Samantha "Sam" Moon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thegreatexperiment) wrote2014-05-11 05:00 pm
thegreatexperiment) wrote2014-05-11 05:00 pm
Entry tags:
Sam's Backstory
Sam heard many different versions of the story of her conception and birth, over the years. What they all agreed on was that her father’s name was Stephen Zachar and that he was a high-ranking member of the Ordo Dracul, a secretive order of vampire scientists, obsessed with finding ways to overcome the vampire condition. The stories further agreed that he was a Daeva, a clan of vampires known for being strong, charming, and quick. Finally, in every version of the story, she was born on the eighth of January, 1994.
The similarities end there. In some versions of the story, Stephen wished to punish a disobedient servant, and so, implanted her with his seed just to see what would happen. In other versions of the story, he fell in love with a mortal woman named Christina Delgadi and simply yearned to have a home and family with her. Some versions even claim that Sam was immaculately conceived by Stephen himself. She really never believed those versions. But regardless of the actual circumstances of her nativity, what Sam first learned was that sometime after she was born, that one of Zachar’s rivals in the Ordo, Karen Kostow, kidnapped her one night, secreting her away from her home in Lincoln, Nebraska, to put her into the foster system of Chicago, Illinois.
She didn’t learn this for many years, though.
From the time of her kidnapping, in 1994, until her Embrace seventeen years later, Sam lived a troubled, utterly mortal life. For some reason, no one seemed eager to adopt the screaming infant. She suffered from nightmares, even from an early age. Bounced around from home to home, it wasn’t until she was nine years old that she was finally placed in her “forever home” with a well-off couple—Robert Halper and Anne Lyons—living in Lake Forest, Illinois.
Samantha was smart. Painfully so. And the suburban schools and lifestyle allowed her intelligence to blossom. Sam’s adoptive parents were good people, but even at her young age, she felt like a stranger in their house. The relationships were always cordial and warm, but never deep or intimate. At least, that’s the way that Sam felt. She could never quite trust them enough to use the word “love,” trust them enough to believe that they wouldn’t one day send her back.
That said, she did become surprisingly close to her adoptive mother’s younger brother, Tom Lyons. Uncle Tom was fun and exciting and he brought an air of energy and life into the household. Young Samantha was equally fond of Tom’s long-term girlfriend, Tina Presten. As Sam grew, she found herself spending more time with Tom and Tina than with her parents. They were wild and artistic and worldly and Samantha wanted to soak that up. It was a foregone conclusion that any time they invited her on an outing, she was eager to join them. They went to art openings and concerts and street festivals. Anything, as long as it was creative. In retrospect, though, Sam would always regret agreeing to join them at that rock opera for her sixteenth birthday.
As they walked from the theatre, discussing how very Avant-garde the music seemed, a man from the crowd was overly drawn to Sam. His attentions were decidedly unwanted and after several polite attempts to get rid of him, Tom decided to play the hero. He stood up to the stranger, forcefully asking him to leave the uninterested and underaged girl alone. Words turned into shoves and shoves quickly turned into blows. And as the terrified Tina and Samantha watched, Tom was thrown against a dumpster. His head cracked on a corner and he was dead before he hit the ground, blood going everywhere. His attacker fled, but as he left, Samantha was sure, beyond any doubt, that she saw the man’s face...change.
The tragedy rocked the family to its foundation. Life had always been so completely safe. Needless to say, Samantha’s insistence that the attacker had been something other than human was largely dismissed, chalked up to the shock. Sam, however, could not unsee what she saw that night. And only Tina seemed willing to listen. But what was there to say? Samantha, the star student, already graduating early and bound for college, couldn’t find the right books to consult, to explain what she’d seen. It was only a late bout of teenage rebellion that told her anything. Sneaking out of the house, going to Goth clubs and punk bars, she began to hear whispers about a world of darkness. But they were little more than unsubstantiated rumors, half science fiction and half superstition.
At the age of seventeen, Samantha was shipped off to the Arizona State University, enrolled as a biology and art history double major, with an art minor. Although she’d been accepted to both Harvard and Stanford, she stubbornly insisted on a party school, where she felt she would have the opportunity to escape and learn more about this supposed world of darkness. And, free of adult supervision, her teenage rebellion did briefly turn into a way of life. She spent large chunks of her time in the seediest places she could find, mostly around Phoenix, seeking out the hidden vampire world. But after months of trying, she found nothing. And so, Samantha settled back into her old habits, studying and going to artistic events. She found that a lot of regulars of the Phoenix art scene seemed drawn to her for no apparent reason, like the stranger who killed Tom. Two particularly ardent suitors, Larry Hiler and Richard Frye, became a little too familiar for her comfort. She couldn’t really figure out a way to get away from them and the steady streams of gifts they sent her. It didn’t matter in the end. The die was cast.
Both men were Daeva, vampires over a hundred years old. It seemed that the two of them had been in arbitration with the vampire prince of Phoenix, Cynthia Kane, for some time, over the right to turn Sam into a vampire. Their strange obsession with a seemingly unimpressive girl was annoying Prince Kane. She finally ordered Larry and Richard to bring Samantha before her, so that she could find out just what was so special about her. Outside of an art opening in the city, Samantha felt a chloroformed cloth over her mouth and nose and was out before she could scream. She came to in the middle of what seemed like a medieval court, hearing Larry and Richard argue before the Prince over who had the proper claim to her. The whole thing seemed utterly absurd to her. The Prince agreed. Finally irritated with the whole thing, the Prince decided to just flip a coin. Larry won (it was tails) and Richard went into frenzy of anger.
