cleostsebastian
Daughter of Darkness
Posts: 106
(11/11/05 10:38 pm)
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Game Thirty-Three 10/30/05
998,009 B.C. • Day 7
The Awakening
Laying in Marcus estate's largest guest bedroom (sparse of furniture, to be sure: only the basics), Cleo was gulled to the pillows on the basalt slab with rocketing memories. The last blocks that her grandfather's Pricus placed on her fell away in chunks of vitae from her long-term memory center. Carmen Maria Santa Lucia Cleo Saint Sebastian-Moncada is whole again.
In flashes, that now were easily accessible, Cleo saw her life in Seville and Barcelona. In Seville, she helped her grandfather in a great ceremony where a powerful artifact was buried alongside an ancient vampire.
In Barcelona, she was fully educated in her place as a Moncada and the hope of embrace was a titillating call to obedience. She remembered Philadelphia and Baltimore... her life, her passions, her specialty in harpsichord, piano and organ, her embarrassments, her torments.... YES, her father molested her. If the Cardinal knew of that, he would certainly be destroyed.
Little Carmen wasn’t helpless any more!
998,009 B.C. • Day 8
Blood and Circuses
She leapt, naked from the alter, covered in the tatters of her clothes. The blood of her day augeries flowed across the warm basalt tile of the tropical Gomorran night. She traced the lines of blood and could see that they had been marked in a great circular sigil around the place that she died for the night.
Upon close investigation, she was sure that it was a power system of some sort, but it was completely alien to her. No research had ever shown the complexity of this design. It would take her two weeks of uninterrupted study, she believed, to fully decipher the full meaning... assuming that there was one.
She stood naked in the austere piazza. The door remained barred to interlopers. She had her own guest chamber, a storage room, with all of her gear, and a bath chamber to herself. The one piece of furniture in the guest chamber was a desk with some of her papers and books. There was also a small bookshelf with a meager collection of four or five tomes. She rifled through them and acknowledged that they belonged to Marcus.
Cleo exited the room, hungry for fresh vitae.
The others were startled by Cleo’s appearance as she had looked tattered and depleted of energy. She asked Marcus for some vitae from some of his ghouls. He reluctantly agreed. Cleo approached the individuals with a hunger that she hadn’t felt in a long time. She enjoyed the taste of blood trickling down her throat.
The others were busily making plans to rescue Jeremiah from the Likids and to find out what had happened to Samantina.
Cleo finished her feast and then headed to the bath to refresh her beautiful appearance. She was gone for some time before she returned to piazza’s main room.
She had been devising a plan for some time on how to deal with the problem of Hirut and came to the conclusion that someone from the group needed to sire her younger self, thereby allowing them to control her as an adult. She thought that if anyone were gutsy enough to do it, it would be her. Jacob might never forgive her for doing it, but the needs of the many far outweighed the needs of the few.
Cleo quietly observed the others and observed that they hadn’t noticed her heading towards Marcus’ ghoul’s chambers.
When she entered, she saw that Nuuk was cradle his young daughter Ba’ashou while tending to a feverish Hirut. He told Cleo that her fever was getting worse. Cleo scanned Hirut with Cariotype and disseminated its information and was able to surmise that her temperature was rising and was already at 104º. Hirut may not last much longer, she thought. She asked Nuuk if it was okay to try and help her.
Nuuk was desperate to save his daughter and deferred to Cleo’s judgement in what to do. She told him that she possibly had a way to save her, if she made Hirut into a “lord,” just like the other vampires.
He agreed to let her try.
Cleo moved closer to Hirut as to ready her for the ritual of siring a childe.
That was the last thing anyone in the room witnessed before time stood still…
…Cleo stopped herself as time moved forward again. She heard a loud bang from upstairs in the main room where the others were.
Suddenly a black shape appeared in the room. It surfed the edge of the walls, dancing around the room as if taunting those in the chamber.
Cleo wondered what this was. Had this something to do with the shadow daemons that were terrorizing Samantina? Were they now after her?
Cleo raised a defense shield around the family and herself, hoping the being would no be able to penetrate within. It swirled around the room as if readying to attack.
Cleo could hear thumping from above. She called Jacob through the armbands and asked what was happening. He said that Samantina had returned but with a shadow daemon in pursuit. He was trying to break through the ceiling to enter below. Eventually he succeeded in cutting a human-size hole and peered into the chamber.
The creature was about to attack, when Jacob shined his torch on it which repelled it back into the shadowy corners of the room. Once more, it began to ride along the walls. Jacob pulled out the sand he acquired from the shore when they first arrived and threw it at the demon. This dispersed it into several sections.
Suddenly it recoiled in fear as it had been attacked by Oras from the netherrealm.
Before it left, it told Cleo that it knew what she was trying to do and she shouldn’t.
Cleo then dropped her force shield and quickly used her telekinesis to lift the family to safety.
As she was pulled out of the room by Jacob she could see the damage that the entity had wrought upon Marcus’s piazza. He was dismayed at how much destruction that followed Jacob and his group of travellers and made him wish he had never heard of them.
Cleo pulled Jacob aside and told him what she had been planning to do to Hirut. Amazingly, Jacob had had a similar idea and after further discussion, they both agreed that it might be better if he was the one who sired her as he, like the older Hirut, was Brujah.
Both Cleo and Jacob took Hirut and brought her into Cleo’s chamber to ready her for being embraced by him. They entered the room and Jacob noticed that Hirut was fading fast. He gave her some of his blood, as she might not survive the experience if she wasn’t ghouled first.
