The Seven: A List of known Vampiric Temporal Doppelgängers
Mayday! Mayday!
The ship is slowly sinking
They think I'm crazy but they don't know the feeling
They're all around me,
Circling like vultures
They wanna break me and wash away my colors
Wash away my colors
Take me high and I'll sing
Oh you make everything okay (okay, okay)
We are one in the same
Oh you take all of the pain away (away, away)
Save me if I become
My demons
I cannot stop this sickness taking over
It takes control and drags me into nowhere
I need your help, I can't fight this forever
I know you're watching,
I can feel you out there
Take me high and I'll sing
Oh you make everything okay (okay, okay)
We are one in the same
Oh you take all of the pain away (away, away)
Save me if I become
My demons
Take me over the walls below
Fly forever
Don't let me go
I need a savior to heal my pain
When I become my worst enemy
The enemy
Take me high and I'll sing
Oh you make everything okay (okay, okay)
We are one in the same
Oh you take all of the pain away (away, away)
Save me if I become
My demons
Take me high and I'll sing
Oh you make everything okay (okay, okay)
We are one in the same
Oh you take all of the pain away (away, away)
Save me if I become
My demons
-- My Demons by Starset
Contents
The Seven Souls of a Man - The Seven Iterations of a Vampire
I as a player or as a storyteller have been playing Vampire the Masquerade for at least twenty years. As I sit here, writing this, that number and its sheer meaning hit me. Some people don't even live twenty years, let alone have a pastime that lasts that long. I have seen many marriages crumble in less time, mine included and careers come and go like the wind. Like the vampire characters I portray as a player or as a storyteller, I have become jaded and I accept that in the end, all things must pass, even me. But, there is a better than even chance that I will outlive most of the things I now consider permanent. Its a child's thought process after all, if you survive more than a few decades, you realize that the only constant in this universe is change. Whether you perceive that change as good or bad, is entirely a function of your point of view and despite what many people believe, one's point of view is entirely a facet of our lives that we can control.
As I look back, I see so many mistakes that I made in my real life as well as the fantasy that I have help to keep alive. I used to regret my mistakes, grieve for them, cry and rage over them. But tonight I just don't have that in me anymore or perhaps I have moved beyond that state of development. Where I am and what I have done is directly a result of my choices, with each step I have moved along to learn something new and with each challenge there have been different results. Its easy to look back and say: "I should have done this or that, said this or that, felt differently than I did"; but the truth is that was just where I was at that moment in time. Each step has made me who I am at this moment and with each passing action I make changes to the essence of me that could mean others will perceive me differently at a later time.
From my limited point of view, its hard to see what other people see; am I good or bad, am I cruel or caring, am I what they want their friend to be or have I become someone they cannot relate to. Only time will tell. Can I control this metamorphosis? The answer is yes, but with only a crude, limited control, because I unlike many people, I am still discovering who I am or what I really want. I know how that sounds and I'm sure that could be said for everyone from an existential point of view, which is true. But to borrow a concept from VTM, I am like a Lasombra, unable to see my reflection and thus uncertain how others perceive me or even entirely how I perceive myself. For me, Vampire the Masquerade has served as a metaphorical mirror by which I can investigate lives that I think I would have liked to live and that I can in a limited, but vicarious way live along with my characters. Am I ashamed of my character's actions? The truth is I used to be. Actually, in the beginning, while I was having fun and the point was to have fun, I was also using the game to vent repressed feelings of frustration and unhappiness. The victims of my character depredations were excellent substitutes for the atrocities that I wanted to carry out, because they weren't real people and thus their suffering or destruction was a victim-less crime. It was mental masturbation and it was fun.
Later, I entered a stage where I felt abashed or ashamed of certain particularly horrific actions, while another part of me reveled in the moral freedom to be anything - whatever my heart desired beyond the expectations and limitations placed upon me by friends, family and society as a whole. This stage lasted quite a long time and perhaps because the game was so diverting and the companionship so fulfilling, I never reached for more. But in time it passed. Traversing that passage was painful, but it led to change and new growth. That growth led to unexpected places in real life and then real life fed the game, providing continuous evolution. Every so often, we would update our characters for various reasons or like the sophisticated players that we had become we changed them to meet our new fantasy needs. But each iteration of the characters left a mark on my soul, perhaps it did on other players as well, I cannot know. What I do know is that each evolution unveiled something new, while allowing me to chart the degree of change. But I didn't realize that I was missing things, that I did certain things shamelessly ingame that never occurred to me to do in real life or equally failed to pursue certain things in the game that I thought I craved in real life. Like a blind-man or someone terribly near sighted I couldn't quite accept what I was seeing in my mirror and because I refused to accept those things, I couldn't change them or capitalize upon them.
