Name: Formerly Kevin Hawking. Known as Zaizane to the Black Spiral Dancers and Pentex
Age: 42
Race: Garou (Werewolf: W:tA)
Alignment: Evil, very evil
PB: Denis Leary

Breed: Homid
Tribe: Black Spiral Dancer
Auspice: Philodox
Rank: 4 (master of the Fourth Circle of the Spiral Labyrinth: The Dance of Cunning)
Dementia: Grandeur - Your mind has been kissed by the fetid lips of Mahsstrac, the Urge Wyrm of Power. You believe your role in the tribe is much greater than what others expect of you...obviously a self-fufilling prophecy.
Camp: The Consultants - Loyal servant of Pentex
Personal Totem: The Defiler Wyrm

Pack: Corrupted Fang Pack
Pack Totem: The Bat

The Bat soars freely through the Shattered Labyrinth, mocking those who fail to find their way. The night is hers, and she uses her advantage in darkness to torment those who are lost. She instills terror in friend and foe alike. Her bastards are like to swoop down out of the night, attacking with the element of surprise.

Traits: Bat grants an additional die to all Intimidation, Stealth, and Survival rolls. She also teaches her bastards two Gifts: Patagia and Ears of the Bat. Though the Dancers she leads astray find crossing the Second and Third circles of the Shattered Labyrinth more difficult, she later rewards them by lowering the difficulty of all rolls involving flight or sonar by two.

Ban: The pack must breed a small family of bats. When these lovelies feed, the werewolves must also devour the insects they have gathered. Bat's bastards are also fanatic about preserving the Veil. Without it, their element of surprise is lost.

Gifts:

Persuasion (Level One) — This Gift allows homid to become more persuasive when dealing with others, in such a way that his statements and arguments are imbued with added meaning or credibility. An ancestor-spirit teaches this Gift.

System: The player rolls Charisma + Subterfuge. If successful, the Storyteller reduces the difficulties of all Social foils by one for the remainder of the scene. In addition, any successful Social rolls may have significantly more impact than they would without the Gift. A werewolf could win arguments with hard line opponents, or cause a cold-hearted psychopath to relent (at least for a little while)

Smell of Man (Level One) — Creatures of the wild have learned well that where man goes, death follows. With this Gift, the werewolf enhances the human scent around him greatly, causing wild animals to feel uneasy and nervous. However, the scent also causes domestic animals to recognize the werewolf as their master. An ancestor-spirit teaches this Gift.

System: All wild animals (not including supernatural creatures in animal form) lose one die from their dice pools when within 20 feet of the Garou (save when defending themselves or running away), and they are likely to flee. All domesticated animals recognize the werewolf as a friend and refuse to harm him. For example, an attack-trained dog ordered to take down the werewolf would run up to the character and wag its tail. If the domesticated animal is harmed, then it will revert to acting naturally. The Garou may use this Gift at will. She simply states when she is activating it or turning it off.

Toxic Claws (Level One) — The Dancer can cause toxic waste to ooze from her claws, coating them with an unhealthy greenish-gray slime. Wounds left by these claws tend to leave unhealthy-looking scars.

System: This Gift requires the expenditure of one Rage point and a turn of full concentration, for the remainder of the scene, the Dancer's claws inflict an additional die of damage and leave residual Wyrm-taint on anything she slashes.

Resist Pain (Level One) — Through force of will, the Philodox is able to ignore the pain of his wounds and continue acting normally. A servant of the Beast-of-War teaches this Gift.

System: The player spends one Willpower point; his character may ignore all wound penalties for the rest of the scene.

Truth of the Wyrm (Level One)  — As judges of the Litany, Philodox have the ability to sense whether others have spoken truth or falsehood. A servant of Pseulak, the Urge Wyrm of Lies, teaches this Gift.

System: The player rolls Intelligence + Empathy (difficulty of the subject's Manipulation + Subterfuge). This Gift reveals only whether the target speaks the truth or lies.

Sense Wyrm (Level One) — The werewolf can sense manifestations of the Wyrm in the nearby area. This Gift involves a mystical sense, not a visual or olfactory tillage, although werewolves using the Gift sometimes say things like, "This place stinks of the Wyrm" (with a few more colorful adjectives). Garou should remember that the Wyrm's taint can cling to relatively blameless souls. Werewolves may sense an innocent person who happens to work in a Wyrm-controlled factory or who has eaten tainted food. This power requires active concentration. Any spirit of Gaia may teach this Gift

System: The player rolls Perception + Occult. The diffifculty depends on the concentration and strength of the Wyrm influence. Sensing a single fomor in the next room would be difficulty 6, while detecting the stench of a Bane that was in the room an hour ago would be difficulty 8. Vampires register as Wyrm-tainted, save those with Humanity Traits of 7 or higher

Spirit Speech (Level One) — This Gift allows the Garou to communicate with encountered spirits. The Garou is thus able to address them whether they wish to be addressed or not. Of course, nothing (usually) prevents the spirit from ignoring the Theurge or leaving. Any spirit can teach this Gift.

