Winter of Discontent - Severely Injured Werewolf
Our most recent session of MOTW picked up almost immediately after the last one ended - 3 am the night after the vampire hunt. This was a bad time for a hunt everyone except Filonyn who is nocturnal anyway and really a lot more bothered by the hunts that take place during the day. Marie, after waking from a nightmare, received an urgent phone call from Roxanne, her girlfriend - someone had nailed a bloody envelope to the doorway of Roxanne's bakery. As Marie went about waking everyone up, we also discovered that Nathan was missing. Fortunately, he is not the only member of the group who can teleport - Francis is also able to - and so we were able to make it to Valentine's Day Bakery in a timely manner despite being in Vancouver. Also fortunately, Francis managed to avoid dropping anyone in the bushes while teleporting this time - a mistake she has made more than once in the past and gotten no shortage of criticism for from Filonyn. Shown here is a picture of Roxanne - I drew it, but Roxanne belongs to Rekanochi. She's usually in a human disguise, though.
After determining that the envelope was not, as Roxanne had initially feared, cursed, Marie went to open it with her bare hands. It turned out that although it wasn't cursed, the nail attaching the envelope to the door was silver - painful for Marie, who is a werewolf, to touch. That wasn't all, either - the envelope also contained mistletoe, which werewolves are allergic to, and the severed finger of another werewolf. It was pretty clear that Roxanne was not the intended recipient of the envelope after all despite it being nailed to her door.
Everyone then rushed to Marie's apartment to make sure everything was okay there. It absolutely wasn't - another envelope was nailed to the door, this one simply stating "I hope this is helpful." Inside the apartment was an unconscious woman in the process of bleeding to death - the werewolf whose finger had been in the other envelope. Something had ripped a massive chunk of flesh out of her chest. No one in the party actually knew this woman, but we were able to determine that her name was Lucy Steele, and luckily, we arrived in time to stablize her through a combination of healing magic and regular old first aid.
While Filonyn sat with Lucy in case she either woke up or started dying again and Sebastian sulked on the couch after being told he couldn't go through her phone, Irene, Marie, Roxanne, and Francis investigated the rest of the apartment. They discovered that whatever broke into the apartment had also ransacked Marie's bedroom, taking personal items and a couple pieces of hunting gear but leaving valuables behind. Even more concerning, whatever it was had come in through the second-story window and hadn't used a ladder - they had scaled the wall with their bare hands while carrying the injured woman. Irene and Marie found a scrap of the entity's ugly canvas jacket and determined that it had been waxed with mistletoe and smelled like death. Because wolfbane is prevalent around Newhaven and a much more logical choice for any werewolf hunter who could tolerate it to wax their jacket with, the group concluded that the creature must be some sort of lycanthrope themself - but also, most likely, undead.
Since Lucy was still severely injured and unconscious despite being alive, we took her to Irene's basement, which has a makeshift infirmary in it. She remained there for three days without waking up while Marie and Filonyn took shifts sitting and watching her - leaving her to wake up alone seemed like a bad idea for plenty of reasons. During this time, Marie told Filonyn that she was worried this could be someone out for revenge, because she used to hunt other werewolves without regard for if they deserved it after her brother was mauled, and she hasn't been able to forgive herself for that. Nathan also returned from his absence, and informed the group that he'd been assigned an urgent job and had no choice but to deal with it immediately, and that's why he was gone. He suspects that the creature we're dealing with may actually be one of his coworkers - a reaper that Death has referred to as a "coyote" in conversations with him.
After 3 days, Lucy woke up. That is where the session ended - it's going to be a multi-parter. For that reason, there is no new bestiary entry yet.
Filonyn is still wearing mourning outfits, but now they've changed into one that has some midnight blue silk along with all the black. This is a sign that they've decided it's appropriate to move on to half-mourning, but no one younger than a hundred is likely to pick up on this unless they're into fashion history.