Character's Fully Name: Catherine de Medici

Aliases: Catherine Clotho, Catherine Lachesis, Catherine Atropus, Catherine Smith and others.

Played By: kitsune13k@yahoo.com

Character Type: Immortal

Apparent Age: 32

Actual Age: 483

Sex: Female

Height: 5'8''

Hair Color: Dark Brown

Eye Color: Black

Nationality: Italian

Distinguishing characteristics: She looks taller than she is and her attitude alone is usually enough to get her remembered.

Skills: Speaks Italian, French, Greek, Latin, English, Spanish, and German. Excellent at manipulation and finding emotional weakness to exploit in others. As good with a sword as you'd expect someone of her age to be. Has friends in unexpected places. Alchemy skills.

History: Catherine was born in Florence Italy in 1519 to the powerful Medici family. Her parents died when she was very young and she spent most of her childhood in the nunnery where she was educated well beyond what most girls of her day were. She was happy there and history might have been very different if she'd been allowed to remain there for the rest of her life. Medici were never left fallow however and when she was 13 her uncle arranged a marriage with her to Henry, the second son of the king of France. She spent the next ten years in obscurity. Catherine used that time to turn herself into a milder version of what she is today. One of the first lessons she learned was that in French royal society a woman that couldn't bear children was considered less than useless. At first she was willing to pass her childlessness off as due to her very young age. But as time went on she began to wonder if there was something wrong with her. Knowing that her position wasn't secure until she bore Henry a son, she finally decided to stage a pregnancy, procuring a newborn when the time was right. Her first attempt at this went over so well that she continued to 'have' a child nine more times during the ensuing years. Despite the fact that these children were not her blood, not even royal blood, which delighted Catherine in the anathema it would have been, had only the royals known, Catherine loved her adopted children fiercely and never considered them anything but her own flesh and blood. It was during this time that Catherine met her first death. An improper mixing of the chemicals she took to fake a pregnancy lead to a very prolonged, excruciatingly painful death. Horrified, her eldest maid, the only one to share Catherine's secrets, hid the death from the others, saying only that Catherine was suffering from womb fever and wanted no one near her while she tried to decide how to cover over the faked pregnancy and therefore protect the children Catherine had already claimed as her own. Both she and Catherine were shocked and horrified when Catherine reanimated. The maid was willing to excuse it as a reaction to the drugs that had only made her appear dead but Catherine knew something had changed.

In 1547 after Henry's oldest brother died mysteriously, Catherine ascended the throne and became queen of France. In 1559 she became regent of France when her husband was killed in a jousting accident. Her oldest 'son' Francis II was only 10. From that point to the end of her 'life' Catherine was thrust into the forefront of the religious wars between the Catholics and the Huguenots of France.

Showing Medici practicality, Catherine attempted to strike a balance between the two factions and managed, despite their best attempts, to keep things civil at least. Compromises were made by each side albeit reluctantly and it seemed for a time that there might be peace. However in 1567 an attempt was made by the Huguenots to kidnap Catherine and her son, Charles IX to gain control of the government. Catherine suffered her second death at this time and she and the young king barely escaped to safety. By now Catherine knew there was something horribly wrong with her despite her attempts to ignore all the signs. At this point she began taking measures to disguise her age and her apparently miraculous healing abilities. Her attitude toward the Huguenots changed at this point as well for not only had they betrayed her trust and endangered France they had actually attempted to harm her son. Despite this she still went on to broker peace in the second and third civil wars that followed between the two factions, knowing that for her son to rule, he must have a kingdom worth ruling. She even went so far as to arrange the marriage of her daughter Marguerite with Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot prince in 1572. Shortly after the marriage however an attempt was made on the life of a prominent member of the court. Events escalated and six days later, with the consent of Charles IX the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's day occurred. The killing went on for almost a week and spread to other towns as well. Hundreds of Huguenots lost their lives. Catherine has never commented on how much of a hand, if any at all, she had in the event, though it would be impossible for her to be unaware of it. She has never shown any regret for the incident either though and in fact always seemed quite pleased with the way it came out.

