
Synopses, by Chapter:
Useful information:
The year is 1094, the place is Madrid. A city only retaken from the
Almohads a few short years before, it is a city with a small but thriving
mortal populace and a dozen Kindred who live in fear of the night when the
Moors -- and their demon lords, the Assamites -- might return.
Politically inconsequential at this point in time, Madrid is nonetheless a
convenient stop-off point between more deeply entrenched Catholic
territory in Spain and the still-contested city of Toledo, to the
southwest. Madrid itself still wears the cosmopolitan trappings of the
Islamic presence; the Cathedral of Santa Maria is a re-decorated mosque.
Geographically divided into a newer, lower-scale eastern half and an
older, more traditional western half, bisected by a slow-moving river,
walled by fortifications her Moorish captors built against Christian
re-invasion, Madrid is a quiet city full of danger by virtue simply of
where it is. Every Kindred there, it is assumed, is there because of
something -- some failure, some humiliation, some slight -- in her past.
At the very least, the sort of risky opportunities open in a city so
underpopulated is the most positive thing which can have drawn any of them
there. Some few came with the reconquista, and settled, yet even they
have hidden reasons for staying put.
On this night, the night before Easter Sunday, 1094, the city is
celebrating. Lent is finished, and at sunrise the Messiah will be born
again. A feast goes on in the town square, before the gates into the
massive cathedral, and the Kindred gather in their quiet Elysium -- a
garden attached to the same religious complex, overlooking the river. It
is time for the annual ritual of Presentment to the Prince, a Lasombra
named Maria Josephina.
Presentment itself carries on as normal. Each member of the city's
vampiric population introduces him- or herself:
With introductions done, the Prince asks whether there is business to
which she must attend, in court. There is none, although a newcomer
with strange, elongated and angular features arrives, leaving his horse
tied up outside the garden, and tells the Prince he is a Lasombra, and
wishes to speak with her after mass. She agrees, and dismisses the
Assembly so she might arrive at the cathedral early for a midnight Holy
Saturday mass. Everyone else makes their way out, save for the PC's, who
all wish to study the newcomer, now standing by his horse outside the gate
into the garden. Rome asks to speak with the man, but gets in return a
chuckle and the reply, "No, I do not think that is an option,
unfortunately," before a wall of darkness erupts across the gateway,
trapping the PC's in the garden's walls. Rome attempts to climb the wall,
while the others wonder what's going on, and gets a crossbow bolt to the
chest as thanks for his effort -- it doesn't hurt him, but it's a nasty
reply. More blackness erupts from the wall around the garden, forming a
ceiling; while the PC's react with shock and dismay, the stranger --
beautiful in an alien sort of way -- steps through a hole in the wall of
shadow, letting it close behind him, another crossbow bolt sliding into
place.
"I'm sorry," he tells them, "But the portents are very bad. It's best
this way, trust me. History will be thankful."
With that, he engages them in battle. Celeste tries to cut her way
through what she's recognized as some powerful Obtenebration, while Aner,
Colin and Rome take on the man at once, doing some frightful damage with
swords and a shovel, but watching the wounds close on the man and inky
tentacles burst out of his sides, grabbing for them. Constance, seeing
what's going on, er, freaks out, and becomes an 8-foot beetle-like
creature, racing into the fray. Aner realizes two demons are fighting one
another within arm's reach, and tries to go head-first through the
Obtenebration over the gate, in escape, knocking himself flat to the
ground. Colin gets the heck out of the way, and Rome stares with a bit of
disbelief as the giant alien-beetle thing grabs the stranger by the head,
the stranger tentacle-wraps the alien-beetle thing, and they start
shredding each other where they stand. Eventually the stranger's head
produces a spray of thick vitae, and his body goes limp.
The Prince is summoned, hears the tale, and goes over to examine the body.
Celeste overhears the stranger when he (surprisingly) opens an eye at the
Prince and murmurs, "The first phase is done. How fascinating, that you
have passed." With that, he sinks into a pool of shadow which forms on
the ground underneath him, the pool closes behind him, and he's gone.
The Prince tells the PC's she has no idea what he was talking about, or
who or what he was, although she does say that she agrees -- he looked
like no Lasombra she has met in her time. Celeste writes to some of her
clanmates she knows elsewhere, and Rome and Aner comb the city looking for
any sign of cohorts. Colin spots the horse he rode in turning and racing
away when the stranger fails to step out of the garden (freed of walls of
Obtenebration when he went limp in Constance's grasp), and Constance
throws a screaming fit about her damned soul after she drops Zulo Form.
No one is able to learn anything, eventually, and the PCs settle into an
uneasy curiosity as to what the man meant. Portents? Portents are rarely
good.
One ensuing consequence of the evening is the discovery that Millecande
possesses sufficient Auspex to see who last handled an object, and the
circumstances at that time. Over the next year, in return for her
services being on permanent retainer for the Prince, she receives a hefty
Domain, and begins teaching Rome to use Auspex 1, as well.
Back to the top.
It is one year later: Easter Eve, 1095. The PCs have come to know one
another a little better, and Colin has become aware that the Prince is, on
occasion, checking him out quietly. She comes to the tavern where he
often spends his evenings, but she arrives silently on the arm of a
traveling merchant, never speaking to him but sometimes interacting less
directly. Meanwhile, Celeste and Rome have taken up some sort of
mentorship of Constance, in many ways. Aner continues working as a member
of the Night Watch in the city, assisted in the practical difficulties of
being an undead member of the workforce by his friendship with the Captain
of the City Watch.
The Holy Saturday feast is, as previously, going on in the town square,
and Presentment is scheduled for that night, as usual. The city's Kindred
arrive outside the gates of Elysium, one by one, but no matter who rings
the bell or for how long, the Prince's chief ghoul, a woman named Julia,
fails to appear. Eventually another ghoul altogether comes to answer it,
just as Colin and Aner hear the first sounds of a carriage approaching
Elysium, on the street, at a break-neck pace. Staying behind, they watch
for its approach, while others step inside and look around to see Elysium
unprepared for the meeting. The Prince steps through the entrance from
further into the cathedral's property, from the other direction, looking
worried about something.
Colin and Aner watch with surprise and concern as the carriage approaches,
a bundle of rags is thrown at them by the driver, and the carriage blazes
past. Aner bends down to open the rags, and sees Julia's head wrapped in
the bundle, dead eyes staring back at him. Colin uses Celerity to move
and think more quickly, whipping around and creating an illusion
(involving sight and smell) of a pack of wolves in the horses' path. They
rear back, the carriage loses its back axle, and the driver barely hangs
onto the reigns to keep going at a reduced rate, panic on his face. An
illusion of a reversed curve in the street later, and Colin, Aner and Rome
are racing towards the wreckage -- licked at the corners by flames from
the lamps -- and the broken, twisted body of the driver at its top. He's
alive just long enough to tell them he has no idea who the woman was, he
was simply paid to bring it, by a man named Suarez. Then, his wounds
gushing, he expires in Aner's arms after a brief debate regarding ghouling
him so he could talk longer (then killing him).
Meanwhile, Celeste alerts the Prince to the situation, and
she reacts coldly, masking any sorrow or surprise behind a hard
countenance. "Where is the carriage," she asks, and Constance points out
the wreckage down the street, towards which Celeste has now started to
move, in hopes of helping somehow. Cries are starting to go up from nearby
about a fire, and Colin, Aner and Rome toss the corpse back into the
wreckage -- which, Colin notices, is completely bare on the inside, rather
than all posh, like a proper carriage should be -- and run before it
really starts to catch flame.
The Prince tells the five of them, on the spot, that she wants them on
this case. For most, it's a form of repayment for the violence a year
before in her Elysium, and a vote of some sort of confidence in them,
mixed together. They react with suspicion -- it seems to them that the
Prince is acting too quickly. She's not showing her surprise at the
matter. She does, however, cancel Presentment indefinitely, while she
tries to attend to the matters made to be at hand by the occurance --
namely, starting to figure out what's going on, and letting the PCs get
about the business of "investigating," as she put it. Unfortunately,
she's given zero advice, or direction. Retiring from the meeting, she
disappears, and Aner goes to begin questioning merchants who might have
seen Julia that morning, at the start of the day.
To make the long story short, the party nails down that there is a man in
gold (Gold Man) who may have handed the head off to the dead carriage
driver. There are two men, Red Man and Green Man, who were seen leaving
the city with Julia that morning (she appeared to be leaving more or less
willingly, although she looked dishevelled and bloodied). They left in
the direction of the southwest, on the road to Toledo. None of the PCs
are familiar with this road, as its ultimate destination is the ongoing
war of the reconquista. Eventually they agree to go ahead and
mount up, pooling some resources to get everyone who can ride one a horse,
and they set off to the southwest.
Before they depart, however, they run into the Nosferatu, who are
typically regarded as gossiping snobs and troublemakers. They taunt the
party mildly, commenting that "now is a good time to leave Madrid," when
asked where they're going with travel gear on their horses. They indicate
they, too, will be headed southwest, and off they ride.
Meanwhile, Aner has been seeing squirrels a good bit, for no apparent
reason. A street urchin bumped into the party, looked around at them, and
declared the squirrels kept attacking him -- squirrels from the river, he
said. After scaring the bejesus out of the kid trying to interrogate him,
they agree to get their stuff together and meet at the southwest gate of
the city the next night, as soon after sunset as possible.
As their journey begins, the party begins to get to know one another a
little better, and they find night travel surprisingly quiet, save the
appearance of four mortal highwaymen, three of whom die by the blade and
one of whom is Dominated into offering himself over to the Church as a
servant, as soon as possible. Whee for the Road of Heaven. As the
journey continues, the coterie arrives in the first village out,
Nibelheim, a six hour ride from Madrid. It's a quiet place of probably a
hundred people, with one taproom, to which the party goes. Spotting a
stranger there who keeps staring at them, they are eventually approached
by a man with bushy eyebrows and slightly backswept ears. He tells them
the town is his, and they should leave as soon as the sun sets the next
night. They agree, but not before Constance completely drains a
grandmotherly woman she connives into thinking that she's lost from her
mother.
The next evening, they set off pronto down the road. Five hours away they
find the second village, Oro, a slightly larger town with about two
hundred residents. It sports a slightly larger church, and a larger
graveyard, although still only the one tavern with rooms upstairs.
Reserving rooms, they realize that a man in a green shirt, perhaps the
Green Man, is sitting at a table, playing cards, laughing it up drunkenly
with his wife in tow. As they leave, Rome corners them and says he needs
to speak to the man, called Enrique, immediately. When Enrique protests
that it is very late, and he has business in the morning, Rome tells him
it's a matter of church business. Meanwhile, Colin observes from the
doorway, and Celeste and Aner sneak through some shadows to observe more
closely, overhearing the conversation in its entirety.
On the other side of the village, Constance plays in the graveyard,
finding two fresh graves, one of which has a very old grave marker --
blank, as the vast majority are at the time, but weather-worn. Curious as
to why a new grave is with an old stone, she reshapes her hand (love that
Vicissitude), and starts shoveling, only to dig up a body in clothes that
look like they were Julia's. Running back towards the tavern in town, she
departs quickly.
As the chapter winds to a close, a small child walks right up to Celeste
and Aner, in their Obtenebration-emphasized shadows, points at the Green
Man, and says, "He's a merchant. He lives in a house on the other street
over." "Why are you telling me this?" he's asked, by Celeste. His reply:
"Just felt like it. Night, lady." And then he turns, and disappears
around a corner.
Back to the top.
When last we left our intrepid band, they were standing around talking to
someone named Enrique, who was perhaps the Green Man, one of the two who
had taken Julia from the city on the apparent day of her death. As Rome
continued to argue with the man, urging him to please let him speak to him
now, as it was a matter of vital church importance, Colin decided the
situation was going nowhere fast. Firing off an illusion of Constance's
Zulo Form, over where Constance was standing herself (having caught up to
the group after making her discovery of Julia's body in the graveyard in
town), Colin watched the fun. Rome screamed and fell down; Enrique
screamed and took off running, his wife still in tow, up the street.
Celeste and Aner decided now was when they should follow him, although
Celeste botched her Wits + Stealth roll to follow without being seen, fell
flat on her face, and screamed, 'Monster, Demon, Aieeeeeeee,' sort of
half-heartedly. Aner had a bit more luck, and saw Enrique and wife slam
the door shut behind them on a house/store, in which the lower level was
obviously a shop front, and from the second story windows of which pairs
of hands were suddenly seen to be rapidly slamming closed all the
shutters. A few of the townsfolk had been awakened by the screaming, and
gathered around the front of the building while Aner knocked on the door
and Rome and Constance approached. Colin and Celeste, meanwhile, snuck
around the back, and managed to get the back door open, observing the
three stabled horses behind the building. Once inside, they confirmed
quietly that it was a shopfront downstairs, and saw stairs leading up,
presumably to living quarters. As Aner continued to knock on the door,
and the townspeople continued to gawk at the spectacle, Enrique threw open
the shutters from a second story window and cried, "Demons! There are
demons about! I've seen one myself! Go to your homes, for safety!"
Crossing themselves and scurrying, townsfolk started off towards home, and
sleep.
As Colin and Celeste had a look around the first floor, they both realized
the frenzied conversation they'd heard murmuring away upstairs had
stopped, as though they were listening for something downstairs.
Cursing their inability to mask their own sound, Colin flipped the bar
from the door in front, and let Aner inside. "Is there someone down
there?" a trembling voice inquired, eventually. "I'm here to speak to you
of the demons," Aner declared proudly. It didn't do much to help.
Again, to make the long story short, they eventually talked the guys --
the Red Man was hiding upstairs -- down the steps, shaking weaponry in
their hands. They didn't act like cold-blooded killers, but oh well.
When asked about "the woman they murdered," the Red Man, named Tobias,
made a run for the back door; Enrique fainted dead where he was. Celeste
fired off enough Obtenebration to make Tobias Roetschrek, more or less,
and as Aner chased Tobas out the front door into the waiting grasp of
Rome, Colin dragged Enrique upstairs and Celeste went up ahead to calm the
cowering wife. Eventually they're all bound and gagged, after realizing
that the coterie are vampires, and suddenly becoming completely
subservient, even happy to be bound and gagged by their enemies
from minutes before. Celeste finds a letter from a "Father Dominic,"
telling Enrique and Tobias that they shouldn't fear the consequences of
their actions because they do God's work, and they will be rewarded
instead. He signs off that he hopes to see them the next night at Mass,
and will speak with them then if they wish. Deciding to cover up their
own violence this evening, they break the neck of Enrique and decapitate
Tobias, as revenge for Julia's kidnapping, then tie Enrique's wife to a
horse, weigh her down with Enrique's money, and send the horse southwest
at a gallop (easily accomplished by Aner more or less doing a scary dance
at it -- gotta hate not having any Animal Ken).
The coterie starts to put two and two together here, and decide mass the
next evening is precisely where they need to be. That decided,
they start to make their way to their rooms, with strict instructions to
the barkeep/inn-owner as they go past that no one is to disturb them
during the day. Aner spots the informative child from before across the
street, watching the party enter their inn while sucking his thumb, and
goes over to strike up a conversation. Explaining that he does "big
people chores," he finds out that the child lives on a local farm, and
has to go so he can feed his pigs. Colin's ghoul, Hans, goes to follow
the child, seeing him disappear into a barn and not come out for the 2
hours he watched.
Sitting in the church the next evening, they get their first glimpse at
Father Dominic, a healthily overweight man of the cloth who enters the
sanctuary from a side-door and begins the mass as though it were the
single most boring event in his life. He does comment, however, that this
evening's service the congregation -- all 200 residents -- should pray for
the souls of Enrique and Tobias, business partners in the town's general
supply shop, who murdered each other in an obvious quarrel over Enrique's
wife. The town reacts solemnly -- it's obvious the gossip was all over
town as soon as the store didn't open that morning, and someone kicked in
the door.
Deciding to liven things up a bit, Conil decides at random to make the
wooden crucifix, crudely hanging behind Father Dominic, glow green while a
voice recited Revelations 6:8, saying, "And I looked, and behold a pale
horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with
him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to
kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of
the earth." True Faith promptly swells from every soul in the church,
and the coterie, by virtue of statistically unlikely (to say the least)
rolls, all manage to stay in the sanctuary and not frenzy.
The priest reacts with no surprise, and as Rome distracts him after the
service with questions as to whether miracles graced the village often,
and Celeste further distracts him with a request to confess her sins,
Colin slips into the priestly chambers, then into a store room, and then
down some stairs behind a shelf and into a much smaller sanctuary, where
he finds several small statues of angels with fangs, and a skull under
glass, with natural fangs, preserved under the alter as though it were a
holy relic. He pockets a statue and bundles the skull up inside a stolen
priest's robe from the store room above, while Celeste draws the priest
into his study to confess, instead confronting him about what sort of work
for the church Enrique and Tobias were doing. At first the priest is coy,
but eventually he recognizes Presence at work, and immediately becomes
ingratiating, begging Celeste to stay after the service to "celebrate
mass" with himself and a few select others -- mainly the alderman who are
outside in the sanctuary still, being chatted up by Aner and Rome while
Constance plays and watches through a window, out in the graveyard.
Celeste refuses, departs pleasantly enough, and strides briskly for the
door. Colin slips out through those same priest's chambers, as the priest
watches Celeste go lustily, then falls in step with Rome and Aner. Once
outside, the five of them decide they must return to Madrid and inform the
Prince -- and equally important to them is the growing theory that the
Prince not only knows more than she's telling, but might well be wrapped
up in it all herself.
Gathering their things from the tavern and preparing their horses, they
ride out of town only to find themselves followed by no less than a cute,
scruffy puppy. Celeste, Aner and Colin immediately think it should be
killed ("it's a spy, I tell you"). Rome reacts more kindly, and Constance
insists she be allowed to keep it. It reacts the way an animal would to
Aner -- with fear -- and Celeste, Colin and Aner begrudgingly allow it to
live. Setting off on the road back to Nibelheim, they wonder aloud
whether the village will be different now that an entire generation of its
populace has been found dead behind a treeline, and they hope it's
interpreted as the plague.
Back to the top.
On the road back to Nibelheim, and Madrid eventually, the coterie
convinces Constance that she should feed the dog some of her blood, so it
is at least blood bound to her. She agrees, and they make their wending
way back to Nibelheim, which is remarkably quieter, even at this late
hour, than it was a few nights before. Noticing sprigs of rowan over
doorways, they wonder against what the citizens are protecting themselves,
and check into the inn (where the tavern keeper is Dominated by Celeste
into blurting out that there's fear of the plague in the tiny settlement).
Rome and Constance set off for the church yard, so that Constance can play
among the graves while Rome awakens the local priest to give confession.
Constance discovers a new friend in the graveyard, a tall, silent,
disfigured and silent man named Quill. He writes
on a slate for her to read, and nods his head or shakes it when
appropriate, and the two strike up something resembling friendship (at the
very least, curiosity about one another). It turns out Quill lives in
Madrid, sort of -- he lives near it, to the northeast. He considers Maria
Josephina his Prince, although he rarely if ever makes it to any
assemblies, as he's constantly out looking for items of study, as he is a
scholar.
Meanwhile, Colin goes out into the woods and fields around the village,
makes a damnably good Perception + Survival roll, and manages to uncover a
scuffed up section of earth in the middle of the thin woods where he
believes the local Gangrel, who warned them away a few nights before,
might be sleeping. He seeks to find out more about the Gangrel, you see.
