HomeBONUS XP: Character Backgrounds / Character Rumors
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BONUS XP: Character Backgrounds / Character Rumors
Admin Sat Mar 31, 2012 12:25 am
Looking for a way to add a little something to your character? Need a little extra XP? Don't quite have everything you need to get started?
Well, there are two ways we are going to remedy that.
#1 Character Background
Write up a character background. This doesn't have to be massive, we aren't talking a 15 page term paper with references. Just put down something definite in your background. Year of birth, year of embrace, places you've been. This helps you focus some details bout your character and about his/her views on things in the world. Since you wrote it down, it also means that it can't change as people bring different and new characters into the game, you're kinda locked into your own past.
If you throw down about a page of notes, and throw down a brief timeline 15-20 entries. You'll receive bonus XP (5 XP). You may, also find yourself with a few additional items awarded depending on what you write, however, do not try to "earn" extra items by writing your background towards something specific. there are things the ST staff may need seeded from time to time. If your background fits, you suddenly become a plothook.
#2 Character Rumors
Another way to earn extra XP is to write rumors about your self. These should be things that walk right up to the edge of getting yourself into trouble, but nothing that would get you into trouble. The are just rumors about yourself that you don't mind other players getting about you. As this is a new chronicle, and we are dropping everyone into a new sandbox, people should know a little something about everyone. If you don't want to put out rumors about yourself, fine, its not required. If you do, you'll get an a little extra XP. If you write 10 good rumors about yourself you'll be rewarded with 5 xp once the ST approves your rumors.
Both backgrounds and rumors should be sent to cjosephwalsh@gmail.com
Well, there are two ways we are going to remedy that.
#1 Character Background
Write up a character background. This doesn't have to be massive, we aren't talking a 15 page term paper with references. Just put down something definite in your background. Year of birth, year of embrace, places you've been. This helps you focus some details bout your character and about his/her views on things in the world. Since you wrote it down, it also means that it can't change as people bring different and new characters into the game, you're kinda locked into your own past.
If you throw down about a page of notes, and throw down a brief timeline 15-20 entries. You'll receive bonus XP (5 XP). You may, also find yourself with a few additional items awarded depending on what you write, however, do not try to "earn" extra items by writing your background towards something specific. there are things the ST staff may need seeded from time to time. If your background fits, you suddenly become a plothook.
#2 Character Rumors
Another way to earn extra XP is to write rumors about your self. These should be things that walk right up to the edge of getting yourself into trouble, but nothing that would get you into trouble. The are just rumors about yourself that you don't mind other players getting about you. As this is a new chronicle, and we are dropping everyone into a new sandbox, people should know a little something about everyone. If you don't want to put out rumors about yourself, fine, its not required. If you do, you'll get an a little extra XP. If you write 10 good rumors about yourself you'll be rewarded with 5 xp once the ST approves your rumors.
Both backgrounds and rumors should be sent to cjosephwalsh@gmail.com
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Join date : 2012-03-23
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Re: BONUS XP: Character Backgrounds / Character Rumors
Admin Sun Apr 01, 2012 3:28 pm
Sample Background:
This is a sample background I wrote for a Nosferatu I played in the Camarilla. I do not expect characters to write anything this extensive, but its just a sample of how writing a flushed out background can help with a character's development.
Drake Bane
Mortal Alias: Dr. Douglas Banner
Street Name: Gabriel the Archangel
Triad Name: Doc Z aka Ezekiel Montgomery
Family Story:
Every family has a long and detailed history, regardless of if the people who are alive continue to know the story of what their ancestors have done. All too often families fall back to the history of their family name, with an individual suddenly appearing and being the first person at the very beginning of the line. If true accurate records existed, the mysteries of creation could be exposed, however, accurate records do not exist that go that far back. The history of Drake Bane is no exception.
As far as Drake has been able to uncover, his family began in 1300 in Portsmouth England. His family progenitor, William Banner, was born a poor common farmer who would end up traveling to France as a soldier during the reign of Edward the Longshanks. William, quite simply was a killer of men. William craved battle, and for a commoner he worked his way up through the ranks of the army until such time as he was given men to command in France. On three successful occasions, he lead troops into French port towns and disrupted their naval operations. William returned to England, and while not given a title by King Edward, he was given free lands to control, a poor farmer he was no longer.
When he returned, he brought with him Maria, French woman that he had met while pillaging on the Western Coast of France. In 1330, Maria gave birth to their first son Michael. Two years later, she blessed William with another son Robert, but she would never be around to see her baby smile. Maria Banner lost her life during child birth, an all too common experience during the time.
William was saddened by the lost of his wife, but with it game a resolve to be more. While fighting in France, William had discovered and experienced new things that the French were brining in from their lucrative trade routes. Taking the money he had from owning his lands and from the wealth he had gathered in France, he opened a small shipping business. Brining items back and forth across the channel, and still having ties with the government, allowed him to have a decent profit margin brining troops and supplies to the French Front.
Raising two young boys on his own was difficult, but he had the money to pay for the women who could help him with the child rearing. It was harder with him to raise Michael than it was to raise Robert. William was a strong, ox like man, his younger son was clearly just like his father, a large boy, larger than his older brother despite the two year age difference. Michael on the other hand was a small and sickly child, however, he had an investigative mind. Michael would stay long hours at the church with the monks a the Domus Dei, learning to read and write in both English and Latin. By the age of seven, Michael was already working on the family books, keeping the records as accurately, if not more so, than his father.
Things in Portsmouth were grant until Michael’s eighth birthday. On that day, the French invaded in what would be known as the Hundred Year’s War. William had known it had started, but he assumed the small nature of Portsmouth would be ignored. He should have known better, for Portsmouth was exactly the type of target he would have sought when he was in France. The French were looking for an English target to destroy and Portsmouth just happened to be it. The French used a tactic of flying English banners in order to get into the port before anyone knew what was happening. This was an important victory for the French because Portsmouth was one of the closest ports in the South of England and had been a source of supply to the French Front for Decades.
In the chaos, William went back into battle. During that time, his two sons were separated. Robert ended up being kidnapped by the French who raided Portsmouth. Michael ended up getting taken in by a monk at Domus Dei, the local hospice. In that battle, William ended up getting killed by French troops who slaughtered everyone in the town except those inside Domus Dei.
Michael would spend the next ten years of his life inside the walls of the Domus Dei learning the ways of religious and medicine. He learned to care for the sick and dying. Over that time, the people of Portsmouth rebuild the city that the French had razed. Michael was proud of the work that he was doing in the town. It seems that the city was just getting over its problems and that Michael would be able to make something for himself in the same line of work as his father’s business.
Just after his eighteenth birthday, in the year 1348, people in the town started getting sick. He began to treat those that he could, but there was little he could do for the actual sickness. It was usually just a matter of making people comfortable while they were passing on.
The Plague lasted in Portsmouth until 1350, when Michael and the others at Domus Dei were able to get a handle on it. From that point on, it looked as if the town was going to be alright. The town population grew, buildings were rebuilt, and everything looked as if the town was going to have resurgence. Deep down inside Michael was annoyed that he had not found a way to deal with the disease, only its effects. In time, however, he accepted the outcome and was happy to see the plague leave his village. He found Faith in his religious beliefs and knew that there was some plan in the will of God, which was beyond his understanding.
Michael had faith, and in that faith he found his drive. He knew that the Plague was not vanquished and that it would return. He began to travel to study it, whenever it would crop up. There were rumors that he was a mad man, for who else would follow a disease that caused all others to drop it its wake. He however, knew that a disease could not be him, and he would find the answer to it. Deep down, the Faith that was his drive, spawned the Pride inside of him. God, and God alone had the power to vanquish the Plague, but Michael felt it was his right, his destiny to do so.
Michael would spend the next twenty years in the Order of the Domus Dei. In that time he kept detailed notes of the Plague in a leather bound book. Every plant, every herb, every variation of medicinal combinations was carefully recorded, the results and the affect, everything that could be noted was noted.
In 1368 Michael decided that he had enough of living a life inside the chaste walls of a religious order. The decision came, not so much with frustration towards God, but because the Plague had subsided and he was cheated out of defeating his enemy. He wanted to vanquish the Plague, not have it disappear with no explanation. It was his right to do so and that had been taken away from him.
Michael was an aging man, but a rich one, and the wealth brought with it a young bride named Elizabeth. In the first three years of their marriage she gave him two daughters, but it was in the fourth year that she finally gave him a son. In 1372 Gabriel Banner was born.
The young Gabriel was much like his father. While his mother raised his sister, Gabriel was his father’s child. For the first five years of his life, Gabriel was always at his father’s side. This was a good thing, for fortune smiled on the only son of the Banner line. In 1377 the French struck Portsmouth again. For Michael and Gabriel God smiled on them, for they were in the walls of the Domus Dei. For the rest of the family, fortune was not so bright. The French cut down Elizabeth and her daughters as they ran for safety. This time, a Banner child was spared losing his family at a young age. However, three years later, in 1380 when Gabriel was eight, the French struck again and leveled the town once more, this time taking Michael in the wake.
Gabriel, just like his father, stayed with the Domus Dei most of his young life. Just like his father he had inherited the family shipping business, but was too young to control it. Gabriel had with him the only real possession that his father could leave him, the medical book of the Plague. Gabriel studied this, just like his father had, trying to find some sense in the notes his father had left. Gabriel never understood why he was doing what he was doing, but instead did it simply because it needed to be done. It was a drive that he had. For some reason, God had chosen the Banner family to stay and die in this city each time the French attacked. Working through the bouts of plague that would strike the area, Gabriel had come to the conclusion that the Banner resistance to the Plague came from the personal loss they all suffered.
In 1400 when Gabriel was twenty eight years old he left the Domus Dei. He settled into town to be a local shipper. He still pursued the studies of the Plague, however, his faith was not as strong as his father’s had been. He knew full well his father had spent three decades in the order, and his was a sacrifice of far less. He noted such in his journals, and then he realized that the hell on earth he was to experience as penance for his going wayward.
In 1401 a stranger came to Portsmouth. He was looking to travel to France. As travel between France and England was not a wise decision unless part of the military, a lot of people came to Portsmouth to find their source of transportation. This led all sort of people to Gabriel, as he controlled his father’s shipping business.
The stranger needed to move boxes from England to France. He needed to make sure that the boxes were not disturbed during the shipment. The Stranger did not want the boxes opened for any reason during the two day trip to Le Havre.
