Elis (Lasombra)

**Elis** is a vampire pirate from Clan Lasombra.

## Biography

You were conceived in rape, and that set the pattern for your life.

Your mother was the priestess of some tribal religion in what had been a remote African valley.

Poaching and industrialization forced her people into a coastal city.

Beyond that, you never quite got the story straight.

You don't know whether she turned to prostitution or was simply seized at random by sailors on a drunken rampage.

Doesn't matter much either way, really -- you were born with the taint of the syphilis she got at the same time she got you.

You grew up in war zone squalor. Three or four nations claimed to rule your area at different times. In practice they were all well armed gangs, favoring their respective tribes at the cost of everyone else.

You were violently and sadistically abused, or coldly abused in a detached manner, and that's how you could tell one regime from the next.

Any nation with one gang or another, so that was no help.

And you remembered that what they did to your mother, they could do to you sometime, if they wanted to.

By the time your mother died, you'd learned enough to make yourself useful to petty waterfront tyrants.

You escaped some of the worst abuse meted out to less talented children and might have gone on to lead (by the standards of the docks) a reasonably decent life.

If it weren't for the syphilis, that is.

Early signs of madness manifested before your 18th birthday, and your increasingly erratic behavior cost you what marginal protection you once enjoyed.

You never talk about the few years after that.

Gradually, you became aware of a persistent voice in your mind, somewhere in the mental fog, an amused and curious probing.

In your moments of fluidity, you learned about the pirate captain with a taste for amateur physiology.

He fed you the blood that let you recover your sanity and kept the disease at bay, and also made you preternaturally strong.

The cost for all this was service, and you gave it gladly.

You soon joined his crew and pillaged throughout the Indian Ocean.

When he lost one of the mysterious crewmates who only came out at night, he held a lottery to replace him.

You won. Then the fangs came down.

You continue to serve your captain. Your existence gives you lots of opportunity to hurt people and movements of solitude in which you don't have to think much about anything in particular. Both suit you fine.

You're a pirate, and a good one. You know how to foil dozens of security measures, jam distress signals, fence loor and so on.

The workings of the Sabbat seem nebulous to you; you know only the routine on your ship.

But others think you naïve are setting themselves up for trouble.

The world has hunters and hunted, nothing more. You hunt. You're good at it.

With practice you may become much better at it. As you gain distance (physical and psychological)

from your mortal days, you're beginning to wonder what else vampires do and are taking your first steps out into larger Sabbat society.

You'll always be a pirate, but you realize that that may not prelude being other things as well.

**Equipment:** Seaworthy clothes, knives, books of Sabbat history