“There’s a whole host of fiends and monsters in this city — of which I am one — that’ll do anything to get what it wants.”
— Eric

Eric has a history with the vampires of Atlanta. To the church of the Lancea Sanctum, he’s a parishoner growing more respectable with each passing favor he does for the priesthood, a respectable whelp with more appreciation for the church than his peers. To the Kindred court and the Invictus, he’s a small-time player who can appreciate the purpose (and the cost) of maintaining stability among the society of the Damned. Eric is respected, even trusted to a point, by the powers that maintain the law among Atlanta’s bloodsuckers. The Prince gave him his domain in Old Boulevard, the church gave him the freedom to dwell among the living without persecution. He has contacts throughout Kindred society and this gets him into trouble.

For more than a year, newly Embraced vampires have been turning up in the Big Peach — wandering the cracked alleys downtown, locked naked in chain-link pens, abandoned in the bloody beds of their Midtown condos, ditched on the busted tiles of low-rise projects. It’s been happening long enough that the Kindred of Atlanta are almost taking it for granted, a problem unsolved to the point that it’s become accepted through apathy. The Invictus blame unchecked Carthians, Embracing carelessly like their young kine counterparts screw, much to the detriment of their souls. The Carthians blame the Invictus, whose feckless investigations are rumored to have snaked back on themselves, revealing old white vampires with stables of slave Kindred to milk for blood.

But the Sanctified — the pious followers of the Church of the Spear — preach that the sin of the Embrace is carried out despite covenant. It’s a sin of indiscretion, of ignorant passion — a sin of youth. Everybody else here has some other motive but you. That makes you the only one I can trust.” — Archie The Sanctified believe the Curse is being passed onto to kine by Kindred of every covenant, and that it is the duty of every pious vampire to prevent further violations of the holy law, to stop mortals from being Damned to vampirism. This is what the priests of the Lancea Sanctum sermonize at Midnight Mass. Meanwhile, ministers of the vampire church strive to shepherd the Damned orphans they find on the street. Orphans like Archie.

Archie was found selling drugs on an unlit street corner near the heart of Atlanta. He was spotted by a Sanctified Muslim preacher who goes by the name Brother Cassius, who tells it like the Testament says: that Kindred shall not lay down with kine. Archie was doing business with the sheep, but not as a shepherd. As Cassius suspected, Archie had not heard the Word of Longinus. (This was just a short introduction session we played after character creation to get everybody up to speed. We got a great sense of the characters now, though, and a lot of goals surfaced that previous stories can build on.) Cassius brought Archie off the street, into a house of the Spear. Until a parishoner could be found to show Archie the nightly ways of the Damned, Cassius sat that skinny white dealer on his ass and preached at him, Testament in hand, in his stiff tea-colored suit. If Archie is to see eternity, he’ll have to renounce the shreds of his mortal life — his drug money, his contacts, his wife — and accept his fate as a blessed beast.

Thinking he should be weened off the world of mortals, but cut clean free of his own mortal associates, Cassius brought Archie to Prohibition, Eric’s club, where Kindred and kine interact in an environment secretly designed by wolves to lure sheep. Giving Eric the new title of Deacon, the Sanctified church tasked him with guiding Archie into his Requiem — and into the Danse Macabre.

But Archie wasn’t the only new vampire in Prohibition that night. Hunting on the streets by himself, lured by the scent of mortal blood and the nerve-wracking stink of other Kindred nearby, undead surgeon Dr. Jarod Walsh stepped into the sweating throngs of kine and almost succumbed to his Beast. But Eric has experience with young vampires. Looking down on the mortal crowd in his club, he can spot bloodsuckers in his crowd by the way they move. The way they smell. With a call to his club manager, Nicole, Eric has a lovely black-haired blood-whore, Rachel, walk Dr. Walsh off the main floor of the club into Prohibition’s VIP room, marked by a stylized capital I on the door.

For the first time, Dr. Walsh feeds from a willing victim, pressing her up against the metal wall of a posh feeding room — a locked metal cell, one of a handful Eric keeps hidden in Prohibition. Archie and Eric watch his blurred body push against his prey, watch him nick her neck with a razor blade, on the small CCTV monitor in Eric’s office. While Walsh feeds, Eric lays it on the table for Archie: damnation, eternity, blood.

Things will be different now. Archie and Walsh will learn what it is to dwell forever in the dark, slipping through the cracks of the mortal city like blood in a concrete floor, to survive each night for the reward of one more chance to die… again.

ARCHIE: So keep your eyes open for anything out of the ordinary.

JAROD: It’s all gonna be out of the ordinary.