Richard started tearing apart the court. Many of the vampires there saw this as an excuse to air all kinds of grudges. The fight turned into complete pandemonium and Sam, the token mortal in the room, was gravely injured. Bleeding out and wounded, Sam was pulled out of harm’s way by a vampire named Karen Kostow. Karen only saw one way that Sam could get out of the situation alive, and that was to be Embraced. She asked Sam if that was what she wanted and Samantha immediately said yes. After that, she lost consciousness.
When Samantha woke again, she was exceedingly disoriented. Karen began to educate her. They were both vampires, she explained: a clan known as the “Ventrue.” They were marked for their mental abilities as well as a certain measure of instability. Once Sam was able to wrap her mind around that much, Karen continued to explain that vampires had been in existence since at least the year 33 C.E. and that there were five clans—or families—and five political covenants. Like in the stories of old, they needed to drink blood to survive. Sunlight burned them. Fire wounded them grievously. Stakes would send them into a coma. Holy water would simply get them wet, unless wielded by someone with True Faith. For someone so young, Sam handled the transition with remarkable grace.
It wasn’t long until Karen realized, however, that Sam was the baby she’d kidnapped many years ago. She was reticent about the subject for a year, focusing on teaching Sam how to survive in her new life. But Samantha, who was still obsessed with what happened to her Uncle Tom, eventually managed to draw some of the truth out of Karen. Karen reluctantly told her that she’d been born a dhampir (half vampire), of Daeva parentage, which was why the Daeva had always been drawn to her as a mortal. Dhampir were incredibly rare. Most vampires thought they were only the stuff of myth and legend. She further explained who Sam’s father was, relating the dozens of different stories about how and why Sam was born. No matter how much Sam pleaded and begged, Karen wouldn’t share what motivated her to kidnap a baby in the first place. She continually insisted that she’d done “the right thing.” But Sam wanted to understand what that was.
This eventually became a huge sticking point between them, frustrating Sam enough to ask to be emancipated only a year after her Embrace. She was very surprised when Karen agreed to let her go. When she asked why, Karen explained that she’d long ago left the Ordo because she no longer desired to be a part of their “evil” politics. And Sam, for better or for worse, was a part of their politics. Stephen Zachar had five children. They were his biological children from his mortal life who had all been Embraced. They were rallying for a position within the Ordo and it had been declared that whichever one of them managed to locate the long-lost Sam would earn the title. Sam was shocked and appalled, both by what Karen refused to tell her and by what Karen had neglected to tell her. They parted on tense terms, although they agreed to keep in touch with one another. As a parting gift, Karen took Sam to Illinois and, before her eyes, convinced Robert and Anne that she had gone backpacking in Europe and that they didn’t need to worry about her.
Against her better judgment, Samantha got in touch with Tina, who had moved out to LA, where she was working as a costume designer for low-budget, independent movies. Sam lied to her old friend, claiming that she was transferring to USC. Tina was only too happy to give her a place to crash. Sam moved into the basement apartment with Tina, adopting the persona of the lazy college student, taking classes at night and sleeping all day. The arrangement seemed to work.
Meanwhile, Sam decided that she needed to learn the truth about her origins and her family. This meant getting involved with the vampire society in LA. Unlike Phoenix, which was set up as a simple monarchy, the vampire society of Los Angeles was sprawling and bureaucratic. The Prince—one Elizabeth Englehart—had dozens of ministries and counsels and representatives. There were hundreds of vampires in the area. One of the first people she met there was Avery Anderson, a member of the Ordo Dracul. As it turned out, Avery was also Karen’s childe, Embraced in the late 1950s. Avery was a former FBI agent and a complete conspiracy theorist. To most people, his insane ideas and thorough files on everything from the moon landing to Celtic demons were eccentric and laughable. Sam, however, found that she liked Avery a lot. He wasn’t at all what she expected from a member of the Ordo Dracul, based on Karen’s descriptions. While Sam was reluctant to tell him the truth about her dhampir origins, she still found herself growing closer to and fonder of Avery.
She joined the Carthian Movement, a progressive political party with a focus on reforming the feudal order of vampire life from days gone by. She made sure to be on friendly terms with every covenant, however. Having been Embraced during her punk stage of rebellion, she tried to make herself most at home in seedy, underground environments, for purposes of appearance. That, combined with her burgeoning love of graffiti as an art form, led her to befriend young gang members, close to her age. From them, she learned how to shoot a gun. Very, very well. She also began, in her quiet way, to start spreading little rumors here and there that she knew the location of Stephen Zachar’s “great experiment.” She used her contacts on the streets and she also used her art, painting messages in the graffiti.
Sam got a nibble on the bait almost immediately. A kindly man in the Ordo Dracul, going by the name of Frederick Michelson, arrived in town. Sam easily realized that he was Stephen’s son, and therefore, her half-brother. She resolved to play the situation coyly, observing Frederick from afar, often using her contacts in order to get a handle on what kind of person he was. She was very surprised to realize that he was actually quite decent. He was a doctor who, she learned, had developed several incredibly important vaccines and treatments over the years. The more she learned about him, the more she liked him. Eventually, she met with him in private, revealing that she was the “great experiment.” Frederick openly admitted that he’d come looking for her. In the position he wished to attain, he hoped to purge some of the less admirable traits from the Ordo Dracul. In his view, they were obligated to use their eternal life and wisdom to help all living creatures, including humans. This, once again, defied her expectations of the Ordo.
