Ezra Imperioli | Vincent Tuveri's page

So yeah...still hectic. I realized today that I never even got around to statting Ezra up as a vampire and I've not been much of a player here even aside that. I hate to do it since I do enjoy the game, but I am just taking up space. Better to bow out.

Thank you for the chance to play some vampire, Falling Darkness. Wish RL were more cooperative with my doing so.

Time to get set for the screams. Ezra could hardly wait, but he kept a tight hold on himself. Sloppy got dead. Or dead again. How'd that work exactly?

Whatever. He had people to watch and kill.

"That's remarkable! What luck, can any of us drive this? Perhaps you Rodrigo?"

"I don't do horses so good," Ezra said.

I'm still here and I'm pretty sure Shadow is, but I'm not sure anyone (other than maybe Daniel) is.

I'm sorta here. Been a hectic...well basically the whole past year. :(

Ezra kept his mouth locked shut and stepped forward. No helping it.

I have Dominate 1, but that's not really enough to do much with as of yet. Combine that with Justin not really knowing anything about his abilities yet...

That being said he could get to Dominate 2 real easy if there was an in character justification for doing so, hell one more XP and he could get to Dominate 3.

Dominate isn't in Ezra's clan disciplines. :(

Daniel joins the other two near the mirror in the hall. "Well that's weird as hell. Still, at least you guys have the right number of body parts," he comments dryly. He rolls his eyes at his own predicament, noting that his third eye feels like moves slightly under its lid in concert with his other two.

"We'll figure this all out later. Let's get going. Don't wanna keep them waiting."

Figure we'll get to responding to Hardestadt as soon as we finish our mirror check lol.

Hearing Daniel, Ezra casually checked his own body parts. Everything was still there. With everything else screwy as hell, it never hurt to be sure. You stayed alive by being sure. Got to hear more screams.

Without more to do before sunrise you are all brought large buckets full of blood to your rooms still warm, enough to make each of you wonder where they get all this blood....

The day passes again and the sun once more sets and you are all once more invited to the Great Hall.

Ezra wasted no time filling up and didn't keep them waiting. Last thing he needed was to piss off some vampires that already had him on their shit list.

if anyone has anything more to do speak now or forever hold your peace. With nothing more we move to the next night's meeting

Ezra is sticking with keeping his mouth shut lest he draw fatal attention to himself. Also thinking about killing people a lot.

Present.

Ezra minded his business and didn't ask any questions. It was time to be a good little soldier, not stir shit up and get killed.

Fanchon looks at you for some time and finally says you will be given a plan, transport and funds to accomplish this plan and at that time these questions will be answered

"Works for me," Ezra said.

Ezra went right for the blood. He could worry about the rest of it later.

"You want someone killed? I'll do it," Ezra said, as though announcing an ordinary skill. "Want 'em to scream first? So much the better. Or you want me to do your books? I can do that too."

"That's all I know too," Ezra said. "There was some talking before that, but nothing last moments. All before the big event."

And if they were into that, Ezra had something else he could give up.

** spoiler omitted **

"I'm fine with whenever," Ezra said.

Blood: 2d6 + 3 ⇒ (6, 2) + 3 = 11 Pretty full belly. Also I still need to update the sheet. Life's been nuts. :(

Courage: 5d10 ⇒ (5, 7, 9, 5, 6) = 32 Oh come on, off by one point... Willpower it is.

Ezra saw the light coming for him and the scream rose in him almost before he could stop it. But he did. Instead he made himself look at the light. They were just trying to freak him out. Or he was probably going to die anyway. Maybe he died if he screamed.

Ezra wasn't about to make it easy for them.

"No reason to make a fight of it," Ezra said. Not one he couldn't win.

Things get exciting just when RL intervenes. :( I'll have Vampire Ezra statted up over the weekend at the latest.

Courage: 5d10 ⇒ (3, 4, 3, 6, 3) = 19

Ezra took everything in while tightly clutching the gun in his pocket. The shit had well and truly hit the fan and here he was exposed. And a vampire because this whole thing couldn't get any more f&#~ed up. But that fire thing wasn't impressing him. He'd seen worse. The fact that he couldn't decide which of these people was most dangerous didn't make him very happy, though.

Time to play quiet. He said nothing and avoided eye contact. Let them think he was just some nobody caught up in this.

Ezra woke up almost already moving. Hot damn, those screams! He reached for his gun and started looking for something to kill, then stopped when he saw the...ghost?

