[OOC] The Story Thus Far

[NickNameless]

[This is a continuation of a Chronicle started on the OGMW site. The archives of the Chronicle can be found here. The game is not currently looking for new players.]

 

Los Angeles, May 1954.

For the local Kindred, nine years have passed since the birth of the Anarch Free States of California. Now, one's vampire freedom here only ends where another's begins, theoretically.  In practice, it is more a question of being perceived as able to hold your claim over anything, if you don't want that claim to be challenged. Isaac Abrams has styled himself the Baron of Hollywood — not so much as a place than as: anything related to the movie industry —, and most Kindred would indeed know better than to be seen without his approval in a movie studio lot, or anywhere near the house of one of his protégés. For those who were already in L.A. before the war, this comes in stark contrast with the laissez-faire attitude of the former Prince, Don Sebastian, which back before the war resulted in the Masquerade being endangered on a regular basis.

However, the current anticommunist frenzy among the kine has forced Abrams to take a step back, for fear that his own schemes may be uncovered. When an anonymous call to the police in the middle of the night leads to the sultry movie star known as Ginger Swan being found dead in her mansion of Laurel Canyon, drained of her blood, Abrams sees his worst nightmares come true. Thanks to friends in high places swaying the police and the media, Swan's death is quickly officially labelled as natural if tragically untimely, but this isn't enough to satisfy the Baron. Promising a major boon as a reward, he asks a group of Kindreds with no known association to him to discreetly investigate the real cause of Swan's death and find the true culprit.

Over the course of the ensuing week, the investigators scratch under the surface of the glamourous life of Ginger Swan. They discover the poor state of affairs of the RKO Studio, that employed her, under Howard Hughes' mix of calamitous management and reign of terror — enforced by his "fixer", Logan Ross, keeping anyone and everyone under close scrutiny. Moreover, all testimonies converge to portray Swan as displaying an increasingly erratic behavior over the last weeks of her life, prone to paranoid bouts, mood swings, and strange crisis where her very own sense of identity was seemingly shattered at times. Last but not least, the investigators also discover that Swan recently started receiving pornographic photographs picturing someone she claimed to be a look-alike of her. Warry of giving Hughes leverage against her, Swan didn't call for the help of Logan Ross, but instead secretly hired Saul Read, a private investigator, who proved able to find who took some of the pictures in the first place: a shady individual named Eddie Dupree, often preying on young women with dreams of stardom. The man, however, vanished without a trace in the days following Swan's death.

Incidentally, the investigators stumble upon some indications that Swan's psychoanalyst, Jared Sanders, may be a ghoul using his work to recruit people from the movie industry into some kind of cult. Upon discovery, Sanders disappears, and both his office and his house are hurriedly emptied with the help of some unknown associates. While it seems that Ginger Swan wasn't actually a target for this, as the operation was focusing on lesser-known names, the list uncovered by the investigators only deepens their patron's concern that he has been losing his grip on vampire activities in Hollywood.

A string of clues and revelations eventually allow the investigators to come to the conclusion that it was the look-alike, not the real Ginger Swan, who was found dead in Swan's mansion — and that the phone call to the police may have been timed to make sure that the forces of the Masquerade would be put in effect, resulting in the official investigation being botched, preventing the body to be correctly identified. The main suspect of the whole thing is a mysterious figure who seemed to have stalked both Swan and Dupree before their respective disappearances, dubbed "the Tall Dark Stranger" by Ravnos resident of Laurel Canyon Eliza Chase. Dupree is found dead, having suffered some gruesome torture and mutilations, which potentially spells bad news again for the Masquerade, since it turned out the pornographer was also a person of some interest for the FBI, beyond the reach of the L.A. Anarchs to control.

The next night, the investigators converge toward the entrance of a network of caves in Griffith Park that they suspect to be the haven of the "Stranger".