Bloody wankers, the lot of them. No more than twenty minutes in this new city, and already he was being dragged into their life and death struggle with the oh-so-evil enemy. None of the idiots understood where the true enemy lay. No one REALLY read any of his poetry. No one except his sister. And that bloody wench was here too. And they were both ridiculously rich. Again.

“Look, sister, you’re not listening to me.” Well, she wasn’t, not completely. “I don’t give a bloody rat’s ass how much money we’ve got; why did you drag me to this bloody hellhole and get me involved in their moronic politics again?!” Ok, so they’d never been THAT rich before, and he did care about the money just a little bit. It didn’t help that she was giving him her “Oh, Joshua, how could you be so stupid” look. Joshua sighed, then rested his head on the table. Cleveland. It made perfect sense, really. Here, the shit had already hit the fan. Here, they could conduct their business without too many prying gazes. If this had been a peaceful city, like London was, there would be no end of neonates with open gazes and high hopes meddling in the affairs of a couple of ancillae. Especially when those ancillae shared a sire. Especially when that sire had just been made an Archon. Bloody git.

“Joshua, despite your insistence upon ridiculous strings of profanity, you do have a point. Don’t worry your pretty little head.” Oh, that condescending bitch! “I have everything under control. If my plan works, you won’t have to suffer, at least not much, for more than a couple of months.” Joshua just glared. It was really the only thing he could do. His sister was already caught in another conversation about how the locals could use her influence with the Giovanni family to secure Cleveland’s dock area from their enemies. Ha! Good bloody luck. They should know that the Giovanni always sold weapons, and, hell, loyalty, to both sides in this war. Moneylenders, the lot of them.

He only paid slight attention to those around him. There was a gnat of a clanmate that needed to be taught the proper respect. There was a meeting to plan the next phase of the war here, and it was being held on a boat, of all places. Perfectly secure. Wankers. After the first few assaults, they’d learn. Public places. Places with many exits and entrances. Escape and survival, not Custer’s last stand. Bah. Half-drifting through social interactions, Joshua began to notice a disturbing trend in the crew. No exits. The crew seemed to be almost too comfortable around his compatriots. There was always that unnatural suspicion and creepiness that servants like these felt around them. And this was completely absent.

The typical local drama surfaced. The new acting Prince, past Seneschal, revealed himself to actually be the old Prince in disguise, yadda yadda yadda. Joshua ignored this and pondered over a map of Cleveland. There was something contrived about these battle plans. Unlike the frantic, yet effective, planning that had gone no in Lansing, every detail was brought up and squabbled over. Like those in power already knew how the battle was going to go. They were all acting out pre-written parts in an undead soap-opera, and none of them had a bloody inkling. Not a goddamn clue. Perhaps his sister’s plan would work. Not that he’d admit it to her face, but he just might go along with it.

This lasted for about seventy or eighty years. Joshua’s search for his creativity, his fire, never ceased. He returned to his haven one night, after spending his evening in a coffee shop, snapping to the almost-extinct beat poets. Frustration and anger racked him, tortured him, as it always did. He looked up to his writing table to see his oil lamp burning (a danger to his current life, but if he was being punished, he might as well tempt the end of the punishment) and the Queen of the Harpies sitting in his seat. She had taken ten or twenty of the crumpled pages of his work and had spread them out on his table. She seemed to be enraptured, as this Clan so often was when looking at something beautiful. Joshua politely cleared his throat, as this was one of the most catty and easily-insulted Kindred in London. She blinked and looked up. “Ah. Joshua. It’s about time you got back. Your poetry is passable. I will exhibit these at the next Elysium, which will be put on by my Clan. You will be introduced in your new station, as Harpy, then. You have a month to prepare. You will be representing your Clan and your soul at this meeting. I expect a new piece, better than these, and I expect you to read it in front of all those gathered. And I expect it to cause a stir. Do you understand?”

