Post by The Mouth on Jul 19, 2014 17:01:52 GMT -8
17 March, 2014
Limerick, Ireland
It was Saint Patricks day, and this was Yuria’s spring visit. She’d taken Mike back to Belfast as soon as she could.
It was also the night that I was, in all likelihood, going to end forty lives.
The ghouls were serving the lower tables. The high table held Yuria, her dwarf standard bearer Jarl, the stolid Setite Liekkle, the punk Veronique, and Mike. The ‘big kids’ table below them was Clete Dunsirn, Gooley in his rags and hair shirt, and Ira with his childe; the broods of Yuria’s crew were on the general seating with the ghouls back behind them.
Catering staff serves high end foods; French mostly, to the ghouls and other guests. The Dunsirns are notable as a mob of leather coated meat heads, chewing with a sullen disposition while being mocked by their neighbors.
I’m nervous as hell; not because I’m afraid of death but because the girls are out there, in the catering staff. They insisted on being present to help get the straights out of the line of battle; I argued against it; I didn’t want to tell them that Liam was going to be here, but I did eventually. They were contemptuous at best.
I tried. Gods, I tried.
So I have agents in the catering company. Because this is such an obvious weak point in security the catering company is owned by Ira who ensured that no new hires were brought on in the last six months - Hacked this by putting the girls on it. Management believes that they are legit due to a couple of spells from Rabbit, a late night burglary to replace some ID photos and head shots in employee files a week ago…
Next; they search all the carts and the food trays. The trick was to slip Corbin in as site security, He’s a pasty white guy, and a similar breakin swapped the ID’s logged in the personnel records. My my, who is a sneak thief, in the middle of the night? This guy.
Seriously though, I just co-opted the janitorial services for twenty minutes. A winning smile, a pair of football tickets… Exploiting the inherent class prejudices didn’t hurt either.
Corbin was further aided by a giant bitch of a German Shepherd; my Zenobia. I’d been training her to detect contraband for a year; now she was going to shine by not finding any. Corbin would handle her outside, and get his goodies in through the catering trucks.
Corbin had his party favors; Liam’s job was to spread chaos and heard all but the chosen to the safe room. Grigori’s mercenaries, a couple of licks he managed to snag from Liverpool, we going to run perimeter clean up and mop up any Kindred who make it past us inside.
There were no guarantees on this whole thing… But we had to try. Rabbit had one job after the balloon went up; it was critical but I think she would manage.
We go through the courses, soups, and salads, and plates… The jangling in my stomach is building. I’ve been hoarding my vitae for weeks for just this moment tonight.
After two hours I am summoned. I have thirty minutes to apply my skills to a row of cups which will be distributed at random among the honored guests; an old trick meant to avoid poisoning a specific guest.
My hands are shaking for a moment then I still them and focus my effort and will; I prepare the gold cups and the crystal goblets. In the goblets I pour brandy. Ancient, casked, smelling of apples and time. In the gold I pour blood; I empty three of the four bottles Katherine made for me. I pour the precise same amount into each cup. The tray with the gold cups is taken to a screened area. Liekkle is supervising me tonight; making sure that I am not trying to illicitly blood bond anyone.
After I pour for everyone the steaming blood is taken to a small tent. Liekkle brings out one cup. There are little round gemstones on the cups, each a different color. I take the cup and drink, deeply. I hand the empty cup back.
Selim gave me one small item to aid me tonight. A Bezoar; an ancient pellet of fur and bone and matter calcified into a rock the size of a robin’s egg. I choked it down before I got here, he promises it will eat the poisons and is enchanted by a skilled alchemist. It will only work a few times, he warned. Good. All I need is twice.
Liekkle nods, examines the cup is empty and takes turns. I murmur “Ah. One last. Michael gets upset at the color blue; his cup should avoid that color.”
Liekkle’s eyes narrow slightly. He nods, “I thank you Master Phillips, for the information.”
It doesn’t hurt that I’ve conditioned Mike to the color blue. He’ll get agitated, as it is the color associated with anxiety and fear.
The cups are passed out. The glasses go out; forty some odd lives hanging in the balance. The catering staff are cleared by their managers, carts with deserts are placed within reach of each table.
