Prisca D'Antomedes
Character Bio
Name
Prisca D'Antomedes
Player
HannibalBarca
Vampire, Doll or Were-creature
Vampire
Age
1999
Claimed
None
Orientation
Bisexual
Hair
Dark Brown
Eyes
Blue
Height
5' 1/2"
Appearance
Prisca's appearance depends upon her mood. She is a stunningly beautiful woman in any regards, though very petite and slender. Her body, while strong as a vampire, appears delicate and dainty. She has small, full breasts and the curves of a woman just come into her own. Her dark brown hair falls in magnificent waves down her back. Her eyes are her best features, though; deep, sea-blue pools that can entrance with desire or flash with dangerous passion. In those eyes one will find a clear indication of her mood and emotion.
Personality
Prisca, as one would expect of someone nearly two thousand years old, has a deep and complex personality. Multiple personalities, you could say, if it wasn't for the fact that she is always in complete control of all of them...more costumes, to be truthful. She is a manipulator and deceiver, layering persona upon persona, so that even she is not certain of her true personality any longer. It isn't something that she bothers to concern herself with. With each new relationship she enters with another person, she virtually creates another variation of herself, and regardless of the way the relationship always ends, she now has yet another layer of self-deceit upon her original self.
She can act helpless, innocent, and fragile—when she wants to project that as a ruse to catch others unaware. She can also portray herself with a scarcely-contained fire—her deep eyes smoldering with lust, passion, or danger. Needless to say, she is an accomplished actress, and has had ample time to hone her skills of manipulation and deceit...she can turn on the charm and sex appeal, or radiate dominance and mastery with a frightening, overpowering danger and arrogance.
Priss is beyond any particular need or desire at this stage of her existence, only taking what pleasure suits her current whims. She has loved, and lost, many times, and long ago resigned any expectation of true happiness—so she spends her time exacting emotional responses from others as a form of enjoyment, whether those emotions stem from terror or joy, hatred or depression. There are so many scales of protection around her heart that her empathy is all but dead. However, there is always a chance that someone—male or female—may awaken her long-vanished need for love and affection, both giving and receiving.
She gives an observer the initial idea of an incredibly outgoing, intelligent, confident (or arrogant) young woman who shows no fear whatsoever. She also shows a lack of concern over the opinions of others, and behaves and dresses as she wishes, when she wishes. She goes along with what others 'order' her to do only as a means to an end, for she accepts no other being, human or otherwise, as her better. She has been through too much to ever let another control or dominate her.
Ability
Fire Manipulation, Heat Generation. Prisca can both create fire of her own, and control her own and other, natural fires. The maximum strength of her flame is dependent on her emotional state, however--the more she is feeling, the hotter it can get. When she is calm, the hottest she can make it is about 600 F--a little hotter than a typical oven. She is immune to her self-generated flame, but can still be injured by normal fires. She can also choose to make her flame non-injurious to others. The temperature of her own flame can go from mildly warming to cutting torch plasma--which she will use as a bladed weapon when she is really, really pissed off. After centuries of practice, she can create usable objects from her own flame, including weapons, tools, rope (for binding), and even armor for herself that will burn those who come in contact with her.
Ons & Offs
Prisca is a worldly and accomplished lover, having tried virtually every fetish known other than scat and watersports. She enjoys everything from vanilla sex to BDSM, but she has to be in the mood for whatever particular one she indulges herself and her partner in. My O&O page here[1]
History
The woman known as Prisca D'Antomedes was born Prisca Calliste Lucia Corvus Valerii, the first child of the Roman senator and general Marcus Fabius Corvus and his wife, Oriana Dione Aglaea Lentinus Corvus. Her childhood was remarkable for a highborn Roman girl-child in the age of Augustus Caesar—protected from corruption, educated, loved and yet taught to love in kind. Marcus was a doting and conscientious father, and Prisca's mother taught her to give ground to neither man nor woman except in love. She eventually had four brothers and three sisters after her in the burgeoning family, and for Prisca life was a wonder and a joy to experience. She was a particularly good dancer and singer, and used these art forms to express her inner fire of life.
