Amanita Zantosa
| Pronouns | She/Her |
|---|---|
| Clan | Tzimisce |
| Sect | Sabbat |
| Sect Faction | Order of St. Blaise |
| Social Class | Neonate |
| Morality | Humanity |
| Pack | White Red Black Pale |
Further Information
A wide shouldered, long limbed and willowy woman with wild and thick chin-length black hair usually wearing fashionable protective eyewear or chunky sunglasses and white labcoat over a mixture of rumpled business-casual attire and mismatched bits of punk clothing along with muddy hiking boots and black latex gloves. Deep red berries and fruit, vines, and flowers seem to grow directly from the pockets of her labcoat, and when the Silence of the Blood is not at issue she frequently wears whole vines or flowers wrapped around her limbs and shoulders. The tattoos and scarifications on her arms, legs and chest are often visible but frequently seem to change, as does the bone structure of her face.
1928: Born Ana Katarina Jelačić Zantosa at a villa outside Zagreb, Croatia in 1928 to Sofija Jelačić, a daughter of the liberal Croatian nobility and Istvan Zantosa, a minor count, patron of the arts and sciences, “gentleman of leisure” and 4th son of his branch of the Zantosa family who had left the family lands for university in Zagreb and never returned. Amanita remembers that the first six years of her mortal life were happy, wandering the forests and paths on the family estate with her father during his “morning constitutionals” in the afternoon as he walked off his hangovers from the preceding evenings and observing the displays of art and science that his visiting chemists, scientists and artists would put on. Her father told her that her family had “bred with dragons long ago” and so were more charming, longer lived, and “blessed by the spirits” than common people, but she knew nothing as a child of the Tzimisce she was destined to serve or one day become. Those were her happiest years. When the noise of her father’s late night parties kept her awake as a child, she would take his unread books on botany to her mother’s greenhouse and try to learn the names of each plant.
1941: Young Ana's happy childhood ended with the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and its capitulation to fascism. While her parents did not directly resist the regime, they attempted to protect their favored artists, writers, and researchers who were targeted by the regime, sheltering them on the grounds of their estate outside Zagreb until they could be smuggled out of the country by her father's contacts.
1943: Despite hiding with her family on their estate since the war’s beginning, the war eventually came to them when their “debauchery” and sheltering of fugitives was reported by their servants to members of the secret police. Amanita and her family were only warned early enough to escape due to the arrival of a pale, tall, unnaturally and cruelly beautiful, seemingly young stranger in the night. Arriving in a black car driven by fearsome and bestial looking attendants, “Ana Katarina” believed the stranger to be a member of the feared secret police until they (she could not tell whether the stranger was a young woman dressed in a man’s sharp black suit or an impossibly delicate young man seemingly cut from marble) introduced themself as “family, from the old country:” Voivode Nikola Zantosa. Their meeting in the villa's parlour was brief that night, but the stranger filled “Ana Katarina” with wonder and terror in equal measure. If her family had truly been blessed by the dragons like her father said, Ana couldn’t help but feel that she had just met her first, particularly after she saw the way her father bowed to this seemingly much younger person and looked at his daughter with palpable fear when she caught the eye of the strange young noble. She had no idea just how right she was, and unbeknownst to her at the time, she was promised to her future sire that night in exchange for safe passage for herself and her family to The United States and out of the grasp of the secret police who were closing in that very night. Ana and her parents were ushered into the black car by the strange Voivode’s attendants, while the Voivode seemed to simply wander off into the woods Despite successfully saving his family, Ana’s father seemed defeated and broken from that night forward. Until her Embrace, Ana assumed her father was simply mourning the fugitives they had left behind and were unable to save. After her embrace, Amanita knew that he was mourning giving away his daughter to the monsters he thought he had left back on the old family lands.
1944: Fleeing Europe by car, rail, and ship, surprisingly unaccosted by the secret police, soldiers, or customs officials and treated with strange politeness in their few encounters after the officer caught her father’s eye, Ana and her family arrived off the coast of New Jersey on a merchant ship where the only other passenger was a wooden box that she was told contained “soil samples for their new garden” from the old country. Many of the sailors on the ship grew ill and a few even died, but Ana and her family were spared. Taken ashore with the strange box by American smugglers whose nails and features seemed impossibly sharp and predatory, Amanita and her family were dropped at a crumbling manor by the sea outside of a glittering city that her father told her was called “Atlantic City.” Despite her curiosity, she was confined to the grounds due to her lack of papers and instead continued her studies of botany with the local flora, learning English from the textbooks and Obertus tutors her father used “family” connections to acquire for her. Her parents had become bored, resentful and depressed since their arrival, falling deeper into indolence and hedonism as they became the patrons of smugglers, drug dealers, and the occasional jazz musician instead of the arts and sciences.
