Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Kindred are motivated by two key contradictions.
Mortals are both herd animals, kept plump in service of their hunger, but also a much needed reminder of what separates them from the beast. The machinations of the damned are both instrumental to their survival and also most likely to bring about their final death.
The any sufficiently important moment in a kindred's life can be reduced to one of these key tensions. If you dig deeply enough, sometimes you don't have to dig very deep at all.
You're listening to the all night society, an actual play podcast brought to you by queens court games.
Ivy Larue is steered by destiny, just not her own.
The west coast native finds herself in Chicago now, moved like a chess piece by another's will.
But why?
Once all tramire were held enthrall to the will of the pyramid. But the toxic love of the blood bond isn't the only way to ensure obedience.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: The tremere are the only clan that can make being a vampire feel boring.
The bruja wake up day one ready to rage against the machine du jour. The ventru start their children off with little empires to run and industries to bleed dry.
Even the toriador get to throw a gallery opening every now and then.
But the tramir.
We get to go to vampire elementary school.
Because it's not just the traditions that'll define your life in the pyramid. That's day one stuff.
No, the real story of life in house Tramir comes down to two things, blood, sorcery, and bureaucracy.
And they spend years making sure you're fully versed in both before they're willing to let you out of the house.
Even then, you're never done.
There's always another ritual to practice or research, some obscure lore to tease apart.
Gabrielle asked me if I wanted to do this forever, but it never occurred to me that this was graduate school for eternity.
Well, 15 years, anyway.
I served alongside my sire as dutiful and honor bound citizens of Las Vegas, dividing my time between the needs of the court and the needs of the chantry.
Or rather, pretending to care deeply about the first while scheming away time and responsibilities to devote more attention to the second.
It was rigorous and stimulating, sure, but, well, a little routine elsewhere in the kindred world. There were wars being fought, cities under siege.
In Vegas, it was pretty much do your homework and occasionally scuffle with a hakata.
I never did get to experience Vegas nightlife fully. On the rare occasion I was allowed to venture beyond the chantry walls, it was never alone. We had very strict in and out procedures and that's without getting into the prince's own rules for the strip.
It was the ideal backdrop for my induction into my new life, though even if it wasn't your scene. Everybody came to Vegas eventually.
The ever changing herd ensured a never ending supply of new bodies. And it was all too common for immortal to have had just a little too much to drink and be safely escorted back to their hotel room by their friends.
It was a city that came alive at night. A microcosm of kindred society was bright, loud, full of life.
A stark contrast to the quiet calm of the chantry libraries.
It was there that I'd spend most of my nights researching and studying and preparing rituals for Gabrielle.
As regent, she'd always treated me a little differently than the other neonates under her tutelage.
At least, that's what they'd whisper.
Whether I was just better than the others didn't seem to matter. The only possible explanation for me moving up ahead of other, older neonates was because Gabrielle was my sire, and that was fine.
I was too engrossed in my duties to care about the others. And any detail they learned about you could be exploited to keep you on the bottom tier of the pyramid while they climbed.
So I kept to myself, back into the world of competing for trophies and accolades. Only now they came in the form of trust and additional responsibilities.
Even with the whispers and the sideways glances from the others, I still felt my progress was never fast enough.
Hard work was to be rewarded, and my reward was being Gabrielle's gopher.
She had picked me because of my intelligence and was wasting my talents, sending me to organize archives and take inventory.
When I brought these concerns to Gabrielle, she would smile and rub my arm, assuring me there was a reason that I'd just have to trust her.
And I did.
Of course I did.
And I wanted to prove to her that her trust was well placed.
So when she sent me to the storeroom to catalog the reagents, I did so with a smile on my face.
She thanked me and sent me off.
And when she sent me to harvest a fresh supply of tamarisk, wolfsbane, and sage, I did so, preserving each flower and trimming off excess leaves.
She thanked me with a nod of approval.
But then she sent me to acquire 44 grams of ground bone. The thigh bone of a hanged man, specifically.
She stared at that scale for what felt like an eternity.
Her body language changed and her voice dropped.
I thought you were better than this, Ivy. She sighed, speaking to the air in front of her and not to me.
Was I wrong to choose you?
I started to respond, but she just put her hand up and waved me away.
I apologized as I backed away from her, but she wouldn't even speak to me.
All that for bringing back 44.3 grams. Instead, her disappointment was palpable, and I felt that pain deep inside my chest. I had to make it up to her, prove that she wasn't wrong, that I was the right choice, that I was somebody to be proud of.
I took on extra projects, put in extra research time, organized the storeroom unprompted, hunted down hard to find reagents by calling in favors with old contacts that I'd had in life. Risky, sure. But for Gabrielle, it was worth it.
I became obsessive with my measurements after that. Perfection was always a trait I sought. But as part of my clan, it was magnified.
Every weight would be accurate to the hundredths. Anything less wouldn't suffice.
