Post by Shade on Sept 28, 2012 10:51:24 GMT -8
Existence as a Kindred is a lot like playing Bejeweled.
No, wait, hear me out.
It’s all about the small movements. Incremental progress – change one thing on the other side of the board from your objective and watch the ripple spread. You have to be patient, observant, and quick. It’s a game that operates on micro and macro levels; you can get by only ever responding to the immediate situation, but you have to consider the whole board if you want to win.
Except you can’t win at Bejeweled.
You can’t win at Camarilla politics, either.
You can rise. You can, given time and luck and skill, become Primogen, or Prince. Archon, perhaps. Maybe even Justicar. Eventually. With patience and small movements you can succeed in the most spectacular ways.
But you can’t win.
There is no game over screen, no final tally of achievements and vital statistics. It just goes on and on, getting harder and more vicious all the time, with higher stakes and pettier disputes and it never ends. Ever.
Christ, I’m depressing myself.
When a mortal dies, that’s it. The end. Game over, win or lose. Their life is tallied, their worth made known, expressed in what they leave behind. When a Kindred dies… what do we leave behind us? Who weeps for us? Who vows to carry on our legacies? Final Death isn’t an ending – it’s failure. Cold and shameful and bitter. And our dearest allies will pause by our corpses only long enough to rifle through our pockets for useful mortals and spare change. A failure is, after all, hardly entitled to consideration.
So we keep playing. Night after night after endless fucking monotonous night of pointless, backstabbing politics. Screen after screen of glittering, virtual jewels. And our reward is… what? Points on a screen? Adjectives trailing after our names? Nothing we can really use. Nothing we need.
My great-grandsire founded the Camarilla, the mighty bulwark of Kindred society, our shield and shelter against the Inquisition’s flames. He created something so completely stable, so utterly ubiquitous that it’s practically impossible to imagine a world without it. But if (god forbid) he should falter. If he should fail. How long would it last, without him? Could the Camarilla, mighty as it is, survive Hardestadt’s loss? Or would it founder and drown, victimized by small-minded scavengers and petty megalomaniacs?
I really, really hope we never find out. I pray nightly that the Old Man survives to see the heat death of the universe, because I don’t think that what he built could survive his loss. Not anymore. We’d like to think that we have something in the Camarilla that will endure, no matter what, our safe harbor through every storm. That some other Ventrue would step into his place – my grandsire, perhaps, or the Lady Lucinde – and the world we’re so accustomed to would spin on, unchanged.
My point is, though, that we can’t be sure. Because we’re not humans. We’re Kindred. We’re immortal. We are our own legacies – so when we build, we don’t build with an eye towards what we’ll leave behind. Because frankly, we don’t intend to leave. Ever. So when a power vacuum does appear, we have no traditions, no customs to handle a graceful changing of the guard. We try, of course – but we’re predators at heart, and we go for the throat every time. We can’t seem to rise above it.
I used to believe that Ventrue could. Did. That the world would spin on a stable axis as long as the Ventrue were there to oversee it. Now, ten years in… I’m not so sure.
Last year, at my Deathnight party, Madame Rachel corners me out on the balcony. My sire’s been watching me lately, examining me in that way she has, as though I’m a piano with a persistently unturned string. Can it be fixed? Worked around? Or will the entire instrument have to go?
I don’t blame her. I feel out of tune. And out of sorts, and out of sync, and various and sundry other out of whatevers. That’s normal for the first decade, or so I’m told, but tonight is my tenth anniversary, and if anything I feel worse than I did on my first. I don’t like it. I don’t like that I’m becoming such a poor investment. I should be better than this. I thought that I was.
“Are you enjoying your party, Adrienne?”
“Of course. Thank you again, by the way – the jewelry box is truly beautiful.”
Everyone in her household receives two gifts each year; a general one at Christmas and a more personal one for birthdays, and that on top of a very generous salary and benefits package. It’s a statement of power and rank, not an act of kindness. Not only can she afford to keep a large household, she can afford to keep them all in style, and treat them gently. Ill-kept or abused servants are a sign of poor breeding. Only the truly worthless need to shit on someone else for kicks.
