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Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 1: Comic Book Superhero Shenanigans

(Magical Minutias 1 and 2 are just standalone character sheets for monsters. I didn’t see the point of devoting whole posts to them.)

quote:

DECEMBER 2012 THE WORLD ENDED .

IT ENDED IN FIRE
IT ENDED IN RAIN
IT ENDED IN DARKNESS

NEMESIS, HAD RETURNED, AN ANCIENT DEVICE BUILT BY THE GODLIKE ATLANTIANS ON EARTH MILLENNIA AGO. IT HAD SEEDED ALIEN WORLDS AND COME HOME TO REIGNITE THE ATLANTIAN GENE ONCE MORE AND BRING ABOUT THE SECOND AGE OF THE GODS.

2024, GODS NOW WALK THE EARTH, MAGIC HAS RETURNED AND BRIGHTLY COLORED HEROES AND VILLAINS HAVE MADE EARTH A POSTHUMAN WORLD WITH ALL THE LOOK OF A COMIC BOOK AND ALL THE PROBLEMS OF A WORLD ON THE VERGE OF A NEW GOLDEN AGE OR FALLING INTO OBLIVION.

The crossover in Magical Minutia #3: “Crossover” is with Nemesis: Modern Mythology, Channel M’s superhero game that they promise will combine “cyberpunk, superheroics and urban fantasy” and will definitely come out at some point.

Crossover posted:

The world of Nemesis:Modern Mythology will be our foray into the world of superheroes. We’re not sure when but It’s coming.

At the time of this writing, this book was released over a year ago. Nemesis is not out yet. Though you can buy a Soto art poster for it for 50 cents or just save the preview picture to your hard drive and rasterbate it if you want.

The opening comic, which isn’t titled, is about this group of characters.



This is Youthquake. They are, it seems, the signature characters of Nemesis. Their group name makes them sound like they spend their weekends going around telling people about Jesus and filming bad Christian parodies of Top 40 songs for Youtube.

(No, I don’t know why the redhead is holding a ghost stomach.)

The comic follows Shane Farris AKA “Mentalmancer”, the blond kid in the yellow. He writes an email to his mom telling her about a typical boring day at his boarding school, Nemesis Academy. He gets up late because his genius roommate tore up his alarm clock for parts, says hi to his friends, catches breakfast in the cafeteria, and saves the world from gold spider-riding soldiers from “the Empire Eternal”. It goes through introducing everyone while they fight, then they go and grab lunch at the local pizza place. Soto didn’t do the art for it, but the comic does have an amazing array of goofy faces, poses, and proportions.



(I didn’t realize Ankle Day was a day you could skip.)

It’s still better than Soto’s stuff though.

Also, only one bit of transformation.



There is no title page or table of contents for the book, nor are there credits for the comic. (Not that it really needs a ToC. There’s only 3 chapters.) DriveThruRPG doesn’t help because it just has “Various” for both the writers and artists. So whoever did this comic didn’t get credit for it. I’m going to guess it’s the same core staff as the previous books.

The first chapter is laid out like a travelogue by Alice Liddle/Liddell. Alice is a witch who invented the “Looking Glass Drive” (LGD for short), an engine that is used to power dimension-hopping vehicles and is installed in her own ship, the Jabberwocky. She spends her free time traveling and cataloguing the different parts of the multiverse with her crew.

She also dyed her hair blonde at some point.



Oh yes. As it’s been hinted at in the past few books, the WGA world, AKA “WWC-Earth”, is part of a greater multiverse. Behold!



(This isn't in the book. I got it from Facebook.)

Yup, we’re part of this multiverse too. FATAL and Friends is canon to WGA.

Also, I have a hunch that “Quester Earth” is what was eventually turned into Bellum Maga. I’ve mentioned in other posts that some of the art for that book was accompanied by an explanation of it being for a “witches after the apocalypse” setting.

Alice’s travelogue talks about Nemesis-Earth (AKA “Nemesis-Earth-Prime” AKA “Earth-Olympus” AKA “Super-Earth” AKA “The Perfect World”), the dimension the events of Nemesis mostly take place in. (If you read the multiverse chart, you probably noticed there’s a couple versions of the same world because we’re doing Crisis on Infinite Earths stuff now.) Nemesis-Earth is fairly similar to WWC-Earth and ours: There’s about 6 billion people, the dimensional size is roughly the same, and mundane world events have gone mostly the same ways. However, 6 million of the population are post-humans with various super powers, time is a couple years ahead due to the dimension being older, there is no masquerade, magic use is unisex (though still skews mostly female), the overall level of technology is higher, and the overall magic level is slightly lower.

The WWC loving hates the place and have banned travel to and from it. If you try to open a portal to it on WWC-Earth, they will somehow detect it immediately and stop you. (So they can instantly know about that, yet have trouble finding young witches and getting them into schools and when someone on Earth commits a magical crime.) As a result, it has to be done from another dimension. If you get stuck there for whatever reason, they will not help you. Alice thinks this attitude comes from the fact that otherkin, presumably witches in general, are not, never have been, and never will be the true rulers of the world.

Not surprisingly, Nemesis-Earth’s various ruling bodies more than just frown upon all of the bullshit witches get up to in their own dimension. Trying to torture mundanes on Nemesis-Earth is a good way to get punched in the face and put in jail.

Alice Liddell posted:

Want to get put into traction? Show off your collection of shrunken mortals.

That’s probably another reason why the WWC hates the place: They can’t get away with their bullshit. The WWC are petty assholes.

That said, magic use is more common on Nemesis-Earth and magical enclaves exist in many major cities. Most magic users use their powers for medicinal uses or as sorcerers-for-hire and are a generally friendly bunch. Religious bias against magic use exists, but is rare.

The superhero stuff came about on Nemesis-Earth due to an alien race called “The Arisen”. For a long time, the Arisen were the only sentient race in the universe. Out of loneliness, they messed around with the DNA of primitive humans to create the first post-humans, the Atlantians. The Atlantians, in turn, upgraded the rest of humanity when they found out why the Arisen did it, because… why not, I guess.

At some point, Atlantis got itself into a civil war that killed over 90% of the population. To preserve their race, a group of 6 Atlantians created a device that would, after 50,000 years of charging up, return and reactivate the Atlantian gene within humanity. I guess they put that in when they upgraded some of humanity too, but just let it sit dormant or something.

The device, Nemesis, accomplished this by, I assume, blowing everything the gently caress up in 2012. Along with creating 3.5 million post-humans (I guess being post-human makes you super virile…) and reactivating the Earth’s “magical field”, it also killed nearly a billion people and almost completely destroyed civilization. Thankfully, that was 12 years ago and now Nemesis-Earth is a technological wonderland of peace and prosperity, with the occasional comic book villain and Nazi.

(If you recall, there was mention in the core of an Atlantis blowing itself up in WWC-Earth. I’m going to guess this happened in multiple dimensions and Nemesis either nope’d the gently caress out or got deactivated by petty witches on WWC-Earth. )

The general premise of modern day Nemesis-Earth is that it’s pretty much our Earth, but better and more progressive. (Seriously, it seems like Nemesis wiped out every far-right person except the Nazis.) During the 12 year rebound in technology, climate change has been eliminated thanks to air-cleaning towers that convert the pollution into resources, and fossil fuels have been replaced by more effective solar and wind power, perpetual motion engines, and rechargeable batteries with decades long lifespans. Most cancers are a thing of the past. Life expectancy for the entire world is now 150 years. Smart, self-driving cars and helicopters are common and available for rent. Underground trains and airships use the planet’s magnetic field to provide fast travel across countries. Paper money has been done away with in favor of debit cards that serve as identification cards. Magic users aren’t massive shits who will turn you into things if you mildly annoy them. Presumably. Any media made before 2012 has been lost though. (Thanks to a typo, the book makes it sound like everyone stopped making TV shows, books, and the like after 2012.)

On Nemesis-Earth, there are several governments and countries of note. As seen from this world map.



(The book doesn't mention this, but I noticed that Hokkaido is no longer part of Japan... and might have been annexed by North Korea?)

United States: Same as the real world US, except it now has 51 states (Hawaii got destroyed during the Nemesis Event, but it picked up Puerto Rico and, somehow, Cuba), universal health care, a female president, and the best technology.

Meso-American Republic: Doesn’t have a write-up.

Rainforest Preserve: Ditto.



(That’s… not what your country looks like…)

The African Imperial Union: A benevolent dictatorship created by Queen Mabaya and her army of metahumans (the in-verse term for the not!mutants that make up most post-humans) shortly after the Nemesis Event. It was not a peaceful takeover. ( I want to know why predominantly Islamic northern Africa and richer than most South Africa survived Mabaya’s mass takeover of the continent.)

Eastern European Waste: No write-up. I guess everyone that lived there is squatting in Heaven now.



United Kingdom: After the Nemesis Event, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland (all of it?), and Australia all banded together to protect itself from Germany and Avalon. Prince Harry rules it along with a council of representatives from each country. It’s the only thing keeping the rest of Europe from falling to Germany.

Avalon: Ruled by fae monarchs King Oberon the 3rd and Queen Titania, Avalon is one of the most magical places on Nemesis-Earth. “The culture here is very Victorian minus the lack of equal rights based on sex". One of Oberon and Titania’s daughters is married to Harry. So I guess the UK doesn’t need to worry about them as much.

Australian Outback Dinosaur Preserve: The Atlantians had a dinosaur zoo in a pocket dimension near Australia. The Nemesis Event hosed it up, and now part of Australia is Jurassic Park. There are still Aboriginal tribes in the area, but dinosaur attacks are rare, so it’s all good. (Which is a good thing because the area is surrounded by a several hundred foot wide and deep trench. Yeah, they just locked them in there.)

Free Tibet/Dragon Mountains: The Himalayas are inhabited by dragons that woke up during the Nemesis Event. The Savads, a group of “mystical martial artists”, live in monasteries there and have bred a species of goat the dragons prefer over humans. Also, I guess Tibet told China to get hosed at some point. That part isn’t elaborated on.

Tartarus Prison: No write-up.

The 1000 Year Reich: A Neo-Nazi group full of metahumans took advantage of the chaos in Germany during the Nemesis Event and set themselves up as rulers. They even have their own version of Ingrid Frieze working with them. Because everything evil comes from Germany. (Alice even starts this blurb by assuring us that she loves the various Germanys she’s visited.)

Other things of note that aren’t included on the map are:

The Trans-American Pantheon Combine: A worldwide organization of benevolent metahumans that organizes and takes care of various metahuman interests, as well as acting as a worldwide police/military force. Has been effective so far, not that the rest of the world’s governments could do a thing about it if they weren’t. (So why haven’t these guys all gone after Germany?)

The United Nations: “This version of the U.N actually has some power when it comes to the Earth.” Has its own military, court system, and space program. Deals in worldwide problems, of course.

Imagitech: Nemesis-Earth’s Maximum Inc., except Macdonald Hartman is a metahuman, because of course he is. (Both versions also have doctorates in something now.)



World War 3 Memorial: A memorial dedicated to a pantheon (group) of metahumans called “The Watch” that died in the 3 month war between Canada (which no longer exists) and an invading alien army, along with the other “less than 100” metahumans that died during it. Millions of humans also died, but they didn’t get a memorial because they’re not special.

The Romanian Rift: A portal to the Shadow opened up in Romania and split it in half. Vampires hang out here. The UN has a wall around the area.

AB-1 Alert Areas: A genetically engineered, effectively immortal Godzilla-like monster named Brutus roams the planet destroying cities. (Alice describes him as being a cross between a troll, an ogre, a shark, and Wolverine.) Various governments have set up a network of alert devices that informs people when he’s in the area.

Up next: Rules

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Jun 23, 2016

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Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Doresh posted:

How'd you make a crossover with something that has yet to be released? And aren't these guys spreading themselves a bit thin if they now want to do supers as well o_O ?

I think the answers are "I need/want money", and "oh my god I can't wait I have to share this brilliant idea and my and my friends' characters right now!"

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 2: One Page of Crunch, Three Pages of Fluff

I lied. There’s a bit more setting stuff before a couple of new character creation options.

Crossover posted:

Crisis of two Earths.

Visiting the world of Earth-Nemesis or interacting with it is a dangerous proposition. Unlike in comic books world crossing interactions are not as "peaceful" as they one would think.

I think Reed Richards-616 would beg to differ. There’s probably other storylines like that, but I’m not a big comic book person. So I wouldn’t know.

The WWC and the Trans-American Pantheon Combine are aware of each other and communicate on a regular basis through an ambassador, Raven Sinclair. She’s on the 20 voodollar bill. No, she is not the same Raven Sinclair who teaches Alteration at Coventry. No, she is not the alternate universe version of that teacher. The explanation is weird and in another book. Along with being a magi (Nemesis term for a magic user), she is also a superhero and part of the best and most notable (adult) pantheon, Team Maximum. (The book doesn’t say who the other members are, but I’m going to guess Nemesis-Macdonald Hartman is involved in some way based on the name.)

Probably due to the line this book is a part of, Nemesis characters and their dimension are portrayed as being more of a threat than WGA characters and WWC-Earth. Metahumans are a paranoid bunch who, due to past experiences, generally assume that anyone visiting their dimension unannounced is there to cause trouble. All post-humans are registered with their respective governments, and children are required to have supervised training on how to use their abilities. Classes on how to properly use one’s powers in public are mandatory, even if the person in question doesn’t do the whole superhero thing. So naturally, they’re not going to take kindly to a group of unsupervised zap-happy tween witches who terrorize mundanes for minor slights. As there is no masquerade on Nemesis-Earth, there is also the danger of them breaking all of that hard work the WWC does to keep it up if they ever visit WWC-Earth. (:roflolmao:) Even more so as metahumans cannot be detected by the WWC’s normal means due to not being magical. So anyone that wanted to come over and take advantage of this could do so pretty easily.

The writing also slightly implies that they’re kind of roid-ragey.

Crossover posted:

This is but one reason (the top being the openly violent nature of so called super-heroes) that makes Earth-Nemesis a world the WWC would rather it's citizens avoid.

“Turning people into frogs is not a crime! Why are you arresting me?! THIS IS ASSAULT! I DO NOT CONSENT!"

Despite the chapter being called “rules”, there’s only two new rule items. The first is a new heritage for characters who are Half-Metahuman. Half-Metahuman characters lose 3 of their starting magic ranks and only have the basic metahuman abilities: Hyper Strength (+3 to Strength based Athletic rolls, +3 Hand to Hand damage, can lift up to a ton), Invulnerability (a point of armor and +1 to rolls against poisons and diseases), and Meta Physology (sic; only needs an hour of sleep, heals 1 extra life point at the end of combat scenes).

The other new bit is a superhero uniform. It costs 3 points, has a base of 2 Armor, and gives an extra point of armor to heat and cold attacks due to being climate controlled.



Add-ons to the uniform include:

Aquatic Adaption: (2) Acts as a scuba suit.

Combat Lenses: (2) Grants night vision.

Flight Suit: (2) Has various features meant to protect and aid flying characters. +1 to Flight rolls and takes half damage from falls.

Utility Belt: (4) Can carry up to 4 mundane devices and use them when needed.

Here’s a picture of some Nemesis people taking a selfie.



Up next: Character sheets for Youthquake.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 3: Youthquake



(What’s going on in the lower right?)

Youthquake is a pantheon based out of Nemesis Academy, a school for metahuman children, in Dallas, Texas. They are the most famous and powerful pantheon of teen superheroes. So no matter what age your Nemesis characters are, they are always going to be overshadowed in importance by these guys or Team Maximum. The book states that these characters were chosen out of the hundreds of heroes and villains on Nemesis-Earth because they are the closest in age to typical WGA characters (all of them are 15 or 16) and the most likely group to respond if they end up on Nemesis-Earth. But really, it’s probably because at least 3 of these characters are self-inserts.

The chapter also stresses that GMs pay attention to the characters’ rankings, since Nemesis characters are designed to be more powerful. But rank numbers don’t really mean anything, so who cares. The sheets themselves seem to use the older version of the rules, since they don’t have a Class/Wealth listing and no knacks.



Candice Phelps/Aura

Candice’s parents are actors. She herself was a child star. Her bio implies that she stopped acting (it calls her a “former child star”) when she joined Youthquake, but the comic says that she’s still acting and is the star of a TV show called Candy’s Sweet Life.

While her write-up and Shane stress that she’s smarter than she appears, she doesn’t really get a chance to show that. She has three lines in the comic. One is an insult about how the Lord of the Rings look is SOOOOO over, and the other two are her bitching about how she should be getting her hair did.

Candice Phelps posted:

Thanks, by the way, for making me miss my hair appointment at Neimen Marcus'... LOSERS.

[…]

I hope everyone appreciate s the sacrifice my hair and I made for them today.

Candice is a Rank 4 NPC. All of the characters in this chapter, except one, have the Metahuman clique, which gives them immortality and immunity to aging spells, a +1 to any two attributes, and a variation on the Meta-Physology perk that, for some reason, requires them to get 4 hours of sleep instead of the one that Half-Metahumans need. It also gives them a +2 to stabilizing rolls.



Candice’s powers are light-based and let her shoot laser beams, create holograms, control light, fly, and turn her body into it.





Han Lee Chin/Chi

Chin (or Han if you go by the comic) is a member of the Savads, as was his grandfather (who trained him) before him. He’s a member of Youthquake partly to continue the Savad tradition. He’s an introvert. Which means he doesn’t talk at all in the comic. So Shane has to explain him to us.

Shane Farris posted:

I'll try to explain how his powers work. Chi controls his and others chi... or life energy (hence the name). That makes him like Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee in their prime times ten. It gives him the ability to find the weaknesses and weak points in almost anything and heal us when we get hurt.

Han is a Rank 3 NPC. Due to being a magical Tibetan punch man, he has the “Supernatural” clique instead of the Metahuman one. This gives him 6 free ranks of Magic based skills, gives him a +1 to his Magic and Resist Magic, lets him restore 2 zap at the end of combat scenes, gives him +2 to Armor against magic attacks, and an immunity to poisons.



As a magical Tibetan punch man, Han is a master of the Jade Dragon style of M’ Katra, the assumed martial arts school of the Savads.





Eric Tucker/Dark-Bow

Eric is the country boy son of ranch owners who likes to flirt with girls. He’s also fiercely loyal and has a strong sense of right and wrong and all the other things you’d expect a generic superhero to be. The comic doesn’t give you much of an idea of what he’s like, other than that he quips at the bad guys in a southern accent and calls one person “pard”.

Eric is a Rank 3 NPC.



Powers wise, he’s Green Arrow if he were a green lantern.

Shane Farris posted:

His powers make him the perfect hunter. He never misses and while most people have five senses. I think Eric has closer to fifteen.

And those arrows he can create? They can do more than just hit one target if he wants them to.





Jill Heedan/Jilith

(Hand…)

Jill is the witch of the group and “potentially one of the most powerful beings alive”. As you’d expect, she’s the snarky rear end in a top hat who would have been yelled at or kicked out after a few days if characters in the Channel M multiverse acted like real people.

Shane Farris posted:

And last but not least, there's Jilith (Jill) . She never follows the rules. She never uses our code names (or real name) and she's not a team player.

Jill Heedan posted:

Hey, Geek-N-Stein you going to float there day dreaming or help out?

[…]

Hey! Like I need help from the nerd wonder.

If you couldn’t tell, she’s actually very loyal and hides her emotions because she’s scared of her powers.

Crossover posted:

Though she tends to hide her emotions and the fear of her power behind a gruff exterior she has shown to be both caring and loyal.

She also thinks Poison Ivy cosplay/burlesque costumes are appropriate day/school attire, if the last panel of the comic is any indication.

Jilith is probably the self-insert of either Soto or Deborah Dodge. I’m going to guess the later due to the red hair and the lack of extreme edgelord-ness.

Jill is a Rank 5 NPC.



Jill’s “manakinesis” abilities let her cast any spell rank 4 or lower at double the zap cost, can banish people with a Will vs Will roll, and alter existing spells at the cost of the amount of zap used to cast it.



Also, I missed a transformation bit.





Ramses McMann/Max

These superhero alias are really generic and lame…

Despite being from a middle class Dallas family, Ramses acts like he’s a gangsta because he thinks it’s the cool thing to do. He also has a tendency to run his mouth, but not to the degree that Jill does. I’m going to guess this is Harris’s younger brother’s character. Or one Harris based off his brother. Who knows.

Ramses is a Rank 5 NPC.



As you probably guessed from his “Speedster” heritage, Ramses’s powers are similar to The Flash’s: he has the power of Go Fast, among other things.





Arthur McMann/Mega

Harris Self-Insert #3, Ramses’s older sci-fi and comic book nerd brother, and the moral compass of the group. Arthur is a gentle giant who can take a lot of hits that the rest of the group can’t, and he knows it. The artwork of him can’t decide whether his bulk is muscle or fat.

Arthur is a Rank 5 NPC.



According to Shane, Arthur and Ramses have the best powers.

Shane Farris posted:

You know how every superhero team I used to read about in the comics had one guy with all the cool powers? Super strength, speed, flight, and invulnerability? Guess what Mom? We have two two of them. Mega (Arthur) and his little brother, Max (Ramese).

Arthur has the super strength part of that set. He’s strong enough to bench press an aircraft carrier in the comic, super resilient, can breathe in the vacuum of space, and has 360 degree vision because why not?



If you’re curious, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier weighs about 97,000 tons when loaded. Arthur’s still got a ways to go before he can bench press one without killing himself.

Arthur and Ramses can also telepathically communicate with each other. Though they don’t have complete mastery of it.



Shane Farris/Mentalmancer

Shane is a “runt” as far as superheroes go. He’s not as strong as your regular metahuman, but makes up for it with his keen intellect, his boundless desire to learn new things, and his psychic abilities. Most of the group gives him unnecessary poo poo for being a massive nerd.

Shane is a Rank 5 NPC.



Shane doesn’t talk about himself all that much. But as you’ve probably figured, he’s a psychic.



He can also fly, so I don’t know why he’s gushing over the McMann brothers being able to do it.



Maria “Mia” Juarez/Riot

Fun Fact: This is the third Latina character with the name “Mia” in Channel M’s stable of characters, if you count Mia/Nina from Willow-Mistt. I’m starting to suspect there’s an acquaintance of Harris’s with that name.

Mia comes from the crime-ridden slums of El Paso, where she had to do a bunch of things to survive that she’d rather not talk about. Being a member of Youthquake is her way of seeking redemption. Shane claims she’s not a people person and kind of “abrasive”, except when she’s around children. If Shane ever complimented her on her abilities, she would give him a wedgie for being a nerd.

Mia is a Rank 4 NPC.



Mia’s abilities let her control her voice, allowing her to use it to various effect.



If you look closely, you’ll notice that whoever drew their portraits can’t do a whole lot of poses.

The last little section is just three story hooks for using Youthquake. You can either help them, fight against them for Hades P. Anubis’s amusement, or get hunted by them.

And that’s it for that little detour. It’s back to witches being assholes in the next book.

Next Book: Magical Minutia #4: Trinity Stone, wherein we learn about where witches in the southern United States go to school, learn about the Trinity Valley pocket dimension, and why do some of these teachers have massive tits?!

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 1: The Second Best School in the US

(:siren:Alternate cover with Soto art, holy poo poo!:siren:)



quote:

South by Southwest

The South Has a different history than the North, or the east or the west. In fact, some would say it's almost a different country. Slower, old fashion more polite and more magical. I grew up with stories about monsters and magic not told as if their fairytales but told as if they are truth and so did most people I know.

In the South everyone knows a witch, or someone they think is one be she a "two headed woman", "Conjure Woman or Bruja. Its not seen odd or strange to for people to be superstitious or talk about seeing ghosts or talking to spirits. It just happens. And that's why this book exists.

Witch Girls adventures deals with a whole wide world of magic. It looks at the big mystical picture. It talks about the big magical schools, the "all powerful " WWC and the differences between the magical and the Mundane world. But though most of the world of "Witch -Girls Adventures" is as you read it there are places with their own unique flavor.

I’m not from the Deep South. Can any US goons who grew up in that area confirm that? Was your education system so bad that you guys thought all the lovely women in your town were literal witches?

Magical Minutia #4: Trinity Stone Academy is a book about one of the other 3 magic schools in the United States. (Along with Willow-Mistt, we have Golden Gate and Lake Lodge. I’m going to guess Golden Gate is in San Francisco. Lake Lodge is presumably somewhere up north. Though a typo says it’s in the south with Trinity Stone.) Harris has used the school at least once to run a game at a convention, and it’s the setting of one of the many attempts at a live action Witch Girls movie: Beyond Convention. I linked the intelligible trailer way back in my write-up of the core. But here it is again, for the hell of it.

Like the last book, there is no credits section. The alternate cover says Harris, Soto, and Emily Foster (?) worked on it, while DriveThruRPG credits “Anna Pierce” as the sole writer and the other artist besides Soto. Some of the writing has Harris’s usual eccentricities, while other bits are stiff blurbs that sound like placeholder notes. While Soto did do the character portraits for this book, the rest of the art is just Photoshopped blurred pictures of stock photos. Like so:





Trinity Stone is located in Dallas-Fort Worth and serves students from Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah, and Missouri. It’s the smallest of the four American schools with only 40 students. (The book says 42, but the grade breakdown only adds up to 40. The wiki has art for two male students, but they never come up in the book.) It’s not as prestigious as Willow-Mistt, but that’s not from a lack of trying.

Trinity Stone’s first headmistresses were sisters Eliza and Alice Coleman. Their mother, Temperance, homeschooled them when their family moved to Dallas in 1880 and set up a homestead along the Trinity River. Temperance quickly became friends with an American Indian witch named Lady Eyes-of-Sun, who introduced her to the Spirit River Valley. The SRV is a magical pocket dimension that the native tribes and buffalo of the area retreated to when settlers started coming through, presumably. Temperance told her daughters about it when they became teenagers and made them promise never to reveal its existence to anyone, including their father.

Unfortunately, Eliza, being a dumb kid, showed one of their mundane friends, a boy named Preston, an arrow head necklace she had received from a native child as a gift. She took him there to prove the valley existed and he ended up getting killed by a cockatrice. Eliza took his body to Alice, who turned him into a zombie with her knowledge of Necromancy. Preston’s parents immediately noticed something was up and got into a fight with their parents. Preston’s father, the town drunk, shot both Temperance and her nameless husband. The girls fled to Lady Eyes-of-Sun, who took them in. The two built and opened the school in the valley in 1894 in honor of their mother, because she was a teacher I guess. She wasn’t teaching other kids. It’s kind of like making a school in honor of Michelle Duggar.

Anyway, the two were co-headmistresses for 20 years until them and Lady Eyes-of-Sun’s tribe decided to gently caress off and go explore the valley. They left a nameless witch in charge. Nothing happened until 1943 when somebody hosed up a magical experiment and set fire to most of the school. The nameless headmistress was kicked out and the school almost lost its accreditation because of the incident. (So take note: Grooming kids to be evil and eventually help with your plan to overthrow the WWC is fine, having your school catch fire by accident is not.) Either way, the school’s already lackluster reputation went to poo poo because of the incident.

In 1991, the current headmistress and former student, Calypso Duexshae, was hired on as a teacher. At that point, the school only had 12 students and a staff that didn’t give a poo poo about teaching. She nagged the WWC’s board of education until they started booting the slacker teachers and the then-current headmistress, Viola Sanchez. Viola challenged her to a magical duel. (Dueling is apparently a thing among Spanish witches.) Calypso won by erasing her from existence for 3 days almost immediately after the duel started. Upon being appointed Headmistress by the WWC, Calypso immediately fired the remaining staff members and personally recruited most of the current staff and 30 new students for the 1992 school year. This and Calypso’s tight grip on the school have earned it the reputation of being the second best place to send your little bundle of magical horror in the United States.

Trinity Stone is run in pretty much the same fashion as Willow-Mistt, with some minor differences. All new students start on the same date every year. This day consists of them meeting the Intern student guides at Trinity Park in Fort Worth and crossing over the unfinished Trinity Creek Bridge to get into the Spirit River Valley. (I guess no one bats an eye at a bunch of kids carrying suitcases into the park.) The rules on what they can bring was pretty much copy-pasted from other books. Instead of a demerit and trial system, Trinity Stone just piles extra work detail onto troublemaking students at the Headmistress’s sole discretion. If you’re a danger to yourself, others, or the school, the most that will happen is you’ll have to manually clean the school grounds more and not be able to participate in extracurricular activities for a semester. There is no mention of suspensions or expulsions. However, the school employs binding bracelets that prevent the student wearing them from using magic outside of classes. These are used for magical offenses. In the eyes of the book, this makes Trinity Stone one of the strictest magic schools in existence. Kids rarely get in trouble (or have learned to hide what they’re doing very well) at the school because of this.

Nearly all of the students live two to a room in the Coleman Dormitory. Neophytes live with the Intern in charge of herding them in the basement while the other grades live on the upper floors, with the first used as a common and study area for the upper grades and as the dining hall. Due to a typo, Interns live on both the second and third floors. All of the dorm’s common areas are maintained by assigned student cleaners. Trinity Stone is very big on having the students do the cleaning for them.

The school offers the standard array of classes that every magic school offers.




Note that Necromancy teaches itself and this school also has a sanctioned witch Neo-Nazi youth group.

As it’s been noted, Trinity Stone maintains its grounds by having the students do work detail. Work detail is mandatory for anyone who is not sick or disabled and is done for one hour every day at least. The school does this both to honor the first students and to teach the students to not depend on their magic, as the chores have to be done without it. Interns apparently don’t have to do it, and instead supervise the Initiates. Jobs include cleaning the buildings, doing lawn work, maintaining the school’s farm, providing security, and cooking meals. (Ramen, pizza, and sandwiches every night!)

Up next: The school grounds and the Spirit River Valley

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Jun 25, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Young Freud posted:

Confession time: considering all the Dallas-centric popping up in the WGA Universe, I think I'm starting to realize that I might have run into Abby Soto before, like outside of a convention or gaming store setting. And I'm scared.

