Post by Nireva Hale on Apr 23, 2016 19:45:01 GMT -5
#1
Adam Newell
Full Name: Adam Newell (born Emilio Martelli)
Age: 375, though current legal documents show his age to be 30
Civilian or Special: Special
Currently Located: Bossier City, LA
Affiliated with: Neutral
Celebrity Claim: Turner, Aiden
Relation to You: Son of Sofia Martelli, Nireva's identity from 1609 to 1650
With mild pyrophobia that three centuries of toying with his memories hasn't been able to cure, Adam Newell is a private and secretive man, working as a valet in the affluent part of New York. Living in an apartment with his boyfriend, situated less than a mile away from the hotel at which he works, he has a rather small circle of friends and very few people with whom he feels he can discuss the intricacies of his immortal existence.
His day-to-day routine is a rather simple one, interspersed largely by birthdays and trips out of town and, much like this routine, his appearance is deliberately subdued and mundane. He keeps his curly black hair abruptly cut short and often goes weeks without shaving, allowing his beard to gradually grow out before discomfort compels him to eradicate the whole thing, where the process can start anew.
When not in his work uniform, Adam doesn't dress in anything overly expensive, but ensures that he's at least attired appropriately for whatever setting in which he happens to find himself; tie-less suits for those expensive restaurants, casual t-shirts and cargo pants for lounging around the house and so on. Adam has spent the better part of the last century living a drab, monotonous existence and, in 2016, his countenance definitely shows it. While his love life does a lot to keep him going, Adam gives the impression that he's been in search of something interesting for a long time and, up to now, turned up nothing.
Aetheric Leeching
The first immortal offspring of Nireva Hale whose ability stems from Khalidah Rahal, Adam's connection to the aether - an omnipresent, universe-binding energy often referenced by spiritualists of all walks of life since time immemorial - is a fleeting shadow of the bonds to it exhibited by his great-grandmother. While Khalidah is able to actively pluck the energy out of the world around her completely at will and repurpose it however she wishes, Adam leeches it out of his surroundings as he goes, utilising it as a life-support system to sustain himself in much the same way Nireva does with her own consciousness.
By actively concentrating, Adam is able to ramp up the rate at which he absorbs energy, turning a barely perceptible relocation of the aether from one place to another into a forceful stripping of his surroundings. Although doing so is incredibly taxing, not to mention impossible to conceal - leading him to only do so in extreme circumstances - Adam can focus the excess energy through his own body, whether to shield himself from harm or to thrust it into another body and use its properties to heal the wounds of others. Regardless of how he makes use of the energy, Adam is little more than a passive conduit for an energy he scarcely understands; a stark contrast to Khalidah in just about every way.
To find Nireva Hale's firstborn, one would have to venture back over three and a half centuries and search the birth records of eastern Italy. Born to a young vineyard apprentice by the name of Sofia Martelli and her boss, Emilio was the definition of a child from humble beginnings. With nothing much to her name other than what little money she'd managed to collect together from the nineteen years she'd worked as a maid in Florence and the education her employers had bundled into the job, both Sofia and her boss - a man who quickly and happily became her husband once they'd learned what had happened - continued to work at the vineyard at which they'd met for a number of years.
Born in the late autumn of 1740, the better part of a decade before his mother would be compelled to leave, Nireva's first immortal son was originally dubbed Emilio and, for his first few years, was just another happy Italian child. It didn't take her long to see the similarities between him and how she had once acted seventy years earlier. When he was old enough to comprehend and learn, Emilio's parents did their best to teach him everything they knew. As they resided in a small village and were far from wealthy, the concept of sending their son to school failed to enter into their grand plan. Sofia passed on her knowledge of literacy and mathematics while her husband gradually taught him about the things he did at the vineyard.
However, when Emilio turned ten, a freak house fire saw fit to separate son from mother. Due to an ill-maintained bracket in the cellar, one of the oil lanterns which lit the large storage room fell to the floor and, within minutes, had turned the whole thing into a raging inferno. Between wooden barrels, a naked flame and hundreds of gallons of maturing wine, there was no shortage of combustible fluid with which to fuel the destruction. The whole family would have perished in their sleep were it not for a fleeting bout of childhood insomnia. The panicked screaming from Emilio soon roused Sofia and her boss-turned-husband and, after surveying the chaos, they all put efforts to escape into motion.
Even for a woman who was incredibly hard to kill, Sofia found the flames to be agony. Rather than save herself first and work on getting her husband and son to safety afterwards, she all but threw the pair out of the door of their home before foolishly trying to salvage something from the harvest. The house could easily be rebuilt and the furniture replaced, but if there was nothing for them to sell in order to fund the necessary work, Emilio would grow up beset by a fate worse than death. At only seventy-one years of age, Sofia was still rather naive when it came to the worldly graces of an immortal. Nevertheless, she forced her way into the cellar and set about hauling whatever she could out from it.
With the barrels either already lost or impossible for her to get out of the cellar without assistance, she focused her attention on the wine which had already been bottled; ready to be sold to the public later that year. The shelves which housed them were at the opposite end of the room to the epicentre of the blaze, which allowed her a few trips into the cellar, grabbing as many bottles as she could carry before rushing into the smouldering kitchen and tossing them out of the nearest window. With nothing but thick grass for at least fifty metres in every direction, the hardy bottles were in little danger of shattering and, with her flesh blackening and her lungs finding nothing but smoke, she persevered until she passed out; an exhausted and burn-scarred mess.