After taking a few days to think it over, she decided that she was willing to go with him, back to the Ordo headquarters in Nebraska, to allow him to be declared the victor in the contest. This would afford her the opportunity to finally meet her estranged father and, she hoped, lead to reform in the Ordo. It was her highest hope that no other child would have to grow up the way she had. The night she made her decision, however, she learned that Frederick had been brutally murdered. No one seemed to know what had happened, but the Ordo was frenzied over it.
A matter of days later, a vampire calling himself Ted arrived. Sam quickly learned that he, too, was one of Zachar’s children and her half-brother. Rumors immediately began to fly that Ted had taken up a secret haven in the city and was working on some project that he wouldn’t tell anyone about. There wasn’t any evidence about what it was, but it made Sam very, very nervous. A little time passed and nothing really spectacular happened. As with Frederick, Sam began to ask around about Ted, everyone just said that he was holed up in that secret haven. The speculation turned to whispers of curiosity and excitement; everyone convinced that this was the verge of a big breakthrough.
A short while later, Samantha heard that Ted was also found dead. Apparently, Ted’s apprentice came back with the news that Ted wanted to speak to a group of some other members of the Ordo Dracul. The group went along, but upon entering Ted’s hideout, they found nothing but a pile of ash. No one, not even the apprentice, knew what went wrong or what killed Ted. Samantha, however, began to see conspiracies everywhere. She started to feel a little bit adrift. Humbled by the deaths of Frederick and Ted and somewhat terrified, Samantha stopped her rumor mills. She slipped back into her quiet existence, unclear on what would be her next move. And more and more, she found herself gravitating to Avery.
A local and outspoken Carthian leader in the area—calling himself Tommy Sunshine—began to show an interest in Sam. He asked her out one night and during their evening, informed her that he was her half-brother. He’d left the Ordo behind for personal reasons; namely, he didn’t much care for Zachar’s wife, his stepmother Claudette. Sam asked Tommy a lot of questions about the mysterious Claudette, but it turned out that Tommy didn’t know much. He also wouldn’t tell Sam anything about her own mother or the purpose of her existence. Sam persisted, asking again and again. Tommy always side-stepped the issue.
About a year after settling in Los Angeles, it became known that the vampire population of the world was ready to drop the Masquerade that kept their existence secret from the human population. In the months leading up to the big drop, their society was filled with turmoil. Daniel Jericho, the leader of the Carthian Movement in Los Angeles, tried to recruit Samantha to aide him in his efforts to halt the drop. Jericho’s cold and brutal personality, however, isolated her from the rest of the Carthian Movement.
More mysterious deaths began to pop up and Sam would often look into them with Avery. They found video footage that was completely blurred out. They used spells to discover that the dead were simply drained of their will to live. They couldn’t quite piece all of it together, but Avery’s conspiracy theories began to get more and more elaborate, right up to the night the Masquerade was due to drop. At the appointed time, a communications blackout seized the world. Pieces of satellite and space station began to fall from the sky, raining fire and death and destruction. Most of the vampires of Los Angeles, including Tommy Sunshine, were killed and the city itself became isolated from the rest of the world.
The surviving vampires came together to try to make order out of chaos, which was difficult because of conflicting political agendas and personalities. Daniel Jericho and Grace Yi, leader of the Ordo Dracul, came head to head. Somehow, through all the fuss, Avery was named the new Sheriff and put in charge of investigating the cause of the rain of fire. Sam stayed by his side, while trying her best to contact Karen through graffiti. Meanwhile, the siblings dealt with panicked mortals, vampire hunters, crazed militias, and assorted other terrors that came with the end of the world. Through it all, Avery maintained a continued interest in the unexplained deaths of Frederick and Ted. Like a true conspiracy theorist, he was sure that there was a link between what happened to them and what happened to the world.
A month into the aftermath, Sam ran into a local woman who called herself Lady Grey. The encounter was unexpected, since Lady Grey largely went about her business under an invisibility spell. The fact that Sam was able to see through the spell was perplexing to both of them. Lady Grey quickly identified Sam as Tommy’s sister, which frightened her since they’d been keeping that a secret. She warned Sam that there were all kinds of files about her in Tommy’s abandoned haven and gave Sam the address and a key. Sam knew better than to simply accept vampires bearing gifts, so she told Avery about the encounter and the two of them agreed to visit Tommy’s haven together.
As it turned out, there were indeed files about Sam’s existence in the abandoned nest. The truth came out that she was the great experiment, but Avery was sympathetic and agreed to keep her secret. They gathered all of the information and prepared to leave, but in the process, they accidentally sprung a magical trap that Lady Grey left behind. Avery started to feel himself drain of the will to live. He slowly began to turn to ash from the inside out. Panicked, Samantha grabbed his arm. The pain immediately vanished. Neither of them were clear on what happened, but they left quickly, returning to the Ordo Dracul library to look through the files. There, Sam learned that she was the 88th in a long line of experiments that involved the murder of dozens of women whose wombs were ripped out and used to incubate hybrid children. Horrified as Sam was, Avery and the other members of the Ordo Dracul, including Grace Yi, were even more appalled. Satisfied that they were not the monsters Karen made them out to be, Sam decided to join the Ordo Dracul. They proved to be the most humane organization left in the city.
