Alice_Evermoore

Born in August of 1950 to a wealthy family of Virginia tobacco farmers, Alice experienced an idyllic childhood on the plantation, learning proper manners and cooking from her mother. Unlike her more rebellious older sisters, the young woman seemed perfectly content with the life of 18th century wealthy American lady-ship- until the Civil War swept the nation and brought ruin to her family.

Alice watched her brothers squabble and fight over the conflict for months beforehand- State's rights, keeping their own plantation running, keeping their slave workforce, without which they were afraid they'd be unable to maintain their crop and output- or duty to the government and President Lincoln, the idea of the nation as a greater whole- "All men equal under god". The arguments were often civil, but when war was declared and the draft was called- Alice watched her family split into two. Half her brothers and mother fled to the new confederate of West Virginia- and she and her father watched as union troops, late in the war, burned and looted his life's work, their opulent family house up in a blaze as their family credibility went up in the smoke, accused of being confederate spies.

Her sisters and mother married and remarried, her father ailing and unwilling to go on after watching the plantation house he'd built with his own hands go up in a pillar of flames, and many of her brothers dead in the terrible war, Alice found herself alone and without aid from family in the aftermath of the war that had torn the nation apart. She put herself to work as a maid, then a nurse- and fate seemed to have cruelly decided the quiet young woman was fated to become a lonely spintress.

Then he came.

and older man, wealthy, an inventor and painter, he said, and very interested in young Alice. She was young, desperate, and willing to put up with any number of eccentricities. But it turned out he wasn't interested in a wife. He was a vampire, and he wanted a servant. First he made a ghoul of her, giving her his blood, a taste of immortality, in exchange for doing his bidding, drawing blood from patients of the hospital where she worked, bring it to him, running errands in the daylight which he could not step into. She became accustomed to the dark underworld of America- the interconnected network of monsters of the night she'd once thought fanciful myth, and the politics of the night

After near a decade of service, her master rewarded her with the true immortality- the Kiss of Death.

It's not uncommon for fledgling vampires to awaken confused, scared, angry, and hungry, no matter how well prepared they were before the Kiss. Alice was no different. Repressed thoughts and feelings felt during life often take control- and Alice had long repressed a burning rage. Rage at the Confederates, for splitting her family. Rage at the Union, for destroying her life. and rage at her master, for taking away what little control of her life she'd had left.

Upon Awakening, she lept upon him and tore him apart, ripping his immortal heart from his body and shredding it like paper, bestowing upon him Final Death. As far as she was aware, she awoke sitting on in a room painted with viscera, her master's severed head, trapped in a horrified, shocked expression, cradled in her lap.

Not that he was particularly awful as vampires went- but she would be lying to herself if her newfound self-determination as an immortal creature of the night didn't make her unbeating heart soar.

She wasted no time siezing control of her deceased Sire's fortunes, home, and network of ghoul and mortal informants and servants. Over time, she retracted from the rest of the society of the Night, releasing servants to the care of allies, liquidating assets, and, finally, dissapearing from their society. The last any other undead knew, she was liquidating physical assets to invest in the early electronics market- and since then, barely anything, aside from whispers of various vampire Princes of a crimson-headed vampire woman in their territory of surprisingly old and powerful blood.

She wanders the night freely now, a leaf in the wind, a bird free of any cage- removed from all expectations and responsibility other than her own whims and desires. Just how she likes it. Freedom, Alice would answer, is the meaning of being alive. Freedom is what makes one truly alive.