Post by The Mouth on Jul 19, 2014 16:20:28 GMT -8
17th May, 2013
The Traveler camp is a mess and it’s raining. There are the remains of six campers; burned out hollow husks that the hissing rain pools and puddles in. There are another fifteen or so still whole in various states of repair. I’m here to meet with Liam Casey, the saddest lick in all of Ireland.
Liam is a Traveler, one of the road people. They have been wandering around the Isle’s for centuries; tinkers and thieves and entertainers. Now largely a motley group of poor sons of bitches they make their way with cons, scrap metal collection, and general fuck all.
Liam is also a rare bird indeed; a Ravnos. I know this because he was a Ravnos in 1853 when Casterly ran across him, and one in 1972 when we used him as part of a job. I’m hoping he can help me with the next one.
I spot his camper, it has a couple of old symbols and signs in the Cant; traveler tongue. It’s also the same one he had in ‘72 when I met with his family outside of Leeds. How he keeps it running I have idea.
Knocking on the door turns into a wait. I hear rustling inside, so I pound a little harder. Suspicious eyes glare through curtain slits as only a loan collector or a copper is out this time of night with the piss coming down.
“Oy, I’m comin. Stop yer poundin ye bastid…” The door cracks open and a fetid smell of old blood and stale beer pours out. I kick against the door hard, sending the person behind back into the camper. I walk into a certain shade of hell.
The carpets are scorched, heroin works, marijuana, empty pill bottles lay scattered in the strewn rubble on the floor. The lights are dim and stains of spattered blood cover every surface; brown spots that could tell a story of death and misadventure going back decades.
“Who the fuck are ye! Do you know who I… Frankie?”
We are both shocked, which is why I’m standing in an open door at the wretch before me. He’s emaciated, hair matted, nails ragged in scraps of hippy clothes that he scrounged from the dead. But it is Liam, always Liam.
I recover first and slam the door behind me and wade through the debris on the floor hoping I haven’t caught Vampire Tetanus and Hepatitis. “The Fuck. Liam, the fuck.”
Liam crawls to his feet, swaying like a palm tree in a hurricane. “Oh, Frankie, the feck ye do that fer. We’ pals, Frankie.” Like magic there is a knife in his hand and he is at me, snarling. My foot meets his face as he comes weaving towards me, and he crashes back into shopping bags filled with empty tins of beer.
He lies there for a moment shaking, it takes a minute before I figure out that he is laughing. “The bloody fuckin’ hell Liam. You act like you didn’t get paid but a stiff cock up yer arse on the last job. Comin at me with a knife…”
Liam lays back against the trash and drops the shitty pot metal knife. “Jes seein ya made me think ‘a them. My people, ye remember em.”
I did. He had a little group; two Childer and a raucous family of ghouls; at least I thought they were ghouls. Liam was always an odd duck and it wouldn’t surprise me if he had ‘collected’ some odd specimens of humanity over the years.
I remember there was Papa, a short wiry scrapper of a man, nose so bent it could see round corners. Mama wasn’t exactly fat, she had a waist. But in proportion… She was over six foot and at least 15 stone, had teets that would make the Norse Gods faint in the trousers, and was mostly pregnant every time I saw her. Good Catholic gel, that one.
They had more children than I knew how to handle, but Jena… Jena was 17 and looking for an adventure. I was nothing near 17 but with the constant surge of Vitae most ghouls are horny goats and Davenish was on the outs with me; I was quite the adventure for her... Two glorious months we had; not that Mama approved. Papa on the other hand had watched me work a room and approved the dalliance; his word was law.
Why the fuck is Ireland full of romantic whimsy?
The Childer were Maggie and Lonaghan, red haired sibling twins that Liam had Embraced for their ‘Luck’.
“That their graves out back?” Travelers believe that a wagon lived in by a dead person was bad luck, cursed and haunted. They said the prayers and burned them out, sometimes with the dead inside. “How long?”
Howling, Liam springs up spraying trash as he bounces against the walls of the camper. “14 years, yer bastid! 14 bloody years!”
14 years? I’d heard of the week of nightmares; something no one likes to talking about. I’d hoped Liam and his would have been spared - Netchurch’s notes hinted that the Ravnos were affected worse than others; tales fitful dreams, nightmares - Cannibalism. Even now the whispers talk about the broken Clan, the fallen Ravnos and their insane need to destroy and consume their Blood-Bretheren.