Sam’s decision did not win her a lot of friends in the new vampire government, which was predominantly controlled by members of the Carthian Movement, including Jericho. The members of the Ordo Dracul, however, were incredibly welcoming and friendly. They helped her start to sort through the documents, which described her entire infancy and referenced both her and a “control subject.” Clarification came when Karen made her way to Los Angeles. She explained that she’d been a part of the experiment, that Stephen Zachar and Claudette had somehow caused her to conceive and give birth to a child as well. This child, a girl, was the control subject. It was never Sam that Karen wanted to kidnap. Karen had been after her own daughter and taken Sam by mistake. And she’d been on the run from Claudette ever since.
It soon became clear that Claudette was not a vampire. Other members of the city were investigating a race known as “Predators.” According to their investigations, Predators controlled vampires the way that the vampires controlled humans. They also fed off of vampires, or, more specifically, the emotions of vampires. They were responsible for the rain of fire, in an attempt to keep vampires from revealing their existence to the mortal population. Claudette was assumed to be one of these Predators and, eventually, Avery and Sam realized that Lady Grey was one as well. They visited Lady Grey’s haven, to try to gather additional information. Lady Grey greeted them, revealing that she was also Zachar’s daughter and Sam’s half-sister. She started to feed on Avery. Sam put a stop to it, compelling her to fall asleep. The other members of the party then staked her, pinning her to the floor so that they could question her.
Over the course of the next several hours, Sam and Avery gleaned as much information as they could about Predators. Lady Grey was manipulative and cruel to them at first, using her powers against Avery (since she quickly discovered they didn’t work on Sam), but eventually, she proved willing to work with them, once they revealed that they had every intention of stopping Claudette. They released her, promising to keep her in the loop about what they accomplished. And it didn’t take them long.
A month or so later, as Avery was directing a meeting in the Ordo Dracul library, Stephen Zachar and Claudette showed up. They pretended to be travelers, but Avery called their bluff and a fight broke out. Claudette used her powers (which worked on everyone but Sam) to escape, but Zachar was left behind. The members of the Ordo Dracul questioned him, at length, about Predators and their nature. Sam kept to herself, watching the proceedings. Once the other vampires had decided they’d gotten everything they could and were prepared to release Zachar, Sam swooped in. She demanded that Zachar answer a question for her: Why? Why had he dedicated his life to creating dhampir children? Zachar coldly told her that he did it for the sake of science and to earn power and prestige among the Ordo. Sam realized, in that instant, that she had a creator, but she did not have a father.
Claudette, angry at her treatment, decided to punish Avery and the rest of the Ordo by paralyzing four mortals working in the library. The members of the Ordo Dracul released Zachar, who was puzzled by Sam’s outburst and couldn’t help but wonder if they’d met before. Feeling directionless, Sam and a few of her friends returned to Lady Grey, to report on what had happened. Lady Grey suggested that if Zachar and Claudette were in town, their “control subject,” Karen’s daughter, would also be. She further assumed that if Zachar and Claudette realized who Sam was and that she was now a vampire, they would probably Embrace the control subject (nicknamed “Addie” by Tommy Sunshine, for Experiment 88) so that she could continue to serve her purpose. Determined not to let anything awful happen to this innocent girl, Sam and her friends decided to rescue her.
Thanks to a map picked from Claudette’s pocket during the fight, they were able to locate the haven where Claudette and Zachar were staying. The doors were booby-trapped, Predator magic causing the front door to be imbued with the power of fear, the back door with anger. Since she seemed to be immune to Predator abilities, Sam touched the front door. She didn’t feel fear. She felt powered up, like she hadn’t felt before. The group charged in and rescued Addie, who, as it turned out had a hopeless case of Stockholm syndrome. Samantha struggled with her decision. On the one hand, she felt that no one ought to be Embraced in the name of science and without their consent, which she was sure was destined to happen. On the other hand, they’d taken Addie away from the only family she’d ever known.
As Sam continued to wrestle with her feelings, the situation in the city continued to deteriorate. Not only were hunters destroying everything, but Predators began to worm their way into Kindred politics. Among other things, one of them insisted that all of the members of the city government—including Avery—bind themselves to him. Although Avery and many members of the council were against this, Samantha worried for her brother’s safety. Realizing that she was somehow immune to Predator abilities, she proposed that the Ordo Dracoul analyze her blood, to see if there was something there that could explain her immunity and be replicated. Indeed, there were many artificial compounds in her blood, but they would take weeks to analyze. In the meanwhile, Samantha and Avery decided to attempt a little experiment. Avery drank a pint of her blood—thus binding himself to her—and asked Lady Grey to feed on him. While she was still able to do so, it took her a significant amount of effort. Some of her abilities also seemed to stop working on Avery, just as they did on Sam. Avery and Sam, armed with this new information, joined with a few other members of the Ordo Dracul to begin developing a new vampiric discipline, which they called the Coil of Rhea.
The new Coil needed testing and Avery’s paralyzed staffers needed to be saved. Sam, Avery, and some of their friends sought out a Predator for both needs. For better or for worse, however, the other vampires in town discovered that the key to killing the Predators lay in electricity. Within a matter of hours after this discovery, three Predators, including Lady Grey, were killed by boot squads marching through the city. Sam and Avery had the misfortune of witnessing one such murder. Sam was left haunted by the image of a Predator—with the body of a nine-year-old girl—being liquefied. The sight, along with her growing frustration, led her to call Claudette out on an open radio channel. Claudette arrived at the library, with Zachar in tow. Sam and Avery begged them to save his staff members, even offering them Addie’s safe return. Claudette and Zachar showed no interest in Addie, although they agreed to spare the mortals, in exchange for Avery “knowing his place.” Avery accepted the deal, but the Kindred still began to prepare for a final showdown against Claudette.
