Note:

The term "wildmen" refers to both men and women of the species.

General History

The wildmen and werewolves share much of their history, which probably fits as their cultures are also very closely knit. The thing to keep in mind is that they were both created with the same idea, cleaning up a problem, but where the werewolves fixed problems for themselves and others, wildmen became the problem.

Victor Von Frankenstein

Much of the following will be familiar to anyone who has seen werewolf history.

In1460 Victor Von Frankenstein, the real Frankenstein, was born in Yorkshire England. Victor was born to privilege and a family that had access to technology far beyond his time. The origin of this technology is speculative but some believe trickster gods were involved.

What is known are his motives. Frankenstein did want to overcome death but not through bringing the dead back. But instead, by keeping people from dying altogether. He had a theory on how this could be done, and somehow he had the tools. What he lacked was a test subject. For this, he chose his own dog, Charline, an old Ban dog.

Victor loved his old dog. He got her when he was thirty and now, ten years later, the prospects for his once puppy weren't looking good. She was lucky to still be alive. The poor dog had gone blind in one eye, was completely deaf, and walked to her master with a limp when he called.

Victor did not see himself as treating Charline as a lab rat, but as saving her life. He injected her with a serum meant to restore her youth ,strength, and maybe even give her back some of her senses. He also gave her some kind of treatment which gave her uncanny healing abilities.

Charline seemed to take well to the treatments. Victor had his puppy back! He took her on hunting trips again and played games with her.

In October of 1501, Victor was on his horse, chasing deer with his loyal Charline. He was knocked from his steed, having a few ribs broken on impact. Apparently, a brown bear had escaped the captivity of a traveling group of entertainers in his area. It was upon him in moments. However, Charline, seeing her master in danger, leaped into action. The bear was quickly dispatched... massacred more like it. Charline tore into the bear with such ferocity that, by the end of the fight, though she did not sustain any injuries, Victor was terrified to even look at her. He reached out his hand to steady the furious dog but she bit him. Victor recovered his hand from her jaws, as she almost instantly let go.

The damage had been done. Victor told his dog to heel, and he fled from her.

Visions of his dog haunted Victor's dreams for months after this. He felt guilt for abandoning her, but he stayed too terrified to look for her. Two years passed. Victor had hoped with time that he would not hear about his dog, that she would fade into memory. Perhaps she had died, sad but... no... she did not die. Victor did not hear of a large dog's body being found, nor did he hear nothing. Instead he heard increasing rumors of barguests, large black dogs with red eyes. According to legend, they foretold death, and they themselves could not be killed.

Victor might not have believed in these hell hounds, until he saw one outside his property. A terrified servant informed him of a large black dog, standing just outside the gate, looking past it, at his room. He came out to see a dog that looked much like Charline, but different. This dog was leaner and stronger looking. Its eyes practically glowed red.

A nearby servant declared the dog to be from hell, sent to judge Victorfor abandoning his loyal companion. Victor would have punished the servant for speaking so, however he was too frozen in fear, looking into those eyes.

He ran from the creature and ordered his guards to kill it. As he ran he heard the booming of guns, then the tearing of the gate, and then the screaming of men.

The dog did not move to attack Victor, however, a surviving guard, who knew much about both breeding and Charline herself, told Victor something that haunted him.

"That was not Charline. No... but it was of her blood. That you can be assured of."

Victor was afraid, but stories from his countrymen eventually gave rise to another emotion. Guilt. He had to stop the barguests, or as he called them, the "hounds of rebirth".

From his guards, Victor took volunteers to hunt down and destroy the animals. The only problem was that they were all terrified of the same fate that befell their comrades who tried to fight a barguest before. To this, Victor hesitantly offered them the same serum he had given to his dog to make her so powerful. He did not tell them that he didn't really remember how the procedure went. Victor though this serum would be effective, but he had no way of predicting just how effective it would be.

In June of 1502, Victor and his men set out to hunt down the barguests. On the fourth, they met one. This dog was pure white but its sheer size and appearance made Victor understand immediately what it was.

