Everything

Nassir Tarnished-Scarab, Bone Gnawer Ahroun, offers some perspective:

The Glass Walkers live in a world where they think everything operates the way they do, like it’s all about shadows cast by supernatural forces with money. They think every human who looks a little pale either is a gûl or is serving one. If Leila were any more paranoid she’d think sunset was a Leech plot. Whatever helps them sleep at night.

The problem comes when they see a vampire’s hand in everything the government does, as if undead fingers pull every trigger. It’s all too easy to lose sight and think that everything bad that happens to oppress the people or thwart our duties to Gaia is the work of a Wyrm-creature or something else. At the same time, you can fall into the trap of thinking that everything that strikes back against them is something you or one of your allies did.

Our people are the ones fighting and suffering and dying over all this. Not the Gnawers, but the poor and downtrodden, the ones who want help that’s not looking down on them from a fancy office building. I’ve seen for myself that the enemy of the revolution is not the Wyrm or the Leeches. Sure, they profit a little more when good people lose hope or die for speaking up. But the dark forces shaping all this are human greed and hatred. At the same time, no matter how many Kinfolk organizers and Garou sympathizers you have, it’s human hope and drive that’s fighting it back.

This is a revolution of humans fighting humans with human strength and human weapons. It’s not a supernatural chess match, no matter how much the Leeches or the Glass Walkers might like it to be.

“We’re near one of the Gnawer caerns,” he said grimly. “A plague ravaged the... less well-off humans some years back and both caerns have been a little anti-social ever since. Just leave them be for now.”

“Shouldn’t they be helping us?” “You’d think,” he murmured under his breath before he picked up the pace to cut off further conversation.

We approached the building where our human and Kin allies holed up. Haytham held a hand out to stop us a block from the building. He’d seen a sign in a window suggesting a trap. I volunteered to scout out the Umbra, just in case, while the others performed mundane reconnaissance, and ducked into an empty alley to step sideways.

The heat was present even there, although the lack of a physical sun took the edge off. An Umbral wind blew more strongly, and the spirits were all foreign to me. They were a little less ‘abstract’ than I was used to and reminded me of creatures out of legends and stories that they either emulated or inspired. The city’s despair bled through to feed and attract hungry things. I could understand why Silent Striders were so worried here, but I didn’t see any immediate threats to the operation.

I stepped back across, left the alley, and slipped through the open door. Haytham was reassuring a slim — almost scrawny — Egyptian with three bandaged fingers. As I got my bearings the others scattered through the small house and made a big show of settling in, going through papers, and getting reports from our frightened allies. Nadir Night- Wire, a Ragabash serving under Leila, ducked into a dark corner and I lost track of her.

The building was small and cramped, with trash and papers strewn about. Smashed furniture was subtly piled up or shoved into the corners like a token effort had been made to clean up after a scene of violence. It was stuffy and reeked of old sweat and ozone.

“Count to ten, close the door, and watch our backs. Try to stay out of Crinos in here unless it goes south; it’s awkward in this space and hell to clean up,” FIGMO quietly said to me. “You wouldn’t happen to be one of those ‘Shaolin monk’ Stargazers I hear so much about with improbable intergalactic kung-fu, would you?”

Despite being used to the question, I never know quite how to answer to anyone’s satisfaction. As I usually do when asked, I gave a simple nod of assent as if to say ‘close enough.’ I took a deep breath and shifted to Glabro in case the extra muscle would be necessary, although normally I prefer the balance of Homid form. As much as I’d like to say we didn’t do anything as obvious as holding our breaths, the fact remains that an ambush was coming and not all of us could pretend we didn’t know it.

When my silent count reached ten, I nudged the door shut and stepped to the side. Less than a minute later, the door kicked open with a bang as did the back door and some of the closets. As predicted, some of them were waiting inside for the signal from outdoors. We were ready. The fight took only moments. I won’t bore you with the details. Not all of the Garou in the group acted as a well-oiled machine but it startled me how ready the others were for this sort of violence. I did not hurt my opponents any more than necessary, for I knew they were likely misguided servants of a greater evil. By the end, half of our attackers lay on the floor dead from bullet wounds or broken necks. They were clearly expecting a smaller group that would submit to a display of firearms, not experienced warriors with the gifts of Gaia.

“We need to move fast,” Haytham said, rubbing at a massive knot on the side of his head that was already shrinking. “The one dead in the bedroom smelled of blood and Wyrm-taint and was much stronger than any human should be. Some of these men are direct servants of the Leeches.”

