To Dartmoor

On the darkened moors of England, prowls a deadly creature. Black as night, vicious, with bright red eyes and power beyond the human imagination. He is rarely seen, and no human has ever been attacked by him... and lived. And we're going to catch him.

I thought he needed a good introduction. Some call him 'The Beast', others a Hellhound, a Demon, 'killer shadow', and I remember Arcturus calling him Bob once...and the list goes on. We just call him The Beast of Dartmoor, since there are many like him around the world and it gets hard to know them all by name. Arthur insisted we name him, so 'Skarin' he became. There was one in Bodmin, just close to Dartmoor - but she was more leopard-like than lion-like in the wolf/big cat hybridisation.

So yes, anyway, what we had decided is that if Methias is going to be involved in genetic engineering, then what we'll have to do is have a look at it ourselves. Since we don't really have the resources to make our own experiments, and we need something live - since that's what he'll be doing - we thought we might as well use what resources we DO have, and that is Skarin. We won't hurt him, but we need to borrow him for a while. We will return him to his natural environment where he was released decades ago. He'd be... about 150 years old. I haven't looked into it, but I would assume his lifespan would be about 300 maximum. The Foreones weren't using him as a test subject for longevity.

We're in Dartmoor now, just waiting for it to be night. The sun is about to start setting, and so we will go out and lay our traps for Skarin. He comes out at night, so we'll do most of our searches then. Away from prying eyes. I of course can't go in natural form, I can't risk it. But the others will. Arthur says that his natural form is now wolf, but we have a disagreement on the definition of the word. But I just let him win, since I suppose English is his native language even if I have been speaking it for hundreds of years.

More updates as they happen.

Now Nano

Jack Peterson came to us saying that there was some suspicious activity going on in a lab in Derby. One of the researchers had deterred from his tasks, and went off on a large tangent - and made some brilliant advancements on that tangent. But one of the other researchers were getting concerned about it and contacted David Hutchinson (A partner of Peterson). By the time we got there, the damage was done. Another blackend body.

The research was taken, the prototypes were gone, and the building was scorched. It hadn't been too long, since there was still the slight crackle of fire in the rubble being extinguished. He makes it hard, when he takes all the evidence with him. But I guess if he made it easy, he wouldn't be such a threat.

The dead researcher's wife has given us all his work and notes he kept at home, for us to copy and then return. She was understandably distraught, as was their child. I remember when I lost my parents - I was only young too. At least she still has her mother - I wasn't so lucky...I was all alone, with just my younger brother. Even he left me in the end, not too long after that day. Really, he had a right to leave.

Getting back on topic...Tharis has returned a suspicion, that Methias is restarting the old Genetic Engineering of our Foreones. He would have access to the main database's information, but not to the pre-set equipment that we do that Tharis controls for us (for the majority), so he'd have to seek out the help of humans pioneering in their fields. We had a meeting the other day with all of the Sectors, and Tharis, and concluded the above suspicion.

Finding the Information

It's been about a month since I posted last. I didn't even realise it had gotten so long since updating my journal. I've just been really busy, and distracted. Methias has been keeping it quiet lately, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Yes there aren't any more deaths or explosions, but what is it exactly that he's up to that takes this much time?

Anyway, to be honest, I haven't been doing that great. 2nd of July was Danulus' Beginday, and then two weeks ago it was his Deathday. I brought another stone to his grave on each of those occasions. You see, in my culture, we don't give flowers. We don't see the presentation of a severed plant organ as a good thing. We give gemstones. My kind have always loved rocks and gems - which is reflected in human history. They are beautiful and have so much more meaning, and last a lot longer. I placed a ruby in his Loshrong (Erg, kinda like... 'ring of life' where you place gemstones in a stone ring around the tombstone to symbolise one's love for the departed's life) and some Calcite for his Dratred (a 'deathbed' which is a bed lain out in front of the tombstone where people place stones of any type on the anniversary of death, but usually they aren't gemstones...so raw, not cut and polished, to represent their mourning for the departed. At the funeral each member places one of a simple stone, like granite or bluestone, in a rectangle at the bottom forming the outline for the bed). But this is irrelevant.

We went on a holiday for 5 days though... on a tropical isle. A nice change from the dreary sights of the UK. An uninhabited one, since it's too far out for humans to travel to to be worth their time. So we got to spend most of it in natural form. It was great - Alastor taught Arthur how to surf, while Julian slept on the sand. I enjoyed just being a dragon again... swimming, lazing about...it was a good holiday.

But of course we had to return to reality. We came back and, i don't know why we didn't think about this before, looked into whether or not the IT guy had a partner. Not a mate, but a working colleague. Turns out he did, one that lived in Bury St Edmunds. They were a little shocked to see us, and still accepting the loss of their friend, but they were helpful. We asked if she had any duplicates of his harddrive, or of the information he was working on. She had a copy of information from about a month ago, so only a week or so before he died. It wasn't extremely recent, but it was something.

Upon looking, it was actually a programme. Mostly just a programme he'd been working on with the woman's help (since she was a robotics engineer), to run robotic equipment. Not quite AI, but a sophisticated programme to allow great functionality of some kind of machinery. None of us being engineers, we can't tell what kind of robot it would program, but Tharis (our computer) is cross-referencing it now for us. She said that she wasn't sure what it was, since it was so different to the copy she received from a harddrive sync a week's prior. That makes me think Methias got to him, made him make something and then destroyed the evidence. 

I'm not sure of a connection, but there'd have to be one between this programming and the server bombs.