TokyoPewPew

Lamplight

"█̸̥̯̥̥̓̏̍█̶̣̗̦̮͛̋█̶̧͙̞̤͑̂█̶̛̤́█̶͖̜̬̓̍̈̑█̸̘̪͉͆̆█̴͙̤̒̈́̚ ̵̼̽͑█̸̯̠͙̲̎͝█̶̥̗͇̆█̵̗̊̈́̈́͠ ̷̪͛̆͒͜͝█̸̢̼̗͎̕█̶̢̹̠͐th, 2016. 6:30 A.M. exactly. Couldn't sleep——too anxious——didn't want to leave the relative privacy of my motel room but eventually paranoia lost the battle to sheer restlessness. Between the ceiling fan and the hum of the A.C. unit, both conspiring to keep the room arctic-cold, both inducing a slow, itchy madness..." [scoff] "Didn't plan on making another recording until I had something more to say——had made some concrete progress——but the library doesn't open until nine and there's not much else to do. Just smoke cigarettes and shoot the breeze...Funny. Yesterday's message was a suicide note in all but name but sitting here on this public bench, intact, unmolested, I blush with a sense of melodrama. Of sheer, staggering silliness. In truth I fight the urge to delete it. A ludicrous fallacy, of course——just ask theEdmund Fitzgeraldand her twenty-nine icy dead whether calm waters today augur calm waters tomorrow——and just because I can't see anyone watching me... "Well, never mind. All the same, so far so good. Slipping into town was easy; trivial, even. No presence on the roads, in the woods, but I don't dare yet gloat that I've come overprepared. In fact I wonder if this calm, this normalcy, is not my first glimpse into my adversary's psychology. Thinking about it, TSA-styled security theater——or the gutless posturings of fascism, for that matter——only the very weak and the very stupid try to obscure, say, an important door by sticking body armor and machine guns in front of it. That all butbegssomeone to wonder what's behind it. And shudder at the state-sanctioned violence they will do to keep one from wandering too close. But that leaves the observer to make an educated choice, doesn't it?——risk it all to get inside, or keep walking. And that won't do. No, maybe that's how

__________________________________________ OOC Declaration of Intentions Engage the janitor in conversation. Keep it pleasant yet superficially banal; placid on the surface, yet tacitly insightful. Use the topic of the missing girl to generate small-talk, prying for any interesting or unusual sightings. Take note of any sticker(s) on the bottle he's rolling across the parking lot: does it feature an NFPA 704 safety diamond? Written contents labels, EPA-compliant? If so, discreetly mark these in my journal after disengaging. Ask him if his [cleaning equipment] supplier also sells PPE. Try to notice whether this question generates any suspicions or mistrust, ie. whether locals are taught to be wary of anyone seeking out means of staying safe from chemical burns, and/or whether the subject of contamination/chemicals alarms them to an unusual degree.

