Last time on Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines… we end up destroying some vampires involved in a crazy cult in order to protect the Masquerade. Well, we also did it to get some brownie points with the anarchs and score a reward from Strauss.
This time we’ll finish the sidequests in Downtown before we go do another job for fancy pants Lacroix.
SPOILER WARNING! Don’t read beyond this point if you care about spoilers. If you don’t or already has played this game then just go ahead.
Ghost Hauntings
In Downtown there is an abandoned hospital that we can enter. Since this is a video-game I just go in for no other reason than because I can.
Right at the entrance a man comes screaming in fear. He says he is a parapsychologist, part of a show about the supernatural. He even admits that he doesn’t believe in ghosts, that everything in their show is fake. However when they came to this hospital to shoot another episode, strange things started to happen and his crew started to disappear. The man doesn’t know what is happening but he is certain that something is coming after him. His terror is so great that he just flee as soon as our dialogue is over.
As we make our way through the place there are some computers the filming crew were using. We can see in the monitors people being dragged away, knocked out or killed by some invisible force.
At the end we find a passage to the hospital basement where we find a really pale woman eating the corpse of a man. She claims to be a vampire like us except her curse is that besides having to drink blood she also needs to consume human flesh otherwise she starts to rot and decay.
She refuses to give her real name instead asking us to address her as Pisha, the name of a lover long gone.
Pisha is only staying for a while in this city looking for some mystical relics. However she won’t bargain with us unless we send the man we encountered earlier to her. He did see too much and Pisha even admits she will eat his flesh eventually.
On our way out, there is a business card in the floor. It is from a Simon Milligan for a show called “Haunted L.A.”. It even has an address on it which happens to be in an apartment in the same building as ours. How convenient!
As we break and enter into the guy’s apartment we can find the man from the hospital cowered inside a closet. I convince him that it was all a prank from his crew and that they are all waiting for him at the basement of the hospital. He is not amused but decides to go there to give them a piece of his mind.
This restores the Masquerade but makes me lose one point of humanity.
There are some other interesting items in the apartment like a blurry picture of a nosferatu ready to feed on a human. Hacking the computer we find some notes about their upcoming shows, including how the hospital we just visited.
Back to Pisha, she pretty much tell us to not think too much about the whole thing. She is however willing to discuss the artifacts that brought her here. One is a fetish described in a 19th century book of a British platoon that made contact with a local tribe.
The book tells how soldiers would disappear in the night and be replaced with those fetishes. Pisha believes the item to be in one of the local museums.
The other item is the “Voce del Morte”, a tome held by the Giovanni. It is used to communicate with otherworldly entities. She does warn that the Giovanni won’t part with this item willingly though.
For each of these items we bring to her she is willing to trade for a mystical item of equal value. Which seems like a good proposition to me. We’ll get to them during the course of the game. For now this quest is over.
The Annoying Ghoul
At the Last Round there is an anarch vampire called Skelter. He greets us in a sarcastic way but as long as we are polite enough Skelter is willing to have a chat.
His story is that, as a mortal, Skelter fought in Vietnam but it wasn’t until he became a vampire that he found out what true oppression is. According to him because of this curse all vampires are bound to the will of their respective clan progenitors. We might not feel it but the blood does. And if these ancestors decide to wake up and call all of their progeny to their side the blood will listen and obey.
Skelter isn’t entirely sure if he believes in Cain or the Gehenna though but he isn’t going to outright dismiss it either.
He doesn’t think the Camarilla is necessary either. To him the vampire traditions are just common sense like the 10 commandments. It is just that things in the real world don’t always work like that and some times you gotta break one of them. But the Camarilla punishes all equally and with the final death which is something Skelter doesn’t agree with.
As the conversation goes, Skelter asks a favor of us. There is a ghoul of this Toreador who disappeared. It is lady been making a ruckus asking for her sire. No matter what the anarchs tell her she just asks again and louder. Which is not only a breach of the masquerade waiting to happen, it is bound to attract some vampire hunters too.
Skelter would take care of it himself but since he knew the Toreador guy he doesn’t feel like it would be right. Since we don’t have any ties to any of them though it should be fine if we take care of the ghoul. It will just be our little secret.
