[OOC] Profile
PLAYER
Name: Nyx
Personal Journal: minilovely
AIM/MSN/etc: gilded chrysanth [AIM]
CHARACTER
Name: Gilroy "Gil" Lowe (birth name); Maya Browning (current alias)
Age: 15-17 (apparent); 23 (actual)
Appearance:
The first thing most people notice about Gil is that he's really, really pale. Most dhampirs, while still pasty, have a reasonably flushed skin tone (especially when compared to full-blooded vampires), but that is not so in Gil's case thanks to his bloodless diet. His near-deathly pallor is only made more pronounced by his dark strawberry red hair, which he wears down to around his shoulder blades, as well as his vibrant green eyes.
After his skin tone, the next thing they tend to notice is how small (barely coming up to 5'3"), frail (hardly 120 pounds when soaking wet), and girly he looks-assuming they realize he's male at all. Even before the whole WELP GOTTA ADOPT A NEW IDENTITY SO LET'S BE AS CONFUSING AS POSSIBLE thing, he had his fair share of gender-related mix-ups, something he very definitely resented. Now that his life very literally hinges on his ability to avoid being recognized, though, he's started relying on his ability to pass as female to get by. His voice, too, borders on feminine, its pitch in a weird place that seems to deep for a girl's voice but too high for a guy's.
Chosen PB: Matsuri Obotsuka
Personality:
Despite being a dhampir, Gil is not particularly inhuman or monster-like in his behavior and attitude. He was, after all, raised among humans, and though he does have some of the more animalistic instincts of his undead relatives, he does his best to repress and ignore them. Really, he clings to his humanity with a ferocious tenacity, rejecting his vampiric heritage and thinking of himself as fully human. He even refuses to consume blood, despite the fact that the lack of it in his diet leaves him perpetually malnourished. The idea of doing so actively repulses him, both on a logical and visceral level. In his mind, doing so would make him no more than an amoral animal.
Most vampires, of course, see this as him stubbornly clinging to ethics that don't and shouldn't apply to him. And, on some level, they might be right-dhampirs don't require so much blood they need to drain their victims dry, though some of the more inhuman ones certainly do, and his refusal to feed impacts him negatively on both a physical and emotional level. However, he's willing to make that sacrifice to stand by what he considers to be a moral absolute. Really, he can be quite self-righteous about this topic, which probably doesn't help the impression that he's doing it just so he can say he's better than others of his species.
In effect, this "sacrifice" of his lands him with something quite like an iron deficiency-which includes psychological symptoms such as irritability, increased anxiety, depression, and moodiness, all of which he displays. He was, back when he was still under the impression that he was fully human, diagnosed with adolescent depression and cyclothymia, which is a more or less accurate description of the mood issues he has. At times he's critical, defeatist, insecure, and apathetic; at others, he's nervous, fidgety, and unfocused. The only real constant between the two extremes is his short temper, Gil having little patience at the best of times.
Ironically, that same refusal to indulge in his instinctual need for blood makes him more likely to behave in an animalistic or feral manner. He is effectively starving, so even small amounts of fresh blood can send him into a half-crazed bloodlust. It adds to his already hot temper as well, making him more aggressive than he otherwise would be. Though he does his best to repress these impulses-and does succeed, some of the time-it often becomes an issue when he's stressed or under pressure. For example, he may forget himself in the heat of the moment and respond to irritation with snarling and growling... Not that such is particularly impressive, coming from him.
Besides all that, though... Gil is pretty normal. As long as his patience isn't being tested, he's levelheaded, and though he has his impulsive moments like anyone else, he generally thinks things through. Of course, he kind of has to, given his situation-one ill-advised step could mean his death, so in general he's not a big risk taker. He's much more the type to quietly gather information and make plans than to jump into a new situation headfirst, typically trying to stay a step or two ahead of everyone else. He can be somewhat rigidly minded about this, though, so he's prone to getting frustrated when things don't pan out how he thinks they should.
