"Orange County is not Los Angeles. Orange County is newer, cleaner, safer and a better place to live. L.A. is a mess."
(Ken Knotts)
Orange County is at once a continuation of Los Angeles sprawl, and an entirely different part of California. The political divide between the two areas is known as the "Orange Curtain." Orange County is one of the most politically conservative areas of the entire United States, and it takes a certain pride in not being Los Angeles. Within Orange County, the divide between North and South county is almost as distinct. South County is the new, the exclusive, and the gentrified. The beach communities have seen property values soar, and from Dana Point to Lake Forest to Huntington Beach, housing developments are creeping ever more quickly across what was once wildlands, wetlands, and foothills. Newport Beach, Irvine, and Laguna Beach form one of Los Angeles's three largest business districts. Only downtown L.A. and Century City are centers of greater finance and commerce. South County is crisscrossed by large, wide roads: Alton, Mouton, Jamboree, Irvine Ave. and MacArthur Blvd. The communities were designed, by and large, after people discovered what a traffic nightmare the Los Angeles area was turning out to be. Parking is available in abundance. But all the same, there is something sterile about South County. Irvine has some of the most draconian Homeowners' Associations in the country, with regulations limiting the colors a person can paint their house to a small palette of inoffensive pastels. There is money and style, from Fashion Island to the Costa Mesa Performing Arts Center, but there is also a lack of soul.
The Domain of South Orange County is a Toreador haven, and is a popular spot for vampires of status visiting from other places to stay while in Los Angeles. Prince Gillian Ventriss is a great patron of the arts, and together with a sizeable number of progeny, has worked to create something of a haven for Toreador in the Western United States. Where the mortal tendency to isolationism from the rest of Los Angeles works as a cloak for the vampires of North Orange County, it works as a pure aegis in the South. Many vampires in the greater Los Angeles area refer to Newport Beach and its immediate vicinity as "The Ivory Tower," a term meant to deride the perceived head-in-the-sand attitude of its residents. Toreador are by far the most abundant of the clans, with the balance being composed mostly of Ventrue and cultured Brujah. Those anarchs that exist in this domain are not really anarchs at all, but social progressives who hold their own salons discussing the possibilities of freedom within the vampiric condition.
