Post by Siobhán Meredydd on Apr 3, 2018 9:42:09 GMT
“There are only two times: now and not-now. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a ffycin schmuck— I mean, liable to get bogged down in their own plans. Or whatever.”
Character Name: Siobhán Meredydd (Jehanne/John Meredith)
Player Screen Name: Zeppeline
Character Type: Primary
Supernatural Type: Vampire
Concept: Time-blind Lesbian Pirate
Nature: Survivor
Demeanor: Capitalist
Morality: Path of Humanity 6
Clan: Dominate Malkavian (Derangement: Attention Deficit)
Sect: Anarchs
Titles: The Captain
Physical Appearance: Though tall for her time, Siobhán strikes most people today as being on the short side when not wearing height-enhancing shoes. Her sharp features allow her, with the proper makeup, to pass as a reasonably attractive member of any gender; however, she currently tends toward the slightly more feminine, relishing the opportunity to appear as a woman while wearing trousers. Though a sailor’s life originally gave her an athletic physique, her strength and stamina have declined due to age and modern conveniences. Her sense of fashion has not really changed since her Embrace; in fact, she owns, wears, and is very protective of at least one coat from her days as captain.
Personality: She may be crazy. She may be a monster. But she’ll be damned if she’s going to let that stop her.
Biography:
Siobhán Meredydd was born in 1806 to Welshman Tomos Meredydd, a distant cousin of the Meredith family of naval suppliers, and his Irish wife Kathleen. As she grew, her mother told Siobhán many tales, but her favorites were always those of Grainne Ni Maillé, known to the English as Grace O’Malley, pirate queen — and, if Kathleen was to be believed, Siobhán’s ancestress. Siobhán, not being of particularly high class, was allowed to run fairly wild during her childhood; but as she grew, expectations began to weigh on her. Particularly dismal was what seemed to her to be endless talk of marriage, though such a thing was still years in the future. She could see the use in many of the feminine arts her mother attempted to teach her, but others were impossible to keep her mind on. And so she began to plan. The following year, as a present to herself on her 15th birthday, she snuck out and, head full of her mother’s stories, made her way to London to sign on as a cabin boy with the East India Company.
The next four years were broadly exciting, but often dull in the specifics. Siobhán found a sailor’s life to be generally a good fit for her despite the occasional harrowing moments that were part and parcel for women disguised as men. About halfway through her 19th year, however, she was reassigned to the Fruitful Venture. Though nominally a sleek, modern merchant ship, the Venture also carried passengers on occasion. While halfway across the Atlantic, a passenger by the name of Rose Anand saw through Siobhán’s disguise. This led Rose to secretly confide in the sailor that the captain of the Venture, far from being an honest man, had in fact been mistreating some of the female passengers. Outraged, but knowing that the courts of their destination would be unlikely to provide justice, Siobhán began looking for other evidence of the captain’s moral corruption. And she found it. Though a lawyer could have taken it apart, the doctored books she discovered were enough to convince her crewmates that the captain had been skimming off their wages -- and that was fuel for a mutiny.
Mutiny is, of course, rather illegal. Siobhán had done what most would say was the correct thing to do, but in doing so, she realized, she had sacrificed any chance of a place in law-abiding society. Though the Golden Age of Piracy had been nearly a century earlier, there was still some fortune to be had in turning pirate in the Caribbean, and so Siobhán, now captain with Rose as her first mate, and her crew embarked on a thorough betrayal of the East India Trading Company. For four years they plundered the shipping lines, until advancing technology and one close call too many led the crew to vote for quitting while they were ahead. The Forlorn Isles seemed perfect: nominally under British control and therefore of familiar culture, yet far enough away from both the Caribbean and the homeland to make anonymity a possibility. The crew of the Sapphire Lady, formerly the Fruitful Venture, made landfall and more or less dispersed, each with enough wealth to allow them to pursue whatever other dreams they might have. Siobhán herself felt rather at odds and ends. Before she really had time to consider the future, however, she caught the interest of a mysterious woman calling herself Delphia. Delphia was perhaps the definition of odd; walking home, Siobhán had found her sitting in the rain and, thinking she perhaps had nowhere to go, offered help or at least a drink, but all Delphia would accept was conversation. She was a fascinating conversationalist. Unable to resist a puzzle, Siobhán met with Delphia again and again, always after dark. It wasn’t long before Delphia introduced Siobhán to her bed. By the time Delphia revealed her true nature, it was too late. Siobhán was madly in love and, drunk on the vampire’s presence and experience, readily agreed to join Delphia in undeath.
