Bounce

New York By Night (A Vampire The Masquerade RP)

@Bounce

How is work on your post going?

@Eviledd1984

I should have it done tonight.

New York By Night (A Vampire The Masquerade RP)

The Italian boy just watched the room as the adults chatted.

"Enzo and I will look too out of place in a club,” Ian remarked. Not an inaccurate assessment to say the least. Internally, the boy felt a bit of relief at the idea of not being dragged along to the club.

“So I propose that Enzo and I investigate the club from outside,”

Large, brown eyes just blinked. They were doing what now? The former ghoul tried to maintain his composure as he gave a slight bow toward the older man. “Bene, grazie,” the boy offered. Purely perfunctory. As one might respond to receiving a task from one of the nonni.

Internally, he was screaming.

Enzo didn’t even go hunting on the streets. These oversized bloodsuckers wanted him to play Watson to Ian’s Holmes? Subconsciously, the boy’s hands grabbed the hem of his t-shirt, fidgeting and fiddling with the fabric in his hands as he tried to process the anxiety.

He was just the book keeper. A Giovanni of the main family, not some La Putanesca from Sicily. Such hitting the streets was not really his strong suit.

What if they came across the Sabbat? What was Enzo supposed to do? Haunt them?

Still, putting on a brave face, the boy looked up at Ian and said, “Andiamo?”

In Venice, they would have had people for this sort of thing.

Unfortunately, right now, they were the people.

New York By Night (A Vampire The Masquerade RP)

Posting coming today. Sorry for the wait, got caught up in all the recent bad weather in the US.

New York By Night (A Vampire The Masquerade RP)

So I assume at this point @rocketrobie2's character will just meet us on the club? If so I'm probably going to have Ian brought it up for my next post

@Randomguy

Given that @rocketrobie2's Steele is a rocker/full-time musician, it strikes me that an alternative approach could be to discover that Steele just happens to be playing a gig at that club, which could also explain Steele not receiving the email. We could just jump to the Club and have everyone there.

Just my two cents.

New York By Night (A Vampire The Masquerade RP)

Being drawn into a hug was still a new experience for him.

Kindred might joke that Giovanni were all kissing cousins, but affection wasn’t a quality many within the Clan - mortal or otherwise - associated with La Famiglia. Enzo was fairly certain there were a few who’d never hugged anyone that wasn’t a corpse.

Given that outlook, it went without saying that some of their necromancy rituals were obscene.

As a result, the flinch that the boy displayed as Edwina reached to pull him into a hug betrayed an instinctive fear at having a hand outstretched toward him. Potence was one of the Clan Discplines after all. It left an indelible mark upon La Famiglia. And how they interacted with one another.

The boy was tense at first, only relaxing in Edwina’s embrace after a moment in which he had to remind himself that this Family was not Giovanni.

Considering how most Kindred were distrustful of other Clans, it was probably odd that Enzo felt safer around this Family than those of his Blood.

Giovanni were right bastards though. Achieve victory through any means necessary and, in the absence of strength, deception. It was the lesson by which the Giovanni had emerged from out of the Cappodocians, the manner in which Augustus Giovanni had led La Famiglia from the start.

When he’d finally relaxed, the boy hugged Edwina back. “Madre,” he uttered softly.

It was formal, but a Giovanni was never familiar.

He listened to the situation, doing a double take at the revelation that Ludwig could have been taken against his will. Ludwig was a Brujah, like Ian was, but far older.

It would take some next level, very bad shit to force a Kindred like that into something against their will, a fact that Ian seemed to pick up on as he spoke.

The boy’s brown eyes glanced up at Ian, then over to Elizabeth before they finally settled on Edwina again. If they were investigating a mortal club, then Enzo’s child-like appearance was going to cause him to stand out.

Unless one were Ventrue or Toreador, standing out in a crowd was generally something Kindred avoided.

“I can plant suggestions in one or two of the mortal’s minds, but I’m likely to draw attention in a club,” Enzo remarked, his voice displaying something close to a British accent as he swapped to English.

It wasn’t a no, he’d do whatever they asked of him. After all, he could see benefits and consequences either way.

