Augustus Giovanni
Sobriquet: Master...
Appearance: A craggy old man, whose intense gaze seems to burn with a feverish gleam, that is not faith or madness...
Behavior: Augustus is completely caught up in what is to come, he fights with all his might to keep his excitement hidden. He will allow nothing to get in the way of his plans for the future.
History: Augustus Giovanni is either the luckiest or unluckiest Antediluvian ever. He diablerized Cappadocius in 1444, and out of his contemporary usurper-diablerists (Gratiano, Tremere, Lugoj and himself), he may be the only one who truly succeeded. He's built up clan Giovanni from a being a specialized sub-branch of the Cappadocians into the new Clan of Death. He's wealthy beyond conception, his clan is amazingly well-organized, and he stands an odds-on chance of destroying the world.
He is however, a weakling by his generation's standards (through his comparative youth and his failure to absorb Cappadocius' soul). The neonates of his clan often refer to him as "Uncle Augie", and treat him as little better than a myth. After the failure of the Giovanni master plan (to obliterate the Shroud), the long-term plans of Augustus and his clan have been cast into ruin.
Recent Events: The loss of the Rosselini soul-cache in Cagliari, Sardinia on the winter solstice of 2031 has thrown Augustus' carefully laid time-table for the Long Night into disarray and provoked a uncontrolled frenzy in the progenitor of Clan Giovanni. Upon recovering from his rage, Augustus sent for his prize bounty hunters Shug Dunsirn and Sizwe Ghiberti, setting them on the trail of a mysterious coterie of neonates he believes to be involved in the loss of over one-fifth of his slave-souls, roughly about ten million wraiths and specters. His bounty hunters tracked the coterie, an eclectic group of Brazilian Kindred from Cagliari through North Africa to the city of Beirut where they attempted and failed to capture the targets. According to the slave wraiths that returned to Venice, Shug and Sizwe failed, but only because of the involvement of another group of Kindred and the manifestation of a greater specter.
Since the failure of his bounty hunters, Augustus has disseminated what is know about the coterie to all capable clan-members with orders to immediately inform him of their appearance.
With the destruction of Cagliari and the Rosselini soul-cache, the Rosselini elders, Baldesar and Rosaura vanished. Initially, Augustus' investigators found no sign of either Rosselini, then in 2036 Baldesar was spotted in Cairo, Egypt. When approached by the progenitor's agents, Baldesar destroyed them and sent their heads back to Venice declaring his bloodline's defection from Clan Giovanni. Augustus called a gathering of Anziani together in Venice in 2037, there he set in motion a purge of all Rosselini, whether they be mortal, Kindred or wraith from all Giovanni controlled strongholds and declaring a clan-wide blood-hunt on all Rosselini everywhere. Over the last five years, the Rosselini Purge has led to a dozen messy conflicts throughout Europe, the New World and in Africa. A third of the Rosselini family survive as dissidents in Egypt where the Followers of Set have granted them asylum. For his part, Baldesar personally trains and Embraces promising recruits to serve as soldiers in his insurrection. Of Rosaura there has been no sign and she is presumed dead.
The loss of so many wraiths has pushed back Augustus' timetable fore the Long Night into the twenty-second century and in his impatience he has commanded all the remaining client families to tithe accordingly, taxing them of souls they desperately need to maintain their own night to night affairs. Augustus has gone so far as to demand that even those client families that are unfamiliar with necromancy must now learn the pale art and tithe accordingly. This state of affairs has created great friction between the client families and the family Giovanni. There are rumors of a plot among the various client families of throwing in with the traitorous Rosselini or of a small alliance of client families seeking to seceded from clan as a whole; all such rumors are ruthlessly crushed and Augustus has established a secret police from among his most loyal family members to hunt down all such rumors and verify their veracity, dealing accordingly with those Giovanni found to be guilty or in sympathy with anything like rebellion.