When dealing with other people, his attitude can be best described as "passively abrasive." He doesn't go out of his way to be rude or anything like that, but he does tend to come off as kind of a smartass-a deadpan snarker, if you will. He's also pretty blunt, since he doesn't really see any reason to hold back when giving his opinion. It doesn't help that he tends to hold other people at armslength for both his and their (but mostly his own) safety, rarely opening up to others and generally telling them as many lies about himself as he does truths. It makes it hard for him to play off his behavior as in anyway friendly... Not that he really tries, anyway.
One last note: Gil is a coward. A big fat yellow-bellied coward. He will not hesitate to throw other people under the bus if it means him escaping with his hide intact-even those he is relatively close to or is otherwise fond of. And for as staunchly as he tries to stand by his morals, there is literally nothing he won't do to avoid death and danger-later in his "canon," he is taken in by a vampire who promises him safety in exchange for total obedience to her. To test him (and to break whatever spirit he might have had), she tells him he has to have a proper vampire's diet, i.e. one that contains human blood. He gives in without a fight.
World Information:
Gil's 'verse is almost identical to the real world, with one major exception: supernatural creatures and the occult are very real. Since Gil is a dhampir and hasn't had any contact with any other sorts of non-humans, I'm going to focus on vampires exclusively for this bit.
Most humans aren't aware of the existence of vampires-or, really, the existence of anything beyond the mundane. There are a few exceptions, but generally speaking these are humans that have entered a Contract with a vampire, usually in exchange for the promise of being changed into vampires themselves at some point in the future. In the interest of maintaining their secrecy and freedom, most groups of vampires make it a rule not to let any humans outside of Contracts know of their existence; if one accidentally reveals itself, it is responsible for killing the human in question and disposing of any evidence.
For the most part, vampires are organized into large, branching families that self-govern themselves. Families are generally spread out over large distances to help avoid infighting about territory, with small groups living together. Typically, they live in cities, relying on the large population to obscure the fact that they're picking off and eating humans. Fighting within a family is solved by a decree from the family head; fighting between separate families is solved by violence.
There are also drifters and nomads that move from area to area rather than settling down in any one place, but these are rare; generally, newborn vampires are adopted by the family that sired them. And, besides, traveling creates the risk of accidentally encroaching on someone else's territory and being killed for it. For the most part, nomads are vampire that have been kicked out of their family for whatever reason and lack the ability to establish a territory of their own.
Vampires are few in number. This is largely because the majority of the families have rules against frivolously changing humans, in order to prevent food and territory from being stretched too thin. The change itself is achieved by the swapping of blood between a human and a vampire, as vampirism is actually caused by a virus carried in the bloodstream. Generally speaking, after the transfer has taken place, humans have to withstand one to three days of intense fever and sickness while the virus changes their body.
Additionally, though vampires are technically immortal, their lifespan is limited in a sense, which in turn helps control the population. Vampirism causes the brain to gradually deteriorate, meaning older vampires are eventually reduced to something feral and animal-like. The exact rate of deterioration varies from vampire to vampire, but its effects usually begin to become noticeable after about a few centuries. Generally speaking, after vampires reach a certain point in this erosion, their family will perform a mercy killing (though truthfully this is motivated only partly by mercy, the need to keep their erratic behavior from being noticed by humans also significant).
Finally, though this rarely occurs, it is possible for male vampires to impregnate female humans (and females of other species that are "human-based" in some way, such as lycanthropes). Female vampires, on the other hand, are incapable of becoming pregnant. Though they're rare enough that this is rarely an issue, dhampirs and other crossbreeds are discouraged if not outright forbidden by most families, largely for two reasons. The first is that they are a security risk of sorts, as the cease aging at some point during their teens or twenties-something very obviously noticeable to the humans they are no doubt surrounded by. The second is that sunlight does not affect them the same way it does full-blooded vampires, and they therefore have an extreme potential to be used as assassins in both inter- and intra-family disputes. As such, most half-vampires are killed at birth, few living to see adulthood.