1950: By the time she was 22, “Ana Katarina"" had begun just going by Ana and understood the depth of her parents’ habits and addictions and saw what five straight years of indulging had done to them. She would accompany them to nightclubs and sampled the occasional sniff of cocaine, pill, or toke of “reefer” alongside her parents and their associates, but she found the music, fashion, and wondrous variety of people she encountered so much more interesting than the drugs. That is, until she was introduced to dexadrine by a young soldier she enjoyed an evening with before he shipped off for the Korean War. Her relationship with the young man lasted a single evening, but her love affair with amphetamines had just begun. Trolling the jazz clubs and dive bars of Atlantic City using her family’s “unique charms,” she found a connection for high-quality dexedrine diverted from naval supplies and used it alongside her enhanced Revenant physiology to study and experiment for hours on end in the lab she built in her family’s increasingly dilapidated estate. In record time, she taught herself to speak English without a hint of her native accent and learned chemistry through a mixture of individual experimentation and “friendly lessons from chemists she managed to charm into teaching her over the years.
1955: At the age of 27, Amanita’s father called her out of her lab (where she spent most of her time) and into his study and said it was time to speak about her future. To her surprise, the “young” Voivode she had met years ago was draped across one of her father’s couches, looking no older than that fateful night and looking resplendent in a glittering ball gown and fashionable and perfectly tailored men’s suit jacket and hat. Before her father could speak, the Voivode presented her with a rose the color of blood and welcomed her to the family. The rose seemed to whisper to her of ancient power and chthonic legacies when she smelled it at the Voivode’s bidding. As her father watched on in grim silence, the strange and beautiful noble told Ana the truth of her family legacy and the deal her father made to give up her life to the Clan in exchange for the family’s escape from the war. Nikola revealed that in five years they would sire Amanita and remake her into something terribly beautiful and show her sensation beyond all imagining, and that her first duty to the family would be to spend her remaining years as a mortal learning modern knowledge that would be useful to her sire; for everything but her knowledge would be cut away and replaced in her Embrace.
1956: Feeling betrayed by her family and realizing that the more knowledge she gained, the more of herself she would be able to keep following her Embrace, she used her future sire’s connections to acquire falsified credentials from University of Zagreb and used these convincing forgeries and her own knowledge and skill to gain admission to Harvard’s chemistry doctoral program.
1957-1961: While she devoted herself to her studies and maintained her strong amphetamine habit, Ana also became introduced to LSD and other psychedelics from her colleagues who took part in the early psychedelic research and experimentation occurring at Harvard in the early 1960’s. Serving as researcher and test subject in a manner not dissimilar to how she would for her sire in the coming years, Amanita began to see the value of “visionary experiences” after a long conversation with an ancient, blood red dragon who appeared to her during a notable LSD trip following a multi-night dexedrine binge. The dragon told her that if she accepted her family’s “birthright,” the land itself would answer to her command and she would no longer need her books or tools because the spirits of the land and even the smallest living things would all bow to her. Following this visionary experience, she faked her own death and disappeared from her doctoral program a few days before graduation, returning to her family estate to meet her sire for her Embrace.
June 21st, 1961: On the anniversary of Kupala’s night, Ana Katarina Jelačić Zantosa was drained of her blood, given a taste of her sire’s vitae, and buried between life and death in the same soil which had traveled across the ocean with her from Zagreb as a teenager. As she awoke, buried in dirt, she could hear the whispers of the spirits and feel the churn of the earth like never before. The whispers told her to let go of her mortal shell, of her feeble science and gutter alchemy, and instead to embrace the power of her blood, the blood of the earth itself. She emerged reborn, in a body predatory, androgyne and gleaming in the moonlight, cradled in a bough of roots that wrapped around her limbs and intertwined with the spears of bone jutting from her fingers and shoulders. The two screaming, terrified figures that her sire pushed in front of her and she fell upon in a flurry of teeth and bone and claws did not even register to her as her parents until the following evening. Instead, the only familiar feeling she had when she drained them dry was the comforting rush of amphetamines as their blood streamed down her parched throat. In the days following her Embrace she rediscovered her vast stores of scientific knowledge, her analytical mind and shrewd eye for detail, her addiction to amphetamines, and her now even more ravenous hunger for new sensations, but everything else of the Ana Katarina Jelačić Zantosa who fled Croatia in the dead of night and charmed her way into an education and the hearts of countless hapless young soldiers, chemists, pharmacists and choir girls was left behind in the ancestral dirt from which she emerged behind what had once been her teenage home. In the place of that girl was something both new and ancient, alien and chthonic, that could hear the whispers of spirits in every tree in the Pine Barrens, spot the careful approach of an animal as it cowered in fear from her deep in the woods, and soon learned that she could reshape her physical form as easily as she once ensnared lonely barflies ensnared lonely barflies. That creature gave herself the name Amanita Zantosa, and began studying the powers of her blood under her sire and Voivode.
