“What if the breath that kindled those grim fires
Awakened, should blow them into sevenfold rage
And plunge us in the flames; or from above
Should intermitted vengeance arm again
His red right hand to plague us?”
John Milton, Paradise Lost

Perceived Goals: Bringing illegal Embraces to justice. Protecting each other.
Meeting Place: The Giani Building
Prerequisites to Join: Membership in the Hardline Sanctified, unknown others
Required Backgrounds: Status (Red Right Hand) •+
Members: Catherine Ward, Genevieve “Gina” Elsworth, Kenneth “Ken” Sanders, Warren Kontkowski

History

Formed in 2016, the Red Right Hand is a Hardline Sanctified krewe of neonates officially led by Catherine Ward, but “mentored” by Caroline Malveaux-Devillers. Most assume that Caroline’s influence is essentially leadership in all but name—they aren’t wrong to do so, though her day-to-day involvement is limited. Created out of a group of illegally Embraced fledglings and spared the prince’s justice by Malveax-Devillers’ direct intervention, the krewe labored under Ventrue’s supervision to apprehend or slay their sires and earn the prince’s clemency, much as she had early in her own Requiem.

They have continued their efforts in the months since completing their appointed task, fighting against the enemies of the archdiocese under Malveaux-Devillers’ direction in a variety of ways. They are known to have a particular hatred for sires that abandon illegal childer and vagabonds that flout the prince’s justice both. Having “earned” their Requiems, they have little mercy for those unwilling to do so the same.

Their most important role, Malveaux-Devillers has told them, might be their very existence and what they have come to represent within the city: the prince’s justice and mercy expressed through his only childe, and the rewards of fidelity and faith. Given the string of Hardliner losses to the Bourbons and Crones in 2016, some wonder if the prince (or at least his childe) is trying to undercut Antoine Savoy’s appeal as a champion of the oppressed and disenfranchised. While the Red Right Hand’s members might be easily destroyed by the French Quarter lord’s more powerful servants, the coterie’s numbers and organization has made it difficult to do so subtly. Further, given the public approval their efforts to curb illicit Embraces have met, there is not inconsiderable concern that having them slaughtered in public fashion might be worse than allowing them to continue as they are now.

The group is one of the Sanctified’s more active krewes and are frequent sights across the Central Business District and at various Elysia. Their existence has encouraged more than one young illicitly Embraced neonate to seek clemency from the prince over the body of their staked sire. Significantly more have tried to do the same with less successful outcomes.

All members of the krewe are young in the Blood and still developing the powers that are their deathrights. What they lack in supernatural puissance, the coterie makes up for in cunning, numbers, and ruthless application of the tools of the modern world: body armor in place of Fortitude, surveillance equipment in place of Auspex, and that king among men, money, in place of Dominate and Presence. The group also maintains an unusual number of ghouls for neonates: no doubt influenced by Malveaux-Devillers’ own sizable stable. Highly motivated, well-funded, tightly organized, and with the backing of the prince’s childe, they have surprised more than one established Kindred with their swift rise from nothing.

More cynical observers point to the fact that the krewe’s members, all of whom faced and were spared execution, consist solely of Kindred willing to accept Sanctified dogma and become eager converts and proselytizers. Malveaux-Devillers only flashes that dazzling smile of hers in response to this criticism, offering that tired but true line that, “Charity starts closest to home.” She tells the krewe it is not their blood that matters, but their faith. The message has resonated to date.

Current Members

Of the initial seven neonates initiated into the Red Right Hand, five survived their harrowing first nights. One departed the city under unclear circumstances shortly thereafter. The remaining four have remained a stable krewe since their release. The krewe includes the following members:

Red Right Hand Status •••

Catherine Ward

Lineage: 12th gen. childe of Alonzo Collazo
Embrace: 2016
Status: Camarilla 0, Hardline Sanctified •, Lasombra •
Coterie: Red Right Hand •••

Red Right Hand Status ••

Genevieve “Gina” Elsworth

Lineage: 13th gen. childe of Trent Ambrose
Embrace: 2015
Status: Camarilla 0, Hardline Sanctified •, Toreador 0
Coterie: Red Right Hand ••
Gina was a teenage graffiti artist Embraced in the heat of passion by her sire after he nearly killed her. Picked up by servants of the prince only nights into her Requiem, virtually all Gina has ever known about the All-Night Society is her membership in the Red Right Hand. Quiet, almost meek, she’s the most withdrawn of the group, rarely seen alone and preferring to shadow her fellows, especially Kenneth.