It seemed as though the lovers might have managed to snatch something beautiful from the jaws of Caine’s curse. But Delphia was a Malkavian, and as Siobhán learned to hunt, to hide, and to navigate the Antarctic waters of Camarilla society, Delphia’s periods of lucidity grew fewer and farther between. Siobhán did her best to compensate for her Sire’s growing Derangement, but she was struggling with her own, more subtle manifestation of her Bloodline. The illusion began to fracture. In 1856, Delphia simply disappeared. Heartbroken, angry, and hungry, Siobhán gritted her teeth and continued more or less on autopilot. Desperate for a distraction, she began to spend more and more time on the hunt, entertaining herself with complicated traps for her prey and ranging farther and farther out of her former territory. Perhaps inevitably, she ended up targeting the same prey as another Kindred. What could have been a serious conflict instead made sparks of a different kind, and the two struck up a relatively friendly rivalry that ended in a brief, passionate affair -- then, again rather shockingly, parted as amicably as Kindred ever do. This was helped along by the opening of a modern hospital in Oddhaven, as Siobhán saw an opportunity to do something interesting. The price of black market morphine was high, and only grew higher as military spending and conflicts in the Balkans rose to fever pitch. A vampire uninvolved in human society has no real need of money, but for Siobhán, it seemed a convenient way to keep score, and the Elders of the Camarilla seemed to draw their power from it in some ways. The theft of so many units of morphine became one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Forlorn Islands, and would later be used as tourist trivia.
Unfortunately, the Great Fire that swept through Oddhaven in 1923 destroyed Siobhán’s haven, and she barely escaped with her life and enough currency to buy passage aboard a ship to the United States, where Prohibition was creating jobs for skilled sailors willing to work away from both the sun and the law. For about a decade Siobhán worked as a rum runner off the Florida coast; then, with the end of Prohibition having put a damper on that particular criminal activity, and realizing the potential of near-immortality for adventure, she made hitchhiking, or possibly just hiking, across America her new project. Major cities, she knew, would often strain her meager diplomatic skills; so rather than touring all the population centers, she instead focused on the series of roadside attractions that were beginning to grow in the era of Route 66 and National Parks. Not having a permanent haven did pose some difficulties that Siobhán found herself considering part of the fun, and memorably, she ended up kicking at least one bear out of its cave for a night. As World War 2 began she found herself in Portland, OR, at the start of a boom for both its population and its organized crime network. Feeling the need to settle down for a bit, Siobhán established a haven in the Old Portland Underground, otherwise known as the Shanghai Tunnels, an appellation that may have in part originated from her presence there. It was at this point that she began to chafe somewhat under the strictures of the Camarilla, though none of the other sects she’d heard of seemed any better, and in most cases sounded worse.
As the 50s drew to a close and attention began to swing towards cleaning up the city’s crime scene, Siobhán once again indulged her restlessness, this time making her way further and further south, until she found herself in Brazil during its long period of political turmoil. Seeing some similarities between the Camarilla Elders and the Brazilian dictatorships, she took it upon herself to make life inconvenient for the regime; never so inconvenient as to draw real ire, but enough so that the Anarchs’ views might start to seem like a better option. This occupied her until 2005, when a travel brochure in the pocket of one of her meals reminded her of the Forlorn Isles’ existence. Hit with a sudden wave of nostalgia and interest, Siobhán returned to the place of her Embrace and, with the benefit of decades of experience behind her, swiftly retook her old hunting grounds. Finding the Anarchs of Oddhaven to be thriving but somewhat lacking in fun, she began instigating biannual games and prank festivals, much to the irritation of the other sects, earning herself the title, or perhaps euphemism, of “The Captain”. But she is beginning once again to find herself restless...
