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West. Also, Cockroach is old, and that’s something that we really like. The Silver Fangs can rant all they like about how they’re righhl rulers by virtue of history and tradition, but they could do well to remember that our lowly tribe’s totem has been around for more than twice as long as the earliest ancestor of Falcon. They’re everywhere, they were once the dominant creatures on the planet, and they can probably survive nuclear winter. There are loads of reasons to like Cockroach. But despite them all, our relationship is business. Strictly business. slick Sims chips in: I think our little Natty here is gening a little queasy about the insects. Typical cluck, am I right or am I right? Listen, a lot of us see Cockroach as much more than just a hsiness partner; he’s a totem of endurance and success. Whenever I’m in the red, I start scribbling little cockroaches on every paper I sign. Weird, but it works: I’ve never gone out of business yet. I know Bypass keeps a little metal cockroach on his computer, too.

But while we h e him, sometimes you want to k n g agirlhomeanditjustdon’tcutit tohave the waUscrawling like in a c h p apmtment. But you can’t kill your daddy’s children, so here’s what you do. Get yourselfa margarine conminer, and smear the imide of the thing with oil before pouring a &s of red into the bottom, and then pour a tablespoon of oil on top ofthat. h v e a few ofthem around the house, and soon they’ll allfill up with cockroaches that you can put outside. We have a clean house, they get a bit tipsy, I get laid, evqone’s happy!

You’re a slimy prick, Guy. No good, you are. No good at all.

Z&#d&k&# awR& Another way we keep our ties to Cockroach is through the ironically named “Little Rite,” which is held on the 15th of March every year. Why the Ides of March? Maybe to remind ourselves not to get above our station like the Romanconspirators, since this rite honors all the things that we forget, but can’t live without. Whether it’s Cockroach and his tiny children, the machines that make us coffee and keep our juice cold, or the paperboy who never gets a word of thanks; we dedicate this day to keeping our relationships with others pure. To that end, we give gifts. We dump whole sacks ofpowdered sugar onto our kitchen floor overnight for the cockroaches, or spend time listening to the binary chatter ofNet-spiders, or tip the boy a few hundred bucks. Septs often celebrate the Little Rite together as well with a massive gift to the minimum wage workers in the mail room below the caem, or with an all-out assault on the Banes in aNetspider nest so that the thing is entirely clean.

However we do it, the Little Rite makes sure that we don’t forget anything or anyone. The city is made up of details, and forgetting any one of them is dangerous.

A%moM,ty Though we b that counts in our of Gaia and the Garou. E its fallen in war, and on that day, we honor ours. city. In the Hall is a record of the nam that died serving Gai . Sometimes it’s a dedicated computer screen monitor, tue or engraved marble wall serves. Durin add any new names to the record and then call a spirit of the city into the Hall. In exchange for a favor, the spirit agrees to keep the Hall, and by symbolic extension the souls of the fallen, safe for another year. May they rest in peace.

P m d f l D H D At first glance, this rite appears almost generic. A week of feasting and cleansing isn’t unique to the Glass Walkers. But look at when we hold it, and the reason behind the rite becomes clearer. The Promethean Daze happens right at the end of the year, along with human celebrations like Christmas, Kwanzaa, Chanukah, and, of course, the New Year. We’re often called the “tribe of Man” and this rite certainly gives some weight to the moniker.

This rite breaks down into two parts. The first part is marked by gluttony, and as a result tends to take up most of the week. We eat, drink, fight and make love (to Kinfolk, in theory) to our hearts’ content. During that time, we supposedly work to throw off our limitations. It all happens through conversations, old grudges break down over wine and dinnertime conversations find an informality that lets us find simpler ways of operating.

But as our Elizabeth proved, it can also happen in grander ways. Thanks to GWnet and video conferencing, this rite is becoming more global every year, and thus it can make a great platform for political moves.

Elizabeth sighs: If there had been a better way to get the word out, I swear I’d hawe used it. I just hope I hawen’t doomed us to endless shock announcements every Daze.

The second part begins when everyone is too full to eat anymore and too hung over to party. In this, we try to foresee the oncoming year. It happens in various ways, Theurges call on spirits for guidance, while m others try to use clever deduction to make logical predictions. We all try to see concrete ways in which the tribe could further its spiritual, Garou, and human ties. In so doing, we renew ourselves. &&# Certainly, our gatherings can give our enemies a very attractive target. All things being equal, you’d see us adopting a cell-based approach, with packs being told to communicate only with specific other packs through secure media.

