OXR

“You see us how you want to see us. In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions.
But what we found out is each one of us…
is a brain
and an athlete
and a basket case
a princess
and a criminal.
Does that answer your question?"
The Breakfast Club

Perceived Goals: Mutual protection and support
Meeting Place: Their clubhouse in the French Quarter
Prerequisites to Join: Majority vote by existing members
Required Backgrounds: Status (OXR) •+
Members: Andromeda “Andi” Brooks, Benjamin Moore, Nova, Ren Zahra, Roxandra “Roxy” Adrieux, Tyrell Turner

History

Bonding Experience

Maybe if you weren’t around prior to the trial you wouldn’t know how much things have shifted. Maybe you’d think “isn’t it weird that some Anarchs and some Bourbons got together to become buddies and look out for each other?”

Maybe you should pay more attention to history, kid.

Things weren’t always so tense. Yeah, you’ve got your three sides, but it was more a cold war than a civil war and, fuck, most of us just want to be left alone to fight and fuck and feed to our heart’s content.

Katrina shook things up in a big way. Lotta people died. Lotta licks got caught out by the storm or the loops or the fangs of their fellows. People who had a cushy spot didn’t have that cushy spot no more. People left, never came back. And other people came to the city to settle down in the wake of the destruction.

Nico Cimpreon was one of those fellows that landed after Katrina and made a home for himself. He was from out west where the Anarchs run wild but found the Quarter more to his liking; apparently the idea of Anarchs bowing to a Ventrue prince didn’t sit right with him and he thought Coco was a sellout for not pushing for more. He’d attend rants, sure, but he still made his home in the Quarter and found the Evergreen to be a more hospitable sort of territory. Plus the feeding is better.

He met Andi and Tyrell at a rant shortly after Katrina (they were out of the city during the storm—Andi was playing to a sold out stadium in Chicago when the hurricane hit land) and took an instant liking to her “fuck the world” view. She and Tyrell had already been tight for years, traveling buddies and all that, so the trio popped a bottle of kine and spent the next few nights getting to know each other. They had a lot in common, as it turned out. Andi also wasn’t terribly satisfied with the idea of the Camarilla in general (she’d spent her first decade of unlife with her sire outside Sabbat infested New York) and her “rage against the machine” attitude lent itself better to the streets of Mid-City and the Anarchs that ruled there.

Tyrell was another story. Antique dealer, sure, but Nico knew a fellow smuggler when he saw one. Andi’s shows were a convenient cover for the Ravnos to carry goods across the nation, and his mortal life had given him a sense of the world and safety holes across the land, with friends as numerous as they are varied. Besides, no one stops a tour bus and asks if they’ve got stolen cargo aboard. Tyrell, for his part, thought Nico had a “good story” and “plenty of experiences to talk about,” and spent some time collecting those before he decided he liked the lick enough to krewe up.

Bit of a small krewe, just the three of them, but they seemed happy with the arrangement.

Tyrell’s Abduction

It’s common enough knowledge that the snakes make their home in the Quarter. And while some of them are ballsy enough to venture outside the safety of those confines, not many of them are so ballsy as to claim their lineage openly. It was shortly after Thurmon’s childe went missing that Charlie Harrison picked up Tyrell on his way back into the city from a late night excursion to the bayou and began to question him, with the hanging threat of handing him over to the Guard de Ville if he didn’t cooperate. Unfortunately for the Snake Hunters, Tyrell wasn’t familiar with the Setites they sought. Double unfortunately, a clanmate of Tyrell felt his fear down the line of their shared blood and was able to divine his position within hours of his disappearance. She turned to his krewe to get him out.

While the three of them were no slouches at breaking and entering, they knew they had to act quickly if they wanted to get Tyrell out without him suffering any sort of permanent damage or final death at the hands of the Snake Hunters. Ren turned to Roxandra, a Gangrel in Savoy’s court with whom she’d had positive interactions with in the past to enlist her aid. Roxy brought more to the table than an extra body: she had a long list of animal companions and allies she could call on in a pinch and was a decent sleuth herself. With her help the krewe was able to quickly locate and free Tyrell, and when they invited her to join them so they could scratch each other’s backs she’d been hard-pressed to find a reason to say no. She’d lost her own krewe to Katrina.

Losing Nico

Things went swimmingly for the krewe until January 1st 2011, when Nico and Ren disappeared. Ren was back within a few weeks and said she’d taken a trip to Houston whenever anyone asked, but Nico never surfaced again. Most people assume they had split under ugly terms.

Few people know the truth: that Nico had orchestrated an attack on the sheriff’s domain and been caught in the act. His other krewemates were cleared of any connections to the plan (Andi and Tyrell were out of town and Travers vouched for Roxandra’s whereabouts), but Ren was present and begged the sheriff to spare his unlife, that she’d take his punishment instead. Nico was exiled rather than executed with his co-conspirators and hasn’t been seen since.

