Ballard
- Clan
- Ventrue
- Generation
- 8th generation
- Role
- [Lodin](/npcs/lodin/)'s Lieutenant
- City
- Chicago
Horatio Ballard was born in 1832 to a family that understood money as a mechanism of control, not comfort. His father served in the Illinois state legislature and ran a provisioning business that supplied westward-bound settlers with overpriced staples. The lesson was straightforward: captive markets produce captive people.
The Civil War made Ballard rich. He secured contracts to supply Union troops with preserved meat — barrels of salt pork and tinned beef that arrived spoiled, short-weighted, or both. Complaints from quartermasters went nowhere. Ballard’s father had the right friends in Springfield. The soldiers ate what they were given. Some of them died of it. Ballard cleared $200,000 by 1864 and moved to Chicago to find larger prey.
Chicago in the late 1860s was the perfect city for a man without scruples and a talent for paperwork. Ballard partnered with his uncle in a construction and land speculation firm that rode the post-war railroad boom. They bought parcels along projected rail corridors using insider knowledge from bribed surveyors, incorporated shell companies to obscure ownership, and flipped land to the railroads at enormous markups. Stock manipulation followed. By 1870 Ballard was worth several million dollars and weighed over three hundred pounds. The eating had become compulsive — twelve-course meals consumed alone in private dining rooms, a physical manifestation of an appetite that had no ceiling.
The Great Fire of October 8, 1871 burned 18,000 buildings and left 100,000 Chicagoans homeless. Ballard’s uncle died in the fire. The official story was that he was trapped in his office on LaSalle Street. The actual story involved Ballard, a walking cane, and a single witness who was later discovered floating in the Chicago River. Ballard inherited the partnership, its assets, and its debts — and the debts all proved to be owed to him. He rebuilt aggressively. Every insurance claim, every reconstruction contract, every displaced business looking for new premises found Ballard already there with a lease and a handshake.
His first heart attack came in 1878. The second in 1880. The terror that seized him was not spiritual but proprietary — he was going to lose everything he had built because his body was failing him. He spent fortunes on patent medicines, galvanic treatments, and sanitarium cures. None of it worked. Then he heard a rumor from a Pinkerton agent about a creature found staked in a collapsed building on the South Side.
Ballard paid $5,000 for the staked vampire and installed it in a locked basement under twenty-four-hour Pinkerton guard. He studied the creature for a month — measurements, sketches, experiments with blood and sunlight — with the methodical patience of a man cataloguing an investment. Then he pulled the stake. The vampire told him everything across a single night. Ballard took notes.
He found Lodin’s haven through bribes and legwork, then walked in with Pinkerton men and a stake pressed to Lodin’s chest. Lodin threw Ballard’s 600-pound body across the room and killed every guard in the house. Ballard wept, begged, and offered his entire fortune. Lodin, who recognized the name on the bank drafts, saw a use for the man that outlived the insult. He Embraced Ballard in 1881.
The Embrace preserved everything: the body, the appetite, the cruelty. Ballard discovered he could force down mortal food through sheer Willpower — massive quantities of it, a grotesque parlor trick that became a signature. He became Lodin’s financial instrument, the creature who could Dominate a boardroom into compliance and then eat dinner with the corpses still cooling. When Lodin wanted Gary’s economy gutted to punish Modius, Ballard orchestrated the capital flight, Dominated the business leaders, and watched the steel mills close with the satisfaction of a man who understood that poverty is a weapon you build, not a condition you find.
His feeding preference settled into something worse than mere predation. He feeds exclusively on children aged eight or nine drawn from his own mortal bloodline — descendants who are told they must spend a week each year with a distant relative. The family cooperates because the trust fund is generous and the alternative is unthinkable. Humanity 0 is not a number. It is a description of what remains when a man who was already monstrous is given eternity to refine the practice.