In 1574 her son Henry III became king of France and Catherine's power continued to wane. Courtly life and the constant intrigues and power struggle as well as having to bury so many of her children was finally beginning to wear her down. So too was the fear of what kind of monster she must be as everyone around her aged and died yet she remained just as she had been at the beginning of her reign. Covertly she began to set her spies to searching out someone that might be like her, someone that might be able to explain what she was. In 1584, just as her youngest son, Francis of Valois died, her spies brought Catherine such a being. His name was Holger Danske, a Dane of immense size who couldn't keep out of a brawl to, literally, save his life. Catherine considers his arrival the beginning of her Immortal life but she was not quite free of her royal one yet. By 1588 Henry III was no longer master of Paris and only by going herself to treat with Henry of Guise was Catherine able to stall his rival long enough for her son to escape. By the end of the year, her son had his rival assassinated and Catherine knew it was only a matter of time before her final son met the same fate. Unwilling to bear it, she finally, at the grand old age of 70, faked her own death. She remained in France until her son's death less than a year later. She spent the next few years visiting her remaining daughters who had always been privy to their mother's secret.

In 1592 Catherine returned to Florence accompanied by Holger. The nunnery from her childhood was in ruins thanks to the grants she had always provided the sisters that had lead them to establish a larger building farther up the mountain. Catherine and Holger rebuilt on the holy ground and Catherine's training as an Immortal began in earnest. For the next fifty years, oblivious to the world around them, Catherine learned the arts that would keep her alive in battle and sharpened the mind that would allow her to defeat the enemies she couldn't reach by sword. Even so it was a time of peace for her and she cherishes the memories. It ended for her when Holger was killed while drinking one night in town. His killer was Raphael Diaz. Catherine spent the next two years turning his life into a living hell. It was only when he was finally past all pity and unable to defend himself that she took his head. It was her first Quickening.

After returning to set the villa in Italy in perpetuity for her and her descendents Catherine returned to France and Spain, collecting two of her granddaughters, Nina and Sophia and began a grand tour of Europe. The New World was being settled in earnest now and the three of them even made short trips to the continent once it was civilized enough to have proper housing.

Catherine picked up several other girls along her travels and as a direct result of Nina's influence decided to begin a school for other unclaimed, unaccepted young girls once her granddaughters were too old to continue traveling with her. Sophia ended up married to an English man thanks to Catherine's meddling but Nina resisted all her 'Nan's' attempts and eventually settled in Italy at Catherine's villa. Together she and Catherine began the school that would allow other women to group up as educated and privileged as they had. It also spread Catherine's spies farther than they had ever been able to go before and she used every advantage available to her to be sure her 'daughters' were placed in the most beneficial positions possible. This continued well into the 1800s with Catherine eventually going as far as Africa and Asia. Fiercely protective of all her daughters, there were mortals that lost their heads as easily as Immortals. At the beginning of the 1900s the world began an all too familiar pattern and began to ready for war. Catherine saw it coming and drew as many of her far flung daughters back to Italy as possible. Together she and her descendants sat out World War I and the subsequent 'peace process'. A time when, Catherine says, 'the men were finally allowed to run amuck'. Afterward she moved as much as she could to America, seeing it as far enough away from what was inevitable. Reestablishing herself in Philadelphia, she and her children again sat out World War II. Catherine alone made return trips to Europe throughout the war, retrieving children and racking up more deaths than she'd managed in all her years previous. It was also the first time she'd allowed boys into her school and under her protection.

At the end of the war Catherine divided her time between tracking down anyone that had hurt her daughters during the war and visiting the school her many times over granddaughter was establishing in a conquered Japan. This kept her busy until the early 1990s when one of the Immortals her daughters were keeping an eye on for her was killed. By mortals who knew how to kill an Immortal. After several months of searching and information gathering, Catherine was delighted to discover that it was because of an organization known as the Hunters. Apparently their head, a man named Horton, had met his death in the quest to eliminate a particularly resourceful Immortal and the large organization had splintered into smaller factions that took their orders from their own leaders and had little to do with each other. Catherine inserted herself into the Hunters her daughters had discovered operating out of California. David Shelton was the head of that cell and saw the benefits of having a 'pet Immortal'. Catherine saw the benefits of letting other people do her work for her. Shelton hid the existence of the Watchers from Catherine, which was not that hard considering most of his new recruits were not drawn from the Watcher organization anyway by this point and blocked her records in the database so that she could work with the very mortals sworn to eliminate exactly what she was. It was a mutually beneficial relationship based on a knowledge that it would eventually end badly for one of them and both Catherine and Shelton always assumed the bad ending would be for the other one. They never got the chance to find out.

Catherine was in the process of tracking down a particularly illusive Immortal when the plague hit. She took the other woman's head and returned to find her communication with her daughters overseas lost and their base in Philadelphia decimated. Moving what was left of her school to a fortified location in the Rockies, she ordered them to stay put and is now in the process of seeing what the world's become as well as trying to track down any of her missing daughters that might be left. Asked what side she's on, Catherine will answer: "mine."

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