Everything

Shapeshifting creatures with close connections to the Umbra also inhabit the World of Darkness. Most of them dwell in remote wilderness areas, but some prefer human cities and the various pleasures and challenges therein.

Murderous Werewolf

Filled with rage at humanity, loathing the extent to which humans have defiled and destroyed the natural world, werewolves strike out at those they think are enemies of the Earth. Members of the Technocracy regard these monsters as deadly threats to humanity… and they’re essentially correct. Some Tradition mages share this view, but others revere the purity of these primal monsters.

Like Awakened shamans, werewolves hold profound ties to the spirit world. They bond with totems and employ nature magic that resembles the effects of Spirit Arts. Mages who travel into the Otherworlds often meet werewolves there, usually with violent results. Although some werewolves (who call themselves Garou) strike alliances with mages who share their views, these alpha predators remain too unpredictable, temperamental, and fanatically devoted to their nature goddess to be truly considered friends.

Hunts-the-Wizards

He wasn’t always this way. Long ago, rumors claim, Hunts-the-Wizards was called Hot Coffee, an urban werewolf who guarded homeless encampments from parasites human and otherwise. Hot Coffee’s pack swept out the neighborhood dope fiends and their high-numbers profiteers, worked soup kitchens, and earned Hot’s deed-name by keeping the locals as safe, fed, and warm as they could manage.

And then some asshole wizard turned him into silver. He still remembers the pain. It wakes him from night­ mares, shivers up his scarred nerves at unexpected times, bristles his neck when a random breeze or sound calls up those memories. He nearly died. Three packmates did: one incinerated by bolts of fire, a second yanked out of this world by evil spirits, and his best friend, Cherokee Red, turned into a cook-brained basket case, unseen magick blasting her synapses in ways no drug had ever managed to damage her before. Her

body lived but she lost her wolf, and now mumbles through the cold nights with vague dreams of who she once was back when she could still think straight.

And then the wizard turned him into silver. That pain never leaves him.

It didn’t last long. Hot would not have survived if it had. But the searing torment of having his own skin and bones and fur turned into mystic anathema lingers in Hot Coffee’s mind. He spent days recovering from the physical damage, then assumed the deed-name Hunts-the-Wizards, took up the banner of his fallen packmates, and turned the mages responsible into abstract urban art. The last of them, after failing to repeat his silver-werewolf trick, perished screaming, his intestines wound like fat spaghetti around Hunts-the-Wizards’ claws.

That might have been the end of it, but then other mages came looking for their friends. From them, Hunts-the-Wizards discovered his vocation. By the time the last of those wizards defaced a mural with biological graffiti, Hot Coffee had disappeared forever beneath the raging heart of Hunts-the-Wizards… or simply, as he’s known in human guise, Hunt.

Hunts-the-Wizards knows the truth: All mages are servants of the Wyrm. Their messy deaths are gifts to the Earth Mother, and so he and his new packmates stalk, hunt, corner, and

kill every single mage they can find. Without pity, reason, or fear, this knot of monsters employs the physical and spiritual environment of their city home in a bloody vendetta that has claimed the lives of over a dozen Awakened souls and over 100 of their friends and allies. No argument can sway Hunts-the-Wizards from that task; this werewolf and his pack consider their hunt a holy crusade, and only death will end it. Until that final night, Hunts-the-Wizards relives his torment, tends his broken friend, and conducts his sacred duty as only a spiritual war-machine monster can do.

Hot Coffee wasn’t exactly a good-looking guy, but Hunts-the-Wizards bears dozens of scars from his various encounters from the magi: burns, bullet wounds, patchwork places where flesh and muscle have been cooked, slashed, dissolved, and otherwise disfigured by magickal Arts and mundane weaponry. Sure, he heals fast, but that healing demands a cost when so much of it comes from metaphysical means.

In human form, the man called Hunt conceals his battle-ravaged body under a large coat and layers of cast-off clothing. The ripe scent of homelessness carries an undercur­ rent of his bestial nature, too. His pale skin features winding tattoos over grotesque scar tissue, and his brown eyes glow with the banked fires of a doomed fanatic.