The creature stood in their path just outside the farm of a local peasant. Victor stood opposite the dog with his six guards. The creature growled low and Victor took aim with his full sized musket. His gun fired, the dog simply standing and growling at him as it fired. The dog took the hit without even flinching, its wound healing instantly before everyone's eyes. Victor fell down in fear, scuffling backwards, his hands shaking. However, his men showed no fear at all. The hellish dog jumped at Victor's lead bodyguard, however instead of forcing the man off his feet, the man grabbed the barguest's neck and redirected the course of its jump, hurling it over the nearby fence. The dog landed on its side and quickly recovered to its feet. The barguest launched itself into a full gate and took off for another one of the men. The second man was named Sir Simon. The dog came within a few feet of Simon, leaped into the air and in a moment its face met Simon's fist. It is not proper to speak of what was left of the dog after the impact, suffice to say, it was destroyed.

Startled, to say the least, Victor got up to speak to his men. He asked how they were, each responding that they felt great, better than they had ever felt before.

For the next few months, Victor had no trouble getting his men to volunteer to hunt barguests. They often begged to go out without him, even recommending he stay behind. They generally went out unarmed, alleging that muskets only slowed them down. Not only that, but the original six men requested that their fellow guardsmen be changed just like they had been. Victor was overjoyed, this was going better than he had imagined.

Again, even as the barguests were being destroyed and hunted down, Victor was noticing that his guards were having an easier and easier time finding them. He didn't know why but, apparently, his old dog had formed a pack and it was coming to Yorkshire. The captain of his guard said he had no doubt, in fact he hoped, that this meant the barguests saw him and his kind as a threat and they were coming for a show down.

The leader of Victor's men was named Cain. Cain and his men decided they were going to meet these creatures on whatever terms it took. Many of them had families and they were determined to drive off and destroy the barguests so their children could sleep in safety. And thus, out they went, night after night. They did not destroy the barguests anymore, instead they constantly chased them, each night, to the same place near the woods outside of Yorkshire, and letting them go.

Finally, one night, there were no dogs in town. Cain and his men went to a hill overlooking were they had been chasing the dogs. They looked down the hill to see a pack of some sixty or seventy dogs glaring back up the hill at them. Even given their new powers, Cain and his men started to feel fear at the sight of so many of these creatures. The dogs looked up at them and charged.

Cain yelled to his men not to fear, but it was meaningless. They knew fear, but by no means was it going to stop them. Twenty guards, armed with hunting knives and swords, fought seventy dogs, each able to heal instantly from all but the worst of wounds. Fifteen men returned home, five dogs retreated back into the woods, never to haunt Yorkshire again.

The next night Cain and his men went to a local bar to celebrate their victory and give toasts to their fallen comrades. However, once again, something went wrong. It is not known what the fight was about, but someone in the bar started a fight with one of Cain's men. The entire bar was reduced to rubble.

Over the next month, after the dogs were driven away, with no outlet for their power, Victor started to notice his guards becoming more and more violent. His furniture lay in ruins, his gate was bent and mangled, and the stone walls of his home were being shattered.

Many of the guards eventually left Victor and his employ, while he threw the others out. Finally in anger and disgrace, Victor left his home. Even as he left, he heard more and more stories of the "exploits" of his guards, some even destroying their own families.

Victor left and lived in the woods. He found a wife and married, living for a time without memory of what he had done and seen. He even had a son.

When Victor's son was six, the boy came home yelling that a strange man was approaching. This man was huge and had saved the boy from a bear. However, the boy was not so much grateful as he was terrified of what he had seen. The man had destroyed that bear with his bare hands.

Not long after the terrified boy told his tale, there was a knock at the door. Victor grabbed a dagger he had in the house and opened the door. There stood Cain, towering over Victor.

