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**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:23 PM

Sophie Penrose
Slave

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Ordo Dracul (Formerly Invictus)
Clan: Daeva
Bloodline: Kallisti
Embrace: 1986
Apparent Age: Mid-20s

Background: This is a lie.

Sophie Penrose was born in 1978 to Chester and Margaret Penrose, the wealthy and reclusive owners of 10% of the Jones-Klein-Beauchamp, a company that specializes in bleeding-edge pharmaceuticals and designer drugs. Raised in the lap of luxury, Sophie spent most of her youth first in the country estates up in the Midlands, and then in an exclusive Swiss boarding school in the Alps, where she first picked up her love of skiing and alpinism. Something of a wild child, Sophie made minor headlines with drunken debauches in Genevan nightclubs as a teenager, and there was an affair with a young actor that was hushed up. A sex-tape supposedly circulates on the internet. Upon achieving her 21st birthday in 1999, however, broke free from her parents control to become a prominent socialite and minor celebrity in the London set, moving into that half-respectable twilight world of the celebutante. On the one hand, she is regal, majestic, a philanthropist and a regular at the society gatherings of London. At the same time, her penchant for exotic (and erotic) parties has only increased with freedom, and no one doubts that under that icy exterior lies a heart burning with passions.

This is the truth.

Sophie Penrose does not exist. She is an experiment in perceptional manipulation on a truly mind-bending scale. Prior to 1999 and her appearance on the social scene, Sophie Penrose did not exist and had never existed. Chester and Margaret Penrose are fictional entities, and Penrose was never in the Swiss boarding school she was supposedly in. The actor she dated never met her till 1999, and no one ever saw the sex-tape at first not because she was insufficiently famous, but because it didn't exist. But, and this is the very important part, the worldbelieves that these things occurred, because the Moulding Room wishes them to believe.

Records can be falsified. Old news stories can be inserted into archives and backdated. Memory is inherently unreliable, and can be altered by means both gentle (leading conversations) and harsh (pharmaceuticals, magic). The vast herd of humanity, confronted with the obvious reality of Sophie Penrose's past and existence, does not question that no one member ever heard of her prior to 1999. Certainly, the specific individual is ignorant, but he or she assumes that this does not hold true for the rest of society.

This is conjecture.

Sophie Penrose was not born to wealth and status, but to its acquisition. For Penrose, objectification is the way of the world. For her parents, she was "Daughter, 1, pretty and bright, symbol of achievement". She was not, strictly speaking, a person. They were kind, in an absent-minded way, but they were absorbed far more in one another and in their ambitions. Sophie was just one more sign that they were successful people, on the way to the highest reaches of the corporate world. Feelings did not come into the equation. "Of course we love you, how can you doubt that?" Was the refrain. And Sophie, in that particular way that children have, internalized the lesson of that saying. There was no doubt that her parents loved her. If there was ever any loss or insufficiency of love, then it was because Sophie was somehow unworthy, and would just have to try harder next time.

The fact was, though, that Sophie was smart, and she was pretty, and she was possessed of seemingly-endless supplies of sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness. But somehow, she was never smart enough or pretty enough to earn the love that her parents would have given her, if only she was worthy. Eventually, Sophie turned abroad for acceptance, but the few who dared date the clever, pretty girl were of the same mold as her parents, interested in her looks (and occasionally her help with homework), but not in her. Sophie went through college, becoming engaged with the most attractive of her boyfriends, and began to reconcile herself to life as a twisted rendition of the perfect daughter and wife, never quite good enough.

But then fate intervened in the form of George Permell, a vampire. For some reason, he appreciated her, enjoyed that edge of barely restrained wrath that Sophie nurtured in herself, enjoyed the elaborate fantasies of revenge and dismemberment that Sophie wrote out in her most private journals, enjoyed her penchant for slicing long gashes on her own arms with a kitchen knife. Sophie was on the crossroads between the death of ambition and a violent, psychotic breakdown. So Permell came to her, seduced her with promises of love and affection, and offered to take her away from it all. She accepted, and he Embraced her.

But then, Permell reverted to type, though when he denied his approval, it was to spur Sophie onward to ever greater things. Sophie could work as though possessed by seven demons when she thought it would get her the affection of her Sire, and Permell knew it. She was the prefect fledgling, eager-to-please and exceedingly competent. Unfortunately for Permell, he had made a slight miscalculation, for when one takes a viper to one's bosom, one should beware, and the same holds for repressed young women with homocidal urges. Finding Kindred society so much less constraining than what she was used to, and with the Beast egging her on, Sophie turned her consistent 'Excellents' in chemistry to good use and fire-bombed her Sire's haven.

Sophie had to flee the city, of course, but she had Permell's money, and a distant contact in London, an eccentric elder named Vincent Moon. The rest, as they say, is history.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:25 PM

Sir Royston Montjoy
“Monty”, The Phantom of Drury Lane

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Carthian
Clan: Nosferatu
Embrace: 1691
Apparent Age: Late 50s

Background: Everyone knows that there are certain things one does not do, certain places one does not go to, if they plan to continue living a healthy life. A young, middle-class girl does not go strolling around Tottenham in the middle of the night, and a group of drug-addicts (assuming they are sober enough to realize), do not invade the private offices of a multinational corporation. It is just not done.

The same applies to monsters.

In London, this unwritten rule was simple. Stay above the ground. All of the lands above the street level were, for a certain, given value, ‘safe’. Certainly, there were angry werewolves, and trickster fae, and vampires could be territorial and vicious. But go beneath the streets, into the Undertown, the London Below, and it is a wholly different world. London, you see, was a very old city. Two thousand years and counting, and in that time, places could get… lost. Basements, passageways, sewers, vaults, mithraeums and cult headquarters, graves beneath graves beneath graves. No one quite knew how deep below the earth the Undertown of London stretched, but it was a place of danger and mystery. It was where the monsters — the real monsters, not the petty poseurs who strutted the stage of the world above — where the true monsters lived.

Monsters, in other words, like Sir Royston Montjoy.

In his life, Royston Montjoy was an actor. He was more than that, he was a very good actor, one of the finest in 17th century London. He played the leading role of every romance, had a beautiful singing voice, and set the hearts of many a society belle aflutter. He had dash, he had verve, he had that magnificent ability to make every person in the audience feel as though Montjoy played for him and him alone. For a few glorious years, Montjoy had it all. He married an Italian actress in 1665, when he was 26. He was knighted in the Christmas Honors of 1681, and he had all the money he wanted. Life was beautiful, and even his separation from his wife (in 1680) couldn’t ruin it.

Time could. And that’s the ironic secret of Sir Royston Montjoy, that he asked for immortality. He was getting old, he stopped playing the romantic leads and started getting the distinguished, mature roles. His body began to ache, and time was running out. Royston panicked, and he began to search for something, anything that would halt his slide into infirmity and decay. That would have been too much, to lose everything he had gained to Time. So, one midnight, sometime in the 1690s, Royston Montjoy found himself seated at a chess board opposite Death, dressed in an undertaker’s suit and a grinning death’s-head mask. How the meeting came about, Royston will never say. Only that desperation always finds a way. And when Royston asked to live forever, in exchange for all his fortune and all his fame, Death agreed.

Montjoy could have accepted the loss of his wealth. It had never mattered to him other than as a way of living the high life. He accepted that he would have to disappear, that fame could not follow him to undeath. But what Death failed to mention was that he would lose his voice, that it would break and ruin and that Sir Royston Montjoy’s beautiful singing voice would turn to a scratchy, unholy horror. No one could hear him and do anything but shudder.

Montjoy went a little mad. He haunted the theaters he knew so well, especially the Theater Royal at Drury Lane, and he built his world there, turning it more and more to his liking with every rebuilt theater. Little passageways that only he knew about. Guards who believed every word that he said to them. Addicts who thought him some dark angel, actors who believed in the Phantom of Drury Lane. He became a ghost, whispering through the world, watching the world he could never again participate.

In modern nights, Montjoy is saner if not sane. He’s a monster, with bloody talons and a sadistic frame of mind, and though he is not the most dangerous demon to lurk beneath the floorboards, neither is he the least. He maintains his Necropolis beneath the West End theater district, with its labyrinthine catacombs and its bizarre theaters and storerooms. With blood and secret whispers, he controls his people, the actors and staff of the Theater Royal, and the homeless vagrants who cluster beneath it. With black magic and force of will, he knows every nook and every corner, can bend every aspect of the theater to his darkest desire. He occasionally lets it out to other vampires or denizens of the supernatural world, in exchange for favors. Those he dislikes never see the light of day again.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:26 PM

Tejal "Chris" Krishnamurthy

Type: Ghoul
Regnant's Clan: Nosferatu
Regnant's Covenant: Carthian
Enthralled: 1998
Apparent Age: Mid-20s

Background: Nothing really singled out Tejal Krishnamurthy for his later destiny as Sir Royston Montjoy's personal hatchetman. He was a normal kid from the East End. His parents were lower-middle class and generally nice people, his brother was a year older and bullied him only the normal sibling amount, and his sister was three years younger and thus doted on. He went to the local comprehensive school where he excelled at nothing other than football, but was neither particularly horrible at anything except history. His grades weren't good enough to get him into a university, so Chris (as people called him, to his long-suffering annoyance) got a job as a day laborer.