In werewolf form, he’s a rangy terror with patchy black fur, ritual scars, and a roadmap of magickal tortures etched across his skin. Though not especially tall or bulky by werewolf standards, Hunts-the-Wizards is fast, clever, and breathtakingly brutal, with a trickster’s glee if he gets a chance to make a mage’s demise especially horrific.

As his name suggests, Hunts-the-Wizards is beyond compromise. To his mind, every single mage must die. The things he’s seen and survived prove beyond all arguments that so-called “mages” are corruption incarnate. His many battles have given Hunt a sense of strategy — rushing in with claws drawn got his first pack killed, and so now deception, distraction, ambush, misdirection, and fear are Hunt’s most effective weapons… until, of course, the moment when speed and power end the chase.

Enigmatic Werecat

Since the days of ancient Egypt, magick and mages have fascinated these subtle and ever-curious creatures. Divided into several distinct breeds — tigers, lions, leopards, lynxes and more — the shape-changing cat-folk enjoy a wide range of sizes, powers, and temperaments. As a rule, however, the Bastet crave secrets and knowledge. That craving brings them into frequent contact with mages who’re obvious about what they are, and often attracts their attention if a mage isn’t who he seems to be.

Like werewolves and vampires, the Bastet have their own forms of magic. Unlike Garou, they don’t seem to be able to walk into the spirit world. Werecats make their home in Earthly reality, and claim territories that can stretch from

apartment-sized to several miles across. Within those terri­ tories, a werecat likes to know what’s going on. And so, it’s often possible for a mage to meet a Bastet who considers that mage and his home to be her property.

Callianne Barrister/Calli Groves/ Whisper/Salome Grey

She always did love books. Calli Groves learned to read short, but full, sentences by around age four, and she wrote her first story, “Bumble’s Jungle,” in first grade. By age eight,

she could read full-length adult novels and actually under­ stand what went on in them. Is it any wonder, then, that she was a full-time professional novelist before she graduated high school… which Calli managed to do at 15? Her first novel, the paranormal romance Mandolin Wind, featured a shapeshifting cat-girl named Whisper, and though the name on the cover read Callianne Barrister, its feline hero was the author herself.

Whisper’s adventures hit just as the post-Twilight surge took hold, making Calli a bestselling author by the time she hit legal age. It didn’t matter that her protagonist’s early brushes with sexuality had been based on imaginative speculation and the sort of internet searches that parents fear — the lush sensuality of Whisper’s world entranced readers of all ages. A rousing contrast to the blank-stare infodumps favored by so many of her peers, Calliane Barrister became one of the names to watch for on the paranormal romance lists. This fame, of course, had a distinct downside for an author who really was what she wrote about: Calli had to distance herself from Whisper when several associates of her Bastet identity began to say, “What a minute, aren’t you the chick from those books…?” Hence, to them, she became Salome Grey, her surname an elbow-shot at the rising Fifty Shades series and the popularity of their slick hero.

Living a double life is challenging enough. These days, Calli lives four of them: Her best-selling pen name, her in­ quisitive heroine, her Bastet aspect, and whatever is left of her own life when she’s not writing, touring, or living the other three. As any writer knows, the sheer butt-in-chair element of writing is time-consuming enough for one person. Add the social media and marketing presence of a persona who’s not really you and not one shape-shifting cat-girl but two, and you’ve got a fair impression of Calli’s busy life. Good thing she’s adept at catnaps or she’d never get any sleep at all.

Granted, Whisper is more a person of the page these days than she is a living entity; still, Calli keeps having to clean up the messes her initial feline self left lying around before she got so popular. Like any good pulp-action hero, Whisper has left her claws in lots of hearts, literal and otherwise, and some of her paramours keep coming back for another round. Whisper has enemies, too, some of whom would love to expose the woman behind the character. As this cat has learned the hard way, hot tin roofs have nothing on the bestseller list!

