grotsnik
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2010
- Messages
- 1,671
I actually had it done this morning, but I forgot to send it to my work email to post it. Ah, well.
Chapter 2 - As It Is Written
Your fingers caress the panel. Slowly, with a heaving of gears, the enormous bookshelves begin to shift forward across the library. Creating a path for you.
You walk through the shelves. More books than you could have ever read in a lifetime – when you were alive. Centuries-old; millennia-old; secret histories of the netherworld, encrypted diaries, filled with the plotting of Kindred long dead and forgotten, Hermetical formulae still undeciphered. And – though for fuck knows how long – you’re free to delve into this infinity of information.
It was in an enclosed space like this – your cubicle at the Provexis offices, brown, cramped, and horrid – that Eames came to you. She told you what you’d always known; that you were special, that you weren’t like the worthless creatures all around you. That you had a great destiny in store for you – and that you could wield power over them all. That you could be free to do what you want, to take whatever you desired, so long as you didn’t give away the secret of her people, and the dark world hidden beneath this one. That she had something she wanted to show you.
And then you were pushed into a filthy third-storey room in Hoxton with her childe – Geoff, a sickly, nervous creature who was whisked off to a new appointment in Brighton after just a few weeks – and they turned you. And before long it became clear that you weren’t special at all, and that your so-called ‘freedom’ was false.
Argyll scoffed at you, when you finally confided in him Eames’ story about your destiny.
“Didn’t you know?” he told you. “We’re all special. We all have a great destiny in store for us – until we’re Embraced. It’s how they hook you in, Joan. It’s their marketing strategy.”
You find a leathery, rotten tome that might suit you; and another on the opposite shelf.
And it trickled through; slowly, in whispers. That there were Kindred outside the Camarilla, unbound by their laws, who did not hide and who saw themselves as a fraternity. They were spoken about by Eames and her peers as hateful monsters; which, of course, made them sound all the more appealing.
They weren’t disorganised and naive, like the Anarchs; they were as free and as wild as the city itself. And you began to listen more intently to the tales about Amen Court, the Sabbat’s great bone-white place of sacrifice, which had been burnt down by the Camarilla five times and rebuilt every time, to the same holy dimensions as before, where Jonathan Ketch keeps his vigil with a scythe that’s forever sharp. You dreamt of those you’d like to kill, in the open – why should you hide? – your old boss at Provexis, your step-father who cornered you in the kitchen one night when Mum was away at her concert, and wouldn’t let go, even when you screamed…and Eames. With her smug smile, and her ridiculous hair, and her promises that led you into this fucking world of darkness where you live as a slave.
At the very northernmost end of the library, old oak desks line the walls, for the apprentices to study at; the two closest to either end are safe-havens, where you can sit back against the wall, secure in the knowledge that you’ll be hidden from anyone gazing out over the shelves by the great brick pillars that hold up the ceiling.
You slap your pile of books down on the table, squeeze yourself up into the furthest corner of the alcove, and begin to read.
*
The night wears on. You skim through the endless pages, listening for that distant slam of the library doors, rehearsing in your mind what you’ll say if you’re caught. If Argyll comes – bored, looking for someone to talk to – it’s simple enough; you’ll tell him you’re working on something for Eames. But if Blackheath returns, or Eames herself…
Finally, you find something.
There are ruins beneath the chantry, vast and largely unexplored, that only Eames has access to. That much has always been clear. And if the rumours are true – they’ll be Lhiannan. That’s where she’ll be keeping it, you tell yourself.
An antediluvian. It has to be.
The ruins were first excavated in 1791, under Regent Warwick. And there were further public expeditions made in 1871, as detailed in the blueprints drawn up by an anonymous Kindred afterwards. A year after this, however, they were closed off; they were, the 1872 list of decrees makes clear, financially unstable.
So why do the records for 1890 clearly state that three gargoyles were used for excavations ‘necessitating the closure of the north-western laboratories; the floor of the Agrippa Rooms falling partly through in the process, to be repaired forthwith’?