Most people who knew Chris considered him a nice guy, an honest, upright fellow. Good with his hands, he was a volunteer at the local nursing home, acting as an unpaid handyman, and generally helped keep his corner of the council flats in good shape. He never got involved in gangs, didn't do drugs, and was active on the dating scene. Pretty much everyone liked the guy, even if they had to admit that Chris had a taste for melodrama -- everything was more dramatic around Chris. The man saw conspiracies and intrigues all around. His crew-boss was having an affair, the government was spying on his co-worker, his sister was secretly working for MI6.

He didn't actually notice when a real conspiracy scooped him up. Chris's downfall came when he took a job fixing some things in the Theater Royal at Drury Lane, right when Sir Royston Montjoy needed someone to deliver a certain amount of tutelary dentistry to a recalcitrant neonate. He spotted Chris. Chris was a big, tough-looking fellow, he had a physical job and he worked out. Montjoy, being a master of Kindred mentalism, crushed the young man's psyche like an egg-shell and told him to go do the job. This, Chris did. He did it very thoroughly-- somewhere in the body of a wiry British-Indian handyman lurked the soul of a berserker.

Montjoy was so impressed that he transformed Chris into his ghoul bodyguard and murderer. He broke Chris and remade him, with vinculums and mental conditioning and blood-addiction, and then he mostly left him alone. Even at the best of times, Sir Royston is not a sociable individual.

For the first few months, Chris was a wreck, but slowly, he started to rebuild his psyche. The human brain is lovely in that it can apply all sorts of cognitive dissonance to life. On the one hand, Chris was an addict now, the lowest, worst sort of addict. The taste of blood was always foremost in his mind, and one word from Montjoy could bring him to heel. Chris became a thug and a murderer, ready to hurt or killanyone for just a taste of that precious Vitae. On the other hand, Chris was still, basically, Chris, a nice guy who was always ready to pitch in a helping hand, who was scrupulously honest and law-abiding, who loved for his parents and was the 'cool uncle' to his nieces and nephews.

In order to cope, Chris turned to vigilante-ism. In a way, he sees himself as a noir anti-hero. Chris is under no illusions that he's a messed-up addict, but some things just aren't right. So he tries to protect people. Just because he's screwed up and a miserable excuse for a human being doesn't mean he has to stand by and let more bad things happen to good people. Mind you, if Montjoy tells him to kill someone, well, tough luck -- Montjoy is the God and Boss and King of Chris's unsteady psyche, a dark and tormenting angel. But left to his own devices, Chris is driven to protect and save.

This of course means that he'll chop up a single mother one week if it'll get him his blood-fix, and kill some guy for trying to rape a girl the next. Sanity is not a concept on which Tejal Krishnamurthy has a terribly good grasp on. He tries, desperately, to hold onto his moral compass, but addiction and Montjoy serve to keep it spinning wildly around. To be fair, Chris doesn't really commit all that many atrocities. Most of what he does is deliver scares and occasional beatings to other vampires, which is... kind of easy to justify to himself, really. He scares a few nosy mortals, but Montjoy is savvy enough to realize that more often than not, the cover-up is as dangerous as the original crime.

Most of the time, Chris is just kind of left alone. He visits the Theater Royal once a month for his fix of Vitae, acts as Montjoy's bodyguard at various functions, and a few times a year he goes off and axes someone. Montjoy has other ghouls and thralls for other tasks. The rest of Chris's time is free, so he still works as a day laborer to earn money, still volunteers at the local nursing home. He's withdrawn from his family somewhat, since his lack of aging might be noticed, and hangs out more with other Kindred or local supernaturals, where he doesn't need to explain things... and where Chris's penchant for big talk doesn't get him in trouble with the Masquerade. You would think that becoming a ghoul would be enough drama for anyone, but Chris still turns everything around him into some greater plot or intrigue, one that will shake this city down to it's very foundations!

Chris doesn't look all that dangerous. He's a wiry young man with short, curly black hair and big hands, and a nose that's a bit crooked from having been broken on a construction site some years back. He smiles a lot and speaks with a mixed Hindi-Cockney accent (despite having been born in London). He's usually dressed in thick cargo pants and a plain t-shirt, and Montjoy's invested in a grey, Kevlar-lined jacket for him for 'business'. Chris's chosen weapon is a fire-axe, and he is much stronger than he looks, fighting with a mixture of vampiric blood and mad, addiction-driven strength.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:27 PM

Lydia
Lydia Morreluck, Morlock, Cindy Mourville

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Circle of the Crone
Clan: Nosferatu
Bloodline: Badacelli
Embrace: 1988
Apparent Age: Early 20s

Cindy Mourville's parents were not ... the best people. They were hardcore fundamentalists, some arch-conservative Protestant sect that believed that the End Times were at hand and that sin was everywhere. From an early age, Cindy was educated at home, force-fed a diet of countless Thou Shalt Nots. When the young girl broke one of them, she was punished, usually by being starved. When she was thirteen years old, malnutrition robbed Cindy of her sight. She went blind due to a Vitamin A deficiency. Her parents, distrustful of any earthly authority, put off going to the doctor until it was far too late.

In a strange sort of way, Cindy's blindness helped keep her sane. The reality of the loss of her sight broke her out of the constricted world-view her parents had created, and it led her to realize that this was not normal. So Cindy kept silent. She planned. She considered. She waited. And when she was sixteen years old, she left home forever.

Things didn't quite work out the way Cindy -- now calling herself Lydia -- had planned. With minimal money, no education, and a severe disability, opportunities for her were slim. She was just barely getting by when she attracted the attention of one Alessandro Bourettien. Alessandro was one of the Baddacelli, a bloodline of Clan Nosferatu cursed to blindness. He Embraced her, as a reward for her sufferings, and perhaps as a salve against the loneliness that gnawed at his own soul.

Lydia drifted in Kindred society, though in some ways she acclimated to the transformation exceptionally well. A marginal, dispossessed member of society before, being a neonate of Clan Nosferatu was only a little different. Though the rhetoric of dominance and of being a Predator of the Night appeals to Lydia in deep-down way, Lydia just never had it in her to hurt people. A terrifyingly botched feeding in her early Requiem led her to feed almost exclusively from pigeons and other animals, and that in turn led to her own interest in pigeons and even to ghouling one of her favorites, whom she named Cher Ami.

At the prompting of her sire, Lydia joined the Circle of the Crone. Her original motives were purely mercenary, as they had magic that Lydia wanted, and in turn, she could offer the mimicry of the Baddacelli to their services. But perhaps as a rejection of the myriad Thou Shalt Nots of her upbringing, Lydia has joined in with the Acolytes with a passion. She respects Abonde vastly, and is part of that witchcraft-focused branch of cult, though she's been among the many who have been nodding along in recent years as Cynthia of the Mara argues for a more proactive approach.

Her own quests brought her to the Moulting Room cult. The fact of the matter is, Lydia is used to being a marginal person, and she's good at being a marginal person, but she is very, very tired of being a marginal person. She doesn't quite have the ruthless streak necessary to thrive in Kindred society, but she would very much wish to achieve the kind of power and wealth that other Kindred have. She just hasn't quite managed it yet, though she's picked up a nice nest egg so far.

Lydia has pale skin, quite nearly translucent, but her hair is dyed a vivid, eye-splitting pink color, and allowed to fall limply in front of her face. Her eyes are hidden beneath shocking-pink bangs, which is intentional given that Lydia has no eyes, only a blank expanse of skin in her eye sockets. She dresses appropriately to her hair color, with a short, leather skirt with a wide belt, a somewhat ragged black blouse with a skull emblazoned on it, thigh-high boots, and fingerless black gloves. As an accent, there is usually a spiked collar worn around her neck. Though she looks like -- charitably speaking -- a freak, this is entirely intentional. The Curse of Clan Nosferatu ensures that Lydia always comes across as being somehow off, and so she cultivates her punk-rocker appearance as a way of offering mortals a rational explanation for why she makes them feel odd. That and she just likes to dress up however she wants with no care for what others think.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:28 PM

Rajani Ravindra

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Unaligned
Clan: Ventrue
Bloodline: Nagaraja (Pisha from Bloodlines is the inspiration)
Embrace: 1857
Apparent Age: 28

Background: Rajani Ravindra was born Chane Nakhasi in Punjab, in 1830. Her family were clothiers, dressmakers for generations stretching back into antiquity -- to this day, Rajani knows rather more about clothing than may be expected -- but they had higher hopes for their daughter. Chane was pretty, she was quiet, and she was attentive, so it was determined that she could enter the service of the local border-prince, and thus secure both the prince's favor and, one hoped, a favorable marriage. Chane, being a quiet and practical girl and not given to causing a fuss, agreed, and so it was done.

Her family's hopes were justified. Chane was married in 1848 to an old soldier who was part of the border-princes personal bodyguard, and she had three children over the following decade, only one of whom would survive to maturity. In many ways, Chane's life seemed set. She was well-to-do by the standards of her caste, well-married and respectable, and her position in the border-prince's retinue allowed her to indulge her own hobbies. She listened to local folk-stories, and managed by dint of connections to learn to read a little. She had some hopes, in the very back of her mind, of writing a collection of tales of Kashmir.

Two matters interrupted Chane's modest, domestic idyll. First was that not all of the border-prince's ancestors had been duly sent on to their next life. On the contrary, the border-prince's great-grandfather remained in the castle, and this was, at least among the servants, something of an open secret. One did not walk the corridors beyond a certain hour on certain nights, nor did one question of the Raja's Ghost fed upon your veins. The other matter was that the border-prince made the thoroughly unfortunate decision to join the Great Rebellion. Sometimes called the Sepoy Mutiny or the Indian Revolt of 1857, the Great Rebellion was a subcontinent-spanning conflagration of startling violence. Entire British garrisons were slaughtered by the rebellious Sepoys (Indian soldiers serving the then-dominant British East India Company) man, woman, and child, and when the British responded, their retaliation was so vicious that they were called the 'Devil Wind' that swept through India, executing tens, possibly hundreds of thousands.