History:
The fact that Gilroy Lowe was not exactly a "normal" child was immediately apparent. Born to a single mother, his "dangerously low" temperature was quickly discovered by the attendant doctors, and as an infant he was held in a hospital for quite a bit of time for observation. Of course, when doctors could find nothing precisely wrong with him besides his temperature-there were no particular complications associated with it, and if anything warming him made his condition worse-they had no choice but to release him into the care of his mother.
Of course, the weirdness didn't end there. Gil's teeth grew in extremely early, and it wasn't uncommon for him to bite through his mother's skin during feeding in an attempt to drink her blood, not that she truly realized this at the time. When this behavior continued as he grew older, she began to chastise him for it, and he eventually stopped, effectively weaning him off of blood by the time she stopped breastfeeding. Of course, with the loss of blood from his diet, he became increasingly sickly and querulous, so trips to the doctor became frequent after that. (His body temperature was still strange and inexplicable, but the other symptoms indicated an iron deficiency, so he was put on a supplement and that was that.)
After that, things were more or less normal, at least outwardly. After entering school, he didn't get along particularly well with the other children his age, and he was always faced with some amount of teasing for being small, fragile, and girl-faced, but he was remarkably good at not caring about things when he didn't want to. He might have said something about it if it had ever crossed over into physical bullying, but it didn't, and, besides, it wasn't like he couldn't just outrun anyone else his age anyway. So, rather than treating his situation as something lamentable, he took to being mostly solitary well enough, focusing himself on his schoolwork and helping his mother around the house.
Life continued in that pattern until shortly after his high school graduation, when his father decided it would be a good idea to enter his life. His father, who was a vampire. Which, you know, was not what the teen had been expecting. Sure, he'd had little inklings here and there that he wasn't exactly normal, but those had been carefully suppressed and shoved back into his subconscious mind. And obviously it wasn't like vampires were real, so the idea that he was anything more or less than human was completely ridiculous.
A few demonstrations of vampiric strength and ability were enough to shut him up, of course. Gil was nothing if not sensible.
So, with Gil having been convinced, his dad decided to drop another bombshell on him: as a dhampir, he wasn't actually allowed to exist. Whoops. Practically, what this meant for him was he would likely be killed if he continued to live without the protection of another vampire--so why don't you come live with me, son? Oh, but you can't tell your mother about this, since if she knows she'll be killed too. You'll just kind of have to disappear into the night. That's not a problem, is it?
Gee, Dad, not at all. I always wanted to be a teen runaway!
Still, despite his misgivings, Gil was not particularly interested in dying or having his mother killed. So, he agreed. He moved in to his father's home in a nearby city, becoming acquainted with the process of acquiring false documentation along the way. He was giving up on attending college for the moment, but it wasn't in his nature to be idle, so he wanted to at least have the opportunity to take a job of some kind. If nothing else, it would give him a reason to avoid his new "family" at least some of the time, since he wasn't particularly comfortable with them and their fairly typical vampire ideology.
Eventually, Gil adjusted to this new life. It wasn't long after that, though, that it all changed again-about a year after Gil left home, the family head his father was subject to discovered the vampire's philandering had produced a number of dhampir children and he was sheltering them rather than following the "proper" procedure regarding their existence. In other words, he was in trouble for not handing his children over to be executed. Though the family head was intending to make a surprise visit so as not to give him the chance to flee or hide the dhampirs, his friends within the hierarchy managed to tip him off in advance.
Deciding it would actually be safer if the moved around separately so that their numbers did not draw any attention to them, Gil's father sent him and his three half-siblings off into hiding. Practically, this meant they were on their own unless they could find another vampire to risk taking them in, but it was better than waiting around to be killed, so Gil didn't argue. He got together the falsified documents to start a new new identity, and off he went. He wasn't even 20 at the time, and the fact that he had stopped aging somewhere in high school made it even harder for people to take him seriously when he went looking for jobs or housing, but he learned to manage well enough, especially when he had to do it all over again every few months. Staying in one place for too long was suicide, after all.
