Spoilers: This show has always been about loss. One of the prime motivating factors I had for this show was losing my cat in February this year. And as an author, you typically go, “Hey, how do I make other people feel what I’m feeling now?”

The terrible thing about loss is that you have to go on. For years. As Cassandra says, it becomes the new normal. But so does the pain.

I have tinnitus. I have never known what it’s like to hear without a constant high pitched ringing. And that’s okay – I can hear fine otherwise. Obviously. I do edit these audio dramas which my actors assure me sound incredibly good. But the pain of loss is like that. It’s always there. And for Cassandra, it’s also mixed with the guilt of having caused that loss, in some way, no matter what reassurances Elijio gives.

So, welcome to the time skip episode, as popularized by your favorite manga. I had first considered skipping five years, and then three years, but when it came time to do the writing, I figured two years was the sweet spot for moving on but still having some remnants of hope. Cassandra has a full time job now, working both sides like Jean Marsh in Upstairs, Downstairs. Originally, I didn’t have the two slice-of-life scenes in the intro of Cassandra interacting with the Upstairs and Downstairs security, respectively. My editor Tony insisted that I add them so we can see what her life is like, before going into how she spends her off-hours. (Also, what was I supposed to do, not drop a Vampire Survivors reference in the show?)

Nichole was originally going to be a pro-domme but then the story necessitated that she and Cassandra be dating so Nichole changed into a girlfriend. I really appreciate that Kelsey was willing to do the role. I’d been wanting to get Kelsey in an audio drama since Brittle Tourniquet. But she was hesitant. The role of Nichole was enticing enough though, she said, and so we finally got her. Yay! Because she nailed the character.

When I was thinking about how Cassandra would be living her life, I always knew that she would want to continue Samael’s salons with someone. (Hell, I would like to have a scene like that someone – tops can HMU on my DMs.) And it’s amusing that we start on their discussion on the nature of evil but the episode quickly gets serious about it, so it’s more emotional and tragic when we see Nichole for the final time.

Also note that Nichole says, “I will nightdream all about it.” Because Kindred aren’t up during the day. So they can’t daydream. … I’ll see myself out.

Minor trivia – Nichole is from St. Louis because a friend of mine is also from there. As well, for the line: “You create the words, “God is great.” But then you have to consider the possibility of “God is not great.” And then it slips from your mind into the world.” I actually got this concept from another Mastodon person (who probably would not prefer to be linked to) who was putting together a conlang, and posted something similar to: “I wrote ‘[Name] is pretty’ but then I had to consider that you could also write ‘[Name] is not pretty.’ And that made me very sad.” I definitely feel for that critter.

So in the original primordial outline, Cassandra was dating Amanda too, but I thought, eh, that’s kinda a lot, and I wasn’t convinced of my acting chops being able to maintain chemistry with Rachel. Anyhow, we find out what Amanda’s been doing – working guard duty with the new sheriff. Someone has to since Brian took out so many of Judith’s gang.

Incidentally, I may not have been clear in the show, but Cassandra is still alive despite having killed Judith because it was politically convenient for the Ventrue to be able to put their own sheriff in charge. Now, everyone has their eyes on Cassandra in case she does that again. But the months after Judith’s murder were full of strife and Cassandra was not a priority at the time, especially since she was funding both war efforts.

Now, Cassandra and Amanda lament that Simon has disappeared. Where has he gone? Will you find out in Season 2? Spoilers, I have no idea yet. I just didn’t really have a good place for him in Episode 7 so I sorta dropped him for now. His arc was pretty much finalized in Episode 5 and I didn’t really have anything for him to do except worry the main characters about what may have happened to him.

Now, clever-eared folks may have been wondering all this time, “why haven’t there been any murders in Harbinger’s? Don’t Kindred lose control of their Beasts sometimes?” (A friend of mine literally told me recently that it took her out of the story a bit.) Well, here you go. Murders have been happening and Cassandra is just dealing with them. I adore Rachel’s performance where Cassandra describes “We had to puppet him out, arrange for his body to be shipped to a hotel, and set him up with his face in a pile of coke.” Cassandra has had to grow hard to survive as the Temple Warden. Poor girl. But hey, great opportunity for acting!

At last, we meet the new Prince Sophia, dumped by the Ventrue onto Seattle probably because of her availability. Sophia is an awful manager. She is perfect for her bosses because she knows how to present results to them and assign blame as needed. She is absolute hell to work for because she doesn’t have a fucking clue about working with people. Everything she knows about managing is probably from some 18th century manuscript on organizing buffers between yourself and the lower classes. Sophia calls Cassandra by her last name and is frustrated that Cassandra can’t solve Sophia’s money problems. Those aren’t Cassandra’s problems but Sophia is saddled with Harbinger’s and over the past year or so has lost sight of what it protects her against. Sophia never saw what Seattle was like without Harbinger’s. She’s also terrible at working with people because she doesn’t like them. Just her upper-crust friends. Bleh. Anyhow, Sophia is the power structure Cassandra is saddled with, and so she serves to the best of her ability.

Writing Cassandra standing before Sophia required a great deal of mental gymnastics, to be able to “yes, and” her as well as speaking as truthful as she can without criticizing her.

Anyhow, Harbinger’s is clearly screwed and on borrowed time. Could Cassandra save it? Probably not.

Also I fucking love Cassandra’s retort to Esther, “We all live with our choices. But mine are small. Yours are the choices of gods. And I am your result!” About the nicest “fuck you” she could give to Esther and still keep her life. Again, I was very surprised a line of that quality came out of me.

So Siobhan has left her warehouse job, not entirely by choice. The war burnt out Lorea and someone needed to pick up her slack. Burnout is real, especially in leftist circles. And often no one is available to do the missing work. And life goes on. Anyhow, we see how Cassandra has changed, having to be more of a Camarilla mouthpiece because she knows they will read her mind. Siobhan hasn’t changed though. She’s just back at her organizing work. Probably a lot changed after the war for her too. Getting back in Cassandra’s good graces wasn’t a priority.

Also, could Sophia be more blatant that she was planning to attack the Anarchs? Sheesh. What did she think was going to happen, Siobhan would just give Cassandra more security and have fewer bodies to protect Anarch territory? Oh please. More reasons why she’s awful.

And we come to Harbinger’s final night. At last, the Sabbat attack. We always knew they were going to attack. And here they are. Sabbat voice actor Maeve came to me expressly looking to play a hammy villain and I did not disappoint her. Nothing gold can stay. Nichole’s girlfriend gets fridged, but loss isn’t unique to Nichole. I wanted this scene quick to be done with it. I also wanted Cassandra to be able to blame herself for it – she could have shut down the feeding chamber early. She’s probably done it before. But she kept it open because Kindred needed feeding and what’s the worst that could happen?

What did I say about complacency? Especially after two years where she’s handled murders before.

Cassandra has held onto that contact information for the Naval Liaison for some time. And she never had a good reason to call it without something to offer. And now she finally has it.

I didn’t know who I was going to cast as the Naval Liaison. But so many of our voice actors have comedy voices that they do on the side. Trunk Slamchest’s Penelope was a joke elderly voice originally, until I perverted it into a dramatic role. Similarly, the Naval Liaison is Katherine Cross doing a suburban Karen voice. It’s a joke when you do it for friends. It’s drama when you do it for me. (That said, Just Another Twink did a whole range of cartoon voices for me that I couldn’t think of a single way to use. Sorry, dear.)

So Sophia is horrified by the loss of a slightly profitable club, and by Cassandra passing over one of her people (even if they were a Sabbat) to the military/Second Inquisition. At last, Cassandra finds the one bit of natural rights among Kindred – we don’t hand each other over to the humans. (Unless it becomes politically convenient to do so but that’s another story and certainly not in a human’s hands.) Writing Cassandra in this scene was particularly tricky because she is twisting everything Sophia says into a positive. She’s trying to keep her club. This fiasco is manageable. Really. It is. Uh huh. But it’s all she can do. “I am not allowed subterfuge in this court.” Because they can read her mind. And it’s grating on Cassandra that she is not allowed to participate in the backstabbing that makes the court – that Esther has perfected.

Exiled home, Cassandra uses Lorea as an escape excuse (an extremely flimsy one) and as a reason to catch up now that the club is probably a goner. Cassandra fills Lorea in with her plan to try to get access to the Kindred on the Kitsap base. Maybe Samael is still there. Or Silver. Who knows?

(I know and I’m not telling you. Just keep in mind that this is, in Rachel’s words, a romantic tragedy.)

