08.02.04 - 12:26 p.m.

[RP character, with sheet and history. I worked on her over the course of several days; she evolved, and I kept emailing myself new versions of her as I moved between home, work and my parents house. I think this was close to the ... I can't remember now, but I think that this was close to the time when my mom was in the hospital last April, so I was going between home and work and my parents' house. In fact, now that I think about it: mom was DEFINITELY in the hospital, because she had been in the hospital for at least a week when her birthday came around, and she got a pass and Dad and I took her out to dinner at Soho's in Charleston for her birthday dinner. IIRC, we had originally planned on going to the Chop House, but that seemed like too much of an undertaking. She'd been in the hospital for at least a week on her birthday, and was in for another week ... and a half? another two weeks? She was in for a really, really long time. Mom said that when she got her bill, the daily hospital charges - just room and board - were over $10,000, but that her insurance would only pay about $2000 to $3000, and, moreover, she wasn't responsible for any of the difference. Anyway: dropping Marie-Helene here so that I can delete the email.]

Marie-H�l�ne Alette de Sausanne d'Allais

"Luce"

Tout le monde est coupable.

attends l�. attends-moi.

Clan : Toreador
Nature : Visionary
Demeanor : Hedonist
Generation : 9th
Sire: de Sausanne

Concept : academic playgirl

Quote: (wryly) Le roi est mort. Vive le roi.

Strength: 2
Dexterity: 2
Stamina: 2

Charisma: 3
Manipulation: 3
Appearance: 4 (expressive)

Perception: 3
Intelligence: 3
Wits: 4 (one step ahead) (10 freebies)

Alertness
Athletics 3 (2 freebies)
Brawl
Dodge
Empathy 2
Expression 3
Intimidation 1 (2 freebies)
Leadership
Streetwise 2
Subterfuge 2 (4 freebies)

Animal Ken
Crafts
Drive 2
Etiquette 2
Firearms 1
Melee
Performance
Security
Stealth
Survival

Academics 4 (scholarly research/interpretation)
Computer 2
Finance 1
Investigation 2
Law
Linguistics 4 (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Latin (read/write), Greek (ancient - read/write), Swahili/Kiswahili (limited fluency), Lingala (limited fluency))
Medicine
Occult
Politics 1 (2 freebies)
Science

Secondary Characteristics:
Style 2 (2 freebies)
Camarilla Lore 1 (1 freebie)
Sabbat Lore 1 (1 freebie)

Disciplines
Auspex 1
Presence 1
Celerity 2

Conscience 2
Self-Control 4
Courage 4

Humanity: 6
Willpower: 6 (2 freebies)

Backgrounds:
Generation: 4 (9th generation)
Resources: 3
Status: 1
Clan Status: 1
Contacts: 2 (Diamond trade: in Africa and the Netherlands. See history.) (6 total freebies)

Flaws: Dark Secret:2 (the Sabbat flirtation. See history.)

Total freebies: 32 -2 = 30

Specialities & Explanations:

Appearance: 4. Expressive. Marie-H�l�ne has a model's appearance, particularly in that her features, though striking, are also easily shaded. She can change her look with a shade of lip color and a mere fillup of expression - perhaps not sufficiently to fool a trained eye, but certainly well enough to enable to "fit" into a variety of scenes, from the formal to the decadent to the underground.

Wits: 4. One step ahead. Mind over matter. The subconscious mind, in the case of Marie-H�l�ne. The Toreador is a rather brilliant academician, but she can get bogged down when overthinking things. When she listens to her gut, her stomach, her half-conscious, barely verbalized instincts, however, she thrives. This adventurous quality, so long imprisoned during her early youth, broke free on her arrival in Europe and has not been chained since. See history.