Joshua’s only response was a slight nod of his head. Then the Queen of the Harpies stood up, and floated out of his flat. A work. That would cause a stir. Something creative, entirely blasphemous, and that would upstage every single Toreador present. But his block whatever it was that had frozen his creativity, made it static, that would have to be defeated to complete a work of this type and magnitude. He chewed on the back of a ball point pen, as he had begun to do to emulate the poets of this age. There was only that static hold, that frozen cage wrapped around his soul, his emotions, and his creativity that held him back from accomplishing anything that would get him respect and praise. Slowly, an idea creeped up his spine, and swept across and through his mind. He put the pen to paper, and did not stop until the sun rose and forced him to sleep.

You would think being turned into a creature of the night would change his life. It should give him opportunity and possibility that hadn’t existed in the past. The punishment should be at an end. No. Nothing ended up changing. He was still alone. After learning the ropes of the society he’d been brought into, which were incredibly simple and full of loopholes, he found that he was still poor. He was still being punished for something that he had done that he could not fathom. He was still filled with these feelings that refused to be expressed in normal modes of speech, normal modes of writing. That, he discovered later, was why he had been given this curse. His Sire considered his poetry revolutionary. What his sire didn’t know was that the very act of making him what he was, making him eternal, had frozen his gift, his creativity, in the instant that he was Embraced. The revolutionary nature was gone, as beat poetry was beginning to spread worldwide. His Sire had failed in Embracing him. So his new life, his life as a Kindred, was already hollow and empty.

Rose, he would discover, was also his Sire’s Childe. Joshua’s sister, in a way. He never discovered why she had warned him away from Lord Welcomb (as if he’d had a chance), and she never deigned to tell him. She, too, had been given the curse because of “revolutionary art.” From what he’d been told, and had gathered from tomes and from his brothers and sisters in London, was that his Clan, the Brujah, were warrior-poets. The knowledge-seekers, and the deliverers of rage-filled justice. He didn’t feel like a Brujah at all. And as his knowledge of his kind increased, he found the Clan he should have been with. Rose, as well. The Toreador. They were the artists and the social sharks of the Camarilla. They were who Joshua most admired. So he emulated them. He wrote his poetry, failing time and time again to create something new. He saw the beautiful sculpture and paintings of the Toreador, and came home and wrote night after night. Trash. Rubbish. Putrid. Clumsy. Not one word was inspired. Not one word was beautiful. They were as empty and as hollow as his new life.

One night, after performing nearer the University, one of the most beautiful women Joshua had ever seen approached Nicholas and asked for an impromptu poem. He asked only for her name, and a word in return. She gave him both. Rose, and predator. Joshua bowed, and signaled the sleepy Nicholas to begin a beat on his drums. He closed his eyes, and let his mind wander to the beat of the drum, and the words began to flow from his heart, his soul, and his mouth. Rose seemed to zone out, her eyes almost glazing over, as he wove a story involving a rose, its petals, its thorns, and its victims. When the poem ended, her eyes were rimmed in red, and she seemed about to cry. She quickly folded a few bills and stuffed them into his father’s work hat. She whispered, again, seeming on the verge of tears, “Stay away from a man named Lord Welcomb. He will be your undoing if he gets his hands on you.” Then she rushed off, eyes darting all over the street.

A gasp from Nicholas brought Joshua’s mind and eyes back to the present. “What?” Joshua was completely unsure what kind of sense he could make out of the encounter.

“There’s over one hundred pounds here. This is room and board for several months, Joshua! You’ve got to find that woman and thank her!”

“I doubt she wants to be found, Nicholas. The way she ran off like that? she’s better off without us trying to search her down. You saw her clothes. You heard her accent. She’s obviously nobility, and us chasing her down would hurt more than help her situation. No, we’ll leave her alone. Plus, she tried to warn me about some Lord? Lord Welcomb. Bah. All of the nobility are looney.”

