<div class="floatleft">(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/e3/44/3b/e3443bd5cc81346d33bc23c341e928b3.jpg)</div>All the best stories began with 'once upon a time.' As does this one.<br/><br/>Once upon a time, there was a man. He was a pious man, a devoted man, and ultimately a good man. He lived in a simple time with simple people following a simple faith. He was older, in his fifties, which was a good deal longer than many people of his time expected to live. And he was handsome, which was also unexpected given his meager financial situation. He had two things he loved in the world--his crucifix and his wife.<br/><br/>And his wife died, which in turn led to him loving his crucifix much less, but still a love of a sort.<br/><br/>He met a priest, who promised him salvation, but this priest could only be seen under the moonlight and wove the shadows with his hands like a demon...and soon enough, the widower succumbed to damnation rather than salvation. Yet he kept his little crucifix in his new life in the moonlight, clinging to some manner of faith and hope. He entered a new life with his fellow dead things, and he found delight in studying history, accounting, and politics...and especially theology. Being Damned, he felt he had no more to worry about studying heresies...but the more he studied, the more it pulled him from his faith. And his Sire, the priest who had brought him into un-life, was a mockery of everything good and holy...and wanted him to know it. Yet the man did not give up his cross.<br/><br/>The world changed. The years melted into decades and melted into centuries. He faded out of living memory of all who knew him, and he became powerful in a certain hierarchy of the undead, the Sabbat, which enjoyed personal freedom, reveling in sin, and being a mockery of anything humanity might value. It was the story of a man's slow descent into monstrousness.<br/><br/>A different sort of story was to emerge, one that would begin with:<br/><br/><div align="center"><em>Once upon a time, in 2016 in New Orleans, there was a monster. A monster who fell in love with a beautiful woman with faith hard as diamond and more beauty than the moon...</em></div><br/><div align="center">* * *</div><br/>It was springtime in New Orleans, and all the local flora and fauna were at their peak. Yarrow and wisteria were in bloom, white and purple blossoms wafting a sweet scent everywhere. It was humid, but then again, it was the American South, and it was always humid. The city was alive with a million million sounds and activities; New Orleans had a patina about it, as if it were never quite in the modern age, as if it were barely just avoiding sinking into the wilds of the bayou of Louisiana. But the modern world did indeed leak in--this was the age of the smartphone, the tablet, the touchscreen.<br/><br/>Niccolo Rossi, a Lasombra Cainite, better known as a vampire, had chosen this city as his home. It was not the easiest city for a vampire to live in. There were supernatural forces here, powerful ones, and despite Christianity's clear influence, Santerian and Vodun practices crept in, both faiths of power and mysteriousness that left Rossi on edge.<br/><br/>Tonight, though, was special, and he tried to put the mystique of New Orleans out of his mind.<br/><br/>Tonight he would see<em>her</em>.<br/><br/>He had watched her for some time. Everything about her intrigued him. He stood outside the hospital she worked in, just after the sun had dipped below the horizon, dressed in a fit black coat, black pants, & black shirt (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/474x/f0/72/9f/f0729fc3dfec949872b11d07ca8812fe.jpg). Had he been a living man, that ensemble might have been too warm for New Orleans, but he didn't sweat anymore...thank God, or whatever fell power responsible for his Curse, he thought to himself. He wasn't one to dress ostentatiously, but style<em>did</em>matter, even if it was simple style. He was not the only Cainite in this city, and it would not do to be seen as anything less than completely respectable and composed.<br/><br/>His plan that Sunday night was to casually 'bump' into her once she was off work and see where the night would take them. She was married, and her husband, a rather intrepid fellow named Robert, had been investigating him with alarming alacrity, which had drawn Rossi's attention in the first place. He wasn't fond of being investigated.<br/><br/>Something would have to be done about the woman's husband, clearly. The amusing thing was that Robert was a private investigator, so he was following Rossi...who was following Robert's wife. It was designed to deeply alarm the man and make him paranoid. And Robert couldn't admit to following Rossi unless he wanted to confess to his wife that he was following someone purportedly highly dangerous and involved in the New Orleans crime scene.<br/><br/>Which Rossi was involved with. The man had a talent for embezzling and smuggling...and his favorite venue to launder money? Churches. Given his once pious nature, the irony was amusing and not lost upon him...or any other Cainite who met him.<br/><br/>In his hand, Rossi held a cup of coffee in a styrofoam cup, brightly colored with a little black lid. The lid was loose. He didn't need to drink coffee....<br/><br/>...he just needed to spill it on the nurse as a 'cute' excuse to speak to her.<br/><br/>So when he saw her leave the hospital, he quickly put himself in her path and, with a slight calculated trip in his own step, tilted his coffee on her. He'd made sure it wasn't too hot when he'd bought it; he wanted to talk to her, not hurt her. In the distance under the moonlight, somewhere from a safe hiding place in the hospital parking lot, lurked her husband...and with a click noise, Rossi knew a picture had been taken of him. How droll.<br/><br/>"My apologies, madam," he said to the nurse in a deep voice, smiling warmly. "I must have not had the lid on there tight enough--are you all right? It didn't spill too much on you? Wasn't too hot?" His accent would betray that he wasn't from New Orleans, in that he didn't have a strong accent of any kind. Rossi had worked hard to scrub his accent from his tone. It generally didn't do to be recognized as a foreigner of any kind in the USA; it got a lot of awkward conversations and questions he didn't care to answer.<br/><br/>He pulled a handkerchief from a coat pocket, a white one with his initials monogrammed on it. He held it to her and said, "This might mop some of it up--again, my apologies. I'm Niccolo Rossi. Might I know the name of the nurse who's scrubs I really ought to pay to replace?"<br/><br/>Another warm smile. He was very excellent at playing the part of a sweet pious man. After all, he'd really been one once. It wasn't hard for him.