Academics: 4. Scholarly research/meta-analysis. Ah, the humanities. Marie-H�l�ne knows more than is perhaps good for her about a variety of things. From schools of thought to outright facts, she is an extraordinary academician and could have been one of the finest minds of her century, did she ever reign in some of her adventurous ways, did she ever temper her extravagent philosophizing with a leavening dose of healthy common sense. Her primary strength is meta-analysis: overviews and underviews and re-arranging views, restacking the world-as-we-know-it. In order to do that, however, she has to FIND things and KNOW things: and find she can.

Linguistics: 4. In addition to her native English (American English, of course), Marie-H�l�ne learned French, German, and Latin as a child. After traveling around Europe, she picked up a smattering of a number of other languages, eventually becoming fluent in Spanish (continental, rather than American) and Italian. She taught herself Russian in order to read Pushkin and Dostoevsky in their native language, and picked up some (SOME) ancient Greek via several undergraduate classes followed by her post-graduate self-education. In addition, Marie-H�l�ne is semi-fluent in both Swahili/Kiswahili (essentially the lingua franca of central and eastern Africa) and Lingala (the commercial language of Congo-Zaire and several of its close neighbors), which she picked up during the mid to late 60s, hanging out with those radical African students on the Left Bank, and in later dealings with the same gentlemen and their successors in flesh if not spirit in the decades thereafter as a sometime-middle-woman-diamond merchant. Add'l languages are based on the extended rules for extraordinary speciality in linguistics, but note that she has perfect, native fluency only in English and French. She betrays varying levels of understanding when speaking the other languages in question.

Generation: 4. Marie-H�l�ne, though relatively young, in the childer of an ancilla/Elder (an older ancilla in Europe, an Elder in the States - were he ever to emigrate to the States, which he would not) of the 8th generation. See her history.

Resources/contacts: diamond trade, see below.

Affiliation

Most outsiders and most Toreador would consider Marie-H�l�ne to be a poseur extraordinaire. She creates nothing, after all. She does not sing. She does not paint. She does not write. She does not stick her hands into dog crap and smear it across her unclad body while chanting the aboriginal word for angel over and over on a small stage while the lights fade to nothing and then flare so bright as to scorch the audience's retinas. And yet: she is an artiste, an intellectual artiste, an artiste of the intellect, and her canvas is the world. Her sire, a few other philosophers and critics within the sect, only these select few recognize her as the genuine artist a theorist and critic can be. Nevertheless, some of this celebrity has attached to her name, some of her vision has seeped through, and she has attained some status within her clan. (Clan Status: 1).

Reputation

Spicy, more than a little risqu�, but still the cr�me de la cr�me of polite company: Marie-H�l�ne is exactly what every Elysium needs, a harpy's harpy, the style-conscious trend-setter of the younger generations. Sharp. Sharding. Lovely, sometimes sly, with enough gossip to keep society moving and enough discretion to make her a valued ally. Her conversation is effervescent, her manners, superb, and if - perhaps - she has a tendency toward irreverence or even nigh-heresy, it is merely the proverbial icing on the proverbial cake, the proverbial hot sauce in the proverbial Bloody Mary. Without Kindred like Marie-H�l�ne, the Camarilla would be full of dry sticks, indeed. There can't be more to it than that - or is there?

Bankroll

Diamonds are a girl's best friend. In this case, blood diamonds or - as they are more commonly known - conflict diamonds, and Paris was the perfect place to forge such connections in the 1970s and 1980s. It isn't all tug and whirl, after all, and a girl must support herself in (lavish) style somehow. Garrets will only do for those still sufficiently alive to appreciate the fringe benefits of the Bohemian lifestyle, and s & d are much less interesting to a vampire than they are to a human. Marie-H�l�ne has developed a small business as a facilitator for importation of conflict-diamonds into the US and EU over the past twenty years. In particular, in recent years, she has developed several diamond dealers in the Netherlands willing to "legitimize" her diamonds by inscribing them with the appropriate serial numbers, as long as they remain insulated by several degrees (Marie-H�l�ne and co.) from the sources themselves. Marie-H�l�ne only deals with small groups of moderate to large stones of the highest quality, ensuring an adequate income with minimum risk and much discretion.