So, he stands there and throws acorns at a big patch of bare earth over,
and over, and over, until finally a very sleepy, unhappy Gangrel rises
from the earth, snarling. A few short, meaningless questions later (his
answers involved repeated use of the phrase, "Gangrel like to be left
alone," you see), Colin makes his way back to town. Quill meets Rome when
he comes out of confession, and admits that he had gone to Oro on the
trail of the party, seen them leaving, and spent just a few hours there
himself, seeing what was up. He heard the heretic service once it was
underway, in the church basement, and immediately turned back towards
Nibelheim, and Madrid, to catch the coterie. Rome goes to alert Colin
(who returns from his chat with the Gangrel and dons his stolen priest
robes from Oro's heretic padre), Celeste and Aner that they were followed,
and the four return to find Quill and Constance still chatting.
Introductions go warily around, and the suspicions of Aner, Celeste and
Colin only grow. Quill informs them he's retiring to a crypt in the
town's graveyard, one of the very few such structures -- and very old,
bearing the name and date of a family from a wealthier time -- as the
troupe returns to their inn. Constance's new pet, however, wriggles free
and disappears into the woods, leaving her in a crying jag and Rome and
Colin order their ghouls to search the town during the day.
The next night, they awaken to go downstairs and find the taproom
completely empty. That's odd. Even the tavernkeeper is gone. Stepping
outside, they realize why -- Rome's squire and Hans, Colin's ghoul, and
Constance's new little dog, are standing fifty yards down the street,
faced by all one hundred of Nibelheim's residents, who are carrying
torches, farm implements, crucifices, the usual riot gear. The local
priest is at the front, chanting an incantation in latin which Quill,
awakening on the other side of the mob, in the graveyard,
recognizes as a legitimate exorcism litany. The ghouls, cowering in fear
already, hear Rome call out to them, as Colin, Celeste and Aner slip
around the tavern to the stable, to grab their horses. Constance runs
forward, calling the dog's new name, and (surprisingly), it jumps free
from the squire's hands and runs to meet her. The ghouls, seeing their
horses being brought around, turn and run as well, as the mob begins to
surge forward at a walking pace, holy symbols and torches held aloft.
Colin decides it's time for another home-made miracle, and creates an
illusion of Christ, on the cross, which appears in the middle of the
street. Mouth unmoving, it seems to speak, as a voice cries out, "People
of Nibelheim, the knight and his companions are holy men and women -- your
priest is a heretic! Destroy him!" With that, the image disappears, and
the crowd grumbles in confusion. The priest, shock obvious on his face,
stares at where the image had been. And, yes, another wave of Faith
washes across the village, driving Celeste, Aner and Quill (who must run
around the mob) to flee at all costs. Rome, Constance and Colin
are able to stay behind, and Rome pulls open his breastplate to reveal his
cross-shaped wound (flaw: Open Wound, as per some book or another) which
leaks blood constantly, crying out that the priest is a heretic. The
crowd goes insane, with torches and pitchforks and scythes flying as
frightened hands simply let go, and people start running in every
direction. Some fall on the priest, to kill him, while others fall on
them to protect him, and yet others fall on both in the confusion.
Taking their chance to escape, the party rides away with Canus (the little
dog's name, Constance has decided) held in Constance's arms. The ghouls
report that the priest had told them they either were demons or traveled
with demons, and that they had brought the plague, and death, and would be
driven out by the faithful people of Nibelheim, before the coterie had
awakened and gone outside. They also report that Canus had been
unfindable all day, until he came running out of the graveyard just
moments after sundown, and that they believed he had been found and cared
for by the townspeople until the evening was interrupted by a general call
to the church. The man standing next to the priest throughout the scene
had, it turned out, been the ghoul of the local Gangrel. He had meant it
when he said he wanted to be left alone. Much more quietly, Hans reported
to Colin that he had found a blood-soaked patch of fur and skin which
looked like it might be the little dog, Canus', as though he had gotten in
a fearful scrap during the day. The dog, however, isn't missing any fur
or skin, and Colin's suspicions grow.
Arriving back in Madrid, the troupe goes straight to Maria Josephina's
house, to find that Lydia, another ghoul, is taking the job of chief
retainer to the Prince, and that Maria Josephina herself is otherwise
occupied but will meet them at Elysium in an hour. Quill takes advantage
of the time to copy down a scroll he finds among the very few books in
Maria Josephina's study, written in some script far too ancient for him to
recognize although the scroll itself is more or less newly made.
Constance stays with Quill, letting Canus off his crude leash only to have
him race upstairs, towards the private rooms of Maria Josephina and her
remaining ghouls, where she overhears an ominous phrase from the Prince's
lips, behind a closed door: "I don't care if what you told me turned out
to be true. I want you to leave me, my city and my Kindred alone.
Out, now!" Constance races downstairs and waits in the lobby, hoping to
see who was the object of the Prince's ire, only to wait a few minutes and
then abruptly realize the front door had just opened and closed.
Disappointed, she goes to Elysium in search of her friends.
Aner makes it to Elysium first, finding the sheriff and the other two
Brujah in some intense debate. He interrupts to ask the Sheriff whether
anything strange has been going on, and his vague insinuations that
something isn't right with the Prince earns him a terse reply that the
Prince has been locked away training Lydia to take Julia's place the
entire time. Rome arrives shortly, and the same conversation ensues.
Celeste, meanwhile, takes advantage of their hour before meeting with the
Prince to drop by the home of the Lasombra brothers, Tomas and Ricardo,
and make similar insinuations. She tells them, untruthfully, that Father
Dominic had told her his heretical services were encouraged by a French
Toreador named Millecande, which is of course also the name of the local
Auspex goddess and general puppy-dog of the Prince.
Making things really interesting, Colin watches Millecande leave
her haven, then sneaks inside and plants the vampiric skull-relic from the
church in Oro in Millecande's bedroom before showing up at Elysium
himself. Once all there, the Prince arrives, dismissing all but the
Sheriff, Lydia and the party. They tell her their story, although the
information that Colin supposedly overheard and told Celeste, that they
were sponsored by a Millecande, comes as a total surprise to Rome and to
the Prince. Millecande walks in, conveniently enough, right about then,
eyes going wide and confusion forming on her face. She is Dominated by
the Prince, saying she knows nothing of a church which worships vampires,
and Lydia is sent by Maria Josephina to search Millecande's house. Colin
and Quill follow, and Aner in turn follows them.
Meanwhile, Rome, Constance and Celeste stay behind to discuss their
findings with the Prince. Maria Josephina tells them they should find out
who is sponsoring the heretical church in Oro, because obviously
the priest, if he didn't have a direct vampiric mentor, wouldn't have
known who was the chief ghoul of the Prince of Madrid. They agree, and
begin discussing various methods, from torturing or Dominating it out of
him, to locking him away long enough to let any blood bonds fade, and even
just injuring him and seeing where he goes for help.
As an aside, I've yet to know why Celeste, Aner and Colin are
avidly working to frame Millecande, but I think they're trying to
test the Prince for a reaction. Not really sure, to be honest, although
there are grumblings of getting rid of her for some reason or another on
the PCs parts. In a tiny town like this, they just might get away with
it. We shall see.
As this chapter draws to a close, we find Quill climbing up and hanging
onto a second story window in Millecande's house, so he can listen for the
conversation which might transpire between Millecande's resident ghoul,
still at the haven, and Lydia, the Prince's ghoul, when she arrives to
search it. Colin and Aner watch from an alleyway, and hear as well, when
Lydia arrives, explains the situation to Millecande's ghoul, and gets an
angry refusal to assist her. Lydia disappears into the basement, and a
few moments later comes back up to the first floor, calling out to
Millecande's ghoul that she's going back to Elysium and he should probably
follow with her. He refuses, she starts to leave, he runs down the stairs
after her...and Aner knocks on the door just as they open it. Quill still
hangs on the side of the house, and Colin watches from nearby, while the
rest of the coterie wait with the Prince, the Sheriff and Millecande
herself, at Elysium.
Back to the top.
The session began with an ultra-brief rewind, in which Aner decided he
didn't want to go knock on the door after all. Colin, on realizing the
ghouls had found something and were on their way to Elysium, immediately
bolted up the street, ducking into an alley to let them go past so he
could follow behind and perhaps overhear their conversation. Aner
followed behind him, just making his way back. Meanwhile, Quill climbed
into his window from which he was dangling, went downstairs in the house,
and started checking around for signs of other people having been there
before the ghoul. With an exceptional Perception+Larceny roll, sure
enough, he found signs someone had been there before Lydia, moving through
the room's belongings much more carefully than the Prince's ghoul had done
in her rapid search for incriminating evidence.
At Elysium, the conversation between Rome, Celeste and Maria Josephina
continued, as Constance played with some bugs. Eventually they ran out of
things to discuss, just in time for Lydia, Michel (Millecande's ghoul) and
Aner not far behind to walk back into Elysium. Lydia carries something
bundled under cloth, walks forward, unwinds it, and reveals the vampiric
skull Colin had planted in the wardrobe in Millecande's haven. Millecande
immediately started babbling in self-defense, with hurried words of "Oh my
God, what is that, where did you find that, oh Mother Mary, it's the skull
of a vampire," while the Prince merely watched, detached. Rome turned to
Millecande and asked, "Do you have any enemies who would frame you for
murder," to which Millecande simply failed to reply, going on with her
babbling instead. So, Rome backhanded her across the face. With a
gauntlet on his hand. And a dot of Potence. Millecande's nose shatters,
blood sprays across the back of Rome's hand, and she stands there, her
head at an odd angle, staring at the ground. Everyone watches and waits
while the blood stops flowing, Millecande's nose resets with a sick
cracking noise, and she turns to look at Rome just long enough to produce
a very, very quiet growl that sends him running in the other direction.
Then, to the Prince, she says, "I know of no one who would hold such a
grudge against me." The Prince sighs, Rome stops running screaming once
he gets about 30 yards away, and the Prince tells Lydia to return to her
haven with the skull. The Prince herself will be along shortly to
consider what punishment would fit the crime apparently commited, she
says, and then she gets up to leave. Quill returns, as well, only to hear
what has transpired and see the Sheriff leave, thin-lipped and silent.
Quill catches Maria Josephina before she makes her final departure, and
asks a few questions about whether or not she believes Millecande is
responsible for Julia's death, the ultimate mystery being solved here.
The Prince doesn't say much, and departs, having given little indication
as to her beliefs except to say that she would be surprised if Millecande
-were- behind it, although she does think she's capable of having done it.
Aner steps out just after the Prince to go talk to a couple of people
about some of his ideas, and is gone. Millecande and Michel make their
way out, stopping so that Millecande can tell Rome he should never return
to her haven for another lesson in Auspex. Then, she goes. Quill follows
after her, at a distance, going to watch her house. Celeste opts to go
home immediately, Constance returns to her sire's home, and Colin (who
never returned to Elysium) goes to the Prince's haven so that he might
speak with her there. Rome goes home to work on polishing his armor.
Colin's conversation with the Prince turns out to be very, very fun. He
approaches her, and tells her that he has no idea why he told anyone that
Millecande was behind the heretics in Oro. The Prince asks if it were
possible someone had forced him to forget, and now he remembered it?
Colin's reply is that, no, he has no idea. The Prince offers to force him
to remember and speak the truth, but Colin asks:
"Is it required?"
Colin weighs the implied threat here, and then says, "Okay, fine, you can
make me remember." The Prince compliments him on his team spirit, then
Dominates him only to have him say, the first time, that -he- told himself
to say it, then that Father Dominic had forced him to say it. Maria
Josephina thanks him for the information and sends him on his way.
Quill goes and watches Millecande's haven, overhearing Millecande ordering
Michel to go out and find how she should go to get to this village of Oro,
because she's going to find out for herself who's behind these heretics,
and why they would want to blame her. Meanwhile, she begins packing for
travel. One of the Prince's ghouls is spotted by Quill while he's
listening in, handing a pouch to a bruiser-type down the street. The
bruiser-type immediately starts watching Millecande's house as well, and
hours later turns to go in the direction of the Prince's haven, as well.
Perhaps the most interesting bit came when Constance got home to her
sire's haven, and started telling him about everything she's seen and
heard. When she tells the story of letting Canus off his leash so she
would have an excuse to run upstairs in the Prince's house and listen,
Victor expresses pride in Constance, rewarding her with information of his
own: Colin is a special kind of vampire, he tells her, and she should pay
close attention to him because she may never meet another like him again.
He also says that he, too, overheard the conversation, except that he was
there -- in astral form. He tells Constance (and Rome, when he arrives)
that he's fond of going out of body to explore the city, and that night
the Gold Man had been the one in Maria Josephina's private chambers.
Victor goes on to explain that he doesn't know exactly why, but the Gold
Man, whose name Victor says he doesn't know, comes to the Prince
occasionally, offering her information which she always refuses to buy.
Was he coming to taunt her with the fact that he had known Julia was to be
murdered, and Maria Josephina turned him away without purchasing his
information when it might have done some good? Who knows.
Aner, Celeste and Colin join up for some sort of private consultations in
the tavern owned by one of Colin's ghouls. Eventually Lydia walks inside,
carrying a message from the Prince that if they are going to return to Oro
in search of more information about the heretics there, Maria Josephina
would appreciate them letting her know before they leave. Quill, off on
his own again, wanders down into the sewers in search of the Nosferatu who
haven't been seen, only to find no trace of Kindred but plenty of dark,
damp places to hide for the day.
A new night dawns in Madrid, finding Rome, Constance, Aner, Celeste and
Colin in Elysium (after Constance's sire found Canus barking outside
their haven, having gotten out in the night), making final preparations to
depart for Oro. Quill awakens in the catacombs underneath Madrid, and
notices odd behavior by some of the rats in the sewers. Chasing one down,
he goes with it to the Prince, only to see it die and then turn to dust
over the course of a few minutes. The Prince says she doesn't know what
this indicates about the Nosferatu, but she hopes they return soon.
Once Celeste goes home again and gets her things together, making the
coterie run about two hours late for leaving, they ride out of town with a
promise from Quill that he would meet them down the road eventually.
Travelling just a few minutes ahead of them, he brings down some deer and
waits a half hour out from Nibelheim, which the coterie managed to flatten
with a Chimerstry-inspired riot the last time they were here, with a
supply of blood at the ready for the PCs, should they need it. The ride
itself is quiet, almost silent, until the coterie meets up again with
Quill only to inform him they were full already, and didn't need the
blood. A debate ran for a while as to whether they should dig graves
there or go on into Nibelheim and hope no one recognized them from a few
short nights ago -- Quill reported that Nibelheim is a near-lifeless husk
of a town now, with perhaps thirty people in it, the church nearly
destroyed, most houses dark and empty. A few lights come from a precious
few buildings, but the sounds of the remaining voices are pleasant enough.
Rome opts to be buried on the far side of the village, circumventing it
through the woods, rather than go into the village at all. Constance,
meanwhile, offers to make sure no one is recognized -- by fleshcrafting
them new faces. A few amazing rolls later, she's managed to up Aner's,
Colin's and Celeste's Appearance traits by one and thoroughly altered
their facial characteristics. Constance turns herself into a little boy
rather than a little girl, and goes ahead to scope out the situation at
the town's one tiny inn. Sure enough, there she finds Millecande, having
a nervous but light-hearted-sounding conversation with the innkeeper and
two of the remaining residents of Nibelheim. She and her ghoul, Michel,
are masquerading (no pun intended) as brother and sister, and as they
retire for a very late night, the innkeeper turns to his friends and,
Constance overhears, says, "Isn't it nice to meet some Godly,
friendly travellers for once?" Constance The Near-Boy inquires with
the innkeeper after banging on the boarded-over front door, whether
her/his mistress and guards can have a room for the evening. The
innkeeper agrees, reluctantly, and sells Aner, Constance, Colin, Celeste
and Hans (Colin's other ghoul) the last three rooms for the night,
promising after they insist on it that he won't bother to wake them for
lunch. Quill goes off and has a look at the local church -- which is
smashed up pretty badly although newly redecorated with rough bouquets of
fresh flowers -- and opts for a crypt again. As Rome climbs into his
makeshift grave, instructing his squire to sit atop the grave to
protect him from any Gangrel or their ghouls, and Celeste, Aner and Colin
sigh heavily upon Constance's realization that her dog has, yet again,
slipped away just before dawn, and Quill falls asleep in his crypt, the
game came to an end with more than one character muttering quietly about
just how they would handle Millecande in the evening. Would she be
violent? Would they end up having to kill the rest of the town this time,
rather than "merely" inspiring them to kill each other? Only the passing
of time, and the daylight, would tell.
Back to the top.
The characters awoke in their various temporary havens for the day -- Rome
awakened just as the last bits of light fell back from the sky to his
squire (now named David) tapping on his armor with the shovel. Quill
awoke in his crypt, with a vague bad feeling about things. Constance
awoke with the same bad feeling, in her room at the inn. Celeste, Aner
and Colin all awoke, and as the group left the room they found Canus
asleep against their door, having returned during the day despite Hans'
report that he couldn't find him at all. Hans -thinks- he saw the
local (and territorial) Gangrel's ghoul during the day, but that he
himself wasn't spotted. Colin and Constance make their way downstairs,
and as Celeste and Aner leave the room to make their way out as well,
Millecande opens her door -- not recognizing the coterie members before
her because of Constance's use of Vicissitude to disguise them all the
night before. She nods a polite greeting, and they all go downstairs.
Celeste takes up station at a table in the inn's tiny taproom, while
Constance, Aner and Colin all eventually make their way out to the stables
to prepare their horses. Meanwhile, Millecande tells Michel to go take
care of the horses, as she wants to stop at the church in the village and
pray before moving on.
In the stables, Michel asks Constance (still disguised as a little boy),
Colin and Aner (whom he doesn't recognize, as noted before, due to the
Vicissitude disguises) whether they live here. He's curious, he says,
because it seems something terrible happened to the village not long
before, and none of the natives seem interested in talking about it. Each
of the coterie members hem and haw, and otherwise deny any knowledge of
it. Eventually Michel makes his way out, and down the street towards the
church.
Rome mounts up and rides into the trees, keeping sight of the village
(small as it is, he can pretty much see the whole place). He notices a
big, scruffy guy come out of the woods and start wandering the graveyard.
He also sees Millecande come down the street and enter the church, and a
few moments later, he hears quiet weeping from inside. His player's
commentary? "It doesn't really matter; the pillars of smoke can't be far
behind."
Sharing an advantageous perspective from the rooftop, Quill sits atop the
inn, long-bow in hand, waiting to see what's up. He's got, as noted, a
bad feeling about things -- although his is less visual than Rome's.
While those at the inn prepare the horses, Rome sees the scruffy guy leave
the graveyard and walk to one of the church windows, look in, turn and
start heading back into the village, knocking on a door. Michel comes up
the road a moment later, on his horse, leading Millecande's behind him,
and then the Gangrel's ghoul exits the house into which the scruffy guy
just went, going to a door down the way and knocking on it. A hurried
conversation ensues, and the ghoul moves on to another door. Another
hurried conversation ensues. About this time, Colin, Aner, Constance,
Celeste and Hans ride up the street, and Celeste goes inside to pay her
respects to God before moving on.
Still unrecognized due to Vicissitude, Celeste kneels at the banister
before the alter, at the far end from Millecande. Eventually, outside,
the coterie notices the scruffy guy -- who is recognized by Colin and Aner
as the local Gangrel -- walking up the road at a liesurely pace. He
stops, glances around the coterie, nods. Aner greets him, and the Gangrel
asks where the coterie is headed. Aner replies they're on their way to
Madrid, from Toledo, but their lady is inside praying. The Gangrel, who
had read Millecande's aura and knew she was a vampire (in his turf, no
less), ah's quietly, and replies that some friends of his said that the
lady inside praying was actually from Madrid, and on her way to
Toledo. Then Aner and Constance and Colin realize the Gangrel is
giving them the optic once-over, and then he says, grumbling, "Yeah,
definitely time to go do some prayin'," before walking inside. He kneels
at the alter, Aner following him inside, and Constance as well (her danger
sense going haywire in the Gangrel's presence), to look at Celeste for a
good, long moment. Then, he begins to pray.