“So what now?” one of the Silent Striders with us asked. “You three,” he indicated the two Striders and myself, “Stay here while we relocate our people. See who comes to investigate. I suspect that after dark at least one of the gûls will come to find out what happened. Find out what you can get from them and we’ll check in with you.”

“Pretty convenient, leaving everyone not in your current pack here while you take care of this. Is there something we should know?” I asked.

I wasn’t trying to challenge him but wanted to make sure we were all on the same page.

“It’s nothing personal,” FIGMO chimed in. “But the fewer people that know our security precautions the better. And we have to leave someone here.”

I wanted to hear them say it more than anything else, so I believed him. The others left as we heard sirens.. We made our way to an abandoned apartment nearby, and waited.

We went back inside after the police had gone over the building with a fine-toothed comb and removed the bodies. We found a spot to wait until nightfall, passing the time by whittling wooden stakes from chair legs. We didn’t have to wait long in the darkened rooms before someone came looking.

The two vampires moved with smooth, silent steps and left no scent in their wake. They murmured among themselves in Arabic and while I couldn’t make out their conversation the Striders with me both tensed up and readied their weapons.

I followed their lead when they struck at the Leeches and the two of them went down quickly... but the third, which we hadn’t seen, threw open the door and made a run for it. I was closest to the door so I gave chase as he pulled out a cellphone to report in to someone. He was familiar with the streets, and would have lost me were I not much fitter than him.

I followed him down an alley that came out into a small cul-de-sac. He was pinned to the ground by three Garou in Glabro and Crinos forms with ragged clothing draped over them. Four more stood around me, watching.

“This is our territory,” one of them snarled in the Garou tongue. “You can go, but we keep this one.”

The Garou tongue threatens well but rarely have I heard it sound so ominous. I remembered the earlier suggestions of anti-social Bone Gnawers and hesitated for a second. In the end, for the sake of diplomacy I did not argue the matter. I returned to the house, wary of followers, to find the vampires bound up for transport and later interrogation. When asked what happened to the vampire, I told them the Bone Gnawers got him and the looks on the Striders’ faces told me more than I wanted to know.

That set the tone of my entire experience there. I remained for about a month, carrying messages when Facebook and Twitter would not do and helping to carry new phones and laptops with the blessings of Gaia to protestors allied to the Garou. When necessary, I chased snake-tongued vampires through the slums although I was fortunate to avoid any further entanglements with the Bone Gnawers. When things escalated in November with the reoccupation of Tahrir Square, the increased visibility forced many of the Garou to take a step back from the ‘front lines.’ I took advantage of a good opportunity to move on as well, and have spent a lot of time-sharing my first-hand accounts with other Garou.

What matters is that we weren’t just arming the people against an oppressive regime that was in the pockets of vampires and oil companies, but we were also bringing them hope. The move back into Tahrir Square, while leading to setbacks for the Garou, was one born of the Egyptians’ need to take back their government and their country. The goings on in Egypt reminds me of another experience of mine.

Are you familiar with the networking site ‘Voicebox?’ It’s one of a number of small tech startups that have popped up in the wake of the social networking boom, trying to get in on the action. Like so many others, it’s building its foundations in Seattle. If it plays its cards right, it could be the next Facebook. One of my Kinfolk relatives learned enough about company law to follow the trail of ownership. Eventually, much of the startup’s funding comes from Sunburst, a software company ultimately owned by Pentex.

I was out on the West Coast in the summer of 2012 when I received a call from Broken Staff, the younger brother of the Stargazer who mentored me. He’d learned I was in the area and invited me to come visit him in Seattle. Even if I’d wanted to I couldn’t deny such an invitation.

Seattle is not as rainy as pop culture suggests. Their summers are actually rather mild and warm and the city’s climate is pleasant at that time, as I learned first-hand. Broken Staff, who is practically an uncle to me, was waiting for me at Sea-Tac and we took the light rail into the city proper.

Seattle lives up to the hype of a city of the future between the affordable mass transit, technology-oriented companies, and Earth-friendly business concerns. The biggest concentration of Glass Walkers in the northwest is hard at work within various enterprises, keeping them honest and turning what resources they can to benefit Gaia and the Garou Nation. Garou of almost every tribe have found Seattle palatable enough for a city and our efforts have made sure there’s plenty of light to go with the city’s share of darkness.

We arrived in the middle of a protest at the Uwajimaya Village. Apparently the Uwajimaya company wanted to expand their shopping and residential complex, leading to opposition from locals who didn’t want to see the neighborhood reshaped any more than it already had been. Things grew heated because of accusations that a manager of the complex had hacked the Voicebox accounts of some of the protestors and presented damaging private information that had ruined their reputations.

