Let’s be upfront about this: if any of our episodes deserves a trigger warning, it’s this one. If the themes of sexual abuse make you uncomfortable, you might want to stay clear of this one. No such scenes shall be described here, but no other Cryfield Echo episode has ever explored themes as dark as Wolf Hunt.
Performing as the MC: Pavel
And with that in mind, I welcome you, my friend, to my 6-step plan on how to sweep the tablecloth right from under your player’s expectations.
ed
Step 1: Call the episode Wolf Hunt.
This will make your players reasonably expect they will be hunting wolves in this one.
They won’t.
Step 2: Start with Downtime.
That’s right. Start with it. Let the characters enjoy their free Saturday. Let the players tell you about Rupert chatting with Collette Jenkins from across the street about trimming bushes in her garden; about Eddie helping Jerry out with setting up a new police force after the events of Fridge Bound; about Freeda’s weekly training with the kids in Hól and Nathan’s attempts to make Lily Chow return his calls.
Let them enjoy it. While it lasts.
Step 3: The Catastrophe.
Set it up so that Rupert and Eddie will know first. They’ll drive along the river when they notice a commotion at the waterfront: police sirens are illuminating a cargo ship rather confusingly docking here, far away from any harbour. A crime scene isn’t anything unusual in Cryfield, but it’s what they’ll find on top of one of the shipping containers that will shock them to their core. Jerry is already here, pale as a freshly dried paint, watching the scene with the captain cowering behind his back.
Collapsed on one of the containers, there she is. Scarlett. Her signature red coat is splashed with blood. Her shoulders rise and fall with shallow breaths. And in front of her there’s a body of a man with his face smashed into a pulp and an axe buried in what used to be his forehead.
Step 4: Just a quick reminder
In case you forgot, my friend, Scarlett is Pavel’s playable character that he uses when other players take a swing at MCing. He played her in Puppet Show and V is for Going Viral, she appeared as an NPC in Carnival of Machines and ended in a coma after Drake’s mechanical wolf trap mauled her stomach.
Given her enclosed nature, the Crew knows exactly X things about Scarlett:
she doesn’t share. Ever.
she also doesn’t take off her coat. EVER.
she was raised by her single mother with whom she has a seriously strained relationship
someone hurt her. None of the PCs know how, when or why though. It’s just one of the things she can’t hide about herself no matter how much she’d like.
Only once she’s hurt somebody else: it happened in self-defense during Puppet Show. Rupert was there. He’ll never forget that night.
“Bob!” Rupert hollers at her with his nickname for her, but gets no response. When he tries to approach her, Jerry stops him in his tracks.
“It’s a crime scene, Rupert,” he strives for authority, but his voice is trembling.
“She’s our friend. And she’s hurt!”
“I don’t think she is,” Eddie whispers.
Indeed. Safe for a broken ankle and some bruising, she isn’t. Very much unlike the man lying in front of her.
“Let go of me Jerry, I need to help her!”
“She might still be dangerous…”
“She’s not dangerous, for fuck’s sake, she's a kid and she’s obviously in shock…!”
“I’m okay, Rupert.” Scarlett finally raises her head. The hood slips from her hair and reveals her intense yet somehow absent gaze. “I’m finally okay.”
Despite Rupert’s objections, Jerry takes Scarlett to the police station. Interrogation takes long until the night as she refuses to say more than a few words. But when Jerry finally returns to the Crew, he has no good news to give them.
“I’m sorry guys,” he shakes his head. “She’ll go to prison for this. Long term. We’re talking ten years, maybe even…”
“That’s bullshit!” Rupert shouts. “She didn't do it, Scarlett wouldn’t hurt a fly unless in self-defense…!”
“She confessed, Rupert,” Jerry says. “Clearly. Proudly, even. She killed that man in a cold blood.”
“That’s not right,” Nathan shakes his head. “I know her from school, this isn’t her. Let me talk to her Jerry, just for a second.”
