Name: Vincento Di Sovoragnollo (only known to a select few)
Nickname: Il Dottore
Age: Roughly 600 years old
Country of Origin: Italy
Special Abilities: Auspex (able to sense weakness and ailments in an intended target), exceptional healing skills (based on folk remedies and treatments of the 15th century)
Weapon Specialty: Poison, small daggers
Back Story:
Among mortals, a common phrase which is thrown around is that “clothes make the man.” While this may be exceedingly accurate with the easily deceived cattle, it is only partially true for vampires. While notorious for decadence and refined taste – sometimes leading to haughty displays of luxury – your turnplace, your home, the very clan the spawned you; all are ever important in what groomed your powers, abilities, how you as a vampire function within the very secret society.
It is therefore important to understand Il Clan dal Malattia, the clan of the walled and secluded Sovoragnollo village commune. Living in a dense inland forest on the Italian Peninsula, the population of Sovoragnollo was a secluded clan of vampires. Their primary means of survival was to leech off the living without them truly knowing they were being fed upon. Few mortals knew where the clandestine village rested, and none knew of its dark secret.
For this clan grew under the guise of being doctors. Purveyors of the end of witchcraft, divine intervention, and otherwise supernatural cure for illness. Many of the citizenry of the 16th century regarded such advances as unpredictable, and looked upon physicians the way physicians look upon these superstitious idiots.
And yet towns and cities had some at least partially rationally proficient townsfolk who looked to doctors more than their backwards counterparts. It would be for these people that the clan would travel as a band of physicians to cities and towns. Vampires, all of them, they donned the infamous bird-evoking plague doctor outfits the doctors of this period were notorious for. This was not only to protect their bodies from the burning sun, but also to conceal their ageless personas from the hunters ever vigilant for the “evil” vampires.
They arrived to town in carriages; a caravan of predators in disguise. Once there, they would stand on street corners and stands. Their refined senses as doctors granted them increased perception of weakness and sickness within the human population, revealing the lamest of the herd. These were the cattle which were focused upon, who were assaulted with questions of their wellbeing.
Those who agreed to be treated were brought to one of the clan’s reserved buildings. There, the patient would receive medicinal herbs and salves. Teas and pellets of pressed nutrients. The patient would be healed. However, the procedure always mysteriously led to bleeding or leeches. What became of the blood that came from the patient was never divulged to the humans.
It was from this clan that Vincento hailed from. His turning was all-around identical to any other inhabitant of Sovoragnollo. As with any of his fellow vampires, Vincento was birthed by this clan of physicians to an unassuming mother who unfortunately met an untimely death in childbirth, as was almost expected at the time. Vincento, as with all the abducted human infants, was brought to the head of the clan (at the time a great vampire named Lorenzo who claimed to be as old as the ancient city of Lazio), and was allowed to live. Vincento was assigned a Mentore and taught the ways of the clan and medicine for many years.
Soon, Vincento was both an adult and a child: an adult in the eyes of a human but a mere insignificant newborn in the eyes of the great vampires he shared a village with. It was at this point that Vincento was turned by the head, Lorenzo himself, as was tradition. Now a vampire himself, Vincento was truly part of the family he had merely lived beside.
Vincento proved to be both a proficient physician and predator. Quickly growing accustomed to his new physical superiority, he grew a fondness for daggers and poison…sometimes both. For a century, Vincento and his vampire brethren treated and fed of the Italian towns and cities. He saw no benevolence in his treatment of the humans. They were cattle, living only to feed the needs of the obviously stronger and divine vampires. Vincento saw it as only ensuring their food source did not run dry; he held no worry for the wellbeing of mere mortals.
This apathy for the outcome of the lives of humans led slowly to contempt, and then towards sadistic wonder for Vincento. With a “scientific” mind, he soon headed a new movement within the commune, a revolution of anatomy and medicine with living humans as the subjects. I Chirurgi abducted living samples from the cities on visits. Quick. Efficient. They struck and took their subjects before any had an idea that someone was missing. At the commune, these wretched souls would be subjected to poisons, infectious diseases and (Vincento’s favorite), live dissections. At times, they took an entire family in order to test psychological reactions when the carving began. Having the children watch as their parents were dissected alive with brutal precision unlocked many answers to the primitive psychological reactions to stress and torment. The screams were an added bonus.
When Vincento made his certain rise to the head of Sovoragnollo, the tone within the commune changed from that of a league of doctors with an underlying hunger for blood to a sadistically cruel clan, thirsty for the pain and anguish of humans, and the betterment of their biological understanding whatever the cost to the cattle. On the outside, they still wore their plague doctor uniforms, and they continued to seem as benevolent as ever.
Perhaps this new, almost barbaric mentality was what fostered the ensuing rebellion. After two centuries of ruling Sovoragnollo, all twelve vampires which Vincento turned, enticed by surprisingly keen human hunters who offered weekly human tribute for the removal of the troublesome doctoral overlord, started a rebellion which toppled his reign, and drastically altered the role of Italian vampires forever. They enticed a rebellion within Sovoragnollo which marched on Vincento’s villa. Unwilling to harm his fellow vampire kin, and his sired children, Vincento fled the commune and lived alone in the countryside, always on the move and on the lookout for vampire assassin’s or human hunters contracted to end his unlife. His notorious reputation worked against him here, and he was never allowed to rest more than a week before a legion of treacherous mortal-pleasing vampires would find him. Normally, these vampires would meet their end at Vincento’s enhanced senses and strength of a mature predator of the night. Soon, however, these legions would be led by his sired children, who realized his only weakness was the lack of stomach he had for killing his brethren. Vincento continued to move and hide about Italy for centuries, grasping at meals whenever they would arrive. When the treachery of these vampires radiated outward and encapsulated much of the Italian Peninsula during the social and political upheaval of what the humans called their second World War, when these pathetic wretched beings bowed to the feet of inferior mortals, Vincento knew it was time to abandon his homeland. Knowing the ports were guarded by disguised vampires or paid-off humans, Vincnto traveled west across Europe to England.
From there, Vincento boarded a ship and sailed to America. Knowing he might still be hunted by international vampire assassins, he donned a face-covering gas mask and adapted a sealed suit, which he passed off was for lack of an immune system to the humans. Among the vampire community, which he seldom interacted with, he was only known as Il Dottore. He lived in the Italian ghetto of New York City, acting as a great heroic doctor for the poor lower class, making trips to disease ridden apartments and taking blood samples for “study.” They called him their guardian angel. He called them his sustenance.
Years passed until he crossed paths with another vampire. A younger female, who’s body smelled vacant of a soul. She was injured…and he was a doctor…