"The hell?"

Have the rest of us been embraced?

Ezra:

** spoiler omitted **

Ezra:

** spoiler omitted **

Ezra:

** spoiler omitted **

Ezra spent XP picking up Italian. Still need to update his sheet.

When you bite the flesh of your food, is it worth the blood you shed?

"Damn straight." Ezra almost reached for the knife, but a shred of his old caution returned in the company of so many eyes. All these nuts had him going sloppy. He let the other guy take it.

Sorry, been hectic. Hoping to get to the questions tomorrow.

Joel raises a glass as well, "To the future".

Ezra kept quiet and drank, trying to keep some distance between him and the ones that got upset about the girl.

slavery was not around in Europe then, I mean now, right? This is more than just casual mistreatment of a subordinate".

My other hobby is studying slavery and Ezra would not know this, so... :)

Sure it was. We're in about the 1420s, unless I'm misremembering. Most enslaved people in Italian cities would be Slavs brought from the Balkans and/or Ukraine. That remained the chief supplier for Mediterranean Europe until the Ottomans took the trade for themselves in 1454. The trade reached at least as far as Ibera, where enslaved Slavs sometimes grew cotton. They're also often described as "black" which in this case connotes more dirty & low class rather than being meant as a fairly literal description of their skin color.

Iberia is a bit of a long haul full of competing markets from the eastern Med, but sailing down the coast of West Africa brought Iberians in contact with slave societies that didn't mind a new market. By the 1450s, enslaved Africans are something one would expect to see on the streets of Lisbon. The Canary Islands ended up sort of a prototype for what became the island plantation colony complex in the Caribbean: original inhabitants wiped out, replaced by enslaved Africans with whites reaping the profits. The two slaveries coexisted just enough that a few enslaved Slavs show up in documents from early Havana.

All of this, plus some more local circumstances, put Iberians at forefront of efforts to develop the first early modern conceptions of race. They were then inherited by Englishmen, among others, who read and translated Spanish and Portuguese narratives about Africa preparatory to and then in conjunction with their own efforts. Because the English are latecomers to this, comparatively, it's possible to sketch out how racial ideas harden over the course of the seventeenth century. The main arena for that is the colonial Chespeake, because modern slavery studies in English are fairly Americentric, but probably the process happened earlier and a bit faster in places like Barbados.

But we should distinguish race theory here, which has a more explicitly religious and cultural cast to it, from out and out biological conceptions of race. They are similar, but the latter are more an Enlightenment and onward construct. Like originally there's some thought that if an enslaved person converts to Christianity, they should be freed. That might not have made them exactly equal to a white person, but seems to have nudged them up far enough on the Great Chain of Being that enslaving was no longer entirely appropriate.

Freedpeople in early Virginia, for example, seem to have sometimes attained something reasonably close to legal equality circa the 1650s. Anthony Johnson, who arrived enslaved, bought his freedom and was able to prosper well enough that he received grants of land from the colony in exchange for funding the passage of whites and was able to sue a white neighbor and prevail in the courts, specifically over that neighbor enticing away a man Johnson himself enslaved. The space for that narrows to almost nothing over the course of the next century, though there is one 1700s case of a black man who was rich enough and connected enough to have himself legally deemed white in South Carolina. He passed that status on to his kids. Neither of those would have flown in, say, 1820. By then we're into the more familiar to us stuff about gross anatomical differences, facial angles, and skull capacities. That probably reaches its zenith circa 1890-1940, but by 1850 the dominant mode of white supremacy in the US is explicitly scientific as accompanied sometimes by Biblical citations and argument rather than the other way around.

[dice=Intelligence + Academics Diff 8]6d10 - 1 success, fail.

Taking a look at the woman, Justin says, "If we let her go, I'm guessing we're gonna have to help her out of this place."

"This is none of our problem," Ezra said, trying not to think too much about what the woman's blood would look like.

Ezra supposed that you wore this kind of clothing to a fancy party. He made sure he was clean and relatively groomed before going.

Ezra knew a good thing when he saw it. Nothing had blown up yet. He kept his head down and now they were giving away clothes. He was a few up from where he started and wasted no time changing.

go ahead and rearrange a few things Ezra

I'll get on it, health permitting. I've been sick all week and the head cold let up right in time for coughing fits to start. :( Basically just going to find somewhere he can get a dot of Italian to get by with.[/ooc]

"I'm not sure we really have much of an alternative." Justin says.

