growl in Glabro is pretty darn animalistic. "Why does that not surprise me? Has no one ever once tried to discipline her? What little I've encountered of that girl is little more than her own selfish behavior and arrogance. I've a mind to see her titled like the cub she continues to act like. She's certainly not proving herself suitable to being Fostern."
Trace leans over and picks up another sizable stick, adding it to the fire perhaps mostly to watch it burn. The Glass Walker rolls his eyes, and shrugs his shoulders. "Who else of her tribe is here, aside from her packmate that I saw yesterday?" he asks. "It seems to me like she does not listen much to the rest of us, in battle or otherwise."
"Jacinta used to be the Elder until she left a few months ago for Alaska. Now it is just those two. Esther has more common sense. Samantha… well…" Alicia trails off for a moment. "I will not speak ill of her," she says as she leans back against the log she settles back on to, fishing through the medicine bag fetish.
Thane jerks a thumb towards Alicia as she explains. "Samantha seems full of typical Wendigo piss. If you're not one of their own you're not worth her respect. I had to just about beat it out of her when she decided to insult me, even then it was as grudging as she could manage. We can't afford behavior like that, not now."
Brings-the-Pack emerges from the treeline, head pivoting to take in those around the firepit, and announces, "I saw nothing out of the ordinary on a circuit of area."
Trace nods once again, and only after a long moment does the low growl fade back to silence. "She will either learn, or eventually her own stupidity will be the death of her," he says, shaking his head once more before waving a hand in greeting to the mage cat. "Fits with what I've seen on my patrols so far, last night and this morning," he says.
"Risking her own life is one thing," Thane says to Trace sourly, "But disobeying orders put other lives at risk. I'll be having a long chat with her as soon as I locate where she went to." The arrival of the mage brings the Alpha to divert his focus from troublesome Wendigo. "Thank you for your help, Brings-the-Pack. They moved on the house quicker than I thought, but at least it was cleared out."
Brings-the-Pack settles back on his haunches near the treeline, not coming closer to join those by the firepit. Skittish, perhaps? "I did not see any members of the Sept who had died in battle, but did not have the time to look particularly hard either. All of the casualties were on the Spirals' side?" he inquires curiously— perhaps tentatively.
Trace looks up into the trees for a moment, and then nods. "This time," the Walker says.
Alicia nods her head. "Yeah, no one died and we have most of them patched back together. So now we just… I suppose we wait.".
Thane nods his head once in further confirmation. "Nothing permanently damaging. I was sorely tempted to add a few more to their body count but… priorities. Thankfully Edgewood is just a building, there was nothing of importance left there we need to sacrifice lives or energy to reclaim. A tactical spot, yes, but this sept has seen worse. We need to be ready to turn back attacks here though. My question is, were these forces belonging to the Queen? I saw what looked like one of her's but I couldn't get a good luck and none of the Spirals mentioned her name. Fomori were coming but they were normal fomori, not wraiths."
"They didn't say," Trace says, his expression verging on murderous for a long moment even through the grip of his control, which doesn't seem to falter. "So either they are," he says, "or they've split and have decided to attack us just because we're here." He lets out a long breath. "Before I hit the treeline, it looked like the white thing and the Spiral were fighting. So if they did come from the Tower, I don't think they're exactly getting along right now."
Alicia bobs her head. "I think they are the Queen's. She said she would hit us hard and she did. It is not unreasonable to think that. I could hear they were shouting… something about killing the pig. It was all over the news as well. Someone tried to attack the mayor and they shouted the same thing in the crowds," she says as she fiddles with her phone. "The crowd went into a frenzy."
"I spoke with Val earlier. She has eyes on a trio of Spirals in the city who tried to grab another Spiral, Blue, in the city last night." The cougar-mage then states, "It is possible— if not probable— that there is a schism that has formed between other Spirals and the Spirals working for the Queen. Perhaps many of the Spirals have actually defected, leaving the Queen with few foot soldiers at her disposal." He then admits, "These are just my own speculations. Val might have more insight."
