So you've come back. Well that's good, because it means you were listening to
me when we last spoke. Now it means you've learned something.
Vampires burn so easily these nights, like dry kindling they just go up in
flames, because they're not listening to their elders, not listening to vampires
that know a little more. I do enjoy coming out of twilight such
as this .The sun has only just gone down, there's still enough light to navigate
the countryside, and I heard what you were saying to your companions in your
coterie: That surely a Cainite or Kindred wandering in the countryside is
insanity. You've all heard the tales of werewolves hunting down vampires in the
countryside. Well as luck would have it, I am quite close companions with another
vampire who's fairly highly ranked in an organisation, that, well, has seized this
territory from werewolves. Don't you worry, we are quite safe quite safe here.
We should talk a little about other threats, but as for the werewolves, yes if you
were traveling between cities I would be concerned. If I was in the middle of the
suburbs I might be concerned. But the organisation, the creatures that pose us
the greatest threat tonight, are the mortals, and there is nothing so
undignifying as being hunted by your own food source. But such is life, that is the
way we are now. This Second Inquisition that you so often hear about, the
boogeyman to our kind, existed for little more than a decade, and yet they have
already purged a number of us from existence. Some of our greatest some of our
greatest domains put to the torch, sometimes literally, by kine... Does it not
just make the blood rise up? But the Second Inquisition is not some
monolithic entity that acts as one, that shares information from point A to point
Z. That's not how they work. I am no expert, but I do know that the Second
Inquisition is a name we have given them because they are all kinds of bodies:
Governmental bodies, they have bureaucratic bodies, they are private
organisations, in some case private paramilitary companies... These groups that
we call Second Inquisition do not share information because just like anyone who
has tasted a little bit of power they want to keep it to themselves, because
they think they're right. So you have fundamentally fanatically religious
inquisitors, you also have inquisitors that are doing this for science, and you
also have inquisitors that wish to seize us alive, such as we are, and find out a
little more about us. What makes us tick. Do we tick?
I suppose you would have to ask an inquisitor that's delved within a chest
cavity. I don't intend to do that. But let us as we often do go to the start of
the Inquisition journey... At least this one... No, we could go back further. You
might recall that I mentioned to you the the reason the Inquisition came
after us so fanatically in the Dark Ages was because we pushed them to do so.
It was our action, our pride, our foolhardiness that resulted in them being
manipulated to turn on us. When an overreaching Brujah commands an
Inquisitor to take out my Gangrel rivals in this territory: "They're impure, they're
unholy." Inquisitor nods. She takes all of the information given to her quite
readily by the Brujah. She goes to the Gangrel haven, she burns that little
coterie out, but then she has a decision to make. "If those things were unholy, if
those things were unnatural, what was the monster that commanded me to come here? They
certainly showed the same telltale signs of being a creature of darkness." And so
that Inquisitor gathers some friends goes back to the Brujah and burns the
Brujah out of their haven. This happened for centuries and the Inquisition — the
first Inquisition — only really died down when the Camarilla was brought into force,
and some hubris taught us "well if we've got the Masquerade, we will never be caught
again." It is perhaps an irony that it was the Camarilla that caused the Second
Inquisition to really gain its feet. Yes, books like the Jyhad Diary if it fell
into the hands of the CIA or some great intelligence organisation, it may have
spurred them into looking into our existence, but a piece of what could
ultimately be fictional, the ravings of a madman, isn't going to set an entire
government on our trail. No, that took the concerted effort of the
Camarilla. The founders of the Masquerade, they led to the Masquerade's downfall, at
least in some domains, and perhaps I should give you the example of one such
domain. I'll tell you the story of London. The Camarilla realised that rather than
going to war with the Sabbat using their own blood they would start using their
mortal assets to do so instead. They had grown so deeply embedded into
surveillance organisations, into intelligence organisations, they started
feeding them information about Sabbat, calling them terrorists, saying they were
harbuoring terrorists, and other fundamentalist groups, and so they would
use the Inquisition to move in, purge — you can see the trend here, this happened 800
years prior. Well, the Second Inquisition — as I call them that as a larger body
although as we have ascertained they do not work in a synchronised fashion — they
started learning, and London was where it all came to a head because... there was a
Cainite of London, I knew him as Mithras, the God-Emperor, the
Unconquered Sun, very much a god of war, came over with a roman invasion but
existed for many millennia before that. One of the eldest Ventrue to exist. A
grand and noble and righteous vampire who I would lay down my existence for again
and again. He was Prince of London for a long time and was believed fallen in the
late 1990s after destroying an entire sept of werewolves.