Alas, Prisca's happy existence was to end both abruptly and horrifyingly at nineteen when Marcus accepted the position of advisor to the new governor of Germania, Publius Quinctilius Varus. Unfortunately, Germania was as yet unconquered, and in his arrogance, Publius led his five legions, cavalry, and the family members they brought with them into the historic slaughter that was known as the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, in which the germanic Cherusci led by Arminius annihilated virtually the entire Roman force. The battle went poorly to begin, but the Romans managed to put up a tough fight despite their army being spread over twenty kilometers, and a raging thunderstorm causing chaos and confusion. Prisca's father and brother Marcus Tarentus Corvus died bravely, defending their family, and when a Cherusci warrior came to capture her mother, Prisca, in a burst of rage, picked up her father's fallen sword and ran the warrior through.
But there were simply too many. Excited at the prospect of capturing a Roman girl with such spirit, several warriors moved to take her. She and her remaining family, with a handful of legionnaires, retreated into the scream-filled night, and the storm-ravaged forest. There were enemies everywhere, and one by one the others were killed or captured. Oriana drew a vial of poison from her dress, and implored her remaining family to take it, to avoid the horrifying possibility of enslavement by the barbaric Cherusci. All took it but Prisca—the fire of life was far too strong in her, especially after killing the enemy warrior—and she watched the life slip from the eyes of her mother, her arms around her. Then she ran, for the violent enemy was unceasing in searching for more prizes of battle, and she left behind forever the Prisca she had once been.
Finally, she found herself lost, in a very dark area of the forest, though still there were bodies of the fallen crumpled here and there, near trees or sprawled upon the wet forest detritus. Then, before her, was a huge warrior, adorned in the gear of a chieftain. He was wiping his blade clean, but his face was wet with the blood of a gravely wounded centurion. Unknown to Prisca, he was Vulferam, both a vampire and a great champion of the Cherusci. Seeing the Roman maiden, he sheathed his blade and rose. She was terrified, yet still able to gather the courage to turn and run; but she had no chance against the Cherusci vampire, and he caught her easily.
That was the end of Prisca's life as she knew it. Fortunately—or unfortunately—Vulferam was intoxicated by her youthful beauty. He forced her down, then drained her blood near to death, only to feed it back to her and make her—as he saw it—his slave for eternity. But before he could rape her, a fleeing Roman soldier saw him atop the Roman girl and, in an act of righteous selflessness, hurled his pilum through Vulferam's back, piercing his heart through with the wooden-shafted spear and killing him. Prisca's hero was slain moments later by the Cherusci who had been chasing him, sacrificing his life to save Prisca from violation.
Still unknowing of the strange and powerful sensations mixing with her own emotions of fear and horror, Prisca rose and ran, much further than she would have ever been able to do before, but in her state she did not pay attention to this fact. By the time she stopped, she was not exhausted physically, but emotionally. She collapsed in a muddy hollow under a rock overhang, and did not wake until morning's light began to burn her, forcing her further back into the shadows.
The next several weeks saw her struggle to survive and cope with the unearthly condition she found her body in. Vampires were virtually unknown in Rome at the time—at least, they had kept their existence well-hidden—and she had no idea what was happening to her. She eventually gave in to her baser vampiric instincts, feeding on animals to sustain her, until she caught a lone Cherusci warrior searching for loot from the battle. Spotting the bedraggled, filthy girl, he thought he had an easy trophy...until she gutted him in her rage and drank him dry. The power she then felt was as intoxicating as anything she'd ever felt in her life, and she knew then that she was invested with some kind of godlike power, which at that time she chose to use to wreak vengeance upon the Cherusci for the murder of her entire family. For nearly twenty years, Prisca remained in the forest, haunting the dark under the forest eaves by day, killing the occasional intruder, and by night entering nearby camps or villages, always taking strong grown men and warriors in her hate.
By this time, she had mastered her basic vampiric abilities through trial and error, and had come to form a new power, born of the heated rage and burning hatred in her darkened soul for the destroyers of her life. She found herself able to summon flame from her hands, and after practice and experimentation, found she could not only direct it towards a target, but mold and shape it into other forms, such as weapons or a burning sheath that she could surround herself with, making her appear aflame yet unconsumed. She could also manipulate other sources of fire, and use them for her own purposes, though those flames she did not create herself brought the risk of destruction by fire for her—her own flames did not harm her in the least. Most of the time she used her powers of fire to enhance her appearance, and building a reputation as a haunting spectre who guarded the final resting place of so many slaughtered Roman dead.
