The Beginning
In your blood-hunger you destroy someone close to you. Kill a mortal Character. Create a mortal if none are available. Take the skill Bloodthirsty.
After my deadly (or undeadly, as the case may be) intimate encounter with Benizzone Petruccio, I awake early the next morning — before the sun rises — in my bed on my father’s farm where I still reside. My head pounds thunderously as if I indulged too heartily in drink the night before. And that may or may not be true! I can’t remember anything that happened to me after Benizzone kissed my neck. I feel violated, yet strangely flattered. He is handsome, after all.
The sun starts to come up and my headache grows so strong and powerful that it feels as if my brain is trying to force itself out of my skull! This is no ordinary morning headache following a possible evening of merriment and debauchery. The sun is barely peaking over the horizon of the fields and I can no longer tolerate it. Without anything to cover up my window, I tuck myself under my heavy blanket and pray for the pounding headache to dissipate.
“Wake up, harlot!” cries a voice from my door. Livius. Four years my elder and he treats me not as a sister, but as a beggar on the roughest, most unseemly streets of Tuscany’s servile quarters. “Another day of helping yourself to food and drink and partaking in excessive leisure while the rest of us break our backs in the fields, is it?” I can hear his footsteps close in on my bedding, and I’m starting to catch a whiff of something that replaces my pounding headache with the ache of hunger.
“I said wake up, you useless bitch!” He dares stand next to my bedding. Still under my thick blanket, I can’t seem to identify the cause for this sudden, insatiable hunger. Not even a “hunger”. “Hunger” doesn’t describe it adequately. This is more… it’s as if every fiber of my being craves…
“Are you deaf? Get your ass out of this bed this instant before I decide to make matters worse of my own accord!”
…blood. Blood! Of course! That sickly, sweet taste of blood. I know I’ve never tasted another’s blood — why would I? — but now it makes sense. Like another sense unlike true hunger, my body is overwhelmed with an urge to seek this blood.
Livius rips the blanket off my body, and I’m overcome with agony so insurmountably great that I thought I might die. It’s the sun. The sun is pain.
To Livius’ complete surprise, I find myself scampering to the broom closet in the next room. I feel ridiculous running off like this, and into the closet no less, but the darkness feels like home. Surely this will anger Livius further. I can only imagine trying to wake up my younger brother Quintilius in the same manner and the teenage boy, without warning, scurries into the broom closet. I could almost laugh if this “hunger” wasn’t overtaking all my thoughts and senses. It lessened for a few seconds, but now it’s even stronger than before.
“What do you think you’re doing, you whore? Is that what you do at night? Whore and fuck for your coin? I’m sure Father is proud of his only daughter, out whoring and putting a stain on the family name.” By now Livius is banging on the unlocked door, obviously goading me to come out to hit him. He has always dared me to hit him, but I’ve never done it no matter how badly I’ve wanted it. I was always too afraid of what he would do if I did. Two heads taller than me and with arms the girth of tree trunks. I would spend many sleepless early mornings pontificating over slipping a dagger between his ribs in the dead of night, but even the mere idea would hurt Father.
And I would never hurt Father. I believe this to be true.
I know what I want now, and a calmness starts washing over me. I know where my next meal will be. I open the door to find the angry, fiery face of my eldest brother. He, in turn, sees my own face. To this day I don’t know exactly how I must have looked to him just then.
“What the bloody hell happened to your eye?” he said, face sallow with sudden fear. With a surge of strength, I pull him toward me by his tunic and into the closet. What happens next is a blur of sensory overload turning to fevered, dim memories. Ripping and tearing sounds, certainly. The wet, red ruins of Livius’ neck. The ambrosiac taste of blood. Most of all, I remember the euphoria. This mysterious sensation that overtook me. At the time I compared it to the effects of the opium den (of which I was never a patron of, but I had an idea), but I know now that it surpassed even that. It dominated every synapse in my brain, completely overtaking logic or rational thought.
And I knew that I needed more.
Skills:
Assassinating
Smooth-Talking
Sneaking
Bloodthirsty
Resources:
Dagger
Slingshot
Locket
Mark:
A permanent blood-red discoloration of the iris of my right eye
Mortals:
Octavius Caesonius, my father; a farmer
Claudius Marcus, my mentor; an assassin
Livius Lucanus, my eldest brother; mean-spirited and ignorant
Immortal:
Bonizzone Petruccio, high-level secretary in King Charles V’s court; handsome and cunning
Memory #1
I am Octavia Maria, first daughter of Octavius Caesonius, a farmer; born on a small farm outside of Tuscany in 1503; I am a 21-year-old female assassin.
Memory #2
My father gifts me with a slingshot for my ninth name day; I immediately kill two moles running around the potato patch from fifty yards away.
Memory #3
Claudius gifts me with a special silver dagger with a ruby on the hilt after I complete my assassin training.
Memory #4
Livius steals my locket and throws it up on the barn rafters; I spend hours trying to climb up to the ceiling and throwing stones at the rafter to knock it down.
Memory #5
Bonizzone hires me to be his private assassin shortly before biting my neck and turning me; the iris of my right eye turns a permanent blood-red color.
My first kill, my eldest brother, Livius Lucanus; I drink his blood, the sensation is wonderful; I am a 21-year-old vampire.
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