Attributes:
Physical
Strength: 2
Dexterity: 4 (Lightning Reflexes)
Stamina: 2
Social
Charisma: 2
Manipulation: 1
Appearance: 3
Mental
Perception: 4 (Tactical)
Intelligence: 2
Wits: 4 (Changes in Strategy)
Abilities:
Talents
Athletics: 3
Empathy: 1
Leadership: 2
Mimicry: 1
Persuasion: 1
Streetwise: 2
Subterfuge: 4 (Seduction)
Skills
Crafts: 1 (Carpentry)
Firearms: 3
Larceny: 3
Melee: 2
Pilot: 2
Sleight of Hand: 2
Stealth: 4 (Silent Movement)
Survival: 1
Knowledges
Computer: 1
Finance: 2
Law: 2 (Maritime)
Linguistics: 2 (English, Portuguese)
Politics: 1
Science: 2 (Chemistry)
Backgrounds:
Age 3 (Mature Ancilla)
Generation 2 (Eleventh Generation)
Armory 1
When one works on the underside of the law, a few guns and sundry implements of violence are something of a prerequisite. Siobhán has been an inhabitant of the criminal world for most of her existence, and so has no trouble procuring mildly specialized gear.
Domain 3 (Old Harbour)
When Siobhán returned to Oddhaven, she set about building a territory that would as closely resemble her original haunts as possible. Naturally, this meant setting up shop in the Old Harbour District. She controls a small, roughly triangular area only accessible by back alleys.
Haven 2 (Arcane, Guards, Library, Security)
Oddhaven’s industrial boom, such as it was, led to vast numbers of factories and other buildings attempting to squeeze as closely together as possible. Siobhán’s lair is centered on a forgotten space between an old coal plant, textile mill, and abandoned library that someone once upon a time roofed over and then neglected to add to the floor plan of any of the aforementioned buildings. She has spent considerable effort in refitting this space and some of the surrounding rooms in each of the buildings to be even more maze-like, rather cozy, and highly secure.
Low Influence 1
Siobhán has yet to divert much effort into rebuilding her criminal network, as the lives of mortals are beginning to seem appallingly short. However, she does have some pull with the local protection rackets, mostly built almost by accident while she was claiming her territory.
Resources 3
As someone who was once a strong player in various kinds of organized crime, Siobhán has plenty of money to draw on and just enough financial know-how to keep herself from the cash flow problems that often plague others of her clan. She also has a few small items stashed away from previous periods in her life that could be sold if truly necessary, mostly things that draw their value from their age, rarity in the modern world, and good condition than from jewels or precious metals.
Disciplines:
Auspex: 1
Celerity: 1
Dominate: 2
Fortitude: 1
Obfuscate: 1
Virtues:
Conscience: 3
Self-Control: 3
Courage: 4
Willpower: 5
Merits:
Expanded Consciousness (2pts)
Labrynthine Mind (3pts)
Flaws:
Tic/Twitch (1pt)
Maximum Blood Points / Blood per turn: 12 / 1
Current Experience: 0
Character Name: Siobhán Meredydd (Jehanne/John Meredith)
Player Screen Name: Zeppeline
Character Type: Primary
Supernatural Type: Vampire
Concept: Time-blind Lesbian Pirate
Nature: Survivor
Demeanor: Capitalist
Morality: Path of Humanity 6
Clan: Dominate Malkavian (Derangement: Attention Deficit)
Sect: Anarchs
Titles: The Captain
Physical Appearance: Though tall for her time, Siobhán strikes most people today as being on the short side when not wearing height-enhancing shoes. Her sharp features allow her, with the proper makeup, to pass as a reasonably attractive member of any gender; however, she currently tends toward the slightly more feminine, relishing the opportunity to appear as a woman while wearing trousers. Though a sailor’s life originally gave her an athletic physique, her strength and stamina have declined due to age and modern conveniences. Her sense of fashion has not really changed since her Embrace; in fact, she owns, wears, and is very protective of at least one coat from her days as captain.
