Vagas - Provvi

[badkarma]

I was bleeding. That house was far more haunted than I had anticipated. The wraiths used some form of ghostly fire and I barely managed to get away. A haunted house that kept appearing in different parts of Constantinople. A manor once owned by a Cappadocian. Of course, I would investigate it, my curiosity got the best of me, and I was still young to all of... this. Kindred society, being a monster, so many things I'd barely learned over the first decade of my unlife. Chasing Esmeralda taught me many things, but not with how to deal with what I had gotten myself into.











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I had wanted to get into the Cappadocian manor within the city, but everything I learned about their necromancy told me they had capabilities I had no way to deal with. At least not yet. I spent many nights watching their haven, mostly, they never left, those that did were their ghouls, off to run some errand. And so I followed her, a red headed woman who came and went, often times wandering to the nearby graveyard or into the city for some mortal necessity or another. It was months that I'd make time to stalk her when she'd go on her errands. I learned to disguise myself, my obfuscation cloaking my visage into someone else. I could mimic someone with focus and practice, but those were earlier days. I learned her name to be Provvi, of the Giovanni family. She had been investigating a manor that was owned by a Cappadocian. He'd met his final death, but something he had done to his manor caused it to disappear and reappear in different parts of the city, and those who witnessed it paid it no mind. It was her goal to conquer it, and watching her, it had become my own goal to beat her to the goal, perhaps I would learn a bit more of the Cappadocians secrets, help myself to whatever treasures inside. It did not happen often, but I observed her using necromancy a handful of times, supposedly to enable her to see the dead.







I learned what the owner of the Manor looked like and mimicked his visage before appearing before her one night. Foolish. I had seen her use her necromancy in the past, but I did not see her use it that night. She told me later that she had prepared herself before going out for the night. When I approached her, she could see the dead, and she knew that I was very much walking among the land of the living. Despite this, she brandished her dagger at me, threatened... Me. It caught me flat-footed, I'll admit. This mortal woman I had thought to know to be so brave, or foolish, that the sudden appearance of a kindred who could snap her in two at a whim and she had gumption to hold her ground. I remember exactly what she told me,







"You're not a spirit, but if you try anything funny, I'll turn your undead ass into one. I am of the Giovanni familia and I am not to be taken lightly." I thought she had cast a spell on me, I was entranced with this red headed woman nearly a foot shorter than I.







I ran. She was my main insight into the Cappadocians on goings and killing her would put me back to square one. I watched her for some time, it had become clear she was being more cautious, at least for a while. When I approached her again, I was disguised as a beggar. She discerned I was the same person that approached her before and threatened me once more. This time, I offered her a deal. She rejected me without hesitation. I left, again.







This game of cat & mouse went on for a few months. I learned I could maintain my visage indefinitely, even if it burned my vitae each night. I maintained the image of a beggar she had met me as the second time. At least when I did not use a new mask to approach her. She would research the manor and its movements, its potential entrances and so on. Until one night, while I watched her traverse through some alleyway she had been through dozens of times before, into a pack of mortals hunting for easy prey. I knew she would fight, I knew what dagger she carried on her person, what she did not know, is she was outnumbered 5 to 1 and had her escape blocked off. I killed that day, I felt justified, but I could feel my humanity slipping as I butchered 4 of them. One tried to run, and would likely have escaped as well, had she not tackled him down and taken his life. It was there I felt that yearning for a woman I had not felt in years. It was that night that she spoke to me not as a cretin that bothered her. She accepted my offer, though the deal had changed slightly from my original intentions. She would feed me her blood, and I would learn what arcane I could from researching the manor, and in return, I would teach her more of kindred society and keep her safe.

[badkarma]

It was a hotel, opulent in every way. I don't know the machinations of how it went unnoticed by the mortals who walked past it. As though it had been there all along. Finding it was not usually a problem, as it would stand out next to everything it would appear by. Getting inside was simply a matter of walking through the front door. There were people there, at least that's what it appeared to be. The first time we entered, she had warned me to not believe my eyes. What she hadn't warned me of, was the mental fugue the room would cause. She seemed fortified against it, surprises that woman.

When the lights went out, I could hear her coughing, gasping as though the air had been sucked out of the room. In the total darkness, I reached out to grab her, but what I felt was cold, like running your hands through frozen fog.


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It had been weeks, perhaps months at this point. We met a few times a week. Hunted the manor, she studied it. She questioned me about being a Kine, so many damned questions. Some I did not know the answer to at the time.

"How do you make yourself invisible?"
- "It's something some of us can do."
"How often do you kill who you feed from?"
- "I don't kill those I feed from."
"Do you enjoy being a kine?"
- "Do you enjoy being mortal?"
"How long have you been a Kine?"
- "Less than many."

And on, and on. On some scale it was, endearing, on the other enraging, and still, I realized there were many things I never realized to ask during my own time.

She kept to her end of the bargain. Gave her own blood, and I had questions of my own. Many of which she refused to outright answer, but I learned even from what she could not speak of.