It was thus, in early 1858, that the border prince and other rebels met the British regiments in open battle, and they were slaughtered. Chane's quiet, orderly life was torn asunder, her lord dead, her husband likely as well. More than that, the British were coming, and there was little reason to expect their mercy. Others might have broken in these circumstances, but Chane had ever prided herself on a practical outlook, and so armed with a torch, her husband's sword, and a collection of folk-tales, she sought out the Raja's Ghost in his crypt. She made her offer, and the Raja's Ghost -- threatened, or amused, or impressed, it is impossible to say -- Embraced her that night.

Chane made her plans then. She took her young son and such money as she could steal, and fled Punjab. Over the following years, the deathless mother and her young boy were refugees across much of the subcontinent. The Indian Kindred were torn apart in those years, and so it is was some time before Chane settled in Gujarat, and saw her son firmly ensconced with a local family. Over the following decades, she would see him mature, and flourish, and marry, and watch her blood live once more.

This was not to say that Chane was accepted. Kindred society in India, even after the Great Rebellion, was organized along caste lines, and try as she might, Chane was neither Brahmin nor Kshatriya, could never pass for a scholar or warrior. To find acceptance and support, the young Kindred, ever practical, turned to the Dalit, who were delighted to have her. It was in those years of the late 19th century that Chane took on the name Rajani -- Wife of the Raja -- as an ironic tribute to her Embrace. Chane stayed in Gujarat until the turn of the century, until came the time to bury her one son. She stayed a little longer, to make certain that his family was well cared for, and then she departed, to travel the world and indulge her curiosity. She has done it ever since.

She presently lives in a crypt in the Kensal Green cemetery.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:30 PM

Emily Wescote
Seneschal of London

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Circle of the Crone
Clan: Ventrue
Embrace: 1914
Apparent Age: Mid-twenties (actually 32)

Background: Emily Wescote was born a child of privilege during the height of the British Empire, and grew of age in the twilight of Queen Victoria’s reign. Though the Wescotes were not as rich or as respectable as they might have been (an alarming tendency towards manifesting violent black sheep marked the family), Emily and her three sisters were taught first by Irish governesses and then by French tutors. Their father, Sir John Wescote, was by the standards of the time an open-minded man, and he hoped for his four daughters to marry well, even as Henry, their brother, would carry on the family name. He was probably not open-minded enough to accept Emily’s hobbies, however.

The farmers around Wescote House had always had more than their fair share of hair-raising ghost stories and dark talk of curses, but Emily’s interest in the supernatural began when a passing spiritualist came through the county when she was just twelve. At the séance, he raised the dead, whispered secrets that he could not have known, and thoroughly captivated the young girl’s imagination. This was significantly more interesting than learning how to crochet.

Even then, Emily’s defining characteristic had always been an absolute refusal to bow to adversity – or to reality, on occasion – and she set about learning everything about the occult. She began to conduct interviews with local farmers to track down local legends and ghost stories – under the guise of ‘recording oral culture’ – and corresponded with figures in London and as far away as Paris and New York. By the age of fifteen, Emily had seen her first ghost, a drowned maiden in a local pond, and by the age of eighteen, she had managed her first summoning, a man of brambles-and-shadows called upon Walpurgisnacht.

In other ways Emily’s life progressed according to plan, as she was betrothed and then married to a certain wealthy American – he got a title, the Wescotes got money, Emily and her husband got to ignore one another utterly. She moved to New York then, entering Gilded Age society there, summering in Newport, attending balls, and hobnobbing – at a suitable remove – with the American industrial aristocracy.

Then, in 1907, disaster struck. Her brother, Henry, was struck down with what others called madness and what Emily suspected was the Wescote Curse. The young woman rushed back to Wescote House, only to discover that her father had had Henry committed to Moorgate Asylum, until his ‘fit of nerves’ was over and done with.

What followed was a thoroughly magnificent row. Emily was an unstoppable force, Sir John (from whom she had inherited her steel spine) an immovable object. They screamed at one another. They argued. There were frigid silences, threats of scandals, thrown objects, and in short, absolute terror for all involved. When her sisters tried to intervene, the two shouted them down. When Emily’s husband tried to take her home to America, she hexed him. Wescote House became utterly unlivable for a month, and then Emily packed her bags and departed for London. She had correspondents there, specialists in the occult. They could save Henry, couldn’t they? And if not, then Emily could get lawyers to at least get him out of Moorgate.

She took up residence in the Charing Cross Hotel and began a furious and swift acquaintance with the leading occult lights of London. She was for a time involved with men and women such as Aleister Crowley, Harry Price the infamous ghost hunter, Margaret Murray of anthropological fame, A. E. Waite of the Golden Dawn and Austin Osman Spare, the occult artist. Most significantly, she struck up a friendship with the head of housekeeping at the Charing Cross Hotel, a soft-spoken but brilliantly intelligent Scotswoman named Elizabeth Sheridan.

For the next eight years, Emily threw herself into the occult, her lawyers fending off those of her father and husband, both of whom eventually gave up on making her come home. Her husband largely thought he was well rid of her, though he never filed for divorce. In the meantime, Emily made no fewer than three separate attempts to break the Wescote Curse – though she was found and ejected from Wescote House on one of the occasions, on the other two she succeeded in summoning beings from other worlds, spirits or demons or other such horrors – but each time she was unsuccessful. Her efforts to see Henry freed from Moorgate were similarly thwarted, in no small part due to Emily’s own increasingly dubious reputation (as if the occult was not enough, Emily was also a noted suffragette).

Finally, in the winter of 1914, as the Great War raged, Sheridan suggested a new course of action to Emily. She knew a way, she hinted, for Henry to at least have freedom, and for Emily to have more time to break the curse. Emily Wescote, close to her wits end, agreed. And so it came to pass that she was Embraced by Elizabeth Sheridan, passing from one life to the next. Now, this was long before Sheridan was the Lady of London, nor even the High Sheriff. At the time, she was a respectable but not dominating Invictus Elder, and over the next few months, she took Emily in hand. Rescuing Henry did not take magic or lawyers. It merely took bloody, unnatural strength.

Sir John’s lawyers were immediately suspicious of Emily, of course, but with Sheridan’s help she hid Henry and waited for the attention to pass. When it did, the two siblings turned to face eternity together. Henry learned, by way of bitter experience, the limits of his curse, while Emily returned into her little home in the twilight world of occult London. In 1918, she divorced her husband, and lived out a seemingly normal, albeit highly eccentric, life until the late 1940s, when she faked her death and more fully joined Kindred society.

For a time, Emily and Sheridan drifted apart, Wescote concerned primarily with the Wescote Curse, her Sire focused more upon political affairs. After her emancipation, Emily joined the Acolytes, continuing to develop her sanguine witchery as a student of the Lady Abonde. She created new human identities so as to continue to engage with the mortal occultists of London, though after her near-Final Death at the hands of Catholic Inquisitors in 1959, Emily has kept a low profile. She Embraced another into the Kindred in 1972, and again in 1984.

Then in 1986, Sheridan became the Lady of London, and suddenly Emily Wescote’s sire was the most powerful Kindred in London. With that ascent came a new offer. Sheridan would make Emily her strong right hand, and in exchange, Emily would have Sheridan’s not-insignificant support for her occult research. Once more, Emily agreed.

In modern nights, Emily Wescote is the Seneschal of London. She is Sheridan’s lieutenant in all matters to do with the governance of the city, and her influence and authority are without bounds. Unlike her Sire, Emily is not some serpent given to secrets and diplomatic intrigue. Instead, she is a steam locomotive, bulling through all obstacles and battering them down with the strength of her will. Essentially, the way Kindred politics breaks down is that Sheridan, with the advice of the Primogen, determines what should happen, and then Emily makes certain that it does happen, the Herald tells everyone that it did happen, and the High Sheriff sniffs out and punishes any violations. More than the High Sheriff even, Emily serves as Sheridan’s iron fist.

Emily is also fairly high ranking in the Circle of the Crone, though since her becoming Sheridan’s Seneschal her rise has hit a glass ceiling, to Emily’s distinct frustration. Simply put, the Acolytes consider her too politically unreliable to advance any further.

To carry out her duties, Emily has several powerful tools. First and foremost, she is assumed to be working with the full backing and authority of Sheridan and the Primogen Council. This assumption holds even when it is not, strictly, true, but Emily is scrupulously careful not to abuse this particular power. Emily also has access to a great deal of monetary wealth, both her own (she divorced well), Sheridan’s, and that of the Court of London as a whole, serving as Master of the Exchequer for the city’s Kindred. She maintains a large number of lawyers on retainer – after her endless legal troubles with her own father, Emily speaks their language. And finally, she has a goodly amount of Acolyte blood-magic, in particular a talent for knowing what will happen right before it happens.

In her private life, Emily maintains a large house in Ealing, which she privately refers to as Wescote House, where she lives with her brother. Large, grand, and elegant, Wescote House is a rambling old pile of a house that serves as haven to Emily and her brother, and to Emily’s hobbies. The greenhouse attached to the house is filled with rare and exotic plants (many toxic), while the west wing indulges Emily’s love of rare insect collection, filled with all of the accoutrements of the trade; bell jars, tiny pins and needles, shadow boxes filled with hundreds of minuscule, transfixed creatures. She sometimes holds formal meetings in the shadow of her insect collection or her greenhouse.

