Name: Irene Maiden
Race: Vampire
Age: 127
Appearance:
Around 175 centimeters tall, typically she completes her ensemble with pants, combat boots, and a blazer-type jacket over her vest.
Physical Attributes
Strength: Incredible
Agility: Amazing
Constitution: Incredible
Other Abilities: Baritsu: A self-defense and combat school that incorporates eastern martial arts techniques with principles of kickboxing, cane fighting and other western martial arts. An eclectic martial art created in England employing European wrestling alongside judo and jujitsu to control all ranges of close combat and its striking foundations to disturb the balance of opponents and subject their joints to strains that will leave them unable to resist. Irene is a seasoned expert of this art, which she learned from its pioneers.
Well-Traveled: Globe-trotting adventures in her youth have enriched Irene's skills and knowledge. She's at least familiar in passing with piloting all kinds of modern vehicles, knows a number of languages, and picked up a slew of practices from different cultures and fields.
Regeneration: Vampires have incredible regenerative ability, allowing them to live with the loss of vital body parts and recover from most damage at great speed. Wounds that would be lethal to humans heal in a matter of seconds, and they can easily reattach severed limbs. Even when dealt extreme widespread damage and blown apart into meaty chunks, they can pull themselves back together and restore their flesh as fast as several minutes, although this is very energy consuming and will not completely undo the harm done. Given enough time, they might regrow full limbs outright, but they possess more efficient ways of replacing them.
Vampiric Essence: A substance produced in the blood of vampires akin to a highly reactive poison, which can turn corpses and living beings drained of blood into zombies, monstrous and physically powerful undead with a hunger for blood and violence. Vampires can spill this substance from their bodies at will or inject it into other beings directly.
The blood of vampires itself is dense with stolen life force, and injecting it into a body just drained of blood will instead create a new vampire.
Body Control: Vampires possess a very developed degree of control over their body functions and organs in addition to limited flesh-shaping abilities. While they cannot blatantly morph their bodies they can consciously manipulate them to a physiologically horrific extent, growing their nails into sharp claws, wielding their hair as a prehensile weapon, sprouting their blood vessels as vicious tendrils, and controlling severed or detached body parts. Able to ignore the loss of most organs, they can even survive as just a head and move around with their blood vessels.
They suck blood through their fingers by puncturing and digging into flesh, and can grab someone's carotid artery between their fingers without causing hemorrhage. If they permanently lose a limb (or their lower body, or even everything from the neck down) they can replace it with another's, which when attached gradually molds itself into the original part. Similarly, they can also meld the bodies of different creatures to create grotesque zombie chimeras.
Healing: Irene may heal others by directly transfusing her blood while mending open wounds and forcing them to close. Their bodies are repaired as though her vampire regeneration acted on them, allowing recovery from the most grievous of wounds. This power is a developed form of body control employing refined flesh-shaping and life force manipulation. They may also receive these benefits simply by ingesting her blood, though less efficiently.
Impaling Missile Arms: Employing explosive power through her blood vessels and willfully separating her flesh, Irene is able to shoot her arms (from the elbow down, typically) like cannonballs to impale or seize enemies even a hundred meters away. If she suffuses the Ripple into her arms she can infuse it into undead struck by the attack, though its range is greatly reduced by the action of the solar life energy on her own flesh.
Enhanced Senses: Vampires have heightened predatory senses, several times stronger than those of humans. They can see clearly in the dark, hear heartbeats from several yards away, and possess a hound-like sense of smell.
Hypnotism: Using their transfixing stare, skilled enough vampires can hypnotize those lacking sufficiently resilient minds, allowing them to mess with their recent memories and make them follow their commands. Irene is particularly skilled at manipulating animals in this manner.
The Ripple: A breathing technique that allows the practitioner to channel and wield life force resonant with the energy of the sun itself, which travels through the blood in the form of ripples and is projected through the extremities of the body.
Use of the Ripple can strengthen living beings and particularly objects to an incredible degree, and project enough force to split rock and wood, even leaving people or creatures unharmed as it passes through them. Users can produce powerful attractive or repulsive forces that allow them to do such things as stick to walls and walk on water. One of its primary uses is to heal wounds and various ailments, fixing bones or damaged organs and cleansing the body of harmful substances, and this same affinity makes it prodigiously effective against the likes of vampires and the undead. Blows and items infused with the Ripple are lethal against such creatures, leaving searing injuries from which the energy continues to spread.