I was not familiar with the site and while asking a couple of people off to the side what happened, I met a Glass Walker blogger named Melissa Press-Pass who was writing up the protest for her website. According to her, the Voicebox website was likely the guilty party and if I wanted to know more she could get me into sort of a ‘town hall’ meeting hosted by a nearby sept. I was too intrigued not to get involved and Broken Staff came along to find out what was going on.

The meeting was held in Capitol Hill, an entertainment and nightlife center of the city, at a Walker-owned coffee house called the ‘Coast of Java.’ The crowd appeared to be mostly Glass Walkers and Bone Gnawers with a light sprinkling of other tribes including a surprising number of Wendigo given the location. The crowd mostly consisted of Garou from the Menagerie Caern in Discovery Park and the Little Water Caern, which is located in a South Lake Union high rise.

A Glass Walker Philodox from the Little Water Caern, Jean Broadcast-Depth, led the meeting. She put the call out to ask local Garou to assist in an impending investigation into Voicebox centered on their office in South Lake Union. The website, she explained to us, was officially focused around bringing people together through the medium of discussion groups much in the same way some sites do it through common interests. This made it a natural fit for a lot of major protest groups, and had been used as an alternative to Facebook for a lot of event planning.

However, Jean had reason to believe that the site also intentionally directed disruptive elements to good causes. She suspected that Voicebox’s influence in an incident where elements of Occupy Seattle used the ‘People’s Mic’ to interrupt their own speakers and sow discord. The website’s security was also selectively dismal, causing some private conversations — all the more damning out of context — to appear on public pages while others vanish into the electronic ether behind inscrutable ‘censorship’ filters.

Jean and her pack asked for Garou to help them get into the Voicebox offices and see what they can do to disrupt their efforts and retrieve information to use later. The plan was to cause a disruption at the office so someone could sneak in and get a look at their files. A Wendigo in attendance asked why they just didn’t hack in. She explained with some embarrassment that the company’s security was not only watertight against everyone up to and including Anonymous — unless a leak suited them — but was backed up by unidentified spiritual assistance.

Broken Staff and I volunteered, as did most of the Glass Walkers and Bone Gnawers in attendance and a couple of young glory-seeking Wendigo.

A few days of preparation later, we gathered at the Little Water Caern. As Broken Staff and I made our way towards the target we could feel the Gauntlet thickening around us like stepping out into high humidity. The concentration of human businesses, many of them Internet and technology-based, couldn’t help but feed the Weaver and thicken the local Gauntlet.

Jean split us up into three teams. One team would cause a commotion outside and two more would go inside where one would cause more trouble to distract security while the rest of us moved in to get at the files we needed. Broken Staff was on the team outside while I was on the retrieval team, being what one of them referred to as ‘the hitter.’ We trickled in a few at a time, pretending to be there for the various companies in the building, while the protest they arranged ramped up outside. About the time police were to be called, the second team got into motion, pulling fire alarms and committing acts of random vandalism in a few different offices.

Employees in the building, not at all used to this sort of carnage, ran for the exits in a near-panic. Security guards from all over the building scrambled every which way trying to get ahead of the vandals and we managed to get into the Voicebox cubicle farm. We made a big show of directing employees towards the exits while looking around for their private files.

The place smelled, not only of faint Wyrm taint but also of rotten food. A couple of the Walkers on the team ducked into offices with fetish USB drives to steal information. That left me with a Bone Gnawer Ragabash named Grabby-Hands, so the two of us checked the corner office that was the source of the odd smells.

A skinny woman sat at the computer, staring dispassionately at the screen. Her hands rested on the keyboard, unmoving, as the computer appeared to work itself. Next to her on the desk sat four bags of O’Tolley’s takeout, left by co-workers but untouched. She turned and looked at us, her body oddly clean for someone in a place like this.

Grabby feigned concern and rushed over to help her out of the office. The woman refused to move and explained how important it was that she be allowed to continue her work. Her voice reminded me of the hum of an A/C unit and Grabby’s eyes glazed over. A fog settled in my own mind. I reflected on koans to snap myself out of it. I shook the Gnawer’s shoulder and woke him. He jumped back, panic in his eyes, and his body tensed for a moment.

“She did something, I can’t shift,” he gasped, backing towards the door to yell for help.

Not being as reliant on my other forms to engage enemies, I moved in to get her away from the computer. I grabbed the woman and physically pulled her out of the seat but she calmly laid both hands on me and a massive electrical charge hit like a live wire had fallen on me. Next thing I knew I was laying on the floor looking up at her standing over me with a lazy, curious look.