Nico might have been the force that brought the krewe together, but Roxandra stepped into the leadership role following his disappearance and his loss brought the four of them closer together.

New Faces

A pretty Toreador once joked that OXR’s eclectic band of misfits was just one jock shy of the Breakfast Club. Could be that the words inspired the krewe to open up their doors to new members once they’d finished mourning the loss of Nico, or could be that the lick who joined them would have gotten in anyway. Either way, shortly after his Embrace in 2013 Benjamin Moore was welcomed into the fold.

At this point nobody knew Andi was only pretending to be a Malkavian, so the addition of the clanless black guy to their ranks made some older licks stop and stare. Bad enough they’d had the one Caitiff, isn’t it, but now they have to go and replace him with another?

But those weren’t the licks who saw how the young Anarch handled himself in the games, who saw him rip the spine clean out of a pair of ghouls and face down a fire-bombed death trap without flinching. Some might dismiss him as a mindless thug, even a discount Brujah, but those who know him recognize there’s something cleverer than all that lurking beneath the hulking muscles and golden teeth.

Like most of the krewe, he’s happy to play the role that society has put him in. All the better to surprise people when they get on his bad side.

Krewe Members by Status

OXR Status •••

Nico Cimpreon

Lineage: 11th gen. childe of Leon “8-Ball” White
Embrace: 1988
Final Death: 2016 (28 years undead)
Status: Anarch Movement ••, Bourbon Sanctified •, Camarilla 0, Lasombra •
Coteries: Leviathan Committee ••, OXR •••
Nico started OXR shortly after arriving in New Orleans. He’d left his old krewe behind when he moved to the city and saw the merits in starting one of his own with like-minded individuals. Maybe he thought that NOLA’s Anarchs were just as good as the ones out West: he turned to the Movement to find his people. He carefully picked his new coterie from the available pool of bodies, leaning towards others, like him, that had little reason to bow to the Ventrue prince holding their regents’ leashes. Though officially still part of the Anarchs, Nico found the Quarter more to his liking and chose it as the locale for their clubhouse. No one in OXR has said if they’ve heard from Nico since his banishment, but the lot of them still hold him in esteem.

Roxandra “Roxy” Adrieux

Lineage: 10th gen. childe of Jared Buckner
Embrace: 1956
Status: Bourbon Sanctified •, Camarilla •, Gangrel Status ••, Invictus •
Coterie: OXR •••
Roxy had her own krewe prior to Katrina, but like most things it was summarily destroyed when the storm hit land. She seemed content to float on her own for a while before another squall turned things upside down for a handful of licks and they pulled her aboard. She hasn’t looked back since.
Roxy is the oldest lick in the krewe and one of the few that remains full time in the city, so it was a no-brainer for her to take over after Nico up and vanished. Her presence has lent some credence to the otherwise largely ignored castoffs and more than a few have wondered what she sees in them. Whatever it is she isn’t saying, and she scoffs at the idea of any ancillae or elder questioning her judgement. She didn’t rejoin society to play nice and grovel to the powers-that-be.

OXR Status ••

Andromeda Brooks

Lineage: 9th gen. childe of Perseus
Embrace: 1999
Status: Anarch ••, Caitiff -, Camarilla 0
Coterie: OXR ••
Though she was a founding member of OXR, Andi’s frequent trips outside the city keep her from being as involved with the krewe as she could otherwise be. She’s generally welcome to their domains and havens while she’s in town, and any longer periods spent in the city grant her an interim stay from Lord Savoy (or rather his steward) so she doesn’t put too much of a drain on the clubs and streets her peers hold. She seems to get on well with anyone musically inclined and, outside of the Quarter, is frequently sighted in Marigny. It’s her fame that attracts others to her, though: she’s said to be on good relations with a lot of the Anarchs on the West Coast and uses her mortal clout to frequently sway popular opinion. Some licks think that she’s been in contact with her missing krewe mate under the guise of “touring” and is planning to smuggle him back into the city now that tempers have cooled.

Benjamin Moore

Lineage: Unknown
Embrace: 2013
Status: Anarch •, Bourbon Sanctified •, Caitiff -, Camarilla 0
Coterie: OXR ••
Apparently Benji and Andi go way back, making it an obvious choice for the Caitiff to join his friend’s krewe after his Embrace. He fit right in with the ragtag band of nobodies and never stopped to consider another path. Benji’s addition to the krewe brought some extra intimidation factor to their rep on the street, and though the rest of the members are significantly older, the whispers suggest that it’s Benji who lays the smackdown when skulls need cracking. He never got a chance to meet their “glorious leader,” but most of OXR thinks that Benji and Nico would have been pretty tight. They’ve got a similar attitude and appreciation for peacocking. When Benji isn’t busy writing and recording at 25 to Life (he manages the studio while Andi is away), he’s most frequently found at the krewe’s clubhouse or patrolling the streets for riffraff.

