Name: Jaspin Reese
Age: 400 (turned at age 25)
Songs: I Hate U, I Love U - Gnash
Monster - Skillet
Background: Jaspin was born in the mid 1300s, to a rather large poor family. His family owned a farm just outside of one of the larger cities, which took almost all of the money that they got from selling their vegetables. Between restocking, paying the taxes for the farm, and fixing the damages done by the rich city kids that had clearly never been taught to respect others. They hardly had enough money to live off of, eating mostly the food they grew. Being the youngest of his brothers, Jaspin usually got the hand me downs and throw aways from his brothers.

His mother and father died when he turned 20, and with his brothers all moved on or married, Jaspin was the one left with the sad little farm. However dealing with the land and debt by himself was much harder than he had thought it would be. When someone from the city came to the farm offering a lot of money to buy the land from him he quickly took the offer without even a second thought.

The money was more than enough to leave and move to a very small poor village far from town, and the rich little brats that he used to have to deal with before. He fit into the small village very well, the children there were better behaved, and no one really had enough money to look down on each other. He sent the next 5 years living happily there, helping the villagers with anything he could, rather it was fixing houses or chopping down wood to build houses for newcomers.

Name: Elizabeth Mercer
Age: 587 (turned at age 28)
Affiliation: Mercer clan (founder and matriarch)
Song: 5 Jahre - L'Ame Immortelle
Way Down We Go - Kaleo
Background: Elizabeth was born in the 1200s to a commoners family. By the time she was turned, she was in her late 20s, with a husband by arranged marriage, whom she regarded with apathy. He was respectfully dismissive of her and she of him. They had no feelings for each other, and though he had a mistress and she stayed faithful, she really did not care, nor was it her place to care. At the time of her turning, they had been married for 10-12 years. They had a son, and should have had more children, but Elizabeth had a difficult time conceiving and carrying children.

She was turned on a cold winters night, away from her forest village home to gather firewood. A small band of vampires had been passing through her village and one attacked her. Before they could drain Elizabeth of blood and kill her, her husband discovered them and the vampire chose to flee. Her husband brought her back home, but she was already almost dead and residual poison from the vampire's fangs was already in her. He pronounced her dead and sent their son to get the village mortician. They were fitting her for her coffin about an hour later when she revived as a vampire. In her initial confusion, she mistakenly tried to attack the mortician, and, with her newly paled skin and sharper teeth, was quickly recognized as a vampire. Her husband and the mortician drove her out and she fled into the woods. Her village was both on the hunt and on the lookout for her for the next few days, so she left them behind.

She emigrated to the nearest city, where she attempted to live under the radar and understand what she had become. She was regarded as a crazy homeless beggar woman for much of the next decade. She managed to survive in the shadows until she worked up the mental stability and sense needed to live alongside people again. The life of a beggar disgusted her and she yearned for something more normal, with dignity and a purpose. All she could do was save what little money she acquired and leave for somewhere new, to live better.

Her survival wasn't easy at all. She was homeless for years more, forced to move around as a migrant after she fed, and there was little work available to someone like her. She was quickly growing weary of a violent, lonely, meaningless life. One night she got her break. She attacked a carriage, took out its master, and drove away his wife and servants. It was then Elizabeth realized he was a man of good means, and she robbed his remains and his carriage. She fled miles away before she felt safe to use the money. She bought her first home in years, and in a home she found purpose, something akin to what she found while she was married - not to a husband, but to a home.

She couldn't interact with people all that much, but she had stability and a roof over her head. She began buying decrepit homes on the ends of villages and repaired them and sold them for a profit years later. She cultivated flower and vegetable gardens and reminded herself what it felt like to have a purpose to nurture and protect something. She began robbing graves instead of hunting, trying to keep her home stable. She slowly taught herself to read and write, partially by studying words inscribed on coins.