A series of gunshots rang out from the doorway, bullets ripping through her and splattering the wall. She staggered and as she turned around to face one of the Glass Walkers with us I could see tiny filaments crisscrossing the bullet holes and weaving together over the wound. I swept her legs out from under her and sprung to my feet. Another Walker at her computer yanked the fetish flash drive out, tossed it to me, and shouted for me to step sideways (since I can get by without a mirror) and get it out of there.

I made a run for the stairs, not wanting to step across into an empty Umbral reflection if I could help it. I heard more commotion downstairs, presumably from the vandalism team. Rather than wade through the chaos, I closed my eyes, put the USB drive in my mouth, and focused on stepping sideways. The Gauntlet was even thicker than I’d expected and it took a few agonizing minutes to push through to the Umbra. I shifted to Lupus in mid-air to better handle the landing, as the building was too new and not yet important enough yet to exist on both sides of the Gauntlet. The flash drive, a sturdy model for just this reason, was already held in my muzzle.

As I turned to leave the empty space I saw the programmer appearing in the Umbra. In the distance, Pattern Spiders skittered closer as if summoned. I didn’t stick around to question how she was able to follow me.

I took off on all fours for the Little Water Caern, moving at the best speed I could manage. I didn’t slow down until I was close to the caern. I stopped and returned to Homid form and thanked Gaia she hadn’t followed me. All I saw were the buildings of Seattle’s Umbra and flashes of light coming off the Weaver webs like dew caught in a spider’s web. I slipped into the Umbral representation of the building where someone from the caern was waiting for me. I gave him the data and we stepped back across.

I told them what happened while I caught my breath and they started decrypting the data. The others returned, more or less in one piece. I took a moment to track down Jean while we were waiting for results on the flash drives.

I asked the obvious question: “Does the Weaver have any real stake in Voicebox?”

“No,” she said with the weary sigh of having heard this question before. “She benefits, but no more from Voicebox than any of those other services. Honestly, slightly less given how much instability it causes.”

I admit I wondered if making Voicebox more stable would be worse in the long run, then. But our goal was finding something that could be used to bring it down altogether so I kept any further commentary to myself. I found a quiet spot in the corner to meditate so I don’t know how much longer it was before Broken Staff was gently shaking my shoulder to get my attention.

Jean and the rest of her pack explained that the prize was a beta version of the new website, complete with new privacy policies and security software. The new policies made it harder to prevent online harassment, sold users’ personal information to companies that were all known Pentex subsidiaries — the final confirmation some needed as to Voicebox’s true masters — and also gave the company legal loopholes to withhold information from police in the case of child predators using the site. Melissa started emailing contacts of hers to leak the information and I asked Jean what that would accomplish.

“It should do a lot of damage to the company, although I imagine they’ll find the funds to weather the storm. It will buy us time to find ways around their defenses for the long haul. Maybe we can find ways to exploit their ties to the rest of Pentex.”

I nodded with sincere approval and then asked her about the obvious interest the Weaver’s brood had taken with the place. After a moment’s thought during which her face registered confusion, frustration, and a hint of defeat, she told me they’d do what they could.

Forest for the trees, cub. Forest for the trees.

Whew, I just realized what time it is. You still seem bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, so to speak. Ah, to be your age again; even with Garou health I already feel my youth leaving me. I think we’ve got time for one more tale. The conflict on Jean’s face when I suggested the possibility of a Weaver ‘problem’ reminds me of a recent trip to London.

Recently, the British government has demonstrated what I will politely call an issue with priorities. They have, in the last few years, wasted a great deal of money on pompous displays of excess. It’s been one spectacle after another. At about the same time all that began, the government slashed funding for education, and benefits for the poor and disabled.

I happened to be in the area when that particular bomb dropped in November 2010. I was visiting with a pack of Indian Stargazers living in North London and when the protests started they heard that some of their human Kinfolk were among the students marching. They headed down to catch up with the protestors as quickly as they could while I tracked down some of the Garou I thought might be close enough to be getting directly involved.

Most of the ones I could have contacted were already down at the protests. A number of Garou with the city, primarily Children of Gaia, Fianna, and Glass Walkers, had Kinfolk who’d be affected by the government’s actions one way or another. Everybody who could get there was involved in some capacity or another, and to say that tensions ran high is like saying that Red Talons don’t get along well with humans.

Some Garou marched with the students while others remained on the sidelines for fear of being pushed into