Ripple energy is conducted especially well by liquids, but it can carry through clothing or metal and pass from one object to another, even through solid walls, and is best at strengthening organic matter, which can also store it. Using the Ripple requires one to constantly breathe in a controlled manner and their blood to be able to flow, so users can be weakened or prevented from using it entirely if their breathing is disrupted or they suffer from extensive blood loss.
Irene was a powerful master of this art who had refined the flexible basics to a point, but as a vampire she cannot use it without destroying herself in the process. However, if she is ever in dire need, she can channel the Ripple through a single limb and then sever it before the energy spreads.
She might still be able to teach it to another, employing a traditional technique which strikes the diaphragm to make the target breathe the correct way and use their own Ripple.
EquipmentStone Mask: A damaged stone mask portraying a masculine face with fangs poking out of a slight smile and sunken sneering eyeholes, excavated from Aztec ruins in the middle of the 19th century. Kept by Irene as a memento, it possesses the power to transform the wearer into a vampire, and she used it on herself decades ago before breaking it to ensure no one else would be able to exploit it.
Satiporoja Scarf: A scarf woven from the stomachs of 30.000 beetles of a particular species native to Southeast Asia, making up a near-perfect Ripple energy conductor. In addition to its many uses for a practitioner, the material is supersensitive to motion and can act as a life detector.
Origin: Irene Maiden was born in the peak of the Victorian Era of Britain, born to a small but wealthy family who had their fortune localized in the Bristol area. Irene spent her early childhood in those parts, attended to by a busy mother in the wake of her traveling father and waiting for him to return by sea. With the flowering of their legacy, they eventually moved to the greater London area. Her father was a member of the Argonaut's Club, a society of explorers, adventurers and extraordinary scholars which rebuffed discrimination in its recruitment. More taken with boyish dalliances than ladylike pursuits and enraptured by the tales of his fellows, she became involved in their meetings, and later joined their membership.
It was at this time that she joined her father in hobbies and occupation and he began to teach her the ways of the esoteric technique he had learned during his time in distant Tibet. She would not have need of it until years later, when a murder in Paris accompanied by the theft of a relic set them both and others in hot pursuit of the culprit through Europe and Asia. It was during this journey that Irene faced her first zombie and her mentor saw himself forced to pass on the secrets of the Ripple.
At a high cost, they put an end to the threat which had appeared in front them this time, but it was not the last they would see of the problems created by the stolen Stone Mask. Irene continued to learn the Ripple from her father as they tracked down artifacts in Casablanca before the remnants of an eerie cult; the tribulation that ensued led them through Africa in competition with French agents pursuing a track of clues left by Napoleon himself. It was at the end of this adventure that they learned the stone mask had resurfaced in France.
Irene's father would lose his life in their endeavor to neutralize the artifact once and for all, with his daughter vowing to carry on his ideals. Knowing the mask was not a unique piece, rather than destroy it they decided to take it in for study at the Argonaut's Club to develop countermeasures against the undead spawns of this ancient artifice, but at the dawn of the 20th century the society diminished and by the end of World War I, it had dissolved entirely. In the following years the Maiden family moved to the United States where they invested in the industry, and after putting her accounts in order Irene left for over a decade to study with the Tibetan Ripple masters.
Upon returning, she continued her adventurous activities and participated in archeological expeditions to Mexico, where the stone mask was supposed to have originated, competing with groups such as the Speedwagon Foundation. It was in these times, when she looked for those who would inherit her mastery of the Ripple and use it for good, knowing wicked beings and goals might prey on people even after her death, that she began to hatch a plan.
When Irene had established a succession of Ripple users to pick up her torch and carry the art through, she committed the act of sacrifice she never thought she would: she gave her humanity to the Stone Mask, becoming an immortal vampire who had no need to fear time or natural death, and used this power to sustain her own resources and finance her goals.
By 1988 she was in the trail of a set of ancient arrowheads stolen from an archeological expedition, when a strange encounter sent her through time and space into the Nexus.
WeaknessesSunlight: Vampires are extremely vulnerable to sunlight. Being directly exposed to the sun will turn them to ash in an instant and vanquish them forever.
Hunger: Vampires must consume the blood of living creatures to sustain themselves. Their stolen life force is what fuels their long-term regeneration and monstrous powers, and in the event that they suffer extensive damage or are deeply weakened for some other reason, they may need to consume many people's worth of life to recover completely.
Brain: The brain is the one vital part of a vampire's body. They cannot heal damage to the brain as easily, and destroying or sufficiently damaging it will result in their effectively irrevocable death.
Likes: Traveling, cleanliness, tea, white wine, beating up crooks, chit chat,
Dislikes: Undead, immortals, waiting times, timidity, relic thieves
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