"You callin' me Weavery, Mister Glass Walker? 'Cause if so, the parable of the mote and the beam springs to mind."

Infirmary
The soft glow of autumn sunlight fills the room with golden warmth. Thin white curtains keep the glare out while allowing enough light in to dispel shadows. A small ceramic heater sits on the floor near the bed, available for use when needed. A wide bed stands in the center of the south wall, white linens carefully tucked in around its mattress. A low table stands beside the bed, a small basin and pitcher perched atop it. Two large chairs sit facing the bed, and a small wooden chair sits against the south wall opposite the table. A tall cabinet occupies the northeast corner of the room, its glass door revealing a well-stocked medicine cabinet, various medical implements and supplies carefully arranged within.
The only exit from the room is a single door on the eastern wall.

The full moon above is invisible in the dim winter afternoon on the second floor of the farmhouse, where slumped on the bed of the infirmary, Cedric lies, looking far from his usual immaculate self, unshaven, unbrushed, unwashed and unhappy... or at least, he looks that. He also seems somehow not quite with it, his eyes' focus drifting in and out.

The door to the infirmary creaks open to reveal the dark-clad and distinctly disreputable figure of one Thomas Grey, his salt-and-pepper hair hanging low over his forehead and his face covered in a thin beard of similar hue. Dark glasses hide his eyes and he seems to be dressed almost entirely in black, from the ankle-length leather greatcoat to the battered canvas high-top sneakers. He brings with him a strong odor of cigarettes that would send any feral lupus into a sneezing fit. He pauses in the doorway until he spots the figure in the bed, and then grunts and stalks forward.

Cedric doesn't respond to the entry of Grey at all. A lock of his dark golden hair falls forward over his brow as a draft enters the room along with the Glass Walker. Otherwise, nothing.

"Hmph." Grey studies the Fang for a few moments, then pulls over a chair and sits down with a grunt. He shrugs out of the big coat, letting it drape over the back of the chair, and then gets comfortable. A few moments later, he fishes out a pack of cigarettes and starts tapping it rhythmically against his wrist.

The tapping noise seems to percolate through to Cedric after a few moments. His lips part and he starts to speak in a quiet voice, keeping time with the tapping of the cigarette. "Pulse... pulse... pulse... pulse..."

Grey stops, an eyebrow lifting over the frames of his sunglasses.

Cedric keeps speaking in the monotone. "Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Recalculate. Standby mode continues. Twenty-two..."

"Hmn." Grey, still watching the figure on the bed, shakes out a cigarette and sets it between his lips. Puts away the rest of the pack, fishes out a lighter, and sets flame to cancer stick after a few crisp snaps of the wheel. Fresh cigarette smoke billows over toward Cedric's finely-crafted nose.

"Twenty-three... twenty-four... ahem!" The smoke drifts under Cedric's aristocratic nose and into it, and he coughs a few times, then blinks. "Dillen? You... hey, it's you." He regards Grey with every appearance of recognising him.

Grey leans back in the chair, propping one sneakered foot on the opposite knee. "Me," he says with a nod. "I heard that you'd had an accident."

"An accident," Cedric repeats, a little vaguely. "I... suppose you could say it was an accident. Did Dillen tell you what happened?"

Grey shakes his head. "I only heard that you'd been hurt significantly. And since I was in the area, I thought I'd see how significantly." He takes a deep drag off the cigarette, then turns his face away to exhale.

Cedric pushes his hair out of his eyes. "I don't think I'm actually hurt," he protests. "Just as weak as the proverbial kitten, damn it." He lifts one hand, lets it flop to the bed. "I don't know how long I was wrapped up like a parcel for, but it was too long. I am going to spank Mathias' bottom for him as soon as I'm strong enough to go looking for the young ripsnorter."

Grey lifts an eyebrow. "How was this Mathias's fault?"

Cedric levers himself a little more upright. "The crazy young fool was doing some mad theurge ritual in the umbra which attracted about a trillion web spiders. I got coccooned by them. I thought I was a goner, for sure, and I thought he was too. And when Dillen and his pack dug me out, they tell me he's sitting back at Clemency House watching TV, as cool as a cucumber." He snorts.

