(no subject)
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Sita
FANDOM: Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire series (reissued as Thirst)
CHRONOLOGY: After the third book, when she attempts to turn herself human through alchemy
CLASS: Antihero. Skewed morals, but she'll sacrifice herself to save humanity.
SUPERHERO NAME: Sita, which she won't tell too many people.
ALTER EGO: Alisa Perne, recent college graduate
BACKGROUND:
Sita was born 5000 years ago in Rajastan, India, descended from a group of Aryans who had invaded to the area and intermingled with the native population. When she was 7, a plague came to her village and killed half the population, including a dear friend of hers who was eight months pregnant. A priest claimed that the plague was brought on by a demon, and the only way to stop it was to summon a greater demon, a yakshini, to eat the lesser. He chose the body of Sita's friend to summon the demon. Sita spied on the ceremony and saw the corpse possessed by the demon and the gruesome slaughter the priest.
The demon seemingly departed, but the infant in the corpse's belly began showing signs of life. Young Sita revealed her presence, said that the baby was really the demon and should be killed. However, she was unable to do the task when her father, part of the ceremony, handed her the knife. She did name the baby boy, however: Yaksha. All who had witnessed the ceremony were sworn to secrecy, and Yaksha was given to Sita's aunt to raise.
Yaksha grew up freakishly fast, and when Sita was fifteen, he began to show an interest in her; despite being only eight, they appeared the same age. Sita found his extreme intelligence and beauty hard to resist, but never stopped fearing him. Over the next few years, the men who had been part of the ceremony vanished one by one. Sita's father was the last to disappear, Yaksha along with him.
Several years later, Sita fell in love with a man named Rama. They married and soon had a daughter, Lalita. However, her happiness was short-lived. One night, Yaksha came for her and gave her the choice of dying along with her family or coming with him and being his wife. Sita chose to go with him to save her husband and daughter, and it was that night that she was made a vampire. She was only nineteen.
Yaksha created an army over the following decades, spreading terror wherever he went. When word reached him about a man named Krishna, supposedly an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, he took his band of vampires to meet him, intending to prove his superiority. However, many of the group were slaughtered and Yaksha himself lost the contest that Krishna had chosen for them: a battle of control over a pit full of cobras with flutes. While yakshinis were serpent demons and Yaksha had an affinity for snakes, Krishna was able to play the very song of life itself.
Krishna was very kind to Sita, and told her that she would have his grace if she never made another vampire. To Yaksha, however, he promised his grace if Yaksha killed what he had created. He spent the following centuries slaughtering the surviving vampires. Sita traveled the world and doing her best to blend in with humanity. She feared that Yaksha would come to kill her one day, until the middle ages when she heard he'd been cornered and killed by a mob.
Cut to modern day. Sita is living on the west coast of the United States under the name Alisa Perne. She is contacted by a private detective who has uncovered some interesting details of her life, including the fact that she's a billionaire and that there are mysterious deaths connected to her. She loses her temper and kills him before learning who set him on her trail. Discovering the man has a son named Ray, she has herself enrolled in in the boy's high school (under another alias, Lara Adams) to get close to him in order to gain his assistance at getting into his father's computer.
Not only does Sita befriend Ray, she takes an immediate liking to a nerdy young man named Seymour, who turns out to have a psychic link with her (he has metaphoric dreams about her exploits). Seymour becomes her good friend and confidante during the series, and shortly after meeting him, she reveals the truth about herself and gives him a measured amount of her blood to kill the HIV in his system that he'd gotten from a bad blood transfusion.
With the unwitting help of Ray, who she quickly develops an attachment to, Sita gets in contact with a man known as Slim, who had hired Ray's father to investigate her. Going to meet Slim, Sita is ambushed by a small army who knows just enough to take precautions when dealing with her -- special alloy handcuffs that even she can't break and avoiding looking in her eyes. Sita lets herself be captured, then turns around and captures Slim/slaughters half the group when they're dumb enough to stop for a bathroom break. Based on Slim's description of his employer, Sita realizes the one coming after her is none other than Yaksha.
Sita and Yaksha meet for the first time in thousands of years. Yaksha admits that he's tired of living, but that he can't die until he fulfils Krishna's order to destroy the vampires he created. However, he knows Sita is protected by Krishna's grace as long as she refuses to make another vampire. And so he mortally injures Ray and leaves her to save him the only way she can. Which Sita does, because at this point, she's convinced that Ray is actually her husband Rama reincarnated.