"There are two factions of Spirals at work, though technically you could say three," Thane remarks. "Renegade's and the Queens. Now, not all of the Queen's are still loyal too. I'm missing too much information to make a real assumption though about who was involved last night but for now I have to presume the Queen given what's been going on. Val let me know through her ally about Blue, though I knew of him prior, as well that there's three Spirals involved in that event holed up in the city."
Trace falls quiet and simply listens for the moment, reaching over to his jacket to pull out a cigarette and a lighter. A moment later, cigarette lit, the lighter gets shoved into his pocket and the Walker takes a long drag.
"I am sure Blue has an end game as well, but so far he has been pretty useful, and if the spirals are now trying to actively kill him in public, the enemy of our enemy is now our friend until further notice." Alicia taps her finger against her cheek. "I think it is time that we pull him into a discussion with some of us big dogs and let him know the severity of the situation. We need whatever intel he has and we need him to be straight with us if he honestly wants to get his friends and get out of town alive. I think what we need to do now at this point is lock down the bawn and Caern and build a specialty team to take the Queen out while the abundance of her army is out here with us. Who do we have in the city right now?"
Brings-the-Pack stays silent as Sept-specific discussions begin.
"A meeting with Blue is something I discussed with Briari," Thane says over to Alicia. "He's been useful but he is still a Spiral. At no point can we trust he's not going to try to take out any one of us. I'm sure he's quite aware of the severity of things, save us risking losing the caern is hardly a bad thing to him. As for who is in the city, the normal groups that are there to begin with. The only ones out this way are those of us that were here last night."
For a moment, it looks like the Glass Walker is going to say something, but then he falls silent again instead, taking a stick and poking at the fire some before adding another piece of wood.
"Well, then get ahold of her and set something up. Let's do this. But with us being stuck out here and them being stuck out there, how are we going to pull this off? We should find some means of coming and going in case of an emergency. We need an exit strategy," Alicia says tiredly. "When this happened last time, the Spirals had the Caern for a month or so, and it took a lot of coordination to get it back. This time, I would like for us to not lose the Caern for a change and actually push back and win. That is why I am curious to who we have in the city available to create a war party and take the fight to the tower while we got the majority of the enemy on our front porch."
Brings-the-Pack seems to be dwelling on a thought as the garou speak, and as an opportunity arises to politely cut in, he shares what he's been thinking about. "Would you be able to tell if Blue is in telepathic communication with a pack he might be a part of? If he is able to communicate with his pack, as many packed garou of the sept seem capable of doing, everything he sees and hears might have already been communicated to his pack, who in turn might be communicating information to others."
"I can't," Thane says to Brings-the-Pack. "Perhaps a Theurge can, or there's a rite of gift, but none of my tribe. It's worth looking into if he doesn't feel like being forthcoming. I'd certainly request a Philodox be present at this meeting to determine the truth of things. It'll be a balance between making sure we're safe in a meeting like this and not scare him off. No doubt we'd be as suspicious of his motives in a meeting as he would be of ours."
Trace looks up from the fire for a moment. "Nor can I," the Walker ahroun adds, before falling silent again.
Alicia gives a shake of her head. "I can read dreams and I can read anything that is printed or spoken to me through a gift I picked up by way of spiritual favor. But I can't read his pack link. I have not heard of anyone that can do that."
Brings-the-Pack offers, "I could do that. It might provide some much-needed insight that the sept needs. Assuming there is a pack link Blue is using." He adds, "But working all this magick is becoming taxing and eating into my reserves."
Trace looks at the mage cat for a moment, and purses his lips. "Is there something we can do to help that?" the Walker asks.
There's no sound or sight that warns of approach, but a familiar voice calls from the direction of the trees. "Ahoy!" Thomas calls. "You folk alright with an approach?"
Rabbit is with Thomas, though keeps quiet.
Thane gives a slow nod of his head towards Brings-the-Pack, with the glabro'ed Alpha sitting by the fire and looking still a bit mangled but otherwise fine. "I don't know that it's mission critical right now to waste your energy," he says to the mage. "We can keep it on the back burner, but we'll see what information he offers first. Poking at pack links can earn the ire of not just the pack but the totem and we can't afford to piss off anyone else." Oh, and then there's a fox and company. He looks over to Thomas's arrival and remarks, "Long as you're not coming to kill us. We're booked up on those right now."
