Page 344 - Hunter - The Vigil

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PHILEXICON (CONTINUED)
“Einhorn” (see above), and also to refer to the monster that is the target
of a specifi c hunt or operation (where chapters from other cities might use
the word “fox”). Other Philly hunters sometimes use the term in that way,
but more often use it to refer to a monster the speaker doesn’t believe
exists, or a suspected monster the speaker believes is just an ordinary
person. (“When are we gonna stop wasting time watching this unicorn?”)
Wit, Witout:
Wit, Witout: Among the general public, a term for ordering cheesesteaks
(e.g. a cheesesteak “wit” = with onions). Among hunters, a way of describing
an area as under supernatural threat or not. (“Be careful going down that
alley, this whole block is wit.” “Relax, the cemetery’s been witout since
those Jeezos blew through here last month.”)
“Yo!”:
“Yo!”: Informal greeting, hello or hey.
Yunk:
Yunk: Resident of the neighborhood of Manayunk.

spiritualist Madame Helena Blavatsky, and so may be a place a natural balance for her quiet bookishness. Then Malcolm lb l f h b k h h l l
of pilgrimage for occultists, New-Age posers and — assuming was lost during a research expedition on the other side of the
there was truth to her teachings — mages. world, gone without even a body to recover. Evelyn, crippled
by grief, dropped out of her life for a while. Eventually she
Evelyn L. Yee, PhD, Null moved across the country to start over, taking up an adjunct
Mysteriis Associate teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania.
Evelyn Yee had a happy life. She was a professor of As it turns out, she’s not yet ready to let Malcolm go.
English who was well liked by her students and respected by She’d always been aware of her husband’s interest in fringe
her peers. She taught on the same campus as her husband, science, in cryptozoology, in folktales that hinted at unknown
Malcolm, a zoologist whose outgoing, impulsive nature was creatures hiding from, or even hidden within, human
civilizations. But she didn’t comprehend how deeply his
commitment to exploring outside the mainstream really was
until an organization calling itself Null Mysteriis contacted her.
Finding out that the group had funded his doomed excursion
and that they consider Malcolm not dead, just “out of contact,”
has both opened old wounds and fostered an unbearable hope
inside her. Offered a position on Null Mysteriis’ roster, she

took it. At first, her only goal was uncover the truth of her
husband’s fate, but she’s since become infected with the same
passion to illuminate dark corners that motivated Malcolm.
Her most recent project involved categorizing a number of
language-related abnormalities cropping up in the city. She’s
led her cell of Penn graduate students on data-collection
missions into some of the roughest parts of Philly — and she’s
beginning to think she’s more like her husband than either of
them realized.
Vanida Quaker,
Network Zero Freelancer

A sophomore pursuing a degree in film and video at
the University of the Arts, Vanida was taking experimental
video samples in the wooded spaces of Cobbs Creek Park
when she noticed an anomaly that kept showing up on the
soundtrack. Using the software on her laptop to isolate and
amplify the odd noise, she found it was the sound of a man
weeping. Subsequent recordings at the same site yielded the
same anomaly, even though there was no one present making
the sound — at least, no one visible. Since then, Vanida

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