"Our father, who doesn't really exist but what the hell, who art not in
Heaven, give me the strength to defend my town, even though you don't
really care since you're not actually able to hear me."
Celeste can't help but notice that he's growing claws as he prays, hands
folded before him. She begins counter-praying, trying to feign ignorance,
when the Gangrel whips around and claws across her chest, sending her
flying through the air and out a window.
Millecande stands, and throws open the doors of Presence, making the
Gangrel incapable of attacking her as well. Aner, for unknown reasons,
decides to go for Millecande and not the Gangrel, and lunges to attack
(after making his Willpower roll to defeat Majesty). He fails to wound
her, and she screams, pleading, "Not here, not in a House of God," before
escaping -- rather quickly -- by going up a wall and out a window of the
church.
Meanwhile, Constance, on seeing Celeste attacked, flips out and pops Zulo
Form on everyone. Growing eight feet tall and buggy, she lunges for the
Gangrel, who lunges at her. They take ineffectual swings at one another
before the Gangrel manages to thrust his hand through Constance's carapice
and start tickling her heart. Aggravated damage ensues.
Rome, meanwhile, has galloped forward to sit near Colin and Hans, with
David not far behind, since he noticed that what few residents of the city
were left had arrived, en masse, advancing up the street with torches and
pitchforks -- the classic lynch-mob ensemble. Quill, also seeing this,
jumps from the roof of the building and starts following the mob. Rome,
in a fit of righteous rage (since he still thinks the Christ on the Cross
the last time they were in Nibelheim was real), lunges forward on
horseback into the mob. Hans flanks the group and attacks the rear, Quill
starts firing arrows, David fires his crossbow, and Colin starts whacking
people up front.
Celeste, having hidden under some darkness long enough to heal one of her
three aggravated wounds, crawls across the ground and up into the window
of the church so she can see Aner trying to climb out a window on the
other side, in pursuit of Millecande, and the Gangrel and Constance duking
it out in the middle of the church's aisle. Clamboring inside, she throws
her knife and lands it squarely in the back of the Gangrel, giving
Constance the edge she needs to wrap the Gangrel in a bear-hug and flatten
him against the ground, his hand still in her chest.
Outside, Colin manages not to Roetschrek from all the torches, while Rome
fails utterly. He blows a willpower point to stay in control for one more
round, just in time for Millecande, at ultra-high speed, to tear around
the corner of the church and...make everyone fall in love with each other?
Quill takes out another torch-bearer on Rome, and shoot a burning flag
free from Rome's unused lance, saving him from further chance of
Roetschrek. Aner, meanwhile, tears around the corner of the church in hot
pursuit of Millecande (still for no apparent reason), grabbing hold of
Millecande and trying to bury his fangs in her neck (and failing). While
the mob stares around in confusion and Rome breaks free, tearing away at
break-neck speed with fangs showing, Colin creates a pretty illusion
infront of Millecande to distract her. Hans takes out a few more mob
members in the back, and David starts chasing after Rome, his regnant,
afraid for his master's safety.
Inside, Constance activates some Vicissitude to turn the Gangrel's
rib-cage in on itself, scoring enough successes to pierce his heart and
cause half his remaining blood to explode out of the hole created. As
blood flies everywhere, both Constance and Celeste frenzy, and leap on the
Gangrel. There's one last stifled groan, and then the Gangrel expires as
Constance diablerizes him and gets to be shocked by the sensation of a
soul shooting through her body before shattering forever.
Rome, just as he's freeing himself of the Roetschrek, realizes he smells
blood. He's -covered- in blood. And he's way hungry. So, he frenzies as
well, leaping from his horse and wheeling around to see in his line of
sight: David, his squire; Quill, his coterie-mate; a mob of mortals,
still standing around confusedly.
Around this time, Aner is surprised when Millecande breaks free of his
grasp momentarily and says to him, "Run, now, while you can,
please!" He responds by tearing her throat open with his fangs.
Colin, meanwhile, launches another illusion, this time of someone crawling
out of the ground and running toward the mob which is again shocked to
feel the sense of love dissipate entirely from the air.
Rome's squire, David, recognizes a vampire in frenzy and leaps into the
bushes. Out of sight, out of mind. Rome races head-long back into the
mob, fangs bared, screaming, "Blood! Blood! Blood for the Blood God!"
That's what his player gets for spending too much time infront of "Chaos
Gates." Colin decides he's thirsty, and in the confusion, grabs a random
villager, hauls him up onto the horse, and starts drinking. Aner throws
Millecande to the ground, and starts drinking, having knocked her into
torpor by nearly decapitating her with his teeth in a single go. Inside,
Constance ceases to frenzy, while Celeste stays at it, and Constance is
forced to hold her down, face-first against the stone floor, until it
passes. Quill races into the bushes to make sure Rome's squire is safe,
and in the background Canus just barks his freakin' head off.
The remaining mortals in the mob, more or less the folks who had just
egged their friends on, see demons in action and decide to run for it.
Three of them actually make it away, one of them being the innkeeper. As
the dust starts to settle, and Constance feels Celeste cease frenzying
beneath her (only to come around with a sudden realization she hates all
Gangrel, and they must be destroyed at all costs -- gotta love those
derangements as a result of botching a frenzy roll), Colin chases down two
of the three escaping mortals, killing them, while the innkeeper sets fire
to his own inn and rides away towards Madrid. In the last week, a dozen
demons had stayed under his roof. It's in those moments you accept a real
life change.
While Aner knelt beside Millecande's rapidly-dissolving corpse, having
just diablerized her himself, he starts to wonder what the hell is going
on, and what he's going to say to the others, when he feels a piece of
wood pierce his back. He gets his hands on Michel -- Millecande's ghoul
everyone had forgotten -- but not a split-second later Michel gets the
stake all the way in, and Aner crumples to the ground still choking the
life out of Michel. Celeste yanks the stake back out, and Aner munches on
Michel for good measure. Realizing what they've done, the coterie gets
down to covering their tracks, throwing "turbans" (I kid you not) around
town and setting fire to some buildings to make it look like an attack.
Meanwhile, Constance bone-crafts horns into some of the dead, and Quill
shrivels a few into mummy-like corpses to achieve the proper horror movie
effect. Aner realizes he feels less convicted in his beliefs now (there
was no roll -- he simply lost a point of road, period), although
Rome's conscience seems to have held up. The group gets their act back
together, drains more blood out of some of the corpses, and rides out of
town, leaving a burning village (pillars of smoke and all) behind.
It's funny, really -- the mob never really attacked Rome and Colin.
They mainly just got cut down. Oh, there were attacks here and there, but
thirty people ought to be able to rush two guys on horseback. Yet they
didn't. Hrm.
Hours later, they arrive in Oro just in time to get rooms at the inn where
they are greeted with warm welcomes. The innkeeper inquires as to whether
they had trouble on the road -- they're covered in blood, after all. Rome
tells them a pack of Moorish dogs were ransacking the village of
Nibelheim, and while he tried to best them, he couldn't get them all. The
city watch, he says, should be on immediate alert. Meanwhile, they tell
the innkeeper they'd like to see Father Dominic as soon as possible. The
innkeepers tells them that after they've slept (since they've had a night
of travel and fighting), they can try to talk to Father Dominic, but
surely he'll be running the memorial mass the next evening? Terrible,
that, the way a tiny boy and his father were so brutally taken from this
world. Everyone knew the father abused the boy, but the boy killed his
father in revenge and then..."punished" himself, taking his own life.
It's too gruesome to discuss, he says, and says he's rather not speak of
it again. Aner is deeply disturbed to discover the dead little boy was
Pig Boy, and goes to the barn where Pig Boy worked to find it in disarray,
as is the dark, empty house next to it.
Quill finds a crypt to sleep in, and the rest of the coterie beds down
looking forward to tomorrow night's mass, so they might yet again deal
face to face with Father Dominic, everyone's favorite member of the
Cainite Heresy.
Back to the top.
Tonight's session was preceded with a big Memorial Day food
extravaganza at my house -- Mike & Bascha split the work of boiling up
some incredible crab legs and made shrimp cocktail while I made hamburgers
out on the porch with a grill and everything. The burgers were good, but
the crab legs were the real hit of the evening. Mike described it
accurately by saying we just tore into them and had bits of crab meat
flying through the air. It's true. At one point, I picked crab meat out
of my hair. It was hardcore good stuff. Yum. Once we were all
there and fed, we moved inside and sat down for about six hours of
vampire, while Kat ate the strawberries. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, good.
The group awakens in Oro, everyone but Quill having stayed in the inn.
The group awakens, heads downstairs (or out, as the case may be), and as
Colin, Rome, Constance, Hans, David make their way to the church (where
Quill, ever the simian, has gotten on the roof), Celeste and Aner head for
Pig Boy's house (again). They investigate long enough to find the barn
empty, the hay stale, stagnant water breeding mosquitos. There's a pool
of blood in one of the stalls, bloodied knives set off to the side and a
bloodied whip hanging over one of the stall walls. Inside, in the kitchen
area (okay, so it's a fancy hut), there's more blood splashed around, now
drying and generally stinking up the place. For a vampire on the Road of
Heaven and another on the Road of Humanity, this is a creepy place to be.
A trail of blood leads between house and barn, and Aner and Constance make
their saddened way to the church, where townspeople are beginning to
gather.
Constance (still in the Vicissituded guise of a little boy) meets a little
girl who's very sad at Pig Boy's death. "My mom says he's going to Hell
now, because he killed someone." The girl is generally unable to be
comforted, but Constance (alias Nol) does a pretty good job of it anyway.
Briefly debating killing the little girl's parents, Constance instead
makes his/her way to a window of the church to listen in on the service.
Rome, meanwhile, goes and sits on the very front pew, and makes some
chit-chat with one of the aldermen of the village -- one of the six men
waiting to speak with Father Dominic when last they were there. Quill
starts listening from the rooftop for anything interesting, and Colin goes
(in his priest robes) and knocks on Father Dominic's door, off to one side
of the sanctuary, hoping to catch the priest before mass. When no one
answers, he picks the lock on the door (with the aid of an aural
distraction that gets everyone's attention), slips inside, and finds it
completely dark. A little Chimerstry fixes that right up, and Quill
(peeking through the thatch roof) is shocked that Colin can just
make a whole room light up. Is this magic? Witchcraft?
An exploration of the priest's quarters reveal about half his belongings
(few to begin with) missing, and a bar across the door into the church
storeroom. That removed, Colin decides that whatever they're trying to
keep in there, he doesn't really want to meet face to face, but sure, why
not let it out? He heads back out only to be greeted by one of the
Aldermen, who gets pulled aside for a brief conversation in which Colin
reveals his fangs and says that the Aldermen and Father Dominic are about
to be in a great deal of trouble for the sort of "angellic visits" which
they enjoy on occasion. The alderman starts playing stupid, and says that
Colin really should discuss this with Father Dominic, later. Colin
agrees, lets the guy go, and heads back into Father Dominic's office to
"look for him." He gives the storeroom a whirl for laughs, finds it
exactly as he last saw it, and heads downstairs to the theoretically
heretical sanctuary in the basement -- only to find it stripped bare of
all signs of the Heresy, save the alter with (now cleaned) drains for
vitae built into it. Poking around, he finds a letter in the alter which
reads invites the "Dear Brethren of Madrid" to visit a man named Suarez
upon arrival in Toledo if they wish to speak with Father Dominic, and two
suits of clothes -- the clothing the Nosferatu were wearing when they left
Madrid.
Meanwhile, Father Dominic hasn't shown up, but the rest of the town has,
including Aner and Celeste. Everyone's getting antsy, and an alderman
suggests to Aner, when he goes to knock on Father Dominic's door and
receives no answer, that the "other priest" lead the mass in Father
Dominic's stead. Colin leaps at the chance, and heads upstairs, letter
pocketed along with one of the suits of clothing from the Nosferatu.
Starting off in Latin, he forgets the service word-for-word (he doesn't
speak Latin, after all) after about three minutes, slips into Gaelic, and
around when people are really starting to look like they could start a
scuffle over this (thanks to some raised tempers brought on by Constance's
liberal use of Dementate around the sanctuary), Aner's voice pipes out of
thin air to begin the mass over again, running through the same three
minutes, from the back of the church. Meanwhile, Quill climbs through the
thatch roof and starts investigating in the storeroom and the
sub-sanctuary himself, finding multiple scripture passages which have been
subtly altered to emphasize blood and its importance to God.
Finally an alderman denounces Colin as uneducated and unqualified, and
people start leaving the church nervously. Rome explains to those left
that he's a knight of a churchly order, and he can lead the requiem mass
if need be. Only about a quarter of the village stays, but they pray
intently. The rest wander out into the yard around the parish, some to
the grave of Pig Boy to pray, others to go looking for Father Dominic.
Rome has an unpleasant conversation with an alderman who insists that
Rome's curiosity regarding the good father's personal habits ("is he prone
to taking walks at random?") would be best used if re-directed towards
joining a search party and actually helping. Instead, Rome sends
two local boys to the stables (where Colin, Aner, Quill and Constance are
readying the horses along with Hans and David, after Colin said that it
was really important everyone leave now) to find out if Father Dominic's
horse is still there. Celeste follows the alderman, who stop by the home
of one of their number long enough to grab pitchforks and blades, and head
back out into the night.
Father Dominic's horse is gone, it turns out, and the coterie decides he
must be headed for Toledo because they didn't meet him on their way from
Madrid (Colin still hasn't told anyone of the letter in the alter, signed
by a man named Suarez). They mount up and ride away, arriving seven hours
later in a much larger village -- town, almost -- of 400 people. The
innkeeper lets them have rooms, and promises not to disturb them.
Lots of people wake up feeling hungry, and by the time the place empties
of vampires, more than one citizen has fallen prey -- literally -- to the
coterie. (Constance spooks a cow into trampling the near-empty corpses of
the couple she slaughters, wisely, while Celeste frames two local men for
having engaged in homosexual behavio [ooooh, listen to the vaguely
clinical terminology]). Without even bothering to learn this village's
name, they mount up and ride forth again, finding themselves at the end of
the night in a tiny village of 100 again.
Quill and Celeste and Canus make for a crypt, arriving there about fifteen
minutes before sunrise, in the church graveyard, only to have Canus snap
the leather leash attached to his body-harness, and run off into the
woods. Celeste and Quill, even with a dot of Celerity, can't catch him,
only follow the sounds of the yipping, and eventually even they stop.
They do run across a pelt of a dog which they'd swear is Canus', and
realize something supernatural is obviously happening here. Back to the
crypt they go, and fall asleep, but not before seeing the sun start to
rise, realizing they haven't seen real shadow in years or even
decades, and feeling the deadly pin-prick of very diffused sunlight
against their skin.
Canus returns, of course, found sleeping outside the crypt in which Quill
and Constance slept, along with the old dog pelt they'd found on Canus'
path the dawn before. Now that Quill looks at that pelt they found, it
doesn't look like Canus' fur. It might fit him, were it a doggie fur
jacket, but Canus is perfectly healthy and in one piece when they see him
the next night. Brief experimentation is done, and Quill decides Canus is
of the Fay while Constance becomes convinced she's the proud owner of a
vampiric mutt (the first Canine Caitiff Cainite?).
Rome awakens and sets out to find children playing in the yard behind the
local church (a much nicer affair than the one in Nibelheim), and finds
out the local priest is loved and respected. Colin is treated like a king
in the tavern of the inn, still dressed as a priest, cajoled into telling
stories and playing the lute. Celeste and Aner go visit the local
priest, only to interrupt him in a deeply movinig session of what can only
be termed "marriage counseling," and realize he makes them vaguely
uncomfortable. They discover that in fact Father Dominic was there a day
or two before, but stopped only long enough to take a quick nap in the
church before moving on. The local priest didn't like Father Dominic very
much, but then he excuses himself, shuts the door on Celeste and Aner, and
goes back to his counseling. They in turn return to help gather up the
group, and eventually everyone sets out for the short four-hour ride to
Toledo itself. Days from Madrid, they come to the outskirts of Toledo (a
real city, of perhaps even 20,000 people!), only to find a Christian army
camped around the city and the news that the city has only in the last few
days been wrested from Moorish control. Aner hooks up with some old army
buddies, Rome hangs out with the Baron who's leading the army, Constance
takes her first chance to ditch her pony and go for a "real" ride on
Quill's much-ignored horse, and Quill, Colin and Constance all make their
way into town.
Constance wanders the streets, and eventually realizes the shadows around
her are not natural. The street is closed off in Obtenebration, and four
figures step forth from pools of black to greet her with a, "Sister?"
Coyly, information is exchanged, and she learns that the Gold Man lives in
this city. Also, they already know about Nibelheim. "These people have
some incredible intelligence," Rome's player declares. Well,
they're Lasombra. Constance also learns two men were seen entering the
city, and have since been unfindable -- they were of vampiric stock.
Colin and Quill head straight for the Cathedral of Our Lady, a
reconsecrated mosque in the middle of town. Quill's saddened to hear that
many of the books and scrolls maintained by the Moors have been burned,
but gets escorted to the library (or what's left of it), slips away from
his watchers, and breaks into some muckety-muck's room or another to find
a bunch of writings and texts that have been set aside, perhaps for his
personal library. Absconding with them, he leaves again.
Colin, meanwhile, follows the orders on the letter he dug out of the back
of the alter in Oro, and goes in search of Father Roberto, who's just now
awakened to begin his duties of tending a patch of strawberries in the
mid-spring pre-dawn dew-covered gardens. Working by candlelight to check
for mold or other blights, Father Roberto tells Colin that yes, the man
named Suarez was expecting them, and that he should expect a message after
they awaken the next night. Father Roberto even recommends an inn which
is "safe for your kind," with a smile. Called the Red Heart, it's about
three blocks east of the church. Eventually everyone ends up there, and
beds down, although Constance is yet again pissed off because Hans
(although Aner lies and takes the blame himself) somehow let Canus slip
out of his repaired harness, and he's disappeared. Again.
Upon awakening, the coterie finds Father Robert upstairs (all their rooms
were in the basement, how handy); he tells them to be at Suarez's (now
generally believed to be the Gold Man, since the dying carriage driver
mentioned a Suarez with his final breaths) home in an hour and a half.
Some shopping's done, and right before they leave to go to Suarez's, they
find Canus sitting on the front steps of the tavern, panting away happily.
Off they go, then, to Suarez's house.
At this point, the troupe and I got up, went out to the now pitch-black
and mosquito filled back yard of my house, and played out the final scene
there. That was fun. The PCs with Auspex got to take flashlights. But
now we all itch. A lot.
Upon arriving to find it pitch dark, Colin makes a diffuse light appear in
the sky, about ten feet overhead, to light up the area. They hear the
click of a half-dozen or so crossbows being loaded, and Colin drops the
light. A voice says, out of nowhere, "Please, if you don't fight, they
won't shoot you. Just....listen to me."
Identifying itself as Suarez, and later as a Follower of Set, the voice
tells them at length that he is not the person ultimate responsible for
Julia's death. Although he was, he admits, a part of it. Unfortunately,
no one was supposed to figure that out, and now Father Dominic is dead for
having failed him, and the Nosferatu are dead for finding out as much as
they did, and Suarez himself will die now for having admitted this much to
the coterie. So why not keep talking? Sometimes you tell truths to help
someone, and sometimes (he tells them) you tell truths because they hurt.
