DATE: Tuesday, June 16, 1998
Place: Silverton Apartments, Apt. #120

---- Recall start ----

Living Room, 120 Silverton
Contents:
Patrick

JJ Malone knocks on the outer door, then waits for it to be answered. Or 
   something.
Patrick looks up at his game at the knock, then quickly saves it before 
   heading over, peeking through the peephole, and opening the door. "C'mon 
   in," he says, gesturing into the living roomwith his other hand. "Have a 
   seat."
JJ Malone is edgy but not so much as under the full moon. Fingers twitch 
   reflexively towards his pocket, but he stills them, following along after 
   the Uktena. At the invitation, he sits down where indicated, looking over 
   to but not quite at Patrick. "Thanks for seeing me. I thought I should 
   report to you about Ashley Turner." Yes, there is a deference to his tone, 
   despite his public attitude towards most.
Patrick plops back down on the floor and looks up questioningly at JJ. "Oh?" 
   he asks. "Found something juicy?"
JJ Malone rubs the webbing between thumb and forefinger of his left hand 
   across his jaw, looking indecisive. "Nigel, Murphy, Lisa, Jayson...they've 
   dug up things about her, but I don't know how important they are. Like, 
   Nigel uncovered evidence which indicates there may have been some funny 
   business surrounding the circumstances of how Ms. Turner," his usage of the 
   name is coldly formal, "started her fortune. That her company was involved 
   in building the railroads which define the southern boundary to the Bawn, I 
   believe?" he questions his own information about the latter.
Patrick nods. "Of that, we're quite certain."
JJ Malone pauses. "About which?" he asks, mildly confused.
Patrick answers, "The last. Well, we're more certain now that we have a better 
   idea about her. The railroad thing."
JJ Malone nods, then goes on. "We've also confirmed, as well as we can at this 
   point, that she is, in fact, a vampire."
Patrick raises an eyebrow and grins. "Oh? How'd you manage that?"
JJ Malone for a moment seems to look straight at Patrick, to sniff. "Please, 
   Patrick-rhya," he says with faint, good-natured disdain at odds with the 
   honorific. "Have the previous Glass Walkers here tainted our reputation 
   with you that much?"
Patrick grins wryly. "Nah, just weren't /that/ competent; besides, you said 
   yourself that she seemed to be well-protected before."
JJ Malone shakes his head. "Not completely immune. There's hints of more 
   information than we've managed to lay hands on, which we're trying to 
   ferret out. Things between her and the Family in Seattle are a sordid 
   tangle of detente, so getting anything out of them is out. Only thing else 
   currently of interest is what we found scouting out her offices up there." 
   Again, his hand begins to reach towards the pocket of his jacket before he 
   stops himself, turning the gesture into a smoothing motion along the knee 
   of his jeans. "Most of the place is what you expect out of a nice business 
   campus. One building's got a minor infestation of Wyrm-corrupted spiders, 
   though. Suspicion is that's where she does her human experimentation."
Patrick coughs politely. "Human experimentation?"
He could be discussing the weather for as much change of reaction the question 
   elicits. The ahroun nods. "The information we dug up suggests she may be 
   doing some experiments on humans. The ops building seems the most likely 
   place for it, given the taint."
Patrick mutters, "Wonderful. Any idea exactly why, or just that she may be?"
JJ Malone shakes his head. "Just hints of it. It could be as wrong as her 
   being a vampire. We're proceeding with caution, and keeping an open mind."
Patrick nods. "Not a bad idea. Anything else fun?"
JJ Malone shakes his head, but smiles slightly in response. "Not yet. I'll let 
   you know if we manage to dig anything up from her computers."
Patrick nods. "Coolness. I'll pass stuff on to the rest of the pack, and to 
   Quiet when she gets back from Western Eye. She spends half of her time out 
   there, seems like."
JJ Malone's eyebrows go up for a moment, but he simply nods in response to 
   that. "You found anything more out about this bane, and the connection to 
   Ms. Turner?"