The next clear memory that Joshua has is waking up, seeing Nicholas’ broken body over his bed, held up by a bearded nobleman with a cane. The nobleman tossed Nicholas’ body onto the floor as if it was a rug, then turned his gaze to Joshua. “It was silly of him to attempt to attack me, even if it was to save your pathetic life, young Kine.” Joshua could only stammer, as light poured into the window and reflected off of the nobleman’s ivory white teeth, which included elongated canines. Fangs. Bloody hell. The next instant, the nobleman’s beard was scratching his neck as his fangs were entering it. Joshua’s body twitched as an unnatural pleasure shot from the wound and through his body. There was a darkness, then a red haze of animalistic anger and rage tore him back up from wherever he was floating into. He awoke, and clamped his jaws around the wrist that had been offered him. As so many tales have told in the past, it was like liquid fire. Appropriate pain, pleasure, and punishment in a neat little red package that he could not deny.

Joshua has never been really effectual. He’s always kind of viewed life as a punishment. It has to have been, the way things have gone in his life. His parents were very poor; his father worked in a factory in the developing industrial district of London. His mother stayed at home to take care of him most of the time, and took him to a fish and meat stand where she mostly cut meat, and left Joshua to his own designs on the sidewalk and among the crowds. She did not neglect him, and Joshua seemed to understand that she did what she did to keep the family going. Joshua would sit next to the meat stand and would watch people. He seemed enthralled with how people acted, how they spoke with each other, and how they haggled over prices. Every time a prospective customer would come up, Joshua’s wide blue eyes would fix on the customer and the man selling the cuts, seeming to drink in the barter, the exchange of money, and the conversation that passed between them.

After a while, when there would be a line in front of the stand, he would go up and start talking to some of the customers. He seemed to have an instinctive understanding of people, and would stay away from those whom his mother would distrust. He’s ask them all sorts of questions, which the customers found cute and entertaining. Someone finally asked what he wanted in return for his entertainment. Joshua had never thought of getting something in return, he was just having fun. After a bit of thought, he asked for a word. The customer was a bit confused, and asked Joshua what he meant. He said he wanted to know a new word, one he didn’t know, and what it meant. The customers were quite entertained by this, and would come to the market with the strangest and most odd words that they could find. Joshua quickly memorized the words and their meanings, and started playing with them, putting them in odd sentences describing the customers, the meat, the shop, and their surroundings.

He continued doing this growing up. His
father was killed in an accident in the factory when he was twelve. He was given, as a gift of consolation, a small notebook and a pen and ink set. He began to write down some of the sentences and paragraphs that he’d come up with. He began to walk down the street toward the factory, back and forth, stopping along the way to write down what he was feeling in an odd way. He’d read books on poetry, on iambic pentameter, and none of that really clicked with Joshua. It was all very nice and pretty and neat, but Joshua viewed the feelings that caused him to write as anything but. They were messy, chaotic, and ever-changing. He never really called what he wrote poetry. Not until his mother passed away when he was fourteen. She had never recovered from the loss of his father, and had never been able to completely support them. They had both become fairly emaciated, and his mother, in Joshua’s mind, had died of a broken heart.

That left Joshua alone. He had no way to provide for himself, no way to provide food. He had not been alone in his life, besides his parents. He had a few friends among some of the poorer kids of the area, as he was. He went to them, and asked them how they could make money. All they had was Joshua’s words, his friend Nicholas’ drums, which were badly beaten and small. Eventually, out of desperation, Joshua and Nicholas hit the street, putting out his father’s workman’s hat to collect any change that someone might throw. To the beat of Nicholas’ drums, Joshua read his words. Word began to spread of a “beat poet” performing on the street, and with this came attention. Good and bad.

Joshua and Nicholas were getting enough money to live, barely, which was good. Every once in a while, the police would come along, scatter the change he’d earned, and give them what they thought was a well-deserved roughing-up. Joshua and Nicholas would always move on, though. They began to pick random spots to perform to avoid the police and the subsequent beatings. Joshua’s vocabulary amazed even Nicholas on a constant basis, as did his ability to twine the words and express emotion to the beat of his drums. Even when Nicholas would change up the beat, Joshua would keep up, varying the emotion or the meaning of the piece slightly to match the beat. It was amazing, or so the people that dropped off change would say.