Dr. Jonathan Stepford, Apprentice in the Third Circle of Mystery (Vampire: the Masquerade 5th edition)

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Epitaph:  The One-Eyed King's sweater-vested spy

Quote:  "Now, now, no need to be crass.  Come on in; Mary's really outdone herself tonight!"
Clan:  Tremere, House Tremere
Sect:  Camarilla
Coterie:  The Calafia-Hippolyta Grove of Evergreen Wisdom (rectorate again, after a decade and a half as vanguard)

Mortal Days
Louis Pasteur was still new and making waves when the Great Blizzard hid Jonathan Stepford's murder.  The forensic doctor's first thought once he'd become the fangs in the snowy white himself was of how much easier it would have gone for the rapidly-cooling body slowly pinking the snow with its dregs if he'd had some of that new local anesthetic he'd read of so much in the medical journals.

Like many doctors of his day, Jonathan'd been a York Rite Freemason and an Odd Fellow and an Elk, filling his social calendar with ceremonies and celebrations and the methods of furthering a career that fester and flourish behind closed doors.  The city of New York wouldn't initiate the office of Chief Medical Examiner until Jonathan was 71 years dead; such cloak-and-dagger, brandy-and-cigars methods were the only way he saw to earn the money he deserved doing the work he'd been put on Earth to do.  He'd had a wife, Constance, and the silly thing had argued with him ever so much as women began to press once more the idea that they should be Masons and the like.

Dr. Stepford prided himself on his breadth of reading, always seeking new translations of Auguste Ambroise Tardieu and Johann Ludwig Casper.  Professional journals flooded hid mailbox everyday and he mostly kept almost up-to-date with nearly all of them.  His epistles often appeared in local papers, famously remarking that the spirit of the age had left the United States to rest for a time in England.  It would return, he said; Emerson and Thoreau's ghosts would not let its absence stand.  The precursors to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn held his fascination, but it was the Fellowship of the New Life, with its message of pacifism, vegetarianism, and simple living that held his fiercest allegiance.  An avid subscriber to their journal Seed-Time, he worked hard to spread the group's ideas among the wealthy New Yorkers who were his peers.  Even joined the socialist splinter group called the Fabian Society.

What could he say?  He liked organizations, and the well-ordered life that came with their dictates.

His sire never told him which of these groups ~ professional, fraternal, occult, political ~ provided the light for his star to shine and catch the old man's eye, but Jonathan believes it must have been one of them.  The field in which he worked ~ forensic medicine ~ was a relatively new, certainly, but he was no Pasteur, after all, no medical genius breaking new ground and defying the scientific consensus with truth as his shield.  

Jonathan has since come to discover that intellectual humility is a rare diamond in the Tremere rough, and one Henderson often exhorted him to keep.  To this day, however, he doesn't consider it a possible cause for him to be given the gift of immortality he was given in the flying ice that night.

Kindred Nights
60 years passed, and with them four families for food, for companionship, for appearances' sake.  New York City with Constance, of course, then Fiorella in Philadelphia, Detroit's Geraldine, and finally: Mary.

Mary won Jonathan's heart in a way no other of his wives had.  Suburban Chicago offered fertile soil for their life together, as full of quiet and pleasantries as anything can be for a vampire and the family from which he fed.  Jonathan nearly remembered what it was to gasp in surprise when Mary herself suggested they adopt their three children, before Jonathan had found the moment to do so himself.  He wanted an illusion, to fool mortal society and his own conscience that human happiness was available to him; she just fretted over the difficulties of the urchins' life.  The goodness of it felt tantalizingly real to Jonathan, almost as if it was something he could take on himself.

Until 1957, that is.  Two Nosferatu, children by the standards of the undead and children in human appearance as well, happened to discover the Stepford family as they practiced their skulking.  Peter and Tammy Walenski were their names, and they had plucked themselves from a house of abuse by alcohol and flame before the Nosferatu primogen immortalized their young bodies.  Elysium was shocked when the two revealed what they had seen to Sheriff Balthazar.  The Brujah wanted to execute Jonathan on the spot, Scourges being less common in those premillenarian nights.  But Prince Lodin stopped him, took the Tremere into a private room muffled with hanging cigar smoke with brandied blood available at a moment's ease.