You might have. They are definitely based in Dallas.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Young Freud posted:

If it's the same person, then I definitely have a poor opinion of her, because she actually yelled at me when I got another job from another staffing agency. It was super unprofessional.

Well, her Facebook says she lives in San Antonio. So you might be safe now, unless it's con season.

So it turns out that an older version of Nemesis was available at one point as Nemesis: A Perfect World. The Amazon page for the book and the GM screen still exist.

quote:

Now comes the answer to the age old question, "What would you do if you had superpowers?" Nemesis: A Perfect World allows players to create and play any type of super-powered being. The characters they create are based on themselves. The setting is a land created by the prophesied end of the world. This land has all the flash and majesty of a comic book plus the added drama and realism of our own evening news. Here, the fate of your city and country depends not on strange visitors from another planet or specially trained mutants, but you! Includes a forward by Paul Dini.

They refer to the game as "superpunk" because it combines superheroes and cyberpunk. I don't get the impression that the game's setting explores the underbelly of an all superhero society and the socioeconomic and political issues that such a society would have, so it's sort of like modern steampunk in that everybody just likes the aesthetic.

The game has also gone under the title Nemesis: Remix and has a Youtube trailer and unfinished opening comic.

Edit: There was a link to a screamy angry article by Harris about racism in fantasy settings here. (In a nutshell: If you do a Tolkien-esque European setting with mostly white people, you are bad and wrong.) I deleted it because it was kind of off-topic.

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Jun 26, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 2: The Campus and Spirit River Valley

Trinity Stone’s campus is located on an island in the middle of the Spirit River. Here, have a map.



All of the buildings are built in either a Southern Antebellum or French Creole style, with one exception. Some of the descriptions are much more elaborate than the ones in previous books (right down to the kind of wood used), probably because Harris was going off his DM notes when he was writing this. They're actually kind of nice and paint a better picture of the school than the Willow-Mistt and Coventry write-ups did.

A – Coleman Dormitory: Was originally the Colemans' house, now it’s the school dorms. The Intern rooms are more opulent than the other students, and they get their own room and bathroom. Also has porch swings and a rec room for watching TV and reading.

B – Temperance Hall: The main hall, built in a Victorian style. The building is divided into three sections, all of which have three floors: The center hall holds the library, auditorium, teachers’ offices, the headmistress’s office, and the band hall. The left hall holds the mundane classrooms. The right hall holds the magical classrooms. The magical side has a bunch of fire prevention spells and wards to prevent another massive accident from happening again.

C – Eliza Gardens: A garden with a greenhouse used to grow magical plants and mundane vegetables for meals. The C in the book is the copyright symbol.

D – Alice Court: A magical building that is used as the cafeteria (so what’s the banquet hall in the dorms for?), the cooking classroom, a teacher’s living quarters, and an outdoor pavilion for barbeques and other outdoor events. (The walls magically fold away when they use it for that.)

E – Lab Buildings: Classroom labs for the more dangerous magical arts, including the Enchantment classroom. Each lab has X foot thick stone walls and 6 inch thick metal doors. They don’t gently caress around at Trinity Stone.

F – Jackalope Stadium: The school’s sports field, gym, and the personal lab of one of the teachers; named after the school’s mascot and one of the many animals in the Spirit River Valley.

G – Trinity Farms: The combination farm and ranch that provides the school with food. Has a chicken coop, cow pastor, an emu pen, a grain mill, and the stables for horses and magical mounts that the students can ride on the weekends with permission from the staff.

H – Santos Hall: A multi-story log cabin that is used as the guest dorm (upstairs) and the meeting area (downstairs) for the various student groups. The Highbinders Youth Group, Hex Scouts, and the “Circle of Steel” have their own dedicated meeting rooms. The building is named after a staff member that was killed by witch hunters two years ago… from whenever you run your game, I guess.

I – Teacher’s Grotto: Where most of the teachers live. The headmistress gets her own house, the American Indian teacher, Maggie Two-Feathers, gets her own cabin, the vampire teacher, Darius Winston, gets his own crypt, everyone else lives in a two story apartment block. The school’s docks are located here too.

J - Spirit River Cabin: The meeting area for when representatives of the various tribes in the valley need to contact the school or trade with them. Also used by Rustics for quiet weekend stays.

K – Trinity Park: A mundane park in Fort Worth. It was actually created magically to hide the entrance to the school. (So… does the local government not acknowledge its existence? How does that work?) The entire park has a mundane avoidance charm on it that gives mundanes a -5 penalty to notice and remember magical occurrences. (Again, does that cover the group of kids carrying a bunch of regular mundane suitcases into the park at the start of the year?)

L – Spirit Valley: The Spirit River Valley itself. The hundreds of miles long pocket dimension is home to tens of thousands of native peoples from the Caddo, Cherokee, Apache, and Comanche tribes, animal paragons, spirits, monsters, and various magical animals from American mythology, including jackalopes, thunderbirds, giant white buffalos, and animals that haven’t been seen in the Americas since the Ice Age. The deeper you go, the more out there the creatures become. Bordering the dimension is a vast desert that connects to other magical deserts and dimensions. Anyone magical enough can enter it by crossing the river, and those of native lineage on vision quests sometimes enter it accidentally due to their mystical connection with the valley. In regards to the environment, the valley is similar to the real world except there’s no sun or moon, the stars at night (which aren’t dampened by light pollution) might actually be distant gates to other dimensions, the valley always gets 12 hours of light and darkness every day no matter what season it is, and most plants grow from seed to fruit within a few weeks.

Other places of note in the valley include:

Blood Jungle: A jungle inhabited by Aztecs. They don’t like intruders.

High Hill: An isolated mountain range home to sasquatches, eagle paragons, and rocs. Only people born in the area seem to be able to navigate it successfully.

Thunder Plains: Named after the sound the hundreds of buffalo, normal and elephant-sized flying ones, make when they roam around the plains.

Two Feathers Trading Post: Named after and run by local valley expert Carlos Two-Feathers, the husband of Maggie Two-Feathers. Students can come here with permission and trade magical bits and bobs.

Due to how vibrant the valley is, everyone in it regains an extra life point and zap point every hour up to an unknown maximum. Characters heal twice as fast and mundane diseases have a 25% chance of being instantly cured. (You can to roll a 4 on a D4.) Garden and Herbalism rolls have a +1. Elementalism spells get a +1 to Casting and their Range and Duration MTRs. Necromancy spells have a -1 to their Casting and Range, Duration, and Damage MTRs. Zombies created only last half as long as they usually do.

M - Spirit River: The dimension’s namesake and the physical border between it and the mundane world. It circles the dimension. The water is always fresh and potable, and restores a zap point per cup when drunk.

Up next: The staff and students

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jun 27, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 3: The Staff

Time for my most and least favorite parts of these write-ups: Character sheets. I’ve decided to just post screenshots of the sheets because I’m just tired of summarizing them. (It also gives you a better idea of how badly edited some of these can be and how annoying the book’s background pic can be sometimes.) Let me know if you prefer the other way more. The sheets in this book use the older rules set.

For the character portraits, I had to dig through Soto’s old work to get larger versions of them, because due to the compression and resizing done to them in the book, some of them look like rear end when they’re blown up.



Headmistress Calypso Duexshae

Calypso hails from Noir-Arbre, a magical town in Louisiana. When she was younger, she would play tricks and commit petty crimes against mundanes and other people in the community. Her mom sent her to Trinity Stone to knock some sense into her, and it worked. Though she is still known for getting things done in “unconventional” ways. (I guess just trying to turn the WWC into poo poo is so common that a simple letter-writing campaign is considered unconventional.) Her nickname among the student body is “The Diva”, due to her immaculate appearance, cool nerves, and habit of never raising her voice. None of those things sound diva-ish to me, but okay. She teaches Time and Space. This makes the Beyond Convention movie make no sense since the students are obviously doing an assignment for a mundane studies class and she doesn’t teach any of those. :goonsay: She likes spicy food, gardening, and caring for the students.

Calypso is a Sorceress with the Beautiful and Queen Bee talents and the Warper heritage. She has 83 mundane points, 63 magical points, and 39 magic ranks.






(Hands… fingers… arms… tits…)

Abigail Bruja

It took longer than I thought it would, but we’ve finally found a Soto self-insert. (I’m pretty sure that is Soto’s head pasted on yay! that body even.) Abigail, if you recall, is the pro-Hag’s Syndrome activist on the 3 voodollar bill with the hosed up toe fingers. All About the Voodollars claims that she is responsible for breaking the “green line”, where those with Hag’s Syndrome and similar deformities (including Crone’s Nose, which is never mentioned) were treated like second class citizens and denied entry into magic schools and organizations. Which, to be fair, is pretty ridiculous. It’s not like they’re mundanes or otherkin. Now letting them vote in the magical town they live in for the government officials that represent them and take their magical taxes? That would be weird.

“Abby” was born in San Antonio and abandoned by her biological parents on the doorstep of St. Theresa Orphanage. Due to the fact that her Hag’s Syndrome was already manifesting as a baby, the nuns there cared for and educated her in secret. She kept her powers a secret from them in fear of what they would do to her. When she came of age, she got the typical witch wanderlust and traveled the world. During her travels, she saved a young Calypso from getting killed by a mundane mob by turning them all into grub worms. Calypso found her in Noir Arbre later on and hired her on as a teacher.

Abby teaches the Alteration, Curses, and Mentalism classes. Despite Calypso going through a lot of effort to get rid of all of the slackers that were on the school’s staff, she makes an exception for Abigail, who frequently shows up to classes hung over (ignoring the fact that witches are immune to the bad effects of alcohol), smoking cigars (because of course), and casting all manner of dangerous spells just for the hell of it. Her bio even admits that she shouldn’t really be a teacher.

Trinity Stone posted:

Abigail is an unlikely teacher, flamboyant, sassy and zap happy she really has no business teaching at a school. But she's really good at what she does and likes nothing more than showing girls how to enjoy life and their powers.

As you’ve probably guessed, one of her favorite past times is casting wicked spells on people. Considering being wicked is a stereotype of those with Hag’s Syndrome, she’s not really doing her cause any favors. (So what did Hag’s Syndrome activists do to earn the right to attend schools? Did they just threaten to turn everyone on the council into cigars?) Though most of the council is probably wicked themselves, so whatever.

Abigail is an Outsider with the Friendly and Wicked talents and the Hag’s Syndrome heritage. She has 64 mundane skill points, 50 magical skill points, and 43 magic ranks. Guess what her highest type is and what her signature spell does.




Pretty impressive how someone with no formal training and a fear of having their powers discovered can become that good at turning people into poo poo and never run the risk of having their magic fade away from disbelief like other characters in a similar situation.



Adani Masauri

Adani was born in Amman, Jordan but spent most of her life in Brass City, a magical city somewhere else in the Middle East. She attended Coventry as a teenager and graduated with honors due to her “anal-retentive” and studious nature. She entered the WWC’s “Academy of Paths”, whatever that is, and got herself a bookkeeping job as "a attaché to the assistant directors assistant to the council secretary". Calypso sought her out for a teaching position despite only meeting her once. She left that much of an impression on her. She teaches Illusion, Divination, and Music, and expects nothing but perfection from her students. She’s also good at music, which is seen as a higher calling in Brass City. Get it? Brass? A lot of instruments are made of it?

Adani is a Sorceress with the Devious and Perfectionist talents and the custom Half-Djinn heritage. Along with her classes, she is the sponsor of the Highbinders youth group. Which is odd, since Highbinders probably don’t have a very high opinion of half-breeds, and nothing in her bio makes her out to be a witch supremacist. She has 59 mundane skill points, 46 magical skill points, and 32 magic ranks.






Ariel Cottonwood

Ariel’s fae father and witch mother were entertainers who worked at Renaissance fairs. They sent her to Trinity Stone when she was 11 when they decided that she needed a formal education. She hated it, but got used to it. She went back to working at ren fairs after graduation as an expert on medieval life. Calypso hired her in hopes that her natural inclination to entertain others would rub off on the students. That’s pretty much it. She teaches Conjuration, Broom-Riding, and Mysticism.

Ariel is an Insider with the Eccentric and Geek talents and the Half-Fae heritage. She has 75 mundane skill points, 49 magic skill points, and 25 magic ranks.







Autumn Austin

Autumn is a member of the Austin family, the oldest family of western witches in Texas. (No, she is not from Austin. She’s from Allen.) The entire family is nothing but prim and proper southern belles, Autumn included. Something she was made fun of for when she attended Trinity Stone, as every Austin witch has done since it was founded, along with the tea parties she held with the other southern old money witch students. She became an etiquette instructor for the daughters of upper class old money families after graduation instead of going into the nebulous family business. She declined twice when Calypso came around to recruit her, but eventually accepted when she realized that Trinity Stone had become an uncultured mess. She likes to throw weekly tea parties, complete with vintage dresses. She teaches Protection and both Etiquette classes. (So she should be the one showing the girls around in the Beyond Convention movie.) Based on her write-up, I get the impression that she rounds down the grades of or just ignores any student that isn’t from old money, who probably aren’t invited to those tea parties. I’ve said “old money” a lot in this paragraph. Sarah Austin from Wicked Ways (who isn’t mentioned at all in this book) and her older sister Kay are her nieces. She’s an expert on mortal avoidance charms. She hates “Yankees”.

Autumn is an Insider with the Calm and Snob talents and the custom “Old Blood” heritage. What does it give her? Who knows. There’s no blurb for it on her sheet. She has 55 mundane skill points, 52 magical skill points, and 26 plus + magic ranks.






Arnie Shellback

Arnie, like most animal paragons, was born to a pair of normal armadillos in or around 1876. Unlike other armadillo paragons, he got the wanderlust and went seeking out a life of adventure. This got him captured by a wild west show. He didn’t mind, however, since he was still in the grips of the wanderlust and it let him travel the world. The owner of the show eventually found out that he could talk and the two became friends while Arnie became the show’s cook and animal trainer. The show closed in 1924, and the show’s nameless owner died 10 years later. Arnie, still wanderlusting, discovered the magical world and how lovely they are towards anyone who isn’t a witch shortly after. He went on to become a magical spy in World War 2 and the Korean War, and befriended and introduced Calypso to her now ex-husband. (Who is just called “Husband”.) She recruited him to be the school’s Cooking teacher and the head of the school’s farm. He lives in a burrow in Alice Court. In his spare time, he is an activist. Good luck with that buddy.

Arnie has no clique or heritage, but has the Friendly and Brave talents. He has 67 mundane skill points, 16 magical skill points, and 2 ranks of Elementalism.






Bonita Botanica

Bonita hatched from an egg in a volcanic area near “Xcoial, Beleze” (sic) over 400 years ago. When she became old enough to communicate, she lived in a cave and was worshiped by the local villagers, who she offered her magical and potion-making abilities to in exchange for food, wine, and gold. (Fun Fact: The Spanish originally didn’t settle in Belize, despite it being declared a colony, partly because it lacked natural resources, including gold.) After a few centuries of that, she got the wanderlust, made a potion that made her look human, and traveled the world. After discovering the finer points of the mundane world, she got into the perfume business. The WWC shut her down after the company became successful and they found out that the perfumes had magical properties. She got 50 years of community service. They were going to assign her to teach at Saint Joan’s as part of it, but Calypso, a fan of her products, pulled some strings. She teaches Healing, Potions, and Spanish. She rambles on about fashion in class and often tests her potions on her students.

Bonita is an Insider with the Drama Queen and Jaded talents and the custom (North American) Naga heritage. She has 71 mundane skill points, 49 magical skill points, and 42 magic ranks.






Lord Darius Winston

Darius is a naturally born vampire from Cardiff, Wales circa 1641. His biological parents left him on the doorstep of Lord and Lady Winston, who assumed his condition was some sort of sickness that required a diet of raw meat and animal blood and an indoor lifestyle. When he became a teenager, he got the wanderlust and traveled the world, finding himself a lot of girlfriends due to his brooding poet persona. He discovered he was a vampire when another vampire attacked his date. He ran off and became a recluse until 1809, when he got over it and joined vampire society proper. In the late 1800s, he turned his family’s manor into a school for orphaned vampires that taught its students to live in harmony with humans. German vampires tried to recruit the student body in World War 2, and Dracula murdered all of the students and left him staked outside when he refused. Calypso’s mother, Ramona, who was part of the magical Allied forces, saved him. He moved to Louisiana with her after the war and became like an uncle to Calypso. He teaches History, Language Arts, and Drama. (The list at the front of the book also says he teaches “mundane studies”.) A lot of the students have crushes on him and want him to make them a vampire, which he hates. His character motivation is Bonita’s copy-pasted. So his bio makes him sound like he wants to be a “perfume queen”. He's actually an acclaimed writer in both the mundane and magical worlds.

Darius has no clique, but is an Imperial vampire with the Gloomy and Mysterious talents. He has 85 mundane skill points, 27 magical skill points, and 4 magic ranks.






(Neck...)

Lana Bayer

Lana is a former Trinity Stone student and a prodigy when it comes to creating magical items. When she was an Intern, she taught the Enchantment class, and after she graduated (as valedictorian), she quickly became the manager of the dwarven magical device company that she worked at. (Fast as in “in a manner of two”) She moved on to Mod Mia’s Modern Magic to get experience with mundane electronics, and excelled there as well. Then she became a magistrate because the WWC wanted more magistrates with tech experience, all at the age of 25. She eagerly took Calypso’s offer to teach because she missed building things, despite loving the combat aspect of her job. She teaches Offense, Enchantment, and Math; likes Nine Inch Nails; and hates Luddites. (Presumably in the original sense of the word of people who are against labor-saving technologies or new technology in general and not Soto’s definition of “cishet white male Christian MRA racists who hate my game”.) She’s also from Dallas. I suspect that she’s either based on someone or is someone’s self-insert.

Lana is a Gothique with the Brainiac and Warrior talents and the Half-Dwarf heritage. She has 104 mundane skill points, 46 magical skill points, and 28 magic ranks. (She’s only 35 and has far and away more mundane skill points than some of the centuries old characters here.)





Leticia “Lettie” Zapata

Ever since she was little, Leticia loved computers. Unfortunately, her family was poor and her school’s computers were poo poo that broke down constantly. So she stole the parts to make her own when she was 9. By 12, she was a hacker and troll extraordinaire who frequently harassed people who crossed her online. She eventually came across a user named ELF whose machine was unhackable and managed to turn Lettie’s motherboard into “pumpkin spice pudding”. (Have you guessed who ELF is yet?) Their little one-sided war continued until she was 14, when she stole another computer to find ELF and ELF just let her find her for reasons. Leticia hacked her way into a first class flight to Kansas. The book doesn’t say outright that ELF is Emily Foster. But it’s loving Emily Foster. (Does her middle name start with an L?) Emily, at that point only a few years older than her, introduced her to magic and Cybermancy because gently caress the masquerade. Eventually, Leticia was enrolled into Trinity Stone. The paragraph makes it sound like Leticia is not a natural witch and demanded to be taught magic.

Trinity Stone posted:

Lettie found ELF who turned out to be a skinny red haired iin glasses a few years older than her. The two started to talk and that was when ELF introduced Lettie to magic and Cybermancy. A Week Later Lettie was emailed into the Trinity stone server by Elf . Lettie then released herself and demanded to be taught magic.

Considering young witches are entitled to a formal education by WWC law, I hope she didn’t have to actually demand to be allowed in. Though come to think of it, did Emily just use her random ability to turn mundanes into witches on her?

Anyway, Leticia went on to earn a degree from MIT in only three years, then used her skills to help in the Lillian’s cyberwar against the WWC and the Highbinders. Part of her “job” included stealing money from the WWC’s accounts and giving it to various mundane charities. The first time she was caught, she had her magic bound for a year. The second time she was caught, Calypso intervened and got the WWC to make her a teacher as part of her probation. She teaches the Computer, Cybermancy, and Necromancy classes. She’s still a hacker and promotes the Lillian cause to her students.

Leticia is an Outsider with the Geek and Tough talents and the 21st Century Digital Witch heritage. She has 72 mundane skill points, 45 plus $ magic skill points, and 35 magic ranks. She’s one of the few characters who doesn’t have ranks in Alteration.







Margaret “Maggie” Two-Feathers

Maggie was born in Two-Feathers Village, a mountain village in the Spirit River Valley. Due to being the daughter of the village shamaness, she received magical training from an early age. At 16, she did the traditional walkabout and came across a magical tourist group. She followed them out of the valley and settled down in Moon Shadow Circle for a few years, taking up a job as a healer. Then she got the wanderlust and visited the various native tribes of North America, then the various tribes of the Spirit River Valley, absorbing their traditions and languages all the while, and was eventually hired on as an expert on the valley. After a while, she became a full-time teacher. She was a staff member when Calypso came along, and the two became fast friends, with Maggie becoming the school’s Assistant Headmistress. She likes helping others and hates “Imperialists”. She teaches Elementalism, Herbalism, and Cryptozoology.

Maggie is a Rustic with the Calm and Green Thumb talents and the custom “Spirit Valley Native” heritage. She has 93 mundane skill points, 51 magical skill points, and 51 magic ranks.







Ms. Nine

(Thumb…)

Ms. Nine is the 9th attempt by Frankenstein’s monster, Adam Frankenstein, to create a bride for himself, hence the name. The rest of her bio is missing because someone couldn’t be bothered to make another page for it. She teaches Phys Ed, German, and Science. She has her own personal lab under the gym.

Nine has no clique, but has the Jock and Brainiac talents and the custom Construct-Flesh heritage. She has 79 plus + mundane skill points, 23 magical skill points with 8 in a custom skill called “Mad Science” that she uses to cast spells, and 21 magic ranks.




Up next: The students

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Jul 4, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Mors Rattus posted:

I keep waiting for the neo-nazi club to come up again. I didn't misremember there being a literal witch neo-nazi club, right?

With a teacher sponsor that probably has no business being involved in it, even, being half-djinn.

Seriously, Adani being the head of that club seems like a complete afterthought. (Moreso than most things in the setting.) "Oh poo poo, I need a teacher to be the leader of this club that hates anyone who isn't a full-blood witch. Okay, who's a Sorceress..."

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Roland Jones posted:

Okay, so, is "High Binders" the Neo-Nazi club? When you first posted about them I couldn't find them on the list, but with you mentioning Adani being the sponsor I went back to look at it and that's the only non-class thing she seems to lead. Or am I just missing something obvious?

No, you got it. The Highbinders' whole schtick, like I've said in other posts, is that they're the setting's Death Eaters: They see anyone who isn't a witch (other magical beings included) as inferior and want to get rid of the masquerade and rule the world.

She also sponsors the Chess Club, but the book doesn't go into the school clubs, so it's also mostly an afterthought.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 4: The Students

For an extra bit of fun, try holding a long stick the same way that some of these characters hold their wands.

Neophytes



Alice Applegate

Alice is a spoiled little poo poo whose mother is the head of the Denver chapter of the Highbinders. So she’s off to a good start. Her aunt, who is also a teacher at Trinity Stone, got sick of her cursing her cousins and convinced her mom to send her to the school in the hope that it would knock some sense into her and make her stop being a little poo poo with her magic. Who is her aunt? It doesn’t say and none of the teachers are from the Denver area. I think she’s an earlier version of Sarah Austin that didn’t get removed. One of her favorite things to do is shrink people.

Alice is a Brat with the Trickster and Temper talents and the Hexer heritage. She has 6 mundane skill points, 8 magical skill points, and 5 magic ranks.





Malicieux Faucheuse

Malicieux is the daughter of Alfonso Faucheuse, an infamous vampire who has settled down and become a magical lawyer in Noir Arbre, and Sadique, a former magistrate and dueling official turned necrobotanist. She’s a quiet girl who prefers to study magic and torture her older brother, Toby, through magical experimentation then socialize with others. She’s the top Neophyte. Alice probably hates her because Alice’s motivation is to be the top Neophyte. Her name is supposed to mean “Mischievous Grim Reaper.”

Malicieux is a Sorceress with the Jaded and Brainiac talents and the Half-Vampire heritage. She has 9 mundane skill points, 7 magical skill points, and 6 magic ranks.



“Animal Trainer” is not a skill, by the way.

Initiates



Blanka Hekseri

When she was six, Blanka’s parents mistook her awakening magic and newfound ability to talk to fairies and spirits for mental illness and had her put on medication. When she accidentally burned their house down with magic, they put her in an insane asylum. By the time she got out at 10, she was “that kid” at her school. An unexplained incident at school caused her to murder everyone there and burn the school down. That’s when the WWC finally noticed her and had her enrolled in Trinity Stone. (Remember: They can instantly detect portals to Nemesis-Earth before they’re even fully formed, but finding awakening young witches and criminals is too much for them.) She is prone to fits of psychotic rage and is kind of infamous in some magical circles. She’s angry at her family and the world for betraying her. She is a weird character, to say the least. She feels like she belongs in a different game. I think someone watched The Craft and didn’t get it. Her name is supposed to mean “White Witchcraft”.

Blanka is a Gothique with the Temper and (custom) Mad talents and the Zappy Fingers heritage. She has 10 mundane skill points, 11 magical skill points, and 10 magic ranks.





Donna Lynn Otis

Donna Lynn’s parents are stereotypical flyover state rural hicks: they live in a double wide trailer, love NASCAR, and run a gas station and bait shop. When her Hag’s Syndrome started to manifest, they assumed she had some sort of sickness and kept her hidden at home. Thankfully, she’s one of the few kids the WWC actually catches and they had her enrolled in Trinity Stone. Her parents still don’t know it’s a school for witches, but they know her being there is for the best. I think these are the kind of people the phrase “bless your heart” was made for. Donna Lynn herself is a rough girl with a big heart who loves physical activities.

Donna Lynn is a Rustic with Friendly and Jock talents and the Hag’s Syndrome heritage. She has 10 mundane skill points, 10 magical skill points, and 9 magic ranks.





Jasmine Yoshihisha

That face model screams “Disney tween idol”. My brain is telling me I’ve seen her in one of their terrible overacted sitcoms while channel-flipping.

Jasmine, like Miako/Mako from Coventry, is a ninja witch, or “Maho-Shinobi”, from Japan. (I guess her family is into giving their kids kira-kira names.) In fact, her clan is the one that killed off Miako/Mako’s clan. This not only pissed off the Matsu’s allies, but the WWC, forcing the family to move to the States. But their export business has made them rich so it’s mostly all good. Unfortunately, the Matsu’s allies found them and stole her mom’s soul, so her father sent her to Trinity Stone for her safety. Jasmine herself is a stereotypical rich party girl on the outside, but that’s just a facade to hide the serious ninja witch that she really is. She likes shopping and anime. Her last name is a given name, not a surname.

Jasmine is a Gothique with the Rich and Urban talents and the “Medative” heritage. She has 8 mundane skill points, 11 magical skill points, and 9 magic ranks.





Kaur Chaturverdi

Kaur’s mother, a cartographer and paranaturalist, moved from Cardiff (which her bio says is in England) to Texas in order to map the Spirit River Valley. This somehow forced Kaur and her sister Misa to leave Coventry and come to Trinity Stone, even though there’s multiple instances of kids from countries other than the UK being enrolled in Coventry with no issues. Due to coming from a more prestigious and status-driven school, Kaur thought she would be a special snowflake among the rest of the students. That has not been the case. Still, she feels she is the most qualified witch in the school and tries to stand out. She likes curry and hates beef.

Kaur is an Insider with the Beautiful and Mary Sue talents and the Wand Waver heritage. She has 12 mundane skill points, 11 magical skill points, and 8 magic ranks.





Luz Penero

Luz comes from a family of scientists. They were only partly surprised when their already smart daughter started talking to computers. When they found out she was a witch, they hypothesized that witches are people with “extremely evolved minds using a pseudo-science to alter subatomic super strings”. Luz knows there’s more to magic than that. That thought kind of trails off into talk about how her individual paradigm when it comes to magic involves cyberspace and computers. She loves mysteries and likes to ramble on about her interest in computers and other digital bits. That green ball in the picture is 3m073, her magical digital pet that takes the form of a smile emoticon. If I had a pet like that, I would make it either the Get Out Frog or the Smug emote. :frogout::smug:

Luz is an Outsider with the Brainiac and Eccentric talents and the 21st Century Digital Witch heritage. She has 19 mundane skill points, 8 magical skill points, and 8 magic ranks.





Rose Duexshae

Very few people like Rose, even though she’s a decent enough person for this setting. Calypso is her mother. So everyone, the teachers included, either assume she’s spying on them, or is only useful as a pawn to stay on the headmistress’ good side. She has very few real friends and likes broom racing. That’s pretty much it.

Rose is an Insider with the Flyer and Tough talents and the Half-Fae heritage. She has 11 mundane skill points, 11 magical skill points, and 9 magic ranks.





Tiffany Ewing

Tiffany is the star of My Pet Mortal, the hit astral TV show mentioned in the core about a young witch keeping a grown rear end man as a pet for some reason. Her agent, a “slickster gnome named Norm” (daaaaamn…), decided one day that she needed exposure to the mortal world, so he sent her to Trinity Stone. (He figured witches from the mortal world were close enough.) She’s a bit shallow, but she means well and can be a little naïve when it comes to mundanes; assuming that they are all good-natured and don’t want to hurt her. Because you know how mundanes are always persecuting and trying to murder witches.

Tiffany is a Sorceress with the Beautiful and Entertainer talents and the The Sight heritage. She has 10 mundane skill points, 13 magical skill points, and 10 magic ranks.





Wanda Epstein

Wanda, as much as I hate to use Tumblr phrases, is fandom trash. She writes fanfic (and hates bad fanfics), she ships characters together, and she’ll get mad if you make fun of her fandom. She became so fascinated with “books about a certain boy wizard” that she pretended to cast spells when no one was looking. One of which included trying to change her cat into a toad. As you can tell from her portrait, it sort of worked. Her subsequent experiments in spellcasting caught the WWC’s attention and they had her sent to Trinity Stone. She’s super excited about all things magical, even if she’s incredibly accident prone.

