Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Vampire's Little Masquerade Breach: Charlotte Adams

“Wait, tell me it again.  What was that you wanted me to do?  Go through all the books on 18th century literature and see if their names match up with any of the obituaries in the local newspapers between 1872 and 1876?  Fine.  You got it, boss.  But you owe me an icecream and that fluffy white cat toy we saw in the store window.”

Charlotte Adams has had a difficult childhood, to say the least.  She was born in 1940 to a soldier and a nurse and raised in the bayou of Louisiana near New Orleans.  She remembers her father as a heroic figure, equal parts brave and kind, though she’s aware that it might be an orphan’s wishful thinking as he died when she was young.  Her father returned from the war to become a fireman and died in service trying to deal with a publishing house fire in 1946 when she was just six-years-old.  Her mother took ill with cancer later that same year and died in late 1947, leaving Charlotte an orphan.  Charlotte had spent much of that year looking after her mother while attempting to home school herself.  Hardly an easy errand.

She’d never seen much of her father’s relatives but her mother’s relatives were more interested in selling off the furniture and disposing of the noisy and demanding girl that Charlotte had become.  Charlotte refused to be parted from her father’s fire axe and when those fostering her threatened to take it away, she stole away in the night carrying an axe almost as big as her.  She hitch hiked to Chicago with a kindly man who thought she had been left behind at a bus stop on her way to see her Aunty.

She lived homeless in Chicago for three years from the age of seven to ten and did odd jobs for people for money, food, and schooling.  She would be a look out for police officers, steal handbags and wallets, and otherwise make a right nuisance of herself.  She avoided creepy strangers offering her a bed for the night and made friends with random kids at playgrounds before making off with their school textbooks and lunch money.  It wasn’t an easy life and she could see her future in the eyes of the young prostitutes, often mothers themselves.

So when James and Peter arrived on her street to take down a serial killer she knew what to do.  She’d already noticed a few strange things about the place and she’d read plenty of Sherlock Holmes so she managed to make herself useful and earned five bucks out of it.  It was meant to be fifty bucks, but James stiffed her in the dark, claiming a five dollar bill was actually a fifty dollar bill.  “You live, you learn,” he’d told her.

Even though she’d picked up on some strangeness about them, she managed to cling to them and get herself adopted.  She had second thoughts when she noticed the queer reflection in the mirror, but figured that she might as well stick with this option as the streets weren’t a better one.  She helped them deal with a nasty orphanage she had spent a stint in and then James finally revealed what he was to her.

She’s learned a lot in the past four years and hasn’t regretted a moment of it.  Even the bits where she’d had to play the hapless kid to lure in some food for James or when she’d had to hide under the bed while a stick-armed creature roamed the house or ... well, a lot of it was scary but that was all right because they were family.

Charlotte’s both more mature than her years would suggest and also far more childish.  James has encouraged her immaturity as he’s more comfortable with her as a child than a teenager.  She’s also been happy to sort of re-live her lost childhood during the gaps amongst their hunting trips.  Her time as a malnourished street kid followed by a somewhat better fed hunter living off truck stop dining has also stunted her growth so she can sometimes pass for twelve.

Age: 14
Species: Human
Gender: Female

Virtue: Hope
Vice: Pride

Intelligence: 4
Wits: 3
Resolve: 2

Strength: 2
Dexterity: 2
Stamina: 2

Presence: 3
Manipulation: 2
Composure: 2

Academics: 2
Computer: 0
Crafts: 1 (Vehicular Repair)
Investigation: 2
Medicine: 1
Occult: 3
Politics: 0
Science: 2

Athletics: 2
Brawl: 1
Drive: 1
Firearms: 1
Larceny: 1
Stealth: 1
Survival: 1
Weaponry: 0

Animal Ken: 1 (Dogs)
Empathy: 2
Expression: 0
Intimidation: 0
Persuasion: 0
Socialise: 0
Streetwise: 2
Subterfuge: 2 (Innocence)

Morality: 6
Willpower: 4
Experience Points: 50 exp

Merits
In this game, I use the LARP rules for merits whereby simple merits cost Total Dots x 2 while complex merits must have each level bought separately.

Danger Sense **
Fleet of Foot ***
Languages (English, Italian, French)

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