Tony Raith

Name:  Tony Raith Age:  28 Auspice:  Itheur Tribe:  Iron Master

"As strange of a sentence as it is to say, I was a typical werewolf orphan. I know I’ve heard the story enough times; a youth spent bouncing around through the system, with a bad temper preventing any one place from becoming a home. It doesn’t help that not every foster parent is a stellar example of good child-raising skills.

At any rate, I grew up and learned to take care of myself. As a teenager, I got really involved with the occult and the goth culture. You know the type: black clothing, dyed hair, makeup. “The world is pain.” What can I say, everyone’s a bit of an idiot in their teens.

My First Change came when I was 18, having recently gained my independence. I was living in a town down in the mountains of Virginia. A bunch of other occult enthusiasts and I were out in the woods, conducting this pseudo-Native American ritual. I don’t remember what it was supposed to do, but it involved a lot of chanting and sitting in circles. Of course, the real reason about half the group was there was probably the strong hallucinogenic that the ritual called for.

I don’t remember a single event of the night after taking my share of the drugs. All I know is that the next morning, I woke up naked and bloody, lying on top of a disemboweled bear. None of the group ever got in touch with me afterwards, and if they did I doubt they would have anything useful to tell me.

It didn’t take long after the Change for the local pack to find me. They introduced me to the world of the Uratha, and I soon joined them.

Several years later, after a series of events longer and less interesting than you would think, I found myself working as a private investigator, with my own office and everything. It’s not an extremely exciting job. For the first year or so I ran it, I didn’t see anything more interesting than a jealous wife wanting to know if her husband was cheating.

One day, though, I had a guy come to me asking for an investigation of his house, which he thought was haunted. Odd, but it would pay the bills. Besides, if there was some sort of spiritual trouble going on in our territory it was only right for me to try correcting it. Sure enough there was, and I took care of it. I naturally didn’t give the guy all the details, but he was apparently impressed with my work. So impressed that practically overnight, I became some kind of expert on haunted houses and spooky stuff. People from all over wanted me to see if their great-grandma really was knocking about in their attics. Most of it didn’t have any spiritual component, just old houses and overactive imaginations. However, some of them did have real ghost and spirit problems, and I always did what I could to fix the problem, or a couple of times, alert nearby Uratha to a problem in their territories. Of course, moving around in other werewolves’ territories caused plenty of stress.

In addition to that, my own pack really didn’t like my shifting career. Partly, they worried that I ran a big risk of exposing myself. But more importantly, they really didn’t like how often I left town, leaving the pack short a member. You see, about the same time that I started ghostbusting, a pack of Pure moved in, setting up shop in the woods outside of town. And over time, they had advanced steadily on our territory, getting more and more violent as they forced us back. We needed practically constant vigilance just to keep a hold of our land, and every weekend I spent telling disappointed suburbanites that they needed to hire a plumber was a weekend I wasn’t helping patrol our borders. I tried to keep my work local as best I could, but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do.

Everything really fell apart, though, when I got a job offer from one rich city kid. He had recently inherited a big summer home in the area, only to find a plague of strange occurrences. Weird scratching in the walls at night, bizarrely behaved utilities, random flashes of emotion. Wanting to enjoy his wealth in peace, he naturally contacted the local supernatural expert. And just as naturally, the house was smack in the middle of the Pure’s territory.

I should have known better than to take the job. But the money was good, so I rationalized that I could get in, clean up, and get out again before anyone took notice. After all, with that many werewolves around the spirit problem couldn’t be that bad, right?

Wrong. I showed up at the house the next evening, ready to do my usual watching and waiting, and almost immediately found myself fighting for my life. It turns out that in addition to being sanctimonious bastards, the Pure are worthless at policing the spirit world. The house, along with the whole area around it, was infested with Beshilu. They had torn the Gauntlet so thin that you could practically trip through it, and the local spirits had taken that to their advantage. Trapped in the house and losing the fight, I called in my pack to get me out.

They were… upset that I had gone wandering into our enemy’s territory so freely, but they still came riding to my rescue. That’s what a pack is for, after all. It was a tough fight, but we eventually managed to get out, and we killed a boatload of the rats on the way.

That was when the Pure showed up. All of the commotion had gotten their attention, and now they saw half our pack just standing in the middle of their territory. We managed to get out without further harm, but it didn’t matter. They saw a direct invasion of their territory, and they responded in kind.

It was a slaughter. My rescue left the pack wounded and low on Essence and other resources, and the Pure left us little time to prepare. We were completely overpowered, and as a result my pack died. I was the most seriously wounded of us all; to the point where I couldn’t even participate properly in the fight. It’s what saved my life, really. And it allowed me to escape. I still hate myself for running away. My pack was killed entirely as a result of my own stupidity, and I couldn’t even do them the honor of fighting alongside them as they fell. There are rationalizations I can tell myself, of course. The Pure pack was powerful, and they had clearly already been preparing to strike. My transgression was only an excuse; they would still have attacked at a later date, likely with similar results. It’s even possible that they allowed my pack and I in to fight the Hosts so that we would be weakened for their final assault. I should be glad that even one us got out alive.

Rationalizations can kiss my ass.

At any rate, I spent the next couple months travelling, laying low and eventually seeking a new pack. I was heading through Pennsylvania when I saw a news report about a courtroom animal attack in State College. It might as well have been labeled “First Change” in neon letters, so I showed up to check it out. And that is how I wound up with the Courage Wolves."

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