Trace glances over at the newcomers with a nod of greeting, and then looks to Thane before pushing to his feet. "I'm going back out to patrol," the Walker says, quietly. "I won't be too far."
The moon is in the waxing Gibbous (Galliard) Moon phase (79% full).
Trace has returned from a patrol of the bawn around the caern, and is sitting next to the fire pit, feeding not-quite-so-small sticks into the fire, his jacket on the ground next to him for the time being. Even now, the ahroun's anger is palpable, a muscle twitching in his jaw as he thinks quietly and a low growl that doesn't sound quite right to his homid form.
Settled on a log and looking pale is Alicia. She has stayed up all night, burning herself out on healing as much as she could. Tapped out, she has a slumped, drained look upon her face. Her hair is sticking out in a few places and her eyes are sunken in. Her hands are a bit twitchy as she wrings them together.
Upon arriving last night, Thane immediately crossed over and was missing a good portion of the night. When he finally did return, paled from blood loss and exhaustion, he explained the caern totems were helping spread word and keeping watch. Only then did he allow some of his grievous wounds to be healed and rested. Even now he's still exhausted but at least awake, having been up since early morning. In his Glabro form he steps down into the caern and makes his way for the fire, giving a faint grunt of acknowledgement to those present.
Trace looks up, and gives the sept Alpha a nod of acknowledgement, before looking over to Alicia for a moment, and then back down to the fire and adding another piece of wood as he speaks. He's quiet when he asks, "Have you gotten any rest?"
Rocking back and forth slowly, Alicia is blinking her eyes a few times here and there before her head snaps up at the sound of Trace's voice. "Huh? Rest? No. Not yet. I will later." At the sight of Thane, she pushes herself up on unsteady and tired legs. "We send any scouts out to investigate the fringes and see if they are deciding to push forward?"
"So far no signs of it," Thane says to Alicia, "But it may just be a matter of time. Attacking a safehouse is one thing. A direct assault on a caern is another. Here…" He rummages in his one pocket to pull out a small decorated medicine bag, "I'd removed it from Edgewood when we learned it might come under attack. It's a healing fetish. I had it secured with one of my tribe, so I had to go retrieve it. Use it between yourself and the other sept healers. It's nothing miraculous but it'll help and at least it didn't fall into their hands.
Trace drums his fingers on one knee, and nods. "We knew something was going to happen at Edgewood," Trace says, "and we left it nearly empty, and they took the chance." He shakes his head, and then continues. "I should have called for backup the moment I saw that door was open."
"Would not have mattered. They had an army waiting in the woods. They would have found someone on patrol if they didn't find someone at the house," Alicia says with a shrug of her shoulders. "An army. They were not going to sit there, bored and play with their cell phones while they waited. It was just luck on their part and bad luck on yours. Do not beat yourself up over it."
"Still," Thane says with a grit of his teeth. "To continue to remain at the house without alerting anyone risked lives needlessly. I saw Samantha come out of there. I have no idea why she was in there in the first place but she is damned fucking lucky she came out in one piece. I'm also particularly pissed off they continue to find ways to skulk about on our bawn. This place is too damn big for the few Garou we have watching it."
There is a moment of acknowledgement of what Thane says, before Trace shakes his head, and that low growl returns for just a moment, directed darkly at the ground beneath his feet. "Justin and I had asked Samantha to scout a bit closer, look in, see if she could see anything through the windows," Trace says, "and before we could stop her, she went in instead and then everything went to hell pretty quickly."
There is a slight snort from Alicia as she listens to Trace.
Thane curls back his lips and the growl in Glabro is pretty darn animalistic. "Why does that not surprise me? Has no one ever once tried to discipline her? What little I've encountered of that girl is little more than her own selfish behavior and arrogance. I've a mind to see her titled like the cub she continues to act like. She's certainly not proving herself suitable to being Fostern."
