Bryn Celyn

Tradition:                     Hollow Ones
Essence:                      Dynamic
Nature:                         Caregiver
Demeanor:                   Conniver
Concept:                      Fringe Journalist 

Physical Attributes:      Strength 2, Dexterity 3, Stamina 3

Social Attributes:         Charisma 3, Manipulation 4, Appearance 3

Mental Attributes:         Perception 4, Intelligence 4, Wits 3

Talents:                        Alertness 4, Awareness 4, Dodge 3, Expression (Writing) 3, Streetwise 2, Subterfuge (Authentic) 5

Skills:                          Crafts 1, Drive 2, Etiquette 1, Stealth 1

Knowledge:                  Academics 2, Computer 1, Enigmas 3, Investigation 4, Linguistics (Latin, Welsh) 2, Occult 3, Kindred Lore 2,  Wraith Lore 2

Spheres:                      Correspondence 4, Entropy 3, Matter 1, Mind 5, Prime 2, Spirit 4

Backgrounds:              Ally (Amanda Goodwin) 2, Ally (Caradoc) 3, Ally (Det. John Olesen) 2, Arcane 3, Avatar 3, Status: Community 2, Library 4, Past Life 3, Resources 3, Sanctum 2 (Phoenix), Sanctum 3 (London) Wonder 2, Enlightened Retainer (Jamie McGowan) 2 

Resonance:                  Nurturing (2)

Arete:                           5

Willpower:                    7

XP:                             3/14/2017 - 32

Notes: One Drive link to full character sheet can be found here.  This will take you outside of the Google ecosystem.

Foci

Mind – gold Victorian fob-watch. You can do a lot of things with a fob-watch. Twirl it around like a music-hall turn, reflect the sun into someone's eyes, and that faithful old stand-by, swing it back and forth hypnotically… it's remarkable how coincidental Mind magic can seem with a little practice. Or as Bryn puts it, “it makes it really easy to wind people up”

Spirit – a crystal skull. Well… actually, it's a Perspex paperweight bought from a Mexican street vendor during the Day of the Dead, and it's only about three inches in diameter, but the way it refracts light looks really cool, and it's the thought that counts.

Matter – a monocle. Another Victorian antique on a length of black silk. More discreet than a magnifying glass. Not to mention a lot more stylish…

Prime – a silver skull ring. Bryn found it in a London junk shop, and thought it was a cheap tourist gewgaw at first, but even his limited knowledge of the Matter Sphere was enough to reveal that it was at least four hundred years old and possessed a very odd Resonance, as though it had been used to channel Prime energies before.

Correspondence – another ring, this one with a broad band and an orange stone that looks a little like fire opal. If you hold the stone against the light, a crazy and confusing pattern of angles are visible deep within, looking much like the “non-Euclidian geometry” beloved of Lovecraft. There is a hidden catch on the band that releases a small needle. Bryn picked it up second-hand from a company that supplies Renaissance Fairs and LARPers; the needle is supposed to represent a poison ring. Cleaned and sharpened, it’s useful for collecting a drop of blood which provides a material link for Correspondence casting.

Entropy – a gold half-noble coin from the reign of King Edward III, genuine, but in a remarkable state of preservation.

Backgrounds

Avatar

Bryn's Avatar takes the form of a Memento Mori, a white marble image of a decayed corpse. Memento Mori sculptures are common on medieval cadaver tombs, but Bryn's Avatar wears eighteenth century clothes - a flowing shirt with lace collar and cuffs, tight pants with knee-high boots, and a long cloak. Its face is almost skeletal, but not quite; the nose is gone, but traces of shrivelled skin still cling to the bones. On occasion, its face changes to the semblance of a roundfaced, slightly mischievous young man - usually during a Seeking, when Bryn has figured out the clues it's trying to offer him. It never speaks. Bryn has started to suspect that its clothing dates from the period that his former incarnation, James Tyrell, died, just as the Memento Mori imagery dates from the time of Tyrell's birth.