But all things are not equal. In the Apocalypse War, one objective reigns supreme: Seize, control and keep secure every caern you can find. The tenet of the Litany about allowing no caern to be violated is simply the most important tenet of them all, in all circumstances, and hence we live a lifestyle rather like most tribes in this respect. The caern is all-important, and we spend most of our waking (and sometimes sleeping) hours there if at all possible.

There are some differences. Many Glass Walkers choose not to live inside the caem itself, though I’d doubt that less than half the sept is outside the caem’s boundaries at any one time. Nor do any Glass Walkers ever live more than five minutes drive from the caem. That’s not whatever justice you like (usually death) to anyone foolish enough to venture into that area. Nor do you usually expect to be caught, since short of a federal investigation you’re outside of the jurisdiction of human law enforcement.

By contrast, the urban environment is cramped and everyone walks everywhere. Even if we tried to set up a bawn, we’d never be able to enforce it in any useful way. We’d have to screen anyone who walked into it, and remember that a ceramic pot with a Bane bound into it can be a weapon of mass destruction as far as we’re concerned. If you don’t believe me, ask Simon Gentle, who continues to pour money down a bottomless well known as “Central Park,” which is so drowned in security cameras these days that he spends more time fighting privacy advocates than the Wyrm.

There’s generally a progression in caerns. The most powerful ones predate the cities they’re now in and pop up in usually unworkable locations. Those that are still around are rare, since they’re indefensible and priority targets for the Wyrm. Central Park is a textbook case, and it’s a wonder that it’s still alive.

Later ones that date back a century or two tend to be weak and located on the outskirts of the city, either in suburbia or semi-rural areas that are quickly becoming suburbia. They’re not quite “country manors” but they’re the next best thing, large properties made for rich folk in developing America (or Australia, Europe, so on and so forth,) which usually got updated with solid walls and security features later. These are less trafficked areas, and they are more defensible, but they tend to be out in the liminal zones, spiritually, devoid of either the really powerful Wyld-spirits of the deep wilderness or the genuine article Weaver-spirits in the heart of the city. There are still a number of them around, but they’re not as strong as we’d like, and that’s a real drawback.

Caerns created this century and especially in the latter half of this century are more common than you might think, because the greatest worry when creating a caern are those who know exactly what’s happening and where to strike. That is, Black Spiral Dancers. And while the Spirals have taken to the city better than most tribes, they’ve got nothing on us. They’re still, even today, on our turf. It’s less true every day, sadly, but you use what edges you have. Even 50 years ago, we owned the city among the werewolves. Our realopponents wereleeches, b qlws Walkers and they never batted an eyelid ifwe tried to create acaern because they had no idea what was going on.

So, after the experiences of dealing with old, poorly positioned caerns and semi-rural, poorly positioned caerns, guess what was the first thing we paid attention to when we made new ones? In the words of the real-estate developers, location, location, location. And that location was up. We started building them on the top few floors of skyscrapers.

They’re perfect. We still have powerful Weaverspirits since we’re right in the middle of the city, where the Weaver is strongest. Literally no one walks through the area of our caem, since we control the floors entirely. We have our bawn back. It’s expensive, but no more so than the large properties we’d used before. And they are defensible. This is the key to the entire choice. Enemies seeking to attack us from the ground give themselves away long before they come close to our floors. If worse comes to worst, we can call on the spirits to have horrible “accidents” occur like elevator cables snapping. Or we can fill a stairwell with bullet fire. Conversely, attacks from above require helicopters, which we can spot from a mile away and counter-attack with smog-spirits or (if need be) heavy-caliber bullets and LAW rockets. And yes, that does leave a smoking helicopter plummeting to the ground and killing people. Any attack on a high rise is flamboyant and draws attention, which, in this case, works for us, since we can easily direct police attention toward our opponents and give them headaches. Jamming technology with Gifts is better, since it doesn’t indict us, but you use what you have to.

The only way that you can make decent attacks on caems in high places is from the Umbra. Sadly, that’s a real concern for us. Most Glass Walkers aren’t the best Garou in the world at quickly jumping from Umbra to physical world in a hurry, since homids seem to lack the spiritual connection that mules and ferals have that lets them quickly step sideways. It’s not surprising that metis don’t quite have as much stigma in our tribe as in many others; they’re far too useful for us to drive away.

