Orlando de Vega was the well-educated son of a Spanish nobleman raised to the good Catholic values of the church in Rome. At an early age, he opted to abandon the comfortable life of his father's court and enter into military service, seeing it as his Christian duty to take part in the Reconquista to the best of his abilities. A decade of fighting and watching the bastions of Islamic learning burnt to the ground soon divested him of the righteousness of his efforts. Too intelligent to rationalize the brutality of what he saw, he finally abandoned his command altogether and rode north, into Provencal, away from the insanity of the war he'd come to despise. He was not alone, however. He was followed by a lone wanderer, a monk who travelled only by night and had an uncanny ability to walk past the soldiers as they looted, into the great mosques and universities, and taking from them the most valuable relics, artifacts, and texts before they were set to flame.
This monk followed Orlando for many monthes as he wandered, aimless and despairing, until, on day, the knight noticed him. That night, they talked, and for many nights after. In time, perhaps monthes, perhaps years, the errant knight agreed to join the strange monk in his quest. He was offered the blood in a holy communion, and joined the ranks of the blessed. He was placed within the entourage of one of the Grail Knights and they set about their work, salvaging what they could of the dying kingdom and helping others find the path, either to the order or to the end of their existence. Orlando burned with his new sense of purpose and aspired to drink from the grail himself. However, as fate would have it, his group was set upon by Muslim Lasombra who mistook them for mere thieves. Routed, their leader seemingly destroyed, Orlando and a few of the others spend many long years trying to find some way to contact their order, but to no avail. Eventually, they went their seperate ways, leaving means to contact each other, should one ever find the way.
Orlando played the knight errant again, for a time, though the difficulties of such an existence and his distaste for mercenary work caused him to search for some other path. In time, he fell in with the Prometheans, first in an attempt to garner any rumors on the Grail Knights, but then due to a genuine appreciation of their cause. Taken by the stories of Carthage told by other Brujah in the organization, the desire for a peaceful coexistance between kindred and kine resonated well with the war-weary knight. Over the years, he acted as a courier and coordinator for the group, moving from city to city, carrying news and warnings, but soon showed a knack for more involved work. Despite his birthright, his years in war had taught him there was negligible distinction between the highborn and the lowborn and he worked just as well with either. As time passed, he learned the ease with which the disenfranchised could be roused and became a master at it. However, even his skill and that of his peers could not avert the failure of their enterprise. When the grand plan was set into motion, victory was fleeting and Orlando was one of the few lucky enough to escape the reprecussions when it all fell apart.
Despondent with his failure and the loss of his allies, Orlando was again set to wandering. It was a different age, but the role of hired sword was still a valid one and he again lived the mercenary life the best he could, trying not to get too involved with any conflict. However, whenever word of the Grail Knights reached him, some rumor passed on by one of the other searchers or some story overheard in a Prince's court, he would ride off, pursing it for months, years, or even decades. As the Renaissance reached its height, he finally found something of substance. Rumors of a castle in the Scottish highlands and a group of ancient kindred hiding the grail set him across the sea to the British Isles. Though his search took decades, like Percival he was finally able to reach his destination. The few remaining watchers told him of the disintegration of the order and the fates of those who he'd known, including his sire (who still existed, it was said, in Alexandria, tending a cache there).
The quest of so many years fulfilled, but with such an anticlimax, left Orlando devoid of purpose. His experiences with the Prometheans had left him cynical of the sorts of rebellions which the Sabbat and Anarchs represented, yet he still believed that a better solution than what the newly formed Camarilla had to offer existed. Settling down a bit, he began to experiment with small attempts to build the sort of community he thought should exist. He spent a significant amount of time experimenting with ghouling, though his distaste for such clumsy means of creating bonds led him to speculate about a form based on the Sabbat vaulderie, something more diffuse and less like mind control. Such speculations did not endear him to the his kindred neighbors, however, and he finally decided to discard the project.