Partly because Whisper’s adventures deal so heavily with the occult, but largely because Calli herself is implacably curious about such things, Salome has ingratiated herself among the local occult subcultures. A few tricks of makeup, hair dye, and body language let her appear differently enough from her other three personas that few people have caught on yet. One of her Bastet tricks also allows her to change her shape and appearance in radical ways — a useful stunt for a cat-woman with more lives than usual. Between her magical powers and social guile, Calli has insinuated herself into a variety of cults, sects, and covens, plus online groups and a

growing circle of intimates who know who and what she really is. That’s an especially dangerous game at her level, though, as she’s begun to realize that some of these people command power and influence far beyond her wildest fictions.

Bastet excel at keeping secrets while uncovering everyone else’s dirt. With money and magic, she’s performed an impres­ sive, if unsustainable, juggling act for years. Her masquerade, though, is wearing thin. Several books ago, Calli tripped over the existence of the Technocracy. Though she understands very little of what she’s learned, she added them to her books as the Agency, a hypertech conspiracy of paranormal author­ itarians. For obvious reasons, this did not go over well with the Union, and although their inquiries have been discreet (so far), the Technocracy would like to find out how this Callianne Barrister person learned as much as she appears to know. Thanks to her insular nature, her financial success, her Bastet bag of tricks, and the odd things you discover doing paranormal-romance research, Calli has managed to cover her tracks thus far. It’s not going to be long, however, until someone slips between the many levels of misdirection Calli Groves constructed around her various identities. If someone manages to get a peek inside her head, this entire Whisper game may soon come to an unfortunate conclusion.

Although her shapechanging Gift allows Calli to cultivate a number of different personas and appearances, her primary “selves” are as follows:

Calli Groves is a rail-thin and prettily bookish woman in her late 20s, with long wavy, black hair, wire-framed glasses (which, since her Bastet birthright manifested in her early teens, she no longer needs), large eyes that shift from green to gray to hazel in accordance with her mood, and a decidedly casual wardrobe of jeans, plain-color sweaters, and near-in­ evitably bare feet. Her features and skin tone suggest Indian descent, but she’s actually Irish-Egyptian with a bit of Lakota from her mother’s side of the family. Though she’s nearly six feet tall, Calli weighs less than 130 pounds and slumps her shoulders so as to appear shorter than she truly is. The author’s fey features, thin build, and changeling eyes earned her the nickname “Elf” among her friends, and though she used to cultivate that look when she was younger, she now concedes it to…

Callianne Barrister, who stands Calli’s full height and accentuates her fey appearance with peasant blouses, hippie skirts, copious bangles, and a flirtatious persona. Like Calli, she shuns footwear; unlike her, Callianne wears tumbles of deep-red hair and faerie-like cosmetics that contrast with her skin to make it look darker than it naturally is. Callianne doesn’t wear Calli’s glasses, and in most regards seems to be more her “better self” than the shy girl she manifests at home. Where Calli’s personal aspect is quiet and shy, Calliane’s a charisma bomb in a New-Age shop.

Whisper, of course, is a lean, punky, sullenly attractive rebel apparently stuck somewhere around her mid-to-late teens.

Like Callianne, she wears no glasses; her messy dark mane falls across her face as she adopts a terminally jaded slump-and-glare. Unlike her other personae, Whisper wears heavy boots, shredded jeans, ankh-and-scarab jewelry, and battered leather jackets. Although Calli herself avoided getting real tattoos that might expose her multiple identities, Whisper has a variety of fake tribal-style black tats, including the inevitable tramp-stamp sported by every paranormal-romance cover girl.

Salome Grey, aside from her slender build, looks noth­ ing like the other three women. Calli’s magic grants Salome paradoxically pale skin, flowing red-blonde hair, and eyes the steely color of her surname. Like that particular Christian, she dresses in tailor-made business wear, with stylish shoes and an intimidating presence. Calli hones her social domi­ nance in this persona, and she uses her height and looks for maximum effect. Most of the folks who know Calli’s Bastet identity are familiar with Salome Grey, with a mere handful knowing Whisper and only three of her must trusted intimates knowing Calli.

In her Bastet feline forms, Calli resembles a lean, black-furred Egyptian Bast statue, a huge black cat, or a saber-toothed monster vaguely reminiscent of a prehistoric panther with especially large ears. In all three forms, Calli goes nude and rarely appears unless she wants to be seen. If you see her at all, you’ll note lambent green eyes and bright white teeth right before the latter rip into a vital part of your anatomy.