After sixty years of terrorizing the Teutoburg countryside, the Cherusci people had given her a name, the Maiden of Flame—a fitting spirit of vengeance for the Roman dead, they believed, and it wasn't far from the truth at all. It was then that she found her vengeance sated, and she journeyed back to Rome. By this time, no one alive would have remembered her there, and she took up a new identity, Prisca Oriana Regillus. In those times, faking an identity was easy with the Roman Empire so widespread. It was there in Rome that she spent her next forty or so years, building upon her early and miniscule power, learning rhetoric and politics and seeing to it that she amassed as much wealth as possible. She took a husband, Paulus Septimus Vestalis, and shared a bed for the first time with him. He was her lone point of happiness in her unlife, but being her first romance and relationship, she was not prepared for the inevitable outcome. As he grew older and she did not, she revealed to him her powers, explaining that she was “the daughter of a goddess and a mortal man”. Paulus accepted this, and treated her no less special than before, with the utmost devotion. Their marriage was fulfilling, with both assisting the other to improve their common lot and advance their family...though they had no children, which gave her the greatest sorrow she knew with him.
Finally, when Paulus was near death, she tried in vain to find a way to give him the same immortality that she had, but—she did not have an elder vampire or coven to instruct her, and had not been conscious when Vulferam had converted her. She watched her husband die of an illness, possibly cancer, with the power to save him, but ignorant of it. It was her second great tragedy, and for many people thatt would have been tragedy enough, but Prisca was vampire now, and heir to many, many more tragedies and triumphs.
After Paulus' death, she liquidated her assets, and traveled to Egypt, which was a Roman province at the time. She took up residence in Alexandria, and studied at the library there as often as she could, trying to learn of her powers. By now she was quite certain of her immortality, and of her blood hunger—which was easily sated with criminals and others she found distasteful. However, the long years—over 120 now—had found her morality slipping by degrees, and she began to prey more and more on what most would call 'normal' people. She rationalized that she wasn't killing them, but giving them a taste of what the gods knew, as she thought her power came from—she knew that her bite caused euphoria for her victims, so she decided that it was actually a blessing to one to be bit.
She carried on like this, moving every forty years or so, to keep up appearances as a youthful-appearing woman, traveling from Alexandria to New Carthage in Spain, then Londinium. By the time she arrived in Britain, the Roman power was at its peak, and Emperor Hadrian was having his wall built in Northern Britain to keep the savage pre-Scots out of Roman territory. For the next eight hundred years, Prisca lived amongst the various tribes and peoples of Britain and Ireland, picking up more and more information on what she was. In the process she made friends with the Druidic peoples, and tried in vain to save them from Roman incursion. By this time she was staunchly against Roman expansionism, and had come full circle, seeing why the Cherusci had so violently destroyed the army her family had traveled with. Once the Roman Empire began to slowly decay and crumble, she continued on in Britain, until her final fateful encounter with her first vampire since Volferam.
Her name was Lady Kyla Eirwen Moireasdan (Kyla Irene Morrison in modern English), and she had been made a vampire by her knight husband, who had died while they were fighting a pack of werewolves who'd encroached upon their territory. Coming into contact with one another in the town that would one day be known as Coventry, they both were wealthy landed gentry by that time, both widowed, and both moved into a larger home to take advantage of their powers and wealth. For Prisca, it was a revelation to meet another vampire, and to know what she was.
Kyla was neither altruistic nor overly concerned with anyone else in the world, and though she had not been a vampire as long as Prisca, she became the dominant one. It was all Prisca could do not to immediately fall in love with the haunting, blue-eyed redhead. It was not unheard of for women to have affairs in her era of Rome, but in Britain it was a thing to keep hidden, and hide it they did. They became lovers and as a couple became integral to the growth of Coventry through the years. And while they did not seek to save the folk of the new city from inevitable Dark Ages disasters like the plague, they did participate and behind the scenes attempt to grow their city in the direction they wanted--filled with wondrous architecture, fine gardens; an unearthly quality of beauty they instilled in it from themselves. It can be said that the wonder of Coventry as a beautiful city is partially the fault of two vampires.