In the end, Jerry obliges. The moment Nathan enters the interrogation room he knows something is off. Scarlett is sitting behind the metal table, still in her blood-splattered coat. The officers wanted to get her out of it, but she bit them both when they tried.
“Scarlett… Is it true?” Nathan asks, afraid of the answer. “Did you really kill him?”
She nods slowly, as if in trance.
“Who was he?”
The relieved smile she gives him sends chills down his spine. “My wolf,” she says.
Step 4: Kick them while they’re down.
But the night’s not over yet. When the Crew leaves the police station shortly before 2 A.M. there’s more waiting for them home.
Remember Snatcher? The cannibal ghoul rift from Killing Her Softly? Rupert actually adopted him after that episode and kept him in his basement for… Honestly, I’m not quite sure what for and I probably don’t want to know. But as you could expect, you can only hide a man-eating beast in your house for so long, even if he only has a half of a brain left in his skull.
And so, when Rupert arrives home that night, he finds Snatcher nibbing onto Collette Jenkins’ bloody arm with her garden glove still dangling off of her fingers.
Eddie in turn returns to the sight of his wife sitting in the kitchen. On the table in front of her there’s an empty bottle of wine and an open letter adressed to him. Inside, there’s a photo of Eddie being pushed into a police car by officer Atherton (apparently taken during Killing Her Softly) with a letter from Ruslana Belenko.
The last copy. My gift to you, Eddie.
Instead of a signature she kissed the paper with a blood red lipstick. And there’s one more thing in the envelope: a finger which, thanks to a ring still wrapped around it, Eddie immediately recognizes belonged to Sammy Jefferson Jr.: the used-to-be owner of Washboard (likewise appearing in Killing Her Softly) who lost everything after the Crew incriminated Martha Ellis as the Banshee killer.
There’s nothing dead awaiting Nathan at home: actually, quite the opposite. It’s an offer. Edmund Chow himself - yes, the enterpreneur tycoon who sent his goons to kill Eddie during Carnival of Machines - has a job for him. Specifically the one which until now was being offered to Nathan’s father. But after a presentation that Nathan had for Chow as a result of a futile bet between him and his father, chairman Chow changed his mind. He likes Nathan’s fresh perspective. Nathan's still a student of course, but he could be an unofficial consultant to a lawyer instructed to listen to his every word.
The only catch? His father - the person that Nathan probably hates the most in the world - will have to finda new job elsewhere.
And Freeda? That morning she woke to find a homeless man squatting at Hól without permission. He turned out to be Ismail: one of the Lemnos Carnies that survived the finale of Carnival of Machines. He looks nothing like the living legend Freeda encountered at the lunapark: he lost weight, shape and his sternum is lined with appalling, festering scars.
“Courtesy of you and your friends,” Ismail grunts from the shower where Freeda forced him after noticing the odor of piss that surrounded him. “When you killed the Mechanist, all of the inventions he gifted us with lost their power.”
“What was your… gift?” Freeda asks nervously.
“Flaming scimitars,” he answers. “I was a sword eater.”
Freeda gulps. Ismail’s scars grin in response.
“Don’t pretend to care,” he scoffs. “You’ve killed most of my family too. This hardly registers.”
She let him stay. Maybe out of guilt. Maybe she still wanted to bring back one of those legendary Lemnos artists she and everybody else in Hól admired from childhood.
When she came home from the precinct however, Ismail was gone. Along with all the cash from Hól’s register and everything even remotely valuable that could fit in his ragged bag.
Step 5: Pull the tablecloth
It seems pretty dark, doesn’t it? And it is. Perhaps even too much, perhaps this time the MC went too far with it. But the tablecloth trick is not finished yet.
The next morning, Freeda woke up at Hól to find…
...a homeless man squatting there without permission.
