Benesj Cherno

Old Clan Tzimisce - Gabrovo Grad

Appearance: Benesj Cherno stands 1.88 meters tall and weights in at 136 kilos. A man in his middle years, he is what some would call heavy, but beneath the fat there is considerable muscle. He obviously shaves his head and wears a mephistophelean Vandyke goatee. Both his eyes and goatee are dark, though the later has a few white hairs, a obvious sign of middle age. Benesj cultivates the image of being a Bulgarian mafioso or Mug by wearing dark sunglasses and expensive black suits sprinkled liberally with amber and gold jewelry. He is never seen without his two female Rottweilers, Helga and Greta or a variable number of similarly clad bodyguards.

Background: Benesj appeared in Gabrovo City at the end of the summer of 2010. His appearance signaled an end to the violence and upheaval that preceded him and as a man of obvious wealth he invested heavily in the flagging businesses of the city. His investments created a large number of new jobs by reopening the long closed communist era textile mills and by hiring a significant number of the recently unemployed former police officers to form Gabrovo's first private security firm, Gabrovo Investigations & Security Corp.

Despite his nefarious image, Benesj Cherno has a clean, if minimal record; though details on him before 2010 are spotty, his image and fingerprints prove that his has no known relations with organized crime and has never committed a crime according to Interpol. This sparse and perfect record leads many to suspect that he might be a wealthy and retired mafioso who changed his face and finger prints to aid in a successful retirement or a former members of Bulgaria's espionage services.

Since his arrival, Benesj Cherno has worked very hard at associating with Gabrovo's upper class and though he isn't yet a member of the city council, he is well known to them. Most recently, Cherno Industries, Benesj's textile business signed a supply contract with Walmart Incorporated, raising the stakes for Gabrovo's economy and returning the city to a BBB bond credit rating. Unfortunately, the home offices of his security firm - The Volos Corporate Building, were attacked in the autumn of 2013 by a faction of Bulgarian organized crime intent on a hostile takeover. Benesj deftly managed a local investigation while side stepping a full federal investigation - or did he?.

Benesj, like his undead sibling Marius and the American Coterie, became enmeshed in the the temporal conflict know as the "Bellum Horarium". In a preemptive bid to gain his sire's eternal gratitude, he and Marius used the power of the Assamite sorcerer Kitab Zeke to journey back to 7th century Greece to acquire a body relic of his traitorous elder sister Zornitsa. Ultimately, he and Marius both survived this errant mission and succeeded in acquiring the body relic, so that Marius could once again become Svarozic's favorite childe.

However, Benesj fell victim to his own success and the vagaries of ill fortune, when the Manus Nigrum assigned him to the next temporal mission to stop the rogue Tremere councilor Meerlinda in her bid for ultimate power. When the mission lay on the cusp of failure, the Kamut members drew straws and Benesj was given the ugly chore of diablerizing Meerlinda with the Fang of the Ouroboros (Item 1) and spending the next thousand years in her guise. But, when the ritual ended - someone did return to take possession of Benesj's body in the present. Blagoy Zhivkov the ninth century barber-surgeon who served as Benesj's physical host in the medieval past awoke in the twenty-first century as a vampire, without any idea of how either of these things might have occurred.

Personality: On the surface, Benesj comes across as a genial professional entrepreneur, who would like to be seen as vaguely nefarious, to play up his image as a playboy millionaire. Despite this, in business he is scrupulously honest and has gone to significant effort to show his civic honor by funding chitalishta (Bulgarian cultural centers), building playgrounds, and donating regularly to local charities. Those who get to know the new textile mogul come to realize that this larger than life character is just a fabrication of a brilliant mind possessed of a cold and predatory business acumen. Though it is exceedingly difficult to get to know the real Benesj Cherno, he rarely meets business associates except in crowded public venues. Those he meets most often with, quickly become drunk or distracted by the alluring beautiful young people who gravitate into his orbit. He has an uncanny knack for pleasantly exploiting personal quirks with immediate gratification, distraction or verbal misdirection. If these tactics fail, he is a skilled listener and has a gift for prompting others to discuss themselves.

Quote: Убийте ги с доброта.... (Kill them with kindness....)

Current Events: To his credit, Blagoy has made massive efforts to accept the unimaginable changes in his transition from medieval barber-surgeon to modern vampire prince. He has made significant strides by learning modern Bulgarian and adapting to the twenty-first century. Strangely, the one change he has taken the best, has been his transformation into a vampire, something that most humans struggle with to one degree or another, he has accepted wholeheartedly as a beneficial transformation. But, that is to be expected of Blagoy, for his is nothing so much as a pragmatist and he is very excited by this brilliant new age of science and technology.

In the last two years, not only has he learned the local language, he has also approached computers and the internet as modern day demons who provide information to anyone curious enough to ask questions and for nothing more than simple money. He now spends as much time as possible online studying or prowling the local hospital to learn how modern medicine has advanced since his own era.

He does suffer from the constant irritation of having to portray himself as a mortal merchant or as the vampiric bureaucrat in charge of Gabrovo Grad. Its been a thankless job, but one that has come with unexpected benefits, like immortality, a sudden facility with the pale art of necromancy and supernatural abilities and perceptions.

But Blagoy is struggling with something, the hunger, in life he was not a passionate man and avoided physical and emotional entanglements as most men avoid diseases. But the Beast will not be denied. The sheer pleasure of drinking blood is many times more carnal than human sexual need and Blagoy just doesn't know how to handle the intense experience of feeding and his new body's constant insistence that he do so at every opportunity.

Unfortunately, there have been 'accidents' and to avoid them, Blagoy has started stocking a larder to prevent embarrassingly public displays of hunger. The last two years has seen a dangerous spike in missing persons within Gabrovo Grad, of course they have all been teenage runaways, drunks or desperate Greek refugees. While the locals are just grateful that it isn't their sons and daughters, the police are starting to look more carefully into the reports of wholesale disappearances among the transient population. They aren't necessarily looking for vampires, white slavery or illegal migrant labor practices could account for it and with Gabrovo Grad's steadily increasing population, it may be a while before they catch on to the possibility of a blood drinking serial killer.

Blagoy was killed in early 2016. What will be told to his sire is up to his brother Marius.

• -- Blagoy Zhivkov