You draw your finger across the blueprints, making a straight line from the shapeless mass of the ruins towards the Agrippa Rooms.
After a moment’s thought, you fetch a map of London and open it up on the table.
Plotting the angle of the 1890 excavations, you run your finger out from St. Alfege’s crucifix marker on the map, in the appropriate direction.
The line moves north-west, through Sabbat-haunted Peckham. It manages, you notice, to avoid every Tube line and station.
Until, at last, it reaches the chantry at Lambeth.
It’s an escape tunnel, you think, with growing excitement. If Greenwich is attacked, the Regentia can abandon her apprentices to their fates and slip away to Lambeth.
And if there’s a way out, there has to be a way in as well. Perhaps, as the tunnel cranes out through London’s underground network, the largest and most tangled in existence, there may even be a way to break into it midway.
This will do nicely.
*
“You’ll never guess,” Argyll says, jabbing his grinning, stupid face in through the doorway, “who I saw upstairs with Eames. Can you believe Daniel Leus is back in town? Old Rabies himself!”
You sit back on your bed, leaning against the wall, and summon up the patience not to tell him to fuck off and die.
“Who’s he?” you ask.
He pushes himself fully into the room, leaning against the doorframe.
“Daniel Leus,” he repeats, as if speaking to an idiot. “Old Malk – very old. Used to be a favourite of Mithras’. Big fat fucker, very sharp-tongued. Liked to…rant. To humiliate those around him. Actually, I don’t know if he liked it – maybe it was more that he couldn’t stop. But he could tear apart your personality just by looking at the way you held your pen.”
“He doesn’t sound very pleasant,” you reply.
“Mithras used him as a raver,” Argyll continues. “He’d sit in on the council meetings, listening to all the talk, biting down on his lip until it bled. Then some baron would say something untoward, Mithras would give some signal, and Old Rabies would start to yell. He’d yell, and yell, mocking their weaknesses, scoffing at their ambitions – and by the end, either everyone would be laughing at the poor bastard or, if he went too far, there’d only be silence. Either way, the baron shut his mouth.”
You close your book. It wasn’t as if you were really studying it anyway.
“So why did he leave?” you ask him.
He shrugs, examining his nails.
“I heard he told Kirkbeck what he thought of him before he came to power,” he says. “So Kirkbeck becomes Prince, and – whoosh – Leus has to leave London. And now he’s back…it’s a sign, Joan. Kirkbeck’s retired, and the Tremere are moving on up.”
He leans, for a moment, in silence, gazing up at your wall – then turns and ducks back out of the doorway, strolling along the corridor, whistling as he goes.
*
Dawn is coming. And yet, somehow, you’re not yet tired.
Tomorrow night, or the night after tomorrow night, there’ll be a sim-card buried near the Observatory, and a phone buried near the river. For these two nights, Bishop Dubrik will be contactable on the single number stored within.
You’ve been lucky so far; the one advantage of the war has been that Eames, apparently distracted, has often been away from the chantry, and Blackheath with her. The ghoul watchman, on his part, likes to take advantage of such occasions to slip away to the brothels in Spitalfields Market, even advising the apprentices to ‘head out and have a bit of fun’.
But tomorrow night, as far as you know, Eames is scheduled to be in the chantry. Which means you’ll have to find a way to get out and remain out for some time without arousing any suspicion.
How will you act?
A) I’ll simply head out, quite openly, as if to feed – logging my entrance and exit in the book at the door. If asked about why I took so long, I’ll reply that I couldn’t find anyone on the streets. I’ll only create suspicion if I over-think this.
B) I’ll ask Eames for permission to take the night off and head to the havens in Soho. There’s a slim chance that anyone I know could be there, and she might say no – but if it all goes to plan, it’ll give me more time.
C) I’ll wait for the right moment. I have two nights; Eames is busy and liable to be called away at any time. Once she leaves, I leave.
