understate: (ᴛʜrᴇᴇ.)
❝ eva blair. ❞ ( ᴀɴɴᴇᴛᴛᴇ ᴅᴇᴠᴇʀᴇᴜx ) ([personal profile] understate) wrote2016-11-02 12:04 am

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eva blair

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canon: Eva Blair [ Annette Devereux ]
canon point: 1 year after turning
age: 23
species: Vampire
pb: Ebba Zingmark

player


name: Nico
over 18? Y
preference: Flexible
contact: PM me or [plurk.com profile] isanghae
time zone: GMT
HISTORY
World Info & Family Info
Annette was the first and only child born to the head of the Devereux family, Michael, and his wife, Jean. Jean, like anyone who married into the Devereux family, was a vampire hunter from another clan who renounced her claim to her family's name and fortune. The Devereux customs have long been seen as unnecessarily secretive and exclusive, never allowing those who marry in to discover any family secrets or explanations for their abilities to construct magical cages. It makes them more than a little unpopular within the vampire hunter circles, as the current general attitude is that cross-family relations can only allow the future generations of vampire hunters to be stronger and more efficient beings.

But the Devereux follow a more old-fashioned view of vampire hunting and their skills, one which - perhaps predictably - becomes their undoing. It all begins before Annette is one year old, when her mother is turned into a vampire while on a job. As the head of the Devereux family, Michael is duty-bound to kill his wife (he does) and expunge her name from all history books and family trees (he doesn't). Unable to do the latter out of his own love for his wife, Michael instead crafts a lie that Jean's death was a heroic action in the line of duty. This is the story Annette grows up believing.

Like many generations of vampire hunters before her, Annette's life is a divided one - during the day, she attends an independent school not far from her family's manor, and her evenings are devoted to learning the skills a Devereux needs to become a vampire hunter. Between explanations of things like probability and where to stick a stake if the cage doesn't kill them, Annette discovers a love for stories and literature. Her family's attitude and discipline allows her to obtain good marks at school despite intense evening education, but her social life suffers for it. She doesn't really have friends at school and her only interaction with children her own age outside of schooling is with her cousins and other relatives. Due to the Devereux policy of isolation, relationships with relatives who have married into other families are rather strained, as Annette is not allowed to speak of any training she's receiving or anything she's learned about the Devereux cagecasting abilities or their hunts.

At thirteen, Annette accompanied her father on her first true hunt, and was - as a Devereux should be - successful. In no more than two years, the whispers among the community had started, that she was certainly a true Devereux heir - a skilled hunter, fierce as a fighter and efficient at her craft. Her schoolwork continued as successfully as her hunts, and by the time she was eighteen, Annette had accepted a place on an English Literature course and had several successful solo hunts under her belt.

Her social life continued to suffer, but her father began to receive the first inquiries into marriages for Annette. Each were rebuffed by Annette herself, deemed a distraction from her work (and, more importantly, she didn't know any of these people). Instead, she threw herself into obtaining a first class degree when she wasn't hunting vampires, and applied for a masters degree. With so much to do, Annette didn't feel the loss of close friends or potential romantic partners too badly unless she was reading romance novels.

During the few months between graduating and the beginning of her master's degree, Annette moved to one of the branch manors near Cardiff to continue hunting vampires. That decision put her in the vicinity of a clan leader with a very personal grudge against her father. Killing her? Sure, that would hurt him, leave the Devereux main family without an heir, but there were more painful things to do.

Turning her, for example.

Following Devereux family guidelines, Annette returned to her father to be killed and expunged from the family records. However, her father's reaction was something far different:

"I have killed my cousins, my father, and my wife. And now my daughter, too...? No. Enough. This is no life to live."
"But dad--!"
"Annette. Listen to me. You must run. Travel to France. They accept vampires, you will be safe."
"Dad, please. I don't want to be a monster."
"Annette. This is an order."


