Jean Luc

Nature: Cavalier

Demeanour: Gallant

Concept: Absolutely fabulous club owner, darling

Clan: Toreador

Generation: 7th

Sire: Alais l'Ensanglanté, Prince of Marsailles

Embrace: 1771 (Born 1750)

Apparent Age: 21

Attributes

Physical: Strength 2, Dexterity 6, Stamina 3

Social: Charisma 4, Manipulation 4, Appearance 3

Mental: Perception 4, Intelligence 3, Wits 4

Talents

Acting 4, Alertness 4, Athletics 3, Dodge 4, Empathy 4, Leadership 2, Streetwise 4, Subterfuge 3

Skills

Etiquette 4, Expression (Dance) 5, Firearms 1, Melee 3, Music 3, Security (Pickpocket) 4

Knowledges

Bureaucracy 2, Finance 3, Investigation 2, Law 1, Linguistics 2, Medicine 1, Politics 4

Disciplines

Auspex 4, Celerity 6, Fortitude 3, Presence 4

Backgrounds

Allies (Legal, Police) 2, Contacts (Legal, Police) 4, Herd (Club regulars) 2, Influence (Political) 3, Mentor (Alais) 4, Resources (Clubs) 5, Retainers 3, Status 3

Virtues

Conscience 4, Self-Control 3, Courage 4, Humanity 7, Willpower 7

History

Jean-Luc D’Aubigny’s mother always told him that he carried the blood of an aristo in his veins. After his Embrace, that memory filled him with a slightly guilty amusement every time he supped on the neck of an aristocrat. But for all he knew, his mother was right. Young Jean-Luc never knew his father, who had faded back into the night after a single brief night of passion with his mother. Perhaps the man was, as she always told him, a handsome young Lord who had stolen away from his family for an evening, to watch the entertainments put on by the roving band of vagrants, miscreants and self-styled troubadours to which his mother belonged.

Jean-Luc never felt the lack. As a boy, he effectively had dozens of surrogate parents beside his mother, for the whole band treated him as their son. Clever, charming and graceful, with an easy smile, a winning manner, and – where circumstances demanded it – very nimble fingers, he grew up as something as a jack-of-all-trades. Mostly larcenous trades, although he was a lithe and talented dancer and adept with a variety of musical instruments.

His childhood was far from idyllic – eating regularly was never something the band could take for granted – but it was, for the most part, happy, or at least contented. It wasn’t until he was seventeen that his mother’s death from pneumonia, following a particularly savage winter, made him question the justice of the established social order.

He was a romantic, not a firebrand revolutionary. The radical notions of liberty, equality and fraternity starting to permeate the boisterous ranks of the sans-culottes appealed to him, but the bloody reality of the band of self-styled liberators he fell in with – really little more than a vicious band of highway robbers – quickly came to disgust him.

The final straw came when the band overheard talk in a tavern of a coach party taking a mysterious and beautiful young noblewoman to Paris. Listening to them make plans to murder the entire party, except (for a while), the woman herself, was the final straw, and he slipped away, his head filled with notions of being the dashing hero who would warn the poor, innocent young woman of the peril to her life.

As it turned out, the “poor young woman”, Alais l'Ensanglanté, had technically already been dead for about three centuries, and in any case would probably have had the marauders for breakfast (literally), if they ever had attacked her. She did not, however, see fit to reveal that to this oddly intriguing young mortal. Instead, she set about seducing and enthralling him with all the formidable skill at her command.

Alais was the childe of Francois Villon, Prince of Paris. An actress of extraordinary skill, she was one of his primary intelligence assets, able to pass herself off flawlessly as anyone she chose – Kindred, mortal, aristo or sans-culotte. Unlike her complacent sire, she was worried about the growing taste of revolution in the air, not just amongst the mortal peasantry but the Kindred as well, for the Sabbat were waxing in power and influence even in France, the Camarilla’s greatest stronghold.

Her initial plan for Jean-Luc was very simple – make him fall in love with her in long months of night-time trysts, and then send him out to spy on the mortal rabble until they discovered his true allegiance and killed him. After about six months, the first part of the plan – make the boy love her – had worked perfectly. It was only when she reached the point of sending him out to die for her that Alais realized, with incredulous horror, that she’d become caught in her own snare. She’d fallen in love with Jean-Luc D’Aubigny, and she would sooner have died herself than sacrifice him.

Centuries of experience had, if nothing else, taught Alais to be flexible. Revealing the truth to him was easier than she’d imagined – he was simply too much under her spell to care. Even her offer of the Embrace, sanctioned by her amused sire, seemed to Jean-Luc to be nothing more than a chance for them to be together forever.

