Reflection: What Stalks in the Shadows

This was very much a Diego chapter, and it was one that I’d been looking forward to a great deal. Diego is a very interesting character to me. He has a strong moral compass while being a bit cowardly, mostly through his lack of confidence and having been taught that cowardice is the only means of survival available to him.  

Lasombra are fascinating to me, and probably my second favorite clan after Tremere. I’ve played a few, and even had a Tremere who became more like a Lasombra (thanks to diablarie) than Tremere. Oblivion powers are so much fun. Diego was actually based on another character that I’m familiar with from my childhood: Marco from Animorphs. The trait that makes Lasombra so unique isn’t their tech shorting ability, but rather their ruthlessness, and Marco was indeed ruthless. He was also cautious, sometimes cowardly, and often considered how his actions may have unforeseen effects on others around him. 

I tried to bring a lot of this into Diego, mostly because I wanted to temper Grey’s confidence with a sense of caution. Diego’s confidence isn’t bold and pronounced, it’s buried and linked directly to his sense of honor and duty. He knows his job is to protect the Anarch movement through his intelligence gathering, and thus struggles with the idea that his intelligence could harm the Anarch movement. He understands Grey’s mind, at least to a certain point, and knows that he doesn’t want to harm the coterie, but Grey’s scheming can also leave him blind to drawbacks that can create rippling effects. 

Currently, Grey has no love for Callie, and really Diego doesn’t either, but to Diego, Callie is still a member of their coterie, and a member of the Anarchs. For him, that means that she is someone that needs his protection because that’s what his job is to do. Protect everyone within the Anarch movement to the best of his ability, without sacrificing himself in the process. It’s the reason why his reaction to hearing that Isadora was Camarilla originally was so visceral. She was chosen by the Baroness, who had to know that she was Camarilla, and she was more reliable than Callie, who is the childer of a member high up in the Anarch’s power structure. Many of his assumptions of the world and his place in it are being challenged. 

Which is what makes his reaction something I couldn’t be prouder of: despite all his understandings of the world being flipped turned upside down, Diego stands by his principles and demands that Grey tell Callie the truth, and that they approach the challenge in front of them as a cohesive unit. He’s not so naive that he believes that just because they’re all on the same team that they’re fighting to achieve the same goal, but he values the tribe more than anything else in the world. Diego will do whatever it takes to keep the tribe whole, because that’s how pack hunters survive. That’s how humans survive. And he will not compromise that. 

Now… we just have to see if Callie holds the same values…