The Prince told Jonathan that he would survive this crime, for the wound to the Masquerade was small and easily bandaged.  He would even be allowed to keep his wife, though not his children.  Jonathan, swept aside by his fear of losing the tenuous hold he'd had on happiness, hastily agreed to whatever price would secure this seeming mercy.  Lodin smiled the kind of smile only Ventrue faces can hold as he revealed what Jonathan had agreed to.  The Tremere would be Blood Bound to the Prince, starting with his first drink that very hour, and he would Dominate his wife into killing his children.  Jonathan's face fell, but he knew he would keep his overzealous bargain.  "Anything to keep Mary," his hollow voice told the Prince.

"And keep her, you shall," Lodin replied, "for she shall be your childe."  Upon re-entering the main body of Elysium, Prince Lodin made a big scene about the cunning Tremere having defeated him with metaphysical manipulations and political chicaneries, just grandiose enough to sell it and not a bit more, and Jonathan carried out the sentence.

For decades he served Lodin as his hidden agent in the Chicago Chantry, curtailing Nicolai's influence and trying to enjoy some semblance of life with his beloved wife.  The War of Chicago struck the nigh-forgotten note of hope in his breast.  He, like everyone else, thought Lodin had fallen beneath the claws of the Lupines, and so he ran.  Bundling Mary and what resources he could into their station wagon, he sped all the way west to California, the two of them recovering from their own battle with the Lupines by means of the Highway Patrol corpses they left trailing behind them like breadcrumbs.

They settled in Oakland (well, Alameda), halfway across the continent from what they'd had to deal with in the Windy City, and for months it seemed like they could rebuild anew.  They made contact with Regent Duncan Campbell and the Brujah Prince of the East Bay Amanda Koller and began to settle, even to smile again.  The Prince found her appetite for power whetted by that conflict and everyone can see it.  The Stepfords have grown comfortable with the limited freedom they have found here, and fear what Sir Olaf will do as Amanda's star rises ever more.    No doubt the broken Prince danced when the Alameda Chantry proved so vital in the face of the Wan Kuei invasion, which Jonathan did all he could do to aid, despite never gaining a true understanding of Blood Sorcery.

Plots and Schemes:

• Burying the Landmine:  Lodin knew of Petra's Embrace well before the mage's daughter was even abducted.  It is so easy to send information to distant masters in this day and age.  From the beginning, the Broken Prince had instructed Jonathan to implant the Gargoyle with a sequence of commands and triggers that would eventually turn this weapon away from the Wan Kuei and towards his enemies.  It's been a dozen years since that war ended, and Lodin seems to be biding his time until the situation is right.  The conditioning continues apace, but there has been plenty of time for Jonathan to consider how he might align his own liberation with whatever Lodin's plans for Petra might be.  After all, it is not Lodin himself who is Petra's master.  If only he could warn Prince Amanda before the scheme is sprung.
• Strange Visitors:  Wheelchair-using Brujah anarch Susan Langston has called upon Jonathan in his role as doorman of the chantry repeatedly over the past few months, wanting to speak to Duncan.  The requests have gone from uncertain asks to casually calling on the deaf Regent.  Jonathan respects his Regent, and enjoys relaxing with him from time to time, but he's done some investigations on the rabble-rouser.  She is a member of a gang with one of the House Carna traitors in South Berkeley.  He doesn't yet know what is bringing her around, or what he can do with the information after he gets it, but he'd love to find out.
• How Far Would You Go To Be Free?:  Jonathan has heard that the Sabbat have a ritual by means of which they can break the Blood Bond.  Just before the day-death takes him, after sending Mary off to the bunker that protects her from the sun, he has been known to sit in a richly appointed chair, a glass of undrunk brandy scenting the air, pondering how he might approach them.  They are monsters, he knows, and believe in leaving humanity behind.  Neither of those is the good Victorian doctor; how might he force them to teach him this most valuable of tools?

