My name is Mitchell Harris. I've always been an enterprising bastard. When realmfall came around, my first thought was 'where's the money to be made here?'. I bought a horse and hauled in bows and rations to Sweden. I bought a boat and hauled in water tablets and steel ox-carts to Crete. I bought a camel train and hauled in oxy torches to Khartoum. And so on.
In Alexandria, I got nabbed. Celebrating just a little too much, I'd bought drinks for my escorts. I don't really remember very much of how it unfolded, because I think my own drink got spiked. I never got hauled in to a temple, he just 'helped' me back to my room upstairs, and marked me right then and there, and was gone by the time I woke up a hemt.
It's different for everyone, I've come to understand. For me... I wasn't upset. I was weirdly calm, but I also had this strange denial that followed me for awhile. I didn't buy new clothes, I just modified my own, wore those. I didn't train myself with the tail, or change my contacts... Hell, I still ordered the same portions for meals. I never claimed I'd be going back to human, but I always figured it'd happen somehow if I made the right bribes or managed to be in the right place at the right time. But whatever my state of mind, I was a Set hemt from then forward. You know the ones, they have the darker fur and the squared-off ears. Looked a little funny at first, but now I like it. I've found a hair style that goes pretty good with it, so it looks neat and crisp. The trick is to use a comb and scissors to make sure the fur ends at the square instead of a jaggy line.
That was 2002. And I'll tell you, it's set me on one of the strangest courses I ever could have conceived of. At the time, I wasn't enthused, I simply went about my business. But looking back? If you offered me the opportunity to reach back in time and prevent it, I'd refuse in a heartbeat. Hemt are a species unlike any other. Unlike any culture or group or race. They defy every border and lock there is. They aren't tied to their gods, or their nations, or their regions. I blended in now. I could travel farther and faster. I didn't need to carry a weapon or keep an escort anymore... Well, unless I had high-value cargo with me, in which case the more the merrier. Shit was rough, but that meant great profit for a guy who knows how to get through.
But suddenly, I had these urges that were pure gold for business. The urges to keep moving, to make contacts. A better sense of who wanted bribes and how much. The ability to procure resources seemingly out of nowhere, to live on no money... For a businessman, this is such a stunning revelation. My profit margins soared, and my lifestyle had become so simplistic, simply by instinct, that I could do nothing but ferret away all this money. To invest and re-invest, to build and build. I took on an administration job with a new shipping company that was designed to cope with the demands of the new Mediterranean business atmosphere. After a month of it, I was having trouble sleeping, couldn't stop thinking about what was over the horizon. I was probably only going to work every other day, by the sheerest of willpower. So they fired me.
The moment he said it. "You're fired." That moment is seared into my memory, because with it came this realization of the amount of control that my boss had over my life. And on a deep gut level, that control over me is anathemic. I'd been fired before, as a human, but as a hemt, it absolutely devastated me. It represented the worst of the worst of what the world could do to me, and right then I told myself that I had to be sure that nobody ever had that on me again. I would never work for anyone but myself. Never again.
So I went back to running goods. And I do mean 'running' goods, because the borders were tight. Us scientifics, man, paranoid as hell. Kemet and Hellas? They didn't care what was coming in or out. But the Libyans? Saudis, Jordanians, Lebanese? Tight tight control. Ironicly, shipping from Russia and Roumania actually ended up being fairly good that way. So I was never in the same country for more than two weeks. I was always going /somewhere/, and at the end of that somewhere, there'd be a buy and-or a sell, a challenge there.
Took a few years, but I started associating with more hemt. That was when I discovered their infamous Network. It's like nothing I'd ever seen before. They have hidden caches and safehouses and contacts everywhere. And their network just grows. You shut down one of their caches, and it's nothing to them. They simply make a new one somewhere else. A hemt can walk into a haven, leave everything he owns, and leave with a completely different loadout, suited to where he or she is going next. They have hub people. Sometimes hemt, sometimes humans. Embassy employees do this a lot. They simply take messages, and pass them along to the hemt in question when they call up. They can receive and hold packages. Whatever. Nothing illegal, but... I talked to one of these guys over lunch at a consulate in Prague. They say that it's such an empowering thing, to be important to an entire species. And they can call on us. If they're ever in trouble, they start mentioning it to the hemt that they've been helping for years, and they-... Or... We. We're there. We're there fast and hard.
