CS for the "evil" stuff. Can we please NOT call it Axis of Evil? I am having a big issue with that . . . sorry to be such a nit-picker.
Here is my latest character for that RP. Draken's sister.
Name: Raven, also has other aliases.
Race: Imperial.
Gender: Female
Age: Four centuries old. Dead.
Home Country: Cyrodiil.
Faction and Rank or Guilds: Unknown.
Combat skills and talents: Unknown.
Eyes: Orange and yellow.
Appearance: Raven appears to those under the banner of darkness as a robed figure. Her face is entirely concealed behind shadow and under a black hood. Her voice is raspy, insidious. No one, save for her closest connections(her brother and other vampires of the clan) had seen her face or stood close to her. She appears as a disembodied spirit, an apparition to those who work for her. Many believe her soul dwells in Coldharbour, and only her brother is able to summon her.
Build: Always robed.
Weapons of preference: Her mind.
Magic abilities or powers: As a vampire of the Order, Raven mastered her natural affinity for Blood magic and became an accomplished sorceress. She studied the doctrines of the Order and perfected her abilities, both supernatural and mundane; seducing people with a touch and a stare, driving people into a fatal state of insanity and despair by displaying to them their greatest fears, or simply unleashing tremendous powers of lightning and fire attacks.
■Vampire's Seduction: Raven can seduce her victims into a trance-like state and hypnotize them with her eyes. If their willpower is not strong enough, she can send them out to do her bidding by enthralling them. It can be noted she feeds on her victims by using this power whenever she diets from blood for two days.
■Reign of Terror: Aside from mundane use of illusion spell, Cyrodiilic vampires possessed the ability to form hallucinations within the minds of individuals by summoning their worst fears and nightmares and silencing them, thus making them unable to use magic. Raven often used this when fighting against mages or necromancers, and her potent use of the power was able to drive a person near death, depending on the images she inflicted. A victim was able to survive if they had strength of will, though if not, the individual would descend into madness. Once Raven made her love claw her eyes out using this power in the Third Era.
■Embrace of Shadows: The vampiric power involved the manipulation of light and sound to render the caster invisible to the naked eye. Raven seldom used this, as she was well-fed on the constant basis, though times of chaos would pave the way for the use of this ability. Raven used Embrace of Shadows when escaping the carnage the Dark Brotherhood unleashed against the Crimson Scars, and when battling a group of necromancers.
Mental Profile/Personality: When a younger child, Raven was a small girl with straight black hair. As she matured by Bal's ritualistic power, she grew into an athletically built, strong woman of tall height. She bore long, lustrous black hair and eyes that were red as blood and yellow as liquid fire from her vampirism. She was often considered by those whom she came across as unnaturally beautiful, and she was fully conscious of her appearance.
Because of the anonymity required by the Order, however, Raven carefully planned her life to make herself inconspicuous when necessary. Despite this, she often exploited full use of her appearance, taking advantage of her looks to support her when extracting information from other individuals.
With time, Raven developed in cunning and manipulation, and her father became impressed with her deceitful and calculating nature. While living in the Imperial City, Raven was often friendly to the mortals with whom she encountered. She also made use of bribes, as such attitudes would allow her to acquire most of the things she needed without drawing unwanted attention.
During her earlier years, she displayed a hunger for knowledge and power, spending hours upon hours on her library in her father's castle. If she was not studying, she was learning aggressive styles of sword combat, and martial arts employed by her father, who learned them in his time as a human in Elsweyr. Though she drilled herself to perfection of the mind and body, she also learned to control her emotions in any given situation.
Before she was sent to society, Raven knew how vampires around Tamriel were vilified and considered "abominations" by the mortals. She staunchly believed, however, that vampires were not evil, and were beyond common morality as they were predators. Additionally to her mindset on that concept, she considered herself the embodiement of vampirism, as she carries the purity of her bloodline.
While rising to prominance in the 3E 153, Raven became increasingly treacherous, betraying and killing numerous people who placed their trust in her for the sole reason to protect her family. Ever since her years at the tutelage of her father, Raven's main goal was nothing less than grasping power. In her personal goal and by vampiric nature, she afforded to be eternally patient, incredibly intelligent, and an amazing illusionoist, able to adopt a façade of a normal and trustworthy politician and noblewoman for a stupendous number of years. Her lack of a relationship with her mother, and a life devoid of a maternal figure had shaped her into a cold and calculating vampire.