Wanda is an Outsider with the Geek and Unshakable talents and the Jinx heritage. She has 14 mundane skill points, 10 magical skill points, and 7 magic ranks.





Winfred/Winifred “Winny” Holden

Winfred comes from a long line of Godmother’s Guild members. She’s too young to be a member, but she acts as her mother’s apprentice and grants wishes to mortals and magical folk all over Texas during her free time. She is a bubbly ray of sunshine who is seemingly incapable of any sort of negative emotion. “Emo” witches find her annoying. She likes romance novels and hates violence.

Winfred is an Insider with the Brave and Goody-Goody talents and the Godmother heritage. She has 11 mundane skill points, 11 magical skill points, and 8 magic ranks.



Apprentices



Lola Rackartyg

Lola is this song incarnate. (Warning: Might be obnoxious to you.)

If you didn’t catch that, Lola loving loves horses. She hung around a ranch near her house as a child, she begged for one from her parents, and she was Trinity Stone’s representative at an equestrian competition the WWC put on. (She won first place.) A groomer gave her a horse as a gift for her performance, and as far as she’s concerned, life began there. She helps runs the stables and sleeps there more than in her dorm. Why does she have pointed ears? Why does she look like a rejected Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure character? Why does she have the Legacy heritage? Who cares! Horses! :horse: She hates chimeras and has no apparent thoughts on centaurs.

Lola is a Sorceress with the Friendly and Trainer talents and the Legacy heritage. She has 20 mundane skill points, 20 magical skill points, and 15 magic ranks.





Tabbi Herrera

Tabbi was born and raised in a magical collectivist commune in Austin, Texas. Everyone in the community is a Lillian and protests against magical elitism (“Even though those two doctrines sometimes conflicted.”) as well as general corporate greed. Which, in Tabbi’s case, seems to mean just going around spraying graffiti everywhere and being an argumentative poo poo. That aside, she tries to treat everyone equally, though has a hard time extending that to the elitist witches at the school. She likes punk music.

Tabbi is a Gothique with the Rebel and Ruffian talents and the Twitch Witch heritage. She has 38 mundane skill points, 30 magical skill points, and 15 magic ranks.



Interns



Kay Austin

When she was 12, Kay was accepted into Coventry. Because they’re dead set on being loyal to a second rate school, her family refused to let her go. She eventually got used to Trinity Stone and has been at the top of her class ever since. She’s incredibly strong-willed and has a bit of a temper. That coupled with her signature spell of turning people into toads can give you a guess as to how arguments go with her. Her temper and curtness also make it hard for her to make friends.

Kay is an Insider with the Brainiac (there’s a lot of Brainiacs in this school) and Temper talents and the custom Specialist heritage. She has 27 mundane skill points, 40 magical skill points, and 19 magic ranks.






Verlina Youngblood

(When I first saw this picture, I thought Soto gave her three hands on accident.)

Verlina is the daughter of a Baptist minister and a choir director. Naturally, they weren’t really big on the whole witch school thing when Calypso and Autumn came around to tell them their daughter was a witch when she was 10. (Until then, she just kept her powers a secret and tried to control them as best she could.) But they came around when they visited the school and saw that witches weren’t all evil or aligned with Christian beliefs. Verlina took to the school incredibly well, eventually becoming the Neophyte teacher (she’ll gently caress you up if you mess with the kids) and Kay’s bestie. She’s a friendly bundle of sunshine and goodness and sings her spells’s incantations. Because choir director mother.

Verlina is an Outsider with the Goody-Goody and Friendly talents and the Melodious heritage. She has 48 mundane skill points, 26 magical skill points, and 18 magic ranks.




And finally, here’s Soto art of all of the characters from the Beyond Convention video. To give you a good comparison between the models she uses and the finished art. (Yup, Miranda Contessa Maldeojo from Wicked Ways is a Trinity Stone student.)

Up next: Dueling rules, because why not?

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Jul 15, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 5: Dueling

Dueling is a tradition practiced by witches from “important” magical families and old fashioned practitioners in the American South, Europe, and Asia. It’s related to the concept of southern civility, and that’s how it’s relevant to this supplement and has an appendix devoted to rules for it.

When witches decide to duel, it’s a big deal. Dueling should only be done if a witch’s abilities, bravery, or family have been insulted; someone is disrespecting their social station; or they’ve been assaulted with malicious magic. (At that point, would anyone really bother with formalities and not just turn them into something?) What happens if someone decides to duel for some other reason? Who knows. They're probably socially shunned. The WWC doesn’t like dueling, but most witches don’t give a poo poo and they don’t bother coming down too hard on it, as usual.

To declare a duel, the offended witch says “I demand satisfaction” or “I call challenge on you” and then states the reason why they’re calling the duel. The defending party has the choice to either accept the challenge or apologize “in a manner the witch giving the challenge finds acceptable”. So the offending party can be an rear end in a top hat and just make the defendant accept regardless. Once they accept, the two agree on a time, a place, and the win conditions of the duel, as well as one additional rule each. Some try to delay the duel for years, but this is considered a cowardly move. The most common win conditions include whoever is the first to cast a spell on their opponent, until someone is incapacitated, until someone gives up, or until someone is dead. Additional rules can be things like no using wands, no using allies, or no using Alteration magic. Duel details can also be determined by the witches’ partners or “seconds”, as is usually done by more prominent families.

Thankfully, most duels never get past the planning stages, as witches are all smart and, once both parties have calmed down, realize that whatever they were fighting about was stupid anyway, especially if it’s a duel to the death.

The dueling area has marked boundaries. Anyone who leaves the dueling area automatically loses and is considered a coward. Before the duel starts, the offended party can ask for an apology. If the defendant refuses, the neutral officiant gets them ready to start.

Duels can and do happen in magical schools and among underage witches. Guardians of the participants can declare duels satisfied and demand that the stakes be bumped down to non-lethal ones if the kids come to their senses during the planning stages. Trinity Stone is fine with dueling and treats them as friendly competitions, even if the participants don’t see it that way. School duels can only be lethal if they are done behind the staff’s backs.

It is also possible to challenge mundanes and other otherkin to duels. Prominent family witches will usually give a mundane a chance to accept the duel before they just start turning them into poo poo or blowing them up, though most refuse. No common reason is given, but it’s probably because most people realize how one-sided the fight is. It’s like a grown adult asking a baby if it wants to fight back before they start beating it to death. Otherkin have an easier time dueling. Dueling Immortals is not advised since they’re usually faster and can just cut their opponent in half, and thus are more likely to win against a witch. Some witches are sour grapes about this and use the excuse that Immortal fighting styles are “uncouth” to avoid dueling them.

In game terms, a Will roll determines whether a character is the offensive or defensive party in a duel. The highest roll gets to decide who they are first. Offensive duelists get +1 Reflex for initiative, +1 to Casting rolls to attack, and +1 to their spell damage. Defensive duelists get +1 to defensive spells and Spell Breaker rolls and ignore a point of damage. Combat proceeds as usual going by Reflex. At the end of the round, the characters’ Will dies are rolled again and each character determines their position and Footing, which gives them bonuses during the next round.

The types of Footings include

Advance: Next attack sends the opponent back a foot.

Intimidating Advance: Triggers a Social roll. Failing it gives the opponent a -1 to all of their rolls for the round.

Retreat: Spells that hit the character are considered to be 1 MTR lower in terms of damage and duration.

Feinting Retreat: Triggers a Social vs Mind roll. If the retreating character wins, they ignore a point of damage and get a +1 to their next Casting roll.

A duel is considered won in-game when both witches are out of health or zap, one person is physically incapacitated, or one person gives up. Schools and dueling halls, which are just now mentioned as being a thing, use a point system. The first person to 10 wins. Injuring an opponent with a spell is worth more points than incapacitating them (2 versus 1) and retreating subtracts a point from your score.

And that’s it for this book.

Next Book: Magical Minutia #5: Mortals: Seekers of Truth, wherein Channel M tries to cater to everyone who wants to play a mortal who doesn’t completely suck in this setting.

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Aug 2, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012
I hope I don't regret this one.



Part 1: “Ultimately, the vampire is a rape fantasy.”

:siren:Hey, this book has a lot of awful poo poo in it. Most of it is rape. If reading about rape ruins your day, you might not want to read these posts. Put me on Ignore or something if you have to.:siren:

Humble Bundle description posted:

Vampires have been associated with sensuality and sexuality since their reinvention at the hands of Polidori. His romanticizing of the concept opened the floodgates - vampires became sensual staples of gothic and Romantic fiction. Vampire: The Masquerade followed the precedent set by other avenues of vampire entertainment. Published in 1991, the game brought a new dose of sensuality to a medium whose previous attention to sex involved circling a gender on a character sheet.

Eternal Hearts is a Vampire erotic novel which features:
  • Some of the most notable Vampire: The Masquerade signature characters, such as Lucita de Aragón, Victoria Ash, Jan Pieterzoon, Sascha Vykos, and Isabel Giovanni.
  • New prose from Bram Stoker Award-winning author Lucy Taylor.
  • Illustration by Books of Magic and The Vampire Lestat artist John Bolton.

EH's Amazon.com review page posted:

A smorgasbord of thrilling horror and stunning erotica! As a fan of White Wolf's game system and their vampire books, Lucy taylor here has launched a masterpiece for any VAMPIRE fan to relish...from incredible ART, and sensual sex,coupled with bloody vampirism,to the characters no cable tv would dare portray for an audience...I love it! Ah, my favorite LUCITA....PRETTY ISABEL GIOVANNI, written by Ms. Taylor in such a way that it's like you are right there with them! This is my favorite Vampire book to date! Please tell me there will be a sequel!

Eternal Hearts is an odd book, to say the least. It’s not a flowery bodice ripper like the title would suggest, and, in my opinion, it fails to be a serious meditation on the place of sex and sexuality within the old World of Darkness’ vampire mythos like its foreword and later descriptions of it imply. It prefers to toss out its core theme when it gets in the way of pure titillation, which comes in the form of Baby’s First 120 Days of Sodom style rape scenes.

If you hadn’t already guessed, it was published in 1999 under White Wolf’s Black Dog imprint.

The book starts out with an explanation from who I assume is Justin Achilli, the “development liason” for this project.

quote:

Do vampires... um... gently caress?

Well, not precisely. They're capable of performing the physical act by redirecting blood to the appropriate pieces of anatomy, but no vampire is going to be fathering or carrying a child. In fact, despite the ability to carry out the rudiments of the act, vampires don't gain any particular pleasure from the act.

If that's the case, why publish vampire erotica?

Short Answer: Because some people find it hot and will buy it. It's porn. Don't think about it so hard.

Long Answer: Because vampires have been associated with sex and sensuality ever since Dr. John Polidori's short story, The Vampyre was published in 1819. Before then, vampires were merely nearly mindless blood-sucking zombies. A bunch of well known works are name dropped, including the movie version of Interview with the Vampire, in which Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt "pushed the boundaries of mainstream homoeroticism", and Blade, in which "porn queen Traci Lords looked suitably lurid before having her head blown off". (I don't think the woman who did most of her movies when she was underage and got a bunch of people in trouble because she didn't tell them that is really a contender for the title of "Queen of Porn". But I’m no porn expert.) So it makes sense to write one.

Then White Wolf pats itself on the back.

quote:

Vampire: The Masquerade followed the precedent set by other avenues of vampire entertainment. Published in 1991, the game brought a new dose of sensuality to a medium whose previous attention to sex involved circling a gender on a hobbit's character sheet. Live-Action Role Playing, particularly of the Vampire variety, even went one step further - sometimes the sex happens for real, instead of just "in-game." Sex -- at least metaphorically, under the guise of a vampire's lust for blood - usurped the traditional T&A chainmail bikini thrill that had long dominated hobby gaming. Out with the old, in with the pale, shapely goth androgynes....

If you go to LARPs to feel sexy or get laid, you have issues that you need to be working out outside of a LARP and need to :therapy: If someone at a LARP tries to encourage you into having sex with them or seems to be taking the sexual aspect of the game a little too seriously, and the STs won’t do anything about them for one reason or another, that is a bad group and you should :sever:.

Anyway, the book goes on to say that they cheated with the whole "kindred get nothing from sex" part and that you should stop thinking about it so hard because this is porn a fantasy. Except they kind of didn't, because Lucy Taylor did take the "not getting anything" part into account when she was writing it. At least part of the time.

quote:

The Kindred in Lucy's tale understand that sex is a means to an end, whether terror or seduction; they glean only a surrogate satisfaction from it, rebelling impotently against their undead bodies.

(I looked up Taylor’s other work while I was writing this. It took me a while to find a description of The Safety of Unknown Cities, the book she won the Bram Stoker award for, that wasn’t just a bunch of quotes from people talking about how great it is. From what I can tell, its plot is similar to this book’s: a bunch of broken people meet up and have a lot of painful sounding sex instead of getting therapy.)

Achilli then goes on to talk about Bolton's works, during which he mentions what appears to be the main theme of this book:

quote:

Ultimately, the vampire is a rape fantasy, but John's luscious bloodsuckers leave you almost begging to be defiled.

That doesn't explain Twilight's use and interpretation of the vampire myth. But to be fair, this was written in a pre-Twilight world and that thing blindsided everyone.

Trust me when I say that this book is written entirely around that theory. Nearly all of the sex scenes in this book are rape scenes. But as I mentioned up top, it doesn’t do much with that theme. No one muses about what they’re doing. No one laments how awful their situation is, how much of a monster they’ve become, or even thinks for a second about the fact that they’re “rebelling impotently against their undead bodies”. It’s shock for the sake of shocking meant to cater to Vampire players that like “freaking out the normies” with their open sexuality and fetish gear outfits. The fact that there are much better sex scenes in other WoD tie-in books doesn’t help its case either.

quote:

Welcome to the sanguinary darkness within.

Chapter 1 starts off with a woman being beaten, mutilated, and raped by a gang of Sabbat vampires. Lovely. Leading the gang of five Sabbat members is a man that the woman calls the "Beautiful One", who watches the whole thing and masturbates. Once they're done and he embraces her, they wack her over the back of the head with a shovel and bury her, because that's how the Sabbat do.

The unfortunate woman is Jean Locklear. Jean is the part-time clerk at an adult toy store, a former stripper, an anorexic cutter, and has more issues than National Geographic. Her favorite past-time is cybering.

quote:

On the Net, her name was Rapunzel. On the Net, she could be whomever she wished. A transsexual latex freak; a double amputee with a fetish for having her stumps licked; a gently caress-me, suck-me, beat-me-till-I-bleed submissive bitch with a ring in her clit and a brand on her rear end; a porn prince with a kink for whipping pretty boys. Online she was a shapeshifting, genderbending, fuckstruck macho slut who took it up the rear end and down the throat and in the oval office, who strapped on a Secretariat-sized dildo when she did rough trade and fistfucked like the hottest leather hustler...

One thing you'll notice right away is this book likes to lay the sex on really thickly. (At least near the start. The book’s sex bits are kind of front loaded.) The way it was written, you would think that the World of Darkness was a place where massive orgies are held right in the middle of busy streets every other day. A good majority of the porn I've seen and read is less subtle than this book.

Anyway, Jean wakes up sometime later, still underground, and starts freaking out about it. At first she assumes that she was picked up by the cops for stalking her former boyfriend, Senator Gilbert McNamarra (a hypocritical Republican with commitment issues and a fetish for childplay) again, sent to a psychiatric facility, and some psycho orderly has bound her up and is having his way with her. After a while, she figures out that she's underground and tries to figure out how she got there without occupying her mind with the fact that she's under 6 feet of dirt, horribly mangled, and possibly dead. One of the few things that stands out in her mind is church spires, along with the torture that she went through and the image of the Beautiful One. This gives her the push she needs to start clawing her way out of her grave.

quote:

Longing. Intense and unutterable. An off-kilter surge of primal lust that spread like the plague through her miswired synapses, the vile allure of the unspeakable. She understood then that she wasn't dead. Jean Locklear might be, but not Rapunzel.

Rapunzel lived and craved and wanted.

Rapunzel was in need.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let me chop off your hair."

Rapunzel wanted her lover. Wanted him now.

Do it to me, do it to me, more, more, more.

She opened her dirt-caked mouth and tried to scream.

Then the blackness rose up inside her, swallowing her whole, smothering what remained of her that was still human. Jean Locklear might be dead, but not Rapunzel.

And she began to dig.

By the way, this book is not about Jean.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 1: Baby’s First World of Darkness

quote:

What about the humans? That’s a question we get a lot when it comes to the world of Witch Girls. Well in most cases humans are utterly oblivious to the magical goings on. In fact most cannot even comprehend the magic around them even if they see it.

The Human mind is a fragile thing and if something doesn't fit a person’s worldview they tend to make it fit even if it means mentally changing what happen. “That wasn’t a girl on a broom, that was a strange looking cloud” and “She didn’t shoot fire from her hands, it was just a magic trick”. Are just a few ways humans deny reality to keep themselves from realizing they reality they live in is one they have little control of.

In other words human’s at sub conscious level don’t want to believe.

But a few do believe. They either by circumstance or some other means discovered that things are not what they seem. They believe in a world bigger and stranger than most can imagine and seek to learn more about it.

Supernatural, X-Files, Kolchek: The Nightstalker, Torchwood, Fringe and Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. It’s been done before and what your reading here is our version of that. It’s our way of showing our world from a different point of view.

Magical Minutia #5: Mortals: Seekers of Truth and Knuckles is Channel M’s attempt at catering to those who want to play humans that don’t completely suck in the Witch Girls world. Supernatural, X-Files et al. are the stated inspirations for the supplement, but I’m going to guess the real ones are all of the people on here and elsewhere pointing out that the witches in this setting make better villains than they do heroes. But making humans that are capable of actually going toe-to-toe with a witch ruins the power fantasy, so what we’ve got is a very World of Darkness-esque game of nearly powerless people going up against a far greater force. It’s pretty much nWoD’s core mortals game without the God Machine stuff.

And just like a WoD book, it starts off not with a comic, but with a written story, complete with crazed rambling thoughts written in the margins.



This intro, and nearly all of the in-character margin notes spread throughout the book, are written by Grady Barns (not his real name), a victim and believer of the “Witchspiracy”. Like every other ignorant small town dweller in this setting and Minerva Winters from Bellum Maga, he is from Digahol, Iowa. He found out about the magical world at 16 when his father went missing, leaving only a pick-up truck full of personal effects and a key on the side of a country road. After “6 months two months”, he was declared dead, Grady’s mom got a drinking and drug problem, and Grady inherited the key. The key opened up a safe full of notes, including one similar to this one, and pictures providing evidence of a hidden magical world.

quote:

The Key they found was to a safe in his study, a safe I knew nothing about. Upon opening it I found multiple note books, folders pictures and papers. On the very top was a letter that said “If’ you’re reading this I’m either Dead or Worse...”.

Yeah, I felt a chill up my spine too.

The Note, or rather , The Rant filled Essay was more than just a letter to me and my mom saying how sorry he was wasn’t around and how much he loved and missed us. It was a letter that according to him revealed the greatest truth of all.

Magic was Real…

Yeah Magic, Spell casting, lighting tossing, poof you’re an iguana kind of magic and that kind of magic .

At first I thought it was some kind of sick joke, my dad when not being aloof had a kind of dry humor. I could see him plotting to freak us out after his death, but there was something about the seriousness of the letter. Something both precise and manic in his writing that made me think otherwise, that made me not share it with my mother.

His father’s notes spurred Grady to start his own research into the supernatural. Over the course of a summer, he learned the witch hunter version of the story of Lilith. In their version, Lilith is a demonic-looking alien who came to Earth and brought magic with her. And things have sucked ever since.

quote:

Tens of Thousands of years ago a creature came to Earth. No one knew were she came for, but that did say she had horns like a ram, purple skin and that with here came magic. Lilith would eventually die, but not before giving birth to four children.

The Children would be the startOif a magical master race that have ruled the world in secret since the dawn of civilization. A Master race known by many names;
Illuminata

The MagA DOMINA

THE SISTERHOOD OF SECRETS

And the Witchspiracy

The Witchspiracy used magic to control humanity, manipulate us and toy with us. To them were are no better than mice in a maze who’s rules can be changed with a thought.

Considering the comic book multiverse stuff that’s now part of the canon, this version might be the more accurate one.

He also learned about the other races of otherkin. According to witch researchers and hunters, the other otherkin are small potatoes and are essentially slaves to the witches because they fear their power.

Grady didn’t believe what he read completely, so he roped his friends Paul (a stereotypical nerd) and Gator (because he’s from Florida and liked to fight) into helping him get some hard physical proof. Using his dad’s “alpha wave reader”, they got a positive reading from a quiet, bookish girl at their school named Christine Morris. (Magical beings can register on a scale of 0 to 13. Most start at 2. Witches start at 6 because of course they do.) They stalked her for a while and took multiple readings, eventually getting one from her mother, who registered slightly higher than her. Being dumb teenagers, they decided to kidnap Christine to get a confession out of her. (Even in the book where the humans are the heroes, they’re still dumb assholes.) They drugged her with his mom’s sleeping pills, dragged her to an abandoned church, and tied her up. They dumped her bookbag, discovering a bunch of witch paraphernalia and learning that it was a Bag of Holding. That was proof enough for Grady. (Paul brings up a “British Sci-fi Doctor show”, and Gator thinks about using it to steal from Not!Walmart. Aim high, brother.) When she came to and they tried to interview her, she called for her mom.

Her mom, in the most detailed and terrifying way Harris can muster, appeared, put Paul into a coma and turned Gator into a rat.

quote:

There are Fates far worse than death….. Far , Far worse.

First she pointed at pAul,, His body went limp and he fell to the ground. I could see he was breathing but nothing more. Gator Started to beg, He said it wasn’t his fault,. I felt a chill go up my spine,, he was going tell her about me, my dad and everything else.

But before he could finish I watched as his body collapsed in on his self and sizzled and shrank till all that was left was a scared mange covered rat.

I felt my leg give, I knew I would be next, unless I ran and after what seemed like an eternity I came to me feet and ran,,, I haven’t stopped running since.

The margin notes imply that Grady later disconnected Paul’s life support when the doctors weren’t looking because he was stuck in a I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream situation, and that either Christine and Christine’s mom or some other witch killed Grady’s mom as revenge.

The end of the note tells the reader where the rest of Grady's research is and begs them to just burn it all and forget about it. But if they don’t, he tells them his rules for researching and hunting witches.

quote:

Trust no one

Use Iron, the purer the better to bind them

Never use your real name.

Never underestimate them

And Write a note like mine as soon as you can.


See you on the other side

Macdonald Hartman left a note for Grady at the end, saying that he’s using “Tesla’s machine" to contact him. Apparently, he hasn’t just kept all of the knowledge of the magical world to himself and his buddies and is actively helping magical researchers and hunters. Him and Grady haven’t spoken to each other in three months and he urges Grady to shake off whatever mood he’s in and call him. If he’s dead, then he tells him to enjoy the vacation and that he’s working on a machine with the Phantom Breakers to contact him anyway.

Once again, there is no credits section in this book. DriveThruRPG just lists everything as “Various”. But the book is similar to how the others are written and illustrated. So I’m just assuming it’s the usual suspects of Harris on writing and Soto on art.

Up next: Character creation

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Aug 7, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012
Accidental double post

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 2: The Perfect Place to Hide Your Keys

This book is about Lucita de Aragon. Lucita is in Washington D.C. because she has business with a group of vampires called the Council of Ragnarok. After getting a dirty look from a hooker that she considers loving, she comes across a protest in front of a three-story sex store that reminds her of the Inquisition.

quote:

The sight of these religious zealots protesting the presence of hookers, sex shops and X-rated video parlors revived old memories of other times, other "righteous" causes espoused by those who deemed themselves morally pure. The hair rose on the back of her neck, and a shudder undulated up her spine. Even centuries later, she could still remember the cries of the tortured, Kindred and kine alike, when they were put to the Inquisitor's rack.

One of the protesters approaches her, mistaking her for a prostitute. She dominates him into going into an alley with her with the promise that she will “suck [his] brain right out the end of his dick”. Once there, she gets into a bout with the Beast about whether or not he's worth it. Eventually, she just knocks him out, drinks, and makes it look like he was jacking off.

quote:

The zealot flung the pamphlet in her face. "Whore, don't you know you're damned?"

"rear end in a top hat, don't you know you're hosed?"

She smiled and rammed her knee into the young man's belly, then, when he doubled over, brought the same knee up between his eyes. He went limp and flopped to the ground.

It turns out the Council of Ragnarok is meeting within the “Pleasure Arcade”, the same complex that all of the sex shops are in. (It’s on K Street across from McPherson Park, if you’re curious. According to the book, the area had been undergoing a “general smutting-down” over the past few years. I’m not from the D.C. area. So I don’t know if that’s an actual thing that happened or if it’s a contrivance created for the book. Probably the latter.) So she goes around the side and is let into what is very obviously a Toreador’s haven. One that is, naturally, obsessed with sex.

quote:

At one end, pink-lit water poured from the penis of a plump creature that resembled the product of a mating between a cherub and a troll.

It’s symbolic!

I think that cherub-troll needs to be checked for kidney and/or bladder problems. Also, outside of a Nosferatu, I can’t think of a more unerotic centerpiece for a fountain.

quote:

Of more interest to Lucita than the artwork, however, were the slaves who waited like tamed beasts at intervals along the wall. Living spigots. Gorgeous men and exotic women, each one outfitted in some lavish or quixotic costume -- Spartacus, Marie Antoinette, Helen of Troy.

One of the slaves, in particular, caught her eye. Not because this woman was more alluring than the rest - in truth, she wasn't to Lucita's taste at all -- but because her sleek, jet-black hair, tanning-booth-bronzed skin and artfully plucked black eyebrows were strangely familiar. Less tarted-up than the others, she wore a long black velvet skirt slit up the side and a silver satin blouse. An opal choker, pale against her dark skin, circled her neck. Whatever vague recollections the woman stirred in her, however, Lucita was sure it had nothing to do with Kindred unlife and politics. Still, she was convinced she had seen this woman before.

The Council of Ragnarok is roughly a dozen local vampires who have come together to overthrow the current prince of D.C., Marcus Vitel. The only two that Lucita knows personally are Bjorn Garinson, a Viking-looking dude with a poo poo ton of piercings that leads the group, and Velvet, who is not Velvet Velour from Bloodlines and likes tight leather pants and “gently caress me pumps”.

quote:

she recognized [them] from an earlier visit to that bastion of hedonistic excess, the nightclub Purgatory in Adams-Morgan.

These are characters from D.C. by Night. Garinson is or was the Brujah Primogen for D.C. (The book says he’s “fiercely anti-primogen”.) Vitel’s downfall is detailed in the Clan Novels, but I couldn’t tell you anything about that because I haven’t read them. But none of that matters because these characters pretty much disappear after this chapter. So you can forget that I said that.

Lucita is looking for Jan Pieterzoon, the group’s funder and her former lover. Pieterzoon paid her to interrogate and assassinate an art dealer and mortal associate of Vitel’s named Enrique Torres. But Pieterzoon’s sudden disappearance and rumors that the Sabbat are in town and in cahoots with Vitel have made the council nervous about assassinating anyone outright. Lucita refuses to abandon the job, since she hasn’t received the final payment yet.

After mentioning offhandedly that Vitel likes to bone his daughters on top of the Washington Monument, the council gets uppity with Lucita. She in turn accuses them of being cowards. Another member of the group, a “giraffe-like” Giovanni named Noah, notes that New York City, where Lucita and Pieterzoon made the deal, is under the influence of the Black Hand and suggests that Lucita may have betrayed Pieterzoon to them. Lucita scoffs at the idea, saying that her loyalty is only to herself and that she has never killed any of her employers.

A nameless vampire comes in late to show that there’s a commotion going on outside between the protesters and the cops. Garinson tells everyone to ignore it.

quote:

"Mobs of Christians is probably violating the hookers," laughed a stylishly dressed Ventrue. "We should go help."

"Shut up; we aren't finished here!" snapped Garinson.

In an actual porn, they would have adjourned the meeting and gone right outside for a pre-rebellion celebratory feast and gently caress.

The slave girl comes up and whispers something to Garinson, and it’s here that Lucita finally realizes who she is: Senator Cordelia Waylan Rosenthal. Cordelia claims that she can pull some strings with Immigration and get Torres shipped back to Spain. Lucita still insists that the hit is not off and that the council ain’t the boss of her.

Just as Garinson gets ready to tear into Lucita for being an rear end in a top hat, everyone realizes that the protesters have set the building on fire! While all of the nameless background characters frenzy, the important characters follow Garinson to the building’s escape route into the sewers. The building is built over them specifically for this reason. At this point, Cordelia’s skirt changes from a sleek, silted on the side one to a cumbersome, voluminous number with a petticoat that prevents her from easily going through doors.

quote:

The other Kindred followed [Bjorn's] example and after that, the slaves, with the exception of Cordelia Rosenthal. She had difficulty fitting herself into the opening, but seemed unwilling to remove the voluminous velvet skirt that was hindering her descent.

The group fumbles around in the building for a while until they come across a locked gate leading to the sewers. It’s at this point that Taylor realized that she had gone seven paragraphs without mentioning anything sex related, so this wonderfully insane thing happens.

quote:

"It's all right, I can open it." So saying, Garinson unzipped his fly and pulled out a flaccid but hefty penis, the underside of which was weighted down with piercings. He now unclipped a tiny key from a ring midway along his cockshaft and used it to unlock the door.

Yes, Bjorn Garinson, the Brujah Primogen of Washington D.C., keeps his key ring on his dick.

That is the best part of this book to me. It is just so ridiculous and hilarious.

I guess his reasoning is similar to swoozie’s when he and some of his friends cheated in high school: no one’s going to check your no-no place for the goods. Though considering that this takes place in the Porno Dimension, a place where nearly everyone and everything wants to touch dicks, that tactic doesn’t really work.

After running for a bit, Cordelia gets tired of fumbling around with her skirts and pulls out a cigarette lighter and a drinking flask. She calmly and flatly chides Bjorn for not knowing “true power” and explains that “it” told her that the riot was going to happen, along with how to kill vampires.

