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hwangoRight from the beginning, I had a bad feeling about the job. I was going in on nothing but hearsay, which meant no official report, which meant that the town hadn't asked for us. That's never good. If the locals hadn't asked for a monster hunter, then they probably don't think they have a monster, which usually means I can expect a lot of tedious arguments about whether or not various things actually exist. That, or everyone was already dead or in the thrall of whatever it was. I mean, hopefully we'd hear more than rumors before it got that bad, but there's a first time for everything.
I arrive at the edge of town and almost immediately stumble upon the site of an incident, and got a good look at what I was dealing with - livestock torn up, huge animal prints spaced like they were left by a man, and last night had been a full moon. It was so obviously a werewolf that I figure that the townsfolk must be willfully stupid or hopelessly in denial, and so I expect the shepherd to laugh in my face or call me crazy when I tell him a werewolf had done it. So you can imagine my confusion when he says to me,
"Well, none of our werewolves could have done it, that's for sure."
I'm sorry, what?
So then it’s on to town proper to interview the three known werewolves they've apparently got living in this place. I figure maybe I was right about "willfully stupid" after all, just not quite the way I'd imagined.
The first one is a cobbler, and the whole time we're talking he's also polishing a pair of boots, because he can't stand to leave his hands idle for this obvious waste of his time. Yes, he freely admits, he's a werewolf, and it's common knowledge in the town. But he can't have caused last night's mess, he says, because he only changes into a bloodthirsty half-man, half-beast during a waning gibbous moon. I tell him that's not how it works, and the withering look he gives me is probably the same one he'd have given me if I told him he was making shoes the wrong way. He tells me he's sorry if his personal circumstances don't line up with my certainties about how the world works, and all I can think about is how I thought I'd be the one having to argue against people's assumptions on this case, and I can see that the universe is having a laugh at my expense.
Anyway, it turns out that, for whatever reason, he's out of sync with the general werewolf experience as I understand it. Waning gibbous moon only for his transformations, and he's only about three quarters of a monster too, with enough of his own mind left that he sticks to wild animals for prey and avoids people and livestock. If he's not due to transform for another few days that would certainly seem to rule him out regardless of what he hunts, though.
The next one doesn't seem like a likely suspect either, because she's ancient, and it turns out that even when she's a monster her hip bothers her and she doesn't like being out in the cold. Whenever the full moon rolls around she just curls up on a blanket next to the fireplace until morning. There's a few well-gnawed, not too fresh, non-sheep bones by the fireplace that back up her story, and anyway the neighbors confirm that they bolt her door from the outside on full moon nights just to be on the safe side.
The third interview isn't much of an interview, because the guy is a feral monster chained up in his cellar. This is a little odd, since it's still mid-afternoon, but otherwise he seems likely to be the guilty party. Then his wife explains that if I wait until sundown I can talk to him, because he's only a wolf monster during the daylight hours of a full moon. Last night when the monster was slaughtering sheep he was a human sleeping off an exhausting afternoon of struggling against his chains and howling at the roof of the cellar.
So I've got one monster with a wonky calendar, one monster too old to be much of a monster, and one monster with a skewed circadian rhythm. That's three more monsters than you'd expect to find in a typical town, and yet none of them seem like great suspects.
You might be wondering why I'm not murdering these people for being monsters even if they aren't guilty of this specific crime, but the key word there would be "murder." It's my job to hunt down monsters that are causing trouble, and these three aren't, and you can't go around killing people just because they have the capacity to do harm and cause trouble. Well, I suppose you can, but you'd be a hell of a hypocrite to call the people you're killing the monsters.
It's as I'm pondering this that a "monster hunter" rolls his wagon into the town square and starts shouting for the people's attention. It seems he's heard of the terrible plight of this poor, innocent town, and has come to vanquish the vicious beast that plagues them and lift the curse of fear under which they have been suffering...for a small and entirely reasonable fee, just to cover his expenses and the risk to his person, of course.
The theme for the day is apparently incorrect assumptions, because this clown clearly didn't come to check on the mood of the locals before he planned this grand entrance, or he would have discovered that they weren't huddling in their homes in fear and therefor likely to be receptive to someone swooping to their rescue. I mean, even I hadn't gotten a very warm welcome, and I wasn't trying to fleece these people for money.
I really feel like an idiot for not doing a better job examining the evidence, but there didn’t seem to be any reason to question it at the time. Which is no excuse at all, and just makes me feel even worse. So I’m not in a very forgiving mood towards our perpetrator here.
I don't technically have any jurisdiction over human criminals, but I have fairly broad authority when investigating a case, so it's not entirely clear how legal it is for me to stroll up to door at the back of the wagon, smash the lock, and rummage around inside. The wagon's owner objects strenuously the whole time, but I ignore him.
It doesn't take me long to find the special boots he'd used to make the monster prints, and I toss them out into the street for onlookers to see. Then I tell the slowly growing crowd that I have found the "monster" who had been causing trouble, and point to the con man in the wagon. The cobbler has come out of his shop at some point during all of this, and he loudly says that the fake monster hunter still stinks of sheep's blood. Which...I mean, it's nice to have some support, but I wish it could have been done in a way that was a bit less creepy.
I'm fine with leaving the guy to whatever justice the town feels is appropriate, because again, not really my jurisdiction. I'm not really needed here after all, so I turn to go. But then someone says,
"We shall make an offering of his flesh to the Oblivion Maw."
Which is rather unsettling, but then gets much, much worse when every single person in town, including people clearly too far away to have heard, in perfect unison drone the reply,
"All Praise the Oblivion Maw."
