Fanfic / Radio Silence

Wendy Taylor is a Nosferatu fledgling who was sired by Gerard Rafin, the creator of SchreckNET. When the NSA breaches it and The Masquerade comes tumbling down in 2004 and Rafin is held responsible, Wendy has to go to the scene of the crime in Baltimore and clear their names. Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like the breach was far from accidental, and Kindredkind as a whole may be in deeper water than they thought…

Unfortunately, Wendy ends up fighting her own side more than the government as politics takes center stage.

Radio Silence is an ongoing Vampire: The Masquerade fanfiction novel hosted on Archive of Our Own. It is standalone, but it also has a prequel called ''The City That Never Sleeps''.

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This Vampire: The Masquerade fanfic provides examples of:

• Actually Pretty Funny: After Wendy discovers the presence of a Lasombra in Prince Isaac's court, she decides to taunt Prince Isaac by drawing a smiley face in some dust that's identical to the one that the Lasombra is implied to have drawn on a handmirror in sharpie. Apparently, the Lasombra thought it was hilarious.
  Prince Isaac Goldwin: "None of this is funny!"
• And I Must Scream: Wendy tries to tell herself that the Antediluvian or Nictuku under New York can’t have been real, and that the reason so many Nosferatu disappeared was simply because they got lost and fell into torpor. Given that she's surrounded by evidence of the Eldest's Vicissitude at the time, it's clear she's lying to herself.
• Big Damn Heroes: How Radcliffe with Teeth and Augustin (Kaiser's grandsire) make their entrance. They save Gerard from execution and Wendy from being staked.
• Break the Haughty:
  • When Wendy appeals to Primogen Alicia and Director DeLaire for help, she ends up losing her temper when they don't immediately fall in line. It results in Alicia giving Wendy a compassionate, but absolute chewing out that takes Wendy down several pegs.
  • While DeLaire is justified to point out that Wendy's inexperience may hinder the mission, her own experience ends up making her a target when the NSA completely wipes out her network of agents, which she spent decades building.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday:
  • Qadir met Wendy a month after he was dispatched to kill her for violating the Masquerade, but had already completely forgotten her name. Ten years later, Wendy has to jog his memory to get him to remember it at all.
  • Thomas Arturo loaned his ghouls to the Nosferatu to help apprehend Wendy when she was a human who’d breached the Masquerade. In exchange, the Nosferatu gave him information on his sire, whom he was implied to have later destroyed. When Wendy makes a joke about offering him dirt on Hansard in exchange for a favour, he clearly has no idea what she’s talking about.
    Thomas Arturo: I feel like I’ve just heard the punchline of a joke I don’t get.
  • Averted with Elias Athanasios, who made a point of learning the name of every single Nosferatu he fed to the Tzimisce antediluvian. He also remembered when he tried to do the same thing to Wendy.
• Camp Gay: Thomas Arturo appears to be invoking this. Also played with, as he is bi. As he says so himself:
  Thomas Arturo: Bisexual, my dear. Although I am queer as fuck.
• Chekhov's Gun: A literal example with Theo Bell's shotgun, which Augustin uses to shoot at Cock Robin. He misses.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Three in the very first scene:
    • Thomas Arturo, who playfully teases Calebros. Arturo appears to be the first person other than Qadir in the New York court to take Wendy seriously, later agreeing to supply her with architectural drawings of the NSA's headquarters in exchange for information on Qadir. He then offers her another favour on top of that for a full report on the situation.
    • Elias Athanasios, who tried to lure Wendy to her death underneath New York five years before. Experiencing a flashback of the circumstances leading to their meeting distresses Wendy enough that Jan Pieterzoon takes advantage to learn some Nosferatu secrets and blackmail her into giving him information on Hardestadt. Elias Athanasios also saves Wendy when she's lost under New York City for the second time.
    • Adelaide Davis, Obfuscating in Elysium against the rules. Adelaide tries to stake Wendy, and then later ends up freeing her from being staked.
  • Cock Robin is mentioned several times before he actually turns up.
    • So are Augustin and Radcliffe with Teeth.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: If Wendy had done what Gerard had told her and traced the Breach instead of making an elaborate plan to go to Baltimore and fight the NSA, she would've found the culprit within hours and the entire story wouldn't have happened.
  • Slightly subverted in if she'd actually done that, Gerard might have been destroyed as a Masquerade risk anyway.
• Creepy Child: Cock Robin has one of these as his interpreter, as his deformed appearance makes it very difficult for him to speak in anything other than Morse-code clicks.
• Dug Too Deep: Sometimes, Nosferatu go missing underneath New York...
• Enemy Mine: Downplayed. A Lasombra in Baltimore posing as Prince Isaac is working with the Camarilla in a time before his clan joined the Ivory Tower, so this counts. He and Harry also reluctantly make a deal with Wendy to watch each other's backs.
• Everyone Has Standards: Cock Robin will threaten your sire at gunpoint, but won’t let his child ghoul take a hit for him.
• Fatal Flaw: Primogen Alicia points out that Gerard Rafin's inability to accept that he picks childer that are anything less than perfect leads to him slacking on his duties and makes his childer unprepared for the real world. It also leads to him putting the onus of saving the entirety of Kindredkind on a childe who's only ten years dead and cannot handle the pressure of it.