I did use her for my own experiments as well. Learned how to make myself vanish in front of this mortal mid-sentence, make her forget I had been there and leave her confused mid-sentence. Once I mastered how obfuscate myself while being watched, I'd do it to amuse myself, or to make her lose track of the question she was asking. Though often times, her forgotten questions would find itself back into the conversation later on.


There was the time I followed her into the Cappadocian Manor. A grand building on the outside, equally so inside, but I did not expect every suit of armor to be filled with animated corpses of the undead, slow things, but still dangerous in numbers. I had garnered there would be wards, and traps, but seeing it first hand paints a better picture. And three headed dogs are far faster than I expected they would be. She wasn't happy about it and blamed me for it, despite not having any proof. I suspect she knew it was I, but I denied it.

[badkarma]

The cold of death, a ghost, or a wraith. Not entirely sure what the difference really is. One espiritu is the same as the next to me really, it's just a matter of how angry they are. My hand pierced through the incorporeal body of one as I reach out for Provvi. It screamed, breaking all the glass in the room, deafening me for a moment as I grabbed her up and ran for the door.

I tried to collide into the doors from which we came, to barrel through into the open night sky, but when my shoulder met the wood, it felt as what I imagine a child might feel like trying to shoulder tackle a tree. That's when the flames came for us.

I couldn't dodge out of the way and hold her at the same time, so I shielded Provvi with my body. The beast beating against the cage within me, raging to be free, for me to escape. My clothing and skin were burned, some fused together as I took off deeper into the hotel. The flames giving me a moment of light in the utter darkness, I tried to memorize a pathway to run, and clumsily I carried her up the stairs. In my deafened state, I could see her trying to shout at me, I could feel her tugging at my garments as I took to the stairs 5 at a time, willing my vitae to reinforce my body. The darkness began to light up again as we reached the top and I threw us both to the ground. The flash from the flames that passed over us lighting up the darkness once more. When I stood, I reached down to gather her up once more only to have the darkness lifted all at once.

A chandelier overhead lit up, and the corridor we were in lined with candles creating a pathway to a double door entrance. Looking back, the darkness hanging in the stairway below. I went to grab Provvi as she stood up, aiming to drag her along in flight, but she took my sleeve and stopped me. In my deafness, she motioned back to where we had came from, and the room was lit once more. Everything back to the way it was, as when we first arrived, the espiritu that had given chase, nowhere in sight.

I healed my hearing with some concentration and was able to speak to her again. Even on the night I had first saved her, she had never uttered those words.

"Vagas, I never imagined you'd risk fire for me. Thank you."

She explained to me how what we saw below us, was likely an echo of the past. How the shroud between our world and the spirit world can exist in echoes of time. It took a good bit of blood to heal some of the damage the flames had caused, but I was functional to proceed. Not as though we had much of a choice but to proceed forward.

Looking again at the double doors, there was a man, a Seneschal by the looks of him. Waiting by the door, watching us as we approached.

"Welcome to the party good lord, Ma'dam. If you wish I will take your coats and you may enter."

I plied him with some questions, the answers ambiguous, evasive, useless. Provvi shook her head and motioned to the door. As it opened, the silence of the corridor was broached by an orchestra. Dancers moved about on a stage set at the forefront of an arrangement of tables, the music playing from above unseen. The tables patrons, Cappadocians mainly, but smatters of other clans dotted the room, some ghouls as well I'd assume but we followed the Seneschal to a table devoid of others. There were two seats, labeled with our names on them....

[badkarma]

Looking at her, she returned the glance and gave a half-hearted shrug and chuckle before sitting down.

"When in Rome I suppose."

The Seneschal left us after I took my seat opposite of Provvi. The performance on stage was carrying on. Dancers twirled about and the ambiance of the gathering only heightened my building paranoia. Everything was... too perfect. Provvi had started speaking but my attention was drawn to the mumblings of those around us. What I originally believed to be a foreign language was indiscernible babbling, the gurgling of infants. My vitae had been drained severely over the last 5 minutes alone and my body was still scorched from the prior encounter. Focusing on the rooms layout, I spotted another set of double doors on the right wall from where we had entered.

We had been sitting only a few moments before I got up to leave again. Provvi in mid-sentence when I grabbed her by the arm and began dragging her to the potential exit. She did not protest but was caught off guard, and began to shout something as the stage behind us detonated. Provvi was thrown to the ground. I had no time to dodge or react as I was thrown through the doorway, pinned to it, we both flew out the room and I blacked out in the process.

I regained consciousness moments, perhaps minutes later as Provvi stood over me, an impromptu wooden stake in her hands, still dripping my vitae after being pulled free from my heart. A shard of the stage or perhaps one of the tables had staked me to the doorway in the blast. "No time for words" she grunted as she lifted me to my feet and we ran. Down another corridor, up another flight of stairs. She began falling behind as we came to a new doorway, I slowed my pace to aid her and spotted again an espiritu forming behind Provvi.


I reached out for her arm, willing some of the precious vitae remaining in my body to reinforce my strength, and threw the woman up and through the door. I dodged the incoming fire as the wraith belched out its hatred. Distracting it enough to not shoot its hellfire through the door ahead, I raced after Provvi and ran out into the darkness of night. My bearings were confused, and looking behind me I was met with a solid wall of stone. Laying among the refuse of the alleyway we stood in, was her body, some of her blood dripping down her hand onto the wet ground.