Crowd

Her friends - and she has a few - call her Luce, short, somehow, for lucent, lucency, or perhaps lunacy. (Or - quite possibly - something else. She smiles when they say the name, a sharp, smoking smile.) To the more proper world of the Elysium, she is Marie-H�l�ne Alette (de Sausanne d'Allais), Toreador.

Roleplaying Notes

Live fast and leave a beautiful corpse. At least you have the beautiful corpse thing down, sort of. Your whole generation - gorgeous, creative, mad, bad - has turned into just another bunch of nothings. Your intellectual raison d'�tre is no longer the brash, raucous challenge to the portentous institutions of the past that it once was: deconstructionism, post-structuralism, ecriture feminine are the oppressive academy now. Pompous asses who have never had an original thought in the whole of their lives, who have never challenged the academic structure, who have done nothing but suck away at the public teat of knowledge now stand in the middle of writing circles and exhort their unfortunate students to challenge the "fundamental notions of being" without any real concept of what that means or meant, or how - thirty years out, the world unchanged - it means nothing. It doesn't matter: you've found a world where you are still a essentially a child, a world as staid and backward and Byzantine and bizarre as any you've seen or studied, one that rivals and perhaps surpasses the culture of your youth. If you can survive that, you can survive anything. Be charming, polite, flatter and deceive while pushing every boundary you can find to push. Never give in to the gloomy-gussy-moping maundering to which some Kindred are subject. Some will love you, some will hate you, but none will forget you and in the end it will never matter. You're reaching for something you can't quite name, something that exists just at the borders of life, some perfect meaning(less) meaning, and you'll find it, doubtless, two seconds before you meet the sun.

Overall, Marie-H�l�ne moves easily between worlds. In Elysium, particularly among her Elders, she is thought to be a delight. Effortlessly polite, always pushing some lesser boundaries, never crossing the great ones, she is slippery as a silver fish in the sun. There's a certain... sometimes delightful verve that the youngster brings to such proceedings that is almost always welcome. At the same time, Marie-H�l�ne is perfectly comfortable in younger circles in the modern world: clubs, nightclubs, the streets.

History

Sunday, June 1, 1941: David Strathmore Henry, IV is married to Eugenia Wilton Stillwell in the Bucks Point Congregational Church in Braintree, Massachusetts. Two old-fashioned families, two old-fashioned names, two old-fashioned people joined in the most holy of sacraments, cleaving together and forsaking all others and all that rot. Boston Brahmins, the lot of them, without an original idea since 1673, or possibly 1776 if one wishes to credit them, in part, for the American Revolution. The two were so stiff that it is a sheer wonder that either/or loosened up enough to have sex and produce children. Loosen up they did, however, and apparently before the wedding, for Amelia Eugenia Wilton Stillwell Henry was born (early, they said) on December 6, 1941. For the Strathmore-Henrys and the Wilton-Stillwells, the beginning of the next generation was more important than Pearl Harbor and the US' entry into WW II. History, of course, has a different take.

Imagine her upbringing: pinafores and dry-as-stick poets, oil soap and silver polish, three crabbed old servants creeping around the edges of their existence like scavenging vultures. Mother and Father (Mummy and Daddy until age 4.25. Mother and Father thereafter) were stuck not in the 1930s or even in the 1920s, but in some distant, more righteous past: the 1880s. The 1820s. The 1690s. It wasn't ever clear. More children followed: a houseful, a silent houseful (children were made to be seen and not heard), and all were educated in a serious, proper, and sober style at home until they were sent to school at age seven. Boys went to boarding school, but the girls (more dangerous, more susceptible to the corrupting influences, the licentiousness of the post-war years) were sent to the most rigid and exclusive day schools.