Over the years, he began to keep an eye out for a more ambitious opportunity. His toying with small groups and communities had produced some intriguing results, but he had to work on a larger scale in order to make any sort of meaningful impact. Meanwhile, he sired a few progeny out of a need to share his vision, though he found many of them frustratingly unwilling to learn from the lessons of his existence and so was forced to wait for them to make their own mistakes. When the Protestant Reformation took hold in England, he returned to the continent, the religious turmoil too reminiscent of the Reconquista for the elder. Settling in France, he began to take an interest in the colonial efforts of it and Spain in the New World. The chance to start from scratch appealed to him given his distaste for the world with which he was familiar. Shortly after, he was rewarded with the chance he sought. Pulling strings and leveraging favors with the French kindred, he was able to lend John Law the support he required to get his Louisiana project afloat and subtly encouraged the plot to populate the colony with the dregs of Paris society.
The rush of excitement was almost too much for the elder to bear as finally a glimmer of hope was able to break through the centuries of disappointments and failures. His new Promethean project was bound to succeed where others had failed and he sought the support of the Camarilla in his venture, citing the disturbing trend of the Sabbat emigrating to the colonies. While he was able to garner significant encouragement, few were willing to commit more and the collapse of the French economy as a side effect of his little project ruined much of his good reputation in the country. So it was that the Sabbat was able to move in and claim New Orleans as its own when the colony was sold to Spain. Orlando, in the opinion of many, suffered a severe break at this point, in grand Brujah fashion. In a fit of blind rage and temper, he vowed to reclaim 'his' city, refusing to accept another failure. Unable to convince any of his allies or even his childer to join him, he left Europe for the last time and journeyed to the Americas. Through raw use of force, he was able to arrive in Baton Rouge and set up his operation there. This 'battle camp' was not meant to be a permanent haven, but merely a fallback position. As he got a more complete picture of how deeply dug in the Sabbat were, however, he began to resign himself to a longer battle and dug in, using any means he could to get influence in the city.
One of his first acts was to embrace a childe to help him in his war. He chose a Spanish soldier named Esteve Serrano, who seemed to have the strength of will and military talent necessary for the venture. Despite his distaste for it, he blood bound his new childe to insure loyalty and appealed greatly to their shared cultural heritage in his oratory about the necessity of their venture and its promise. The 'war', such as it was, turned into a game of politics rather than violent conflict for two reasons. First, once his temper had cooled, Orlando's bloodlust went with it and all the old reservations about war came back to him. Second, he and his childe were simply grossly outnumbered by the Sabbat. Esteve was, thus, put in charge of keeping Baton Rouge secure, while Orlando began to apply his centuries of skill at intrigue to work, placing barbs in city, state, and eventually regional politics, using subtle threats and encouragements to get desired results. As it was, the subtlty of the operation meant that its first real fruits weren't seen until 1849, when the capital was moved to Baton Rouge from New Orleans.
When the slavery issue began to increase regional tensions, Orlando set about to take full advantage of the conflict he felt was sure to come. Calling on one of his progeny from England, he began to set up a masterful assault that would establish a firm presence in New Orleans, if not seize it outright. The key was the defection of Jean Lafitte, whom he sent his newly arrived childe to sway to their cause during one of his visits to Lake Charles. Callough's masterful arguments proved to be sufficient, along with vague promises about position in the city after it fell into Camarilla hands. When Union troops arrived in Louisiana in 1862, everything was set into motion. While he wanted to take part in the invasion himself, his childer both convinced him to stay in Baton Rouge and direct the operation rather than risk final destruction. In truth, Callough hoped to make his own place in New Orleans before his sire got his claws into it.
The invasion was a success, though not as much as Orlando hoped, and the rest of the war and the whole of Reconstruction was a protracted political battle over the state, with Orlando placing operatives among the newly arriving carpetbaggers and the newly enfranchised blacks in order to wrest control with them from those under Lasombra influence. When Reconstruction ended with no decisive victory by either side, Orlando was again forced to concede the possibility of a quick victory and settle in for a long fight. His increasing frustration led him to push Callough, demanding regular reports of their progress and attempting to manage the whole affair from Baton Rouge. Tensions between the Brujah increased, with Orlando increasingly convinced that his childe was scheming to betray him and Callough coming to the realization that his sire was no less a power-mad overlord than the Lasombra Archbishop (or, for that matter, the oppressors he's been fighting in England). The progress made during the Long dynasty helped to alleviate some of the pressure, but finally Callough had enough and defected, with the rest of his brood, from the Camarilla, stormed the haven of the Archbishop and destroyed him. Orlando was convinced that this was proof that Callough had been planning to take the city for himself all along and threw all of influence behind crushing the political machine that provided Callough's support structure, wrecking his own network of influence in the process. His temper tantrum worked and the lack of backing allowed the Lasombra to regroup and plan their counterassault.