He turned out to be Ismail: one of the Lemnos Carnies that survived the finale of…
[Terka: Wait a minute… Freeda checks her phone. What day is it?!]
[Pavel: It’s still Saturday.]
[All the players: What?!]
[Pavel: Probably around 8 A.M. That means that as of now, Eddie’s making phone calls in his office, Nathan’s sending another elaborate text to Lily Chow and Rupert’s chatting with Collette Jenkins about trimming the bushes in her garden.]
[Terka: Oh my god. Are we playing Groundhog day?!]
[Pavel: Yup. Remember that Alley Leading to Yesterday mentioned in the corebook? Well, I put it in our City. Except it isn’t actually an alley, but that’s a mystery for another time. Right now, you have a case on your hands.]
[Kapik: Right. Scarlett’s going to kill someone by tonight.]
[Tom: But we don’t know that. Only Freeda does. And even she doesn’t know who the victim was, right?]
[Pida: And I doubt Freeda noted the name of the cargo ship, and even if, the murder could have happened anywhere on the river, maybe even still in the harbour. I bet that was deliberate on Pavel’s part so we couldn’t just backtrack this case.]
[Pavel: You know it. But you have the rest of the day to figure it out.]
And so the hunt begins.
The convincing part is relatively easy: afterall, it’s hardly the weirdest thing the Crew has come across this season. And once they visit the Pandolorian Clinic in the Old Quarter, dr. Killroy (who’s already being interrogated here by police officers Das and Quinn) indeed confirms that Scarlett disappeared from her room shortly after awakening from coma this morning.
[Kapik: How could a girl fresh out of a coma get anywhere further than the lobby?]
[Tom: Her mythos managed to crawl out of wolf’s stomach, I’d say she has some predispositions]
Das and Quinn refuse to let the Crew in Scarlett’s room, but luckily they have another way: in the end of Carnival of Machines, Rupert left one of his camera drones on a shelf in her room so he could check up on her while she was stil unconscious. However unsettling that may sound in a context of an episode such as this, it gave them a chance to see what happened in Scarlett’s room this morning.
Around 8 A.M. a stranger entered her room through the window (although the head nurse swore she had closed it for the night) and put a rose in the vase on her night table. He sat next to her bed for several minutes, stroking her hand, his back turned to the camera. His face remained unseen.
[Tom: You couldn’t have made it easy for us, could you?]
[Pavel: Where would be the fun in that?]
Then he kissed unconscious Scarlett on her forehead and left the same way he came.
She woke up twenty minutes later, slowly at first, but once she laid her eyes on the rose he had left her, her face came alive with terror. She grabbed her coat tossed over the chair next to her bed and as if it poured fresh strength into her tired muscles, she shakily managed to stand up and stumbled out of the camera’s view.
In doing so, she knocked over a bottle of pills expecting her awakening on the nightstand. A quick chat with the head nurse back at the clinic reveals that these were not Pandoloria issued drugs.
“They came from her therapy office,” head nurse exclaims in between long sniffs into a dirty handkerchief. She seems a bit too old for this hi-tech place: and possibly now, after her mistake, she’s afraid that dr. Killroy will see it so as well. “Doctor Conroy had them sent here.”
[Terka: Shit. Conroy again.]
It’s not the first time the Crew has come across the name of Mayreed Conroy: therapist of both Martha Ellis from Killing Her Softly and the Mechanist from Carnival of Machines. And they’ve seen how they ended up.
[Kapik: Alright. We have the address of her clinic from Martha’s card, we should go and see what this woman is about.]
[Pavel: It might be wise to split up during this investigation. After all, you don’t have all day for it… Well, you do, actually, but not a minute more.]
[Pida: I have an idea. We know something has happened to Scarlett before, right? Maybe the guy from the hospital room has already attacked her before, and if so, there might be a report about it somewhere.]
[Tom: Das and Quinn might know that, but they didn’t seem the sharing type.]
[Pavel: They’re not. They have a by-the-book-3 status actually.]