By the time she was about 200 years old, Elizabeth had a routine of buying and selling homes and had a relatively stable, if not lackluster, life, with a faint sense of purpose. It wasn't enough. Everything she had was so temporary. She still yearned for something truly meaningful. In one unremarkable village, she found something.

~~~

In order to survive and preserve a measure of stability on the edge of human society, Elizabeth organized her clan with specific roles to avoid suspicion. When moving from place to place, usually every seven years, Elizabeth moves the majority of her clan to a house on the outskirts of whatever large town they're residing in. They pose as a family of coffin-makers (which they do), and Elizabeth poses as Kilroy's second wife.

Name: Jonathan Mercer
Age: 217 (turned at age 26)
Affiliation: Mercer clan
Song: Starlight - Muse
Background: Jonathan barely remembers his real family, and he doesn't remember his real last name at all. He was born to a working-class couple. His father flitted from job to job as necessary. His mother took care of him. He was their first child. He has some memory of his birth mother, a hard-working, often exhausted, gruffly loving woman. He doesn't remember the disease that killed her or his father. He was found by Elizabeth as a homeless orphan at about seven years old on the streets of an English town. Something about him reminded her of her long-lost, likely long-dead son, the child she never got to finish raising. She took him in off the street and gave him a home and love. From then on, his childhood was somewhat normal, and he got used to his new mother's odd habits. When he was fifteen, she told him the truth about her existence, and to her great thanks, she'd earned his trust and he didn’t run away or turn her in. However, he was still uncomfortable with the discovery and began striving for more normalcy and independence. Several years later, Jonathan left his mother to begin attending a university, where he could bask in education and the company of his peers. He did return to Elizabeth after several years of study, having come to the decision that he wanted to become a vampire. To deal with his turning and subsequent uncontrollable stage, he begged his mother to keep him closely watched and restrained, which Elizabeth obliged.

His motivation for choosing the existence of a vampire is based in how he valued his education and time in the university setting. He saw the potential to learn and see so much. He realized the opportunity to witness hundreds of years worth of history in the making. He came to the (possibly naive) conclusion that perhaps being a vampire wasn't so bad, from seeing how his mother dealt with her life. He became convinced by watching his mother that being a vampire didn't mean one had to completely isolate themselves from the world, and vampires could survive without killing. Even after almost 200 years, Jonathan has never killed a human.

~~~

His role in the organization of the clan is to move into the town proper, under the guise of a doctor, and establish himself as a trustworthy presence. With decades of medical training in universities beyond his physical age, he does provide the services of a doctor to the town. When a patient is unable to be cured, he convinces the family to let him take the body to some inexpensive coffinmakers outside town. He then takes the body to his mother for them to all drink from.

Background is subject to improvement

Name: Eleanora Radley
Age: 243 (turned at age 22)
Affiliation: Mercer clan (loosely)
Song: Team - Iggy Azalea
Background: As a human, Eleanora was part of the merchant class and was part of a family of social climbers. She wasn’t well educated, but made a conscious effort to stay aware of what was going on in her house. Between her and her parents, she was able to wheedle into a marriage with a local minor noble. He unfortunately kept her mostly housebound. She had two children by him, one stillborn, the other died at several months old. With life dull, depressing, and unstimulating, Eleanora kept watching and listening for an opportunity to escape. She got her chance when her husband died suddenly, and she took as much of his money as possible and ran. She made it across the English Channel, but she didn’t make it far into France before she was mugged one night, bitten, mostly drained of blood and left for dead. Her attacker was sloppy and their recklessness meant Eleanora became a vampire. Broke, alone, feeling sick and crazy, Eleanora vanished into the forests of the Ardennes. She didn’t resurface for years until she’d gotten control of herself. She then fled from the Ardennes, having terrified the locals, and spent several more years drifting around France, quickly being outed in most villages, chased out at best and almost killed at worst. Even so, her ability to blend in was improving and by the time she reached the Holy Roman Empire, she was able to lead a fairly stable life, hopping from one major city to the other, mostly avoiding other vampires, and began exploring the education she’d always wanted to have by hanging around the universities the area held. She remained mostly undetected for over one hundred years, eventually exploring other European cities and universities, and eventually returned to England.