While, perhaps, the worst possible time for Michael to grow a conscience about Devereux family policies, Annette did what she's always done: listened to her father and ran away, gathering a bag of things and draining her accounts before beginning to head south. Even as she took the train out of Wales and into England, her mind was fixated on the idea of simply allowing herself to starve to death, waiting out the time in a flat in a small village near Bristol. Unfortunately, vampiric self-preservation instincts overrode her own determination and her body went into auto-pilot, ultimately feasting on her upstairs neighbour. Horrified and only more convinced of the monstrosity she'd become, Annette's attempts at suicide became more active - she tried every method of killing a vampire that she knew, but her body fought against each of them.

Eventually, swallowing the Devereux pride that had taken her this far, Annette decided to try and attract the attention of the local vampire hunters. This began far more successfully, but in the course of The World Does Not Want Annette Devereux To Die Today, a local vampire intervened in the fight, incapacitating the hunters and escaping with her. The vampire - a woman named Antonia Blair - offered Annette a kind smile and insisted that she stay and recuperate. Weakened by her latest failed attempt, Annette wasn't in any position to fight Antonia; she tried, but the woman was infuriatingly good at subduing her without injuring her further. So, Annette stayed.

"You are a secretive one, aren't you? Vampire hunter? Don't look so surprised, darling, you're hardly the first. And with that red hair... ah, you're a Devereux, aren't you? And they haven't killed you yet? How strange!"

Clever, warm and with centuries of knowledge and perspective on things, Antonia offered Annette far more than a simple place to recuperate. In fact, she seemed determined to keep Annette with her until she could be "deprogrammed" of all her faulty thinking regarding vampires. It had been a long time since she'd had a young vampire to help, after all. Unsurprisingly, Annette resisted these lessons continually, getting in many long, painful fights with Antonia in an attempt to escape - each of them ending in Antonia's favour, and eventually Annette stopped trying to brute force her way out of the woman's clutches.

"Darling, the world is far too complex to be boiled down to monsters and not."

PERSONALITY
Quiet and prone to understatement, Eva has been wrapped up in a near lifetime of isolation and keeping too busy to make proper friends. The recent turning into her worst nightmare has only added another layer of turmoil, a mixture of badly wanting not to be alone, not wanting to exist, and not wanting to harm others.
SKILLS/ABILITIES

You're probably familiar with some amount of vampiric lore, so let's just talk about the things that are a deviation from that. For one, the sensitivity to sun isn't anything that can't be handled by good quality sunscreen and rigorous reapplication throughout the day. For another, being allergic to garlic hasn't been a thing for decades. Centuries, even.

  • ★ immortality
    as you're probably accustomed to with vampires. Eva cannot be killed outside of a few choice methods, most of which can only be managed by vampire hunter magic. she also has a heightened survival instinct which has so far prevented her from turning her own magic against her or starving herself. this usually manifests in a panic response when she encounters external forces that could seriously harm her.
  • ★ enhanced speed/strength/healing
    more standard vampire abilities. Eva can dash for short distances, demonstrates strength far beyond what her physical frame would suggest, and heals at an accelerated rate. all of these abilities are linked to how well fed she is, and therefore aren't usually very potent in her.
  • ★ animal transformation | bat
    of course. shapeshifting is a learned magical ability for a vampire, and relatively easy to achieve for them. Eva's mentor taught her this skill as soon as she agreed to come with them, offering her their bat form for the benefit of flight.
  • ★ enhanced senses
    mostly hearing, in Eva's case. her ears attune to the sounds of pulses from living people around her. this becomes stronger the hungrier she is, so Eva often wears headphones in an attempt to block out the noise.
  • ★ cagecasting & barriercasting
    the magic passed down through the Devereux family, cages and barriers are defensive and offensive magic designed to help in battle with vampires. Eva can cast barriers that act as a shield against most physical attacks (they can be broken with enough raw force, however) and cage enemies in an electrostatic field* that shocks them upon contact. although capable of creating both at all sorts of sizes, Eva must be present within the barrier's walls in order for it to work (in other words, she could cast a barrier around a building if she was inside the building, but not stand outside the building and cast it).

    *note: the electrostatic field that is produced is specifically created to be especially harmful to vampires, and prolonged exposure to it will kill them.

SAMPLES

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