you send a message, but not how you keep a secret, and if you were in charge of this coverup, with the stated goal of keeping eyes off Lamplight at all costs, no expense spared——you would almosthaveto recognize Stone's Throw's crucial importance in that endeavor, wouldn't you? It's the enemy's bridgehead. It's where she'll eat, sleep, plan, and recover. Where-to she'll retreat when things get dicey. Where-from she will launch all her efforts. And sending weapons and uniforms goosestepping down Main St., tangling the sidewalks in barbwire——dammit I'm a fool. If this place is anything to them it's a damn honeypot, not a bulwark! They're watching; they'relistening;they don't have to shoot a single living soul near the cordons because they can disappear people right here, right off the sidewalk. Anyone who fits the profile. Investigative journalists, whistleblowers, tinfoil hatters, why not? Anyone who asks the wrong questions, naturally. But anyone who stumbles too close at all, too, wittingly or otherwise!" [The morning air is so still, so quiet, one can hear the crackling of the cigarette paper as the speaker inhales.] "Sorry, I'm not used to this yet. Questioning everything, taking nothing for granted. I mean intellectually speaking I am, but not, not...existentially. Checking and re-checking peer-reviewed, trustworthy sources, sure, a little skepticism is just prudence, but this...holistic paranoia? It's exhausting. Does it get easier with practice? When does it stop being sotiring? "Let's just..." [swallowing] "Taking stock for a minute. Irrational anxieties be damned, I'm sure nobody remembers me. It's been eighteen years for God's sake. I haven't done anything suspicious in town so I can move freely for now. At this stage they'd have to find the dirt bike and I'msureI hid it as well as it can be hid. I mean even if they found tire tracks, even if they ascribed more significance thereto than the mere leavings of——of offroading hooligans, they'd have to follow those tracks uphill, downhill, over all manner of terrain. (Already a lot to ask of an E-3.) They'd have to bushwack and trailblaze, maybe for hours, through the wet, with all their equipment slogging them down. Then they'd have to find it despite the camouflage. And afterall that,I unbolted the license plate and scoured the VIN, so they'd have to think to check the serial numbers, which couldmaybelead back to me eventually...no. No, I think I'm in the clear. As long as I don't get complacent now. No heroics, no unnecessary risks, just keep my head down and do what I came here to do. Which... "Which, in that spirit, means I will have to take nothing for granted;assumenothing. Starting with the MSMA, which for all I know might not be MSMA at all but an entirely different chemical or hell, a whole alphabet cocktail of them. After all, what layman is going to know better? And which farmer whodoesknow better is going to say anything, when it's no doubt been heavily impressed upon him——upon them all——what will happen to their wives, their children if they do? No. First order of business——after the library, of course——has to be learning the true chemical composition of this stuff. Ascertain that I'm not wasting my time out here. I don't have the equipment nor the know-how to do this myself, of course. Bringing the samples back with me will just have to do. There's spectrometers and chromatographs in the Chemistry Department; someone there will help me for sure. Then a simple cross-reference with the records; check for chemical decomposition over time; check for any attempts to clean up or neutralize the spills; and I should have a pretty decent picture of whether the official story is bullshit. Then either the funreallybegins, or...or else I've expended a whole lot of time, money, and emotional energy on a snipe hunt. "So, a few resealing containers. Nonreactive plastic of course. That should be nothing more arduous than a trip to the dollar store. The hardware store should have some gloves and a ventilator——if the cashier asks I'm, uh, painting a bedroom. Sure. Why not. I may need a hydrologic map, too; provided thisisn'ta snipe hunt, the size and coordinates of the Superfund area should tell me, fairly accurately, which tributaries one could have used to disperse a water-soluble toxin at such scale. True, it may yet prove to be as simple as following the █̶͙̈́͝█̸͍̾█̴̹̦̲͊̑̓█̶̡̗̲̪̅̓͊█̸̠̏͗̍͜█̴̛̤̣̈̽█̷̰͉̩̞͒͝█̶̝̪͈͓̔█̵̫̠̗͔̾͌́█̵͎̀̓█̸̻̝̱̈́█̷͔̎̅̎͝ River until I reach that cranberry farm, but it's best to be prepared. And by the time I've gathered all this the library will be open. Then it's a fairly straightforward, if tedious, matter of——...of..." "Con——be——god damn it——goddammit!" "What is he——?...I wonder...Sir?" [footsteps: leather soles clacking imperiously over flagstone] "Sir, hold on a moment. Let me help you with that..."

♡♢ 𝚅𝙰𝙼𝙿𝙸𝚁𝙴: 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙼𝙰𝚂𝚀𝚄𝙴𝚁𝙰𝙳𝙴 — 𝕯𝖊𝖆𝖉 𝕸𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖞 ♤♧

<sup>Sometimes it took the form of an ambush, as it had in the library. Other times a bribe, a trade. Extortion or duplicity or even a gift freely given. But The Hunt; ever and always and ubiquitously (and more than a little euphemistically) they called it The Hunt. Its afterglow still tingling in his veins, Connie expressed himself on anything that would survive him; vented some of that vigor, that aggression, some of that newfound resolve on whatever laid within reach. He slammed his palms against the steering wheel and stomped down on the gas pedal. And when the Hemi roared so also did he, hanging out the window of the Challenger, loosing a war-whoop which startled a gaggle of sidewalk-goers into a bout of nervous giggles. A message to the Other sharing his body that he wasn't for sale—not tonight. A message to the fledglings wherever they were. A warning. They didn't have to hear it bellowing through downtown toward the Strip; only feel it as a rising of the hairs on the backs of their necks, a dread-stone calcifying in their kidneys, a whisper, a promise. Another of their Dark Ancestor's many barbed gifts: the same voice scraping the insides of their skulls as which scraped every Kindred's. Danger. Danger...

