Andrea Visconti
- Brujah -x- League of the Night -x- Quebec City
Sobriquet: Duchess.
Appearance: Andrea is a great beauty, with long, curly black hair and lustrous brown eyes, which she skillfully accentuates with makeup. She is about 5'4" tall, with an excellent figure.
Behavior: Andrea speaks loudly and vivaciously, often gesturing wildly with her hands to make a particular point. It comes as a shock to many vampires, for She wears her emotions very close to the surface. Her moods can be mercurial to say the least, as she fluctuates from amused to enraged in the blink of her lustrous eyelashes. Her mortal Italian background mixes with her Brujah temperament and her quixotic femininity to produce a woman whose passions run wild through the entire spectrum of emotion within just a few minutes. There is no question that she feels every emotion, perhaps too much as she can take offense at the speed of light, but is equally quick to forgive.
History: Andrea was born in Milan in 1852 to a destitute noble family. Her birth coincided with a period in European history of liberal revolutionary movements that would culminate in the formations of labor unions on the one hand and full blown communism on the other. It was a time of radical ideas and constant unforeseen change and Andrea was completely at home in this environment. As a daughter of privilege, the door to education was open to her and the female members of her family scrimped and sacrificed to ensure she received an education. As a child, Andrea was brilliant and precocious. An avid reader, she absorbed history, literature, mathematics, philosophy and the new sciences the way a sponge absorbs water. In an age when most women received little or no education and young women of station were just beginning to pine for the education of their male counterparts, Andrea was the equivalent of a doctorate student in multiple subjects. While these achievements were of a nearly extraordinary character, they were little appreciated by the men of station, young or old, with whom she was expected to socialized in the hopes of a profitable marriage.
Thus it was that Andrea was twenty-five, practically a hag, in the ultra-competitive salons that served as a hunting ground for eligible men of polite society searching for acceptable wives of station. Not so surprisingly, it was also the hunting ground of a vampire. Count Luigi Visconti was five-hundred years old when he was introduced to Andrea by a professional chaperone. Count Luigi had belonged to the ruling family of Milan throughout the renaissance and had become prince of the city when he finally destroyed his Sforza counterpart. As a neonate and ancilla he had been instrumental as one of the more sophisticated and educated members of the original Anarch Revolt. But as the centuries passed, so did his passion for revolution and change; yet in this precocious young woman he found once again the passion to explore new things. From that night forward, Andrea and Count Luigi were constant companions from the setting of the sun to its rising the following day. Andrea adapted to a nocturnal life-style which shocked her family, but gave them hope of a late-life marriage to a man of prestige and station. For Andrea's part, she had finally found a man with whom she could have an intelligible conversation and who was a patient and skilled lover. But both Andrea and Luigi knew that time was their enemy and a year after their introduction, Luigi offered Andrea the Embrace.
Unfortunately, immortal relationships have a way of dying on the vine and after a century of constant companionship both the Count and Countess Visconti were ready for some sort of change of lifestyle. As fate would have it, another vampire revolt was taking place in the New World with the popular overthrow of the prince of Los Angeles, Don Sebastien. At that time, the Count and Countess Visconti were playing host to a trio of Brujah Idealists studying Marxism. The trio were instantly taken with the idea of observing, and perhaps even playing a part in this new Anarch Revolt. While both Andrea and Luigi were loath to part company, they both realized if they were to save their relationship they both needed distance with which to heal the rift growing between them. So when one of the Brujah scientists suggested Andrea accompany them to California, she agreed and Luigi gave his approval to this radical journey to the revolutionary New World.
The journey itself wasn't so much a source of terror as a thrilling adventure for Countess Andrea. The Brujah Idealists were not fond of titles, so the countess became just Andrea. This change is social standing was quite refreshing and appealed to the former aristocrat. But the chaos and violence of 1950s Los Angeles was something of a shock to a southern European ancilla used to the ordered regime of the Camarilla. Initially accepted, albeit somewhat grudgingly by the anarchs of Los Angeles, Andrea had to prove herself more than once. While she had trained with her sire in the sword and pistol, she never imagined that she might have to actually use those skills to survive. But those skills and her brilliant intellect allowed her to survive two Sabbat sieges and the final political uprising that evolved into the League of the Night. Originally, she was not in favor of the ideals of the league, feeling that it was a step backwards rather than political evolution. However after exploring the subject with other ancilla, she eventually came to see the wisdom of an evolutionary vampiric feudalism based more upon merit than upon the prestige of blood descendancy. Sadly, she was forced to part company with the Brujah Marxists with whom she had shared sixty years of companionship; the coterie broke up with rage and tears, but to Andrea's mind that was the Brujah norm. It was time once again for a change of life and Andrea embraced it like a lover. She would serve the league in a variety of positions over the following thirty years and when the league saw the opportunity to liberate the city of Quebec from the Camarilla, they knew they would need a sophisticated aristocrat in order to master a city with such Old World influences.
League Investiture: 2010
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