Demba Makemba Adoula

Demba Makemba Adoula, also known as Conrad, was a Lasombra vampire, Templar of the Archbishop Lucita de Aragón, and sire of Andrew Emory.

Biography[]

“	Throughout history and before, gods in the night have demanded blood and meat from humanity. These are our sires. You are Artemis. You are Ahriman. You are the volcano goddess of Catal Huyuk and Tezcatlipoca, the Aztecs' god of the smoking mirror. A darkness so thick it obscures the sun, wielded by the one who requires more blood than any other god except the sun? This should sound familiar. You are Inguma, the Basque spirit that haunts the Iberian night and strangles sleeping victims who did not propitiate it. You are Hina, the Polynesian goddess who guards the underworld and teaches crafts. You are darkness personified. So were your sires back to the beginning. Look through history for darkness. There you find us.	”
	— Demba Makemba Adoula to her Sabbat students

Demba was born in the Belgian Congo under the ruthless reign of King Leopold II and his army. When she was an adolescent, she fell in love with one of the countless charismatic conquerors who carved little personal empires for themselves out of the jungle. He taught her some European culture, but when he died, she threw herself into a blind panic and raced away from the river, toward some fresh illumination. Before long, Elias Bruylant found her and Embraced her. Together they traveled all over Europe and parts of Africa, but she never returned to the Congo.

After the First World War, Archbishop Monçada took her as a personal project and tried to convince her to convert to Christianity. She parted with him after explaining that as far as she was concerned, his God was her Devil and she did not need to worship one power of darkness with two faces. Demba nurtured a deep hatred for mortal society – for the conquerors who destroyed her hopes and for the people who would not rise up and fight back. She considers Gehenna ludicrous to believe in, because it seemed like someone's world was always ending.

In the 1920s, she began calling herself "Conrad" in a quiet personal nod to a Polish-English writer who made a deep impression on her. He had been to her homeland and seen the same horrors she had, and captured them in prose that spoke to her soul. In moments when she felt purposeless and truly dead, his written anger would rekindle her desire to reshape the world. During the Great Depression, she came to the New World in search of fresh opportunities. Her natural flair for rhetoric gives her many opportunities in black communities, from North American ghettos to poor districts in South America. She loves to stir up trouble and see which souls show enough fire or ice to endure when official persecution descends.

From time to time, she dreams of organizing a coordinated Sabbat effort to provoke white governments in more tyrannical states, to see if American empires would breed more people like herself, but so far nothing has come of it. When she tires of personal ventures, she spends time instructing new recruits in Lasombra history and powers. Herself a product of destructive novelty, she remains curious about the opportunities that the new century's chaos may bring forth.

Lasombra Novel Trilogy[]

“	You see your fears in the darkness, don't you? All your life, all anyone's life, these things live beneath your skin. Now they flow out along with your life itself. Learn... You see, Andrew, you have cut yourself out of the fabric of society. But you do not yet know what you want to clothe yourself in, and your anger is not enough... You remember your enemies. I made sure of that. Can you envision them suffering as you now and worse? Will you accept this gift?	”
	— Demba Makemba Adoula

After Lucita was captured by Andrew's pack, she requested that Conrad and Rosa (a rebel member of the same pack) accompany her in the pursuit of some Abyss summoners in order to abide the sentence gave by the Court of Blood.

During a Vaulderie, Lucita had an insight on Dmnba's persona. Conrad is like obsidian animated and made aware of herself. All of mortal society lies crushed within the massive footprints she has left in the ash from the burning of all their works. They are gone and she endures and at last the ghosts along the Congo are quiet.

Lucita and Conrad grew very fond of each other, and when Lucita was appointed as Archbishop, she named Conrad as her Templar.^[1]

Final Death[]

In one of the news tickers of the WTOJ, Andrew Emory says that he and Conrad were attacked by members of the Black Hand and that he committed diablerie on his sire.^[2]

Appearance[]

When she is not in disguise, Conrad is a tall slim woman with an extremely dark complexion. Her face is scarred with ritual marks, overlaid with garbled Westerns symbols she picked up from her insane mentor. She prefers to dress simply, in shirts and trousers that give her room to move freely, though she can match the heights of fashion when she chooses to. When she deals with mortals, she uses Obfuscate to very slightly shift her features^[3], just enough so that she seems to belong in whatever community she is manipulating.