Josiah Kipp

Josiah Kipp was an American werewolf and homesteader based in Missouri during the period of the American Frontier.

He and his pack protected a swath of land that began at Josiah's homestead and expanded to the swamp-lands. Having changed under the auspice of the New Moon, Josiah served as the pack's assassin and would only occasionally head to the nearby town to make appearances and restock necessities. He felt it was important to beat away gossip and hearsay about him and his associates - whenever possible.

History
Josiah was a father and husband whose family had no direct relation to the celebrated Missouri fur trader, James Kipp, or his kin for that matter. Funny enough, he was once an honest fur trapper himself; he was one of those quiet settlers who had migrated from the northern territories, coming down without a son or wife. Only his sister Pearl accompanied him before she decided to part ways for a different settlement herself.

However, there was a deeper history to Josiah that would foretell his change - namely being been born with the blood of the moon in him. A wolf-blooded boy from birth. The 'tells' of his wolf-bloodedness had always been an inhuman sense of smell and a telltale itch from silver. But as he grew, he also developed the "Liar's Skin", a mantle of fur forming under his flesh where tissue or bone should show instead. Common injuries could slice away the thin skin and show Josiah for the monster he was, thus his formative years were fraught with close calls, but Josiah managed to live his life cautiously - often not exhibiting those 'gifts' that existed blatantly outside of God's grace.

But Josiah's sister always knew. Pearl Kipp had a tight bond with her brother that could never be broken, even by the darkness writhing under the skin of the world. If there was one person left that the man trusted in the whole earth, it would be Pearl. When their parents would punish and blockade Josiah in the shack he and his sister slept in, casting down silver charms like willow branches, she would stay in with him until they relented. When Josiah went hunting, Pearl wasn't far behind, and when he would catch a scrape or a gash, she was the only one he wanted to patch him up.

But such monstrousness should rightly not be seen by much of anyone, even by the closest of friends and loved ones, no matter how much they'd swear to understand. Pearl was a strange one, God-given, and witnessing the lies under Josiah's skin was like staring straight into the Devil's behind. Made people go crazy. It was disastrous enough when he and his own son were harried by wolves one summer, sending Josiah tumbling down the side of a hill and scratching him up something fierce. The roughest part of it followed soon after, when upon witnessing the blood and fur that slipped through the cracks of his father's wounds, lunacy struck little Jameson.

Traumatized by the experience, the boy and his father would never bond again - Jameson avoided Josiah around the clock, and the saddest part is that the son could never put to words why he did so, repressing that one summer day and all previously happy moments with his papa.

The logical conclusion: Josiah's gradual alienation from his son's life, eventually ending with being cut out entirely when the boy's mother took ill and perished. By that point, Jameson was a man and a merchant, and Josiah was nothing anymore.

Ultimately bereft by the loss of wife and son, Josiah and his sister decided to migrate away from their former homes together. So they prepared. The few years he had left in the north were hard on Josiah, given the death of his wife and the cold cut-off from Jameson. Pearl was, as always, the only one who could come close to understanding.

Missouri
After the journey south together, the siblings parted ways to live their own lives in different territories. It was a kind of dream for the two of them, to be away from one another and be sure they'd make it. Josiah wasn't content to mope about the way of things, he thought to take a page from his child's book and forget he ever had a kid. He turned the other cheek and got cracking, grabbing a parcel of land and building his own home from the bottom up.

Pearl, on the other hand, finally married and turned to portraiture to help make a living on her end of the frontier, and once her brother dug his heels in, he took up fur trapping in Missouri like he did before in the north - distancing himself when possible from the townspeople to hide his ungodly nature. Things were fine, until life plateaued for Josiah. The stress of his cursed lifestyle, the monotony of keeping away from good men and women, and the past, they all wore away at him. Even Pearl wasn't there to hold him up; while the two siblings had maintained communications by post, Pearl had gone quieter and quieter, leaving Josiah emotionally adrift when he needed reassurance the most.

But it was not the poor man's fate to languish in his wolf-blooded, half-baked farce forever - all things change.

It wasn't until that one night, a moonless night as dark as pitch long into his adulthood, that Josiah experienced his first change under the New Moon. He found himself lost and morose in ways he hadn't felt before, compelled to spy upon and stalk behind a town fool who lived farther out in the wilderness; a man who was none the wiser until he decided to veer into the outhouse behind his home for a 'break.'

What met him inside the privy was a near-human - all-wolf Josiah, clawed hands immediately breaking through the fool's esophagus, surgically burrowing back out and then through the man's skull. The fool's suffering ended in an instant of spiritually-charged predation.

Josiah feasted that night on his remains and when he regained control of himself, he met with two realizations:

One, that there was always something more to his life-long burden, and that in the dark instant of murdering that pitiable fool, he finally felt complete. And two, that he was not alone on the fool's property. It was not long after the first change that he met with more of the Uratha, joining under a pack and tribe of his own.

