Korrinda Taylor
(Based on the game "Werewolf: The Apocalypse" by White Wolf)
Volume One Gathering the Pack
Prelude: The Rage Awakens
Lyrica Grey took one final drag of her cigarette before finally spitting it out and grinding it into smoky ashes under her heel. Checking the time again on her watch, as if in disbelief that it actually was two o'clock in the morning, she swore under her breath and then began her short walk home through the streets and back alleys of the city of Necropolis, in the state of Washington. Lyrica knew she was going to be in trouble even before she got there, and that there was precious little she could do about it.
"Well, maybe not," she said out loud, as though someone heard her and cared, "Maybe Mom and Frank both got drunk after work again, and forgot about me. Maybe in their alcohol-soaked minds, I don't exist anymore." She shook her head, her short black hair whipping about her face and stinging her cheeks.
"Ha! Not likely, but a nice thought, Lyrica." She sighed, and wrapped her trench coat tighter about her small frame to block out the cold she felt seeping into her insides, the cold she always felt when thinking about her stepfather, Frank Rosenberg. Lyrica did not even know the name of her real father. Her mother, Margie Grey (now Margie Rosenberg), had gotten drunk at a party one night in New Orleans (Lyrica's mother was a heavy partier before Lyrica was born), and woke up the next morning in some person's bed; the owner of the bed was not even home, so her mother had left. Nine months later, Lyrica Margeaux Grey came into the world.
Even before her daughter was born, Margie was a heavy drinker, alcohol being her only constant companion. By the age of three, under the supervision of the neighbor's six-year-old son, Lyrica had learned how to cook dishes such as macaroni and cheese and ramen for herself. But, because of her mother's inability to hold a job, sometimes there was not even food in the house, only beer. As Lyrica grew older, she found ways of getting money by doing odd jobs for the landlord and other tenants in the slummy apartments her mother and she lived in. She also managed to figure out public transportation enough to get to the nearest school everyday. When Lyrica was thirteen, she found work at a convenience store around the corner from her apartment. Thirteen was an eventful year for her; it was the year she started smoking, and the year when her mother met Frank, at her first, and last, Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. From that point onward, her life became even more of a hell. Within a month, Frank had moved himself into their apartment, and convinced Margie to marry him. Then the abuse started. At first, it was small things: name-calling, smacks on the arm, things like that; but, over the course of a year, it had escalated in to full out beatings, especially after Frank had been drinking heavily. Her mother did not care; she had never really cared what happened to Lyrica.
Now at sixteen, Lyrica was searching for a way out. From a young age, Lyrica felt that she was different from everyone else around her, as if she could, one day, see and do things that no one else could. People, she felt, from her classmates to complete strangers that came into the store or that she passed on the street, avoided her because of this. They acted as though she was not there or, if they had to interact with her, as if she were some unpleasant trifle that must be acknowledged before the individual could move on with their day. Not that she cared, Lyrica would tell herself. She was too strong of a person to let other people patronize her. But (she would tell herself) on the other hand, it would be nice to have companionship. Perhaps the one person who she thought would have understood her plight was her biological father, and he did not know that Lyrica Grey existed. She often found herself gazing in the mirror, wondering what her real father would think of her, or if she looked like him. Margie was a short brunette-dyed-blonde, with one of those unfortunate bulging figures, with fake-tanned skin that appeared to have been wound around her as if to keep whatever was inside from spilling out; not like Lyrica, whose was tall and willowy, with long arms and legs, and a slender build. Her skin was very pale, almost unhealthy looking in its pigmentation, but it accentuated her dark red lips and the short, coal black hair that framed her face, cut bluntly at chin level. Perhaps her most striking feature was her eyes, which were large and violet, with dark purple flecks in them, giving them a luminescent quality. Altogether, Lyrica was a very pretty girl, who would probably be rather attractive in a few years.
Lyrica climbed the last set of steps that led up to apartment 28B and apprehensively made her way down the dimly lit hall. Fumbling in her coat pocket for her key, she took a few shaky breaths to calm herself and drew out the cold piece of metal that she needed to unlock the door.