[Pida: Okay. I’ll check the Cryfield Echo’s archives then.]
[Pavel: (laughs) What would you ever do without that crew tag...]
Let’s start with Eddie and Freeda who decided to pay Mayreed Conroy a visit. Her office is a part of an establishment called Kintsugi Clinic: a new chain of therapist’s offices initiated by the Knight Institute, City’s oldest Mental Hospital. The pair don’t meet her there (“She’s out of town on an important business and unavailable,” her bored and receptionist explains in a condescending tone) but that doesn’t stop them from breaking into her office after Freeda forces said receptionist from her post by making her almost pee her pants.
[Kapik: New power tag?]
[Terka: Yeah. #Controlling_body_fluids. Should be fun.]
Conroy’s office is full of curios to go through. In her desk drawer, Freeda discovers a box of vials: some empty, some still full of minced shards of glass.
[Terka: Perfect. Another reoccuring motif we know nothing about.]
However it’s her file cabinet where they hit the jackpot. All the files on all her patients are here, but the most precious evidence are her hand-written notes on every each one of them.
[Pavel: Check out the file I sent you to the chat. It’s all there.]
It’s a pretty percise assessment of Scarlett’s personality: hurt, distrustful, enclosed. Impenimently resisting any attempt at a deeper human connection. Plus a few curiosities: as when she managed to remain silent for the first 40 minutes of their first meeting or how it took eight sessions (and a heater turned to the max) to take off her coat. Then there's a note about an external figure she uses to project all her fears and hatred into. She calls him The Wolf. In her notes, Conroy wonders for a while whether it’s a mental construct or an actual Rift...
[Kapik: Wait… So she knows about Rifts?]
[Terka: She treated Martha and the Mechanist, it would be a weird coincidence if she didn’t.]
FInally Conroy finishes her scribbles by underlining the word Wolf and adds one last note:
Use.
Her files on Martha Ellis and the Mechanist (who was apparently called Maxmillian Drake) carry a similar tone.
[Kapik: What the hell is this woman about?]
Nathan’s investigation into Scarlett’s past also bears some fruit: she indeed reported a case of stalking and attempted assault by a strange man following her around about a half a year ago. Officers Das and Quinn managed to identify a lowlife criminal named Keith Ruben as the perpetrator, but before they could apprehend him he disappeared. His last known location: a club in the Blue-Collar District called Gleipnir.
[Pida: Gleipnir? Whaaat?!"]
[Pavel: I thought you deserve a little fan service.]
You see my friend, Gleipnir is a club heavily featured in our season zero. Back then Pida, Terka, Kapik and Tom all played different characters going against the forces of Hades and the Wolves of Gleipnir featured heavily in their fight, especially in Pida’s storyline since she played the Rift of Loki. In those times, Wolves were led by an anarchist called Fenrir, but after he was - rather tellingly - killed by Terka’s Thor, their whole gang fell into utter dissaray.
That's why when Freeda, Nathan, Eddie and Rupert enter Gleipnir now, instead of a wild, confident wolfpack they find a sorry bunch of beaten dogs commanded by Akela, a woman way prouder than her miserable situation allows. Nathan offers her money for intel about Ruben (and the club door which the Crew smashed upon being denied entry inside), but she raises her chin in defiance.
“I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you,” she spits at his feet. “See me crawl for your filthy money. But green don’t mean nothing here you brat. Not more than honor anyways.”
“Honor won’t feed your puppies,” Nathan objects. “Don’t be an idiot, just take the money and tell us what we need to know.”
“I will.” Akela cracks her knuckles in response. “After I beat them out of you. One on one, in the back,” she nods to the kitchen behind the bar. “Wouldn’t want your friends to get in the way.”
Nathan sighs and obliges - but once Akela closes the kitchen door behind him, she strikes the shelf full of dirty plates next to him, crushing the dishes along with the furniture.
