The City of the Dead

Ken's Vampire Game

Session Nine

Sunday Night

As the girls are in the van monitoring the necropolis, someone knocks on the back door. Jennifer peers through the door and finds Alfred's ghoul, Robert, who tells them that Alfred has something more important that he needs them to help with.

However before he tells them what Alfred needs them for, he asks Daria to tell him about the symbol that she had recognised. Daria becomes flustered and nervous, and says that when she saw the screen flicker, the symbol flashed up at the same time. When she is questioned more in response to her nervous reaction, she reconfirms that she saw it on the monitor.

Before they leave, Robert tells them that there have been reports of sightings of Bradley, and that they were going to look for him tonight.

The girls follow in Daria's car, and are eventually led to a carpark in Springvale. A silver Lotus and a black Cadillac sedan are parked in the lot, and the girls can make out Alfred and Luke's forms. Daria and Helena automatically begin to feel panicked by Luke's presence, but know that they have to face him anyway.

Apparently a man matching Bradley's description had been seen fighting in and around five clubs in the Springvale/Dandenong area every night; the nights he was at the clubs was random, but each night he seemed to be moving out of the suburbs and then back in. Based on the clubs that he had been in recently, the Knights had concluded that tonight he was likely to go into one out of two clubs.

Their plan was to get Helena to dress up in Jessica's clothes and have her walk around the clubs to try to get his attention on the basis that Helena looked the most like her. She was to get his attention and then eventually run towards the door to lead him outside where Alfred would help stop him. Luke's ghouls would be on standby and would come back for clean-up afterwards. However Alfred, Daria and Jennifer would be in the club as well. Helena is understandably unexcited about their plan, but figures that not only does her reluctance not matter to the Knights, but it would probably be a good idea to do what they say. Despite her quiet protest she puts on the flanelette shirt and pants that the Knights offer her. The girls fill Daria in on what Bradley looks like as she hasn't seen him before, and make their way to the club.

The club is not very busy, probably because it is a Sunday night. The girls and Alfred start walking around. Jennifer crosses the dance-floor, briefly breaking out into stints of dancing and pulling herself out of it as she goes, looking very concerned as she tries to keep herself under control. Once she is at the bar she sits and starts drinking beer. Daria moves towards a group of people near some speakers and tries to blend in and watch. Alfred stands against the far wall of the club and strikes up a conversation with two girls. Helena checks the mezzanine level and eventually stops in the middle of the staircase back down to the ground floor to look around from there.

Jennifer eventually sees a very drawn, pale man who looks like Bradley, only much more thin and unhealthy looking than he had been. He is talking to two people who stare at him blankly without speaking, who just seems to nod at what he is saying every so often. His eyes appear very bloodshot, and he talks as though he is furious, with his lips pulled back into a snarl. His aura throbs out brightly with hunger.

>From her position on the mezzanine level, Helena sees Daria fix her attention on a group of people on the dance-floor, or someone within the group, and turns and heads in their direction.

As Daria walks past Bradley, his head rises as though he has caught a scent, and he begins to follow her. When his gaze with the two he is talking to breaks, they seem to snap out of their trance and shake their heads with confusion. Daria starts to walk towards Alfred not recognising Bradley. As she moves towards him, she suddenly becomes very aware of the sound of people's feet shuffling on the floor hissing loudly in her ears.

In the mean time, Helena has seen Bradley and moves down the stairs to the ground floor where she hopes to get his attention, hopefully when she is on his side to the door rather than the wall, gesturing to Alfred and pointing to him as she moves. Bradley starts to move towards Daria, he grabs out towards her, but she manages to dodge him but still collects her with his claws, which leaves a series of cuts on her back. Before he goes to attack her again, he catches sight of Helena and begins to approach her, but luckily she is closer to the door than he is, and she begins to shove her way through the crowd. However it is quite dense near the door and slows her escape.