Fame

Bryn's moderately high Arcane means that he doesn't tend to be recognized in person. Online, however, he has a small amount of name recognition from occultists thanks to his work for Exoterica

Wonder

The laptop which Bryn inherited from Derek Teller, a Hermetic Mage of House Thig doesn't look very spectacular. It's small and lightweight, with a slightly battered silver case. Bryn still hasn't quite figured out how the modifications built into the thing actually work. It seems able to get a wireless network connection absolutely anywhere, which presumably is some sort of Correspondence and/or Forces effect. That it never needs recharging is easy enough to understand – a simple Forces effect to pull energy from the surrounding environment. The storage capacity is another matter. When Bryn first got his hands on it, it held almost 700 Gb of files – much of it PDFs scanned in from the library at the old vicarage. Then, the machine showed 9Gb free. Since then, Bryn has added at least a hundred Gb of files – and the disc still shows 9Gb free. He's still not sure how that happened. A Matter effect to give the disc more storage capacity? Remote access to some other storage medium using Correspondence? He has no idea, and mindful of the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs, he isn't about the open the machine up to find out.

The laptop always runs the latest version of Windows, even though it doesn't have a Microsoft subscription, but it runs it at lightning speed.

Library

When Phoenix Rising formed its Horizon Realm, Bryn “uploaded” the digital library back into physical form. The library is available for any member of the Chantry to use, although it’s still vaguely considered to be Bryn’s. 

The library is a near-duplicate of the one in Bryn’s former Chantry, a run-down Victorian vicarage. It’s centred around a great, worn stone fireplace that, in the original version, dated back to the building's predecessor, a monastic priory. The stone-flagged floors are copies of a medieval survival as well, although the thick, Persian-styled rugs that cover them to protect against the chill are far more recent, running a gamut from the 1890s to the 1960s. Battered armchairs and tables, from a similarly wide range of periods, are scattered around in no particular arrangement. The library is on two levels, with a mezzanine balcony, accessible from two sets of spiral wooden staircases, running around three of the walls.  At the far end, the fourth wall holds a great, Gothic-arched window, stretching up from floor to ceiling. During the day, the grounds of Phoenix Rising are visible through the window. At night, it shows a moonlit scene of a rambling, unkempt lawn leading down towards a Norman church with an ancient graveyard beside it. The night-time scene is also a copy of the one from Bryn’s old Chantry.

The walls are lined with bookshelves, holding duplicates of what was, in its heyday, one of the largest, most eclectic, badly-organized occult libraries in England. Much of the original was destroyed in a fire, but a significant percentage of it was saved in digital form on Bryn’s laptop, and has now been recreated as seemingly ancient tomes with worn leather bindings and yellowing paper.

The library at night is a place that a Hollow One can really feel at home. The lighting is electric, to avoid risking an open flame near the precious books, but it uses special bulbs that simulate flickering candlelight, with holders fashioned after ancient, wrought-iron wall sconces. The place is a mass of flickering light and shadow, with the scarlet drapes of the great window pulled back to show the moon and stars and the dark bulk of the church, the gravestones, and the softly waving branches of the mighty churchyard oaks. On one side of the fireplace, a great raven perches on a church lectern - not a product of taxidermy, but a plastic model. And above the fireplace is a picture of a wolf howling at the moon, in front of Dracula's Bran castle. The tarnished silver frame is in eighteenth century style, but the picture itself is a print from Woolworths. Bryn loves those elements, with their acknowledgment that authenticity is about the beholder's emotions, not the antiquity of the thing beholden. The great globe in the corner is from the nineteenth century, showing the British Empire at its height; the Viking chess set on the table beside it, a resin reproduction from Past Times. On the shelves, modern pop-culture books had rub shoulders with the personal diaries of Victorian and Edwardian adventurers and occultists. 

