The Devil’s Darling

Per request, a Lasombra privateer. The tone’s a bit different with this one, allowing for a bit more action-and-adventure-style Vampire chronicles.

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Esperanza Lucifer, the Devil’s Darling

Few Kindred are so renowned as to be known beyond the limits of the city in which they have made their haven. The interests of the Damned are almost universally personal and rarely furthered by activity that exceeds the geographic boundary of their own domains. In fact, despite a salacious social construct that elevates its saints and bogeymen to artificial heights, most Kindred spend the bulk of their existence in local pursuits. Pursuing a secret, acquiring information, creating a work of art, mastering a Discipline, enjoying a literary or cinematic work, and simply overseeing one’s nightly affairs takes time. Even setting aside the never-ending hunt for blood, most Kindred simply have no interest in involving themselves in the affairs of other Kindred who don’t threaten their domains. Even the vaunted Primogen and Princes much prefer to remain big fish in their respective small ponds than small fish in a much larger ocean. Recognition and fame only invite a host of political and supernatural entanglements that offer far more trouble than benefit. Worse, celebrity among the undead is the surest way to draw the attention of hunters, Kindred or otherwise, who seek the famous vampire’s demise.

Some few among the Damned have risen to notoriety, however. Besides the semi-mythical Antediluvians and a host of legendary Methuselahs, for the most part these Kindred are elders whose achievements were instrumental in shaping the modern society of vampires. Hardestadt, for example, whether admired or reviled, is known across the globe by many Kindred for his role in the founding of the Camarilla. On the other hand, Francisco Domingo de Polonia, the one-time Sabbat Archbishop of New York City, achieved fame primarily due to the global importance of his domain. In addition, certain Justicars and a few of those they hunt have also become known throughout the world’s Elysiums. Still, besides their names, little else of these figures is known, even by Kindred of a scholarly nature.

Ultimately, only a handful of Kindred have achieved anything akin to true fame, Kindred who have by virtue of their deeds and misdeeds become legend. One of these, a rogue whose exploits have been recounted by the Damned from Los Angeles to St. Petersburg is Esperanza Lucifer, the Devil of the Deep.

According to some accounts, Esperanza was the daughter of a Spanish naval commander who fought the mostly French and English buccaneers who patrolled the waters off the coast of Haiti, then Hispaniola. Others claim that she was actually a prostitute, brought to the island of Tortuga by the French to sate the rampant lusts of the local pirates. A few voices say she was both, a lord’s daughter captured and forced into prostitution by her captors. Whatever the truth, all tales agree that she was quite young and quite beautiful, with long, fair tresses and eyes of the deepest blue, like the sea.

Aristocrat or harlot, Esperanza fell in love with a veteran captain employed by the Dutch West India Company, one Hendrick Jacobszoon, a rather rough-around-the-edges fellow who adopted the surname Lucifer to enhance his image among friend and foe alike. How the affair began is the subject of a plethora of very different stories, but in 1627 the two were together when Hendrick’s ship had a fateful encounter with a pair of Spanish ships sailing from Honduras.

The Dutch West India Company ships, for there were three in all, dared not let the opportunity pass and so set upon the Spanish ships, succeeding in capturing one, while the other escaped their barbarous clutches. The fighting was fierce and Hendrick was injured by a bullet in the action. Ignoring pain, he fought as if possessed of some preternatural potency and so won the day, as well as an untold fortune in guilders. He was unable to enjoy the spoils, however. Later that day in his own cabin, Esperanza at his side, he breathed his last.

Terrified at being left alone with Hendrick’s bloodthirsty crew now that her protector was gone, Esperanza racked her brain for a way of avoiding what seemed an obvious and unwholesome fate. She hatched a scheme that called upon all the imagination, courage, self-control, and willpower she could muster, along with a hearty helping of rum. Emboldened by drink and what she saw as her only possible recourse, clad in some of the accoutrements of her now-deceased lover, armed with his pistol and rapier, the young girl vanished in the blood-stained cabin and the new captain of the ship stepped onto the deck.

