Gone are the desperate battles of the Final Nights. While impending disaster may lurk around the turn of the century, it is still little more than an ominous rumour, easily dismissed as ancient superstition or the rantings of madmen locked away in dismal asylum cells.
Great facades built of marble and stone are stained with the soot of the Industrial age. By night, they are stained with the blood of the innocent.
Queen Victoria's empire offers wonders, even to the Damned. Indefatigable engines of industry drive locomotives and steamships around the globe. Webs of telegraph wires unite distant countries in rapid communication. Science attempts to redefine man's role in the evolutionary pageant, tests the limits of human sanity and strains to see eternity in the "luminiferous ether" of space. With similar effervescence, the upper class of Victoria's empire bear what Kipling will call the "burden" of spreading civilisation around the glove. Idealism and imperialism are as omnipresent as hypocrisy.
The fictional heroes of this Victorian empire champion these new ideals with a purity few mortals can emulate. Holmes employs reason to eliminate crime. Phileas Fogg traipses around the world in 80 days. Verne's heroes travel to the centre of the Earth, the kingdoms of the moon and an airship fortress fit for a man who would be king of the world. Yet, here we also find Frankenstein's monster seeking the meaning of his existence in a meaningless world, mad Nemo forsaking mankind for an ocean kingdom and the Invisible Man driven to beastial acts in gross displays of supernatural power. Even in fiction, these extremes of the Victorian psyche are evident.
The upper crust of society emulates these heroes. Sadly, their counterparts - the impoverished and squalid denizens of the largest cities - hold little significance to idealists, save as object lessons of Dickensian proportions. Within the largest empire in history, ignorance and suffering are as widespread as syphilis and consumption. Children sweep away manure in the streets so that the wealthy may remain unsullied, many of these children die of horrific diseases long before adulthood. The Industrial Revolution has just begun, but there are, as yet, no truly mechanised methods of mass production. If work is to be done, it requires human hands. Men, women and children labour long hours for starvation wages, living and dying in the shadow of the Machine.
That mass of central humanity - London - is a city the likes of which has never been seen before. Better to stay here: in Aquae Sulis, where the blood was nearly as sweet, the tastes nearly as refined. Better Aquae Sulis, where the trains deliver new, malnourished and desperate flesh daily and the rich of London come to debauche and degrade themselves amongst the squalor and silks. Better to stay in Aquae Sulis, where nights are easy and days seem short, where the blood flows like wine and there is always another inn, another tavern, another whore...
Beyond the pale, smooth stone houses and neat, orderly gardens, the countryside opens up. Farmland crests the hills all the way to the Industrial behemoth of Bristol, skulking in a crest of smog and steel along the banks of the Severn estuary. South: endless miles of rolling fields all the way to the Somerset levels, marshland rich in wildlife, poverty and tiny, archaic villages. To the East, the moist evening air brings the taste of coal and the smell of countless thousands crammed together, the stacks of London belching into the night.
From the hilltop, the view over the valley is haunting - low mists drift from the twisting snake of the river, punctured by points of light flickering from oil lamps. The town houses loom over cobbled, slippery streets, and echo the clattering of horse drawn trams and the barking of stray dogs. Over it all stands the Abbey, like a frozen grin, judging those below it and casting its shadow across the recently discovered public Baths, heathen decadence nestled against crushing piety. A mirror of the city itself.
Beyond it all rises the sloping roofs and the sulphur fugue and the cold river stretching out to the sprawling dark continent's indifferent consciousness.
Sharpening one’s senses, the world opens up further. The cries of a small child, abandoned in its crib whilst its mother whored for pennies in a filthy room next door. The rattle of dice and the laughter of the intoxicated coming from the gambling dens. The sweet stink of opium on the breeze, mixing with the foulness of shit-stained streets and bloody knuckles from the fighting pits.
In stark contrast lies the domain of the rich: with opalescent gilt and jewelled obsidian so deep it exhaled the plush carpets. A wild pornography of colour and form, the shameless posturing, the brazen succulence and flaunted curves.
Aquae Sulis. The city of Bath - before its new name. The rich man’s paradise, the poor man’s last resort. 60 thousand people huddled together in a market town built in a marsh. The occasional train grinding against the newly laid iron tracks makes for an eerie counterpoint to the bustle and hum of the city.
The news spread throughout the underground like a fire, whipped by the winds of fear and disbelief. The Prince is dead! Toothless mouths whispered and clawed fingers scrabbled with filthy scrolls from tiny couriers. The Court is destroyed. Aquae Sulis is burning!
The Silence Before
In the summer of 1880, the Nosferatu entered Elysium en masse, locals supported by visitors from the nearest three cities. Lead by a prominent elder, they announced that the clan has discovered widespread diablerie within one of the other clans.
July comes. A Midsummer Judical Conclave is called to determine the guilt - or innocence - of a Kindred who'd fallen beyond the scope of princely justice. Namely, the Prince himself.
