The Sisterhood of the Waves
By Moe Lane
Despite the name, this organization accepts both men
and women in its ranks (although the leadership
positions are traditionally reserved for females). In
its heyday, members of the Sisterhood could be found
throughout the British Empire: with the loss of
Britain's overseas possessions, the group has
retreated to the United Kingdom, with a few cells in
Canada (and one beleaguered one in Hong Kong). This
has not really affected the Sisterhood's core,
however.
Purpose and Goals
To keep the British Isles free of foreign invaders.
Organization and Membership
The Sisterhood of the Waves is fairly small (about 500
active members in the United Kingdom, with another
couple of hundred abroad): the organization is based
around a group of families that have kept their secret
for literally millennia. Recruits from the outside
are fairly rare, if only because it's hard for the
Sisterhood to recognize likely candidates.
All Sisters (note that this is a genderless
designation) must have at least six Forces: the
Sisterhood has developed elaborate tests and rituals
that can determine suitable initiates. Unfortunately,
said rituals are family-specific, which makes it
difficult for the organization to expand. As partial
compensation, most of the families involved in the
Sisterhood have a much higher proportion of six Force
humans. Those in Heaven that are aware of the group
involve past Grigori involvement; indeed, it may even
be true.
The hierarchy is fairly informal: each family has a
leader (usually female) who handles local activities.
A group of ten of the most influential families is
traditionally vetted with supervising national and
international affairs: they in turn choose one of
their own number to make the final decisions.
Currently, the 'leader' of the Sisterhood is one Dame
Frances Hodges, a seventy-five year old grandmother
who lives quite comfortably in her Glasgow flat with
three cats, one dog, two parakeets... and a
innocuous-looking button wired to some very illicit
high explosives embedded in the Chunnel. She also
knits.
The Sisterhood is a very secret organization - if only
on the corporeal plane. Unlike the vast majority of
secret societies and conspiratorial groups, its
members have never been interested much in amassing
temporal power or influence; it is possibly the only
group of its kind in history to be primarily
orientated towards a defensive posture. Its members
tend to be wealthy, although not notably so: the men
folk of the group gravitate towards the middle-upper
ranks of civil and military service, while the women
concentrate in the social arena. It's an open
question about which sex is more effective.
Abilities and Resources
As mentioned earlier, all active members of the
Sisterhood are six Force humans: their initiation
rituals also provide Symphonic Awareness. Aside from
this, members seem to have access to the Songs of
Dreams, Healing, Motion, Shields, Storms, Tongues...
and Water. Most Sisters may only perform the
Corporeal versions of said Songs, but Sisters with
Ethereal Connection are not unknown and one with
Celestial Connection has been discovered on at least
three separate occasions. How they have accomplished
this is apparently clouded by Superior-level
ineffability: inquiries to the relevant Heavenly
authorities are not answered.
Interestingly enough, the Sisterhood's claim to
millennia of continual existence is valid: its
ceremonial language is clearly an early variant of
Indo-European (with the inevitable loan words) and its
archives are a historian's dream. Some of the scrolls
and documents held by the Sisterhood only otherwise
exist in Yves' Library, and the recorded
organizational history goes back for at least two
thousand years. Quite a few Sisters have used this
advantage to carve out for themselves some very
respectable academic positions.
Celestial Relationships
Heaven
The Sisterhood is quite firmly in Heaven's zone of
influence, if not complete control. The Seraphim
Council has determined that the organization should be
allowed to fulfill its core mission without undue
influence or interference. Whether this is due to
enlightened policy on the Host's part (as opposed to
caution over the ineffability issue) is a matter for
some debate.
Sisters are still Soldiers of God, however. They
retain contact with Heaven, are aware of the War and
will assist the Host in whatever operations take place
on their part of the corporeal plane. The Sisterhood
usually works with Destiny, Stone and Trade; it took
the Sword centuries to work past the institutional
prejudice caused by the Anglican schism, and the
damage from that is still not completely healed. War
has some contacts, but both the Sisters and Michael
are tight-lipped about it.
