pls talk more about cleveland im love her
(here’s a link to Cleveland’s moodboard for anybody who wants to hear about our VTM campaign but is wondering who the fuck Cleveland is)
Cleveland is…or was…Annunaki: in the Demon: The Fallen setting, they’re the third House of the heavenly host, the one tasked with creating the Earth and everything on it. Their sphere was all material substance: what it was, how it acted, how it moved, and how you could move through it. They determined the perfect mathematics that govern physics and chemistry. It was the Annunaki who decided that the shortest distance between any two points would be a straight line. (That means the Annunaki also have the simplest time suspending that rule, and Cleveland has left a string of ‘magic doors’ behind her that link up places that have no business sharing a wall.)
The result of all of this is that talking to Cleveland can be…a little opaque. She’s not withholding information on purpose, exactly, she just knows that you don’t understand the polyphasic quantum arcane way that she perceives the world, so, well, why waste her time trying to explain it? More than any other house, the Annunaki never understood people. The Annunaki knew things. Cleveland can create enchanted devices that work miracles no problem, but talking to people is difficult and frustrating and frightening. They don’t understand her, she doesn’t understand them, and, in her experience, practically everyone would rather exploit and enslave her for her talents than treat her with any kindness.
At heart, Cleveland has never fallen very far. She still has the pure and earnest desire to make things that are useful to others. A lifetime of abuse and neglect has not left her well-equipped to communicate her intentions, however. Cleveland is near to my heart because, well…something I learned from being from an abusive household, and doing lots of relief work for other people from abusive households, is that in real life, people who have been mistreated for years and years usually aren’t big-eyed loveable woobies. A lot of the time, they aren’t very pleasant to be around. Cleveland is glib and dismissive and mistrusting and arrogant. It’s easy to dislike her. She never learned the social skills you need in order to be likable.
But she’s made it through with the better angels of her nature battered, but intact. She still lets herself hope for something better than what she’s known. She still chooses to be the active agent in her own life. That’s so huge. I think that’s much harder than coming through a history of violence and mistreatment and seeming ‘normal.’ Cleveland is awkward and weird. She’s still figuring out how to have positive relationships. But she’s picked herself up one more time than she’s been kicked down. That’s what matters.