“How’d it happen Liam?” I stay standing, wary that Liam will lose it again. Liam flits about like a junkie hummingbird, sending trash randomly fly about the room until he unearths a large leather bound book. He flips the page open to a spot near the back of the book and flips it out to me.
“‘Ere she is…Look at em, my family. My big beautiful family…”
The book falls from Liam’s hands and I lunge forward to catch it as the Irish Ravnos weeps. I see a picture, taken at night, of Liam, the Twins, Papa & Mama and their horde of children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. Papa and Mama are still looking vigorous, Mama is pretty clearly pregnant again, and their children have an odd cast to them. In fact the whole batch of them, seen in one group and still, not moving for the picture, they all have… Something. More than human, less than human, but it is there. And Liam clearly has it too, in the cast of his eyes and cheekbones.
Three women, identical but for their hair; blonde, red, and black, stand in front of Jena. Jena for her part is beaming at the camera, older, more settled in her place in life. The Blood is in her now too; Liam or the Twins had her; she has that vague ageless look that ghouls get. But she is giving all her focus to the three women who each have two girls, twins, in front of them, roughly in their late teens, early twenties, and each of the twins is clearly with child. The triplets have a few younger children huddle around them as well.
The triplets. Their father’s stamp is clearly upon them.
I close the scrap book and carefully set it to the side. Than I lunge at Liam and grab his throat, “THE BLOODY FUCK HAPPENED LIAM?!”
“The Twins!” he rasps out. “When he rose; he spoke t’ the old ones or the ones with old blood first. But he didn’t speak with words but madness. And the Twins; they had the Luck, old blood indeed. They went for the kids; Papa and Mama stopped em’ but I was too late to save em, to save me bairns, to save them all.”
“What’d you do Liam? What about Jena’s gels?”
“Aye, they lived. They had moved on the Road; Jena… She was here. She… When it got mad she got the children out. Most of em’. She had her youngest sister… The Madness, ye see, I saw t’ Twins and I…”
Liam gulps for air and smears the vitae leaking from his eyes. “I ate them. The twins, Jena, her sweet sister Mags. Not jes’ their blood, them all. I can still hear them rattling round my head. But Jena and her sister was too sweet and I had to have them all…” Liam trails off, staring blankly for a moment.
“I got tha luck ye see. I took it from the Twins. Cept it tis a Curse in me. I cannae die, and I’ve tried to. Sumptin always happens to get me out of it and I just have te listen to em carry on and tell me that it weren’ me fault. They loved me so much and I fuckin ate them…”
I sit down with a nerveless thump.
“Show me, Liam.”
“I cannae do-”
“Show me.” The command snaps into my voice and into his mind. And he does, using all the crafts of his illusion, he shows me.
Afterwards he is drained and have a new appreciation for some of the things I heard in Seattle.
“You owe me Liam.”
The old fire comes back to Liam; his eyes blaze up and he grabs me by my jacket collar. “Who the fuck are ye to tell me what I owe? You’re just some jumped up gutter punk of a ghoul serving some prissy…”
He is now aware that my pistol is socketed in his eye.
“It won’t kill you Liam. Just blind you one eye. And then I shoot the other one.”
“No Ventrue ghoul would dare…”
“This one would you old fuck. You don’t owe me for Jena, but the babes.”
Liam sets me down a sight gentle. I put my gun away.
“What are they te you?”
“I’m their father, you twat. They’ve got my nose and my eyes.”
Liam has the grace to look embarassed. “Ye might have taken em, or worse tried to give us money t’ care for em.”
“Fuck you Liam. I’d have done something. But I know my reality as well as you do. I couldn’t raise them, but I deserved to know. So I could’ve made provisions.”
“Nay, they’d have enough problems with the leeches. You’d have sold em to your masters soon enough.”
“And what, precisely, the fuck does that mean Liam?”
Liam lets out another sigh. “The Old Blood; Mama and Papa were full of it. Something fey in their family; made their blood potent. Adding mine to it; the kids was special. If we fed off em we took less to get more; and it made us feel… Good.”
“Wait. What?” On the last job Liam wouldn’t let a vampire within a mile of his camp. If what he said was true…
“Aye. The gels, your gels. They was even more… Shite, Frankie. They was even better. And something even more fey with em’. Always knew what each other was thinkin’ like they was… We didn’t know that Jena was with child, and we was worried she would a’ followed ye. The Twins took her; and they had the Old Blood, the Luck we used t’ call it. Them gels… They still look they did on their sweet 16.”
