Twitcher Society

Twitcher Society

Some say we should care for the humans who are starving on the street and get them to join us. Me? I just pray for the day when the human race dies out. Now you know why this Plague is hammering you so hard.. .”

Rat kin @sychology “You probably understand why your body’s been reacting so strangely to the disease. Look at you! You’re so scared that your hands are twitching. I can almost feel your muscles tensing from where I’m sitting. And you look like the visions are pushing you over the edge. This madness you have, this disease -you better get used to it, because it’s going to be with you for the rest of your life. Your blood, my friend, pulses with the Wyld, and there’s thousands of years of feral instincts and memories flowing through it right now.

“We know the force of the Wyld better than any of Mother’s other children, because our ancestors have had to hide in the spirit worlds longer than any other Changing Breed.

You look skeptical. If you’re quiet enough, you can almost.. . hear.. . the spirit world. Sit still and listen to the blood flowing through your veins. You’ll hear your nerves surging.. . twitching ... You want to move.. . to scratch ... to gnaw!

“That’s the Wyld alive inside you! A source of endless strength! (THE CALLING OF ENDLESS CHAOS!) GLORIOUS MADNESS. .. CLIMBINGTHEWALLS!!!TEAREARINGTHEMDOWN!!!

RIPPING AND TEARING AND CHEWING!!!

R” MADNESS!!!

HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE!

CHCHCHK CHK! CHK! CHK! FT! FT! TITIT!”

Gregor drops his fourth can of beans, leaps over the nearest seat andruns fur the back of the bus. The door is shut, but if she does that again, he’sgoingout the back. His hands start tearingat the comers of the door, trying to remember how to open it.. . .

“Ssssh! Ssssh! Calmdown! It’sokay! It takes some practice to get used to your nerves racing like that. See, if the stress and anger builds up in you too much, your reason can’t contain the rage building inside you. But if you can focus yourself on what you hear surging through your veins, you can master that energy. It’s a good thing we’ve brought you somewhere safe.

“If you sit in a safe nest like this, and meditate on what you hear, you can learn to contain that madness. You can help reason win out over rage. Take a deep breath. Listen to your heart beating. Listen to those chittering sounds you’ve started making. Do you understand them? I wouldn’t mind finding a nice, safe quiet spot where I can stay clean and maybe breed a few dozen kids. When you’re really quiet and listening to the blood in your head, the surging of your nerves, when you start toclean thefilthandfoulnessfromyourfur, that’s when youcan remember the fragments of Mother’s wisdom within you.’’ 0 . .

Gregor has made his way to the back of the bus. His hand is about five feet away from the ha&.

One thought runs through his mind like a mantra: must. .. open... dow .... Gregur opens the emergency exit, and light floods the back of the bus. Screw h s , he thinks. He’s gonna Tun until they pin him to the ground. No more damn lectures. W m , Weavers, Wild - screw it!

Chapter Two: Infesting the World That’s when the gateway to the next dimension opens.

The emergency exit opens up on a vast spirit tunnel, dimly lit by the illumination of another reality. No sane man would dare walk downthatpath,andprobably,nooneever~. Three tinyfmleap out of the light, start running around the floor of the bus. “Christ!

Rats!” Gregor reflexively jumps about a foot off the ground. The three rats stop in unison, then slowly turn to look at Gregurperched on top of the bus Seat. There’s a chittering in the back of Gregor’s mind; he can start to make out words.

“What were you expecting?” the first rat says. “Werewolves, lll4lybe?” d Robens’ Tale: Twitcher Society Gregur sips up his situation. He is homeless and diseased, buried in a school bus under a farm in Eastern Washington. Three r a t s h a v e e n t e r e d t h e r o o m ~ o m a ~ ~ d i ~ ~ t o t a l k t o h i m .

On the plus s&, he’s got two more cans of beans in his pocket, and a psychotic religious nut might want to sleep with him. Gregor does some quick mental arithmetic and decides he might as well listen to the Rat from Dimension X.

“Don’t worry, kid. I’m not diseased.. . yet. I won’t bite you, not if you come down offa that bus seat. Stop acting like a damn housewife! Who the heU are you?”

“Sorry. I’m Gregor. Um.. . I don’t know my full name yet.

Um.. . Sleeps-in-Alleys? Eats-in-Dumpsters?”

“What’s with this Three Names shit?” the rat says, clear as day.

“Drinks-of-vodka? Nibbles-at-FrencheFries! Verbs-with-PretentiousPoetry? Where the heU were you infected, a poetry slam? Are you tryingtoget intouchwithyourlnjunancestors orsomethin‘? Weneed tofindyouaname. Fi7stwegottofi~reoutwhatthehellyouare.”

Gregor starts laughing, can’t stop. It’s all a dream. Then the Voices answer him in his head, something lik a scream, like a sound of metal being tom. Round about that time, Gregor decldes to shut the hell up. He fah onto the ground and curls into the fetal position.

