From SuspireWiki
The objects of his Las Vegas collection, whether new or classic, young or old
No animals seem to roam the grounds, outside of the occasional local wildlife (roadrunners, wild hares and the like) that can be seen moving about on their normal business. There are no fences, so any animals could indeed wander in and out at their leisure - and probably do. The only fencing rests along behind the actual house, near a stable area. The turned ground and hoof marks mark the obvious well-kept stable as such, and a beautiful black Tennessee Walker can be seen grazing in a paddock which looks to be kept with shrubberies and other grazing plants (with the tell-tale sign of actual watering, were one to look for the mechanisms). The horse is somewhat ill-tempered (especially towards Kindred) , and would be considered slightly large for it's breed. One who knows much about horses and is a Kindred would definitely recognize it as a ghouled horse that was probably between 8-9 years of age when it was ghouled.
Known, Active, Invictus Sworn Oaths to Mycah
- Brent Lee, Oath of Fealty
- Brigid Highwater, Oath of Service
- Caroline Shreve, Oath of Service
- Daniel Clover, Oath of Fealty
- Emily Taylor, Oath of Service
- Ivan Kee, Oath of Service
- Nathaniel Zimmerman, Oath of Fealty (( View here. ))
- Paul Robertson, Oath of Fealty
- Shawn Kroll, Oath of Fealty (( View here. ))
- Slater Clearwater, Oath of Fealty
- Vera Hughes, Oath of Fealty, Secret (( View here. ))
- Wes Smoltz, Oath of Fealty
- William Peabody, Oath of Service
- Zack Baker, Oath of Fealty
- Interested in seeing the Invictus of the Hold's Oaths all at once in graphical format? Click here.
The history of one Mycah Thaine, abbreviated and condensed into a bite-sized morsel.
"...John."
"John, wake up."
"I know you can hear me, your eyelids are moving."
"John, if you are always sleeping and being a lazy bones, other not-lazy people are going to steal your place, don't you want to grow up and be rich?"
The young boy moved and got out of the bed. By the time his feet hit the floor, his face was already being inundated by a wet cloth.
"John, you are so filthy, and you slept in your bed like this? I'm going to have to wash all your bedding today! Now go wash up!"
The young boy wobbled blearily to do just as his mother told him.
"And you better say your prayers!"
His father had died in a Chinatown. They said it was an accident, but by the time you reach a teenager, you know about Chinatown. John was called Johnny by then, he was a hard worker, but didn't see the need for schooling. He left school after his mother died and started working the local stables' as a horsehand. The first time he was told to help break a horse it was the first time he'd actually been within a couple feet of a horse. He and his mother had always been too poor to afford transportation, and lying to say you'd dealt with horses since your daddy died came off the tongue well, and engendered some sympathy, which meant you got the job.
That stallion ate him for lunch. It became a joke for awhile to call Johnny Peg-leg Johnny because that stallion broke his leg in no time flat. It worked out though, because the owner just knew that horse was too damn wild and so Johnny got a free bone setting while getting to sit on the sidelines and watch how the real horse handlers went along their business. Johnny had eyes for one of the maids anyway. You know how hormones are at that age.
By the time Mary was showing, Johnny realized he needed to skip town. He was worried and couldn't afford to be burdened in marriage from some woman who was never going to have no good family ties. Johnny had been told by his mother to marry up. He collected his last check and left before she realized he even knew what she'd been planning to tell him.
He owned himself a good horse from that stable by then, a real fine steed with shimmering golden blonde coloring and mojave red around the hooves and underbelly. Johnny called him Keezheekoni, some indian name for fire, but he liked the way it rolled off his tongue. Every man needed a damn fine horse.
He was moving his way on down towards the port of angels, Los Angeles. He'd stop here and there to work for a couple months, paid for some new clothes, paid for some whiskey, paid for some smokes, paid for the company of some experienced ladies of the night. Johnny was becoming his father, he just didn't really know it.
It was in one of the small towns outside of Los Angeles proper where he picked up his first weapon, an old revolver that looked like hell but still fired like a beauty. He only had to work for two months to get that gun, too. It was a damn fine trade.
John was what he was called again by now, he was in his young twenties and long called a man. He was always moving up and up, slowly but surely. He didn't know anything different anyway. He finally found his way into doe eyes from a nice young girl who was the daughter of the land owner he wasn't working for (yet). John was pretty sure the girl hadn't been wooed by anyone ever, she wasn't exactly a looker, but John cared less about looks and more about where the process could take him.
He endured the giggles of a shy girl and got invited to work for her daddy, who immediately took a shining to John. Probably wouldn't have if he knew that John was a consistantly plotting and scheming man. He didn't really want to be married to this low-ranking woman, but he knew by now that land owners like her daddy got invited into the places where the real deals were made.
A year after working for the family, he used some of his earnings to buy her dad a fine bottle of scotch and a young foal from a local fine stable. Then he used them and his silver tongue to ask for the daughter's hand in marriage. After the initial silence wherein the older man considered getting his shotgun, he agreed. He liked John after all.