The way to kill vampires, as she then demonstrates, is to douse yourself with a drinking flask’s worth of gasoline, set yourself on fire, and run through them.

quote:

Pinwheeling her arms, the woman made of fire charged the cringing Kindred. Her eyes gleamed with a bizarre, almost lust-struck radiance. Whatever madness gripped her apparently made her impervious to pain, for even as the skin charred on her bones, she was laughing, screeching, capering like a crazed jester as the Kindred fled before her.

In-between killing some vamps, including Noah the Giraffe, and descriptions of how gross she looks from being burned alive, Cordelia, still calm, lifts her hands to the ceiling and proclaims her love for her master.

quote:

"My lord," she croaked through her scorched throat, "my lord, I do this for you. For love of you, my master!" Her dying eyes shone. Agony mixed with an unholy radiance.

Lucita quickly deduces that Cordelia is being buffed up by a supernatural benefactor, because people on fire don’t act like that. Then she draws her scimitar and throws it at Cordelia’s neck, decapitating her just as Cordelia turns to charge at her.

She picks up her weapon and continues on alone. A Nosferatu reveals himself and compliments Lucita on her sword skills.

quote:

"Quite a spectacle! It's been centuries since I've watched the undead burn, and it's no less ghastly now than it was then. But you, you're the best I've seen with bladed weapons since I made my haven beneath the mountains of North Africa. Quite resourceful. Still, if you want to get out of here without having to swim through poo poo up to your ears, you'd better follow me."

That is Erasmus Bonhomme. He’s so ugly that Lucita has a physical reaction of disgust when she sees him. But you don’t have to take my word or Taylor’s for it, because he’s featured in the first of 16 pictures drawn by Bolton for this book. As you probably expected, every last one of them is not safe for work.

:nws:http://imgur.com/dKqN91P:nws:

I actually went and looked up medieval hair removal methods because of this picture. (Lucita, if you don’t know, was embraced in the 1190s.) I’m certain the explanation for the shaved look is “it’s porn”, but I was curious anyway. I’m going to stop talking about this now because it’s a weird train of thought.

Also, Erasmus’ look is not what I imagine when I read…

quote:

His face looked like a ball of wet clay that had been dropped on its side, squashing half his features into unsightly lumps and wattles.

After doing the stereotypical “does my ugly rear end bother you? I’m not touching you” Nos spiel, Erasmus mentions through some small talk that he’s “gainfully employed in the mental health profession” and that the D.C. brood used to have a drier haven underneath a church, which they got evicted from by a hunter. He then offers to show Lucita the way out, which she accepts. Before they head off, he gives her a helpful tidbit/opinion: Whenever awful, violent poo poo goes down in Washington, “you’ll usually find a black hand in the picture”.

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Aug 9, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Young Freud posted:

I'm not sure when it was written, but late-'80s, early-'90s K Street apparently was like New York's Time Square, pre-Giuliani. There were sex shops and prostitutes within sight of the FBI building and drug dealers making deals in the middle of McPherson Square. Things must have changed by the mid-'90s because, by 1995, K Street had become synonymous with lobbyists because of Grover Norquist's, Tom Delay's, and Jack Abramoff's K Street Project.

EH (and the Clan Novels, which it seems to take place alongside of) was released in '99. So that was well underway at that point.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 3: Singer/Songwriter/Slut

Chapter Three starts off with a nameless crack dealer harassing a couple in a car. He is not important. Who is important is the guy he tries to talk to; who he initially thinks is an undercover cop until he recognizes him.

quote:

"Hey, hold on a second. Ain't I see you someplace?”

Emmet held the man's gaze, but said nothing.

"Holy poo poo, I know you! I seen you on TV. You that preacher dude my sister watches, the one preaches angels are coming to earth one day, gonna set things right with us sinners - the one that just announced you was running for mayor of D.C.! Holy poo poo, wait till I tell her where I saw the Reverend-future-mayor-piece-of-poo poo! Can't help but wonder what you and a sweet young thang like your girl there be doin' sittin' here this time of night, though, when you could be in a nice warm motel room smokin' some first-rate product while the young honey sucks your dick."

"Suck on this," said Emmet as he pulled aside his overcoat to show the semi-automatic Glock in his lap. The effect was instantaneous. Like fog evaporating, the dealer slide back into the night that seemed to have spawned him.

This is the Reverend Emmet Vargas. He’s a vampire hunter with the Society of Leopold. The woman with him is his daughter and the second protagonist, Becca Vargas. She is also a vampire hunter. She has mood ring eyes.

quote:

The woman, in her late twenties with eyes that vacillated between green and gray, depending on the weather and her mood, and dark red hair worn with bangs to hide the deep scar above her eyebrow

I’ve never heard of a character whose eyes change color with the weather. I guess it’s the prettier version of getting a headache right before a big thunderstorm or an earthquake.

Sometime later, after a paragraph about how Becca wants to go to bed but vampires don’t sleep, she wakes up to the sound of ambulances heading towards the fire. Emmet speculates that it’s happening near the anti-porn rally, which he discouraged his congregation from attending due to the rumors that it was going to turn violent. (He also knows that Bjorn Garinson hangs out in the area. “couldn’t happen to a nicer fiend.”) Becca points out that setting buildings on fire is the M.O. of the Society of Leopold. Her father dismisses her angrily, pointing out that they only do it when necessary and when no one will get hurt. Which she then points out is impossible. Becca vocally hopes that Tony DeAngelo, Emmet’s part-time roofer/hunter combo assistant, isn’t involved. Emmet, who takes a swig from a flask to indicate a possible drinking problem, asks if she’s seeing him.

quote:

"Am I cheating on Francine, you mean? What do you think, Dad?"

"I think you love Francine and you're loyal. You're also bisexual. Tony's an attractive man, and - well, the flesh is weak."

Thanks, Reverend Exposition.

Becca snips back at him that Tony likes to gently caress vampires while using the excuse that it helps him get dirt on them. This is apparently a risky move, since Emmet considers Tony to be a son to him. His actual son and Becca’s half-brother, David, was “lost” to drug addiction. But it’s also risky to criticize him for reasons. She asks again if Emmet and Tony had anything to do with the fire. Emmet denies it, saying that she should know what he’s capable of. Becca says that she doesn’t know what he’s capable of and that he has used fire before. Emmet reiterates that fires are appropriate when they can be contained.

quote:

”Oh bullshit, Dad, how does anyone ever know a fire can be contained? Half of Montreal burned to the ground last year because some hunters thought they could burn out a nest of them. Hundreds of innocent people died. You've killed innocent people, too. We both know it."

This is how you contain and control a fire.

Emmet flips into righteous fundie mode and says that civilian casualties are unavoidable and acceptable in such a holy and just war and that she has to understand that. But Becca hasn’t understood him lately. Not since her mom was killed. He shushes her as their actual quarry finally shows up.

quote:

Two women had rounded the corner and were approaching on the opposite side of the street. One was a blonde, elegantly thin, tottering along on four-inch spikes. Her suede coat hung open, revealing a leather skirt slit up the side and a black turtleneck under a leather bustier. Her make-up was so heavily applied that she almost appeared masked, but something about the eyes looked frightened and childlike, more like a high school girl tarted up for Halloween than an adult woman. The other face was already familiar to Becca - singing sensation Victoria Ash. The rising pop star was a good three inches taller than her girlfriend. She wore an ermine jacket over a swirling, blue velvet skirt, and her dark hair was highlighted with streaks of red so rich that it looked almost purple.

Victoria and the girl head to a nearby apartment building, arm in arm and lip locked. (For those of you following along on a map, this is happening on “the corner of U Street”.) When they get up there, Victoria and her other companion, a muscular man with dark hair, feel up the girl’s breasts by an open window. Emmet becomes uncomfortable, while Becca becomes aroused.

quote:

Becca remained silent. Despite herself, despite the fact that she had been the voyeur on many previous occasions, she wet her lips and tried to will her heart to beat less thunderously.

Emmet wants to go in guns blazing, but Becca insists that they need more proof. They argue some more.

quote:

"We've got reports."

"The reports don't mean poo poo unless we see something ourselves. Half of those Leopold freaks are so paranoid, if they'd lived in seventeenth-century Salem, they'd have burned their own mothers for witchcraft.

Emmet turned on her. "This isn't a few vicious malcontents scapegoating old women. This is real."

"So we think."

Real rage animated his slate-gray eyes. "So we know. Never forget that, Becca. So we know."

"Except all we really know, in this case, is that the redhead is a singer/songwriter/slut who swings both ways, like to dabble in art occasionally, and probably doesn't belong to any animal-rights groups."

Does she say the slashes?

Emmet continues to insist that he just knows that Victoria is a vampire because he gets feelings from God, and insists that Becca gets the same feelings too and is just not admitting it. Her mind wanders back to the fire and an incident from a few nights prior.

quote:

Like that night not long ago when he'd used her as bait at an embassy party and the target, a beautiful blond man whose face she still remembered, had fallen for it, had gotten into the car with her and gone with her to the church where...

Emmet starts to get out of the car, but Becca insists on going instead. She climbs up the fire escape with her Society training in sexy acrobatics and finds a partly open window to peek into. Inside, the muscle man, who is now a blond, has sex with the nameless girl on a sex swing made from a human pelvis under a mirrored ceiling while Victoria watches and gives them some mystery pills. The room is empty save for the swing, a lightbulb with a blue cover, and a wall covered in pictures of Victoria.

Becca unconsciously masturbates to the scene, then catches herself and feels really bad about it.

quote:

From her spy's position at the window, she suddenly felt ashamed, disgusted with herself. What kind of sickness did her father and she indulge in anyway, playing Peeping Tom in the name of Jesus? Francine was right -- she ought to leave this madness to her father and go to law school.

Considering Becca’s general reaction to everything regarding vampire hunting throughout this book, I don’t think she would make a good lawyer either.

There’s also a picture for this part.

:nws:http://imgur.com/BSRivKq:nws:

The book’s description of her clothing doesn’t match the picture.

quote:

Becca was already shedding her coat, underneath which she wore black tights and a leotard. A black pullover concealed a semi-automatic similar to her father's.

Victoria, who temporary becomes “Veronica”, kisses the girl. Becca mistakes her lipstick for blood, but comes to her senses and begins to leave to tell her father there’s nothing wrong until she realizes that the swing is made of a pelvis. She runs back to the car just as Victoria steps out to investigate the sound of either her or a police car that rushes by. The presence of the bone swing is enough to convince the two of them that vampires are afoot and not just your garden variety sick fucks, and they rush off.

quote:

Victoria Ash stepped out onto the fire escape. Her gleaming flesh was sheened in bluish shadows. Beautiful, thought Becca. Like a moon goddess, dipped in silver, mother-of-pearl.

"You wait, I'll get the fuckers!" Emmet hissed.

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Aug 10, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 4: How to Kill a Rapist's Mood

Two days later, Lucita is on a date with Enrique Torres. For some reason, Torres thinks this is good moonlight date walk material.

quote:

After dark, Potomac Park seethed with a seedy, largely unseen nocturnal life. Beguiling hustlers, some as lewdly beautiful as a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, shared prowling space with sultry-eyed transvestites, while hordes of Washington's homeless -- panhandlers, the indigent, the mentally-ill -- camped in cardboard boxes or snuggled next to garbage bags in the denser regions of the park. Thieves and pickpockets reconnoitered in the park after a night's work and those in disfavor with the Mob were brought here to be roughed up or to take a bullet through the ear. Not a place for a romantic stroll unless some hardcore kink was on the night's agenda.

Eh, I don’t see it.

Lucita is rightfully caught off guard by the suggestion and almost asks him what the gently caress he’s thinking, worrying that it might be some sort of trap. But she goes along with it anyway, partly assuming that he just doesn’t know the area, partly because she wants to see if he actually is setting her up, because I guess Lucita has a thing for getting out of obvious traps.

quote:

"Should I be worried?" she teased him as they left the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after attending the ballet. "I've heard of men bringing unfaithful wives and lovers to the Park at night to murder them, but if that's the case, then I'm afraid you have reversed the natural order of things. Unless, of course," she'd added slyly, "you've a bent toward necrophilia."

Torres, who is fluent in English, doesn’t get her sly little masquerade breach. When she finally asks him why he chose the park, he tells her that another art collector he had been doing business with talked about all of the awful poo poo that goes down in the park at night, and it made him skeptical and curious. Lucita feigns being scared and worried, but he insists that everything will be okay because he’s armed.

You can probably already guess where this is going.

While they wait for a cab (all of which (read: one) speed past them because no one wants to pick people up in the middle of the night), Torres starts trying to make out with Lucita. She thinks it’s “tiresome”, but goes along with it because she has a job to do. Eventually, when it’s apparent that they’re not going to get a cab, she insists that they just continue walking. They go back and forth for a bit talking about how it’s dangerous but he’s armed but she’s not afraid because he’s armed (what?) but D.C. isn’t Madrid and yadda yadda.

They make out some more. The book talks about all of Torres’ different smells that Lucita smells (including his blood) and mentions that he is also the Spanish ambassador and was once a museum director. I’m guessing Taylor had just decided to make him these things at this point because that seems too important for neither Lucita nor the Council of Ragnarok to not bring up during their meeting. It also probably makes Cordelia’s plan to get him deported useless. Being an ambassador, he probably has diplomatic immunity.

They go back to discussing his art deals, during which he mentions that he is trying to work out a loan on a piece for “the Prado” with the collector; a sculpture with some possibly religious subject matter. He refuses to tell her more about it there.

quote:

She snuggled closer. Wondering how many brandies it would take -- or how many orgasms -- to get him to talk more freely. She didn't have a lot of time. And the night still felt wrong. Like a vast, obsidian ocean whose currents had shifted almost imperceptibly, whose flow was altered by the passing of something treacherous and stealthy, the shadow of a shark passing just above her, like a cloud.

Torres tells her that if she spends the night with him, he will take her to church the next day so she can meet the collector. He’s a man of God, you see. One that has made Torres open to “certain ideas”.

One of which is carrying a cross and a metal stake along with his gun.

Lucita feigns confusion, asking him what damage a simple cross and stake could possibly do to monsters, if they existed. Torres insist that such things ward off vampires, and begins to tell her about how he learned that vampires exist and form organizations just like humans do. One in particular, the “Sabbath”, wants to reveal themselves to humanity and take over the world.

With all the self-control she can muster, Lucita pretends to be completely neutral to the new information and presses him for more details on how he learned such things. But before he can tell her, some literal gangbangers show up and beat the poo poo out of him. Another grabs Lucita and forces her to suck his dick, and punches her in the face when she doesn’t comply immediately.

It’s at this point that the “no pleasure from sex” thing is pretty much thrown out, since the book points out that the sudden change in roles from what Lucita is used to arouses her.

quote:

She looked up at him, memorizing his features, not to describe later to the police, but for future fantasies.

quote:

Hunger clawed at her throat. And arousal, for though the victim role she'd been assigned in this impromptu drama was not the one she generally preferred, its very suddenness and unfamiliarity made it powerfully exciting.

After a paragraph long description of her attacker and various smells, another guy joins in, cuts off her skirt, and enters her from behind. There’s a picture for this.

:nws:http://imgur.com/W8AVing:nws:

Woo.

She gets into it, which confuses and pisses him off.

quote:

"gently caress you, bitch. You getting raped, you understand? Your lover-boy, he gonna get raped, too. We kill you if we want to."

“Umm, EXCUSE YOU, we’re trying to cause you mental and physical anguish here! OMG stop enjoying it! Argh!” :rant: Also, do any of the criminals in D.C. know how to use copulas?

God drat, this book...

Meanwhile, Torres gets beat up some more and the rest of the gang members try in vain to rape him.

quote:

One of the thugs had his dick out and was trying to gently caress Torres in the mouth, but the man was lashing his head from side to side, teeth gritted, making high-pitched, keening sounds in the back of his throat, like a child refusing medicine.

Lucita isn’t concerned about him and ultimately decides that the shared experience and guilt of him not being able to protect her will create a bonding tool and get him to talk easier.

More rape, more smells, more punching, some mentions of Lucita’s sire boning her, then Torres gets shot and killed. Lucita doesn’t react until she drinks from one of the dude’s dicks, then she lashes out and beats the poo poo out of them in a “scene” that consists entirely of one sentence.

quote:

Pausing only long enough to relieve the wounded man of his knife and thuggish TEC-9 pistol, she followed a jogging trail that, with luck, would lead her out of the park miles away from where the cops would be investigating the carnage here.

Lucita conceals herself with Obtenebration and jogs away until coming to "The Awakening", a statue at Hains Point. (Sometime after this book was written, it was moved to the National Harbor.) At which point, a werewolf attacks.

quote:

The lupine hurled itself upon her from behind the giant's upraised arm. A huge and muscular beast, ears pinned tight to its skull, lips drawn back in a hideous grin. For perhaps the first time, she had a taste of what her victims must feel when they saw her fangs and felt their own flesh penetrated.

Scared, but also really good? You’re not a Giovanni, Lucita.

Except it’s not a werewolf, because after the two fight for a while, it turns into this.

quote:

The beast spun faster. From its torn flesh, spines began to sprout. Its muzzle shortened, squashing back into its face. The massive canine torso narrowed and flattened, turning into the squat shape of a horned lizard. Its ragged crimson mouth lolled open to reveal two sets of gleaming teeth.

Spoiler: She’s fighting Sascha Vykos. Taylor doesn’t say it’s Sascha, and Sascha’s name doesn’t come up at all in this scene or the preceding chapters, but the caption on the picture in the next chapter gives it away.

:nws:http://imgur.com/N0Govzi:nws:

Good job, guys. Also, what's with the war paint? Did she wear that for the date?

She manages to slash out one of Sascha’s eyes, but it start redistributing its flesh to block the other. They go at it some more, it throws the knife at her and indicatea that it knows who she is.

quote:

"Moncada's bitch!" the thing hissed, as its razor teeth clamped down across her arm.

Eventually, deciding that she’s too wounded to continue, Lucita turns herself into a mass of shadows and jumps into the Potomac.

quote:

The dark water seethed around her as it absorbed some of the blackness conjured from her soul. Black as oblivion, black as annihilation, black at the heart of the thing that still paced the bank in confusion, snapping and clawing at shadows.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 5: The Worst Character

At the start of Chapter Five, David Vargas is banging a fat woman. He is not enjoying himself.

quote:

David Vargas closed his eyes and pretended he was with another woman. Unlike the flabby but exuberant brunette that he was loving doggie-style on the narrow bed, the woman in his fantasy was slim-hipped and bosomy with wide-set green eyes fringed with thick black lashes that looked very much like David's.

As that odd fantasy implies, he’s kind of a narcissist.

quote:

he scrutinized himself, entranced. Jet-black hair, eyes even more beautiful than his half-sister Becca's, so captivating that he could often enchant a woman or make an argumentative person go silent with just a glance. And his body. At thirty-six, he looked years younger -- nor did he require a fastidious regimen of exercise and diet to maintain the hard, lean muscles, the flat belly and narrow waist. David's secret for eternal youth was a simple one based entirely on self-indulgence -- booze, drugs and sex, preferably all three at the same time.

David is two weeks into his stint at Harmony in the Hills, a rehab center, for his drug use. The woman he’s having sex with, Daphne Kellerman, is one of the higher ups there. There’s a lot of pointless sex talk, then this:

quote:

One of the less obvious advantages of being hung like Godzilla, he reflected, was that his organ stayed about the same length whether hard or flaccid. If he felt like faking it, his less sophisticated lovers never knew the difference.

This is not a plot point that will come up later. So feel free to forget it.

David tells her that he’s going to borrow her car. She tells him no. He insists that he doesn’t belong at the clinic because his half-sister, who is jealous of him, got their dad riled up over him having a bump or two of coke. The story she heard was that he was about to go to jail for assaulting a man at a bar and that his dad pulled some strings to get him into rehab instead. (Ahh, the Celebrity Method.) When she still refuses, he tells her that he’s going to the administration and telling them about their little trysts. That convinces her.

He takes her car and speeds down the road towards D.C., thinking about all the different ways he’s going to rape Becca for getting him put away and making him horny. After that, he plans to go hide out in some third world country with lax drug laws.

On the way, he stops at a gay bar, orders a drink, picks up a dude with a wide mouth and a stash of drugs, and gets a bathroom blowjob. At some point, the drugs kick in and he starts talking out loud about how much he wants to rape and kill Becca. This understandably unnerves his one night stand. So David pulls this bullshit.

quote:

From his repertoire of manipulative gimmicks, David pulled out his pouty, hurt-little-boy expression. Forcing himself to put his sexual needs aside momentarily, he tenderly stroked the other man's face and kissed him on the mouth. "Hey, what's going on here? You don't like me no more? Just 'cause I get into my fantasies sometimes? It's nothing, Charley. It's just, when I do crank and alcohol together, I'm like an artist, man. My head's full of poo poo would make a van Gogh jealous, there's a flood of words and pictures pours through my skull, but sometimes when they come out my mouth, they're all jumbled up, they're all crazy. I wouldn't kill anybody, Charley. What would I want to do that for? I'd end up in prison. Hell, I'd prob'ly turn queer."

Whatever helps you sleep at night, dude.

Charley buys it, blaming it on the drugs making him paranoid. David suggests that they go to Charley’s car so he can show him what kind of a man he really is.

As you probably guessed from his stereotypical evil demeanor, David is a villain. He is also The Worst. So much so that even the rest of the universe hates him and won’t let him catch a break, as you will see in later chapters.

Elsewhere, in Chapter Six, Victoria gets mad at Muscle Guy, whose name is William, for making her shout because he’s moving. She’s painting a picture on his back, because sometimes you just got to stop watching people have sex for a while to pursue the arts.

quote:

The self-portrait was a copy of the photograph that graced her latest CD, the one featuring her pop hit, "4ever I," currently ranked at Billboard #8. Although her career had progressed quite nicely in recent months, she was between gigs at the moment and was already obsessing over which of several tempting offers to accept.

I guess no one, Camarilla lifers included, gives a poo poo about the Masquerade in the Porno Dimension.

It turns out that the pelvis swing was William’s idea. Making structures from human remains is an interest that he shares with her.

quote:

The loft above her U Street studio was used for housing slaves. The apartment below was where she slept, made love, and dabbled occasionally in painting, calligraphy, and sculpture. For the latter, she sometimes combined swatches of silk, bits of fur, and precious stones with human bones polished and painted to the luster of fine ivory.

[...]

Victoria reminded herself that she was not a monster -- she'd obtained the bones from a ghoul with a penchant for graverobbing who belonged to a Nosferatu acquaintance.

Sure you’re not, hon.

There’s another paragraph or two musing on her art pursuits and another description of how she looks.

quote:

All to the good, too, that her looks were more those of a model than a calculating killer. Thick, dark red (this week) hair framed her heart-shaped face and set off the flecks of yellow in her green eyes. She wore a costly brocade robe imported from Bangkok – deep turquoise shot through with gold threads that gleamed in the light. Henna designs marked the backs of both hands, complex arabesques and fleurs de lis extending all the way to her varnished nails.

It turns out Victoria is painting with blood. More specifically, the blood of the girl Becca and Emmett saw her with a couple of nights prior.

quote:

Motioning to a corner of the room where shadows piled as thick as snow drifts, she said, "Come out, Odette, where I can see you. And stop sulking. I wouldn't have brought you here if I didn't find you beautiful. You should be flattered."

A barely discernible frisson from the shadows as the girl curled herself into a tighter ball.

"Don't play games. Come here to me. I need more paint."

Odette, it turns out, is a fan of Victoria’s who presumably listened to her to stick it to her hyper Christian family and has ended up a ghoul. She dabs the brush into some of Odette’s fresh wounds, then grabs and drinks from her. There’s a picture for it. And I lied. There’s one that’s not not work safe. Though you might still get weird looks if your boss and coworkers catch you looking at it.

http://imgur.com/OGLbNZq

Victoria tells her to look at her. She refuses. Now that Odette knows she’s a vampire, all she wants to do is go home. Victoria tells her to deal with it. Odette starts speaking in tongues, which confuses and annoys Victoria, partly because she fears that it’s some sort of spell taught to her by a mage. She smacks her upside the head, which sends her flying across the room.

After being creepy for a bit, Victoria senses someone out in the hallway. While trying to figure out if they’re human or not, we learn the reason why William is in her employ.

quote:

"If you're finished, Mistress," said her canvas, "can I paint your lovely body? I'll use my cock."

William favored her with a lascivious sneer. Victoria had chosen him not just for his looks, but his compulsive sexuality. Ordinarily his obsessive lust aroused and titillated her. Now it was merely annoying.

His compulsive sexuality that she is getting absolutely nothing out of possibly maybe depending on who your ST is, what ruleset you’re using, and how many sex-obsessed weirdos your LARP group has.

Turns out the person outside is Lucita. William, who Victoria sent to investigate, just gets his arm twisted around his back for his troubles. Victoria, meanwhile, had grabbed a gun from her armoire because she’s had the feeling someone has been following her for the past few weeks. And despite being a somewhat famous pop star who is said to be one of prettiest characters in the oWoD metaplot, it’s not the paparazzi.

Victoria lets her in (because Lucita is older and she doesn’t have much of a choice) and asks her what happened, since Lucita looks torn the gently caress up.

quote:

"A werewolf, I think, in Potomac Park. A huge beast that changed its form. It came from nowhere."

"Inside the city? Then it's true the dogs infest the southern part of the park. But I thought they knew better than to gently caress with Kindred?"

Yes, I’m sure a 10 foot tall, hyper-regenerating, aggravated damage-dealing, bipedal war machine knows it can’t possibly gently caress with a single vampire.

This revelation freaks Victoria out.

quote:

While her guest refreshed herself, Victoria paced back and forth across the Oriental carpet. Finally she said, "I heard this might be coming."

Lucita looked up from William's bloody neck. "What are you talking about?"

"It's a sign isn't it? Of Gehenna? It's said that when werewolves start to stalk our kind, Gehenna can't be far behind."

“I thought of that.

That’s kind of like saying “we are born slowly dying”. Werewolves attacking vampires is the normal 9 to 5 for them in oWoD. They’ve been doing it for eons. It’s not like every werewolf in the city is regularly crashing elysiums, which would be a cause for concern and Gehenna paranoia… or a mole.

Lucita determined that whatever attacked her wasn’t a true werewolf. When she mentions witches, Victoria’s mind jumps to Wild Ones and says that Jan was right about Gehenna. When pressed, she says that she last saw him at a party in the British embassy.

quote:

There's talk, he says, that young Prince William has a steadfast admirer among the Kindred, that someday the throne of England may be occupied by one of ours."

I guess that plan fell through.

Lucita uses that to talk about how the Inquisition sucked and humans can be just as evil as vampires before she lets Victoria continue. Jan thinks Gehenna’s coming because a bunch of people are starting to get more into studying the supernatural. She also mentions that the Society of Leopold might have a base of operations near Georgetown University. They eventually get to talking about the porn riots, which Lucita believes were orchestrated by the Sabbat. She talks about what happened with Senator Rosenthal, which makes Victoria silently paranoid about her own ghouls killing her.

quote:

"Witch-hunters can incite their flock to a degree of madness," Lucita went on, "but 'persuading' a powerful woman like the senator to self-immolate sounds more like the Sabbat's style. If that's the case, the danger's greater than we thought. So if you know anything about--"

"What would I know about the Sabbat?" Victoria played nervously with the beads of her necklace -- human knuckles and nails threaded onto tightly woven strands of human hair.

Presumably a lot less than the woman who is older than you, comes from a predominantly Sabbat-aligned clan, whose sire is the Sabbat ruler of Madrid, and has enough clout with the Sabbat to take his place when he dies later in the metaplot. Also, there sure is a lot of not lesbian sex going on in this chapter of this porn book with two women that look an awful lot like these two tonguing on the cover. Seriously, I would think there would be one here. Cover all your bases and all.

Lucita insists that Victoria should tell her if she knows where Jan is. She does, but she’s afraid that if she tells Lucita, she will be held accountable if something has happened to him. Victoria insists that she would just like to be left alone, gives Lucita a change of clothes, and ushers her out.

quote:

A few minutes later, Lucita stood in the doorway, wearing the long-sleeved blouse, long skirt, and suede coat Victoria had given her. Even in the designer clothes, she still looked, Victoria reflected, like a whore, albeit an expensive one.

Even with her gone and seemingly fooled, Victoria is paranoid about Lucita being on the case, so she sends Odette out to tail her.

quote:

"And Odette? Don't be a naughty girl and try to run away," Victoria added. "Don't even think about it. Until I'm ready to be rid of you, you'll never get away."

In closing, here's a picture of Odette being naked and sad next to... some voodoo dolls or something.

:nws:http://imgur.com/wSoiGRo:nws:

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Aug 15, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

SirPhoebos posted:

So, what the hell is the point of Eternal Hearts? Have there been any rules or stats included?

It's a tie-in novel White Wolf made to show everyone how edgy and sexual they are compared to all those other lame tabletop companies, and to cater to the sex-starved weirdos of the oWoD fanbase.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012


Part 2: Callings and Belief

The character creation chapter begins with an explanation that the book is for making and playing “mortals”, not “mundanes”. The difference is that “mortals” aren’t ignorant Alteration fodder and try to figure out all of the weird poo poo that goes on around them due to circumstances stemming from either their birth, training, or happenstance.

quote:

they know there is more to the world and have traded a mundane life for one that will likely lead them to places they wish they never seen, Knowledge they wish they never knew and short violently ending lives…. If they are lucky.

The book also emphasizes that playing a mortal is not about having a power fantasy like playing a witch is, but about surviving.

quote:

Part of playing a Mortal is being the underdog and a star really willing to push themselves should consider that more than anything, because in the case of Mortals its not about power, it’s a bout survival.

Instead of Cliques, mortal characters have Callings. A character’s Calling, along with determining all of their starting stats, indicates how they generally get things done.


