The Lazarak Lineage

Arkadi Dimitriov Lazarak, Circle of the Crone
- Natalja Lazarak, Circle of the Crone
  - Jarek Lazarak, Circle of the Crone
    - Veles Lazarak, Circle of the Crone
      - Anthony Lazarak, Circle of the Crone
        Grayson Lazarak, Circle of the Crone

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Known Facts at Game Start

Grayson is a Savage of the Circle of the Crone who practices an Animistic religion that worships spirits rather then Gods.
Before embrace, Grayson was an influential and prized fighter within the Underworld caged fighting arenas that existed before UFC sanctioned fights weakened and protected fighters. His investors were Underworld Overlords who, to this day, owe him some attribute to their claims of power.

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Background

You know, you're almost as pretty as your friend was. I'm glad the two of you managed to find your way here, few humans are so enlightened to find their true purpose in life. We have some time before we begin, so this is a bit of an interlude for you. I feel I owe homage to you for your sacrifice to our cause, and because of this reverence it is customary that I bestow upon you the story of my life and the continued prestige of the Lazarak name. You are truly special, not because of your physical beauty, not because of the sacrifice you will so willingly make, but because you are a messenger and for that we share a love for you. You see, I am what we call a Vedmak, your creative arts call us vampires. Because my soul is not pure, not as your spirit is, I cannot transcend to the Nav, what your creative religion calls the underworld or heaven. You are my chasque, my messenger, and it is during this time I will prepare upon your very spirit, the story I wish you to convey to the Great World Tree.

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Mortal Life

The European Theatre of World War II ended on May 8, 1945. Returning soldiers scattered back to their homes, with little else to do besides consummate, and little more mental stability than to just survive. My father was such a man, and his mental stability was even more declined than that of the common soldier. He stayed around just long enough to see my birth, before wild adventures and nefarious drugs called him away from the family he could have made.

I can't recall much from my childhood. I remember the girl next door, the garage we scurried into, the awkward sweaty palms, the first kiss and our attempts at what we thought we had learned about sex from late night television. I remember briefly moving about the city from rental to rental, staying only long enough for the property owner to become concerned that the rooms were soiled beyond cosmetic repair. I remember my grandmother, the matriarchy of my mortal family, whom supported more than she should have had to. My mother was a bit of a dreamer, but too scared to follow them. She would chase after freedom and liberation as a dog does cars, but would always return out of fear that she wouldn't make it, or wouldn't be accepted. That's probably why she never found a man, only adult males. Adult males who were abusive because they lacked confidence in their own right. Men who couldn't hold a job, and barely tolerated young children.

I'd say I was fairly young when I decided that my grandmother would look after me best. To this day I still pretend I remember how the kitchen smelled after school as she prepared dinner. The chewy cookies and cold milk that was served on the weekends before bed. I felt at home there, as much as I have ever felt, anywhere. Time progresses and like all teenagers that are raised by people that don't connect with them, I separated from my grandmother and the home she built for me.

It was during those rebellious years that the violence I had once fled followed me again. My grandmothers home was small, it contained the two of us comfortably, my mother was a begrudging addition, what it sufficed. The boyfriend she brought along with her, was not. I guess what pushed me over the edge was when my own grandmother, the woman I had turned to when I had no other place to go, asked me in earnest if I had stolen from her. I guess I shouldn't have taken it as a personal insult, but she invited two tweakers to live in her home and sought to blame a rebellious teenager for theft than to believe her own daughter was stealing from her to pay for her heroin addict boyfriend. I didn't really have anywhere to go when I left home, but it wasn't the first time that life had come up short on me.

Living on the streets of Vegas wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. Sure, the discards are of a much higher quality than that of others cities, but you're still homeless. It still rains and shelters simply fill, or business owners turn to violence when they find you sleeping under their awnings. What surprised me the most was how cold it got a night. I'd lived in Vegas my entire life in some fashion or the other, but I never experienced the night time like this. Removed from the lights and the casinos, the city is unwelcoming and cold, in more ways than just the temperature.