I’m not her servant anymore, but I am her childe, so I still get gifts – personal ones – on both occasions, although I celebrate my death now, not my birth. And I’m expected to reciprocate. It’s not hard. She’s easy to shop for, given I’ve known her over fifty years. It’s another formality, one of the five thousand and three ritual gestures that delineate and encircle our nights. Regere sanguine, regere in veritatem est.
Which isn’t to say the gestures are empty. The jewelry box really was lovely, and carefully chosen.
“I thought you would enjoy it.”
We stand in silence and watch the river. I’ve always loved the view across the East River. Most of it’s industrial wasteland and tenement buildings and I suppose that’s what I like about it; the contrast between the bright city lights and the stark pipes and factories that keep it working.
“Adrienne.”
“Yes, ma’m?”
“Are you… content? Here, in New York.”
Content. She can’t bring herself to say happy. She doesn’t come from a time or a place that valued personal fulfillment. To do one’s duty, to live with grace and honor within the laws of one’s society – that’s the closest she can come to it. Happiness is a gift, a rare one, and ultimately irrelevant, never to be sought or yearned for. One does one’s duty. One knows one’s place, and operates within it.
Knowing this, I also know what it’s costing her to ask. To place herself in an alien mindset, to concede the validity of what is to her an unimaginably selfish outlook. I know how deep an expression of her concern and affection for me it is. So I take a long time to think before I answer, truthfully.
“I feel – restless, ma’m. As though there’s something I’m supposed to be doing, but I can’t remember what it is.”
“I see.”
She thinks this over for a while. I’m sure that I’m only confirming her own conclusions. She wouldn’t have approached me if she didn’t feel she understood what was going on, and have a proposed solution.
“It is not uncommon, in young ones, these nights,” she says finally, and a trace of German shows through her carefully cultivated English. “The restlessness. I have a thought…”
“Ma’m?”
“I have kept you at my side, as my sire kept me at his, and so on. I had intended to do so for some decades yet. As it is always done. But the world is different now. Perhaps that way is not what you need. Perhaps you must find your own way.”
“I don’t understand.” It’s hard to keep my fear from showing. Is she sending me away? Am I being punished? I’ve tried – I’ve met every challenge, obeyed every order, never been anything but loyal. I can’t help how I feel. As hard as I try to push it back and down into a corner of my mind, that only seems to make things worse.
Calm. Be calm. I am the mountain; I am the bedrock. Men die, cities die, their names and works crumble into dust and are forgotten, but I remain. I am Ventrue.
Madame Rachel bows her head, slightly, and I remember how tall she had always been to me – until a few years ago, after the last fight with those damned witch-hunters, when Yuri hauled me in half-dead and missing a hand and I realized, as she examined the stump, that I towered above her by a full head. And I’m not the tallest person on the planet.
I had never seen her express anxiety before that night.
“I do not wish for you to leave my side,” she says bluntly, and that in and of itself is almost more disturbing than the threat of being sent away in shame. “If you do not wish to go, then stay. But I have thought – perhaps you need to make something truly your own. Away from the nest. To find your own purpose.”
I have nothing to say. Except that she’s right, of course. The thought of leaving, going somewhere new and starting my own life, with her guidance and blessing but out of her shadow is almost enough to make my heart start beating.
She would never have brought this up if she wasn’t completely sure.
“I – never without your permission, ma’m. Or your blessing.”
“But it is in your heart to do this?”
I close my eyes, briefly. My new hand clenches – the one that the hunters took, that I reclaimed through the gift she’s given me, the rich blood that lingers in my veins.
“Yes.”
“Then you have it. My permission. And my blessing.”
There is something else. I can hear her not saying it; so I ask.
“Did you have a somewhere in mind, ma’m?”
“Yes.” Is that – a smile? Dear god. I haven’t seen her think something was funny since that Toreador prick visiting from Paris slipped on the stairs at the Met and skidded down three flights on his ass in front of the assembled Court. What a weird night. Did someone spike the punch? “A strange place, true. You need not choose it, but – perhaps it will suit you.”
“If you recommend it, ma’m, I’ll at least try. Which city?”
She turns to face me and I am caught in her gaze, pinned breathless – though I have no breath to lose – beneath the weight of her analysis. There’s no discipline use here. She doesn’t need it. Her eyes are ancient and remote, as challenging and inviting as a Himalayan peak.
“Seattle.”