The crew was flabbergasted at Esperanza’s daring and thought it a joke, laughing at the woman’s audacity. The humor died when one of the pirates dared to grab her and found six inches of steel in his stomach, courtesy of the self-anointed Captain Esperanza Lucifer. The action gave her enough room to quickly tell the crew of how, unless they accepted her command, they would suffer at the hands of the Spanish. She surprised even herself with her rhetorical gifts at that moment and feared it might not prove enough for the hungry, drunken crew, but many were exhausted, wounded, and in no more mood for violence. They had their gold and they wanted little more than to return to port to enjoy their share of the plunder. Until they made port, most reasoned, the sailors might as well give her the service she wanted.

Esperanza’s initial plan to flee upon making land did not come to pass. Perhaps she had nowhere to go, or she was more worried about her fate away from the crew than with them. Or, she simply realized the potential offered by being a pirate captain. Again, it matters little to most Kindred what her thinking was. What is of importance is what happened a few years later when, for a second time on the high seas, she faced a truly life-altering decision.

Word of Captain Lucifer’s “mutiny” were widespread, especially in Tortuga and among those seafarers who frequented the infamous port city. She became one of the most wanted pirates when the Spanish recaptured the town in 1654, yet she proved exceptionally capable of evading capture… for a time. But all man’s works must come to an end and her own ship, which she had rechristened the Devil’s Darling, finally met a force that it could not outgun or outrun.

Esperanza’s foe was not another ship, but rather a mysterious visitor who appeared on deck one particularly stormy night, master of the briny waves who proved unbeatable. A Lasombra of great age — some claim a Methuselah, even — rose from the depths of the churning sea, a creature of the abyss who was inexorably drawn to the charismatic pirate captain. Under cover of unnatural darkness and torrential rains, the shadowy vampire entered Esperanza’s cabin and introduced itself. Those who tell the tale hotly debate its name and even gender, but it was undeniably potent. One version of the story even claims that the Lasombra was the Antediluvian’s spawn and that it had lain in torpor beneath the sea floor since the Great Deluge, rising only when it was tasted a tide-borne drop of the fiery Captain Lucifer’s blood.

The Ancient had fed on nearly half the crew before entering the private bedchamber in order to quench its ungodly hunger, so that when it did enter and present itself to the half-asleep woman, it was able to do so with a demeanor of civility. The incalculable power of its presence and the unbelievable words it spoke left Esperanza incapable of responding. When she finally did, the legend says she agreed to become like her visitor only so long as she was permitted to keep her ship and crew, which had apparently become her life’s purpose. The Lasombra gave its word that she would be able to do as she pleased, then it unleashed the forces of the ocean’s blackest depths and she drowned in the darkness of its Embrace.

Of course, a few stories relate Esperanza’s activities or whereabouts for the next decade. Some among the Night Clan assumed that she accompanied her sire for at least some of this time, learning the ways of the Damned and doing his bidding, whatever that may have been. Suffice to say that in 1666 the Devil’s Darling was again in action and once more making quite the name for itself and its Damned captain. By this time, however, though the ship was involved in a number of well-known acts of traditional piracy, its real target is of far more interest to the Kindred. Esperanza’s primary concern had become the destruction of those Lasombra who did not cleave to the Sabbat, the antitribu traitors who had joined Montano’s cause and threw their support behind the Camarilla and its staid ways.

Throughout the Caribbean and the Atlantic the Devil’s Darling hunted these wayward Lasombra, many of whom had themselves taken to piracy. Perhaps it goes without saying that many of her most recounted battles took place under the light of the moon, though her crew, rumored to be ghouls or revenants possessed of some small measure of supernatural ability, certainly took advantage of daylight to capture enemy vessels and more easily dispatch their captain’s enemies. As the stories of Esperanza’s adventures grew even in her own time, the Camarilla made some effort to put an end to her business, more to protect their financial interests than the Lasombra fugitives she hounded.