Their initial flush of passion lasted a decade and a half, until the outbreak of the French Revolution. Despite his devotion to her, Jean-Luc simply couldn’t condone the ruthless methods that his sire was willing to use to out-manoeuvre, suppress, or destroy the Sabbat mingling with France’s mortal revolutionaries, and their relationship grew increasingly strained. He was still in love with her, but no longer blindly infatuated, and their passion for each other gave rise to some truly epic fights that nearly had them going for each others’ throats on several occasions.

As the Revolution was consumed by its own fires and some measure of sanity returned at last to France, their fights became less frequent, but Jean-Luc had gained a new sense of purpose from the experience. Determined to save his lover from himself, he took it upon himself to become her conscience. Alais was amused, exasperated, frustrated and infuriated in turns by his crusade, but to the surprise of both of them, it was a great success. The woman who had earned the nickname “the Bloody” through her lethal lack of scruple slowly began to mellow.

In 1848, the Sabbat launched an attack on the city of Marseilles, under cover of the chaos of the Year of Revolutions. Their offensive was eventually beaten back, but not before it had caused the Final Death of the city’s Prince and most of his senior lieutenants. Wary of the prospect of chaos in the periphery of his domain, Francois Villon engineered the ascension of his favoured childe to the vacant fief.

Jean-Luc spent some years in Marseilles, ruling at his sire’s side; effectively, he was the Deputy Prince, although he never claimed the title. He was the velvet glove to Alais’ still sometimes iron fist, and the two worked well together, creating a stable and prosperous Kindred polity out of the ashes of the Sabbat attack.

Gradually though, over the course of half a century or more, the two of them became aware that their position as rulers of the city was weakening their relationship. Not in any obvious way; they weren’t fighting (any more than they always had), or even disagreeing about anything significant. It was simply that they were turning into friends and business partners rather than the lovers they once were.

After long discussion, they both agreed that the best course was separation, on the theory that absence – and the lack of routine, humdrum administration filling all their hours – might once again make their cold, dead hearts grow fonder. Jean-Luc had long been intrigued by America’s brash, revolutionary spirit (as he saw it). It seemed to him that the American colonists had set out to create much the sort of utopian, equal society that the French Revolution had striven for, but unlike the French, the Americans had got it more or less right

Some disillusionment was inevitable, especially since his earliest residences in America were in Louisiana and elsewhere in the racist South, but he also found a great deal to admire, a great deal to inspire him. Harkening back to his earliest days as an entertainer, he established himself in the club business, starting in the 1920s during the Prohibition era, which netted him enormous profits and laid the foundation for his later successes. It also taught him the advantages to a club owner of having connections to the legal and law enforcement communities, as well as the odd politician in his pocket. From Prohibition to the War on Drugs, he has managed to arrange an unspoken deal with the local police – he will help them crack down on serious, organized criminal dealers, and they in turn will turn a blind eye to the smaller-scale recreational use which is rife amongst his twenty-something patrons.

The Kindred of Phoenix consider him essentially apolitical, and harmless unless provoked, but they’re also aware that he is (by American standards), a fairly powerful elder, scion of one of the most prestigious Camarilla bloodlines in the Old World, and skilled enough with his savagely witty put-downs to destroy a vampire’s social standing for years or decades with a single blow of his tongue. So they treat him with wary respect and keep him (ever so politely) at arm’s length. His club, Tranzylvania, is a Kindred Elysium at which all violence is strictly prohibited, a decree that the Prince has been willing to enforce with extreme prejudice in the past. Jean-Luc (or “Luke” as he prefers to call himself these days; it’s less painful that listening to people with American accents try to manage his real name without mangling it beyond all recognition), is free to concentrate on the really important aspects of his existence – like hosting absolutely fabulous parties, darling…

Allies

Mark Carlos

A political opponent once described Mark Carlos as “one of the finest androids which Stepford ever manufactured”. Admittedly, he did do a fair amount of partying, boozing, and smoking or snorting exotic substances during his college years, but no more – indeed, rather less – than many of his contemporaries. And that’s the only dirt that anyone can dig up on him. He’s popular human rights lawyer who does a lot of pro bono work for good causes – particularly amongst the Hispanic community – and a prominent Democratic activist and fund-raiser. A fairly devout – but not preachy – Catholic, he’s enjoyed twenty-five years of faithful marriage to his college sweetheart, with whom he has three delightful children. He gives away a lot of his income to homeless charities and has never had the slightest irregularity in any of his tax returns. He drives the local Republican Party absolutely crazy. There simply doesn’t seem to be any dirt to dig up on him. Of course, even most of Rush Limbaugh’s most devoted fans might find the idea of him doing the occasional favour for a vampire a little implausible, which suits Mark Carlos just fine, thank you.

He got mixed up with Jean-Luc by chance, when one of his cases took him a little too close to the Kindred’s secrets. A quixotic impulse led Jean-Luc to conceal his involvement from his fellow Kindred, and several nights filled with long conversations later, the Toreador had a new lawyer.

