Luke Willis

     Legally growing weed in the mountains of Colorado is great work if you can get it. The pay could be better, but the whole thing is just an experience. Everyone is cool, laid back and vibing on the sun rising and setting behind the mountain as we grow these green life forms that we will later harvest and incinerate for our pleasure. Score a bit off the boss, drive into Denver to hook up some boys who still do it dirty, and party all weekend on the money that got made. It was the bachelor's wet dream job.
     Until Sonya showed up. 
     Sonya, if that is her real name, pops up in Denver where we're kickin' it. I figured she's like the other club rat girls that can identify a good bottle of bubbly who wanted a taste. My buddy. Roger, tried to get in her panties, but for some reason she was all about me. He was loaded too! His parents owned the farm. Maybe she didn't like braggers.
     After a week of partying, and talking all night, I made the mistake and told her my feelings for her. She was beautiful, and seemed so alive and happy when she was with me and that's what I wanted in my life. I told her my feelings, and she became a different person. 
     She became distant, morose. I asked it something had happened, and she lashed out with the usual 'psycho gf' nonsense. After a week, she became mean and abusive and I called it off. She didn't let it go. Things just got worse over time. I called the cops, they said to file an injunction. When she found out, she called the cops to tell them I went to her to tell her and then beat her up. The cops were dicks about it, but there were no witnesses and her face was unburdened with signs of being battered. 
     After that, she got quiet. I started moving on. 
     I got home one night to find the neighbor girl tied to a chair with duct tape over her mouth. She was crying, terrified from her situation. Then from the hall emerged Sonya holding a taser in her hand. She was going on about if she can't have me, no one can and that Misty (my neighbor) wasn't good enough for me, and she had to pay for trying to steal me because I helped her with a flat tire the day before. That's what sluts do, apparently.
     I wake up from being tased, and I'm just so hungry. I can smell my blood in the carpet under me, and it made the hunger worse. I suddenly hear the whimpering Misty still bound in the chair next to me. I suddenly knew she would make this better somehow. I got up and looked at her. She was attractive, tantalizing. I had to have her. I thought it was sexual at first. I kissed her neck, and she began to fling her head around to fight me and she headbutt me in the nose. 
     I came to again to find her dead. Her neck was ripped out where I had kissed her. She laid there with her big, pretty eyes wide open in terror and disbelief. It was wonderful. Like getting laid for the first time. Then I realized what I had done to Mandy. Sonya started to cackle madly from somewhere, telling me I better do something with the body before the others find me and end me for letting the cops find this mess, and risk their Masquerade. 
     Been on the road ever since. Heading east, looking for other kindred and piecing together what they all know into some form of education.

     "Her name was Misty."
     "What?"
     "When she first appears in the story, her name is Misty, and you, just now, called her Mandy."
     "Whatever, I barely knew her. Her name might not even be Misty for all I know with all the weed I've smoked."
     "Man, how much of that story is actually true?"
     "Man, fuck you." 

