Chronicles of the Camarilla's Deathknight (Exalted/World of Darkness)

"I think we can do this on our own, and I feel like we should avoid owing favors we don't need to," you say. "As for the politics of it, maybe we can talk to the Brujah Primogen? See if he's willing to support us if we attract unwelcome attention."

"Unlikely, Jeremiah's a real asshole." Jeremiah! That was his name, Jeremiah Freeman. "But it's worth seeing where we stand with him, I suppose, given all your, you know," says Leila as she makes a vague gesture in your general direction.

"So can we just walk up to him and chat, or is there like, protocol here?"

Leila shakes her head. "If we were Ventrue or something it'd probably be a different story, but Jeremiah will at least hear us out without a fuss."

So Leila leads you out of the bushes and over to where Jeremiah is. He's been watching you the whole time, apparently, and so is not surprised when you come over to speak to him.

"Let me guess," he says. "You want to know whether or not you're actually in the clan? Whether or not we'll claim you as one of our own?"

You frown, a bit annoyed at being preempted. "Yeah, guess I do. So what do you say?"

He looks you in the eyes, his gaze unsettling in its intensity. "Do you feel it?" he asks.

You stare back at him, baffled. "Feel what?" you ask.

"The Beast," he urges. "Do you feel it clawing at your mind, trying to tear its way out of your skin and into the world with every waking moment? Do you feel the urge to give in to base animal instinct, to rip and tear at those delicate little mortals and gorge yourself on their blood? To claw out the throat of anyone who stands in your way, consequences be damned? Do you feel like a wild animal forced to pretend she's civilized, because if you stop pretending you don't think you'll ever find your way back from the rage?"

You had up until now forgotten that the Beast was something you were supposed to have to contend with. Perhaps yours was just quiet? You hoped that was the case. The alternative was yet another strange inconsistency.

"No," you reply in full honesty. "No, I don't feel like that at all."

He shakes his head. "Then you're a Caitiff as far as I care."

"Fuck you, old man!" Leila snarls. "I sired her, you know I sired her, so-"

"Shut your trap, Harrow, and think for a moment," says Jeremiah. "You think the other Brujah will accept someone who doesn't have to fight the Beast every night? I'm doing you little shits a favor."

"Yeah, this is definitely your idea of a favor alright," argues Leila. "You sit back and do nothing, leaving us to fend for ourselves, and when we ask you for help you say we should be grateful!"

"Make up your fucking mind, Harrow," he fires back. "Are all us elders evil manipulators who should stay out of your business, or do you need our help just to get by?"

"I fucking-" Leila begins, only for you to interrupt.

"Okay, time out!" you call out, causing both Brujah to glare at you. You do your best not to wilt under the weight of Leila's displeasure, but you know from experience that when she gets worked up like this, she sometimes needs to be interrupted before she does something she'll regret. "Leila, I'm really sorry, but you need to cool off before you frenzy in Elysium."

"You fucking-" she says, only to cut herself off. "Fine! Fine, you've got a point, Strider."

You nod to her, relieved, then turn to the other Bruja. "Jeremiah, if you say I'm not in the clan, I accept that. Can't do much to fight it. But can you at least throw us a bone here? Do something so we're not stranded out here with no one to back us up?"


"No," he answers bluntly. "You want my help, you gotta earn it."

"Well fuck you too," you reply without any heat. "Leila, I think we're wasting our time here."

"Right," she snarls, still clearly worked up. "Best we move on from this fucking asshole."

Jeremiah flips you off as Leila storms away with you in tow. Before you can get far, you're intercepted by a balding man in a suit with an unsightly, puckered scar on his face. He's alive, which means that he's likely a ghoul since he's in Elysium.

"Miss Harrow? Strider? I have information from my master concerning the task you've been assigned."

"Then fucking-" Leila starts, before visibly calming herself. She takes a deep breath, something you know she's only doing to center herself since breathing is, of course, optional for her, before replying again. "This is from Seance?"

The ghoul nods. "Indeed. I have the last known location of Simms and the rest of his new pack, a picture of the man so you know who your target is, and the number you should call when you've completed your task."

"Give them to us," says Leila. "Then we'll get this show on the road."

***

You drive south through the winding streets of Boston in silence for a few minutes, Leila quietly fuming in the passenger seat of your old beat up sedan. You contemplate not saying anything, but ultimately what does it for you is the realization that she's scared. She's focusing on the anger to distract herself from what you're about to do because she's not sure you're going to come out alive.

