Sisters

The sudden disappearance of the Tremere antitribu in the late 1990s was hardly a clean break. Although Goratrix’s house itself seems to have been swallowed up in some sudden reckoning, it left behind it countless experiments and thaumaturgical workings. Many of these have come to naught, but a few have grown unchecked. The Hungry Sisters are one such experiment. The pseudo-Cainite shock troops known as Blood Brothers were the product of Tremere antitribu experimentation in the Old World, undertaken in cooperation with a few especially twisted Tzimisce sorcerers. For most Sabbat, these “Frankensteins” were little more than a sometimes useful tool. They worked well to undermine stability in a city being targeted for crusade or to enforce the archbishop’s dominance at home if need be. A few of Goratrix’s followers, however, hoped to improve on the design. One such antitribu, Elena Mendoza Vasquez, created a single Blood Brother capable of reproducing itself. Vasquez developed this variation on the Embrace from Tremere research on altering blood potency. In it, this Frankenstein (a female) locks herself in a mutual feeding with her victim, allowing their blood to flow from one to the other and back again in a perverse circuit. Both sire and childe become immobilized as their common blood supply mixes and distills itself to a concentrate of vampiric vitae. Between three to 10 nights later, if all goes well, the feeding ends and sire and childe rise. This artificial Embrace utterly transforms the childe, remaking it into a physical duplicate of its sire and erasing most of its memories to integrate it into the hive mind of the brood. Innate and learned capacities shift, so that the only thing that truly distinguishes the childe is her higher generation. This process is hardly universally successful. Elena’s work was very much in progress when she vanished, and only about one in 10 such Embraces result in a viable, properly integrated new brood-mate. Most fledglings simply never rise from their death, while a small minority awake in a frenzied state similar to Wassail, from which they never recover. Even when the transformative Embrace is successful, there’s a heavy price to pay, as both sire and childe awake starved for blood. Not only do they rise with only a hint of vitae distillate left in their systems, but their vampiric metabolisms are so charged that they burn blood at a phenomenal rate. It is not uncommon for freshly risen Frankensteins to consume the blood of a dozen mortals before feeling sated. They earn their “hungry” moniker with ease - all the more since this post-Embrace feeding is highly ecstatic for the vampires and makes them crave further reproduction. Elena Vasquez never intended to let the three “brothers” she had created loose in Mexico. According to some of the notes she left behind in her chantry, she was working toward a thaumaturgical ritual with which she could grant and withdraw the ability to Embrace to other Blood Brothers, presumably as a way to make them personally loyal to her as a sort of “hivemother” of their kind. She died with the rest of the antitribu before her research progressed any further, and her three “prototypes” remained in torpor in her subterranean chantry until November of 2000, when the koldun Esteban del Agua y Tierra and the Harbinger of Skulls known as La Viuda Blanca broke in to exhume Vasquez’s research. They freed one of the Frankensteins in the process, who escaped into the shantytowns of the eastern fringe, where she has gone to ground. In her two years of freedom, the escapee has spawned again and again. Whole neighborhoods of the poor have been slaughtered to feed the ravenous hunger of first one, then two, then 10 and now 20 Hungry Sisters. They have only the sketchiest memories of the nights before the escape from the chantry, but the Sisters have established a sort of petty domain of fear among some of the city’s poor. The locals do not know exactly what they are; theories include ghosts seeking vengeance and saints come down to exact holy justice, but a small cadre of men now serve as their eyes and ears in the day and choose victims to feed to the brood. They are rewarded with sips of their mistresses’ blood, which gives them strength and a hint of the sisters’ bottomless hunger. The entire brood of Hungry Sisters nests in the basement of a disused hacienda that has seen the shantytowns grow up around it. Most of the above-ground part of the building is gone, destroyed in the 1985 earthquake, but the large basement now crawls with the Sisters and is littered with the bones of their victims. The Sisters aren’t privy to any deep secrets beyond their own existence. The brood, which shares thoughts as well as blood, is aware that their hunger grows ever stronger. With every reproduction, their need to consume and burn blood grows. Soon, the shanty will not be enough to sate them. The Sisters keep a clutch of a dozen or so ghouls, who help them to keep much of the surrounding shantytown paralyzed by fear. Unbeknownst to them, the Sisters are also under observation by Esteban del Agua y Tierra and others in the local Sabbat. The young koldun hopes to learn the secret and undermine his own rivals. He is well aware that they are on the edge of Wassail, but is unsure what to do about it. Bishop Natalio, meanwhile, sees them as a threat to his own herd in the shantytowns and is readying a purge of the creatures.

Open by id →