Intro story, for those who might be interested.
As my other game has, alas, kicked the bucket, I have joined, albeit reluctantly, a modern vamp game (Chicago White City- under new management, for those who may have heard less appealing accounts of it in the past. It is pretty fun, though it does make me break with my long-standing loathing for Vampire and the vampire-obsessed. Though, for the record, I still think vampire as a genre often leads to whiny emo-ness and/or black-hat revelry that I find equally distasteful.
I decided to recreate a character many of the Bloomington vamp players met briefly- Echo, whom I visited as for a single session- I came in as drydem's childe, if that's any help.
Echo communicates only through quotation, reprise, and fortune cookies. It is really hard. This is the intro story I wrote for her (as she is amnesiac, there was not too much I could do in the way of character background, since I prefer to be surprised by the STs rather than making up a bunch of stuff that my character doesn't know.)
Anyway:
Echoes
Consciousness came slowly. The girl’s perceptions drifted down as if through water. Her skin itched. She raised a hand to scratch. That’s when she realized that her body was unable to move. Some kind of metal framework was holding her in place, and she felt a deep, disturbing pull in her wrist as she tried to move her arm. She was ice cold.
She couldn’t see. Her eyes were sealed shut, the eyelids tugging painfully when they fluttered.
Panicked, she jerked her hand free, feeling a moment of resistance as the bolt head caught, sliding between her radius and ulna. A hot wash of blood ran down her arm, its steaming temperature strange and shocking against her icy skin. The blood smelled somehow familiar, though she knew, in some strange way, that it wasn’t her blood, even as it gushed from the gaping hole in her wrist.
Pulsing with the outpouring of blood, visions skittered across the retinas of her closed eyes, lasting moments only:
• A silver key worked in the shape of an aspen leaf.
• Blood on the ice, kneeling on the frozen lake while the huddled shapes of ice covered trees on the shore bent like supplicants before the Pythia’s seat.
• Running with her father’s sword, she tripped and fell, cutting herself on the leaf-shaped bronze blade.
• Another blade, another life. The boy panted like a sheep, too exhausted to speak. Milk and alcohol crusted his lips, blood and semen a sticky mess around his thighs. His eyes widened and squeezed shut as she pulled his head back, a wild cry bursting from somewhere deep within her: Eaun! Eaun! Eoi oi oi!
• A dark-haired man, his face contorted with hatred. “You sold me out, you crazy fucking bitch!” he hissed.
• A white city by a sea of sweet water. Its sloping walls were webs: at its center a shadow spider crouched, its franticly spinning legs forming threads of silk and shadow. The tearing wind off the lake battered the structure, tearing pieces free even as the spider replenished them.
Still reeling from the onslaught of visions, the girl probed delicately at the inner corner of her eye. Her fingers encountered a thread. She pulled, marveling at the feel of the suture sliding through the flesh of her eyelid.
Her eyes had trouble focusing. Something gleaming gold entered her field of view. It took her a moment to sort out that the golden thing was her arm. Her skin seemed to be flaking off in large patches.
Leprosy? she wondered.
The flakes were gold. A whitish compound adhered the gilding to every inch of her skin.
White lead and gum ammoniac were typically used for the application of raised gilding, she thought. I should be poisoned.
Why do I know that?
She searched her mind for a crumb of identity, finding none. Instead, she more cautiously extricated the rest of her body from its entrapping armature and looked around the room.
A fountain graced the back wall of the cave, its contorted satyr face more resembling catalepsy than laughter. A faint, sweet smell like grapes came from a deep crack in the earth. A metal tripod lay on its side, its shallow basin cracked and corroded. In the dust of the corner a smooth stone lay, round as an egg, some six inches in diameter. As she approached it, the girl could feel the metal still entangling her wrists shift, pulled toward the stone.
A lodestone, she thought.
Her eyes detected motion in the deeper shadow of the crack in the floor. The girl slipped quietly to the edge of the crack, leaning over to gain a better look.
“Hello?” she called softly into the crack at her feet.
Only her Echo returned.
