Simon le Gris
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: Seconds ticked by as Simon slept and dreamed of a magnificent medieval castle sitting at the summit of the higher of two twinned mountains. Then as dreams are wont, he was walking its seemingly new halls, through endless corridors, past great libraries and the workshops of hermetic wizards. He was looking for something, or was it someone important? In his hand he carried a odd, ivory dagger, like the tusk of some extinct animal it must have belonged to a saber-tooth tiger or prehistoric bear. But it felt right in his hand, like it belonged there, had been there his whole life. His thoughts refused to run in straight lines and he couldn't recall exactly what he was supposed to do when he found what he was looking for. As in many dreams, suddenly there was a spontaneous, if incomplete recollection of his mission, he was here to kill a woman with the knife. Which woman? And why? Who gave him this mission to murder some medieval woman in cold blood? There was that bizarre realization that sometimes occurs during somnolent sojourns like this, that if he just had enough time to wander this dark medieval fortress, that all his fleeting memories would return to him like a murder of crows. Unfortunately, and predictably, as he rounded the next corner he heard his own hoarse scream and everything went black...
...There is an old Romanian folk belief that dreams are harbingers of future events, that their portents are the clues that Providence provides us as tools to save ourselves from an otherwise dark and terrifying world. If Simon believed such things, when he awoke, he would have spent the precious seconds necessary to memorize every detail of that strange, seeming irrelevant dream. But there is a dissonance between the two states of our mind, the transition from the unconscious to conscious can be fraught with stops and starts, and unless trained to reflect upon the details of dreams they slip away like wisps of smoke dissolving in a cool morning breeze.
Simon's eyes were still closed when his conscious mind fully reasserted itself. Rather than his eyes, his other senses went to work providing him with relevant input, the ticking of a slowing cooling engine, a cold blast of wind smelling faintly of snow, the growing scent of smoke and the slaughterhouse stench of blood. Gravity seemed to reassert itself and something held him tightly in a sitting position. His first thought was: was I just in a car accident? The truth was far worse. In opening his eyes there was pain, and despite the dying twilight of a early winter evening, it was much too bright for Simon to open his eyes fully. The white, light gathering properties of snow magnified the light so much that he had to squint as he looked around himself. Simon was in a car, and while it was badly damaged, it hadn't been a car accident that led this Cadillac to its final doom. The vehicle had obviously been someone's prize possession for other than the broken glass that lay everywhere, and the bullet holes that riddled the driver's side of the car, it had been well cared for, even tricked out by the look of the interior.
As Simon studied his surroundings, he came to understand from whence the charnel stink emanated. A trio of young Hispanic boys shared their dying place with him, each had clearly been shot several times and their blood splattered the inside of the car and had begun to pool in the foot-wells. Horror wasn't Simon's first reaction, he had seen death up close and personal before, and even if it had not been so obviously violent, he had always observed such things from a emotional distance. In a response he wouldn't even admit too himself, the sight of so much blood sent a strange, but familiar thrill through his nervous system. His mind rationalized it as shock and he unbuckled his seat belt and decided it wouldn't do to be found covered in the blood of a trio of Latino gang-bangers by the police who most certainly must be on their way as the thought passed through his sluggish mind.
As he exited the car into the slushy, snowbound street, the source of the smoke loomed into his awareness. Across the street from the ruined Cadillac, was a dilapidated three story Victorian brownstone that was fast becoming a pyre. Flames of yellow, orange and red roared from every window and thick black smoke boiled from the open ground floor door. An electric charge of fear traveled the length of his body and back again, before he made the irrational and unconscious decision to enter the building. Later, for many years afterward, he would sit for many dark hours and contemplate why he had made that particularly insane choice. But in the heat of the moment, Simon found himself across the street and standing before the burning building without anything like a plan. Without thinking, he ripped a long strip from the blood-soaked remains of the t-shirt he was wearing and grabbing a fistful of snow from the dirty sidewalk, into which he poured the snow to act as a makeshift filter and wrapped the whole mess around his nose and mouth as he entered the ground floor of the burning house.
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 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 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.
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