Post by Nathaniel de Boer on Sept 25, 2013 17:25:28 GMT -5
LU-SHALIM and it lasts and it lasts |
RANK. E AGE. 8,004. appears 23 DOB. he doesn't know. (march 23rd) ETHNICITY. mesopotamian OCCUPATION. trust fund baby RESIDENCE. upper west side  |
tl;dr
The vampire who now calls himself Nathaniel de Boer has had a very colorful life. He was born Lu-shalim in the village of Hassuna circa 5992 BC. A small settlement in the foothills of Mesopotamia, the community of Hassuna survived through agricultural. There were perhaps twenty people in the group at most, Lu-shalim's family and a handful of others. When he was eighteen, he established his own household half a mile away from his father's household, and took a wife. At twenty, he had a son. At fifty, he was supposed to be dead. Instead, when Lu-shalim was twenty-three, his life was completely obliterated. A woman who called herself Lilith appeared at the edge of Lu-shalim's fields one evening. "Is there anywhere I can stay?" she asked. Her long hair pulled forward over her shoulders. Her eyes as golden as bells. "You're the first people I've seen in days." His wife's face, name, his son's voice--all these things have faded, but that moment remains. His second mother-monster, who killed him and then re-made him. She remains. Lu-shalim walked her back to his house. Invited her inside. With both feet over the threshold, she turned back and smiled at him and for the first time he saw her fangs. She ripped his wife open like an overripe fruit, tore his son limb from limb, and Lu-shalim she saved for last. Lilith bent over his neck tenderly as a lover and took one small sip from his veins. "I was so thirsty," she said. "So thirsty, and of you I drank. So in return, I will give you a gift." Her jagged claw of a nail tore open her wrist and she pressed the open wound to his mouth. With her other hand, she slit open his stomach. "You can drink and live," she said. "Or you can die." He swallowed. He lived. She left him writhing on the floor with the pain of the change, sprawled in the blood of his family. He never saw her again. Whether she lives still, or has died, he doesn't know. But he cannot forget. When he awoke the next morning, Lu-shalim staggered out into the morning sun. And at once staggered back into the shade of his house, skin on fire with pain. The broken bodies of his family lay where Lilith had dropped them. As the sun inched its way across the sky and his new fangs tore their way out his gums, the scent of their blood haunted him. And then it tormented him. And finally he caved. Drinking the clotted cold blood of his wife was not Lu-shalim's highest point and yet for the next thousand or so years, everything was downhill from there. He wiped the town of Hassuna--his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters and their children--off the map to slake his all-consuming thirst. And then, he found, he enjoyed it. He enjoyed the kill, the rush, the sweet-sour taste of blood sliding down his throat. And there was never, never, enough. For a thousand years he roamed Mesopotamia and Asia. From time to time, he encountered others of his kind. He killed them, discovering and refining his powers over darkness and shadow during this time. Around the mid 4000s BC, his violent rampage came to an end and a new rampage, of sorts, began. Lu-shalim began to regain his sense of self, his memory of humanity, if not quite the full-fledged feeling, and he became interested in more human pursuits. Why kill other vampires when he could own them? And so the Lu-shalim dynasty arose. He created his own mythos and turned around one hundred vampires in the next fifty years. Telling them that he was the very first vampire, and their god, he held them unrelentingly in his thrall. Sumer rose, and Lu-shalim rose with it, making his abode in Uruk. Even the non-supernatural elite of the city-state became aware of him; he was a legend passed down among the priests and nobles, the undying shadow that stalked their temples and glutted himself on their acolytes. He was the storm and the lightning. You could pray to the gods and you knelt to the ensi, but you begged Lu-shalim. Of course, all things must come to an end. As the Uruk period ended, Lu-shalim's star fell. His empire had over-stepped himself. His bloodline had swelled to near unfathomable numbers for the time and his children began, as all children must, to question him, his absolute dominance and their unflinching allegiance. At first they grumbled, but then they began to leave. And some of them even fought with him, and if he did not lose these fights, he did not win them either. At once, his palaces crumbled to dust, his legacy was ash, and there was a young upstart king Gilgamesh and Lu-shalim's life was, for neither the first nor last time, obliterated. He tried to blend, to re-introduce himself to human life. He was an officer