Believer

Believers want to show everyone that magic is real and the world is more dangerous than they think. They know it’s going to be hard, but they’re up for it. Yes, the write-up is incredibly generic sounding and could apply to any of the other Callings.

Along with a two D4 and three D6 spread that they can assign however they want, every Calling gets a D6+1 to one of their attributes. In the Believer’s case, it’s Magic. They get 20 mundane and 10 magical points to allocate towards their skills, and 2 ranks of a new attribute called Belief. For bonuses, they get a free rank in two of either Mythology, Cryptozoology, or Mysticism. Each Calling also gets to choose from one of four Specialties to choose from, which work pretty much the same way as Niches. The specialties that Believers can choose from are Family (+2 magic skill points, +1 Resist Magic), Piety (+2 Resist Magic, +2 to rolls against “evil” and “wicked” magic), Trauma (+1 to Focus and +2 to Plucky), and Weirdness Magnet (can make a Hard Senses roll to determine if something or someone has a supernatural element to them).


Charmer

Charmers use their looks and social skills to get what they want. They get a D6+1 to their Social, 15 mundane and 5 magical skill points, 1 Belief, and get a free rank of Charm and Fib. For specialties, they can choose from Beautiful (+1 Social to rolls against people the character is romantically interested in (and -1 to whoever is rolling against them), Cool (+1 Social to rolls when making a first impression and +1 to rolls to remain calm), Empathy (can make a Hard Senses roll to determine if someone is telling the truth), and Humor (can make a Hard Charm roll to calm someone else).


Jock

Jocks deal with problems by either beating the poo poo out of them or outrunning them. Not all of them are dumb, but they’re not necessarily focusing on being smart either way. They get a D6+1 to their Body; 20 mundane and 3 magical skill points; 1 Belief; a free rank in Athletics and a free rank in either Fighting, Hide, or Sports. For specialties, they have Fast (+1 Reflex, +1 rolls to running and jumping, and they run twice as fast and jump twice as far), Scrappy (+2 Fighting, +1 Reflex for dodging rolls), Strong (+2 melee and hand-to-hand damage and +1 to rolls when lifting, pulling, and throwing), and Tough (+2 Life and ignores a point of damage).


Nerd

(Hand…)

Nerds are nerds. Nerds are smart. That’s pretty much it. Mind D6+1; 20 mundane and 3 magical skill points; 1 Belief; and a free rank in two of either Build/Repair, Computers, or Science. For specialties, they have Bookworm (bonus gained from books are doubled and they can read one page very 5 seconds, this is a lovely specialty), Geek (+2 to Pop Culture, +1 to rolls involving beings related to pop culture in some way), Hacker (+2 Computer, +5 Allowance to spend on computer equipment), and Investigator (+2 Basics, +2 to rolls for solving puzzles and riddles).


Roughneck

Roughnecks are low lifes: thugs and hoodlums that see laws as suggestions and don’t mind committing crimes if it will help them accomplish a goal. Will D6+1; 20 mundane and 5 magical skill points; 1 Belief; free rank of Urchin and two of either Hide, Scare, or Streetwise. Their specialties are Fraud (+2 Acting with the ability to perfectly imitate voices by succeeding on an Easy Mind or Acting roll), Thug (+1 Life, +1 Scare), Rebel (+2 to rolls when defying authority or inspiring people to defy authority), and Thief (+1 Hide, +1 Urchin).

So yeah, if you ever play this, pick Believer. They get more skill points than everyone else for some reason and their buffs make them less likely to not get one-shot by a witch.

The other important factor in making a mortal character is their age. Like the optional age rules in the core, they give stat bonuses and minuses.

Kids: 10 to 13 years old. +1 Magic, -1 Body and Will, +2 Belief, -1 Wealth.

Teens: 14 to 18 years old. +5 mundane skill points, +2 magical skill points, +1 Belief.

Adult: 19 to 59 years old. +1 Will, +10 mundane skill points, +4 magical skill points, +1 Wealth.

Elder: 60 years old and over. +2 Will, -1 Body and Senses, +15 mundane skill points, +5 magical skill points, -1 Belief.

So, Belief. What is it and what does it do? Well, it’s basically a power stat that lets mortals use their zap points, which represents their “inner magic”. This is awakened in them by an Epiphany: the event that first exposed them to the supernatural world. Belief goes from 1 to 10 and each rank gives a specific bonus.



Increasing your Belief costs 10 + the level you’re going up to voodollars. The book also suggests that directors give out free ranks (limit of once per episode) for surviving events that strengthen their belief.

Belief factors into the consequences of Freak Out rolls. These are rolls that happen whenever a character encounters some new supernatural horror. These are Will or Plucky + Belief rolls and can have different difficulties.



If someone fails the roll, they can choose to lose a rank of Belief by denying what they saw was real. It is possible to go down to Belief 0 this way. If they don’t, they get to roll on the “dreaded freak out table”. You roll a D10 and consult this chart.



Other characters can also try talking down a person having a freak out with a Hard Social or Psychology (a new skill) roll. They can only attempt this once.

If a character rolls a 1 during any freak out roll, they gain a “crack point”. 5 crack points gets them an Idiosyncrasy, which are basically Derangements. The character rolls a D12 and gains the idiosyncrasy listed on this chart.



Each idiosyncrasy comes with certain penalties.

Absent-Minded: +2 voodollars to all skill and ability costs.

Anxiety: -1 to Initiative rolls, -1 to Will vs Social rolls.

Coward: -1 to all combat rolls, must roll an Easy Will roll to not run from fights.

Depression: -1 Magic, -1 to rolls that require motivation.

Mumbler: -1 Social, them and everyone within 10 feet of them has -1 to rolls to detect surprises.

Outspoken: The character is always talking to themselves. -1 Social, must make a Hard Will roll to lie.

Paranoia: -1 Social, cannot participate in group rolls.

Phobia: -1 to all rolls involving their fear, which the director determines, and they have to make a freak out roll when confronting it.

Queasy: -2 to Life and the character pukes when they get stressed.

PTSD: Once a day, the character makes a Hard Will roll. If they fail it, they have an episode and get an idiosyncrasy from the chart for the rest of the day. This also has to happen when they confront something that triggers their PTSD.

Rage: Must make a Hard Will roll not to attack someone who pisses them off and to not fight to the death during combat.

Shaky: -1 to rolls that require their hands and any objects in their hands are dropped if they roll a 1 on a D4.

A lot of these rules remind me of the “character shits their pants if they get a dramatic failure” house rule I read once.

Unlike mundanes, mortals can spend their zap points to augment rolls, ignore damage, and stabilize themselves and others. Along with adding up to 3 points to a roll and ignoring up to 3 points of damage, mortals can spend a zap to negate a rolled 1 and instantly stabilize themselves. (Keep in mind witches and otherkin need to spend 5 to do that.) For 2 points, they can stabilize someone else, can add up to 3 points of damage, add up to 3 to their Resist Magic, and use an ability at one rank higher. For 3, they can completely negate non-lethal spells and ignore all points of damage they take from an attack except one.

Oh, and you can use it to pull deus ex machinas out of your rear end, if this blurb is any indication.

Grady Barns posted:

I once jumped from an Airplane without a parachute after it was all but destroyed by a Dragon. There I was falling through the air, nothing but air between mean and solid Earth.

Suddenly I hit an updraft that not only slowed me but moved me so I hit the Dragon’s wing as it came by to hit the plane again, slowing me down and angling me so I hit a some pine trees and landed in a lake. I broke a few bones but I lived.

Yeah it was a Miracle, but for us, Miracles are real.

Next: More character creation stuff.

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Aug 15, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Part 3: Skills and Traits

Up next in the character creation chapter is a rundown of the new skills that all types of characters have access to. Because this game needed more skills. Like witch characters, mortals get 3 free points in Basics. They can use any mundane skill from the other books, but can only put their magical points in Cryptozoology, Focus, Herbalism, Leyology, and Mysticism.

For new skills, we've got:

Demolitions: A Mind skill; deals with the building and handling of explosive devices, as well as how to acquire them.

In WGA, explosives are divided into four different types.



Accelerant: Used more to start and keep fires running than to blow poo poo up.

C4: The “safest” type of explosive, but also the hardest to get a hold off. You specifically need points in Streetwise to get it.

Dynamite: Fairly stable (assuming it’s not left to sit out for too long) and can be detonated via an electrical current or the traditional burning wick. Also hard to get a hold off, but doesn’t mention needing the Streetwise skill.

Nitro Glycerin: Can be made in small batches with a Very Hard Science roll. That’s it.

If the character wants to play it safe when handling explosives, they can make whatever roll they’re doing at one less difficulty rank at the cost of having to take twice as long to do whatever they’re doing. You can also do the opposite if you want to do something faster. The former is helpful since the book points out that failing a Demolitions roll usually ends in things exploding. You also get a free reroll of any Demolitions roll if you have at least one rank in either Science or Build/Repair.

Navigation: A Mind skill; lets you navigate by any means whether it be using Google Maps or the positions of the sun and stars. This is usually an Easy roll, unless it's a roll to decrease the travel time by 25%, then it’s a Hard roll. Having three or more points in Survival gets you a +1 to wilderness navigational rolls.

Pilot: Body; the Flying skill for mortals. Only applies to aircraft.

Psychology: Social, resisted with Will or Resolve; lets you talk down a character who is in the middle of a Freak Out as well as learn about a person’s history, M.O., and motivations.

Resolve: Will; represents training in resisting various coercion tactics (i.e. interrogations, torture, and so on) and is used in place of a Will roll. Lets you spend a zap to use this to resist a Mentalism or Illusion spell instead of your Resist Magic stat.

Religion: Mind; lets you understand various beliefs and belief systems. One of the examples it gives is “understanding the push and pull of the forces of Light vs Shadow and Order vs Chaos”.

Grady Barns posted:

Is there something out there controlling the universe, is there an absolute good or evil?

Those answers are above my “Pay Grade.”. what I do know is Death isn’t the end, There is a lot of evil in our world and I’ve seen a place… a place of absolute Darkness beyond our world. So maybe that’s where Evil comes from.

As for Light… I’ve heard only rumors.

I paid for a whole book, but got a bunch of edges.

Time for Traits. Traits work the same way for mortals as they do for otherkin, and they can have any talents from the other books that don’t deal with magic or the magical world, as well as the Legacy and Medative heritages. (Otherkin, however, can take any of the traits from this book.) To replace all of the off-limits heritages, mortals get their own list of Origins… which are still called heritages in the book and work the same way.

For new Talents, we have…

Actor +2 to disguise attempts, can alter their voice and body language at will. Just be careful not to forget who you are, which is a risk for those who have this talent according to its blurb.

Avenger: +1 to rolls when righting wrongs against themselves or their friends, real or imagined.

Brash: +1 Initiative, +1 to rolls when they are the first to act on something or arrive at a scene.

Diligent: “Time to create an item drops by one.” As determined by the difficulty chart for the Build/Repair skill in Respelled.

Guardian: +1 Armor, +1 to rolls when protecting people, places, or things.

Hardcore:

quote:

Bering Hardcore means knowing you’re the under dog and still fighting back. Hard Core Characters excel at beating the odds and fighting against the status quo. Hardcore Characters tend follow their own nonnonsense in your face rules and won’t change for anyone.

Can still take normal actions if they hit 0 to -10 life for D6 minutes. That is pretty hardcore.

Knowledgeable: Can add a +3 to a non-Body skill roll they don’t have points in once a day.

Logical: A free rank of Investigate, +1 to Freak Out rolls.

Mellow: -1 Crack point per day, +21 (???!!!) to rolls when calming volatile social situations.

Pious: Can use a bonus they have that normally costs zap for free once per day.

Resourceful The character can Macgyver up items. -1 to all created item costs, can ignore a component that they need to make a specific item.

Thug: +2 to rolls to break things and Hand-to-Hand damage.

Before the section on the new heritages, Grady points out that Mystery Inc. exist in Witch Girls World and he thinks they’re all cray-cray.

Grady Barns posted:

You’re crazy….

No really, you are and you need to embrace that. No one can be sane or /stay sane doing what we do. It’s impossible.

Want proof? I knew these kids.. Don’t know if their still alive or not. They were really good at solving mysterious, traveled around in a van, dealt with mostly with Ghosts and zombies.

Any way they had this g0odnatured , big happy mutt and they all swore he could talk….

Yeah, like I said… Nuts.

You hunt and study magical beings for a living, and yet you have a hard time believing in a (fairly mundane) creature that a starting witch character can buy for themselves? They probably picked him up from some magical person. Maybe they ran into some magical animal hoarder witch and took him off her hands.

Anyway, heritages/origins.

Ace: A free rank of Pilot and Navigation; +1 Reflex when flying; +2 to recognize, analyze, and repair aircraft; and everyone riding in the plane take half damage from crashes. Requires 3 ranks of Pilot to take.

Cipher: "There is just something about [the Cipher] that makes them nearly invisible." -2 to rolls to “find, identify, or even find” them; people have to make a Hard Mind roll to remember them; +1 Reflex to dodge; -2 to Casting rolls for Divination spells against them; and 2 ranks of Hide.

Conspiracy Theorist: +1 Belief; a free rank of Investigate and Computers; can ignore a Freak Out by ranting about a conspiracy theory once per game; and +1 to rolls related to their pet theory, which is decided on when they take this heritage.

Daredevil: +1 Armor; +2 to rolls when risking their lives or fighting someone stronger than them; +2 to rolls to resist fear and fear-causing abilities; can spend 5 zap to ignore all damage from an attack or situation.

Detective: +2 to rolls to solve puzzles; +1 Senses; +1 to look for and disarm traps; can make an Easy Senses or Investigate roll to determine if someone is lying.

Enchanted: Probably the most interesting and notable new heritage, Enchanteds are the unfortunate children of witches that didn’t get the bulk of their mother’s magical genes and the half mundane children of otherkin. Any children that a pair of enchanteds have will also be enchanteds. Enchanteds were first mentioned in Pirates of Buccaneer Hill, which told you to go read the Moon Shadow Circle book, which never came out, for more info, and are mentioned without explaination in 13 Magazine. Well, now they’ve got a write-up.

quote:

Ironically most of magical society are enchanted even though in that society they are in most cases second class citizens.

This heritage works the same way as the Half-Otherkin one from the core works: every otherkin type gets their own set of bonuses. Every type lives slightly longer than most humans (usually reaching 100) and are unaffected by spells designed to hide things from mortals, including avoidance charms. They have the same physical traits as their witch counterparts.

Fae: Along with the ability to change their form for an hour for a zap, they get +1 Reflex and 3 free skill ranks to place in Craft (which no longer exists, so presumably Build/Repair), Instrument, and/or Singing.

Immortal: +1 Body and Armor and 3 skill ranks that they can place in any Body skill, with a limit of 2 in any skill. Interestingly, they don’t have the “Hard Will roll to lie” disadvantage half-immortal witches or their fast healing abilities.

Shapeshifter: +1 Senses, a claw attack that does 2 damage, +2 Athletics "and one free rank and tracking." They don’t have the weakness to silver.

Vampire: +1 to all rolls that happen at night, +2 Stealth, +1 Athletics, and they ignore a point of damage.

Witch: The most common type of enchanted. Witch blooded enchanteds are almost always physically attractive and have “vibrantly” colored eyes. +1 Magic; can spend a zap to sense witches and other witch blooded up to 10 feet away; a free rank in Enchantment, Potions, or Alchemy and the ability to put points in that chosen skill when they level up; can use magical items made for witches; and can spend a zap to levitate objects and perform a telekinetic push attack. (Up to 50 pounds and does 5 points of damage, respectively.)

Gadgeteer: Start with 5 free equipment points to spend on devices, time needed to build and repair items are halved, can spend a zap to instantly know how something works, and can spend a “power point” to add a +2 to “jury rig” rolls or make a jury-rigged device work again. Requires 3 ranks of Build/Repair.

Martial Artist: The Martial Artist heritage from Respelled. So that’s three heritages mortals can take. Though this version adds a +5 to dodge and the ability to instantly get back up after being knocked down, and the bonus to Fighting is dropped to a +1. Requires 3 ranks of Fighting to take.

Ninja: Martial Artists, but more special because they use magic.

quote:

The Ninja are not what you think. They are in fact a trained branch of martial artist who have embraced the supernatural.

Can make a Hard Stealth roll to hide in plain sight, can spend a zap to either double their running speed or jumping distance or only take half damage from falls, and can give a target a -2 to their rolls for the remainder of a scene (if they fail a Hard Body) instead of an attack doing damage. Hitting a target twice with this move will knock them out for D4 minutes. Requires Athletics 2, Acrobatics 2, Fighting 2, and Hide 2.

Powerful Item 10 free Wealth points, on top of the character’s starting pool, to build the magical trinket. The item, whatever it is, has 20 HP, 11 Resist Magic, and 5 points of armor. It restores its HP at a rate of 5 points per day. The item gives its owner +1 to an attribute of their choice, 3 points of armor, and +2 to rolls to stabilize themselves if they’re dying.

Powerful Pet: While mortals can purchase magical pets, this character’s is more powerful than most. The character starts the game with a 10 point magical pet that has +1 to an attribute, +2 Life, and +2 zap. The pet and its owner get +5 to rolls to find each other and can communicate telepathically. Finally, all magical bonuses for the pet and owner are doubled if they’re within 20 feet of each other.

Psychic: A free rank in Psionics, +1 Will, can spend a zap to communicate telepathically with up to 6 people up to 100 miles away, and can spend up to 3 zap to give themselves a +1 bonus to resist mind controlling or invading abilities.

Stunt Driver: An unknown amount of free ranks in Drive and Navigation, +1 Reflex when driving, the +2 to analyze, recognize, and repair aircraft copy/pasted, and everyone in the car takes half damage from crashes. Requires Driving 2.

Superhero: Be a Phoenix Jones style vigilante (or Batman if you’ve got the points for it). -2 to rolls to discover their identity, can make a Resolve roll to restore a life point once a turn in combat, starts the game with a costume made of light armor that gives 5 armor points, and anyone who fails a Scare roll against the character is at a -2 to all of their rolls against them. Requires Athletics 2, Fighting 2, and Resolve 2, and cannot have the Wicked talent.

Starting mortal characters can have up to 4 positive knacks (along with a matching amount of negative ones). New positive knacks include:

Animal Lover: +2 to Social rolls with normal animals.

Big: +1 to Lifting and Breaking rolls and can lift twice as much weight. Must be a teen or older to take.

Double Jointed: +2 to rolls to escape binds.

Hawkeye: +1 to sight-based Senses rolls.

Healthy: +2 to resist diseases.

Intuitive: +1 to resist surprise attacks.

Nightvision: Self-expalinatory.

Palmer: +1 to take things the size of their hand. Anyone looking for the item has a -1 to their rolls.

Quick: Normal movement speed is doubled.

Resistant: +2 to resist poisons.

Mortals can also take the Big Bank, Book Worm, Fast Healer, and Energizer knacks from Respelled.

For negative knacks, we have:

Loud: -2 to Surprise or Hide rolls.

Lame: Walking and running speed is halved.

Normal: -2 Zap due to their partial inability to “grasp the strange”.

Sickly: -1 to resist diseases.

Weak: -2 to Life and are physically smaller than most characters. Big people can be weak too, but okay.

Unbalanced: -1 to Freak Out rolls.

Unlucky in Love: “The character romantically attracts the worst possible person for them.” …So, I guess they occasionally derail the game to angst over their lovely abusive SO? Or just so Harris has an excuse to post this blurb.

Grady Barns posted:

The spawn of Lilith are rarely ugly.

I heard a big-brain explain it by saying, the look good so we’ll accept them as being better than us so they can rule us.

I’m saying that to say this… Be careful. If someone looks to good to be true they probably are and could be the creature that ends you.

They can also have the Attitude, Bad Luck, Chubby, Ditz, Fragile, Four Eyes, Naive, "Shirt", Shallow, and Willowy knacks.

Up next: Training and Abilities

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Aug 28, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Part 6: Don’t Lose Your Head

I wrote part of this post while eating dinner. I don’t know what that says about me.

In Chapter Seven, David the rear end in a top hat has stolen Charley’s car, which has a now dead Charley in its trunk. (David didn’t mean to kill him, he just hosed up tying him up because he’s still wired.) As he drives around looking for her Georgetown residence, his mind goes back to Becca.

quote:

With all the warped sincerity of which he was capable, David believed he'd done her a big favor on the two occasions when he had raped her years ago. His only regret was that he hadn't had the opportunity to violate her more frequently, for surely, had she been favored with more of his masculine prowess, she might not have become the pervert that she was today.

The incidents happened with she was 14 and he was 20. He had just gotten expelled from the University of Miami for cheating, which he thinks ousted him from his position as his father’s favorite child. She and a friend giggled at him for reasons unknown, and he’s been wanting revenge ever since. The third time he tried, she pulled a knife on him. Emmet doesn’t know about the incidents, but David assumes him getting put into rehab is revenge on Becca’s part, since she’s her father’s right hand woman now and can do that.

Shortly after a paragraph describing the area of Georgetown Becca lives in is a picture that spoils just exactly what is waiting for David up in her place a page and a half early. Nice job on the book layout there, guys.

The light is on in Becca’s bedroom, and he wonders who exactly turned it on. He knows about her and Emmet’s late night hunting outings, but thinks they’re dumb and a cover-up for some weird sex going-ons because porn book.

Before he can start breaking in, this insane thing happens.

quote:

"Are you waiting for the Devil, too?"

David jumped up, looked around.

The shrubbery rustled and parted. A scrawny, slack-jawed youth draped in a cracked leather jacket several sizes too big stared at him with furtive, narrowed eyes. His cheeks and forehead appeared to have been smeared with some kind of viscous ointment -- maybe treatment for a skin disease, thought David, stepping back.

Apparently mistaking David's wide-eyed amazement for interest, the young man continued, "The Devil's already here, you know, but I can show you how to protect yourself. Is that what you're afraid of -- the Devil?"

[…]

"You know what repels him? Semen. If you want to protect yourself, you need to jerk off and smear the cum on your face and body."

David notices that the man is masturbating, freaks out, and accidentally on purpose uppercuts him.

This guy is important to the plot, I assure you.

Still a little hosed up from the drugs, David makes his way up to Becca’s bedroom, and silently flips the gently caress out some more.

quote:

Then, gasping, he lurched backward, the breath frozen in his throat, for what he saw inside that bedroom simply could not be.

[...]

But still he looked, hypnotized by the appalling spectacle. He was stunned, enthralled, and terrified, but unable either to flee or look away.

This is what he sees.

:nws:http://imgur.com/IwK5nzf:nws:

Yes, Becca still sleeps with stuffed animals.

Isabel Giovanni, who looks Asian in that picture despite being Italian, is having a little private blood orgy with that poor lady’s decapitated corpse. There’s a lot of descriptions of her noisily slurping blood as it trickles down her body sexily, including a straw sucking the last bit of liquid from a cup sound when she goes for the stuff that isn’t freely flowing from the neck stump. I don’t know if sucking blood out of a neck stump would actually make that sound. So I’m just gonna take the book’s word for it.

As he wheezes in an attempt to not puke, David attracts Isabel’s attention.

quote:

The blood-covered bitch turned toward where he cowered in the darkened hall. A red smile split her features.

"Sascha, is that you?" Her voice was bell-clear, sweet and honeyed, with undertones of an accent that reminded him of some actress he had seen once in a European movie. She wait, her wide-set, heavy-lidded eyes sweeping the darkness like flares. Her nostrils twitched, a predator scenting game.

"It's not you, is it, Sascha? Who is there? A voyeur? Let me see you. Come out, come out, little one, Isabel wants to see you."

Isabel masturbates to tease him, urging him to come put his head between her legs and lap up his sister’s blood. No idea how she knows who he is. Could be research, could be Auspex, could be a plot hole, could be Maybeline, who knows.

David tries to crawl out of the house and back to the car, only to have the severed head thrown at him. This causes a minor freak-out that gets him dragged into the room.

quote:

"Look at me, darling," crooned the bitch. "Look at Isabel, and don't be frightened."

Struggling to speak, he managed to get out the words, "Who are you? What are you?"

She laughed again. "If you prayed, I might say I'm the answer to those prayers, David. But since you don't, let's just say I'm the answer to your curses. For all the hatred you've poured out into the world, you've finally received an answer." She reached down, lifting up the headless corpse as though it were feather light, and laid it on the bed between them. David recoiled, but she grabbed him by the hair and forced his face down onto the dead woman's boyishly flat chest. "Isn't this what you wanted, David? To gently caress your sister? Isn't this what you came here tonight to do?"

Problem is, the headless corpse is not Becca.

quote:

Becca Vargas had a pair of truly memorable tits. Cantaloupes that he could barely get his hands around. Lesbian or not, he doubted the latest thing in dyke fashion was having C-cup tits reduced to flat fried eggs.

I don’t know. They don’t look that small in the illustration. But I’m pretty sure at this point that Bolton just didn’t care and did this solely for a quick paycheck.

Anyway, David doesn’t want to say anything for fear of getting smashed into a wall or whatever it is Isabel likes to do to people who disappoint her. She asks if he wants to gently caress her, since he’s hard despite the situation. She doesn’t wait for an answer. They foreplay for a bit, then talk some more.

quote:

Still half convinced he was in the middle of some drug-induced hallucination, David gasped, "You're one of them aren't you? My old man believes in vampires, but I always thought he was nuts. But that's what you are, isn't it?"

"Didn't I already tell you, David, that I was the answer to your prayers?"

"I don't pray."

She sneered at him. "Don't take me for a fool. Wanting and lusting and obsessing after something or someone -- that's a kind of prayer. You pray all the time. You just don't do it on your knees and you don't do it to something you call God. But you pray for power and to be able to hurt the people you hate. Every time your heart beats, every time you draw a breath, you pray that same prayer."

"I don't know what the gently caress you're talking about."

Either way, the notion arouses him and he goes to enter her. Isabel stops him and tells him he’s gotta have sex with the headless corpse first. He doesn’t want to.

quote:

"You refuse? I wouldn't do that, David. She's got a nice body, but she's not worth losing your head over."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaa :downs::downs:

David tells her that there’s no guarantee she won’t just kill him after he’s done, but Isabel insists that “they” need him for something. So he, reluctantly, goes ahead.

quote:

"Very good, little whore. And don't be too discouraged if she isn't very into it. You'll find out soon that not all dead women are so unresponsive."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA :nattyburn: :pusheen:

That chapter was used as the preview chapter in some places when the book was first released, by the way.

The first part of Chapter Eight follows Tony d’Angelo, Emmet’s other assistant that was mentioned chapters ago. There’s not much here. What you need to know is he only got into vampire-hunting because the thrill of loving vampires and almost dying gets him off, and he really wants to bone Victoria Ash.

quote:

Convinced that the fuckable-looking pop star was a vampire, he speculated on how ancient she might be and where her proclivities, sexual and otherwise, might have led her in ages past. Had she bedded pharaohs or plotted intrigues with the Medicis? Whored the backstreets of Constantinople or consorted with French nobility? His fantasies around such possibilities were endless, the hard-ons they inspried almost indestructible.

There’s also a mention of religious protestors hanging around the White House (which isn’t allowing traffic around it due to a bombing the previous spring) and an umpteenth mention of angels coming to save humanity from itself.

Elsewhere on U Street, Odette is debating with herself whether or not to make a break for it and head back to her family. But the blood bond being what it is, she can’t really muster up the mental strength to do so.

quote:

A week earlier, even a day earlier, she might have given in to that impulse, but now just knowing that the thought had crossed her mind filled her with terror. A part of her mind that she realized was child-like, primitive, now believed Victoria to be all-powerful, all-seeing, and all-punishing. Even to allow thoughts of escape was desperately unsafe. Just the fact that she was capable of such disloyalty was proof of what a wretched creature she was. And even if she did manage to escape, she would be lost because she'd never again taste Mistress's honeyed blood or feel the succulent sweetness of Mistress's mouth upon her neck.

It doesn’t help that when she thought about asking William, who has been molesting her in scenes where Victoria won’t gently caress him, to join her, Victoria came into the room and told her to knock it off.

quote:

But no sooner had the thought entered her mind than Victoria had stormed into the room and said, "Don't even dream about it, Odette. William's too in love with me even to think of running off with you."

As she tails Lucita, Odette thinks about how she used to take part in the religious protests that have overtaken D.C. A camp counselor told her her speaking in tongues was a sign of favor from God right before he molested her with everything but his dick because God obviously called dibs on her. Also, porn book.

Lucita, being Lasombra and a vampire, is hard for Odette to keep up with and eventually disappears into the shadows of the night.

quote:

In the dark, the black-haired woman was almost impossible to follow, so perfectly did she blend into the night. As she passed, the very shadows seemed to darken and elongate. At times, Odette wondered if there was fog ahead, because parts of the woman seemed to disappear while her head or legs remained visible, as though she were being wrapped in tendrils of mist. But then Odette would reach the spot where Lucita had just stood and find the night immaculately clear and glittery with stars.

Lucita eventually goes to hail a taxi, decides against it, and then walks toward where Odette is hiding in some nebulous shadowed place. But before she’s caught, someone else grabs her from behind, telling her that she’s coming with them.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

In like Zinn posted:

On top of all the incest and rape, there was that name Sascha kind of prominent there, please tell me that White Wolf didn't include The Vykos in their porno book.

Please?

I'm sorry.



Part 7: Vampiric Bejeweled Dick Goblin

Back at Becca’s apartment, in Chapter Nine, David has managed to finish banging the headless corpse without passing out and is banging Isabel as a reward. As you can imagine, his mind is already spinning with the possibilities that being part of the secret world of vampires could afford him.

quote:

He only knew that in the last few hours, the world as he knew it had been transformed, revealing to him a world he knew his father fervently believed in, but which he'd often scoffed at as the fantasy of the deranged and superstitious. A world that left him both terrified and elated, one with almost limitless potential for evil and for power.

A world, he realized, that could become his own.

