Necessary Context: Werewolf: The Forsaken
The Apollo program captured the imaginations of millions of people the world over. The months leading up to the first moon landing had a great significance for a certain, small subsection of the population – the werewolves.
After all, the Uratha always revered the moon as a goddess – something intangible, something that had a spirit. Not a lifeless lump of rock, slowly, imperceptibly falling towards the earth.
However, some of them – the Iron Masters in particular – some of them wanted to find out what she was like, to see how they would feel with their paws on her soil. They wanted to see if they could commune with their Mother on a deeper level, to achieve that spiritual connection.
Luckily for them, a man named Edwin who was one of those selected to visit Luna was Wolf-Blooded. He was almost forty, however, so his First Change was probably never going to happen.
Never, that is, unless they could force it.
Dozens of tribes throughout the United States worked on the issue; those with vampire connections – or with the ability to barter with them – managed to get a good contingent of the Ordo Dracul working on the problem.
There were sacrifices to be made, of course – some of the more dedicated packs let their spirit domains go to a rather unkempt state. Some of them – the ones whose totems did not support their perhaps rather foolish errand – abandoned their totems. One or two packs even had an all-out fight with their totems, killing them. They didn’t fear the loss of their totem; any totem that didn’t help them with what they viewed as a righteous mission was not worth it, anyway.
In fact, so strong was the desire of the werewolves to work together that it saw for the first – and perhaps only – time in history the forsaken and the pure were united for a common purpose.
In the end, the oldest, most knowledgeable vampire scientists announced the breakthrough with heavy hearts. They had found out the ingredients they would need to concoct a potion that would force any Wolf-Blooded human to have their first change.
The problem was, it called for some very rare and hard to acquire ingredients. The first was the blood created from the birth of three separate ghost pups – one born to pure parents, one to forsaken parents, and one to one of each.
In addition, all six parents needed to be ritually sacrificed and drained of blood by their own pack alphas, and this blood would be part of the potion as well.
Once all the blood is reduced into a fine, thick paste (by evaporation) it is to be combined with crushed samples of dozens of rare herbs and animals.
The Ordo Dracul announced the cure to the werewolf community, knowing that their new allies would not take the news all that well.
They were not disappointed. The werewolves murmured amongst themselves, trying to work out what the most ethical course of action was. To get a Uratha to the moon, were they going to have to disobey many of her most important teachings?
Some of the werewolves took it upon themselves to try and conceive this ghost wolf. They performed the rituals that were meant to reduce the severity of their Mother’s wrath, and then dozens of male werewolves and dozens of female werewolves would spend the night together, the females taking care to only pair themselves with a single man, to make identification of the father easier.
Many of them hadn’t gotten approval from their pack alphas, yet: but they would worry about that later on.
As the months wore on, about twenty pregnancies were recorded, all in all. And, out of these twenty, they did manage to find werewolves whose pack alphas would consent to their ritual sacrifice, even if they did not necessarily approve.
And so, in May – after all the ‘births’ had occurred - the fateful ceremony was performed, amid much wailing and regret at not being able to follow Mother Luna’s doctrine. However, after performing the ceremony, one of the pack alphas went mad; he had not adequately prepared himself for the horror of the deed.
The scientists got the blood, and boiled it and boiled it and boiled it, until nothing was left but a paste. They then tirelessly – over the course of two weeks, keeping careful account of the moon phases – created the compound.
After more than a year and the deaths of so many, it was now complete!
All that remained was to administer it to Eugine Aldrin. And how hard could that be?
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