| abstract | - Aoife was sired in 1669 and she will tell you that her life before that was of no importance. She was born in London in 1650. Her parents died of plague in 1665 and her brother affectively sold her into marriage to a stranger. He changed her name, removed her to rural Ireland, and eventually turned her. In the 341 years since, she has returned to London only once, to kill her brother. On Aoife’s Earth, magic is alive. It hides within the cracks of human science, tangible only to magical beings and those humans lucky enough to be born mages. It comes from subjective experience – what red is like, exactly how the first sunlight after rain feels – and it affects the world by way of chance. Through magic, the near-impossible becomes probable. Enter the vampire, a human who has been drained of blood and, in the moment of their death, been infused with vampiric blood. They are cursed to live on as perfectly preserved corpses, at a cost. They have an unquenchable thirst for human blood. In Aoife’s world, if a vampire is not taught to touch magic, their curse will instead consume their own soul. This is the reason so many forget their humanity so soon and go into bloody, murderous rampages. Every act of animation, every falsification of life, from breathing to moving to keeping decay at arm’s length requires blood and magic in order to take place. Aoife was sired when magic was abundant. She was instructed as an intuitive mage and given a far better education than she ever had as a human. With nothing but time and her sire’s company to occupy her, Aoife busied herself with whatever most pleased her. Initially, this was academics. She was living, after all, through the enlightenment. The explosion in art, philosophy, poetry and music was fascinating to behold. But as it tapered away, what pleased Aoife more and more often was hunting humans. Eventually, Ireland became too small for her sire’s coven. Aoife’s grandsire picked them up and moved them all to Australia in 1815. As he set about building himself an empire of magical havens – properties in out-of-the-way places where magical beings could hide – Aoife set about doing what amused her most; hunting. That was how she met Aodhan. She first met him when he was five, and it wasn’t so much a meeting as she took his mother from his family’s paddocks one evening. They met again years later, when he was much older. He was a pretty thing to her eyes, lean and brown and worn by years of stock work. He taught her how to ride, how to shoot. She entertained him with word games and couplets, toys made of verse. They became lovers. Aoife’s sire found out. He imprisoned Aodhan in the coven’s main house, but refused to turn him. He told Aodhan what had happened to his mother. After a month or more, Aoife managed to sneak in and offered to turn Aodhan. He spurned her. Instead, she then resolved to kill him, and he would have died willingly. But when the deed was almost done, Aoife’s sire entered and used his own blood to turn Aodhan himself. Aodhan fled, but returned to the coven after devouring his own father in bloodlust. He remained cold to Aoife. Aoife, furious at her sire’s replacing her and her lover’s rejecting her, returned to Aodhan’s house and turned his three sisters. It was only after this that the coven noticed what Aoife’s grandsire had anticipated and prepared for. As human society had evolved and industrialised, magic had begun to fade from the world. Now, 341 years after Aoife’s rebirth, magic is all but dead. Most magical creatures have vanished, but not the vampires. As their curse struggles to survive within them, consuming their humanity and gradually failing, they begin slowly to rot away, their bodies atrophying more and more with each act of a living being. And so Aoife has found a purpose for what remains of her ‘immortal’ years; she intends to return magic to the world, no matter the cost. It’s no altruistic calling, though she of course will say otherwise. Aoife is afraid to die. Her grandsire is long dead and her sire is little more then a putrescent skeleton on the edge of death. She has no intention of accepting the same fate quietly. Along with her three progeny, she has recruited a human seer, Trent, and a werewolf, Bianca, to her cause, and has set about gathering support in all of the coven’s havens. Aoife is a vampire with all the usual trappings. She is an animate corpse, requiring blood and magic to preserve her body. Sunlight is inimical to her, and will cause her to decay completely within a matter of minutes. But otherwise she can only feel pain if struck with silver, decapitated, or stabbed in the heart with a wooden stake. The last two are also the only means by which she might be killed. As a corpse, every living action or sensation is a voluntary experience for Aoife, and each adds to her hunger. She doesn’t generally feel pain, is a little more durable than a living human – her flesh can be cut, but blunt force will do less damage – and has almost inexhaustible stamina as long as her hunger is relatively sated. She could theoretically keep running until she’s driven into bloodlust, or someone cuts off her limbs. She will also ‘heal’ without treatment if given enough time and blood. It actually isn’t healing, rather a replication of her corpse exactly as it was when she ‘died.’ But the end result is much the same. Even if all her limbs are removed, she will continue to live. The detached limbs will decay. If given enough blood, she will reproduce them. Aoife is not a fighter as much as she is a hunter, but at this she has centuries of practice. She has learned to be stealthy enough to be able to follow the average person without being noticed any more than she’d want to be. Being only average in height and build, and lacking in supernatural strength, Aoife relies on speed, agility and surprise once she decides to go for the kill. She will always go immediately for the throat, preferably from behind with a rope or wire, but alternately she will strike to crush an opponent’s windpipe. If she is forced into a more drawn out confrontation, she will try to wear her opponent down with quick, darting strikes. If she’s clearly overmatched, she’ll run. Aoife is an intuitive mage. That means she uses emotion and passion to cast, rather than logic and rationality. Her own personal method is via poetry; she will pour out her intentions through a line of verse to cast her spells. She herself never knows exactly what her casting will do, as it’s ends focused and works by way of chance. If she were to try to use magic to injure someone, her spell might cause them to trip down a flight of stairs or just as easily cause something to fall on them. As Aoife’s a third generation vampire, her spell-work is not all that powerful. What Aoife can and cannot do depends on how probable it is to begin with. If someone were wounded, she might, for example, be able to tip the balance so that they survived long enough to get medical attention. She would not be able to bring about the rapid and highly anomalous cellular growth needed to actually heal them. Likewise, she might be able to cause an existing fire to spit embers at someone she dislikes, if they were sitting close by. She would not be able to cause a person or object to spontaneously combust, unless it’s a faulty appliance connected to a power source. While there is enough magic aboard the Elegante to allow Aoife to ‘live’ without decaying, her magic there will be extremely limited. She will be able to cast, at most, two spells between meals. She will pass out upon attempting the third. And even then, she will only be able to bring about outcomes that were already very likely in the first place. As usual, she won’t be able to cause structural damage to the ship, she also won’t be able to influence any event requiring an out-of-character dice roll, obviously. After 360 years of life, Aoife has only two passions left to her: Poetry and her determination to restore magic to the world. Everything else she does is purely for her own entertainment. Playful, cruel and manipulative, Aoife’s idea of entertainment is decidedly sadistic. At her most benign, she will engage in mockery, teasing and banter, so harmless she’s almost friendly. If she’s among those who don’t know what she is, she knows how to put on a friendly face. There’s a certain amount of pleasure to be had in gaining a human’s trust only to watch it bleed away into horror as you pin them to the ground and find their pulse. So while Aoife might have a complete contempt and disregard for human life, she won’t necessarily spurn human company, and is fully capable of playing nice. But that’s simply one point on a much wider spectrum of behaviour that her sire would call “playing with her food.” Aoife will stalk prey, not because she’s hungry, but just for the pleasure of watching them run. When she does hunt to feed, she will try to keep her victim aware for as long as possible, and they are always a victim. There as much satisfaction in feeding from a volunteer as there is from drinking stale blood from a glass. When she is amongst those who do know what she is, she’ll play upon any fears or mistrust they might show by behaving friendly or threatening by turns. If people refuse to be perturbed by her, however, she will simply continue as before, manipulating, mocking and taunting as she pleases. The only humans she can come to respect, the only humans she would think twice about feeding upon, are those who share her love of poetry. They number among the few whom she could actually grow to care about. But should anyone ever hurt her, Aoife does not hesitate to exact brutal revenge. She will hurt them back, worse by far, and she doesn’t care who gets caught in the crossfire. By the example of her sire, Aoife has learned that she is entitled to anything she wants, as long as she has the means to take it for herself. She is, therefore, something of a perfectionist and has worked hard to develop her skills as a hunter, mage and poet. By this stage, she honestly believes she deserves the world, and wouldn’t hesitate to reach for it. An unnatural pallor hangs about her, accentuated by her dark hair and dark eyes. She’s graceful, her movements precise and deliberate. Often dressed conservatively, she will hide what she thinks is a wasted figure. She is not unnaturally thin – not yet at least – but her body has atrophied remarkably from what it was when she died. At the time she’s pulled aboard, her curse is only just beginning to fail. There is a slight hollowness about her cheekbones, making her look older than she used to appear, a girl in her late teens or early twenties. In the hot Australian climate, she still wears jackets, cardigans and leggings beneath her skirt, as the skin in the creases of her elbows and behind her knees begins to rot. She is neither remarkably tall, nor remarkably short and she always appears poised, like a cat ready to pounce. The only time she loses this grace is when she tries to dance.
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