Simon le Gris
- Toreador -z- Paris -z- The History of the Clan of the Rose in Paris -z- The Seven: A List of known Vampiric Temporal Doppelgängers -z- A Toreador's Story
Sobriquet: Simon doesn't really bother with nicknames, but the effete Toreador of Paris have a number of them for him.
Appearance: Simon is an athletic looking young man caught somewhere between his late teens and early 20s. He is Caucasian with pale skin, a round face framed by seal brown eyes, and dark brown hair that naturally hangs to his waist in a mullet. When left to his own devices, he wears old T-shirts, worn denim jeans and comfortable athletic shoes. When called to court or visiting Elysium, he always wears the finest fashions of previous ages so as to clash with the oh-so-modern Parisian Toreador, it is his way of mocking them, of showing them how silly they looked and that they are relics of a bygone age. When dealing with the modern mortal social situations, he wears whatever everyone else is wearing to better fit in with the living.
Behavior: In city where the fashion and image conscious compete to out do one another, he barely stirs the interest of his hedonistic clanmates. Despite his humble beginnings, he has learned a great deal about how to improve his image and uses that knowledge to a calculated effect. And yet, his unwillingness to pay heed to the current score of who is more beautiful than whom and his willingness to just be himself has a tendency to enrage the ever-beautiful, ever vain Parisian Toreador who feel that in some underhanded way he is deliberately flouting those things that give them a sense of self-entitlement; wouldn't they be surprised to discover that they were absolutely correct? Over the last few decades the hedonists of Paris have tried to break his unique spirit, but all they have done is fan the flames of his hatred for them, like Louis from 'Interview with the Vampire' he is deeply passionate soul and when he finally takes his revenge on the effete vampires of Paris, it won't be so much the end of a vendetta as a final reckoning -- ending in flames.
History
The ground floor of the house was a maze of smoke filled rooms and passages lit by the orange glow of the burning second floor. The ashen smoke stung Simon's eyes, blinking out tears just to see a few feet, he was surprised that he didn't stumble or fall as furniture made barely perceived obstacles in the fire-lit gloom. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, Simon was trying to remember which circle of Dante's hell had been a burning one, with a wry sense of humor he realized it had been the one predestined for the terminally stupid. He did not dare laugh however, the makeshift breathing mask could not protect him from the toxic smoke and the air he was receiving wasn't completely breathable.
Suddenly sweating like a pig, he got down on the floor where the air was cooler and the smoke blinded him less. As he moved forward deeper into the house, he let instinct guide him, he had come in here for a purpose after all. It was then that he felt rather than heard a muffled sound through the old floor boards of the house's back hallway. There not twenty feet from him was a balustrade that heralded an unlit stairway, that would undoubtedly lead him down into the bowels of the house. While there was smoke in the basement stair, it wasn't very thick and it was cool. When Simon reached the bottom, he stood up and tried the light-switch, but found the power off. By feel, he tried the old porcelain door-handle and found it unlocked. As he opened the door, he quickly stepped through and shut it firmly behind him.
The air inside the basement was both cool and breathable, and Simon coughed as he removed the makeshift mask and drew in his first real breath of breathable air. As he did so, he blinked the last of the smoke from his eyes, while they still stung, he could see reasonably well in the faint gloom. He had expected pitch darkness, but instead he found a well appointed antique hall lit by oil lanterns affixed to the walls by beautifully crafted brass holders. Simon's first thought was: "some fool was lighting his house with kerosene." During the more difficulty portions of his childhood in Colorado, he and his mother had of necessity used kerosene to light their home when the power was cut off due to unpaid bills. Still, while the lighting was familiar, it spoke volumes about those who lived here. However, that made time even more of a factor, when the fire finally reached the storage place for the kerosene, and to light so many lanterns whoever lived here would need barrels of the stuff, the house would go up in one hot explosion.
Simon moved fast down the hall and as he turned in the direction he felt certain the muffled sound had emanated from, the wall in front of him erupted as two individuals smashed their way through it as they wrestled with each other. Both were covered in blood, dust from the sheet-rock and bits of plaster or paint. They moved fast, too fast to be human, and Simon couldn't help but stare in awe as they battled each other completely ignorant of this presence. It was then that Simon noticed a third and fourth individual entering the hall through the ragged hole from a unseen room. One of these latter two, a petite woman dressed in tattered denim and a face full of piercings finally noticed him. When she smiled there was an animalistic glitter in her eyes and it seemed in the guttering light as if her eye-teeth were growing in size.
Simon didn't even know he was wearing a holster until the huge gun bucked like a horse in his hands. The first shot went wide and buried itself in the beautiful wallpapered walls. The petite vampire vixen was suddenly there in front of him, and she was saying something to him, but he had been deafened by the .50 caliber's report. As she reached for him, all Simon could see was the perfectly white razor sharp fangs and then there was flash as a powerful vibration passed through both of them, a strange intimate moment that only they shared in all the world. They were so close, that he could see the look of surprise and then pain in her emerald eyes, as she opened her mouth to say something, acrid smoke smelling of gunpowder drifted from her lips. It came as a surprise to Simon when he looked down and saw that he had pressed the dessert eagle's barrel under her chin and that a hole large enough for his fist had opened itself in the top of her red-headed skull.