He took stock of himself, the Brujah, once he was pulled away into the first abandoned, weedy lot he'd happened across; engine idling; headlights tunneling the dark and terminating on the white and grey wall of a derelict auto body shop, white paint flaking off grey concrete in scabs. The scents of the city tangled in his hair, the Brujah, its dusts darkening the inner conch of his left ear. One of the lenses popped from his clubmasters, a mean, one-eyed glare peering back at him from the rearview mirror. (He peeled the broken sunglasses from his face and cast them out the window, heard their plasticky clatter across the asphalt.) Sand and road grit glued to the mayonnaise slathered up and down his suit pants. But despite this—despite it all—better. M̴͕̖̫̱̒ü̷̧̡̼̬̐c̶̥͆̀̂h̶̞̜͎͇̐́ better.

He patted down his pockets and much to his relief it had survived his hot-heeled escape across the library lot, back through the sports medicine place, the entirety of his rolled-window rout out of downtown: the guest slip, thin and brittle as a cicada's sheddings. "Alright, 'C. Capdevielle,'" Connie muttered—as if he addressed the Gangrel herself, sat beside him in Teresa's usual spot or perhaps in the backseats where the ziptied fugitives liked to kick and struggle, and their loved ones bleated and begged without end—"show me where you've been hiding." Already the MDT, built into his center console, glowed at the ready; bathing his every scruffy feature in an artificial cobalt blue. He didn't waste his time where the cops no doubt had already scoured—residences, registered vehicles, previous criminal activity, outstanding warrants—all the obvious and trodden avenues—no need. Not when he knew something they didn't. Instead, navigating the blocky U.I. with practiced pecks, tapping in the name of the fledgling who'd haunted and harangued them for most of two weeks, Connie pulled up two nationwide databases. Missing persons first, a compilation of Silver Alerts and AMBERs, kidnappings, all the human trafficking hotlines. Then, windowed beside it, the obituaries. He queried strings, substrings, and tokens. Hot cases and cold ones. False positives and recent sightings and every dead-end lead. He pulled it all; cast his net as wide as wide went. Couldn't be too thorough, not with Brace breathing down his neck.

Sifting through the flagged results, his spine curdled.

Not at first, of course; fewer than a dozen matches, most of them useless. (Thank God she wasn't a Smith or a Jones or a Lopez.) But as Connie sifted through the males, the elderlies, the blondes, the pre-2000s, just as he was becoming sure he'd sniffed his way to nowhere, lost the scent at a creek or a falter-line like an old bloodhound with a nose not half of what it used to be, the first fateful track caught his eye: wherein a "Paul Capdevielle, Sr."—along with a Horatio T. Behan and a Jack and Lily Addison—had pooled a $25,000 dollar reward for information leading to the safe return of their three children, last seen, the whole clique, on the eighth of June, boarding a taxicab to Louis Armstrong International. Connie didn't know what compelled him to pull up a police report from Louisiana, replete with a Xeroxed scan of the reward fliers ("5'3...petite build...last seen wearing..."); to give it more than the perfunctory dismissive glance; but it could not have been anything less than a quirk of fate, the guiding hand of good luck itself. As these posterboards had not only been slathered across every telephone pole, bulletin board, and milk carton in NOLA that Old Money could buy: a little more delving, and it turned out this cadre of aging socialites had photocopied it to every major newspaper and late-night news outlet in Vegas. A few tabloids had picked up the story and buried it on page six or ten or twenty-two; the Review-Journal and the Sun had each rented out a half-spread of ad space. (Hardly the showing a few old rich pearl-clutching cunts had hoped to bring out for their dead rich cunt kids, and yet...)

Connie's hands would have begun to tremble had his undead body still featured a functioning endocrine system. All the same he lit a cigarette. Readied his notepad and a cheap gel pen, and kept digging.

