Don Alejandro History

Alejandro's Family

Early life

He grew up at the family home in the south east of the Torres region, the third of five siblings. He had two brothers and two sisters, one of each older than him and one of each younger. Although born into nobility, he never felt he stood much chance of distinguishing himself in any way. Certainly as the middle sibling tended to be the most overlooked, so he had to find ways to gain his parents’ attention and favour. He achieved this by trying to be better than the others at everything he possibly could. He pushed himself hard at everything, his fighting skills, his studies, learning the teachings of the prophets, and generally made a nuisance of himself to anyone who was willing to teach or show him anything useful.

By the age of 9 he was already ahead of the others in his sword skills. That same year, a close friend of the family (known to the children as Uncle Felipe) noticed Alejandro’s keenness and took it upon himself to teach him how to shoot, a skill which had come in useful many times since. What he didn’t know was that this was his first encounter with the Kreuzritter. Felipe was a member of the Order who had spotted possible potential in the son of the family he had befriended. The shooting lessons were an attempt to find out more about the boy, teach him a useful skill and subtly indoctrinate him into the Order’s philosophy.
By the time he went to university he had already completed his training in the Aldana Swordsmen’s school.
University

Alejandro enrolled at the University in Altamira to study theology (aiming to be ordained as a Vaticine priest), philosophy, maths and history. He threw himself into university life with the same enthusiasm / determination as ever and passed his exam for ordination on his first attempt.

He studied hard but still found time to keep up his fighting skills and go out socialising with his fellow students. However, although he did all his work on time, and out performed many of the other students academically, his behaviour wasn’t always perfect. As students do, he would go out drinking with his friends. Quite often he got himself into fights or duels, sometimes at his instigation, sometimes not (in typical fiery Castillian style he was quick to take insult, and never one to back down from a challenge). He didn’t always get into fights for silly reasons, however. On several occasions he rescued people from street robbers. His friends weren’t sure whether having him around was good thing (for getting them out of trouble) or a liability (for getting them into the trouble in the first place).

He had a room in an undergraduate hall of residence where they locked the doors at 10 p.m. sharp. Needless to say, he was frequently out later than that. Rather than face the punishment for being late, he became quite adept at finding ways into the building and sneaking back to his room without being caught. He had three or four different ways of getting in, just in case one got blocked for any reason. Always good to have a back up.

He had no idea he was being watched...

Recruitment

Satisfied that his prospective acolyte showed promise, Felipe had waited until Alejandro was older, then observed him to check if he was still a worthy candidate for recruitment into the Kreuzritter. Despite Alejandro’s fiery temper and its tendency to get him into trouble, Felipe was reasonably impressed. He was particularly pleased with Alejandro’s ability to sneak around his hall of residence undetected; he’d probably make a good assassin. After a month or so, Felipe made his recommendation to the Hochmeister, who approved his choice.

So, one night Alejandro returned from another late night to find Felipe in his room. Alejandro listened to what he had to say. He was quite astounded by the amount Felipe knew about him, and even more surprised by some of the other things he was told. He accepted Felipe’s offer to join the order without hesitation. His acolyte training consisted of accompanying Felipe on missions and patrolling the city. After a short while he was deemed ready for initiation, and was shown the dark paths and the tear in the barrier. After initiation (following Felipe’s suggestion), he chose to join the assassins.

After training he completed several successful missions, most but not all of which were assassinations. Although these weren’t pleasant tasks, and completely against his teachings as a priest, they did not cause him too much of a problem. They were necessary for the greater good. His actions still damned him, but if he was saving others, so be it.

The black glove and the problem assassination

It is an honour to be awarded the black glove that gives a knight the ability to form a night blade. However, the Kreuzritter are also pragmatic and will also take into consideration who might be most in need of it to carry out an important mission. In Alejandro’s case they had an assassination in mind, and it needed someone capable of getting close to the target. Alejandro, as a noble with a (slight) family connection to the person was deemed a suitable choice. He was not their first choice, however. Luckily (or unluckily) for him, their first prospective candidate, for reasons of her own, refused the offer, so it was given to Alejandro.