Gabrielle appreciated this effort.
She began speaking to me again once I showed her all the things that.
[00:08:44] Speaker C: I'd done for her.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: The problem with raising the bar, though, is that it becomes baseline.
I had to work harder to prove that I deserved to be here and had earned all the responsibilities I'd been given. But I was happy to do it. To see that approving smile.
And the other neonates?
They weren't anywhere close to the bar.
No, this was a one woman competition, and I was always in first place.
I was the perfect witch, or had the makings of it.
And Gabrielle knew this, which is why she kept pushing me.
And then, well, Vienna happened.
I know. The destruction of the prime chantry rattled kindred society top to bottom. But none of you will ever, ever understand what it means to lose the pyramid.
The tremere succeed in this world because of our discipline and our hierarchy. And overnight, both had been reduced to a burning pile.
The clan was paralyzed.
And while the fire still raged in our ancient libraries, burning out the very womb of our clan, we saw the schismatics rise against us.
It is only by our strength and ingenuity that we survived those nights.
House tremere stands as it ever has, an irreplaceable pillar of the Camarilla, no matter what our detractors might say.
But Vienna wasn't the end of our problems.
Because after Vienna came London. And after London, Memphis.
And after Memphis, Las Vegas.
You know what graduate school doesn't prepare you for? Being hunted through the city by fucking Vatican Seal team six.
None of us were ready.
The second inquisition burned elders out of their havens just as easily as they swept day old licks off the streets.
They knew our weaknesses, understood our routines.
Which of Kane's gifts is supposed to protect you against a CDC data warehouse plucking oases of hemophilia out of public health records? What good is a Bruha's unholy strength against an NSA algorithm?
We could only run, hide, wait.
Well, the lucky among us, anyway.
We knew that anybody who wasn't captured had fled, whether or not they'd made it very far.
By the time the federal agents were done with their anti terrorism operations, there were only two tremere left alive in the state of Nevada.
From a bustling chantry staffed with dozens of sharp, inquisitive minds to a pair of terrified witches huddling in a cold war fallout sheltered deep in the Mojave.
This wasn't graduate school anymore. This was war.
War for the survival of our clan, for the survival of our species.
Suffice it to say, that necessitated a change in curriculum.
They hunted us. We hunted them.
We set up all manner of wards for lupines, for kindred, for kind.
If anything so much as sneezed in that desert, we knew about it.
Gabrielle taught me how to communicate with her telepathically. For the occasions we became separated, we planned escape routes, planted traps, everything.
We knew that if, when they found us, we wanted to be ready to fight, to flee, whatever made sense at the time, this was easier said than done. Gabrielle was clearly impacted by it all. Her fuse, short, her comments, Curt.
It didn't take much to set her off. Spilled vial of blood, cracked mortar, a miscalculation on material ratios. Any of these would see her turn cold.
Can't say the attitude shift was surprising, though.
What we were going through, it was unprecedented.
Gabrielle had survived for too long to be taken out by some military fuck boys. Then I wasn't about to let anything happen to her.
Not because of my now nonexistent blood bond, but out of respect, obligation.
She did everything she could to keep us safe. And it was my responsibility, at the very least, to keep her in a good mood.
So I did the heavy lifting. I would make note of what we needed to source to keep our stocks at acceptable levels, venturing out to secure the land, but only if we felt activity levels were low enough that the risk was worth it.
There was a small farm close to our shelter that kept enough livestock around to fill specific reagent stocks. The day sleep made its demands, of course, but we made sure to at least be prepared if our hunters came by day. And in a pinch, the creatures were barely acceptable sustenance, but that old farmer kept better track of his animals than I ever gave him credit for. This crazy old man had called in reports of occultist activity on his farm, which. Okay, guilty, on that front. But then the local police came poking around.
The next night, I noticed the deadbolt on the chicken coop, but I was desperate, and I pulled back some wire mesh to secure a bird.
I know. I pulled it back into place, but I must have been too hasty to leave, because the next day there were floodlights.
That occult activity had made its way through special law enforcement channels, and I was too engrossed in this new development to notice the pair of SI agents peering at me from the loft of the barn.
I knew I had a decision to make.
The farm was marked useless to us as long as the si thought there were still kindred to hunt down, however long that took.
I could flee, go back into hiding immediately, and hope our stores lasted long enough to find a new source.
Or I could bring home a present for my sire.
The choice was easy.
I must have been quite a sight when they tracked me down and came around the back of that boulder. A slit down each forearm, Vita dripping from my fingers like thick tendrils.
They were certainly surprised, which made painting them with a thick layer of corrosive sludge that much easier. Their weapons sizzled and smoked. Their body armor began to warp and buckle, and I warned the pair not to try anything, lest their flesh meet the same fate.
I am so lucky that bluff worked.
I helped myself to their equipment belts and cuffed the agents to one another. Everything else went into the still curdling pool of acid.