The ghoul in question is a girl called Patty. We can find her easily enough in one of the night clubs in Downtown. She starts acting like she is friends to every vampire in L.A. and it doesn’t take long for her to ask about her sire.
There are a few options on how to deal with her. The one that is probably the most humane is to persuade Patty that her sire went to San Diego. This feels like it would just turn into a problem for someone else to deal with. Instead I decide to go with one of the other options, saying that the sire is planning a rave in the basement of the abandoned hospital. Amazingly enough she believes it.
I figure this way I am not only helping the anarchs I am also getting Pisha a free meal. Of course, this makes me lose a point of humanity but I figure it is a small price to pay for helping the community out.
Skelter thanks us for taking care of this problem then comments that ghouls are nothing but trouble. Personally, I am pretty happy with Heather but to each their own.
Action Jones
In one of the side streets there is a weapons dealer called Fat Larry. I buy some weapons from him as well as some armor upgrade. For male ventrue the armor upgrade comes in the form of a suit. I don’t know how that protects more than the t-shirt I was wearing before but it somehow does.
Anyway, Larry notices we are packing a lot of heat, so much that it makes us perfect for a little job. Basically there is a deal going on between the triad and some local gang and someone wants whatever is in their briefcase. If we do this we will get a cut of the profits and Larry will give access to his special stock.
I also convince him to give me a discount on all of his merchandise which he doesn’t like much but he agrees to.
The meeting is in a nearby garage with both triad and some gang members guarding the place. I try to sneak through, bypassing some of them. Eventually one of them notices me and opens fire. Since I didn’t remember if there was any difference in the quest reward I decided to just give up and slaughter everybody in there.
At the end I got the briefcase, got my money from Fat Larry and he even recommended me for a friend of his that needed someone with my skills. It is the owner of a club called Confession. That will be our next stop.
Her name was Venus
At Confession we meet the bartender and owner of the night club, Venus. She has a pretty simple job for us: just go to the nearby parking lot and tell some russian men that they won’t be getting their money tonight. She does ask if I can run and to not start any fights since they are connected… As a reward we’ll be get free drinks for a week. I don’t drink but XP is XP.
Well, I relayed the message to the russians but they didn’t like it much and started to shoot me. The fact that my message involved the guy’s mother too probably didn’t help.
In the middle of the fight I end up killing a civilian by accident. I honestly didn’t even know that was possible (which I should, I mean, there isn’t anything that prevented me to do it before). Worse, this accidental murder end up costing me one humanity point.
As for the russians they weren’t all that hard. A bit annoying but not hard.
When Venus hear the news she is pretty impressed by the results. Apparently her bouncer can’t even move his neck to the right anymore thanks to those guys. Now she wants us to take care of their boss, a man named Boris.
Venus tells us that to start this club she had to get a loan from him. Since then she has been having to pay the money back plus interests. When she wasn’t able to he takes whatever he considers to be a “suitable late fee”. Understandably enough Venus is fed up with it and wants us to deal with Boris.
There is only the small matter that Boris is part of the russian mafia. We dealt with worse so I am sure this won’t be a problem. In return for this job Venus will make us a silent partner to her club. I don’t really need the money from this but the XP will be nice so I accept.
Boris is at the penthouse of the Skyline hotel. No enter and breaking this time since Venus gave us the keycard to that floor. We do have to kill some of his men to get to his office.
He isn’t amused to meet us but I just use Dominate on him to drop Venu’s debt which works like a charm. Then he starts shooting me because I loot a ring that is laying around in his office. Again, in hindsight I should have seem this coming but I thought Boris wouldn’t care about me looting his office… Oh, well, it is not like I really mind murdering him.
With Boris dead, Venus fulfill her part of the bargain and give us our share of the night’s profits. She didn’t seem all interested in my suggestions to improve the club though….
Next time we’ll go visit Grout as per the Prince’s orders.
P.S.: After all the humanity loss during these sidequests my Humanity was down to 5. It started to affect my dialogue choices with some of them just having the asshole option. I didn’t know Humanity affected the dialogue options like that since the only times I got it this low I was purposefully playing evil characters. XD