(Long delay between games so I added this to clarify things I have only hinted out previously)

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Jean De Meung... ah... here you are.



My first servant, my first ghoul... my poet mage. I could not leave this haven for the Nosferatu and that damned Sorrow without the sketches of our first nights together. You were so young, so strong... so very convenient... so well placed... with all your parts in their proper places.



And here are the sketches of our last night together. You were so much older and wiser, deciphering the meaning locked within the chest of glyph-marked stones that Blaze had entrusted me with. How you laughed at my offer to bring you across, to embrace you... your work had already made you immortal you said, as long as you were never forgotten.



Even today my sweet speaker of sooth, your Roman de la Rose is spoken of in reverence by the artists and scholars of Nice and your book is damned by theologists and clergymen in their pathetic little cloisters. But forget you I have, and for that I shall make amends not that I have my drawings of you with me again.



The Kindred Prince of Paris should have let me bring you across while your flesh was sweet, soft, and supple. I was truly mad to sit idly by as the years sucked the life from you, yet you can have no true complaints on that score, for I remained as I always was, to let you sup from my wrist, to lap the blood from my loins, to drink from my flesh what I drank from yours. I let you take me like a rutting dog and you showed me the mortal pleasures that was normally a wife's duty, had I lived to see the day.



Never did the madness touch you. I knew so little of my clan then, I did not know the risks. Your disdain for women grew into a fervent fever, over time, true. Many were the nights that I had to clean up your kills, although there is no arguing your reasons - they seemed perfectly sound to me - you must realize it was supposed to be the other way around.



The nights you insisted to wear dresses, to better bed the mortal Prince Phillip... Phillip the Long they called him and with good reason, from what you told me... well, that might seem mad to some, but what is the alchemy of Gender to one such as us? Generation and Corruption can not exist where like substances mingle.



"We spin in an ever-turning circle, and it is our delight to change the bottom for the top and the top for the bottom. You may climb up if you wish, but on this condition: Don't think it an injustice

when the rules of the game require you to go back down." As you translated Boethius for me, you made yourself my teacher even as I made you my servant. My slave. My lover. Showing me how dead I had been in life; top and bottom, bottom and top. I remade you. Renamed you. I introduced you to the angel you called Nature and it was I who married your fates together.



How could I forget you? Is my memory of our time together as much a disjointed ghost as you are now, rotting beneath the city of lights? I pray not, for I prey still and I would not be such an uncaring and dismissive monster.



I am so sorry I wondered off. I mislaid Paris, if you can believe that. So absorbed was I in my building of bridges and buildings, I simply lost track of time. When I had realized my mistake, I rushed home as quickly as I could to be by your side. By then, you where dead and half-rotted, although you looked better than those that will soon haunt these walls on a regular basis, and I felt bad for what I had done. I would have gone to dig up some more old friends, but I have had so few. I thought about taking you with me, but... well, you know how I feel about bugs.



And worms. Plus, you were pretty old when you died. Not pretty. Not pretty at all.



This is why I am so strongly attached to my new friends. Since fleeing Paris... they outlawed Chess, mon ami. Chess! Charles and his stupid, stupid outrageous fears. And I was winning, I was winning. Well-beloved, my ass.



Speaking of which, you should have seen this beautiful ass I liberated from this farm I liberated from some farmers I liberated from life. He was so shy and smart, although he was afraid of me for some reason. I am afraid I misplaced him, too.



Perhaps that is what he feared. Equines are so perceptive.



Where was I?



Ah! Charles the Well-Beloved and the Prince of Paris. We were playing for the city, you know. If he won, I would let him slay me. Him being the Kindred Prince, of course. If I won, he would let me build this giant iron tower in the middle of Paris. I was sure I would win for I saw the tower in one of my dreams of things yet to come, lit by small, golden fires standing upon four legs as peasants crawled to the top to jump off.



But dawn came soon enough and I was winning and there were witnesses and the Prince was sweating blood. So very not attractive. There were enough of the Prince's enemies in the witnesses that I was sure he could not cheat, as I was sure he would. I wasn't sure how I was going to pay for all that metal, but I assumed something would come to me.



Only, when I awoke the next night, it seemed that King Charles had OUTLAWED! CHESS! WHILE! I! SLEPT!



Ssssssshh!



The Prince had used his influence, I knew, to arrange this, but the King is the King and it's god's will that he rule. Charles, I mean. I doubt God had a hand in the Prince's ascension to the throne of Paris, after all. In my fury, as he knew I would, I smashed the chess board and scattered the witnesses... of course, this caused the Prince to happily declare the game a draw and be magnanimous about it, damn him! I was so furious, but I couldn't take my wrath out on the Prince. Of course not!