Despite lasting until morning, the fire died before she did and, by the time Emilio and his father returned to the vineyard, all they found amidst the ruin of their home was a pile of charred lumber, the smell of scorched wine and nearly two-dozen intact bottles at the foot of a shallow slope a short distance away. As far as they knew, Sofia had been claimed by the flames; flesh, bones and all. If they had shown up two hours earlier, however, they would have seen a humanoid figure of charred meat and bone lumbering away from the devastation, its flesh slowly knitting back together and mending as tresses of black hair sprouted once more from the skull. Her mother hadn't been lying when she'd told Sofia that she would be ridiculously hard to kill.
When his ability manifested out of grief following his father's death twenty years later, Emilio watched a sizeable proportion of the vines on the property wither and die before his very eyes as his body ravaged the land for twenty metres in every direction, clawing everything that granted its fertility out and bestowing it upon himself. At a complete loss as to what to do - and not wanting to damage any more of what would be profitable land for many years to come - Emilio fled the vineyard in a scatterbrained panic, travelling around Italy for a number of years before he finally saw fit to stop, allowing his mind to dwell on the enormity of what he was and what he should do.
The vineyard he left still exists today, having passed between dozens of owners over the intervening generations. For over two hundred years, geologists and botanists alike couldn't fathom why a small corner of the vineyard produced nothing but unusable garbage while the rest produced the same high-quality wine Sofia and her husband had grown. By the time technology caught up to the point where fertilisers and various other treatments were able to breathe life into that little corner of the property, it was well into the twentieth century.
#2
Kayli Knudsen
Full Name: Kayli Knudsen (born Fleur Levesque)
Age: 308, though current legal documents show her age to be 24
Civilian or Special: Special
Currently Located: Las Vegas, NV
Affiliated with: Neutral
Celebrity Claim: Kuznetsova, Alana
Relation to You: Daughter of Celine Levesque, Nireva's identity from 1704 to 1719
After the emergence of her ability in 1732, Fleur found herself suffering a crisis of faith. Her decision to intentionally cut her thumb hadn't come from the advice of a higher power who had been known to 'work in mysterious ways' but from a letter written by an absent mother who'd left her to be raised in a convent twenty years ago. Over time, her outlook on religion grew increasingly less favourable until she abadoned the prospect of religious faith entirely. If a higher power did exist, they would have absolutely no use for material offerings, nor would they concern themselves with mortal affairs as much as their followers would wish they did. She, on the other hand, was immortal. She possessed a capability that should have resided within the realm of the divine.
As she dismissed more and more of the trappings of religion, Fleur began to enjoy the myriad delights of the world she'd been denied for much of her upbringing. She had quickly realised that her ability would happily repair any damage to the inside of her body as easily as it did the outside and, with this insurance in mind, she became quite the hedonist as time went on. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this meant that she was quite the party animal, not above bouts of heavy drinking and recreational drug use when the mood took her.
Now going by the name Kayli Knudsen, Nireva's second immortal child is a carefree and fun-loving individual who, like her mother, has the look of a woman in her mid-twenties due to the cessation of the aging process. Living in Las Vegas, Kayli frequents a great many haunts residing in the desert city's underbelly and is always dressed in whatever suits the occasion on a given night. During the day, however, she does rather little to show off her good looks. Her often scruffy - she'd argue deliberately so - clothes and lack of make-up make her look like a throwback to the grunge musicians of the nineties and her pale brown hair is left mostly to its own devices. She is capable of making an effort, she just has to want to.
Transcendence and Biological Reversion
Just as Charlotte and Eric had inherited elements of their ability from their grandmother, Kayli's ability has been inherited almost genetically verbatim from her mother, due in no small part to the Rahal DNA's tendency to exert dominance over any "mortal" contributions to the genetic make-up of offspring.
As well as having identical immortality-granting and wound-healing capabilities as her mother, Kayli is also prone to all of the same drawbacks; from the blackouts to any debilitating illnesses only being prevented from killing her by her own ability's presence.
When Nireva slipped into a three-month coma after evos across the world lost access to their abilities, so too did Kayli. By startling coincidence, she was also kept alive by the virtues of medical curiosity until her own DNA kicked back in and brought everything back under control.
The eighteenth century really didn't start out particularly well for Nireva. Ringing in the days leading up to her 135th birthday by fleeing barefoot and half-naked into a mountain forest in southern France, somewhere north of modern-day Montpellier, the actions of her previous "incarnation" had caught up to her with alarming efficacy. Having been spotted associating with - and, on this day in particular, caught sleeping with - a French Royalist on a few occasions in recent weeks, the raging War of Spanish Succession led a gang of British infantrymen to deem her a civilian party somehow complicit in the maddening plots to implant various successors onto the throne of the Spanish Empire.
While the man had been chased down and unceremoniously beaten to death in the street, Nireva had elected to use her resilience to beat a much more hasty retreat. Rather than try to bound down the stairs of the tavern like her latest one night stand had tried to do, she had thrown caution to the wind and simply hurled herself through the nearest window. With shards of glass and splinters of wood peppering her skin and her need to be elsewhere forcing her to hobble onward while her broken shinbone healed, she used the sacrifice to her advantage and left the village limits by fleeing in the opposite direction.