System: Once learned, this Gift allows the Garou to understand the communication of spirits intuitively. Particularly alien spirits may be difficult — or, in the case of many Banes, outright painful — to understand.

Scent of the True Form (Level One) — This Gift allows the Garou to determine the true nature of a person. This information is conveyed as an olfactory sensation — it is actually a scent of the target's natural form. Any spirit servantof Gaia can teach this Gift.

System: The Garou can tell automatically when someone is a werewolf; anything else requires a Perception + Primal-Urge roll. It takes two successes to detect vampires, faeries or other shapeshifters as such, and it takes four to detect fomori or mages.

Call to Duty (Level Two)  — Any spirit the Philodox knows by name is a potential servitor. With this Gift, the werewolf can summon and command any spirit she knows by name. Only one command is possible at a time, and the spirit departs after fulfilling the one request. An Incarna avatar teaches this Gift.

System: Obviously, the Philodox must learn the spirit's name, which usually requires personal acquaintance or use of the Gift: Name the Spirit. The player rolls Charisma + Leadership (difficulty of the spirit's Willpower). If the player spends two Gnosis points, the werewolf can summon all Gaian spirits within one mile to protect or assist her, even if she does not know their names.

Patagia (Level Two) —The Dancer can extrude large flaps of skin under her arms, resembling a flying squirrel's membranes. When not in use, the flaps usually shrink into theDancer's arms and sides, where they are not detectable.

System: The Dancer stretches her arms and leaps from a height. She may glide at 25 mph, but the player must make Dexterity + Athletics rolls (at the Storyteller's discretion) to avoid losing altitude.

Ears of the Bat (Level Two) — This Gift allows the Black Spiral Dancer to use sonar like a bat. He may act in complete darkness without impairment. Black Spiral Dancers with this Gift have large, bat-like ears. Even in Homid form, they have abnormally large ears. Corrupted bat-spirits teach this Gift.

System: This Gift can be counteracted with some means of generating confusing ultrasonic sounds. Garou who make a Perception + Alertness (or Primal-Urge in Lupus) roll can hear the sonar. With three or more successes, she can determine the Dancer's exact location.

Terrify (Level Two) — The Dancer with this Gift is more intimidating and terrifying than normal. A sneer from her is as effective as a full-throated growl from another.

System: Roll Charisma + Intimidation (difficulty is the target's Willpower). If successful, the difficulties for Social rolls made against that target decrease by one — but only if intimidation could conceivably alter the outcome in the Dancer's favor. The target's difficulty to strike the Dancer in combat is one higher as well.

Wyrm Hide (Level Two) —A Dancer may use this Gift to transform her skin into a lumpy, leathery, odious, sickly hide that grants her additional protection from harm. Once the Wyrm Hide wears off, it slides oozing and bubbling off the Black Spiral Dancer, leaving a congealing, smelly mess where she stood.

System: The Dancer must spend one poittt of Rage to activate Wyrm Hide, and the player must roll Stamina + Survival. Each success grants the Dancer one additional soak die. This Gift lasts until the end of the scene. Until then, other Garou may pick up her scent af two lower difficulty, due to the stench the power generates.

Burning Scars (Level Three) — Black Spiral Dancers often carve stylized scars representing their devotion to the Wyrm into their bodies. With this Gift, a Dancer can draw upon that devotion to inflict horrible injuries on her foes. When invoked, this Gift causes the Dancer's scars to glow with an unwholesome brilliance that almost seems to crawl into the victim's body through his eyes, nose, mouth and ears, burning him from the inside out and leaving horrible burns that mimic the Dancer's own scars.

System: The Dancer must grab the target, and the player must spend two Rage and roll Wits + Primal-Urge (difficulty is victim's Stamina + 2). Each success inflicts one level of unsoakable aggravated damage that appears upon the victim's body as a mirror of the Dancer's glowing scars. These marks of the Wyrm may prove a powerful social handicap, and it may take some effort to remove them.

Dagger of the Mind (Level Three) — The Black Spiral can command a Bane to seed a particularly dark emotion int he mind ofhis prey. The emotion is chosen when the Gift is learned (eg. paranoia, despair, remorse, lust; "rage" is not an option for obvious reasons). The Black Spiral calls upon the proper Urge Wyrm; one of its servitors then evokes the proper emotion from the victim.