Kenneth “Ken” Sanders

Lineage: 12th gen. childe of Janaya Barnes
Embrace: 2016
Status: Brujah 0, Camarilla 0, Hardline Sanctified •
Coterie: Red Right Hand ••
Kenneth is the most devout of the Red Right Hand and a fiercely religious lick who aspires to become a priest. A devout Catholic in life, Ken strayed from his idyllic middle-class life and wife during his midlife crisis, falling in with a teenage girl who kept him out at all hours and increasingly consumed his life right up until she took it. He murdered his wife and son hours after his Embrace in a frenzy. He views himself as truly damned, but is grateful that he may continue to serve God’s will.

Warren Kontkowski

Lineage: 13th gen. childe of Maurice Wheeler
Embrace: 2016
Status: Caitiff -, Camarilla 0, Hardline Sanctified 0
Coteries: Guard de Ville •, Red Right Hand ••, Snake Hunters •
Warren was an army infantry officer before his horrific Embrace at the hands of a Setite that corrupted his sister. The Blood stuck, but the clan didn’t, and he has become a brutal and savage foe of his “parent” clan and all of their supporters ever since, working with the Snake Hunters while also continuing to serve as the mailed right hand behind the Red Right Hand’s member. He despises moral corruption in all of its forms, and supports the prince and his loyalists less out of deep faith than out of absolute hatred for the other pretenders.

Past Members

The Red Right Hand hasn’t been without casualties over its existence. Two prior members have met final death, one at the hands of the krewe’s enemies, the other at the hands of its patron.

Red Right Hand Status ••

Malcolm Solomon

Lineage: 12th gen. childe of Christian Bentley
Embrace: 2016
Final Death: 2016 (0 years undead)
Status: Brujah 0, Camarilla 0, Hardline Sanctified 0
Coterie: Red Right Hand ••
Malcolm was a gangster Embraced in the French Quarter under the most vicious and petty circumstances imaginable. His sire was a newly-Embraced lick who used his newfound power to “get even” with Malcolm, his still-living rival from a rival street gang. Malcolm’s sire murdered his sister in front of him, Embraced him, then all but shoved Malcolm into Hardliner clutches to see his childe both destroyed and damned. Malcolm grew close to Gina Elsworth during the hunt for their sires, but ultimately allowed himself to be lured into a trap and destroyed while seeking a more personal vengeance against his sire.

Red Right Hand Status •

Jane Francis

Lineage: 13th gen. childe of Benjamin Francis
Embrace: 2017
Final Death: 2017 (0 years undead)
Status: Caitiff -, Camarilla 0, Hardline Sanctified 0
Coterie: Red Right Hand •
Information on Jane is sparse compared to the Red Right Hand’s over members. They won’t speak of her, and with good reason. Embraced by her husband following his own illegal Embrace, she resided in the French Quarter for more than a month in obscurity as one of its many Quarter rats. She was eventually captured and brought to face the prince’s justice while trespassing into Hardliner territory. Ignorant of the Camarilla’s laws and customs, she pled for her husband’s Requiem. She agreed to bring him over from the Bourbon Sanctified, and to bring in her husband’s sire to face justice. Jane proved duplicitous and easily swayed, for she attempted to betray her krewe as part of a scheme to flee the city with her husband. She was executed for her betrayal.

Haven & Domain

The Red Right Hand operates out of the Giani Building, and that they keep their haven(s) in the heavily fortified (by Kindred standards) building is one of the worst-kept secrets in the city. Situated on the border of the French Quarter and the Bourbon-held portions of the Arts District, the Giani Building has given them a powerful position from which to clash with the trash that Savoy fills the borders of his domain with. On more than one occasion, they’ve abducted trespassing Quarter rats to face justice—an increasingly dangerous proposition.

Ghouls

The Red Right Hand maintains an exhaustive stable of ghouls by neonate standards, urged on by their patron. They run the gamut from combat trained men-at-arms to building managers, to priests, and all the way down to corrupted family members of krewe members.

