November
Lucy's Age: 14
It appears that I've weathered the storm, as it were, but there were some interesting developments along the way.
I realized that I didn't need to destroy or move my memories of Venice into a safe spot, either one. Instead I simply moved each memory slightly which served to strip away all of the emotion associated with them, thereby making them safe and providing Imastious with exactly what he would expect to see. Plenty of time spent together, attraction and even love on her part, and an almost complete lack of emotion on my part.
Cleaning up the loose ends among the leadership of the White Tears likewise went acceptably well. Not only was I able to kill all three of my direct contacts in the gang, I was also able to arrange the deaths in such a way as to help avoid any suspicion that there was any kind of overall guiding force behind them.
I used one of their wives to stage a murder-suicide in one instance and simulated a mugging gone bad for my second contact, but it was the third hit that was the easiest to pull off. My third contact has a brother with a much younger, very attractive wife. It took less than six hours of observation to establish that my contact was indeed sleeping with his brother's wife. I simply arranged for the brother to find out and let him kill my contact for me.
In reflection, the whole process was much easier than I seem to remember thinking it would be back before I started sanitizing my memories.
Imastious did in fact show up a few days ago to scan my mind. I'm nearly recovered from the effects of the torture, and as far as I've been able to tell he wasn't able to find anything which would link me to his unknown opponent.
Venice was likewise tortured and scanned, but is taking much longer to recover from the effects of her session with Imastious. It appears that Imastious is more worried about the potential threat we represent than he is about maintaining our effectiveness as a team. He apparently told Venice what he found in my mind and even despite my warnings beforehand, she's having a hard time with things.
I've taken the prudent course and moved out of her apartment while she processes everything and decides where she wants to go from here. It's inconvenient from the standpoint of our working relationship, but I believe that it has some offsetting benefits which I'm planning on taking advantage of. The main one of course is the fact that increased distance between Venice and I will mean that I'm able to spend additional time with Lucy and Renworst.
I think that the biggest plus to come out of this whole round of adjustments is that I'm feeling remarkably clearheaded. Looking back at some of my recent actions has caused me to realize that I've been making suboptimal decisions in a number of areas.
Becoming involved with Venice was certainly an enjoyable experience, but in hindsight I didn't need to become as attached to her as I seem to have gotten. In fact, I'm becoming quite certain that my feelings for Venice caused me to neglect Lucy and Renworst to a much greater degree than I should have.
I'm going to spend much more time trying to repair my relationship with Lucy now than if I'd simply made sure to be at least a small part of her life on an ongoing basis. I believe the root of that problem however wasn't Venice, or at least not just Venice. Ultimately I think that I allowed anger at Mrs. Agosti to persuade me to leave Lucy upstate much longer than I ever should have.
I've always viewed sanitizing my mind as something to be avoided as much as possible, but I think that it is time for me to consider a program of regular emotional purges as a way of optimizing my decision-making process.
Honestly, I'm surprised that I haven't decided to do so sooner. My feud with Imastious has an undeniable set of core reasons which are entirely valid. He is enslaving me and I live under a near-constant risk of death that has only little to do with my own actions. That being said, the way that I've chosen to proceed with my shadow war against him has had a very strong emotional basis which hasn't advanced my cause in the slightest.
I've undertaken numerous operations against Imastious which had only slight economic benefit to me and which had correspondingly slight negative impacts on Imastious. Looking at those activities, I'm hard-pressed to justify them under the cold mechanics of risk versus reward.
My financial situation is such that these types of vendetta actions don't add appreciably to my war chest, and I've therefore decided that I will no longer be pursuing any activities against Imastious that don't provide either a very large benefit to me or create a very large detriment to him. I'll need to spend some time deciding where the exact threshold should be, but certainly in the tens of millions of dollars at least.
I think that I may be the first vampire to have hit upon the ability to move my memories around and thereby strip them of emotion. Certainly one would expect that most of the low-level grudge fights going on between the various vampire elders would cease if they had the ability to look at things rationally.