Mentor

Alais l'Ensanglanté, Prince of Marsailles

Her nickname of “the Bloody” was intended as irony by her fellow Kindred – or Cainites, as they called themselves in the days of her youth. Alais l'Ensanglanté’s trademark has always been to avoid becoming stained with blood; her enemies and targets merely met with misfortunes and accidents, often when Alais herself was miles away.

In fairness, she had little choice. A minor noblewoman, she lost her husband in the Hundred Years War and was left with the problem of ensuring that her son (then eight), would come into his inheritance – a problem that required the discreet “removal” of several other local nobles who saw the property as easy pickings. She actually managed to disguise herself as a serving girl to infiltrate their properties and slip poison into their wine.

Francois Villon, ever one with an eye for the ladies, saw her beauty as a definite bonus, but what really made her attractive as a potential childe was her ingenuity, intelligence, and loyalty. All that it took to secure her allegiance was his assurance that her son would, indeed, inherit his honours – a promise that the Prince was happy to make and keep, and one that he considered a cheap price for securing her services.

As clever and successful as she was, however, Alais’ humanity eroded steadily over the centuries, leaving her cold, calculating and utterly ruthless. It was her childe Jean-Luc who re-awakened her human sentiment, a gift that she still sometimes find to be two-edged.

Vignettes

Basement

Tranzylvania

Downtown Phoenix

Early evening

"Luke?"

The tentative, hopeful hail is accompanied by a soft knock at the door.

Jean-Luc D'Aubigny fastens his shirt cuff unhurriedly, shakes out the sleeves of the shirt and studies the effect of white silk embroidered with twining black roses. He smiles as the lamplight gleams sudden silver from the cufflinks - delicately moulded rosebuds. Under the ultraviolet strobes, the black roses will stand out as stark silhouettes against the eerily glowing white.

"Bon," he says with quiet satisfaction to his own reflection. Then, raising his voice to be heard, "J'arrive, chérie."

Luke returns his attention to the all consuming task of cologne and kohl and subtle maquillage. This takes a little time and much critical concentration. Finally, satisfied with his enlarged, delicately shadowed eyes and the shimmer of shell-pink lip gloss, Luke is ruffling his short black hair into soft-spiked disarray when there is another knock at the door.

"Luke?" This time the tone is a little strained. "Boss? Listen, I'm so sorry to hassle you but there is . . . "

The door opens and as darkly elegant and perfumed as a black rose, Luke steps out, his mouth tucked into an impish, apologetic curl. He places one pale and exquisitely manicured finger lightly on the young woman's lips. "Alyx, ma belle, you are radiant, this evening, and I *would* kiss you but I don't want to smudge." He frowns, a tiny quirk of shapely eyebrows, "You know I adore you but never 'Boss', d'accord? 'Luke', 'darling', 'cheri'," he ticks off on his fingers, "'my love', 'mi corazon', even 'honey'. But not 'Boss'." His smile sparkles free again. "Now, how can I serve you, lovely one?"

Alyx has been with Luke for more than ten years, as long as he has owned and run Tranzylvania. She should, she knows, be immune to his ways after all this time but still, her heart pumps faster and she can feel blood tingling, rising to suffuse her dark skin. She knows that he might look twenty but he's more than two hundred years old. She knows that he spends his days dead to the world, quite literally and she knows the ornate ebony coffin he sleeps in is not simply a wealthy GothBoy pose - although a hell of a lot else about him is. In spite of all that knowledge, Alyx smiles back, helpless to do otherwise for an instant. It does pass, fortunately and on a deep, steadying breath, she delivers her message.

"There is someone here to see you, Luke. Here at the Club - I left him upstairs. A friend of yours - I think. Pretty sure I've seen him here before - but he's not really a regular. It's just that, we're not open yet - it's still pretty early. Especially for someone like him, if you see what I mean."

Luke raises his perfect brows, intrigued. "A friend of the night?" Luke grins. "Hmmm. Did this friend give a name?"

***

Main Bar

Tranzylvania

Early evening

The slender Toreador Keeper of Elysium, his shirt a vision of white silk and black roses, strolls into the bar and toward his visitor. He smiles an extravagant welcome.

"Dubhan!" he says, "Am I expecting you?" The winsome smile curdles, slightly, with mischief, "Are you here for your own sweet self, lured by my charm or here on behalf of our much esteemed Prince?" The flexible smile relaxes into something approaching genuine. "Be welcome, whatever the reason."

Luke sinks into an ornately upholstered sofa and pats the seat beside him invitingly. He watches his visitor, his kohl-lined eyes far shrewder than the pose of effete and gothic dilettante would tend to imply. "What can I do for you, my dear? Talk to Uncle Luke."