Jonathan met Eleanora at an English university (not the first university he went to). She was already a vampire and he recognized her as one. Due to their similar study habits, they ended up spending plenty of time together, and Jonathan became smitten with her. He began to court her, and she liked him enough and humored his affections, but it wasn’t until he took her to meet Elizabeth did she take him very seriously. She joined the Mercer clan partially for Jonathan, partially for the safety in numbers.

She considers education to be her key to survival.

~~~

Her role in the clan is to move to the town proper posing as Jonathan's wife, with her social skills and intelligence helping establish them as regular and trustworthy people. She also assists Jonathan with moving bodies and occasionally as an emergency messenger.

Name: Violet Mitchell
Age: 370 (turned at age 19)
Affiliation: Reese Clan
Song: Kill Em With Kindness - Selena Gomez
Background: As a human Violet was the only child of a high class family, while they weren't near poor, her father had married up and was very frugal man. He kept a tight hold over the money that came from her mothers family. While she was put into a wealthy school and well educated, she still had to deal with the other children, they would bully and make fun of her for the fact she couldn't go out or spend as much money as openly as they did. When she was around fifteen years old she started to get pains whenever she moved her left hand, and begged her father to start homeschooling her instead. She deeply believed it was caused by the mental abuse she was getting from the other students, but her father refused, insisting that she was making things up to get her way.

Over the next year the pain only seemed to get worse, spreading from her hand to her arm, left leg, and right hand. However, she kept this to herself not wanting to upset her father and knowing he wouldn't believe her. It was her mother that realized something was wrong with her daughter one night when she wasn't even able to grip her folk over dinner. After what seemed like hours of her mother and father fighting they finally took her to the doctor. To their dismay they found out that Violet was not faking it, in fact she had a issue with her nervous system, the same one which her grandfather had dealt with for years, and because they had waited so long to get it checked the damage had already been done. For the next three years it only got worse, she was pulled from school as it hurt to walk for long periods of time. When she was nineteen however, she finally got relief.

One night on her way back from the park where she was studying she was attacked by a man, he pushed her into an alleyway and bit down on her neck. That man was Jaspin, she had stumbled upon him hunting and he planned on killing her. Not that she had the strength to fight back anyway. As she started to fade off into the darkness, she could smell smoke and hear people yelling about a fire. He dropped her and ran towards the fire, for she would later learn it had been his house that had been set on fire. It was there in the dark alleyway that the bite took her, and when she awoke, she felt no pain, no weakness. When he returned to check she was already changed and though he wanted to kill her then, he couldn't. Forever greatful that she would never feel her crippling pain again she joined the Reese Clan and was its first member.

Although she would never say it, in fear of upsetting Jaspin. There is a small part of her that is thankful for this Elizabeth woman he talks about. For without her interruption she would be dead.

Name: Maxen Shay
Age: 220 (turned at age 25)
Affiliation: Reese Clan
Song: Believe - Hollywood Undead