Gabriel, always needing money to do his good works, agreed to move the boxes that he was asked. Although not a sailor himself, he did, on some occasions take to the seas with his boat and crew. On the first occasion that these boxes went across the channel, Gabriel went with his men. The day that they unloaded the cargo, he expected a man with a letter of introduction to receive the cargo. What he did not expected to find was the same man who had paid for the shipment to arrive that night. Apparently he had taken separate means to Le Havre to ensure the shipment.
That night Gabriel did something that he didn’t do very often. He sat and drank good wine with the stranger. To tell the truth he drank, but he could not be sure if the stranger did or not. All he knew was that through the night he told the stranger about his shipping industry, the loss of his father and mother, the loss of his sisters, his life in the Domus Dei and just about anything else that came up. What he was interested in was the fact that the stranger asked him a lot about the days the plague had struck and how Gabriel was able to survive. The stranger asked him a lot of questions about Drakes religion. He was very concerned about what can only be called Drake’s immortal soul. That night the stranger gave him a name to call him by: Michael. No family name, no last name, simply Michael.
In the months that followed, the stranger returned at the same time every month. Sometimes he would have messages that needed to be delivered, sometimes small boxes, large boxes, every size of parcel was asked to be delivered. Every time the stranger would bring the material to be shipped he would bring a bottle of fine red wine for Gabriel to enjoy. It got to the point where Drake anticipated the strangers return simply for love of that wine. He didn’t drink on a regular basis, but at that time of the month, he always enjoyed that vintage of wine.
Over the next decade the town prospered. The population of Portsmouth grew, the city expanded, and Gabriel was beginning to lay plans to build his own hospital there, one without the interference of religion in the medicine. He paid close attention to anything that resembled the plague anywhere in the nearby area. There were, on occasions, outbreaks of plague, and Gabriel always went there to investigate. He was getting quite adept at mixing herbs with water to at least provide the victims some amount of ease of pain while they passed on. As time passed on however, Gabriel noticed two things. The first was that every month either Michael would appear in town with something for him to do and a bottle of wine, or someone would bring him the bottle of wine. The other thing he noticed was that while his friends in town began to suffer from the ills of aging, he never did. While they began to slow as their bodies turned older, he never did. Everyone began to notice this as well, and began to think it was something in the water and slaves that he created for the Plague patients.
In 1410 Gabriel began to feel the resentment of the other people in town due to his youthful resilience. He turned his shipping industry over to the men who worked for him and began to travel in England as a traveling physician in need.
What Gabriel always found odd was that as he traveled the messenger from Michael always knew where to find him. As much as he wanted to ignore the gifs of wine, he could not do so. He had an addiction to the vintage, and he could find it nowhere else. What made it hard was he was never left with the bottle and could not enjoy it over the course of a few nights; it was something he always drained down in the course of a single setting.
In 1449 Gabriel returned to his home in Portsmouth after hearing rumors that the town had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church because of the fact that Adam Moleyns, the Bishop of Chichester had been murdered. The town people looked at Gabriel and could not believe their eyes. He was a man who had just traveled for four decades, but who looked like the man he was the day he left. Just before the towns people came to question him, Michael appeared and eased their minds. He spoke softly and plainly and told them this was not the Gabriel Banner they thought he was, and in fact he was the son of Gabriel Banner. Something about the man did not seem right, but the town people seemed too afraid of the Michael to do anything about it.
Michael then grabbed Gabriel and told him the truth of what he was. Gabriel had been brought into the world of ghouldom, into the World of Darkness as an unknowing pawn. Michael had wanted him because of his shipping business, and he had gone and given that up. Just when Michael was going to snatch immortal life away from him, the entire idea of a traveling doctor had prospects. Gabriel, who had never been a fighter in his entire life, wanted to kill the evil hell spawned, but he could not bring himself to do so.
Thus began a 216 year term of hell on Earth. For the next two centuries Gabriel would be the thrall and slave of Michael by the blood. Many times he tried to escape but he could not will himself to do so. The only time he slipped away was in 1563 when the plague once again returned to Portsmouth. The order of the Domus Dei had been dissolved some 23 years earlier and Gabriel knew that the suffering would need aid. He spent a few weeks there before Michael showed up and returned him to his duties as a ghouled slave.
Gabriel wrote little in his journal of his personal life and treatment, but he did keep his medical records and his testament to the goodness of God. He carried with him his father’s single tome, and several of his own.
Early in the year 1368 Gabriel escaped from Michael again. This time he traveled to a small town in Poole England. There, he met a girl named Brenda. Michael knew the only way he could save his soul from damnation was to fix the wrongs in his life was with a son who could take up the mission that his father had given him some 293 years prior.
Brenda fell in love with Gabriel right from the beginning. The two shared a bottle, or four, and ended up being with each other. Gabriel had to slip away into the night, to return to Michael, or else fall to the death that would come due to his age. He left Brenda with enough money to survive for the times he was gone. He would make sure to return now and then to check on her.
In October of 1668, Gabriel saw the light of salvation for the first time in two centuries. His son was born. Giving his son the name Drake, he would not commit his son into the hands of eternal servitude by having his own name. Removing the last letters of his name, he named his son Drake Bane, for his son would have to overcome everything evil and vile in the world in order to save the father from damnation. Leaving Brenda with the books and tomes he had collected, and series of notes for his son to understand everything Gabriel had gone through, Gabriel did the one and only thing he could think of to end his pain: to run. He ran and ran every day, putting more and more distance from Michael and the blood that would continue to grant him life. That was the last of Gabriel Brenda ever saw.
Drake’s Story
To be a son without a father has never been easy, no matter what age you lived in. For Drake Bane, it was doubly hard. Drake grew up in Poole England in the 1670s. During this era of history, Poole was an up and coming Harbour of England. The town had always had a rich shipping history, in the 14th Century it had ties to Spain and Itlay. In the 17th Century, the era Drake was living in, it was beginning to have a huge impact on the Transatlantic Trade.
The town was just beginning to get over two major events in it recent history during Drake’s lifetime. The first was the Civil War of 1642. That war left many of the men of age dead in Poole. The other was the outbreak of Plague in 1645. As Drake learned to read his father’s books on medicine and the plague, he began to see his calling.
Drake’s mother Brenda never had want of anything. Gabriel had left her enough money to raise his son. Drake attended school during every year of his early life. Drake was the story of the third male child in a proud line. God was an important figure in Drake’s life, for Drake took it upon himself to be responsible for the redemption of his father’s damned soul.
This is a crucial point in the understand of Drake Bane. Imagine being around the age of seven and being told of the existence of vampires. Imagine being told that you are the child of one of their “slaves.” Imagine having a mother not knowing what is in the content of the books you read, because she cannot read but has ensured that you will be able to.
This is precisely what Drake understood his life and his future to be. He did fear the vampires nor did he bear them any ill will. His mission was not to hunt them down and kill them, in fact in all preference he would have prefer for them to have stayed out of his life, however, such is not always possible. Instead, his main goal was making sure that he could finish the purity of his father’s work, the medicine and the traditions of the Plague and now some 300 years after his father began medicine, to take the family understanding of medicines to a whole new level.
Drake studied and learned every day. Just like his father, he was a weak boy, never applying himself to the work on the docks, but instead to the work in the classrooms. He studied with the local herbalists, the local doctors, everyone who knew anything about plants, medicine, or anything that could be used to help cure the plague. He also spent a long time inside of the monastery with the local monks. Drake was intend on making sure his spirtuality was as sharp as his mind, and he knew that only through divine intervention would an answer come to him that had escaped his family for centuries.
As he was growing up there were bouts of plague in his lifetime, and from a young age he was with the doctors giving them advice on what remedies could offer the most comfort. Many adults were surprised at how much he already knew as a child. When people would ask him, he would simply tell them that someone else had told him and always kept the adults guessing between themselves about who knew more than they were letting on about.
When Drake was eighteen he was married to Rebecca, the daughter of the local herbalist. The two were a match made in heaven. They worked long hours with each other in their home, they traveled together to difference places the plague had hit, they were happily in love. Even though they were both nearing their twenties, they might have still been children together. They worked together and they played together. They were so much in love. Their first daughter, Emily was born in the first year of their marriage and their son Gabriel was born in the second.
Together the family lived happily, until disaster once again struck one of the descendents of William Banner in 1691. While working with a patient suffering from the Plague, Rebecca fell ill. Drake worked day and night, never sleeping, never eating, until he too was suffering from the first signs of the Plague. Rebecca held on from day one, long enough to deal with the torture and torment of watching both her son and her daughter die. Drake finally laid his wife to rest some ten days later. Drake fell ill to the signs of the plague, but through some reason he pulled through it.
Walking out into the night, barefoot into the snow, he walked long and hard away from everything in his town. He came upon a church, oddly set in the middle of the woods, too far to be of any real use to anyone but passing travelers. Picking up a handful of stones he began to pelt the church cursing the name of God and asking why over and over again.
As Drake walked away into the night, he was left with a hole in his heart. He no longer wished to live. He had tried so hard to be a good man, a pure man. He had tried to save his father’s soul, he had tried to save as many people as he could from the grips of Satan and the Black Death, but in the end he was unable to save his own family.
In the still of many nights Drake considered taking his own life. He had been forsaken by God, forgotten and personally attacked left without his wife and children, and made to suffer in a hell on earth. In a drunken rage he picked up a knife and planned out the way he would slash his wrists.
That night while Drake laid in bed, he woke to a fire in his wrists. At first Drake assumed that he had slashed his own wrists, however, being a doctor and examining his own affliction he discovered that it was not slashes on his wrists, but rather puncture wounds. As almost a direct sign from God, Drake was inflicted with one of the signs of the Stigmata.
At that moment, Drake’s faith was restored. Things began to become more clear on what his role in life would be. He was to serve God for a lifetime. Before December 1691 Drake figured a lifetime would be only a few decades, he could not know what future awaited him.
As with any Stigmatic, rumors circulated around his monastery, and then around local parishes and all the way to Holy Mother Church. While he would have preferred to keep his name away from the mortal men of piety who would seek him out to see his wounds, he would have really preferred to keep his name from the men of his father’s society who would like wise seek him out.
In late December1691 Drake was embraced, against his will. His sire was a man who normally hid behind the high walls of a local monastery, filled with the religiously devout and by those that had been driven insane. The sire made the rarest of appearances outside of the high walls in order to pass on the Dark Gift to a newly chosen.
Drake would be sired by the same being that sired his brother Michael Thomas Sullivan. For eighty four years Drake traveled with his sire’s brood, learning the ways of his father’s captors. Some vampires look upon their dark gift as a curse, but to Drake it was a blessing. He had read his father’s notes and he knew what it was to be a thrall to the kindred, but to be one of them was something totally different. Drake knew that with the ability to live for lifetimes he would be able to complete the work that he needed in order to save his father’s soul. As far as his own soul, he could have cared less. His world had died with Rebecca, Emily and Gabriel, so he figured since he knew God was paying attention to him because of the marks on his wrists, who was to say this was not God’s plan?