Personality: She may be crazy. She may be a monster. But she’ll be damned if she’s going to let that stop her.
Siobhán is a classic Survivor, and her instinctive refusal to quit while she’s ahead has gotten her out of at least as much trouble as it’s gotten her into. She doesn’t worry about this overmuch, as the thing most anathema to her is boredom, and trouble never fails to be interesting. If there is no other source of entertainment to be had, she tends to play with her prey -- and the more bored she has been, the crueler and more inventive she becomes. The surest way for a mortal to catch her attention would be to escape her hunt; this has yet to happen, but a part of her un-dies in hope that one of the kine may yet surprise her. Once her prey is caught, however, she feeds quickly and efficiently, with a minimum of damage done, which she refers to as “catch-and-release fishing”.
Unusually for a vampire, Siobhán migrates with relative frequency. This combined with her apparent instinct for conflict and criminal hotbeds has let her get by without modern identification for quite some time. Packing up every few decades also ensures that she’s never gotten bored enough to endanger the Masquerade; her tactical abilities thrive on the knife’s edge of coming into a new town, inserting herself quickly and quietly… and then, every so often, raising hell.
Like most Dominate Malkavians, she regards the cryptic pronouncements of her more overtly insane brethren with some skepticism. However, like all sailors she is superstitious to some degree, and will occasionally make statements that would fit better in the mouth of a more typical Lunatic -- then deny she ever said anything to begin with.
Unusually for a vampire, Siobhán migrates with relative frequency. This combined with her apparent instinct for conflict and criminal hotbeds has let her get by without modern identification for quite some time. Packing up every few decades also ensures that she’s never gotten bored enough to endanger the Masquerade; her tactical abilities thrive on the knife’s edge of coming into a new town, inserting herself quickly and quietly… and then, every so often, raising hell.
Like most Dominate Malkavians, she regards the cryptic pronouncements of her more overtly insane brethren with some skepticism. However, like all sailors she is superstitious to some degree, and will occasionally make statements that would fit better in the mouth of a more typical Lunatic -- then deny she ever said anything to begin with.
Biography:
Siobhán Meredydd was born in 1806 to Welshman Tomos Meredydd, a distant cousin of the Meredith family of naval suppliers, and his Irish wife Kathleen. As she grew, her mother told Siobhán many tales, but her favorites were always those of Grainne Ni Maillé, known to the English as Grace O’Malley, pirate queen — and, if Kathleen was to be believed, Siobhán’s ancestress. Siobhán, not being of particularly high class, was allowed to run fairly wild during her childhood; but as she grew, expectations began to weigh on her. Particularly dismal was what seemed to her to be endless talk of marriage, though such a thing was still years in the future. She could see the use in many of the feminine arts her mother attempted to teach her, but others were impossible to keep her mind on. And so she began to plan. The following year, as a present to herself on her 15th birthday, she snuck out and, head full of her mother’s stories, made her way to London to sign on as a cabin boy with the East India Company.
The next four years were broadly exciting, but often dull in the specifics. Siobhán found a sailor’s life to be generally a good fit for her despite the occasional harrowing moments that were part and parcel for women disguised as men. About halfway through her 19th year, however, she was reassigned to the Fruitful Venture. Though nominally a sleek, modern merchant ship, the Venture also carried passengers on occasion. While halfway across the Atlantic, a passenger by the name of Rose Anand saw through Siobhán’s disguise. This led Rose to secretly confide in the sailor that the captain of the Venture, far from being an honest man, had in fact been mistreating some of the female passengers. Outraged, but knowing that the courts of their destination would be unlikely to provide justice, Siobhán began looking for other evidence of the captain’s moral corruption. And she found it. Though a lawyer could have taken it apart, the doctored books she discovered were enough to convince her crewmates that the captain had been skimming off their wages -- and that was fuel for a mutiny.
