Gwenevieve Rossellini is born a revenant ghoul in the Rossellini family. Centuries of dark blood experiments and inbreeding had finally produced in Gwen, and a select number of her siblings and relations, the abilities of a ghoul, yet without the need of the Proxy Kiss. The Giovanni had at last produced a line of revenants of their own. Gwen and her twin sister both displayed extra sensory abilities from a young age: able to commune with the dead. Both possessed the sometimes maddening deathsight. Both sisters were sent to the family manor house to study the arts of necromancy until their fiftieth birthday. Yet, the Giovanni determined that only one of the twins was to be embraced. Gwen made sure that twin was her.
Following her embrace by a relation who hated and resented her, Gwen was sent to hone her craft in the Giovanni stronghold of Boston. She was to live in the crypts within the Family’s private island in Boston Harbor for the next decade. There, she was tasked with the maintenance of one of the Family’s most treasured secrets: a Well of Souls. After spending the 1980s and the early 1990s studying under Uncle Marco, Gwen proved to be a necromantic prodigy.
One night on the island, a helicopter broke Gwen’s reverie as it flew past the wraith-wall defenses and landed at the ramshackle family manor. Gwen found that it bore an elder (of the Anziani): Aunt Lucretia Giovanni. Lucretia dispatched of a disloyal relation who knew too much to be made a wraith and whose death could serve as an important lesson in loyalty to the young Gwen. The centuries-old Lucretia gave her niece her new Family job: Gwen was to travel to Washington, D.C. as a “cultural attaché” to the Giovanni Embassy in the old Congressional Cemetery there. Her true mission was to use her unique sight to aid in finding a disturbance the Family had sensed near there in the Sudario. But she was not to interfere in the vital mission of Carlo Giovanni, the Giovanni Ambassador to the Camarilla. And, she was to await further instruction from Lucretia.
Statistics:
Died: October 21, 1982, aged 50.
Generation: Tenth Generation Giovanni
Sire: Gabriella Rossellini, a relatively well-regarded member of the Rossellini Family Estate in New Jersey.
Gabriella is a night-to-night overseer of the Family’s blood/breeding experiments to produce revenants, though not the mastermind behind it. She provides some training to her most promising relations in the basics of necromancy, but is a very withholding teacher.
Havens:
Embassy at Congressional Cemetery with a cell and adjoining laboratory free for use. A reasonably-stocked library is there.
Given Royal Assent to rent (with an exorbitant tax added to go to the Crown and Arts Council) in the Adams Morgan Domain, as long as abide by restrictions and Camarilla Law
Alliances:
Gwenevieve seems to have a nice early working relationship with His Excellency, Carlo Giovanni.
Gwenevieve is almost officially Lucretia Giovanni’s pawn, who is almost officially Ambrogino Giovanni’s pawn (who is, himself, Augustus Giovanni’s bastard son), so it is a family affair with many eyes upon Gwen’s progress . . . but that also means that she has quite a bit at her disposal, should it prove mission-critical.
Ghouls: none personally bound, though has been given care and use of her younger brother, the revenant family ghoul Giuseppe Rossellini.
Wraiths: Patrick. Fetter: a thick coin with a golden center and silver outer ridge.
Special Abilities: Gwenevieve has the “flaw” of deathsight — we will get into the negatives of that shortly — but through it, she does get a bit of a glimpse into a probable (though not necessarily inevitable) future of a given person or item. It also makes it very difficult to charm her with a “pretty face.” It is, however, an unreliable “power.” Her more salient powers are in Necromancy, of which she has completely mastered the Sepulchre Path and has made true inroads in her understanding of the dreaded Bone Path. She is an accomplished medium and has a perception of the Underworld that can be envied by many lesser necromancers. All of this in a blisteringly short amount of time: far less than a century of study! The success of the Rossellini blood experiment will make some factions within the Family very angry and others very curious. She appears harmless and is easily underestimated by those unaware of her knowledge and power.
Weaknesses: Gwenevieve has the blood curse of the rest of the Giovanni. Her bite inflicts unfathomable pain to the poor recipients who receive it and it might well kill them. This circumstance makes access to a stable food supply essential for Family operations (and trouble during the “lean times”).
Further, as a Rossellini revenant, Gwenevieve possesses deathsight. She sees everything as decaying and dying, sometimes these visions are worse than other times. It can be hard to determine things as seemingly-disparate as social cues and building integrity in the material realm.
Finally, Gwen is fairly physically weak. She had a rare genetic disorder in the family of muscular dystrophy (MD) growing up throughout her 50 years of ghouldom. She was fairly sickly and at times unable to move very far without assistance. Her own vitae as a revenant kept the condition from becoming fatal when she lived in the Rossellini compound in New Jersey. This could have been altered with an earlier Proxy Kiss, but the Family behind the experiment determined that they should leave the matter until embrace to see how the mortally-generated vitae would work without introducing any Kindred vitae. Her embrace has ameliorated this somewhat, but she is still physically quite weak.