As for Prisca, she took to calling herself Lucia, or Lucy, while she lived with Kyla. She felt as if she had been reborn. An entirely new layer to her personality was laid over the old, and Kyla introduced her to many of the darker, less savory aspects of sexuality. She knew now what she was, and had a partner who not only knew of it, but shared it with her freely and pleasurably. It was a freeing kind of sensation and emotion she'd never known before. The years with Kyla were spent productively and lustily, as they explored both each other and their pet project of making Coventry into a place of everlasting beauty. Through different persona over the next 230 years, they helped their home make an amazing amount of progress.
It wasn't meant to last, however. As the Dark Ages grew into the Middle Ages, witch hunting and dangers of many other kinds grew up to combat many of the darker things that walked the earth, but mostly innocent ones were caught up and destroyed in humanity's religious fervor and fear of the unknown. Kyla and Prisca were victims of a mob, trapped while they slept during the day, tied securely so even their vampiric strength could not help them, and set to burn at the stake. For Kyla, it was her end--she was not old enough of a vampire to resist the flames and sun together, but Prisca, mistress of flame and enraged, surrounded herself with her own fire, preventing the normal flame from harming her in any way. She burst from the pyre after she burned the ropes away, rose into the sky wreathed in flames, and proceeded to burn much of the city down in her rage and loss. She continued her rampage well after nightfall, and only stopped when she realized she could not bring Kyla back.
Prisca could not stand the thought of continuing to live in the land where her beloved Kyla had died, so she left and went to France, even refusing to speak English. Over the next two centuries, she moved across mainland Europe, though always came back to France, and Paris, which was her semi-permanent base of operations. Besides being the most advanced European city of its time, with sewers and a university--The Sorbonne--she had come to identify with the French people. After Kyla, she had sworn off of personal relationships, instead living a wild, carefree life, falling into relationships at roadside taverns at night, and moving on during the day, preying on brigands who almost always picked the slight, diminutive woman as an easy target on her horse, alone, traveling the lawless countryside between the reaches of local feudal lords. Oftentimes she would slaughter entire bands of cut-throats, or play the role of a harlot and sleep with many of the warriors in a mercenary band, leaving in the morning with most or all of them dead in their sleep. Death was a form of distraction for her, but always she became disgusted with herself, and would retreat to Paris again, to take up her studies, for she had always had a love of learning.
Her affection for the French people would end after the Hundred Years' War. She was an admirer of Joan of Arc, and when she heard of her death and means of such--so similar to Kyla's--she blamed the entire French people for it. She went on a sinister, silent rampage in Paris, singling out innocent Parisians who, in her rationalizing mind, had somehow contributed to Joan's--and therefore Kyla's--death. Finally sated, she left France, seeking solace in Italy again, though by now it was a collection of city-states.
She settled in Florence, becoming intimately connected to the Medici Family, as her personality had become darker after Kyla's death, and only deepened upon leaving France. This was her most conflicted period, when she actively pursued the agenda of her adopted family, becoming a skilled assassin and provocateur, interweaving herself into the intrigues that brought noble families into conflict with one another over the papacy and the control of the various cities. At the same time, she finally indulged in her lifelong love of dance, becoming a prodigy with her knowledge of so many styles. She continued to learn from various masters of both dance and knowledge, her art becoming the only positive outlet for her terrible emotions brought upon by her past and her violent present. It was at this time she took up the surname of D'Antomedes, from a beloved dance instructor--Antonio Gaspar D'Antomedes. He was an accepting, compassionate and confident middle-aged man in amazing physical condition due to his career, and Prisca fell in love with him almost immediately. They became lovers, and for a short time of eight years she had a semblance of happiness amid the turmoil of the times and her profession.
But while she was away on a mission to Naples, he fell ill with an unknown disease, and by the time she returned he was near death. She revealed to him who and what she was, and told him she could save his life...but he refused, saying all things must end sometime, and told her that she must accept it, too. He told her he loved her all the more for being honest with him and sharing with him her deepest secrets, and they spent the remaining hours of his life with him asking her of her long past, and she indulging him. She continued sharing her past with him after he'd died, only ceasing when his body was cold--she'd not had such a cathartic yet painful experience since her time with Kyla.