Lorea does offer Cassandra an Embrace here. But Cassandra certainly wouldn’t be able to stay in Seattle. And she’s not good at hiding. She is tempted but her pragmatism wins out.

Finally, Cassandra descends into the Underworld. At Kitsap base, she is taken underground in a bunker and speaks with three captured Kindred, including the Laughing Sabbat. I used this scene as an excuse for Cassandra to embrace her own dark manipulative side. To show off how much she’s learned working with Kindred night in, night out. To show how desperate she is that the next Kindred she sees in the Underworld is Samael.

Rachel originally wanted to play the Laughing Sabbat scene by ridiculing the Sabbat (“The Dark Father destroys all. The Dark Father destroys all.” in a mocking tone). I had to insist, no. She’s trying to get in the Sabbat’s head. She’s making the Sabbat uneasy with her, being honest with the Sabbat and then setting them off-kilter until they make a mistake and reveal too much – “Elixir.”

Next is Cynthia, a poor Thin Blood who got picked up. I think I described her to Alyrian as a beach hippie? Her purpose is her connection to Zachery, who we last saw in Episode 4. (Yes, I set up a lot of things in advance.) She’s obviously a victim in all this and I wanted to show Cassandra’s sympathy for her. Unlike with the Sabbat, Cassandra’s honesty is kind, but still manipulative. Cynthia gives her name away in hope that something better will come from Cassandra down the line.

The last visit is with Silver, who is not doing well, but to whom Cassandra gives Lorea’s message of hope. All of these poor Kindred in detention. It really makes me mad.

Finally, the Naval Liaison reveals that she suspects Cassandra of being a Kindred herself, even though she’s seen her in the day. Cynthia can probably daywalk though. The Naval Liaison doesn’t know everything about Kindred, except that their sensitive noses react badly to a particular spray. We discussed Kindred’s smelling sensitivity in Episode 4 and I wanted to focus on scent as a sign of one being a Kindred. Even in Episode 1, Samael told Cassandra that Kindred can smell her wherever she goes. But it’s also a detriment when you can’t turn it off.

Anyway, Cassandra is pissed about being tested but at the same time, she doesn’t want to anger the Liaison. She wants back in.

After informing Lorea that her message got to Silver, Cassandra is picked up by Esther. Things are not going to go well and Cassandra is unrepentant. What would be the point of an apology anyway? As Cassandra says, “Which is worse? A lie in defiance? Or the truth in shame?” And Esther completely misses what Cassandra is saying. She just goes for the lie immediately. She doesn’t have a fucking clue.

Cassandra is very lucky that Sophia knows what vengeance Lorea and the Anarchs might wreak were they to hear that Sophia killed Cassandra. Sophia does have half a brain after all, so she frees Cassandra from servitude and banishes her. If you know me, this is a major theme in my writing. Back in the 90s, I was able to participate in the Boston fetish/BDSM scene but after transitioning, no one was interested in playing with me. So I was essentially cast out and it still hurts me to this day. I want my audience to feel it to, although in Cassandra’s case, it is a blessing in disguise. She no longer needs to be useful among the Kindred to survive. They trust her to keep their secrets as she knows intimately what will happen if she does not.

Trivia: originally Cassandra’s final words to the court were something like, “I need to pick up my car from the Anarchs” where it was parked. But obviously, that’s not a particular good final line. So I let that plot point slide.

Banishment from the Kindred’s world also means Samael’s rooms, so Cassandra says her parting words to Esther there. She’s going to have to start her life on her own.

The next scene with Nichole I believe is what sold the part to Kelsey. Nichole chooses not to Embrace her girlfriend. To do so wouldn’t just be unethical – it would risk losing her girlfriend if she didn’t want to be Embraced or if she found the concept of being a Kindred horrific. More reasons not to do so than to do it. Kelsey really knocks this scene out of the park. Bravo.

And Cassandra is back in the human world. With a huge pile of cash, of course. Sophia has to leave her something if she is to live and keep her trap shut. So after buying a new place to live (and presumably staying in a hotel until the paperwork goes through), Cassandra gets bored of being alone and returns to her touchstone, Stephanie. Like with Siobhan, Cassandra is not looking for forgiveness. She’s going to pay her dues. She starts volunteering at, what I imagine, is Southside Commons in Columbia City. And Stephanie recognizes that she’s putting in the work. They reconnect in a friendly way.

And then Cassandra runs into Zachery again. It makes sense – Cassandra has met all the Seattle Kindred, so non-zero chance she was going to run into one after her banishment. Zachery is sympathetic (although a little manic). He eagerly accepts a drink and Cassandra enjoys hers again. He seems mostly harmless. He wishes her the best from within the Kindred world to which she can’t belong.

And now a side note – this is bad practice but I do search for Blood Doll references on the Internet. And one of the things I find is posts from people talking shit about Blood Dolls. I won’t name names, but they’re all talking about how laugh-inducing it is for humans to get addicted to the Kiss. How sad and weak of them. We should pity them.

First off, fuck you with your fucking slut shaming, addiction-shaming bullshit. If people are having a good time together, fuck you, it’s none of your fucking business. Being a slut if you want to be is fantastic. Highly recommend. What fucking patriarchal asshole did you climb out of where you want to control people’s sexuality. And if you’re dropping addiction metaphors into this too, fuck you with a rusty crowbar on Sundays. You’re why politicians keep closing down harm reduction centers where people can use needles safely which have been proven to fucking work. Go jump in a volcano and stop listening to my fucking show. We don’t need your Puritanical self-righteous bullshit.

Whew. Okay, back to the show notes.

I wanted to show Cassandra getting used to being in the human world again, so I wrote about Stephanie taking her out for drinks. They’re warming up to each other again. Cassandra still likes her expensive whiskey (like me!) to show she’s not the same person who Stephanie originally fell in love with. And we get a “Kanpai” call back to Episode 1!

But who’s that at the bar? When I was working on the primordial outline, I imagined this scene – Peter and Rachel meeting up with Cassandra again! Catching up after everything that’s happened. Except Peter and Rachel aren’t the same either. They’re ghouls now. They’ll be in service to Esther for as long as they live. They’ll never be entirely their own people. Like I keep saying, this story is about loss and tragedy. I wanted to send them off in a sad state for the listener.

And then Cassandra is ready to leave her old life in the Kindred world behind. She sets out a candle for Samael, who she will love forever. And that’s that.

…

This was a hard scene to write and record. I discussed this with Slip and Rachel separately. I wanted to make Slip understand that this is an assault on Cassandra. Zachery isn’t thinking clearly. He’s maniced out, for whatever reason, he’s not thinking straight. He’s been thinking to himself since he met with Cassandra, this isn’t fair. She did so much good for so many Kindred. She deserves a chance to become Kindred herself. She deserves that chance and no one else will offer it to her.

Zachery is not listening to her at all.

This is a hard scene. Thank you for making it through it. I promise, Episode 8 will be worth your time and everything you went through to get here.

It

Will

Be

Worth

Everything.

So Lorea was originally supposed to die in this episode. Long long ago when I was in the Outline phase of this project, this episode was supposed to be a bloodbath in which I took out half the cast. But when I got to working out the plot beats for this episode, I thought it would be more interesting if she lived… or rather, I didn’t like Brian’s original plan for pulling in all the big name Kindred to harvest them for their blood. I thought it would be more interesting if his vengeance was personal against Aaralyn.

Okay, we start with a flashback to a salon with Samael to show off what Cassandra has lost. (Trivia: When I was working on the Outline, it was originally Elijio who got captured but I quickly reconsidered that as being a Burying Your Gays trope. It had to be Samael because it had to be someone who truly mattered to Cassandra.) The main question of this episode is, will Cassandra be able to save Samael? And the answer is, ultimately, no.

Well, that’s bound to make her a little mad.

Next we have a lovely little scene in which the metamours begin to address losing Samael. Cassandra has plunged off the deep end into grief. Elijio does not attempt to reassure her, only how to manage her grief. He’s been around a while and this isn’t new territory to him. I am proud of the Buddhist/Catholic banter, which is something I wanted to explore in the show more than, alas, is probably in there. Ah well, there’s always Season 2 in which I’ve planned to add an explicitly Buddhist character to challenge Cassandra’s very Western beliefs. Anyhow, this is more poly stuff. When something has happened to someone you’re close to, it’s happened to everyone in the polycule, and I wanted to show poly folks dealing with loss here.