People and businesses and governments either hate hemt, or love them. There's no middle ground. Either you take the good and laugh over the bad... Or you hate the bad, and throw the good away. The hemt now have 23 years of bribes and relationships out there. Contacts in most governments, most shipping companies, most anywhere that can be useful to them. Every time one of them has money, it gets funneled into some kind of resource or contact, that the entire network of the species can access. That spirit of cooperation is powerful, too. I feel it myself. My company is open to the species. I call on them often to escort my runs or to acquire diffiuclt goods, or to put bribes in the right hands... They call on me to ship special goods, to give one or another of them a job, to make space available on one of my boats, to make funds available for a large bribe or gift, to equip a new haven... And I do it. I do it gladly.
Don't get me wrong, I still have my human friends. I still keep in touch with my family and the university I got my MBA at... I just... Well, there came a point at which I was simply 'Mitch the hemt'. Borders were more open, business was great, and I was part of my adopted species. A real part, an important cog. With that realization, I simply... Let the change be complete. The biggest change was that I stopped resisting the advances of the vixens around me, and stopped having relationships with human women.
It had been a losing battle anyways. Human women want commitment. They want a provider and a soul mate and romance. Hemt women are different. They want to travel with you, and to work as a team until they're sick of you. Typically, that's about two or three weeks. They wander their own way, no hard feelings. Sometimes they come back for another fling, sometimes they don't. Sometimes none of them want me because I'm too busy to pay them any attention. Other times, they're impressed by a recent accomplishment and I end up with three at once.
What I came to learn later was that they have an interesting parenting system. Their mothers raise them for the childhood years, the fathers for the adolescent years. Vixens might stay with mom to 11 or 12, boys to 9 or 10. So... When I began to realize I had kits out there, I started spending more time managing the company locally, and making regular trips to Alexandria, where they knew how to find me. I spent time with these kits, contributed money to their mothers and the havens around them. It took awhile to sort out which were mine and which weren't, because there are a /few/ mercenary vixens whose choice in mates were less responsible.
The interesting part has been these last few years. For many hemt males, it is important to ensure that one does not have too many kits, or they end up with too many teenagers all at once when they come of that age. Never have I been gladder of the wealth I've earned over the past 25 years, as I globetrot my fuzzy little horde. Sometimes we do it the human way, other times the hemt way. Sometimes I'll rent a boat for the lot of us, and island-hop. Other times, we'll stay in a city for awhile... I once paid a Scottish locksmith 20,000 pounds to close his business for a few slow days, and to spend 3 days doing nothing but teach mine how locks work, and how to defeat them. I paid bored Columbian mercenaries to teach the lot of us their aggressive machete techniques. I paid a family in Okinawa to teach us how to fish without rod or reel. I paid a Siberian pilot for a month of tundra survival lessons. I paid a retired rally driver and his friends a substantial amount for some rather exciting and extensive driving lessons. I paid gypsies and musicians and salesmen and tradesmen... And I teach them money. That was what I know. I koew money and trade.
Hemt say that they have no need for wealth. This is stupid. Hemt need money and resources just like anyone else. What they /need/ is money without commitment. Money that nobody but they themselves control. They cannot get locked down into contracts or payments, the way that humans do. Their spending and saving is simpler, but I prefer to be wealthy my way. I am retired from my career for the most part, but staying responsible and active with a dozen vulpine teenagers, all yearning for independance... Well, that is as dangerous and exhilarating a job as I have ever had.
And so, to wrap up this rambling narrative, I would offer my advice to all of you who have been transformed, or who fear it. And my advice is... Don't. Don't fear that life. It is a twist away from what you know, but there are wonderful possibilities down that path. A forced mark or a transformation of your form is only one detail. To humans... Do not pity a forcemark. Do not be sorry for them, as their perspective has been widened beyond what you can comprehend. To become a khnum or a satyr or a sensi or a selkie... Is to embrace a wider world than you could ever have known. To create challenges in every day's mundane details, and to meet them, and to become a stronger man or woman than before.
And that is why I am hopeful. I am surrounded by forcemarks, I have been tied to the realms since they arrived. I have watched the trends and I have been a part of the blending of our worlds. The forcemarks that are my friends, and the half-scientifics that are my children; by their greatness, their ambition, their wide perspectives and open eyes... They are becoming the future, and I would not trade that future for anything.