Hell
The existence of the Sisterhood is hardly a secret to
Hell, of course: if nothing else, the faint trickle of
Damned Sisters would take care of that. However, the
diffuse organization of the group makes it difficult
for Hell to infiltrate and/or destroy it. There is
also the earlier-mentioned issue of Superior-level
ineffability about the whole situation: this does
nothing to aid Diabolical activity. Finally, there is
the problem that the Sisterhood is precisely ruthless
towards their (rare) Fated traitors as one would
expect an organization of worried grandmothers to be:
there's been a whisper or two that the punishment for
treason involves grim matriarchs, a captured Coffin of
Undeath and a large wooden stake...
However, possibly the most potent defense of the
Sisterhood is the fact that it seems to have such a
narrow focus. After all, when it comes down to it...
does anyone besides Baal actually care too much about
invading Great Britain? For that matter, the Demon
Prince of the War has derived a great many benefits
from having an unconquered British Isles present to
muddy the waters of European politics. There's even a
reasonable chance that he might continue to do so in
the future. Why rock the boat?
Other
The Sisterhood can be quite tolerant towards
ethereals, all things considered; after all, some of
them have been living in the British Isles for
millennia, and are willing to defend it at need. This
has led to some disputes with the Host, but nothing
that can't be worked past. Needless to say, foreign
ethereals had better be on their best behavior.
There is one other 'other', as it were. There are a
lot of weird things that seem to be associated with
the Sisterhood, from their remarkable cultural
longevity to the odd haze of ineffability surrounding
them to their anomalous access to metaphysical power.
There's also a suggestion or two that they might have
some sort of access to Oannes' old resources, or
possibly an Orphan Servitor or two, or possibly
even...
No, it couldn't be: Oannes is Truly dead. There isn't
even a chance for a Remnant: everyone knows that
soul-killed Kyriotates and Shedim don't leave behind
that sort of residue. Surely that's even true for
Superiors, right?
Right?
History
The basic story of the Sisterhood is well known to the
Host: they are descended from Oannes' first Soldiers.
The Archangel of the Waters was always fond of the
British Isles: in the days when Superiors could
operate more openly, she had the island chain as her
primary base. Naturally, the Archangel recruited
among local tribes for assistants. Fully one third of
the current Sisterhood can reasonably claim descent
from those original Soldiers.
The death of Oannes caused these first Soldiers to
become dispersed: Heaven was not really prepared for
the aftereffects of the Thera explosion, and by the
time that anyone thought to look for them, her
servants in the Isles had been apparently been
destroyed or scattered to the four winds. Heaven
eventually stopped really looking for them after a few
years.
However, the groups that would later become the
Sisterhood still survived, although it took almost a
thousand years before a researcher of Knowledge
stumbled across a set of interrelated tribes with
highly distorted customs. The realignment of these
tribes with the forces of Heaven was not particularly
difficult: they had retained the essential civility
and selflessness over the intervening time period, and
were quite prepared to rejoin the War against Hell.
They made (and make) quite good Soldiers, which is one
reason why Uriel used them extensively during the
Roman period. Unfortunately, the Sisterhood did not
quite appreciate the honor; both the Republic and
Empire were at times not too solicitous of the native
population, and the eventual withdrawal of Rome from
Britain had disastrous effects on the Isles. The
Sisterhood eventually decided that they would have to
work to keep England free from similar invasions.
It has gotten quite good at it, too: it is no accident
that no foreign army has stood on English soil since
1066. Indeed, the only reason for that particular
aberration was that the Sisterhood had not quite
recovered from the disruptions of the Roman
withdrawal. Even that invasion ended in an essential
victory for the Sisterhood: thanks in no little part
from their efforts, the Norman invaders were
assimilated into the existing framework of the Isles
and transformed into Englishmen (and Englishwomen, of
course).
Everybody else has frankly had their heads handed to
them. The British Isles have always enjoyed the
natural protection of the sea, and the Sisterhood is
apparently able to improve on those protections at
need. The storm that disrupted the Armada was no
accident. Neither was the 'Protestant Wind', or a
hundred different stormy days that persuaded Napoleon
and Hitler to hold off the invasion for just one more
day, or the acceptable weather that permitted the
D-Day invasions, or a thousand less-publicized
examples. For that matter, what temporal power that
the Sisterhood has is currently invested in retarding
the current integration of both the United Kingdom and
the Republic of Ireland into the European Union. They
also plan to vaporize the Chunnel at the first sign of
real trouble, as well.
Not that they have anything against foreigners, you
understand. They just have this thing about
foreigners telling the English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh
what to do: the bloody Americans are quite enough,
thank you - even if they are cousins, of a sort.
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