After that, I made a small show of healing my wounds. The look on the younger one's face was just priceless, and I led the men on a merry hike through the desert back towards the shelter.
I didn't let them see where we ended up, obviously, the mortal mind is so easily plied, and introduced them to my sire.
The look on Gabrielle's face when I walked in with not one but two delicious gifts.
I could live a thousand years and never feel such delight again.
She pulled me close and kissed my forehead before enjoying her first real drink in what felt like ages.
The SI wasn't happy about this, of course. Activity ramped up in the days that followed, but we had food, we had reagents. We had everything we needed.
With our hunger properly slaked, the rescue teams that dared to stalk us through the desert never stood a chance.
They sent enough people our way to keep us busy, sure, but we had the upper hand.
This was the contingency we'd spent months preparing for. I wasn't going to let anything happen to us now and was backed by the confidence of my actions.
It didn't last long.
Not because I managed to win some climactic battle against impossible odds or anything.
Nope. The Si just moved on.
Too many bodies makes for bad press. And there were plenty of easier targets to take down.
By the time the dust had settled, though, Las Vegas had been depopulated. All the same.
We'd extracted a fair price from the enemies, sure, but two tremere aren't enough to rebuild a chantry, let alone a city.
We would abandon Las Vegas. For now. Gabrielle returned to the old world to meet with her own elders, and I. Well, I ended up here.
On her orders, of course.
Whatever Gabrielle has planned, she hasn't deemed it necessary for me to know yet.
But, hey, that's the pyramid for you.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Violence follows Joshua crozier like a faithful hound through life, to death and ever after.
It would be easy to blame his ancestry for the carnage that follows in his wake. But stereotypes never tell the whole story, do they?
Is it Joshua who treads on the heels of death, or death that follows him?
[00:20:00] Speaker D: I do appreciate your accepting my presence in the city, especially considering the circumstances under which I arrived. It's one thing to accept a new kindred into your domain, but another thing entirely to welcome one of my clan. I confess I have much to learn so far as my ancestors are concerned, but I know that we're scarce in this part of the world and that our reputation is unseemly.
As I've mentioned, I was embraced into the Banu hakeem, then called the Asimites, by a man called John Thicketz.
I've given his description to your sheriff. Suffice it to say, he was certainly from somewhere in or near the cradle of civilization.
I tell you this because you may have met him at some time or another, or at the very least, know someone who has.
In truth, I have no knowledge of his true influence, power, or reputation, only that his tendrils extend far beyond Boston, and I suspect he operates under many different masks.
Given the uncertainty surrounding his origins, or even his name, as I doubt John Thicketts was born as such, it should come as no surprise that to this day, I'm not sure why he chose to embrace me at all.
My sire did not make a habit of revealing his true motivations.
Whatever purpose he intended for me yet eludes my understanding.
Perhaps he just liked me. But alas, I'll never know.
I understand that some of our kind are made aware of the kindred before being embraced themselves.
I am not among that number. Rest assured, though, John Thicket's made short, efficient work of introducing me to my new existence.
Or the physiology of it, anyway. And the importance of keeping our secret.
I refer, of course, to the masquerade. But in the case of my sire, this also included my existence.
I was an unauthorized embrace.
Prince Quentin king. At the time, Prince of Boston would never have given my sire permission. Nor was he the type to give second chances.
Apparently, he and the prince had been feuding from the moment he'd arrived in Boston.
Prince King didn't trust the Banu Hakeem, as few do, and it was an open secret that John was currying favors and securing boons from the court for his own purposes.
Thus, the early days of my unlife were spent exclusively in the company of John Thicketts and his small circle of trusted associates.
This didn't prevent me from indulging my vengeful desires. Discreetly, of course.
I knew better than to alert the authorities, or worse, the prince, to my activities.
Not that anyone was eager to mourn the disappearance of the murderers who took my wife from me, but mortals and princes alike frown on vigilantes.
Unfortunately, such an existence is unsustainable.
As it was, I was in John's company for nearly two decades and had begun to assume the coast was clear.
It wasn't, of course.
John's trusted associates were not so trustworthy after all.
It's somehow fitting that the only mistake I ever saw John make was also his final one.
This rat, Jamie.
He revealed our existence to the court in 2002. And the blood hunt came immediately after.
The announcement came without warning, though another of our number did manage to warn me before the news had been widely circulated.
A race against the Herald, as it were. And I'm grateful our man won. Because those few hours of forewarning were enough to save my life. John and I fled to a small cache he'd prepared for just such an occasion. He was not so careful as to avoid it. The occasion, I mean. But either paranoia or experience, maybe both, at least allowed him to prepare for it. He'd built up a cash in an empty apartment downtown and paid the building's owner to keep it locked up and off the market.
Inside, he kept everything you need for a clean getaway. Fake identification, keys to several different vehicles, basic disguise kits, and enough guns and ammo to outfit a platoon of marines.