Yuria gives her speech; she always gives one to rouse the troops.
“Ladies and Gentleman; we start the Spring today. A few years ago I would never have dreamed that the Anarch cause would bloom so readily in Ireland, but she has opened her arms to our liberation.
In that, she has embraced you, my fellow Kindred.”
I can feel her Presence flow over the crowd, filter into the words, and trap us in a spell.
I grin, and pull the shadows closer around me, stepping further away from behind the dais. She drones on about the perfidy and dire collapse of the Camarilla; stewing in their own corruption. Hypocracy, no elder speech is complete without it. Finally we come to the end.
“I toast to you, my Brothers! My Sisters! You are the strength of our cause, together we shall know victory sweeter than any vitae!”
She raises her cup, and quafs it, as does her entire inner circle, the childer, and apparently the Dunsirns.
But the Dunsirn’s put down full cups.
Almost immediately everyone who drank is swaying, not so much as sitting as sliding into their chairs. Diazepam and Ketamine; with a hint of magic, contained in fairy blood - All four bottles were from Jory, and I only needed three. Apparently, according to Jory, the vamps are going to ‘Trip Balls and get real bitey’.
Liekkle has a chance to recognize what I’ve done and staggers around but I’m long gone.
The smoke starts to billow out from the carts as the Dunsirn’s roar and start stabbing with forks and steak knives. Clete beelines for Lister, who is insensate, and I see a prodigous feat of strength in that he rips off Lister’s arm and the beats him with it, laughing the entire time.
My suspicions are confirmed; the last thing I see before rolling around the corner is Ira’s childe, flickering. I blink and it is the Roman, and he is angry and heading towards me. I dive through the smoke to my cache on the battlements.
The screams are just getting started when the flashbangs start going off. Anyone who tried getting through the smoke with their senses sharpened is now blind and deaf.
I hear gun fire; that means Liam is at work, and I hope the girls keep away from him. This part is where Corbin comes in, get’s Gooley and Ira, get’s them safety and the Dunsirns take a beating and murder everything in their path around them. Then Corbin gets to go back and join the mayhem.
You might ask why the Giovanni would get involved; easy. I promised that any Diablerie would be forgotten. Apparently the Dunsirns are relatively thin blooded in town and wanted a chance to get that blood up.
Don’t blame them.
I get the top of the battlement and look into the stone courtyard; the catering staff is huddled by the service docks and I see three figures run from them and into the smoke… Fucking hell, it’s the girls. Pretty sure I saw a bow, a gun, and that funny knife-sword that Hannah won’t let me touch. No armor… Gods damn it.
I get my kit on, rack the slide on my FNH .45 Tactical; god I love this gun. The supressor is a bit of bear, and nearly six grand on the black market. Six grand euro.
My sword and stake are set, my vest fits over the armor. Put my goggles on - No reason to get smoke in my eyes, and I head back into the chaos. My part is to pick up straglers and force them to the east end of the exhbition hall into the foyer that the construction is just wrapping on. We removed the barriers and left them everywhere else; panic with the blood bond… The ghouls will be defending their masters and trying to drag them to safety. Ira’s people will most likely die, a payment for his treachery I think you would call it.
I hate this.
I come out the stairs and put a bike lock on the doors behind me. I see smoke billowing from the conference hall in the visitors center; the deep booms of flashbangs tell me that Corbin the mad bomber is at work.
I see ghouls carrying their bloody and insensate masters - The goggles do one other thing for me. I now look a wee para.
“This way! This way! For Yuria! Yuria and the People!”
I point them in the direction of the foyer. They choke and gasp, sobbing. Too often Vampries have intel to tell them when a fight is coming… I’m using Sabbat raid tactics and doing a damned good job of it.
Hope they don’t figure out what we put in the ceiling.
The plan works until a tall figure, lizard limbed, and wearing the garb of a Roman legionaire comes out of the smoke. He is stumbling until he sees me. “You.” The voice is surprising; clear and high, sweet tenor. He stumbles towards me, flickering in and out of the smoke.
“Who are you?” he slurs as he stalks towards me. “Who are you to have done this?”