Minor gentry from the English countryside, Emily appears as a self-assured, comfortable young woman. In contrast to her forbidding reputation, she is a friendly person, if not garrulous or outgoing by any definition. Emily is very warm and caring, although she does her best to avoid seeming matronly; she is willing to take the initiative to help anyone whom she thinks needs assistance. Despite her better intentions, she is a little overprotective of her brother, who is utterly embarrassed by this. She has a good sense of humor and is usually easygoing and pleasant, though her emotions run deep, and she can get very touchy if provoked. Unlike her brother, she is less optimistic about worldly affairs, often playing the pragmatist to her brother's idealism.

Which goes a bit deeper than that - calling her less optimistic is a complete understatement. For a woman of such cheer and good humor, she is surprisingly and amazingly pessimistic. Unlike many, she does not characterize herself by exclaiming proclamations of doom aloud - it is simply that Emily always assumes things will turn out for the worst. As such, she is always quick to try and take damage controlling measures. As a woman of great generosity, she will often take it upon herself to do this to help others out, even at cost to herself. Decades of undeath have taken their toll on her humanity, and the madness of the Ventrue blood brews in her veins, but Emily soldiers on regardless, refusing to bow to the horror of her existence.

This is in fact something of a theme for her. Emily is exceedingly self-reliant and bull-headedly stubborn, sometimes in the face of reality. This comes through clearest in how she has spent one hundred years trying to break the Wescote Curse, without much success, but it came through as well in her relationship with her father and husband, and in modern nights in how she carries out her duties as Seneschal. Though she can be subtle and obscure when she chooses to be, Emily’s preference, when confronted with a problem is to apply overwhelming force, enough so that no degree of finesse or skill can withstand it. Someone coming to the Seneschal’s professional attentions is liable to feel like a mouse avoiding an elephant.

Slender and leggy, Emily is an amply proportioned, pretty young lady (she was thirty-two when she died, and the Wescote family tended to age very well). She has slate-grey eyes and curly blonde hair which is usually coiffed and drawn back. Her jaw is a bit too strong to be fashionable, and it would be exaggerating for her to be called gorgeous, but her confident air and gracious smile has turned more than its fair share of heads. She is taller than most women, though her tendency to wear short heels evens this out somewhat. She usually wears pragmatic, comfortable clothing, sleek, solid black dresses with gloves and often a hat. Outside of her home, she almost always wears an enchanted black cloak as well. Though a radical feminist by early 20th century standards, to this day she tends to sniff a little at women wearing pants. She usually wears silver jewelry and has a flower pinned somewhere to her person, either on a hat or as corsage.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:31 PM

Henry Wescote

Type: Possessed
Covenant: Lancea et Sanctum
Possessed: 1906
Apparent Age: 23

Background: When Henry was growing up in the last days of the 19th century, the local farmers talked about the ‘Wescote Curse’, about how the Wescotes had sold the soul of one of their firstborn sons for continued power and wealth. Certainly there was something to this story, if judging by how the family seemed to spawn a black sheep every generation. Henry’s uncle had ended his days in a debtor’s prison, dragging the family name through the mud with his infamous debauchery. Henry’s grandfather had been discreet at home, but had served in suppression of the Sepoy Mutiny, and every so often stories of his brutality reached back to Wescote Manor. And of Henry’s great-grandfather, the least said the better, save that his fortunate death by arsenic saved the family from ruin. Yet none of these people hadstarted bad. Henry’s uncle had been a respected barrister, his grandfather a war hero in the Crimean War… and Henry had been close to both of them.

Growing up, Henry had borne the brunt of suspicion and anxiety from his family. He was the firstborn son of Sir John Wescote, and more to the point, he was the only son, though the Wescotes had four older daughters, from Abigail, the eldest, on down to Emily, just a year older than Henry. Sir John angrily dismissed the Wescote Curse as silly superstition, but not all were so easily persuaded.

Other people, under the same weight of expectations, might have twisted or grown resentful, but this simply wasn’t Henry’s way. He was a sweet, good-natured young man, and if he was a little resentful, anything more was simply not in his character. Instead, he resolved to prove the curse wrong. At first he’d turned to religion for solace, a way to get some privacy in a house with four overprotective sisters everywhere. But then he began to realize that he actually simply liked his Church for what it was. It was a way to frame the larger questions of his life (who am I? what is my purpose?) at the same time as it allowed him to get out of the house, meet people, and do some good deeds. Perhaps he could even rehabilitate his family’s reputation.

Henry made plans to study at a local seminary after a period at the university, with an eye towards becoming a village vicar of some sort. Then, on his 23rd birthday, when Henry had returned home from his studies to help on the family estates, the Wescote Curse struck. And Henry learned that it was no silly superstition at all.

First he began to see things. Dark spots on the walls, with the faces of the dead emblazoned upon them. The marks of sulfur and ash upon the townsfolk, or a greasy patina upon the altar at church. Then he began to feel oddly, hungers and desires that were not his own, that he had never felt before, strange and unholy lusts. And then came the voice. Henry wished it merely screamed and ranted, though the Voice did this as well, hurling vile imprecations at all that Henry held dear. But this he could stand. Worse was when it spoke softly, suggesting to Henry the advantages it could offer, or ruminating upon the fatal flaws of those he loved. Look at his sister, Emily, did she not love him? Perhaps a little too much…? Did her eyes not linger on his body…?

Under the pressure, Henry began to crack. He never listened to the Voice, but he grew distant, quiet and dark. Hopelessness and despair grew in the young man’s life, and he withdrew into himself. He made the mistake of talking a little too freely about the Voice, however. And so about a year later, in 1907, his father had him committed to the local Moorgate Asylum, until his bout of ‘schizophrenia’ was over.

For years, Henry stayed there, neglected and abandoned in the darkness with only the Voice for company. It spoke to him constantly, and in a curious way it kept Henry sane. He knew he wasn’t so twisted as to suggest the things the Voice did, and therefore, he was not schizophrenic. That there were holes in this logic also occurred to him. But he learned more about the Voice, more about the strange spirit that had infested his family since the days of the Jacobite Rebellions, and he learned that what it wanted. Above all else, Henry, as the sole son, must propagate the line, and then conduct the strange, elaborate ritual that came to him in his dreams, the funeral mass for his own self, the sacrifice of blood, the devouring of the still-beating heart. Then, the Voice told him, he would be free.

This state of affairs continued until 1915, when Henry’s time in the asylum was over. It was Emily who rescued him, sweet, protective, older Emily, who grew older no more, but with sanguine strength wrenched the bars from his windows and drew Henry out. They fled to London, away from family and Curse alike, the three of them. Emily, Henry, and the Voice.

When Henry learned just what Emily had done to save him, how she had found the aged monster that had Embraced her into the night, Henry was engulfed with guilt. And yet, in some way, the guilt freed him from his depression. He gained determination, to defy this creature that had forced Emily’s sacrifice, and fell to it with a will.

Over the following decades, Henry has slowly, often painfully, learned the extent of the curse upon him. He learned, first, with a stolen razor blade and a moment of utmost despair, that he could not die. Until he gave in to the Voice’s will, until he sired a son and carried out that black ritual that it requested of him, it was powerful enough to deny even Death. He learned, in a frightening moment with a far too beautiful girl, that the Voice could control him if it so wished, though that with will and faith he could resist it. He learned, in a single moment of soul-screaming agony, that he couldn't set foot on consecrated ground. He learned, through a thousand nights of soft whispers, that the Wescote Curse offered him powers, the strength to rend and tear and kill, and that he could tap into a portion of that diabolic strength if he chose. And he learned that Henry had what his ancestors didn’t – a powerful enough will to deny the Voice what it wanted. Henry embraced religion yet more firmly, even as his orthodoxy drifted further from anything that could be considered ‘proper’.

As Emily was drawn more heavily into the bloody witchcraft that she practiced, Henry slowly entered into Kindred society as well. Though hardly a vampire, he was an immortal and he was most certainly one of the Damned. The Lancea et Sanctum was as suitable a place as any for him, and he serves there to this day, as a Confessor. The fact that Henry is apparently possessed by some demonic entity has caused trouble, but after the first three or four attempts to murder him proved unsuccessful, the Sanctified let him into their covenant. They could take a Divine hint as well anyone else.

Presently, Henry lives with his undead sister in a comfortable house out in Ealing. The curse has left him isolated and ascetic, which has slowed his adaptation to the modern world. He still holds a sense of wonder at all the sights and sounds of the city, but also holds a deep seated bashfulness, due to lack of dealing with people. Due to a minor speech impediment, a stammer he never quite got over, he always seems a little nervous. This and his youthful face tends to make him look vulnerable, which in turn tends to attract people trying to help him out. Henry does his best to be grateful, but he finds it a bit embarrassing. He is aware of this, and makes a definite effort to be a friendly and easygoing person, happy to talk or to listen. He can, however, become very withdrawn when dealing with others, often due to unfortunate whisperings in his mind.

He is very interested in learning new things; his grandfather and some of the returning missionaries he met gave him a taste for exploring the world, leaving him rather open to exciting new ideas he encounters. He is a true aficionado or learning, on any culture, religion, or subject, but his real passion tends towards Christian (or Longinian) scripture. A compassionate soul, Henry believes strongly in the Christian doctrine of aiding others, even those lost souls and sinners who have fallen into evil. The Calvinist belief in predestination has also become more important to him after his curse has hit him full force. Although he believes your choices are your own, he believes the results are in the hands of the divine, and is very fatalistic. Though he is not a judgmental or extreme kind of person, there is a touch of fanaticism in him that can cause discomfort. Henry still tends to mention religion or God in daily conversation, having not quite adapted to the times. The fact that God is all that gives him hope strengthens this.