It seems like a definite improvement. 0 . .

“Hey, kid, now that you’ve been infected, you’re one of us.

That sickness you had, that was your Birthing Plague. The visions you had? They hold all the clues about who you really are. We may not all agree on how to survive the End Times, but we’re all part of the same family, all descendants of the first Birthing Plague our Mother released upon the world. The eldest and the youngest, the fattest and the smallest - we all have our place within Rat’s family. Once Her blood begins to pulse in your brain, you’ll begin to hear the many names of your brothers and sisters.

“Unfortunately, the first time you Change, the voices stop.. . for at least a little while. Most Ratkin don’t hear the voices unless they’vegonereallynut, whenRapture &esholdofthem.There’s a few lucky ones, though, who never have to be alone. The voices call them all the time. Rats like me. Rats like you. The Twitchers.

“Yeah, that’s it, Greg. We all start off on afirst-name basis, but your true name, well, you don’t get that until after your Rite of Passage. My kind, we don’t go in for that. I got me a name, and I found it the old fashioned way: I stole it. It’s a name someone threw away.. . that’s the best kind. I can tell you’re gonna be one of us, so this’ll be easy.

“Let me tell youabout theRite ofNaming, anoldTwitcher tradition. You take a big trash can filled with Stuff: the bigger, the better. Then you knock it over. Most of these things in there got words on ‘em. You pick one at random, grab it in your teeth (or your little paws, ifya ain’t got the guts), and you’ve got the beginning of a name. Take me for instance. I was the runt of the litter, so Mom called me Johnnie. Once I was old enough -and didn’t die in some terrible wayI found the nearest pile of trash, snatched the first piece ofpaper that fell on me, and ran off with my name. One of the homids read it to me, and he said it fit me just right. I’m proud of my name.

“I’m Johnnie McMuffin, and don’t you forget it.”

Crash Space Gregorcan’t stop laughing. He’s snapped. He’sgone. He’s off in Joe’s white-Line Dimension. He’s trapped in Julia’s Fewer Dream, or hearingabout the endofthe worldin Ariel‘s Underpound Surwiwalist School Bus, and he’s snapped. 0 . 0 “Don’t worry, kid, we don’t all live like this. We don’t all joinmilitias,~~ liveon thestreets,orsignup asmonkeywrenchers and ecoterrorists. Some of us are smarter than that. Some of us really arerats .Thisplacehere... this isjustanotherRatkinnest, a nice bit of crash space. Anyone else saw it, they’d think it was a mess, but it’s home. The safe places become sites where we can Ratkin rest up and share stuff. You hang out with these people long enough, you’ll see what I mean.

“Crash spaces are the only safe places to meditate. Rats don’t react all that well to stress; if you lived in a sewer tunnel long enough, you’d know what I mean. Yeah, if a rat lives in filthy conditions with constant danger, he’s gonna act like a feral little beast. If his home is overcrowded, he’ll get so wound up he’ll be set to attack his brothers and sisters. There’s something about a nest, though, that’s got a calming effect on everyone of the blood. I always get kinda warm and sleepy - kinda hungry, too. This is your crash space, and you better remember where it is.

“Now, there are some kinda nests I’d never go near, and I’d advise against you going there either. They call ’em rat colonies; they’re huge and dangerous. Around here, we’re all rather informal. We all see things differently, but it’s not like we’re going to eat each other because of it. The biggest families of Ratkin, though, they’ve got some pretty fierce disagreements about how to do things. The ones that get their act together, they start forming tribes, setting up rituals, starting a whole bunch of mumbo-jumbo. Invariably, one rat’s going to try to rule them and serve as the Rat King. Any real Twitcher learns to avoid them like the plague. You, you’re one of us. A street rat.

As long as you can make it back here, you’re safe.

Oehsions, Again ‘‘I know this is all confusing; It’s because people have been lying to you for so long. Human history is built upon lies. There are two groups ofcreatures who have perpetuated them throughout history. The first one, the humans, are utterly oblivious to the truth. They believe the Lie because they’ve been kept ignorant. Gaia, the Earth Goddess, has sheltered their minds from the truth because they’ve suffered so much already. The second group, includes the Wolves -you might know them as Garou, or Lupines, or werewolves, or whatever, but I know them for what they are. Bastards. Deceivers. Killers. The fools who started the Concord and are responsible for all this mess.

“This world the humans built since the Concord? It’s all part oftheGreatLie.They like tokeep itallshinyandnew, just tofool themselves. Their whole society is built around the nicely packaged, the neatly contained, and the freshly scrubbed. Dent a human’s car and you’ll see what I mean. A little scratch about as big as a rat’s paw drives him ballistic. Those big square buildings above ground they like so much, they keep them shiny and bright, just to keep from thinking about all the rot and imperfection inside everything. Tearing them down exposes the Lie. For some reason, the wolves think that all destruction has something to do with the Wyrm. They’re fools. Chaos works much faster than corruption. That seething rage that lies sleeping within you, that’s chaos. That’s the Wyld - your strength.

