Podcast: Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology

A series of vignettes about the characters in Vampire:The Masquerade: Blood Doll, read by their actors.

Slowly, two shadowy figures come into focus, one behind the other with their hand on the other's neck. Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology. An series of vignettes from the Not Ready for Opsec Players and Alicia E. Goranson.
Slowly, two shadowy figures come into focus, one behind the other with their hand on the other's neck. Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology. An series of vignettes from the Not Ready for Opsec Players and Alicia E. Goranson.
Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology
Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology - Season 1 - Aaralyn
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Aaralyn is written by Alicia E. Goranson and read by Amber Ashe.

Transcript:

Aaralyn despises the world because the world smells of smoke. She despises polite society because society smells like men. She spends her days in her laboratory reading the chemistry periodicals, and the magical works of Agrippa, trying to synthesize the two among her beakers, flasks, and burners. She confirms every new development herself, unaffected by sulfurous plumes or mercurial spills, yet always feels years behind the scientific world. She wants to make a discovery someday that will get her name printed on the front of her favorite journals, or be referenced in the footnotes of students. While she understands the potential of her discoveries, releasing energy or clarifying water, she is not their driver, their trailblazer, and many a flask has suffered by her hand.

Aaralyn is called to attend a fundraising party by her clan. She pulls out the usual case of party tricks; demonstrating sublimation and glowing substrates. She is prepared to be bored to tears. The parties always smell like smoke. They are always dominated by men. This one will be no different.

Aaralyn dresses herself in her hoitiest, toitiest fashion and pretends to be interested in her introduction to Prussian royalty. She downs several cups from the drinks table and heads out to the balcony to watch the clouds roll by – cumulus tonight. She is not expecting a French heiress to come sit by her a full minute before speaking. “You hate it here,” the heiress says.

“Come with me,” Aaralyn says. She returns inside and evades conversations until she finds an unoccupied sitting room, filthy with tobacco. The heiress is still in tow.

“What are you looking for?” the heiress says.

“Like always,” Aaralyn says. “Money.”

“And what would you do with it, if you were to come into some?” the heiress says.

“I would buy sulfur, platinum, various salts, and I would figure out a way to burn this motherfucking society to the ground,” Aaralyn says. “If we’re being honest with each other.”

“Would that include me?” the heiress says.

“It depends,” Aaralyn says. “What are you looking for?”

“Nothing so grand,” the heiress says. “I simply want to live forever.”

“You’ll need money,” Aaralyn says.

“So do you,” the heiress says. “How much?”

It is not Aaralyn’s decision. It is not one she needs to make immediately. But this woman does not smell of smoke and does not smell of men, and Aaralyn could make this transaction easily. So very easily, like sublimation or producing glow in a glass.

“I want to be known forever,” Aaralyn says. “And for now, like you, I must continue existing without this. But come. Let’s talk.”

-END-

Portions of the materials are the copyrights and trademarks of Paradox Interactive AB, and are used with permission. All rights reserved. For more information please visit worldofdarkness.com.

Slowly, two shadowy figures come into focus, one behind the other with their hand on the other's neck. Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology. An series of vignettes from the Not Ready for Opsec Players and Alicia E. Goranson.
Slowly, two shadowy figures come into focus, one behind the other with their hand on the other's neck. Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology. An series of vignettes from the Not Ready for Opsec Players and Alicia E. Goranson.
Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology
Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology - Season 1 - Lorea
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Lorea is written by Alicia E. Goranson and read by Katherine Cross.

Transcript:

When Lorea visits her collective, as they gather to discuss resource distribution, leftist gossip, and who petted the cutest cat that week, she is at a disadvantage. The structure is supposed to be flat, the hierarchy eliminated, which is difficult to do when you own your own warehouse and fleet of trucks. Lorea works with the ships coming in on Puget Sound, bearing their goods to the waterfront for the next stage of transport. She is skilled in international shipping, ensuring all the correct forms meet their requirements. She employs a lawyer whom she has never dated.