*************************************************************************
Echo crouched behind a wall of boxes of dried fish. Their pungent smell taunted her. Echo was ravenous, and while the desiccated seafood no longer smelled like food, memory suggested that it should. Outside of her hiding place dockworkers chattered among themselves in Koine Greek- nearly unintelligible to her ears. She heard a sudden noise of exclamation above her head and looked up to see a pair of startled black eyes.
Instinct is stronger than ethics. The dockworker was jerked down into the dark- fortunately out of sight of his companions. There was little fuss. Echo laid the young man down gently, briefly pressing her now ruddy lips to his pale ones. She absently stroked his hair, draping the dark curls so as to conceal the bloody ruin of his neck.
She felt both replete and a little melancholy. A nebulous thought suggested to her that the emotion was one she might once have associated with sex. She was a little shocked that she was not more horrified by her murder of the poor man.
“‘…the spiritual savage caged within my skeleton raged afresh,’” Echo whispered.
Once, she knew, she had been able to construct words of her own. Now it was all she could do to assemble ones already softened by other usage.
She was afraid…of what?
In a flash she knew: She was afraid to make her own words because she was afraid of what they might release. A monster slumbered within her: she did not want to attract its attention; alert it to the fact that she existed- crippled, amnesiac, but still aware.
She knew one more thing: She needed to get out of Greece.
Echo’s mouth tightened and she drew a short knife. She murmured Hellenic Greek to herself in a mad whisper as she drew the knife in a sudden arc across the man’s belly, releasing his bowels like coiled snakes. Echo stared at them for a moment, her pupils dilated and twitching as they followed some internal scene. Then she set her weight against a barrel, overturning it and spilling sixty gallons of olives into the hungry sea.
She climbed into the dank, olive-scented prison and pulled on the lid. Some hours later, long after the shouting and sobbing over the murdered deckhand had ceased, she heard a soft step approach. There was a soft thump as something heavy was placed atop her barrel. Then nails were driven in, affixing the lid.
That’s odd… thought Echo, not yet panicked.
Then a voice spoke, cutting through the claustrophobic darkness like a knife:
“Θάλασσα καὶ πῦρ καὶ γυνή, κακὰ τρία. But in this case I’ll take two out of three.”
It was as if the voice dripped terror directly into her veins. Echo beat against the lid to little effect. Whatever blocked the lid was far beyond her strength to shift.
A sudden ray of light pierced the stifling black of the barrel as a bung was driven into its side. Then a flood of brine began to pour in, muffling Echo’s cries as the burning seawater entered her lungs.
The shadowy figure remained by the barrel until the frantic thumping from within subsided.
“Sleep well, child(e?),” he said.
*****************************************************************************
Translation: "Sea and fire and woman, three evils."
*****************************************************************************
A slow billow of hair drifted in front of Echo’s face like seaweed. She flinched slightly and a shiver ran through her limbs as a sharp splintering noise disrupted her torpid state, muffled somewhat by the brackish liquid in which she was suspended. Her face tilted upward toward the growing crack of light above her. No thought or sentience was yet visible in her eyes- it was a tropism only, as mindless as the yearning of a sunflower toward the sky.
That changed as a thick arm was thrust into the pickling brine above her. Sudden intelligence flashed into the eyes and the barrel erupted in a spray of brine. Echo vomited, her involuntary expulsion of seawater continuing without break into the scream of a creature driven to its limit. Spiro, the cook, cowered against the wall before the maddened goddess before him, his fingers fumbling for the crucifix at his neck.
Echo advanced on him, murder in her eyes. Spiro whimpered as her hand reached out. Instead, Echo’s face crinkled with delight and she pressed her hand to the sole wooden wall in the cellar.
“The wall is false! My words are true!” she caroled, rapping on the suspect wall. With a sly glance she took in Spiro’s gradual creep for the door. She seized his wrist and phrased the next line as a question:
“I started keeping secrets when I sold myself to you?”
*******************************************************************************
“Man, I know you have night hours!” the student complained, clacking his tongue stud against his teeth in agitation. “I saw a bunch of people go in there last night.” He pushed forward, craning his neck to look into the shadowed Greek Diner.
