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“Adelaide, darling!” Calantha let out a titter of joy, sliding down next to the dainty little creature, on her wooden bench, “how are you, my love? It's been much too long.”

“All the better now that you’re here, sweetness!” the petite girl chirped, “I’m awfully fond of this new look of yours!” 

Calantha giggled with warm joy. 

On this particular night, she had a strong jaw, big eyes, and pale, snow white skin. 

She was also garbed in leather crafted from flayed flesh and bone.

Adelaide, by contrast, had spent the last handful of centuries frozen in the body of an eight year old girl. She had rather promptly diablerized her sire, as compensation for the inconvenience.

“Have you been busy, darling?” Calantha asked Adelaide. 

“A bit of this, a bit of that,” Adelaide waved one hand dismissively, “nothing too exciting. Mass murder loses so much of its charm after your third century.”

The cavern in which the two women sat was heaving with a veritable horde of ghastly, hungry cainites. The Camarilla and the Anarchs considered themselves to be monsters, but the Sword of Cain were a roaring inferno to their flickering match stick.

Clan Lasombra had come to America with the conquistadors, centuries ago, and the California Gold Rush only saw their power and influence grow further and further. Grace Cathedral, was a relic of such times, built in 1849, with the devious schemes of the Sabbat very much kept in mind. 

Hidden from the mundane eyes of the kine, a series of dark, winding passageways, and subterranean chambers, loomed beneath Grace Cathedral, to be employed in times such as these.

Calantha and Adelaide were sat in a sort of battered old pew, surrounded by twisted, terrible figures. 

On a bench, little more than a stone’s throw from where the pair were seated, Calantha spotted Leila Monroe, a blonde-haired Priscus, who had been hell bent on claiming LA for the Sabbat for as long as anyone could remember, trading words with a gaunt-faced Andy Warhol, who was hiding his haggard features behind thick, dark shades. 

“It's a shame about your lot and cameras,” Warhol was saying to Monroe, “I’d have loved to shoot you in the studio, sometime.” 

Across from the odd couple, Calantha spotted Isabella Cocolo, a tall, spindly Malkavian woman, with bronze skin, and long black haired, tied into knotted braids. A pair of twisted scars were carved deeply into her cheeks, forming a permanent warped grin.

Isabella was chatting with a grim looking man with an enormous white beard, whose overly-muscular form was squeezed into a much-too-tight leather jacket. 

“Quite the gathering, isn’t it?” Adelaide murmured to Calantha. 

She nodded in agreement.

Suddenly, out of the darkness, a towering character appeared, and stepped into the centre of the underground chamber. His misshapen body was shrouded beneath a long black cloak.

The monster raised one clawed hand, and the murmuring of conversation slowly petered out.

“It's him…” Calantha muttered, more than a little startled.

El Conde was exquisitely grotesque to behold. Even amongst the ranks of the Sabbat, nobody was quite sure if el Conde was a particularly ugly Nosferatu, or some other, alien breed of monster, all together.

From beneath his dark hood, a pair of enormous, milky white, orb-like eyes glistened. His distended mouth was stuffed full of jagged, razor-sharp teeth, and the flesh around his lower jaw had rotted away, to reveal bleached white bone. Ribbons of bloody, peeling skin hung off of el Conde's bloated face, and his necrotic likeness was overflowing with sickly yellow pustules, which oozed rank, stinking discharge.

"Exalted siblings," el Conde called out, his voice a guttural wheeze, as he addressed the room, "the matter which brings us here, on this most grim of nights, is indeed a dire one!"

El Conde clasped his hands together. His long, bony fingers grew into jet black talons, as lightless as smooth obsidian.

"Ancient, terrible powers stirr in the darkness. Our oldest enemy, dismissed as fiction by the ivory tower, has reared its foul head." 

The room was silent, hanging on the raspy words of the pestilent speaker.

"You have all felt, as I have, hideous energies swelling, and thrumming, inside our very minds. Make no mistake; this is the beginning of the end. The final nights are upon us, my siblings, and these dreaded signals are harbingers of Gehenna itself." 

The misshapen figure paused, allowing his enthralled audience to consider his words.

"But we shall not roll over and die, like some sickly pup, as the Camarilla, and those which baseless claim the mantle of "Anarch" will," el Conde declared, "we are more than the hapless feast of the antediluvians!" 

El Conde spread his arms wide, his morose voice swelling into a roaring bellow. 

"[b]WE SHALL TAKE THE FIGHT TO THE BLOOD TYRANTS![/b]" el Conde boomed, "[b]AND WE WILL BLEED THEM DRY![/b]"