The Camarilla
Brujah
Good Animals, the Brujah. Good animals. Not herd, by any means; not wolves or cats. Dogs. Angry dogs, but smart dogs. They can watch you take out your keys, and they know you’ll be opening the door. They can watch you unlock the door and work the handle, and they know what you’re doing. But they never think to work the handle themselves. And they probably don’t have the thumbs to do it, either.
We could probably give them thumbs, but we’d likely get in trouble with the other animals for that.
Nosferatu
It’s very hard not to like the Nosferatu. For all their creeping and sulking, they are so very, earnestly sincere. The younger ones treat me with pity that I don’t require; the elders treat me with respect. We play a little game together, a little game of conspiracy. It wasn’t my idea or theirs to begin the game, but since the others liked to leave both of us out to one side, we started our game for something to do.
It’s particularly charming when they try to creep up behind me when they think I’m not looking, as if I’m going to drop something absent-mindedly and reveal my ankle as I hop a mud puddle or something. They get very offended when I notice them, though, so pretend they aren’t even there.
They really are a little too attached to their fleshly bodies, though. It’s vain of them to disfigure themselves as they do. Perhaps someday they will grow bored with their mortifications and then we can chat like adults.
Toreador
It isn’t such a difficult thing to understand the Toreador’s obsession, if you try. Think – they too have the Sight, even if their lenses are somewhat fractured. They see beyond the realm of human senses; they run their fingers along the weave that so many others blindly ignore. Even their fêtes and dances and social games – those trace out a greater pattern, the sigil of their own identity. They know who they are.
Their fault lies in their weakness, regrettably; a Toreador would rather slice his own flesh than slice a beautiful section of pattern. They can see beyond the lie, but so many prefer the Lie’s beauty to the things, ugly or not, that lie beyond the paper walls of perception.
I loved a Toreador once, most ardently. I loved him because he could speak to me, because he understood the compulsions that the Sight brings.
Of all the things that have withered and broken from remaining too close to my accursed self, I miss him most of all.
Tremere
The Warlocks are half-awake. They cast out with childlike fingers, feeling the texture of things. They touch. They touch and they taste and they smell the world, looking for connections. They see that the moon changes, and that the tides change, and that women’s blood shifts, and they see a pattern. They see the bright new star that bleeds in the vaults, and they see the blood falling on concrete, and they see a pattern. They believe that all things are connected.
That is where they draw short They believe. They do not know. Yet.
Watch the Tremere. They do not see as far as we do, but they see things that are se near as to escape notice. Watch them, and listen to what they believe they have learned. Eventually, they may notice us imitating them – and then they might become wise enough to imitate us.
They are very close.
Ventrue
They sit on their thrones because their thrones are barbed. Hooks and wires spring from the chair and pass into their flesh, and not one of them will relinquish his seat. If one were to do so, then the barbs would pull away his skin, and he would be left naked – and they do not so much fear having others see their nakedness as they fear beholding their own selves unmasked.
Even when a throne is vacates, its hooks and jags and barbs glistening with bits of the last king, the Ventrue will vie for the empty chair. “We are the finest,” they say. “We can govern you. We can protect you from the Sabbat, from the Lupines We can make things safe for all of you.”
I don’t know how they can protect me if they can’t protect themselves from the chair.
The Sabbat
Lasombra
They don’t know. They really don’t.
I can only guess that they think they’re the ones in control. They gesture, the Void moved in that direction, they presume that they are giving orders.
I suppose that the honey guide believes that it orders the ratel destroy the beehive, kill the bees and feast on the honey, all purely so that the honey guide has it’s choice of leftovers. It would probably like to think that the ratel is obeying its commands.
So it is with the Lasombra. Strings run from their hands off into the blackness, and they believe that they are the ones who do all the pulling.
Tzimisze
Diseased. Filthy, crawling things. Plagued with the infection of flesh. Disgusting. Dirty. Diseased. Weeping sores. Slice them away. Slice their bodies away before they are lost in the meat.
No. Don’t touch the meat. Let them boil in their prisons. Don’t touch them, the filthy, crawling creatures. Keep away from them. They share their infection. They think they have carved out their cancer, but it grows. It grows in them. It waits until Gehenna to eat their flesh. To consume the corrupted, stinking meat.
CAN’T THEY SEE?
The Indepentents
Assamite
Listen here, child. Here’s a secret. For free.
You see, Assam or Hakeem or Mustafa or whatever those blood-parched devils call their primordial father, he’s a severed god, too. Just as was Malkav, he was hewn into bits and scattered into the mouth of his younglings. The same thing. Only – and this is an “only” you should pay careful heed to, O best beloved – Assam did not settle into the minds of his childer.
Where did he go? Well, what does an Assamite love best? Learn this, and you learn where their own forebear dwells.
But that’s why they’re not the beasts they once were. He stirs in them, just as Malkav stirs in us. And oh, I feel sorry for us all when the Assamites start vomiting up their father-god into a communal vessel so that he can stand on bare feet under the night sky once more.
Followers of Set
Encounter a Setite, and what you might see is vampire with a poignantly acute eye for opportunity. Encounter two, and you see a partnership in vice. But look at all of them, the whole bloodline, and what do you see?
Us.
Faith, madness, the same. For a very good reason, a terrifyingly simple reason. Remember: Upon your death and rebirth, while you were drifting in the void, Malkav’s blood called out to you. You looked to see where the voice came from. To use a simple metaphor, where other vampires were still scrunching their eyes shut, refusing to look at what lay between worlds, you looked to the left, and you saw.
Now you see, when a Setite is brought across the threshold, Set’s blood calls to him. The not-quite-dead, not-quite-undead childe hears the voice, and looks to the right.