“THAT’LL TEACH YOU SOME MANNERS!” she howls, but then immediately lowers her voice. “The money actually sounds pretty good,” she admits quietly. “But… You know. I can’t lose my face in front of the boys.”
“Right,” Nathan nods. “So what about Ruben?”
“He’s in the old water treatment plant in the Industrial Zone, YOU FRATBOY SCUM!” Akela punches a hole into the dishwasher with her bare fist. “That’ll be extra, by the way,” she whispers. “And the plates are fifty cents a piece.”
“No problem.”
“I DIDN’T THINK SO!” BANG! CRASH! “You need to know he’s not one of ours anymore. I had to cast him out after… well..."
“After what?”
“The thing… with the girls. We don’t tolerate that. Ever.”
[Terka: The thing with the girls?]
[Tom: Big Bad Wolf in all his glory...]
“YEAH! YOU BETTER STAY DOWN!” Akela wipes the sweat of her forehead. “Just promise me one thing. Leave him where you found him. It’s where he deserves to be.”
Does he though?
Cause about an hour later the Crew finds Keith Ruben on the bottom of an empty, rusting water reservoir. And he doesn’t look anything like they would imagine a Big Bad Wolf to look.
It’s apparent he spent the last half a year in this well and it was only his mythos that kept him alive. His throat is parched from dehydration and skin burnt by the absence of shade. Remains of muscles hang from his bones and he barely has any strength to even speak.
[Terka: So… That means he can’t be the guy who visited Scarlett this morning...]
But the most horrifying sight comes when they unbutton his shirt: a large, edgy shape is straining his skin from the inside of his stomach.
[Pavel: It’s a breezeblock. Someone cut him open, put it in and sewed the wound again.]
[Pida: I think I’m gonna be sick.]
They try to talk to him, but he barely squeezes a whole sentence from between his dry lips.
“Who did this to you?” Nathan shakes with his shoulders. “And why, for God’s sake...”
Ruben’s voice sizzles as a thumb pressed against a hot stove. “He said… it was… for… what I did… to… his daughter.”
[Kapik: Wait. His daughter?]
[Tom: Shit. It’s Scarlett’s dad.]
As the Crew crawls out of the water reservoir, the sun is already setting beyond the horizon. They call Jerry to tell him about Ruben so that the police can pick him up and then they immediately set off to Dylan’s residence.
They don’t have any more time to lose.
Barbara Dylan, Scarlett’s mother, invites them in with a crooked smile. She’s a woman who takes great care to always look meticulous, even if her desperate clinging to her lost beauty contradicts those attempts to a large extent. Tonight though, she looks like a wreck. Even as she’s keeping up appearances in front of the Crew, assuring them that Scarlett will turn up any minute now, her make-up is running, hands are shaking and the empty wine bottle on the kitchen counter speaks volumes on its own.
Rupert takes charge of the conversation as the only one who’s met Scarlett’s mother before.
“Barbara… We need you to tell us about Bob’s… I mean, Scarlett’s father.”
“Loyd? Oh, we don’t talk about him in this houselhold,” Barbara scoffs. “Not since the divorce. And that would be some wonderful fifteen years.”
“Has he ever hurt her in anyway?”
The twitch in her eyebrow is impossible to miss. “Not that I know of…” she gives a desperately inadequate response.
“Barbara, this is important. Somebody visited her in the hospital this morning. It’s the reason she ran away.”
“That couldn’t have been him,” she objects. “He has a restraining order…”
“And why is that?” Eddie asks.
She gulps instead of an answer.
“Did he ever give her roses?”
“Well... For her birthdays,” she whispers.
“Miss Dylan, please,” Freeda urges her. “Does Scarlett have any reason whatsoever to hate or be afraid of her father?”