  Alicia: And that's going to damn him now.
• Foil: Cock Robin has more than a few characteristics in common with Wendy.
  Radcliffe with Teeth: [Cock Robin is] carrying on like he's the only person trying to do anything about this. And when he gets an idea, he thinks he's so brilliant that no alternative could possibly have merit.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Wendy finds a handheld mirror in Prince Isaac's desk with a face drawn on it, a rosary, and a letter from someone called Sejanus. By chapter 7 she's certain that he's a closet Lasombra. Lasombra have no reflection, have links to the Catholic church, and "Sejanus" is the real name of an infamous Lasombra known as Marcus Vitel.
  • The title of the chapter where we meet the Lasombra for the first time is titled “I’m You, But With Poor Impulse Control.” The Lasombra, who's posing as Prince Isaac, reacts to Wendy's discovery of his presence by taunting her right back. His body double has a lot more self control in comparison.
  • Thomas Arturo playfully goofs around when Wendy calls him asking for a favour. He quickly snaps to attention once Wendy points out that there might be more to the Breach than the NSA just happening to stumble upon SchreckNET. As anyone who’s played Coteries of New York knows, Arturo has Prince Panhard blood bound to him, and is therefore the real power in New York — and has vested interest in protecting it. This leads to Panhard, when Wendy finally meets her, being willing to negotiate with Wendy and hear her out. At least until Cock Robin stuffs it up.
  • Radcliffe with Teeth's name is one, as it's implied that it's his teeth that caused Wendy to recognise him when he was in disguise.
  • One of the first chapters mentions that Wendy has so many rats ghouled she has to post a schedule for the others to feed them when she’s gone. When hunters infiltrate the Warren, Wendy sends these rats to swarm them to buy Gerard time to destroy the servers before the hunters can get to them.
• Hypocrite: Kaiser criticises Wendy for taunting people in power that she’s spying on instead of doing it subtly, then brazenly goes through the drawers in Prince Goldwin’s kitchen in front of said Prince’s ghoul.
  Noah: “You’re not even pretending to not want to get caught!”
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Director DeLaire is antagonistic to Wendy, but is also right when she points out that her network took decades to properly establish and that a ten-year-old fledgling can't possibly match that by the time it takes DeLaire to get her network back up and running. It's also pointed out that Wendy lacks the impulse control of older, more experienced vampires, and that this is a Fatal Flaw in someone leading a counterintelligence operation.
  • Cock Robin points out that the Nosferatu covering up SchreckNET breaches to keep its own members out of trouble lulled the Camarilla into a false sense of security regarding the danger of having an unrestricted Kindred presence on the internet.
    • Cock Robin also gets another one: he's laser-focused on tracing the Breach in New York instead of going to Baltimore to fight the NSA. As Wendy discovers after meeting him, he was right about that all along.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Wendy acts as if she’s the only person who’s not only interested in dealing with the Breach, but the only person with the skills to actually do it. She’s also crippled with anxiety and self-doubt.
• Kick the Dog: When Wendy is in a vulnerable moment due to a flashback, Jan Pieterzoon subtly uses Presence to implicate herself and her sire, and even her whole clan in acts that “topsiders” would see as treasonous. Luckily for both of them, he sees that she is sincere in her belief that she was doing the right thing, and is content to let it be in exchange for intelligence on Hardestadt.
• Mama Bear: Wendy likes to joke around and antagonise people, but when the people she cares about are threatened, the gloves come off. When she was a human believing the Nosferatu were some shadowy criminal cult running her out of New York City and trying to kill her, she instantly turned hostile when they threatened her mother.
  Wendy: “You think that me being scared means I’m stupid? That I’m weak? Oh, no, Calebros. Fear is what makes us ‘humans’ strong. Fear is what sends us hurtling out of a third-storey window and has us walk away with only a broken ankle. Fear is what lets us survive being shot twice. Fear is what lets us keep one step ahead of people like you. You touch my mother? I’ll show you the full extent of what a terrified ‘Kine’ can do. I’ll show you the monster inside me. Trust me — you people have nothing on it.”
• Like Father, Like Son: Primogen Alicia notes that Wendy inherited Gerard Rafin's Fatal Flaw of poor social skills and arrogance.
• Lost in Character: Harry’s been Isaac’s body double for so long that he can't even drop the fake accent when challenged, and forgets not to speak about him in first person.
• The Masquerade: Par for the course for a VTM fanfic, but this time it’s been broken by the US government. Wendy just has to figure out how badly.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The biggest breach of the Masquerade in Kindred history is the catalyst for the fic.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Prince Isaac Goldwin's reaction or rather, the reaction of his body double, Harry, to discovering that Wendy might know about the Lasombra in his court. The Lasombra in question finds it a lot more amusing.
  • A much less amusing example at the end of chapter 10, where Francesca DeLaire discovers evidence that a Nosferatu betrayed all of Kindredkind to the NSA.
• Papa Wolf:
  • Despite having a reputation for being something of a dick, the first thing Gerard does after the breach is get the alligators and traps ready in case somebody threatens the Warren.
  • Harry, the ghoul body double who poses as Prince Isaac to get around limitations involving technology and mirrors that might give away “Isaac”’s true identity as Alexander the Lasombra all but threatens Wendy when he believes she’s threatening his regnant. Played with in that part of it is out of genuine self-interest, but Wendy also notes that his regnant is genuinely fond of Harry and considers him family.
  • Cock Robin's first instinct, when taking a firey missile to the face, is to protect his interpreter.
• Parents as People:
  • Or rather, sires — Gerard starts out the story annoyed at Wendy for telling him to stop harassing Calebros, and clearly resents her for taking “his side”. Despite that, he genuinely appears to love his childe and wants her to be kept safe in the coming conflict.
  • Calebros was something of a parental figure towards the whole Warren, and not only failed to advance Nosferatu interests but also let them down by resigning as Prince.
• Pet the Dog: Cock Robin saving his interpreter's life. Slightly subverted in that it's not entirely clear if it's due to genuine fondness or attachment to her, or if it's because she's the only one with the skills to interpret for him.
• Phrase Catcher: Every Nosferatu's favourite nickname for Cock Robin is "Cock Sucker."
• Reasonable Authority Figure: A few of these.
  • Gerard doesn’t believe his childe at first when Wendy insists the NSA have breached SchreckNET, and also shows hostility to her when she defends Calebros. However, he comes around to face the truth of the breach and also apologises to Wendy for his behaviour.
  • Qadir is sent to either capture or destroy Wendy after a Blood Hunt is put on her. Even though he’s a friend of the Warren, his reputation for being able to keep his personal and professional life separate makes her extremely nervous when he turns up. Instead, he gives her a lift to Baltimore to buy time for her to do what she needs to do. Promptly averted in the next chapter when he all but accuses Wendy of being a conspiracy theorist.
  • Primogen Alicia gives Wendy a "Reason Why You Suck" Speech, but it's kindly meant as constructive criticism of how Wendy's been conducting herself. She also backs off once she sees it's hit close to home.
  • Thomas Arturo is quick to take Wendy seriously once she lets him know the Breach may have been an inside job.
  • At first Director DeLaire does not take Wendy at all seriously because of Wendy’s inexperience and her poor ability to control her impulsiveness — which is actually true, and even Wendy admits it, but when DeLaire discovers that her agents are all compromised, her first instinct is to report it to Wendy, ask her for help, and defer to her judgement on what to do next when she’s struggling to control her own distress over the revelation.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Harry is the blue to the Lasombra’s red. In other words — Alexander’s body double is calm, strict and dignified, whereas Alexander himself is more expressive, witty and open. You can often tell them apart based on whether or not "Prince Isaac" is being serious, or acting a little silly. Harry is often frustrated with how the Lasombra wants to run things.
• Running Gag: Started in The City That Never Sleeps, Wendy has a habit of jumping off high places, especially windows.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Wendy comes across like this to people who don’t know her, as she hasn't yet developed a reputation for being able to follow through on her boasts.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat:
  • After Wendy delivers a beatdown to Jan Pieterzoon, the two of them engage in a bit of this afterwards.
  • Wendy has a moment of this in Elysium when she meets Cock Robin again, leading Aisling Sturbridge to lampshade it and compare Wendy to a twelve-year-old who’s backchatting her father.
• Tagalong Kid: Cock Robin’s inability to speak means he often has to take his interpreter with him, who was a child when she was ghouled. Averted sometimes as he tends to leave her behind when the situation is quite dangerous, such as during the Battle of New York.
• The Ghost: Sascha Vykos is mentioned several times, but never appears. Their disappearance by the beginning of the first chapter implies that the story takes place either before or during their stint at Prospero's during Beckett's Jyhad Diary.
• Troll:
  • Wendy can't resist messing with people who can destroy her if they don't find her jokes funny.
  • Kaiser also likes to mess with people by planting bugs in easily-discoverable places, while keeping the real bugs hidden in walls or carried on the backs of his rats.
  • After Wendy discovers the existence of the Lasombra in Baltimore and taunts him, he reacts with amusement, and then starts taunting her right back.
    Wendy, mouthing: Really?
• The Worf Effect: How Radcliffe with Teeth finally makes his appearance. He gets the drop on and stakes Theo Bell. Lampshaded and subverted in that Teeth really didn’t expect to actually win that particular confrontation and only won because he had the element of surprise.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The Camarilla attempt to invoke this on Gerard, trying to force him to trace the Breach through the SchreckNET servers so they can get rid of him afterwards. All-too aware of what will happen to him and possibly Wendy once he’s finished, Gerard does everything he can to delay and sabotage. Thomas Arturo, however, is convinced that this is not the case and that at most, it is a bluff, as Gerard is too valuable to be destroyed even after he serves his purpose, just in case things continue to go wrong afterwards. He's wrong.

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