The beast within me had enough. Fire, fear and now finally, hunger all culminated into my frenzy. It took every bit of my remaining will to not bite into and consume Provvi. I roared, startling an already scared mortal who had heard the commotion we had been causing, and forced my beasts path towards him. I think he managed to scream before my teeth met his flesh....

I consumed every bit of him. Perhaps he had a family, perhaps he had an important part in the politics of the city. Within a few moments, he was but a husk of a man, drained completely dry.
I heard Provvi's protests as I dropped the empty cattle onto a pile of trash. My beast only the barest of satiated, my wounds still leaking, still scorched in places. I felt some of my humanity slip from me.

She stood before me, giving me a weak smile as she saw me dump the body, she managed to say sarcastically. "I thought you said you don't kill others when you feed."


We did not speak again for some nights after.

[badkarma]

It was a few weeks before we met again. Her arm in a sling when I saw her, like a bird with a wounded wing. She seemed upset. When I probed as to why her reply was curt, angry.

"My familia, they've taken over what I started. Are sending a coterie to investigate the house. To claim what they could from inside it. I've been forced to not search for it. I must return, we can't see each other, perhaps ever again."

I was hurt. Deeper than the flames of the wraiths, sharper than the table leg that had pierced my heart the week before. I probed further. I asked her to stay, but she refused. I begged her to leave with me, but she continued to walk back to her familias haven.

I grabbed her, held in place. Without looking at me through tears in her eyes she simply repeated:

"I must return home."

Over and over. For a moment, she looked at me, told me to go, before making her way back to her mansion. I was conflicted on what to do. By every right, she was their ghoul, and their property. Had I taken her, I would be hunted.

The only idea I had, was to make a trade. What the mansion had, for Provvi. It was foolish, I knew, but it was all I could come up with at the time.

I searched for the house, nights passed. On the 4th, I stumbled upon it sitting in what was a boarded up building, the ghostly mansion cloaking over it like my own masks. The last time, we went in through the front door. I scoured around the building for the side door we had exited from before to no avail. So instead, I ventured down below the surface, looking for a way into the ghostly hotel through the under dark.

What I believed to be luck, I found an entrance. A sealed door in what should have been stone that led be inside. Pillars of marble and stone lining a red carpeted room, the walls decorated in disheveled works of art that bled their colors. As I went deeper into this, corridor, there was a thing. A blob of gelatinous sentience. I still do not know what it was, but it spoke to me.

"Hello stranger, welcome to my home."

We spoke for a time. Unnerved by this presence, I kept my distance, but as it led me deeper into the corridor, it opened up into a grand ballroom full of statues of dancing men and women. In the center was a lone table where the creature bade me to sit.

When I asked for its name, it claimed to have forgotten it. Being alone for so long, it seemed it simply wanted someone to speak to. It offered me a drink, I refused.

It, commanded me to drink. I had not expected it to be capable of dominating the mind, but I took up the cup that had been presented to me, and swallowed its contents. Expecting the liquid to be promptly expelled, I felt it burn within my stomach. I ran.

The creature chased after me. I pumped the blood into my legs to go beyond my normal limits, I instinctively tried to vanish before it to no avail but the creature could not keep up with my preternatural speed. I escaped, but as I made my way out of the area, my stomach began to bulge. The thirst for blood became ravenous, I needed to feed.

I tore through to the surface. The beast within me rattling me to feed. The first mortal I came across, I drained dry once more. A second saw me do so and began to run. Had he been sober, I would have likely not caught the man as he stumbled and barreled down some refuse. Draining him dry as well, the bulge within my belly grew. The blood I drank providing me no sustenance, I pulled out my knife, and cut open my own belly.

As a mortal man, I had delivered a few children. I imagine that time was an accursed image of giving birth. As I slit open my belly, six blackened creatures spilled out of me onto the ground, flopping like wet fish, crawling in six different directions. I began to crush them. A few lashed back at me, causing some superficial wounds but each one I crushed under heel or in my hand as I held together my open belly with the other.

I had failed.

I drained a third man dry, my humanity slipping, my options limited, I willed the vitae to stich my wounds together and made my way to the Cappadocian Mansion.

Making my way inside was simple enough. Finding Provvi was another matter. I searched, hiding myself under the bed of a room below ground and slept there during the day, praying a spirit would not find me by chance. The second night within that mansion, I found her. The animated corpse of Provvi shambled through the halls, and in my dismay stepped out from behind the cover I had been taking. I knew a spirit had spotted me as the Necromancer walking her stopped to look at a ghostly form making itself visible, pointing to me.

I ran. I used every means of escape at my disposal, and fled. Hurt, injured, hunted and alone, I sought help from my fellow clansmen, who informed me that the Cappadocians had hired a fledgling Toreador to bring me back to them. Killing the Toreador was simple enough, but I could feel my humanity slipping.

I learned a harsh lesson from the whole ordeal, though my lessons have yet to cease.