We had to travel light, so packing didn't take much time. Maybe ten minutes.
I'm scooping ammo and supplies into a duffel bag. He's giving me a crash course and what it takes to move to a new city, what rituals we'd be expected to observe, what politics needed to be honored, that kind of thing. I guess it's telling. All these years, he never thought a fly by night escape was in the cards, so he'd never briefed me on it.
In any case, the whole thing actually went off without a hitch. John shoved a thick wad of cash at the building's owner, thanked him for his cleaning services over the years, and we were on our way, bouncing through Boston in some early 80s shipbox that was probably white once, beneath all the grime and rust.
It wasn't my first time running for my life, or unlife in this case, but it was as close a call as I'd had since the night of my embrace. I settled in for the long haul, shotgun loaded and chambered in my lap as the midnight city blurred on by.
I remember staring at it. The shotgun, that is.
John had filed the serial numbers off, but otherwise it was in perfect condition. Cotburn didn't like that. Why take the extra risk of carrying an illegal, most likely stolen weapon? Then I remembered gun stores don't usually keep kindred friendly hours.
Another small crime, small sacrifice required by the particulars of our existence.
And that really was John Thicketts in a nutshell.
A tangled, naughty mess of small sacrifices required by the particulars of his existence.
Everything was contingency plans and veiled threats and subterfuge designed to cover for his bloodline and his personality, both of which were almost universally hated.
And now I was smack in the middle of his paranoia and his slow burn power plays right as everything came falling down.
That's when I realized exactly where, what, and who. I was sure John had given me the rundown on politics, a few history lessons here and there, the basic how not to be a vampire stuff vampires for dummies.
But it's one thing to hear all that, and another thing entirely to be experiencing it. Up until that point, being kindred meant a little posturing here and there, but mostly a lot of taking advantage of my newfound gifts to exact revenge on the people who brought my mortal existence to a close.
Now it's a new night, and I'm in a world of shit with nowhere to go but forward.
With no offense meant, kind prince. That's simply our nature, right?
It was. About then I looked back up at John.
I'd meant to ask him about our plans, where we were going, but I never made it to the question.
He had this look on his face, what I'd never seen him wear before.
John was normally calm, collected, always moving about with an air of quiet disgust and arrogance. I'd never seen this, this enraged determination.
I don't know what you'd call that if you saw it on immortal, but on John. His face was the beast. It was fury and conviction and stalwart hate, and I knew something very, very bad was coming in our immediate future. At first I thought that rage was coming from me, and I realized where we were. John had driven us to Jamie's place, the one who'd sold him out. I'd been there a few times before, either on errands or as an accessory to some business between the two. From the street, it looked an innocent place, with an aura of family meals, quiet chatting, and wholesome politeness.
In truth, it felt like hell itself.
John was opening the car door. I turned and grabbed his sleeve, ordered him not to go in there, but yeah, he wasn't listening.
He wrenched himself away, dropping the keys in the seat as he climbed out and walked up the driveway toward the front door.
His stride was set, and even not in the way I'd come to know.
It was alien. His beast knew exactly where it was and exactly where it was going, and I know if I tried to stop him in any way more meaningful than I'd already tried, he would have torn me limb from limb.
I watched him walk into the house, leaving the front door hanging open, and my mind immediately went back to how I died.
There was this confused motion inside.
I couldn't tell what was going on, but I could hear the inhuman howls echoing from the yawning door. Was he murdering his betrayer? Was his betrayer murdering him? I couldn't say, but I knew better than to walk in after him. Hell, at that point, my own instinct was to book it. It was fight or flight, and John had already picked fight. The whole thing took less than a minute, and at the end of that minute, a face I didn't recognize stepped out onto the porch.
I knew instantly this was a setup.
They'd been banking on John doing something stupid, and he'd followed the beast right into their trap. Another figure stepped out, Jamie with his finger pointing out toward the car, where my dumbass was still sitting.
I got the gist. I hurled myself into the driver's seat and jammed the key into the ignition. I was still groping for the shotgun when I saw one of them sprinting down the steps and through the yard, beelining for the car.
That face.
I'll remember that face forever.
That entire moment, really.
It's a portrait burned into my mind. Something I'll be able to study for centuries.
That man, crowned by a shaved head and twisted with the grin of someone aching to shed blood.
I remember his fist smashing through the window and the fingers stretching out, eager to grab my hair, my throat. Anything he could use to pull me closer to court ordered doom.
In the time since, I've wondered what might have happened if he had caught me.
Would have been proper to stake me and return me to the prince for a formal execution, maybe. Would have simply set to work, tearing flesh until I was so thoroughly destroyed that even the undead body couldn't piece itself back together.
Perhaps his thirst for blood was so literal that he might indulge in that which defines my own clan.
It doesn't really matter.
Have you ever seen a gunshot wound up close? The kind of damage a point blank load of double odd buck does to the human body?
