To Matthias
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IamLEAM1983
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To Matthias
I've been poking around some online playthroughs for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, and it got me wondering. How were the last few decades before the Accords were signed?
-
IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3709
- Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
- Location: Quebec, Canada
As Matthias
"As any vampire with more than half a century to its name could tell you, being undead was a demanding and paranoid existence, one problem essentially snowballing into a myriad of unavoidable issues we all had to contend with. These issues would create power vacuums, some of us would hold more power than others, and our darker penchants were more openly pandered to. Those of us with fortunes at their disposition could consequently afford to be cruel and callous - to endanger the rest of us for their own selfish ends.
Even as late as in the 1950s, interracial tensions between bloodlines were generally high, with occasional oases of collaboration brought about by the presence of the rare forward-thinking Council leader. Every city possessed its own chunk of the undead underworld and followed along the shadowed half of the world's economy - what our still-concealed billions allowed us to influence. Council leaders tended to favor their own bloodline, leaving the others with diminished access to vital services. Blood banks and hospital morgues had to be infiltrated to ensure our sustenance, and most, if not all places of employment available to undead needed to be controlled by the Council. Control was paramount, being the only thing that guaranteed our survival in the age of slayers operating in impunity and the Atomic Age's rising technological standards.
Seeing all this, the powerful ones hid away. In being hidden, they shielded themselves and their entourage from the modern world and its rapid pace and legitimized a certain form of obscurantism. Why care about a world that was fast learning how to kill you with a single button press and a few grams of uranium or plutonium? They pulled strings to keep money and blood flowing in, but otherwise did their very best to ignore the mortal world, to shield themselves away in a simulacrum of whatever decade or eon they called their own...
Everything was girded and policed. While the mortals scared themselves with works of fiction chronicling the death of democracy and notions like Thoughtcrime or Newspeak, we lived in such a dystopia. Every facet of our existence was handled through euphemisms, handwaves or convenient excuses, and we had to politically dance around the occult ambitions of antediluvian bloodsuckers with no concern or care for our mortal brethren.
In 1952, I was at the end of four hundred long years of lies, corruption and deceit that ate away at the honest man I'd been in life. I was tired - morally exhausted.
I saw three ways out of my predicament. I could take the sun and leave my blackened corpse as an enigma for the mortal scientists to work themselves in a tizzy over, potentially condemning my entire species in the long run. I could also bury all pretensions of morality and let the Kenning swallow me; become the dispassionate monstrosity I knew I ran the risk of turning into without mortal input. I'd only damn myself, if I did this - my curiosity probably landing me at the pointy end of a slayer's stake.
Or, and this was the option I took, I could form a team of mortal scientists and prepare them for what lay ahead. I could train my own assistants, first reveal the truth of what I was to some of my then-current collaborators in the Sorbonne's Medical Research department, and record the exact specifics and nature of my existence for the world to see. I could record my findings and mail the tape to France's largest television-broadcasting networks - let the chips fall where they may.
It worked. Our years of suspicion and paranoia have ended, although those who benefited from them still resent me deeply for having foiled their aeons-long plans. We dismantled the structures that had allowed us to wreak havoc with mortal democratic institutions and restored mortal freedoms to their intended state. Fortunes were lost, political gains were squandered - but we gained moral tolerance, then followed with public approval. We found that other supernaturals shared my melancholy, my desire for better, more honest lives.
The rest, happily enough, is history."
Even as late as in the 1950s, interracial tensions between bloodlines were generally high, with occasional oases of collaboration brought about by the presence of the rare forward-thinking Council leader. Every city possessed its own chunk of the undead underworld and followed along the shadowed half of the world's economy - what our still-concealed billions allowed us to influence. Council leaders tended to favor their own bloodline, leaving the others with diminished access to vital services. Blood banks and hospital morgues had to be infiltrated to ensure our sustenance, and most, if not all places of employment available to undead needed to be controlled by the Council. Control was paramount, being the only thing that guaranteed our survival in the age of slayers operating in impunity and the Atomic Age's rising technological standards.
Seeing all this, the powerful ones hid away. In being hidden, they shielded themselves and their entourage from the modern world and its rapid pace and legitimized a certain form of obscurantism. Why care about a world that was fast learning how to kill you with a single button press and a few grams of uranium or plutonium? They pulled strings to keep money and blood flowing in, but otherwise did their very best to ignore the mortal world, to shield themselves away in a simulacrum of whatever decade or eon they called their own...
Everything was girded and policed. While the mortals scared themselves with works of fiction chronicling the death of democracy and notions like Thoughtcrime or Newspeak, we lived in such a dystopia. Every facet of our existence was handled through euphemisms, handwaves or convenient excuses, and we had to politically dance around the occult ambitions of antediluvian bloodsuckers with no concern or care for our mortal brethren.
In 1952, I was at the end of four hundred long years of lies, corruption and deceit that ate away at the honest man I'd been in life. I was tired - morally exhausted.
I saw three ways out of my predicament. I could take the sun and leave my blackened corpse as an enigma for the mortal scientists to work themselves in a tizzy over, potentially condemning my entire species in the long run. I could also bury all pretensions of morality and let the Kenning swallow me; become the dispassionate monstrosity I knew I ran the risk of turning into without mortal input. I'd only damn myself, if I did this - my curiosity probably landing me at the pointy end of a slayer's stake.
Or, and this was the option I took, I could form a team of mortal scientists and prepare them for what lay ahead. I could train my own assistants, first reveal the truth of what I was to some of my then-current collaborators in the Sorbonne's Medical Research department, and record the exact specifics and nature of my existence for the world to see. I could record my findings and mail the tape to France's largest television-broadcasting networks - let the chips fall where they may.
It worked. Our years of suspicion and paranoia have ended, although those who benefited from them still resent me deeply for having foiled their aeons-long plans. We dismantled the structures that had allowed us to wreak havoc with mortal democratic institutions and restored mortal freedoms to their intended state. Fortunes were lost, political gains were squandered - but we gained moral tolerance, then followed with public approval. We found that other supernaturals shared my melancholy, my desire for better, more honest lives.
The rest, happily enough, is history."