Cain fell to his knees. "Please, lift this curse! I am no longer a man, I am a wild animal, like a beast. They call me and my kind wildmen and they have started to hunt us." He looked down, kissing the ground in front of Victor. "My boy, he is like me. He has my rage, I can see it in him. He harms his friends without intent, he's terrified of his own power. How do I change this? Whatever you want, take this from me!"

Tears came to the eyes of Victor. He had nothing for Cain. He confessed he had no idea how to change him back to normal, much less how to fix his child. He could only offer his home to hide Cain's son.

Cain's son, Samuel, and Victor's son, James, became friends, but James was always a little bit afraid of Sam. Sam was only five, younger, but he was much stronger than James. He didn't seem very smart either but seemed to solve most of his problems by breaking things. Victor was beginning to fear for his son.

In the year 1510, in the dead of winter, a young Egyptian boy met Victor on the road and offered him a deal. He wanted the serum that made the barguests and a vial of Charline's blood. In return, the boy guaranteed a solution to the problems of the wildmen. He promised he meant no harm to the wildmen, just to put Victor's mind at ease. Victor took the deal, hoping it was real.

Cain and the other wildmen had been living in a village just west of Yorkshire. Victor told him he had to leave and go back. Cain was furious, but he still obeyed the wishes of his host and took his son.

Rise of the Werewolves

When Cain returned to his village several days later, there was a meeting in progress. In the town center two large men were arguing, Cain recognized one of them as Simon from his guard unit, the other he did not know. Simon turned and looked at Cain. "Here!" Simon shouted, "This is our leader." Cain was surprised by this.

It turned out Simon and the other man, Jackson, were arguing about leadership of the wildmen. Jackson seemed to know exactly what wildmen were and did not seem afraid at all of them. When asked about this, Jackson revealed that he and everyone else in the village who was not a wild man had been mysteriously changed overnight. Jackson and his people were noticing that they had abilities that were reminiscent of dogs along with increased strength and speed.

"This man here says he and his kind should lead us, us as in the wildmen. What sense does that make? They know less about what they are than we know about ourselves and we've been what we are much longer. What makes them more qualified to lead?"

"Because you are brutes. From my understanding, the only thing that kept you and yours from destroying Yorkshire was a steady dosage of violence each day. And then, when you actually defeated those hell hounds, just like I would have predicted, you turned on the people around you and were kicked out because you couldn't control your rage. To be honest, you and your men, even your children, have become violent here. I and my kind have not."

"All the more reason we should lead!" shouted Sam. "We are stronger and more prepared for a fight. War with the rest of the world is coming once they realize what we are. The strong should lead... you shake your head, do you wish to challenge me for it?"

"Of course, I, and a hundred of my friends."

"What?"

"You want to fight the world, or even just the next city over? You'll be outnumbered hundreds to one in every battle, every time. You'll lose. You beat a bunch of dogs, much as I would have predicted you would have. You're a man, you're smarter than a dog, but besides your muscles, what advantage do you have over other men?"

"What are you suggesting we do then?"

"Hide. All of us. Hide what we are for our own good. For the sake of our children. We're monsters. Men fear monsters and men destroy what they fear. They'll destroy us."

Overtime the wildmen and the new creatures, eventually called "werewolves", agreed on what they had to do. They had to hide what they were from the world. As subtlety did not seem to be something the wildmen were very "good at", the werewolves, somehow more controlled, lead the way in this endeavor.

Ever since that time, the werewolves and wildmen have been extremely close allies. Working together to keep what they are from a world they very much fear can never understand them.

Wildmen Powers:

Wildmen powers are mostly centered on the physical body and the five senses and are extreme even by mutant standards.

To start out, wildmen are much like werewolves in that they are twice as fast and strong as normal humans. They also have a heightened sense of awareness, meaning all of their five senses work much better than humans.