This episode is all about tearing Cassandra’s heart to pieces so we continue the rending with Lorea denying Cassandra their one hostage. Cassandra has to be desperate for the rest of this episode to work so we set her up here to accept any help she can get.

And then there’s Siobhan. My direction to Rachel for this scene was “if you could kill Siobhan, you would.” Alas, Alyrian was only available to record on evenings when Rachel wasn’t available to all their scenes were recorded asynchronously (which is a miracle that the ending of Episode 4 worked as well as it did). But still, Siobhan’s disdain for Cassandra (“I got you help, WTF more did you want?”) comes across well. Anyhow, the main plot beat of this scene is that Cassandra gets the contact for the Naval Liaison. This will become important later.

Following this, Cassandra gets to express her frustration to Esther, who indicates the court has no plans to help out Samael. But Esther is not without sympathy – she is willing to call back Vanishing Girl (who I adore). I love it anytime Cait gets to perform – her Esther performance is truly on fire. Also, the bit in which Cassandra says, “Then teach me to vanish like she does” is a callback to when Samael was talking about actual humans who can do magic (a.k.a. mages). Teaching Cassandra to be a mage is not something remotely interesting to Esther.

And Brian’s back! As mentioned in Episode 3, I was thinking about bringing him back then and thank goodness I didn’t because his re-appearance here is much more surprising instead of him showing up like a bad penny. Anyhow, he continues to be an asshole and Cassandra nonetheless needs him and I love their dynamic. Brian is obviously manipulating her and she is so desperate for allies she could care less. Kudos to Michael for bringing on the smarm. In my other show, Victory Asterisk, he was going to play the sweetest little cream puff, but here, he got to really go full ham. Bravo.

Also I want to give a shoutout to my long-time actor and friend Julia Lunetta, who once again does the news announcer role. She’s been in every audio drama I’ve worked on (except Victory, I think) and it behooves me to mention her favorite show in which she starred, Second Shift podcast. Second Shift beat Mask of Inanna to the release by a year or so, and we were both up for a Parsec award (I won). It’s about a bunch of college kids isekai’d into a fantasy land and having to deal with magic and such, and their website describes it better than I can. Anyway, Julia, there’s your plug.

Well, reluctantly, Cassandra takes Brian home and ponders that she really should have staked him then. And in retrospect, things would have been a lot better if she had. Ah well. There’s so much we don’t know about the future.

Boy, Aaralyn is not happy to hear that Brian has disobeyed a direct order from her never to return. He must have a damned good reason, right? Right? On a technical note, I have Cassandra waiting in the hallway outside Aaralyn’s chambers while Esther goes in to tell her. And Esther comes back a lot faster than she would have in the actual situation. You don’t want to keep the listeners waiting to long – drama needs to happen – so I fudge time like this all the fucking time. Whenever I do leave a long pause it’s for a good reason, and this didn’t warrant a pause or anything.

After a short stop to pick up Brian and the phones, we have another SFX nightmare for me. Writing Alicia always has it out for Editing Alicia. That bitch has me so many complex scenes, I want to throttle her. That said, when it sounds terrific, it makes me very happy to hear the final result – after my brain can distance itself from the editing work. Usually a day or so. Listening to a scene on the same day as I cut it means that I remember what I was thinking when I decided to put that phrase there and that SFX there with that panning effect etc. Anyhow, my greatest regret in this scene is that I didn’t put the mic under Amber when she did her recording. I put it over her, which meant she wasn’t talking directly into it while she was sitting in the studio. So her recording doesn’t sound great. I’m sorry. We’d have to re-record it to fix it and I’m not putting Amber through that performance again. (Her performance is really, really great.) I did what I could with the audio – it sounds okay, I guess.

Anyhow, originally, Cassandra was going to do some “ignore all previous instructions” shit on the T2M, or at least convince it that Brian was a fictional character like Lestat from its training material. Both of these were dumb and I’m glad I settled on making Brian unrecognizable to the T2M. (Way to go Aaralyn!) Another bit of artifice in this scene is that the blood being ripped from the Kindred’s bodies goes on way too long – they don’t have that much blood in them, but we needed to have that SFX going in the background to indicate that the T2M wasn’t finished killing Aaralyn yet. This is just how things go when you’re making a fictional show. As I’ve probably said before, sound effects are all about being so natural that the listener doesn’t hear them. That is, that they seem natural and fade into the background, and the listener would notice if they weren’t there.

So Brian does his villain speech, fills his bucket, gets killed, etc. etc. And then Cassandra gets to completely fall apart from her trauma. Which Rachel loved to do. She’s endured all that murder and her response is not to not-process it, but to go full speed ahead into it. She goes ballistic. She talks to Brian’s corpse because it’s amusing to her and she finally doesn’t have to hold her feelings back. She also recognizes her one chance to pit computer against computer and heads off to the Anarchs.

By the way, I do try to keep in mind when a Kindred dusts and when they don’t… retroactively after I’ve recorded the dialogue, but still, I try. Brian wouldn’t dust because he’s so young. Aaralyn definitely dusts and I have that SFX in there. And I cut the line about the Anarchs wanting to check out her body. There. Discrepancy solved. At the Anarchs, Lorea makes the huge mistake of letting Cassandra in to see the TAM after Cassandra has made it clear how much she hates it. Bad call. But this show is all about bad calls and wonderful drama that ensues.

In the battle of the computers, a lot of the influence for this scene came from a friend of mine who I’ve been writing with for a couple years now. (I’m unsure which of their myriad names they want me to use so I’ll just call them Coyote++.) Coyote++ said that the scene should have some technical grounding. It shouldn’t be a wizard’s duel, so I have the TAM and T2M look for exploits in each other’s code and try to corrupt each other’s volumes until both are unusable. Also Coyote++ came up with the term “BLOODOS” (a.k.a. Blood Disk Operating System (DOS)) so credit where credit is due. Trunk Slamchest did a great job voicing both computers and I enjoyed overlaying their voices over each other as they continue their attacks.

Now, as my advice to future writers, if your character has come to a space, have multiple plot beats happen in that space. So Lorea discovers what’s happened to Mandy and informs Cassandra. I distinctly remember this scene when I was working on the outline – seeing Mandy dead, her face pointed upwards with mushrooms sprouting from her mouth. Judith wasn’t content with killing her – she wanted the Anarchs to know who got by their defenses to do it. She’s still sore from getting beaten up all those decades ago.

As well, one of the major themes of this episode is “Kindred don’t change.” And this scene gives Cassandra some space to lament this. “You fight and you fight and you fight and you kill. And what does it get you? You could live forever. You told MANDY she could live forever. What is the fucking point of any of you?” And the answers suck. We’re just too human for our own good, with all our fears and patterns.

Back at Camarilla HQ, things are bad. Dee delivers a fantastic “There is currently no Camarilla!” Esther is appointed interim-Prince. And everyone blames Cassandra… but not enough to immediately kill her. Judith makes it clear that that may come later. I love Cassandra’s little tête-à-tête with Judith. Despite Judith being the one with the real power, Cassandra still accosts her like an equal. And it is very clear that they hate each other now. Good set-up, Writing Me! Also I love that Judith expresses regret for having saved Cassandra but come on, she’d have never guessed Cassandra would be in the position she’s in now.

Next up is the Great Breakup with Lorea. Damn, Katherine delivered again. She’s furious at Cassandra or having broken her trust and destroyed her deterrent. So many people who want Cassandra dead make the mistake of letting her speak first. She’s going to kill Judith. I came to this decision late in the scripting process, that is, it’s not in the outline. When I was putting together the plot beats for Episode 6, that’s when I realized she would want to kill Judith. I checked the outline, didn’t see anything that absolutely required Judith to live, and well, that was that. And it’s good enough for Lorea to give Cassandra a stay of execution.

I also love Cassandra’s admission that “I want to be in Samael’s death grip. Allowed to live.” Being in that perpetual state of active submission and fear is fucking hot and now that’s gone. What’s left for her? She can’t leave the Kindred world. And we’ll explore more of that next episode.

Then Elijio comes back, poor Kindred. He gets a moment with Cassandra where they continue lamenting their loss of their loved one. I especially like the depth of his line, “The most horrid of deities. Those who dwell in the blackest of existences. Unnamed and scorned. Who, of all God’s creatures, know best how to laugh.” Because laughter is best and most genuine when pointed upwards. Also, I love Cassandra’s distinction between Elijio being Camarilla and being Samael’s. We all have to choose between our work and our loved ones at some point and there’s often consequences, but fuck those. We know what’s more important.

