The World Outside
12.1 What the Outside Sees
The Heartlands are not forgotten. They are ignored on purpose.
Kindred Princes refer to it as dead land—culturally inert, spiritually unstable. Garou elders call it tainted and move their packs around it. Mages debate its existence at all, claiming consensus anomalies too strong to model.
Orpheus agents log it as a Tier Four Breach Zone. Dangerous. Non-compliant. Non-essential.
Changelings call it a waking dream of ash.
Demons flinch when they feel the leyline friction.
No one's neutral. Everyone feels it.
But almost no one stays long enough to understand it.
The Heartlands do not reject the world. The world rejected it first.
12.2 Exiles, Agents, and Silent Wars
Not every outsider comes to conquer. Some come to vanish. Others come to finish the story that began long ago.
Here are a few factions and forces operating within or against the Heartlands, still standing on the edge of its wound:
Foley Engineering
Pentex in a tailored suit. Their purpose isn't resource extraction—it's ritual commodification.
- Converts haunted sites into datacenters.
- Packages spiritual pressure into marketable “aesthetic trauma.”
- Runs psychological cleansing programs through fake nonprofits.
- Keeps everything legal, green, and sealed in NDAs.
Suidelike Gat
Technically not broken. Functionally enslaved.
These are the operatives from the Suidelike Gat street gang from Soweto, South Africa. Now, in the States, they serve under Foley Engineering, directed by Dmitri and entangled with the corrupted Rotting Fist Hive.
- Some remember Africa. Most try not to.
- Their enhancements still function. Their autonomy does not.
- They patrol memory sites, secure breach points, and extract Echoes.
They are tools now. Dangerous ones. Bound by debt, contract, and silence.
The Rotting Fist Hive
They should not exist.
A Black Spiral-aligned construct—yes. But not just Garou. The Rotting Fist includes Bastet and Mokolé who have willing chosen the shared rhythm of destruction. These Kinfolk members of the Suidelike Gat are thrown into the Labyrinth when they are discovered, Dmitri overseeing the Dance of Insight.
- Their rites are blends: half Luna, half blood memory, half devourer myth.
- Their Hive sings in three languages. None are safe.
- They believe corruption is the only honest answer to extinction.
The Heartlands didn't make them.
But it did welcome them.
12.3 Crossroads Beyond the Border
The Heartlands does not sit alone. Its memory ripples.
- Leylines cut through railroads, burial mounds, and dust-choked highways—reaching places that never agreed to remember.
- Echoes of Greenwood surface in Brixton, Soweto, Ferguson, and Seoul.
- Tornadoes that carry names from lost tongues leave impressions in cities that don't know what wind means.
It is not a portal.
It is a consequence that forgot how to localize.
12.4 When the World Pushes Back
Some powers want in. Others want everything locked down.
- Pentex Global Division seeks to turn the Red Dirt into a spiritual fuel.
- Vatican Occult Archives label the region a structural breach of divine order.
- Technocratic Diplomatic Guilds are trying to close the Consensus around it.
- Dreaming Courts report changelings waking up inside Oklahoma after falling asleep in Japan.
The Heartlands was never meant to be a node.
Now it's becoming a core.
12.5 What the Heartlands Sends Back
It doesn't just receive. It transmits.
- Ghosts carrying protest songs drift into cities across the globe.
- Spirits of dust and blood rewrite Fae courts in foreign tongues.
- Mages in Berlin wake from dreams of salt-hardened hands and red skies.
- Ritual dirt from Oklahoma has been found in altars across the diaspora.
The Heartlands do not whisper.
They echo—and some echoes find homes in the throats of others.
“We buried it here. And now they're digging it up over there.”
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