Not much is known of her normal life. What is known about her to those who are aware of her nature is that she is a vampire of the Order. Raven was a manipulative, deceitful and a seductive megalomaniac, using people and subtely bending them to her whims.
Raven had a particular obsession with purity and youth. Even though she was unable to age physically, she often chose to feed on newborn infants and children and virgins as well, believing a pureblooded vampire occasionally were better fed if their nutrition was pure.
Biography: Just as her true face, Raven's history is shrouded in secrecy. The sole group of people that truly are aware of her life is her brother and other members of the clan.
Raven was a pureblooded vampire who was a member of the
Cyrodiil Vampyrum Order.
A Daughter of Coldharbour who followed the manifesto, an ancient tenet of the secretive vampire clan in Cyrodiil, she was one of the most powerful vampires in Tamriel's history. Her entire life as a ancient was the culmination of a centuries' old plot to save the vampiric tribe from within.
Throughout her centuries Raven lived a double life, simultaneously keeping an untarnished career as an ambassador of the empire and a noblewoman while learning the mysteries of magic and vampiric power. Raven, her brother and her father, all exceptionally skilled and powerful in Night Powers and Blood Magic, were able to conceal their identities from mortals for centuries.
Raven began her political career at a very young age, carefully hiding her true nature as a vampire. In the Imperial Palace, she joined in as a scholar after graduating from the Arcane University, and thus worked her way upward. After a four-year stint in the political field, she was appointed court mage.
Raven lost many of her elections than she won in her young career, missing out on many important appointments in the political field. She secretly elected to maintain a low profile so as to allow her to discreetly disappear from the map in order to focus on her vampiric training and powers in dark and remote places of Cyrodiil.
By the time she stepped into the field of politics in the Imperial City, she was already aware that the prominent members in the High Council looked down their noses at the more provincial counts and aspirant rulers, expecting very little to nothing of important from them. Raven knew that, she too, was also in with the other hopefuls from the corners of Cyrodiil, those who, having never been very experienced in the field, would in short order be overwhelmed by the greater politics of the Imperial City.
Rather than do anything to prove herself to the elites, Raven encouraged them to keep that mindset. Once again she failed to take advantage of opportunities that could have granted her position on important places with powerful people, and unless bothered, she never shared her motives with her colleagues; the truth was that Raven purposely sought to maintain her advancements slow, knowing that the more she kept it that way, the more harmless she seemed to her rivals. The performance eventually worked; the powerful politicians of the empire, lost in their own petty power struggles, only laughed at the young aspirant girl, and paid her no mind until they were too weak from infighting to prevent her rise in power.
As the years passed, Raven and her father decided, after the fall of Mad Pelagius, that politics was ripe for more bolder forms of manipulation. The Imperial City was festering with political corruption, both the citizens of the empire and other provinces yearned for strong central leadership. So, in order to place Raven in the upper echelon, her father planned for the current holder of the position to be assassinated.
Though she followed the tenets of the manifesto like a religion, Raven disagreed with the current elite members of the clan known as the ancients. Though she respected them at first, she gradually lost his trust in the Order Vampyrum, believing it to be flawed and tainted with the current leadership who had hinted in using subjugation to bring control to themselves and even revealing the vampiric masquerade within the empire that protected them for so long. Infuriated and fearful that mortals would one day seek to begin a war if they discovered vampires walked among them in stations of power, Raven secretly began plotting against the clan's ancients in a plan to return the clan to its roots of secrecy in the shadows.
Raven, under the guidance of her father, was able to cooperate with her brother to quell a growing vampiric problem that rivaled the chaos in the days of the Tharn Family. The problem grew enough that the elders and ancients of the clan saw them as a potential threat that could inspire other foreign vampire clans from crossing the borders into Cyrodiil. Raven and her family did bitterly anticipated the rise of vampire hunting groups, which was a minor setback for them but ultimately a tool they were able to use to quell the rise of the feral vampires.
Raven presented a solution; to infiltrate the vampire hunting organizations and use them to exterminate the barbaric vampires. The ancients agreed and having their full trust in Raven, granted her leadership over the plan. Her cunning ideas went off without a hitch and through the skilled vampire hunters, her and her brother was able to have the growing pestilance destroyed in a matter of eight months and in celebration hosted a party for the vampire hunters and all their supporters in a reformed fort. In their drunk revelry and festivity, Raven's brother trapped all of the members in and had them killed. The scapegoat was a handful of thralls Raven had turned who was ultimately executed for his crime.