It takes a special kind of person to learn about something and go “how can I use this to do evil?” One that I’m not sure actually exists.

quote:

[Isabel] certainly looked alive, thought David. Her thick auburn hair, strands of it still caked with blood, swung wildly around her head. Her skin, which was pale to the point of translucency, gave off a luminous sheen. Silk stippled in moonlight. For David, the fact that it was also streaked with blood did nothing to detract from her macabre allure.

One thing I’ve noticed is that you can tell when Taylor is into a scene while she’s writing it and when she isn’t. The former tend to go on for longer and are more descriptive. This is one of them. The scene with David in the bar was not. Nor was the fairly dry Lucita/Victoria scene. But that’s kind of a given since there was no sex in that one. The part at the end of this chapter just fades to black, if you're curious.

They finish up and Isabel gives him a limp blowjob, telling him that he has to keep his strength up to meet his master. They’ve heard that David is a vain, selfish shitbag, which angers him. She plays with herself as she continues, her voice becoming darker as she says that everyone he knows is just jealous because he’s so pretty and knows that they're all hypocrites.

quote:

Isabel's face was changing, the features rearranging themselves from those of a woman who was merely beautiful to one whose pallid symmetry was so perfect as to resemble an exquisitely crafted death mask. With a languid smile, she brought her fingers back to her mouth. Since David had no way of knowing that her skin was flavorless, that her body could produce no sexual discharge, he assumed that she was licking off the taste of herself, relishing the flavor of her oval office.

So either blood took the place of lube and vaginal fluids during their little tryst, David keeps a bottle of Astroglide on him at all times, or that was the driest, most uncomfortable sex ever.

David grabs her and demands that she tell him who she is. She says that the better question would be what she is.

quote:

From behind him, a woman's soft, melodic voice chimed in, "Yes, David, ask. Ask it what it is."

David leaped to his feet. There were two of them. Isabel behind him, reclining on the blood-soaked bed, lifting up one plump breast to suck her own nipple.

Up until I read this book, I didn’t realize that there was a somewhat female equivalent to sucking your own dick. So… thanks, I guess, Eternal Hearts

quote:

And before him, the creature he had thought was Isabel now transforming into something else -- a hideous male-female thing. Its skin was chitinous and armored, its lidless eyes were slitted and insectile. Where lavishly curled eyelashes had been now shone rows of glittering hooks. Its eyes were pierced, the pupils outlined with tiny hooks adorned with gems and feathers. Rings hung from skin flaps on breasts and belly. Between its legs, pierced testicles-to-foreskin with what looked like fishing hooks, jutted an enormous penis.

Surprise! He was loving Sascha Vykos! I hope the guy who reviewed this on Amazon and gushed over Isabel didn’t mind this little bait-and-switch. David does, and is both disgusted at Sascha’s appearance and the notion that the both of them are bisexual, which Isabel mentions.

quote:

"David, you disappoint me," said Isabel. She gave a soft, throaty laugh. "Don't look so shocked. You go both ways. That's something else that you and Sascha Vykos have in common."

"No, gently caress that. I don't want any part of this."

Vykos eyed him with wicked, contemptuous mirth. "You just hosed the dead body of your sister, but I disgust you?"

Well, to be fair to David, it’s not every day that you see the woman you’re loving turn into a vampiric bejeweled dick goblin.

Sascha demands that Isabel take another look at the decapitated head. She tells Sascha to piss off and not talk to her so rudely. Sascha throws the head at David and demands that he confirm that the head is Becca’s. Terrified, he says that it isn’t. It’s Francine’s.

Sascha throws a hissy fit, throwing Isabel against the wall along with the head.

quote:

"You! You didn't even bother to find out what the bitch looked like or if anyone else lived here with her! Now the police will be involved, and the Vargas whore will know that she's in danger. Now that you've hosed things up, it's going to be more difficult."

Isabel met Vykos's furious gaze unflinchingly. "We made a mistake, the two of us, in a situation where you were the one in charge. But I'm sure the Sabbat would understand how you might become distracted from your work when so much of your time and energy goes into -- what would one call it? -- your pastime as a cyber-pervert."

Sascha threatens to murder the poo poo out of David multiple times over. David insists that he can get both Becca and Emmet. But Sascha ain’t hearing any of it and says that it can just as well do it itself.

And then Sascha rapes David. Because porn book.

quote:

It exhaled a dead, reeking breath into David's face and flung him back onto the bed as though he were a doll. Before he could get up, it straddled him, engorged cock wagging in his face. “The first thing, David, is I'm going to break you. From what I've seen so far, that won't take much. Then, if you regain consciousness soon enough, I'll tell you what you're going to do for us."

"Anything," said David. "Anything at all."

"Anything at all isn't enough," said Vykos. "First I have to hear you scream."

Slowly it crawled on top of him, immobilizing him with its weight. The heavy, truncheon-like penis pressed against his belly.

"Two hours may not seem like much," it sighed. "But you'd be surprised how long those minutes and seconds can stretch."

There’s a really awful joke I can make to that.

By the way, say goodbye to Isabel. She’s only in these two chapters. Yes, her entire purpose in this book was to just be in a creepy sex scene.

Chapter 10 takes us back to Jean Locklear/Rapunzel. You remember her, right? From Chapter One? She’s still working her way out of the dirt. To entertain herself between digging sessions, she fantasizes.

quote:

In life, Rapunzel had entertained herself with an active fantasy life as much as drugs and sex. Now, in such a state of total sensory stimulation. A pyrotechnic porn show, rich with sounds and colors and laser lights, orchestrated itself in her brain. Body memories so vivid that her dead synapses shivered with phantom orgasms passed through her like electric current, emotions and sensations inundated her life cells.

She didn't just remember -- she re-lived. And the re-living was both a salvation linking her to some remnant of sanity and a terrifying return to the horror that had led up to her death.

Most of the rest of the chapter is the chatlog between her and her sire, a man who goes by the username “Dracon”, that led to this mess. If the username and the mention of Vykos being a habitual “cyber-pervert” in the last chapter didn’t tip you off, yeah, it’s Sascha. This is what Sascha does in its spare time when it’s not doing research.

In the conversations leading up to that night, she portrayed herself as an overweight mother of four who spent her days eating, cutting herself, having suicidal thoughts, and masturbating (when her husband isn’t hanging her up on hooks in the laundry room). “Dracon” claimed to be a tall blond-haired, violet-eyed ad exec with multiple Porsches, which she didn’t believe at all.

She tells him about her cutting. He isn’t impressed and tells her to :therapy:. She says that she imagined a lover doing it to her, and the conversation turns briefly to suicide by snu-snu. Dracon claims to be both disturbed and aroused by the idea.

quote:

[Rapunzel] You mean you wouldn't want to ram your cock into a woman while the life slowly drains out of her?!!!

[Dracon] Such a romantic you are, aren't you? Okay, that's it! I'm ending this conversation.

[Rapunzel] Oh, hold on, Dracon, don't be a pussy. We'll talk about something else - my wrists maybe.

[Dracon] We already talked about your loving wrists.

The rest of the conversation is mostly just dumb pointless sex talk meant to meet a word quota until this part.

quote:

[Rapunzel] So tell me, Dracon, do you believe suicide is a sin?

[Dracon] Are we back to suicide again? For your information, Rapunzel, I don't believe in sin. I do believe in stupidity. And suicide is definitely stupid.

[Rapunzel] I disagree.

[Dracon] So I gathered.

[Rapunzel] You've never thought about offing yourself?

[Dracon] I'm having too much fun. Besides, it's not my nature.

[Rapunzel] But I'll bet you've thought of killing someone else? A sex partner you had tied up, helpless, with a gag in her mouth and a scarf around her throat. You've thought how easy it would be, how painless, how she might even find it pleasurable.

[Dracon] That's not my nature either.

[...]

[Dracon] What my real nature inclines me to do, you see, is torture. Sexual torture. Bringing a lover to the brink of death, then backing off, then back to the brink again.

Rapunzel’s intrigued, but Dracon doesn’t believe she’s really up for him actually torturing and killing her, since she’s hanging out on the Internet and not dark alleys waiting for someone to come along and mess with her. But she insists. Eventually, he relents after being given her permission to give her “the most thrilling, most exquisitely orgasmic of demises that [her] perverted little heart could ever desire.”

By now, you're probably wondering why Jean/Rapunzel’s subplot was even included at all since her chapters have been completely divorced from the main plot so far. Let me assure you, there is a specific reason why she’s here. And it is really, really dumb.

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Aug 29, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

wiegieman posted:

I'm not even reading the posts anymore and I'm still repelled by what I get secondhand from the posts around them.

Does that have anything to do with how I'm covering it? Or is it just the subject matter is too much?

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

SirPhoebos posted:

If Satanic Panic still had momentum when White Wolf started, I bet that WW would just have doubled down on all the horrific elements.

Yeah, probably. They made a parody of a Chick Tract as part of their advertising campaign for Demon: The Fallen and really seemed to play up the "yeah, you play fallen angels, like :siren:SATAN:siren:. What are you gonna do about it, DAD?:colbert:" aspect.

Hostile V posted:

I mean I personally enjoy your commentary, you give me fun sentences to share with my friends who ask me "what the hell is this from?". But then again my formative internet years were spent reading reviews of lovely fanfiction and writing for entertainment. It's not you, it's the subject matter. It's excessive and gross and hardcore just for the lovely "gently caress YOU DAD, I'M MATURE!" way 90s White Wolf/Black Dog did poo poo. It is also badly and catering to a weird part of the audience like more than half of the people who play Storyteller wouldn't recognize. You're doing the best you can with crap, like with the Witch Girls stuff, except this is just some kinda weird and irredeemable fringe product. That's just my opinion, though. How much of the book is left?

72 pages, divided up into 17 chapters.

wiegieman posted:

It is absolutely the subject matter.

You must have incredible fortitude. :v:

It's gotten to the point where I just shake my head at it all. It's not offensive to me. Just incredibly dumb.

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 10:55 on Aug 29, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Part 8: Perverted Little Peccadilloes

Hours or a day or whatever later, Becca finds out about Francine and rushes home. As you can imagine, the scene is gruesome and she is not in good shape.

quote:

In a voice that suggested he was reading a recipe, the detective continued enumerating the atrocities that had been committed upon Francine's body. Unable to listen any longer, Becca walked out of the room when he was in mid-sentence. She slumped down on the steps, buried her face in her hands, and gave way to sobs so harsh and gut-wrenching they made her ribs ache.

When she looked up again, the Asian detective was sitting beside her, pad and pen in hand. "Only a few questions," he said.

"I have one first," said Becca. "Who called the police?"

"A guy who said he was a neighbor called from a phone outside the Southern Cross. He said his name was Leo, then he hung up. We're checking into it. Now please, I need to ask you, your friend, did she have any enemies?"

Her mind immediately goes to vampires doing it and thinking it was all meant for her. After the questioning is over, the random masturbator from Chapter Seven shows up and asks if she’s looking for the devil… while masturbating. She asks if he’s Leo, then leaves in a hurry when she finds out he isn’t… and is masturbating.

This chapter is one and a half pages long.

Chapter 12. In his church, the Cathedral of the Order of Angels, Emmet is praying. (A cathedral by that name doesn’t exist in D.C. But I have a hunch, based on its description, that it’s based at least in some part on the National Cathedral (and maybe the cathedrals surrounding it), and the thought of using an actual person or replacing them with an expy in a porn book was just too questionable.) He’s found out about Torres’s death and has decided that the best thing to do with the art object that he was interested in is to destroy it. He’s praying that he will not take any pleasure in doing so.

quote:

Finishing his prayer, he stood up and looked around the church's vast interior. Although remodled less than twenty years earlier, the cathedral was a prime example of the revival in medieval architecture that had accompanied the upsurge in violent crime, doomsday cults, and mass suicides that swelled during the same period. Some said that superstition had flourished, too. Where once stained-glass windows had depicted the stations of the cross, now they illustrated sword-wielding angels battling demons. Above the nave, light filtered through a circular window spanned by the unfurling wings of a magnificent male angel.

Outside, of course, angels presided, too. Fierce-eyed warrior angels stood guard at the four corners of the roof; placid bronze angels with folded hands gazed down from above the doors; painted angels with serene smiles, floating against a ceiling of radiant clouds, embellished the gilded spires. Demigods who could be supplicated, believed in, and hoped for by people eager for something more personal than a distant, abstract God.

Emmet had given up believing in angels a long time ago. But he did believe in a certain fundamental goodness in the human spirit that transcended the squalor and desperation of the times. "The angel that resides in each of us," was how he thought of it,

There is a point to all of these mentions of angels, I assure you. Also, I think this is a pretty nice passage.

30 feet below the basement of the church is a series of catacombs which used to be inhabited by the local Nosferatu. The Society turned it into a dungeon/torture/interrogation chamber after they, along with Emmet, drove them out. Only select Society individuals, including Becca, know about it. Except she might not because the wording later makes it a little confusing, at least for me.

quote:

As far as Emmet knew only he, Becca, and a hand-picked few of the Society of Leopold's top epople were even aware that such a labyrinth existed.

quote:

Emmet proceeded down a stairway behind the altar to his basement office. From there, a second, hidden stairway allowed him to descend twenty feet to the first level of the catacombs. The level below this one not even Becca or his assistant Tony knew about.

Or maybe I’m reading it wrong.

Emmet heads down to his basement office clad in his black robes and onyx cross. He has True Faith, so brandishing religious symbols works for him and pretty much catches vampires off guard every time. Unlike most people. His latest “subject”, who he is letting stay in a spare room, is Odette. Tony brought her in. He’s got her chained up in his office since she tries to run off at every opportunity. He tries to feed her, but she insists that he’s just trying to poison her. He calmly tries to talk her down, but she only insists that he’s going to use her to hurt Victoria. He eventually breaks her by mentioning Victoria exploiting her desire to be loved and how her parents (who Odette insists are dead to her and vice versa) must be worried about her.

Then this happens.

quote:

The loose-fitting tunic top that she was wearing had slipped down over one shoulder, revealing the tops of her breasts. A trickle of sweat appeared between her collar bones and wended its way down. He followed it with his eyes, remembering the lump ripeness of those breasts when he had seen them through binoculars the night that he and Becca had spied upon Victoria Ash's apartment. An image came to him, unbidden, as pornographic as anything he'd ever witnessed in his years of spying. He tried to move away from her, but found he lacked the will.

As though reading his mind, or perhaps picking up on the change in his breathing, the girl twisted around and arched her back. Her breast nudged at Emmet's fingers as she murmured in his ear. "But maybe I don't need her to love me anymore. Maybe you can love me instead. Would you do that for me? Don't you want to?"

The first thought when I first read this scene was “Oh God damnit, no…” The last thing this character needs is her trying to take advantage of someone. Thankfully, the notion that old people having sex is gross Emmet’s devotion to God and his duties win out and he pushes her away. He shakes her by the neck, then pulls out a lighter.

quote:

Emmet withdrew a cigarette lighter from his pocket and flicked the flame on and off in her face until her eyes opened.

"Does that frighten you? It should." He moved the lighter toward her mouth, then downward to where the wildly tangled locks of hair fell across her chest. "What if she turns you into what she is?"

He touched the flame tip to Odette's shoulder and drew a scream from her that made all her previous cries seem inconsequential.

"Because this is what's in store for your precious mistress and all the other monsters out there, you understand! And you're going to be one of them! Either dead -- truly dead, if you're lucky -- or undead, like that thing you're being loyal to!"

He burns a lock of her hair to drive the point home and keeps being super intense about it just as Becca unlocks the door and walks in.

quote:

The door opened. Becca stood there, taking it all in, while Odette resumed her screaming. Becca looked as pale as Odette now, the freckles on her nose and forehead stood out like flecks of blood. Her eyes were red-rimmed, swollen from sobbing.

Tonelessly she said, "Francine was murdered last night. I called you, but you didn't answer. I needed you and now I find you--"

Oh yeah, Becca has freckles now, if you care.

She fills him in on the details outside of the room, then chides him for torturing Odette. Emmet tries to justify himself, saying that Odette is a danger to herself and others in her current state, but Becca doesn’t want to hear any of it and demands that he give her the key to the girl’s chains.

quote:

"Becca, we can't let her go yet. She's a danger to us and to herself. You've just had a terrible shock, and you're not thinking clearly."

"Maybe I'm thinking clearly for the first time in years."

"Listen to me."

"No arguments, Dad. I swear I'll call the police. I'll give this whole place up if I have to."

Emmet looked at her as though she'd struck him in the face, then handed over the key.

Becca gives Odette her coat and leads her out. When she returns, Emmet has poured himself a glass of scotch and wants to talk. But Becca still needs to deal with all of the bullshit surrounding Francine’s death.

quote:

She started to sob. Emmet reached to touch her.

"Get away from me! I hate you and I hate the Society of Leopold. The vampires are right -- it is the loving Inquisition. And Francine is dead, and I know it had something to do with this nasty business that we're in. The horrible way that she was killed, whatever did it wasn't human, I'm sure of it."

If she hated all of this so much, why didn’t she stop doing this a long time ago? Why did she even start? There isn’t an explained motivation for why she’s started hunting beyond “Dad does it”. Up to this point, she comes off like she’s just going through the motions to please her father, who she fights with every step of the way.

I would think that Francine’s death would be a great motivator for her to want to get even more involved, not conclude that the Society are the true monsters and want to stop. And if her loved ones getting caught in the crossfire was a concern for her, wouldn’t she have realized that that was a possibility a long while ago? Wouldn’t Emmet have told her that? That’s kind of a no-brainer thing when you’re dealing with powerful immortal monsters with questionable moral codes.

Anyway, Becca goes all “no you shut the gently caress up dad” on him, saying that there’s no way he knows what she’s going through. He tells her that that’s not true, and that there is something that he never wanted to tell her that he wants to tell her now: the reason why he got into vampire hunting.

quote:

She looked at him sadly. "All right. I'll listen. But right now all I know is that both of us are doing something terribly wrong. I think the punishment has already started."

She rolls over real quick for someone fighting the supposed agents of Satan. I don’t think she would have made a good lawyer if she did go to study law.

Also, you just let someone go back to their abuser to prove a point. Good job.

Elsewhere, in Chapter 13, Erasmus Bonhomme is in the middle of his shift as a night watchman in a psychiatric facility. You remember him, right? He was the Nosferatu from way back in Chapter Two who helped Lucita get out of the sewers. Like Jean, there is a specific reason for his presence, I assure you.

quote:

Intermittently he read from a small pocket volume of untranslated Proust, pausing every few paragraphs to contemplate a passage.

I like to think that he’s reading all of In Search of Lost Time very very slowly.

quote:

His large, knobby hands rested on a gelatinous belly that lolled over the waistband of his trousers in flabby folds. A gray-black beard and mustache concealed some of his facial deformities. A wig helped hide the peculiar, half-inch high ridge of bone that jutted up along the center of his skull like a crested dinosaur. Nothing could improve the appearance of his eyes, however, which were like flat, reddish scabs imbedded in sockets of loamy, pitted flesh. Still he felt content tonight, even buoyant.

Why is he happy? A woman named Valerie Chase has readmitted herself into the facility. When her husband died, Erasmus visited her at night, causing her to suffer a mental breakdown and admit herself the first time. Considering this is a porn book, you can probably guess why.

He goes into her room and molests her. Have a picture.

:nws:http://imgur.com/M7x9Jwf:nws:

Still doesn’t quite match what I see in my head when I read his descriptions…

quote:

Valerie Chase drew a deep breath. "No, not you. It can't be you. You aren't real."

"Of course I'm real," whispered the Nosferatu. He took her hand and pressed it to his face, his meaty chest, then further down. "My head is real, my body's real, my dick, as you can feel yourself, is hard and very, very real."

That took effort on his part.

Valerie insists that he and the other person in the room are just hallucinations, just as her doctors and family said he was, and that they will be gone when she wakes up in the morning.

Lucita has broken into the hospital and accidentally on purpose twists Valerie’s neck, disabling her. She internally quells the Beast, feeds from Valerie to put her out of her misery, then demands information from him. As they leave, the drugs from Valerie’s system kicks in and doesn’t really affect Lucita much besides making her slightly lightheaded. Erasmus is annoyed because now there’s going to be an investigation into Valerie’s death, which might cause him to lose his “job”.

quote:

"That woman was my hobby," he pouted. "I drove her straight down the road to paranoid schizophrenia. I had plans for her -- a life as a catatonic vegetable. Mon petit chou, as the French would say. My little cabbage. Now you've ruined her."

Lucita eyed the Nosferatu with scorn. "gently caress your perverted little peccadilloes. Where can we talk that we won't be interrupted?"

That’s such a weird phrase, “perverted little peccadilloes”… Also, did none of his clanmates tell him that sex dolls are a thing you can buy on the Internet? Amazon was around in ’99.

Erasmus suggests that they talk in the basement where the hospital keeps all of the old equipment that you would expect to be in a stereotypical mental hospital: straightjackets, electroshock machines, and the like. Erasmus likens it to an “S&M boutique” because this is a porn book.

quote:

Fingering one of the straitjackets, Lucita had an image of a captive, struggling prey, and smiled despite herself.

Lucita has somehow figured out that Sascha was the one who attacked her and is the possible culprit behind Senator Rosenthal’s freak-out. She wants Erasmus to tell her what it's doing in D.C.

quote:

"It was like somebody had hosed their way into her head and stolen her soul."

Of course it was.

Erasmus thinks that Sascha is trying to break down the masquerade and start a war between vampires and humans. When the numbers issue is pointed out, he elaborates that Sascha might be operating on the assumption that humans are naturally inclined to be servants and, with some trickery, they can be made to do anything. (So it’s not really a war more than it is an open attempt to enslave humanity… Also, this isn’t really the M.O. of the Sabbat. So who knows why Sascha wants to do this.) When asked about its whereabouts, Erasmus can’t give her an answer. But he does point out that Sascha has a long standing hatred of Jan Pieterzoon, and there’s very little chance that Sascha left him alone. Jan has three havens, one normal and two decoys, in the D.C. area. Erasmus suggests that the real one would be a good place to look.

Why she didn’t think of finding his haven and looking there before is never said.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Part 9: How Do Disciplines Work?

At the start of Chapter 14, Victoria is having herself a nice little outing to a place called Club Osiris.

quote:

As she glided past, Victoria Ash surveyed the crowd with cold, knowing eyes, ignoring the gawkers who recognized her as a singing star, but acknowledging those few whom she might wish to know with a gaze held slightly longer than normal. Inevitably these objects of her interest either grew wide-eyed with abject enthrallment or shrank subtly away, as though struck by a whiff of disease. For the most part, though, where she passed, only whispers and longing stares followed. One thing was assured -- that she would pass through the gilded doors of the Club Osiris with no waiting in line and no questions.

And amazingly, there is absolutely no paparazzi following her.

The club is your basic gothpunk 2edgy4you club that are probably a dime a dozen in oWoD, but with a slightly “sexy” twist.

quote:

Inside, the multilevel club was adorned with steel sculptures of gigantic, plated insects and bizarre, twisted trees whose emaciated branches bore foliage of sculpted hands and feet. Steel sheeting covered the tables, bars, and light fixtures, while the bartender and waitstaff, unusually comely specimens all, wore steel armbands and high, chokingly tight steel collars over their black spandex uniforms. The clientele crowded around the bar, where drink menus listed forty-six different kinds of martinis and the glittering array of bottles was bookended by vending machines offering Cuban and other imported cigars. The air stung with smoke and pulsed with the rhythm of hypnotic acid jazz.

The crowd shuffled aside to accommodate Victoria as she made her way to the bar.

Everyone in the club is high as a kite. This is an issue for Victoria, since the club offers blood dolls for its kindred clients, and those blood dolls are also high as a kite, and she doesn’t want to drink from an intoxicated person. (Though it’s mentioned she does make an exception for coke users.) So she settles on an old stand-by: Reiko, the daughter of a Japanese embassy official and former blood doll for a Kuei-Jin Osiris cult based in Shinjuku. Unfortunately, her key is not with the bartender, so Victoria goes upstairs to the “kissing floor” to find her herself.

quote:

It was in one of the grottoes that she found Reiko, half-naked in the arms of a dark-skinned, leather-clad brute whose mouth was clamped to her slender throat even as his hand roved over her white, dark-tipped breasts. His long greasy hair was tied back in a ponytail. His jeans were unzipped and tugged down, revealing the tops of white, well-muscled buttocks. Despite the heated nature of the work he was engaged in, he'd kept on a bulky aviator jacket that made his broad upper body look even more imposing. His rough appearance and crude style of copulating -- bothering only to unzip his fly and take his dick out -- aroused Victoria. Although she didn't know Reiko's despoiler, she took him for a neonate of Clan Brujah, a ruffian of the most violent, criminal ilk. In her view, the Brujah were a squalid lot, given to such primitive behaviors as home invasions and gangbanging. She was annoyed, but also frankly titillated...

The “neonate” tells her to piss off. Victoria does the whole “do you know who I am?” celebrity bullshit. They snip at each other until Victoria demands that he get Reiko dressed so that the three of them can go somewhere more private.

quote:

"You look like a bitch who wants a helluva lot."

She smiled. "Indeed I do. And you look like you can deliver it."

I want. Those simple words had summed up her life and now summed up her unlife. I want. With what terror she looked forward to the time when all her wants would have been satisfied, when there'd be nothing left, no drug-laced blood, no celebrity ego trip, no debauchery degraded enough to arouse in her the faded echo of what it had been like to live.

Considering the paparazzi seem to give no shits about her, I don't think she's as famous as she thinks she is.

The three head back to Victoria’s apartment with little incident (other than some mention of Gangrel coteries bullying the DCPD into submission over the previous months) and get down to work making the sex. During which we learn that Victoria apparently has a knack for picking up Asian diabetics.

quote:

She and the Brujah took turns sucking at the puncture wounds on Reiko's neck. Her blood was thick and flavorful, almost drug-free and faintly sweet, a taste Victoria thought must be peculiar to the blood of Asians, for she had seldom tasted it from whites and blacks.

Want a picture? Of course you don’t. But you’re getting one anyway.

:nws:http://imgur.com/l1oiCdP:nws:

William and Odette are both in the room, and sometime during their make-out session, Odette starts screaming her head off.

quote:

She was still gazing down at Reiko's lovely face, devouring her exotic beauty with rapt fascination when she finally became aware that Odette was shrieking and speaking in tongues.

"Be quiet!" ordered Victoria, but the bizarre babbling only intensified. Odette was on her feet now, pointing at the Brujah.

With eyes scrunched tight, making what seemed to be a violent effort of will, she cried out, "It's him! It's him! His name's Tony! That's the one who grabbed me and took me to the Inquisitioners' loving dungeon!"

Jarred out of her self-induced erotic trance, Victoria heard it then -- the beating of the "Brujah's" heart. Stupid! Too preoccupied to have read his aura!

Yes, in the hour or so that she was with him, and in close proximity to him, Victoria never once noticed that the guy she was with was human. Either Tony has some sort of special ability or she was a special kind of distracted. (If you care about the numbers aspect of this, her character sheet from the revised Toreador clanbook says that she has Perception 5 and Alertness 3. She probably would have rolled a success or two.)

A fight breaks out, and Tony manages to get a shot in on Victoria before William strangles him to death with the chain that he’s tied to. This almost sends Victoria into a frenzy, but frenzying isn’t sexy so she uses her worries of losing her singing fame to force the Beast down. Since she worries that would make her lose the ability to infuse her singing with real emotions. She screams at Odette and William to get rid of the body and take Reiko back to the club. She then puts on a long coat and says that she’s going somewhere safe where she can heal, worried that someone heard the gunshot and called the cops.

Back with Emmet in Chapter 15; he’s in his upstairs office trying to write the sermon in which he explains why he is stepping down from his position in the church and running for mayor. He’s scheduled it for Sunday night, which he realizes is a bad idea, but is doing it anyway because it will allow for a dramatic confrontation to take place at the climax of the book.

He finally admits to himself that he tortures vampires because he gets pleasure out of it, and that Becca was right all along. He vows to stop drinking as well, since the habit has caused his sixth sense for ferreting out vampires to weaken.

It turns out the reason why he had gotten into vampire hunting, and the thing he told Becca, was that her mother had been killed by a vampire. He hoped that by telling her, it would make her hate them as much as he did. Why he didn’t tell her this from the very start is beyond me. Since it probably would have made her actually be on board with the whole thing from the start.

While he’s writing, the cops call him about Tony’s death. That destroys his resolve to continue his new found sobriety.

quote:

When the phone call ended, he sat for a long moment with his head in his hands. He felt sledgehammered, knowing he should do something, but feeling too weak and powerless even to get out of his chair.

It was the scotch, whispering to him from the basement, that finally got him moving. A drink wouldn't do it now. He needed the whole bottle and he wasted no time in descending to his office to start medicating himself after this latest tragedy.

Unfortunately, Sascha is waiting for him down there, and it’s Vicissitude’d itself some more edgy features.

quote:

Its voice was a raspy, reptilian whisper, its eyes hooded and languid, the pupils flecked with what looked like tiny, overlapping scales. Around it hung a glittering aura of icy fog, as though it had just stepped from inside a meatlocker. The talons of its hands clicked hollowly on Vargas's desk. Rows of larger talons descended its pale, plated belly and sprouted on either side of its grotesque, exposed genitals.

And now, the picture I'm sure you've all been eagerly waiting for: A full frontal color shot of Sascha Vykos.

:nws:http://imgur.com/twjBRfc:nws:

Like I said, “bejeweled dick goblin”.

quote:

Emmet watched as the thing-from-hell rose to its full height and emitted a low, rank-smelling belch of fetid air. Then slowly, with the torpidity of a sated slug, it glided toward him.

What’s with the burping? Does Vicissitude give you gas? Is Sascha just being gross for the sake of being gross?

Emmet tries to ward Sascha off with his cross, but it doesn’t work.

quote:

"There was a time I might even have been impressed. Why do you think I waited this long to find you, Emmet? I wasn't waiting to destroy you. I was waiting for you to destroy yourself. And you've done a pretty good job of that, I'd say. You've made the transition from piety to perversion with commendable dispatch."

