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Save Point: White Noise

Age Of Eversion

The end of the world begins with a faint humming sound.

Cleo can hear it but no-one else can, and when she describes it to Terrowne, he can't hear it either. The Dragon can detect all things, but it has no way of knowing what she's looking for, because from its point of view everything including the sunlight is a constant hail of minor noise if it cares to listen to the radiation that way.

Attempts to isolate the noise lead them throughout the house, listening to every conceivable appliance and object. Terrowne listens to Niphurs swollen kitty belly as a joke, and reports that the recently well-fed feline is not at fault.

The noise isn't annoying, precisely, but it shouldn't be there and although it randomly stops and starts sometimes, it is continuous while it occurs. Cleo gets some of her ancient Azatlani military ware on it, and manages to isolate the sound as some sort of low-frequency harmonic with an enormously long wavelength, several meters at least. Even she shouldn't be able to hear something that low, but there it is, annoying the fine hairs inside her ears.

Tracing the intermittent nuisance is improved when a little internet research reveals that traditional dry-walls can't even begin to stop a wavelength that long, they're simply too thin. Which means the sound could easily be coming from outside, possibly from a considerable distance away.

Terrowne is already a little spooked by the strange probabilistic events that have been going on lately, which seem to suggest that _something,_unspecified, is literally waiting to happen. So when the sound suddenly cuts out again, and after a few minutes seems to be over for the day, he suggests that she should keep an ear out and try to track it down herself if it reoccurs, and call him if she manages to find out where it coming from or the direction of the source. Her usual daily peregrinations about the city as a 'service provider' (her euphemism; she enjoys servicing her various hungers with horny willing werewolves) should provide enough of a baseline to get a decent estimate on the direction and origin of the signal.

The next day, the sound starts up again just as she is fucking a lovely couple in the back of a lushly upholstered transit van crossing the Harbour Bridge. A quick glance out the window seems to suggest that the sound is coming from the city skyline, somewhere across the blue waters. She's able to ignore it after that, but it starts at much higher volume this time and then trails off as they head away from the city center to a nice little place in the suburbs, out on the beach. The werewolf couple are enthusiastic surfers and don't mind her going out with them between rounds, happily sharing a board and ultimately a kite-surfing kit with her in exchange for a discount and a little 'special attention' in their well-appointed dark basement. She has a fabulous time and being handed the cash at the end is just a minor formality that makes her smile and kiss them both on the muzzle.

New Zealand of course has quite a large werewolf ex-pat community. Every other continent has a long-standing werewolf tradition, even 'Merica, where the last skin-walker witch-wolves held sway for thousands of years before the anyone else visited. So for those who don't want to be pinned down by all that weight of cultural habit, the last decent landmass ever discovered is something of a magnet. Shifters, stalkers and skin changers of every stripe have migrated in from all over the known world. Being able to reset your official age fairly easily on arrival, and the fact that the local passport is good to visit almost anywhere if your current span starts to seem suspiciously long, only adds to the draw. It's a good place for an old immortal to take a vacation lifetime.

They look just like everyone else, of course, but Cleo can smell them by the traces of skin and body scent that linger on them even after they've changed. Dogs and cats don't find them all that remarkable, because they assume the scent is normal for whatever type of human they are, and they're not telling anyone that people come in an extra category or two. Cleo, on the other hand, knows that a human who smells like a wolf with a hint of cinnamon is almost certainly something else (although there was an incident once with a spice-shop owner who funded a sled-dog team, leading to pleasant misunderstandings all round). If there's even a slight breeze, she knows who's who.