Within the Shattered Labyrinth, the Dance of Endurance tests the limits of a Dancer's self-control. If the initiate survives, one of the Urge Wyrms will show him how to inflict similar tortures on his enemies. Curiously enough, Stormcrows have learned this Gift; they guard their knowledge carefully. Theurges often use this rite to weaken an enemy before battle; Philodox use it to give themselves an edge in negotiations.

System: The invocation burns a point of Gnosis and requires a Gnosis roll; the victim can resist this with a contested Willpower roll. Unless the victim can overcome his emotional struggle, he succumbs to the desired emotion for a full hour. For an additional Willpower point, the temporary dementia is accompanied by a brief, revelatory illusion.

Disquiet (Level Three) — This Gift makes its target feel inexplicably depressed and withdrawn. The subject finds it difficult to draw on his full emotion or to maintain any type of concentration. An ancestor-spirit teaches this Gift.

System: The player rolls Manipulation + Empathy against a difficulty equal to the target's Willpower. If successful, that opponent will not be able to recover Rage for the duration of the scene. Furthermore, all difficulties for extended actions increase by one.

Wisdom of the Ancient Ways (Level Three) — All werewolves have an innate connection to their ancestors, a form of racial unconscious accessible through intense meditation. The Philodox can tap into these deep memories to remember ancient facts and lore. An ancestor-spirit teaches this Gift.

System: The character must meditate for a short time, concentrating on the past. The player then rolls Gnosis (difficulty 9, -1 for each point of Ancestors the Garou possesses). The number of successes determines how detailed and exact the answer he receives will be.

Beautiful Lie (Level Four) — When the Veil is endangered, Gaia protects the minds of the innocent with the Delirium, granting false memories and delusions.Since Black Spirals commit particularly grisly crimes, they can use this Gift to channel the Delirium, producing further misdirection or even summoning false evidence to cover up their activities.

System: A Black Spiral observing a particularly unsubtle crime may attempt to cover it up with a "beautiful lie". He begins to chant a story of what humans nearby are actually seeing. The Dancer spends one point of Gnosis and rolls Wits + Subterfuge; the difficulty is 6 (so long as the story is vaguely plausible). Mass delusions follow, and ephemeral evidence (eg. animal footprints, a bloody chainsaw, saliva from a rabid dog) remains for an entire hour to obfuscate the truth.

History:

Kevin Hawking has always been ambitious. Born on the wrong side of the tracks in metro Atlanta, Kevin Hawking was the bastard child of a male Black Spiral Dancer and one of their corrupted Kin. Kevin's mother raised him alone, of course. How she managed to do so without losing Kevin to the Dancers is probably due more to the efforts of the Glass Walkers in Atlanta, rather than her parenting skill. In school, Kevin naturally gravitated towards leadership and dominance. Class president. Boy scouts. Football. That is, until his first change.

The young Black Spiral's Kin-Fetch drew the attention of a Hive just south of Chattanooga, and a pack was on its way when he changed at a remote subway station, to the horror of the few people waiting on the train at that late hour. The young Black Spiral was brought back to the Hive and forced to enter the Shattered Labyrinth for the first time in his Rite of Passage. He danced the Black Spiral and successfully fought his way past the First Circle of the Spiral Labyrinth, the Dance of Insight. Dark truth about his soul was revealed to him by the Wyrm, truth, he was told, that had been hidden for the sake of his sanity. To learn more, he would have to dance the spiral further, plunge deeper into the Shattered Labyrinth and overcome each of the eight other circles.

The first syllables he spoke when waking from this horrifying Rite were "Zai zane", and so, according to tradition, among the Black Spirals he was known as Zaizane. The young Black Spiral was educated, brutally, in the ways of the Hive, a lesson he learned well and sought to master. For, deep within his heart, dancing the Black Spiral only made the lust for power grow stronger, his mind corrupted by Mahsstrac's blessing. In accordance with tradition, he took one of the Wyrm's three heads as his personal totem: The Defiler Wyrm.

He was loaned to Pentex as part of the corporation's first strike team, where his talent for leadership earned him notice from the Corporation. He joined the Consultants, a group of Dancers sometimes more loyal to Pentex than their own Hives. He has since traveled further into the Spiral Labyrinth, past the Third Circle. He, and the other Corrupted Fangs take on special projects for Pentex, usually requiring oversight of various Wyrm servants or coordination of defenses against Gaia's defenders. His human identity is changed by the corporation. He is not dedicated to one aspect of Pentex, but is moved around to any subsidiary that needs his special talents.

In Los Angeles, he is a Magadon representative, in charge of special operations and research. The recent "plague" and the resultant Garou invasion caught the Wyrm's attention, and now its minions search for a way to exploit the defilement left behind by the violence and loss of life. Corrupting the local caerns is just the beginning. In a city as ripe for corruption as Los Angeles, how could Pentex loose?