Garou rite-looking

Garou rite-looking

**of Note**

out for him. After questioning Antonine carefully on the circumstances of his birth, he concluded that his mother was Kinfolk and that her Stargazer relatives had bonded the Kin-Fetch to Antonine soon after he was born.

This Kin-Fetch had made sure Antonine would one day find a fellow tribe member who could train him. Laughing Crane was that one.

More than his discovery of being Garou, Antonine was most overwhelmed by his first step into the Umbra, the spirit world that lay beyond the Gauntlet erected around the material world by humankind’s unwitting acceptance of the Weaver. When Laughing Crane took his young pupil to the Aetherial Realm for the first time, to meet the Stargazers there and witness the vast firmament, Antonine saw his calling in the stars, spelled out for him as if the constellations were pages in a book. He saw a Half Moon destiny of service to Gaia, an attempt to bring accord between divided parties, to create unity amid diversity. He prayed then to the spirit of the central star in his vision-Vegarda, the Pole Star of the North, axis of the heavens-for the will to take up this task and the wisdom to achieve it.

Over the course of the year, two more cubs joined Laughing Crane’s school. Like Antonine, they had been discovered by Laughing Crane or his spirits.

One of them was Catrina Scarborough, daughter of a wealthy British tea magnate based in New Delhi. She had been sent to boarding school in California at a young age and barely knew her family. It turned out that her grandfather had been a Stargazer; the heritage skipped a generation.

The other was Wen Chou, son of Chinese immigrants to Chinatown. His family members were longtime friends with Laughing Crane’s human Kinfolk, and he was the reason Laughing Crane had come to San Francisco: to train Wen Chou upon his First Change. This took place five months after Antonine had taken up tutelage, upon Wen Chou’s fifteenth birthday. Thus, he and Antonine were almost the same age. Catrina was older; she had not experienced her First Change until she was seventeen.

They all became fast friends. After two years had passed, Laughing Crane announced that it was time for them to journey to the heartland of Stargazer power: Nepal and Tibet. He would not accompany them, for they had learned all they could from him at this time in their training. They needed to now find septs in the East to take them in and complete their passage from beginners to seasoned Garou.

Tracking game was a breeze with wolfen senses. The same for long-term endurance; their different forms provided different degrees of strength and staying power. After a few months of such extended trips, they figured they were ready for any hardship Asia could throw at them.

They left by merchant marine ship, with stopovers in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore before landing in Ceylon. They walked across the lisland to Talaimanar and there took a ferry to India.

Laughing Crane had urged them to avoid the Indian Penumbra, for it was populated by strange beings with unreadable agendas, some hostile, some merely selfish. It was best for them to wait until they contacted one of the Stargazers he told them of before attempting an Umbral journey there. A guide to its different ways would be necessary.

They backpacked across India, by foot, bus and train, visiting various human shrinededicated to