His target was a minor but wealthy Castillian noble who had been persistently organising and funding expeditions to certain Syrneth ruins despite having been ‘warned off’. It was Alejandro’s job to find out as much as he could about the man’s motivations and how much he knew, then kill him. He had to befriend the target and work his way into his circle of friends and confidants. The family connection was useful to start the ball rolling, and being nobility ensured that he would be able to mix in the right circles to get to meet him.

Everything went to plan, but the more contact Alejandro had with his target and the more he found out about him, the less he wanted to complete the mission. He actually liked the man. He turned out to be very pleasant, charming, erudite and quite harmless (apart from his insatiable curiosity and persistence in sending people out to find artefacts that could potentially bring about the destruction of the world). He also had a wonderful wife and children who loved & depended on him.

Once he had found out everything he was going to (he strung this out rather longer than necessary), the deed had to be done. Although Alejandro was in no doubt as to its necessity, the thought of what he had to do made him sick. He was lent a shadow cloak for the assassination, and chose a night when he knew his target would be alone. He was choking to fight back the tears while he read the last rites (quietly so the target didn’t wake), but the worst was yet to come. He murdered his new friend, immediately took the cloak back where it belonged and informed his fellow knights of a successfully completed mission. If they noticed he was upset, they were too polite and understanding to say anything. The problem was he couldn’t just disappear. Even though the night blade leaves no visible mark on the target and the assumption was he’d died of a heart attack, it would have looked odd if Alejandro had never been seen again. He had to go to the funeral, talk to the wife, family and friends, keep in touch and be supportive. At least he didn’t have to pretend he was as upset as everyone else, but all the same he felt like a complete rat.

Fortunately the wife was not interested in Syrneth ruins or artefacts and had no intention of carrying on her husband’s work. He still keeps in touch with her, although it pains him to do so.

It was the worst things he has ever had to do, and it bothers him a lot. It won’t stop him carrying out another assassination when he’s asked. It’s just a part of being in the Order. You are forced to do the most unpleasant things to prevent even worse happening.

The Duel

Two years ago, towards the start of the hostilities with Montaigne, Alejandro had a run-in with a certain Montaigne nobleman on the streets of Altamira. The Montaigne bumped into him, then told him to watch where he was going in very impolite terms. Alejandro wasn’t going to be spoken to like that by a sorcerous Montaigne son of a dog, so the incident ended in a duel. It was supposed to be to first blood, but when Alejandro won that, the Montaigne threw himself back into the fight insisting it was now to the death.

Alejandro wasn’t going to back down, so to the death it was. He even read his opponent the last rights while they were fighting. For some reason it seemed to put him off. Alejandro won the duel, but not without injury. In addition to numerous other cuts and bruises he came out of the fight with a huge gash on his left cheek which has left him with a quite noticeable scar.
He was arrested later that day by the town guards. Although it had been a legal duel, the Montaigne had been the special diplomatic guest of an important local bishop, so the deed was not going to go unpunished. Political pressure and the sudden absence of witnesses in his defence landed him with a two-year prison sentence from which he has only just been released.

Family Matters

Alejandro’s family is descended from one of the original knights who fled to Castille after the Battle of Tannen. Many family members have since become Kreuzritter. Alejandro’s grandmother was the last member of the order before him, but she died before he was born. He was pleased to discover that membership in the order is a sort of family tradition.

There is only one member of his immediate family left alive since the Montaigne invasion: his sister Constanza. She is a Vaticine high priest and is living in Vaticine City at present. His parents and his younger brother and sister, Miguel and Luisa were killed defending the family lands from the invaders. (His elder brother Sebastian was already dead, killed in a riding accident while Alejandro was at university.) Miguel’s wife and baby son were also killed, because she refused to leave her husband and head for safer regions. Alejandro also had friends and extended family members in San Juan.

All this happened while he was in prison in Altamira, and there was nothing he could do about any of it. He knows that not every Montaigne is responsible for the deaths of his family and friends, but he can’t help feeling a little bit hostile towards them.

Spiders

Alejandro has been afraid of spiders for as long as he can remember. He doesn’t really know why. He is slightly concerned that instead of lessening as he’s got older, his fear of them seems to have got worse over the last few years, but no specific incident seems to have brought this about. Not that he can remember, anyway...

There is the incident detailed below, but that was because he’s afraid of them, not why.

Knights of the Rose & Cross - Oh My!

