Vidya Sangupta

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Concept

Nature: Trickster

Demeanor: Conniver

Concept: Mistress of Spin

Clan: Toreador

Generation: 13th

Sire: Eric Gautreau

Attributes

Physical

Str: 2

Dex: 2

Sta: 2

Social

Cha: 5 - Urbane

Man: 3

App: 4 - Fashion Sense

Mental

Per: 3

Int: 2

Wits: 3

Abilities

Talents

Alertness: 1

Athletics: X

Awareness: X

Brawl: X

Empathy: 4 - Gaining trust

Expression: 4 - Social media

Intimidation: 1

Leadership: X

Streetwise: 2

Subterfuge: 4 - False Personas

Skills

Animal Ken: X

Crafts: X

Drive: 1

Etiquette: 2

Firearms: 1

Larceny: X

Melee: X

Performance: 3

Stealth: 1

Survival: X

Knowledges

Academics: X

Computer: 3

Finance: X

Investigation: 1

Law: X

Medicine: X

Occult: X

Politics: X

Science: X

Technology: 1

Advantages

Disciplines

Auspex: X

Celerity: 1

Presence: 3

Backgrounds

Contacts: 2

Domain: 2

Fame: 1

Influence - Media: 3

Influence - University: 1

Mentor: 2

Resources: 3

Retainers: 2

Virtues

Conscience: 4

Self-Control: 3

Courage: 3

Other Traits

Humanity: 7

Willpower: 8

Merits

Computer Aptitude: 2-pt

Enchanting Voice: 2-pt

Protege: 1-pt

Flaws

Infertile Vitae: 5-pt

Prestation Debt (Prince): 2-pt

Experience

8

Appearance

Vidya is a woman of medium hight and voluptuous build, with dark olive skin that is starting to fade to more of an ash grey. The wasting of death has given her more of an hourglass figure than she had in life. Her hair is black and shoulder-length, framing a round face with dark eyes. Her preferred fashions run between neo-Victorian goth for Vampire society and more colorful cyber-chic for the wider world. She often wears fashionable spectacles cosmetically, as she needed reading glasses in life.

Living Appearance

Undead appearance

Background

Infertile Vitae: Not particularly surprising for a 13th-generation to have. But it’s particularly troubling for Vidya because: Like many neonates, she had a feeding accident early on, and in her panic tried to Embrace the victim. Like many neonates, this failed. However, according to what she’s learned, she did everything right. And she’s heard talk of ‘thin bloods’, so 2+2… Ever since siring her, Eric has had his white picket fences, man of the 50s hat on. He’s even commented offhand how he’s looking forward to being a grandsire, despite how rather weird that is for a vampire. And Vidya knows that if she ever does get a creation boon, she won’t be able to go through with it.

Contacts & Influence: Vidya’s contacts are mostly online, granting her wide but somewhat shallow access to people and information, through semi-anonymous communication. Through the various social media identities she manages, she cultivates and quashes trends, turns media scrutiny in useful directions, and keeps her finger on the pulse of New Orleans society. She also maintains an active interest in Tulane as an alumnus, and in her sorority. Her major contacts are: Liberty Applegate, working for the City of New Orleans’ Public Affairs Division. Libby studied Communications at Tulane, and was a senior member of the Alpha Delta Pi chapter, which she convinced Vidya to pledge to. Vicky is her ‘troubled little sister’, making things awkward while giving Vidya some leverage. Michel Anders, a drug dealer in the French Quarter, who has seen some seriously spooky shit. A lot of his customers - mostly service employees to the upper crust - have seen spooky shit, too. Sometimes, it’s even coherent. She lets him and his employees deal in her club in exchange for keeping quiet to everyone but her.

Domain: Eric passed control of one of his clubs - The Side Door, in the French Quarter but off Bourbon Street* - over to Vidya. While it aligns well enough with her mortal ambitions, she can’t help but feel that the whole ‘vampire owns a nightclub’ thing is more than a little cliched. So she’s tried to go the opposite of gothy with it, going instead for glitzy neon and high-energy jazz and R&B. With her ghoul Alicia frequently headlining and her own mixes dominating the musical selection, it actually mostly works. It’s not officially a gay or lesbian club, but projects a strong rainbow-friendly atmosphere. As a public business, The Side Door is not a terribly secure domain. Her bouncers are all mortal, though Vicky helps them with trouble sometimes. The first time another Kindred kills or seriously injures a mortal on her property, she’s probably going to make some drastic changes. For now, though, she prefers to build goodwill by providing a relatively safe feeding ground where the management knows what’s up. ...like her sire before her.

*Location subject to change based on ST’s determination of the geography of power in NO.

Fame: Vidya has DJed for a lot of local acts and on her own. Only those paying attention to the scene would even recognize her, but that plus owning The Side Door greases her path through most of the New Orleans nightlife. Being ‘in the entourage’ of slightly-more-famous local singer Alicia Burroughs gets her into the rest.

