Later5 continued…

Buffy and her tutor Giles

***

… she came from Sunnyvale.

Masquerade in Santa Monica:

***Bloodlines: Vampire game.

Introduction

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Masquerade in Santa Monica:

***Bloodlines: (choice): Sebastian LaCroix, Andrei of the Sabbat, Smiling Jack, Bishop Vic, Dr. Alistair Grout, Gary Golden, Pisha in search of Artifacts, Maximilian Strauss, Bertram Tung, Barabas, Mitnick the techy, The Sheriff and the Southland Slasher.

****LaCroix dies his final death in 2004. It’s rumored that Smiling Jack is one of the few modern vampires that has met Caine.

***Unlike other Vampires, Jack is a tolerant individual when it comes to personal opinions. He acts friendly to the fledgling no matter what path they take. He is also very knowledgeable about the modern times, aware of drugs such as heroin, and comic books.

***Jack is the only character in the game to appear in both games: Los Angeles By Night, and Bloodlines. If you activate cheats at very start of the game, Jack will call you out on it and lead to an immediate game over.

***The Principal Character we deal with is Therese Voerman (and her twin sister who we learn is actually one person, Therese Voerman, with a split personality, fractured after the trauma of her younger life.

***Smiling Jack brings us closer to Caine than we’ve been, but soon it will be made clear by Smiling Jack that the ‘Shadowy Figure’ our story is concerned with is NOT Caine… leaving some theories in this revelation’ wake: perhaps it is Charon? (We find one the glimpses of the future segment that this creature from the intro isn’t any of the theories we have been tracing)

***With LaCroix out of the picture Therese has a bid to move from the role of Baron to the Prince of Santa Monica. Her nightclub, the ‘Asylum,’ is popular in the area of Santa Monica (not sure if we go here before or after or during the final death of LaCroix).

***Jeanette, or Therese, depending on the time of day, favored the Anarchs and is in direct contact with Smiling Jack.

***like an echo of the Overlook Hotel we explored with Danny Torrence, one of her most promising investments, The Ocean House Hotel, however a scandal hurt the business after an insane guest decapitated his wife and children…and one of the children’s heads was found in the dryer in the hotel laundry room. It subsequently became abandoned, but Therese wasn’t going to give up on her investment yet. She hired a team to fix the place up but they kept getting scared away by the poltergeist spirits that infest the Santa Monica establishment. She eventually is forced to “go old school” and sends for an artifact to be recovered from the property so they can conduct a rite of exorcism on the place.

***this split personality are called ‘Daughter of Janus,’ by a particular group of vampires called ‘the Malkavians.’

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Peter Vankman, con-artist:

The protagonists in Akroyd’s original script idea would travel through space and time to combat a host of demonic and supernatural threats. Following John Belushi’s death, and with Dan Akroyd’s concept deemed financially impractical, he was paired with Ramis to rewrite the script to set it in New York City and make it more realistic.

Peter Vankman, Ray Stantz, and Egon Spengler are scientists at Columbia University investigating the paranormal.

Following their first encounter with a ghost manifesting in the New York Public Library, the dean fires them and dismisses the credibility of their research. They then convert an abandoned firehouse, developing high-tech equipment to capture and contain ghosts, and dub themselves the “Ghostbusters.”

A being called ‘Zuul’ crosses their radar, after a skeptic had had an encounter in her kitchen, Dana Barrett, and after initially being reluctant she calls them after seeing an ad they put out on television.

Ray and Egon research her claims, and outside of Dana Barrett’s apartment the boys are finding that business is slow…until one night when they are hired to remove a poltergeist from the Sedgewick Hotel. They capture their first ghost and deposit it in a special containment unit in the firehouse.

“Peter Vankman had been pursuing Dana Barrett romantically, from the very beginning, and had further damaged their credibility with ms. Barrett, having done so.”