Catherine’s Ghouls

Hector Lowe

Ghouled: 2016
Status: Ghouls •
Catherine’s near-constant companion, Hector’s life trajectory largely mirrored Catherine’s. Born to immigrant parents and immersed in the Catholic Church from a young age, Hector’s early years were spent on the straight and narrow, even serving as an alter boy. That came to an end when his father was deported in in Hector’s teens and he was drawn into increasingly unsavory work to ‘support’ his mother and sister. By 2016 he was a fully initiated member of a criminal gang, the Cottonmouths, in Algiers. When most of the gang vanished in 2016 he found himself the inheritor of portions their ill-gotten wealth—that good fortune was not to last however as months later Catherine Ward came calling on him at the Ventrue’s prompting.
Originally planning to kill him as both a sinner and loose end, Catherine found him repentant in the face of the combination of overt demonstration of the supernatural and religiously inspired reckoning visited upon him. Hector threw himself on Catherine’s untender mercies, seeking to save not his life, but his soul. The rest is, as they say, history.
Years in service to Catherine has served to break down any remaining loyalty or attachments to Hector’s past life. These nights he is entirely his domitor’s agent, a repentant and masochistic servant of the damned. Those same years have hardened the street brute, under the watchful gaze of the many more professional former service members he was surrounded by, into a genuinely skilled fighter, marksman, and foot soldier to the Sanctified.
His relationship with Catherine is uncomplicated: she is the savior of his immortal soul even as she remains a tormentor of his mortal body, regularly torturing him at his own insistence to help ‘purge’ his more impure desires. As nights have gone on the Lasombra has had to develop increasingly cruel and creative tortures for him—not that she objects.

Sarah Anne Widney

Ghouled: 2015
Status: Ghouls •
Once the ghoul of Caroline Malveaux-Devillers, Ms. Widney was one of the early ‘gifts’ given to Catherine in her role as the ‘leader’ of the Red Right Hand, there to support their transition into the All-Night Society and handle many of the day-to-day administrative requirements that the krewe required to take their lives public and private across the veil. These nights she serves as a capable day-to-day administrator that handles finances and many other more mundane requires for the krewe. That role has gradually expanded into assisting with all manner of Masquerade-related matters (including inconvenient bodies). The irony of her growth into that role is not lost on Widney. Catherine has tended to take a much firmer hand with the once-butler, though whether to her pleasure or chagrin is less clear from the famously taciturn ghoul.

Timothy Jackson

Ghouled: 2016
Status: Ghouls 0
Father Jackson was once a merely covetous priest, perhaps beneath the attentions of the Sanctified as he quietly supplemented his income with money from the church’s coffers. That changed when he found himself how lucrative extorting his fellow corrupted members of the clergy—child molesters and simple fornicators both—could be. For his part, Father Jackson found his own vices mild. Catherine disagreed. Though initially inclined to see him slain for his intransigence, his ‘reform’ and subjugation presented a lever window into the Church without perverting a ‘genuine’ man of God.

Gina’s Ghouls

Jimmy Watt

Ghouled: 2017
Status: Ghouls •
Gina’s designated ‘security’ ghoul, Jimmy was one of a number of individual’s ‘auditioned’ to the Red Right Hand by Caroline Malveaux-Devillers’ through her own head of security, Brian Fuller. A prior Navy corpsman, he was more quiet, reserved, and introspective than many of the others when introduced. Gina was drawn to Jimmy when she saw him with a sketchbook. In his spare time (especially when waiting around) he’s often found with a pencil in hand sketching whatever strikes his fancy. Though less stocky than many of the security ghouls utilized by the group, Jimmy, like the others, saw actual combat in Afghanistan and is no pushover. Less well-known and advertised is that Jimmy regards himself as well and truly damned, deserving of his fate as a servant to Kindred masters, due to an firefight in which he shot and killed a woman and her infant child by mistake in Afghanistan—a split-second decision that has haunted him ever since. Jimmy’s frame is all wiry muscle built over a marathon runner’s long legs and lanky arms. His blonde hair is sharply offset by a patchy mustache he’s cultivated since his first days in the navy that Gina has coined ‘endearing’. Other opinions are more mixed, ranging from ‘you should shave that shit off your face’ to ‘you look like the child of a porn star and a child molester’.

