From SuspireWiki
Babylon was one of the most magnificent cities on Earth, nearly 2000 years ago that is. Historians have always been fascinated by the civilization, and more the gardens, since it was first written about by the Greeks. It wasn’t until the early 1800s though that the modern world had its first peek into ancient Babylon.
Diane Wade Ward was a proud member of the Blue Stocking Society, which essentially meant she was female and she liked to use her brain - two things which did not generally go well together in England in the late 1700s. It was really about the worst thing a woman could be. Well, maybe not the worst. The worst was running off with your lover to wild unknown parts of the world and abandoning your husband and children. That was the worst.
Diane’s love was what modern era would call a looter, then they were adventurers. With her money, stolen from her husband, they financed a trip to excavate ruins in the Middle East. Luck would have it that they ended up on the very first expedition to excavate the ancient city of Babylon. Together with her lover, Diane managed to acquire several items of potential value and enormous historical significance. However, luck wasn’t with her when Rich came down with cholera and died. With nothing else to do, Diane returned home to the husband and children she abandoned.
Catherine was 12 when her mother returned home. She peered between the railings of the banister along side her younger sister and older brother as the unshamed Diane walked into the house she left five years ago as if she never disappeared. Her father hadn’t ever divorced her mother, divorce just wasn’t done, but she was old enough to understand that Diane wasn’t exactly welcome in their home. Diane’s motherly impulses lasted all of two weeks before she disappeared again, this time to never be seen from again. In those two weeks though, she tried fruitlessly to buy her children back to her side with gifts stolen from the graves of ancient Babylon.
After Diane disappeared, Catherine’s father insisted that the items be donated to the museum. Hidden inside a stocking in her drawer was the one item that would change Catherine’s life forever. When her father collected them, she kept it hidden. It told her to. The twelve year old girl never considered that objects shouldn’t talk.
[20 years later]
She never knew where the name Zizi came from. One day she turned over the necklace, as she did every day of her life, and rubbed at the little inscription there, and suddenly that day she could read it. “Zizi.” Just as she’d always known, from the first time she touched the necklace, that it was hers so did she know that Zizi was her. From then on, while the world called her Catherine, she knew herself as Zizi.
Having grown up with few companions, a disinterested father, an absent mother and a necklace that whispered to her, Zizi didn’t have what you would consider the normal interests of a well-born girl in 1830. These obscure interests is precisely what had driven her to the cult on the outskirts of the city. She’d heard whispers that they worshipped the ancient Gods of Mysterious Religions, whatever that meant. Well educated, from books as well as whispers, Zizi assumed they meant the Mithras cults of ancient Greece. From standing in the shadows though, she saw little more than an excuse to copulate on a fake altar.
The Hell-Fire Club wasn’t a religious organization at all. In truth it was just an excuse for degenerate upper-class males to do as they want, which usually just meant rape and mayhem, and say it was philosophically justified. The name alone though was enough to draw curious and degenerate Daeva to watch though and maybe even take part. So as Zizi watched hooded and shadowed, she was in turn watched hooded and shadowed.
Zizi tried her best to slip out of the festivities unseen. She had no desire to be pulled beside the screaming, begging girl on the altar to become another plaything for the night. Maybe it was odd, but she also had no desire to help the begging girl either. Zizi had found out long ago that her desire to help other people was muted. Modern era would call her a sociopath. Sticking to the shadows, she felt her way to the exit and stepped out into the moonlight. Two steps later she was yanked back into the shadows. A voice whispered in her ear, “Did you like that? Did you want to play?” She opened her mouth to give the voice a scathing set down when her words died on a moan. The watching Daeva had sunk its teeth into her throat.
Daeva often embrace on whim. Perhaps they’re the only clan to do so, given the high cost of the embrace. Daeva have always had skewed priorities though. Zizi woke to darkness. She wasn’t quite sure which darkness it was. The same night, a different night? Had she been used and discarded? Was she dead? She reached up to feel for her necklace; her fingers wrapped around it and the answers slowly filtered into her. She wasn’t dead, did the night matter?, her honor as it were was intact, and she was awfully, awfully hungry.
