Name Eriko Nishimura
Generation 8th Generation
Clan Ventrue
Disciplines- Dominate
- Fortitude
- Presence
PersonalityHer own mind is a sordid place; shallow emotions (including reduced fear, a lack of empathy, and high stress tolerance), cold heartedness, egocentricity, superficial charm, manipulative, moral ambiguity, a lack of remorse, and a strictly usefulness based gauge of acceptance and respect for others. She is extremely focused and social. She adores leadership, is tactful and goal driven, as most Ventrue are. To see the girl wearing a happy disposition is usually indicative of something malicious playing through her mind. She truly is what the Camarilla seek; even before gaining her disciplines she was mastering them in her own human right. Her small stature has suited her well, ensuring she is almost always underestimated.
BiographyOther kindred talk about their life as a mortal as if it was some bastard at the dinner party. They narrow their eyes and stare down their nose at it; knowing they can’t remove it, yet shoving it away in an irrelevant file of the eons. Maybe it was the time period she came from, maybe it was the culture, but Eriko did not share these feelings. It wasn’t as if she valued humanity, no, she mirrored the majority of the kindred’s feelings in that. She did value her own morality. There was something strangely alluring about morality though and what it did to a species; it made them stronger and it gave them drive, and that was worth value.
Eriko was born in Hakata, Japan. The port town was just awakening to its promise and her father jumped at the chance to monitor the pulse of this growing industry. He and Eriko’s mother, both business minded but weary of sea travel, opened a tavern in which they negotiated trade between arriving/departing merchants and the land based merchants of Japan. In modern times they would say Eriko married young, then there really was no concept of that. Her husband was an adequate merchant managing operations between Shandong and Hakata, lacking the business sense of her parents but making up for it in a true love for Captaining. She couldn’t remember now if she loved him then, but she likes to think they were happy.
The competition was growing in the industry, making it difficult to distinguish themselves and maintain steady client flow. Eriko, who had in everything but title taken over the business management began to wonder down the alluring capitalistic road, long before it had been paved. Your position in life was what you created for yourself; it was with this philosophy that their reign of piracy began. At first they only raided small towns on the coast of China, but soon they had amassed a multitude of ships and an arrogance that did not go unnoticed by the Camarilla.
Her husband spent months away, managing the ships from the deck while Eriko sat in their lavish home; mapping, evaluating, negotiating and recruiting. It was during her husband’s absence when she met Domitius. Being in the sea merchant trade she had met a greater number of foreigners, but none quite so foreign as he. He was alluring, charming and spoke of exotic places, people and things; wooing the girl with her own curiosity and insatiable need to possess. He courted her late in the night when none of her husband’s men were around; whispering great promises.
When her husband returned he was greeted by a changed Eriko. It wasn’t long before her husband, in a drunken stupor, challenged the new Eriko and was put down. She continued to manage the business and raise her 3 children; allowing everyone to believe that her husband was simply traveling. Death was not rare then and it would have been difficult, if not irrelevant, to attempt to blame Eriko for her husband’s loss. She began to collect Ronin and pirates of note; becoming a fierce and shrewd businesswoman, as well as a Captain and warrior. The Ventrue and Domitius were pleased.
While her mortal life seems crystal clear it was her undead life that became a blur of moments, places and faces. She grew bored of her tyranny in the East China Sea, though around what year she can only approximate the 10th Century. She learned that missing sailors were often forgiven in light of her crew’s superiority in battle. They lost few on land and those lost at sea were credited to disease, common accidents and superstition; all of which ran rampant in the field of piracy. She traveled the Northwest Pacific, the Archipelagic Seas, and the Indian Ocean to the Southeast Atlantic. She gained joint stock in the East India Trading Company and had a sizable hand in the exploration and colonization of Africa. She resided in the Cape of Good Hope, long before it acquired its ironic name. She pillaged in the Mediterranean, centuries after the slaughter of Pirates undertaken by the Romans. She saw the Caspian, the Black Sea all the way to Barents and then she traveled to the America’s, almost all the way to Weddell Sea and back up to Bering. She found a true love in the Caribbean which stays true even to this day. A place reminiscent of debauchery and degradation, just the way a pirate would like it.
Throughout all of this the crews were buried and replaced, the boats evolved, the modes of operation evolved, and Eriko evolved as well, though her appearance remained the same. She dabbled in everything from common pillaging to fisheries, logging to slave ships, oil drilling to communication cable laying. The latter two being her current industry of choice. She excels in almost all subjects relating to maritime including: international maritime law, naval history, ship design, ship building, navigation, oceanography, cartography, hydrography and maritime economics and trade; almost as if she lived through it all.
During an extended stay in the Americas she discovered Stephen Bishop. He was cunning, cruel and ambitious in all the right ways and spoke to something deep within herself. She saw what he could become and she was already weary of the Camarilla’s pressure for her to settle down. In a way he was created to be an extension of herself; someone she could live vicariously through, but soon she came to respect the Kindred in his own right as someone whose opinion was not always her own, but was valued none the less. Shortly after Bishop was accepted into the ranks of the Ventrue and the Camarilla Eriko took up the position of Primogen in New Orleans. She enjoyed the city and the anonymity it favored amongst residences. With enough money you could be an Empress, or you could be invisible.
In recent times she has moved to Boston under the order of Camarilla to take up the position of Seneschal, an honor to be sure. Her operations were relocated and she continues to manage a plethora of cargo ships, container ships, tankers and cable layers; though now this is done almost entirely through proxy.
Fallenreaper
Izurich
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