Trace leans over and picks up another sizable stick, adding it to the fire perhaps mostly to watch it burn. The Glass Walker rolls his eyes, and shrugs his shoulders. "Who else of her tribe is here, aside from her packmate that I saw yesterday?" he asks. "It seems to me like she does not listen much to the rest of us, in battle or otherwise."
"Jacinta used to be the Elder until she left a few months ago for Alaska. Now it is just those two. Esther has more common sense. Samantha… well…" Alicia trails off for a moment. "I will not speak ill of her," she says as she leans back against the log she settles back on to, fishing through the medicine bag fetish.
Thane jerks a thumb towards Alicia as she explains. "Samantha seems full of typical Wendigo piss. If you're not one of their own you're not worth her respect. I had to just about beat it out of her when she decided to insult me, even then it was as grudging as she could manage. We can't afford behavior like that, not now."
Brings-the-Pack emerges from the treeline, head pivoting to take in those around the firepit, and announces, "I saw nothing out of the ordinary on a circuit of area."
Trace nods once again, and only after a long moment does the low growl fade back to silence. "She will either learn, or eventually her own stupidity will be the death of her," he says, shaking his head once more before waving a hand in greeting to the mage cat. "Fits with what I've seen on my patrols so far, last night and this morning," he says.
"Risking her own life is one thing," Thane says to Trace sourly, "But disobeying orders put other lives at risk. I'll be having a long chat with her as soon as I locate where she went to." The arrival of the mage brings the Alpha to divert his focus from troublesome Wendigo. "Thank you for your help, Brings-the-Pack. They moved on the house quicker than I thought, but at least it was cleared out."
Brings-the-Pack settles back on his haunches near the treeline, not coming closer to join those by the firepit. Skittish, perhaps? "I did not see any members of the Sept who had died in battle, but did not have the time to look particularly hard either. All of the casualties were on the Spirals' side?" he inquires curiously— perhaps tentatively.
Trace looks up into the trees for a moment, and then nods. "This time," the Walker says.
Alicia nods her head. "Yeah, no one died and we have most of them patched back together. So now we just… I suppose we wait.".
Thane nods his head once in further confirmation. "Nothing permanently damaging. I was sorely tempted to add a few more to their body count but… priorities. Thankfully Edgewood is just a building, there was nothing of importance left there we need to sacrifice lives or energy to reclaim. A tactical spot, yes, but this sept has seen worse. We need to be ready to turn back attacks here though. My question is, were these forces belonging to the Queen? I saw what looked like one of her's but I couldn't get a good luck and none of the Spirals mentioned her name. Fomori were coming but they were normal fomori, not wraiths."
"They didn't say," Trace says, his expression verging on murderous for a long moment even through the grip of his control, which doesn't seem to falter. "So either they are," he says, "or they've split and have decided to attack us just because we're here." He lets out a long breath. "Before I hit the treeline, it looked like the white thing and the Spiral were fighting. So if they did come from the Tower, I don't think they're exactly getting along right now."
Alicia bobs her head. "I think they are the Queen's. She said she would hit us hard and she did. It is not unreasonable to think that. I could hear they were shouting… something about killing the pig. It was all over the news as well. Someone tried to attack the mayor and they shouted the same thing in the crowds," she says as she fiddles with her phone. "The crowd went into a frenzy."
"I spoke with Val earlier. She has eyes on a trio of Spirals in the city who tried to grab another Spiral, Blue, in the city last night." The cougar-mage then states, "It is possible— if not probable— that there is a schism that has formed between other Spirals and the Spirals working for the Queen. Perhaps many of the Spirals have actually defected, leaving the Queen with few foot soldiers at her disposal." He then admits, "These are just my own speculations. Val might have more insight."
"There are two factions of Spirals at work, though technically you could say three," Thane remarks. "Renegade's and the Queens. Now, not all of the Queen's are still loyal too. I'm missing too much information to make a real assumption though about who was involved last night but for now I have to presume the Queen given what's been going on. Val let me know through her ally about Blue, though I knew of him prior, as well that there's three Spirals involved in that event holed up in the city."