The similarities end there. In some versions of the story, Stephen wished to punish a disobedient servant, and so, implanted her with his seed just to see what would happen. In other versions of the story, he fell in love with a mortal woman named Christina Delgadi and simply yearned to have a home and family with her. Some versions even claim that Sam was immaculately conceived by Stephen himself. She really never believed those versions. But regardless of the actual circumstances of her nativity, what Sam first learned was that sometime after she was born, that one of Zachar’s rivals in the Ordo, Karen Kostow, kidnapped her one night, secreting her away from her home in Lincoln, Nebraska, to put her into the foster system of Chicago, Illinois.
She didn’t learn this for many years, though.
From the time of her kidnapping, in 1994, until her Embrace seventeen years later, Sam lived a troubled, utterly mortal life. For some reason, no one seemed eager to adopt the screaming infant. She suffered from nightmares, even from an early age. Bounced around from home to home, it wasn’t until she was nine years old that she was finally placed in her “forever home” with a well-off couple—Robert Halper and Anne Lyons—living in Lake Forest, Illinois.
Samantha was smart. Painfully so. And the suburban schools and lifestyle allowed her intelligence to blossom. Sam’s adoptive parents were good people, but even at her young age, she felt like a stranger in their house. The relationships were always cordial and warm, but never deep or intimate. At least, that’s the way that Sam felt. She could never quite trust them enough to use the word “love,” trust them enough to believe that they wouldn’t one day send her back.
That said, she did become surprisingly close to her adoptive mother’s younger brother, Tom Lyons. Uncle Tom was fun and exciting and he brought an air of energy and life into the household. Young Samantha was equally fond of Tom’s long-term girlfriend, Tina Presten. As Sam grew, she found herself spending more time with Tom and Tina than with her parents. They were wild and artistic and worldly and Samantha wanted to soak that up. It was a foregone conclusion that any time they invited her on an outing, she was eager to join them. They went to art openings and concerts and street festivals. Anything, as long as it was creative. In retrospect, though, Sam would always regret agreeing to join them at that rock opera for her sixteenth birthday.
As they walked from the theatre, discussing how very Avant-garde the music seemed, a man from the crowd was overly drawn to Sam. His attentions were decidedly unwanted and after several polite attempts to get rid of him, Tom decided to play the hero. He stood up to the stranger, forcefully asking him to leave the uninterested and underaged girl alone. Words turned into shoves and shoves quickly turned into blows. And as the terrified Tina and Samantha watched, Tom was thrown against a dumpster. His head cracked on a corner and he was dead before he hit the ground, blood going everywhere. His attacker fled, but as he left, Samantha was sure, beyond any doubt, that she saw the man’s face...change.
The tragedy rocked the family to its foundation. Life had always been so completely safe. Needless to say, Samantha’s insistence that the attacker had been something other than human was largely dismissed, chalked up to the shock. Sam, however, could not unsee what she saw that night. And only Tina seemed willing to listen. But what was there to say? Samantha, the star student, already graduating early and bound for college, couldn’t find the right books to consult, to explain what she’d seen. It was only a late bout of teenage rebellion that told her anything. Sneaking out of the house, going to Goth clubs and punk bars, she began to hear whispers about a world of darkness. But they were little more than unsubstantiated rumors, half science fiction and half superstition.
At the age of seventeen, Samantha was shipped off to the Arizona State University, enrolled as a biology and art history double major, with an art minor. Although she’d been accepted to both Harvard and Stanford, she stubbornly insisted on a party school, where she felt she would have the opportunity to escape and learn more about this supposed world of darkness. And, free of adult supervision, her teenage rebellion did briefly turn into a way of life. She spent large chunks of her time in the seediest places she could find, mostly around Phoenix, seeking out the hidden vampire world. But after months of trying, she found nothing. And so, Samantha settled back into her old habits, studying and going to artistic events. She found that a lot of regulars of the Phoenix art scene seemed drawn to her for no apparent reason, like the stranger who killed Tom. Two particularly ardent suitors, Larry Hiler and Richard Frye, became a little too familiar for her comfort. She couldn’t really figure out a way to get away from them and the steady streams of gifts they sent her. It didn’t matter in the end. The die was cast.
Both men were Daeva, vampires over a hundred years old. It seemed that the two of them had been in arbitration with the vampire prince of Phoenix, Cynthia Kane, for some time, over the right to turn Sam into a vampire. Their strange obsession with a seemingly unimpressive girl was annoying Prince Kane. She finally ordered Larry and Richard to bring Samantha before her, so that she could find out just what was so special about her. Outside of an art opening in the city, Samantha felt a chloroformed cloth over her mouth and nose and was out before she could scream. She came to in the middle of what seemed like a medieval court, hearing Larry and Richard argue before the Prince over who had the proper claim to her. The whole thing seemed utterly absurd to her. The Prince agreed. Finally irritated with the whole thing, the Prince decided to just flip a coin. Larry won (it was tails) and Richard went into frenzy of anger.