As her father privately searched to usurp the Cyrodiil Vampyrum Order with her, Raven and her brother manipulated politics, resulting in the invasion of Akavir and the death of Uriel V. In the wake of the crisis, the High Council voted to elect Raven as member of their council while her brother became High Chancellor. As tens of thousands perished in the invasion, the vast majority of Imperial citizens rallied behind Raven and her brother, thus giving him enough support her in name of security of a potentially weakened empire and transfer most of the palace's executive authority to her own office. After succesfully gaining power and prestige to her family, Raven set the next step of her plan in motion; exterminating the ancients once and for all before they risked exposing the clan.
Raven Meridius formed a covert partnership with the Glenmoril Wyrd using a thrall as a puppet. With the aid of the witches she gained potions that would cure vampirism, though the process took over a year. During that year she gained sympathizers from her own clan that agreed that the old ways of manipulation and secrety was the ideal lifestyle of the Order and that anything else was a threat and perversion of the natural way. With the help of her allies Raven sought to save her fellow clan members from a possible doom.
She patiently had the potions made and brought to her office under the guise of fine wine that she stored away. During her rise as an elder in the Order Vampyrum, Raven distributed the potions in old bottles of human blood that was said to have been preserved for centuries for a special occasion. The ancients, not foreseeing her treachery, drank the cure at the time in a ritualistic toast. They were instantly cured, and immedietly killed by those allied with her who kept their vampirism. In that single night Raven saved her people through acts of treachery and deceit, which ironically was the very methods the ancients used to reach their craddle of power.
After the demise of the ancients Raven and the High Council(who were ignorant of the secret plot happening behind the scenes) effectively wielded considerable control in Cyrodiil and virtually everyone who lived within it, rebuilding the most powerful military force in Cyrodiil after most of the Legions had perished in Akavir.
The Clan: The Cyrodiil Vampyrum Order has long been one of the proudest lines of vampires. Its members work hard to maintain a sense of honor, genteel behavior, and leadership. A sense of noblesse oblige has been rooted in the clan, joined by the genuine belief that the Order knows what's best for their members.
They see themselves as the enforcers of tradition and the rightful rulers of vampiric presence in Cyrodiil. Unsurprisingly, they're members have long been chosen from the ranks of nobility and privilege, whether nobles or merchant princes. They live their lives believing that deception and manipulation are the surest means of protecting vampires from the growing mortal masses, and protecting their own way of life.
Recognizing the mortals of the empire to be a proud and superstitious people that would sooner stake and condemn any vampires than consider living with them let alone beneath them, the ancients did not seek to rule them directly or make themselves deities as certain vampires had done, but influenced events from behind the scenes by procuring favors from the province's citizens. This tactic of establishing political connections would be used throughout the centuries. Instead of using thralls, many of the Order's members used proxies to deliver favors and contacts, allowing themselves to grow rich and powerful while the mortals remained ignorant of their true nature. This strategy would be widely adopted in the centuries to follow and would serve the Order, even enabling some of its newer members to take a bolder approach.
The first years after the foundation of the Order were spent in singleminded pursuit of power and influence; Most members recognized that the goals of their fraternity could not be achieved in a single lifetime. The early years, rather, were mostly concerned with laying the foundations upon which they can reap the fruits in the coming centuries.
With the destruction of the native clan in Cyrodiil, the members of the Order had their own personal accounts of coin and territory. The only members of the clan were those not only gifted with Bal's blood, but also having their own power base and sphere of influence; wealth, connections, etc. With the financial leverage at the Order's disposal, the members were able to forge a vast intelligence-gathering web. With bribery, seduction and a keen mind were they able to hide themselves behind a perfect masquerade. The Order's member's time was certainly not spent idly. They waited and watched in secret, having the luxury of observing the empire and mortals, taking pride that their altered blood meant their prey and enemies never even knew they existed.
As the centuries passed the Order began changing from within. Members disfavored living in secrety and using manipulation to control the minds of mortals in exchange for direct control. Though they waited when the time was right to carry out their plan for ultimate domination, some of their latest members were enamored by the idea that the Order had to be preserved and that only in secrecy and living in shadow could the vampire truly thrive lest he be the instrument of his own downfall and those as well.
In the end, however, it is said that Raven had fell prey to her own schemes, and died while attempting to transfer her spirit into the body of her foe. She was never heard from the mortal population again.
Quite the opposite, the mind-reading idea has sparked a storm of creativity, which was a big part of my purpose in opening a tavern. Right now we have two new RPs brewing, one with its own theme song!! That’s pretty awesome.