Sanctum

There’s a hidden switch set into the carved image of the raven in the library fireplace. Pressing it opens a narrow panel beside the fireplace, just wide enough for a slim person to squeeze through. A short passage beyond leads to a spiral stone staircase that opens onto a sprawling subterranean room with a low, gothic-arched ceiling. The chamber somewhat resembles a crypt, with a stone slab at the far end that looks a little like a tomb. Bryn has dressed the slab in the manner of a black magic altar, with a pentagram cloth, candlesticks, chalices, and piles of (mostly plastic) skulls. In front of the altar is a pentagram-styled ritual circle. The rest of the room is decked out as a bedroom and study, with bookcases, a computer desk, a large-screen TV, several armchairs, and a canopied four-poster bed which Bryn describes as “large enough for entertaining”. The walls are partly wood-panelled, and the furnishings are largely Victorian in style, although with some modern flourishes like the TV and computer desk.

Bryn’s personal paradigm is an eclectic mix of Hermetic, pagan and pop-culture influences from the

Western tradition. In broad terms, any magick that would feel like a comfortable fit for an HP Lovecraft novel would be coincidental here, although the Order of Hermes and the Verbena would probably have the easiest time of it.   

Past Life - James Tyrell 1417 - 1722(?)

James Tyrell was born in London around the year 1417. His father, Robert Tyrell, was a wealthy London merchant with a somewhat mysterious past, who vanished when James was a teenager.

James Awakened at the age of seventeen, during his apprenticeship to a master mason. He joined the Craftmasons a year later. He was a brilliant creative talent, but considered overly impulsive by his more stolid compatriots. He was at the forefront of many of the battles which the early Order of Reason fought against monsters and rogue Mages, but unlike many of the Order, he defined "monster" according to a being's actions rather than its nature. That allowed him to forge some unlikely but -- to the Order - ultimately successful alliances. It was one of those "unusual" allies, the vampire Simon the Troubadour, who helped him to escape the Order's purge of the Craftmasons. He died of old age in peaceful exile in north Wales, sometime in the early eighteenth century.

Resources

Exoterica News Service – Bryn gets a regular salary from a private news service, Exoterica. A subscription web-based service, it specializes in the unusual, not to say the outré – with the occasional bit of celebrity gossip thrown in to keep the punters interested.

Actually, although it's a profit-making organization, Exoterica is part-funded and part-run by the Arcanum. It's a useful front when Arcanum researches need some kind of plausible deniability, and it's also a valuable – if unfocussed – research tool in its own right, at least when it comes to doing the scut work in the preliminary stages of an investigation. 

Bryn remains blissfully unaware of this. He knows that the occasional weird academic type tends to hang out around the organization, but given the nature of some of the stories it runs, that's hardly surprising. In fact, Bryn has never even heard of the Arcanum, and would be amazed to learn that he's been indirectly working for them.

Allies

Caradoc the Celt (“Doc”)

Most of London's Kindred know "Doc". He's a neonate Caitiff who apparently arrived in the city sometime in the 1970s. He ekes out a marginal existence among the city's homeless; he may be the only Kindred in history to be a Big Issue badge holder. He's remarkably well informed; some Kindred who aren't willing or able to pay the Nosferatu's prices come to him for the latest gossip.

The few Kindred who've ever bothered to inquire into his background believe he was a Welsh medical student in the fifties or sixties who was left partially amnesiac by the trauma of his Embrace, although the evidence is sketchy at best; little more than that he sometimes speaks with a slight Welsh accent, his nickname, and the fact that he frequently offers first aid to the homeless people who he associates with. He's remarkably human; his body is warm, he eats the occasional Big Mac (even if he has to throw it up again an hour later), and he even takes mortal lovers from among the homeless. All of which has led to a widespread belief that he's a thin-blood, but he escapes most of the abuse usually directed at the thin-blooded because he's considered to be marginally useful and totally harmless.

It suits Caradoc very well to have them believe that, because he finds the petty backstabbing of Kindred politics an unutterable bore.  His hard-won and jealously guarded Humanitas sometimes compels him to play the game, especially when lives are at stake, but he does it through intermediaries, never showing his own hand if he can help it.

Caradoc is old. Very old. He was born in 375 B.C. within the great earthwork ramparts of Maiden Castle, in Dorset, England - although those names belong to a time many centuries in the future. He was a clever child, curious and imaginative, but the bearer of a curse. He possessed a rogue magical talent that manifested itself as epilepsy-like fits during which he was able to see into the spirit world. To the people of Maiden Castle, it seemed obvious that he was touched by the gods - a mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. Caradoc was taken as an apprentice by his tribe's priestly caste, the group that later writers would call the druids.