As a Giovanni, Enzo could investigate the Shroud in or around the Club to try and get answers. He could also plant suggestions inside the minds of any mortals that might present an obstacle to them.

...and if things got regrettable, he could move the bodies. Or, rather, get the bodies to move themselves so that it didn’t look like... well, a murder.

At the same time, he wasn’t going to pass for any older than thirteen. That made it very hard to go clubbing in the mortal nightlife of New York. Unless it was a Pokemon Go event.

...or, that was probably dating him now. Did mortals still play Pokemon Go? The older he got, the faster it seemed fads such as that passed.

The possible exception seemed to be Skyrim. When Gehenna came, they probably still wouldn’t have Elder Scrolls VI.

New York By Night (A Vampire The Masquerade RP)

You see, tonight, it could go either way. Hearts balanced on a razor blade...

A pair of noise cancelling headphones hugged the side of the boy’s head, as Ed Sheeran’s voice played in his ear while the child sang along with all his heart, as if enshrined in his own world. Head bopping to the rhythm, fingers clattered across the brightly lit keyboard.

Legs drawn up into the chair, the boy sat cross-legged before a widescreen monitor, opening, minimizing, and shuffling various Excel spreadsheets around while keying in different formulas. A gaming PC sat on the desk, it’s transparent panel illuminating the inner workings of the machine.

Finally, the child’s brown eyes looked up as his hands paused over the keys. Two fingers keyed ctrl+s before the boy kicked out with one leg to send his chair wheeling across the room to a small refrigerator that was behind him.

Cracking open the chill box, the boy’s fingers perused three blood donation pouches, before deciding on the one labeled AB Positive and then pushing off to wheel himself back over to the computer.

That was enough work on the Ventrue account.

Popping the blood bag into his mouth, the child’s fangs slid down through the plastic as he held and sipped on it like a kid’s juice box, all the while closing Excel and opening a secure email to send the files over to his client.

The mouse cursor then hovered over Steam. He could get in lots of Baldur’s Gate 3 before sunrise...

There was a ding as an email arrived.

The boy hesitated a moment. He’d already launched Steam, did he want to look?

Curiosity got the better of him, and he brought his email back up.

A summons? The frown was fleeting, but a twinge of regret at not being able to play Baldur’s Gate was felt nonetheless.

---

It was fortunate that in the modern nights one need only have an Uber or Lyft account. Much more convenient than the bygone era of trying to hail a cab in the streets of New York. Especially in the small hours.

The boy was dressed in a vintage The Lost Boys graphic tee. Black paint was chipped and fading from his fingernails. His bangs were brushed so that they fell over one side of his face, with the most prominently visible eye displaying an application of guyliner. Finishing the look was a choker that looked as if it were a spiked dog collar around his neck.

The Uber driver caught one look of the kid’s fangs in the rear view mirror and just shook his head, muttering something about Marilyn Manson and posers as they made their way toward the mansion.

The smile that spread across the child’s face was genuine.The popularity of the chain store known as Hot Topic had somehow made possible what would otherwise be a flagrant violation of their oldest Tradition.

Certainly, COVID had been nice. Wearing face masks always helped when one had fangs that they could not hide. But in the absence of masks, playing into what had become a cultural norm made him almost invisible.

Just another goth kid.

Fake goth. Mall goth. Whatever label one chose to apply to it.

Getting out in front of the mansion just cemented the preconceived notion that was in the driver’s head. The kid was just a spoiler white brat stuck in some cosplay fantasy.

In contrast to his informal appearance, the boy bowed graciously to the butler at the door – once upon a time, he’d been the butler doing the door answering for his master – and then proceeded repeat the gesture as he entered to find Ian and Elizabeth already present.

“Buona notte,” the boy offered in his native tongue. Then, looking around the room and the assembled faces, asked, “Mi dica?” which was a simple phrase meaning how can I help?

If Edwina shared the information about the club, Enzo wouldn’t be able to join Ian or Elizabeth there, but it was possible he could make inquiries with the spirits and ghosts in the area to see if they’d seen or heard anything.