Somehow, the selfish gambit paid off and Nireva ended up sleeping for the rest of that particular night in a muddy ditch; a rather ignominious end to the twenty-one years of exploits attributed to Agathe Pelletier. Reinventing herself for the fourth time - this time as Celine Levesque - her escape from danger had left her with almost nothing. She was penniless and, having left most of them behind in the tavern bedroom, almost devoid of clothing, too. With little alternative, she saught sanctuary at the first building she came across that didn't look like it was meaningfully affected by the war which had swept up the Kingdom of France into its confusing chaos.
Making up a partially-true story about how she'd been attacked and left for dead in the forest, she was able to coax enough pity out of the denizens of the convent for them to take her in and, for the next decade, Celine remained there, taking up enough vows and jumping through enough hoops to ensure that her new friends wouldn't kick her out. Having spent her childhood being looked upon as a miracle, being sincerely pious was something she could no longer do. The musings of the divine and its reasons for allowing whatever came to pass to happen simply bored her. She was immortal, after all. It stood to reason that she could even outlive deities if she waited long enough. If they didn't die, then their followers would, making their very concept meaningless.
With this conflict raging inside their neophyte's mind, it was a wonder Celine wasn't expelled sooner. On an excursion to a nearby town for supplies, she managed to sneak off and indulge herself for the better part of an hour. Witnessing a young nun saunter into a tavern and order a drink wasn't something anyone of the time would have expected. It just didn't happen but, after ten years, Celine was sick of the bible recitals and philosophical bullshit. She had everlasting life and she was damn well going to live it. After being disciplined and commanded to leave when she and her fellows returned to the convent, Celine went to the one place within walking distance where she was welcome.
Her relationship with the father of her next child - just as the years at the convent had been - was a steady point in a turbulent time in history. Having managed to escape most of the war by confining herself to a rural town, Celine took her time. After being Agathe - a rebellious woman who simply hadn't cared what befell her - what she wanted the most was to straighten out a lot more than just her head. Her mother's rules had been imparted onto her for a reason and, after ignoring them for almost thirty years, she did her best to get back in touch with her behaviour during her earlier lives. The presence of a daughter went a long way towards helping her to do precisely that.
The drawbacks of a rural life, however, were the same as the reasons for choosing it. When the three of them - Celine, her boyfriend and her daughter Fleur - all fell violently ill, the only thing their neighbours could really do was send word to a doctor in one of the larger cities. It took days for one to actually arrive and, by the time they did, there was little that could be done for one of the town's resident blacksmiths. The illness, however, was precisely the impetus Fleur's ability needed to manifest itself and, after a few days, both mother and daughter were perfectly healthy once more. However, after an illness which had proven fatal for Fleur's father, Celine once again found herself doing what she'd been taught.
With her emotions tearing her to pieces, she set out for the convent with her daughter in tow. While she was no longer welcome there, she implored them to at least take care of her daughter in her stead. The year she spent trekking north - away from her immortal four-year-old daughter and towards central France, where she would end up spending the next sixty-one years - was the worst twelve months she'd ever endured. Fleur, on the other hand, spent the rest of her childhood and adolescence at the convent, falling into the life of a nun far better than her mother did. Her lessons served her well in the eighteenth century, allowing her to evade the horrors of the war and everything which followed behind the shield of religion. Very few people of the time turned away the advice or assistance of a virtuous woman decked out in the telltale attire and, as she passed into adulthood, the serenity made her quite content.
Other than letters every so often, Fleur had very little contact with her mother but, just like her, the letters eventually abandoned her. The last of them, written shortly before her twenty-fifth birthday, was a lengthy missive in which Celine told her daughter everything her mother had told her. Celine explained - in the only way she knew would definitely be heeded - that there was a chance that she would live forever. Her past incarnations had told her with startling clarity that passing on her ability to her children was a hit-and-miss affair. For the most part, her offspring had been mortal; completely and utterly normal. By this point, the explanations were more her clinging to hope than anything else but, if Fleur did turn out to be one of the lucky ones, she at least wanted her daughter to be prepared for what would befall her.
For Fleur, prayer was far more than simply communion with her maker. It was also an opportunity - scarce as they were - for her to be utterly alone. Having seen nothing of her mother since the age of five, her first thought had been to dismiss the whole story. But, as she dwelled further on the words, she eventually came to realise that there must have been some reason why her mother, after all this time, would expend so much time and effort to dedicate page after page to such a fantastical notion. After all, the Bible was less than two feet from her knees. They, to her, were written accounts of events which had taken place almost two millennia before she'd ever existed; of an all-powerful creator who had granted his son mortal form so that his wisdom could be imparted to the world and heeded. She couldn't help but draw parallels between the two and, once one had taken root in her mind, she started to rationalise more.
So, in private, Fleur decided to test the theory. Having learned that her mother's gifts had emerged after an injury she'd sustained as a child over a century ago, she decided to try something a lot less life-threatening. Having spied an exposed nail near the altar, she steadied her nerves and, bolstered by her faith, raked her thumb across its sharp point. Sure enough, blood began to stream from the shallow wound, her handkerchief serving to hide the evidence. For minutes, there was nothing. Just white fabric catching tiny rivulets of blood. But, as she swept the cloth across her injured skin for the tenth time, she watched as the broken skin slowly started knitting itself together.