By the time he'd reached his nineteenth year, he had learned enough about magic to reduce the frequency and intensity of his fits, but however hard he struggled, he couldn't overcome his disability entirely - until he met the Eagle.

Maiden Castle was the largest and most powerful settlement in England, and it traded extensively with other Celtic communities throughout England, Wales, and Europe. The Eagle was the nominal leader of a delegation from the Welsh island now called Anglesey - a young warrior and orator in the service of a cabal of priestesses and sorceresses known as the Circle of Nine. As a night-walker, a being poised between life and death, he was largely shunned by the common folk of Maiden Castle, dealing almost exclusively with the druids.

Caradoc was fascinated by him from the first. They spent long nights in conversation, becoming inseparable friends and companions. It wasn't long before Caradoc's obsessive curiosity about the Eagle's nature led him to take his first taste of the young Gangrel's potent vitae.

It was a revelation. The power of the vitae proved to be the missing element that allowed Caradoc to control his erratic gift, freeing him at last from the debilitating seizures that had plagued him all his life. The Eagle, in turn, found Caradoc's blood inexplicably delicious.

Their craving for each other’s blood lasted for several months before the Eagle lost control and drained Caradoc to the point of death. He came to his senses just in time to save Caradoc with the dark gift of the Embrace.

Caradoc accepted his transformation philosophically. He wasn't completely happy about it, but he was fundamentally fair-minded, and recognized that it was at least as much his fault as the Eagle's. He'd always felt isolated and shunned by the society around him, so he didn't feel cut off from human companionship – the closest friend he'd ever had was the Eagle, and now that precious friendship might last for all eternity. And his new nature, despite its dark thirsts and violent appetites, fascinated him.

The druids of Maiden Castle were furious that the Eagle had taken one of their own, but Caradoc's impassioned insistence that the blame lay equally with him cooled tempers. The Eagle was asked – rather forcefully – to leave Maiden Castle. Caradoc chose to return to Anglesey with his sire, and remained there, serving the Nine alongside his sire and studying their druidic-inspired blood magic, for the next few centuries.

When the Roman Empire conquered Britain, Caradoc was sent to the new capital of Londinium as a spy for the Nine. Although he's wandered frequently and extensively, he's always gravitated back to the city in the two millennia since.  Most of the time, he poses as a neonate and vagrant, living on the streets without a permanent haven or power base, although occasionally he's played with other roles. 

In one of those roles, an itinerant minstrel named "Simon the Troubadour", he formed a loose alliance with Ranulf Fitz-Rufus and with a group of pious Mages who called themselves the Craftmasons. Initially, they came together to fight the Black Death. A hundred years later, their uneasy collaboration resumed, this time to fight a Hermetic cabal in London's Night's Bridge Chantry, who had been capturing, enslaving and magically mutating innocent Sleepers to use as shock troops in their battles with the Order of Reason.

It was during the campaign against Night's Bridge that Caradoc first met James Tyrell, a mason, architect, Craftmason Mage, and - though he was unaware of it - the son of a renegade Tremere Mage allied with Caradoc's childe Eirik Harraldson. They remained in sporadic contact over the following two centuries, their friendship grudging but undeniable. When the Order of Reason purged the Craftmasons in 1670, Caradoc helped Tyrell escape into hiding in Wales, along with his now-extensive mortal family.

Caradoc has reinvented himself several more times since the eighteenth century. In the height of the Victorian era he became a music-hall performer and supposed "agent" for a mortal society of occult investigators, and during the Second World War he gave some quiet and very discreet help to some friends in the Special Operations Executive. But the streets are where he feels the most comfortable, and it's to the streets that he's returned in the modern nights.

