If one of your parents is or was a garou, then it might have been a bit disrupted, or if your garou nature was bleeding through you would have been more of an outsider than most werewolves, but in general in Australia that means school, friends, teenage drama, the usual stuff.
So, normal here can go from "lived with mum and dad in a nice house went to primary school and high school locally" through to "moved constantly, sometimes used fake names, weird people would turn up covered in blood, went to school as best as I could."
Your family might have been known Kinfolk (humans related to werewolves, and having some small measure of garou soul themselves). It is rare that kinfolk will know more than the mimimum about any garou relatives or activity - both for their own safety and for that of the caern/sept - but even with efforts to keep it a secret, you might have stumbled over some weird things.
At some point, something sufficiently emotionally charged happened to bring your garou nature out. This is often is an anger thing, because the urge to kill is often boiling just under a garou's psyche, but it doesn't have to be. It often *ends* in violence, because the usual end to a first change is a frenzy.
Other charged things can be getting hurt (eg: car crash) or well enough scared (eg: hold up); sex; spiritual encounters (eg church); music (eg: concert); drugs (eg: hallucinagens); reaching/breaching personal limits.
These things can happen in combination - sex while on drugs at something like confest with music everywhere, or having some nasty spirit shit burst out of the umbra and scare the crap out of you - to provide that final push for your spirit to burst out and take your true nature.
First change commonly occurs from sometime after age 15. Teenagers living on the outside of their skin provide a lot of lot of opportunities for emotional turmoil and spiritual charge to combine to push things into freaking out. But it can take longer than that - circumstances just don't come together for you until you're in your 20s or even 30s, and have your own established human life.
If you are the child of a garou, or of kinfolk that is known to other garou, then its common that at birth the werewolves performed a ritual that bound a spirit to you called a kinfetch. When you go through first change, that spirit is released and it comes running back to try and find the garou who bound it. This process is not always sucessful - sometimes the bindings undo before first change, something eats the kinfetch on the way back, or the ritemaster who bound it is now dead or otherwise unavailable. Not all kinfolk are known to a garou sept, so it is possible for two seemingly normal human beings to have a garou child.
At the other extreme is a kinfolk family where mum or dad is a werewolf, and decides that *now* is when this child of theirs (or someone else's, why limit yourself) is going to go through first change. They might set up a situation where their potential garou child is faced with the sort of emotionally chanrged events that bring on first change. That can be as brutal as kidnapping them and causing physical harm until they change, or as spiritual as bringing them to some sort of ritual.
It is extremely difficult to tell whether a kinfolk child is actually garou until they go through first change. So, sometime the above process leaves you with a scarred and scared un-changing kinfolk child instead of the hoped for new Garou.
In other circumstances, the usual way to find a newly changed werewolf is to keep one ear out on the police dispatch radio. Practically every first change ends in a violent rampage in the half-man half-wolf war form called 'crinos'. On the plus side, this form is also the one that inspires Delerium the most readily - due to ancient hunting practices, humans who see crinos form don't remember it well and will often clutch at any other explanation for what happened.
So, *if* there are any surviving witnesses, they won't be sure what happened. :) "Billy must have run off when that pack of wild dogs that killed his classmates" not, "Billy burst into a monstrous shape and killed 3 of his classmates"
Well, once you've been discovered to be garou, your re-education happens pretty rapidly. You get a crash course in what the world is really like and why it's doomed. Various garou take a hand in teaching you the basics of stuff like fighting, the triad (wyrm, wyld and weaver nature of reality) spirits and the umbra. The last is really only about the local stuff, how to step in and out of the spirit world and the spirits you might encounter around the sept.
As weird as it all is compared to learning about math and english and accounting, there's a part of you that responds to the knowledge, almost like you were being remined rather than told the first time. It makes sense in an intuitive way. Of course, there's only so much skepticism can do in the face of "And this is our tribe totem, RAT".
You are still kept a bit apart from the Sept proper - you don't really get involved in sept business, not often brought to Moots, don't get a list of the local kinfolk or contacts the Sept might have. Regardless of how old you are, you're a child again in the eyes of the Sept and the garou - even rank 1 16 year olds have are due more respect than you, even if you're 25 and still haven't gone through the Rite of Passage.
This period tends to not last very long, the Garou nation can't afford to have people standing around learning the basics while other garou are getting killed. Somewhere between 6 months and maybe 2 years.
As the basic education goes on, an existing pack might choose to pick you up as an additional member. There's a certain amount of attrition to packs, and so having replacement members join when they are ready is a way of not having the pack just break up.
For Some Reason each of you hasn't really fitted with the existing 3 packs at Sleeping Lore (on top of not fitting with your tribe if its not one from here - tho 'wrong tribe' might be the reason you don't fit with the 3 packs too) and so there's been a gradual build up of lone garou who are now ok enough with each other to form a pack.
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