We take a quiet moment where Cassandra speaks with Vanishing Girl. I directed Cassandra to speak very casually, almost monotone, to show how burned out and eaten away inside she is. She both hopes and understands that she will receive no hope. She pledges her support to whoever is in charge. It doesn’t really matter to her now.

Next, Cassandra baits the trap, getting Amanda to deliver the summons to Judith instead of bringing it to Judith herself. Judith is always suspicious and no reason not to play into her fears.

And at last, Cassandra disposes of both the Army Kindred and Judith in one fell swoop. Dee had a fabulous time dying twice (for each take). Rachel also had a great time performing as Cassandra taunting her.

My, there are a lot of SFX in this scene.

As far as repercussions go, killing Judith wasn’t just for Cassandra’s own benefit. She was doing the Ventrue a favor, as you’ll see next episode. Thanks for listening.

Oh gods, this episode.

When I was outlining the show, when I got to this point, I originally thought about Elijio getting captured. But then I immediately thought that, no. That would be more burying the gays, doing it to the boyfriend. That would be against everything I’ve opposed in fiction. The listener doesn’t have the same attachment to him as they do to Samael.

So, fuck it. Samael got taken and disappeared by the government. Future episodes will address this, as horrific as it is.

We start the episode with some Cassandra/Samael/Elijio domesticity. Cassandra is still shaken from the previous night. Having to shout and confront someone as harsh as she did is brutal on neurodiverse people. She needs some time with her spreadsheets. We also see Samael and Eilijio hooking up again, which is fine by Cassandra. (“Oh no, the poly life!”) Look, showing a healthy poly relationship is important, especially in today’s political climate. Besides, too many vampire stories depend on jealousy and polygamy.

Anyway, we start on a happy scene because things are about to go terribly, terribly tragic.

Next up, we hear that Lorea has handled Siobhan. She’s handled it.

And then Cassandra goes to see Stephanie again, who asks Cassandra what the fuck went wrong on press night.

She’s handled it.

You have to trust that someone has handled a situation and you aren’t privy to why.

I wasn’t expecting Cassandra and Stephanie to break up again when I wrote this scene. It just sorta happened. I’m glad it did because it added some more needed drama but still, these poor women can’t catch a break.

Then we get to The First Labor of Cassandra – Amanda’s Boon. This was something I actually wrote up in the Blood Doll Anthology, which I will get around to releasing, I promise! It was about Amanda’s and Penelope’s multi-year feud, so of course, Amanda has Cassandra check in on Penelope. I’m always thinking about dementia. A few women in my family have had it (my great-grandmother (who I met briefly), my grandmother’s sister, and a distant cousin, Nancy Heath) and it’s not pleasant to speak with them coming in and out, misremembering things (like correctly gendering me). I also explored it in The Mask of Inanna with the Speed Bump, which I mentioned at the time was a metaphor for Alzheimer’s. Having Amanda force Cassandra to confront that it may happen to her – and does she really want to put Samael through that? It was an interesting supposition for Cassandra to think about.

My editor Tony originally wanted me to take it out and, I don’t know. I think it works. Maybe it’s a little long. Or the right length. Time and you, dear reader, will tell.

Also, if you aren’t familiar with the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), it’s a solemn affair. I attended some of the early ones in Boston arranged by Gwenners. My friends read poems at them. Utterly heartbreaking.

(Also, I’ve mentioned this before but Amanda is the third audio drama character I’ve based off of a dyke co-worker I had back in the 90s named Annette Turla. I fucking loved being around her. She passed in 2022, and her partner Jackie passed in 2023, and even though I never saw them much after 2000, I dearly miss them.)

Back to the story, Cassandra checks in on Siobhan to find her working at a warehouse to pay Cassandra back. This is how a lot of anarchists handle situations like this – working to earn back trust. Showing that you’re dedicated to repairing the relationship that you broke. Siobhan’s voice actor complimented me on how Siobhan was handling the situation which, as a (possibly lapsed?) anarchist, I really took to heart <3

Next, Lorea gives Cassandra The Phone. The Phone will be with us until the end of the show. It is Cassandra’s lifeline and will doom her soon. I had considered Lorea giving her The Phone earlier in the show but it made more sense that she receive it in the same episode in which it becomes relevant.

Next, for the Second Labor of Cassandra, Simon asks her to take him out for a night on the town – at least, Lake City. I chose Lake City in particular because I had a roommate who worked the overnight shift at the (now closed) Fred Meyer there, and whose co-workers would go out for drinks afterward at bars that would be open at like 6 AM. Anyhow, it was my delight to give Thomas Hale of Flash in the Pan podcast a minor role on the show when he was in Seattle. I let him choose the name of his character (Felix) and he did a magnificent job. I’ve been friends with Thomas since before he started the podcast with Alex and I host their show’s RSS feed (since the free version of WordPress won’t host it).

Back to the show, Simon has himself a little bender and probably drinks more drugs through Felix than a Kindred ought to safely, aaaaaaaaand he’s out. So Cassandra has to wrap him in blankets and get him home. It’s okay. Simon trusted that she’d have his back.

And yes, the whole Simon bit was an excuse for Simon to bust into Samael’s sitting room screaming, “I’m okay!” while Samael was helping themselves to Cassandra. It’s fucking great, I love doing that shit.

For those of you who know me, when Samael says, “Do you want marks hidden or where everyone can see them?”, this is a me thing. I like being bitten and marked up. My skin marks up incredibly easily. You can rake my flesh with your fingernails and see the traces. It’s incredibly hot. There, there’s your TMI for the day.

Next we finally have Judith and Aaralyn admitting that the Blood Temple was a good idea. (At least, it better have been, at its cost.) Cassandra gets paid for her work. At last. Always pay your Blood Dolls, Kindred. And then while I was writing it, I thought, well, Cassandra is now officially part of the court (and they said in earlier episodes that humans can’t be a part of the court! Ha! What do Kindred know?) and why wouldn’t Esther try to drag her down like she does with Samael? And Cassandra’s response just came to me. A hug! A big thank-you hug. Gods, I was like, Esther would never put up with that but just this once, for comedy.

So when I was originally thinking about Simon’s boon, my thought was that he would take Cassandra out to watch the moon rise over Tacoma. And then when I thought of a better bit for him to do for his boon, the idea of watching the moon rise still stuck with me. And so here we have the last time Cassandra and Samael were together, happy. In celebration. When The Phone rings. “And that was it.”

And now we move into the Assault on Precinct 13 part of the show. The US Armed Forces now know about the TAM (we’ll learn why later). And the Anarchs need to confront how much they want to lose to retain it.

So we get to the famous ambush scene that took me about two days to do the sound effect (SFX) for. We meet Hank, who will be more relevant in Season 2 of the show, and Silver, who will unfortunately be captured. Silver was a one-off character I wrote a piece for in the Blood Doll Anthology, but I didn’t have a slot for her in the show until now. For those of you wondering who the fuck Harry Sullivan and Sarah Jane Smith are, well, I just provided links for you. You’re welcome. Essentially, Hank and Silver are nerding out over classic Doctor Who.

Everything was fine until the government attacked.

This scene was a pain in the ass to do the SFX for, but I’m glad it came out as understandably as I wanted it to. There’s lots of gunfire and driving, but I want to give extra credit to all the actors who did the scene asynchronously (I think only Rachel and Katherine were the only two who recorded at the same time together) and absolutely exhausted themselves making the scene sound as intense as it was. Sangria (Arturo) especially was wiped out by the time we got to the end of this scene (twice! We record every scene twice, minimum). Bravo to them!

Anyhow, Cassandra brings up the choice to Arturo and then the others – why keep the TAM? Why not put bullets in it and save everyone? The tension is wracked when Cassandra says, “I could make them go away right now. Permanently.” And she doesn’t because Lorea asks nicely. But y’all know…. she should have. She really should have.

And then there’s Mandy. Named for the Panos Cosmatos movie, Mandy also got screwed over by the government in being made a Kindred without learning what they are. I think about her like queer kids who don’t know their history. Or who have no connection their culture. And are held away from it. Utterly tragic. And I knew that Lorea understood her and had to get through to her. And so I wrote a page-length monologue in which Lorea pours out her heart to this kid. I went through everything I’d learned from my various medical trainings about death by hypovolemic shock. (I got things wrong about Canada but I edited them out of the final cut.) And I hope y’all were as moved by it as I was.