He was working on a scheme to "out" a Sabbat sleeper agent in the Court of London when he met Bryn. At first, he had trouble believing his eyes. Bryn might be younger, slimmer, darker of hair and a great deal more Gothic than Tyrell, but there was no mistaking his ancestry - or his inherited gifts. Unlike someone raised in the modern era, Caradoc had no trouble believing in Fate or Destiny, and he rapidly concluded that Bryn's accidentally involving himself with the plot was both. Bryn wasn't especially happy to find himself manipulated into becoming Caradoc's unwitting intermediary, but he decided that Caradoc was basically on the side of the angels, and the two formed a cautious friendship. 

Recently, Bryn started to recover the memories of his previous "incarnation", and his relationship with Caradoc has strengthened as he begins to recall the vampire's centuries of close association with his ancestor. 

Caradoc isn't in a position to help Bryn very much, directly; he's in a distant city, and he deliberately eschews an open position of power and influence. But he does have childer and contacts in a lot of the Camarilla Courts of Europe, and Ranulf Fitz Rufus, the Prince of London's "Court Sorcerer", is a close – if secret – ally. Given a little time, Caradoc can usually pull a few strings among the Kindred on Bryn's behalf.

Amanda Goodwin, Editor-in-Chief, Exoterica News Service

Education:       MA, History, Cambridge University (1973)

PhD, History, Cambridge University (1980)

Arcanum

Experience:      Associate, London Chapter House, 1980-1982

Journeyman, London Chapter House, 1983-1989

Chancellor, LA Chapter House, 1990 – present

Publications:   Evolution of folk myth from the Renaissance to the present day, Annual Proceedings of the Arcanum, Vol. LXXXI

Discerning the pattern: new perspectives on modern urban legend. Annual Proceedings of the Arcanum, Vol. LXXXII

Amanda Goodwin started her career as a historian in Cambridge. Finding the work interesting but ultimately unchallenging, she switched to journalism, doing a twelve-year stint at the Economist in various domestic and foreign postings before being head-hunted for her current post by her colleagues at the Arcanum. Originally a medievalist, she has long been fascinated by the idea that wizards might still exist in the modern day, but her somewhat dated notions of what Mages are like (mostly garnered from surviving tales of the exploits of the Order of Hermes in the High Middle Ages), have hampered her efforts to seek them out. She would be amazed to learn that one of her own employees is one, but she knows that Bryn has a knack for finding interesting situations, and so she backs him to the hilt.

A small, compact, grey-haired woman with a precise and motherly manner, she was once described by Bryn as “Jessica Fletcher without the serial-killer instincts”, much to her amusement.

Detective John Olesen

A Phoenix native, John Olesen grew up in a conventional middle-class household, the son of a teacher and an insurance broker. He read his first Whodunit - by Agatha Christie - at the age of ten. It spawned a life-long obsession which not only led him into a career as a police detective, but also a successful and lucrative sideline as a writer of detective fiction. He could retire and live off his royalties, if he wished, but the combination of a sense of duty and a desire for new challenges keeps him in the police force.

He'd heard of Bryn Celyn from Charlie North, an acquaintance in the FBI. Charlie was characteristically guarded about him, but reading between the lines, Olesen could tell that she had a lot of grudging respect for this mystery guy and his "hunches". He was intrigued when Charlie called him to say that Bryn wanted to meet him to discuss a hundred-year-old cold case.

He was surprised to find that Charlie's mysterious informant was a Goth fringe journalist, but he didn't attach much significance to the encounter until a few months later. An investigation into an international insurance scam left him possessed by the recorded memories of a Victorian Mage. Bryn's intercession restored his control of his own mind, and left him with an outdated but extensive knowledge of Mage society. He's shown no sign of Awakening, or even Numina, but for some reason that neither he nor Bryn can understand, he doesn't seem to attract Paradox like a normal Sleeper. 

A slim, fair-haired man with a neat beard and cool grey eyes, Olesen has a quiet voice and an unassuming manner that masks a ruthlessly analytical mind. He’s a straight shooter, willing to stretch a point if a threat is clearly something that the mundane authorities can’t handle, but otherwise unwilling to compromise his professional ethics.

History

I grew up a citizen of the world.