John was disappointed to learn that those parties and gatherings aren't often at all, only when somebody wants to make deals or somebody died and folks had to come by to pay their respects.
That made it simple for John, then, he'd just have to find somebody to kill. Couldn't kill the brother of his wife, that'd leave the old man, couldn't kill his wife, because then he'd have to pretend to be in mourning. Instead, he started adding tasteless poisoning to the old man's morning slop. He got naturally sicker and sicker, but it looked real genuine.
Sure enough, come winter, the man was as dead as dead gets and there was a party to be hosted. And people came, lots and lots of people. He watched the widows the most. There were the widows you steered clear of, the ones who genuinely looked sad that the man had died, and the widows who looked like they just came for the socialization.
John had a limited amount of time to work his magic, and so, he zeroed in on one who was walking the property by the stables and brought her out a glass of tea and a fresh rolled smoke.
Annulment is hard, and was especially hard then, but he was marrying up, and marrying up has the benefit of having more ties to make things go faster.
This is where he wanted to be, this was real rich. She lived in a villa, with servants and a stable and had men who harvested grapes for wine.
John and his new wife were happy. For different reasons, sure, but they were happy. People complimented him, men and women he'd never in a million years supposed to have ever met, on how radiant his wife finally looked. He was supposedly a good man.
It made him wonder if he was a "good man", how many other "good men" there were in this fine society of his.
The answer, unshockingly, is: pretty much all of them.
John had gotten paperwork done up for a new bottling warehouse. At first he didn't know what he was doing, got drug around like he was trying to tame a horse at first, but John was tenacious. If one man could learn how to do it, he could too. No other man was better than him. So he learned how to do it.
It was a process, his wife was used to running the business, so when he stumbled a little it was supposed to be embarassing for him when she came in to help the process. He didn't mind, which helped in two fronts: the first front was that he learned how to really run a business, and second, it made his wife feel like he actually loved her enough to treat her as an utter equal in such an unequal time.
There was a nice plot of warehousing that the two of them agreed on would be a great point for shipping and selling, but was owned by someone who didn't exactly make it easy to deal with them. A french fellow, Bouchard is what they called him. John figured he could get anyone in the world to agree with him, so he went out of his way to find out where and when he could meet this Bouchard fellow.
He expected to find a crusty old man, but was very surprised when it was not in fact a crusty old man, but a spry man who looked almost identical in age to himself.
Son of a bitch, John thought. He'd gone and encountered someone who was probably just like him. The only way to con a con is to lie better and look more convincing doing it.
John had encountered the real dangers of the upper crust, people who had everything, wanted for nothing and were better liars than he. Richard Bouchard knew John for what he was before he'd even opened his mouth to speak. In fact, Richard broke off the greeting John would make to him, by pre-empting it with the choice words, "And so Mycah walks before him, singing songs laced with silver and wealth, covering up the sinfulness behind his eyes."
John thought that was the weirdest damn thing he'd ever heard, and it actually caught his greeting in his throat. He couldn't remember that being a verse anywhere...
That meeting went unwell, but not for John's trying. The whole damn meeting, the nutjob kept calling him Mycah. But John wasn't going to give up that easy.
He had learned early in life that showing up again and again and again and pressing the line again and again and again meant the line gave in to him. Every time he came and tracked down this Bouchard funny fellow, he'd laugh (sometimes his friends would be there, and they didn't look too amused). Then they'd try to argue business again, each time only being called Mycah started to grate on his nerves.
He decided he'd just have to resort to the old, more or less civil way of handling the dispute.
Waking up upside down with his own blood tripping off of his forehead was a shock. He expected to be dead. He could tell he was in some underground place by the way it smelled. He knew earth smell, no matter if he'd been away from it for awhile, you never forget that smell.
He phased in and out of consciousness.
Men, women would occasionally come by and bite him. They spoke in strange tongues and wore robes like the woodcut pictures of the old church robes.
He was sure he was going to die.
Bouchard finally came in, looking perfectly fine, as if he'd never at all been shot betwixt the eyes. But John knew he wasn't dreaming. He saw the bullet go through and saw where it sprayed wall behind him. He knows he shot him dead, and there he was, no damage in sight, looking fine and charming with such red lips and white teeth so razer sharp on the corners, like a grinning snake.
He had a thought... he had tried to kill satan.
"Do you understand what we are?" John understood that they were devils. Rich devils. That was apparently not the right answer.
He was cut down unceremoniously. After being hung upside down for so long, your sense of balance and vertigo gets askew. He landed on his right shoulder and his body flopped down behind him.
"Mycah, do you understand what we are?"
He thought for sure his shoulder was broken, but no, he could feel his fingers. He slowly turned his face against the cold floor. There was more than the Frenchman there, others, he'd not met. They asked the same question over and over and over. Finally he just splurted out, "I don't know what you are, you god-damned vampire-looking bastard."