It is said that, like her sire, Esperanza came to possess an unusually formidable mastery of Obtenebration, one that seemed fittingly adapted to her environs. In particular, one rather popular tale tells of how she found herself along with another ship cut off from an escape route near Cuba by a half-dozen warships backed by Camarilla interests. As her second ship listed under cannon-fire and her own seemed poised for a similar fate, Captain Lucifer called upon the very void of the ocean depths and from it summoned the mythical Kraken, a nightmarish monstrosity whose umbrageous tentacles rose up from the swelling waves and pulled each of the enemy ships to their watery doom. The crews on board were drained of their vitae, exsanguinated by the hellish thing before being sent to Davy Jones’ Locker.

Some suggest that Esperanza consumed the souls of her foes when she could, sometimes engaging in diablerie and sometimes indulging something even worse, if such a practice exists. This tall tale, and many others, ensured that the Devil’s Darling, as both Esperanza’s ship and later the captain herself were named, would not be easily forgotten and would go down in the history of the Kindred as entertainment at the least, if not actual fact. Even some of her pack, who served as officers both on her flagship and other vessels that comprised the fleet she commanded throughout her career as a buccaneer, gained some acclaim of their own. A particularly repulsive Tzimisce known as Abbatoir, who led the ritae for the Devil’s Darlings and is said to have committed diablerie no less than four times, was put down in 1708 near the Florida Keys by a Gangrel of some esteem. Another member of the pack, a Toreador antitribu named Mogrovejo destroyed a trio of Ventrue, including a childe of London’s Prince, who were traveling to England from the Americas in 1811.

While the great age of piracy finally ended in the mid-1700s, the name of Esperanza Lucifer proved far more durable. Rather than fade away into the shadows along with tales of swashbuckling avarice and dramatic sea battles, the Devil’s Darling continued to make her presence felt in ways that her fellow Kindred could not ignore.

In 1812 Esperanza threw her support behind the just-announced war on Britain by the United States. Quiet for a time, she recruited a crew for her fleet in Baltimore and terrorized ships of the Royal Navy, technically as a privateer under the flag of the U.S. Naturally, the targets chosen were often those ships believed to be transporting Camarilla Kindred, for the Devil’s Darling had by now largely turned her aggressions toward that sect as a whole rather than merely her clan’s antitribu, who were likely too few in number to reasonably pursue. With Lucifer’s ships in play, the Sabbat had a very real impact, with no less than two dozen Kindred meeting their Final Death in the cold waters of the Atlantic.

What is not known to many Kindred storytellers is that by the late 1700s, Esperanza was becoming quite tired of plying the sea lanes for victims. She doubted she would find many more traitorous Lasombra and she felt the heavy bonds of the ennui that plagues so many of the Cainite race, which had progressively extinguished all but a few embers of her previous passions. Whether the heaviness of her sire’s Ancient blood in her dead heart, her own detachment from Humanity that was part and parcel of her Sabbat identity, or something else from deep below the waves, she grew weary of her existence. She so rarely participated in the Vaulderie that even her Vinculi to her packmates had become little more than faint tethers, and were unable to stand the growing might of the dark current that called to her and made her days sleepless.

In 1802, she surrendered to the call of the deep. While her pack performed the Blood Feast on the deck of her flagship, courtesy of a helpless merchant ship that had appeared on the horizon, she summoned from the abyss the same unholy monster that her sire had learned to command, an entity of shadow and evil from elsewhere. She called it to her and then, making her own escape in a rowboat, she released the abyss-thing upon her pack. None survived the calamity besides Esperanza. Relying upon her own wits and now quite impressive gifts, she made her way to Baltimore and hid among the noisy throngs of the city’s busy harbor.

