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Amalthea is a perfect blend of her mother and father. Both in appearance and attitude, she takes the best characteristics from either parent. She is a tall, long-legged woman, with a healthy bosom and a striking face. Her hair is dark and curly, with a strong widows peak like her father. Her eyes are paler than Istvan's, while darker than Cynthia's. Her skin tone is tan with a light dusting of pale freckles over her shoulders. She was born with the light fluff of cheetah-cub-fur on her head and neck, indicating that she was truly her father's daughter and would surely be a shapeshifter when she grew older. She mastered the shifting that her siblings occasionally struggled with, early on. She was never into playing with dolls or 'becoming a mommy' like some of the other children her age and in that era. What did interest her was history and archaeology, and magic. And, this deal which her father made to trade her to the vampires of Italy, in exchange for their family's safety. Amalthea was born in 1900, and by her second birthday she was speaking in full sentences, if only to family and close friends, never to strangers. When she was eight, Istvan took her to Italy to speak with the Voice of the Giovanni. It was then that their pact was fully realized, though it was to the distress of Cynthia and the whole rest of the family. Amalthea backed her father up both carefully and cleverly, proving that their skills for negotiation would win the family a secure future. By the time Amalthea was 11, she had mastered Italian, Latin, French, Ancient Egyptian, and several other more arcane ancient languages. At twelve, with the coming of her first blood, she also began to shapeshift. At first the changes were dramatic and dangerous, but she quickly caught on to how to control them. The presence of so many vampiric individuals around her had led to a slightly less-active protection from the family's goddess, Bastet, though she is still able to visit in the Dreamlands, and utilize the temple they have there to afford blessings and perhaps even curses on those who need either. When the first of the vampires (a young one of course) attempted to feed from Amalthea, thinking that her shapeshifting blood and ability to regenerate would make him stronger, she killed him outright. Not one more vampire has attempted to take blood from her unless they have asked (and she occasionally did provide it, too, to very special vampires). While Amalthea was only about 14 years old and she was in Italy, Istvan used a device that sent him away from their dimension. Eventually, she would aid in his return. (He does, some 90 years later.) This left Amalthea in the position of negotiator and she does this duty with style for decades. She does eventually leave them, in favor of her own interdimensional traveling. During her stay at the Giovanni-funded mansions of magic study, Amalthea learns many magical spells. So many in fact that some of the vampires begin to think she ought to be made into one of their kind. Though their clan leader dismisses this idea and forbids it, Amalthea has already mastered their own preservation and protective spells, effectively letting herself into their clan in a back door - she is not an actual Vampire, but sometimes it's hard to tell, because she grows fangs... While she was spying on certain less-trustworthy Giovanni vampires, she saves a young man named Aaron Nash from being crushed by magically-loosened masonry. He shouldn't have been there in the first place, of course, but given the circumstances, neither should those Giovanni been making deals with the underworld figures that Aaron was investigating. The Giovanni decide to keep Amalthea in their ranks as a mage and consultant, in addition to her duties as a negotiator with 'normal' people. She's hardly 'normal'. But also, they recruit Aaron as an investigator, as he seems reasonably able to keep his head during dangerous or otherworldly encounters. Amalthea and Aaron are almost inseperable from that moment. Though both of them are young, they marry when she's 18, and Amalthea keeps her own already-hyphenated last name. He's fine with this, the world is a progressive place! Their lives hardly change much even though there is near-constant war going on either within Italy's borders, or sponsored by them in other nearby countries. The Giovanni do not involve themselves with those wars, and the couple are encouraged to also avoid it at any cost. By the time their son Nash Sanger is born (yes, yes, hush, it's a perfectly good name) Amalthea has dug deeper into her family's connection to Bastet, even visiting the African Cat Temple (as it's a closer visit than over in the USA, and far less difficult than reaching the Dreamlands), and makes sure that her children are all of the shapeshifter's bloodline type. That said, they only have one child, though he is not Amalthea's only one... Amalthea encouraged her son Nash to study the magic that is provided by the Giovanni, but also kept track of whether those same vampires knew about it. Over the next twenty years, through world wars and changing political tides, Amalthea herself decides to keep her family safe as best she can. Aaron's family had a degenerative disease that for all their magic could not be