When the vampires rose to power in 2006, the metropolitan areas were the first battlegrounds. The Veil ended the same hour the Masquerade did, and Glass Walkers, Bone Gnawers, and their spirit allies fought desperate street-to-street and house-to-house battles in almost every city of the globe. They were at their most powerful, linked by satellites and computers, wielding fetishes of amazing power, honed by decades of leech-fighting experience no rural Garou could hope to match. And they died in the thousands. In the two month period between June and August, almost 90% of the Glass Walker tribe and 70% of the Bone Gnawers, along with each tribe's kinfolk, perished. In many places they were wiped out altogether; in many others, it would be years before any Wyrm-minions would realize that there were any Gaia-servants within their walls.
Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the vampiric takeover the biggest threat faced by the surviving urban Shifters was from each other. Modern-day plays and musicals gloss over this (witness the remake of "The Odd Couple," with Felix the former Walker CEO and Oscar the Gnawer trash-picker forced to coexist in a bomb shelter -- the old come for the witty dialogue, and the young come for the entertaining Klaive fights -- and the hit musical version of "Guess WhoÌs Coming to Dinner," where a wererat who just wants to be left alone has to come to terms with thirty Garou moving into his tunnel), but the sad fact is that conflicts between Walker and Gnawer and between Garou and Ratkin (not to mention Harano-induced suicides) almost doomed Silicon Blaze before it began.
Many credit Mama Rat with saving the tribe. January, 2009, was a low point for the city-dwellers: the surviving Garou and kin were huddled in hundreds of makeshift underground communities, few of them in touch with each other, many of them unsure that any other Garou had even survived. Many Ratkin, meanwhile, were pushing for a "final revenge," a complete purge of the weres who had "invaded" their tunnels. The evening of the Ratkin Grand Moot, as preparations were being made for "Knifenight," Mama Rat physically manifested and laid down the law: rather than see one group of Her children exterminate another group, She would feed them all to the vampires Herself and collapse all the tunnels after them. The urban Garou and Ratkin were to stand together as one.
Mama Rat then opened a series of Umbral tunnels and summoned (dragged out of bed, in a few cases) the remaining Gnawer and Walker Elders to the Moot to hear the rest of her ultimatum: to make it perfectly clear that the urban Garou and the Ratkin needed each other to survive, from that point on Ratkin could only be magically healed by Garou, and (within the cities, at least) vice versa. (This prohibition was lifted after the return of the Sun.) Any babies born to Garou or their Kinfolk were to be given to the Ratkin to raise, and vice versa. (This has also been lifted, but every child of one Breed spends at least two years with the family of another, similar to an exchange student program.) As a final gesture, the tail of each Garou Elder became ratlike, and each Ratkin Elder was given a long, fluffy dog-tail. The occasional shifter is still found with a mismatched tail, the closest thing to a sign of Pure Breed the tribe possesses.
(There are stories which claim that Mama Rat also manifested at a Nosferatu Conclave, and cut some sort of deal there. If any members of Silicon Blaze know the truth behind this, they're not telling.)
Some Garou and Ratkin rejected this "shotgun wedding," and tried to make their own way. With rare exceptions, they failed. Those shifters who co-operated discovered that the Ratkins' tunnel-senses, Umbral trails and far-flung support network combined with the Walkers' technosavvy and spirit-alliances and the Gnawers' skills at infiltration and investigation to create a whole much stronger than the parts.
The remaining urban Garou who would eventually become Silicon Blaze were not the strongest or most noble. They were instead the ones most attuned to survival: the ones who knew every alley and bolthole for miles; who could provide light, food, and shelter in secure tunnels far beneath the surface; and who could ensure that even enemies capable of reading minds and moving invisibly would not find them. Centuries of life in the very backyards of their enemies honed this even further.
Members of Silicon Blaze today revere Intelligence, Cunning and Diplomacy as the supreme qualities a Gaian-servant can cultivate. Totems of Cunning are much more common and revered than in other tribes, and Silicon Blaze remains perhaps the most close-to-the-vest and inquisitive ("duplicitous and spying," say critics) of any of the Gaian supernatural groups. Saying Silicon Blaze collects information is like saying a school of starving piranha collects cattle flesh. However, getting the same, non-contradictory answer to a question from two tribemates can be a cause for celebration. To illustrate:
Q. What does your name mean?
Well, there's us, see, we're the Silicon. And the vampires in control of our cities, see, that was the Blaze, like a crucible, you know? Without it, we wouldn't have come into being. -- Tripwire Tess, Kansas City
We created light in the darkness with our tech. Through our machines -- our "silicon" -- we brought forth a blaze of light. -- Doc Simpson, Ithaca
It's a phoenix-thingiemabob-metaphor, that's it. The Weaver had to die and be reborn, 'cuz she was nuts. Our name symbolizes our commitment to her and to helping her new incarnation be better and healthier than the last one. -- Fnord Ferguson, Toronto
The social and organization structure of Silicon Blaze was formed during a century when the group had almost no contact with outside Garou, and very little contact with members of their own tribe in different cities. Each Sept basically operates on its own, and their Caerns can be anything from a publicly-known lab to a mercantile with regularly-posted hours to a subterranean listening post. Elders are treated with a lack of respect that would cause coronaries in more conservative tribes (the thought seems to be: "If you can't trick a cub into doing what you want, how good are you?") Moots are rare, and some old-guard Blazers even have superstitions about too many members of the tribe being in the same room at the same time. Despite this, though, information passes from tribemate to tribemate at an astonishing rate, and members have such a knack for showing up in an area a few hours or days before "something interesting" happens that speculation has run to oracular visions or an alliance with some sort of Time Spirit.
Silicon Blaze's goals are to assist in a return to civilization, through setting up and protecting exploration parties, schools, hospices and merchant caravans; to ensure the stability and well-being of the new Weaver by working hand-in-hand with the Guild of Technology to find and secure old, dangerous technology and create new, Gaia-beneficial tech; to nurture and guide cities so that they grow in a sound, healthy way; and to watch and be ready for threats to Gaia or the Wyld.