When I was first asking famed internet celebrity Katherine Cross to be a part of the show, we met at a local coffee shop and I gave her this scene to do. (I had just written it a few days before.) And she did it well for a first-time read. Hopefully that was the hook I needed to get her on board.

The next sequence is Cassandra deliberately weakening herself so that she has to struggle more for the final scene. She’d have to go to the hospital. This gave the Anarchs more incentive to get passed the Army Kindred.

Cassandra makes a lot of mistakes. She can’t tell they’re mistakes at the time, but in retrospect, they should be obvious. I sympathize with her a lot. Anyway, before going downstairs to see Mandy, she makes a call to Siobhan to ask for help. She didn’t trust the Anarchs. All the pieces are in place for the final scene.

Yeah. Poor Samael and Elijio.

At least Elijio managed to escape.

Fuck.

This was rough to write. Even rougher to edit. What more do you want out of me?

When I wrote the ending at the hospital, I wanted Rachel to absolutely rip the listener’s heart out when she cried out, “WHAT?” I think it worked. I dunno.

I really appreciate the chance to write these show notes. It’s cathartic and gives me the chance to go over the emotional states I was in when I was writing and editing these. (I don’t really cry or anything when I’m directing? It’s more like I’m pushing the actors towards whatever I had planned for them and I don’t get emotionally wrapped up in the scene.) I’m glad this episode happened, even if the characters is it are not.

One of my actors mentioned that this was the episode where they felt truly invested in everything I’d been building up to in the show. I hope you feel the same.

Anyhow, the next episode is one of our best. Stay tuned.

I originally started Episode 4 with a flash-forward to the Dybbuk conversation between Cassandra and Samael. Then I thought about it during edits and cut it for length. The episode is already as long as the first episode and y’all are saints for making it this far.

Speaking of Samael, I gave them that name as an in-joke because there are so many Liliths out there, I wanted to increase the Samael-count. Also it sounds like a name an 18th century bureaucrat would choose to piss off their boss. But I get ahead of myself.

So I ended Episode three with Aaralyn’s decision to build Cassandra’s Blood Temple and it pained me – it PAINED me y’all – that I couldn’t finish the episode with Jotham’s traitorous reveal and staking. I didn’t think it would make a great opening for the next episode, particularly when that episode needed to do a lot of heavy lifting. An hour and forty-five minutes of heavy lifting it turns out. Nonetheless, like the bad ending to the Wisdom of Solomon, the scene was cut in twain and I hope you didn’t start with Episode 4 because you will be lost.

This episode features character growth for a lot of characters, and Aaralyn is not left behind. She’s obviously a monster considering what she did to Cassandra last episode, but as Samael says, she is the power structure under which the Camarilla work. I wanted to show how adaptable she is as a leader, and that even the worst of us is still capable in a number of ways. And you often have to work with your abuser. It fucking sucks, and the abuse is always there, but (as a major theme of Blood Doll), life goes on. All sorts of things happen and life goes on.

(Now to deal with the Dragon in the Room – pronouncing Camarilla as Kam-ah-rill-ah and not Kam-ah-ree-ah. I have no pony in this Umamusume race. I simply went with the pronunciation that Jacob Burgess used in Not a Drop to Drink and that Dee (who played Judith) also reiterated that I use. As I recall, Amber wasn’t thrilled with that pronunciation so we do have division in the ranks and all y’all on the Kam-ah-ree-ah side can be assured that I knew better and chose not to go down that path.)

Next up, Cassandra gets her first taste of power by arranging for the CamaRILLLLLLLLLa to meet with the Anarchs over the Blood Temple project. Aaralyn struts her stuff and comes across as reasonably convincing without being explicitly manipulative. I felt that was very important – she doesn’t bullshit the Anarchs the same reason that I don’t bullshit my audience. I’m old, y’all, and I don’t have time to pussy-foot around topics of contention.

Another aside – I don’t know if you noticed but there is no single antagonist in Season 1 of Blood Doll. There are just people – terrible people – but it’s still an ensemble cast and no one is any more evil than anyone else – including Cassandra. We’ll get there with her. I thought it was important to give everyone their own motivations and plot through-lines and not have everyone gather together at the end to defeat the Prime Antagonist in a rousing display of unity. That’s not how this world works. That’s not how *our* world works. We’re just people doing our own shit and often shit sucks but Life. Goes. On.

Anyhow, in the Camarilla/Anarch meeting, I emphasize a distinction between people who use hierarchical methods of organization vs. anarchic methods of organization. Samael comes to the Anarchs with a plan to show that they’re serious about making the Blood Temple and Siobhan throws it back in their face – no. Anarchists don’t show up with a pre-conceived plan. They sit down together as equals and hash it out from scratch. Showing up with a plan tilts the scales toward the assumptions provided in that pre-conception. (This is me begging all other authors to read modern anarchist literature or go down to Left Bank Books Collective and talk to people about how anarchists actually operate, I’m begging you.) In the few TTRPG campaigns of VtM I’ve seen, the Anarchs don’t work like anarchists and it bugs the ever-living FUCK out of me.

Next, we FINALLY get Samael’s background with William. As Baldrick to William’s Blackadder, until they turned the tables in the 1960s/1970s (I haven’t decided which yet). Samael is hurt by being excluded from the Blood Temple and it was important to show them invoking the Circle and opening up to Cassandra. The all-powerful vampire persona that Samael presents is a facade, and this scene concludes it, letting Cassandra completely in. The scene also features a bit of dialogue that I couldn’t believe I’d written:

BLOOD DOLL: (DRINKING THE GLASS SAMAEL POURED FOR HER) This is pretty strong.
SAMAEL: The night calls for it.

I was like, “this is fantastic, who wrote this?” And then I was like “oh shit.”

And then Cassandra goes into the discussion of the Dybbuk. (Thanks again to Esoterica for educating me on this particular concept.) It’s a question that must have plagued the minds of religious scholars – are there exceptions to every spiritual process under (Abrahamic) God? How does Gilgul handle the excessive accumulation of sin? I guess it just sloughs it off as Dybbuks which present their own problems in the world. Anyway, this discussion is more of the religious wankery wandering, presumption, and reinterpretation that I love to do. And hopefully contribute to the vampiric canon, if you’ll have me.

Next up is Jotham’s trial…. ha ha ha… ah ha ha ha… oh, you thought this trial was going to be fair? And not just something else to pad Aaralyn’s ego? Y’all probably saw this coming so I got it out of the way. (Side note, I originally had Jotham’s body remain after beheading, but during recording, Amber informed me that Jotham would have been dusted so I retroactively made him do so – and even found the foley to make it happen!) Also, Aaralyn is managing the transition to the Blood Temple as best as she can – by making it Judith’s problem. Poor Judith.

Speaking of Judith, I typically named a lot of characters in this show from prominent Bible names to give the show a more spiritually-epic air. And not just because my dad’s cousin is named Judy. Look, the Holy Bible only has so many names in it which are still in use.

When I’m working on a script, conversation bits will come to me and I’ll write them down in my notes. The section with Samael and Lorea were a couple of those, namely Samael literally dropping the book on Lorea, and telling Lorea that to second they admit to loving Cassandra, they have to kill Lorea. Because to the CamaRILLLa, giving up the pretense of distance with a loved one is dangerous. Suddenly Samael is opening up to getting hurt again, and their culture demands that kill rather than do that with an enemy.

Oh, and Lorea tells Cassandra about the Sabbat and here is where y’all Sabbat players, led by Amber, pierce my heart twixt my bosoms and demand that I treat them better. Folks… there’s going to be a Season 2 in which I might do that. However, this is not your season. Sorry. I need to show how the Sabbat are the bogeymen (not the antagonists) that the CamaRLLLa and Anarchs fear.

Next up, we finally get around to Samael’s Gender Shit. Samael is canonically non-binary and came out at a time before being enby had great words to describe it. How does an enby manage living without a supportive community for almost three hundred years? Not very well! Now, I planned for Samael being enby long before I cast Soleil, also an enby, in the role. It just happened to work out and I’m very pleased by the synchronicity. Anyhow I wanted to explore what happens when You’re Queer But Don’t Have A Great Way to Describe It and Samael is my vehicle. This also explains why Samael connects with Cassandra like they do – their Gender Shit. (Gender Shit for life <3.)