Richard started tearing apart the court. Many of the vampires there saw this as an excuse to air all kinds of grudges. The fight turned into complete pandemonium and Sam, the token mortal in the room, was gravely injured. Bleeding out and wounded, Sam was pulled out of harm’s way by a vampire named Karen Kostow. Karen only saw one way that Sam could get out of the situation alive, and that was to be Embraced. She asked Sam if that was what she wanted and Samantha immediately said yes. After that, she lost consciousness.
When Samantha woke again, she was exceedingly disoriented. Karen began to educate her. They were both vampires, she explained: a clan known as the “Ventrue.” They were marked for their mental abilities as well as a certain measure of instability. Once Sam was able to wrap her mind around that much, Karen continued to explain that vampires had been in existence since at least the year 33 C.E. and that there were five clans—or families—and five political covenants. Like in the stories of old, they needed to drink blood to survive. Sunlight burned them. Fire wounded them grievously. Stakes would send them into a coma. Holy water would simply get them wet, unless wielded by someone with True Faith. For someone so young, Sam handled the transition with remarkable grace.
It wasn’t long until Karen realized, however, that Sam was the baby she’d kidnapped many years ago. She was reticent about the subject for a year, focusing on teaching Sam how to survive in her new life. But Samantha, who was still obsessed with what happened to her Uncle Tom, eventually managed to draw some of the truth out of Karen. Karen reluctantly told her that she’d been born a dhampir (half vampire), of Daeva parentage, which was why the Daeva had always been drawn to her as a mortal. Dhampir were incredibly rare. Most vampires thought they were only the stuff of myth and legend. She further explained who Sam’s father was, relating the dozens of different stories about how and why Sam was born. No matter how much Sam pleaded and begged, Karen wouldn’t share what motivated her to kidnap a baby in the first place. She continually insisted that she’d done “the right thing.” But Sam wanted to understand what that was.
This eventually became a huge sticking point between them, frustrating Sam enough to ask to be emancipated only a year after her Embrace. She was very surprised when Karen agreed to let her go. When she asked why, Karen explained that she’d long ago left the Ordo because she no longer desired to be a part of their “evil” politics. And Sam, for better or for worse, was a part of their politics. Stephen Zachar had five children. They were his biological children from his mortal life who had all been Embraced. They were rallying for a position within the Ordo and it had been declared that whichever one of them managed to locate the long-lost Sam would earn the title. Sam was shocked and appalled, both by what Karen refused to tell her and by what Karen had neglected to tell her. They parted on tense terms, although they agreed to keep in touch with one another. As a parting gift, Karen took Sam to Illinois and, before her eyes, convinced Robert and Anne that she had gone backpacking in Europe and that they didn’t need to worry about her.
Against her better judgment, Samantha got in touch with Tina, who had moved out to LA, where she was working as a costume designer for low-budget, independent movies. Sam lied to her old friend, claiming that she was transferring to USC. Tina was only too happy to give her a place to crash. Sam moved into the basement apartment with Tina, adopting the persona of the lazy college student, taking classes at night and sleeping all day. The arrangement seemed to work.
Meanwhile, Sam decided that she needed to learn the truth about her origins and her family. This meant getting involved with the vampire society in LA. Unlike Phoenix, which was set up as a simple monarchy, the vampire society of Los Angeles was sprawling and bureaucratic. The Prince—one Elizabeth Englehart—had dozens of ministries and counsels and representatives. There were hundreds of vampires in the area. One of the first people she met there was Avery Anderson, a member of the Ordo Dracul. As it turned out, Avery was also Karen’s childe, Embraced in the late 1950s. Avery was a former FBI agent and a complete conspiracy theorist. To most people, his insane ideas and thorough files on everything from the moon landing to Celtic demons were eccentric and laughable. Sam, however, found that she liked Avery a lot. He wasn’t at all what she expected from a member of the Ordo Dracul, based on Karen’s descriptions. While Sam was reluctant to tell him the truth about her dhampir origins, she still found herself growing closer to and fonder of Avery.
She joined the Carthian Movement, a progressive political party with a focus on reforming the feudal order of vampire life from days gone by. She made sure to be on friendly terms with every covenant, however. Having been Embraced during her punk stage of rebellion, she tried to make herself most at home in seedy, underground environments, for purposes of appearance. That, combined with her burgeoning love of graffiti as an art form, led her to befriend young gang members, close to her age. From them, she learned how to shoot a gun. Very, very well. She also began, in her quiet way, to start spreading little rumors here and there that she knew the location of Stephen Zachar’s “great experiment.” She used her contacts on the streets and she also used her art, painting messages in the graffiti.
Sam got a nibble on the bait almost immediately. A kindly man in the Ordo Dracul, going by the name of Frederick Michelson, arrived in town. Sam easily realized that he was Stephen’s son, and therefore, her half-brother. She resolved to play the situation coyly, observing Frederick from afar, often using her contacts in order to get a handle on what kind of person he was. She was very surprised to realize that he was actually quite decent. He was a doctor who, she learned, had developed several incredibly important vaccines and treatments over the years. The more she learned about him, the more she liked him. Eventually, she met with him in private, revealing that she was the “great experiment.” Frederick openly admitted that he’d come looking for her. In the position he wished to attain, he hoped to purge some of the less admirable traits from the Ordo Dracul. In his view, they were obligated to use their eternal life and wisdom to help all living creatures, including humans. This, once again, defied her expectations of the Ordo.