New York By Night (A Vampire The Masquerade RP)

Enzo Giovanni

Name
Lorenzo Gabriele Augustus "Enzo" Giovanni

Age
97 years (57 years ghoul, 40 years kindred)

Gender
Male

Clan
Giovanni

Generation
11th

Occupation
Underworld Accountant

Appearance

A “tweenage” youth of an ambiguous 12 or 13 years of age, Enzo has a mop of raven black hair and nondescript brown eyes. His original Italian complexion has paled slightly in undeath, though the alabaster quality of his resulting condition renders him an appearance some regard as “cute.” A small boy, standing about four-and-a-half feet tall (54 inches), Enzo has an overall impish appearance that is only heightened by his permanent fangs. Often mistaken for a child that is cosplaying, in recent nights he has dipped into the “Hot Topic Goth” trend to hide in plain sight when he must venture out around mortals.

Personality
Conceal, don’t feel. Smile, don’t show. Don’t let them know.

Outwardly, Enzo appears as a happy, even cheerful boy. In truth, he’s a frightened child who knows well just what might be peering back from the Shroud. A love of music has become an enduring vice and personal luxury that has helped him to cope through the Long Night. Those who have heard him sing have been known to remark that he would have made a better Toreador, had he any other last name. A ghoul from a young age, he was brought up in Kindred society as a servant beholden to a strict patriarchal hierarchy that would make a Ventrue sweat, making him adept at reading the room to know when to be entertaining, or seen and not heard, or neither seen nor heard. In truth, he much prefers the latter, being better with ghosts and numbers than he is with either the living or the undead.

Background
Enzo was doomed to the Curse of Caine by the accident of his birth. Born into the incestuous family of necromancers, as a child he demonstrated a natural talent for mathematics and was ghouled at a young age to help with the family finances – just one of many ghouls serving as clerks servicing the family’s many legitimate and illegitimate transactions. From the view of the traditionalists within the Family, this wasn’t seen as either cruel or capricious, but followed the old practice of a child becoming apprenticed to the trade that he would be expected to follow into as a career for the remainder of his life. Except, in the case of Enzo, that fate was an eternity of child labor as a bookkeeper.

It was a task he attended to for over a half century. Then, forty years ago, the Sabbat-Camarilla conflict around Milan had proven too tempting for several up-and-coming middle management Giovanni, who sold information, blood, and weapons to both sides. Externally, the sectarian response was to attack the Giovanni as if they had taken sides, while internally the elders of Clan Giovanni eliminated two of the ring leaders and sent their heads each to the Sabbat and Camarilla in order to reassert their neutrality and independence from the conflict.

The vacancies within the Embraced middle management of the family business necessitated the accelerated promotion of ghouls that could take over their boss’ portfolios. Seen as both competent and loyal, Enzo was “promoted” with the Embrace during one of the Giovanni’s Fourth of April ceremonies, and then transferred from overseeing currency exchanges to more oversight over the Family’s distribution of funds across currency markets, eventually moving up to managing a portfolio of the Family’s investments. It was a position he managed for more than two decades, before he made the “mistake” of catching an accounting error that led to the revelation that one of the elder Giovanni nonni was stealing from the family. Before the evidence could be brought before the Anziani, the books were altered to make it appear as though Enzo had been siphoning off the accounts.

The nonno might have had more friends in higher places, but Enzo was fortunate to have had enough allies of his own that he was able to disappear before he could be brought to Venice. Some speculated that the nonni had been involved in order to silence the only witness, which created enough disbelief in Enzo’s continued existence that his “early retirement” from the Family has caused less controversy than is typical for these (all too common) situations. Enzo left the European continent, arriving in America where the Giovanni’s influence was largely that of the Milliner family, who were often left in the dark as to the internal politics of the Clan’s “pure blood.”

As there are no Giovanni antitribu, Enzo didn’t see that he had any prospects for finding shelter with either the Anarchs or the Camarilla. However, neither of them were looking for him, whereas his family was. At the start of his “coming to America” journey, he moved around as often as he could manage. With his knowledge of accounting, he managed to eek by doing contract work mostly for Anarchs, primarily Caitiff, Brujah, Toreador, and even the occasional Ventrue who needed some off-shore accounts tied up away from the eyes of his own Clan. Eventually, he found his way to New York and fell into work Ludwig Strauss and Edwina Adamson, settling into their coterie as a surrogate family for the one that he’d lost.