Soon their business booms as paranormal activity increases across New York City. To cope with demand they hire a 4th member, Winston Zeddemore. Privately, Egon warns the team that the increase in supernatural activity is becoming dangerous and their equipment is at risk of failing under the stress.

Vankman, meeting privately with Dana, shares what the team had uncovered: that the entity “Zuul” was a demigod worshipped as a servant to ‘Gozer the Gozerian,’ a shape-shifting god of Destruction.

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Vampire: The Masquerade

The table-top game setting of ‘the world of darkness’, released in 1991 by White Wolf Publishing, is a fictionalized “gothic-punk” version of the modern world, where players assume the role of vampires, who are referred to as “kindred” and are portrayed dealing with their night-to-night struggles against their own bestial natures, each other, and vampires hunters…

Steve Jackson Games also published an adaptation of ‘Vampire: The Masquerade’ using their popular generic table top role-playing game system. The Steve Jackson company also produced ‘Werewolf: The Apocalypse’ and ‘Mage: The Ascension.’

Other titles related to these companies include: ‘Hunter: The Reckoning,’ and ‘Wraith: The Oblivion,’ and interesting sounding titles like ‘Changeling: The Dreaming’ or ‘Mummy: The Resurrection,’ or finally ‘Kindred of the East.’

‘Vampire: The Masquerade’ was inspired by rpgs such as ‘Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘Runequest’, as well as by writings of mythology and occult symbolism, and by vampire films such as ‘The Lost Boys.’ He wanted to go beyond what writer Anne Rice had done by creating not only interesting individual vampires, but a whole secret vampire society and culture.

…the idea was that the cursed character of the Biblical Cain was the original vampire.

‘Vampire: Bloodlines’ is a computer game from 2004, developed by ‘Troika Games,’ and follows a human who is killed and revived as a fledgling vampire. The game depicts the fledgling’s journey through the early 21st Century Los Angeles and Santa Monica environments to uncover the truth behind a recently discovered relic that heralds the end of all vampires…

Troika’s 32-member team began development of ‘Vampire: Bloodlines’ in 2001, and the settings available to the player to explore, including the ability to move freely between them all, are Santa Monica, Hollywood, Downtown Los Angeles, and Chinatown; they had begun development as a sequel to ‘Vampire: Redemption.’ Set in the ‘world of darkness’, the game depicts a world in which vampires, werewolves, demons, and other creatures help shape human history.

The vampires are bound by a code to maintain their secrecy (forbidding the use of vampiric abilities in front of humans) and avoid unnecessary killing. The vampires are divided into seven clans of ‘Camarilla,’ or the vampire government, each with distinctive traits and abilities which they focus on. The clans are loosely united by their belief in the Camarilla’s goals and opposition to the Sabbat: vampires who revel in their nature, embracing the beast within.

The player controls an unnamed fledgling vampire, of the Los Angeles order and particularly takes place within Santa Monica, employed by Sebastian LeCroix, who is the current prince of the L.A. vampires. The fledgling travels through the vampire world after having been turned lose by the Camarilla, who at the start of the game has your sire executed for the unauthorized act of transformation. LaCroix shows clemency in front of the representatives of the clans, and as leader of the Camarilla he takes the fledgling under his wing, so to speak, sending the player to Santa Monica to help his ghoul, Mercurio, destroy a Sabbat warehouse.

LaCroix then tasks the fledgling with investigating a docked ship, the ‘Elizabeth Dane’, for information about an ‘Ankaran’ sarcophagus rumored to contain the body of an Antediluvian, one of the oldest and most powerful vampires. His arrival may herald the vampire apocalypse, ‘Gehenna,’ and once recovered the fledgling learns that the sarcophagus may have been opened from within…

Increased Sabbat activity coincides with the sarcophagus being stolen from the Museum of Natural History and the biker-vampire, ‘Smiling Jack,’ the first vampire the player talks to in the start of the game, warns the fledgling that prince LaCroix wants the sarcophagus so he can drink the blood of the ancient within—gaining its unholy power.

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