Cleopatra

Maybe it was the beauty contest to which your mother dragged you when you were three. Maybe it was the saccharine smile that charmed the other kindergarten kids into giving you cookies during lunch. In any event, you quickly learned that other people liked to look at you and that you could use your looks to make them do what you wanted. Things really began to work for you when you - and the other kids - hit adolescence. A word, a look, could get annoying people beaten up, test papers conveniently placed in your peripheral vision, free meals - whatever you wanted.

You coasted through high school and college and into the corporate world. You were wonderful - everyone told you so. Thus, you really didn't have much time or use for people who didn't have anything you wanted. Like that disgusting bum who approached you in the subway station and asked you for change. You dismissed him from your presence with a contemptuous curse.

Your action didn't go unnoticed, and you had a visitor that night. The pain of the Embrace and transformation was nothing compared to the hysteria when you first looked in the mirror that your sire gloatingly held before your face. The mirror shattered, and so did you. Everything you owned, everything you were, had been based on your looks. Now look at yourself. Smile.