[20 years later]
Zizi started noticing the weird looks she was getting after her blood started thickening. Did people think she was strange? Was this abnormal? Sure, the other neonates embraced about the same time as her hadn’t aged-by-blood so fast. But then, they weren’t nearly as good of vampires as she was either. They didn’t attend Elysium as frequently. They didn’t make the sort of bargains she made. They didn’t enjoy their Requiems as thoroughly and Zizi certainly enjoyed hers most thoroughly. Obviously not being as vampire-y made them less, well, vampire-y.
In the twenty years since her embrace, Zizi had joined the Invictus. It really was the only saving grace she could give her sire, who had impulsively and illegally embraced her. She wasn’t by any means a stellar Invictus though. In the realm of Kindred of Quality, Zizi fell in the knock-off Chinese sort of quality land. She spoke enough Invictus-ese to get by. She didn’t really care to seek out oaths to those older than her, but when pressed she’d serve an oath of service here or there. In general, it was concluded by the Invictus that Zizi was just “no better than she ought to be.”
So when her blood thickened faster than maybe it should have, the covenant only half heartedly defended her against the rumors of diablerie that started spreading. You get out what you put in, after all. A Mekhet with a grudge - really what other sort of Mekhet are there? - started a rumor, well the truth really, that Zizi had “a shadow” over her aura. Now, a shadow isn’t a diablerie line but details, details.
As luck would have it, and luck always seemed to be closer to Zizi than normal, she was in the midst of pity fucking a Gangrel who happened to have one of the last Caspian tigers ghouled, when he received a letter stating a blood hunt would be initiated on Zizi for breaking the 3rd tradition. Being a gentleman, and feeling a little guilty for considering killing the woman he just screwed, the Gangrel gave her a head start out of the city. The head start was all she needed, with only the necklace on her neck she fled to America.
[20 years later]
Zizi had settled in New York after fleeing England. There she abandoned the Invictus, finding it far more comfortable to just associate with them than actually join them. Despite rhetoric, more than a few Invictus are willing to deal with an Unaligned so long as they feel as if they get the better end of the deal. Zizi was very good at making people feel as if they got their, ahem, money’s worth. Naturally these deals only existed in the darkest shadows and when in Elysium Zizi was often shunned by those more than eager to work with her outside it’s hallowed halls. She grew used to, and even thrived, on this sort of double-dealing intrigue. There was something about hypocrisy that left a very flavorful aftertaste on Zizi’s tongue. She grew to love it, court it and devour it in every way that she could. The necklace liked it too.
It was in New York that Zizi had her first taste of the Circle of the Crone. She didn’t care much for the religion preached, but the idea was something she could adopt. She made no attempts to join the covenant, but always made sure she was present for any open rituals they did. In private she’d try to mimic their actions, recreate their powers. Between multiple watchings of the Acolytes, the studying of ancient books, and her own dear necklace, Zizi slowly started to draw out her own success in blood magic. It would be this that her future was based on.
[20 years later]
Eventually Zizi joined the Crone. It wasn’t that she adhered to the religion practiced by the main cult, so much as she needed a base from which she could build her own. The Crone encouraged creation and expansion and Zizi was well used to hiding her own motives by now. Steadily she drew in mortals from the area, expanding the Crone’s communal herd while sheering off the best for her own special cult.
Person by person Zizi built a living monument to Ishtar the Babylonian goddess of fertility, love war and sex. She encouraged degeneracy within the ranks and took them step by step into the depths of hell, metaphorically that is. It was with this first cult that Zizi developed each of the seven tests. Drawing from various aspects of a classical and occult education, Zizi devised tests that drew each cultist, and prospective childe, through one more of the seven deadly sins and through one more gate of hell. It really was a time of learning for both Zizi and the cultist. Well, really more Zizi. To learn you have to survive.
[20 years later]
It took several years of tweaking, but eventually Zizi had come to an innate understanding of what she was doing. She had, step by step, built a bloodline. Those who knew her wouldn’t say that her blood was potent enough to have made her own bloodline. It wasn’t, for them. But for her? Well she’d done it. She embraced her first childe among the desperate hopelessness of the Great Depression. He’d carefully made his way through the tests she’d set for him. He’d fearlessly stepped through each sinful gate on the way to hell. So when her fangs sunk into his neck, he knew he was damned. Wouldn’t the Sanctified love that? He wasn’t to be reborn was one of their god’s monsters though but one of her own.