Events of the American Frontier
Josiah's first change was some time ago, concluding a chapter in Josiah's life and penning a new one for a young tribe and Missouri as a whole.

Affairs for the Uratha became status quo for Josiah, until the day that he and the other monsters that stalked the lands met together for the first time. It started with a trickle; a month or two before the destined night, Josiah began a fevered investigation into a bogeyman, one he would come to know as a vampire by the name of Eli Rollins.

Many a supernatural being's life was forfeit come their crossing into his tribe's territory. He couldn't be sure that Eli wasn't going to be a threat himself until Josiah closed in on him and told him what for. Bogeymen with no respect for the spirits and their wants had no place in the area, after all. But the two never actually met, Josiah's leads vanished in his hands like shadows and for all of his stalking, the prey would melt into the darkness and shake his tail.

Until one outing put Josiah on the path into town, right after sundown. That night, the monsters would collide into one another and pull off an unfathomably human act with inhuman means. But I digress; on this night, after some time chasing, Josiah caught tale that Eli was in town. As he passed the crossroads on his way over, he made acquaintances with a black man - with no owner and certainly not an average man.

Not only was his face on the wanted posters, he was large, lumbering, and openly prideful. This man was a free man, a fugitive, and a breaker of chains working to break the slave trade; aptly named Freeman. He was also a walking corpse, a Promethean or 'fire-thief' as Josiah one day put it. The conversation was terse, at first, but a rapport was quickly forged between the two when the werewolf assured Freeman that he had no problem with his kind, or his obvious fugitive status.

Freeman offered his help in tracking down Eli, not entirely sure of Josiah's intentions in seeking him out. They found him quickly, hearsay placed Eli in front of a church - broodingly staring. The werewolf called him out and warned him, stubbornly and hamfisted, to keep away from the swamplands. The encounter would have ended in blood had Freeman not stepped in to mediate and question the hostility.

Freeman's attempts shone through as the trio hashed out their business, first at a saloon and then in private by the riverside. In the middle of formal introductions, however, they were joined by a fourth. A Native American shaman by the name of A'chak, who was on good terms with Freeman, forded the river in style - conjuring up the water to act as a walk-way.

Unfortunately, A'chak also picked out Josiah. The werewolves and the Natives had a distrust and a hatred towards one another; Native culture branded Uratha as demonic skin-walkers. Incidentally, skin-thievery was indeed one of Josiah's gifts, so if anyone could be branded a skin-walker, it would be him.

Moreover, Josiah and A'chak had an encounter not long after the werewolf's first change, the former being in the guise of another animal. Needless to say, tensions rose high again until Freeman dispelled them. The burgeoning group would have parted ways by then, were they not approached with a proposition by yet one final member.

[Fizzly's Character]. A Nosferatu and a well-entrenched merchant who had grown weary of the slave trade, just as Freeman had - though obviously for different reasons. He announced, with little fanfare, his intentions to track a slave shipment coming up by the river a town over... and shut it down. He would need the manifests and the man-power to pinpoint and reroute the men and women, and he couldn't help but notice the diverse cast of characters conveniently laid out before him.

Whether it was the fugitive in their midst, a fellow Kindred in Eli, or the obvious collection of supernatural horrors in one spot that attracted the vampire, the group never pieced together. They did, however, agree to the proposition almost immediately. There was an irony to having monsters pledge themselves to another group's freedom and well-being that escaped few of them, but that didn't stop them from committing.

The night unfolded and the group was united in a matter of hours. Guided forth by [Fizzly's character] to the trading offices, Eli and Josiah took point while A'chak (disguised as a white man, no less,) and Freeman served as lookouts and distractions. Josiah managed to gently persuade a window open with his gifts, and the two infiltrated the offices in no time.

Of course, A'chak and Freeman had to spring into action not even a few minutes later, by way of an improvised spit-shine service for the two office proprietors coming by to finish off some business. This served as a sufficient distraction, if a close call, with Eli grabbing the manifest and bolting off the premises, leaving Josiah to rush out and quietly undo the 'persuasion' work he put into the window before the two men could enter the building seconds later.

With manifest in hand, the party pinpointed the shipment, which was already set to travel by road into town that very night. Not people to waste an opportunity, the group prepared to set out and intercept. It went about as well as expected.

The slaves were witness to the blood-bath and the gruesome slaughter of the caravan, and though Josiah took the biggest beating and was on the verge of collapse, A'chak uncharacteristically came to his aid, mending his wounds in the midst of battle.

Nevertheless, the skirmish was won and the caged slaves unharmed - if terrified and affected out of their minds by things they were never meant to see. The group rerouted them to Freeman's safehouse, a literal hole in the ground that he had prepared for the very occasion. A place to mend the wounded, feed the famished, and prepare to send them on their way as free people.

Thus that surreal night came dwindling to an end. A surreal one for Josiah, who had known only of helping his own Uratha brothers and sisters, and dealt little with monsters beyond his own kind and the spirits. And a surreal one for the others for nearly the same reason.

But it would not be the last.