And he sees.
Keep that in mind. No bloodline understands us and our insight better than the followers of Set, and no clan excels so greatly at keeping the heart of their knowledge a secret, hidden under layers of propaganda and slander worn like cloaks They are our great co-conspirators, even if they shall never admit it. Further, they are…irritable regarding the subject, so remember not to press the point.
Giovanni
Children of a dead god. Eaters of the dead, of the dead who ate corpses themselves. Feasters on corruption. They have spent too much time dead, dead like stones.
Are corpses afraid? They should be. The people on the outside, the people that they let in only when they feel like it, are pounding very hard on the glass. I hear them striking at the glass. I heard the glass crack. I think they’re coming in.
The Giovanni should be afraid. The glass is cracking. And the people on the other side hate them.
Ravnos
I held Delizbieta’s hand as she died.
Poor child. Her only crimes were being descended from a monster that gnawed itself hollow long ago, and being ignorant. When it woke, she was unprepared.
I should have reached her sooner. If she’d been ready, she might have survived. But she couldn’t endure the pain of her clan’s broken minds. She wasn’t accustomed to it.
The cross is broken now. The devil’s tenth head has been severed. The demon king has bled out his life, and Golden Lanka is toppled and burnt.
Beware. Beware. Delizbieta’s fate is my own. We must be ready – we cannot be ready – we must be ready, or we will die their deaths for them all over again.
Gangrel
What a bunch of preteens. Hanging around in their leather jackets, too cool to talk to anybody else. Too cool to care. And if you don’t pay enough attention to them, then they just make this big show of stomping off and sulking, trying to convince us that they don’t need us, that they’re so big and tough and cool and mighty that they don’t need us, that they don’t need anybody. And they keep looking back over their shoulders as they go, but only in little glances so you don’t see that they’re looking.
What they want is, they want us to go running after them like some jilted cheerleader, plucking at their sleeves with tears streaming down our faces, begging them to come back, telling them that if they come back and stay with us then we’ll never ignore them again, that we’ll always be faithful and true.
Fuck ’em.
Caitiff
I think I shall start a collection, and I think I shall collect Caitiff. They are raw, unformed; they are untainted by traditions, the fetters of blood. They have no prejudice, no confidence. They acknowledge their own ignorance. They are in need.
Others
Lupines
What was that last bit? Lupines… Does that mean some kind of werew…the…oh Jesus, it…I…hrrk- AAH! Hnnngggh…
…they are the Lilin, the monsters begat of an angry mother and the demons of the field! They are our scourge…
…my arms! My arms! Please, spare me! Please…
…fools, all of them… should have known that if you build a wall, something on the other side will want it to come down…
…AA-ANG! SYKORA! From the West he rises, from the corpse-seas, the Waksha-water…girt in black, robed in violet! AA-ANG! Master of the profane! SYKORA!…
…you can hear them crawling under the ground; you can hear them scratching at the door; you can hear them creeping across the roof. they are all around us. they want to kill us. oh god why am I out here where they can find me?…
…Daisy? Henry? Don’t leave me. Don’t leave. Please – DON’T LEAVE! DON’T GO¬–
…hhhh…hkkh. Guh. D–Dammit. God. If these are the scars they leave on the weavey, what will actually meet one of these monsters be like?
Mages
Never listen to an idiot’s ranting. It’ll only make you angry. Stupid, stupid cow, bull, steer, whatever. No different from the rest of the herd. So damned convinced that reality is something you can touch and hold and fold and spin like clay. Idiot!
Backwards. He had it all backwards. So ready to accept that reality is what everyone tells you it is – worse, worse than that! Moron!
Reality is immutable. There is no change in reality, there is only a change in your perception. Move your hand in front of the mirror all you want – you’re not moving the mirror. You’re not even moving a real hand, other than your own. You’re just swallowing the mirror’s little speech.
Break the mirror. Break the mirror, idiot. You’ll never get anywhere if you think that moving the reflection around is going to change anything. You can’t change the reflection.
Look beyond the mirror. Look at what the world is.
Ghosts
Have the dead begun to rise from the cracks in the earth yet?
I cannot see for myself, but I feel certain that the dead must be walking b now. I had…visions, once, long ago. Can you tell me if they have torn themselves from the grave yet?
I knew a dead woman once. She was so sad and so faint, I thought that surely if I were to tremble while she touched me, her fingers would snap and drift away. She was haunted, and I could smell her pursuers on her – I could smell their obsession. The dead are obsessed, you know. They’ve forgotten everything they knew, forgotten their sense of perspective – only the obsession matters.
I knew a dead woman. She didn’t tell me anything about the fires burning in the underworld, even when I asked about them, when I told her that I saw them burning.
That was long ago.
Now even my memory deceives me. I cannot hear her voice – what I hear is howling, a howling so loud it deafens me, drives me into hiding. The voices are so loud; she must have been torn to pieces, evaporated, erased by their force. Surely the howling has broken the earth by now; surely the dead are walking once more.
Are you certain you cannot tell me? I want to know…
Faeries
Gone. And we cannot, could never follow.
Hunters
God damn it, what is this world coming to? LeRoi’s dead, and the guy who did it was just this freaky little office worker with a can of kerosene and a match! He just stood there by the body while it was burning; he should have split a long time before I got there. It didn’t make sense. What was he thinking?
Uhn… was I trying to forget? Something…something was hanging over his shoulder. What the hell was that? Are there creatures out there of the invisible side of things now coming across, out of the three-dimensional side of things?
Was I just hallucinating?
Dammit, it’s been one fucking hell of a night if I think that seeing things that aren’t really there would be the lesser of two evils.
//And…wait…LeRoi died a month ago…/