Rather than waiting for Yaksha to come back and slaughter them, Sita and New Vampire Ray put together a trap that will blow up Sita's mansion with Yaksha inside, while launching the pair to freedom. Yaksha, being smarter and more powerful than Sita figured, catches onto this plan. However, he does get Sita to reveal Krishna's other words to her so long ago "Where there is love, there is my grace." Deducing that, because Sita broke her vow out of her love for Ray, she is still protected by Krishna's grace, he lets both of them go, staying inside the house with the bomb.
When the house blows up, Sita unfortunately gets speared through the heart with the wooden leg of her piano bench. She barely survives the injury and it doesn't quite heal all the way, continuing to cause her pain.
Sita recovers from her injury just in time to hear about a series of brutal murders in Los Angeles that seem vampiric in nature. Heading south to the city, she encounters several newborn vamps in the Colosseum and slaughters them. However, the leader proves to be much more difficult -- he has the powers of Yaksha. She puts six bullets in him and he strolls off, while she barely survives.
Sita gets entangled in the FBI investigation of the murder, befriending an agent named Joel. With his assistance, she finds out that the leader is a psychopath named Eddie Fender and he used to work at the coroner's office where Yaksha's remains were taken. Both Eddie and the remains vanished at the same time, so Sita assumes Eddie was fooling around with Yaksha's blood and changed himself into a vampire.
Tracking down Eddie's hideout, Sita brings Ray to help her blow it up and waste Eddie and his gang. However, she again underestimates Eddie and he again nearly kills her. Ray sacrifices himself to blow up the warehouse. The gang is destroyed but Eddie escapes. Sita is crushed by the loss.
After recovering from the latest battle, Sita finds Yaksha. His legs were blown off in the explosion at her house and Eddie has kept him impaled and stashed in an ice cream truck, but he's still alive. He tells Sita of his last meeting with Krishna and then has her drain the rest of his blood, increasing her powers and giving himself the death he's been longing for.
Sita holds Eddie's mother hostage (30+ plus, a vampire, and he still lives at home), but Eddie takes FBI Joel hostage as well. The deaths in recent days have taken their toll and she can't bear to lose another friend. Not to mention Eddie ends up killing his own mother, far more interested in getting Sita's blood and thus her power. However, Yaksha's story and her own dreams give her insight and she manages to bewitch Eddie by whistling, much as Krishna himself bewitched the cobras. She seduces him, he drags her into the walk-in freezer for sex because he has a creepy cold fetish, and she decapitates him with the emergency axe.
Joel is near death after Eddie opened up his jugular. Sita, blaming herself for his involvement, makes him a vampire too.
It takes Sita a full day to recover from the blood she lost, and by the time she wakes up, the LAPD have arrives. Sita sets the house on fire to destroy Eddie and his blood before she and New Vampire Joel are taken into custody. The police are eerily prepared for them. Fearing more experimentation and more Eddie Fenders, Sita extracts herself and Joel. This requires her to wreck a bunch of police cruisers and shoot down two LAPD helicopters with a shotgun. Two dozen officers die before she commandeers a civilian helicopter for her and Joel to escape in. The news later reports that the attack was carried out by dozens of Arab terrorists wielding military weaponry.
They make it to Lake Tahoe before they are engaged by the U.S. Army. Two Apache copters attack. Joel jumps into the lake while Sita feigns her own death by staying in the copter until it's shot down (and very nearly does die in the process).
Joel is taken into custody by the Army and delivered to a secret base outside of Vegas. Sita follows and sees the general in charge conferring with a scientist. She tracks the scientist back to Vegas, determined to use him to get into the base. She also notices that her skin seems to glow when she's out in the moonlight.
Using the Lara Adams alias again, this time a redhead from Florida, Sita gets to know Andy Kane, the scientist. Middle-aged, a degenerate gambler and alcoholic, unhappy with his job, he's ripe for her manipulation. However, she's in for a shock when she visits his house and sees a model of vampire DNA, less than 24 hours after Joel was captured.