Maxen Shay was born in 1600 Ireland, and thus he was actually born into the chaos of the Nine Year War. His father had been a fighter in the rebellion, and was one of the many killed when Maxen was only one year old, leaving his mother to raise him and his two sisters. His life growing up was far from the easiest. His mother whom never remarried truely did try her hardest despite their hardships, working in a brothel to feed her three children, and yet things never seemed to work out for the Shay family. What wasn't taken as payment for the Madame of the brothel house was either used to pay taxes or scrapped together to pay for food. By the time Maxen was eighteen his family was still rather poor but due to the fact both of his sisters had taken after their mother and started working in the brothel as well. They had at least enough money not to be living on the streets, yet things were still tight, and do to Maxen's anger issues. He had trouble even holding on to a job, and so help support his family, he became a thief. Not large stuff, but things that he could easily fence, or use. A few coin purses here, a few bits of food there, jewelry, and fancy items from rich peoples homes. The little things he needed to keep his family getting by.

It was this skill however, which ruined his life and got him bitten, when he was twenty five. Tricked by a smooth talking vampire he had unwittingly stolen from, Maxen was lured to his mother and sisters home late one night, under the belief that his mother had died in her sleep. Yet instead he was forced to watch his mother and sisters be killed by the vampire whom later turned on him, draining his blood as well. Yet the vampire was sloppy and instead of killing Maxen, left him there to turn into the same monster that killed his family. He claims that the next thirty or so years were a blur, fueled by anger, bloodlust, and the never ending desire to kill the person that did this to him.

Eventually he ended up tracking him to Italy, when he finally found him by luck as he was getting ready to feed on some seamstress. Though he intended to try and leave the seamstress alive, hoping maybe the fact he saved her would be enough to earn her help. After the battle was over he realized that the beaten and broken human girl wouldn't live much longer and some how he managed to leave enough blood in her for the venom to change her. After she came to, it was only after much swearing and so many kicks and slaps, that he managed to get her to calm down and learned her name. Simone.

Meeting the Reese clan after they were forced out of Italy, was purely by accident. The small town they stumbled into was a wealthy town where Simone managed to convince everyone that she was from a rich Italian family and Maxen was in service of her family. It gave them the comfort they needed along with the ability to lure people where they could feed from them. It was in this town were they met, or more liked saved Nathaniel. Some people had claimed they had seen him drinking from a beggar's neck, and as people were starting to go missing he must have been killing them. Simone took pity on the young vampire and ran to get Maxen, the four townspeople were beating Nathaniel when Maxen and Simone returned and killed them, saving him.

After helping him return home, they met Jaspin and his family, and though Simone wasn't the happiest about it, they joined the Reese clan. Though things aren't always the smoothest between Jaspin and Maxen, he has proven to earn Jaspin's trust more than a few times and is even courting Violet.

Name: Rowland Kilroy
Age: 199 (turned at age 39)
Affiliation: Mercer clan
Background: Kilroy doesn’t talk much about his background. During his human years, he was a longtime bachelor, earned a living as hired muscle for various nobles and high-class merchants, and usually spent those earnings on alcohol. He caught Elizabeth’s attention due to his habit of getting kicked out of bars late at night for fighting. She decided he would be perfect as both a bodyguard and an enforcer, and she was convinced she could get him under control. One night, Elizabeth lured him away from the busier parts of town and turned him herself. When he came to, he was initially angry about what she had done, even after she explained her proposal. He remained bitter at her and hid himself away for years, before learning to accept who he was now. He had been going nowhere in life, and now that he wasn’t going to die anytime soon, he had to figure out something to do with his time. He eventually returned to her to for the new purpose she had proposed for him. What began as a strictly professional relationship softened over the years, and they became confidants. By the time he had spent over one hundred years with her, he had become completely loyal to her. He remains a dignified bachelor and tries to live from day to day, not to ever think much of the endless future he faces.