"Hmnh." The Glass Walker grimaces, taking another drag. "How'd he escape getting coccooned himself?"

Cedric shrugs. "That's the weird part. When I was bein' wrapped up, so was he. So how he got out, is beyond my jolly old feeble deductive powers." He struggles upright. "Gahg. I'm not gonna make it over there if I set off now. I could just demolish a T-bone and steak fries."

Grey grunts again. "Help you get downstairs?" he offers curtly. "I don't know about the steak, but there should be some ground meat."

Cedric swings his legs to the floor and tests them cautiously. "Unit in need of charging," he informs Grey in the same monotone he was first using.

Grey stares at the Fang for a moment, then grunts and hauls himself to his feet. Cigarette dangling off his lip and coat hanging limply off one arm, he stands and waits to see if Cedric can get up and walk by himself.

Cedric seems a little more gaunt and lean than normal once he's upright, but he does seem able to at least walk. He makes his way cautiously to the door and confronts Grey across the doorway.

Grey arches an eyebrow, then wordlessly heads out the door and downstairs, not hurrying.

Farmhouse: Kitchen and Dining Room
Homey is the first word to come to mind when looking at the farmhouse's kitchen. Dark, wood-paneled wainscoting covers the walls to about waist height, dark beige wallpaper continuing to the ceiling. Twin refrigerators occupy the north wall, facing the large six-burner stove on the south. The kitchen counter runs the length of the eastern wall, broken only by the double-basin sink. Cabinets run above and below the counter and a twin-pane window is set in the wall above the sink. A small pantry is set into an alcove alongside the refrigerators, presumably holding the deep freezer as well as shelves of dry goods.
Some twelve feet above the floor, a large chandelier hangs from the ceiling, lighting the dining room and casting long shadows over the bar to the kitchen. A long table occupies the center of the dining room, three chairs setting along each side, and one on each end. On the west wall, a large window looks out on the trees alongside the western pasture. Set into the north wall is a large cabinet, its glass doors closed on shelves containing a full compliment of fine china and glassware as well as a few decorative nicknacks. On the east, a wide bar separates the dining room from the kitchen.
An opening in the southern wall allows passage to the front entryway of the house, while a sliding glass door in the kitchen opens to a clearing behind the house.

Cedric follows Grey down to the kitchen without mishap. He whistles softly when he sees the wintry weather out of the window. "Holy moley. Talk about the lost weekend. I'm missin' whole weeks. Is it Christmas yet?"

Grey drapes his coat over a chair and, cigarette still hanging off his mouth, opens the fridge. Sure enough, there's ground beef and a bag of frozen steak fries. "Not yet," he answers, cancer stick bobbing in time with his words. "It's only the sixth."

Cedric flops down into a chair gloomily. "That's still weeks passed," he sighs. "Mathias, your ass is grass."

Grey extinguishes the cigarette, finally, and washes his hands. "From what I've gathered, his ass is grass in any case. If he's lucky, a Jackaling. Hamburgers all right?"

Cedric nods eagerly. "And if you'll let me bum a fag off you," he says hopefully, "I'll owe you large size."

Grey obligingly digs out and tosses over his half-empty pack of Camels and a green Bic lighter, then sets about washing his hands and defrosting the frozen meat in the microwave. "Be my guest."

Cedric tosses a cigarette into his mouth and clicks the lighter onto the end of it. "Don't normally do this," he explains apologetically, and coughs as though to prove it. Then he starts laying the frozen fries out on a baking tray, slowly, one at a time, like an artist putting brush strokes on a canvas, graduating them from large ones at one side to little ones at the other.

Grey notices. "Fight the impulse," he advises. "Disorder them."

Cedric rolls the cigarette to the corner of his mouth and back like a bad Clint Eastwood impersonator. He regards Grey with a puzzled look. "Just tryin'," he says round the tobacco stick, "to fit as many on as I can."

Grey tilts his head slightly, favoring his good eye. "The Weaver's influence can be as insidious as the Wyrm's. Considering your recent experience, a little deliberate chaos would do you good."

