(expanded from Clanbook: Cappadocian, p. 65).

This potent elder was one of the first to suffer an unfortunate characteristic unique to the Cappadocian clan. Clan legend has it that upon her Becoming around the time of the fall of Rome, Troglodytia’s body continued to “die”, and over the course of a few weeks the rot accelerated until she entered the advanced state of decomposition. She soon resembled a walking corpse, or particularly deteriorated zombu. Her sire, the methuselah Caias, considered destroying her at first, but changed his mind when he realised that her spirit was undiminished by her misfortune, and that her horrid state might actually lend her an intimacy to death that could help to find the answer to the Great Riddle. Mean-spirited peers gave her the unpleasant moniker of Troglodytia but rather than let their cruelty crush her, she discovered that she was uninterested in such petty concerns and she took on the name for her own. To this night, she wears it like a badge of martyrdom and pride, challenging others to face their condition with equal courage. Troglodytia’s original name is now lost, except to those remaining elders who are her elders and contemporaries.

Troglodytia has had a difficult time of her unlife, as her horrid appearance is a constant threat to the Silence of the Blood. She cannot appear in busy areas, and her experience has shown that even other Cainites despise her for her rotten visage. Wryly, she is fond of saying that they don’t like to be confronted by the truth of what they really are- walking corpses. In past centuries she circumvented this by feeding only on the freshly dead, the lost and forgotten, or those stupid enough to enter graveyards at night. Even more than other Graverobbers, Troglodytia feels most comfortable in tombs and catacombs, and she enjoys making High Clan Cainites troll through the muck to deal with her. She is much in demand for her occult and alchemical secrets, her knowledge of poisons and strange herbs, and her odd ability to find only the best corpses for study.

She relocated to La Serenissima to trade her secrets of Mortis and the occult for those of nigrimancy. She is neither welcome, nor does she desire to stay at, the Giovanni loggia, though she deals with them quite readily. Instead, she resides on the necropolis isle of San Michele with Nicolo and his Wretches. There she sees to the welfare of their mortal herd in return for learning the arts of Obfuscate, which may finally free her in part from the curse of her horrid visage. During her sojourn in Venice in 1202, Sister Maude Khlesl made the acquaintance of Troglodytia, and despite the cool indifference to suffering that the older Cappadocian made little secret of diguising, they struck up something of a camaraderie based upon their outsider status in the clan and a shared, barbed sense of sarcasm. They traded a few ritual secrets over those months, and again when Maude revisited the Serene Republic in 1210.

Embrace: Thought to be some time around the death of the 5th century.

Lineage: Childe of Caias Koine, the Master of Erciyes (d), who was a childe of Cappadocius. Troglyodytia is of the 5th generation.