She quickly awakened and ran to the other side of the room.
“Stay away, I know what your you and your filthy kind want from me.” “I know who you really are, you are not really lords, your not even remotely human,” she bellowed.
Jacob told her that they could help her. He told her everything about her future and what carnage her older self would bring. Hirut was shocked. It seemed that he was getting through to her and after awhile, she agreed to let him pray for her. Cleo knew that when Jacob had previously done this, it opened a lot of memories for her, not to mention what it had done for Nikolai, Jeremiah and Samantina.
Jacob positioned Hirut on the floor in the center of the room and turned to Cleo and told her that they would be vulnerable for the next hour and that she would be their only line of defense during this time.
As if on cue, just as Jacob started his ritual, they were attacked by another entity.
Cleo immediately raised a massive shield, big enough to encapsulate the entire room.
She could see it swimming on top of the layers of the path of force barrier. It seemed to be playing, no, manipulating to a small degree, Cleo’s shield.
Cleo was concerned and didn’t know for how long she could keep at it. She was running low on vitae after the 20 minutes. She called out for Samantina and asked her if she might be able to enter her barricade. She told Cleo that if there was any shadows within, it would be possible.
Cleo activated her obtenebration to conjure up a black sphere within the barrier and soon Samantina was able to utilize it as a gateway back and forth from the piazza’s main room. She was able to find blood from Cleo’s items and then from Jacob’s stores.
As Jacob’s ritual came to an end, he became aware of the dire situation they were in. He told Cleo that he would try to get it to chase after him, away from the others. Cleo agreed.
Cleo reduced the shield to only protect her and Hirut, while Jacob went into celerity and led the entity off to somewhere else.
It followed.
Cleo then dropped her force barrier and told Marcus that they must get her and her family to safety. Marcus told her that Oras had already taken the others to the scientists.
Cleo was outraged. Hirut was afraid for her daughter. Cleo vowed to return her family to safety. Hirut responded that her kind should be put to death as they were never to be trusted. Cleo implored her to let her get them as she was the only one that could possibly do so. She agreed and both went off to find Oras.
They arrived at the great science hall and Cleo knocked on the door, but was not allowed in.
Cleo was not in the mood for games…
Activating her force projectiles, she tore through the door with ease.
She could see Oras ducking on the other side as Kraio and his fledglings surrounded the entranceway.
“Where is the child?” demanded Cleo.
Kraio was not amused and told Cleo that she had declared war by attacking the science hall with her heretical powers.
Cleo wasn’t impressed by his threats.
Kraio was ready to strike and his subordinates were ready to support him.
Cleo turned the tables and claimed that his one of his people was told to help her and Jacob. That by taking the child and the other family members, he was defying their god, Mehket.
He laughed, though several of his assistants were starting to question his motives.
Marcus entered and seemed to be frightened by what he saw happening before him.
Kraio called for Marcus to denounce Cleo, but he couldn’t. Cleo then asked him to tell everyone the truth. Marcus fled the room.
Cleo was outnumbered and Kraio knew it.
Cleo had noticed that Oras was missing too and sensed that Kraio was about to attack her will, so she activated her earring to block his attack. She raised her willpower y clamping her bracelet.
It was not enough.
Kraio was far more adept at playing mindgames. She didn’t know how long she could maintain her protective barrier and she was already drained from her previous battle.
Cleo began to feel her nose and eyes bleeding.
Her will was depleting fast.
She needed to escape quickly.
She turned to Hirut and told her to hold on and dropped the shield to allow her to celeritize and vacate the vicinity.
If only Cleo had thought of it before, she could have saved herself a lot of damage if she had activated her speed earlier. She had forgotten that when activated, their celerity would send the True Brujah into pain and agony.
She sped around them several times before exploring the room for an exit that wasn’t blocked.
Eventually, she made her way down a corridor that Oras had escaped from and exited out into the night air and out of harm’s way.
She vowed that she would get even with Kraio and seeing as nothing was ever written anything about him, history wouldn’t be damaged if he met an untimely demise.
As she entered the grounds, she noticed two guards and approached them for vitae as she was running perilously low.
Eventually they agreed and soon she was on the prowl with Hirut in tow.
As they were making their way back to Marcus’ piazza, Cleo noticed something familiar.
Another temple, though much smaller.
She noticed that the door was open and entered. She saw that it was lined with ticks that were similar in nature to those of the Manassas temple. She quickly tried realigning them and succeeded. Making their way below, they ran into Oras and Hirut’s family. He had taken them to safety in his own temple. He smiled as if to throw Cleo off her tracks. She looked at him with the same hunger that a hunter did with prey, warning him not to make any sudden moves.
She asked him why he took them. He tried to placate her and she wasn’t buying it. He was lying. He did it for his own personal gain, an offering to Kraio, to hopefully advance in power and position within his clan.
He started activating some of the controls. Cleo told him to stop. He did.
They could both hear someone enter above.
Oras quickly positioned himself to ready for an attack as did Cleo. He activated the ticks that reduced the distance between the top layer to the bottom where they stood.
Slowly someone entered the room. It was Marcus. Everyone was relieved. Oras begged Cleo to allow him to activate the controls so that they could leave before they were found.
Cleo nodded and asked him where they were going. “Home,” he replied.
“My home, the red star on the screen.”
Cleo wondered how long they would be separated from Jacob and Samantina.
Hopefully, not for long…
Edited by: cleostsebastian at: 12/16/05 6:58 pm
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