#rey malcolm

[wiliowtreemarch]

idk if/when ill ever get the time to finish this but ive been thinking a lot about new york by night s1

[tanoraqui]

While watching NY by Night, Rey was my least favorite PC, mostly because I find anger kind of boring in characters when it’s their go-to reaction, rather than a deep driving force. But! Rey is the one I’m most dwelling on a week later.

When he was alive, Reyes [surname unshared] from the Bronx changed his name to “Rey Malcolm” because it’s “nondescript on a piece of paper”, so he could get a job in Manhattan where he always wears suits and can afford a Manhattan apartment and sometimes treat himself to a bottle of fancy whiskey. He assimilated, fervidly, and it worked. (Though we have to ask: did it, really? Rey presents as a Finance Guy, but his go-to Finance Work is money-laundering schemes. His whole career, was he working for richer white men who thought it was apt, maybe even thought it was funny, how this should-be gangster thug from the Bronx had dressed up in a white-collar suit to do white-collar crime?)

And now in his unlife, he’s once again just randomly “born” as a kind of person, by nature, whom those with power look down on. Whom they don’t accept in their ranks. Whom they regard as closer to animals than to humans. Undead society is even more strictly tiered, social groups differentiated, than living society, and there are NO precedents for a Gangrel in the Camarilla (Reyes Malcolm was not, at least, the first Hispanic man to work on adjacent to Wall Street). And he is trying again, SO HARD, to assimilate, to earn & prove his place—because it worked once already! Didn’t it work once already? It will work again, it has to.

If we ever get s3, I hope Rey gets to figure some shit out, and lose his temper with a righteous cause.

[chupenguin]

working on an anarch coterie talks to Isaac ghouls and start to undertand isaac better fic:

“I asked you if you were happy and you didn’t answer,” Serif says. “You said you were content.”

Angela looks at her and seems almost surprised.

“Of course I’m not happy,” her answer doesn’t surprise Serif, that’s what she expected. But then, Angela keeps talking. “My friend is dead. One of my oldest friends, offered himself on a silver plate for murder. Of course I’m not happy miss Serif. I saw Isaac die. How could I be?”

She hadn’t stopped to think about that part.

“He thinks he was lucky enough to choose the embrace. That he’s not like you. But from the outside? From Michel and mine point of view? He killed himself. Gave someone the knife willingly. It’s going to take more time for me to be happy about it, because I don’t even have a grave to mourn. My friend may be dead and still walking, but he’s still dead."

[conteur-reveur]

Rey: "You don't think that's the beast talking?"

Serif: "Maybe it is. So?"

Isaac: "You don't have to fight it all the time."

Fuego: "You guys fight it??"

[eclecticfiend]

The Anarch Coterie as (semi-)viral Tweets p.2

[kindredbynight]

[wren-blue]

My original plan was to paint Fuego and Rey with similar colours, but I had trouble getting Rey to fit with Fuego’s palette. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere!

[centaurianthropology]

A ‘NY by Night’ Introduction, for All My Poor Followers with a Morbid Curiosity

I’ve been watching Ny by Night since episode 1, and I have to say that I’m obsessed with how good this show is!  Every player is at the top of their game, the main cast is fantastic (and distractingly lovely across the board), and the characters are so fascinating.  I watched the first few seasons of LA by Night, and though I enjoyed it, I never really fell down the rabbit hole with it.  But this show has exactly the right ingredients to get me deeply engaged, and the core of that is the main cast of characters.

For those of my readers who may not yet be watching NY by Night, it’s a live-play series that airs every Friday.  It’s set in the Vampire the Masquerade RPG system, which has lore that’s a bit too deep to get into here, but the simplest explanation is that all the characters play vampires.  The standard ‘party’ is called a coterie, a group of vampires, usually recently turned, that have been thrown together by circumstance to try to survive the nights they now find themselves in.  There are 13 different clans, or types of vampire that one can play, each playing into various folkloric beliefs about vampires.

I’ll probably be writing up my thoughts about individual episodes, but for the curious amongst my followers who might be interested in getting into a really cool new live-play series, I’ve written this as an introduction to the world, the characters, and at least briefly to the story so far.  This means that the intro contains loose spoilers up to episode 4, so for those who want to go in completely blind, maybe just dive in.  If you would prefer a simple non-spoiler intro it’s this: this is a great introduction series to Vampire the Masquerade, has a fantastic core cast of characters, and is a delightful watch for horror fans, goths, and anyone who wants to dive into a live-play series that tends to be a little darker than D&D.    

The coterie is particularly young and inexperienced in this campaign, which is great for the new viewer who might not know what’s going on.  The oldest of them was turned about 4 years ago, and the youngest having been turned barely 6 months ago.  This means that a lot of concepts and world-building need to be explained to these baby vamps either by the limited knowledge of their oldest member, or by NPCs. This acts as a nice introduction for the characters and an audience who might not be familiar with the World of Darkness or Vampire the Masquerade.

Our newly-formed coterie find themselves in The Bronx, which is currently controlled by the Anarchs, one of three major political organizations of vampires in this world (there are other minor political factions, but they haven’t come up in the story yet).  The Anarchs are, as their name implies, vampires that believe in self-governance and a lack of large-scale hierarchy and structure.  They tend to me more accepting than the other vampire political organizations, but their weakness is their lack of organization, which makes them easy to pick off.  In New York, they are very much the political minority.  

Across the river in Manhattan are the Camarilla, the dominant political faction, defined by meticulous rules and hierarchies meant to keep their members safe and secret. Their strength  is their organization and their unity.  Their weakness is their rigidity and their inability to adapt to changing times.  

