Editing ToG Necessary Evil - Count Umbre (section)

== Backstory ==

'''Cupar Sandru d'Umbre''', The Cupbearer of Darkness, is someone who regards the typical idea of a vampire as an Eastern European aristocrat with a strong accent and a widow's peak as mildly quaint - that is not a popular hairstyle in Romania and he enjoys his mustache, thank you very much. But it's too accurate for him to find it more upsetting than Mexicans do Speedy Gonzales, it's actually rather endearing.

Technically a boyar meant to ensure his superiors were not poisoned rather than a count (it came from a pun and mishearing on his actual title that he found rather funny - Umbre is no technophobe and he loves classic horror movies as ironic tragic comedies, growing quite impressed with Lugosi), Umbre is a fairly typical mildly elder vampire by his own admittance. His whole purpose in life is to help maintain, and occasionally expand, his line's domain, and secure enough mortals and contacts to support them.

True, vampires are more distinctly linked to magic than they are to some mysterious power of undead blood, and creating another (especially one with a soul as opposed to a shambling near-mindless corpse) is a bit more involved, but the Karnstein clan - what many Europeans would consider to be "classic" vampires - are indeed classy, predatory sorts that mostly recruit from old money, or people they don't mind sharing old money, and consider themselves to be natural feudal lords of the mortals around them. If you ask them, they don't even qualify as "evil", which is why they aren't repulsed by holy symbols and have reflections. They simply have an extra requirement to their sharecroppers when seeing a share of their crops. That the world has ceased to acknowledge the planet is a chaotic, dangerous place that requires the strong to rule the weak to protect them is not their problem, which is why Sandru d'Umbre got so very frustrated when that irritating little vagabond, Nick Wilde the Gunsmoke Mage, started harassing his family and lands when pursuing a business partner of theirs, and followed him home on occasion to vent his displeasure at the intrusion.

Really, he wasn't even that upset with Wilde - the more he realized the man was more akin to a knight-errant and wandering adventurer than a bandit, the more he came to respect him as a fellow noble protecting his people, albeit one on a rather lower social stratum than himself. That the Gunsmoke Mage was one of many, many victims of the V'sori deeply upset him - the man deserved to die heroically defending the weak or at least being offered patronage into the Karnstein clan, not stabbed in the back by alien treachery! Thus, even beyond the fact he recognizes his herd will be put in danger by the ultimate invasion and that in the upheaval a good portion of Star City is prime to he seized by his house, he also seeks to avenge his old rival's honor.

The vampire is a monster of the night, after all. Traitors and mutineers have long since strayed into it.

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