They are not the investigative team of the Prince, he tells them. No,
Maria Josephina picked six screw-ups from her city, and handed them the
job publicly, to make herself look weaker than she is. This, he explains,
was to fool her enemies. Then she really assigned the
Nosferatu to investigate, but then they got too close. And the
coterie got too close. So the Nosferatu were exterminated, but Suarez is
leaving the party alive, although he assures them that he is far more
powerful than they, and could kill them if he wished. (Constance waves
her hands in the air under the voice, and doesn't hit anything, I should
note.)
"Now that I've told you this, I'm sure I will die."
He explains that fear drives men more than love, and certainly more
than hate, and that his involvement (which included the Prince refusing to
purchase information from him, tsk) was driven by fear. Of what? Of a
ghost. Whose ghost?
The ghost of the first chief ghoul of the Prince, who's jealous of her
other ghouls, jealous of the Prince, and determined to take her apart
slowly. A ghost of fearsome power, more than capable of destroying them
all, he says.
He also assures them that by the time they return to Madrid, Lydia -- new
chief retainer of the Prince -- will be dead.
With these beans spilled, the voice stops moving in a circle around them,
and says, "Any questions?" No sooner are the words out of his mouth, than
a hole opens in the sky above him, giant claw-like pincer thingies reach
out, grab Suarez, and drag him inside. Quill and Aner think that makes
it time to get the hell out of Dodge, and the rest follow suit.
Constance, Celeste and Colin, however, hear the gateway open again, and
five chunks of Setite (big chunks) plop out, hitting the ground.
Constance tastes the blood, and sure enough, it's vampiric. Then
they book it, and the story draws to an end with them leaving the
garden and hearing a cry go up among the crossbowmen, who leap from their
posts and descend on the decomposing corpse of their former master.
Back to the top.
The coterie steps out of the garden and into the street, with Rome
conspicuously watching the sky for more signs of giant monsters while the
others discuss what to do. Celeste and Constance think it's a
great idea to vacate the city at maximum possible speed and
dignity, whereas Colin would like to stick around a little longer. Quill
seems disposed towards staying as well, while Aner is more on the
home-bound bandwagon. As they stand there talking, however, they realize
there's a circle of light shining on them from above all of a sudden, and
upon looking up, claws on the ends of giant arms descend upon the coterie.
Whatever killed the Setite isn't done.
As they scatter towards walls or dark corners, Aner is grabbed first,
while Celeste throws out some tentacles to try and hold the giant claw
back. Rome gets grabbed, then Constance (who pops Zulo Form almost
immediately). Quill goes straight through the wall of the house across
the street from the Setite, while Colin gets out of the way and observes
the arms, noting that other than Aner, they've attacked only those who
attacked back. Canus, for his part, cowers in a corner and
whimpers the entire time, like the little dog he is. Ahem. Eventually,
arms get hacked through, or claws get torn apart, although not before
almost everyone takes some damage. Dismembered arms begin retracting
through the hole in the sky, while new ones descend. Quill, inside the
house across the street, grabs a giant iron poker from the fireplace,
fires off his specialized Mortis 3 power (very nasty roiling mist that
does damage to everything within a ten-foot radius, including himself) and
runs back outside, making everybody's skin crawl. Suffice to say,
the six arms total which have descended are chopped up or otherwise
incapacitated, save the one around Rome, to which he clings as it begins
to retract. "It's a hole in the sky, and I want to see what's up there,"
he says. So, he does.
As the others pick themselves up or dust themselves off, healing wounds
and attempting to assess the situation, Rome is pulled aloft and through
the hole in the sky, where he sees...the city of Toledo. Only it's
decaying, crumbled, rotting. He looks at his own flesh, and down at his
coterie-mates, to see maggots crawling from every oozing shred of flesh.
He also sees....Julia? Standing behind Quill? And slightly above him, a
figure in a black cloak, with the cowl pulled low over his face, hands
waving in the air as though he controls the giant claws -- which are just
giant, disembodied limbs? As this begins to sink in, he sees Julia lift
into the air, screaming, then fly towards the figure in a robe before he
suddenly drops back through the hole which shuts with a clap of thunder
and he's dumped on the ground.
Meanwhile, back in the Skinlands, Quill realizes he's -hungry-. And
there's blood around. And...he frenzies. Back through the hole in the
house across the street he goes, racing at the first figure he sees, a
well-dressed man descending the stairs saying, "What the hell is going on
here?" Quill promptly attacks him, getting his teeth in his neck and a
taste of blood -- that's vampiric. Yummy! Celeste recognizing frenzy in
the eyes of her travelmate, chases after him, grabbing him with her
tentacles while the man underneath Quill sprouts tentacles of his own,
screaming for "Lord Lucien." Quill, frenzied as he is, gets held aloft
while Aner runs in, and Constance follows. Outside, Rome decides now is a
good time to go feed, and runs off for the poorer side of town. Colin,
meanwhile, finds a home in the same, wealthy neighborhood they're already
in, breaks in, and starts draining the sleeping people.
Inside, heavy footsteps begin descending the stairs, and when Celeste sees
a form of little -but- shadow step into view, she immediately curtseys,
hitting the floor with that Etiquette stat. Aner made sure the man Quill
had attacked was okay, and Quill blew some Willpower to get temporary
control so he could try to stake himself (which didn't work out).
Constance dropped out of Zulo Form, reverting back to her little-girl
"natural" state, not the little boy state, and curtseyed as well. Lord
Lucien asks where they're from, and what's going on, at which time Celeste
starts spillin' those beans. Telling Lord Lucien that she's from Madrid,
as are the others, on a mission from Prince Maria Josephina, and even that
she believes Maria Josephina is in over her head dealing with something,
she herself is surprised when Lord Lucien replies that he would be
surprised by that, given his previous experiences with Maria Josephina.
After a pause, he begins talking to Quill, who's still frenzied,
and...talks Quill out of his frenzy (I love Dominate 6). Then he asks how
soon the coterie will be leaving, and goes back upstairs. Quill is
released from the dozen or so tentacles wrapped around him, and put back
on the ground by Celeste (through the hole in the wall, with roughness).
The man on the stairs, who never gives his name, does turn out to be one
of the people who cornered Celeste the night before and questioned her as
a newcomer in the city, and listens to her story about the crab claws from
the sky (leaving out that they had been to see the Setite named Suarez,
aka the Gold Man).
Everyone goes to feed, and Constance goes to play, dismembering and
murdering a family of five -very- quietly, just for kicks. Quill
disappears into the sewers/catacombs, thinning the rat population and
going in search of someone he's been looking for. Similarly, Colin went
off in search of someone he's been looking for. Eventually, they found
their respective goals, but it meant they were away from the rest of their
companions when their companions decided that now was a very good
time to leave Toledo. Making their way out of the city, they head to
Village Four, four hours away, they get rooms in the only inn in town, and
go to sleep, realizing that Canus has, yet again, disappeared.
Quill and Colin, on the other hand, spend another hour finding out some
things about Toledo (perhaps very, very wisely), and decide to try and
catch up to the coterie after they find out they've left (with Quill's
horse). They end up getting most of the way and finding an abandoned barn
in which to sleep (under lots and lots and lots of hay). Getting up the
next night, they make it into town just on the heels of the rest of their
coterie.
The next night, Rome, Constance, Aner and Celeste awaken in the inn to
find that Canus hasn't returned like he normally would. Constance
goes outside calling his name, and he comes running up the road, running
slightly behind his normal schedule. Now's when Rome, Celeste and Aner
decide they need to find out what the deal is with Canus.
Constance, ever protective, makes sure an argument breaks out, so there's
a lot of screaming and yelling. The innkeeper comes outside, an older
man, and asks what's going on. Rome explains that the dog may be rabid,
and he's going to find out. The innkeeper asks that they "find out"
someplace other than infront of his place of business, and Rome tells him
it's vitally important that this be done now. The innkeeper
reminds them that they are guests at his inn, and should acquiesce to his
request. Rome, enraged, tells the man to remember his station in life,
and that Rome, as a knight, is his superior. "I am a knight," the
man replies, "Retired from the field of battle -- someplace you yourself
seem to have left as well." Rome stomps off, Constance gets Canus back,
and Colin and Quill gallop and jog back into town to join back up with
them. They travel on to Village Three, where Constance and Quill find a
crypt (with a 't') about an hour or hour and a half before sunrise. With
Canus inside with them, they seal the crypt, and act as nonchalant as
possible while they wait for sunrise to find out just what Canus is.
Canus, meanwhile, starts scratching at the door, wanting to be let out.
Constance, it turns out, used Auspex 3 on the dog that night when he came
running up the road, and saw Canus as a big Canus, going from two
legs to four. That, and a botch on her second Auspex 3 attempt, had made
her scream, making Rome and Celeste and Aner think Canus was attacking
her, which is why they reacted as they did. So, they aren't just being
randomly cruel after all.
Colin heads to the inn for a room, but Celeste, Aner and Rome go to the
treeline within sight of the graveyard, and the crypt in question, and
start digging holes to sleep in, with one eye on the crypt. Aner and
Celeste decide to sleep rather than try to stay awake, but Rome throws a
blanket over himself and peeks out, making a Willpower check to stay awake
for a little while after sunrise. When there are no horrible screams in
the first minutes of sunrise, he goes to sleep as well, with David working
extra-hard to get him covered up.
In the crypt, on the other hand, Quill gets inside a coffin and peeks out
of the cracked-open lid, while Constance hides behind her own, watching
Canus scratch more and more at the door. Finally he stops scratching,
there's a terrible ripping sound, and Canus' pelt flutters to the ground
as an athletic African man rises out of Canus, curses in Latin, turns and
gets into a coffin. Constance wakes him up, sleepy herself, and says,
"Who are you?" "We'll discuss it tomorrow night," he replies, and goes
back to sleep.
I was going to end it here. They wouldn't let me.
The next night, they awake inside the crypt, or out in the woods, or at
the inn, and Constance finds that Canus -- or the man who was Canus -- is
already awake and seated atop his coffin for the day. Quill stands there
while Constance questions him, as the others knock on the door repeatedly.
Eventually Rome and Aner get the crypt open, while the man -- named Atsu,
tells the others that he is a vampire, and that Oro is his home. Two men
came to town, told Atsu that they required his assistance, and that others
would be arriving -- namely, the coterie of PCs. Atsu didn't like the
two men who came before the PCs,
so he didn't help them, and decided to study the PCs when they arrived, to
assess how much more or less noble they might be. Now that Oro isn't the
best place to live, given the amount of attention recently centered upon
it, and that he's in this country to study others of his own kind anyway,
he decides that he will travel with the coterie. He warns them, however,
that he will not be in human form, and he will not appear as the same
animal all the time, although he does promise at the very least always to
be a bird. Then, disappearing into the woods, he leaves. A few minutes
later, an owl alights atop the crypt, and the coterie sets off, strangely
happy to have someone along for the express purpose of studying them.
Back to the top.
Aner reserves a room at the inn, but then slips out and back to the
church, going into the sanctuary and knocking at Father Dominic's door.
Hans answers, startled, but when he sees it's Aner he lets him into the
storeroom in the back, from which Aner takes some jugs of wine and then he
departs, back to the inn.
Constance and Quill, as usual, head for a crypt in the old graveyard
beside the church, although Quill heads first to the tavern, posing as a
scholarly traveller up perhaps for an early day, reading through the texts
of Arab origins he "liberated" from the new "cathedral" in Toledo. Rome
talks to Quill briefly about what he saw "on the other side," in Toledo,
and then retires. Likewise, Celeste and Aner retire to their rooms,
having instructed the innkeeper that David would come downstairs to
deliver lunch up to their quarters.
Everyone goes to sleep, and awakens the next night in their respective
temporary havens. Colin finds he wasn't disturbed, and Hans reports to
him that people occasionally came and went, praying in the sanctuary, but
otherwise he was undisturbed (he, too, caught some sleep while he had the
chance). Colin picks up two statues of angels with fangs from downstairs,
dumping one under Father Dominic's old bed and another in the pews of the
sanctuary as he makes his way out to feed. Celeste heads down and out
from her room, going to look for Constance and see about getting her horse
ready. As she does so, she sees a knight in dark, cross-emblazoned armor
ride into the town, dismount, and step through the doors of the tavern
calling for a Celeste Castaneda. She goes in, identifies herself, is
handed a letter, and then the courier knight mounts back up and rides
away, in the direction of Toledo.
Aner gets up and feeds, putting some blood into one of the jugs of wine as
he does so before topping himself off. Constance feeds, also, and Rome
goes to church to confess to the Father (with a capital 'F,' he noted),
finding a statue of an angel among the pews and snapping off its fangs
just to be safe. An owl alights near Constance when she returns, and as
everyone (except Quill) comes back together they set off for Nibelheim,
now a ghost-town, with the knowledge that the town of Oro did dispatch
some soldiers and found an ugly, smelly scene.
The group knows, of course, that Quill isn't with them, but they assume
that he can catch up, or they can catch up to him, since his horse is also
gone. In the meantime, Celeste tells everyone that they should
remember that Celeste disappeared in Toledo after getting
angry about something. Her friend from Toledo, Isabella, has
taken her place. No one's really sure why Celeste has decided to
take advantage of her drastically different appearance (at
Constance's doing), but they go along with Celeste's request. About
three miles out from Oro, they find Quill's horse, tethered to a tree on
the side of the road. The group stops, and Constance volunteers to go
"tracking" Quill, using Auspex 3 to touch plants and trees along the way
for glimpses of where Quill went. Quill, a hundred yards or so off into
the woods (where he's been hunting deer, not people, and wisely -- gosh,
the gang's gotten a lot of blood out of the 800 or so people scattered
between Toledo and Madrid, and that can't last much longer, can it?), can
hear Constance coming with his Heightened Senses, so he scales a tree and
hides, tying a length of rope into a noose, attaching it to a sturdy
branch and looping it around his neck while he waits for Constance to
wander up. Sure enough, she does, and (a) Quill fires off his Roiling
Mist of Doom to make a rain of leaves descend upon her, then (b) Quill
drops out of the tree (glad he made his Stamina+Fortitude check against
snapping his own neck) like a corpse, making rasping choking noises.
Constance utters a single high-pitched yelp, then just stands there,
looks at him, shapes some quick claws out of her fingers, scales the tree
as Quill gets out his knife to cut himself down, and gets to the rope as
he does, severing it and dropping him to the ground. She doesn't seem
particularly frightened or amused, but she -does- like the fact that from
the top of a twenty-foot tree she can see further than she could before.
As Quill makes his way back to the road, Constance finds a much taller
tree and scales it rapidly, ascending fifty feet and gleefully discovering
she can see Oro, three miles distant, as a collection of dim light on the
horizon.
Celeste and Aner, by the way, decided to ride on after a few minutes, and
wandered off, leaving Colin and Rome as the only two people waiting for
Quill and Constance. When Quill steps out of the trees, after a distant
yelp and otherwise silence, with blood on his shirt, Rome jumps to the
conclusion that Quill diablerized or otherwise murdered Constance, and
kicks him in the shoulder. Quill isn't hurt, but he is surprised, and
steps around to swat the tail of Rome's horse, nearly throwing Rome when
it jumps onto its hind legs. Colin stares at them blankly, and when Rome
demands to know what's happened to Constance, Quill can only point, since
"at missile range, in the treeline" is outside "slating range," as
his player put it. Eventually Constance came out of the woods, and
verified for Rome that the blood on Quill's cassock isn't her own, it's a
-deer's-. Oddly, there's deer blood on her own shirt, as well, but Auspex
3 fails to reveal anything about how it got there. Everyone mounts back
up, and off they go, towards Nibelheim.
Celeste and Aner arrive there a few minutes before everyone else, only to
discover that what was left of Nibelheim has been burned flat to the
ground. All the graves in the graveyard have been emptied of the corposes
they contained, and there's a giant pile of ash, wood and bones in the
center of town, with a giant cross sticking out of it. All buildings are
gone. The church is knocked down. The graves are empty. Aner
says, "Hey, here are some handy graves for us to sleep in," since nothing
else, quite literally, is safe for them to sleep in for the coming day
(they've got a couple of hours). Celeste prefers to sleep in the woods,
in a hole she digs for herself, and that's where she heads. Everyone else
arrives right about now, and makes the same discoveries. Aner, however,
finds out that the soil excavated from the graves burns his hands rather
badly, and once he's touched it he doesn't want to go into the graveyard.
Quill discovers the same when examining the graveyard from a distance with
Auspex 2 on and active -- the place has really been sanctified.
Constance uses Auspex 3 on some bones in the former pyre, finding an image
of a priest tossing into the fire one of the dessicated corpses Quill
manufactured after the final conflict here a week or so ago. She also
gets an image of one priest atop the pile of ashes and bones, planting
the crucifix in it, while some others chant and sprinkle water around
the burnt-out buildings in the background. Colin tells Hans to
collect some of the dirt from the graves in a sack, Rome starts working on
a hole, David and Hans start working on holes, and eventually everyone
beds down for the day with their own grave. David and Hans take the
daylight hours in shifts, to watch guard over their Kindred masters (the
phrase "Kindred masters" makes me want to do a really bad Evil Overlord
laugh; help me).
The next night, upon awakening, David and Hans report that a group of a
handful of people -- a couple of priests and some traveling companions
(the standard guard or two) came into town, looked around, and left again.
Nothing had really been disturbed, so they made a cursory tour without
even encountering David and Hans where they stood watch over the sleeping
coterie. Everyone dusts off, mounts up, and they ride out to Madrid
again, getting there by only an hour or two after midnight, with three or
four hours before sunrise. Upon arriving on the outskirts of the city,
with the walls ahead of them and the gates just yards away, standing open,
the same five gate guards on-duty as when they left, Constance takes off
at top speed, glad to at last have her haven in sight (she misses Victor).
Atzu, in owl form, flies off after her, having promised to come and speak
with Victor.
Colin heads into town, towards his tavern to let Jaycon know that he's
returned, finding out that Maria Josephina has been in once or twice to
ask whether Colin and the others have returned. Celeste, having changed
her name and appearance, shows up at her own haven, much to the confusion
of her ghouled maid, explaining her new identity and securing the maid's
cooperation and planning the redecoration of her home to complete the
ruse. In the course of the conversation, Celeste/Isabella's ghoul
tells her that gossip among the ghouls is that Lydia, the Prince's new
chief retainer, has been showing signs of something being wrong.
Muttering to herself, deep circles under her eyes, complaining of not
sleeping enough. Celeste warns her ghoul not to associate with the
Prince's ghouls if at all possible. Meanwhile, Aner hangs out with the
gate guards, handing them a...jug of wine. And telling them it's a present
to them. Rome heads off to home, seeing David starts working on getting
the house ready to be re-opened after their absence, and Colin talks to
Victor just long enough to secure an appointment with him the following
evening before heading to the Prince's house. Constance, glad to be
home again, starts telling her sire all about her trip, but ends up
ditching a lot of the story to tell her all about Pig Boy/Canus/Atzu.
"You met a Laibon?" he asks, amazed. He knows what a Laibon is?
Quill, in the meantime, gallops full-speed through Madrid, on his way to
his monastery 2 hours north of the city, to speak with his rather gifted
exorcist friend about the ghost which is now rather obviously accompanying
him on his travels.
Back in Madrid, Colin arrives outside the Prince's home to hear a heated
argument upstairs. He can hear Lydia begging, Maria Josephina speaking
angrily, and then he knocks on the door. The argument upstairs ceases,
and a door slams. Eventually, the front door opens, and it's the Prince
herself, not Lydia, not some other ghoul, who answers it. Colin
introduces himself as himself, since he, too, looks pretty much completely
different now, and asks why the Prince needed to talk to him (having been
around to his tavern once or twice, as Jaycon reported). She replies that
she was curious to see whether he had returned yet, and did he have a
report? Yes, he replies, and she invites him in to give it. He starts
telling the story, and gives a no-holds-barred re-telling of the fight in
Toledo with the giant crab legs, along with Rome's information about the
CrabMaster. Maria Josephina, surprised at this report, asks whether
everyone else has returned as well. And whether or not Colin is
making some sort of joke. He tells her that yes, everyone else is back,
and that no, he is not joking. He even creates an illusion, on the spot,
of the giant crab legs coming down out of the sky, to Maria Josephina's
surprise. Just then, there's another knock at the door.
