Caleb Moorhead

People lie to me a lot.

It’s inherent in my line of work. It’s inevitable. Attorneys hear a lot of lies. Cops lie about their intentions, about their evidence, about all kinds of things, really. Witnesses lie about what they’ve seen. Sometimes my clients lie to me as well, which is always frustrating. It’s very hard to defend someone when you’re working with inaccurate information.

I would much rather work with someone who was open with me about being guilty than try to represent a client who pretended to be innocent when they were very clearly not. It isn’t as though I would rat them out if they told me; it would be wildly against my personal and professional ethical codes to do so. At most, I might decline or drop their case, and even then I wouldn’t tell the police or prosecutors a word about what they’d said, because that confidentiality is a cornerstone of the legal system, and I feel strongly about maintaining it as an absolute. A client has to be able to trust that what they tell their attorney will be kept strictly, entirely confidential.…

Epilogue

Three weeks later, I was standing in a small apartment in a bad part of town waiting for someone to make a choice.

I still wasn’t entirely sure this would work. I’d worked through the theory extensively. I’d consulted with a ton of people about it. Alice, the wizard from the Tribe, had helped a lot with the underlying theory and principles involved. I’d been introduced to a guy named Nate who mixed magic with graffiti and was more shamanic in his focus, less tied to concrete and rational thought than a wizard. The categorization tools for mages would always be inadequate, but it was informative in this case. Wizards, as the most common categorization system defined them, were characterized by linear reasoning, structured and abstract thought, and rational logic. Alice fit that description perfectly, which was great for my education. But for this I also needed to draw on that more intuitive thought process.

So, I met Nate and we talked for a while. He introduced me to a girl named Opari who had personal experience of what I was doing here. Derek, Cassie, and Robert all had some amount of insight because of werewolf things. They also had a veterinarian that they worked with in town, which I found fascinating when they told me about her. Werewolves rarely needed medical care at all, but apparently there were some very specific things that sometimes came up that a vet was helpful with. So there was a vet in Pittsburgh who knew what they were, and I talked with her for a while. Hell, I even went back to my old cognitive neuroscience connections and asked them some questions.…

Oaths, Debts, and Favors

Several characters now have mentioned things like oaths, debts, and favors. These things have an enormous degree of weight assigned to them in this setting. Given that these things are so significant, there will be plenty more about them later on in the story. A lot of things, notably including why all this is the case, will not be explained in this note. But that still leaves plenty of room to explore things which Kyoko knows, which are common knowledge in this setting, but which will generally not be exposition in the story itself.…

Language Use

The narration mentions in places that Kyoko draws conclusions about someone based on their presentation and particularly on their use of language. This has shown up a few times now, and with Cassie the narration also observes how the way she presents herself has shifted. So why do different characters use language the way they do? It’s not the same pattern for everyone, not at all, and the differences are significant, even when they’re subtle.…

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I do not like hospitals.

I am aware that this is not exactly a shocking, novel opinion. Nobody really likes hospitals. They aren’t a place anyone goes for fun. They’re a place of death deferred, of fear and pain and sickness. The patients go because they’re seriously sick or badly injured. The families arrive full of anxiety, sick with worry that something will go wrong, that they’ll be leaving in mourning. The staff mostly go there while tired, stressed, and badly overworked, hoping that nothing goes too terribly wrong today, that they won’t be the one who has to deliver bad news, all while their empathy is being steadily ablated away by the sheer volume of tragedy they’re immersed in. Virtually no one goes there because they like it.

And that emotional resonance sinks in. It makes the structure feel like fear and pain and grief. There are exceptions, sure. There are individual departments and wings that have a very different mood. They are a place of healing as well, and sometimes that shows through more clearly. But by and large, hospitals ache with the negative emotions that have passed through them. I really did not like that feeling.…

Kyoko’s Arsenal

People in this setting have and use a wide variety of weapons. I think now is a good time to start breaking down what they are and why, since it’s now apparent what more of them are. There will be more on this in the future, as a broader perspective develops on how people in this setting fight. But this is a good time to start.

Beginning with Kyoko, we can for the moment set aside Thorn; there are a lot more things to say about that sword than would fit here, and it also doesn’t say that much about her given she didn’t exactly pick out what it looks like or how it works. But as was already apparent, when she visited her armory earlier, Kyoko has a whole lot of weapons for someone who hasn’t gotten in fights much. Many of them have never been used. Why?…