---

And she does. Toreador or not, Maynard had taught her how to play second fiddle and she'd gotten pretty good at that. Being underestimated, ignored. Picking her moment, lining up the shot. Bang.

"Well, blazes, that who I think it is?" A faintly familiar voice behind Faith. The individual it belongs to is dressed in bootcut jeans, filigree Justins and a plain black shirt with long sleeves. Not too dissimilar from how she'd dressed a century ago and change, except the individual items are all designer now, expensive brand names stitched onto 'em, just missing a cowboy hat from Gucci. She's missing the matched brace of Bisley race guns she'd brought with from the Bill shows, but those are long gone and even if they weren't there's no way she'd be allowed to bring them into Elysium.

There is space for her, recently freed up, to drift into before the circle closes but she waits for acknowledgement, arms folded. Waits for the conversation to stop, and the spotlight to drift onto her. Even in life she'd been a showman, that was what had made her Sire convinced that she had to die. The blood had made her, perhaps, a bit worse. It made all of them worse.

Geoffrey Wodeward


To all things housed in her silence

Nature offers a violence

---

Geoffrey took another drink from the bottle in his hand and found somewhere to lean. One shoulder to the corner of a nearby column in the room. There was a little too much comprehension in the glance that passed over Abel and Faith's conversation on his way to Dio. He did understand French.

He let Abel talk to her; he just looked at her a moment. The way he might study a bit of the ancient statuary. A note of appreciation for the craftsmanship. From a time and place he wasn't familiar with.

"I'm glad to hear it." He remarked with a beat of lag, like he was turning the words over in his head to make sure they were in the correct order.

"That was certainly a night." He remarked Travis' way with the slip of a grin when the other Gangrel picked up one of those things from his own travels. "Find me later, I'll tell you all about it."

Which was to say: find him somewhere outside Elysium and the audience and he'd be glad to put it to proof. That was one of the things that happened with the way he existed: always an opportunity to get into ****.

Like now, maybe. He hadn't missed the knot of tension that had wound up when Faith had come in. His gaze, ever watchful it seemed, passed between her and Travis once more. In case it was going to escalate.

Yorick Tsipras
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep
Do not stand at my grave and cry
I am not there, I do not die

Euthanatos | Notoriety 2 | Medium

---

When asked if hunting was something he still did, Yorick fell silent for a moment. ‘Younger’ meant very different things to each of them. It was a matter of different time periods and societal expectations; a span of years instead of centuries. In terms of distance it was closer to him. Hotter. Like a spectre chasing at his heels.

The intensity of thought, memory, and emotion in the dreamstate rose sharply in that moment. Geoffrey's supernatural perception allowed him to perceive the subtle furrowing of the younger man's brow and twisting of his lips. It was a mask of grief, fury, and trauma tightly controlled by a strength of will beyond his years.

In that moment they rode past a thick wall of trees, but nestled amongst them was clearing. The clearing served as a stage of sorts, revealing a vignette of concepts. Somewhere sweltering and humid near a distant ocean. A dark, cramped space underground. Overwhelming entropy and decay. Blood and blasphemous arts. A vicious battle of blade and willwork that left a still-teenaged Yorick victorious but profoundly hurt. A hurt of the soul, something the Gangrel might recognize as a loss of humanity. And encapsulating it all, the sense that it was just one example of many.

“No. I don't.”

He swallowed down bile, resentment, and self-loathing, and listened.  He could only imagine the depths of change the world had seen during Geoffrey's lifetime.

“The gods do not abide hubris. So my kind exists within the margins of man; the awakened amidst the sleeping masses.”  It was an interpretation of consensus and paradox. It was also an explanation of how modern mages survived - by keeping to the shadows. By recontextualizing themselves to be anything other than what they actually were. Relatable, maybe.

“That's the curse, then,” he replied to Geoffrey's bit of Latin. He didn't make the connection between Cain the biblical figure and the word ‘Cainite’, but he did understand the intention. “A divine suspension of Tamas reaching through time for eternity.”

