Carried Equipment:

Antler-handled knife in beaded sheath, primitive bow, primitive garou bow, foxfur quiver of primitive arrows, ritual components, fresh fruit, venison jerky, pemmican, other snacks, very dark Oakley shades, vintage brass cigarette case (half filled with hand rolls of homegrown sleeping tobacco, the other half joints of Awakened cannabis), gecko-shaped glass pipe, small pouch of Awakened cannabis, small pouch of normal cannabis, small pouch of Awakened psilocybin, sparking vintage Zippo, iPhone 5 with cracked screen.

Possessions and Other Equipment:

Decent two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea with a balcony and roof access, roof garden (half outdoor, half in a greenhouse), big 4K TV, Playstation 4 Pro and many games, record player, CD player, big music collection, ‘94 silver Volvo station wagon, ‘06 black and chrome Vespa.

Freebie Expenditure:

Stamina 2->3 (5pts)

Gnosis 3->6 (6pts)

WP 3->6 (3 pts)

Computers 1 (2 pts)

Herbalism 2 (4 pts)

Character History

I am Evil Eyes, Fostern Theurge Metis of the Uktena Tribe, accepted by the Abenaki people of upstate New York. I had my first change when I was 9. I earned my noble Rank of Fostern just a few months ago, shortly after I turned 25. Isn’t it crazy that I’m a sin-born who knows his birthday? That’s because I get a candle in a cupcake (sometimes not even the prepackaged kind!) every year from my Mom.

I didn’t kill my Mom, okay? I need you to know. I didn’t claw my way out of the womb under Luna’s full light, my own mother’s intestines as the first food my tiny beastly body took for sustenance. I’m sure glad I didn’t, ‘cause being sinborn is hard enough. Mom says I’m lucky to be Uktena, that there are a lot of other Tribes that treat their metis worse. I’m not going to try to compete with a Fianna or Silver Fang metis for biggest sob story, but I got my share of shitty treatment in the tiny Purelander Sept I come from, way upstate. A stone’s throw from the Canadian border, really, and you know that means my Sept was mostly Wendigo. I figure my father was probably one of them and not Uktena like Mom and me, but I could be half-Wyrmbringer for all I know. I can’t get it out of Mom, but the way she scowls whenever I get near that topic of conversation . . . I’m not sure my conception was consensual. Or my sperm donor’s an asshole. In Native America, most of ‘em are drunk or dead, anyways. The rest are assholes.

“I always felt different”, I hear the homids and lupuses say, and they talk about being treated warily by their own kind pre-Change. I dunno, the garou at my Sept mostly ignored me or gave me more to add to my endless chore list. But from the moment I first stepped in the Umbra, I felt a ripple of excitement. I couldn’t understand the murmurs of the sparrow-spirits that noticed me first: they flew in a dense cloud around me and I curled up in fear. But they just settled on me, hopping excitedly on my fur. I think they wanted me to fly with them, but that, too, was beyond my young abilities. Squirrels spotted me next, and they weren’t so happy, probably expecting me to raid their food stores like squirrels tend to do to each other. I ran from the cacophony of scolding and the barrage of fluffy tail-waving, and found myself in an Umbral meadow- where rabbit-spirits barely lifted up their heads from their grazing as another rabbit joined them.

I had a huge number of baffling encounters with animal spirits before I could articulate the bizarre behavior of the spirits to my Mom. She smiled warmly and walked into the Umbra with me, to lead me to the bank of a fast-moving river and show me the family of otters she called my cousins. The young otters examined my paws while the older ones wrestled for the best spot to get scritches from my Mom. “You know how the Abenaki have clans?”, she asked me in her rough voice.

I hated talking back then. Guttural short phrases in English, or wolf-tongue that also came out weird through my too-thick snout and bipedal body. But at least I could get more out in wolf, so I dropped to all fours and tried. “It’s like our people, the Totem-spirits that bind packs. But because they’re human, they can’t hear their Totems. They worship them, but can’t hear their guidance.”

She looked pleased by my intuition. “Yes, but they’re also born into those clans. They were given a place in the tribe, just by whose belly they grew in.” I remember her touching the fur at the back of my head, distracting me from playing with the otters. She was the only one whose touch was usually kind. “Because of whose belly you grew in, and who gave the seed that sprouted into you, there’s a lot of pain and hardship ahead of you. But also because you’re my son, you’ll be seen by all the animal-spirits in the Umbra as one of their own. I’m so glad your great-grandmother’s gift runs true!” She smiled and hugged me tight, though naturally the tale of how the spirits became part of our family heritage would not be told that night.