1961-1999: Amanita and her sire wander the United States, stealing a tour bus in the late 1960’s from a band they traveled with, bent to their will, and disposed of in a staged overdose upon growing bored with. Posing variously over the decades as beautiful runaways, psychedelic chemists, new age mystics, disco drug-runners, wandering acid casualties, punk-rock vagabonds, or post-Soviet exiles, Amanita and her sire wandered from town to town like deathly angels, doling out enlightenment and destruction in equal measure. Amanita initially progressed quickly in the Tzmisce’s ancient arts, and she became proficient in speaking with animals, seeing beyond the mundane, reshaping flesh and bone, and even listening to the spirits. But when it came time to learn her sire’s most prized art, the ancient rites of Koldunic Sorcery, Amanita proved a dissapointment. While the spirits of the land would speak to her, and animals would share their knowledge and bow to her command, the elements themselves would not bend to her will and vitae. Her sire was as cruel and exacting as they were beautiful, but despite her sire’s torments, her own unrelenting efforts, and the suffering of countless experimental subjects and desperate sacrifices, she remained unable to master the Koldunic arts. Like her mortal parents before her, Amanita sought chemical refuge, and through self-experimentation and experiments on the herds she was able to cultivate for as long as they could avoid her sire’s lethal experiments, she realized the new depths of sensation and biological control available through the combination of Cainite vitae and the ever-growing mortal understanding of botany, psychology, and chemistry. Her experimentation bore fruit as she discovered that with the application of vitae and quiet entreaties to the spirits of the natural world, she could shape plant life as easily as she could flesh and whisper with or even charm the grandest tree or smallest clutch of moss as easily as she could any animal from rodents to mortals. Out of necessity, she also became proficient in hiding the bloody aftermath of her and her sire’s experiments, learning to bribe, manipulate, threaten, or console as needed. These grim errands brought her back into contact with the mortal world she had left behind that fateful night behind the family mansion, and the succession of grieving parents, friends, lovers, and coworkers she encountered reawakened her memory of what it was to love, and grieve, and hurt for another. She had seen from the natural world that all living things were connected from the smallest microorganism to the kine themselves, and that all could be made to grow into a mutually sustainable and generative ecosystem where even death could nourish more life with the proper management and application of Cainite vitae. For while she was not alive and had been forever severed from the bonds between all living things, she could “nurture” the soil and feed the animals and kine with her blood and shape their growth with her undying vision. While empathy still eluded her, by her 10th year amongst the Cainites she had ceased killing indiscriminately for her experiments and sustenance, instead gathering a herd and chosen experiments who she could “cultivate” over years or even decades and watch how they were born anew through her chemical and physical interventions. Her sire had no such compunctions however, and so Amanita taught herself to use her control of the natural world to return the bodies of her sire’s victims to the earth and leave no trace of their passing.
2000: A representative of the Sabbat tracks down Amanita and her sire on the road and demands that they use their talents in sorcery and the creation of Szlachta in defense of the “Sword of Caine” in the battle for Washington DC. This is Amanita’s first encounter with the Sabbat, who she finds to include fascinating subjects of study, visionary (albeit often merciless and messy) artists, and zealous brutes in equal measure. Amanita also has her first encounter with the Camarilla when she kills an anonymous young neonate on the battlefield, pitying the poor puppet of the ancients as she holds him screaming for mercy in her vines, tears the flesh from his chest, and rips out his heart with her fingers. Regrettably, her favorite and longest lasting herd is sacrificed for the war effort, converted into a Vozhd by her sire and destroyed valiantly defending Zantosa holdings outside the city.
2001-2005: Amanita’s talents in covering vampiric deaths and protecting the Silence of the Blood proved crucial as the War on Terror began and a new surveillance state sprung up over night. During the bloody celebrations following the defense of DC, Amanita takes the Vaulderie and becomes True Sabbat, traveling up the east coast with a Sabbat war party fighting occasionally but usually focusing on protecting the Silence and covering their tracks from the Camarilla, Anarchs and Hunters. Her sire follows behind the front lines, building Vohzd and Szlatcha for the war effort and resenting the “distraction” from their research.