The others nodded. One laughed. The others looked much more solemn than her though.
What followed was exactly The Choice. You know the one. And being as John-now-Mycah wanted nothing more than to live and never let another "steal his place", he refused to die for good, even if it meant damning his soul.
Mycah Thaine had always believed in God, he just didn't think God really had a damn care about his people now. Answer was much nastier than that, he came to found out. It made sense though, men like him were allowed to exist without any restrictions, and lawmen considered men like him "good men".
But he was much more than a man, now, he was a monster, damned by God and tasked with spreading misery to the people who he'd always spread misery to before. But Mycah was a man who always wanted to have his place, just like his mother would always tell him growing up. That place was to be one of wealth, richness and comfort.
He wanted to be a vampire King, and was stupid enough to think that it was all-powerful and without a care in the world because of the power.
It took him only a few years in the Danse Macabre to realize how untrue that low-brow mentality truly is.
He took well to his lessons in the Dark Gospel, after all it was natural for him. He'd always been taught on the harsh side of life, so to him it came much easier to grasp than for others who had been taught that God was a benevolent man-like being.
He took well to the parties of the "honorable men" and hammed it up within the society of Kindred, even going so far once to state how much he would love to be a part of the society he was only scratching the surface of as a mortal man.
Mycah Thaine was walking the line between the Lancea Sanctum and the Invictus without even realizing that most make a very literal choice to do so. Both seemed instinctively natural him, as though you couldn't have one with the other.
It always seemed odd to him when others would question how he could have loyalty to both. Does a man ask another man why he goes to Church on Sundays and the Courthouse on Monday? It was a damn strange sentiment. Naturally some didn't trust him on both sides, but most realized that he simply thought they were natural inclinations and wished to be a part of both exactly equally.
He went in through circles like you'd expect a young Ventrue to do. He always thought that he should be moving up, not down, and sought to continue that mentality in his new death-life. It took him to swearing Oaths in the Invictus, and attending extra-curricular activities in the Lancea Sanctum.
At times he took lovers, at times he couldn't be bothered.
He felt like it was natural to him in his blood, even more strongly so now than ever before, that he should be above those around him. He and his sire often disputed real matters of estate and diplomacy, of the interpretations on situational things which cropped up. In the end, Mycah learned that he knew all along what was the real thing to be trusted: his own instinct.
Most would call it confirmation bias now, but then, they're not Kindred, now are they?
Bouchard and Settipani came to Mycah one night to talk about the lineage. It went well, for Mycah. He finally had achieved that which he had been striving for, to become (what he believed) a part of what he knew he would always become part.
He accepted the blood invite and then threw a party to celebrate his "death day". Only the Bosonids knew what it was truly for, but was it a magnificent party. One of the only ones he'd thrown, and he used such a showing of wealth, people had almost no choice but to remark on how beautiful and fine the place and party was.
After the party, he went back to work. He knew that he'd joined what he wanted to join, but he still had a long way to go. He was having trouble advancing. He was maintaining his place, and maintaining it well, but maintaining was not in his blood. He wanted to move up and up.
Not many opportunities came up, so when they did, a Damned had to truly consider the possibility out in front of them. Mycah knew that Las Vegas was going to be a new stop along the line, but it would take a loss to get there. But it would be a new frontier, some place to create his own glass ceiling with which to stand on top of.
Getting information into the city of Las Vegas was a bit like a crap shoot. Who was there? What were they doing? Are there any good houses? How many Waffle Houses are present? This was a pain for anyone, especially a man who took his security seriously. It took half an age to find out that there were a couple people from Los Angeles in and out of the city, doing clean-up for the new Duchess. Disgusting. Still, Mycah needed a place to head to, and he certainly wasn't going to waste a person to find out. When he could finally get in touch with someone, it wound up being Troy Evans. Not his first choice, but they'd worked together a couple times in the past over minor errands and connections so it would have to do. Beggars can't be choosers and all. He requested that Evans see about locating a home in Vegas of "good security" and then set about his other business. There was always a lot to do.
Hmm. Vera was already here. Why did no one tell him? Why would someone not ever tell him something as important as knowing your cousin (extended) was going to already be in the same city you were moving to? "Minor detail my ass". What's more, she was certainly not happy to see Mycah when he arrived, and couldn't even bother to pretend. Talk about an insult!
Mycah folded his arms after the debating over Diplomat. Cassandra and her nonsense about being too biased for a cosmopolitan city would simply have to go on his list. Those who supported it, Evans (always faithful, that one), cousin (of course, if she didn't there would be an issue later to discuss), unsurprisingly Hartford supported (after all, that was the deal, I walk to her side of the room in the cattle call - oops, I mean Consensus) and somewhat surprisingly, Richards also walked over to support (he must have wanted to look amicable). Annoyingly, the Prince refused to take part in his own consensuses until the very end.