He fell to the unworthy fangs or a Banu Haqim of the Sabbat by the name of Monty... The
ignominy of falling to diablerie, to Monty Coven. But Monty Coven drank
Mithras, his broken form. Drank the blood, drank the soul, Mithras was no more.
Except Mithras did of course survive. Mithras existed within Monty Coven
because what young diablarists never understand is they need to take their
fill and leave. If they keep drinking they will just find their personality
gradually replaced by the more powerful vampire they have devoured, and so this
happened to Monty Coven. I know because I was his adviser just as I was Mithras'
adviser before Monty, and Monty as Mithras wished to regain his praxis. He
was always the Prince of London but Monty was Sabbat. Mithras was nominally a
Camarilla, and there was a new prince in town: Anne Bowesley,
formerly Lady Anne, now Queen Anne. So Mithras stuck to the shadows, arranged a
shadow government one could say, and so it was, for a little while, at least. Mithras
came to me in recent years and he said: "There is a war coming. A war that I have
been anticipating for over a thousand years. The war that I have sought." Mithras
was a god of war, you understand, and so he said "this war is going to come to
London's very street,s my domain will be drenched in blood," and I said "my prince,
then we must arrange the battlements, we should arrange to fight back, we should
arm ourselves, or we should all flee. We should hide, we should hunker down, lock
ourselves in our sepulchres, and wait for this war to pass." And at the time I
thought he was talking about mortal terrorism perhaps, or the Sabbat in number
that would not care for Monty Coven as Mithras and he corrected me and
he said "the war at our door is the Inquisition. The Inquisition will attack
our city." "You," he pointed at me, "and my cult must leave,
must move the cult to a safe harbour, another domain under his control, all
take a vial of his blood his vitae, and leave the city for him to defend." I did
not ask him why he did not speak to the other Kindred of the city, the ones not
of his cult: Lady Anne, Valerius, other great Kindred, but he did not inform them
of this coming war, and so we left at our prince's order with his vitae around our
necks him, with enough to keep him fuelled for battle we could say, and so when
battle arrived, Mithras watched as havens were burned,
Kindred fell in the streets, the Second Inquisition they tore through
the London Underground, they visited all those abandoned stations the Nosferatu —
who thought they were so smart to inhabit — they went to the old places and
the new. They purged London of its Kindred. And you may be thinking, "why did
Mithras not stop this?" and I cannot speak for that. All I know is he got the war
that he had been wanting. His great bath of blood.
All those Kindred that had clearly failed him time and time again fell and
so it was just Mithras standing when the Second Inquisition came to his door. He
met them with righteous anger, great might, and bravery. He fell, but took many
of them with him. But I can be assured that he fell with a
smile on his face. Is Mithras gone? I know my lord and
prince better than that. But London was purged clean. The Inquisition are capable
of this. One could ponder if Mithras had informed all other Camarilla vampires
that this was happening, would the Second Inquisition have even gained enough wind,
enough impetus to move on to another domain. If they had been neutered there,
and then, would they have been stopped in their tracks?
Perhaps. Maybe Mithras wanted it this way, He is not the sole figure to blame for
this, not at all. It was the Camarilla who had constantly been moving mortals
around like they were playing on some great military map. Mithras was only
ever Camarilla in name. He wanted this. He enjoyed it. London suffered and burned
and bled at his pleasure. But the Inquisition were not done.
Whether it was through information gleaned in London or elsewhere, whether
it was the same part of the Inquisition that did this, I do not know. But I do
know that the next place they targeted en masse was Vienna. Vienna. What do you
know of Vienna, childe? What Kindred are known to inhabit that august city? The
Warlocks. Clan Tremere.
