Love’s Easy Tears

Territory

• Manhattan, CBGB

Members

Ductus

Hester Reed

• Clan: Lasombra
• Position: Ductus
• Faction: Moderates (Commissar)
• Status: 3 (Positional), 5 (Reputational)
• Background: Her sire, Anthony, was addicted to the blood of junkies and Hester let him drink her blood from time to time until she almost died because of an overdose. That was when Anthony decided to Embrace her. Not a decade following her embrace, Hester became the ductus of her own pack, Love's Easy Tears.

Pack Priest

Rurik Rakocyz

• Clan: Tzimisce
• Position: Pack Priest
• Faction: Moderates (Marshal)
• Status: 2 (Positional), 5 (Reputational)
• Background: At the turn of the 20th century the Rakoczy family, a clan of Obertus revenants, fled the Old Country to escape to a Romanian enclave in Sunnyside, Queens. For a few years, the Rakoczys lived a quiet, new life until a child was born. Her name was Ludmijla and she spoke with the spirits of the land. She was born with a crippled body and was thus confined to bed but soon grew large with a brood of children in her belly (rumor was one of her uncles was the father). Before long, despite its distance from the bloodthirsty lords of the Old World, the Rakoczy family was once again the thrall of eldritch powers and their lords embraced Ludmijla.

Thus, Rurik grew up in a reluctant but newly resolute community of New World Obertus, never knowing the ignorant security of life untouched by the Damned. As proof of his devotion, Rurik killed his sister at the request of the debased Tzimisce Ludmijla, who turned her remains into a skin-mask that adorns her abandoned haven to this night. Demonstrating such commitment in spite of the cowardice of his family, Rurik was drawn into the ranks of the Sabbat.

Tonight, Ludmijla remains the matriarch of the Rakoczy family, attended by ghouls and miserable Cainites who helped move her bloated bulk to New Jersey after the Camarilla sacked the Sabbat in New York. Rurik remains in contact with her, poring over the cryptic messages she sends him that claim some legacy or another of the sect slumbers beneath the filthy streets of the city. While she cannot risk her own unlife to make her haven there or risk the family’s existence, he tracks down this mystery for her. She has told him of Istvan Zantosa, of the Nosferatu warrens that confuse the Tzimisce legacy with some horror of their own, and of the veritable miles of subterranean passage she has dreamed of that lead to a chamber of transcendent illumination.

More and more, Rurik has had to withdraw from his duties to the remains of Love’s Easy Tears. This has put him at increasing odds with Hester and Rashid, both of whom suspect him of growing soft or abandoning his duty to the sect. He wants to tell them what he’s been up to, but this is a matter for the Tzimisce first and then, perhaps later, the rest of the Sabbat second.

Abbott

Anthony Ruiz

• Clan: Lasombra
• Position: Abbott
• Faction: Moderates (Marshal)
• Status: 3 (Positional), 5 (Reputational)
• Background: The next most dangerous and exhilarating thing to Cainite politics is the business world of the Big Apple. The night Anthony Ruiz was dragged into a rather well lit uptown alleyway, he presumed he would make it out of the mugging with his life. The reality ended up being a bit more complicated than that. As a Cainite, Anthony found that he could no longer accommodate his former low-tier position at a common Manhattan law firm, but also that he was no longer interested in it. With what few connections he possessed, he began his own company, and through a series of intermediaries and very successful (read: Dominate) business dinners, established himself a tiny empire of his own.

Other Members

Rashid Stockton

• Clan: Gangrel antitribu
• Position: True Sabbat
• Faction: Moderates (Comrade)
• Status: 1 (Positional), 4 (Reputational)
• Background: Rashid’s sire Embraced him during a minor crusade of his own — one that ended in his Final Death. After a skirmish with police over a drug deal gone awry, Jeffrey Mullins found himself on the run from a dozen police cruisers and an APB. Mullins took refuge in the basement of Rashid’s apartment building during the day, planning to head out of town and lie low the next night. Rashid and a few of his boys went into that basement to cut cocaine, and when Mullins rose, he found his temporary haven full of dope dealers hard at work. Laughing at his “good fortune,” Mullins killed all of them except Rashid, whom he Embraced with the intention of forcing to sell the coke and then taking the cash for his own. Rashid calmly listened to what he was told to do, finished cutting the coke, beat Mullins into paste with a length of pipe, and sold the cocaine as a Cainite. Without a mentor to explain his condition to him, Rashid attracted curious Sabbat in a few nights.

Not a year after Rashid joined the pack, though, the Camarilla made its move into New York. To his credit, Rashid survived better than several of his packmates. To the pack’s detriment, however, it wasn’t enough, and Love’s Easy Tears had to content itself knowing only that it had helped a few prominent Cainites escape to plan a fi ght for another night.