Chapter 8:
(09/08/01)
After arriving on Earth, the cabal relocated to the city of Aminus, Oregon, where they pooled their money and purchased a large, run-down house on a large tract of land on the outskirts of the city (where their neighbors were primarily rich yuppies). Everyone helped dismantle the spaceship, reclaim their belongings, and move into their new home. Several days later, everything was back to more or less normal, with Kenley and Joe having sex nonstop, Gabriel making breakfast and constantly flirting with Jennifer as the two of them explored the Digital Web from their adjacent rooms in the attic, Ripple hosting hot tub parties every night, Marcus disappearing into his basement workshop to be secretive, and Wan running off to Chinatown at the first opportunity.
From then on, the rest of the cabal barely ever saw Isabella. She spent her days interred in Saxon’s garden and came out at night to explore the city and serve its Malkavian prince. Soon, she decided that a good way to use her talents would be to hunt down red-listed vampires and kill them. She focused in on one, a very dangerous guy named Bishop, and started tracking him down but told no one else about her plans.
One night, Jennifer, Kenley, and Ripple were awakened by the sound of Isabella entering the house. She had brought a stranger with her: Bria, a Hollow One who had been living on the streets for a number of the years and desperately searching for the parents who had abandoned her as a young child. Isabella announced that she was inviting Bria to stay with the cabal for at least awhile, then left. Bria didn’t even fully understand why she had been brought to the chantry, but she was hardly in a position to turn down hospitality, either. Jennifer and Kenley were rather suspicious of her, but Ripple was at least polite enough to offer her a room until everyone agreed on what to do about her.
The next morning, Bria met everyone at breakfast. Most of the cabal didn’t trust Bria or Isabella’s motives in bringing her to the chantry, but Marcus seemed to take a liking to her and announced that she would be staying. Hardly in a position to question him, the rest of the cabal agreed. Later that day, Ripple decided to take Sadira clothes shopping. They invited Bria along, but she declined, rather frightened by Sadira’s extreme perkiness. Instead, she accepted Kenley’s invitation to come along to the zoo and help her collect DNA from a gorilla for the DNA library she was attempting to amass. At the zoo, Kenley tried to climb into the gorilla’s cage, asked the horrified Sadira to cover for her, and was knocked unconscious by a silverback. The zookeeper had to retrieve her from the cage and kick them out of the zoo. Kenley got so frustrated that when she decided to leave, her self-satisfation-powered Geo Metro wouldn’t start, and Jennifer had to come to the zoo parking lot and bail her and the rather frightened Bria out (displaying her truly horrible driving skills the whole way).
A few days later, Wan read a story in the newspaper that disconcerted him greatly. It seemed that a man had suddenly collapsed and died in a local restaurant, and Wan was very suspicious of the forces that might be behind in. That day, he went to the restaurant (a typical Olive Garden franchise) and began poking around for clues. He found nothing but a man who claimed to be a detective (but was, Wan soon realized, actually a Man in Black), shook his hand, and used a lot of fake politness and idle threats to discourage him from looking into it any further.
That night, Wan tried to talk to Marcus about what he’d seen, but Marcus was locked in his basement room and refused to come out or see anyone. Frustrated, he went to Gabriel instead and described his experience. After hearing the story, Gabriel got a strange look on his face and asked to see Wan’s hand. He scanned it, found a Technocracy locator chip implanted in it, and freaked out. He ripped the chip out from under Wan’s skin, jumped out a window, and began trying to chase down a very frightened stray cat to stick the chip on. “Kitty’s gonna save us from the Technocracy,” he insisted. Eventually, he managed to implant the chip in the cat, but no one was sure how well Gabriel’s plan would actually work.
Meanwhile, crazy things were happening in the backyard of the chantry. Two tribes of werewolves suddenly showed up and began waging a battle, and Saxon stepped outside to try and cool things down. Eventually, with the help of a man named Jericho Cromley who was related to the werewolves, Saxon managed to calm them down and convince them to leave. Afterwards, Saxon and Jericho became friends, and Jericho later introduced Saxon to his extensive family.
A few days later, Gabriel showed up at breakfast with a nondescript, mysterious man named Michael Lyrnus. He explained that Michael had recently defected from Iteration X and was looking for a place to hide out for awhile. Gabriel had decided to volunteer the chantry as a safehouse. Everyone was a little suspicious of him, particularly Jennifer. As she put it, the only reason she even tolerated his presence in the chantry was because Gabriel seemed to trust him. Things were a little tense at first, but eventually everyone became more or less accustomed to Michael’s presence.
Shortly thereafter, Saxon’s 21st birthday rolled around. When Ripple found out about it, she insisted that the entire cabal go clubbing to celebrate the occasion. Everyone, even the more reclusive members of the cabal, joined in, though some of them barely participated. Sadira and Saxon danced together all night long. Gabriel left the chantry dressed entirely in black leather and used Mind magic to make women irresistably attracted to him despite his utter lack of dancing talents or social skills (a situation which caused Jennifer to get very drunk very quickly). Ripple decided to celebrate the cabal’s return to Earth with a little meaningless sex, and began combing the club for a potential conquest. She settled on a borderline creepy but very attractive fellow named (you guessed it) Bishop. Before leaving with him, Ripple sent the rest of the cabal a message with Mind annoucing her intentions and telling them to have a good time without her.
Upon receiving Ripple’s mental message, Isabella became horrified and started tracking down the rest of the cabal to bail Ripple out of what would almost certainly become a very dangerous situation. Everyone except Sadira and Saxon went with her. Eventually they made their way to the cheap motel room where Bishop had seduced Ripple and was in the process of drinking her blood, and burst in to keep him from killing her. A fight broke out, and Bishop eventually jumped out the window and escaped when he realized that Isabella was there. Ripple had lost a lot of blood, but she was okay. Shaken, the cabal returned to the chantry, where they gave Ripple a massive lecture about not sleeping with the undead. She seemed almost offended by their lack of faith, though she realized she had done a foolish thing and had a close call. Everyone agreed to be more vigilant in the future, then went to bed.
Later, Saxon got in contact with the Seat of Life, explained that he and his friends were trying to begin a new chantry, and asked for her help. She gave him a seed and told him to plant it in the backyard. The seed grew into a pumpkin, which grew into our chantry’s first (if very small) node. Saxon was very pleased with himself.
Around the same time, Isabella’s hunt for Bishop climaxed when she confronted him for the last time and, in an amazing show of skill and luck, killed him and won the admiration and respect of all the vampires in Aminus.