Our Story Thus Far (Preliminary)

[Wired*Nun]

The latest Event turned out to be more than anyone, especially the Camarilla, bargained for, though few knew it at the time.

They are calling them the Inauguration Murders. Later, those who knew would call them something else.

At first, mortal and Kindred society speculated that they were an attempt to embarrass the new administration - right-wing wackos, home-grown terrorists trying to start the "Final Race War", a modern-day Jack the Ripper taking the opportunity of almost two million nameless visitors, looking for hope in these dark economic times. After all, how could one add so many people to the murder capital of the US and not get more murders? To have none at all on Inauguration Day was just...preposterous.

But to have five in one day, in fact within minutes of each other, was unusual even in DC. And once it became known that not only were there five murders of the Kine, but five murders of Kindred, all within minutes...well, that was simply too much to swallow.

The initial rumors swirled around the Usual Suspects - Assamites, the Black Hand or some other Sabbat, rogue mages, rogue Garou, rogue Fae, rogue something. To disturb the tightly-controlled Ventrue stronghold of Washington, DC, center of political power of the most powerful nation on Earth...something was gravely amiss.

"These Things Simply Do Not Happen Here." The Primogen could hear these final capital letters pronounced with great precision by Prince Marcus Vitel, absolute ruler of the City. His icy Presence filled the chamber, cowing everyone there. It was hard to disagree with this conclusion of an awesomely controlled tirade. Even the opposition he allowed had to agree with this assessment, though one or two laughed inside at his presumed discomfiture. If one waited long enough, Everything Happens Eventually.

Peter Dorfman, Pontifex, Tremere Primogen, stood smoothly. He pressed down his preferred accoutrement with his hands, a caped coat suggestive of a hansom cabbie of the late nineteenth century. "My Prince."

"Speak."

"As offensive and distressing as this action is, may I point out that none of the dead were of particular importance of themselves, or even symbolically. Has-beens, those on the outs, fringe elements...united by nothing, it seems. I find the method much more of interest. In fact, should I be forced to speculate, this seems more like a provocation or an experiment...the stick into the hornet's nest, as it were. Let us not overreact. Let us not dance to the perpetrator's tune."

"I agree." This languid reply from Chas Voyager,Toreador Primogen, was typical of the man's laissez-faire attitude toward most things outside of the arts. "Send some minions, let the Justicars and Archons look into it...and guard ourselves a bit more stringently, of course," he said indulgently. "But take no precipitate action."

Vitel appeared to grind his teeth, but he was something of a showman himself, and knew how to exhibit a towering cold rage without letting it affect his judgment. There was a murmur of assent around the Chamber, signaling the general mood of the elders there. They were all conservative in their way, even the Gangrel who was missing from his seat, even Bjorn Garinson the Brujah, prone to the usual pugnaciouness of his clan, even the Malkavian Levin, virtually present on his enormous computer monitor, and the others...all knew the value of not rocking the boat, of stability.

The debate went on for a while, but the outcome was eventually obvious...and, if truth to be told, exactly what Vitel wanted. He also believed in not overreacting, but he knew the value in having the Primogen think they had imposed their will on him, smug in the belief that they were in control. He wanted this incident to fade from primacy, to be just one more of a number of concerns...in short, for them to leave it to him, and the Justicars. One Justicar in particular.

Thus prevailed Princes.

In the private meeting later, Justicar Menicus was properly attentive. serious, focused. He received his instruction and both sets of files with gravitas and diligence, asking only the most pertinent of questions. Then, he set to work.

[Wired*Nun]

The word went out after the meeting of the Primogen - calm, everyone, and the matter would be investigated, but there was no cause for undue alarm. It filtered out as only word of mouth can, over telephones and text messages and from person to person. In the bars and the hangouts and the clubs, in the penthouses and the boardrooms, the word was received with normal skepticism, but it did its work anyway. The elders were on it. The elders would take care of it. The elders knew best. Even those who vehemently denied this platitude were reassured, that at least it wasn't their problem. Except, perhaps, for those who lost acquaintances, friends, vassals or minions or those simply too close for comfort.