Domain and Haven:

• Alameda Point / Naval Air Station Alameda (stats to be determined once I finish writing up the rest of the chantry):  While most of the chantry, including Jonathan's wife, sleep in basements scattered throughout the decommissioned naval base for safety from the burning sun, Jonathan serves as the public face of the East Bay Tremere in many cases.  Accordingly, his daytime rest is had in the USS Hornet museum.  The aircraft carrier provides wonderful protection against both Sol and any attack from Kindred or other supernatural beings.  Many of the Kindred in the East Bay know to call here before seeking any other member of the Grove.
• 2805 Otis (Resources 🌢🌢):   In order to receive more personal guests and maintain his mask, Dr. Stepford uses his own meager investments and the money he can steal from the sleeping and groggy patients whose blood he drinks to maintain a cozy home in Alameda's East End neighborhood.  Giving him the comfort that can only come from retreating into memories of a cozier time, he has had Mary decorate it in a mid-century style, only slightly updated to reflect the tastes of a culture seven decades more recent.  Every other month or so, he takes her on a vacation to the house for a weekend to forget the life they've been forced into and pretend to just be the conservative suburban couple they once were.
• In recognition of their role preventing the spread of the Wan Kuei, Prince Koller has granted the Calafia-Hippolyta Grove of Evergreen Wisdom domain rights over all of Alameda.  Notable hunting grounds include the South Shore shopping center, Robert W. Crown Memorial State Beach, and the 19th-century storefronts of the Historic Park Street Business District.  Dr. Stepford prefers to haunt Alameda Hospital and the various skilled nursing facilities that surround it, drinking deep from those unaware by sleep or anesthesia.

Thralls, Tools, and Enemies:

• George Burton (Enemy 🌢🌢, Nuisance): George Burton believed in a lot of bizarre fringe sciences in his youth. Thankfully, the New World Order of the Technocracy saw that he had some reason about him, and reached out to talk about the errors of logic found among the Society of Ether he'd found himself in. His only daughter, as dutiful and perfect as ever the daughter of a Mind mage could be, was last seen by her Mythbusters coworkers in 2002. Mustering all the resources and Procedures available to him, he quickly discovered the bloodsucking reality deviants infesting Alameda Point, where the Mythbusters performed their most dangerous experiments. With no answers beyond that, he began a cautious war, hoping to find answers before he found vengeance. Almost two decades later, the flame of hope has died down to an ember, and that ember itself grows cold and dark. This does not bode well for the Tremere, as George's amalgam-mates have begun to pressure him to go on a full offensive. (Data ❇️❇️❇️, Forces ❇️❇️, Matter ❇️❇️❇️, Mind ❇️❇️, Primal Utility ❇️)

Kindred Relationships:

• Camarilla (Infamy 🌢🌢 former cleaver / Camarilla Status 🌢🌢, Bastion of Decency): Vampiric society certainly doesn't offer many options for clean living, does it? The anarchs refuse to accept any semblance of order and the Sabbat are . . . distasteful. The Camarilla alone offers Dr. Stepford and his wife a chance at common American decency and a stable life.
• House Tremere (Loresheet: Descendant of Karl Schrekt 🌢🌢 / Loresheet: The Pyramid 🌢🌢, Living the Dream): What could be better than life as a Tremere? The blood served in the chantry is of a spectacular vintage, well spiced by brandy and Cuban cigars, the study is plushly appointed, and there is little to do all the long nights than to study and practice. Here, Jonathan has found a quiet unlife where knowledge and political power can be wed for all eternity.
• Regent Duncan Campbell (Our Savior) Sheriff Darius (A Threat) Petra (A Tool) (Coterie Advantages 🌢🌢): Jonathan much prefers the Calafia-Hippolyta Grove of Evergreen Wisdom to the child-regent Nicolai Antonescu's Hyde Park Chantry. There is a freedom to be found here, a willingness to invest in the projects of its members. Regent Campbell relies on collegial friendship rather than supernatural force and pawns with ungodly power to maintain the cohesion of the group. Of course, there is at least one such pawn with ungodly power, created in the early part of this millennium to fight against the Wan Kuei of San Francisco, but the Gargoyle now named Petra serves the Grove as a whole. No one member of the East Bay Tremere can unilaterally command their secret weapon, but Dr. Stepford is the chantry's expert on mind control. Darius is the inspirer of worry for Dr. Stepford, though to be fair, that anxiety is due less to his personality, with its strange blend of gentle prayer and shadowy brutality, and more to his position. Jonathan, after all, knows well what it is to owe loyalty to both Regent and Prince, and how little there is to trust in such a position.
• Mary Stepford (Living in the Past 🌢, Guilt-Tainted Love): Jonathan just didn't have the heart to not mess with Mary's head. Knowing full well what the piling build-up of its repetition would inevitably do to his wife's mind, he has repeatedly made use of his Dominate to protect her from her memories. He destroyed her to save her, and now he comforts himself with the dull predictability of a life that hasn't noticed the last seven decades of societal change. Mary is still here, standing by his side, and in fact her star has been on the rise for some time now thanks to her innovative application of the domestic arts to Blood Sorcery, while he struggles to politick his way up the Pyramid as a vampire who leans more heavily into his mental powers than his sorcerous ones. Despite this, Jonathan feels no jealousy, or really only the slightest bitl he just loves her too much to begrudge her the respect of her peers.
• Sir Olaf Holte, the One-Eyed King (Long Bond 🌢 / Mawla 🌢🌢🌢🌢🌢, Swallowed Disgust): Kindred are denied happiness by whatever force, God or alien or otherwise, that has left them what they are, and this destiny was fulfilled for the Stepfords when a Chicago street thug showed up in a beat-up car on the streets of Alameda on Christmas of 1994.  He had a present for them: a burnt crisp of a man in the back seat with one piercing blue eye left of his former grandeur.  The One-Eyed King told Jonathan to drink, and the Tremere couldn't resist even what dregs of Lodin's blood were still holding them.  He drank and he renewed the Ventrue's hold over him.  Every May 1st now sees Jonathan travelling to Chicago on Olaf's orders to once more renew the hold.  Thus did the hidden King of Chicago's streets maintain one tenuous tendril of influence elsewhere, a bolthole in case things went bad like they had before, and an influence in the famously Sabbat-contested East Bay.
• Tammy Walenski (Vengeance):  Jonathan can never forgive Tammy and her now-truly-dead brother for damning him so fully.  Humanity had begun to root in his heart and then she ripped it from his grasp, leaving him a hollow monster.  One day, he will be his own man again, and she will pay.  Maybe he'll stake her for the sun atop Olaf's own ashes.
• William Albert Grissom (Mawla 🌢, The Son I Wish I Had): A fledgling in the Las Vegas chantry, William was assigned to be Jonathan's apprentice in recognition of his efforts against the Wan Kuei. The former CSI technician approaches the initiation that will make him a Tremere in his own right, and the mixed pride and grief at losing the specific bond he'd fostered with the boy provide a vaguely-welcome relief from the many heavy things on Jonathan's mind.

Whispers:

• Every Vampire's Fear:  The Ivory Tower of the East Bay has noticed the difficulties, accidents, and just plain bad luck that have followed Jonathan for more than a decade.  Clucktongues have begun to speculate on the possibility of a haunting, a careless feed catching a victim's soul between worlds.  Worse, some of them claim that ghosts cannot see vampires well, being as they are dead-but-not.  Perhaps hauntings are contagious, they say.  No one has asked the Hecata who rule Rockridge about it yet.
• A New Shining City On The Hill:  As one of Karl Schrekt's descendants, and a true believer in the former Justicar's version of the clan post-Vienna, Dr. Stepford is always watching, evaluating the East Bay for Schrekt.  The Pyramid needs a peak, one chantry through which its business can flow, and Schrekt is using Stepford to investigate the possibility of making the Calafia-Hippolyta Chantry of Evergreen Wisdom that peak.
• No One Likes A Diplomat:  Jonathan Stepford wishes to build an alliance with the Heaven Promise Society that rules San Francisco, the tiniest sect in the nocturnal world of the Kindred.  Regent Demian's hatred of the Wan Kuei and wariness of Schrekt's new Inner Council has kept the Heaven Promise Society and the Camarilla in a state of ceasefire; Jonathan would end that stalemate with peace and friendship, and undermine the bookish pale lady.  Perhaps he sees this as his path to a Regency in his own right.  One that might have diplomatic immunity, no less.