His curse does not weigh lightly on him. The whispering is light in his mind, but it never stops. The Voice is always in his mind, always suggesting ill-motives and sickening secrets about those around him. In Kindred society, it has often proven sickeningly right. The Voice constantly tries to wrest control, pressing Henry to lash out in a bloody rampage, or engage in carnal acts to sire a son. For this reason, Henry becomes nervous around women - unfortunately, they tend to find him boyishly attractive. Vampires offer him some measure of relief: even if he caves in to their advances (and many of them refuse to hear "no"), the dead do not have children. And if he snaps and kills one... well, it hasn't happened yet. The ennui and jadedness of the Kindred takes its own toll, however. Henry has fantasized more than once about running away from everything, but the sheer guilt he feels over Emily’s Embrace ensures that he never will.

The relationship of the two siblings is… complicated. Emily considers it her duty in life to protect Henry and to keep him safe and sane, which Henry appreciates but wishes she’d stop. Henry find the whole thing both stifling and embarrassing, but he can hardly refuse after what she gave up for him. As such, he tends to loosen up when he's not around his sister, and the presence of his sister tends to make him more withdrawn. The two of them also fight regularly over their respective humanity or inhumanity, with Henry wishing that Emily would feed off him so as not to risk hurting others, and Emily resisting out of finding feeding off her brother to be simply creepy. At the same time, the two love each other dearly, and woe betide the one who threatens either of them.

Henry’s relationship with the Voice is more straightforward: he resists it at every opportunity. Even after so many years, the Voice keeps tapping away at the glass of Henry’s will, throwing it’s full infernal weight onto it at key moments. So long as Henry remains moral and true, he can resist the Voice with ease. Should he ever stop…

Tall and sinewy, Henry is clearly no stranger to work. He's tall at five feet and eleven inches, his height is tempered by a willowy frame, aristocratic cheekbones and long, elegant fingers. Henry isn't terribly muscular, but his demonically-empowered body is much more powerful than looks may indicate. He seems almost painfully aware of his strength, moving with a distinct caution to avoid breaking or bumping into anything. Henry is fresh-faced and sometimes a bit wide-eyed, and tends to have a hint of sheepishness that colors his actions. A good country boy, he acts with the best aristocratic manners as he can manage, which sometimes makes him look a bit stiff and uncomfortable. Henry favors pragmatic English wool clothing. He wears a long-sleeved collared shirts, usually preferring white or light, neutral colors, and dark pants, usually favoring brown or grey.

In his demonic form, Henry looks like something out of H. R. Giger’s nightmares, a huge, maned, ten-foot-tall gargoylean beast, dripping with a toxic black ichor and simmering with infernal heat.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:32 PM

Louis ibn Haroud
Louis Ouassi, The Sheik of Edgeware Road, Louis de Montagne, Louis-Sifal Feraoun, Tariq Louis Zidane

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Invictus (formerly Al-Amin)
Clan: Gangrel
Bloodline: Taifa
Embrace: 1972 (Enthralled in 1959)
Apparent Age: Late 20s

Background: Londoners often call the southern end of Edgeware Road, the part that starts at Marble Arch, just north of Hyde Park, "Little Cairo" or "Little Beirut" for its high concentration of Middle Eastern restaurants and shisha cafes. Louis ibn Haroud likes to think of himself as its Kindred Mayor.

Louis showed up in London in the early-1990s, part of a wave of Algerian immigration sparked by the civil war in that country. Most of the immigrants wanted only to escape the bloody conflict brewing between the one-party socialist government on the one hand and the Islamist insurgents on the other. Louis claimed to be no different. He was a man of culture and elegance, and there was little room for either in the increasingly bloody world of North Africa. London was a respectable place, where a Kindred such as Louis ibn Haroud could settle in peace, growing fat on the blood of prosperity. Louis pledged his loyalty to the Lady of London, and in a surprisingly short period of time he became just one more face in the London scene, an Invictus stooge, all talk and no action.

There were certainly a few... rumors. Not terribly consistent rumors, one had to admit, but some claimed to remember a Louis-Sifal Feraoun, a French informant and torturer who made a great many enemies during the late 1950s. Others talked about Tariq Louis Zidane, a FLN bomber responsible for the Petit-Palais massacre in eastern Algeria, when a dozen died in a cafe bombing aimed at the local chief of police. Certainly no one knows his sire -- his name, ibn Haroud, means that according to the traditions of Maghrebi Kindred, he was sired by a vampire by the name of Haroud. But no one knows who that is. If asked, Louis just laughs off the rumors with an easy smile and an offer of a drink and a song. It helps that Louis spread most of them himself.

The truth is this. Haroud ibn Khalil was an elder of the Taifa, a Gangrel bloodline that stretched well into antiquity. They prided themselves on their refinement and their culture, on being bastions of civilization amidst the savagery of the Beast. They were also great believers in blood and lineage as signs of worth. And so when, towards the beginning of the Algerian War, Louis Ouassi, the great-great-great-to-the-umpteenth-power grand-nephew of Haroud ibn Khalil displayed the beginnings of a poetic talent, Haroud turned him first into a ghoul, and then some years later, into a vampire. Such talent had to be preserved, after all, through war and conflict.

Not that anyone Louis was asked what he thought about this. Three-quarters Kabyle Berber and one-quarter French, Louis was set for the exciting and glamorous life of a junior postal official for the French colonial government before civil strife and then Haroud ibn Khalil intervened. His forays into poetry had been modest, juvenile attempts to impress certain very pretty girls in the neighborhood.

No matter. Over the next decades Louis received training that would not have gone out of place in the most rigorous of finishing schools. He learned to play several instruments, compose poetry and song in a dozen styles, and became a passable calligraphist. He also committed to memory the bloodlines of dozens of prominent Kindred, as well as the history of the Taifa. He served as Haroud’s amanuensis, his secretary and protégé at the courtly affairs of the Al-Amin, ‘the Faithful’ or ‘the Trustworthy’, the dominant covenant in most Islamic lands. Louis learned and waited and watched old, gnarled monsters with centuries of blood on their hands play at civilization.

But all good things come to an end, and so did Louis’s long apprenticeship. It came about during the Algerian Civil War, when in 1993 an Islamist terrorist organization blew up a small hotel in Algeria… and crushed Haroud ibn Khalil under twenty tons of rubble as he slept in his haven. Louis, luckier, merely had the terrifying and traumatic experience of being buried alive for six days, on the verge of slipping into torpor, before allies managed to uncover him.

This was the last straw. Algeria had become entirely too dangerous, and Louis was, for the first time in his Requiem, free. He took such of Haroud’s treasures and finances as he could, then hired a freighter and set sail for somewhere far, far away. London sounded nice.

Since arriving in London, Louis’s worked hard to establish himself as the Kindred that everyone likes and that no one wants to maim, murder, or enslave. Louis is a lover and a scholar, not a fighter. He’s loyal to Sheridan because Sheridan is the most dangerous Kindred in the area, and is otherwise generally seen as a fop and dandy by the elders, while his careful rumors keep younger Kindred from trying their luck. Left to his own devices, Louis would avoid other vampires in general, operating on the not-wholly-unreasonable premise that other vampires are terrifying and powerful, while Louis’s most dangerous ability is his talent for delivering flowery insults (also clawing people, but this is of limited utility against Solomon Birch or Royston Montjoy). But his Taifa blood rebels at the idea of isolation, and so Louis finds himself drawn again and again to Elysium, where at the very least Kindred cannot harm one another.

He’s also focused on becoming the absolute master of Edgeware Road, establishing himself a power-base to protect himself. He has money invested in dozens of small bars and shisha cafes, has community leaders eating out of his hands, and has a lovely estate just off the road, built in the style of a Venetian palazzo, with a courtyard of its very own – ever since his sire’s demise, Louis’s had an acute sense of claustrophobia. He tends to sleep in the courtyard, as a matter of fact. Meanwhile, Haroud ibn Khalil’s library, with its genealogical records stretching back to the dates of Il-Andalus, has been opened to the use of occult scholars and researchers, with Louis’s eventual goal being to have his large estate declared an Elysium. Louis himself is only an indifferent scholar, though his training under Haroud ibn Khalil means he’s frightfully well-read.

In person, Louis is smooth, eloquent, and handsome. He’s a little under average height, just five and a half feet tall, but surprisingly muscular for all his stockiness. He has curly black hair and sports a small mustache and half-beard, and he has a boyish grin that gives him an infectious sort of charm. His mixed-race heritage and bronzed skin gives him an exotic appeal wherever he is, and he uses it to his advantage, supported by generous doses of Majesty. He can dress in a three-piece suit with an elegant cigarette-holder, or in the thobe, bisht and kaffiyeh of traditional Berber tribesmen, as the situation calls for it. Louis acts every inch the decadent Kindred courtier, a patron of the arts and a fixture of Elysiums. He speaks fluent English and French, as well as Arabic and Berber, and can sing or declaim poetry in all of them. And if he has a faint under-current of danger about him, all the better and more enticing. When using the Claws of the Beast, Louis’s hands turn into the talons of a lion, capable of rending and tearing flesh with unexpected ferocity.