It's messy. It's real messy.
The buckshot punched little round holes in his hand and in his face. But the dead don't bleed.
He had enough of a head left to scream in pain and enough of a hand left to yank it back through the window. It was unnatural, which, yeah, sounds obvious now, but I'd never seen a vampire get shot before. I guess I wasn't quite ready for it.
Being dead, though. That doesn't dull the of gunfire.
The house was a pillbox now, every window a firing port. There wasn't time to see if I'd killed my assailant, and certainly no time to ponder the fate of John Thickett's. I just hit the gas, and sure enough, within ten minutes, I was leaving Boston.
I'm afraid that's the end of the interesting part. I made it out of the city, bounced between a few smaller towns, fearing, in my naivete, that the hounds of Boston would continue their hunt beyond the borders of their prince's domain.
Once I realized that wasn't the case, I had to make a choice.
Where would I like to spend the rest of my life?
I considered LA, but they have a bit of an anarch problem.
I considered New Orleans, but. Well, they've got their own issues.
So here I am in Chicago.
I apologize for not thinking to send a word until I was already standing on your doorstep. And I hope you can forgive me that one transgression that I might stay among those of your domain.
[00:33:59] Speaker A: Curiosity killed the cat, as they say. And Schmendrick too. But despite being embraced on the opportunity rich streets of a freshly reclaimed New York, the nosferatu now haunts Chicago's brick and grime.
How ironic that a kindred who considers herself above the domineering urges of her species would travel halfway across the country to pursue a grudge.
[00:34:27] Speaker E: Hey. So there's something I should probably talk about, and I figured you, more than the others, would probably appreciate the heads up.
[00:34:40] Speaker D: Is there any way you can make that sound a little more ominous?
[00:34:45] Speaker E: You ever hear of the circulatory system?
[00:34:49] Speaker D: Yeah, blood for the highest bidder. Powerful people with refined tastes and all.
[00:34:56] Speaker E: Mm hmm, that's the one. The huge organization with influential clientele, where tons of money and favors change hands and. Okay, look, there were a lot of reasons I ended up back in Chicago. I'd been planning the move for a while, actually, but the circulus hori system. Let's say they put some pressure on my schedule. We have a bit of a beef.
The get your ass kicked in an alleyway after being warned to stay out of their business kind of beef.
[00:35:31] Speaker D: That's pretty serious beef.
[00:35:34] Speaker E: Yeah. Look, I know you've got the whole being a cop and a detective thing going on. That's why I'm telling you first.
Fancy blood is just the surface, but there's more. Extortion, torture, human trafficking, blackmail. A whole bloated, dark underbelly lurking just out of sight.
[00:35:56] Speaker D: Vampires with a dark secret. You don't say.
[00:36:01] Speaker E: Okay, follow me on this one. So I wasn't exactly a model citizen after the embrace.
More like a real problem child.
I know, right? Who'd a thunk? I'm so well behaved and innocent now. Hard to imagine it wasn't always the case.
I don't know. Maybe it's just an Osferatu thing.
When we change, it's painful.
Literally.
You've got the whole eternal hunger thing. Yeah, but on top of that, entire weeks of torment as your body twists into this, where your only solace is being forced to sleep at dawn.
So you're miserable and you're starving. And, yeah, Lady Green had seen it all before and tried to help me out, but I was a picky eater, straight up refused to feed from actual, living, breathing humans. And, yeah, you know that about me now, but.
Okay, so the first time my sire offers me this college student, she knows I need to eat, and she's giving me the normal.
I guess they're normal, like does every sire have to give the whole it's okay to eat people talk, right? Anyway, so she's giving me that talk and just sets me down with this kid.
I'm making eye contact with him, and his fear, his fear really resonated with me.
Just touching him, putting my hands on that warm skin, just rattled my core.
I couldn't do it. Lady Green just watched as I jumped away from him and skittered across the floor into a corner. Not because I was scared of him, but because I was scared of what I'd do to him.
Sure, I understood the whole you need to feed thing. I didn't know what torper was, but my sire made it sound pretty awful. And then there's the whole slowly lose control of your actions because the beast doesn't like being told no thing.
It still felt too wrong.
This went on for a couple nights. Lady Green kept offering, even brought in some of the others from the clan to help. And I kept refusing. And it was starting to get bad.
Then one night, this other guy just barks out, voice like a shotgun blast, oh, for fuck's sake, just give the kid a juice box already.
And hey, what do you know? Just like that. There was a solution to my predicament.
The first feeding was days late, and I tore into that bag, several bags like a wolverine, sucking out every last drop, licking up the remains from my fingertips.
For the first time since the embrace, I felt good. I understood the grip. The blood holds on all kindred, but also there was relief.
I might look like a monster, but I didn't have to act like one.