Emmet is literally almost scared shitless. He backs up toward the statue of an onyx angel as he continues to hold the cross out. Sascha leisurely strolls towards him, taunting him.

quote:

"If you think your angels will save you," said Vykos, in that sweet, sighing voice that was infused with both debauchery and surrender, "then why are you trembling like a cow going into the slaughterhouse? Is it because you know you're not the same man who built this church? Is it because you know you're farther from the angels these nights, and closer to me?"

Vargas's voice became a strangled chant. "Angels protect me. Angels watch over me. I am protected, protected, pro--"

I have stairs in my church. I have stairs in my church. …Sorry.

quote:

As the thing slunk slowly, furtively toward him, he realized it was also hypnotizing him. Its appearance, although ghastly, was also spellbinding. Its fluid, undulating gait, like wine poured from a poisoned chalice, was also mesmerizing. Like watching a torture victim writhe in agony, it was a sight so numbingly hideous as to preclude looking away.

And perhaps the thing could read his mind, because it smiled at that last thought, saying in its raspy lisp. "Ah, yes, you've acquired some interesting tastes over the years, haven't you, Emmet? Until your second wife was killed, you thought loving was the greatest possible pleasure. Until you discovered torture..."

Emmet pulls the statue’s wing down with a scream, revealing a hidden staircase down into the catacombs, and manages to close the door before Sascha can follow him. He continues down it long after hearing silence.

quote:

To his left branched a corridor so narrow it could only accommodate the passage of a single person of average build. At its end, a blue light reflected feebly and there was the barest suggestion of motion, a pale form floating or hovering. He could hear the burble and cascade of water descending over stone, peaceful and almost musical.

At that point, he can hear the statue toppling over from above, and continues onward. Blindly, as he doesn’t have the entire catacombs memorized.

quote:

For a moment his heart stuttered raggedly and he had a wild hope -- that it would fail before the thing got to him. He clutched his chest.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Halloween Jack posted:

I went into so much detail on all those powers that I'm reading through from page 185 now, so I gotta gird my loins for this.

Is this that fiction compilation they put out where they had an excerpt on their webpage, and it was a story about Lucita making a guy commit necrophila before she'd let him have sex with her?

It's just a single story, yes, and it's Isabel Giovanni. And she is only in the book just for that scene.

Kavak posted:

Eternal Farts'

Ehehehehe.

Kavak posted:

Also, I thought Vykos was an it because they turned themselves into a neuter. Shouldn't the book be using "him" if it's given him a penis?

I think it's several parts White Wolf wanting to be edgy, the fact that this was written in the 90s, and the fact that everyone in the setting, Sascha included, doesn't really see them as anything resembling a human anymore. Also, what Halloween Jack said.

I'm just using "it" because that's what the book uses.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Part 10: “Cowardly, Dishonest Rot”

In Chapter 16, Lucita has found Jan’s real haven. Multiple paragraphs in the chapter are dedicated to describing it.

quote:

Tall hedges set against a high, wrought-iron fence surrounded the Tudor-style mansion that had once been home to a visiting dignitary from France. Lighted fountains illuminated the home's ivied facade and the gleaming luxury cars parked in the circular drive -- a gleaming Bentley, a silver Rolls Royce, a dark blue, late-model Mercedes.

[…]

Its interior opulence remind her of certain rooms in London's Victoria and Albert Museum, or the most grand and gilded of French chateaux. Exquisitely carved wood paneling along walls hung with medieval tapestries; ornately designed chairs cushioned with velvet; a curving marble staircase displaying banisters embellished with gleaming mahogany falcons. On the second floor, Pieterzoon's bent toward furnishing his home with museum-quality art was still more in evidence. A huge painting that Lucita recognized as Delacroix's Rape of the Sabines hung at the top of the stairs. Voluptuous nude women helpless to fend off the assault of enemy soldiers. Other, less familiar, paintings depicted lascivious-eyed satyrs molesting willowy nymphs, a leering centaur galloping away with a captive maiden on his back.

Jan, like a lot of people in this book, has a rape fetish. Rape victims are the only people he can feed on, as per his clan (Ventrue) weakness.

He even keeps people chained up in his bedroom.

quote:

Other, less refined evidence of Pieterzoon's erotic predilections could be found in the enormous master bedroom: wooden stocks like those used on miscreants in Colonial America, a leather horse of the type used by gymnasts for vaulting -- this one complete with leather manacles for the wrists and ankles of the person bending over -- a plush-lined, slide-out bed equipped with manacles beneath the larger one -- presumably for the convenient storing away of slaves after a hard night's play.

Honestly, the entire description of Jan’s house is just… a thing.

quote:

A leather riding crop and red leather rose formed an "X" in the middle of the bedspread.

Jan Pieterzoon: Christian Grey before Christian Grey was a blast of current across Stephenie Meyer’s unconscious mind.

Lucita can’t find anything unusual beyond the sex equipment, but can’t shake off the feeling that she should be on her guard. As she searches, a ghoul comes out of one of the bedrooms she investigated.

quote:

A bolt of saffron-colored silk wrapped her torso; silk scarves draped her arms and hung down, concealing her hands. Thick makeup masked her features, lips lined with black and painted scarlet, eyes outlined red against a heavy fringe of lashes.

The ghoul doesn’t know where Jan is, but says that she can probably help Lucita find him…

…by killing her!

quote:

Suddenly the silks fell away. An arm holding a snake flashed out and slashed at Lucita's neck. Another arm, another serpent snapping at her eyes. Then another and another. The woman's arms, four fleshcrafted monstrosities, didn't hold the snakes, they were snakes. From the shoulders down the first pair undulated; a second pair emerged from her lower ribs. Where her hands should have been, hissed fanged heads.

[...]

The ghoul screeched and let the last silk draping fall away. There were snakes embedded in her ghastly skin; they crawled and rippled in the flesh of her ribcage. Snakes dangled from her genitals and anus, writhed to life in the matted snarls of hair between her thighs.

Have a picture.

:nws:http://imgur.com/DC6G9DO:nws:

They fight. Lucita wins. The book doesn’t mention it, but Lucita apparently also takes her clothes off, drinks from the ghoul, then drools and smears the blood all over her tits and stomach. As you do.

:nws:http://imgur.com/0qLla59:nws:

Knowing that all of this is Vykos’s doing, Lucita beats feet, fighting a couple more ghouls along the way. Eventually, she gets to the foyer, and almost accidentally cuts Victoria’s head off. There’s a picture of Victoria posing on the steps.

:nws:http://imgur.com/7onznyH:nws:

This scene, by the way, specifically mentions that Victoria’s hair is red.

quote:

It was too late to abort her strike -- she could only add a wrist-flick to the final motion that redirected the blade a few millimeters off-target so that it hissed harmlessly through the tangled red tresses of Victoria Ash.

Also, the gunshot wound that she got from Tony (on her abdomen) is completely missing. But that’s because this is a porn book and gunshot wounds are not sexy if you don’t have some weird specific fetish. That and fast regeneration, I guess.

Victoria says that she came there to rest after the encounter with Tony because she assumed she would be safe. When Lucita asks her how she got in without tripping the security system, she says that she kicked in a door panel like Lucita did. Lucita calls her on her bluff, saying that she must have had the code to the system. Victoria whimpers some more about Gehenna and the Masquerade breaking. Lucita tells her to shut the gently caress up and help her protect it by telling her all that she knows.

Victoria asks if she knows about Jan’s fetish. She does.

quote:

"He claims that when he takes the blood of rape victims, he can vicariously relive the surge of sadistic power that the rapists felt. Sometimes he can even see images. I asked him once why he doesn't just rape the women himself, but that would prey on his conscience too much. When he fucks them, he does it consensually. He's a strange man, Pieterzoon. There are moments he likes to fancy he's still human. Like the rest of your Camarilla Kindred, I suppose."

It turns out Jan met a woman at that embassy party, fell in love/lust at first sight, and wanted to turn her. (He knows that she was raped at some point. My question is how did he figure that out? Does Becca just go around announcing that she was raped? Does Pieterzoon probe peoples’ minds? Does he ask around and get screamed at until he hits pay dirt? Does he Dominate ask?) He left the party with her, telling Victoria that they were going to the Cathedral of the Holy Order of Angels. The woman had a fantasy of loving him in the catacombs that only the Society of Leopold and the Nosferatu are supposed to know about, you see. Victoria told him it sounded like a set-up and he was being a loving idiot. She hasn’t seen him since.

By the way, during all this, it’s mentioned that Lucita can hear the rest of Sascha’s fleshcrafted hellspawn army running around on the upper floors. I guess neither of them are concerned with that when they were having that conversation.

Also, say goodbye to Victoria. She has fulfilled her purpose in the plot. Want to know what happens to Odette? Well, too bad.

We’re back with Rapunzel in Chapter 17. She’s still digging and still reliving her online chats with Dracon.

Dracon says that he’s going to meet her in a churchyard, and what he’s gonna do is gonna hurt, but it’s gonna be orgasmic and awesome and the tits. She says she’s not frightened, but Dracon doesn’t believe her. He also doesn’t believe that she is a bored housewife. She insists that if she were lying, she would have described herself as someone sexier. But Dracon points out that that’s so she sounds more believable, and insists that she tell the truth because he’s going to find out anyway.

quote:

And so, amazingly, she had described herself -- coolly and dispassionately, unforgiving of her defects while not too modest to point out her assets, too -- the exotic black and green tattoos encircling her breasts; the lustrous, long platinum-blonde hair she'd once had and which men had always told her was her finest feature.

[Rapunzel] My long hair, it's my favorite sex toy.

[Dracon] It sounds beautiful. Exotic.

[Rapunzel] Oh, it is. Except it's not attached to my head anymore. I shaved it off.

[Dracon] Your long blond hair? All of it?

[Rapunzel] I'm bald.

[Dracon] Fresh out of chemo, is that the look?

[Rapunzel] Oh, but I still have the hair. I braided it and hung it from the headboard of my bed. It's long and glossy and it feels like silk. Like silken rope.

[Dracon] Ahh, I think I'm getting the idea.

[Rapunzel] It feels so good around my neck. Like a long, delicate scarf, but so strong.

[Dracon] And is it long enough to loop around your neck twice?

[Rapunzel] Three times. I told you it was very long. Before I cut it off, I had a lover who used to gather it up in his fist and wind it around my neck. Loosely at first, but then he'd tighten it. At first it hurt, but then --

[Dracon] Then you loved it. It felt like sinking into a blissful dream. Like floating away on a sea of sensuality.

[Rapunzel] How did you know?

[Dracon] You won't be the first person I've choked back and forth along the brink of consciousness.

And that’s why she calls herself ‘Rapunzel’ online. I’m sure you all feel sufficiently enlightened now.

Dracon talks more about what he plans to do, saying that he’s going to bring in people to help. She says that she should have a say in her own death, but he insists that she should trust him because he’s the “artist”. He insists again that this isn’t a game and that she needs to say so if this is just a fantasy for her. But she’s deadset on going through with it.

Becca heads home for the night in Chapter 18, faced with the task of cleaning up her entire bedroom, sans Francine’s corpse, because the cops weren’t getting paid to clean it up. She laments and reflects, exhaustedly, on her situation and what her father told her.

quote:

"I would have left the Church altogether," he'd told her, "but being a minister was too good a cover-up, too close to people in positions of authority who might know something. I used all that pain of losing your mother to find energy to fight them. You have to do that, too. For Francine."

But she had no energy. Grief had drained her of it as thoroughly as the exsanguinating bastards had emptied Francine's corpse of blood.

Unbeknownst to her, the chronic masturbator has snuck into her house. She kicks him in the face and asks him why the gently caress he’s there.

quote:

He cringed and got to his knees. He wore a beige vest of the type favored by hunters, and his long blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. Tears gathered in his eyes.

"Your girlfriend died."

She nodded grimly. "Who the hell are you? What do you know about Francine?"

"She was a nice woman. She used to leave food for the Devil, but I'd eat it instead. One time she tried to take me to a shelter, but Leo didn't like it, so we left."

That detail about the vest sounds like it’s a bit of foreshadowing. But it’s not.

He says that Leo lives in the park and that that was who Becca met the other day. Whoever this is came to tell her he was sorry for what Leo did the other day.

As she assumes, the man has Dissociative Identity Disorder. The personality she’s speaking to calls himself Moss. When she asks him if he saw anything the night Francine was murdered, his mood becomes dark.

quote:

"I won't talk to the cops. I don't care what you do. I don't talk to cops. They hurt Leo 'cause he lives in the park, 'cause he shits on the street and 'cause he plays with himself where people can see him."

With some coaxing, Moss says that Leo saw a man in the park that night. He thought he wanted to pay for sex, so he offered. When Becca asks what the man looked like, Moss produces a well-drawn picture of a familiar face.

No, the chronic masturbator isn’t Caine or anything interesting like that. He’s just there to point Becca towards David.

A scene change later, Becca is traveling down into the cathedral’s second level of catacombs, a place that Emmet never encouraged her to go or forbid her but she’s interested in seeing what goes on down there, but then again she’s not because that won’t make her guilty.

quote:

What cowardly, dishonest rot!

After talking to Moss, Becca called Harmony on the Hills and learned of David’s escape, got her dad’s answering machine when calling him about it, and found the signs of the struggle between him and Sascha when she went into his office.

So against her best judgment, she’s gone into the catacombs. Eventually, she finds Emmet chained up in one of the prison cells along the walls, scratched the gently caress up and covered in his own blood. He begs her to leave, saying that there’s no way he’s getting out since “it’s” got the key and he broke his ankle trying to run. She insists that she can go get help, but he’s not hearing any of it.

quote:

"Becca, listen to me." Despite his injuries, his voice exuded power, command. She hadn't heard him sound like that in years, not even when he addressed the congregation. The old Emmet, before the madness started.

"You can help me and you will. But it's going to be difficult."

"Anything, Dad. Just tell me."

He tells her to bring him a knife that’s hidden in one of the skulls embedded in the walls nearby. He wants her to stab him in the heart with it. She refuses and says that she’s going to get help.

quote:

"It'll be too late. Don't you understand -- in only a short time, the church will be packed with people. You were right -- I was an idiot to plan a nighttime service, to use myself as bait. If it hadn't had some further use for me, it wouldn't have left me alive. And if that's the case then I -- and all of us -- are better off if I'm dead."

Becca still refuses and says she’s going to get help. Before she hands him her flashlight (she can somehow find her way around without it) and leaves, she tells him that David was in her house when Francine was murdered and she thinks he killed her. Emmet doesn’t believe her, but she tells him they’ll discuss it later.

After a while, she comes across a strange light.

quote:

Then, off to her right, she saw an extremely narrow branch of corridor, at the end of which a pale blue light flickered wanly. Something about the light proved irresistible, and Becca moved toward it.

Quick Question: You are a vampire hunter. You have just captured a vampire and need to store him somewhere without killing him. What do you do?

If you answered “throw him in a giant fish tank full of water and let him float sexily in it”, then congratulations. You have the same weird mindset as Emmet.

quote:

She found herself in a room, at one end of which there appeared to be, incongruously enough, a huge television. Against a deep blue backdrop appeared the image of an alabaster figure, so pale and perfectly sculpted that it might have been Michelangelo's David. Even in the dim lighting, she could tell the figure was that of a male and that its proportions and musculature were exquisitely formed.

There had been a few occasions in Becca's life, notably at the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery of the Arts, when the beauty of a work of art had overwhelmed her, but never had she found herself so captivated by the sheer aesthetic perfection of an image, especially one she was unable to see completely clearly. She could only think that her mind, in turmoil with guilt and grief, was somehow more susceptible to distraction and that the limpid image on the screen, which surely she thought now must be an angel, offered a soothing visual oasis.

She eventually realizes that she’s looking at an actual person, and becomes aroused.

quote:

An angel, yes, but a man, too, for now as her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw the fleshy swaying of his heavy genitals. Male beauty never had greatly moved her -- it was usually the female form that made her blood rush and her vulva moisten -- but now she felt an unfamiliar, almost mortifying stirring of physical response.

She also realizes that the “TV’ is actually a fish tank, and that the sight of the man brings back some unwanted memories, despite the fact that she’s almost compelled to look at him.

quote:

With a sudden pang of horror, she saw herself running through the alleyway behind the church, running till the cold air hitched in her throat, then hurling herself through a doorway that led down to these very catacombs. Hearing his footfalls on the stairs behind her as she hid, waiting for him to come closer.

Come on, come on, you bastard, get a little closer. Come see what my father's got planned for you.

I thought he had consented to going down there… Oh whatever.

Yes, she’s looking at Jan Pieterzoon. Though her father didn’t actually tell her that he was going to put him on display in a fish tank. Was he seriously going to try to sell this to Torres as an art piece?

quote:

The thing that floated in the tank opened its heavy-lidded eyes and fixed her with a languid, knowing stare. Its full lips parted seductively.

He's drowning, I've got to save him," a part of Becca's mind though wildly, even as another part acknowledged the absurdity of that idea. What floated in the tank couldn't drown -- it was already dead -- and certainly, as her father would attest, it merited no "saving".

And yet, she tries to get him out anyway. As she works to get the pile of stones keeping the lid of the tank on off, Jan floats around to look at her, his arms open and his genitals hard. Before she started doing this, she had bit her hand for some reason. Blood from the wound gets on the side of the tank and sends Pieterzoon into a frenzy.

quote:

The reaction from the beautiful, drowned man was immediate and terrifying. His body stiffened so that the muscles of his neck corded and quivered. The languid blue eyes bulged froggishly and filled with hate. A wild energy pulsed through him. He gave a silent snarl and let Becca see his fangs.

The transformation from seductive capture to blood-hungry beast did more to snap her free of the enchantment than if she'd run a screwdriver through her wrist. She screamed and leaped to the floor, fleeing back in the direction she had come, convinced that, at any moment, the smell and sight of blood would renew his strength sufficiently to allow him to break the glass and follow.

She leaves the room and slams the door just as Pieterzoon tries impotently to lick the blood off the glass. When she reaches the door leading to the outside, someone grabs her from behind.

quote:

"Who'd have thought it?" said a familiar voice. "You finally get turned on by someone of the opposite gender, and he turns out to be a dead guy."

Didn't the book make a somewhat big to-do about how she's bisexual near the start?

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Aug 31, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Part 11: The Bad Guys Win

At the start of Chapter 19, we learn that it’s David who grabbed Becca. He acts like the creeper that he is while she tries to tell him that Emmet is hurt and needs help.

quote:

"Can't do that, Sis. Too bad about the old man, though. Guess the excitement of launching a political career from the pulpit in the same week his dyke daughter-in-law gets her head cut off was too much for him."

She slams her boot’s heel into his knee and foot, forcing him to turn her loose. He, in turn, punches her in the head.

quote:

Her skull seemed to shatter into fragments like a crystal chandelier. Fiery confetti raged across her vision. Slowly she slumped to the floor. She saw David standing over her, silhouetted in a blazing pyrotechnical display.

This knocks her unconscious.

She wakes up later in one of the catacomb’s cells just as David comes back with their unconscious father over his shoulder. He tells her that he and an unknown party have plans for him. She once more implores him to get their dad to a hospital. He whines about how everyone treats him badly.

quote:

"You just don't get it, do you? You never have." He dumped the old man unceremoniously onto the floor. Becca winced and shut her eyes. David said, "He's had this coming for a long time, the sanctimonious old prick."

"He's our father."

"He's a used-up old piece of meat," said David. "I've taken his poo poo all these years. I've bowed and scraped--"

"--You've done nothing of the kind. He adored you."

If you haven’t noticed, they don’t really show much of how Emmet “adores” his shitbag strawman of a son. It’s all telling, not showing.

quote:

"--Nothing I ever did was good enough, nothing satisfied him."

"That isn't true."

"But I understand why he thought I was a gently caress-up. It was because of all the crap you fed him all these years. Don't look at me like that. You're worse than he is. You poisoned him against me. God only knows what lies you told him about me."

"You mean like how you raped me?"

"You loving bitch! I never raped you. You seduced me. You practically begged me to come to your room and gently caress your brains out." He began to pace, gesticulating wildly. "See, this is what I mean. Your malicious lies have ruined everything. Destroyed my life. Kept me down. That's why there's got to be some punishment, some long-overdue justice meted out.”

If the circumstances hadn't been so ghastly, she might have laughed hysterically. To think that David actually believed she'd been a co-conspirator in her own rape,

She asks him if he killed Francine. He denies it, but she doesn’t believe him. She then asks him, almost nonchalantly, when he’s going to kill her. He says he’ll do it when he’s good and ready and isn’t going to tell her. Then, he randomly shocks her with a stun gun he found in Emmet’s store of vampire-hunting equipment. When she comes to, he’s cutting her clothes off. She mentions Pieterzoon and how he’ll kill both of them once he gets loose, but David’s not worried. She kicks him. He punches her.

Then he rapes her as something moves in the shadows.

quote:

When the shadows coalesced into their final form, however, she found the strength to scream.

Chapter 20. Lucita kicks David off of Becca and demands to know where Pieterzoon is. Becca manages to get out a groggy answer about him being around there somewhere before Lucita licks her face and drinks from her “sexily”. While she’s distracted, David manages to get Lucita with the stun gun. There’s a picture for this. Even though I think it's meant for something that didn't happen now.

:nws:http://imgur.com/JRBKWLZ:nws:

Eh, I’ve seen bigger. Also, what the hell did Bolton use as a model for David’s face? It looks he’s wearing a mask.

David looks like that, if this book was written nowadays, he would be going on about how he’s the “Supreme Gentleman” while piercing his lips for his camera phone every few seconds.

Lucita and the Evil Ken Doll fight some more. (She manages to get him in the dick with the stun gun. Oww.) Then Sascha comes out of nowhere and slams a stake through Lucita’s heart, paralyzing her.

quote:

Vykos smiled and patted David's cheek. "You've been tortured, so now you want to be a torturer. I love seeing that transition in a mortal. It bodes well for your potential as something more."

Sascha kisses Lucita and tells her that it’s going to bring her an eternity of suffering by leaving her drained enough that she’s crazy with hunger, but not enough to kill her. (Being in torpor doesn’t affect one’s hearing. So that isn’t a pointless move.)

quote:

It turned to David, who stood watching, spellbound with awe and terror. "Torture is an art. If you're good, I might let you practice on your sister later on."

His presence is torture enough. He doesn’t need training.

At the start of Chapter 21, Rapunzel is still trying to dig her way out of her grave and still thinking about her chat conversations with Dracon. Apparently, she originally went along with it to get back at Senator McNamarra… somehow.

quote:

When had she decided to make it real? To actually let Dracon go through with it? When had sex and death become so united in her mind that not to experience both together seemed a tragic lack? She wasn't doing this to punish Gil McNamara anymore, she told herself, or because some sick part of her craved annihilation. She was doing this because she wanted to experience everything.

Dracon tells her to meet him in the garden of an unnamed cathedral. While he wants to fucks her, he also wants to get back at someone. Kill two birds with one stone, I guess.

quote:

[Dracon] Later I'll take you somewhere else, of course. But I'd like us to meet at this particular location. It's special to me. An old acquaintance of mind, an arrogant old fool, presides there. To defile the ground that he considers sacred would be quite satisfying.

[...]

[Rapunzel] While you gently caress me every way you possibly can.

[Dracon] Certainly. Sex acts you can't even imagine. I'll give new meaning to the expression 'to gently caress your brains out."

At this point, Rapunzel finally reaches the surface and pulls herself out of her grave. She finds herself somewhere east of the Washington Monument, and decides to look for the church spires she remembered. But not before finally getting a look at herself.

quote:

A sickle moon slid gleaming out of the clouds, providing just enough light for her to look down and see the ghastly changes in her body. The sight wrung screams from her and short-circuited what was left of her mind. All that remained was the obsession that had driven her from one lover to the next throughout her life.

In life, obsession had ruled her. In death, more so.

She barely could remember who Gil McNamarra was, but she remembered well the man who'd had her tortured and buried.

He was her real lover, her unholy prince. And she was going to find him.

Meanwhile, David tries to find his way around the catacombs. He’s frustrated at the thought of Becca both being alive and watching her die for some twisted reason. We also learn that he’s made an agreement with Sascha.

quote:

Even more importantly, he had his arrangement with Vykos. Eternal life, eternal youth and beauty. And, afterward, if his poo poo was on the devil's cock -- and it already was -- then so be it.

I think Satan has a bit more self-respect than that.

Eventually, he comes across Emmet. (I don’t know if he moved Becca somewhere else before he raped her or Taylor just somehow lost track of the fact that he brought Emmet to her earlier.) Emmet is relieved to see his son, but David just gets all pissy with him.

quote:

"Why, look, imagine running into the old paterfamilias, the esteemed Reverend Vargas, candidate for mayor, a prisoner in his own dungeon! Becca mentioned seeing you. I know how much you depend on her, but unfortunately, she's in no condition right now to be of any help."

"What are you talking about? Where is she? What's happened?"

"Ah, as usual all your concern is for her, Dad. None for me. But that's all right. I'm used to it."

"David, listen--"

"No, you listen to me!" Raw hatred rent his features. Emmet found himself cringing, stunned by the display. "In a few minutes, when the pews are full, Vykos is going to drag you back upstairs to address the faithful. And don't go all noble and tell me you won't cooperate, because believe me, Dad, you'll do what it tells you to. I know, I've been there."

Emmet asks where Becca is again. David says she doesn’t matter and will probably be dead soon, if she isn’t already. Emmet then begs him to tell him that he had nothing to do with Francine’s death. He says he didn’t, but he did gently caress her, and pretends that he actually enjoyed doing it.

quote:

"Jesus God, Becca was right. You're sick."

"Shut up! You want to know who needs help, Dad? It's you. I mean, Christ, look at this -- this tomb you've got yourself down here. All these years you've dedicated your life to fighting vampires. Why? Because you thought Becca's mother was killed by a vampire. Stuck his fangs in her neck and his dick up her twat, drained her blood out, left you a widower with a lifetime grudge against the world."

No offense to Kuuenbu, but I can only hear David’s dialogue in his voice now.

He continues his rant, and it turns out that David was the one who killed Becca’s mom. What a twist. :what:

quote:

He let out a laugh. "That's a hoot, Dad, because you know what? Your wife wasn't killed by a vampire. I killed her. I killed Becca's mother, because she got in my face, said I was an evil influence on Becca, some such garbage. I knew you were obsessed with the supernatural, so I set it up so you'd believe what you wanted to believe anyway--" He made his voice sarcastic, campy, Twilight Zonish, "dark forces are afoot in the universe. It isn't other people we have to be afraid of, it's them, the spooks and the goblins, the things that go bump in the night. You pathetic old fool -- Elaine's murderer was right there at your dinner table and you were too busy ramming stakes though dead guys' chests to realize it."

Emmet’s only reaction is to declare that he is ashamed to have fathered David.

Oh, and have a heart attack.

quote:

Emmet's eyes half-closed, and he blinked as though suddenly disoriented. Then he gave a moan and bent double as he thumped his cuffed wrists to his chest. "Oh, God -- my heart!" His face went ghastly gray. Wheezing, he sank to his knees, then fell forward, hitting his face on the dirt floor.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Part 12: A Literary Hail Mary

Chapter 22. An hour later, Sascha is pissed and David is drinking. Emmet didn’t die from the heart attack, but he’s not coherent enough to address the congregation like Sascha wanted. David doesn’t give a gently caress as long as he gets to be a vampire.

quote:

When he peered out from behind the curtain at the people filling the church, David fantasized what it would be like when he could look at such a scene and see only one thing -- food. Living bags of blood -- sack lunches, if you would. Nourishment for the future rulers of the world -- himself, of course, among them. It hadn't happened yet, but it would. It must. Vykos would turn him. Then not only immortality would be his, but power unimaginable.

Sascha sneaks up on him and asks if he wants another type of drink. It’s changed its form again.

quote:

He still wasn't accustomed to Vyko's stealth, or that tortured voice whose raspy whine reminded him of a psychotic child on uppers.

[...]

At the moment, Vyko's face was again monstrous, the face flecked with glittery, pearl-white scales, the hairline marked with tiny, hook-infested sores. Its hands looked normal, but the skin along its arms was a thorny mass of corrugated tissue interspersed with smooth, slick patches that looked like candle tallow. Its overall appearance was horrific enough, but the worst was its eyes -- unblinking drillbits embedded in sockets of unnatural depth.

…Vampiric bejeweled wax mannequin goblin?

Sascha hands him a communion goblet full of blood. David isn’t quite sure about it.

quote:

Vykos threw back its head and emitted a noise that must have been intended as a laugh, but came out as a clipped, chittery screech. "No wonder your father denigrates you, David. He's probably intimidated by your dry wit. I, however, find you quite amusing. After all, one who aspires to the Curse of Caine must acquire certain tastes.

The blood isn’t the best thing David’s ever tasted, but it’s the importance of the act that counts for him. Then Sascha drops another bombshell.

quote:

"If the taste's a tad on the sour side, there's a reason," said Vykos calmly. "It's your father's."

David's stomach felt as though it twisted inside out. He willed himself not to vomit. Not with that thing watching anyway.

Sascha notices his reaction, but David assures it that he doesn’t give a poo poo about the old man and blood is blood. Before he heads out to address the now assembled congregation, he asks if his transformation into a vampire is going to be a sure thing. The book says they made the deal earlier, but I guess Taylor forgot that.

quote:

Still, despite his terror, David pressed on. "I need your word you'll turn me. Soon."

Vykos studied him. "Why not? God knows you're sufficiently vicious. I shall make you my childe," it said grandly. "Instruct you in the dark arts that you already have such a bent for."

"Your word?"

"You have it. You will be my childe."

"But beautiful, the way I know you can look," he added quickly. "Not looking the way you do now."

The hate in Vykos's ungodly stare almost stopped his mind from working, almost halted his heart. Then the thin lips twisted into a facsimile of a smile. "So you shall have it, David. More beautiful than you could ever imagine, for all eternity."

You’re gonna get Vicissitude’d the gently caress up. Except you’re not because I know how this book ends.