As her body began to collapse like a puppet without strings, it revealing the approach of a tall man of African descent, whose face bore some kind of animal like mutation. His snout-like mouth bore a rictus grin filled with sharpened teeth and his eyes held a bestial hunger. But with the girl's collapse he seemed to lose all reason and while Simon could not actually hear him scream, from the stretching of the man's mouth he assumed it sounded like a cheetah might. Unlike the girl however, the African man wasn't so fast that Simon couldn't follow his approach, and with just one or two seconds to react, he grabbed one of the kerosene lanterns from the wall and hurled it at the dark man's midsection. Although Simon's opponent tried to dodge the oil lantern, he couldn't stop his own headlong rush fast enough and the lamp shattered against his groin as burning kerosene engulfed the lower half of his body. This time, Simon could hear the man's screams and that sound would haunt his dreams for years to come, but the sight of the dark man as he began to burn left Simon paralyzed with morbid fascination. The mutant man's death wasn't pretty to watch, as he tried in complete panic to put out the flames, first with his hands, which caught fire as well and then by throwing himself like a mental patient against the walls until he collapsed and ceased to move.
As complete detachment came over Simon, he noticed a strange glittering in the firelight cast by the dark man's burning body, it came from something lying in the red-headed girl's outstretched hand, as if she were offering it to him. Simon reached down and neatly plucked the object from her hand, which was cold where their skin made contact. Standing up, in the flickering light he could see that the object was a finely crafted ivory handled straight-razor engraved and inlaid with mother of pearl and antique gold. Having owned and used a straight razor himself in college, Simon pocketed it without a second thought and then looked down the smoky hall to where the first two combatants lay entwined on the floor. As he approached, he realized that one of the individuals was kissing the other individual's neck and as sound began to fully return to Simon's ears, he could hear the unmistakable noises of sucking.
So completely detached was Simon that he stood a few feet away and watched this intimate and perverse tableaux unfold. When the sucking finally stopped, Simon leveled the desert eagle at the vampire as he turned from the creature he had been feasting upon to look at Simon with hungry eyes. No words were exchanged, but the look in the vampire's hazel eyes seemed to capture Simon and he suddenly knew that this was the person he had come into a burning house to find. "We have to get out of here before the place blows up, the fire cannot be far from where the kerosene reserves are stored." Simon offered the vampire his hand up off the floor, the man looked at it as if he had never seen a human hand before and then took Simon's help getting up. The vampire didn't release Simon's hand right away and he said: "I'm Leslie Wilkes, and there is a escape tunnel this way. Who are you? Who sent you?" Simon hesitated and then offered lamely, the first name that came to mind: "I am Simon and no one sent me, I just knew that you were here and needed help..."
Together, they passed back through the hole in the wall and into a lovely room filled with Victorian furnishings and Simon felt a deep sense of sadness that all these beautiful antiques would be left to the fire and said so to Leslie. In the interim, they crossed the floor to find a stunning beautiful and full figured blond lying on the old Turkish carpet with a wooden stake driven into her full bosom. As Leslie effortlessly picked up the woman and threw her over his shoulder, he gave Simon a hard, appraising look and said: "Yes, but we haven't the time to save them, better they burn than end up in the hands of the Sabbat - the monsters that attacked me and my sire. But you are welcome to anything that you see, I owe you at least that much, if not...far more." Burdened by only a few first edition books, a painting and the desert eagle, Simon followed Leslie through a sliding wall panel and into darkness.
Traveling with the Dead
The panel slid shut, leaving all three of us in the dark. Perhaps for Leslie Wilkes and his sire, a buxom blond named - aptly enough - Leslie Booth, the dank and dusty tunnel we were standing in wasn't that dark. For me, it was as dark as the abyss. While my other senses were heightened by stress and adrenaline, I was as blind as a bat. A condition that I was not entirely unfamiliar with given the fact that I couldn't really see until I was almost five years old. The dark and I were old friends, but it is something else again to be blind while in the company of half tamed predators, spurred on by fear, but forever thirsty for the life sustaining blood that still circulated through my mortal veins.
The City That Care Forgot
Morgaine
Simon le Gris was Embraced almost fifty years ago, in a city beset by the savage Sabbat. His sire wasn't anyone of significance, just a Toreador cornered by a small group of Sabbat. But Simon was there at the right moment to turn the tide of the struggle, and when the fight was over the young Toreador drained him to feed his insatiable hunger, but horrified by the animalistic act of killing his rescuer, Simon's sire gave him eternal life and damnation instead of oblivion. Despite the circumstances, Leslie wilkes had no permission from his prince to create a childe and hid Simon away until he could find a way to smuggle the fledgling out of Denver. Leslie gave Simon more than immortality and an eternal thirst for human blood, however, he give the fledgling a crash course in being Kindred and Toreador before shipping him off to Paris. The journey to France was far from pleasant or safe, but Simon learned how to survive and hunt without drawing attention to himself. Once he reached the City of Lights, his true ordeal began as the Parisian Toreador rejected him for being an American who couldn't speak French, for not being an artist and for his mundane appearance. For a decade he struggled to survive at the edge of Parisian society, eking out a living by stealing and sheltering with the so called 'Low Clans'. As time passed he learned to speak Parisian French and he made it his mission to speak the language better than his gorgeous peers. After proving to the Court of Paris that he could speak their oh-so civilized tongue, he found his niche as storyteller, first in the streets of Paris less desirable districts and then latter in the countless theaters of the City of Lights. Tonight, he acts as an agent representing the untouchable vampires of Paris among their more civilized and self-important betters. This willingness to dirty his hands with the ugly, insane and worst of all, the clanless, has granted him the toleration of his Clan, for now.
Recent Events: Known at court as Petit Ecrivain de Toilette