Next, Lorea introduces Cassandra to the Skunkworks. This place will become very important in future episodes. For now, it’s where everyone meets to discuss the Blood Temple’s creation. Poor Esther, having to take notes in the first meeting. But everyone need to take their turn to diffuse the labor! Soooooooooolidarity foreeeeeeeeeever! Soooooooolidarity foreeeeeeeeeever. I mean. Uh. No, that’s those other guys. Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao! Anyhow, I tried to make this scene interesting and by that I mean Tony cut like two pages off my original script and he was right to do so. Also I appreciate Siobhan’s voice actor barking enough for me that I could put together the Gangrel part of the scene. They were very confused when I first asked them to do so!

Next up was a scene which wasn’t in my original outline for the show, but one I thought was strongly needed. Judith gets more characterization so y’all can continue to lust over her. In particular, she gives Cassandra enough rope to hang herself and makes her point that she doesn’t want anyone hanging around the Blood Temple thinking it’ll protect them. It is Not. A. Sanctuary. Gods, I love Judith in this scene, where she has to deal with Cassandra as That Human That Unfortunately Isn’t Going Anywhere And Will Become The Power Structure With Which I Have To Operate. (I remember Vanishing Girl’s voice actor telling me it was amused by the concept of a human in the VtM world who, for political reasons, everyone is highly discouraged from killing.)

Now, we get to the design of the Harbinger’s Blood Temple. (Why “Harbinger’s”? Fucked if I know. I just needed a placeholder for the Blood Temple name and “Harbinger’s” stuck.) Lorea guides us through the club to give the listener a sense of place, since I can’t exactly use anything visual in a strictly auditory medium. Originally I was going to only have one feeding chamber but when thinking about it for more than one second I realized they’d need a bunch. Also, the bouncers somehow have never pieced together what’s going on in the feeding chambers when the lights go out. Don’t think too hard about it. For the love of the gods, please don’t think too hard about it.

And then we get to Steph’s assault. In my original outline, Cassandra wasn’t going to spend so much time in Harbinger’s. The Anarchs were going to dump a beaten-up fash on the steps to Aaralyn’s mansion with the message that, if the CamaRILLLLLa were going to own Cap Hill, they should handle the shit there too. So Cassandra would go out with Q squad along with Steph. Steph would then criticize Cassandra for showing up again after their breakup and says basically everything she does later and I ended up cutting all that and just had Cassandra learn about Steph’s assault. (That original outline was so fucking cringe but I couldn’t have made this show without it as a potential future.) Anyhow, why did I make Steph get beat up? Say it with me. Character development. Cassandra needed something of her own to fight for outside the Kindred’s world, and also needed a way to reconnect with her old touchstone – to show off how far Cassandra has come since being the “uwu I’m so weak and reliant on Samael” woman she was before.

So Cassandra goes to Amanda and Simon to have them do something mysterious to revenge Steph. And this pays off Samael’s previously stated desire to help Cassandra grow. “Are you sure you want to revenge Steph?” “Bold of you to assume that, having vampires at my beck and call, I wouldn’t want to revenge Steph.”

And now everything the episode has been building to comes together – press night at Harbinger’s. Cassandra helps break up a Kindred fight in the basement because, like, a fight was going to happen just to test out Judith’s guards. And Cassandra gets to lay it out to the Kindred that she’s sick of their shit. She is not taking it anymore because she has been granted responsibility for making this fucking place work.

And then there’s Mr. Boswill. I met Patrick, his voice actor, at a garden party over the summer where I was force-fed fresh strawberries and blueberries from the garden. I heard Patrick talking to someone else about wanting to do some voice work post-retirement and wasn’t I the lucky bitch who happened to be sitting there nearby? I told him about the character, showed him the script, and I’m so grateful to him that he played this character as well as he did. Bravo, Patrick. Also, if you want to be cast in Season 2, I advise you to attend a party, invite me, and talk within earshot about wanting to be a voice actor and maybe, just maybe, I asked you for a demo reel.

I wrote the scene in which Mr. Boswill finds out… well, you know, his livelihood has been wrecked (by vampires) in my writer’s workshop and got a good reaction from folks when Cassandra drops, “Are all the cars in your lot okay?” I don’t typically like to write show scenes in workshop but this scene really needed to happen, as many scenes do.

And then the power goes out because, of course it does. I had always planned for the power to be cut on press night but I didn’t know who would cut it until I started plotting out the Episode, when it made sense for Siobhan to do it.

So.

Y’all.

Did you understand that Cassandra performs a literal exorcism on Siobhan? And it works? That she is so creeped out by Cassandra’s rendition of Psalm 91 that she freaks out and runs?

Anyhow.

When I was first proposing the role of Cassandra to Rachel, this scene was one of the big ones I gave her to read. And as I recall, she fucking loved it. When we recorded it in the studio, we did it twice, of course, and Rachel nearly blew out her voice on it by the time we were done. It was glorious. (Side note: I do not recommend that directors ask their actors to blow out their voices in recording. That’s bad. Shame on you if you’ve ever done that. Now, if the actor happens to do so on their own, it’s your job to do aftercare and take them out for ice cream afterwards.)

When I originally wanted to have Cassandra do an exorcism that worked, I told Dee about it. She didn’t understand me at all why it would have worked. So – true story – I went to her kitchen, squeezed a handful of blue Dawn dish soap on my hand, smeared it on my face like blood, put Psalm 91 on my phone, and slowly approached Dee while reading it increasingly loudly. She got the idea.

Okay, so this is the Cassandra at the height of her power. Let’s get around to that tragedy bit next time.

Let’s talk about the Transmigrated Artificial Masterintelligence (TAM).

I went through three iterations of the TAM’s intro scene until I hit on making them sound like a game show host. I imagine the TAM as a cartoon in VtM’s more grounded world, very Roger Rabbit-style. I wanted a mix of comedy and horror in the style of Sam Raimi here, where you never know what’s going to happen. And then I wanted to contrast that with TAM’s BEAST who was all terror, all the time. Cassandra, of course, logics her way to escape destruction, but is also inspired by the BEAST’s call for a Blood Temple, which will help with the whole “Kindred leaving bodies around” problem.

Trivia: I originally had a bit where TAM would talk about asking for Anne Rice’s Lestat to eat, in which it would be revealed that TAM can’t tell between real and fictional vampires because that distinction wasn’t made in its data set. I cut that because it was originally meant as a set up for [FUTURE SPOILERS] but I didn’t end up implementing [FUTURE SPOILERS] so I cut that, even though we had recorded it.

Well, now we get an official intro to the Anarchs. Yes, my VtM-loving cast has made me aware that the Anarchs precede anarchism as a political philosophy. I don’t care. I wanted to contrast anarchism with hierarchical methods of political organization. Also contrasting the more proletariat Anarchs with the “I am the bourgeoisie” Camarilla. And the final contrast was Lorea – what happens in an anarchist system when certain members have excessive financial independence with which they could easily spread their influence but choose not to.

I had no idea who I was going to cast Lorea with until I had cast Rachel as Cassandra. Rachel came over during one recording session and mentioned her partner Katherine Cross was interested in a role after hearing her practice the scripts. I met with Katherine in a cafe and brought over one of Lorea’s soliloquies from Episode 5 (if you’ve heard Episode 5, you know which one). She performed it great, and I cast her. I think she did a magnificent job and it’s a shame y’all had to wait to Episode 3 to properly hear her. I’m also proud that Katherine mentioned to me that if she was going to be in a VtM game, she would play a character a lot like Lorea.

I always intended Cassandra to span the Camarilla and the Anarchs, and this is the episode in which she starts to do so. At first, she’s being held prisoner because Lorea and the Anarchs need her as the trigger to their “nuclear solution” (the TAM), but once Lorea sees how invested Cassandra is in improving vampire’s lives, she remembers how Samael referred to Cassandra as a falcon that returns to one’s arm – only the arm in question is Lorea’s. And so Cassandra is officially set up to bounce between the factions – and of course to date Lorea because polyamory representation is important. Also, look, Cassandra is stuck in the Kindred world – what the fuck else is going to do besides fight to improve things?

And now we come to the Elephant in the Episode – now, I didn’t think of Aaralyn’s non-consensual ghouling of Cassandra as a r*pe scene originally but Amber and Rachel sure told me that it was. So, sorry y’all. I am fervently against writing r*pe for exploitative or titillating purposes. I literally can’t watch any media with r*pe in it. Now, Aaralyn’s ghouling was definitely non-con and played as horrific, but not sexually non-con. I really don’t have a good excuse for writing it except that I think the story needed it to raise the stakes for Vanishing Girl’s introduction and Cassandra’s reunion with Samael. And I think that the strength of the story justifies it. YMMV.

