The Werewolf has a problem.
What, you don't know who the Werewolf is? Sloppy of you; he's the latest blessed soul
recruited for Heaven's glorious battle against the forces of evil. Hung out with The Man in Black and the King
- you do know who they are, right? - right up to the moment where the
Powers That Be stopped being indifferent and started deciding that making him a
Saint was a good idea after all. Not
that the first had anything to do with the seco... oh, right. Damn all Seraphic resonances, anyway. At any rate, he's now a Saint of Judgment -
His Nibs insisted, and nobody felt like arguing - and part of a very special
Triad, with an even more special mission: track down and get a fix on a certain
footloose Archangel.
No, Dominic really does thinks that this might
actually work. The Werewolf has, in his
uniquely and annoyingly human way, already demonstrated that while he certainly
doesn't think like Eli, he thinks more like Eli than, say, Dominic does
(this, of course, is merely one more thing for the Archangel of Judgment to
disapprove of). He and his two fellow
Triad members (Carmelita, Cherub, and Roland, Malakite; almost-affectionately
nicknamed the Domini Canes by the Werewolf) have been able to find Eli's
old trail and stick to it, which is more than most manage, and no one else
reliably. From there it's merely a
matter of moving faster than the Archangel of Creation does. And saving the receipts, of course: the
Werewolf tends to be a touch, ah, excitable when it comes to the
materials he needs to keep motivated.
The Triad stopped arguing with him sometime after that run of bad luck
at the dance studio; he was right and they were wrong, and they all know it.
This is where the problem kicks in. The Werewolf suddenly announced to the rest
of his rapidly becoming 'long-suffering' Triad that he needed about six hundred
gallons of paint, a gorilla, five acres of land dedicated to potatoes and a new
guitar. Freakishly enough, everything except
the paint was immediately available - yes, including the gorilla. One of the more reliable ways to determine
how close you are to the Archangel of Creation is to see how difficult it is to
acquire a great ape - but the paint was a problem, and right now the Triad is
busy teaching the gorilla how to play the proper melody line - hence the new
guitar. It'd be insane for the Werewolf
to give his own guitar to a gorilla.
It's his guitar, for the love of God. His baby. So, he
needs somebody to nip over to the nearest local hardware store and pick some
up.
Yes, the PCs will do nicely. Simple task, no? No is right. The Werewolf
will give the angels a credit card that is, completely unbeknownst to him,
hotter than Belial's throne room. It
will set off both metaphorical and literal alarm bells if anybody attempts to
use it; only a literal Divine Intervention will prevent the user and all of his
scruffy (and probably armed) friends from being arrested. This is a prime opportunity to make all
sorts of folks regret wandering around the countryside armed for bear and
armored for sabertooth, providing that you are the sort of person who would
enjoy that sort of thing, which I'm not saying that you are, mind you... right,
stick 'em in jail and let them try to figure out how to get out, get the paint
and get back without making too much of a stink. Or, at least, without being followed. If they're the sort of desperadoes that tend to solve their
problems with superior firepower, drop hints about sensitive Tether-formations
in the area, assuming that you haven't already run that excuse into the ground.
Anyway, they'll get back, hopefully not needing
legal representation, more firearms and getaway cash... and with the paint,
which will promptly be scattered across the fields, the better to track the complex,
hula-like waveforms that arise when metaphysically-sensitive developing
vegetables (a potato field, remember?) are being pinged by a great ape
playing "Just Like Heaven"
and "Friday I'm In Love" - unpleasantly; it's a gorilla, after all -
on an electric guitar. If everything
works, it should allow the Werewolf to shave a whole three weeks off of Eli's
lead.
If not, well, poor, poor, pitiful him.