HelenaTaylor
Clan: Tremere
Age: Ancilla
Sire: Jack Weston
Childer: Cohn Rose, James van Dorn
Status: Acknowledged, Honorable
Position: Keeper of Elysium, Primogen of Clan Tremere, Regent of Clan Tremere

Being confronted with Helena is a little bit like being suddenly confronted by the brightest, most happily smiling administrator ever to ask for pertinent details before telling someone to have a nice day. Helena is beautiful, true, but most people notice her overflowingly energetic personality first, which causes her to be in constant motion, talking to everyone and anyone who might be useful to her at the moment and doing her best to maintain a wide web of connections for future interactions as well. She is and always has been as committed to Clan Tremere's goals as it is possible to be, and those who meet her tend to come away dazed, aware only that she spoke a mile a minute and that they may or may not have given something important away in the general chaos.

Mortal Life

From an unremarkable middle-class family in an unremarkable London slum, Helena became a magician's assistant in the mid-nineteenth century, working as a bird-catcher and scantily-clad trick subject for The Fantastic Fanzini, in fact a working-class man from Kent who bilked audiences for as much as he could get away with. Helena was somewhat dazzled by the promise of a life in show business, but soon learned that it was mostly faded recycled clothing, cleaning bird droppings off of tools, and slapping her boss out of a drunk in time to get on stage every night.

Life became more interesting, however, when her boss sent her on a mission to investigate the operations of a rival magician, Marvo the Marvellous, who was siphoning off crowds and considerably cutting into their already strained finances. Helena went undercover as a magician's assistant-for-hire for Marvo, but discovered to her surprise and joy that he was in fact an actual magician with real powers. She promptly quit her job, leaving Fanzini to find a new assistant, and begged Marvo to take her on as an assistant until she wore him down and he reluctantly agreed.

Embrace

Under Marvo's tutelage, Helena studied night and day, performed constant spells she designed herself as well as experiments that constantly backfired, and made her boss's life a living hell as she refused to let go of her determination to learn magic. Much to her delight and his surprise, she eventually accidentally succeeded, becoming a Mage almost overnight.

Unfortunately, this led to Marvo, whose name was actually Jack Weston and who was a Tremere vampire and former member of the Order of Hermes, to spring into action to prevent her from accidentally doing anything that would endanger the Masquerade. Rather than risk her recognizing him as a vampire and possibly destroying him, he immediately Embraced her in order to stifle her latent powers and Blood Bond her into obeying him; this successfully prevented her from developing into a threatening magical presence, but left him with a new vampire with an incredibly excited outlook on the world and a lot of energy to put toward acquiring new blood magics. He passed her off to the London Chantry rather than trying to train her himself, where she spent fifty years studying and proposing an endless stream of rituals.

Activity in Washington, DC

Having thoroughly learned from all her London mentors and designed several new paths of ritual that her superiors dutifully promised to follow up on, Helena was transferred to the New World, where it was hoped that her boundless energy would be well-spent in consolidating Tremere power on the frontier. Helena surpassed their expectations, successfully building up relations with other clans, performing favors for important Kindred in order to gain boons for the chantry, and supporting Marissa into a successful bid for the Princeship, and eventually the clan was forced to install her as Regent somewhat by default.

To date, Helena does not seem to have any direct connections to the Mage orders in Washington, DC, but as a former one of their ranks, she is always on the lookout for any magical activity that she might be able to turn to the clan's advantage.