Patrick shakes his head. "Nothing solid, really, though we've been doing a 
   little poking on our side, too. Just that she obviously knew too much. She 
   knew where to look to find it, partly because she was here at the time. Its 
   release was no accident, but we're still working on all the exact whys."
The thumb of JJ's left hand circles along the fingertips of the same, over and 
   over again in a gesture of nervous energy. "Remind me? She got involved 
   with a dig site that unearthed a fetish into which the bane was bound, 
   right? What else do we know about it?"
Patrick quirks an eyebrow at JJ. "About the fetish, the bane, or both?"
JJ Malone nods once. "All of it. I missed most of the excitement of this 
   winter concerning it."
Patrick thinks back for a bit. "Um, heap big nasty fetish with heap big Wyrmy 
   spirit in it. The fetish was leaking all over the place, like radiation or 
   something, so we broke it open. The bane, Consumer-of-Stone, and some heap 
   big Wendigo dude poped out and fought; the bane was weakened but not 
   killed. Umm ... the thing was originally imprisoned by the Wendigo way long 
   ago, about the time that the railroad tracks were first being laid down. 
   Some of Ouro went back hrough time in a dream or something and saw some of 
   the circumstances, including seeing Turner, as we currently think, in the 
   town at the time to oversee things."
JJ Malone's brow suddenly furrows in thought. "The plot thickens," he comments 
   musingly. "Where did the bane come from? Why was it here at that time? Was 
   Ashley turner the cause or the effect, or was it pure happenstance?" The 
   questions are half-directed at Patrick, half just voicing them aloud, but 
   he finishes by giving a look which seems to be right at him, again brief.
Patrick shrugs at the questions in general. "From what we've gathered, it 
   seems to be happenstance, or at least happenstance that Turner is, was, or 
   later became a vampire. However, she certainly seems to have taken 
   advantage of the situation. From whqat we can tell, the railroad seems to 
   be more the immediate cause, the railroad and the tension is caused between 
   natives and whites."
JJ Malone shakes his head again slowly. "I think it might go back further than 
   that. Turner Rails wasn't the first company to attempt to build the Seattle 
   to St. Claire line. That honor in fact belonged to another company, 
   Bartholomew Rails. And then Peter Bartholomew, then one of the richest men 
   in Seattle, turns up missing, presumed dead. And his beneficiaries name 
   ought to set off small bells. David Turner."
Patrick frowns. "Wonderful. I wonder if she purposely was trying to rile the 
   Garou with the railroad line?"
JJ Malone's fingers begin tapping his knee arhythmically. "Quite possibly. 
   But, there's more." He begins ticking off points on his fingers. 
   "Bartholomew's efforts to make the tracks from here to Seattle was 
   disrupted by what the paper's described as an earthquake." Another tick. 
   "Bartholomew is reported to have left a young widow, but we can't find 
   anything more out about her, Bartholomew's finances, an obituary listing 
   her name..." *Tick* "Lastly, all the railroads in the 1870's were owned by 
   Bartholomew Railroad Company. By the time the link to St. Claire was built, 
   all of it was part of Turner Rails."
Patrick sits up straight at the mention of the young widow. "When we saw 
   Turner or whoever in the past, someone mentioned she was the railroad 
   tycoon's widow."
Patrick adds, "And, come to think of it, she was a Bartholomew, not a Turner, 
   unsurprisingly. The plot thickens."
JJ Malone's eyebrows go up, but he nods simply. "Stronger proof for the 
   circumstantial jury-rig." The fingers of his off-hand continue going 
   tap-tap-tap on the denim of his knee. "Nigel mentioned a feeling that the 
   earthquake was tied in with the bane's first appearance in this area. If 
   so, that'd put it prior to Turner directly getting involved with the 
   railroads. So," he concludes, again distracted with a look Patrick may 
   recognize from Chicago of the ahroun being furiously thinking, "the real 
   question is...what's the connection. How is a *leech* involved with a bane. 
