Sarah, my Tremire Mamba, is considering moving to Florida at the earliest opportunity.

She's also considering a radical personality change. I wonder if my GM will let me.

First off, my character was written up as a Conformer/Sycophant as nature and demeanor. ("What kind of sycophant are you?" "What kind of sycophant would you like me to be, ma'am?") This personality, while it would be interesting to play, is almost exactly not what I'm doing, which means I'd better never spend any willpower, because I won't ever get it back.

I don't really have a choice, as neither of the other members of my coterie are anything remotely resembling a strong-leader type, thus giving me a shark to lamprey on to. I'm trying to settle for sucking up to the Prince and hoping that'll be good enough.

(let me say as an aside that while I like my fellow players, their characters seem massively underequipped for the political machinism that is the World of Darkness)

First off, we've got Alexis, who has been in torpor for the last two thousand years or so. Alexis was embraced during the Roman Empire's peak by someone who thought she was a beautiful woman. When he discovered that "Alexis" was actually Alexander, a cross-dresser, he was so infuriated that he nearly killed the neonate and left "her" in torpor under the city. She was recently awakened during an archelogical dig and found herself in a world she does not understand in the slightest.

She's a Malkavian, which is probably just as well. There are things that other vampires will put up with from the childer of Malkav that they simply will not tolerate in other clans. Cross-dressing, however, is not one of those things. My character is aware that Alexis isn't a woman, but it's such a matter of extreme indifference to her. In a species that does not breed by sex any more, gender and sex are irrelevant, except as tools for seducing mortals into the Kiss. Gender is certainly no longer important in matters of vampire love.

However, she is tactless, clueless, and extraordinarily vain. She can't seem to get her little brain wrapped around just how much time has passed and is constantly referring to things that are ancient history as "just recently" and scorning things like this "cult of Christianity" as "just one of those phases that people go through". She frequently borders on breaking the Masquarade, which is not surprising, as there was no such thing when she became a vampire, nor did she remain in vampire society for very long following her embrace.

Joshua, on the other hand, is a Gangrel who is frenzying himself slowly into alligatorness. He's also wanted by the various white supremicist groups for his work prior to the Civil War as an underground railroad conductor.

His grasp of tact and subtle can be rivalled by my 9-month-old daughter. He is involved in the murder of three KKK thugs not but a block from my character's haven and is so traumatized by the animal features that he gained from his frenzy that he forgets all about the BODIES that are torn apart in the alleyway. He runs to my character's haven and stares, horrified, at his mouthful of alligator teeth while my character is left to deal with the bodies and the resulting police ruckus.

Two days later, he out and out confesses to the murder to a mortal friend of his. Now, admittedly, said mortal is a black doctor and not at all likely to turn Joshua in for murdering three known KKK thugs, but still. There is a $200 reward, and in 1872, $200 is a lot of money. (On the plus side, says Greg, just about any jury would rule it as self-defense unless it was completely stocked with KKK members. On the bad side, court cases are heard during the day, and no matter whether they find him guilty or not, turning into a pile of ashes would be pretty permanant.)

I admit to spending a large part of the game immitating Jessica's baby flailex manuever. (Folding in half, forehead pressed against the the couch cusions and waving my arms back and forth frantically)

What little information Sarah's been able to dig up about the situation in New Orleans is as follows:

- The prince is barely holding on to his power
- The rival Toreador groups have made some sort of alliance with the GET OF FENRIS
- The Tremire Primogen was kidnapped and/or murdered by the Get.
- There are Uktena on one side of New Orleans and Black Spirals to the south. The only thing that keeps them from anhilating each other is that the city's vampires are usually united to keep them out of the city and the country territory between them is occupied by the Mokole, who don't like either group and are a real bitch to deal with - being able to turn into Very Large lizards is a huge advantage in the swamp. With the war for power going on in the city, the chances that the BSDs might not start trying to get to the Uktena are getting slimmer by the minute.
- the chances that the Get know that someone was spying on them recently are pretty high. Alexis pulled a SNAFU by forgetting that she couldn't feed on women before attempting to kidnap a female servant from the Get's kinfolk household to pump her for information and to Mask of a Thousand Faces as her for a while. So, Alexis grabs the girl, then remembers her aversion and ends up dragging this kicking, screaming servant out of the house (still obfuscated, so the other servants see the girl being carried off by nothing at all). On the plus side, they probably don't know who is was, specifically.

So... d'you suppose I can get passage on the next boat downriver?