She regularly sends trucks across international borders to Canada and has rarely been caught bringing drugs into the country without smoothing the matter over first. Lorea knows how to get the best Japanese whiskey flowing in the apartment she keeps in a nice South Seattle gentrified neighborhood, although visitors rarely find her there, married to the job as she is. She has crash space in the top of her warehouse where she regularly disappears when the jobs are coming in hot and heavy.

It’s feast or famine in shipping but Lorea still finds time for darts and pool at the south end bars and the occasional one night stand through Lexx. It’s just that other members of her collective squat in decaying houses, or in tent cities under bridges. Some cluster-rent in old apartments built for migrant workers in the 70s. Some still pan-handle or busk, work graveyard gigs, or have online hustles that they are too busy to talk about.

And here’s Lorea, nails done perfectly, black leather vest with eyes that must have taken a half hour to get right, bringing up that maybe the collective should look into building five-over-ones near the Ike’s over by the Lake. Yes, the money is there but also Lorea handles that kind of cash for funsies on a weekend at the Sodo strip clubs. No one’s voice should mean any more than anyone else’s and yet this thirty-year-old looking woman who has probably killed a man in front of cops has opinions that pass through their minds with the weight of icebergs. When they tell her “no,” she nods and folds her hands and thinks whatever they decide is cute. She knows the point of this collective. She knows her power. And she is very careful not to whip it out and lay it on the table, bare for all to see and fear.

-END-

Portions of the materials are the copyrights and trademarks of Paradox Interactive AB, and are used with permission. All rights reserved. For more information please visit worldofdarkness.com.

Slowly, two shadowy figures come into focus, one behind the other with their hand on the other's neck. Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology. An series of vignettes from the Not Ready for Opsec Players and Alicia E. Goranson.
Slowly, two shadowy figures come into focus, one behind the other with their hand on the other's neck. Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology. An series of vignettes from the Not Ready for Opsec Players and Alicia E. Goranson.
Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology
Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology - Season 1 - Amanda and Penelope
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Amanda and Penelope is written by Alicia E. Goranson and read by Trunk Slamchest.

Transcript:

Amanda doesn’t have to breathe anymore. It took over a year for her to stop trying and even now her autonomic nervous system will just start inhaling on its own, without her noticing until Simon, her partner in crime, starts laughing. When this happens, she pulls out her vape pen and takes a drag. Might as well. She does feel the smoke even though it won’t wake or calm her as it once did. She goes through a lot of vape pens. They get crusty.

Her throat is dry most of the time, except after she’s had a cocktail or another drink and she loves having another drink. She used to drink regularly at Wildrose until she stopped getting older and just before they started noticing. But, damn, she wants Penelope to notice.

Penelope had always been a huge piece of shit to Amanda, talking down whatever cracked-ass leathers Amanda wore and stealing her dates. Penelope was an old school Seattle dyke, old enough to remember 1980s Q patrol in Capitol Hill, and any bitches starting something on her turf better pay her respect first. Amanda never did. She moved in from St. Paul and starting dating girls and taking bouncer gigs like she’d always been there. She couldn’t take Penelope’s whole “bow down before me and then we’ll talk” schtick.

The bartenders hated when the two were at Wildrose the same night, sending hate-drinks to each other, some watered down Natty Light to Amanda and some shit-ass sour to Penelope. The bartenders would have cut them off if they hadn’t tipped so well and kept their fights to the street. It got to the point, Amanda would just nod to Penelope and they’d drop whatever they were doing. It was on.

Amanda always had a temper. Her family could go fuck itself and thank the gods most of them were dead by this point. As the decades passed, Penelope stopped coming out so often. She mostly stays at home with her cats and her partner Lou-Anne. Amanda still catches glimpses of her in the front yard, staring down the college kids, the young queers, and the puppies like something somewhere broke. Amanda sees her at the Safeway sometimes, hunting for Gatorade bottles and supermarket cookies. Amanda stays back, wandering around a corner or putting a KN95 mask over her face, as if she could catch COVID anymore. As if she needs to ever exhale. (Curse her ancient reptile brain.)