Live your lives, and carpe some diem, because each diem is looking brighter than the last.
-Mitchell the Hemt
In Alexandria, I got nabbed. Celebrating just a little too much, I'd bought drinks for my escorts. I don't really remember very much of how it unfolded, because I think my own drink got spiked. I never got hauled in to a temple, he just 'helped' me back to my room upstairs, and marked me right then and there, and was gone by the time I woke up a hemt.
It's different for everyone, I've come to understand. For me... I wasn't upset. I was weirdly calm, but I also had this strange denial that followed me for awhile. I didn't buy new clothes, I just modified my own, wore those. I didn't train myself with the tail, or change my contacts... Hell, I still ordered the same portions for meals. I never claimed I'd be going back to human, but I always figured it'd happen somehow if I made the right bribes or managed to be in the right place at the right time. But whatever my state of mind, I was a Set hemt from then forward. You know the ones, they have the darker fur and the squared-off ears. Looked a little funny at first, but now I like it. I've found a hair style that goes pretty good with it, so it looks neat and crisp. The trick is to use a comb and scissors to make sure the fur ends at the square instead of a jaggy line.
That was 2002. And I'll tell you, it's set me on one of the strangest courses I ever could have conceived of. At the time, I wasn't enthused, I simply went about my business. But looking back? If you offered me the opportunity to reach back in time and prevent it, I'd refuse in a heartbeat. Hemt are a species unlike any other. Unlike any culture or group or race. They defy every border and lock there is. They aren't tied to their gods, or their nations, or their regions. I blended in now. I could travel farther and faster. I didn't need to carry a weapon or keep an escort anymore... Well, unless I had high-value cargo with me, in which case the more the merrier. Shit was rough, but that meant great profit for a guy who knows how to get through.
But suddenly, I had these urges that were pure gold for business. The urges to keep moving, to make contacts. A better sense of who wanted bribes and how much. The ability to procure resources seemingly out of nowhere, to live on no money... For a businessman, this is such a stunning revelation. My profit margins soared, and my lifestyle had become so simplistic, simply by instinct, that I could do nothing but ferret away all this money. To invest and re-invest, to build and build. I took on an administration job with a new shipping company that was designed to cope with the demands of the new Mediterranean business atmosphere. After a month of it, I was having trouble sleeping, couldn't stop thinking about what was over the horizon. I was probably only going to work every other day, by the sheerest of willpower. So they fired me.
The moment he said it. "You're fired." That moment is seared into my memory, because with it came this realization of the amount of control that my boss had over my life. And on a deep gut level, that control over me is anathemic. I'd been fired before, as a human, but as a hemt, it absolutely devastated me. It represented the worst of the worst of what the world could do to me, and right then I told myself that I had to be sure that nobody ever had that on me again. I would never work for anyone but myself. Never again.
So I went back to running goods. And I do mean 'running' goods, because the borders were tight. Us scientifics, man, paranoid as hell. Kemet and Hellas? They didn't care what was coming in or out. But the Libyans? Saudis, Jordanians, Lebanese? Tight tight control. Ironicly, shipping from Russia and Roumania actually ended up being fairly good that way. So I was never in the same country for more than two weeks. I was always going /somewhere/, and at the end of that somewhere, there'd be a buy and-or a sell, a challenge there.
Took a few years, but I started associating with more hemt. That was when I discovered their infamous Network. It's like nothing I'd ever seen before. They have hidden caches and safehouses and contacts everywhere. And their network just grows. You shut down one of their caches, and it's nothing to them. They simply make a new one somewhere else. A hemt can walk into a haven, leave everything he owns, and leave with a completely different loadout, suited to where he or she is going next. They have hub people. Sometimes hemt, sometimes humans. Embassy employees do this a lot. They simply take messages, and pass them along to the hemt in question when they call up. They can receive and hold packages. Whatever. Nothing illegal, but... I talked to one of these guys over lunch at a consulate in Prague. They say that it's such an empowering thing, to be important to an entire species. And they can call on us. If they're ever in trouble, they start mentioning it to the hemt that they've been helping for years, and they-... Or... We. We're there. We're there fast and hard.
