The Hengeyokai BBS
What if supernatural creatures were just plain folks—friends, neighbors, co-workers—living their lives with few the wiser other than one another and a few trusted humans?
An immigrant nation like the United States would have more than its share, perhaps: not only vampires and werewolves and selkies and suchlike from Europe, but kitsune from Japan, talking jaguars from South America, even mimi from Australia. To where would such exotic immigrants turn for advice and a sympathetic ear?
Sometime in the late seventies or early eighties, when bulletin-board services cropped up like the mushrooms in fairy circles, a small and very special BBS made its quiet debut. The Hengeyokai BBS was initially created to serve the needs of Japanese supernaturals who had emigrated to the United States. But word spreads fast in any small subculture, and within a few years, supernaturals originating from all over the world were logging in.
Even as the nineties progressed and many BBSs withered away, replaced by USENET newsgroups, e-mail, and Web sites, the Hengeyokai BBS soldiered on, offering the one thing the Internet’s replacements could not—privacy. After all, its constituency had little wish to call broad public attention to itself. Mobs of peasants with torches and pitchforks were rather less common, but they had been replaced by reporters with microphones and television cameras, a no less deadly or at least annoying problem in the long run.
Editor’s Notes
The intended tone of this milieu is light drama; horror or the current trend toward dark, moody angst should be avoided. Understated humor is welcome, especially that derived from the incongruities of supernatural creatures living matter-of-fact modern lives. The Hengeyokai BBS should, of course, figure into each story to some degree, even if as nothing more than a background element. Within those bounds, the more inventive the story, the better.
One may wonder how to treat with the idea that some supernaturals are incorrigibly evil. In the modern world, they would have even less desire to come under the glare of publicity than their less malign fellows, and would favor secretive plots and schemes, if they are the plotting or scheming types. Politicians, terrorists, avaricious business tycoons, criminal masterminds, and the like spring to mind.
But many probably have something of a bum rap among humans: consider, for instance, European werewolves. Of course they were regarded as evil and vicious; those that weren’t probably didn’t interact much with humans while in wolf form, and were probably perfectly content to wander around in the forests doing wolf things instead. In other words, unless the whole concept of a given supernatural creature revolves around being good or evil, it’s best to assume that, like humans, individuals vary in their personalities and behavior.
So what kind of, er, people log into the Hengeyokai BBS?
Well, there’s the vampire who works at night from his home in the western U.S. as a trader in the overseas commodities exchanges, but gets laid off and has to find another night job. (He eventually becomes a nighttime radio DJ.)
How about the men’s club that is successfully challenged in court by a woman who wants to join, not realizing that the real exclusivity of the club is that all its members are werewolves? (One of the members falls in love with her.) Imagine a member’s wife wiping up muddy pawprints from the kitchen linoleum and berating him for staying out late, chasing cars with his buddies again.
Then there’s the hapless kelpie who took up residence in a small lake in the Pacific Northwest years ago, now frantic for ideas to stave off a developer who wants to drain his home dry and turn the area around it into a ski resort. (A suggestion comes back that the development be challenged on the grounds that a sacred tribal burial ground may be in the area.)
Why, the South American talking jaguar was asked, would he want to be cooped up in a zoo rather than running free in the jungle? His response was eminently practical: out in the wild, he’d have to work for a living, and he wouldn’t get medical care, and there are all those hunters! In the zoo, he gets all the food and care he needs from keepers who are his friends, he can keep a laptop and modem hidden under a rock in the enclosure’s shelter, and his public comes to see him every day.
Kitsuko McCloud is, in her words, one-eighth kitsune, half Japanese, half Irish, and all American. (Her father is a retired U. S. Army officer who as a young man served in the Occupation; her great-grandmother, who visits occasionally, is the original kitsune in the family bloodline. An aunt lives in Killeen, Texas.) She works as a traveling sales rep for a toy company and attends science fiction conventions occasionally. At one of the latter, she meets her new human boyfriend, Scott Taylor, who rescues her from a situation so intimidating she begins to lose control over her form, her tail unfurling out of the bottom of her skirt.
“Rawlf” (not his real name), a werewolf and radio DJ in Killeen, Texas, also works as a moderator on the Personals Board of the Hengeyokai BBS, and used to date Kitsuko. He’s a breezy, pleasant fellow, but firm when it comes to his duties on the BBS.
The Sysop is known by no other name to the users of the Hengeyokai BBS. Who or what he, she, or it may be is completely unknown, even to the other staffers of the BBS, but it is clear that The Sysop—always capitalized, even in speech—is immensely old, extremely wise, preternaturally perceptive, and capable of great kindness as well as steely resolve. Rumors and speculation abound as to The Sysop’s identity, of course.
What’s on the BBS itself, anyway?
The Hengeyokai BBS is a full-service buffet. (Hengeyokai, as I understand it, means “shape-shifter” in Japanese.) Among other things, there’s a virtual mall, with mail-order just-about-everything—for instance, sunglasses for nighttime supernaturals and wetsuits for aquatic types who might have to swim in polluted waters. There’s a personals board, moderated by “Rawlf“, and for a more . . . intimate forum there’s the Bumps in the Night board, described by The Sysop as a “great place to meet individuals for enlightenment”. Ω
Some characters and elements created entirely by or in collaboration with Waverly Pierre III, including the Hengeyokai BBS itself, “Rawlf”, The Sysop, and Kitsuko McCloud and Scott Taylor.
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