He knew nobody, and nothing, in Dallas. That did not matter. Dallas had room; the Tremere clan had its reasons; he did not need to know them. He went. When he told Vanessa he was being transferred, she told him she'd been seeing someone else ... he wondered briefly if they'd arranged that. It did make it easier to leave. But that did not matter. Perhaps it was only something she said to hurt him for leaving. He took it... let the pain help him... let it work its subtle magic. He thanked her for her honesty.

The journey was uneventful. A long car trip, two nights in hotels along the way. A trunkful of file folders in a lockbox. They were all in code anyway. Handwritten code, much safer than digital nowadays, with the modern cryptographic models now available. One of his fellow researchers in the Philadelphia chantry had been a cryptanalyst. It was amazing what computers could do these days.

The Dallas primogen greeted him on his arrival. It was quite an honor, Arthur felt. A pretty ghoul of the primogen's showed him around his new apartment, and helped him get set up. They explained the weekly routine, how ghouls were transferred into and out of the Chantry secretly to avoid any chance of their discovering its secret location. Blindfolded, he sat in the back of a limousine, a white noise machine running to drown out any sound clues as to where they went. The ride took a measureless amount of time - he was never able to tell how long, somehow - and then he was walked into what seemed a building, and rode in what seemed an elevator, and then he was there. The Chantry. It had no windows; there was no ambient sound; it was impossible to tell where it might be situated, or in what manner of place. In town? Outside town? Within a large building? Underground? He had a cell there, a tiny room, barely big enough for a cot and a sink. There was a toilet and a shower on each floor, small and little used.

During this first stay, he met only one other ghoul, a man called Burgess. He seemed to have the role of custodian: keeping the building in repair, cleaning, and so on. Burgess informed Arthur that there were two rooms he was not permitted inside, and that he'd been told that Arthur would be in charge of seeing that they were kept clean. He showed Arthur the room where his supplies were kept, and then gave him a key ring, with keys to the two specific rooms and to the supplies closet. Arthur slipped this onto his own keyring.

The keys fit two rooms opposite one another on a hallway. When Arthur entered the first of these, he saw immediately why he was to be responsible for it: this appeared to be an experimental laboratory, complete with animal cages and a lot of glassworks. It would take specialized care for which he'd had much experience as a lab assistant in university. The other room was a bit less obvious; but it had an otherworldly feel, and some odd pieces of equipment, festooned with restraining straps and mystic pictograms. He did not like to make assumptions, but he thought he knew why this one would be his responsibility as well.

Arthur carefully locked both rooms back up and returned to his cell, where on arrival he found a piece of expensive paper, words on it written in an old-fashioned scrawl. It bore his schedule, times specified in detail: who to meet with, where to be, what to do. Sleep was stenciled in for eight daylight hours each day. On the seventh day, at nearly the same time to a week that he had entered the Chantry, he was scheduled to depart again. He read it over carefully, committing it to memory. He very much wished to make a good first impression.