Nova

Lineage: N11th gen. childe of Frank Larsen
Embrace: 2015
Status: Bourbon Sanctified •, Camarilla 0, Malkavian ••
Coterie: OXR ••
While her sire and her grandsire made her more likely to join the Anarch Movement or stay Unaligned herself, Nova’s natural curiosity for faith and the world around her led her to the Sanctified Faith. Claiming the Harderliners were “just too into it” and had “too strict a code” for her to explore to her heart’s content, Nova fell in with the more relaxed atmosphere of the French Quarter and the Bourbons within. She hit it off well with a certain possibly insane night doctor that introduced her to multiple alters and felt a kinship for the lick that she hadn’t with most other non-Malkavians, and when the prettiest lick in the city turned out to have the same alters inside of herself, well, it just made sense for Nova to sit up and take note. She was happy to be invited to join OXR and didn’t even hold it against the Caitiff who pretended to be a kook when that news came out. She says that her favorite part of the krewe is its menagerie.

Ren Zahrah

Lineage: 11th gen. childe of Michael Dupont
Embrace: 1997
Status: Anarch •, Camarilla 0, Gangrel 0
Coterie: OXR ••
Some licks who concern themselves with what go on in other people’s beds whisper that Ren Zahrah fucked her way into OXR, and that she stole the tattooed leader‘s attention from a certain Toreador. The Toreador in question has never confirmed, but Ren certainly makes herself scarce whenever she comes around. She was approached shortly after her arrival to turn their trio into a quartet, adding to their “not from around here” numbers. Unlike Andi and Tyrell Ren spends most of her time in the city. Some rumors suggest that she and Roxy are lovers now that Nico is gone (Ren is almost always in the company of her krewe leader), while others claim that the reason Ren rarely shows her face outside the Quarter is because she’s not Gangrel at all. Or maybe she is and she’s Roxy’s bastard, terrified of getting caught for her illegal Embrace. Such rumors are hardly well-known, however. Ren just isn’t relevant enough to talk about.

Tyrell Turner

Lineage: 11th gen. childe of Shejana Džugi
Embrace: 1998
Status: Anarch •, Camarilla •, Ravnos •
Coterie: OXR ••
Tyrell was a founding member of OXR with his travel partner Andi Brooks, but he says that while he loves his “sometimes home” there’s so much more to see in the world and it would be a real shame if he let any of it slip through his fingers. Stagnation, he says, is the quickest route to boredom. Some Kindred take him at face value, but more savvy licks recognize that Tyrell offers a very real perk to any willing to pay his price: smuggling. He’s got friends all across the States and, using Andi’s tour bus, can get anything from knickknacks to people in and out of the city and past inspection points. No one in OXR wants for anything just because it’s in another city. If popular rumor is to be believed he’s secretly part of Lord Savoy’s inner circle and has been ferrying messages and licks through the borders.

The Name

Ask any of the members of OXR what their name means or how they got it and you’ll hear a different story. Andi likes to say that they all took hits of variously drugged kine and came up with the most obscure thing they could think of. Roxandra says they named it after her; she’s the only one with all three letters in her name. Tyrell says that they all pitched their favorite letter to be part of their name and it was happenstance that a few of them doubled up on “O.” Nico used to say that they put the alphabet on the wall and threw darts. And Ren likes to make up more and more obscure meanings for it every time someone asks, from “Over the Rainbow” to “Orangutans Versus Xylophones” to a simple “Crossroads.”

Whatever it really means, none of them are saying.

The Haven

With half their krewe out of town as frequently as they are and the vast differences in ages of its members, OXR doesn’t have a communal haven where the lot of them sleep. They do, however, have a clubhouse where the various members and their retinues get together to hang, entertain, and otherwise relax. All five of the original krewe went in on it and had a hand in decor; Tyrell supplied many of the art pieces, functional and otherwise, while Roxy and Nico focused on the security and Ren and Andi picked out colors, fabrics, and textures.

The clubhouse is a two-story building with a small yard and balcony around the upper floor that looks out across Royal Street. A door off the side leads to a shared common area that has a larger pool, and a wall around the perimeter of the house itself assures the licks who reside there the sort of privacy they need. The first floor is built to entertain: a gate off the side of the property leads to a covered patio with natural stone flooring and retractable walls and ceiling, with a pool and hot tub along one edge. Comfortable, overstuffed chairs surround a handful of tables, an unlit and unused brick fireplace, and a state-of-the-art entertainment system. A set of double doors lead to the living room and large kitchen, stocked despite the undead status of the home owners, with marble counter tops and a sizable island any hostess would be proud of. The living room features another unused brick fireplace and a pair of couches for a more cozy feel.

Upstairs the wooden floor trend continues through a long hallway that leads to three spacious bedrooms and the master suite, replete with king-sized beds, walk-in closets, and ensuite bathrooms with both a standing shower and marble tub. The master suite also features a small attached office and balcony.