Samantha Grey

Prelude

July 27^th: I do not recognize this stranger, yet he seems very familiar with me and the troubles I am having with my Gift. He says that he can assist me in disciplining it. His aura was strangely pale yet it told me that he believed what he told me. He said that he would return this evening to begin my training if I so desired, and I do.

Samantha Grey always had the Gift, the power to touch objects and know their owners, to read the auras of the people the met, but it was never reliable or constant. She naturally became a Spiritualist during its hey-days in Britain in the 1890s, sometimes forced to use the sleights and tricks the others used as a matter of course when her own powers would capriciously fail her.

One night a stranger approached her, speaking knowledgeably of her powers and her problems, and offered to aid her. She readily agreed, seeing in his aura that he spoke the truth. He did not speak the whole truth, however, since the way he had of training her was to make her a vampire.

After her Embrace, however, Samantha found that the stranger did indeed speak the truth. Her Gift of psychometry easily translated into the Kindred Auspex Discipline, and she was taken to Vienna and trained by the Tremere to the fullest use of her gift. The clan was surprised to discover her other gifts, of being able to sense and sometimes communicate with the spirit world. She assisted the clan in several investigations into the realm of spirits and she gained great knowledge of the subject.

But after several decades she began to tire of the sterile research as her desire to help those troubled by spirits eventually became too strong for her to resist. She and the stranger who Embraced her, whom she knew by many names but never his given one, left the Chantry in Vienna just after the Second World War to come to America. There they traveled between Chantries, familiarizing themselves with the latest inquiries and passing on the fruits of their own investigations into the spirit world.

Then, one night in 1980, a night she has little clear recollection of, she and her mentor were attacked. By whom she cannot remember; she suspects mages, but cannot know for sure. She suspects (and fears) that the hunters traced her Mentor through her. All she knows is that she ran, ran until almost dawn, then holed up in a deserted building through the day. When she returned to the site of the attack the next night, all she found was the burnt patch of ground which had been the pyre of her mentor.

In pain, she returned to the Chantry to report the death of her mentor. She also asked for time to cope with the death, and to embark on her mission alone. Shortly thereafter, with the Clan’s blessing, she bought a small house on the edge of town and set up her present psychic consultation practice.