The powers of a wildman differ from a werewolf when the adrenaline starts to flow. Normally adrenaline taps reserve strength in a person, multiplying their strength three or four times or even more. Werewolves can tap this adrenaline and increase their strength by that factor pretty easily, making them capable of being eight to ten times as strong as a normal person at a moments notice. Wildmen tap their adrenaline at will as well, but their adrenaline is far more potent. Wildmen can reliably count on their strength increasing by ten fold, making them twenty times as strong as a normal person. Actually that's the minimum they can do. Wildmen have been know to lift and throw cars, bend metal with their bare hands, and even use fifty pound weight training poles, like martial arts bow-staffs, spinning them just as effortlessly.

The trouble is, adrenaline based power is not the same as having a more powerful muscular system in general. Adrenaline works by speeding up blood flow and redirecting it, generally away from the smarter parts of the brain. A full strength wildman is essentially an out of control freight train, it can't be stopped and it can't think, it just destroys everything in its path. Wildmen give a whole new meaning to the term "anger management issues". Wildmen study meditation and other arts for years trying to get their tempers under control and sometimes they succeed.

Wildmen tap their adrenaline so readily that this causes them to have a very hard time learning. When dealing with a hard math problem, a wildman is more likely to snap the four inch thick math book in half rather than solve the problem. The more intelligent parts of their brains starve for lack of blood and it seems lucky wildmen are capable of understanding language.

Wildmen in the Present Day:

Hard as it is to believe, Wildmen can be intelligent people. They often aren't but it's possible.

Wildmen usually work with werewolves on patrolling the world for problems, generally problems of a violent nature as werewolves tend to doubt wildmen can handle anything that requires thought, such as cover up operations. Wildmen are terrific at saving kids from burning buildings or intimidating bad people, but they're generally lost as to what to do if someone sees them doing it who shouldn't.

Other society members see them as dumb barbarians blissfully unaware of their regrettable situation. Other members are, of course, wrong. Wildmen may not be very smart but they are aware of the fact that they are looked down on and actually most of them want to be smarter. Wildmen resent their circumstance and for generations have been trying to change it. Sure being strong enough to lift a car would be great, but imagine if you had a hard time driving the car, with ripping off the doors and steering wheel. Imagine if you had a hard time playing with your friends without hurting them.

Culture:

Wildmen don't have much of a culture of their own. They mostly mimic and join werewolves in everything.

Raising a Wildman:

From birth to about nine years old the children of wildmen are isolated. They only ever see members of their own families, mostly just their mother and father. At times siblings are even kept apart for fear that they might hurt each other.

For this time they are home schooled, as one would suspect. However, they also study a special martial art. Actually perhaps Fay-kan is poorly labeled as a martial art. It is not, in fact, a combat art. It is an art of controlling the flow of one's adrenaline and even one's own blood. It is the art of pushing your blood into your arms or legs to make them stronger and faster or diverting it quickly away to weaken them.

Wildmen spend middle school with other mutants in private institutions made specifically for mutants. In this setting they are supposed to learn how to get along with other mutants. In reality, wildmen generally congregate together in large gangs, the only ones not afraid to physically play with other wildmen. Other kids may talk to them but they're generally too scared to do much more than that. Most wildmen children turn into class bullies and trouble makers. They and werewolf children are generally adversaries, despite many werewolf children thinking wildmen are "awesome".

Good news is, it's pretty rare for wildmen to be bullied. Even other wildmen are pretty scared of what the consequences of driving a ten-year-old hulk over the edge might be.

Boot Camp:

At around thirteen wildmen enter a kind of boot camp with werewolf children. They work in the same camps but have profoundly different instructors. Werewolf alphas (their version of drill instructors) are tough, wildmen Taskmasters are nightmares.

Wildmen children are trained to fight crime, rescue people from disasters, and even prepare for possible war. They know constant danger in training and are taught not to fear anything. Anything except for Taskmasters of course. Wildmen teenagers do NOT talk back, they do NOT raise their voices out of turn, and they do NOT step out of line. Punishment for those who even think of doing so is very severe.