I thought it was a good idea for Cassandra to meet up with Rachel (character, not the actor) and Peter again, especially to hear Peter’s side of his relationship with Simon. And to have people she could express her despair with. Again Rachel (actor, not the character) did a fantastic job in this scene, and with her narration in which Cassandra is saved by someone knocking in the distance.

So I cried a lot when I wrote the reunion between Cassandra and Samael. Not much more to say there, really. At least it gave Samael the impetus to put Cassandra in charge of their club. Also from a production standpoint, I had to foley the fuck out of this scene to show the physicality of Cassandra being close to Samael. So many cloth movements.

Oh, I should probably mention the whole magic Gum Wall thing. I wanted to include as much Seattle Shit in this show that Paradox hadn’t added to their own Seattle VtM setting. So what’s more Seattle Shit than orcas and the Gum Wall? Besides it’s nice to add some creepy lore to some tourist trap thing like the Capitol Hill mystery soda machine, which I would have added to the show, had it not disappeared elsewhere. You’re lucky I didn’t animate the Seattle Lenin statue.

Okay, so Vanishing Girl makes her official appearance. I wanted to cast clans against type so I made Samael a Ventrue who doesn’t want to rule and Vanishing Girl a Toreador who doesn’t want to be seen. Also, yes, I am a huge XTC nerd and I named her after their Dukes of Stratosphear song. (Her actual name is Blaise as you’ll learn in the Anthology when I put it up.) So the Camarilla Ventrue have had it in their craw for a long time that Seattle is run by the Tremere. (What can I say? Money talks and tech makes money.) So with the eventual vote coming up (which, who knows it would actually change anything except make Aaralyn very angry), Vanishing Girl is sent to destabilize Aaralyn. And what’s Samael going to do, tell her no? That would make things very politically difficult and if there’s one thing Samael can’t stand is having things politically difficult for potentially hundreds of years.

And then Cassandra returns to Lorea, partially as a hostage and partially as a date. Look, relationships are complicated. I enjoy increasing their complication because, honestly, that’s what they’re like in the real world. “What have you done with the Lorea I know?” “I fucked her and you should try it sometime!”

(I think Samael and Lorea fucking would be a recipe for disaster. I should have written it.)

Finally, it’s Arturo’s time to shine. With a little precog, there’s no way that Vanishing Girl could get out without Arturo capturing her. When Sangria and I were working on Arturo’s voice, we went through a lot of iterations until we settled on “stoner.” Because that’s probably what Arturo does most of the time to take the edge off of his life.

Trivia – I originally had Brian come back to act as the moneypot to attract Johnathon. Fortunately, I thought better of it when it came time to write the episode.

And at last, Samael gets their wildest dreams realized by telling Aaralyn the fuck off. I loved writing their rant. At long last, Cassandra’s getting her dream of socialized blood feeding for Kindred, setting her up for some fantastic character development next episode!

All right – Episode 1 is setting up the pins (characters, plot) and Episode 2 is where we start knocking them down. Cassandra and Samael’s relationship changes from purely D/s to a classic romance, particularly with the introduction of The Magic Circle.

Most people are probably familiar with The Magic Circle from the Steam game, which is where the concept was popularized, including with me. It’s not only “game/roleplay space” but also “equality space” where people in various power dynamics can consensually release them while admitting they will return when the Circle is broken. This manifests culturally during the historical Feast of Fools where the orders of clergy would swap power roles. Anyhow, The Magic Circle is there for you and it’s very healthy to incorporate it into your and your partners’ lives.

Okay, the episode starts with the introduction of Stephanie, who is basically Cassandra’s touchstone, or connection to the mortal world while she’s off in the Kindred realm (let’s be serious, she’s basically in the lands of the Fae). I based Steph on a partner of mine, who I love very much, and who is sorta that for me too. We start by seeing Cassandra and Steph’s connection, before Cassandra gets pulled back into her grand adventure. We didn’t see that in the previous episode because I want to contain these arcs in the same episode. Let’s face it. Blood Doll episodes are long because they are contained. They include full arcs that are mostly resolved at the climax.

Next, we see the consequences of the Episode 1 ending. The purpose of this is party cohesion. I also did this with Episode 2 of The Mask of Inanna – I put the characters through some trauma so that they would recognize each other’s strengths and become closer. Cassandra is no longer solely Samael’s plaything. She has proven herself and is invested in the world, and others such as Amanda are invested in her too.

Finally, we hear from Aaralyn, the Tremere Prince of Seattle, because let’s face it, tech rules here. She takes very little shit and is one of the few people who can wrangle Esther to do her bidding. Your favorite Dommy Mommy. She also makes huge mistakes like Brian. So, y’know. Consolidated power sorta sucks. [Insert anarchist flag here.]

I fucking love Esther and Cassandra’s scene while Esther is escorting her out. It establishes so much of their dynamic and Rachel and Kait did a fabulous job. We typically record emotionally charged scenes like this at the end of a recording session, as we did here, especially since it strained Rachel’s voice.

By the way, support Rachel on Patreon. Her photography is fantastic.

Back in Samael’s rooms, Amanda finally connects with Cassandra and we establish that Samael does not like pizza, which I was later informed was a Very Ventrue Thing To Do. Keeping her diet to what Samael permits becomes another touchstone for Cassandra. Another friend did tell me that the whole “won’t eat pizza” aspect of Cassandra didn’t work for them, so if it didn’t work for you, you have company. I thought it was important to Cassandra’s character. I dunno.

Then we get The Magic Circle’s introduction with Cassandra and Samael which was one of my favorite scenes to write. It changes their dynamic and lets them open up to each other safely, which they will need to do as the show continues.

Then we meet Jotham. Oh wow. Jotham. He’s a big stoic boy who has been through a lot. He also regards Samael as one of the oppressive class which is absolutely fair. Soleil just pulled out his voice after I described Jotham and it ended up working really well. Soleil has so many voices, it’s wonderful.

We finally hear Lorea and the Anarchs as something more than interstitials. I wanted to explore anarchist power dynamics with Lorea – someone with a ton of cash in an anarchist movement. (Yes, also I am aware that the VtM term “Anarchs” comes before anarchists, but movements change and adapt, y’all.)

After this, Cassandra gets her last day to wrap things up with the mortal world. Sucks to be her, I guess, but it gave me the opportunity to have a nice little scene with Judith, who I adore. Cassandra shouldn’t expect to be able to flit between worlds any more than anyone else in the Fae territory. I particularly was looking forward to the scene in which she breaks up with Steph – heartbreaking to write, of course, but it’s drama and all drama is good. I also wanted to establish that Cassandra refuses to outright lie to her, but won’t tell her the truth for her own protection.

“And then I became a kept woman. But it was okay. I knew my place.” I wrote this to show how caught Cassandra feels, and I directed Rachel to perform it as sad as possible…

In order to set up for the dance sequence! I was driving home from a partner’s house one night when I saw all of the city of Seattle spread out in front of me, lit up and gorgeous, and ELO’s Xanadu came on the radio – it was sublime. I knew I had to have a scene that could convey this feeling to the audience and so I figured I needed a dance sequence.

After asking some other big name furry dance musicians, Avian Invasion agreed to do 1) the intro, 2) the outro, and 3) the big dance number. Avian Invasion was recommended by a friend of mine although I’d seen him perform at various FetchNW club events that I’d been to. Originally I asked for a three minute rave dance track but Avian Invasion provided a five minute track, so I had to rewrite the scene to fill it up. I’m so glad they did though. The dance is a real highlight of the show. Due to how long it took to get the dance track and coordinate with the actors’ schedules, the dance sequence was almost one of the last scenes to be recorded. It was completely worth it though and I hope you agree.

Aaaaaaand then Cassandra gets taken hostage. She can’t get a break, but you know, danger and threats make for excellent drama, and who am I to deny any of you the most compelling drama I can muster?

Also, fuck Jotham. Tossing Cassandra around like that. Humans just can’t get a break in the VtM world, can they?

So, uh, I was neck deep in Victory Asterisk when the idea for this show hit me.

After I had completed Brittle Tourniquet, I needed another project. I had just seen Dune: Part Two and it hit me – an anarchist epic. This was later scaled down to a murder mystery set in an anarchist utopia. I was going to criticize the heck out of it. (Yes, I’m technically an anarchist myself, feel free to judge me.) I wrote the scripts for all seven episodes, got my editor Tony Amato (who also edited my Lambda Literary finalist novel Supervillainz) to finish edits, and started casting voice actors and recording scenes.