cured. This left him paralyzed in his forties, and eventually he died around the same time his grandson Martin was born to Nash and a Spanish woman named Lucinda. The disease was not present at all in any of his descendants, thankfully - or perhaps not luck, instead due to Amalthea's magical and divine interference. After her husband's death, and without really announcing it to anyone, Amalthea had fling after fling - and three children born to two different men, in the next thirty-odd years. On one of her now-regular journeys to the African temple, she encounters another shifter - not a cheetah, no - this man is big, tall, dark, and named after the lion into which he shifts when he hunts. Tau Ngangello remained a trusted friend and family member long after this 'fling' that produced twins Kgosi and Lengau. Both of these children were shifters, with Kgosi bearing his father's large build, but a 'king cheetah' pattern of fur on his pelt, and his sister Lengau a more or less traditionally-lanky cheetah with the same 'king' patterns. As these children were born to an obviously-white woman and a very-dark man, they did get a few unkind looks... Until either of them smiled, baring their impressive canines... They generally remained with the Temple Cats, but still became part of the Sanger clan quite easily and with their own families to boast about later on. Amalthea watched as her first son moved to the USA again in 1954, to her family's 'Ranch', which she'd visited perhaps twice in her life. Nash however truly enjoyed flipping back to Italy when she asked him to, mainly in order to 'do bad things, for bad people'. Or to them - she knew when a negotiation wasn't going to save the day, but she certainly still knew the value of a dagger between the shoulderblades. Amalthea was never known as anything less than pragmatic, and having lived among vampires her whole life... doesn't seem to mind that aspect of her duties. Surprising no one, in 1960 Nash and his 'student' Devi (she was a college student, poking around the Ranch wanting to learn about the shapeshifters she'd heard whispers of) have a daughter, Rhea, who doesn't meet her grandmother until she's in her early teens. At that point, she also has a half-Italian aunt half her age, Carmina. Born to Amalthea and one of the Giovanni retainers, a big game hunter by the name of Doriano Corvi - one who had been trained with shapeshifting, and one who lent his feathered form to this girl... Martin, on the other hand, managed to start up a weird band with his disreputable friends in the early 70s, and Amalthea finally realized that this was why she'd often gotten cryptic notes from him asking for definitions of words. They were actively writing music spells, magic tunes, and spewing a lot of dangerous magical incantations. Thankfully, Martin was never dumb enough to play at an un-warded location... She sat in on one concert, it wasn't much to her liking, but she did give a little smile at the lyrics that would absolutely go over everyone's heads - literally, he spoke clouds to move, and whispers to flow from the nether-realm. Though others around her seemed to never notice, Amalthea, now in her 80s, had never bothered aging much into her thirties in appearance. Well, no, once back in the days when Cassandra visited, visibly grey-haired and a bit weather worn, she had commented about how Amalthea hadn't a hair out of place how did she do it? They all assumed Giovanni magic, though that would only be half right. When the Giovanni had outlived their usefulness to her - at least, to her contractual obligations and library spaces that she'd spent a century reading - she decided to go looking for her father. Yes it had been a century, but she knew he'd been alive out there somewhere. That machine that he'd built had been recreated by one of her grand-neices and maintained somehow in a working state, calling him through the aether, and she'd started dreaming of ways to 'tune' it. She was never one to ignore blatant signs from the universe, if it told her to move a dial she'd never physically seen on a device that was halfway across the world from her in a ranch filled with her father's feline descendants... She'd go and turn that dial. Istvan had had a terrible time, but had also seemingly been frozen in it, or perhaps outside of it. So when she stepped through the portal his machine made, to a strange, dark place called Ravenloft, she took him away from there as quickly as she could. Her magic wasn't working correctly, she knew it was only a matter of time before the place trapped her too. They came back out into the world of 1999. They came back to a world she had to explain to her father, had lost most of his original family and all of his old friends to time. But some remained. And the Dreamlands welcomed them for their own - large, furry - reunion. The physical one at the Ranch was quite a bit more filled with fur and celebrations, as it was of the living, where the Temple in the Dreamlands was of their beloved dead. She'd never spent a lot of time in either locale, but now that the Giovanni had plenty of her own spells and artifacts to work with... She would leave Italy and head to the Americas. As well, the Dreamlands continued to show her methods of moving around that were quite unexpected. With her expertise in