This is why Theurges get such a large share of the military pie in our tribe. When assaults on our caerns do come, they almost inevitably come from the Umbra. And since we’re not the best in the world at Umbral combat, spirit allies are crucial to our hopes of your plans non-concealable becade no-one’s going to look in. The problems are considerable, though. We’re talking about the Wyrm, after all, and worms like burrowing in the ground. Motion detectors do wonders for informing us of an attack, but they only alert us, rather than actually deterring the attack. In the end, underground bunkers give us a bawn, and privacy, but not enough security to be preferable to high-rises. In less-developed nations, though, they’re out in front.

When we’re not risking life and limb to protect our caems, Glass Walker septs are ten-percent social club, forty-percent mission headquarters, and fifty-percent temple. The social club thing is more important than you might think. We’re a tribe that spends all our time around humans, and that’s actually pretty demanding.

Little things that humans just gloss over can get incredibly irritating, especially when they repeat themselves. It’s just the incredible sense that they don’t understand; that they can’t feel the last dying gasps of the Earth that are so loud in our ears. Believe me, when hicks come into town and they end up killing someone, we may get mad, but we can’t really blame the guy.

After a few days, any Garou would just want to rip humans apart for being so damned apathetic about it.

Chnpfer Two: bfefworkiwj We’re still mad, it’s a hassle to clean up, but we’re not the Warders of Men anymore. People die. It happens.

So the social club aspect becomes important. If they can afford it, most septs like to buy televisions, stereo systems, and other stuff that facilitates talking and civil social intercourse. We don’t have the same luxury as wilderness caems, if someone flips out and starts trying to rip out someone else’s lower intestine, the noise and commotion attracts attention, and attention is a real problem for us.

Mission headquarters is, however, much more important. We’reanarmy,notmembersofthejetset. (Well, some of us are both. But the former is the more important one.) To that end, we have computers. Lots of them, all of them hooked up to various networks or acting as hubs for spiritual communications. Information is the word for the day, and we like to have as much of it as possible. We get updates from any handy Net-spiders trailing people we need trailed. Eyes are kept on the news feeds, and the includes Kinfolk, by the special section of the caem that wants to get into the back r first. We don’t lock the area, it’s pointless. Try to keep out a werewolfwitha lock?Get real. Instead, we keep a silent alarm on the door, a video camera above it and if we can, that little spiritual touch that only we can provide. If you break the rules, we find you, give you a public dressing down and get the Galliards to write it up in the annual report. Ouch, take that!

Second, we provide a cover story. If you can’t come up with the capital to own an entire office block, and I’ve yet to work for any Glass Walkers who can, then you need to consider an investigation. While my special consulting team can work out the perfect solution for your needs, we tend to buy a lot of old but large computers, and we update our workstations as often as we can, selling the others rather than working off a lease. It’s all smoke and mirrors, baby, keeps our bill with our computer supplier high and the ‘exploding’ machinery can account for any noise or damage that gets spotted.

Just play by the rules, and any troubles you have will be short and sweet. Give me a ring if you need any help. higher up the chain we can go, the better. Only the best septs out there manage to get the news before CNN does, but a well-tuned sept can hopefully get it before it goes out on television. A lot of it is also perfectly normal, legal, commercial services: Janes.com is useful for keeping track of world trouble spots, and Reuters offers excellent services in the economic sector. All of this is information we can and do use.

Finally, we don’t forget our own agents as well.

There’s a whole group in our tribe devoted to electronically breaking and entering our enemies’ systems, and Umbral tactics can make most intelligence gathering a breeze, provided we have someone available in the area (which, given the size of our tribe, we all too often don’t). This is perhaps the one area inour tribe in which the Kinfolk really get to shine; we all love being able to have a reliable voice anywhere in the world. Pity it’s complete garbage duty and most Kin rightfully hate the idea of being separated from their family to live in a foreign land, investigating creatures that would kill them in very cruel, sadistic ways if they were discovered.

I’ll come back to this, because it’s very important.