Drake found that his dark family was not a dark family at all. They might have been creatures of the night, however, they were bringers of hope to those with none, the bringers of charity to those in need, and the bringers of the word of God to those who did not have it. Finding what could only have been the rarest of vampires, those that used their immorality to do the work of God could not have been an accident. Clearly this is what God had to have intended.
In 1775 Drake entered Torpor. He slept a long sleep. Although he had not reached his elder years, Drake was none the less exhausted. For the years that he was awake, the Plague struck many times and Drake was constantly overworked. The mental strain of fighting the plague left him mentally taxed. He had assembled allies in order to keep the place of his rest secure. He had planned on a twenty to thirty year sleep. What he did not plan on happening was being dormant for more than a lifetime. During the eras of his sleep his allies all died. Furthermore, his dark family had left the local area in order to travel to somewhere to the West. When Drake arose he found that his crypt was fine, but the lands around it were foreign.
Drake awoke in 1850 to a world of wonders. Medicine had grown in leaps and bounds and he immersed himself in the new found wonders. Having the ability to work tirelessly, he poured through the tomes of knowledge of modern day science and medicine. He spent five long years studying and trying to reclaim what a long sleep had taken away.
Drake would have spent a decade studying, but he didn’t have such a luxury. Five years after he woke from torpor, his ancient enemy stirred its ugly head. Far to the East the plague struck again. Drake packed up what he owned and traveled to South Asia in order to try and deal with the plague there.
Drake headed off to the South of China in order to try and save those people from the fate of the Plague. His research was in some ways outdated but in some ways revolutionary. While he was not yet a master on modern medicine, the Banners had seen several strains of plague, and all of those notes were contained in his book. While he was unable to come up with a single cure that would save the lives of all effected, he was able save individual lives, and that was what mattered most to him. For the ones he could not save, he was at least able to provide them some comfort.
While in the South of China he met an individual who knew him by name. In fact the individual knew much about him, more than he would like any individual to know about him. The individual spoke to him vampire to vampire. This was the first time that Drake had addressed another vampire that was not of his family or an associate of his family. He had never chosen to get involved with Kindred affairs.
The vampire he met was clearly Nosferatu, but clearly not, yet clearly more. Through speaking with the man, he found out about the bloodline of the Burakumin, a group that studied death. They had their eye on Drake for many years, as he was a man that showed no shame in the handling of death bodies and the working with plague. While it was an interesting and tempting offer to join their bloodline, two things stood in his way. The first was that he was too weak from his long sleep to take any bloodline, and the second was that he would be more inclined to be of his family’s line if he was going to be anything other than Nosferatu.
During his time in Hong Kong, Drake slipped in and out of Torpor on several occasions. The times he was awake, Drake learned a great many things. He refined his art of medicine, to include what he could learn from Chinese Masters. Using these arts of herbal medicine and pressure touch, he began to find that he could often time treat patients that were badly hurt and help them recover in a few days rather than weeks. Although time consuming to perform, it did help that not all medicine needed to come from the cold touch of technology. It was amazing how open people became when you could practice ancient medicines that worked their wonders. While in his time in China, he also began to study Kung Fu from his masters. It was a strenuous activity, but well worth the while.
Through his Chinese Masters he became entangled with the Chinese Triads. In order to escape investigations, quite often Triads would need to have someone fix them up when they were injured in conflicts with the authorities. Drake became quite adept at fixing those who needed in on the go. This key factor allowed him to become a player in the game of Chinese Crime.
This is an odd point in Drake’s development. Until Drake had gone to China, he was about the development of a cure in order to save the people from the Plague. Drake soon learned however, that in time there was something more that he could be a part of. He understood now why vampires took place in a manipulating the humans, for it was something to ensure their survival. Drake had never considered death before, he assumed that for all his powers as a vampire, he would in fact be timeless. The more he considered this, however, the more he began to realize that one day he would be able to die.
For the decades prior to his next long sleep, Drake built up a connection of allies in the Chinese Crime families. Having many options, he finally decided upon the Triads. He had made arrangements with them to keep a certain place secure. He bought them a mortal establishment that he wanted them to run and manage and keep free of any gang wars. He spend the next twenty five years dreaming about what his new empire would be like, and then when he woke in 1985 he created it.
Things were going well. Drake knew that he had created a stable pocket of control on the streets of Hong Kong. Drake had decided that by the year 2000 he would go and rendezvous with the others in his Dark Family and invite them to see what he had created. Things would have been well, except the particular sect of Triads he had support began to crumble as the year neared 1997. His payoffs had always gone to the British police and investigators and now that the Hong Kong police would be fully in charge of investigations, he knew his Triads would no longer be able to keep control.
Late in 1997 Drake had no choice but to leave Hong Kong, as the British were losing their control of the city, and it made no sense to stay in a city where he would have to rebuild everything. Besides, the time was coming for him to return to his family. Using his influence over Miamato Chan, he convinced the soon to be exiled Chinese Crime Lord to relocate with him to the United States, where they could use their arrangement to set up a profitable business. Miamato, knowing that his days of being a Crime Lord in China were coming to a swift end, was eager to continue to have the help of the man who kept him healthy. Packing up his wife and son, Miamato made his arrangements to travel to Chicago, a city with a small, but strong, section of Chinese Influence.
Arriving in Chicago, he knew that he had to get himself established in two communities to be effective. The first was the criminal world the second was the medical world.
In the criminal arena. It was not a problem for him to begin using inroads through is Triad allies; however, he wanted to make sure he had his own avenues in case the loyalty of his mortal pawns went south.
Having an extensive knowledge of medicine, and knowing that in the United States, all serious injuries, especially those from firearms, are required to be reported, he established an illegal clinic, a chop shop for the human body. Buying a holistic medicine shop and operating it under legal terms, he built into a basement a small vampiric haven that housed a small surgical clinic. His holdings from years of investment allowed him to spare no expense. He had liquidated everything he had owned in Hong Kong and used the money to buy the things he needed to build two well furnished medical suites.
In order to be able to acquire the equipment he needed, he had been forced to dig up the dirty little secrets on several members of the local medical community. The first was the head of pathology at University of Chicago hospital. The head of pathology had a certain craving for a several illegal drugs, but was too afraid of getting caught to actually go out and attempt to buy them. He had heard of too many other medical professionals getting involved in drugs busts. Drake was able to manipulate the head of pathology by feeding his addiction, and simultaneously becoming the Assistant Head of Pathology at the clinic under the name of Douglass Banner.
A lot of people in the hospital come to Dr. Banner with their problems, which is always willing to help with. There are those who understand that the Head of Pathology is an idiot who often does not handle things in the best manner. There are those who would like to see Dr. Banner take over that department, however, whenever the subject is brought up, he informs people that his private research is very important to him and he does what he does for the sheer love of medicine and that is why he enjoys working nights. He always has the time to get done with what the hospital needs, but does not have to get involved with the bureaucracy that is the management of a department. He also tells them that it is because they don’t always require him to come into work that is what makes the job enjoyable. This suits Drake fine because his knowledge of many of the things that plague people comes from his 700 years of existence and he doesn’t have to work as hard as he probably should have to unravel certain courses of disease. Knowing full well that the head of the department is required to work days is the only reason why Drake has not taken the position after all these years.
The other person that was of crucial importance to him was the City Coroner. Living in a society where your members have to feed on human blood, it was always nice to know in advance if crimes tat would lead to the exposure of vampires were committed. Getting the City Coroner blackmailed was quite easily. A happily married man with three kids enjoy Geisha girls is not so bad of a thing, but when he likes them at tender age of 16, something is seriously wrong with that, especially if you are a devoutly religious person. However, not wanting to burn a potential source of exploitation, Drake did two things in this regard. The first to make arrangements for the city coroner to be able to sample eighteen year old Asian beauties, to enjoy them on the day of their seventeenth birthday, the day of being legally acceptable in the state. The second was to promise the city coroner that nothing bad would happen to him as long as his play things were not under 17, for it sickened Drake to think of him abusing little girls. The ploy, backed up with several dozens of hours of video tape of him ravaging the little girls, was more than enough for him to see thinks Drakes way.
He knows Drake also as Douglass Banner. Whenever there are odd cases that come by the morgue, he gives Drake a call. Dr. Banner has informed the city coroner that he is working on a book for forensic science, but does not want to have to deal with all the red tape of getting release forms from the victim’s families about doing official studies, and that everything he does is simply for research purposes only. The city coroner has accepted what Dr. Banner does for four reasons. The first is that his entire world would be crushed if he lost his wife and children. The second is that Dr. Banner provides him with the one thing in life that he enjoys as much as his wife and children, and that is young girls. The third is that he truly does enjoy the idea of scientific work, and since Dr. Banner does not interfere with the official processes of the work and since he does have his own credentials his being in the morgue is not a problem. The final reason, is that on an unconscious level Drake scares the crap out of Dr. Gill.
Having established his medical credentials, Drake set up both of his medical shops. The one under the auto garage is a modest surgical suite, able to perform what has come to be known as street surgery. Drake can treat most severe wounds, gun shots, knife wounds, drug overdoses in his suite.
The other facility that he has set up is a medical research laboratory. To this day, some 300 years after the first time he has been exposed to it, Drake is still committed to the elimination the Plague. In addition, Drake does several private experiments from the confines of his laboratory, depending on what is needed for him to be working on at the time. This laboratory is set up in his private haven, which also serves as the secondary haven for the family.
From 1997 until 2000, Drake was a busy man trying to get his influential network established. It took a lot of time for him to build to separate havens in the city, to acquire all of the medical equipment he needed, to get the proper credentials to be a doctor, and so forth. During that time there was little room for anything else.
In 2000, when he was established things began to change. He began to have more time to establish contacts.
In the vampiric world he met Jason, a young child Mekhet who seemed to have a good heart for people. The only reason why Drake bothered with Jason was because of Drake’ needing ties in the Covenant in the local area. Drake’s initial impression of Jason is that he should have never been created. He skirts the Masquerade with his very existence. Drake has never been one to fall into the politics of his species; however, Drake enjoys his life, and doesn’t want it to end. In the end, however, Drake began to find him to be a necessary ally. Drake wants to keep his existence as limited known as possible, however, in order to use the covenant; he needs to be able to fit in a few well placed “friends.”
On the street he began to establish his contacts. He opened his body shop and began to take on clients. It was not a widely known fact, but a very elite secret fact of it you got hurt on the streets; you could go to the angel of mercy, Gabriel. Nobody every saw his face, as he always wore a mirrored mask over his face. None ever dared ask him why. Why does one need to see the face of the doctor who saves your life?