“So, you’re sayin that I bred up a set of triplets with magical blood powers that have addictive blood?”
“Well, the whole family wasn’t like the Curse O’ us, but I do miss em fierce.”
Holy shit. 14 years. And he is still in withdrawal. The drugs and the booze in the camper are for his herd so he can dull out the crave for his long lost ghouls.
“They left after you all went mad,” softly, almost lost in the small confines of the camper. “They used you for decades to protect them from other Vampires. And when you became a liability, they left you.”
“Aye, and I loved em so!” Liam wails.
Like an addict loves heroin.
Oh shit.
And in that moment, I had Yuria. I had the bitch.
“Fuckin hell. Okay Liam. You killed the mother of my children. We weren’t wed, but I would have made sure she was taken care of. You owe me a debt, and it will be paid.”
“I don’t owe any fookin ghoul any-”
I became enraged; icy fury used to club my beast into submission and directed at Liam; hissing, my fangs exposed, my eyes red and an inhuman. Liam recoils in terror.
“The hell I’m a ghoul. I’m young Liam, a lot younger than you. But a debt is a debt; and you ain’t the dangerous and charmin’ thief you were. This works and I’ll get the gels to come by with a drop or two; clearly they come by in the day to keep the brush off the burned out campers. Those should be mounded over and gone, hell the other Travellers would have gotten rid of ‘em, they is bad luck to have around.”
Liam is still cringing in the corner.
“And they are fucking with you. Keepin you away with the guilt; makin sure none of the others touch the trailers. Bet if I asked round I’d find some money had changed hands and some threats made.”
“They wouldnae…”
“They damned well would; it is a hell of a con. And that, you drug addled cunt, is how I know they are my daughters.”
I look out the window of the camper at the burned out shrines to a horror made 14 years in the past.
“And I couldn’t be more proud. Sort yourself out Liam, you’re moving to Limerick. Two weeks. Or I come looking for you.”
I lean down close to Liam, and he flinches.
“And you don’t want that.”
Liam nods. “I’ll be there,” he whispers.
Now. I got to find my all too clever girls.
Ravnos
By Ben Vaughan
The Traveler camp is a mess and it’s raining. There are the remains of six campers; burned out hollow husks that the hissing rain pools and puddles in. There are another fifteen or so still whole in various states of repair. I’m here to meet with Liam Casey, the saddest lick in all of Ireland.
Liam is a Traveler, one of the road people. They have been wandering around the Isle’s for centuries; tinkers and thieves and entertainers. Now largely a motley group of poor sons of bitches they make their way with cons, scrap metal collection, and general fuck all.
Liam is also a rare bird indeed; a Ravnos. I know this because he was a Ravnos in 1853 when Casterly ran across him, and one in 1972 when we used him as part of a job. I’m hoping he can help me with the next one.
I spot his camper, it has a couple of old symbols and signs in the Cant; traveler tongue. It’s also the same one he had in ‘72 when I met with his family outside of Leeds. How he keeps it running I have idea.
Knocking on the door turns into a wait. I hear rustling inside, so I pound a little harder. Suspicious eyes glare through curtain slits as only a loan collector or a copper is out this time of night with the piss coming down.
“Oy, I’m comin. Stop yer poundin ye bastid…” The door cracks open and a fetid smell of old blood and stale beer pours out. I kick against the door hard, sending the person behind back into the camper. I walk into a certain shade of hell.
The carpets are scorched, heroin works, marijuana, empty pill bottles lay scattered in the strewn rubble on the floor. The lights are dim and stains of spattered blood cover every surface; brown spots that could tell a story of death and misadventure going back decades.
“Who the fuck are ye! Do you know who I… Frankie?”
We are both shocked, which is why I’m standing in an open door at the wretch before me. He’s emaciated, hair matted, nails ragged in scraps of hippy clothes that he scrounged from the dead. But it is Liam, always Liam.
I recover first and slam the door behind me and wade through the debris on the floor hoping I haven’t caught Vampire Tetanus and Hepatitis. “The Fuck. Liam, the fuck.”
Liam crawls to his feet, swaying like a palm tree in a hurricane. “Oh, Frankie, the feck ye do that fer. We’ pals, Frankie.” Like magic there is a knife in his hand and he is at me, snarling. My foot meets his face as he comes weaving towards me, and he crashes back into shopping bags filled with empty tins of beer.