Well, actually, that's not quite true. I grew up a temporary resident of whichever place in Europe or America my Mum was posted next. She was in the Foreign Office – not actually an Ambassador, she's not what you'd call a schmoozer. More of a petty dictator, actually. She gave Dad his marching orders after that business with his secretary. And her secretary. And his boss's secretary. And… well, you get the picture. He had quite a thing for secretaries. Shortly before she cut him off – in a figurative rather than a literal sense, although I understand that was a pretty close-run thing – Mum suggested that he open a secretarial agency, on the grounds that it would be like working in a sweet shop – after a while, maybe he wouldn't want to touch them anymore. Then – since he was obviously too flighty and irresponsible to be entrusted with my well-being – she scooped me up and swept me along with her to her next posting.

She was always far too busy to pay much attention to me, so I was left pretty much to my own devices. Unlike many Hollowers, I wasn't much of a rebel in my teenage years, simply because there was so seldom someone around to rebel against, It would have been like trying to punch a cloud of smoke. I just happened to like black clothes, alternative bands, Victorian funereal imagery and the occasional spliff. 

I was bright enough to coast through my schoolwork with minimal effort. When Mum ordered me to choose a career – and yes, it really was that blunt – my mind went totally blank. I looked frantically around her office. There was a stuffed tiger's head mounted on the wall, but somehow I didn't think “big game hunter” would pass muster. There were expensive oil paintings on the walls, but while I wouldn't have minded living in a Parisian garret painting gorgeous women in the dishabille, I couldn't even do convincing stick figures, so “artist” was out. There was a drinks cabinet, but that didn't suggest anything except “barman”, or possibly “alcoholic”. There was a copy of the Times laid out neatly on Mum's desk…

“I'd quite like to be a journalist”, said my mouth before my brain had a chance to catch up.

Funny how things turn out. I didn't mind the college-based parts of the journalism course, but what they called the “practical” – going out at 3am in the freezing rain to cover riots that didn't take place (because all the rioters quite sensibly didn't want to be out in the freezing rain at 3am), interviewing the winner of the most-amusingly-shaped vegetable competition at the village fair, covering the Mayor's speech on the new Municipal cleaning contract – i.e., all the things a real journalist wouldn't touch with a ten-foot barge-pole – those made me wish I'd tried to pitch the big-game-hunter idea. I was giving serious thought to giving that artist's garret a try – these days, all you need is some disembowelled animal parts in formaldehyde to be exhibited at the Tate Modern, and with my predilection for Victorian Gothic, that wouldn't have been a problem – when something happened that changed my life forever.

At the time, I thought it was just another lousy job. Someone had been vandalizing the outskirts of an old graveyard dating back to the Civil War. Now, bear in mind that this was in England, so “Civil War” meant the mid-seventeenth century. The parts of the graveyard that had been disturbed were so old that most of the headstones had crumbled away. The “vandalism” consisted of some tangled patches of grass and bramble getting dug up. I didn't much fancy the prospect of lurking in a graveyard all night on the off chance that the vandals would come back, especially as it was February, freezing cold, and pelting down with rain. I don't know why I even bothered to do it. Maybe it was my brooding Goth nature wanting a chance to be miserable. Maybe I just wanted a legitimate reason to feel pissed off. But for whatever reason, I was there that night when it happened.

I was hiding under a tree. Well, not really hiding – it was just the closest thing to shelter within sight of the area the vandals had targeted, I was lurking there, soaked to the skin, freezing cold, sipping lukewarm coffee from a cheap thermos and thinking mournfully of animal parts in formaldehyde and large cheques from gullible patrons of the Tate Modern. I was so wrapped up in my own self-absorption that at first, I didn't register the way the ground in the old section of the graveyard was churning. I thought it was just the rain splashing in the mud. But eventually, the way the earth was rippling and shifting became too obvious and unnatural to ignore. 

Especially when the half-decayed hand pushed its way up through the soil like a drowning swimmer clawing desperately for the surface. 