D) I’ll slip out. If they look for me in my room and I’m not there – well, I could be in the laboratories, or the library. My absence may not even be noted.
Chapter 2 - As It Is Written
Your fingers caress the panel. Slowly, with a heaving of gears, the enormous bookshelves begin to shift forward across the library. Creating a path for you.
You walk through the shelves. More books than you could have ever read in a lifetime – when you were alive. Centuries-old; millennia-old; secret histories of the netherworld, encrypted diaries, filled with the plotting of Kindred long dead and forgotten, Hermetical formulae still undeciphered. And – though for fuck knows how long – you’re free to delve into this infinity of information.
It was in an enclosed space like this – your cubicle at the Provexis offices, brown, cramped, and horrid – that Eames came to you. She told you what you’d always known; that you were special, that you weren’t like the worthless creatures all around you. That you had a great destiny in store for you – and that you could wield power over them all. That you could be free to do what you want, to take whatever you desired, so long as you didn’t give away the secret of her people, and the dark world hidden beneath this one. That she had something she wanted to show you.
And then you were pushed into a filthy third-storey room in Hoxton with her childe – Geoff, a sickly, nervous creature who was whisked off to a new appointment in Brighton after just a few weeks – and they turned you. And before long it became clear that you weren’t special at all, and that your so-called ‘freedom’ was false.
Argyll scoffed at you, when you finally confided in him Eames’ story about your destiny.
“Didn’t you know?” he told you. “We’re all special. We all have a great destiny in store for us – until we’re Embraced. It’s how they hook you in, Joan. It’s their marketing strategy.”
You find a leathery, rotten tome that might suit you; and another on the opposite shelf.
And it trickled through; slowly, in whispers. That there were Kindred outside the Camarilla, unbound by their laws, who did not hide and who saw themselves as a fraternity. They were spoken about by Eames and her peers as hateful monsters; which, of course, made them sound all the more appealing.
They weren’t disorganised and naive, like the Anarchs; they were as free and as wild as the city itself. And you began to listen more intently to the tales about Amen Court, the Sabbat’s great bone-white place of sacrifice, which had been burnt down by the Camarilla five times and rebuilt every time, to the same holy dimensions as before, where Jonathan Ketch keeps his vigil with a scythe that’s forever sharp. You dreamt of those you’d like to kill, in the open – why should you hide? – your old boss at Provexis, your step-father who cornered you in the kitchen one night when Mum was away at her concert, and wouldn’t let go, even when you screamed…and Eames. With her smug smile, and her ridiculous hair, and her promises that led you into this fucking world of darkness where you live as a slave.
At the very northernmost end of the library, old oak desks line the walls, for the apprentices to study at; the two closest to either end are safe-havens, where you can sit back against the wall, secure in the knowledge that you’ll be hidden from anyone gazing out over the shelves by the great brick pillars that hold up the ceiling.
You slap your pile of books down on the table, squeeze yourself up into the furthest corner of the alcove, and begin to read.
*
The night wears on. You skim through the endless pages, listening for that distant slam of the library doors, rehearsing in your mind what you’ll say if you’re caught. If Argyll comes – bored, looking for someone to talk to – it’s simple enough; you’ll tell him you’re working on something for Eames. But if Blackheath returns, or Eames herself…
Finally, you find something.
There are ruins beneath the chantry, vast and largely unexplored, that only Eames has access to. That much has always been clear. And if the rumours are true – they’ll be Lhiannan. That’s where she’ll be keeping it, you tell yourself.
An antediluvian. It has to be.
The ruins were first excavated in 1791, under Regent Warwick. And there were further public expeditions made in 1871, as detailed in the blueprints drawn up by an anonymous Kindred afterwards. A year after this, however, they were closed off; they were, the 1872 list of decrees makes clear, financially unstable.
So why do the records for 1890 clearly state that three gargoyles were used for excavations ‘necessitating the closure of the north-western laboratories; the floor of the Agrippa Rooms falling partly through in the process, to be repaired forthwith’?