Finally, in the shadows, having been kicked out of New York about 50 years prior to this story, are the Sabbat.  They are an organization that believes vampires to be so beyond humanity that they don’t need organization or rules or secrecy.  They are the most in touch with and accepting of their inner monsters, and range from uncontrolled and disorganized murder machines to a highly organized medieval death cult, depending on which group of Sabbat are in play. In most games of VTM, they are the antagonists.

In a world filled with older, far more dangerous creatures of the night, with huge political machinations they barely understand at play all around them, our coterie of baby vampires are particularly vulnerable.  Hence, these 4 very unlikely allies are now working together.

In no particular order (because I could never choose who is my favorite amongst the four, as they’re all amazing), the coterie consists of:

Margot ‘Fuego’ Walker – the youngest of the coterie.  Fuego is the most closely tied member of the coterie to The Bronx, having been born and raised in the area, from a sprawling family tied in with the borough and their politics.  She served on the borough council before a vampire from the Camarilla turned her and planted her back in her own community as an attempt to undermine Anarch control in The Bronx.  Her sire’s name is Rafferty, and he, and by extension she, are Ventrue, a clan that play into the vampires-as-greedy-controlling-capitalists trope.  Fuego finds herself torn between her love for her home and her community and her desire for power and control brought on by becoming a vampire.  She seems to be trying to square this circle by vying for power in The Bronx, trying to control it in order to protect it. She is intelligent, seductive, a master manipulator, and tries to appear less dangerous than she really is.  She is played by Aabria Iyengar.

Serif – Serif is a little older than Fuego, but acts younger.  She has a plucky, spunky attitude and a love for graffiti art. She is a well-known local tagger to the Bronx, where she as been living for at least a while.  She is not originally from the Bronx, and her background is shadowed in some mystery.  Her sire is someone named Argus, and they are Ravnos, an uncommon clan of nomads and artists. They play into the vampires-as-illusionists trope, and she can cast minor illusions and vanish into shadows. We recently found out that her mother is a ghoul, a human who is addicted to the blood of a particular vampire and acts as a servant to that vampire.  It seems likely that Serif’s sire is also the vampire that controls her mother.  Beneath her good humor, smiles, and easy-going demeanor, there is a lot of anger and resentment in Serif that I’m really excited to see play out.  She clearly wants a group to belong with, and she was the first to really embrace their coterie.  She is played by Mayanna Berrin.

Reyes ‘Rey’ Malcolm – Rey is about the same age as Serif as far as turning goes, but is physically the oldest of the group, being a ‘jogging in the morning’ 50.  He was originally from the Bronx, but moved to Manhattan to make his fortune.  It’s unclear what business he was in, but he was successful enough to have a penthouse. He also, at some point, got into money laundering, and was apparently well-versed in it.  Within the past year, Rey was ‘mugged’ in an alleyway, and crawled back to his penthouse to find himself changing.  He and his unknown sire are Gangrel, usually the ‘outlander’ vampires who are most in touch with nature and their animalistic nature.  It seems like his embrace was a touch of irony on behalf of his sire, and Rey has gone from a successful businessman to ending up back in the Bronx with his self-control shredded, massive anger issues, and a tendency to fly off the handle and try to confront every problem with fist and claw.  He’s a deeply conflicted character, wanting to be a gentleman (he regularly holds doors for ladies, stands when they enter the room, etc) and a smooth operator, but ruled by a beast that wants him to give into his basest nature.  He regularly makes poor choices, and is fairly easily manipulated.  Of all of the coterie, he is the least happy with what he has become, and has the hardest struggle with his monstrous nature. He is played by Joey Rassool.

Isaac Brooke – Isaac is the oldest of the coterie, and somewhat their de facto leader.  He was a member of a gang called the Midnighters, who are mostly street racers, though he was apparently more involved in a protection racket.  He got involved with people and things he didn’t understand, and instead of being killed, he was embraced about 4 years ago.  Since then he has made a meticulous study of his new existence, and has become the group’s best source of information about the world of vampires, about clans, and about the politics around them, even though his perspective and knowledge is fairly limited.  Interestingly, Isaac and his sire (a being called Vacla who is male or female or neither depending on their mood) are Tzimisce.  Like Serif and the Ravnos, Tzimisce are rare, but unlike Ravnos, who generally give off a neutral impression to other vampires, the Tzimisce tend to garner reactions that range from distrust to revulsion.  This has to do both with their close traditional ties to the Sabbat, for whom they acted as spiritual leaders, and also for their particular aptitude for the discipline of Vicissitude, or flesh-crafting.  They are vampires that lean hardest into body horror, and twist both themselves and those around them into whatever form suits them.  They are traditionally associated with torture and sadism.  Isaac, however, is both very young and seems to have been made outside the Sabbat, and with little understanding of his clan’s traditional place in that Sabbat or even of Vicissitude (or at least that’s what he claims).  He projects an eerie calm, a possessiveness that is common amongst Tzimisce, and a weird friendliness that seems at least part a push-back against the overwhelmingly negative reactions he gets when other vampires find out what he is.  Despite his clan and the very real danger it puts his coterie in, Isaac seems to care about them to some extent, and has gone out of his way to provide them with shelter and advice and as close to friendly help as he’s able to give. He’s played by Alexander Ward.

These four are still early in their story, having established domain (a very small area that they have been given to control by older and more powerful vampires in their area) of the neighborhood of Port Morris.  They face a run-down new home, an eye-sore of a high-rise building project meant to gentrify the area that Fuego especially wants to detonate, and a ‘monster’ that seems to bode very ill for the coterie and for all the vampires in New York.

Because if that monster is what they think it is, the Sabbat are back.  And both the Anarchs and the Camarilla are in huge trouble.