Currently, he is presenting as female and using the alias "Maya Browning" to further confuse his pursuers.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
As a dhampir, Gil should, hypothetically, possess a number of physical advantages over humans. While they're not nearly as powerful as full-blooded vampires, a dhampir's strength and stamina is notably higher than a normal human's, and they possess speed and reflexes nearly equal to their purebred relatives. Dhampirs also heal at a rapidly accelerated rate, and their senses are much greater than a human's-particularly where night vision is concerned.
The typical weaknesses of vampires are also mitigated in dhampirs. The sun does not affect them the same way for one thing, though dhampirs do become sunburned easily and require powerful sunscreen if they're going to be out in the daytime for an extended period of time. Their allergies to silver and garlic are also less pronounced. And like vampires, they possess a resistance to illness and to cold weather thanks to their naturally low body temperature.
However.
Gil, for the most part, does not possess these same advantages due to his refusal to drink human blood. While his speed, reflexes, and senses are about as heightened as they should be, he's physically weak, hardly any stronger than a normal human of his size if at all. He also becomes breathless from physical exertion, and the rate at which he heals is actually slower than an average human. He is also frequently fatigued, the lack of blood in his diet making him malnourished despite not outright killing him.
His nutritional issues also affect him emotionally as well as physically. He tends to be irritable and prone to mood swings and anxiety, as well as possessing generally 'low' mood. This also makes him susceptible to bouts of bloodlust when confronted with fresh blood. Intense cravings for blood are not uncommon, though they usually manifest in the form of desire for very rare meat. (While animal blood can be consumed in place of a human's, it does not provide the right nutrients in the right quantities and therefore doesn't work well as a substitute. Its taste is also repulsive to vampires and dhampirs, so Gil isn't particularly fond of it.)
Additionally, like other vampires and dhampirs, he's very vulnerable to heat, easily succumbing to heat exhaustion in hot weather.
Abilities:
In addition to the heightened physical abilities mentioned above, Gil has the fairly standard vampire equipment-fangs and claws, both retractable. Though extending them is typically voluntary, it can be an involuntarily response, particularly where the fangs are concerned. They tend to extend when he's excited, be that excitement emotional or physical.
Name: Nyx
Personal Journal: minilovely
AIM/MSN/etc: gilded chrysanth [AIM]
CHARACTER
Name: Gilroy "Gil" Lowe (birth name); Maya Browning (current alias)
Age: 15-17 (apparent); 23 (actual)
Appearance:
The first thing most people notice about Gil is that he's really, really pale. Most dhampirs, while still pasty, have a reasonably flushed skin tone (especially when compared to full-blooded vampires), but that is not so in Gil's case thanks to his bloodless diet. His near-deathly pallor is only made more pronounced by his dark strawberry red hair, which he wears down to around his shoulder blades, as well as his vibrant green eyes.
After his skin tone, the next thing they tend to notice is how small (barely coming up to 5'3"), frail (hardly 120 pounds when soaking wet), and girly he looks-assuming they realize he's male at all. Even before the whole WELP GOTTA ADOPT A NEW IDENTITY SO LET'S BE AS CONFUSING AS POSSIBLE thing, he had his fair share of gender-related mix-ups, something he very definitely resented. Now that his life very literally hinges on his ability to avoid being recognized, though, he's started relying on his ability to pass as female to get by. His voice, too, borders on feminine, its pitch in a weird place that seems to deep for a girl's voice but too high for a guy's.
Chosen PB: Matsuri Obotsuka
Personality:
Despite being a dhampir, Gil is not particularly inhuman or monster-like in his behavior and attitude. He was, after all, raised among humans, and though he does have some of the more animalistic instincts of his undead relatives, he does his best to repress and ignore them. Really, he clings to his humanity with a ferocious tenacity, rejecting his vampiric heritage and thinking of himself as fully human. He even refuses to consume blood, despite the fact that the lack of it in his diet leaves him perpetually malnourished. The idea of doing so actively repulses him, both on a logical and visceral level. In his mind, doing so would make him no more than an amoral animal.