Like any Bastet — much less one of her Bubasti lineage — Calli possesses an unquenchable lust for secrets and a literal hunger than never goes away. Nothing is ever enough for her: enough books, enough food, enough money, enough lovers, enough forbidden secrets about things she really should leave alone. Calli indulges them all as much as she can without putting her multiple lives at too much risk. As a result, this werecat is a fabulous liar and social chameleon whose prodigious mind and boundless curiosity are backed up with magical powers that let her slide between identities and slip out of perception when she wants to disappear. Those powers let Calli move unseen and unheard, edge around most physical barriers, change her human guise on cosmetic levels, and convince people to give her whatever it is she wants at that time.

Despite inhuman speed, endurance, fangs and claws, plus some basic fight training she’s picked up while writing a paranormal adventure series, Calli’s not fond of physical conflicts. If backed into a corner, she can take out the average human without breathing hard. That’s not her style, though. Knowledge is so much more satisfying than blood.

The Fae

Ah, the wonders of the fae! Their flitty mischief and giddy playfulness! The rustic glamour of bygone tales, half-draped in wild joy and packaged colorfully for our amusement! Wait… you mean faeries aren’t like that?

Nope.

Not even close, and an attitude like that will get a mage killed if she’s lucky and worse if she’s not. The Disneyfied bullshit cloaks entities of strange and fearsome mien, and though some who know them claim the fae are harbingers of imagination’s power, those same mages are often quick to warn you that “imagination” also gave us the atomic bomb.

Despite formidable powers, vampires and werebeasts are fairly prosaic monsters — more complex than Sleeper legends give them credit for, but ultimately straightforward reflections of human fears. Faeries, though, are other. Unpredictable. Often alien. Although they might superficially resemble the sanitized legends attributed to their name, faerie beings are walking puzzles whose ways make little sense when analyzed with magely vision.

Lore asserts that the True Fae left the mortal realm be­ hind some time ago. An Umbra-faring mage might run across such beings in a hidden glade or distant palace, but those immortals won’t be found on Earth. Instead, a mage might encounter changelings: faerie spirits trapped in human hosts, struggling in the face of what they call banality to retain the essence that makes them what they are. Their magics are, by nature, more subtle than Awakened Arts, their effects often hidden behind screens of misdirection. Literally “such stuff as dreams are made of,” the ephemeral Arts of changelings bend reality in ways mages envy but cannot duplicate.

Faerie creatures display an inhuman affinity with magic, and although those Arts are not True Magick in the way that willworkers understand the term, they’re far closer to that power than are the weird talents of vampires and werebeasts. Faerie beings share ancient ties with the Verbena and some Hermetic mages, but those ties don’t necessarily mean friend­ ship. Ultimately, the fae remain mysterious, haunted by dream horizons that not even mages truly understand.

True to faerie-tale lore, fae characters take aggravated damage from cold-iron weapons, and they suffer illness and a distinct lack of magic in areas with high levels of “cold” technology (as opposed to the weird Science of Etherite mages). If a changeling gets stuck someplace with high levels of cold technology or banal behavior (the unimaginative herd mind that seems safest for the Masses), he might forget who and what he really is, losing not only his magic but also his memory that he was something other than a normal, mortal man. For this reason, among others, the fae avoid such places and behaviors; to them, banality literally is a plague.

Although certain fae practice their own form of odd tech­ nologies, most changelings fear Technocratic establishments and forces… and with good reason: Such institutions can drain a faerie’s magic simply by existing in his presence! And so, most fae-folk concentrate their pranks on environments that encourage a least a bit of magic and imagination: churches, temples, Akashic dojos and Verbena groves, art schools, media offices, and even labs where science favors imagination over procedure. In more rigid areas, a changeling’s powers falter,

locking him into that mortal guise until he can escape again. This innate tie between imagination and ability provides a key to any faerie’s nature. It’s been said that technology strangles the very essence of what faeries are. If and when the Technocracy gets its wish, fae of all sorts will disappear forever.