For a time, Esperanza stayed clear of the affairs of the Damned. She made use of her kine contacts in order to access part of her fortune, which she had spread among various institutions and locales throughout the coastal domains of the Atlantic, but otherwise kept to herself and ceased using her infamous name. Part of her regretted what she had done to her fellow Sabbat, but not enough to make any atonement. She was no longer Captain Esperanza Lucifer, but simply a vampire who sought some semblance of solace, and solitude that could not be found while bound to others. In her loneliness, she would return to the ocean, or wherever she must go, to find her sire. She labored without a knowledge why her Ancient sire Embraced her and she desired to be by its side among the darkest shadows of the world.

Vanity intervened. A small part of the Devil’s Darling still did not want to see her legend die, and she came to the decision that before embarking on her journey she would Embrace a childe and bestow upon her progeny the identity and legacy she had spent centuries building. Just as the War of 1812 ignited, Esperanza found her replacement. Like herself, Mary was barely more than a girl when she received a visitor in the black of night. The Devil’s Darling extended an offer to enter the shadows for eternity. A laborer’s girl with no obvious merit, Mary nonetheless had a certain confidence about her that Esperanza was drawn to, as well as an unusual lack of fear. She learned quickly under her mentor’s tutelage, and when the Devil’s Darling appeared off the coast and word spread that she was seeking a crew, the Damned perked up as readily as the kine. Naturally, the living assumed that the ship and its eponymous captain were not the originals — how could they be, over a century after their first tales of infamy? However, the Cainites were not so sure and when the captain introduced herself to a group of Sabbat by the light of a bonfire on a Maryland beach, they were convinced that this was indeed the legendary Captain Lucifer.

To ensure her childe survived her first years, the real Esperanza remained at her side, claiming to be her fledgling’s childe and taking her name, Mary, as her own. In this way the elder Lasombra was able to teach the “new” Esperanza all she needed to know to both command a fleet of ships and a pack of wild-eyed Sabbat Cainites. A few years later, while in the Caribbean at a place where “Mary” felt strongest the call of her own sire’s Blood, she bid her childe farewell and vanished into the ocean, sinking beneath the waves and leaving only one Esperanza to the Sabbat.

Esperanza (the younger) proved nearly as capable as her predecessor, though her interest in the seafaring unlife waned and by the mid-1800s she had abandoned her legacy and made her way on land. Some members of her pack remained with her when she turned her back on the ocean, but the Devil’s Darlings never truly disbanded. Instead, the pack served its sect by supporting a series of actions against the Camarilla in the Americas. From Florida to Boston, Esperanza’s reputation grew as her pack ran the length of the East Coast striking at its enemies and plundering their precious vitae. The pack ranged in size from as many as a dozen vampires to as few as four, but bound by their Vinculi, they were always a force to be reckoned with.

For the next two centuries, Esperanza Lucifer led her band of marauding Sabbat in an inchoate, yet effective crusade on many Camarilla domains. In truth, there was nothing random or unplanned in what they did. While most packmates were unaware of it, Esperanza and those closest to her had actually been very precise in deciding what the pack would and would not do. The destruction of the arrogant Camarilla Kindred was surely a worthwhile goal, but this inner circle had another, more overriding aim: a transition from nomadic unlife to that of a founded pack. Even as they harangued the Camarilla and its close ties to the kine and their money, the Devil’s Darling’s adopted the same practices as their nemeses in order to grow the great wealth Esperanza already possessed on account of her sire. She hadn’t wasted the intervening centuries. Rather Esperanza had studied economics and understood their importance, even to the unliving, and she felt that without real financial assets the Sabbat would eventually find itself outmaneuvered. With money she could purchase loyal agents among the kine, and she could protect herself from her growing list of enemies’ moves against her.