Most vampires, of course, see this as him stubbornly clinging to ethics that don't and shouldn't apply to him. And, on some level, they might be right-dhampirs don't require so much blood they need to drain their victims dry, though some of the more inhuman ones certainly do, and his refusal to feed impacts him negatively on both a physical and emotional level. However, he's willing to make that sacrifice to stand by what he considers to be a moral absolute. Really, he can be quite self-righteous about this topic, which probably doesn't help the impression that he's doing it just so he can say he's better than others of his species.
In effect, this "sacrifice" of his lands him with something quite like an iron deficiency-which includes psychological symptoms such as irritability, increased anxiety, depression, and moodiness, all of which he displays. He was, back when he was still under the impression that he was fully human, diagnosed with adolescent depression and cyclothymia, which is a more or less accurate description of the mood issues he has. At times he's critical, defeatist, insecure, and apathetic; at others, he's nervous, fidgety, and unfocused. The only real constant between the two extremes is his short temper, Gil having little patience at the best of times.
Ironically, that same refusal to indulge in his instinctual need for blood makes him more likely to behave in an animalistic or feral manner. He is effectively starving, so even small amounts of fresh blood can send him into a half-crazed bloodlust. It adds to his already hot temper as well, making him more aggressive than he otherwise would be. Though he does his best to repress these impulses-and does succeed, some of the time-it often becomes an issue when he's stressed or under pressure. For example, he may forget himself in the heat of the moment and respond to irritation with snarling and growling... Not that such is particularly impressive, coming from him.
Besides all that, though... Gil is pretty normal. As long as his patience isn't being tested, he's levelheaded, and though he has his impulsive moments like anyone else, he generally thinks things through. Of course, he kind of has to, given his situation-one ill-advised step could mean his death, so in general he's not a big risk taker. He's much more the type to quietly gather information and make plans than to jump into a new situation headfirst, typically trying to stay a step or two ahead of everyone else. He can be somewhat rigidly minded about this, though, so he's prone to getting frustrated when things don't pan out how he thinks they should.
When dealing with other people, his attitude can be best described as "passively abrasive." He doesn't go out of his way to be rude or anything like that, but he does tend to come off as kind of a smartass-a deadpan snarker, if you will. He's also pretty blunt, since he doesn't really see any reason to hold back when giving his opinion. It doesn't help that he tends to hold other people at armslength for both his and their (but mostly his own) safety, rarely opening up to others and generally telling them as many lies about himself as he does truths. It makes it hard for him to play off his behavior as in anyway friendly... Not that he really tries, anyway.
One last note: Gil is a coward. A big fat yellow-bellied coward. He will not hesitate to throw other people under the bus if it means him escaping with his hide intact-even those he is relatively close to or is otherwise fond of. And for as staunchly as he tries to stand by his morals, there is literally nothing he won't do to avoid death and danger-later in his "canon," he is taken in by a vampire who promises him safety in exchange for total obedience to her. To test him (and to break whatever spirit he might have had), she tells him he has to have a proper vampire's diet, i.e. one that contains human blood. He gives in without a fight.
World Information:
Gil's 'verse is almost identical to the real world, with one major exception: supernatural creatures and the occult are very real. Since Gil is a dhampir and hasn't had any contact with any other sorts of non-humans, I'm going to focus on vampires exclusively for this bit.
Most humans aren't aware of the existence of vampires-or, really, the existence of anything beyond the mundane. There are a few exceptions, but generally speaking these are humans that have entered a Contract with a vampire, usually in exchange for the promise of being changed into vampires themselves at some point in the future. In the interest of maintaining their secrecy and freedom, most groups of vampires make it a rule not to let any humans outside of Contracts know of their existence; if one accidentally reveals itself, it is responsible for killing the human in question and disposing of any evidence.
For the most part, vampires are organized into large, branching families that self-govern themselves. Families are generally spread out over large distances to help avoid infighting about territory, with small groups living together. Typically, they live in cities, relying on the large population to obscure the fact that they're picking off and eating humans. Fighting within a family is solved by a decree from the family head; fighting between separate families is solved by violence.
