Mia Coleman

Five years ago, you were called in to interrogate a woman suspected of being a vampire. For you it was a career first as a police detective, but you figured you were up to it. Two hours later, you left the interrogation room in a state of confusion, a vampire yourself, having made your first serious ethics breach.

The woman used the name Alice X and you know she’s some kind of an important person in London vampire society. You have a number but haven’t called her.

You used to be a straight and narrow career person, but inside that certainty of purpose has withered away. It gave you the professional success you have, but being a cop and handling the daily disappointments of humanity seems less meaningful every day. Somehow it offends you that none of your colleagues figured out you became a vampire, not even with the regular use of sunglasses and a lot of night shifts.

Your only serious act of vampirism was to make your little sister into a vampire too. You did it in a moment of weakness: It seemed so terrifying to face an eternity with no familiar faces.

You know that although vampires are technically just humans with a medical condition, the Dawntower in London exists beyond all human law, as long as the vampires keep their depredations private. In this, it’s not too different from any human institution of power and wealth.

When you became a vampire, you resolved to continue your life as before. Work, hang out with friends… Since that dream has quietly died, you’ve started to wonder who the woman who made you a vampire really was. Your road has been straight and narrow. Maybe it’s time to give in to all those temptations of money, corruption, pretty people, blood and violence that you’ve heard vampires are supposed to be all about?

Good at: Violence, browbeating people, sounding official.

Violet Dusk (orig. Heidi Coleman)

You’re a moderately successful music podcaster. You also have a Youtube channel with a focus on style and fashion. You’ve tended to see yourself as a tastemaker, someone who decides what’s cool and what isn’t.

Three years ago, your sister made you into a vampire. It was a dream come true, completely unexpected and wonderful. You’d always secretly felt that you deserved to be a vampire and it was amazing that fate agreed.

Before your Embrace, you had to do odd jobs because none of the things you enjoyed actually made any money. After becoming a vampire, you started secretly selling your blood to buyers online. An illegal practice, it nonetheless freed you from the trouble of actually having to work.

One of the problems in your life is that you have been unable to have a proper relationship since you became a vampire. Your last girlfriend was three years ago, and since then it’s been a repetition of the same pattern:

1. You start something with a girl.

2. You tell her you’re a vampire.

3. She starts hounding you to make her a vampire too.

4. The relationship ends.

You’re a big fish in a small pond. Some of the people in your scene know you’re a vampire because of indiscreet bragging on your part. It was fun at first because it elevated you onto a new plane of scene celebrity and status, but it also made you realize how small your world really is. Once at the top, there’s nowhere to go.

Somewhere out there vampires hold real power and wealth. You’ve been scared to make the jump because it means that you have to leave your comfortable cocoon and enter a world in which you’re nothing. Still, doing so means that you might become so much more.

Good at: Making people pay attention, style, scene politics.

Henry Vane

You feel that kleptomania is such a judgmental term for what’s essentially guerrilla redistribution of the very basic units of material wealth, i.e. stuff owned by your friends, enemies and random strangers. For a lesser person, a trait like this might have become a crisis at some point, but for you it never has. You always get away with it.

You have a very definite idea of what’s a good life. You want slightly debauched, sophisticated parties, people who understand a good classical reference and a modicum of transgression. You’re not ambitious per se; rather you have exacting standards for what life should be like.

You run a used book store, more as a hobby than a business. You have everything you need to do a bragging your to a fellow book aficionado but as a business your store is continually collapsing. To keep it afloat, you steal stuff from the high class parties you get invited to, sometimes by your better customers.

Aspiration and realistic possibility were out of synch until the night you were making out with a man you’d never met before in a party in a London townhouse. He talked a good game about first editions of the Romantic poets but it wasn’t books that you were interested in. A few hours later, you woke up on a bed drenched with your blood, alert and hungry.

That night of becoming a vampire created one essential change in your life: It hinted that it might be possible to fulfill the dreams you had, not in some small way but in full. You could move your bookstore to London and go socially straight to the top. No more settling for less, no more tawdry thievery. Instead, the vampire life you were made for.

Good at: Projecting a sense of moral superiority, dropping a cultivated reference, stealing your stuff.

Andrei Mikhailov

You’re a man of endless little hustles, one feeding to the next. You like to say you do it because only a fool works hard but in reality your life is not all that easy. You owe too much money from failed ventures and so much of what you do is just in service of your debts. You feel like you’re drowning, with no hope of ever escaping this desperate little life of failed drug deals and shitty junkie parties.

For you, it happened in a fancy hotel. You’d been called there because a bunch of rich assholes needed drugs. You came ready to sell them low quality crap for a high price but instead they sucked you dry of blood. As a parting gift, one made you a vampire.

You don’t really know who they were. Sure, your Embrace was undignified, but you don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.  You’re still in debt, your life is still shitty, but becoming a vampire has made you think that perhaps there’s an escape from all this.

Perhaps the only act of taking responsibility you’ve done on purpose was to make your younger brother Alexei into a vampire. You felt that you owed it to the family. As a vampire, Alexei wouldn’t get into trouble and could take care of himself.

Or that was your plan, at least. Unfortunately it now seems that Alexei’s propensity for trouble didn’t end with his human life. Instead, he’s gone to find bigger problems in the big city. You’ve wondered whether you should have done the same, a long time ago. After all, your life is small and inconsequential but as a vampire it doesn’t have to remain so.

Good at: Getting into places uninvited, making friends in low places, running away.