Cedric's eyes narrow and for a moment, he looks like a moderately good Clint Eastwood impersonator instead. The cigarette goes back to the corner of his mouth. "You callin' me Weavery, Mister Glass Walker? 'Cause if so, the parable of the mote and the beam springs to mind." He deliberately selects a large fry and places it with all the other large fries.

Grey dries off his hands on a paper towel and sets to work shaping the burgers, working them into fat discs of not especially regular size. "Do I look especially Weavery?" he asks. His voice is dry, with a sharp bite of repressed rage behind it.

Cedric drops the bag of fries and takes the cigarette out of his mouth. His eyes meet Grey's coolly. Then they go to the burgers. Then back to Grey. "By your tribe's standards, no," he concedes. Then he shakes his head. "Hell. If I've jumped two weeks ahead, that makes it full moon. No wonder I'm snappin' at you."

Grey's shoulders lift and fall in a vague shrug as he focuses on the forming burgers again. "No tribe knows the Weaver quite as well as mine. That means we know the signs of Her influence. Since you'd been held by the Pattern for so long, well..." He shrugs again. "There are bound to be side effects. You're lucky She didn't take you entirely."

Cedric pushes some of the fries round on the tray with the hand that isn't holding the cigarette. "She wouldn't dare," he says, but his usual cocky tone is considerably less brash than normal. He looks at Grey from the corner of his eye with an unspoken "...would she?"

Grey pauses to stare at the Fang for a few seconds, eyebrow raised. "Of course she would. You would not even have been the first. The Weaver converts Garou and humans just as the Wyrm does... only less often."

Cedric's brow furrows in annoyance. "Of course I wouldn't have been the first, damn it," he hoots, "but I'm not just any old Garou, you know. I am a Silver Fang and a nobleman." He tilts his head upwards a little, which seems to denote that he thinks he's striking a majestic pose.

Grey snorts. After washing his hands clear of traces of raw meat, he spatulas the burgers into a pan and sets them on the stove. Sizzle, sizzle. "I doubt," he says dryly, "that the Weaver gives a shit."

Cedric grunts, shovels a few more fries onto the tray, and pushes it into the grill. "I'm not a pushover," he says, still sounding heated. "If the Wyrm can't take me what makes you think the Weaver can?"

"She already had you," Grey points out. Leaning against the counter near the stove, he crosses his arms across his chest, spatula in hand. "If you'd stayed in that cocoon, she would have, eventually, broken you down into your component spiritual bits and worked her into her patterns. If you were lucky. If not... well, I met someone once who met a Garou who'd been turned into what she described as a Weaver-fomor."

Cedric's cigarette goes back into his mouth. He takes a long draw on it, then removes it once more. "And the spiders did that?" he asks, plainly suspicious of the story.

"She ran into it in the Umbra around Boston," says Thomas Grey. "An absolutely flawless Crinos, not a hair or claw out of place. Not a hint of rage or primal instinct, and it spoke the Mother's Tongue like a machine. It was helping a swarm of hunter-spiders beat off trio of Wyrm spirits from a section of webs, moving and reacting like it was part of their group-mind." He glances over at the burgers, gauging their progress. "Later," he continues, "she did some research. A Theurge told her how the Weaver sometimes drags humans and Garou into a cocoon, breaks them down, and then rebuilds them mote by mote for her purpose. They can't shapeshift, of course, and heal wounds by pulling technology into themselves. And they are utterly her servants."

Cedric seems torn. Part of him appears disgusted. Another part seems fascinated. A third part, true to his auspice, is plainly noting down all the details of this story mentally for later retelling. "So how was she freed?" he asks breathlessly.

Grey arches an eyebrow. "The Weaver fomor? It was hunted down and killed by a pack that my source had contacted. She herself didn't get caught."

A thought seems to strike Cedric with the weight of an iron bar. "Hold the phone. Do you think...is is possible... that Mathias...?" Dismay appears on his face.

Grey frowns, considering this. "It's easy enough to check. Have him sniffed for Weaver taint. Or, if the rumor is true, force him to shapeshift."

Cedric takes a big step as though to head for the back door, and nearly falls. "Damn, damn, damn. I must eat first. I wish my car was here." He flops back into the chair he was in earlier and stares at the stove as though willing the food to cook faster.