The knock at the door is Rome's. Maria Josephine excuses herself to
Colin, answers the door, welcomes Rome in, and asks him to give a report.
When he, a level-headed Ventrue, corroborates Colin's tale, Maria
Josephina is...surprised. When they tell her they had gone to see Suarez,
she pauses a half-beat and asks who Suarez is. When they tell her that
Suarez told them everything and they know the Prince really sent the
Nosferatu -- who are now dead -- to investigate, and is using them to
throw attention away from herself, the real investigation, or both, she
asks them if they believed a Setite. They tell her no, but they
are pretty sure the Nosferatu are dead, since they never encountered them.
Maria Josephina tells them it's ridiculous to think she would have toyed
with them like that, and points out that to further prove that the Setite
lied, the Nosferatu are (a) alive, and (b) back in Madrid. She has a
meeting with them the next evening, in fact, in Elysium, and Colin and
Rome are more than welcome to be there to see the Nosferatu for
themselves. She also mentions that it's interesting Millecande died
(tragically, at the hands of a crazed Gangrel, they tell her) in Nibelheim
-- there are rumors in the city that in a village not far away, namely
Nibelheim, demons rose out of the earth and consumed everyone. And, that
same night that they report Nibelheim was razed by crazed locals and a
crazed Gangrel, Rosa began to act strangely. Rome asks the Prince if she
would like him to observe Rosa for signs of what might have caused her to
start acting weird, and she tells him that if he wishes, that would be
most welcome information. When they tell her about Canus turning out to
be Atzu, and having spied on Maria Josephina (or attempted to, when he
snuffled around the house that once), and they describe how he takes the
skin of an animal and thus takes that animal's form for a night, she asks,
"You met a Laibon?" The Prince knows about Laibon? ...Okay, so
maybe she does know what a Ravnos is. In the meantime, Colin and
Rome's players absolutely amused the utter hell out of me. They were in
perfect form that night, and even as Maria Josephina, super-serious
Lasombra Prince, I couldn't keep from cracking up at least three times.
Eventually she thanks them for their report and sees them to the door.
As they stand in the street and the door closes behind them, they realize
that the ten or twelve people out this early are all looking...up. When
they do the same, they see Lydia crouched in a bedroom window
above, hear her say, "Please...no..." ...and Colin makes an apparition
of -someone- ducking back inside as Lydia plunges from the window,
"jumping" suicidally. Rome manages to get over and try to catch her, but
it doesn't help -- her skull splits against the ground, and blood begins
to pool underneath her. Rome knocks on the front door, tells the Prince
her ghoul has fallen to her death, and Maria Josephina walks over to look
down at the rapidly bleeding to death ghoul. She looks around as other
random mortals stare at the scene, assesses the fact that it would break
the pre-Masquerade to feed her ghoul blood right at the moment in hopes of
saving her life, closes Lydia's fading eyes, and says to Colin, still in
his priest robes, "Father, will you prepare my sister for burial? I must
go inside to inform the rest of our family of this tragedy." Rome tells
her that there was an assailant inside, and asks if he can search the
place, to which she agrees. All he finds are an empty bedroom with an
open window, a closed but unlocked bedroom with a sleeping ghoul, and a
locked bedroom, ostensibly Maria Josephina's. Downstairs, he finds no
one, as well, and tells Maria Josephina through the closed door of her
study, over the sounds of sobbing from inside, that he will speak with her
the next night.
Colin, meanwhile, gathers up the body, bundles it off to Victor's house
(where Victor and Constance have just returned from splitting up to find
the owl which is Atzu for about an hour), and gets Victor (who Constance
says is much better at Auspex 3 than she is) to try to see who might have
pushed Lydia out of the window. He studies her intently, feeling up and
down her clothing and corpse, and reports that he sees a woman whom he
doesn't know, who "is there and is not there," almost translucent in
nature, pushing Lydia. Colin thanks him, tells Victor he'll see him the
next night, and goes to dispose of the corpse.
With a massive "meanwhile..."
Aner, who had told Rosa he would investigate whether or not Millecande
might have been framed for her connection to the Heresy, goes to Rosa's
house to report his findings, ready to lie out the wazoo and tell her that
Millecande was murdered by a Gangrel who was obviously wrapped up with
Heretics, and that the Nosferatu were also wrapped up with Heretics, and
that they framed her for it. He arrives outside her hovel -- she's very
poor, and that's no secret, although she is very beautiful and a very
gifted carver of dolls. When Aner knocks, Rosa answers -- but she looks
bad. Her hair is all stringy and matted, dark circles are under
her eyes, she has a bit of a "wild look" to her face. "Aner," she
murmurs. "Hello." He asks if she's okay, and she says of course she is,
inviting him in. He enters the front room, and sees the stacks of wood,
both scraps and unhewn blocks, littering the place like any workshop.
There's also a table, with a collection of dolls on it -- and they are
exquisite. One is of a woman with long, dark hair and a dark
dress. Another is of a man in a suit of armor. A third is of a slightly
larger woman with dark hair and black clothing. There's a doll of two
men, dressed in black, joined at the feet to form a base for both of them.
There are two men in colorful clothing but with no faces, also joined at
the feet. There's a doll of a beautiful woman, previously joined to
someone else, but the base has been snapped in half. Aner tells Rosa his
story, although Rosa frequently interrupts and tells him she already knows
this or that (that Millecande is dead, that Nibelheim was destroyed in a
riot). "Are these dolls of people you know?" asks Aner. "Yes," Rosa
breathes, as she continues working on a doll in her hands, of a man in a
robe with a cowl over his face. And, Aner realizes, so does he
know the people on whom these dolls are based. There's Celeste, and Rome,
and Maria Josephina, and the Nosferatu, the Lasombra brothers, Rosa
herself...
"I feel like I should make some new dolls," Rosa says, all of a sudden.
"Yes, I should make a doll of a very, very large man. A dark man." But
she keeps working on the doll in her hands. And...there's no Millecande
doll, no Julia doll. There's a doll of Father Dominic, and Pig Boy, and a
little dog, but they're all set off to the side, as though about to be
thrown away or worked into something else. Yes, the entire city's -- and
entire Chronicle's -- major players are all sitting there on the
table, carved in wood, and unbelievably lifelike. Rosa asks if
Aner likes the doll of himself, and he replies that it's very good. "I
feel like I should work more on that doll," she murmurs. "Yes. I
should." When Aner tells Rosa that the Nosferatu are dead, she says
she knows, she threw the dolls away, but then they came back, and she
carved new ones. "How much would one of these cost," Aner asks, to which
Rosa replies, "They are MY dolls!" He backs down quickly, and asks
if he can watch her work on his doll. She tells him no, and keeps working
on the doll of the man in the cowl instead. When Aner asks if he can come
back the next night to watch her work, she tells him, "Perhaps." That's
the best he can get out of her. She goes quiet for a moment, closes her
eyes, waits. He watches. Then she opens her eyes, lifts a doll of Lydia,
and tosses it into a bin of scraps. "Yes, I don't need that doll
anymore," she whispers, and then goes back to carving. Aner eventually
beats a hasty retreat, asking if Rosa's fed yet tonight. "Of course I
went out," she says, like he's asked the stupidest question in the world,
and then she sees him to the door, saying, "I think now you leave." On
his way out, though, Aner realizes that the pattern in the top of the
table at which Rosa's been working is a chess-board design, and that the
dolls are all off to the side like pieces waiting to be put in place.
Meanwhile, Rome goes home, Colin disposes of the body, Constance listens
to Victor and Atzu discuss the various clans and bloodlines of which they
know, learning a lot in the several-hour conversation, Celeste
writes letters of recommendation for "Isabella" from herself, Quill bunks
down at the monastery, and Aner finds uneasy sleep after feeding again and
dumping more blood into another jug of wine. The chapter closes with more
than one person declaring they can't wait to play chess with and/or spy on
and/or visit with Rosa, who has gone "completely fucking nutters," as I
put it. An interesting night indeed.
Back to the top.
A new night dawns over the city of Madrid. Everyone rises from slumber in
their various havens. Constance, remembering that Colin is supposed to
drop by and speak to Victor tonight, tells Victor she's going to
Elysium, then sneaks into Victor's study/office/library type room and
hides behind the door, between the bookshelf and the wall, tucked away in
a shadow with the help of a little Obfuscate. She overhears when the
Prince's last remaining ghoul, Consuela, knocks at the door and Victor
answers. Consuela is looking for Constance, on behalf of Maria Josephina,
but Victor tells her that Constance has left for Elysium. She hears
again, when someone comes to the door but she can't hear their
conversation. Victor asks the other person to come back two hours before
sunrise, and that they can talk then -- although Constance still doesn't
know who is at the door, or what they want to talk about.
Colin, meanwhile, wakes up, feeds Jaycon and Hans, and goes upstairs to
the tavern to get a little blood back for himself. He's planning on
making it to Elysium within a half hour, so he beats a hasty path there,
but not before Rome.
Rome, on the other hand, woke that night, skipped feeding, threw on his
clothing, buckled on his armor, and went straight to Elysium. Finding it
empty, he creeps through the garden and to the other side, onto the
church's property, crouching down to listen for the entrance of the
Nosferatu (who are coming to meet the Prince, as the Prince told him and
Colin the night before). Sure enough, the Nosferatu are along shortly.
Colin engages in some not-so-subtle deception, based on his new appearance
(thanks to Constance's Vicissitude). He tells the Nosferatu that he's a
new vampire in town, of the Laibon, named Stephen. "Laibon?" they ask.
"You are of entirely the wrong....complexion." Colin/Stephen acts
surprised, and thanks them for telling him this. About then, Rome can see
Maria Josephina coming from the cathedral, so he rises and waits for her
at the church-side gate.
While this has gone on, Celeste/Isabella has awakened at home and fed her
ghoul, the maid named Marie. Just as she's leaving, Aner knocks at her
door and asks to come in. Coming inside, he tells Celeste/Isabella
about the episode at Rosa's home, and says that he's afraid Rosa knows he
diablerized Millecande and that he might leave town. Celeste/Isabella
agrees, but Aner says he's still not sure what to do, and he'll think
about it. He leaves, Celeste/Isabella leaves, and then she arrives at
the Prince's home, finding Consuela there. She's directed to Elysium, and
told she can speak with the Prince at the garden.
When Maria Josephina enters Elysium, Rome follows, and the Nosferatu greet
Maria Josephina by nodding their heads. Colin had made Hans take the
sacred earth from the graveyard in Nibelheim and rub it on Maria
Josephina's throne, which results in a couple of false starts to sit down
on the Prince's part before she says she feels like standing, and gets the
heck away from The Throne With True Faith. (About this time,
Celeste/Isabella arrives in Elysium.) The conversation picks up
quickly as Maria Josephina asks the Nosferatu where they've been, and they
respond that they've been "south, exploring enemy territory," meaning the
Assamites & other clans which accompany the Almohads. The Prince is
obviously suspicious, but doesn't immediately tell them she doesn't
believe them. Instead she asks if they've been to Toledo, and they say
no, they didn't make it that far. She nods, and asks if they were in Oro.
They say they believe they "stopped through." Colin makes an illusion of
a voice just behind their heads, saying in French, "How does it feel to
lie to the Prince?" They snap around and ask one another if the other
just said something, but otherwise fail to react. The Prince tells them
that if they have nothing of interest to report from their "vacation,"
that is all, and begins studying the flowers in the garden.
Celeste/Isabella approaches to "present herself as a new resident of the
city," and gives Maria Josephina the letter of recommendation which
Celeste wrote out for Isabella, her "sister." Maria Josephina reads the
letter and reacts with happy surprise to hear that Lord Lucien now rules
Madrid. "He's my sire," she confides. "You must be a very powerful man,"
Celeste/Isabella comments, to which Maria Josephina replies, after a
pause, "Wherever he goes, he is Prince. Yes. He is a very powerful man."
After indicating a desire to write to him, and realizing the Nosferatu are
on their way out of Elysium, Maria Josphina turns and calls out to them,
asking, "Are your pets...your rats...are they in good health? More than
one of them surfaced near my home shortly after you left, aged, withered,
and then died before my very eyes." The Nosferatu respond that their pets
are perfectly healthy, and then start to leave again. Colin calls out,
"Give my regards to Father Dominic," to which the Nosferatu respond they
know no Father Dominic. Rome, standing by the outer gate, through which
they must go to leave, pauses long enough to intimidate the one he'd
beaten up severely in the past, saying that the next time the Prince asks
them questions, they had better have answers. The Nosferatu seem
unimpressed, and then leave. Colin follows after, finding the entrance
into the sewers under the city which they use a few blocks away, and then
goes to have his conversation with Victor.
Rome, investigating the Prince's throne, finds that it's -very- holy, and,
with the help of some river water and a thick cloth, begins cleaning it
very carefully.
Meanwhile, at Quill's monastery two hours northeast of the city...
Quill awakens and goes to speak to his associate, a monk over whom he has
little if any control but who is aware of Quill's nature, and whom Quill
knows to be a gifted exorcist. Still followed by what must be the ghost
of Julia, Quill speaks to Mannuel about the possibility of interrogating
Julia on his behalf. The priest agrees, and says he will travel to Madrid
with Quill that night. They arrange to borrow one of the small carts at
the monastery, since Quill is working on his death-sweat-belching Mortis 4
and can't -really- ride a horse without killing it. Off they go, as Quill
works on consuming more of the apparently necromantic work he lifted from
the private rooms of a priest in Toledo.
Colin arrives at Victor's house (thinking perhaps he saw Aner just up
ahead of him?) and talks to Victor about the possibility
of learning Obfuscate from him. They strike a deal, so that Colin will
owe Victor "a medium-sized favor" for two levels of Obfuscate -- but not
before Victor spots Constance spying on them, throws her out of the room,
and she puts on a charade of going upstairs and slamming the door to her
room then sneaking back downstairs. Colin, fully aware of the possibility
that Constance will just listen from the other side of the door with
heightened senses, creates an illusion of jangling bells just outside.
Constance, thwarted again, spends a highly amusing few minutes discussing
the possibility of using Vicissitude to stretch out her ear and slide it
under the door, but decides that might make Victor mad. Their deal cut,
they speak briefly of other things -- Victor comments that Rosa has
come to find much stability of late, and that this is good. Victor looks
at Colin just before dismissing him and says, "One question:
did you meet any -other- Ravnos in Toledo?" "What's a Ravnos?" Colin
asks. "Very well," Victor replies with a smile, "I'll see you to the
door." In the process, Constance realizes that her Auspex could -almost-
let her ignore the illusion Colin made -- and thus the race is on between
Colin and Constance to see who can accumulate the higher level of their
chosen Discipline.
Celeste/Isabella takes her time after being in Elysium to go to Rosa's
hovel, finding exactly what Aner described. She approaches Rosa as
Celeste's sister, Isabella, and says she wants to commission a chess set.
Rosa tells her it will be "a long time" before she can work on anything
other than the dolls she's carving. Celeste/Isabella can see some
paintings on the wall -- one of Millecande which inspires love, one of
Rosa which inspires nothing, one of a handsome man that inspires fear --
and asks if Rosa did them. "I only do these dolls now," Rosa replies.
Their conversation is brief, but Celeste/Isabella gets full confirmation
of everything Aner reported, and departs for home to find that Marie has
started the redecoration, and begins planning a party for all the Kindred
of Madrid, during which time she will, no doubt, manipulate everyone she
can.
Not long after Celeste/Isabella leaves, Rome knocks on Rosa's door, and
finds all the same things. When asking about the doll Rosa's carving --
the man in a dark robe with a cowel over his face, the man which Rome
recognizes as the CrabMaster -- Rosa tells him that he has "a match," but
she can't find his match. "I don't -want- to find his match. He hates
everyone. He wants to kill everyone." She goes on to say that he doesn't
want to kill her, but she doesn't know why he doesn't. "You've looked in
his mirror!" she tells Rome, exhasperated by her own inability to
communicate what she's thinking. Eventually Rome decides to leave, but
not before offering to watch out for Rosa. "No! Don't stand outside my
door," she tells him. He promises he won't, but she makes him promise
repeatedly before he leaves. No sooner is he out the door, though, than
he heads across the street and knocks on the door of the opposing hovel.
A tremendously amusing scene ensues, when he offers the dirty old
woman who answers a single gold coin for her hovel. "You want this house?
Why?" Eventually they strike a deal, and Rome purchases the home on the
agreement the old woman will be gone the next night. Now, time to find a
mercenary he can trust enough to watch Rosa's house from across the
street, discreetly.
Quill arrives in town, finally, the wagon having slowed down his progress
tremendously. He speaks with the priest along the way about the
possibility of the priest helping him with his necromantic ritual he's
reading about. "You do this at the risk of your immortal soul. I will
not attend," Mannuel replies. They agree to give Mannuel's methods a try,
and if they don't work, to try Quill's. Quill then heads for the only
safe inn he knows about -- Colin's. Colin is introduced, and then Quill
heads out into the sewers upon hearing about the Nosferatu, bent on
"killing every rat in this city," then trying to break & enter where he
can to gather supplies for his ritual. He gets some of the things he
needs, and while Colin waits, Constance makes herself into a young woman
via Vicissitude and visits Colin's tavern, just visiting and relishing her
ability to hide completely (she had told Victor, after he had given her a
brief lesson in how one must sometimes appear honest in order to be
successfully deceptive, that she was going out -- Victor had asked her to
find Aner if she could and let him know that he would be very busy that
night, and to come again another night rather than later that same night,
as he had asked to do). Colin has a little fun with Animalism,
summoning some bats and telling them to go in search of Aner. They return
later, unable to find him anywhere. Quill surfaces again, and goes to the
Prince's home to ask if he can bring over a priest who might be able to
speak with Julia. Maria Josephina tells Quill that she doesn't believe in
ghosts, and would very much like the opportunity to observe this. Quill,
knowing the priest has some version of something like Faith, says he
doesn't think it's such a good idea, but she insists, and he finally
agrees. It's to take place a few nights from then, in Maria Josephina's
own home.
Constance, after having her fun at Colin's (which consisted of being hit
on repeatedly by drunk men), goes to the Prince's house as well and tries
to cut a deal: Constance will become the new person who provides Auspex
for the Prince, and in return the Prince will tell her secrets. The
Prince asks what sort of secrets, and Constance replies, "Things I don't
know, like what the Laibon are, and things like that." The Prince agrees,
and tells her to meet her in Elysium in two nights. Another deal struck
in the city, Constance goes back home and tells Victor, which makes Victor
very happy. He tells Constance a bedtime story, and then goes to
his own room for the day.
Rome finds someone who can watch Rosa's house from the hovel across the
street, and pays him sufficiently to guarantee that he won't bother Rosa
while he watches her haven.
Everyone settles back into bed for another day, at the conclusion of the
chapter, having begun some machination of their own to, perhaps, get to
the bottom of all this. And so another chapter ends.
Back to the top.
Yet another game session preceded by Bascha making hamburger patties
and me firing up the charcoal grill. This time I didn't just set meat on
fire over too-warm coals, like last time, which was nice.