Mutiny is, of course, rather illegal. Siobhán had done what most would say was the correct thing to do, but in doing so, she realized, she had sacrificed any chance of a place in law-abiding society. Though the Golden Age of Piracy had been nearly a century earlier, there was still some fortune to be had in turning pirate in the Caribbean, and so Siobhán, now captain with Rose as her first mate, and her crew embarked on a thorough betrayal of the East India Trading Company. For four years they plundered the shipping lines, until advancing technology and one close call too many led the crew to vote for quitting while they were ahead. The Forlorn Isles seemed perfect: nominally under British control and therefore of familiar culture, yet far enough away from both the Caribbean and the homeland to make anonymity a possibility. The crew of the Sapphire Lady, formerly the Fruitful Venture, made landfall and more or less dispersed, each with enough wealth to allow them to pursue whatever other dreams they might have. Siobhán herself felt rather at odds and ends. Before she really had time to consider the future, however, she caught the interest of a mysterious woman calling herself Delphia. Delphia was perhaps the definition of odd; walking home, Siobhán had found her sitting in the rain and, thinking she perhaps had nowhere to go, offered help or at least a drink, but all Delphia would accept was conversation. She was a fascinating conversationalist. Unable to resist a puzzle, Siobhán met with Delphia again and again, always after dark. It wasn’t long before Delphia introduced Siobhán to her bed. By the time Delphia revealed her true nature, it was too late. Siobhán was madly in love and, drunk on the vampire’s presence and experience, readily agreed to join Delphia in undeath.
It seemed as though the lovers might have managed to snatch something beautiful from the jaws of Caine’s curse. But Delphia was a Malkavian, and as Siobhán learned to hunt, to hide, and to navigate the Antarctic waters of Camarilla society, Delphia’s periods of lucidity grew fewer and farther between. Siobhán did her best to compensate for her Sire’s growing Derangement, but she was struggling with her own, more subtle manifestation of her Bloodline. The illusion began to fracture. In 1856, Delphia simply disappeared. Heartbroken, angry, and hungry, Siobhán gritted her teeth and continued more or less on autopilot. Desperate for a distraction, she began to spend more and more time on the hunt, entertaining herself with complicated traps for her prey and ranging farther and farther out of her former territory. Perhaps inevitably, she ended up targeting the same prey as another Kindred. What could have been a serious conflict instead made sparks of a different kind, and the two struck up a relatively friendly rivalry that ended in a brief, passionate affair -- then, again rather shockingly, parted as amicably as Kindred ever do. This was helped along by the opening of a modern hospital in Oddhaven, as Siobhán saw an opportunity to do something interesting. The price of black market morphine was high, and only grew higher as military spending and conflicts in the Balkans rose to fever pitch. A vampire uninvolved in human society has no real need of money, but for Siobhán, it seemed a convenient way to keep score, and the Elders of the Camarilla seemed to draw their power from it in some ways. The theft of so many units of morphine became one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Forlorn Islands, and would later be used as tourist trivia.
Unfortunately, the Great Fire that swept through Oddhaven in 1923 destroyed Siobhán’s haven, and she barely escaped with her life and enough currency to buy passage aboard a ship to the United States, where Prohibition was creating jobs for skilled sailors willing to work away from both the sun and the law. For about a decade Siobhán worked as a rum runner off the Florida coast; then, with the end of Prohibition having put a damper on that particular criminal activity, and realizing the potential of near-immortality for adventure, she made hitchhiking, or possibly just hiking, across America her new project. Major cities, she knew, would often strain her meager diplomatic skills; so rather than touring all the population centers, she instead focused on the series of roadside attractions that were beginning to grow in the era of Route 66 and National Parks. Not having a permanent haven did pose some difficulties that Siobhán found herself considering part of the fun, and memorably, she ended up kicking at least one bear out of its cave for a night. As World War 2 began she found herself in Portland, OR, at the start of a boom for both its population and its organized crime network. Feeling the need to settle down for a bit, Siobhán established a haven in the Old Portland Underground, otherwise known as the Shanghai Tunnels, an appellation that may have in part originated from her presence there. It was at this point that she began to chafe somewhat under the strictures of the Camarilla, though none of the other sects she’d heard of seemed any better, and in most cases sounded worse.