“Well… I mean... Look. She was, well, chubby… As a kid, you see. We used to take her to beuaty pageants, like my parents did with me. I could have been a model you know, if it weren’t for… Well, Scarlett. And… Um, once, long after the divorce, she told me… I mean, she fabricated that story, that’s clear as day I’m sure…”
“What did she tell you, Barbara?”
“That… That Loyd used her feed her stones. So that she… wouldn’t eat so much.”
She tells them about the sawmill that Loyd Dylan runs in the Industrial Zone. But as they’re rushing to leave, she stops them at the door.
“It couldn’t have been him! It couldn’t…!”
“Why not, miss Dylan?”
“Cause if it were him… Then it means it's all my fault.”
Perhaps it was. Fault of the mother who’d sent her daughter alone to the woods.
They arrive at Loyd’s sawmill just in time. Just as he meets them among the conveyor belts lined with sharp saw blades and covered in wooden dust, Scarlett walks through the main gate. Her red coat flaps in the wind and only her eyes can be seen from the darkness under the cape. They penetrate the space between her and Loyd with radiant hatred.
“Scarlett…” Nathan steps forward, carefully, as if the slightest move could set her off like a bomb. “We know why you’re here… But you don’t need to do this.”
“I do.” she says without giving him as much as glance. Almost as if she didn’t even recognize him. “I’ve been needing to do this for the last fifteen years.”
“We found Ruben,” Freeda adds. “And your mother told us everything. About Loyd… About the stones…”
“Yeah? She told you why he did that?” Scarlett scoffs. “You think this guy cared about some dumb beauty pageants? That’s my mother’s baggage.” She scratches her arm as if there was something beneath her cloak irritating her. “But him? He just wanted me pretty.”
Meanwhile, Loyd Dylan correctly evaluates that he’s not getting out of this without a fight. While the Crew is arguing with Scarlett, he quietly picks up an axe idly resting on one of the saw tables.
“Scarlett, you’ll go to prison for this!” Nathan urges on.
“I’ll still be freer than now,” she says. And as she finishes that sentence, a shadow of a gigantic wolf covers the entrance behind her. “If they stand in my way,” she tells it while nodding to the Crew, “take care of them.”
[Kapik: What?! Where did she get a wolf familiar?!]
[Pavel: You wouldn't believe the things coma does to your Themes...]
Loyd swings his axe in preparation and his so far contempt expression changes into a predatory smile. “Oh, c’mon, honey,” he grins at Scarlett. “As if you didn’t know that wolves are my specialty.”
So here we are, my friend. The final climactic battle of this episode. While Scarlett grabs a shard of broken glass from the ground and launges at Loyd in an effort to gauge his eyes out, her Wolf is keeping the Crew in check. All of those three are formidable Dangers, Pavel made sure of that when he drafted them - but what ultimately causes the Crew’s downfall is that they simply can’t agree on what to do.
Eddie is at loss. He’s not a fighting character in the first place but more importantly, he simply doesn’t know who’s side to join. Rupert doesn’t have that problem: from Tom’s perspective (much to Pavel the MC’s surprise) the only thing Rupert wants to fix as opposed to the “yesterday’s” timeline is the part when they dispose of Loyd’s body before police finds it.
And so the only two PCs intent on stopping Scarlett from crossing this line are Nathan and Freeda, both believing that whatever is left of Scarlett’s mental integrity will be shattered if she takes her father’s life. They try to stop her.
And so the Wolf goes after them.
In the following fight, Loyd Dylan manages to stand his ground against Scarlett, however tenaciously she fights. It’s through Rupert that he meets his demise:
[Tom: I’ll call the rats on him. Hit him with all I’ve got and give him a gnawed-to-the-bone status.]
[Pavel: Well that’s brutal...]
[Tom: I’m sorry, were you listening to yourself when you explained what he did to his daughter? I’ll add some rat pheromons to make sure they finish the job...]
The rat swarm ambushes Loyd from behind and swallows him whole. When they’re done with him, there’s barely any meat left.