"Come on," she muttered under her breath, "Be asleep. Please, please be asleep." She inserted the key into the lock, held her breath, and turned it. Light spilled out from the door as it creaked open, revealing to all who cared to look the nauseating conditions of the personal prison that Lyrica called "home."
The small front room, which was a combination living room and kitchen, was practically bare of furniture, save for a small table, with one whole chair and two broken chairs encircling it, in the kitchen section, and a rat-eaten recliner in the portion that served as a living room. Half-drunken bottles containing a liquid of unknown (but undoubtedly dubious) origins were everywhere: here was one tipped on its side on a kitchen chair, spilling its alcoholic contents about, here was one on the floor, apparently with the same occupation as the first, here were several standing upright around the recliner, while two rats were using them to play a ratty version of the game "hide-and-seek." Scattered among the minute glass monoliths were cigarette butts, many of which were still lit and burning, creating smoky holes on the threadbare orange carpet.
The cigarette butts congregated in their greatest numbers around the recliner, whose sole purpose, at the moment, was to enthrone an enormously obese man. When a baker mixes flour and salt and yeast and water to make the dough for bread and puts it in a warm place, it swells, growing white and soft and spongy. The man in the chair had the appearance of undercooked bread, a great deal of undercooked bread. Moldy undercooked bread. Every visible inch of skin had some form of hair sprouting from it, except for the peak of the head, which was severely lacking any type of growth. The creak of the door opening had roused this creature from his spirits-induced stupor, his brown, currenty eyes peering out into the light from the rolls of flesh on his face, his gaze made lackluster and dull from the alcohol he had ingested that evening. This lump of wasted, spongy human meat was Lyrica's stepfather, Frank Rosenberg.
The awakened beast stumbled to his feet, adjusting his grip on the half-empty bottle he clutched in one beefy fist. As he stood, Frank lurched unsteadily, as though he was not used to the all-encompassing force of gravity that had taken hold of his gelatinous mass. Lyrica started to ease her way out the door, away from the drunken creature, but he surged forward in one swift movement (too swift, it would seem, for one his size), and procured a large amount of Lyrica's collar with the other fist. Lyrica tried to wrench herself from his clutches, but Frank held fast, his size and weight being an obvious advantage over her.
"Hold still, dammit!" Frank yelled the words, slurred and drunken. Then, as if to convince his stepdaughter to cease in her struggles, he brought the bottle up to one side of his face, and then sent it careening down to Lyrica's. The fragile glass container shattered on impact with Lyrica's cheek, sending shards of glass and drops of liquor in all directions like an alcoholic pipe bomb. Much of the glass hit Lyrica, creating numerous incisions all over her exposed skin. The force of impact tore her from her father's grip, sending her flying into a wall and then to the floor, where she lay cowering.
"You little bitch! Making me an' your mother worry all night! I oughta kill you for that!" Frank forced her to her feet, and then threw her to the other side of the room. Lyrica reached out with one hand to try to stop herself from slamming into another wall, the wall that stood between the front room and her parents' room, but to no avail. She came down hard; all the pressure from her falling body focused onto her wrist, which snapped from the weight, the ragged bone ends nearly forcing themselves through the delicate layer of skin that encased them. Crying out in the agony that comes with pain like that, Lyrica pulled herself to her feet, protecting her injured arm with the cupped palm of her other hand. Her breath was greedily sucked into her body with ragged gasps; sweat drenched her face. She was petrified with fear, frozen against her parents' bedroom door.
The door behind her suddenly opened, pushing Lyrica forward onto her knees. Out of the gaping maw of darkness came a lone figure, Lyrica's mother, her brain raw and fuzzy from the night's drinking. Ignoring the scene spread before her eyes, Margie Rosenberg half walked, half stumbled toward the kitchen table, and immediately began searching for some drop of alcohol to consume. Incredulous and disbelieving, Lyrica stared up at her mother, searching for some type of motherly instinct that would come to protect her. The knowledge that nothing could (or would) save her slammed full force into her mind. This flash of insight revealed the thing that she had always known: no one loved Lyrica Grey enough to care about her. Not her classmates, her employer, her stepfather, or even her own mother.