Of course, underneath the façade of brown-nosing Invictus courtier is a poet that doesn’t take anything seriously, least of all himself. He tends to think of himself as much weaker than he is, and he treats everything like it’s all an amusing game, and you win if you’re alive. So far, Louis’s been winning.

He has a feline ghoul named Charles, a Maine Coon. Charles thinks he's the brains of the operation.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:33 PM

Anna Darlington
Madam Anna Darlington, High Sheriff, Baroness of Soho and Dame Knight, Anna Markovna Dragunsky

Type: Vampire
Covenant:Invictus
Clan: Mekhet
Embrace: 1924
Apparent Age: Late 20s

Background: Anna Darlington was born at the turn of the century in the Russian Empire, to a Russian Jewish family in the Pale of Settlement. Her early life was unexceptional, though characterized by a foreshadowing of her later mysticism. When the First World War came, Anna saw much of the menfolk march off to war, few of them to ever return. Then came the Revolution, and then came the Civil War, and Anna had a vision. It was a confused welter of sights and sounds, that came to her in her dreams, but Anna took the message clearly enough. She had to leave Russia.

And so she did. To the west was still a war zone, and so Anna walked east. And she kept walking, for the next three years. She walked alongside the Czech Legion, across all of Russia, the entirety of Siberia, surviving in any way she knew how. She stole. She begged. On one notable occasion, she killed a deserter with unpleasant designs. She learned to fire a gun and she scavenged bullets, and learned to hide. She learned a smattering of Czech. And somehow, she reached the Pacific Ocean.

Anna stole away from Russia on board a British ship, and thus found herself, a pretty, hard-bitten girl of twenty, in London. With that same quiet certainty, Anna anglicized her name, found a job in a factory, then as her English improved, as a shopkeeper's assistant. Sometimes she told stories of her journey, and it was when one such story reached the Kindred of London that she was Embraced. Surely, her Sire reasoned, such a woman would make a magnificent bodyguard.

Anna took the Embrace with the same quiet faith she took everything else. For the next decade, she served her Sire, and then when she was emancipated, joined the Invictus, became one of the City's Hounds. Her interest in faith and God shifted slowly into mysticism, and it was through one of those that she met with Vincent Moon. She became a follower of his philosophy, and would remain such for a long time to come, though Moon's recent disappearance has fractured Anna's ties to the rest of the Golden Room.

Anna is a member of the Invictus in large part due to her belief in old-fashioned courtesy, and because her Sire was a member. She is one of the more mystical members of the covenant, and it is perhaps only a matter of time, now that the Golden Room does not occupy her, before she moves on into the Lancea et Sanctum. Birch has certainly marked her out as a possible convert.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:33 PM

David Ivenistky
Master David Ivenistky, Childe of Anna Darlington

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Invictus
Clan: Mekhet
Embrace: 1943
Apparent Age: Early 20s

“I was born in Poznan, in Poland, and I never saw my life as that strange. This was between the wars, you see, but I suppose, looking back, it must have been very strange. I grew up when Pilsudski had made his new country, and this was the first time Poland had lived for… oh… over a hundred years. A long time even as the dead measure things.”

“Everyone was Poland this, and Poland that, and my family was somewhat left out by it. My parents had come over before the Great War, back in ’03 or ’04, I can’t even recall now, from somewhere by the Black Sea. So we weren’t even proper Poles, which made things… difficult.”

“We were poor, though we didn’t expect to be. My father was a clockmaker, actually, and a rather good one. He taught us something of his trade, though I think I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever learned of it. My brothers and I were a pack of hellions, at any rate, so I don’t think being outcast was wholly unwarranted. We didn’t know any different, really, so we were just boys.”

“It didn’t get to be truly bad till the war. The starvation did more than the Germans ever did personally. I was always the healthy one, the physical one. It’s probably why I lived longest, when the supplies were running out. Not a happy period of history. I was the last one, when Anna came. I think it’s why I took her up on her offer. That was something interesting. You know, I’d never met her before she made the offer.”

“To be honest, I think I was hallucinating at the time. Or I thought I was. Old ghosts buzzing about. I was desperate, and I think just a bit cracked in the head. Then there was this woman sitting on the little balcony of the flat I used to share with the others. And we talked. I can’t quite recall what it was about… sunlight, I think. Very philosophical.”

“She asked if I wanted to live forever with her. I said yes, and she kissed me. And everything from there was a bit intense... The next evening we set out for London. Anna had connections, you see, to some very powerful people. They arranged things, even if that arrangement consisted of a rowboat and tying myself to an anchor when the sun came up. It was a rather thorough debunking of the myth of the seductive vampire when one has to avoid being nibbled by crabs during the day.”

“But Anna was there, and reached the city. I won’t say there hasn’t been excitement since. Learning her world, her people and ways… but the worst was over. It’s hard to fall farther. Which is why I love her and love this city and everyone in it.”

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:34 PM

Allison “Allie” Newton

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Carthian
Clan: Ventrue
Bloodline: Architects of the Monolith
Embrace: 1970
Apparent Age: Late 20s

Background: “You can have clarity or you can have the truth. Choose carefully, Citizen.”

When Allie was eighteen, she chose clarity. Her passionate nature was poorly suited for compromises and contradictions. Born during the Second World War, growing up in the bombed-out suburbs of Surrey, south of London, the second of three children, she wanted a world of good and evil, right and wrong, black and white. Religion had an appeal to her, a sense of clarity and righteousness that promised to explain everything. In hindsight, no one was too surprised when in 1960, at the age of eighteen, Allie became a nun. Everyone was certain this would end in disaster. It didn’t.

Allie joined the Marist Missionary Sisters, a Catholic religious order originally dedicated to missionary work in the South Pacific Islands, but which over the years had moved into education and medical services. Sister Allie spent her twenties shuttling between Samoa and London, specializing in teaching, and becoming ever more involved in social justice movements, especially the communitarian Catholic Workers Movement.

Then came the Embrace. Sister Allie was passionate, active, personable… all qualities that endeared her to her scientifically-minded Sire. But when she was embraced, something broke in her soul. She’d done everything right, and ended up a bloodsucking monster. She was Damned, and so she must have transgressed. For years, Allie moped around London Kindred circles, locked in deep depression. Her Sire eventually abandoned her to her own devices, the vibrant personality she’d desired lost.

It was the Carthians who pulled her out of it. They knew a hurting Kindred when they saw one, and ever desperate for members, they dragged her in, cleaned her up, and started preaching the philosophy of the Movement to her. It took a while, and some not so gentle persuasion, but eventually something clicked.

Nowadays, Allie is one of the Movement’s up-and-coming occultists. Her combination of quick wits, thorough theological training, and the fact that she used to be a consecrated nun makes her remarkably well suited for handling ghosts and demons, and while Allie’s still young, she’s also active. If she survives, she’ll be a value to the movement.

Allie’s own personal ethos is a variant on that of Christian Anarchism, the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, and Dorothy Day. Critical of both Church and State, Allie’s nevertheless thoroughly selfless and believes in simple living and abstention from unnecessary ‘luxuries’. Despite her best intentions, she doesn’t always practice what she preaches, and she more or less figures that vows of chastity and nonviolence are for people who aren’t bloodsucking vampires.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:35 PM

Evan Adair
Scribe of the Burning Hunger

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Ordo Dracul
Clan: Gangrel
Bloodline: Mara
Embrace: 2004
Apparent Age: 22

Background: Every family has its dirty little secrets and peculiar quirks. The black sheep cousin that stole cars, the hair-pulling squabble at an aunt’s wedding twenty years ago, and so forth. The Adairs, Evan always thought, just had a few more. Grandpa was a virulently anti-German World War Two veteran who still had his old Sten gun and practiced with it constantly. Aunt Emily was a nice, polite dowager who always smelled of garlic and kept a stock of ‘cures’ containing everything from belladonna to arsenic. Evan’s father had a set of six, parallel marks on his face that looked a bit like he’d been clawed by a giant mutant bear. And Evan’s mother said everything in a little sing-song voice as she compulsively did blood-tests on the entire family twice a week, checking for contaminants. Oh, and they hunted vampires. This was perhaps a little odd too.

For the longest time, they tried to keep the family business from Evan, but the young man was an unfortunately sharp one. He had grown inured to his family’s weirdness, though he always had his suspicions, but when his mother came home missing two fingers from an encounter with some ravenous feral thing when Evan was fourteen, the jig was up. What followed was an absolutely blistering row. Evan refused to be kept out of the family business, not when his parents were at risk of death or worse, while his parents refused to involve him and thus risk him.

Eventually, a compromise was hammered out. Evan was a clever kid, the first of his working-class family to have a shot at the university. He could help out behind the scenes, spending hours hidden in old libraries and government archives, cross-referencing aliases and learning quite a bit more about the supernatural than was usually healthy. He went to the University of Essex, where he studied classics and philology, and his interests ranged more widely than his parents. He dabbled in a range of useful subjects, from medicine to psychology to finance law. A bookish sort, it came easily to him, though he went in and out of Essex without making much of a mark on his classmates.

Then the Adairs stumbled across something big in the course of routine surveillance. More than just a solitary bloodsucker in a club, this was an entire conspiracy rooted deep in the local government, which did not have London’s best interests at heart. Over the course of six months of work, involving stakeouts, burglary, and days of research at the national archives, they formed a picture of a plan that, when enacted, would kill hundreds. They never figured out why, whether it was some kind of insane sacrifice to a bloody-fanged god or simply an excruciatingly callous case of insurance fraud, but it didn’t matter. The main question was how to burn this cancer out, root and branch. But even as the Adairs came across the conspiracy… the conspiracy came across them. And Evan was the weakest link.