He lies there for a moment shaking, it takes a minute before I figure out that he is laughing. “The bloody fuckin’ hell Liam. You act like you didn’t get paid but a stiff cock up yer arse on the last job. Comin at me with a knife…”
Liam lays back against the trash and drops the shitty pot metal knife. “Jes seein ya made me think ‘a them. My people, ye remember em.”
I did. He had a little group; two Childer and a raucous family of ghouls; at least I thought they were ghouls. Liam was always an odd duck and it wouldn’t surprise me if he had ‘collected’ some odd specimens of humanity over the years.
I remember there was Papa, a short wiry scrapper of a man, nose so bent it could see round corners. Mama wasn’t exactly fat, she had a waist. But in proportion… She was over six foot and at least 15 stone, had teets that would make the Norse Gods faint in the trousers, and was mostly pregnant every time I saw her. Good Catholic gel, that one.
They had more children than I knew how to handle, but Jena… Jena was 17 and looking for an adventure. I was nothing near 17 but with the constant surge of Vitae most ghouls are horny goats and Davenish was on the outs with me; I was quite the adventure for her... Two glorious months we had; not that Mama approved. Papa on the other hand had watched me work a room and approved the dalliance; his word was law.
Why the fuck is Ireland full of romantic whimsy?
The Childer were Maggie and Lonaghan, red haired sibling twins that Liam had Embraced for their ‘Luck’.
“That their graves out back?” Travelers believe that a wagon lived in by a dead person was bad luck, cursed and haunted. They said the prayers and burned them out, sometimes with the dead inside. “How long?”
Howling, Liam springs up spraying trash as he bounces against the walls of the camper. “14 years, yer bastid! 14 bloody years!”
14 years? I’d heard of the week of nightmares; something no one likes to talking about. I’d hoped Liam and his would have been spared - Netchurch’s notes hinted that the Ravnos were affected worse than others; tales fitful dreams, nightmares - Cannibalism. Even now the whispers talk about the broken Clan, the fallen Ravnos and their insane need to destroy and consume their Blood-Bretheren.
“How’d it happen Liam?” I stay standing, wary that Liam will lose it again. Liam flits about like a junkie hummingbird, sending trash randomly fly about the room until he unearths a large leather bound book. He flips the page open to a spot near the back of the book and flips it out to me.
“‘Ere she is…Look at em, my family. My big beautiful family…”
The book falls from Liam’s hands and I lunge forward to catch it as the Irish Ravnos weeps. I see a picture, taken at night, of Liam, the Twins, Papa & Mama and their horde of children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. Papa and Mama are still looking vigorous, Mama is pretty clearly pregnant again, and their children have an odd cast to them. In fact the whole batch of them, seen in one group and still, not moving for the picture, they all have… Something. More than human, less than human, but it is there. And Liam clearly has it too, in the cast of his eyes and cheekbones.
Three women, identical but for their hair; blonde, red, and black, stand in front of Jena. Jena for her part is beaming at the camera, older, more settled in her place in life. The Blood is in her now too; Liam or the Twins had her; she has that vague ageless look that ghouls get. But she is giving all her focus to the three women who each have two girls, twins, in front of them, roughly in their late teens, early twenties, and each of the twins is clearly with child. The triplets have a few younger children huddle around them as well.
The triplets. Their father’s stamp is clearly upon them.
I close the scrap book and carefully set it to the side. Than I lunge at Liam and grab his throat, “THE BLOODY FUCK HAPPENED LIAM?!”
“The Twins!” he rasps out. “When he rose; he spoke t’ the old ones or the ones with old blood first. But he didn’t speak with words but madness. And the Twins; they had the Luck, old blood indeed. They went for the kids; Papa and Mama stopped em’ but I was too late to save em, to save me bairns, to save them all.”
“What’d you do Liam? What about Jena’s gels?”
“Aye, they lived. They had moved on the Road; Jena… She was here. She… When it got mad she got the children out. Most of em’. She had her youngest sister… The Madness, ye see, I saw t’ Twins and I…”
Liam gulps for air and smears the vitae leaking from his eyes. “I ate them. The twins, Jena, her sweet sister Mags. Not jes’ their blood, them all. I can still hear them rattling round my head. But Jena and her sister was too sweet and I had to have them all…” Liam trails off, staring blankly for a moment.