Though similar to other Conclaves, Judical Conclaves are less social affairs. Much remains rumoured as to what occurred during that trial. Not many were invited. What little is known paints a grim picture. Allegedly, a great many Kindred in Bath were accused of diablerie, guilty by the act or in the sheltering thereof of diablerists. The Prince himself put his childe - one such diablerist - above the safety of the Masquerade. They were both put on trial and executed. The Justicar and her Archons systematically purged the city of any traces of the corruption that had fostered the heinous act, and any other perpetrators were slain.
Of all the clans that suffered during the cleanse, none took so heavy a loss as Clan Brujah. Theories suggest, then, that they must have been involved. Perhaps they rebelled amid the violence, seizing some opportunity to revolt against their betters whom allegedly oppress them - proletariat rabble that the Brujah are - but there were strong allegations otherwise. Rumours speak of dark underworld pit fights and famous Brujah tempers. Things could have easily gone too far.
Shock rippled through English Kindred society, horror at the ease and speed with which the Court of Aquae Sulis was destroyed. Amid the confusion and distress gleaming, greedy eyes looked towards the valley, dreaming of power and wealth. Slowly, new Kindred trickled into the ancient city, claiming Haven in the ruin and pumping their coin and their minions into rebuilding. The newcomers were greeted with suspicion by those who survived, their motives unclear and their strengths unknown. Civilisation once more began to shiver into being, help offered by surrounding townships under auspice of “goodwill.” Homes and businesses were put back together, families reunited, the Masquerade cloaking all.
First came the month of the dead, when the humans remembered ancient All Hallows Eve and drew closed the curtains against the dark. As Yule and Christmas draw close, highlighting the stark lines between the rich and the poor, November hit. The city ground back to life, the Kindred hiding in the shadows and greasing the wheels, as they had done for centuries. Underneath, though, the city was torn and bruised, the Court in tatters and the Throne empty with praxis facing fierce contest. Ultimately, as December loomed and brought with it chilled winter winds and the threat of early storms -
Clan Ventrue took the reins.
Aquae Sulis is a City Divided
It is hard for one to imagine two places more different from one another than the separate halves of our fair city.
In shocking rebellion against an unfair and impoverished world, an underworld thrives - it is a world with its own laws, regardless of what the police may insist. It is everything south of the river. Cracksmen and scavengers, flash girls and whores, beggars and burglars, flower girls and sewer hunters - the pageant of the underworld lives and dies in the same city of Victorian gentlemen and ladies, sometimes only a few streets away from their ostentatious homes. Costermongers wheel carts of goods through the streets, acting as lookouts against the constabulary and their truncheons. The wealthy profit while "unfortunates" perish, sometimes at the hands of the innovative murderers. Even the Un-Dead cannot equal the atrocities of some mortal slayers. Fire and faith alone cannot purge this world of corruption... or of evil.
Victorian science presents its own measure of hypocrisy. The sciences have learned to tell how the physical laws of this world work, but not why. Thus, charlatans and visionaries have rushed to fill a spiritual void. Even educated ladies may consult a spiritualist in Aqua Sulis for the chance to commune with loved ones who have passed on. A host of new faiths arise to challenge established beliefs, often spurred by "secret masters" of supernatural lore. Theosophical wisdom exults the wonders of Lemurian kingdoms and Hyperboeran ancestors. Egyptology, Atlantology, Neo-Druidism - numerous exotic and esoteric fields of occult study come into vogue. Secret societies offer living glimpses of magic in a world where faith itself is challenged.
Mysticism and the supernatural become secretive ways to indulge in taboos. Victorian men and women who tire of tragedy seek an escape from the scientific age. They find it - and often find suffering or death at the hands of night-fiends who would exploit them. For, just as the criminal underworld lurks in the greatest empire since Ancient Rome, the Un-Dead prosper wherever mysticism flourishes. Romantic notions of death and eternity allow creatures of great passion to seduce - and sometimes destroy - those who seek a respite from Victorian propriety.
Just as the opium addict retreats to his den of iniquity to indulge in vice, those who feign propriety may submit to their baser instincts, slaking their lust by submitting to nocturnal predators. The surging lifeblood of the civilised world depends on the cursed vitae of vampires. Powerful Kindred built financial empires, sponsor artists and artistry and protect the herds of mortals that gather in their domains, but the price of progress is paid in blood.
The proper, genteel end of town, Sulis' northern half is the home those Sulians (or, "Bathonians" as you'll have it now) with status, breeding, intelligence and poise. Most Kindred who make their havens north of the river - very nearly all, as best I'm able to determine - are like the mortals around them. They are the wealthiest of the kind, as concerned with matters of decorum and propriety as any upstanding gentleman. Most, if not all, are part of a secret society of Kindred called the Camarilla, which sect maintains a peerless influence over undead society in nearly all of Great Britain.