Spiro looked the kid up and down from his adidas to his carefully gelled hair. Sensing… something, the kid backed off.
“No,” Spiro said with finality. “The Salonica closes at six, except by special invitation. You will not be receiving such an invitation, I think.”
Finis.
I decided to recreate a character many of the Bloomington vamp players met briefly- Echo, whom I visited as for a single session- I came in as drydem's childe, if that's any help.
Echo communicates only through quotation, reprise, and fortune cookies. It is really hard. This is the intro story I wrote for her (as she is amnesiac, there was not too much I could do in the way of character background, since I prefer to be surprised by the STs rather than making up a bunch of stuff that my character doesn't know.)
Anyway:
Echoes
Consciousness came slowly. The girl’s perceptions drifted down as if through water. Her skin itched. She raised a hand to scratch. That’s when she realized that her body was unable to move. Some kind of metal framework was holding her in place, and she felt a deep, disturbing pull in her wrist as she tried to move her arm. She was ice cold.
She couldn’t see. Her eyes were sealed shut, the eyelids tugging painfully when they fluttered.
Panicked, she jerked her hand free, feeling a moment of resistance as the bolt head caught, sliding between her radius and ulna. A hot wash of blood ran down her arm, its steaming temperature strange and shocking against her icy skin. The blood smelled somehow familiar, though she knew, in some strange way, that it wasn’t her blood, even as it gushed from the gaping hole in her wrist.
Pulsing with the outpouring of blood, visions skittered across the retinas of her closed eyes, lasting moments only:
• A silver key worked in the shape of an aspen leaf.
• Blood on the ice, kneeling on the frozen lake while the huddled shapes of ice covered trees on the shore bent like supplicants before the Pythia’s seat.
• Running with her father’s sword, she tripped and fell, cutting herself on the leaf-shaped bronze blade.
• Another blade, another life. The boy panted like a sheep, too exhausted to speak. Milk and alcohol crusted his lips, blood and semen a sticky mess around his thighs. His eyes widened and squeezed shut as she pulled his head back, a wild cry bursting from somewhere deep within her: Eaun! Eaun! Eoi oi oi!
• A dark-haired man, his face contorted with hatred. “You sold me out, you crazy fucking bitch!” he hissed.
• A white city by a sea of sweet water. Its sloping walls were webs: at its center a shadow spider crouched, its franticly spinning legs forming threads of silk and shadow. The tearing wind off the lake battered the structure, tearing pieces free even as the spider replenished them.
Still reeling from the onslaught of visions, the girl probed delicately at the inner corner of her eye. Her fingers encountered a thread. She pulled, marveling at the feel of the suture sliding through the flesh of her eyelid.
Her eyes had trouble focusing. Something gleaming gold entered her field of view. It took her a moment to sort out that the golden thing was her arm. Her skin seemed to be flaking off in large patches.
Leprosy? she wondered.
The flakes were gold. A whitish compound adhered the gilding to every inch of her skin.
White lead and gum ammoniac were typically used for the application of raised gilding, she thought. I should be poisoned.
Why do I know that?
She searched her mind for a crumb of identity, finding none. Instead, she more cautiously extricated the rest of her body from its entrapping armature and looked around the room.
A fountain graced the back wall of the cave, its contorted satyr face more resembling catalepsy than laughter. A faint, sweet smell like grapes came from a deep crack in the earth. A metal tripod lay on its side, its shallow basin cracked and corroded. In the dust of the corner a smooth stone lay, round as an egg, some six inches in diameter. As she approached it, the girl could feel the metal still entangling her wrists shift, pulled toward the stone.
A lodestone, she thought.
Her eyes detected motion in the deeper shadow of the crack in the floor. The girl slipped quietly to the edge of the crack, leaning over to gain a better look.
“Hello?” she called softly into the crack at her feet.
Only her Echo returned.
*************************************************************************
Echo crouched behind a wall of boxes of dried fish. Their pungent smell taunted her. Echo was ravenous, and while the desiccated seafood no longer smelled like food, memory suggested that it should. Outside of her hiding place dockworkers chattered among themselves in Koine Greek- nearly unintelligible to her ears. She heard a sudden noise of exclamation above her head and looked up to see a pair of startled black eyes.