In hindsight, I'm not sure why Lady Green didn't start with that option, but she seemed to be happy enough with the outcome, and the clan was thrilled. They didn't have to worry about some blood starved lick causing trouble because she was too good to eat the old fashioned way. Now, given my peculiarity, it was only a matter of time before the circulatory system came knocking.
They like to pretend it's all about having the right contacts and the right pedigree, but they've got just as many pushers in their network as they do hemoglobin. Somayas.
Sure, it's shady as all hell, but their business model includes guaranteed delivery. Vampire grubhub, no hassle. Blood to my doorstep. That's nice.
Real nice.
No need to worry about what I had stored up or risk breaking into places for my meals. Just fire off a discrete phone call or email. So why not? I had the money, they had the blood. Nothing more needed to be discussed.
But every business has its upsell, right? They want to get you hooked on the good stuff, where they can really milk your wallet.
I got an invite to a tasting where they were showing off specialty vintages for those with unique and discerning tastes.
Not usually my kind of party, but I guess I was too curious to say no.
It wasn't exactly what I expected. The whole thing played out like a fashion show. Mortals paraded up and down in front of kindred, playing salesperson for their own blood.
Not everyone appreciates the thinner flavors that come from irish heritage, but it allows the special notes of a strict vegan diet to breathe without being crowded out.
I'm your choice for special occasions. A bold and heady vintage with just the right cocaine edge when you want the buzz without losing yourself. Tobacco and alcohol free, of course.
I went in for the free samples, but damn, this was good. You have to figure they're not giving up the top shelf stuff for free. This was the dregs. But if these were the dregs, I wanted more. I was ready to sign the checks and promise the favors and whatever else our dealer wanted, but, well, fuck me and my big conscience. I kept asking questions.
It was hard getting past the scripted sales pitch. The further we got from flavor profiles and ethnic heritage, the more tight lipped these salespeople became.
I saw that fear, the same fear pouring off the college student that first night. But this time they weren't afraid of me. They were afraid of something worse. And all I could think of was what could be more terrifying than a literal monster?
I started to get the distinct impression my prying was upsetting the security for the evening. That didn't help the growing sense of wrongness about the whole thing.
The woman I was talking to must have noticed, too. We both saw the muscle closing in, ready to break things up. She put on this big, broad, fake smile and whispered, help me.
Imagine a human asking a nostratu for help. How crazy desperate do you have to be where that becomes part of your rescue plan?
I didn't have time to think about it. The security staff were there a few seconds later, politely taking the glass from my hand and less than politely encouraging me to find a man hold the scurry down.
I don't know that I'd have let it go either way, but being pushed out like that? They knew I knew. The fact they made such a show of shooing me away made me sure there was something up, something to hide. I started looking closer so the circulatory system. They get their livestock through kidnapping, extortion, bribes, any deal, no matter how dirty. If it gets them what they want, they string the poor soul up in some dank basement and bleed them like clockwork. Sure, they try to keep them alive. Can't go damaging the merchandise, but accidents happen. And if the price for a particular vintage was right, well, fuck this analogy. Long story short, they traffic humans and torture them to inevitable death. And yeah, big shocker. Most of us could give a fuck about human well being, but I do.
With or without allies. Okay, well, entirely without allies, I was going to dive into those trenches and fight the good fight.
Well, after talking to my sire, obviously I'm not a total idiot. I knew there are rules to this kind of thing and that she probably knew them better than I did. So I spilled.
Told her everything I had learned about the circulatory system, laid it out in this big, feverish Sherlock Holmes speech, like I was over explaining the truth behind a murder.
She just sat there, shifting uncomfortably, and I felt all my enthusiasm just ooze out onto the floor.
Then she placed a clawed hand on my shoulder. Schmendric, you are my only child. This makes you special.
You have gifts that you've yet to realize, but trust me when I say they are extremely important.
The blood that we share is too precious to waste. Please stop looking into this for me.
I could see the concern welling up in her eyes, and, well, I swallowed my pride. I just nodded, dropped the conversation, and let it go.
I wasn't happy, but I was prepared to move on.
Unfortunately, the ball was sort of already rolling. The next time I went topside, I was met by a trio of goons and a proper beat down.
They never said they were from the circulatory system, but they were perfectly clear about wanting me to stay out of their business. And it's not like I had other enemies.
I'm not sure why they didn't just kill me right there. I know they have been less restrained with other vampires who get in their way. Maybe Lady Green pulled some strings.
Regardless, it was all I could do once they were done to drag my broken body into a drainage culvert and wait for the day's sleep.
I was surprised when I woke up the next night, but that pretty quickly gave way to raw, blind rage.
That's how they wanted to play things. Fine. I was game.
Chicago had always been on the itinerary. My father's health was fading, and for all our ups and downs, I wanted to be there to say goodbye. In whatever way I could.
Even if, thanks to this face, that only meant standing next to his freshly dug grave, but. Right. I'm getting distracted here. Point is, I'm here in Chicago. Have you been able to figure out why yet? Yeah, because of the circulatory system, obviously, but they're everywhere.