One night, Amanda finds an old photo of herself and Penelope at an early 2000s Trans Day of Remembrance gathering. Under which was a discussion from Penelope taking credit for organizing the whole thing. Bitch didn’t organize shit. She’s taking over real history now.

Amanda rides the Link over to Cap Hill and wanders out in the dead of night, past midnight when the bars are starting to trickle their clients out. Up Republican Street and over 14th, Amanda finds Penelope’s house. A little gingerbread cottage surrounded by apartments. One of Penelope’s cats stares out the window. Amanda looks right back at the cat. Go get your mom. The cat jumps off the sill, fluffy white tail streaking the darkened glass. And Amanda waits, unsure she can even talk to cats now.

She hopes Penelope will come to the window. She wants so badly for Penelope to see her, not having aged a day since the early 2000s. She wants Penelope to stare and let the horrible truth set in. That perhaps Penelope shouldn’t be trying to rewrite history when history itself can come knocking and exhale a breath of smoke.

Of course, after that, Amanda would just leave, with Penelope wondering if she had seen a ghost, or a dream, or a warning, or a cancer, or the end of the fucking world. That would be great. That would be the best fucking night for Amanda. She takes out her vape, sucks a deep, unnecessary breath in, and waits.

-END-

Portions of the materials are the copyrights and trademarks of Paradox Interactive AB, and are used with permission. All rights reserved. For more information please visit worldofdarkness.com.

Slowly, two shadowy figures come into focus, one behind the other with their hand on the other's neck. Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology. An series of vignettes from the Not Ready for Opsec Players and Alicia E. Goranson.
Slowly, two shadowy figures come into focus, one behind the other with their hand on the other's neck. Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology. An series of vignettes from the Not Ready for Opsec Players and Alicia E. Goranson.
Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology
Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology - Season 1 - Cassandra
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Cassandra is written by Alicia E. Goranson and read by Rachel K. Zall.

Transcript:

Cassandra sometimes thinks about her childhood if she had known she was a girl earlier than age nineteen, despite being openly queer, bisexual, actively crossdressing, and with her own pair of falsies she’d picked up at a convention. She remembers her father rising her from sleep at five in the morning, hurrying out to the truck, and driving to the lake to get poles in the water before sunrise. She sat on the blue foam seat beside her dad’s in the rented motorboat, and felt the bow rise as the boat cut through the water’s surface, saturating the air. Soon, her father would stop and set down the anchor, choose a lure, and toss it through the water’s surface. He showed her how to throw a line, pull it taut, left, then right, and then to reel it in slowly, waiting for a hit, and then to jerk it quick. She hadn’t really wanted to even be there. She preferred fishing from the docks, where the boat didn’t continually face the wind, where she could set up music and dangle her toes in the water. Out here on the lake, she couldn’t tell what her father was trying to teach her. It was as if she had pulled him from his bed early and made him wait in a line with her at a convention center, puling him into multiple panels, the dealer’s room, and the art exhibits without ever telling him about the experience he should expect at a con. And what he would find interesting about it.

Cassandra remembered when her birthday parties grew smaller as she grew older. It eventually occurred to her that her parties weren’t going to get any larger as her friend group shrank and the kids formed cliques and Cassandra became one of the weird kids whose parties were only for her two friends, one of whom typically couldn’t make it, always being busy that day. Her mother commissioned cakes for her, and as the cakes got fancier, fewer people were there to appreciate them.

Cassandra distinctly recalled a seventh grade birthday when her friends stopped bringing presents and only brought themselves, which was enough, she had supposed. But the fact was she loved what birthdays had been and was disappointed at what they were becoming until her first year of living alone at community college, when she stopped having birthdays. Her own became a bit of trivia – yes, truly, today was her birthday. Would you look at that. It’s been a whole ass year. Whatever has become of the time.