in Drehem during the rule of Amar-Sin. He fought against the Assyrians, and then for them. He stalked the battle fields and drained still-living men of their blood and threw down the corpses beneath the city walls. He prayed to the gods of the Babylonians, of the Akkadians, of the Parthians, and there was still no relief, or no respite, no hint of understanding of the reason for what he was, what had created him, his purpose. He came to understand: there was no purpose. When the Romans arrived briefly to Mesopotamia in 115 AD, he went to Rome. In Rome, he was called Tiberius, and at the height of the Roman empire, may her memory live forever, he was a minor god. He had a cult of young men and women who lived for the brush of his fangs against their neck, and he had the fear and respect of their fathers. His domus was resplendent with music and wealth, and Tiberius at last reveled in the world. He sponsored musicians and manumitted slaves, grasped the city with both hands, and the world was, so to speak, his apple for the picking, but his time in Rome was brief, for by 500 AD, a rumor drove him onward. Oh, the sacking of the city and the decline of the west were tedious things to be sure, but Tiberius feared no mortal cause. It was one of his progeny who arrived in 480 AD, still half-tamed by her father's power, with the news: there was a woman with golden eyes and long dark hair, another vampire, who had been killing Lu-shamlin's bloodline methodically and completely in Mesopotamia. All her brothers and her sisters who had stayed behind were dead, his daughter told Tiberius, and some of those in Asia as well. She herself was going to Africa, and had no plans on looking back. He dallied a few decades longer, but soon the mask of Tiberius was set aside, for above all else, he remembered Lilith, the woman who had taught him the truth of fangs. And regardless of the rumor's veracity, he had no interest in putting it to the test. The Middle Ages swallowed him. Christianity was spreading through Europe, and a combination of utter faith in their God and an equally utter faith in the supernatural lead to centuries of skulking in caves, reduced to preying on lone travelers and pilgrims. For another vampire, it might have been demeaning, but he took his time alone as a retreat from the world and besides--they were only centuries. What were centuries to a life that had spanned millennium? He crawled out of hiding just in time for the English Renaissance, and just in time to begin confronting the quandary of the modern period. It was no longer quite so easy for a man unchanging to go unnoticed, much less acquire himself a position of status, and he was, above all else, tired. Tired of the world that now seemed to pass him by; tired of contorting himself to mortal society--tired of being something he was, at heart, not. From the early 16th century to the late 18th century marked his second, and hitherto final, break with humanity and loss of self. While not as bloody or indulgent as his snap upon first turning, his feats of violence during this time were still prodigious, bestial in their depravity. The end was facilitated by his own personal discovery of the New World, with the American Revolution in full swing. Originally making his way over on a boat for the promise of carnage and battles to haunt, he found himself, quite strangely, intrigued by the idea of going West once he arrived. Europe had been thoroughly conquered, but this was a new land. For almost two centuries he would devote himself to exploring every inch of the Americas (and sampling the blood of every nation as well, of course) and seeking to test himself against ever more challenging natural obstacles. The gifts given to him by Lilith were not those of physical prowess, save for his superhuman regeneration, and climbing a mountain or exploring a canyon were for him as rewarding as for any mere human. Now, though, the call of New York, that new Rome, has lured him, and he's assumed the name of Nathaniel de Boer, slipping into a wealthy oil magnate's family easily, the adjustment facilitated by the daughter of one of his sons with a gift for memory manipulation. He hopes that the city will hold his attention for at least a handful of decades, but he doubts it. With this latest rampage relatively recent in his history, Nathaniel easily plays the part of the gentleman, slightly anachronistic and kind, with ease, although in his own mind, this is simply a facade. The raging battle between ennui, violence, and that insufferable desire to simply be human and die is never at rest within him, and he prefers not to let it show. |
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ASSETS COST: 750 (150 power ii, 50 artifact i, 350 influence iii, 150 sanctum ii, 50 familiar i) STARTING FUNDS: 100 BORROWED: 200 BONUSES: 450 (opener + 4 old chars) |
played by tsundere |