It was in 2000 that his faith began to falter. In the years since the death of his mortal family, he had traveled the globe looking for something to believe in. His new family of darkness had tried to convince him that being a vampire was really a blessing from god. For the first some hundred years of his life he was able to cope with that fact, however, what he truly longed for was the time when he would lay down in a coffin and not wake after the passage of time. He longed to feel the arms of his wife wrapped around him, and to hold his son and daughter in his arms. He longed to go back to being someone’s daddy.
He hid these doubts from his family. How could he go to them and tell them that what he really wanted to do was die so he could go to heaven and that he feared if he would really be able to go to heaven.
He walked alone in the hospital corridors the weeks before Christmas. The hospital staff was growing concerned form Dr. Banner. He had always been a warm and friendly guy, with people able to go to them with their problems. Shortly after thanksgiving, they began to notice that while Banner would always make time to listen to their problems, he never really want to talk about any of his own. He came in, did his work, signed his reports and then went on.
Right after thanksgiving one evening a little girl was admitted to the hospital. She had some sort of blood borne virus. The chief of pathology, Drake’s supposed boss, tried to come up with an explanation, however, it was clear that it was something out of his league. He left Dr. Banner all the notes that he had from the mornings testing, but in his hurry to leave work for the evening, he forgot to put the blood samples into the refrigerator. Drake arrived at the hospital, melancholy as he had been in recent weeks, and began to look over the notes.
Needing samples of her blood to work with, Drake called up to the Nurses station and asked for one of them to draw a sample. Unfortunately there had been an accident that evening and the ER was swamped with minor cases. The nurse, knowing that Dr. Banner was good with children, asked if he would not mind collecting the sample himself. Drake, not wanting to actually go and see anyone, decided that he would go and get the sample so that if nothing else he could have something to work on in his private lab to block the memories that were haunting him.
When Drake went to the little girl’s room, he stood in the door way while his jaw nearly hit the floor. There sat his little Emily. Same blond hair, same blue eyes, same bright smile flashed to a stranger she didn’t know. She was 13, the same age his own daughter had been when she was lost to the plague.
“You can come in you know” she said with a bright smile on her face.
She offered all the warmth that a sick little girl could. It was clear she was trying to be welcoming to those that were trying to help her.
“Hi sweetie,” Drake said, with his human emotions flooding back into him. Emotions that had been suppressed for nearly 300 years. “I’m Dr. Banner”
The little girl sat herself up on the bed and turned the television off. “Hi Dr. Banner, I’m Emily, and this is Charlie.” She held up a stuffed bear who was clearly the only friend she had right now.
Drake could not believe his ears. He was a little girl with the same name, the same look, the same smile. If ever he had been granted a sign by his lord in heaven, this was it.
“Hi Charlie,” Drake said as he extended a hand to shake the bear’s paw. “Where are you parents Emily?”
The girl did not look like a child, but instead like a little adult, groomed too young to be so professional. “Mom’s at work, Dad’s in Europe or Asia or something.”
It broke Drake’s heart. Here was a little girl facing something on her own, and parents lucky enough to be parents were leaving their little girl alone in a hospital.
“Listen Emily, I’ve got some bad news, I’m gonna have to stick you in the arm with a needle. I need to take a little of your blood.”
It was clear the little girl had no love of needles. “Is it gonna hurt?” she asked, with fear creeping into the corners of her eyes.
His bedside manner being superb, he took the blood from the child, and then sat with her until she fell asleep. She was relentless with her questions, and he answered them all, even the ones that he probably shouldn’t have answered. He did not break the rule of Masquerade, but he came damn near.
When she slept, he worked with a fever that he had not had since his own children were in danger of dying from the Plague. Deep down inside he knew the Plague would always be his enemy, as he had developed dozens of different inoculations for it, but every time it showed back up again. When it came to the Carter case, he put everything into it.
He was in the lab from sunset to near sunrise. He would return to his private lab and work until the call of sleep forced him to loose consciousness, usually slumped on his desk over a computer terminal.
It took him only a few days to discover the cause of the disease and to come up with a cure. Somewhere along the way she had ingested a parasite, which had been carrying a strain of a contagion that amplified white blood cell production. His knowledge of Holistic Medicine allowed him to find a substance that would counter act the problem related to her case. The problem was that the virus had damaged her kidney, and that she would need a transplant quickly or she would die. Two further problems were that she had the rare blood type of O- and that she was 19th from the top of the list to receive a kidney.
Drake watched as she got sicker day by day. Every night he would make sure to stop in and visit his little Emily. He would sit with her through meals and watch TV with her. He even helped her keep somewhat current with her schoolwork. He knew there was little that could be done to save her life, unless a miracle came to his doorstep.
One night, while working at his desk, he received a page from someone needing the services of Gabriel. He went to his body shop, eager to save a life and had to remove a bullet from the stomach of a valuable street punk. He was only valuable because he was the only one who knew where a certain dollar amount of money was hidden.
As Drake sat there he realized that he might have stumbled on the solution to his problem. He didn’t think this street garbage had any more right to live than his Emily, but why was it he could save his life and not hers. Then he realized he could trade a life for a life. Typing the blood, he found this individual did not make a match, however, he did have records for all the people that he had treated. Going to his records he found a match for type O- blood.
A year prior, he had treated a Jeffery Ambers, a stupid punk of a kid who liked to get his rocks off by peddling second rate drugs to innocent suburban kids. The only reason why Drake had saved his life was because he was of value to his Triad allies. If it had been up to him, he would have been allowed to die a horrid and painful death, however, now he realized that the Lord worked in mysterious ways.
Using his contacts in the Triads, he found where Ambers was holding up shop as of late. Going there, he used the powers of his blood to augment his poor strength, and used a mixture of anesthetics to paralyze Ambers. Taking him back to his medical facility, he tested Ambers for anything too impure to put into his little one. Drake was delighted to find that while he peddled the filth of street drugs, he did not partake in them. Strapping Ambers to a table he went to the hospital to collect Emily.
She was sick and weak, but not so sick or weak that she could not be moved. He knew all the secrets to be known about the hospital. Taking her out a back way, he was able to sneak her out of the hospital before anyone knew she was gone. He took her to his body shop and set her on a table next to Ambers.
“Your going to sleep now, and when you wake up you will be all better”
“Promise?” she asked, more scared than uncertain.
“I promise. But you have to promise something for me. You can’t tell anyone who helped you. When they ask, you need to tell them the Angel Gabriel helped you. No one must know it was me.”
For a girl of 13, she seemingly understood with the mind of an adult. She agreed to the request.
While any transplant surgery could be difficult, doing an entire procedure with no help could be mind numbing, even for someone with as much experience as Drake. Surgery was not his expertise, but that did not mean that his hands were not capable. With great skill he opened both Ambers and his Emily, with more care being given to Emily as to not leave tell-tale scares. With only an hour before dawn, he finished the procedure. Knowing he did not have time to bring her back to the hospital himself, he took her upstairs and across the street and set her gently in the corner of a church.
“God will watch over you my little one”
He kissed her hair and then called 911. He had left a set of type written instructions explaining the care she would need. The next morning, on Christmas day, her parents arrived at the hospital to discover what had happened to their daughter. Emily, keeping her word, explained to all who investigated that it was “A Christmas present from God. A guardian angel named Gabriel.”
Guilt never entered his mind for what he had done to Ambers. He had been given a year to redeem himself, and he had chosen not to. What sort of man with the extra year of life would do nothing to correct the mistakes he had made? Drake felt pride in that he had given parents back that which had been taken away from him.
It was business as usual again for Drake until March of 2002. Drake witnessed a member of the Vice Lords rapping a young girl in a back alley. Drake could have handled the matter himself, but why should he have to. He had his connections to the Triads, he had financed them, helped them build from the ground up, they were his to use when he needed to. He dispatched Billy Chan to deal with Eli Gonzalez, the filthy rapist.
Billy got the job done, but he got the job done sloppy and he was seen. Not wanting to burn his bridges or loose resources, Drake went and dealt with the witness himself. Amazing what you can learn about poisons over the course of a 650 year lifetime.
Since then Drake has been quietly building his networks in Chicago. He makes sure to give the illusion of aging. He does not buy all new clothes, that way he dress at least appears to get somewhat outdated. He also changes his appearance on occasion, where as he used to let his hair be natural, he makes sure to cut it short every night when he wakes, giving the illusion of some mild hair loss.
In September of 2004, Drake; still feeling bad from the death of Gonzalez and Martinez, helped a woman he didn’t even know because Jason asked him to. The woman, with a bad foot, had told her story to Jason and she needed help. It took a great sin off Drake’s soul to redeem a life for a life.
In the recent months he has learned that the new Daeva Prince, has become outnumbered by the Ordo Dracul on his council. Drake went to Joseph Matthias orphanage on December 10, 2004 to introduce himself as Gabriel to the new prince. Never showing his face to the Prince, he simply told the prince that he had allies that would help to protect this throne in the way that they saw fit, and all this would come at no price, for the moment.
Late in December in 2004 Drake had to uproot his operation at the hospital. The hospital finding out just how incompetent that their Chief of Pathology was, fired him and forced Drake into the Head of Pathology department. Drake, knowing he could not work days, declined the offer and left the hospital under the guise of opening his own clinic. What had been a plan of his for many months, it did cause him to have to burn several levels of allies in the medical and financial world. Drake now has his own clinic that serves people at night, since all other medical facilities are open during the day when people have to take the night off of work.
Early in 2005, Drake was left alone in the world again. A strange fire claimed the lair of his brood mates. Michael, Anne Marie, Christopher, and the other two Nosferatu he was just getting to know were all destroyed. The strange Nosferatu of the Crone also left shortly after that, leaving him to assume the political role of Priscii of the Clan for the City of Chicago.
His ideas in the world of networking also led him to begin gaining respect in the world of the Carthians and the Nosferatu. His nights began to drift more and more from the mortal world, and deeper into the tangled web of vampire politics.
And thus we are again at present day
This is a sample background I wrote for a Nosferatu I played in the Camarilla. I do not expect characters to write anything this extensive, but its just a sample of how writing a flushed out background can help with a character's development.
Drake Bane
Mortal Alias: Dr. Douglas Banner
Street Name: Gabriel the Archangel
Triad Name: Doc Z aka Ezekiel Montgomery
Family Story:
Every family has a long and detailed history, regardless of if the people who are alive continue to know the story of what their ancestors have done. All too often families fall back to the history of their family name, with an individual suddenly appearing and being the first person at the very beginning of the line. If true accurate records existed, the mysteries of creation could be exposed, however, accurate records do not exist that go that far back. The history of Drake Bane is no exception.