It wasn’t unheard of to raise trans kids in the 90s and 2000s. But, Cassandra thinks, it would have been hard mode for her parents. If they had decided to honor her gender at all. If her father had understood that his fishing lessons were not going to reach her and her mother would have wondered how such a child could have been so happy while strange. They would have read no books about trans parentage or visited any online site about it. Cassandra had been the first to try and educate them. And then to flee when the education did not take. When the shouting replaced it. And the continuous questions about why everything had to be so difficult with her. She was such a lovely child who seemed so happy and yet so bored. She will not tell them of her first sexual experience, far too young, with another boy, also far too young, where she got to be the girl, for the first time, and loved it. Loved it so very much. And never got to be that way again for years, after many experiences and online forums and other rough times and ground her into someone without many friends, in a queer circle where she just wasn’t queer enough, but at least not in the middle of a lake with her father, learning to be someone she was not.

-END-

Portions of the materials are the copyrights and trademarks of Paradox Interactive AB, and are used with permission. All rights reserved. For more information please visit worldofdarkness.com.

Slowly, two shadowy figures come into focus, one behind the other with their hand on the other's neck. Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology. An series of vignettes from the Not Ready for Opsec Players and Alicia E. Goranson.
Slowly, two shadowy figures come into focus, one behind the other with their hand on the other's neck. Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology. An series of vignettes from the Not Ready for Opsec Players and Alicia E. Goranson.
Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology
Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood Doll Anthology - Season 1 - Samael (1)
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Samael (1) is written by Alicia E. Goranson, and read by Soleil Golden.

Transcript:

Jess didn’t know what to make of the elderly gentleman who entered her gas station at three in the morning. He was balding but his haircut was immaculate, as was his black suit and white shirt, fine enough not to need a tie. He seemed eager to show off his money to someone, not her. She only worked here and “working” (in quotes) only took half her time.

“Excuse me,” the elderly gentleman said as he entered. “One hundred dollars for pump four, please.”

He set down a hundred dollar bill in front of her. She simply shook her head.

“We don’t accept anything over a twenty,” she said. “Store policy.”

“Oh,” the gentleman said. He was about to depart when he noticed the paperback she had been reading. “I say, is that Hawthorne?”

“’The Scarlet Letter,’” Jess said. “It’s pretty good.”

“It’s fascinating how surreal it is,” the gentleman said. “Of course, Hawthorne would have no idea what ‘surreal’ meant. But I’d like to think he had an inkling of magical realism before the movement took off.”

“I don’t know,” Jess said. “It’s kinda slow.”

“Compared with books today, yes,” the gentleman said. “But it’s what I like. Careful. Deliberate. Well revised. What do you like about it?”

“I like Hester,” Jess said. “I can relate. She gets screwed over so bad but at least she’s got space for herself and her daughter.”

“Do you need space?” the gentleman said. “Is this station as overwhelming and constrictive for you as it is for me?”

“It’s fine,” Jess said. “I guess. Are you from management or something?”

“I assure you, I am not,” the gentleman said. “Not from your company at least. I am familiar with working at a shop though. My father ran a shop like this in many ways. Cramped. With baubles and cheap foods for the workers. I spent many on hour behind the counter. Like you. And I remember the feast or famine of my time. Either no one in line or the line out the door, working as fast as possible. At least that ghastly machine makes most of the decisions for you, regarding price. I would mischarge for people’s orders all the time. It wasn’t pleasant, but I did have the luxury of undercharging friends, who I knew would undercharge me and my family at their own businesses.”

“What store did you work for?” Jess said.

“You wouldn’t have heard of it,” the gentleman said. “Anyhow. I must have my gasoline. Here are five twenties. I hope they can cover the minimum price for the pump’s use?”

Jess accepted the twenties and activated the pump. The gentleman bowed to her and walked out. Jess watched his driver fill the car with seventy dollars worth of gas. And then, to her surprise, the car drove off without its change.

Jess rang up the transaction, checking the bills that had been left behind. To her horror, she noticed they had become hundreds. Perhaps they always were. Perhaps the gentleman had had nothing smaller, and so had given her five hundreds and somehow…

Somehow…

Jess didn’t know what to think of the elderly gentleman then.

-END-

Portions of the materials are the copyrights and trademarks of Paradox Interactive AB, and are used with permission. All rights reserved. For more information please visit worldofdarkness.com.