But Bronwyn is here, and she runs the whole thing.
[00:47:33] Speaker A: Rebecca Mitchell is an outlier among kindred, defined by a life spent in isolation and possessed of a deeply spiritual moral code.
Once, she seemed content to spend her years holding eternal vigil over the scorched sands of her tribal homeland.
Now she stalks Chicago's streets, a guardian of a different kind.
What changed?
[00:48:02] Speaker C: Do you remember where you were when Prince Lodan first invoked the blood hunt against the Garu sheriff? Or what you were doing when he first learned that he'd been destroyed?
Our war against the Garou was fought and won before I arrived in the city, of course, but I have since heard many tales from many kindred. I cannot help but wonder how all of them define themselves by their answers to those two questions.
Our prince holds that title because he distinguished himself as both paladin and peacemaker. His domain stretches only so far as streets we are willing to risk final death to hold.
Our city is defined by the Garou, whether we like it or not.
Prince Jackson and I have this much in common. It is our experience with these monsters that has led us to our current positions.
Thus, of course, meaning no disrespect, so long as werewolves define Chicago, I intend to remain.
I have battled the Garo for nearly two centuries. Not so many as attacked this city, yes, but also with a great many fewer allies at my side.
The desert offers little to those forced to call it home. Every ounce of life must be wrung from parched earth and sheltered from the roaring sun. And few of our kind are willing to accept so strain in existence.
For the garou who roamed shadia, only myself and my sire stood in their way.
In the beginning, that burden fell more on Silas's shoulders. He knew plenty of the lupine's fury and put great effort in despairing me. The pain of learning those lessons firsthand.
But every bird must leave its nest eventually. Yes. And when my sire failed to return to our small cabin one warm summer night, well, fate had decided it was my time to fly.
You must understand, his absence was quite unusual.
Solitary as our clan may be, Silas and I were bound in war than blood. We had been called together to serve the land and held against all that might threaten it. Together.
When the fort soldiers departed the barracks to carry out their wicked reprisals, we felled their patrols as hunters in unison. When the miners built their camps on stolen land, blackened our skies with cold fired filth, we carried equal shares of explosives into the black and lit matching fuses.
When the prince of Tucson summoned us to demand the right to feed from our nation, we stood side by side in his court and delivered our refusal with one voice.
So when my sire stood out one night and failed to return, I wasted no time. My conscience would not tolerate his absence under the pale red moon, I sought his trail. Despite my competence in such tasks. To do so under that sinister light was an unnerving endeavor. The desert landscape is dangerous, and an unfamiliar light turns even well known lands into a treacherous stretch of pitfalls and crevices where unknown terrors might lie in wait.
Finding Silas'trail did little to help the mood. The Danae always marked their paths with trail marks, especially when traveling long distances.
They're a navigational laid of sorts, showing you where you've been and what area you've already covered. It didn't take long for me to notice. His marks began to shift, each drawn more hastily than the last, clean lines giving way to urgent scrawls, then disappearing entirely.
Then there was the smell. It was a familiar scent, not unlike something left by a coyote or wolf, but tinged with something wrong.
Human, beast, some unspeakable thing all twist into a single scent at once both sickly and enticing.
I followed it to its source, a clump of thick, wiry brown hair caught in a bramble amidst the scene of a brutal fight.
That unfamiliar smell had mixed with Silas's blood. I'd know that smell anywhere in a mess of upturned earth, scraps of clothing, and yet more hair from the bloody scene. I continued, though not without some degree of trepidation.
This was precisely the kind of task my sire would have demanded we undertake together in his absence. I did not have that luxury. The trail led to more. More fur, more sundered landscape. More blood.
Spatters turned to smears, smears to pools, pools to rivers.
And while not all belonged to my sire, I began to worry more and more that I'd not find him alive, so to speak, at its end.
And it did end, eventually.
What I found would make even the staunchest of our court shiver. Silas had survived the encounter, and though the thing he had battled had not. Well, suffice to say, I will never again witness such awful carnage, the havoc that even a single werewolf can wreak. It reminds you that we do not rule the night unopposed.
Neither Camarilla coterie nor Sabat Warpak can match the raw rage of one single unrestrained garu. I was already old by her standards, my sire. Even older. So when I saw how badly he fared in his battle.
Look, sheriff, the times I've lived through have been anything but gentle.
Watching a kindred that powerful, brought low by any single creature, is harrowing.
Before the sun rose, we returned to our shared haven, one shaken, the other barely able to even limp along.
I cared for him as he endured that long recovery, that he might mend the horrors of the flesh and join me once more as a guardian of our people.
Never once did he name the creature aloud. But I knew what had attacked him that night.
I knew these creatures hunted in numbers, that they abhorred our kind and would already be working to sniff out our haven.