Eventually, even that changed, as of course it must. A few constants remained, a love of my friends and the companionship that they provided. The stability of the game became a relationship in itself, as it had been all along, a fact I couldn't or wouldn't see. My love of the darker things and a thirst for a more exciting life and a seemingly unrestrained moral flexibility that in real life might be considered unhealthy. Along the way, old relationships slipped away and new ones blossomed, but I still managed to misuse my mirror, never quite understanding that mirrors are for more than looking behind you. Eventually, after enough time, perhaps too much time, I started to act on what my mirror revealed to me, I finally understood that I 'wanted' to be the characters that I role-played because they seemed happier and because they lived in a vacuum of consequence. Yet, once I came to understand that consequences were real regardless of whether I fanticised an action, I was still taking that action, I understood that I was from a psychological point of view living more than one life at a time. This is not to say that I was a man with multiple personalities, which is a very rare and dangerous condition, but rather I was getting fulfillment from to distinct and separate lives. What is stranger still, is that from the psychological point of view, going through the mental action of living an inhuman life was like slowly learning to be inhuman. Unbeknownst to me, my role-playing wasn't just a learning tool, although, it is superb in that context, it was also a kind of life guide that I was failing to follow because I didn't treat it as real. If I were still in my self-judgemental phase, I would have kicked myself for being so stupid. But all along, the truth was there staring me in the face, I just wasn't ready to see what it reflected and then act upon what I perceived.
All along, life and the game seemed to touch upon one another in a strange and inexplicable way. And for reasons I don't now understand, that made me afraid. I can only guess that as long as I refused to admit that I wanted the things my character pursued, I wasn't really the same person. But, in the end, I am the same person, just living with greater limitations and lucky enough not to have made my character's mistakes in a harsh and unforgiving world. But there were and are still consequences for actions taken in the game. In our fantasies, we reveal who we really are, when you strip away all of societies limitations and rules, fantasy will always reveal the face beneath the mask imposed by society. Those we game with are the closest of companions or they should be, because we reveal our deepest secrets to them, even those we don't consciously admit to ourselves. Perhaps that is why the ancient Greeks treated the theater, role-play and masks as religious in nature.
The point of this rambling monologue is that as the game has provided so much to me and I have tried to set up the game so that others can also use the mirror of role-play to divine their heart's desire, I have actually begun to act upon my mirror's truth. Ironically, at just this time, I find myself portraying seven different iterations of myself; truthfully, I am still trying to understand what that says about me, if anything at all.
How did such an unlikely storyline begin? Well, I am glad you asked me that. After we had been playing for about nine or ten years, a real chronicle plot emerged, that of the Giovanni's Final Night project and the end of the world as we the characters had known it. Collectively, the players and the storytellers of our unique chronicle were looking for ways to reinvent our characters and to breath new life into vampires who were becoming as all undead must, static. We had read about the Dur-an-Ki ritual "Turn Back the Skies and I think it triggered a plot of going back in time and stopping Augustus Giovanni from destroying the world. I suspect it offered our players and storytellers something else, a chance to right old wrongs, for flawed characters and imperfect plots to be reborn. So we plunged our characters into the time stream and returned to the night of our collective Embrace. But it wasn't long before time travel and good intentions through the game for a loop and we tried it more than once. Like a series of mad scientists from the Hammer horror films, we would solve one problem with time travel, only to realize we had created another equally difficult problem that required a quick and dirty solution. Then as agents of the Tal'meh'Ra (Manus Nigrum) we were offered a chance to right all wrongs when it was revealed that our meddling with history had caught the notice of someone truly powerful, Councilor Meerlinda of Clan Tremere. The great lady had somehow detected the temporal distortions that we the time travelers gave off, or some such, we never did figure out how she became involved. But suddenly we all plunged backwards in time, but this time we were going way back before our Embraces, supposedly back to the year 1020 A.D. - just before the mages of House Tremere turned themselves into vampires with the stolen blood of Clan Tzimisce.
Truly epic and inspiring isn't it? The title for this heroic romp through medieval history was and is called the "Story 29 - Bellum Horarium", or for those of you who don't speak Latin, the "War of the Hourglass". A fitting title in my opinion, and since I came up with the plot and the title, I guess I deserve to feel a bit proud, but then pride goes before a fall. But not all was to be as promised, after all, its well known that elders lie, it happens when they breath air in to speak. As such, we awoke in early 3rd century of the common era, the year 211 A.D. to be specific. You see our True Brujah sponsor had plans of his own to which not even his childe Jeremy Sanderson (my friend Jamie) was privy, you see, Numerius had decided it was time to set a plan in motion that allow him to overthrow the Brujah antediluvian Troile and return the True Brujah to its rightful place as one of the thirteen clans. As it turned out, we were his pawns and to a degree so was Meerlinda, but ancient undead sorcerers are tricky and difficulty to manipulate. But I digress and that comes later in our narrative.
