Don Cerro
Appearance: Don Cerro is a tall, thin figure, draped in carefully tailored but restrained suits. He rarely goes without his cane while in London, but tends to affect different mannerisms in each city he visits, to see if people respond differently to him as a result. This experiment has been running for over three centuries now. Cerro has a slightly hooked nose and bushy eyebrows over deep-set eyes. Many people, both mortal and Kindred, find his presence disquieting because he always appears to be watching and appraising them. Underneath his civilized demeanor, the mind of a warrior is clearly at work.
Background: Don Cerro believes in the Camarilla with a passion few would understand. He fervently believes that freedom from the constant fear that conflict creates is the surest route to progress for a society, be it mortal or Kindred. The Camarilla is the best hope for vampires, he reasons, and some people need to be prepared to fight to protect it so that others are left free to help it grow. He has spent the last three centuries of his existence doing just that, and is now grooming promising neonates to fill that role alongside him.
Don Cerro was born, grew up and fought among the minor nobility of northern Spain, surrounded by the religious tension of the 15th century. He was adept at hunting and fighting, as his father wished, and gave little of his time to study. Instead, he took advantage of his position to dispense justice as he saw fit among the common people. Years of religious warfare and constant fighting had made them a fractious, rebellious lot, given to using violence as the first solution for everything. Cerro reasoned that he could bring a measure of peace to their lives by making them more afraid of him and his anger than of each other. He was right, and over the course of the next five years he brought a measure of peace to his father's lands.
One night, while riding home from a hunt, he disappeared. An elder Brujah known as Helissente took Don Cerro from his horse without apparent effort. She then challenged him to fight her. She had watched the young noble for months, drawn by his passion for bringing order to people's lives and curious as to his motivation. Was he merely sadistic, or did he genuinely believe in what he was doing? Within minutes of Don Cerro's acceptance of the challenge it became obvious both that he would lose and that she was merely toying with him. He then tried to talk her around. By doing so, he passed her test and entered the ranks of the unliving.
For the first century of his new existence, Cerro found himself subjected to a rigorous training regimen that developed his physical prowess far beyond anything that he could have expected. Equally, though, his sire focused on training the Spaniard's mind, teaching him about the history of Europe's mortals and Kindred, and teaching him to see that the brief flashes of conflict were part of patterns of struggle that played out over decades and centuries.
In the early 16th century, Helissente declared that Don Cerro was now ready to face the world alone. She told him to meet a contact of hers in Madrid, who would help him find suitable passage to the Americas. He has not seen his sire since.
Cerro spent a little while on the American West coast. Clashes between the Sabbat and Camarilla there slowly angered him. He approved of the progress the Camarilla stood for, and the more of the Sabbat he saw, the more he grew to hate their anarchy. It reminded him too much of the excesses of medieval Europe. He took it upon himself to train neonates whose sires had been destroyed in those conflicts, so that they would have both the physical and mental skills needed to take revenge should they wish to do so. This, he reasoned, would turn the young Kindred into useful weapons for the Camarilla.
Don Cerro relished unleashing his passion and anger in face-to-face confrontations with the Sabbat. It soon became a running joke among the American Camarilla that the surest sign that the Sabbat were on the way was Don Cerro's arrival with his proteges in the the city. Still, few princes turned him away, for their domains were usually safer when he left at next to no cost to the city's native Kindred population. As a result, powerful Kindred all over America, and even some in Europe, owe Don Cerro more than a few estimable boons.
By the beginning of the 19th century Don Cerro was acknowledged as one of the Camarilla's leading figures. However, he grew distracted by the first stirrings of the desire to Embrace a childe of his own, to train as his sire had trained him. His curiosity was aroused by a series of wanted posters he found in the American Deep South. Eventually, he tracked down the man in question, one Theophilus, and observed him for over a year. Finally, he came to the conclusion that the man would make the perfect childe, because he had a passion for his cause, and the brains to approach it calmly and sensibly.
The relationship was everything Cerro could have hoped for. Once Theo had worked the desire for revenge on the man who had kept him as a slave out of his system, he proved an apt pupil and learned quickly - faster than Cerro himself had, in fact. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, an educational experience in its own right, he decided that it was time that Theo experience the Camarilla at its best and worst - and that meant going home.
It had been years since Cerro traveled widely in Europe. While his main objective remained Theo Bell's education, he also found the experience quietly fascinating on a personal level. The growing conflict between the sect and Mithras fascinated him, and his was keen to see how it progressed.
Shortly before the dawn of the twentieth century, his childe Theo Bell returned to America to continue the battle against the Sabbat that Don Cerro had begun centuries before. It was also about that time, that Mithras seemed to begin to withdraw from the Court of Avalon. At first the prince's absences were few and far between, but as the years progressed, so to did the Mithras' growing absenteeism. By the beginning of the First World War, most of the London Kindred were aware that Mithras had gone into seclusion and likely torpor. Over those same years, the seneschal, Lady Anne Bowesley slowly began to fill the void left by the prince's absence and like a childe pretending to be an adult, she initially received a certain amount of condescension.
But, the twentieth century is over, Mithras all but forgotten and Lady Anne is Queen of London. Don Cerro has been in residence for almost 150 years and as the city's eldest Brujah, he has come to be seen as the primogen of his clan. It is not a role that Don Cerro relishes, but one he does understand; the violent and vulgar young Kindred of tonight need his guidance and protection more than their sires or their grand-sires did, and what Don Cerro vows to do, he sees done.
Personality: Don Cerro is quiet,calm and dignified in social situations, and flamboyantly joyful in combat. Cerro pretends to be utterly disinterested in current events in London, but he drinks in every detail nonetheless. He has no real desire to be any more involved than is absolutely necessary, because his agenda is larger than the city of London.
