Elena de'Medici
Character Bio
Name
Elena de'Medici
Player
NowhereWoman
Vampire, Doll or Were-creature
Vampire
Age
440
Claimed
None
Orientation
Straight
Hair
Black, cut short
Eyes
Gray
Height
5'4
Appearance
Svelte and remarkably petite, taking more after her French parent. Always impeccably dressed and groomed, usually in designer fashions. Pierced ears, uses light makeup to give her skin a more living appearance.
Personality
While she can be quite imperious at times, she is also very indulgent towards the dolls around her. Not terribly interested in coven politics or much of anything other than beauty, she spends her time dressing up anyone who will hold still, and painting competent but average portraits of the other denizens of La Nuit. She's also a passingly decent pianist, and spends hours every day listening to selections from her gigantic collection of CDs.
Like many Mediterraneans, she tends to speak floridly and with her hands; she has impeccable manners, but also a volcanic temper, when truly roused.
Ability
Enhanced Memory. Mistress of no trade, but Jill of dozens, if not hundreds, Elena remembers anything she's ever learned how to do, even across hundreds of years. She doesn't get any better at it, necessarily, but she never loses the facility she gained during her apprenticeship.
Animal
Ons & Offs
Ons & Offs Elena prefers her women feminine and her men masculine, and both reasonably clean-cut. She has no issues with waifish or andro looks, but too butch girls or too femme men, lots of skin art, excess piercings, or sloppy dress and manners offend her sense of style. She prefers men for long-term liaisons, usually, but will quite happily cuddle and play with a woman; her sexual tastes are pretty conservative beyond that.
History
Born sometime in the summer of 1576 (as an out of wedlock birth, there are no records, or none that survive, at least), Elena is one of several unrecognized children of Giuliano de'Medici, fathered just after he was created Bishop of Albi. As was the custom among more noble sorts, the Bishop settled handsomely with Elena's mother, with the understanding the girl would never know of her patrician blood.
Olympia Pierro honored her promise for over twenty years until, on her deathbed, she confessed to her daughter who her father had been. By that time, the Bishop had been dead for almost a decade and so, with a healthy inheritance and no way to prove her paternity, Elena did the sensible thing, and went on a grand tour of Europe, leaving behind the depressed, plague-ridden walled market town.
Somewhere along the line, possibly as far east as the Russian frontier- she's vague about exactly when and where, and the story changes in small details when she can be convinced to tell it- she fell in with a caravan of Gypsies. Apparently the usual revulsion for the Traveling People that was prevalent at that time didn't influence her, for she took a young man of the clan (or his sister, or possibly both- again, she's rather unspecific) as a lover. In every version she tells, however, this is when she was Embraced, by her lover, at about the age of 30. The Romani clan, far from fearing the vampire living among them, saw it as a matter of pride- as well as no small protection against bandits and pogroms.
Elena traveled with her lover and sire all over the Continent for nearly a century, all that time using her mother's name. In Barcelona, however, her sire was recognized for what he was and killed by a band of vampire hunters, a fate she escaped by the lucky accident of having been at a concert that evening. Feeling his death like a knife in her own heart, she fled the concert and the city, killing a member of the City Watch in the process, and went into hiding.
The fugitive returned at last to France, which remained the center of her activities for the next two centuries, with a few brief interruptions. The covens in both Paris and Marseille were both ancient, and well-versed in hiding among humans, aided in the masquerade by the chaos or war that shook Europe nearly constantly throughout the 18th and 19th centuries- and also by the vogue for extremely pale skin for women. At one time or another, she was a courtesan,a painter's model, a painter in her own right, a trader in jewelry, an innkeeper, a nurse, a 'gypsy' fortune teller (no doubt drawing from her real experiences) and a clothier- the last of which she still pursues as a hobby to this day. Here it was that she reclaimed her paternal name, changing from Pierro to de'Medici.
In fact, she didn't leave Europe for good until 1940, just before the fall of France in World War 2. She claims to have been working as a mannequin for Coco Chanel at the time (and was one of the fashionista's lovers, or so she's implied several times), and when Mademoiselle closed her establishment in anticipation of the Nazi invasion, Elena collected what cash and transferable paper she had, and fled. It's hard to say why one of her tastes would not have settled in one of the large cities on one of the Coasts; she claims that even then they were 'too loud, too busy'. More likely it's that New Orleans, with its still heavy French influences, reminds her the most of where she spent the majority of her existence.