At the time, she felt she was hallucinating the ribbons of light which coiled around her hand as... something worked to mend her. Or maybe her prayers had borne fruit and granted her some kind of vision. The next thing she knew, Fleur was awakening in bed hours later, her peers confused as to why she'd fainted before the prayer altar with a bloodied thumb devoid of any visible wound.
#3
Charlotte Bell
Full Name: Charlotte Bell (born Mathilde Bellerose)
Age: 288, though current legal documents show her age to be 34
Civilian or Special: Special
Currently Located: Cleveland, OH
Affiliated with: Neutral
Celebrity Claim: Popescu, Adela
Relation to You: Daughter of Countess Emelie Bellerose, Nireva's identity from 1719 to 1780
From an early age, Charlotte has allowed herself to become absorbed in the role of the protective big sister. Nine years her brother's senior, many of the interactions she had with Eric as a child was as a sort of babysitter, making sure that he didn't get into trouble, injured or worse in case her parents weren't watching. Regardless of how much time passed or what social conventions applied at the time, Charlotte put her brother first. If Eric was hurt or taken ill, she'd be first in line to nurse him to health. If Eric got into trouble, she'd be there to bail him out.
Because of this, Eric and Charlotte rarely argued with one another or fought. The two of them were what many considered the model pair of adult siblings; figuratively joined at the hip and ploughing through life's obstacles and the endless years together. In slight contrast to her brother's personality, Charlotte is a usually quiet, contemplative and conniving woman. Having known full well what she and her brother have needed for over two hundred years, she's had rather a lot of practice at obtaining it. Though, rather than outright backstabbing, this personality has manifested as a great helping of business acumen. With experience as a manager, administrator and financier under her belt as well as knowing when to plan ahead, she has almost singlehandedly managed to keep the two of them afloat.
Although a natural blonde, Charlotte has taken to dying her hair in recent years in order to keep up the ever-evolving fashion trends of the modern age. These days, her moderately-sized frame - rising the better part of 175 centimetres (5'9") off the ground - is capped off with fiery red hair. Her hair, however, is often the only real sign of aesthetic rebellion. Whether in work or out of it, Charlotte prefers to dress respectably; whether in a dress that isn't overly showy or a traditional set of businesswear. She's more than happy to leave the exploration of fashion trends to her brother.
Reciprocative Symbiosis
As well as inheriting the Rahal's genetic capability to live forever, Charlotte and her younger brother Eric's DNA operates as a symbiotic pair. Mirroring elements of the abilities exhibited by their grandmother - Felicia Rahal - the two siblings are capable of exhibiting physical traits vastly in excess of a normal human being, provided they remain relatively close together. Over the course of their lifespan, the strength of their shared ability has gradually increased thanks to their mutual decision to stick together and, after over two centuries, not even standing on opposite sides of the world is enough to weaken their genetic bond to the point where they would be comparable to a non-Evo.
As well as being able to use the bond to heal their wounds, Charlotte and Eric can - through active concentration - utilise it to augment their speed and strengh to inhuman levels for short periods of time, though the best results of this endeavour are usually only seen if the two siblings focus as a combined unit, causing the increases to their capabilities to loop back and forth between them, allowing them to share the fruits of the efforts of the other.
Born with the name Mathilde Bellerose in 1727, Charlotte - and later her brother Eric - were perpetually surrounded by their parents' servants while they grew up in a palatial manor house in central France. Being young members of nobility, Charlotte and Eric were subject to all of the trappings of the proverbial high life; Eric taking pointers from his father for his inevitable rise to the head of the family while Charlotte would eventually grow up to have legions of suitors at her feet.
Being in her teens by the time Eric could walk and start grasping literacy and numeracy, Charlotte often took pressure away from the maids by serving as her brother's babysitter. Although she was - at the time - unaware of her mother's or her own immortality, she knew that she was likely to outlive most of the people she saw on a daily basis. The subject of immortality - and whether she had passed it on to the next generation - was something which consumed Charlotte and Eric's masked mother for a number of years. Still able to clearly remember how her own ability had manifested, Emelie's hesitation was borne mostly out of refusing to put her children through the same ordeal in case she happened to be wrong.
When Charlotte turned eighteen, her mother finally sat her down to have an in-depth talk about everything she could expect in adulthood. Most of the subjects were the usual fare - sex, romance, marriage, the social graces of nobility and so on - but, just as she'd done where possible for her other children, Emelie had also done her best to explain the concept of immortality. It was the reason why, behind the mask, her appearance had never changed since Charlotte was born and, as her child, there was a chance that she too would be able to live forever.
With her husband Césaire dying in 1754, just after Eric had reached the age by which he'd be considered a man, Emelie was slightly ill-equipped to tell him what he needed to know. With his father gone, Eric refused to believe that he was ready for becoming the head of a noble household. Where other families would have simply thrust the next eldest male family member into the proverbial spotlight, Emelie instead elected to take the reins of the Bellerose estate herself. In the quarter of a century which followed, she watched her children grow further into adulthood and, to her utter joy, come to realise that they had indeed inherited her immortality; finally finding the answer she and her husband had sought.