Mask and Mien:

• With hair as comfortably warm a brown as the welcoming wood of a home-office chair, Dr. Stepford adopts the style of a suburban white man of the mid-20th century.  Sweater vests in calmly cool pastels provide a pleasant background to the pipe that is rarely far from Jonathan's mouth.  Immaculate, almost glowing, white button-up shirts, soft grey trousers, and loafers the color of his hair complete the look, though the brilliant brass pince-nez glasses atop his hawk's beak of a nose confuse it some.  Behind their round lenses, honey-colored eyes dart with exacting purpose to rest on any number of details in turn.  He keeps a smile on his face and a pleasant manner about himself, welcoming and gracious.
• Jonathan plays the part of the domestic lord at home with the sort of easy perfection that can only come from a desperate clinging, whereas at work (whether for the hospital or the chantry or even in less formal circumstances,) he tempers a crisp professionalism with a fatherly demeanor that manages to communicate both care and enforced distance.  This front melts away whenever he is alone with his wife, though the desperation remains to mark the genuine, tender love with which he treats her.  She is the only thing he really loves, and he is slowly destroying her to save her.  It is only in the rare moments he has alone, with nothing to do or nowhere to go that he lets himself realize that and search for a solution.  It hurts when he does that, so he keeps those moments mercifully rare.
• Alameda Hospital has a doctor among its staff by the name of Ira Levin, whose description matches that of Jonathan Stepford.  He works as an anesthetician and physician, and his paychecks are set to direct deposit into an account held by an Oakland food bank.   (Mask 🌢)

Sire:  the Spiritualist Henderson Nealy, childe of Ann Pudeator who was "killed" in the Salem Witch Trials, childe of Hartmut Feig, childe of Nathan Mendelssohn, childe of Karl Schrekt, childe of Lotharius, childe of Etrius
Embraced:  1888 (172 years old; 40 years old in seeming; born 1848)
Ambition: Slip free from this web of control spun by these monsters around me.
Convictions (Touchstones)

• For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays (Joseph Nolan, labor organizer in the Hospital Technicians' Union)
• Her face Is the summ’d sweetness of the earth, Her soul the glass of heaven’s grace, To which she leads me by the hand; Or, briefly all the truth to say To you, who briefly understand, She is both heaven and the way. (Meiying Tam, a Chinese-American housewife of a hospital doctor and friend of Mary's)

Humanity 🌢🌢🌢🌢🌢▢▢▢▢▢
Generation:  11th
Blood Potency 🌢🌢

Strength 🌢🌢  /  Charisma 🌢🌢🌢  /  Intelligence 🌢🌢🌢🌢
Dexterity 🌢🌢🌢  /  Manipulation 🌢🌢  /  Wits 🌢
Stamina 🌢🌢  /  Composure 🌢🌢🌢  /  Resolve 🌢🌢
Health 🌢🌢🌢🌢🌢 / Willpower 🌢🌢🌢🌢🌢

Athletics   /  Animal Ken  🌢 /  Academics 

Brawl   /  Etiquette 🌢🌢🌢  /  Awareness 🌢🌢
Craft   /  Insight 🌢  /  Finance 
Drive   /  Intimidation   /  Investigation 🌢🌢🌢
Firearms   /  Leadership   /  Medicine 🌢🌢🌢🌢 Anesthetics, Forensics
Larceny   /  Performance   /  Occult 🌢🌢
Melee   /  Persuasion 🌢  /  Politics  🌢🌢
Stealth   /  Streetwise   /  Science 🌢🌢🌢 Anthropology
Survival   /  Subterfuge 🌢   /  Technology 🌢🌢

Predator Type: Sandman
Blood Sorcery 🌢 A Taste for Blood ☥ Level One: Bind the Accusing Tongue, Blood Walk, Craft Bloodstone, Devil's Touch, Purity of Blood

Dominate 🌢🌢🌢 Compel, Mesmerize, the Forgetful Mind
Auspex 🌢 Heightened Senses