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     So back in the early 2000s, our hero was a dirty, nomadic hippie that traveled the country in a huge hippie pack that squatted in various national parks and preserves across the country pending on climate. They "lived off the land" and "traded" good and services without need for "the man." They were free to live in the dirt, bathe naked in the lakes and talk about how vaccines caused autism with the weekend warrior hippies that came out to party under the light of a bonfire and the full moon. 
     They were willing victims to the scam. They'd come in for a weekend of hedonism, and leave with a lighter load than when they came in with. They'd get blasted and give it away, or lose it in the woods. Some pass out on a trail and get picked clean. Take their money for drugs and then take their shiny to sell to a pawn broker on the way to the next National Forest.
     The life was great for Lionel. He was swimming in cute girls, and the money of people desperate to believe in something bigger than them. When he decided that he made enough money, and was tired of the head lice, he began to make plans for a new chapter in his life.
    Unbeknownst to him, this was contradictory to the hopes and plans of the monster that traveled among them in secret.
     After the Week of Nightmares, Sergio came to hide among the nomadic hippies. The setting was familiar, but he grew lonely. The last pack of nomads he hid within had members of his family working with him to keep it all moving. Most of the mortals in the commune never saw him, much less capable of offering him suitable company. This loneliness drove him to find a companion, someone to make into a vampire like him.
     Lionel was the most like the people in Sergio's former family. They were a clan stereotype, and so was Lionel. When Lionel started talking about leaving and doing something else with his life, this forced Sergio's hand to embrace him. There were other con-men of the commune, but Lionel had a sense of panache about him that the Ravnos could appreciate. He had people seek out his big, bell tent in the woods to learn their fortunes from reading their palms, or throwing some cards. Afterwards, he'd sell them the drugs they'd need for a vision quest to really meditate and become one with the revelation. Months later, he would drive into a new town and sell all the shiny trinkets to pay for the next load of drugs to start the process all over again.
     Sergio wasn't much of a sire. He frequently warned his childe of the other clans and how they distrusted the Ravnos. The Camarilla was full of preening egotists who would never accept a Ravnos in their domains. The Sabbat were full of madmen who would eat the soul of an outsider as soon as look at them. It was all a fear campaign to keep Lionel from wanting to leave the commune, or Sergio out of some strange co-dependency that came from the loss of losing so many during the Week of Nightmares.
     Lionel was all he had, and Lionel did not want to stay. He didn't even want to be kindred, and that was another point of resentment towards his sire. When Lionel decided to leave, Sergio forbade it. Lionel told Sergio that it wasn't his choice, and he was tired of living under his thumb. Sergio punished his childe to the point of chimerical torture. He believed that the scary stories of mad kindred was no longer enough, and fear of the inflicted horror would be the rod to unspoil the childe.
     It became obvious that Lionel would have to plan an elaborate escape to get from under Sergio's thumb. He had to plan three of them, to be exact. After the first two failures, Sergio insisted that the childe drink his vitae and undergo the blood bond lest he destroy the childe for being so willful.
    Something happened. The Blood Bond did not take. Lionel did not reveal this to Sergio, instead he played the part of being the eager lapdog looking to please its master. He often begged for forgiveness for trying to escape to put a little sugar on top. He knew he could use this new behavior to get Sergio to drop his guard for the next attempt; the attempt that Lionel knew was going to work.
     Lionel's failure stemmed from him trying to leave with it all. Trying to leave with 20 years of loot, trinkets and memorabilia of a life he was trying to leave behind. Not only leave it all behind, but he had to destroy it so it wasn't there to hold him back. Sort of how generals of antiquity had soldiers burn their boats so they fought harder with the threat of no escape if they failed. 
     The chaos he would unleash to make that sacrifice would rend the commune apart with fire. The hippies that made it out will tell horror stories of wolf-like monsters howling erupting from the darkness around them. How they could hear the horrors get closer as they tore through the hippies that crossed their paths. They began to panic, running half-blind in the dark forest for the safety of flimsy tents, and derelict automobiles. Authorities assume that the panic flung the flames and embers of their campfires to start the forest fire, but the fire was another part of the plan. There was no physical evidence of monsters or their victims, but such a thing is scarce after an inferno.
     It was too much for Sergio to deal with. The hippies were in a frenzy, and the fire had started to spread. He went looking for Lionel only to find the last 20 years of Lionel's life going up in flames. Lionel's VW van exploding into a fireball was the final straw that pushed Sergio into Rotschrek, howling madly into the night. 
     Sergio lives. He found a spot to hide from the sun that was in the opposite direction the wind was blowing the forest fire. He was suspicious as to whether or not the fire was another escape attempt, but the inferno that was the last 20 years of Lionel's life, that sent him frenzied into the woods, made him think otherwise. Even if he believed his childe to still be alive, he wasn't going to find the Ravnos that did not want to be found. 

     Running into those biker brujah at the gas station was a stroke of good luck. They were all going on about how they had somewhat recently come from DC, and on their way out, they had heard about this Cammie Prince in Baltimore that just abdicated their throne to some Anarch. Apparently the whole domain has "gone metric", and the biggest of dogs are on board. 
     An Anarch domain? Anarchs are pretty accepting people, right? They aren't the elitists the Camarilla are. They might still fear the Ravnos, but would they be afraid of the clanless? It's not like it's that big of a stretch for the lonely Ravnos. There is no clan behind him for support. There was a chance that there was no clan out there at all anymore. He was in the cold as much as any other caitiff out there. 
     That was the point. He needed a place to operate, and make allies to help each other survive. Baltimore was a port city, and that meant a lot of potential was waiting to be reaped. The Mystery of the Abdicated Throne had to have a grand climax that could be capitalized on somehow, even if it was just for entertainment. All signs were pointing Lionel to Baltimore.

     "Throw in another 5 G's an I'll leave the machines in there. A couple of them need repair, but if I did it, I'd just charge more for the whole thing, and you seem like a handy guy." said the greasy, track suit wearing stereotype trying to sell a laundromat.
    The deal wasn't bad. It was what Luke needed to start laundering the small fortune he had made on posers and weekend warriors for the last two decades. The best part was that the greasy tracksuit accepted payment in cash.
     "And if you're smart, you'll keep Mrs. Ho here." suggested the stereotype, nodding his head towards the older Asian lady sitting with them at the table.
     Mrs. Ho gives Luke a upwards nod with an unlit cigarette between her lips, appearing very hard for an aging Chinese lady, "Mrs. Ho here is all business, and people just think it's an innocent mom and pop joint with her at the helm. She's also really good with being lost in translation when people come snooping around, and asking questions."
     Luke looked at Mrs. Ho and asked, "How much?"
     She smiles, her lips still holding the cigarette between them. Her hand holds up a small piece of paper that's folded in half, and then slides it over to Luke. He looks at the offer, and nods, "Alright. You two have a deal." 
     "Congratulations, Mr. Willis, you're now the proud owner of the Hi-Lo Laundromat of Baltimore Maryland." he says sliding over a document for Luke to sign, "Welcome to the neighborhood!"