After Antonio, Prisca continued her work for the Medicis, spending over three hundred long years in various identities with them, gaining mastery of the arts of deception, assassination, and great skill with the small, agile sorts of weapons that would fit the persona of a small, slender woman of her size--rapiers, dirks, daggers, scimitars and sabres. By now she was very resistant to the effects of sunlight, and did her work by day or night, though she still preferred the night--both her ability to terrorize and the effect of her fire manipulation were heightened in the dark.
Still, after so long a professional killer, the lifestyle and the constant intrigue wore on her, and she finally sought to travel to the newly-discovered Americas. She headed to Spain and assumed the guise of a Spanish noblewoman--her Spanish, among many other languages, was flawless--and took ship to Cuba, which was at that time the capital of the Spanish Empire in the New World. There she became infatuated with the promise of new, unexplored lands, and took up a new identity--Lucello Marroquin, a half-Spanish, half-Italian explorer, hiding her gender with the skills she'd learned in Italy. She traveled throughout what would become the Caribbean, Mexico, Florida, Louisiana, Venezuela, Colombia, and Central America. For four decades she acquainted herself with the native peoples of those lands, until their treatment at the hands of the Spaniards drove her to side with them, and she became, once again, an avenging spirit of fire. But there were simply too many invaders coming, and while she could protect the native Americans from death by sword, she could not protect them from the multitude of diseases the Europeans brought with them.
She moved north, up the North American coast, from St. Augustine, coming into contact with newly-establish English colonies in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New England. Here, too, she found the arrogant and superior attitude of the rather overly-religious puritans towards the natives disgusting, as well as the slavery of Africans only, and continued on until she reached Canada. There, to her surprise, she found the French colonists much more amenable to the original people of America, many actually intermarrying. Settling in Quebec, she rediscovered a concern for the French people, and stayed there as a wealthy colonist, taking many lovers, both French and native, male and female, until the war that saw England defeat France and take control of Canada. This made her decide to move further into the wilds of North America, living with various tribes over the proceeding 180 years. Eventually, she made her way to the Pacific Coast of what would someday be British Columbia, and worked up into Alaska, continuing to discover new tribes of natives, learning their languages and ways, and then moving on before her lack of aging would raise suspicions.
She finally headed back down the Pacific Coast, in time to serendipitously see Louis and Clarke's expedition arrive in modern-day Oregon. She had been away from white civilization for many, many years, and upon hearing of the formation of the United States from some of the natives after the explorers left, she was intrigued. Such a country based on the choice of all of the people had not been known to her since the times of the Roman Republic before her birth, and she desired to explore this new nation further. She spent the next year traveling to the East Coast, finally returning to New York City in 1816.
The vibrancy and promise of the new country reinvigorated her, and she thought that perhaps she would find a new purpose and satisfaction with her existence there. For 24 years she traveled the new nation, absorbing its history, cultures, background, and constantly-evolving population. Finally, after over three hundred years of a nomadic lifestyle, she was hungry for a settled life, and moved to Massachusetts, finding the state's attitudes towards slavery conducive to her--of all of the new land's vices, slavery disturbed her the most, and she joined the fledgeling abolitionist movement, eventually meeting notables such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. Prisca now called herself Callista D'Antomedes, and she worked tirelessly to assist in the ending of slavery, in some ways also her own way of atoning for her many, many acts of wickedness over her years of vampirism.
This, however, brought her into her first conflict with other vampires...a coven based in Richmond, Virginia, that was all too eager to continue the tenets of American slavery and the feudalistic antebellum South. The Richmond coven hoped to engineer slavery for humans of any ethnicity, then humans in general, with vampires as their masters. Callista found herself coming into conflict with them repeatedly, and while she kept her vampirism hidden to the best of her ability, they eventually discovered it and offered her a place within their coven. Her violently defiant response to their messenger in her Boston home left no doubt as to whether she was an enemy or not. Soon enough, attempts on her unlife were being made, but Callista had kept something else entirely secret--her abilities as an assassin and combatant. With her abilities of deception, she was able to convince the coven that she was only a recently-turned vampire, with little or no skills, and the initial vampires sent to kill her died in ways that she made seem entirely separate and accidental. But she knew that would only be accepted for so long.
