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The Abbreviated Historical Facts & Potential Inaccuracies

The Beginning, before it mattered

Anyone who has dealt with the "upper crust" professions (modeling, stock moving, etc) usually referred to as white collar know that it's basically the worst sort of people who are involved. Models are treated as posable dolls, regularly screamed at, called out and belittled. That is why they may be beautiful, but have terrible self-esteem. Stock brokers are high pressure, aggressive people who are only in it for the money and will use whatever bullying tactics they can, including insulting, belittling or undercutting their compatriots. And that's where I come in. I went to a "job fair" at my high school where a modeling agency had set up shop. They gave me a card and invited me to come to free lessons (so long as I took one free of charge photoshoot!) and I did. Talent for pretending came easy to me, the only thing you had to do was sell it. Sounds simple, but some people just can't make themselves get that distanced look.

I wouldn't say I was famous; I did a few campaigns for local retailers out of Phoenix, famous that does not make, and modelling for that low tier doesn't exactly pay what people think it does. It's like any other job. At the bottom, you're lucky to get the shells of peanuts. Your hair's grown out long, then chopped for one appointment, and your next one bitches at you and refuses to hire you because you cut your hair off you stupid girl, now you're completely worthless to us. Understand what the continuous stream of insults like that would do to a person?

Most girls and guys it would (does...) beat down, all except for the strongest of will, those who knew they had what it takes, and could weather the heat. I liked to think I was one of them who could, so I'd become so famous no one would dare speak to me that way again. Every time I was insulted, belittled, harassed, gained a pound that wasn't acceptable, lost a pound that wasn't acceptable, I would take myself to a place far away. A place smoke filled where I was wearing a ski-mask and holding a lit bottle of vodka prepared to go to town! And then I came back to reality. Sigh. Reality by that time was probably screaming at me for not paying attention; it happened fairly often. Needlesstosay, I didn't really make it big, but I did make it into working night events live, because I was excellent cast in the darker shadows of the nighttime. They said my tone "blended" well, without being lost in the shadow. I wasn't a photographer, I didn't care about their babble, their job was to make me look right in the pictures. Simple as that.

Phoenix isn't exactly a mecca for night time activities, so there's only so many places you can show up to model for new events. That's where my sire found me the first time. We were having a normal argument, probably over the color of makeup, where I was being petulant. Apparently it made an impression on her, in any event. She introduced herself, I told her apparently "I'm too busy to sign autographs" or something very close to that (how utterly bitchy and undeserved of me!) and she decided I would be the person she wanted to follow after her in the lineage. I wouldn't say that was one of my shining moments, but it got me in the running to become an undead vampire so...

I worked the jobs that were given to me, mostly night jobs, though the occasional daytime and bright light photoshoot snuck in, and then my contract was purchased by another company. Voit agency, in fact. There was a rumor about that agency that was quickly passed to me by one of the few girls I actually trusted enough to go and have drinks with on occasion. Apparently they make all the models starve, the only way you can advance is to sleep with, blah blah, yadda yadda. It was the same rumor that every other damn agency had going on for it. There isn't an agency out there that doesn't have those rumors of favoritism, because the truth is, none of us want to admit when we're cut or passed over, that it might be for genuine reasons. Being catty is so, so much easier.

So I started, and immediately I was put into two different and opposing styles. I never really thought the old movie star glam worked well for me, and the majority of the pictures taken proved that fact. They were bland; even if my faint sneer could manage to salvage the shoot, I wasn't happy with them and told... well... pretty much everyone about it. Instead of addressing my concerns like they do in the real world, I was booked up for more and more of the same. I was being photocopied into the back of crappy department store magazines, further and further away from where I wanted to be even though the pay was getting slightly better each shoot. It was almost like I could see myself being moved out of the faint little bit of limelight I'd managed to claw out for myself, and I realized that it pissed me off. It wasn't about the money. Well, it was about the money, but I didn't want it to be about the money. I knew I could do the right things.

I charged into the office of Adele Voit, my sire-to-be, and demanded she move me back to the night-gloss shoots. Well demanded is maybe a polite word for the upwelling of angry emotion. An eruption of profanity, like Kilimanjaro blowing up and raining down "fuck"s and "bullshit"s all over the countryside. Like I said, demanded was a polite version of what really happened. Adele sat there, watching me while I exploded all over the place, stormed back and forth, arms and hands akimbo no doubt. I was so mad that I was going to get fired and start at another agency type of mad.

She sat there the entire time letting me rant and rave, not even speaking. She didn't have to speak, I was speaking enough for ten people, because I had enough of being that girl. I was going for broke, and she knew it. It occasionally happened, and if you were worth enough, they saved you, if you weren't, you got cut. Cut girls and boys rarely made it back in. People don't forget when you insult them, and they do their best to hold on to it for as long as they can. When you think it's done, it comes back to get you, and you're so broadsided because you honestly had forgotten about the insult and what caused it (because there's probably been so many...) that you initially don't know how to even act. But that's another story altogether, so continuing on...

