By Strutinan Cerberus (abrein@jeffnet.org)
"Johny, I`m hungry."
After a couple of minutes under Johny`s blow torch glare, Shank was filled with relief when his Sire broke out into a rare grin and confessed his own hunger. "I know an easy enough mark. Consider him to be your emancipation gift."
Shank was ecstatic. After three years of almost continual beatings and humiliation, Johny was finally going to present him to the prince! This news was so startling and welcome that Shank didn`t notice that Johny`s grin had not left his face.
An hour later Shank was in a parking garage waiting for his sire to arrive when he saw Johny drive up and park beside him, his cell phone antenna contracting as he hung up the receiver.
Johny spoke with barely restrained eagerness, "He`ll be walking along the sidewalk on the other side of the street in a couple of minutes. You can`t miss him; he`ll be wearing a Klingon uniform."
Puzzlement temporarily replaced Shank`s suspicion of Johny`s behavior. "Is he a trekkie or something?" When his Sire failed to respond Johny became doubly suspicious. What was the old Brujah up to? Was this some sort of test to see if he was worthy of emancipation? Was this `easy mark` someone`s ghoul, or maybe even another one of the kindred? Shank had heard rumours about Johny being a diabolist, even about his destruction of his previous childer. Was he supposed to be killed by this blood bag or was he supposed to follow in his Sire`s footsteps?
Just then Shank spotted the night`s meal accross the street, an old man in a trekkie`s make believe Klingon uniform. Pitiful, the old gaffer must have been a hundred. He looked at Johny to see if his Sire wanted to do the deed himself, but Johny just motioned that the geezer was all his. Delighted, Shank ran accross the street and with one Potence boosted punch sent the old man hurling into a wall to lie crumpled at its base. When he bent down to grab an arm and dig in, Shank was amazed to have the mark`s arm reach up and touch his face.
Shank struggled to pull away but was held fast by countless hands that he could not see, only feel. Johny came into his field of vision as the old man finished realigning his bones into their proper positions and stood up. "See Mark, I told he would be an easy target."
"Are you sure you want to get rid of this one Johny? That was a pretty good hit he gave me. Best one yet."
"I don`t care. If he had half a brain he would have been suspicious of an old guy in a trekkie outfit walking home, in this neigborhood, at five a.m."
"Well then, I`ll have those pictures you wanted in your car by sunset."
"Nice doing business with you Mark."
One night in 1955 he saw a small group of people playing something called a role-playing game, and was intrigued when one of them said, "I`ll stake the vampire guard; you two go for the Lich." Wondering what was going on, Jose introduced himself and became a regular participant in their games. One of the other players, a guy named Timothy, was always asking questions about the undead they came across and trying to gather more supernatural power for himself.
After a few weeks, Jose met with Timothy outside of the group and offered to tell him all about the undead as well as give him true supernatural power. What self-respecting death obsessed gamer would not take him up on the offer?
After the Embrace, Jose noticed that Timothy didn`t rot, but grew older. His grasp of the Samedi`s disciplines was abyssmal, but Timothy compensated by picking up Thaumaturgy an his own and developing two new disciplines out of whole cloth. Realizing that Timothy had become something entirely new, Jose bade him to hide his relationship to the Samedi in order to avoid their stigma, and to diablerize him so that his secret could never be revealed by casual inspection of Jose`s aura. With bloody tears Timothy granted his Sire`s last wish.
Timothy then started embracing the gaming group, and the five of them presented themselves to the prince as members of a neutral bloodine known as Liches in 1959.
Today the Liches are a small network of undead concerned with the acquisition of magical knowledge for themselves an their clan as well as the enjoyment of hobby games such as miniatures board games, RPGs and most recently (as well as avidly) Magic the Gathering. They can be contacted at most major gaming conventions and competitions (in which they almost always win). The oldest known Lich is Timothy, the head of the bloodline, who is seventh generation due to the diablerie of his Sire.
Upstart bastards! They are not nearly as powerful as they pretend to be. We will destroy them soon. We really will. Really.
Sabbat: They are dangerous and unpredictable. Never show them anything but your strength and confidence or they will tear you down.
Creapy little things, but more useful alive than dead.
Werewolves: They know a lot about magic but are miserly with that power and very anti-social. Avoid them at all costs, unless you can swipe something from them.
Lousy thieves are worse than a Ragabash cleptomaniac.
Mages: Our brothers in knowledge and our worst enemies. Harvest the friendship of those that follow the Traditions but destroy those that flock to the banner of the Technocracy.
They know how to enjoy themselves and share our passion for magick. They are soulmates.