People and businesses and governments either hate hemt, or love them. There's no middle ground. Either you take the good and laugh over the bad... Or you hate the bad, and throw the good away. The hemt now have 23 years of bribes and relationships out there. Contacts in most governments, most shipping companies, most anywhere that can be useful to them. Every time one of them has money, it gets funneled into some kind of resource or contact, that the entire network of the species can access. That spirit of cooperation is powerful, too. I feel it myself. My company is open to the species. I call on them often to escort my runs or to acquire diffiuclt goods, or to put bribes in the right hands... They call on me to ship special goods, to give one or another of them a job, to make space available on one of my boats, to make funds available for a large bribe or gift, to equip a new haven... And I do it. I do it gladly.
Don't get me wrong, I still have my human friends. I still keep in touch with my family and the university I got my MBA at... I just... Well, there came a point at which I was simply 'Mitch the hemt'. Borders were more open, business was great, and I was part of my adopted species. A real part, an important cog. With that realization, I simply... Let the change be complete. The biggest change was that I stopped resisting the advances of the vixens around me, and stopped having relationships with human women.
It had been a losing battle anyways. Human women want commitment. They want a provider and a soul mate and romance. Hemt women are different. They want to travel with you, and to work as a team until they're sick of you. Typically, that's about two or three weeks. They wander their own way, no hard feelings. Sometimes they come back for another fling, sometimes they don't. Sometimes none of them want me because I'm too busy to pay them any attention. Other times, they're impressed by a recent accomplishment and I end up with three at once.
What I came to learn later was that they have an interesting parenting system. Their mothers raise them for the childhood years, the fathers for the adolescent years. Vixens might stay with mom to 11 or 12, boys to 9 or 10. So... When I began to realize I had kits out there, I started spending more time managing the company locally, and making regular trips to Alexandria, where they knew how to find me. I spent time with these kits, contributed money to their mothers and the havens around them. It took awhile to sort out which were mine and which weren't, because there are a /few/ mercenary vixens whose choice in mates were less responsible.
The interesting part has been these last few years. For many hemt males, it is important to ensure that one does not have too many kits, or they end up with too many teenagers all at once when they come of that age. Never have I been gladder of the wealth I've earned over the past 25 years, as I globetrot my fuzzy little horde. Sometimes we do it the human way, other times the hemt way. Sometimes I'll rent a boat for the lot of us, and island-hop. Other times, we'll stay in a city for awhile... I once paid a Scottish locksmith 20,000 pounds to close his business for a few slow days, and to spend 3 days doing nothing but teach mine how locks work, and how to defeat them. I paid bored Columbian mercenaries to teach the lot of us their aggressive machete techniques. I paid a family in Okinawa to teach us how to fish without rod or reel. I paid a Siberian pilot for a month of tundra survival lessons. I paid a retired rally driver and his friends a substantial amount for some rather exciting and extensive driving lessons. I paid gypsies and musicians and salesmen and tradesmen... And I teach them money. That was what I know. I koew money and trade.
Hemt say that they have no need for wealth. This is stupid. Hemt need money and resources just like anyone else. What they /need/ is money without commitment. Money that nobody but they themselves control. They cannot get locked down into contracts or payments, the way that humans do. Their spending and saving is simpler, but I prefer to be wealthy my way. I am retired from my career for the most part, but staying responsible and active with a dozen vulpine teenagers, all yearning for independance... Well, that is as dangerous and exhilarating a job as I have ever had.
And so, to wrap up this rambling narrative, I would offer my advice to all of you who have been transformed, or who fear it. And my advice is... Don't. Don't fear that life. It is a twist away from what you know, but there are wonderful possibilities down that path. A forced mark or a transformation of your form is only one detail. To humans... Do not pity a forcemark. Do not be sorry for them, as their perspective has been widened beyond what you can comprehend. To become a khnum or a satyr or a sensi or a selkie... Is to embrace a wider world than you could ever have known. To create challenges in every day's mundane details, and to meet them, and to become a stronger man or woman than before.
And that is why I am hopeful. I am surrounded by forcemarks, I have been tied to the realms since they arrived. I have watched the trends and I have been a part of the blending of our worlds. The forcemarks that are my friends, and the half-scientifics that are my children; by their greatness, their ambition, their wide perspectives and open eyes... They are becoming the future, and I would not trade that future for anything.
Live your lives, and carpe some diem, because each diem is looking brighter than the last.
-Mitchell the Hemt