Of course, to those who know the real Enzo, finding someone to care for him was always the excuse to stop running that he’d been searching for.

Skills
https://imgur.com/a/YSkk0Rt

Notes
In terms of the Giovanni family's internal blood politics, while a member of the main family, Enzo is considered a "half-blood." That is, his father is a descendant of Augustus Giovanni, but his mother hails from the Rosalini family. He was ghouled by his second great aunt, who became his sire.

Merits

• Former Ghoul
• Medium
• Enchanting Voice
• Blush of Health
• Language (+English)

Flaws

• Short
• Permanent Fangs
• Clan Enmity (Giovanni)

Child flaw not used as the official rule specifies “between ages of 5 to 10.”

Resources **
He eeks by as an accountant, more so in the advent of remote work where he can hide behind a computer screen and may never be seen by his employer, but is also able to pad his income with interest from investments.

Contacts *

Spirit Slave * (Clanbook: Giovanni Revised)
Bruno Francesco Matteo Rosalini, a ghost fettered to a locket that Enzo wears, which is the last remaining item belonging to a daughter he lost in the bombing and devastation of World War II.

Rituals **
Call the Hungry Dead
By burning a person’s hair over a black candle, the Necromancer can listen for voices across the Shroud.

Death’s Communion
A Last Supper-like ritual with vitae that gives a temporary bonus to any use of Necromancy.

New York By Night (A Vampire The Masquerade RP)

@Eviledd1984 here's the full sheet for your review.

Hider

Name
Lorenzo Gabriele Augustus "Enzo" Giovanni

Age
97 years (57 years ghoul, 40 years kindred)

Gender
Male

Clan
Giovanni

Generation
11th

Occupation
Underworld Accountant

Appearance

A “tweenage” youth of an ambiguous 12 or 13 years of age, Enzo has a mop of raven black hair and nondescript brown eyes. His original Italian complexion has paled slightly in undeath, though the alabaster quality of his resulting condition renders him an appearance some regard as “cute.” A small boy, standing about four-and-a-half feet tall (54 inches), Enzo has an overall impish appearance that is only heightened by his permanent fangs. Often mistaken for a child that is cosplaying, in recent nights he has dipped into the “Hot Topic Goth” trend to hide in plain sight when he must venture out around mortals.

Personality
Conceal, don’t feel. Smile, don’t show. Don’t let them know.

Outwardly, Enzo appears as a happy, even cheerful boy. In truth, he’s a frightened child who knows well just what might be peering back from the Shroud. A love of music has become an enduring vice and personal luxury that has helped him to cope through the Long Night. Those who have heard him sing have been known to remark that he would have made a better Toreador, had he any other last name. A ghoul from a young age, he was brought up in Kindred society as a servant beholden to a strict patriarchal hierarchy that would make a Ventrue sweat, making him adept at reading the room to know when to be entertaining, or seen and not heard, or neither seen nor heard. In truth, he much prefers the latter, being better with ghosts and numbers than he is with either the living or the undead.

Background
Enzo was doomed to the Curse of Caine by the accident of his birth. Born into the incestuous family of necromancers, as a child he demonstrated a natural talent for mathematics and was ghouled at a young age to help with the family finances – just one of many ghouls serving as clerks servicing the family’s many legitimate and illegitimate transactions. From the view of the traditionalists within the Family, this wasn’t seen as either cruel or capricious, but followed the old practice of a child becoming apprenticed to the trade that he would be expected to follow into as a career for the remainder of his life. Except, in the case of Enzo, that fate was an eternity of child labor as a bookkeeper.

It was a task he attended to for over a half century. Then, forty years ago, the Sabbat-Camarilla conflict around Milan had proven too tempting for several up-and-coming middle management Giovanni, who sold information, blood, and weapons to both sides. Externally, the sectarian response was to attack the Giovanni as if they had taken sides, while internally the elders of Clan Giovanni eliminated two of the ring leaders and sent their heads each to the Sabbat and Camarilla in order to reassert their neutrality and independence from the conflict.

