No one comes to the Ryukyu Islands without seeing the shisa, or shishi dogs. They grin hungrily from atop store entrances and

glare at visitors in every home. Tourists buy plastic versions and T-shirts of them. Even the filthiest cockroach nest of an apartment has a pair of shisa lurking by the door. At first glance, you might mistake a pair of shisa for statues of lion cubs or mastiffs. Their cartoonishly large heads and wide mouths give them broad smiles easily mistaken for inviting.

But don’t worry about their physical forms too much. Sculpted from stone, clay, or wood, each pair of shisa statues poses only a mild risk. But the conjoined spirits that inhabit the shisa pairs can completely erase unwanted trespassers, channeling waves of memory and existence until even the wrongdoer’s closest friends forget that person existed. If these creatures sound like absolute nightmares, good; that means you won’t underestimate them. Most of them don’t swing that level of power or aggression, but the former Ryukyu Kingdom has almost as many shisa as people; a careless mage doesn’t live long enough to learn the difference between the minor shisa and that ones that purged the dragons from the islands.

Speaking of learning things, shisa have human-level intelligence, but many pairs have lived for generations, accumulating a significant amount of knowledge. Talking with any of them will teach you an entirely new way of looking at the world, particularly with identity politics. Simultaneously one gestalt entity and two separate bodies, shisa may refer to itself as “I” or “we” and they may refer to their pair-mate as “he,” “she,” or “me.” Each head has its own mind and its own opinions, often agreeing with their lifelong companion, but these creatures can and will argue with each other from time to time. On top of that, each shisa pair is somehow linked to every other shisa in the prefecture. Thanks to this connection, the pronoun game gets further complicated when shisa pairs refer to other pairs, using any and every damn pronoun they feel like, including “we.”

Shisa consider themselves to be the guardians of the Okinawan people, and they take great pains to care for their charges. (Non-Okinawan residents also get included in this protective attitude, but there is a pecking order.) For the shisa, “taking care” of their people encompasses all aspects of life, from defending family members against violence to making sure the children packed their homework. This means that the shisa have a vast number of things they could use help with.

Really, the problem with working with shisa is that there’s a nearly infinite supply of both work and reward. Mages who aren’t careful will find themselves doing relatively trivial tasks for the rest of their lives. For the shisa, the focus is always on taking care of their families; getting them to see any sort of big picture is a struggle. This, coupled with the fact that all shisa share a psychic link, means that it’s easy to get frustrated and exactly as easy to get blackballed.

Provoking the shisa to violence is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, getting them to kill to protect their families is remarkably easy. On the other hand, trying to enlist their help to kill someone else is nearly impossible, as they want their families to continue believing that shisa are just statues. Okinawans live in peace because they don’t know that they have the Awakened

equivalent of cruise missiles sitting on their front step. That’s not hyperbole, by the way. The last time the entire shisa community was active in the Ryukyu Islands, dragons roamed the islands. It is important to note that there are currently over a million shisa pairs in Okinawa and zero dragons.

Attributes: Strength 2, Dexterity 4, Stamina 4, Charisma 3, Manipulation 5, Appearance 4, Perception 4, Intelligence 3, Wits 3

Abilities: Academics 3, Alertness 4, Athletics 3, Awareness 5, Brawl 4, Cosmology 4, Enigmas 2, Esoterica 3, Etiquette 3, Intimidation 4, Investigation 3, Law 4, Leadership 2, Occult 3, Politics 3, Stealth 3, Subterfuge 4

Willpower: 8

Health Levels: OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, ‒1, ‒1, ‒1, ‒5, Dematerialized

Armor Rating: 5 (nine soak dice, total)

Powers/Advantages: Bite for Strength + 2 aggravated damage / Armor (5 pts.); Aww! (4 pts.); Bond Sharing (2 pts.); Earthbond; Empathic Bond; Fangs (aggravated); Human Speech; Information Fount; Mystic Shield (four dice, 8 pts.); Soul Sense / Death Sense(3 pts.); Spirit Travel (10 pts.); Telepathy (6 pts.); Tides of Fortune; Unaging; When suitably annoyed, a pair of shisa can focus their wills in order to temporarily erase someone from existence and memory. This frightening power involves spending all 16 points of the shisas’ Willpower and putting both entities into stasis for a week; that effort, however, makes a normal person disappear forever. Mages and Night-Folk return to existence when the shisa recover from their week-long “vacation,” but do so far from the Ryukyu Islands (Storyteller’s call about how far “far” might be).

Keeping in mind that shisa are all linked, anyone brave enough to do a shisa pair a favor might see the favor repaid by virtually any other shisa. This is not to say that all shisa are equal. Some retreated away from humans, dwelling on otherwise uninhabited islands, while others revealed their true nature to their families. Some of these families willingly submit to their shisa with fanatical reverence, and others live in a perilous balance of fear and Stockholm syndrome. Perhaps the strangest situations with shisa arise when a shisa pair attempts to protect their family from criminals who have their own shisa pair protecting them. Usually, this results in a stalemate, but Okinawa sees up to a dozen typhoons per year, providing plenty of opportunity for a house to be leveled without provoking Paradox.

Image: Huge-mouthed and mighty-maned, shisa are often (though incorrectly) referred to as “fu-dogs” by clueless westerners. Their hefty bodies loom behind those grinning maws, and while many of them crouch and wag their little tails in what seems to be a playful manner, don’t be fooled into thinking that their idea of “play” looks like anything the average trespasser could survive.