If you understand the level seven ritual of Dur-an-Ki called Turn Back the Skies, then you understand that the vampires sent back in time are really just observers who risk complete destruction if they tamper with history in more than a minor way. But this journey, like our previous temporal sojourns was heavily augmented with the discipline of Temporis, a tool only known to and used by the True Brujah bloodline of the Tal'mah'Ra. In this collaboration, an excuse was found to allow the characters to change history in a meaningful way. But, only one of the characters, an NPC called Kateb Zeke - Ashipu Autarkis was in on the details of the plot, and even he didn't know everything. The rest of us woke up members of the doomed 9th Roman Legion soon to vanish from history beyond Hadrian's Wall. The story was complex and I won't even try to detail all that happened to the characters, just key points that are relevant to this discussion.
For the better part of a year our characters labored under the identities of the people whose bodies their minds had hijacked. I think it changed all of us and left its mark on the chronicle as a whole. Truthfully, I never imagined it would have so profound an impact, but then I was naive. A handful of modern men and one woman stranded in the remote past without any allies or hope of backup did produce an effective sense of camaraderie. I don't remember our group ever working together so well as during that story, but then time flies and we had passed from the western edge of the Roman Empire to Rome itself in the company of the Empress Julia Domna, wife of the late Septimus Severus - The Emperor. Thrust into byzantine (literally) politics amid the sibling rivalry of Caracalla and Geta as they scrambled to seize the throne of the greatest empire the western world has even known. Behind the scenes we briefly encountered the Cainites who sought to manipulate the empire for their own reasons. It was thrilling and terrifying, but we made to the eastern end of the empire, Byzantium, a small fishing village to trek overland through the benighted lands of the earliest Slavic tribes to the region where eight hundred years in the future the mortal House of Tremere would induct themselves into the world of the Kindred.
Once we reached our destination in the wilderness of Dacia, the Roman province that would in the modern age become the nation of Romania, the wheels of Temporis and Assamite sorcery picked us up and thrust us into medieval bodies in early March of 996 A.D. Just twenty-six years before Tremere dragged his entire hermetic house into undeath. We arrived to see that Ceoris, the medieval fortress and chantry that served as the haven for the bloodline of Tremere throughout the medieval period, had only recently been completed. This time, our mortal hosts were already hedge wizards soon to be inducted into the House of Tremere. We went through our initiations and dealt with the unique personalities and circumstances that temporal body-jacking can thrust upon one. As master sorcerers ourselves, freely admitted to the home-base of House Tremere, we quickly figured out that Meerlinda was sending herself dreams from the future. Apparently, both mortal Meerlinda and her future vampire self are or were or will be masters of dream magic. Somehow she had found a way to send herself prophetic dreams of future events in a bid to change her own history for reasons we never learned. Whatever her goal was, we discovered that these temporal manipulations had already caused the younger Meerlinda to seek out the vampiric Embrace and with the help of her future self she was well on the way to developing the Tremere brand of thaumaturgy decades ahead of schedule. But in discovering these things, we were discovered in turn, and when it became apparent that our cell of time traveling heroes were about to become victims of medieval Meerlinda, we drew straws to see who would remain behind to kill her and become her.
Yes, I did say that someone was selected by the drawing of lots to become Meerlinda's assassin and to take her place. How the heck does that work you ask? Well, it required an ancient artifact called the: Fang of the Ouroboros (Item 1), an ancient artifact of Koldunic Sorcery, which would allow the user to completely and undetectably diablerize someone, in essence becoming them while still retaining their own personality, memories and motivations. So to return to the event of importance, five of us stood around in a circle ( Blagoy Zhivkov (Benesj Cherno / Bruce), Countess Ecaterina Petrescu (Madame Mina / Kate), Master Mason Márton Eszes (Morgan Hanover Erlich / Milan Svarozicev), Merchant Boldizsár Prohászka (Brian O’Reilly / Brian) and Padre Jacopo Vaccaro (Jeremy Sanderson / Jamie) and cast one die each, the lowest to remain behind, while the rest of the coterie returned to the future. When the final die was cast, my character Benesj Cherno (my Bulgarian Tzimisce identity) had rolled the low roll, a 1 if I remember correctly. Was it good luck or bad? After all my character was given an ancient artifact and told to commit diablerie for the betterment of the world. Well, thank you very much, I would like to be a 4th generation Tremere at the heart of one of the most powerful clans in the modern nights. But, for my player it meant giving up my character, because we had all seen, from previous storyteller errors, that allowing a member of the 4th generation to parade through a chronicle is to spell its doom. While this isn't the worst way for a character to go, it would be final, my character would be dead to me and would become a storyteller character. Still, at the time, I had been seriously toying with giving up playing because the demands of running were weighing heavily on me and my character was constantly being consulted by PCs even as I was running a game. So, it wasn't the sacrifice it could have been, but it wasn't easy either, as it turned out, I was more attached to the character than I thought.