Having done her best to teach her children everything they could possibly need to know about their lives as nobility and whatever would lie beyond when the time came, Emelie realised that it was now her turn to do what her own mother had done nearly two hundred years ago. By all mortal accounts, she was now eighty-six years of age and there was only so long she could reliably maintain the charade which had begun six decades ago. Asking her children to ensure that her porcelain mask remained in impeccable condition, she abandoned her elaborate gown in favour of the relatively innocuous uniform of a maid, packed some of her belongings and left. Her final command to her children and those still around to serve them: wait five days, then spread news of her death.
So they did. The immortal heads of the Bellerose family operated as an inseparable unit, following their mother's instructions and living out what semblance of a noble existence they could until each of their servants succumed to old age around them. With literally nothing else tying them to the home in which they'd both been born, Charlotte and Eric decided to sell everything that they could, such as the furniture, cutlery and other such supplies. However, when it came to their mother's belongings, they decided to be rather more respectful. Packing up her now borderline antique porcelain mask, some jewellry and her wedding dress, the siblings travelled to Paris and, after a lengthy discussion with a trustworthy curator, donated the legacy of Countess Emelie Bellerose to the grandest museum in France, where they hoped she would be immortalised for eternity.
#4
Eric Bell
Full Name: Eric Bell (born Léonard Bellerose)
Age: 279, though current legal documents show his age to be 28
Civilian or Special: Special
Currently Located: Cleveland, OH
Affiliated with: Neutral
Celebrity Claim: Arnaud, Francois
Relation to You: Son of Countess Emelie Bellerose, Nireva's identity from 1719 to 1780
Since his youth, Eric has been a man who has, wherever possible, tried to shy away from responsibility. With his father dying of a heart attack shortly after his eighteenth birthday, Eric didn't exactly take the whole situation well. Without his father around to guide him, he felt he had no way to adequately rise to become the patriarch of an entire noble household. His indecision prompted his mother - and, by extention, his elder sister - to take the reins in his place. It was only twenty or so years later, when Emelie felt it was time to leave, that he finally rose to the position intended for him. Even so, he had Charlotte by his side as his hierarchical equal to help take care of the tricky parts of his duty.
What some would call laziness has persisted ever since, resulting in a slightly lackadaisical and laid-back personality all wrapped up in a man who prefers to follow rather than lead. Leaving all of the outwardly professional and upwardly mobile characteristics to Charlotte, Eric works as a waiter in a restaurant; one of the very few occasions in his life where he smartens himself up in terms of clothes and that's only because the restaurant provided him with a uniform. Outside work, his fashion habits are a lot like his - as yet never seen - elder sister Kayli; tending far more towards function rather than form.
Reciprocative Symbiosis
As well as inheriting the Rahal's genetic capability to live forever, Eric and his elder sister Charlotte's DNA operates as a symbiotic pair. Mirroring elements of the abilities exhibited by their grandmother - Felicia Rahal - the two siblings are capable of exhibiting physical traits vastly in excess of a normal human being, provided they remain relatively close together. Over the course of their lifespan, the strength of their shared ability has gradually increased thanks to their mutual decision to stick together and, after over two centuries, not even standing on opposite sides of the world is enough to weaken their genetic bond to the point where they would be comparable to a non-Evo.
As well as being able to use the bond to heal their wounds, Charlotte and Eric can - through active concentration - utilise it to augment their speed and strengh to inhuman levels for short periods of time, though the best results of this endeavour are usually only seen if the two siblings focus as a combined unit, causing the increases to their capabilities to loop back and forth between them, allowing them to share the fruits of the efforts of the other.
Born with the name Léonard Bellerose in 1736, Eric and his sister Charlotte were perpetually surrounded by their parents' servants while they grew up in a palatial manor house in central France. Being young members of nobility, Charlotte and Eric were subject to all of the trappings of the proverbial high life; Eric taking pointers from his father for his inevitable rise to the head of the family while Charlotte would eventually grow up to have legions of suitors at her feet.
Being in her teens by the time Eric could walk and start grasping literacy and numeracy, Charlotte often took pressure away from the maids by serving as her brother's babysitter. Although she was - at the time - unaware of her mother's or her own immortality, she knew that she was likely to outlive most of the people she saw on a daily basis. The subject of immortality - and whether she had passed it on to the next generation - was something which consumed Charlotte and Eric's masked mother for a number of years. Still able to clearly remember how her own ability had manifested, Emelie's hesitation was borne mostly out of refusing to put her children through the same ordeal in case she happened to be wrong.
When Charlotte turned eighteen, her mother finally sat her down to have an in-depth talk about everything she could expect in adulthood. Most of the subjects were the usual fare - sex, romance, marriage, the social graces of nobility and so on - but, just as she'd done where possible for her other children, Emelie had also done her best to explain the concept of immortality. It was the reason why, behind the mask, her appearance had never changed since Charlotte was born and, as her child, there was a chance that she too would be able to live forever.
With her husband Césaire dying in 1754, just after Eric had reached the age by which he'd be considered a man, Emelie was slightly ill-equipped to tell him what he needed to know. With his father gone, Eric refused to believe that he was ready for becoming the head of a noble household. Where other families would have simply thrust the next eldest male family member into the proverbial spotlight, Emelie instead elected to take the reins of the Bellerose estate herself. In the quarter of a century which followed, she watched her children grow further into adulthood and, to her utter joy, come to realise that they had indeed inherited her immortality; finally finding the answer she and her husband had sought.