Alejandro really has a problem with these self-righteous, sanctimonious, ‘more honourable than thou’, totally clueless prats. Part of this is due to the jealousy most of the Kreuzritter feel towards the Knights of the Rose and Cross. They can be open about what they are and everyone knows what they do and thinks they’re wonderful, while the Kreuzritter are doing all the real work in secret. They can’t tell anyone they exist, and they don’t have the luxury of being ‘men of honour’. There’s more to it than that, though, and it has to do with the only mission Alejandro has completely screwed up.

First of all, his contact failed to show up (on account of being dead, but Alejandro wasn’t to know that). In the absence of any further information, he decided to work with what he’d got and continue with the mission. (Big mistake.)

The target was staying in a large town house in an expensive part of Avila, and when Alejandro arrived there seemed to be rather a lot of activity going on. There were carriages in the driveway, and more lights on than usual in the house. On closer inspection it turned out that there was some kind of party going on, and although it was late (a couple of coaches had been leaving as he climbed the outer wall and entered the grounds), it still seemed to be pretty much in full swing for the remaining guests. Still, a party should give him enough cover to get into position, and wait it out until most of the guests had left. Hopefully the target would also be drunk which would make the job easier.

He entered the building by climbing up the ivy and slipping in through a first floor window at the back. He did a quick scout around the building, and took a careful look at the party. The guests appeared to be mostly wealthy merchants, academics (probably invisible college and explorers’ society among them) and some local Rose & Cross Knights. There were also a few rather high class jennies. Most of the guests seemed to be keeping to one or two designated party rooms, so, feeling safer, he decided to find a suitable location to wait for the party to wind down. He was just heading down a corridor away from the party when he heard voices and footsteps around the corner ahead of him. He looked around for somewhere to hide. The best he could find was an alcove with drapes decoratively pulled aside to reveal a bust on a plinth. There was no time to do anything else, so he dived behind one of the drapes.

Forcing himself not to sneeze or choke on the dust he’d kicked up, he waited for the people to pass. They didn’t. They stopped right by the alcove where he was hidden, four Rose & Cross Knights. One of them had made a joke about the bust. They stayed there nattering and swapping jokes. Alejandro stayed hidden, gradually growing more cramped and uncomfortable, and barely daring to breathe for fear they would hear him. Why wouldn’t they just go away? After a couple of minutes that seemed like hours they were joined by a lady they all seemed very eager to talk to, so Alejandro resigned himself to a long,uncomfortable wait. That was when he noticed the spider. He nearly screamed out loud when it crawled onto his hand. He desperately wanted to brush it off, but any movement would move the curtain and alert the knights to his presence. He watched in abject terror, panic sweat dripping off his forehead, as it began to crawl over his shirt cuff and up his sleeve. He lost sight of it when it reached shoulder height. Then he felt the tickling on the back of his neck, moving slowly downwards inside his collar… It was the last straw. (Not down the shirt! Not down the shirt!) Panic took over and he dived forward out of the alcove straight into the surprised knights, screaming, “Get if off me! Get it off me!” and trying to pull his shirt off to get at the spider. All the knights had their swords drawn immediately, but once they realised what was going on, they laughed at him. One of them held him still while another calmly removed the offending creature from his shirt. They didn’t let him go. They laughed at him some more, and then questioned him in front of the host, his target, and some of more curious party guests.

He managed to convince them he was just a common thief. It was frustrating not to be able to tell them what he was doing, and why he was doing it. He really did have a good reason for being there, but these honourable knights were treating him like something slimy they’d just found under a stone. They were a little kinder to him than they might have been because he was unarmed (thank Theus for the night blade), “I’m a thief, not a murderer!” Unfortunately this did not stop them handing him over to the city guard to be hauled up before the magistrate the next morning with all the other thieves, footpads and ‘ne’er do wells’. He was found guilty of attempted burglary, sentenced and thrown in jail. The Kreuzritter sent another knight to carry out the mission, then arranged for Alejandro’s release.

His has disliked the Knights of the Rose and Cross ever since. They laughed at him and treated him like dirt when he’s every bit as good as they are. Better, actually. At least he knows what’s really going on, unlike those clueless morons. He is also concerned that every time he meets Knights of the Rose and Cross, there is a chance he might come across one of the knights who caught him in Avila. If they recognise him, they are bound to wonder what a Castillian priest and nobleman was doing sneaking around pretending to be a common thief.