“I got tha luck ye see. I took it from the Twins. Cept it tis a Curse in me. I cannae die, and I’ve tried to. Sumptin always happens to get me out of it and I just have te listen to em carry on and tell me that it weren’ me fault. They loved me so much and I fuckin ate them…”
I sit down with a nerveless thump.
“Show me, Liam.”
“I cannae do-”
“Show me.” The command snaps into my voice and into his mind. And he does, using all the crafts of his illusion, he shows me.
Afterwards he is drained and have a new appreciation for some of the things I heard in Seattle.
“You owe me Liam.”
The old fire comes back to Liam; his eyes blaze up and he grabs me by my jacket collar. “Who the fuck are ye to tell me what I owe? You’re just some jumped up gutter punk of a ghoul serving some prissy…”
He is now aware that my pistol is socketed in his eye.
“It won’t kill you Liam. Just blind you one eye. And then I shoot the other one.”
“No Ventrue ghoul would dare…”
“This one would you old fuck. You don’t owe me for Jena, but the babes.”
Liam sets me down a sight gentle. I put my gun away.
“What are they te you?”
“I’m their father, you twat. They’ve got my nose and my eyes.”
Liam has the grace to look embarassed. “Ye might have taken em, or worse tried to give us money t’ care for em.”
“Fuck you Liam. I’d have done something. But I know my reality as well as you do. I couldn’t raise them, but I deserved to know. So I could’ve made provisions.”
“Nay, they’d have enough problems with the leeches. You’d have sold em to your masters soon enough.”
“And what, precisely, the fuck does that mean Liam?”
Liam lets out another sigh. “The Old Blood; Mama and Papa were full of it. Something fey in their family; made their blood potent. Adding mine to it; the kids was special. If we fed off em we took less to get more; and it made us feel… Good.”
“Wait. What?” On the last job Liam wouldn’t let a vampire within a mile of his camp. If what he said was true…
“Aye. The gels, your gels. They was even more… Shite, Frankie. They was even better. And something even more fey with em’. Always knew what each other was thinkin’ like they was… We didn’t know that Jena was with child, and we was worried she would a’ followed ye. The Twins took her; and they had the Old Blood, the Luck we used t’ call it. Them gels… They still look they did on their sweet 16.”
“So, you’re sayin that I bred up a set of triplets with magical blood powers that have addictive blood?”
“Well, the whole family wasn’t like the Curse O’ us, but I do miss em fierce.”
Holy shit. 14 years. And he is still in withdrawal. The drugs and the booze in the camper are for his herd so he can dull out the crave for his long lost ghouls.
“They left after you all went mad,” softly, almost lost in the small confines of the camper. “They used you for decades to protect them from other Vampires. And when you became a liability, they left you.”
“Aye, and I loved em so!” Liam wails.
Like an addict loves heroin.
Oh shit.
And in that moment, I had Yuria. I had the bitch.
“Fuckin hell. Okay Liam. You killed the mother of my children. We weren’t wed, but I would have made sure she was taken care of. You owe me a debt, and it will be paid.”
“I don’t owe any fookin ghoul any-”
I became enraged; icy fury used to club my beast into submission and directed at Liam; hissing, my fangs exposed, my eyes red and an inhuman. Liam recoils in terror.
“The hell I’m a ghoul. I’m young Liam, a lot younger than you. But a debt is a debt; and you ain’t the dangerous and charmin’ thief you were. This works and I’ll get the gels to come by with a drop or two; clearly they come by in the day to keep the brush off the burned out campers. Those should be mounded over and gone, hell the other Travellers would have gotten rid of ‘em, they is bad luck to have around.”
Liam is still cringing in the corner.
“And they are fucking with you. Keepin you away with the guilt; makin sure none of the others touch the trailers. Bet if I asked round I’d find some money had changed hands and some threats made.”
“They wouldnae…”
“They damned well would; it is a hell of a con. And that, you drug addled cunt, is how I know they are my daughters.”
I look out the window of the camper at the burned out shrines to a horror made 14 years in the past.
“And I couldn’t be more proud. Sort yourself out Liam, you’re moving to Limerick. Two weeks. Or I come looking for you.”
I lean down close to Liam, and he flinches.
“And you don’t want that.”
Liam nods. “I’ll be there,” he whispers.
Now. I got to find my all too clever girls.
Ravnos
By Ben Vaughan