Trace falls quiet and simply listens for the moment, reaching over to his jacket to pull out a cigarette and a lighter. A moment later, cigarette lit, the lighter gets shoved into his pocket and the Walker takes a long drag.
"I am sure Blue has an end game as well, but so far he has been pretty useful, and if the spirals are now trying to actively kill him in public, the enemy of our enemy is now our friend until further notice." Alicia taps her finger against her cheek. "I think it is time that we pull him into a discussion with some of us big dogs and let him know the severity of the situation. We need whatever intel he has and we need him to be straight with us if he honestly wants to get his friends and get out of town alive. I think what we need to do now at this point is lock down the bawn and Caern and build a specialty team to take the Queen out while the abundance of her army is out here with us. Who do we have in the city right now?"
Brings-the-Pack stays silent as Sept-specific discussions begin.
"A meeting with Blue is something I discussed with Briari," Thane says over to Alicia. "He's been useful but he is still a Spiral. At no point can we trust he's not going to try to take out any one of us. I'm sure he's quite aware of the severity of things, save us risking losing the caern is hardly a bad thing to him. As for who is in the city, the normal groups that are there to begin with. The only ones out this way are those of us that were here last night."
For a moment, it looks like the Glass Walker is going to say something, but then he falls silent again instead, taking a stick and poking at the fire some before adding another piece of wood.
"Well, then get ahold of her and set something up. Let's do this. But with us being stuck out here and them being stuck out there, how are we going to pull this off? We should find some means of coming and going in case of an emergency. We need an exit strategy," Alicia says tiredly. "When this happened last time, the Spirals had the Caern for a month or so, and it took a lot of coordination to get it back. This time, I would like for us to not lose the Caern for a change and actually push back and win. That is why I am curious to who we have in the city available to create a war party and take the fight to the tower while we got the majority of the enemy on our front porch."
Brings-the-Pack seems to be dwelling on a thought as the garou speak, and as an opportunity arises to politely cut in, he shares what he's been thinking about. "Would you be able to tell if Blue is in telepathic communication with a pack he might be a part of? If he is able to communicate with his pack, as many packed garou of the sept seem capable of doing, everything he sees and hears might have already been communicated to his pack, who in turn might be communicating information to others."
"I can't," Thane says to Brings-the-Pack. "Perhaps a Theurge can, or there's a rite of gift, but none of my tribe. It's worth looking into if he doesn't feel like being forthcoming. I'd certainly request a Philodox be present at this meeting to determine the truth of things. It'll be a balance between making sure we're safe in a meeting like this and not scare him off. No doubt we'd be as suspicious of his motives in a meeting as he would be of ours."
Trace looks up from the fire for a moment. "Nor can I," the Walker ahroun adds, before falling silent again.
Alicia gives a shake of her head. "I can read dreams and I can read anything that is printed or spoken to me through a gift I picked up by way of spiritual favor. But I can't read his pack link. I have not heard of anyone that can do that."
Brings-the-Pack offers, "I could do that. It might provide some much-needed insight that the sept needs. Assuming there is a pack link Blue is using." He adds, "But working all this magick is becoming taxing and eating into my reserves."
Trace looks at the mage cat for a moment, and purses his lips. "Is there something we can do to help that?" the Walker asks.
There's no sound or sight that warns of approach, but a familiar voice calls from the direction of the trees. "Ahoy!" Thomas calls. "You folk alright with an approach?"
Rabbit is with Thomas, though keeps quiet.
Thane gives a slow nod of his head towards Brings-the-Pack, with the glabro'ed Alpha sitting by the fire and looking still a bit mangled but otherwise fine. "I don't know that it's mission critical right now to waste your energy," he says to the mage. "We can keep it on the back burner, but we'll see what information he offers first. Poking at pack links can earn the ire of not just the pack but the totem and we can't afford to piss off anyone else." Oh, and then there's a fox and company. He looks over to Thomas's arrival and remarks, "Long as you're not coming to kill us. We're booked up on those right now."
Trace glances over at the newcomers with a nod of greeting, and then looks to Thane before pushing to his feet. "I'm going back out to patrol," the Walker says, quietly. "I won't be too far."