I suppose it was a mix of desperation and hatred that brought me to my first occupation. I began pulling favors for dealers, collecting money from tweakers who skipped turf. I just always imagined it was the slew of random fucks that my mother drug in and out of my life, I justified it in my own right. I guess my first big break came when some of the local shops asked me to sleep there for the night, amateur protection I guess, it paid minimal, but at least I slept indoors.

I guess I'd roughed up enough thugs for locals that the smaller shops started to look to me for continued protection. I think it was that they were tired of me kicking in the asses of the guys they hired to do a job that wasn't on record. I guess it doesn't really matter, but I gave up the protection gig when I was offered the chance to get into the ring. Now, I know what you're thinking, I'm not the biggest guy. How in the hell did I stand there with gloves and take hit after hit and not be some washed up punch drunk boxer. Well, I'm a little older than you think. Mixed Martial Arts were just becoming popular around my time, I didn't like getting my shit kicked in, so I began learned from anyone who had something to teach. I'm not going to lie, it was different back then. The fights were brutal. Guys got hurt. We didn't have all the protective gears and rules that you have now in arenas like UFC and such. But after taking my licks for enough fights I began to win, and win big. The Russians approached me about fighting exclusively for them. It was the best experience of my life. Women, parties and money all leading to one big fight every two weeks. I though life couldn't get better. In that aspect I was right, but it could sure get worse.

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Embrace

You know how, whenever everything in your life is going just perfect, you can still feel uneasy, like the calm before the storm. I guess that's the best way for me to describe it to you. I didn't know what to think at first when I checked my bank transactions. Most people would be happy to see that they had an extra grand, but it send shivers down my back. I don't know why it came to mind so quickly, but I knew exactly what check didn't get cashed that month. I had always sent my grandmother some money. She retired early because of the stress that my mother and her continuous string of boyfriends put on her. She was as poor as you can get but still gave everything she didn't have to give. It took me three days to finally pick up the phone and call home.

I don't remember the funeral. I think I was shelled shocked. I'd grown so far from that life that I couldn't imagine that it could tear me apart so badly. I remember a letter that I found, a letter that at the time I thought was from my grandmother, but I'll come back to this later. The letter was just a chain of event that brought me crashing to my knees, begging for forgiveness. The letter led to my mother's attempt at suicide. Her attempted suicide brought around a half dozen old flings that wanted to check on her. That led to her relapse into the drug scene, which in turn led to a growing depression in me as I witness the only legacy that my grandmother had dwindle into nothingness. I wanted to die, I thought it would be the best thing for me. I never admitted it, but I was so physically and emotionally broken that I couldn't imagine I had any self worth or will of spirit left within me.

I can't take credit for pulling myself out of the funk that I was drowning in. Ironically I'd have to attribute yet another heroine tweaker, though it stirs a deep hatred in me to credit someone like that with anything. I was wondering the city as I had begun to do those nights, wishing that death would find me, when I saw a little old lady making her way home from the local grocer. The sweet naive thing passed a darkened back alley. So dark that if it wasn't for her muffled yelp I wouldn't have noticed her disappear from the sidewalk at all. It's one thing to tweak out and harm yourself in the process, it is another by far to harm innocent people just to get your fix. I can't say that I'm proud of what I did that night, I believe I startled the poor old woman more than the mugging. I also cannot even tell you what nationality the man was, his face looked like red dented hamburger when I was through with him. I left his limp body as I raced further into the darkened alleyways. It was there that I was greeted by the perpetrator of all my sorrows, the progenitor of my living nightmare. As of that night I, as a Vedmak, am the childe of Anthony Lazarak.

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Kindred History

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1974 - 1984

My time as an unreleased Kindred and later as a member of the Chorus were nothing short of agony. It wasn't that I discredit the years of tutelage I spent with Anthony, it's just that I was so eager to prove I could make it on my own I feel that I often disrespected the lessons he taught me. Nevertheless I succeeded in all the goals Anthony and I could have hoped for and upon my release I ran wild for a period of time. It was only after my release that I realized how desperate a situation our lineage and covenant had fallen upon. As the population of Las Vegas grew, so too did the populace of Kindred, but new arrivals into the city began to outnumber the domestic citizenry. As I was nearly the first of the 'next generation' it was humorous to see what I myself had been like as new childer started to appear.