Shortly after, Callough was diablerized by Sabbat agents working with one of his childer and the Brujah's brood was either assimilated or destroyed. With another burst of insane temper at having a century's progress ruined in a few years, Orlando set his loyal childe Esteve on Lafayette, which had long been a center of Sabbat activity near Baton Rouge and one of the main obstacles to a more direct assault on New Orleans. While he was unable to drive the Sabbat out completely, the damage done in the 1970 raid was significant and bought (to Orlando's mind) Baton Rouge time to rebuild and not have to worry about a Sabbat counterattack on the weakened Camarilla. Since then, he has grown more and more obsessed with his goal, trying to convince his childe and the other Camarilla kindred in the area that a full assault is needed to retake the city before the Lasombra have time to recover from the damages he's inflicted. His fanaticism, however, has made any potential ally wary of aiding him and this has further fed into his increasing paranoia.
Orlando is an idealistic visionary who is beginning to feel the full weight of his many centuries of unlife. To his credit, he's held out for almost a millenium and with much more conviction than many kindred his age, but this very idealism is what is now destroying him. He is now in the position of finally giving up his principles and values in favor of the jaded cynicism of most elders, or being driven insane by the paranoia and frustration that his constant failure to bring them to realization is producing.
The elder now exists in a constant state of bipolar frenzy, swinging from frantic idealism to paranoid rage. While in the former state, he is a passionate and charismatic speaker who seeks to bring those he is speaking to over to his fantastic vision of the world as it could be. Once he's swung to the other extreme, however, he become terrifying, raging about the ends to which everyone around him will go to sabotage his vision and destroy everything worthwhile he's attempted to build.
Orlando only truly trust his childe Esteve now, though many think it inevitable that the mad elder will soon turn on him as well (and whisper that this point will mark his downfall). The two have suffered much together and have striven with all of their energy to pursue the vision they share. While very different men, they share an understanding built over two centuries of nightly interaction.
He is wary of the other kindred in the city. In a good mood, he is able to grow excited with the prospect of recruiting them to his cause, but most of the time he watches them carefully for signs of potential betrayel. He is, thus far, unconcerned with Macy and Chung, concentrating his paranoia on Degas and Packard, who he deems bigger threats to his authority. He has taken to setting his childe on watching their actions even more than the Sabbat on his more paranoid nights.
He was very fond of Kyle Anderson, the new Prince of Shreveport, as the man was pivotal to his success in the Long era and, he feels, will be necessary to the next stage of the war. He isn't nearly ready to accept the Ventrue's younger 'sister' as a replacement and still fully expects him to return to Baton Rouge once matters in Shreveport are settled to his satisfaction.
Orlando doesn't trust Martin LaSalle and thinks he is planning to take over Baton Rouge (which he is, put not with quite the drive that Orlando attributes him). He has been toying with how to eliminate the Tremere without losing the services of his more talented childer. He is also keeping a close eye on Landau but isn't overly concerned about him since his banishment to Biloxi.
Orlando is particularly fearful of Jean Lafitte. He remembers the half-promises of power in New Orleans he made to the Lasombra in exchange for his betrayel of his sire and now thinks (quite rightly) that the antitribu would just as soon betray him for this end, particularly given that he has no intention of holding up his end of the bargain. He is also very wary of the man's growing influence, both in Camarilla politics in the Gulf region and in the economic sphere.
Most of the Brujah influence in Louisiana was tied up in the Long political machine. When Orlando helped to break it in order to spite Callough, he ruined much of the power he had built up over the course of this century. Most of what he has left is in unions and the more populist side of the state legislature, as well as a handful of judges and other law enforcers. Though money is growing tight, Orlando is skilled at putting it where it needs to go and is no stranger to making do with limited means. He has also managed to get a few tendrils into the FBI and DEA task forces dealing with corruption in New Orleans and drug running from the gulf. He has been careful not to overplay himself, using these few tenuous contacts to help direct their efforts toward Lasombra and Serpent operations.