There are also drifters and nomads that move from area to area rather than settling down in any one place, but these are rare; generally, newborn vampires are adopted by the family that sired them. And, besides, traveling creates the risk of accidentally encroaching on someone else's territory and being killed for it. For the most part, nomads are vampire that have been kicked out of their family for whatever reason and lack the ability to establish a territory of their own.
Vampires are few in number. This is largely because the majority of the families have rules against frivolously changing humans, in order to prevent food and territory from being stretched too thin. The change itself is achieved by the swapping of blood between a human and a vampire, as vampirism is actually caused by a virus carried in the bloodstream. Generally speaking, after the transfer has taken place, humans have to withstand one to three days of intense fever and sickness while the virus changes their body.
Additionally, though vampires are technically immortal, their lifespan is limited in a sense, which in turn helps control the population. Vampirism causes the brain to gradually deteriorate, meaning older vampires are eventually reduced to something feral and animal-like. The exact rate of deterioration varies from vampire to vampire, but its effects usually begin to become noticeable after about a few centuries. Generally speaking, after vampires reach a certain point in this erosion, their family will perform a mercy killing (though truthfully this is motivated only partly by mercy, the need to keep their erratic behavior from being noticed by humans also significant).
Finally, though this rarely occurs, it is possible for male vampires to impregnate female humans (and females of other species that are "human-based" in some way, such as lycanthropes). Female vampires, on the other hand, are incapable of becoming pregnant. Though they're rare enough that this is rarely an issue, dhampirs and other crossbreeds are discouraged if not outright forbidden by most families, largely for two reasons. The first is that they are a security risk of sorts, as the cease aging at some point during their teens or twenties-something very obviously noticeable to the humans they are no doubt surrounded by. The second is that sunlight does not affect them the same way it does full-blooded vampires, and they therefore have an extreme potential to be used as assassins in both inter- and intra-family disputes. As such, most half-vampires are killed at birth, few living to see adulthood.
History:
The fact that Gilroy Lowe was not exactly a "normal" child was immediately apparent. Born to a single mother, his "dangerously low" temperature was quickly discovered by the attendant doctors, and as an infant he was held in a hospital for quite a bit of time for observation. Of course, when doctors could find nothing precisely wrong with him besides his temperature-there were no particular complications associated with it, and if anything warming him made his condition worse-they had no choice but to release him into the care of his mother.
Of course, the weirdness didn't end there. Gil's teeth grew in extremely early, and it wasn't uncommon for him to bite through his mother's skin during feeding in an attempt to drink her blood, not that she truly realized this at the time. When this behavior continued as he grew older, she began to chastise him for it, and he eventually stopped, effectively weaning him off of blood by the time she stopped breastfeeding. Of course, with the loss of blood from his diet, he became increasingly sickly and querulous, so trips to the doctor became frequent after that. (His body temperature was still strange and inexplicable, but the other symptoms indicated an iron deficiency, so he was put on a supplement and that was that.)
After that, things were more or less normal, at least outwardly. After entering school, he didn't get along particularly well with the other children his age, and he was always faced with some amount of teasing for being small, fragile, and girl-faced, but he was remarkably good at not caring about things when he didn't want to. He might have said something about it if it had ever crossed over into physical bullying, but it didn't, and, besides, it wasn't like he couldn't just outrun anyone else his age anyway. So, rather than treating his situation as something lamentable, he took to being mostly solitary well enough, focusing himself on his schoolwork and helping his mother around the house.
Life continued in that pattern until shortly after his high school graduation, when his father decided it would be a good idea to enter his life. His father, who was a vampire. Which, you know, was not what the teen had been expecting. Sure, he'd had little inklings here and there that he wasn't exactly normal, but those had been carefully suppressed and shoved back into his subconscious mind. And obviously it wasn't like vampires were real, so the idea that he was anything more or less than human was completely ridiculous.
A few demonstrations of vampiric strength and ability were enough to shut him up, of course. Gil was nothing if not sensible.