Helena runs out the door heading left, hoping Alfred and the others are close behind her, but Bradley soon catches up to her and pushes her to the ground. She increases her strength and throws him off, and manages to dodge him before he can hit her again. He reaches back as though to strike, but Helena ends up watching as a gun is smashed extremely quickly into the side of his head in a whir of indecipherable movement. Bradley reaches and grabs Alfred and strikes his fangs into his neck, and Alfred drops his gun. Helena tries to use her presence to slow him down, but nothing happens.

By this stage Daria and Jennifer have arrived, and Daria remembering how successful she was the last time that she kicked someone in the head, manages to kick him and make him stumble. Helena grabs Alfred's gun and shoots Bradley in the head, knocking him onto his back. To make sure, Helena shoots him in the head again at point-blank range, guessing that he will probably survive the injury.

Alfred clutches at his neck as he stumbles back onto his feet, staring disbelievingly at Bradley's unconscious body. He moves to his car and opens a refrigerated container and pulls out a number of blood bags and drinks them quickly. He holds out a hand to Helena gesturing for her to give his gun back. He tells Daria that he needs to use her car to transport Bradley and searches around for a plastic bag to put over his leaking head. But before he hauls the body into the car, he shoves a stake through his heart to make sure he doesn't regain consciousness. Once he is ready to be moved, Alfred calls Luke.

They take the body to the office building in the Western suburbs that Daria and Helena remember all too well (See session XX). Alfred waves to someone who is sitting at the front as he passes by with Bradley's body slung over his shoulder. Out the back there is a room containing a bench with metal cuffs attached to it to which Alfred constrains Bradley's limbs.

Upon an examination of Bradley, the group notice that he has long claws, gnaw marks on the inside of his arm, a scar on one of his sides and elongated eye-teeth. Helena notices that he has a very pale aura, meaning that not only is he alive, but now that he has been embraced (previously he had a strange, yet mortal aura).

Alfred tells the girls that Jessica is being held in the building and that the Knights had been questioning her through the week, however they hadn't been able to get much information out of her. All she would, or could tell them is that she just reached inside of herself, pulled out her beast and put it into Bradley. It seems that she barely remembers what has happened despite having fed her a large quantity of blood.

Despite talking about killing Bradley and whether or not Jessica will die, Alfred admits that it would be an idea to speak to the other Gangrel - they're not going to kill her just yet. He asks the girls if they have noticed anything else funny going on, and Helena tells him about Jennifer's strange compulsion to dance at the club the other day. This strikes a cord in Daria, and she hesitantly tells Alfred that she had seen someone else doing that the other day. Alfred is confused; "what, dancing?" She becomes very flustered with her mistake and resigns to go out to the car and wait for the others there.

Alfred takes Jennifer and Helena into the room where Jessica is being held. She is naked, very pale and drawn, barely conscious and slumped in a corner of the room. Alfred looks at her with confusion, saying that they had given her a lot of blood, and she should be much stronger. Alfred asks "Jess, have you been doing something?", and she weakly responds "no, I'm fine". They contemplate the possibility that she has been somehow giving her blood to Bradley.

Alfred puts her in a bath in the room and tips a tap over her mouth. The tap is connected to a large fridge near the bath. He turns the tap on over her mouth and blood starts pouring out of it. Jessica barely takes any of the blood; she slowly swallows it, which is strange, as a vampire as low on blood as her should be caused to frenzy by the blood.

Alfred resigns to see what she will be like tomorrow, but asks the girls to look up Frederick who lives around the industrial estates around Port Melbourne and Newport, and see if they can get any information from him. While Daria and Jennifer prepare to go, Helena says that she has to be somewhere tonight, and that she will join them again another night. Daria offers her a lift, and Helena says that she has to go to the Casino which is out of the way of the industrial area, but a lift as far as they are going would be good.

Soon into their investigation, the girls see a fire in the distance. Up ahead, they can see a group of five people dancing around it. As Daria approaches the group, feeling more and more uneasy about the dancers, but when she moves back away from the fire, the feeling goes. Jennifer hears a woman's laugh behind her, and someone say, "Ginger? No, it's not." She quickly grabs Daria and pulls her away from the fire, telling her that people are fucking around with her, that they are turning invisible and and saying stuff.