Amelia grew, like the others, and read, like the others, and learned, like the others. She was no different from any of the other children. There was no reason to know that she would be the bad seed, the noise in the family's machine. There was no reason to suspect (her father said) that college would unbend her mind. She had a brilliant intensity of focus praised by all her teachers and admired (perhaps too much, her father said) by her parents, and when she graduated from the Stillwell Dewhurst Academy for Girls and asked to matriculate at Radcliffe, Harvard's then single-sexed-sister-school, there was no reason to deny her. An educated wife, after all, is a benefit to her husband and a blessing to her children. The wild 1950s had made not a mark upon her - all the changes, the race riots and such in the south, the beatniks, the jazz, the rock and roll did not exist for her.

Four years at Radcliffe. The country was changing. Minutely. Slowly. Under its skin, the country changed. Superficially, the civil rights marchers still wore sober, respectful suits and assumed sober, serious expressions and deferred to ministers of god. But something was changing, some movement beneath the skin of things like liquefaction of the crust of the earth in an earthquake - essential and unstoppable.

Amelia Henry was a star student if not a brilliant student. She absorbed and spat back everything she was to absorb and spit back, and she did it with a whole-hearted intensity that was gratifying and refreshing to her teachers and advisors and parents. Despite such intensity of focus, she was never seduced by the charlatans, the intellectual pied-pipers, the black-turtlenecked Marxists, the proto-feminists who smoked and gyrated and beat their little bongo drums at the edges of campus life. Amelia attended three civil rights demonstrations during her years at Radcliffe, and her family whole-heartedly approved of such attendance. After all, even if their distant ancestors had made a killing on the slave trade, their more recent ancestors had been passionate abolitionists, sober, black-suited, righteous and upstanding.

And so, after Amelia graduated from Radcliff at the top of her class in 1963, who were her parents to say no when she asked for a year in Europe to study and absorb the cultures and traditions of the continent, the history, the art, the philosophy and theology? Two of her younger sisters were already married to upstanding, sober, dull-witted young men carrying on in the usual style, but Amelia - with European polish added to her intellectual rigor, she could be the wife of a senator, the wife of a president. And so they sent her, poor dull parents, who could never have suspected that the world would change so in an instant, in an hour. And so she went, Amelia Eugenia Wilton Stillwell Henry, never to return.

1963. 1964. The years came and went, and there was always an excuse, another plea for just a bit more time. By '66, her parents stopped listening to her pleas, protestations, and excuses, stopped sending her money and instead sent a private detective to find her and return her to the States, forthwith. She claimed that she was in Oxford, buried amidst the old volumes furiously running to ground the writings and letters of a late medieval female theologian whose beliefs presaged the Protestant Reformation. He found her, instead, on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris, indulging in all manner of intellectual heresies. She was hardly neglecting the moral heresies, either, and drank and took drugs and slept with whomsoever took her fancy: African exiles, German communists, Israeli zealots, Soviet intellectuals, Parisian playboys.

Always a clever woman, Amelia had socked away her parents' money during the flush years, as protection against what she knew would be lean years to come. She was certainly not amenable to the detective's mission and politely declined to accompany him, again and again and again. Eventually, the family gave up on her in the "you-are-dead-to-me" manner. Had events not intervened, they would have retracted the familial obituary in a decade or two or three, when Amelia came to her senses and decided that she would rather speak to her mother again before she died.

Events, however, intervened. Time passed. Amelia - always brilliant - was now also scintillating, one of the stars in a small firmament of other original philosophers and critics. She studied, haphazardly, at the Sorbonne and published furiously. Her short stories and poetry were forgettable, but her tracts and treatises had a bizarre, intense, brilliant focus. They burned, and the trail of embers she left in her wake sparked any number of mazed, Kafkaesque, self-referential, brilliant and nonsensical theories. One of those embers also sparked the interest of one of the city's Toreador, a gentleman and scholar who vaguely remembered the Last Great Revolution in thought (he was thinking not of Modernism or even of Romanticism, but of the Enlightenment) and who was fascinated by the young scholar. He had only embraced once before: an unfortunate young dancer unsuited to the dangerous halls of Elysium and was reluctant to embrace again. There was something about her, however, and when he noticed some other parties - rivals even - interested in the young woman, (to his surprise: she was a scholar, not an artist), he knew the time was ripe and sought permission from his Prince to embrace again.