I stalked across Paris and right into Charles the Well-Beloved bedchambers and I bit into his neck like it was a juicy pair, although his neck was not that green, it was certainly gritty. Did you know his blood's not really blue? Anyway, I left him half drained and stalked off knowing that the curse you were spared would afflict Charles, and indeed, he is now known as Charles the Mad and was falling under the sway of the Duke of Burgandy.



You know, I'm not one to hold a grudge but... Chess, please... it was an outrage. Every few months, I hear he's shaken off the madness and I feel compelled to sup at his bedside. I still dream of an iron tower proclaiming Paris' manhood, and certainly I will find a way to erect it, but for now I am happy to make him suffer so.



So, I think the Prince holds a grudge and madness made Charles uncontrollable so he told the Inquisition where they could find me. And, so... here I am, with a vision and a great many friends, one of whom I must kill for he is a Moor and more. Much more.



There is Howald, he's a Bruhah who doesn't like to be called Harry. The Prince of Nice made him the Sheriff of Nice, which was nice, except I don't trust Jean-Paul the Seanachi.



There's Georgie, but I don't see him anymore. But he changes his own features around, so maybe I have but I didn't recognize him.



There's the Gangrel, whose name I forget. They call him Spot behind his back, although after that terrible ambush, Smear might have been a better name.



There's a witch name Gwynneth, although I have no use for girls, she is quite fetching and I am hoping she might fetch some gin-gin for me, that I might make some poison for Sorrow. Surely poison will prove effective where future memories of science are as yet unclear. Sorrow must die, although he is my friend and promised to introduce me to a werewolf I might study.



There's another girl named Dolcea Nola and I tried to rescue her from the Moor under her roof, but he escaped harm. In retrospect, it's probably better this way. If the inn burned down, that might have attracted the wrong kind of attention.



There is Tobias, the vampire saint of lepers. He is a dedicated man of science and apparently Christian for he keeps company with a nun. I think he was arrested last night.



There is Bridget Fitch and I despise her for embarrassing me in front of the Prince. I think maybe the Prince picked on that and asked Jean-Paul to take her down a notch or two. Last I checked, she was making an unliving on her back in one of Jean-Paul's whore houses. The Prince is so good to me that way. I might kill Bridget or I might not. Unlike the Sorrow issue, I don't _feel_ compelled to kill her. I still might. I like to leave my options open.



Who else is left? Roderick the Lasomba. Cute kid. I distinctly recall killing him at some point in the future. He's trying to be good and a part of the Nice social scene, but since so many of his fellow clansmen are running around kidnaping Toreadors... well, I guess I'll learn the reason I kill him when I kill him.



If I kill him.



It's not like everything I dream comes true.



I'm sure I've forgotten someone... OH! Dante. He's my new special friend. He used to be a Brujah but I'm going to turn him into a Toreador, just like me. I even have myself a Toreador ghoul. I would use you, my sweet Jean, but you've earned your rest. Yes, you have.



All I need is a gold mask and some theatre props and a little luck and the slab of beef can pretend to be Karnak, returned from the enemies. And because I have acted insane my friends will not suspect me of machinations against Sorrow. We have gelled. We have bonded and his death, final death, shall surely draw us closer.



Provided, of course, that I can get away with this.



I must say, I am rather proud of the way I rescued Dante from right under the noses of my friends. Sorrow was arguing with me about what FOOOOOSH meant when I said FOOOOSH, and so I grabbed a torch off the wall and stuck it in Dante's face.



FOOOOSH! He lit up like a candle, What with being chained to the wall and with the stake in his chest he could hardly move. Bridget threw water on him and doused his flames even as I wondered how long it would be wise to let him burn. The Prince, knowing my taste for the male form if not exactly the way I like them served, agreed to let me take Dante home to study in the same way that Tobias was taking another of the captured kindred for "study."



I would have liked to see that. I really would have.



So, she had Dante delivered to what would someday be a clock tower, if we ever figured out what clocks were. I gave him my blood and schooled in all the things he must do to stay with me, and he learned faster than any dog did. He did.



And when it was time to give him back, I created a vampire childe all my own. I dressed him in Dante's rags and staked him while he cried tears of blood. I burned his face and sent him to the Prince's in Dante's place.



I am glad to have learned all you could teach me of castle intrigue, my sweet Jean. But enough about me...



How have you been?