Amberton’s
This shop has a lot of different things for sale. It’s hard to really call it a shop. It’s a lot bigger now than it was in its humble origins.
It was founded on October 23, 1710 in Livurgia, an Eastern European Kingdom that existed some time between the Crusades and the Napoleonic Wars by Alexander Amberon a half-slavic, half-British tradesman living in the town of Slove.
At the beginning it was just a normal shop but Mr. Amberon did have one peculiarity for the region, a virulent and quite voluble anti-vampirism. The Vampires of Livurgia where not the sleek, feline vamps of pseudo-pornographic gothic literature, they were vicious brutes.
At night time they would assail the shop but never be allowed access, outside one could hear the sounds of their frustration, it kept Mr. Amberon and his family awake all hours of the night. So he contracted with a passing witch to make one of the back doors of the store to open onto an alleyway in Philadelphia, which at that time was the greatest city in the British colonies along the Eastern seaboard of North America.
That’s a whole other time zone — 7 hours difference. At first they thought they would go into New York, rent a hotel room and sleep and they did that for a bit, but then of course Mr. Amberon had the quite obvious idea of staying open during prime business hours in New York and converting his back door into the front door of his establishment there.
It was at this time that he legally changed his name, and the name of all his progeny, to Amberton, as he felt it sounded more upper class.
Obviously he did not make lots of money from Philadelphia, as his business was in a hard to find alley, but due to the exchange rate it really didn’t matter, 1 sale in the colonies was worth ten sales in Slove.
But still for people with specific tastes in both municipalities Mr. Amberton’s was a very interesting destination, and his reputation grew, even as the attacks of the Vampires on the exterior of his building increased in the nights of Slove during the American day his clients were blissfully unaware of what a horrifying fate would have awaited them if they had mistakenly exited the building in the wrong continent.
The Son of Mr. Amberton ascended to ownership of the store in the 1750s but his father still kept quarters in-house and was available to consult on important matters of strategy. The Amberton’s took an anti-Tory stance during the American Revolutionary War, mainly due to influence of their friend and frequent customer, Benjamin Franklin.
Not coincidentally a few years before hostilities broke out Amberton’s opened another location, by which is meant knocking down a part of a wall to make a doorway into a narrow side street near Cavendish Square, London.
This secret way into London was used for the vital transmission of state secrets that helped turn the tide of war in America’s favor.
This access to London made Amberton’s a primary stopping point for any one interested in the more rare and hermetic products, as well as giving the Amberton family easy access to lapidaried goods from the House of Cygnet and Drake.
In return for the services during the war, Thomas Jefferson brokered a peace between Mr. Amberton and European and American vampires (excluding the more degraded ghoul like specimens that were more prevalent in those days) which of course allowed Vampires to enter Amberton’s as valued customers for the first time ever in 1801.
In the next few generation Amberton’s expanded several times, to controlling doorways into the following locations:
Philadelphia, London, Slove, Naples, Sarasota, Mexico City, and Singapore.
Shop at Amberton’s — The Premier location for hermetic, occult, cross-temporal and reality altering cultural remnants packaged in consumable sizes.