How does she know what vampire DNA looks like? Backtrack 700 years to Florance during the Italian Inquisition. Sita fell in love with a young and brilliant priest named Arturo who was secretly experimenting in alchemy. After learning what she really was, he was determined to use her blood to recreate the blood of Jesus Christ, forming a perfect being that is a hybrid of human and vampire. Swayed by his genius and his promise that he can make her human again, she allowed him to use her blood. However, his zealotry over his quest, his guilt over letting her seduce him into a sexual relationship, and the visions he begins to have about DNA made him reckless. Arturo experimented on a young boy who lived at the church who was like a son to both him and Sita. Things went terribly wrong and the boy became a bloodthirsty monster that Sita was forced to slaughter. Knowing that Arturo was out of control, she testified that he was a witch to the Inquisitors, leading to his execution; she didn't have the strength of will to kill him herself.
And back to Vegas. Sita confesses who/what she is to Andy and convinces him to help her break in to the military compound. He admits that they have a second vampire that they've been experimenting on for weeks, one that was apparently made by one of Eddie's converts. And then Sita sleeps with Andy because she really does like him.
Of course, once she arrives at the compound, she finds out it's a trap. Andy actually IS Arturo, who managed to turn himself into a partial hybrid and survive his execution, aging only 25 years or so after the last seven centuries. He's still seeking to recreate Jesus' blood, even willing to work with the clearly insane general. Sita's thrown in a cell with Joel, one even she can't break out of.
Through a combination of telepathic tricks (she has telepathy by now too) and a show of brute force, Sita gets the general to open the cell door. She slaughters dozens and dozens of soldiers, gets the general to arm a nuclear warhead via psychic flaying, and waits for the explosion to destroy the experiments and the vampires alike.
And then the whole glowing in moonlight thing happens again and she floats away on the shockwave.
Based on Arturo's last words to her, Sita goes back to his house, to a secret basement where his alchemy setup is waiting. She gets a sample of human blood from her friend Seymour and sets everything up to turn herself human.
And that's when she's pulled into the City.
PERSONALITY:
Despite the fact that Sita is 5000 years old, she rarely gives the impression of great age. She can be impulsive to a fault and often lacks patience. She establishes relationships quickly, sometimes considering someone a friend after only a brief conversation. She trusts her intuition (and her enhanced senses/empathy) and is usually fairly accurate with her initial impression of people.
Sita's relationship with humanity is complicated. She doesn't need to kill to feed and she often doesn't. That's not to say she won't kill for self-preservation or if someone is clearly a bad person. Or just really annoying. She generally prefers clean, painless kills, but on occasion makes it slow and painful if the person really deserves it.
The less faceless people are, the more difficult it is for her to kill them. She will if need be, but she'll try and spare those whose names she's learned, those who are innocent. She often shows compassion for those she has to kill out of necessity. As for the deaths of those she truly cares for, be it at her own hand or not, that can leave her emotionally devastated, a pain that will linger for centuries.
Sita has adapted very well to the modern world. Over the millenniums, she has build up an immense personal fortune and knows how to utilize it to get what she needs, particularly in the realm of setting up convincing identities quickly. However, she has no qualms about getting her own hands dirty. She's just become quite good at living under the radar, as she considers having to deal with the authorities a waste of time.
As one of the most powerful beings on the planet, Sita can be arrogant to a fault. She does have a habit of underestimating her enemies, often to her detriment. She is quite resourceful, however, and can often turn unpleasant situations to her favor. More than anything though, it's the grace of God (or luck) that has helped her survive over the years.
While her love for Krishna has guided her most of her life, she doesn't always see herself as someone worthy of his protection. Often times, she considers herself nothing more than a monster, a scourge of humanity. Yet she continues to lie and kill and do what she needs to survive.
Above all, her greatest regret is the loss of her husband and daughter so many years ago. Vampires are sterile, and despite all her amazing powers, she would give it all up to be human and a mother again.
POWER: Sita is a vampire and thus has awesome vampire powers that fall under the following three subsets:
Regenerative Blood: The vampire blood in Sita's veins helps her to heal pretty much any wound (although she can't heal around implanted blades) and halts her aging process. Her immune system is described as "impenetrable" with disease and most poisons having no effect on her. In carefully measured quantities, her blood can heal the injuries/illnesses of others. A enough transfusion will cause the vampiric DNA to completely overwrite all the human DNA, transforming them into a vampire like her. The structure of her DNA is markedly different from human DNA (twelve straight strands instead of a double helix).