As far as Drake has been able to uncover, his family began in 1300 in Portsmouth England. His family progenitor, William Banner, was born a poor common farmer who would end up traveling to France as a soldier during the reign of Edward the Longshanks. William, quite simply was a killer of men. William craved battle, and for a commoner he worked his way up through the ranks of the army until such time as he was given men to command in France. On three successful occasions, he lead troops into French port towns and disrupted their naval operations. William returned to England, and while not given a title by King Edward, he was given free lands to control, a poor farmer he was no longer.
When he returned, he brought with him Maria, French woman that he had met while pillaging on the Western Coast of France. In 1330, Maria gave birth to their first son Michael. Two years later, she blessed William with another son Robert, but she would never be around to see her baby smile. Maria Banner lost her life during child birth, an all too common experience during the time.
William was saddened by the lost of his wife, but with it game a resolve to be more. While fighting in France, William had discovered and experienced new things that the French were brining in from their lucrative trade routes. Taking the money he had from owning his lands and from the wealth he had gathered in France, he opened a small shipping business. Brining items back and forth across the channel, and still having ties with the government, allowed him to have a decent profit margin brining troops and supplies to the French Front.
Raising two young boys on his own was difficult, but he had the money to pay for the women who could help him with the child rearing. It was harder with him to raise Michael than it was to raise Robert. William was a strong, ox like man, his younger son was clearly just like his father, a large boy, larger than his older brother despite the two year age difference. Michael on the other hand was a small and sickly child, however, he had an investigative mind. Michael would stay long hours at the church with the monks a the Domus Dei, learning to read and write in both English and Latin. By the age of seven, Michael was already working on the family books, keeping the records as accurately, if not more so, than his father.
Things in Portsmouth were grant until Michael’s eighth birthday. On that day, the French invaded in what would be known as the Hundred Year’s War. William had known it had started, but he assumed the small nature of Portsmouth would be ignored. He should have known better, for Portsmouth was exactly the type of target he would have sought when he was in France. The French were looking for an English target to destroy and Portsmouth just happened to be it. The French used a tactic of flying English banners in order to get into the port before anyone knew what was happening. This was an important victory for the French because Portsmouth was one of the closest ports in the South of England and had been a source of supply to the French Front for Decades.
In the chaos, William went back into battle. During that time, his two sons were separated. Robert ended up being kidnapped by the French who raided Portsmouth. Michael ended up getting taken in by a monk at Domus Dei, the local hospice. In that battle, William ended up getting killed by French troops who slaughtered everyone in the town except those inside Domus Dei.
Michael would spend the next ten years of his life inside the walls of the Domus Dei learning the ways of religious and medicine. He learned to care for the sick and dying. Over that time, the people of Portsmouth rebuild the city that the French had razed. Michael was proud of the work that he was doing in the town. It seems that the city was just getting over its problems and that Michael would be able to make something for himself in the same line of work as his father’s business.
Just after his eighteenth birthday, in the year 1348, people in the town started getting sick. He began to treat those that he could, but there was little he could do for the actual sickness. It was usually just a matter of making people comfortable while they were passing on.
The Plague lasted in Portsmouth until 1350, when Michael and the others at Domus Dei were able to get a handle on it. From that point on, it looked as if the town was going to be alright. The town population grew, buildings were rebuilt, and everything looked as if the town was going to have resurgence. Deep down inside Michael was annoyed that he had not found a way to deal with the disease, only its effects. In time, however, he accepted the outcome and was happy to see the plague leave his village. He found Faith in his religious beliefs and knew that there was some plan in the will of God, which was beyond his understanding.
Michael had faith, and in that faith he found his drive. He knew that the Plague was not vanquished and that it would return. He began to travel to study it, whenever it would crop up. There were rumors that he was a mad man, for who else would follow a disease that caused all others to drop it its wake. He however, knew that a disease could not be him, and he would find the answer to it. Deep down, the Faith that was his drive, spawned the Pride inside of him. God, and God alone had the power to vanquish the Plague, but Michael felt it was his right, his destiny to do so.
Michael would spend the next twenty years in the Order of the Domus Dei. In that time he kept detailed notes of the Plague in a leather bound book. Every plant, every herb, every variation of medicinal combinations was carefully recorded, the results and the affect, everything that could be noted was noted.
In 1368 Michael decided that he had enough of living a life inside the chaste walls of a religious order. The decision came, not so much with frustration towards God, but because the Plague had subsided and he was cheated out of defeating his enemy. He wanted to vanquish the Plague, not have it disappear with no explanation. It was his right to do so and that had been taken away from him.
Michael was an aging man, but a rich one, and the wealth brought with it a young bride named Elizabeth. In the first three years of their marriage she gave him two daughters, but it was in the fourth year that she finally gave him a son. In 1372 Gabriel Banner was born.
The young Gabriel was much like his father. While his mother raised his sister, Gabriel was his father’s child. For the first five years of his life, Gabriel was always at his father’s side. This was a good thing, for fortune smiled on the only son of the Banner line. In 1377 the French struck Portsmouth again. For Michael and Gabriel God smiled on them, for they were in the walls of the Domus Dei. For the rest of the family, fortune was not so bright. The French cut down Elizabeth and her daughters as they ran for safety. This time, a Banner child was spared losing his family at a young age. However, three years later, in 1380 when Gabriel was eight, the French struck again and leveled the town once more, this time taking Michael in the wake.
Gabriel, just like his father, stayed with the Domus Dei most of his young life. Just like his father he had inherited the family shipping business, but was too young to control it. Gabriel had with him the only real possession that his father could leave him, the medical book of the Plague. Gabriel studied this, just like his father had, trying to find some sense in the notes his father had left. Gabriel never understood why he was doing what he was doing, but instead did it simply because it needed to be done. It was a drive that he had. For some reason, God had chosen the Banner family to stay and die in this city each time the French attacked. Working through the bouts of plague that would strike the area, Gabriel had come to the conclusion that the Banner resistance to the Plague came from the personal loss they all suffered.
In 1400 when Gabriel was twenty eight years old he left the Domus Dei. He settled into town to be a local shipper. He still pursued the studies of the Plague, however, his faith was not as strong as his father’s had been. He knew full well his father had spent three decades in the order, and his was a sacrifice of far less. He noted such in his journals, and then he realized that the hell on earth he was to experience as penance for his going wayward.
In 1401 a stranger came to Portsmouth. He was looking to travel to France. As travel between France and England was not a wise decision unless part of the military, a lot of people came to Portsmouth to find their source of transportation. This led all sort of people to Gabriel, as he controlled his father’s shipping business.
The stranger needed to move boxes from England to France. He needed to make sure that the boxes were not disturbed during the shipment. The Stranger did not want the boxes opened for any reason during the two day trip to Le Havre.
Gabriel, always needing money to do his good works, agreed to move the boxes that he was asked. Although not a sailor himself, he did, on some occasions take to the seas with his boat and crew. On the first occasion that these boxes went across the channel, Gabriel went with his men. The day that they unloaded the cargo, he expected a man with a letter of introduction to receive the cargo. What he did not expected to find was the same man who had paid for the shipment to arrive that night. Apparently he had taken separate means to Le Havre to ensure the shipment.
That night Gabriel did something that he didn’t do very often. He sat and drank good wine with the stranger. To tell the truth he drank, but he could not be sure if the stranger did or not. All he knew was that through the night he told the stranger about his shipping industry, the loss of his father and mother, the loss of his sisters, his life in the Domus Dei and just about anything else that came up. What he was interested in was the fact that the stranger asked him a lot about the days the plague had struck and how Gabriel was able to survive. The stranger asked him a lot of questions about Drakes religion. He was very concerned about what can only be called Drake’s immortal soul. That night the stranger gave him a name to call him by: Michael. No family name, no last name, simply Michael.
In the months that followed, the stranger returned at the same time every month. Sometimes he would have messages that needed to be delivered, sometimes small boxes, large boxes, every size of parcel was asked to be delivered. Every time the stranger would bring the material to be shipped he would bring a bottle of fine red wine for Gabriel to enjoy. It got to the point where Drake anticipated the strangers return simply for love of that wine. He didn’t drink on a regular basis, but at that time of the month, he always enjoyed that vintage of wine.
Over the next decade the town prospered. The population of Portsmouth grew, the city expanded, and Gabriel was beginning to lay plans to build his own hospital there, one without the interference of religion in the medicine. He paid close attention to anything that resembled the plague anywhere in the nearby area. There were, on occasions, outbreaks of plague, and Gabriel always went there to investigate. He was getting quite adept at mixing herbs with water to at least provide the victims some amount of ease of pain while they passed on. As time passed on however, Gabriel noticed two things. The first was that every month either Michael would appear in town with something for him to do and a bottle of wine, or someone would bring him the bottle of wine. The other thing he noticed was that while his friends in town began to suffer from the ills of aging, he never did. While they began to slow as their bodies turned older, he never did. Everyone began to notice this as well, and began to think it was something in the water and slaves that he created for the Plague patients.
In 1410 Gabriel began to feel the resentment of the other people in town due to his youthful resilience. He turned his shipping industry over to the men who worked for him and began to travel in England as a traveling physician in need.
What Gabriel always found odd was that as he traveled the messenger from Michael always knew where to find him. As much as he wanted to ignore the gifs of wine, he could not do so. He had an addiction to the vintage, and he could find it nowhere else. What made it hard was he was never left with the bottle and could not enjoy it over the course of a few nights; it was something he always drained down in the course of a single setting.
In 1449 Gabriel returned to his home in Portsmouth after hearing rumors that the town had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church because of the fact that Adam Moleyns, the Bishop of Chichester had been murdered. The town people looked at Gabriel and could not believe their eyes. He was a man who had just traveled for four decades, but who looked like the man he was the day he left. Just before the towns people came to question him, Michael appeared and eased their minds. He spoke softly and plainly and told them this was not the Gabriel Banner they thought he was, and in fact he was the son of Gabriel Banner. Something about the man did not seem right, but the town people seemed too afraid of the Michael to do anything about it.
Michael then grabbed Gabriel and told him the truth of what he was. Gabriel had been brought into the world of ghouldom, into the World of Darkness as an unknowing pawn. Michael had wanted him because of his shipping business, and he had gone and given that up. Just when Michael was going to snatch immortal life away from him, the entire idea of a traveling doctor had prospects. Gabriel, who had never been a fighter in his entire life, wanted to kill the evil hell spawned, but he could not bring himself to do so.