She then took the fight to their home. After planning for two months, she made her move, swooping down upon the coven and slaughtering every last member in their own homes, many during the day, before they could mount an effective defense. She had learned which ones were the eldest and most powerful, and destroyed those first, leaving the weaker ones to slay at her leisure--something she suddenly took great pleasure in. When her slaughter was complete, she withdrew to Boston once again, but the sudden journey into darkness and violence again had made her eager to leave America. She took ship to England once more, knowing that slavery was illegal there, and found a quiet estate on the Scottish moors to make a home of.
Here she assumed again the name of Prisca, though the modern version of Priscilla. She lived alone there but for a few loyal blood doll servants, and was as seclusive as possible, desiring neither human, vampire, or were contact. Throughout the Victorian Age, she spent her years there, seeking solace for a soul that could find peace only through intimacy with others, but not daring to be intimate with anyone for fear of losing them again. She would occasionally share her bed with her dolls, but never allowed herself to become attached to them. Indeed, she began to indulge in darker and darker fantasies with them, using the sexual repression of the times to bring out their own deepest sexual appetites. Now, instead of a fulfilling happy life, or killing, she used sex as an outlet for her life's frustrations and agonies.
When World War One arose, she volunteered to spy for her adopted country, becoming familiar with Germany again. After the war, she slipped back into anonymity on her estate, but with the advent of World War Two, she again assisted her nation as a spy. This time, the war ended with her still in Germany, and after leaving the service of the government, she traveled to the Teutoberg Forest, instinctively finding the spot at which her life had ended and the vampire was born. Lying down amid the fallen leaves and light misting rain, she let her mind wander over the centuries of experiences she'd had, and the people with whom she'd shared them with. She paid her respects to her long-dead family, and those who died with them, as well as the Cherusci who had fought to keep invaders from despoiling their lands. It was the closest to closure she'd had since becoming a vampire, and she felt the need to move on from her home in Scotland, to begin a new chapter in her unlife.
She again chose the United States, seeing it once more changing and growing, having finally shed slavery, if not racism. For a time, she lived once again in Boston, but after a year was too saddened by the lack of former friends and acquaintances. Instead, she moved to Chicago and began a dance studio. By this time the advent of photography and mass media was making it more and more difficult to stand out in a civilization without questions being brought up over close resemblances to other 'people'--really herself--and so she began to assume personalities more in-line with middle-class lifestyles. Always, though, as she had always done, she remained self-sufficient, continuing to amass wealth, and remain aloof from other supernatural groups like covens and were-packs.
She eventually chose to abandon standard society altogether, first as a beatnik, then in the fledgeling rock-and-roll culture. She started small, but ended up becoming something of a well-known singer and performer by the 70s and 80s. She adored aggressive music--it appealed to the sometimes-dormant, sometimes-burning rage within her, and naturally gravitated towards heavy metal and its various genres. She finally gained fame as simply Callista, a speed metal/goth vocalist with her own backing band, though she did try to keep her appearance somewhat under wraps with makeup, on stage or in public. By the early 2000s, she was quite famous, having already outlived many of her contemporaries, and able to go on the cover of plastic surgery to explain her still-youthful appearance. However, by 2012, she was tiring of the rock and roll lifestyle. For nearly 2000 years, she had lived life at the same moderate pace, but the fast, modern style of living was taking a toll--not on her physical body, but her sanity. She decided to fake her death--from a completely believable drug overdose--and start again, with a less-hectic pace.
It was with this in mind that she found herself in La Jara, hearing from other vampires she'd come into contact with in the last year or so that a coven was forming there. She was nearing her two-thousandth year of existence, and for such a momentous occasion, she had made a momentous decision--she'd finally join a coven herself. For all of her time, other than her relationship with Kyla, she had lived apart from her kind. Now, in many ways, she ached for the contact with others of her kind. However, the fact that she hadn't ever spent time in the company of a community of vampires makes her a loose cannon of a sort. She is fiercely independent, though she knows that to live in a community of any sorts requires one to accept what is good for the group, not just the individual. She'd spent many a year in human communities, and to her, she still pictures herself as human, just with greater powers. She's never bought into the angst and self-hatred that many vampires possess as anything more than normal human emotions stretched out over centuries. In fact, she has no idea what to expect in the coven, and that is part of why she wishes to join it.