My head started pounding. I was developing a migraine worse than any I'd had in my life before, and I was totally transfixed, unable to move a muscle. Even the simple act of drawing breath felt like an effort. Everything seemed sharper, clearer – I seemed to be tracking each individual raindrop as it fell, tracing its progress as it fell through twigs and leaves. And the leaves themselves – I could see their veins, feel the life pulsing through them, the complex structures beneath their surfaces. My gaze was tracing every striation in the bark of every nearby tree at once.

I'd never done LSD, but I'd had friends who had, and this sounded like their accounts of its effects. But it didn't feel like a hallucination. It felt more real than anything I'd ever experienced – despite the horrific impossibility of the creature I could see clawing its way out of the ground.

It started out as a decayed corpse, clad in a vestigial mass of rotted, unidentifiable rags. But as it pulled its way free of the soil, it took on form and definition, the flesh reforming itself over the yellowed bone, and the rags becoming recognizable clothes and expanding outwards to cloak the flesh. By the time he was completely out of the earth, he looked like a living man, albeit a thin, cadaverous one clad in archaic black seventeenth-century clothing. And boasting hideously elongated nails, like talons. He looked straight at me and grinned malevolently, revealing a mouthful of teeth in serious need of dental attention. He started walking towards me, and I knew, somehow, that if he reached me, I'd die. I yelled at him to stop, and I could feel the power in my words, the kind of power I'd never experienced before. He could feel it, too; he didn't stop, but he slowed down, moving as if he were fighting his way through a strong wind.

I heard cars pulling up in the distance, but I didn't dare to take my eyes off the… whatever the hell you call it. Zombie? Revenant?

Out of my peripheral vision, I saw half a dozen black-clad figures sprinting through the rain and the mud. They got between us, and started chanting in Latin. I know a bit of Latin – they were telling the thing to get back into its grave and stay there, as closely as I could make out. A couple of them began throwing salt at it.

It staggered back from them. Its flesh and clothes started to come unravelled again as it retreated, returning to the putrescent state they'd been in when it had emerged from the ground. It was little more than a grinning skeleton when it eventually topped over backwards into the wet earth and was lost to sight.

As Awakenings go, it wasn't the most pleasant, but it sure as hell took care of any suspension-of-disbelief issues. The cabal who'd rescued me were a mixture of Hermetics and Hollow Ones, who'd sensed something evil stirring in the old graveyard, some ancient magic related to the Interregnum-era witch craze.

They were mostly interested in finding a way to undo the curse, but I was intrigued by the question of why it had suddenly started causing trouble after all these centuries. I was sure there had to be more to it than random chance, and eventually, it turned out that I was right. 

There had been a murder committed on the soil of the old graveyard. A very ordinary, very petty murder, one teenage drug dealer knifing another, but it was that killing – a secret killing for which no justice had been given, no debt repaid – which was activating the curse and resurrecting the victims of the witch hunts to rise and seek revenge on the living.

The ghost of the victim was a feeble thing, just an echo, really, but I managed to get enough out of it to track down the killer. Combining my journalistic skills – such as they were – with some early, clumsy, ham-fisted experimentation with my new powers, I was able to see the killer brought to justice. And the curse became dormant again. The cabal who'd rescued me were impressed enough to offer me membership.

We were an eclectic lot. Several Hollow Ones and a couple of Hermetics from House Thig. Our base of operations was a converted Victorian vicarage, draughty and falling down in places, but with an amazing library which had been built up over a century and a half. The main problem with it was that there was so much material to look through that it was often hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Derek, our Thig computer whiz, was trying to solve that by scanning the entire lot into his souped-up laptop in searchable PDF form.

With the backing of the cabal and my own newfound talents, my career in journalism started to take off. Spirits make great informants, and so do ghosts. The cabal turned me into a sort of guided missile, using me to target exploitive industrialists, crooked politicians, organized crime, drug and people trafficking, you name it. We had all sorts of defences set up around the vicarage to shield us from magical detection or attack, and we were constantly on the look-out for signs that the Technocracy might be targeting us. We were very confident that they wouldn't be able to sneak up on us unawares.

