chapter vignette 2

It feels like forever ago since I Awakened. Wasn’t really too explosive, just blew out a lightbulb or two. Caused a block-wide power surge. You know how it goes, right? Of course you do. That was back when I was a gawky teenager and me and my mom still lived in a dingy apartment on our own. Never really understood what I was, just that I could do the zappy thing. Sometimes if I focused I could close wounds that came from me getting into trouble before anyone knew about it. That kinda thing. And I knew that sometimes, it bit back.

Well when I turned about seventeen, my mom got found by this weirdo triangle-shaped richey-rich with ponce hair. Told her we were some long-lost branch of the family, and that he was a rich uncle we never knew about. I always knew Mom doubted every word he said, but she always did look out for way to make life better for us. He shipped us off to Seattle, where we lived with a bunch of other people in this gigantic villa. On the one hand I was a little bit disgusted that the bourgeoisie was hoarding all this cash and probably not paying his employees very well, but on the other hand, now I was that bourgeoisie, wasn’t I? On top of that, I knew he wasn’t just some sun-sensitive schmuck like he made himself out to be. The man was a vampire and I knew it. I could feel it, through some sixth sense. Maybe it was magic.

I ended up making pretty good friends with one of the girls who he called ‘niece’. She was a future law school student, and I wanted to be a cop. Well, Uncle Moneybags didn’t let me be a cop, and went and bit her before she went off to college. Nev was pretty up front to me about it all, looking back. Told me I was right the whole time. Every time we saw each other, we had a laugh about it. Eventually, she made me a ghoul, and that was that. I guess it marked me as someone who shouldn’t be bit, because Uncle Moneybags stopped looking at me all funny after that.

Things started to change when that fat sausage found me. He called me a Mage, and told me I could learn so much more if I started learning from other mages. I thought to myself, sure thing, I could use to know what the hell I am. Me and a couple of other kids not much older than teenagers were all gathered into this guy’s basement, and he taught us about the Forces and the Matter and the Prime and the Traditions.

He seemed proud of the fact that he was being considered by something called the Order of Hermes. But when I did my looking into these Traditions, through the piles of books he collected, I wasn’t really impressed. What I saw were a bunch of cultists and douchebags who didn’t know when to quit. On the flipside though, I also learned about what he called a Technocracy. Apparently they liked to try to brainwash other Mages who didn’t fit into their little square reality cube, and if they couldn’t be brainwashed, they got wiped out with every other supernatural critter that crossed their path. To my eyes, both options sucked. I never brought it up, and eventually he found his apprentice in a tiny little cancer patient and I got left alone again.

Eventually, he found two other older women that had just blown into town together with their vampire lovers. An old Indian lady and an albino with hair down to the floor. When they walked through that basement door for the first time it was like I was blasted in the face by nature and mysticism. For all his prattling about Traditions and Order teachings, they only ever seemed amused at best, and concerned at worst. Still, they seemed to like me, and offered to teach me themselves.

I started getting better at magic after that. We were told to be on our guard after the sausage and his little friend got bit by a lizard vampire. Didn’t take long before the Order came knocking for him. The guy at the door said they better have just up and disappeared. Said it’d be a shame if they were something like what he called a ‘massasa’  and they’d have to get killed. We all lied and said we hadn’t seen him for the sake of the cancer patient. She had been up front about what she’d done – the cancer was coming back, who could blame her for choosing not to go back to the hospital?

He was real condescending to all of us in the sausage’s basement who didn’t have a Tradition. Called us ‘orphans’, and one of the kids, a ginger-ass Air Force cadet who wanted to punch fairies, really wasn’t having it. She started asking about Traditions herself, and unlike me, the promise of science and the punching of arrogant mages caught her eye. We all knew she signed up for the Technocracy, but none of us said it to her face. But no one seemed more unamused than the old ladies who ran the group after the sausage got bit. They warned her over and over and she didn’t listen. Vasanti even told me she had tried to impress them by showing them top secret documents, but it failed to make an impression.

I started hearing them talk about forging their own Tradition, where they could teach the newly awakened how not to be arrogant twats, and to understand the natural balance and the unnatural Consensus that the Technocracy keeps feeding the masses. They theorized the study of Life itself, and spirits, how to extend lifespans and weaken what they called a Gauntlet and how to work with werewolves. That, I liked the sound of a lot. I approached them about a membership, and I got to be the first official member of the Nobles Undying.