Yes, there are other Kindred, but it is known that the Tremere stronghold was in
Vienna, and now you notice I use the word "was." I cannot attest to how they did it, but
the Inquisition successfully decapitated Clan Tremere in their very home.
Imagine the pyramid with no peak. Is it still a pyramid if its head has been cut
off? My understanding is the entire Council of Seven, even Tremere himself in
whatever form he took — referring to that Jyhad Diary I was telling you about, he
was by that point an armless, legless, and spineless worm, quite literally — they all
burned. They all met Final Death. Tremere lost their leadership. What happens when
you are a clan defined by your leadership commands and and that leadership
suddenly disappears? Well, that's when you fracture, little neonate. That's when you
form Houses. House Tremere, House Goratrix, House Carna, and we will discuss
this a little more when we talk about clans in greater detail. But needless to
say, the rumour mill has it the Second Inquisition thought that Vienna was
the home of all vampires. After all, it is in Eastern Europe, it ties into the
mythology, and believe me, these inquisitors believe their mythology. I
have heard of these inquisitors approaching us with garlic. I have heard
them holding crosses aloft. I have heard that they believe that shooting a
stake through our heart will disintegrate us into ash. They have been watching a
little too much pop culture and interviewing too few of us. That is why
these books such as the Jyhad Diary are so dangerous, because they can learn a
little more about the truth. It is however interesting to see how quickly
they parse the truth from the lies, and we will have to see the result of that in
time.
I'm sometimes asked what is the best method of combating the Second Inquisition,
and there is no easy answer to that. After all, they are mortals they have the
sun on their side, and that is a great and powerful weapon that we have very
little defence against. One of the reasons I come out at twilight is quite
simply because they're not looking for us when the sun has only just gone down.
I ensure my ghoul wakes me as soon as she can, and I take a walk while I can still
admire the flowers in the garden. But either way, how to combat mortality? We do
not wish to destroy them. After all, they are our source of blood now, and we do
not have the numbers or weaponry to do so. We've already seen what happens when
you try to manipulate them. Eventually one vampire gets a little full of
themselves. A little too consumed with pride, and pushes those inquisitors a
little too far, only to find that doing so will get them destroyed. So what to do?
Well you sow misinformation. You play on the mythos. You play on the rumour mill.
You expect them to digest every little seed of misinformation you feed them,
because they love to learn. They love to learn about this, they love to think that they
are smarter than us, but we have centuries, millennia on our side. We know
how mortals work. They do not yet know exactly how we work, and that is why it
is a frightening prospect to consider that they take us from our crypts and
they interview us in interrogation chambers as if we were mortal terrorists,
and they were trying to pump us for information. Because I have every belief
that neonates such as you, weak blooded Kindred such as you, would give up
anything for another night of life. Well, I can tell you that another night of
life isn't so precious if it means your entire society will collapse as a result.
The Camarilla has, as a result, become infinitely more elitist. They are afraid
that the Anarchs will bring the Inquisition to their door. They do not
accept that they are in large part responsible for the condition that we
exist in tonight. So they carve out the Anarchs from Camarilla domains. They send
them away. They say "you can no longer be in this city. This is a Camarilla city."
And when they do that, they weaken their number, but they ensure their Masquerade.
The Camarilla fight them by hiding. The Anarchs fight them by wearing cloaks
woven of mortal flesh. Not a literal thing, you understand, but I
do the same thing. I surround myself with kine. They may be heavy on my
shoulders, they may make me slow my pace, because I have to maintain them, but if I
am masqueraded by mortals I am not being looked for. And you can see I don't find
it easy to hide. I look quite ill in fact. But that is something I cannot control.