Kathleen “Kitty” Palmer

Ghouled: 2016
Status: Ghouls •
Kathleen is the most recent building manager for the Giani Building. Smiling and motherly (at least around Gina), she presents a welcoming image for the building and prospective tenants utterly at odds with her existence as the ghouled servant of unholy monsters. A divorcée with no children, Kathleen was rendered sterile in a botched abortion that also destroyed her marriage. What even her husband didn’t know was that it wasn’t his child, and that the abortion was an attempt to hide that fact and save her marriage after her infidelity. In her own way, Kitty views Gina as the daughter she never had, the bond warping into a twisted maternal affection for her. The vampire’s failure to reciprocate any similar affection—and attempts to avoid her—no doubt contributes to her spending most nights with a bottle of wine. Kathleen provides most of Gina’s clothing—and other needs for that matter—frequently showing up at night with wrapped ‘presents’ for Gina. She tells the Toreador that they’re things she saw that she thought would look good on her, but the truth is her shopping is much more deliberate, and she feels a surge of pride on the rare occasions when Gina deigns to wear the outfits she’s provided. Kathleen looks like a woman past her prime—but only just. Her skin hangs a little too loosely on her arms and legs, her face has just the beginnings of wrinkles, her dark hair has just begun to thin, and there’s the slightest hint of a paunch at her stomach. She’s not ugly by any stretch of the imagination, but she’s the type of woman that young men have only recently stopped chasing, no matter how many cosmetics she dolled herself up with. At least that was true until the blood gave her just a bit of an edge on the average woman at a bar—enough to help her satisfy her growing and shameful appetite that Gina has privately used to help justify the woman’s damnation, citing, ‘she can serve until she learns the lesson she didn’t the first time’.

Ken’s Ghouls

Betty Mitchell

Ghouled: 2018
Status: Ghouls 0
Betty was a fifty-ish-year old county clerk approaching a comfortable government retirement when breast cancer came calling for her life. She caught it late—not shocking for the overweight woman who’d spent the last ten years resigned to her solitary existence. She was bitter, but more than anything else, she wasn’t surprised: of course that’d be how she went, on the verge of reaping the rewards of her hard work. She’d spent most of her life preparing for her retirement, only to have it all for nothing.
Ken found her at a support group—she’d declined treatment but still wanted someone to talk to about her rapidly approaching end of life. She liked his laugh: he liked her stoic resignation. He also appreciated her administrative know-how and believed his patron would appreciate someone in her office. Today Betty is happy enough to continue her life, and grateful to Ken for the opportunity. The demands placed on her are comparatively mild—and even when they aren’t she find them to be a far better option than death.
On the other side of her brush with death, Betty has worked to enjoy more of the life she deferred—improving her physical fitness and taking a greater appreciation in the moment.

Rudy Brown

Ghouled: 2018
Status: Ghouls •
A former New Orleans Saint’s defensive linemen, Rudy was out of the league before thirty, having squandered most of his career earnings and suffering the rapid onset of chronic traumatic brain injury from his time in the league. Ken found him selling used cars—a gimmick for the dealership that subsidized his meager savings. He found Rudy the second time with a gun in his mouth, considering ending it all rather than continuing his bleak and increasingly painful existence. Ken offered him another, less bleak, way to end his life as he knew it.
The brush with abject failure and death did wonders for Rudy’s outlook. He came through the other side with a great appreciation for life as a whole, and the need for a purpose in it. He quit the job in the used car lot and now mostly does outreach with local youth programs while quietly trying to finish the college degree he never finished at Xavier—at his domitor’s urging.
Today Rudy feels better than he has since he was in his teens—stronger, faster, tougher, and more alive. He knows he has Ken to thank for that, and doesn’t hesitate to unleash all the strength of his more than 300 lb frame on anyone Ken thinks deserves it. Regularly works out with Brian Dunlap Fuller, who he readily admits is in better shape—while also joking about how he has ‘little man’ syndrome.