Retainers: Alicia Burroughs, vocalist (ghoul) Ally is an up-and-coming vocialist in the music scene in NO, with a stylistic range crossing most of R&B. Her stage styles are influenced by Lady Gaga and Nikki Minaj, but (before succumbing to the Blood Bond and resulting shift of priorites) she remained straight-laced, low-key, active at church, and pursuing a fallback career as a music teacher. After Eric, who had been her manager at the time, nudged Vidya to take her as her first ghoul, Alicia moved to the club scene full time and now serves largely as a daytime face and managerial assistant for Vidya and nighttime food lure. Very few of Alicia’s family have seen who her mysterious new ‘girlfriend’ is, but they uniformly hate how Alicia’s changed. Through the Blood Bond, Ally considers Vidya her girlfriend - a possibility she never would have entertained before the addiction, which went strongly against the beliefs she all too quickly shed. Vidya alternates between humoring her and edging her away, both largely out of guilt. It still bothers the young vampire that Eric gifted Ally to her like a puppy. Vidya recognizes the practicality - having Alicia in her pocket is useful for keeping her own cover career stable, and rotating sets of groupies keep the blood supply fresh without the Kine sticking around long enough to really get much of a clue - but it’s starting to worry her how increasingly comfortable she is with the arrangement. Vidya has kept Ally as blind as possible to the world of the Kindred, to try and keep her from changing even more. This will probably not work in the long run.

Victoria Applegate, bodyguard (ghoul) Vicky is the little sister of Vidya’s sorority sister Libby, and a reminder of her poor rural heritage that the ambitious public official would probably like gone. After getting out of high school, she tried to follow Libby from the little town outside Shreveport where they grew up, but unlike her older sister she didn’t have the discipline and schmoozing ability to get a scholarship into a prime school like Tulane - and she quickly ended up failing out of the local college that was all her parents could afford. When Vidya found out through the grapevine that Libby was looking to avoid the fallout from her sister being picked up on a shoplifting charge, she pounced on offering to help her sorority sister out and give Vicky a stable job that would be mostly out of sight. Since then, Vidya has put already-scrappy Victoria through a lot of martial arts training to make her more useful as a bouncer and bodyguard - and spent considerable sums and uses of Presence to get dojos to put up with her. She’s a useful escort, and adequate arm candy when one needs to show off in Elysium (there are some benefits to bringing a ghoul you know won’t be paying attention), but Vidya knows that she can’t give Vicky much slack or any open-ended responsibility or she’ll be back to old habits.

Mentor: Eric Gautreau Eric was Embraced in the early 50s by one John Freeman, a travelling ancilla who settled in New Orleans during the interwar period and joined the jazz scene with the fluency of someone who had been there since its inception. While at war in Europe, Eric had grown fascinated with the music industry through USO shows and managing to pull duty helping with the preparations. And being able to fraternize with some of the performers afterwards helped him come to terms with parts of himself that 1940s society just wasn’t ready to accept. On returning home to New Orleans, Eric got a job handling supplies at a club called The Side Door, and worked his way up to managing the establishment and some of its frequent acts. He attracted John’s attention with his eye for upcoming talent and rogueish good looks. Over the next 7ish decades, Eric built a solid network of clubs and small recording studios around the city, feeding from the groupies of the acts he managed and working more and more through intermediaries as time passed. One such intermediary was Vidya, a communications major fresh out of Tulane, looking for music industry work in social media so she could keep up her musical ambitions as well. Having never really grasped the interwebs or whatever, Eric was able to set her loose on his company’s needs and she quickly made up a huge amount of lost ground. Eric was so impressed with her - and, stragely after so many decades, feeling nostalgia for the idea of starting a family - that he petitioned the Prince for a Boon to Embrace her. He was delighted when she was somewhere between too shocked and too intrigued to refuse. Since the Embrace, he has tried to style himself as Best Vampire Dad, though of course he still has the Beast to deal with, and he has some rather rigid ideas of proper vampiric behavior for his childe.

Sample interactions:

• Eric rattles on, “Now, it’s not going to be anything like those Twilight books, because that would just be weird, although having a crush on your sire is perfectly natural…”

Vidya rubs her forehead. “Boss… I’m gay.”

“Well that’s great! So am I!” A wide grin splits his face as he throws up something resembling jazz hands, and Vidya’s not sure if she’s only just noticing the fangs or if he’s kept them retracted until now. “So that’s what all those rainbows were for…”

• “Sorry. Sorry. Just… frustrated.” Eric takes a deep and ultimately superfluous breath as he flexes his hand to work the shards of the crushed glass out. “I went to a lot of trouble to snag that starlet waiting in the foyer for you, so you’re going to bleed into that wine and then get out there and seduce her!”

Personal background:

• 3rd generation immigrant on both sides of her family, who grew up in Baton Rouge. By middle school, she was already sick and tired of people being surprised that she has a 'Normal' southern accent, and being asked where she's from by the parents of children she's been in the same class with since Kindergarten.
• Started composing electronica and DJing in high school, and distributed her works via MySpace. Branched out to other social media after that. Used online pseudonymity to both compartmentalize and broaden her social sphere.
• Style largely influenced by Daft Punk and The Glitch Mob
• Hired to handle social media promotion for Gatreau Talent Management after impressing the (hopelessly computer-inept) owner “Marvin” Gatreau with the turnout boost her self-promotion of a weeknight gig produced.
• After being Embraced, drifted mainly into the internet side of the music scene, withdrawing from her friends like most vampires do; she mainly appears in public just to maintain her influence.
• Has known she’s a lesbian since high school, but never fully came out publicly before being Embraced, and now it’s kind of a moot point.
• Communications BA, Minor in Music Engineering, Tulane University. Member, Alpha Delta Pi.

Personality:

• While Vidya will put on a variety of personas for the needs of her audience, she relaxes into a vaguely-ironic southern belle peppered liberally with internet memes. For Elysium, she turns up the Belle and turns down the irony.
• She prefers not to talk openly about hunting, and follows her sire’s method mainly because it’s practical, rarely involves repeated contact, and leaves the prey with memories of a night roughly in line with what they were looking for.
• Tends to advocate consideration towards Kine in the sense of not harming them, but manipulates them shamelessly.