Chaun - SuspireWiki

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Details for others from Philadelphia

Chaun (or Shaun, depending on who you talked to) was embraced illegally by a Daeva Acolyte named Marina in the mid 1970's. He was the second of four embracees of hers in a relatively short time period. He also was much more reasonable to approach too, by outsiders. While his other siblings were female, he was the only male, and as such was often the individual handling menial Elysium tasks with other Kindred. Still, even with this, he seemed to not be bitter about it.
His sire, for those who had any clue on gossip or other Kindred's business, believed herself the host of Itzpapalotl during rites dedicated to the Obsidian Butterfly, and their cult was indeed named "Culto de la Mariposa de Obsidiana Aleteo" (or Cult of the Obsidian Butterfly's Beating Wings). He was known to be an ardent member.
From time to time, he was also known to be... egotistical concerning affairs surrounding relics and their ilk, and spoke openly on more than one occasion (when others were discussing it, no less) that he very seriously doubted that anyone could know anything about relics, truly, unless they knew anything about how to create them. He would go on and on until probably everyone was annoyed about it enough to drop the subject. But he certainly did know enough to make it seem like he knew what he was talking about, even if he went overboard with it.
He was known to be constantly quarrelling with his older sibling, and it was obvious that he believed himself more capable of second leadership in their cult than she. Though, he wasn't actually. He didn't seem to have the same carrying power that she did, the same "stage presence". So it was obvious to most everyone that in a cult, where personality ruled, Chaun would be second to his sibling despite his ability.

The Background of "Chaun"

Others will tell you that race is the designation of strife within the 20th century, with the race riots and the attempts to bring about equality all throughout the American States. But what happens when you’re embraced into a new country of sorts, a whole new demographic in fact, where race is still a designation of sorts. While some would see my skin and tell me that I am light enough to pass as Caucasian, most realize what I am soon enough. Hispanic and White mix, while trouble enough when I was alive, is just as ugly - if not uglier at times - within the Kindred race.

I was embraced not to be a bastard, and was never treated as such until I began to develop my own opinions. But let me back up, I’m getting too far ahead of myself.

My mother of birth was a beautiful hispanic woman, and my father a white soldier stationed for a time in Mexico. When the soldier was shipped out, my mother was still not showing signs for pregnancy, so when she began to show there was a problem. She was able to contact the soldier, and they were distance-married, if only so that she could raise her son in the United States. He had her moved to Philadelphia onto a nearby base by pulling strings, which is where I was born.

I actually never met my father after I was three years old. I was raised by a woman, with all the difficulty that entails, for her and for me. Naturally, being raised one sided has it’s pros and cons, and when I was a teenager, I was determined to be... difficult. That’s where my new life, or death if you’d like to call it that, began to take form. I was attractive for my age, strong and showed signs of adulthood earlier than most boys. By the time I was in my second year of High School, I was part of a “juniors” group, where basically it was a group of teenage kids pretending to know what the hell we were talking about after reading a couple books on practical magic.

Mostly, the guys were just along because we got to see tits.

I could still tell you now what herbs and candles, spices and stones were supposed to have magical properties and what for, but the longer we took part in that little grouping, the more most of us with two braincells realized not everything was as it seemed. There is where The Incident happened.

The northeast has a breadth of old wives tales for witchcraft, cults and the like, most of them simply urban legends passed down to frighten children into going to church, lest they turn out like those kids. But some of them have an inkling of truth. What we stumbled on was one of those truths, and for all the wishing in the world, I’m not sure if I’d change anything now. It was a horrible thing, a horrible creation, evil even, but also holy and sacred, and we woke it up by fucking around with the wrong things. I would come to know this thing as Sire.

It was 76? Maybe 77. It might have been earlier than that, without the days to break up your nights, you actually lose track of time, but I’m fairly certain it was in the mid-70’s. Think of it much like days that blur together when you’ve had too much to drink, and you’ll find that it’s a lot like that. We decided to take our small little “coven” (because we were older now) out on a camping trip to commune “at sites where witches were fabricated to be killed”. Or something. Mostly it was just a camping trip with some candles and herbs and fumbling through wind spirit north-south-east-west callings.

Normally, we did these things during the day because a couple of the small group was more or less afraid of the dark and a cricket would send them into a screaming fit. This time though, we convinced them to come out into a circle for the group at night. Our leader girl, who’s name escapes me now (isn’t that sad?) had read that an offering of blood brings more potent blessings to those who use them in one of her various occult bookstore books by Rayven Nightwynd or whatever they call themselves. So we trekked out from our camp sight probably only a couple hundred meters or so, next to a small little set of rocks that someone swore (oh-my-god-for-real-guys!) looked like an altar. It did kind of. But it also kind of looked like a pile of stupid rocks if you looked at it another way.

So we all cut open a little finger and whined about how much it hurt, but bled onto the altar and around it in little splotches. Nothing happened, at least not initially. We chanted and did a little stupid dance until the majority of the group passed out pretty much right around the altar, bottles of wild turkey left littered about. I didn’t pass out, and neither did another girl. We had... other things in mind. Hormones, you know. So while we hunched and did what we did, we didn’t hear things moving not too far from us, an old cellar door being slid out of the way from undergrowth. We didn’t hear the corpse-like vampire scenting the air and crawling on hands and knees towards our passed out friends or our fucking by an old altar. The vampire didn’t interrupt though, strangely enough (I didn’t ask, because I could fathom a guess), at least not until my short young man stamina gave way to after-glow. She wanted to hunt.

