Red Moon Rising 1/2

A StoryTelling Chronicle of San Francisco in the Early 20th Century


1 May, 1932

Twenty six years, two weeks and one day ago, this city was an entirely different sort of place. Our sires were alive. We were twice our present number in this city. We were disorganized, disarrayed, living in truest anarchy for our kind, but we were not alone.

Now, we are alone.

The sun was just rising that morning, when the first quake hit us. It lasted one minute, fifteen seconds; one and a quarter minute of sheer terror for those of us who, like me, had just said their good-days to our sires, our childer, our friends, and seen them begin to walk up the stairs in the dim, dim light of twilight towards their rooms, or down into the cellars, or out to join with the earth. When that quake hit, walls collapsed, protections shattered, ghouls were lost to falling stone and brick while those who were our peers were lost to the sudden infiltration of growing sun, wide beams of searing light which burned them before our own, horror-struck eyes.

The fires started just as quickly. Neither the quakes nor the flames would leave us be for another week. Hundreds were dead. Many of them were our own.

We might have done something for them, we realized, had we been better organized. Had there been even the loosest association of Kindred, we might have concentrated our efforts, and done something of aid to the elders around us. We had no means of organizing, though. They were lost, as we each wept or screamed in the nights that followed, unable to free them, or working long hours only to discover a pile of dust and clothing at the bottom of a cellar buried days before in rubble. When June Hanesway, a Toreador who had come west to help found the Camarilla's foot-hold in Los Angeles, extended her invitation, we were eager to accept. There, we came together, to give our city a means of protection. Never again would the twenty five of us who remained be as lost as we were on the night of April 18, 1906, the night after the fires and the quakes had ravaged our city for a day.

There, I was chosen to lead the Malkavians, and to speak for us all.
Gray Ballu was chosen by the Brujah.
Luc d'Avignon stepped forward from the Toreador.
Victoria took leadership of the Ventrue.
Ted spoke for the Gangrel.
Cory, the clanless, was elected by the Nosferatu, whose mutual sire was lost to the quake.
Vincent of the Giovanni joined us in later years, a representative from that clan.
Janet DeMilo, Tremere antitribu, brought Thaumaturgy for our defense, in return for safe haven.
Ed Simpson, of the Magi, came to observe our ways and join with us for protection.
Carter, who claimed to be of the Reborn, offered his assistance in return for the chance to study us.

Together we formed the council which now rules in this city. Together, we forged our names on the state, the nation, and the world. Together, we gave my dream its living form: The Empire.

Joshua Norton I
Emperor
The Empire of the United States


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