Thankfully, if I choose just the right mortals to surround me, we can all look a
little ill. We can all hide me, and so wearing a coat of mortals is quite an
effective means of hiding. So while the Camarilla hides in its skyscrapers, many
floors above where the mortals walk, and the Anarchs walk among the huddled
masses, and the Sabbat... well, the Sabbat are a story for another time... We try to
survive the Inquisition. But it is not going anywhere. The only time it will
fade is when it thinks it has destroyed all of us or when one of us decides to
get to a point where we can control the heads of information in all the
countries where these inquisitors have arisen, and that is not going to happen
any time soon, if ever, although certainly Kindred like Marcus Vitel have
pretensions of achieving such an act.
One of the places where the Second Inquisition hit us hardest, one of the
reasons they knew exactly where to strike us, why elders great and powerful
often quite removed from Kindred society burned where they slept, was because of a
thing called "SchreckNET." Have you heard of SchreckNET? It no longer exists. It was a
Nosferatu online information network. It wasn't just some forum or chat server. This was a grand old database in the dark net that detailed secrets. Hundreds,
thousands of secrets tied to Kindred dead and still extant. But somehow, and I
do not know how, the Inquisition got inside SchreckNET. They discovered it. They
worked out how to get through it, and when they discovered it, it wasn't long
before the Nosferatu noticed. I understand they tried to perform a heavy purge of their
information, but how much of that was seized by the Inquisition, I cannot say.
The Nosferatu — all credit to them — they went to their masters in the Camarilla.
They grovelled and they kneeled and they wept, and they said "we did not know. We
could not have anticipated it." But let me point something out:
The Nosferatu took far fewer blows to their power bases than any other clan. Oh,
it is believable the Nosferatu purged their information before anyone else's,
but I think it is more likely the Nosferatu were using SchreckNET to
chronicle other clans' information. They were never storing theirs there,
because they always had it in their minds that someone might get in. They do
not threaten themselves in this. They led to the death of hundreds of Kindred
and they are yet to be held accountable. Perhaps because the Camarilla is in
desperate need of enforces, spies, and numbers, and Nosferatu are for the time
being loyal to the idea of the Masquerade. I suppose they have to be,
looking as they do. The Second Inquisition started because Cainites and Kindred
were foolhardy. We thought we were the gods. We have not been gods for millennia.
No matter what the Sabbat might tell you, we are weak when we're on our own.
We need our sects to hide us. Our domains and our herds to hide us. They will
continue until we convince it that we are gone, until it is destroyed, or we
come to exist in this new state of being: A permanent fear that we might burn any
day, any night. That is no way for a Cainite of my age to exist, so I have plans
and you should make plans as well.
Never make the mistake of attempting to manipulate kine
in great positions of power. It has been tried before, and every time it comes
back to bite, and despite my warning you of this I know that you and Kindred like
you will attempt it. Someone will think "the president is mighty dopey, let's try
and get in his head." As soon as you try something like that, as soon as someone
notices something is wrong, this is
when the information networks around the world are on to us.
We have very few places to hide and the one coda to this little lecture is
a question I'm often asked: "Why has the general public not reacted? Why have they
not started publishing stories in the newspapers? Why have they not started
spreading stories online ? Why have they not created their silly little vlogs
saying 'I've seen a vampire, I know a vampire, vampires exist?'" and it's because
the intelligence networks — this Second Inquisition — who can trace us with heat,
they can trace us via pulse, they can trace us by the electricity our body
should be giving off, they have their equipment in cameras, they have their
equipment in sensors, they have weapons specifically designed to take us down,
and yet they have not told the public that we exist. Why is that? Is it because
they're afraid the public will panic, so like any good intelligence service they
keep the clandestine clandestine? Or is it because they're just like us? When these
mortals get a handful of power, a handful of influence over something they don't
quite understand, but they know is powerful, they want to keep it from the
masses, the mob, the ill-educated. Because we have seen this before, haven't
we? And whether it's information, whether
it's nuclear weapons, whether it's anything when a government
gets something the public wouldn't understand, they keep it to themselves.
Because I guarantee there is a man in the CIA, and there is a man in MI5, and
there is a man in the Society of Leopold. They all think that "when I know
everything there is to know about the Kindred, when I know everything there is
to know about vampires, I can control them, I could turn them against my
enemies," and just like that, we come full circle in a weird state of affairs.
I think that's my time to go.
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