~~~

Kilroy's main function in the blending in of the clan is to provide the coffins Jonathan needs for his ailing patients, so he busies himself with the skills of a woodsman and carpenter. When need be, he poses as the head of the household, with Elizabeth as his second wife and Bela as his son from his (fictional) first wife.

Background is a work in progress

Name: Nadya (Kostareva)
Age: 160 (turned at age 20)
Affiliation: Mercer clan
Background: Born into a community of poor Russian travelers, the Ruska Roma, regarded as little better than thieves, gamblers, prostitutes. Appropriately enough, Nadya was little more than an entertainer and, once she was considered of age, a prostitute. She remained sequestered in her community all her life, fearful of outsiders, rarely straying from her people wherever they went, and entertained travelers, mostly men, half-heartedly and with a forced smile.

But her community was of Russian gypsies that were persecuted at every turn. When nearby villages began to contract diseases, Nadya's community was blamed, attacked, and violently driven out of the area. Nadya was beaten to near death and her family was driven away before they had a chance to bring her body with them. That night, once the hordes had moved on, Rowland found her and the bodies of several of her kinsmen. Nadya was barely alive, but alive enough that she could be turned. Rowland took the opportunity to sire a new vampire for Elizabeth, Nadya was turned that night, and as she suffered the effects of the venom, Rowland brought her back to Elizabeth's home.

To everyone’s surprise, Nadya quickly embraced her new identity. She relished it almost immediately. She felt freer than ever before, strong and invincible. She proved difficult to control. Her experiences made her cheerfully disregardful for almost everyone, from ordinary villagers that she saw persecute her community, to the community and family that she saw as having used and abandoned her. She made no qualms about feeding when she wanted, on who she wanted (usually men she told she was a prostitute), and with little discretion. She didn’t share the concern the others had for human life and to retain her humanity. It wasn’t until she was caught, nearly burned to death, and cast out by a town and nearly abandoned by the Mercers that she realized how wrong she was for spending her existence like that. Elizabeth was eventually persuaded to give her another chance, but though Nadya remains a wild child and can't help but toe the line, she knows her boundaries very well and of the dire consequences that she'll face if she doesn't respect them.

~~~

Nadya's place within the ruse of the clan is to pose as Bela's young wife.

Name: Simone Pecora
Age: 180 (turned at age 21)
Affiliation: Reese Clan (loosely)
Song: Sit Still, Look Pretty - Daya

Born in the small coast city of Positano, Italy. Simone's mother died at a very young age, leaving her and her three brothers to be raised by solely her father. Her life as a human wasn't the worst, a family being merchant class they didn't struggle to much to feed themselves, and being the only girl in her family and the youngest, she was for the most part rather spoiled by best her father and brothers. Though being raised in a house full of boys, she wasn't really thought to be a proper lady, or the sense of how to talk and act. The most lady like thing she could do, other than dressing the part, was sew. Something that caused her father issues as she grew older. Far to opinionated and at times down right rude to the men that tried to court he, by the time she was twenty one she had rejected a few suitors, and been rejected by quite a few more that her father had tried to arrange. It was that hard headedness that lead her to meet the vampire that changed her.

Hoping to improve his families social ranking, Simone's father tried to for the fifth time to set an arrange a marriage for her. A new comer to town, whom came from a rich Irish family, from what he said. However, Simone didn't like him at all, while he was extremely handsome, she was smart and could tell there something wrong about him. He was to flawless, he pulled to much attention to himself, and although she hated higher class people, he was the most boastful about it. Very the the opinionated person she was, she didn't make her rejection of him a secret, telling him to his face she didn't want him. A rejected that he didn't take well.

Later that night when Simone was closing up the small stemress shop she worked at, he returned and forced his way into the door. The beating she endeared at his hands seemed to take hours though it was in reality no more than an hour at the most. Being hit, thrown against walls, and in the end thrown into the empty street trough the glass out the shop. His voice in her ear whispering something about playing with his food, was the last thing she thought she would hear before death. However, before the vampire could turn her, he was pulled off by another. The vampire who not only turned her, but killed the one whom put her through so much pain, Maxen.

