Chapter 139
Cora--
I might need to have a talk with the alphas about online privacy settings. The other packs I’ve found– and I know that they’re shifters, now– are just as bad. After finding the communities already spotted by the conspiracy boards, I looked on social media for people that would be living in or around them. Most of the time, the posts are perfectly normal– if you calibrate normal to a cult. Once you get into the homeschool groups around the community, the correlation is obvious.
It makes complete sense why shifters have to homeschool, of course. It isn’t that the kids are unable to control their forms at five or whenever they would start their first year of school. It’s more that you can’t reason with a kid that age enough to make them understand that they could never expose the secret. They would nod and smile and then shift on the playground to enhance their pretend games. I’ve seen it happen in the yard around the pack house. It slows down as they get older– something about puberty makes the shift more difficult, according to Landon– so a lot of the teenagers can go to public school if they really want to. They have their packs for community, though, so most don’t bother.
Once I find the homeschooling groups around the communities that have a prominent member with a last name that’s the equivalent to some kind of animal, I look for the group that skews more attractive than average. I’ve found two so far, but I’m sure there has to be more. Maybe the other suspects know better than to have social media, or maybe they know to make everyone set their accounts to private. I don’t know. I just jot down the two communities that I’m sure are actually packs, along with the one that I’m suspicious but unsure about.
It isn’t that shifters are all beautiful people. Most of them are pretty average, except for the height and fitness levels. Shifters stay more fit than you average American– probably all the running in the woods. They tend to be a little more outdoorsy, of course, and they all seem to be a little under 6 ft for the women. Taller than that for the men. Shifters are just bigger on average than humans. There are a few shorties that come closer to the national average, but they always stand out in the group photos.
Looking at the social media for Logan’s pack, I’m surprised I was the first one to expose shifters to the rest of the world. I looked up the pack members I know both the first and last names of and saw all the same markers– this feels like an inappropriate time to use the term dog whistles– that led me to the other packs. Logan is in a ridiculous amount of selfies with the other pack members. It’s clear they idolize him, which makes sense with the shifter culture I’m starting to pick up on. There’s a homeschool group where moms bemoan the difficulties of keeping their kids inside to learn for even a few hours a day, there’s the group pictures where the shortest woman would be tall among humans, all of it.
It’s amazing to me that no one else has put this together before. If no one else, Ollie should have put together an algorithm that could do the same thing I’m doing but faster. Is it a lack of self awareness? Do these shifters not realize how damn tall and muscular they look next to their human coworkers? I add a recommendation at the end of my notes that James and Ollie put together something to obscure these tells on social media somehow and call it done. It’s above my paygrade to figure out how to fix it, and I don’t have the social clout to demand as Beta that everyone set their accounts to private. It would be smarter to make everyone delete their accounts and just use group chats, but those are only slightly more private than actively blasting everything on social media. I’m not sure what the answer is.
If I had my way, I would blast the existence of wolf shifters so far and wide that even the government couldn’t keep a lid on it. I would have them shifting in the park in front of multiple phone cameras. I’d have them doing interviews with major news networks. I’d have them on late shows and early shows and every streaming service. Then, if anyone started to mysteriously disappear, they could make waves about it. Once enough people know about something, it always gets solved. But the generational trauma of being hunted as something other– something dangerous– is too strong. Logan would never allow me to ‘out’ the shifters for good. He doesn’t understand that all they need is a solid PR team. The only thing I can do for now is put packs in touch with each other so they can find strength in numbers and hope one day someone grows enough of a brain to listen to me.