Finally, and most importantly our caerns are temples. Glass Walker caerns are often littered with I k small religious iconography. You find bullets engraved with the symbol of Clashing Boom-Boom scattered everywhere in caerns of Glory, or small statues of monkeys placed on top of each water cooler in a caern of Wisdom. Individuals tend to make their own marks, too, so a particularly multicultural sept can be gloriously eclectic: a row of workstations each decorated to the point of tackiness with metal cockroaches on one, Gaia-glyphs converted into crosses (occasionally crucifixes) on the next and a Buddha statue holding a small moon shaped icon on the third.

Most of the features you expect to find in any caern you can find in ours. Shrines are incorporated into everyday surroundings like I just said, and many tribes also have a few dedicated shrines in the forms of statues.

Dedicated shrines are always labors of love and quite stunningly beautiful; the sculptor throws herself into the piece as a worthy tribute to the totem. Sacrifices made to the totem tend to be in the form of burned possessions rather than blood, though buying expensive gifts to be burned is considered insulting to the spirit.

Long-held, precious possessions make fitting burnt offerings, and money is in most cases appropriate. In the latter case, however, it is ritually offered to the spirit, who is then consulted, and the money is spent in a cause that meets its desires. Why waste it by burning it?

In contrast to the intricacy of shrines, the caem’s heart is usually exceedingly simple. Inlaid into the floor in brass or another decorative metal is a perfect circle surrounding the glyph for the caern spirit, also inlaid into the floor. No other decoration is placed in the area.

Sometimes, these decorations occur in a room, most of the time they exist simply in an empty space of floor surrounded by the other details of the room.

Now, you’d think at the very heart of the caem, we’d be filling the area with appropriate items such as guns for a war totem, or appropriate icons for a totem of calm, so on and so forth. We don’t, for a very simple reason. While the Weaver is a wonderful ally to have in many circumstances, the Wyld is of paramount importance to a caern.

Without the Wyldandaconnection toprimordialchange, allowing the Gauntlet to drop enough to make a caem work is impossible. As we tend to fill our caems with artifice from top to bottom it makes sense to leave the caem’s heart as free of such as we can. It still seems stark and barren to most Garou, but simple, uncluttered elegance seems to appeal to the spirits we summon, and when we get it right it’s as easy to step sideways in one of our caems as it in any Wilderness caem.

The one thing you don’t tend to find in our caerns is a lot of living quarters. Offices are a lot smaller than bedrooms, and only the wealthiest septs can afford to offer every werewolf living space. There are a lot of other reasons to avoid in-caem housing, as well. First of all, while we can still create a fairly large caem in about three floors or so, we never have caems as large as those you find out in the wilderness. This means that when conflicts arise, and again let me remind you that they do, neither angry werewolf has an opportunity to walk far enough away somewhere to calm down. We get our share of fights in urban caems, and they’re riskier. Keeping as few potential disturbances on the premises at any one time seems wise. Secondly, we’re known as the “money tribe.” Can you really imagine a whole bunch of people very used to creature comforts deciding to go ahead and live in, what would effectively be, a dormitory? Actually, I can imagine that when you consider how dedicated most of us are to the cause, but it’s still something we prefer not to do.

Ingeneral, most Glass Walkers live in apartments as close to the caern as possible, and certainly no more than five minutes away by car. Lots of them look like that mirror scene from Enter the Dragon, too. The possibility of having roadblocks put up to keep our warriors from getting on scene is troublesome enough that the option of using the Umbra to reach the caem has to be kept open. And while this seems like a tremendous safety hazard, it actually works to our advantage, forcing the enemy to be more cautious. If all our troops are in one place, then we’re one big red target.

Packs driving in after an invasion has begun allow us to easily flank the opposition and are often tactically useful. Nor can the enemy do something simple like cut off communications to deny us tools like the police.

Most caems keep a number of servers connected to our warriors’ homes, and if every one of them suddenly pings out, we have at three or four calls made from off-site.

Generally, at least half of the sept can be found in the caem at any one time. Normally it’s more during the day than at night, but this changes depending upon which enemy is the greatest threat to us at the time. If we’re fighting vampires, then you tend to see most of the sept become nocturnal and spend their nights in the caem. In addition, a lot of the Random Interrupts spend more time in the caem than others. Most claim this is because they’re “really committed to saving Gaia” and a few will offer a slightly more truthful: “We’re the new guys, and we need to prove ourselves.” And sure, they bring their sleeping bags; they happily camp out on the floor to stay in the caem with little regard for their own modesty or privacy, or civilities like washing for that matter. (I’m not entirely in favor of this development.) But if you ask me, thetruthisthattheywanttheirLANpartiestoneverend, and this was just the easiest way to do it. by those with corporate interests, and even if our budget isn’t unlimited, we’ve no gripping need of donations from our Kinfolk. Or how about sending Kinfolk to the cities to keep an eye out there? No good, we’re in the cities, and sending Kin into the wilderness is exactly the garbage duty most so rightfully hate.