In the end, the other player characters stepped forward to the year 2010 (our point of departure) and resumed their unlives with some reasonable level of difficulty and transition. But when everyone awoke in Numerius' hidden castle in Bulgaria, they had some unexpected hitchhikers, Kateb Zeke's Thirble had burst and a Roman era merchant awoke in his place - Cato Cadeyrn, and when the body of Benesj Cherno awoke, the soul of Blagoy Zhivkov entered the twenty-first century. These complications definitely affected the group, but were minor obstacles that gave the remaining PCs a sense of cost to their mission. Shortly thereafter they learned that Meerlinda's stronghold in Dallas, Texas had been overrun by the Mexican Sabbat and she was dead. Of course no one believe it, and shortly thereafter she contacted them in their dreams, like the dark ancient being she had become, she offered them their heart's desires as renumeration for her success and as a bribe to let her go her way rather than turn her over to the Manus Nigrum. Most of the PCs accepted this at face value and took full advantage of it, all same Jeremy Sanderson, who saw Benesj/Meerlinda as a traitor to the True Hand. While the character of Phineus Niger (Benesj/Meerlinda) remained in the shadows manipulating events and the PCs, I was left bereft of a character. In time, I conceived of the idea of a temporal Doppelgänger as a means of playing my character in some form, while showing the other players and storytellers that there was paradox inherent in changing history for good or ill.
However, from the moment I conceived of the temporal doppelgängers, I understood as the myth of such creatures clearly explains that in the end, there can only be one survivor, one true doppelgänger. My rational for this comes from two distinct lines of reasoning. The first is that the doppelgängers are temporal hobgoblins (for those of you familiar with mage parlance) spawned by a massive backlash of temporal paradox, their single purpose is to destroy the Methuselah that changed history. Alternately, and my preferred theory, is that poor Benesj Cherno (my character) failed to kill Meerlinda and she did in fact survive, obviously Benesj was killed and when the Turn Back the Skies ritual came to an end in 2012, his soul snapped forward through history and was shattered into seven distinct pieces. What could cause that and why didn't he just die? Both are excellent questions. My best guess is that Benesj's soul being discorporated and subject to so much temporal paradox ruptured and that Varvara Kale, a mystical sanctum he created during the Grand Eclipse of 2010 acted as a mystical anchor, not unlike a phylactery, to ensure his spiritual survival. While it is just as likely that he might have become a wraith, I believe his will to live and his desire for revenge was powerful enough to ensure his survival in some corporeal form. Thus as the ritual guttered and died, his soul was spread along his former timeline, bits and pieces of his shattered soul trying to find purchase in any dying mortal they could locate.
While I have a certain fondness for all the doppelgängers (yes, even the Setite - though it stings that I never got to play him), I believe that only one can and will emerge as the final doppelgänger. Initially, I looked at the individual strengths of the doppelgängers to determine which would survive. As I did that, I also talked to the other players and storytellers to get a sense of their opinions and they gave me much food for thought. As the doppelgänger story/chronicle continued I began to see that the plot had a life of its own and that when the individual doppelgängers died, they enhanced the surviving individuals through a kind of mystical inheritance, a kind of reversed diablerie. In fact, as each doppelgänger dies, they pass on attributes, abilities, disciplines, merits and quite possibly generation. Its a rich spiritual story and a fascinatingly organic process that plays itself out on an independent timeline from everything else that is occurring in the World of Darkness.