magic and spell casting, Amalthea realized that some worlds overlapped, duplicated, flowed between one and another - the Ranch was one of those locations that appeared on at least three distinct 'worlds'! And she spent time on each of them, learning, expanding her magical knowledge and expertise, and becoming more active in local affairs. (And having local affairs, but we'll get to those at some other time!) Travel time between several far-flung American cities was negligible in this modern era, and while she appreciated the evolution of transportation - having seen it all with her own eyes - she still preferred a simple teleport spell or two to get around. Or a speed-boost spell and protective warding on her cheetah-paws as she ran almost faster than sound... Thus she was able to reside in the massive suite that had been her sister's at GoCat Ranch in Missouri, at the same time as fighting crime and occasionally letting loose and battling supernatural entities over on the east coast, in Paragon City. She realized that she'd left her 'home' dimension when aliens invaded there... Because the local horrific and otherworldly creatures already present under the sea near Rhode Island would have chased them off immediately had they been on her birth-dimension. The calling of the Dreamlands Temple alerted her to other worlds, other versions, and when she stepped out of her portal in one version of the Ranch, she stepped into another, she was getting used to it... Very little was different except the climate, and when she consulted someone nearby they told her... well, several things had been a little different here: 'she' had perished in the early 80s, for instance, rather than effectively becoming immortal. Another, was that the Ranch itself was located in the New Mexico desert rather than up in the high plains or farmland in a northern state. A third... Was that this wasn't Earth, it was a place called Twoarth, and the presence of cheetah shapeshifters was the least of their furry concerns... Amalthea wound up on the west coast, with a small home in a little hidden mountain community called Wonder - but she taught school on the coast, at a place called Oliver Carramba High School... And there were already several Sangers working there! *** With clear and open eyes, Amalthea looked at these creatures, unsure of whether they were going to attack. They did not, rather they looked at her with the same expression if that could be said. Their heads after all were far from humanoid, long and narrow snouts and sharp-toothed mouths. Dragons, in a word, that examined her with care and were wary. The campus dragonry had become quite active over the years, starting with a few students here and there, but soon enough blooming into a vast array of colorful creatures showing up. The skies were growing busy with wings and tails, prompting lawmakers to start thinking about ways to regulate ... dragon riding. It wasn't going to interrupt her own schedule very much, given how much time she spent more or less exclusively at the Magic campus. But still, she was intrigued. And so, apparently, were the dragons. One of her father's analogs - 'Crazy Doc' Sanger - also worked at the campus, and it was his admittedly-lovely dragon that was staring at Amalthea. He was the same color as her father's eyes, and his wings had lightning, Umpteenth seemed to match the whole aesthetic of the Sanger clan. The dragon kept looking between Amalthea and Van, and apparently was communicating with the man. He shrugged, and took a look at Amalthea. "He says that you've been Searched, it doesn't surprise me, really." The young-looking woman blinked slowly, her own eyes glancing between man and dragon. "And that... means... what?" He adopted a smirk that Amalthea dearly wanted to see on her own actual-father's lips, but he had hardly smiled in the twenty-odd years he'd been back from Ravenloft. Van however said, "it means, my dear not-daughter, that you should be prepared to care for your own dragon at some point soon." It wouldn't be the weirdest thing she'd ever done, though perhaps it might be the most physical work! During her off hours, and class periods that she wasn't instructing shapeshifting and attack magic, she would sit in on the Dragonry classes. Learning about those varieties that had come through the city's system and many more that were elsewhere. She realized with a broadening smile, that dragons could tip balances easily, but she also knew better than to think she could bring a pack of them to the Giovanni... they weren't up to the tasks. Dragons often flew and sunned themselves on open cloudless days - vampires had trouble with that kind of thing. Amalthea's sense of direction kicked in once more, apparently something that her father and many of his analogs on other dimensions simply lacked, and she created a spell to take her to 'the right spot in the right moment'. That brought her to a place called Akelara, or ... well she wasn't really certain, this place was old, and had its own whole library full of history to account for. On seeing those walls of books and scrolls, Amalthea almost swooned! But no, she was here for a specific purpose. There might be time to learn their local magic later. Or perhaps share her own knowledge! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