And yet again, a new night dawns on the city of Madrid, and everyone rises
from their respective slumbers. It had been looking to be a sort of a
slow night, since both Mike (Quill) and Kat (Celeste) were out of town or
otherwise occupied, but Kat ended up being able to be there, and Quill
ended up spending the night preparing for his necromantic ritual. Yeah.
That.
At any rate, Rome awoke in his haven, looked forlornly at his piled up
armor, his boots cast hurriedly aside, wished his squire wasn't off
watching Rosa's house, and then started hunting for his clothes. Colin,
for his part, woke up, remembered he'd blown huge quantities of blood to
redecorate his haven with his new, improved Chimerstry, and went out in
search of blood (blood! blood for the blood god! er...). Constance,
everyone's favorite child-Malk with Vicissitude 4, awoke in her room in
Victor's house and ran downstairs after getting dressed to tell him that
she was going out to feed unless he had a lesson to give her. He told her
that her lesson for the night was to watch Elysium, and see what went on.
After all, she's the Prince's new Auspex-in-a-box. Celeste/Isabella awoke
as well, fed Marie, her maid, and got the latest word on her house's
redecoration. The word was that Marie's almost purchased everything she
needs to completely redecorate. "Good," Celeste/Isabella replies,
"Because we're having a party tomorrow night." Marie nearly faints with
surprise, babbling that she doesn't have time to get everything ready, so
Celeste/Isabella hands her a bag of money and says, "Go hire some help."
Remembering that part of the duty of this help is going to be putting
mirrors all over the house so Celeste/Isabella can see around corners
surreptitiously and the like, and that the "help" is more than likely to
realize that she isn't casting a shadow, she spikes a bottle of wine with
some blood and tells Marie to make sure that the "help" drinks it when
they get back. They're going to be permanent help. Allaying
potential jealousy from her blood bound servant, she assures Marie that
the maid herself will be chief among her retainers, and that Marie will
have total run of the help. Marie is thrilled beyond belief, and dashes
off to find women who are alone in the world and looking for steady work.
Constance, in her time to feed, goes out and notices some local watchmen
knocking at Millecande's long-empty house. They go inside, and so does
she -- making full use of Obfuscate. They search the house, then comment
that Aner must have been right, and leave. Constance makes a search of
her own, digging out Millecande's journal and slipping it into a pocket
before she leaves.
Rome decides tonight is a good night to go feed, since he's feeling a bit
peckish, and "hands out bread to the poor children," escorting four of
them off into an alleyway for brief moments to get a blood point out of
each of them. The little sicko. Once done, he heads to Colin's tavern,
chatting with him there about the fact that they have zero leads in the
case at hand, and that all he really knows is that Rosa's gone completely
bonkers. "Yes," Colin replies, "Victor says she's getting much better
lately." The little sicko. Colin decides that he really should go
talk to Rosa, particularly after Rome tells him that he's hired a man to
watch Rosa's house from the hovel across the "street" (more like an alley,
but hey). So, off the Ravnos goes to Rosa's house. Once in sight, he
creates an illusion of Rosa throwing open her door, grabbing her hair,
screaming, cackling, and running off down the street. Sure enough, the
mercenary Rome had hired the night before is one the job, and he comes
tearing out of the house he's inhabiting in his work, chasing after the
illusion as it disappears around a corner. Colin smiles to himself,
realizing someone else is also watching Rosa's house (as he noticed David,
Rome's squire, inside the observation house as well), waves to them, and
goes up to knock on Rosa's door. Initially there's no response, but when
he turns around to go knock on the door of the other house, where David is
watching, he sees Rosa standing right behind him. Her cheeks are plump
and rosy, her hair isn't stringy, there are no huge circles under her
eyes. "I can't answer my door because I'm not inside," she murmurs.
"Well," Colin replies, "If you went inside, I could knock again, and
then you could answer it." "Yes," she agrees, "But I could also
just ask you to come inside right now, and then you wouldn't have to
knock?" "That would save us both," Colin says, "A lot of trouble."
"Okay," Rosa agrees, "Would you like to come in?" "Certainly," grins the
Ravnos. As Josh (Rome) said at the time, When the Insane Meet the
Confused.
In they both go, and Colin sees the chess table with the dolls in
everyone's likenesses spread out on it. Rosa sits down, and Colin joins
her, sitting down in the chair so many others have since occupied. The
arrangement is this:
Colin takes an especial interest in the dolls which match his current
likeness and his past likeness. Leaning very close, he says, "My
goodness, that's quite a good likeness." Using Chimerstry, he makes the
doll seem to have responded with, "No it's not!" Rosa is a bit startled,
but says, "That didn't really happen. I know it didn't." A bit of a
philosophical discussion ensues, along the lines of 'if something didn't
really happen, can it be perceived,' and then Rosa says she knows it
happened, but she also knows it didn't happen, and she doesn't know why,
and that's that. Picking up the doll of the Crabmaster and starting to
work on it, again, Rosa abruptly goes seriously pale, the bags reappear
under her eyes, and her hands become significantly more nimble.
Colin can't help but notice this, although he doesn't comment.
Instead he mentions the dolls of the Nosferatu, commenting that he had
thought they were dead. "Yes, they went away," Rosa says, "But then I
had to make new dolls for them." The topic turns towards Millecande,
eventually, and Rosa says, "You know what Aner did to her. He did a
bad thing to her. But I don't have to do anything about him.
He hates Aner for doing the bad thing to Millecande." She
indicates the CrabMaster. "Yes, well, he doesn't like what
anyone does, Colin replies. "I'm afraid of him. He knows I
know about the matches." Rosa goes on to talk about Millecande, saying
that when Rosa died, she "felt" it, because she had made Millecande love
her by blood bonding her, and that Millecande was only pretending when she
seemed to be bound to the Prince. "You know about this doll," Rosa says,
holding up the CrabMaster. "Do you know about the matches?" Colin
replies he's afraid he doesn't, although he would love for Rosa to
tell him about them. "You don't know about the matches. They are
a match." She indicates the Nosferatu. "He has a match." She
indicates the CrabMaster. "But I can't tell you about the matches. I
know about them. If I tell you, he would be mad at me. You don't know.
It's good." Their conversation continues a bit, Colin pointing out that
the CrabMaster probably wants them anyway, given what attacked them in
Toledo and earned the CrabMaster his name. "I think you're leaving now,"
Rosa says, "And please don't stand outside my door." Colin agrees, and
leaves again, heading towards Elysium.
Elysium is precisely where Celeste/Isabella, Rome and Constance were all
headed originally, and the three of them meet up outside the gates to
Elysium itself. Rome and Celeste/Isabella don't recognize Constance,
since she's back in petite-young-woman form, and after a bit of concerned
questioning on Rome's part, they find out who Constance is after all. In
they all go, to find (who else?) the Nosferatu standing off in a corner
talking amongst themselves. They greet the three PC's politely enough
(given what they're generally like, which is, they're snobs), and Rome
starts asking them what they saw when they were in Toledo (they weren't in
Toledo, they say), what they saw when they visited the heathen lands of
the Saracen dogs (there's much to learn from the Arabs, they say), and
whether they saw any giant crabs in the sky (no, they didn't). They ask
how "the kids" are doing, making Rome mad. So, Rome brings up the
matter of the Nosferatu's rats, which all up and died a couple of
nights after they left town. They deny this information, saying all
their rats are fine and healthy and happy. Colin bops along eventually,
coming from Rosa's hovel, and starts fucking with the Nosferatu, making
illusionary whispers mutter things at them in French -- to which they
don't respond, although one of them definitely spoke it, Colin remembers
-- and in Spanish and Italian. This causes everyone else to notice that
they're growing agitated, and Rome decides to investigate the murmuring
Spanish he's heard, yet again, in Elysium. The Nosferatu make excuses
about overhearing some priests on the other side of Elysium's garden wall,
and Rome finds a couple of priests, yes, but not priests who have been
speaking Spanish in the last five minutes.
The entire time, Constance is "playing with bugs," which means she's
exercising that Auspex 4 and staring a hole through the Nosferatu. What
does she get, asking, "Who are you, who controls you, and what is the
deception going on right now?" That they really are named what the
Nosferatu have always been named, they are in control of themselves, and
they, themselves, are the deception.
As their conversation winds down, the Prince herself enters with Consuela
on her heels. Celeste/Isabella comes over and invites the Prince to her
social gathering at her home the next night, adding that the rules of
Elysium will apply. The Prince accepts the invitation readily, saying she
quite looks forward to attending.
Colin, realizing from his trickery that the Nosferatu just flat are
not understanding French, starts talking to them in it, outloud.
One of them interrupts, to say that Colin's accent is far too bad
for them to make out what he's saying. "That's interesting," the Prince
replies. "I understood him quite well. Colin, would you just...say
something? In French? Just speak for a little bit." Colin starts in on
a longwinded monologue detailing how the Nosferatu standing there are not,
in his opinion, the same Nosferatu who left the city of Madrid two weeks
ago, and that while they may have the attitude down pat, they just
don't speak the right languages. When he's finished, the Prince says,
"My, I had no idea you were so familiar with the flora of southern Italy."
The Nosferatu clear their throats and one says, "Yes, I was particularly
impressed with your description of...lilies. Was that poetry?" Colin
shakes his head and says, "No, it wasn't." Maria Josephina nods at the
Nosferatu and says, "Well, gentlemen, rude as it may be, I must ask you to
leave so that I might meet in private with the team I assigned to
investigate Julia's death." The Nosferatu bow out gracefully, and Maria
Josephina turns to the rest of the group, asking what they think is going
on and why this French business is such a big deal. They explain what's
going on with Rosa's dolls, and Celeste/Isabella expresses the theory that
Rosa's Auspex has started invading her own mind, showing her what's going
on and forcing her to get it out the only way she knows how: by carving
dolls and setting up a chess board with the city's current politics and
murder schemes. Colin and Rome ask if they can kill the Nossies, and the
Prince tells them that if they have evidence that the Nosferatu are
someone else entirely, masquerading as the real Nosferatu, then
yes, they can do whatever it takes to see justice done. Quite happy, they
leave Elysium, setting off to follow the Nosferatu with the aid of some
dogs Colin summons and then instructs to find the Nosferatu's scents and
follow them.
Back in Elysium, Celeste/Isabella has a chat with Maria Josephina,
revealing the fact that she is, in fact, Celeste, and that the identity of
Isabella is a ruse to allow her the chance to make use of the knowledge
she has while seeming, to whatever dark forces are afoot, to be someone
who would know nothing, or perhaps even be a potential ally. The Prince
admits that she had wondered, but had made no ultimate judgement as to
Isabella's true identity. They agree that the party might be just the
place to find out some of what's really going on around town, and Celeste
makes her way home. Upon arriving, she finds that Marie has found three
women who matched Celeste's specifications, and has fed them wine before
putting them to work around the house. They're all tremendously pleased
to have some steady work that doesn't immediately seem to involve
prostituting themselves to men in back alleys, and off they go, throwing
up decorations and mirrors around the place. There's a knock at the door
while Celeste speaks with them, and Marie returns to say it's Rosa -- and
she looks like she wants to talk in private. Celeste goes to the front
door, where Rosa, looking awful says, "You're putting yourself in
the middle with the Prince! You don't know about the matches! Ask
your sister!" With that, she turns, and runs away up the street.
Celeste, confused and surprised, goes into a room and tries talking to
herself (to no avail), since the identity of Isabella is supposed to be
Celeste's sister (thus the potential similarities in facial features,
height, weight, haven, etc.). Realizing this might be one of the more
surreal moments of late, Celeste walks back into her kitchen and starts
directing her new ghouls, and Marie, yet again.
Meanwhile, again, back at Elysium, Constance plays for a bit after Maria
Josephina asks her to stick around so someone who's new to the city can
meet with her. She knows nothing of where he's from, apparently, and
wants Constance's Auspex handy. Constance mentions somewhere in here that
she had noticed that the Nosferatu don't stink like they used to, and she
finds that odd. Eventually there's the sound of a horse outside, and
someone dismounting, and...in walks a man who looks almost but
not quite exactly like the man who tried to kill the coterie a year
before. Constance growls, but restrains herself. Maria Josephina doesn't
appear to recognize him, and Constance realizes that if it weren't for her
Heightened Senses being on, she might be fooled into thinking this
is the man who attacked them a year ago. Bending to one knee
before Maria Josephina, he introduces himself as Joseph, a member of Clan
Lasombra from the Kingdom of Prester John. Just like the guy from a year
before. He tells Maria Josephina that he wishes to visit her city and
relax, on occasion, and merely wishes her permission to do so, and to
interact with the Kindred of Madrid. Constance's Auspex reveals that he's
telling the truth -- more or less. He does believe he's from the Kingdom
of Prester John, but he doesn't just want to relax. She points this out,
and the man admits that the Kingdom of Prester John may wish, on occasion,
to make deals with lands on this side of the enemy, since the kingdom is
"in another land, very far away," and that he is, yes, going to be
observing the city of Madrid, as a diplomat. But quietly. This,
Constance's Auspex says, is true. The Prince agrees, but Constance has a
question. "If you're so peaceful," she asks, "Why did you send someone to
try and kill us a year ago?" The man denies any knowledge of the kingdom
sending someone to kill them, and seems genuinely surprised by this. He
promises he has no desire to hurt anyone, and secures reassurance of Maria
Josephina's extended welcome to him. She provides one -- and recommends
Colin's tavern as a place in town which is "sensitive to our needs." He
leaves, and Maria Josephina and Constance walk part of the way back to
their respective havens, talking a bit before parting ways.
All this time, Colin and Rome spend following the dogs which follow the
Nosferatu -- straight down into the sewers and up to a blank wall. Colin
decides it must be a hidden door, and pushes on it -- to no avail. Rome,
then, charges straight through a brick wall, finding himself in a pitch
black room. Colin creates some light for them, and they find the
Nosferatu lying on stone benches, undisturbed by the shattering wall,
hands clasped over their chests. Rome and Colin decide to tie them up for
questioning later, and get one's hands and feet bound before moving to the
other. "You know, this is really too easy," Colin says. And, as
they begin tying up the second Nosferatu, they hear a -pop!- behind them,
looking around to see a giant, green, carapiced, taloned and winged
monstrosity with an extended mouth that opens to reveal a row of tiny
fangs lining its edge. It takes a swipe at each of them, and a fight
ensues. Eventually, they chop up the two Nosferatu (the other one takes
his wacky combat form, as well), but not before one of them latches onto
Colin with that tiny mouth and he...loses a point of Permanent
Willpower. As soon as that one's dead, however, the point of WP comes
back, and the StoryTeller admits to the player involved that, yes, he just
had a SoulEater try to feed on him. If he'd not rolled 4 successes on a
Willpower roll, or if the fight had gone on much longer, he would have
died. Kaput. After the fight's over, they look around and
find that the room the Nosferatu were sleeping in is otherwise empty;
this is not someplace people live. Rome and Colin are tremendously
freaked out (and hurt, aggravated wounds for both of them), and gather up
remnants of the Nosferatu to take to their respective local experts: Rome
to the Prince, and Colin to Victor.
Auspexing the wing piece and arm fragment Colin brings him, Victor tells
him that he sees a woman who is "there and not there, translucent,"
shaping the Nosferatu into these winged creatures. He admits that
their form is an extended version of the power both he and Constance
possess, much to Constance's horror (yeah, right, she's loving every
minute of it). Thanking Victor and receiving a reminder that Victor is
glad to help defend the city through what small means he may have, Colin
sets off to report to the Prince -- noting that his wing remnant and arm
piece didn't start turning to ash until a good half hour after the
Nosferatu they came from had died. He must have been a young one.
Rome takes his Nossie's head to the Prince, and tells her what happened
while Conseula hands him rags soaked in water to wipe the blood from his
face wounds (yes, face -- it was easy to grab and wasn't covered in
chain-mail). He reports on what happened, and the Prince listens, tells
him that, yes, since the Nosferatu attacked them, and were obviously not
what they claimed (otherwise they would have turned to ash by now), he can
consider them retroactively Blood Hunted. She also tells him about
Joseph from the Kingdom of Prester John, and reminds him that he
cannot just attack the man; he should observe him first, as it would
appear that the man doesn't have any intentions of harming anyone. Rome
thanks her, and heads out to collect his squire and have the mercenary
watch his own home since he now feels that he's in danger.
After that, he spends the rest of the night collecting blood to heal.
Colin shows up shortly after, makes his report, and Maria Josephina also
tells him that he can expect to find Joseph at his tavern. Colin thanks
her, after telling her what Victor's Auspex revealed, and then leaves,
finding blood to heal himself as well.
Constance, upon getting home, gets a French language primer from Victor,
who's busy studying in his study, and heads upstairs, cracking the book
open to read until dawn rears its emblazoned head again. Another night
draws to a close, and Madrid is short two Nosferatu -- but makes up more
than enough for them in straight-up paranoia.
Back to the top.
Chapter Eleven largely excludes Constance, largely because her player
was out of town on business, thus couldn't play -- and I suck at playing
PCs as NPCs while I StoryTell. But Constance had plenty of time off by
herself, in-character, and she'll get some XP and the chance to make up
for it because I'm nice like that.
A new night dawns on the city of Madrid. Quill has spent the entire
previous evening preparing for and enacting his ritual to speak with the
spirit of Julia, which is apparently haunting him. She confirms that the
Red and Green Man were the ones who killed her, and that Father Dominic
presided, and that he mentioned Suarez, but that he also mentioned
"Suarez's bishop." Julia seems confused and weak, and intimates that she
doesn't have the power to manifest and is perhaps grateful that Quill was
capable of summoning her in this manner. She also says that the
CrabMaster fled Toledo in the direction of Madrid, moving at high speed.
Since Julia's just the local font of information, she also passes on that
she's remained behind after death, as a spirit, to protect the Prince --
but she senses danger to the Prince from within and without the city.
That done, Quill goes on to start preparing a new "ghoul," aka a
zombu, a la Mortis 6, through a combination of Auspex, Mortis, a
little Fortitude, some blood, some ritual, and his new study of
Necromancy, via the book lifted from the bishop's rooms in Toledo. He
packs it slap full of glass and pottery vials of embalming fluid (which is
highly flammable), wraps it in rags, throws a hooded robe over it, and as
the new night breaks over Madrid, Quill goes to collect his zombie from a
hidey-hole he's put together in the city's catacombs before heading back
to Colin's tavern.
Colin, meanwhile, wakes up, goes upstairs, and talks to Jaycon -- about
their new guest, Joseph of the Kingdom of Prester John. Finding out from
Jaycon that Joseph hasn't asked for anything out of the ordinary, and
merely returned to sleep before getting up tonight, paying for a week's
accomodations in advance, and then going out for the evening, Colin
instructs Jaycon to get Joseph anything he asks for (within
reason), and then report it to Colin at his earliest opportunity. Jaycon
eagerly agrees, and once Quill shows up with his zombie, Colin accompanies
them, and Manuel (Quill's exorcist friend from the monastery) out to the
Prince's home.
The two arrive with their small entourage, to find the house brightly lit
and Maria Josephina dressed colorfully in a gown that speaks of wealth as
well as the attractive form she usually downplays under as much black as
she can manage to get on. Manuel has been told that the Prince is the
widow of a wealthy merchant, and the charade works well: the home is put
together to look like the relative mansion such a wealthy merchant might
own in the city. After a round of introductions, the Prince asks Quill if
his "new ghoul" is a "new friend," careful to protect the ruse of
mortality to the exorcist's eyes. When Quill replies on his slate, a
little trickery from Colin makes it read, "I've come to banish the demon
spirits." Maria Josephina's a bit confused, and the confusion goes all
around before Colin drops the joke and the slate starts reading what was
intended when Quill writes on it. That done, they go upstairs to find
Julia's room kept almost perfectly intact since the two weeks, give or
take, that Julia died. Quill can tell Julia's still around, and he orders
the zombie into the room, on the far side, with the command to protect
Manuel. Quill and Colin take up positions in the door, knowing that an
exorcist's prayers might be uncomfortable for undead like themselves.