Amelia Eugenia Wilton Stillwell Henry died, and Marie-H�l�ne "Luce" Alette was born. Something of a bad girl in the city of lights, she never made the missteps that her long-lost pseudo-sibling made and survived and perhaps even thrived in the cutting world of the Elysium. At some point, however, the old world started to chafe, and she needed new realms, and new horizons. With some encouragement from her Sire, she left for the new world in the mid-90s. After some time in New York, she has decided that the time has come to move on, and settled on Chicago. Perhaps she will keep moving west: can the Anarch Free States be far behind?

That's not the whole of the story, of course, but that is the story available, generally, for public consumption in the Camarilla. More might damage the reputation of her sire, Jean-Jacques Alain de Compagnie au Verre, Marquis de Sausanne, Duc d'Allais (simply known as de Sausanne in contemporary Parisian parlance). Sausanne and Alais have long since disappeared, absorbed and destroyed during the Revolution (which tells one something of de Sausanne's age and resiliance), but the formidable old Toreador still holds private deed to at least two chateaus in the Loire Valley through various intermediaries, while maintaining a subtle, undeniable presence in the capital city itself.

In truth, the young Toreador chafed against the bonds of sect and Sire, but hid her discontent from all: it was clear, quite precisely, where such overtly challenging restlessness would lead. She had heard the story of her would-have-been-sibling one too many times not to take the lesson of his short unlife somewhat to heart. Marie-H�l�ne was so obedient, and yet still somehow so adventurous and compelling, that her Sire began the process of releasing her much sooner than he had planned, and within five years, the fledgling had the freedom of the city.

She explored her new society from both above and below. Although Marie-H�l�ne has long been inclined to challenge authority, as a scholar she has never been interested in blindly challenging authority: the tyranny of the ignorant is perhaps worse than mere tyranny. And yet - and of course - the limitations of vampiric society were all too clear all too soon. Marie-H�l�ne was, in essence, perfect fodder for Sabbat propaganda.

The friend of a friend, some even-more-peripheral member of the closed society of the Camarilla approached, vetted, and courted her. Intense discussions of the meaning of being and the essence of freedom, the tension between autocracies and civil liberties gave way to something more, a subtle drumbeat, an ever-present, insistent little mantra: freedom, freedom, freedom. In some ways, she craved freedom - fiercely - above all else, and the proganda was seductive.

Something happened, however. Marie-H�l�ne *noticed* something awry, or overheard the wrong conversation, or put 2 and 3 and 4 together to come up with nine: it wasn't that hard, not with her eyes open. Fanatics have one essential blindspot: they do not know how to honestly challenge their own beliefs, because they believe that their beliefs are not challengeable on any essential level. Therefore, they are not able to anticipate the questions and reactions that someone not given to such black-and-whiting of the issues at hand might have on any intuitive level. They are used to seeing religious conversions, rather than intellectual conversions, and a religious conversion answers all the troubling questions by pointing one back to faith.

Before she was to be jumped in ("le bizutage"), Marie-H�l�ne had a change of heart, or mind, or whatever shredded almalgation of the two remained to her. She knew precisely how precarious her position was, but somehow the betrayal (of self, not other) the Sabbat demanded of her seemed worse than her likely fate at her Sire's hands when he learned of her intricate, dangerous little waltz with the other side. And so: Marie-H�l�ne told de Sausanne everything, in a confession that began in the darkest hour of the night and continued until her eyes were heavy from the unseen traverse of the sun. He was meticulous, de Sausanne, and precise: he requested every detail, and elaborated on the snippets of information she had been able to obtain until he constructed a fairly accurate picture of the pack and its activities. Marie-H�l�ne - his childe, his second childe, his only childe, the creature of his making, the creature who had come so razor-close to betraying him - would be the bait, and when the pack was assembled, he would strike.