[Wired*Nun]

The Justicar made two careful copies of each file, using machine or pen or mystical means as appropriate. He was nothing if not meticulous and diligent, and the master copies must be safeguarded carefully. He scanned into the newfangled machines as much as he could, though some things simply were not reproducible in electronic format. The smell of a lock of hair, for example, or the auspex of murdered blood. Once the originals were securely locked away, he reviewed each of the files of the murdered individuals, and their peculiar deaths.

He thought of them that way - individuals. Unlike many of his fellows, this man, if such he could be called, deliberately excised all prejudice from his mind, all bias, all favoratism. There was no relation to the value of each individual to his or his clan's or his Prince's society - all were a collection of data points, a problem to be solved, none more or less outrageous than any other. Thus, he started in no particular order, trusting to his meticulousness and, strangely enough, his well-honed intuition, to lead him to the correlations necessary.

The first file he opens is that of Jean-Claude Reynaude. Potentially the most important of the individuals killed, at least, as far as status is concerned. Or was. This Kindred was, for at least one-hundred-and-fifty-six years, Prince of Paris, France. He had held immense power in the Camarilla, but had apparently been going slowly mad, his decisions becoming more and more erratic. Eventually the insanity of the preposterous "marriage" of two notable Kindred in 1995 resulted in a fracturing of the Camarilla in that city, deaths of the "groom", disappearance from public view of the "bride," and the deposition of the Prince by the Paris Primogen. Jean-Claude had been driven out in disgrace, to take up residence in a crumbling mansion in the east side DC neighborhood of Georgetown. Surrounded by urban blight and decay, he was seldom seen outside of his home, and was largely forgotten, until his death by misadventure.

That misadventure was interesting indeed. Apparently something had lured Jean-Claude outside of his haven - apparently to feed, for his remains, as little as they were, were found attached to his dead victim, a streetwalker who went by the name of Shiela, but whose driver's license identified her as Shawna Marie Benson. She did not die of overfeeding, but rather, apparently of a heart attack. It was impossible to determine exactly how Jean-Claude was killed, but careful auspex examination confirmed that it really was his fangs still lodged in her throat.

The most interesting part of the whole thing was that they were both, apparently, defenestrated. Launched out the window of her sixth-floor tenement flat by a force powerful enough to land them both a hundred feet away, just about 9 pm. It was a strange and startling enough occurrence that some of the street-dwellers and onlookers had notified a nearby free-clinic doctor at his workplace across the street, who had come out and pronounced her dead on the spot, and called the authorities.

It was fortunate that the Camarilla had tight control of the Medical Examiner's office. A lot could be covered up by simple, false, dry scientific reporting. The Justicar allowed himself some amusement, as he thought about the similarity to a hobby of his - UFO-ology. Someday, in his nonexistent spare time, he would penetrate Area 51 and see for himself if there was any truth to those rumors. Unfortunately, lovely young Sheila had not been Embraced, or he might have obtained some firsthand answers in contravention to the wish of whatever force had done this.

[Wired*Nun]

The next file shows a number of portfolio shots of the Toreador known as Swann. He is - was - a performance artist known for his bizarre, almost Malkavian shows for very exclusive audiences. The Justicar slides the pictures aside to read the details of the crime, as compiled by witnesses. He was rehearsing, if that was the word, in his private studio, with an audience of one - a mortal and probable blood doll named Kristine Wilson, the younger sister of a nightclub owner known to be connected to both the Toreador clan and to organized crime. The audience was also slain. It appears that the murder happened around 9pm as well, by the forensic performed on the mortal. They as yet did not know what to make of the remains of Swann...especially the feathers. The decomposition of the hundred-year-old Kindred was too severe to tell exactly how he died...but the mortal died of hanging, after a fairly merciful drop of at least six feet on the rope attached to the high-ceilinged beam. Swann was also hanged, leaving some bones and suchlike attached to another rope...but obviously, this was not what caused his final passing. The authorities had turned up nothing else at the scene, and were calling it suicide for now.

Ridiculous.

