Pain-of-Animals

Pain-of-Animals is a Spirit from Chicago, Illinois.

Overview

In 1890, nine million animals were butchered a year at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago. This went on for a period of decades, causing an insurmountable mount of animal death and all the accoutrements that come with it - blood pouring into the river, the screams and squeals of dying animals, the smell of rotten fat and fetid flesh. Something awful and overwhelming in the physical world is sure to leave its mark in the Shadow, and all this death was no exception. It built up, millions of gallons of blood, miles and miles of bone and intestine. From this death and suffering, a spirit was born, and that spirit is the collective herd known as Pain-of-Animals.

Pain-of-Animals is a huge composite entity very much like a chaotic mass of stock animals - cattle, hogs, chickens, even mice and rates (inevitable casualties of stockyard killing). All the animals are bloodied and battered. Some chickens are without heads. The skins of the bulls are patchy and foaming with putrid blood. Hogs are missing eyes or have cracked skulls. Pain-of-Animals is usually attended by a small herd of lesser spirits of similar sort, which it avoids feeding on unless other prey is unavailable.

Not long after its "birth," Pain-of-Animals and its swarm began a campaign of revenge against the physical. Individual spirits began Urging or Claiming stockyard workers or their families, even people who just happened live within a few miles of the Union Stock Yards. It wasn't long before the local Forsaken noticed - how could they not? Three Ithaeur, Hunters in Darkness each, came together irrespective of their own packs and pleaded with the spirit, negotiating a sacrifice of a single human family to be paid every decade. Ot was a high, unfortunate cost, and these three Forsaken accepted it without the knowledge of the other Chicago Uratha. Since the dawn of the 20th century, this sacrifice has been taking place, passed down from the three generations of Forsaken until it reached its most recent pack of Ithaeur known as the Wolves of the Wheat. But something destroyed this pack recently, killing two and leaving one a useless wreck. The sacrifice was missed.

Pain-of-Animals smelled sudden freedom. It felt pent up, tied down, and here it saw that escape was within its grasp. Seeing the pact broken, now the spirit is free again, gaining power and letting its individual animals go out and possess the unwitting mortals of Chicago, like Tariq Anderson (see p. 266).

Stats

Rank: 4
Attributes: Power 9, Finesse 8, Resistance 11
Willpower: 20
Essence: 25
Initiative: 19
Defense: 9
Speed: 25
Size: 10
Corpus: 21
Influences: Domestic Animals **, Pain **
Numina: Blast (bone and blood), Chorus, Discorporation, Living Fetter, Harrow, Material Vision, Primal Howl, Reaching, Silent Fog
Ban: Pain-of-Animals is said to lose much of its power when presented with an animal that has not suffered at human hands and that feels love toward humans in return. An urban legend among the Forsaken claims that the spirit fears the bark of a dog.

References

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