Wildmen children are also taught to see werewolves, even their children, as superiors. Taskmasters are actually thoughtful and gentle around werewolf children, changing their demeanor on a dime, from screaming orders, to preparing to bow to thirteen year olds. This is supposed to teach wildmen children to respect werewolf authority. It works on the surface, but wildmen resentment of werewolf rule is extremely common and starts in camp.

Why is everything so harsh for these kids? This boot camp is viewed as the last chance for wildmen children, they either learn control or they become a danger to themselves and everyone around them.

Adulthood:

Wildmen adults generally accompany werewolves on patrols around the world, trying to maintain order. They take orders even from werewolf children on occasion, but nonetheless, they are rarely disrespected beyond name calling.

Wildmen are like special forces for werewolves. When wildmen are called in on missions specifically, something bad is happening. Generally wildmen are split up, but if they are in a unit of one werewolf to six wildmen, this is know as an enforcement unit. Enforcement units are called in when whole buildings have collapsed and getting to survivors seems impossible. They are called in when a band of witches threatens to start throwing cars at a local school. They are called in when a banshee group has decided to tell the werewolves to heck with their rules. Enforcement units are seen as a last resort and are impossible to beat.

Enforcement units can get out of control on occasion. At this point, the only way to stop them is to bring in another enforcement until.

Werewolves are nervous around wildmen but do their best not to show it. They keep wildmen to strict rules. They are terrified of the wildmen rebelling because, in the end, there is very little the werewolves could ever do to stop them.

All this being said, most wildmen are intelligent enough to understand their situation. They generally are not intelligent enough to hide from humanity. If normal humans were to find out about mutant kind, perhaps they could accept werewolves, maybe they would fight for control of the magics, maybe they would ally with the Pharaohs and maybe they would assimilate banshees into their own culture. However it is very unlikely even the existence of wildmen would be tolerated. Wildmen would likely be hunted down, institutionalized, imprisoned and even destroyed. Wildmen may resent werewolves, but they are terrified of a world without their order and their secrecy.

Interactions with other societies:

Wildmen deeply resent how they have to live their lives and in reality generally aren't very friendly. Many even feel more kinship to animals than humans, mutant or not, as humans are just to hard for them to understand.

Werewolves:

Wildmen are often sarcastic and snap at werewolves at a moments notice. However they rarely disobey orders. They respect werewolves in their actions, however not in their minds. There are many wildmen/werewolf friendships, but generally a werewolf has to put up with constantly being insulted in such a relationship and only being able to comeback with words. Werewolves are rarely dumb enough to try to fight wildmen.

Banshees:

Wildmen generally have choice words for banshees that shouldn't be repeated. They rarely associate but to name call.

Mystics:

Wildmen resent mystics and actually contest the idea that supernatural power is to be feared more than pure brute strength. Werewolf propaganda doesn't help this matter, to wildmen, mystics are the bad guys. If a mystic "knows what good for him," he stays clear of wildmen. Not that magics view this as much of a loss.

Pharaohs:

Generally most wildmen don't concern themselves with a civilization that is mostly in outer space. They pretty much take pharaohs on an individual basis.

Gargoyles:

Gargoyles are the bad guys. They are to be fought on sight. Wildmen generally aren't very open minded on the issue of gargoyles.

Normal Humans:

Wildmen are very afraid to interact with normal humans. They'll do it but they're very hands off and rarely even shake hands. Oddly enough, most wildmen come off as nerds as they avoid physical activity around normal humans like the plague.

How to Spot a Wildman:

Be very careful if you think you've seen a wildman. Be nice and give them space.

Keep your eyes out for people who look pretty strong but they never do anything active. They avoid anything more physical than playing video games, but they're built like tanks. Also for people who play so few sports, they seem pretty confident.

If you go to the house of a wildman and look at his stuff, most of it will probably be broken in some way.

It may seem tempting to be afraid of wildmen, some would say you should be, but there is another way of looking at things. Wildmen generally have few friends because they are so feared. When they do make friends, they make them for life. Having a wildman for a friend is like having a big dog, no one who knows what they are is ever going to mess with you.