As the new childer began to be released and the population swelled I feared that difficult nights would be ahead, and I think my Grandsire felt the same. He never admitted it but Veles asked me to start running protection for him. I'll admit I felt overwhelmed at first, his domain isn't the richest, but I'd only consider the Strip a busier piece of real estate.

It's funny how some things transcend even the most abrupt changes in a person. How one minute a woman can be a complete fucking nympho, choking on your cock like it's the fucking lifeblood of the world, and the next she's a crazy ass cunt who goes off the deep end. Michelle was never anything more to me than a fuck toy, but the bitch wasn't going to bail without being taught a lesson. I knew the stupid whore would bet on any fighter that I was setting up, so I rigged the fight. Placed all my money against my fighter. Michelle's money and teaching that dumb bitch a lesson was well worth the ass kicking I endured from Cha. Didn't matter in the end, I still got paid.

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1984 - 1994

But you know, that's what people come to Las Vegas for, to get paid. The odds are about as lousy as the company, but still Kindred and Kine both flock here as if it's the promised land. It's a stupid thing to come to Las Vegas looking for trouble, it's an even less intelligent thing to live here and cause some. When the Hunters caused trouble for us by staking a coterie of Kindred to the roof of the Bellatio something had to be done. I let the people who took the biggest risk take credit for it, but I couldn't sit by and not get my hands a little bloody too, it's just my nature. Long story short, as Las Vegas boomed it became increasingly difficult to remain out of sight if you know what I mean. You can't even fuck in the back seat of a volvo without it being caught on three different cameras, try walking down the damn street.

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1994 - 2004

Now there are people in this world that I truly despise, to the point where violent action is hard to restrain, but there are others that are just fun to mess with simply because they aren't used to it. Addison Whitfield is one of these pompous assholes that always expects things to go exactly the way he wants. I think as a child he probably suckled on his mommy until he was well considered a toddler. I guess looking back I should have felt bad that I caused such a stir, but I wasn't blamed, I'm not sure anyone even noticed. When the Velvet Shadow closed shop it wasn't hard to run the paper trail and find out that it shouldn't have. I kept my mouth shut about what I'd found because I had been told to stay out of it. I guess I just couldn't resist ruining a perfectly good party. Ephemeral Deville was always such a little firecracker anyways. The type of girl you were sure went home at night and cut herself and she whined about how bad she had it. Poor little goth girl got her heart broken by Cha so I just put it into her ear that the club shouldn't have closed, somebody set her up. Well the rest was an eventful ordeal. Ended with her being drug out of the party, Grandesire just behind the agitated ex-lovers. I guess I should have felt bad about what I did, and that's why I went to her after she was punished. A month of helping Ephe feed and make her way around the city was the least I could do, at least I didn't have to share in her punishment.

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2004 - Present

My grandsire Veles has always been so charitable to his adopted lineage that I thought I would honor him by bringing one of his favorites into a business I had running. You see, it's not only humans that can do the bidding of Kindred, but animals as well, and in many instances they are more preferable. So I brought in Franco Martinez to help me run the place and push the commerce. It was more profitable that we could have imagined it would have been, but some jealous fuck burned it to the ground. We went in after the smoldering stopped, found one small pup that had survived the fire by crawling into one of the air conditioning ducks. I let Franco keep him, just to make sure we stayed on good terms.

You know, some people just don't think about things like that, staying out of the shit. Deangelo Bell is kinda like that. I don't know what made him go off, I'm glad that I wasn't in Elysium when the shit happened, but the crazy bitch only had one thing on his mind when he entered the room. He sure as hell started to dominate everyone in the room. I'm sure they deserved it, most people do. It didn't really matter to me either way, when Vasily approached me about roughing up Deangelo I rolled with two of his ghouls to make sure it went down like it was supposed to.

Alas, I do hear my Grandsire calling for you, so it's time now. I know you don't understand much of what I've said to you, and there were gaps in the story that make it hard to figure out exactly how the story should flow. As I said before, it's not really necessary that you understand, only that you pass what I need you to know to the Great World Tree. I'm just filling holes, now off you go.

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