Maria Josephine is insistent that she remain in the room to observe,
despite Quill's polite objections, and so they all settle back to watch
the show.
As Manuel starts praying, the vampires all feel a wave of...something wash
over them. It's not True Faith, exactly, but it's similar. It makes them
very definitely aware, as the priest's prayers get louder and he clicks
his rosary beads together, that they are out of place in the overall
scheme of reality. For Colin, that's not so terribly bad, and Quill, one
might think, sort of accepts that as expected. Still, it's not fun. The
Prince straightens up in the chair, but keeps watching. As Manuel's
prayers grow further in volume, the vampires all realize they can't move
their feet. They are rooted to the floor, practically, and Quill
can tell that Julia is trying to back away from the entire scene but
can't, as though trapped in a corner with her back to the wall. Finally,
Julia is sucked into the center of the room, not a foot from Manuel, and
everyone (even Colin and Maria Josephina, both without Auspex) can see
Julia begin to materialize infront of the priest, absolutely terrified of
whatever is going on. She answers the priest's questions, giving the same
answers she's already given Quill in private, and then the priest asks if
Julia is ready to depart for her heavenly reward. That doesn't seem to
make her happy at all, so the priest looks to Quill for a decision:
leave her a ghost, or "send her on." Quill turns to the Prince, and the
Prince (knowing when not to argue with an exorcist) tells the priest to do
his job. The Prince's prayers change in tone and tempo, and as Julia's
"skin" starts to peel away from her body and her form shakes, Colin and
Quill both face an unpleasant moment in which they realize they should be
very thankful for Fortitude, since it feels like their insides are trying
to rot away. Quill also realizes he hears his zombie starting to
bubble, so he orders him out of the room and down the hallway, noticing
a fine layer of rotting flesh where each foot fell. The zombie was,
quite literally, going to pieces. The Prince shifts her posture in her
chair, just once, and as they all watch Julia spiritually rended by the
priest and her connections to her fetters torn away, they hear one final
scream of abject terror from the ghost, a sound like a distant clap of
thunder, and Julia is gone.
It's of note, during this, that Colin had decided to have a little fun
with the priest by giving him an illusion of icy claws on his head and a
voice saying something menacing. But when he spent the blood and the
willpower, and made his roll garnering four successes...the illusion
fizzled. "Active" Disciplines had ceased to work. Only passive ones,
like Auspex 1 & 2, or Fortitude, were in effect still. That's not fun.
With Julia gone, the priest began to backtrack his incantations, and they
started feeling all the same effects, but in reverse -- until Colin and
Quill both noticed another form materializing from a far corner of the
room -- another ghost, but this time in the form of Lydia. Quill
immediately fires off the Auspex to see what he can see, and he realizes
that, whereas Julia had an aura (of sorts, as she's still, in a way, a
living being, and definitely has some sort of life force as a ghost), this
form doesn't -- just like the giant crab-legs from the sky in Toledo.
Meanwhile, Colin recognizes an illusion -- a Chimerstry-based illusion.
They both start exclaiming that, whatever it is, it isn't real.
Meanwhile, the form finishes materializing and addresses Manuel, saying,
"I don't know what just spoke to you, but if it was Julia, she was under
another's control. All she says is false." The priest finally gets the
"stop the ritual" signal from Quill, and Colin and Quill see the Prince
out of the room as "Lydia" turns and departs in a hurry, the priest
finishes his prayers, the ritual ends, and they all go downstairs to
discuss what they've seen.
As they get downstairs and send Manuel on his way, Rome arrives, having
spent the early part of the evening in confession and prayer at the
cathedral. The discussion turns to the idea that one person might be
behind it all -- might be the CrabMaster, be producing the illusion of
Lydia, might be "Suarez' bishop," might be responsible for the false
Nosferatu which battled Rome and Colin the night before. The Prince
confirms that yes, there are other Cainites in the city who could be
Prince, could make a legitimate bid, were something to happen to Maria
Josephina herself: Victor, Syria, Rosa and Don Sanchez. Someone brings
up the possibility that it's Lord Lucien of Toledo, but Maria Josephina
tells them that's silly -- he has interests larger than Madrid, and
besides, if he wanted the city, it would be his for the asking. There's
much discussion of the CrabMaster's gender, since s/he has appeared to
Victor as a woman but to Rome as a man. As the discussion goes on a bit,
Maria Josephina reminds everyone that "Celeste's...I mean, Isabella's"
party is starting before long, and that she must prepare herself. Without
really thanking or scolding Quill or Colin for the evening's display so
far, she sees them out the door, and that's that.
Meanwhile, Celeste/Isabella has been preparing her home for the party that
evening. Hiring out some troubadors to perform (with the mission to spy
on the guests while they move through the crowd) and making sure her new
"maids" get more of her blood, and that there are mirrors hung everywhere
and the blood that's been gathered is ready to be served (not containing a
drop of her own, she adds) and the place looks good for the night, she
starts greeting guests as they're announced by one of the new maids.
First Syria and Jacob, both of Clan Brujah, who've brought a couple of
Blood Dolls to snack on during the evening. Don Sanchez arrives, as do
Victor and Constance, the Lasombra brothers, and even Rosa -- who's
looking healthy, pink and beautiful again. Rome arrives, and sets out to
start chatting up Don Sanchez to see if he thinks he's capable of being a
suspect. Quill arrives, with his ghoul-zombie, and starts setting up some
weird ritual-looking, mass-looking stuff in a corner. He's wearing a
freshly stolen priest's robe, as is the zombie. Yum. Joseph, the
mysterious and suspicious visitor, arrives as well. Once Colin arrives,
looking bushy-browed and gruff through some Chimerstry, and
Celeste/Isabella makes a Willpower check not to freak out because Colin
just looks like a Gangrel, then the last people to arrive are the
Prince, and Atzu. Everyone in the city is there, as it's the first party
anyone's heard about in the several years they've lived here. As the
socializing begins, the coterie's subtle movements and conversations
through the crowd begin as well, with various suspects being chatted up
along the way. Rosa talks to Quill briefly about her dolls, saying she
had to work on Aner again and that she then needs a new drink. Victor
tells Colin tales of when he lived in Italy, and traveled in Hungary and
other parts of Eastern Europe which Colin has also seen. Don Sanchez,
then Atzu, speak with Rome at some length, and Celeste/Isabella talks with
the Prince, with Syria, moving through the crowd as well. The music is
loud enough to make Auspex 1 uncomfortable, although Auspex 2 is still
possible (and Quill starts reading auras), and everyone seems to be in a
very jovial mood, actually, by Cainite standards. One more guest arrives,
though: Aner. That's odd. Celeste/isabella asks Aner why he hasn't left
town, and he replies that he's going to stick it out and take his
punishment if that's what Fate has in store.
Over the course of the night, everyone notices that pairs of people have
wandered off together, at different times, to speak. Both
Celeste/Isabella and Rome set their ghouls down the hallways which lead to
a back hall where these conversations take place, and they note that they
go on between:
As the night wore on, people started to trickle out, leaving only Rome,
Celeste, Colin and Quill, along with their ghouls, the troubadors, etc.,
there with them, as well as Aner and Rosa, Victor, Joseph and Maria
Josephina. Syria had excused herself, saying that Jacob wanted to go home
so she was going to walk with him and then return. Constance had left
earlier. About then, Quill finally gets done reading auras,
finding that:
In other words, Victor, Rosa and Maria Josephina all encourage the
coterie to follow Aner. So they do.
Creeping down the hallway behind him, they see Aner headed for the
tucked-away hall where all the secretive conversations from before had
gone on. Colin creates an illusion of his original self stepping around
the corner in Aner's path, saying, "Come, old friend, it's good to see
you. Might I speak with you for a moment?" Aner stops, startled, when
the coterie realizes that, simultaneous to the appearance of a
mirror-Colin from around the corner, they've heard something behind them
and there's ethereal light shining from back there. Rome and Colin turn
to see the CrabMaster standing infront of a gateway of light, hands
raised, and everyone starts reaching for weapons or (in the case of
Celeste and Quill, who are still turned towards Aner) taking their combat
forms (Quill's improved, self-damaging Mortis 4, and Celeste's newly
acquired VRev version of Obtenebration 4). And, as everyone readies for a
fight...
...everything goes dark. And then, the lights come back up, but they're
filtered through a wall of sorts. It's like the coterie is standing in an
opague box, and outside that box, very, very large figures move about,
watching them. They hear muffled voices, and Quill and Rome pick up
enough that it sounds like the coterie is being talked about in a
historical context? Very weird. Colin, meanwhile, who speaks English,
garners rather a lot more about the conversation going on outside the box
(which various others are trying to destroy from within via their seperate
powers): two women and one man are speaking of the coterie in the context
of being a sample of just how random factors can destroy even the
best-made plans. One of the female voices asks whether they knew what
they were just about to get into, what they were facing, and the male
voice replies, "Yes and no. More likely, no to the former, and yes to the
latter, although they had no precise idea." With that, the box faded out
of view again, everything went dark, and when the lights came back up,
there was Aner, facing Colin and Quill, and the CrabMaster facing Rome and
Colin -- and everybody rolled for initiative.
The CrabMaster started waving his hands around, and Rome leapt forward,
sword raised, bringing it down through the middle of the CrabMaster with
enough force to lodge it in the wood under his feet -- but it merely
sliced through the CrabMaster with a ripple, doing zero apparent damage.
In frustration, and moving at light speed, Rome fires off Presence 2 at
the CrabMaster, scoring 3 successes -- and when the CrabMaster finally
gets an action, he spins and hurdles through the gateway of light. Colin
and Rome follow after, weapons drawn.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the hallway, "Aner" explodes into another
one of the 8-foot behemoths with wings, vicious talons, a green carapice
and a mouth/snout a foot long and ringed with tiny fangs at the end.
Celeste, by this point, has grown her tentacles out to 14 feet(!), and
proceeds to grapple the creature that used to be "Aner" something good
with three of them while using a fourth to balance herself firmly (which
was, I might add, a brilliant idea -- can I just say here and now that
such smart combat techniques impress the heck out of me, and that Kat
kicks some serious butt?). Quill, having activated his nasty powers that
make him very, very dangerous to touch, gets gored through the stomach by
the creature (causing the creature damage, since it touched him), and
proceeds to lunge for its knee, biting down and doing aggravated damage
with his fangs -- and spilling some of its blood into his mouth. The
monster lifts its leg, to which Quill is attached at the teeth, and jams
its "mouth" against his neck, with tiny teeth pricking his skin. Time for
more contested Willpower rolls, although Quill wins his by a mile.
Colin, lunging into the portal of light through which the CrabMaster had
entered and exited again, sees a rotting, morbid reflection of Celeste's
home and the CrabMaster running ahead of him at high speed. Deciding he
needs to help Celeste and Quill more than chase ghosts, he turns back
around and rushes back out just as Rome leaps in behind him and throws his
sword at the retreating form of the CrabMaster. It hits -- but it's
almost like a pocket opens in the CrabMaster as the sword flies through
him and lands, point down, in the rotten Shadowlands reflection of
Celeste's floor. The CrabMaster's form, moving at -extremely- high
speeds, disappears through the stone wall at the end of the hallway, and
is gone. Rome grabs his sword out of the floor, tries to run through the
wall as the CrabMaster had, and simply hits it head-on before standing
there cursing for a moment.
As Colin runs out of the portal and back into this side of reality, and
towards Quill and Celeste and "Aner," Celeste twists the abdomenal region
of the monster like she were wringing out a wet shirt, producing even more
damage. Quill grabs the monsters mouth and exhales a cloud of acidic gas
down its snout, and Colin takes a good chunk out of its shoulder. It's
obvious to all that the creature doesn't have long left for this world,
but it's obviously intelligent -- if Quill hurts to touch, then it will
touch Colin and Celeste with Quill. Grabbing Quill by the ankles
and spinning him through the air, "Aner" first clubs Colin (who soaks the
aggravated damage, but not the four non-agg levels), then Celeste (who
takes four agg and one normal level of damage when she fails her Stamina
roll completely). As Rome finally runs back out the portal to the
Shadowlands and throws a piece of the floor on this side that he'd taken
out with his first blow back through in frustration, just before the
portal closes, then Celeste simply stands up underneath Quill (thus taking
no new damage from touching him with some other portion of her body),
throwing Quill off altogether and throwing him back onto "Aner," the final
blow which brings the beast to its Final Death. As the gargantuan form
starts to sizzle and melt against the floor, and Quill eagerly starts
beating its head apart so he can get to its brain for a Necromancy 1 scan,
Victor, Rosa, Maria Josephina and Joseph all run into view, drawn by the
commotion of battle, staring in shock. Celeste and Colin shakily make
their way back to the room where the party was contained, eager to finish
off the blood left over so they can do some healing. Victor makes his way
over to the corpse of the creature, kneeling down beside Quill to start
Auspex'ing parts of it as he did with the Nosferatu, for Colin. Maria
Josephina, Rosa and Joseph simply stare in shock, and David runs up to
Rome to tell him what he's observed that night before the confusion
becomes too great and he loses his chance.
Quill has no difficulty discerning the last thing the creature whose brain
he holds saw before its first death -- the Embrace. It was no more than
three or four nights ago, and the scene is a dark room with an earthen
floor. The real Aner is in a corner, staked and unmoving. The
person whom Quill and the others have just fought is kneeling, tied at the
wrists. He feels something sharp leave his neck, he swoons mightily, and
a masculine hand is thrust infront of him, its wrist opened. He
drinks...and that's the end of the vision.
David, meanwhile, tells Rome that almost everyone who came down the
hallway together to speak in private that night had been mentioning
something about "the arrangement." Marie tells Celeste the same thing as
she greedily drinks goblets of blood and tries to heal her wounds. Colin
comments, as he had in the Prince's home, about everyone having a
"mirror," or a mirror image, according to Rosa. Celeste, still looking
like Isabella, her "sister," reminds everyone that the troubadors must
either die or be ghouled, because they've seen too much tonight -- but she
needs to get her reports from them first. The chapter draws to a tired
and frightened close, however, as there's one last ring of the bell by the
front door. A maid goes to answer it, there's a long silence from the
foyer, and then the maid's voice announces the arrival of...Celeste.
Back to the top.
As a sidenote, counting the Prelude, there were thirteen chapters;
fitting enough, I think.
Tonight was the last night.
They figured it out.
Get comfy, campers, it's a long story.
The twelfth and final chapter picks up exactly where the eleventh left
off: as Quill moves to finish off the blood from the party, and Colin and
Celeste refresh themselves, Rome clicks his rosary and prays for
forgiveness, and Constance (about a block down the street, after finding
some interesting bugs) decides to return to the party after all. There's
a ring of the bell by the door, and a befuddled maid
announces..."Celeste?" But Celeste's standing right there, so who could
that be at the door? Everyone pops back into combat form, if they've left
it, and moves into the foyer to see who's dared to show up looking like
Celeste in an ill-fated attempt to fool anyone, and see...Syria?
Chuckling?
"Geez, sorry," she says, surprised by everyone's rather rugged and
aggressive appearance. "I just thought it would be funny. Since, you
know, everybody thought they saw her walk through the party earlier."
Non-plussed in the extreme, everyone relaxes, and Maria Josephina tells
Syria that it was not funny. Constance slips in the door, and
hears the story of what's gone on, and dashes around the corner to run
down the hall and Auspex "Aner"'s body herself, seeing the fight, seeing
Victor Auspexing the body, and seeing masculine hands fleshcrafting
some stranger into looking like Aner! He's wearing a ring, made of
silver or some other "white" metal, which bears an insignia of a
strange-looking beast. Quill had seen it, too, when he had whipped up
some Necromancy on the brain of the dead "Aner," but hadn't recognized it.
Constance, however, recognizes it: the beast in the sigil is the bust of
a zulo form-like creature, in profile.
Maria Josephina makes her exit, Rosa makes hers, and Colin sidles up to
Victor and starts whispering to him. Their conversation,
basically, goes like this:
Colin: So, what's the "arrangement"?
Right. Well then. As the conversation goes on, and Rome eyes Joseph
warily while Celeste sees to the ghouling and care for the troubador who
survived everyone else's panic over the possibility a faux Celeste was at
the door, Constance comes back from her little trip down Auspex Lane and
starts checking out the hands of the two male vampires standing there:
Victor and Joseph. Joseph's hands don't look very much like they could be
the hands from her vision. Syria, she must admit, has very masculine
hands. But Victor's? Those look like the right hands. As Victor leaves,
Constance follows him out, striking up a conversation which runs more or
less along the lines of, "I know you created the fake Aner." Victor
denies any knowledge of what she's talking about, or any guilt, but
Constance's Auspex makes quick work of that, seeing deception quite
clearly as he says he would never hurt her, or lie to her, and that he
certainly did not create a false Aner. What would he have to gain from
it?
Constance just gets angry, and stomps down the street towards home, where
she throws another fit. Victor greets this with his usual aplomb,
scolding her for irrationality and pointing out flaws in the theory that
he would have done this. If you ask him, it was Joseph. Constance grows
less and less rational, and Victor -- well known for his belief that only
he and his childe, and other insane people, are sane, and that the
"insane" in his world, sane people, are dangerous -- comments that he
would "hate to see Constance's grip on reality begin to slip." I've never
actually managed to strike fear in one of my players with a few quiet
words like that. Yum. As Constance's tantrum winds down, and she thuds
against the floor when she throws herself against it in exhaustion, she
realizes something: she's never known about any basement, but there was a
hollow echo under the floor when her ear hit it. She would never have
heard it otherwise. There's a basement down there. And she saw the faux
Aner being fleshcrafted in a basement.
Time to play nice. Off she goes, doing her chores and reading a book, at
Victor's direction. While she moves around, she checks behind paintings,
under rugs, under furniture, and finds no trap doors. Upstairs again, in
her room, she hears Victor come out of his study and leave the house, and
after making sure he doesn't come back immediately, Constance heads
straight for the study, to find out how to get into the basement she
didn't know existed.
Meanwhile, Rome follows Joseph outside, and when Joseph asks if he can
help him, Rome replies that Maria Josephina has ordered him to be Joseph's
protector, and that's that. He's going with Joseph from now on. Joseph
replies that he's a pacifist by nature, abhoring violence, and while he's
very grateful, he can't accept. Rome tells him that he, in turn,
can't go back on an order from his Prince, and so tough noogies. What's
Joseph going to do? Punch him? So he acquiesces, taking Rome along with
him on a visit to Rosa's house. Rome stays outside, across the street,
making sure Joseph doesn't scurry away somehow, and when Rosa and Joseph
emerge together, Rome sets off accompanying them again, this time in the
direction of the Prince's home. Along the way, they see Colin, who spent
some time out by the docks with the intention of framing Joseph for murder
-- but now he's not so sure about Victor anymore, so he doesn't go through
with it, despite Victor's request that Colin get rid of Joseph by framing
him for a crime that would get him kicked out of the city. The group
stops to speak to Colin, and he tells Rosa he was coming to see her. Rosa
tells Colin to come back later that night, and he agrees. Off he goes, as
Rosa, Rome and Joseph make their way to the Prince's haven.
Meanwhile, Celeste oversees the clean-up of her home, and the care of her
new troubador ghoul. Quill decides to head to the Prince's house, because
he's wanting to check out the spirit-world side of Maria's house. She
agrees to let him, but only because he can't read thoughts. Weird, that.