The vacancies within the Embraced middle management of the family business necessitated the accelerated promotion of ghouls that could take over their boss’ portfolios. Seen as both competent and loyal, Enzo was “promoted” with the Embrace during one of the Giovanni’s Fourth of April ceremonies, and then transferred from overseeing currency exchanges to more oversight over the Family’s distribution of funds across currency markets, eventually moving up to managing a portfolio of the Family’s investments. It was a position he managed for more than two decades, before he made the “mistake” of catching an accounting error that led to the revelation that one of the elder Giovanni nonni was stealing from the family. Before the evidence could be brought before the Anziani, the books were altered to make it appear as though Enzo had been siphoning off the accounts.

The nonno might have had more friends in higher places, but Enzo was fortunate to have had enough allies of his own that he was able to disappear before he could be brought to Venice. Some speculated that the nonni had been involved in order to silence the only witness, which created enough disbelief in Enzo’s continued existence that his “early retirement” from the Family has caused less controversy than is typical for these (all too common) situations. Enzo left the European continent, arriving in America where the Giovanni’s influence was largely that of the Milliner family, who were often left in the dark as to the internal politics of the Clan’s “pure blood.”

As there are no Giovanni antitribu, Enzo didn’t see that he had any prospects for finding shelter with either the Anarchs or the Camarilla. However, neither of them were looking for him, whereas his family was. At the start of his “coming to America” journey, he moved around as often as he could manage. With his knowledge of accounting, he managed to eek by doing contract work mostly for Anarchs, primarily Caitiff, Brujah, Toreador, and even the occasional Ventrue who needed some off-shore accounts tied up away from the eyes of his own Clan. Eventually, he found his way to New York and fell into work Ludwig Strauss and Edwina Adamson, settling into their coterie as a surrogate family for the one that he’d lost.

Of course, to those who know the real Enzo, finding someone to care for him was always the excuse to stop running that he’d been searching for.

Skills
https://imgur.com/a/YSkk0Rt

Notes
In terms of the Giovanni family's internal blood politics, while a member of the main family, Enzo is considered a "half-blood." That is, his father is a descendant of Augustus Giovanni, but his mother hails from the Rosalini family. He was ghouled by his second great aunt, who became his sire.

Merits

• Former Ghoul
• Medium
• Enchanting Voice
• Blush of Health
• Language (+English)

Flaws

• Short
• Permanent Fangs
• Clan Enmity (Giovanni)

Child flaw not used as the official rule specifies “between ages of 5 to 10.”

Resources **
He eeks by as an accountant, more so in the advent of remote work where he can hide behind a computer screen and may never be seen by his employer, but is also able to pad his income with interest from investments.

Contacts *

Spirit Slave * (Clanbook: Giovanni Revised)
Bruno Francesco Matteo Rosalini, a ghost fettered to a locket that Enzo wears, which is the last remaining item belonging to a daughter he lost in the bombing and devastation of World War II.

Rituals **
Call the Hungry Dead
By burning a person’s hair over a black candle, the Necromancer can listen for voices across the Shroud.

Death’s Communion
A Last Supper-like ritual with vitae that gives a temporary bonus to any use of Necromancy.

Justice League - The Unlimited Protocol

If he could just concentrate for a moment, he could weave a spell to purge the toxins from his body. Or maybe carry his body backward in time to a point before he’d been exposed. Or forward to a point that the toxins had been processed out of the body?

He couldn’t make up his mind. It was like one idea after another, floating in a fog.

Then an explosion ripped a hole between the floors of the tower. The boy looked and saw what appeared to be Shazam emerging from the smoking ruins.

The black-and-gold clad figure started toward him.

Instinctively, the boy shied away, even as he tried to steel himself. “You’re just an illusion. You’re not real. You’re not me,” the boy uttered, speaking to himself to try and muster up the courage to stand up to his hallucination even as he took another step back.

“Teth are you okay?”

The child’s green eyes just blinked. A look of confusion replaced that of fear, before the boy’s head tilted to one side.

That was a... very odd thing for him to say to, well, himself.

Plus, Shazam was way too much of a jerk to ask that. Something about the wisdom of Zehuti. Ultimate intelligence...