And we were probably right, too. Nemesis, when she finally showed up to punish us for our hubris, came in the form of a dodgy electrician in the pay of a common-or-garden mortal drug dealer whose rackets we'd smashed up. The wiring in the place was old – the “accident” which burned it to the ground was so easy, so ridiculously, pathetically easy for that wretched, worthless little scumbag to arrange. No magic, no spirits, no Primium-enhanced cyborgs, just a bit of insulation carefully sawed through in exactly the wrong place. 

Derek and two other members of the cabal died of smoke insulation – we weren't stupid enough to have neglected the smoke alarms, but the electrician had removed the batteries. Afterwards, we all kind of drifted apart. I got one legacy from Derek – his precious laptop, with its scanned collection of tomes from the vicarage library. Too bad he never finished the project – I could cry when I think of the irreplaceable books that went up in that fire – but what was already there is still amazingly impressive.

I'd built up enough of a reputation that I had a reasonable choice of jobs. The one I chose, Exoterica, surprised a lot of people. It's part of the New Media wave, a predominantly web-based subscription news service on the outer fringe of what most people consider serious journalism. It does do serious, hard-hitting investigations, but there's usually a flavour of the Fortean Times about them. Or, occasionally, the National Inquirer. But it has one thing the others didn't – an editor who's willing to support me when my investigations go off at a tangent. I wish I knew exactly why. I sometimes get the feeling that she knows more than she ought to, or that she's working to some hidden agenda. I know she's not a Mage, or a bloodsucker or a shape-shifter, but there's something a bit… well, weird, about her. I haven't tested it a lot, for obvious reasons, but I don't think she triggers Paradox the way a Sleeper would, and she's never seemed surprised about anything she's seen or heard from me. 

I became a roving reporter – and sometimes I rove a very long way. Different continents, on occasion. For the last few years, I've been working out of the company's American office, based in LA. I decided that a change of scene would be healthy after the Bleeding Heart Yard murders, in London, started to draw me a little too deeply into the Kindred's night society. Doc throws a great party, and he's given me some good advice over the years. But being a vampire's buddy and being a vampire's patsy are too close for my peace of mind, and - much as I like the guy - I sleep more soundly knowing that the Atlantic Ocean lies between us.  That goes double since I recovered the memories of my ancestor and the friendship Doc shared with him, five hundred years ago when the Technocracy and the Traditions were forming.

Joining Phoenix Rising was an unlooked-for benefit of a fraud investigation. A California property magnate with an interest in Native American stuff was buying Hohokam pottery that didn't seem to come from any known source. It looked like someone was organizing their own little dig and selling off the stuff they were finding.

At least, it looked that way to the property magnate. Looked that way to whatever Sleeper experts he hired to check the stuff, as well. Matter magic – even the basic level I know – told a different story. The Hohokam ceramics were all fakes. Perfect fakes, the kind of perfection you only get through Awakened means.

I had a contact, an inside guy who was part of the gang bringing the stuff in from Phoenix. Only he was murdered before he could give me the final links I needed to break the story open. Not that the police realized that, because it was a perfect murder. The kind of perfection you only get through, you've guessed it, Awakened means.

I take it kind of personally when my contacts get murdered. And forgers are the kind of Mage who give the rest of us a bad name. So I headed for Phoenix for a serious talk with whoever was responsible.

Not exactly my finest hour. The Mage responsible didn't know she was a Mage - she thought she was just some latter-day Uri Geller. And she ended up manipulating me into helping her frame her father and brother - well, perhaps "frame" is the wrong word, they were both involved in Carlos' murder - before she tried to kill me. She would have succeeded, if I hadn't weakened the Gauntlet enough to let Carlos reach through and deliver a little eye-for-an-eye style justice.

But at least as a result of that whole disaster, I got to join a Chantry again. I've made mistakes and taken a few knocks, but they had a vacancy for a resident necromancer, and I'm it. It's nice to have a niche. Don’t get any ideas about the word “necromancer”, though. I leave the armies of zombies to George Romero. I help the spirits of the departed move on, try to give them justice, and try to stop them causing harm to the land of the living. I don’t exploit or abuse them for my own ends, and I don’t look kindly on people who do.