When she awoke turned she was angry, of course, and Maxen took every punch, slap, kick, and swear she threw at him. He apologized for turning her, promised to take care of her, and though she was unsure, she followed him. For awhile the two of them lived and hunted in Italy, though they were drove out with pitchforks due to her carelessness. She thought Maxen would abandon her after that, but no he moved to two of them and found somewhere else for them. She learned to hunt in secret, she managed to convince everyone that she was from a rich Italian family and Maxen was in service of her family. The natural vampiric like grace making it easier to pretend to be rich. Whenever someone noticed that a guest they invited over was missing, Maxen would say that Simone payed for the person to go on a vacation to Italy, and once the coast was cover they would move

Meeting the Reese clan was a total accident, she couldn't find it in her heart to let poor Nathaniel die because of a small mistake she had done herself, she planned to let him join the two of them. It was only after she and Maxen saved him that she found out about his family. Their leader Jaspin even saying that he knew Nathaniel was being beaten and did nothing, the knowledge of this this bothers her to this day, but seeing that Maxen is so intent on staying with the group, she does as well. At least as long as Maxen is.

Name: Bela Daroczy
Age: 310 (turned at 31)
Affiliation: Mercer clan (loosely)
Song: Die Schlinge - Oomph!
Background: work in progress

Bela has a history of being hot-blooded and prone to violence, even as a human. But when he was human, it was a little more about passion than anger. Bela was nothing more than an average foot soldier to the Kingdom of Hungary near the decline of its state. He was reasonably talented in raw combat and had a streak of luck to survive many battles. He despised being a soldier, not for the dirty and gory lifestyle, but for the taking orders. His disrespect for authority cost him opportunities for advancement in the chain of command. Being a soldier also meant he had little time to spend with a wife and family. He married a farm girl named Helená, unremarkable in station, but whom Bela adored. By the time Bela was 31, together they had three surviving children - two boys, János and Imre, and a little girl, Ana.

He met his end along with the end of the Kingdom of Hungary, fighting in the Battle of Mohács. The battle could have been won, but his military leaders were incompetent. He was struck down and was among the dead and dying when the battle ended, along with thousands of other men. Unlike the others, however, Bela wasn't dead when vampire scavengers came to feed on the battlefield. He wasn't even unconscious - he was awake to see a rogue vampire descend upon him, and had the instinct to fight, but none of the strength. When the scavengers failed to drain every last drop of blood from him, Bela began the agonizing process of becoming a vampire. He managed to deliriously crawl off the battlefield into a nearby bog, and he remained there for weeks, suffering, feeding off the bodies, and terrorizing those coming near to collect the bodies. It took weeks to mentally recover enough to have coherent thoughts about Helená. It took several more to fully realize what had happened to him. Only then did he set out to return home, despite his new state of being. It took at least a month for Bela to return home, between the disorientation he'd suffered, coming to terms with his new blessings and curses, not the least of which was becomingly increasingly more violent and unpredictable.

His welcome home was miserable. Bela arrived in his home village late one night to find that Helená had remarried. She'd been told he was dead, was encouraged to remarry quickly for the sake of their children, and was absolutely terrified to see him again, especially in his new state. Bela's already fragile mind couldn't hope to contain itself. He murdered her new husband in a fit of rage and immediately fled the village.

Furious and with nothing left, Bela went out with the full intent of tearing away from his old life. Much of the next 200 years only served that function, and served it violently. He traveled from town to town, sometimes on a nightly basis, picking fights, brushing with the law, having sex with whores, taking the odd mercenary or bounty hunter job. He killed one or two military higher-ups he did recognize from his soldier days, though he rarely came across any after thirty years or so. He once came across the vampire who turned him, the face of whom he vaguely remembered. Bela dismembered him and burned his limbs.

If asked, Bela couldn't say why he joined the Mercer clan. He hates taking orders and hates restraining his impulses. He has little respect for Elizabeth. The only understanding they explicitly have is one that promises that Bela knows what has to be done and will do it, as long as Elizabeth doesn't order him to. Perhaps a nicer place and a regular meal appealed to him, for a little while. Perhaps he merely wants access to Nadya, whom he openly lusts after. Perhaps, deep down, he can't forget what it felt like to have a family and is desperate to feel having one again. But he still hates being low in the hierarchy, being in a family that isn't his.

~~~

Bela's place in the ruse of the clan is to pose as Kilroy's son from his first marriage. He tends to enjoy playing husband to Nadya and will not hesitate to milk it.

Name: Nathaniel Phillips
Age: 175 (turned at 22)
Affiliation: Reese Clan
Song: Misery - Maroon 5
Background: Work in progress.

Name: Abigail Adams
Age: 340 (turned at age 28)
Affiliation: Reese Clan
Song: Me Too - Meghan Trainor
Background: Work in progress.