Jason “Goatboy” McClean

Class clowns often start off as kids with social handicaps they learn to work around by making people laugh. In Jason’s case, those handicaps included thick body hair, a strong body odor that resisted every antiperspirant on the market, and a temperament that’s volatile even by adolescent standards. As so many embarrassing things do, the bodily changes kicked in when Jason hit puberty, leading his schoolyard nemesis Vince Angelini to dub him “Goatboy” — a name that stuck even after Jason started racking up an impressive list of hookups that included some of the best-looking boys and girls in school… including, to both guys’ amazement, Vince himself. When asked how a smelly, hairy dude named Goatboy was able to win his way into their hearts and pants, Jason’s intimates tend to shrug, look aside, and say, “I dunno, he just makes me laugh.”

And so he does. Of course, Jason’s heritage among the satyr-kith fae doesn’t hurt his popularity either, but the kids at school don’t know about that, and Jason’s certainly not gonna be the one to tell ‘em.

Jason learned the truth about two years ago, and now understands why he’s always felt so drawn to art classes even though he’s got little talent for art himself. Currently the superstar of his high school’s drama department (a status he earned through charisma and popularity, not his ability to act worth a damn), Jason passes freely among every clique

in school, scoring like an 80s rock star despite being under legal age. The fact that some of his satyrian hookups include several members of the faculty keeps people from looking too carefully at what he’s doing and who he’s doing it with. The messes he makes, however, turn those relationships into stormy dramas, and although Goatboy remains mysteriously popular with his peers (and many of their parents, too), the emotional turmoil in his wake keeps Jason’s life… interest­ ing. His family has begun to notice this sensual chaos, and although mom thinks she knows what’s really going on, she has no idea what to do about it. As for Jason’s dad, well… um, “That’s my boy” isn’t an especially healthy attitude to take about such things, but sadly it’s not unusual even when dad himself isn’t actually fae.

Not long ago, Jason’s dramas included every single mem­ ber of his school’s miniscule goth occultist contingent — a contingent scattered by the resulting emotional typhoon. One of those kids, though, realizes now what Goatboy really is… and she’s begun to orchestrate a grand, public reveal that might bring Goatboy’s kingdom down for good.

Really, Jason’s not a bad kid. Although his vengeful ex suspects he’s what folks call Unseelie Fae, the truth is, he’s not deliberately malicious. Jason is a kid — kind of literally speaking. Passionate by nature as well as by age, he hurts himself as badly as he hurts the folks around him. In time, Goatboy might learn to temper his impulsive sexuality with discretion and ethics, if only out of self-preservation. Right now, though, Goatboy stars in a real-life teen flick that veers from comedy to tragedy to impending horror with all the verve of a horny goat on a hormonal cocaine binge. Everybody’s laughing in public and crying secretly, with several ticking clocks just waiting for the right explosion.

To ordinary eyes (and to any mage who doesn’t exam­ ine him with magick), Goatboy appears to be a moderately attractive, red-haired teenage dude with copious body hair and a weirdly compelling musk. Jason wears his hair shortish but shaggy, and most folks seem to like it that way. (It’s even kicked off a mini-trend around school, with Vince among those wearing that style these days.) His careless sense of fashion is just mainstream enough to let Jason navigate cliques with­ out defining him by the clothes he wears. He has large feet and stubby toes (another source of his nickname, thanks to locker-room exposure), and is incredibly self-conscious about them, generally wearing socks even in bed. Whether Jason’s facial features can be defined as “strong” or “heavy” depends on who you ask, and under what circumstances. The older he gets, though, the less he looks like his parents and more like some dude out of an old painting his mother has a print of in her closet… a print she no longer hangs up around the house because it reminds her (and her husband) of a guy she knew a long time ago, in what was literally a different life than the one she and her family live in now. To folks who can see through a changeling’s human illusion, of course, he looks like the young satyr he truly is. Like most teens, Jason feels

both horrified by what he sees in the mirror now and yet fascinated by what it says about the man he’ll soon become.

What kind of man will Goatboy be? That remains to be seen… but if anyone thinks he’ll ever be “just one of the guys,” the joke is truly on them.