The third file reveals a Ventrue named Dominic Kellough. He sees a small note in the margins that explains he changed it from Denny Kelly back in the Twenties, when being Irish was something of a liability to anyone with prestenses. He was a relatively undistinguished functionary for clan Ventrue, apparently acting as liaison to what Irish mob remained in the City. He owned a pub in Georgetown, the Silver Shamrock, as cover. This one was discovered frozen in his own deep-freeze, then torn into four pieces...in that order. There were some axe marks that seemed to be in the nature of perforative creasing - ensuring the body was quartered, nice even sections. Most of the body was in the morgue, delayed in its decomposition by his people at the ME's office. Identification was only slightly complicated by the intermixed quartered remains of another accompanying mortal, one Selwyn Circe, apparently a regular at the pub. Neither were exsanguinated, either. Both were probably killed around the same 9pm, on that same Monday night, the pub's dark evening. This begged the question of what they were doing there. They were discovered the next morning by the day manager opening up for lunch.

[Wired*Nun]

Number four. A Tremere of no note whatsoever. He could tell by how little the usually reactionary clan squawked at her ending. Maxina Lunmila...strange name, that, for a younger. Though not a childe of his, she had the makings of being a protege of that odd bird, Dean Noir. His files on the Tremere were woefully incomplete, but he had information that she had approached him just two weeks ago, aping his beatnik mannerisms, pleading for him to teach her the esoteric ways of his "science" of political analysis. It appeared he had agreed, at least preliminarily.

The murder of this one was easily examined, since the weakblood had been born in 1981, embraced in 2006...childe indeed. The body had scarcely decomposed.

It had been found neatly decapitated, by some kind of blade, laid out upon the butcher-block kitchen island of her Georgetown third-floor walkup. This allowed the blood from her body to drain neatly into the built-in sink. The body of her apparent last meal mingled with hers, and the two bodies faced each other. The heads were set upon their neck stumps, in a now-eternal near-kiss, in the sink. The mortal was identified as one Raoul Adan, 28, an immigrant from Buenos Aires, no other particular relationship to the deceased Kindred other than as a rather winsome blood pool.

What was starting to make this interesting was the location of this apartment...two floors above the Silver Shamrock, less than a mile from Jean-Claude's mansion, only a half-mile from Swann's studio...and the murderer had either made a small error, or, more likely, left a deliberate piece of evidence. Perhaps a taunt. The stroke that had taken the mortal's head had severed the cord of an old electric clock, freezing its hands at 8:58PM.

Number five was a Brujo with, he had to admit, good taste in kine. Not such good taste in final death, however. Cristobal Tejon-Pascuale, impaled on the tetherball pole of a neighborhood playground, two blocks from the pub. Well within a half-mile of all of them. His head was wrapped tightly with duct tape, apparently enough to stifle his cries, which would have been apparent at the approximately 9pm time of death...he was joined, half-Christlike, by the now-obligatory mortal companion, and this one was a stunner. Jennifer Stanley, an up-and-coming model - a bit too fleshy for true supermodel work, but amazingly attractive and likely to have her fifteen minutes as a starlet, dancer, or American Idol contestant. His own fangs ached a bit as he contemplated her picture. "Pity," he said quietly. She was also impaled, classically, on another of the poles. Also taped. Both were taped head to foot, in fact, and the Brujo had been bound with steel cable, tightly wound. These two had been found about 9:20pm, by some kids wanting to use the playground. The lights had been turned off at the pole, but were otherwise unaffected. That mean the murderer had to overcome a relatively tough Brujo, avoid his coterie in public, manage a mortal, then impale them both in public...all in the space of just a few minutes. For good or for ill, the Brujo was also fairly young, and his tightly-wrapped corpse was still laying in the morgue.

Somehow, he did not think it was the Strangler returned...

[Wired*Nun]

The news media during the day reported the as-yet unidentified prostitute defenestration; the "suicide" hanging of Christine Wilson, along with some strange animal parts, possibly with some voodoo-like connection; the butchery at the pub; and the very public impalement at the playground. The decapitations had so far been kept sub rosa, but he had no doubt they would surface eventually.