2006-2012: The Final Civil War begins following the Red Star (non)event. As Cainite turns against Cainite, Amanita and her sire stay out of the conflict. While her sire takes the opportunity to return to anonymity and continue their research, Amanita continues to travel with the Sabbat, working with both sides to hide the evidence of the Civil War out of fear for the massive loss of life and “ecological destruction” that would be caused by the Civil War destroying the Silence and the Hunters openly joining the war. She kills when necessary but is otherwise circumspect and moves between Sabbat packs and war parties as needed.
2012: Amanita and her sire attend the Palle Grande. Her sire sees the chance for glory and to return to the old country, and bids her to leave with them for the Great Crusade. Amanita instead chooses to stay, parting from her sire to continue protecting The Silence and tending her garden as the Sabbat leaves for war en masse. Her sire leaves her with the still deep red and whispering rose she was presented on that night in 1955 where the truth of her bloody legacy was first revealed to her. As she travels,s Amanita takes the opportunity of the Sabbat’s attention being elsewhere to make contacts among the Anarchs upon hearing of their own innovations in Technomancy and the Green Path, warily trading rituals with Tremere exiles she did not share her sire’s irrational hatred for when the reward for tolerance was new knowledge and sensations, and learning a few tricks that prove incredibly useful in her work.
2018: The war ends, but her sire does not return. She asks around after them, but does not know whether they fell in battle or simply never returned.
2020: After two years of no contact, Amanita considers herself formally free from her sire’s dominion. She officially joins the Order of St. Blaise, winning admission by sharing her knowledge of Anarch Technomancy rituals, demonstrating the utility of her sorcery for protecting the Silence of the Blood, and tracking down and reporting the locations of the Anarchs from who she learned these rituals. She travels between hot zones as needed, working as a freelance “cleaner” for the Order.
2020-2021: The war against the Anarchs begins and Amanita’s talents are in high demand around the United States. She collaborates with the Ventrue Antitribu Nathan Masterson on one particular operation and finds they make an effective team, with Masterson's vast funding, influence, and persuasive abilities complimenting her perceptive abilities and command over the elements. While the besuited, genteel Ventrue and the ragged and manic Tzimisce make a strange pair at first glance, Amanita finds Nathan to be amusing company who does not make further messes for her unlike many of her fellow Sabbat, and she delights in giving the haughty Ventrue a taste of the world of vice and indulgence that she has chosen to inhabit.
2022: Amanita tires of the endless warzones and inability to create the ecosystem she has envisioned and decides it is time for her to create a Zadruga of her own where she can cultivate her garden. Hearing that the Sabbat has taken the city which so captivated her in her mortal youth and where she was able to learn so much, Amanita sets off for Atlantic City with her “soil samples” and the rose in the company of Nathan Masterson. On the way there, she notices a gang of mortal drug dealers and other petty criminals squatting in abandoned hotel off the highway just outside the city. She surreptitiously scouts the hotel for a few nights from the nearby swamps before reshaping and disguising herself into the form of a hitch-hiking young woman with more drugs than sense and takes up “residency” at the squat. Sufficiently convinced that the motel will one day be a fitting keep for her Zadruga, she lures the gang of petty criminals into her room with the promise of abundant drugs and a good time. As she expected, their leader pulls the gun she had seen days ago tucked into his waistband and demands that she hand over the drugs and start working for the gang. His threats are cut short when thick roots burst through the mildewed carpet of the hotel and wrap around his limbs as Amanita assumes her natural form and removes the face of the gang’s nearest enforcer with her claws. She makes short work of the four men, saving their leader for last so he can see how thoroughly he has been defeated with each of his men she butchers. When the small gang of hustlers living at the hotel investigate the screams and find Amanita draining the gang leader as he is choked by roots and see the bodies of the others on the floor, they all wisely remain silent and simply watch the strange, blood-covered woman work. All but one of the hustlers, a slight young person who simply grabs a clean robe from the hotel bathroom and presents it to the bloodied Amanita. She becomes Amanita’s “gardener,” and after the entreaties of both Amanita and her new ghoul and Amanita’s use of her bloodline’s unique charms, the others become her new herd and test subjects.
October 31st, 2022: Amanita arrives in Atlantic City in the company of the Ventrue Antitribu Nathan Masterson and presents herself to Archbishop Unknown Nebraska with a gift of hallucinogenic apples. She accompanies a war party during its raid on a Steel Corp base at a former motel in Atlantic City. Following this evening, she takes the Vaulderie and becomes a member of White Red Black Pale
| Player | Charlie K. |
|---|---|
| Pronouns | She/Her |
| MES # | US2022060019 |
| Domain | NJ-007-D |
| Storyteller | Rob R. |
Other PCs: Delphyne Lamb , Danika Astor