So, with Gil having been convinced, his dad decided to drop another bombshell on him: as a dhampir, he wasn't actually allowed to exist. Whoops. Practically, what this meant for him was he would likely be killed if he continued to live without the protection of another vampire--so why don't you come live with me, son? Oh, but you can't tell your mother about this, since if she knows she'll be killed too. You'll just kind of have to disappear into the night. That's not a problem, is it?
Gee, Dad, not at all. I always wanted to be a teen runaway!
Still, despite his misgivings, Gil was not particularly interested in dying or having his mother killed. So, he agreed. He moved in to his father's home in a nearby city, becoming acquainted with the process of acquiring false documentation along the way. He was giving up on attending college for the moment, but it wasn't in his nature to be idle, so he wanted to at least have the opportunity to take a job of some kind. If nothing else, it would give him a reason to avoid his new "family" at least some of the time, since he wasn't particularly comfortable with them and their fairly typical vampire ideology.
Eventually, Gil adjusted to this new life. It wasn't long after that, though, that it all changed again-about a year after Gil left home, the family head his father was subject to discovered the vampire's philandering had produced a number of dhampir children and he was sheltering them rather than following the "proper" procedure regarding their existence. In other words, he was in trouble for not handing his children over to be executed. Though the family head was intending to make a surprise visit so as not to give him the chance to flee or hide the dhampirs, his friends within the hierarchy managed to tip him off in advance.
Deciding it would actually be safer if the moved around separately so that their numbers did not draw any attention to them, Gil's father sent him and his three half-siblings off into hiding. Practically, this meant they were on their own unless they could find another vampire to risk taking them in, but it was better than waiting around to be killed, so Gil didn't argue. He got together the falsified documents to start a new new identity, and off he went. He wasn't even 20 at the time, and the fact that he had stopped aging somewhere in high school made it even harder for people to take him seriously when he went looking for jobs or housing, but he learned to manage well enough, especially when he had to do it all over again every few months. Staying in one place for too long was suicide, after all.
Currently, he is presenting as female and using the alias "Maya Browning" to further confuse his pursuers.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
As a dhampir, Gil should, hypothetically, possess a number of physical advantages over humans. While they're not nearly as powerful as full-blooded vampires, a dhampir's strength and stamina is notably higher than a normal human's, and they possess speed and reflexes nearly equal to their purebred relatives. Dhampirs also heal at a rapidly accelerated rate, and their senses are much greater than a human's-particularly where night vision is concerned.
The typical weaknesses of vampires are also mitigated in dhampirs. The sun does not affect them the same way for one thing, though dhampirs do become sunburned easily and require powerful sunscreen if they're going to be out in the daytime for an extended period of time. Their allergies to silver and garlic are also less pronounced. And like vampires, they possess a resistance to illness and to cold weather thanks to their naturally low body temperature.
However.
Gil, for the most part, does not possess these same advantages due to his refusal to drink human blood. While his speed, reflexes, and senses are about as heightened as they should be, he's physically weak, hardly any stronger than a normal human of his size if at all. He also becomes breathless from physical exertion, and the rate at which he heals is actually slower than an average human. He is also frequently fatigued, the lack of blood in his diet making him malnourished despite not outright killing him.
His nutritional issues also affect him emotionally as well as physically. He tends to be irritable and prone to mood swings and anxiety, as well as possessing generally 'low' mood. This also makes him susceptible to bouts of bloodlust when confronted with fresh blood. Intense cravings for blood are not uncommon, though they usually manifest in the form of desire for very rare meat. (While animal blood can be consumed in place of a human's, it does not provide the right nutrients in the right quantities and therefore doesn't work well as a substitute. Its taste is also repulsive to vampires and dhampirs, so Gil isn't particularly fond of it.)
Additionally, like other vampires and dhampirs, he's very vulnerable to heat, easily succumbing to heat exhaustion in hot weather.
Abilities:
In addition to the heightened physical abilities mentioned above, Gil has the fairly standard vampire equipment-fangs and claws, both retractable. Though extending them is typically voluntary, it can be an involuntarily response, particularly where the fangs are concerned. They tend to extend when he's excited, be that excitement emotional or physical.