...and absolutely zero social skills.

“It’s me, Kara.”

The boy’s head went back at the statement, as what appeared to be Shazam’s face was now speaking with Supergirl’s voice.

“I believe the appropriate idiom for this situation is, I am tripping balls right now,” the boy deadpanned flatly, still noticeably apprehensive toward the spectre of his empowered form, but accepting for the moment that it was just a product of whatever he’d inhaled.

“I need help figuring out where this gas is coming from. Do you know where ventilation room is?”

“The what room?” the boy asked, for a moment looking his age as he stared up at the man, who was really a woman.

Ventilation, as in air conditioning? To be honest, he’d never even given the tower’s method of air circulation a thought.

Maybe if he’d been in his empowered form, he could have helped, but as it was...

That was when it seemed that the air pressure suddenly dialed up, as the tower was aired out. “I have a feeling that’s Red Tornado,” the boy opined aloud.

Later

“Zor Isis Fulmis.”

As he spoke the incantation, the child moved a hand in the air. As he did, the damage that Kara had inflicted from earlier seemed to reverse itself, until the hole was patched as if it had never happened.

Rather than inspecting his handiwork, the child looked down at his hand. Snapping his fingers a few times, pale sparks seemed to form.

He was finally back to being able to cast magic again.

“Well, that was officially annoying,” the boy commented aloud.

Justice League - The Unlimited Protocol

The child’s green eyes seemed unusually large as he stared up at the figure before him. A figure that, by all appearances, was himself. The likeness of Shazam peered back at the small youth with an intense energy that caused the air around the larger figure to crackle with electricity.

Then the man’s head went back, his face adopting a sneer as he barked, “Do you not bow before your god?”

_{“God complex maybe,”} the boy uttered under his breath, along with the absolutely necessary roll of his eyes.

A bolt of lightning struck the ground at the child’s feet.

The figure before him seemed larger than life as he levitated up from the ground, voice booming as he spoke, “I am Theo Ramses Teth-Adam. I forged the chains of Egypt into weapons. I built the great cities of Khandaq...”

“-tch-” the boy uttered, a derisive clicking of his tongue. There was a roll of his head before he leveled a glare up at the figure, arms crossed, and he tossed back, “You made the name up to try and impress the Assyrians.”

Wait, why was he even wasting time with this conversation? His arms un-crossed, making a gesture as if to try and wave off the figure of Shazam, as he boy began to think out loud. “We can’t both exist. An illusion? I bet this is Mister Mind’s work.”

A shadow passing over the boy gave him a warning. Jumping backward, Teth narrowly avoided a fist that slammed down into the floor where he’d been standing.

“Ignore me at your peril, mortal!” the figure of Shazam barked, before a roll of thunder seemed to shake the walls. “I am the THUNDER GOD!”

Hands balled into fists, the child glared up at the glowing megalomaniac. “You were supposed to be the best version of me, and somehow, you’re a total jerk!” the boy snapped, before taking a deep breath. His green eyes flashed dangerously as he boasted, “You want to play with lightning? Then let’s do this – SHAZAM!”

This was generally the point where Metro Tower was supposed to get hit with lightning and Teth was going to get yelled at for one or more broken window, burned out electrical appliance, and or exploding television.

He also should have been over six feet tall and spitting lightning bolts.

Sadly, none of that was happening right now. And, instead, Teth just found himself staring up at a large fist that was coming right at him.

Pitching himself to one side, the child rolled out from under the sweeping punch and then scrambled to his feet as he started to break into a run.

_{“This has to be an illusion. This can’t be real. This can’t be happening...”} the boy muttered to himself, as he skidded around a corner and broke into a sprint, as a voice came overhead.

This is Red Tornado speaking. I strongly suspect that our base of operations has been struck by some type of airborne poison...

That was reassurance.

...well, maybe not reassurance, but at least it was confirmation of what Teth already suspected. “Great,” the boy muttered, turning another corner and looking to see if this illusionary Shazam was following him or not.

Wait, if he wasn’t real, then why was Teth running?

“We’re under attack and I’m too high to be of use,” the boy remarked aloud.

Definitely not a good look for a new Leaguer.