You get that, you really do, but you think she'd be better off focusing on something besides the anger. So you opt to give her another distraction.

"So, what was that?" you ask.

"What was what?"

"With the Primogen. Sounds like you had some history with him. Anything I should know about?"

Leila doesn't reply. You glance over to her and find her expression to be some mix of contemplative and pissed off. Well, you'll take it.

Finally, she speaks. "I never told you about my Embrace, did I?"

You quietly shake your head. "No, you didn't." You do your best to conceal your excitement at learning more about your love, knowing that while you'll certainly treasure the moment, your glee is not what she needs right now. Even if this is a part of her life she's conspicuously avoided talking about until now.

Leila sighs. "Right, well, it was fucked up. The asshole that did it never got permission from the Prince, so he got murdered as soon as I was discovered. And that left me without a sire, which is dangerous as hell when you're a fledgling. I begged Jeremiah for protection, for some sort of replacement sire I could learn from or something, but he just left me to rot. Said it was for my own good, even, that I needed to learn how to fend for myself."

"Fucking asshole," you snarl.

"Right?" says Leila. "Anyway, I had to beg and borrow and trade favors for every scrap of protection and education I could get, which put me deep in debt with a lot of powerful people. I've done a lot to balance the scales since then, but I'm still in the red. Every now and then someone will call me up on one of those favors I owe from way back when, and I don't have a choice but to do what they want."

"That's… I'm sorry, Leila," you say. Now that you have power, you'll do your best to get her out of that mess. "So why does he hate you?"

"I don't know, because he's an asshole?" she grouses. Then she sighs. "No, that's not fair, he's made it plenty clear why he doesn't like me. He doesn't like any of the Anarchs, he thinks we're hypocrites for talking like we do while still bowing and scraping for our elders. Like it's our fault that all of society is stacked against us, like we want to play nice with the fuckers that murdered my sire. We can't all live in the Free State, some of us have to play the hands we're dealt."

"Right, fuck him for forgetting what it's like to be on the bottom of the totem pole."

"Fuck him," Leila agrees.

The rest of the drive passes in companionable silence.

***

You eventually pull up to a somewhat dilapidated looking two story house: the siding is rotting off, and some of the windows are boarded up, but there's lights shining through the boarded up windows so you know the place is occupied.

"Well, we're here," you say, getting out of the car. Leila quickly follows you.

"Hey, slow down a minute," says Leila, and you pause on your walk up to the front door. "We need a plan."

"Okay, then what's the plan?" you ask.

"Christ, I don't know, there's only two of us. What were you going to do before I stopped you?"

You shrug. "Knock on the front door and kill whoever answered."

Leila facepalms, and you grin at her sheepishly. You know it's not the most elegant of plans, but you don't feel like you need an elegant plan here. You feel strong. Really strong.

"Fuck, okay, sure, go ahead and do that," says Leila. "I'll wait back to ambush in case we need it."

"Works for me," you say with a shrug, Then you turn back to the house, walk up to the front door, and knock.


A moment later, the door is answered by a gangster with a shaved head and a wifebeater revealing… are those Nazi tattoos?

"The fuck are you?" asks the gangster.

You sigh. "This is a white supremacist gang, isn't it? That's what the Sabbat have taken over?" you ask. You don't bother waiting for an answer. You just drive your fist straight through his skull, exploding it in a shower of gore and grey matter. His headless corpse topples to the ground a moment later, revealing behind it a crowd of about a dozen stunned onlookers deeper in the house.

"Jesus Christ!" one of them shouts, and then you move.

You blur through the crowd, making corpses as you go. Here you tear a throat out with your teeth, there you disembowel a man with your bare hands, on and on it goes. They've barely realized you're in their midst, and already half their number are dead. Some part of you seems fulfilled by the bloody violence, that great ocean of power inside of you swelling, roaring into a maelstrom as it leaks out of your skin. You are a cyclical engine of murder, feeding on the violence you create.

You spot your target in the crowd. Simms barely has time to peel himself off of the girl he was feeding on before you rip him in two.

"We're fucking dead!" calls one of the gangsters, racing up the stairs. You grin. You've always felt at home in the middle of a fight, but this… this is something else.