Even as her pack massacred the kine and stormed the havens of their elders in the name of the Sabbat, she took advantage of the mayhem to seize whatever assets she could: cash, unsecured stocks,  and bearer bond certificates, property deeds, and whatever else she could get her hands on. To make use of these employed a small network of accountants, lawyers, businessmen, and bureaucrats, all isolated from one another, but nonetheless pawns ready to cross ethical boundaries in return for a small cut of the illicit gains. Indeed, the Devil’s Daughter emulated her Camarilla foes in whatever way best served her purposes.

As the 20th century became the 21st, Esperanza, like her sire before her, became aware of a bizarre homeward urge, a calling from her blood to that of her predecessor and her grandsire. In an increasingly complex world that whispered of the Final Nights on the winds, she decided that she too would step out of the limelight and seek the patron of her bloodline. For the past few years, she has actively sought her own replacement, the next Captain Esperanza Lucifer, to pass on the legacy she feels she has no right to let wither. Once she finds the next Devil’s Darling, she will instruct her as she had been, albeit at the head of a Sabbat pack and not aboard a ship, and she will then release the childe as her incarnation. She knows that this means that she will also have to dispose of her pack so that none know the truth, and to this end she has also been working hard, seeking to weaken her Vinculi in order to do the Devil’s work, though it has come at great cost to her morality.

Soon, a new Esperanza Lucifer shall step onto the stage and, without missing a beat, take over the role made so fearsome by those Lasombra who came before her.

Sire: “Mary”

Clan: Lasombra

Nature: Capitalist

Demeanor: Bon Vivant

Generation: 5th

Embrace: 1812

Apparent Age: Late teens

Physical: Strength 3, Dexterity 5, Stamina 4

Social: Charisma 5, Manipulation 3, Appearance 4

Mental: Perception 2, Intelligence 3, Wits 4

Talents: Awareness 2, Brawl 4, Intimidation 2, Leadership 4, Subterfuge 2

Skills: Firearms 3, Melee 4, Stealth 2

Knowledges: Finance 3, Politics 2, Technology 2

Disciplines: Chimerstry 1, Dominate 5, Fortitude 2, Obtenebration 5, Potence 2

Backgrounds: Contacts 3, Fame 1, Resources 6, Retainers 2, Rituals 3

Virtues: Conviction 2, Instinct 3, Courage 4

Morality: Path of Night 3

Willpower: 5

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 40/8

Image: Esperanza appears as a very attractive club girl, with long brown hair and deep blue-green eyes. She has a thing for leather pants and corsets, as well as motorcycle jackets, and she always wears a ribbon around her neck. She carries herself with a cavalier air and is always ready for the next challenge, whatever it may be. She protects the secret of her identity jealously and usually keeps at least one pistol on her person, if not a more formidable personal arsenal.

Roleplaying Hints: You are a legend in every sense of the word. Act like it. You love to regale others with tales of your exploits, or at least those attributed to you, all the while sizing up your listeners and considering how you can use them to your advantage. Beneath your hellion’s facade, you are tired and hope to soon let another assume the role given you by your sire. Ride the wave until then, but when the time comes, yield to it, for you will finally be able to rest among the darkness that, in a voice suppressed by the sea, calls to you in your sleep.

Haven: Because she is always moving around, Esperanza uses a number of different havens along both sides of the Atlantic’s coasts, most of which her own packmates do not know about. Most of these are as opulent as one might expect of immensely wealthy Magister’s lineage, but many are also unassuming and pragmatic. When with her pack she usually repurposes an existing structure, like an automotive garage or neglected office building. She uses only enough of her fortune to ensure her safety, keeping the rest hidden from even her closest fellow Sabbat.

Influence: Esperanza has a surprising volume of financial assets spread out smartly among a variety of industries and interests. She usually uses proxies to manage this empire, but will involve herself directly when she feels it imperative. Were she to consolidate all her resources and influence in a single city, she would likely rival a Camarilla Prince, but that would put a big red target on her back. By doing as she does she avoids becoming too real for her enemies, something that would destroy the legend that has taken so long to build.