They were not assembled until la nuit du bizutage, when the small pack gathered to destroy and ressurrect their two recruits. Marie-H�l�ne was beaten, bloodied and buried deep in the dirt floor of the basement of an old warehouse in one of the older neighborhoods of the crowded ring of suburbs surrounding Paris. She carried, secretly, wafers of her Sire's blood to quell the beast that would rise underground. The pack carried, secretly, concrete, brick and mortar with which to seal her tomb. Something had happened: they had sensed something of her betrayal, or perhaps simply determined that the decadent Toreador was unworthy of membership in the sect. Or, perhaps, they simply wanted to give the creature a true challenge, to break her once and for all.

The pack was too late, of course. Not only had de Sausanne located the warehouse, he had located their Camarillan patron (or spy: it was never clear whether the marriage was one of convenience or conviction), and two simultaneous fires ripped through two very different locations on the same night, at the same hour. Honor� de Saltan, the respected childe of the city's Seneschal, died in a mysterious fire at his fashionable townhouse. And the pack to which he either belonged or with which he was allied died in the warehouse fire set by two trusted ghouls of the city's Sheriff while the Sheriff and de Sausanne looked on from afar. After the fire, the pair returned to the warehouse and dug the Toreador's childe up from dank, scorched earth, then sealed the tomb of the second recruit with concrete. The earth had insulated Marie-H�l�ne from the fire, and de Sausanne's blood had saved her from the madness of the de-humanization of a Sabbat "bizutage."

As reward for her ultimate loyalty and courage, de Sausanne allowed Marie-H�l�ne to live, against his much better judgment. Or, perhaps, this was his better judgment: she had been tested, after all, and not found wanting. Once more, the young Toreador was essentially confined to her Sire's home and to her Sire's counsel. During this second period of confinement, de Sausanne tested Marie-H�l�ne again and again and again: he did not believe she would betray him, but he was not willing to release her until he was certain of it. This time, however, she re-focused some of her rather prodigious intellectual powers and scholarly interests on her study of the Sabbat. Marie-H�l�ne became a valuable minor player in the Sheriff's efforts to control Sabbat access to the city. With her ear to the ground and instinct for detail, she was able to identify "at risk" Kindred easily. Over time, de Sausanne again allowed her more freedom, and eventually released her once more. He wanted her to continue to grow - but was afraid that the past would haunt her. Although they had destroyed every Sabbat who had seen Marie-H�l�ne as a "recruit," there was always a remote possibility that another might identify her, and there was the possibility that the incident, although very hush-hush, might be discovered by one of her (or his) enemies and used against either.

de Sausanne quietly suggested that his childe return to the land of her mortal birth: America. The battles raging there were more pitched, the opportunities more clear, the ultimate outcome less so. Not only would she have a chance to make her own name, she would be safer and - she would help to extend de Sausanne's influence across the pond (even if the old Toreador was still half-convinced that the US was a flash in the pan). Marie-H�l�ne ended up in NYC, where she played a small part (intelligence analyst: the Toreador is no warrior) in re-taking the city. Oh, but - New York is almost like Paris, now, and she needs a new stage.

It's important to note that the brush with the Sabbat did not change Marie-H�l�ne in any profound way. She is in many ways what she always was, she just has a deeper understanding of vampiric society and a new scholarly interest in vampiric society. The Sabbat ideology (those religious children) was attractive to her only when it was couched in very specific terms when she was chafing against her new bonds. When more of the apocalyptic-religiousity became clear to her, well, it offended her independent spirit in every way even as it fascinated her. The secret story is only a story, in the end. The events do not make the woman: the woman makes the events.