Places

The larrikin tradition plays strongly amid the Kin­ dred courts of Melbourne, where rebellion is ingrained in the Australian character as a result of British im­ perialism: Almost a century ago, the Barcade Boys, a youth gang of pimps and drug pushers, infested the Block Arcade. Out of place in the splendid Victorian style of the arcade, the gutter gang nonetheless ran their rackets with seeming impunity.

And impunity they had, as their shadow patron, a Malkavian claiming to be the childe of Sydney’s Prince Sarrasine, had brought the proprietors of the

Block Arcade under her sway. At the same time, the Malkavian courted the support of Melbourne’s then-Prince Montague Lytton — keeping each of the Princes ignorant of her involvement with the other.

Such a ruse could work for only so long, and when Sarrasine learned that he was being played against Lytton, his ghouls lashed out with a desire to cause a panic in Melbourne and make its Kindred feel Sarra­ sine’s supremacy. In 1891, they stormed the Block Ar­ cade by day, scattering the Barcade Boys, and hope­ fully breaking the Malkavian’s sway over what she had treated as her entitled domain.

The next night, however, the Malkavian had her re­ venge. She sent a plague of wraiths to settle the score — a trio of ghostly firefighters who had lost their lives

a few years earlier in the Georges department store fire (which had, not coincidentally, also started under bizarre circumstances). Sarrasine’s ghoul agents met their end and the Prince of Sydney was rebuffed, in another turn of the Jyhad’s events.

Just who this Malkavian childe of a Setite Prince is remains unsolved, however. She claims the Block Arcade as her domain to this night, over a century af­ ter its original construction, having survived multiple Princes of Melbourne and the enmity of the Prince of Sydney. And just how is that she was able to ma­ nipulate the shades of the departed firefighters? The Kindred of Melbourne, many of whom are Anarchs (despite Prince Taylor’s suppression of Brujah other than himself), prefer not to entertain such questions.