You hear noises from up stairs, a brief exchange between the gangster and someone else.

"Someone's tearing us apart! She's an animal!"

"Here, explain everything to the person on the phone. I'll deal with the problem myself."

Then a figure comes bounding down the stairs, a grotesque looking Tzimisce with finger-shaped growths instead of hair, dressed as a mockery of a Catholic priest.

"To me, my faithful!" he calls as he throws himself at you with supernatural speed. You dodge deftly to the side, causing him to crash into the wall beside you.

"Shoot the bitch!" calls one of the gangsters, and the air is filled with gunshots. You laugh as you dance between them, dodging bullets by inches. Then a band of shovelheads come flying down the stairs, clawing and biting at you in a blur of motion, and you dodge them too. You flow impossibly swift and smooth, graceful motions no human could hope to match taking you between claws, teeth and bullets, all without a scratch on you.

Then Leila finally joins the fray, moving through the front door with speed born of Celerity, body-checking one of the more distracted gangsters before slugging another in the face.

That brief moment of distraction is all you need to tear yourself free of the crowd, stride over to the still dazed Tzimisce, and tear out his unbeating heart. There's a lull in the violence, then, as Kindred and kine alike react in horror to the death of their leader. Then one of the remaining Sabbat howls in rage and pounces at you.

You sidestep the airborne Kindred, grab her leg in passing, and then spin and toss her towards a gangster. The two land in a heap before she bites out his throat, unthinkingly violent in the throes of frenzy. Then you wade into the crowd again, and you make more corpses.

The gangsters are easy: a strong blow to the chest shatters one ribcage, a firm grip and a twisting motion snaps a neck. The Sabbat are harder, but still not hard: you rip one in half, painting the walls with his entrails, while another gets her head torn off with one swift motion.

It's a massacre.

By the time the last gangster falls, wheezing through the hole in his chest, the two surviving Sabbat have fled. It's just you, Leila, and a lot of corpses.


"Jesus fucking Christ, Strider," says Leila. She's staring at you, eyes wide. Then she glances around at the walls (stained red), and the floor (covered in the dead and the dying). "You, uh, you care about me, right?"

You turn from where you're exulting in the abattoir you've created to stare into Leila's eyes. Your hands are caked in gore, and shadow rolls out from you in waves as a dead sun bleeds on your forehead.

"Leila Harrow, I love you more than anything in the world."

She gives you a nervous smile. "Right, that's, uh, that's good to know."

A single slow clap resounds through the room.

You whirl towards the source of the noise and find a pale, androgynous figure with messy black hair in a long dark coat leaning against the doorframe of the front door. On their forehead is a green symbol, like a 2 with a vertical line through the tail, or an open 4 that curls on the leftmost part. Their eyes are a piercing green and sparkle like the night sky.

"Well aren't you impressive?" they remark. "Unfortunately, that was my lead, so I think we're going to have to have a little conversation, the three of us. What do you say?"

"'Your lead?'", you ask. "You were investigating these people?"

"I was, and I'd made good progress into understanding these 'Cainites' until you came along. So I'd appreciate a little quid pro quo, you understand."

"Strider, the Masquerade," urges Leila, and you nod to her before turning back to the mysterious intruder.

"Sorry, this is nothing personal," you say, grimacing. You really don't like doing this, not to some innocent stranger, but you can't have it be known you let someone escape after admitting they were investigating Kindred.

"Now, before you go all ultra-violence on my ass, are you sure you don't want to have a conversation? I could tell you all about the apocalypse that's coming."

"Strider, wait," says Leila, and you still. "What's this about an apocalypse?"

"No, no, no, that's not how we're doing this," they say with a shake of their head. "I gave you some info, now you have to give something up in return. We'll go a question for a question, how's that?"

You frown and turn to Leila for guidance. She shrugs nervously, still eyeing your surroundings with some wariness. Looks like she's leaving the choice up to you.

"What's your name, stranger?" you ask.

They shoot you a grin. "I don't have a name anymore, everyone's gone and forgotten it. Nowadays people just call me Trouble. So what's your choice, Strider? Questions, or violence?"

[ ] Play a game of questions with Trouble, focusing your questions on…
-[ ] This apocalypse Trouble is warning about.
-[ ] Trouble: their goals, their capabilities, etc.
-[ ] Write in

[ ] Don't play, just kill them