Vampiric Body: Having the blood of a vampire in her veins results in a physical traits beyond that of a normal human, including enhanced strength, reflexes, and endurance. Her abilities are based on her age and the purity of her blood rather than her size (a tiny 5'2"), which makes her one of the strongest vampires in her universe. Sunlight and cold do weaken her to an extent, though less than most other vampires.
Vampiric Mind: Sita possesses the ability to sense emotions in others, particularly in regards to whether they are lying to her or not. She has limited hypnotic/mind control abilities when she has strong eye contact or is speaking to someone. In the City, she will primarily use it to feed on NPCs without hurting/killing them. Additionally, during a fight, she switches to what she refers to as "hyper-accelerated mode", where she is able to process information at such a speed that the world appears to be moving in slow motion.
Powers from canon that won't be brought over into the City include super senses, hypnotic scent, telepathy, perfect memory, phasing/flying after absorbing moonlight, and the ability to read 30,000 words a minute.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE: [ Video clicks on to reveal a pretty blond girl, maybe twenty years old. Striking blue eyes. Her expression is hard to read. She blinks several times, as if tying to focus her vision. ]
They say that God has a strange sense of humor. But it seems I've underestimated just how warped it is. I was in the desert one moment, and now I'm staring at snowbanks. I have to say, if I had a choice, I'd choose the desert. [ A pause. ] Not to mention that I was visiting a friend. The timing of this, whatever this is, is incredibly inconvenient. To say the least.
[ She's silent for a moment, brushing back her hair. ]
I don't even know who I'm supposed to be talking to on this thing. Or if anyone out there even knows who I am. My driver's license says that I'm Alisa Perne and I'm from Los Angeles, California. But I don't have it with me at the moment, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it. [ A small smile. ] Of course, that recording said I'm supposed to be a hero now. So it seems someone out there trusts me. Or finds this funny.
[ And her voice changes a bit, takes on a deeper, more compelling tone. More dangerous. ]
I would appreciate a better explanation of what is going on here, if anyone can provide one. I'd particularly like to know why every phone number I've tried is either wrong or disconnected. My business manager on this coast always picks up on the first ring.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE: Maybe she'd broken her vow one too many times. Maybe this was part of her punishment.
Sita know she'd only done what needed to be done. To protect the human race from a plague of vampires that lacked the empathy she had. Monsters like Eddie and his ilk. But the endless blood she'd shed at the compound still weighed on her, even if the blood itself was nothing more than nuclear fallout now. The loss of Joel, of Arturo. Of Yaksha and dear, dear Ray. They were shadows not easily cast off.
Still, the loss of the chance to be human again, to live the life that had been stolen from her. That perhaps hurt more than anything else she'd suffered over the past weeks.
She thought it had worked at first. Her senses were dulled in this place, her memory fogged around the edges. But when she'd cut her hand, it had healed instantly. She felt as strong, as fast as ever. As for her thirst...
Still a vampire. Weakened, partially changed perhaps, but still her old self.
Love, hate, fear. Only one could live in the fourth center at a time, be it a human heart or vampire. Sita knew which one her heart held for Krishna right now.
She stepped outside, doing her best to shrug off the cold and the sun. She didn't have access to her vast resources here. It could be dangerous, if the things that people were saying about this place were true.
But danger had never been a deterrent to Sita. In fact, until very recently, it had been motivation. But it seemed that even a vampire could grow tired of spilling blood, of skating death's edge and barely surviving.
Maybe this was Krishna's idea of a vacation. Her chest unclenched a little at that.
A hard stare at a street vendor got her a free pair of cheap sunglasses. Sliding them on, she strolled down the street, head lowered. Wondering what Seymour was dreaming.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
Although Sita is a vampire, most of the common vampire traits don't apply to her. Crosses, garlic, holy water, etc don't affect her (she actually wears a cross sometimes). While sunlight and cold do weaken her somewhat, they won't kill her, and she can actually handle cold better than most humans. She survived a wooden stake through the heart (barely) and is technically alive (breathes, has a heartbeat, eats and drinks things other than blood). And no fangs.
While it is possible for Sita to make other vampires, she only breaks her vow to save the life of someone she cares about, and the City's resurrection policy will eliminate that. Still, someone with access to enough of her blood could change themselves. She'd kill pretty much anyone who tries this, though.
Sita has a wide range of skills due to being alive for so long. She has mastered pretty much every form of martial arts and man-made weapon, can fly a helicopter, is an accomplished pianist, etc etc etc. This will be toned down a bit with the loss of her perfect memory.