Vampire 30-Day Challenge: Favorite Enemy

Vampire 30-Day Challenge: Favorite Enemy
And again, I wrote a post answering a question that had not yet been posted.  So here I go repeating what I wrote previously:

My favorite enemy would be Jadviga Almanov of Bohemia.  The woman is cruel, selfish, devious and deadly.  The woman lies the way humans breathe.  The woman spins facts around with the ease of a potter and concocts plots with the ease of a storyteller (ahem ahem).  I have portrayed her in three different ways given the multiple times we have played Giovanni Chronicles in our group.

The most memorable one that I recall would be when I based her on Anne Bancroft's portrayal of Ms. Dinsmoor in the 1998 Alfonso Cuaron film adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations with a dash of my favorite Judi Dench.  She was seemingly lost in her thoughts and tended to move into weird tangents while talking to others, but without warning would snap into full predatory focus and remind the vampire of who was the teacher and who was the student in the scenario.

She challenged the players to truly prove their loyalties to their sect, forcing them to turn a blind eye towards their sect's horrible skeletons or challenging them to speak up and take action against their self-appointed leaders.

My personal favorite moment with her, was when she eventually wrapped her strings around a player character so well, he could not help but admit to caring about her as she was the closest thing in the World of Darkness he ever had to a mother.  A true mother.  After all, "She watches and waits, and knows my every moves.  And yet, she berates and insults my every attempt to break free from her.  She is the deepest hatred and the source of my wrath, but without her I would have never been reborn."

He still killed her.  He held her close, kissed her and told her it will all be okay, then held her in place as the sun rose past the horizon and began to burn them both.  And in the tiniest of moments remaining before Final Death came to claim them both, he willed the Earth below him to swallow him up and left her to burn alone in the unforgiving heat.

"Goodbye mother.  Today, I have shown you.  I am no longer the student."

He rises at the return of night and finds her ashes on the ground, near the remains of her darkened ring are scratches on the ground.  He blows against the ashes and they reveal the markings she had left before the flames consumed her completely:   You taught me well today.