Nora let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding after the door closed behind "Jane."  She felt she had achieved a minor victory there, though now that she found herself standing alone in the hallway, she found herself wondering if she was doing the right thing.

[i]Oh, stop it![/i] she told herself with a shake of her head.  [i]She needs help, and it's not my business to pry into what brought her here.  What's important is that I've done most of what I've reasonably been able to do to help her, and just hope that nothing forces me to bring her to the attention of my bosses.[/i]

She went downstairs and brought up the laptop, among the other things that they had recovered from the crash site.  She laid the laptop right outside of the door to Sam's room, then took the metal-infused hoodie and threw that into a cycle in the washer/dryer.  While that ran, she took Justin's glove - the one he had given her with the sample of the metallic goo - and brought that into her room.

A few minutes later, her suitcase was empty and all of her clothes were haphazardly hung up in her closet.  Mostly she had white shirts, various colors of slacks, and several more of the white labcoats; there were only a very few other things she had to wear, and if she had not already had her science gear out on a desk by the room's window and was involved in transferring the goo from the glove into a safer container, she might have regretted that she had very little casual wear.  As it was, Nora was in the middle of [i]science![/i] and that overtook just about all of her other concerns.

By the time the wash cycle finished for the jacket, Nora had safely contained the goo and had already run a few diagnostic scans on it with her portable equipment.  Transferring the gathered data to her portable computer, she then sent that data over the commnet to her lab computer at Cybertronics.  It would take time for the analysis to be completed, and she figured she may as well get that started as soon as possible.  Once she had a better idea of what this goo was, then she could figure out what kinds of tests she could run on it for further experimentation.

She took off the apron and put that away, then swept on another labcoat, and she felt at ease again as she left her room.  She took the hoodie - now washed and dried - and put it in a neatly folded pile on top of the laptop, then gently knocked on the door and called out, "I put your things just outside your room, Jane!" before she went back to her room and pulled out the blueprints she had been working on before being assigned to work here.  Sure, she would go downstairs later to make sure everyone had dinner, and to clean up and put away things, make sure the lodge was all locked up...

Not very long later, she was slumped over her desk, snoozing and drooling a little on her (laminated) blueprints.  It had been a very stressful day for Nora Minder already, and if today was any indication, this was only the start of it.

At one corner of the blueprints, the word "Rockbear" was printed...
[center]* * *[/center]
Boxcar finished up his dinner and left Ashley and Jaiden to talk in the kitchen.  While he wanted to get a better idea of what kind of wolf Ashley was under that human skin, he did not want to hang out too long around Jaiden.  The young human man was...something felt [i]wrong[/i] with him, something that offended Boxcar's animal instincts.  A competing predator sort of smell.  It was hard to say, exactly, what it was that bothered Boxcar, since it wasn't Boxcar's conscious speech-capable brain that was reacting to Jaiden.  How could instincts speak words that the awake brain could translate?  The wolf knew he could handle it better than any of his former brethren of the wild, but he still did not want to push it.

That, and he was curious about the flares of fiery essence that his nose detected outside.  Sure enough, after he wrestled with the back door (grateful the handles in the lodge doors were long handles and not slick round doorknobs), he found Samuel out in the backyard behind the lodge, practicing some kind of...dance?  That was Boxcar's first thought, though he thought he sensed something martial within the motions, meaning behind the gestures.  He sat and watched for a few moments on the patio, panting quietly in the warm air outside the lodge.  Whatever Sam was doing, it was relaxing to watch.

Boxcar's nose was able to predict each instance when Samuel was about to let out a burst of flames from his hands as he went through his motions.  Each release let out a signal to Boxcar moments before it happened, almost like a bat's echolocation, though a bat's ears couldn't discern the smell of smoke and burnt oxygen like Boxcar could.  Boxcar had little to no curiosity about his own power and how it worked; he only reacted to and trusted it like any of his other instincts.

He finally spoke up after a while.  "Hey, Sam," he called out, "what're you doing?  It looks kinda like a dance to me, but there's no music, and I don't think any dance partner you had would 'preciate the fireworks in the face.  Is it exercise, or some kind of religious thing, or what?"

This was Boxcar's attempt at conversation, such as it was.