Fear, a different type of fear, more primal than the one she had felt only moments before, coursed through her body. But along with that fear came rage, an overwhelming kind of rage that turned her blood into white-hot molten steel, and that filled her mind with a venom seldom rivaled. Lyrica's only thought, the only thing she could see, was the hate of the one person that should care for her: her mother. And this snapped her self-control like a frail twig.
She spoke softly at first, but her words quickly increased in volume until she was screaming at Margie; at Frank; at everyone she had ever known who had pushed her aside and ignored her:
"…damn…you…. Damn…you. Damn you. Damn you! Damn you! Damn you! DAMN YOU! DAMN! YOU!" Fists clenched, she lunged at Frank from across the room with a speed that should have been impossible for a human to reach by simply running. Halfway to him, Lyrica launched herself off of the ground with a simple push of her legs. In midair was when it happened, when Lyrica ascended into something more. Her blood turned to fire, coursing through her veins on the wave of euphoric rancor that filled her mind. The physical change began with the extremities, the arms and legs. They grew longer, more muscled, the sinews tightening and constricting as if they were tensing for the kill. There was a short, painful, burning sensation in her legs, as the bones rearranged themselves under the new growths of muscle, and then it was quieted. Next, her ribs and spinal cord rounded out her torso, and also built more muscle onto it. The end of her spinal cord pushed itself through the skin, with a feeling that may have bordered on painful before it was over, and created a long, thin tail. Her hands and feet tightened, fingers and toes shortening slightly, becoming more blunted, the thumbs of her hands moving farther up her arm. Four razor-sharp claws tore through the skin on the tips of her fingers. Lyrica threw her head back in a cry that would have shattered pure crystal as her skull mutated, the jawbone and upper mouth growing out, becoming more muzzle-like. Her open mouth provided observers with a spectacular view of her teeth as they also grew, canines wickedly curving into fangs. Whiskers sprouted on either side of her face, each sensitive quill acknowledging a thousand different sensations imperceptible to humankind. Up the line of her jaw to her ears came a tingling feeling, like fire ants had been turned loose underneath her skin in those areas, then Lyrica's ears pulled themselves up to the crown of her head, concurrently stretching themselves into taller, pointed shapes. For the final touch, pure midnight-black fur sprouted from every pore in her skin, the hair follicles forming a sleek raven armature around the sinewy mass that Lyrica had become.
The whole ordeal had taken less than a fraction of a millisecond, and, at the same time, taken more than a lifetime to complete the transformation from abandoned, abused waif to an unrivaled, unstoppable, Raging feline machine-of-destruction. A cat warrior. A werecat. A Bastet, in full Crinos form, bent on accomplishing the single thought emblazoned on her feral, Rage-filled mind: DESTROY.
With one swipe of her paw, she ripped Frank's head of his shoulders and onto the floor, trailing blood and entrails behind it, that look of fear and Delirium frozen forever on its countenance. The body collapsed onto the floor, the red plasma gushing from the stump of the neck onto the floor, staining the carpet crimson; a great deal of blood, for Frank was a large man. Lyrica tore at the body with her sharp claws, ragged gashes being traced into the corpse, vital organs exploding as long, blade-like nails punctured them.
Fueled in an animalistic way (as only a were-creature in the throes of the full -blown Rage that comes with the first shift can be) by the sight, smell, taste, feel of blood, Lyrica turned on her biological mother, who, at the first sight of the Crinos werecat, had fallen into Delirium, and was completely oblivious as to what had happened. Attacking with blinding speed, Lyrica tore her mother into so many bloody chunks, littering the floor with her severed limbs and various assortment of body parts.
Yowling her hatred in the feral tongue of a Raging were-creature, Lyrica flung herself through the small window of the apartment, and fell three floors down, tumbling and flailing through the air, only to land perfectly on the pavement below. Then she ran, blindly, into the night; the path of property destruction that trailed her the only marker that she had ever passed, both obvious and inexplicable. The damage was quickly repaired by city maintenance workers, the murder of Frank and Margie Rosenberg filed under "unknown causes," and Lyrica Margeaux Grey, at least in that corner of the city of Necropolis, was forgotten about entirely by people who never really knew that she had once existed.