2.3
"Fight well, brother," you say, and you leap out the window, cutting through the heavy curtain. Bolts of plasma and hypersonic tungsten darts track your mad dash across the clubroom, but your ghostly golden blades deflect them. You explode out of the thick, darkened glass and run down it, biting back a curse as you see the dozens of onlookers waiting outside. A few cops are desperately trying to herd them back, but whatever the things you fight were, they don't seem to be more of them.
An explosion rocks the building and something very large, very furry, and very much on fire is thrown out onto the street. It looks at you for one moment as you both land, the cops very cautiously pointing guns at both of you... only for something else to emerge from the burning rubble the werewolf was thrown from.
It was huge, with smooth insectoid armoured plating and rippling pitch-black artificial muscles visible through the few gaps in the plating. Four arms emerge from its shoulders, two ending in some form of multi-barreled, rotating guns with smoking barrels and two ending in what looked like electrified blades.
The crowd screams, mostly at the burning werewolf. Which you understand - it was very large, its claws were dripping sizzling blood, and it didn't really seem all that bothered by being lit on fire. But you sense something try to touch your mind, some delirious, supernatural fear - it could find no purchase, and you saw the wolf-man incline his head towards you.
The suit of armour raises its gun-arms and opens fire. Bullets tear at the werewolf's skin, sending sprays of red blood across the street, but it wasn't enough. It charges forward so fast it is only a blur, and its claws cut through the advanced composites of the suit's armour as easily as flesh.
You hear only a grief scream as the werewolf tears a bloody hunk of meat that had once been a man from inside the suit of armour. Blood drips down its jaws, and you find yourself alone on the street as the sound of gunfire and battle echoes from inside the Sunset Club. You feel your power fade as you let the essence go, sheathing your sword as you look around.
Nobody seems to be waiting for you, though you can hear sirens in the distance. Whoever these interlopers are, you hope Ivo isn't dumb enough to stick around and fight them. Maybe the werewolf will distract them, you hope.
You walk down an alleyway, put your katana and mask back in your bag, and begin to climb up to the rooftops. It's easy for you now the leap and climb up a half dozen stories, and you take a moment to rest once you do. You can see the smoke rising from the Sunset Club, the police forming a cordon between you and it, and the helicopters slowly circling overhead.
"It's a beautiful sight, to see that blight burning. Watching half the night folk in the city descend on the Sunset Club and blowing it to burning splinters is something else," a woman says. You spin around, and you see her standing on the edge of the building behind you - perhaps two stories above you. She's dressed in a fine black suit, with a black shirt and tie, and has long dark brown hair tied back in a ponytail. Leather gloves cover her hands, and she smiles slightly as you turn to look at her.
"Who are you?" you ask. Something about her seems off, but you don't get the sense of wrongness some things - the vampires, and whoever your dark mirror was - give you.
"That's an interesting question, Anna," the woman says, and she steps off the dge. She lands on the rooftop with you as though she was as light as a feather.
"You're one of those... mages?" you ask, your eyes wide as she says your name.
"Not any more than you are. I was... affiliated with a group of them before destiny found me. Much as you were, I was but one small cog in their war," she says.
"Their war?" you ask, confused.
"I see your teacher has told you so very little. The War, the only one that matters to them - the Ascension War. The conflict between the traditions, like your teacher, and the Technocracy - who you have just been introduced to. It is a battle for history, for reality itself, and we have so little time for it," she says.
"Is it about the, uh, consensus?" you ask, hoping that's the right word.
"It is, though mages have a terrible habit of overplaying their hands when it comes to the power of the Consensus. We have so little time left to us, and the world will need the Awakened before the end,"
"You sound like you think the world's about to end or something," you say.
"You can see the red star, can't you? Omens and portents and predictions, and all they say is that we approach the end of this age. Do you remember that typhoon in Bangladesh, the one that caused that war?" she asks, and you nod.
"I was only a kid when it happened, but..." you say, and you remember that week of chaos. Your parents had been glued to the news every night, and then suddenly it was all over and nothing really seemed to have changed.
"That was no natural disaster. One of the first vampires woke back up, and the hungry dead waged a war halfway across the subcontinent trying to stop it. They failed," she says.
"The hungry dead?"
"You will, I suspect, meet them soon. Blood-drinkers of a different sort, who rule the nights of Asia much as the Camarilla does in the West. It was not them alone, of course, who did battle with the thing vampires call an Antediluvian - but it was they who called the typhoon. When they could not disrupt the storm through their enlightened science, the Technocracy took a different tactic," she says.
"What did they do?" you ask, and you feel a sense of dread run down your spine. You know how many died that week - you've seen pictures of the towns broken apart by the typhoon.
"They unleashed a weapon more terrible than anything these nights had ever seen. A kind of spiritual neutron bomb that slew everything supernatural in a wide radius, with a relatively limited blast radius. Though, a ten kiloton airburst is still a ten kiloton airbust... and even a pattern of five of them merely managed to wound the Antediluvian," she says.
"Five fucking nukes and it was just wounded?" you whisper, horrified.
"Five relatively small, tactical weapons. In any event, the bombs killed the creatures maintaining the storm and allowed the Technocracy to bring their orbital mirrors to bear. That killed it," she says, and you feel somehow small for the briefest moment. Then, it seems almost that a part you rebels against that. You feel your essence, and you feel the warmth of the sun on your face.
"So if it's dead, how's that related to the end of the world?" you ask, and you dread the answer.
"Because that was one of them, and there are a dozen more still slumbering according to Vampire legend. The Traditions and the Technocracy both have been weakened, cut off from their great masters - and there are other things waiting for us in the dark. Things worse than Antediluvians,"
"What the hell am I supposed to do about it?" you ask, and she smiles.
"You are something new. Or, depending on your point of view, something very old. I can't claim to know why we returned, or where we've been for so long, but I know a little. You are one of the Exalted, a Solar of the Dawn Caste. I have seen you fight, Anna, and you carry that peerless skill out of legend and into these fallen nights. You have only touched the barest hint of your true potential, and already there are few who could face you. If you master that power sleeping within you... there will be none," she says. Her words ring with truth at some level beyond instinct or understanding, as if the world itself guaranteed her words.
"Who are you, then?" you ask, remembering the 'we' she used.
"I am one of the Sidereal Exalted, a Chosen of Battles. But you can call me Alice," she says, and she extends one of her gloved hands. You take it, and you see the mark of Mars burn red on her forehead. Your own cast mark shines brilliant gold, reflected in her dark eyes.
Where do you go from here?
[x] Back to Ivo's place, at least for a few moments - you need a place to lay low for a little, and it should be off the radar.
[x] Go to ground completely, and simply find somewhere unconnected with you to hunker down in.
[x] Write In