Thus began a 216 year term of hell on Earth. For the next two centuries Gabriel would be the thrall and slave of Michael by the blood. Many times he tried to escape but he could not will himself to do so. The only time he slipped away was in 1563 when the plague once again returned to Portsmouth. The order of the Domus Dei had been dissolved some 23 years earlier and Gabriel knew that the suffering would need aid. He spent a few weeks there before Michael showed up and returned him to his duties as a ghouled slave.
Gabriel wrote little in his journal of his personal life and treatment, but he did keep his medical records and his testament to the goodness of God. He carried with him his father’s single tome, and several of his own.
Early in the year 1368 Gabriel escaped from Michael again. This time he traveled to a small town in Poole England. There, he met a girl named Brenda. Michael knew the only way he could save his soul from damnation was to fix the wrongs in his life was with a son who could take up the mission that his father had given him some 293 years prior.
Brenda fell in love with Gabriel right from the beginning. The two shared a bottle, or four, and ended up being with each other. Gabriel had to slip away into the night, to return to Michael, or else fall to the death that would come due to his age. He left Brenda with enough money to survive for the times he was gone. He would make sure to return now and then to check on her.
In October of 1668, Gabriel saw the light of salvation for the first time in two centuries. His son was born. Giving his son the name Drake, he would not commit his son into the hands of eternal servitude by having his own name. Removing the last letters of his name, he named his son Drake Bane, for his son would have to overcome everything evil and vile in the world in order to save the father from damnation. Leaving Brenda with the books and tomes he had collected, and series of notes for his son to understand everything Gabriel had gone through, Gabriel did the one and only thing he could think of to end his pain: to run. He ran and ran every day, putting more and more distance from Michael and the blood that would continue to grant him life. That was the last of Gabriel Brenda ever saw.
Drake’s Story
To be a son without a father has never been easy, no matter what age you lived in. For Drake Bane, it was doubly hard. Drake grew up in Poole England in the 1670s. During this era of history, Poole was an up and coming Harbour of England. The town had always had a rich shipping history, in the 14th Century it had ties to Spain and Itlay. In the 17th Century, the era Drake was living in, it was beginning to have a huge impact on the Transatlantic Trade.
The town was just beginning to get over two major events in it recent history during Drake’s lifetime. The first was the Civil War of 1642. That war left many of the men of age dead in Poole. The other was the outbreak of Plague in 1645. As Drake learned to read his father’s books on medicine and the plague, he began to see his calling.
Drake’s mother Brenda never had want of anything. Gabriel had left her enough money to raise his son. Drake attended school during every year of his early life. Drake was the story of the third male child in a proud line. God was an important figure in Drake’s life, for Drake took it upon himself to be responsible for the redemption of his father’s damned soul.
This is a crucial point in the understand of Drake Bane. Imagine being around the age of seven and being told of the existence of vampires. Imagine being told that you are the child of one of their “slaves.” Imagine having a mother not knowing what is in the content of the books you read, because she cannot read but has ensured that you will be able to.
This is precisely what Drake understood his life and his future to be. He did fear the vampires nor did he bear them any ill will. His mission was not to hunt them down and kill them, in fact in all preference he would have prefer for them to have stayed out of his life, however, such is not always possible. Instead, his main goal was making sure that he could finish the purity of his father’s work, the medicine and the traditions of the Plague and now some 300 years after his father began medicine, to take the family understanding of medicines to a whole new level.
Drake studied and learned every day. Just like his father, he was a weak boy, never applying himself to the work on the docks, but instead to the work in the classrooms. He studied with the local herbalists, the local doctors, everyone who knew anything about plants, medicine, or anything that could be used to help cure the plague. He also spent a long time inside of the monastery with the local monks. Drake was intend on making sure his spirtuality was as sharp as his mind, and he knew that only through divine intervention would an answer come to him that had escaped his family for centuries.
As he was growing up there were bouts of plague in his lifetime, and from a young age he was with the doctors giving them advice on what remedies could offer the most comfort. Many adults were surprised at how much he already knew as a child. When people would ask him, he would simply tell them that someone else had told him and always kept the adults guessing between themselves about who knew more than they were letting on about.
When Drake was eighteen he was married to Rebecca, the daughter of the local herbalist. The two were a match made in heaven. They worked long hours with each other in their home, they traveled together to difference places the plague had hit, they were happily in love. Even though they were both nearing their twenties, they might have still been children together. They worked together and they played together. They were so much in love. Their first daughter, Emily was born in the first year of their marriage and their son Gabriel was born in the second.
Together the family lived happily, until disaster once again struck one of the descendents of William Banner in 1691. While working with a patient suffering from the Plague, Rebecca fell ill. Drake worked day and night, never sleeping, never eating, until he too was suffering from the first signs of the Plague. Rebecca held on from day one, long enough to deal with the torture and torment of watching both her son and her daughter die. Drake finally laid his wife to rest some ten days later. Drake fell ill to the signs of the plague, but through some reason he pulled through it.
Walking out into the night, barefoot into the snow, he walked long and hard away from everything in his town. He came upon a church, oddly set in the middle of the woods, too far to be of any real use to anyone but passing travelers. Picking up a handful of stones he began to pelt the church cursing the name of God and asking why over and over again.
As Drake walked away into the night, he was left with a hole in his heart. He no longer wished to live. He had tried so hard to be a good man, a pure man. He had tried to save his father’s soul, he had tried to save as many people as he could from the grips of Satan and the Black Death, but in the end he was unable to save his own family.
In the still of many nights Drake considered taking his own life. He had been forsaken by God, forgotten and personally attacked left without his wife and children, and made to suffer in a hell on earth. In a drunken rage he picked up a knife and planned out the way he would slash his wrists.
That night while Drake laid in bed, he woke to a fire in his wrists. At first Drake assumed that he had slashed his own wrists, however, being a doctor and examining his own affliction he discovered that it was not slashes on his wrists, but rather puncture wounds. As almost a direct sign from God, Drake was inflicted with one of the signs of the Stigmata.
At that moment, Drake’s faith was restored. Things began to become more clear on what his role in life would be. He was to serve God for a lifetime. Before December 1691 Drake figured a lifetime would be only a few decades, he could not know what future awaited him.
As with any Stigmatic, rumors circulated around his monastery, and then around local parishes and all the way to Holy Mother Church. While he would have preferred to keep his name away from the mortal men of piety who would seek him out to see his wounds, he would have really preferred to keep his name from the men of his father’s society who would like wise seek him out.
In late December1691 Drake was embraced, against his will. His sire was a man who normally hid behind the high walls of a local monastery, filled with the religiously devout and by those that had been driven insane. The sire made the rarest of appearances outside of the high walls in order to pass on the Dark Gift to a newly chosen.
Drake would be sired by the same being that sired his brother Michael Thomas Sullivan. For eighty four years Drake traveled with his sire’s brood, learning the ways of his father’s captors. Some vampires look upon their dark gift as a curse, but to Drake it was a blessing. He had read his father’s notes and he knew what it was to be a thrall to the kindred, but to be one of them was something totally different. Drake knew that with the ability to live for lifetimes he would be able to complete the work that he needed in order to save his father’s soul. As far as his own soul, he could have cared less. His world had died with Rebecca, Emily and Gabriel, so he figured since he knew God was paying attention to him because of the marks on his wrists, who was to say this was not God’s plan?
Drake found that his dark family was not a dark family at all. They might have been creatures of the night, however, they were bringers of hope to those with none, the bringers of charity to those in need, and the bringers of the word of God to those who did not have it. Finding what could only have been the rarest of vampires, those that used their immorality to do the work of God could not have been an accident. Clearly this is what God had to have intended.
In 1775 Drake entered Torpor. He slept a long sleep. Although he had not reached his elder years, Drake was none the less exhausted. For the years that he was awake, the Plague struck many times and Drake was constantly overworked. The mental strain of fighting the plague left him mentally taxed. He had assembled allies in order to keep the place of his rest secure. He had planned on a twenty to thirty year sleep. What he did not plan on happening was being dormant for more than a lifetime. During the eras of his sleep his allies all died. Furthermore, his dark family had left the local area in order to travel to somewhere to the West. When Drake arose he found that his crypt was fine, but the lands around it were foreign.
Drake awoke in 1850 to a world of wonders. Medicine had grown in leaps and bounds and he immersed himself in the new found wonders. Having the ability to work tirelessly, he poured through the tomes of knowledge of modern day science and medicine. He spent five long years studying and trying to reclaim what a long sleep had taken away.
Drake would have spent a decade studying, but he didn’t have such a luxury. Five years after he woke from torpor, his ancient enemy stirred its ugly head. Far to the East the plague struck again. Drake packed up what he owned and traveled to South Asia in order to try and deal with the plague there.
Drake headed off to the South of China in order to try and save those people from the fate of the Plague. His research was in some ways outdated but in some ways revolutionary. While he was not yet a master on modern medicine, the Banners had seen several strains of plague, and all of those notes were contained in his book. While he was unable to come up with a single cure that would save the lives of all effected, he was able save individual lives, and that was what mattered most to him. For the ones he could not save, he was at least able to provide them some comfort.
While in the South of China he met an individual who knew him by name. In fact the individual knew much about him, more than he would like any individual to know about him. The individual spoke to him vampire to vampire. This was the first time that Drake had addressed another vampire that was not of his family or an associate of his family. He had never chosen to get involved with Kindred affairs.
The vampire he met was clearly Nosferatu, but clearly not, yet clearly more. Through speaking with the man, he found out about the bloodline of the Burakumin, a group that studied death. They had their eye on Drake for many years, as he was a man that showed no shame in the handling of death bodies and the working with plague. While it was an interesting and tempting offer to join their bloodline, two things stood in his way. The first was that he was too weak from his long sleep to take any bloodline, and the second was that he would be more inclined to be of his family’s line if he was going to be anything other than Nosferatu.
During his time in Hong Kong, Drake slipped in and out of Torpor on several occasions. The times he was awake, Drake learned a great many things. He refined his art of medicine, to include what he could learn from Chinese Masters. Using these arts of herbal medicine and pressure touch, he began to find that he could often time treat patients that were badly hurt and help them recover in a few days rather than weeks. Although time consuming to perform, it did help that not all medicine needed to come from the cold touch of technology. It was amazing how open people became when you could practice ancient medicines that worked their wonders. While in his time in China, he also began to study Kung Fu from his masters. It was a strenuous activity, but well worth the while.
Through his Chinese Masters he became entangled with the Chinese Triads. In order to escape investigations, quite often Triads would need to have someone fix them up when they were injured in conflicts with the authorities. Drake became quite adept at fixing those who needed in on the go. This key factor allowed him to become a player in the game of Chinese Crime.