Yuria stumbles out behind him, carried by Mike. Only one cup had the blue gem; it was the only cup I didn’t poison. It was a risk, but a calculated one, given what I remembered of a blood bond group of thralls and our internal jealousies centered around Casterly.
“I am Reginald Royce, called Francis. Mike knows me pretty damned well, don’t you Mike?”
The Nosferatu turns and sees Mike carrying Yuria. He hisses something Germanic and start towards him but Mike just runs past us, a harried and haunted look in his eyes.
“But for now, call me Devon,” as Jarl comes past us, the dwarf is looking the worse for wear.
“Come on Licinius, we have to go!”
There is a slamming of a door ahead, a dull boom. In a room, with my minds eyes, there is a crowd of Kindred and ghouls trying to escape whatever was done to their masters. That would be the night guard I dominated two weeks ago to, when a ruckus started, to wait three minutes then seal those doors.
I have a clacker in hand. One click and some gates open on sacks in the ceiling. One more click and the lights in the foyer go out.
The doors outside are chained; the Kindred claw at them, but this is a sealed construction zone. Going back was an option, but the doors slam shut.
From the ceiling there is a rain of dust, and a hissing noise fills the air. Oxygen, aluminium dust, and smaller amounts of magnesium… The lights go out and some smart little fuck uses a lighter.
The second boom is not so dull.
A gout of fire blows the doors from the foyer construction out and past us; Jarl catches a flaming steel door the hard way. A moment later a while streams by, trying to gain some altitude past the flaming debri - The explosion blew out the doors on the far side of the foyer leaving a clear escape route. The air between is impossibly hot, flames are eating all the available fuel and I try hard to avoid looking at the human charcoal and the bodies flaking to ash in the room.
A chair flies through the air catches Jarl as he is trying to fly through the flames. The owl gives a screech and tumbles into the flames.
Clete Dunsirn stands in the doorway, eye gouged out, blood running down his chin.
There is the sounds of fighting behind us, but dying down.
Licinius seems to steady himself, then vanishes. I start running because I know the next thing that is going to happen is that I’m going to get shivved.
Oh well. All hail Yuria’s Kingdom, may it long lie in ashes.
Brujah, Pt III: The End is Nigh
By Ben Vaughan
Limerick, Ireland
It was Saint Patricks day, and this was Yuria’s spring visit. She’d taken Mike back to Belfast as soon as she could.
It was also the night that I was, in all likelihood, going to end forty lives.
The ghouls were serving the lower tables. The high table held Yuria, her dwarf standard bearer Jarl, the stolid Setite Liekkle, the punk Veronique, and Mike. The ‘big kids’ table below them was Clete Dunsirn, Gooley in his rags and hair shirt, and Ira with his childe; the broods of Yuria’s crew were on the general seating with the ghouls back behind them.
Catering staff serves high end foods; French mostly, to the ghouls and other guests. The Dunsirns are notable as a mob of leather coated meat heads, chewing with a sullen disposition while being mocked by their neighbors.
I’m nervous as hell; not because I’m afraid of death but because the girls are out there, in the catering staff. They insisted on being present to help get the straights out of the line of battle; I argued against it; I didn’t want to tell them that Liam was going to be here, but I did eventually. They were contemptuous at best.
I tried. Gods, I tried.
So I have agents in the catering company. Because this is such an obvious weak point in security the catering company is owned by Ira who ensured that no new hires were brought on in the last six months - Hacked this by putting the girls on it. Management believes that they are legit due to a couple of spells from Rabbit, a late night burglary to replace some ID photos and head shots in employee files a week ago…
Next; they search all the carts and the food trays. The trick was to slip Corbin in as site security, He’s a pasty white guy, and a similar breakin swapped the ID’s logged in the personnel records. My my, who is a sneak thief, in the middle of the night? This guy.
Seriously though, I just co-opted the janitorial services for twenty minutes. A winning smile, a pair of football tickets… Exploiting the inherent class prejudices didn’t hurt either.
Corbin was further aided by a giant bitch of a German Shepherd; my Zenobia. I’d been training her to detect contraband for a year; now she was going to shine by not finding any. Corbin would handle her outside, and get his goodies in through the catering trucks.