Well, damn it.
I arrive at the edge of town and almost immediately stumble upon the site of an incident, and got a good look at what I was dealing with - livestock torn up, huge animal prints spaced like they were left by a man, and last night had been a full moon. It was so obviously a werewolf that I figure that the townsfolk must be willfully stupid or hopelessly in denial, and so I expect the shepherd to laugh in my face or call me crazy when I tell him a werewolf had done it. So you can imagine my confusion when he says to me,
"Well, none of our werewolves could have done it, that's for sure."
I'm sorry, what?
So then it’s on to town proper to interview the three known werewolves they've apparently got living in this place. I figure maybe I was right about "willfully stupid" after all, just not quite the way I'd imagined.
The first one is a cobbler, and the whole time we're talking he's also polishing a pair of boots, because he can't stand to leave his hands idle for this obvious waste of his time. Yes, he freely admits, he's a werewolf, and it's common knowledge in the town. But he can't have caused last night's mess, he says, because he only changes into a bloodthirsty half-man, half-beast during a waning gibbous moon. I tell him that's not how it works, and the withering look he gives me is probably the same one he'd have given me if I told him he was making shoes the wrong way. He tells me he's sorry if his personal circumstances don't line up with my certainties about how the world works, and all I can think about is how I thought I'd be the one having to argue against people's assumptions on this case, and I can see that the universe is having a laugh at my expense.
Anyway, it turns out that, for whatever reason, he's out of sync with the general werewolf experience as I understand it. Waning gibbous moon only for his transformations, and he's only about three quarters of a monster too, with enough of his own mind left that he sticks to wild animals for prey and avoids people and livestock. If he's not due to transform for another few days that would certainly seem to rule him out regardless of what he hunts, though.
The next one doesn't seem like a likely suspect either, because she's ancient, and it turns out that even when she's a monster her hip bothers her and she doesn't like being out in the cold. Whenever the full moon rolls around she just curls up on a blanket next to the fireplace until morning. There's a few well-gnawed, not too fresh, non-sheep bones by the fireplace that back up her story, and anyway the neighbors confirm that they bolt her door from the outside on full moon nights just to be on the safe side.
The third interview isn't much of an interview, because the guy is a feral monster chained up in his cellar. This is a little odd, since it's still mid-afternoon, but otherwise he seems likely to be the guilty party. Then his wife explains that if I wait until sundown I can talk to him, because he's only a wolf monster during the daylight hours of a full moon. Last night when the monster was slaughtering sheep he was a human sleeping off an exhausting afternoon of struggling against his chains and howling at the roof of the cellar.
So I've got one monster with a wonky calendar, one monster too old to be much of a monster, and one monster with a skewed circadian rhythm. That's three more monsters than you'd expect to find in a typical town, and yet none of them seem like great suspects.
You might be wondering why I'm not murdering these people for being monsters even if they aren't guilty of this specific crime, but the key word there would be "murder." It's my job to hunt down monsters that are causing trouble, and these three aren't, and you can't go around killing people just because they have the capacity to do harm and cause trouble. Well, I suppose you can, but you'd be a hell of a hypocrite to call the people you're killing the monsters.
It's as I'm pondering this that a "monster hunter" rolls his wagon into the town square and starts shouting for the people's attention. It seems he's heard of the terrible plight of this poor, innocent town, and has come to vanquish the vicious beast that plagues them and lift the curse of fear under which they have been suffering...for a small and entirely reasonable fee, just to cover his expenses and the risk to his person, of course.
The theme for the day is apparently incorrect assumptions, because this clown clearly didn't come to check on the mood of the locals before he planned this grand entrance, or he would have discovered that they weren't huddling in their homes in fear and therefor likely to be receptive to someone swooping to their rescue. I mean, even I hadn't gotten a very warm welcome, and I wasn't trying to fleece these people for money.
I really feel like an idiot for not doing a better job examining the evidence, but there didn’t seem to be any reason to question it at the time. Which is no excuse at all, and just makes me feel even worse. So I’m not in a very forgiving mood towards our perpetrator here.
I don't technically have any jurisdiction over human criminals, but I have fairly broad authority when investigating a case, so it's not entirely clear how legal it is for me to stroll up to door at the back of the wagon, smash the lock, and rummage around inside. The wagon's owner objects strenuously the whole time, but I ignore him.
It doesn't take me long to find the special boots he'd used to make the monster prints, and I toss them out into the street for onlookers to see. Then I tell the slowly growing crowd that I have found the "monster" who had been causing trouble, and point to the con man in the wagon. The cobbler has come out of his shop at some point during all of this, and he loudly says that the fake monster hunter still stinks of sheep's blood. Which...I mean, it's nice to have some support, but I wish it could have been done in a way that was a bit less creepy.
I'm fine with leaving the guy to whatever justice the town feels is appropriate, because again, not really my jurisdiction. I'm not really needed here after all, so I turn to go. But then someone says,
"We shall make an offering of his flesh to the Oblivion Maw."
Which is rather unsettling, but then gets much, much worse when every single person in town, including people clearly too far away to have heard, in perfect unison drone the reply,
"All Praise the Oblivion Maw."
Well, damn it.
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Date: 2022-08-01 10:08 pm (UTC)Please take this as a compliment but I LOL-d when I read the last three lines. Yes!
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Date: 2022-08-04 07:47 pm (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
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Date: 2022-08-06 08:04 pm (UTC)Great job. I really love this!!
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Date: 2022-08-07 10:29 pm (UTC)Thanks, and glad you enjoyed it!