But all the while this is happening, Freeda and Nathan need to fight off Scarlett’s Wolf. And when you fight something that big, you need to fight big.
[Terka: I’ll burn my #Fire_Toys tag and throw an oil lamp on his snout, giving him drenched-in-oil-3. Nathan, go!]
[Pida: Awesome. Nathan will set his sword on fire and slash him across the snout, using that status to his advantage. *rolls 6&5* That oughta do it.]
[Pavel: Wow… Indeed. He’s down.]
[Pida: Wait… What do you mean *down*? Did I kill him? I didn’t want to kill him!]
[Pavel: Well, you just set him on fire with a tier-5 status, what did you expect it was gonna do to him?]
The Wolf howls in terrible agony as the flames rush through his fur. Whatever held Scarlett’s attention a second ago is now rendered irrelevant. Her Wolf cries out one last time in a heartbreaking, tortured bark and collapses to the ground, smoke coming out of this scorched body.
[Tom: Well, fuck.]
[Kapik: So... What was the point of this whole Groundhog day thing? To pile on more trauma for Scarlett, or...?]
[Pida: I didn’t want to! He's a wolf the size of a truck, I thought he could take more!]
[Pavel: Phew. Be glad he couldn’t...]
Kapik’s right though.
However badly Scarlett ended up in yesterday’s timeline, this one is looking even worse.
She watches her Familiar exhale his last breath. There are no tears in her eyes, only an endless void. Then she turns to Nathan.
And she jumps to her feet, ready to kill for what he's just done.
[Kapik: Eddie will stand in her way. I’ll use all my hypnotic powers to stop her dead in her tracks and calm her down. With all my tags that’s power of 4...]
[Pavel: You’re rolling against her consumed-by-hate status, tier-5.]
[Kapik: Shit. Alright, I’ll start by Changing the Game, that will knock it down a few pecks, then we can try to calm her down and finish this...]
But even as Eddie manages to hold Scarlett in place for a while, it doesn’t last long. When it’s time for MC’s soft move, players are in for an unpleasant surprise.
[Pavel: Scarlett scratches her arm again and her face twists back into a vile expression of sheer hatred. Her status goes back to tier-5. It renews as a soft move.]
[Kapik: What?! Then how are we supposed to snap her out of it?!]
[Pida: Take off her coat.]
[Tom: Um... Did you seriously just suggest calming a rape victim down by undressing her?]
[Pida: Yeah, I know how it sounds. Which makes it all the more perfect cover-up for a malicious therapist abusing Rifts. Trust me, gyus. Nathan is going to Go Toe to Toe. We need to get that coat off of her.]
Scarlett screams, kicks and scratches as a rabid dog - she’d sooner kill Nathan then voluntarily let him part her from her Relic. But Pida’s roll speaks in Nathan's favour. And even with a few bruises, he manages to rip the coat off her shoulders.
Underneath it, Scarlett’s wearing only a tank top, laying her arms bare for the Crew to see. They are covered in a thousand cuts each, braided with tiny streams of blood bursting from scabs opening again and again all the way from her shoulders to her wrists.
The sleeves of her coat are lined with tiny splinters or razor-sharp glass.
[Terka: I know I’ve said it like a million times this session, but: fucking hell.]
[Pida: Conroy. The heater in her notes, remember? She made her take off her coat on purpose so she could put the splinters in.]
With the glass out of her skin, Scarlett looks as if she’s awoken from a horrible dream. Only when she blinks to properly open her eyes, she sees her Wolf still lying on the floor, schorched to the meat. And she realizes she just woke up to another nightmare.
[Pavel: Yeah, guys. Sorry. But this is a far cry from a perfect ending.]
In a way, this episode may have ended up even worse than it began.
The Crew gets rid of all the tracks. Unlike yesterday, this time police never learns about the death of Loyd Dylan. And Scarlett returns home to her mother on that same night - although whether she is still able to trully return anywhere at this point would be up for a debate.