   Was she a leech even then. The whole thing sounds like a deal done to give 
   control of the Rails over to her. Or," he starts as a thought occurs to 
   him, "could they be at odds? Dammit all anyway," he suddenly swears. "Too 
   much of what we need to know is lost. Do the Wendigo know anything about 
   this shit?"
Patrick shakes his head. "Not much, though we have some of the not-quite-local 
   ones checking histories and all to find out something. Hmm ... if she went 
   through all that to get control of all the rails under a different name, 
   it's not unlikely she was a leech even then. They tend to have longer-term 
   plans. It's more likely, though, that the bane popped up while she was 
   Bartholomew, pre=Turner involvement." He grimaces, then specualtes, "If 
   they /are/ together, then there has to be something to enforce the 
   agreement. If they're in opposition, why lead the group to find the fetish 
   in which he was bound?"
"Easy," the Glass Walker states flatly. "What better way to keep an eye on 
   your enemy than to have the object it's locked into?" He suddenly grunts 
   with disgust. "This still doesn't make any sense, though. I've never known 
   leeches to be involved with spirits. Ever."
Patrick shrugs. "First time for everything. Besides, who says she knew it was 
   a spirit?"
JJ Malone gives an exasperated sound, and interrupts. "Do you mind if I smoke?"
Patrick grins wryly. "Mind if I choke?"
JJ Malone seems to study the ragabash for several moments assessingly, then 
   surpresses another, small, frustrated sound, reaching into his pockets and 
   pulling out a pen, beginning to twirl it through his fingers. "Maybe she 
   doesn't know. But, that turns us back to the question of why she wanted the 
   fetish so badly."
Patrick shakes his head. "Maybe she knows it's some sort of Mysterious Object 
   of Power, but not that there was something caught in it."
Funny how the usual skeptic becomes advocate. J.J. shakes his head. "I believe 
   in coincidences, but I don't trust them. And there are starting to be too 
   many."
Patrick nods. "True. For whatever reason, she's working with it, and was 
   wanting to free it."
Patrick says "No, it just fits the facts as we know them."
JJ Malone's fingers stop their twirling, bringing the end of the pen up to 
   chew on unconsciously. "The most likely circumstances," he agrees with 
   reluctance, then seems to realize what he's doing. He blushes with prickly 
   embarrassment, and returns to twirling the pen trying to act as if nothing 
   out of the ordinary happened. "So, what we really need to find out is what 
   the connection is. As if I didn't know that before," he says with sardonic 
   humor. "But I have a better idea of what to look for now, I think. And, 
   look into the experimentation."
Patrick observes, "Part of the connection could be in there, in the 
   experimentation."
JJ Malone frowns, caught off guard which is rare for him. "Could be," he 
   agrees in an almost-mutter. "I can't see why right now, but worth keeping 
   an eye out for."
JJ Malone shakes his head after a moment, and sighs. "I think that's 
   everything I've got so far."
Patrick shrugs. "Never know. Could be some sort of sacrifices or something. 
   Anyways ... I'll talk with the others, put our heads together, and see what 
   else we can come up with. Things are slowly but surely getting clearer. 
   Thanks, JJ."
JJ Malone shakes his head, rising to his feet. "Thank the Family when it's all 
   over," he says gruffly, posture becoming an odd mix of prickly pride and 
   wary defensiveness, shoulders squared stubbornly. "We're all doing our 
   share, and they're doing a damn fine job of things."
Patrick grins. "I'll be sure to say something to 'em when it's all over with. 
   Right now, go on and pass on my thanks, along with the information. This 
   mess is finally starting to look like there's some snese behind it 
   someplace."
"Love to know where," J.J. says with a return of his usual, subtle sarcasm. 
   "Good night," he says on the way to the door.
Patrick says "Night, JJ."

---- Recall end ----