David occasionally comes around the church for Easter and Christmas services, so the crowd already knows who he is and isn’t completely surprised when he takes the pulpit in place of his father.

quote:

I want to clear up some of lies [sic] that have been propagated. Sadly, those lies are promises my father made to you. Well, you need to know that those are promises which won't be kept. My father promised you a Second Coming, when divine beings will walk among us, when angels will walk on Earth. My father talked about a time when superior beings would move among us. What my father promised was a lie -- not because my father is an evil man who wanted to deceive you, but because he was deceived himself."

[...]

"The lie is that this time is in the future. The lie is that we have to pray for angels, that we have to beseech a Higher Power to rule over us and guide us in our sinfulness and confusion and weakness. We are not weak or sinful or confused, but we've been duped into believing in all manner of hypocrisy. Deny yourself now, my father taught, and you will be rewarded later. Deny yourself wealth and pleasure and sex. Well, let me tell you, that time is over. The time of self-sacrifice and self-denial is ended. Because that time my father talked about is now. That time has come. An angel is among us tonight, the first of many who have come to lead us and guide us."

After he says this, a blinding light appears behind him, revealing Emmet strung up on a crucifix, complete with stakes through his hands and feet. People start freaking out and heading for the exits as Sascha reveals itself.

quote:

"Stay exactly where you are, my friends. You are not free to go yet. I have things to say to you." Vykos's penetratingly seductive whisper came over the PA system. From the pulpit, over David and his father's head, radiated a gleaming yellow light. At the center of that light stood Vykos. So different was his appearance now, however, that David scarcely recognized him.

[...]

For Vykos, in its present form, was radiant, heart-stoppingly beautiful. Not clearly identifiable as either male or female, its pale skin and flowing hair seemed made of some ethereal liquid in a constant state of flow. Colors rippled just below the surface of its translucent skin. David found that, if he focused more than a few seconds on this phenomena, the colors seemed to mesmerize him, draw him in. As though his mind could fall inside Vykos as one plummets down a well and drown in the rank, dark depths of it.

The people in the crowd that haven’t managed to leave become transfixed by the sight of Sascha’s new form. I guess it’s like one of those octopus that changes its skin color to attract fish.

quote:

"Your angels have come," said Vykos. "We may not be angels as you envisioned us, as you were taught to expect us, but we are angels all the same. Powerful, immortal, and all-knowing. It is we whom you will worship, it is we whom you will obey and honor and adore. And as the Christ of your old belief system shed his blood for you, so you will shed your blood for us. And some of you, like David here, will be rewarded, will be allowed to rise and enter the Angelic Order. Immortality can be yours, but before that gift is given, you must worship and adore we who are gods in your midst."

Sascha hands David a stake and tells him to drive it through his father’s heart. Sascha wants to use the display to show that the new angels are supposed to be feared as much as they are worshipped. David doesn’t hesitate in complying.

quote:

[Emmet] saw David standing below him, stake raised. He tried to speak. There was no time. But as the stake was driven into his heart, something transformed. As he felt his soul part his body, he saw David's soul desert his body, too. David continued to live, of course, but what was left was only madness and corruption. The rest of David, the real David beneath the evil surface, slipped silently from his body and went with Emmet.

And, to his vast wonderment, it was, indeed, angelic.

So there was actually a sliver of a good person in that stereotypical shell of an evil shitbag? Could’ve fooled me.

So by now you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Sascha and David have won. The plot seems to be pretty much over. How the hell is anyone going to fix this mess?”

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to see why Rapunzel was included in the book.

Chapter 23. The second she saw them, Rapunzel has been making a beeline for the church spires, only stopping to feed from the worst sources of blood imaginable, which isn’t helping her psyche in the slightest.

quote:

So she kept to the shadows and back alleys, feeding from whomever was too weak or sick or inebriated to fend her off.

A woman with glazed eyes and missing teeth propped herself up next to a shopping cart overflowing with shiny plastic garbage bags. Rapunzel ripped her throat out, slurping blood that was a toxic hellbroth of street drugs. The impact of what she had ingested staggered but didn't stop her.

[...]

Along the way to her lover, Rapunzel found new victims. A homeless man who'd ingested so much alcohol that, had Rapunzel not finished him off first, he'd have been dead by morning. A hooker sprawled in a doorway, semiconscious after ingesting a cocktail of smack, 'ludes, and Ecstasy. A runaway with so much coke in his system he didn't stop prattling until Rapunzel ripped out his tongue.

With each polluted feeding, what was left of Rapunzel's humanity fell away, and her madness deepened.

By the way, everyone can see her gross fleshcrafted self. This doesn’t have any lasting effect on the Masquerade.

Oh, you want to know what she looks like? Here you go.

:nws:http://imgur.com/GwjqiEV:nws:

She eventually finds her church spires and enters the building.

quote:

"Jesus, what the gently caress is that!"

David saw the shambling wreck that was what remained of Jean Locklear as she shuffled up the center aisle of the cathedral. Her garments ripped and bloody, face contorted in a grotesque snarl. Half her skull was caved in, patches of brain matter showing through. An obscene euphoria glittered in her eyes. Oblivious to the reaction of the people in the pews, she made her way up to the altar and prostrated herself at Vykos's feet.

"My lord and master," she intoned. "I've come back to you. Your daughter has come back."

"Get away," hissed Vykos.

David watched in horror as the crazed thing grasped at Vykos's legs. Her crimson tongue snaked out. She licked its feet, reached up to grovel for its penis, clawing at its clothing to try to take it in her mouth.

So Sascha kept that massive penis in its hypnotic angel form? Does it change colors too? “Behold, my angelic cock!”

David watches in horror as Sascha beats the poo poo out of Jean/Rapunzel, realizing that this is what happens to people that Sascha embraces.

quote:

David watched with mounting horror and revulsion as Vykos stomped her head until only an oozing porridge of flesh and skull fragments remained.

This is my future, David thought. Even if it doesn't destroy me right away, Vykos will never keep its word. It will make me as hideous as she was.

With Vykos's attention focused on the wretched thing at its feet, David began to back away. Then he ran for the stairwell leading down into the catacombs, thinking about Lucita chained there -- thinking it was not yet too late to strike a better deal.

Eh, based on the Tzimisce OCs I’ve seen, all you really have to do is dye your hair and eyes an unusual color, get a couple of piercings, give yourself some tastefully placed horns, and you’d fit right in. No need to Vicissitude’d yourself out 24/7.

And that, is why Jean/Rapunzel was in the book. She was a literary Hail Mary designed to get Taylor out of the hole she wrote herself into by having Sascha and David win. gently caress.

Chapter 24. David, being the fuckboy that he is, immediately to runs to where they left Lucita staked.

quote:

David didn't know if she was capable of hearing him or not.

"If I let you go, are you willing to promise me something? Well?" He waited a few seconds, got no response. "I'll help you, but you have to make it worth my while."

He takes the stake out. There’s a very half-assed pic for this.

:nws:http://imgur.com/JkaVEOT:nws:

Dude, why are you even loving naked in this picture?

When she comes to, she gives him the death stare to trump all death stares.

quote:

"Wait, don't hurt me. I saved you. I just went along with Vykos because I was scared not to, but I know better now."

"You're telling me you're changing allegiances?"

"What I'm saying is, I saved you, so you owe me, right? You understand?" Apparently she didn't, for she came toward him now, black malice in her glare, fangs visible beneath her upper lip.

She drinks from him. Once she’s done, he immediately starts nagging her about when she’s going to turn him.

quote:

"When?" he gasped, when she released him. "When will you turn me into what you are? You promised me, remember?"

"I didn't promise anything," Lucita said. "You're lucky I don't kill you."

"But I just saved you! Please, do this one thing for me. I want to be one of you."

"And why is that?"

"To be powerful, beautiful, immortal -- isn't that what everybody wants?"

I’m writing this from a sick bed and right now I want my body to stop exploding more than any of that stuff.

quote:

"Not everyone," said Lucita, "and I don't make promises. But you are an unusual man and might do well as one of us. When this is over, perhaps we'll talk again."

Lucita wraps herself in shadow and disappears. When she’s gone, David slowly realizes that he might have hosed up again. Sascha took Lucita down once and could easily do it again. And if Sascha finds out what he did, he’s screwed. As he goes to get the hell out of there, he realizes that Becca is still nearby, wounded, but conscious. Realizing that he would have an easy time killing her now, but wanting to do something a little more imaginative (and because Taylor needs to start wrapping things up), he picks her up and tosses her into Pieterzoon’s tank.

quote:

"I'm going to do you a favor, little sister. I'm going to throw you in there with your boyfriend." Setting Becca on the ground, he raised one panel of the steel aquarium top, then lifted Becca and pitched her into the cold water of the tank.

At the shock of the water on her skin, her eyes snapped open. David permitted himself to look at her only an instant, relishing her terror, before he slammed the heavy cover shut again and consigned her to the water.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Part 13: The End

Chapter 25. Lucita makes her way into the church and Sascha’s about to stuff its gross face with all the blood any vampire could ever want.

quote:

Lucita saw the faces of the people as they watched Vykos drink from his first victim: stricken awed, spellbound. Willing to believe the beautiful monster in their midst was one of the angels they'd been waiting for. Willing to overlook the discarded heap at its feet that had been Rapunzel.

Bovine beasts -- Lucita felt only contempt for them. She'd have liked to show them her powers, to twist their malleable minds even further than Vykos already had, but that wasn't her way. Her way was darkness deception and she relied on that now.

Lucita conjures up the shadows in her heart or some poo poo to flow out and cover the congregation, breaking their line of sight with Sascha and sending them into a scared frenzy, hiding behind the pews. She takes advantage of the distraction to get a hit in on him with her scimitar, but misses.

Most of the rest of the chapter is just these two fighting on the roof of the church. Sascha spends most of the start of the fight throwing chunks of stone at her. Then manages to disarm her and use her sword against her. She grabs one from one of the stone angels and hurls it at it. Sascha tries to diablerize her (i.e. drink her blood and absorb her soul and powers), but fails when she hurls the two of them backwards off the roof and Sascha onto one of the crosses. It’s all competently written. There are no pictures because none of this could be remotely considered sexy.

Hours later, a couple of ghouled fleshcrafted vultures come around and take Sascha’s body off the cross before the sun can come up and finish the job. So Sascha can still go off and do metaplot poo poo.

Chapter 26. Sometime later, Becca and Jan watch a recording of her addressing the congregation from a video screen while having sex. They stop, then start up again every single time they restart the tape.

quote:

"A demon had been sent to tempt us and to tempt my father. It corrupted his own son, my brother David, and used him to destroy his own father. The demon has been vanquished. A true angel, like the ones whose appearance my father predicted, was sent in darkness to defeat the demon. How can there be any doubt now that angels do protect us, that God watches over and blesses us through their eyes?"

Ooo. So hot. :geno:

quote:

But then it took a while for interest in the normal pleasures of the flesh to fade away, [Jan had] told her. In some Kindred, they never did.

It took you nearly 150 some pages to come up with that excuse? Why the hell didn’t you just go with that from the beginning?

If you haven’t guessed yet, Jan embraced Becca shortly after David threw her in the tank. Jan then used his renewed strength to get them both out of there.

quote:

And after that, he'd begun her instruction in how to hunt, how to kill, if necessary, and how to feed. How to make love even when there was no love in her soul to give.

Becca complains about having to watch the video over and over, but Pieterzoon insists that she needs to study it so that she can do a better job… emoting? Next time. She then gets pissy at the fact that no one is questioning the explanation she’s given.

quote:

Pieterzoon reached for the remote and hit rewind. He put a hand beneath her chin, tipped her head up to be kissed. "One of the more endearing qualities of humanity, you'll come to realize, dear, is its willingness to believe whatever it needs to if it will protect mortal sanity at any given moment. I think the Camarilla's fears about a breach of the Masquerade may be unfounded. As long as human beings find it too terrifying to believe in the existence of vampires, the Masquerade is safe."

And that’s why this entire event, which is covered on several big national networks, is never going to come up again.

Becca wants to tell everyone the truth about vampires, stating that she can feel the Beast rumbling inside her, but Jan assures her that she’s small potatoes compared to some of the “real monsters” out there. She insists that she wants to tell the truth again, then destroy herself, but she can’t because she loves being a vampire too much. It’s here that we finally get some loving explanation for the seemingly tone deaf book title.

quote:

"I want to tell them the truth and then destroy myself. I tell myself I've got to do it, but I don't. That's how I know that already I've become a monster. Because I don't want to stop what I'm doing. I like the taste and smell of blood. I love drinking it. I love the power. I'm happy to trade a beating mortal heart for a dead, eternal one."

Jan’s only response is for them to… just go back to having sex, I guess.

quote:

Pieterzoon kissed her nipples, neck, and mouth. "You see, my darling, you're becoming wise already."

Last chapter. David has retreated to a bar and is nursing his bruised ego with drink. He tells everyone that he was in the church when all the weird poo poo went down, but no one really cares.

quote:

"You read about the crazy guy who had himself crucified in his own church? Yeah, you must've, it made the headlines, it was on CNN, every loving cable news show. I was there. Some kind of spiritual psychosis, the shrinks are saying. The guy who crucified himself, that was my old man. You believe that? Hey, you don't believe what I'm saying, then gently caress you."

The woman gave him a queer, giggly grin. He wanted to punch her, but a bouncer the size of a Frigidaire was closing in.

He heads out and immediately realizes that he’s being followed. By Lucita. She’s incredibly upbeat for someone who is about to hand the gift of eternity to a massive, ungrateful rear end in a top hat.

quote:

She took his hand. "Walk with me."

She led him south, taking him to the part of the city that had burned the night of the riots. Under the unforgiving luster of the streetlamps, he saw the empty hulks of burned-out buildings, boarded-up windows and the broken bottles from looted liquor stores. When they reached one gutted building, she guided him inside, stepping over the sodden ashes of cremated furniture, books, drapes.

At the stairs leading down into the basement, he balked. "Okay, no more. Exactly where the gently caress is it we're going?"

"You wanted me to fulfil my promise, didn't you?" She slid her arm through his, long nails pressing into his biceps. "What is it, David? You're scared if you go down here with me, you won't be coming back alive? I thought that was the point?"

When he asks why they’re going down there, she tells him that when he wakes up, he’s going to be hungry and tired, and will need some place dark and away from humans to rest with a decent food source (in this case, rats).

The thought of feeding on rats doesn’t disturb him.

quote:

Nothing had the power to touch him now, he thought, not really. Not after what he'd been through. All he felt now was simmering rage and the excitement that came with the anticipation of committing cruelties on as many people as he could.

No, the world hadn't heard the last of David Vargas. No loving way.

The basement she leads him to shows signs of water damage from the firefighters and evidence that some homeless and drug addicts have set up shop in it, possibly providing David something other than rats to feed off of.

quote:

"To hell with loving diseased lowlifes," David said. "I'm going to drink from rich, beautiful people -- models and actors and thousand-dollar-a-night whores. Then I'm going to drain them dry and use their empty skins to wipe my rear end."

"Not that you'll be needing to perform that function," Lucita said.

Something shifts in his peripherary, but she tells him to ignore it as she bites down into his neck. The world fades.

He wakes up sometime in the middle of the afternoon alone. There’s nothing apparent to feed off of, but someone did leave him a flashlight. He turns it on and finds a cracked mirror propped up against the wall.

quote:

"Good evening, childe."

[...]

"Allow me to introduce myself. Erasmus Bonhomme, Nosferatu -- your sire."

With a cheery giggle, the repulsive beast picked up the shard of mirror and turned it so David could see himself.

The image froze him. When finally he could tear himself away, it was to bend double and vomit up his last meal as a human being. Then he screamed, or tried to, for his mouth was repositioned on his face in such a way that moving the flaps of flesh that passed for lips produced a spasm in the knobby lump of muscle around his jaw. His eyes, misaligned, asymmetrical pits, squinted and squeezed out bloody tears.

And that’s how Erasmus is relevant to the plot. Everything’s all tied up now.

Not willing to be ugly for the rest of eternity, David just runs outside and burns up in the sun.

quote:

Pushing aside Erasmus, he raced up the stairs, shrieking, knowing that outside the sun was blazing.

With a cry, David flung the door open and stepped into the fires of Hell.

And everyone lived happily ever after… for about 4 and a half years, then the Time of Judgment stuff happened and everything exploded and turned into a better game line.

Thank you for reading my dumb posts about this dumb porn book. It is now safe to read this thread at work again.

Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Sep 4, 2016

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Desiden posted:

Was Eternal Hearts supposed to be canon originally? My vague recollection was that it was supposed to be an "elseworlds" type of deal. However, I can't remember if that was the case from the beginning, or if WW just started claiming that after they realized that it was inducing far more laughter than arousal.

I don't know. All I know is the stuff with the Council of Ragnarok and Marcus Vitel that gets immediately dropped after Chapter Two is something that gets covered in the Clan Novels (which I haven't read).

The book was included in a Humble Bundle right when I started the write-up. So someone at Paradox apparently didn't get the memo and thinks the book's cool and good.

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Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Part 4: Training and Abilities

Alright, where was I?

In place of magic types, mortals can buy ranks in various training regimens and/or innate special abilities. (The book specifies what’s what. The only real difference between the two is fluff.) Starting characters get 5 free ranks to spend where they want and have the option of buying up to 3 extra ranks at creation at a cost of 15 + the next level number of voodollars. (Ranks in specific types of training have to be bought in order, natch.) The same cost applies when they’re buying ranks outside of creation. Starting characters can have only up to 3 ranks in a training/ability, free ranks included. They can also use the starting training ranks to raise an attribute 1 for 1 or buy skill ranks at a rate of 5 skill ranks for 1 rank of training/abilities.

The book also points out that yes, you can give these things to otherkin characters, but you run the risk of making them overpowered. You know, if you didn't manage to do that with the stuff in the core book.

quote:

I'm sure there are Directors and Stars out thee who would love to some of the things here to Otherkin Characters.

Yes an Immortal with Advanced Martial Arts is a no brainer, But such characters ca be over powered and you should be really careful and make sure that fit in your Adventures.

You could probably do better with stuff from the other books. These lists kind of suck.

Training/Abilities follow the same MTR, referred to as ATR (Ability Type Rank) when dealing with mortals, charts as Magic Types when determining how specific powers work at specific ranks. The only exception is Range.

quote:

the only change for mortals is range as it becomes a less a matter of line of sight and more about numbers.



The book also points out that the ATR mechanic will also be used in every Drama Dice game Channel M publishes from here on out.

Every type of training/ability except “Skeptic” has requirements. Protip: Give yourself Fighting 3 and/or Mysticism 3 and you’ll open yourself up to a good chunk of the stuff on this list. The blurbs for each also have a section for specific drawbacks. But most don’t have any.

Also, don’t tell anyone you can do this stuff.

Grady Barns posted:

Some of you reading this may only be part vampire or part witch. . You may even be psychic, Guess what? Keep that kind of thing to yourself.

And that mindset is probably part of the reason why you're dead, Grady.

Adrenal Surge: Hulk out and gain various physical advantages either whenever you want during combat or by succeeding on an Easy Will roll outside of combat. Half Immortals, Vampires, and Shapeshifters with a D8 or higher Body only. Makes you eat a lot and act roid-ragey as a drawback.

  • Rank 1: Immunity to fear-causing abilities and magic, heal 2 HP after combat.
  • Rank 2: Spend 2 zap to raise the Body attribute by 1. (Max 2.)
  • Rank 3: Spend 2 zap to gain +2 Life per ATR in this ability for a minute.
  • Rank 4: Spend 2 zap to get +1 (per ATR) to Strength rolls, +1 hand-to-hand damage, and lift 500 pounds.
  • Rank 5: Spend 2 zap to get +1 Reflex, +1 to running based rolls, and +40 feet combat walking and running speed per ATR.

Spending over 6 zap in an hour using this ability makes you unable to use it for D6 hours and gives you -2 Reflex and -2 to Body rolls.

Advanced Martial Arts: Self-explanatory. Can’t have this and Adrenal Surge on the same character for whatever reason. Fighting 6 or the Martial Artist heritage required.
  • Rank 1: +1 hand-to-hand damage, +10 feet when jumping, +20 feet running speed.
  • Rank 2: Spend a zap to be Goku and do a Chi Strike, which does +2 hand-to-hand damage per ATR.
  • Rank 3: Spend 2 zap to do a Perfect Strike, a hand-to-hand… add-on, I guess, that lets you ignore all of a target’s natural armor and half of their artificial armor.
  • Rank 4: Spend 2 zap to remove all diseases and poisons from your body and heal 2 Life.
  • Rank 5: Spend 2 zap to gain another combat action, at a max of 2.

Archaist: The character is a master of one type of melee weapon, which is picked when they take this type of training. The blurb mentions that being a LARPer is training enough to have this. Requires Fighting 3.
  • Rank 1: +1 damage, parrying and blocking do half their normal damage to the weapon.
  • Rank 2: Spend a zap to +1 per ATR damage.
  • Rank 3: Spend a zap to block all incoming normal attacks.
  • Rank 4: Spend 2 zap to get a second attack that does half damage on the same target in the same action.
  • Rank 5: Spend 3 zap to turn a single attack into an area one that does full damage to every enemy in range.
Archer: The character is a whiz with bows. Fighting 3 required.
  • Rank 1: +1 damage; can reload as a free action.
  • Rank 2: Spend a zap to "fire an into a crowded arrow to hit a desired target with zero chance of hitting anything"
  • Rank 3: Doubled arrow range.
  • Rank 4: +1 per ATR damage to arrow attacks.
  • Rank 5: Spend 2 zap to hit a target from around a corner or barrier at half damage.
Dabbler: The description is the one for Archer copy/pasted, but this ability basically turns you into a hedge mage. This can be taken by witch-blooded characters of either sex. The chart near the front of the chapter lists it as a form of training, while the blurb says it’s an ability.
  • Rank 1: Can now put skill ranks in Alchemy, Enchantment, Potions, Leyology, and Naming. Also gives you a free rank to put in any of them.
  • Rank 2: Can disable spells using a Magic + ATR roll. The move costs twice the cost of the spell and takes D6 minutes to complete.
  • Rank 3: Spend 2 zap to double the height and damage of their levitation ability.
  • Rank 4: Spend 3 zap to give someone within range a +2 or -2 penalty to their next roll.
  • Rank 5: Lets the character use their life points as zap points if they run out.

Genius: D8 Mind and up only.
  • Rank 1: +2 Basic and a +1 to a Mind skill of the character’s choice.
  • Rank 2: Spend a zap to read a hundred pages of text in a minute.
  • Rank 3: +1 per ATR to all Mind and Senses rolls to recall a situation with photographic memory.
  • Rank 4: Spend 3 zap to add “=+1” per ATR to a Body roll.
  • Rank 5: Spend 2 zap to give another character a +1 per ATR to any Body, Mind, or Senses skill roll.
Gun-Hand: Fighting 3 required.
  • Rank 1: +1 damage and can draw and reload as a free action.
  • Rank 2: Spend 2 zap to get +1 Initiative when using a pistol. This ability is called “skin the smoke wagon”.
  • Rank 3: Spend 2 zap to replace the damage on an attack with a -2 penalty to all rolls for D6 rounds of combat.
  • Rank 4: Spend 2 zap to ignore 1 point per ATR of armor.
  • Rank 5: Spend 2 zap to do +1 per ATR damage.
Hacker: One of the nicknames for Hackers in-verse is “L33t”. Does anyone actually use the term “l33t” unironically anymore? If I go to Defcon and say “How do you do, fellow l33ts?” Will I be accepted and not get my laptop destroyed? Requires Computer 4.
  • Rank 1: +5 Wealth to buy computer equipment; time needed to complete Computer related action is halved.
  • Rank 2: Spend a zap to find someone using cameras with a Hard roll.
  • Rank 3: Spend a zap to get a +1 per ATR bonus to skill rolls when breaking into other computers.
  • Rank 4: Spend a zap to instantly take control of a computer controlled device connected to the Internet.
  • Rank 5 The character can make a Computer roll to block or disable Cybermancy spells. They also have to spend the same amount of zap as the spell.
Healer: Faith healers, specifically. So atheist doctors need not apply, I guess. Pious talent required. (So you’ll get a free use of one of these once a game day.) Healers have to make a Hard Will roll whenever someone is in intense pain. If they fail, they get a -1 penalty to all of their rolls for an unspecified amount of time. They have to touch their target and use an action and they can’t heal themselves.
  • Rank 1: Spend 2 zap to either stabilize a character or give them a +1 to fight off a disease.
  • Rank 2: Spend 2 zap to heal 1 per ATR Life points.
  • Rank 3: Spend 2 zap to get +1 per ATR to rolls to resist poisons.
  • Rank 4: The rank 3 power, except with diseases.
  • Rank 5: Spend 4 zap to remove a Crack and give the target a +2 to resist Freak-Outs.
Mad-Science: The character can use their science based and Build/Repair skills like magical skills. Science 4 and D8 and up Mind required.
  • Rank 1: A free rank of Build/Repair and Computer.
  • Rank 2: Spend 2 zap to use the Science skill as the Potions skill.
  • Rank 3: Spend 2 zap to use Science in place of “Immolate the Animate” skill, which doesn't exist in any of the required books listed near the start.
  • Rank 4: Spend 2 zap to use Build/Repair to make Enchantment rolls.
  • Rank 5: Spend 3 zap to remove 1 per ATR Wealth to the cost of equipment.
Medium: The blurb is the one for Gun-Hand, but you actually can see and hunt ghosts. For some reason, you can't be this and a Dabbler, Healer, Medium (sic), or a Psionic at the same time.
  • Rank 1: +1 to rolls and damage when dealing with ghosts.
  • Rank 2: Spend a zap per minute to sense ghosts within 20 feet of the character.
  • Rank 3: Spend a zap a minute to see ghosts.
  • Rank 4: Spend a zap to touch and damage ghosts. (So is the damage part of the Rank 1 power just useless until you get this?)
  • Rank 5: Spend 2 zap to do +1 per ATR points of damage to ghosts.
Monster Hunter: A hunter that hunts stuff other than otherkin and ghosts. One of the nicknames for them is “saints”. Cute. Cryptozoology 4 required.
  • Rank 1: +1 Survival, +1 Tracking, +1 to Tracking rolls when tracking monsters.
  • Rank 2: Spend a zap to add your ATR to your Cryptozoology rolls.
  • Rank 3: Spend a zap to communicate with monsters via body language, roars, and so on. Because for some reason, you need to use magic to do that instead of figuring it out through research.
  • Rank 4: Spend 2 zap to get +1 x ATR damage to monsters.
  • Rank 5: Spend 2 zap to get +1 x ATR to Reflex for dodging monsters.
Psionics: Fabulous psychic powers. D8 Will and up or the Psychic heritage required. Due to the constant background noise in their head, if a Psionic character fails a Will roll, they lose a Life point and get a -1 penalty to all of their rolls for D6 minutes.
  • Rank 1: Spend a zap to detect other people’s emotions.
  • Rank 2: Spend 2 zap to get +1 x ATR to resist mind and emotion altering abilities.
  • Rank 3: Spend 2 zap to read a target’s thoughts.
  • Rank 4: Spend 3 zap to create a mind shield.
  • Rank 5: Spend 3 zap to give someone a -2 to their rolls for D4 minutes and lose their next action.
Skeptic: Skeptics so strongly disbelieve in the supernatural that they are able to suck zap out of the world. In as much as one can with a list of small bonuses and penalties to rolls. As a drawback, freaking out prevents them from using their skeptic abilities for D6 minutes. The book says they also can’t use their zap for Belief bonuses, but none of those bonuses require zap, so that doesn’t change anything.
  • Rank 1: +2 zap; +1 to Freak Out rolls.
  • Rank 2: Spend 2 zap to remove a crack point or give a +2 to Freak Out rolls to a person.
  • Rank 3: Spend 3 zap to add +1 per ATR to resist spells and other magical abilities.
  • Rank 4: Spend 4 zap to let someone else have the previous bonus.
  • Rank 5: Spend 3 zap per minute to give a -2 zap penalty to all non-mundanes in range.
Skinner: Shapeshifter hunters. Mysticism 3 required. They have a -1 Social penalty when dealing with shapeshifters because the shapeshifters… somehow know who they are.
  • Rank 1: +1 Hide, Survival, and Tracking.
  • Rank 2: +1 per ATR to recognize shapeshifters.
  • Rank 3: Spend 2 zap to get +1 per ATR to resist shapeshifter powers.
  • Rank 4: Spend 2 zap to get +1 per ATR damage to shapeshifters.
  • Rank 5: +1 to Reflex when one of the enemies in a combat scene is a shapeshifter.
Slayer: Vampire hunters. Mysticism 3 required. Characters who take this automatically get a Wanted (Vampires) knack.
  • Rank 1: +1 Athletics, Hide, and Investigation.
  • Rank 2: +1 per ATR to recognize vampires.
  • Rank 3: Spend 2 zap to it’s just the Skinner power set except with vampires. Moving on.
Thief: Urchin 3 required.
  • Rank 1: Gains full walk speed when climbing, and doesn’t gain penalties to movement speed or Reflex when climbing surfaces.
  • Rank 2: Spend 2 zap to get +1 per ATR to all Urchin rolls.
  • Rank 3: Spend a zap to instantly know if a character is carrying something of worth.
  • Rank 4: Spend 2 zap to gain +1 per ATR to Reflex when the character is cornered or chased to avoid… being hit.
  • Rank 5: Spend 2 zap to gain +1 per ATR to resist all Senses and spell rolls.

Witch Hunter: Mysticism 3 required. They also get a Wanted knack because the WWC keeps a log of every single active witch hunter. So there’s another thing they can do, but can’t/won’t track down criminals or kids that need to be put in schools. The ability list is the Slayer one with “vampires” replaced with “witches”.

This section ends with a smaller, black and white version of some art that was also used in Bellum Maga. Specifically, the picture of the perfect progressive girl from the lovely stupid podunk town that got burned to death because her school lost a football game.





Next: Equipment rules.

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