She came to Evan in the night, when the others were on another stakeout, a goddess, a beauty, eyes dark with promise, shimmering in the moonlight. She was all that the awkward young man could have imagined, and more. He could scarcely think as she ran her fingers along his skin, and a single kiss shattered all his fears. Evan was ready to give her everything, to betray anyone while under the effects of her intoxicating presence, but… he said something wrong. It was just a joke, he wasn’t actually going to give her his blood, but trying to explain it seemed to only make matters worse. Suddenly his beautiful goddess seemed to go mad with greedy hunger. She knocked him back against the headboard and sank her fangs into his neck, and so Evan died.

He awoke a few minutes later, hungrier than he could have ever imagined. His beautiful Sire, furious at losing the chance for his knowledge, chagrined at her own loss of self-control, her mind still clouded by the after-effects of Frenzy, had Embraced him. She held the young fledgling down and fed him three swallows of her blood, and then she asked him what he knew. And Evan told her everything.

When the rest of the Adairs returned, Evan and his new Sire were waiting for them. Infuriated and looking for someone to take out her anger on, with the element of surprise and Evan’s undead presence at her side, Evan’s Sire killed them all. Evan himself remembers only vague glimpses of horror from that night. But as quickly as the bloodshed had begun, it was over. Under his Sire’s instruction, Evan covered up his family’s death, winding down their affairs and making the Adairs vanish. Thus Evan Adair began his Requiem by destroying the last vestiges of his past.

And… that was that. His Sire, having Embraced him, more or less abandoned him to his own devices. Evan can’t prove it (his mind tends to turn into adoring mush whenever his Sire is around), but he’s fairly certain that his Sire did something very wrong by Embracing him. Wrong by vampire standards, anyway. The fact that his Sire forbid him from ever mentioning her name, and sees him at most once a month, rather supports this notion.

This suited Evan just fine. For reasons not entirely clear, Evan – despite his Vinculum – loathes his Sire. He hates her, and if he could think of how to do so, he’d see her turned to ashes. But she’s a good deal more powerful, and somehow his loathing never quite survives encountering her in close quarters. Then it turns into sexually-frustrated adoration, a state of affairs his Sire approves of and encourages with just the right amount of teasing. Evan has a bit of an Oedipal complex with his Sire, to put it mildly. And yet, it isn’t a full Vinculum. It’s more like… half a Vinculum. But his Sire doesn’t know that, and Evan is smart enough to keep his thoughts to himself.

In truth, Evan usually keeps his thoughts to himself. Despite joining a covenant best known for insane mad science, and the Childe of a vampire who is hardly a model of restraint, Evan is a very polite, quiet, and dignified young man. He is calm, composed, and always looks interested in what others have to say, but on the flip side rarely displays anything further. He is neither flashy nor outspoken, and gives his opinion as unassumingly as possible to avoid treading on any toes. In short, to most people Evan Adair is a rather boring neonate, easily overlooked and forgotten, and to most people, this is as much as they’ll ever see of him.

Those that spend time with Evan realize that this is not the entire story. His unassuming demeanor belies a quiet determination, and when the chips are down, he has the courage – or perhaps the ruthlessness – to face down the worst if he has to. Evan also has a cynical streak a mile wide, his sarcastic remarks made all the more cutting due to their infrequency and mild delivery. He also has a twisted sense of dark humor that has lead him to play practical jokes on people more than once.

Evan also likes to know everything that is going on around him, even to the point of spying on other people. To many bad things can happen when one isn’t paying attention, so he tries to protect himself. He generally assumes the worst of any situation, though some distant spark of his earlier idealism remains, and he at least tries to think the best of people. This can be very hard, but in some way he came out of his Embrace thinking that people, when pushed, can do some truly horrible things, so he tries to maintain a spark of compassion and sympathy for them.

Evan ended up joining the Ordo Dracul as a way of finding some undead company, and because on the one hand, his nebbish demeanor suited their methodology, and on the other hand, because transcending the vampiric form is an attractive proposition for a reluctant vampire. Evan follows a ritualistic method his Great Work, focusing on the Coil of Blood as a way of mitigating his bloodline’s curse. Feeding is nightmarishly difficult enough that he tries not to do it any more than he has to. However, Evan was clever enough to make his mentor the local Kogaion, which grants him a great deal of reflected prestige. It also means that he’s constantly doing work for the Kogaion, but it also means that even when Evan is doing something for himself, other Kindred tend to assume the Kogaion’s hand in matters. A useful assumption Evan rarely corrects.

Evan is a tall, gawky young man, six-foot-one in height, with knees and elbows everywhere. He’d been just coming out of a growth spurt when he was Embraced, and so he maintains a certain level of teenaged coltishness, with the attendant breaking of things. He has a sharp Roman nose, high cheekbones, and shoulder-length black hair that he tends to tie back in a short knot. He usually dresses as plainly as possible, earth tones, and has large glasses perched upon his nose, magnifying his hazel-colored eyes.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:36 PM

Cornelius van Holt
Adept of the Untamed Void*, Sworn of the Mysteries

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Ordo Dracul
Clan: Daeva
Embrace: 1943
Apparent Age: Early 60s

Background: How was he to know that being able to lie with such proficiency and panache would come back and bite him in his ample hindquarters?

Cornelius Holt was born in modest circumstances in a small town in the Orange Free State in South Africa, in the latter years of the 19th century. As a quick-fingered, quick-witted youth, he ran messages and picked pockets for gold nuggets in the frontier towns there. When the Boer War came, the nineteen-year-old Cornelius graduated to running messages for Louis Botha’s forces and Lord Kitchener’s British army alike, supplemented with a bit of spying on the side. When the war was over, Cornelius found himself with a tidy little nest egg, and South Africa was looking a tad small (also there were a rather lot of people who wanted to string him up).

Cornelius scurried northwards to Paris. He began a second career as an artist, a virtuoso painter of post-impressionist, modernist work and a regular at the salons and coffeehouses of those cities. It wasn’t that Cornelius was actually a very good artist. But he could charm the critics and dazzle the debutantes, and that was plenty. Actually, Cornelius took art lessons and eventually became a decent landscape painter. But no one buys landscapes.

Not that anyone bought his modernist paintings either. In that dazzling period just before the First World War, Cornelius was what was called, politely, an adventurer. Work was entirely too much… work, for him to deign to do it. Instead, Cornelius traded off his wits and his charm to live the high life. His tailor never saw any payment, neither did the wine merchant. The hotel let him live free of charge in exchange for his name-dropping it in conversations with Society friends, and he ate luxurious meals at everyone’s house but his own. This too, came to an end however, when after several years Cornelius’s creditors began to make awkward noises about seeing some money, some day. For his health, Cornelius decided that now was an excellent time to see more of the world.

For most of the 1910s and 1920s, Cornelius bummed about the British Empire. He wintered in Hong Kong, sipped champagne in Sydney, hunted rhinoceros in Kenya, and dazzled Maharajahs in India. It was also during this time that Cornelius appended the aristocratic ‘van’ to his name, and it was during this time that Cornelius’s eyes were opened to the supernatural world. Out where ‘civilization’ (or more accurately, urbanization and rationalism) had not reached its tendrils as much, magic could hide less. Cornelius, always uncomfortably sharp and painfully curious about other peoples’ secrets, found it. Then he started to use it.

When Cornelius moved to London in 1927, he had acquired a comfortable heft, a deft hand at spell-crafting, and the companionship of the dour Ms. Adelaide Prescott. With perfect aplomb and perfectly forged documents, Cornelius began to lecture about art history at local colleges and rub elbows with high society once more. He also began to act as a spiritualist and high class medium, contacting the dead for the enlightenment and improvement of his guests. For a modest fee, of course.

Cornelius van Holt thus lived a very satisfactory life well into the Second World War. His earlier outrageous frauds were now moderated, more subtle, though perhaps no less outrageous for it. Then, in 1943, Cornelius was Embraced. He claims it was because his Sire was charmed by his wit and intelligence and wished to preserve it for posterity – or at least for his own use. But strangely enough, no one is actually sure who Cornelius’s Sire was. For that matter, Ms. Adelaide Prescott was Embraced at the same time, and no one has any idea who her Sire was.

Cornelius did not let his newly undead status slow him down very long. Looking about himself, he discarded the Carthians as too boorish, the Circle of the Crone as too bloody, the Lancea et Sanctum as too religious, and the Invictus as too dour. Thus Cornelius joined the Ordo Dracul, seeing it as the most congenial covenant for a man of his proclivities.

At first, lying about knowing the Coils just seemed like common sense. Being a Slave was just about as much fun as it sounded, and when a few other Dragons proved amenable to a conspiracy to let them lie better and get away with it cleaner – well, Cornelius would have been afool to pass it up, yes?

Over the years (and decades) his co-conspirators died, moved to Manchester, and passed into a convenient torpor, but by then Cornelius was moving up in the ranks, and frankly, lying did not get any harder once he was Sworn. He made himself useful to a couple of Guardians, mainly by being a politician who understood how important Wyrm’s Nests were without particularly wanting to run one himself. Today, Cornelius is the Parliamentarian of the Sworn of the Mysteries. As Parliamenterian, Cornelius is the leader of the Ordo Dracul’s political branch, setting the schedule, ensuring order is maintained, and allowing or forbidding certain topics from coming up. Lujza Dvorzsak has greater respect and influence, though relatively few actual legal powers.

