INTERLUDE

I pulled into my drive and took my parking spot. Edwin and his mom were outside playing basketnall, a game which I had discovered need only be watched during the last 2 minutes. Edwin missed a basket, then ran over to me as I got out of my car.
"Hi, Mr Frazzi, " he greeted with a glow and a smile..
Hi, shortstuff."
He grinned even wider, baring his little fangs, , with a look of self amusement,
"Do you know how chickens get up in the morning?"
A sense of impeding victimhood washed over me.
"No, I don't," I confessed.
"They use an alarm cluck!" he laughed and bounded back to his game.
I shook my head, grinned, waved to the she ape, who waved back, and entered the house. It was time to get to work. I has a werewolf to track and a date with a vampiress to keep. I unloaded and set up Glore's computer. Glore had a personal password, of course, but our systems also had a common password, known by all our researchers, in case of emergencies.
I logged on and began to review Glore's notes. Must say he was very unimpressed wothnthe planet. The ritualized combats called sports struck him as the barbic expression of am umderlying psychosis. The political jockeyings for power struck him as a preoccupation for conquest. The bloodthirdty attacks of religous fanatics denoted an inability to self analyse and reprogram. And on And on. A negative set of views I could sympathize with, but I felt we were missing something.
And none of this brought me any closer to my more immediate goal. The werewolf.
It was possible that the were had come across Glore some where along the line by sheer happenstance. If that were the case finging the beast would be difficult. A more favorable scenario arose if thry had come across each other during the course of Glore's societal explorations. Therefore I reviewed the Blurbo's activity logs. He had done much like me, visiting various stores and merchants, sampling goods and services, and following the local and national events. Much of his time was spend gathering opinions for the locals, looking for common threads of reasoning that woulkd provide insight into the ape boys and a hook by which to judge our future actions.
Unlike me, he hadn't developed any regul;ar hasngouts.
As the afternoon drew on I compiled a list of places he had visited the last 2 days of his life. My sense was that shifters were creatures of impulse. I doubted much time has lapsed between his first encounter with the were, certainly in human form, and his last.
I would retrace his footsteps and see what would turn up, starting tomorrow. It was moving toward dinner time and I still had my own creature of the night to meet.
I got out a pot and a package of macaroni and cheese, a quick meal deal thatIi also had found surprisingly tasty. While the macaromi cooked I tapped into the human's information web and looked up the location of The Witch's Brew. It was an hour 'til sundown and an hour and half 'til my date with the vampiress Marchell.