Negotiations — Dr. A

The trip from Pasadena to Phoenix — provides a very consistent scenery… of desert. And more desert. And towns along the desert. And casinos along the desert. And Coachella where the San Andreas fault (running through the desert) meets the I-10. So a view of… a deep (but narrow) chasm in the desert.

If I had the time to stop along the way to Phoenix, I could visit Sherman tanks, fake dinosaurs, and strange-looking Joshua trees. But I am in a hurry, so those are not options however enticing they might be.

It is after dark when I exit the 101 — (a circle route around greater Phoenix area) for the Courtyard in Scottsdale. This is near the Mayo Clinic, which is a major player in liver and kidney diseases, so if anything goes wrong, I suspect they will know what to do with me. I can look for the marker tomorrow, when the stores open. I don’t know why the markers aren’t out in the wild. My guess is that a bunch of people looking around a park might seem like it was a geocaching location, and then other people would start snooping around there as well.

I check in, unwind, and get some sleep before dragging myself out of bed at four in the morning: several hours before normal on a Saturday. I don’t yet know where I am headed next, so the suspense is kind-of killing me.

The Home Depot in Scottsdale — opens at 5 a.m. on Saturdays. This must be why they picked this location: so you could get cracking at the dawn of the day, or visit at 10 p.m. after you arrived in Phoenix. There could be a dozen markers hidden in here, and unless you walked all the aisles, and were a vampire, you

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wouldn’t have found any of them. But I had an aisle and shelf number (Aisle 21, Bay 007), so I only had to look in a few square feet. Actually, what I was given by the V-WAN was “Go home to 472-21-7”. Somehow that combined with my cohort number would be a marker and tell me how to get to the next marker.

I believe the first part of this code means ‘Home Depot’ because that company is mentioned prominently in a lot of the founder’ s materials. Home Depot also has a location numbered ‘472’ that is located the right distance away. We were told the first marker could be twelve or more hours away. Ideally these pieces of information are not well known, so those outside our community would have a harder time deciphering the code than vampires would.

The critical obfuscation though — comes from a vampirespecific talent: the ability to see blood in even small quantities. I go to Aisle 21, Bay 007, and look around. There are a bunch of Milwaukee tool sets containing power drills and impact drivers. On each of them are all the normal pricing, barcode, and descriptive information. And on each of them, in the brilliantly bright color of blood — although only a few droplets per inch — is my cohort number and the next marker: “Go chuck wine at five-one-nine”

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