After taking a few days to think it over, she decided that she was willing to go with him, back to the Ordo headquarters in Nebraska, to allow him to be declared the victor in the contest. This would afford her the opportunity to finally meet her estranged father and, she hoped, lead to reform in the Ordo. It was her highest hope that no other child would have to grow up the way she had. The night she made her decision, however, she learned that Frederick had been brutally murdered. No one seemed to know what had happened, but the Ordo was frenzied over it.
A matter of days later, a vampire calling himself Ted arrived. Sam quickly learned that he, too, was one of Zachar’s children and her half-brother. Rumors immediately began to fly that Ted had taken up a secret haven in the city and was working on some project that he wouldn’t tell anyone about. There wasn’t any evidence about what it was, but it made Sam very, very nervous. A little time passed and nothing really spectacular happened. As with Frederick, Sam began to ask around about Ted, everyone just said that he was holed up in that secret haven. The speculation turned to whispers of curiosity and excitement; everyone convinced that this was the verge of a big breakthrough.
A short while later, Samantha heard that Ted was also found dead. Apparently, Ted’s apprentice came back with the news that Ted wanted to speak to a group of some other members of the Ordo Dracul. The group went along, but upon entering Ted’s hideout, they found nothing but a pile of ash. No one, not even the apprentice, knew what went wrong or what killed Ted. Samantha, however, began to see conspiracies everywhere. She started to feel a little bit adrift. Humbled by the deaths of Frederick and Ted and somewhat terrified, Samantha stopped her rumor mills. She slipped back into her quiet existence, unclear on what would be her next move. And more and more, she found herself gravitating to Avery.
A local and outspoken Carthian leader in the area—calling himself Tommy Sunshine—began to show an interest in Sam. He asked her out one night and during their evening, informed her that he was her half-brother. He’d left the Ordo behind for personal reasons; namely, he didn’t much care for Zachar’s wife, his stepmother Claudette. Sam asked Tommy a lot of questions about the mysterious Claudette, but it turned out that Tommy didn’t know much. He also wouldn’t tell Sam anything about her own mother or the purpose of her existence. Sam persisted, asking again and again. Tommy always side-stepped the issue.
About a year after settling in Los Angeles, it became known that the vampire population of the world was ready to drop the Masquerade that kept their existence secret from the human population. In the months leading up to the big drop, their society was filled with turmoil. Daniel Jericho, the leader of the Carthian Movement in Los Angeles, tried to recruit Samantha to aide him in his efforts to halt the drop. Jericho’s cold and brutal personality, however, isolated her from the rest of the Carthian Movement.
More mysterious deaths began to pop up and Sam would often look into them with Avery. They found video footage that was completely blurred out. They used spells to discover that the dead were simply drained of their will to live. They couldn’t quite piece all of it together, but Avery’s conspiracy theories began to get more and more elaborate, right up to the night the Masquerade was due to drop. At the appointed time, a communications blackout seized the world. Pieces of satellite and space station began to fall from the sky, raining fire and death and destruction. Most of the vampires of Los Angeles, including Tommy Sunshine, were killed and the city itself became isolated from the rest of the world.
The surviving vampires came together to try to make order out of chaos, which was difficult because of conflicting political agendas and personalities. Daniel Jericho and Grace Yi, leader of the Ordo Dracul, came head to head. Somehow, through all the fuss, Avery was named the new Sheriff and put in charge of investigating the cause of the rain of fire. Sam stayed by his side, while trying her best to contact Karen through graffiti. Meanwhile, the siblings dealt with panicked mortals, vampire hunters, crazed militias, and assorted other terrors that came with the end of the world. Through it all, Avery maintained a continued interest in the unexplained deaths of Frederick and Ted. Like a true conspiracy theorist, he was sure that there was a link between what happened to them and what happened to the world.
A month into the aftermath, Sam ran into a local woman who called herself Lady Grey. The encounter was unexpected, since Lady Grey largely went about her business under an invisibility spell. The fact that Sam was able to see through the spell was perplexing to both of them. Lady Grey quickly identified Sam as Tommy’s sister, which frightened her since they’d been keeping that a secret. She warned Sam that there were all kinds of files about her in Tommy’s abandoned haven and gave Sam the address and a key. Sam knew better than to simply accept vampires bearing gifts, so she told Avery about the encounter and the two of them agreed to visit Tommy’s haven together.
As it turned out, there were indeed files about Sam’s existence in the abandoned nest. The truth came out that she was the great experiment, but Avery was sympathetic and agreed to keep her secret. They gathered all of the information and prepared to leave, but in the process, they accidentally sprung a magical trap that Lady Grey left behind. Avery started to feel himself drain of the will to live. He slowly began to turn to ash from the inside out. Panicked, Samantha grabbed his arm. The pain immediately vanished. Neither of them were clear on what happened, but they left quickly, returning to the Ordo Dracul library to look through the files. There, Sam learned that she was the 88th in a long line of experiments that involved the murder of dozens of women whose wombs were ripped out and used to incubate hybrid children. Horrified as Sam was, Avery and the other members of the Ordo Dracul, including Grace Yi, were even more appalled. Satisfied that they were not the monsters Karen made them out to be, Sam decided to join the Ordo Dracul. They proved to be the most humane organization left in the city.
Sam’s decision did not win her a lot of friends in the new vampire government, which was predominantly controlled by members of the Carthian Movement, including Jericho. The members of the Ordo Dracul, however, were incredibly welcoming and friendly. They helped her start to sort through the documents, which described her entire infancy and referenced both her and a “control subject.” Clarification came when Karen made her way to Los Angeles. She explained that she’d been a part of the experiment, that Stephen Zachar and Claudette had somehow caused her to conceive and give birth to a child as well. This child, a girl, was the control subject. It was never Sam that Karen wanted to kidnap. Karen had been after her own daughter and taken Sam by mistake. And she’d been on the run from Claudette ever since.