Eventually, Joseph, Rosa and Rome appear, and all five of them sit down in
the study. Maria assures Rosa that they can speak freely infront of Quill
and Rome, and off they go -- being as obtuse as possible. Joseph is
apparently trying to interest Maria in joining a group devoted to
tranquility and solitude, but Maria hasn't proven herself worthy. Maria
is annoyed that he would make demands along with offers of gifts, and
replies that her leaving the city would displease a great number of other
Cainites anyway. It starts getting weird, and about here, Mike starts
saying, "Joseph's Inconnu. I know it!"
Celeste, tired of looking after her house, decides to head to the Prince's
as well. She joins the conversation, as another quiet observer, and
Quill notices that Rosa has left her body, floated up into the sky,
scanned the city, and returned. She excuses herself, leaving Joseph by
himself (it's clear that she and Joseph are on the same "side," in
something). Joseph keeps speaking with Maria, trying to manipulate her
subtly this way and that, and it eventually takes the turn that Maria
Josephina tells Joseph, politely, to leave. She's "had a long night," and
hopes he won't object to her "terrible hospitality."
Back at Constance and Victor's haven, Constance starts exploring the
study, and sure enough, one of the bookcases (even just one being a sign
of tremendous wealth in that era) pulls away from the wall and reveals a
staircase into the secret basement. With a candle, Constance descends
into darkness which is anything but natural, feeling her way around until
she finds, sure enough, the real Aner: staked and lying on the dirt
ground. She finds a secret door into the sewers, too, and then she hears
Victor return.
"Constance," he calls down the stairs quietly. "Are you down there?"
When she replies yes, he invites her to come upstairs and talk to him.
She tells him that didn't work earlier, why would it now? He tells her
they should talk again. She should come upstairs. About here, Constance
starts to realize that she's not blood bound to Victor like she thought
she was. "You should come down here," she tells him. "I like it down
here."
"I don't," he replies. "Come upstairs now, so we can talk."
Acquiescing, she ascends the stairs, dragging her fingers along the wall
to see images of Victor carrying the man who became the false Aner over
his shoulder, down into the basement. She sees him carrying the real
Aner. She sees him carrying two men down the stairs with a smile on his
face: she surmises they were later the faux Nosferatu. As she reaches
the landing, she sees two things: a young woman about the height of her
new body, drained partially and passed out in the chair Constance was
sitting in earlier, and she sees no Victor -- until he drops out of
Obfuscate and tries to stake her. A brief struggle ensues, in which
Constance goes Zulo Form, Victor gets thrown across the study, and when he
drops back into Obfuscate, Constance bolts for the door at top speed, in
Zulo Form, taking advantage of incredibly high strength and stamina, and
Celerity, and hapless mortals along the way, to race at light speed
towards the Prince's house.
While all this is going on, Colin has returned to the inn to ask
Jaycon if Joseph's requested anything odd yet. Only, Jaycon replies, that
no one enter Joseph's room, even to clean it with a decent broom. Colin
says now is the time to clean Joseph's room, and Jaycon of course agrees,
telling Colin he'll let him in, but he won't let Colin do the cleaning.
Instead, Jaycon cleans the room while Colin fishes around through some
Obtenebration covering the top of a chest which he's picked open, Joseph's
only personal possession in the room (if you were a mortal thief, would
you, upon opening a chest to find its top covered in a slimy film of the
Abyss, choose to proceed? hell no). He finds some clothes, a Catholic
catechism, and a diary. Closing up the chest again, Colin retires to his
room to do some reading, and there discovers that Joseph is indeed a part
of some organization which prizes nonintervention and the power of
observation over violence, rationale over brute force. Rosa was his
contact here, who nominated Maria as a new member. This is Joseph's first
mission on his own, and he's here to assess Maria's "suitability" as a
candidate -- namely, her stability and personal resolve. Eventually
Jaycon knocks at his door, and tells him he has a visitor: Rosa. She's
invited him to come upstairs and meet her, prepared to take a short walk.
Colin goes, and off they head towards Rosa's home, where Rosa tells him
about the dolls.
And "the arrangement."
When the city was reconquered, she says, she, Maria, Syria and Victor
entered into "the arrangement." They all wanted peace and quiet. None of
them wanted more vampires showing up. So off they went, each in their own
way, to keep other vampires from moving there: Maria through clan
connections, Rosa through false prophecies of doom, Syria through Presence
and clan connections, and Victor through unknown but terribly effective
means. However he did it, she says, Victor could just keep
neonates away. They just wouldn't come near the city. And over time, the
arrangement became more important to him than anyone, and he became its
enforcer. Now Joseph threatens the arrangement, because the arrangement
also stipulated each conspirators continued presence in the city, with
Maria Josephina as Prince. This makes "him," Rosa says, tapping the doll
of Victor on the head, very unhappy. He knows what's going on. He comes
and watches her make the dolls. He's angry right now, and he's going to
hurt lots of people right now, Rosa says, and now she tells Colin he
should go to the Prince, or there will be new dolls of everyone.
Sure enough, sitting in a box by her side, are just-started dolls of
everyone who was in the city before the trouble started. So new,
they are, that Colin can smell fresh wood-shaving still in the air.
"He's going to put everything back the way it was, so it will stay that
way?" he half-asks, half-states as an understanding.
"Yes," Rosa breathes. "I have to stay with the dolls. I have to make new
ones for what happens. Leave now."
And off Colin goes, towards the Prince's house.
Back at the Prince's house, two things happen. Joseph leaves, with Rome
following, and Quill hears a woman's brief scream and the approaching
footsteps of something big running this direction. He moves to the
window, and sees (just as Rome does, shoving Joseph against the wall and
drawing his sword) Constance in Zulo Form barreling down the street
towards the house. In she runs, with Rome in hot pursuit and Joseph being
dragged back inside, dropping back into her normal shape and gasping out
that she saw Aner in her basement, and that Victor is the Crabmaster.
Celeste pops Obtenebration 4 in preparation, Quill starts readying his
Mortis powers, as he spots the Crabmaster flying (literally) towards the
house in the spirit realm, and Celeste asks Maria if she keeps a store of
blood anywhere in the house. Maria points towards the kitchen, and there
they find wine carafes of blood, specially sealed, where they all start
pumping stats and chugging. They can see the portal the Crabmaster likes
to open, opening in the front door of the home, blocking the only exit,
and they all set off running in that direction -- although not before
Maria fires off some heavy Obtenebration of her own, sprouting
Obtenebration 4 form as well as summoning -two- shadow men to fight with
her. Joseph cowers in a corner, and the coterie, and Maria, run back out
into the foyer to face off with the Crabmaster -- where they all hit a
wall of Presence, and everyone but Maria Josephina makes their Courage
rolls to attack. Not only does everyone (but the Prince) make their roll,
they all make a success with every single die. This was the single
best group roll I've ever seen.
And here I flipped over our soundtrack to the "combat" side.
Claws extend out of the portal, and grab people. Colin recognizes it as
high-level Chimerstry, and ceases to be affected. Celeste sees that Colin
isn't affected, and realizes she can ignore it, too, if she concentrates.
Quill is similarly non-affected, and goes out a window, chasing up the
street after the other end of the silver cord he sees coming out of the
Crabmaster's back, in the spirit world, thanks to his new Necromancy
powers. Rome hacks the claw which he believes has grabbed him in half,
and Constance is trapped by hers, while Maria Josephina stares,
dumbfounded.
Celeste, with her new Celerity and her new Obtenebration, shoots tentacles
at the Crabmaster/Victor, only to discover that the Abyss incarnate
can be very unpleasant on something astrally projected. She starts
doing some carnage, weaving tentacles around Victor to hold him in place
in hopes Quill has run off to find his real body, but somehow the
Crabmaster/Victor breaks free and makes a dash for the portal back into
the Shadowlands. Rome leaps in after him, as does Colin (after dragging
the Prince out of the middle of the fight and letting her regain her
senses). Celeste goes in as well, as does Maria Josephina, and Constance
makes the claw still on her disappear in a splintering use of Vicissitude.
Into the portal she goes as well.
Right about here, I'll note that when the Crabmaster first appeared, Quill
had ordered his zombie to light a torch, lifted it over his head, and
thrown the zombie -- torch and explosive stuffing and all -- through the
Crabmaster and right through the portal, creating a bonfire of zombie on
the edge of the Shadowlands. Everyone who runs through makes their
Roetschrek checks, and unlife goes on. Rome's had a head-start, though,
and Colin's interested in whatever Quill is chasing, so Rome has the
chance to run the Crabmaster down, tackle his vaguely corporeal form
("this is Crabmaster Jell-O, at best, dude"), and start hacking at it. It
takes a lot of damage, between Celeste's tentacles (one is up to
thirty feet) and Rome's knife (the same knife which caused his
cross-shaped Open Wound). Fourteen health levels later, while Quill and
Colin are racing towards a house into which the silver cord Quill can see
leads, the Crabmaster turns the consistency of mashed potatoes and
slithers away, apparently dead. Rome roars in triumph, believing he's
just bested Satan in combat (due to a botched Intelligence roll when he
first got grabbed by the claws), and as everyone on the Shadow side of the
Shroud realizes the portal is closing, they all dive through -- barely.
Up everyone goes, chasing off up the street, all care thrown to the wind
(Constance in Zulo Form, Celeste and Maria both in Dark Metamorphosis
form), in time to see Colin and Quill jump through a window into a house
and tear through it, towards the rear.
Quill gets there first, just in time to try to bite the Crabmaster's
comatose form, only to have his fangs skitter off the man's skin. Then
Victor wakes up, and pops Vicissitude 6 form, grabbing Quill's robes
between plates of carapicine armor and snapping at him with the
soul-sucking mouth of doom(tm). Quill does a little damage with his
Mortis 4 and his fangs, but not a whole lot. Colin tears in, as well, and
fires off enough Animalism in the round to draw every dog and bat (yes,
bat, not cat) for a half-mile. The sound of baying mastiffs carries
across the city as Rome lifts his lance from his horse and Maria
Josephina, Constance and Celeste leap through the same window, tearing
towards the kitchen of the same house, ready to do some carnage.
The battle ensues, with Quill opting to hide in the corner so as not to
lose any more blood or kill anyone else with his area-effect Mortis 3,
Colin stabs Victor through one eye, and Celeste stabs into his skull with
a tentacle through the other. Constance tackles Victor from behind, Colin
hacks at him with his sword, Celeste pushes further into his brain with
her tentacle, and Victor (having blown all his action to produce a measly
two aggravated wounds on Quill) goes down when he drops into torpor and
Constance rips his rib cage open, tears out his heart, and starts smearing
his blood on her face in her blind rage. Maria Josephina turns and
leaves, as does Celeste, as does Quill, as does Colin, just in time for a
flock of bats to fly through the windows and descend on the
quickly-turning-to-ash corpse of Victor in Vicissitude 6 form, and dogs
begin tearing into the home through windows, barking like the dickens.
Amid the noise, shrieking and terror, Constance smears some of Victor's
blood across her tongue, and tastes...kinship.
Sameness.
Eventually everyone ends up at Maria Josephina's again, finishing off her
supply of emergency blood, and Maria fills them in a little more on the
"arrangement." She doesn't know how, but Victor could keep others away
from the city. Now that he's gone, the arrangement's a thing of the past.
Neonates will flood the city, she says, asking the coterie if they'd ever
wondered why no one was younger than 9th gen in Madrid, or why no neonates
had moved there in a decade. Various strategies for keeping the city all
theirs are discussed, and then Maria dismisses them, still unsure why
Victor killed Julia and Lydia, except that it might have destabilized
Maria Josephina enough to make Joseph (who was
inviting her to join the Inconnu) uninterested, but not enough for any
Cainites to care and call for her removal as Prince. Constance is awarded
her and Victor's haven as her own Domain, and everyone leaves, hoping the
rest of the night will be quiet.
Over following weeks, Constance pieces together some of what was going on
from Victor's writings: he knew Joseph was coming, and that Joseph was of
the Inconnu. Victor thought the Inconnu, in their pursuit of solitude and
enlightenment (they're different for this game, okay?), were the least
sane of anyone in the vampiric world. To sacrifice Maria to them would be
to abandon her to insanity, and to lose her as Prince, meaning Lord Lucien
would take a more active interest in things than he did when a "trusted"
childe of his own was on the throne. This was unacceptable -- it would
have ended his experiments. They also describe what Victor had termed
"the change," and which anyone in the Black Hand (but no one in this city)
would recognize as the point at which the Souleater associated with
Vicissitude mythos takes over completely: Vicissitude 6 is its natural
form. He would consume almost the entire soul of a victim, then Embrace
them, turning them into an automatic Souleaten childe. With liberal
Dominate and Vicissitude, he could churn out duplicates who only had one
power: Vicissitude 6 (and none of the lower levels), since that was the
Souleater's natural form. He had killed Julia and Lydia to destabilize
the Prince's grip on reality. He had tried to get the coterie killed
because they got too close to the truth (his appearances to Suarez as a
ghost of immense power). He had killed the Nosferatu when they learned
the truth, and tried to come back to Madrid. Did the Prince think the
coterie were bumbling idiots? No, she merely thought two investigative
teams would do twice the work. Victor thought they were idiots,
and Suarez' statements reflected that. And they were also a group Victor
could manipulate soooo easily, because they were his childe, and her
friends. They brought him evidence for Auspexing. They came to him for
advice. They liked him (well, some of them did). And he was the
Crabmaster. And now he's dead.
Is this the end, really? Maybe not. Had Victor staked Constance, he
would have whipped up a duplicate who would claim proof that it was
Joseph, and after Joseph had worn them down in self-defense, Victor would
swoop in, stake them all, and replace them. 900 years later, the stakes
would rot away in his basement, and they would all wake up in a Sabbat
city run by an Archbishop named Victor, with a ruling council of Biships
and priests who were 900 year-old duplicates of the coterie -- not the
best situation to wake up to, with a city full of confused neonates who
think you are the imposter. Had they never suspected him, he would
have removed them one by one, in order to build a Madrid which conformed
to his ideal. He was ancient, and powerful -- Maria Josephina admits to
the coterie in her later discussions on the matter that Victor and Lord
Lucien knew one another in mortal life -- one thousand years ago. When
they were in the Roman government.
Regardless of Victor's power, he's dead now, and life goes on. We may be
continuing the Chronicle, after a few months of a break, with some
one-shots Josh and Kat want to run, as well as a separate game Eric is
going to run and a Mage one-shot Mike's involved in and encouraging us to
join. Will we see what happens when hordes of neonates, three hundred
years later, turn Madrid into a Sabbat stronghold and Maria Josephina
joins them for fear of losing her precious city? Will we move to
Jerusalem to let the heat die down right now? Will we jump ahead a few
hundred years, and turn it into a modern-era game? We'll see.
And quiet descends, once more, on the night in Madrid.
Back to the top.
A quick review of NPCs:
Locations:
Some images on this page come from other websites -- all found via
Lycos. No copyright infringement is
intended, and no copyright information was included with the images I
subsequently modified at their original location.Portents and Signs: Prelude
Looking Through a Glass Darkly, Story I
Murder Most Foul: Chapter One
Take This Cup: Chapter Two
Sound and Fury: Chapter Three
Conflicting Intrigues: Chapter Four
"No, of course not," the Lasombra Prince replies. "Purely voluntary."
"Oh, good," Colin says. "I think I'd rather not, then."
"Fine, fine," Maria Josephine replies. She pauses a few beats, and adds,
"You know, you have a very nice tavern."
Taking Care of Business: Chapter Five
Goldfinger: Chapter Six
"And why are you telling us?"
"Why am I telling you?"
"Because now that we know, we'll die, too?"
"Ooooh, exactly."
Mirror, Mirror, Story II
Shards: Chapter Seven
Reflections: Chapter Eight
The coterie travels most of the night, but arrives in Oro, headed towards
Madrid, about three hours before the sun should rise. Colin and Hans
break off to go investigate the local church to see if Father Dominic's
come back, or what else might be up. At this hour of the night, the
church is closed (although not locked -- in a village of 200 people, who's
going to steal from a church?) and there are no candles or torches
burning. Colin heads inside to investigate, finding only that there's a
small prayer-memorial on the desk of Father Dominic, placed there
assumedly by someone else. Everything else in the room is covered in
dust, and untouched. Leaving Hans upstairs in a priest's robe and with
strict instructions to allow no one downstairs with the story that Hans is
a priest from elsewhere, come to visit Father Dominic, Colin heads down to
the sub-sanctuary, where the pool of stagnant water, the clothes of the
Nosferatu, the statues of angels with fangs, and the "alter" with
convenient drainage slits at each corner. By now the pool of water is
gone, with faint rust-colored stains all that's left on the floor.
Otherwise, it is exactly the same, and Colin beds down for the night.
Face to Face: Chapter Nine
Enter Sandman: Chapter Ten
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Funhouse: Chapter Eleven
Their ghouls report back here and there, or they notice themselves. Of
special note is that Victor sounded as though he were intimidating Rosa as
he spoke to her, which Colin noticed when he went to disrupt them by
poking his head around the corner and saying hello. Rome, as well,
disrupted Rosa and Joseph's speech, at which time Joseph said he was of
the Kiasyd bloodline, explaining why he has a reflection in the mirrors
but claims to be Lasombra. Celeste's ghoul tells her the same, and
Celeste/Isabella yanks the Prince aside to tell her that Joseph isn't
really Lasombra at all. She's definitely aware there's someone named
Marconius who got involved in some magic which was unpleasant, and banned
from the clan for it, but she's never heard of any Kiasyd. The player
pointed out that the Kiasyd don't exist yet. Quite right she is. Maybe.
Regardless, the Prince thanked Celeste for the information, and said she
would keep an eye on him.
Huh? Aner doesn't have lines in his aura from diablerie? Quill brings
this to Rosa's attention after alerting everyone else that he thinks Aner
might not be Aner at all. Rosa looks at him, then shrugs and says that
it's Aner. She insists on this point, in fact, despite what she knows
Aner did (and she admits, she does know that Aner diablerized Millecande).
She says that if Quill doesn't believe it's Aner, then Quill should ask
him. Victor is alerted to it by Colin, and agrees, that's not the aura of
a Diabolist, which everyone knows Aner is. Victor notes, however, that if
Colin wants to do anything about it, not to look to him for help, since
that would mean telling the Prince it's not Aner, and how they know
it's not Aner, and Victor refuses to tell the Prince that he knew Aner was
a practitioner of diablerie and didn't tell the Prince that himself.
Instead, he advises, why not follow Aner now, as he's heading out the
doors and down the hall "to refill his glass?" Rome and Celeste alert the
Prince to the fact that Quill is quite certain Aner isn't Aner, somehow,
and the Prince tells them that, as with the Nosferatu, if they bring her
proof that Aner isn't who he says he is, then fine, they can do something
about it. The proof, however, is necessary. And if they want to confront
him, she adds, there he goes now. Do it quietly. Meanwhile, Victor
assures Colin that if he goes following after Aner, Victor will be
elsewhere, tucked away, observing the conversation astrally to provide a
witness. Rome and Colin decide they're going to follow Joseph home rather
than pursue Aner, since Victor warned Colin that Joseph was very,
very dangerous, and advised him to "get him out of the city somehow
without actually hurting him," but the Prince promises she'll make sure
Joseph doesn't leave before Colin and Rome will have the chance to follow
him. She'd rather find out what the deal is with Aner before Colin and
Rome go after Joseph.
Through the Looking Glass: Chapter Twelve
Victor: Like I'm going to tell you. It's not important, anyway.
Colin: But I'm willing to bet it involes me.
Victor: Not at all. You know, I'm glad you asked me. You'd tick Maria
Josephina and Rosa off if you asked them.
Colin: Right.
Victor: Your direct approach disappoints me.
The Extras
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Red Moon Rising 1/2
1999