Hester Reed

Lasombra -x- Vampires of New York from 1999 to 2022 -x- Vampires of New York from 2022 Onward

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Sobriquet:

Appearance: Hester is one of the early punks, not yet so jaded with the scene at the time of her Embrace that her appearance is completely outlandish. Her hair is blonde and layered, which she sometimes ties back into a ponytail if she plans on any physical violence. She wears tight leather clothing in dated styles, her tastes never quite keeping pace with the years that have passed since becom­ing a Cainite.

Behavior: More than anything else, she is resentful. When the Sabbat was the dominant sect in New York, she was on top of the world, doing what she wanted, taking blood whenever she grew thirsty and generally enjoying the power that undeath gave her over the pathetic juice-bags who scrabbled to make ends meet in their short lives. Now you're the one skulking around just to see each new night, and that, honestly, is complete bullshit. The sooner she drives the Camarilla and its stooges back to wherever the hell they came from, the sooner she can have her old unlife back. Anyone stand­ing in her way gets the beat-down, and anyone not expressly fighting the Camarilla may as well be standing in her way.

History: The Sabbat of New York were without a doubt the dominant sect in the city all throughout the late '70s and early '80s. As punk crawled from the fetid corpse of the disco era, the sect embraced the ethic with wanton abandon. The two seemed destined to go hand in hand -- both were violent rebellions against the status quo, both were brash and young, both were ready to take on the world. Like many other Sabbat Embraced at the time, Hester is a product of this singular alignment of mortal trends and undead politics.

As part of the burgeoning punk nightlife weaned on stage acts at CBGB's and heroin binges at the Chelsea Hotel, Hester would have died as unremarkably as she had lived if fate hadn't intervened. A Lasombra who had become part of the underground took quite a shine to Hester, and also to ingesting the blood of smack junkies. As part of her "duty" to this Lasombra, Hester would cook up, shoot up and let him drink from her so that he could share the rush. On a particularly active weekend, Hester shot so much heroin and lost so much of her blood to her "boyfriend" that she overdosed, poisoned by the sheer volume of drugs in her veins. There, amid the dirty windowsills and scag-vomit of his Chelsea room, Hester's sire Embraced her for the sole purpose of not having to hide the body or explain why a dead junkie had been found in a room with his name on the ledger.

After her inauspicious induction into the sect, though, Hester distinguished herself as a bravo and, eventually, the center of an ever-growing network of contacts. Not a decade following her Embrace, Hester had become the ductus of Love's Easy Tears and generally acknowledged as an up-an-comer in the hierarchy of Sabbat neonates. She briefly served as a templar to Archbishop Polonia on a few occasions and often led her pack on patrols and skirmishes with Camarilla scouts, thin-blooded vagabonds, and even rival Sabbat packs that refused to understand the concept of territory.

Hester led her pack during the doomed six-night stand against the Camarilla when in swept into New York in 1999. During that time, most of the pack met Final Death, largely owing to Hester's inexperience with openly fighting the Camarilla on its own terms. In the fighting, Love's Easy Tears ran afoul of the Nosferatu Justicar Cock Robin. Hester called for the pack to withdraw, later falling back to assist Polonia and a strangely disturbed Lambach Ruthven. The tattered remains of Love's Easy Tears helped force open an avenue of escape for fleeing Cainites, making a stand against archon Federico di Padua before Polonia sent him to a bloody torpor.

At that point, Hester decided to keep the pack in New York City. She still remains in occasional contact with Polonia, who considers her pack one of the foremost tools the Sabbat has to retake the city. Hester has dedicated herself to this cause -- she guides the pack as an agent provocateur against the rapidly steadying Camarilla pres­ence. Of late, she has taken to ambushing individual Kindred and small coteries, but she knows these terror tactics only serve to slow the Camarilla influx, not over­ turn it. She and the two remaining members of the pack are currently seeking new converts for Love's Easy Tears. Whether they Embrace them anew or indoctrinate disil­lusioned members of the Camarilla doesn't matter to her. Hester simply wants to be in charge of a pack that matters again and to once more see it on top.

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