She got around to it eventually, and yeah, great-grandmama got down with a caribou of all things! Don’t tell the Fianna, they hate me enough just for who I am.

I kept my head down and didn’t complain about my shitty chores, waiting impatiently like all metis kids for that lovely day when I’d be free to explore the worlds of people and wolves. My First Change came when three Cliaths decided to “train” me at once. That’s what they called the times they’d be throwing rocks at the small crinos or whatever- like I said, I got some shitty treatment. Normally I’d just give ‘em the show they came for- howls of pain, adorable powerless growls, a tucked-under tail, and eventually the offer of my throat, if they didn’t knock me out first. But this one time, I just felt sick of them, sick of how they made me feel small even as my body was finally getting taller than theirs- in their homid forms, anyways. I saw one pick up the first rock and the world went red.

I woke up not far from Dancing Spider’s unconscious body and smiled at the tracks of the two others. They sprinted away from their favorite rock-target like I was the Horned Serpent himself! I don’t lose my shit often, but they were stupid, taunting me when my moon hung like a yearling ram’s horn in the sky.

For the next six years, I trained even more closely with the bitchy old Den Mother, doing my best to not bite all the way through my tongue as the newest batch of homid and lupus Cubs stumbled their way through the simplest Litany tenet or spiritual concept. Sure, holes in the tongue heal, but they hurt. The best part of my Cub-hood was that I was trusted to leave the Sept without a chaperone by year two. The village on the Rez was the same as most Rezes: Purelander kin mixed in with lonely, desperately poor people who clung tight to whatever bit of family they had. A young man that appeared out of nowhere with a semi-familiar face barely registered with the Native humans- most Indians call each other “cousin”, anyways. The wolves in the surrounding woods were more wary at first. I was friendly to both new groups, but more and more I found the Umbra to be my true home, always surrounded by real love. Or whatever you want to call my, uh, impressively acrobatic great-grandmother’s gift.

Truth, though, the adventures I had in the Umbra with my spirit-friends (and enemies) were much more epic than my Rite of Passage. When I was finally deemed “almost up to a half-wit” (old Wendigo think they’re funny, see, ignoring my soulless eyes and pretending my curse from Gaia is mental in nature), I was bound into a pack with five rash hotheads. All Glory, no Wisdom. They thought they were hot shit after we badly wounded a skull pig, but then the idiots insisted we track it to its lair and finish it off that same night. Yeah, of course there were more of them, fresh and eager to tear us with their tusks. Three fell to Frenzy and I just kept shooting arrows and healing, shooting and healing, shooting and healing. One of the Ahrouns finally clawed through the neck of the last wyrmbeast and I almost fainted on the spot. I didn’t tell him what a fucking moron he was, though he looked around at the devastation and his shoulders slumped a little. I just tended to the wounds of our worst-off, set an arm in a sling, and collected my arrows in silence.

Later came the bragging. Later the story changed to the usual we kicked ass, rah rah rah, USA, USA, macho bullshit. I had an arrow clenched in my hands. I had the fire to tend. I had something to do, though the worst Sept chores were now being done by a younger metis.

That pack died. Not even the full force of our Materialized Totem could save them from the leeches we’d woefully underestimated in the outskirts of Montreal. I lived because I knew when to run, okay? I knew from all those shitty training sessions, I knew when they were gonna stop tossing fist-sized rocks at me and move onto the bone-breaking sizes. I knew before my quiver was half-empty, but I fired every arrow. I glanced desperately at each packmate’s chest, willing them to show me the slightest breath, the slightest movement. With my last reserve of Gnosis, I stepped sideways and ran on four legs all the way home, only remembering in the last ten miles to stop leading them directly home, if they had some means of gaining access to our holy spiritual plane.

I told the whole shitty story, and they made me Fostern anyway.

I dunno. I guess I should stop feeling guilty, my packmates were all Adrens by then, and most of them were made Athro posthumously.

But as much as I love my Mom, I had to get away from there, had to stop seeing the hate and pity and sorrow in everyone’s face as they saw that the sole survivor of what had been a promising pack was only the metis with the scary eyes. So, here I am. The Big Apple is a huge change from the one rinky-dink little town I’d known, but I like it so far. Can’t decide if I should support the Yankees or the Mets, though. What do you think?