Back at the car, Daria sees that something has been placed underneath one of her windscreen wipers. Jennifer picks it up and sees an image of a teenaged girl with red hair and a white lock, Ginger, her sire.

In the car, Jennifer asks Daria if she knows anything about Rita, the leader of the outsiders, but Daria doesn't. She says that she was concerned that the woman messing around with her was Rita. Jennifer says that she's concerned by their cults' activities. Jennifer doesn't want to return to the factories tonight, but is happy to return another night. Daria agrees, but tonight she needs to feed.

Back at her home, Jennifer locks the photo inside a special box.

Monday Night

Jennifer and Daria return to the factories the next night, and find paw prints on the ground. Not knowing where to start looking, the girls call out Frederick's name. Out of the dark they see the glowing red eyes of a huge black wolf, a deep voice growls "Run". They call out his name again and say that Alfred wants to see him about Jessica.

The wolf bounds out of the shadows and flows into the form of a dark-haired man wearing a suit. He looks at the girls with hostility, sniffing the air around them. In a deep, gruff voice demands that they take him to Jessica.

On the way to the building where Jessica and Bradley are being held, Frederic sniffs at the blood that was still in the back from the previous night. At some stage amidst his sniffing he pauses and tells the girls that whoever's blood is in the back of the car was turned into a vampire last night.

At the building in the Western suburbs, the girls and Frederic arrive to find Alfred there already. They had examined Jessica and again and discovered her drained of all the blood that she drank the previous night. Meanwhile Bradley has healed all of his injuries despite not having fed at any stage and having been extremely hungry the night before. Frederic moves towards Jessica's weak body, sniffing at her and calling her name. He turns to the group and tells them that she has given her soul away.

Luke arrives a little later, and is filled in on what has happened with Jessica and Bradley. The group discusses what to do about the situation. They agree that it could be a problem if Bradley is killed as it is a possibility that Jessica may die as well. Luke, who seems to be rapidly losing his patience with the situation, says that he thinks that they should go next door and kill "the other one" right now, then deal with Jessica later.

A thought occurs to Luke, and he grabs Jessica, dragging her into the room where Bradley is being held. He tears a hole in his arm and forces Jessica's face to the wound, but she is unwilling to take the blood and tries to move her head away. Suddenly Luke grasps her face, stares into her eyes and orders her to "take it until there's nothing left". Jessica grasps the wound and drinks until Bradley's skin becomes tight on his bones; he begins to go slack and relaxed, and eventually crumples into dust.

Jessica jumps away from Bradley's desiccated body screaming, and leaps upon Luke, clawing and slashing at him. Alfred draws out his short-sword and goes to stab Jessica with it, but she manages to dodge the blow leaving the sword to collect Luke in the back. Jessica keeps on slashing at him with her claws. Frederick runs over and begins to claw Jessica in the back, and Jennifer takes the fight as her cue to dash outside. Daria moves to pull Jessica away from the furious Knights, slamming into her and grabbing her around the waist. Frederick tries to grab at Jessica, just as she dodges a slash from Alfred. Luke smashes Jessica in the nose while Daria struggles to keep her grasped to her chest. Jessica tears free, knocking Luke and Fredrick aside and claws Alfred's abdomen. Alfred kicks Jessica to the ground, raises his long sword above his head and lops off her head. Immediately her body begins to crumple and turn to ash. The ash falls away leaving only her contorted skeleton.

Frederick stops, moves towards Jessica's remains and sniffs at them, then stands and declares to the room that he is going to hunt.

Luke stands up and demands to know why Alfred finished her off. Alfred angrily responds that he saw the chance and he took it, and Luke didn't seem to be holding on to her. Luke accuses Alfred of not having the courage to make a proper example of her. They both glare angrily at each other.

Remembering urgent business elsewhere, Daria runs to try to catch up with Frederick. He is looking visibly upset, so she asks if he is okay. He keeps walking without looking at her and barely responds. He says that a Knight was hurt, and someone had to pay for it. Daria lets him walk off alone and she heads back to her car.