You draw your finger across the blueprints, making a straight line from the shapeless mass of the ruins towards the Agrippa Rooms.
After a moment’s thought, you fetch a map of London and open it up on the table.
Plotting the angle of the 1890 excavations, you run your finger out from St. Alfege’s crucifix marker on the map, in the appropriate direction.
The line moves north-west, through Sabbat-haunted Peckham. It manages, you notice, to avoid every Tube line and station.
Until, at last, it reaches the chantry at Lambeth.
It’s an escape tunnel, you think, with growing excitement. If Greenwich is attacked, the Regentia can abandon her apprentices to their fates and slip away to Lambeth.
And if there’s a way out, there has to be a way in as well. Perhaps, as the tunnel cranes out through London’s underground network, the largest and most tangled in existence, there may even be a way to break into it midway.
This will do nicely.
*
“You’ll never guess,” Argyll says, jabbing his grinning, stupid face in through the doorway, “who I saw upstairs with Eames. Can you believe Daniel Leus is back in town? Old Rabies himself!”
You sit back on your bed, leaning against the wall, and summon up the patience not to tell him to fuck off and die.
“Who’s he?” you ask.
He pushes himself fully into the room, leaning against the doorframe.
“Daniel Leus,” he repeats, as if speaking to an idiot. “Old Malk – very old. Used to be a favourite of Mithras’. Big fat fucker, very sharp-tongued. Liked to…rant. To humiliate those around him. Actually, I don’t know if he liked it – maybe it was more that he couldn’t stop. But he could tear apart your personality just by looking at the way you held your pen.”
“He doesn’t sound very pleasant,” you reply.
“Mithras used him as a raver,” Argyll continues. “He’d sit in on the council meetings, listening to all the talk, biting down on his lip until it bled. Then some baron would say something untoward, Mithras would give some signal, and Old Rabies would start to yell. He’d yell, and yell, mocking their weaknesses, scoffing at their ambitions – and by the end, either everyone would be laughing at the poor bastard or, if he went too far, there’d only be silence. Either way, the baron shut his mouth.”
You close your book. It wasn’t as if you were really studying it anyway.
“So why did he leave?” you ask him.
He shrugs, examining his nails.
“I heard he told Kirkbeck what he thought of him before he came to power,” he says. “So Kirkbeck becomes Prince, and – whoosh – Leus has to leave London. And now he’s back…it’s a sign, Joan. Kirkbeck’s retired, and the Tremere are moving on up.”
He leans, for a moment, in silence, gazing up at your wall – then turns and ducks back out of the doorway, strolling along the corridor, whistling as he goes.
*
Dawn is coming. And yet, somehow, you’re not yet tired.
Tomorrow night, or the night after tomorrow night, there’ll be a sim-card buried near the Observatory, and a phone buried near the river. For these two nights, Bishop Dubrik will be contactable on the single number stored within.
You’ve been lucky so far; the one advantage of the war has been that Eames, apparently distracted, has often been away from the chantry, and Blackheath with her. The ghoul watchman, on his part, likes to take advantage of such occasions to slip away to the brothels in Spitalfields Market, even advising the apprentices to ‘head out and have a bit of fun’.
But tomorrow night, as far as you know, Eames is scheduled to be in the chantry. Which means you’ll have to find a way to get out and remain out for some time without arousing any suspicion.
How will you act?
A) I’ll simply head out, quite openly, as if to feed – logging my entrance and exit in the book at the door. If asked about why I took so long, I’ll reply that I couldn’t find anyone on the streets. I’ll only create suspicion if I over-think this.
B) I’ll ask Eames for permission to take the night off and head to the havens in Soho. There’s a slim chance that anyone I know could be there, and she might say no – but if it all goes to plan, it’ll give me more time.
C) I’ll wait for the right moment. I have two nights; Eames is busy and liable to be called away at any time. Once she leaves, I leave.
D) I’ll slip out. If they look for me in my room and I’m not there – well, I could be in the laboratories, or the library. My absence may not even be noted.