Whatever second chance the Crew got for this, it’s hard to feel as if it wasn’t wasted.
What’s more: when they come home that night, there are still the dilemmas awaiting them. This time around, they knew the consequences of their actions. The question was: will they allow them?
Their catastrophes have just turned into Hard Choices.
Nathan still takes the job offer from Edmund Chow. His father will be furious when he learns about it. But the feeling of satisfaction overruled any empathy Nathan might have had left for his father.
Kapik uses his Flashback to have Eddie call Ruslana Belenko during the case. He does so with the intention to save Sammy Jefferson Jr.’s life. It didn’t matter that he tried to blackmail him and sabotage his next elections - he may be a crook, but he certainly doesn't deserve to end up on the bottom of the river. But the longer the phone call went on, the less certain Eddie was about this.
“Do you know why I take such a good care of you, Eddie?” Ruslana asks him over the phone with a voice sweet as honey. “Because you are an investment. And if you lose your next term, all that investment will be lost and my boss will be very, very angry with me. I know you want to be a good guy. But I also know that more than anything else, you want to make it to the top. And you can’t do that without getting your hands dirty sooner or later. So be glad you can pop your cherry with just Sammy whom nobody’s going to miss. And be glad I’m here to walk you through it.”
With that phone call, Eddie sentenced Sammy Jefferson Jr. to death - and his career to a brighter tomorrow.
"Just one thing Ruslana. Next time, direct your business correspondence to my office please."
Freeda was the only one who managed to turn her Hard Choice around. Before she left Hól this morning, she made sure everyone there knew that Ismail is one of the Lemnos Carnies. When she returned tonight, he was still there, surrounded by a crowd of admirers. Once again he tasted the feeling he never expected to feel again after Lemnos Fairground was closed so many years ago - and burnt to the ground by Freeda a few weeks back. The spotlight of attention.
And Rupert and his Snatcher dilemma?
He had dosed him with sedatives before he left for the Wolf Hunt. It saved Collette’s life, true. But he knew this couldn’t last forever. Sooner or later an accident is bound to happen and somebody innocent would pay the price.
He brought him the few pieces of Loyd Dylan that survived the rat attack.
[Pavel: Very gross, by the way.]
Snatcher gobbled them up with grateful munching.
“There’s some more in the fridge,” Rupert says then and approaches the large object tucked away in the corner of the tbasement.
It was APA’s Fridge. The one the Crew agreed to hide here after the events of Fridge Bound.
Rupert opened the heavy padlock and then, with a heavy heart, the Fridge itself. Snatcher suspiciously watched the black arms stretching hungrily from inside, but eventually tried to grab one. Three others grabbed him in return. Rupert closed his eyes and tried not to listen to Snatcher’s cries as the hungry Relic swallowed him bite after bite.
[Kapik: Okay, this is officially starting to be a bit too much.]
[Pavel: Don’t worry, I think we’re done for this episode.]
[Tom: Not yet. There’s two more things Rupert needs to do. First, he’ll get rid of the Fridge. Give it to L’Estrange by all means, he’s gonna love it I’m sure. But more importantly, he makes an appointment at the Kintsugi Clinic with doctor Conroy. It’s time to meet with her face to face.]
Oh. Well, in that case we are still not done indeed.
Because when Rupert enters doctor Conroy’s therapy office the next week for his scheduled appointment, he is met with one last tiny twist. He has actually met with her before. In fact the whole Crew has.
Remember the events of L’Estrange Dreams, my friend? The very first episode of this season in which the Crew got entangled in a conflict between L’Estrange and a man named Lin Ayuma over a genie in a bottle? In that episode, Ayuma was assisted by a woman capable of torturing people through their dreams.
They saw her face for only a few minutes before she escaped and they never learned more about her, so they’ve simply gotten used to calling her Nightmare.
Her real name is Mayreed Conroy.
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