Name: ‘Karnstein’, legally recorded as Anne O’Neal
Age: 684.
Gender: Female
Appearance: ”Would you believe I looked like this at eighteen? Tragic, I know. Forever mistaken for a young girl…” Personality: As a rule, Anne endeavours to be polite and to keep a rather large emotional distance from people. It’s a mask that can quite often slip—some people are simply too intriguing to keep her distance, and others are annoying enough that she can’t help but turn sardonic words to them. Some of her manners are far too antiquated for her apparent age.
Skills: Anne lacks much in the way of relevant superhero skills—all she has going for her is a large amount of personal experience with fighting and subduing people that would rather not co-operate. She is, however, an enormously talented chef, and claims to have made all her own clothes.
Abilities: As a vampire, Anne has rather a large variety of abilities—especially since she’s had a long time for the curse to set in. This brings with it a fairly enormous set of weaknesses, again amplified by age and potency.
On the plus side, she has enhanced speed and strength, hugely superior senses, and wounds heal at a visible rate. More cultivated skills are turning into bats, rats, wolves, and mist and communicating with creatures of the night in general. She also has the ability to slowly hypnotise someone, which can lead to notable infatuation if kept up over a long period of time.
The downsides? Obviously, a need for blood—human blood—triumphs, followed by rather annoyingly burning (though not fatally) in sunlight, as well as forsaking other abilities. Garlic is repellent, as is any actually holy item, and silver or fire-inflicted wounds heal at a normal pace. She can’t enter homes without permission or cross running water under her own power and she can only properly rest on her home soil. The most frustrating, however, is an inability to not count things, and straighten up any disorder. The others are flaws when fighting… whilst this obsession gets in the way of everything else.
To kill her and keep her dead is an involved process. ‘Kill’ her, follow the mist back to its resting place, stake the recovering body, decapitate it, and toss the head into a river. She might have all the weaknesses, but at least she doesn’t have a pansy ‘oh, just burn/stake them’ vulnerability like most of her ilk.
Equipment: Her parasol, a sadly necessary item when you start burning the instant that you go into the sunlight. She also has proof of ID with her actual physical age on it.
Brief Backstory: As a normal human, ‘Anne’ was part of the lower orders of the nobility—not influential on world politics, but well off and relatively insulated from many of the illnesses that plagued the lower classes in particular. It was, then, her own actions that had her facing the most virulent plague to have faced the world at that time—the Black Death.
It would have, and should have, killed the girl, but supernatural intervention spared her where her own body could not: an angelic being the likes of which she’s never been able to meet since stood by her bedside where nobody else would. Perhaps, if she had let it take its course, it would have healed her.
Instead, the delirious blonde seized upon the apparition as an attacker and struck out with as much force as her slowly fading body could muster. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to draw blood, and licking the few drops off her wrist both reduced the girl’s illness… and cursed her forever. It was a curse that only strengthened as she sought
more.
Hours later, to all appearances, the girl died alone, and was accorded one last mark of her station and not simply tossed into a pit with the masses. It was a grave that soon lay empty and forgotten, its inhabitant wandering for centuries to come.
A lonely existence, she sometimes tried to make others to stay by her—but more often than not they died to wounds that the progenitor could shrug off, or abandoned her. So she spent time trying to blend in with humans, and a few brief decades revelling in her abilities. Her most notable contributions to society lay in speaking with numerous gothic authors, turning modern conception of the vampire away from its revenant origins.
“Polidori got it all wrong, Fanu was closer with the characters, Stoker took the abilities and made everything up...”
In recent years, ‘Anne’ chose to join crimefighters—both for the security of being able to get official documentation rather than existing wholly outside social niceties, and to try and deal with some of her… mistakes.