Other Factions

Food Fight

Pentex has grown wise and devious in its workings, even more so as the Apocalypse draws nearer. In order to avoid wholesale destruction at the claws of the Garou Nation, the company has ingratiated itself into all levels of human society. The big subsidiaries of Pentex are the most obvious, but the smaller efforts are sometimes the ones that hurt the most. Pentex funds and supplies many orphanages, homeless shelters and at-risk youths. Of course, they lace the foods they serve at these places and donate to charities with Wyrm-taint, too minute to detect by mundane senses. Over years, the Wyrmish toxins build up to poison the mind, body, and soul of those who have come to depend on such donations. To cubs, this seems an easy solution: tear down the tainted organizations, and the Wyrm’s touch won’t spread. Their elders know that it is never so simple a matter.

Certainly, one could destroy Feed-and-Read, the small organization which provides food for the struggling poor and helps with basic education. It would no longer spread Wyrm-taint through the foods and even the texts it employs, many of which use hidden messages that tug at the corners of a person’s mind. Yet thousands would starve without the organization and Feed-and-Read is only one of many like it. If the Garou wipe out all these programs, they halt the spread of taint — but they let families go hungry, or go without power or clean water. By actually promoting humanitarian efforts, Pentex forces the Garou Nation to choose between allowing taint to spread or damning many thousands of lives to misery. Certainly, werewolves know that the aid groups who help people pay for their bills and build up communities secretly do terrible things. They might put slow-acting spiritual poisons in the wood used to build a house, which slowly eat away at the sanity of those living within. Animal shelters euthanize healthy, adoptable animals and missing pets with tags, and use others for experimentation.

Similar things go on at many of the poorest refuges. Sadistic employees at an orphanage play on their victims’ fears to exploit children who have nobody to turn to. Organizers of women’s shelters mentally abuse women in no less hurtful a way than the physical trauma they have already suffered. Blaming women for their plight, engendering in them feelings of inferiority and weakness, deserving of punishment for stepping out of line. Peeling away the layers of a person’s self-esteem makes children to grow up hateful and abusive, and makes women prone to seeking out abusive partners. Yet these people often have no other recourse, and if you take away the Wyrm-tainted organization, you leave them with no support and no hope. The Garou Nation cannot take care of the poor and unfortunate humans itself, and neither can it afford to fund any kind of large-scale relief efforts. Pentex caught on to the few septs that tried and used its superior position in human society to snuff out those efforts.

The Garou, like hunting wolves, must instead nip at the heels of the huge beast that is Pentex. They cannot simply topple every organization, no matter how small, but small gains here and there make all the difference. With the aid of spirits and their own magic, werewolves can aid an honest company legitimately trying to help people. Untainted crops can be made to grow faster, the spiritual landscape of an area cleaned up to help promote positive feelings and actions, and packs root out and destroy small groups of Wyrm agents. Though small in the larger scheme of things, such acts change the course of whole lives, and those people go on to affect other lives in a chain reaction of positive influence. Even then, the weight of past sins bears down heavily upon the Garou Nation: the lost breeds and those all but destroyed in the War of Rage would provide mighty aid in this most dire time of need. The Grondr wereboars working alongside the werewolves could help root out the taint and filth that so infests humanity, and check Pentex’s growth. Unfortunately, those who would have been staunch allies are now only memories and regret, and the world is the poorer for it.