Warren’s Ghouls

Isaac Snyder

Ghouled: 2016
Status: Ghouls •
Isaac will proudly tell you that he spent more than ten years of his life ‘in the sandbox’ to keep barbarism from the shores of the US. He’ll also tell you how much of a kick in the teeth it was then to hear about the kinds of ‘fucked up shit’ going on across the country, and maybe right in his own back yard, at the hands of more depraved Kindred. In another life he might have become a hunter when confronted with that: instead he answered his old company officer’s call and became a ghoul. He’d never been much good at anything other than soldiering anyway. The chain smoking, dipping, hard drinking Texas native was loyal to Warren long before the blood bond reinforced it. His time as an NCO—including three years at Fort Bragg—has made him an ideal ‘trainer’ for other ghouls brought into the fold in service to younger Sanctified, but Isaac’s real passion is being in the churn. Thrice divorced with two kids he hasn’t seen in years.

Randal Little

Ghouled: 2016
Status: Ghouls •
Randal grew up in a small time in Iowa, the kind with three churches and only one general store. He joined the army out of high school in 2010—hoping to both serve his country honorably and to earn his GI Bill. He found the military different than he’d imagined—a cross section of parts of America he’d never visited—and hadn’t even been certain were real. The reserved and conservative young man had some difficult adjusting to army life—especially the macabre humor and sexual jokes he was surrounded by. His fellow soldiers were (largely) far from the ‘Christian Soldiers’ he’d expected and held in esteem his in entire life when he imagined ‘veteran’. Matters came to a head in 2012 when on watch he caught a group of his fellows using fake penises with attached bladders to fool their regular drug tests. Unwilling to ignore the frank dishonesty—and to his mind endangering of fellow soldiers through their use of illegal substances—he brought the matter to his non-commissioned officer and through him his company officer—and suffered the beating of a lifetime when those he’d dimed out found out and assaulted him in the barracks a few nights later.
The experience could have soured him on service entirely, but instead strengthened the Iowa farm boy’s resolve to be a force for good. It also earned him the respect of his NCO and platoon officer, who leaned heavily on him during the unit’s Afghanistan deployment. It was there that Warren earned Randal’s enduring respect in turn when the then still green 1st Lieutenant dragged him out of a burning Humvee after an ambush. Though his service in the army ended in 2015 as a corporal, his relationship with his once and future bosses didn’t, and he answered his call from across the country following Warren’s Embrace.
Though far from ‘ok’ with his boss’ monstrous nature, Randal has been largely able to push aside his misgivings when set alongside some of the things he’s seen since his ghouling in the fetid dens of other vampires and the fact that Warren is still Captain Kontkowski in his eyes. There are worse people he could be working for, and worse things he could be spending his life on. Besides, he owes Warren.

Jessica Kontkowski

Ghouled: 2016
Status: Ghouls 0
The younger ‘baby’ sister of Warren, Jessica is a broken woman that despite the Kindred’s best efforts he has been unable to put back together. Several attempts were made in the months following her ‘rescue’ from the clutches of Warren’s sire to return her to something resembling a normal high schooler’s life—with no success. The trauma’s she endured while serving as a ghouled sex slave (and worse) were too persistent, too deep, for those memories to simply be replaced, especially combined with the poignant physical need for something she couldn’t quite put to words. Twice she turned first to recreational drugs trying to take the edge off, but the sights, the sounds, the smells, and the feeling associated with those experiences inevitably brought up more and more repressed memories.
In the end, after months of trying, Warren was presented with an uncomfortable choice, for the acute and growing danger to the Masquerade she presented could not be ignored: kill her, or ghoul her. He chose the latter—a choice she’s seemed determined to make him regret every night since as the lesser of two evils. Despite attempts to help return her to something approaching decency (as decent as a ghoul can be) she remains a wanton thing, constant in her desire for vitae, for drugs, and even for sex. He’s caught her several times sleeping with other ghouls in the service of the Red Right Hand—and is quite certain that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
There are several other more extreme options he’s considered—including sending her to a Kindred groom or even Else Benson at an attempt at greater ‘reeducation’ but he has always blanched at the more extreme descriptions of their methods.
Today she ‘serves’ her brother mostly running errands, taking care of day-to-day tasks, and working in the office of the Giani Building—mostly so that other more reliable ghouls can keep an eye on her. They regularly drag her along to church services and have been actively working to keep her clean of drugs (other than vitae)—but it’s a constant effort. Despite all professions to the contrary, she doesn’t appear to want to change.

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