Overall, Cornelius van Holt is a man who likes to live well. He is unashamed in his pleasures, a connoisseur of gourmet food, fine art, pleasant company, and of course, blood. He is seen at the best restaurants, attends the theaters of the West End religiously, and his chambers in the St. Thomas Club are ever the site of an informal party, with people coming and going and Cornelius enjoying the company of all, most especially the ‘delightful young people’ who form the lower ranks of the Ordo Dracul. Admitedly, he periodically mixes up the names of the aforementioned delightful young people, but after spending sixty-six years lecturing neonates on the artistic legacy of the English-speaking cultures, he can be forgiven a bit of absent-mindedness regarding names. Besides, Cornelius always has some excellent blood on tap, so he can be forgiven many things.

In truth, Cornelius van Holt hides a bitter and nihilistic personality beneath his hedonistic façade. For decades, Cornelius traveled the World of Darkness, and the one central fact that he has learned from his travels is the following: Morality is a lie. It doesn't exist. In a well-ordered universe, the good shall triumph over the evil, the just shall defeat the wicked, kindness will win out over cruelty. Instead, over the course of his journeys, Cornelius has seen villages of people enthralled to blood-drinking overlords, their one purpose in life to be the meal for some monstrous creature of the night. He's seen werewolves chase down and capture peasants to be sacrificed on the bloody altar of some alien spirit. He's seen a merchant's freighter fall to a ghostly pirate, never able to defend itself. And not just the monsters in the shadows. He's seen what people do to each other in the ruins of Nanking and the basements of the NKVD. Even his fellow Dragons, who know more than most what the world is really like, see other people as things.

Cornelius gave up. What's the point? The lot of man is to suffer and die, and if he's unlucky to come back from the dead to torment his neighbors. Cornelius now views the only point of existence as bringing pleasure to oneself. If your life is ultimately pointless, you might as well enjoy it.

Of course, it's not completely true. When he was a young man Cornelius was a con man and a fraud, but while he lied and cheated, he never killed, he never used force or took more than people could afford. He’s grown jaded and cynical from his life, but there’s still some spark of irrepressible enthusiasm and good-feeling towards his fellow man hidden away in him. It's buried deep however, and Cornelius van Holt did not reach his rank in the Ordo Dracul by being a soft touch.

All that aside, though, Cornelius’s fatal flaw is that he's lazy. He’s a brilliant mind, and he talks an excellent game, but he’d much rather argue art history or Coil theory in his parlor than spend three weeks prepping a ritual circle in the attic. He simply lacks the interest and energy to conduct the kinds of grand experiments necessary to propel him to the heights of scholarship. It’s always been easier to simply lie and fake, and the older and higher-ranked Cornelius has gotten, the easier it’s been to bluff his way through.

That said, while Cornelius is only about half as clever and competent as he appears to be, he is still very competent. He’s an autodidact who taught himself the classics, art history, arcane theory, several languages, and a significant amount of economic theory. Underestimating him is a very dangerous thing to do.

Though frighteningly intelligent and very on the ball, Cornelius tends to act like a somewhat absent-minded, bumbling professor. He quotes lots of obscure artists and scholars, introduces bits of Latin or Greek into the conversation, and is generally always eager to talk shop, but at the same time he can acts a little vague about the people he talks to, as though he doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to anyone but himself. This is particularly the case with students and 'delightful young people', but pretty much applies to anyone whom he hasn't known for decades. This isn't really an act, strictly speaking, as it is what Cornelius’s really like when he's not paying attention. Around the Ordo Dracul politics or supernatural threats, he's a lot more focused.

Cornelius takes very few risks, partially out of laziness and partially out of a strong self-preservation instinct. He prefers to put off decisions for a while to think them over. Any snap judgments or whimsical decisions he makes were actually preplanned days in advance, at least. Ifforced to make decisions on the spur of the moment, Cornelius almost always opts for greatest safety and least risk.

In person, Cornelius is an enormously fat (as in pear-shaped) man in his early sixties, with a whiskered face that has a kind of strangely engaging ugliness about it. No one would ever call him handsome, but with his large ruddy nose, intelligent brown eyes, and imperfectly trimmed whiskers he is simply interesting to look at. His hair was once black and is now layered strands of black, white, and grey, and he dresses in formal academic clothing, well-tailored black suits with white cravats and such, perhaps with a colorful flower in his breast pocket.

**NeoTiamat** · 01-31-2014, 10:37 PM

Ms. Adelaide Prescott
Initiate of the Elysian Curse, Sworn of the Dying Light

Type: Vampire
Covenant: Ordo Dracul
Clan: Gangrel
Bloodline: ??????
Embrace: 1940s?
Apparent Age: Late 50s / Early 60s?

Background: No one is entirely certain where Ms. Prescott comes from. The generally accepted story is that Cornelius van Holt discovered her somewhere in the East, working as a teacher somewhere in China or India. Or perhaps she’s an Australian, from some tiny township out in the great desert of that country. Or perhaps she was a missionary in Africa, bringing God and modern medicine to the tribes of the interior.

Not that anyone knows for certain. Cornelius isn’t consistent, and if asked, Ms. Prescott merely sniffs and says that she fails to see how it is relevant. Her life after arriving in London in 1927 is more thoroughly documented. She worked closely with Cornelius, acting as his secretary and personal manager, though their relationship has always been one of equals. At least, even though they squabble constantly, they seem to stay together?

Like Holt, she was Embraced sometime during the Second World War, though no one has the faintest idea who her Sire was, and Ms. Prescott is singularly uninformative on the matter. She joined the Ordo Dracul, like Cornelius, though her upward rise has been significantly slower than his. In part this is because Prescott, at least, is scrupulously honest in her Great Work, but also because transcendence is only a secondary goal for Ms. Prescott. Instead, she has been engaged in her own version of Chasing the Dragon’s Tail, running a decades-long social experiment in consciously shaping mortal belief by means of stories.

For someone so wholly free of whimsy, Ms. Prescott’s dedication to music and stories seems somewhat incongruous. Ms. Prescott does not see it this way, however. A devoted nihilist, Prescott considers most of what man holds dear - justice, morality, religion, right and wrong - to be utter hogwash, and yet these lies and stories cause men to do strange and great things. To her, stories are everything: they create reality, not vice-versa, and whomever understands them and controls them controls humanity. To those who ask, she might point to history as the greatest example, but in general, she focuses on the smaller scale of things; how stories effect how people view the world and how they act.

To that end, Prescott has been crafting and spreading songs for decades now, inserting her chosen themes and motifs into human society, specifically the concept of ‘The Restless Wolf.’ It’s a little manipulative, but doesn’t seem particularly harmful unless one considers overly-catchy tunes harmful. Prescott teaches night classes in musical theory at several local colleges, and acts as a behind-the-scenes songwriter for numerous local London musicians (usually through a variety of blood-bound cut-outs). It seems a very great deal of effort for very esoteric rewards, but Prescott is pleased with her results so far.

In person, Ms. Prescott is a woman with absolutely no sense of levity whatsoever. Everything is serious business to her, and she does not appreciate anyone treating things otherwise. She has an exceptionally dominant personality, demanding respect from others while being exceptionally slow to give it herself. She rarely gets involved in other people's affairs, but she does not take well to being challenged in any way. She interprets disrespect as a threat to her authority, and is unlikely to be assuaged until she has reasserted herself as superior. Oddly enough, if legitimately defeated, she will usually defer to said person until such a time as they prove themselves her inferior.

Despite her constantly sour demeanor, Ms. Prescott is never sarcastic, which would require far more humor than she possesses; that is to say, none. She is instead blunt and straightforward - the niceties of society seem to only confuse or annoy her. A wholly pragmatic woman, she is completely unconcerned with pleasantries, societal taboos, or gender roles, as well as having a somewhat callous attitude toward somewhat touchy subjects like infant mortality or killing. Though she is not an evil person, she places necessity and common sense over sentiment, seeing the comforting taboos and rituals that humanity surrounds itself as no more than silly play acting, which makes her somewhat horrific to the civilized Kindred who think themselves anything other than monsters.

At the same time, while Prescott is exceptionally pragmatic and not very good at the little white lies society is built on, she is certainlyinterested in said little white lies. Prescott doesn’t respect most people, but she doesn’t disrespect those who act dumb for the sake of a cause: the stupider they act, the more curious she becomes as to understanding why. (Those who act dumb because they are just stupid are not quite as interesting to Ms. Prescott).

Ms. Prescott is… a distinctly unique-looking woman. Silver-haired and hazel-eyed, she is of average height, looking taller due to the high-heeled shoes that she wears, but is very solidly-built – powerful and muscular. Her limbs are slightly stocky, and her skin is unusually rough; it is sometimes joked out of her earshot that she gets her figure from running down and thwacking fledglings with her baton. Her face is long and thin, showing the signs of her age, though it might have still been handsome if not for her permanently disapproving expression. Even when not actively annoyed, Ms. Prescott looks stern and unfriendly. She has an overbite that is visible whenever she sneers at anyone. As perhaps a tiny concession to fashion, she wears her nails long, filing them into rounded points that only increase her intimidating appearance. She customarily wears dark grey dresses and high-heeled, sharp-toed women’s boots that laced up at the front. Her clothing is coarse and unpleasant, but virtually indestructible. She also wears a simple iron band on the third finger of her left hand (though no other jewelry), and carried an ebony conductor’s baton that has been fitted with a silver handle – it looks more like a switch than a baton, and she has been known to use it to rap the knuckles of misbehaving neonates.

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