A rock cracked one of the sleeping friends on the side of the head and jolted him out of his sleep and upright, which cut short the afterglow as I and the girl with whom I’d had relations with scrambled for clothing. That blood that trickled from his temple must have been too much for her, there’s a difference between smelling blood and seeing it when you wake from torpor or are starving. The next I knew, there was a vampire on us, savaging the poor guy’s throat. Naturally, screams awoke the rest of the party and we all scattered, two of us half-clothed (if even that) and the others wildly running in flight-pattern. She had her hunt then.

She let two of us live, and I’m sure you can venture a guess as to which ones, but not without a period of being drug underground bled and fed while she regained her wits and bearing. She asked me always if I was from Mexico, and I would always tell her no. She had exceptionally broken Spanish, which made it hard to understand her. It’s funny how languages change so much over time. I didn’t understand how she could be so far from Mexico. The outskirts of Philly isn’t exactly that close to the border. When she finally figured out what I was (half-white, half-mexican) she bitched at me like it was my fault. I was terrified. Terrified maybe isn’t even a good word. I was sure that I was going to die like everyone else, and I just remember the utter paralyzing fear that kept me from not moving at all for days and nights. It wasn’t like we could go anywhere, she would come by, feed from us, toss us some snacks from a 7-11 or something then leave and lock the door behind her and put something on top. But it was terrifying all the same.

It was about a week before we were really too weak to sustain her any more, but she knew that. Before too long in the cramped, old-as-dirt cellar, two more joined us. She tossed them in the same as us and did the same to them as she had done (and continued to do once we weren’t dying) to us. I was the only one who could even reasonably understand some of what she would say. Most of it wasn’t good. She’d speak out needs to no one, like she were seeing if any of us understood her. No one answered. Two more joined, but she didn’t feed from them. They stayed with us and stared at us. When someone would get brave enough to try and make a rush for the door, they’d grab them, toss them back down the steps into the cellar and then beat them. After the second try, no one tried a third time.

For weeks it felt like we didn’t speak. We shivered and were taken outside to shit and pee, then drug back inside and thrown into our respective areas. What were we doing? What were we supposed to be doing? Why were we being held? I wanted to ask these things so badly, but every time she came back, I was too terrified. The first to speak wasn’t me, it was the girl who was caught with me. She screamed and howled one night, in some kind of terrible way that I’d never heard come from a human, and attacked the vampire with her nails and hands, dirty hands and knees. She was a rag doll to the vampire, but she kept getting up and trying again. And again. And again. One final lunge was met by a sidestep and the girl fell onto the floor panting and tears soaking the earthen floor. The vampire crouched beside her and then brushed her hair back from her face. She said to the girl, which I could understand, “You will be my first.” and then picked up the girl and took her away. I didn’t see her again for some time.

The vampire returned the next night more voracious in her appetite than the other nights, and all of us went under her fangs. When she was dropping me to the dirty earthen floor, I finally spoke in my Spanish, “What did you do with her?” and she looked at me, tilted her head, and then left. She didn’t come back for another three weeks.

When she came back, she pulled out the two who would watch us day and night and slammed the door. She never came down into the cellar that night, but what she sent instead was more than hungry enough. A jaguar made its way down into the dark cellar with us, only three of us, and immediately lunged on the first person it could find. The jaguar too was starved, so when it bit the poor girl on the neck there was no way for her to survive. It savaged her throat as only a wild, starving cat could do, while myself and the other young man screamed and tried to shove open the door. The jaguar ate.

When it realized it’d had enough of the screaming things in the same room, it turned, it’s face red from the blood of the girl who was still gurgling on the floor and tried to determine which of us it should strike. I somehow managed to dislodge one of the wooden planks of the old rotting steps and used it like a life support to keep the cat at distance. The jaguar went for the other. While he struggled and fought, the claws of the beast had little trouble opening him with fatal wounds, but I wouldn’t be the third victim. I swung the wooden plank of the board over and over onto the cat until bones cracked and it wouldn’t move any more, before slumping to the far corner of the room away from the dying two.

She came back later to survey the damage. “Chaun,” she called me (my name was Shaun). “Chaun, you can come now.” I didn’t move. “Chaun,” she insisted. “Come with, now.” I held the wooden stair, or the remainder of it, tightly but I pulled myself off of the floor and crawled up onto the forest floor. I must have stank like only a human can stink after weeks (months?) under ground. That’s when I saw her, my older sibling to be, looking at me with some degree of sympathy. They picked me up and took me to a stream where I was stripped of my dirty clothes, bathed, drenched in salt and water, then bathed again. I was too weak to resist even if I wanted to, the jaguar terror had sapped everything out of me, I no longer cared if I lived or died. I just wanted it to end, or take it’s course.

But I wasn’t killed, at least, not in the way that most people are. I was embraced. My sire was Marina, a mestizos (which explained her bitching at me), or during rites she was Itzpapalotl. She truly believed in this, and had the strength to back it up. She believed to be one of the Kindred allowed to host the goddess during the rites and practices, and as such would damn well have what she wanted. She only wanted those who could hunt and those who were strong and beautiful. Oh, and she didn’t have a cult, so we needed to help her to regain that too.

It was hard not to believe the truth in the matter, she was strength, she was death, and she certainly could take the forms of animals which were appropriate. I began to believe, and I helped her cult expand in Philadelphia properly. But, there was a problem. That older sibling of mine was less capable (in my eyes) and so we constantly quarrelled. When decision would have to be made, it would always be her who would be granted the right or the nod of assent. I suppose this favoritism festered in me.

At a boiling point in the last few weeks, where nothing good would come from my staying within Philadelphia, I took myself from the cult, and said I would be going elsewhere to find what had been stolen from our cult, which was loaned to the Carthian Movement for a time to aid in their work against the Invictus. Personally, we didn’t give a flip about the covenant fights, but when our relic went missing, it became an issue. Probably everyone knew I was just looking for an excuse to depart the city, and my sibling.