Adelaide Roleplaying Community Inc.

In December’s session of Caduti di Napoli, a Vampire: The Requiem game held at the 1st Salisbury Scout Hall in Salisbury, the Vampires of Naples met again with a defector from VII – a notorious vampire killing faction – who feared that she would be killed. Here is the story of the defector…

My task on this night is to enter the Vampire’s Court Gathering. I am to learn who will take over control of this city and, most importantly, learn if the safety my sister’s and I have been offered will continue. If the safe haven is revoked, then we will be systematically slaughtered by Vampires around the world for our part in designing the great assassination plot against their kind. At any moment while here, I expect to be betrayed and killed.

We are the Daughters of Van Helsing, the Vampire Hunter, and our purpose for existing was to create a perfect legacy that would finally cleanse the world of all vampiric kind. But we betrayed him, Father Abraham Van Helsing. For these Vampires showed us kindness and compassion, they sat with us and treated us like people, not as monsters who seek their destruction. Now, we wait to see if the rest of their ilk in this city will hold the same values, or if our betrayal was for nothing and he was ultimately right.

The power amongst their kind is claimed by one Nala Markopolous of the Invictus, who takes on the title of Principessa. I ask the gathering if the deals made by Paige Ní Rose, former Director and member of the Carthian Movement, will be honoured and our safety assured. She agrees. We are allowed to survive.

I shall tell them everything I know to defeat Father Abraham. If they kill me after, then so be it, they were smarter Monsters than us. As I am detailing everything about him, his plan, and why we were bred through his human lineage, I feel the familiar sensation of a vision filling my field of view. .

The scent of Sulphur fills in my nostrils and my eyesight blurs. A mist begins to part in my hazy vision, and my prophecy begins. A devastated clearing in a long-dead forest, the ground is not a grassy knoll that one would expect but a chessboard pattern painted atop the grass. Father Abraham sits on a throne caked in white, the Queen Piece, commanding his army of pieces. His army has no King, he would not allow such a weakness. The pawn moves, E4, as a new game commences. As my eyes flick across the board, I see a hazy sight, his King Piece, flickering in and out of view. It signals the one time he is weak, the night of the Third Quarter Moon when he enters an involuntary sleep. If the Vampires are to defeat him, their only chance is on that night. I turn my head to the Black Army, and see rows upon rows of Vampires. Some seem to match those who reside within this city. Without my sisters and I he has been forced to start a new game. His Pawn on E4 shows a screen, a recording of him begins to play with words I cannot hear. The King’s Pawn sends a message, he can no longer work from the shadows. My vision fades as my senses return.

I see the Principessa’s Council staring and waiting, unmoved from their prior position. “Miss Fontaine, are you alright?” The Principessa asks me and I am taken aback. Only my sisters have asked me that after a vision. A kernel of warmth I have not felt in many years sits within my chest, these vampires are kinder folks than any of us anticipated.

Return to the Caduti Session Summary List.