Zizi, much like her sire, wasn’t too good at asking permission for things. So after her illegal embrace and her suspicious quickening of the blood, her and her childe were “politely requested” to leave New York. This time Zizi wasn’t cast out with only the necklace around her neck, although to her mind that’s all she really needed. As she taught her childe over the coming years, the real power isn’t what the Invictus teaches nor is it what the Carthians aspire to. The real power is in you, what you can do. If you’re stripped tomorrow of every thing you own and you’re no longer powerful? Then well, you were never powerful. It’s possible this philosophy came from the fact that Zizi never really gained that much to begin with. Whatever it was, the sentiment would live on.
[20 years later]
It turns out that moving South of the Mason-Dixon line wasn’t such a great idea for Zizi. The Sanctified held strong contingents in the southern States, not as Monochals but as Tollisons. At first Zizi was tolerated, after all you can’t murder all the heretics. Her faith, while philosophically wrong, at least accomplished much of the same thing the Sanctified wanted anyways. She drew out the sinners, pulling them into her web of prostitution, murder and theft. Often enough they’d leave broken and fearful. While the Sanctified knew that Zizi wasn’t doing this to promote God’s wrath in any way, they had no idea she was doing it to slowly draw out prospective childer.
The thing about destroying a soul before embracing it is most are simply too weak to withstand a total descent into depravity. Most souls are weak. For the bigger part of a generation Zizi was left to worship, so long as she did so in private, and build her own influence. She was a presence in Elysium, a go-to girl for backroom deals, and the lover of more than a few. Her welcome in South Carolina ended though when she embraced three childer at once. How was she supposed to choose though when all three had shown the fortitude to step through the seven gates and survive? This time there was no politely worded instruction to leave nor any gentlemanly Gangrel to warn her of the impending bloodhunt. She was simply caught unawares.
Unable to justify killing her, after all she hadn’t openly preached against them, the Sanctified instead staked Zizi and buried her deep within the earth. Two nights later her childer dug her up. Two went north, to spread the line further while two more went with Zizi’s body west to the developing cities of California. It’d be years before she woke again.
[50 years later]
Waking up weak of blood was probably the worst tragedy Zizi had ever suffered. The only thing she could be thankful for was the necklace the Sanctified never thought to take from her. It was there, sleeping just as she had slept, waiting just as she waited. Zizi would never know if the necklace knew when she woke and woke as well or if it was the taste of blood that woke the ever-present voice of guidance, after all, she woke hungry.
Zizi slowly licked the blood off each pointed fingernail as she looked at the slaughter that surrounded her. She counted three bodies, or maybe it was four, it was really hard to tell in the aftermath. Definitely four on second count. She stepped away from the slaughter and through the doorway. Later Zizi would find out she’d carelessly murdered four of her childe’s ghouls who had been set to care for her. Oh well, accidents happen.
After finding herself in a palatial estate in the affluent suburbs of Los Angeles, Zizi discovered that her two childer had decided among themselves the best way to spread the influence of the line was to divide their loyalties between the Crone and the Invictus. Together they worked from both sides of the spectrum - religious and powerful - to gain a foothold in the city. It was this foothold Zizi used to slowly build her own power back. She despised the weakness of body that came with weakness of blood and loathed having to put her trust in symbols of mortal worth. In these modern nights to which she woke though, it was evident to her that it was impossible to be strong while eschewing those symbols.
Zizi refused to exert her time and energies in pursuit of power given by items better left to the Invictus and instead saved herself the effort by creating a parasitic existence for herself. As the necklace lived through Zizi’s often scattered thoughts, so did Zizi live off the affluence of a lover. She found an Invictus, Mekhet this time, who she could sponge off of while rebuilding her strength. She found so long as she stroked egos and hard phallic things, living in comfort wasn’t an issue.
And so Zizi rebuilt. Step by step she build anew her cult. Lesson by lesson she taught her childer how to test the mortals and how to pick the best for the line. She taught them about the seven gates of hell and how important it is to step through each one. She taught them about the destruction of a soul and the rebirth into death. With each further lesson, Zizi carefully reconstructed Babylon in the souls of her childer.
Eventually there was only one thing left to do: to create the most glorious and memorable aspect of that ancient fallen city. And where better to do it than a modern fallen city? With that in mind Zizi once more left a city, for the first time of her own free will, to travel towards the City of Sin. She intends to rebuild Babylon in all it’s glories, hidden under the oppressive dinging of a slot machine.