Corbin had his party favors; Liam’s job was to spread chaos and heard all but the chosen to the safe room. Grigori’s mercenaries, a couple of licks he managed to snag from Liverpool, we going to run perimeter clean up and mop up any Kindred who make it past us inside.
There were no guarantees on this whole thing… But we had to try. Rabbit had one job after the balloon went up; it was critical but I think she would manage.
We go through the courses, soups, and salads, and plates… The jangling in my stomach is building. I’ve been hoarding my vitae for weeks for just this moment tonight.
After two hours I am summoned. I have thirty minutes to apply my skills to a row of cups which will be distributed at random among the honored guests; an old trick meant to avoid poisoning a specific guest.
My hands are shaking for a moment then I still them and focus my effort and will; I prepare the gold cups and the crystal goblets. In the goblets I pour brandy. Ancient, casked, smelling of apples and time. In the gold I pour blood; I empty three of the four bottles Katherine made for me. I pour the precise same amount into each cup. The tray with the gold cups is taken to a screened area. Liekkle is supervising me tonight; making sure that I am not trying to illicitly blood bond anyone.
After I pour for everyone the steaming blood is taken to a small tent. Liekkle brings out one cup. There are little round gemstones on the cups, each a different color. I take the cup and drink, deeply. I hand the empty cup back.
Selim gave me one small item to aid me tonight. A Bezoar; an ancient pellet of fur and bone and matter calcified into a rock the size of a robin’s egg. I choked it down before I got here, he promises it will eat the poisons and is enchanted by a skilled alchemist. It will only work a few times, he warned. Good. All I need is twice.
Liekkle nods, examines the cup is empty and takes turns. I murmur “Ah. One last. Michael gets upset at the color blue; his cup should avoid that color.”
Liekkle’s eyes narrow slightly. He nods, “I thank you Master Phillips, for the information.”
It doesn’t hurt that I’ve conditioned Mike to the color blue. He’ll get agitated, as it is the color associated with anxiety and fear.
The cups are passed out. The glasses go out; forty some odd lives hanging in the balance. The catering staff are cleared by their managers, carts with deserts are placed within reach of each table.
Yuria gives her speech; she always gives one to rouse the troops.
“Ladies and Gentleman; we start the Spring today. A few years ago I would never have dreamed that the Anarch cause would bloom so readily in Ireland, but she has opened her arms to our liberation.
In that, she has embraced you, my fellow Kindred.”
I can feel her Presence flow over the crowd, filter into the words, and trap us in a spell.
I grin, and pull the shadows closer around me, stepping further away from behind the dais. She drones on about the perfidy and dire collapse of the Camarilla; stewing in their own corruption. Hypocracy, no elder speech is complete without it. Finally we come to the end.
“I toast to you, my Brothers! My Sisters! You are the strength of our cause, together we shall know victory sweeter than any vitae!”
She raises her cup, and quafs it, as does her entire inner circle, the childer, and apparently the Dunsirns.
But the Dunsirn’s put down full cups.
Almost immediately everyone who drank is swaying, not so much as sitting as sliding into their chairs. Diazepam and Ketamine; with a hint of magic, contained in fairy blood - All four bottles were from Jory, and I only needed three. Apparently, according to Jory, the vamps are going to ‘Trip Balls and get real bitey’.
Liekkle has a chance to recognize what I’ve done and staggers around but I’m long gone.
The smoke starts to billow out from the carts as the Dunsirn’s roar and start stabbing with forks and steak knives. Clete beelines for Lister, who is insensate, and I see a prodigous feat of strength in that he rips off Lister’s arm and the beats him with it, laughing the entire time.
My suspicions are confirmed; the last thing I see before rolling around the corner is Ira’s childe, flickering. I blink and it is the Roman, and he is angry and heading towards me. I dive through the smoke to my cache on the battlements.
The screams are just getting started when the flashbangs start going off. Anyone who tried getting through the smoke with their senses sharpened is now blind and deaf.
I hear gun fire; that means Liam is at work, and I hope the girls keep away from him. This part is where Corbin comes in, get’s Gooley and Ira, get’s them safety and the Dunsirns take a beating and murder everything in their path around them. Then Corbin gets to go back and join the mayhem.