"You're right. Nothing else we can do.

Sorry I've been absent. Unkind RL.

If we're going to be in the past for a goodly while, I'd like to rearrange Ezra's stats so he can interact more with people from the era. If it's just a temporary thing like a flashback scene or two, I'm not fussed.

Still here...just not real sure what to do...speaking strictly for myself...

Same here. Ezra has limited ability to talk to anyone and is keen on keeping a low profile. Right now, doing about anything seems like it would be conspicuous.

Ezra's stomach settled and he made his way back to the group, pretending to pay careful attention to the sermon.

Just then a pot starts being beat by wooden spoon and all the wagons except Lord Este cone to the center fire and you all eat roasted pheasant and carrots with a good wine. It is all amazing and you realize you are eating without processing...

Something wasn't right. Ezra quietly got up and absented himself, looking for a convenient bush or tree. Not a good idea to puke in public. Too memorable. Put you on the radar.

Apologies, to be honest I was thrown for quite a look having built for modern day only to be spirited away shortly into the game. I think I was holding breath a bit and seeing what others might do to try and get a feel for the situation better. But I fear that everyone did that to some degree.

I almost made Ezra a historian...but he'd probably have been doing 19th century US history so I didn't have to bug my medievalist or early modern friends for references.

Ezra let himself drift toward the good looking woman, keeping an eye on her and working hard not to look like he was thinking about the kind of screams she would make. He didn't know what was going on here, but there was always blood and screaming.

"Anyone care to take a guess as to why the old Romani woman is staring at..." Justin says, before obviously being distracted by something else.

With a half-smirk he says, "Maybe this place isn't so bad after all."

Ezra had no interest in the naked woman unless he could gut her, but it wouldn't do to appear uninterested. People would notice and remember. He answered Justin with a sly grin.

Perc+Alertness: 5d10 ⇒ (3, 4, 7, 9, 10) = 33

Ezra kept his mouth shut when it all went sideways. Wasn't enough time to play Vincent and panic like a good little boy. Whatever was going on didn't feel like drugs to him and that talk did sound a lot like when the priests used to do things old school, just to show them how it was back in the day.

And what the hell happened to my clothes? And gun. And money.

This was going to keep going sideways, no doubt. Might be more interesting that way.

"Ezra Imperioli," he said. "No Latin. No Italian except swearing. No idea what the hell's going on."

I'm back.

So hi. I'm currently going through some relatively serious issues in my personal life and may be unavailable for a while. I also might not be. One of those things where I have no idea how it's going to shake out or when I'm going to be capable of posting. It sucks and I'm sorry, but it's unavoidable. I'll do what I can.

Resources: 3d10 ⇒ (1, 6, 5) = 12 It's been a bad month.

All I've given him is a knife, a pistol, and a car rental. Still good? Murder weapons are kind of important for a serial killer. :)

Ezra sat nursing a beer he hadn't actually had a drop of until the package arrived. He took it and watched the place start to heat up. The weight bothered him, but if it blew up or something he'd never know. If it wasn't, then he wasn't about to leave his money behind.

The noise in the bathroom passed through drunk, drugs, and sex before landing on odd. That could be interesting. Suddenly Ezra needed to take a leak. He took up his package and headed for the bathroom.

Ezra stepped into the bar just as the slap landed and carefully suppressed the rush at seeing a man hurt. The girl should have had a knife. Stuck it right in the side of his throat, so the blood would spray. People screaming. The guy gurgling and swaying as he drowned and lose blood pressure at the same time. It would have been beautiful. But she didn't so Ezra moved on to thinking about how she would howl if he cut her stomach open and showed her her insides.

Win some, lose some. Maybe she could be an extra. Or him. Or the guy snorting coke. Not the bartender. Never kill a fat man, Pop always said. Guy that fat would be a pain in the ass to haul around and chop up. Ezra had a rental car, not a forklift. Not the cop either. Don't kill cops because they take that personal for some reason. Didn't make sense but that's how they were.

Anyway, he was here to get paid. Better take care of that first. Once he had his money, he could think about sightseeing. Otherwise he might not get paid and that would be unprofessional. People would think he worked for free.

I made it. Had to hurry a little, by which I mean a whole lot, so he's nowhere near so fleshed out as I'd like. But he's got mechanics and a backstory.