Instinct is stronger than ethics. The dockworker was jerked down into the dark- fortunately out of sight of his companions. There was little fuss. Echo laid the young man down gently, briefly pressing her now ruddy lips to his pale ones. She absently stroked his hair, draping the dark curls so as to conceal the bloody ruin of his neck.
She felt both replete and a little melancholy. A nebulous thought suggested to her that the emotion was one she might once have associated with sex. She was a little shocked that she was not more horrified by her murder of the poor man.
“‘…the spiritual savage caged within my skeleton raged afresh,’” Echo whispered.
Once, she knew, she had been able to construct words of her own. Now it was all she could do to assemble ones already softened by other usage.
She was afraid…of what?
In a flash she knew: She was afraid to make her own words because she was afraid of what they might release. A monster slumbered within her: she did not want to attract its attention; alert it to the fact that she existed- crippled, amnesiac, but still aware.
She knew one more thing: She needed to get out of Greece.
Echo’s mouth tightened and she drew a short knife. She murmured Hellenic Greek to herself in a mad whisper as she drew the knife in a sudden arc across the man’s belly, releasing his bowels like coiled snakes. Echo stared at them for a moment, her pupils dilated and twitching as they followed some internal scene. Then she set her weight against a barrel, overturning it and spilling sixty gallons of olives into the hungry sea.
She climbed into the dank, olive-scented prison and pulled on the lid. Some hours later, long after the shouting and sobbing over the murdered deckhand had ceased, she heard a soft step approach. There was a soft thump as something heavy was placed atop her barrel. Then nails were driven in, affixing the lid.
That’s odd… thought Echo, not yet panicked.
Then a voice spoke, cutting through the claustrophobic darkness like a knife:
“Θάλασσα καὶ πῦρ καὶ γυνή, κακὰ τρία. But in this case I’ll take two out of three.”
It was as if the voice dripped terror directly into her veins. Echo beat against the lid to little effect. Whatever blocked the lid was far beyond her strength to shift.
A sudden ray of light pierced the stifling black of the barrel as a bung was driven into its side. Then a flood of brine began to pour in, muffling Echo’s cries as the burning seawater entered her lungs.
The shadowy figure remained by the barrel until the frantic thumping from within subsided.
“Sleep well, child(e?),” he said.
*****************************************************************************
Translation: "Sea and fire and woman, three evils."
*****************************************************************************
A slow billow of hair drifted in front of Echo’s face like seaweed. She flinched slightly and a shiver ran through her limbs as a sharp splintering noise disrupted her torpid state, muffled somewhat by the brackish liquid in which she was suspended. Her face tilted upward toward the growing crack of light above her. No thought or sentience was yet visible in her eyes- it was a tropism only, as mindless as the yearning of a sunflower toward the sky.
That changed as a thick arm was thrust into the pickling brine above her. Sudden intelligence flashed into the eyes and the barrel erupted in a spray of brine. Echo vomited, her involuntary expulsion of seawater continuing without break into the scream of a creature driven to its limit. Spiro, the cook, cowered against the wall before the maddened goddess before him, his fingers fumbling for the crucifix at his neck.
Echo advanced on him, murder in her eyes. Spiro whimpered as her hand reached out. Instead, Echo’s face crinkled with delight and she pressed her hand to the sole wooden wall in the cellar.
“The wall is false! My words are true!” she caroled, rapping on the suspect wall. With a sly glance she took in Spiro’s gradual creep for the door. She seized his wrist and phrased the next line as a question:
“I started keeping secrets when I sold myself to you?”
*******************************************************************************
“Man, I know you have night hours!” the student complained, clacking his tongue stud against his teeth in agitation. “I saw a bunch of people go in there last night.” He pushed forward, craning his neck to look into the shadowed Greek Diner.
Spiro looked the kid up and down from his adidas to his carefully gelled hair. Sensing… something, the kid backed off.
“No,” Spiro said with finality. “The Salonica closes at six, except by special invitation. You will not be receiving such an invitation, I think.”
Finis.