She got out of her seat and walked over to the office door, right past me. Me asking her where she was going. She closed all of the blinds, silently, one after the other, and closed the lock on the door. It was about that time that my instinct, the one you know you have in you, but you don't realize it until your hair stands on end for the first time, started screaming inside of me that something was very, very wrong. You know, that one. I tempered my emotions, suddenly. The room went quiet except for her twisting the blinds all closed one after the other, then she gestured at a seat for me silently. I hesitated, but I sat down, and started to inquire what was going on.

She told me that I'd finally impressed her, and that I'd be a good addition, and how she'll be proud when I shine. I was trying to digest that - it was much more abstract than I'm saying it now, so it took some processing - but I never got to finish. She was a vampire, and she was on me. I certainly wasn't strong enough to pull away, and as the moments passed, I only grew weaker anyway.

A beautiful death, really.

The stage of learning, it kind of mattered

To say the beginning was an easy one would be an understatement. I'd been embraced right at the height, almost, of a temper-tantrum. It took a long time to break the emotional lock that the embrace had infused in me, and I can't imagine it was easy for Adele either. It took awhile for me to not utterly hate my sire's guts. Anything she told me I pretty much refused to accept. The traditions? HA! Not important. She had to grab me from running off and slap some sense into me before I ran around showing off my new silver tipped fang enhancements. You can only imagine how much of a (not) good time it was for her. She probably thought she'd made the worst mistake ever. She tried to explain many things to me, but I wasn't hearing it.

That went on for awhile. She finally got me to accept the traditions as a necessary evil, but then let me go and move into my own place. I think I just needed my freedom. I didn't want to live with my maker, and even if it made all the sense in the world, you know... temper-tantrum embrace. Not everything makes sense during one of those times.

To cut out the unnecessary parts of the growing period, let's just say that I found the Invictus to be the older version of the model to which I'd always been a posable doll. Their temperament was get it done for me or fuck off, and while I could respect the sentiment, as I got a little older, it still reminded me of my past, and I couldn't really get down with that. No matter how often their recruiters said it wasn't really that way, you always knew it was. Which is what really lead me back to the Carthian Movement. I didn't want to dedicate myself to making people miserable, and science is whatever... so it was important to me to feel like I could actually find a place where I would be able to figure out who I really was.

That turned out to be the Carthians. I'd always gone to the little activist parties, but it was always more of a social event for me than anything, so at the base I was familiar with the idea of collective theory. That made it easier for me than probably for others. I know Adele was happy to see me there the first and second time, but she wasn't really willing to ruin a good thing in case I were still taken to being contrary (I was, and am, but that's besides the point...).

Before too long, I was a part of the Carthian Movement and right in it. I figure if I'm going to be doing something, then I don't want to be half-assedly involved. I want to be in the thick of it, and that's just who I am. It's always what I've been and it's always what I'll be. They would tell me it's normal for a Daeva, like somehow that was supposed to make me feel worse or something, or maybe that I wasn't special. But what the hell do they know anyway? There's nothing wrong with wanting to be in the thick of things.

I met another Carthian who was actually a member of the Acolytes. She was way more into it than I was, but she took me around to see her garden. I thought it was... amazing. I really did. It was so stunningly gorgeous I wanted to know how she did it, and I wouldn't take no for an answer. It took awhile, and I had to do some things that I didn't think were really important at first, but the longer I spent with her, the more I realized that there's more to the Acolytes than just being blood sacrificing sociopaths. She said she didn't trust me to really give proper thanks, because I wouldn't break away from the Carthians the majority of the time like she would, but she did say she would teach me something that I wanted.

We spent a while growing a beautiful garden on the top of the apartment roof I was in, probably took us months to complete, and she taught me how to make it shimmer and shine during the night. It was beautiful, to say it was magical would be campy, but accurate at the same time. It was one of the first times in my life, dead or alive one, that I'd stopped to smell the flowers. I would go up there some nights and consider the night's arguments or debates, or mild discussions or arrangements and I would just watch what we'd made and it'd soothe my nerves. I felt very connected to it.

The application of now, it does matter

Earlier in this story I told you that there wasn't a lot of things that one could do different in Phoenix, and that goes doubly-so for Kindred. I wanted something different, I'd gotten older and to be frank I was getting kind of bored of The Blacks (bless their hearts, but still) and the city of Phoenix itself. It was very brown, grass, dirt, rocks, designs. I wanted something with a little more color to it.

I thought maybe I would go to Los Angeles at first, but that concerned me that I'd just be another minnow in a sea of big fishes again - also I heard the Gaoler stalked asian Kindred and then raped them and yeah.... so I considered San Francisco, then I heard the rumors about San Fran which was that they experimented all of the time on Daeva which is why there's so many Mekhet and Gangrel and little of the other groups. And no. I am not an experiment directly, I am part of the Carthian experiment. Biiiig difference.

Then the news came that Las Vegas had been claimed for the Hold. Oh sweet mercy, I always wanted to go to Vegas! I had to pay off some boons and get my name cleared, since I didn't want to run off and get my name ruined everywhere in the hold because I just wasn't patient, which took me a couple years... As you can expect, that brings us to the present. I sent a person ahead to handle the living arrangements, then I got my plane ticket, one-way. Things were going to be so great.

Now, I'll set up my place, and grow another garden to soothe my temper, and bask in the glow of the nightlights.

Viva Las Vegas!