Caroline Capdevielle, Madison Behan, and Haley Addison. Once he had all three names, courtesy of their worried-to-death families' missing persons flier, tracking their week-long glorified bar crawl across the Strip was a cinch: their cards pinging from concierge desk to restaurant to casino teller. ATM to ATM to ATM. (Spoiled little shits. Connie couldn't see the objects of the transactions but he salivated at the amounts in the statements, all zeros and commas; seethed at the names of hoity-toity celebrity chefs, at hour upon hour of bottle service. And not a credit line in sight; only debit.) Interestingly, all three paper trails ended at roughly the same time, in roughly the same area: the Resorts World complex. For some reason all three girls had drawn large sums of cash all within twenty minutes of each other—one at the on-site sports betting shop, two more at the casinos—seemingly to meet up again somewhere nearby and blow it all at a fourth location. Connie clicked his pen and recorded his suspicions:</sup>

^{Caroline Hilton casino floor
Madison Conrad cas. floor
Haley Egan's Saloon/Sports Book
___________________________________
June 14th, met up @ RESORT WORLD, drew cash
in 3 difrent spots (worried abt getting traced/
folowed??) to nervus to use cards?
WHY THE SECRESY
Must of been founded last sign of them
befor they vanish of the face of the earth}

<sup>He had a date now; maybe even a rough triangulation of where these girls had met their First Deaths; but hardly enough to seal the case. With that avenue, for the time, exhausted, he continued the—

Girls?

He paused—wasn't the second perp—the one in the CCTV footage...?—Connie fast-rewound the tape, still inserted; pulled up the feed of the parking garage, of Curtis Prince DeWayne being herded to his slaughter. He played it back. Rewind and replay and rewind and fast-forward and replay. No. No, no matter how he looked at it, what timestamp, what angle, Caroline's accomplice was male. Skinny-wristed and a bit of a faggot, sure, but in the shoulders and the crotch and the hunched, shrinking gait, shriveled by neurosis, by paranoia, unequivocally a fucking dude. Connie tabbed over to the missing persons poster; zoomed in on the photocopy of a photocopy of three small, grainy, cropped pictures of three dead girls, all three dolled out and dressed up in their prettiest little princess blouses and bell skirts. Nope: not a she-male in the bunch. This, too, began to make its way into his notebook, but before he could finish asking himself the question did its answer call out to Connie from the dark, low and mewling. It occurred to him to tab back to the obits—to query Behan and Addison and sure enough up came their mugshots, the splatter across their chins and throats the color of chocolate cake batter, their perfect skin the color of grubs, the one girl's stare a glassy and lidless stare the other's bunched and raisined, transfixed mid-scream by the death-stiffness. Connie looked at them; beheld them. Beheld the desolation and the waste. He amended his question.</sup>

^{Who is the boy?
Were did Madison and HaWhy only Imbrace
Caroline?}

<sup>Little by little, inch by agonizing inch the picture was becoming clearer, but he had to laugh; it wasn't like him to flinch away from uncomfortable truths, to draw out the inevitable, to ignore disquieting questions by posing other, gentler ones. Certainly not to miss the constellation for the stars. They'd already found the girls. They'd already found the girls and catalogued their names, their faces, already uploaded the mugshots to their server farms, already filed the carcasses away in cold, steel cabinets scrubbed neat as silverware. They'd already prodded glass rods at the wound channels (cursorily and amateurishly concealed with knife or gunshot or belt sander as was the habit); already typed up a coroner's report awash with words he didn't understand like "carotid sheath," "antemortem," "acute exsanguination," "demarcated." And his "C. Capdevielle"—already toe-tagged, already autopsied, already a fucking Masquerade breach. He was wasting time. A corpse walked the streets—they had her I.D., her picture, they'd broken the news to her family and here was Connie Beauclerc puzzling over the polite dead girls, the obedient ones not walking out the freezer front door and eating the tourists. There had to be something. Come on you washed-up bastard, you old sniffer-dog, it's out there somewhere and all you got to do is find it, then you can go back to your ratty apartment, the neighbors' meth-den stink seeping through your walls, your loathsome landlady; get back to the nightly grind and stop doing charity work for the Primogen Council at least for a little while. The bank statements. That's right, all those bottles of Château de Fartsniffer 2007, all those Michelin-starred midnight snacks, there had to be a room; and no mere four-walls-and-a-bed affair, either, not for this pillow-mint posse. Come on, you stupid little pricks, Connie muttered as he backclicked his way to the relevant page, as cigarette ash spilled down into his lap, please for the love of Caine don't use PayPal. And his prayers were answered. He widened the parameters, pulled up new searches; scoured Addison's financial details and Behan's, but accordingly it was Caroline herself who had paid for the group's lodging, for so went one of several dozen frivolities she had transacted within city limits since her arrival: Point of Sale Withdrawal / VENETIAN PALAZZO FRT DESKLAS VEGAS NV 881921311 Card #1447.

