So we made our way into the Zeta house, blowing off anyone questioning why we were there. We'd disappear through the portal in the closet any way. Claire, understandably, was freaked out having a bunch of strangers waltzing right into her room. I wanted to try and calm her down, but she was too hysterical. When we opened the gate though and she saw the portal to the hedge, she quieted really quickly, looking as if she'd seen a ghost.
After we got through, we quickly closed it so as to avoid any authorites the Zeta girls may have called and to prevent them from accidentally slipping through. We followed the path from Claire's closet door to a clearing. From the looks of it, several paths ended at this clearing. There was one path oriented differently from the others, and Lana could tell it led to Faerie. We quickly ascertained (or at least I guessed) that the other paths led to the various portals on the college campuses, while whoever was causing this mischief would come from that path to Faerie.
We decided to check the path out, but we were only on it a short while when we sensed something stalking us. Eventually, a briarwolf jumped out of the thorns, a little Brownie armed with a thorn lance riding on its back. Lana was so amused by the sight of the little creature she didn't even bother doing anything but laugh. While the brownie was small, the briar wolf it was riding was no joke! Then again, I took it down pretty quickly, I clipped it good with my .45 as it lunged at me, and then when it tried pinning me down, I overpowered it and ripped its throat out.
Jake tussled with the Brownie, but I finally grabbed hold of it and we questioned it. Its name was Widget, and we learned that a hot winged Fae named Gothic Rose would have parties in the clearing. We suspected these “parties” were the source of the consternation experienced by people like Claire, and why those people tried to grab Nehemiah Rumples's grandson. I let Widget go, but bound him to bring me back a tamed briar wolf within a fortnight in exchange for his freedom.
When we got out, it was night time. We managed to sneak out without waking Claire. There were some drunken sorori-cuties in the living room, and Jake distracted them while the rest of us snuck out. Lucky bastard got their numbers!
We went to Nehemiah and told him of our discovery, but he wanted a little more corroborating evidence just to be sure. So we checked out Agnes Scott next, Jake checking the student records to find people who may fit the profile. Again, we split up and each took a person. Mine, Deena Bishop, was a dead end. Still, she was pretty cute- short haired dirty blond and apparently bi-sexual, as I learned through some small talk. I managed to get her to take me to her room where I tried to sense if a portal had been opened there recently, but if there had been one, I could not tell. Even though she's not involved in this mess, I may give her a call after we're done with this and see where things go.
Jake's candidate, Denise, seemed to be who we were looking for. After finding a hole in her and her roommate's schedule that we could use to sneak in. We had to leave our driver's licenses at the front desk (pretending Lana was a resident of the dorm and our escort). Ugly Archie didn't have a license though, so I had to use the charm to get the girl at the desk to let him uses his expired library card instead.
Once we were in, we got to Denise's room and through the portal to the hedge without incident. We checked the other paths. The hedge would change every so often, making new paths and causing old ones to disappear, but the path to Faerie was constant. The behavior made sense, there weren't nearly enough paths to lead to the number of places that seemed to have incidents. But as we suspected earlier, those paths did lead back to various colleges and houses/apartments near colleges.
Now that we know that, not sure what we're gonna do. Widget told us the next time Gothic Angel would probably appear at the clearing, so we have until then to decide how we should proceed.