A Steampunk Story - Introduction and Background Part 4, Villains Most Foul

In every story needs villains to match the heroes, listed below of the descriptions of our coterie of villains most foul.

If you missed the earlier posts in this series please click the links below:

The Introduction Part 1 - The General Situation  

The Introduction Part 2 - The Gentleman of the Army

The Introduction Part 3 - The Ladies & Gentleman of the Air Service  

Dr Albert Lassale 

Doctor Lasalle, is a man of medium height and tidy, tight, curling brown hair. He wears a circle style beard and is beginning to grey in places. Lasalle's most notable feature though his eyes, there is something truly disturbing about his pale grey eyes. Lasalle speaks good, Swiss accented, English French and German and just enough Spanish to get by in Alta California.

Albert is fascinated with the scientific application of the occult, he has spent years separating children's stories from fact and is now bent on applying his theories to practical ends. To the good Doctor, the most pressing of those practical ends is revenge upon those who have humiliated him and belittled his ideas over the years, although his "friends" in the cabal have other ideas about how best to use his inventions. 

With the aid of Long Wolf, he has taken the shamanistic practices and lore of the Shoshone and combining it with his knowledge of European science and engineering has developed many terrible engines of war (man/machine amalgams), poisons and drugs (with the aid of Lady Constance) and enhancements to the Shaman's powers, much to the delight of Long Wolf.   

 Lady Constance Lucrezia Mayhew, Dowager Countess Richmond 

Of mixed Italian and English descent, Lady Constance has dark hair and eyes and yet a pale almost alabaster complexion. She has a slight, very fashionable figure which she works hard to maintain by various means.  

Lady Constance has been unlucky (well, at least her husbands have had a run of bad luck) in love, two wealthy husbands perishing soon after marrying her and leaving her wealthy, with position in society and yet bereft of inconvenient, elder men folk to interfere with her plans.  As the widow of an Earl and mother/regent of an Earl, Lady Constance moves in the very best society and has connections which her natural ruthlessness can use to full advantage. The title of Empress of the Americas appeals to Lady Constance and to this end she has already planned the deaths of her co-conspirators, she feels that the Doctor is too close to the edge for the good of the enterprise and so she intends to convince the others to do away with him first, without getting her hands dirty of course.  

Her first husband, she met whilst studying at Cambridge, a wealthy professor, whom she met, seduced, married and dispatched without suspicion all in the space of 6 months. Her area of study was Vegetable Alkaloids and their medicinal uses, although she also found some definitely none medicinal uses for her discoveries. After her devastation of her loss, she took her late husband's wealth and moved to the colonies and again married well, this time to the Earl of Richmond. This time a year passed, allowing for a child to be born, before the gentleman was discovered to have had a heart attack in his sleep and passed away, leaving his two month old son Earl and his poor distraught widow to manage his affairs until his majority.  

Lady constancy is currently penning some learned papers on various discoveries obtained from Long Wolf, laying out their medicinal potential. She has taken an interest in the affects of the stings of certain insects brought to her attention by Long Wolf recently.  

Lady Constance believes that in time of true turmoil the people might look more easily to an aristocratic Lady with authority and who is a recognised Doctor of Philosophy, a learned and powerful Lady may have advantages not available to others, a potential mother to a new nation or even empire.  

Sir Perceval Ambleside - His Majesty's Minister for trade to the American colonies    

Sir Perceval is a cadaverously thin gentleman of middle years with piercing blue eyes. His receding hair is carefully styled to suit a man of his standing in society. 

Having risen through the ranks of the Colonial office and then through political appointments to its current station, Sir Perceval is deeply dissatisfied with his lot in life, often seeing incompetent, titled or politically connected men promoted over him and having to clean up the mess from those appointments. He is now determined to raise himself, by whatever means, to a position of true power and he has met just the right people to achieve his goals. Sir Perceval has numerous connections throughout the Americas and in European capitals, all made, quite properly, whilst in the service of the Crown. He has determined that he can use these connections to sew discord and mistrust without being directly involved himself or implicating any of the other players in their grand project.    

 Don Alajandro Matias Moreno - Conde de Sacremento

 Tall and painstakingly elegant, Don Alhajandro looks down his aristocratic nose with ever greater dissatisfaction upon the world around him. He is a tall and naturally handsome man, he always dresses to the height of fashion and appropriately to a situation, so enhancing his authority and looks. 

Don Alajandro has seen the power and prestige of the landed nobility decline in his lifetime. Ever since the Austrian upstart Maximilian and his Belgian whore was foisted upon the nobility of Mexico by that French pipsqueak Napoleon III, everything's gone downhill. Those heretical French ideas about equality and so forth have diminished the standing of the ruling class, raised up a class of money-grubbing businessman and banker and given the peons ideas beyond their station. It is good that his father never lived to see such things happening in his beloved Mexico. Such events have turned it into an act of filial duty; putting a knife into his father's back.   

Long Wolf - Native Shaman 

Long Wolf looks the epitome of the noble savage, is tall, always standing straight and proud with flowing dark air running past his shoulders (sometimes gathered or plaited). 

Greatly disturbed by the modern world, the Shaman has come to desire the destruction of all Europeans and their technology in the Americas. Originally from the Shoshone people, the Shaman went into the wilderness as the western expansion of the Empire and the enormous metal monsters that they brought with them began to be more commonly seen amongst his people. In that solitude he gradually lost his mind and as he wandered and then the idea came to him from his spirit guide that to fight these monsters, he too must become a monster.  He has since become a Skinwalker, enduring the horrific rites that turn a man into those most evil of monsters and has a small following of less powerful Shaman Skinwalkers to aid him on his path of destruction. 

He met Lassale in the mountains of Alte California some years back and recognised the sort of madness and desire that could serve his purposes well, he spared his life and aided his research rather than feast upon his flesh. It is obvious to Long Wolf that Lassale's madness could be turned to his advantage and bring destruction on a massive scale and the end of the White man in the Americas with a little Shamanic guidance. 

Long Wolf plans a long slow death for Lassale, once he has outlived his usefulness; the pompous superiority and personal slights have been difficult to bear over the years.