Acting as liaisons with humanity? Ever since we were the Warders of Men, that’s been what we do. We’re the tribe that deals with humans better than anyone else, and we can’t afford to let our people skills slip.

All the standard roles for human Kinfolk are the kind of things we Glass Walkers just do on an everyday basis. All that’s left are garbage jobs, cannon fodder or breeding stock. When you add in the complication that most septs force their Kinfolk out of the caem for reasons of “safety,” you soon realize we have some of the worst Kinfolk relations of any tribe in the Garou Nation. Kinfolk are ignored, asked to do hideous jobs at incredible risk and are rarely seen as anything more than attractive genetic material.

It used to be a little better back when the Wise Guys were running the tribe. All the emphasis on “fami1y”meant that everyone got something to do. But even then, the female Kinfolk never got any jobs beyond child bearing or sexual entrapment, and being Kin was still seen as somehow being a “disappointment” to the family. They still ended up having too little to do that we Garou couldn’t do better. And the Corporate Wolves made the whole mess even worse; nepotism ran rife and top to Kinfolk in our version that beargmdges but only afew ofthem can really come back and kick us in the teeth over them. Little things like fding waste dumpingfromsome Corporate Wolfs factmy, that‘s smaUf.r.

Any dumbKinasshoEfromaccountingcanmanage that. What we’re d i n g here is direct action that could lead to several dozen Garou deaths, minimum. Secondly, each me ofthem has some reason we can’t just take care of the problem in the most otwlous way possible. Yes, we love our Kinfolk. But when it comes down to it, we’re soldiers. If they’re going to turn muitor, you make a pre-emptiwe strike. But each of these three has some safeguard against that, so we hawe to be more careful.

The first is Melissa Ruth Bithell. She’s the obst of the three, bom in 1938 andplanted by the Wise Guys late in their period of greatest influence. The Corporate Wolves were making striaes, and they got this girl (who had already been forced to have two k& before she was 20, by the way) manied to some rich oil baron as a way to counter their growingpower. They didn’t thinkmuchof herpast the pretty flesh, and that was a mistake. Once her hubby kicked the bucket, she proceeded to hire the best consultants money could buy and used common sense where she lackedfinamial acumen to diwersib the company. Now, she’s well known in business circles, gets mentioned around Wall Street, and bears her fonner family one hell of a grudge for her earlier mistreatment. We can’t touch her directly, because it’ll be noticed. She hagrudge, undmore money thanGod. One scary combination. Right now, she’s considered the most likely SH-2 candcdate. It’s not quite “when she’ll turn, not if’ yet, but it’s considered even odds that she will.

Numbertwotakesusow~tothefomzerUSSR.Aris~ Wowk, bomin f 943anda~tedcolonelintheRussianarmy.

We also believe him to be affiliated with the growing Dies Ultimae movement within the tribe, which would explain the camp’s strength and success in Europe, he’s supplying them with weapons and information. That’s why we’re doubly worried about Wowk. First of all, he could easily bring down the force of at least some of the Russian army doeon on the tribe. him to hawe connections with the e no reason to has he noted any major Wyrm activity in his for the year. If he’s been feedingus misinforall we know the Wyrm could be up to literdy world-shaking proportions in the area, and we’d know nodung about it. That’s enough of a frightening prospect to put him in the SH-2 basket, as well.

Problem is, he might not be telling us lies, and if we got rid of him, we’d lose our only source of intelligence in the area. Still, don’t be surgnsed if we cut our losses there.

Parting note: The idea of any of these Kinfolk turning against us is scary enough. What happens when two or all three of them do? Or when one we don’t know about does?

We don’t help our Kinfolk situation here, either.

We don’t have a tremendous reputation like, say, the Bone Gnawers or Childrenof Gaia for siring metis, and true enough, we don’t sire that many. But we have a lot of them in the tribe anyway. They weren’t necessarily born into this tribe, is all. The Rite of Renunciation is costly, but when you consider how most tribes treat their metis, a lot of them think the price is worth it.