It soon became clear that Claudette was not a vampire. Other members of the city were investigating a race known as “Predators.” According to their investigations, Predators controlled vampires the way that the vampires controlled humans. They also fed off of vampires, or, more specifically, the emotions of vampires. They were responsible for the rain of fire, in an attempt to keep vampires from revealing their existence to the mortal population. Claudette was assumed to be one of these Predators and, eventually, Avery and Sam realized that Lady Grey was one as well. They visited Lady Grey’s haven, to try to gather additional information. Lady Grey greeted them, revealing that she was also Zachar’s daughter and Sam’s half-sister. She started to feed on Avery. Sam put a stop to it, compelling her to fall asleep. The other members of the party then staked her, pinning her to the floor so that they could question her.
Over the course of the next several hours, Sam and Avery gleaned as much information as they could about Predators. Lady Grey was manipulative and cruel to them at first, using her powers against Avery (since she quickly discovered they didn’t work on Sam), but eventually, she proved willing to work with them, once they revealed that they had every intention of stopping Claudette. They released her, promising to keep her in the loop about what they accomplished. And it didn’t take them long.
A month or so later, as Avery was directing a meeting in the Ordo Dracul library, Stephen Zachar and Claudette showed up. They pretended to be travelers, but Avery called their bluff and a fight broke out. Claudette used her powers (which worked on everyone but Sam) to escape, but Zachar was left behind. The members of the Ordo Dracul questioned him, at length, about Predators and their nature. Sam kept to herself, watching the proceedings. Once the other vampires had decided they’d gotten everything they could and were prepared to release Zachar, Sam swooped in. She demanded that Zachar answer a question for her: Why? Why had he dedicated his life to creating dhampir children? Zachar coldly told her that he did it for the sake of science and to earn power and prestige among the Ordo. Sam realized, in that instant, that she had a creator, but she did not have a father.
Claudette, angry at her treatment, decided to punish Avery and the rest of the Ordo by paralyzing four mortals working in the library. The members of the Ordo Dracul released Zachar, who was puzzled by Sam’s outburst and couldn’t help but wonder if they’d met before. Feeling directionless, Sam and a few of her friends returned to Lady Grey, to report on what had happened. Lady Grey suggested that if Zachar and Claudette were in town, their “control subject,” Karen’s daughter, would also be. She further assumed that if Zachar and Claudette realized who Sam was and that she was now a vampire, they would probably Embrace the control subject (nicknamed “Addie” by Tommy Sunshine, for Experiment 88) so that she could continue to serve her purpose. Determined not to let anything awful happen to this innocent girl, Sam and her friends decided to rescue her.
Thanks to a map picked from Claudette’s pocket during the fight, they were able to locate the haven where Claudette and Zachar were staying. The doors were booby-trapped, Predator magic causing the front door to be imbued with the power of fear, the back door with anger. Since she seemed to be immune to Predator abilities, Sam touched the front door. She didn’t feel fear. She felt powered up, like she hadn’t felt before. The group charged in and rescued Addie, who, as it turned out had a hopeless case of Stockholm syndrome. Samantha struggled with her decision. On the one hand, she felt that no one ought to be Embraced in the name of science and without their consent, which she was sure was destined to happen. On the other hand, they’d taken Addie away from the only family she’d ever known.
As Sam continued to wrestle with her feelings, the situation in the city continued to deteriorate. Not only were hunters destroying everything, but Predators began to worm their way into Kindred politics. Among other things, one of them insisted that all of the members of the city government—including Avery—bind themselves to him. Although Avery and many members of the council were against this, Samantha worried for her brother’s safety. Realizing that she was somehow immune to Predator abilities, she proposed that the Ordo Dracoul analyze her blood, to see if there was something there that could explain her immunity and be replicated. Indeed, there were many artificial compounds in her blood, but they would take weeks to analyze. In the meanwhile, Samantha and Avery decided to attempt a little experiment. Avery drank a pint of her blood—thus binding himself to her—and asked Lady Grey to feed on him. While she was still able to do so, it took her a significant amount of effort. Some of her abilities also seemed to stop working on Avery, just as they did on Sam. Avery and Sam, armed with this new information, joined with a few other members of the Ordo Dracul to begin developing a new vampiric discipline, which they called the Coil of Rhea.
The new Coil needed testing and Avery’s paralyzed staffers needed to be saved. Sam, Avery, and some of their friends sought out a Predator for both needs. For better or for worse, however, the other vampires in town discovered that the key to killing the Predators lay in electricity. Within a matter of hours after this discovery, three Predators, including Lady Grey, were killed by boot squads marching through the city. Sam and Avery had the misfortune of witnessing one such murder. Sam was left haunted by the image of a Predator—with the body of a nine-year-old girl—being liquefied. The sight, along with her growing frustration, led her to call Claudette out on an open radio channel. Claudette arrived at the library, with Zachar in tow. Sam and Avery begged them to save his staff members, even offering them Addie’s safe return. Claudette and Zachar showed no interest in Addie, although they agreed to spare the mortals, in exchange for Avery “knowing his place.” Avery accepted the deal, but the Kindred still began to prepare for a final showdown against Claudette.