As the 50s drew to a close and attention began to swing towards cleaning up the city’s crime scene, Siobhán once again indulged her restlessness, this time making her way further and further south, until she found herself in Brazil during its long period of political turmoil. Seeing some similarities between the Camarilla Elders and the Brazilian dictatorships, she took it upon herself to make life inconvenient for the regime; never so inconvenient as to draw real ire, but enough so that the Anarchs’ views might start to seem like a better option. This occupied her until 2005, when a travel brochure in the pocket of one of her meals reminded her of the Forlorn Isles’ existence. Hit with a sudden wave of nostalgia and interest, Siobhán returned to the place of her Embrace and, with the benefit of decades of experience behind her, swiftly retook her old hunting grounds. Finding the Anarchs of Oddhaven to be thriving but somewhat lacking in fun, she began instigating biannual games and prank festivals, much to the irritation of the other sects, earning herself the title, or perhaps euphemism, of “The Captain”. But she is beginning once again to find herself restless...
Attributes:
Physical
Strength: 2
Dexterity: 4 (Lightning Reflexes)
Stamina: 2
Social
Charisma: 2
Manipulation: 1
Appearance: 3
Mental
Perception: 4 (Tactical)
Intelligence: 2
Wits: 4 (Changes in Strategy)
Abilities:
Talents
Athletics: 3
Empathy: 1
Leadership: 2
Mimicry: 1
Persuasion: 1
Streetwise: 2
Subterfuge: 4 (Seduction)
Skills
Crafts: 1 (Carpentry)
Firearms: 3
Larceny: 3
Melee: 2
Pilot: 2
Sleight of Hand: 2
Stealth: 4 (Silent Movement)
Survival: 1
Knowledges
Computer: 1
Finance: 2
Law: 2 (Maritime)
Linguistics: 2 (English, Portuguese)
Politics: 1
Science: 2 (Chemistry)
Backgrounds:
Age 3 (Mature Ancilla)
Generation 2 (Eleventh Generation)
Armory 1
When one works on the underside of the law, a few guns and sundry implements of violence are something of a prerequisite. Siobhán has been an inhabitant of the criminal world for most of her existence, and so has no trouble procuring mildly specialized gear.
Domain 3 (Old Harbour)
When Siobhán returned to Oddhaven, she set about building a territory that would as closely resemble her original haunts as possible. Naturally, this meant setting up shop in the Old Harbour District. She controls a small, roughly triangular area only accessible by back alleys.
Haven 2 (Arcane, Guards, Library, Security)
Oddhaven’s industrial boom, such as it was, led to vast numbers of factories and other buildings attempting to squeeze as closely together as possible. Siobhán’s lair is centered on a forgotten space between an old coal plant, textile mill, and abandoned library that someone once upon a time roofed over and then neglected to add to the floor plan of any of the aforementioned buildings. She has spent considerable effort in refitting this space and some of the surrounding rooms in each of the buildings to be even more maze-like, rather cozy, and highly secure.
Low Influence 1
Siobhán has yet to divert much effort into rebuilding her criminal network, as the lives of mortals are beginning to seem appallingly short. However, she does have some pull with the local protection rackets, mostly built almost by accident while she was claiming her territory.
Resources 3
As someone who was once a strong player in various kinds of organized crime, Siobhán has plenty of money to draw on and just enough financial know-how to keep herself from the cash flow problems that often plague others of her clan. She also has a few small items stashed away from previous periods in her life that could be sold if truly necessary, mostly things that draw their value from their age, rarity in the modern world, and good condition than from jewels or precious metals.
Disciplines:
Auspex: 1
Celerity: 1
Dominate: 2
Fortitude: 1
Obfuscate: 1
Virtues:
Conscience: 3
Self-Control: 3
Courage: 4
Willpower: 5
Merits:
Expanded Consciousness (2pts)
Labrynthine Mind (3pts)
Flaws:
Tic/Twitch (1pt)
When hungry or otherwise “wound up”, Siobhán’s right leg bounces or vibrates irregularly and uncontrollably, though it is less noticeable when she is standing or in motion. In these cases, it can manifest as pacing, spinning, or other repetitive movements.
Maximum Blood Points / Blood per turn: 12 / 1
Current Experience: 0