Having done her best to teach her children everything they could possibly need to know about their lives as nobility and whatever would lie beyond when the time came, Emelie realised that it was now her turn to do what her own mother had done nearly two hundred years ago. By all mortal accounts, she was now eighty-six years of age and there was only so long she could reliably maintain the charade which had begun six decades ago. Asking her children to ensure that her porcelain mask remained in impeccable condition, she abandoned her elaborate gown in favour of the relatively innocuous uniform of a maid, packed some of her belongings and left. Her final command to her children and those still around to serve them: wait five days, then spread news of her death.
So they did. The immortal heads of the Bellerose family operated as an inseparable unit, following their mother's instructions and living out what semblance of a noble existence they could until each of their servants succumed to old age around them. With literally nothing else tying them to the home in which they'd both been born, Charlotte and Eric decided to sell everything that they could, such as the furniture, cutlery and other such supplies. However, when it came to their mother's belongings, they decided to be rather more respectful. Packing up her now borderline antique porcelain mask, some jewellry and her wedding dress, the siblings travelled to Paris and, after a lengthy discussion with a trustworthy curator, donated the legacy of Countess Emelie Bellerose to the grandest museum in France, where they hoped she would be immortalised for eternity.
#5
Brandon Wilsham
Full Name: Brandon Wilsham (born Diodato Mosconi)
Age: 232, though current legal documents show his age to be 40
Civilian or Special: Special
Currently Located: San Francisco, CA
Affiliated with: Hero
Celebrity Claim: Bomer, Matt
Relation to You: Son of Lorena Mosconi, Nireva's identity from 1780 to 1814
Being a full-time business executive, Brandon is almost always seen wearing some kind of suit, be it the gunmetal-grey one he wears to work or a jet black one more suitable for charity dinners and other black-tie events. His facial hair very rarely shows itself, while his dark brown hair is neatly cropped short whenever it strays beyond the nape of his neck. All-in-all, Brandon's the type of guy who has all of his proverbial ducks in a very regimental row and, to an extent, his personality matches. While just as happy to engage in frivolity as the next man, he does his best to keep the various parts of his life separate.
Transcendence and Biological Reversion
Like Kayli before her, Brandon was the second of Nireva's children to inherit her genetic bag of tricks. Though, whether through dilution of the Rahal DNA across the ages or sheer dumb luck, Brandon isn't at all prone to blackouts like his mother. Instead, overuse of his ability - or simply the fact that he possesses it - has led to him suffering from severe dizziness and vertigo instead. So, while Nireva shies away from heights due to fear, Brandon similarly likes to stay at ground level because of his ability.
After Nireva left the Bellerose estate, she made the decision to also leave France entirely and return to Italy. Piecing together her new name from the first headstone she saw and a slight distortion of the name above the door of a tavern she passed along the way to her first night's sleep on Italian soil in almost a hundred and fifty years, she became Lorena Varetto. Dressed as she was in a maid's uniform, her background simply started to write itself in her head the more she spoke to passers-by. It was quite hard to go back to speaking Italian as her first language but, within a couple of weeks, she was falling back into her old conversational habits.
Having crossed the border into Italy via Mont Blanc, she used her spotty knowledge of geography and a great deal of hitchhiking to make the trip south-east to Milan. Although Turin was closer, she decided to head for the bigger city. More people meant more opportunities for work as well as an easier time blending into the background. In a bizarre twist of fate, the first job offered to her was in a bank, the same line of work her father had been in back in Florence. While her job was to simply keep the place clean as opposed to actually handling money, the work paid decently well. It was there she met and befriended Savio Mosconi - Brandon Wilsham's father - who offered her a place to stay.
In the space of five years, Lorena and Savio had a child together, and when their son - whom they'd called Diodato on account of Savio coming from quite a religious family - could walk, they agreed to marry. While it was customary for a couple to marry sooner, they had grown quite fond of the idea of having Diodato be their ring-bearer. He may have only been two years old at the time but, with the assistance of Savio's younger sister, he managed to do what was asked of him, making for an unforgettable moment for all in attendance.
The family lived peacefully in Milan for nearly thirty years, with Lorena having two more children - a daughter and a second son - with Savio. However, in 1814, during a trip to the market, Lorena was abducted on the street by a criminal gang. After stripping her of any valuables in her possession, it was the wedding ring that led the ringleader to try extorting a ransom out of her husband. Even when Savio paid up, the gang refused to uphold their end of the bargain and, a week after her husband had left the money as instructed, they viciously bludgeoned Lorena and dumped what they believed to be her corpse in the river.
While she was once again forced to abandon another family and move on, Lorena decided to put things right before leaving the city. After lacing a barrel of wine with the juice of enough crushed poisonous plants to fell a small garrison, she followed the gang back to their hideout and waited. In a fit of horror and delirium, the debilitated gang were no match for the otherwise meek cleaner they thought they'd killed. After ensuring that none of them would pursue her, she gathered together enough of their ill-gotten valuables to act as adequate recompense for the stolen ransom and, under cover of darkness, left the whole collection at her husband's door, along with a small note, informing him that 'the angels had allowed her one final act before she died'.
