WoD vignette #1: The Sluagh In The Library


	"What I don't get," said the Young Nocker, "is why that guy is
supposed to be so incredibly cool.  He spends all his time in the
university library, going over books about mortals.  I mean come on, how
is knowing who started the Thirty Years War going to be any use at all?"
	"Well," said the Old Sidhe, "If he spent all his time in the 
library at the castle, I suppose that would be different."
	"Yeah," admitted the Young Nocker, "That would make him a force 
to be reckoned with.  See, the books there are about the real history, 
_our_ history, and by knowing that history you can tell a lot about 
what's going on now."
	"And this isn't true of mortal history?" said the Old Sidhe.
	"No, I mean think about it." said the Young Nocker.  "Their history
is just ours except less real.  It's like a reflection of real history. 
You can learn all kinds of things about mortal history from looking at
our..."  The Young Nocker trailed off, as if realizing what he had just
said.
	"Subtle, isn't it?" said the Old Sidhe.


WoD vignette #2: The Dark Ages Weren't Dark To The Blind

	The Malkavian came to the Prince of the kingdom without knowing 
the policy there.  The Prince was an enlightened and liberal man, a 
Ventrue, not the hidebound and tradition-laden Lasombra.  The Prince was 
magnanimous and believed that the insane couldn't necessarily help 
themselves, and so couldn't be blamed for many of their actions.  But 
the Malkavian ability to cause madness in others was debilitating to a 
holding and therefore had to be stopped.  Malkavians were of course free 
to come and go where they chose in the kingdom, as long as they consented 
to having their eyes put out with red-hot pokers first.  In this way, 
they could not use their dementation abilities.
	Alternately, they could choose to be housed permanently, at the 
Prince's expense, deep within the bowels of the castle, and feed on the 
blood of rats provided by the Prince's blindfolded servants.  Everyone 
agreed that this was a generous and fair-minded solution to the spreading 
problem of insanity.
	In that dungeon, it was said, were three Malkavians, one who sang 
all the time but wrote nothing, one who wrote all the time but said nothing, 
and the third who spoke all the time, but wrote and sang nothing.  They 
were referred to as the "Muses" of the castle.  Anyone was free to visit 
them in their imprisonment, as long as they were securely blindfolded 
before entering.  This led to some further interesting theories that the 
prisoners were really Nosferatu, or that they were in fact angels, too 
beautiful to even gaze upon.  The Prince himself visited them many times, 
spellbound by the music of the first, the poetry of the second, and the 
intriguing and enlightened rhetoric of the third.
	A small minority of Kindred in the kingdom, Brujah mostly, 
objected to this treatment of the Malkavians as unduly prejudiced as one 
of a long list of grievances against the Prince.  But this was expected, 
of course.  Finally they organized a coup: one of the parts of the coup 
that was most carefully thought out was that a small group of knights 
would release the Muses and the other Malkavians in the dungeon into the 
castle, which would throw the guards into disarray as they attempted to 
recapture them without looking at their eyes.  Also, they theorized, the 
true reason for the Prince's antipathy to Malkavians was that he himself 
feared insanity, and that he would attach too much importance to the 
escape and not enough to the attack.
	When the attack finally began, the small band of knights entered 
the dungeons, and, for some reason which nobody has ever been able to 
completely understand, only one returned.  He must have been driven mad 
by what he saw: his only words before throwing himself from the parapet 
were "They already had a key."
	The Prince survived that attack, and continued in his position 
for hundreds of years.  Finally, he was destroyed in a Sabbat attack, and 
they found the dungeons quite empty.