This is an odd point in Drake’s development. Until Drake had gone to China, he was about the development of a cure in order to save the people from the Plague. Drake soon learned however, that in time there was something more that he could be a part of. He understood now why vampires took place in a manipulating the humans, for it was something to ensure their survival. Drake had never considered death before, he assumed that for all his powers as a vampire, he would in fact be timeless. The more he considered this, however, the more he began to realize that one day he would be able to die.
For the decades prior to his next long sleep, Drake built up a connection of allies in the Chinese Crime families. Having many options, he finally decided upon the Triads. He had made arrangements with them to keep a certain place secure. He bought them a mortal establishment that he wanted them to run and manage and keep free of any gang wars. He spend the next twenty five years dreaming about what his new empire would be like, and then when he woke in 1985 he created it.
Things were going well. Drake knew that he had created a stable pocket of control on the streets of Hong Kong. Drake had decided that by the year 2000 he would go and rendezvous with the others in his Dark Family and invite them to see what he had created. Things would have been well, except the particular sect of Triads he had support began to crumble as the year neared 1997. His payoffs had always gone to the British police and investigators and now that the Hong Kong police would be fully in charge of investigations, he knew his Triads would no longer be able to keep control.
Late in 1997 Drake had no choice but to leave Hong Kong, as the British were losing their control of the city, and it made no sense to stay in a city where he would have to rebuild everything. Besides, the time was coming for him to return to his family. Using his influence over Miamato Chan, he convinced the soon to be exiled Chinese Crime Lord to relocate with him to the United States, where they could use their arrangement to set up a profitable business. Miamato, knowing that his days of being a Crime Lord in China were coming to a swift end, was eager to continue to have the help of the man who kept him healthy. Packing up his wife and son, Miamato made his arrangements to travel to Chicago, a city with a small, but strong, section of Chinese Influence.
Arriving in Chicago, he knew that he had to get himself established in two communities to be effective. The first was the criminal world the second was the medical world.
In the criminal arena. It was not a problem for him to begin using inroads through is Triad allies; however, he wanted to make sure he had his own avenues in case the loyalty of his mortal pawns went south.
Having an extensive knowledge of medicine, and knowing that in the United States, all serious injuries, especially those from firearms, are required to be reported, he established an illegal clinic, a chop shop for the human body. Buying a holistic medicine shop and operating it under legal terms, he built into a basement a small vampiric haven that housed a small surgical clinic. His holdings from years of investment allowed him to spare no expense. He had liquidated everything he had owned in Hong Kong and used the money to buy the things he needed to build two well furnished medical suites.
In order to be able to acquire the equipment he needed, he had been forced to dig up the dirty little secrets on several members of the local medical community. The first was the head of pathology at University of Chicago hospital. The head of pathology had a certain craving for a several illegal drugs, but was too afraid of getting caught to actually go out and attempt to buy them. He had heard of too many other medical professionals getting involved in drugs busts. Drake was able to manipulate the head of pathology by feeding his addiction, and simultaneously becoming the Assistant Head of Pathology at the clinic under the name of Douglass Banner.
A lot of people in the hospital come to Dr. Banner with their problems, which is always willing to help with. There are those who understand that the Head of Pathology is an idiot who often does not handle things in the best manner. There are those who would like to see Dr. Banner take over that department, however, whenever the subject is brought up, he informs people that his private research is very important to him and he does what he does for the sheer love of medicine and that is why he enjoys working nights. He always has the time to get done with what the hospital needs, but does not have to get involved with the bureaucracy that is the management of a department. He also tells them that it is because they don’t always require him to come into work that is what makes the job enjoyable. This suits Drake fine because his knowledge of many of the things that plague people comes from his 700 years of existence and he doesn’t have to work as hard as he probably should have to unravel certain courses of disease. Knowing full well that the head of the department is required to work days is the only reason why Drake has not taken the position after all these years.
The other person that was of crucial importance to him was the City Coroner. Living in a society where your members have to feed on human blood, it was always nice to know in advance if crimes tat would lead to the exposure of vampires were committed. Getting the City Coroner blackmailed was quite easily. A happily married man with three kids enjoy Geisha girls is not so bad of a thing, but when he likes them at tender age of 16, something is seriously wrong with that, especially if you are a devoutly religious person. However, not wanting to burn a potential source of exploitation, Drake did two things in this regard. The first to make arrangements for the city coroner to be able to sample eighteen year old Asian beauties, to enjoy them on the day of their seventeenth birthday, the day of being legally acceptable in the state. The second was to promise the city coroner that nothing bad would happen to him as long as his play things were not under 17, for it sickened Drake to think of him abusing little girls. The ploy, backed up with several dozens of hours of video tape of him ravaging the little girls, was more than enough for him to see thinks Drakes way.
He knows Drake also as Douglass Banner. Whenever there are odd cases that come by the morgue, he gives Drake a call. Dr. Banner has informed the city coroner that he is working on a book for forensic science, but does not want to have to deal with all the red tape of getting release forms from the victim’s families about doing official studies, and that everything he does is simply for research purposes only. The city coroner has accepted what Dr. Banner does for four reasons. The first is that his entire world would be crushed if he lost his wife and children. The second is that Dr. Banner provides him with the one thing in life that he enjoys as much as his wife and children, and that is young girls. The third is that he truly does enjoy the idea of scientific work, and since Dr. Banner does not interfere with the official processes of the work and since he does have his own credentials his being in the morgue is not a problem. The final reason, is that on an unconscious level Drake scares the crap out of Dr. Gill.
Having established his medical credentials, Drake set up both of his medical shops. The one under the auto garage is a modest surgical suite, able to perform what has come to be known as street surgery. Drake can treat most severe wounds, gun shots, knife wounds, drug overdoses in his suite.
The other facility that he has set up is a medical research laboratory. To this day, some 300 years after the first time he has been exposed to it, Drake is still committed to the elimination the Plague. In addition, Drake does several private experiments from the confines of his laboratory, depending on what is needed for him to be working on at the time. This laboratory is set up in his private haven, which also serves as the secondary haven for the family.
From 1997 until 2000, Drake was a busy man trying to get his influential network established. It took a lot of time for him to build to separate havens in the city, to acquire all of the medical equipment he needed, to get the proper credentials to be a doctor, and so forth. During that time there was little room for anything else.
In 2000, when he was established things began to change. He began to have more time to establish contacts.
In the vampiric world he met Jason, a young child Mekhet who seemed to have a good heart for people. The only reason why Drake bothered with Jason was because of Drake’ needing ties in the Covenant in the local area. Drake’s initial impression of Jason is that he should have never been created. He skirts the Masquerade with his very existence. Drake has never been one to fall into the politics of his species; however, Drake enjoys his life, and doesn’t want it to end. In the end, however, Drake began to find him to be a necessary ally. Drake wants to keep his existence as limited known as possible, however, in order to use the covenant; he needs to be able to fit in a few well placed “friends.”
On the street he began to establish his contacts. He opened his body shop and began to take on clients. It was not a widely known fact, but a very elite secret fact of it you got hurt on the streets; you could go to the angel of mercy, Gabriel. Nobody every saw his face, as he always wore a mirrored mask over his face. None ever dared ask him why. Why does one need to see the face of the doctor who saves your life?
It was in 2000 that his faith began to falter. In the years since the death of his mortal family, he had traveled the globe looking for something to believe in. His new family of darkness had tried to convince him that being a vampire was really a blessing from god. For the first some hundred years of his life he was able to cope with that fact, however, what he truly longed for was the time when he would lay down in a coffin and not wake after the passage of time. He longed to feel the arms of his wife wrapped around him, and to hold his son and daughter in his arms. He longed to go back to being someone’s daddy.
He hid these doubts from his family. How could he go to them and tell them that what he really wanted to do was die so he could go to heaven and that he feared if he would really be able to go to heaven.
He walked alone in the hospital corridors the weeks before Christmas. The hospital staff was growing concerned form Dr. Banner. He had always been a warm and friendly guy, with people able to go to them with their problems. Shortly after thanksgiving, they began to notice that while Banner would always make time to listen to their problems, he never really want to talk about any of his own. He came in, did his work, signed his reports and then went on.
Right after thanksgiving one evening a little girl was admitted to the hospital. She had some sort of blood borne virus. The chief of pathology, Drake’s supposed boss, tried to come up with an explanation, however, it was clear that it was something out of his league. He left Dr. Banner all the notes that he had from the mornings testing, but in his hurry to leave work for the evening, he forgot to put the blood samples into the refrigerator. Drake arrived at the hospital, melancholy as he had been in recent weeks, and began to look over the notes.
Needing samples of her blood to work with, Drake called up to the Nurses station and asked for one of them to draw a sample. Unfortunately there had been an accident that evening and the ER was swamped with minor cases. The nurse, knowing that Dr. Banner was good with children, asked if he would not mind collecting the sample himself. Drake, not wanting to actually go and see anyone, decided that he would go and get the sample so that if nothing else he could have something to work on in his private lab to block the memories that were haunting him.
When Drake went to the little girl’s room, he stood in the door way while his jaw nearly hit the floor. There sat his little Emily. Same blond hair, same blue eyes, same bright smile flashed to a stranger she didn’t know. She was 13, the same age his own daughter had been when she was lost to the plague.
“You can come in you know” she said with a bright smile on her face.
She offered all the warmth that a sick little girl could. It was clear she was trying to be welcoming to those that were trying to help her.
“Hi sweetie,” Drake said, with his human emotions flooding back into him. Emotions that had been suppressed for nearly 300 years. “I’m Dr. Banner”
The little girl sat herself up on the bed and turned the television off. “Hi Dr. Banner, I’m Emily, and this is Charlie.” She held up a stuffed bear who was clearly the only friend she had right now.
Drake could not believe his ears. He was a little girl with the same name, the same look, the same smile. If ever he had been granted a sign by his lord in heaven, this was it.
“Hi Charlie,” Drake said as he extended a hand to shake the bear’s paw. “Where are you parents Emily?”
The girl did not look like a child, but instead like a little adult, groomed too young to be so professional. “Mom’s at work, Dad’s in Europe or Asia or something.”
It broke Drake’s heart. Here was a little girl facing something on her own, and parents lucky enough to be parents were leaving their little girl alone in a hospital.
“Listen Emily, I’ve got some bad news, I’m gonna have to stick you in the arm with a needle. I need to take a little of your blood.”
It was clear the little girl had no love of needles. “Is it gonna hurt?” she asked, with fear creeping into the corners of her eyes.