Without his mother's influence, Diodato followed in his father's business-minded footsteps. After taking the job held by his mother to keep him financially afloat, he learned as much about numeracy and banking as he could from his father before moving into the banking business. The cycle of learning and taking high-paying jobs which took advantage of what he'd learned served him well and, while his two siblings hadn't inherited his mother's immortality, the fact that he had allowed him to continue providing for them - whether overtly or behind the scenes - until it was their sons and daughters seeking him out to collect his helpful handouts.
#6
Adila Zaman
Full Name: Adila Zaman (born Shahira Ahmad)
Age: 171, though current legal documents show her age to be 27
Civilian or Special: Special
Currently Located: Somewhere near Jackson, NH
Affiliated with: Neutral
Celebrity Claim: Pinto, Freida
Relation to You: Daughter of Beverly Merrick, Nireva's identity from 1814 to 1879
Quiet, calm and contemplative. If Adila has inherited any traits from her predecessors, it would be their worldly wisdom. Between her mother's openmindedness and her father's penchant for the spiritual, Adila is very much prone to looking at the bigger picture; seeing little point in reckless immediacy when a drawn out and thoughtful solution would see a task completed ten times better, even if it took three times as long. Understanding and accepting almost to a fault, she is very difficult to anger or coax any wholly negative emotion from and, to friends and family, she strives to be all they could ever ask for in a companion or confidant.
Symbiotic Tether
With the Rahal's ancestry able to be traced to just about every corner of Europe and a good number of places beyond due in no small part to her immortal predecessors, the abilities of Nireva's children have in some way held some sort of connection to her mother, grandmother or, in some cases, herself. In Adila's case, however, her DNA exhibits elements of abilities from all three of them. With her consciousness as naturally in flux as her mother's, the source of her immortality stems from her apparent ability to tether fragments of her consciousness to people around her.
Whether through physical contact or meditation, Adila can forge and sever these metaphysical tethers almost completely at will and, depending on their nature and proximity, she finds they confer different benefits. After study and testing, her theory is that these tethers exist in one of two states. Dominant tethers augment her physical capabilities, but are only able to remain in this state if she is less than approximately a hundred metres away from them. Outside that range, the tethers become recessive and no longer affect her physically. Instead, recessive tethers slow down the cellular aging process while vastly improving her cells' ability to repair damage.
With enough recessive tethers forged between herself and unsuspecting people, Adila has managed to slow down her aging to the point where it no longer applies. Her ability to heal from her wounds, as a result, is comparable to that of her mother.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, seeing a (relatively) pale-skinned British woman anywhere in the Middle East was almost unheard of. If anyone from the countries lying to the west ever travelled out this far - be they scholars seeking knowledge, explorers passing through on their way to southern Africa or something altogether more malevolent - it was always men; men who had left their wives behind to seek fortune and renown. To see a woman from England spend a prolonged period of time in the region; enough to fall in love, get married and have a daughter? People would have thought you crazy if you told the tale.
But that was precisely what Nireva Hale did in 1839. Having grown sick and tired of the monotony of working a London market stall, she elected to sell all of her possessions and start a journey east. It had been a good century or more since she'd last succumbed to wanderlust and, even at the age of 270, the furthest east she'd ever been was what would eventually become Turkey. For millennia, Turkey had been a cultural crossroads, bridging the western world she'd seen all her life and the Arabic Middle East she'd only read about in books. Being immortal, she'd realised there was nothing at all stopping her from making the trip to see what the fuss was about.
Despite books of the time romanticising the area to the point of magical fantasy, Nireva - or Beverly Merrick as she called herself back then - still found quite a lot of enthralling charm in the region. She may not have been able to communicate with any who spoke the native language but, when she found a scholar who had once journeyed west and studied English in order to compare the accumulated knowledge of the two worlds, she found herself with a reason to stick around. Having reduced her existence for the time being into something of a nomadic one, Beverly found herself falling for the young scholar and adopting a way of life more fitting to where she might as well have called home.
It might have felt a little wrong to use nearly three centuries of knowledge to impress him, but it worked. They loved, they married and, just over three years after they'd met, Beverly realised that she'd got pregnant. After that, a whole new clutch of traditions were hurtling her way. If she'd already accepted her new surroundings to the point of wanting to bear a man's child, then she might as well have gone all the way. They weren't the richest couple around but, between them, they managed and when their daughter Shahira was born, they could see her as nothing other than perfect.
It was the first time in a while Beverly was able to actually raise a child to adulthood; to teach her all she knew and be a mother for once. Keeping Shahira away from the notion of arranged marriages out of principle wasn't easy but, after finding out that she was destined to be immortal, her daughter was far more than a child who would eventually move out of her parents' house. There were things she needed to know to stay safe and, until Beverly herself left the Middle East in 1879 - her husband succumbing to illness almost twenty years earlier - she made sure to teach Shahira everything.
Like Nireva before her, Shahira has taken solitude to heart but, where her mother did her best to remain out of contact with just her family, she did so with as much of society as was practical. If she wasn't travelling around the world, she was putting down roots in a rural part of whatever country she happened to be inhabiting. By the present day, Shahira - now going by the name Adila Zaman - lives very much out of the way in New Hampshire.
