Name: Velvet Alviva Coventry
Fairly short at just under 4'11" ("It was normal then, I swear! I'm not short!") and of a fairly slender build, Velvet lives in an eternal state of early-twenties. Twenty-three, specifically. She doesn't look too unlike a regular human, if a rather short one. However, there are three things that mark her out as being the immortal creature of the night that she is. Her flawless, dead-pale skin; her eyes, brilliant red dancing with starry lights and tending to glow under low light; and of course, the unmistakable hollow fangs, about half inch long and needle sharp. Her charcoal-black hair is smooth and straight, falling down to between her shoulder blades. She looks, for all the world, like exactly what she is.
Which is why when she leaves the condos, she puts on a pair of pale water-blue contact lenses and reflective orange aviator sunglasses (even though it's night 95% of the time). After all, "It's always bright on planet cool!" Generally, she wears light clothing like tanktops and sweats; it's not like she can get cold or uncomfortably hot, after all, so she just wears whatever's comfy and she likes the look of that day.
Race: Vampire (Higher, Ancient)
Racial Traits:
As a vampire, Velvet naturally only consumes blood. However, being as old and powerful as she is has resulted in some other interesting wrinkles. What it mostly boils down to is that she is hilariously difficult to actually injure in any meaningful way. Short of exposure to the sun, and even then, she can tolerate sunlight for a while if she's fed recently enough, though it makes her extremely lethargic (notably, just because she only gains energy from blood doesn't mean she can't eat anything else; her vampiric physiology will simply burn it away into nothingness. It's like throwing food down a bottomless pit). She has an enhanced sense of smell, especially sharp for the presence of blood. She's abnormally strong and fast, though exposure to sunlight strips those away from her. Along with the power that most defines her as a higher vampire: compulsion.
Or well, it kind of used to. Ever since her long nap, her ability to look into someone's eyes and dictate the truth to them has been rather...hit-or-miss. More miss than hit, even. She has yet to figure out exactly why.
She's very much nocturnal; her typical wake and sleep times are a bit before sunset and a few hours after sunrise (gaming time!). Before she enters a building, she needs to be invited in. It can make things awkward sometimes, certainly; but being that she's a resident of Building 1, she can at least pass freely into the building and her own room. However, even if invited she can never enter a center of religious worship (if she's ever forcibly brought into a place that she ordinarily wouldn't be able to go, she's dramatically weakened until she's removed from it). Religious symbols such as crosses and six-pointed stars make her uncomfortable; silver burns her severely on touch; and she's repulsed by the smell of garlic flowers (notably, not garlic, the food. It's specifically the flowers) to the point of not being able to, say, pass through a doorway garlanded in them.
Requirements:
It kind of goes without saying, but as a vampire, Velvet needs blood. The fresher and purer the better. She'll drink blood bank stuff (with a Capri-Sun straw, ideally) if she has to, but all the preservatives and stabilizers can make her a bit sick. She'd prefer a live-in companion to get overly attached to, as long as they're fine with taking iron supplements. All things being equal, she needs to feed roughly three times a week and drinks somewhere in the neighborhood of a pint or two at a time. If she goes without for a short time she'll just get a bit twitchy, but after two weeks she'll start having to resist going feral and jumping on the first warm-blooded humanoid she sees. And if she feeds when she's been starved and lost control, she'll feed an amount that might be genuinely dangerous for an average human.
Personality:
Velvet is a fascinating case study in what happens when you take someone who had a great deal of power and a penchant for using it, and let her take a very long nap.
Because there's so little that can actually pose a threat to her and she no longer really cares for the whole 'malevolent queen of the night' schtick, she's more or less become a creature of pure vibes. Watching TV and playing video games for days at a time ("Is it 11AM already? Man, I need to sleep"), using potato chips to eat extra thick milkshakes like dip, going out on the town at midnight to get sloshed and have a good time...she just does whatever while being FAR too chill compared to most peoples' ideas of vampire. When she got trapped, lightbulbs hadn't been invented yet; she doesn't really want to ruin a good thing now that suddenly she finds herself in a world with TV, Wi-Fi, ice cream, aluminum mirrors that she can actually see herself in ("Is that what I look like? Hello, vampiress, you are stunning and gorgeous!")...you get the idea.