“Maybe there’s hope, huh? Maybe we can teach them a little about the Lie, just by giving entropy a little push. Start small. Scratch a door. Tear the comer of a piece of paper. Rip a little piece of cloth. That book you’re holding. It looks so nice and shiny! Can you scratch it? Can you tear off a little piece?

Maybe you’ll feel a little guilty. Then, oddly enough, you’ll feel.. . free, because the Lie will start to give way.

“It’s addictive, though. Once you let a little chaos out, you’ll want more. Maybe you’ll want to take off your shoes and walk around barefoot ... or draw on a wall ... or just break a human law for the hell of it. If a human catches you, she’ll go ballistic, ’cause humans fear chaos. All laws contain the Wyld.

They know instinctively that the Wyld can destroy their world.. . and replace it with Mother’s world.

“And what if it did? What if, in one of the biggest human cities, we set off enough explosives on street comers and released enough plague and shut down a power plant or two?

One rat couldn’t do it all, but I know a thousand rats could. I’ll tell you what would happen: the Wyld would start to come back.

And you know what would happen after that? The Wyrm would start to weaken. Of course, not all of my brothers and sisters agree with me, but, well, you know ....

“One of my Bone Gnawer friends -he says he gnaws on bones so his teeth won’t grow - says he thinks the Apocalypse will be the end of human civilization, and that will mean the end of the world. I told him a little secret. If all the human cities go to hell, that doesn’t mean the end of the world. That means the battle for the world has just begun. When the power goes out, and the policemen can’t do anything, and all the television screens get smashed and there’s breeding in the streets and killing and looting and riots, then the real War of the Apocalypse will begin.

“And guess what, kid? It’s a war we’re going to win. We are the Wyld, and we will win. You better start training now. ...

Chapter Two: Infesting the World “I don’t understand,” Gregorrespunds. “Severing the WeauPr”s webs? You’re talking about gratuitously ripping and tearing down anything you feel like.”

“Uh, yeah.. .” his Twitcherfiend replies.

“But.. . it’s not some abstract concept to me. You’re talking about messing with people’s shit. Breaking windows. Keying cars.

Stealing people’s stuff. ”

“Uh.. . yeah. By the way, that’s anasty cut you’vegot on your knuckles. ”

Gregor slowly lifts his hand, looks at like it’s an alien lifefurm grafted onto his arm. Then the memoy came back: afew hours ago, he had slammed his fist through a window for no particular reason.

“Wekome to the family, brother.”

Eke First Change The wisions come back. Sitting on the roof of a farm out in Montana, waiting for the FBI to come in and kill him. Hiding in alleyways, strikingfroom the darkness at anything that just happens topiss him off. The voices of ten thousand brothers andsisters waiting to break through froom another dimension and become real again.

Feeling so much anger surging through his blood that he’s set to kill.

The scratching starts again. Is it on the outside of the bus? Or is it comingfroom that other dimension everyone keeps talkingabout?

That spirit world.. . Gregor’s trapped underground in a school bus.. . trapped like a rat.. . he feels his anger surging through him.. . .

Gregor’s way over the edge now, laughing and shaking and giggling as a few more of the waUs that confine his reality come crumbling dourn. He starts physically shaking. His skin is pulsing.

Reflexively, he decides he’s not going to hde it anymore.. . his skin starts growingfur, the front of his skull grows larger, ripping through his skin.. . his spine curves, hunching him over.. . his teeth start cutting through his lip. . . .

Gregor slowly grows to a full seven feet, eventually towering over everyone around him. He lowers his head, hunches over and bears his yellow teeth. Rage flows through him like blood; anger surges; fur bristks. Then the screaming starts, the squealing, the shrieking, like the sound of metal being ripped apart slowly. And whenitallcomes toanend, ahulkingrat-shapedmmteriscowering in the back of the school bus. The monstrous beast starts choking out a strange coughing sound: black bile. The fever is passing. The madness is gone. Another Ratkin s t a d on Gaia’s world.

“Hmmmph,” McMuffin stoically declares. “They’re so cute when they’re small.” &pilogue Nine months later, Gregor’s finally made it back to his uncle’s farm. He’s sitting on the rooftop with a high-powered rifle, waiting for the ATF agents outside the froont gate to make up their minds. It’s just like the visions told him, months ago. There’s a storm gathering on thehcmzon, andGregor’swaiangforit. LikeanygoodTwitcher, he feels the surge of the Wy Id pulsing through his veins.

There’safeelmgonthewind, somethinglikeozone,andit’spwing Gregor off. The agents are gettingready to call in for buck*.. . unless hedoessomethingfist. Hefeelshisangerpulsethroughhim. .. thebones pu.shingupthruughhisface ... theskmgihgway ... Heleapsofftheroof top, rifle in hand, charginginto the gathering of Federulagats.

Gregor’s got a taste for meat now, and he likes it.