Then Season 3 of Loading Ready Run’s Not a Drop to Drink happened. Blame Jacob Burgess for Blood Doll.

In one of the later Not a Drop to Drink episodes, Jacob takes the players through a gala ball where they have to navigate all kinds of social dilemmas and manipulations. But the thing that stuck out to me was a background detail he mentioned – humans called Blood Dolls wandering around the room for Kindred to feed on. I wanted to know about them. (I wanted to be them but that’s another story.)

I was thinking about what sort of perception they would have of the Kindred. From a newcomer’s perspective, these were gods. They could do god-like things. What the hell did their existence mean from a religious or philosophical perspective? And why were they so bad at being gods?

I immediately dumped all this on a lover of mine about a character I would like to play if I ever got into a VtM TTRPG. A Blood Doll with the attitude, “Why can’t you be better gods?“

(I have since been informed by every friend of mine who runs VtM TTRPGs that I am banned from their games because of my eternal unstoppable urge to dissect everything in a postmodern fashion. Blame Grant Morrison for that.)

Anyhow, this was in late December 2024. I was churning through Victory Asterisk when a major problem hit the recording cycle. Our main voice actor wasn’t available to record often enough to get through the massive amount of lines we needed. (Maybe if you haven’t noticed from my other works like The Mask of Inanna but I tend to write things epic-sized.) We had recorded about 1/3rd of the scripts while the idea for a Blood Doll show seized me. I started writing down ideas for it. I started doing research online for fundamental religious concepts that might work well to explain vampires. On a recommendation from one of my actors, I started watching episodes of Esoterica. I absolutely adored them and found that he had researched a lot of what I was looking for.

Bits of dialogue started to come to me. Characters began to emerge from the ether. I attended a VtM LARP with a friend where I tried out some of the concepts I’d researched on the participants. I’m sure I annoyed them quite a bit, although my friend said they were cool with this afterward.

In February, I worked daily on an outline for the Blood Doll show. I think it took a couple weeks to complete (17k words). I settled on eight episodes, which is pretty much the length of most Prestige Television seasons. I fought tooth and nail to chart out Cassandra’s voyage through the VtM world. I felt the urge to start writing Episode 1 before I’d finished the outline, but I’m very glad I waited until the outline was complete.

I wrote Episode 1 (18.5k words) in a week, y’all. This show fucking poured out of me. Subsequent episodes took about a week or two to get into draft state, so I could pass them off to Tony for edits and revisions. I started to consider casting the show. I think I was on Episode 4 or 5 when I asked one of my actors on Victory Asterisk, the amazing slam poet Rachel K. Zall, whether she’d be interested in the role of Cassandra. She was. Rachel and I had known each other back in Boston so performing in my show seemed a natural extension of our work back in Gendercrash (PDF).

Samael was harder to cast. I was considering asking Jacob Burgess if he wanted the role – I could hear him doing the voice. However, getting him to record synchronously with Rachel would be a challenge. I preferred all my actors to record in my private studio which wasn’t going to happen with Jacob.

So while winding down recording on Victory Asterisk, one of my voice actors, Soleil (who I had recast with Dee since Soleil had been perpetually busy), suddenly became available. I brought them into my studio to record a bit part. And while they were at my place, I figured, what the hell. I told them about the Blood Doll project and asked them to try out Samael’s lines.

Well, they fucking nailed them, and my problems were over.

A few days later, I went into the Victory Asterisk chat, gave them a cut of Episode 1 (with some scenes missing) and told them that I was going to set the project aside to work full time on Blood Doll. I was up to Blood Doll script Episode 5 when we started recording the show. I brought Rachel and Soleil over to my place to read the scripts together and their chemistry was incredible. I knew we had a winner on our hands.

Okay, I should actually get to some of the notes on Blood Doll, Episode 1 itself. Because I’m a writer and a bitch (the two are often synonymous), I wanted to start the show without Cassandra and then surprise the audience by switching over to her perspective. This was similar to how I started The Mask of Inanna halfway through one of the minisodes, and ended the episode playing the first half of the minisode to give the whole episode an uroboros effect. I like playing with perspective and expectations, what can I say.

I’ve been attending Tony Amato’s writer’s workshops on and off since the year of our Lord 2000 and I spent most of my time writing vignettes about each of the Blood Doll characters. So I had a chance to flesh them out before they showed up in the scripts. Not so with Cassandra – I played fast and loose with her. Her personality came out during the writing of Episode 1.

(Also the final Blood Doll scripts don’t especially match the outline I had written, which is for the best. The Episode 1 script remained the closest to the Episode 1 outline, but the others went in their own directions. I’m glad I wrote the outline though as it gave me a lot of plot points that I could select from and use in the subsequent episodes.)

So we start Episode 1 with what Rachel calls the “odious” techbro vampires. They are the inciting incident for the show – creating the TAM and dragging Cassandra into the Kindred world. They are also the entry point for the audience, many of whom may not understand how vampires work in the World of Darkness. So Brian and Jeffrey spell out how everything happens. Rachel later convinced me that we needed something more than just the techbros to tell the audience that the show wasn’t going to be just about them. So I wrote the “Scene 0” with Cassandra and Samael together six months later to tell the audience, “no really, this show is about a love story, not techbros.”

I’m especially pleased by our Brian and Jeffrey voice actors who were playing against type compared to their Victory Asterisk characters. Brian’s voice actor was a sweetest little trans man in V*, and we had to rehearse to turn up his smarm and asshole settings.

In my writing, I like to push things to their logical conclusions, so I came up with the idea of Embracing an AI as an investigative tool into The Beast, and ghouling an orca because, Welcome to the Pacific Northwest. I had to start the show with a bang so I frontloaded both of these. (We’ll get to the Gum Wall in Episode 3.)

Cassandra’s subsequent imprisonment in Aaralyn’s chambers was another bit of tutorialization I wanted to use to teach the audience more about the World of Darkness. I like Rachel and Peter as making the best of a not-great kidnapping situation, and I thoroughly annoyed voice actor Rachel by naming a character that she was not playing Rachel in the Episode 1 script. I could have changed Script Rachel’s name but I didn’t see a huge reason to.

I did change Amanda’s name though. She was originally “Carolyn” but the Seattle Prince was named “Aaralyn.” One of them had to change and it would not be the Prince.

I’m very proud of the work that Rachel, Soleil, and I did on the sex scene. I needed to declare exactly how erotic I was intending on taking the show, even if I never intended to have another explicit sex scene again. I’m also a bitch so I needed to sell the eroticism of the sex scene to make the cut-away to the Anarch’s warehouse that much funnier. My actors said it was a highlight of the episode.

The sex scene also establishes that consent is everything. Samael asks “Is this all right?” Cassandra has the opportunity to say anything she wants, and oh gods, does she want it.

I like using the word “cavorting.” What can I say.

Yes, Samael is basically Jared Harris; specifically his role of Anderson Dawes from The Expanse. Soleil is a big Expanse fan and knew exactly the voice to do. I regularly joke with my cast that Blood Doll is my midlife crisis Daddy dom fanfic. What do you want from me, I’m technically human.

Finally, we get to the meat of the episode. Cassandra (with her name withheld, although Samael is fully aware of it, having read her driver’s license) and Samael discussing religious topics from over a month’s of my research. I had to make it hot. Judge me if you want. I’m especially proud of the “God’s own breath” bit. These scenes were actually the first ones we recorded. It was vital to nail down exactly how Cassandra and Samael would sound together. Everything else came from that.

The raid on the Anarch’s warehouse came from one of my earliest ideas for the show. Cassandra had to be a Blood Doll for other Kindred too, of her own free will. And I was thinking about what role my Blood Doll character might have in a TTRPG, which is, when shit goes down, the other players can take a sip off of her. So that needed to happen on the show. It gives her and Samael’s coterie a moment of awesomeness, and a reason why she gets kidnapped by the Anarchs and has to retell the whole Episode to them.

One of my actors, the one who dragged me to the VtM LARP, read the Episode 1 script and kept telling me “it’s too long.” They kept saying, “there are so many points at which you could stop.” I replied, yes, but there weren’t any points at which we could start a subsequent episode. Well, once they heard the whole Episode 1, I didn’t hear a peep out of them about cutting it, so here it is, in all its hour-and-forty-five-minutes glory. Hope you enjoyed. They’re only going to get wilder from here.