[HOE] The Librarian's Almanac for December 1st

[Michael Cone <Michael.Cone@apollogrp.edu>]

HIDDEN TIMBER, SOUTH DAKOTA- Herman Manning, a local Law Dog, is forming up
a posse for an investigation to the nearby Badlands National Park. Over the
past three weeks, a number of wasters have straggled into the town's walls;
alive, but severely beaten and stripped of all supplies. The stories all
have common threads; each person was traveling alone and had taken shelter
within some canyons for the night. They all have woken up, beaten black and
blue and missing all of their personal belongings. A local syker agreed to
probe one waster's mind but caught only fragments of memory. The unlucky
soul had some form of powerful, traumatic dream; a sort of symbolic
near-death experience before jolting awake.

MOSES LAKE, WASHINGTON STATE- Geralyn Franks, the mayor of the walled
enclave of Moses Lake is offering a large supply of dried meats, hides and
barter quality wood to the persons that can investigate a large problem with
the area's water supply. The town rests on the Wanatachee River and recently
noticed a strange violet algae spreading in the Potholes Reservoir. Mayor
Franks is nervous because the gunk is spreading upriver and the fish have
begun to disappear. There is the old Hanford Department of Energy
installation roughly two days travel south from the Reservoir but the area
is given a wide berth due to packs of ferocious wolves, large varieties of
hostile plant life and tales of a logger camp infested with specters.

FARMINGTON, NEW MEXICO- Lightning Shadow, a veteran waster scout, has
arrived with a word of caution for anyone heading into the southwestern
corner of Colorado. Shadow was on an antibiotic run for the tiny village of
Durango in southern Colorado, when she returned to the canyon town to find
the place completely deserted. She was approaching the town when she
discovered the tracks. Each three-toed print measured two feet long, was
almost five inches deep and the spread of each stride was over eleven feet
in length. There was no visual sighting of that beast that left the trail.
There is no word on the current location of Durango's citizens.