And so at last. At last he'd hunted down the next bread crumb. At last he knew where to go next. And yet no exuberance, no triumph flooded him; for weren't Connie's heart an inert lump of muscle in his room-temperature chest it most assuredly would have dropped down into his diaphragm, pressing the dread deep, deep into the gulf of his stomach. The Venetian was Giovanni turf.</sup>

Lamplight

The rest of your suggestions, both here and in your character sheet, are things I'll adapt in some way. I apologize in advance if it ends up not to your liking.

@Antarctica

You worry too much. 😄 💖

Lamplight

double post >:\

Lamplight

Will be starting my post soon. In the meantime I've given character histories some thought.

First, some disclaimers: I apologize if these suggestions seem too commensalistic and/or passive for our lovely GM's tastes. This is the one area in which my character's central red-herring conceit—setting out to 'merely' uncover a government or corporate conspiracy and inadvertently uncovering something so much worse instead—has really challenged me. Because said conceit falls apart fast if it turns out Marion actually knew about vampires or wendigos or magicians the whole time.

Additionally, these are merely spitballs. I'm not married to them whatsoever and in fact you'll (plural) find me receptive to adjustments, refinements, and improvements in general. I merely hope for these to get some ideas rolling at the very least.

All that aside:

@Tally Dor - with Antarctica's permission, I think it best if our characters don't know each other. For the aforementioned reasons, and likewise so as not to trespass upon Alexander's lone wolf vibes.

@Raqueltrper - "Our agents who've reconnoitered the area in preparation for your mission have reported something troubling: a foreigner exceeding Sleeper-level clearances, asking questions about things she should not be asking questions about. When the opportunity presents, identify this person; verify her intentions; assure that she cannot interfere, wittingly or otherwise, with our directive; and—if necessary—terminate."

@PatientBean - Several macabre details outlined in Dr. Lovelace's various articles, research papers, and seminars RE: the local tribe have directly paralleled gruesome imagery appearing in Tiffany's nightmare-fugues. That means the nearby Indian reservation is significant but how? Why?

@enmuni & @Passable Writer - will discuss in DMs as per usual.

Do You Have RP Pet Peeves?

Yes..... the behavior that's annoying and gross and worthy of lampooning. The one whose ridiculousness I set out to accentuate, on purpose. Yes, I used a low-effort meme in tandem with this highly advanced, sophisticated technique called "slight exaggeration" to mock it. Kudos for noticing the reductionist joke-post was, in fact, reductive.

Do You Have RP Pet Peeves?

I also find it a little ironic tbh considering in your original post you're the one that seems to treat race as an aesthetic with the whole "Aladdinland" bs, which literally reduces being Middle Eastern to an aesthetic fyi.

@Qia

I need help understanding how confronting and mocking this pattern of behavior, per the conceit of this thread, is actually endorsing and perpetuating it.

Do You Have RP Pet Peeves?

Woof. Thank goodness you're just playing devil's advocate, else the insinuation that race is merely an "aesthetic" and not "how characters are written" would have been insidious as fuck 🙏

Do You Have RP Pet Peeves?

make a fantasy rp with an enormous, detailed world map

fill the map with (say) six factions

five of those factions are slightly different flavors of gorgeous white people

the sixth faction is the token Aladdinland where very-slightly-tanned gorgeous white people wear thawbs and turbans and scimitars

Lamplight

Same