His bedside manner being superb, he took the blood from the child, and then sat with her until she fell asleep. She was relentless with her questions, and he answered them all, even the ones that he probably shouldn’t have answered. He did not break the rule of Masquerade, but he came damn near.
When she slept, he worked with a fever that he had not had since his own children were in danger of dying from the Plague. Deep down inside he knew the Plague would always be his enemy, as he had developed dozens of different inoculations for it, but every time it showed back up again. When it came to the Carter case, he put everything into it.
He was in the lab from sunset to near sunrise. He would return to his private lab and work until the call of sleep forced him to loose consciousness, usually slumped on his desk over a computer terminal.
It took him only a few days to discover the cause of the disease and to come up with a cure. Somewhere along the way she had ingested a parasite, which had been carrying a strain of a contagion that amplified white blood cell production. His knowledge of Holistic Medicine allowed him to find a substance that would counter act the problem related to her case. The problem was that the virus had damaged her kidney, and that she would need a transplant quickly or she would die. Two further problems were that she had the rare blood type of O- and that she was 19th from the top of the list to receive a kidney.
Drake watched as she got sicker day by day. Every night he would make sure to stop in and visit his little Emily. He would sit with her through meals and watch TV with her. He even helped her keep somewhat current with her schoolwork. He knew there was little that could be done to save her life, unless a miracle came to his doorstep.
One night, while working at his desk, he received a page from someone needing the services of Gabriel. He went to his body shop, eager to save a life and had to remove a bullet from the stomach of a valuable street punk. He was only valuable because he was the only one who knew where a certain dollar amount of money was hidden.
As Drake sat there he realized that he might have stumbled on the solution to his problem. He didn’t think this street garbage had any more right to live than his Emily, but why was it he could save his life and not hers. Then he realized he could trade a life for a life. Typing the blood, he found this individual did not make a match, however, he did have records for all the people that he had treated. Going to his records he found a match for type O- blood.
A year prior, he had treated a Jeffery Ambers, a stupid punk of a kid who liked to get his rocks off by peddling second rate drugs to innocent suburban kids. The only reason why Drake had saved his life was because he was of value to his Triad allies. If it had been up to him, he would have been allowed to die a horrid and painful death, however, now he realized that the Lord worked in mysterious ways.
Using his contacts in the Triads, he found where Ambers was holding up shop as of late. Going there, he used the powers of his blood to augment his poor strength, and used a mixture of anesthetics to paralyze Ambers. Taking him back to his medical facility, he tested Ambers for anything too impure to put into his little one. Drake was delighted to find that while he peddled the filth of street drugs, he did not partake in them. Strapping Ambers to a table he went to the hospital to collect Emily.
She was sick and weak, but not so sick or weak that she could not be moved. He knew all the secrets to be known about the hospital. Taking her out a back way, he was able to sneak her out of the hospital before anyone knew she was gone. He took her to his body shop and set her on a table next to Ambers.
“Your going to sleep now, and when you wake up you will be all better”
“Promise?” she asked, more scared than uncertain.
“I promise. But you have to promise something for me. You can’t tell anyone who helped you. When they ask, you need to tell them the Angel Gabriel helped you. No one must know it was me.”
For a girl of 13, she seemingly understood with the mind of an adult. She agreed to the request.
While any transplant surgery could be difficult, doing an entire procedure with no help could be mind numbing, even for someone with as much experience as Drake. Surgery was not his expertise, but that did not mean that his hands were not capable. With great skill he opened both Ambers and his Emily, with more care being given to Emily as to not leave tell-tale scares. With only an hour before dawn, he finished the procedure. Knowing he did not have time to bring her back to the hospital himself, he took her upstairs and across the street and set her gently in the corner of a church.
“God will watch over you my little one”
He kissed her hair and then called 911. He had left a set of type written instructions explaining the care she would need. The next morning, on Christmas day, her parents arrived at the hospital to discover what had happened to their daughter. Emily, keeping her word, explained to all who investigated that it was “A Christmas present from God. A guardian angel named Gabriel.”
Guilt never entered his mind for what he had done to Ambers. He had been given a year to redeem himself, and he had chosen not to. What sort of man with the extra year of life would do nothing to correct the mistakes he had made? Drake felt pride in that he had given parents back that which had been taken away from him.
It was business as usual again for Drake until March of 2002. Drake witnessed a member of the Vice Lords rapping a young girl in a back alley. Drake could have handled the matter himself, but why should he have to. He had his connections to the Triads, he had financed them, helped them build from the ground up, they were his to use when he needed to. He dispatched Billy Chan to deal with Eli Gonzalez, the filthy rapist.
Billy got the job done, but he got the job done sloppy and he was seen. Not wanting to burn his bridges or loose resources, Drake went and dealt with the witness himself. Amazing what you can learn about poisons over the course of a 650 year lifetime.
Since then Drake has been quietly building his networks in Chicago. He makes sure to give the illusion of aging. He does not buy all new clothes, that way he dress at least appears to get somewhat outdated. He also changes his appearance on occasion, where as he used to let his hair be natural, he makes sure to cut it short every night when he wakes, giving the illusion of some mild hair loss.
In September of 2004, Drake; still feeling bad from the death of Gonzalez and Martinez, helped a woman he didn’t even know because Jason asked him to. The woman, with a bad foot, had told her story to Jason and she needed help. It took a great sin off Drake’s soul to redeem a life for a life.
In the recent months he has learned that the new Daeva Prince, has become outnumbered by the Ordo Dracul on his council. Drake went to Joseph Matthias orphanage on December 10, 2004 to introduce himself as Gabriel to the new prince. Never showing his face to the Prince, he simply told the prince that he had allies that would help to protect this throne in the way that they saw fit, and all this would come at no price, for the moment.
Late in December in 2004 Drake had to uproot his operation at the hospital. The hospital finding out just how incompetent that their Chief of Pathology was, fired him and forced Drake into the Head of Pathology department. Drake, knowing he could not work days, declined the offer and left the hospital under the guise of opening his own clinic. What had been a plan of his for many months, it did cause him to have to burn several levels of allies in the medical and financial world. Drake now has his own clinic that serves people at night, since all other medical facilities are open during the day when people have to take the night off of work.
Early in 2005, Drake was left alone in the world again. A strange fire claimed the lair of his brood mates. Michael, Anne Marie, Christopher, and the other two Nosferatu he was just getting to know were all destroyed. The strange Nosferatu of the Crone also left shortly after that, leaving him to assume the political role of Priscii of the Clan for the City of Chicago.
His ideas in the world of networking also led him to begin gaining respect in the world of the Carthians and the Nosferatu. His nights began to drift more and more from the mortal world, and deeper into the tangled web of vampire politics.
And thus we are again at present day
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Re: BONUS XP: Character Backgrounds / Character Rumors
Admin Sun Apr 01, 2012 3:33 pm
Sample Rumors:
Going along with the above sample background, these are the sample rumors I had submitted to go along with Drake Bane.
True Rumors for Drake Bane
Drake comes from somewhere in the Far East
Drake has been around since the first outbreak of the plague in England in 1700s.
Drake arrived in the 1998, but took his time to introduce himself to the prince.
Drake has been a doctor since 1350 and worked to cure the plague for hundreds of years.
Drake traveled to Hong Kong in 1890 in order to help cure the plague.
Drake has killed two mortals since he arrived in Chicago.
Drake is the unknown Guardian of a mortal named Emily Carter.
False Rumors for Drake Bane
Drake is the sire of Khalid, making him older and more powerful than the Nosferatu Clan Head of Chicago.
Drake is responsible for the loss of Hong Kong to the Chinese, in the bad business dealings of the 99 year lease clause
Drake traveled to the Far East to found a bloodline that was banned by a prince of England. There are several members of his bloodline that have infiltrated several different clans.
Sub Rumor: Drake founded the Ka’Tiff a line of Nosferatu who randomly change their disciplines, however, they suffer from the inability to hold onto the disciplines they have learned. He fled the far east before they took his soul in order to stabilize the mutation.
Drake Bane is also known as the Evil Dragon, turned his back on the Camarilla. His teachings are prophetically studied by the Sabbat and the Baali.
Drake brought the ideals of the fabled Camarilla to China and was banished in 1997 by a powerful Warlord Elder there.
Drake was once known as Dracos, the elder Nosferatu from Greek times, who woke from torpor and took the guise of a neonate to help be a pivotal founder of the Camarilla.
Drake came to Chicago in order discover why the Nosferatu have never been a dominant power factor.
As a mortal Drake was a monk in the Domus Dei.
Drake is the child of Khalid who came to Chicago when his sire called him, in order to fix the ills of the forsaken city.
To survive, Drake must feed on the flesh of children in some ritual.
Sub-Rumor: Drake has his own discipline that he created that allows him to steal the powers of other kindred.
Going along with the above sample background, these are the sample rumors I had submitted to go along with Drake Bane.
True Rumors for Drake Bane
Drake comes from somewhere in the Far East
Drake has been around since the first outbreak of the plague in England in 1700s.
Drake arrived in the 1998, but took his time to introduce himself to the prince.
Drake has been a doctor since 1350 and worked to cure the plague for hundreds of years.
Drake traveled to Hong Kong in 1890 in order to help cure the plague.
Drake has killed two mortals since he arrived in Chicago.
Drake is the unknown Guardian of a mortal named Emily Carter.
False Rumors for Drake Bane
Drake is the sire of Khalid, making him older and more powerful than the Nosferatu Clan Head of Chicago.
Drake is responsible for the loss of Hong Kong to the Chinese, in the bad business dealings of the 99 year lease clause
Drake traveled to the Far East to found a bloodline that was banned by a prince of England. There are several members of his bloodline that have infiltrated several different clans.
Sub Rumor: Drake founded the Ka’Tiff a line of Nosferatu who randomly change their disciplines, however, they suffer from the inability to hold onto the disciplines they have learned. He fled the far east before they took his soul in order to stabilize the mutation.
Drake Bane is also known as the Evil Dragon, turned his back on the Camarilla. His teachings are prophetically studied by the Sabbat and the Baali.
Drake brought the ideals of the fabled Camarilla to China and was banished in 1997 by a powerful Warlord Elder there.
Drake was once known as Dracos, the elder Nosferatu from Greek times, who woke from torpor and took the guise of a neonate to help be a pivotal founder of the Camarilla.
Drake came to Chicago in order discover why the Nosferatu have never been a dominant power factor.
As a mortal Drake was a monk in the Domus Dei.
Drake is the child of Khalid who came to Chicago when his sire called him, in order to fix the ills of the forsaken city.
To survive, Drake must feed on the flesh of children in some ritual.
Sub-Rumor: Drake has his own discipline that he created that allows him to steal the powers of other kindred.
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