Yorick shook his head. “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God,” he quoted the father of tragedy, struck by the enormity of it. Despite the danger involved in associating with the other man, he still felt a great swell of sympathy.

Then they reached the city gate. “You're English.” How he'd arrived at that particular assertion was unclear. He said it as if it had just come to him like a bolt. “But you lived here. Romania's pretty far from England, especially in a time before airplanes.”

---

Travis examines the bottle for a long moment, shrugging off the pat on the back from Dio with a slight nod of acknowledgment. He takes the bottle by the neck and swirls it around a couple of times and glances back to Abel, but he don't speak French, so whatever he was chatting with Faith about was lost on him. He tucks his hat up under one arm and opens the bottle, quickly sniffing the air before tossing one back. - He uses the bottle to block his face, careful not to let anyone, or any cameras, get a clear view of his feline canines.

He chuckles a little when Geoffrey mentions one of his exploits in Austin, TX. It was top of his list for sharing at Clan Gathers, and when it came to boasting and bragging Rites, he was a big talker that used that particular story to bait other Gangrel into calling his bluff. He wasn't altogether surprised about that one getting tossed around. "Sure sounds like something I would do... but you sir cain't be Geoffrey... Wodeward, the very same Geoffrey that shot his way out of the Long Branch Saloon? Boy howdy I heard you was outnumbered and outgunned" He laughs "Sure good to see you're above snakes." He was used to the competitive back and forth at Gathers, but it was interesting how they were spinnin it 'roundways and bringing up each other's stories now.

Travis didn't get long to enjoy the moment, and he knew it was coming... well, not this exactly, but he knew something was coming. Faith wasn't just going to let him slip by with a simple 'evening' like they didn't go back a ways. It wasn't anything personal, and they didn't really know each other back then, but it was enough to leave an impression, and possibly some bad blood. "Ms. Everette, my apal-o-gies. You're more beautiful than I remember, and I plum didn't recognize you. I guess I ain't reckon just how small these circles can get. I hope thar's no hard feelings atween us after all this time" He says, sincerely.

He shoots a quick look around the room, scanning for reactions. It didn't seem like she was still sore at him, but iffin she was he was going to try and figure who's side who was on. Giving his best guess he figured Clan Brujah were in long supply. Faith also had friends outside her Clan... the pretty boy didn't say much, but even a raised eyebrow says something to a poker player like Black Cat. - It wouldn't be his first time outgunned and outnumbered, but he was going to play it cool and see it through.

Yorick Tsipras
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep
Do not stand at my grave and cry
I am not there, I do not die

Euthanatos | Notoriety 2 | Medium

---

Geoffrey threw a lot of proper nouns at him that he wasn’t familiar with: Tremere, Gargoyles, Cainites.

“I...am familiar with the word chantry,” he said with a self-effacing laugh. “It’s a word the Order of Hermes uses to describe a...I dunno. Part clubhouse, part sacred site, I guess; a place where consensus can be suspended and the laws of nature can be bent or broken. We call them ‘marabouts’, but I haven’t been to one in a while. Not since the last one blew up. I’m kind of a bad luck charm to have around.”

He squinted. “I’m intuiting that Cainites is another word for vampire, the Tremere are like, a faction or flavor of Cainite, and they…what, used magic to turn themselves into vampires, and then more magic to build those monsters out of other vampires? Uhhh, yikes. That’s some **** up Weird Science, Temple of Doom ****. When I was younger I used to be sent to hunt mages who were deep into dark magics like that.”

Yorick shook his head. “Come to think of it, I remember hearing about some war the Hermetics were waging against vampires back around 2000. Maybe they were your Tremere. I don’t know how it turned out, but the Order’s still around being anal-retentive twats so it can’t have gone too badly for them.”

He didn’t seem to be picking up on the emotional subtext. He could feel some resentment bleeding off Geoffrey into the emotional currents of the dream, but didn’t understand the reason. Honestly the psychic resonance of this memory-dream was kind of heady and distracting.

“Why are they called Cainites? You, I mean. If the word applies, I mean.”