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Written by K
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Friday, 01 February 2008 |
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Ambrose the Elder
I have the unfortunate disease of being prone to boredom very easily. This is why many of my friends and role-playing companions are forced to have an entire section on their buddy lists purely for my screen names; I get bored, whip up a screen name, and pop new characters out like candy. Considering that, I didn't expect to have Ambrose for more than a few weeks at most. I made him to try and fill the gap in some plot holes, to make a cool bad guy to torture my characters with, and because I was bored.
Three or four years later he was still around. In truth, this is another aspect of my disease. The characters I intend to keep for the shortest amount of time (Sinjin, Ambrose, Icarus) more or less become my main characters. While I intended to make a cheap shot bad job for everyone to kill, what I accidentally created was a cruel, tortured, and morally twisted man by the name of Lucien Jean-Pierre Rosie, better known as Ambrose.
I brought him aboard as an elder kindred attempting to eradicate the weaker points in his own bloodline after his once-trusted childe decided it was a grand idea to sire everything he thought was pretty. It was all supposed to be pretty simple: Ambrose shows up, Ambrose begins purging his own bloodline, Sin realizes he's in Ambrose's bloodline, epic battle ensues, Ambrose dies. However, being the kind of player who should never run structured storylines, that's not what happened. What did happen was Ambrose found someone who could easily become himself in later years and he wanted to spare him that pain.
If that wasn't enough in itself, the character continued to develop into someone I wasn't expecting. I was fond of him because he was twisted. He was complex, not stereotypically evil, but most certainly ill-intending, and Rhy'din had such a shortage of actual villains that it seemed best to keep him around. Rather than Sinjin being the one person in the world he treated with kindness or all that rot, Sin ended up getting himself royally beaten by Ambrose more than most of the elder kindred's own enemies. Ambrose taught through what he knew best: pain.
So in four years, Sinjin has been: strung up to a crucifix with barbed wire, nearly killed via random torture three times, burned alive twice, trapped in a basement dungeon with salted wounds for several days, and partially skinned alive, all by Ambrose's tender loving care. Not to say Ambrose didn't save Sin as well, or teach him valuable lessons -- but for the most part, everyone IC and OOC knew Ambrose as a sadistic bastard who deserved to die, and I was apt to agree with that assessment myself. So when I began to plan for his eventual death back in July of 2007, I was expecting choruses of excitement at finally seeing him go down.
As previously started, I really shouldn't be allowed to run structured storylines.
When Ambrose died, everything went a bit crazy. I planned to use that time to take a break from Sin and dust off a few older characters, but that didn't happen. Why? I realized -- and I think Ambrose realized too -- that people were beginning to see that he was not so villainous as my original intentions. For about a month, I was surprised and utterly pleased to see several posts from different characters and different players affected by Ambrose's death. In one corner, we have a normally apathetic fae who doesn't seem so emotionless and frigid any longer; in another, we have her son chasing after the man he loves after he ran away to cope with Ambrose's death -- and still there is a young girl who comes to an empty home and has to come to terms with the seemingly secret lives of those she loved with no answers to turn to.
Funny how one supposedly throw away character can grow into something you never expected.
So cheers to any of you that rejoiced in Ambrose's passing, same as those who didn't, and a special tip of the hat to anyone who willingly (and sometimes happily) allowed one disturbing old vampire to torture their character over the years. Thank you for helping me make one simple villain into more than I could ever ask him to be.
-- Kelsey Desrosiers
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 27 March 2008 )
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