Background:
Velvet has been around for...a long time. Over 700 years, now. Though she hasn't always been 'Velvet.' Born in the British town of Coventry as a peasant girl in 1316, her name was simply 'Alviva.'
Growing up the daughter of a farmer, she contributed as best she could; weaving textiles, milking cattle, churning butter and cheese with her mother, and so on and so forth. She doesn't remember a lot about it now, it was so long ago. When she was fifteen years old, she was married off to a neighborhood boy six years her elder. She remembers this part even less, because some years later her husband and his family were butchered and their blood drained by a hundred-some year old vampire. When he saw little Alviva, though, he let her live. Kind of. Pity? Perhaps a darker motivation? Whatever the reason, he took her, then force fed her some of his blood and drained her dry. And so, in 1339, Alviva the human died, and Alviva the vampiress was born.
For the next hundred years, she was what amounted to little more than a vampiric slave to Benedict, the vampire who'd turned her. A thrall, to deliver him blood tithes. But then one day he grew just a little bit incautious, and the newly vindictive 120-something-year-old Alviva jammed a stake through his heart. Staked him, burnt her hands badly decapitating him with a silver blade, and left him outside to be taken by the morning light. For the first time in her life, Alviva of Coventry was well and truly beholden to no one. So with that vindictive streak she had now, she renamed herself after the first thing she thought of when she imagined opulence and luxury: Velvet. So as Velvet Coventry, she reigned terror over the shadows of the British Isles for a few hundred years, then traveled the rest of Europe, seeing and causing many kinds of violence. Battles, wars, campaigns, revolutions; blood was her currency, and the Dark Queen would have her dues!
(She cringes a lot thinking about that now. She was such a tryhard!)
Finally, just a couple decades after watching the execution of Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution, a vampire hunter started following her trail. Again. She'd dispatched many before; it was extremely hard to kill her now, so she wasn't particularly worried. This one was particularly clever, though; he knew that he probably wasn't going to be able to kill a vampire like her. So he'd need to confine her. He shadowed her across the continent of Eurasia until she finally returned to England, entered her crypt, and had a brief sleep in her tomb.
That's when the vampire hunter struck. Upon her coffin, he placed a silver crucifix and a wild rose. And so, her sleep went far longer than 'brief.' By the time she awoke, disoriented and confused--some teenagers had excavated her now-underground crypt, picked up the neat-looking cross, and brushed the desiccated plant matter away--well over a century had passed. It was all so confusing. Where was she? What had happened to Queen Victoria? What did the map mean, Prussia was gone? What was happening?
But sometime between going down and waking up 150 years later, the whole Dark Queen thing had lost its luster. Why did she care so much, again? She'd been really angry, but like...what was the point, now? She'd had vampire hunters on her ass for so long. Wouldn't it be fine if she just...relaxed for a couple decades?
...Internet? What was an 'Internet?'
Building, Floor, and room: 1-205 (Building 1, Floor 2, Room 5)
Room description:
You'd expect an ancient vampire's room to be a lot...more than Velvet's. She eschews the trappings of wealth, for the most part. It resembles nothing so much as a streamer's room. Big computer with multiple monitors, tons of gaming consoles. All of it sitting on a relatively nice, modern-looking desk. Couch, coffee table covered in books and manga. Not only that, but it's actually kept brighter than most rooms ("Lightbulbs! You all take them for granted!"). Fridge and freezer filled with her favorite foods. But overall, there's nothing special about it.
Well, except for the bed. Or, what there is instead of a bed: a large tomb of black stone. Spartan-looking enough on the outside, but once she yanks the lid off, you can see the whole thing is lined with a comfy mattress and some very nice cushions. Hence why keeping the lights on so bright isn't a big deal; no light gets in anyway.
Oh, and the window. Instead of being held by a curtain, it's covered entirely by a heavy sheet of plate metal that slots into place so there's never an accident with the sun.
(In order to afford all the games she wants, she works part-time as a bartender on the night shift at a human bar nearby. She's very good at it; I mean, who
knows how many times she's mixed drinks over the course of her long and varied life, right? It doesn't hurt that after the centuries of practice, she is an absolute immaculate expert at hiding what she is. It's a real skill to talk and smile while hiding the fangs.)
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