As loathsome a thing as it was, I knew we needed help now. I mean, you know ill will, sheriff, but I despise the games we kindred play at. Your position exists to keep those schemes in balance with the so called greater kindred. Good. And while I understand the necessity of that work, my own unlife is wasted on such subterfuge.
Yes, the camarilla allows for mortals to suffer less under the tyranny of blood fuelled monstrosities. And that is why I keep its laws. For the sake of those who yet draw breath.
But like my sire, I am called to higher purpose.
That is why we kept our distance from Tucson and its court, from the Camarilla and its schemers. And that is why it pained me so to appear before the Ventru who considered himself my prince and seek his aid.
Suffice it say, I have done much to forget the finality of the politics he made me suffer.
For our purposes, it is important only that he lent us his aid and that he extracted his price.
Might for might. A sword for a sword.
He would lend us the means to defend our lands until Silas was fully recovered. After which, we would repay his kindness by giving our service to his lands.
That is how, even as the needs of our people went unattended, we found ourselves walking Tucson's dusty fringe, guarding camperilla turf against scaru incursions.
It was, of course, only a matter of time before we found one. Or I suppose more accurately, they found us, Silas and I. Our senses were trained for the open desert. It is a much simpler thing to ambush a kindred within a city's cacophony. To cloak the sound of your approach, or the miasma of car exhaust and diesel fumes to mask your scent.
When the first of them burst from the shadows, I was prepared to fight.
But one became two. Two became three.
Three became a pack of the vile things, pinning us in like a shepherd's flock.
Now, there's no shame in fleeing in the face of certain defeat, and I can only stand here before you tonight because of that choice.
But this was no simple escape. Where I fled, one followed in pursuit, roaring and chasing with a flag, a scrap denoting its pack or order. Trailing behind on the rush of wind, I sent yucca, my falcon, to summon help. Although even then I knew the reinforcements would arrive too late to do anything more than examine the aftermath of the battle that now stood as inevitable.
It was older, with worn down canines and slightly clouded eyes, likely an elder wolf chasing one last glorious, violent rush into the night. The reflexes granted by my blood were enough to spare me the worst of its swipes, and my own claws are formidable weapons, even compared to a garu.
For every bite maul or bash suffered, I answered in kind with my own single minded ferocity.
Two monsters, each too stubborn to give in despite their mounting wounds, neither able to find the other's throat through a desperate defense fueled by rage.
All that mattered in that moment was survival.
Final death would not take me. Not by a werewolf's claws, not by the kiss of the ever encroaching sun.
Or if I was going to end up ash. I was taking this ugly bastard with me.
I don't need to tell you how it ended. I am here. The garu is not.
My fangs eventually found their mark. I gorged myself on the fullness of its blood and felt its fury burning hot within my veins.
I could taste its paranoia and rage on my tongue even as my reinforcements arrived. What a sight that must have been. An outlander. Even more wild than they'd expected, drenched in gore and clutching a garu banner in her claws.
My bravery, as the prince instructed his harpies to label it, earned me no small amount of praise for my city dwelling cousins.
But not so much that I was released from the prince's levy.
We continued to hunt, succeeding more than we failed. Over the decades, Tucson's asphalt footprint bubbled ever further over the cracked desert earth, pushing the garu deeper into the desert.
Threat of invasion dwindled, and with it, the local kindred's willingness to set their own schemes.
Hmm.
My services were no longer needed.
This is the part where I was supposed to return to my land, freed of the city's distractions.
But these were no longer the chaotic years of before, where a proud and ancient people struggled daily against an angry child of a country obsessed with its westward destiny.
My people fought their battles in courtrooms now, and there were kindred enough in Tucson to keep the darker things. Well, not subdued, but scattered enough that a sole ancient gangrel could shepherd his people without my help.
I spoke with him, Silas, the mentor who has filled me with the wisdom of the ages. When word first arrived that Chicago had fallen under siege, he could hear it in my voice, the urged to ride off to war.
This is the march of there are not so many miles between our borders and the troubles beyond as there were before.
I expected him to temper my wanderlust, to remind me of my duty to our people and our home.
But he did not.
He agreed. The trials of our city cousins weren't nearly as distant as we once thought. Given time, conflict in the east or west will eventually find its way to our borders.
And what becomes of us then?
What becomes of our people?
I'll give the Camarilla this, you know, structure.
The wind had yet to carry off Prince Lordin's ashes, and already your lot had begun formulating your plan to strike back.
As I understand, you have Rosa to thank for that.
But the peace Prince Jackson bought is only temporary.
I've seen promises made, oaths taken, treaties signed.
They'll all be ignored at the very moment greed for glory or land takes hold, I intend to be there when the peace he brokered fails.
Put simply, sheriff, you're in Chicago to deal with the kindred monsters.
I'm here to deal with the other kind.
[01:01:29] Speaker A: You've been listening to the all night society, an actual play podcast brought to you by Queens court games.
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