I have just one last thing to add, while I cannot say for certain which of the doppelgängers will emerge as the survivor, I believe that time has a pattern and like a river it has specific currents that move to pull one particular doppelgänger to the forefront, making him likely to emerge as the final doppelgänger. I believe that the flow of time is trying to return Benesj as closely as possible to the form he had before the Turn Back the Skies ritual scattered his soul into different forms. Thus, while I have a certain fondness for one doppelgänger or another, I believe that the form Kurt Barlow will be the final surviving vessel. However, just because it is the Tzimisce body that survives, doesn't mean that Kurt Barlow will be the same person he was before the reintegration of Benesj Cherno's soul began, each time one of the doppelgängers dies they subtly evolve and the final product of their spiritual fusion probably won't resemble any of the current doppelgängers as much as the original Benesj Cherno.
finis -- "The Magister 00:27, 23 August 2016 (MDT)"
And Then There Were Six
And Then There Were Five
Kurt Barlow and Fairuza's entire pack were destroyed by Dieter Kotlar and the Final Reich as they prepared to defend themselves and Sasha Vykos entering Berlin's Tegel Airport terminal A. What in all likelihood would have ended in the Final Reich's complete destruction turned into a resoundingly successful ambush as Dieter Kotlar used a German made Panzerfaust 3 (disposable recoilless anti-tank weapon) against Prici Vykos' rear guard. The RPG destroyed the one side of terminal-A, sending glass shrapnel flying into the terminal and setting fire to the building. When Prici Vykos and Fairuza's Pack turned to face their attackers, Kotlar launched as second round just as a mystical funnel cloud grabbed the pack and plucked them from the ground. Thus effectively defenseless, the second RPG entered the funnel and detonated, turning the funnel cloud into fiery pyre for the pack. The prici barely escaped by using a powerful version of the thaumaturgic path movement of the mind to fly as great speeds directly up and out of the fiery funnel. As the pack burned in the burning tornado, Dieter Kotlar launched a third RPG into it, ensuring the pack's total destruction. As Barlow died in a airborne inferno, his fellow doppelgängers screamed in collective pain as his essence was merged with theirs and then there were only five left.
Potential Resolutions
 Kurt Barlow -- A American Sabbat Tzimisce in Rio de Janeiro.
{Destroyed -- December 26th, 2042} |
[[]] Blake -- A American Lasombra antitribu prince of Leeds, England. |  Edwardo Putanesca -- A Putanesca professional chauffeur and bodyguard in Houston.
|
 Czere Ubireg -- A American Tremere, recently spotted in Melbourne, Australia.
|
||
 Seker Aamon -- A young American Follower of Set in Cairo, Egypt.
{Murdered -- December 22th, 2042} |
 Bogdan Zhdanov -- A Bulgarian Ravnos currently living in Paris, France.
|
 Ward McGovern -- A City Gangrel from San Francisco.
|
'
Potential Doppelgängers
 Benesj Cherno -- An Old Clan Tzimisce of Bulgarian stock who was a resident of Gabrovo Grad until Autumn of 2012 (currently missing).
|
 Blagoy Zhivkov -- A Doppelgänger of Benesj's, Zhivkov was slain by the Lasombra Bruce in 2016 in Gabrovo Grad, he is now a Wraith (deceased).
|
The Voices of the Doppelgängers
Blake
{First Person -- Confident, contemptuous and predatory.}
The darkness of the sea calls to me and the salt laden breeze is refreshing as it blow into my face, driving away the ever-present smells of popcorn, cotton-candy and of course human blood. So many mortals, so many choices of potential prey to feed from and while the prince of Houston claims Galveston, he and everyone in his court knows that his authority here is a polite fiction. Which means I can feed until my cold, dark heart is utterly satisfied and while I contemplate my first course, a part of my mind is going over all that happened over the last month. I know its foolish to spend my ill-gotten time on reminiscence, and its dangerous to not be one hundred percent in the present, as even now there could be Sabbat vampires in this quaint little town. Still, as I settle on a pair of delicious and delicate teen flowers and fall into step fifty feet behind them, I reflect on how things turned out and I smile a secret smile to myself that has nothing to do with the sea or the prospect of a fine meal.
Czere Ubireg
{First person -- Critical, self reflective and sardonic.}
My first conscious thought was: "it must be Capital Hill, because it smells like alcohol and piss and something undefinable like despair and or desperation..." My clothes were soaked through and I was chilled to the bone. Having grown up in Colorado, I knew the danger inherent in hypothermia and got to my feet. I felt groggy and disoriented with no recollection of how I might have come to be in this particular alley. Despite the dim lighting and my fuzziness of mind, I recognized the building as the Scottish Rite Temple. I have no idea how many times I walked past the place and never once walked inside, but its a memorable building.
Simon Le Gris
{First Person -- hypnotic, melancholy and wistful. Sad & Sexy, as if he is in love with everyone, even the people he hates or kills. The beautifying of minutia is the insanity of the Toreador.}
"I could hear the slow retreat of his steps down the hall, the scuff of the expensive leather soles on the aging Victorian carpet of hand-tufted wool upon the stairs, and the exquisite groaning of the aging wood which bore his weight as he descended to the main hall below."