#7
Zoe Durante
Full Name: Zoe Durante
Age: 57, though she's started to lie by this point
Civilian or Special: Special
Currently Located: New York City, NY
Affiliated with: Villain
Celebrity Claim: Eckhardt, Tiah
Relation to You: Daughter of Mia Vilaro, Nireva's identity from 1951 to 1978
While possessing quite a lot of worldly experience, revolving mostly around the criminal underworld of New York, Zoe is a habitually reckless individual. Having grown up wanting for nothing and believing that she deserves to retain her life of privilege despite the general downturn of organised crime that had plagued the city during her childhood, Zoe sees very little reason not to engage in criminal activity and, as she's grown older, she's traded in her violent streak for a manipulative one, playing friends, lovers and acquaintances like fiddles until they do her bidding or give her what she wants.
Socially, while not inept, Zoe keeps herself distant, electing only to get close to people if she's at least mostly faking it. Still unmarried and without children in her late fifties is a telling testament to her social lifestyle and, with a steady income - some of it even being legal - keeping her very much afloat, she sees little point in allowing her circumstances to change, leading to her long since becoming stuck in her ways.
A lot of Zoe's wardrobe is almost excessively extravagant; designer clothes, jewellry both bought and stolen, enough shoes to adorn the soles of a football team with pairs to spare. Her recklessness has very much spilled over into her shopping habits and, seeing it as her right to both possess disposable income and spend it, the amount of clothing she owns borders on the stereotypical. Like hell she'd actually do something as silly as selling it...
Targeted Aetheric Consumption
Like her much elder brother Adam, Zoe's ability is inherited from her great-grandmother, Khalidah. However, unlike her siblings, whose abilities passively allow them to live indefinitely and mend their wounds, Zoe's grasp of immortality is one she actively has to maintain. Although taking her fill of the mysterious, universe-binding energy is enough to sustain her for multiple decades, Zoe can only do so by intentionally latching onto a plentiful supply before stripping it bare.
While the average human does contain a sizeable quantity of aether merely from existing, allowing for numerous comparisons to vampires in Zoe's head, she has found that the energy she requires is also attracted to epicentres of any of the other four elements, be they unnatural or otherwise. While she has drained this energy from people before - mostly those who have pissed her off - she has learned that she can achieve the same goals by paying a visit to large bodies of water or by remaining in proximity to a burning building, both of which are in plentiful supply.
The hot-headed daughter of a New York mafia enforcer, Zoe Durante was quick to grow accustomed to the life of luxury her father's illicit line of work provided. Born shortly after the start of 1959, when organised crime still enjoyed much of its power in New York, Zoe never quite seemed to see eye-to-eye with her mother - a lounge band pianist by the name of Mia Vilaro - and really only obeyed her parents' wishes when her father was around to put his foot down. Respect between her and her mother was begrudging at best, while her father's ability to have her want for nothing led to her idolising him.
Feeling that she was nigh-on untouchable, especially when she was a child, Zoe often used her father as a get-out-of-trouble card. Whether she got into fights at school, was accused of stealing from her classmates or was in danger of full-on expulsion for some other major transgression, her father was the solution to her problems. His various connections in the community meant that problems the school had with his daughter - bratty as she might have been - were quickly swept out of sight, allowing her to continue to get the education he'd paid for.
By the time she graduated from high school in 1977, Zoe had somewhat mellowed out. Instead of resorting to violence to solve her myriad issues, she had instead started to use her talents of manipulation (and a little bit of pickpocketing) to get what she wanted. She'd play those she knew - rivals, enemies and friends alike - against each other in order to further her own goals. It was a method that worked out surprisingly well for her and, while Zoe was seeing nothing amiss with the path her life was taking, her father was noticing the signs she had been displaying since childhood. Having exhibited similar traits himself - traits which had got him involved with the Mob in the first place - he found himself encountering a line. As innocent as they both weren't, he didn't want Zoe to fall into the life which had already claimed him.
His efforts came to a head a year later. Having foolishly tried to steal from a rival mafia family to the one her father worked for in an effort to get back into his good graces, Zoe had been too inexperienced to realise that she was being followed and, when her pursuers spotted her going into the club at which her mother worked, the whole event quickly boiled over into a violent confrontation. Zoe's father, as one of the few survivors on either side, was eventually rushed to hospital. Mia had been performing at the club that night and, as far as Zoe and her father were aware, she had been caught in the crossfire along with the rest of the band.
It hadn't been the first time the woman who would eventually become Nireva Hale had ducked out of a morgue after being declared dead and, with no way to return to her family without landing herself or them in trouble with the police, she simply elected to leave New York and move on. To her, twenty-seven years was nothing. The coroners would find a way to explain her disappearance, Zoe and her now-former husband would attend a touching funeral and, like always, everyone would eventually get on with their lives, coping with the lack of her presence as best they could.
As for Zoe? She would discover the manifestation of her ability after witnessing an altercation at the age of twenty-one, during which she would take a bullet to the shoulder after trying to flee a bar brawl. By the mid-nineties, she would start to realise that she wasn't aging and, because her mother wasn't around to offer the advice her mother had imparted, she would happily keep her original name until the present day, despite looking far younger than she should.