You might ask why the Giovanni would get involved; easy. I promised that any Diablerie would be forgotten. Apparently the Dunsirns are relatively thin blooded in town and wanted a chance to get that blood up.
Don’t blame them.
I get the top of the battlement and look into the stone courtyard; the catering staff is huddled by the service docks and I see three figures run from them and into the smoke… Fucking hell, it’s the girls. Pretty sure I saw a bow, a gun, and that funny knife-sword that Hannah won’t let me touch. No armor… Gods damn it.
I get my kit on, rack the slide on my FNH .45 Tactical; god I love this gun. The supressor is a bit of bear, and nearly six grand on the black market. Six grand euro.
My sword and stake are set, my vest fits over the armor. Put my goggles on - No reason to get smoke in my eyes, and I head back into the chaos. My part is to pick up straglers and force them to the east end of the exhbition hall into the foyer that the construction is just wrapping on. We removed the barriers and left them everywhere else; panic with the blood bond… The ghouls will be defending their masters and trying to drag them to safety. Ira’s people will most likely die, a payment for his treachery I think you would call it.
I hate this.
I come out the stairs and put a bike lock on the doors behind me. I see smoke billowing from the conference hall in the visitors center; the deep booms of flashbangs tell me that Corbin the mad bomber is at work.
I see ghouls carrying their bloody and insensate masters - The goggles do one other thing for me. I now look a wee para.
“This way! This way! For Yuria! Yuria and the People!”
I point them in the direction of the foyer. They choke and gasp, sobbing. Too often Vampries have intel to tell them when a fight is coming… I’m using Sabbat raid tactics and doing a damned good job of it.
Hope they don’t figure out what we put in the ceiling.
The plan works until a tall figure, lizard limbed, and wearing the garb of a Roman legionaire comes out of the smoke. He is stumbling until he sees me. “You.” The voice is surprising; clear and high, sweet tenor. He stumbles towards me, flickering in and out of the smoke.
“Who are you?” he slurs as he stalks towards me. “Who are you to have done this?”
Yuria stumbles out behind him, carried by Mike. Only one cup had the blue gem; it was the only cup I didn’t poison. It was a risk, but a calculated one, given what I remembered of a blood bond group of thralls and our internal jealousies centered around Casterly.
“I am Reginald Royce, called Francis. Mike knows me pretty damned well, don’t you Mike?”
The Nosferatu turns and sees Mike carrying Yuria. He hisses something Germanic and start towards him but Mike just runs past us, a harried and haunted look in his eyes.
“But for now, call me Devon,” as Jarl comes past us, the dwarf is looking the worse for wear.
“Come on Licinius, we have to go!”
There is a slamming of a door ahead, a dull boom. In a room, with my minds eyes, there is a crowd of Kindred and ghouls trying to escape whatever was done to their masters. That would be the night guard I dominated two weeks ago to, when a ruckus started, to wait three minutes then seal those doors.
I have a clacker in hand. One click and some gates open on sacks in the ceiling. One more click and the lights in the foyer go out.
The doors outside are chained; the Kindred claw at them, but this is a sealed construction zone. Going back was an option, but the doors slam shut.
From the ceiling there is a rain of dust, and a hissing noise fills the air. Oxygen, aluminium dust, and smaller amounts of magnesium… The lights go out and some smart little fuck uses a lighter.
The second boom is not so dull.
A gout of fire blows the doors from the foyer construction out and past us; Jarl catches a flaming steel door the hard way. A moment later a while streams by, trying to gain some altitude past the flaming debri - The explosion blew out the doors on the far side of the foyer leaving a clear escape route. The air between is impossibly hot, flames are eating all the available fuel and I try hard to avoid looking at the human charcoal and the bodies flaking to ash in the room.
A chair flies through the air catches Jarl as he is trying to fly through the flames. The owl gives a screech and tumbles into the flames.
Clete Dunsirn stands in the doorway, eye gouged out, blood running down his chin.
There is the sounds of fighting behind us, but dying down.
Licinius seems to steady himself, then vanishes. I start running because I know the next thing that is going to happen is that I’m going to get shivved.
Oh well. All hail Yuria’s Kingdom, may it long lie in ashes.
Brujah, Pt III: The End is Nigh
By Ben Vaughan